Works with their own pages:
Other:
- AMV Hell, despite being mostly lowbrow humor, has a degree of this in that you need a lot of knowledge about a lot of different shows to get all the jokes.
- Maddox, owner of The Best Page In The Universe
, occasionally interjects these in his pages:"In fact, this book can be expressed mathematically by the following theorem: lim(manliness -> â) Books = The Alphabet of Manliness"
"36 NEW PAGES! 8 FULL-COLOR INSERTS! NEW ISBN NUMBER! HOLY SHIT!" - In Berleezy's JIMMY NEUTRON: EXPOSED Berleezy references the Project MKUltra experiments.
- Chaos Fighters shows the constituents of various alloys and composites which can be understand better if one has the periodic table of elements.
- The first impression show Continue? follows these with SMART JOKE vibrating in big red letters appearing onscreen.
- Darwin's Soldiers is laden with little references that are not necessary to the plot but are quite interesting to know about nonetheless. The catch is that one must be fairly well versed in science to understand them.
- Dream High School:
- Mr. Army (who isn't the brightest bulb) capitalizes the names of two cheeses wrong in his dialogue. Yes, you read that correctly.
- You can tell the writer knew the correct capitalization too, because Miss Paloma, who apparantly knows about cheeses, correctly capitalizes them in her dialogue immediately before and after Mr. Army's line.
- The particular line of dialogue, "Well, Burrata is good, but I'm much more partial to gouda myself." was provided by a reader who won the opportunity to give the writer a sentence to use in the story. Was the reader testing the author, or was it an accident?
- Mr. Army (who isn't the brightest bulb) capitalizes the names of two cheeses wrong in his dialogue. Yes, you read that correctly.
- In Demo Reel, Uncle Yo compares Donnie to Sisyphus. Sisyphus was punished for his lies by having to walk a rock up a steep hill over and over. Donnie has told nobody about his tragic past by this point, and his punishment is self-loathing.
- This happens frequently in the Dr Glaucomflecken series since the primary audience of the series is doctors:
- Glaukomflecken is an ocular characteristic that is a sign of acute angle closure glaucoma.
- Ortho is frequently shown to really love Ancef. Ancef aka Cefazolin is an antibiotic that is administered to prevent infections related to surgery and to treat bone and joint infections.
- In Bill does a Lumbar Puncture, Neurology hands Bill a bottle of red wine for the "traumatic [spinal] tap" he did. A lumbar puncture without the presence of red blood cells is considered a "champagne tap," so a red wine tap would be one with red blood cells.
- In Showdown in Dialysis, Nephrology says, "Why is this patient getting dialysis? Yesterday she had four functional nephrons." Nephrons are filtering units in kidneys, and the average person has one million nephrons per kidney.
- In The Anesthesiologist Goes to Therapy Psychiatry mentions that Anesthesia wrote "The General Surgeon is a Mallampatti IV" on a whiteboard in the hospital. The Mallampatti scale is a measurement of the distance between the tongue base and the roof of the mouth, which is a predictor of how difficult it will be to intubate a patient for surgery. A IV on the Mallampatti scale is the highest possible score and is a predictor of a more difficult intubation.
- Freeman's Mind (a narrative playthrough of Half-Life "voiced" by Gordon Freeman himself) does this a lot. Sophisticated jokes about quantum physics pop up from time to time (Gordon is supposed to be a physicist, after all) and the episode where Gordon does nothing but talk like a pirate is full of archaic English and historically accurate nautical terms. Fortunately the show is still very approachable from a lowbrow perspective.
- Homestar Runner once recites Coulomb's Law, though he mistakes it for the sum of two and two.
- A Strong Bad email featured a jumbled spam message to which Strong Bad says, "Did the quadratic formula explode?".
- In "Ballad of The Sneak", the eponymous creature is referred to as "The Strong Bad's Leporello".
- GOMERBlog is basically The Onion for medical personnel, mostly physicians. It is chock full of these kinds of jokes, such as when a nurse's "Eyes Get Stuck After Aggressive Eyeroll," leading her to have a case of Eyeroll-Induced Strabismus (ERIS). Eris is the Greek goddess of strife.
- Jontron:
- Lampshaded for laughs in his review of Birdemic: Shock and Terror when he jokes that the movie was written by 18th century novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë.My god! Every character speaks in run-on sentences! I'm sorry, I wasn't aware this movie was written by Charlotte Brontë!(The words SMART JOKE fill the entire screen to triumphant music)
- In his review of Christmas with the Kranks, he questions the movie's lack of focus and asks if it's a Shakespearean classic while zooming in on Tim Allen's crotch. While it may seem like a random joke that makes no sense (Which is typical for Jon), it's a lot funnier if you know that Shakespeare was far from a stranger to dick jokes and the like.
- Lampshaded for laughs in his review of Birdemic: Shock and Terror when he jokes that the movie was written by 18th century novelist and poet Charlotte Brontë.
- Mr. Mendo's review of a racially insensitive propaganda cartoon ends with a lengthy soliloquy about how the animators must have been "sulky and dissatisfied". With some slight re-purposing, this is a word-for-word quote from an actual medical journal from over 150 years ago talking about the supposed "disease" of black slaves wanting freedom from their white captors.
- The Most Popular Girls in School: Transparent Closet Jonath-ahem, Than, compares Brittany Matthew's genitalia to The Eye Of Sauron. To put it this way, a good portion of this series (as well as its sister show, Dr. Havoc's Diary) isn't as funny if you don't have an above-average knowledge of pop-culture stuff.
- The Nekci Menij Show is fueled by Genius Bonuses, particularly in regards to the modern music industry. No bit of Billboard chart knowledge or tidbit about an artist's personal life is too obscure to be joked about.
- Players who haven't read Oedipus the King will have a hard time understanding the plot to Oedipus in my Inventory.
- One of Open Blue's mods is Kukulu, a Captain Ersatz of Cthulhu. If you look at his profile, his country section says he's from "Pitcairn", which is the name of one of the three Real Life countries nearest to the canon location of R'lyeh.
- Red vs. Blue:
- During The Chorus Trilogy, at one point Simmons claims that it's so cold that it's -40 degrees Celsius. Grif and Tucker only respond with blank stares (with Grif even asking him to "repeat it in American"), to which Simmons sarcastically responds by claiming that it's actually -40 degrees Fahrenheit, and they're all idiots. In reality, -40 degrees is the point where the two scales are identical.
- In the season 14 episode "Immersion: Warthog Flip", Lopez refers to the movie Speed by calling it Maximum Velocidad. That was the actual Latin American title for Speed in reality, and it's a rather impressive detail to include considering how Lopez's Spanish is usually meant to be intentionally awful.
- RWBY: The episode "Alone in the Woods" is one long Shout-Out to Herman Melville’s classic short story "Bartleby the Scrivener," which focuses on a Wall Street copyist who eventually dies because he is too depressed to work or even feed himself.
- Of a sort: Sears.com had a zombie-themed page for Halloween with the text almost entirely in Zamgrh, one of the user-created languages of Urban Dead.
- The Finnish-made science fiction parody Star Wreck is full of this trope. For example, most Star Trek items are called the by the names given to them by older bad translations of the shows.
- In the Whateley Universe:
- Phase is almost as snarky as Daria, with refs covering everything from Shakespeare and Sinclair Lewis to Umberto Eco and Spenser. Also doubles as "Showing off the Research".
- When Chaka is deciding on her codename ('chaka' means 'leopard'), she mentions some old book by some Belgian guy who said that pound for pound, the leopard is tougher than the lion. Most readers won't know this is supposed to be Congo Kitabu by Jean-Pierre Hallet.
