The first time you say it, you’re my ally.
The 73rd time, you’ve become a scary person who desperately needs to leave the house more.
I guess I’m only a partial geek. Because I do sincerely believe that half an hour of throwing Blackadder quotes (as funny as they are) back and forth is not the same thing as having an actual conversation. And I cringe when I’m stuck among people who haven’t figured that out.
I must agree with Amarinth. I know all the citations and references. I like/d them. However, now I am in my 7th year of grad school and have been around college kids for a very very very long time. I have been on college campuses for SO so so long. . . I’m going to cry. . . ANYWAY, I have observed from experience in this environment, which has such turn-over, that people in this age group at any moment of time either a) think they have discovered a secret culture in Monty Python/ Groening/ Sci Fi-fantasy (including Illuminatus styled conspiracy theory and role playing games/ Douglas Adams OR b) think they are the first cool people to ever discover Bob Marley, Led Zepplin, and the Velvet Underground (Captain Beefheart, Beatles, whatever) OR c) think they are the first to ever discover beer and/or sex.
We’re talking about option A here. I’ve gotten to the point where when I hear “Ni” on campus my heart stops for a moment and I think, panicked, “Oh no! DRAMA MAJORS!”
And Simpsons? Come on, now. We’re all into Futurama now.
Sad anecdote: I saw perhaps Douglas Adam’s last public performance the month before he died (he lived here in town). He was talking about his book about endangered animals, Last Chance to See (great book) and conservation and evolution, etc. The opportunity arose for audience members to comeup and asks questions with the mike. The first person asked a question about some contemporary symbiosis or whole-habitat kind of evolutionary theory, or some-such. The second person to approach the mike was a young woman who, by mannerisms and dress I would peg as “Drama/ Anthropology double major with body-image issues who watches Deep Space Nine and Red Dwarf” asks, grinning like a clod and glowing with pride, and asks, as half the audience cringes in shame at the memory of their own mis-spent youths, “Do you know where your towel is!?” He was polite about it, though, but it was clear that he had answered this about fifty-thousand times.
I don’t think of myself as a geek, but I do like repetitious humor sometimes. Not so much quoting tv or movies, but using the same joke for the same listeners, over and over and over, eventually it moves beyond the dumb and into the inanity and completely ridiculous. then it’s funny.
Example:
I went to school with a guy named Edward Hey. Everyday, whenever I passed him in the hall or outside or where-ever, I’d say, “Hey, Ed”, then I would give sort of a half chuckle. I did this for the entire school year. I thought I was pretty hilarious and had many a private laugh about it. I’m not sure that Ed, who, by the way, was indeed a complete geek-type, thought it was funny or even, truth be known, ever figured out what I was doing.
Heh.
too much of anything is just enough
It still brings a smile to my face as incoming email is announced by
whoosh-thud (arrow hitting target)…
‘message for you, sir!’
I guess I’m a part-time geek, since I say Douglas Adams or Monty Python (etc) quotes, but they are used rather sparingly (say, once a month average for any “geek” quote).
Although I remember being in my Discrete Mathematics course near the end of the semester. My prof was actually an adjunct, and taught in the evenings simply because he LOVED math. After awhile, we found we could joke around with him, and he completely understood that most of us were lost a majority of the time with the material covered.
So it got to be a little running joke in class where he’d start a problem and ask for an answer (no one would know, of course), so someone would just give any answer. So once he said, “c’mon, pick an answer!”, so I replied with “42!” His reply was, “Ah, but this is not a philosophy class!”
So you had him grinning, me laughing, and maybe two other people smiling. The rest of the class was giving each other completely lost looks. 
You could throw in some stuff about whales, potted plants and sandwich makers to add a little variety
So…What about people who like referencing private jokes repeatedly? If my brother or I want to make each other laugh, all we have to do is repeat one of the following things:
" A front of a castle? We don’t need a front of a castle!!" (a reference to a comment made while playing Castles)
" Oh no, it’s Grammyzilla, she’s destroying the city!" (a line from short play we wrote a long long time ago)
" Why did you kill Zipper? He’s our friend!" (another long ago short play, this one about The Rescue Rangers)
" Jesus Christ, lady." (a fed up shopper cussing out a woman holding up a line in front of us)
Yeah, no one else gets it, but we crack up every time.
Ok, I’m a geek. I knew the answers to all five of Tygr’s questions (btw, Wapcaplet’s first name is Adrian).
But Drama club. shudder I lost two of my best friends in high school to Drama club. By the end of senior year they could only refer to nouns by their first syllables and communicated solely by repeating script lines.
You’re all GEEKS!
points and screams crazily
GEEEEKS! GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKS!!!
My high-school friends and I actually started a Yahoo! group called TheKnightsWhoSayNi, to facilitate keeping in touch while we’re at college.
Beat that! 
-Andrew L
it goes to eleven, man
*Wating to die … waiting to die … *
WHAT - is your favourite colour?
of course, among some of my sicker techno-geek friends, the phrase “Challenger, go at throttle-up” comes up on occaison when something fails, burns up, explodes or generally comes apart in a particularly graphic or irreversible manner…
blue
no, no yellow!
AAAAAAARRRRRRGH
It only gets repetitive because there exists only a limmited amount of work that isnt crap.
You forgot one thing… to those kind of geeks, that is an actual conversation. Those kinds of people (like my H.S. and college classmates) would rather talk like that than talk about sports or something, which they see as beneath them.
I was in the same kind of situation as Spoons at work as well, except I’m surrounded by football and hunting geeks. I eventually tired of the constant babble about the Ravens or what kind of animals they’d killed over the previous weekend. Same difference, I’d say.
On the one hand, I dislike repetitive humor. Things are funny when unexpected, and if you quote a Monty Python skit at me,
In either caes, I’ll make a point of avoiding you.
On the other hand, I’ve got a dozen posts in a thread on another forum debating whether the Death Ward spell protects against such save-or-die spells as Phantasmal Killer, and I’ve written two emails to Dungeons and Dragons customer service over this one issue. So my geek credentials are impeccable.
Daniel
Ahh! Yes! See, this brings up an important point - there are various levels of geekdom. People who reference Douglas Adams and Monty Python are low-level geeks - beginners, amateurs, kids. For us life-long geeks, those were our frames of reference in high school. Beyond that, we’ll tend to move toward stuff like the Church of the Subgenius and/or Discordianism and related topics, like the writings of Robert Anton Wilson.
Actually, that’s true only for one subset of geeks. Geeks tend to “fork” into different sub-geek categories. There are SF geeks, and within that, SF geeks who are into things like Bablyon 5, Star Trek, Farscape, etc. vs. those fundamentalists who insist all that other stuff is crap, and only “serious” SF books matter. There are comic book and anime geeks. There are RPG geeks and video game geeks, and quite a bit of crossover in between. There are subject geeks (physics geeks, math geeks, music geeks, etc.). Each group has its own little “secret codes” they use to identify each other and seek out similar-minded people. And their humor reflects this.
In regards to the OP, one thing I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that many geeks see great comedic value in flogging a dead horse. Long after a joke ceases to be funny, the fact that it’s endlessly repeated and referenced (hopefully to the annoyance of others) remains a source of amusement. Creating new ways to deliver an old joke is looked upon with admiration. Sometimes, just the tension of waiting for someone to make an obvious reference is enough to make us laugh when someone finally does it, and they get extra points for making it in a non-obvious way, or mangling it in a funny way.
An example: When I first heard, “make like a tree and leave,” I thought it was kind of clever. It was good for a chuckle. It’s the sort of thing that quickly gets old, though. When some joker mangled it to, “make like a tree and get out of here,” that was funny! It references the appropriate source material without mindlessly repeating it.
That quote is not mangled in the slightest, thats the exact words from Back to the Future, Biff said it.
I spent 15 minutes reading all this and when I hit submit I know someone will have noticed the bttf reference, but i’m gonna hit it anyway.
In that case, the “someone” to whom I refer is “that guy who wrote the script for Back to the Future.” My point was that someone, somewhere, had turned a cliche into something clever with a little bit of mangling.
Fair point.
But where does it all stop?
next thing you know someone will turn around and say
“Make like a bush and make me a sandwhich”
which may be a funny thing to say if you are hungry and you have just finished watching bttf, but
where was I going with this again?
At this point, it’d be criminal (or at least entirely non-geeky) not to reference The Brunching Shuttlecock’s wonderful Geek Hierarchy.
Daniel