It was especially funny because everyone thought of her as June Cleaver. The Beav’s Mom talking jive! Barbara Billingsly was a very talented lady.
The very first time I saw Airplane was in a movie theater when it originally came out in 1980. I was 11 years old.
I was going to the movies together with my then best friend once a week, every week for a lot of years from the 1970s-1980s. We were a couple of fanatics about the movies. We talked, read, ate, drank, and slept the movies. After seeing our movie in the theater, we usually retreated back to his apartment to watch more movies on his living room tv, whatever happened to be airing that afternoon and evening.
While I found that scene very funny, a senior citizen white woman who can speak jive, at the time i had as of yet to have seen an episode of Leave it to beaver. As a kid, I watched LOTS of daily syndicated reruns of classic tv shows around those years, but leave it to beaver wasn’t one of them. Either because it wasnt airing where I lived or it aired at an inopportune time like during school hours or late at night while I was sleeping.
Either way, because I never saw the series, the additional cultural reference of beaver cleavers mom speaking jive sailed way over my head. I didnt know specifically who she was. It wasnt until years later when I started watching episodes of leave it to beaver did the jive talk scene really connect and become twice as funny to me.