I love humor with depth. I’ve lately been enjoying some metahumor—humor that alludes to a detail related to the work, not the story of the work itself:
In Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, Professor Slughorn never can quite remember the name of Harry’s friend Ron Weasley. Slughorn tells Harry that he has “a house-elf taste every bottle after what happened to your poor friend Rupert.”
Rowling is clearly nodding to the fact that the actor who portrays Ron in the movies is a fellow by the name of Rupert Grint. [chuckle]
In a recent episode of Phineas & Ferb, Lawrence (Ferb’s father) is watching television. (We don’t see what he’s watching, just the flickering of light on his face.) Finally he pipes, “This isn’t much of a horror movie! Where are all the rock & roll numbers?”
Now that’s pretty funny by itself in a Monty Python-esque non sequitur sort of way. But it’s bloomin’ hilarious if you realize that the guy who voices Lawrence Fletcher is Richard O’Brien, the man behind The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a musical “horror” film. Brilliant! (Rocky Horror is not exactly a film I recommend, by the way, but I must confess that I have seen it.)
Also in a recent Phineas & Ferb (perhaps the same episode), they did a takeoff of one of the Twilight movies (which they called something like “Almost Dark”—heh, heh). The werewolf character is voiced by none other than Michael J. Fox, the original ’80s Teen Wolf. Genius!