It also brings to mind the Hawaiian restaurant sketch from Monty Python’s “The Meaning Of Life.”
When capitalized, "Sie" is the formal way to address adults of either gender in polite German. I majored in the…
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Ob sie wirklich Deutsch spricht. Normalweise, kommt die US Soldaten nicht ins Stadt und spricht nicht so oft mit denn…
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I…don’t get it? Like, it’s sad that someone might have to get their conversation topics from a frozen dinner, but it’s better than nothing. A nice gesture from Stouffer’s. If I ever was so desperate that I needed these, I’d be glad they were there.
Or am I missing something?
I suppose it would help if I knew the MP sketch in question.
Besides the horror of having a frozen dinner suggest conversation topics (and who eats frozen dinners in a group?–after all, they’re called “TV dinners”) there’s also the stunning vapidity of the suggested topics. Things like this don’t make me cringe. They make me feel like laughing and screaming at the same time.
Good catch.
More to the point, a frozen dinner box? It’s not like a cereal box. how would that even work?
Cereal boxes sit on the table and get read. Frozen dinner boxes get opened and discarded–they have no use once the dinner’s in the oven, unless you need the box to tell you how to stir.
So it’s even more depressing, when I imagine bringing a (soggy, cold, ripped, and empty) frozen dinner box to the table, just so I could have some Stouffer-approved dinner topics of conversation.
Actually, the “ask questions” meme isn’t all bad, and could be sort of funny if the questions were OK. It’s just the placement taht makes it so ridiculous. It might be a hell of a lot more amusing to have them on paper napkins though.
I don’t watch a lot of movies, I have no kids, I don’t have a tv either, and I haven’t thought of anything for the exchange student deal.
Feel free to suggest alternative conversation-starter questions.
When did you experience your first earthquake?
Are you a serif or sans-serif-preferring person?
If you could rewrite a famous work of literature, which one would it be and how would you change it?
What’s the highest squirt you’ve seen when a bulging can of food gets punctured?
[all right, that one isn’t so good for the dinner table…]
What’s the best alternate-history/parallelworld story you’ve read?
Ever notice how some CRT monitors phosphoresce after you turn out the light even if they aren’t plugged in?
Ever notice how some infrared light sources aren’t all infra?
How come the watch-out-for-children-crossing sign always shows a big boy shepherding a little girl and never the reverse? Do you suspect there’s some stereoptyping going on?
And so on; you all can come up with some more. I don’t buy a lot of frozen dinners either, but on the other hand, I’ve never seen one develop internal gas pressure from anaerobic decay…
It’s actually a way of getting the t.v. set to keep you company. First, turn the sound down, then, after you’ve spent five minutes bent over that lovely gluten-rich rich t.v. dinner on your knees, look up start asking the screen provocative questions (“When did you last see your father?”, “Do you think I’m sexy” etc.) in a loud, blurting, poorly articulated voice – and hey presto! You won’t feel so alone and suicidal this Christmas! It’s actually a very charitable innovation.
I’m sure they realize just how silly this is when you take it seriously, but it’s not meant to actually be used — it’s meant to associate an aura of family-friendliness with the Stouffer’s brand, thus boosting their sales.
Somehow I find the “What is your favorite Saturday morning TV show?” question particularly depressing. It implies a family situation in which the kids sit and watch hours and hours of crap cartoons every Saturday morning, while their exhausted parents stay in bed until two in the afternoon.
Really, though, I find all of the questions, with the possible exception of the foreign student exchange one, both depressing and faintly surreal. They make assumptions about the sort of knowledge children are likely to possess that I find totally alien. Do most children know the names of lots of actors and singers? Really? I doubt I could have come up with the name of even one when I was a kid. Is an encyclopedic knowledge of the Saturday morning television schedule really so ubiquitous as this box cover implies? I find that incredibly bizarre.
Oh, and Type12point: the frozen lasagna in question was a family-size or party-size monstrosity, not a single-portion TV dinner. But that makes Sailorman’s objection even more striking, really. I mean, the thing takes over two hours to cook in the oven, and then another load of time to cool. By the time you’re at the table, it’s extremely unlikely that you’d still have the box lying around.