I have just recently discovered the two Wild and Crazy Guys skit from Saturday Night Live. I was pleasantly surprised and also proud in a sense that a tiny bit of Czech culture got into such a famous American show! Are you telling me that Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd actually impersonated 2 Czech guys?? That’s pretty cool!
I dug out a YouTube video of these 2 dudes and it is pretty funny. Mind you, this was shut in about 1977, during the deepest communist era and ‘the wall’ was higher then ever. My husband remembers watching this as a little kid and laughing like crazy -little did he know he would eventually marry a ‘wild and crazy’ Czech girl! The funniest thing is that their ‘Czech’ names are really not Czech at all – Georg Festrunk and Yortug Festrunk? – they sound more like Swedish names if anything. Also, Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd tried to speak ‘Czech’ and again,sorry to say, it sounds more like some kind of a Moon language ;0)
CZ: Nedavno jsem narazila na americanum velmi zname ‘ceske’ postavicky ze Saturday Night Live – bratry George a Yortunga Festrunky, neboli “Wild and Crazy guys”. Citila jsem se dosti pysne, ze se trosicku z nasi ceske kultury dostalo do tak zname americke show! Tento skit byl natoceny kolem roku 1977, tedy behem hlubokeho komunismu, ktery v teto dobe vladl nejen v byvalem Ceskoslovensku. Muj manzel si pamatuje, jak se na tento program dival, kdyz byl jeste maly kluk a prislo mu to vsechno samozrejmne hrozne vtipne. Ani by ho ve snu nenapadlo, ze se v budoucnosti ocitne pred oltarem s ‘wild and crazy czech girl’! ‘
Nejvtipnejsi na tom je, ze producenti SNL moc toho patrani o ceske kulture nepodnikly, tudiz cesti bratri nezni vubec cesky a jejich jmena zni spis svedsky, norsky nebo zkratka ufonsky ;0)
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Sorry, I was not impressed.
If you want to see “crazy Czechs”, look at “Jozin z bazin” :))
Czech humor is an intelligent one. Not all people can get it. Czech humor is targeted only to a chosen circle of people :)))
yeah but the scary thing about this sketch is that my dad had some pants like those and he mixed his paisley with his stripes. I think my mom has given him a makeover.
I too think that they could have made it funnier…if they had done their research on Czech culture!
I can’t believe, Jana, that you dad had those pants! That is scary…;)
In another sketch on YouTube they have a vacuum cleaner which they brought from Bratislava, the firm name is Pozor. You have to find that one too.
I do not want to find the crazy pants pic of my dad. I know it exists and that is enough for me.
These characters were almost certainly just given the nationality “Czech” more or less randomly, and not really because they represented Czechs specifically. They’re a generic depiction of young guys from Eastern Europe or the Middle East who came to the United States and didn’t know how to behave around women. They could just as well have called them Bulgarians or Saudis. Nothing in it was really meant to be identifiably Czech, sorry.
However, some of their English involves some typical Czech mistakes, such as “wild and crazy” or generally putting “and” between adjectives where you shouldn’t. Although we now use the collocation “wild and crazy” a lot — specifically because of these skits — it was considered odd and foreign at the time these shows aired and was part of the humor. A lot of kids now are probably not aware of the humor in it, just as they’re not aware that the title “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” was hilarious at the time the original movie came out.
Here is an advertisement from nearly the same era dealing with “Russians”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaMUfxVJVQ&feature=related
What some of you are doing is the same as if I were to go over all the details in “Limonádový Joe” that I found disturbing because they’re not accurately American. Of course they weren’t accurate, because the Czechs knew it was all a spoof about America and not a movie about real Americans.
I checked out that YouTube Wendy’s ad and it is great…my favorite part is the “evening wear” :))
Dan is a classic comedian. I love his role on the Blues Brothers.”;-
Dan Aykroyd is a classical comedian, i love Coneheads movie~`:
I’m a full-blooded Czech, never been abroad for more than twoo weeks (thus I am a typical Czech). I cannot agree that Czhech humour is intelligent. Do you know “S tebou mě baví svět” by Poledňáková? It is said ti be the best Czech comedy and all its humour is based on farting, pissing and shitting in the public places. Intelligent? Sorry, it is not. It’s quite fecal, but primitive enough to be understood by a normal Czech, whitch is something like a stupid monkey in the jungle.
Jamie, you should study English grammar yourself.
Red, white, green AND blue.
Larry, show me where on the page my mistake is. I don’t list a series of colors here, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.