The gag originated in a sketch in which Scott Thompson played a homophobic man who took offense at another man's ( McKinney ) attempt to seduce him by taking him to a Maple Leafs game: " Every time I come to this city, some guy picks me up at the bus station, takes me to a Leaf game, gets me pissed, then tries to blow me.

The term “ gag rule ” originated in the mid-1830s when the U. S. House of Representatives barred discussion or referral to committee of antislavery petitions.

The chalkboard gag for the episode, which is an " apology " for the song in " A Streetcar Named Marge " This episode originated when Al Jean commented to Mike Reiss, " We had a lot of luck with Homer stealing cable, which was based on the eighth commandment, so maybe we could look to other commandments.

However, the most popular running gag of the beach party series is " The Himalayan Suspender " technique, originated by Professor Sutwell in Beach Party, in which the forefinger is pressed against a certain part of the skull, rendering the victim paralyzed.

Another stock vaudeville gag ran: `` Mother is home sick in bed with the doctor ''.

The gag was often at his own expense, as in the above 1951 sequence showing Capp's interaction with " fans " ( see excerpt ), or in his 1955 Disneyland parody, " Hal Yappland.

A horizontal strip can also be used for a single panel with a single gag, as seen occasionally in Mike Peters ' Mother Goose and Grimm.

The ending credits of the show start with thanks to the colorfully nicknamed actual staffers: producer Doug " the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion, bongo boy frogman " Berman ; " John ' Bugsy ' Lawlor, just back from the ..." every week a different eating event with rhyming foodstuff names ; David " Calves of Belleville " Greene ; Catherine " Frau Blücher " Fenollosa, whose name causes a horse to neigh and gallop ( an allusion to a running gag in the movie Young Frankenstein ); and Carly " High Voltage " Nix, among others.

Modern single-panel gag cartoons, found in magazines, generally consist of a single drawing with a typeset caption positioned beneath or ( much less often ) a speech balloon.

On some occasions, new gag cartoons have been created for book publication, as was the case with Think Small, a 1967 promotional book distributed as a giveaway by Volkswagen dealers.

Though he originally just contributed gag ideas to some duck cartoons by 1937 Barks was ( principally with partner Jack Hannah ) originating story ideas that were storyboarded and ( if approved by Walt ) put into production.

Her increasingly bizarre hairstyles become a running gag, culminating in Give ' em Enough Rope, when she is completely bald and festooned with ribbons.

He is the focus of a running gag where he will laugh hysterically along with Mike at any anecdote Mike tells him, before admitting that he does not understand it.

The 1987 movie Robocop while in no way presented as fact, does include several fake television ads which have nothing to do with the rest of the movie but become a running gag.

The command to " cut the cards ", following by someone literally chopping the deck in half with an axe, is a none-too-subtle gag that has been used many times in popular media, going back to at least the vaudeville days.

" The joke was sometimes combined with another running gag in which, rather than having a sign language interpreter visually presenting the news to aid the deaf, the show would provide assistance from Garrett Morris, " head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing ", whose " aid " involved cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting the news as Chase read it.

Technology changes to suit whatever a gag requires ; a battle with spears and arrows might be followed by a peasant using an ATM.

A running gag with Clouseau in this and the following film is that he randomly attacks his partner to keep him on his toes, only to be successfully countered, and complimenting him.

" As with waterings, the sliming gag was used in almost every episode, especially from 1982 onward ( a number of 1979 and 1981 episodes featured no slime at all, and slime is known to have been used on only one episode of Whatever Turns You On ).

One whole episode, 1981's Drugs, was constructed completely around the pie-in-the-face gag: to avoid the wrath of the censors, the episode showed the cast getting " high " by pieing themselves continuously over and over, comparing the stupidity of hitting oneself with a pie to the stupidity of taking drugs.

The pro-slavery forces responded with a series of gag rules that automatically " tabled " all such petitions, preventing them from being read or discussed.

The House passed the Pinckney Resolutions on May 26, 1836, the third of which was known from the beginning as the " gag rule " and passed with a vote of 117 to 68 ( The first stated that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states and the second that it " ought not " do so in the District of Columbia.

However, it had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108, with substantial opposition among Northern Democrats and even some Southern Whigs, and with serious doubts about its constitutionality.

The gag was finally rescinded December 3, 1844, by a vote of 108-80, all the Northern and 4 Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 78 % of the Northern Democrats.

Cued speech-method of communication that combines speech reading with a system of handshapes placed near the mouth to help deaf or hard-of-hearing individuals differentiate words that look similar on the lips ( e. g., bunch vs. punch ) or are hidden ( e. g., gag ).

Smithers ' relationship with Mr. Burns has long been a running gag on The Simpsons.

When Dorothy removed the gag and asked who had done this to her, Sophia replied " the Sandinistas!

Animator Bill Nolan did the voice of Oswald in Cold Turkey, the first Lantz cartoon with dialogue, and the following year Pinto Colvig, who was working as an animator and gag man at the studio, started voicing Oswald.

* Uncle Dennis ( Ransom Sherman )-Molly's hard-drinking uncle, Dennis Driscoll, who was the subject of a running gag ( see below ) and was generally never heard.

This is the subject of numerous running gags in I ’ m Alan Partridge, in particular his numerous efforts to deny his interest in Bangkok " lady-boys " ( whom he describes as ‘ fascinating creatures ’ whilst insisting that he is merely confused by them and not attracted to them ) and a recurrent gag in which he will daydream about performing an erotic dance in a peephole Pringle jumper and a vulcanised rubber thong for a selection of men ( usually those who can help further his career in some way, such as BBC Chief of Programming Tony Hayers ).

In 2010, with the gag orders finally lifted from the 1985 lawsuit trial of Marc Christian versus the estate of Hudson, Robert Park Mills, the attorney who represented the Hudson estate against Christian in court, released a new 492 page book entitled Between Rock and a Hard Place-In Defense of Rock Hudson.

Sankara was appointed Secretary of State for Information in the military government in September 1981, journeying to his first cabinet meeting on a bicycle, but he resigned on April 21, 1982 in opposition to what he saw as the regime's anti-labour drift, declaring " Misfortune to those who gag the people!

This gag may have spawned the segment of the children's show Between the Lions featuring a person named Cliff Hanger, who, like Sergeant Snorkel, is hanging from a cliff in each feature.

Guests who participated included many big names of the 1970s and 80s, such as Flora Robson, Penelope Keith, Laurence Olivier, John Mills, Vanessa Redgrave, Eric Porter, Peter Cushing ( who in a running gag would keep turning up to complain that he had not been paid for an earlier appearance ) and Frank Finlay – as well as Glenda Jackson ( as Cleopatra: " All men are fools.

Anime Rei also tends to engage in long periods of sticking her tongue out at Usagi ( who returns the favor ), as a kind of running gag in their arguments.

A running gag in the comics typically comes when in trying to catch the Pigs, Zeke runs afoul of Br ' er Bear, who ends up pounding " Br ' er Wolf " for one offense or another.

They ( famously ) had five daughters, Marjorie, Natalie, Edna, Marilyn and Janet, who provided comic fodder for Cantor's longtime running gag, especially on radio, about his five unmarriageable daughters.

Good friends in real life, Fred Allen and Jack Benny inadvertently hatched a running gag in 1937, when a child prodigy, violinist Stuart Canin, gave a very credible performance on the Allen show, inspiring an Allen wisecrack about " a certain alleged violinist ," who should hide in shame over his poor playing.

* Lee Lorenz, nationally-known gag cartoonist and magazine cartoon editor, who attended North Junior High School in Newburgh in the late 1940s

He appeared in the late 1960s in a gag on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in as a French ventriloquist named Lucky Pierre, who has the misfortune of having his elderly dummy die of a heart attack in the middle of his act.

A running gag occurred when Peter ( and on one occasion, Harry as well ) shuddered every time " wonderful personality " was used in reference to Mary Jane due to the fact it is usually believed that someone who is described with a " wonderful personality " means they are hideous in appearance.

This arose from a gag in episode 203, Jungle Goddess, in which Joel referred to " Art Crow " in a skit centered on the sitcom The Honeymooners ; after Best Brains received a letter from a child who had evidently missed the cultural reference and labeled a drawing of Crow as " Art ", the show's writers turned the name into a recurring joke.

In the Family Guy episode, Business Guy, a cutaway gag retells the story of the thumb sucker, however instead of the tailor, it is the boy's mother who cuts off the boy's thumbs.

In spite of being designed as a sketch comedy television program, the series is set in a fictional universe in which it also is broadcast as a popular television comedy as evidenced through staged mishaps with members of the viewing audience and performers featured the program and comedic sub-plots involving Amanda's unhealthily obsessed, nerdy, feckless self-proclaimed " Number One Fan " Penelope Tate, who has prioritized devising schemes that will assist her in achieving her lifelong goal of meeting Amanda before all else and her multiple failed attempts at landing a meeting with the hostess of the series ( as a gag, Amanda Bynes actually portrays Penelope in reality and the pair are never shown onscreen together ).

A major running gag portrayed the studly David Hasselhoff character as a balding, middle-aged, pot-bellied and out-of-shape man who is nonetheless seen by all the other characters as highly fit and attractive.

Mad editor Harvey Kurtzman spotted the word printed in the Polish language section of a multi-languaged " Instructions for Use " sheet accompanying a bottle of aspirin, and Kurtzman, who was fascinated with unusual words, decided it would make an appropriate but meaningless background gag.

The show also created new, previously non-existent backstories, as well as significantly different personalities for the characters, including, but not limited to, Penny Milfer's father ( who has yet to appear in the series ) being physically abusive toward both his wife and daughter, a running gag that the show uses for black humor.

Animator Matt Groening had obtained a copy and incorporated the phone high jinks into a running gag on The Simpsons with barkeeper Moe Szyslak, who is based on Deutsch.

In a running gag, starting in the episode " Dammit Janet !," Chris is regularly tormented by an evil monkey who lives in his closet, though whenever he complains about it to anyone, they don't believe him ( a reference to the iconic tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf ) and often laugh him off instead, after which the monkey appears with a malevolent grimace and points at Chris in a threatening manner.