Removed these examples which are not about a character failing to get a joke:
- Watch The Three Stooges shorts as an adult and you will be surprised to find that they aren't just about three guys giving each other concussions.
- The very first joke a lot of people learn is "Why did the chicken cross the road?"/"To get to the other side." The problem is that in this case, the joke is that there is no joke. To get it you have to be familiar with the setup/punchline format; you have to have learned to expect some kind of payoff when someone asks you a stupid question. But instead, everyone's heard and retold it by the age of about four without having any idea why it was supposed to be funny, and then by the time they're old enough to get it, Seinfeld Is Unfunny.
- Some people will use jokes to test how quick-witted someone is, such as with this example: A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is leaning against the headboard, a satisfied smile on its face. The egg, looking a bit irritated, grabs the sheet, rolls over, and says, "Well, I guess we finally answered THAT question!"
- Any song with innuendo-filled lyrics.
- Brazilian band Mamonas Assassinas, which appealed to children with songs that took Refuge in Vulgarity (one of their greatest hits involved a Portuguese woman going to an orgy instead of her husband). Many of the kids only understood what it was about after they were grown (and the band was long dead).
- Another famous song by them states that "Eating armadillos is good. Too bad it gives me back pains, because they're so short, which is the reason I'd rather have goats". Well, the point is "to eat" someone (or something) means something else in Portuguese.
- French band Billy Ze Kick did many songs about drugs, like 'Mangez-moi' ('Eat me', talking about hallucinogen mushrooms) or 'OCB' (name of a French cigarette rolling paper brand, famous for its long-size ones...). It was quickly a success among kids due to the funky music, and was hilarious to understand when they grew up.
- Sonic The Hedgehog features Miles 'Tails' Prower. Drop the nickname and you're left with a truly hideous pun that many kids growing up with the franchise were oblivious to until years or even decades later.
- ... oh! Yeah, that's, um, hilarious. Note, I played Sonic games when they were first out, and have only just got that.
- If you watch Animaniacs as a kid, you'll laugh because of the silly cartoon antics. If you watch it when you're a little older, you will laugh because you actually get the jokes now.
- Ditto Freakazoid, except this applies after your teenage years.
- And the Looney Tunes cartoons, particularly the Pepe Le Pew ones, which rely on a lot of character and verbal humor (and of course, the humor behind a sleazy French skunk chasing after pussy...cats), despite being tied to a formulaic plot.
- Rockos Modern Life has a tendency to evoke this on a regular basis for most people. One example is when Filburt was pissed off that Heffer ate all the potato chips and then began to stuff other things in his mouth starting with the potato chip bag, then a random car engine and finally a light bulb. Hilarity Ensues when you think about those science class experiments.
- ... ''what'' science class experiments?
- The potato/lightbulb ones. If I remember the episode correctly, the light bulb turned on when it was stuffed in his mouth, and the science experiment involves powering a light bulb with a potato.
I'm not sure why this page was changed from "Swiss Moment", but "Late to the Punchline" strikes me as a bit too bland in comparison. Sure, it's descriptive, but I'd like to nominate "Fridge Humor" or "Fridge Punchline" to match "Fridge Logic", "Fridge Brilliance" and "Fridge Horror", since it's essentially the exact same thing but with a joke rather than plotting or unfortunate implications.
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Here's an idea: because it doesn't fit well with the Fridge theme due to the important factor being the delay in reference to everyone else instead of a rather stunning and unique conclusion, why not Time Delayed Laughter? It gets the point across without being iffy, and is a fun play on words.
They are inverse. Late to the Punchline is when most people get the idea right away, but some people take longer to figure it out. Fridge Brilliance is when almost nobody gets the idea right away — when the immediate collective judgment is that the idea is a Wallbanger — but some people eventually find the logic behind it, or at least some logic behind it.
In short, Fridge Brilliance is when practically everyone is Late to the Punchline.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage — Paul McCartney
Actually, I think the major difference is that Late to the Punchline mostly happens inside a storyline whereas Fridge Brilliance is a Real Life phenomenon. Looking at examples between the two pages this is the main obvious one.
I've rewritten this page's description to take all this into account.
See you in the discussion pages..gif_100.jpeg){kind=avatar}
When the Troper Tales page was changed to TroperTales/LateToThePunchline, some of the examples (including mine) were lost in transition. What gives?
I like Fast Eddie's edit where the directions to place personal examples on the Troper Tales was converted from a big warning in the article text to a prominent source-only comment. It's less distracting to non-editors and hopefully less in-yer-face bossy to editors.
Discussion taken from the old article under Swiss Moment. Man, the YKTTW for this one was very poor: doing those properly in the first place saves a lot of trouble later.
Original dodgy 4 entry YKTTW
Scifantasy: Yanked out the second Re Boot example.
Doctor Worm: Not sure if this actually applies, so I'll just throw it in here:
Tom Lehrer: I remember particularly fondly a heartwarming novel of his about a young necrophiliac who grows up to achieve his boyhood ambition of becoming coroner. (Some laughs) The rest of you can look it up when you get home!
Klaue: I've heard lots of prejudice about the Swiss, but I diddn't know anyone outside Germany thought we're slow ;) You know, actually only the people from Bern and Basel are slow.
Frank75: Cut some Natter:
- This troper and his sister were juuust knowledgeable enough at the time to actually get the "Binary Standup" bit at Enzo's tenth birthday compilation party.
foamy: Cut this material, the people arguing mostly seem to have a weak grasp of relativity at best, rendered a moot point, as the initial post doesn't actually seem to be an example of this trope anyway:
- In Futurama, the FTL drive on the ship works by staying still and moving the universe around it. While patently ridiculous, this troper had helped design a video game for a school project using Open GL, and found that doing so was significantly easier than moving the camera and the ship itself.
- Unless you adhere to the "Brain in a jar"-theory, billions of creatures moving the universe around them as they "move" would tear it asunder.
- Which is exactly what they're doing according to relativity. So either Einstein was wrong or you are.
Bryndon: So while you were at it, you left this in-
"** Technically, before you had nice libraries like Open GL that would help you do all this 3D stuff (i.e., you programmed your own darn renderer every time), it was actually much easier to wrap your head around changing the entire scenery around than to change an abstract "camera" (because let's face it, if you know the camera is always going to be at the origin and always facing along one axis, why bother with extra calculations? Just do your matrix transformations and drop the depth axis, and you've got a technically correct non-perspective-utilizing 2D wireframe). This troper happens to possess a couple of books on BASIC from The Eighties that had examples that worked this way."
which confused the hell out of me until I checked the discussion. I DO NOT LIKE DEDUCTIVE THINKING THAT MUCH.
Edited by Camacan
I redirected the blank page Wait A Minute to here since it is the closest fitting thing that that expression would be used for.
Don't make me destroy you. @ Castle Series