^ “Come on, come on, don’t you realize this is costing me money?” 
Do they they ring the sense of you call a 800 number and actually hear a phone ringing until someone picks up? (which is the basis of the joke) Nowadays any time I call a telephone number for a large organization (or any organization that’s not the hole-in-the-wall takeout place down the street) it goes straight to a “thank you for calling Acme, your call is important to us, yada yada” message.
My kid was the worst picker in his football pool, and the loser had to do a set at a comedy club. Somebody (me, the wise dad) said “Don’t worry about being funny. Just tell stories about how weird your family is.”
It worked, people laughed. And it was less stress than “telling jokes”.
The first time Bugs Bunny said “What’s up, Doc?”, it absolutely brought the house down. It was in response to a hunter (probably Elmer Fudd) pointing a gun at him, and instead of doing what a real-life rabbit would probably do, Bugs is just so sly with him.
I have a vague memory that it was a parody of Jimmy the Greek.
Since we’ve covered anchovies, I’d like to mention a staple of 80 TV shows, commercials, and comic strips: Brussels sprouts. The go-to horrible tasting vegetable. Even Kids Next Door had an entire episode revolving around a hallucination-inducing Brussels spout.
I have both eaten and seen them for sale precisely once in my life. I haven’t gone to a single restaurant that offered them. (In my experience, the go-to vegetable dish is usually broccoli, asparagus, or a root vegetable such as turnip; a few offer zucchini.)
Black Angus and a number of independent eateries have had Brussel sprouts as a side dish on their menu for the last few years. However, they roast them with butter and seasonings which makes a big difference in how they taste. Brussel sprouts got their reputation as a standard “Yuck” food when they were prepared by being boiled. Boiling ruins the texture of Brussel sprouts by turning them into soggy and rubbery globs and destroys their flavor so they taste acrid and bitter.
Spinach was also a go-to horrible tasting vegetable before people stopped boiling it and began eating it raw in salads instead.
Another thing about brussels sprouts is they don’t taste the way they used to. Back in the late nineties they developed a new cultivar of brussels sprouts which was significantly less bitter and that’s now the standard brussels sprouts you see sold in stores.
The downside is it turned out the chemical that gave brussels sprouts their bitter flavor was also the chemical that gave them a lot of their health benefits.
No it wasn’t. It was a question about whether Janet, who appeared to be a prim straight laced teenage girl, was really a bad girl. It was a tease/flirt.
No it wasn’t, it was a reference to MSG in the food having that supposed effect (has this been proven?).
This is less about translation and more about knowing that steak tartare is actually raw meat.
It still hits true in places like Belgium, where their variation of raw minced meat with spices is called Americain. It seems to get every American over there, unsurprisingly.
There’s a sidequest in Witcher 3 I always assumed were a reference to that Asterix sequence:
Geralt decides to investigate the ruined manor that belonged to a cheese fixated mage (There’s even a word for that: tyromancer)
You must navigate a maze of toxic cheese fumes that will explode if ignited by your torch. At the end of the quest you will receive a special longsword. It hasn’t got a name, so Geralt decides to name it Emmenthaler!
Even back before the 90s, Brussels sprouts tasted just fine… if you cooked them properly. It’s almost never a good idea to boil vegetables, and I’m still not sure how America got its decades-long fixation with ruining them that way.
The joke about being hungry predated American knowledge of MSG by several decades. MSG only started to be considered an issue starting about 1968. I heard the “hungry again” joke by 1960, from jokes in movies from the 40s.
Yes, MSG existed; you could even buy it for home use (Accent). But the joke was far older than the connection with Chinese food.
I think it’s one of those things that came from the Great Depression - people were so used to eating questionable food, that they developed a habit of boiling it to death to be sure they didn’t get sick. After all, if you’re starving, you’d generally rather have weird mushy food that fuels you than food you can’t keep down. People coming out of the great depression acquired a lot of weird habits, and it will be interesting to see what weird stuff Millenials and Zoomers end up doing 20 years from now.
I assume boiling vegetables started with frozen vegetables. Off season canned or frozen were the choices for green vegetables in much of the country. I never encountered fresh brussels sprouts as a child, frozen was all I ever had to force down my throat to avoid worse consequences.
Mask fetish.
How about jokes like, “How many elephants can you squeeze into a phone booth?” Heck, I barely remember phone booths. People younger than 25 have probably never even seen one outside of old movies. Now, they have iPhone charging stations instead.
Maybe they’ve just advanced freezing techniques since the old days, but frozen brussels sprouts work fine for roasting or steaming (they even have ‘steam in bag’ ones that are not bad). Also while boiling is a good way to get a frozen vegetable into edible condition, doing a thaw-cook on frozen veggies doesn’t require the ‘boil them to death’ technique that results in the sad, mushy stuff that kids hate.