Bonus video! More deleted jokes, and a salesman scandal
Added 2022-02-27 18:01:02 +0000 UTCHello hello! This week's bonus video has one more deleted-and-then-reconstructed joke from the pilot of Soap. Plus! A little sneak-peek at the Dynasty video I'm working on next, featuring lots of glamour, beauty, and slapping ... and also a pretty incredible life-story of creator Aaron Spelling, who wound up in Texas because when the family came to America, the only word of English his grandfather spoke was "cowboy."
Backup link if the embed's not working: https://youtu.be/RsLBc5tVW6o
Comments
I am at a loss for how Soap resembles Welcome Back, Kotter other than both being sitcoms. I don't recall Kotter having an unusual amount of jokes about sex or other vices (if sex is a vice!) or gays. On the other hand the rather vile Three's Company hardly had any jokes except about sex and gays. Usually people overheard a conversation between two characters that could be taken as sexual assignations or interests or one character longing for another carnally. It was extraordinarily insulting to gays, IMO. The premise is that Jack (the lead) pretended he was gay in order to share a flat with two female friends because the landlord wouldn't allow straight men and women who were unmarried to rent from him. Gayness was presumed to be such an awful thing that it was intrinsically funny, they thought, that a man would ever lower himself to such a low status as a gay man. All the gay-related jokes had to do with various male friends of the girls or Jack being thought to be gay because of the overheard conversations, or simply because they were friendly to Jack. This was uniformly presented as awful and the straight characters did everything they could to deny this horror. A part of the humor was that usually their defense strategies were taken as even further proof they were gay. A fate worse than death. Offhand, I cannot remember anything that suggested gays were even fully human. Awful, awful, show but yes, I watched it, at first because it was better than what was on other channels and it was in that sitcom line-up with Laverne and Shirley, etc. I stopped watching after while because the overheard seemingly sex situations got just too repetitive. Sadly I did not stop watching because of the insult to gays; even though I was one, I kind of bought into the idea that gays were kind of funny and were at the low end of humanity and that nothing could be worse than anyone suspecting one to be gay. It was a very long time, alas, before I put two and two together and realized that was ME they were laughing at and that I wasn't as bad a person as they (and most other shows) implied.
Dan Maloney
2022-02-28 17:26:17 +0000 UTCEmbed working again!
Irisarc
2022-02-27 18:44:27 +0000 UTC
