Overly Long Gags in real life.
- A letter written by a Union soldier serving under General McClellan during The American Civil War described the daily routine at the D.C. garrison as one long string of drills. (The entire letter was read aloud during part one of Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War.)
- A Japanese rock band asked Tom Green of all people to sit in on drums for them one night. The result was, simply, Tom playing the drums. And playing. And playing. And playing. Long after the song had ended.
- When Flava Flav had his 50th birthday, at the party celebrated with the longest "Yeeeaah, boyyyyy" in history.
- For numerous long gags made into names in real life, check this index
. - YouTube:
- A video can (and has, in the case of some YouTube Poopers) be removed for using an overly long gag. According to their "Community Guidelines", "It's not okay to post large amounts of untargeted, unwanted, or repetitive content, including comments and private messages." However, it's not as if this actually stops people from uploading ungodly numbers of "character X does momentary action Y repeatedly for 10 minutes while Yakety Sax plays in the background" videos. So it's sort of used and averted at the same time. Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged owner LittleKuriboh has had his account terminated nine times, the last of which being on February 26 2012, and it has been restored eight times.
- Comment sections can have overly long gags where posters keep trying to one-up each other or just follow along.
- "the nutshack theme but every nutshack is replaced with the entire reading of the bee movie script". A large series of these types of these nesting videos, which EmperorLemon calls "But-edits", has become a meme in YouTube culture, taking this trope up to eleven. As EmpLemon himself describes it:"You take The Nutshack theme, but replace each "Nutshack" with Smash Mouth's "All Star", and replace each "All-Star" with the Cyberchase theme, then replace every other syllable with the entirety of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and every time the Monolith appears, BonziBuddy reads the entire Bee Movie script, but every time he says "bee" it's replaced with the entire Paul Blart movie, and every time someone says "Paul Blart", it's replaced with John Cena's intro. Now, as you can see, we started off with a simple 60-second long intro, but after just a few operations, we now have something longer than the entire age of the observable universe."
- The John Isner vs Nicolas Mahut tennis match at Wimbledon 2010 got like this at times. The bloke doing the writeup for the Guardian certainly thought so. The match is by far the longest in the history of tennis at 11 hours, 5 minutes, and the final set itself was longer than the second-longest tennis match of all time."Isner and Mahut are dying a thousand deaths out there on Court 18 and yet nobody cares, because they're watching the football."
- Paul Rudd may hold the world record for this. For seventeen years, every time he appears on Conan O'Brien's show to promote a movie he's starring in, Rudd promised to show a clip from "his new movie", and then play the exact same scene, sometimes with small edits, from the E.T. mockbuster Mac and Me. Every. Single. Time. And it never gets any easier for poor Conan. A complete guide to the joke, from its inception to Rudd's surprise appearance during the final week of Conan's TBS show, can be found here.
- A paper presented at the annual meeting of the Annals of Improbable Research: Chicken Chicken Chicken.
- Knock knock. Who's There? Banana. Banana who? Banana. Banana who? Banana. BANANA WHO! After at least 10-50 more times... Orange, Orange who? Orange ya glad I didn't say banana!
- The full chemical name of Titin. Which has 189,819 letters. Seriously. Here's the full name pronounced. Note that the video lasts three and a half hours.
- A perfect example on this clip of X-Factor.
- Famous writer Mark Twain would on occasion go on tours where he would tell stories and run routines that were known to be hilariously funny. On the night of one such performance, Mark Twain stepped on the stage and proceed to stare at the audience for several minutes without saying a word. The confused audience stared back for a VERY long time, until finally they started to chuckle slightly. This was followed by some light laughter, and before long the whole audience was inexplicably in stitches. This led into a very successful (and more typical) performance by Mark Twain for the rest of the evening.
- According to Robert Llewellyn, Norman Lovett once did the same thing for about fifteen-twenty minutes.
- The Owl Channel is a website that broadcasts a live feed of the nest of two barn owls, Roy and Dale. As of the time of this entry, the male barn owl has brought the female 87 rabbits over the course of about two months. Eighty seven. For those not familiar with barn owls, that is ridiculous.
- Originally to filibuster in the United States Senate, politicians needed to talk nonstop to delay the voting on a bill. This led to such things as reading Shakespeare and reciting a list of recipes to the rest of the Senate for hours on end.
- For many years, the San Diego Zoo posted one throughout the park that also functioned as an anti-Loophole Abuse PSA:PLEASE DO NOT annoy, torment, pester, plague, molest, worry, badger, harry, harass, heckle, persecute, irk, bullyrag, vex, disquiet, grate, beset, bother, tease, nettle, tantalize, or ruffle the animals.
- Receptionists, secretaries, guards, or anyone else working by the outside door of a building hear "Wow, it's hot out there!" and "Whew, it's cold out there!", tens of times a day, matching the season. This is a social convention that's fine for the occasional hearing, but gets old. Saying "I know, I work by the DOOR!" is bad form, unfortunately.
- Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List, a ten-page document in the style of a scientific paper consisting of the title sentence over and over again, complete with flow chart and scatter-plot graph. It was originally created by a pair of computer scientists as a response to spam mail from a rather disreputable "journal". Naturally, they accepted it for publication, pending their usual $150 fee.
- Dream Land 64 except the intro keeps looping and gradually speeds up.
- In rugby union, after normal time has expired, play continues until the ball goes dead or someone scores. Unless it's a penalty, in which case the penalty is awarded and play continues. However, the law to allow penalties to kick the ball out of touch and the resulting lineout to proceed had yet to be implemented in the Northern Hemisphere for the 2017 Six Nations. This resulted in the situation where France, trailing 13-18 to Wales after a relatively dull 79 minutes in the last round of the Six Nations, first got a scrum near the Wales try line in the 79th minute, and after that kept opting for the 5 metre scrum whenever they got a penalty in an attempt to score a try, while Wales, desperately trying to prevent France from scoring, kept conceding penalties, most of which were during the scrum, resulting in repeated reset scrums. The scrum was reset so many times that one Welsh prop that got yellow carded early on in added time and suspended for 10 minutes as a result was able to come back and continue. Finally, at 99:55, 19 minutes and 55 seconds into added time, France finally scored a try, drawing level. The clock was stopped there for the conversion attempt, which was not usually done. France converted the try and won 20-18.
