Like Homer pounding on the TV when Garrison Keiler is on:
“BE MORE FUNNY! BE MORE FUNNY!”
FWIW I saw Rocky before I saw The Godfather and I was stunned at how beautiful Talia Shire looked.
I was telling my kids and nephews (all in their 20s) about the Hot foot - Wikipedia and how I’d seen it in cartoons and movies as a kid. They found it hard to believe that it was a thing.
Then there’s the one with the middle-aged men reminiscing about their college days and that one time they took the dean’s car apart and reassembled it in his office.
Neighboring cousins of mine inherited a large farmhouse, and ‘shared’ it for twenty years barely speaking, each keeping to their side of the staircase ascending to bedrooms upstairs. Their mothers were sisters who co-owned one of the tiny gingerbread cottages in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard - no room for divided spaces in those buildings, but they had separate sugar bowls and salt shakers on the one small table, and woe to the the guest of one who used the condiments of the other…
Herman and Grandpa Munster divided the house up over a falling-out. Lillian explained to Marilyn that they even divided up the family pet Spot (the fire-breathing dragon that lives under the stairs) “and Herman was furious that he got the half that eats”.
I remember thinking that would have been preferable to the other half.
I guess that depends on what the dragon likes to eat, how hungry it is, and how well you get along with it.
Not to mention, I hear dragon breath can be unpleasant. It may come steaming out the back end, but the front end… 
Uma Thurman and Janeane Garofalo starred in a movie called The Truth About Cats and Dogs sometime in the late 1990s. In the movie, Garofalo, insecure about her looks, has her model friend played by Thurman meet someone in her stead. No shade on Thurman, but at the time I thought Garofalo was gorgeous and the premise of the movie just didn’t resonate with me.
Yeah, “Hollywood Ugly”. Tina Fey owes half of her career to it.
I’ve wondered whether it’s designed to make guys feel less shallow. “I’m not shallow. I find the ugly woman attractive”.
I remember a Drew Carey Show episode where they decided on an ad campaign for their local micro brew Buzz Beer using their pal Kate O’Brian (Krista Miller) as the spokesmodel, comparing her with model Rachel Hunter: “Buzz is the beer of attainable women”. I thought Miller was much more attractive.
In the same category is the supposedly “ugly, lazy, and talentless” Sweet Dee character in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia played by the drop dead gorgeous Kaitlin Olson.
I adored the late Terri Garr when I was a teenager (still do, really). One of her first roles was a cute airline stewardess who met Al Mundy (Robert Wagner) on a flight in It Takes A Thief. Al agreed to meet with her for a drink sometime, but he was really interested in pursuing the more “mature and sophisticated” (and “rich”) Dana Wynter.
Nothing against the beautiful and talented Ms Wynter, but if I had to choose between the two women, I’d have gone after Terri like a shot.
I was watching this episode with my mother, who (with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor) almost never complimented another woman about anything. She reproached me by saying Ms Wynter had “class” and called Terri a “thing.” (That was precisely the word she used.)
By the way, the episode ended with both women offended because Al’s duties as a secret agent kept him from rendezvousing with either. In the final scene, Terri pushed him off a dock into the Mediterranean as she vented her frustration.
(My mother also said “I bet she has skinny legs” after she met my high school girlfriend for the first time. She didn’t; her legs were as beautiful as the rest of her. My mother was a real piece of work!)
That reminds me of another trope that is probably entirely dead: a joke about a stewardess saying “Coffee, tea, or me?”.
Terri would never have stooped so low! 
That’s just a book title, isn’t it?
My dad told me that jet planes had taken all romance out of air travel because now there’s never any time to flirt with the, uh, “flight attendants.” 
Hot debutantes enrolling in college or going on an ocean cruise to snare a man.
I’m watching Carry on Cruising (1962) at the moment, and the main plot is the latter.
The old MRS degree.
Rayon was called “mother-in-law silk” because it caught fire so easily
Equally a disparagement of both mothers-in-law and the burgeoning synthetic fabric industry. Everything women were obliged by convention to wear had that hazard. Oscar Wilde’s two half-sisters (equal to one full sister?) were killed when an unscreened fireplace ignited their crinoline.
Are you sure you aren’t conflating rayon with celluloid? Celluloid is nitrated, making it VERY flammable; while rayon iirc is basically heavily reprocessed cellulose.
ETA: from what I can research online, the main problem was the airy puffy design of crinolines, not necessarily what they were made of.
Maybe I am. Wasn’t Rayon originally called “Duparu” by DuPont?