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 "Do you notice how men always leave the toilet seat up? That's the joke.""Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process."
Michael Eisner: Are aces high or low?
Peter: They go both ways.
Bill Gates: He said they go both ways.
(Everyone chuckles)
Ted Turner: Like a bisexual!
Michael Eisner: Thank you Ted... that was the joke.
Few things can kill a joke faster than explaining it (assuming that the joke was even working). This can come in five variants:
- Someone doesn't get the joke, and has to have it explained. Then again, that doesn't actually kill the joke. It was already dead, since the listener didn't get it in the first place. It can still work if the joke actually is that someone doesn't get the joke.
- Explaining the joke with no prompting. This may be done as an attempt at Post Modernism, but it's usually done with jokes that wouldn't need any explaining. It can still work if the explanation is tongue in cheek, but Your Mileage May Vary on how actually funny it is. Sometimes the real joke is about killing the joke by explaining it.
- Explaining the joke actually is part of the joke, and by "part of the joke", I mean, "have sex with me".
- The joke-teller or writer has a tin ear for comedic timing, and overdoes the joke without knowing better.
- The listener has only the dimmest idea of what constitutes humor, and will blurt out the punchline to ensure that everyone knows s/he's got a sense of humor and they were laughing at something funny.
Note that the lines between these can be blurred. And despite the title, sometimes you can get away with explaining the joke. A way is hinting to the pertinent parts of the joke. That way you don't have to actually explain it completely.
It's very common to have the character explaining the joke wink at the audience, which can lead to homicidial mania towards winks.
Compare If You Know What I Mean, a close cousin of Variant 3.
Examples of Variant 1:
- In Batman The Animated Series, Harley Quinn tries to explain the deathtrap she built for Batman, but she needn't have bothered. With the Joker it was more a case of The Only One Allowed To Defeat You.
- In the first Austin Powers movie, one of the evil spies (an Irishman with a charm bracelet that has a unique trinket on it for every man he kills and is of vital interest to international law enforcement) proclaims "they're always after me lucky charms!" which causes the audience and everyone sitting at the table with him to snicker. He asks why everyone always laughs when he says that, and Frau Farbissina tries to tell him about the commercials. Her ridiculous description of the commercials doesn't help him one bit.
- The third movie was particularily rotten with this trope. Near the start, it cuts to The Osbournes and has them deconstruct the running gag of people seeing the spaceship and using sexual eupheisms to describe it. A later scene features a japanese exec who speaks in subtitles, but parts of the sentences are blocked to make the remarks look offensive ("Please have some shittake mushrooms" and "Your assignment is an unhappy one"); the scene ends with Austin Breaking The Fourth Wall to explain the whole thing to the audience.
- Witches Abroad. She tells it, "So he said, 'Get me an alligator sandwich -- and make it quick!'"
- After much speculation on alt.fan.pratchett (it says here
 ), Terry Pratchett explained it thus:
"It is (I hope) obvious that Granny Weatherwax has absolutely no sense of humour but she has, as it were, heard about it. She has no grasp of how or why jokes work -- she's one of those people who say "And then what happened?" after you've told them the punchline. She can vaguely remember the one-liner, "Give me an alligator sandwich -- and make it snappy!" but since she's got no idea of why it's even mildly amusing she gets confused... all that she can remember is that apparently the man wants it quickly."
So explaining a joke about failing to get the joke, because people failed to get the joke...
- Although it was a threat instead of a joke, after the sheriff in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves threatens to Cut His Heart Out With A Spoon, Sir Guy of Gisborn doesn't get the comment, so the sheriff says, "Because it's dull, you twit. It'll hurt more!"
- The Simpsons, "We're on the Road to D'owhere", with customary Lampshade Hanging:
- The Daily Show, actor Russell Crowe makes a comment that falls flat with the audience and then remarks, "And the crowd goes mild". After Jon Stewart attempts to correct him on his phrasology Russell is forced to Explain the Joke.
Examples of Variant 2:
- In Epic Movie, a Samuel L Jackson lookalike says the "muthafucking snakes" line (although a PG-13 variant), and then keeps repeating it instead of getting rid of the snakes. Could have worked (just not in that movie), but then after the third time, he says that the fanboys in the Internet love it when he says it.
- Agony Booth's recap of Epic Movie makes a nice comparison of all the joke-explaining:
So, don't just tell a joke, tell it twice in a row. That way, it's double-funny. Imagine Leslie Nielsen saying, "I am serious, and don't call me Shirley. Because, when you said 'surely', I mistook it to mean that you were calling me by the woman's name 'Shirley'. They sound alike and I became confused."
- The Soup made fun of Meet the Spartans (and Epic Movie and Date Movie) by making a trailer for Reference Movie, including one girl dressed as Britney Spears saying, "I'm just fighting for custody of my kids, y'all. Get it?"
- In the new Mike Myers movie The Love Guru: "Bring me alligator soup, and make it snappy! ...See, 'snappy', because it's 'alligator' soup. And also because I want it 'promptly'." (grins for camera)
- In the Danny Phantom episode Shades of Gray, Danny needlessly explains the joke "Who let the dog out?".
- Dinosaur Comics does this quite a bit. For example, Programming Advice: Jokes Explained.
- Martin from Frasier does this sometimes - "Tommorrow, I'm going to the birthday party of one of my old friends from the force, he'll be 16... Because you see, tomorrow's the 29th of February... It only comes every four years... He's really 64..."
- "The previous act was a guy with a parrot - Sargent Joe and Officer Chirpy. Dick Chirpy was one of the finest men I ever worked with... Did you see what I did? Chirpy sounds like it would be the parrot but it's actually the man... Dick Chirpy, you see, you'd think he'd be Sargent Joe... Joe is the parrot."
- Double lampshading in this Schlock Mercenary.
- "I'm a zit. Get it?" from Animal House.
- Fozzie on Muppet Babies killed his already tepid jokes by explaining them.
- Spaced: "So it wasn't so much an Eskimo roll, as a case of rolling right Inuit!" (blank look) (Delivered in the same tone) "Inuit's another word for Eskimo!"
- Arrested Development is more subtle about it than most of the examples on this page, though... the number of forumites I've seen complaining about "the narrator who explains all the jokes"...
- Occasionally done by O'Farrell on Fillmore. This one followed a Chase Scene in which the perp was caught with a roll of bubble wrap.
O'Farrell: I'd say you two wrapped this case up rather nicely. Bubble wrap, that is! Get it? It's basically a play on the word "wrap"...
- The puns in the recent Xanth novels are often explained rather than actually showing their pun nature. Take the "Hippo-Crite". Does it actually do things that are hypocritical? No. It just says, "I never mean what I say."
- Well, since it's a series of books built exclusively on puns, anymore, it's not hard to imagine the guy'd run out of steam eventually.
- Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series Bakura in Episode 18. "Run while you can mortal, soon I will rule the world, and then we'll see who smells. (pause) It'll be you!"
- Also Kaiba in Episode 21, while inside a computer simulation: "Time for a trip to the recycle bin, Phantom. And then once you're in the recycle bin, I'm going to right click on it and select "empty recycle bin". Because otherwise, you'll just be taking up unnecessary space. In other words, I'm going to kill you."
- Japanese humor can have a lot of this. A common "gag" is one character blurting out a non sequitur and another character shouting "THAT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE!"
- Occasionally appears at The Other Wiki. Since a chicken in the act of crossing the road might be called "a fowl, proceeding," the joke makes a pun by calling the action "a foul proceeding".
- "Turn that everyman into a BEVERYMAN! Bevery stands for BEVERAGE!"
- Done to hilarious effect in Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog by Captain Hammer:
Captain Hammer: Because she's with Captain hammer. (Displays his fists) And these...are not the hammer. (leaves, comes back) The hammer is my penis."
- Discworld often had characters who after making a pun, or other clever word play would usually start to explain the joke before the other character even has the time to react to said joke. Death tends to be the biggest offender - being The Spock of the series,
- BBC Radio 4's The Now Show has a Running Gag that, before the audience has time to react to particularly lame puns (and there's a lot of them), they'll be lampshaded with "Do you see? Do you see what we did there?" Most notably:
Jon Culshaw: (as Alan Sugar, as the coroner in the Diana inquest) "Your task was to try to prove a conspiracy by Prince Philip to kill Diana. You've offered no real evidence and wasted my time. I have no choice - You're Fayed!
Hugh Dennis: You see? Because it sounds like "fired"! Fayed! It's his name!
- During the roast of Bob Saget, Norm Macdonald did this with lame and predictable jokes, turning his roast into a Post Modern mockery of roasts themselves.
Examples of Variant 3:
- Seen It A Million Times, particularly from Zapp Brannigan.
- "You may have to metaphorically make a Deal With The Devil. And by 'devil', I mean 'Robot Devil', and by 'metaphorically', I mean 'get your coat'."
- John Kennedy from Clone High, who often used the joke type: "I'd like to X her Y....and by Y, I mean SEX!"
- Penny Arcade's "Randy Pinkwood" enjoys this. "If you know what I'm talking about. And I think you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about my penis."
- "That was a pune, or play on words..."
- There is a joke where someone tells a joke wrong in order to emphasize it.
Speaker A: Did you hear the story of how Michael Jackson was seen in a department with his pants half off?
Speaker B: No, no, no, the joke is that Michael Jackson was seen at a department store because they had kids pants half off, dummy!
- In one Family Guy, Brian catches a rerun of One Day At A Time. Mocking Snyder's comic schtick, he announces that he's there to "fix your pipes. And by 'fix your pipes', I mean 'have sex with you'. And by 'have sex with you', I mean 'fix your pipes'. And by..." he goes on until Brian is forced to destroy the television.
- From (where else?) The Simpsons:
Lionel Hutz: He's had it in for me ever since I kinda ran over his dog... Well, replace the word "kinda" with "repeatedly" and the word "dog" with "son."
- In his stand-up, Bill Bailey often tells jokes of this nature:
Three blokes go into a pub. One of them is a little bit stupid, and the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability.
- Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series does this version, too
Joey: That is one girl I'd like to play card games with! And by "play card games," I mean "have sex!"
- A diner worker in Garfield & Friends: "No more burgers until I see some lettuce, cat. It is money to which I refer."
Examples of Variant 4:
- One of the biggest criticisms of Ctrl Alt Del is that its author, Tim Buckley, seems insistent on explaining each and every joke in minute detail through walls upon walls of unnecessary character dialogue. Most of the time the punchline is already blurted out in the first panel, and the other three panels are then dedicated solely to dancing around the joke.
- Anytime someone tells a joke on Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, it'll probably end up like this, probably with Dean Learner delivering the over-done line. For instance, in an episode where a character is killed by a screwdriver:
Sanchez: Let's all go for a drink.
Liz: As long as it's not a screwdriver!
Dean Learner: I'd prefer a beer!
Examples of Variant 5:
- A series of Rooster Teeth comics featuring the guys involved in an escalating prank war culminates with them in the hospital calling a truce they clearly don't intend to keep. One of the first comments on it? "I like how they're all holding weapons." You, sir-slash-madame, are a master of observation.
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