Originally published at: Look at this genius list of prohibited lazy "jokes" | Boing Boing
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Just look at it?
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Surprised not to see “That’s what she said” or “Whaaatsupppppp”, but those may be a bit too old for this list.
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So’s your Mom
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Christ. What a banana.
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A TV writer I know told me that there’s something they call a “joke-like substance”, which is basically filler that isn’t funny at all but which is close enough that they can slap a laugh track after it.
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It can get tricky in front of a studio audience. Something that sounds like a joke (or a lazy joke like these prohibited ones) may pass in the writer’s room but land poorly even with flashing prompts.
Fortunately, you don’t see this much anymore outside broadcast network sitcoms and the Disney/Nickelodeon style shows for teenagers (which I suspect recycle scripts from primetime 70s sitcoms).
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Which is what I assume that whiteboard was covered in, because I did not see any actual jokes there.
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One quick look at this list and I feel like someone downloaded the complete transcript archive of Big Bang Theory into my brain.
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The tweet says it looks “like a time capsule of the most annoying millennial humor from the early/mid 2010s.” It also looks like a time capsule of social media and other comment threads from early/mid this morning.
A few years ago John August and Craig Mazin created and read out a similar list of dialogue cliches on their Scriptnotes podcast. I gotta search for that transcript.
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half of those aren’t jokes but just slang/common sayings that I guess are dated now.
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It’s interesting to see what’s basically the last ten years of online culture laid out like that. Every cutesy little phrase that most of us have used in the last decade. I’ve certainly used the majority of those at some point for no other reason than I heard them somewhere and liked how they sounded at the time, then added them to my rotation (subconsciously for the most part).
The takeaway for me here is that culture is powerful, and we’re all less original than we think we are. 
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Because that’s timeless humor that never gets old.
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That’s the thing I’m a little baffled by; you’re right those aren’t jokes, they’re just little quips that say something ordinary in a more interesting way and nobody thinks they’re going to get a out-loud-laugh when they say them. To me it says something about the kind of writing sitcoms are stuck in; that they think of the only acceptable humor as having a punchline that you are able to laugh-track.
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Agreed. I think it’s fine for most of us regular humans to use these phrases on occasion. I do, and I’m not ashamed. They lighten the mood if used sparingly or ironically. But for professional writers to put them into characters’ mouths for the umpteenth time is tiresome and lazy. At the very least they should freshen them up, invert them, poke fun at them. Or maybe, being paid writer bucks, they should invent the next hot catchphrase that is tomorrow’s cliché.
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so, this is just a list of common phrases. it’s how people talk, meh.
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