When the writers openly acknowledge that a Running Gag has run its due course, even as they are hauling it out again— gain— gain— gain—*WHACK*
There we go. Anyhow, the use of a Running Gag is generally constrained over the course of one episode. But there are some jokes that the writers thought are just so funny that they should be used in another episode, and another, and another and another. Even if it isn't Once an Episode, it's still squeezed into the series wherever they see fit— fit— fit— fit— fit—*THUMP*
Okay. After a while, though, the writers will come to realize that the bit has started to peter out. Then one can be sure to start seeing plenty of Lampshade Hanging and heavy subversion in the effort to keep the joke fresh, or tolerated. Once that wears thin, one can expect the bit to be dropped like a Christmas ham— ham— ham— ham— ham—*SMACK*
Okay, that joke's really wearing thin. Before we continue, let's get that audio equipment fixed.
One hour later....
There, fixed. Anyhow, for this to be a trope, examples should not be subjective. They should be based on whether the writers have reacted to its overuse (lampshaded or used it less), rather than just a feeling that the gag has been used too much.
The inevitable fate of many a comedy Catch Phrase. Commonly confused with Overly Long Gag, which is when a single gag is stretched out for an irritatingly long time. That said, for any joke, good or bad, enough repetition can make people decide it's an Overused Running Gag.
The next step after this is Running Gagged, where the joke is terminated with extreme prejudice, once and for all. Or until they bring it back.
Compare Discredited Meme, which this often leads to— to— to— to— to—*WHUMP*
Sigh. Okay, if it does that again, that audio equipment is gonna get a dose of C-4.
Note: This is for In-Universe examples only. Do not use this trope to Complain About Running Gags You Don't Like.
In a meta example, Bakuman。 featured the main characters working on a light-hearted comedy manga, but only a bit more than 10 chapters in, they're already making entire chapters based on the running gag of the main character saying "I dunno about that." This serves as one of the signs that this isn't the right sort of series for them.
In Clannad, Okazaki attempts to make Kotomi more social by bringing her to new people and telling her to introduce herself, at which point she always turns around and introduces herself to Okazaki. The third time this occurs, Okazaki remarks that that particular gag is getting old.
In Mahou Sensei Negima! there was a running gag throughout the Mahorafest arc of Takane always getting stripped, four times in total, largely because she used magical clothing that stopped working if she was knocked unconscious. When she reappears in the Magic World arc she forces several girls to wear it as well because it increases defense, so when attacking the Cosmo Entelechia stronghold you can see the only one who knows about that and has to wear it herself nearly in tears. Contrary to all expectations, not one of them gets stripped this time.
Brock flirting with any older female he sees in Pokémon, before being hauled away by Misty/Max (by the ear), Bonsly (using Double-Edge) and Croagunk (getting Poison Jabbed in the ass). It's acknowledged in-universe by his companions (and even antagonists Team Rocket) occasionally getting annoyed at his antics. It was funny the first three times, then it just became old. For Croagunk's bit, it's a minor Running Gag in of itself for Dawn to get caught completely surprised whenever Brock makes an instant recovery.
The series also occasionally made fun of Meowth's tendency for the bizarre Imagine Spots, mostly from the other members of Team Rocket.
The series also has the running gag of mispronouncing Bill and Stafan...er, Team Rocket's Butch and Best Wishes' Stephan's names. Both characters frequently mention that they're going to change their names after several characters get them wrong.
By the third Austin Powers movie, the running gag of several witnesses likening a flying object to a naughty body part was called out by Ozzy Osbourne, watching it on TV with his family.
In the first two The Swan Princess movies, Puffin says, "No Fear!", so many times, Jean-Bob finally grabs Puffin's beak shut and threatens to tear it off if he says it again.
Literature
Dave Barry often has Overused Running Gags in books which aren't merely recycled columns:
"No! Sorry! That's it for the Hawley-Smoot tariff, you have our word." (Dave Barry Slept Here, which continues to allude to it in three subsequent chapters).
"Do you think we've had enough Winston Churchill jokes? Explain." (also Dave Barry Slept Here)
"Do you think the author will eventually grow tired of the Buffalo Bob joke? Why not?" (Dave Barry Turns 50)
"If you think we're getting tired of the zucchini joke, you had best think again." (Dave Barry Hits Below The Beltway)
The Trolls has Aunt Sally reminding us about how Great-Uncle Louis, who came for two weeks and stayed for six years, came for two weeks and stayed for six years almost everytime she says his name.
Live Action Television
The Man Show had a "Museum of Annoying Guys", and one of them was the Real Life version of this trope. "It's the beat a Catch Phrase to death guy."
The Rita Moreno episode (#5 of season 1) of The Muppet Show features an old-style phone backstage. When it rings, Fozzie answers it, and something comes out of the receiver related to who's calling. At the fifth call, Kermit gets fed up and asks, "Is there no end to this Running Gag?"; then Animal comes in and puts an end to it (as well as to incoming calls, unless someone thinks to call the number for the phone on the desk).
In the 2000 The Invisible Man TV series, Darien Fawkes would greet each worsening situation with "Oh Crap" in a resigned manner. Eventually, the characters find it annoying. By the second season, there are lampshades; for instance, it's the only thing he remembers about himself when he gets Laser-Guided Amnesia, forcing him to use it to tell who his friends are.
Parodied in The State. Under pressure to create more catchphrase-driven characters like Saturday Night Live, the writers created "Louie, the guy who says his catchphrase over and over again." The character would repeatedly ask for volunteers to present him with a substance and then loudly announce, "I wanna dip my balls in it!" while holding up two golf balls. The Only Sane Man in the sketch can't understand why the gag never gets old to any of the other characters. Ironically, the character proved popular and was brought back a few times.
Hannah Montana's tendency towards zany schemes is noted, repeatedly, by Lilly, who eventually gets fed up at never being asked to just sit down and have breakfast but constantly being roped into Miley's schemes.
iCarly: T-Bo's food on stick gag (capsicums, chicken, doughnuts, etc) is put up with a couple of times, and now every time it's brought up he is forcefully rejected by the other characters.
Friends had Ross's running joke "We were on a break!" Despite being called out on it, this saw usage right up until the very last episode. Additionally, Joey's Catch Phrase "How you doin'?" saw a few lampshades.
The IT Crowd has Roy answer the phone almost every time with the line, "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?" However, early in the second season he interrupts his signature line with, "I'm sick of saying that. What do you want?" From that point on he never again utters that catchphrase until he brings it back in the fourth.
One episode has Jen bet him he cannot go an entire day without saying it. He loses.
And in another episode, his phone is hooked up to a tape machine that plays a recording of him saying the catchphrase when someone calls.
In the film Escape 2000, there is a scene at the beginning where the phrase "leave the Bronx" is repeated constantly. Mike and the Bots naturally turn this into a Running Gag, with Servo even singing the phrase repeatedly along to the music at the end credits. But when the movie is over and Mike tries to make the joke again, Crow tells him that it's not funny any more.
Stargate SG-1 had a habit of making Who's on First? jokes using the Goa'uld System Lord Yu. When Elizabeth Weir tried to get in on it, she was stopped by Daniel.
Daniel: Don't. Every joke, every pun, done to death.
Web Comics
El Goonish Shive has used every possible permutation of the hammer and the demonic duck, and yet they just won't go away, even despite the author explicitly saying they will.
They haven't been seen in a while, so maybe he kept his word. A whole arc was spent on some of the characters going to see why the hammers have stopped working, which resulted in a canon explanation for why they're gone (and were there in the first place), and one character gaining the ability to use them as her personal magic spell (which she has yet to use). This was also the last time the Demonic Duck was seen. This was in 2010.
Ctrl+Alt+Del had the Running Gag where Ethan gets hit by an arrow from off panel (as a homage to The Kentucky Fried Movie). The author decided to end the gag after it became overused and played with its end by having the last arrow fired by Ethan and into the author himself as punishment for all the times he was hit.
A strip of The Order of the Stick has one person telling his teammates to stop screaming "SNEAK ATTACK"; after that, for the first time, someone reacts to them yelling and kills them before they can land the blow.
For added strangeness, the one being criticized for calling his attacks is a fighter that shouts "Power Attack", while the dozens of rogues in the fight are shouting "Sneak Attack" with no commentary.
PvP had a panda that would randomly attack Brent. The reasons behind these attacks were eventually explained in a rather long arc, and the gag died down considerably after that.
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff does this on purpose to go with the Stylistic Suck, outside the universe the fans reference SBAHJ endlessly and inside the Homestuck universe, where characters reference SBAHJ all too often.
In Square Root of Minus Garfield, this happened with the "Garfield (pun for Minus) Garfield" meme, also known as the "pudding pops" strips. Strip 268, "Garfield Linus Garfield", began this gag. Each strip in this gag editted Garfield strip 2001-11-28◊, by replacing the second panel's Garfield with Linus, Sinus, or anything that rhymes with "minus", or sounds a bit like "minus". Most of the strips kept a line about "pudding pops". Strip 478 lampshaded the gag but failed to stop the meme. Strip 518 provoked a forum thread that became strip 625, "Garfield Skynet Garfield: Judgement Day". This strip killed the Overused Running Gag; but the gag later returned to life, and now the admins limit new "pudding pops" strips to about one per month.
The Nostalgia Critic has M. Bison's "Of course!" that pops up every time someone wants to Take Over the World. When the Nostalgia Critic got sick of it, it showed up on its own and crushed him.
Saying the word "Elephant" summons the Burger King who silences the characters in the movie who won't shut up. It didn't work on Twister. After the Top 11 Nostalgic Mindfucks, he recalls that it didn't come when he talked about the Pink Elephants from Dumbo; after some experimentation, the Burger King logo brained him out of irritation.
Nostalgia Critic: I had my fun.
On his commentary for the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog review Doug spent some time discussing the need to alter running gags frequently and drop them before the audience gets sick of them. He also mentioned that people have asked to drop every running gag except "OF COURSE!".
In conventions, at least one person will bring up a "Bat Credit Card". Eventually he went on record saying he's really tired of that (mostly because the raging does a number on his voice) but he still does it because it makes the people laugh.
Like Critic's Sonic episode, Phelous's "Dawn of the Living Dead" episode has him declaring he'll never end his "I'VE GOT A SHOTGUN!" gag and that he's sick of it after using it again seconds later.
In her "Top Eleven Animated Villainesses", The Nostalgia Chick had to be stared at by sad puppies for a while until she was forced to break out of deadpan mode and do her running gag:
The series is riddled with running gags, some of which are overused for comedic effect. Most notoriously, the "Retrieve arms from x" command has been done about 12 times in Problem Sleuth and Homestuck. So far.
Subverted in Act 5. When the first new character of this act is introduced, it seems that, as usual, all the typical running gags will play out before he's introduced for real... but the narrator and the character are having none of it.
"And that was the X time I died" used by Unskippable when some catastrophe seemingly killed the main character was eventually acknowledged with the words: "No, wait, I take it back. Semenoske got nuked, this guy's going to be fine."
Richard of Looking for Group doesn't seem willing to acknowledge the "Fork of Truth" has had its day and needs to be retired. In the Fork's most recent appearance, the other cast members completely ignored his rant about it, except for Sooba.
Newsgroup rec.humor was flooded with the two-strings-in-a-bar/frayed-knot jokes. This is to the point where some jokes began pointing out that the joke was killed.
The Citation Needed podcast begins with a rundown of improbably named podcasts that supposedly failed to last as long as Citation Needed. By episode 8, these podcasts include "Running Gags To Start Your Podcast With That Are Becoming Increasingly Hard To Think Of".
Wrestle Crap's induction of a wrestler named Man Mountain Rock featured a picture of said wrestler shrugging with the caption "Yeah, I don't know either dude." After using this picture in 6 straight updates, writer RD Reynolds threatened to end its use. Fan demand brought him into an additional 6 updates and possibly counting.
South Park's "Oh My God, They Killed Kenny!" It gets old, gets lampshaded, subverted and eventually cut down severely in the later seasons.
Drawn Together is yet another example of the "regurgitate the same jokes over and over, then acknowledge how they've stopped being funny and continue using the jokes over and over again" tactic.
The two vaudeville players Vern and Johnny, who appeared so often to fill the time before commercial breaks that Stewie killed them to assure the audience that they would never appear again. (They still came back... as ghosts).
In the last season or so, Cleveland would get knocked out of his house on a regular basis. It was even used twice after Cleveland left for The Cleveland Show. Cleveland eventually lampshades it, saying "I fell out of that house way too many times than could possibly be funny." In fact, that's how Cleveland's first wife died.
Another episode pokes fun at itself for its constant use of a Cutaway Gag by having Cleveland complain about how he hates it when a show cuts away to some other bullcrap. Cue a Cutaway Gag showing Hitler riding a unicycle as he juggles objects. Later on, the same gag is used again, but Peter rushes in and punches out Hitler, saying "See? We had a plan for that all along!"
In The Simpsons, the clip where Homer falls down the Springfield Gorge (from the episode "Bart the Daredevil") was referenced several times. In the episode "The Blunder Years", when Homer flashes back to it, Lisa interrupts him, saying "Everyone's sick of that memory."
It also gets referenced in the episode "Behind The Laughter" when its called a comedy classic, and then deconstructed when we see Homer in rehab with several broken bones.
Ben 10 is especially guilty of this. It started in the first series, when he often didn't get the alien transformation he selected. Okay, makes sense. It was the prototype Omnitrix. By Alien Force, it tended to happen. Whatever. But by Ultimate Alien and Ben 10 Omniverse? Oh, come on! Drop the joke already! In fact, Ben, himself points this out when he selects an alien, but ends up with the rotund, metallic Clockwork. "Clockwork? This is ridiculous!"
TV Tropes
On TV Tropes itself, there was a time where a ridiculous number of trope pages mentioned by way of example that they were one of The Oldest Ones in the Book. (This trend was referenced by Uncyclopedia.) This is because over 95% of recorded human history is older than the "book," which was apparently written in 1950 (when television gained popularity in the USA). It became common to see tropers avoid the repetition of that unwieldy trope name by putting it in a Pot Hole under some phrase like, "You know what that makes this..." Splitting The Oldest Ones in the Book into sub-indexes such as Older than Dirt, Older Than Steam, and Older Than Radio has done a lot to reduce the annoyance, both because of the variety and because anything that isn'tOlder than Dirt is newer than much of the book.
Now Older Than Dirt itself has become way overused and misused, being frequently applied to pages that are nowhere near old enough to count (currently the cutoff is 800 BCE; previously it was 500 BCE). Doesn't help that despite being an index, it's often treated as a trope.
