I was watching the movie "Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown", a film about Queen Victoria and her highland servant, John Brown, on Netflix and a scene came up that contained a joke which I did not understand. It was told during a party from one woman to two others and goes like this:
"Why is the Queen penny wise and pound foolish?"
"Because she looks afters the Browns...and lets the sovereigns take care of themselves!"
What is the meaning behind this joke?
OK, this isn't my specialty but I think I've got it figured out.
After the death of Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, the Queen became very close with a Scottish servant by the name of John Brown. Her attention to John Brown caused public outcry from those who thought she was being disloyal to her family.
Pennies back then were made of bronze, which as you can see here turned to a dull brown over time. And the sovereign was (and still is) a gold coin nominally worth one pound sterling.
So, she is being "penny-wise" because she is paying attention to the "Browns" (the brown pennies) at the expense of the sovereigns (the pounds).
Does that make sense?
It's a bit of wordplay - the "browns" are pennies, and the "sovereigns" are the pounds. While I can't definitively say if it's just the colour that makes the brown-penny association, there is a bit more to the sovereign-pound connection: the sovereign was a gold (bullion) coin amounting to one pound sterling.
So really, on the surface, this joke says that the Queen Victoria was frugal with small amounts of money but threw away large sums, whereas the double entendre perhaps means she cared more about her relationship with John Brown than her connection with nobles (again, the idea that she focuses on small things at the expense of superior ones).
That's my reading of it, anyway - though I may easily have missed something here.
If it helps, the gold sovereign was a unit of currency (which had a high value), while "browns" were half pennies (low value). So you could literally interpret "looks after the browns and lets the sovereigns take care of themselves" as "looks after pennies but is careless about pounds." I suspect the joke is really only "funny" in the context of talking about the Queen and John Brown, though, which adds a third layer of meaning.