Here’s his compatriot, Hal Douglas, doing the ultimate turn-of-this-century trailer:
The movie In a World… looked at this phenomenon.
Mary Tyler Moore show: Mary’s talking to Rhoda after Georgette caught Ted kissing another woman. Ted claimed she was a vacuum cleaner salesman who was knocked cold when the electric plugin shocked her, and he was giving her mouth-to-mouth.
Rhoda: You gotta give Ted credit. That is quite a story, bringing a vacuum cleaner salesman back to life.
Mary: You ever hear a story like that before?
Rhoda: Once, on Kathryn Kuhlman.
Kuhlman was a televangelist faith healer who had a weekly TV program in the 1960s and 1970s called I Believe In Miracles.
Speaking of televangelists…
What did the cops find when they cleaned the makeup off Tammy Faye Bakker?
Jimmy Hoffa.
Not too long ago, I was watching a quiz show (probably Jeopardy!) where the obvious answer to a clue was “Jimmy Hoffa.” None of the contestants had any idea of who he was. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had never heard of the Bakkers, either.
I’ve heard of references to Jimmy Hoffa as some guy that went missing, but I have no idea who he is. I always assumed it was mob-related.
Right, he was a crooked labor leader who had threatened to squeal:
Here are the Bakkers:
Interesting. I listened to a podcast recently about the Bakkers. It was about the business failure of Heritage USA.
I would have thought that Scorcese’s recent film The Irishman, which is largely about the Hoffa case, might have brought it back to prominence.
Before that the go-to reference for mysterious disappearances was the Judge Crater case in 1930. I’m sure very few people would get that now. I recall a Mad satire of Lassie in which she found a host of lost people, including Judge Crater, who said “Is anyone looking for me?”
Awhile back I was in the waiting room of some doctor and was watching some game show where the answer was “Soupy Sales”. I had to explain to the younger man next to me who that was.
Did the contestants on the game show know who he was?
I seem to recall that one of the contestants answered.
Another reference to him was in the movie ‘Juno’ from about a dozen years ago. The teen protagonist and her peers are about as died-in-the-wool as “millenials” as ever there were. Juno observed that one of her classmates’ home always smelled of soup, and once referred to her as “Soupy Sales”. Pretty insightful kid, but I wonder if her peers got the joke, though she figured they would.
Not too long ago, my daughter (born in 1995) heard Soupy Sales mentioned on TV and just laughed.
“Who?!?” she said.
I corrected this flaw in her education by telling her the “I’ll send you a postcard from Argentina!” story.
I would say ‘Picky, picky, picky!’ more, but I don’t think anyone I know has heard of Pat Paulsen (for President!).
Your collection of friends must be well under 60.
With a 209 minute run time (three and a half hours!), limited theatrical release, limited commercial success (according to wikipedia, it brought in around $10 million but cost $280 million to make) but good critical reviews means it’s a good prestige piece for Netflix, but not something that’s likely to pull Jimmy Hoffa’s name back into pop culture.
I was wondering the other day if people watch Jack Nicholson in The Shining, and don’t know what he’s referencing when he says, “Heeeere’s Johnny!”
One thing that needs explaining off the bat in that video is the “pretentious moi?” line. Similarly with all the Fools and Horses jokes
The idea that casually dropping french phrases is a pretension to sophistication, isn’t a thing anymore I think (at least any more than casually using any foreign language could be consider pretentious). Its no longer the case that French is the go to language (the Lingua Franca even 
) of sophisticated cultured classes. Outside of cooking and fine dining, I think that’s a relic of 19th and 18th century Europe that has finally disappeared.
I’m under 60!
I doubt Miss Piggy would agree with you. 