Home Forums Ganymede & Titan Forum Jokes you don't/didn't get

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  • #232228
    Dave
    Participant

    I think it’s partly due to the fact that Red Dwarf makes reference to both real people and fictional ones in gags like this. If you didn’t know who Kevin Keegan was but then found out he was a real person, you might wonder if the same was true for Harry.

    #232230
    Plastic Percy
    Participant

    I presume it’s just the passing of time and changes in technology, but I just about don’t understand Blaize Falconburger’s comments about never being short of an ashtray in Lister’s house. Was it common practice to use record/cassette/CD cases as ashtrays?

    #232231
    Dave
    Participant

    I think it might go back to vinyl records, which you could melt and turn into ashtrays.

    #232232
    Plastic Percy
    Participant

    Thanks, that makes sense.

    On the subject of the above Harry Beedlebaum, I always figured that it was a lawyer-friendly proxy for the Fatty Arbuckle chain of restaurants.

    I believe that Grant Naylor deliberately toned down references to fictional celebrities and pop culture from III onwards. The first series is filled with them – Rastabilly Skank, Mugs Murphy etc. But from III onwards they tend to keep it to the likes of Dustin Hoffman, The Flintstones etc.

    #232233

    Kind of a shame, as I really like the world-building aspect of Rasta Billy, Mugs Murphy and so on. I think it was part of a general shift towards more sci-fi storytelling that focuses less on the characters’ past daily lives.

    #232234
    Dave
    Participant

    Kind of a shame, as I really like the world-building aspect of Rasta Billy, Mugs Murphy and so on.

    Yeah, me too. I guess you don’t want that stuff to distract from or overwhelm the stories, but the likes of those things you mention – and stuff like zero gee football, dollarpounds and esperanto – gave the earlier series a slightly different feel almost as much as the sets did.

    #232246
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    The WIlma Flintstone scene might’ve worked if they’ve changed the characters’ names to fictional ones, but it’d have been far less funny.

    #232257

    The Flintstone scene only really works because we know exactly who they’re talking about, and we know they’re cartoons. Replace that dialogue with fictional names, we have no idea they’re talking about animated fictional children tv characters. You’d immediately just assume it’s some random future live action tv show they’re talking about.

    #232260
    Dave
    Participant

    Yes, it doesn’t work otherwise.

    #232268
    Hamish
    Participant

    What if they cut away from a brief clip of the fictional animated show?

    #232269
    Dave
    Participant

    I think without the recognition factor it’s not as funny in the same way that Joe Klumpp is not as funny as Kevin Keegan.

    #232271
    flanl3
    Participant

    What if they cut away from a brief clip of the fictional animated show?

    Like they did in Back in the Red?

    #232272
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    They’re mad anyway, Betty is the superior choice.

    #232275
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    >What if they cut away from a brief clip of the fictional animated show?

    They’re not even watching The Flintstones when they have the conversation in Backwards

    LISTER: Cat?
    CAT: Mmm?
    LISTER: Ya ever see The Flagstones?
    CAT: The animated TV show about a man called Frank and his wife Winifred?, sure,
    LISTER: D’ya think Winifred’s sexy?
    CAT: Wilnifred Flagstone? The animated character in the animated TV show you just mentioned. The one who’s married to a Frank?
    LISTER: Maybe we’ve been alone in deep space too long, but every time I see that body, it drives me crazy. Is it me?
    CAT: Well, I think in all probability, Winifred Flagstone is the most desirable woman that ever lived.
    LISTER: That’s good. I thought I was goin’ strange.
    CAT: She’s incredible!
    LISTER: What d’ya think of Britney?
    CAT: Britney Slagheap, the next door neighbour? (Pause) Well, I would go with Britney… but I’d be
    thinking of Winifred.
    LISTER: This is crazy. Why are we talking about going to bed with Winifred Flagstone?
    CAT: You’re right. We’re nuts. This is an insane conversation.
    LISTER: She’ll never leave Frank, her husband, and we know it.

    #232278
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    Oh, the site I copied that extract from Backwards queried what Lister says here: “every time I see that [??] body it drives me crazy”

    I realise that I’ve no idea what Craig says here either. It sounds like “sharwood” (?!).

    Anyone?

    #232279
    bloodteller
    Participant

    “show”

    #232283
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    Oh, so it’s “every time I see that *show, her* body drives me crazy”

    Sometime it’s difficult to understand the Scouse…people.

    #232284
    Dax101
    Participant

    >world-building aspect of Rasta Billy, Mugs Murphy and so on

    For series 1 and 2 you could see they really were trying to say HEY LOOK ITS THE FUTURE WHERE EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT! but by 3 to at least 5 they settled more for verging on pop cultural references and influences.

    Modern Dwarf feels more futuristic social commentary on modern times.

    #232295
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    I can’t work out if PPT edited that transcript to make it clunkier and less funny to make a point or if the Mandela effect is fucking with me or what

    #232298
    clem
    Participant

    > Yeah, me too. I guess you don’t want that stuff to distract from or overwhelm the stories, but the likes of those things you mention – and stuff like zero gee football, dollarpounds and esperanto – gave the earlier series a slightly different feel almost as much as the sets did.

    I agree all that stuff added to the richness of the show’s world in the early days. With things like “Wilfred Shakespeare” and Rimmer’s merging of Columbo and Columbus, do we think the intention was that he’s just ignorant, or was the joke meant to be that over time bits of history have gotten distorted and/or mixed up with popular culture? I’ve always thought it was the latter. Lister referring to Cliff Richard being shot could be another example.

    #232299
    bloodteller
    Participant

    its like Rimmer’s line “why don’t you listen to something REALLY classical, like Mozart or Mendhelssen or Motorhead”. is the joke that in the future, Motorhead is considered classical? or is it meant to be Rimmer being stupid?

    #232300
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Probably Rimmer pretending to be cultured (we know he really prefers the classics to be funked-up on Hammond) and ignorantly spouting a historical musical name he’s heard that starts with ‘Mo-‘. Though you can imagine a scene where Rimmer asks Holly to play some Motorhead and sits there pensively pretending to admire it while wincing.

    #232301
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    I assumed it was a joke about Motorhead being considered Classical. Rimmer pretending to appreciate them in order to seem cultured is pretty funny.

    I just thought, Cliff Richard being shot could be a pretty convoluted mixup of remembering where you were when Elvis died and when JFK was shot

    #232302
    Hamish
    Participant

    You know, Grant Naylor predicted the rise of Otakus arguing about who is the “best girl” with the Wilma Flinestone gag.

    Wilma is Lister’s Waifu.

    #232324

    I assumed the Rimmer remarks were a mix of culture being lost and Rimmer’s ignorance – i.e. these things have become more obscure by this point, especially from an idiot like Rimmer’s perspective. The ‘classical’ joke doesn’t work for me though (it’s used in Doctor Who a couple of times – Vicki calling The Beatles ‘classical music’ in The Chase, Orbital being described as a classical group in one of the novels, as a nod to their cover of the theme tune) because what is generally regarded as ‘classical music’ – i.e. orchestral and acoustic chamber music – is still popular and still composed right through to today, and still separate from popular / jazz / avant-garde / folk. I can’t fathom a point where there’s such a break in musical norms that suddenly pop/rock and classical seem similar.

    #232326
    Dave
    Participant

    For me the joke isn’t exactly that they are all ‘classical’ music, just that they are all universally-recognised great composers who are generally seen as being on the same level by future society.

    I didn’t think it was a joke at Rimmer’s expense, I thought it was a joke about Lemmy & co. being seen as on a par with those musicians.

    #232355
    Warbodog
    Participant

    I lump it in with the likes of Rimmer owning but not having read Shakespeare and pretending to recognise a Mugs Murphy cartoon as Citizen Kane and admiring its cartoon explosions.

    #232356
    Dax101
    Participant

    Rimmer can’t make his mind up on his opinion on Shakespeare or Jesus.

    #232377
    Ben Paddon
    Participant

    Wilma is Lister’s Waifu.

    Fucking Hell.

    #232522
    Seb Patrick
    Keymaster

    I confess I’ve never really understood why women would be banned from playing the cello.

    #232527
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Hol Rock cellos would have to be made of a transparent material for that joke to work, at least as I understand it.

    #232528
    bloodteller
    Participant

    >I confess I’ve never really understood why women would be banned from playing the cello.

    because everyone would see their vaginas

    #232529
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Yeah, their clothes would have to be transparent too.

    #232531
    Dave
    Participant

    I just assumed it was because it would be a particularly ungainly position for a woman to sit in, moreso than for a man. I don’t think it was intended to be any more graphic than that.

    #232545
    Pete Part Three
    Participant

    Oh, here’s a fucking stupid one. I was watching Legion the other day, and I recalled that on my first couple of watches, I completely misunderstood a joke.

    I’m going to have to paste the whole thing for context:

    —-

    RIMMER: Legion: may I be frank? It’s not often we meet an individual who we feel could improve our already pretty damn fine top-notch team. But in you, we feel we have. In all our travels, we have met precisely thirty-one individuals: three one. And we have never felt moved to invite a single one to join our crew. True, most of them wanted in some way to suck out our brains, or erase us from history altogether. Nevertheless, they still weren’t what we would consider The Right Stuff. We feel that you are different. We feel that you, like us, have the courage and the dignity it takes to make it as a Dwarfer.

    KRYTEN: Sir! Don’t cross the chopsticks!

    LEGION: Mr Rimmer, I am moved by the eloquence of your invitation, but it is quite impossible for me to leave the confines of the institute.

    RIMMER: It was Lister, wasn’t it? He put you off.

    KRYTEN: Is there nothing we can do to change your mind?

    LEGION: Absolutely.

    KRYTEN: Then I’m afraid we must bid you farewell. We have a long journey ahead of us.

    LEGION: Nonsense. You have no journey at all, my friends. I insist you stay here with me. You will be my honoured guests – from now until the day you die.

    RIMMER: Thirty-two.

    Right, so; the first few times i watched this, I thought Rimmer was saying “Thirty-two” to indicate the age he’d be when he died (in response to Legion mentioning the day they die) I knew that Rimmer was aged 31 from the novels, and he was dying of embarrassment from being pelted with all the Mamosian cuisine. So, due to the fact that his little speech is over a minute before the pay-off, I’d obviously already forgotten all about the “thirty one” individuals.

    Obviously, this is fucking stupid because:

    1) The “day you die” doesn’t invite someone to announce the age they’ll be when they die.
    2) Rimmer is already dead.

    Go on take the piss out of young me, you shits.

    #232547
    Dave
    Participant

    I love that the human brain can go to such lengths to try and make sense of stuff it doesn’t understand.

    #232551

    I always thought that was Rimmer saying the age he died too. It seems so obvious now you explain it…

    #232556
    pi r squared
    Participant

    It’s a nice touch that the thirty-one is emphasised by the reinforcement “three one”. There’s no real reason why you would do that (where you might for, say, thirty which may be confused with thirteen), so it just subtly places the number a little more prominently in your short-term memory, to be paid off quite delightfully by the thirty-two. All jokes are ruined when over-explained, but the construct of that whole gag is so nice that it is worth seeing it broken down.

    #232558
    Ben Saunders
    Participant

    >I confess I’ve never really understood why women would be banned from playing the cello.
    They’d have to open their legs really wide, that’s all I understand about it

    #232559
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Not a joke, but I always found the description of Lister as “the ultimate atheist” unusual. It’s not like he bangs on about it all the time like a Richard Dawkings, isn’t he just a regular atheist?

    But it works in the “final” sense of the word, since he’s the last human and the guys he hangs around with all have some form of indoctrination that they go back and forth on (except maybe Holly, but he originally believed in Silicon Heaven in the books).

    #232561
    Warbodog
    Participant

    Plus, he claims to be a pantheist in an earlier episode, suggesting he might believe in a vague something.

    #232563
    Dave
    Participant

    I don’t know if Lister as the ultimate atheist was meant to be a path that the character should have followed but didn’t (and so we didn’t get to see it), like Rimmer being a secret special agent for the space corps.

    #232567
    bloodteller
    Participant

    was re-reading Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers today. despite owning the book for almost 15 years, i’ve only just realised that the sentence “George McIntyre left the Salvador Dali Coffee Lounge of the Mimas Hilton, carrying his nose in a napkin” simply means the Mafia attacked him and he had to hold a napkin up to his nose to stop the bleeding.

    from the wording of the sentence i had always thought it meant the Mafia had actually cut off his entire nose with the bolt clippers, and George was just taking his severed nose out with him for some reason.

    #232568
    clem
    Participant

    I’ve always thought they cut his nose off. Otherwise that is very oddly worded. You’d say “holding” rather than “carrying”, surely.

    #232569

    Huh … I had always assumed it meant his literal nose too

    #232570
    bloodteller
    Participant

    i guess that one’s open to interpretation then, as it doesn’t seem to be mentioned in any of his other scenes in the book. at least for me though, it seems more sensible that they punched him really hard or jammed the bolt cutters up his nostrils or something. cutting his entire nose off seems a bit cartoon-like, doesn’t it?

    #232572
    Dave
    Participant

    Who nose.

    #232574
    clem
    Participant

    > cutting his entire nose off seems a bit cartoon-like, doesn’t it?

    It seems very violent and gruesome, so I’m guessing Rob wrote that bit.

    #232575
    si
    Participant

    Yep. 25 years a nice I first read the books, and it must have taken me about 8 years before I realised that his nose was actually still attached to his face.

    #232576
    si
    Participant

    25 years a nice I first read the books

    That’s supposed to be “since”, obviously.

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