Misused: Brick Joke

^ That's all good with episodes in mind. But what about standalone works? Can we Call-Back an event earlier in a film?

I'd say no, personally, because characters are expected to remember things that happened in the same film. It's not notable for someone to reference the beginning of their movie.

So would a joke in the same movie/episode that gets a follow-up joke later on still count as Brick Joke?

For example, there's an episode of The Fairly OddParents! where a messenger owl shows up and chases a mouse, which is depicted as the joke. But a later joke brings the owl back to eat a leprechaun. Is that a Brick Joke even if the first bit wasn't necessarily left hanging?

I'd personally say yes, but I don't know if others would agree.

It's case-by-case. The intent of Brick Joke is for it to be something the audience has completely forgotten about, so a throwaway scene from the beginning of a cartoon episode may or may not qualify. It really depends on how exactly the joke is delivered.

mewtron's example is a callback, because the original joke worked as a full joke.

This is a brick joke: Early in an episode of 8 Simple Rules, Jim sends CJ to Canada to get him some acetylsalicylic acid, which he needs for old man problems. Then the rest of the episode happens, and the very last gag is CJ calling Jim from Canada to complain that acetylsalicylic acid is just aspirin.

This demonstrates the structure of setup, followed by other stuff, and the punchline only coming later.

Then I guess the obvious question here is:

Is that distinction meaningful enough? Even if we can pinpoint the difference on paper, is it enough of a difference to warrant a separate trope?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here. We gotta address the elephant in the room and make sure we're all on the same page here.

I think you can recognize when a setup leaves you hanging, and the punchline comes later. Especially when the initial setup has an obvious punchline that isn't immediately fulfilled.

Maybe the "in-work call back" concept could be something distinct, if people think Call-Back should be reserved for serial works?

Edited by mightymewtron on May 1st 2021 at 10:59:17 AM

I think we just need to standardize the definition. No name change necessary. Humor is subjective, but the actual concept of a brick joke can be narrowed down. Personally, I would say that a humorous event happening a few episodes or issues ago getting another look would qualify. And for a film, maybe an hour difference? Depending on length of course. Just long enough that it's out of the audiences head.

Problem is, I'm not sure the actual trope description or definition is the issue here. The issue is the misuse and the fact that we have so many goddamn Continuity Tropes that all mean very similar things, so people get confused.

I'm also not sure a name change will really help, but I also don't think it's just "standardizing the definition". Stronger measures have to be taken. People don't read trope descriptions (this is an objectively provable fact, and I'm more than happy to share the mountains of evidence if I must), so something else has to be done.

I think the definition is pretty straightforward. It's not a matter of time between the start and the end of a joke, it's about additional jokes happening between the setup and the punchline.

Here's an example from the trope page:

Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to your house.

What's green, sticky, and travels at 200 kph? A snot in a Ferrari.

Knock knock.
Who's there?
The chicken.

Not a major delay, but the snot joke is what turns the chicken joke into a brick joke.

As for what is to be done to the trope, one option is to do what we did with Getting Crap Past the Radar and make it temporarily on-page examples only. The issue there is that there are 12,631 wicks, so we'd need dedicated volunteers to clean them all up.

I highly doubt we'd be giving the same level of overhaul that we gave GCPTR (i.e. we don't need any outside sources to confirm these as examples), so I'd rather not remove every single instance of the trope when we'd likely add many examples back anyway.

Mm, true. I imagine most of the examples will be replaced by Callback or Continuity Nod, so there would be little risk of bad examples being re-added.

That said, we probably would want to take a careful, systematic approach to cleanup.

Yeah, GCPTR was a special case.

If anything, we might just need a designated cleanup effort, but not to the same extent.

If discussion is leaning toward standardizing definition as "joke's punchline is delivered after a not-humorous-by-itself setup has long passed or should've been forgotten" and cleaning misuse, I'm all for it.

I want to point out, politely, that that evidence includes yourself. Maybe it's time for a page action crowner.

I'm not saying it doesn't. It's a wiki-wide epidemic and we've all done it before. It's exactly why I don't think just editing the description will fix the problem. Because almost nobody will actually bother to read it.

Yeah. I don't always read, either...

Hm. With Brick Joke though. The name barely indicates what the trope should be, so I assume editors using it have to have read the description at least once. (Not like, say, Reality Ensues, where one could read the trope and guess what it's about.) So maybe the description wasn't strong enough on the "setup is not joke" from the beginning but can still be remedied with cleanup, a fat bold note on the article stating what Brick Joke isn't, and notifiers.

The Delayed Punchline rename could still work with this definition.

If it was a much smaller, less established trope I’d support a rename but I don’t think it’s worth doing that in this case. I think at most we can rewrite the description and try to clean up any misuse we encounter.

Edited by MacronNotes on May 3rd 2021 at 6:01:00 AM

There are over 145,000 inbounds. That's a lot of external recognition, so a rename is going to need a strong case.

Yeah, a rename would help but isn't viable with this many inbounds and wicks.

Bumping. I agree with Macron; I am thinking we can just add Delayed Punchline as a redirect and rewrite the description.

I'm just unconvinced a description rewrite will do anything, since it's been consistently proven that tropers don't read the descriptions. For decay, it won't help on it's own unless it's a rewrite to match the decay, in which case it's not about preventing further issues but conforming to make those issues legal.

Basically, it boils down to what we want to accomplish. If it's about getting tropers to stop the misuse, a rewrite alone won't help at all.

Where would this example go?

• The latest episode of "Inside No. 9" plays out in a hotel room where a side character mentions the Little Known Fact that half of the kettles in hotel rooms are used for peeing in. The main character is disgusted. Later, the toilet room gets blocked for some reason and the main character notes they shouldn't worry since they can still pee in the kettle.

Before this TRS I would have gladly filed this off under Brick Joke but that's not working anymore with the new definition since the first event was self-contained. So where do examples of "joke built on an earlier joke" go now? Chekhov's Gag seems unfitting since there is no plot relevance in the second occurrence either.

Edited by eroock on May 25th 2021 at 4:46:19 AM

That might just barely count as a Call-Back, since it's making the original joke relevant again.