ContextMenuItem picky about function declaration

programming flash
1

I can literally toggle weather the item is shown or not by changing the way the onSelect handlers function is declared.

This works,

wme.customItems.push(new ContextMenuItem("Widget Settings", helpme));
function helpme(obj,item){
	trace('wtf');
}

But this doesn’t,

wme.customItems.push(new ContextMenuItem("Widget Settings", helpme));
helpme = function(obj,item){
	trace('wtf');
}

I don’t understand why this happens.
I can obviously work around it, but would like to know what’s going on if anyone knows. :smiley: