I'm Italian, and I burst out laughing when Willard said that. By the end of that segment, I had tears rolling down my face from laughing so hard. That's some hilarious sh*t right there!!! 😂
Nice to see a shout out for FERNWOOD 2NIGHT, the first true "anti-comedy", still ahead of it's time after close to forty years. Elements of this show could later be seen in the LETTERMAN and LARRY SANDERS shows, clear through to shows like ERIC ANDRE and TIM & ERIC. If you like it edgy, this is the show for you. Available here on RU-vid.
Patton Oswald=complete hypocrite! That being said...Fernwood was one of the most hysterical shows EVER! I miss the days when people LAUGHED at our differences instead of rioting, looting, destroying property and hating because people are different. Better times, back then!
@@patdonnelly9392 lol. Cancel culture is a bullshit idea. The people that talk most about it are the main ones trying to "cancel" people they don't like. It's a fraudulent gimmick for politicians and talking heads to grift off of dummies.
Mull was hilarious! Always playing the cantankerous, impatient, know-it-all so well. And Willard, with his ability to play the village idiot who thinks he's the smartest person in the room. It took great timing. Both of them had me crying with laughter in F2N.
I hated his character on that show, he played the exact opposite of every other character he ever played. Maybe that's what he wanted to do, who knows?
The song they played to bring him out was People, made famous by Barbra Streisand...Fernwood Tonight was great, no way they could do something this good in the politically correct whiner era of today
The polish joke reminded me of something a bit weird. In 3rd grade or so my school had a book fair, where they sell some of their old library books. The one I bought was a polish joke book. It had some standard "how many polacks" style jokes, the hack kind, but there were some brutal ones that were just hateful. Some were picture jokes that were hilarious. Picture a big huge beefy man, a surly look to him, squinty slits for eyes, a cigar butt in his mouth and wearing one of those "cabby hats". He's dead pale, wearing too small swim trunks. He's standing in one of those small plastic kiddy pool tubs with some sand around it. There's a lightbulb hanging from a wire above his head. The caption reads "Polack beach party".
Half my family’s polish, so when I was a kid I openly said I was mostly polish. So…. Yeah they started hitting me with polak jokes. Right to my face. Didn’t bother me at the time, and that’s probably because I didn’t understand them. I’d never heard that we were stupid, and I’m betting that probably made it funnier. Odd thing is: I’ll occasionally mention to people I know that I was treated as if I was mentally retarded for a few years there until polak jokes kind of faded off. From about 6 to 10 years old maybe. And sometimes it wasn’t jokes. A few times I was told flat out that my ethnicity meant that I was stupid. It kind of stuck with me till I shrugged it off around 9th grade. Nobody ever seems to react to this as if I was saying something significant. Sometimes I’ll ask if they’d react differently to what I said if I was a black man telling the same story. They kind of get uncomfortable and try to brush that off. Then when I tell them my favorite polak jokes, they act like I’m being a racist. I guarantee that my complexion has a lot to do with all of it.
If you look closely, you can see Tommy Tedesco on guitar. One of the greatest guitar players ever ! A member of "The Wrecking Crew" ! And Frank De Vol, Academy Award winning Musical Director.
Holy shit, I've never heard of this show, but I did know about the Mary Hartman one that it was spun off from. Its pretty funny, but of course couldn't be done now. Nearly everything from the 70's, 80s, and even the 90s wouldn't make it on TV now, too many fragile snowflake SJWs would be offended. I've always liked Martin Mull, he's always been able to get movie and TV work, good for him. As for Fred Willard, I didn't know about him until much later on, and he also got a whole bunch of work on TV. He died recently, RIP him.
"The Japanese enjoy the feeling of leather and straps around their necks..." I was expecting the punchline to this to be far worse than "That's why they enjoy wearing cameras and binoculars."
"kris and rita...and marty mull are meetin at the troubadour" from 'lonesome l.a. cowboy' by the new riders 1971! I guess he was kool even before fernwood!
He was a musician and also had a musical comedy show for years before this. He was almost the band leader on the first season of SNL... he had to turn it down because he couldn't read sheet music. He and Steve Martin were contemporaries and friends at the height of the whole 70s rockstar comedian thing.
Patton Oswalt has a thing for weird, obscure stuff, he'll hype some obscure comedy on the show and make it sound like it's this genius work, and then you check it out and it's just stupid and weird, nowhere near as funny/bizarre/interesting/fascinating as he made it sound like it would be
I'd forgotten this show existed. Even though I was a teenager when it originally played and was a fan. I can't imagine anyone now telling a Polish, Jewish, Italian or whatever joke yet they were so common then. Anyway Mull and Willard, both from Ohio, were so damn funny and also on Roseanne as a gay couple. They're both gone now.
I thought it was so funny they didn't know who the other guy on the couch was. Then they went on to mention Jim Varney was on the show a lot but they didn't recognize him when he was sitting right there. Must have been the greasy hairdo that threw them off.
I note with interest that the faux Polish researcher ends the segment by saying the Polish people are "bright, perceptive and highly intelligent" - no doubt to make up for the ridicule that came before. All that being said, right now Poland - and Hungary - are the two nations in Europe displaying the smarts that have kept terroristic 7th-century barbarians out of their countries. It is only a matter of time Germans, for example, will be clamoring at the gates of Poland, this time not to conquer but to stay. And at that point, remembering all those unfair Polish jokes, many Poles will be thinking "So, who's laughing now~?"
This show isn't out on dvd nor is it in reruns anywhere probably because of the political incorrectness. Yet when this guy tries to put them up on YT off his old vhs collection they pull his channel everytime. I w got all of them downloaded from his tapes last time except the last ten and they pulled him.
As great as this was and as edgy as they went with it, the fact that they basically did all stereotypes but Blacks, that felt like a bit of a cop out, especially cause all of the other race stereotypes they did were so funny and relatable, would've been interesting to see where they went with the Black jokes and what they deemed funny and edgy but not too over the line, not just them completely avoiding it
