I was thinking about a moment in the Proctor & Bergman movie, J-MEN FOREVER!, where the footage we're watching from old Republic and Monogram serials shows the cave walls softening and running down in a horrific cliffhanger way, and the evil voice of our nemesis The Lightning Bug cackles "It's Uncle Melty!"
And I get that reference! I even know I saw at least one Milton Berle show, because I remember there was a gag about a "topless dancer" (or was it waitress?) and it turned out to mean SHE HAD NO HEAD! Well, okay, I get it. Anyway!
I probably know Uncle Miltie from repute, via an older relative-- I had plenty-- or from MAD Magazine, which answered questions and asked many more, or from any of the nostalgia sources I readily found and latched onto. Let me tell you about secondhand nostalgia! Wait, no.
I was an early misguided adopter of nostalgia, and somehow managed to learn that old stuff wasn't all good by the time I was much of a teen, but if nothing else, it gave me an elevated level of ability to converse out of my own depth, and drop names and slogans and whatnot. So I know Uncle Miltie.
These kids today, though, would hear those words and think "Oh, yeah, like if you're in a family, and they're all cute and stuff so you say 'Uncle Milty,' only the walls are melting, so it's Uncle Melty, and I guess that's an okay joke." They don't even know the Uncle Milton from the ant farms. WAIT, ANT FARMS?
Yep, this is another thing that was normal in my world, students. You could buy this clear plastic cross section and put sand in it and ants would build tunnels in it. You got the ants in the mail after you sent in this coupon that came with it. Ants. In the mail. Is this still happening?
I picked up an ant farm, good condition in box, 25 cents at Mac's Swap Shop. Took it to show my sixth-grade classmates, and we put in some of the best playground dirt and some outside ants, then pondered how to feed them. Honey! I thought of honey from a cotton swab, and pretty much murdered those damn ants. No wonder they hate me now. What a mess. I'm sorry.
But kids today, they don't even know about sea monkeys, I'll bet. Or have a friend who'd order them, knowing what they were, just to see how it goes. But I was in my 40s by then. But there's the problem with a lot of my favorite humor. It was created by smartasses, and they came right out with current names and brands and jingles and catch phrases, and it takes the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion to decipher them, even if you were lucky like me and damaged your brain on books of antiquated ephemera.
Perhaps the answer to the question that vexes surviving Monty Python members ("Why are these people still so obsessed with this one job I had in the 70s?") is that they hit upon a magic balance of current references with eternal generic equivalents, and will take another generation or so to make the humor truly obscure.
Some ancient humor survives surprisingly well, like D'Ordel's Pantechnicon, written around 1908 by an architect of the doomed Afghanistan partition, partly by boiling all its targets down to archetypes that I can still spot. I feel like the part where he explains how to generate a multi-page article from a (redundant) two-word prompt sounds like it's talking about how to use A.I.
There's also MURDERS by George Grossmith Jnr, son of the original Ko-Ko, which I talk about at the link. Despite the changes since 1915 (no 'organ man' playing along the street, no 'laundress'), it holds up better than, say, most radio comedy. (If I could ever find it online, I'd link to "The Albert Brooks Show" from "1943," which came out on a comedy LP in the 70s, written by Brooks and Harry Shearer, which contains every single cliche of the genre, except for six others.)
Anyway, I'm on borrowed time, so end of sermonette. Go, sin no more, and touch grass. Listen to a new joke, a current song, read a fresh book. The old stuff's okay, as long as you remember it's old and it's stuff.
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