problems about the universe

 

..."getting to the heart of things" -- in The Four Seasons, Alan Alda's character always wants to talk things out and get to the "heart" of a topic.

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     When watching the sitcom Friends I noticed that they used the expression "freak out" quite often.

"He was freaking out!"

"Don't freak out!"

"It freaked me out."

...etc.

I thought for a while that the writers of Friends invented the term, or that maybe "freak out" became a commonly used expression in some parts of American society during the 1990s and the Friends writers picked up on it.

     But then I watched episodes of The Cosby Show from DVDs and heard Theo say "freak out."  I only heard the phrase one time, it wasn't frequent like on Friends, but this tells us that the expression "freak out" existed in the 1980s, before Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey introduced themselves to us.

     Then this week, listening to The Four Seasons on Netflix, I had a "Whoa!" moment because Alan Alda's character, Jack Burroughs, says he "freaked out" -- that film was in theaters in 1981 (before The Cosby Show came on the air) so that expression pre-dates Friends by more than a decade.

     (Yes!  It does!  Film at eleven...)

     Maybe I worry about things like the phrase "freak out" to keep from worrying about bigger, scarier things like extremism and crazy people in the U.S. Congress.

---------------------------- [excerpt from the script for Manhattan (1979)]

Woody Allen, lying on a sofa and talking into a tape recorder:

An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan

who are constantly creating

these real unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves

'cause it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about--the universe.

Let's...

Well, it has to be optimistic.

Well, all right, why is life worth living?

That's a very good question.

Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile.

Like what?

OK...for me...

Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing.

And Willie Mays.

And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony.

And... Louis Armstrong's recording of 'Potato Head Blues'...

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