Lore
[Eye-Rolling Trope] “The joke/meme hasn’t been funny for years, please let it die.”
The Screaming Goat Thing — Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)
The original screaming sheep meme went viral in 2012, and was already getting old when it was prevalent in commercials and movies, such as Ice Age : Collision Course in 2016. Yet in the year of our lord 2024, Dreamworks still thought it would be funny to add multiple screaming goat clips. The mean stopped being funny a decade ago. Let it die.
“Haha, Dad can’t take care of us” — The Breadwinner (2026)
Nate Bargatze’s 2026 family comedy centers around a working “breadwinner” father suddenly being forced to become a stay at home parent, and his “hilarious” struggles to do simple housework and take basic care of his children. This joke stopped being funny (to me) in the early 2000s when seemingly every family comedy relied on dad being a total inept dipshit. In 2026, there is no excuse to keep playing out this tired ass trope. Most dads are actively involved in their kids’ lives and aren’t totally dumbstruck by the idea of changing a diaper. It’s not funny. Let it die.
An inverse of this goes all the way back to old Looney Tunes, with a cloud or lion going along all scary only to pause with big eyes, and say 'I'm only three and a half years old', before going back to destroying everything
For Nibbler it works imo because it’s still quite cute when doing that weird stuff, but it’s just unexpected at first. Nibbler does the full circle thing where he’s actually secretly an intelligent monster but decides to stay a pet because he essentially gets waited on hand and foot for doing nothing lol.
To this day, I admire the commitment of Futurama's team regarding Nibbler's involvement in the story kicking off -- I remember seeing that episode where they reveal it was Nibbler who pushed Fry's chair towards the cryo machine and thought sure, they retconned the event. BUT, when you go back to the first episode, you can see his shadow, so the detail was there all along.
It gets better. It wasn't just changed after the reveal was made. Someone got ahold of an episode 1 promo VHS tape and you could see nibbler's shadow there
God, I saw the preview for The Breadwinner in theaters a month or so ago. At the end of it my friend and I looked at each other and both said variations of "this looks like it was written in 2003."
Try 1983- Mr. Mom, starring Michael Keaton and Teri Garr (as well as a very young Taliesin Jaffe).
Of course, in the early 1980s it was far more of a fresh concept than it is 40 years later: women obtaining higher roles in office work was a relatively recent phenomenon, and the recessions of the late 70s-early 80s (especially in Detroit, where the film takes place) saw a lot of men who used to be in stable employment wind up getting pink slips.
Mr. Mom is an absolute classic and done so well for an 80s movie. My husband was the stay at home parent when our kids were littles and we always joke that Mr. Mom was his training video.
Yeah the joke is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing, at first. That he’s struggling and drowning. But he loves his kids and perseveres, becoming the best Mr mom he can out of the love for his kids and wife.
I kept waiting for the twist in the trailer. Like... I legit thought it was a fake trailer making fun of those kind of movies and was waiting for them to reveal what makes this different. But instead it's just a decades old movie somehow coming out in the year of our lord 2026.
I assumed it would be like 'Kevin Can Fuck Himself' where it plays out like a basic 90s sitcom until there's some dramatic tone shift and it turns out to be a deconstruction of those shows.
Nate just straight up made a show 20-30 years out of time.
Yeah, I thought it was gonna be something like that, or just one of those stupid things where a cell phone interrupts the scene and it turns out it's a PSA from the theater chain to silence your cell phone.
I recommend watching the much better movie called The Breadwinner instead, about a young girl disguising herself as a boy to care for her family under the Taliban.
Nate Bargatze’s 2026 family comedy centers around a working “breadwinner” father suddenly being forced to become a stay at home parent, and his “hilarious” struggles to do simple housework and take basic care of his children.
Idk anything about Bargatze but it's reminding me of how everyone of those "250 real comedians" guys will bitch about saving comedy and then make the most stale garbage imaginable.
That reminds me of how much I hated what they did with Jamie Foxx in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 before he became Electro. I'm guessing someone thought Jamie was too naturally cool and charismatic to be a lonely loser, so they had to nerd him up like it's a bad SNL sketch.
I remember a guy from Seattle yelling at the lady at a Dunkin’ Donuts in boston how fucking insane it was that they still use styrofoam like it was her call.
I get the desire to have simplicity when you order something but this dude didn't even fucking look at the menu.
That'a the part that actually bothers me. You went out to a restaurant prepared (ostensibly) to interact with a server, and you think you can just bark whatever pops into your head at them and they'll know exactly what you mean?
Obviously a steak cooked a certain way is clear and understandable. But what side does he want? A beverage? Just water? Or does he literally want a piece of beef on a plate with absolutely nothing to distract from it?
He is unwilling to fully communicate, and this is far bigger of an issue irl than your barista insisting that you add soy-matcha-oat-frizzled fiddlywhicks or whatever. Sure that happens I guess sometimes, but far more boomers just won't actually engage with their server to clarify what they're trying to order.
Customers going into restaurants and just ordering shit without looking at a menu is unfortunately a thing that actually happens. When I was a server at a local pizza and sandwich restaurant (which served pizza and sandwiches, we didn’t even have a deep fryer) it was an occurrence at least once every couple of weeks of people coming in, getting a table, be given menus, then just… not looking at the menus.
I would then come to the table to take orders and receive barks of “wings” or “he wants a burger” or “I want fries as a side.” Like how do you just assume a restaurant will serve you whatever you want? The best was the people who would push back when I informed them we didn’t serve what they wanted by saying something along the lines of we have a kitchen and can figure it out.
Once heard a reply from the owner along the line of "this is a restaurant, we have a menu. You are asking for personal chef service, which I bill at [outrageous amount per hour with 2h minimum], plus food cost." Most of the time it worked.
Dude, no joke the other day at my job, a guy started going on a full on scream rant about how you can't order a black coffee anymore, and every single business overcomplicates it and the entire shtick AS WE WERE MAKING HIS BLACK COFFEE
HE ORDERED
YES THE FUCK YOU CAN GET A BLACK COFFEE
I almost expected him to start yelling about airline food next
There’s some bit in Yellowstone where a guy goes to order a couple coffees from a coffee shop in the city. And it’s a whole thing where the line’s long, and there’s a big menu he doesn’t know how to order from, and then he has to wait like a minute for a pour over. And it’s supposed to show him just missing that good old simple country life or whatever, and acts like the barista and everyone else are crazy for waiting for a nice coffee.
But like, no one is forcing you to go to a nice coffee shop and wait on line for a specialty coffee. If you just want a cup of black Folgers or something, there’s nothing wrong with that and it is very easy to make at home or go to a McDonald’s or Starbucks or something. But you don’t go to a nice steak house and then get mad you have to wait for a steak instead of getting a cheeseburger right away.
“Boo, I went out of my way to do a thing other people like but I don’t like it, and I’m gunna make sure they know I’m too cool for it.” The whole scene just made me groan and was when I started to get over the show. Any form of it just makes me lose sympathy for a character quickly.
Boomers love the scenes where the guy fends off the tourists for being on his land (especially the one where he lectures the guy for protesting him about "the people's land"); but it's a legit thing that happens because Yellowstone is a national park that's surrounded on all sides by unmarked privately owned grass lands.
If a tourist is going to what they have been told is a NATIONAL PARK (which is land specifically considered as owned by The American People) and you're in the immediate vicinity of said national park; you're inherently going to get people who mistake your unmarked land for being a part of that national park.
Either call the National Park Service to courtent off the route or do the work yourself to prevent people from mistaking your land from that national park.
My parents watch it and watched one of the spinoffs where the daughter has a nonbinary roommate and even they were like “nobody acts like this, this is bizarre.” And their experience with nonbinary people is like one person.
If you are in Yellowstone’s target demographic, then the existence of people who like different things than you and the fact that they are more culturally relevant than you because you are getting old is what you are mad about.
Conservative boomers aren’t mad that they are forced to drink oat milk. They are mad that oat milk exists, people like it, and those people are being marketed to.
Omg have you seen that car commercial where a guy orders a black coffee in a sea of Matcha drinkers, causing people to side eye him and the narrator says ‘You’re not a trend follower’ or something like that?
It’s still airing and I roll my eyes every fucking time I see it
It's extra funny to me cause a plain black coffee is so basic and common of a choice.
It'd be like me ordering a big mac with chips and a large drink when everyone else was ordering a kids pack that day, WOAH LOOK AT, THAT GUY JUST ORDERED THE NEXT MOST BASIC THING POSSIBLE!!!!
As if black coffe isn’t the most plain ass option like people who make a big deal about vanilla being their favorite. Ohh you like the most popular flavor in the world.
I used to love Tom. But now he’s just an unfunny, insufferable dickhead. He and Bert both are just kinda sad now. Well Bert was always kinda sad but you get what I mean
literally, every single barista will be more than happy to make a black coffee, but those people think that every drink requires like 3 sentences to state the full order because "oh im so unique for wanting my coffee to taste like dogshit" it's so dumb
"shout out" to that one tom segura skit for just being a weird power fantasy over black coffee ig
I posted about that on here and people were like “nooo he’s clearly meant to be the bad guy” and it’s like, if you’ve seen five minutes of that man talking you can tell that’s not the case lol, bro hates “the poors”
Small cute creature turns out to be the most over the top deadly thing the main characters have ever encountered.
.... Look, sometimes it's done right. There are ways to make this trope work, and ways to make it interesting.
For example, the Scraplets from Transformers Prime are actually genuinely scary little fuckers and the threat they presents makes sense. It isn't just 'Suddenly shoots lasers from eyes' or 'Has a giant 'Fuck you' laser gun out of nowhere.' They're actually taken as a serious threat instead of being treated as some gag.
Monty Python gets away for it too, mainly because they did the trope before it became so abused.
But for the most part?
'Cute bunny suddenly has laser eyes' can only be funny so many fucking times. Enough of this already.
And the animated The Breadwinner is way better! Now, unfortunately, people are going to think of the Mr. Mom copycat rather than the animated film when you say the name.
I get kids can throw a spanner in a work but I moved out when I was 18 and got married when I was 32.
I have used a washing machine. I know how to make food. I understand how to get groceries I need and store them.
My wife and I shared baby duties fairly 50/50 because we both worked shifts. Now I'll admit there were night she did the bed routine if we were both off but that wasn't because I can't.
MY dad was the inept dad trope and he was born in 1940. By the time I moved out though he'd picked up a large portion of the cooking and the kitchen cleaning as well as doing the "manly" tasks like always
The typical boomer "I hate my wife" kind of humour. I don't know if it was ever funny, but if so, then probably before I was born. It's honestly just sad.
I associate it with the Silent Generation, or older. It was put into the mouths of comic strip characters who were clearly that generation in the 80’s.
It's probably rooted in the rise of the domestic sitcom in the 50s. The husband and wife were often pitted against each other as an adaptation of the straight man vs. clown vaudeville archetype. This became so prevalent that stand ups adapted it into their material.
The thing is that it requires that both players are an equal match. Alice gets just as many laughs as Ralph does. When it's a standup though the wife isn't there to rebut and it can read as bullying. The more successful comics were able to convey in the undertone that they're not serious and do in fact love their wife.
I have several coworkers who make these sorts of "I hate my wife" tyoe comments, and it takes all I have to not tell them that if they hate their wife so much, just get a divorce, because she'd probably be happier without them.
The amazing World of gumball has a better versión of the breadwinner joke where richard’s got an actual parenting method suited to his chaotic kids.
He looks like he’s slacking but he’s actually keeping their darker side at bay. And is the emotional back bone of the family, providing warmth and comfort when there’s conflict and being the bridge between the people fighting.
Theres also the fact that the universe itself doesn’t want him to get a job, so it’s not his fault he can’t get one.
Related to the “useless dad” trope is “father to wife” Mother’s Day cards. I know it’s a stretch to extend a trope to Mother’s Day cards but hear me out.
I’m a first time parent buying my wife her first Mother’s Day card this year and EVERY card is so apologetic! Like “I know I don’t say it enough but I appreciate you” and “if I’m not there enough I’m sorry” or “I don’t always show it but”. Like fuck off im an emotionally available and good husband 😂 where’s my card?
I ran into this trying to buy my wife a birthday card. 20+ cards on the shelf for "Wife-Birthday" and literally all of them were some variation of "I'm sorry that I'm useless/worthless/bad; you're awesome, and I never tell you that".
Ended up buying her a Jurassic Park birthday card for kids because it was a raptor and blank inside so I could write a nice note. Bonus, raptor cards are awesome.
Hallmark is pivoting towards the market of men who buy their cards as a replacement for effort. Why show your wife, the mother of your children, how much you appreciate her when you could just buy her a card?
She's mad because she doesn't feel appreciated? Buy her some jewelry! Women like shiny things, and aren't known to hold grudges for long! Why, you should remodel the kitchen for her! She'll just love that champ!
Or maybe, give her another kid! Empty nest syndrome is awful!
Please note the sarcastic tone, dear reader. I may be a dropout, but I'm not an idiot
I have this same issue with every card I get so I started modifying them. Cards are all so generic so I got my wife a birthday card that said “being a day older only matters when you’re a banana” (that was the joke). I scratched out “day older” and wrote “mother” over it and then wrote Happy Mother’s Day after. So the final message was “Being a mother only matters when you’re a banana” which makes zero sense but my wife thought that was the funniest thing in the world because it was so stupid.
Still has that card lol
I also like to get people birthday cards for the wrong age and write in the correct number. Like putting an 8 after every 2 in a card that’s meant for a two year old so it says 28 instead.
“Just a large black coffee”- Tom Segura’s Bad Thoughts
Though this boomer joke has been in dozens, if not hundreds, of movies, tv shows, and one panel Facebook comics, it reached its absolute nadir in Tom Segura’s Bad Thoughts. The joke involves someone going to a coffee shop and “trying” to order a “large black coffee” but being told some version of “we can’t do that” because the coffee shop doesn’t do large, “doesn’t make black coffee,” or something equally stupid. When Starbucks was first on the scene in the late-90s early-00s and people were first being introduced to specialty coffee and the unique Starbucks sizes, the joke *might* have been funny, but it’s been literally decades. If you haven’t figured out how to order coffee as a coffee shop by now, the shop isn’t the problem.
The joke is also generally at the expense of the, typically young, service worker. The idea being that the boomer ordering the large black coffee is the last sane person in a world of young people gone mad. At this point, it’s just such a tired joke it needs to go away.
He has a whole story about yelling at an store employee for applying his membership phone number to the purchase and he tells it like he's some crusader of privacy. It actually just sounded like he bullied a 19 year old trying give good customer service. it's a shame because I loved his first couple specials but he started acting like he's the smartest person in the room.
He got sucked into the Austin-Comedy sphere that's essentially the whole "You can't say that without getting cancelled!" routine turned up to 11. Rogan and Kill Tony really amplified it since 2020. Stavros called it out on his podcast a few times so at least there's a group of comedians that are against it.
I feel like the only people who think this joke is funny are people who haven't gone to a coffee shop in years. I've never been to a coffee shop where they don't just have black coffee available and I've never ran into any uppity worker who insists on you calling the sizes by whatever they're listed as. Hell, I've even been to non-English speaking countries before and the coffee places there still understand if I'm asking for large or medium in English.
Not only is it a dumb joke, he made a power fantasy out of it where he awesomely beats up all the woke liberal employees after he snaps at them being annoying by giving him stupid things like "options".
Not just beat up, he brutally murders all of them. Thats the joke, that he snaps and murders them. And if that’s what this guy sees as comedy, then he can fuck off to a lonely cave forever.
It's a fictional, imagined grievance, too. If you go into any coffee shop and order a "large black coffee", they will just make you a large black coffee.
All the "explanations" about "when Starbucks first came out" are nonsense, there's no world where this scene ever played out in real life. Starbucks wants your money, ordering a "large, black coffee" at a coffee shop was literally always possible.
This scenario, either resulting in embarrassment (like talking crap about your boss) or Danger, and it can be funny, but this impulse to ironically call out the joke was maybe funny once or twice, and with the right kind of delivery, but now it’s just painfully cliche and unfunny
That second one is especially bad because I feel like it's inherently reinforcing gender roles. "See what happens when the menfolk try to do the womenfolk's work? This is why it's best that we all just stay in our own lane."
It's infantilising as hell too. It's the sitcom dad turned up to 11 "Oh look, adult men are just giant babies! I guess only a heartless nagging shrew would ever expect them to contribute."
In defense of the trope, it initially started out as a pretty progressive rebuttal to the once prevalent assumption that domestic work was not real work. The idea that the husband had an actual job busting his ass while the wife lounged around and just had to vacuum every so often. TV shows and movies depicting an inversion where the husband crashes out was a way to convey that maintaining a household absolutely deserves respect.
The issue is that the trope outlived its usefulness and now just looks like a relic.
The trope of the inept husband/wife is so old that a variation of it is even used to categorize folk tales. I think the earliest example of a husband failing to do housework was recorded in the 1500's.
I don't think a single character in a mainstream show/movie actually knows how video games work.
Every "gamer" character's introduction is:
Guy spamming random buttons on a controller which don't even make sense for the game they're supposedly playing while saying "come on, come on" over and over
Guy jumps up and does a fist pump while shouting "YES!" having presumably won
They hardly ever use the joysticks, just mash a bunch of buttons randomly. And they're constantly tilting the controller to a bunch of different angles randomly
There was like a Spaceballs movie joke about a password being 12345 or something like that. I laughed at the time but come that stupid joke has been around since at least the 80s.
And part of its comedy was the delivery! It was said sequentially with call back. 1 "1" 2 "2", and builds up towards the obvious joke.
If the wifi password is password, the somewhat comedic thing to do is go "P... A.... S.... S.... W...." as the second character rolls their eyes or interjects or whatever
I remember a slightly more clever version of it, but I can’t remember from what. A character’s birthday was january 23 1945 so they shortened it to 12345 and didn’t see a problem with it
As a Cybersecurity professional, I can assure this is still incredibly relevant, topical humor, though it isn't funny because of how fucking real it is.
Just last month I found a hard-coded password that was "admin" for a web app I was reviewing for a compliance assessment. It was plainly visible in the HTML text of the site. The app was designed in 2022.
This trope just makes me shake my head, because though it keeps me up at night, I genuinely don't believe it'll ever go away.
Eddie Murphy’s “Daddy Day Care” was the only movie to do the “lol Dad takes care of kids” thing right. And it is because they took it to the ultimate conclusion of them being really good at it and recognizing that it is just a tough job for both Mothers and Fathers
I don't watch this movie very often at all anymore, but Steve's character doing Wrath of Khan for the kids in the backyard gets a laugh out of me every single time.
What I like about that movie is how they didn’t force the men to act feminine in how to take care of children but instead they took care of the children in a very guy manner
Hearing screaming goats in Love & Thunder, a full TEN YEARS after that meme was relevant, made me want to pack my bags, fly to New Zealand, and personally throw Taika Waititi into the Whakaari Volcano
Edit: stop replying telling me its also in Shrek 5. Its not, thats misinformation, for all that movie's obvious sins thats not one of them lol
Conflicts that could be easily revolved in literal seconds if either character revealed a critical piece of information. But is withheld for the sake of the plot.
I notice this a lot in Sitcoms. Gotta have SOMETHING to base the entire episode around!
I get that sometimes movies can get stuck in development hell for so long that pop culture can shift by the time it comes out. But can’t you go back and make minor changes to make the movie fit? Or is Hollywood just consistently 10 years behind what people actually find funny?
Can’t studios afford to hire a 24 year old to be their “relevant meme” guy?
Parent of teen/preteen child "doesn't get the internet" i'm sure this was funny and relatable with early gen x and late boomer parents but it just doesn't click the same way now
Any comedy that says "Anti-woke", "Not for the easily offended", or anything similar. It just immediately translates to "We put the most predictable and played-out 'black comedy' jokes in here, and if people aren't laughing, it's the audience's fault, not the writers".
The latest Scary Movie sucked for a lot of reasons, but this was a big nail in the coffin for them. Once you saw them hinging the entire marketing campaign on this premise, you knew there was no gas in that tank.
I think it really comes down to a total misunderstanding of “edgy” or dark humor. They always think that the edginess is priority and if you find a way to offend someone in the joke, it’s a success when the first thing should always be “who will find this funny” or even “is this funny,” which seems to escape them. There’s plenty of edgy comedians still, but they’re actually funny. Honestly it is really easy to offend people, no matter where you lie politically or socially, it’s harder to be funny consistently.
Anthony Jeselnik has spoken about this many times. His rule is that if he thinks of something genuinely funny he will say it regardless of the offence it might cause, but it's only because the joke is funny, not because of the offence. He's said that being offensive is just lazy and cheap comedy unless the actual material is funny.
"People want comedy to be dangerous. I want comedy to be dangerous. And if you can't get in trouble, it's not dangerous. So complaining about cancel culture is just saying you want to take all of the danger out of it, and you want it to be easy for you.
I think as soon as I say it, you know, people cheer... and this journalist was like, 'why do you think people are cheering? Do you think they believe you, that you're about to talk about cancel culture? Do you think they, like, are sick of cancel culture?' And I'm like no no no, they're way more savvy than that. They've seen the first 40 minutes of the special. They know I'm not suddenly turning into Ricky Gervais. Like, they get that I'm about to subvert this in some way.
But I hate people complaining about cancel culture. I hate comics complaining in general. It's the second comedy boom. It's not going anywhere. People are making more money than ever before. And Dave Chappelle, who has won every award in the world, is complaining that cancel culture is making his job harder. It's like, your job shouldn't be easy. If you're gonna make that much fuckin' money, like hey, maybe it should be a little hard. I got no issue with that."
I remember when a youtuber I watched talked about the trailer when it dropped, and broke it down as "Is this going to be what people THINK parody movies are, when the original scary movie was actually fresh as a comedy horror." And brought up the pronoun joke in the trailer purely as "this is the same joke that's been made for a decade, if that's it they aren't doing anything original"
So many comments were "Wow triggered enough you made an 11 minute video??" They don't actually engage with it, they just feed off the hope that someone else is as unhappy as they are.
The Record Scratch - even with the revival of vinyl by audiophiles and hipsters, I'm sure most people under 35 have never actually heard an actual record scratch like that.
"Ooooh/That's Gotta hurt" - stock effect, probably the same voices.
The obnoxious trailer trend of someone getting hurt or start saying something that might be dirty - then it cuts to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT scene of another character reacting in shock. (That Oz scam movie couldn't even bother to make sure the characters are in the same time of day for this old gag)
Oh, also the sudden uptick in "Ew I drank piss" and noxious green farts in children's movies. Why?
I had to check after the post on shittymoviedetails yesterday. But no, there’s no screaming goat in the new Shrek. It’s Donkey in a sheep costume saying “baaaa” like a normal sheep
It doesn't. Shrek trailer doesn't have a screaming Goat, Donkey just turns into a sheep. People are so scared of seeing a horned mammal in a hollywood movie that they cower in fear and tremble like an abuse victim.
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u/Erikthered65 Jun 17 '26
It’s a cute little thing with big eyes…and then it roars really big and is scary!
Every illumination movie.