00:00So with the longer form nature of TV that we have today, it allows storytellers to set up
00:04running gags that don't merely just run for a mere two hours, but whole seasons and perhaps
00:09the entire length of a multi-season TV show itself. Now these 10 shows, from universally
00:15acclaimed dramas to goofy animated comedy series, all offered up deviously sneaky running gags that
00:21you almost certainly didn't notice, at least not on your first viewing. So let's take a look at
00:25them as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 long-running TV gags that you've never
00:30even noticed. 10. CJ's Goldfish Bowl Contains Episode-Specific Props
00:36The West Wing. The West Wing boasts an especially creative and subtle running gag which endured from
00:41its first season through until its seventh and final one. Now you might recall this in one of
00:46the show's first episodes, Dani buys CJ a goldfish for her office, but the prop master for the series
00:52decided to go one step further by ensuring that new episodes had a thematically appropriate new
00:56prop inside the goldfish bowl. For example, a Christmas episode had a Christmas tree in the
01:01bowl, a Capital Punishment episode had a fake dead fish floating in it, and when there were leaks at
01:06the White House, there's a plumbing pipe placed in the bowl. There are almost 50 different versions of
01:12the gag throughout the West Wing, and yet it is just supposed to pay close enough attention. Though here's a
01:17running gag so slight and unassuming that you might have spaced on it entirely, and that is that Rick
01:22never wears a seatbelt. Aside from the brief appearances of Detox Rick and Pickle Rick,
01:28Rick doesn't wear a seatbelt throughout the show, a nod towards his cavalier attitude towards his own
01:32safety, and to be kind, his generally suicidal levels of despondence. Rick's refusal to wear a
01:38seatbelt isn't ever directly brought up in the show itself, but it's nevertheless a neat morsel of
01:43character shading which confirms the kind of place that he's in. Only in his alternate healthy estates
01:48is Rick ever shown wearing a seatbelt. Now that is character development.
01:538. The Riker Chair Maneuver
01:55Star Trek The Next Generation
01:57It's entirely possible to have watched all 178 episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation
02:03and never noticed the tendency for Riker to sit down on chairs in a rather unusual way,
02:09straddling them almost as though he's mounting a horse.
02:11In more recent years, the Riker Chair Maneuver became a bit of a meme as fans started to take
02:16notice, and yet, despite how distracting it seems in retrospect, so many millions of fans
02:21never once picked up on it themselves. Now there's actually a practical reason for this
02:25move though. Will Wheaton confirmed on Reddit that Jonathan Frakes suffered a back injury while
02:31moving furniture prior to working on The Next Generation, and so this peculiar means of sitting
02:36was actually an attempt to take off some of the strain on his back. Similarly, Riker can often be
02:40seen leaning or otherwise bracing himself against objects throughout the series, all of it in an
02:45attempt to prevent further aggravation of his real-life existing injury. Despite its basically
02:50medical purposes, that hasn't stopped the internet embracing it in recent years as a charmingly odd
02:55character trait.
02:567. Reoccurring Use of the Song Daybreak
02:59Community
03:00Community is unquestionably one of the most meta and self-aware TV shows ever. And though eagle-eyed
03:06fans are committed to catching every last split-second gag, there's one hiding in plain sight throughout
03:11the series that you may have well missed. This is in large part because it's not something that can
03:15be seen, so scouring every inch of a single shot won't actually help you. You see, the instrumental
03:20jazz tune Daybreak can be heard on no less than a dozen different Community episodes between seasons
03:263 and 6, and characters are heard humming it in separate episodes. It also plays on a radio and in an
03:31elevator, amongst other situations. According to the creator Dan Harmon, the reason for this is that
03:36the production spent so much money securing licensing rights to play the police's Roxanne
03:41in the legendary season 3 episode Remedial Chaos Theory that the season's music budget had mostly
03:46been eaten up, and so Daybreak was used to fill the gaps for the season, with Harmon ultimately
03:51deciding to run with the ball and turn it into a wider community gag that you probably had no idea about.
03:566. Tyrion's Half-Told Joke
03:59Game of Thrones If you're not a hardcore
04:02Game of Thrones fan and have only seen each of the episodes once, then you wouldn't have much
04:06hope of noticing this sly running gag subtly deployed over the course of eight seasons.
04:11On three separate occasions, Tyrion Lannister attempts to tell a joke about bringing a jackass
04:16and a honeycomb into a brothel, but each time he's interrupted before he's able to finish it.
04:20It first shows up in his trial in season 1's A Golden Crown, and he attempts again to tell the
04:25joke in season 6's No One, but is cut short by a ringing bell, while his third and final effort
04:30in the series is in the finale The Iron Throne, where the scene simply cuts away as he starts to
04:35tell the joke. Now, some of Thrones' more obsessive fans did catch wind of this. However,
04:40they were infuriated by the lack of closure and attempted to come up with their own answers,
04:44while the Huffington Post even asked some comedians to complete the punchline. Again,
04:48if you're not a hardcore Thrones fan, this is incredibly easily missed, especially if you've
04:52not revisited the series since it ended. Committing to the bit three times over an eight-year period,
04:57well, that is impressively sneaky. 5. The Secret McBain Movie Hidden
05:02Throughout The Show – The Simpsons
05:04The Simpsons is of course jam-packed with running gags both blatant and subtle, from Bart's prank
05:10calling Moe's tavern to the reoccurring crow that always caused distinctively during any
05:14establishing shot of Springfield's nuclear power plant. But an altogether more ingenious
05:19running joke occurs between the second and fourth seasons, where five separate episodes show clips
05:24of the fake movie McBain starring the action hero Rainier Wolfcastle. Viewed across three years,
05:29the clip seemed simple enough. But more recently, as more fans began to binge The Simpsons,
05:34they started to realise that these clips all form part of a continuous narrative and are,
05:39in effect, a truncated version of the McBain movie. The four minutes of footage are
05:43effectively a McBain short film, showing McBain's best pal and partner being killed by the corrupt
05:48Senator Mendoza, and McBain's blood-soaked quest to avenge his fallen friend. We all remember McBain,
05:54but these excerpts are by themselves such typical parodies of corny action movies that most fans
05:59didn't even realise that they were connected in a kind of coherent way. Pretty incredible, right?
06:044. Pineapples Everywhere – Psych
06:07Hit detective comedy series Psych touted a most bizarre running gag across its 120 episodes,
06:13that a pineapple would appear in some form in almost every single episode. Perhaps it might
06:18be a whole pineapple, mere slices of one, a pineapple smoothie, a pineapple pizza,
06:22or even just images of pineapples somewhere within the frame, but the commitment to the bit
06:27is nothing if not admirable. Fans cottoned on enough that a website was made to track the
06:31pineapple's location in each episode, all 170 of them, amounting to an average of almost 1.5 per
06:38episode. There's never been any official explanation for the gag beyond the showrunners
06:43doing it to amuse themselves, and it caught on enough with the hardcore fans that eventually
06:46it would have been a crying shame to stop it. Sometimes a running gag is its own weird reward,
06:51whether it makes sense or not.
06:533. The gang always reuses the same videotape – It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
06:59It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is basically built on the foundation of in-jokes and running gags,
07:04though one of the sneakier ones involves the gang always using the same damn grotty VHS tape to
07:09record and display their latest audiovisual scheme. The ads for Fight Milk and Kitten Mittens,
07:14Dee's Invigoron video, Dennis and Mac's fake terrorist video, and so many more were all shot
07:19on the same tape, with each recording over the previous one. Several times throughout the show,
07:23when their latest video is playing, we'll see scattered fragments of their previous ones at the
07:27beginning and the end of the tape. It's easily missed if you're not paying total attention,
07:31but a hilarious ongoing callback if you do. Hopefully they'll never ditch this gag,
07:36because the longer it goes on, and the further that weirs the society stray away from VHS,
07:40the funnier it actually becomes. 2. Tommy Shelby Never Eat – Peaky Blinders
07:46Peaky Blinders might not be a show where you'd expect to see anything in the way of a major
07:50reoccurring joke, and that's likely why this running gag is rather on the sly side.
07:55While recently promoting the show's final season in an interview with the BBC,
07:59star Cillian Murphy confessed a gag that's been part of the show since the very beginning,
08:03that his character, Tommy Shelby, is never seen eating on screen. Obviously it's a given that
08:08Shelby, being a living human and all that, does eat, but Murphy confirmed that once the production
08:12team realised that Tommy hadn't been seen eating in the first two seasons, that they opted to keep
08:17it going for the remainder. He said,
08:18I remember we had gotten through the first two series, and then we realised that Tommy had never
08:23eaten. We've never seen Tommy eat. Like he sat down at tables, but he's never consumed a morsel.
08:28So we then made it a kind of running gag. So throughout the 36 hours of television,
08:32Tommy Shelby never consumes anything, except I think once he consumes a sprig of mint when
08:37he's with his son. In its own way, it subtly implies Tommy's obsession with his life's work,
08:42something a small quarter of fans picked up on years ago, but which was only recently
08:45confirmed as an intentional character flourish by Murphy and the creator of the series.
08:501. Foreshadowing Buster Losing His Hand – Arrested Development
08:55Perhaps the single most memorable moment in Arrested Development happens in the Season 2 episode,
09:00Out on a Limb, where poor Buster Bluth has his hand bitten off by a loose seal,
09:04with the missing limb then being replaced by a hook. Hilariously though, Buster's impending
09:09dismemberment was foreshadowed almost an entire year in advance, with a series of gags throughout the
09:14latter part of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2. These include a flashback to Michael performing in
09:19the play The Trial of Captain Hook, Buster declaring this party is going to be off the hook,
09:24a mention of a seal attack on the news, Buster playing a claw game and winning a toy seal,
09:29and Buster sitting on a bench which reads, Arm Off. Obviously it says more than that,
09:34but the way that he's sitting obscures the rest of the text. These are just a few examples,
09:37but of course nobody read into these gags on an initial viewing, because nobody knew the fate
09:42awaiting Buster. Even on repeat watches, most of these sight gags and one-liners come so thick and fast
09:47that you might well miss them. And that makes them utterly brilliant.
09:51And there we go my friends, those were the 10 longest running TV gags you never even noticed.
09:55I hope that you enjoyed that, and please let me know what you thought about it down
09:58in the comments section below. As always I've been Jules, you can go follow me over on Twitter
10:01at RetroJWithA0, or you can swing by LiveAndLet'sDice where I do all of my streaming outside of work,
10:07and it'd be great to see you over there. But before I go, I just want to say one thing,
10:10hope you're treating yourself well with love and respect my friend, because you deserve all of the
10:14the best things in life, and do not let anything or anyone else tell you otherwise, all right?
10:19You're a massive ledge, and we need to go out there and smash it. As always I've been Jules,
10:23you have been awesome, never forget that, and I'll speak to you soon. Bye.
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