In my childhood, EVERYTHING was B&W. We didn’t get a color TV until the 80s. (The whole thing of The Wizard of Oz turning color was lost on me.)
But, I did watch DvD in syndication. Could be.
Or Mel. Could have been Mel and Buddy.
There are a lot of possibilities, any of the shows mentioned already are good candidates. I don’t see any reason it would be a ‘dirty’ word based on the OP, there’s enough of a joke there without any specific word. It does sound a lot like Ed Asner on the MTM show.
Thanks all. I think it’s going to be one of those things I’ll just have to stumble across someday, flipping channels.
I’m sure this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but a similar exchange happens in Gangs of New York. Here’s a clip. I know, its not an old sitcom. But maybe your memory is making a mighty leap of conflation?
I haven’t watched GoNY yet. That’s a futuristic conflation!
Rio by Duran Duran?
Sounds quite subtle.
If it’s DvD it sounds like an exchange between Alan Brady yelling about a script with either Rob or Mel.
TV.com says the show ran during the daytime on CBS from 1965-1969 and syndication from 1969 on, so it could be possible.
Of course, out of all the possibilities mentioned, onlyHerchell Bernardi and Herb Edelman really had anything more than a passing resemblence to each other.
I am delurking to say that this reminds me of a Mary Tyler Moore scene but with Murray Slaughter and Ted Baxter. Ted is going over the news copy that Murray wrote. Of course being Ted, he can’t read it and then just pretends he never saw it written out before.
I am mostly likely wrong however, and I will go back to lurking now.
Hmmm…maybe more than one show used the joke.
If they were characters on *Marry Tyler Moore, *the questioner would have to be Ted Baxter. Based on the show’s character dynamics, the other person would probably be Murray, with a lesser probability of Lou Grant.
The only other possibility would be Radar and Col. Blake on MASH.
I’ve got the first four seasons of MTM on DVD, and there are several scenes sort of like this between Ted and Murray. I don’t remember one like that verbatim, but I do remember one where the implication was that Ted thought something was a dirty word until he heard Murray say it. The laugh was slightly delayed while it dawned on the audience what word Ted thought it was (MTM was filmed live). I can’t remember what the word was though. I think MTM is on Hulu now-- you could watch them.
Ted was always mispronouncing words on air-- it was sort of a running gag. Once, when Murray carefully went over all the difficult words in a broadcast (eg, “Phnom Penh”), Ted goes on to stumble over his own name when it comes up on the teleprompter.
Come to think of it, Les Nessman used to mispronounce words a lot, but he wrote his own copy, and it’s a little late for the time frame.
Or maybe Frank Burns and Radar? :dubious:
Could the word have been Fornicator? Someone unfamiliar with the word might think it pronounced For-nik-at-or. There was a British comedy a while back (set in a stately home with Paul Shane as the butler IIRC) which had this as a gag.
The work could have been “awry.” I know a lot of people who knew the word to use in conversation, and still didn’t recognize it the first time they saw it written. Ditto “segue,” but “awry” is funnier. People think it looks like “AW-ree.”
This was a joke on That Girl. Ann’s father Lew was pissed off when Donald caught him out mispronouncing the word around the breakfast table (Don thought Lew was just trying to be funny). It wasn’t until he checked in the dictionary that he believed Don was right.
I’ve never seen that episode, but I can personally name three people (one is my husband), who, as children, could use “awry” correctly in a spoken sentence, and understand it when they saw it written, but not realize it was the same word.
Yup, awry, he was pronouncing it aw-ree. I think they were at her parents house in Brewster in that episode.
FWIW, it took me a while to link “AW-ree” to “a-WRY,” even though I had seen the word in print many times (and I was reading at university level by the time I was in sixth grade).
The same with “misled.” For years, I thought it was pronounced “MY-zeld” and failed to make the connection with “mis-LED.”