I think we all have seen Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd’s 1970’s SNL skits where they play the Festrunk Brothers, two ‘wild and crazy guys’ from Bratislava (which is Slovak and not Czech, but that’s another point) who came from Czecoslovakia to America in search of freedom and “big American breasts”.
As with Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford impression (the likeness was uncanny isn’t it?), is there something behind this skit that audiences of the day, but perhaps not people like me born in 1976 would automatically get. I mean was there some exodus of oversexed eastern Europeans here at one time? Were Czechs viewed as horny devils? Is there some arcane stereotype here I am not getting? Do Czech men really wear tight leisure suits and “swing”?
Why pick on the Czechs? Maybe they were just a ‘safe’ group to pick on, since there are no Jesse Jackson style Czech-American activists to worry about…who knows?
I think they were making a play on the fact that Communism had repressed Czechoslovakia - and that once those men got free, they were two wild and crazy guys!
They weren’t allowed to be wild and crazy in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s. Heck, my great-granddad went back to Moravia in 1975 to see his relatives (who he’d left behind as a child to come to America). When he got there, they all thought his claims of being an American were some kind of KGB trick. They refused to speak to him, and so his great trip home became the great waste of a trip (though he did take some great pictures).
Kind of a WAG here, but I think the humor came from the fact the the TWACGs thought their clothing, style, and attitude were studly and what American women found attractive. The joke was that they didn’t get how lame and overblown (even by 70s standards), but sweet, they were.
Half-Polish myself, we used to have relatives and family friends come and visit from time to time or stay for a while when they first immigrated here. Also sometimes family in Poland would write asking us to buy music not available there and send it to them (lots of ELO during the mid 80s). Some of their ideas of what was hip, cool, or fashionable in America could be considered odd or out-of-date. So I can see how SNL could take the idea and exagerate it for comedic purposes.
Back around 1980, a woman named Andrea something wrote a book called My Russian Journal. I came across it and read it a few years back. She and her husband were exchange students at Moscow University in 1979, and she related in the book how the Russians were so gung-ho about American stuff that they would do all kinds of wacky things:
To them, Hippie equaled American. So lots of young little hippies running around Russia. (In 1979. That had to be funny.)
Jeans were nowhere to be found. Blackmarket for jeans was probably more profitable than the market for gasoline.
American music was very cool. Again, major blackmarket for the stuff.
Sometimes, their desperation for American stuff led them to some bad mistakes. At a concert, Andrea once spotted a girl wearing a shirt with a pro-KKK message. She asked the girl if she knew what her shirt said in English. Girl had no clue, but said she adored it because it came from US/UK. :smack: