Sort of an offshoot of the “cliche” thread we had going on…
Jokes that are a sign of lazy writing in sitcoms and must die painful deaths…
“He looks just like my mother-in-law, except for the mustache.”
“He doesn’t have a mustache.”
“EXACTLY.”
“How many times have you done this [landed a plane/defused a bomb/changed a baby] before?”
“Including this one? Once.”
Also…
I’m going to do an impression of somebody. But I’m sure going to keep my back to the door and not ever check to see if they’re there… and I won’t stop when everyone giggling suddenly stops and glares over my shoulder. Nope, going to keep pantomiming!
Although it’s not a sitcom, but that situation worked for Paul Newman in the Color of Money when Eddie bet Vincent he (Eddie) couldn’t get a woman at the bar to walk outside with him. Eddie won, and Vincent had to pay for dinner. But then again, that was Paul Newman.
Sitcoms: hypnotizing someone in 10 seconds by dangling a watch (pen, etc) in front of them, and saying, “You’re getting sleepy, sleepy…”
To be fair, that may not be a device used so often anymore, but boy, was it overused by the the time the 70s came around.
No one ever answers that question straight up. The character invariably relies on film editing to get to the next scene where the Important Confrontation takes place.
c.f. Quincy
In the sitcom version of this, the answer is not an ominous promise, but an outright lie.
“Hey kids, where are you going?”
“Um… out to play?”
“In your dress-up clothes?”
“Um… We didn’t want to get our play clothes dirty?”
[hijack]My roommates and I did that in college once – dangerously I might add, so don’t pile on me for this.
Our mutual friend was over at our apartment when his newly ex-girlfriend found out he was at our place and came over with a bunch of her girlfriends to get in an almost-yelling match with him. All three of us roommates decided that it was a perfect time to go to the supermarket and so we left with them still arguing in our apartment.
In retrospect it was a bad idea since we didn’t know either of them well enough to know if they had violence on their minds (and 3 girls versus an older, larger and martial-arts trained guy is a good match, nevermind the possible property damage.)
Someone is fixed up with a person and not told that he’s gay . . . or that he’s not gay . . . or that she’s actually a drag queen . . . etc. . . . etc. . . . etc. . . .
A guy is desperate to impress a girl, so he puts on this big lady-killer act, bragging about his BMW and his Hollywood friends and his glamorous job, and then when he finally gets trapped in his own lies (after hilarious attempts to extricate himself with further lies), he backs down and comes clean only to discover that she likes his real-life aw-shucks personality better.
Slight hijack here. Saw this trumped in a book I read just recently and wish I could remember the title of. Supernatural menace invades small town. Boy sees psychopathic town bully back from the dead. Boy goes back home and grabs shotgun and solid slugs. Father sees him do it. Normally you’d get a ‘where are you going?’ ‘To do what I should’ve done…’ yadda yadda.
Not here.
There’s about a paragraph explaination about how the father trusts his son, and if the boy’s grabbing the gun and the solid shot, there’s some serious crap going down, and the father doesn’t want to trouble the son with details until its over.
Interresting twist, and it made the read much more interresting to me.
Cool kid starts hanging out secretly with ugly girl.When friends find out, cool kid drops ugly girl, who has makeover which somehow turns her into smoking hot girl, cool kid goes crawling back to smoking hot girl, who then dumps him.
