10 Long TV Running Jokes You Never Even Noticed

WhatCulture

Peaky Blinders' Tommy is intentionally never shown eating on-screen.

Transcript

00:00So with the longer form nature of TV that we have today, it allows storytellers to set up

00:04running gags that don't merely just run for a mere two hours, but whole seasons and perhaps

00:09the entire length of a multi-season TV show itself. Now these 10 shows, from universally

00:15acclaimed dramas to goofy animated comedy series, all offered up deviously sneaky running gags that

00:21you almost certainly didn't notice, at least not on your first viewing. So let's take a look at

00:25them as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 long-running TV gags that you've never

00:30even noticed. Number 10. CJ's Goldfish Bowl Contains Episode-Specific Props, The West Wing

00:37The West Wing boasts an especially creative and subtle running gag which endured from its first

00:41season through until its seventh and final one. Now you might recall this in one of the show's

00:46first episodes, Dani buys CJ a goldfish for her office, but the prop master for the series decided

00:52to go one step further by ensuring that new episodes had a thematically appropriate new prop

00:57inside the goldfish bowl. For example, a Christmas episode had a Christmas tree in the bowl,

01:02a Capital Punishment episode had a fake dead fish floating in it, and when there were leaks at the

01:06White House, there's a plumbing pipe placed in the bowl. There are almost 50 different versions of

01:12the gag throughout the West Wing, and yet it is just subtle enough that you couldn't be blamed for

01:16missing it. Number 9. Rick Never Wears a Seatbelt

01:20Rick and Morty Rick and Morty is another show that rewards those

01:23who pay close enough attention, though here's a running gag so slight and unassuming that you

01:28might have spaced on it entirely, and that is that Rick never wears a seatbelt. Aside from the brief

01:34appearances of Detox Rick and Pickle Rick, Rick doesn't wear a seatbelt throughout the show,

01:39a nod towards his cavalier attitude towards his own safety, and to be kind, his generally suicidal

01:44levels of despondence. Rick's refusal to wear a seatbelt isn't ever directly brought up in the

01:49show itself, but it's nevertheless a neat morsel of character shading which confirms the kind of

01:54place that he's in. Only in his alternate, healthier states is Rick ever shown wearing a

01:59seatbelt. Now that is character development. Number 8. The Riker Chair Maneuver

02:04Star Trek The Next Generation It's entirely possible to have watched all 178 episodes of Star Trek The

02:11Next Generation and never noticed the tendency for Riker to sit down on chairs in a rather unusual way,

02:18straddling them almost as though he's mounting a horse. In more recent years, the Riker Chair

02:22Maneuver became a bit of a meme as fans started to take notice, and yet, despite how distracting it

02:27seems in retrospect, so many millions of fans never once picked up on it themselves.

02:32Now there's actually a practical reason for this move, though. Will Wheaton confirmed on Reddit that

02:37Jonathan Frakes suffered a back injury while moving furniture prior to working on The Next

02:42Generation, and so this peculiar means of sitting was actually an attempt to take off some of the

02:47strain on his back. Similarly, Riker can often be seen leaning or otherwise bracing himself against

02:52objects throughout the series, all of it in an attempt to prevent further aggravation of his

02:56real-life existing injury. Despite its basically medical purposes, that hasn't stopped the internet

03:02embracing it in recent years as a charmingly odd character trait.

03:057. Reoccurring Use of the Song Daybreak

03:08Community

03:09Community is unquestionably one of the most meta and self-aware TV shows ever. And though eagle-eyed

03:15fans are committed to catching every last split-second gag, there's one hiding in plain sight throughout

03:20the series that you may have well missed. This is in large part because it's not something that can

03:25be seen, so scouring every inch of a single shot won't actually help you. You see, the instrumental jazz

03:30tune Daybreak can be heard on no less than a dozen different community episodes between seasons three

03:35and six, and characters are heard humming it in separate episodes. It also plays on a radio and

03:40in an elevator, amongst other situations. According to the creator Dan Harmon, the reason for this is

03:45that the production spent so much money securing licensing rights to play the police's Roxanne in the

03:50legendary season three episode Remedial Chaos Theory, that the season's music budget had mostly been

03:56eaten up, and so Daybreak was used to fill the gaps for the season, with Harmon ultimately deciding to

04:01run with the ball and turn it into a wider community gag that you probably had no idea about.

04:066. Tyrion's Half-Told Joke – Game of Thrones

04:09If you're not a hardcore Game of Thrones fan and have only seen each of the episodes once,

04:14then you wouldn't have much hope of noticing this sly running gag subtly deployed over the course of

04:19eight seasons. On three separate occasions, Tyrion Lannister attempts to tell a joke about bringing a

04:24jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel, but each time he's interrupted before he's able to finish

04:29it. It first shows up in his trial in season one's A Golden Crown, and he attempts again to tell the

04:34joke in season six's No One, but is cut short by a ringing bell, while his third and final effort in

04:39the series is in the finale The Iron Throne, where the scene simply cuts away as he starts to tell the

04:45joke. Now some of Thrones' more obsessive fans did catch wind of this, however they were infuriated by

04:50the lack of closure and attempted to come up with their own answers, while the Huffington Post

04:54even asked some comedians to complete the punchline. Again, if you're not a hardcore Thrones fan,

04:59this is incredibly easily missed, especially if you've not revisited the series since it ended.

05:04Committing to the bit three times over an eight-year period, well that is impressively sneaky.

05:095. The Secret McBain Movie Hidden Throughout The Show

05:12The Simpsons

05:13The Simpsons is of course jam-packed with running gags both blatant and subtle, from Bart's prank calling

05:19Moe's tavern to the reoccurring crow that always caused distinctively during any establishing shot

05:24of Springfield's nuclear power plant. But an altogether more ingenious running joke occurs

05:29between the second and fourth seasons, where five separate episodes show clips of the fake movie

05:34McBain starring the action hero Rainier Wolfcastle. Viewed across three years, the clip seemed simple

05:39enough. But more recently, as more fans began to binge The Simpsons, they started to realise that

05:44these clips all form part of a continuous narrative and are, in effect, a truncated version of the

05:50McBain movie. The four minutes of footage are effectively a McBain short film, showing McBain's

05:55best pal and partner being killed by the corrupt Senator Mendoza, and McBain's blood-soaked quest to

06:00avenge his fallen friend. We all remember McBain, but these excerpts are by themselves such typical

06:06parodies of corny action movies that most fans didn't even realise that they were connected in a kind

06:11of coherent way. Pretty incredible, right? 4. Pineapples Everywhere – Psych

06:16Hit detective comedy series Psych touted a most bizarre running gag across its 120 episodes,

06:22that a pineapple would appear in some form in almost every single episode. Perhaps it might

06:27be a whole pineapple, mere slices of one, a pineapple smoothie, a pineapple pizza, or even

06:32just images of pineapples somewhere within the frame, but the commitment to the bit is nothing if

06:36not admirable. Fans cottoned on enough that a website was made to track the pineapple's location

06:41in each episode, all 170 of them, amounting to an average of almost 1.5 per episode.

06:48There's never been any official explanation for the gag beyond the showrunners doing it to amuse

06:52themselves, and it caught on enough with the hardcore fans that eventually it would have been

06:56a crying shame to stop it. Sometimes a running gag is its own weird reward, whether it makes sense or not.

07:02Number 3. The gang always reuses the same videotape. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

07:07It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is basically built on the foundation of in-jokes and running

07:12gags. Though one of the sneakier one involves the gang always using the same damn grotty VHS tape to

07:18record and display their latest audio-visual scheme. The ads for Fight Milk and Kitten Mittens,

07:23Dee's Invigoron video, Dennis and Max fake terrorist video, and so many more were all shot on the same tape,

07:29with each recording over the previous one. Several times throughout the show when their

07:33latest video is playing, we'll see scattered fragments of their previous ones at the beginning

07:37and the end of the tape. It's easily missed if you're not paying total attention, but a hilarious

07:41ongoing callback if you do. Hopefully they'll never ditch this gag, because the longer it goes on,

07:46and the further the wizards of society stray away from VHS, the funnier it actually becomes.

07:51Number 2. Tommy Shelby Never Eats. Peaky Blinders.

07:55Peaky Blinders might not be a show where you'd expect to see anything in the way of a

07:59major reoccurring joke, and that's likely why this running gag is rather on the sly side.

08:04While recently promoting the show's final season in an interview with the BBC, star Cillian Murphy

08:09confessed a gag that's been part of the show since the very beginning, that his character,

08:13Tommy Shelby, is never seen eating on screen. Obviously it's a given that Shelby, being a living

08:18human and all that, does eat, but Murphy confirmed that once the production team realised that Tommy

08:22hadn't been seen eating in the first two seasons, that they opted to keep it going for the remainder.

08:27He said,

08:27I remember we had gotten through the first two series, and then we realised that Tommy had never

08:32eaten. We've never seen Tommy eat. Like, he sat down at tables, but he's never consumed a morsel.

08:37So we then made it a kind of running gag. So throughout the 36 hours of television,

08:41Tommy Shelby never consumes anything, except I think once he consumes a sprig of mint when he's

08:46with his son. In its own way, it subtly implies Tommy's obsession with his life's work,

08:51something a small quarter of fans picked up on years ago, but which was only recently confirmed as an

08:55intentional character flourish by Murphy and the creator of the series.

08:591. Foreshadowing Buster Losing His Hand

09:02Arrested Development

09:03Perhaps the single most memorable moment in Arrested Development happens in the Season 2 episode,

09:09Out on a Limb, where poor Buster Bluth has his hand bitten off by a loose seal,

09:14with the missing limb then being replaced by a hook. Hilariously though, Buster's impending

09:18dismemberment was foreshadowed almost an entire year in advance. With a series of gags throughout the

09:23latter part of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. These include a flashback to Michael

09:28performing in the play The Trial of Captain Hook, Buster declaring this party is going to be off

09:33the hook, a mention of a seal attack on the news, Buster playing a claw game and winning a toy seal,

09:38and Buster sitting on a bench which reads,

09:41Arm Off. Obviously it says more than that, but the way that he's sitting obscures the rest of the text.

09:45These are just a few examples, but of course nobody read into these gags on an initial viewing,

09:49because nobody knew the fate awaiting Buster. Even on repeat watches, most of these sight

09:54gags and one-liners come so thick and fast that you might well miss them, and that makes them

09:58utterly brilliant. And there we go my friends, those were the 10 longest running TV gags you

10:03never even noticed. I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about it

10:07down in the comments section below. As always I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on

10:10Twitter at RetroJWithA0, or you can swing by LiveAndLet'sDice where I do all of my streaming

10:15outside of work, and it'd be great to see you over there. But before I go, I just want to say one thing,

10:19hope you treat yourself well with love and respect my friend, because you deserve all of the best

10:24things in life, and do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright? You're a massive

10:28ledge, and we need to go out there and smash it. As always I've been Jules, you have been awesome,

10:34never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.

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