In Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, Heidi and her grandfather are expecting company from the city to visit their mountain hut. Heidi’s grandfather has made stools for extra seating, but Heidi is concerned that one visitor won’t use hers. “Then we will invite her to sit on our grass-covered sofa,” he answers.
I was an adult before I realized that he meant she could sit on the ground, if the stool wasn’t good enough. The visitor in question doesn’t come after all, although the others do and don’t complain about the seating arrangements.
My husband claims to have always noticed this but it was pointed out to me: Kevin’s dad accidentally throws away a plane ticket in Home Alone. That’s why no one notices at check-in that the head count doesn’t match the ticket count!
Denis Norden and Frank Muir wrote a mock travelog called Balham, Gateway to the South about a London suburb (later performed by Peter Sellers). A quick quote:
I wouldn’t be surprised that this is true. What’s weird is that in at least one comic history book the guy claimed that an international team of comic historians had decided that The Yellow Kid was the first comic strip.
Until I watched the episode of American Masters on PBS 2 nights ago about Mel Brooks I had no idea the bellboy in High Anxiety that stabs Mel with the newspaper was Barry Levinson. Its one of the most memorable scenes in the movie but I never thought about who the actor was.
Levinson was also the writer of the movie which I did not know. I became aware of him as a writer and director later and never really looked at what his earlier work was.
Having just noticed the posts mentioning Ally Sloper: I recall reading that in World War I, the Army Service Corps of the British Army – which Corps handled putting together all necessary gear for the fighting troops, and expediting its reaching them – were popularly nicknamed “Ally Sloper’s Cavalry”, after their initials. Derision implied toward them, from the guys in the front line: suggesting that the ASC were not proper soldiers, but a bunch of cowards who did un-dangerous stuff well in the rear.
Ally Sloper turns up, not surprisingly, in the second volume Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore’s love letter to Victorian fantastic literature and art. He’s in the fifth book (“Red in Tooth and Claw”), the second panel in page 8, where Hyde is being conveyed back to the British Museum in the carriage. He’s drinking (appropriately) on the left side of the panel. Also in the panel are Weary Willie and Tired Tim, another pair of British comic strip characters who started out much later, in 1896:
In fact, the book is filled with former comic strip characters, given a savage and dark twist. A lot of the talking animals in Dr. Moreau’s menagerie are revamped Victorian-era comic strip animals, like Rupert the bear
In the movie Annie Hall Alvy and Annie are sitting on a park bench, and Alvy (woody) is making ad lib wisecracks about strangers walking through the plaza. (“Those two guys just got back from Fire Island…” "That guy is definitely Mafia… his business is linens…)
At one point a small man with white a wide-brimmed hat walks by, and Woody quips, “There goes the winner of the Truman Capote look-a-like contest.” Turns out the guy was actually Truman Capote.
Seen that 20 times and just found out that piece of minutia last month.
(Sorry if it’s been mentioned, but I did a search in this thread)
Actually, Rupert first appeared in 1920. The other main source for Moreau’s animals was Tiger Tim and his chums, from 1904 onwards – not, strictly speaking, Victorian either, but close enough.
This was probably mentioned already, but in the Harry Potter series there are a number of puns with character and location names; the one I never saw was “Diagon Ally” reads as “Diagonally”.
In “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” it was an important plot point. Harry was using floo powder (I had to look the spelling up - I thought it was flue powder, given that they used it in a fireplace) for the first time and was meant to say “Diagon Alley”, but instead said “Diagonally” which meant that he ended up in a shop in Nockturn Alley (Nocturnally).
I first read the first Harry Potter book by downloading a .txt file of it and loading it onto my old Palm V PDA. That’s right - I was doing ebooks before ebooks were cool. The Palm Pilot’s capacity was so small I had to break up the file into multiple chunks, because I couldn’t fit a whole book on at once.
Anyway, the file I had was riddled with typos from the OCR conversion, and I automatically assumed that “Diagon Alley” was a typo for “Dragon Alley”, because that’s exactly the type of change I saw lots of. It wasn’t until much later when I finally saw it in actual print that I got the joke.
Is that the only point of the name “Diagon Alley”? I always thought the name a bit weak and “so-what?”, on the author’s part. Knockturn Alley’s significance, I get – it’s where dark, dodgy, and illicit (“nocturnal”) dealings of the wizarding kind, are carried on (as opposed to the “legit” and above-board stuff in Diagon Alley). It’s maybe a quirk of mine, that wordplay has to be “about” something, for me to find it funny: if it’s pointlessly for its own sake, it strikes me as lame and silly.
Since it’s brought up, and this might be considered a form of “threadshitting”, I will say that for Harry Potter…
Nothing drove me away from the books faster than Rowling’s idiotic punning. Couldn’t stand it. And she did it throughout the books for, seemingly, everything, including the spell names. “Riddikulus”? Really?
jayjay – thanks, I get it. This’ll do for me – must have missed that subtlety when reading the appropriate bit.
JohnT: in the main, in fact, I enjoy JKR’s wordplay: so long as there’s a point to it, even if vestigial, I usually relish such stuff. That in respect of Diagon Alley, seems to have eluded me.
Completely-pointless punning, does truly annoy me. There’s a pet British corny crack, about a person “getting a potato clock” – meaning, “getting up at 8 o’clock”. No backstory about whatever a “potato clock” might be – the pun just “is”. Likewise, the mythical character – or was he a real comedian? – called Nosmo King. A pointless play on “No Smoking”. Such doings have me wanting to scream, “So fucking what !?”
I did not make the connection between Alotta Fagina (Austin Powers) and Pussy Galore (Goldfinger) until I was translating the joke for one of my Russian girlfriends several years after I first saw AP. :smack:
I wonder how many non-Brits got Spellotape/Sellotape. I wouldn’t have, except I coincidentally heard of Sellotape from other British books. Since I did get it, I rolled my eyes about as hard as JohnT.
