Yes! Many small jokes like this get overlooked by the casual viewer.
And very few people realize that the guy on the magazine cover is the director, Jeremiah Chechik. Or that Swede in A Christmas Story is that movie’s director, Bob Clark.
Or that the guy who directs Ralphie and Randy to the end of the ‘see Santa’ line is the author of the original material on which the movie is based (Jean Shepherd).
Dorothy: “How can you talk if you haven’t got a brain?”
Scarecrow: “I don’t know. But a lot of people without brains do an awful lot of talking.”
–The Wizard of Oz
In The Great Muppet Caper, at the climax, the Muppets try to stop Nick and his gang from stealing the Fabulous Baseball Diamond from the Mallory Gallery.
Naturally, they play baseball with it.
But it goes to another level when Scooter dresses up as a popcorn vendor and, at one point, goes up to Camilla.
“Popcorn, chicken?”
[Ron Howard] Hey, that’s the name of the show! [/Ron Howard]
Richard Dreyfuss in Down and Out in Beverly Hills yelling for someone to call 911 while holding a phone.
Frau Blucher (horses whinny) in Young Frankenstein telling the others to follow the light of the candles up the stairs. None of the candles are actually lit.
From Poirot, the tv show with David Suchet. Poirot and Hastings are discussing the case while washing dishes after a meal. Hastings washes a dish, hands it to Poirot, who is drying. Poirot glances at the dish, then hands it back without comment. Hastings washes it again and the cycle repeats with neither of them mentioning the dish being rewashed multiple times.
It’s very cute and gives honest insight into their friendship where they each accept the other without concern over their differences.
After Kinney gets blown away by literally like 100 bullets from ED-209 at the beginning of RoboCop in front of the horrified board of OCP, there’s a delay before someone cries out, “Will someone call a goddamn paramedic?!”
One of my favorite bits in RoboCop is when Emil (Paul McCrane) tries out his new cannon, blows up half the block and shouts “I… LIKE it!”
I thought he shot a 6000 SUX.
I thought that was Chevy Chase in Modern Problems (1981) in the ‘demon powder’ scene.
Clarence blew up Joe Cox’s car then Emil took out a storefront.
That line was ad-libbed and Verhoeven loved it.
Many people have laughed at The Killer Shrews, the incredibly cheap SF/horror movie from 1959, about an island infested with giant, dog-sized shrews (played by actual dogs). It’s a pretty bad movie, so the laughter is understandable.
There is, however, at least one line that seems to be meant to be intentionally funny. The heroine, the daughter of the scientist responsible for the giant shrews, is played by Swedish model and actress Ingrid Goude. She had a very thick Swedish accent. Which is strange, because none of the other characters are Swedish.
At one point, she confronts the hero over his lack of curiosity regarding the weird goings-on: “Don’t you wonder about the unusual things around here? The guns? The fence? The shattered windows? My accent? Anything?”
The MST3K guys: Ingrid was Goude, but James was Best!
As awful as the movie is, the ending is inspired — using the oil drums as armor and duck-walking to safety is ingenious.
Which makes me wonder: if they were safe in the oil drums and all of the shrews would be dead by morning, why did they have to go anywhere?
I don’t remember that, but good point.
You’ve just reminded me of the little joke in OUR MAN FLINT, where the scientists Doctor Wu and Doctor Schneider are played by an Asian guy and a German-looking guy — and you of course shrug and go with that, because, hey, why wouldn’t you? And when they finally meet our hero near the end of the movie, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it throwaway gag is that the Asian guy gets introduced as Schneider and the German-looking guy as Wu.
Gags like that always get a laugh. A group made a musical-comedy based on Harry Potter.
Several characters come one, one that is Asian. They then proceed to introduce Cho Chang to Harry, etc. They immediately greet the Asian girl…only for it to be one of the white girls that is Cho Chang.
It has always been kind of strange that the one* Asian character in Harry Potter is named Cho Chang.
*The Patil girls are of Pakistani or Indian decent, I think? I mean East Asian decent.