The movie Airplane! had three joke suicides (although the last one changed his mind at the last minute, he accidentally killed himself anyway).
But then there was Borat. And before that there was Ali G. In fact, Sacha Baron Cohen seems to have made a career out of stereotypes - or at least caricatures. Can’t think of another (more-or-less) contemporary example of that sort of thing, though.
j
Possibly Don Novello, best known as Father Guido Sarducci?
We don’t get SNL here (UK) so I had to look him up. Yeah, I see what you mean.
j
having a "weenie roast " ok what this was you built a fire and cooked hot dogs or anything you could put a stick upright through pretty harmless right ? until me and a few people discussing it today realized the skewer of choice was cut up wire hangars…
Not to mention the effect from the metal getting red hot someone pointed out that the hangars were allegedly rustproof and wondered what chemical they coated them with for that effect,
Well, John Lovitz did that “Frenchy” character.
according to mark foster who sang the song, the song was was based off a mentally questionably friend and him finding the dad’s empty gun and the friend twirling it around like a cowboy and shooting it at a bus stop across the street … lyrically the shooting in the song never happened it was all in the kid’s mind …
In the 1960s Jackie Gleason had a very popular hour-long Saturday night comedy/variety show on CBS. Jackie did a monolog while holding a glass in his hand, which he would sip and say things like “OOOOH that’s good.” The implication was that it contained liquor, and with Jackie it indeed may have, though the drinking of liquor on TV was not permitted at the time.
More to the point, he had a weekly comedy bit as “Joe the Bartender.” Each week he would have a conversation with a character in the bar called “Crazy” Guggenheim, played by Frank Fontaine. “Crazy” was barely coherent, and the bit was hilarious. I’ve never known for sure if he was supposed to be a drunk or was brain-damaged, or both. (He sometimes talked about being a former boxer, and there was a syndrome often called “punch drunk,” which happens when someone takes too many hits on the noggin.) Either way, Crazy had severe mental problems which were played for laughs.
Neither alcoholic or brain-damaged would fly today, nor should they, but people thought some pretty odd (and awful) things were funny back then.
Parkinon’s Pugilista is a very real thing. Muhammad Ali is the most famous example.
IIRC Gleason would be holding a coffee cup, from which he would take a sip, and react, “Wow!”
Guests would react similarly: “Jackie, this is excellent coffee!” To which he might counter, “Coffee? Why you know we serve nothing stronger than lemonade on this show!”
You burn the coating off the hanger before you skewer the hot dog. Leave it in the fire for a few minutes and the coating turns to ash and you’ll find bare metal underneath. Same thing if you’re just roasting marshmallows.
We roasted marshmallows with whatever sticks we found on the ground
Here’s another one that wouldn’t play right today
Around 1970 or so: we were in a local 4-H “Share the Fun” competition, where the various clubs would put on skits or musical numbers. One that got kibashed was that “Joe the Bartender” sketch filled with stupid jokes. (Hee Haw had a similar routine with moonshiners.) The problem was the club (not mine!) had filled their see-through glasses with brown-colored water; at least it wasn’t actually liquor! The judges deemed the skit not appropriate, but added that if the glasses had clear water it would have been OK (I guess they never heard of gin or vodka).
Growing up in California, we heard horror stories about people using oleander sticks to roast their hot dogs. Scared me straight away from using “natural” implements.
Red Skelton had a character who was a punch-drunk boxer – Cauliflower McPugg.
Mentally handicapped people used to be comedy fodder - people who weren’t just foolish like Homer Simpson, but rather people who were clearly disabled. For example, in the radio show Duffy’s Tavern there’s a character described by the lead character, this way
a subnormal chowder head . . . a dope . . . a low-grade moron.
You have to forgive him. When he was born, the baby doctor was a little nearsighted and Finnegan got slapped on the head.
That has dropped off considerably.
So far I haven’t seen any mention of Fawlty Towers.
There was a character called Manuel who played the role of a fool,(unable to follow simple instructions, unable to learn, and always on the losing end of every joke, treated in a humiliating way by all the others, willing to let them hit him on the head or slap his face.)
He spoke poor English with a very heavy Spanish accent.
It might have been funny in the 1970’s–but it sure wouldn’t work today
Lynyrd Skynyrd - “Saturday Night Special”. A southern rock band doing a song with a decidedly anti-gun message? Not going to fly these days, at least not with today’s generation of Trump lovin’ redneck gun nuts.
I don’t think people see that as an attempt at any kind of realistic portrayal. I don’t know how those odd people in England envisioned what they had created but I think people see it as satire in the manner of Chico Marx. The terrible treatment of Manuel comes from Fawlty who we are supposed to think of as an unsympathetic clown, and that old racist guest of the hotel in the same manner. My recollection is the other characters treated his character well.
They still chant USA to Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A… I think you give them too much credit.