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10 Jokes You May Have Missed In Arrested Development Season Four

If the continued popularity of lists like this one is any indication, people are still discovering jokes from the first three seasons of Arrested Development ten years after it first started airing. The show was so full of obscure references, lines too quick or subtle to take note of, and details that take multiple viewings to really click in your mind that it was impossible to appreciate just how much comedy was hidden in its many layers. It’s why watching it over and over again, sharing your observations and favorite moments with fellow watchers, was immensely rewarding.

[h2]1) George Maharis[/h2]

Arrested Development

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I might as well start with the one that made me blow a cow when I first heard it. I thought George Maharis was just some silly made up name that George Michael came up with. But George Maharis was a real guy. He was an actor who was arrested for lewd conduct in 1967 after engaging in a sex act with a hairdresser in the rest room of a Los Angeles gas station. So in his effort to distance himself from the reputation of George Michael the singer-songwriter, George Michael Bluth takes his new name from a man with an almost identical sexual history.

And that’s not even the kicker. The hairdresser real-life George Maharis was gettin’ sexually perverted with (awww, yeah) was a young man by the name of…Perfecto Telles. This show’s still got it.

[h2]2) References to Clue[/h2]

Arrested Development

One detail that seemed downright bizarre was the fact that the only food in the old model home that Gob, Tobias and then Maeby—although she stops herself—make for themselves is a weird mixture of parmesan cheese and mustard that they pour in their hands. This made no sense to me, but folks seem to take this as a kind of reference to the fact that Martin Mull, the actor playing Gene Parmesan, also played Colonel Mustard in the film Clue. There is also a curious scene in which Gene Parmesan is purchasing a knife, a famous Clue weapon, next door to a literal ball-room, where Gob and Michael have their fight. Mitch Hurwitz has a way of working a ton of things into these fights, like when they have a real life rock-paper-scissors fight with props. There’s something to this that’s still somewhat elusive, but it seems bonkers and awesome, whatever it is.

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