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?!

@Words I wasn't trying to be a div to you ... No idea how old you are. Glad you get it now
🐘💸

Old enough to be your granny I imagine @Letmegohome

On reflection, maybe not. 'Div' belongs to a certain generation.

Kenny Everett "Cupid stunt". Only got that recently 🤦‍♀️😆

No, it doesn’t, beyond thinking ‘Oh, yes, that’s wordplay for a different dialect of English’. Never mind.

I saw this one, I knew it was a joke sitting there in plain sight with pom poms waving at me goading away, but it took until about the 5th reading of the book for my brain to come at it from the right angle and truely get it 🤦‍♀️

Not quite a joke, but I am particularly fond of "when designing something completely and utterly foolproof, never underestimate the ingenuity of a complete fool". It has served me well

OMG 😂🤣🤣

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.)

Quite

Apparently a rejected name for the same character was "Mary Hinge", but I'm not sure if it was rejected by the broadcaster, or by Kenny Everett for not being quite obvious enough.

During the 1960s, one of the BBC radio comedy shows had a character called Martha Farquhar (say it quickly). This was a time of quite strict censorship. I remember reading a book about the comedy of the time (but not the name of the particular show, doh) and the writers commented about some very mild stuff was getting removed, but the stuffed shirts didn't spot the joke here.

I’m not sure how differently Shaun and shorn can be pronounced from each other? In any case, they do sound the same in the movie the pun in question comes from. How other people pronounce the name/word seems kind of irrelevant.

That's the thing. They sound the same when Wallace first says it.

It’s fine that you can’t get your head around it.

I thought this too! Even when I eventually twigged that it was Wimbledon Common, I still couldn't get past how it sounded to me.

Yes. Master Bates is also an urban myth.

It isn't. It's Master Mates.

It's Master Mate. No 's'.

Why the sigh?

Wow my mind has been blown with how many other things I've missed! Smarties, Our House, the Harry Potter puns, Otto from The Simpsons... This has been very enlightening! And I've learned more about pronunciation than I ever expected to.

I suspect there are lots of song lyrics which I've misheard over the years. I'm sure that would be worth a thread of its own.

It doesn’t work as a joke when you read it if you have absolutely no idea that the name Shaun is supposed to make you think of ‘shorn’ because they don’t sound alike in your accent. It seems seeing the film would have helped but I didn’t 😅

The nuns in the bath one upthread doesn’t work either because wear and where are pronounced differently in my Irish accent, as are wine/whine and witch/which, though I believe the sounds have merged in many accents in the UK.

@BunnyLake I can't speak for the pp you quoted but I can guess the sigh was because this is a regular thread which always goes the same way.

@BunnyLake sigh is a Mumsnet socially acceptable form of pass agg whilst not rule breaking

But Jaime Lannister is pronounced the same as Jamie?

It's always been a pronounced Jamie, even George R. R Martin pronounces it like that.

I still don't get it.

It's a clever misdirection around the word 'have'

Why does Noddy have Big Ears
Because he didn't pay the ransom.

So it's not about Noddy having enormous ears
He 'has' poor old Big Ears still with him because he hasn't let him free as he hasn't paid the ransom.

We have to imagine the step in between

The discussion of the Shaun/shorn joke (which totally works in my accent though obviously not in all accents) in reminding me of a joke in the film The Santa Clause, where Tim Allen's character's son thinks that the line 'arose such a clatter' in the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas is 'A Rose Suchak Ladder'. A couple of minutes later, a ladder miraculously materialises and has the words 'The Rose Suchak Ladder Company' on it. That joke only works with an American accent, or some of them. Sure as heck doesn't work with mine.

@JawsCushion

'Why do elephants have big ears?'

As in elephants the animals have large ears. But the joke is that Big Ears is a character in Enid Blyton's Noddy books - so the elephants 'have' Big Ears as in they have taken him, kidnapped him and won't give him back til Noddy (his friend) pays the ransom.