OK, so at some point I have to pull myself away from writing about Mork & Mindy. I have unloved early 80s radio sitcoms to discuss, after all. But I thought you might all enjoy one final deleted dirty joke from “Mork vs the Necrotons”.
Take a look at this clip, where Mork is thrown onto a torture device which features disembodied hands massaging him:
Well, that’s a suspiciously large audience laugh for the innocuous line “Magic fingers”, isn’t it? And even more suspicious is the hand that appears next to Mork’s crotch between shots, between him and Sutra:
The answer, as ever, is in the shooting script. In an episode which is all about Captain Nirvana torturing Mork using pleasure:
MORK: (INDICATING THIRD HAND) What does that hand do?
CAPTAIN NIRVANA: You can’t afford it.
The third hand was literally designed to wank Mork off.
Enjoy your family sitcom.
2 comments
Diamond on 8 October 2026 @ 7pm
“Magic Fingers”, even though it wouldn’t have gotten that big a laugh, is a pun worthy of at least a chuckle. You probably already know this, but it was a brand of coin-operated vibrating massage beds found in American motels from the 60s onwards.
John J. Hoare on 8 October 2026 @ 7pm
I have to be honest, I didn’t know! So easy for this stuff to get lost, particularly once you cross countries.
Mind you, it was *alarmingly* late in the day with the recent Young Ones piece that I realised what the specific “Dust Bug” reference actually was. I figured it out about a day before publication.