This was used in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from 1948.
They have one of these in the newest episode of Leverage: Redemption.
Q: Do you smoke after sex?
A: I don’t know, I’ve never looked.
King of Queens - Arthur gave Spence (who worked in a glass booth in the subway) a package that blew up into a raft.
I saw this old comedy trope recently (don’t remember exactly where though) and I thought ‘huh, haven’t seen that trope in awhile’.
Basic setup is, main character goes to person (A) to ask a favor. Person (A) says "fine, I’ll help you if you can get person (B) to do me (favor). Person (B) only agrees if person (C) will do some other favor for them, and so on and on in a round-robin wild goose chase.
I remember that trope from an episode of MASH where Hawkeye had to do so many things for so many people to get a new pair of boots.
Chain chain chaaaain…chain of deals
Live bands at school dances… I think this is dead now although it lived well into the 2000s I think.
And live play-by-play commentary over the P.A. system at youth sporting events (as seen in every Mighty Ducks movie).
Still have this at our local high school (total enrollment <500) and at all the away games as well. For football. I haven’t attended any other sports except tennis and of course not only is there no play-by-play, you’re liable to get bounced by your own coach if you cheer a little too loudly between points.
Students in middle/high school forced to take a “Career Aptitude Test” which apparently will literally decide what their sole future job will be. Usually the smart person will get a job like “Farmer” or “Bum” and the dumb person will get a job like “Scientist” or “Engineer”, and the smart person will act in despair while the dumb person will act suddenly like the smartest man in the room, then it turns out their tests were accidentally swapped and there’s a lesson on how you shouldn’t let tests determine your future.
Which is funny because I literally never remember taking ANY aptitude test in school. We had career fairs, and we had to take the ASVAB, but literally that was it. I didn’t take some weird test that told me “Civil Engineer” was my future career path.
One I remember from several old shows was “X gets audited”. I haven’t seen that one in years. I don’t think it’d work with most people – who saves all their receipts anymore?
My personal theory about shows like this is that nobody really wanted to write episodes using well-worn tropes. Screenwriters used these as prompts in their writing classes. But when crunch time came and they started running out of sitcom script ideas, they just plunged into their old assignments and came out with crap like this one, and the others listed above.
– Bringing your boss home for dinner
– someone overhears a discussion about what’s going to happen to an animal, and thinks it’s about them
–X is saved from certain death, and now acts like a suck-up to Y, who saved them.
–They can’t find the winning lottery ticket!
– You’re picked for jury duty
Etc. etc. et cetera ad nauseum
When I was a freshman in college we took an aptitude test like that - everyone called it “the carrot test” because one of the questions was “Do you like carrots raw or cooked?” But we didn’t get the results back automatically - you had to make an appointment for a session with a counseler to discuss the results, which I didn’t get around to doing until I was a senior (my best fit career was “linguist,” but “engineer” was not excluded, fortunately).
On “Facts of Life” they did the IQ test version…
Opened a new thread on this one The Jury Duty plot versus reality
There’s a current commercial which uses that.
We did, as seniors in high school. A surprising number of us got “forest ranger.” I guess we were all introverted.
I think we did an aptitude test but no one seemed to care much about it. The counselors certainly didn’t try to influence the students off of the results.
tim white… hes gone now but he had some stories …
We did some sort of test but it wasn’t to see how apt we would be for any given profession, more like what professions would fit our interests. For some reason, I got a small variety of suggestions rather than anything specific; one of which was “electrician” and another was “airline pilot”.
Ain’t no way I would have been able to handle the stress of being a pilot.