If I had a spatula for every time someone said, “Asking for a friend,” I could create a burger franchise across the galaxy.
And if I had a pound of ketchup for every toadeater who thought they were being funny because it’s not really for a friend but for them, I could stock all the burger franchises everywhere in this reality and the next for a whole year.
Not that the joke’s getting old, but…it’s ready for carbon dating. It’s more stale than a Jersey bagel. It’s as predictable as a Stephen King novel. Everybody and everything knows how it goes.
Any joke where you say something you don’t mean, like, “Thanks for sharing,” just falls flat. At least that’s how it falls in my ear. Flat. More fake than funny. More pusillanimous than punctilious. Anyway, enough alliteration. Some things are good in moderation. Some things are good not at all. Like an ear worm early in the morning—it can ruin your whole day. Some jokes manage to lose functionality every second they’re out there.
You know what else is done to death? The hero’s slow motion walk. It was first done in some astronaut movie, I think. Today, it’s a director’s crutch, for those times when there’s no good dialog left in the script, there’s an action sequence coming up, and there’s no gas in the imagination tank.
We slay ourselves with the overused, don’t we? I’m not out to destroy the trite, the common chestnut. They have a way of destroying themselves. The next person to use one puts a chink in the base of the cliche pyramid. Soon enough the whole structure will be like those boulders in the desert balanced on a small stone, or a tiny neck of sandstone. Then not long after, the unnatural and unbalanced will fall from its own sloppy weight.
Xenosthesia.com 