Mayberry, the Beverly Hillbillies and Hee Haw were jokes on southern folk and their perceived backwards ways. We used to be able to make fun of seemingly unsophisticated white people.
The first time I showed my son Superman (1978), when Clark Kent about to switch to Superman, he stops by a phone kiosk, gives it a disapproving look, and moves on. I remember this getting a huge laugh when I saw it in the theater, but thirty years later my son looks at me with a “What just happened?” expression. I had to explain to him about Superman and phone booths.
Thanks. The last time I watched that was probably 1975.
Just checked - you’re right. Snails, and brains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJROfaeLfvc
I have a couple of copies of the WPA Guide to New York City from 1939 and they have to give descriptions of ravioli and minestrone, plus things like tortillas, tacos, smorgasbord, shish kebab, pilaf, and chow mein.
Yes, exactly! “Escargot” and “ratatouille” are supposed to be hilarious alien names (as I assume were “pizza” and “gumbo” once upon a time), but does the trope/joke extend to, say, Chinese restaurants? Does it go without saying that everybody is familiar with “pockmarked old woman bean curd”, “ants climbing a tree”, and “husband and wife lung slices”?
Longhorn steakhouse (a chain) offers them as a side. My dad tried them and was unimpressed. I dislike Brussels sprouts, tried one and was not repulsed but not impressed, either.
When I was a kid in the 1970s a popular joke on those old Dixie joke cups was “Why don’t hurricanes have male names?” “Because they’d have to call them himacaines.”.
can we extend this to whole tv shows? in a thread about mash i realized that no one born after say 1985 or so wouldn’t get most of the anti vietnam/military/war jokes and commentary …and will need grandpa to explain it to them…
It might depend on where you live, but they’re fairly common around me (Washington, DC).
My younger sisters and I all love Brussels sprouts, spinach, and artichokes. I like them boiled, steamed, or however they are prepared.
A couple of years ago my mom joined us on a cruise, and wouldn’t touch any of these vegetables. I asked her about this, and told me she hated all of them. To which I said, “What?? You made those for us all the time growing up!” She said, “Sure, but I never ate them.” 
I told my sisters about this, and none of them ever noticed this growing up, either.
I think Friends generally did a decent job of avoiding current references so as not to become dated (answering machine plot lines notwithstanding).
But I recently saw the first-season episode in which Monica and Rachel date doctors played by George Clooney and Noah Wyle. George hands over the bottle of wine they’ve brought and says, “From the cellars of Ernest and Tovah Borgnine.”
This is a riff on the once-ubiquitous commercials touting wines “From the cellars of Ernest and Julio Gallo.” Even though Gallo wines are still around, those commercials are not. Furthermore, young people may have no idea who Ernest and Tovah Borgnine were. So this one eight-word line manages to need two explanations.
Has it been long enough for this one?
What’s the opposite of Christopher Reeve?
Christopher Walken!
There was a long series of jokes that appeared in SF magazines as “Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot,” which were flash fiction stories that ended in an involved pun. (They even gave their name to literary form – feghoots). Several were riffs on popular songs of the day, so the puns, though very clever, are meaningless today.
One of my favorites has the punchline, “A gritty pearl is Michael, L.L.D,” but there’s the classic “The furry with the syringe on top.”
Yeah whenever I think of bad boiled foods I think of the Brits, from boiled ham to boiled eels.
I feel people being personally angry at weathermen for being wrong about the weather is also a joke/sitcom plot that was all over the place prior to the 2000’s you never see anymore, both due to advances in weather forecasting technology and also a lot of stations now have attractive women as the “Weather Girl” so presumably you wouldn’t take it so personally. There were so many sitcom jokes about a weatherman saying that today was going to be nice and sunny, then it cuts to obvious rain storm, then somebody penning an angry letter to the weatherman.
So I randomly listened to my Dad’s CD of British comedy songs from the 1950s and 60s. The premise of one of them was a working class londoner bemoaning the fact his wife insisted on feeding him weird exotic italian “pasta” and “spaghetti” rather than good honest British chips.
It required explaining that in my dad’s memory “pasta” and “spaghetti” were considered weird exotic foods in the uk rather than boring unimaginative staples. Nowadays that same stereotype would try and order “spaghetti bolognese” in some far-flung exotic restaurant (I literally just read a a travelogue where this happened)
I’m not. Are these real Chinese dishes?
Absolutely. All three are popular Sichuanese dishes.
Pock-marked old woman bean curd = mapo tofu = bean curd with spicy minced meat
Ants climbing a tree = mayi shang shu = bean thread noodles with ground meat in sauce
Husband and wife lung slices = fuqi feipian = spicy beef offal slices served cold
Now imagine going to a restaurant where the menu is in Chinese, or at most has the names literally translated, and not daring to ask the waiter to explain the dishes!
Cf. is a “burrito” something you would order without explanation?
Although nude beaches were only slightly more common then, the idea of swimming nude was much more common – as discussed in the several threads here about swimming nude.
Most of the nude swimming in the 60s and 70s that 80’s sitcom watchers would have been referencing would have been just at secluded locations with difficult access. The idea that a nude beach would have a sign saying “nude beach” was just a plot device.
A burrito? Sure. You know it’s going to be food rolled up in a large tortilla. Most places will tell you what comes in it, as well as let you pick the type of meat (prices may vary).
“Waiter, can you describe to us what a Little Donkey is on this menu?”
I doubt most people in the US even make the connection between the two.