Genius Bonus

E = MC Hammer not good enough for you? Twilight Sparkle does time dilation.

"And here we go, another reference no one gets but you. Consider your audience once in a while, huh?"

— Daru, Steins;Gate

A joke or tidbit meant for people knowledgeable in a certain field. The rest of the audience doesn't get it, but it's usually subtle enough for them not to care. This is the non-age-related counterpart to Parental Bonus.

Genius Bonuses are most often seen in series with a direct connection to its audience, especially New Media, as they can expect their audiences to be sufficiently focused that most of them will recognize an in-joke.

If this goes too far, it falls into Viewers Are Geniuses, so it has to be applied carefully. If it seems to be a byproduct of necessary research into the story, setting or plot, then the author is showing their work. Understanding one of these may lead to Fridge Brilliance.

For example; whenever a series of binary or two-digit hex codes are shown, chances are they'll spell out something when decoded as ASCII text.

A Super-Trope to Lampshaded the Obscure Reference.

Can overlap with Reference Overdosed.

Contrast with Small Reference Pools.

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Example Subpages:

• Anime & Manga
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!
• Jokes
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
  • BTS
• Video Games
  • The Binding of Isaac
• Web Original
  • Epic Rap Battles of History
• Western Animation
  • Bojack Horseman

Other Examples:

Advertising

• There's a commercial for dental insurance in which a little cartoon girl uses a hand mirror to count her own teeth. It's actually an in-joke for dental care professionals: she's too young to have adult teeth yet, yet keeps counting even after reaching 20 — the total number of baby teeth in human kids — indicating she must've lost count somewhere along the line.
• At the 2014 Paris Motor Show, Lamborghini released the Asterion LPI910-4 hybrid concept car. "Asterion" happens to be the name of another hybrid — the Minotaur of Greek legend. In addition, Lamborghini's emblem is a charging bull, and many of its models' names are related to bulls and bullfighting.
• In the UK, Lloyd's Bank introduced a TV advertising campign in 2020 using a version of "We've Only Just Begun". While some people complained at it using a new cover by Bat for Lashes instead of The Carpenters' classic version, fewer people spotted the subtle Mythology Gag: though known as a Carpenters hit, the song had come full circle as it was originally written as an advertisement... for a bank.

Comedy

• This clip features Dave Foley delivering a monologue, in which he claims that the average temperature in Canada is 275 degrees below zero, which he quickly qualifies with, "But that's in Celsius." High school physics students are duly impressed.
• Dennis Miller has spoken of liking to say things like "the Middle East situation is less stable than Crispin Glover", knowing that few of his listeners will have seen Glover nearly kick Letterman in the head, but that the few who have are saying, "Thank you for making that joke".
• The Firesign Theatre is notorious for this; e.g. "Antelope Freeway, one mile. Antelope Freeway, one half mile. Antelope Freeway, one quarter mile." And so on.
• Patton Oswalt often lampshades this in his act, facepalming at the fact he just made a reference nobody will get, then sarcastically topping himself.

Comic Books

• Although Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth can be enjoyed as a Psychological Horror story with drool-worthy art, readers with a knowledge of Jungian psychology and symbolism (or who own a copy of the fifteenth anniversary edition with Grant Morrison's annotated script) will get much more out of it.
• Asterix: Numerous references to antiquity and Latin language that only history buffs and Latinists will understand. Little jokes referencing French literature and linguistic brain-twisters are also thrown in.
  • In Caesar's Gift, Asterix has a sword fight against a Roman with a large red drunkard's nose and lines directly lifted from Cyrano de Bergerac, in which the protagonist also has a Gag Nose. This clever joke loses somewhat of its power in the English translation, where Asterix quotes Hamlet instead.
  • Everything the crippled pirate says is untranslated Latin, but always fits the situation.
  • The entire battle between the Belgians and Caesar in Asterix in Belgium is accompanied by text on scrolls which is a linguistic spoof of Victor Hugo's Les Châtiments, a poem written about the Battle of Waterloo. A double joke in the sense that Caesar, too, loses the battle and that Waterloo is located in Belgium.
  • Towards the end of Asterix and Cleopatra, Cleopatra swears by "Ammon and Helios", Helios being the Greek god of the sun. Cleopatra and her family were Greek and worshipped Greek gods.
• Body Bags: The city where all the action takes place is Terminus, Georgia. A little research reveals that Terminus was the original name of the city of Atlanta. By this the reader can assume that Terminus is just Future Atlanta.
• Issue #27 of the 2013 Deadpool run touts itself on the cover as "The most important issue #27 in the history of comics!" While it does involve the title character getting married, and wedding issues are usually important, there's the small detail that a certain high-profile star of the Distinguished Competition made his debut in an issue #27 as well...
• An Italian Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic story has Daisy Duck and her friends eating madeleine cookies. One of the friends remarks "The memories they awaken..." If you're a fan of Marcel Proust, a writer most adults consider too "heavy" to read, you recognize this reference to classic, deep French literature. In a children's comic. Never let it be said that the Walt Disney company underestimates the smarts of their readers.
• As a Fantasy Kitchen Sink series, Finder is overflowing with obscure and unusual references. The author wisely chooses to weave most of them into the background and leave the most complex and unwieldy connections in the (substantial) footnotes.
• In The Incredible Hulk #418, Death herself appears as a guest in Rick Jones' wedding, and gives Marlo, the bride, a hairbrush as a gift. It could be just a joke about a Psychopomp giving something so mundane as a gift... or it's a reference to the fact that in japanese culture, hairbrushes are considered bad gifts to give, since their name contains the words for pain and death. It could however just be a pun on the phrase "A Brush with Death".
• In Knight and Squire #3, Britain is under threat from the Bad Kings of England, superpowered clones of the originals. Each of them attempts to conquer a different area of the country; Edward I takes the north, and his superpower is a massive energy-mallet. If you know the real Edward was called the "Hammer of the Scots"...
• Just try to catch all the references in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Victorian literature, politics, and events.
• Monica's Gang has "Chauvinist" as the name of a character's pet pig.
• The Sandman (1989) has a ton of mythological and literary references, and you'll need to have read a lot to catch them all. Just to throw in a few:
  • William Shakespeare plays a significant secondary role during the whole series. Bonus points if you are familiar with the relevance of The Tempest in Shakespearean studies.
  • Lucifer quotes Satan from Paradise Lost and immediately claims having borrowed the quote from Milton.
  • There are characters a-plenty from different traditions: Morpheus, Orpheus, Calliope (Greek Mythology); Odin, Loki (Norse Mythology); God, Lucifer, Azazel (Christianity); Ra, Bastet (Egyptian Mythology); the Three (found in multiple traditions as the embodiment of femininity); and many, many more.
  • Why and how does abusing a woman named Calliope make you a bestselling author? If you're familiar with the concept of Muses, you will get it: not everyone is, nowadays.
  • The Fair Folk sent to parlay with Morpheus in Season of Mists say that they want an end to the tithe they've been paying to Hell. If you're familiar with the 400-year-old Child Ballad "Tam Lin", this will make perfect sense. If not, well...
• In the first issue of Seven Soldiers: The Shining Knight, all the stuff about King Arthur plundering the realm of the Sheeda with three ships, and only seven men returning, but they did get the Cauldron of Rebirth out of it? Straight from the less-well-known Arthurian epic The Spoils of Annwn, supposedly by Taliesin. "Revolving Castle" is one of many possible translations of the Welsh Caer Sidi; others being "Castle of the Mound" and "Castle of the Zodiac".
• Squadron Supreme: The original Squadron Sinister version of Hyperion, one of Marvel Comics' Superman Substitutes, believed his real alien name to be Zhib-Ran. This is a Stealth Pun on "Kal-El" by way of the early 20th century writer Kahlil Gibran.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: During the hostage situation in issue #6, Whirl at first seems to just be doing his usual thing, hurling insult after insult at Fortress Maximus. Except this is a real life hostage negotiation technique: Whirl's keeping Max from shooting anybody by making conversation with him and getting Max to identify with him by voicing the most probable thoughts in his head.
• In The Umbrella Academy, Vanya's neglectful father, to whom she is The Unfavorite, scoffs that she can "barely" perform a Paginini caprice. The "Caprices" are among the hardest pieces ever composed for violin, requiring extremely swift movements, perfect control of the instrument and frequent tone jumps. That Vanya could complete one at all, at her age, speaks volumes of her skill. This reference was likely included to reiterate how unfair Reginald's standards were for all of his children.
• Untold Tales of Spider-Man actually makes this part of the story in one issue. The Wizard challenges the Human Torch to a contest wherein he'll leave clues for where his next crime is going to occur; if the Torch figures out the clues, he'll be able to stop him. The Wizard uses science-related clues that he figures will stump the Torch, but Spider-Man teams up with Johnny and his heavy science background enables him to figure out the clues easily. This infuriates the Wizard, since he considers Spider-Man helping Johnny to be cheating.
• V for Vendetta: Nearly every other sentence V utters is a quote from some famous writer.
• In X-23: Innocence Lost, a minor detail during X-23's training scenes with her sensei is the color of her belt. The first time we see her train she's wearing a white belt. We then see her progress to yellow, then brown, and finally, by the time she kills her sensei, she's wearing a black belt.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes, beginning with the names of the two main characters referencing philosophers John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes.
• The Far Side is full of these, becoming very popular with scientists as a result.
  • In one comic, there are two scientists. One is explaining some complex math that shows that those many wrongs equal a right. However, if you do the math described, it equals 0. 0 wrongs make a right.
  • Anatidaephobia, the fear that a duck is watching you. Antidae is the scientific name for the duck family, which Larson describes as "a joke a dozen ornithologists got, and everyone else just went 'what the hey?'"
  • One strip depicts a man named Muhammad sitting in his house when a mountain rings his doorbell. This is based off an idiom from Francis Bacon that goes "If the mountain won't come to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain".
  • One comic has a horse teacher ask her class an arithmetic question, which the foals answer by tapping their hooves on their desks (and all getting the wrong answers). While funny by itself, the cartoon also makes fun of Clever Hans, a horse who was trained to paw the ground a certain number of times when asked a math question. The horse didn't actually know the answers, but rather its owner had trained it to stop pawing the ground whenever he made certain facial gestures.
  • One has a dog filling himself with water from a hose when he is interrupted by his wife who says, "So! Planning on roaming the neighborhood with some of your buddies today?" Once again, funny by itself, but even funnier when if you know that dogs and wolves can mark a huge territory without replenishing their liquid intake.
• While the pun-heavy Finnish comic strip Fingerpori occasionally dabbles in these, one strip had a punchline that became infamous for being absolutely incomprehensible to most readers. A man asks a repairman to change the sparkplugs on his car, and in the next panel the repairman is pulling some sort of ghost out of the vehicle. The joke relies on the word "tulpat"^note "Sparkplugs" translates to "sytytystulpat", usually shortened to just "tulpat" being a homonym with the plural form of tulpa, a mystical concept originating from Tibetan Buddhism.
• FoxTrot author Bill Amend sometimes put challenging math puzzles in his strips, where only the genius or patient would try to solve them. The rest just scratch their heads. Amend also has a real-life degree in physics, so all of the formulas in the series are perfectly accurate.
• Frazz has one in this strip◊ for climatologists. See Snow Means Cold for details.
• Peanuts: Whenever Schroeder plays piano, the note transcriptions are actual melodies. Charles M. Schulz did this just for fun, knowing that only people who could read notes would be able to read and possibly recognize the piece.

Fan Works

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged has a few examples, usually spouted by Gohan (to which Piccolo retorts "neeeeerrrddd"). But one of the more subtle ones was Piccolo's "Damn you, Pavlov" moment, which was followed by an interrupted explanation of who Pavlov was. The Namekians all speak in Klingon as well.
• Among the topics discussed/mentioned in one episode of Calvin & Hobbes: The Series include squat lobsters that perform chemosynthesis, as well as acromegaly.
  • Then there's "SouthWest Pacific", which is about Calvin performing in a school play. The title is a reference to the South West Pacific theater of World War II.
• Infinity Train: Blossomverse
  • Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail: Hope you have an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure myths and demons!
    • Chloe's story of the wish-granting shapeshifter references two myths: that of Greek God Proteus (a primordial sea god who could see your future if you held onto him as he changed forms) and Irish myth Tam Lin (of a woman who has to grab onto her lover who constantly shifted forms due to a fairy curse).
    • Chloe's story in Chapter 6 references Eligos, who is a demon in the Ars Goetia described as a White Knight that often appeared as a specter (a hint is given that the kingdom in her story is named Arsgoeti). In the Flashback of the Midnight Car in the following chapter, he wields a lance and briefly transforms himself into a skeletal horse. Eligos is commonly shown riding such a horse and one of his symbols was a lance.
    • Show of hands, who has ever heard of The Erl-King?
    • The story of the sunken city and how Vine was forced to believe he was a princess named Dahut is actually based off the mythical city of Ys which became the basis of the Sunken Cathedral prelude by Debussy.
    • The seal on Chloe's scabbard is of Marchosias, a wolf-demon who wishes to return to heaven but in some adaptations has been deceived in that hope. This is a reference to how Chloe wants her old life with Goh but lost hope in the two becoming friends again.
    • Gadreel is named after the supposed angel who let Lucifer into the Garden of Eden. Here he prevents others from leaving the "Garden of Madness".
    • The boat rental service for the Cyan Desert Car is called "Ubar". At first, it's a punny reference to "Uber"; but it's actually said to be one of the possible names of the legendary "Atlantis of the Sands". Moreover the "Atlantis of the Sands" was named that way by Lawrence of Arabia, hence the boat that is used is called a Telawrence. The author even lampshades that she'll see the reader in the Genius Bonus tab after they research this little factoid.
    • In the final part of the Cyan Desert, Chloe gets blessed by a rabbit priest with a silver unicorn horn who calls himself Miraj. Miraj also mentions that if Chloe's cloak was blue, she would've been mistaken for a priestess of Ashera. Ashera was a blue she-wolf related to the mythological origins of the Turkish people.
  • Infinity Train: Knight of the Orange Lily:
    • Margaret crushing a pearl to mix with the grape juice is based on a myth that Cleopatra did the same thing (albeit with a pearl earring) to Marc Anthony in a bet that she could devour the most expensive dish ever.
    • Sooty, the two-headed dog who guards the Charcoal Car, is an Orthos — an actual creature from Greek Mythology similar to the much more famous Cerberus.
    • The White Rabbit's joke about how 400 is shorthand for an infinite number is actually accurate. The Aztecs saw the number 400 as equivalent to infinity. Moreover, the 400 Rabbits are actually Aztec deities that are all about the numerous ways of getting drunk.
• Subverted in You Got HaruhiRolled!. It includes a parody of Eliezer Yudkowsky's "AI in a Box" thought experiment, with Kuyou as the AI and Kyon's sister as the gatekeeper, but the narration right out tells the readers of the experiment beforehand.
• In The Powers of Harmony, much of the backstory mythology is tied into a group called the Order of the Zodiac, whose members had the names of the Zodiac constellations. Bearing that in mind, also take into account Ophiuchus (an Energy Being whose existence is crucial to the plot) and Cetus (the Big Bad) — Ophiuchus and Cetus are also the names of constellations (the Snake and the Whale, respectfully) considered in some circles to be the unofficial thirteenth and fourteenth Zodiac symbols.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fics by Bad Horse tend to reference literature and philosophy as core parts of the story.
  • The Descendant is famous for Christian theological and thematic undertones in his works.
• Bait and Switch has a bit character named S'bek, a Gorn who is the skipper of an independent freighter. The author mentions in the author's notes on DeviantArt that the name is a play on Sobek, an ancient Egyptian river god depicted with the head of a crocodile.
• In Jeconais' Harry Potter fanfic Happily Ever After, a knowledge of psychology will let the reader suspect the main plot twist well ahead of its reveal in-story. No reputable or competent psychologist would give a diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder for a six-year-old child. The diagnostic criteria specifically requires that the patient be at least 18 years of age to be diagnosed, as several of the possible symptoms are not atypical behavior for small children and are only alarming if they persist unchanged through adolescence and into adulthood. Of course, Gabrielle's psychologist is actually the Big Bad and misleading her parents for his own Svengali-esque agenda, which is exactly why he did it. In addition, the Quibbler building's elevator uses Catalan numbers.
• In Between Minds, Adlivun Electric is the laboratory located in Greenland that discovered the Borealis ship from Half-Life and Portal. Just so happens, Adlivun is analogous to purgatory in Inuit Mythology.
• The Writing on the Wall describes the building that the titular writing is in some detail, making note of metallic thorns built around the place and a room full of warnings in dozens of ancient dead languages. Only people familiar with a proposal for a real life nuclear waste depository will realize that the building really is before the end. The text of the eponymous writing itself is a genius bonus as it is derived from the same proposal. Brr.
• Bad Future Crusaders:
  • Pavel's silver and eggs joke actually does make sense if you know "eggs" are Russian slang for testicles.
  • Silver Spoon referring to the Cake Twins as "Nicola and Bart" is a reference to Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-born anarchists who were (unjustly, according to common opinion) tried and executed for their beliefs in the 1920s.
  • Ms. Daydream's rant about the importance of "positive and negative lightning" sounds silly, but is actually a real thing. Given the difference between the two, the polarity of lightning would be a very important thing in a world where lightning was artificial.
• In the fan comic Twilight's First Day, a periodic table on the wall of Twilight Sparkle's science classroom has certain elements highlighted in colors associated with Twilight's friends in the series premiere. Put them together in the order the friends in question highlighted their connection to one of the Elements of Harmony (Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash) and you get Hydrogen-Argon-Molybdenum-Nitrogen-Yttrium, which abbreviates to HArMoNY: the Elements of Harmony.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: A fair deal of background information and details rely on obscure knowledge that most readers do not realize during the first read. See that fic's YMMV page for details.
• Some of the religious jokes in Episode 8 of Hellsing Ultimate Abridged come from this, including Integra's mocking suggestion to 'nail a formal protest to Maxwell's door.' or the Temple Beth Zion's taunting reference to the Rhineland Massacres. ^note ya schmucks!
• In Dobby's Deceit Harry complains that Dobby wanted to set the bounceback destinations of his anti-apparation ward to inside Mount Etna, Antarctica and the Phlegraean Fields.
• In Skyhold Academy Yearbook, in the noir installment Bright Jewels, Chained City, the detectives think that "Sophia Perennis" is the name of a possible suspect. As it's eventually revealed, this actually means "absolute truth." In the real world, this Latin phrase is one of the core concepts of perennial philosophy.
  • Also, in The Memory Band, Duke Prosper identifies Tallis as "Agent 3354242." On a telephone keypad, those numbers correspond to the letters spelling the name Felicia - as in Felicia Day, the actress who voiced Tallis in Mark of the Assassin.
• Misery Loves Company: The potion that erases Gaz's memory is called Water of Lethe. In Classical Mythology, Lethe is a river in the underworld that the dead drink from to forget their earthly lives.

Films — Animation

• Aladdin's song "Never Had a Friend Like Me" has a lyric about "Scheherazade had a thousand tales". This references One Thousand and One Nights - better known as 'Arabian Nights' - where the Aladdin folktale became famous. Jasmine also confirms Aladdin's identity while they're in China - a possible reference to the fact that Aladdin was originally set in China.
• For The Book of Life, the character designs of the soldiers of the town militia are based on the styles of several famous Spanish painters, the most surreal-looking characters being based on Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.
• In A Bug's Life, the queen of Ant Island has a pet aphid. It's very unlikely that anyone in the audience other than hardcore entomologists recognized this as an allusion to real-life "dairying ants", which live alongside populations of aphids and "milk" them for honeydew in exchange for protecting them from harm.
• Coraline:
  • The Amazing Bobinsky wears a Liquidator's Medal on his chest, which was given to the clean-up crew of the Chernobyl Disaster. This turns his baldness and odd color scheme from a funny quirk to a Dark and Troubled Past, when you think about it.
  • A subtle and brilliant case of Foreshadowing can be found in the calligraphy on the cake Coraline is first given when she comes into the Other World. In calligraphy, an "o" with one loop shows the writer is telling the truth, whereas an "o" with a double loop through it shows the writer is telling a lie. The cake says "Welcome Home." However, the loops on the cake show that while Coraline is "welcome" (there is one loop in the "o") in the Other World, she is not "home" (there is a double loop in the "o") and the place is actually far more dangerous than it may appear at first glance.
  • Going with the book's implication that the Other Mother is a member of The Fair Folk, her ability to transform things into something else (rats into mice, a pumpkin into the Other Father) is very similar to the glamour that faeries use to lure humans. Leaving a doll behind when she takes a human also calls to mind faeries leaving an inanimate object behind in place of the abductee. Said object also resembles the person stolen.
  • The Beldam, in her spider form, catches Coraline trying to escape her web by feeling the vibrations that her movements make. This is actually how real spiders are alerted that something has been caught in their web.
• Encanto: From 1899 to 1902, Colombia suffered a civil war known as the Thousand Days' War. The war was caused by numerous political ideologies warring against the governing structure of the country for varying reasons, and caused over a hundred thousand deaths. Based on the timing of the war historically and its infamously high death toll, there is significant possibility that Pedro was murdered by a member of one of the various political parties in a desperate effort to buy his wife and children time to escape. Knowing this detail makes an already heart-wrenching scene even more devastating.
• Finding Nemo has a Stealth Pun in the title that requires knowledge of Latin to understand. Nemo is Latin for "no one", so the title means "Finding No One". It's also a Shout-Out to Captain Nemo, whose name was itself a genius bonus; Nemo is the Latin equivalent of the Greek Outis, which is the name Odysseus used when blinding the cyclops Polyphemus in The Odyssey.
• Horton Hears a Who! (2008): It's pretty well-known that Jim Carrey likes to insert little impressions in all of his movies. Here, as Horton (played by Carrey) is being chased by the Wickersham Brothers, he randomly does an impersonation of... Henry Kissinger, of all people.
• Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation: The decrepit-looking plane that carries the monsters to the Bermuda Triangle is identified as "Gremlin Air Flight 19". There's a reason they picked that number— Flight 19 was a group of US Navy planes that disappeared in the Triangle in 1945.
• The training sequence in Kung Fu Panda is a useful tool for illustrating the concept of subconscious learning.
  aqulia2sax: The analogy with language acquisition is this: The language center is a thinking part of the brain, that is located in the subconscious, its thinking processes hidden away from conscious awareness. Thus, it bears some resemblance to [Po's] budding kung fu skills, which lurked beneath his awareness.
• In The Land Before Time XII: The Great Day of the Flyers, Guido is a Microraptor. One of the three known species of Microraptor is Microraptor gui. As in GUI - do.
• In Madagascar, the side of the titular island on which its indigenous predators live bears several signs warning passerby of "foosa". Since that's how the word is pronounced and it's an incredibly obscure species, very few people are likely to catch the joke that "fossa" has been misspelled.
• Big Bad Shan Yu from Mulan is pretty much the only character in the entire movie to never even care that the titular Mulan is a woman, only remarking "the soldier from the mountains!" when he comes face-to-face with her during the Final Battle. Anyone familiar with the history of China and the Huns will know this is because Mongolian women had a much higher social standing than anywhere else in Asia (Genghis Khan's daughters were even army combat Generals). The significance of Mulan being a woman is completely lost on him and she really is just a soldier like anyone else as far as he's concerned.
• Pocahontas:
  • The film's Signature Song "Colors of the Wind" is basically the religion of animism put to song form. Animism is the belief that all natural phenomena has a soul, and was/still is practiced by most indigenous peoples of the Americas. Pocahontas has to learn to listen to the spirits around her, which ties into traditional animist beliefs. The lyrics of "Steady as the Beating Drum" and "Listen With Your Heart" reference this too.
  • At the end, Pocahontas gives John Smith something from Grandmother Willow's bark to "help with the pain" after he took a bullet for Chief Powhatan. Willow bark is traditionally an ingredient used in aspirin and can be used for pain relief on its own too.
• The Prince of Egypt: The production team behind the film really did their homework when it came to Biblical and Egyptian history and culture; more specifically, The Ten Plagues, which undermine the power of specific Egyptian gods:
  • The Nile turning to blood=Hapi (Divine waterbearer)
  • The frogs=Heket (Goddess of fertility)
  • Lice=Geb (God of the earth)
  • Death of livestock=Hathor (Goddess of love) and Apis (Manifestation of Ptah)
  • Flies=Khepri (God of creation)
  • Fire from the sky=Nut (Sky goddess)
  • Boils=Thoth (God of wisdom and medicine)
  • Locusts=Set (God of chaos)
  • Complete darkness=Ra (Sun god)
  • Death of the Egyptian firstborn=Osiris (God of the afterlife) and Pharaoh (divinely chosen)
• Ratatouille:
  • Anton Ego's food-induced flashback hails from Marcel Proust's concept of "involuntary memory". Quoth In Search of Lost Time:
    No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory â this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. ... Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? ... And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.
  • Additionally, if you look at the movie from Chef Skinner's perspective, it starts to look a whole lot like a fantastique story, a genre in which the French excelled in the nineteenth century. Your typical fantastique story is about an ordinary man who grows increasingly obsessed with some supernatural phenomenon, until it destroys his life, but it's never exactly clear if the supernatural phenomenon is real, if it's a conspiracy by persons unknown, or if it's all a delusion in the ordinary man's head. See Skinner's rant about "Is there a rat?" "No! But he wants me to think there's a rat!"
  • In one scene, Anton Ego stops himself from doing a Spit Take while drinking wine. Close inspection of the bottle reveals it's a real-life rare wine, Cheval Blanc 1947, and far too expensive to waste on a spit-take.
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: While the Dwarfs forcibly wash Grumpy, they put a ring of flowers on his head and Sneezy comments that he smells like a petunia. In botany, petunias symbolize anger and resentment, which explains Grumpy's Meaningful Name.
• All the unexplained visual symbolism of Son of the White Horse. Which is to say, the entire film. Religious and mythological imagery, references to seasons and weather, heavy focus on astrology, hard to interpret folk tale quotes based on East European and West to Middle Asian cultures, with hints of Nordic myths thrown in. To those unfamiliar with folk symbolism, the film could seem like an utterly bonkers retelling of a paper-thin bedtime story, which has no doubt contributed to its status as a Stoner Flick.
  • The planet Saturn's blink-and-miss-it appearances in the Underworld refer to the Roman god Saturn and to medieval cultures' reinterpretation of him as a fallen god and the marker of the great divide between life and the unknown, like how Saturn is the farthest planet visible by eye.
  • The griffin who sprouts a second head while trying to flee the Underworld is a nod to the Orthodox Church's two-headed eagle and the mythological griffins' ability to cross divides, both symbols of resurrection.
  • The titular White Mare's gradually shrinking crown of ice and slow metamorphosis from a deer into a horse invokes the snowdrop flower shedding its petals as Spring nears, the real-world shift of ancient nomads abandoning deer and taking up horse breeding as they moved to warmer climates, and an old nomad tradition of dedicating masks with antlers to sacred dead horses.
  • Even those who know the source tale in and out can easily be confused by the film, unless they're aware of the dozens of different versions the story exists in, seeing as the movie borrows aspects from those as well.
• Hook Hand, the leader of the pub thugs in Tangled, dreams of becoming a concert pianist, despite missing a hand. One-handed concert pianists are in fact not entirely unheard of.
• Toy Story 2: "What, that's in yen, right? DOLLARS?!" This was done at a time in which not a lot of people in the target audience knew about how Yen worked compared to US/AU/CAN Dollars, which use decimals, unlike Yen. So yes, it really was expensive for Al to check luggage and ship stuff to Japan.
• Turning Red: Mei's nightmare while appearing to be simply a bizarre nonsensical dream, is actually packed with meaningful imagery that requires extensive knowledge of Chinese symbolism to understand. This video walks through all of it.
• Up: When Carl goes down in the stair lift, the music is "La Habanera" from Carmen, which is about how love is unpredictable. Some of the lyrics are "if you don't love me, I love you, but if I love you, beware". Carl doesn't like Russell or Doug but ends up loving them both; and he loves Muntz, who will try to kill him.

Pinball

• Invoked as a gameplay mechanic in the AC/DC pinball. During the Album and Tour Multiball modes, scoring a multiball jackpot shows either an album or a tour ticket, in Real Life chronological order. If the player's current song first appeared on that album or was first played live on that tour, the player also gets the Song Jackpot as a bonus. Folks who know their AC/DC history have used this to strategically increase their scores.
• In The Simpsons Pinball Party, Abe "Grampa" Simpson says, "Back in my day, we didn't have flippers!" It sounds like another characteristic absurd thing he vaguely recalls but was distorted by his deteriorating memory. However, The Simpsons Pinball Party was released in 2003, and the first machine with flippers, Humpty Dumpty, was released in 1949, 54 years earlier, meaning pinball flippers really didn't exist when he was young.

Podcasts

• On the Threshold: Victorian physician Dr. Powell makes passing references in his journal to treating his female patients with "pelvic massages", in one case until they "achieved a satisfying paroxysm, for which she and her husband were, as always, most grateful." This refers to actual Victorian medical treatments in which physicians would essentially give women handjobs.
• When listening to The Scathing Atheist, it helps to be knowledgeable in world politics, science, literature, the English language, films, and pop culture to get all the jokes. Keep this in mind when Noah compliments a patron's penis by stating that it has Lagrange Points.

Pro Wrestling

• Little Egypt's Gratuitous Rap in GLOW is surprisingly well-researched.
  • "Even though I may be little, I'm the answer to the Sphinx's riddle" - technically she's right as she is a human after all.
  • "Here's one wrestler who never fails, there's action behind my seven veils" - the dance of the seven veils performed by Salome for her father King Herod's birthday. As a reward she asked for John the Baptist's head on a platter.
    • The character herself is a Genius Bonus as she is a Hot Gypsy Woman when you consider that Gypsies were mistaken as Egyptians by medieval Europeans.
• Kane. He's the treacherous brother of The Undertaker, and Cain is the treacherous brother of Abel. The only difference is Xtreme Kool Letterz.
• In the mid-2000s, WWE fans were treated to a (Kayfabe) mentally-challenged wrestler named Eugene. Ironically, "Eugene" is from a Greek phrase meaning "well-born" (or, less literally, "genetically superior"), which WWE's Eugene definitely was not.
• Matt Striker is notorious for these. He seems to have a vast knowledge of professional wrestling history and movesets that could constitute an entire encyclopaedia.

Radio

• BBC Radio 4 quiz show The 3rd Degree. Steve Punt's introductions to the specialist rounds usually incorporate some highly esoteric reference to the subject in question. Although this is Played for Laughs, the references do (usually) make sense... if you're an expert.
• In the Adventures in Odyssey epsiode "Stage Fright", the action centers around the "Taft-Hartley Theater" where a School Play is to be held. In professional acting circles (including radio), being "Taft-Hartleyed" refers to a non-union actor being allowed to take one role in a union-signatory production without joining SAG-AFTRA (incidentally, being Taft-Hartleyed is often the first step to joining said union). Incidentally, Adventures in Odyssey is a union production.
• In Dragnet, the idea was to present police work as realistically as possible. So, the characters used accurate police terminology and codes without providing explanations for the audience. In most cases, listeners caught onto what was being said in context. This was carried over into the TV series.
• Old Harry's Game: In one episode, Satan tries to attract God's wrath by saying "you only picked the Jews as your chosen people because you knew the Welsh didn't want you!" Listeners familiar with Jewish theology will realize that this isn't far off from what many actually believe; it's a widespread tradition among Orthodox Jews that they were actually the people God least wanted to receive the Torah, but every other nation found its rules too burdensome.

Software

• Though the (alleged) historical incident it refers to is relatively well-known, one suspects that the pun in the title of the Nero Burning ROM software package still went over many people's heads.
• If you open a URL to the website Imgur with a line-feed or a carraige return character in the URL, it will redirect you to an image that appears to be a parody of Spanish Inquisition sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus, with the caption "Nobody expects the CR/LF." While this might fly over most people's heads, anyone who's familiar with web security might understand the joke.

Tabletop Games

• Some pairs of black and white cards in Cards Against Humanity are made for each other specifically, such as Things White People Like and The 3/5ths Compromise.
• The Pathfinder Bestiaries are gold mines for people familiar with mythical monsters. Most people will recognize the classical monsters pulled from Classical, Egyptian, and Norse Mythology. A lesser, but still significant, number of people will recognize the single popular monsters from certain mythologies, like the Algonquian Wendigo, the Orcadian Nuckelavee, and various Yōkai. But only very dedicated or specialized mythological scholars will be able to identify all the lesser known monsters right off the bat, which draw from Taíno, Mesopotamian, Persian, Aztec, Inuit, Ojibwe, Chinese, French, Aboriginal Australian, and Bagandan folklore and myth, among many others.
• In Shadowrun, the Puyallup Barrens in the Seattle metropolitan area has an abandoned shopping mall called the Crime Mall, which is currently used as a front for many black market dealers. Now consider that the real life town that the Barrens is based on is named after a Native American tribe whose term literally means "the generous people" in their dialect. Given the location of the Crime Mall in that particular town, the name couldn't be any more coincidentally accurate.
• Warhammer 40,000 has little references tucked away everywhere, ranging from science fiction to military history to history in general to Scandinavian and Ancient Babylonian myth.
  • Nurgle, the Chaos god of plagues, sounds incredibly similar to Nergal, the ancient Sumerian god of plague.
  • Tzeetch, the Chaos god of knowledge and magic, has demons and priests with bird features, such as feathers and beaks. What Real Life deity has avian appearance and connection to birds? Thoth, the ancient Egyptian god of knowledge and magic. Bonus points that several of Tzeentch's followers, such as the Thousand Sons, have attire which resembles that of ancient Egypt.
  • In Western magical traditions, the number 3 has a great deal of occult/magical potency. Tzeentch's sacred number is 9, being three squared (three times three, or three plus three plus three) and the only number more inherently powerful than three. Perfect symbolism for a god of magic.
  • One of the first worlds in the path of the first Tyranid Hive Fleet was named "Prandium", which is Latin for "lunch."
  • The double-headed eagle, the primary symbol of the Imperium, is a triple-whammy. It has been a symbol of many empires throughout the ages, such as Byzantine, Russian, Austrian and so on. It's also eerily similar to the Reichsadler, a symbol of Nazi Germany. Lastly, for thousands of years it has been a very popular symbol in the Anatolia region — the very same one the Emperor is said to originate from.
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus's belief that all technology already exists in the galaxy and only needs to be discovered seems like it's illustrating just how backwards they actually are, but if you talk to any decent programmer, they can basically sum up programming as "discovering the path to the program you want". As all programs are made from mathematical symbols put into sequences, it literally means all programs exist right now, you just need to input the correct sequence to access it (which is one method of thinking when it comes to actually writing scripts and programs). Hence, all technology does really exist, it just depends on your definition of "discovery" and "creation". Considering the Adeptus Mechanicus are often shown to merge themselves with technology, this would be a surprisingly logical (if somewhat skewed) assumption on their part.
  • The aforementioned Rainbow Warriors name being a double reference: One to the Greenpeace vessel, the other to the Native American legend.
  • In the backstory given to Ollanius Pius, it's mentioned that he's a "Cathar," one of the last remaining Christians (or at least practitioners of a Christianity-descended religion) in the 30th millennium. On the surface, it just seems like a Future Imperfect interpretation of Catholicism. However, Catharism was an actual Christian cult originally practiced in southern France during the 13th century. Furthermore, the Cathars were considered to be very heretical by the standards of the day since they believed the Earth was such a Crapsack World that it was literally Hell (which is rather appropriate if one makes a comparison to the abysmal state of the Milky Way in 40K), and also because they thought people had genderless, immortal souls that would be reincarnated multiple times until they earned access to Heaven. That latter belief sounds surprisingly similar to the existence of Perpetuals (which Pius was later Retconned as being one) in the 40K universe.
  • When you look at them closely, each of the main factions can be seen as representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins:
    • Imperium: Sloth. They've lasted for 10,000 years, but have fallen into stagnation and suffer from a severe lack of innovation, to the point where they constantly throw their own lives away to appease a dead deity.
    • Eldar: Lust. They birthed the Chaos god of excess, Slaanesh, through their decadence and depravity.
    • Orks: Wrath. They want to slaughter everyone in sight almost entirely for the fun of it.
    • Chaos: Greed. Most of its followers are often driven by a selfish desire to acquire power.
    • Tyranids: Gluttony. Devouring everything in their path is their main motivation and characteristic.
    • Necrons: Envy. The reason they became the way they are was because they envied the Great Old Ones and their immortality.
    • Tau: Pride. They believe that their philosophy is the best and if you don't think so, they'll force you to agree. Meanwhile, the other factions would just kill you.
  • It's no coincidence that the Ultramarines are the 13th Legio Astartes and the resident Space Romans with a Julius Caesar Expy for a Primarch: the Legio XIII Gemina was the one that Caesar took across the Rubicon to invade Rome.

• Yu-Gi-Oh!: The effect of Last Chapter of the Noble Knights actually works as an elaborate Mythology Gag when taken in tandem with Bedwyr's lore article. The art clearly depicts Bedwyr returning Excalibur to the lake, and a knight with a red sword about to strike Bedwyr down, thus a knight and arms are lost. But the card returns a Knight and Arms to the field. Why is the dissonance? Bedwyr's lore article describes these events from Merlin's perspective, and Merlin sees time in reverse. The effect is reversed from the events because that's how Merlin sees it.

Toys

• BIONICLE: If you've spent any significant amount of time studying Hinduism, you might notice that "Unity", "Duty" and "Destiny" are three of the primary meanings of the word dharma — a word that's notoriously difficult to concisely translate into English. Depending on the context, dharma can be understood to mean "One's ultimate place in the world, as dictated by the universe itself", "One's moral obligation to find one's place in the world and fulfill one's destiny", and "The underlying direction of the universe, which binds all living beings together in one common purpose".
  • Teridax, the first name of arc-villain Makuta; was originally used by author Greg Farshtey as a World of Warcraft character name. However, Teridax is also the nickname of a radiocontrast tracer (Iophenoxic Acid) which was used in medicine. It is unknown if Greg pulled the name from the radiocontrast, however its complicated side-effects make it similar to the corrupted nature of the Makuta.
• Cabbage Patch Kids is a well-known line of dolls that's been around since 1978. However, what some people may not know is that the name is a reference to one of the myths surrounding "where babies come from". One of those myths is that they're "found in the cabbage patch", inspiring the name of the toyline.
• The date on which the dolls are sewn in the Lalaloopsy line could count as this. One example is Patch Treasurechest, a living doll who likes to play at being a pirate. He's said to have been sewn into life on September 19th... but how many grade-schoolers are going to recognize that as International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day?

Theater

• In Company, Joanne says that smoking is the best, saying that it's "better than Librium". Librium was the precursor to Valium and is a sedative/muscle relaxant/anti-anxiety/anti-convulsant drug, mostly prescribed in the short term to treat anxiety. You know what else it's prescribed for? Acute alcohol withdrawal.
• Elisabeth: References to Heinrich Heine's poems pop up in the libretto, mostly via Death's lines. This isn't surprising, because Lucheni stated in the first song that Elisabeth loved Heinrich Heine (she did, in real life). The original casting call for Death specifically stated that he should be "young, attractive, androgynous" and close to an idealistic representation of a young Heine. The German poet also contemplated death extensively.
• In Evita, a musical based on the life of Argentine First Lady Eva Perón, mourners at Eva's state funeral sing a Latin chant based on the real-life Roman Catholic prayer, the Salve Regina. The original prayer references the Biblical Eve, known in Latin as Eva, meaning that the chant can be read as a prayer to Eva Perón herself.
• In Irma Vep, stage directions indicate that the innocent-young-girl character is to play a few bars of "The Last Rose of Summer" on the dulcimer. Although "The Last Rose of Summer" is perfect for this Gothic-style play, being a sentimental Victorian song that's really pretty morbid, few people in the audience will know the words, even if the tune sounds vaguely familiar to them.
• In Noises Off, Lloyd the director mentions in the second act that another play he is directing is having many problems, including the actor playing Richard III suffering a back injury. This becomes funnier when you remember that Richard III the character has back problems, too.
• The Pirates of Penzance: The Major General Song sounds impressive to the uninitiated, but most of the things that the Major General brags about doing are either flat-out impossible or trivially easy (except maybe the achievement of singing a difficult Patter Song properly- he even sings it again twice as fast).
  • "Sing the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes." The entire chorus is "ribbit". (Or, in the original Greek, Βρεκεκεκὲξ κοὰξ κοάξ. Which is, naturally, Greek for "ribbit".)
  • "quote the fights historical from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical" — He has only read about them in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: from Marathon to Waterloo but can't even remember the timeline. Also, a categorical order memorization is no big deal, just remember that Salamis was a naval battle and you're good.
  • "can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies" — Raphael painted religious iconography heavy with symbolism while Dow and Zoffany painted photorealistic scenes from life. The difference is unmistakable.
  • "tell you every detail of Caractacus’s uniform" — The only depiction of Caractacus shows him in the nude. Also, Caractacus was a Gallic chieftain who lived around the birth of Christ, and would never have worn a uniform at all.
  • "I can quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus" is well and good, but an elegy is very specifically a poem of praise. Someone has misunderstood something here...
  • "I can write a washing bill in Babylonic Cuneiform": Cuneiform was at the time understood to be a form of writing, but nothing else was known about it.
  • "And I can hum a fugue of which I've heard the music's din a-fore": Fugues are per definition polyphonic, i.e. have more than one melody running at the same time. Tuvan throat singers can accomplish something to this effect by singing one tune and humming another, but good luck humming two tunes at once.
  • "About binomial theorem I’m teeming with a lot o’ news"—No real advances had been made in the area since Newton generalized it more than 200 years before, hence there were no "news" for him to teem with.
  • "I'm very well acquainted too with matters mathematical/I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical"—Understanding a quadratic equation is junior-high-level math and should not impress anyone older than fourteen. At the very least, a man of his class would be expected to have been introduced to calculus as a university freshman, so a statement like this would be roughly the equivalent of someone today saying "I went to high school."
    • To be fair, he's also "very good at integral and differential calculus", although as the above states, this is at best something a university freshman should know.
  • "I know the Kings of England" — Quite impressive today, but at the time being able to recite the line of regents was part of middle school history.
  • "In conics I can show peculiarities parabolous" — Conic geometry can be pretty advanced, but any military officer will be given at least a taste of parabolas since they are so strongly associated with ballistics.
• At the very end of Urinetown, the Narrator, Officer Lockstock, concludes the tale of the eventual decay and collapse of the town's society when people are allowed to use water without restraint by shouting "Hail Malthus!" This is a reference to a Malthusian Catastrophe, which is exactly what Urinetown illustrates.

Theme Parks

• The former Universal's Back to the Future: The Ride: When Doc Brown goes back in time and meets Albert Einstein, he doesn't look ecstatic or happy like the other scientists that the Doc saw. During the press shoot, there is a man standing next to Einstein; that man is Oppenheimer. The press shot that Doc went to was about the atomic bomb during/after World War II!
• The Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Walt Disney World features a scene in the queue area where you see skeletons of pirates playing chess. The average person would think nothing of the way it's arranged, but apparently, Imagineer Marc Davis set up the pieces specifically so that it would result in a neverending game — justifying why the pirates were playing up to their deaths! (Though apparently they didn't get it quite right.)
• A very subtle one can be found in Dorney Park in Allentown, Pennsylvania. When it opened in 1989, the attraction Hercules was the longest, tallest wooden roller coaster in the world. It was removed in 2003 due to waning popularity, and was replaced by a steel coaster called Hydra: The Revenge. The names are an allusion to Classical Mythology, in which the great hero Hercules was eventually killed by the Hydra he had defeated years earlier.

Visual Novels

• In Daughter for Dessert, when Mortelli is telling his story about his infiltration of a chess club, he drops names of real chess openings.
• Doki Doki Literature Club!:
  • Doki Doki has character files, which are absolutely vital in completing the main game. However, these files are all .chr files, which isn't an actual file type. Some people on Reddit figured out that, when opened in a text editor like Notepad, these files are all puzzles needed to reveal the secret of Project Libitina.
    • Sayori's file needs to be converted into an .ogg audio file, then the sound produced needs to be put through a visualizer. You end up with a QR-code, which, when scanned, leads to the Project Libitina-website.
    • Yuri's file is a string of garbled letters and numbered when opened in a text editor, but converting that from Base64 to normal text reveals a creepypasta written by Dan Salvato about a 19 year-old girl who becomes a murderer.
    • Natsuki's file was originally a .png file, which, when color-inverted, flipped 180 degrees then wrapped around a 3D cone and viewed from the top, reveals an unfamiliar woman's face.
    • Just like Natsuki's, Monika's file was originally a .png, but converting it into a png-file reveals a picture of a flaming ring with a block of black and white squares in the centre. This block can be converted into binary, which, when translated, reveals another Base64-code. Translate that, and you end up with a transcript of a short, one-sided conversation, in which someone (persumably Monika) tells you that "everyone else is dead", and that it's "time to be a fucking hero", ending with "2018".
  • Some of the poems hide secrets too.
    • One of Act 2's special poems is a block of redacted text with only a few letters visible, which spells out the phrase "nothing is real". However, opening this picture in Photoshop and turning up the exposure all the way reveals what looks to be a diary entry from a doctor, who talks about the severe symptoms of someone named "Elyssa", and how she's screaming even louder now that there's someone with her.
    • Natsuki's first poem in Act 2 seems like a garbled mess, but when decoded from Base64, reveals a poem titled "Open your Third Eye", in which the narrator takes pleasure in stabbing someone to death.
• In Double Homework, during one of the protagonist’s counseling sessions with Dr. Mosely, she brings up the Rohrschach Test (allegedly used to determine brain activity) and the Big Five (a personality test).
• In Melody, the narrator gives music quizzes to the title character which are packed with music trivia.

Web Animation

• When watching Dr. Crafty, people invested in snails will quickly notice the extent of Messibelle's snail motif throughout her design and personality. In addition to wearing a snail shell bonnet and a slime dress evocative of a gastropod's foot, Messi's occupation as a maid coincides with snails' roles in providing natural sanitation for their environments. What's more, her bottomless sex drive echoes snails' extremely sexually active lives and the common belief that snail caviar is an aphrodisiac.
• Unbiased History: As to be expected from the series, much of the humor comes from getting things in history backwards, like the rape by the Sabine women (rather than rape of).
  • In "Imperial Wrath", Gothic cavalry at the Battle of Adrianople is revealed in a flash of lightning. This is probably a reference to how sources say it "descended like a thunderbolt".
  • In the Israel spin-off episode, there are weird drawings when he talks about "spiritual reconnection". Those drawings are actually ancient engravings found at an archaeological dig at Kuntillet Ajrud, Egypt. The drawing is actually the engraving found at the site depicting YHWH - making it perhaps the oldest depiction of the Biblical God.

Webcomics

• This Bob and George:
  Ran: The way I see it, we've broken every law of physics except the third law of thermodynamics.
  Dr. Light: Aha! Negative two Kelvin!
  Ran: Nevermind.
• Chasing the Sunset plays with this a lot. In one notable instance a broken automaton lets out a stream of plusses and other symbols which, when compiled with a brainf*ck compiler (it's a programming language), spells out "beep".
• One of the "About" pages for Comments on a Postcard reads "According to an analysis of your IP address, you access this site from a computer located in the Langerhans Islets. In accordance with Langerhans Islets pornography laws, individual pictures will not be displayed." The Islets of Langerhans are groups of hormone-secreting cells in the pancreas.
• Cyanide and Happiness actually had a week's worth of strips called "90% Of The General Public Won't Understand Week".
• Ursula Vernon, author of Digger, has a degree in anthropology and an interest in the more obscure mythologies (South American, Balkian). This shows up frequently in her works.
• Dresden Codak bounces around between physics, psychology, math, philosophy, and general geekery jokes, so you need to be fairly cosmopolitan in your background to enjoy it. It's worth it though. The author mentions at one point that the comic probably wouldn't work in another medium, because only on the web do readers have near-instantaneous access to obscure information.
• In a filler comic of El Goonish Shive, the Demonic Duck informs Dan that he's going to Australia to discover his roots. There is fossil evidence of a large, prehistoric bird that lived in Australia which has come to be known as the "Demon Duck of Doom".
• As it is befitting of the title, several Girl Genius strips offer incredibly obscure references, a selection:
  • A flirtatious Jäger referring to a waitress as his little nokedli (it's a type of dumpling).
  • More a "Wisconsinite" bonus but when Agatha was listing Othar's supposed exploits she included "Savior of the town of Mt. Horeb from the rain of Mustard."
  • Brillat-Savarin, mentioned here, was a famous gastronomist and essayist — just the sort that a minor spark would crow about outwitting.
  • Spot the typography Easter egg in the Geisterspeak on this page.
  • "If you analyze these vellum pages really thoroughly you get instructions on how to build a cow." The "instructions" in question are a sequence of the letters A, C, G and U... genetic code (specifically, RNA). And vellum is parchment made from calf skin...
  • Krosp refers to another character as "Prince Myshkin", who is the titular character from the novel The Idiot.
• Gunnerkrigg Court makes some obscure references without stopping to explain: Though Reynardine's character is more based on Reynard the Fox, his first meeting with Antimony references the seduction from the English folk song "Reynardine". Similarly, Winsbury and Janet's secret relationship is a reference to the song "Willie O'Winsbury". The First Treatise copies poses and Latin from the Mutus Liber, a 17th-century Huguenot alchemy text. And Chapter 17 references Medieval German master swordsman Johann Liechtenauer.
  • Tom Siddell seems to be particularly fond of song references. Mr. Eglamore's name contains yet another one.
• Homestuck is chock-full of references to video games, pop culture and bad movies, but its biggest bonuses are probably in astrology.
  • People who study the astrological signs will often find the corresponding trolls to be either spot-on representations of their supposed traits... or humorous subversions. (Such as the traditionally rational, serious Capricorn being deployed as their friendly neighborhood stoner.)
  • The biology bonuses. While Hussie is a bit artistic with the trolls, the fact that the handle abbreviations are genetic code pairs (GCAT), and the fact that Bslick's "cancer" is caused by an error in his genetic code are completely sound. Especially if you consider that the "cancer" was caused by Karkat, whose chum handle (carcinoGeneticist) practically means "creator of Cancer". He's also the Cancer troll, and John changed his handle from valid genetics to "EB", (a mutation) after Karkat messed with Jade, who brought it up, causing John to decide to change his handle. And his weapon of choice is a sickle- this initially appears to just be because it resembles a crab's claw, until we find out Karkat is a mutant himself, with the only other troll sharing his blood color being his ancestor. Let's see, sickles and genetic blood disorders caused by a mutation...
  • The first three kids' sylladexes. Those three are commonly used data structures in computer science. Extra Genius Bonus Points goes to Rose's Tree Module, specifically an AVL tree, which mandates that the two subtrees of a binary tree must not have a height that differs by more than 1 (and consequently all the subtrees must follow this rule). As such, the auto-balance is a perfect double rotation that would be used in an AVL tree. Shame it doesn't handle the deletion of the root element very well, like a real AVL tree.
• The Illustrated Guide to Law does this every now and then. In its section on Duress, for example, the members of the outlaw biker gang engage in discussions of physics and philosophy and multiple dimensions while brawling. In its section on Entrapment, the physicist has real equations on the blackboard behind her. The first page of the section on "taking the Fifth" has a couple of math jokes like "Wow, your truncated Maclauren fits so well. Of course... it's Taylor made," and a kitten saying "μ" (a Greek letter pronounced "mew").
• Irregular Webcomic! does this a lot. DM Maus tends to explain the references for those who don't get them in The Rant, though. Even then, they can be a bit brain-breaking and tough to understand. In this one he explains the Banach-Tarski theorem and making it make sense.
• In Ménage à 3. Zii's guitar is a Telecaster...with a Stratocaster neck. Anyone knowledgable in guitars would know that this would actually make sense, since Telecaster necks are famously chubby and Zii is quite petite; it's also feasible, since Fender necks are bolt-on; and there's even precedent for it, in that Eric Clapton played a Tele with a Strat neck while he was in Blind Faith.
• When morphE isn't overtly explaining the game mechanics of Mage: The Awakening, it is using spells and information from the source books without any extra focus or attention. Readers with a knowledge of the source books will pick up on these bread crumbs and hints to ongoing mysteries through their understanding of the universe. The rest of the audience are left to discover these facts with the main characters.
• Narbonic is chock full of references to literature and manga and comics, many of which are not apparent even to the aficionado without reading the "Director's Cut" version.
• In The Order of the Stick, Tiamat, the Dungeons & Dragons goddess of evil dragons, is part of the Western Pantheon. The Western Pantheon is based on the gods of ancient Babylon, which is where the name Tiamat (although nothing else about her, as Babylonian Tiamat was a sea goddess) came from.
• The Packrat already expects the reader to be a synth geek, but still, spotting the many unmentioned but accurately drawn synthesizers and other electronic devices is a nice bonus.
• If you suck at remembering flags, you'll have trouble finding the Polandball comics funny. Consider then that many also include references to history, geography, politics, languages, dialects, slang, religions, movies, literature... "Ostrakon"◊ is a good example of this. The comic's punchline features a Pun on the words "ostracise" (i.e. excluding someone from society) and "Österreich", the German name for Austria. The name of the comic comes from the word ostrakon (which means "shard" in Greek) because the citizens would vote for whom they wanted to banish by writing their names on clay shards.
• The Property of Hate does this every so often. One of the characters, Melody speaks entirely in musical notes. Another character, Dial has an old microphone for a head.
• In Sandra on the Rocks, the British geek girl Marie swears in old British comics titles.
• Schlock Mercenary does a cool arc where the villains use command injection to force a CCTV system to sleep for ten minutes. When a QR code is held up to a security camera, the system reads the commands contained in the code and executes them because the administrators never changed the system's admin username and password from their defaults. The QR code in question is displayed to the reader, so what happens when you use your smartphone's bar code scanner to read the QR code the character is holding up? Your phone returns the following data:
  • UID='ADMIN'
  • PASS='DEFAULT'
  • CMD='sleep, 600sec, noprompt, fnord'
• Spinnerette nails it with the engineering crowd with one superhero claiming to fly via the "Left Hand Rule".
• The entire cast (and most of the dead bodies) in Weapon Brown comes from various syndicated comic strips. Identifying all of them and picking up all the references and in-jokes would take someone who's a talking encyclopedia of the hundred year history of comic strips.
• xkcd is loaded with these, to the extent that some have called it a series of obscure references that occasionally involve jokes, rather than the other way around. There's even a crowd-edited site "Explain xkcd" devoted to explaining each and every xkcd comic to help you unravel it all.

Web Videos

• Dr Glaucomflecken has a lot of these, since the primary audience of the series is doctors.
  • Ortho is shown to be very fond of Ancef. Ancef aka Cefazolin is an antibiotic that is given to patients undergoing surgery to prevent infections. It's also commonly used to treat bone and joint infections.
  • Glaukomflecken is an ocular characteristic that is a sign of acute angle closure glaucoma.
  • In "Bill does a Lumbar Puncture," Neurology hands Bill a bottle of red wine for the "traumatic [spinal] tap" he did. A lumbar puncture without the presence of red blood cells is considered a "champagne tap," so a red wine tap would be one with red blood cells.
  • In "Showdown in Dialysis," Nephrology says, "Why is this patient on dialysis? Yesterday she had four functional nephrons." Nephrons are filtering units in kidneys, and the average person has one million nephrons per kidney.
• If you don't know much about World of Warcraft, the humor of the Leeroy Jenkins Video comes from watching a guy yell his name really loud before ruining his party's elaborate plan by blindly charging a group of enemies, getting them all killed. If you're a bit more familiar with how the game works (or just read our page about the video), you can understand that their plan was absolutely ridiculous and had no chance of working in the first place, which gives the video a whole new meaning.

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