Let’s talk about those moments in entertainment that gave you a “duh” moment because you didn’t get it the first time, only to have it suddenly dawn on you later what the hell was actually going on. These can be profound or minor, from any form of entertainment. I remembered two recently.
In All That Jazz there’s a scene where a young Joe Gideon is about to perform between acts at a strip club. He gets “timulated” by one of the dancers and goes out on stage. Everyone in the audience starts to laugh because he has a big stain down the front of his pants. When I first saw the movie in 1979 (at age 11) I thought they were laughing because he had wet himself. It was only when I watched it again maybe a year later that it dawned on me that the stain was semen.
I read a jooke in Boy’s Life magazine. Patient: “Doctor, I always get a sharp pain in my eye when I drink hot chocolate.” Doctor: “Take the spoon out of the cup.” It was literally years later that it suddenly occurred to me that the spoon was poking the patient in the eye.
With the Barenaked Ladies song If I Had $1000000, there’s a line that says “I’d buy you some art - a Picasso or a Garfunkel.” It took me almost a decade to realize that the line was a pun on Garfunkel’s first name.
When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the Starkist Tuna commercials:
“Starkist doesn’t want tunas with good taste. They want tunas that taste good.”
I didn’t get that it was a matter of comparing aesthetic taste with gustatorial taste. I didn’t know that “taste” could also have aesthetic connotations, so to me the phrases meant the same.
Also. . .
In the “Our Gang/Little Rascals” short “A Lad and a Lamp,” Spanky turns Stymie’s little brother Cotton into a monkey by rubbing a magic lamp. Stymie is really upset, and later tells his story to a cop. He tells the cop, “He used to look like me, but now he looks like ingaggy.” I had no idea what that meant for a quarter-century. Then I discovered it by accident. The word was actually “Ngagi,” and was a well-known gorilla in a San Diego zoo. Then it made sense.
(Actually, he didn’t really turn Cotton into a monkey, and it was a chimp anyway.)
For some bizarre reason, I always parsed the band name “Manic Street Preachers” as “preachers from Manic Street,” rather than “street preachers who are manic.” It just occured to me a few days ago that the second one made rather more sense.
This is not really from entertainment but it WAS on TV.
Thre used to be a commercial for an organization called RIF - Reading Is Fundemental, which promoted cild literacy programs.
When I was very young I thought ther were saying - “Reading is fun to mentals” referring to mentaly reatrded people. I was shocked (!) because my mother was very politically correct and would have washed my mouth out this soap for referring to people as “mentals”.
I mean, that’s funny. But I just didn’t get it. I didn’t get the Oh! moment until I was about 12 or 13, which would have been somewhere around the 40th time I’d seen the damn thing. It just flew straight by. Wooooosh!