Space Shuttle jokes were actually funny for a while, simply because it felt good to laugh in the face of tragedy. No way would I want to tell one today.
A prime example for this trope: Billy Wilder’s movie “One, Two, Three”. A comedy about the pre-wall Berlin situation and status, one of his finest comedies, but the story hinges on the fact that people could move between West and East Berlin rather freely before Aug 13, 1961. But between production and release of the film, Aug 13 had happened, the Wall got built, the premise of the story got ruined and no one wanted to watch a comedy about Berlin anyway because reality had become so terrible.
The movie was only resurrected and rediscovered more than 25 years later.
Chris Benoit was one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all-time, a technical virtuoso who finished his story by making Triple H tap to the Crippler Crossface at WrestleMania XX.
And I find it very hard to enjoy any of his work anymore after he murdered his wife and son and killed himself.
As Lenny Bruce said at his show that night, “Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.”
Isn’t there an episode of Friends where Chandler is fondled when he gets measured by the tailer that Joey’s family has gone to for years?
I had that album. Should have kept it.
Regretting What I Said to You When You Called Me at 11:00 on Friday Morning to Tell Me That 1:00 Friday Afternoon You Were Gonna Leave Your Office, Go Downstairs, Hail a Cab, to Go Out to the Airport, to Catch a Plane, to Go Skiing in the Alps for Two Weeks. Not That I Wanted to Go With You; I Wasn’t Able to Leave Town, I’m Not a Very Good Skier, I Couldn’t Expect You to Pay My Way, but After Going Out With You for Three Years, I Don’t Like Surprises. (A Musical Apology) is excellent.
Have I ever recommended Uncle Bonsai to you? They’re a Seattle-based folk trio with sensibilities similar to Lavin’s.
Punch and Judy?
They typed up the report and she didn’t want to sign it. My father was an MP in the US Army back in the 70s and 80s, he sometimes spoke of how frustrating it was to go to a domestic dispute only for the abused individual, sometimes the man, to refuse to press charges. I expect that kind of thing is still happening.
The Monster Squad was released the same year as Lethal Weapon in 1987. I hadn’t seen it since I was eleven, but I watched it a few years back when it was available on Netflix, and I was gobsmacked by a brazenly homophobic scene in a kid’s movie. This kind of homophobia simply wasn’t noteworthy at the time.
I didn’t discover the film until the 21st century. By then, all the topicalness had gone away. I love it! Bonus: filming in actual East Berlin. No cgi or faked reconstruction here.
What was it?
“I Wanna Kiss Her Butt; She Won’t Let Me” is how that one sounds in performance, even if the title is differently parsed.
One would think that an OB/GYN, which Cosby portrayed on his show, would know better.
On a related note, while I never saw “Airplane II”, I have seen clips from it, and there’s a sendup on the “Boys’ Life/Nuns’ Life” scene from “Airplane!” where a priest is reading a magazine called “Altar Boys.”
It wasn’t funny then, and it isn’t now either.
The “I’m dating someone who has homework!” scene in Manhattan hasn’t aged well either.
There was a scene where two kids were discussing an adminstrator/teacher they either genuinely suspected was gay or just didn’t like him so referring to him with slurs was okay. When I rewatched it, all I remembered was “Wolfman has nards.” The homophobia was completely unremarkable back in 1987 which is why I had forgotten all about it. The movie goes hard in other ways we might not expect. When Dracula makes his presence known to the kids, he straight up tries to kill them. Then there’s the scene where Horace, the fat kid, shoots the creature from The Black Lagoon with a shotgun.
Julie Brown’s song “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun.” The idea of a student showing up to prom and killing her classmates was a joke in 1983 but I don’t think many people find it funny these days.
I think we’ve got two kinds of “events” changing the perception of the works in question in this thread.
There’s the specific localized viewpoint-shifters that I think the OP was primarily asking about, such as the Kennedy assassination souring audiences on the satirical album The First Family. Then there’s more general evolution of attitudes in popular culture, such as decreasing societal acceptance of domestic violence making old wife-beating jokes land weird nowadays.
My candidate for the specific localized viewpoint-shifters category is the 1934 fatal fire and shipwreck on the ocean liner SS Morro Castle, which delayed the imminent opening of the Cole Porter musical Anything Goes. It was felt that in the wake of the tragedy, audiences would perceive the show’s theme of merry passenger hijinx on an ocean liner as in very poor taste.
Definitely the most famous example.
Ennis’ death was extremely tragic and even Bill Cosby didn’t deserve to have his own son murdered in cold blood.