I made a Charlie Brown and Lucy joke to my barely-20 coworker.
He didn’t know who they were. And Snoopy was just a plush animal to him. No knowledge of the cartoon.
Canadian edition:
What do you call a politician who tips over outhouses? John Turner!
“… and curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid get”
(He introduced tobacco to England)
That was “git,” wasn’t it?
Told to me by a young boy- “Why are Michael Jacksons pants so short?- They arent his!”
I tried to watch Laugh-in when is made a brief come back with re-runs. The jokes were no longer funny, they were so topical. (and of course- many of the jokes were not funny when the show first aired, but there were lots of them).
A riddle and a question that doesn’t play to the younger crowd.
Q. What do you get when you cross a Polish person and a Mongolian with one leg?
A. A Polaroid One-Step
Because most young people today are not familiar with vinyl records-
Q. On the “A” side of a standard 45 RPM record, how many groves does it have?
A. One
It was “get” - both printed on the White Album lyric sheet and audibly pronounced /gɛt/. To rhyme with “cigarette” in the previous line, the topic being tobacco. Although Lennon was so tired, he had another cigarette - he was tired of cigarettes too, which is why he curses Raleigh.
Back when AIDS was just beginning, one of the first things epidemiologists noticed was that it struck Haitian men a lot. So they looked at what might be causing this in Haiti (some environmental pathogen?).
That was a mystery until they noticed later that it struck gay men in the U.S. and elsewhere. The thing was, all the Haitian men getting AIDS were gay, but admitting to being gay was very dangerous in Haiti, so the connection was not made until the disease spread to other gay populations.
Anyway, the joke way back then was “What’s the hardest thing about getting AIDS?”
Answer: Trying to convince your parents that you are Haitian.
(Because admitting to homosexuality way back in the 70s was also difficult in places outside of Haiti.)
Sounds like git to me, and that’s certainly a close-enough rhyme. Plus, what’s a “stupid get”? “Git” in English slang fits perfectly.
Also, every lyric site I checked (yes, they are not definitive) lists it as “git.”
I owned the original release on Apple Records. It came with a printed lyric sheet.
“Get” is standard English. “Git” is dialect. Now git, consarned varmint.
OK, what’s obsolete about that? Wite-Out is still in common use, and it’s still just as airheaded to use it on a computer screen as it’s always been.
I don’t think that it’s the lack of historical knowledge that hinders people getting that one…
One that happened to me, personally – I completely did not get that the woman who speaks jive in Airplane! was Barbara Billingsley (June Cleaver) until others explained it to me. I mean, I still though it was funny that an old white lady spoke jive, but I guess I didn’t get the joke on the same level older audiences did.
For the record, I just turned 46 last month. Airplane! was released the year I was born.
Is it, though? Particularly among people under 40, who’ve never used a typewriter?
I suspect that Airplane! jive scene will fly over the heads (
) of a modern audience for a lot more reasons than the actress. What is Jive and why is that black guy talking like no black person a kid born in 1990 (so age 35 today) has ever heard? Even if that “kid” is themselves black and urban.
I’ve seen wite-out used to correct hand-written documents. But the use on typewritten documents has gone to zero as typewriters have gone to zero. If a screwup is noticed on page 4 of something on the computer, just reprint the page. Or, if you’re blonde, the whole 500 page document. Just kidding.
I’ve told this before, but my bro was married for a few years to a naturally blond woman. Who had a bumper sticker that read “Dumb blondes have dark roots.”
I listened to many episodes of “Fibber McGee and Molly” from the 1940s. Some of the comedy held up pretty well, but not the references to Westbrook Pegler or James C. Petrillo.
I will bet that a lot of Tom Lehrer’s funny songs don’t work for modern audiences. Yes, a couple are timeless, but most are topical.
I’m not as familiar with the musical work of Allan Sherman. But it’s pretty stale now too. I’m blanking on the names of some other comics doing the same kind of material: essentially stand-up set to piano music.
I suppose the whole oeuvre of Borscht Belt stand-up comics would be near incomprehensible to modern audiences, whether delivered as prose or in song.
I’ve seen that many times, so definitely a joke in America as well.
That it came from immigrant prejudice is obvious. Many or most of the late 19th/early 20th century immigrants didn’t speak English and therefore were thought to be stupid, a stereotype perpetuated today. The issue is why Poles in particular.
Lateness may be an issue. The use of Polack was negligible until the 1940s, and most say Polish jokes are a post-war phenomenon, from the 60s and 70s. Think of Mike Stivic, “Meathead” and “dumb Polack” in All in the Family, made Polish because he couldn’t be Jewish at the time.
Yet the Irish, Swedes, and Hungarians were earlier the butt of widespread stupid stereotyping. I can find jokes made about them, but they never seemed to sweep the country. Maybe All in the Family did in fact start the craze, using Poland as a made-up target for Archie.
Back when I was in high school or maybe college I found some humorous postcards my mom had purchased when she was in college (because Mom is a total packrat who never throws anything out, ever). They included a joke about the students hijacking the political science classroom to Cuba or something along those lines. Yeah, that joke only worked in the late 1960s.
This may be incomprehensible to a non-British audience from the get-go. But anyways:
Did you hear about the couple who didn’t know the difference between vaseline and putty? All their windows fell out.
I think Vaseline should be understandable
I think putty may be window glazing in American English
j
So? The joke doesn’t depend on typewriters at all. And the fact that it’s easier than that to fix computer errors is, well, the entire point of the joke.
And yes, students have asked me if they could borrow some Wite-Out.
Assuming you mean what I think you mean, we usually call that substance “caulk”. If I heard “window glazing”, I’d assume you meant either the glass itself, or some sort of coating on the glass.