Exactly. For a joke to work, it has to have a connection with something real.
Bullwinkle can make a joke about pulling a large animal out of his hat because people are familiar with the idea of magicians pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Then explain the slap sound
Someone slapped the record player.
It’s just a bit of unexpected absurdity. You think it’s going to be one thing, then it’s something else altogether. It doesn’t really hold up to deep scrutiny, but it’s funny due to the silliness.
Which you wouldn’t hear as a slap. IMO
Little_Nemo’s theory depends on the idea that people would expect live music. IMHO, that’s not what they would have expected in 1959.
It did. People were very familiar with records skipping. For a joke to work you need to have that connection that is then subverted.
The other problem of the “joke is funny because they’re going cheap” is that the whole show is obviously cheap.
Kinda like the Milli Vanilli disaster.
A case of an apparent error being kept in the released version of the song is when apparently Denny Doherty comes in too soon with “I saw her” at 2:42 in The Mamas and the Papas song titled “I Saw Her Again” and it was decided that this sounded better than the version without this apparent error:
On a tangent from the above: Am I the only person who thinks the censored version of “Break On Through” by the Doors is better than the uncensored? At 1:15 of the song, the radio edit clips the word “high” from the lyrics. I think the cut-off sentence works better in the song than the complete sentence does.
Radio edit:
Unedited version:
On I Dream of Jeannie, Major Nelson and Major Healey lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida. In real life, astronauts lived in Houston.
The edited version was the only one I’d ever heard for most of my life. So on the rare occasion I happen to hear the original, it does sound off. I think that’s mostly due to what my brain expects to hear.
It’s very difficult for me to say which one “works” better. If the situation were reversed I’d probably think the edited version would sound wrong.
I could hear that …exactly…in my head, and I’ve always loved that little “stutter.”
Maybe without the repetition of “I saw her” he couldn’t have seen her again?
I’ve often wondered about that “mistake”. The backing tracks were previously laid down, and his vocal was an overdub - it could have been easily fixed by re-recording the vocal. Or, even with the primitive editing options in that era, the false entry could have been cut out. Maybe somewhere in the early rehearsals or early takes the mistake was made, and they liked the idea of it, and it became part of the arrangement.
John Sebastian did the same thing in “Darling Be Home Soon”
Or everyone was high/drunk, didn’t notice it, and they ran out of studio time/money to fix it… 
I saw a live performance that had a sort of stutter.
It was a band playing for a belly dance party. The leader/violinist liked what the dancer was doing with a particular section of music, so he just kept playing that bit over and over. Until the dacer turned around and said “Would you stop that!” 
In the movie The Right Stuff I thought it portrayed the astronauts living in Cocoa Beach. Were they actually living in Houston? Or was the movie mistaken?
That’s one of my favorite movies. There’s the big barbecue scene near the end celebrating the astronauts’ moving to Houston, but I don’t remember anything specific about where they lived before that. There’s a scene just after Grissom’s flight that suggests NASA has provided a shot-term hotel in Florida for him and Betty.
In reality, the Johnson Space Center was constructed in Houston in 1962-63, and became the home base of the astronauts. I Dream of Jeannie started in 1965, so Houston would have been correct by then. Not that I expect reality from that show, but setting it in Florida didn’t really add anything.
Heh, that reminds me of the time I was at a flea market where people were selling records and tapes and Focus’ “Hocus Pocus” was playing over a PA system. The vinyl started skipping just after the yodelling starts: “Yo-dee-oh-doh, yo-dee-oh-doh, yo-dee-oh-doh…,” over and over for at least a few minutes until someone finally got to it: “Yo-dee-oh-d…WHAP!” (audible scratch).
The Spielberg poll I started in the “Polls Only” thread got me thinking about the film Duel.
In the phone booth scene, the truck driver blows his horn before he smashes into the phone booth, giving Mann just enough warning to jump out of the way. It took me many viewings before I realized the truck driver wanted him to escape. He didn’t want to kill Mann, not just yet, anyway. He’s like a cat playing with a mouse. What he wanted was to continue the chase (and probably to disable the phone).