Dirty jokes on old TV shows

I read once that on an early Tonight Show, Jack Parr introduced a well-endowed actress to the accompany of the bass drum: And here’s (BOOM BOOM) Jayne Manfield’s.

The censors objected.

Hah! It’s not as if that’s anything new. Jane Russel got all those jokes over a decade earlier. They renamed the Frank Sinatra/Groucho Marx movie “It’s Only Money” as “Double Dynamite” when Jane Russell joined the cast. The posters for The French Line read “Jane Russell in 3-D. Need we say more?” They advertised “The Outlaw” by having skywriting planes draw two circles.

Jayne Mansfield was even more brazen than Jane Russell. And they objected to two tympanis on TV?

Me too!
Sometimes when I watch I wonder whether Dorothy was in her cups or not. I personally enjoy it when she is teased and becomes quite snippy. But for malapropisms she is the best on the show.

I used to think TV was getting a lot raunchier as I got older. And it is getting raunchier, but I just didn’t get a lot of the jokes when I was younger! :slight_smile:

I recently caught about 2 minutes of a Bewitched rerun in which a man asked a woman if she was a thespian, and the woman acted outraged until someone explained that he was asking if she was an actress. Considering it was on a family sitcom from the late 60s, I thought that was pretty close to the edge.

The line was “Here they are, Jayne Mansfield!”

Or the ever popular “Jane Russell in 3-D. It will knock both your eyes out.”

BTW, Mansfield was first noticed in Hollywood when she deliberately dropped the top of her bathing suit during a press junket promoting a Jane Russell movie.

Some great ones were heard on the original Hollywood Squares:

Peter Marshall: According to Cosmo, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think he’s really attractive, is it okay to come out directly and ask him if he’s married?
Rose Marie: No, wait until morning.

Peter Marshall: According to Ann Landers, is their anything wrong with getting into the habit of kissing a lot of people?
Charley Weaver: It got me out of the army!

Peter Marshall: In “Alice in Wonderland”, who kept crying “I’m late, I’m late?”
Paul Lynde: Alice, and her mother is sick about it.

Fans of the original Squares will remember those and a ton more. :smiley:

I can’t remember the name of the movie or the man who starred in it (I seem to remember it being Cary Grant, but I’m really not sure), but in one scene, he wasn’t dressed and there was a knock at the door and the only thing he could grab to put on was a woman’s frilly bathrobe. He made a remark to the visitor that went something along the lines of, “I’m going all gay today.” That was a bit of a surprise!

Bringing Up Baby.

It was from Bringing Up Baby (1938), in a scene between Cary Grant and May Robson:

And that last line wasn’t in the script — Cary Grant ad-libbed it.

Or just use Google. :wink:

Rolf the Dog, The Muppet Show, in the course of a song about cruelty to fruit, claimed, “I’ve even balled a melon…”

Yowza.

But 1938 seems early for “gay” to have acquired its current connotation. Anyone know the timing of this?

The panel on What’s My Line? was using the term to mean “lively” and “fun-loving” through the end of the 50s.

Actually, it’s quite late. The word started having the meaning of “homosexual” in the 1890s (the OED has a first cite as an adjective in 1897). However, the meaning was not generally known to the straight world until the early 1970s.

Gays kept it among themselves, using it as a way to approach other men. If you met someone and weren’t sure if he was gay or straight, you could say, “Are you interested in a gay time?” and the person’s reaction would show his sexual orientation.

In addition to the “gay” line in Bringing Up Baby, a little later, Grant is again asked what he’s doing in the woman’s robe, and answers, “I’m just waiting for a bus on 42nd Street.” More gay slang: 42nd Street in NYC was where gays would look to pick up men; if challenged by the police, they’d say they were just waiting for a bus.

On an episode of MAS*H, the doctors were in the O.R., and as usual, Hawkeye was hitting on a nurse. Frank, miffed, asked Hawkeye, “Are you gonna knock it off?” Hawk replied, “That’s what I’m trying to find out!” Went right by the censors.

I am watching Cecil & Beanie with my kids. (Cartoon from 1961).
Lots of word play and puns. They sailed to No Bikini Atoll. Cecil was quite excited by this.

BTW: I never saw these before, I am too young but they are very funny and were done by Bob Clampett of Looney Tunes Fame. The kids love them. I rented them from NetFlix.

Jim

At least a couple of times, Red Skelton had a situation where a woman had fainted and he had to pick her up. He made a hilariously awkward show of picking her up from behind without putting his hands on her breasts.

Thus, he could:
look foolish,
make a breast joke, and
poke fun at censorship.

No, the line was “I’ve even made a melon bawl.”