To Shakespeare plays are referenced. "To bite or not to bite; that is the question," which is a paraphrase from "Hamlet", and "Parting is such sweet sorrow," which is from "Romeo and Juliet".
Boris saying, "It's a far, far better thing you eat than you've ever eaten before," is a paraphrase of a quote from the novel, "A Tale of Two Cities".
In the commercial for the Home for Bad Actors, two characters repeat the names "John" and "Marsha" which refers to the 1951 record by Stan Freberg's called "John and Marsha" which was a soap opera parody where the two title characters doing nothing but repeating each other's names with intonations to match the mood.