You know how when you read really old novels, they’ll often drop in an apropos line or two of poetry or a phrase in Greek or Latin or something, and not explain it at all? The reader is just expected to be a lettered person, familiar with the canon of western literature, and they’re just supposed to get it.
Same thing with geeks. There’s a geek canon with which geeks expect other geeks to be familiar.
French, is it? 
Mind if I expand on this? 'Coz I think there’s a point to be made here…
Most of us aren’t brilliantly funny. But most of us DO have a sense of humor. And this is, or at least can be, a bit of a problem because part of having a good sense of humor can be wanting to make people laugh. So you deal with it in one of two ways: 1) You make up your own jokes that are really awful, and spew them out as frequently as you can in hopes that eventually someone will laugh at you. Or 2) you quote jokes made by people that ARE brilliantly funny.
(Unfortunately, either option can be undone if the do-er lacks a decent sense of timing. Learning a sense of timing can be an excruciatingly painful ordeal, because it must be done in public. The young woman in capybara’s Douglas Adams anecdote obviously suffered from lack of this sense. Namely, not knowing the audience - you don’t need to quote back a joke to the person who wrote it.)
I think the second option also gets difficult if you don’t have a sufficiently broad base of source material. IOW, if all you quote is Monty Python, you will eventually exhaust your sole resource. (I said it was “an enormous fount”, not a “limitless” one)
Ever since I read Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Science-Fiction Fantasy Horror Role-Playing Club comics, I have handed in my geek card. But I hated Monty Python parrots long before then.
I hate to break it to you, KidCharlemagne (and arisu, photopat, and FordPrefect, but the Simpsons aren’t “cool”. Not even close actually. (Maybe they were once, a very, very long time ago, but not anymore.) You are all geeks, especially if you own any of the Simpsons’ DVDs, or any books about the Simpsons. (But you probably already knew that.) Sorry.
We don’t want him. You can have him. He’s ridiculous.
You know what this reminds me of?
Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra.
Me and my friends are known to quote liberally from the Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy and a number of other shows we’re all fanatical about. This is partially because we all watch them together, but mainly because there’s enough material to draw from to find a quote for every situation.
Course, it was horrible when we were in Sydney. Every time we glimpsed the monorail, we’d burst out in a rendition of “The Monorail Song”, and then argue over who gets to say “Mono-d’oh!”
Godamn, we’re nerds. NERDS!
OMG I actually got that…
Indeed. I have a friend – a fellow English lit geek, actually – who tells me that one day I’m going to have to start using my own language, instead of quoting from Shakespeare all the time. My answer is that there’s no need to bother: if Shakespeare doesn’t have a quote for it, the Simpsons do. 
But I fully acknowledge that I am pathetic.
And, as a side note, I envy those of you who get to see Futurama often enough to quote it repeatedly. Ponces.
BTW, the episode with “Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra” is my favorite TNG ep.
And I have to agree with pestie that the running-ness of running gags usually evolves into a joke in its own right, or rather a meta-joke, if you will.
Like a few people already mentioned, it’s partly as a way of identifying fellow geeks; but it’s important to mention the flip side of that, which is excluding non-geeks.
Geeks, by and large, are people who were ostracized and excluded by their peers, at least during childhood and adolescence. In-jokes are a way of turning things around by excluding the non-geeks who aren’t familiar with the source material: we get it, they don’t. (As a related aspect, there’s also an element of celebrating “Yes! Somebody else likes the weird things I like!” when you’re used to being ostracized precisely for liking those weird things.)
A pretty natural tendency, really, and there’s nothing wrong with it in moderation. But you can tell who’s been left with serious Issues about social inclusion by the extremes they take it to.
… me too. :smack: too much TNG
<raising and waving hand in the air>
Oooh! Oooh! Over here!!
</raising hand and waving in the air>
I have to tell you about this one that I had forgotten earlier. It proves that there are geeks in all walks of life and at the strangest moments…
I had a motorcycle accident earlier this year. When I made it to the ER, they hooked me up to an EKG monitor and gave me morphine. Under the influence of the morphine, I began a conversation with a nurse and aide who were attending me with the line “OH! It’s the machine that goes ‘BIIINNG!’…” I laughed. Then, much to my surprise, the aide repeated another line … “Nurse, bring in more aparatus!” Then the nurse picked it up with “There’s nothing you can do, you’re NOT QUALIFIED!” and it went from there.
…then they wheeled me into X-Ray where the technician put me in great pain while trying to move things around to take pictures, so the laughing stopped at that point.
Maybe “The Meaning of Life” is required viewing at this particular hospital, or maybe they’d heard the joke 1000 times, but it made me feel better.
Several years ago, I was hit from behind while riding my bicycle and had a particularly nasty concussion. (It was a hit and run; I was “woken up” by someone who saw me lying face-down on the concrete outside of his apartment…but I digress.)
When you’ve had a head injury, the medical staff will try to find out whether or not you’ve been rendered completely out to lunch by asking you basic questions and seeing if your answers make any sense. They usually ask you stuff like, “What day is today?” or “What were you doing before you got hurt?” or (in the US, anyway), “Who is the President?”
The nurse on duty asked me, “What is the wingspan of an unladen swallow?”
I answered, “African or European?” The staff appluaded my grand show of with-it-ness, and I was marked as “not disoriented” on the chart.
You should have said, “you mean airspeed.”
::wanders off to ponder his geekiness::