- Adored by the Network: The show has become a mainstay on New York station WPIX, an affiliate of The CW. The station has aired the show for several decades, and remains the only local station outside of MeTV to carry the show. WPIX has a long-standing tradition of airing a marathon of the show every New Year's Eve starting at 11:00 PM and lasting into New Year's Day. The marathon's duration varies, but it's usually 13 or 14 hours, with a break in the morning for local news.
- Follow the Leader: The show created the term 'lost episode', although ironically they weren't lost; Jackie Gleason knew all along that he had copies of the live sketches in storage. He just didn't know what to do with them. Now, any time a previously unaired or censored episode of a series is released, it's generally labeled a 'lost episode'.
- He Also Did: Jackie Gleason had a second career as an easy listening bandleader with a series of very popular mood music albums. His first album, Music for Lovers Only, still holds the record for the longest stay in the top 10 of the Billboard album chart at 153 weeks. At one point, he held the record for the most albums at #1 on the album chart without any hits on the top 40 of the Hot 100 singles chart. Despite being unable to read music, he also composed the theme tunes for The Honeymooners ("You're My Greatest Love") and The Jackie Gleason Show ("Melancholy Serenade") by singing out his ideas to transcribers. note
- The Other Darrin:
- Audrey Meadows as Alice, with Pert Kelton as The Pete Best. Kelton lost her job due to The Hollywood Blacklist.
- Joyce Randolph replaced Elaine Stritch (yes, Jack Donaghy's mom) as Trixie when Gleason's variety show jumped from DuMont to CBS.
- Sheila McRae and Jane Kean took over as Alice and Trixie for the 1966-67 color sketches, due to Meadows and Randolph being unwilling or unable to relocate to Miami Beach (where Gleason's show was then being produced). Kean also played Trixie in the late '70s specials.
- Recycled Script: More than half of the lost episodes (not the Classic 39) follow an almost exact formula. Ralph hears about a scheme, he comes home and asks Alice for the money to support it, she says no, he enlists Norton, the scheme fails, and Ralph tells Alice she was right all along. Justified in that much of the show's humor was physical and slapstick-oriented, therefore it wasn't necessary for the writers to spend too much time coming up with different plots. It's also worth noting that sitcoms were in their infancy at this point, and many of the tropes we find predictable and repetitive today were actually cutting-edge back then.
- Screwed by the Lawyers: Jackie Gleason considered this when The Flintstones came out. He immediately recognized that the cartoon was simply The Honeymooners with cave people, and considered suing Hanna-Barbera for the blatant theft. However, Gleason was savvy enough to know that if he tied the issue up in courts, he'd go down in history as "the guy who yanked Fred Flintstone off the air." He thus left the issue alone to preserve his reputation, and given people's fond memories of both The Honeymooners and Gleason himself, the plan worked.
- Short-Lived, Big Impact: Lasted less than a year, with 39 episodes total, and is regarded as one of the classic sitcoms of all time.
- Throw It In!:
- In "The Man from Space", a knob falls off of Ralph's spaceman costume while he tries to get Alice to guess what he's supposed to be. Alice picks it up and hands it to Ralph. Instead of stopping filming, Gleason simply ad-libs, "Gimme that. That's my Denaturalizer", and the scene continues.
- In "Better Living Through TV", as Ralph and Norton rehearse a commercial to sell an all-purpose kitchen gadget, part of the gadget falls off. Gleason ad-libs by picking it up and saying, "Maybe we ought to say something about spear-fishing?"
- Trivia websites like IMDB have pointed out that a great deal of the show was ad libbed. Apparently, Gleason had something of a photographic memory, and didn't like to rehearse, so he would only look at the script once before appearing live on air. When he forgot his lines, he would pat his stomach as a signal to the other actors, so they could cover for him. It often fell to Audrey Meadows to get the scene back on track; for instance, she would glance at the refrigerator when someone needed to cross to it.
- You Look Familiar:
- The very first Honeymooners sketch featured Art Carney as a passing policeman who gets a container of flour dropped on him from the Kramdens' window. Ed Norton would make his first appearance in the second sketch.
- In the crossover Christmas episode where Gleason plays all his different variety-show characters, Alice never notices how everyone looks like Ralph suddenly.
- Pert Kelton, the original Alice, appeared in a 1967 sketch as Alice's mother.
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