Basic Trope: Characters share an idle, pointless conversation.
- Straight: Alice and Bob talk about socks.
- Exaggerated:
- The conversation becomes Serious Business, eventually becoming a "Cavemen vs. Astronauts" Debate.
- Alice and Bob are having a casual conversation during a huge shootout.
- Downplayed: The conversation ends after two sentences since it's so boring and pointless.
- Justified:
- Alice and Bob have nothing else to talk about, but wish to break the silence.
- Alice and Bob are rather bored with their normal duties, or just want to pass the time.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob have a serious conversation.
- Subverted:
- Alice and Bob start a seemingly pointless conversation but it quickly turns out to be important.
- Alice and Bob are actually using code words and double-meanings to have a rather pointed conversation.
- Double Subverted:
- Alice and Bob then start to Talk About the Weather.
- Alice and Bob, as it turns out, are being literal, or are using double meanings and idioms to have a Seinfeldian conversation.
- Accounting for the code words and double-meanings show that they're having two Seinfeldian Conversations at the same time. A conversation about how it's going to snow over the weekend is simultaneously a conversation about last week's baseball game.
- Parodied: Someone writes an entire PhD dissertation on the merits of different kinds of socks.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes Alice and Bob have serious conversations, other times silly ones, and every kind in between, or conversations that cross all of these lines regularly.
- Averted:
- Alice and Bob don't discuss stupid things.
- Alice and Bob don't speak to one another.
- Enforced: "We need these characters to be sympathetic, so we need to introduce a few humanizing elements here."
- Lampshaded: "Why are we talking about this?"
- Invoked:
- Alice is standing alone in a slow elevator with Bob.
- This is a characterization device for Alice and Bob's general outlook or their relationship.
- Exploited: Alice walks up to Charlie and starts a petty conversation, where she casually says something important or gets him to without being obvious.
- Defied:
- Bob ignores Alice when she starts going on about socks.
- Alice tells Bob to shut the hell up about the pointless conversations about the varieties of motorcycle fenders.
- Discussed: "This is usually the part where we listen in, but they're usually talking about how a pair of socks look like they're making love or something."
- Conversed: "Usually, they talk about nothing at this part to fill in extra film time."
- Implied: Alice says, "And that's why the colour of your socks is is so important". We don't see the rest of the conversation, but it's implied to be a long discussion about socks.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice and Bob have nothing to discuss, which can be awkward.
- Alice and Bob are pegged as being unproductive and blase.
- Reconstructed:
- Alice and Bob find stuff to discuss, and find that they have stuff in common.
- They realize Alice and Bob are calm and in control at all times, and peg them for as being cool and collected instead.
- Played For Laughs: Alice and Bob successfully use pointless conversations as distractions.
- Played For Drama:
- Alice and Bob are trying to avoid a serious issue, like the death of Charlie.
- While driving between towns in the peak of winter, Alice and Bob are involved in a traffic accident that leaves their car dead and Alice with a head concussion. Bob carries Alice on his back over the last few miles to town. But with her injury, if Alice sleeps, she will die. To stop this, Bob struggles to keep a conversation going. It doesn't matter that he doesn't really have anything to talk about. It's a matter of life or death. A life rides on this trope.
- Played For Horror: A man who pauses in the middle of torturing a man to converse about how awesome the soundtracks of Quentin Tarantino films tend to be can't be nothing more than a sociopath, and one with possibly a few more loose wires than usual.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Bob establishes what kind of a man he is by ordering Alice to get to the damn point already.
Back to Seinfeldian Conversation
"Do we really need Blue links to go back there?"
"Well, it's customary on this site."
