I was watching a rerun of Soap. This was back when interracial couples were seldom shown on TV, but Soap had already shattered some norms and this was nothing new for them.
Danny Dallas falls in love with a black woman named Polly. Her brother wants to kill him. Danny decides it’s best to have their families get together, so he invites her family over for dinner.
Danny’s family is nuts. His brother Bob is playing cards with his ventriloquist dummy. His dad Burt was informed he only has 5 months to live, so he decides he wants to leave his mark on the world before he departs. He settles on trying to break the Guinness Book of World Records for bouncing a balloon. His mother Mary is pregnant, but doesn’t know if it the father is Burt or Burt’s alien double.
So when Polly’s family arrives, the situation is already tense. Polly’s brother still wants to kill Danny. Burt continues to bounce the balloon while attempting conversation. They eventually settle down at the dinner table. Bob brings the dummy over, and it bends over and says in a loud voice “So, I hear you’re a family of NEGROES!”
I remember that, when Vincent shoots Marvin in the face in Pulp Fiction, I instantly burst out laughing and almost immediately felt terrible about. But because Jules and Marvin are arguing about the state of affairs I quickly forgot my brief discomfort.
I’m pretty sure that in 1975 I made the single most horrifyingly inappropriate joke ever, and I realized it in about a half second and felt like slime, because however unintentionally I WAS slime.
The story: in high school I dated Jewish guy, and we had to go pick up his mother from a dentist appointment. He was driving his family car with me as a passenger. We got to the dentist, he goes in, and comes out without his mom, explaining, “she’s not ready to leave yet. The procedure took longer than they thought and left her woozy afterward; they had to give her laughing gas.”
I laughed and blurted (and nearly a half century later I’m still ashamed and can’t believe I’m admitting this), “well, they gas Jews, don’t they?”
Half a second later, I recognized just what a grotesque thing I’d said. I gasped, and exclaimed, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I just said that, that was terrible!”
To his credit, my boyfriend didn’t kill me on the spot. He simply agreed with me: “Yeah, that was a horrible thing to say.”
Decades later, I still feel like slime for saying that. No excuses, but the explanation is just that I was young and hadn’t quite figured out how to manage my dark sense of humor yet.
When I was a teenager, my friend and I got high and walked over to the local burrito place. While we’re waiting for our food, this little old lady comes over with a tiny dog. She ties the dog’s lead to a chair and goes in to get food. The thing is, the chairs at this place are this super light weight rattan, and it only takes a few moments before the dog manages to pull the chair over. The sound scares the poor beast, and it takes off running, now pursued by the chair it’s still tied to. Luckily, they’re a young woman nearby who immediately leaps into action, sprinting after the dog - because my friend and I are incapacitated with laughter. Like, that weed laughter where you just cannot stop. We’re just getting it under control, when the old lady comes out and asks in a querulous old lady voice, “Where’s my dog?” And we both lose it again.
I think our order came out right about then, and we split. Took a few years of maturing before I realized what little shits we were. She probably thought we’d done something to her dog, based on how we were acting.
I hope that girl caught her dog and got it back to her. Sorry for being a shitty teen stoner thirty years ago, ma’am.
I also laughed at that, but it was one of those cringe laughs. Like when you laugh at someone who has taken an embarrassing fall.
The one that embarrasses me lately is laughing at all the people reacting to being frightened by a guy behind a bushy tree branch on a busy walkway in San Francisco. I laughed all through dinner watching his antics. The whole restaurant we were in was laughing, so I guess I won’t be alone in hell.
It’s a scene from The Odd Couple that is so inappropriate today, but still makes me laugh - and feel bad about it - every time. One of the funniest bits they ever did on that show, and the actors involved seemed to be very good sports. I hope they don’t mind.
I wouldn’t rank this scene that highly among all the funny bits in the Odd Couple series. It is somewhat funny, it makes Felix the butt of the joke as he acts stupidly around little people, and treats his daughter with the same kind of lack of consideration of the feelings of others. It didn’t make fun of the couple he was photographing. To act that way in real life would be inappropriate, but like the scene described in the OP it is fiction making a point about real societal behavior so I don’t see the scenes as inappropriate at all.
Wasn’t the use of the word ‘negroes’ pretty much non-PC by the late 1970s, and as a result was part of the joke? I mean, it was supposed to be wrong in a funny way, not because the word “negroes” is funny, but because it was out of the pale, even back then, especially right in front of Polly.
I’m not sure why you’d feel bad for laughing at that joke. It’s not all that different from the Odd Couple little person scene; Felix is the butt of the joke, not the little people.
I thought of this one earlier today when I was out walking around the neighborhood. The city runs a vo-tech training center nearby and one of the things they offer is driver’s ed classes. So I frequently see “student driver” cars driving around the neighborhood at about 10 mph.
The classes seem to be taken by a lot of Asian or Middle Eastern women who likely never had the opportunity to learn in their country of origin.
One day when I was driving home I saw the driver’s ed car, which pulled over to the curb and then everyone got out and started changing places so that someone else could drive. And I blurted out (to myself) “Chinese fire drill!” And once I stopped laughing I felt kinda bad. At least nobody heard it but me.
Something I still laugh about that my mom told me. Her and dad were at their goto watering hole and someone came in proclaiming “I just got back from burying my sister”. And my dad said “I hope she was dead”.
I like stupid puns and wordplay. And I laughed at a highly inappropriate one and felt like slime. You may remember it:
There was an airplane crash at San Francisco International Airport. The plane was from Asiana Airlines and the pilots were Korean. Three people were killed and many were injured.
Someone called in a fake story about the disaster to a reporter with made-up pilot names for her to read on the air. She breathlessly read them without realizing she was being pranked or how the names sounded. The fake pilot names were:
Sum Ting Wong
Wi Tu Low
Ho Lee Fuk
Bing Dang Ow
When I heard this I’m afraid I laughed hysterically and then slapped myself. I’m a bad, bad person.
