As You Know - Television Tropes & Idioms

Homer: Well, here we are at the Brad Goodman lecture.
Lisa: We know, Dad.
Homer: I just thought I'd remind everybody. After all, we did agree to attend this self-help seminar.
Bart: What an odd thing to say...
-- The Simpsons, "Bart's Inner Child"

A form of exposition where one character explains to another something that they both know, but the audience doesn't. It has been described as a "pernicious form of infodump through dialogue".

"As you know, Simon, Jennifer has never been the same since the tragic codfish incident."

"As you know, Jennifer, my Death Ray depends on codfish balls."

In discussions of science fiction this is often As You Know, Bob (abbreviated AYKB), or occasionally, "Tell me, Professor [about this marvelous invention we all use every day and have no reason to be talking about except to inform the audience]". Poul Anderson referred to this as an "idiot lecture," in the sense that either the lecturer must be an idiot, or the lecturer must think the lecturee is an idiot. Nevertheless Anderson used the device often at the beginning of short stories, usually to establish historical details.

Terry Pratchett refers to the fantasy fiction version as the "As you know, your father, the king..." speech.

This is also a common feature of pilot episodes, where characters' backgrounds and relationships need to be established for the first time. Likewise, when new characters are introduced or the writers believe a reminder is in order, characters will explicitly refer to each other by name during a regular conversation, when this is rarely done in real life: "Say, Alice, how are you enjoying your coffee?" "Why, it's delicious, Bob, thanks for asking. How are you coming along, Carol?"

This is also quite common on medical drama shows like ER, Scrubs, and Greys Anatomy, where common medical phenomena and simple procedures must be explained to the unfamiliar audience. In most cases, this is achieved by explaining the disease or procedure to an intern or non-professional character.

On some shows, characters will As You Know in order to provide information that was already provided in a previous episode (that viewers might have missed) or even earlier in the show (for those who just tuned in), to the great annoyance of dedicated fans. (e.g. Just Tuned In: "Remember, Bob, you only have 20 minutes to defuse the bomb..." or Previous Episode: "Jane is really mad at you for running over her dog last week, isn't she?")

Solitary characters prefer to use "Here I am..." instead.

Specific variants:

Examples:

Doctor Who ran into this problem when Romana (another Time Lord who actually was cleverer than the Doctor) travelled with the Doctor. In this case, however, the sheer quality of the two actresses who played Romana meant that few really noticed -- plus Romana was meant to be a bit naive.
- A particularly bizarre Doctor Who example occurs in the final episode of "The Armageddon Factor", where two incidental characters As You Know a recap of the Doctor's current predicament for the audience's benefit -- despite the fact that the Doctor is across the star system and out of contact, and has been for some time: there's no way they could have known the events they relate.
- Another extremely blatant example is in the serial "Resurrection of the Daleks", when the character rescuing Davros from cyrogenic suspension explains the plot of "Destiny of the Daleks" to him. This doesn't even start As You Know; Davros reacts as if the events that led to him being placed in cryogenic suspension are entirely new to him.
  - To be fair, it was implied that the prolonged period of cryogenic suspension had given Davros partial amnesia, so he needed the recap.
Spoofed on the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. In the episode "Super Rocksteady and Mighty Be-Bop", Shredder is setting up a mind-control device while talking to Krang via communicator, and remarks that he needs to get away before the device goes off so he doesn't fall under its influence.
Krang: Why are you explaining this to me? I invented it!
Shredder: I wasn't explaining it to you...(he points to the audience) I was explaining it to them!
This was also going to be spoofed in the original script of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, in which the film's Mr Exposition (appropriately named Basil Exposition) tells the main character: "You're Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, and you're with Agent Mrs. Kensington. The year is 1967, and you're talking on a picture phone." Austin then replies: "We know all that, Exposition."
Spoofed yet again on the series 'Allo 'Allo!, in this case, as with the show in general, it was meant to mock the format of wartime dramas of the day. However, as the show was later aired on other networks with episodes out of order, the utterly tongue-in-cheek recaps became somewhat necessary.
An episode of Duckman also makes fun of this practice. A character from an earlier episode returns, and Charles/Mambo (siamese twins who have one body with two heads) tell Duckman it's that woman he used to date, who used to be hideous but became gorgeous through plastic surgery and left him. Duckman responds to the effect of "Don't you think I know that?", to which the twins respond with something like "Of course you know that, but we can't expect the audience to have seen every previous episode of this obscure late-night show running on the USA Network."
- Another example: To suggest how ordinary his life is, Duckman describes the ironically ridiculous premise of the show to Cornfed in one sentence: "I'm just another duck detective, who works with a pig and lives with the twin sister of his dead wife, has three sons on two bodies, and a comatose mother-in-law whose got so much gas she's fire hazard."
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot and Foundation were rife with it, as a result of the serialized format in which the stories originally appeared. As it was possible that a magazine buyer reading one of the stories had not read the previous ones, Asimov felt it necessary to re-summarize the Three Laws of Robotics, or the Seldon Plan, through Expospeak in the early parts of each story.
Subverted in an episode of Justice League Unlimited, where Flash, in Lex's body, asks for an As You Know recap from Dr. Polaris over the "Big Plan." Polaris, on the other hand, is angry that "Luthor" couldn't remember the plan he announced to them that morning.
Early chapters of the Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch manga have Lucia constantly being reminded she's a princess, a mermaid, forbidden to date humans, can't go into water in public, and various things she already knows. Then again, she's always been a bit headstrong about these limitations anyway. The anime got rid of this by tacking on a prologue on every episode explaining the whole situation.
Used to the point of being beaten to death by David Weber. Every single Honor Harrington book has this at least once, maybe twice. It's particularly painful, because most of these recaps appear to be at the end of a meeting that just talked about the recapped stuff.
Spoofed/lampshaded repeatedly in the webcomic Order Of The Stick. At one point, Elan compliments Roy for working the exposition into his angry tirade so smoothly.
Parodied in the movie Spaceballs, when Colonel Sandurz unnecessarily explains the evil plan to Dark Helmet, who turns to the camera and asks, "Everybody got that?"
Spoofed in an episode of Freakazoid, during a conversation that came with captions indicating which of the statements were "IMPORTANT" or "NOT IMPORTANT". The As You Know conversation eventually degraded into spewing frivolous things like "I'm wearing blues socks" (captioned with "NOT IMPORTANT") and "You know, if you mix baking soda and vinegar together, you can make a little volcano." ("NOT IMPORTANT... BUT INTERESTING")
Babylon 5 had a painfully straight instance of this in its pilot.
The Assassins Of Tamurin: S.D. Towers fills the reader in on the entire Backstory of the Empire of Durdane by devoting most of a chapter to covering a History class.
24: Nearly every episode starts with CTU in a room having a meeting in which they recap the last episode. Lampshaded with Chloe O'Brien, who As You Knows constantly and tactlessly, to the great annoyance of her co-workers.
Robert A Heinlein's novel, Methuseleh's Children opens with a meeting of Howard Foundation members where one character goes on for several pages, detailing the history of the foundation, its goals, and his plans for the future. While very interesting (to the reader), the entire monologue is framed as an As You Know. As the characters are all extremely long lived and therefore very patient, they don't mind too much.
Used straightly, if a little awkwardly, in the pilot episode of Angel. Since Angel is a spinoff of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, new viewers would not be aware of Angel's intricate backstory. It was worked in by a new character, Doyle, showing off how much he knew about Angel by reciting Angel's life story.
The anime version of Witchblade tends to occassionally fall back on this.
Lampshaded rather neatly in one issue of the X Men comics.
- Cyclops: This isn't good, Emma. Warren isn't answering and I can't even tell if my calls are going through.'
- Emma Frost: You needn't narrate, dearest. I'm sitting right here.'
Spoofed in Killroy And Tina here with a fourth wall lampshading.
Novelist Harry Turtledove has a tendency to fall into this trap in his multi-volume alternative history epics (such as the Worldwar and Timeline-191 series); he will often recap complicated alternative histories and the plots of two, three or more previous novels in the series by having characters engage in conversations or think to themselves about things that they would already know.
Smallville: Chloe stops Clark from leaving so that she can remind him of the very reason that he's leaving, which both he and the audience are well aware of, just so that she can spill a secret to one of Lex's henchmen, secretly listening.
Parodied somewhat in Red Vs Blue where the exposition is for another character's benefit rather than the audience. Church, Tucker and Tex are held at gunpoint by Wyomming. Church uses his radio to try surreptitiously tell Caboose what's going on, but none of the other characters present know he's doing this and can only wonder why he's suddenly become "the narrator".
Sort of done in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. In one story a hitman lectures an elderly billionaire on how addictive the pharmaceutical that made him rich was. The strange thing with this was that, while the billionaire should have known this already, it seems bizarre that the hitman, even having looked into his clients past, would have researched such a trivial an tangential detail.
There's a hilarious scene in the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie where the two comic relief pirates, watching the main characters duke it out in an epic battle over the Mac Guffin, wonder exactly how they got into this situation and briefly recap the whole movie up to that point for the benefit of anyone still watching.
Lampshaded in a recent Simpsons episode (which was a 24 parody), where Lisa begins some exposition by saying "As we both know (but I'm going to say anyway)"

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