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Vengeance (2022)

Literary fellow that he is, Ben explains, “There’s this playwright, Anton Chekhov, and he says that if there’s a gun in Act One of a play - “

“There’s no guns in any one of his plays I can think of,” says the overweight sister in the leopard print pants. “Cherry Orchard, no. Uncle Vanya, no - ”

“I’m not actually that familiar with his plays,” Ben says impatiently, before steering back to his point.

That's a solid joke right there which also hits on the difference between academic 'knowledge' on a topic and the actual experiential knowledge that is usually considered 'low status' but is nonetheless more in touch with baseline reality.

Which is to say, you've got Ivy-Educated elites who know all the correct terms for various high-level concepts, who have a well-defined map of a particular area in their head, and thus can claim the pretense of knowledge but have rarely actually interfaced with the phenomena referenced by those concepts in a direct way. It's like knowing all about how agriculture works from reading about it, and never actually working on a farm. An actual farmer likely can't tell you names of the biological processes by which corn grows, but he sure can explain exactly how much corn you can expect to harvest given specific conditions of temperature, moisture, soil quality, etc.

And that's translated onto the guy who has skimmed the TVTropes articles for various famous literary works (I do it all the time!) rather than actually reading them vs. the person who actually reads them and enjoys them and thus has knowledge of the actual contents vis-à-vis the words on the page rather than knowing there's some higher-level literary term derived from the works.

Maybe I'm missing the joke, but there definitely is a gun in uncle vanya.

Here's the TVTropes entry on this instance:

Chekhov's Gun: Ironically averted. When Vanya does attempt to murder the professor, it is totally done off-stage with no clues present that he is about to shoot him.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Theatre/UncleVanya

Interesting.