Not so fast! It arguably has turned into a kind of reverse pitting!
No, my friend, you’re going to have to do better if you want to wallow in the Pit! 
Demanding cites for things that would take you 2 second to look up is lazy
In some cases I think it’s not lazy, but an unethical debate technique. Sort of an inverted Gish Gallop where somebody starts demanding cite after cite to bog down the other side in looking things up and avoid having to actually reply to their opponent.
I tend to be of the “look it up” ilk, myself. There’s so many references I haven’t heard of, but so many I do, that I don’t want the prose to be riddled with explanatory stuff left and right. A few months ago, I had never heard of the apparently everybody-knows Studio Ghibli. I looked it up, but I did mention that I had never heard of it. So I got some condescending remarks about how is it possible you haven’t heard of one of the most popular animated studios in the world? I don’t know. I just missed it, but that type of response is not helpful, especially when I did the legwork (I did end up watching one of the films, and it was beautiful, but not something I really wanted to watch more of.) I don’t know what thread inspired this pitting, but it’s hard to figure out what common cultural references are and what aren’t, and I don’t expect every possible source of confusion to be flagged. In my circles, Boomhauer is absolutely common, even though I don’t think I’ve ever watched a single episode of KoTH (Do I need to explain that acronym?) to know. Happens to be in my circle, but I’d just Google it otherwise. I mean, I check out Reddit and YouTube comments and lord knows I have to Google left and right sometimes to understand what anyone is talking about.
[quote=“Dinsdale, post:40, topic:1020281”]
the “reasonable man” standard itself [/quote] seems a quaint notion these days.
Interesting. Having already known he was a TV character, it didn’t even occur to me until this post that someone might not have even sussed out the category of person Boomhuaer was. The answer is obvious when you already know the answer.
Social dynamics in internet groups are weird. In meatspace, you aren’t likely to find 30 year-olds, 50 year-olds, and 70 year-olds hanging out together, you mostly hang out with your own cohort and have shared cultural touchstones that you take for granted. My real-world Gen X cohort grew up steeped in American 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s TV. If I were hanging out with my real-world peer group I would absolutely take for granted that someone I was talking to not only knew who Boomhuaer was, but also Skeletor, Grimlock, Punky Brewster, and Mister Belvedere. My native culture is like an episode of Family Guy or Robot Chicken (constant reminders of something that happened on some older TV show that I’ve seen 1,000 times). But on a forum you don’t usually have a visual reminder that you are talking to someone 30 years older than you or 30 years younger than you or living 15,000 miles away from you.
I have no problem with people saying “what is X?” if they have at least tried one lazy Google search for X and gotten multiple conflicting results.
I find it unlikely that someone would have been confused by the Google search results for “Boomhauer”.
One of the first links is this video. Whole lot of seeing how he talks
As for media references in general, I wonder what level of cultural saturation does something need to be at before you can take reasonable familiarity for granted? I can see assuming that you need to explain a reference to The Oblongs or Stressed Eric or other short-lived, unpopular shows. In contrast, King of the Hill ran for 259 episodes on one of the big four broadcast networks, ending only 16 years ago. But The Flintstone ran for only 166 episodes and ended 59 years ago. And yet I doubt anyone would demand that someone explain who Barney Rubble is if they mention him.
FTR:
The parenthetical in the title was added later by a mod.
I’ve heard the name “Skeletor” for years, but none of those other names mean anything to me; never heard of them.
I have some vague notion now that long ago I probably knew what Skeletor was, or had seen a bit of whatever show he’s from. Now? It’s just a name that suggests a skeleton and a super-hero/monster character.
This next snip is key.
One of the coolest things about the Dope is the huge variety we do have.
Urban or rural, rich or poor, religious or not, US or not, black, white, yellow or red. Straight, gay, male, female, or maybe all three? etc. etc. etc. It’s really amazing to interact with so many different sorts of folks. But we do sorta need to check our pre-conceived notions of homogeneity at the door. And yes, sometimes that leads to a bit of over-explaining for the folks who’re culturally close to ourselves. IMO that’s the better mistake to make.
Sometimes I’ll do a search about an unknown word (or name or acronym) and sometimes not. The problem with a search is you’ll find the most common answers, but not necessarily what any particular poster intended. Since this is a message board, I find the best approach is to simply ask “what do you mean by …?”. Many people and most Dopers are very happy to explain their unusual knowledge if asked.
From Wikipedia’s King of the Hill article:
Boomhauer [voiced by the show’s co-creator, Mike Judge], who also lives in the Hill’s neighborhood, is a slim womanizer whose fast, nonfluent, and jumbled speech can be hard to understand for the audience despite being easily understood by his friends and most other characters. He is shown to be able to sing clearly and speak fluent Spanish and French.
During a perspective flashback in the season-three episode “A Fire Fighting We Will Go”, Boomhauer sees himself speaking in a typical manner, while everyone else speaks in Boomhauer’s manner of speaking. Though his occupation is not explicitly stated, a single line early in the series indicates he is an electrician living on worker’s compensation. In a montage leading to the conclusion of the final episode, a Texas Ranger badge falls open on his dresser. His given name, Jeff, is not revealed until the 13th and final season
——-
I’ve read, and mostly believe, that when Boomhauer’s speech is captioned or transcribed it’s surprising coherent.
This, it wouldn’t kill anyone to be asked to clarify a term.
Well, with that thread – which I hadn’t seen – what’s the point of adding a parenthetical explaining he was a character from King of the Hill? If you don’t know who Boomhauer is, you probably don’t know what King of the Hill is, and you definitely don’t know what he sounds like, so to participate in the thread, should you wish to, you still need to go to YouTube to find a clip of him to know what the OP is getting at, anyway.
Skeletor, Grimlock, Punky Brewster, Mister Belvedere are all staples of Gen X and very early Millennial culture, like include the Xennials in there. I assume you must be a generation older, so I wouldn’t expect you to get that, unless you were a parent raising kids through the 80s (and not necessarily even then.) That’s okay. I have to look up stuff all the time when people start referencing cultural icons before my time, and sometimes even of my time. Hell, my wife didn’t even know who Marjorie Taylor-Greene was a month ago when I asked my wife about her, and she’s a completely competent and intelligent individual in data science. Does MTG need a parenthesis every time she comes up? Does MTG an acronym even need an explanation on first mention? I’d argue, no, it’s part of board culture.
So much of what I consume involves me having to look shit up. How many books have you read where you didn’t have to go off searching a word, an allusion, a historical context? Almost every book I read requires me to do that. Nothing wrong with expecting a poster to do a simple Google, in my opinion.
I didnt know who it was and Im genX- Im pretty sure if I asked my friends who it was they wouldnt know either. (I might verify that later)
Boomhauer is a bit later for Gen X. I’d expect that’s more firmly Millennial culture and sticks out from the other examples, which were all 80s touchstones. The show started in 1997. I didn’t even know what in the hell it was until 2004 or so (I spent 1998-2003 abroad, and in 1997 I was busy finishing up college. South Park was our main watch then.)
I aspire to be that most incongruous of anti-heros, Ikon-O-Klast, the Indefatigable Defender of the Incomprehensible. I explain myself to no man or beast!
Stranger
I had to look this up… Apparently the dinobots didn’t make much of an impression on me.
Optimus and Bumblebee might be better examples, but “Me…Grimlock!” was a minor, and I mean minor, catch phrase.
I agree that anyone knowing of Boomhauer would necessarily know of King of the Hill. But the opposite is not (as) true.
I’d certainly heard of King of the Hill. I’d seen ads for it, or stills posted here. I knew it was a serial animated sitcom. I knew the name Hank Hill was the protagonist and the show title was a wordplay on his name. But that’s the sum total of my KoTH (see what I did there? 
) knowledge. Which means I have no idea who any of the other characters are. I still don’t, except now I know a smidgen about Boomhauer.
Not that I’m any sort of standard to emulate, just one data point among many.
That’s the work “probably” was doing in my sentence. I realize there are people who have heard of King of the Hill in passing, but even if they did, if they don’t know who Boomhauer is, they are exceedingly unlikely to know what he sounds like.
Mr. Belvedere pre-dates the GenX/millennial crowd by quite some time: