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And here we go, another reference no one gets but you. Consider your audience once in a while, huh?
A joke or tidbit meant for people knowledgeable in a certain field. The rest of the audience doesn't get it, but it's usually subtle enough for them not to care. This is the non-age-related counterpart to Parental Bonus.
Genius Bonuses are most often seen in series with a Direct Demographic, especially New Media, as they can expect their audiences to be sufficiently focused that most of them will recognize an in-joke.
If this goes too far, it falls into Viewers Are Geniuses, so it has to be applied carefully. If it seems to be a byproduct of necessary research into the story, setting or plot, then the author is showing their work. Understanding one of these may lead to Fridge Brilliance.
Whenever a series of Zeroes and Ones or two-digit hex codes are shown, chances are they'll spell out something when translated to ASCII.
A Super Trope to Lampshaded The Obscure Reference.
Can overlap with Reference Overdosed.
Contrast with Small Reference Pools.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Billy Bat is chock full of references to American, animation and film culture and history. So are 20th Century Boys and Master Keaton. Perhaps historical references is Urasawa Naoki's Author Appeal.
- The opening of The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya depicts positronium, Lambda baryons, benzene ring, cyclohexanes, infinite number, Titius-Bode law, Planck's constant, Drake equation, time-dependent Schrödinger equation, Hubble's law, infinite product, definition of information entropy, large numbers, stationary Schrödinger equation, the theory of relativity, probability axioms, definition of Laplace operator, the wave equation in one space dimension, and small numbers. In case you haven't noticed, the author likes math.
- The Second Season (kind of...) continues this tradition, with Millennium Prize Problems, photons, quarks, electrons, tau neutrinos, gluons, M-theory, supersymmetric GUT, Tsuchinoko, and oddly enough some Nietzsche (Gott ist tot, ha-ah).
- The books are even worse. In addition to the advanced mathematics and science references mentioned above, Kyon's narrative contains allusions to obscure science fiction novels, classical mythology, medieval Japanese history, and other highly esoteric topics. Also doubles as making him come across as, contrarily enough, a Book Dumb First-Person Smartass.
- The later novels and the incredibly complicated Time Travel plot take the advanced mathematics from "Extra Credit" to "Required Courses".
- In the Deep Immersion Gaming episode, Kyon makes reference to the philosopher Lacan when musing about being special because he's a completely normal person who's been able to cope with some pretty odd things.
- Aside from the confusingly vast amount of scientific and mathemathic references, there are also a few philosophical and mythological ones. In the earlier parts Kyon compares his life to Sisyphus' task in such a way that evokes Albert Camus.
- In later novels, we see Sasaki, who talk about quantum physics with Kyon in middle schools.
- In The Day of Sagittarius, Nagato is seen to be wielding syntactically correct C Language and Windows command line arguments
 . * The code itself has not been verified to be correct logically.
- Nagato Yuki's alien incantations are shown in the anime as seemingly random high-speed gibberish. In the first light novel during her confrontation with Asakura Ryoko it's SQL code.
- And if you slow down the corresponding clip from the anime and play it in reverse, it is, in fact, SQL code (although, between the audio quality and the voice actor's accent, it's just barely identifiable as such).
- Hunter × Hunter often contains very minor and obscure details that can actually completely change the perception one has of a character of event if one does get the reference. The most notable case is a dialog scene in issue 10, chapter 84, between Feitan and Shalnark, where an attentive reader will notice that Feitan is reading a book from Trevor Brown, a Real Life, underground illustrator who specialized in such family friendly subjects as bondage, rape, torture, dismemberment, and pedophilia, all of this with a voluntarily uncanny style of drawing (his characters often look like puppets). So not only Feitan is a Psycho for Hire who completely lacks any kind of patience and uses torture on a regular basis, but he is also apparently a sick and sadistic pervert.
- There are some Genius Bonuses in Neon Genesis Evangelion, like Central Dogma coming from biology, or the Pribnow Box where the Simulation Bodies are kept coming from a sequence of base pairs in a section of DNA.
- Numerous other scientific, philosophical, mythological, psychological and even political allusions, shout-outs to works of film, music and literature, and of course, obscure religious references that may or may not possess a deep symbolic meaning.
- But the really obscure parts of Evangelion? The ones drawn on from real life. It's the one and only topic there hasn't been a flame war-igniting argument over, at least in English. Which is weird considering it involves the only Japanese animator most of us can name.
- In the Kingdom Hearts manga adaptation of Chain of Memories, the female Nobody Larxene is seen in a library reading a book about the infamous French writer Marquis De Sade, the namesake of sadism, which is clearly related to her sadistic nature.
- Lucky Star likes to hang lampshades on this trope, mainly in regards to otaku culture, which most of the characters don't get, but the minority understand all too well (* cough* Konata * cough* ).
- Fullmetal Alchemist uses a moderate amount of Hebrew in the background, and the Gate has the Kabbalistic Tree of Life on it.
- Large portions of random English seen in various books in the first anime are copypasted from third edition Dungeons & Dragons books (or online reviews of the same). The selection is completely meaningless, however, so its appropriateness to this trope is debatable.
- Another surprising thing is OST in Russian. There is a song performed by boys chorus in a second episode of first FMA series which has meaningful text and perfect language.
- Also, a joke for those who know Chinese - Ran Fan enjoys using explosives. "ran fang" is Chinese for "to light/set off (as firecrackers)"
- One combined with a Woolseyism: The English term for Xingese Alchemy is Alkahestry, which is named for a substance called the Alkahest, that was supposedly discovered by Paracelsus. Paracelsus' real name was Von Hohenheim, and in the series, Von Hohenheim is the inventor of Alkhahestry.
- Black Lagoon includes loads of these. To name a few, several European/Asian dialects are used (from Russian to Romanian), quite a few old movie references are made ("This looks like a remake of the movie "The Last Command") as well as several obscure gun comments ("I mean he's Jewish, right? Of course he'd have an Israeli-made gun!"). References to various philosophers and their view on consequence ethics, like Kierkegaard and Sartre, are made by several of the characters.
- When Minatsu teaches math in Seitokai no Ichizon, a proof of Euler's identity can be seen on the whiteboard behind her.
- Mahou Sensei Negima! has tons of these in the Omake in the collected volumes; one needs a decent understanding of physics to understand the explanations of how the spells function. There are also a number of visual Shout Outs to famous architecture, such as the bell tower at Mahora being the bell tower on the Florence Cathedral, and the background of this page contains the Suleymaniye Mosque. It's strikingly realistic when compared to the actual landscape.◊
- Not to mention that the spell incantations actually make a lot of sense if one has a familiarity with ancient Greek, Latin, and Greco-Roman Mythology.
- Yu-Gi-Oh! GX features references to alchemy, tarot cards, and various other subjects.
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei ladles these on thick, primarily in the form of random scribbles on the ever-changing blackboard. Topics range from writer/illustrator Edward Gorey to philosophy to prominent (and obscure) works of Japanese and English literature. Even character names are not exempt ("Kafuka", anyone?).
- On the surface, the concept of Strike Witches is just a shallow excuse for underage Fanservice, with storytelling chock full of moe cliches. And yet it's littered with references to WWII events, figures, and especially technology down the the obscure, unimplemented aircraft designs. Basically, it inverts Getting Crap Past the Radar.
- In Toward The Terra, when the first Mu baby is born by sexual reproduction, the mother is given a wreath of pea flowers. Gregor Mendel discovered heritability and genetics of sexual reproduction through his experiments with pollinating pea plants.
- Poor Eureka Seven. Since the show is a massive sea of pop culture references with Fauxlosophic Narration, its surprisingly well-applied Buddhist elements are written off as equally shallow Faux Symbolism.
- In Anime/Xam'dLostMemories, at the the climatic moment of she show (Nakiami reversing the Hiruken emperor's zone of darkness), the animation is a visual depiction of the solution to a (until it was solved) long standing topology problem: how to turn a sphere inside out without making any cusps, tears, or holes. A video of this can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_w4HYXuo9M.
- Surprisingly, Princess Tutu is rife with these. Naturally they're all ballet references, but it's still saying something when the translators compiled a list of notable references several pages long and it's likely they missed quite a few.
- Revolutionary Girl Utena has the student council's speech in the elevator. It sounds like it's just some wordy nonsense, but it's actually a shout out to Herman Hesse's novel, Demian. The rest of the show benefits tremendously from knowledge of fairy tale tropes.
- Fun game: try to recognize all of the Real Life people/events/spacecraft shown in the Planetes opening.
- With Tears To Tiara, barring the obvious Arthur, Morgan, and Gaius, a lot of names and characters harken back to Welsh Mythology like Arawn, Rhiannon, Epona, Annwn, Pwyll, etc. Especially clever is the Sword in the Stone being named 'Durnwyn' rather than the generic Excalibur.
- Myrddin is more of an Expy of Greek Titan Prometheus and has nothing in common with his Welsh namesake. The villains feel like a Gnostic Demiurge committee, being tasked by an aloof deity to create the world but failing at making it `perfect`... and not happy about it
- Taliesin is named after a poet who supposedly lived during the time of King Arthur and wrote a bunch of poems about him.
- Akagi is about a guy who plays mahjong, anyone can watch and enjoy it even if they haven't the slightest clue of how to play mahjong, however the autor manages to make the games realistic and the point of view changes from time to time so at one round you can see the main character's tiles and next round you can only see his oponent's tiles, this obviously means nothing if you know nothing about mahjong and can be easily ignored, however if you learn to play mahjong even to the most basic level it instantly becomes way better because you understand what's going on, and you can finally understand why is Washizu in love with his 1-pin.
- Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is both the title of a story, and the incantation that Vamdemon uses to open the gate from the Digital World (where everything is made of computer data) to the Real world. One of the main themes of the story is that ideas (or data) ultimately manifest themselves in the physical world.
- Heartcatch Precure is filled with stuff about flowers and just about every episode has Tsubomi (sometimes the other girls pitch in) talking about what their Heart Flower means in The Language of Flowers.
- Asobi Ni Iku Yo has quite a few references to obscure artistic films only a handful of film students and hardcore film enthusiasts will know.
- Viewers of Puella Magi Madoka Magica with a knowledge of physics will be amused when they realize that Kyubey is Maxwell's demon.
- Not to mention the scene of Madoka's ascension to godhood and her wish being granted. Upon firing straight up to the sky, the pattern that forms for a split second is a map of the trail particles took in a particle accelerator.
- Speaking of physics demons, a character in Mondaiji-tachi ga Isekai Kara Kuru Sou Desu yo? is confident about the accuracy of a certain prophecy because it was made by the source of all prophecies: the Demon of Laplace.
- Berserk has one of these in Meaningful Name form. Cute Witch Schierke may just have a random Germanic sounding name. Nope. Schierke is a mountain village in Germany right next to the Brocken - the mountain of witches.
Comedy
- The Firesign Theatre is notorious for this; e.g. "Antelope Freeway, one mile. Antelope Freeway, one half mile. Antelope Freeway, one quarter mile." And so on.
- The aforementioned Dennis Miller has spoken of liking to say things like "the Middle East situation is less stable than Crispin Glover", knowing that few of his listeners will have seen Glover nearly kick Letterman in the head, but that the few who have are saying, "Thank you for making that joke".
- This clip features Dave Foley delivering a monologue, in which he claims that the average temperature in Canada is 275 degrees below zero, which he quickly qualifies with, "But that's in Celsius." High school physics students are duly impressed.
- Patton Oswalt often lampshades this in his act, facepalming at the fact he just made a reference nobody will get, then sarcastically topping himself.
Comic Books
- Brazilian comic book Monica's Gang has Chauvinist as a character's pet pig name
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore. Just try to catch all the references in it to Victorian literature, politics, and events.
- Moore's V For Vendetta. Nearly every other sentence V utters is a quote from some famous writer. Lampshaded near the end.
- Although the Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison can be enjoyed as a psychological horror story with drool-worthy art, readers with a knowledge of Jungian psychology and symbolism (or who own a copy of the fifteenth anniversary edition with Morrison's annotated script) will get much more out of it.
- As a Fantasy Kitchen Sink series, Finder is overflowing with obscure and unusual references. The author wisely chooses to weave most of them into the background and leave the most complex and unwieldy connections in the (substantial) footnotes.
- Body Bags. The city where all the action takes place is Terminus, Georgia. A little research reveals that Terminus was the original name of the city of Atlanta. By this the reader can assume that Terminus is just Future Atlanta.
- In Knight & Squire #3, Britain is under threat from the Bad Kings of England, superpowered clones of the originals. Each of them attempts to conquer a different area of the country; Edward I takes the north, and his superpower is a massive energy-mallet. If you know the real Edward was called the Hammer of the Scots...
- De cape et de crocs pretty much runs on this trope, and still manages to avoid Viewers Are Geniuses.
- You sure have to have read a lot to catch all the mythological and literary references in The Sandman. Just to throw in a few:
- Worlds End is a rewriting of The Canterbury Tales.
- William Shakespeare plays a significant secondary role during the whole series. Bonus points if you are familiar with the relevance of The Tempest in Shakespearean studies.
- Lucifer quotes Satan and immediately claims having borrowed the quote from Milton.
- There are characters a-plenty from different mythological traditions: Morpheus, Orpheus, Calliope (Greek mythology); Odin, Locki (Norse mythology); God, Lucifer, Azazel (Christian mythology); Ra, Bastet (Egyptian mythology); the Three (found in multiple traditions as the embodiment of femininity); and many, many more.
- The Fair Folk sent to parlay with Morpheus in "Season of the Mists" say that they want an end to the tithe they've been paying to Hell. If you're familiar with the 400-year-old Child Ballad "Tam Lin", this will make perfect sense. If not, well...
- An Italian Donald Duck comic story had Daisy Duck and her friends eating madeleine cookies. One of the friends remarked "The memories they awaken..." If you're a fan of Marcel Proust, a writer most adults consider too "heavy" to read, you recognize this reference to classic, deep French literature. In a children's comic. Never let it be said that the Walt Disney company underestimate the smarts of their readers.
- In the first issue of Seven Soldiers: The Shining Knight, all the stuff about King Arthur plundering the realm of the Sheeda with three ships, and only seven men returning, but they did get the Cauldron of Rebirth out of it? Straight from the less-well-known Arthurian epic The Spoils of Annwn, supposedly by Taliesin. "Revolving Castle" is one of many possible translations of the Welsh Caer Sidi; others being "Castle of the Mound" and "Castle of the Zodiac".
Fan Works
- DBZ: The Abridged Series has a few examples, usually spouted by Gohan (to which Piccolo retorts "neeeeerrrddd"). But one of the more subtle ones was Piccolo's "Damn you, Pavlov" moment, which was followed by an interrupted explanation of who Pavlov was.
- The Namekians all speak in Klingon as well.
- Among the topics discussed/mentioned in one episode of Calvin And Hobbes The Series include squat lobsters that perform chemosynthesis, as well as acromegaly.
- Subverted in You Got HaruhiRolled!. It includes a parody of Eliezer Yudkowsky's "AI in a Box" thought experiment, with Kuyou as the AI and Kyon's sister as the gatekeeper, but the narration right out tells the readers of the experiment beforehand.
Film
Literature
- The works of Neal Stephenson can be read and enjoyed without advanced knowledge of computer science, meme theory, classical and ancient mythology, international finance, particle physics or the geopolitical dynamics or history; however, readers who are familiar with those topics have a massive head start when it comes to figuring out what the hell is going on.
- The Michael Crichton novel Sphere involves a cryptogram. A plot point is that a character deliberately errs in solving it, changing its meaning by changing one letter. The deception is not revealed until much later in the novel, but if the reader solves the cryptogram himself, he discovers it right away.
- The Discworld series is plenty accessible, and damn funny even if you're not a genius, but there are hundreds of subtle jokes and references in the books that are easy to miss if you're not well versed in a number of subjects.
- This especially applies if you're not British, in which case you will miss about half the references.
- The Annotated Pratchett File lists hundreds of obscure and esoteric Genius Bonuses from each of the books in the series, a must read for any Pratchett fan who wants to truly appreciate Pterry's abilities as a writer.
- The APF has not been updated for some years and all thirteen the books after A Hat Full of Sky are just blank spaces. The Terry Pratchett L-Space wiki has taken over the job of compiling annotations and references:- Annotations
- Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man features a code key of various business phrases in its first chapter. There are so many listed that readers will likely just skip over them. However, if you actually apply the key to the messages sent and received in the chapter, you'll see that the message a character claims is a rejection of a merger request is actually an approval of the merger. This becomes very important toward the end of the book.
- House of Leaves is stuffed with references both to entirely fictitious and real works, mixing them up for maximum confusion. Astute readers, however, will start noticing the references to Jorge Luis Borges, author of The House of Asterion and The Library Of Babel... including a multiple-paragraph quote from Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote.
- The novel also contains numerous references to philosophers like Derrida and Heidegger, who are known for their theories on language and textuality. Heidegger specifically is known for his notion of 'Unheimlichkeit', meaning both creepy (uncanny) and unhomely. Also, and according to him, "language is the house of Being."
- The Crying Of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. While quite enjoyable without much knowledge at all, it truly becomes brilliant with a thorough understanding of thermodynamics, Jacobean revenge drama, the American 1960s, human sexuality, and linguistics.
- Contrast with Gravity's Rainbow.
- There's comparatively easy Pynchon, and then there's stupefyingly intimidating Door Stopper Pynchon. The former would include The Crying of Lot 49, his "Whatever happened to the 1960s?" novel Vineland, a few short stories like "The Secret Integration" and his most recent book, Inherent Vice. These offer a healthy dose of Genius Bonuses, while V, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Against the Day head over into Viewers Are Geniuses territory.
- A lot of jokes and references in John Hodgman's Complete World Knowledge series will fly over readers' heads unless they have enough historical, geological, or pop cultural knowledge to understand why they're funny.
- Ditto for his subsequent books and half the things he says when he appears on The Daily Show.
- Neil Gaiman's American Gods is, not surprisingly, rife with references to religions around the world, so much so that the forums on his official website are filled with guessing games as to the identities of many of the more obscure ones.
- Nearly all of them have been positively identified, except for the 'Nameless God' or 'Forgotten God', who appears twice in the novel but whose name is never revealed, it seemingly being part of his innate power to go unremembered. Despite the intense research attempts by Gaiman fans all over the world (Gaiman's fans including a large scholarly demographic), this God has yet to be identified.
- It could, of course, be a reference to the Bible - in Acts 17:22-23 it's mentioned that the Athenians had an altar dedicated to "the unknown god".
- Anyone who knows the origins of the English days of the week will know who Mr. Wednesday as soon as he's introduced Wednesday is named for Woden, a Germanic name for the Norse god Odin. He even drops a big hint when he mentions that today is his day (meaning that Shadow is meeting him on a Wednesday), but because of the stormy weather, it might as well be Thursday. Thursday is named for Thor, Odin's son and the Thunder god.
- Lois McMaster Bujold tosses an easter egg for classicists in her SF novel The Warrior's Apprentice by piling Pelian on Oseran.
- T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land contains so many obscure references to different works that it makes the reader wonder if they are reading a poem with footnotes or footnotes with a poem.
- Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is filled with a massive cast of historical figures, 19th century fictional characters, and more recent vampire horror characters, all swanning around in a London where Dracula survived and married Queen Victoria. You pretty much need an encyclopedia to catch all the historical references and literary in-jokes.
- The Artemis Fowl books have some fun wordplay, the notable example being in Eternity Code. Try saying the names of the rival telecommunications companies out loud. They are "Phonetix" (think three syllables) and "Fission Chips" (perhaps less erudite, but still amusing).
- Doctor F. Roy Dean Schlippe anyobody?
- All of his pseudonyms. Emmesey Squire probably knows quite a lot about Einstein. Dr. C. Nial De Mencha is mentioned to be a psychologist. Sir E. Brum is named after part of the brain. The Other Wiki lists them all in his article/profile.
- The Dalziel and Pascoe series of novels has any number of literary references that erudite readers can pick up on.
- Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files has one in Ghost Story. It starts on May 9th, which was the first day of the Roman festival of Lemuralia, which was when people would banish the Lemures, vengeful angry ghosts.
- Cold Days has a few as well. People familiar with their mythology will recognize the names Harry uses for Mother Winter as one of the Fates and one of the Norns. The revelation that Santa is an aspect of Odin will also make a lot more sense to a reader who knows about the history of the mythological figures involved.
- Dr Seuss indulged in these now and again. One particular example is when a character is charged with having "a flugelhorn ge-busted." Flugelhorns are real instruments, even if the word does sound like a Seuss invention.
- Better yet, the Flugelhorn is a German instrument with a German name. Adding "ge-" to the beginning of (some) verbs in the past tense is a feature of the German language.
- In Brian Clevinger's Nuklear Age, Dr. Genius mentions that her company does testing on various animals to make sure that they aren't just using humans for slave labor. However, they're having trouble with cats, as they can't seem to prove that they're actually in the testing box.
- Surprisingly, Harry Potter is far more meaningful to those who have a working knowledge of Latin, are well-versed in European mythology, or happen to be religious scholars.
- Letters Back To Ancient China has many details about Munich, where the story is set.
- Isaac Asimov wanted to call his short story "Flies" (in which a manufacturer of flyspray is worshiped by flies as a vengeful god) "King Lear Act IV, scene i, lines 36-37", but his editor said no-one would get the reference. (It's the "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods..." line.)
- The Secrets Of The Immortal Nicholas Flamel has some. Machiavelli's passwords are the best examples, being titles of his lesser-known works. In Italian, so it doubles as a Bilingual Bonus.
- The Lord of the Rings contains several major shout outs to Macbeth, all taken from Act IV, Scene i, when the Witches tell Macbeth their prophecies of his death. First of all, the phrase "Crack of Doom" was coined by Shakespeare in this scene. The Ents' besiegement of Isengard and the Witch-King's defeat by Éowyn are references to two of the three prophecies—namely, that it will not happen until "Great Birnam Wood...shall come against him" and that "none of woman born shall harm" him. Of course, the trees do come to the castle when Macduff's army uses their branches as camouflage, just as the Ents come to Isengard, and Macbeth is killed by a man who was not born, but removed from his mother's womb, just as the Witch-King, who can be killed by "no living man," is killed by a woman (who was dead inside).
- Arguable these are not so much ShoutOuts as Take Thats, since Tolkien reportedly wasn't a fan of Shakespeare's plots. In particular he claims to have written the scene where the ents attack Isengard as a direct riposte to the Birnam Wood scene, because he felt that if a wood was going to move it should damn well be a real one.
- I can't believe the oh so common Shakespeare shotout\take that is listed but the glaringly genius Kalevala, Nibelungen, Nordic mythology, Mabinogion, and above all Beowulf, Pearl, Gawain and the Green Knight and other Old and Middle English works. This, many claim, is the core genius of the Lord of the Rings - being a fictional work internally consistent but building on most of North Europe's literary heritage of the Middle Ages.
- While you don't need to be familiar with ancient/medieval Middle Eastern art and Islamic theology to enjoy My Name Is Red, it doesn't hurt. On the other hand, the neophyte reader gets several college courses worth of information on the subjects, wrapped up in a fascinating set of narratives.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events may be the best example of this trope to date.
- There's a pretty subtle one in Lovely Assistant by Geoph Essex. The few Angels of Death whose names we learn (besides Jenny) are Caravel, Ketch, Curach, Pauzok, and Voitas. If you know boats or the right languages, the shout out to The Ferryman guiding the dead to the afterlife is a fun bonus.
- The main character of the obscure children's book Sleepers, Wake by Paul Samuel Jacobs states that his favorite organ piece is Bach's Sleepers, Wake, an alternate name of the chorale prelude Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (BWV 645). Obviously, the intended audience of the book would not know what Jacobs is talking about. Even most parents wouldn't know about the piece because of how obscure Bach's chorale preludes are to the general public.
- The Genius Bonuses are practically nonstop in Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales. Valente was a medievalist scholar, and a little research into monsters and mythology of the medieval period will reveal how many creatures she borrowed from pre-existing stories. Like African cyclops that are at war with griffins, dog-headed men, people with one giant foot, goldfish that can turn into dragons if they swim over a waterfall (Japanese myth, along with polite kappas and fox-women), even huldras. Yes, one-third girl, one-third cow, one-third tree? Authentic Germanic myth!
- The "eaten" people of Marrow might be a reference to The Faerie Queene. Marrow was cursed for its gluttony, and all of its people devoured by a hunger-spirit. Once they have been eaten, the people stop looking human and instead grow long necks and fat bellies. This happens to sound a lot like the description of the incarnation of Gluttony according to Spenser.
Live Action TV
- Frasier is as much a master of this trope as Ada Lovelace was a master of mathematics.
- That's Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace to you!
- According to the producers, sitcoms generally run on "the 70% joke", where 70% of the TV-watching audience will get the joke and laugh, while Frasier often had "the 20% joke". It didn't seem to hurt them, though.
- Parodied when Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce guest-starred on The Simpsons:
Cecil: But I suppose I should thank you. After all, it led me to my true calling.
Bob: Cecil, no civilization in history has ever considered "chief hydrological engineer" a calling.
Cecil: *clears throat meaningfully*
Bob: Yes, yes, the Cappadocians. Fine.
-
Cecil: I have the '82 Chateau Latour and a rather indifferent Rausan-Segle.
Bob: I've been in prison, Cecil. I'll be happy just as long it doesn't taste like orange drink fermented under a radiator.
Cecil: That would be the Latour, then.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus included many of these. In the words of Trey Parker, "They'll do that joke that they know only 20% of the audience is gonna get, so you know that 80% is not gonna be with you, but you know that 20% is gonna follow you to the grave."
- The West Wing:
- In one episode, Toby tells the president, "Your favorite movie was on last night." They then spend a few minutes (mis)quoting and discussing it, and Toby eventually applies An Aesop from the movie to their current situation. But neither of them ever actually says the name of the movie. (It's The Lion in Winter.)
- In another episode, Bartlet learns that his daughter Ellie, who seemed to be manipulating him by appearing to express confidence in him, was simply, honestly, expressing confidence in him. He just says, "My God, King Lear is a good play" (in that play, the daughter Lear thinks is the least loyal is the most).
- The West Wing is simply crammed with this. The sheer number of subtle puns and jokes that would take a rather high level of knowledge about American history and politics to understand makes watching any given episode five times funnier for a political wonk than for a regular viewer. And the genius bonuses aren't limited to history and politics - there's a lot of literary, religious, scientific, sports-related, and pop-culture references slipped into the dialogue as well.
- Leo goes on a long rant comparing Pro-Wrestling to politics (Which happens a few times) and concludes with: "But at the end of the day you don't vote for them." To which Josh replies: "Except for in Minnesota."
- In a much less genius of a bonus, over the course of several episodes NewsRadio had a running gag concerning every time a character goes to a movie theater, the same terrible movie is playing, though its name is never mentioned. Astute viewers will pick up that the crappy movie is John Travolta's Michael.
- LOST contains constant references to philosophy, religion, literature, and science. Is the casual viewer really expected to understand the significance of someone named John Locke, or their using the alias Jeremy Bentham? Plus, the plot became increasingly complicated as the show has gone on, with innumerable callbacks to previous episodes, making it extremely hard for new viewers to understand what is going on.
- When Hurley wonders what could be inside the hatch. Locke responds that he believes hope is inside, referencing Pandora's Box.
- Another episode had John Locke asking Desmond David Hume how he knew something. Answer: "Experience."
- The Doctor Who story Dragonfire had a sequence in which the Doctor distracts a guard by discussing semiotics with him. The real joke... the dialogue came verbatim from a semiotics text examining Doctor Who. Particularly impressive for a story which came out way back in 1987, before such post-modern humor appeared everywhere.
- The real real joke: Apparently, the Doctor's line is semiotics-jargon for something like "The less relevant an in-joke is to the story, the greater its cultural significance".
- The episode "QPid" of Star Trek: The Next Generation is a lot funnier to anyone who's seen The Adventures of Robin Hood, as it's basically a Whole Plot Reference, down to several shots and some of the background music cues. It also makes Vash's complete inversion of the Marian character all the more hilarious.
- A lot of Blackadder. For instance, when Edmund tells the newly-solvent Prince Regent to "take out the plans for the beach house at Brighton" he's referring to the Royal Pavilion, which was indeed paid for and occupied by the Regent.
- In the same episode, Blackadder, explaining why purchasing a "tuppenny ha'penny" tract of land will cost a thousand pounds, lists a string of spurious expenses, including "window tax". While it seems to fit in with the other expenses, like "swamp insurance", the window tax was a real thing in Georgian Britain; an attempt at progressive taxation on the basis that rich people had bigger houses, and therefore more windows. (Which is why in some parts of Britain you can still see historic houses with bricked-up windows.)
- Mystery Science Theater 3000. Annotations circle the Internet... You have to have a wide knowledge of a lot of things to get many of the jokes on the show, a lot like The Simpsons.
- Other references can be chalked up to over-obscuring the comedy, forcing the viewer to laugh not because they get the joke but that it's so random there's no way it can't be funny. A backstage motto of the writers was "The right people will get it."
- The right people could occasionally just be the writers though. One of the robots quipping "There goes Mike's keyboard!" was absolutely meaningless to everyone who was unaware that Mike's ex-girlfriend had taken his keyboard with her when she moved out the previous week.
- The episode featuring The Rebel Set nicely worked in an obscure reference that was still funny if you didn't know the source: As the camera pans past a man in a suit with slicked back hair playing a vibraphone, Crow quips "...And looking very relaxed, Adolf Hitler on vibes". This is a direct quote from The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's "The Intro And The Outro", but if you've never even heard of that group, it's just funny because of the actor's vague resemblance to Hitler.
- Babylon 5:
- The station's head of security is named Michael Garibaldi. The most famous real-life Garibaldi is probably Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major figure in the struggle for Italian unification and independence. Giuseppe's followers were dubbed Redshirts.
- Ironically, Sheridan is probably the real Garibaldi expy: Crazy Awesome general specialized in coming Back from the Brink and who wins battles even when his side has already lost the war? Check, Check and re-Check. Plus the events described in Severed Dreams resemble a lot the events of the siege of Montevideo.
- The Seinfeld episode "The Betrayal" is based on Harold Pinter's Betrayal and is far funnier if you've seen the play first.
- In one episode Elaine's boyfriend takes Jerry's parents to the art museum and his father spends the rest of the episode obsessing about how Claude Monet must have been nearsighted to paint waterlilies like that. This parallels the Jewish scholar Max Nordau's theory of Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), the belief that the oddities of 20th Century modern art reflected various disorders on the part of the artists, such as impressionism being symptomatic of a diseased visual cortex. This idea was famously (and somewhat ironically, considering Nordau's background) co-opted by the Nazis as justification for their censorship of the art world.
- The Big Bang Theory. Oh... where do we even start?
- How about with Cylon toast? To the general public, funny because Sheldon is making toast with scifi characters on it. To nerds, funnier because Cylons are often called toasters.
- Also, the equations on the whiteboard are always real and recognisable to physicists. They have a physics professor helping them out.
- In fact, the equations on the boards change throughout each season in a logical manner as the characters work on and solve the problems depicted.
- 30 Rock had an episode which parodied Amadeus.
- They also centered a storyline around a birthday party thrown for a Hapsburg. If you knew who the Habsburgs were, there's a chance you could know where things were going at the start of the episode when the name Hapsburg is first mentioned, but either way, the Habsburg in question is so ridiculously inbred to cause everyone to laugh on sight.
- At one point, Liz went out to a club and was questioned on it. She responded "I'm saying yes! to life."
- Cerie showed up to a Halloween party dressed in a bikini. When asked what her costume was, she replied "I'm an Italian senator!"
- An episode of Supernatural: Sam and Dean meet an author who has been inexplicably writing sci-fi novels about characters named "Sam and Dean" whose monster-fighting adventures are exact retellings of their own story. When confronted, the author has a moment of realization when he admits that his still-unfinished new novel is kind of inspired by Kurt Vonnegut. Dean asks "Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut or Cat's Cradle Vonnegut?" and he replies "Kilgore Trout Vonnegut." The references are not elaborated upon, it's just assumed that the viewers understand what that means.
- In The Office (US) episode "Trivia," Robert California, while discussing the various unpleasantries of living in Florida, remarks, "Alligators are dinosaurs, Dwight. You know that, right?" Dwight makes a pained face and replies, "Mmm... it's complicated."
- The IT Crowd is so chock full of real technology in-jokes and references that people who work in IT would go Squee in recognition at almost every scene.
- The decor of their basement office was a clutter of old computers, classic videogame posters and other nerdy reference, with the occasional ThinkGeek t-shirt.
- Glee: In an episode introducing two show choirs, one of them was from a ghetto school that had a member named Aphasia, while the other was from a deaf school. Heh.
- It's not excessively intelligent, but one brilliant visual joke in the "Manny's First Day" episode of Black Books depends on the viewer recognizing a physical similarity to Beethoven.
- When he learns that a possible "recruit" was a dance teacher when Mitchell knew her, Being Human's William Herrick offers a wonderfully subtle Shout Out to Emma Goldman:
"Come the revolution, we'll all need to know how to dance."
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: While sneaking into the Initiative during the fourth season, the Scooby Gang are surrounded by enemy soldiers. Buffy quickly grabs their leader as a hostage with a crossbow to his head:
Buffy: "Stay back, or I'll pull a William Burroughs on your leader here."
Xander: "You'll bore him to death with free prose?"
Buffy: "Was I the only one awake in English class that day?"
- The exchange is funny even if you know nothing about William S Burroughs, a famous author from the 50's who's probably best known for writing the book Naked Lunch. However, Buffy's original threat only makes sense if you know that William Burroughs drunkenly shot his own wife to death.
- In "Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered" there's an example that's either this or Critical Reasearch Failure on the writers' part. Amy casts her love spell by invoking "Diana, goddess of love and the hunt". Anyone who's savvy on their Roman mythology knows the spell is going to backfire because Diana was NOT the goddess of love, Venus was. It's probably why the spell had the opposite effect and enchanted every woman except the intended target (Cordelia).
- Dollhouse. Oh, so many... The biggest (and most obvious) is the name of the Dollhouse's parent corporation: Rossum, which comes from Karel Capek's play R.U.R.. The basic premise of the play is very similar to that of the Dollhouse- a company that produces humanoid slaves.
- "The Target" features a psychopathic (and possibly cannibalistic) hunter calling himself "Richard Connell". Richard Connell wrote a short story called The Most Dangerous Game, in which the protagonist is hunted by a psychopath, as sport, and winds up killing him in a plot deliberately echoed by the episode.
- Wondered why the D.C. House uses Active codes from Greco-Roman mythology? Thank Bennett Halverson. The cabinet in her office contains a small statue of Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf.
- In the Jim Hensons The Storyteller episode "The Soldier And Death", the soldier plays cards against a troupe of devils in an abandoned castle. The game they play isn't specified, but based on the fact they're using three cards in a hand it appears to be three-card brag (a predecessor of modern-day poker) that would fit in with the medieval setting of the show.
- When one thinks about it, anything in Sesame Street could be considered this. Don't forget what kind of show it is, and what its purpose is.
- The Vampire Diaries has one that most in the target audience will probably get: During an emotional scene between Damon and Elena, there's some piano music playing in the background. This could simply be because there's a funeral going on, or it could be background music. Someone who knows the song, however, may remember the lyrics.
You tore me to pieces...You tore me to pieces...
- And in a sort of combination of this trope and Funny Background Event, the Salvatores' house is full of famous paintings that a viewer with both keen eyesight and a knowledge of art will spot. This includes a Manet that shows up in almost every living room scene.
- Similarly the paintings in Klaus's bedroom are reproductions of actual paintings that have been stolen from various museums throughout the years.
- In Sliders, Quinn's cat was always named Schroedinger. Interestingly, in different Alternate Universes the cat was visibly different.
- But always alive, so...y'know...that answers that.
- A number of signoffs for Bill Nye the Science Guy, while relevant to the episode's topic, are much more advanced in that field than the target demographic has likely studied.
- During one episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun Dick comments that Easter Island was a practical joke that got out of hand. Many listeners will simply associate this joke with the massive stone heads and laugh, but a person who has read about the ecological and societal collapse resulting from overuse of natural resources due to moai construction will understand the "got out of hand" differently.
- Hilariously done by the Mythbusters editors in a combination with This Trope is [BLEEP]. Adam tests out a curse-proof tool in the "No Pain, No Gain" episode. If you know Morse Code, the beeps spell out HELLO.
- Criminal Minds
- The two-parter "The Fisher King" has the team trying to find a kidnapped girl. We're shown her locked in a basement bedroom, coughing hard and apparently ill, having been taken some time ago by a kidnapper who acts as though he cares for her. At this point viewers who've read John Fowles' The Collector may have spotted that this plot is somewhat familiar; and then the clues the kidnapper sent to the FBI turn out to be centred around... John Fowles' The Collector. It's never mentioned in the episode what the novel's about.note It should be noted that The Collector has been a favorite book of several serial killers in real life, despite the moral of the story being don't be a serial killer.
- The fifth season episode Slave of Duty refers not only to the action of the episode but is also an alternate title for Pirates Of Penzance, which is referenced a few times in that episode and a couple of first season episodes. The high school production of the play was when Hotch met Haley (who got murdered in the previous episode).
- The UnSub in "I Love You, Tommy Brown" defends her relationship with a teenage boy who was a student of hers by arguing that Henry VIII's first wife was twenty years older than himnote Not quite; Catherine of Aragon was only six years older than Henry VIII, and that Romeo and Juliet were teenagers as well. Now that might sound all very intelligent and cultured, but think about how both those relationships turned out...
- Stargate SG-1 features a cat called Schrodinger.
- Stargate Atlantis introduces a character named Janus in an episode featuring time travel into the distant past and stasis. In myth Janus was The God Of Memory And Sleep; seems more than a little suitble to me.
- Knowledge of myth, history, physics, and millitary strategy, while rarely unexplained, can occassionally make moments in Stargate more fun.
- Lexx might be extremely perverted, but it also has some very obscure jokes. One is the Higgs Boson apparently can't be measured without causing a planet to implode into a stranglet. Another involves a big crunch and the corresponding theory for the effect on time it has.
- Max Headroom, a show ripe with social commentary, features a trailer for the wacky show "Lumpy's Proletariat". Aimed at the lower classes, no less.
- On The Wire, Brother Mouzone is a Cultured Badass who tasks his assistant with collecting his issues of Harper's while researching hits. The Bonus is that the actor and character are a dead ringer for the original composite sketch of the man who allegedly murdered Notorious BIG.
- Sometimes on JAG, the meaning of military acronyms are at times never explained to the viewers, and upon even rarer occasion are references made to federal case law without explaining in detail what that case means to the viewers.
- Better Off Ted loves working this into background gags. For example, Rose, Ted's daughter and moral compass, attends Eugene Debs Elementary.
Music
Newspaper Comics
- FoxTrot author Bill Amend sometimes puts challenging math puzzles in his strips, where only the genius or patient would ever try and solve them. The rest just scratch their heads. Amend also has a real-life degree in physics, so all of the formulas in the series are perfectly accurate.
- Frazz has one in this strip◊ for climatologists. See Snow Means Cold for details.
- The Far Side was full of these.
- Calvin And Hobbes, beginning with the names of the two main characters referencing philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.
Professional Wrestling
- Vince Russo has been known to make gags out of referencing pieces of obscure wrestling trivia, particularly during his time in WCW. Take the (in)famous "San Francisco 49ers match", which featured Booker T, Jeff Jarrett and boxes on poles. One box had a "coal miner's glove", referencing a terrible match that took place years earlier between Sting and Jake Roberts, and another had a picture of Scott Hall, who hadn't been on television for some time but had remained notorious behind the scenes for drug and alcohol problems. Eventually these crossed the lines from "bonuses" to "Viewers Are Geniuses about Esoteric Behind-The-Scenes Wrestling References"... which most weren't.
- In the women's match at Survivor Series 2001 it was a 6-pack challenge. The match's format itself will make someone grin who knows about the careers of the women involved. Each team had one woman who had previously worked in WCW - Jacqueline Moore and Molly Holly, one who had worked in ECW - Lita and Jazz and one who was only WWE - Trish Stratus and Ivory note Aside from GLOW Ivory never wrestled for another major promotion. Another bonus is that each of these sets of women wrestled each other in the match. Lita and Jazz started off, then it was Jacqueline and Molly and finally Ivory and Trish were involved in the decision.
- Little Egypt's Gratuitous Rap in GLOW is surprisingly well-researched.
- "Even though I may be little, I'm the answer to the Sphinx's riddle" - technically she's right as she is a human after all.
- "Here's one wrestler who never fails, there's action behind my seven veils" - the dance of the seven veils performed by Salome for her father King Herod's birthday. As a reward she asked for John the Baptist's head on a platter.
- The character herself is a Genius Bonus as she is a Hot Gypsy Woman when you consider that gypsies were mistaken as Egyptians by medieval Europeans.
- Matt Stryker is notorious for these. He seems to have a vast knowledge of professional wrestling history and movesets that could constitute an entire encyclopaedia.
Radio
- BBC Radio 4 quiz show The 3rd Degree. Steve Punt's introductions to the specialist rounds usually incorporate some highly esoteric reference to the subject in question. Although this is Played for Laughs, the references do (usually) make sense... if you're an expert.
- In Dragnet, the idea was to present police work as realistically as possible. So, the characters used accurate police terminology and codes without providing explanations for the audience. In most cases, listeners caught onto what was being said in context. This was carried over into the TV series.
Toys
- Cabbage Patch Kids is a well known line of dolls that's been around since 1978. However, what some people may not know is that the name is a reference to one of the myths surrounding "where babies come from". One of those myths is that they're "found in the cabbage patch", inspiring the name of the toyline.
- One of the dolls in the Lala Loopsy line is Patch Treasurechest, a living doll who likes to play at being a pirate. He's said to have been sewn into life on September 19th... but how many grade-school girls are going to recognize that as International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day?
Theater
- In Evita, the musical based on the life of Argentine First Lady Eva Perón, mourners at Eva's state funeral sing a Latin chant based on the real-life Roman Catholic prayer, the Salve Regina. The original prayer references the Biblical Eve, known in Latin as Eva, meaning that the chant can be read as a prayer to Eva Perón herself.
- At the very end of Urinetown, the Narrator, Officer Lockstock, concludes the tale of the eventual decay and collapse of the town's society when people are allowed to use water without restraint by shouting "Hail Malthus!" This is a reference to a Malthusian Catastrophe, which is exactly what Urinetown illustrates.
Theme Parks
- The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Walt Disney World features a scene in the queue area where you see skeletons of pirates playing chess. The average person would think nothing of the way its arranged, but apparently, Imagineer Marc Davis set up the pieces specifically so that it would result in a neverending game- justifying why the pirates were playing up to their deaths!
Video Games
- General Pepper from the Star Fox series. Think about it. If you don't get it, here's another clue for you all: in the Star Fox comic in Nintendo Power, Fara asks why Pepper didn't do something. His answer? "I was only a sergeant then..."
- In Batman: Arkham Asylum, the last health upgrade is described as the batsuit being soaked in a secret formula. While the description is pretty vague, it sounds very much like a dilatant.
- In The World Ends With You, the math jokes that Sho Minamimoto makes vary from simple to comparatively advanced.
- To give a notable example: Level i Flare, which is lightly foreshadowed by the mentioning of imaginary numbers. The "Level x" spells in the Final Fantasy games hit all enemies whose level is divisible by the number placed in x. i is the square root of negative 1, and negative 1 is a square root of 1. In addition, i is the most basic imaginary number, meaning Level i Flare is a powerful attack that will hit more than a Level 1 Flare would.
- As with Discworld, these jokes are all over the place in Kingdom of Loathing.
- These include jokes about J.R.R. Tolkien's "Cellar door" idea, and a parody of the rats' song from the novel version of Coraline.
- Symphony of the Night's "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!" won't be immediately recognizable (if at all) by most gamers unless they know André Malraux.
- Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness: Episode One has the first robot you meet ask you "01100110 01110101 0110001101101011?" "01100110 01110101 0110001101101011!". 01100110 01110101 0110001101101011 is binary for "Fuck". The robots want to rape you.
- The opening of Persona 3 is full of philosophy, including a whole paragraph of Descartes that gets flashed on screen for a couple seconds. The PSP remake prefers Nietzsche, and it throws in some complex math too.
- The Shin Megami Tensei metaseries, which includes the Persona games, is also generally chock full of very obscure mythology references. The tameable/fusable "demons" include Greek and Roman gods, Judeo-Christian angels, both Eastern and Western dragons, Japanese mythological creatures and even Aztec deities.
- The entire Persona series is rooted in Jungian psychology, mainly the titular personae and the shadows the characters fight regularly. Persona 4 also utilizes some Nietzsche in it's underlying themes as well, both in the stereotypical Nietzsche Wannabe sense and Nietzsche's actual philosophy.
- Speaking of Persona 4, Izanami may come right out of left field when introduced as the ultimate mastermind behind the game's events, unless you know that Izanami is the wife of Izanagi - the Protagonist's initial persona - in Japanese mythology. In fact, the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is named after the Japanese underworld where Izanagi went to see Izanami after she died.
- Certain games in the series like to focus on a particular mythology or religion, offering little moments like these to people who know a lot about them. Persona 3 had Greek mythology, Persona 4 had Japanese mythology, and the Digital Devil Saga duology focused on Hindu mythology and Buddhism.
- Dmitri and Jorge of Backyard Sports throw in a lot of references to computer programming.
- Ratchet & Clank 3 contains a pair of of planetoids named 'Obani Gemini'. Both planetoids have their own name - one is 'Castor', the other is 'Pollux'. Castor and Pollux are the two main stars of the Gemini constellation.
- And when The Dragon tries to create an artifical third planetoid, she names it 'Obani Draco', after a huge constellation (the fact that she and the constellation are The Dragon is a coincidence, but brilliantly fridgy).
- Starsiege: Tribes and its sequel Tribes 2 featured a number of maps with obscure names that would seem meaningless to most people, but brilliant to those who know something about archaeology (Skara Brae), meteorology (Katabatic), history (Masada), metallurgy (Recalescence), et cetera.
- The Neverhood has a few bizarre jokes that only make sense if you've read The Bible.
- "Hang me from a tree by my hoop and we can play Absalom!"
- And then there's that one story in the Hall of Records that parodies Gnosticism...
- Well, the entire Hall of Records is a parody of the Old Testament.
- In Team Fortress 2, The Sniper has an apricot air freshener. The "apricot" is a real-world sniper slang for the medulla oblongata, a popular "sweet spot" to aim for. The team has confirmed this was an intentional reference.
- Likewise only those that play a lot of FPSes are likely to get the fact he drives a camper.
- In the "Meet the Spy" trailer, one of the many signs on the board at the beginning reads "defenestrated". Defenestration is the act of being thrown out of a window, which actually happens to the Sniper later on.
- Another example from "Meet the Sniper". The line "be polite, be professional and have a plan to kill everyone you meet" is a popular quote amongst United States Marine Corps soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- World Of Warcraft is so chock full of references to other things that even the smartest player is bound to miss on a few. On the websites that collect data about the game, discussions about new items frequently flare up concerning whether or not the name of an item or an NPC references something or not.
- Everywhere in Touhou, especially in the spellcards and music. By far the most famous is the title of U.N. Owen Was Her?, referencing the Agatha Christie story And Then There Were None, in which the characters are invited by someone calling themselves U.N. Owen (i.e. Unknown).
- The boss to whom the aforementioned song belongs also has her second to last spell card named Secret Barrage "And Then Will There Be None?". The SAME boss also has some other spell cards with terms such as Starbow Break and Catadioptric.
- The Komeiji sisters have many of these: their costumes are negatives of one another, Koishi's theme sounds the same played backward or forward, and many of Koishi's spell cards have Psychology related themes such like Instinct "Release of the Id", Suppression "Super-ego", Subconscious "Rorschach in Danmaku" and of course, the one that Dr. Freud would be proud of Rekindled "The Embers of Love", which is basically a barrage of danmaku phalluses. And yes, MOST of the attack patterns used by these bosses and others do reflect the meaning in their names. Also, from the wiki:
Koishi's musical theme, Hartmann's Youkai Girl, may refer to Eduard von Hartmann (whose most famous work is entitled The Philosophy of the Unconscious) or Heinz Hartmann (as many of Koishi's spellcards seem to make references to ego psychology.)
- Classic example in Grand Theft Auto III, a series of levels labeled "The Crook", "The Thieves", "The Wife" and "Her Lover"
- In Super Robot Wars, this and Bilingual Bonus crop up occassionally in the names of mecha and their attacks. This is only notable because almost all of the games are Japan-exclusive, making this the primary method of figuring out the correct way to say the names. One notable example is the "Ley Buster" attack, which was called "Ray Buster" until fans made the connection between Ley Lines and another character's "Akashic Buster" attack.
- The Subject 16 puzzles in Assassins Creed II contain all sorts of references, typically about various cultures' versions of The End of the World as We Know It. The "radar" puzzles in particular will contain hidden text, often in binary or other languages, that further expands on what Subject 16 is trying to tell you.
- The Half-Life series is full of these, mainly regarding physics, and quantum mechanics in cosmology. This is where most people hear about Dark Energy and The Calabi-Yau Model for the first time.
- In one of the sidequests in Mass Effect you are sent to eliminate a rogue VI, which is an advanced computer intelligence that doesn't have the self-awareness to become true AI. When you destroy the VI, it sends out a signal that your helmet displays as binary. It translates as "help", so the people who translate it know the VI actually did become self aware.
- In another sidequest, Shepard will quote Crime and Punishment.
- Several of the location names in the first game are references to the history of space travel, ranging from the commonplace to the obscure.
- The Tereshkova system is named for Valentina Tereshkova, first woman and first civilian in space.
- The Gagarin system is named for Yuri Gagarin, first man in space.
- The Grissom system and Grissom Academy are named for an in-universe character named John Grissom, likely a reference to John Glenn/Gus Grissom, the first and second Americans in space.
- The planet Benda is named for a minor planet in the solar system's asteroid belt.
- Mass Effect 2, in one of Shepard's favorite shops on the Citadel, charming the clerk results in Shepard saying:
- When Legion hacks a rocket turret during their loyalty mission, one of the possible random comments is "Executing sudo command." 'Sudo,' short for 'superuser do,' is a Linux command that allows an admin to give certain users temporary admin privileges.
- Mother 3 had a few, but by far the most egregious example is the naming of the Magypsies (Ionia, Doria, Phrygia, Lydia, Mixolydia, Aeolia, and Locria) after the names of the modal scales.
- Tales Of The Abyss uses the modal scales as well, though not as explicitly. Tear is a "Locrian" Sergeant and Van is a "Dorian" General. It's easy to assume these are indications of the hierarchy in Daath, especially when you consider who's at the top - Ion, who's named after the first modal scale.
- There are other music bonuses in Abyss on top of that. In Tales Series games you're normally limited to carrying around fifteen of each healing item. In Abyss it's extended to sixteen. Why? In everyday life, we like things rounded into fives and tens. But in music, it's (usually) simplest when things are in four - 4/4 time, for example. So the game rounds it to a multiple of four instead of a multiple of five. Another one occurs when you open the menu and realize it's decorated with musical staves.
- You also get bonuses for having knowledge of the Kabbalah - that's where the names Sephiroth, Qliphoth, Daath, Keterburg, St. Binah, Grand Chokmah, Hod and Malkuth originate from. It's especially fun when they give places a double meaning. "Keter", the term from which Keterburg originates, represents the divine will of the God to create - appropriate, since Keterburg is where Jade decided to play God and create the first replica.
- And there's a little literary one - you can find a Vorpal Sword in the same area in which you encounter an enemy called the "Jabberwocky."
- The English translator for Pokemon Diamondand Pearl is also a writer for Something Awful. So for fun, he subtly slipped in a few references that a meme-savvy gamer might catch, such as the line "My Pokemon is fight!".
- Also there are tons of weird, out-there Pokemon that are based on obscure animals.
- The Thief series has a few of these:
- Thief: Gold features a mission with several obscure nods to Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera. First, the protagonist encounters a man named Raoul living in the caverns under the opera house (albeit in the musical, Raoul is not the one who resides there, but the Phantom's real name - Erik - is not mentioned in the musical). Further allusions include a ballet dancer named Christine being mocked for her lower-class upbringing (the protagonist of the musical, Christine, was orphaned and raised in the opera house) and a haughty soprano storming out of a rehearsal telling the manager to "find a new leading lady" (a central plot point in the musical).
- The phrase "Bunch of taffers in this city" is used in multiple missions in Thief 2. Since "taffer" is the all purpose curse word in the series, and the city is always referred to as "The City", this hearkens strongly to the oft-repeated "Bunch of savages in this town" line from Clerks.
- Also in the second installment, there is a book titled "Hunting of the Frumious Bandersnatch".
- The graphics for bard songs in Forsaken World use correct musical notation. (For those who aren't musically inclined, the description lists the notes in text.)
- Twelve in Street Fighter III, whose speaking is half understandable in battle, but has his victory quotes (as in after the battle) are all in binary code. One of the funniest is 00101 01101 00001 01111, meaning "LMAO". note The first character's binary representation is incorrect, however, as a character in Twelve's cipher is representable by its index in the alphabet ("00001" for 'A', "00010" for 'B', etc.). "00101" is 'E', not 'L'; 'L', instead, is supposed to be "01100".
- The music for one of the nastier dungeons in Final Fantasy IX uses a slowed-down version of the opening of "Dies irae," the best-known of Gregorian chants, as its bass line. Since it's an ominous chant about the Day of Judgment, it's rather appropriate.
- Some secondary villains on the first disk are called The Black Waltzes. Zidane guesses there are only three of them because of the name. The Waltz is performed at three beats to the measure.
- Dragon Age: Origins includes a banter in which Leliana is praising Wynne for doing good for its own sake rather than for show, and comparing her favorably to women in her homeland, who will make boasts such as "Today I washed the feet of forty lepers." This is a reference to a common practice in Real Life history; medieval women would wash the feet of lepers (considered unclean, the lowest of the low) as a means of showing their charity and humility.
- And in the Leliana's Song DLC, which tells the story of her Heel Faith Turn, there is a scene where she is escaping from jail. One of the fellow prisoners she rescues (who joins the party) is named Silas. This is likely a reference to the Biblical apostle Paul, who, like Leliana, got religion and repented of his previous life of sin and was imprisoned with his future helper Silas.
- In the Zelda series, the most obvious nod is to a certain Celtic goddess of horses. However, one can drive oneself mad with what appear to be this, such as noting that the Koroks in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker look suspiciously similar to how kodama are depicted in Princess Mononoke.
- Silent Hill: Homecoming has an unusual one. The original series was developed in Japan, and would have lots of forgivable errors regarding American culture. Homecoming was developed in the United States, and the devs had Shown Their Work regarding background details about the US Army. If you understood military culture at all, and you remembered that the devs were in the States and had done their homework, you had a good chance to guess The Reveal right about the time you finished the tutorial level. There's no way Alex could be mistaken for anything except someone trying to impersonate a troop, even if it is because of psychiatric disease.
- In The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim, the Sabre Cats have bodies more similar to bears than cats, with many a player probably thinking this was some fantasy take on saber-toothed cats. Well, the genus Smilodon had bear-like bodies stockier than modern day cats, with the most accepted theory being that it was an adaptation to take down large prey such as mammoths. Mammoths also live in Skyrim.
- All over the place in Marathon, which contains numerous references to philosophy and mythology (the name "Durandal" was not picked out of a hat). Many of the terminals also contain gibberish characters... some of which are actually hex values that contain meaningful messages if one knows how to decipher them. The developers even went so far as to hide the code for an entire multiplayer level in two terminals that, to the average user, contained nothing but a long string of nonsense.
- In one mission in Modern Warfare 2, a corkboard in a terrorist safehouse holds a diagram of the chemical structure of RDX, a military-grade high explosive.
- While gamers are an audience expected to understand a lot of military jargon, Modern Warfare basically requires the player to sit down with a book of U.S Military code phrases to get a full idea as to what is going on around them. "Oscar Mike" is just the start. For instance, anyone familiar with the phrase "Broken Arrow" will undoubtedly have an additional Oh Crap moment at the start of "Wolverines!", whereas the rest will probably wonder what the hell that Christian Slater movie has to do with a Russian invasion.
- During the Chernobyl mission's sniping section in Call of Duty 4, Captain MacMillan tells the player to compensate for the Coriolis effect.
- Dungeon Overlord:
- On the Mission screen, a Warlock is teaching a goblin about the golden ratio.
- The illustrations for Primordial Elements contain Platonic Solids corresponding to the element in question.
- Resident Evil: Revelations. Ever read the The Divine Comedy? Play this game and count the references. It may take a while.
- Diablo II: The first game featured a type of high-level demonic enemy called the Balrog. That is, there were several palette swapped variants, and the most powerful ones were called Balrogs, but the type they all belonged to were also called Balrogs. That's just an obvious J.R.R. Tolkien reference. But in the next game, while some enemies are still called Balrogs, the broader type they belong to is now "Megademon". Since "bal" in Sindarin means something like "might" (Quenya: "vala", cf. the Valar, Tolkien's "gods"), and "rog" means demon, "Megademon" is a stylistically odd but pretty much direct translation of "Balrog".
- The Sims Medieval: in a quest you get the screenshot of a tablet with writing in Runes. The transliterated message is: nom donuts are so good like them lots
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer on XBOX contains a plot where The Master takes over Angel's body. David Boreanaz; who plays Angel, cameoed as The Master in the season two premier after the character was killed off.
- Similar to a reference further down, Professor Layton happens to have a colleague called Dr. Avogadro. If you're a mathematician, this instantly becomes hilarious.
- In Resident Evil 5, the player encounters Reapers, which are mutant cockroaches with praying mantis-like arms. These mutated arms are likely a reference to the fact that cockroaches and mantises are—as unlikely as it seems—evolutionary relatives.
- In Dominions 3, each playable nation is based on real-world mythology and history. Many unit and commander types, and almost all national hero units, are based on specific people. The game is still fun if you don't know the references, but there are a lot of historical in-jokes and tie-ins to get.
- In De Blob 2, the intro text for the Soda Cannery level has one of the characters drinking Blanc Cola and remarking, "Yuck! What's in this? Waxed Tadpoles?"
- RayStorm is actually a reference to the Roman Empire and its fall. For starters, the bosses are named after enemies of the Roman Empire and are even fought in the places where said enemies came from. This gives more insight to the story.
- The combined form of Bit and Byte in Mega Man X 3 is known as Godkarmachine O Inary, which is basically a big old mish-mash of Shinto and Buddhist references. Bit and Byte's Japanese names (Vajurila FF and Mandarela BB) are also Buddhist references.
Webcomics
- Irregular Webcomic! does this a lot. DM Maus tends to explain the references for those who don't get them in The Rant, though. Even then, they can be a bit brain-breaking and tough to understand.
- Schlock Mercenary does a cool arc where the villains use command injection to force a CCTV system to sleep for ten minutes. When a QR code is held up to a security camera, the system reads the commands contained in the code and executes them because the administrators never changed the system's admin username and password from their defaults. The QR code in question is displayed to the reader, so what happens when you use your smartphone's bar code scanner to read the QR code the character is holding up? Your phone returns the following data:
- UID='ADMIN'
- PASS='DEFAULT'
- CMD='sleep, 600sec, noprompt, fnord'
- Gunnerkrigg Court makes some obscure references without stopping to explain: Though Reynardine's character is more based on Reynard the Fox, his first meeting with Antimony references the seduction from the English folk song "Reynardine". Similarly, Winsbury and Janet's secret relationship is a reference to the song "Willie O'Winsbury". The First Treatise copies poses and Latin from the Mutus Liber, a 17th-century Hugenot alchemy text. And Chapter 17 references Medieval German master swordsman Johann Liechtenauer.
- Tom Siddell seems to be particularly fond of song references. Mr. Eglamore's name contains yet another one.
- Listening To 11.975 MHz, if you understand every obscure literary, mathematical, and radio reference, you need to get out more often.
- As a comic that bounces around between physics, psychology, math, philosophy, and general geekery jokes, you need to be fairly cosmopolitan in your background to enjoy Dresden Codak. It's worth it though.
- The author mentions at one point that the comic probably wouldn't work in another medium but the web, where readers don't have near-instantaneous access to obscure information.
- The entire cast (and most of the dead bodies) in Weapon Brown comes from various syndicated comic strips. Identifying all of them and picking up all the references and in-jokes would take someone who's a talking encyclopedia of the hundred year history of comic strips.
- This Bob and George:
Ran: The way I see it, we've broken every law of physics except the third law of thermodynamics.
Dr. Light: Aha! Negative two Kelvin!
Ran: Nevermind.
- xkcd is loaded with these, to the extent that some have called xkcd a series of obscure references that occasionally involve jokes, rather than the other way around.
- Cyanide and Happiness actually had a week's worth of strips called "90% Of The General Public Won't Understand Week".
- In a filler comic of El Goonish Shive, the Demonic Duck informs Dan that he's going to Australia to discover his roots. There is fossil evidence of a large, prehistoric bird that lived in Australia which has come to be known as the "Demon Duck of Doom".
- No Black Plume does this from time to time.
- Homestuck is chock-full of references to video games, pop culture and bad movies, but its biggest bonuses are probably in astrology. People who study the astrological signs will often find the corresponding trolls to be either spot-on representations of their supposed traits... or humorous subversions. (Such as the tradionally rational, serious Capricorn being deployed as their friendly neighborhood stoner.)
- Don't forget all the biology bonuses. While Hussie is a bit artistic with the trolls, the fact that the handle abbreviations are genetic code pairs (GCAT), and the fact that Bslick's "cancer" is caused by an error in his genetic code are completely sound.
- Especially if you consider that The "cancer" was caused by Karkat, who's chum handle (carcinoGeneticist) practically means "creator of Cancer". He's also the Cancer troll, and John changed his handle from valid genetics to "EB", (a mutation) after Karkat messed with Jade, who brought it up, causing John to decide to change his handle.
- Also don't forget the first three kids' sylladexes. Those three are commonly used data structures in computer science. Extra Genius Bonus Points goes to Rose's Tree Module, specifically an AVL tree, which mandates that the two subtrees of a binary tree must not have a height that differs by more than 1 (and consequently all the subtrees must follow this rule). As such, the auto-balance is a perfect double rotation that would be used in an AVL tree. Shame it doesn't handle the deletion of the root element very well, like a real AVL tree.
- The Packrat already expects the reader to be a synth geek, but still, spotting the many unmentioned but accurately drawn synthesizers and other electronic devices is a nice bonus.
- The Illustrated Guide To Law does this every now and then. In its section on Duress, for example, the members of the outlaw biker gang engage in discussions of physics and philosophy and multiple dimensions while brawling. In its section on Entrapment, the physicist has real equations on the blackboard behind her.
- Chasing The Sunset plays with this a lot. In one notable instance a broken automaton lets out a stream of plusses and other symbols which, when compiled with a brainf*ck compiler (it's a programming language) spells out "beep".
- Narbonic is chock full of refs on literature and manga and comics, many of which are not apparent even to the aficionado without reading the "Director's Cut" version.
- Spinnerette nails it with the engineering crowd by one super hero claiming to fly via the 'Left Hand Rule'.
- Ursula Vernon, author of Digger, has a degree in antropology and an interest in the more obscure mythologies (South American, Balkian). This shows up frequently in her works.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Half of the comments made by Brain in Pinky and the Brain.
- Half of the comments made by Brian in Family Guy.
- And a great many Non-sequiturs that leave a majority of the audience going, "huh?", while a handful are laughing with tears streaming down their cheeks.
- Some of those moments would require a pretty big knowledge of musicals
- Family Guy is nowhere near as funny unless you have a good knowledge in 80s and early 90s pop-culture.
- Back in the earlier seasons particularly, there was an extra layer of funny for those who live or have lived in Rhode Island. Lately, however, they seemed to have abandoned that.
- Lampshaded early in the episode ''One if by Clam, Two if by Sea'':
Louis: Nigel's charming! All British men are!
Peter: Yeah, right...that's what they said about Benjamin Disraeli.
(Cut to Benjamin Disraeli at a writing desk)
Disraeli (scornfully addressing the camera): You don't even know who I am.
- Another episode noted that Jesus's actual last name is Hong.
- Futurama contained a large amount of jokes relating to scientific concepts. For example, a dating agency had a sign reading "discreet and discrete", a joke which would make more sense to mathematicians. (Although, Word Of God says that it is a reference to discrete electronics, not mathematics.) Other jokes included binary, and not one but two bilingual bonuses in the form of "languages" (actually encrypted text) which the viewers were left to translate/decrypt for themselves.
- There are so many mathematical jokes in Futurama that the writers did a special for the first movie's DVD with a real Mathematician dedicated to explaining them.
- Math isn't the only topic they do this with. How many people will get all the jokes about decades-old politics in "A Head In The Polls", for example? And not just the Nixon stuff, but the Bull Space Moose Party, which is a joke almost a century old.
- Or the obscure webcomic joke, to boot.
- "Wow, I love symposia"
- They note several of these jokes during the Creator Commentary. Following the explanation for the 'Aleph-Nought'-plex theater as "infinity, but a small form of infinitynote Specifically, it's an infinite quantity that can be indexed by the natural numbers, unlike, for instance, the set of all reals.", the voice actor for Fry chimed in:
Billy West: "That is the nerdiest thing in the universe. However, it's only the fifteenth nerdiest thing in Futurama..."
- "It's so cold, my processor is running at peak efficiency!" -Bender, Bender's Big Score
- It's probably the only TV show, ever, to include a homage to Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, the Holophonor.
- And the Professor bemoaning how a horse race was so close that it came to a "Quantum Finish", but they changed the outcome by measuring it.
- Or the beer in Klein bottles, on display next to St. Pauli Exclusion Principle Girl beer.
- In "The Honking," Bender sees a string of zeros and ones on the wall, and tells Fry and Leela it's gibberish, then sees it in a mirror and panics. The creators are very coy about the significance on the commentary, but anyone who bothers to check will find the backwards string, 1010011010, is the base-2 representation of 666.
- "The Prisoner Of Benda" is full of these. The Couch Gag is "What happens in Cygnus X-1, stays in Cygnus X-1" — a fact that's almost certainly true, since Cygnus X-1 is the most famous observed black hole candidate. Then Bender proves he's a robot through a reverse Turing test. Finally, at the end of the episode, the Globetrotters use abstract algebra to sort everyone back into their proper bodies. Naturally, the math checks out. And they said math has no practical applications!
- It should be noted that the theorem and proof used by the Globetrotters were developed specifically for the show - in this case the practical application was "resolve a cartoon plot twist in a mathematically valid manner." The creator of this theorem is writer Ken Keeler, who holds a PhD in applied mathematics.
- In "Fry and the Slurm Factory" the chip in Bender's head reads "6502", the model number of the 8-bit 6502 microprocessor.
- "The Why of Fry" appears to take its name from "The Why of Y".note For the non-mathematicians/programmers - the Y combinator allows an anonymous function to be defined in terms of itself, exactly what Fry does to his own life during that episode.
- In Hell Is Other Robots we encounter the Church of Robotology, whose logo is a jagged line, the schematic symbol for a resistor in electronics. I.e. "Resisting temptation".
- In one episode, they go to a dance club called "Studio 1^2 2^1 3^3," the math adding up to "Studio 54."
- In “Law & Oracle” there is a reference to Erwin Schrödinger and the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment:
URL: Erwin Schrödinger, huh? What's in the box, Schrödinger?
Schrödinger : Um... A cat, some poison, und a cesium atom.
Fry: The cat! Is it alive or dead? Alive or dead?!
URL: Answer him, fool.
Schrödinger : It's a superposition of both states until you open it and collapse the wave function.
(Fry enter the car)
Fry: Says you.
(Fry opens the box and a cat jumps out of it, attacking him. Fry screams. URL takes a close look at the box.)
URL: There's also a lotta drugs in there.
- On Rocko's Modern Life, the guys are making a cartoon and have some problem taking the film out of the camera with the lights off. When Heffer asks to turn the lights on to see what they are doing, Filburt says, "That'll expose the film, Eisenstein!" To most viewers, this will sound like a mispronunciation of Einstein; those familiar with film history will recognize it as a reference to Soviet silent film director Sergei Eisenstein.
- One could argue that this is the best kind of Genius Bonus - it's funny on a level most people can understand, but to knowledgeable people, it's even funnier.
- Fillmore! contained a surprising number of these, in a addition to the regularly spoofed cop show tropes; including a quick, but legitimate discussion of whether Judy Blume has subtext, and shout outs to Charles Laskey, Miles Davis, Arthur Schopenhauer, and others.
- Garfield and Friends:
- The name Federico Fettuccine (the director character in "Lights! Action! Garfield!) is probably to many people an Italian-sounding name with a food reference. But to those with the right knowledge of film history, it's an obvious reference to Federico Fellini.
- Daria, being the genius that she was, often made quips at her family's expense in relation to literature she enjoyed. Odd for a teen animated show, most of the titles she referenced averted Small Reference Pools of teenage life.
Jake: "Why do they make sewing needles so damn SMALL?"
- An episode of The Simpsons brought this exchange between Homer and Lisa: "He's nailing something to our door!" "Hmm, I wonder if it's theses?"
- Which, surprisingly, wasn't even close to the first "Martin Luther nails something to a cathedral door" joke in The Simpsons:
Lisa: I've created Lutherans!
- In "Much Apu About Nothing", Chief Wiggum prepares his men to deport illegal immigrants:
"Allright men, here is the order of deportations. First we'll be rounding up your tired, then your poor, then your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Sounds familiar?
- The Simpsons is full of obscure — and accurate — mathematical references. You may be surprised to know that many of the writers possess advanced degrees in physics, mathematics and astronomy, among others. Many of the same writers moved on to to work on Futurama. Given the futuristic bent of the latter show, it's even more packed with scientific references.
- This fact lends itself to a Genius Bonus from Arrested Development in which Michael refers to the child of Harvard alumni as "Probably some geek Simpson's writer's kid."
- The "Homer 3D" episode was full of references to mathematical equations, physics and 3D graphics once he enters the 3D realm.
- The UtahTeapot can be seen in the 3D world, as well as many 3D graphics primitives used as standard building blocks in 3D modeling, such as spheres, cubes and pyramids.
- One of the equations in the background (1782^12 + 1841^12 = 1922^12) is very obscure. It 'almost' disproves Fermat's Last Theorem, which states that such an equation should not be true. If you do it on your calculator, it seems to be correct - the error is in the eleventh decimal place, which is more than most calculators will display.
- Not to mention that the place he's in is an Einsteinian representation of space-time and the vortex he creates is therefore a black hole which leads to an alternate universe.
- The library from Myst also shows up, along with the music that plays when you are infront of it.
- The chalk lines drawn on the wall where Homer vanished are a reference to the Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost".
- The rhyme scheme that the Jonah Jameson Captain Ersatz rambles is the pattern for a Petrarchian sonnet.
- In the episode Thank God, It's Doomsday, God reverts everything back to normal and shouts 'DEUS EX MACHINA!', which means in Latin 'God/s in the Machine', as well as meaning 'excuse to make everything suddenly go well for the protagonist'.
- In the episode 'Mountain of Madness', Mr. Burns say that "there's more organization in a Marx Brothers film", which nowadays wouldn't be that known. Now, the true Genius Bonus is in the Latin American translation. Burn's phrase turns into "Hay más orden y cordura en película de Buñuel! (There's more order and sanity in a Buñuel's film!)" Those familiar with the name know that the famous Luis Buñuel is one of the masters of surrealist film, and that along notable and famous surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí, made the film 'Un Chien Andalou'. The Latin American translations of the Simpsons episodes are famous for translating jokes and phrases that are not much known in the United States, instead they mention events and characters that are known through Mexico, South America and Spain.
- Actually, (and I could be wrong, but I don't think I am)...Burns says "Ritz Brothers", which many would know as a cheap Marx Bros. knockoff. Something akin to Ritz Bros=Go Bots to Marx Bros=Transformers....
- Not to mention referencing HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness in the title.
- In one of the "Treehouse of Horror XIII", several historical criminals come back as zombies including the most evil German, Kaiser Wilhelm ( Hitler was Austrian). This isn't as much a genius bonus as a "paid attention in 9th grade history" bonus.
- In Black Widower, Sideshow Bob is prisoner 24601.
- In one episode, Lisa is trying to complete a cryptic crossword with the clue "Yentl singer" (13). This is too short to be Barbra Streisand and Lisa is stuck until she triumphantly cries Isaac Bashevis.note
Isaac Bashevis Singer was the author of Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, which the movie was based on.
- The show also has some not-so-well hidden science jokes
Homer (about Lisa's perpetual motion machine): In this house, we obey the Laws of Thermodynamics!
- The villains in the episode "The Crepes of Wrath" are named César and Ugolin, which were the names of the antagonists in a pair of french Novels, Jean de Florette, and Manon des Sources.
- In The Venture Brothers episode "The Lepidopterists," two OSI agents claim to be amateur lepidopterists as an excuse for helping him fight the monarch. A lepidoperist is, of course, someone who watches butterflies.
- more specifically, someone who COLLECTS butterflies... as in impaling them on pins in little display cases.
- In "Self Medication", Sgt. Hatred makes a reference to Henry Darger. This while at a movie that is obviously LOTR inspired... double genius bonus since Darger was kind of a darker, damaged-goods version of Tolkien.
- In the episode "Return to Malice", 21 names his revenge scheme for 24's death "An Eye for an I." Go look up Exodus 21:24.
- Brock has just bisected an assassin, vertically. As he drags the body away, he tells Dean to get a phone number from his coat and call "The Cleaner" and tell him "we've got a 'Damien Hirst' in room 204." Hirst is a controversial conceptual artist who is known for, among other things, creating anatomical sculptures of humans with various layers of skin and muscle peeled back.
- The episode "ORB" is positively dripping with this trope. A scene set in the late 19th century chronicles the precursors of The Guild and the OSI. Most people could probably recognize the references to Twain, Tesla, Wilde, and maybe even Crowley. But there probably weren't that many who knew that Fantomas was a character from a series of French novellas, or that Sandow was a real-life strongman and the father of body-building. To take this trope to rediculously meta levels, the characters attempt to solve a series of riddles using Wikipedia and end up entirely in the wrong place. The Alchemist calls them out on this, pointing out that the meaning of words change over time. He uses an old dictionary to prove his point and find the location of the final clue.
- The show is PACKED with references of all sorts. There are at LEAST 30 an episode. You don't have to have an eclectic knowledge of art, literature, television, music, film, philosophy, religion, etc. to enjoy the show, but it certainly helps!
- Animaniacs. Particularly for the supposed target audience, but even amongst adult viewers there were some references that were quite obscure... enough so that there's a Cultural Reference Guide circulating the Internet.
- There's even an example in Veggie Tales - in Silly Songs with Larry, no less! During the song "I Love My Lips", while Archibald is showing Larry a series of Rorschach Test cards, near the end of the cards, if you pause just about 1:41, you see the number 6.023 x 10^23. For the average child, this is nonsense, which fits the song's theme. For people in chemistry, this is Avogadro's Number.
- There was a stand-up comedian who had a joke that, while in college at Lehigh, their basketball team once lost a game by Avogadro's Number. He then thanked the people who got that and laughed.
- In one episode of Arthur, Binky is frustrated because he wants to write a poem on a birthday card for his mother, but he can't rhyme. He goes to sleep and dreams that he ends up in a magical land called Verseburg, where "it's a crime not to rhyme," and Verseburg's authorities throw him in jail for his inability to rhyme. Binky ends up sharing a cell with William Carlos Williams, a 20th-century poet famous for his use of "free verse" (poetry that doesn't rhyme), and Binky asks, "So you can't rhyme, either?" Williams answers, "Oh, I can rhyme—I just choose not to. FREE VERSE! FREE VERSE! I'm a political prisoner." Williams then shows him a secret passageway out of the cell and gives him a rhyming dictionary. A few minutes later, the episode mentions Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda without any further explanation.
- Additionally, Williams and Binky escape jail in a Red Wheelbarrow, and the people of Verseburg give him a large tuna caught by Pablo Neruda.
- When Binky complains while wheeling Williams out of the cell, Williams quips that Binky's "lucky you weren't imprisoned with Sylvia Plath - now she's a heavy poet!"
- Spongebob Squarepants:
- In one scene in "Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost", Squidward has tricked Spongebob and Patrick into doing his every whim, and has them carry him around in a litter to various locations, which he dismisses as "Too hot" and "Too wet" They then stop in front of a background that looks like a fish-y version of a Moulin Rouge poster, which Squidward dismisses as "Too-louse Lautrec!" Cue rimshot.
- A Valentine's Day episode had Patrick look at paramecium under a microscope. Made all the funnier by how Patrick is most of the time an idiot.
- Horton Hears a Who!- It's pretty well-known that Jim Carrey likes to insert little impressions in all of his movies. In this kid's movie, as he (who's voicing the titular character) is being chased by the Wickersham Brothers, he randomly does an impersonation of... Henry Kissinger, of all people.
- During a talent show in Reboot, one comedian cracks a joke in binary, which is promptly derided for not being child-friendly. For those patient enough to translate it (or google it), turns out to mean "Take my wife, please!".
- That's just the tip of the iceberg. Any episode of Reboot can basically be described as "24 minutes of computer jokes", some of which require intimate knowledge of computer hardware from the 80s and early 90s to understand.
- There were also references that one wouldn't get unless one was very familiar with the show creators' previous work. In that same episode about the talent show, a more crudely-rendered handyman and younger man appear, who are promptly booed off-stage. This is a reference to the Reboot creators' work on the (at the time) very cutting-edge CG in the 1985 music video for Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing."
- Many characters and jokes are based off of actual CGI development terminology. In the case of Phong and Ray Tracer their namesakes were actual rendering tools that were important in their visual look (Phong is a gradual shading composition tool that is evident in his metallic head and Ray Tracing is about layers of opaque surface reflections that can be seen in his crystal-like body suit). Also in the "Talent Show" episode, one group of musicians called "The Primitives" consisted of a sphere, a cone and a cube, which are the basic shapes of CGI called the primitives.
- In the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command episode "Ancient Evil", the Sealed Evil in a Can is a "living mummy" (found on a planet with all Ancient Egypt motifs the artists could imagine) called Natron the First. In Real Life, natron is a mineral that was widely used in the mummification process in Ancient Egypt.
- Archer frequently goes from jokes about anal and drunkenness to jokes about Indira Gandhi, Eugene V. Debs, and Herman Melville. "I would prefer not to." * click* "Bartleby the Scrivener? What, not many Melville fans here, huh?"
- Archer: Archer gives a gun, branded "Chekhov", to Cyril and adds that it tends to go off for no reason. Later on... nothing happens with the Chekhov gun, but the unreliable pen he also gave him does become important. So let's see, that's subversion, aversion, lampshading and playing it straight?
Archer: "God, I SAID the cap slips off the poison pen for no reason, didn't I?!"
Cyril: "I know, I know, but I just assumed that if anything bad happened it-it would've been-"
Archer: "No, do NOT say the Chekhov gun Cyril! THAT, sir, is a facile argument!"
Woodhouse: "Also woefully esoteric."
- Archer also tends to make obscure psychology jokes. At one point Lana tells Cyril that his sexual addiction is not a real thing. Cyril responds "Just wait until the new DSM comes out."
- In the second Strawberry Shortcake special, The Purple Pieman tries to enter the bake off in "Big Apple City" by making "kohrabi" cookies. "Kohlrabi" is a type of cabbage, hence why they taste so awful.
- Quite a few of the details of Avatar The Last Airbender would go completely over the head of anyone not familiar with written Chinese, or various intricate details of Asian cultures and history.
- There's more linguistic jokes: in the episode Bitter Work, Sokka promises to give up meat and sarcasm. The word sarcasm comes from the Greek word for meat/flesh: sarx.
- The Boondocks is rarely a subtle show. Some viewers might have missed the Wunclers parodying Bush's family and administration, since their actions work as jokes on their own and it's never stated outright. The comics became famous almost entirely for the author's stance on them, though.
- Not to mention that "Wuncler" sounds exactly the same as "Once-ler", a man who—in Dr. Suess's "The Lorax"—used business to drive out everything that was natural to the land and make it a desolate wasteland. Take notice in the episode where Mr. Wuncler tricks Robert Freeman into opening a soul food restaurant which drives the crime rate up so that he can buy the park next to it.
- My Gym Partner's a Monkey contains a surprising number, usually delivered by Windsor the Gorilla, such as when he explains what would otherwise be a fairly lame gag about an owl answering "Who?" to every question asked of it is, in fact, an illustration of the Socratic dialogue.
- Dexters Laboratory - Dexter's Joke. It's about the professor's wife being a pain.
- One comment on the video explains:
"I feel like there can be two meanings:
1) As many commenters have stated, hydroxyl ions are abbreviated as OH- or, in this case, HO-. So, the punchline will read: "That's no HO, that's my wife!"
2) He talks about the professor trying to "liberate" negatively charged hydroxyl ions (HO-). After the punchline, it could mean that the professor is trying to figure out how to "liberate" himself from his wife.
Either way, it is a GREAT joke, which definitely went over my head when I was younger!"
- In Ratatouille, Anton's food-induced Flashback hails from Marcel Proust's concept of "involuntary memory". Quoth In Search of Lost Time:
No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory â this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
- In the X-Men: Evolution episode "Middleverse", one of the devices created by mutant Forge is said to run on CP/M, a pre-DOS computer OS.
- Batman The Animated Series is *thick* with these, but one standout example is "Carl Rossum," a brilliant cyberneticist named for the author Karel Čapek and the main character of his best known play, R.U.R., a.k.a. Rossum's Universal Robots.
- In Fireman Sam, the Welsh wannabe rockstar being named Elvis Cridlington is funny for obvious reasons. It's even funnier if you know the popular but discredited theory that Elvis's name is of Welsh origin (Elfys Preseli).
- Phineas And Ferb: In The Movie, Candace wonders out loud why the mysterious force of the universe help her brothers so much. Buford says, "Well, why don't you ask it, Kierkegaard?" He gets weird looks from the others, to which he responds, "Existentialist trading cards. It came with the gum."
Baljeet: Would you like to trade two Sartre for a Nietzsche?
Buford: Alright.
Baljeet: Sucker...
- In the episode where they're at the endangered species benefit...
Scientist 1: I bet I'll have more species named after me than you. Care to make a wager?
Scientist 2: No.
Scientist 1: Why not?
Scientist 2: Because your last name is "Pithecus."
- When Lawrence drops an address and accidentally reads it upside down, he says that it's on Palindrome Road.
- The song writing staff are clearly familiar with Marxist economic theory, because they keep referencing it.
Doofensmirtz: And at the end of the day, there's more for me/'cause everyone else is the proletariat/ and baby I'm the bourgeoisie- Look it up, Joe!
- Heck, half of the humor on Phineas and Ferb is this.
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the ponies give Princess Luna a flower necklace as a sign of forgiveness. The flowers are red and white roses, together, symbolizing reconciliation within the royal family, just as the red-and-white-rose of the Tudor house in real life symbolized the reconciliation between Lancaster and York at the end of the War of the Roses.
- "Luna Eclipsed" has one that doubles as a Stealth Pun: Twilight Sparkle dresses for Nightmare Night as "Star Swirl the Bearded", a unicorn wizard from ancient times who was "father of the amniomorphic spell", according to Twilight. "Amniomorphic" means "bowl-shaped" in Greek, which means Star Swirl was a bearded shaper of bowls, or a hairy potter. In addition, the "amnion" is the term for the membrane that forms around the fetus of reptiles, birds, and mammals, meaning this may also be a Call Back to the spell Twilight cast in "Cutie Mark Chronicles" to hatch Spike's egg.
- In "The Cutie Pox", Apple Bloom all of a sudden gets a cutie mark shaped like a Fleur de Lis. Immediately, she begins speaking in French. The average American child watching the show is unlikely to be aware of the connection between a Fleur de Lis and the French language. And of course, if the viewer does not speak French, he or she will not know what Apple Bloom is saying.
- In the episode "Bridle Gossip", Zecora shows a number of strange habits or possessions that cause the ponies to conclude that she's evil. All of these are explained away in the episode as actually being entirely innocuous... except for her habit of pawing at the ground and digging small holes. This is something zebras actually do to find water — by pawing at the ground of dry river beds and the like, they can draw out water that's seeped into the ground.
- In "Read it and Weep", the Big Bad of the book Rainbow Dash is reading is Ahuitzotl, who is based on a real creature of the same name from Aztec mythology.
- In "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle is seen working at a chalkboard full of equations while trying to figure out the supposed disaster that her future self traveled through time to warn her is due to happen by Tuesday morning, and how she might prevent it. The equations in question describe the effects of time dilation.
- In "A Canterlot Wedding - Part 1", we get a musical foreshadowing bonus in the form of "B.B.B.F.F", as explained here and verified here. Long story short: a certain sequence of tones ending in a major chord is called an "authentic cadence". If it instead ends in a minor chord, it's called a "deceptive cadence".
- The goofy astronauts in Tom And Jerry Blast Off To Mars spout an extensive Joseph Campbell quote while wondering if humanity is alone in the universe:
Astronaut 1: The universe? An inconceivable immensity of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and clusters of clusters of galaxies, speeding apart into expanding distance. And humanity? A kind of recently developed scurf on the epidermis of one of the lesser satellites of a minor star in the outer arm of an average galaxy, amidst one of the lesser clusters among the thousands, catapulting apart, which took form some fifteen billion years ago as a consequence of an inconceivable preternatural event.
Astronaut 2: Well, I don't see anything.
Astronaut 1: Guess that answers that. Let's hit it.
- In My Life as a Teenage Robot, when faced with the proposition of building a dream chip for Jenny, Dr. Wakeman posits, "What do androids dream of? Electric sheep?"
- In the Doug episode "Doug's Brainy Buddy", Doug has a hard time believing that Skeeter could be a genius after the latter gets a perfect score on an intelligence test... until he notices Skeeter's collection of books includes Immanuel Kant's A Critique of Pure Reason, among other heavy science and philosophy texts.
- In one episode of Mad, a young time traveler knocks out his father with a "Titor" brand aluminum bat. John Titor was the name used by someone who posted on various internet forums claiming to be a time traveler.
- Shows up in a couple episodes of Adventure Time:
- In "Daddy's Little Monster", while Jake is recording Finn's fight with the amulet-possessed Marceline, Finn gets thrown at Jake and Jake shouts "Ow, my hippocampus!" Present!Jake says "That explains why we got amnesia", and he's right: the hippocampus is the part of the brain that supports formation of long-term memory.
- "Chip Off The Old Smurfs" from The Smurfs. Handy Smurf and Painter Smurf are arguing over Baby Smurf's future when Poet Smurf walks in to find Baby Smurf singing a song to himself, in baby talk, and rhyming the last syllable as he sings. Poet's response? "Why, listen to that, free verse!"
- In "Helga on the Couch", from Hey Arnold, one of the paintings on psychiatrist Dr. Bliss's wall is by Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth was involved in a complex, semisecret relationship with a model named Helga, whom the show's character in fact somewhat resembles.
- Mission Hill had a few, but one as a Running Gag. The gay couple Gus and Wally are huge fans of David Niven and Broderick Crawford. Anyone familiar with movies from the 50's will instantly recognize Gus and Wally as looking like Broderick Crawford and David Niven respectively
Other
- Though the (alleged) historical incident it refers to is relatively well-known, one suspects that the pun in the title of the Nero Burning ROM software package still went over many people's heads.
- There's a commercial for an Allentown, Pennsylvania dental clinic in which a little cartoon girl uses a hand mirror to count her own teeth. It's actually an in-joke for dental care professionals: she's too young to have adult teeth yet, yet keeps counting even after reaching 20 — the total number of baby teeth in human kids — indicating she must've lost count somewhere along the line.
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