A 25-Year-Old “Gay Joke” In “Boy Meets World” Has Aged Surprisingly Well
It’s fair to say that whenever a clip from an old movie or TV show resurfaces online, it typically doesn’t go down too well amid today’s cultural climate.
Which is why Boy Meets World fans were left pleasantly surprised when they rewatched a “gay joke” from a 2000 episode of the show that was recently posted to Reddit.
For context, one of the episode’s storylines follows Eric Matthews, played by Will Friedle, after he finds a “lucky penny” on the floor. To prove that the penny has made him invincible, he tells his friends to watch as he seemingly goes to pick a fight with a burly footballer called Rocco in front of his teammates.
Approaching Rocco while his friends look on in horror, Eric says: “Hey, Rocco, just curiously, as an athlete on the football team, is it a distraction being gay?”
The live studio audience gasps at this question, but they were delivered an instant plot twist when Rocco gently reaches out to Eric and exclaims: “Thank you.”
“It’s OK,” Eric kindly smiles back, reaching out to comfort the footballer. Rocco then tells his teammates: “I’ve been holding it in for so long… Fellas, I’m gay.”
But his teammates barely react, with two of them replying: “That’s OK, Rocco, so are we!”
And after pressing play on this clip with bated breath when it resurfaced on Reddit, viewers were pleased that a “gay joke” that initially appeared to be set up for a cheap laugh or offensive punchline actually flipped the script entirely.
Needless to say, people were quick to share how impressed they were by the scene in the forum’s comments, with one person writing: “That’s an actually great and powerfully positive joke that was definitely ahead of its time 👏”
You can watch the scene in question below — let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Disney / Via reddit.com
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