Misused: Brick Joke

Delayed Punchline sounds like a good name. I think it sounds different enough from Late to the Punchline (which is about a character being late to understand a non-delayed punchline) to avoid confusion, and it's certainly more indicative than the current name.

^^ Quite a task there to go through all the examples of Brick Joke and try to decide if the earlier scene was just a setup or already a completed joke. But so be it.

I also think Delayed Punchline works much better.

Keep in mind that Brick Joke has 12456 wicks and 146,021 inbounds. That alone should give renamers pause.

There was debate earlier about whether it’s an established term or not. I heard about the term in real life before I ever joined tv tropes; there is also an episode of BoJack Horseman using the word and concept that post dates me hearing about it. Even if we originally made it up, the idea has purchase outside the wiki.

The real issue is the ambiguity of whether those joke call back examples count. Whether a one-off reference that gets a call back later is funny enough to stand on its own is somewhat subjective. I’ll post some examples of what I mean in a little while.

Expand Brick Joke to include Call Back Jokes and make Delayed Punchline a subtrope? Or would it be a related trope but not a subtrope?

The episode of BoJack in question does not use the term Brick Joke, I believe, though it's a good example of what counts as such a joke. I did find at least one interview where the term "brick joke" came up. So it does have off-wiki usage, and should at the very least be a redirect.

What would be the point of Delayed Punchline being distinct from an expanded Brick Joke?

Edited by mightymewtron on Mar 17th 2021 at 8:28:42 AM

I don’t know if “brick joke” as a term has a strong off wiki foothold but I had heard the joke about the brick before.

As mentioned earlier in this thread: no, it does not. The standard term for this is "the plant", not "brick joke".

(edit) The criterium for this should not be "I think I once heard it mentioned somewhere", but how many google hits it gets (not a whole lot, and the first hits are all tvtropes-related).

Edited by Spark9 on Mar 18th 2021 at 9:40:54 AM

Nevertheless, the term has over 100,000 inbounds, a very large number. Whether or not we invented the term, it has wide purchase off-wiki. Tv Tropes usually ranks highly in google searches for trope names, the question is whether there are other pages that also use the term, which there are.

I think the easiest thing to do would be to keep the name and expand the definition, due to how many wicks there are.

FWIW: when checking on internet usage, Duck Duck Go searches for "Brick Joke" etymology and origin are >75% TVT or those weird clone sites... DDG doesn't shape your results based on previous searches or browser history, so possibly a little better at getting an unbiased overview of internet content...

In that case, we may very well have invented the term, so renaming probably wouldn't be off the table. That said, we'd still have a five-digit wick count to deal with if we renamed this.

Edit: Also, even if The Plant would be the preexisting term for this, I don't think it's as clear as Delayed Punchline.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Mar 18th 2021 at 2:11:59 PM

From this extremely old YKTTW describing Brick Joke as What Happened to the Mouse? subverted, the "Brick Joke" name is a thing TV Tropes, but there's familiarity with the "brick joke" source itself.

A problem with "The Plant" is that it's too vague, and has different meanings. In live performance, for example, it refers to a member of the cast who pretends to be a member of the audience, in order to be an "audience member" who gets called on stage.

Also you just know some people will use that term to refer to photosynthetic multicellular organisms.

I think that Brick Joke is discrete from Callback, or at most is a subtrope. My understanding is that the difference between a brick joke and a funny callback is in structure.

Funny callback:

1. Setup
2. Punchline
3. Other stuff
4. Additional joke that builds on the previous joke

Brick joke:

1. Setup
2. Other stuff
3. Punchline

Part of the issue seems to be that tropers aren't aware that Callback exists, so they use the closest thing they're aware of, which is Brick Joke (despite Callback being a much older trope). Renaming it to Delayed Punchline probably won't completely eliminate the misuse, but I imagine it would help; I'm not a fan of the rename, but I can see how it's warranted.

So, in other words:

• Callback: Bob makes a joke in episode 1. In episode 5, he brings that same joke up again, and Alice adds a new punchline.

• Brick Joke: Bob loses his keys in episode 1. In episode 5, Alice suddenly sits on them, which is the punchline.

^ Your first point sounds close to Chekhov's Gag.

That does sound close, with the possible difference that Bob tells the first joke so that he can add an additional punchline himself. Is that a distinction worth making?

Chekhov's Gag only counts if the gag comes back as something plot relevant, not just a joke.

I don't want to make the thread's scope excessively broad, but I do think that we may need to address a few of the other Call-Back/Continuity Nod-based tropes, given how many people are confused about what exactly distinguishes one from the other.

Giving this another bump.

IIRC, this is I think what we're looking at:

• Left Hanging: A show ends without resolving some of the plot threads.
  • Cut Short: A show is forced to end before it can resolve the main plot
  • No Ending: The plot is intentionally left unresolved.
  • Cliffhanger: The story temporarily ends at a tense moment that gets resolved later
  • Bolivian Army Ending: The story permanently ends at a tense moment with an unclear outcome
• What Happened to the Mouse?: A minor plot point is forgotten about with no explanation.
  • Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: A major character disappears with no explanation
    • Absent Animal Companion: A character's pet disappears with no explanation
  • Put on a Bus: A character is written out with an explanation
  • Absentee Actor: A character isn't around for no real reason
    • Written-In Infirmity: A character isn't around, but there is a reason for it
• Brick Joke: A joke is set up but doesn't get a punchline until much later, presumably after the viewer forgets about it
• Continuity Nod: Described as a subtrope of Shout-Out where the work references itself
  • Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: A continuity nod involving a character's best accomplishment
  • Once Done, Never Forgotten: A continuity nod involving a character's worst accomplishment
    • Never Live It Down: The above trope, but applied to how characters are seen out-of-universe.
  • Chekhov's Gun: A random object is shown early on, but becomes relevant to the plot later
    • Chekhov's Gag: A joke from earlier that becomes important to the plot later on
    • Chekhov's Boomerang: A Chekhov's Gun that is used more than once
  • Call-Back: A Continuity Nod that also becomes important to the plot
  • Something We Forgot: A character realizes they forgot something or someone at the end of a plotline
  • Running Gag: A joke that is repeated several times
    • Overused Running Gag: A joke that is repeated so often that the characters acknowledge the repetition in-universe.
    • Didn't We Use This Joke Already?: A character points out that a joke was already made via the fourth wall. Does not have to be a running gag.
• Meaningful Echo: A line is repeated, but with a different meaning the second time
  • Ironic Echo: Same as above, mixed with Irony
  • Gag Echo: A line is repeated as a joke

Tying it back to the thread, the main problem is people keep confusing Brick Joke with Continuity Nod and Call-Back. Based on the above, a Continuity Nod is when a work does a Shout-Out to itself, a Call-Back is a Continuity Nod mixed with Chekhov's Gun, and Brick Joke is something else entirely. The TLP draft a few posts above implies Brick Joke was an offshoot of What Happened to the Mouse?, being an event that was seemingly forgotten about only to get some kind of payoff later, which isn't exactly the same as the current definition (WHTTM involves plot elements, not jokes), so I'd assume Trope Decay is also in play here. Some of the replies on the TLP draft express concern that it's too similar to Chekhov's Gun, but the OP of the draft said the latter is something that is expected to become important later, though she also admitted the tropes are related. Left Hanging, Meaningful Echo and all of their related tropes don't seem have too much to do with the topic at hand.

So in theory, Brick Joke and Call-Back are seperate tropes, the former was originally a subtrope of What Happened to the Mouse? and the latter is a subtrope of Continuity Nod. I think we just need to do something about the way these tropes overlap.

A correctly used Brick Joke shouldn't overlap with Continuity Nod. Continuity Nods are given in different installments and aren't really a completion of something seemingly left hanging from earlier. I think.

The misuse (joke is reused or given attention again) is a kind of Continuity Nod.

The requirements for having a split Brick Joke trope is the former isn't funny and becomes funny and the latter is funny and is funny again. I don't know how easy it is to distinguish those two in practice.

I think I see what's happening. To put it in simple terms:

• Brick Jokes tend to involve something being set up at the beginning of an episode that gets a punchline at the end of an episode
• Continuity Nod is for part of an episode where a reference is made to something from an earlier, different episode.
• Call-Back is a Continuity Nod where the reference also becomes a plot point n the later epsode
• A Chekhov's Gun (and all of the subtropes) is something that is brought up early in the episode and becomes important to the plot at the end of that same episode. By extension, a Chekhov's Gag is a Brick Joke where the punchline becomes important to the plot in the same episode it's established in.

This might be the clearest way I can define these. I don't really know how to fix the misuse problem other than making these distinctions clearer.