About a quarter of a century ago, when the 'net was young, I was reading Slate magazine. They had a feature called “The Breakfast Table”, in which they would get a small group of people, and have them write messages to each other as a sort of informal commentary on the news of the week. On one particular week, the writers were Eric, Daniel, and Jennifer Mendelsohn; three siblings who also happened to be authors, essayists, critics, and generally smart cookies. In the Monday column, Jennifer mentioned an item she had read about a strange neurological condition which caused people to laugh continuously, and she challenged her brothers to come up with a title for when Oliver Sacks (neurologist and author) wrote a book about it. In a moment of inspiration, and still being rather new to whole online thing, I thought of a title, and clicked the comment button to share it. I said it should be called “The Man Who Mistook His Wife, Please”.
I got a very kind reply from one of the brothers saying he laughed his ass off for five minutes. He was kind enough to mention me in one of the later columns in the series, and said Slate should sign me up. By some miracle of the information age, it’s still there. Conger, Schmonger--Be a Shrudilee
(For anyone who’s a bit confused, Sacks was somewhat well known for writing “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”.)
So, yes, at the right time and place (even if it never comes again), “take my wife, please” is still funny.
Some of these jokes are hundreds of years old. The Joe Miller Joke Book was first compiled in 1739.
So who was Joe Miller? He was an English actor at the beginning of the 18th century. And he was known for playing comedic roles such as Trinculo in The Tempest and the grave-digger in Hamlet. After he died, a playwright by the name of John Mottley published a book called, Joe Miller’s Jests, or the Wit’s Vade-Mecum in 1739. It was hugely popular, although it apparently had only three jokes attributed to Joe Miller. The subtitle of the book was, “A collection of the most brilliant jests; the politest repartees; and most elegant bons mots [clever remarks], and most pleasant short stories in the English language.”
The first edition contained 247 jokes, including thigh slappers like, “A lady’s age happening to be questioned, she affirmed she was but forty, and called upon a gentleman that was in company for his opinion. ‘Cousin,’ said she, ‘Do you believe I am in the right, when I say I am but forty?’ ‘I ought not to dispute it, Madam,’ replied he, ‘For I have heard you say so these ten years.'” Actually, that’s not a bad joke. But it isn’t exactly fresh. Over the years, the book contained more and more jokes. Its popularity, however, was its own undoing. Since everyone had read it, everyone knew all the jokes. So before long, “Joe Miller” became shorthand for a tired and unfunny joke.
I bet you could find a version of that joke on a hundred different sitcoms.
Want more? Gutenberg has one of the later versions from 1865, with 1286 jokes plus humorous poems.
It wasn’t. It was just something she could do. I never saw her do it in a routine just in the question and answer portion of the show. Some one would aske her to do it, she would do it, they applauded.
Related (perhaps) to the Bob Hope question is, how is it that some movie comedies of a certain era are (IMHO) not seen very often anymore – e.g. many of Danny Kaye’s movies, many of Jerry Lewis’ movies – being somehow old-fashioned; but some comedies contemporary with those, or even older ones (e.g. W.C. Fields’, Buster Keaton’s) are still funny.
I find quite a few classic comedic silent movies and early talkies funny, but never saw much that was humorous in Laurel & Hardy movies. To me, Hardy was a jerk and Stan was just a sap who made sad faces.
Abbott & Costello had a lot of the same dynamic and I didn’t think they were much of a scream either.
In graduate school, I had a classmate from California who’d worked in LA as a driver for visiting celebrities and VIPs, one of whom was Henny Youngman.
She told me about driving Henny around to drop in on his cronies at places like Magic Supply shops, reminiscing non-stop about his early career and telling her jokes that were already old at the turn of the 20th century.
“It was awful,” she said. “His stories were boring and his jokes were awful, but I had to laugh at them and pretend they were funny.”
I wanted to strangle her. I would have gargled with Drano and battery acid to spend an evening alone with Henny Youngman!
Agreed; I’m not sure that Burnett did it specifically for laughs, so much as it became identified with her (sort of like how she’d tug at her earlobe at the end of every show), and her fans came to expect it.
I always had assumed it had been part of a skit or joke at some point, and people were impressed by it and asked her to keep doing it.
If not that, then when did people first find out she could do it?
Every time someone says Bob Hope, I think Bob Newhart. I actually grew up not having any clue who Bob Hope, and I don’t even recognize him when I google him. I do not believe I have ever heard his comedy.
I believe Carol started doing the yell in sketches on Garry Moore’s old variety show, where it was relevant to the story. It just kind of caught on after that.
There may be some clips of this on YouTube. I seem to remember seeing a couple.
Her Wikipedia entry indicates that she taught herself how to do it when she was a child. How her fans came to know about it, I don’t know; it might have been in a skit, or it might have originally been something she mentioned in an interview.
I recently watched some of Carson’s interviews with Dangerfield, and most of the interviews were Dangerfield telling his jokes. That’s actually fine because he was so funny.