Deeeeeeeead giveaway.
Those immortal words belong to Charles Ramsey, a former dish sanitation engineer in the Cleveland area who rose to fame following an impromptu press conference he gave after rescuing three women from his neighbor’s house who had been held captive for ten years.
How does this hero tie in with the headline you just hate clicked?
You see, certain jokes get filed under the “deeeeeeeead giveaway” category of humor.
Either the jokes are old, have been run into the ground, are unoriginal, have been repeated countless times absent of evolution, or any combination of the aforementioned. A joke finding its way to the deeeeeeeead giveaway graveyard has less to do with the joke and more to do with the person invoking it.
What exactly is the deeeeeeeead giveaway?
The dead giveaway is that the person saying the joke is either not creative, a plagiarist, or -- and this is the worst category -- a Barstool bro (he writes as he makes himself unhirable by one of the fastest rising sports media companies in the country).
Like countless Patriots fans, the team’s historic comeback over the Falcons in Super Bowl LI is one of my fondest memories. I have framed photos of the tears I shed in the closing moments at my bedside. I hope others remember that game in whatever way they please. This is not an indictment of fandom. It’s an indictment of laziness and uninspired humor. Humor? I hardly even knew her.
The three guilty parties I previously mentioned have quite a bit of overlap. The three-way Venn diagram isn’t quite a circle, but it’s close.
Take for example: when millennials such as myself went to college we were bombarded by two types of jokes: Family Guy jokes and people repeating things Barstool employees say. Both caused a few hair follicles to go gray over a very short period of time and both led to some decisions being made about particular friendships. The pure oversaturation that comes with a flock of frat bros just repeating “bananaland,” “Chris, can I speak to you in the kitchen,” and trotting out either the joke from Family Guy or the joke from The 40-Year Old Virgin any time Coldplay comes up is rather exhausting.
That’s 28-3. It’s people repeating the simple joke. Taking the easy way out instead of saying literally anything else, or nothing at all.
Remember the scene in The Dark Knight when Harvey Dent is in the hospital and a nurse, who is clearly the Joker, comes into the room but Dent doesn’t realize it’s the Joker until Joker takes his mask off? Despite Joker’s face paint, raspy voice, and indistinguishable cadence during the entire scene?
Someone noticed that in 2009, and it was hilarious. Since then, the mentally sterile have attempted to pass it off as an original observation.
The joke has been oversaturated and it’s novelty has gone the way of the Dodo bird. It isn’t funny and invokes more frowns than it does laughs. It’s a deeeeeeeead giveaway that the person who said it put in very little thought, ripped it off, and quite frankly wasted oxygen. No one has put a new spin on it in over a decade. The same can be said about 28-3 jokes.
It’s time to let 28-3 jokes die. Hang it in the rafters next to the Colts’ “AFC Finalist” banner as a monument to the five seconds it was funny and let’s move on as a society. It’s possible to do that while still cherishing the memory of the Patriots’ comeback over the Falcons.
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