You know, in a casual post- Pulp Fiction/ Family Guy/ Kevin Smith/ Joss Whedon kind of way? Were there old shows and movies that did this? Certainly movies like Airplaine! had gags that refer to plenty of other movies, but not to ‘pop c.’ all around (tv shows, etc.); and for a tv show to have characters shooting the crap and talking about other shows or movies couldn’t have existed before the 90s-
or did it? 
I’ve no doubt whatsoever that vaudeville comedians would use then-popular books or plays as punchlines, and carried over the practice when they started performing on radio and then television. Certainly the animated cartoons of the thirties and forties were loaded up with references that might’ve seen hilarious and topical to their original audiences, while we scratch our heads and wonder why Bugs Bunny saying “I’m only t’ree and half years old!” is supposed to be funny.
What was the earliest TV series or movie to do this? Well, draw up lists of the first ten TV series and movies, period, and I’ll bet one of them sneaked in a reference somewhere.
Okay, no, earliest doesn’t matter- you’re doing what I want: let’s talk about the kinds of pop-c references old shows made, and which ones made the most for their time.
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950-58) was very postmodern; it acknowledged that it was a TV show, and that the stars were actually “Burns and Allen,” and during several seasons George watched the “set” from offstage on a TV!
Wasn’t Jesse James alreadfy legendary when *The Great Train Robbery * was made?
I saw a great silent film of Buffalo Bills Travelling Show.
Didn’t they hire Wyatt Earp as a consultant for some early westerns?
Raymond Knight was paroding radio on the “Cuckoo Hour” back in 1930.
The Jack Benny radio show did that in the 30s and 40s. There were lots of shows that happened “just before the show went on the air” as the actors raced around trying to get to the studio. Not sure if it’s actually a pop culture reference, but of course Benny was also always talking about his nemesis radio comedian, Fred Allen. They’d also talk about current movies sometimes, and various movie stars.
The Burns and Allen radio show probably did that as well, though I’m not as familiar with it.
But you know…I’m having trouble thinking of old movies that did this kind of thing a lot. Most of the examples we’ve given so far have included every other form but movies (I think I’d count furryman’s examples as having more to do with historical references than pop culture). Maybe movies were thought of as a higher art form than radio/vaudeville/cartoons, and that they couldn’t lower themselves by making pop culture references. (Even the movie that started/resurrected the trend in the 90s acknowledged its low roots in its title: “Pulp Fiction.”) Most movies, if they did mention TV shows, celebrities, fads, etc., seemed to make up their own “movie world” versions. Can anyone think of exceptions?
Doubtful, since the studios largely looked upon films as disposable. Recall, however, that cartoons were theatrically released, so pop-c references in cartoons were pop-c references in the movies. One could argue that newsreel segments on movie stars, sports heros, etc. were extended pop-c references.
watch any of the Hope/Crosby “Road” pictures,and I think in Meet Me In St Louis,Judy Garland begins a song that refers to Clark Gable.
“Dear Mr. Gable/You Made Me Love You” pre-dates Meet Me in St Louis by several years. It was included in the 1937 movie Broadway Melody of 1938. Garland told the story that Gable once snarled at her “You’ve ruined every goddamned birthday of mine, every damn party someone drags you out from behind some curtain to sing that damn song!”
Also, MMISL is set about 25 years before anyone would have heard of Clark Gable.
The first two Marx Brothers movies started as Broadway plays. They had loads of contemporary references and comments on the day, starting with the plots. The Coconuts was about the Florida land boom, in which suckers literally were sold plots that were still under water. The big game hunter in Animal Crackers was a type of enormous celebrity of the day, from Frank Buck to Osa and Martin Johnson.
The scripts are littered with jokes that only contemporary audiences would get without explanation, but the oddest one comes from Animal Crackers.
Groucho has a scene in which he breaks off from the conversation and delivers a stream-of-consciousness monologue into the camera, an obvious parody of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. All sophisticated Broadway audiences would be familiar with this device. Problem is, the movie version of the O’Neill play wasn’t made until after Animal Crackers. Although some in the audience may have been aware of what he was doing, especially when Groucho says, “pardon me, I’m about to have a strange interlude,” only the tiniest percentage could ever have seen it for themselves.
They didn’t stop there. All of their early - good - movies have timely jokes. The Maurice Chevalier imitations in Monkey Business. Or the intrepid aviators (who took the steamship) sequence in Night at the Opera. You get the feeling that their best writers were always writing for themselves, or at least the in-crowd hipsters of the Broadway show world that they belonged to. Oddly, this makes the movies work better than the later ones with almost meaningless but “standard” jokes.
Adding to the list: the movie Hellzapoppin has someone spotting a sled and saying, “Orson Welles must have been here,” a clear reference to Citizen Kane, released earlier that year.
The entire plot of Million Dollar Legs revolves around attending the upcoming LA Oympics of 1932.
I’ve seen a silent short film (10-15 minutes, as I recall) composed of clips from various newsreels linked together and misrepresented by humorous intertitles. Aside from lacking silhouettes of Mike and the bots, it had a real MST3K quality about it.
It was a local no-budget production assembled in the late teens, made funny mostly by showing clips from big cities like New York and claiming them to be Starks (Starks hasn’t changed much since then so, if you don’t see what makes that hilarious, ride through it one day and you might), but it also made several current political and pop-cultural references. At least, several that a caught. Perhaps it made many more, but they’re too obscure to recognize now.
Yep, which is why if there was some old movie where a couple of dudes sat around shooting the cool and talking about tv shows, that would be cool :D.
I should write Ebert w/ this one.
Of course, Hellzapoppin was a Broadway show first (and spawned several sequels). They relied on old Vaudeville jokes, audience participation, and topical ad libs, the last of which would have just been updated for the movie.
It’s a good example because it brings together all these historic threads. Traveling performers must have been throwing in local references or jokes about the king or famous personalities from the dawn of time. Vaudeville comics and emcees almost certainly did so back into the 19th century.
Topical revues enter Broadway early in the 20th century and so do the big shows like the Follies and its imitators. Both stepped outside of the vaudeville tradition of honing one act forever, and made much more use of specialty material writing specifically for the show, material that could be easily updated to include current events. These shows attracted audiences who saw them multiple times, so they’d want to keep the material fresh. (This also spread into nightclubs, especially when they became speakeasys in the 1920s, because they needed to keep the suckers there through show after show.) Will Rogers made a name for himself commenting on national events like a modern stand-up, but you can see it on a very different level in song lyrics, the best example probably being Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top.” Many of his references there are now so obscure that whole articles have been written in which people try to pinpoint just what the hell he was talking about.
Broadway audiences were thought of as being far more sophisticated than movie audiences, probably correctly in some ways, so it’s not much of a surprise that movies lagged behind in the reference department. But by the time radio grew really big in the 1930s and even more so in the 1940s you can hear comic routines that talk about movie stars, politicians, national events and other current topics. They didn’t think it funny to be as pointlessly self-referential as modern scriptwriters do, but I’m not at all sure they were wrong about that.
And Animal Crackers was also. I suspect the Strange Interlude bit (which I was going to cite also) was from the play.
RealityChuck, has Hellzapoppin’ ever made it to DVD? I used to watch it when I was a kid on TV, and my Mom saw it on Broadway, but it wasn’t available last time I looked. Ever see their next show, Crazy Street, with Shemp Howard?
There are rights issues preventing such a legal release in the US. Any copies availible either come from abroad (where there are no such issues) or are pirated.
How about literature? Let’s try to shy away from references to politics- b/c, as you say, plays and literature and comedies were always chock full of them, and I want to talk about works referencing other works specifically.
What I had in mind was Ulysses, which I’ve heard is so ladden with detailed references to pop c. and allusions to lit. that it’s hard to read, yet it’s still a great book and of course I’ll be reading it… 
Thanks. That seemed to be the situation the last time I checked.