Running Gag / Literature

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• In 1066 and All That, most English rulers who were not murdered are said to have died of surfeits of various things.
• In the 1632 series, James Nichols often compares 17th-century European nobles to 20th-century Chicago gang leaders. The comparison usually ends up in the favor of the gang leaders.
  • In 1636: The Saxon Uprising, several chapters summarize the reaction to the latest events in various royal courts (and in two German taverns). Each one ends the same way:
    Madrid, capital of Spain.
    There would be no reaction to [latest event] in the court of Spain.
    They had no radio. They wouldn't receive the news for days yet.
• In the Dale Brown novel Act of War, people keep calling Sergeant Major Ray Jefferson a Sergeant. The man's reaction is understandably Dude, Not Funny!.
• The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi: Amina gets the villain Falco Palamenestra's last name wrong every time she tries to say it, even though no one else struggles with it. She only gets it right immediately before she kills him.
• Lenk mocks Kataria's flatulent tendencies every few chapters in the Aeon's Gate series.
• Animorphs:
  • Initially, Ax was dead serious and Jake was truly embarrassed, but over time, even they consider their "Don't call me 'prince'." / "Yes, Prince Jake," routine to be a running joke. Variations include "Have I mentioned don't call me 'prince'?" / "Yes, Prince Jake, you have." and "The Jake formerly known as 'prince'." Jake eventually lampshades it as a running gag between them. He also specifically notes that if he doesn't say "Don't call me prince", it's a sign of how serious the situation is.
  • Rachel always starts off the mission by saying "Let's do it." In one book it's lampshaded when she begins with "Let's...". Marco makes a bet with Jake that she will say her line, only for Rachel to finish with "... go for it."
  • Marco of the same series has a tendency to question the sanity of the group at least once a book, if not more; most commonly in reference to the completely whacked-out plans the group comes up with. "Are you insane?!" and "This is insane!" are practically his Catch Phrases.
  • Also, "we have X number of your minutes remaining." / "They're everyone's minutes!" and variations thereof, which is Ax's Running Gag with Marco.
  • #17, The Underground, has two. The first one is the "nuts" conversation outside of the lunatic asylum, and demonstrates the fickle nature of the Running Gag when Jake attempts to cash in on the joke after the funny has worn off. And then there's instant maple and ginger flavored oatmeal...
  • In three different books, including the first, Marco's bad driving is played for laughs, culminating in him driving wildly in a tank.
  • Ax really likes cinnamon buns.
  • Ax also likes stretching out and repeating parts of words, especially cinnamon buns. Cinnnnamon buns. Buns. Bunzah.
• Dave Barry examples:
  • Dave Barry Slept Here includes several running gags. For convenience of memorization, all major events in American history occur on October 8, his son's birthday (Most notably, he dates the attack on Pearl Harbor to "The fateful December morning of October 8."). To satisfy the demands of education professors, there are periodic allusions to the contributions of women and minorities, none of which get specifically mentioned. The later chapters have the Inherently Funny Words "The Hawley-Smoot Tariff," and at several points the end of Richard Nixon's political career is widely predicted.
  • In any Internet chat described in Dave Barry in Cyberspace, someone with the handle of "Wazootyman" is likely to pop up and ask, "Anybody here from Texas?"
  • For that matter, through Barry's entire oeuvre, there are at least two long-time recurring gags: references to booger jokes, and insisting that a certain phrase would be "A Good Name for a Rock Band." The latter of these gags has been catalogued.
• Black Legion has three:
  • In the first half of the novel, people keep on remarking that they thought Khayon died at Drol Kheir. By the third time, he lampshades it.
  • Lheor keeps on being called by his Embarrassing Nickname, Firefist, and always answers "Don't call me Firefist", growing more annoyed with every time it happens. Becomes somewhat less funny once you learn where does the nickname come from and why he doesn't like it.
  • Lheor calling Khayon's psyker powers "magic". Khayon is annoyed every single time, but Lheor refuses to stop.
• Blowing Up the Movies: One aspect of the "Setup and Callback" that the Hot Fuzz essay discusses.
• Way back in the Book of Genesis, Leah names a son, Gad, after joking that "a troop is coming". Not only does Jacob reference that phrase on his deathbed in blessing Gad, but Moses references it to Gad's descendants in the Book of Deuteronomy, which makes it Older Than Feudalism.
• The Cat Who... Series: In the early books, all of Qwill's editors misspell his name with a "q-u" instead of his actual "q-w". This occasionally resurfaces in later installments.
• The Circus of Doctor Lao: Throughout the novella, visitors to the circus argue with each other about whether a particular exhibit is a man, a bear or a Russian.
• City of Thieves has Kolya talking about how long its been since he had a shit.
• In Clementine and the Family Meeting, Clementine wishes to wear her father's new tool belt, but he insists that it's too valuable, variously because that it's an heirloom from the Ming Dynasty, that the president gave it to him at the White House for lifelong service to the country, etc., even though Clementine was there when he bought it at Hardware Depot. Later, after she keeps bugging him about it, he asks why she's so focused on the tool belt and she admits that she wants to build something. He takes her to Hardware Depot to buy her own tool belt, but her mother freaks when she sees her wearing the hefty tool belt. She then tries to borrow her father's excuse of it being an heirloom from the Ming Dynasty, but it doesn't cut any ice.
• In the Culture books, many ships have names with "Gravitas" in them, referring to the Culture's tendency to give (powerful) ships fairly lighthearted names. They can't even be serious with the "Gravitas" ships, generally giving them names that mention a lack of gravitas...
• The Dinosaur Lords: Whenever Rob, who seems to be gifted with perfect pitch, finds himself around musicians, they always prove to be terrible and just listening to them hurts his ears.
• Likewise, the Discworld series has plenty.
  • For example, reactions to CMOT Dibbler's sausages span both multiple books and multiple countries/incarnations of CMOT Dibbler.
  • Similarly, we find multiple versions of Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs elsewhere in the Discworld. These repetitions are pegged in the canon as "morphic resonance."
  • Or Moist keeping stealing Drumknott's pencils, and only Vetinari noticing. Even the time Drumknott was very careful to put it back in his pocket.
  • Or Granny Weatherwax's broom, which needs a large running start in order to get it to fly.
  • Each book has its own, personal running gag. Feet of Clay features a vampire who complains to the watch every time something goes wrong at his new job. His jobs? Holy water bottler, garlic stacker, pencil maker, picket fence builder, and sunglasses tester.
  • Across the later books, "It is a pune, or play on words."
  • "Oh no, it's Mrs. Cake!"
    • The two Ridcully brothers have an amusing exchange. Mustrum asks who Mrs. Cake is. The other brother, a high-priest, asks Mustrum, the head wizard, if they have evil eldritch abominations from the Dungeon Dimensions. You do? We have Mrs. Cake.
    • You mean evil oblong abominations, right?
  • In Soul Music, we have the people constantly asking if the main character is elvish (which a double pun—the book, being about rock music and rock icons while, at the same time, the character comes from an environment consistent with myths of elves).
  • Also the insistence that scumble is made from apples. Well... mainly apples.
  • Most books involving witches will mention the old idea of them dancing around in the woods at night with no clothes on, and how impractical it would be due to nettles, stones, hedgehogs, the cold, etc.
    • With the caveat "Well, maybe Nanny Ogg" added if anyone who's met her is present.
  • In Small Gods, everybody says that "there's good eating on one of them" to tortoises.
  • Mort repeating his name whenever people call him "boy". That happens often.
• Dive (2003): Each book has a lot least one scene where English calls the protagonists "American teenagers" and Kaz interjects that he is Canadian.
• In Dora Wilk Series, every time Dora enters a basement, there's something bad and evil inside it, and every time this happens she lampshades the fact that she wishes it was just a pantry this time.
• Jack says some Earth slang, Draycos says pardon? Jack's response? Skip it. Jack eventually makes Draycos memorize a dictonary in order to stop this gag.
• The Enchantment Emporium has Allie meet a reporter for an intentionally-trashy tabloid.^note It's basically a cover for the activities of both reporter and owner Several different discussions involve whether Allie is saving him because of this, or the fact that he's a hitman for a sorcerer.
• There are various over the course of the Fairy Oak series:
  • Oak being cut off or misunderstood because it speaks too slowly.
  • Cherry being unwillingly transformed into an animal. Bonus points if it's one that "slithers along and says nothing".
  • Meum Spignel's bad hearing.
  • People being scared of Dr. Chesnut Pestemon's special ointment.
  • Billie Ballatel's trumpet playing.
  • Every time the members of the Band start a storm of questions, it always ends with someone asking a completely unrealated one. More often than not, it's little Sophie Comically Missing the Point.
• In the Far Fetched Fiction of Robert Rankin, it is a running gag that there are so many running gags. This fact is blatantly lampshaded by sentences like "I hope that isn't going to be a running gag, it's crap."
  • Some of his books even have "editor" footnotes giving him advice on these. The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code, for example, has "editor's notes" telling him to stop it with running gags about policeman names, or that he's peaked way too early on the "police with sci-fi weapons" joke by giving one a doomsday weapon.
• The Fault in Our Stars:
  • The books based on Gus's favorite video game. Count how many times "Max Mayhem" is brought up after Hazel reads them.
  • America's Next Top Model.
• In Garrett, P.I. novel Whispering Nickel Idols, everybody and their dog just happens to abandon a stolen cart, wagon or carriage in front of Garrett's house.
• In Michael Grant's Gone series, when Caine meets Duck in Hunger he takes to calling him Goose.
• In Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens, it is mentioned early on that any cassette left in a car for more than a fortnight magically transforms into The Best of Queen. Throughout the book we are treated to Bach (with vocals by Freddy Mercury), Tchaikovsky's "Another One Bites the Dust", and so on. Later in the book, one character manages to trap a demon on a cassette tape, and considers leaving the tape in his car, but concludes that that would be too cruel.
  • Terry Pratchett explained this as being inspired by situations where you've listened to all the tapes in your car and decide to buy some different music at the next services; inevitably the only thing they sell that's at all worth listening to is a Best of Queen album. Apparently, Neil Gaiman preferred the theory that tapes left in cars really did metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.
• In Matthew Reilly's The Great Zoo of China: Every time the Chinese unveil something spectacular about the park—the architecture, bullet trains bringing people in, the menu—they then spoil the effect by revealing it to be have been designed/created by a foreigner originally. Even the bombs that annihilate the park at the end turn out to have been bought from the Russians.
• Harry Potter:
  • If Professor McGonagall walks into a scene carrying books, expect her to drop those books in shock or horror at some point.
  • Several times in the first book, Hagrid gives Harry, Ron, and Hermione important information, then pauses, and then says "I probably shouldn't have told you that." This joke is also used in the movie version.
  • And then there's the fact that no one in the main cast likes Divination, not even Dumbledore.
  • Professor Trelawney never seems to predict anyone else's death but Harry's. Completely averted with an actual prediction said to Harry about Dumbledore, not about Harry.
  • Harry: "And Snape..." Other person: "Professor Snape..."
  • "I read it in Hogwarts: A History."
  • Ron's fear of spiders crops up on occasion, notably during the second and third books.
  • Hermione answering teacher questions with a lightning fast-hand in the air and a response "like she had swallowed the textbook."
  • Hagrid's inedible cooking.
  • Dawlish is a running gag character. Every time he shows up or is mentioned, it is so he can get confunded, often with someone remarking on how often or how easily it happens to him. Neville’s grandma even puts him in the hospital.
  • Harry having dreams that are just plain bizarre, played as a contrast to his plot-relevant dreams.
  • Christmas sweaters from Mrs. Weasley.
  • Something messing with Harry either while playing Quidditch or preventing him from being able to do so; averted in the final book/final two films, since war leaves no time for such things, but just in case, the Death Eaters burned down the field and the giants took the rings as bludgeons.
  • Every time Aberforth Dumbledore gets mentioned, expect a nod to his proclivity for goats.
• He Who Fights With Monsters:
  • After the recording of Jason going full Terror Hero in a simulation gets around, people tend to greet him with "aren't you that guy with the evil powers?"
  • The fact that when they first met, Jason accused himself of sleeping with Clive's non-existent wife, and later accused Clive of sleeping with Jason's non-existent wife, gets brought up a lot.
  • Clive keeps complaining about how Jason killed Landemere Vane, the best astral magic specialist in the region. Jason keeps retorting that the guy was a cannibal who was planning to eat him.
• Helen and Troy's Epic Road Quest: Troy summons an elemental spirit with his magic sword, only for the once-a-day request to go unfulfilled, either because Troy had no intention on using the spirit for anything, or because the spirit refuses to do it for one reason or another.
• In The Hidden City, someone makes an exclamation such as "Dear god!" or "Good god!" in the presence of Aphrael, and she responds with a comment along the lines of "Thank you".
• Hollow Kingdom (2019): Whenever penguins are brought up, it's usually accompanied by a comment about their lack of intelligence.
• I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence!: Whenever anyone sees Goodnight, they immediately glance up to see if she's about to drop something on them. It's to the point that Goodnight identifies a new superhero by the fact that she's the only one in the crowd who doesn't do this.
• The Infernal Devices: "There's no such thing as demon pox, Will!". As it turns out, we find out in Clockwork Prince that Demon Pox IS a real disease, and Benedict Lightwood has had it for years and gave it to his wife, driving her to kill herself in shame. Will is so pleased about being right all along that he sings a song about it.
• Also in The Infernal Devices: Will Herondale hates ducks. This is turned into a running gag of sorts as not only does he hate ducks, but several of his Herondale descendants also dislike ducks in some form, turning hating ducks into a key character trait of the Herondale family.
• Kill time or die trying: Several, but most notable is Nathan giving people Ari's number instead of his own, which culminates when Nathan is in a potentially very messy situation after hooking up with a girl he shouldn't have. Nathan says to Brad the next day 'I think Ari is going to get some really awkward messages today'. Word of God: this really did happen, and Ari did indeed get an extremely personal message from a complete stranger.
• Knaves on Waves gives us Trigger's hatred of swearing, and the subsequent punishment. That's half-rations.
• The Last Knight uses the running gag of one of the main characters Fisk saying "Heroism is vastly overrated".
  • The character Fisk will often say "Obviously, only a complete idiot would say something at this point, so I wasn't surprised when Michael said..." or something extremely similar.
• Being heavy on the comedy side of things, Loyal Enemies has a few running gags:
  • In the first few chapters of the book, there are Rest's hapless and escalating attempts at saving his master from the "clutches" (actually care) of the "wild beast" (Shelena, a most civilized werewolf). He tries it with a sword, a crossbow, singing sorcerous incantatios beneath her window, ground pepper and five dead crows, among other things.
  • After master Veres tells him to quit the nonsense and move in, the next chapters often mention various pieces of kitchen utensils the two of them manage to break while Rest practises levitation.
  • Various races bestow their armies on the heroes as a gift for helping them and try to outdo each other in the size of those armies. The dryads give them a hundred archers. Upon hearing that, the elves give them two hundred elite fighters. And after hearing that, the dwarves give them their entire clan.
  • Veres' temporary Big Eater affliction drives Shelena mad. There's no piece of food he hasn't managed to gulp down before Shelena even thinks of having a snack, and Veres has the guts to ask for more.
  • Veres has an infuriating (to Shelena) habit of giving serious answers to her purposefully idiotic questions. She never learns to avoid either.
  • Shelena is very fond of claiming that of course she eats people, being an evil, evil werewolf. Everyone's eager to tell her to stop that already, we get it, but they still immediately look at her whenever someone goes missing or is found dead.
• In The Machineries of Empire:
  • Throughout the stories, we keep seeing futuristic emails sent from one of the heretic leaders to another, while the rest of the rebels are still figuring out the names for everything in their new calendar. The "date" field always has the former complaining about how ridiculous the names for the days of the week are getting.
  • The various unrealistic things that happen in Cheris' Troperiffic dramas.
• A Master of Djinn:
  • Haida's seemingly inexhaustible supply of cousins, all of whom work for an industry that proves to be important or know a piece of information that turns out to be crucial. She's even able to get Siwa to open up about his gambling addiction because she claims a cousin of hers suffers from the same affliction.
  • Ahmad has a habit of stalking out of the shadows whenever he wants to hold a conversation with Agent Fatma, not realizing his crocodilian features make his appearance more of a Jump Scare than a Stealth Hi/Bye. When he apologizes, he asks if he's being creepy and always gets an affirmative.
• In The Migax Cycle, Leafsong frequently talks while the teacher is talking, and the subsequent reprimandation becomes a running gag.
  • Also, Summer insisting she's not a hacker, even as she hacks increasingly complex systems, becomes a gag.
• Mind Games:
  • Whenever James does something that irritates Danielle or she thinks he's getting too full of himself, she socks him in the shoulder. He tries to duck but it's utterly useless; her Dexterity is so high that she always hits him, in the exact same spot every time.
  • The most common cause of this happening is James using a pop culture quote about something related to the System, such as when he responds to someone who says that something "is the strangest thing I've ever heard", by saying, "Imagine what you'll know tomorrow".
• Tomasz pulling off a Big Damn Heroes moment, in More Than This. It's so convenient and happens so often, Seth starts to suspect there is some sort of narrative intent.
• Nine Goblins: Any time the goblin sergeant has to give instructions to her squad, the last one is always some variation of "Gloober, don't stick your finger up your nose/in your ear".
• Old Scores: The vampire Salem has three different tee shirts ruined throughout the course of the novel (two clawed to shreds by Shafax, a third holed by a gunshot). In preparing for the final battle, he takes off a fourth shirt in part so as not to lose yet another.
• It's a Running Gag in the Origami Yoda books that Dwight likes to lie down in random places.
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Similar to a Swear Jar, Penny keeps two jars for her father: One that he puts a dollar in every time he calls her Pumpkin, and one that he puts five dollars in when he calls her Princess. Both are well funded.
• Over the course of President's Vampire, Cade chastises various people for taking Lord's name in vain, and those characters always react with exasperation.
• Leon van Dommelen's Quantum Mechanics for Engineers has a lot of snarking about how physicists love to give Non Indicative Names to everything, supposedly to make sure that the common folk can't understand them. There are also several snarky jokes about laws and formulas whose names credit someone else than the actual discoverer.
• The Rainbow Magic series has the goblins being terrified of pogwurzels, creatures goblin mothers warn naughty children about.
• In the Rangers Apprentice book the Sorcerer in the North and the Siege of Macindaw: "It's not a lute, it's a mandolin."
• Reaper (2016): Becomes a plot point. Hercules keeps needling Hawk about "cutting Jex's head off" in their sting operation. So when the Reaper has Jex hostage, threatening her with the deletion weapon unless Hawk surrenders to him, Jex shouts, "What Hercules said. Make it real!" Hawk decapitates her, killing her in the VR world of Game so she wakes up a few hours later in her house and leaving him free to deal with the Reaper.
• In The Riftwar Cycle novel Silverthorn, any time Prince Arutha asks Jimmy the Hand what reward he wants for his assistance, the answer is always "Name me Duke of Krondor" (roughly the fourth-highest noble in the kingdom). At the end of A Darkness at Sethanon, one sign that he's growing up is that the only reward he asks for is "a week of sleep" — at which point Arutha arranges for him to be trained for possibly being named to the position.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events:
  • The Lemony Narrator giving unnecessary and often extremely context-specific definition to words that are complicated, a word which here means "somewhat uncommon and likely to be given unnecessary and often extremely context-specific definitions by Lemony Snicket."
  • Characters attempt to define words to the Baudelaires in similar fashion, only to be cut off by Klaus saying he already knows what the words mean.
  • Sunny's baby-talk being translated, often in a similar fashion to the narrator defining real words. As the books go on, her dialogue starts to become more intelligible without it, but still often gets translated.
  • Lemony Snicket going off on bizarre tangents related to his past, and often somehow meandering back into the plot. Often involve pining for his lost love Beatrice.
  • Mr. Poe coughing, occasionally when someone is trying to tell him something important.
  • For a while, Count Olaf's ridiculous attempts at an Evil Laugh.
  • Lemony's insistence that the reader stop reading any further in the books.
  • After the society known as VFD is introduced to the plot, the sheer number of objects and concepts referred to with three-word names beginning with "V", "F", and "D", usually (but actually not always!) associated with the society, is staggering.
• Shaman Blues: Every time Witkacy enters or exits the hospital, he feels obliged to point out that the security is terrible.
• Charles Gordon's journal, kept during the Siege of Khartoum, mocks a British official who mistook an Arab leader named El Obeid with the Sudanese town of that name. Gordon sarcastically draws the distinction each time he mentions one or the other. The day the Sheik dies, Gordon notes "now we only have the City to deal with."
• In Skagboys, Renton and Sick Boy have a running gag referring to a laundromat called the 'Bendix', which is quite clearly a pun on the words 'bend' and 'dicks'. It also portrays their descent into apathy through the use of heroin, as toward the end they don't even bother to joke about it as they pass by it.
  • Truth in Television: One of the earliest brands of washing machine sold for home use was Bendix.
• Skulduggery Pleasant features the resident Action Girl Tanith Low getting hospitalised in progressively more impressive ways, all because the author's publishers wouldn't let him kill her off in the first book.
• Auley in Someone Else's War has a fear of lions and brings it up every time his regiment enters the savanna.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, ser Boros Blount's shtick involves him being the target of hypocritical insults.
  Boros Blount: You speak to me thus? You?
  • There's also the antics of Pyp and Grenn up on the wall, especially after Jon Snow starts promoting Grenn. "Me?" "Him?"
  • Shagga son of Dolf's favorite threat: "I'll chop off your manhood and feed it to the goats."
  • Hodor's limited vocabulary.
  • As of Book four, Jamie slapping people with his gold hand.
  • Gendry's constant befuddlement when people he meets for the first time bring various Baratheons they happen to know up (usually it's Robert, his unacknowledged and incognito dad... or, failing him, it'll be Renly, the uncle he doesn't know about who happens to look quite a lot like his dad). Or when he bumps into people who look a quite bit like he does, and who happen to have stories about how Robert slept with their mums, once. That penny just has to drop sometime, right? Right?
  • So, you're a Wandering Minstrel, eh, new character? Good luck; may your death be not as entertainingly gruesome, prolonged and/or ironic as the last one we met... (slim chance of that).
  • Dunk threatening to clout Egg on the ear. His bark is worse than his bite (when aimed at Egg).
• In The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, the lack of appropriate words — to his knowledge, anyway — to translate complex medical concepts from Demane's mother tongue into that of the northern lands is remarked upon a couple of times, with escalating proportions. It begins with him admitting that "good juju" is not a good way to express "panaceaic endosymbionts" and ends with Demane muttering entire sentences in his mother tongue when trying to make others understand the downsides of smoking random shit.
  Demane: "Qaïf poison, very dangerous. It's [an insult to the homeostasis of body and mind]. You understand me?"
• In many of Peter David's Star Trek novels he recycles the name of a low-level security duo. He notes in one novel that they and their predecessors had been a duo all the way back to the Enterprise-A. Later on they seem to transfer between Deep Space Nine and the Enterprise-D on a regular basis.
• In some Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels Chief O'Brien is noted as having more than a bit of a potty mouth as he deals with all the technical problems in getting the station up to spec. Kira once tells Dax that some of Chief O'Brien's swearing is prime stuff that she could not imagine in all of her lives, and that she should be at the station taking notes.
• In Star Wars: Kenobi, a Nikto woman, Erbaly Nap'tee, comes into Annileen's store every single day, but never remembers Annileen's name or position as shopkeeper. When Annie is imagining her future, she figures that someday when she can't run the store anymore, she'll end up in a senior center with Erbaly as her roommate, explaining to her every day that no, she doesn't work there.
• Stephanie Plum's car blows up. Repeat up to several times per book and lampshaded.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Rock being tired of the "airsick lowlanders".
  • Eastern Rosharans calling all birds chickens, because those are the only birds they are aware of.
  • Lift calling Wyndle "Voidbringer", and his annoyance at it.
  • In Words of Radiance, Pattern calling various figures of speech, like idioms and metaphors, "lies".
  • In Edgedancer, Wyndle asking Lift to die in some painless fashion (and if that's impossible, anything other than stabbing), and pondering what manner of her death would be the most comfortable - for him. Also from Edgedancer, Wyndle isn't supposed to tell Lfit about where Shardblades come from. Unfortunately he's really bad at keeping his mouth shut about it, which leads to him complaining a lot about how she's going to end up hitting people with him.
  • Starting in Words, after Shallan steals Kaladin's boots, boots come up between them a lot. When she finally gives them back he complains that they don't fit right any more, and he's afraid she's going to steal his boots again when they fall into the chasms together. In Oathbringer, the first thing Shallan notices after the final battle is that Kaladin somehow lost his boots, and Kaladin gives her a pair of boots as a present for her wedding with Adolin.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: Most of the stories open with a lizard observing or reacting to things near Magdelene's house in a humorous way. It turns out that she can see all that these lizards do.
• Tough Magic has Holois constantly hitting peoples nose with her tail.
• Lucifer killing non-Fellowship allies with the Magic Wand is a running gag in The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard.
• Ward: In one chapter, protagonist Victoria briefly mentions she doesn't eat eggs. The fans began speculating on this line having deep significance to her character, to which the author responded "Maybe she just doesn't like eggs?" From that point on, egg references began to appear in the narrative, usually in negative contexts, up to and including a character literally named "Egg" who is kind of a jerk.
• Warrior Cats: About half of the times Runningnose makes an appearance, one of the main characters has to remark that he can't be that great of a medicine cat because he can't cure his own cold.
• Career criminal John Dortmunder (a character from Donald E. Westlake's novels) often introduces himself as "John Diddums". Variations of this exchange then happen: "Diddums?" "It's Welsh."
• In Lord of Chaos, Nynaeve meets Theodrin. Theodrin is very interested in breaking Nynaeve's block, which would let her channel anytime she wants. She is also very inventive. Her attempts include, but are certainly not limited to: "shock treatment" (the book doesn't go into detail, but they end up punching each other a few times), exhaustion (stay awake as long as possible), the calming effect of responsibly-applied alcohol, irresponsibly-applied alcohol, and other unpleasant extremes. They never work, but it's still funny.
• The Short Story "Wikihistory" by Desmond Warzel:
  • It's presented as a forum for Time Police. The running gag throughout is people pointing out that the current conversation is off-topic.
  • Also, a sequence of noobies who triumphantly and smugly boast about going back in time and preventing Hitler's rise to power... followed by increasingly irate moderators undoing their actions and repeatedly telling people to knock it off with the stopping Hitler already.
• Zero Sight: Dieter's lack of knowledge about magical creatures and the truth behind myths causes him to be on the receiving end of various jokes. Crosses into Idiot Hero when he continues to refuse to study the subject despite various warnings of his friends and a previously friendly mage gets him to carry an Artifact of Death.
• Tracy Wallace's recurring craving for an ice cream sundae in Zeus Is Dead: A Monstrously Inconvenient Adventure. Eventually this manifests itself in an actual new sundae god.

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