From Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe, in which he illustrates the origin of language, which soon led to the first jokes:
First Caveman: Why chicken cross road? Yuk yuk
Second Caveman: Hmph. That one old already.
One of The Simpsons Halloween specials has giant advertising mascots running amok. The solution was to start ignoring them as ads go away if no one watches them. "Like that old woman who couldn't find the beef?'" Lisa observes.
At one of his concerts, Dave Chappelle finally chewed out fans for endlessly repeating "I'm Rick James, Bitch!" from Chappelle's Show. At one point someone came up to him and said it while he was at Disneyland with his family! This is one of the bigger reasons for his Creator Breakdown.
DM of the Rings had a strip where the players started quoting it. The author note stated the next Dungeons & Dragons edition should have the option to punish players for quoting the movie.
White Wolf's The World Of Darkness games mention this in many of their Storyteller handbooks. In fact, they even tell you how to deal with a player who is an obsessive quoter.
xkcd had an old strip encouraging Python fans to celebrate the group by making up their own surreal, Pythonesque jokes rather than endlessly parroting their lines.
Anyone who's been in a LARP group knows that inevitably a newcomer to the group will quote the movie. The stigma isn't just that Holy Grail has been quoted to death, it's the fact that no matter how taboo it is, once one person quotes it everyone in the group will begin doing so as well. Including the ones that were just whining about someone having started it.
The Princess Bride sees elements of this in LARP and fencing groups as well. We all love the movie, everyone knows the lines, but please don't say it. And then one person does anyway and the rest of the gang is at it like a bunch of chattering parrots.
Zany VG Quotes'sZero Wing page says, "It's dead, Jim," and has a link to the infamous intro that simply says "Oh hell, you already know what this one is." At one point there was a snarky comment about it being time to stop wearing the AYB t-shirts and repeating it all the time. Notable because the entire All Your Base fad can be traced back to a Zany VG project.
In The Simpsons episode "Simpson Tide", Bart sings a short ditty of his 90's Ear Worm song "Do the Bartman"- even Ralph Wiggum comments "That is so 1991!"
Likewise, in the episode when he starts going to a Catholic school, Bart introduces himself by rattling off one of his old catchphrases ("I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you,") in a very bored voice, ending in saying "yadda-yadda-yadda."
Also in the episode in which Bart briefly gains 15 Minutes of Fame on the Krusty the Klown Show as the 'I Didn't Do It Boy'.
By about season 5 or so, it seemed they could only use "Ay carumba," "Don't have a cow, man," and "Eat my shorts" if they were making fun of them.
According to Dork Tower, a meme is 'officially' dead whenever Matt Goering adopts it. The case in point that led to this observation? "All your base are belong to us!"
The entire concept is embodied in a The Man Show sketch of their "Museum of Annoying Guys" (faux Latinate name: "Jokus Repeatus Shut the F Up-us"). "It's the beat a Catch Phrase to death guy."
Gamesradar was one of the first to declare this, and Valve agreed, stating in commentaries and interviews that they were so sick of it that they excluded it from Portal 2 for that very reason. They were unable to help themselves entirely, however, as there are two specific references in the game. One is in Rattman's mural depicting Chell's victory over GLaDOS and the other is Shmuck Bait that serves as a Take That from both GLaDOS to Chell and Valve to the player. There's also a bit of binary code in Chell's file in the "Lab Rat" tie-in comic that translates to "the cake is a lie".
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation is similarly heartily sick of The Cake Is a Lie meme. He generally refers to it as "a Portal reference," but it's always the same one. He's so sick of it that he completely trashed Castlevania: Lords of Shadow just for containing the reference (in spite ofothergivenreasons) long after the meme had stopped being funny. He also bashes anyone who dares to use the cake reference in their Web Comic for the same reason: "And if that doesn't work then just go on about the cake being a lie."
Yahtzee:Castlevania: Lords of Shadow contains a Portal reference. That is literally all you need to know. ...If a game has a Portal reference, whatever purpose it serves, it tells you everything you need to know about the absolute wankers who had creative control of the thing.
The infamous MinecraftCreepypastaHerobrine has been deemed not-scary and way overused by many creepypasta community members, and, in spite of Notch's recurring mentions of the ghostly NPC (including an explicit statement that it's fake, which may have also contributed to the popularity downfall), Notch's ex-wife ezchili made this tweet regarding the character's overbearing prominence, a statement with which a good amount of members of both communities seem to agree.
Survival of the Fittest: According to one of the administrators, Kenny the bear's appearance was done mainly to make people shut up about the "inactivity bear" meme.
KnowYourMeme, a website dedicated to... well, memes, has an upcoming dictionary term called "The Family Guy Effect." To wit: "when Internet memes are showcased on the animated television show Family Guy, the meme will see a brief burst in popularity, followed by an immediate sharp decline." E.g. Chuck Norris? He's been unpopular a long time.
So the next time you watch Family Guy and see your favorite meme on it, weep for your fallen meme.WEEP.
Oddly enough, their use of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" may have been too early (depending on how long episodes take to produce) to have been a reference to Rickrolling.
The Nostalgia Critic admitted in his Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog review that his use of M. Bison exclaiming, "Of course!" in response to world domination plans was no longer funny. The clip has made a handful of NC-related appearances since then, but the buildup in each instance deviated from that past reviews (NC simply saying, "He has an evil plan to, you guessed it, take over the world") in order to make the gag less stale (eg, a character announces world domination plans himself, NC notices a character looks like M. Bison, or someone says "Of course").
In the commentary for the same video, he cited this trope as his reason for not including the famous "bad touch" clip, mentioning also that, really, it was good advice and it was pretty ballsy of the show to make it.
He also stated on his commentary for "Top 11 Batman the Animated Series Episodes" that he's really gotten sick of the "Bat-Credit Card" joke, to the point where if someone says it to him at a convention, he'll only respond once.
For an omnipresent meme, numerous sites have rules about not saying "First" in comments.
Fark.com has turned it into a new meme: its filter replaces "first (to) post" with "Boobies" and "first comment" with "Weeners", and if the post actually was first, adds twelve hours to its time stamp, thus pretty much guaranteeing it will be the minimum post (last post in Fark filter).
The Escapist, home of Zero Punctuation has a rule that comments in a thread about one of Yahtzee's videos are automatically deleted if they appear less than X minutes after the video is posted (X being the length of the video itself).
About two-thirds of the way through DM of the Rings, author Shamus Young started preemptively posting "first" in various snarky ways (e.g. an image of Steven Furst).
Screwattack has made a clip of the week stating to stop this or a "first monster" will come and delete the post.
Nodwick drove the new swearword "krutz" out of fashion by getting henchmen to adopt it en masse. A good thing, as a group of villains had created the new swearword as a means of accumulating mystical power.
Quotes from The Inbetweeners became so memetic in the UK that one of the lead actors, Simon Bird, got sick of them before the series ended its run.
Things gameshow audiences do not do: Shout out quotes from The Inbetweeners such as: Clunge. Bus Wankers. Football Friend. Right, that's all you're getting.
Sailor Venus: "Okay...no. Maybe there's enough underage kids here that you thought this was 4chan, but it's not and that shit hasn't been funny since 2007, anyway, so I don't even wanna hear it. Venus Meteor Shower!"
The Left 4 Dead custom map "I Hate Mountains" has some (custom-made) graffiti where someone asks "What WouldChuck NorrisDo?" about the Zombie Apocalypse. After a couple of lines of banter, the exchange is ended with four words: "Seriously, he's fucking dead."
In a moment of Self-Deprecation, LittleKuriboh discredited his "Card Games On Motorcycles" meme by having Lector destroy it in order to demonstrate Jinzo's special ability. Lector then laughs and says "I've been waiting a whole year for that!"
He promoted the possibility of a Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds Abridged for charity, and specifically said that it won't involve the phrase.
This episode features Jack trying to find a new catchphrase. He's told that "he will be doubled his paycheck if he never says that phrase again."
Chuggaaconroy has completely disavowed Steve the Trooper, a red leaf Pikmin. Originally a throwaway gag, as Chugga often names characters, the fans picked up Steve and made fanart, videos, Facebook pages, and more. Throughout his Pikmin2 review, he has specifically avoided the name Steve, sometimes stating "You know what that Pikmin's name is". Still, this being Youtube, most comments on his videos relate to Steve in some way.
On this very website, Candle Jack is loathed by many. note As you can see, our page for him is still up showing that his status on this site is...divided.
Saying "I'm 12 and what is this" is a bad idea in places where the terms of service explicitly state that you must be at least 13 years old. GameFAQs is a rather infamous example, but there are others.
The creators of Marble Hornets have said that they are sick of the "Gimme 20 Dollars" joke (which in their opinion bordered on a Forced Meme when it was new).
Referencing the meme at all is a bannable offense on the Unfiction forums.
The meme got a temporary new lease on life with the game "Slender", which had an unlockable "$20 Mode". Due to copyright concerns, the creator of the game removed the mode from the renamed "Slender: The Eight Pages".
The trend of predicting a post number ending in doubles on a few boards on 4chan got old to mods rather sooner than it did to posters. On boards such as /b/ and /v/, the final three digits of the post number were blocked out by X's as to make it harder to ascertain whether doubles were achieved (and to prevent the server from crashing so badly the next time the board hit another hundred million posts). When this did not hinder posters attempting to predict their post number, over the years it was removed. In another zig-zag, the mods eventually got so fed up with /v/ and /vg/'s dubs that every post that would have ended in the last two numbers matching skipped to the nearest set of numbers that didn't. It seemed to have finally worked...until browsers began predicting the final number of their post only.
On Danny Phantom, Danny makes a joke about "Who let the dogs in!," obviously in reference to the "Who Let the Dogs Out" song that was everywhere when Nickelodeon's second Rugrats movie came out years earlier. He briefly tries to explain the joke while his friends just look at him like he's an idiot.
Sophistication And Betrayal has the protagonist comment on the tendency for people to mock Twilight whenever sparkling is mentioned, and opines that it "stopped being funny two years ago".
On Two Best Friends Play, Matt and/or Pat tend to get sick of any of their running gags that catch on as fandom memes. In particular, after people started posting "[X] is the Origami Killer!" under every video they uploaded, Matt said that the joke was no longer funny.
On "Sonic For Hire", Sonic goes back in time to try to make sure that he doesn't squander his money. The event that he goes back to is when he and Knuckles battle Robotnik at the Death Egg Zone. Since the battle takes place in the 90s, Knuckles says a bunch of 90s lingo. Sonic gets really annoyed by it and quickly tells him "Now the novelty's worn off" when Knuckles says "Don't go there beyotch!"
