
In the first season of 30 Rock (which for the uninitiated, is a sitcom set behind-the-scenes of a SNL-style sketch show), Tracy Jordan is having money problems and is advised to come up with a product to put his name on and sell. He comes up with the ridiculous "Tracy Jordan Meat Machine."
The Meat Machine is a dual-press grill that burns three pieces of meat together into a "food ball." Tracy sells this as an alternative to sandwiches, saying that you'll no longer have to "suffer through the bread part of your sandwich." It's classic Tracy: He's a character with ridiculous ideas and grotesquely indulgent appetites. This all-meat sandwich was the product of the writers trying to think of the saddest, most misguided form of excess that a man like Tracy could come up with. That was 2006.

There really is elegance in simplicity.
Somewhere, a man or woman working at the KFC headquarters saw that and thought, Hmmmm ...
Four years later, they would unveil the KFC Double Down: A cheese and bacon sandwich with two pieces of fried chicken instead of bread. Also, it looks like this:
That's right; it's actually quite a bit more deadly than what Tracy was suggesting. But the spirit is the same: You no longer have to suffer through the bread part of your sandwich. Hell, they basically borrowed that for their ad campaign:

Saturday Night Live has been around for 36 freaking years now. When its very first episode aired back in October of 1975, it was considered cutting edge. Also, Gerald Ford was president and razor blades only had one blade.

Sorry folks, we've got another five years before Gerald Ford jokes are OK. Here's a razor.
One of the "fake commercial" sketches in that very first episode (the transcript of which is here) was for a ridiculous razor called the "Triple-Trac." Get it? It's a razor with three blades! Ha! What an absurdly surreal idea!
You have to understand that dual-bladed razors were new to the scene at the time, and considered a ridiculous gimmick. So they were just going with the laughable logical extension of that "more blades = better somehow" idea. Of course, if you have bought a razor recently, you know it's hard to find one with just three blades. It was actually 23 years later, in 1998 when the Gillette razor company introduced the MACH3: a three-bladed razor.

Hundreds died in the testing phase alone.
Then in 2004, the Onion ran a story with the headline "Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades," a supposed commentary by the clearly crazy CEO of Gillette.
The real-life version, who we're hoping is equally insane, said, "Good idea!" and the five-bladed razor appeared 18 months later.
Dave Berg from Mad Magazine predicted the multi-blade razor back in he 60's:

/Best image I could find without driving home, unearthing my "Best of Dave Berg" book from 1981, driving back to work, scanning and posting it.
There's a little-acknowledged bit of Dave Barry humor that predicted a real-life event.
In Dave Barry's book "The Complete Guide to Guys" (copyright 1996) he writes about a bit in his past where he was trying to get his mechanic, a guy named Ed, to repair his Camaro, but Ed was more interested in making his own fireworks. He describes a scene where he watched Ed ignite one of his homemade fireworks:
"I saw Ed test-fire one of those babies once, and I can tell you that if those radical Muslin fundamentalist terrorists had had Ed on their team in 1992, the World Trade Center would now be referred to as the World Trade Pit."
While I doubt Ed was part of that particular event, the prediction is still valid.
In my experience, cartoonists have a better track record predicting the future than futurists.
I've mentioned the 1919 British cartoon about how pocket telephones always ring at inopportune times already in other threads.
I believe I also mentioned the 1964 surfing acticle in which MAD magazien basically invented snow-boarding, possibly before the first kid made his first "snowboard", let alone before the idea went commercial (1968 or thereabouts, IIRC).
Then there's the "punk" hairdos from an 1860s edition of The Southerner magazine (parodying the extravagant hairstyles of the day).
Cartoonists and other jokers are constantly coming up with bizarre ideas and product parodies that are just not far-out enough to stand the test of time and the absurdity of humanity.
How about those Vibram(TM) Fivefinger shoes that look like feet (five separate compartments for the toes, the soles are shaped to the human foot). Al Bundy got that idea from God. But who got it first, Bundy or Vibram? It seems the real footy shoes date to 2007, while the TV show "God's Shoes" dates to 1991.
But I think my favourite is the 1919 cellphone cartoon.
It always rings when
... you are running for a bus or tram
... you are baptizing a baby
... you have your hands full and it's raining
... and three other gags.
I got my first cellphone 80 years after the cartoon, but even the giant clunky cellphones that look like military com equipment didn't really show up until sixty or seventy years after the cartoon which makes the prediction as good as most of Jules Verne's tech winners (his losers are now mercifully forgotten, as well as the politically incorrect crap on Jews and non-whites which accompanied his worst SF efforts)
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