My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger.

Connolly’s joke hinges on cultural association: Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” has been so widely repurposed—especially as the theme for the American radio/TV hero The Lone Ranger—that many listeners can’t hear it “purely” as concert music. By defining an “intellectual” as someone who can resist that reflex, he satirizes pretensions about high culture and intelligence, suggesting that what we call sophistication may amount to nothing more than having different reference points. The line also comments on how mass media can overwrite original meanings, turning canonical art into a shorthand for popular imagery.