Lexicon. Not derived from Ulrika and myself having each lived in LA for decades, but calling out Fawlty Towers, and the relationship between Basil Fawlty and poor Manuel. Thus:
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Category Archives: Humor
“…my theory, which is mine”
Lexicon. Mild reworking of a Monty Python sketch involving John Cleese playing Anne Elk, (Miss). YouTube doesn’t seem to have the original, only performances later, which don’t appear to have the right phrasing. This implies it was being improvised, within certain limits. Here’s Miss Elk announcing a new theory:
This can be rephrased in all kinds of ways. “My drink, which is mine…”, “My car, which is mine…”, etc.
“Foreshadowing”
Lexicon.
About a week before Bloom County went on a substantial sub-plot about Bill the Cat being a Russian spy, there was this glorious 3-day sequence. It has even been quoted in academic papers.
“Foreshadowing” — Your clue to quality literature.
Here, have a link to the very first Bloom County strip, December 8, 1980. Then, you can read through the whole thing. If you want.
The Man In the Shack
Lexicon.
This comes from “Fit the Twelfth,” the final episode of the radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The lads have found the ruler of the universe, who is a solitary man in a shack, and who has a cat. While feeding the cat he says,
“I think fish is nice, but then l think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?”
I’m going to include some screen captures below, because I’m too lazy to type out the whole thing. But it’s Douglas Adams at his most humorously philosophical, and also empirical.
The Frantics
All of them lexicon.
Boot to the head:
Ti Kwan Leep:
And, Make Up Dirty Words:
These are all, spectacularly, from the same album. But so many phrases come from them:
”Boot to the head.”
”Yeah, yeah, patience… how long will that take?”
” I have urges in my areas.”
”…and one for Jenny and the wimp.”
”Beat people up?”
What’s interesting is “Ti Kwan Leep” has generated second generation performances in… martial arts schools, of all places. Here’s an example (a little shaky, but others stick in Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire):
The Frantics were a recurring act on a radio show for novelty records, hosted by Dr Demento. The good Doctor’s most famous acolyte was “Weird Al” Yankovic, who got his start on the radio program.
“I’m an actor…”
Lexicon. This will dovetail into another entry about the difference between an actor and a star that I hope to make, but this guy is a 37-year-old Harrison Ford, in Apocalypse Now. Many people miss him, even when told to look for him. When asked about it, he (reportedly) once said, “I’m an actor. You’re not supposed to notice me.”
“As Canadian as possible…”
I’m going to quote this in full. Mostly so I can have it in a safe place, and not disappear due to link rot, or the Brownian swirl of the internet.
“As Canadian as possible under the circumstances” is arguably one of the most famous Canadian aphorisms. But not many know its author, or how it came to be.
In 1972, Peter Gzowski, then summer host of This Country in the Morning, held a contest to complete (in the manner of “As American as apple pie”) the saying “As Canadian as …”. Heather Scott, a seventeen-year-old summer music school student at the time, heard of the contest, and immediately came up with the phrase that has since become so famous. The subsequent telephone call from Peter to Heather at her school began what was to become an on-and-off relationship with “Mr. Canada”.
Heather was a passionate Canadian, who cared deeply about her country and her fellow man. She bravely completed her University of Toronto Honours B.A. while recovering from Hodgkin’s Disease, and went on to a career as a production editor with Prentice Hall, married and miraculously (after all her radiation treatments) bore a daughter, Sarah. Her other popular claim to fame is as editor of Don Cherry’s autobiography, for which she earned a flowery dedication from Don.
Sadly, her cancer returned in 1990, and she died at home (in White Rock, B.C.) on 30 October 1994. Ironically, Peter Gzowski visited White Rock on a book tour just a few days later. They never met, until perhaps Peter’s own passing a scant eight years later.
R. W. Scott (Heather’s father)
Long Point, Ontario
18 May 2004
This can be lexicon, as I joke about five (maybe six) of my eight great-grandparents being Canadian makes me ethnically so. Sometimes rephrased as, “As well as possible…” in response to the American opening question, “How are you doing?”
(Note that Ms. Scott was a music student, and there were rules about a minimum of Canadian content on radio and television.)
“May (or may not)…”
This comes from a sub-section of the original BBC Radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a bit intricate, so here’s the whole thing:
“May (or may not)…” pops up all over in my lexicon.
“Some of you may (or may not) remember the story I told…”
Although on re-hearing it, I admit a fondness for “Representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries, and Other Professional Thinking Persons.” Let alone, “(W)e demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
“Space…”
Lexicon. You’d think it wouldn’t come up much, but there I was, watching an episode of Property Brothers on HGTV, and after the reveal they were talking about how they had so much more “space…”
This is from Creature Comforts, a short similar to Wallace and Gromit by Nick Park and his Aardman clay animation crew. As the jaguar speaks, the Brasilian accent is vital.
“I think I need a bigger box”
Taco Bell used to have a whole series of commercials featuring a talking Chihuahua. This was my favorite, a movie tie-in with a US Godzilla:
I like this particular one because of the ‘tude. “I can take him… I just need a bigger box.”
This reminds me of a prank pulled by Harvey Mudd College against CalTech. The two colleges have a longstanding rivalry, both being engineering schools. (A rivalry Tech’ers insist doesn’t exist — even as they think up their next prank.)
There’s a large cannon in the middle of CalTech’s campus. A group of enterprising Mudders decided it would be fun to steal it. They consulted a recent alum on how to do this. He reportedly got a faraway look and said:
“You guys are going to need a big crane.”
Not, “No, that would be wrong.” Not, “Have you considered what the jail terms might be?” No… You guys can take ‘em. You just need a big enough box. Er, um, crane.
The spirit that builds great things.