Recycled jokes/lines in the 1981 season

[rhodiecub]

I noticed these lines were used twice or maybe more times in the some of the 1981 eps.

- Has anyone told you that you're attractive to the opposite sex? What gave you the idea?

- Do you know my dog can do math? I asked him what 2 minus 2 is and he said nothing

- Did you know our producers type like lightening? Have you ever seen the damage lightening does.

I think there were some others ones too.

[ChrisInMI]

I noticed these lines were used twice or maybe more times in the some of the 1981 eps.

- Has anyone told you that you're attractive to the opposite sex? What gave you the idea?

- Do you know my dog can do math? I asked him what 2 minus 2 is and he said nothing

- Did you know our producers type like lightening? Have you ever seen the damage lightening does.

I think there were some others ones too.

The "dog" joke you mentioned was a reworking of a joke from the 1979 Executive Washrooms episode, where Ian Fingler mentions how smart his baby sister is, and the punch line is the same.

As for the 1981 season, the jokes that seem to be "recycled" seem to be from the locker joke segments. Watch the hour-long CJOH versions of Peer Pressure and Crime and Vandalism and they have locker joke segments, while the half-hour syndicated/international versions do not. The reason for cutting the locker joke segments was most likely the use of Ottawa- or Canada-specific jokes that wouldn't make sense to viewers outside Ottawa (or Canada). Instead of shooting new locker joke segments they apparently just reused some of those jokes in new link set segments that were shot for the syndie version after the '81 season was over (in addition to other skits that were reshot to remove the Ottawa/Canada references). For example, watching the locker joke segments in CJOH Peer Pressure and CJOH Crime and Vandalism, I notice several jokes that were used in links (often to introduce the opposites) in the half-hour episodes (fish as brain food, "send me a coconut," the three fastest forms of communication with the third being "tell a girl," and so on). In my opinion, the "new" versions were usually better and funnier.

If this theory is correct, it begs the question - why not reshoot the locker joke segments? Perhaps they just didn't have the money for it. The locker joke segments that made it to the half-hour version don't appear to have been reshot - the locker joke segment in Sexual Equality in the CJOH and half-hour versions are the same except that the half-hour version doesn't use the Whatever Turns You On theme as background music. (It appears that the WTYO theme music was used as accompaniment for the locker jokes in all of the hour-long 1981 episodes. Why not in the half-hour versions? Legal reasons?)

The Drugs episode appears to be an exception, as the locker jokes, including Christine's locker joke about getting stopped by the cops on her way to the studio, are still in the Nick version, but they reused that particular joke anyway in the half-hour version of Crime and Vandalism, just swapping kilometers for miles.

That's my theory anyway. I get the impression Darby and Price tried to keep the recycling to a minimum when editing the CJOH episodes to half an hour and adding the new/reshot material, but perhaps it wasn't always possible.

Also, one of the locker jokes from Drugs (Did you lose a wad of money with an elastic band around it? Yes, I did! Well, you're in luck; I just found your elastic band) got reused eight years later, in the "Losing Things" episode.

One thing that strikes me about YCDTOTV, however, is that there wasn't as much recycling of jokes and gags as there could have been, even with the recycling of themes - there wasn't much overlap between the two Music-themed episodes, Sports 1989 wasn't a remake of Sports 1982, and so on. A lot of the gags from YCDTOTV season one were reused in Don't Look Now, but DLN viewers at the time, unless they had somehow seen the 1979 episodes on CJOH (which is extremely unlikely), obviously would not have known that.

[rhodiecub]

That joke about the wad of money rolled up sounded like an actual joke related to drugs.