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"Destroy us all! Destroy us all! Destroy us all! Destroy us all! Destroy us all! Destroy us all! Destroy us all!"
A gag that uses the Rule Of Three to the extreme. The concept is that something happens repeatedly, to the point of boredom. Then it keeps going, to the point where it actually becomes funny again.
One famous example of this trope is the "Rake Scene" from The Simpsons episode "Cape Feare", where Sideshow Bob kept stepping on rakes ad nauseum until the pointlessness of the scene became the gag and it became funny again. (The production team has confessed that the gag was added because the episode ran short.) The older "Dental Plan"/"Lisa Needs Braces" sequence from "Last Exit to Springfield" also likely qualifies.
However, many people fell that once the audience recognizes the trope again, the gag permanently loses its entertainment value to some people, and the viewer is left waiting for it to end and some other humor to begin ("Oh, it's another one of these; how utterly hi larious..."). Others find it a brilliant subversion of audience expectations on the lines of Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby for twenty minutes. Funny thing is, the more they use it, the more it's expected.
Comedy writers take note: It's good for a laugh occasionally, but expect diminishing returns for each Overly Long Gag you employ after the first.
Compare Crosses The Line Twice and Overly Long Name. Not to be confused with Over Used Running Gag.
The serious version is Leave The Camera Running.
Examples:
Live Action TV
Anime
- Azumanga Daioh used a few Overly Long Gags. These include Osaka needing to "Get it together!" in episode 2, the "Nandeyane! Nandeyane!..." bit from episode 8, and the "Today is a summer service day..."/"Get motivated! Get motivated!" bit from episode 14. They seem to involve Tomo a lot...
- Episode 9's "You took it, didn't you? Give it back, give it back, give it back!" is a milder, but still very long, example.
- Sakaki petting Chiyo's dog for a solid 45 seconds (and that was just onscreen) probably counts too.
- You might have heard some Pokémon fans liek mudkips. With the power of You Tube, nobody ever wants to hear from a Mudkip
 ever again.
- Lucky Star pulls this one in the very first episode.
- One episode of Bleach contained a scene of Yoruichi eating bowl after bowl of food. For almost two whole minutes. During which time the camera never moves, and no says or does anything else. The actual scene doesn't go as long as this video does, but it certainly feels like it.
- Which is made even more ridiculous due to the fact that the scene in the manga occupies all of a page.
Comic Books
- Preacher contains a rare comic book version. Villain Herr Starr has a huge scar drawn down the middle of his bald head, making him look like a giant penis. It's that kind of comic book. Anyway, one entire page contains nine identical panels of him looking at himself in the mirror. In the last one, he says 'Shit'. It's repeated later with nine different kinds of wigs and nine different kinds of hats, the last of which he quite likes. Not an especially serious spoiler, by the way, but better safe then sorry.
Film
- Spaceballs opens with a huge spaceship that scrolls into view and keeps on scrolling for 90 seconds. At least three times something that resembles a tail section comes into view, and the background music segues into the next piece, only to false-start and cut right back to stalling. As it finishes, the camera pans to the rear of the ship, which has a bumper sticker saying WE BRAKE FOR NOBODY. At least six editors are agreed that the scene is not only a brilliant parody of the more ominous sequences in Star Wars (and the Enterprise fly-by sequence in Star Trek: The Motion Picture), but remarkably efficient in establishing the bad guys' character.
- This is also a parody of some of the endless interstitial shots in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Mel Brooks actually said in the commentary that he would've let that sequence go on for hours if the studio had let him. I hope he wasn't serious.
- Lampshaded later in the movie, as President Skroob is seen running onto the ship's bridge. "The ship is too big! If I walk, the movie will be over!"
- An unintentional version of this is the fight scene in the 1988 movie They Live! In it, the main character, a fugitive accused of murder, is trying to convince another character to put on a pair of sunglasses and thus see the aliens and their handiwork. While originally intended to only last one to two minutes, the fight scene was done so well that it was placed in unaltered, for almost five minutes. The pointlessness of the fight combined with the length is enough to make most viewers laugh out loud.
- The fight was recreated exactly in the South Park episode "Cripple Fight".
- Part of the reason the fight was good, one notes, is that both actors were professional wrestlers. Really.
- The first Austin Powers made good use of this trope. The best example is Dr. Evil's neverending maniacal laughter, which continues through two full cycles of funny, then not funny, then funny again.
- And what about "Evacuation compl.... Evacuation com.... Evac..."
- The puppet-sex scene in Team America: World Police aims for this trope; whether or not it works is up to the individual viewer. The Unrated Edition makes the scene even longer, to the point where most viewers are likely bored.
- The drunken puke scene definitely qualifies as well.
- One of the flaws that marred the infamous Bruce Willis vehicle Hudson Hawk was a tendency to drag scenes out far too long; whether this was intentional or not, it didn't work, and scenes which could have been mildly amusing were instead tedious. Conversely, a number of potentially viewable scenes were cut too short.
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show: "Janet! Brad! Janet! Dr. Scott! Rocky! (Bullwinkle!)"
- In the 2005 film of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: When showing the Vogon Constructor Fleet around Earth, the camera jumps back with every "beat" of the music. When this effect is put into play, it usually only happens about three times. In the movie, it happens a grand total of fifty-five times.
- This occurs a number of times in Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, such as the dramatic camera movements and sounds before a fight.
- In a deleted scene from Borat, Borat explores an American supermarket:
Borat: What is this?
Employee: That's cheese.
Borat: And what is this?
Employee: That's cheese.
(Repeat ad nauseum and back again)
- The multiple police car pileups in The Blues Brothers. Not to mention the ones in the sequel that go on for so long they cross the line three times.
- Chico Marx's endless piano solo in Animal Crackers.
Chico: I can't think of the finish.
Groucho: That's strange, and I can't think of anything else.
Chico: I think I went past it.
Groucho: The next time you come around, jump off.
- In the Steve Martin movie Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, Steve Martin is making coffee by putting grounds into water, and putting grounds into water, and putting grounds into water, and... you get the picture. I think this goes on for two minutes of him putting more and more coffee grounds into a pot. Probably ends up putting about twice as much coffee grounds as you could fit into the can empty, but it probably doesn't matter, the audience has long since been bored not just to death, but to death and resurrection and rebirth.
- The 1986 movie ˇThree Amigos! used this trope in its theme song, where one note is held for an uncomfortably long period of time.
- The Disney film The Three Caballeros uses the same gag, with the other characters trying everything they can think of to stop it.
- And don't forget Spy Hard, during whose closing theme Weird Al Yankovic holds a note so long his head explodes.
- Japanese comedy Tampopo features a fist-fight scene that lasts...well, nobody really knows, because they always fast forward through it.
- Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich.
Literature
Western Animation
- The first, and most famous, Family Guy is Peter Griffin spraining his knee after winning the golden beer ticket. In the commentary track of The Stewie Griffin Story DVD, creator Seth MacFarlane said that he rather enjoys making gags run just a little bit longer than they should. Many people feel that the show uses it as a crutch.
- The famous chicken fights are frequently accused of being nothing more than overly long gags, although there's usually a good wealth of film references in each.
- One could argue that the repeated usage of the overly long gag is itself an overly long gag. Whenever the show starts a new one, you find yourself thinking "wow, they're still doing that?"
- MacFarlane has a pretty big influence on Seth Green's Robot Chicken, so to no surprise, to say the least, some clips are longer and tedious than others. This really comes into play in the second season.
- Garfield And Friends features an episode, "How To Be Funny", where the titular cat explains the fine points of comedy and admits repetition of a stupid Visual Pun like being handed lightbulbs after yelling "Lights!" can get funnier with time.
- One recurring gag in U.S. Acres is that whenever Orson sorts his books, he always has to put one in particular - Deja Vu, the Sensation of Experiencing Something You Have Experienced Before - away about five times in a row.
- In the Sealab 2021 episode "Vacation", the suggestion that Quinn is in his room with a prostitute twice prompts a segue into a ridiculously long chain of characters going "Uh-oh!". The Rule Of Three comes into play at the end of the episode, as Quinn interrupts the beginning of a third such chain.
- Speaking of Sealab 2021, in "Predator", Quinn consults a man who has been mauled by a monster. Due to the victim's (fortunately-not-seen) injuries, his attempts at speech come out as gruesome little squishy sounds. Rather than using So What You Are Saying, Quinn stands there listening to the sounds for about a minute, while saying "Uh-huh... Right... Sure... Uh-huh..."
- A popular moment from Duck Tales is from the episode "A Whale of a Bad Time", where Scrooge Mc Duck is informed that a shipment of his ice cream (in which he'd concealed half his fortune) has been eaten by a sea monster, which causes him to go berserk and spend about a minute jumping around the room repeatedly yelling "A sea monster ate my ice cream!!" before his nephews can subdue him.
- The above quote come from The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, when Billy thinks clowns "want to become the dominant species" and then proceeds to spend nearly half a minute straight yelling that they'll "Destroy us all!". In the made for TV movie "Wrath of the Spider Queen", he is cut off half-way before starting another such joke.
- In the episode of South Park, "Cancelled", this trope is spelled out. Kyle is asked to activate the satellite dish in Cartman's rectum, and each time he approaches, Cartman farts and laughs. Everyone agrees it is no longer funny, and Cartman does it again, prompting the others to laugh and Chef to proclaim it funny once more.
- Episodes of Drawn Together frequently seem to spend most of their air time in Overly Long Gags, culminating in one episode featuring a character drawing a fart out for an entire 60 seconds.
- Space Ghost Coast To Coast: The "Fire Ant" episode, as originally aired, contained a ten-minute-long sequence consisting entirely of Space Ghost following an ant around. No action, almost no dialogue, just Space Ghost following an ant. (For obvious reasons, this sequence was cut out of all repeat broadcasts, which cut directly from Space Ghost's decision to follow the ant to the underwhelming punchline.)
- Twelve Ounce Mouse would sometimes have two Overly Long Gags running concurrently. In episode 5, Fitz and Skillet have an extended shoot-out with an offscreen assailant while Peanut tries to rob the Diner. In episode 11, Shark spends half the episode trying to get his car started, while Rectangular Businessman spends the other half trying to decide which one of many identical harmonicas to buy. By the end of the episode, neither has succeeded.
- In what is probably on of the most famous scenes from Kenan and Kel, Kenan examines his friend during a lawsuit brought about him almost choking on a screw in a can of tuna. Kel ends up breaking down, confessing loudly to his friend that he dropped the screw in the tuna, over and over and over, while stumbling about the courtroom.
- Another Simpsons example: When told that the sleeping medication he's taking causes mood swings, Homer goes into a lithany of every conceivable emotional reading of the phrase "mood swing."
- Taken to its logical extreme by Futurama; "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad", a special episode included on the Bender's Big Score DVD, takes a single gag and runs with it for twenty-two minutes, the entire length of the episode.
- There are some other gags included ("Guests of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad stay at the famous Cragmont Human Cage!"), but otherwise fits. The point being that in order not to miss all of these gags the viewer has to sit through the entire episode. Some of them are so short that they can easily be missed by fast-forwarding through them.
- Almost every episode of the cartoon Chowder seems to have this. I smell gum!
- Dexter's Lab used this quite a bit, usually centering around endlessly repeated shots of Dexter typing on a keyboard, tightening a screw, pulling the same lever, etc. One commercial lampshaded this by asking after about thirty seconds of the screw-tightening, "Isn't he going to overtighten that thing some day?"
- Culminating in a scene after Dexter gets Dee Dee out of his lab for good by "firing" her, which is a running montage of Dexter doing the same four things, progressively slower and slower, going from beaming to sad as he starts to miss Dee Dee's antics.
- Don't forget the episode which focused on Mandark and every sound made was similar to his signiture laugh. For the entire episode.
- Lampshaded in an episode of Freakazoid ("Virtual Freak"), where Freakazoid and the Lobe take an overly long time to fall from the top of a mall...
Lobe: Freakazoid, why does it take so long to fall?
Freakazoid: Because it's funny!
Lobe: No it's not! It's just stupid!
- This is Invader Zim's bread and butter. Take for example, this quote from Tak: The Hideous New Girl, in which Tak has just started to explain her evil plan to Zim, starting with "Part 1" - crippling his base's functions.
"Part 2 is --"
"NOOO! My beautiful base!"
"Part 2 is --"
"NOOO! My beautiful base!"
"Part 2 --"
"NOOOO! My base!"
"Part 2 --"
"NOOO!"
"Part --"
"NOOO!"
"Okay, I'm -- "
"NOOO!"
"Okay, I'm going now."
"But you didn't tell me what your plan was."
- And don't forget "My Tallest! My Tallest! Hey! Hey My Tallest! My Tallest? My Tallest! Hey! Hey! Hey! My Taaaaaaallist! My Tallest? My Tallest! Hey! Hey My Tallest! My Tallest? It's me! My Tallest? My Tallest!" Which the creator originally wanted to last for five whole minutes.
Video Games
Web Animation
- From Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad email boring (really), Strong Bad gets an email from a viewer complaining of boredom, and asking how exciting day-to-day life in Free Country USA really was. He and several other characters manage (by speaking and moving very slowly) to make a twenty-five-second conversation last four minutes -- which, SB insists, makes for an extremely exciting day.
Comedy
- David Letterman does this often. This editor can't hear about Uma Thurman or Oprah Winfrey without thinking about "Uma, Oprah. Oprah, Uma."
- Adam Sandler is fond of this in his comedy CDs, perhaps most noticeable in the sketch satirizing Carrie: "NOOOOOO! They're all gonna laugh at you!"
- One sketch on Mad TV was nothing more than two people engaged in a Mexican standoff and yelling at each other, "Drop the gun!" "No YOU drop the gun!" "I said drop the gun!" "No YOU drop the gun!" etc.
- A lot of Monty Python falls into this category.
- This happens with plenty of Saturday Night Live sketches nowadays. Sometimes it completely ruins sketches that could have been funny: See the "Over 21" sketch.
- It always has. There was a sketch back in the late 1970s/early 1980s that consisted of nothing but Steve Martin and Bill Murray standing around and asking each other "What the hell is that?" in various intonations. Sometimes they would pretend to recognize what "that" (bordering on Take Our Word For It, "it" was something they pretended to see in the camera/toward the audience) was, but they always came back to some form of "What the hell is that?" This editor actually doesn't even remember if the punch line involved revealing what "that" was, just that the sketch went on for what felt like at least ten minutes.
- As a matter of fact, they never did say what that was.
- The opening of this QI episode.
Radio
- The Goon Show used this trope, making it one of The Oldest Ones In The Book. No, the camera is not required. Several episodes used this, presented as a minute or more of dead silence "For the safety of the performers", footsteps, or Minie Banister's ramblings....
- One episode of Hancock's Half Hour began with a character hitting the keys on a typewriter very slowly, until after a couple of minutes Hancock asks, "wouldn't it be quicker if you took off the boxing gloves?" And in the famous "Sunday Afternoon at Home" episode, there are long sequences of Hancock just sighing and saying things like, "Oh, dear... dear, dear, dear... dear me... stone me, what a life... sigh... oh, I do hate Sundays," etc.
Misc
- NOOOOOO!
- This article by Mark Rosewater, lead designer of Magic: the Gathering. In fact, he spells it out.
- They're all gonna laugh at you!
- The end of this piano piece by Dudley Moore.
- Chicken Chicken Chicken.
- They're all gonna laugh at you!
- Many You Tube Poop videos try to milk comedy out of repeating a clip over and over and over again, sometimes mixing it up by slowing it down, speeding it up, or applying a filter (grayscale, pixellation, etc.).
- NOOOOOO!
- "Repeatedly used on this very Wiki."
- Swedish example: Martin Ljung's "Fingal Olsson" sketch, in which he's trying to explain what makes a joke funny by telling the same joke over and over, varying the punchline slightly each time. The joke is less than hilarious to begin with, but after about seven repetitions...
- The Onion will occasionally print an article that contains the sentence "Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood," repeated for the entire article.
- NOOOOOO! They're all gonna laugh at you! They're all gonna laugh at you! They're all gonna laugh at you!
- Similarly, the "Start-up Sound" practical joke from Prangstgrüp.
- Lying somewhere between Overly Long Gag and Leave The Camera Running: an infamous sketch from an old Finnish sketch show (starring the Finnish actor/comedian legend Pertti "Spede" Pasanen) features a customer and a salesman in a hardware store. The customer asks for a certain product and the salesman picks it up from the shelf: the joke lies in that the salesman goes to the shelf, picks up the item and brings it to the customer veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly, easily taking a few minutes with the camera patiently watching the 'action'. And then this is repeated. Several times.
- IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAND!!
- KRISTEN SCHAAL IS A HORSE!
They're all gonna laugh at him.
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