Discussion Main / BrickJoke

I was just about to post about that.

This is still a problem on this page. The majority of examples in all the sections I looked at are callbacks or running gags, with a few Chekhov's Guns thrown in there even though page does specifically say that Chekhov's Gun is the dramatic version. (the Lord of War example under live-action films is a literal Chekhov's Gun!)

Uh, no. It's just a phrase. It's synonymous with "at first glance"

I just found out there's a whole Lord of Light page in TV Tropes, and they classify this only as Pun, but I think it's Brick Joke.

I vote that the above is NOT an example of a brick joke. I think intentional set-up is an important requirement, otherwise any callback would be a Brick Joke, which shouldn't be true given the definition.

Not really. "Brick Joke" is a pre-existing term. TV Tropes didn't come up with it.

More like a Chekovs Gun.

What do you mean?

It was showing up on pages as an index. It doesn't seem to be doing that any more, though.

If you wish to propose a title change, bring it to TRS. But I'm guessing that such a suggestion wouldn't fly, because we already have a lot of Chekhov titles, and adding more (especially one so similar to Chekhov's Gag) is likely to only cause confusion, especially when Brick Joke already makes sense and has a strongly established presence on the wiki.

A Brick Joke can be important to the plot or unimportant to the plot. The defining element of Brick Joke (what makes it a Brick Joke) is that it is funny when it reappears. If a Chekhov's Boomerang is funny each time it reappears, then the example is both a Chekhov's Boomerang and a Brick Joke. If it's not funny, then it's just a Chekhov's Boomerang and shouldn't be on this page.

Link to them on the article page. If you can't be bothered to do that, I'm reverting the changes, server be damned.

The trope has been re-defined. (See this TRS thread for the discussion.) The sub-pages no longer belong with this page, which is why there are no longer links to them on the article page.

edit: Disregard

From Real Life:

• Any time someone fails to come up with a retort to an insult, only to have L'esprit d'escalier later and tell the original insulter.
• Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson has been supporter of spinal injury research for decades and specifically continued funding the Miami Project for years after the rest of the NFL had decided to direct their charity donations elsewhere. In 2007, a technique developed by the Miami Project was used on Buffalo Bills player Kevin Everett after a critical neck injury and possibly saved his life.
• Christmas presents (most of the time).

There's no audience to show something and set up for a later payoff in these examples. (In the other two Real Life examples, there were.)

• In Total Drama Action,the running gag of Beth's boyfriend Brady qualifies. Everyone in the show and quite a few real people dismiss it is Beth making things off, but then in the final episode Brady actaully shows up, much to the shock of the audience.

Can a Running Gag really be one of these? After all, you're not counting on the audience to forget it.

More Continuity Nods:

• In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Haruhi mentions early one episode that they needed a mysterious transfer student. The plot continues, having no other mention of that wanted character. The next episode (which takes place significantly later), Haruhi mentions that she has found said transfer student.
  • The SoS Brigade Clubroom is full of Brick Jokes, due to the Anachronic Order of the episodes. Notable examples include the bamboo tree and the frog-head costume, both references to episodes that occurred chronologically during the first season but weren't actually shown until the second.
  • During one of Kyon and Haruhi's first conversations, she asks if they've met before, and Kyon replies that no, they haven't. Fast forward to the next season, and it turns out Haruhi had met Kyon before, but Kyon at that time hadn't, thanks to Time Travel.
• From Yu Yu Hakusho:
  • Don't forget about Yusuke's Spirit Egg introduced very early on and forgotten about until several story arcs later.
  • The joke about tickets returns when Kuwabara is going off to see a pop band in the middle of a world-saving mission, stating that Yusuke would've gone too if it was floor seats at the Tokyo Dome.
• In Psyren, Ageha is being pursued by two fake cops trying to grab his Psyren card before it activates to get the 500 million yen reward it entails. They appear again in Psyren much, much later and are dangerously close to killing Nemesis Q. One of these would be the giver of the huge reward herself.
• From Mahou Sensei Negima:
  • Chapter 1: Negi says "Our magic is not omnipotent... a little bit of courage is the real magic". Chapter 297: The keyword to leaving Cosmo Entelechia is "Audacia Paula" — "A little bit of courage".
• From Phineas And Ferb:
  • In one episode, Major Monogram tells Perry that Dr. Doofensmirtz is apparently giving him a vase for Christmas. Guess what Perry gets from Doofensmirtz at the end of the Christmas Special?
• On the first episode of Invader Zim, Tallest Purple mentions that they had banished Zim to the planet Foodcourtia; Zim off-handedly mentions that he "quit" that ("You quit being banished?!). More than a full season later, Zim's old boss from Foodcourtia captures him on Earth and drags him back.
  • Then there's Invader Skoodge and his mission to invade Planet Blorch, "home of the slaughtering rat-people", with the expectation he will die horribly, only to return later having successfully conquered the planet.
• In the Arthur episode about the blizzard, we discover at the end that this was the winter D.W. got her special snowball.
• From South Park:

  • The animals themselves are from a story Cartman wrote during a Christmas special.
  • And from the same episodes, Man Bear Pig, a fictional creature that Al Gore thought was real in a earlier episode.

  • Let's not forget the recent 200th episode, in which they bring back several characters and plotlines from earlier on in the show. Including Barbara Streisand, Tom Cruise (and the closet gag), Super Bestfriends, Muhammed not being allowed to be shown on TV and, to top it all off, gingers.
• From Family Guy:
  • In "To Love and Die in Dixie", the Griffin family moves down south, and Peter and Brian are acting out Dukes Of Hazzard. Peter encourages Brian to jump in through the window of the car, but then conveniently forgets to wind it down, knocking Brian out cold. Four years later, in "The Fat Guy Strangler" Brian hits Peter with a rock, claiming; "That's for rolling up the damn car window when I tried to jump into the General Lee."
  • The "Surfin' Bird" song:
    • The song also appears in "Big Man on Hippocampus", where Peter gets amnesia, and thinks that it's new.
    • And once again in 'April in Quahog', when Peter's trying to get out of jury duty. The best bit being that the preparatory "oh, haven't you heard?" is played almost completely deadpan so the song (THAT FUCKING SONG) comes out of nowhere. Mericfully, it's only played for a short time.
    • It comes up A-FUCKING-GAIN in 'Welcome Back Carter,' this time as a slow version Peter sings to 'set the mood' for Carter to apologize to his wife for his affair.
• From Futurama:

  • Said monster appears again "Beast With a Billion Backs" to bust the Professor and Wernstrom out of prison, saying that the Professor still had one wish left.

  • The Australian man shows up two seasons later in "A Pharaoh to Remember", apparently now working as a slave on an entirely different planet.
  • The 2010 revival features an astonishing 10-year brick joke: In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back," the crew waits at the end of a very long line to see the Central Bureaucracy, informed by a very old man in front of them that he is there waiting on his birth certificate. Ten years later, in "Lethal Inspection," the very same old man has finally reached the front window, now requesting his death certificate as he promptly falls over. The woman at the window then informs the collapsed (presumably dead) man that he had actually gone to the wrong building.

• A very short brick joke comes in Class Of 3000. When it's said that the cafeteria trays are made out of recycled trampolines, there's a cutaway to a kid being served green slop and it bouncing off the tray into the air. Cut back to the main kids and then it's said the gym's trampoline is made out of recycled cafeteria trays. Cue a cutaway with a kid trying to bounce on the trampoline and hurting himself on the hard surface, followed by the green slop from the previous cutaway landing on his face.
• Strange version happens in an episode of Rex the Runt when the eponymous character enters the house and tosses his umbrella off to the left, only to have it fly back into the scene from the right and hit him.

Too short; the Brick Joke relies on you forgetting the original joke. These are just, well, jokes.

• Frisky Dingo used this in its first season. Watley continually advises his supervillain boss, Killface, on establishing boundaries with his petty son; in the final episode, Killface's archnemesis blames his outlandish behaviour - which eventually dooms the planet - on not having had boundaries established by his parents as a child.
  • Which actually leads into another brick joke as Killface mentions the only reason the world wasn't destroyed due to melted couplings, something that was referenced several times in season 1.
  • It's brought up yet again at the end of Season 2, when Wendell declares that it's time for him and Antagone's baby to establish some boundaries.

These seem more like Running Gags.

• From Mahou Sensei Negima:
  • The most far reaching example yet: in Chapter 15 or so, a rumor goes around class 3-A that Negi is a prince. Some 240 odd chapter later it turns out yeah, he's a prince.
  • Gah, you people missed the most important one. When Negi asks Chao who she is, she replies that she is a Martian, and while fighting, her skin turns black with glowing lines. Many chapters later, Negi learns Dark Magic, which makes his skin turn black with glowing lines. And it turns out Mundus Magicus is Mars in an alternate dimension.
  • Remember Evangeline (pure mage, not magic knight) saying early on that over time the differences between magic knights and mages basically stopped mattering? She wasn't kidding.
• In the second episode of Godannar, minor character Hayashi is absorbed by a memetic beast, leaving Anna, the series' main heroine, to save her. Afterwards Hayashi's main role is as one-half of a Sickeningly Sweethearts Running Gag. Until the very last episode, where it turns out her contact with the memetic beast made her the key to the human race's survival.

These are straight examples of Chekhov's Gun.

About the Pokemon examples, how is the split ribbon a Continuity Nod (the fact that they win it, not that it was mentioned later)? It's a seemingly meaningless idea that used again over a year it was first mentioned. Now I'm not sure if it's a Brick Joke, but that doesn't sound like a Continuity Nod to me...

It's more a Reverse Funny Aneurysm than either.

Yeah, they've been interweaving the two. Not really the same thing:

• There was a series of Geico commercials where the slogan was "So easy a caveman could do it," then having a couple of (surprisingly civilized) cavemen getting pissed off about it. These suddenly stopped in favor of the Geico Gecko and "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance." The caveman thing was largely forgotten... Until a recent commercial for the Geico Glovebox App, which ended with "so easy a caveman could do it" cue the off camera spokesperson (presumably a caveman) leaving in a huff.
  • They also had another one which was lost on people who hadn't seen some of their older commercials. Back when the gecko was complaining about getting calls intended for Geico, one spot had him asking to get a name change. His choice? Komodo Dragon. In a much more recent commercial, When the gecko comes back to work after having a day off, someone remarks that the replacement wasn't doing a great job. Cue shot of a Komodo Dragon.

Also:

• Wrong on three parts. (1) The Gecko pre-dates the Caveman. (2) The Caveman has shown up fairly regularly. (3) It was a Bearded Dragon, not a Komodo.

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