Rename?: Dont Explain The Joke

The trope keeps getting confused for giving context about the setup, which is actually okay for a joke, so people can understand some parts.

I'll look for misuse in a little bit. I just needed to get this thread up before an opening closed.

Don't Explain the Joke found in: 1602 articles.

Anyone want to guess how many of those have to do with the use of the trope in the work and how many are sinkholes for people that need to point out their own jokes?

...or sinkholed because actually the joke makes no sense unless you've read/watched a specific work.

Could you give some bad examples? Outside the wiki, I've always heard "don't explain the joke" to mean "don't explain the punchline."

Well I have to finishing cleaning up the "genre launch" wicks. Then I'll get to looking at the wicks here.

But if someone is willing to look for the wicks on this trope, I would be grateful.

Okay, to start, I'm looking at the 23 wicks on the trope's redirects:

• But You Screw One Goat: Misused for giving context.
• Sue Donym: Is explaining the punchline, but is not in-universe.
• Bad Teacher: It's a caption, and isn't actually a misuse, but it's really awkward. I would count that as a pass, but am still fixing it to flow better.
• Cabin Fever: Is explaining the punchline, but is not in-universe.
• Codename Kids Next Door: Is explaining the punchline, but is not in-universe.
• Decap Attack: Is explaining the punchline, but is not in-universe.
• Drake: Correct
• Trivia.Exalted: Seems to be WMG in the guise of explaining.
• Frisky Dingo: Correct
• Go Get a Roomie!: Is explaining the punchline, but is not in-universe.
• Hollywood Density: Not in-universe
• Film.House OF The Dead: Correct, I guess
• It Runs in the Family: It's not any kind of explaining. Total misuse.
• Characters.Kung Fu Panda: Is not even explaining a joke in the movie.
• Funny.Naruto The Abridged Comedy Fandub Spoof Series Show: Correct
• Main.Naruto The Abridged Comedy Fandub Spoof Series Show: One use is correct, but the other is explaining the context.
• Fanfic.Paths Of Our Fathers: Not in-universe
• Staff of Authority: That's not a joke. That's etymology.
• Suicide as Comedy: Misuses it for giving context.
• The Ant Bully: Correct, I guess
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: Misused for Fridge Brilliance, and it was even a personal comment entry (which means I deleted it, but still counting it as misuse).
• LampshadeHanging.Western Animation: Still not correct, since that's more questioning the joke than explaining it.
• Characters.Whose Line Isit Anyway: That's Stealth Pun, not this trope.

Now this is just the redirect wicks. More extensive wick checks will come later.

edited 18th Dec '11 7:59:22 PM by DragonQuestZ

How would Dont Explain The Punchline not have the same potential for misuse and abuse as Don't Explain the Joke already has? To me, I would be inclined to think that both names would lead to the same kind of problems.

edited 19th Dec '11 7:49:08 AM by SeanMurrayI

I'd think it would at least cut down the misuse in that it would only deal with explaining the punchline rather than the set-up. Other problems, like it not being used in-universe, would obviously still apply.

I just killed the Staff of Authority one. Aside from being misuse, not everyone that uses fasces as a symbol are fascist.

I suspect that this trope needs cleanup on the same level as Understatement.

edited 19th Dec '11 9:30:24 AM by Auxdarastrix

I see what you mean. A name should help make it clear that it's strictly in-universe.

How about Bob Explains The Punchline?

I like it.

edited 21st Dec '11 10:08:03 PM by Firebert

Bump.

Despite the first paragraph of the description, most of the examples don't really seem to be about punchlines per se.

edited 24th Dec '11 6:02:21 PM by Prfnoff

Yeah, this is going to need a lot of cleanup.

I would like to point out that the use of potholes for things other than in-universe examples really shouldn't be viewed as a strike against a trope name. When someone who, for instance, uses the word fanservice four times in a work's description decides to pothole to Department of Redundancy Department on the second one, Rule of Three on the third, and Overly Long Gag on the fourth, it does not mean that any of those tropes need a rename to discourage improper usage. It may mean that editing guidelines need to discourage overuse of allegedly witty potholes, but that's a rather separate issue.

As such, it seems to me that the practice of potholing to Don't Explain the Joke in order to point out an unnecessary explanation isn't really relevant to a discussion about the name's clarity.

Ontopic now, I think that misunderstanding the distinction between explaining a joke's setup and explaining why it's funny doesn't really become more clear upon renaming. Changing to Bob Explains The Punchline might discourage its use for meta-examples, but that's kind of separate from the issue described in the OP.

"I would like to point out that the use of potholes for things other than in-universe examples really shouldn't be viewed as a strike against a trope name."

If something isn't In-Universe, then it's Not An Example, which is a bad thing.

"As such, it seems to me that the practice of potholing to Don't Explain the Joke in order to point out an unnecessary explanation isn't really relevant to a discussion about the name's clarity."

If the explanation is unnecessary, then it's misuse, which is relevant to a name's clarity. And again, a lot of these potholes are for things that aren't the punchline, so it's double misuse.

From the description: 2. Explaining the joke with no prompting. This may be done as an attempt at Postmodernism, but it's usually done with jokes that wouldn't need any explaining.

This trope is about "unnecessary explanations", and their common use as a gag. pointing that out is only misuse if it's presented as something it's not. If a troper-created gag is presented as originating in a work, it's misuse. If it's presented as a troper-created gag, it's not.

Not An Example is only a bad thing when it's presented as an example. The potholed Running Gag that opens every Final Fantasy article is Not An Example of a running gag because it's not from any work, but it's not a bad thing because of that because it's not an instance of Square Peg Round Trope, which As You Know is the real target of that redirect.

I object to the rename. "Don't explain the joke" means not to ruin a joke by telling its good parts, it doesn't mean explaining that one word that nobody heard of. We aim for the common meaning of a term, not for the technically-correct-but-nobody-uses-it-that-way meaning.

If nobody uses it that way, then your argument is invalid, since you cannot stop misuse that way. This wiki is about telling people about tropes, and information they misunderstand is against that mission.

If any rename is called for, it should be to something like Explaining The Joke. Please see Naming A Trope.

Again, the misuse is people thinking any part of the trope being explained. So a new name actually does need "punchline" in the name, not "joke". The latter goes against clarity, as it makes a trope seem broader than it is.

Plus the reason I like Bob Explains The Punchline is that is makes it unambiguous that it's a character doing this, thus helping curb further misuse by those that don't realize this is In-Universe.

And on that note, should I change my sig or not, as this trope is potholed within? I know this is a forum, and not a trope page. So would that count as a troper pothole or as a legitimate use?

Explaining The Punchline sounds good to me as well.

Well I'd still prefer some tweaking, but it could still work (as in if we don'g get loads of potholes after the rename cleanup).

I don't see why we need to have two different tropes for "killing the joke by explaining the punchline" and "killing the joke by explaining some part of the setup". And frankly, I think that will lead to more misuse, not less, since it will still be used as a troper in-joke, plus it will mean that any example has to be properly sorted to the correct side of a fairly fuzzy line.