10 Long TV Running Jokes You Never Even Noticed
Peaky Blinders' Tommy is intentionally never shown eating on-screen.
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00:00 So with the longer-form nature of TV that we have today, it allows storytellers to set
00:04 up running gags that don't merely just run for a mere two hours, but whole seasons, and
00:09 perhaps the entire length of a multi-season TV show itself. These 10 shows, from universally
00:15 acclaimed dramas to goofy animated comedy series, all offered up deviously sneaky running
00:20 gags that you almost certainly didn't notice, at least not on your first viewing.
00:24 So let's take a look at them as arm jewels, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10
00:28 Long-Running TV Gags That You've Never Even Noticed.
00:31 10. CJ's Goldfish Bowl Contains Episode-Specific Props - The West Wing
00:37 The West Wing boasts an especially creative and subtle running gag which endured from
00:41 its first season through until its seventh and final one. Now, you might recall this
00:45 in one of the show's first episodes, "Danny, Buy CJ a Goldfish for Her Office", but the
00:50 prop master for the series decided to go one step further by ensuring that new episodes
00:54 had a thematically appropriate new prop inside the goldfish bowl. For example, a Christmas
01:00 episode had a Christmas tree in the bowl, a Capitol Punishment episode had a fake dead
01:04 fish floating in it, and when there were leaks at the White House, there's a plumbing pipe
01:08 placed in the bowl. There are almost 50 different versions of the gag throughout The West Wing,
01:13 and yet it is just subtle enough that you couldn't be blamed for missing it.
01:17 9. Rick Never Wears A Seatbelt - Rick and Morty
01:21 Rick and Morty is another show that rewards those who pay close enough attention, though
01:25 here's a running gag so slight and unassuming that you might have spaced on it entirely,
01:30 and that is that Rick never wears a seatbelt. Aside from the brief appearances of Detox
01:35 Rick and Pickle Rick, Rick doesn't wear a seatbelt throughout the show, a nod towards
01:39 his cavalier attitude towards his own safety, and to be kind, his generally suicidal levels
01:44 of despondence.
01:46 Rick's refusal to wear a seatbelt isn't ever directly brought up in the show itself,
01:50 but it's nevertheless a neat morsel of character shading which confirms the kind of place he's
01:55 in. Only in his alternate, healthier states is Rick ever shown wearing a seatbelt. Now
02:00 that is character development.
02:02 8. The Riker Chair Maneuver - Star Trek The Next Generation
02:06 It's entirely possible to have watched all 178 episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation
02:12 and never noticed the tendency for Riker to sit down on chairs in a rather unusual way,
02:18 straddling them almost as though he's mounting a horse. In more recent years, the Riker Chair
02:22 Maneuver became a bit of a meme as fans started to take notice, and yet, despite how distracting
02:27 it seems in retrospect, so many millions of fans never once picked up on it themselves.
02:32 There's actually a practical reason for this move though. Quill Wheaton confirmed
02:36 on Reddit that Jonathan Frake suffered a back injury while moving furniture prior to working
02:41 on The Next Generation, and so this peculiar means of sitting was actually an attempt to
02:46 take off some of the strain on his back. Similarly, Riker can often be seen leaning, or otherwise
02:50 bracing himself against objects throughout the series, all of it in an attempt to prevent
02:55 further aggravation of his real-life existing injury. Despite its basically medical purposes,
03:00 that hasn't stopped the internet embracing it in recent years as a charmingly odd character
03:05 trait.
03:06 7. Reoccurring Use of the Song "Daybreak" - Community
03:09 Community is unquestionably one of the most meta and self-aware TV shows ever. And though
03:14 eagle-eyed fans are committed to catching every last split-second gag, there's one
03:19 hiding in plain sight throughout the series that you may have well missed. This is in
03:22 large part because it's not something that can be seen, so scouring every inch of a single
03:27 shot won't actually help you.
03:28 You see, the instrumental jazz tune "Daybreak" can be heard on no less than a dozen different
03:33 community episodes between seasons three and six, and characters are heard humming it in
03:37 separate episodes. It also plays on a radio and in an elevator, amongst other situations.
03:43 According to the creator Dan Harmon, the reason for this is that the production spent so much
03:47 money securing licensing rights to play the police's Roxanne in the legendary season
03:51 three episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" that the season's music budget had mostly
03:55 been eaten up, and so "Daybreak" was used to fill the gaps for the season, with Harmon
04:00 ultimately deciding to run with the ball and turn it into a wider community gag that you
04:04 probably had no idea about.
04:05 6. Tyrion's Half-Told Joke - Game of Thrones
04:09 If you're not a hardcore Game of Thrones fan and have only seen each of the episodes
04:14 once, then you wouldn't have much hope of noticing this sly running gag subtly deployed
04:18 over the course of eight seasons. On three separate occasions, Tyrion Lannister attempts
04:23 to tell a joke about bringing a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel, but each time
04:27 he's interrupted before he's able to finish it. It first shows up in his trial in season
04:31 one's "A Golden Crown", and he attempts again to tell the joke in season six's "No
04:35 One", but is cut short by a ringing bell, while his third and final effort in the series
04:40 is in the finale "The Iron Throne", where the scene simply cuts away as he starts to
04:44 tell the joke.
04:45 Now, some of Thrones' more obsessive fans did catch wind of this. However, they were
04:49 infuriated by the lack of closure and attempted to come up with their own answers, while the
04:53 Huffington Post even asked some comedians to complete the punchline. Again, if you're
04:57 not a hardcore Thrones fan, this is incredibly easily missed, especially if you've not
05:01 revisited the series since it ended. Committing to the bit three times over an eight-year
05:06 period is impressively sneaky.
05:08 5. The Secret McBane Movie Hidden Throughout The Show
05:12 The Simpsons
05:13 The Simpsons is of course jam-packed with running gags, both blatant and subtle, from
05:18 Bart's prank-calling Moe's tavern to the reoccurring crow that always caws distinctively
05:22 during any establishing shot of Springfield's nuclear power plant. But an altogether more
05:27 ingenious running joke occurs between the second and fourth seasons, where five separate
05:31 episodes show clips of the fake movie McBane starring the action hero Rainier Wolfcastle.
05:37 Viewed across three years, the clips seem simple enough. But more recently, as more
05:41 fans began to binge The Simpsons, they started to realise that these clips all form part
05:46 of a continuous narrative and are, in effect, a truncated version of the McBane movie.
05:51 The four minutes of footage are effectively a McBane short film, showing McBane's best
05:55 pal and partner being killed by the corrupt Senator Mendoza, and McBane's blood-soaked
06:00 quest to avenge his fallen friend. We all remember McBane, but these excerpts are by
06:04 themselves such typical parodies of corny action movies that most fans didn't even
06:08 realise that they were connected in a kind of coherent way. Pretty incredible, right?
06:13 4. Pineapples Everywhere
06:15 Sike.
06:16 Hit detective comedy series Sike touted a most bizarre running gag across its 120 episodes
06:22 - that a pineapple would appear in some form in almost every single episode. Perhaps it
06:27 might be a whole pineapple, mere slices of one, a pineapple smoothie, a pineapple pizza,
06:31 or even just images of pineapples somewhere within the frame, but the commitment to the
06:35 bit is nothing if not admirable.
06:38 Fans cottoned on enough that a website was made to track the pineapple's location in
06:41 each episode - all 170 of them, amounting to an average of almost 1.5 per episode. There's
06:48 never been any official explanation for the gag beyond the showrunners doing it to amuse
06:52 themselves, and it caught on enough with the hardcore fans that eventually it would have
06:56 been a crying shame to stop it. Sometimes a running gag is its own weird reward, whether
07:00 it makes sense or not.
07:02 3. The Gang Always Reuses The Same Video Tape
07:05 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
07:09 It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is basically built on the foundation of in-jokes and running
07:12 gags. Though one of the sneakier ones involves the gang always using the same damn grotty
07:17 VHS tape to record and display their latest audiovisual scheme. The ads for Fight Milk
07:22 and Kitten Mittens, Dee's Invigoron video, Dennis and Mac's fake terrorist video, and
07:26 so many more were all shot on the same tape, with each recording over the previous one.
07:31 Several times throughout the show when their latest video is playing, we'll see scattered
07:34 fragments of their previous ones at the beginning and end of the tape. It's easily missed
07:39 if you're not paying total attention, but a hilarious ongoing callback if you do.
07:43 Hopefully they'll never ditch this gag, because the longer it goes on, and the further
07:46 the weirds of society stray away from VHS, the funnier it actually becomes.
07:51 2. Tommy Shelby Never Eats - Peaky Blinders
07:55 Peaky Blinders might not be a show where you'd expect to see anything in the way of a major
07:59 reoccurring joke, and that's likely why this running gag is rather on the sly side.
08:04 While recently promoting the show's final season in an interview with the BBC, star
08:08 Cillian Murphy confessed a gag that's been part of the show since the very beginning,
08:12 that his character, Tommy Shelby, is never seen eating on screen. Obviously, it's a
08:16 given that Shelby, being a living human and all that, does eat, but Murphy confirmed that
08:20 once the production team realised that Tommy hadn't been seen eating in the first two
08:24 seasons, that they opted to keep it going for the remainder. He said, "I remember
08:28 we had gotten through the first two series and then we realised that Tommy had never
08:31 eaten. We've never seen Tommy eat. Like, he's sat down at tables, but he's never
08:35 consumed a morsel. So we then made it a kind of running gag."
08:39 So throughout the 36 hours of television, Tommy Shelby never consumes anything, except
08:43 I think once he consumes a sprig of mint when he's with his son. In its own way, it subtly
08:48 implies Tommy's obsession with his life's work, something a small quarter of fans picked
08:52 up on years ago, but which was only recently confirmed as an intentional character flourish
08:57 by Murphy and the creator of the series.
08:59 1. Foreshadowing Buster Losing His Hand - Arrested Development
09:03 Perhaps the single most memorable moment in Arrested Development happens in the season
09:07 two episode "Out on a Limb", where poor Buster Bluth has his hand bitten off by a loose
09:13 seal, with the missing limb then being replaced by a hook. Hilariously though, Buster's
09:17 impending dismemberment was foreshadowed almost an entire year in advance, with a series of
09:22 gags throughout the latter part of season one and the first half of season two. These
09:26 include a flashback to Michael performing in the play "The Trial of Captain Hook",
09:31 Buster declaring "this party is going to be off the hook", a mention of a seal attack
09:34 on the news, Buster playing a claw game and winning a toy seal, and Buster sitting on
09:39 a bench which reads "arm off". Obviously it says more than that, but the way he's
09:43 sitting obscures the rest of the text. These are just a few examples, but of course nobody
09:47 read into these gags on an initial viewing, because nobody knew the fate awaiting Buster.
09:52 Even on repeat watches, most of these sight gags and one-liners come so thick and fast
09:56 that you might well miss them. And that makes them utterly brilliant.
10:00 And there we go my friends, those were the ten longest running TV gags you never even
10:03 noticed. I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about
10:06 it down in the comments section below. As always I've been Jules, you can go follow
10:10 me over on Twitter @RetroJWithA0, or you can swing by Live and Let's Dice where I do
10:14 all of my streaming outside of work, and it'd be great to see you over there. But before
10:18 I go, I just want to say one thing. Hope you're treating yourself well with love and respect
10:21 my friend, because you deserve all of the best things in life, and do not let anything
10:25 or anyone else tell you otherwise, alright? You're a massive ledge, and I want you
10:29 to go out there and smash it.
10:31 As always I've been Jules, you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak
10:35 to you soon. Bye.