In Joshua, there’s a scene where Joshua and Father Pat are headed into the pool hall. Behind them is a fund raising sign, complete with thermometer, that reads: PLEASE HELP US SEND FATHER TORDONE TO ROME.
I guess they intended to reinforce the plot element of Father Tordone’s impending trip to Rome, but he isn’t that well liked as a priest, and the sign sort of sounded to me like they were begging for help to get rid of him.
My personal favorite “Dark Shadows” flub was between Barnabas and Julia. In the scene, Barnabas doesn’t recognize Julia (because of the show’s convoluted time travel scenarios), and wraps his hands around her throat. Minutes go by, as Barnabas and Julia stay on camera and Barnabas stammers “You…you…you…” Finally, Julia blurts out “You’re not going to kill me are you?” To which Barnabas utters “Oh yes! Yes! Yes! I’m going to kill you!!” Cue the cliffhanger music…
On a different track, there was the infamous moment when Martha Stewart appeared on “the Early Show” when she was grilled with questions about her insider-trading scandal, while furiously cutting up vegetables. "i just (CHOP) want to focus (CHOP CHOP) on…my…salad! (CHOP CHOP CHOP!!!)
When I was growing up in central PA, all of us watched the WNEP-16 news out of Scranton. Its lead anchor was the elderly Nolan Johannes, a charming if sometimes scatterbrained man who would sometimes pepper the news with his own off-the-cuff editorials.
Anyway, one time I saw a teaser for the noon-time news program that Nolan was doing the voice-over for. The picture was of a shopping mall, and the voice-over went something like “At 12 o’clock, at the shopping mall…oh, no (something unintelligible).” In the background, you could hear the entire crew laughing uncontrollably.
That was almost as good as the time Joe Zone had to wear a bag over his head for a week, or when because of a power outage, they had to do the whole newscast in the parking lot…during a snowstorm…with hand-drawn weather maps.
I haven’t seen it in years (and only saw it once) but I remember a scene in Commando in which the Governator and a woman are driving in a jeep and collide at a pretty high speed with a telephone pole or something similar. After which, they immediately hop out, completely unharmed, even though neither one was wearing a seatbelt. I thought the sheer unreality of it was hysterical.
Oh! Oh!
The beginning of Lawrence of Arabia, showing Lawrence’s fatal motorcycle accident.
When I saw the restored print at the beautiful Princess Theatre in Edmonton, the entire audience broke up at the cutaway shot of his goggles swinging on the small branch after apparently being thrown clear of the crash.
The scene was supposed to have some gravitas, but it clearly came off as slapstick. I wonder if it was originally received that way or if it only seems that way now that we are used to much more graphic films.
There’s a really cheesy movie that I dimly recall seeing parts of about 20 years ago called “Lovely but Deadly” or some such nonsense. Completely MST3K worthy and probably was done.
In it, two small sailboats, you know the kind - about 12’ long with the thick compressed foam hulls, collide head on at about 1 mile per hour and both EXPLODE into flames.
In general, any scene from any episode of the A-Team where 30 guys stood around in circles waving machine guns at each other and no one ever got hit.
I woke up slightly hungover one Sunday morning, turned on the TV, and started watching the old Spiderman cartoons from the 80s (not the ones with Firestorm and Iceman but about the same era). Spiderman is chasing Electro (IIRC) and as Electro’s running away, Spiderman says “Not even OJ Simpson can get away from Spiderman!”
It meant one thing when the episode was made, a whole 'nother thing when I saw it. I laughed my ass off.
And then, there’s a bountiful crop of “Star Trek: Next Generation” moments:
-“Encounter at Far Point” - Counselor Troi: “I sense such…pain, and (tries to snarl) anger! Terrible, terrible anger!!” not to mention terrible acting.
-“the Game” - Wesley struggling vainly as he is held down in a chair, with Cmdr Riker closing in on him with a game headset…
-forget the episode name, but has a subplot with an ensign developing a crush on Data - Data: “Ensign (what’s her name) has just given me, what might be described as, a “passionate kiss” in the 'torpedo bay”…"
-“Remember Me”- Dr. Crusher: “If there’s nothing wrong with me, then…perhaps there’s something wrong with the universe!”
There’s a moment in an early Doctor Who where a man in a giant ant costume crashes into the camera filming him.
One of my favorite: I went to see Gone With the Wind with my girlfriend-at-the-time and some friends of ours. It was showing on the big screen–not the first time, obviously, just a few years ago. So we’re sitting there…and sitting there…and the melodrama and bad stuff is just piling up. And the girls are caught up in it and the guys are just dying in their seats of boredom. And then, like 3/4 of the way through the movie, Scarlett is sitting in a cart, yelling at this donkey and beating it with a whip. And then the big fake donkey just falls over. “Dead.”
I don’t know if it WAS that funny, but it took us a good five minutes to stop laughing.
I may have listed this earlier, but there is some Steven Sagal movie out there (and I know they are all laughably bad) but in this one he wakes up from a 10 year coma, just in time to elude a professional hitman in a daring chase through the hospital. Why’s that so funny? They whole time he’s lying flat on his stomach on a gurney – wheeling around with a mop for a pole – as a group, we were all just dying through the whole sequence, which may not be as long as I remember it – but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph it was killer funny.
I remember that one. IIRC Innes didn’t just shove Sharpton, he clipped him on the jaw. He was angry because Sharpton kept interrupting him (they were supposed to be having a semi-formal debate, where you were allotted a certain amount of time to speak).
Innes: “You had your chance, brother! You had your chance!”
Sharpton: “That’s a load of crap!”
Innes: [BAFF!]
Roy Innes was also in the middle of the infamous Geraldo show brawl, where Rivera got bonked by a chair.
A favorite moment of mine is when Pierre Berton carved up his hand pretty good while trying to do a cooking demo on the old Peter Gzowski show. I think I am the only person to have seen it though; nobody else remembers it. It was on Canadian TV, so that narrows down the audience quite a lot right there, of course.
Berton, who is an author, not a chef, got tired of waiting for the food processor to stop, so he put his hand on the slicing blade to stop it. He never did finish making those scalloped potatoes.
Last night I was watching TV & there was an ad for a political party…a very excitable candidate yelled “I HAVE A PLAN, A TWO POINT PLAN, THE FIRST PLAN IS TO LOWER YOUR TAXES, AND SECOND! SECOND IS…” and then the commercial cut out and immediately the ad for Texas Chainsaw Massacre came on with the woman screaming “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!”
I was watching the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson one night in the early 80’s when they went to a commercial, but instead of a commercial, there was a lengthy clip from a Marilyn Chambers movie.
Manduck, that’s doubly funny since it would have been right after the traditional title-card with the caricature of Johnny, captioned with MORE TO COME…
It was Hard to Kill, and it’s one of the most unintentionally funny movies I’ve ever seen. My friends and I started counting how many times the bad guys called him a “son of a bitch” in the movie. “Storm! You son of a bitch!”
I mean, Christ, they killed his wife and kid and put him in a coma for (not 10 BTW, it was like 2 I think) years and HE’S a son of a bitch? But you’re right, the gurney thing was a gutbuster.
Also unintentionally hilarious and very disturbing was his game of mercy with the bully in the bar in Alaska in his anti-oil-company movie which name escapes me.
Isn’t ANY Segal movie pretty much unintentional comedy? I mean, the dude is hammier than Shatner.
I recently saw the infamous clip of an anchorman talking about loose cows on the highway. He read the prompter wrong and called the cows “Black” and “Gus”. When they went to video footage of the loose cows, he went on to say, “Oh, that must be Black right there. Or maybe that’s Gus?”
He honestly didn’t have a clue why everyone in the studio was cracking up until someone pointed out to him that the cows were, in fact, “Black Angus” and not two cows named “Black” and “Gus”.
That one makes me laugh just thinking about it.
Oh! Oh! That reminds me of another TV-show-to-commercial incident, from a year or two ago. I was watching The Hitler Channel–of course, it was a documentary on the Holocaust. The voice-over said how the Nazis tried machine-gunning and then carbon monoxide to kill their victims, but then found that inventing gas chambers was more efficient.
Cut to German car commercial: “Germans have always been very proud of their engineering skillls . . .”
Many years ago. Watching the Yanks on Ch. 11 with my bro. This back with Phil Rizzuto and Bill White.
To set the scene, Scooter was famous for rattling on about nothing in particular, and White would gently urge him back to the game. Always funny. Great chemistry between the crazy Scooter and the dignified White.
Director cuts to full screen image of a beautiful full moon.
Scooter: Lookit that, White. What a beautiful full moon.
White: Sure is, Scooter.
Scooter: Wow, that is so clear. That’s so clear, White, that you can even see Texas. Wait, White, Texas ain’t on the moon!
Don’t know what White said, cuz me and my bro were pissin our pants.