AS THE WORLD TURNERIZES

The main reason I posted that opinion piece on comedy sketches was due to a sketch I stumbled across while randomly surfing the other day.

I landed on Comedy Central and they were showing 'Mad TV'. (Maybe it's me, or just the time of day, but I seem to ALWAYS land on 'Mad TV' when I visit Comedy Central!)

In the sketch, a black & white family from a 1950s sitcom were sitting around the dinner table, extolling the virtues of that night's meal. And everything they said was a double entendre, involving swallowing hot dogs, eating Mom's pie, and shaving the... cat.

Those who know me well would call it a "go there" moment.

Finally the family got sick of making everything a double entendre and tried to find subjects in which nothing had a dirty meaning. They finally gave up and tucked into Mom's pie.

Even though they were characters living within a sitcom premise of the 1950s, they were tele-cognizant; that is, they were aware they were in a TV show. And they were up-to-date with the current lingo and what passed for suggestive to the TV audience.

Therefore, I had to figure that, like the Nielsens of 'Hi Honey, I'm Home', this family was also living outside of their own TV world in a sitcom relocation program.

'Hi Honey, I'm Home' has always been a show I'd rather avoid altogether because of the headaches it causes for Toobworld. It was about a sitcom family no longer being watched on a regular basis and so the government somehow moved them out of the TV world and into the "real" world until such time - if any! - when they could go back and be viewed by the masses again.

But if what we see on the TV is considered Toobworld, then their "real world" is actually Toobworld. Therefore, that world's TV world is a further dilution of the many-worlds theory.

It gets worse, trust me. Each episode of 'Hi Honey, I'm Home' also had appearances by actual TV characters from other, "real" TV shows: Alice and Trixie from 'The Honeymooners', 'Gomer Pyle', Mr. Mooney of 'The Lucy Show', and Grampa from 'The Munsters'.

Sure, it was great to see them reprise their roles, but those characters are supposed to be living in Toobworld along with the Duff Family (who were the Nielsens' next door neighbors). They're not supposed to know they are TV characters, and the Duffs should not be thinking of themselves as being "real" in comparison to them.

It's too late for this splainin to keep me sane, but maybe it might help anybody else who finds themselves easily obsessed by the trivial.......

The "real world" of 'Hi Honey, I'm Home' is in fact not Toobworld at all. It is another alternate dimension controlled by tele-cognizant deities who abduct characters from Toobworld to bring them through the vortex for their own unknowable purposes.

The TV dimension from which the Nielsens and that 'Mad TV' sketch family came from is the actual Toobworld. And once relocated to that alternate dimension, they are aware that they came from a world based on TV shows.

They may not be 'The 4400', but not everybody who mysteriously disappears from our TV screens is automatically abducted by the people from the future. Or by aliens.

I may be wrong about this, but I think of all the celebrity character cameos on 'Hi Honey I'm Home', the only one to be ever seen again on Earth Prime Time was Alice Nelson of 'The Brady Bunch'. (She appeared last year in a commercial celebrating the liberation from drudgery of the household help on our TV shows, thanks to the Swiffer Duster.)

But that doesn't mean the others didn't slide back from that alt. world. Although many of them have passed away since the show was on we might still see Gomer Pyle and Eddie Haskell one day in some program or blipvert. (We still have Trixie Norton and June Cleaver with us, but I'd rather preserve my memories.)

However, Grampa might want to show up again, somewhere, somehow. Even at his advanced age and with the amputation of his leg, Al Lewis has always been irrepressible. And his ordeal in that other dimension could be used to splain away his missing leg......

BCnU!
Tele-Toby