10 Subtle Movie Jokes That Probably Went Straight Over Your Head

7. Flashback Humour - Fight Club

Fight Club, in a lot of ways, is a movie about movies, and director David Fincher uses the narrative framework of his 1999 masterpiece to deconstruct a bunch of filmmaking tropes - even one of his own invention, apparently, which Tyler Durden brands "flashback humour" close to the movie's iconic ending.

Here's a gag that likely went over everybody's heads the first time they saw the movie in theatres, but it's actually an incredibly clever, funny, and mind-bending moment of absurd meta-inclined hilarity, and one that perfectly ties Fight Club together, too. So think back to the first scene in the movie: Tyler Durden asks our narrator (let's call him Jack) if he has anything significant to say, to which Jack replies: "I can't think of anything." Then the bulk of the movie plays out.

When we return to this scene at the end, what we should be getting is an exact copy, but Fincher cleverly has Jack say: "I still can't think of anything," acknowledging the passing of time between the first time we saw this scene and the second, to which Tyler hilariously replies: "Ah, flashback humour." It's a joke that only makes sense if you remember the first version.