Line #17 YMMV/MadTV1995


1	* DiagnosedByTheAudience: Stuart Larkin shows many of the signs of autism including not liking being touched and engaging in repetitive speech patterns or motions. He is also prone to making remarks that sound rude or arrogant and doesn't know how to talk with other people. On another note he also shows signs of Oppositional Defiant Disorder such as doing the exact opposite of a direct command.
2	* EnsembleDarkhorse:
3	** ''HAI AHM KENNY ROGERS''.
4	** Miss Swan is one of the quintessential sketch characters, and one of the most widely-known.
5	** The Vancome Lady is also very popular.
6	** Stuart, though like most of the show's popular characters he suffered from overuse.
7	* FanonDiscontinuity: Many people would most likely try to forget that the 2016 revival season ever happened due to the inexperienced and unfunny cast, decreased production values, and awful writing. Not surprisingly, it only lasted eight episodes.
8	* GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff: This show is popular in Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands. Most of the sketches uploaded on Website/YouTube are in English with either Swedish, Norwegian or Dutch subtitles.
9	* HarsherInHindsight: Unlike ''Saturday Night Live'', [=MADtv=] was known for being particularly vicious in its celebrity parodies, which naturally resulted in a lot of this.
10	** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6-VDXZuZTE& sketch]] depicting UsefulNotes/DonaldTrump appearing on a talk show hosted by Kim Jong-il is a lot less funny when you know that Trump would eventually become President of the United States during a period of unusually tense relations with UsefulNotes/NorthKorea. Circumstances eventually forced Trump to take part in several high-stakes diplomatic talks with Kim's son Kim Jong-un, which weren't remotely funny.
11	** One episode from the late 1990s had a ''Series/FullHouse'' parody of a TV movie reunion. The RunningGag was of the Olsen twins obviously changing between shots, with Mary Kate being overweight. This is hard to watch considering she developed an eating disorder as an adult.
12	** The "Coz" sketch (a parody of ''Series/{{Oz}}'' starring Creator/BillCosby) ended with Cosby about to commit rape. Yeah, about that...
13	** A sketch depicted a man attending a seminar on sexual harassment, where he purposefully offers very specific situations that would enable the discouraged behavior and deliberately misunderstands the woman running the seminar. Afterwards, he meets his new supervisor, who immediately starts getting very touchy with him, to his discomfort. While the sketch definitely makes a darkly comic point about how sexual harassment/assault is hard to understand if you're unsympathetic until it happens to you, the fact that the audience is laughing like crazy while the man is made to grope the supervisor makes it very uncomfortable to watch now, especially in the aftermath of the [=#MeToo=] scandals.
14	** A Creator/MelGibson skit involved an advanced screening of ''{{Film/Apocalypto}}'' where it was a thinly veiled "SomeOfMyBestFriendsAreX" screed lampooning the antisemitism controversy surrounding ''Film/ThePassionOfTheChrist''. Keep in mind this skit aired just a little bit ''before'' Gibson went on the infamous drunken tirade about Jews during his DUI arrest.
15	** A sketch portrayed TV producer Aaron Spelling as a DirtyOldMan who is purely focused on showing as much sex as possible on TV. The skit also shows Spelling on the set of ''Series/Charmed1998'' disappointed that Creator/AlyssaMilano's already revealing outfit for not being fanservicey enough, and demands she jiggle her breasts for a scene. In light of [=#MeToo=] allegations of abusive Hollywood producers, including from Milano (albeit not against Spelling), the sketch feels a little too much of truth rather than parody.
16	** Speaking of [=#MeToo=], one 2006 sketch had Nicole Parker visiting Creator/MartinShort in his dressing room for his Broadway show ''Fame Becomes Me'' (in which Nicole was a co-star)... which ended with Short committing BlackComedyRape against Nicole and Nicole staggering out of his dressing room in a traumatized state. Fast forward to the Weinstein scandals of 2017-18 in which a slew of male celebrities were accused of sexual misconduct against female co-stars and subordinates, this sketch is still very uncomfortable to watch in the post-Weinstein era.[[note]]Short for his part was never accused of wrongdoing, though he did end up playing a Weinstein-esque character on ''Series/TheMorningShow''.[[/note]]
17	** The show made absolutely no bones about its belief that Creator/AnneHeche was with Creator/EllenDeGeneres strictly for the notoriety and that she was not even remotely interested in her sexually (with more than one sketch showing her physically recoiling from even the most chaste physical intimacy). Sure enough, after their breakup Heche had never again been publicly linked with another woman (though she continued to identify as bisexual for the rest of her life).
18	** The sketch Regis & Cassidy & Cody, where Kathie Lee Gifford is portrayed as a StageMom forcing her kids to be on television and making them uncomfortable, can be hard to watch due to Cassidy being portrayed by Creator/JennetteMcCurdy, who would detail in her autobiography that her own mother was abusive and that [=McCurdy's=] acting career was essentially forced on her by her mother, to the point of said autobiography being titled ''I'm Glad My Mom Died''.
19	** Averted, surprisingly enough, by the show's legendary parodies of Music/WhitneyHouston, many of which pulled absolutely no punches about her drug addiction or her toxically co-dependent relationship with Music/BobbyBrown. Even with her bitter divorce from Brown and her tragic drug-related death, fans continue to praise Debra Wilson's uncanny performances (including her strong singing voice) and her chemistry with Aries Spears as Brown. (Ironically, Wilson herself retired her Whitney impression after her death, and has described the success of those sketches as being products of their time despite their enduring popularity.)
20	* HilariousInHindsight:
21	** ''Mad TV'' did a parody of the MTV reality show, ''The Ashlee Simpson Show'', which included a sequence where Ashlee's lousy singing is remedied by sound engineers making her sound like a mix between Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez, and Paula Abdul. While Ashlee is lip-synching to the track, she momentarily stops to groove to the music, then stops when she realizes she's not lip-synching. About two years after that sketch aired, Ashlee would actually be outed as a lip-syncher on rival show ''Series/SaturdayNightLive''... after she started doing a "hoe-down" when she realized they were playing the wrong song.
22	** The "''Sopranos'' on PAX" sketch -- back then, it was a commentary on how, due to censorship, ''Series/TheSopranos''' violent, sexual content would be reduced to nothing on a channel that wasn't HBO (which was gaining fame for showing television shows that pushed censorial boundaries). These days, this joke has become a reality (only ''The Sopranos'' would be EditedForSyndication on A&E, not PAX).
23	** Speaking on the "''Sopranos'' on PAX" sketch, Joey Diaz plays Big Pussy on the sketch, based on his uncanny resemblance to the character (and his actor Creator/VincentPastore). Diaz would later be cast on ''Film/TheManySaintsOfNewark'', the prequel to ''The Sopranos'', as the father of Big Pussy.
24	** The ''[[Film/Apollo13 Apollo the 13th]]: Jason Takes NASA'' sketch inadvertently predicted ''Film/JasonX'', the next film in the ''Franchise/FridayThe13th'' series.
25	** One of the sketches they had during Season 12 was an animated three-part sketch showing pilots that Creator/CartoonNetwork rejected (one show about an amputee superhero team and another about a Korean superhero who decapitates people). Cartoon Network (and its parent company, Time-Warner) were the ones behind the attempted 2016 relaunch.
26	** One of the sketches for "Clops" had Gumby running away from the police and robbing a grocery store. A similar event happened in 2011 where a guy dressed in a Gumby costume decided to rob a grocery store.
27	** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXUmd-T8mfM "Huge Momma Fatso"]] sketch predicted ''[[Film/BigMommasHouse Big Momma's House 3]]''.
28	** One sketch parodied Apple's iPod commercials by advertising an electronic feminine hygiene product called the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lskbO1k9VO0 iPad]]--a few years before the actual real-life iPad made its debut.
29	** A 1999 sketch featuring Lorraine Swanson on ''Series/WhoWantsToBeAMillionaire'' had a running gag of Regis Philbin (played by Alex Borstein) lamenting about how the show would work better with a time limit. In 2008, the real ''Millionare'' would introduce a time limit on each question, a format which was abandoned after two seasons in the US, as it was derided for adding too much tension to the game, though it's still used in various international adaptations (including the original UK version from 2010-14).
30	** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwnKE5oINQA A 2004 sketch]] featured Creator/IkeBarinholtz playing Creator/AlexTrebek, who does not hide his frustrations with Ken Jennings' dominance on ''Series/{{Jeopardy}}'' 20 years later, Barinholtz would win a primetime Celebrity Jeopardy tournament hosted by... the real Ken Jennings.
31	** A sketch that aired was a gender-swapped version of ''Film/WhatWomenWant'' called [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vDbOcUzHSc "What Men Want"]], where a woman can hear the thoughts of men. Fast-forward to 2019, and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Men_Want_(2019_film) a movie of the very same name with the very same premise]] is released in theaters.
32	** The sketch [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wYobyZCyZ0 "Miss Swan in a Taxi"]], which guest-stars Creator/TonyShalhoub as a taxi driver. This was over eleven years before Tony Shalhoub and Alex Borstein would be reunited in ''Series/TheMarvelousMrsMaisel''.
33	** A BlackComedy sketch featured Nicole Parker playing the role of a mother who advertised an abortion-inducing pill and wished she had never given birth to her daughter. Fast forward to March 2019, when Nicole happily announced and showed off her pregnancy.
34	** The parody of ''Series/FearFactor'' depicts Creator/JoeRogan as a barely-literate, monosyllabic lunkhead who somehow manages to mispronounce ''his own name''. This is years before Rogan started his own podcast, which revealed him to be (if nothing else) an extremely verbose and opinionated person with a very shrewd ''business'' sense, at the very least.
35	** One [[https://youtube.com/watch?v=B0lhDQSYm1k commercial parody]] featured Creator/JordanPeele as Creator/WhoopiGoldberg for Slim-Fast, including some pointed comments about Goldberg's SassyBlackWoman persona popularized in ''Film/{{Ghost\|1990}}''. Fast forward to 2018, when Jordan Peele won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for ''Film/{{Get Out\|2017}}'', and Goldberg is the first person he thanks in his acceptance speech - saying ''her'' Oscar acceptance speech for that film inspired him to go into filmmaking.
36	* MemeticMutation:
37	** Most notably the ''Can I Have Your Number'' sketch, featuring Nicole Randall Johnson as a man who hits on women by repeatedly asking for their number.
38	** Ms. Swan, particularly her infamous "Okay"/"Oh yah", "I teh yu evrteen", and "He look-a like-a man" lines.
39	** Stuart, particularly his "Look what I can do!"
40	** The ''Pretty White Kids With Problems'' sketch made fun at late 1990s and early 2000s teen dramas, but the formula is still commonplace in television. Thus it's a meme to compare the sketch to shows.
41	** The ''Nice White Lady'' sketch that parodies SaveOurStudents works gets mentioned a lot when mocking said works.
42	* OlderThanTheyThink: The hilarious 2001 sketch of ''Series/TheOprahWinfreyShow'' that has Oprah becoming so enraged by the end of the skit that she explodes and sprays food all over this place is, while still very funny, nothing new. ''Mad TV's'' SpiritualPredecessor, ''Series/InLivingColor'', did the same exact skit eleven years earlier (but had her explode for different reasons; the former has her angry that [[ItMakesSenseInContext her "true weight" was shown on her slimming camera]] and the latter has her angry over an insensitive male guest who she took her anger at her boyfriend, Stedman, out on.)
43	* SeasonalRot:
44	** Spoofed on the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1ocC0xocQM "What's on TV"]] music video (with Josh Meyers as Eminem).
45	** For the real seasonal rot, see TheyChangedItNowItSucks.
46	* ShallowParody:
47	** There's a parody of ''Film/TheDarkKnight'' made during the final season where Batman (played by Matt Braunger) couldn't afford good gadgets because of how bad the American economy has become, and makes it seem like that without gadgets, his villains could easily kick his ass. While it ''is'' funny, any Batman aficionado will tell you that Batman portrayals haven't been especially gadget-heavy since [[Series/Batman1966 the 1960s TV show]] starring Creator/AdamWest (which ironically tends to be lampooned for how specific some of its gadgets were, such as the "Bat-Spray" shark repellent), and while Batman still has the coolest toys in later incarnations, he relies mainly on his detective work and physical abilities. Though this case of ShallowParody is undercut with some RuleOfFunny, as the sketch more made fun of the fact that the American economy is in the crapper and a lot of once-rich people are trying to be inventive and resourceful in laughably bad ways. Becomes somewhat HilariousInHindsight when the sequel ''Film/TheDarkKnightRises'' does in fact have Bruce Wayne's company hit by hard economic times and having difficulty, culminating in his losing his personal fortune as well. And he does indeed get the everloving crap beaten out of him when he has to go hand-to-hand with no gadgets. Of course it was played out with more nuance (plus the villain in question was Bane, whose massive physical strength is part of his character), but one has to be amused that the parody was halfway prescient.
48	** Some of their parodies of ''Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer''. An early one, "Buffy the Umpire Slayer," portrayed the titular heroine as a cheerleader and has the characters wonder if the undead umpires are attacking because of a cursed burial ground, a joke on all the villains attacking the same place, which is explained early on in the show with the hellmouth. They also make a joke about Buffy not wanting to fight a vampire since that's not in her job description. The literal episode after the pilot, "The Witch," specially had Buffy fight a witch to make clear to viewers she'd fight all kinds of monsters. In fact, the first season is filled with stories without vampires. Another one, actually featuring Michelle Trachtenberg, did a little better, but still had things like Dawn being confused by a person claiming to be a long lost relative, when she herself is an ArtificialFamilyMember, and to this day, nobody can agree on who the hell Stephnie Weir was supposed to be dressed as.[[note]] The normally blonde Weir has dark hair, suggesting she's meant to be Anya or even Cordelia. But she is also wearing Willow's iconic red outfit from "Hush." with Mo Collins wearing Tara's iconic blue outfit. ''Except'' Collins has a red wig on, suggesting she's meant to be Willow.[[/note]]
49	** Around the TurnOfTheMillennium, ''[=MADtv=]'' started making ''Series/ThePriceIsRight'' parodies. By this time, Bob Barker had been hosting the show for over 30 years, so they decided to parody what the show would have been like in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7To54TBBlE the 1970s]] and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jL_sIKL22I0 the 1980s]], if it were [[UnintentionalPeriodPiece filled to the brim with topical references]] and invoked HarsherInHindsight moments (particularly seen in the 1980s version, with Josh Meyers as a yet-unknown Jeffrey Dahmer, Stephnie Weir as Martha Stewart dropping hints that she would later get in trouble for insider trading, and Nicole Parker as Tonya Harding before she got into figure skating). In reality, of course, ''Series/ThePriceIsRight'' changed so little during Barker's lengthy tenure that the most visible change in 35+ years was his hair graying. Not only that, but Rod Roddy (Artie Lange) is depicted as having announced during the 70s; in actuality, Johnny Olson was the original announcer and remained until his death in 1985; a rotation of guest announcers ensued until Roddy (then known at that point as the announcer from ''Series/{{Soap}}'' and ''Series/PressYourLuck'') was picked in 1986.
50	* TheyChangedItNowItSucks: Much like ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'', a lot of fans have cited many cast and writer changes (and a change in studio and show format in its last couple years) as a reason why the show went downhill, as well as the show, based on ''MAD Magazine'', phasing out all of the magazine's hallmarks (Alfred E. Neuman and his "What me worry" catchphrase, the Don Martin shorts, and the "Spy vs. Spy" cartoons) after season 3, after which the show became a cheap knock-off of post-1970s ''SNL'' mixed in with ''Series/InLivingColor'' in its fourth and fifth season and the short-lived pre-''Series/MadTV1995'' sketch shows, ''House of Buggin'' and ''Saturday Night Special''. And then there was the 2016 revival, where the cast was made up of inexperienced nobodies who had to be carried by the original cast members who made sporadic appearances. Combined with a multitude of other factors, this resulted in the revival only lasting a measly eight episodes.
51	* WhatDoYouMeanItsNotForKids: The show was never intended for young kids, but there are some easily misunderstood sketches that a parent would not think much of unless he/she sat down and really listen to the dialogue carefully. The best examples being the Sesame Street parodies and Disney Girl sketches, which looks superficially kid-friendly but contained mature themes (or at least covers topics that kids would not usually care about) that would often go over kids' heads. These sketches have also erroneously been marked as being "For Kids" on Website/YouTube.
52	** To elaborate, besides covering mature topics like the economy and politics, Sesame Street parodies also features the muppets' death from bird flu, Gordon dousing Big Bird in gasoline to ready for death by burning, gun violence, internet pedophiles, and a song/dance mentioning prison rape.
53	** Each Disney Girl sketch had the character starting out seemingly kid-friendly and wholesome, but eventually end up revealing her to be either a prostitute or porn star.
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Context YMMV / MadTV1995