I still listen to all three of those Christine Lavin songs without the disturbing connections. My Aunt and Uncle were named Doris and Edwin, and I always found that song funny.
I can’t listen to the song Rehab by Amy Winehouse; it feels like a suicide note.
I got curious about how well I remembered this, so I looked it up on YouTube. WOW. It’s even creepier than I remember.
Just to recap: on a family sitcom, the main character, who is a doctor, doses the food he serves his guests with some sort of aphrodisiac, without their knowledge. And it wasn’t just a one-time thing: Dr. Cosby makes it clear he’s done it several times in the past.
“Our young president has been cut down in his prime!” I don’t really see the issue. It wasn’t like he was the first president assassinated*. Maybe people were just more sensitive? I was all of two, what did I know from JFK?
The other part about Maj Kong reading the contents of the survival kit: the line was supposedly changed from “Shoot, a fella’ could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff.” to Vegas because of bad thoughts about the assassination? Really? Either way, I think it works better as Vegas anyway.
*Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?
One Cosby bit that stuck out in my head, even back when I heard it, was in a comedy routine where he casually mentioned “protecting my daughter’s virginity.” The line got a pretty negative reaction from his live audience. Given the later revelations about Bill Cosby, I’m guessing he was operating under the assumption that the other guys out there would all do to his daughter what HE did.to other women.
That was also the plot of a film released one year earlier:
In another Cosby Show episode, Cliff and his wife discuss their faithfulness to each other, leading him to postulate a scenario where he’s home alone and a beautiful female technician shows up to fix their TV…
“How young?”
“Oh, 19. Firm and fully packed.”
“A child.”
“Yes.”
Yeah, the idea of playing sex crimes for laughs was nothing new in the 80s (case in point: ‘Revenge of the Nerds’; and I’m sure ‘Porky’s’ had its share of sex crimes, though I don’t remember its plot as well).
The difference is, most of those ‘crazy 80s sex hijinks’ scenarios that we now recognize as criminal acts were in R-rated movies, not family sitcoms, and weren’t created by someone who later became known as an infamous serial sexual assaulter.
Nope, never. He blustered and shouted and hollered “To the moon, Alice!” and she gave him a look, as if to say “I dare you.” Because she knew, and we knew, that he would fall apart without her. That was the character part of that comedy.
I don’t remember enough about The Flintstones and how much cartoony violence there might have been, but anyway Fred was a very different sort of character from Ralph.
I think of a couple action movies that took on an ironic tone later on-- I was watching Rambo III a few years ago, where Rambo fights evil Russians in Afghanistan. There was a scene where Rambo is hanging out among the Afghanistani freedom fighters in their camp, and having a bit of a soliloquy about what what good, simple, virtuous people they were. And I thought “many, if not all of those freedom fighters, later became the Taliban. Osama Bin Laden could have been one of the camp members there”.
Deborah Lipp, in her book The Ultimate James Bond Fan Book, discusses this in her section on The Living Daylights (the better of Timothy Dalton’s two Bond movies). This movie, released in 1987 when the Mujahideen were still our allies against the Soviets, had a group of Afghan freedom fighters helping out Bond and his love interest, Kara Milovy. Deborah explained that for a while after 9/11, she had a hard time watching this movie, and it’s a prime example of why it’s a good idea for Bond movies to distance themselves as much as possible from real-life politics. (That’s why the Sean Connery movies gave SPECTRE a larger role from the beginning…they replaced SMERSH, a real-life Soviet spy agency, from the novels as backers for the bad guys. Cubby Broccoli and company thought it would be a bad idea to date the Bond movies with political issues that might eventually shift, so they replaced the real-life Soviets with the fictional crime agency that wasn’t introduced in the novels until Thunderball.) Deborah went on to say that since the group of freedom fighters in the movie didn’t immediately put a burqa on Kara, she could at least tell herself that this particular group didn’t become the Taliban.
ETA: Ninja’d. That’s what I get for posting before I’ve finished reading the thread. Deborah Lipp’s book is great, though.
Because of the time between the story getting bought and getting published, Isaac Asimov “predicted that Mount Everest would never be climbed, five months after it was climbed.”
In Bananas, Woody Allen’s character hastily attempts to explain his purchase of a porno mag to a disapproving bystander:
Doing a sociological study of sexual perversion…I’m up to advanced child molesting!
Similar to your Christine Lavin songs, the comedian Tim Cavenaugh is a musical comedian (he has songs such as “The Pistons Song,” “I Wanna Kiss Her (But She Won’t Let Me,” and “99 Dead Baboons”).
One of his songs (which I can’t find on YouTube) was about Prince Charles and Lady Diana called “Let’s Drink Up, Chuck and Di,” (the conceit of the song being that it’s sung as “let’s drink, upchuck and die”).
I’m pretty sure that one’s been retired from his repertoire.
Much speculative sci-fi suffers from the march of progress. One in particular I read as a kid was Arthur C Clarke A Fall of Moondust, which plot hook hanging on assumptions of the moon’s environment was obsolete as soon as we started sending probes and missions to the moon a couple years later. Still a fun novel, but the “sci-” part of the sci-fi is moot.
Yeah, but the “after it was climbed” bit still feels like it deserves special mention.
In Lethal Weapon, Riggs makes it clear on a couple of occasions that he finds homosexuality disgusting.
They realize that they’d been assuming that Amanda Hunsacker had been sharing her bed with a man, but it’s possible that it could have been Dixie. Riggs: “Okay. Disgusting, but okay.”
And later, when Dixie’s house blows up, Murtaugh is all over Riggs’ coat. Riggs: “What are you, a f–?” No, Martin, your coat is on fire.
Pet Detective- a huge transphobic scene where he has kissed a trans woman, discovers that m and then goes on a series of washing his mouth out.
Besides, if we wanted good old-fashioned woman beating up man humor, all we had to do was read Andy Capp in the comics paage.
This has been done against Russian troops in Ukraine, but the girls there use poisoned food and bottles of vodka instead of IEDs. No collateral casualties that way.
I remember a 1986 article in which the writer said it took only three minutes before someone phoned him/her with a Space Shuttle joke after Challenger exploded.
I was watching the movie “Heavy Metal” (1981) in a theater shortly after the explosion. At the beginning of the movie a shuttle is moving across the screen. Someone audience yelled out “KA-BOOOOM!” Needless to say, the audience erupted in laughter.