Question
Hi, there

Could you help me with some questions?

1) In a episode of Everybody Hates Chris, two men are talking and they say:

A: I figured while you sell the newspapers, I open up a whole new customer base.
B:How about I open up your skull with a tire iron? I can't drive around with a truck full of stolen goods.
A:I am not a thief. I am a wholesaler. Cut out the middle man
B: How about you cut out the bail man? Because that's what we are gonna need.

What do cut out the middle man and cut out the bail man mean?

2) Let us say a salesperson is explaining the differences between AA and AAA batteries to you. Then, with a set of AA batteries in their hand, he/she says: "The battery life is much longer on these ones." Is it odd to use "ON" in this sentence? "On these ones"?

3) If you are standing/sitting/lying in front of a ventilator or an air conditioner, does it sound odd to say you are "in the way of the air conditioene/ventilator"? What could I say?

Thank you very much!

Question

Question
Hi, there

Could you help me with some questions?

1) In a episode of Everybody Hates Chris, two men are talking and they say:

A:  I figured while you sell the newspapers, I open up a whole new customer base.
B:How about I open up your skull with a tire iron? I can't drive around with a truck full of stolen goods.
A:I am not a thief. I am a wholesaler. Cut out the middle man
B: How about you cut out the bail man? Because that's what we are gonna need.

What do cut out the middle man and cut out the bail man mean?

2) Let us say  a salesperson is explaining the differences between AA and AAA batteries to you. Then, with a set of AA batteries in their hand, he/she says: "The battery life is much longer on these ones." Is it odd to use "ON" in this sentence? "On these ones"?

3) If you are standing/sitting/lying  in front of a ventilator or an air conditioner, does it sound odd to say you are "in the way of the air conditioene/ventilator"? What could I say?

Thank you very much!

Answer

1. A) The middle man usually refers to somebody in between transactions. For example, a business creates a product, but they do not have a store to sell it. So they sell it through Walmart. Walmart is the middleman. An example to cut out the middleman is to stop selling in through Walmart and sell online or in their own shop. Samsung, for example, sells through Walmart and through their own stores.
B) He is making a joke about him being a thief. If a thief is caught by the police, they will go to jail. But before a criminal trial and sentencing, the bailman or judge can set bail (please google) so the suspected criminal can be released from jail and wait for a trial. Also funny because both words contain the word man, middleman, bailman.

2. The use of "on" is okay and normal in this sentence.

3. You could say "in the way of" or you are "blocking" the air conditioner

Answer

1.
Middle Man:
Imagine that I am an apple farmer and that you want an apple.  You could come to my farm and buy an apple.  (That's probably inconvenient, but you could do it.)
I could sell apples to a store and then you could buy the apples from the store.  The store is now a "middle man,"  because it is in the middle of the transaction from the original seller to the final buyer.
If I sold the apple to the store, and then the store sold the apple to a neighborhood apple seller who comes right to your house and then you bought the apple from the apple seller, there are  two middle men (the store and the neighborhood seller).
Each middle man is going to want to make some money, so the apple you buy from the neighborhood seller is going to be more expensive than the one you buy from the store which would be more expensive than the one you buy from the farmer.
"Cut out the middle man" is an expression that means 'buy closer to the original source of the product' (in my example, go to the farm) usually to save money.  In the US, that is usually considered a positive thing.

In this example, though, he's not cutting out a middle man, he's becoming a middle man.  And he's stealing.  It's funny because he is trying to use a positive phrase to justify a very bad action.