In a 2003 movie Dead Bodies, Kelly Reilly (who played Mary Morstan in the 2009 Sherlock Holmes) played the love interest of Andrew Scott, who- forward about a year later in 2010- plays Moriarty in Sherlock.
In Season Four of Six Feet Under, David, played by Michael C. Hall, is kidnapped by a deeply unstable drug addict. At one point, David tries to reason with the man saying "I just need to understand how you can do this to me, to anybody?! How can you not feel sympathy for me?!" Michael C. Hall's next role, Dexter, is that of a sociopathic serial killer faced with occasional Ho Yay.
Even more amazing, in Season Five, David hears about about a serial killer on the loose, and a mix of new parent paranoia, and stress following Nate's death, he starts to imagine himself being stalked by a man in a red hoodie. This is ultimately resolved in a surreal dream sequence where he is confronted by his stalker and unmasks him, first to reveal a horrible insect monster... then David himself. Almost makes you wonder if Six Feet Under had more than a little to do with Dexter being cast.
The series could also be described as "David Fisher Takes A Level In Badass," considering how anal Dexter is.
There is a split second moment in that scene, just after David grabs the knife and charges at the hooded figure; it evokes the show that would later come very well.
This video becomes funnier when you realize that Julie Benz once played a vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has probably killed more people than Dexter ever will.
In an episode of Everybody Hates Chris, Greg reveals that he cosplays in his sleep. He chooses a different character for each night. One of which is Robin. A few years later, his actor, Vincent Martella, would do the voice of the teenage Jason Todd in Batman: Under the Red Hood. The show took place when Jason Todd was still Robin.
Even though it probably count as some kind of hate crime to laugh, but the fact that a pre-outedNeil Patrick Harris guest-starred as a nervous ex-gay leader of a "Reformist-Club" that ended up being seduced by Jack in Will and Grace is hilarious. Earlier in the series, Messing jokes about current President Barack Obama back when he was a junior senator, claiming she had sex with him in a dream, "Oh-bama, he Barack'ed my world!"
A closeted John Barrowman auditioned for the role of Will, but was turned down on account of being 'too straight'. The role went to Eric McCormack, who actually is straight, and Barrowman later came out as gay.
Before season 3 of Battlestar Galactica, the actress who played Starbuck gave an interview where she jokingly indicated that the big secrets of the upcoming episodes were that "Starbuck is a Cylon and she DIES!" Amusingly, Starbuck did indeed seem to die towards the end of the season, with all involved making a big deal out of the event and with every indication that she wouldn't be back. The real twist came in the season finale, in which Starbuck was revealed to be alive and therefore possibly a Cylon! (but she's not) Amusingly, while Starbuck's departure from the show was made public early, the character's return was kept secret right up until airtime, even from much of the cast.
In a season 2 episode, one character remarks sarcastically to another: "Oh, maybe I know [you're not a cylon] because I'm a cylon and I've never seen you at any of the meetings." This line just gets funnier and funnier as the show goes on... And more so funny since the line turned up in the mini-series, spoken by Head Six, which may/may not be a Cylon chip in Baltar's head, talking about a character who is later revealed to be a Cylon at the very in of the miniseries.
In episode 820, Space Mutiny (which everyone needs to see simply for the list of nicknames for the beefcake star), Crow makes an offhand comment about an online encyclopedia: "Wow, 26 pages on Gwen Stefani alone!" This was four years before the launch of Wikipedia, which currently has at least 15 pages directly related to her, as well as a Wikicommons and Wikiquote entry. The same movie had Mike riffing on one of the many '80s-refugee extras with the line "What have you got for me, Rick Astley?"
Not the only time they've done that joke. In Eegah, a young man in a suit with his hair cut exactly like Astley's inspires Tom to sing the first line of the chorus from "Together Forever".
In the Santa Claus Conquers the Martians episode, as a ridiculously cheap spaceship flies by, Crow declares (in a stereotypically nerdy voice) "If they cancel Battlestar Galactica, I'm gonna kill myself!" This was funny back when the original series was a nerd cult classic. It became even funnier when the new (even more nerd-loved) series came out. And now, it's been announced that the next season(4) of the new show will be its last.
The line (which got a firm Dude, Not Funny-type reprimand from Joel) was inspired by a real-life incident where 15 year-old Eddie Seidel Jr. jumped off St. Paul, Minnesota's High Bridge in August 1979 after his written pleas to ABC to reinstate the show went unanswered. (They reused this joke in an eighth-season episode.)
And then there's the moment during Hercules Versus the Moon Men when they parody a then-ubiquitous ad for the Scientology text Dianetics -- A Modern Science of Mental Health, which involved reciting life questions and page numbers for the "answer" in the book. The last one? "How much more money can we get from Tom Cruise?" This was roughly a dozen years before Tom's Couch Shuffle incident.
In Riding With Death, Mike comments, as a group of men try to beat up the hero, "We'd like you to consider Scientology!" Jump to the Anonymous campaign against that religion...
Mike Nelson did a Riff Trax of Battlefield Earth early 2007. During the scene were the cave people are learning how to work technology, Mike cracks a joke: "Caveman Geniuses: On FOX". Several months later, a show about the Geico Cavemen aired on ABC.
Episode 409, The Indestructible Man, made in 1992 (the episode, not the film), has the riff on Lon Chaney's name: "Any relation to Dick Cheney?" (Cheney was Secretary of Defense in 1992 - but many people didn't know that...)
Many people also don't know that Dick and Lon were related, although distantly.
In The Beast of Yucca Flats, or rather in the tourism short about Puerto Rico, Mike makes an offhand comment about "Fun times in Guantanamo."
In the same episode, in one of the host segments, Crow parodies the Film Preservation Foundation with his own group that wants to let bad movies deteriorate. He calls it the Film Anti-Preservation Society, and uses the acronym "FAPS"
A few years before the Mike/Joel switch, Mike was guest-starring (he was a writer, so he'd always been around) in War of the Colossal Beast and read a fan letter, which included the line "My favorite is Joel". A few years later, the entire internet started arguing this exact question, but it's clear from the start that Mike was on the side of Joel.
In the episode for Rocket Attack USA, Joel & The Bot's get a Hexfield-Viewscreen visit from a Russian cosmonaut stranded in space with two Bots of his own. The man playing that cosmonaut...Mike Nelson!
In a related vein, during the episode for Gamera, Joel goes overboard with the stupid Johnny Carson "Art Fern" impersonation. This annoys the Bots to no end until Crow says, "Stop! You can be replaced by Leno, you know....". Considering what happened with Joel Hodgson a few years later (albeit not with Leno).
One of the Mads' invention exchanges was a tiny square exercise mat, which they talked about as if it unlocked some great fitness secret. Nowadays the mat bears an uncanny resemblance to the Wii Fit balance board and its advertisements.
In episode 821, Time Chasers, there is a riff on how the Big Bad's suit-wearing henchmen are "the director's friends who owned suits." In a later interview, the director himself confirmed this was true.
In the same episode, at one point a bearded overweight resident of the Bad Future comments that he'd cut the throat of the guy who invented the time machine that caused the whole mess. Crow calls him "Michael Moore in 30 years".
...I'd hate to be the "Mike and Joel are Time Lords!" guy, but...Mike and Joel are Time Lords.
From Eegah, they have this quote, referencing a caveman: "I'm with Allstate. Who're you with?" Now consider the popular Geico commercials...
In Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders, Mike makes a crack about the father in the second half of the movie rushing out to go rent Barb Wire. This was already a shot at Barb Wire for its negative effects on the production of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. However, the joke falls under this trope because the first airing of this episode had heavy advertising from Sci-Fi for Barb Wire.
In Werewolf, Mike and the bots riff about a gas station sign with gas prices that were absurdly high at the time of taping. The riff's funny now for the opposite reason: the prices in question are below $2 a gallon...
Entirely in-series: at the end of 201, Rocketship X-M, when Crow comments about how bad it is for people trapped in a capsule to be watching a movie about people dying in a capsule, Joel asks the Mads, "Why don't you just show us Marooned?" Forrester's response: "We couldn't get it!" 2 years later in episode 401, they did... thanks to Film Ventures International releasing it as Space Travelers.
The last episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 showed Mike and the bots back on earth, sitting down to riff on a movie even though they weren't being forced to anymore. Their actors did the same thing.
There's a direct-to-video release of Have I Got News for You from the early '90s that features the joke "The first episode not to be shown on TV, but good luck watching it without a TV". It's now onYouTube.
A Mork and Mindyblooper reel from 1978 (WARNING: NSFW language and brief nudity that you probably don't want to see) is all the more hilarious due to a young (and possibly coked-up) Robin Williams lamenting, "I see my whole career flashing before me" and "A brief moment of silence for my career."
One clip has Williams telling Pam Dawber that "someday you'll have a career of your own, and you won't need me anymore." And, though she's running under the pop-culture radar, she does: she's kept rather active.
In the beginning of "Putting The Ork Back In Mork", Mork has forgotten how to be Orkan and turned, well, bland. His hair is very, very short and he wears glasses... and he looks almost exactly like Robin Williams did at the time of his death. Maybe Robin hadn't forgotten how to be an Orkan, but he sure made it clear that he just didn't want to be one. If only there had been some way to turn him back...
Long, long before Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status:
Mork: I've been to all the planets in your solar system. Exador: Mars? Mercury? Pluto? Mork: Oh, don't ever go to Pluto - it's a Mickey Mouse planet.
In a first-season episode of Monk, a person of interest asks whether he's psychic, and Sharona quips "he's a psychic who doesn't believe in psychics." Four years later, it begins being paired with Psych, whose main character uses the skill Monk used to have... to pose as a psychic.
In fact, one promo for both shows had Monk (correctly) accuse the lead of Psych, Shawn Spencer, of not being a psychic. Shawn promptly notices that Monk is somewhat fastidious, and then licks the not-Cheetos dust off his fingers and offers to prove he is. He'll read Monk's mind - by touching his skull.
Another promo had Monk at the same party as The Dead Zone's John Smith. Smith is a psychic. He warns Monk not to drink the punch because someone picked up the bowl and drank directly from it.
And then there is the promo where Monk and John Smith don't want to shake the other's hand, each for their own reasons.
There was also a three-way promo in which John and Shawn debate being a real psychic vs. being a fake psychic, only to look over their shoulders to see Monk counting and organizing his peas. They both agree they have it better then poor OCD Adrian.
Also, Tony Shalhoub's role as OCD Adrian makes Ian Stark's (his character on Stark Raving Mad) claim that he once had OCD much more amusing. Of course, Ian Stark cured his OCD through hypnosis, but when Monk tried doing that in "Mr. Monk Gets Hypnotized," it didn't go as planned.
In the teaser for Psych's season 2, Shawn and his Black Best Friend Gus, who run the eponymous Phony Psychic detective agency, recreate portions of the "Ebony and Ivory" video, including the line "Stick together in per-fect har-mony". The actual trailer for the season promptly revealed that Gus is leaving Psych. That situation lasted for only one episode and culminated in Shawn blackmailing Gus' boss - one of Shawn's Crowning Moments Of Awesome.
Though the line is actually "Ebony and ivory sit together in perfect harmony on my piano keyboard; oh lord, why don't we?", which makes perfect sense if you've ever seen gus and shawn work together.
Straddling the line between Hilarious in Hindsight and Late to the Punchline is the famous "Ross and Rachel kiss for the first time" scene. The set-up seems normal at first, but try to remember this exchange while wearing your Troper Glasses - and remember it happened before Internet culture:
Ross: What matters is I-I don't need this right now. I'm happy! Thisship has sailed. Rachel: Ok, you go ahead and you do that, Ross, because I don't need your stupid Shipping.
Also, Joey, during the premiere of Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., voices his doubt that he can carry a show on his own. It was proved true a few years later.
In an early episode, Chandler and Monica jokingly agree to get married if they're both single by the time they're 40. There was also a couple of these in the series 3 finale about whether or not Monica would date him if they weren't friends. Fast-forward a few seasons, and They Do. A Clip Show before the wedding actually highlighted some of these.
There's also that one-off gag very early on where the group wonders which of them will be the last to get married, and everyone looks at Chandler. While he isn't the first to get married, he is the first to get married and stay that way.
A season 6 episode has a throwaway gag with Rachel robbing some money out of Ross's jacket. When she catches a girl looking at her she replies "Alimony". Which becomes especially funny knowing she has a baby with Ross one year later.
The message of Angel season 5's episode "The Girl in Question" rapidly becomes non-serious when additional information is provided by Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. To explain: in "The Girl in Question," Angel and Spike go to Italy to try and find Buffy (well, to stop a demon war, but that's just an excuse). Each one says they love her; but when they talk with Andrew, they find she's in a relationship with the Immortal, their nemesis. Sort of. Anyway, it all ends with them bonding (again, sort of) over the fact that neither will be with Buffy, who has moved on. In Buffy Season 8, it's revealed that the Buffy involved with the Immortal is a double used so people won't know where the real Buffy is (in Scotland), and Andrew made up her relationship with the Immortal as a practical joke on Angel and Spike.
Also in Buffy, "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" (Season 1, Ep 11): Willow presents Buffy with a list of missing students, and Buffy remarks that the most recent student's only activity was band - and that she played the flute. Willow's reaction was intended as confused, but anybody who's seen American Pie can't help but think that her "...So?" looks quite shameful and guilty.
The same missing student in that ep was a girl who was so ignored by her fellow students that she became invisible. The final scene of the episode shows the girl being recruited by the FBI for a special unit using people with special powers such as invisibility as assassins and other secret agents. Fast forward a few years, and that same actress is on Heroes as an FBI agent, recruiting psychic Matt Parkman to help catch superpowered multiple murderer Sylar.
The best Buffy example is in season 3, episode 16: "Dopplegangland." An evil vampire version of Willow arrives from an alternate dimension, threatening the real Willow while acting rather sultry all around. Willow describes the vampire-Willow as "kind of gay." Buffy assures her that a vampire's personality has nothing to do with that of the original human. Angel replies "Well, actually...[Buffy glares] That's a good point." Less than a year later, Willow discovered that she herself was gay.
This is made worse because Willow uses the exact same words the episode "Tabula Rasa" from Season 6 when she realizes (once more) her sexual preference after having wiped clean the memory of the whole cast due to a spell misfire.
Joss was trying to decide which of Xander and Willow would come out. If you look at vamp-Xander's behavior, especially to "puppy" Angel, it feels they were going for Depraved Bisexual. (It falls a little short, but then, this was ten years ago and Most Writers Are Male.)
Some of "Doppelgangland" passes into Harsher in Hindsight. The two most horrific words in Buffy are "Bored Now".
And again from Dopplegangland, after Willow hears about her double being a dominatrix scoffs at the thought of her and Oz playing Mistress of Pain games. Alyson Hannigan ad libbed the femdom scene in the first American Pie and in the second it turns out she's flanderized into a super crazy hot evil male dom chick.
In a season five episode of How I Met Your Mother, the gang see a "doppelganger" of Lily, the character played by Alyson Hannigan. The doppelganger is a rather nasty stripper with a European accent. Unfortunately, the writers didn't go with a quote of the Buffy line.
On the topic of Buffy, in the first season, there's a brief one of these when investigating a monster butchering kids for their organs. Willow mentions that she and Giles are just going to "do some research into organ harvesting" or the like. Made funny years later with Anthony Stewart-Head taking the role of the Repo Man in Repo! The Genetic Opera - a character who works - yes - as an organ harvester.
Anthony Head plays Giles, a skilled magician. Years later, he would play the fanatically anti-magic King Uther on Merlin.
After a brief stint as stage magician Adam Klaus in the pilot of Jonathan Creek.
In the first episode of Angel Angel runs into Cordelia at a party. After a brief conversation which ends with Cordelia saying that she has to talk to people who actually are someone, Angel comments "Nice to see that she's grown as a person." Funny at the time, but ironic in light of the vast amount of Character Development she would undergo over the course of the series.
In that same episode, Cordelia asks if he's still "Grrr". He says "Yeah...there's not actually a cure for that." He finds out later, in "I Will Remember You", that there actually is.
The traditional nickname for Buffy's horde of sidekicks was "the Scoobies", after the group in Scooby Doo. Several years later Sarah Michelle Gellar, Buffy's actress, would go on to play Daphne in the live-action Scooby Doo movie. Oz's actor Seth Green would also show up as a minor character and Velma's love interest (which is also inadvertently amusing, given that Velma is sometimes theorized to be a lesbian, and is like Willow in character).
There's an episode where Buffy tells Angel that "being stalked isn't really a turn-on for a girl." Uh...
Way back in the first episode Buffy is freaked out to discover a vampire victim, so she approaches Giles and asks, "Okay, what's the sitch?" Kim Possible did for the spy theme what Buffy did for horror, and would adopt this as a Catch Phrase.
In "As You Were" Spike is illegally selling demon eggs on the black market using the alias "The Doctor." Years later, James Marsters would get a recurring role on Torchwood, a spinoff of Doctor Who.
In Angel, season 5 episode 19 "Time Bomb", Illyria has this to say to Angel regarding vampires: "Do you know what you were when I was young? You were the muck at our feet. We called you the ooze that eats itself. You were pretty at night. You sparkled, and you stank. You still stink of it!"
Buffy: Oh, come on! This is Sunnydale! How bad an evil can there be here?
This Season 2 conversation, years before the revelation that Spike was a bad poet:
Angelus: Dear Buffy. I'm still trying to decide the best way to send my regards. Spike: Why don't you rip her lungs out? It might make an impression. Angelus: Lacks... poetry. Spike: It doesn't have to. What rhymes with lungs?
In Season 5's "The Replacement," Riley remarks to Buffy that he appreciates her "bad ice-skating movie obsession." This comes two episodes after the introduction of Dawn, played by Michelle Trachtenberg, who, 5 years later, would star in Ice Princess.
In Homicide: Life on the Street, a major plot point is Kellerman's (Reed Diamond's) murder of a drug dealer, particularly getting past Internal Affairs. In The Shield, Vic Mackey murders Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond) and claims an already dead dealer did it. It is also the main reason he is so loathed in the series finale.
In this clip from The Daily Show way back in January of 1999, commentator Beth Littleford does interviews at Super Bowl XXXIII, and late in the clip, ends up making comparisons to gay porn while asking uncomfortable sexual questions about homosexual sex to various players, including Esera Tuaolo, who, three years after that show aired, came out of the closet.
Also, the sketch where a gorilla is applying for a job as a librarian, to which he is ideally suited until he reveals himself as a man in a suit. Discworld used an orangutan, admittedly....
The "Science Fiction Sketch" has a man named Harold Potter who, despite being English, goes to Scotland for supernatural reasons. [1] This may however be a deliberate reference, since the Harry Potter series has a number of other Monty Python references.
And then there's the Verrifast Airline sketch, which pre-dates many of the shadier charter and low-price airline companies by about thirty years, and arguably becomes even funnier in the light of, say, Ryanair.
In the UK, they somehow managed to make the tap water toxic in the process.
That too happened in Only Fools and Horses, due to Trigger accidentally polluting the local reservoir, and so cue the 'Peckham Spring' water glowing in the dark.
Similarly to the Mystery Science Theater 3000 example above, an early Peter Kay routine involved him demonstrating the concept of "literal dancing" using a certain Rick Astley song. The rise of the rickroll has made this even funnier than it was originally.
The state of Earth in Babylon 5 is often read as a commentary on the Bush government and the many widespread strawmen about the PATRIOT act. Babylon 5 ran from 1994-1998, ending three years before either.
The conclusion of the third season episode "A Day in the Strife" is a lot funnier (unintentionally) now than when it originally aired. A mysterious alien probe arrives asking the station questions to see whether it was worthy of the probe revealing some of its own technology, but it is a ruse by which its unknown builders intend to destroy any race advanced enough to pose a threat; Sheridan becomes suspicious of the probe's true nature at the last minute, hesitating whether to send the answers and prompting the following:
That's a standard military communications protocol, that long predates B5.
The Babylon 5 Curse is a humourous way of noting that actors whose bodies were referred to in the script inevitably injured that body part. Claudia Christian fell out of a tree and broke her foot mere hours after reciting the immortal line "I have a very good relationship with my left foot"; Jerry Doyle broke his arm in a fight scene just before recording the scene where the computer asks him if he has a broken arm.
Ivanova's lament that the Drazi are "a race that speaks only in macros" is even funnier in the age of web forum image macros.
In a Frasier episode, Frasier and Niles are shocked to learn that an old Shakespearean actor they admired as children is now starring in a science fiction series (a reference to Patrick Stewart in Star Trek), which he hates. The guy that played the actor? Derek "The Master" Jacobi (ironically, Jacobi has stated that a part in Doctor Who was a lifelong dream). And Frasier Crane is played by Kelsey "The Beast" Grammer (who had also previously done an appearance on Star Trek).
What makes this even funnier is that before he bumps into Jacobi's character, Frasier says "I can't believe I'm scouring a convention for X-Men comics! I feel like I'm contributing to the decline of my son's intellect!"
In another episode, Frasier refers to his new agent (played by Kristin Chenowith) as his old agent's winged monkey. Chenowith later starred as Glinda in the first Broadway run of Wicked.
In the same vein as the Neil Patrick Harris one, this scene from the season one finale kills me:
Niles: (Upon seeing Roz's date) Wow! Frasier: Wow? Did you say wow? Niles: I did didn't I? I have never said "wow" about another man before. I wonder if that means anything. Frasier: (Voice dripping with sarcasm) Yes. It means you are a gay man. Your entire marriage with Maris have been a scam, and you should have come out of the closet years ago. Do you want to tell dad, or should I?
Another David Tennant example: An episode of the Murder-investigation-occasionally-interrupted-by-song-and-dance-routines 6-episode Blackpool features him walking past a Doctor Who museum over a year before he would go on to play the Tenth Doctor.
From the Casanova mini-series with David Tennant as a young Casanova:
Just before the start of the Doctor Who Children In Need special Dimensions in Time there is a brief segment of Jon Pertwee (as the Doctor) visiting Noel Edmunds; the Doctor tells Edmunds that he's seen him in year 2010. 2010 has come and gone, and Edmunds is still on television and currently presents (among other things) Deal or No Deal, the Doctor's answers to Noel asking if he does serious programming ("I don't visit fantasy land!") is another point to consider here. Even funnier considering how Edmonds takes his relatively low-brow daytime gameshow as Serious Business.
Another Doctor Who example: The 2005 episode "Father's Day" episode, set in 1987, contains contemporary background music, including a late-80s hit record by a Lancashire-born pop singer. The song? Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Clearly, the writers used the TARDIS to extract the meme from two years in the future.
In the Doctor Who spoof sketch Curse of the Fatal Death, the Tenth Doctor is portrayed as being so full of himself that he licks a mirror. Later, the series was relaunched and we got a canonical Tenth Doctor who was quite egotistical and liked to lick things.
That Doctor was played by Richard E. Grant. Grant would star as the Doctor again in a non-canonical 2005 web-series called "Scream Of the Shalka". It contains a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo of pre-fame David Tennant being horribly killed. Around the same time as that, Richard E. Grant was in a cooking/comedy show called Posh Nosh where he played a married man who was very obviously gay. His lover was played by... guess.
On a related note, Grant's Posh Nosh co-star Arabella Weir voiced the role of a female Third Doctor in Big Finish's What If audio drama Exile- which also featured David Tennant as an unnamed Time Lord looking for the Doctor. And Weir happens to be a good friend of David Tennant (he's the godfather of her children).
More Who: A few people had fun comparing the Master's Saxon persona to Barack Obama. Then came "The End of Time", in which the Master transforms Obama (and the entire planet) into, well, (clones of) himself!
In the episode "The End of the World", Jabe at one point asks if Rose is a prostitute the Doctor hired. Billie Piper has since gone on to play one in Secret Diary of a Call Girl...and to make it even funnier, one of her clients was Matt Smith.
It all gets funnier still: It looks like David Tennant is set to marry Georgia Moffett, his co-star in "The Doctor's Daughter," wherein she played...his (clone) daughter. Her real-life father is none other than former Fifth Doctor Peter Davison. The mind boggles....
In the old school episode, 'The Crusade', the First Doctor, after seeing Ian knighted by King Richard, laments to Vicki, "I wish he had knighted me." Vicki laughs and says, "That'll be the day." Jump ahead 41 years to 'Tooth and Claw', where the Tenth Doctor finally does get knighted, and Vicki's comment becomes a lot funnier. That'll be the day indeed, Vicki. Could also be construed as a Brick Joke.
While on some talk show, Catherine Tate looked at a picture of Matt Smith and joked that he was so young he would be the first Doctor Who would have to travel the universe with his parents. (contains spoilers [dead link]) Turns out Amy Pond, his companion, became his mother-in-law.
Don't forget Rory, who of course became the Doctor's father-in-law.
Alex Kingston, AKA River Song, made a couple guest appearances on Law and Order Special Victims Unit. Her character's surname? Pond. Amusing coincidence which became hilarious after River was revealed to be Amy and Rory's daughter, Melody Pond.
On the season 8 episode of Law and Order "Baby, It's You" that was Ripped from the Headlines about the Jon Benet Ramsey case they arrested the stalker of a 14 year old model that was raped to death and he misread the name tag of a certain visiting Baltimore Homicide detective as Defective Monk this was in 1997 5 years before the debut of Monk, "the Defective Detective". In case you were wondering and since this was the first half of a Crossover with Homicide: Life on the Street which you are unlikely to see any more, it turned out that the kid was innocent and the girls own mother was the one who raped and killed her daughter.
In a Law and Order episode in 1996, a homeless woman mentions having a crush on NY mayor Rudy Giuliani, but Briscoe informed her Giuliani was married. This was years before Giuliani's extremely public affair (with a woman much less attractive than the actress) and subsequent divorce.
More or less anything Vince (Queer as Folk UK) has to comment about Doctor Who becomes extremely funny for all those who picked up the series because Russell T. Davies created the series back when, before his new project NuWho was realized.
Tony Hale's delivery of the line "Alias is a show about a spy!" on Arrested Development was already hilarious, but it's even better now that he has a recurring role on Chuck, another show about a spy.
A first season episode of Night Court has Assistant District Attorney Dan Fielding bragging that he once met Donald Rumsfeld. Not such a big deal in the 80s, when the episode aired, and Rumsfeld had been out of the limelight for years, but a lot funnier when the DVD was released in the 2000s, when Rumsfeld was going through the Abu Ghraib controversy and all over the news.
The Goon ShowGrand FinaleThe Last Goon Show of All was recorded for both radio and TV in 1972. Before the show proper begins, Peter Sellers - whose screen career was bottoming out at the time - does a bit where he whistles the soliloquy from Hamlet. "That was Mr. Sellers rehearsing his comeback," the announcer explains afterward. Three years later, his rehearsing paid off when The Pink Panther film series was revived.
A sketch from an early episode of Mad TV featured Jason Voorhees IN SPACE!. Later, Jason X was released.
There's also the "iRack" sketch. In the beginning, Steve Jobs shows regular iPod products like the iBook and ridiculous ones like the iMicrowave. The last one in the list is the iVacuum. On December 11, 2009, Electrolux revealed their concept design: a vacuum with an iPod dock.
Inevitably, Apple began to sell its own tablet computer. It's called the Apple iPad.
In the pilot episode of Thirty Rock, Tina Fey is ordered to dress up to meet a new actor for the show. Since she dresses casually for her job, she is forced to take a Laura Bush pink suit and put her hair up at the costume/make-up department. She later does a series of sketches for Saturday Night Live as Sarah Palin wearing a strikingly similar outfit and hairstyle.
In an episode of Spaced, Tim claims something is as sure as "eggs is eggs and every odd number Star Trek movie is shit". Simon Pegg is now cast as Scotty in the upcoming Star Trek movie... which is the 11th Trek movie being made. Pegg claimed "Fate put me in the movie to show me I was talking out of my ass."
In an episode of Red Dwarf, the crew travel to an Alternate Universe and meet genderswapped versions of themselves. The female Rimmer is (very unsuccessfully) hitting on the male Rimmer, and at one point the male Rimmer explains to Lister that she's now "gone to get some sexy videos -- she seems to think that seeing two men together might turn me on". This is supposed to just be another hilarious gender-reversed version of a real-world phenomenon (specifically heterosexual men liking female-homosexual pornography) but it's a lot funnier because of the changes since 1988: Female Rimmer is just a Yaoi Fangirl!
Then there's the bit in DNA when Lister tells a story of how he saw the simplicity of a squirrel's life and wished that his life could be the same. Then Rimmer facetiously asks if Lister's a "closet squirrel" who likes to parade around with a strap-on bushy tail calling himself "Nutkin". As with the above example, this is a lot funnier now due to the Furry Fandom.
May have been funny to Furries at the time too (1991). The fandom is Older Than They Think.
Actor John O'Hurley is not one, but two real life instances of this trope. First example was his role as catalogue retailer J. Peterman on Seinfeld - O'Hurley later ends up in a business partnership with Peterman in real life. Later on in the UPN sitcom The Mullets he played the role of a game show host. O'Hurley then hosted the revival of To Tell the Truth and went on to host Family Feud.
David Duchovny starring in Californication as a charming, self-deprecating Chivalrous Pervert brought low by ennui and too much fame: entertaining. David Duchovny starring in Californication as a charming, self-deprecating Chivalrous Pervert brought low by ennui and too much fame after publicly admitting to an affair with his tennis coach and entering rehab for sex addiction: hilarious.
Actually, the story about the tennis instructor was proven false and retracted by the newspaper that printed it. There's no evidence that he ever cheated on his wife.
Replace the Californication references above with references with Red Shoe Diaries, and it becomes even more hilarious.
In an episode of Greek in March of '08, Cappie calls rival Evan "Evan Longoria", making fun of him by linking him with the Desperate Housewife of similar name. Seven months later, baseball player Evan Longoria wins the Rookie of the Year award and leads his team to the World Series. Who's laughing now, Cappie?
SCTV had a recurring segment, The Gerry Todd Show, with Rick Moranis as the host of a program that played Music Videos. Since those sketches first aired the same year MTV debuted (1981), it's natural to assume they were parodies of MTV, but in fact the sketches all originally aired before MTV debuted on August 1st. Moranis used to be a radio DJ and came up with the idea of a VJ who played videos, unaware that a network (also created by former radio people) was being planned around this same concept.
Also, given the subsequent use of Michael McDonald as a humor trope (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Yacht Rock), the Gerry Todd Show sketch making fun of McDonald seems prescient.
SCTV had a commercial parody advertising an album called Stairways To Heaven, with various unlikely performers covering "Stairway To Heaven" ("30 great artists, one great song"). A decade later there was an actual Stairways To Heaven album built around the same idea (with covers done In the Style Of other artists).
"Cake" from Brass Eye, already utterly hilarious. It's a made-up drug, which they somehow managed to convince people meant that it was made from chemicals rather than that it was, well, made up. Or to put it another way, the cake is a lie.
In the novel Shogun, the hero John Blackthorne's rant against the evils of homosexuality after casually being offered a boy to have sex with is an uncomfortable piece of Values Dissonance. However, with Blackthorne being played by gay actor Richard Chamberlain in the miniseries adaptation the scene suddenly becomes a hilarious "doth protest too much" moment. In all fairness, the book mentions that Blackthorne HAS had sex with boys and that most other sailors have. Which doesn't stop it from being funny.
Made even funnier by the fact that Extras-Winslet appears to show a rather irreverent attitude to the Holocaust ("I mean how many films have there been about the Holocaust? We get it! It was grim. Move on."). In The Reader she plays an SS officer.
Ricky Gervais lampshaded this at an award ceremony, you can find it on youtube.
Made extra extra funny by the "OSCAR CLIP" quote in Wayne's World: "I never learned to read!"
Also there's the fact that, for extra awards bait Extras-Winslet was playing a nun in the film. Come real-world Oscar night, Winslet's main competitor for Best Actress was Meryl Streep for Doubt...in which she played a nun.
There's undoubtedly numerous examples from a show so long-running and steeped in '80s culture as Kids Incorporated. Here are a few.
The drummer, who has maybe three lines in the four years he was on the show? That's Mario Lopez.
"School's For Fools" -- The Kid is brushing off his studies because he plans to be a rock star and doesn't care about school. Instead of studying for finals, he plans to go to a rock concert. Why is this funny? One of the things he's supposed to be studying is the difference between East and West Germany. And the rock star he's going to see? David Hasselhoff
"The Boy Who Cried Gorilla" -- This 1987 episode includes a cover of "In Too Deep" by Genesis that is performed by the Kid, with main character Richie being the only other character on screen. The funny part is that the song, despite the efforts of Kids Inc. brass to turn the song in question (originally a romantic song) into a friendship one by changing the word "love" to "like". Didn't work. Made even funnier because Rahsaan Patterson ("Kid") is out of the closet now.
A joke in an early episode of Corner Gas has Davis explaining his theory that Battlestar Galactica could have actually happened. Just plausible enough from the original series. But if you flash-forward to the finale of the reimagined series, this is exactly what's said to have happened.
There's a scene in season one of House where House is talking to a black senator who is running for President. He suspects the man has contracted HIV from a homosexual encounter, and says "Someday there will be a black president. Someday there will be a gay president. There may even be a black gay president. The only combination I don't see is black, gay, and dead." Snarky at the time, but now that Obama's ruling the roost it's hilarious.
They even LOOK similar. They both have short hair, a mole on the left cheek. They're both depicted as charismatic speakers - face it, its an expy of Obama, from when he was just up and coming.
"You're not going to be president either way. It's not called the White House because of the paint job."
In one episode, House's roommate from the asylum moves in with him. He has issues with his status as a US citizen, which House clears up. He leaves, saying now that he won't have any problems with immigration, he plans to move to Arizona. This episode aired about a week after Arizona passed several controversial immigration laws.
Johhny Gomez says, "I don't know Jack, Leonardo may not have an oscar, but he's a hot young stud," to which Nicholson replies: "Johnny, he is a little tiny snot-nosed has-been in training."
Leonardo Dicaprio: "You washed up old grease bag!"
Jack Nicholson: "The sad truth, kid, is you're just another pretty face who can't act."
This advert for the first season of Robot Wars narrated by Norman Lovett (Holly in Red Dwarf) becomes pretty amusing when you take into account that Craig Charles took over as presenter in season 2.
Once Upon a time a then-unknown Jada Pinkett was turned down for a role as one of Will's many girlfriends on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. She would later marry Will Smith.
You can also see footage from a home video of her as a young girl in Tupac: Resurrection, dancing to one of Smith's songs.
It gets better. She was turned down because she and Will didn't have any chemistry. Something with which Will clearly disagreed.
A season 4 episode has Will mocking an actor he didn't believe as a cowboy with a sarcastic dance and repeated refrain of "Wild Wild West".
In one of the "Myths Revisited" episodes of MythBusters, the narrator makes a comment about Tory having "about as much lift as a lead balloon". In a later episode, the MythBusters built a lead balloon and made it float.
Western fans of Japanese Toku shows, whether it's Super Sentai or Kamen Rider, will agree on only one thing - the Blind Idiot Translations of these Japanese shows on bootleg Hongkong DVDs are always funny. Case in point, a supporting character named Goro in Kamen Rider Ryuki would always be named 'Inagaki' in the HK DVD subtitles, simply because he shares the given name of Goro Inagaki of the popular boyband SMAP. Fast forward to 2009, and Goro Inagaki lands a role as a Kamen Rider.
An episode of Father Ted features a Scooby-Doo Hoax involving a mysterious sheep-eating beast. Dougal, who is terrified of it, rattles off a long list of increasingly ridiculous characteristics that he's been told that it has, finishing with "...and instead of a mouth, it's got four arses!". Several years later, Dr Mephisto on South Park would genetically engineer various four-arsed creatures as a recurring gag.
In the pilot of Firefly, Kaylee appears daunted by the idea of being a doctor when first meeting Simon Tam. An interesting viewpoint for Dr. Jennifer Keller.
In "The R.Tam Sessions," River comments that her brother is a surgeon and she could never do what he does. Later on, cue the first episode of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where Cameron does surgery on an injured Sarah Connor....
In "Ariel", the crew must use fake IDs to gain access to a hospital so Simon can perform tests on River. Jayne's new identity? Kiki LaRue. This is funny for obvious reasons, but then you add in that the name later showed up elsewhere in Whedon-verse...
In the year 2525, Gina Torres had to fight to survive alongside a cryogenically frozen stripper. Eight years earlier, she was headed out toward the black.
After Kate quibbles over semantics on Jon and Kate Plus Eight, Joel from The Soup quips, "stay tuned for next season's Jon Minus Nine"!
In Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror," mirror universe Sulu puts on a smarmy smirk and hits on Uhura. When she objects, he says "is the captain here?" flash forward to the 2009 movie, where Kirk puts on a similar smirk and hits on her as well.
The episode "Shore Leave" has Dr. McCoy trying to tell everyone he saw this giant rabbit (meant to be the White Rabbit of Alice in Wonderland). After TOS was cancelled, DeForest Kelley starred in Night of the Lepus, which featured Giant Killer Bunny Rabbits.
In the second season's "The Ultimate Computer" the eponymous machine was built to control the starship without any need for a crew. Upon learning this, Spock laments that "The most unfortunate lack in current computer programming is that there is nothing available to immediately replace the starship surgeon." 26 years later, we have Star Trek: Voyager and the Emergency Medical Hologram.
Probably the best, and definitely the first, example in Star Trek: in the original unaired pilot The Cage, Captain Pike's first officer, "Number One", is played by Majel Barret who is widely known for playing the computer voice in every future Star Trek series. At one point in the episode, Number One is beamed down into the cage the Talosians are holding Pike in, to act as an alternate choice for the captain to breed with in order to create a slave race for the Talosians. The woman originally planned to be his mate, Vina, is none too happy about this development, and verbally insults Number One. Her choice of words could not be more appropriate: "He might as well try to mate with a computer!"
In the second season Howard has designed a toilet for the International Space Station. He discovers that it will malfunction and regurgitate and tries to find a solution ... he fails. A few months later the real toilet on the real ISS malfunctioned in a quite similar way.
Similarly, Howard manages to get the Mars rover stuck in a sand drift. He was eventually able to free it, though.
In the first season, after Sheldon leaves the other geeks' Physics Bowl team to form his own, the geeks discuss who might serve as a replacement; they consider Mayim Bialik, the actress who played Blossom, but decide that'd probably be a lost cause. A good decision; as the third season finale shows, she's much more suited to Sheldon's team anyway...
In the second season, Sheldon and Leonard have to give a lecture to a room full of students. The students were extras picked from the show's resident physics researcher's class. This creates two hilarious moments when you know this: Firstly, Sheldon Cooper, an actor, delivers a speech to a room full of physics students about how they are not smart enough to compare to him. Secondly, there's an inside joke. The physics researcher for the show put the answers to their last exam up on the board behind Leonard and Sheldon.
An intentional one in the flashback episode at the end of Season 3. While making out the roommate agreement, Leonard asks if Friday night being Firefly night needs to be in the agreement. Sheldon responds that they might as well decide now, because the show is going to be on for years.
On The Sopranos, Tony loses a ton of money on a New York Jets football game, with the Announcer Chatter describing Buffalo QB J.P. Losman fumbling the ball, then picking it up and scoring the winning points. When the game described was actually played, J.P. Losman fumbled for real...and New York ran it in for the winning points.
Film critic Mary Pols became pregnant after a casual encounter with a much younger man. She suggested that he live with her to raise the baby, without being in a relationship with her. He rejected the idea because it "sounded like a sitcom". Now Accidentally on Purpose is a sitcom, based on her book but with the father doing exactly what she suggested.
Season 5's "The Masseuse" has a subplot where Elaine's boyfriend-of-the-week shares his name with a notorious serial killer and during her ardent effort to convince him to legally change it she suggests O.J., after Simpson. That's right, Elaine begs her boyfriend to change his name to O.J. to avoid sharing his name with a killer. This episode was pre-trial.
Season 6's "The Scofflaw" contains a scene where Kramer is on a corner and yells at a passing litterer "Hey, pig!", and a black police officer thinks he was addressing him. This is both funnier and uncomfortable after Kramer's actor had an infamous racist rant at a black heckler.
In Season 7's "The Wink", George Steinbrenner gives a rundown of all the managers he's fired, mentioning Billy Martin's name four times. He concludes by mentioning Buck Showalter (the then-current Yankees manager), then quickly clams up about it. "George, you didn't hear that from me!" Mere weeks after the episode aired, Showalter was let go and replaced with Joe Torre.
One early episode of The Mighty Boosh features a guest character who is an eerily accurate retroactive Sarah Palin Expy, in terms of looks. This would have been a Reverse Funny Aneurysm in its own right - but the fact that she appears for the first time immediately after Howard Moon utters the line "the man, the myth, the maverick" had me in stitches.
Even funnier? She's a zookeeper (though it's reptiles so not as funny).
At the end of a Beverly Hills, 90210 episode in which Andrea tries to get the school to distribute condoms, she says, "If I never hear the word 'condom' again, it'll be too soon." Maybe that explains why Andrea is the first one in the gang to have an unplanned pregnancy two seasons later.
Watching Bob Saget on Full House becomes much funnier if you've heard his stand-up routine, and know just how sick his sense of humor is.
In the American version, a Scenes from a Hat prompt is "Strange causes to raise money for." Ryan Stiles said "Get Drew Carey a third show." Drew would go on to host a third (Green Screen Show), a fourth (Power of 10), a fifth (The Price Is Right), and a sixth (Drew Carey's Improv-A-Ganza) show, though only two ever aired at the same time.
On another episode of the American version, there was a game of "World's Worst" that was the show's last act, so Drew Carey was playing. The minute Kathy Greenwood said the prompt "World's Worst TV advertisement", Drew immediately stepped down and said, "Hi, I'm Drew Carey for Slim-Fast!" Now watch an episode of The Price Is Right from Season 39 and notice that since Drew took the reins, he's lost 70 pounds.
A similar thing happened in a "Scenes From a Hat" segment:
Drew: Diet books that didn't exactly fly off the shelves. Ryan: "Lose Weight" by Drew Carey
One scenes from a hat had "Celebrities that shouldn't release rap albums" and Brad did one for Stephen Hawking. Year later Epic Rap Battles of History has Hawking rapping against Einstein.
An early episode of The West Wing has a subplot about the White House email system going down after someone hits Reply To All on a chain letter. One character, trying to explain the problem, uses the words "pipeline" and "clogged"...
The X-Files had an episode in which a womanizing, adulterous MIB switches bodies with Mulder. Said MIB, while playing a golf game on an FBI office computer, announces, "Yes! I am Tiger Woods!"
In a Season One episode of Cousin Skeeter where Skeeter trying to avoid his old girlfriend, Nina says how much of a crush she has on Tiger Woods, which Bobby replies, "I heard he had a girlfriend." Player hater indeed, Bobby.
Top Gear is notorious for keeping the identity of their Tamed Racing Driver, TheStig, a secret, to the point where they will replace any Stig who reveals himself as the Stig. In their first Car Football match, one of the players is a driver named Ben Collins, who was at the time the most current incarnation of The Stig. See him here.
An episode of Better Off Ted focused on the company installing motion sensor technology for all the building's functions... with the downside that it didn't recognize black people, so the black employees had to be followed around by white employees at all times. Now comes news that HP's facial recognition web cam software may not work on black people.
Back in the early nineties, Spitting Image reacted to criticism of their portrayal of John Major as the most boring man in Britain by giving him a clandestine affair with Cabinet colleague Virginia Bottomly. The joke was intended to be the ludicrousness of the very idea, but many years later it would transpire that they'd simply picked the wrong colleague...
One episode of Bargain Hunt had them auctioning off a pair of skis and snowshoes which the auctioneer mocked as only being suitable in the UK if they had a particularly bad winter, the year the episode was recorded later turned out to be the coldest on record and skis and snowshoes would have been a real benefit.
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Starship Mine," Captain Picard disables a terrorist using a Vulcan Neck Pinch. The guy who gets pinched? He's played by Tim Russ, who would later star in later Star Trek series Voyager as Vulcan Security Chief Tuvok.
Other Hilarious in Hindsight Tim Russ appearances - as a somewhat xenophobic cop in Alien Nation, and in Spaceballs. Just TRY picturing Tuvok shouting "We ain't found shit!"
Another Star Trek: The Next Generation bit that's worthy of a chuckle. Watching "The Host," there's the senior staff debriefing where an exhausted Dr. Crusher is going over the basics on what Odan was and how limited their options are. There's a reaction shot where Worf looks terribly bored and about to fall asleep. He really should have been paying attention, because his luck with Trills would only slightly be worse than Beverly's...
In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "11001001", Picard mentions that part of their reason for stopping is to fix the holodeck, with which they have been having some problems. Given later events...
In "New Ground", Geordi is excited to try out the experimental soliton wave due to its historical significance, saying "it'll be like being there to watch...Zefram Cochrane engage the first warp drive!". In Star Trek: First Contact, Geordi actually takes part in Cochrane's first warp flight.
In "The Outrageous Okona", Wesley tells Okona that he couldn't be like him, saying "it would be difficult for me to be leaving all the time. I'd miss my friends, the people I love. I guess leaving's gotten easy for you." Two seasons later, Wesley would be leaving all the time.
Overlapping with Technology Marches On: one episode has the crew trying to stop a computer virus rampaging through the Enterprise. When Geordi finally comes up the solution, it more or less translates to "Wipe the hard drive and restore from the backup". It takes a Starfleet engineer the entire episode and a Eureka Moment to come up with what's essentially standard operating procedure for 21st-century IT.
The really embarrassing part is that Geordi doesn't even think of it himself, he realizes that Data recovered from the same virus because HIS designer was smart enough to have a hardware-level implementation of the equivalent procedure in case something ever fatally corrupted Data's system.
In "Phantasms", inside Data's dreams, he finds himself having a telephone in him. So that makes Data an Android phone.
Combined with another episode where a glitch causes a large number of holodeck characters to look like him and you get unlimited Datas...
In The Office episode "The Merger", Michael stabs the tires of the other employees to get them to unite against Vance Refrigeration. When they get annoyed and leave, he says:
In the pilot of Castle, the protagonist's author poker buddies react to his killing off his money-making character. One of them is James Patterson, who says, "You don't see me trying to kill off Alex Cross." Cue a few months later, James Patterson shoots an ad for his latest Alex Cross novel, where he says, "Buy this book, or I'll have to kill Alex Cross."
"Officer Morgenstern will make detective in no time." Yes, she most certainly did.
A TV special Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett recorded at Carnegie Hall included some hilarious parodies of "My Favorite Things" and "Do-Re-Mi". Andrews, Burnett, and twenty unidentifiable males performed these songs in character as the "Swiss Family Pratt," (who apparently have twenty children) sharing "Happy songs that [Andrews] used to sing when [she] was a happy nun back home in Switzerland." Three years after this ridiculous performance, Julie Andrews portrayed the lead in the Epic Movie of The Sound of Music. Andrews later said the parodies have come back to haunt her many times since. [2]
A more indirect omen came when Andrews and Burnett sang a medley of showtunes from various eras of musical theater. The medley ended with "A Boy Like That/I Have a Love" from West Side Story, which resulted in Burnett briefly calling Andrews, "Maria!"
The series The Commish had an episode where a rookie was complaining about not being given any tough assignments. He finally snapped "I'm a man, and I'm ready to do a man's job!". That rookie was played by Eric McKormic, who later starred in Will and Grace.
In the first series of Prime Suspect, Jane Tennyson (played by Helen Mirren) says this line "And don't call me ma'am. I'm not the bloody Queen." Fifteen years later, she did play the bloody Queen, twice, both Elizabeth I and II in the same year.
In the Australian game show Talkin Bout Your Generation, a Running Gag of season one was that Generation Y representative Josh Thomas was hopeless with women and, in fact, that the sum total of his experience with girls was made up of his female guests on the show. In late 2009, between seasons one and two, he came out of the closet.
This sketch on Big Train of a Billie Piper fan becoming despondent over the lackluster chart performance of one of her singles, comparing it to the flame-out of other former pop stars like Debbie Gibson or Sonia. Although Billie doesn't sing anymore, she's most certainly doing well for herself. (A reference to her now-ex-husband Chris Evans is also rather amusing in hindsight.)
Michael Weatherly, Agent Anthony Dinozzo on NCIS, married an oncologist Sept '09. His character was seriously dating to a doctor on the show! (Though hopefully his real-life marriage won't end like his character's!)
Not long after A New Hope's original release, Mark Hamill made an in-character appearance on The Muppet Show. Miss Piggy took one look at "Luke Skywalker", got the hots for him, and spent the next few scenes hitting on him ... dressed as Princess Leia.
In an episode of Yes, Dear Greg tells Jimmy to stop thinking about sex, to which Jimmy says "That's like Tiger Woods not thinking about sex." Freudian Slip, or amazing prescience?
Also, Jamie Foxx often impersonated Ray Charles on In Living Color (this was during the era when the real Ray Charles was doing ads for Diet Pepsi). Foxx later went on to win an Oscar for playing Ray Charles in Ray (2004).
During the final season of Lost, Michael Emerson showed up as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live, revealing that the series was still filming at the time(so neither he, nor Jimmy would know the series' ending). At one point, Emerson talked about how he'd mostly done comedies in his theatrical career before TV had typecast him as a creepy villain. Jimmy joked that maybe after Lost was over, Emerson could do a sitcom, "the Hurley and Ben Show!" That joke became much funnier when the Grand Finale aired, revealing that Hurley becomes the Island's new No. 1 while Ben becomes his No. 2.
In the first episode of Criminal Minds, Hotch says that while Hayley likes the name Henry for their unborn son, Hotch doesn't because it reminds him of the Serial Killer Henry Lee Lucas. This connection apparently doesn't bother JJ, though, because when she has a son in a later series, he's named Henry.
In that same premiere episode, a suspect mentions a research paper Gideon had written explaining that there had never been a true case of a murderer with multiple personalities. There were at least two later episodes featuring murderers with multiple personalities.
An episode of Popular opens with Mary Cherry auditioning for a singing show called Teen Tartz in front a panel of 3 judges. At the time, they were trying to ape the reality show "Popstars", but now it looks like a prophetic version of American Idol.
Eerie, Indiana: There's an episode where the main characters are out to stop a werewolf that's named after an actor famous for playing the Wolfman, but a vaguer discription would be "some guys go out hunting and someone gets shot." The episode? It's called Mr. Chaney.
Glee getting shot down by NBC to perform at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. As of now, that same cast is going to be opening the Emmys, which are on NBC this year.
In the Dirty Jobs Shark Week episode "Dirty Jobs that Bite Harder", after making/testing a shark suit, Mike mentions that he "Does it once, and crosses it off the list". When the suit's inventor, Jeremiah Sullivan, comments on this, Mike replies with a joking "Get a TV show, cross it off the list." One or two years later, during Shark Week, we see Jeremiah again-- a major part of another show.
Clark Gregg appeared on The Shield for several episodes. A few years later, he was in the Iron Man films as an agent of... you guessed it... Shield.
In Birds of Prey, Joe Flanigan (who played Sheppard in Stargate Atlantis) guest starred as a Detective. He and Shemar Moore are walking along discussing 'meta-humans' (people with super powers) and Flanigan says " I've seen perps who can shoot lightning from their fingertips, drop from ten stories, or turn into bugs." Moore replies "One big bug, or lots of small ones?" Flanigan just says "Both."
Amusing in context, but if you're a Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis fan, hilarious. Sheppard got infected by a special virus in the episode 'Conversion' and starts to turn into a big Iratus bug. This was a rip off of a plot in SG-1 which had Teal'c being slowly turned into hundreds of insects. So, now, he really has seen both.
Another Stargate Atlantis example: in the season 2 episode "Epiphany", Rodney gets frustrated with all the questions coming from Teyla and Ronon. He says something along the lines of "I could get this done a lot faster without having to stop and explain everything to Conan and Xena: Warrior Princess!" apparently taking digs at the backwater origins of his two companions. Cue 2011, where Jason Momoa is actually cast to play Conan in the summer 3D film...
In a "News of the Future" segment of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Dan Rowan made a joke about "president Ronald Reagan." In 1968!
Reagan was actually a late entry for the Republican presidential race that year.
Another "News of the Future" sketch predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, down to naming the year.
A man named Edward Cullen has a much younger girlfriend (they're neither sparkly nor living happily ever after).
"Purple Heart" seems like the Downer Ending to The Princess and the Frog, if it hadn't been made circa 1997: An African-American couple consists of a very hard-working woman from a poor background who starts her own restaurant, no thanks to her husband who's always out for a good time and has absolutely no money management sense (the title comes from him delivering expensive contraband beer to cheer up his injured buddy by taking a shortcut through a mine field). She eventually hires two guys (the first one failed) to try and kill him after he maxes out her credit card.
At the end of one episode, Malcolm questions Lois's authority and asks if she intends to control his life when he's 30 years old and married. In a separate entire episode, he spends the entire episode pondering what he wants to do with his life, but at the end of the episode, decides he'll just continue being a kid while he still is one. As the last episode reveals, the answer to the former episode's question was "yes", and the point of the latter was moot to begin with, because his whole family planned his future out for him from the very beginning. (Could be either this or a Funny Aneurysm Moment.)
That '70s Show has a Halloween episode where Donna leaves her house in a disguise, which includes a blonde wig. Eric can only remark "Who's the hot blonde?" when first seeing her from his house. Lucky for him, because she ended up dying her hair that exact colour a few seasons later.
Another game show one for the animé/manga fans: In the Regis Philbin version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, two of the choices for Bernie Cullen's million-dollar question were "N" and "L", which Bernie were mulling over. He used his 50:50 lifeline, and after some banter, Regis quipped, "Well, 'L' is gone." So Bernie picked "N" as his final answer and won the million dollars (The YouTube commentors also notice the irony).
An episode of Thank God You're Here featuring Hamish Blake featured a Jayco Expander in his scene. This was especially funny for radio listeners because by the time the episode aired, Hamish and Andy had set off on their Caravan of Courage tour across Australia - in a Jayco Expander.
In an early episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the male lead becomes paralyzed from the waist down. What's his name? Sully.
We did inherit a golden legacy, the best situation, the most encouraging set of statistics since the War. But clearly, Kirsty, it's going to take us some time to turn that round.
The Season 2 finale of the series Intelligence was entitled "We Were Here Now We Disappear". It ended up being the last episode, as the series was cancelled before Season 3 began filming.
In a Series One episode of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler (John Simm) jokes that he's asked Doctor Who about the time travel situation. Simm's other big role in a BBC drama would turn that into retroactive Celebrity Paradox.
For anyone who's watched later episodes of The Cosby Show and then re-watched the pilot, there is an exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Huxtable that goes "Why did we have four children?" "Because we didn't want five." The show later added the character Sondra, the oldest of their FIVE children.
SCTV had this clip. If you're a Hetalia fan, you'll find it funny for entirely different reasons. (Plus, the host's name is Feliks... which is also the "human name" for Poland in the anime.)
During the 1980 filming of Hamlet on the BBC, Patrick Stewart was riding in an elevator with Lalla Ward, who played the second Romana on Doctor Who. Among his questions that he asked were why she did television as opposed to theatre, and why she liked working in science fiction saying "I wouldn't want to do that sort of stuff." Really!
In Season Four of 24, when former president David Palmer was called in to assist the newly-ascended President Logan with managing the current crisis, one of his cabinet members noted that Logan didn't seem very strong and, with that being the case, it was good to know that he was "in good hands". After his time as Palmer ended, Dennis Haysbert became the pitchman for Allstate Insurance Company, which assures its customers that they're in good hands.
In one episode of Scrubs, J.D. does a voice-over for a fake commercial and then remarks "Wouldn't I be a great spokesperson for things?" He later voiced the Cottonelle Puppy and Pu R water filter in commercials.
Also, in this clip (Forwarded to important part), the Janitor mentions that "we should be looking for Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan". Guess where we found Bin Ladin in 2011?
In the British show Are You Being Served, Frank Thornton, who played Captain Peacock, later played 'Truly' Truelove in Last of the Summer Wine. Bizarrely, Peacock shared his defining backstory (falsely claiming to have had heroic experiences During the War) with the character that Truelove would replace, Foggy Dewhirst, yet Truelove was a completely different character type.
Similar to the Neil Patrick Harris reference above, Frasier's episode Head Game had Niles unwittingly playing a good luck charm to a struggling Sonics player. In the end of the episode, he tried to cut off the relationship with the player. He breaks it off at the end with a horrified security guard in the locker room. Unfortunately, the guard walks in again on the player saying "Just let me touch it." David Hyde Pierce would come out of the closet in 2007.
A Family Matters episode features Eddie singing a song that consists entirely of the word "baby," which he proudly says he wrote himself. Um...
In the mid-nineties series Prey there is a character, an evolutionary anthropologist, named Ann Coulter.
In Star Trek, there are inoculations to counter the effects of radiation exposure. In 2011, say hello to Ex-Rad, U.S.-developed drug to counter the effects of radiation exposure.
That name...In Fallout game series there's an anti-radiation medicine called Rad-X.
Even funnier when you consider the SF Debris review of Star Trek: First Contact, where he dismisses the idea of an anti-radiation medicine as "ludicrous".
An episode of America's Funniest Home Videos on ABC Family that originally aired on ABC in 2003 that featured a clip with host Tom Bergeron narrating, "The Spice Girls are back together...". All five did reunite briefly in 2005.
In season three of Grey's Anatomy Mark has a conversation with Callie asking her if she thinks he'd be a good father. She comes to the conclusion that he wouldn't. Four seasons later she gets pregnant with his baby. And by that point she has no reservations about his parenting ability.
The Community episode "Modern Warfare" has the college's students engage in a massive paintball war. The study group encounters the college's glee club (an Expy of the one from Glee) at one point and defeats them. As a parting shot, Jeff tells them "Write some original songs!" The following year, it was announced that Glee would do an episode with original songs.
Jeff constantly makes fun of the Dean's writing abilities (That is gonna be the worst book I ever read cover to cover). This year Jim Rash won a Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In season 4 of Gossip Girl Blair dates a prince and the designated roadblock between them is that she's a commoner and he is heir to the throne. It's taken for granted that a royal prince could never marry a commoner. Probably was a safe bet when the episodes were written. But the episode in which it is brought up aired mere days before heir to the British throne Prince William married commoner Kate Middleton amidst a media frenzy spectacle and the union was celebrated by everyone everywhere, including William's family members.
YMMV but it seems like a Did Not Do the Research, as since at least the 60's, most Royal families have been pretty relaxed about who their heirs marry. In 2001 the Crown Prince of Norway married a divorced single mother, who had dabbed with drugs and the rave scene. This was followed by a string of heirs to various thrones marrying commoners: The Moroccan crown prince in 2001, the Dutch crown prince to an Argentinian in 2002, the Spanish crown prince in 2004, the Danish crown prince to an Australian commoner in 2005, and the Swedish crown princess in 2010. In most of the countries, the choice have to be approved by the head of state, but this has rarely proven to be a problem.
The famous union of Prince Charles and then-assistant schoolteacher/nanny Diana Spencer.
It's probably just a case of sloppy writing, seeing as how Blair herself makes a number of references to Grace Kelley, a commoner who married the prince of Monaco. The prince Blair gets engaged to just so happens to be the prince of... Monaco.
Especially sloppy since no prince of Monaco has married a non-commoner since the mid-19th century.
Mock the Week, "Unlikely things to hear on a TV election debate," at the start of 2010:
'Andy Parsons: "The lines have closed. Gordon, it could be you. David, it could be you. Nick, it's not gonna be you."
In the Wings episode "Planes, Trains, and Visiting Cranes," Frasier and Lilith get into a fight, prompting Joe to quip "Five bucks on Morticia, she's scrawny but she's quick." Twenty years later, Bebe Neuwirth was cast as Morticia in the Addams Family musical.
After the killing of Bin Laden, Zach Braff pointed Scrubs fans to this clip on his Facebook page.
Also, the very next day (meaning it was written and filmed weeks before) Chuck had Casey planning on using pictures of bin Laden for target practice.
In an episode of Moonlight, Josef knocks on Mick's freezer, waking him up. Mick's response? "Don't tell me, it's Twilight."
In an episode of CHiPs in season 4 Dwight Schultz guest starred as Vietnam Vet who was traumatised from his experiences in the war and spent time in a VA Hospital...a full two years prior to him becoming Murdock on The A-Team.
Adam: "Is this the first Terminator you've cooked?" Jamie(stirring a pot of hot lead):"No, every time a robot misbehaves..." (motions to the melting pot)
In The Twilight Zone episode "A World of Difference", the main character, who happens to be playing the part of an actor in a movie, can't tell the difference between the movie set and reality. The name of the character/actor is Reagan. This was 30 years before President Reagan's grasp on reality was questioned.
Reagan's "grasp on reality" was never questioned: Alzheimer's is not schizophrenia.
Back in the 1990s during his stint on Saturday Night Live, Will Ferrell took part in a sketch in which he played an anchor of a local news program who can only read off the teleprompter when doing the news. Boy, why doesthatsound familiar?
In the 3rd Rock from the Sun episode "Dick the Vote", Harry runs for city council. His opponent is played by by Al Franken, then best known as "Stuart" from Saturday Night Live, now US Senator from Minnesota.
In the pilot episode of Bones, Booth compares himself and Brennan to Mulder and Scully. This was a funny line at the time, but it's even more hilarious when you consider not only that Brennan develops into an exaggerated version of Scully and Booth, a watered-down version of Mulder, and that they faced several of the same problems, such as Brennan and Scully both going through a phase where they wanted a baby and Brennan and Mulder both realizing that their parents weren't who they thought, but that their relationship progressed in much the same way, both culminating in (off-screen) sex after a traumatic event, which we weren't even sure really happened until it lead to a pregnancy.
In the first episode of The Chris Rock Show, Chris is touring the studio as though it were years later, and one of the things he shows is a self-help video by O.J. Simpson titled "I Didn't Kill My Wife! But If I Did, Here's How I'd Do It". Years later, O.J. actually would publish a book entitled "If I Did It" about how he would've done the deed.
In the Alternate Universe of Fringe, one of the differences is that DC Comics publishes Red Lantern and Red Arrow (who apart from the colour scheme are identical to their mainstream counterparts). It has not yet been revealed what the AU versions of Atrocitus's Anger Corps and Roy Harper's third identity are.
One of Tex Baxter's ideas in the Mary Tyler Moore Show, was to host the news in front of a live audience. Mary and her co-workers rejected the idea. Now, there are quite a few news shows like The Daily Show that has a live audience.
A great one crops up in Lois and Clark. The titular characters disguise themselves to speak with someone in prison. Lois uses the name Angel, and during the conversation she introduces Clark as Spike.
In one early episode of Boy Meets World Eric refers to his lucky towel as "towelie". Especially since the show made a bunch of actual South Park references several seasons later after South Park came on in 1997.
They even foreshadow this at the movie theater at which Josh works in a late episode with a movie titled "Now She's Carly." Most of the movie titles they put up are joke titles and parodies that you won't notice unless you watch again, or pause it. It seems like another stupid and failed joke titled, but becomes pretty funny if you see this episode now that Drake and Josh is off the air and iCarly is in full swing.
Bill Grundy's notorious interview with the Sex Pistols caused widespread public outrage in 1976, when it set a record for televised profanity. Now in the 21st century, it comes across as funny, as do the newspaper headlines that followed.
Season 6's "The Egg and I" begins with Al trying to pay his taxes and pretending to hang himself (he already had a noose around his neck), crying, "I don't wanna be on ABC!" Then along came Ed O'Neill's cameo on 8 Simple Rules (during the episodes after John Ritter died) and his new starring role on Modern Family, both of which are ABC shows.
In "Damn Bundys" (1997) Al goes to Hell. There he has the following conversation with the devil:
Al: "Hey Lou. I want my soul back". Lou: "I want my soul back, I want my soul back. It's all I hear from you and Tiger Woods". Al: "Tiger Woods sold his soul?" Lou: "Of course. You don't think anybody's really that good, do you?"
What makes this line so amusing is that Tiger Woods had a clean cut good image for years, until his adultery scandal in 2009. Seems that selling his soul had a downside after all...
One memorable Once an Episode trait of the original Iron Chef was Chairman Takeshi Kaga dramatically taking a bite out of a bell pepper. Come 2006, Takeshi Kaga portrayed Soichiro Yagami, the father of Light Yagami, in the live-action Death Note films. Light is known for eating potato chips in the most dramatic way possible. Cue jokes about how Light gets his epic eating skills from his father.
Back in the second season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers', Rita Repulsa married Lord Zedd. When he suggested they have a child together she freaked out for a moment. Fast-forward to Power Rangers Operation Overdrive and the 15th-anniversary special "Once A Ranger": The villain of the special is... drumroll please... Rita and Zedd's son.
Lily: No, friends make each other feel good. They build each other up and support them. That's what being a good friend is about. Barney : Yeah, if you're a SMURF.
A 1955 episode of I Love Lucy, Lucy attempts to seduce Rock Hudson and asks him to "make love to her" in front of her husband.
For extra giggles in that regard, an '80s stand-up comedian did a skit in which most of the Original Series actors were replaced by, in the comic's words, "real celebrities." He did vocal impressions of the replacement actors, and portrayed Christopher Lloyd playing Spock -- essentially as Reverend Jim.
A recurring gag from the Allo Allo shows disgust of René (played by Gorden Kaye) when he realizes that Lt. Gruber (played by Guy Siner) is hitting on him. The kicker? Kaye is homosexual. Siner is not.
The late 2011 portion of Khloe and Kim Kardashian's reality show became this after Kim's 72 day marriage with Kris Humphries ended before the airing began. Predictably, everything the newlyweds-turned-divorcees have said turns into comedy gold, and The Soup has taken advantage of this.
In the first season of the U.S. edition of The Voice, after all four coaches selected the same artist for their teams, Adam Levine said:
Adam: I want to win this {{[[[Sound Effect Bleep]] bleep}}]...
[general laughter] Christina: Adam, you are a seller, man; you sell and you sell yourself. Adam: ...so I really, I really, really need ... you to pick me.
Said contestant was Javier Colon -- who, in fact, won the competition on Adam's team.
In 1998, Alec Baldwin hosted Saturday Night Live and during Alec's opening speech, Jimmy Fallon, then a new cast member, made an appearance and told Alec that he was given a prediction that he would become famous and host the show in 2011. Fast forward to 2011, where Jimmy is now one of TV's most popular television personalities and hosted SNL's Christmas episode.
During a Season 3 episode Batman reveals a mini-Batphone that for all intents and purposes is similar to a modern Cell Phone.
The Penguin's A Jinx: After movie star Dawn Robbins comments that Batman could use more publicity, his agent, Mr. Jay, answers:
"Forget it, Batman never lends himself to commercial enterprises"
Police, Camera, Action! had made itself quite Hilarious in Hindsight, considering how much the 1995-1996 series mentioned Essex, a good 16-17 years 'beforeThe Only Way Is Essex premiered. Granted, it wasn't about the younger crowd, more the Essex Police, but still, the locations would end up being familiar to today's audiences. The scene in the 1995 episode Safety Last (made July 1995) is set in the exact location that Lauren Goodger works in. Hilarious in Hindsight indeed.
In episode 4 of The Vampire Diaries, Caroline and Damon have a discussion of how a person becomes a vampire. This could cause a few giggles in Season 2 when Caroline is turned into a vampire by way of Damon's blood.
In Growing Pains, when Mike Seavor is arrested for a protest he and some students orchestrated to reinstate their coach, Ben Seavor, who was watching the report and talking on the phone, mentions that a lot of the family was calling them about it, even "Uncle Sam." Kirk Cameron, the person who played Mike Seavor, will later direct several pro-American documentaries.
Two and A Half Men has one in the season 9 episode "Not in My Mouth!" where Jake asks his dad Alan for money to buy a Call of Duty game, justifying the purchase as an investment. As Jake puts it, "If I ever go into the Army after high school, I already know how to kill terrorists!" By the season 9 finale, Jake does just that, joining the Army after graduating from high school. The Army recruiter even wins him over with the sales pitch, "Do you like to play video games?"
A late-1972 episode of Banacek had as Girl of the Week Margot Kidder, who six years later played Lois Lane for the first of four times. When Banacek introduced himself, giving only his last name, she responded quizzically, "One name? Like Superman?"
↑Though those supernatural reasons are "turned into a Scotsman by blancmanges from the Andromeda Galaxy", not "learned he was a wizard"...
↑Five years after she said this for the Sound of Music 40th Anniversary DVD, Fox decided to preserve the parodies on Blu-Ray as extras for the movie's 45th Anniversary Edition...
