Shows like Ted Mack’s were what all the old farts watched on TV before going to bed early on Sunday evenings. Lotireg is “Geritol” spelled backward.
https://www.definitions.net/definition/serutan
Clever, eh? 
“Geritol and Serutan” would be a great stage name for a comedy duo, or a morning drive-in radio show.
This will resonate more with people who grew up before cable – and who remember the products.
‘Twas Brillo and G.E. Stoves
Did Proctor-Gamble in the Glade
All Pillsbury were the Tasty Loaves
And in a Minute Maid…
New Ajax
laundry detergent
is stronger than dirt,
is stronger than dirt,
is stronger than dirt!
I’d never heard of Serutan before reading Bored of the Rings and this was back in the 70’s. The 'Arrowshirt, son of Arrowroot" went over my head too.
And in a recent commercial about turning into your parents, an older woman says to the young wife, “Oh you have a tattoo. You don’t work?”
I find those commercials hilarious, especially Dr. Rick.
I remember a bunch of homophobic jokes about AIDS, back in the 80’s. Won’t post them, because they’re hateful. But most of them would not be incomprehensible today.
This one, though, would (and it’s not quite as mean-spirited as others, so I don’t mind posting it. Nevertheless, I apologize if it offends any Dopers):
What’s the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your parents that you’re Haitian.
For those of you who don’t remember the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, the initial reporting of the disease was that it struck mainly gay men and Haitians. Also, homosexuality has less of a stigma, especially among young people, than it did in the Reagan era.
Ah, Ethnictown, where hardworking immigrants dream of becoming lazy, overfed Americans.
—Homer Simpson
Also intravenous drug users. So of the three, being a Haitian was most socially acceptable. (Actually, other ways included being hemophiliac or having received a blood transfusion, but those wouldn’t have made a good joke.)
Partly because they were too true. It really was hard for hemophiliacs and people who had received blood transfusions to convince other people (including health workers), that they weren’t injecting drug users. Injecting drug users were /always/ trying to convince people that they weren’t injecting drug users.
There are a lot of old jokes based on gay stereotypes that just flop now because the stereotype is outdated. As a general example, there are a good number of jokes that hinge on the ‘fact’ that all gay men, and almost only gay men, have anal sex, or the idea that a lesbian couple has a ‘takes the role of a man’ and ‘takes the role of a woman’ partner.
Two specific examples: the joke in Heathers that leads to the “I love my dead gay son” line, where they plant mineral water with the bodies of two football players and it’s treated as conclusive proof that they’re gay. At the time it was loosely associated with homosexuality (though even in 1990 it seemed out of date to me), today ‘mineral water means gay’ doesn’t occur for anyone unless they’re referencing that specific scene.
Another one is that Jerry Seinfeld who recently complained that college kids didn’t laugh at his joke about people holding a phone like a “gay French king”. He claims it’s that kids these days are too PC and ready to take offense, I think that it’s because the idea of ‘gay’ indicating frilly clothes and using exaggerated gestures is dated and doesn’t occur to people. (That is, they don’t find the joke offensive, it just doesn’t parse quickly if at all, and then by the time they figure out there’s not enough substance for it to be funny).
Yes, but I was talking specifically of jokes about AIDS - one about what “AIDS” stood for, another about an HIV wing on a hospital, that was an ugly pun on Six Flags Over Georgia. I sincerely hope that people wouldn’t find them funny nowadays, but they would get the joke.
And as funny as *Airplane!" is, I really doubt the character Johnny would fly today, since his persona is based almost entirely on the old stereotype that gay men are effeminate.
FWIW, Stephen Stucker was actually gay and died of AIDS.
Well excuse me for living, Anita Bryant!
From joke references to song references, the Doors’ “Touch Me” quotes from that jingle. I’m sure most people today don’t get it.
There are so many jokes from the 90’s until now about movie trailers starting with IN A WORLD and having a deep voiced guy narrate them, there was an M&M commercial that aired as last as last year that parodied it, but I just realized, do movie trailers even have announcers anymore? It seems like since 2005 at least movie trailers just have the in-movie dialog narrate itself with maybe a few expository texts on screen. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie trailer that had somebody else not in the movie narrate it, or a movie trailer that started with the words IN A WORLD.
That deep voiced guy was Don LaFontaine, a voice actor who narrated the vast majority of movie trailers in those days. Hell, he pretty much helped invent the modern movie trailer back in the 1960s. “In a world…” was kind of his catch phrase in a way.
LaFontaine passed away in 2008. I kind of wonder if that had something to so with that.
Johnny didn’t fly back then, he was on the ground control team.
But that’s not important now.