I apologise beforehand for what i am about to say. I love this movie and am a huge Gary Oldman fan...but I can't help but make this awful, crude joke:
It could have been renamed PRICK UP YOUR REARS!
Again, I apologise but i can't help but make lame word play jokes!
The holes in your Swiss cheese are somebody else's Swiss cheese
The title actually is a wordplay joke. 'Ears' is an anagram for 'Arse'. So your joke wasn't too far off, actually.
share[deleted]
It began life as a title dreamed up by Kenneth Halliwell for a book that he and Joe Orton were supposed to write together. I'm sure that both of them knew what they were doing when they agreed on the title.
shareRead Orton's diaries. They cover this brilliantly inspired title.
Prick Up Your Arse was indeed the injoke Halliwell dreamed up and Orton loved it.
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Halliwell was a great influence on Joe, he shaped him, moulded him, inspired him, then staved his head in.
shareI always thought it was more of an auditory pun than a written one. Nobody much thinks of anagrams, but the two phrases "Prick up your ears" and "Prick up your rears" sound pretty much identical in most people's casual speech.
You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.
This is from Wikipedia:
Title
"Prick Up Your Ears" was to be the title of an unreleased play by Orton - the name, ironically, suggested by Halliwell who had provided much of Orton's titles throughout his successful years. In the title, the word "Ears" is an anagram of the word "Arse" making Prick Up Your Ears a rather blunt reference to the homosexual subject matter. It is also a phonetic play on the conjunction of "your" and "ears" to produce "rears".
Looks like the OP is right.