Getting the joke 30 years later - just me?

[HappySquid]

I have just realised that Shaun the Sheep's name is a play on words (Shaun/shorn). Feeling rather sheepish.

Has anyone else come across a joke that only sunk in many years later or is it just me?!

I just realised the meaning of Private Dancer. All these years I just thought it was a another great song
It still is a great song. Tina sings it perfectly and with great emotion

Sigh. Rhotic accents pronounce ‘r’ in whatever it appears, whether that’s inside a word or at the end of a word. So Shaun and Shorn sound completely different. So the pun on Shorn/Shaun which works for the majority of English people (not all) doesn’t work for the majority of, say, Irish people.

Like, for instance, the song ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from The Sound of Music where Maria is teaching the kids solfa. ‘Fa — a long, long way to run’ only works in Julie Andrew’s’ RO accent because she inserts a linking/intrusive r’ between ‘Fa’ and ‘a’ (the way many English accents do when saying ‘drawing’ as ‘drawRIng ’ or ‘AfricaR and India’

The letter ‘R’ is often pronounced ‘or’ in many Irish accents so ‘Toys R Us’ doesn’t work as a declaration as it would elsewhere.

And some US accents don’t distinguish between types of vowel which are strongly differentiated in the UK eg ‘Barry’ and ‘berry’ sound identical to some US English speakers.

It’s not that any of this is such a big deal, though ‘water’ in my accent was totally incomprehensible when I lived first in the US. I think I only noticed it in the UK when DS was little enough for me to be reading children’s books written in rhyme to him — there were quite a few rhymes in Julia Donaldson’s books which don’t rhyme in my accent.

Yes, it is. There was no such character.

Shaun the sheep was in the Wallace and Gromit film ‘A Close Shave’.

Ah, that's where the extra R comes from then 😁

Possibly someone had replied as haven't read whole thread, sorry. But it was me who put this originally. The peparami ad was an angry, out of control peperami. Bit of an animal referred to the ad in terms of the angry personality. But the play on it was it's also a meat product so it is literally a bit of an animal.

I think you need to be aware of the ad to get it.

My mistake; I've never seen it, was just told that.

Thanks yes someone explained that. I was thinking it was something to do with the peperami name.

It took me years to notice The Darkness ‘Christmas time, don’t let the bells end’ = bell end.

Also, 'Just let them ring in peace', which Justin Hawkins has also said was deliberate i.e. ring piece!

It does still work as a joke because the word ' shorn' means to have had the wool removed and Shaun is a name.
Verbally it doesn't sound the same to you but it still works when you read it.

Vaguely related to topic but the walking dead and everyone pronouncing Carl and Carol the same. I was utterly lost at times. A character would say caarrl and I had to decipher which one they meant. Not always obvious which they did mean, even if one was in the shot.

And game of thrones, at the beginning everyone managed jaime and by the end everyone, every single character called him Jamie.

Drove me insane for a few series while they adjusted from one name to the other.

Well I didn't realise that until you said! 🤣
I'm feeling that the older I get the slower I get...its only very recently I realised the song Saving All My Love For You by Whitney Houston is about her sleeping with a married man! 🤦‍♀️

Harry Potter is full of them. I find it a bit twee. Also extremely derivative. She nicks dialect words from Hardy, for example.

Aardman on the other hand, love it.

Libel case regarding double entendres
In 1991, the Pugwash cartoonist John Ryan successfully sued the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian newspapers for inaccurately claiming that some Pugwash character names were double entendres.[9][10]

smarties have the answer!

TIL - I am definitely not a smartie...

@TheLeadbetterLife

I didn't realise that either!!

(Waves)

I don't get the joke about not paying the ransom for the elephant's ears . Can anyone explain?

I can fathom being wrong just fine thank you. It absolutely categorically isn't incorrect though. Neither is the rhotic way of saying it. If anyone's finding it hard to fathom being wrong, it's you. You appear to think you know better than actual dictionaries. Rhoticity and non-rhoticity are a recognised and documented feature of correct, modern spoken English.

Language changes. Spoken English was all rhotic before about the 15th Century. But the unpronounced 'r' is hardly the only thing that's changed since then.

Noddy in the stories by Enid Blyton had a friend called Big Ears.

Elephants have big ears.

Why do Elephants have big ears? Because they kidnapped him but the ransom money wasn't paid.

(I only just pieced this together after someone else gave a hint earlier in the thread).

It's a reference to Noddy & Big Ears ( Enid Blyton) it might be before your time

Err no not before my time. I knew obvs it's Noddy and Big Ears but don't get the ransom bit.

Oh god I get it now. Poor old Big Ears is still a hostage.
Naughty Noddy.

OMG I'm howling at your response, you sound like Alice from Vicar of Dibley 😂😂😂

The point was that Peperami was (is?) a hot, spicy sausage. So there was a suggestion that, being hot and spicy, it was a bit of a tearaway among sausages. One to watch out for, as it were.

Meanwhile, calling someone "a bit of an animal" is a banter-ish way of saying that they are capable of major high jinks ("Watch out for Barry, he's a bit of an animal after a few pints").

Hence the pun. Not only is it literally "a bit of an animal" in the sense that it is made of meat (although quite probably from several "bits" of the animal), but also, it's not to be taken lightly. Hur hur hur.

(A PP seemed to be suggesting that there was a penis reference, but I honestly don't think it was that. The ad was all about the fiery heat, plus the product was mostly pitched at men, and I don't think that suggesting that they were putting a cock in their mouths was going to go down to well with the target demographic.)