The problem with this should be clear to anyone who's tried this around their home or workplace. Keyholes don't look like that anymore, and haven't since, I think, the days of ancient Greece.

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Nowadays, if you try this, you're not going to see much more than this ...

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... which means any attempts to view ladies changing is going to have to involve a little more planning, or, like, an Internet connection.

Almost every sitcom set in the suburbs has done this. I Love Lucy did it. Monty Python did it. And here's Married With Children doing it, in this case with the milkman's best friend, the mailman:

We don't see this joke much anymore, and it's not merely because we've banished milkmen from our civilization.

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"I SHOULD NOT BE."

No, the main reason is because women aren't trapped in their homes all day. The idea of their wife meeting men without their supervision is something that husbands just have to get used to now. It's a part of modern life; grown women should be free to adulter with any profession of their choice.

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"Cream, madam?"

And that right there contains a big hint about how this became a running gag -- because hijacking used to involve the plane actually landing somewhere, either "freedom" (well, communism) or someplace where the hijackers would at least attempt to negotiate with authorities, passengers walked away from hijackings all the time. Fatalities happened, but they were far from a guarantee, and that was enough of a survival rate for comedians around the world to start joking about it. Here's a Monty Python sketch featuring a hijacker:

And here's the same gag during an episode of Seinfeld:

To put it mildly, the September 11 attacks changed things. We don't joke about hijacking anymore. That it took a generation-defining moment of horror to make writers give up a tired joke is a bad sign; we've got a lot more tired gags to go, and only so much appetite for generation-defining moments of horror.

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How many have to die to finally rid us of "That's what she said"?

This is most famously depicted in the classic comedy Airplane, in which the gag is turned on its head when two Hare Krishnas are approached by Christian missionaries and brush them off with rolled eyes. It's also more hilariously depicted in the same film when the superbly named Rex Kramer is approached by a variety of airport missionaries and politely declines their advances:

We're unlikely to see this joke too much (although here it is mentioned in House M.D.) because Krishnas have been banned from airports for years now. Also, the movement itself has massively toned down its public proselytizing. They sing and chant and quietly do their own thing and there's no point referencing them because no one's seen them in 20 years and holy shit what if they're turning invisible!?

You know something, I've changed my mind. We must keep making Hare Krishna jokes, if only to raise awareness of this terrifying possibility. Carry on, hacks.

Maniacs, it turns out, easily found employment in the 1940s as cartoon writers. Warner Bros. cartoons in particular featured tons of characters killing themselves as the punchline to various bits. And not just bit characters. Have you heard of a guy called Daffy Duck? Yeah, he's dead now.

Here's Pepe Le Pew, the famous sexual predator (another hilarious character type that hasn't aged well), threatening suicide to get a girl to love him.

One of the most insane forms of this gag had a character (typically a bystander to the action) see something really zany. A dancing frog or something like that.

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Or that specifically.

And then this character turns to the camera and says, "Well, now I've seen everything." And then, having nothing left to live for, he puts a gun to his head and, holy shit, kills himself.

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Holy shit.

I can't pretend that watching this kind of cartoon violence ruins a person. I watched Warner Bros. cartoons featuring gags like this all the time growing up, and I've managed to survive to this day. (Although I had one close call due to a mix-up between rabbit season and duck season.) But, you know, I think we can live with a lack of suicide jokes in our entertainment options. I think that's something we can safely tuck away in our past.

The thing that always pissed me off about this joke, aside from the fact that I heard it a billion times, is how it was utter nonsense. VCRs were not hard to program. They were annoying to program. More importantly, there was no need to program them -- we all had better, more usable clocks everywhere else in the household, and resetting the clock on the VCR every time the power went out was pointless. That's why these clocks stayed blinking. Because people couldn't rightfully be bothered.

The intent of these jokes -- making fun of old people -- is fine and admirable. We, as a society, need to mock the elderly more. But if someone didn't set the time on their VCR, that wasn't a sign of stupidity. It was a sign of someone who had set their priorities perfectly.

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"Ehhh. I'll just ask my kids to do it. I've been looking for a way to instill in them a false sense of superiority."

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and is rapidly becoming the elderly. Join him on Facebook or Twitter to mock him for it.