What’s a meadow for?
On edit: That’s for Eyebrows
“Metaphor” sounds a little like “meadow for” so the spoken question sounds like “What’s a meadow for?” Cows used to be kept in meadows, before [insert rant against modern agribusiness here].
Ahhh, thanks. I don’t pronounce meadow like meta so that never occurred to me. I thought maybe a meta was some kind of milking tool. :smack: 
That is dead solid perfect, R A. I recently saw the interview of John Cleese on Inside the Actor’s Studio where the discussion rolled around to the question of just what is funny. He maintained that it is comical to see someone going increasingly berserk, but what is really humorous is the reactions of the other characters observing the meltdown.
I had to re-review the dead parrot sketch after reading your post, and my cold beverage came out my nose until I was forced to set it down before wasting more of it. My sides still ache from seeing him try to explain “…was no more…he has ceased to be… he has expired… gone to meet his maker…he’s an EX-PARROT!”
There were a couple.
Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”:
“Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger now he’s dead”
For a long while I didn’t get that there was a comma after mama. I always visualized the singer’s mama being some hard-knock woman busting into a trailer with a revolver.
Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”:
“But I got no offers
Just a come on from the whores on 7th avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there”
I was about eleven when I first heard the song and I thought “whores” was “horse”. I pictured this young man sleeping in the stables among the horses :eek:
:o
Wow, my hearing must be screwed up.
I could never make out the lyrics between “But I got no offers,” and “on 7th avenue,” and actually, I thought they were saying something about 5th avenue.
So now that part make sense. Thanks.
Oh yeah, I also remember seeing a blurb about the 4th century Greek jokebook (Philogelos: the laugh addict) that contained a variation of the sketch, but it was a slave rather than a Norwegian parrot.
Great thread, and I’m a little off on this but …
a couple of say aloud pranks that some people haven’t heard:
I am sofa king
we Todd Head
and a pink phone message note
7/31/09 4:25 p.m.
(312) 555-1624
please return call
Oliver Klozehoff
I tend to miss basic plot elements until the tenth reading or so, never mind hidden meanings and such.
F’r instance, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods. I’m reading it for aproximately the one billionth time, and it occurs to me that deserts are a reoccuring theme here. There’s the deserts that prophets are associated with, the deserts around the citadel, the desert in the afterlife, the desert that Vorbis sneaks his troops across, the desert that Brutha crosses with Om and Vorbis… No, this hadn’t occured to me before. :smack:
Thinking some more on Pratchett’s oeuvre, I realized that Thief Of Time was a meditation on the meaning of humanity, along with its cons and pros. You know, because just about every character short of Jason struggles with that very issue over the course of the book?
And The Last Continent, in addition to being about Asutralia, is about sex. Not just the bit with the God of Evolution- the whole UU wizards subplot is about Mrs. Whitlow, and the effect she has on them.
Some day I will discover some other stunningly obvious theme while rereading my Discworld collection, and I will be sure give myself a :smack:.
WHAT fell off? Augh–this thread is frustrating.
I always hear a very unaccented “I” before “killed a man”. So it’s “Mama, I killed a man”. It might be a dialectical difference that I heard it and you didn’t.
This is from watching the final episode of season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
She sacrifices herself to save her sister. She falls into the vortex thingy with her arms spread out wide. And then she gets resurrected in season six.
It took a while before I made the connection.
The funny thing is, it’s my ex-teacher mother from Pittsburgh who loves that one and told it to me a lot as a child, not my Georgia born dad.
What, you mean like this guy?
I’ve got two.
The first is from The Usual Suspects. I used to complain that the Kobayashi character made no sense. He had a European face, a Japanese name and a Pakistani accent. Finally, someone explained to me that:
In all likelihood, Kobayashi either never existed or was completely different from how he was portrayed in the movie. Remember that what we were seeing was merely Kint/Soze’s bullshit story. Oh, we saw someone at the end who looked like Kobayashi, but how could we know who he really was. He could have been just another driver.
Another one was from Dodgeball. In a Vegas motel, Patches O’Houlihan tells Peter LaFleur that he has a couple of call girls in his hotel room, if LaFleur cared to join him. When LaFleur turns down the offer, Patches goes “Suit yourself, queer!” and wheels away. It took me a few times watching the movie before I realized that there probably weren’t any prostitutes in Patches’s room, and LaFleur was right not to join him.
In the opening sequence to Watchmen, we see a bunch of stylized scenes establishing the heroes’ characters. Among them is a scene of a bomber with Sally Jupiter’s portrait on the side. It was our third time watching that scene before my wife realized that the bomber was returning from dropping the A-bomb on Japan.
It was only after I noticed the lack of eyebrows in the Girl With a Pearl Earring that I realised that was the source of her ambiguous expression (eyebrows show a surprising amount of expression), and then noticed exactly the same on the notorious Mona Lisa.
He was briefly a modern languages scholar, and he wrote in French because he wanted to be forced to be more succinct. Odds are he thought about his character names extremely carefully, and would have either chosen those nicknames because of what they meant, or would at least have become aware of the meanings shortly after they were chosen.
Of course, they’re also a pun on ‘did he go.’