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It’s a joke from The Nanny specifically about linguistic drift.
This post is like someone watching Austin Powers and being like “I can’t believe they almost showed his dick! What a whacky accident!”.
Yeah, I know it’s black and white but some younger folks seem to way overestimate the quality of older television. This looks like it may have actually been HD, or at least higher SD.
The show is in color, this comes from an episode with a bit in black and white.
Anything old enough to have been filmed in black and white was shot on film, which can be scanned in HD just fine so long as you have access to the actual film. The remaster of the original Star Trek is a great example.
Semantic drift > Continental drift > Tokyo Drift
family
ding ding ding ding du du du ding
UK parlance
“fag” = cigarette “Gay” = happy/good times “Queer” = odd or unusual
🏳️🌈❤️
My friend’s dad is from Scotland. He came to Canada and works as a dealer at a casino. One day, two obviously gay men sat at his table and one of them put down his pack of cigarettes. My friend’s dad then unknowingly said “I’m sorry sir, but we don’t allow fags at the table”. Everyone learned a bit about regional dialects that day!
This is literally from The Nanny. The fact that it sounds like he’s talking about gay stuff is the joke, in the show itself.
I don’t know what show this is from, but that’s an awfully strange choice of words to use to describe your butler, and I’m just saying this wouldn’t be the first time Tumblr has lied to me about what the dialogue in a TV scene was.
This is from The Nanny, but I don’t know the episode. Those are the two main characters, though Fran is in a blond wig for some reason. It was made in the 90s and not in black and white, so this must have been a strange episode.
Oh! I found it, or at least this clip: https://youtu.be/82NuUC8WBko?si=30zJLoRGSBjtAnN7
I stand corrected
It’s a play on words assuming that you know both meanings of all 3 words, which the audience clearly did.
Also, it was during a time when people were becoming more aware of queer rights and those words were becoming offensive to more Americans, part of the joke, kinda like “you should never say this in the US, but in the UK it’s totally acceptable because all the words have different meanings than in the US”
It’s also a play on linguistic drift as mentioned in another post. It’s also hanging a lantern on how unacceptable that kind of language had become and in that sense was progressive.
I cannot think of a way that joke flies in the US today unless in a meta context of old jokes, which this meme attempts.
Hopefully this explanation has made the joke completely unfunny at this point.
Hahahahh
I think the term is “lampshades” or something like that, rather than “hanging a lantern”.
“So, another Friday is upon us. What will you be doing, Smithers?”
