Wayne's World Revisited

Wayne's World has been my favorite movie since I was nine years old. When I was a kid, I watched it and re-watched it until my VHS copy was on the brink of disintegration; I quoted it incessantly; I wanted to move to Aurora, Illinois; once, I put Barbie and Ken in their little pink Porsche 911, parked the car in front of the TV set while I had the movie going, and pretended that the dolls were at the drive-in, laughing hysterically and making out. 


I'm not exaggerating when I say that Wayne's World is the foundation that my sense of humor was built upon. But, as true as that statement is, it's also extraordinarily insane because when I watch the movie as an adult, it's clear that at nine years old, I didn't understand what the hell was going on. 

Because Rob Lowe and Ione Skye were in bed, barely clothed, I understood that coitus had just taken place and--totally ignoring the pizza box and fast food employee uniform on the chair--thought that Shakey's was some kind of sexual maneuver or adult slang word for sex. So to me this meant: You haven't been into having sex for so long. 

For about 10 years, I thought he was saying "Merve-mobile." I didn't know who Merve was, but I just went with it. Even if I had heard him correctly, I don't think I knew what "mirth" was--I'm not being poetic or philosophical when I say that, I literally didn't know the definition of the word.

I didn't realize that Tiny was Meat Loaf until I watched the movie earlier this week.

The pelvic thrust that usually accompanied the word "schwing," or the variant, "scha-wing," well, I did that all the time, having no idea that it was a boner reference. You see the picture of that little kid over on the sidebar of this blog, under the words "Vintage Amber"? Just imagine her spastically thrusting her pelvis at her mother and inanimate objects, saying "schwing"over and over again.

The full line is: "She makes me feel kinda funny, like when we used to climb the rope in gym class." I wish I could remember why this was so funny to me--it probably had something to do with Dana Carvey's delivery--but obviously I didn't know about boys and puberty and friction at nine years old.

I couldn't appreciate how clever this line was until I was a sophomore in college.

Perhaps the most crucial joke in the movie, and I didn't get it. What's worse, I used it on everyone I knew and laughed when they said "what." If they didn't get it and asked me to explain the joke, I just said, "exactly" until they stopped asking me. All I knew was that an "asphincter" wasn't something that anyone wanted to be, even if I didn't know what an "asphincter" was. 

May not have understood this line when I was a kid but it sums up my life right now.

 Unfamiliar with the word "gratuitous," I looked it up in the dictionary. So here's a moment where I actually learned something from the movie. 

The full line is: "Ribbed for her pleasure...Ewwwww!" I didn't get this until I was in high school. Around that time, I watched the movie with my cousin who was maybe four years old. After hearing the line, he laughed and then walked around my grandparents' house saying, "ribbed for her pleasure...ewww." I love that kid. He's like my little apprentice. 

When I was 10 and spending the summer with my grandparents, one of them decided to order Chinese food. I said, "I'll have the cream of sum yung guy," totally oblivious to its meaning but knowing that it was supposed to be a joke. Thankfully, my grandfather was incredibly cool and did indeed laugh. But if you really think about it, anyone who would punish or reprimand a kid for saying that, is probably the same sort of person who wouldn't understand the joke.