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The Honeymooners is a 1950s TV sitcom that spun off from The Jackie Gleason Show. Herein, Gleason's character, Ralph Kramden, a bus driver from Brooklyn, and his best friend, Ed Norton (played by Art Carney), keep engaging in a slew of hair-brained schemes to strike it rich, while their wives look on with tired patience.
- One of these days... One of these days... (He shoots his fist up) POW! Right in the kisser!
- Hamina-hamina-hamina-hamina.
- (To Alice, gesturing with his fist) Bang, zoom!
- (To Norton) You... are a mental case.
- (To Alice's mother after she gives away the mystery ending of a play Ralph was planning to go to that evening) YOU...ARE A BLABBERMOUTH!!!!!! A BLAAAAAAAAAAABBERMOUTH!!!!!!! YOU!!! BLABBERMOUTH!!!!!
- (To Alice) You're gonna get yours!
- (To Alice at the end of many episodes) Baby, you're the greatest.
- I've got a BIG MOUTH!!
- BANG, ZOOM! To the moon, Alice!
- Somewhere, there's a strait jacket waitin' for that man.
- A mere bag of shells.
- Pins and needles, needles and pins. It's a happy man that grins.
- You're a riot, Alice! A regular riot!
- (about Ralph) Sheesh! What a grouch!
- Hey, Ralphie boy!
- (in The Golfer, Norton is teaching Ralph how to play golf) First, you step up and address the ball. (To golf ball) Hello, ball!
- (in A Matter of Record) In the words of the immortal bard, Shakespeare, "There are three times in a man's life when he wants to be alone: one, when he's communing with his thoughts; two, when he's being tender with his wife; and three, when he's in the isolation booth on The $64,000 Question."
- Like we say in the sewer: "Time and tide wait for no man."
- (In response to Ralph being temporarily laid off) I know just how you feel because I went through the same thing two or three years ago when they laid me off from the sewer. I felt just like a fish out of water.
- (Norton has been fired from his job) Ol' Ed Norton, reliable ol' Ed Norton, working 17 years in the sewer. And now everything's down the drain!
- (in A Matter of Life and Death) Don't touch me, Ralph. I'm sterile.
- (in TV or Not TV) Official space helmet on, Captain Video!
- Va va va voom!
- I don't possess a mansion, a villa in France, a yacht, or a string of polo ponies.
- Only myself to blame. My mother warned me.
- (To Ralph): Ahhhh, shaddap!
- (To Ralph): The biggest thing you ever got into was your pants.
- (To Ralph): I don't wanna look at that icebox, that stove, that sink, and these four walls. I wanna look at Liberace!
- (Ralph states that his mother-in-law said this): I'm not losing a daughter, I'm gaining a TON.
- Alice: I'll go fix my lipstick. I won't be gone long, Killer. I call you Killer 'cause you slay me.
Ralph: And I'm calling Bellevue 'cause you're nuts!
- (Ralph can't remove a ring from his finger)
Ralph: Isn't there any lard around here?
Alice: Yeah, about 300 pounds.
Ralph: Oh, you're gonna get yours!
- Ralph: Me and my silly pride. Well, I promise you this, Norton: I'm gonna learn. I'm gonna learn from here on out how to swallow my pride.
Norton: Well, that ought not to be too hard; you've learned how to swallow everything else.
Ralph: GET OUT!
- Ralph: Peanuts! Peanuts, Alice! What am I supposed to do with peanuts?
Alice: Eat 'em, like any other elephant!
- Ralph: You're the type of person that would bend waaaaay over to pick up a purse on April Fools' Day. I wouldn't.
Alice: You couldn't.
- (Ralph is outraged that he and Alice now have a phone)
Ralph: What's the matter, is yelling out the window too good for you now? Was it raining out?
Alice: Yelling out the window is bad manners.
Ralph: Don't you make any nasty remarks about my mother. She's been yelling out the window for 80 years!
Alice: Yeah? And before she lost her voice, there were more people listening to her than to Amos 'n' Andy.
- Ralph: Don't start that again, Alice. No wife of mine is gonna work. I got my pride. You know, no Kramden woman has ever supported her husband. The Kramden men are the workers in the family.
Alice: Wait a minute, Ralph. What about your father? For a long time there he didn't work at all.
Ralph: But neither did my mother. At least he kept his pride, Alice. He went on relief.
- Alice: What am I supposed to tell my mother when you're not here?
Ralph: I don't care. Tell her I ran off and joined the circus.
Alice: What as, an elephant?
Ralph: Oh, you're a riot, Alice, a regular riot. I'll bet you got the whole building laughing. Ha, ha, ho, ho! You know, you're the one ought to join the circus. You ought to be in the circus. You'd be funnier than that Emmett Kelly, the clown they got there. Much funnier. In fact, you look a little bit like him. All except for one thing: the big red nose.
[cocks his fist at Alice]
And you might get that before this is over.
- [Ralph is trying to assert his intentions on staying in their frozen, candlelit apartment to Alice, after their apartment's heat and electricity had been cut off]
Ralph: I'm the general. And what I say goes!
Alice: (dripping sarcasm) Then you better say, "Alice," 'cause I'm goin'!
- Norton: Ralph?
Ralph: What?
Norton: Mind if I smoke?
Ralph: I don't care if you burn.
- [Ralph and Norton are reading scripts for a play they're rehearsing for]
Norton: (reading from the script) I don't possess a mansion or a villa in France or a yacht or a string of poloponies.
Ralph: (reading) I'm glad to hear...
[He stops suddenly]
"A string of poloponies"? Where do you see that?
Norton: (pointing) Right there, "a string of poloponies".
Ralph: That's "a string of POLO PONIES"!
- Ralph: That's the trouble with you, Alice. You don't know the latest developments!
Alice: I don't know the latest developments??! Who is it that lets your pants out every other day??
Ralph and Norton are on the way to a Racoon Convention in a sleeper on a train and somehow get handcuffed together with supposedly fake handcuffs. Ralph says ok will get out of them now on the count of three "One two three ... boomph"
- Even more revolutionary than the scorn for violence between men is the scorn for violence against women. Many baby boomers are nostalgic for The Honeymooners, a 1950s sitcom featuring Jackie Gleason as a burly bus driver whose get-rich-quick schemes are ridiculed by his sensible wife, Alice. In one of the show’s recurring laugh lines, an enraged Ralph shakes his fist at her and bellows, “One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . . POW, right in the kisser!” (Or sometimes “Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!”) Alice always laughs it off, not because she has contempt for a wife-beater but because she knows that Ralph is not man enough to do it. Nowadays our sensitivity to violence against women makes this kind of comedy in a mainstream television program unthinkable.
- Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2012)
- The Honeymooners quotes at the Internet Movie Database
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