Thanks! I’ll have to rewatch that one.
I just posted about the Full English Breakfast in a different thread and it reminded me of the old trope about English food being atrocious. This likely started when WWII food rationing created poor quality cuisine that lasted generations. And it didn’t help being so close to France with their fancy-pantsy haute cuisine. You don’t hear the trope much any more because British cuisine (to the best of my knowledge as an American with a dead English mum) improved greatly in recent generations.
Let’s not forget the Cranes collaborating on Frasier to put Marty’s “She’s Such a Groovy Lady” down on paper so he could submit it to Frank Sinatra. That episode ended with the song being performed at the funeral of a hated aunt, after Sinatra rejected it.
How about celebrities serenading sitcom stars with songs that mirror what’s happening in their lives? They can be part of the story (as often happened in shows with, e.g., Lucille Ball and Danny Thomas) or just appear magically out of nowhere:
I hope I didn’t miss this one when looking through the thread. But one I used to see a lot, but don’t recall in a long time, is having a baby in an elevator. I remember it on All in the Family, Benson, Night Court, and a couple more. Has it been done more recently?
Maybe a baby born in a taxi?
Just dropped in to say that I understood that reference.
Likewise!
For a while there were jokes on different shows about scrambled HBO or porn. That wouldn’t work now.
When was the last time you saw the “person is accidentally given a posthypnotic suggestion and starts acting compulsively without being aware of it” trope?
This was the plot on today’s episode of That Girl, which apparently ran through the entire catalog of tropes over five seasons,
I saw that one on “The Greatest American Hero” in the 1980s, and it came up on The Simpsons and Monk.(in both cases with a character regressing to childhood) -and of course a post-hypnotic suggestion is a significant plot point in “Office Space”
I hope this hasn’t been mentioned already, but that reminded me of the trope that getting hit on the head gives you amnesia. Come to think of it Monk did that one, too.
I seem to remember an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where it happened too. IIRC, Rob started to act drunk whenever he heard a phone ring.
Somewhat similar: on Friends, Chandler is smoking again and the gang try to get him to quit. Rachel gives him a “sleep-tape” that a friend gave her; the idea is to play the tape as you are falling asleep and you absorb the message subliminally. However, among the “stop smoking” messages are phrases like “You are a strong, confident woman.” Subsequently, Chandler is getting in touch with his feminine side: putting on Chapstick like it’s Mac or Estee Lauder, getting out of the shower wearing a towel just under his armpits, stuff like that.
Yeah, the post-hypnotic suggestion trope is a good one.
I think Voltaire characterized British cuisine as having “only one sauce”. The food has improved but always suffered from comparison to France or Italy. “To eat well in England, have breakfast three times a day” also predates rationing. Still, good fried fish and late night curries should count for something.
Main character decides to call in sick from work/school to do something more fun but doesn’t want work or their family to find out it’s a lie.
Proceeds to walk around in public and keep accidentally encountering someone who could blow the whole sick excuse. Spends so much time avoiding other people they find they wasted the entire day. Then they find out either something exciting happened at work/school or they all got off early regardless.
Happened all the time in sitcoms but I think social media and phones killed this trope too (though it also happens all the time in real life)
The corollary to this is the employee skipping work to go to a ball game, attracting a ridiculous amount of attention during the game’s telecast (by interfering with a play, or getting into a fight with one of the players, or some such), and then going to great lengths to keep the boss from watching the sports report that night. This of course was before the days of social media and “going viral.”
The quote I remember is, “England has forty-two religions and only one sauce”.
When one of the executives on Mad Men (Duck Phillips) arrived in the U.S. from a stint in England, he expressed interest in putting on weight. Patting his trim waist, he lamented, “English food!”.