Who is Holden McGroin? Joey looks for a new stage name. Over the episode he tries many of them on. By the end he appears on a stage and introduces himself with a name that gets lots of laughter from the audience. Joey: Holden McGroin. Who is Holden McGroin? And why is Joey taking that name is funny? At first I thought Holden McGroin is some all America-famous guy. But I googled and googled and nothing. But than I realized Holden McGroin is a play of sounds. If you say really quickly 'Holden McGroin' native speaker would hear not a name but three words 'holding my growing'. It is your first step in understanding the joke. The next step is that you got to know that 'growing' in slang means 'testicles'. The rest is pretty about putting two parts together. A man holding on to one's testicles in public is considered weird and therefore funny. I love this joke, not just because most of the traffic to this blog comes through googling 'Holden McGroin
Did you notice that about 7% of F.R.I.E.N.D.S jokes are hard to get? Especially if you are from a different country, like me. I've started this joke-research when I was learning English at home. I loved getting nerdy with all the cultural references here. The aim of this blog is to help you laugh with confidence at every joke our English speaking friends make. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. Explore the blog posts archive. And share your perspective on the jokes! Kate
Реклама :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAVALXH9nxU
ReplyDeleteFantastic! That seems to be it! The joke is sure based on this ad.
ReplyDeleteIt's actually more likely that the ad was based on the joke! The Warner-Lambert Company, makers of Trident sugarless gum, commissioned a market research firm to survey dentists in July 1976. The question was: sugared gum, sugarless gum, or no gum at all?
ReplyDeleteOut of 1200 dentists surveyed, sugarless gum won by about 85%, the next option was NO GUM AT ALL.
Trident didn't publish this though, they just said '4 out of 5 dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum'. It was implied that the other doctor didn't care which kind of gum they chewed, not that some doctors were against gum-chewing. It is kind of a classic example of lying with statistics!
Anyway, Friends pointed out the fifth doctor's choice back in 1995, and I think the squirrel ad came much later, when Trident decided to drop the health option and try to attract people by being funny. Friends did a much better job of being funny, I think.
True. If I got it right the ad above was done in 2002:
Deletehttp://vimeo.com/43920762
And the episode aired almost a decade before the commercial. So my guess is that that dentist research was promoted very well. Unfortunaly I didn't find the original ad from 70ies on YouTube. But I did find an update for 2002 ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEKlhl4NPLk
I actually expected a change of a finale. But never happened. Friends writers are indeed more humorous than the Trident ones.
Yes, you have to be an old-timer to remember the rapid-fire disclaimer: "4 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who CHEW gum." It is committed to memory from seeing it constantly back in the '70s and '80s. LOL
ReplyDelete