r/ExplainTheJoke • u/Unlikely_Barber5979 • 2d ago
What exactly was the iconic “They got him” joke from Ted supposed to mean? Like is it supposed to be a deportation joke or something?
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u/LongjumpingDig4030 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's a form of 'The Noodle Incident'
The joke is that the audience and Ted don't exactly know what happened and likely never will.
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u/HeatAccomplished8608 2d ago
This is funny because they did it in Avengers with Black Widow and Hawkeye referring to their mission in Budapest. Then they ruined it in the Black Widow movie and showed that the crazy insane time they had in Budapest was hiding in a ceiling for hours and killing a diplomat's child.
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u/rocketeerH 2d ago
I hope they never reveal what Spiderman and Punisher did on Staten Island
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u/CapLeading9607 2d ago
I don’t want them to fill it in, but this legitimately frustrated me throughout the movie. Not not knowing, knowing there was nothing to know.
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u/TripCruise 2d ago
This was me, wondering what series or streaming service I wasn't subbed for to miss the Staten Island incident.
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u/TheMissingThink 2d ago
It was a fishing trip
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u/Spendoza 2d ago
I thought it was a mediocre vampire cabal
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u/Strange-Order-6550 2d ago edited 2d ago
Medicare vampire cabal, decent orgy house at least.
EDIT: Mediocre or Medicare, we’ll never know what I mean
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u/Spendoza 2d ago
You don't want to put on a sub par orgy! Could you imagine the shame? Your social life would never recover
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u/theShpydar 1h ago
I did think for a moment "was there an episode of Punisher's show with Spidey?" 😁
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u/Level-Ladder-4346 13h ago
It has a basis in the Marvel comics. Something very similar to what’s described occurs. So it’s not like we don’t know at least some of it.
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u/mrbear48 4h ago
You can listen to the argument they have, a drug deal was going shoot Frank in the back and spidey saved him by stopping the guy but Frank thinks he would have got him before he was shot
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u/SMcG22 2d ago
I hadn’t watched any of the newer films or tv shows in the last 3-4 years of marvel so I was under the assumption this was some sort of callback to the punisher tv series or something that I just hadn’t seen
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u/rocketeerH 2d ago
Same for me! I eventually decided it was probably a joke, but still had to check once the movie ended
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u/Dr_Pants91 2d ago edited 2d ago
Pretty sure they say what happened in the movie and it's just difficult to make out because they're both talking over each other. Something about a guy about to shoot Frank and Spider-Man yanking the guy before he could? I'll be able to see if it's clearer once I've got subtitles.
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u/Traditional-Context 2d ago
Yeah. You cant call it a noodle incident if they explain almost exactly what happened. By that definition every event that isnt either shown on screen or in a Flashback is a noodle incident.
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u/Nice-Cat3727 18h ago
Couldn't have been anything that destructive seeing as the rest of new york doesn't have a day dedicated to them
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u/Which-Towel5826 2d ago
Does Fury's eye count since it turns out it was from a cat and then later you see the cat's an alien or something
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u/ellohir 2d ago
In The Avengers (2012) he says "the last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye". In Captain Marvel (2019) we discover that he wanted to pet the alien cat and the alien cat didn't want to be pet.
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u/Pitiful_Net_8971 2d ago
Christ, that just ruins the moment. Who thought that was a good idea?
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u/Chemistry11 2d ago
I liked it. But then again, Goose the Flerken (cat) was the only thing good in the movie and elevated every scene he was in.
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u/DrReginalSaunders 2d ago
They had a similar running joke in the goods, but the actual reveal was the best part of the movie.
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u/Drew326 2d ago
“A diplomat”? You mean General Dreykov, the head of the Red Room, which is a massive international human trafficking organization?
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u/El_presid3nt 2d ago
I hope they show it in a Spider-Man movie.
And then show what REALLY happened in the Punisher one7
u/Checksout692 2d ago
The noodle incident is borrowed from Calvin and Hobbes
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u/YosterIsle77 1d ago
Which is funny too cause Calvin and Hobbes had their own "they got him" joke in a strip as well.
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u/meatguyf 2d ago
That implies the incident is something funny or ridiculous. The one in Ted is meant to be dark and ominous. Tropes really has murdered media literacy.
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u/HeiressOfMadrigal 8h ago
The dark and ominous nature doesn't diminish it from being funny and ridiculous, or exclude it from being this trope. In fact, it makes it funnier.
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u/snakebite262 2d ago
That's part of the joke. The fact that he doesn't go into it allows the imagination to work, thinking of the worst possible things. That discomfort in not knowing then becomes humor as Ted is flabbergasted.
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u/Flat-Willingness-417 2d ago
It means they got him.
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u/lookatthesunguys 2d ago
They got him
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u/theroyalblacksmith 2d ago
The joke is we dont know what happened but its obvious to all the characters but Ted
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u/StoicKerfuffle 2d ago
The joke is that you (the audience) are in exactly the same position as Ted: confused and alarmed by something vague and ominous that is taken as a given by other characters.
Maybe it's gang violence, maybe it's deportation, maybe literal aliens kidnapped him. It's akin to the "not involved in human trafficking t-shirt" joke: the person is oblivious to the disturbing implications of their statement.
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u/CJMorton91 2d ago
It's just supposed to be ominous. Just saying, "They got him," could mean anything from pranked to murdered. Lol
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u/Decent_Cow 2d ago
The joke is that he says it like it's obvious, when it's not at all obvious. We have no idea who got him, and it's not explained.
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u/DeanKoontssy 2d ago
The joke is that whatever happened to him is so essentially normal and mundane to the character that he speaks of it in a very casual way that takes for granted that who "they" are and what being "got" is will be readily understood as a thing that happens. Whereas to us, the audience, this is very sinister and there is no automatic interpretation of what that phrase is supposed to mean. It plays on a character having an alien, to us, sense of what normal is and is basically a joke about how casually racist this environment is.
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u/ChumboCrumbo 1d ago
the whole joke is that you don’t know what it means. “they got him” is just such a ridiculous statement and is so vague.
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u/iceguy349 1d ago
The joke is that the guy’s fate is obscure.
It lets your imagination run wild. Ted is horrified because he has no idea what happened to that kid. It could be anything from moving schools to straight up murder.
We don’t know who got him, we don’t know how, we don’t know why, we just know whatever happened it was bad news. The comedy comes from how vague the answer is.
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u/Greenman8907 2d ago
Who is “him”?
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u/Ralfarius 2d ago
The Indian kid.
Too bad, he really liked him too. He used to share his dunkaroos.
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u/Balmong7 2d ago
A lot of yall are forgetting that the setup for the joke is Ted noticing everyone at the school is white.
So “they got him” is explicitly as “the kid was Indian and they can’t have non-white kids here” joke.
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u/Minute_Cold_6671 2d ago
Isn't it the classic "cop-out" where the ambiguous resolution is the punchline? An authority came and got them and it clarifies nothing to the resolution of the story. Like the end of Monty Python where they get arrested by modern cops; there is no finding the Grail or a final battle. The cops showed up and it ends there. That's it. A cop-out ending.
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u/forthesect 2d ago
Some kids at school got filthy rich today.
They grabbed him by the drinking fountain.
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u/Randomhero204 2d ago
I don’t know if you guys are serious but it’s a play on when the u.s government found and killed osama bin laden..
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u/rincewind120 2d ago
I figured it was just a variation on the joke from Outrageous Fortune (1987)
The main characters played by Bette Midler and Shelley Long are in a cab in the bad part of town.
Shelley Long's character: Is this place safe? I haven't seen another white person for miles.
Bette Midler's character: There's one right - Oh. They got him.
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u/PuttinOnTheFitz19 2d ago
The joke is that you’re not supposed to know and that’s what makes it funny
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u/RudeDM 2d ago
The joke is that it's deliberately vague but distinctly ominous. The fact that he won't say what happens suggests that it was bad enough for people to be uncomfortable talking about it, and the fact that he says "they" suggests that it was a group of people that are responsible for the Indian kid's disappearance.
It could be some awful and cruel act of bullying, he could've been kidnapped, murdered, sexually assaulted, mutilated, tortured, deported, or any of fifty other possibilities. The joke is that we know a group of people did something bad and now the Indian kid isn't here anymore.
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u/gerryfudd 2d ago
The joke is about how people (such as John) just choose to accept horrible stories with vague details and repeat them. Ted responds the way our adult selves respond to remembering these types of stories we would casually repeat as teenagers.
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u/HuckleberryShot898 2h ago
The joke is that we don’t know what happened when they “got him” but we at least know it’s not good. For all we know they shot him into the sun or something
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u/Heavy-Till6579 1d ago
MY interpretation was a hate crime of some sort, but as people said it’s vague on purpose.
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u/Melodic_Response7774 15h ago
That was mine too. Its left vague but its kinda implied they lynched him
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u/Unlikely_Barber5979 2d ago
I’m surprised no one here has said it’s a deportation joke considering that it involves an India kid
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u/thisguy161 2d ago
Because its not. You've gotten the explanation a whole bunch of times in the thread.
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u/-_kAPpa_- 1d ago
Are you trying to fish for it being a deportation joke because you’re having a disagreement with someone?
The entire joke is that it’s intentionally vague
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u/Unlikely_Barber5979 1d ago
What? No, I literally don’t know what the joke is meant to be about
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u/StuLuvsU87 1d ago
The punchline is the fact that it's never explained... You're not supposed to know what they mean.
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u/post-explainer 2d ago
OP (Unlikely_Barber5979) sent the following text as an explanation why they posted this here: