I’m watching Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends with my kids. There’s going to be a Foster’s Movie “Good Wilt Hunting.”
My internal dialogue goes somethign like this:
-Clearly that’s a play on the movie “Good Will Hunting”
-That’s a weird title. I’ve seen that like five times and Will Hunting wasn’t really all that “good” in any ethical sense until the end
-Maybe it was just ironic
Then somewhere, a long neglected fired
-Our maybe the protaginist in that movie was Hunting… for …Good Will!
-Or… Maybe he was Hunting for his better self, his self being Will. That better self being Good!
-Maybe it means all three!
Then, I realized incredibly obvious that was. After considering the implications of this for five minutes, I realized that this might make me the stupidest human being on the planet.
I’m so depressed. Run away. I might be contagious.
Funny story. But, since I expect it will be far more likely to generate similar amusing stories of long-delayed comprehension than angry replies by people calling you a dumbass, I’m thinking it would be better off in another forum. But which one? MPSIMS? Cafe Society?
Do you have a preference? I’ll hold off moving it for a few minutes and see if you do.
No answer. Well, I’ll stick it in MPSIMS (it is pretty mundane, after all). The mods there can move it again if they like, or wad it up into a ball and throw it at me.
I believe it was at least a decade before I actually understood this classic exchange from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A decade of reading the books, watching the television production, listening to the audio tapes…then one day, there I am reading the book again and it hits me. Like a brick inna sock.
I’ve got one of these “loooong delayed comprehension” stories as well, but the object of my incomprehension is a bit more obscure …
There’s a novel by Larry Niven and David Gerrold, The Flying Sorcerors, that I first read in the mid seventies. I enjoyed it immensely and it is strewn with obvious puns like the title. The main character in the book is called “Purple” throughout the novel. When he asks about it late in the story he is told that his translator (speakerspell to the natives) translated his name as “As a mauve, shade of purple-grey”. If that clue wasn’t enough, the same phrase was given earlier in the book at the time it happened. About the fifth reading of this book, it hit me like a thunderbolt - “As a mauve” = “Asimov”!! :smack: :smack: :smack:
I was only slightly mollified when I talked to my brother about it and he had missed it too.
I didn’t get the “pearl necklace” joke in the movie Half Baked until a few years ago. I was only in 8th grade when the movie came out and didn’t see it again for quite a few years.
And, of course, as the complete opposite (huh? no way! hehe) in what must have been a prescient moment I remember picking up on that when I saw it for the first time at age 8 or so. Not sure if that says more about the reference or me, but there it is.