• The Kay Jewelers ad campaign, with the tagline, "Every kiss begins with Kay". Took me a long time to figure it out. Luckily, I was alone on the viewing on which I finally got it, unlike my poor sister, who about a month later figured it out when the whole family was together watching TV.
  • This troper had never realized there was anything *to* get until just now. And now I get it. Wow.
  • Ooooohhhhhhhh...I get it now. I was looking for something way more squicky in there.
  • This troper didn't get it until she was watching TV with her mother, who promptly chimed in "and every hug begins with H".
• The current Gordon's Gin campaign, which is fronted by Gordon Ramsay. I walked past a billboard everyday for three weeks before I finally made the (obvious) connection between the chef and the product. Gordon's Gin...

• Funnily enough for this troper, it's Pokemon. No, not for the subject matter, or the characters, or even the Fetish Fuel. She had a true Moment when she watched a few episodes of the English dub again recently and understood what some of the titles were alluding to — i.e. pop-culture references. Seriously, how could she have missed something as blatantly obvious as Good 'Quil Hunting?!
  • This troper recently re-watched some of the old (really) old episodes out of nostalgia. Brock has a lot of... Interesting dialogue. ("She can violate my rights any time!")
  • It took this troper FIVE YEARS to get what was so funny about the exchange "I didn't know there were any vikings still around." "They mostly live in Minnesota." from the first movie.
  • This troper only just realized that fact that Ash had a thing for Gary's sister might explain Gary's dislike of Ash.
• The Samurai Pizza Cats had in its opening theme song "As soon as someone finds the script we might begin the show". Initially this troper thought it was just a throwaway line given the large amounts of fourth wall breaking... then he remembered the scripts to the original series were never sent over. They made all the dialogue up.
  • It took me a few years of the occasional repeats YTV used to air to get what, exactly, the dub was implying with Bad Bird and Jerry. And I really had no excuse no to catch "Ginzu Sword"...
• In Ghost Hunt, Mai's being psychic was NOT, in fact, a sudden occurrence as this troper originally thought. It was foreshadowed within the first few episodes, when she correctly guesses Naru's nickname. I can't believe it took me so long to get that.
• The fact that the title Outlaw Star refers to Gene's star tattoo coupled by how he's an outlaw.
• Recently watching the Full Metal Alchemist dub over again for the first time in almost a year. In episode 12, a minor villain who has some fauxlosipher's stones appears to run out, and Ed and Al are surprised to find that he has more. He says, at this point: "Didn't think I had the stones?" Just now realized what he was punning.
• This one was probably unintentional on the part of the writers, but watching Digimon Adventure again when I was a senior in high school and could actually read Japanese and actually hearing Patamon say that "it was written in Digicode," made me start cracking up. Half because it was a funny thing to do, and half because I remembered vividly falling for it hook, line, and sinker around 7 or so years prior.
• It wasn't until a rereading of chapter 140 of the Keroro Gunsou manga that this troper noticed Zoruru had been sitting in on Keroro's meeting from the start. That's right, Zoruru's presence is so slight even some readers didn't notice he was there.

• It took this troper over ten years to figure out the joke behind "Mr. Boddy" from Clue. He burst out laughing in the middle of class, and when asked what was so funny, just said, "It's funny because his name is 'Boddy' and he's dead."
  • Doesn't work in the original version, sadly, since the deceased's name was Dr Black before the game crossed the Atlantic...
  • So Dr Black died first...?
    • ... wow. That a swiss, or Fridge Brilliance?

• Pick an Asterix book, any Asterix book. Film parodies, political and social satire, sly tips-of-the-hat to rival cartoonists (especially Hergé, creator of Tintin), lampoons of French regional stereotypes... Goscinny and Uderzo packed the Asterix books with references to ensure that while the kids were enjoying the slapstick comedy and superpowered fights, the grownups could congratulate themselves on getting all the references.
  • And the names!. Dear god, the names. If you haven't read Asterix since you were a kid, you will crack up just reading the cast list...
• This Troper used to know every Calvin And Hobbes strip by heart, yet he can still go back, read one of the books, and suddenly get a joke that he used to be too young to understand.
  • I was a very sheltered child and didn't figure out what all those funny symbols were supposed to be for an embarrassingly long time.
• This 19 year old troper only just realized that Harley Quinn's name is a pun on "harlequin".

• Who Framed Roger Rabbit works on two levels: it mixes wacky cartoon antics (for the kids and kids-at-heart) with a traditional film noir storyline (for the grownups, and the kids when they grow up).
  • Not to mention the sheer amount of dirty jokes/visual puns that would fly right over a kid's head. "Booby Trap" and The "Jessica in Eddie's Office" scene comes to mind immediately.
    • Or the references to Golden-Age cartoons and studios — The Ink And Paint Club for example. ("Walt sent me.")
    • And then there was the subverted Parental Bonus: the photos of Jessica Rabbit "playing patty-cake" with the victim. The photos depict... Jessica Rabbit literally playing patty-cake with the victim.
    • The patty-cake scene also parodies a scene in Chinatown where a client is being shown pictures of his cheating wife.
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory may suffer from Adaptation Decay, but a lot of its humor (particularly for a family film from 1971), such as the Serious Business hunt for the Golden Tickets, is surprisingly sharp in a way that this troper didn't get until she was a preteen, and even more so as an adult. Gene Wilder's performance in the lead could be seen as one giant Swiss Moment once a kid has learned to understand both sarcasm and the various literary quotes he uses (just funny non-sequiturs to this troper as a tot).
  • Not to mention this Getting Crap Past The Radar quote from early in the movie:
    I am now telling this computer exactly what it can do with a lifetime's supply of chocolate!
  • The password to the musical lock is the opening bit of the overture to The Marriage Of Figaro. Upon hearing it, Mrs. Teavee nods knowingly and says "Rachmaninoff". This joke took me ten years.
  • This Troper was cast as Gwendolyn Fairfax in her high school's production of "The Importance of Being Earnest." Upon reading her script she realized that one of her lines, "The suspense is terrible! I hope it will last" was directly referenced in Willy Wonka. It was from then on known by cast and crew as "the Willy Wonka line."
• This troper just recently realized how freaking filthy Robin Williams' dialog in Mrs Doubtfire was.
  • We are talking about Robin "Get Shit Past The Radar" Williams.
  • This troper remembers watching that movie years later with her mother and suddenly realizing that the two guys who help Robin's character make the costume were gay. She said this quite loudly and with an air of astonishment that put her mother in stitches.
    • You think that's bad? My uncle was married to a woman who went by "Jack," as in, short for "Jacqueline." So when Williams says that "Uncle Frank and Aunt Jack" made the costume, my sister and I wondered why everybody was laughing. After all, we had an Aunt Jack. We were kids, but still. It took a while to hit us.
    • This troper understands. He has an Uncle Jessie (named after the famous outlaw) and Aunt Jack (like above Jacqueline).
  • "Oh I'm sorry, am I being a little graphic? I'm sorry. Well, I hope you're up for a little competition. She's got a power tool in the bedroom, dear. It's her own personal jackhammer. She could break sidewalk with that thing. She uses it and the lights dim, it's like a prison movie. Amazed she hasn't chipped her teeth." I could go on forever, but that one is my favorite.
• This troper thought the mom in Pleasantville just really enjoyed the bath until he read a review/synopsis several years later ...
  • I watched that with a high-school class and in the delicate discussion afterwards got to watch realization dawn on the face of the teacher (who wasn't a lot older than we were).
• This troper first watched Monty Python And The Holy Grail when she was a sophomore in high school. When she watched it, she thought it was one of the stupidest things she'd ever seen. The next day she was cracking up in the middle of class over how hilarious the movie was.
  • This troper's Monty Python-related Swiss Moment came the first time she watched the movie, because her parents (especially her dad) spent her entire childhood saying things like "We want...a SHRUBBERY!" and she would go "Dad, you're weird." Now, of course, she's the one quoting Python at every opportunity.
  • This Troper's parents had one of these upon said troper's first watching of the movie. They never understood why the ending was just solid black for a few minutes. They thought it was just them being weird. Cue this troper cracking up with laughter, as the black is because the credits people were fired during the opening of the movie.
    • I had this exact same Swiss Moment just yesterday.
• It took this troper four viewings of the Iron Man movie before he finally got the joke when Tony is boarding his plane and says "I got caught doing a piece for Vanity Fair." I kept thinking it was the car.
• It took this troper 10 years and many re-watchings of Speed to get the "Oh yeah, well I'm taller" taunt at the end. The fact that Keanu Reeves is actually taller than Dennis Hopper (even with his head) was confusing.
• The Muppet Movie: This Troper loved this movie as a kid and watched it countless times. It wasn't until rewatching it almost 15 years later that the running gag of "Can you help me? I've lost my way." / "Have you tried Hare Krishna?" made sense.
  • This Troper just had a Swiss Moment right now, as Peter David slipped a reference to this into an issue early in his run on X-Factor — Madrox is hunting a rogue duplicate in the Smithsonian, encounters Kermit The Frog and they exchange a similar bit of dialogue, although it's revealed that the Kermit puppet is being operated by the rogue dupe, who took it from its display case and proceeds to punch his pursuer in the face with it.
  • And while not being able to point out the specific Swiss Moment, the fact that a fork in the road was an actual navigation term and not just something weird for the movie...
  • Also the sheer number of cameos... Seriously, go look at the cast list and try to figure out how many of them you would recognize at six years old.
• This troper was fairly shocked when she finally discovered exactly how dirty most of Grease really is. Holy cow, how did I get away with singing this stuff as a kid? "Well she was good, you know what I mean"? "You know that I ain't braggin, she's a real..." well. You get the idea.
  • I didn't get the whole sequence after Rizzo leaves the slumber party for years and years. "What's up Kenickie" "One guess"?! "Sloppy seconds ain't my style"?! "Where are you going, to flog your log?"?!
• Something that goes straight over most viewer's heads, from Blazing Saddles: Cleavon Little, a black man, plays a character named Bart. In other words, he's Black Bart.
  • "Black Bart" was considered as a possible title for the movie. I think it got rejected because nobody got the joke.
• This troper finally had her Swiss Moment regarding Bill Murray's character in Little Shop of Horrors. That whole scenario went right over my head... for about eleven years.
• Upon re-watching Ghostbusters for the first time in many years, This Troper suddenly realized what the "Keymaster" and "Gatekeeper" bit was all about.
  • You can hide behind the same excuse I do, in that the first few times it was the television edit I saw.
  • It took me a while to work out what that ghost did to Ray in his dream as well...
• This Troper is ashamed to admit how long it took her to get the "Well you never know if it's going to run" joke ("A Little Priest") regarding politicians from the film/musical Sweeney Todd. She still facepalms thinking about that.
  • Same thing for this Troper. She also missed the "sweep, if you want it cheap, and you like it dark" until she started actually thinking about the lyrics she had been blindly singing along to.
• While in the car some five or six years after seeing the movie this troper with no prompting suddenly got the "cover of High Times" joke at the end of Road Trip.
• Don't ask how long it took to get the "red herring" pun from Clue. Just don't.
• The last scene of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids shows Nick laughing as he finally makes the connection between artificial respiration and French class. I made the connection several years after seeing the film.
• Even though she watched it quite a bit when she was younger, it's only now that This Troper is getting the more 'subtle' jokes in Robin Hood Men In Tights. One of the more prominent being why the Merry Men gasped at Robin's 'sword' in the 'Moonlight Serenade' scene.
• Some time in the late 1980s, this troper saw Young Frankenstein for the first time. Some time in May, 2009, this troper finally realized why the horses bray whenever Frau Blucher's name is mentioned.
  • Most likely, that troper is wrong. Most of the commonly cited reasons are apocryphal. It really is because she's just that scary.
• This troper was recently discussing Cast Away with a friend, who in the middle of the conversation realized why the volleyball's name was Wilson.
  • Wait, it's got a special meaning?
    • It's the brand of volleyball. If you didn't notice, then the name wouldn't make much sense.
• This troper never understood that final punchline to Marlin's sea cucumber joke at the end of Finding Nemo. Months later it finally hit home: "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?" was an Incredibly Lame Pun of that stock "with friends like these..." gag.
  • This troper only understood the conversation between Marlin and Nemo ("Forgot to brush." "Ohh..." "Do you want this anemone to sting you?" "Yes." "Brush.") after learning about clownfish and sea anemones.
• This editor is almost embarrassed to admit how old he was when he realized that John Belushi falling off the side of the sorority house in Animal House was a boner joke.
• Similarly, in Spaceballs, when Barf says "I'm my own best friend". This editor didn't figure that one out 'til his twenties.
  • Referring to a dog as "man's best friend" has nothing to do with sex.
    • You see, there's this thing called "Double Entendre"...
    • ...But that wasn't one. The full line is "I'm a mog: half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend." Mel Brooks certainly isn't above making cheap masturbation jokes, but that line honestly seems clean.
• Watching Pulp Fiction at the age f nearly 23 was a MAJOR Swiss Moment for me. So many parodies, nods, references and homages over so many years, that I had never understood previously.
• This troper has watched A Christmas Story with her family for years, and growing up was confused about why Ralphie got the bar of soap in his mouth for saying "fudge". She even thought that in some contexts, fudge could be a bad word but wasn't sure when. Fast-forward to when she was seventeen and bought the movie on DVD as a present for her dad, and going over the scene again and realizing what exactly Ralphie got in trouble for saying. Cue laughter and plenty of "How did I not get that sooner?"
  • I thought he really was saying "fuck" and was confused everytime I heard "But I didn't say that, I said the word." I finally realized a year ago (at the age of 20) that I misheard every time and he was actually saying "fudge".
• This troper saw Hard Day's Night several times as a teenager, but never worked out that Paul's grandfather being "a clean old man" was a reference to the same actor playing Albert Steptoe, whose son would frequently yell "you dirty old man!" Seriously, I never worked it out; I just found out just now because it gets explained on the Steptoe And Son page.
• There was a part in The Dark Knight where Joker says that Batman and co will capture Lau "and make him squeal". I assumed this was just the Joker being offbeatly terrifying as usual, until I later realised the double meaning: squeal as in 'like a pig', and squeal as in 'give up information'.

• Pick a Discworld book. Any Discworld book. The sheer amount to references to everything under the sun in the books has prompted the creation of the reference file. Some of the early books became far more enjoyable once this troper was able to understand all the jokes.
  • Witches Abroad is an overall satire on fairy tales and happy endings in general, but it was only some time after reading it that I spotted the significance of the main villain creating her artificial idea of the perfect fairy tale kingdom in the middle of a swamp. Hello, Disneyworld.
    • ...Oh my God. That one's not even in the file!
    • Probably because Disneyworld isn't in the middle of a swamp. It's in the middle of orange groves. The swampy parts of Florida are elsewhere.
    • It works if you go by the maps for sale there or at Disneyland.
    • It's in the middle of orange groves now....
    • Yeah, and it was before. Go ahead and check construction videos. Part of the part was supposed to have orange trees, but Walt marked uin a different color ribbon than the others and the truck driver was colorblind.
    • Actually, that was the original Disneyland in California. Have a look at Walt Disney World on Google Earth sometime. It's completely surrounded by patchy wetlands.
    • This troper heard that Disney World was almost built in New Orleans, but was built in Florida when it turned out the local government was too corrupt. Sound familar?
  • It took this troper until he saw the Animated version, to get the "Elvish" and other jokes in Soul Music, though as soon as I Heard it, I held my head in shame. Though I don't think I had heard of the "Bigger than Jesus" thing the first time I read it. To be fair, I did suffer from a speech problem, so even today, I sometimes don't fully connect how words sound and how they are spelt.
    • Ditto with the Signifigant Name of Imp Y Celin, when this troper read it at age twelve (yeah, I had few friends), I never got the point of Bud (Y) of the Holly.
    • The "Bigger than Cheeses" line isn't in the book, anyway. It's one of a few gags the scriptwriters added, and Pterry said he wished he'd thought of.
  • I just realised, this morning, that "knurd" is "drunk" spelled backwards. Only took me, what, twelve years?
  • This troper only recently realised, after reading Wyrd Sisters countless times, that when the Duke protests that he's not the Fool's "nuncle", this is the same foreshadowing as Granny's "A man has to be a born fool to be a king".
• I found and read my father's copy of The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy when I was seven. I liked it overall, but it took me nine years to get the "it's unpleasantly like being drunk'' joke. I was sixteen and sitting on a bus thinking about nothing in particular when it suddenly dawned on me. (Actually, when I went back and re-read that book as an adult I realised how many other jokes I'd missed, so I guess pretty much all of it could fall under this trope.)
  • This troper was actually thinking over the above moment and wondering what the joke was because he still didn't get it...before getting it. The full joke, for those who don't remember, is "It's unpleasantly like being drunk", "What's so unpleasant about being drunk?", "You ask a glass of water." This troper thought it was just riffing on drinking lots of water being a hangover cure — in fact, it's talking about being drunk like a glass of water is drunk.
    • This troper literally woke up knowing the answer. She didn't get it for years until she figured it out in a dream, woke up, and realized it wasn't normal dream nonsense, and that the explanation actually made sense.
    • This troper was actually ashamed that it took her the better part of a decade to get the joke.
    • This troper would like to thank you for explaining that joke, since he's only had the chance to read the translated (Finnish in this case) version of the book, and it made no sense there.
  • Another example: This Troper remembers a story about a kid who watched a short film about pollution, after which the teach casually remarked that the car looked like an old Ford Prefect. The kid suddenly burst out laughing, as he finally realized where the Hitchhiker's character's name had come from.
    • Even funnier if you remember how Ford met Arthur. (Arthur saved him from getting hit by a car due to Ford thinking that cars were the dominant species on Earth.)
    • For bonus points, the car that nearly hits him in the movie is a Ford Prefect.
  • It took This Troper several years of intermittent exposure to information on Richard Nixon to realize that the name of the computer Deep Thought may be a pun on Deep Throat (Adams himself having identified it as an "incredibly obvious pun").
    • Perhaps That Troper isn't quite old enough to remember Linda Lovelace...
  • About the third time I read the first book in the series, I finally understood how that mind control alien Drinking Game had this penalty that was "obscenely biological" and Ford Prefect played to lose.
  • It took this troper several months to get the "Stavro Mueller Beta" thing.
  • This troper only recently got the joke behind the phrase "the scale of the problem is not widely understood".
  • This troper only recently realised that the Guide's publisher, Megadodo Publications, isn't just a funny collection of syllables, but named after a "Mega-dodo" in the same way as "Mega-donkey" and "Mega-grasshopper". And, therefore, is probably a reference to a real publishing company named after a flightless bird...
• The first few times This Troper read Artemis Fowl, she completely failed to pay attention to the pen names the main character used when submitting articles to scientific journals. Then she noticed that Artemis had published an article on psychology under the name Dr. F. Roy Dean Schlippe.
• This Troper just got one — during the introduction scene of Starfighters of Adumar, Derek "Hobbie" Klivian tells the mission documentarian, "I'll get back with you on my last name. Lots of people misspell it." Indeed, his name goes back and forth between "Klivian" and "Klivan" depending on the source.
• Machiavelli's work, The Prince is filled with these. One good example: He describes Charles XII of France's troubles with invading Italy, one of them being that he could not deal with the Vatican, ultimately appeasing it, which was his ruin. The next chapter describes Alexander the Great's ease of conquering Darius's kingdom, which falls into a system much like the contemporary Turks, as opposed to the French. Sixteen chapters later, he compares the Vatican to the Turks, almost in an off-hand way. In essence, he's told the reader how to conquer the Catholic Church. This is also a prime example of Getting Crap Past The Radar.
• Peter David's Sir Apropos Of Nothing series has so many injokes that sometimes it took three readings for this troper to get them all.
• Laden with historical in-jokes and literary shout-outs as it is, the Anno Dracula series by Kim Newman is just freaking made for Swiss moments. For example, in Bloody Red Baron, the scene with the doctor and his assistant West operating on vampires didn't really hit me until much later. Nor did the incident in which the Red Baron shoots a small, annoying white dog...
• Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth is a classic, and most kids find it funny, but it wasn't until I re-read it at the age of 19, on a whim, that I got all of the puns. The book definitely operates on two levels — half of the jokes go over your head unless you're old enough to have heard the phrases they're punning on.
• This troper used to read [[Animorphs]] as a kid, and was also a pokemon fan. It was not until recently reading the Tropes page for the series that the joke "I have already made sure, Prince Jake. They think I am a "pokey man." I have told them I am an Andalite and am actually quite swift, but they insist they need to train me." refered to Pokemon.
• It took this troper an embarassingly long time to realize the puns behind the street names Diagon Alley and Knockturn Alley in the Harry Potter books. (The names sound like the words 'diagonally' and 'nocturnally'.
  • I only just got the Knockturn one now.
  • Grim Old Place, anyone?
• This troper was an adult before it occured to him that when Eeyore loses his tail, and Christopher Robin fastens it back on with a nail, he's pinning the tail on the donkey.
• The map at the beginning of The Tough Guide To Fantasyland is a map of Europe turned upside-down. I have had that book for what, three years now?
• This troper knew that David Weber liked to use Safehold's naming conventions play with names. One example he knew because of the wiki was Kynt Clareyk. One he utterly failed to see, however, until it was emphasized for a separate reason, was Nahrmahn Baytz.
• More of a fandom thing than actually to do with the Lord Of The Rings books, but the Agent Smith/Elrond jokes were much funnier after I actually saw The Matrix.
• About a week ago this troper realized that "Wayside" was an anagram of "Sideways", which is how the school is built.
• This troper realized just a few minutes ago that Nancy is a crude pun on Anansi.
  • And the title Anansi Boys itself is a pun on "nancy boy", the word for gay people back when "gay" meant "happy".
• It took a few math and physics classes for this troper to realize that the book within a book "The Squire of High Potternews" refers to the Pythagorean Theorem.
• I read 1984 before I knew much about the USSR. I reread the book recently, and I think I might've actually said "Oh!" out loud while doing so.

• Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the king of this. Nearly 200 episodes of that 90 minute long show exist, and each episode is piled high with layers of cultural reference humor, including metareferences, call-backs, and Memetic Mutation (for example, their joke "I thought you were Dale" when a movie calls attention to someone's hand resulted from either a) the writers misremembering two different commercials as the same commercial or b) metareferencing the parody film Kentucky Fried Movie). Often, their references were very specific. An untold amount of space on the WWW and Usenet has been dedicated to discovering the origins of all their references, some of which were extremely specific or obscure. When asked about specific jokes in interviews, the writers themselves can't always identify the origin of a joke. Some of the jokes from the series, which ended almost ten years ago, are still mysteries. In addition, the show, while being very family friendly, was not above slipping in more risque Parental Bonus style Swiss Moments. This density is one of the major reasons individual episodes have such great rewatchability (see also: Better On DVD).
• When this troper was a child, she innocently watched an episode of Sesame Street featuring a special guest named "Polly Darton." Several years later after hearing some news tidbit about Dolly Parton, she finally understood what had been pegged as boring.
• Anyone who watched Sesame Street as a kid will probably have a bunch of "Oh, so that's what they were parodying" moments when they get older.
  • For instance, this troper remembered a bit with an orange in a kitchen singing opera. Only upon embarking on a nostalgia binge did he realize that the orange was singing Carmen.
  • Also, Placido Flamingo.
  • "Colaaaaaambo" the Private Detective, too.
  • Don't forget their extended parody of Twin Peaks, of all things.
  • This troper can only imagine his kids' reaction when they figure out the Mad Men sketch.
• This troper grew up watching Seinfeld with his parents. It wasn't until he watched all the episodes again on DVD that he realized how much of the show he didn't get the first time around.
• A scene from an episode of Friends has Rachel and Ross breaking up when he says he won't take full responsibility for their previous breakup. He leaves after the fight, at which point she shouts to him, "And hey, just so you know, it's not that common, it doesn't happen to every guy, and it is a big deal!" at which point Chandler shouts "I KNEW IT!" It took this troper five years to finally figure out that they weren't talking about the breakup itself.
  • This Troper did the same thing with all the jokes about Joey having small feet. As well as countless other jokes. They were really too young to watch Friends...
• This troper only figured out a week before Heroes' third series finale that "Elle" is so named because it's the first syllable of "electricity".
  • Oh christ.
  Recursive trope moment?
  • Another layer is that "Elle" = "L," as in Lightning.
• The Adventures Of Pete And Pete was surprisingly sophisticated for a kids' show, making cultural references no one in its intended audience could have possibly gotten. For one example, in the episode with Little Pete tunneling his way out of being grounded, he finds a wallet underground, looks in it, and says "Hoffa!" and pockets it. There was no kid in the early 1990s who knew about the disappearance of trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa.
• In Dharma And Greg, it's revealed that Larry and Abby nickname each other Major Tom and Ground Control. This becomes much funnier and more fitting when you find out what the song "Space Oddity" is actually about.
• This Troper had one of those moments involving The Goon Show, and specifically an interview with Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe where Sellars was explaining that they sometimes got crap past the radar. His example was the character name Hugh Jympton, pronounced "Hugh Jampton", said it was rhyming slang for something else, and muttered the something else inaudibly to me, but to gales of laughter from the studio audience. Years later, I was leaving university for the day and, out of nowhere, thought "Hugh Jampton, Huge Hampton, Hampton Wick... oooh!", realising immediately that another British comedy had for an entire season run a serialised sketch called "Hampton Wick"!
• This troper, a nanny in her twenties, took far too long to realize that London Tipton of The Suite Life Of Zack And Cody was a No Celebrities Were Harmed, Disneyfied version of Paris Hilton.
• This troper, not two days ago, got a joke from Malcolm In The Middle about "some girl named Molly Hatchet."
• This troper finally got this one joke from the Spin City episode "The Rivals", in which the Mayor has accidentally caused former mayor Abe Garfield's death during an attempt to appease him, and blames himself for it. And this is in spite of having the DVDs for over three months and having watched it who knows how many times...
  James: Morning, sir.
  Mayor Winston: (somberly) Yes, I am, son. (hands on James's shoulders) The whole city is. (pats him on the shoulder, quietly) I'm sorry...
• This Californian troper was watching Rocky, set it Philadelphia during very cold weather, and thought, "Hmm, I wonder why it's never that cold in Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Ohh... right."
• It was far into adulthood that I got the joke behind "Fargo North, Decoder" in The Electric Company.
• This Troper's mother had quite a beautiful one regarding Wallace and Gromit: A Close Shave that she has never since been allowed to forget. A sheep is put through a machine which washes him, then sheers him. Wallace then picks him up and says "We'll call him Shaun." The family all laughed, including my mother. Three years later, she suddenly cried out "Oh, that's why he was called Shaun the Sheep!" Yes mother. Yes, it was.
  • This troper thought for the longest time that he was straight-up called Shorn...
• This troper's first watching of the Red Dwarf episode "Polymorph" was when she was about nine. Cue the scene of Kryten wearing his groinal attachment removing Lister's shrinking underpants and she giggled because it looked silly. It wasn't that funny. Many years later, an older and wiser troper watched the scene. And fell off the sofa laughing as she saw exactly what everyone else was seeing!
• When This Troper was a kid, my parents REFUSED to explain to me a joke in Black Adder where Black Adder, Baldric and Percy were all frameing the Baby-Eating Bishop of Canterburry by getting him drunk, and in the morning he wakes up in a bed with Percy in a very unusual costume.
  • I only just had a Swiss Moment about that very episode: I just realised that the beginning scene with Molly the inexpensive prostitute is a false Chekhovs Gun, with the audience expected to think that she would be the "second figure" in the painting at the end — making the reveal that it's actually Percy even funnier.
• It took me several years to get the double meaning of this Swedish Chef-skit.
• I only just realised why the prosthetic-nose maker from Red Dwarf: Back to Earth was named Swallow (i.e. because the character he's based on — the eye-designer from Blade Runner — is named Chew).
• A particularly embarrassing one: Pushing Daisies's first episode is called "Pie-lette." Pie-lette. I'm bad with puns, okay?

• This troper listened to Tom Lehrer songs from an early age; early enough to have had a moment when he realized what the "Old Dope Peddler" was selling.
  • Try re-listening to the song Smut
• This troper's parents listened to a lot of Meat Loaf when I was a child. I liked it but never understood it, until one day when I was about ten years old I turned to my father wide-eyed and asked, "Dad, is this song about sex?" The look on his face still makes me grin years later.
  • The baseball sequence in the middle of "Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" (I assume that's the above) took a while with me, too, when I was younger. Apparently, they didn't tell Phil Rizzuto about it either — he thought the script was improbably full of close calls, and didn't realize what he was actually "narrating" until he heard finished song.
• This Troper has a Swiss Moment when he found out a song called "Let's Go Crazy," which he'd only head as a kid on a Nintendo Piano lesson, was actually a song... done by Prince. That Prince. Though this may be more a case of Covered Up, since I'd never actually heard the lyrics before...
• Since the middle 1980s, this troper has had (and frequently listened to) a copy of Tom Paxton's song "I Sold A Hammer To The Pentagon", written during the Reagan-era Pentagon procurement scandals in which the military paid outrageously high prices for everyday goods, like $436 for a hammer. It was only in early 2008 that he figured out the punchline: the song comes in three verses, in the form "I sold X to the Pentagon, so you can sell Y, and we'll both be millionaires", where in the first two X and Y are related — hammers/nails, coffee pots/coffee. In the third verse, he sold toilet seats and merely says "you know what you can sell to the... Pentagon". It took this troper over twenty years to figure out Paxton was coyly saying that you could sell literal shit to the Pentagon and get them to pay through the nose for it.
• How many people figure out on their own that Rubber Soul is a pun?
  • Or even that the name The Beatles itself is one?
• This Troper just had one right this very minute, when a friend mentioned getting "Bu Fu'd" by a computer virus, and I finally, after almost three decades, realized what Moon Unit Zappa was calling her effeminate teacher when she dubbed him "Mr. Bu Fu" in the 1981 song, "Valley Girl".
• This Troper was doing a project in high school, and for reasons lost to the mists of time was transcribing the lyrics to the Dave Matthews Band song "Two Step." Halfway through, he shouted "THIS IS ALL ABOUT SEX!" confusing his mother and passersby.
  • This troper had the same reaction to "Crash Into Me".
• This troper listened to a lot of Sammy Hagar as a kid (This being my first exposure to heavy metal); my favorite song being There's Only One Way to Rock. It wasn't until roughly 10 years later, that I finally figured out what some of the lyrics meant...and I wound up liking the song even more.
• When I first heard "Violin" by They Might Be Giants, I thought the bridge dividing George Washington's head into quarters was just an arbitrary bit of silliness, albeit one that fit in perfectly with the song's already absurd lyrical bent, as well as TMBG's odd fixation with severed heads in general. I then realized it kind of makes a surreal sort of sense to divide George Washington's head into quarters, since George Washington's head is on quarters. It also took me ridiculously long to realize the TMBG EP title Back To Skull was a pun on "Back to school".
• It took reading this site for this troper to realize that The All American Reject's "Move Along" is about a guy trying to convince his girlfriend to not commit suicide. Namely, after he had made an Anime Music Video using the song and, Tales Of Symphonia (and its then-upcoming OVA). Guess what the big event one third of the way into that game is? Exactly.
• This troper has a song called "Green Lantern: Hal Jordan," by J-Sin Starr, on her computer in MP3 form. The track's album title is listed as "Three Million New Yorkers Died And You Weren't One Of Them." Over two years after having acquired the song, she read her first Western comic. She laughed very, very hard when she realized that the album title was a reference to that comic.
• This troper's swiss moment came when, after not hearing it for six or so years, recalled this poem.
  Mary had a little lamb/She also had a duck/She took it round the corner to teach it how to...
  Fry some eggs for breakfast/Fry some eggs for tea/The more you eat the more drink the more you want to...
  Peter had a boat, the boat began to rock/Up jumped jaws and bit off his....
  Cocktails, gingerales, 40c a glass/If u dont like it, we'll shove 'em up your....
  Ask no questions, tell no lies/I once saw a policeman doing up his....
  Flies are bad, mosquitoes are worse/And that is the end of my silly little verse.
  • ...Now children, what rhymes with duck? This troper was singing this to someone trying to recollect it, but couldn't get past the first line as the penny dropped. It was the only line that needed a Swiss Moment however, as the rest was self explanatory to an eleven year old.
• One of this troper's favorite songs from The Who as a child was "Squeeze Box". Today, reading Getting Crap Past The Radar ...
• Weird Al Yankovic is considered family-friendly, and this troper started listening to him at a young age. Which meant it was between ten and fifteen years later that he understood the meaning of "I'm stranded all alone in the gas station of love, and I have to use the self-service pumps".
  • This troper had the SAME DAMN thing happen to him. As a kid, he always thought that line was lame. And then...suddenly, it was funny.
• [[Mike K I] didn't fully get the joke of "Don't Pick It Up" by The Offspring until I started listening to more ska (well, specifically, I think it was when I first heard Operation Ivy's "Sound System" that I, er, picked it up): Ska songs often have musical breaks where the vocalist will shout "pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!", so The Offspring wrote a ska song about things one shouldn't pick up (such as dog feces, venereal disease, and gender benders).
• Listening to Julia Nunes' "Stairwell" this troper just now realized what was meant by "I'm lying here on the floor just like the man on the yellow cone": think of the fallen stick figure on the slippery floor signs.
• Once I found out the name of music magazine NME actually stands for "New Musical Express", the Gin Blossoms' album title New Miserable Experience seemed a lot more clever.
• This trooper had known the song "Girl at the Rock Show" by Blink-182 for years, but it wasn't until her senior year of highschool, that she stopped in her tracks while listing to the song and shouted "OH! Bon Jovi!" to the line "She took my hand / And I made it, I swear".
• I just figured out that the band name Days Of The New is sort of a reversal of "news of the day".
• I know I'm dating myself by admitting this, but back in the early Eighties when I was still a tween, there was a band named April Wine who came out with a song called "If You See Kay," which I loved. I heard it on the radio, sang it all the time and even taped it (and back in my day, we didn't have those fancy MP 3 players. We recorded songs by holding a tape recorder in front of the radio, and we liked it!). It wasn't until a few years later that I realized that the title of the song was actually the spelling of a certain word (sound it out).
• This troper used to listen to, and sing along with, Eve 6's "Inside Out" when young. Several years later, I find it on iTunes, put it on my iPod, and start singing along... "Tie me to the beeeedpost!" Wait, what?
• It took this Troper a while to figure out that David Bowie's stage name came from the main character of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman. Similarly, the song title Space Oddity.
• This troper used to really like the song "Metarie", by Brendan Benson when she was around eleven or twelve. She hadn't listened to it until recently, when she realised what the line "bought some mags on the way home/For later on, ya know, when I'm all alone" really meant.
• When I was in Grade 5, other kids used to ask me, "Can you sing high?" At the time, I could go well into the alto range and would gladly demonstrate this for them... only to have them laugh and/or repeat the question. At that time, there was a song in the top-40 charts called "High", but it took me well into high school to realize this was what they meant.
• The ultimate one for me: It took me over a decade to notice that "The Beatles" was spelled differently than insect "beetles" and that their spelling was meant to refer to a beat, as in the beat of a song. Then immediately, I realized that arguably the greatest band in music history had arguably the lamest band name of all time, and it saddens me to this day.

• The series The Far Side was notorious for this; there's a story about a college professor who placed a number of the cartoons on the door of his classroom — the more jokes his students got, the more they had learned.
• This troper and several of his friends find Calvin And Hobbes massively funnier now that they're older and wiser and thus understand much more of Bill Watterson's satire. This troper in particular has been known to cry and laugh at the same time while reading the books.
  • Somewhat lampshaded when Calvin quotes Paul Gaugin, haughtily responds to the quote, waits a Beat Panel, then asks "Who the heck is Paul Gaugin?"
• There's a Fox Trot comic in which Peter has a Dream Sequence with a pair of swimsuit models fighting over him. Then the models decide their suits are too pinchy and they should just take them off, at which point Peter is woken up by his alarm. This Troper first read that comic as an (apparently very naive) preteen, only realizing years later what the joke was.
  • Several arcs became way, way funnier after I read The Lord Of The Rings.

• My parents have been fans of Im Sorry I Havent A Clue since before my brother and I were born. Before our Swiss Moment, they had to explain away about half of the jokes with, "Maybe someone pulled a funny face" — that show was the embodiment of Getting Crap Past The Radar.

• Since the Munchkin card list is basically a Hurricane Of Puns, there's bound to be ones you don't get until later. For example: failing to recognise the significance of "Fire Arms", not connecting the Dn D creature known as the Rust Monster to the Munchkin Lust Monster, and so forth.

• Anything by Shakespeare is likely going to evoke this. When you read Romeo and Juliet for the first time in Junior High, it probably seems densely written and pointless, unless you're a fan of random death. Come back when you've got enough literature experience to figure out what the hell's going on, and suddenly The Bard's work is beautifully written and wildly funny.
  • Works the other way around, too, considering the sheer number of literature, movies and series that crib off Shakespeare plays, whether it's plots, names, quotes or homages. Reading them for the first time in college, This (French) Troper had a slew of "so that's what that was about" moments.
  • Also, Shakespeare was a master at Getting Crap Past The Radar. This Troper's favorite is the stuff Hamlet is saying when he's pretending to be mad. It was years before he realized that the stuff he says to Ophelia is downright raunchy.
  • This troper was actually amazed when freshman English class started reading Romeo and Juliet. "They're not old enough for the content," she thought to herself. "Freshmen are too immature to handle all these dirty puns." Then she realized that most of her class didn't get the puns at all, because they weren't quite as familiar with Elizabethan English as she was.
  • Really, Shakespeare requires things to be spoken and performed to be understood properly by a modern audience. Even then, you're probably best off seeing it a couple of times, just to make sure you're picking up all the little details.
• This troper has been a 1776 fan since sixth grade... and just recently realized what exactly John Adams was referring to when he mentioned "his favorite lover's pillow" to his wife.
  • Or when Jefferson is complaining about how he never gets to see his wife. That one actually got me to turn off the movie to go into the kitchen and ask my parents what they were thinking letting me watch it at so young an age.
  Jefferson: But I burn Mr. A.
  Adams: So do I, Mr. J.
• An improv troupe this troper watched a while ago did a game in which two of the three actors could only say lines given to them by the audience. One audience suggestion was "I like pie." For some reason — I don't even remember the rest of the skit — this came up:
  "What are you, a mathematician?!"
  *shrug* "I like pie!"
  • ...Five years later, in the middle of school, I suddenly burst out laughing. Damn it.

• This troper had a rather... different kind of Swiss Moment while playing Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. I'd read about a little bit of Nightmare Fuel in the cutscene right before Xion's boss fight, but I didn't get how her turning into Sora could be considered creepy... until I reached it in my first playthrough. Let me just say that Sora was never, ever supposed to have a voice that high pitched. Also, this line: "You're next, Roxas. I have to make you a part of me too." *shudder*
  • A very similiar moment with that same series: after beating both Kingdom Hearts II and 358/2 Days, this troper read the Kingdom Hearts II manga... and almost broke down crying, because Roxas's fate had finally been put into perspective for me.
• It took me until about a weak ago to realize the pun in the classic Final Fantasy enemies "Marlboro". Think for a moment. They're called "Marlboros" and their attack is "Bad Breath". If that's not a Take That I don't know what is. Also, headdesk-worthy.
• It took this troper over a decade to realize that "PlayStation" was a play (heh) on "workstation."
  • -blink- -blink- ... oh, you are kidding me. (Yeah, I still hadn't.)
  • ...Ow...that one hurt my brain...and my ego.
• And it took this troper far longer than he'd care to admit to get "Miles Prower."
  • ...Oh, great. Now I'm going to be spending all day trying to figure out what the pun is.
    • And now I get it and feel appropriately stupid.
  • This trooper never got it until it was explicitly spelled out for her. You are not alone.
• Due to the sheer number of pop-culture references (some quite obscure), Kingdom Of Loathing is likely to prompt some of these for most players at one time or another. This Troper had one recently when he introduced a Tron fan to the game and made a link, and another on noticing the names of the pets in the level 12 quest the quest involves starting a war, and there are adventures for each side where you get accused of killing a pet, which is named Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination set off WWI.
  • This a double-example, as the fish is owned by a frat boy, who yells about you killing the fish named after his favorite band.
    • The Ko L wiki gets into Dont Explain The Joke territory.
• Tracer Tong, in Deus Ex. Don't worry, if you're even vaguely familiar with some basic Windows command line commands to test network/internet status, you'll get it... eventually. Let's just say that several people's responses have been to headdesk repeatedly.
• The Guitar Hero series has quite a few references that will fly right over the heads of those unfamiliar to rock trivia. This editor thought one of GHIII's loading screen messages, "20 minute free form jazz odysseys are NOT okay", was just a Take That at another genre of music, but found out it's actually a reference to This Is Spinal Tap.
  • As is "Eleven IS louder than ten" from the first GH.
• This Troper just realized, in Mega Man Legends, in addition to the traditional Mega Man pun (Rock and Roll), Roll's grandfather is named "Barrell."
• ThisTroper could never understand why the ground on the title screen for Super Mario Bros. 3 was checkered. Then he noticed that the title screen opened with a curtain rising, and that there were shadows on the supposed "sky" that was the backdrop. He then saw that the blocks in the levels were bolted to the "sky" and casting a shadow on the sky. In the higher up levels, the platforms were hanging from a ceiling of sorts, and the platforms moving on the black lines were moved by gears that were apparantly poking through the sky. Then it clicked. The entire game was just a stage show. A play. Mario was never in any danger. We were just an audience.
• In Super Mario RPG, when Toad says "He Knows About Timed Hits", he was talking to the Goomba. I thought he was talking to Mario (The Goomba knows about Timed Hits), and the Goomba just decided to wander away for no real reason.
• It took coming across the Quotes Wiki for me to get this exchange from Enter The Matrix. Now I know that Onanism isn't an obscure religious thing.

• It took this troper until the second playthrough of The World Ends With You to realize the terrible pun in the "go to to √3" when you were supposed to go to route 3.
• This troper literally just got the "pun" in Punch Out: if the main character were taller, he would be called Big Mac.
  • Here's one I had for Punch-Out: in the Wii version, Von Kaiser's supposed to be a joke on German engineering. He makes clicks and ticking noises when he throws punches, there's a big SPROING noise when you knock him down, he talks about machines alot too.
• This editor always got a good laugh at the "You turn 360 degrees and walk away" line, and never really bothered to wonder why they call it an X-Box 360. It's because it's a complete revolution.
  • Which, amusingly, might explain why they call it a Wii too.
• This troper just had one for a groan-worthy Hotel Mario line, of all things: ""Maybe dis'll keep dat lizard king from playing with The Doors". Not even due to not being aware of Jim Morrison's Fan Nickname or anything.
• The Japanese console port of RayForce is called Layer Section. Just now, this troper noticed a (maybe intentional) pun in "Layer Section": "RayForce" in katakana is レイフォース (reifoosu) and and "Layer Section" is レイヤセクション (reiyasekushon). They both start with "rei."; write "Layer Section" with the L's mixed up with R's and you get "Rayer Section."
• This troper is watching a guy play through Assassin's Creed 2 on Youtube. I looked up Ezio's love interest on the game's wiki and saw that a "rather famous landmass" was named after her cousin. Her last name was Vespucci. I looked at that for a moment, wondering what landmass would be named "Vespucci". Then I inadvertently thought back to 8th grade American History, slammed my hand down on the computer desk, and yelled "AMERIGO!" Amerigo Vespucci was the namesake of the Americas.
• Two years ago, This troper wouldn't even be able to tell you what a May-December romance was. Fast Forward to today, she now knows, and feels kind of weird whenever she sees characters with the title 'May-December Couple' in Pokemon Battle Revolution.
• A short time ago I was playing a game on some site and one of the levels has you walking through a locker-lined hallway with 2 guns. In one of the sections of the hall is Michael Moore, who throws bowling balls at you. I just thought he was a boss and took him out. Then, a few hours later I suddenly realized that was a "Bowling For Columbine" joke.

• While rewatching the animated Iron Man series from the 90's, this particular comment struck me... (while doing a Fantastic Voyage into Hawkeye's body) "Whatever you're doing is making him do the horizontal hula!" "Just tie him up like one of your old boyfriends!"
• The Aladdin movies become infinitely more enjoyable for older viewers who have the frame of reference to understand Robin Williams' madcap impersonations and references.
  • Troper Tales: The genie's impression of Peter Lorre was used by This Troper in helping to explain his fondness for Casablanca to a friend and his girlfriend.
• Back when Toon Disney still ran it weekday mornings, this troper loved watching Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog; seeing the entire series in it's entirity from start to finish several times before it was removed from their schedule. A year later, when waiting impatently for the premiere of Sonic X, that I finally understood why Tails lifted up his dress while he said "I just noticed; I'm a girl!" while in the book of fairy tales in the final episode of the series.
• Any and all Looney Tunes, especially the classics of the '30s and '40s, which were intended for an audience old enough to buy movie tickets.
  • The spiritual revival Tiny Toon Adventures, despite being aimed at the 6-12 range, pushed this to its limits, crossing into getting crap past the radar territory. The feature-length How I Spent My Summer Vacation includes a pun on bigamy, an extended Deliverance spoof, and a throwaway line about Esperanto of all things.
• Certainly applies to the long-running The Simpsons. If anyone claims that they can watch one of the older episodes after a gap of a few years and not find new things to laugh at, then they're goddamn liars.
  • A major one for this troper was realizing that, in the episode where Santa's Little Helper gets lost and eventually is brainwashed to become one of Mr Burns' hounds, said brainwashing process is a blatant reference to the film version of A Clockwork Orange.
  • Or the joke about conjugal visits when Marge goes to prison and tackles Homer. So that's what that was about...
  • It took this (non native English speaker) troper about ten years to understand this joke:
    Bart: OK...steady, Bart. Taking ballet doesn't make you any less of a man. [opens the door; all the little girls point and laugh]
    Teacher: All right, girls, today we learn the dance of the Faerie Queens. You can either be a faerie, or a queen. It's wide open.
    Bart: [groans]
• This troper was watching South Park for ten years before realizing the connection between the name Tolkien and the fact that said character was black (the only black person in the town other than his parents).
  • You might kick yourself even more when I tell you that his name is actually "Token" and his last name is "Black".
  • Ironic because the character, Chef, was in the series from the begining.
  • Also, Butters Scotch.
• Shrek (in fact, this editor once heard Shrek described as "What Aladdin would be like if every character was The Genie.")
  • The first Shrek had a million Disneyland refs, and a lot of shots at Michael Eisner that no kid is going to get. The second Shrek? IMDb.com has about a hundred movie and TV refs from Shrek 2, and the target audience is going to get about 10 of them.
• Animaniacs and Pinky And The Brain feature a touch of political humor that you probably won't understand until your mid-to-late teens.
  • I mean fer cryin' out loud, the lead character in Pinky and the Brain was based on Orson Welles! No, not Pinky, the other lead.
    • Pinky and the Brain did an episode-long parody of The Third Man. There aren't even enough American grownups who know The Third Man to parody it on American TV (which is a shame).
  • Also, there were plenty of random pop-culture and animation-history references that went over the heads of even some of the high schoolers (or, at least, This Troper, who laughed for a good week solid upon finding the Cultural References Guide on the Web once he started college in 1995).
    • I remember Animaniacs lampshading it once: "We'll have to numb the pain with a little Anastasia!" (Tiny Russian Princess enters and smashes the villain with a mallet). Dot turns to the camera and says, "Obscure joke; ask your parents".
  • And that's not even getting into the...inappropriate jokes...
    • One scene that comes to mind is where Yakko and Dot are detectives. Dot is told to go find prints, and comes out with Prince (the singer).
    Yakko: No. fingerprints
    • HOLY CRAP!
• The (sadly short-lived) Saturday morning cartoon series for Sam And Max Freelance Police operated like this: sure, there's plenty of slapstick for the kids, but there's a whole treasure trove of old movie references in there too. One episode is a parody of The Thing. Another is a parody of A Sound of Thunder. And that's just two examples.
• Cartoons that got a lot of crap past the radar, such as Ren And Stimpy and Rockos Modern Life, become a great deal funnier once the viewers are old enough to understand what exactly is being implied.
  • This Troper, despite having a filthy FILTHY mind, did not get "Night of the Shaved Kittens" until he read the entry on Getting Crap Past The Radar on this very Wiki. He also didn't get the episode "Closet Clown" until he was much older. The line that made him spit out his drink? "I like ...rainbows!!!" "You're SICK!"
  • This troper recently figured out the pun of the mega-corporation "Conglom-O".
  • A prime example: this editor didn't even realize the following exchange from Rocky And Bullwinkle was supposed to be funny until nearly a decade after he first saw it.
    Rocky: Bullwinkle, that's a team of girls! What kind of games can you play with girls?
    Bullwinkle: Wow, this really is a kid's show.
  • Bullwinkle: Spider, spider on the wall/ Have you got no brains at all?/ Don't you know the wall's been plastered?/ Get off the wall you little... spider.
  • This troper heard about a student in a college class who laughed loudly when the professor mentioned Russian ruler Boris Godunov. He explained to the class that he had finally caught on to the joke behind the name Boris Badenov...
  • For this troper, the Bullwinkle references that did this were the "Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam" (much funnier after studying a bit of Middle Eastern poetry in lit class) and the "Kirwood Derby" (much funnier after hearing of the comedian Durward Kirby).
• Just about anything made by Mainframe back in the day. ReBoot and Transformers: Beast Wars were great shows if you're in the stated target audience. But not only are they just as good revisiting them ten or twenty years later owing to fantastic action and character development, but suddenly all the programming in-jokes in ReBoot and the mythology gags in Beast Wars come crashing down on your head as well.
• The animated version of The Tick has numerous instances of this.
• The musical number "Worthless", from The Brave Little Toaster, is only mild freaky (and catchy) when you're a kid. However, as an adult, you begin to realize what the song is actually about—aging and midlife crises. It goes from being simply slightly scary to utterly depressing.
  • I didn't get it until reading this page! Thanks for ruining my childhood!
• The Great Mouse Detective. 'Let Me Be Good To You.' This troper saw the movie for the first time when she was seventeen, and she could not believe Disney put that in a kids' movie. After much stunned blinking, she died lauging, because that was something she knew her little sister wouldn't get for a long time.
  • This troper recently saw it again and was surprised at one of the lines, "I'll take off all my blues", less because of the line itself and more because she could swear she remembered it being "I'll take off all my clothes", and still not thinking anything of it until years later — of course, the sexy girl mouse in question is wearing all blue, so it may just be a case of early association...
  • That's one of the prime examples of Getting Crap Past The Radar.
    • Really? I always found that to be more like throwing crap in the radar's face.
• The Flintstones had a number of these:
  • Man meets Barney and Fred, to hire them as private eyes: "Are you two married?" Barney: "No, just friends."
  • Long build up on this one: Fred and Barney have been practicing to get Wilma to the hospital in time when she's about to give birth. So when she announces the labor pains have started, they rush her to the hospital. Barney is bringing her along, when they run her into the hospital so fast that spins the revolving door and Fred is ejected. He flies across the street, through the revolving door of a hotel, where, he quiet innocently says to the desk clerk (thinking it's the admissions clerk at the hospital), "I'm looking for my wife, she just came in here with my best friend."
• During its original broadcast run, the name Federico Fettuccine in Garfield And Friends was, to this troper, a fair random Italian name with a pasta reference. Years later, after learning some things about movies, and specifically Federico ''Fellini''...
• Transformers Animated does something similar, with titles like "A Fistful of Energon" (complete with the bounty hunter Lockdown wearing a poncho in space) and "A Bridge Too Close", (which features Bulkhead building a space bridge for the Decepticons). There's also the episode "Mission Accomplished", in which Ultra Magnus tries to force Optimus Prime to deny the existence of Decepticons on Earth, as it might "embolden the enemy". Remind you of anything?
• This troper first saw The Lion King during its original theater run, and many times later on video, but didn't get one of Pumbaa's lines — a line which he practically had memorized — until he saw the musical more than a decade later: "I always thought they were giant balls of gas burning billions of miles away." And he'd already had the relevant knowledge for years, but never connected it.
  • Similarly, this troper just never bothered to menally finish Pumbaa's line from Hakuna Matata: "And oh, the shame/ Thought of changing my name/ When I got down-hearted/ Every time that I—". Took me years to realize it was a fart joke.
  • This Troper downloaded Be Prepared, mostly out of nostalgia. After watching the video on Youtube, he finally got all the Putting On The Reich references. Including the hyenas goose-stepping, based on Triumph of the Will.
    • You think that's bad. I didn't get the references until I watched it in German.
  • It took This Troper a few years to think to herself "Wait, during Can You Feel The Love Tonight....Nala gave Simba an interesting expression...and a short time later there's a baby...OH MY GOD HOW DID THEY GET AWAY WITH THAT??!!"
    • Having seen what you said, I just realised how accurate you are! Huh, I've been watching that movie for fifteen years, and ten years ago, I was too young to remember much of the subtleties, the remaining five years, I've been so busy ogling the amazing backgrounds in that scene that I've never actually bothered to focus on the characters. How's that for a Swiss Moment?
    • Oh my God I just now got that as well! Which is funny because for YEARS I kept thinking that, while beautiful, the scene was kind of lame since all Simba ever gets is one kiss. DAMN YOU DISNEY!
    • Watched Lady And The Tramp lately?
• All Dogs Go To Heaven: The beginner-level Swiss Moment is when the book Charlie uses to tell her the Robin Hood story is War And Peace.
  • If you want a reeeeeeeeeeaally tough Swiss Moment, you'll need to work out where they got the name "The Grand Chawhee" from. The head of parliament in Ireland at the time (where the film was animated) was named Charlie Haughey. Take That
  • And, like the character, Haughey was a scheming crook!
  • This troper had a Swiss moment for the sequel (it didn't hold up as well as I remembered). In the scene, Charlie asks Sasha what would her qualifications be for would-be Mr. Sasha. One of them is "breeding" which Charlie replies, "Oooh, I'd be good at that!" When I was was younger, I thought it was a reference to Charlie's mixed heritage as mentioned in All Dogs Go To Heaven. Now, this troper knows Charlie had something else on his mind.
• The first episode of Freakazoid features the title character operating the narrator like a marionette, then turning to the camera and exclaiming "Pull the string!" in a dramatic voice. Years later I finally get it. Seriously, how many ten year olds are familiar with the film Glen or Glenda, and what must their therapy bills look like?
  • Fully half of another episode is spent on an extended, scene-for-scene homage to the 50s Z-grade Forrest Tucker vehicle The Crawling Eye.
    • And the opening of the cartoon "Hero Boy" parodies the opening of The Abominable Dr Phibes.
• Buy 'N' Large. By and large. Seriously, it took me like two weeks to realize that.
• In Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown!, there's a part where Snoopy and Marcie get into a road rage incident with a French driver. When this troper was little, it was just a funny scene. Come high school and French class, however, jaws dropped as everyone suddenly realized just what Marcie's yelling and Snoopy's hand (paw?) gestures meant.
• It took This Troper several years to figure out just why Buzz's wings popped up after talking to Jessie at the end of Toy Story 2. He also didn't get the Basic Instinct reference in Hercules.
  • This Troper had a singularly more humbling Futurama Swiss Moment, realizing that Kif's last name, Kroker, is a play on "croaker" since he's an amphibian. In the year 2009, well after the show was canceled.
• This troper used to watch Frosty The Snowman on TV every Christmas season, and figured that Frosty saying "happy birthday!" every time the hat was put on him was just meant to be a silly non sequitur. But then it dawned on him years after: Frosty is born every time the hat is put on him!
• Watching the Superjail! pilot, I always assumed that the Warden's insistence that all of the insanity going on was a part of his plan was just another way of showing just how crazy the Warden was. But upon the fifth viewing, I remembered that the Warden told Jared to "let [him] take care of the Twins" . The entire episode was the Warden's Xanatos Gambit against the Twins for screwing around in his jail; it really was his plan.
• In the Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends episode Jackie Khones and the Case of the Overdue Library Book, Wilt has to has to assure another friend, Jackie, of not doing various things, including assassinate Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. The assassination of the archduke triggered World War One.
  • The first attempt on the Archdukes life failed, but ran into to the Assassin again at a restaurant where he was eating a sandwich. Guess Jackie's favorite food.
• Several years after the last time I watched Chicken Run, this troper just got that Rocky's shout of "FREEEEEDOMMMMMMMM!" was a Braveheart reference.
  • This is even better when you realize Rocky is voiced by Mel Gibson.
• This troper is not in the least mechanically inclined. Which was why it took years before they found out why the dragonfly from The Rescuers was called Evinrude.
• This troper refers to this trope as a "Blue String Pudding Moment" after one of the foods eaten by the Clangers. A friend recounted the tale of how she was nodding off to sleep one night and suddenly realised that "Blue String" was a pun on the dish cordon bleu (or "cord en bleu"), more than a decade after she'd watched the show as a kid.
• This Troper didn't realize that Darkwing Duck villain Taurus Bulba was referencing anything until years later. At the time it just seemed like an apt name for an anthropomorphic bull.
• Current example for kids of the future: "Little Howard's Big Question". Runs on childrens BBC and is a televised extension of a supposedly kids-and-parents stand-up/stage show, using adult human characters vision mixed (or powerpointed on stage) with various mostly preteen cartoon characters in fine Looney Tunes-lite fashion. However anyone between the ages of about 20 and 40 will be paralytic with laughter — and at the sheer number of in-jokes and references in it. How is a six year old supposed to get jokes to do with the X-Files, Harvey, or Dangermouse? (I guess these days they could just google for the info, but a large part of this trope is realizing there's a joke/reference there in the first place — it's almost always played straight, with the child characters either not clocking anything or being confused).
  • PS, I'm not sure whether to put this in Western Animation or Live Action TV, can it be both?
• Another current CBBC series — Timmy Time (a sweet hearted little spinoff-squared of Wallace And Grommit, via Shaun the Sheep) — seems to have the odd veiled reference/homage in it which the target audience may one day understand. For one major example, a toddler hedgehog who curls into an invulnerable ball and rolls around at high speed when spooked, popping soccer balls and other fragile obstacles. Plus a badger classmate who always walks around with arms and legs akimbo as if about to do a squat thrust, and a pig wearing what looks like a fisherman's pullover. Not to mention they all talk in a certain onomatopaeic style.
  • In fact having sampled a lot of modern kids' TV in the last few months thanks to the iPlayer et al, I'll have to stop before I go too much further. Suffice to say that Oucho the cactus is a dirty, DIRTY mexican potted plant. And not just because of the compost.
• I didn't realize this until JUST now, but in the episode of Reboot called "Identity Crisis", that Binome with an afro has a corrupted ID chip, which gives away his status as a traitor.
• It wasn't until I rewatched an episode of Rugrats that I realized it was a blatant parody of the movie version of The Fugitive.
  • On a similar note, I never understood Grandpa's joke about Borscht being able to "clean the grease spot off a driveway" until many years later when I tasted it for the first time. Didn't help that I had a mouthful when I started laughing.
• In the Futurama episode where Fry fights Zoidberg, the Anthem of Zoidberg's planet is the Star Trek TOS fight music.
• This troper only just got the joke in the title of Duck Dodgers in the 24th and 1/2 Century.
• It took this troper ten years to figure out that Cats Dont Dance was REALLY about how blacks were actually treated in 30's Hollywood.
• There's a scene in the Avatar The Last Airbender episode Sokka's Master where Sokka, the designated "Funny Guy" returns to the group. They implore him to say something funny, and he goes, in a completely Deadpan Snarker sort of way, "Funny How?" and the rest of the Gaang cracks up, and I never knew why. One year later, This Troper sits down to watch the old classic The Goodfellas. De Vito has a scene where he goes "Funny How?" with the exact same inflection. One week from that and I finally get the reference.

I can't believe that no one has mentioned this one yet, but one episode of SpongeBob SquarePants called "Sailor Mouth" is so much funnier when you know what can go into the dolphin noises when they say the word Spongebob learned on the dumpster writing...

• -> Spongebob: "Hey Patrick, how the *dolphin noise* are ya?"

• Related to this very wiki, it took me several months to realize the significance behind the trope name Steven Ulysses Perhero.
  • On the same note, this troper just realized the joke in the trope name Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion. She felt like a total idiot for not getting it sooner.
    • This Troper just figured out Zero G Spot. In her defense, she didn't even know what a G-spot was until an accidental search on The Other Wiki...
  • this troper had been wondering for over half a year why the Pokemon episode I Feel Skitty was in Getting Crap Past The Radar, since the potential Ho Yay innuendo was the furthest he'd seen the wiki reaching for GCPTR examples in a long time. He just realized: "feel" was taken as an active verb, not passive.
    • It can even be Getting Crap Past The Radar when taken as a passive verb: just replace the 'k' in Skitty with an 'h'...
  • Once again, a stroke of brilliance hits Dinru. She just realized why there's a lapmshade on the banner...
  • This one again, on the clothing trope title "Of Corsets Sexy" (again, well over six months). It had to be some sort of literary reference or something, because otherwise, why would it bother stating the trope name, and result, in such an antiquated way? Of course it's... *facepalm*
  • This troper was terribly embarrassed when she worked out Well Done Son Guy. Before in her head she'd been parsing it as "well done, son guy", like the father figure wasn't comfortable calling their child just "son", or like the person being congratulated looked up to them like a father but wasn't a blood relation. But no, she realizes now that it's a guy who just wants to be told "well done, son". Or possibly a guy who people want to say "well done, son". I feel so dumb.
• This Troper just got what that creepy alien icon that links to the "It just bugs me"-pages. It is a bug! duh!
  • This troper has never noticed those icons before.
• Ever since I found it on Fark, I have used variations of the line "police in Sweden made two cocaine busts the other day. I don't get modern art..." as an ad hoc test of wittiness in my audience. It takes just about everyone a second or two, and some people never get it.
• This troper finally just understood why the hell there is a lampshade on the TV Tropes logo. *facepalm*
• This Troper just noticed Buttercupistiny's user name is Buttercup. is. tiny. It may or may not be the purpose of her username but still how could I have not noticed?!
• This troper often wondered why "tea" redirects to the Pain Series on ED. He felt idiotic for not seeing it the first time. T-Pain.

• Girl Genius: This Troper only just realized why Agatha's last name is "Heterodyne" and why the elder Von Mekkahn's line this comic is hilarious.
  • "Heterodyne" is a joke...? I don't get it. D:
  • It's a technical term. That Other Wiki explains it. If you multiply (mix) two sine waves together, the resulting waveform contains two distinct frequencies. One of them is equal to the sum of the frequencies of the original sine waves, and the other is equal to the difference. The two frequencies produced are called heterodynes, and the process of multiplying signals together to make these new frequencies is called heterodyning. The theremin uses heterodyning to transform high-frequency electronic signals into pitches that the human ear can detect. (That's why there's music when Agatha goes to work.) Additionally, Agatha herself comes from the mixing of two different Spark bloodlines, which implies...
• It was days later when This Troper realized that homo is short for something else.
• It took me about three months to get the joke of this this Order Of The Stick shirt. And now I feel stupid.

• So [[Tyrekecorrea this troper]] heard her favorite athlete was to play in a women's basketball game in the Czech Republic. By then, they had beaten the Czech puns to death. This troper said she would "czech it out," referring to the game. Player's response: [[Fanservice "Love where your mind is at!"]] This troper was happy with herself, thought she got a laugh,and was snickering all day. By the time she realized how the player took it, it was eight hours later. This troper laughed till her cheeks hurt. "The game, not those, silly!"

Made funnier by the fact that both parties are women.

• This troper and a friend were once hanging out when she exclaimed, "Intense!". Her friend replied with, "You know what else is intense? *beat* Camping." This troper didn't get the joke until several weeks later in the middle of a class. For my fellow Swiss: intense= in tents
• "I wonder: how do you describe the flavor of sour cream?
• "It wasn't till my 30s that I realized that "arbitrary" division symbol showed two dots DIVIDED by a line."
• This troper discovered a few weeks ago, on TV Tropes, that "In America, you can always find a party"/"In Soviet Russia, party finds you!" meant that the ruling political party would find you through the secret police, as opposed to what This Troper thought it meant: actual partyers tracking down the person seeking the party.
• This troper has been playing the cello since the third grade. When she got to the age where people started making G-string jokes, she just didn't get it. At least, not until she learned what a G-string actually was, which wasn't until, what, halfway through high school? Oh, and she also can't bring herself to laugh at the word "fingering."
  • What if you were fingering a minor with a G-string?
• This troper was in the grocery store, about to pick what type of apples she loved. Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Macintosh... She had an epiphany and loudly went "Ohhh, that's what the computers are named after!" and got several alarmed stares for her trouble.
• This troper's grammar teacher once asked the class, "How is a clause like an elf? Because it's sentence little helper." Most of the class giggled politely. A few minutes into the lecture, one person began laughing hysterically.
• This troper first heard the "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side." joke in kindergarten, and, since the answer was so mundane, wondered what joke he was missing. Around 10th grade or so, he figured out that the joke was meta, playing on the expectations of a clever answer or pun, and that the answer being mundane was the joke.
• This troper was watching A Few Good Men, and as soon as Tom Cruise got drunk, was looking at a map online of "Generic Names for Soft Drinks by County". As soon as the movie was over, he said "I finally figured out why they're called Soft Drinks" and his roommate started laughing hysterically. For anyone else with this problem, it's because alcohol is a "hard drink"
• In one of those sudden realization moments... could "chain mail" possibly be thought of as a pun◊?
• This troper's friend admitted several months ago the truth of something I'd been trying to convince her of, (specifically, that she was good at Cosplay,) and said it was probably a triumph for me. I replied that it was a triumph, and that I was making a note here; "Huge success". It completely escaped her until today that I was referencing Portal.
• It wasn't until she was thirteen that this troper figured out why most of her friends from primary school never called her back when she wanted to play...
• A few days ago in English class we were discussing 1984. The teacher asked "What was the Party's position on sex (no pun intended)?" Most of the class giggled slightly, just to get it out of our systems. Then we hear an "OH!" from across the room, and everyone started laughing histerically.
• This tropers friend is terrible for this kind of thing. One time in Science our teacher was playing Nirvana and shut it off saying 'Nevermind.' Most of the table laughed a bit but Friend looked really confused, and being the horrible people we are we refused to explain it to her. Halfway through the next lesson, Friend let out an audible 'OH...I get it.'