One of the techniques that comedians use is the
‘callback.’ This is where they make a joke
that references a joke used earlier in the set. Go and
watch some Ross Noble if you still aren't sure what I'm
talking about (or just go and watch some Ross Noble
anyway — you could not spend your time better).
For we civilians the callback can often add a humorous twist to a conversation but there is one particular abuse of it that we sometimes make:
A: “Did you see the FA Cup final? My lord, that was dull”
B: “Yeah, like watching synchronised swimming”
A to Z: “Ha ha ha”
It's the lazy callback to a joke made, not earlier in the conversation, but just in assumed common experience — in the received popular culture. As though it were an established fact that synchronised swimming is so dull that the mere mention of it should elicit nothing but derisive laughter.
One popular example of this phenomenon from a few years back was Damir Dokic — the Yugoslav-born father of tennis player Jelena Dokic. All you had to do at the time was say the word ‘Dokic’ and you would expect the eager crowd gathered about you to collapse giggling to the floor, incapacitated with the biting humour of it, without you actually having to go to the effort of actually thinking up an actual joke.
I was at the time rather fond of Dokic. Do you remember he was once thrown out of Wimbledon for alleged drunken and disorderly behaviour? He had approached a British journalist Mark Saggers, working for Sky Sports at the time, and asked to use his mobile. Saggers handed it to him; Dokic looked at it saying “I used to have a phone just like this and the stupid thing never worked!” and hurled it to the ground, smashing the phone into a very large number of very small pieces.
If you were Saggers you'd be livid and would want to see Dokic man-handled off the Wimbledon grounds in front of his teenage daughter. But for the rest of us, that's pretty bloody funny.
My heart warmed to the big old lunatic after that and
yet to this day we still hear people mindlessly reaching
for the Dokic callback.
But it's true: the FA Cup final was like watching
synchronised swimming.
It was particularly useful in a big group of friends in that moment AFTER the previews, but before the movie starts when we all went to see 'The Mummy Returns'. But also, given (society's) love of egyptology documentaries, that little catch-phrase has come in mighty handy over the years.
So I'm lazy. I can deal with that.
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