by zbicyclist

My Wife

Warning: you may find some of the references here offensive — because they are!

A momentary CIDU, because it’s explained in the mouseover text: ” Borat came out twenty years ago this year–closer to the breakup of the Soviet Union than to today–but it honestly feels like it’s been even longer, somehow.”

But, before mousing over, I was reminded of Henny Youngman: “Take my wife … please.”

And then “My wife, I think I’ll keep her”, a Geritol ad from long ago.

That Borat reference:

8 Comments

  1. Unknown's avatar

    Cultural osmosis is a heck of a thing. I’ve never seen Borat, but I got the XKCD without the hovertext and can even hear him saying it.

    I always thought “My wife, I think I’ll keep her” was for Clairol. I guess I’m old enough to have seen the ads, but young enough to think Geritol was only marketed to seniors. And is that Joe Flaherty in that ad? It looks and sounds enough like him to make it really hard to take the ad at all seriously, even without the sexism.

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  2. Unknown's avatar

    Geritol! I can still hear Ted Mack’s voice on The Original Amateur Hour pushing Geritol, with “twice the iron in a whole pound of calf’s liver”.

    Not necessarily a good thing: “… supplemental iron products, including Geritol, have been contraindicated because of concerns over hemochromatosis, and serious questions raised in studies for men, postmenopausal women, and nonanemic patients with liver disease, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or cancer.” [Wikipedia]

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  3. Unknown's avatar

    I’m 99.44% sure that isn’t Joe Flaherty. I see the resemblance but no.

    Amazing to watch that ad again in this day and age! Sheesh.

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  4. Unknown's avatar

    Nicolas Coster is the actor (and it seems that was his wife at the time, Candace Hilligoss).

    I didn’t realize the Mary Chapin Carpenter song “He thinks he’ll keep her” is from the phrase in the commercial.

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  5. Unknown's avatar

    I want to ‘get’ Borat. I should ‘get’ Borat. I don’t and have never ‘gotten’ Borat.

    Time for my Geritol and my nap.

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  8. Unknown's avatar

    For me, the most salient cultural reference to “my wife” is the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife”, a fragment of what appeared to be an ancient manuscript but turned out to be a forgery. It contained the sentence fragment “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…'”

    Even at the time of its discovery it was viewed with skepticism and suspicion, and even if it had been determined to be authentically from the first or second century C.E. it would not have been taken as evidence that Jesus was married. There are other authentically ancient works such as the Gospel of Thomas that contain a lot of non-canonical material, apparently for entertainment purposes only.

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