Hold this episode up to your face. Now point at it and smile. You, too, can be a pitchman.
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You always make me smile, or laugh outright, all while busily searching out obscure references you make.
Today your Jello comments really hit home. Jello was definitely a big staple at my childhood Lutheran church. Yuk. Until someone hit on Strawberry Bavarian.
Any day I hear someone say “trencherman” in ordinary conversation is a Good Day.
Some day if the inclination is there, sir, I would enjoy hearing the Lileks opinion of two of the icons of my youth: Steve Allen and Stan Freberg. I have fond memories of Jack Benny, which you nicely froze in a Jello mold this week. Benny was a national phenomenon, and Freberg was pretty West Coast except for the parody records, so I won’t be too surprised if he’s not on your radar. Allen pretty much invented late night TV, and I remember him as the hour before the test pattern on sleepless nights.
My mother, in telling me about the days when television commercials were shown live, told of one particular one for coffee.
The commercial showed the coffee being poured from a chrome coffee pot into a clear glass cup so the television audience could see the texture and color of the coffee as it swirled in the cup as it was being poured. The steam rising from the coffee as it was being poured showed that the coffee was hot. Except . . . when the hot coffee contacted the clear glass cup, the cup shattered. My mother’s report was that the live feed immediately ended.
I was watching the Steve Allen Show one night and he was touting a fiberglass chair. To show how strong it was, he hit it with a hammer. The second hit, he poked a hole right through it. After the audience stopped cracking up, he looked at the hammer and said, “This hammer is made of fiberglass!”