I have just finished the Nightside books by Simon Greene. It seems that every time we meet a new character, the main character gives us his back-story via dialog. They have a back-and-forth where it is exposed where the two met and when they last saw each other. It is a tiresome device. Is there a word for this?
I frequent Television Without Pity and have taken to calling it “blah blah expositioncakes” 
. But I think the standard term is exposition.
Expostition?
Yes, although around our house we refer to candidates for induction into the “Halls of Ungainly Exposition,” which is taken from one of S.J. Perelman’s hilarious book reviews.
The Turkey City Lexicon describes this as a variation of the “As You Know, Bob” technique, called either “Rod and Don dialogue” (attr. Damon Knight) or “maid and butler dialogue” (attr Algis Budrys).
I’ve always called it expository dialogue. For the sake of someone who may be reading this, I first used the term in 1982 … blahblahblah…
Michael York’s character in the Austin Powers movies is called “Basil Exposition”, because that’s his sole purpose: giving exposition.
The boundaries of bad writing have no bounds, he said with boundless enthusiasm, and so the variousities of ways that bad writing can be bad must be tautologized with taxonomic precision.
In other words, while using dialog to tell the audience what the characters already know is known in the lexicon as “As You Know, Bob,” using large amounts of indigestible paragraphs of prose to do so was traditionally called an “expository lump,” although the Turkey City Lexicon has updated the term to “Infodump”.
Even shorter dumps can bring the reader to a screeching halt. Back in the Clarion days, these were known as “expository lumpettes.”
Spewing information randomly may be referred to as “suppository lumpettes,” but not around me.
…this movie, legion, had quite possibly one of the worst scenes of exposition that I have ever seen… characters were introduced to each other as if they were reading the plot synopsis of the back of the cover: (stuff like “meet Dr Jones. He’s been locked up for murder for the last seven years. He has an unpredictible personality, but as long as you keep on his good side you could be okay.” Only much worse than that… )
It’s called direct exposition.
Bad writing?
I like the name “Exposition Fairy” for a character who has no other purpose than to tell other characters plot points.
(may be paraphrased)
Miss Piggy: “Why are you telling me this?”
Diana Rigg: “It’s expository dialog. It has to go somewhere.”
The Great Muppet Caper
There’s also the obligatory scene in prison movies (Escape from New York, Escape from Alcatraz, No Escape, et al) wherein the warden/prison official reads the new prisoner’s dossier aloud in front of him, in case the prisoner suddenly forgot who he was.
One of my favorites was the “Atomic Shakespeare” episode of Moonlighting.
Curtis Armstrong (Herbert Viola), playing Lucentio, is newly arrived in Padua. He walks up to a local, and announces that he is Lucentio, newly arrived in Padua.
The local, looking bored, walks off.
Lucentio walks up to another local, and announces that he is newly arrived in Padua, and is seeking a wife.
The local walks off, noting that he “must away to floss”.
Lucentio, very much in Herbert Viola’s character, grumbles: “Is it my fault I get stuck with all the exposition?”
Dusting the furniture
Goes back to the hackneyed idea of having a couple of maids come on when the Act I curtain goes up. They do their chores on stage while talking about the background things which the audience needs to know to understand the unfolding of the play.
It’s quaint now, I suppose, but it came to be synonymous for exsposition in its various forms.
It’s exactly this kind of writing that made me give up on reading historical fiction. No matter what era, nobody describes their king/ruler/leader/president by title and curriculum vitae.
Comic books, with their gigantic casts of characters, continuations of story lines from years in the past, and cross-over marathons galore, combined with audiences picking up the book for the first time, may be the worst offenders.
Here, in actual dialog from J’onn J’onnz to Aztek, from an old JLA, may be the all-time contender for As You Know, Bob dialog:
Your height is 6’2" and your shoe size is 13D. You dislike Bearnaise sauce and always get the chalupa grande. I’m getting the letter P or maybe G. Is there a male relative in your family named Pepe…?
Well, this does give the prisoner the opportunity to – with great pride – fill in any crimes that he did commit, but aren’t in the dossier because he got away with them.
Darn, you beat me to it. I was going to mention the exact same scene.
I’ll just add that you missed my favourite line from the scene, the local’s response to Burt’s tale :
“Sir, thou hast mistaken me for one that carest”