Elsewhere, I've described the fact that "Back to the future" is a member of a particular genre of comedy, the "comedy of manners".

My favorite novels, when I'm looking for something fresh, are the works of P.G. Wodehouse. These stories, including the Jeeves & Wooster series, have been referred to in places as a "comedy of manners".

In "Back to the Future" we get a fish, called Marty, carrying modern senses and sensibilities (well, modern as of 1985) and we place this fish out of his usual water, into a time where those senses and sensibilities are wildly out of place. The "who's on first" style miscommunication about wanting "a tab" is a clear cut example, along with running jokes like Marty's "life preserver" clothing, and his allusion to two televisions and re-runs. In the third film, the same comedy sense is taken further: the most extreme example is when Marty is told to "dance" so he commences to moon walk like Michael Jackson. This and many more exchanges are typical examples of a “comedy of manners”. The time travel aspect is simply the literary device used to Make It So.

A heck of a lot of stories are a “comedy of manners” — once you begin to look at the world through my newly patented “I see comedy of manners everywhere!” glasses. Mean girls, Heathers and their ilk, Saltburn, Eddie the Eagle, Pulp Fiction, Blues Brothers, you name it.

References

• Comedy of manners - Wikipedia

See also

• The Magic of the Blues Brothers
• Time Travel Models — the various types of time travel