miscellaneous
Someone asks for something extremely specific/unusual, and are immediate given it likes it the most common thing in the world
The Simpsons: Barney's Yoko Ono-esque girlfriend asks for "a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat." Moe immediately pulls it out from behind the counter, somehow having it right on hand.
The Simpsons again: Homer asks for the phonebook to Hokkaido, Japan at the library. The librarian immediately pulls it out without searching for it, despite the phonebook for Hokkaido, Japan probably not being a common request at small town public libraries.
The Muppets Movie: Fozzie Bear asks the ice cream guy for honey ice cream for himself, and a dragonfly ripple for Kermit, and gets it no questions asked.
I remember being the person who did this at this point.
"Hey do you know those strawberry candies you get when visiting grandma people are making memes about?"
By sheer luck I was in the position of being able to just pull a handful and slam it on the table and took it.
"Oh these?"
Guy looks carefully at one of them as if he was appraising a diamond.
"Holy shit you got the real deal! Where you got it?"
"I am the local dealer."
Then with kayfabe off I asked, "wait what the hell do you mean by real deal?" as apparently most people get imitations and Arcor just so happens to be the gold standard for that particular confection.
His original conversation plan was to show that he got some (they were from another brand) and make conversation on how Arcors are rumored to be much better and if we should buy some online for the meme.
I did not realized I just happened to be the "I know a guy" for this specific resource in the area.
I had a mate desperate for somebody to bartend a wedding at a function centre. I have my RSA*, it was cash in hand and I wasn't working that day, so I went for it.
Rocked up, helping set everything up for the event, guests start rocking up, and I realise that the entire venue does not have a single bottle opener. Thankfully I have one on my keys so it didn't turn out to be an issue, but they would have been screwed (or had to go shopping during a wedding).
*RSA = Responsible Service of Alcohol, mandatory credentials for the serving of alcohol at events in Australia.
Also, the wedding was between an Indian man and a West African woman, and the theme (and cuisine) was a glorious combination of India, West Africa and then somehow also L.A. Rap/Hip Hop. The music was incredible.
I ate like a king, was paid in full, and also given two bottles of Johnny Walker Black to take home with me.
I helped a contract bartender at a wedding. Y’all are a godsend. He knew when to stop serving the messy uncle. Had club soda for cleaning up dress spills prepared like he was Mr Clean.
you remind me of the kid in 3rd grade who got moved up a year.
he wore a fanny pack and carried lots of stuff in it. i commented on it once and he said, "i even have a lit match" and pulled out a Q-tip that was colored red with marker
That's the kinda dumbshit prop comedy I would have married that kid over when I was 8.
I walk around with 2 bananas and hand one to a coworker saying "hang on to this in case I need to reach you later," and then walk away holding the other banana to my ear and pointing at them.
There's one episode of Phineas and Ferb where they need a tool that can fuse wood and steel. Baljeet says won't exist for another 20 years. So Phineas and Ferb get in their old time machine and go to the future. There they meet Candace's future kids, who're just sitting under a tree doing nothing.
And even though these kids apparently do nothing all day, when Phineas mentions the tool they need, they're just like "Yeah, I've got one in my pocket, here you go."
i like to think that in the future, doof starts selling his inventions because all of the materials are too pricey. the wood/steel fuser happens to be his most successful.
In one episode of Jimmy Neutron, a fast food robot he makes goes haywire and he has to trick it into destroying itself by ordering a burger heated to the surface temperature of the sun. His friend Sheen, who took to fast food work with gusto and has completely memorized the restaurant's kitchen lingo, refers to this as a "King Arthur with a hip replacement on a bed of coals" like it's actually something they sell.
I think if you made something like a satay-inspired peanut sauce and tweaked the toppings around it, people would line up to pay 25 bucks for it in a pub setting.
I think if you scraped Kraft on a Big Mac I'd spit it out.
We used to sell like exactly this at a place I used to work. The toppings were just pickle, bacon, house sauce, and mayo but since I worked in the kitchen I could put whatever I wanted on it, (typically Bleu cheese, Swiss, hot sauce, and tomatoes)
A bar in my town sold a burger with pepper jack cheese and peanut butter on it. It was apparently added to the menu as a joke and became one of their most popular burgers. Lmao I think they called it "The Sticky Burger." The bar isn't around anymore.
The Key and Peele sketch where the duo is at a soul food restaurant and keep trying to one up each other with more and more absurd and extreme food choices culminating in ordering a human foot, a possum spine and a cellar door
Oh wow that was so fuckin dumb i'm dying. a cow hip and a dog face wrapped in an ebony magazine. Oh god i wish i didn't wake up with a head ache this morning, because this sucks right now lol. My fault for clicking that link, considering i read your description, i knew it was gonna make me laugh.
Orson’s Diner from an episode of Garfield and Friends.
I’m quoting from the wiki on this:
“Upon hearing the restaurant’s offer (“If you can order something we can’t fix, you eat free for a month.”), Roy tries to come up with an impossible meal. His orders include moose stew with chocolate sauce, broiled yak nose with green gravy, and an alligator cheese sandwich with very specific details, all of which Orson and Wade are able to serve him.”
Ultimately, they're unable to fulfill Roy's last order of an elephant-foot sandwich with mustard. Not because they lacked an elephant, but because they lacked mustard.
The best part of the gag is after all those crazy requirements like a specific number of seeds in the bread and a pickle shaped like Merv Griffin Orson doesn't even hesitate and calls out "One #8!"
Little Britain - a twist on the recurring sketch which usually involves a lengthy conversation in which the shopkeeper tries and fails to meet the increasingly specific demands of the customer. This one played out much more quickly:
"I would like to purchase a record of James Last playing the hits of Nelly Furtado on the banjo. And I would like a picture on the front of James Last displaying his hands with stigmata."
I work in retail and every time someone wants something and I show them what we have but they have some stupid holdup like "It's a ten pack, I only need eight. Do you not have an eight pack?" I mutter "Any other pirate memory games?" under my breath as I walk away.
My favourite one was always the disappointed horse sketch:
"I'm looking to buy a painting of a disappointed horse."
"How about this one?"
"That horse looks more perturbed than disappointed."
"Right... This one?"
"The horse looks disappointed, but not because it received bad news. It looks more like it was disappointed because it had high expectations in life that have remained unfulfilled."
"Now you say it, mmm. How about this one?"
"I can see the disappointment, I can see the frustration, but I can also sense a flicker of hope that things may get better for this horse, and that really isn't what I'm looking for."
Also when Bubble Bass orders "Double Triple Bossy Deluxe on a raft, 4x4, animal-style, extra shingles, with a shimmy and a squeeze, light axle grease, make it cry, burn it and let it swim." Somehow SpongeBob gets it done even after Squidward stops writing it down.
It sounds complicated, but it's just basic ingredients and recipes with unique nicknames. Since SpongeBob has worked there for years, he already knows the routine.
His order is basically: 6 hamburgers, 100% beef, with everything on it. Toast instead of bread. 24 patties in total, plus 24 slices of cheese. Patties fried in mustard, 24 layers of everything. Extra toast, 2 per layer, 14 in total. Jam on the toast. Orange juice to drink. Light butter on the toast. Extra onion. Well-done patties. Extra special sauce.
And if you think about it, it does correlate to him hiding the pickles, because that's why he never asked for any changes on them; it would be easier to hide.
The novel is funny in how it originally dealt with that, Miracle Max sent them on a quest to a fiery location for the medicine for Wesely, giving them the fire resistant cloak to protect them while they actually gathered the ingredients for that. The author, who talks to the audience frequently in the book, says he isn't goimg to bother telling us about this side quest. Later, Max let Fezzik keep the cloak because it fit him so well.
The author later explains that this whole scene was to be funny and create a Checkov's Gun for them to have a fireproof cloak on hand for storming Humperdink's Castle.
Truly, if one likes The Princess Bride, the movie is just amazing, but the novel it was based on is great, and further enhances the movie. There are several jokes in the movie that are references and play on the novel.
Yeah, a lot of times, you will see people say "the book was better" or "the book will deepen the experience," about movies or shows, but, this really was a special instance of that totally being true.
The Princess Bride is a phenomenal work where the more you know about it, the better it gets.
Yes, movie cast interviews are worth watching. Yes, scenes dropped from the movie adaptation are in the book and some are pretty fun to read, especially with knowledge of how it goes down in the movie, then, going back to the movie, and seeing how they reference the book subtly. It is great.
And, I must say, Fezzik and Inigo, already wonderful, gain so much from the deeper backstories, then tying it in with their movie portrayals. Like, Inigo doesn't come off as just a plausible pretty good sword fighter, he is a bona fide sword master that truly devoted his life to the sword for his revenge. His quest is all the more meaningful for the blood and sweat he devoted to it. Then, add in Many Patinkin's loss of his father irl and how he channeled that into his performance and you can contextualize how he can make you really feel his pure, raw sorrow.
The plum hat was displayed at a 2016 art exhibit she curated, but it wasn't made by her.
Yoko Ono curated a recent exhibit at the Reykjavik Art Museum called “Yoko Ono: One More Story...,” which features work that spans her career, as well as pieces from other artists. One of the pieces on display by the artist Ragnar Kjartansson brought to life a classic “The Simpsons” joke about Yoko Ono. In the 1993 episode “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet,” a character based on Ono orders a “single plum, floating in perfume, served in a mans hat” at Moe’s Tavern. Kjartansson’s work in the exhibit is literally just that.
Even if it's pure water it'll still evaporate in a couple of days. You'd either need to continually refill it or use some sort of transparent solid substance (resin or the like).
Gallery owners and their staff are usually in charge of display maintenance and could do that. I personally wouldn’t do resin, I would try to make it as close the joke as possible. I do wonder what fragrance would be best though for the perfume solution.
"Greetings. May I have a half-caff decaf mint mocha latte, foam on the bottom, served in a flower vase, and if y'all got some green food coloring back there, throw it in."
SpongeBob, "Rockabye Bivalve" (I think that was the episode name). While raising a clam like a baby bird, SpongeBob and Patrick go to an ice cream cart, and for some reason the guy just has worms on hand.
Maybe, but in the context of SpongeBob, there'd never been a scene with the regular "people" fish eating worms like it was a common thing. There's a clear distinction between the sentient characters, and the "animal" life forms (Gary being a slight exception).
There's an entire skit about this in Family Guy where Peter goes to Anthropologie and asks for a bunch of bizarre things that they have at hand.
Then when challenged that they have EVERYTHING he asks for Black Customers, which they do not have, and the store assistant melts.
Janet (The Good Place). she can instantly produce basically any object someone asks her for, like a 14 ounce ostrich steak impaled on a giant novelty pencil.
I like how, when they reached the actual Good Place, it was revealed that getting literally anything you want instantly is actually so boring that, after thousands of years of it, you lose your entire personality.
There's a Twilight Zone episode called A Nice Place To Visit about this concept, but with a twist.
Rocky realizes that he is dead, and he concludes that he must be in Heaven and Pip is his guardian angel. Pip looks at him oddly but only says that Rocky can have anything he wants. Rocky asks for $1 million and a beautiful woman, and quickly has both requests fulfilled.
One month later, Rocky has become bored with having his whims instantly satisfied. He wins every game at the casino, and the women do anything he wants. He refuses his latest winnings and kicks the women out of his apartment.
Deciding that he will go insane if he stays in this stifling paradise any longer, Rocky asks Pip to send him to "the other place" — insisting that he does not belong in Heaven. Pip retorts, "Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This IS the other place!"
You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror. These are just examples; it could also be something much better. Prepare to enter: The Scary Door.
Bro had no creativity. "I want a rival who has even odds of beating me in games of chance, approximately equivalent ability in games of skill, and the desire to win."
Constant instant gratification will at some point just make you run out of things to do. You're spending eternity in the good place so at some point you will have literally done everything there is.
There is no struggle for survival, no worries, only whatever your heart might desire at that moment which simply gets dull after a while which was why the big way to fix the good place was a way out instead of just vegging out for the rest of your afterlife
Theres a scene in red dwarf where Lister in infected with a luck virus while theyre being chased by a mad evil infect Rimmer. While theyre escaping, Kryton keeps asking for even more specific and conviluted equipment to defeat Rimmer one of them being a precise resister, that Lister happens to find in his pocket.
I once managed to hand my neighbor his wife’s favorite wine, which he had forgotten to get for their anniversary (or he got the wrong wine maybe? It’s been a decade). He was rushing down the (apartment) stairs as I was going up after returning from grocery shopping and I asked if he was good, he didn’t stop and was like ‘I need to get a bottle of 2016 cupcake vineyard Merlot for my anniversary’ (or something super specific like that).
Whelp it turns out his wife and I have similar tastes, and I was like ‘dude I got it’ and pulled it out the total wine bag (the huge liquor store in TX) I was carrying up. Dude looked at it like Jesus had finally appeared, gave me a big hug, thanked me profusely and ran back inside. Dude gave me like 4x the cost in cash the next day.
Now I hope you had some mental image from reading that, because my neighbor was a huge Pacific Islander dude who did construction. He could bench me and then snap me in half, and would only need one hand unless I struggled too much lol. Think the rock, but taller and with ultra dad bod strength. When he hugged me I was air born. He was also a master of the arcane art of smoking meats and shared with his neighbors. Awesome dude.
Half the episodes in Doctor Who are reliant on the fact that the Doctor owns or knows how to create incredibly specific gadgets because of some tangentially related offscreen adventure hundreds of years ago. Occasionally that very specific thing actually calls back to an item he gained on screen decades ago and that's awesome
The whole sketch is set around a bar that offers drinks that do or cause as they're called. (Total Overreaction, Spanish Dub, Perpetual Motion, Recurring gag)
Also, while I can’t remember a specific example, the variation where they then ask a question that makes it even more specific, implying they had several versions of the requested item on hand.
CHOSEN ONE: "Excuse me, kind blacksmith, do you know where I could find some little silver triangular pyramid caps roughly an inch and a half in diameter?"
The Muppet Movie is a justified example since in a world where muppet frogs and bears exist as a speices, those flavors might actually be relatively popular.
Oh man honey ice cream is the best. Buy vanilla ice cream, put a smaaalll amount of honey drizzled thinly over and start stirring until it becomes like soft serve.
That was pretty realistic, other than maybe the bar having corn? Zooble very obviously had no idea what that meant and just made something with what they had on hand.
Definitely a downplayed and lampshaded example of the trope, but an example nonetheless. Zooble, acting as bartender, outright says that they're more or less improvising based on the name. Actually having corncobs on hand at a bar, however-- that's playing the trope straight.
US Acres has an episode called "Orson's Diner". Orson opens a diner, and says that if Roy order something he can't prepare, he gets dinner for free for a month. Moose stew with chocolate sauce; broiled yak nose with green gravy; and an alligator cheese sandwich with cheese from an alligator named Sydney, with lettuce grown in northern Bolivia and picked on Memorial Day, served on rye bread with exactly 71 caraway seeds per slice, and a pickle in the shape of Muncie, Indiana (this sandwich is known as a "Number Eight" in the episode) are easily provided.
Unfortunately, the elephant's foot sandwich with mustard is a step too far - while they have elephant's foot (thanks to a passing circus truck that blew a tire and an elephant escaped), it turns out that they're out of mustard.
This is literally just an old joke where a guy walks into a diner with this premise (gets $500 if they can't make it or something) and orders elephant ears on rye. The chef storms out and slaps the money down saying it's the first time in 20 years they've been out of rye bread.
In Va-11 Hall-a, as a reference to this very Simpsons scene, a customer asks for the same drink, and in the menu, it is available as a 'bottled' drink, meaning the bar has it immediately available at all times.
In Black Books, Bernard gets locked out on a rainy night, enters a pornography store, and requests a pornographic video themed around administrative nurses in hopes the guy will have to spend ages looking for it so he can stay out of the cold for longer. When he immediately produces such a tape Bernard amends his request to senior administrative nurses, and the guy moves his finger to reveal the full title, it was already about them.
Simpsons again, Moe related again. Bart prank calls, asking for a "Mr. Hugh Jazz." Moe of course calls it out, and this gentleman over here immediately answers.
In the webcomic Delve (NSFW) three of the protagonists find themselves in a club built inside some wizard's abandoned pocket dimension. The very British hunter Phawkes makes the following request to their waitress:
"The lady will have 125 pounds of your finest Sparklecap Mushrooms, and I'll have the Salmon Mango Chutney. Also, a bottle of Loch Dhoomond '25 with two glasses, 500 rounds of Merriweather and Pike's .455 caliber hollowpoints, a candle, and a block of sealing wax."
Every item was promptly brought out, and their waitress didn't even need to take a note.
There’s a series of animated sketches called Bird Pizza. This puffin comes in asking if they sell burgers and fries. The day shift is like nah man this is a pizza place. He follows up asking if they “still sell oysters” and they’re like we have never done that.
The same puffin comes back in for the night shift and asks if they sell burgers. Night shift is like no but they’re too busy doing skateboard tricks to be annoyed by the question. The puffin asks if they sell oysters and they’re like oh yeah and hand a plate over before going right back to the sick skateboard tricks.
Girl Genius - Old Man Death’s sandwich shop in Mechanicsburg. Famous for their ability to make you any sandwich you ask for, even if you’re unsure what the order you give means.
Unless you ask for a Prince of Sturmhalten’s Big Bet. They’re out of hats for you to eat.
I mean, in a world where muppets are real then unusual ice cream flavors are probably not that strange. Dragonfly ripple is technically a real ice cream(Mint chocolate chip with gumdrops for the eyes and wafer rolls or regular wafers for the wings), I imagine it was actually bug flavored ice cream.
Bob's Burgers: During the episode Bob and Deliver, Gene shouts nonsense phrases as a form of Diner Speak and is genuinely surprised when Zeke knows exactly what he's talking about because even Gene doesn't know what he's saying
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u/StongaBologna 9d ago
This happened to me IRL.
In my youth I spent the weekend at a friend's college. I tuckered out, and wanted to sleep. His roommate offered me his bed for the evening.
I lay down, about to fall asleep. His roommate asks, "anything else I can get for you?"
"Not unless you have a bag of those marshmallow circus peanuts"
He calmly pulled a bag of marshmallow circus peanuts out of a drawer and handed them to me.
I had never had them before, or even seen anyone purchase them.