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 {{Squick}}y 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".

I've always corrected the tv "No, EVERY kiss begins with E"

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...

The Wells Fargo slogan "Together We'll Go Far". ''We'll Go Far''. ''Well(s) Far Go''. It took me ridiculously long to work that out.

...wait, what? Oh. Oooooooh.....

I know this sounds crazy, but it took me 10 years, count 'em, 10 years to get the Trix yogurt commercials. Trix=Tricks are for kids.

Tropers/DesertDragon was about 8 or so when Herbal Essence started running ''those'' shampoo adds, and it a few years before he figured out just what was up with those women.

Funnily enough for this troper, it's ''{{Pokemon}}''. No, not for the subject matter, or the characters, or even the FetishFuel. 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.

Ohhh, SPELL of the Unown. Because...they're shaped like letters, and the little girl spells them out.

Wow. Just wow. I never got that one. I guess I assumed there wasn't a hidden message in the first place.

The ''SamuraiPizzaCats'' 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 ''GhostHunt'', 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 ''OutlawStar'' refers to Gene's star tattoo coupled by how he's an outlaw.

Recently watching the ''FullMetalAlchemist'' 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.

Two that just hit this troper- Envy is a green monster; also, the significance of a guy named ((Greed)) having a body that is made of diamond.

This one was probably unintentional on the part of the writers, but watching DigimonAdventure 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 ''KeroroGunsou'' 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'' [[FailedASpotCheck didn't notice he was there.]]

DNAngel. '''D'''aisuke '''N'''iwa. I seriously just got that. I saw this anime what, six years ago?

It tends to be the opposite for French readers, because "DNA" is "ADN" in French. So we've got an excuse for thinking the title is really lame until finding out how it goes in English, yay!

This Troper was in her school's Anime Club watching Ponyo. Lisa was having mood swings (this was the part where she was sending Morse Code messages to her husband) and someone (a girl, mind you) made a comment about how familiar this seemed. This cued This Troper to say "You know what that calendar in the background's for, right?" Everyone burst into laughter, immediately understanding the joke. Another Anime Club member (a boy) thought about the joke and didn't understand it till a good 30 seconds after everyone else calmed down from their laughing fits.

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...

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...

ThisTroper used to know every ''CalvinAndHobbes'' 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".

This troper used to read DisneyAdventures in the 1990s, and back right around 1993/94 they ran a comic called ''Nervous Rex'' by one William Van Horn. It wasn't until ''seventeen years later'' (in fact, less than twenty minutes ago on December 23, 2010, to you future readers) that I got the pun in the comic's title. Just kinda came to me out of the blue.

A few years back, this troper read a {{Spider-Man}} comic where he teamed up with DoctorStrange. The bad guys hit them with an attack that displaced them in time. Spider-Man ended up in the dark void before the beginning of the universe; Doctor Strange was sent in the other...Um, direction? Anyway, the Doctor establishes telepathic contact with Spidey, and describes his current time-space location as "cold, dark, and dismal. Rather like Newark." Spider-Man pointed out that Doctor Strange just told a joke, and was told, "Yes. Unfortunately, that's considered a SignOfTheApocalypse." It took me a couple of weeks to realize that he was saying that the world was, in fact, about to end. - Classifed

Oh, okay, so the Beano feature The Germs with Ill Will, it's "The germs with ill will". Only took about a decade.

''WhoFramedRogerRabbit'' 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 ParentalBonus: 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.

A guy rags on Eddie, saying that Eddie's name used to be Valiant but the guy thinks it's changed to Jack Daniels. This troper had watched the movie several times before stopping to wonder about that. Then, she remembered that Jack Daniels is an alcoholic beverage, and the guy was talking about Eddie's descent into alcoholism.

''WillyWonkaAndTheChocolateFactory'' may suffer from AdaptationDecay, but a lot of its humor (particularly for a family film from 1971), such as the SeriousBusiness 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. GeneWilder's performance in the lead could be seen as one giant LateToThePunchline 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 GettingCrapPastTheRadar quote from early in the movie: #QUOTE#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 ''TheMarriageOfFigaro''. 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."

Made ''still'' funnier by the fact that OscarWilde looks rather like Gene Wilder.

This troper just recently realized how freaking filthy RobinWilliams' dialog in ''MrsDoubtfire'' 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.

''It's like a prison movie''... I ''just'' got that part. I mean, I got the power tool joke a while back (as in, I realize they're not actually discussing a traditional power tool), but the prison movie part. It's a reference to electric chairs.

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 ''MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail'' 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 MontyPython-related LateToThePunchline 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 LateToThePunchline Moment just yesterday.

And this troper just realized hat the ending with the police... was a "cop out."

One this troper's mother pointed out: "So we built a castle... and it sank into the swamp" and its repetitions. "But the fourth one - it stayed up!" It's not perseverence, it's because its foundation is the three that ''sank''.

It took this troper four viewings of the ''IronMan'' 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.

''TheMuppetMovie'': 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 LateToThePunchline Moment ''right now'', as Peter David slipped a reference to this into an issue early in his run on {{Comicbook/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 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 LateToThePunchline 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?"?!

This troper once heard that her high school's theater troupe wanted to do ''Grease'', but the admins were worried about some of the content... Namely, ''the cigarettes''. When I heard that, I rolled my eyes so hard I had a headache for the rest of the day.

Something that goes straight over most viewer's heads, from ''BlazingSaddles'': 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.

They eventually used the title for a failed TV {{pilot}}.

I realized just today that Lili von Schtupp (aside from "Schtupp" being Yiddish slang for "fuck") was based off of Marlene Dietrich, a famous German actress from the 1930s. The song she performs in the saloon scene seems to be based off of "Falling in Love" from TheBlueAngel. I nearly burst out laughing in my history class when I saw that scene and realized where Mel Brooks got it from.

This troper finally had her LateToThePunchline 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.

You almost have to read the lyrics to "A Little Priest" to get all of the jokes. My favorite (that I didn't get until I bought the DVD) was "Then actor/It's compact-er/Yeah, but always arrives overdone!"

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 ''HoneyIShrunkTheKids'' 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 ''RobinHoodMenInTights''. 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 ''YoungFrankenstein'' 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 ''CastAway'' 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 ''FindingNemo''. Months later it finally hit home: "With fronds like these, who needs anemones?" was an IncrediblyLamePun 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 JohnBelushi falling off the side of the sorority house in ''AnimalHouse'' 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 "DoubleEntendre"...

...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 ''PulpFiction'' at the age of nearly 23 was a MAJOR LateToThePunchline moment for me. So many parodies, nods, references and homages over so many years, that I had never understood previously.

This troper has watched ''AChristmasStory'' 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".

About ten years ago, this troper was watching "24 Hours of ''A Christmas Story''" while helping my mom and brother put the finishing decorations on the tree. During the gift-opening scene, when the Old Man opens the (very heavy) present his wife has just plunked into his lap and exclaims, "Well, it's a blue ball!", my brother (16 at the time) started laughing so hard he couldn't breathe. Five years later, I finally got it.

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 ''SteptoeAndSon'' 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'.

''HalfBaked'': I was naive enough when I first saw it to not know the ''other'' meaning of giving someone "a pearl necklace" - thus CompletelyMissingThePoint of that line in the ''exact way'' the character Brian did.

In ''AustinPowers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'', FatBastard has a line about having "a turtle head poking out" - I'd never heard the expression before, and had the even more disgusting idea that there was ''literally'' a live turtle trying to escape his rear.

A while back, This Troper read a comment (on this very wiki) about how in ''9'', dead body "''had that Pink Floyd The Wall mask look to him.''". She didn't really understand, but cue a few months later, reading the {{Fridge Horror}} page, where the entry for ''{{The Wall}}'' says "''...his mental representation of himself is a dead-eyed ragdoll...''", and it all suddenly made perfect sense. Horrifically.

If serious examples count, then the following happened when this lurker first saw ''TreasurePlanet''. #QUOTE#Lurker, about nine: This movie's kinda cool, but what's Jim Hawkins' ''problem''? He's so mopey! #QUOTE#(Ten years later) #QUOTE#Lurker, about nineteen: OH GOD, JIM HAWKINS MY BRO IN ARMS WAAAAH.

Appropriately, this example is from ''The Adventures Of Rocky And Bullwinkle''. The scene where Judge Cameo (WhoopiGoldberg) lists the charges, ending with "Incriminally Bad Punning, 18 counts." Bullwinkle replied, "And three Dukes and seven Earls." It took this troper's mother a few minutes to get it and explain it to me.

I knew TinaFey had to seriously tone down her original ''MeanGirls'' script in order to get a PG-13, but it didn't occur to me how much she'd managed to keep in by other means until I thought real hard about this line: #QUOTE#'''Janis''': We could publish [the burn book], and then everybody would see what an ax-wound [Regina] really is!

In an example not involving the transition from childhood to adulthood, this troper only realized after quite a few viewings of ''{{Clerks}}'' what the deal is in the introduction of Jay and Silent Bob when Jay graphically propositions Silent Bob and then loudly denies being gay immediately before Willam shows up. It isn't clear why this troper never realized that Jay sees Willam approaching before the audience does and hastily tries to preserve his state of denial.

This troper watched the Mostly MontyPython film Yellowbeard when he was 8 and laughed at the character who was obviously a female with a fake moustache. When he watched it again at 21, he got the joke of the character's name: Mr. Prostitute.

In TheBigLebowski, The Dude goes to the doctor Maude recommended, and in the end of the scene the doctor prepares to give him an unexpected rectal examination. Cut to The Dude driving back home with Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Lookin' Out My Back Door" on the stereo. It took a second viewing for it to dawn on me how, er, appropriate to the prior scene the title of that song is.

The first thing that went through this lurker's mind when he saw this scene from ''TheMatrix'' was "So ''that's'' where they got the idea for that commercial!"

The title of ''The Gore Gore Girls'' - it wasn't until I actually started watching the movie and noted the many gratuitous strip tease scenes that I realized "Oh, like ''go-go'' girls!"

It took my brother and me years to get the "I shot an elephant in my pajamas, how he got there, I'll never know" joke from AnimalCrackers, because we both assumed that the elephant was wearing the pajamas right off the bat.

This troper had an ''eight year'' delay regarding the title ''Amber Brown is Not A Crayon.'' See, the joke is that her name is a color. (The joke was not that people aren't crayons, as I previously thought.)

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.

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 MeaningfulName 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".

Count de Magpyre. Count de magpies. I would have {{facepalm}}ed had it been enough.

This troper can't believe it took himself so long to figure out why, in ''Discworld/FeetOfClay'', Mr. Ironcrust got mad after Carrot stopped the unlicensed thieves from robbing his store: Carrot had (unwittingly?) caught him out on his claim that he was a taxpayer, and now he was most likely about to be audited.

In ''Discworld/TheLastContinent'', the titular continent of XXXX was put onto the Disc after its original creation by an entirely different Creator than the one introduced in ''Discworld/{{Eric}}''... which given all the jokes about evolutionary theory in the book may or may not be a subtle reference to a letter written by Charles Darwin during an expedition in Australia: #QUOTE#I have been lying on a sunny bank and was reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared to the rest of the World. An unbeliever in everything beyond his own reason might exclaim, '''"Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work."''' [emphasis mine]

This Troper was riding her bike when she only got the pun in the blurb for ''Men At Arms'', about Nobby being 'disqualified from the human race for shoving'. As in ''a race you run''.

I found and read my father's copy of ''TheHitchHikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' 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 -- 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.

This troper only got the joke recently. She was walking along the street and suddenly understood it. "Drunk! A glass of water is drunk. You drink a glass of water."

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.

In the novel, there's a line about Ford Prefect assuming his name ''because'' he thought cars were the dominant species. (He was trying to blend in.)

It took This Troper several years of intermittent exposure to information on RichardNixon 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 ThatTroper 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 DrinkingGame 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 ''ArtemisFowl,'' 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.

I didn't realise there was a joke there at all until they explained the other joke pen name in the fifth book (C. Niall [=DeMencha=] = Senile Dementia). Then I looked back at the name F. Roy Dean Schlippe and finally got it.

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 GettingCrapPastTheRadar.

Peter David's ''SirAproposOfNothing'' 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 ''AnnoDracula'' series by KimNewman is just freaking made for LateToThePunchline 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 ''HarryPotter'' books. (The names sound like the words 'diagonally' and 'nocturnally'.

I only just got the Knockturn one now.

Grim Old Place, anyone?

Almost a reverse example: American child reads ''HarryPotter''. In the first (?) book, the Dursleys send Harry a fifty-pence piece for Christmas. Ron marvels over the shape and says, "This is ''money''?" I assumed the joke was that wizarding coins are some kind of bizarre shape so that a regular round coin seemed weird to him. It wasn't until a few years later I found out that that coin is ''heptagonal'' (what madness is this, anyway?).

For a more straightforward example: When this troper first read GobletOfFire, I thought Hagrid greeting Madame Maxime by saying "bing-sewer" was just silly. Four years later, I started my first year of French in high school. When we started learning the greetings and came across "''bonsoir''" ("good evening"), I got it.

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 TheToughGuideToFantasyland is a map of Europe turned upside-down. I have had that book for what, three years now?

This troper knew that DavidWeber 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 LordOfTheRings books, but the Agent Smith/Elrond jokes were much funnier after I actually saw TheMatrix.

About a week ago this troper realized that School}} "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 ''AnansiBoys'' 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.

From the HonorHarrington series, this reader kept seeing references to "Oyster Bay" without making the obvious (in hindsight) connection, perhaps having been spoofed by knowledge of Oyster Bay, Long Island. Then one morning, the penny dropped: a bay can also be a harbor, and what comes from oysters?

When I was ten I read a kid's joke book with the following: "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." For years I puzzled over this one: thrown banana, thrown banana ... yes, it would fly like a piece of fruit, what the heck is the joke? It's only very recently that it occurred to me that the joke might just be referring to fruit flies.

When this troper first read Robert Asprin's ''Myth Directions'', the joke of the setup--in which the city-states of Veygus and Ta-Hoe, in the dimension of Jahk, have a Big Game every year--passed completely over her head. (Earlier, she also didn't get why gnomes came from the dimension of Zoorik.)

''Lord of Light'' by RogerZelazny has one part that goes through an extensive build-up to produce the line: the fit hit the Shan." It was at least two years after first reading it that this troper did the inversion -- and he wasn't even reading the book at the time; just remembering it.

Not a joke, but early in AndreNorton's ''Year of the Unicorn'' a minor character exclaims that she'd rather "wed steel" than marry one of the Were-Riders. It took this troper fifteen or twenty '''years''' to realize she was talking about suicide by knife.

This Troper read a book of toned down Greek Mythology when he was a young'un that detailed the marriage of Aphrodite to Hephaestus who wooed the goddess by saying he "worked late." At first, he thought it was sweet that she appreciated his hard work but knowing what I know now about Aphrodite

''HouseOfLeaves''. Leaves as in paper. So, of paper, and the [[color:blue:house is a labyrinth, and the book is a labyrinth, so ''the [[color:blue:house]] is the book''. I ''just'' got the double meaning of the title. The damn cover is even blue, and it took me this long?

I started reading ''ASeriesOfUnfortunateEvents'' when I was about 12 or 13. I never got the joke behind Uncle Monty's name until about seven years later as a sophomore in college, when this thought process went through my head: #QUOTE#''I probably should get around to watching FearAndLoathingInLasVegas someday. I mean, it's got Johnny Depp and it's directed by a Python...is that the right term for a member of MontyPython? Maybe- OH! His name is'' '''''MONTY''''' ''and he works with reptiles, including'' '''''PYTHONS!''''' ''Wow, I'm slow.''

''MysteryScienceTheater3000'' 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 MemeticMutation (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 ParentalBonus style LateToThePunchline Moments. This density is one of the major reasons individual episodes have such great rewatchability (see also: BetterOnDVD).

When this troper was a child, she innocently watched an episode of ''SesameStreet'' 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 ''SesameStreet'' 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 PrivateDetective, too.

Don't forget their extended parody of ''TwinPeaks'', of all things.

This troper can only imagine his kids' reaction when they figure out the MadMen 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}}''...

When Joey got Chandler a bracelet and asked him to imagine what it would do for his sex life, this troper never understood Chandler's response--that once he got used to the extra weight, he'd be back on track. Only after rewatching the episode for probably the tenth time about five years later and finally realizing that Chandler didn't have much of a sex life did it finally make sense.

This troper only figured out a week before ''Series/{{Heroes}}''' third series finale that "Elle" is so named because it's the first syllable of "electricity".

Oh christ. #QUOTE#Recursive trope moment?

Another layer is that "Elle" = "L," as in '''L'''ightning.

''TheAdventuresOfPeteAndPete'' 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 ''DharmaAndGreg'', 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 ''TheGoonShow'', and specifically an interview with PeterSellers 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 ''TheSuiteLifeOfZackAndCody'' was a NoCelebritiesWereHarmed, Disneyfied version of Paris Hilton.

This troper, not two days ago, got a joke from ''MalcolmInTheMiddle'' about "some girl named Molly Hatchet."

This troper finally got this one joke from the SpinCity 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... #QUOTE#'''James:''' Morning, sir. #QUOTE#'''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 ''ItsAlwaysSunnyInPhiladelphia''. Ohh... right."

It was far into adulthood that I got the joke behind "Fargo North, Decoder" in TheElectricCompany.

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 shears 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 BlackAdder where BlackAdder, Baldric and Percy were all framing 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 LateToThePunchline moment about that very episode: I just realised that the beginning scene with Molly the inexpensive prostitute is a false ChekhovsGun, 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 ''RedDwarf: Back to Earth'' was named Swallow (i.e. because the character he's based on -- the eye-designer from ''BladeRunner'' -- is named Chew).

A particularly embarrassing one: ''PushingDaisies'''s first episode is called "Pie-lette." ''Pie-lette''. I'm bad with puns, okay?

Much to his eternal shame, it took this Troper well over a year to realise that the "Dancing" the ''Doctor'' keeps referring to in The Doctor Dances is actually ''the horizontal tango''.

Don't feel bad. This troper and a few friends were watching that episode (one for the first time) when one of them brought this up. Cue angry glares at her for trying to ruin a lovely, harmless, completely innocent episode of ''Series/DoctorWho'' for the rest of us, followed by fits of giggles every time the word "dance" is mentioned after we realize she's actually right.

''SaluteYourShorts'' had Kevin Lee, a counselor who was called Ug by the campers, making his name Ug Lee. That went way over my head as a kid.

I was pondering the IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming of ''TheBigBangTheory'', and how most of the episode titles seem only tangentially related to the overarching plot of the episode until you think about the weave of the plot threads. After two years of watching the show (plus most of the first season on DVD), I only ''just'' realized that the title was a play on words about sex.

This troper didn't understand the following joke from {{Glee}} until a friend in the drama department explained that it was about oral sex. #QUOTE#'''Rachel''': I guess I don't have much of a gag reflex. #QUOTE#'''Emma''': One day, when you're older, that'll turn out to be a gift.

I have one from (believe it or not) FullHouse: I was in college before I realized Joey was lying to Michelle about newlyweds Jesse and Becky "doing their taxes".

I didn't get it until I was an adult that the bad ringmaster on TheGreatSpaceCoaster's name was a pun: M. T. Promises.

This Troper only realized today that the Bones episode title Mayhem on the Cross was ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin because ''the victim's stage name was Mayhem and his bones were crucified!!''

This troper and her big sister were watching Scrubs, the episode where we find out Turk has diabetes to be exact. When Carla puts the bowl of Milano's in front of Turk and JD mispronounces them, he says Mulattoes. Naturally, I laugh hysterically, while sis just looks confused. Later we go to a bakery and she picks now, where everyone can hear her, to ask: "I don't get why JD said 'Milado's was racist. He was just a letter away right?". I explained it to my older sister and she laughed, only to point at the black and white cookies and say: "No those are Mulattoes!". Of course everyone heard her and we couldn't pay quick enough!

This troper JUST NOW, ten years after it aired, got the joke in the title of the ''{{Scrubs}}'' episode "My Bed Banter & Beyond." In my defense, there are no Bed, Bath & Beyond stores within perhaps 100 miles of where I live, but still…

This troper saw the Seinfeld episode with Jerry's girlfriend whose name he couldn't remember when he was a child. It took him a decade to realize what part it sounded like.

This troper took 3 years to get a few of the jokes in ''FawltyTowers''. One is when Basil says, "The Samaritans were engaged" -- meaning he couldn't call them as the phone line was busy. As a child brought up atheist, and therefore having never heard of the Good Samaritans, and having always used 'busy' instead of 'engaged' when referring to phone lines, I initially thought it was about a couple (the Samaritans) getting engaged to be married, and wondered what the line was doing there. The other one was when Basil says that the police were busy, since there was a lot of "bloodshed at the Nell-Gwyn Tearooms last night." I was mystified, having never heard of the tearooms, until my father explained to me that tearooms are peaceful, dignified places that old ladies go to.

This troper listened to TomLehrer 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 MeatLoaf 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 LateToThePunchline 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 CoveredUp, 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 didn't realize how dirty Back in the USSR is until she was singing it out loud with some friends.

This Troper just had one ''right this very minute'', when a friend mentioned getting "[=BuFu'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. [=BuFu=]" in the 1981 song, "Valley Girl".

This troper just had that same realization while reading your comment, and is having a LateToThePunchline moment as he types this.:He always thought she was saying "Boo-Hoo," and was wondering why that made so little sense.

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 TheyMightBeGiants, 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".

And George Washington's head is also on the one dollar bill, which when divided into quarters yields four quarters, both fractionally and monetarily.

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 TalesOfSymphonia (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 "GreenLantern: 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 LateToThePunchline moment came when, after not hearing it for six or so years, recalled this poem. #QUOTE#Mary had a little lamb/She also had a duck/She took it round the corner to teach it how to... #QUOTE#Fry some eggs for breakfast/Fry some eggs for tea/The more you eat the more drink the more you want to... #QUOTE#Peter had a boat, the boat began to rock/Up jumped jaws and bit off his.... #QUOTE#Cocktails, gingerales, 40c a glass/If u dont like it, we'll shove 'em up your.... #QUOTE#Ask no questions, tell no lies/I once saw a policeman doing up his.... #QUOTE#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 LateToThePunchline moment however, as the rest was self explanatory to an eleven year old.

This happens a lot with the "Miss Suzy" rhymes. You learn them as a little child to play clapping games to (I was about 7), and don't get how completely ''filthy'' they are for a long, long time. There are many versions, some talking about kissing, bras, flies, etc. For reference: #QUOTE# Miss Suzy had a steamboat, her steamboat had a bell #QUOTE# Miss Suzy went to heaven, her steamboat went to ... #QUOTE# Hello operator, please give me number nine ...

One of this troper's favorite songs from TheWho as a child was "Squeeze Box". Today, reading GettingCrapPastTheRadar ...

WeirdAlYankovic 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.

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 MP3 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).

Wait, so Britney isn't even being original? Lamer. I had one of these moments when I tried to figure out what was up with "If you seek amy" - I had to overhear someone explaining it to someone else before I got it.

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.

It's an interesting coincidence, but Bowie actually was using that stage name at least a little before the movie came out, as an homage to Jim Bowie.

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.

See above. It's probably a triple pun.

Took this Troper a while to get what "U + Ur Hand" meant. Heeeee.

Dinru, the brilliant one, just realized that the Christmas Carol "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" isn't so much about ''Christmas'' per se, so much as wanting some goddamn figgy pudding.

This Troper was in his early 30s when he realized that Kool & The Gang's "Tonight" was about a boy getting his v-card punched by an older woman. ThisTroper blames the sanitized video.

The Arrogant Worms has a song me like hockey. The last few seconds have them suddenly screaming "Yeah!" I just realized that they're imitating the siren that plays at the end of a hockey game.

I just figured out that XTC's album title ''White Music'' is a play on the phrase "white noise".

A few days ago I made the connection between the fact that Kate Ceberano's song "Pash" is about deep kissing, and that the music video included subtitles in French, besides thinking French = romantic.

Crazy Train's opening riff sounds like a starting locomotive. I didn't realize that for ''years''!

I'd bet there's very likely an entire subpage to come out of subtle stuff like that. Consider, for example, Pink's "Just Like A Pill" and its signature looped trianglemonitor.

Similarly, it took me a while to figure out that the intro to The Yardbirds' version of "Train Kept A Rollin'" (which Aerosmith also borrowed for their cover) is supposed to sound like a train whistle.

{{Nirvana}}'s "Gallons Of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip" is mostly full of WordSaladLyrics (which is justifiable because it's completely improvised), but there is in fact a clever bit of wordplay/dark humor I missed at first: #QUOTE#Somebody else already used the word aurora borealis #QUOTE#She was tied up in chains, and Sam had helped her in the freezer

See, we go from Aurora bore''alis'' to AliceInChains to Alice from TheBradyBunch apparently getting chained up in a meat locker by Sam The Butcher. That last part might seem like kind of s stretch, but there's a general "wholesome sitcom characters with a dark secret" theme in common with "Floyd The Barber".

It took me a long time to figure out that TheBeastieBoys' "Negotiation Limerick File" isn't just called that because it mentions limericks and ends in the line "Let's try to negotiate"... The lyrics roughly follow the meter and rhyme scheme of a limerick. For instance: #QUOTE#I tell you everybody I've had it #QUOTE#With all these people with static #QUOTE#I'll go insane #QUOTE#if it don't rain #QUOTE#Sucker MC's are problematic

The band Love have an album called ''Four Sail''. It took me some time to realize it was a PunBasedTitle ("for sale"), and a bit longer to figure out it was also a play on the band's name ("love for sale").

I used to think {{Tool}}'s "Hooker With A Penis" just had a weird, NonAppearingTitle. Then I realized that since the song is about the band supposedly selling out, the significance of the title is that Maynard James Keenan is comparing himself to a prostitute.

Warren Zevon's "Werewolves Of London" has the lines "You better stay away from him / he'll rip your lungs out, Jim", and the mention of Jim always sort of bugged me because it seemed like it was just there for the sake of rhyme. Later on, I realized it was actually part of a punny ShoutOut to one of his comtemporaries: the very next line mentions a tailor. Jim, tailor, James Taylor.

{{Radiohead}} have a dvd compilation of the music videos made for ''The Bends'' and ''Ok Computer'' called ''7 Television Commercials''. It took me a really long time to figure out they were calling their music videos advertisements for the albums.

ElvisCostello's "Chemistry Class" has an odd skip in the middle of the line "if it wasn't for some accidents then some of us would never learn", rendering the word "accidents" as "acciden-accidents". The first time I heard it I thought my cd was skipping - when I listened again and it happened in the same place, I thought there was some weird mastering mistake in this version of the album or something. Then I finally got that it was an intentional "mistake" occuring right when the lyrics mention ''accidents''.

It took me a while to figure out the significance of the title of Sloan's ''The Double Cross''. It was released when they'd been together for exactly 20 years, and the album title subtly acknowledges this - 20 in roman numerals is XX, or a ''double cross''. I didn't get it until I was at a show and noticed all of their crew had jackets that said "XX" on back, and that all their gear was similarly marked.

The series ''TheFarSide'' 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.

The infamous "Cow Tools" cartoon played with this in epic fashion -- readers kept expecting to get the joke when the entire point of the strip was that the punchline was gibberish.

Several of the cartoons are puns that this troper took years to understand, such as one with a lone chicken in a bar with cow patrons and a caption that reads, "Vera looked around the room. Not another chicken anywhere. And then it struck her - this was a hay bar."

This troper and several of his friends find ''CalvinAndHobbes'' 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 BeatPanel, then asks "Who the heck is Paul Gaugin?"

There's a ''FoxTrot'' comic in which Peter has a DreamSequence 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 ''TheLordOfTheRings''.

My parents have been fans of ''ImSorryIHaventAClue'' since before my brother and I were born. Before our LateToThePunchline moment, they had to explain away about half of the jokes with, "Maybe someone pulled a funny face" -- that show was the ''embodiment'' of GettingCrapPastTheRadar.

This troper heard "Shaving Cream" once on the radio as a kid and somehow remembered enough to sing several verses of it by heart for years. And it took years for him to realize the SubvertedRhymeEveryOccasion aspect of the song's chorus... he figured it was just about how funny it was that people kept running into shaving cream in odd places. #QUOTE# "I have a sad story to tell you / It may hurt your feelings a bit / Last night I walked into my bathroom / And stepped in a big pile of shaving cream / Be nice and clean / Shave every day and you'll always look keen."

Since the ''{{Munchkin}}'' card list is basically a HurricaneOfPuns, 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 [=DnD=] creature known as the Rust Monster to the ''Munchkin'' Lust Monster, and so forth.

In a game of Scion headed by a friend of mine--for those who don't know, all characters in Scion are the sons/daughters of a god or goddess--we were mingling amongst ourselves and making small talk before we actually got our mission. Someone asked my character, a scion of Hermes, about his father. "Well, he's something of a postal worker, I suppose." "A government official, then?" Seeing the opportunity, I responded quickly "You could even say he's a government official director, yes." Thirty minutes later, one of them starts laughing out of the blue, and I say "You finally figured out what it stood for, huh?" Everyone at the table realized what I'd said at that point. There was much rejoicing.

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 GettingCrapPastTheRadar. 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 this Troper's class were laughing but then we're just dirty minded.

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. #QUOTE#'''Jefferson:''' But I burn Mr. A. #QUOTE#'''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: #QUOTE#"What are you, a mathematician?!" #QUOTE#*shrug* "I like pie!"

...Five years later, in the middle of school, I suddenly burst out laughing. ''Damn'' it.

This troper's parents absolutely love the show {{Cabaret}}. They used to play the soundtrack in the car all the time when this troper was growing up. Every couple of years or so, her mom would check in to see how many of the jokes she got in ''Wilkommen.' (For the record, the last joke she understood was the "cunning linguist" line.

This troper and her friend were listening to "You'll Find Your Happiness in Rio" from TheProducers while riding in the car one day. At the line, "The tropic breezes always blow there/and so, we hear, do the girls!", said friend, who is rather naive, said, "I don't get that line. Girls don't bl--...''ohhh''."

This troper had a rather... different kind of LateToThePunchline moment while playing KingdomHearts: 358/2 Days. I'd read about a little bit of NightmareFuel in the cutscene right before boss fight, but I didn't get how [[spoiler: 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: [[CreepyMonotone "You're next, Roxas. I have to make you a part of me too." ]] * shudder*

This troper. SonicTheHedgehog. Miles Prower. Miles Per Hour. How did I not see that until I was 21?

This troper did not understand the purpose of the name of the Raeb Yddet until looking at the SdrawkcabName page recently. *Facepalm*

After a couple of years of intermittent gameplay, I was taking a break from the main game to try Adventure Mode on DwarfFortress, and surfing the wiki after finding the quick reference guide for the controls. The Adventure Mode starting guide said not to take on any quests too early, "as you will more than likely have tons of fun". As I expected, "fun" was a {{redirect}} to "losing" (losing=fun, ergo fun=losing) . Partway down the page, "terminal hissy fit" linked to Rage Spiral... And I laughed. It's not an adventure/sim game with running gags and jokes throughout the game and fandom. ''It is the joke''. I like Dwarf Fortress now.

...and now I know why the rivet gun-wielding Big Daddies are called Rosie.

Some time ago, this troper saw this TouhouProject flash video. I just dismissed it as typical Japanese weirdness and found more enjoyment in the PC-98 flashes on that site. Just now right before I wrote this, I stumbled across the page for WeeblAndBob with its link to the flash video Badger Badger Badger (Mushroom Mushroom). Now I know that Touhou can infect anything. ''Anything.''

Ah, the wonders of rule (9)...

Oh I get it! He's called Spat because he makes couples fight and he spits when he talks! I played that game years ago and just got that now...

Ohh, the fan nickname for the water starter in Pokémon Black and White, no, not Derp, the other one, "Wotter". In some dialects it's a homonym for water! It makes so much sense now! Sorry, but where I speak, water sounds closer to Warter (without the r being sounded).

This troper has only just realised the fairly obvious fact that, in this ''ArthurKingOfTimeAndSpace'', the discussion about "if an ancient warlord lived today instead of a thousand years ago" is discussing the central concept of the comic itself.

"Hey, Johnson! Working hard or hardly working? Hahaha!" "Actually, I'm looking at porn....so the first one." Me, years later: Hahahaha! Working ''hard''!!! I get it!

Ohhh, SFDebris aired his Opinionated Review of the ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode Father's Day...on Father's Day.

This Troper did not get TheStinger in this episode of PhineasAndFerb [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAMR2EoLxp0]] for several weeks until *that* question came up on a rerun on Tosh.0

This Troper is 28, and took nearly 15 years to get this ''{{Animanciacs}}'' joke.

This Troper got the joke in the climax of ''ToyStory 3'' clawwwwww right away, but it took 5 days for it to really hit me that it was punchline to a 15 year BrickJoke

Hen Grenades. Hand Grenades. It took me 15 years. To my defense, English is not my native language.

"Ed the hyena, hmm..., Ed the... ''HOLY SHIT!'' ''Ed'' ''the'' ''hyena!''"

I was kind of skeptical reading this at first, but given that the film slips in some other dark references about it's villains, it's possible.

Oh, okay, that scene in ''Futurama'' where the searchlights shoot down a pilot. Of course!

It took ''years'' for me to figure out that ''ToyStory'' was a pun on 'toy store'.

This troper took an unbelievably long time (from elementary school to college) to figure out the joke about a skeleton that came into a bar and ordered a beer and a swob. He was literally just walking down the street when he finally figured out why he wanted that swob.

This troper, after working in retail, figured out the joke behind the old "Prince Albert In A Can" crank-call gag... Prince Albert is a brand of pipe tobacco.

For the longest time, I thought that "Revenge is a dish BestServedCold" referred to something stupid like how ''cold-blooded'' (or, basically, badass) you were when you finally carried out your revenge. It didn't occur to me until the end of high school, if not sometime in college, that it was referring to waiting until you were ready to serve up the dish of revenge. Which was cold because you waited that long. Duh.

This troper, being Italian, doesn't know much about American pop culture. She often learns some random tidbit of information on the Internet, remembers an old joke she hadn't understood before, and starts laughing with no apparent reason.

For this troper, it was in a fanfic where a short character is offered a calcium pill by a third party. He then tells his lover that he doesn't need a calcium pill to grow big. It took him a year to understand the meaning of that line.

It took this troper ''years'' to get the "seven-eight/ate-nine" joke

True story: This troper was just reading the main page for this trope and thought that the joke about the chicken and the egg (which she got right away, for the record) was especially groan-worthy. When my roommate asked why I was groaning, I told her the joke. Her response: "That's disgusting." She then walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Two seconds later, I hear from the bathroom: "Oh, god, I just got it. That's DISGUSTING!" I laughed.

Similar thing with me. I read this post. "Hm, I wonder what that joke is?" *Looks up* "Meh"

Next day, in a room full of people, "NOOOOOO! COME OOOONNN!

This troper looked up the joke just now and got it almost immediately, but I can guarantee when I tell it to my friends they're gonna have a hard time.

This troper is named after his grandfather, Thomas. Granddad had two brothers, Harry and Richard. 'Dick' is short for Richard. So we have Tom, Dick, and Harry.

My father supposedly spent the first 25 years of his life with my grandfather routinely saying "Did you know that a cook who cooks carrots and peas in the same pot is unhygienic?" and then laughing, but never explaining the joke, before he finally realised the effect of shifting the emphasis of the spoken phrase had.

This troper had a classmate once whose graduation blurb contained the phrase "Tamara looks forward to many years in various institutions." The great thing about an audience of a thousand people is hearing the laughter grow as more and more people gradually get the joke.

There is a saying, "You'll be late for your own funeral." This Troper always took that just to mean that the person was always so habitually tardy, that he would simply manage to fail to make it to his own funeral on time somehow. It was maybe 20 years (so from the age of five or sixish to the mid-20s) before I finally realized... when you are dead, you are the ''late'' so-and-so. Late for your own funeral.

It took this troper several years to realize what "make love, not war" ''really'' meant. Especially since it originated in the 60's.

This troper only recently got the double meaning of the "If I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me?" joke.

You know that thing on the second "t" in the Tvtropes logo? I'll just let that sink in for a second.

I ''just'' got why SubvertedRhymeEveryOccasion is a self-referencing title.