When making a joke, you may want to consider whether or not the cultural experience on which it is based is universal to your audience. Case in point: I made a bad joke yesterday. While rinsing the pesto sauce out of my lunch dish, I chuckled at my own cleverness. I went into the other room and said to Mrs. Rodius:
"If I were an adman creating a campaign for a company that sells pesto sauce, I would pitch the slogan, Pesto es vivia."
She said, "What does that mean?"
It then occurred to me that not everyone, and certainly not Mrs. Rodius, watched as much television through the '80's as I did. Perhaps for them, the Lynn Redgrave Weight Watchers "This is living" campaign does not occupy any space in the memory cells of their brains. If that's true, then the exotic spin Ms. Redgrave put on it in a commercial for a Mexican dish of some sort ("esto es vivia") may not immediately spring to mind when it is cleverly tweaked to apply to pesto sauce.
And once again it was demonstrated to me in clear terms that the me walking around out here in the real world just ain't as funny as the me inside my head.
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