I can only guess that the studio audience got to see either an expression or a prop that was really funny. If the humor comes entirely from the dialogue, then I’m missing it too; maybe there’s a double entendre that made more sense at the time that show was produced.
I would see that, except that John refers to the item in the plural, and the only small, furry, and plural section of the female body I can think of is armpits.
“It’s so dark I can’t see anything. Hey, what is this? And why do they have fur on them?”
It seems like a very fast “triple punch”: while the audience is still imagining what strange thing has been found, John jumps straight into a semi-paranoid/hysterical reaction.
It’s intentionally too fast. John isn’t likely to find an unidentifiable object, then immediately not be able to figure out why it’s furry. It’s reflective of faulty thinking.
The triple punch is: audience reaction to thing in dark, audience reaction to furriness, audience realization that John has misidentified the object entirely.
That the audience laughed suggests that “John” got the timing right. That you didn’t is probably a matter of conditioning – the pacing with TV humor is different from radio, and also from standup live comics.
The sexual reference seems remote – if it exists. Earmuffs are partly metallic, springy, and lightweight. Body parts aren’t.
Certainly it was a sexual reference. Ever hear the phrase “muff diving”? (The OED has this use dating back to 1699, with a quote from 1935, so it was probably familiar to the audience.)
I suspect it was unintentional. The censors back then would never have let this go by.
I wonder if it could have really been unintended. Because the got scripts. Anyway like I said. It seemed the audience to take a good 10 seconds. (a long time in a fast paced radio show.) then they roared with laughter.