THOR
Written by James Ward
This is a poster for the film Thor:
Thor is directed by the actor Kenneth Branagh. I know this because a couple of weeks ago at work, someone said “Guess who directed the film Thor” and I said I didn’t know and he said “Guess!” and I said “Well, can you give me a clue?” and he said “OK, it’s an actor” and I said “Is it an American actor?” and he said “You don’t really understand the concept of ‘guessing’ do you?” and I said “I just want to narrow down the parameters before I start guessing, it’ll take a bit longer to begin with, but ultimately it should save time” and he said “OK, it’s a British actor” and I said “Dean Gaffney?” and he said “No, he’s more famous than Dean Gaffney” and I said “Adam Woodyatt?” and he said “No, he’s more famous than Adam Woodyatt” and I said “Ross Kemp?” and he said “Name someone who wasn’t in Eastenders” and I said “Kenneth Branagh” and he said “Yes”.
That isn’t exactly how the conversation went if I’m honest, although it definitely started with him asking me to guess who directed Thor. And I didn’t actually guess correctly at all, and gave up after about ten seconds and so he told me the answer. However, later that same day, I went to the monthly quiz at the Big Green Bookshop and during the film round, one of the questions was to name the director of Thor, and I was able to answer that one correctly, scoring one point which ultimately made no difference to our final position. I think we came fourth, out of about seven teams. I bet you’re impressed, aren’t you? Unless you were in one of the three teams which did better than us, in which case you can fuck off, you smug bastards.
Anyway, as is customary with these kinds of posters, it features a selection of quotes to illustrate how brilliant the film is.
Mark Adams of the Sunday Mirror gave it four stars and called it “an epic action packed fantasy adventure”:
Chris Hewitt of Empire also gave it four stars, saying that it is “tremendous fun… heady stuff”:
Matt Risley from Sky Movies.com gave it four stars as well, saying that the film was “impressive” and “undeniably fun”:
David Edwards of the Daily Mirror also gave it four stars, and said it was “brilliant” and called it “an action spectacular”:
Four stars again from Yahoo! Movies, who injected a bit of humour into their recommendation, describing the film as “thor-oughly entertaining” and adding that it is “a great summer movie”:
Finally, Robbie Collin from the News Of The World gave the film four stars, describing it as “a little belter”. Like Yahoo! Movies, Robbie also attempted a pun:
I thorly enjoyed it
Now, both Yahoo! Movies and Robbie Collin from the News Of The World have had similar ideas. Both of them have correctly identified the name of the film – Thor. They have both attempted to then squeeze that into the word “thoroughly”. Yahoo! Movies have realised that the word “thoroughly” already includes the word “thor” and, through the deft application of a hyphen, they have been able to draw attention to this fact.
Robbie Collin from the News Of The World has taken a different approach. He’s kept the “thor” bit, obviously – that’s the whole point after all – however, instead of inserting a hyphen between the “thor” and the “oughly”, he’s chosen to remove everything between the “r” and the “l”. He’s removed four letters from the middle of the word (“o”, “u”, “g” and “h”).
Two different ways of essentially solving the same problem. But which is the most successful? I personally would argue that the Yahoo! Movies approach is best, because “thor-oughly” is quite close to “thoroughly”. In fact, it’s the same word, but just with a hyphen inserted after the fourth letter. However, “thorly” hardly resembles “thoroughly” at all. It doesn’t look the same – it’s only six letters instead of ten. It’s a syllable short. It’s just a mess. “Thorly” could work as a substitute for the word “surely”, but it doesn’t work as a substitute for the word “thoroughly” and on this basis, I shall not be going to see this film.
JAMES WARD: I LIKE BORING THINGS 
O how I love thee, James Ward.
Let me count the ways …
Well, one way at least, and that’s a sort of distant affection tinged with pity.
You’ve overlooked the central conspiracy though. Every single reviewer has given the film four stars out of five (or 80%). How is this possible? Could you make further enquiries please, or are the stars a red herring, a bit like the **** motif that is sometimes used to separate sections of a story?
Yes! “Sort of distant affection tinged with pity” — that’s it exactly!
I watched Thor. I enjoyed it but didn’t feel the need to make a pun.
Oh, look, Mr Yahoo! from the modern internet is better than the dinosaur who fiddles about with ink and stuff like he thinks its still the ice age. The death of printed media, hello.
I didn’t even realise Robbie Collin was aiming for ‘thoroughly’ or even ‘surely’. I would read it as ‘sorely’, because of the old joke:
A Norse god rides into Valhalla on a horse, bareback.
‘Are you Thor?’ one of the giants asks as the god dismounts.
‘Of course I’m thor,’ replies the god. ‘I forgot my thaddle.’
The conceit being that the god has a lisp. And ‘I sorely enjoyed it’ isn’t really something people say. If he’d said ‘You thorly need to see this movie,’ I suppose that might have been OK.
PS Amazingly, my wife has just walked in and said she is going to take out the ice cream *to thaw*!!!! She has no idea what I’m typing here. You couldn’t make it up.
I vote for “thorly” ’cause the first time I read “thor-oughly” I got hung-up on the “oughly” but this is moot as I wouldn’t go see it no matter how many stars or puns. But if Kenneth B. was Thor, maybe… he’s a great actor. After watching him only a few minutes, I forget his complete lack of lip flesh and begin to think any amount of lip fat is oddly ugly…or… oughly.
@internetsdairy the problem i have with this joke is that it requires either Thor to have a hearing disorder accompanying his lisp, or that he assumes the person asking him has the same lisp. I don’t know anyone with a lisp who does that.
The joke comes out a little more coherent if we assume that the giant asking the question has a lisp, and that the god – who might or might not indeed be Thor – is making fun of him. It’s less funny that way, though. But we’ve got to stick to principle here, I say.
I saw the right-hand poster up on a Brisbane CBD billboard recently (we don’t have the thor-oughly amusing version down here), and was drawn to the top billing: “From the studio that brought you Iron Man”
Hmmm. I thought: how odd. I stood there and tried to unpack all the loaded implications of that phrase.
Is it a desperate association (by viewership/box office) with a previously successful movie-brand?
Was there *nothing else* they could say about the film, to warrant that top-billing eye-space? “Has the Dude from Home & Away”? or: “Not quite Downey Jr”?
Who’s ever cared about the studio as a pull-factor, ahead of cast, director etc? (and hence an insult to Branagh)? No movie is better or more powerful simply because of its studio, obviously. Except maybe with animation flicks.
Possibly an insecurity about its own product, not quite knowing how to market & to who; hence the lame/desperate §s above?
Does anyone parse this unconscious gufft? It begs comic extrapolation: From the third director’s assistant and the gaffer from Titanic, with some studio space from Leeds, comes a Jane Austen classic…
Honestly, even something as savagely simple as “It’s. Really. Good, yeah.” would’ve sufficed. Or a cryptic: ‘From a studio.’ Or, ‘Direct from Valhalla.’ Or ‘Hammeringly good’. Or perhaps in that line: ‘Götterdämmerungly good.’
Rino
I had a quote on the poster for I Love You, Phillip Morris which said, ‘An Unmissable Ride.’ It was only when I saw it in a billion-point type on the underground that I realised people might think I was trying to make a pun. I really wasn’t.