Only if they sold their television and DVD player to pay for the gifts.
You indirectly raise a point I’ve been trying to remember when I’m posting paragraphs from home, not one-liners from my phone.
From the ~1880s to ~1950s, NYC held almost a lock on both show business and on publishing. Likewise there was a large (overwhelming?) Jewish presence in showbusiness in that era. As a result, one heck of a lot of the rest of the country learned a lot about how things are done in NYC and about the foibles of Jewishness. Despite having little to no personal experience of either.
Starting in the late 1950s show business diversified a LOT. As did publishing. It’s not nearly as NYC-centric as it was when I was a kid or the decades before.
Lots of jokes of that era were be set in NYC to NYC sensibilities and were understood by people from elsewhere. People today all over the USA are more cosmopolitan, but paradoxically are less NYC-aware than they were 50 years ago. The cultural messages are a lot more spread out than just NYC.
e.g. Lots of classic 1950s-1960s Bugs Bunny bits assume NYC culture and local knowledge. As a kid from LA I slowly pieced together some ideas about NYC from those gags and all the others on all the shows. Mad magazine? Pure NYC culture. etc.
A non-NYC kid from the 1990s or now has a lot fewer cultural cues about NYC embedded in all the entertainment that kid takes in. As such jokes that assume NYC familiarity will fall flat for those kinds of kids. And one hell of a lot of 1940-1960s humor assumes just that.
I used to collect the Truly Tasteless Jokes books. I don’t remember the setup exactly, but it involved John Belushi and John Lennon going to a dinner in Heaven, but it got called off because Bobby Sands came early and ate all the food.
NYC-centric attitudes still exist. We do the NYT mini crossword every day, and sometimes there is some clue that depends on knowing NYC culture or slang. Whoosh it goes right over our heads. I bet they don’t even know they are doing it.
In The Rocky Horror Picture Show there’s a scene where Frank asks Brad if he has any tattoos. Then Frank turns to Janet and asks her.
Back in 1975, the audience laughed at what was an obvious joke. Of course, Janet doesn’t have a tattoo; women don’t get tattoos.
Back when I worked at an archive assisting visitors with their geneaology or historical research, I’d occasionally have an older patron who would gush about how much better everything was back then. After one patron left after gushing about the past for a while, I turned to my coworker, twenty years my senior, and said in a badly done New England accent, “Do you remember a time when women stayed in the kitchen and Negros knew their place? Pepperidge Farm remembers!” She thought it was hilarious, but most young people probably don’t remember those Pepperidge Farm commercials from the 70s and 80s. (I stole the joke from an unknown comedian I saw on television many, many years ago.)
About ten years ago, someone in my office made a joke about CB radios and CW Mcall’s “Convoy.” Our intern, in her early twenties, had no idea what we were talking about, so we hopped on YouTube and introduced her to the song. She didn’t know anything about the CB craze and was absolutely floored someone made a movie based off the song. Good times.
I sometimes listen to old radio programs and have run accross jokes that have
lost thier meaning unless you are aware of the history of the period. Shows like
Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, etc. occasionally make jokes about
events or people that are now almost forgotten. Here is one joke built
around the lyrics Istanbul, Not Constantinople, a song that would probably be
forgotten if band They Might Be Giants didn’t revive it in the 1990s.
Istanbul, Not Constantinople by Jack Benny
I would guess that there are many jokes in old movies and literature that
would make no sense to those of us who are living here in the early 21st century.
It’s “window putty” to me.
Don’t think I’ve ever seen a double-glazed window in a private residence.
Or the reporters knocking over the row of phone booths.
Laugh-In, back in the late '60s. Santa is sitting in his sleigh, talking to his reindeer: “All right – that’s the last stop. We can go home now!” Castro lookalike in the back of the sleigh stands up, holding a .45: “One moment, Senor Claus… .”
Back in '76 or early '77 I met a bunch of German teens who were performing at the Iowa State Fair. They knew a lot of jokes I did, but they told them as Ostfrieslander jokes rather than Polack jokes.
Typo, or intentional joke?
There was a comedian back in '89 or '90 who did a routine, dressed in a football uniform and talking about “dain bramage”. “Because a mind is a terrible thing.”
When I was in eighth grade we told Helen Keller jokes and dead-baby jokes.
Link doesn’t work for me.
I admit, that part was lost on me, too. Especially Leslie Nielsen – Besides Airplane! I mostly knew him from the Naked Gun movies. I had no idea he used to be know as a dramatic actor. I pretty much always thought of him as a comedic actor.
Oh, here’s another one from Airplane!:
- Steve McCroskey: Gunderson, check the Radar Range. Anything yet?
- Gunderson: [gets up and opens the door of the Radar Range microwave, which is roasting a turkey] About two more minutes, chief.
No younger person today knows about the old Amana Radar Range microwave. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a YouTube reactor who actually got that joke.
This is a bit of a hijack, for which I apologize, but this statement astonishes me. In practice it has been illegal to install a single glazed window in a UK home or business property since 2002. You can still have an existing single glazed window, but in most circumstances you can’t replace single glazing with single glazing.
j
Reminds me of a joke that wouldn’t work on a younger crowd today, mainly because the people it involves are no longer in the news.
A sports talk show is going to have three guests on today’s show: boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and hockey player Paul Coffey. But something happens, and while the show will go on, it only has time for two guests. The producer asks the host which two of the three he’d like to have on.
The host thinks a minute, then says, “Give me Coffey with Kareem, hold Sugar.”
That’s strange. It worked for me when I posted it. Here is the link:
And NYC itself has arguably shed many of those “NYC sensibilities” in the last 50 years - including the distinctive local accent.
i hope I didn’t sound like I was ragging on NYC & the people there. I agree that NYC has become less provincial than it was when I was young.
I now live in Greater Miami. AKA NYC’s 6th borough. Both permanent transplants and folks who mostly live up there and come down here a couple-few weeks per year are everywhere.
They all most certainly have an accent that is very distinctive. Now I can’t say how much NYC and the rest of the northeast has sort of blended into one mélange I’d call “Urban Northeast American” versus e.g. Baltimore, Philly, Jersey, NYC, NYS, and Boston all sounding very distinctive.
But nobody from up there sounds anything like like a Midwesterner, Southerner, Minnesotan, Californian, New Englander, etc.
So I’m wondering what “distinctive local accent” you’re referring to that’s been / being shed. I’m not necessarily disagreeing; just not on the same page yet.
All the windows in my house are double-glazed.
Last place I lived in with single-layer windows was about 1985 in a cheap apartment.
The HVAC expense of a house with single-pane windows must be horrific.
I’m tragically no longer a younger person, but I never got that joke, either. I assumed it was just absurdism that one of the complicated-looking panels in the flight control tower was actually a microwave.
Plus the Head Cheese asks in effect “How far away are they from the airfield; what is their range on our air search radar?” But he words it “What’s their radar range?” Which is not a bad way to ask the question in a real control tower, but it invites his idiot sidekick to look at the microwave oven marketed as a “Radar Range” instead. What a stoopid sidekick!
And as you say, the incongruity of air traffic controllers roasting a turkey at work just adds to the silly-stupid tone of the whole gag.
Same, especially since there is another scene where someone opens another similar looking screen and removes laundry from it as if it were a dryer.