I’m sure I’m adding nothing new on the 84th page of this thread, but troons have ruined comedy so much it’s really sad.
I was actually watching a YouTube video about
the troon who was stopped from going into the women’s bathroom at a public library in Georgia. Whenever I see a troon like that saying he’s a woman, trying to convince all of us he’s a she, I think of the running joke from the 1960’s American TV show,
Get Smart, the line, “Would you believe…?”. If you’re not familiar, it’s a sitcom about a bumbling spy named Maxwell Smart who has a phone in his shoe and other goofy gadgets, and his ineptitude gets him into hilarious trouble. Mel Brooks was behind the show, and it was meant to ride the wave of popularity
James Bond left behind. The show ended decades ago (I think there was a movie or a recent reboot but I didn’t see it), so troons didn’t ruin it directly, but the humor that the show relies upon is the contrast between Max’s delusional, grandiose claims and reality.
The “Would you believe” joke is based off of Max making some kind of boastful claim, which his interlocutor seems suspicious of, and then he keeps scaling down the level of his boast to something very pathetic. In one, he says he’s so good at karate that with a single chop he can break 8 boards at once. His partner gives him a “hmmm” response, so Max says, “would you believe 7?” And the guy is still doubtful so Max says, “okay a loaf of bread?” We can believe Max is strong enough to smash bread but no one thinks he can break 8 boards. My favorite is when he claims to have swam across a giant body of water like the English Channel or the Atlantic Ocean and then he reduces it to “would you believe twice around the bathtub?”
Troons are constantly asking “Would you believe I’m a woman?” But we’re no longer allowed to openly doubt them until they reduce it down to “would you believe I have a paraphilic sexual fetish?”
I was thinking about how to frame my thoughts about
Get Smart and the Library Troon and I went to YouTube search to find “would you believe” clips and the second one on the list, which had the best thumbnail frankly, so I clicked it first, was this gem that could never be published on Netflix:
If troons weren’t so threatening nowadays, this would be fucking hilarious. The fact that they made this joke in the 60s makes me smile. Agent 99 (the woman in the clip) is pretty well convinced the obvious woman in the photo looks convincingly female but the audience (like every human) knows that in person, one or two minutes could be enough, but
four dates is pathetic! I don’t know if there was an implication back then that the “third date” meant sex, but if there was, that’s even worse. Even if 3rd date sex wasn’t a thing in the 60s, there are still 4 relatively intimate encounters described, where people could be expected to dance or otherwise embrace for long enough to feel your date’s body. A kiss wouldn’t be out of the question after 1 or 2 dates I don’t think, so there’s the implication that he at least kissed a man without knowing, and it still took more time to figure it out because he’s so stupid.
Max’s inability to clock a man in a disguise is a bad thing and we laugh at him for it. It was a great joke but those days are long gone.
