What is the unintentionally funniest thing you have ever seen in TV or film? Here’s mine:
I was setting up the bar a few days ago (I’m a bartender) and for some reason Walker: Texas Ranger was on the TV. None of us changed it. After awhile it started to grab my attention just because of the sheer absurdity.
Walker is involved in an SUV chase with some guy, who pulls off the road into a farm. The owners of the farm, a woman and her elderly father, are about to go up in their hot air balloon. The criminal hops out of his SUV and demands at gunpoint that they take the balloon up. It’s a balloon jacking! A brilliant move, because we all know that hot air balloons are the perfect getaway vehicles. And as if that wasn’t funny enough, Chuck Norris then gets in the other balloon and we are treated to a thrilling 4 mph hot air balloon chase.
third rock from the sun, last season when the writeing got really bad.
nina winks once way before the script calls for it. and then you can see shes thinking “I messed that up!”. but they didn’t apparently bother to reshoot the scene, I guess.
I recall almost 15-20 years ago watching the original “Morton Downey Jr. show” just due to the fact this was the most outrageous thing on at the time. Anyway, he had two guests on that night. One was Al Sharpton and the other was Roy Innis and they were discussing black leadership in general. Anyway, the exchange got pretty heated and for some reason both men stood up to confront each other. Roy got really angry at being touched by Al Sharpton and he pushed Al back in his chest. The momentum of the shove forced Al back. Al lost his balance and fell back into his chair which then tipped over backwards! All I saw what his feet flying up and at that point, even Morton started laughing at the absurdity of it all. He did a total backflip!!! To me though, the best part was watching Al Sharpton trying to regain composure after his accident. The shock on his face was priceless! Morton’s crew knew they had struck gold because when they took a hard break, the crew showed the “flip” in slow motion as they went to commerical.
It was soooooo funny. I wish I could see that again.
In Titanic, when the boat is sinking and is almost vertical and people are falling off of it. One guy falls and on the way down he bangs into something (I forget what) and makes this very loud “ping!” sound. It’s this long sad sequence of events but that moment is just so funny.
Oh, man, when I saw it, the theater had the Dolby cranked WAY up and the guy made a truly melodic GOOOOOOONG! as he hit the prop (I think that’s what it was). Man, they all hated me in that theater, cause I was just dying.
Part of the fun of watching old Dark Shadows episodes is that they don’t cut out technical flaws or messed up lines.
Occaisonally, the camera will be dollying and suddenly start to shake violently.
Actors change characters in different time periods but sometimes the other actors forget their new names.
The best cover of a flub. One of the characters is in a car accident. While describing it, he says, “I skidded the last 30 miles (pause, chuckle) it seemed like 30 miles, 30 feet”
There was a bit on Late Night, back when Dave Letterman was on NBC. He had a guest who raised exotic poultry and was showing his birds. They were actually a pretty impressive flock, and the main attraction was a truly beautiful and huge Rhode Island Red rooster strutting around on the table. Letterman was making his constant derisive wisecracks, of course, and I have strong memories of the following exchange:
Poultry guy: Shove him. Just give him a shove. [reaches out and nudges rooster] Shove him.
Dave: [reaches out, touches rooster, pulls his hand back.] Hey! He pecked me!
PG: See? He doesn’t like to be shoved.
Where a guy flashed on a live chat show (Kilroy) - funny because Kilroy is a smarmy pain in the ass and the set erupted into confusion when this happened and he was really caught off guard
At an awards show last year or the year before, when a famous daytime tv hosting couple (Richard and Judy) were accepting their award the top half of Judy’s dress fell down to her waist revealing her bra as she was saying her thank yous. It was like slow-motion. This woman is probably in her 50s and isn’t the most svelte of creatures. It was pretty funny and embarassing at the same time but they took it in good spirits - they kind of had to as the moment was re-run over and over again on TV the next day.
I had forgotten all about this, but I remember it now. It was the best thing in the whole movie, I laughed my ass off.
Another Third Rock moment: I forget the details, but there’s an episode that included some stuff about the Allman Brothers coming to play nearby Branson, MO (yeah, right). Tommy says “If I go with you, I’d just end up managing the Allman Brothers. And at this stage of their career, that’s just not a good idea.”
Ha-ha, it’s a “the band is old” joke. Well, Third Rock from the Sun is gone and the Allmans are still going strong. I think that’s funny.
A more recent moment: Stardust and I were sitting in her room the other night with her Californian roomate, cracking wise about futuh Guvunuh Ahhnuld. A lot of ‘groping’ jokes were made. He was only a few sentences into his acceptance speech when he said “I want to reach out to all the people of Kahleefawneeyuh.”
The Whose Line Is It Anyway? show where Ryan was doing Party Quirks as “Carol Channing whose head keeps sticking to things.” He went to stick his head on Drew’s desk and accidentally BROKE the tube of red neon on the front of the desk.
Any * Who Wants to be a Millionaire* contestent who fails to get passed the $1,000 mark, and burns their lifelines trying. I laughed for about two days after somebody went out on the first question.
This happened a few weeks back on Countdown with Keith Obermann (MSNBC). They did a segment where he interviewed a psychic about the upcoming California election. The interview itself was unremarkable, except when the psychic said she got her info from her dog and felt compelled to add the dog didn’t actually talk to her but “channeled” (I wish I could get my neighbor’s dog to channel instead of talk, especially late at night).
Anyway: interview ends with the usual goodbye and thanks from Obermann. But instead of saying goodbye, the psychic (off camera) asks a question to the effect. “So what are you going to ask me about?” Obermann, to his credit, doesn’t dredge up any of the old psychic jokes, but lets the question hang (but since he appeared ready to keel over in laughter, he may not have trusted his voice). After about half a minute he moved on to some schtick they had been doing which begins with Obermann drawing a numbered ping pong ball from a squirrel cage. But he fails to latch the door properly, the cage promptly does a 180 and spills ping pong balls all over the studio. Obermann loses it. He eventually begs the director to go to break. The director stays on him and lets him suffer.
Yeah, they finally let him back on to pimp “Willard”. He was no more normal, but better behaved. They, IIRC, replayed the clip and talked about it briefly. Crispin said nothing about being drug-addled or anything to really defend himself beyond saying that he had been in self-defense courses at the time.
Okay, this was sometime during the '80s. The Cowboys were playing some team I can’t recall and Jim Lampley was one of the sportscasters covering the game. I swear this is real, maybe somebody can coroborate this story.
I know there has to be a tape circulating somewhere.
So anyway after a commercial break we cut back to the studio but Lampley wasn’t given a heads up. He was in the middle of eating and so he just goes right into reading the prompter but with a mouthful. And I mean a mouthful.
Gets better. So he decides that his mouth is too full to speak clearly and he grabs some of the chewed food and places it aside. He continues on like nothing ever happened still chewing.
I could have just died!
I figure that he thought it was just a voiceover and he couldn’t be seen.
Wrongo!
So for awhile after each commercial break they were cutting back to shots of the crowd in the stadium and they’d hold up hot dogs and stuff offering them to Jim.
Whew!
I still recall one actor saying, “This is the tomb of my incestors. [Pause] Did I say ‘incestors?’ Of course, I meant ‘ancestors.’”
I also fondly recall a line from Miami Vice, which I saw first-run. Don Johnson was in a hotel room with a classic Vice chippie of undefinable accent. She looked longingly at Don and purred in a sultry voice, “When I meet the man I love, I geeve heem everytheeng he wants. I geeve heem everytheeng he needs. I geeve heem everytheeng he wants to need, and everytheeng he needs to want.”
