Jokes that, nowadays, need explaining

don’t make the connection now - but go back to a time when no one not from a border state was familiar with Mex/Tex-Mex food, and a restaurant opening and handing off translation of its menu to some one not particularly fluent in Spanish.

For further examples, it does not have to be burritos or Spanish. How about “farfalle” and “mostaccioli”? Or (back to French…) tablier de sapeur?

I do suspect the tropes specifically about French restaurants have to do with (especially American) “cuisine classique” restaurants and social class clashes. But, who knows, there may be some old jokes about alien Italian food or Chinese food or Mexican food that would need to be explained nowadays.

How many people have heard of Billie Sol Estes (1925-2013)? He was involved in a fraud/scandal involving agricultural ammonia in Texas in the early 60’s.

Allan Sherman had one of his humorous songs about him (from “My Son the Celebrity” - 1963) based on the song “Billy Boy”. The audience is laughing then - they wouldn’t have a clue of who/what he was singing about today.

Yeah. I feel like I have to footnote Tom Lehrer songs too. “Massachusetts has three senators,” etc.

I have a tattoo near my left armpit (ouch). Back when I got it in ‘98, I’d tell people I got a tattoo honoring Monica Lewinsky. Then I’d lift my arm and show them. Most people laughed.

Nowadays when I show someone the tattoo, a bird, specifically a swallow, I don’t mention Ms Lewinsky.

Speaking of Tom Lehrer, I’d always heard a bunch of praise for his song “New Math.” I was rather bemused, when I finally listened to it, to discover that the “new” method that he seems to find so confusing is just Borrowing, which is the way I was taught to do subtraction. Meanwhile, his description of “the way we’ve always done it” sounds like utter gibberish to me.

I was educated in “the New Math,” so it’s what I find natural. I would definitely need an explanation of the way that Tom Lehrer was taught to subtract.

Here’s a bit of explanation of “the old method” Carry (arithmetic) - Wikipedia (it amounts to the same thing of course, but was apparently taught as a method without explanation)

There were so many jokes about New Math. And cartoons, including a handful of Peanuts strips. I still remember Sally crying “How much is two and two?”

https://www.commondreams.org/sites/default/files/schulz.jpg

Yes! It’s a central part of my response to people complaining about Common Core math. I sympathize with them and offer to play them a song that mocks the newfangled way we teach kids math. Then I reveal that the song is 55 years old and describes the way they grew up learning math.

The fact that we’re learning new ways to explain concepts to children, and we haven’t stopped trying to improve, is a feature, not a bug, of educational policy.

How about pasta “whore’s style” (puttanesca) or “Brother Devil” style (Fra Diavolo)?

The April Fool’s joke one year:

Wikipedia source

It doesn’t have to be an unfamiliar product to fool morons.

For dessert I’ll have some nun’s farts and goat turds.

Don’t forget the Spotted Dick.

I watched an episode of All in the Family last night. The joke was about where they were changing giving phone numbers with the telephone exchange name to three numbers (like Beachwood 4 is 234). The funny part was when she realized that the two numbers were the same.

Yeah that was definitely part of folk law in the UK when I grew up, but until I heard that song I didn’t realize that the reason that April Fools worked is at the time spaghetti was a weird exotic food in the UK.

Explain, please?

Just the opposite. MSG doesnt have the effects it has been maligned for . Proven by double blind, etc. It doesnt cause headaches or migraines, etc- except by psychosomatic methods. (You can bring on a migraine by thinking you should have one!)

Cologne and Düsseldorf are the two biggest cities at the Rhine and only 50 kilometers apart. There has been a local rivalry for hundreds of years between the two. Now Kölsch is the native brew of Cologne (Köln in German) and is almost exclusively served in Cologne bars and pubs, whereas Alt is the Düsseldorf native brew with a similar status there. You just won’t find pubs in Düsseldorf that serve Kölsch as well as no Cologne pub that serves Alt, and if you make such an order, the bartender or server will automatically assume that you want to wind him up. It’s almost a kind of taboo, at least a VERY big faux pas.

Different brews are often regional in Germany, and there are more fuck ups of that kind possible (don’t order a Pils in Munich, for example), but ordering ALt in Cologne or Kölsch in Düsseldorf takes the cake.

Hell, I still show it most years to my elementary students, and then ask them what they think, and get kids saying, “I didn’t realize you could grow spaghetti on trees!” It works because we’re super conditioned to trust the authority of boring British man voiceovers.