From
Are You Being Served...
[Captain Peacock, Mr Humphries, Mrs Slocombe and Miss Brahms are out at a fancy restaurant hoping to sit down to dinner with a rich person, but their night has just turned for the worst]
Captain Peacock: Er, garcon?
Waiter: Sir.
P: We ordered pheasant, lobster, venison, pate de foie gras, guinea fowl and Champagne. I'd like to make a slight alteration.
W: Certainly, sir. What would you like?
P: Egg and chips - four times - and a pot of tea!
The funny part of this little sequence partly stems from first that Captain Peacock addresses the waiter as "garcon". The waiter is not only not French and they are not necessarily at a French restaurant (although all of those dishes certainly could appear on any good French restaurant menu), but apart from that it either highlights a feature of the era in which the series was made, or simply a perpetuated comic / sitcom element in restaurant scenes. These days, it would be extremely offensive to address a waiter (I would hazard a guess, even a very junior one) as "garcon" (French for "boy"). That said, given the Captain was somewhat annoyed in this scene, it made that address even funnier.
This also seemed to remind me of a scene in
Frasier when Frasier had the apartment set for a date, but the night eventually ended with the date leaving prematurely without them even sitting down for dinner. After the date left, Frasier's dog saw fit to have carte blanche on helping himself to the date's intended portion, much to Frasier's annoyance.
Maybe even funnier is that a posh restaurant may permit one to order egg and chips, one of the most defining working class dinners one could ever think of!
