In the play (I don’t know if it’s in the movie) You Can’t Take it With You, a stuffed shirt banker named Mr. Kirby is droning on about his orchids and has the following exchange with his free-spirited dinner hostess, Penny:
I’ve been in two productions of this play and seen a couple of others and most of its humor still holds up, but nobody has ever known what this line means. It’s kept in all productions, but it never gets a laugh, so apparently nobody else does. Anybody have a clue?
If not, feel free to ask for help with any line that you’ve never understood from a play/movie/book/poem/etc. (and all are forbidden to mock you on penalty of enemas).
I saw a college production of the play during my undergrad years, but can’t remember if the line was kept and, if so, what kind of response it got. At any rate, if anyone thinks additional context would help decipher the intent of the playwrights, the scene is here.
One I’ve asked about before. From “All About Eve,” Lloyd, Karen and Margo are driving to the train station on icy roads. Lloyd skids on the ice, Karen warns him to be careful, he says he has no intention of having an accident and Margo says it doesn’t matter what his intentions are, “we (she and Karen) are wearing long underwear.”
And, um, what? Only line in the film that falls utterly flat. Is the joke related to wearing clean underwear in case you get in an accident? Not wanting to be caught dead in long underwear? Some obscure cultural reference? Fortunately Bette almost immediately becomes maudlin and full of self-pity, and thus magnificent, but it’s still a sore thumb of a line.
Never seen it but it sounds like “If we get stuck out here, our long underwear will keep us warm,” i.e. we didn’t trust you to drive safely, before we even got in the car.
Forest Gump…When he is on the bench i never understood one of his lines. I think its when he was telling about his running across the country. The line is in the trailer its something like “For some reason things i was doing make sense to people” I could never understood what he said. My hears would just hear jibberish. Is this what he said?
I’ve never seen the movie, but this looks like a pun on the word “intentions.” Have you ever heard the cliche of the woman’s father asking her boyfriend, “And what are your intentions concerning my daughter? Are your intentions honorable?”
So Margo is making a joke about Lloyd wanting to have sex with them, and how it’s not going to happen.
Orchids are also associated with testicles, for what it’s worth.
Has Penny known Kirby for years? It kind of sounds like if he would have given her flowers (or otherwise expressed “intentions”) she would have, uh, blossomed.
Can anyone explain the purpose of the song “Little Bird” in Man of La Mancha? It just doesn’t fit at all. The one time I’ve actually seen the play it really felt like it was just stuck in there (but that wasn’t the only problem, so maybe it was just that group)
I think it may have been an incidental song (sometimes happens- the lyricist/music people write a song for another show that doesn’t work so they reincarnate it, or one for a scene that gets deleted*). I’ve heard it referred to as a double entendre song but I don’t really see it (little bird=penis? cinnamon tree=…nah, just doesn’t work).
I know that they sing it half seriously and half mockingly to Aldonza, then it’s sung ominously when she’s abducted. (Most chilling production I’ve seen was when the innkeeper’s wife sang it during the abduction scene as Aldonza was being dragged away.)
But no, doesn’t really work. Catchy, though.
*Example: the song Say a Prayer for Me Tonight was written for My Fair Lady as Eliza waits to go to the embassy ball, but the scene was cut, so Lerner & Leowe incorporated it instead into Gigi (their tribute to the romance of teen sex slavery).
Remember Grover Cleveland raised a ward for a long time - and then married her as soon as she came of age. Could that have something to do with it? It would make the response make sense.
In the movie “Blazing Saddles”, Howard Johnson talks in a bar about how Louis Pasteur’s research will help eliminate anthrax in sheep. Right afterward, Mongo rushes into the bar. What’s the point of this scence? It’s doesn’t even attempt to make a joke, and it doesn’t seem to be related to anything else in the movie.
Rosemary’s Baby–Rosemary has been suffering horrible pains through her 2nd and 3rd months of pregnancy. When her friends convince her to see another doctor, the pains vanish.
Were the pains physical from carrying Satan’s child, or were they inflicted by the Satanists to keep her away from other people?