Inappropriate Humor (OT)

A Sunday truffle:

(All of this should be considered NSSFW, not-so-safe for work. Although it's just naughty, not nasty.)

I noted to a group of former Corcoran Photo classmates that the 37th anniversary of our graduation just passed, an email I began by saying, "Prepare to feel ancient...." One of my classmates replied that his wife was 12 then, so he replied, "I feel dirty, not ancient."

That reminded me of one of the wickedest SNL skits. (No offense to my classmate, who's been happily married for years.)

When I look at video or film what I mostly think about is how well it's written. That one has Tina and Amy all over it—I'd bet a hundred dollars they wrote it, or most of it. Candy Kirby at The Jest called it the "most savage SNL skit ever made," adding, "also making an Emmy-worthy appearance: Leslie Jones’ death glare." The death glare is one of the few things on video that actually makes me "lol" every time I see it.

Hooker story
And speaking of wicked but hilarious, I ran across this a few days ago. I saw it when it originally aired, in the hazy, distant days of 1978—and probably haven't seen it since then. It's an appearance by the reformed con man Frank Abagnale, who passed millions of dollars in fake checks in his youth, on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson*.

Pick it up at about the 7:45 mark for the story about the hooker.

What Johnny says at the end was "so you both got screwed!" although it's bleeped.

Who knows if it's true—Abagnale appears to be something of a compulsive liar, and/or a natural storyteller, however you prefer to look at it. His life story, or some version of it anyway, was the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo DiCaprio, which further fictionalizes Abagnale's claims to have successfully impersonated a pilot and a medical doctor among other things, and to have passed all those millions in bad checks. It's possible that the only thing he really impersonated was a famous con man! That is, that his whole con man story is a schtick, and never happened. Which adds further convolutions to the story. The final hoax may be Abagnale's more recent depictions of himself as completely reformed criminal who has become a highly ethical man with a long FBI career. Fooled Google, if so.

Interesting. Personal honor gets almost zero mindshare today, but it's surprising how complicated things get when it's completely absent. In any event, I think we'd better accept the "hooking the hooker" story as nothing more than a well-told joke.

Associated rascality
By the way: apparently the word "hooker" came from Joseph ("Fighting Joe") Hooker, Lincoln's short-lived General in command of The Army of the Potomac who got thrashed by Lee at Chancellorsville. Apparently fighting was not all Joe was known for—he was an overenthusiastic patron of the army's camp followers, who came to be called "Hooker's brigade," a nickname that outlasted the General's tenure.

Joseph Hooker. I admit that I fixed up this JPEG
a bit, including separating the horse's neck from
the background, which you will no doubt notice
now that I've mentioned it.

That tale, like Abagnale's, might or might not survive the fact-checker.

Mike

*Carson was the host from 1962 to 1992. Those shows were much bigger then—Carson's peak viewership was 58 million in 1969, more than a quarter of the U.S. population then, for the wedding of an entertainer called Tiny Tim and his fiancée Miss Vicki. The current Tonight Show's best performance recently was 1.9 million, when President Joe Biden appeared. And that's against a population more than half again larger than it was in 1969.

Book o' the Week:

The Beatles: Get Back. The story of the band's last year, coinciding with the release of Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back.

The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.

Here's the link to B&H Photo

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Featured Comments from:

Comments

[Albert Smith]

"Show him the sonogram." Wow, did not see that coming. And everyone goes home with a Kayak... vicious.

Yep, terrific writing and unpredictable.

Mike, if you haven't seen it already, start season one of 30 Rock. Tina Fey at her best and a great supporting cast to speak her well written lines. I have the whole series on DVD and binge it once a year.

[hugh crawford]

Tina Fey using her real name in that skit is brilliant. Adding a bit of truth makes the fiction so much sharper.

Orson Welles‘s film F is for fake certainly merits a mention in this fine company. After explaining that the movie is about lying and deception Orson says “During the next hour, everything you'll hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.” Needless to say the film is somewhat longer than an hour, The fact that the famous literary forger Clifford Irving wrote the book about the art forger Elmyr de Hory upon which the film is based is only the beginning of the layers upon layers of deception and misdirection in the film. There’s a synopsis of the film on Wikipedia and I have seen it several times (I was a film student briefly) and even with the notes trying to figure out where you as the audience are in relation to the story and or facts is really hard. I highly recommend seeing it. It seems pretty simple until you try to explain it. Worst college paper I ever wrote was about it.

[Richard Alan Fox]

That was one of my favorite skits.
My current wife of twenty three years was five months old when I married my first wife.
Sometimes life moves in mysterious ways.
My camera at time was a Nikon F Photomic.

[R. Edelman]

As the saying goes, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

[Kenneth Wajda]

Hey Mike, take a look at this photographer from Barcelona, Txema Salvans.

https://txemasalvans.com/work/the-waiting-game/
and
https://txemasalvans.com/work/the-waiting-game-ii/

I got the idea from him that the word hooker was a fishing term that prostitutes used to hook men.

[Peter Barnes]

About the hooker story - true or not, I hope US talk show audiences today would not applaud so enthusiastically a story about a criminal cheating a worker.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

Wicked

[PaulW]

A totally entertaining post. Thanks. IMO, the title should have been "Humor (OT)". I found nothing inappropriate about it.

[Mike Ferron]

You know Mike as someone who is now closer to 70 than 60 I find a lot of what I found humorous in my younger years is no longer so. It is now harder to get a chuckle of of me than it once was. But that skit? Damn. Good pick and the death look was a classic.

[Luke]

Cripes, that SNL skit is funny.

[Alex Mercado]

The origin of the term comes from NYC’s Lower East Side neighborhood named Corlears Hook. By the early 1800s it was notorious for its high amount of streetwalkers of both sexes colloquially referred to as Hookers.

As his “reputation” started while on campaign in Mexico during the late 1840s, the association of hookers with the Major General’s name seems to be fortuitous. Too bad he wasn’t in the Navy, this could have been a seaman joke.

I’ll show myself out.

[Bill Pearce]

Great late nite hosts:
1. Johnny Carson
2. Dick Cavett
3. Steve Allen
4. David Letterman

Poor late nite hosts:
everyone else.