{"id":549661,"date":"2026-07-14T18:42:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T18:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549661\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T18:42:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T18:42:10","slug":"why-christopher-nolan-cut-a-3000-year-old-joke-from-the-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/549661\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Christopher Nolan Cut a 3,000-Year-Old Joke From ‘The Odyssey’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIf there\u2019s one thing Christopher Nolan<\/a>\u2018s movies are known for, it\u2019s their sense of humor. <\/p>\n

\n\tOkay, so that\u2019s entirely untrue. Nolan\u2019s movies are hugely dramatic, cinematic and thrilling \u2014 among many other things \u2014 but funny? Not really (aside from the occasional smattering of dry, rather British, wit).<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, Nolan wanted to get a famous joke from Homer\u2019s The Odyssey<\/a> into his epic adaptation which opens this week, but he couldn\u2019t quite make it work. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe joke is considered one of the oldest puns in the Western literary canon, a nearly 3,000-year-old gag. <\/p>\n

\n\tIn an interview on The Daily Show (watch it here<\/a>), host Jon Stewart gushed about Nolan\u2019s film<\/a>, calling it \u201cstaggering\u201d along with plenty of other praise. Stewart said he saw the film with a Daily Show writer who has studied the original Greek text.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is a person that would probably be a bit of a pain in the ass to watch The Odyssey with,\u201d Stewart said. \u201c[The person] loved [the movie but] had one note\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOkay, it\u2019s a little late,\u201d Nolan gamely quipped (hey, there\u2019s some of that dry British wit). <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cApparently, there is a joke that Odysseus makes with the Cyclops,\u201d Stewart said. \u201cHe was very upset that was not in the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI understand,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cIt\u2019s a pun. Puns in translation are tough. I tried. It was not possible to work in it.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tSo here\u2019s the joke. <\/p>\n

\n\t(This contains very minor spoilers from the Cyclops scene for those who haven\u2019t read the original text.)<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Homer\u2019s version, the clever Odysseus (Matt Damon in the film) encounters the murderous Cyclops in his cave. Odysseus first tells the creature his name is \u201cNobody\u201d (Outis in Greek). Later, when Odysseus drives a stake into the Cyclops\u2019 eye, the creature screams for help and other Cyclopes come running. Asked who is attacking him, the Cyclops cries that \u201cNobody\u201d is doing it \u2014 so the others misunderstand him and leave. Like with the Trojan Horse, giving a fake name was a trick that pays off later. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere is additional wordplay with the pun later on, but you really have to get knee-deep into the original Greek to make the jokes work. <\/p>\n

\n\tSpeaking of the Trojan Horse, the sequence marked a significant departure from the traditional depiction, and all for the better. As shown in the trailer, Odysseus and his men leave the horse half-submerged on the beach rather than outside the gates of Troy on wheels, looking like an obvious ruse. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was briefly attached to direct Troy \u2014 the film that David Benioff had written based on The Iliad,\u201d Nolan said. \u201cI came up with this idea of the horse half buried in the sand, about to be destroyed or carried away by the waves. So that when the Trojans find it, the last thing it looks like \u2014 there\u2019s no wheels, it doesn\u2019t look like something that\u2019s meant to be carried into the city. That image stuck with me for decades. How can we present this to an audience in a way that they can believe it? And that became the mantra for everybody on the film with every sequence. People want to go on this journey with us. Let\u2019s give them a reason to believe.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tSaid an impressed Stewart, \u201cI guess what I\u2019m saying is: Homer ain\u2019t got shit on you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Odyssey tells the story of the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his long, perilous journey home from the Trojan War to the kingdom of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway), son Telemachus (Tom Holland) and loyal servant Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) await his return. Along the way, he encounters mythic figures including the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) and the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron), while Penelope is pursued by the treacherous suitor Antinous (Robert Pattinson). The film opens this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there\u2019s one thing Christopher Nolan\u2018s movies are known for, it\u2019s their sense of humor. Okay, so that\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[50678,93,61,60,270,83194],"class_list":["post-549661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-christopher-nolan","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-the-odyssey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}