Brick Joke/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Brick Jokes in Live-Action TV include:

  • In Community Abed has a whole subplot entirely in the background in the Psychology of Letting Go towards the beginning of the season - he refers back to this in one of the last episodes, Applied Anthropology, when Shirley goes into labor, to widespread confusion among the rest of the study group, and proceeds to coach Britta and Shirley through the delivery.
    • In the second episode, when they are working on their presentations, Jeff complains that the Spanish skit Pierce wrote is, among other issues, "really, really specifically, surprisingly, and gratuitously, critical of Israel." Pierce replies that he will rework it. Then at the end of the episode when they are presenting the skit, at one point they are standing standing side by side waving the Israeli and Palestinian flags together.
  • In the Only Fools and Horses episode "Time On Our Hands", while he tries to get Rodney to talk about Cassandra's miscarriage as they sort through their garage, Del picks up a random piece of junk and remarks that he wishes he could just put his hand into life's lucky dip and "go 'da daaa, there you are, Rodney, I've changed our lives'", and then discards it onto a nearby cooker. Later in the episode it turns out to be a priceless pocket watch that they sell for over £6 million.
  • The Good Guys: Played straight... and literally, in the episode "$3.52". At the start of the episode Dan vows to take down the drug smuggling ring with the $3.52 in his pocket. Fast-forward to the last minute of the episode, when everyone believes that the brick of Heroin is long gone. In comes Dan with a flashback to where he buys a brick for three bucks and a nougat bar for fifty cents, loses the two pennies somewhere along the line, and swaps the bricks.
  • Oh Babylon 5. If you haven't done your homework before watching it, you'd see nothing but self contained story lines filled to the brim with unanswered questions in the early seasons. Of course, this being the Trope Codifier for the Myth Arc, everything comes back in some way, shape, or form later on.
  • The original Battlestar Galactica had lines in the opening monologue "There are those who believe that life here began out there." In the 2000s revival series "life here began out there" are the first words of the Sacred Scrolls, referring to the colonization of the twelve worlds by people from Kobol. In the original series, Earth was another such colony, humans not having evolved there at all. In the new series, with the revelation in "Sometimes a Great Notion" that the planet called Earth in this series is not our Earth, it seems that the words cannot apply to us. In the very, very last episode, it is revealed our Earth is named after the original, and we are descended from a combination of humans who evolved there and Kobol-descended humans and Cylons who arrived 150,000 years ago.
  • Friends, "The One With... George Stephanopoulos". In the middle of the episode, Rachel is sitting on the balcony and drops a pillow over the side. She waves it off, and the audience chuckles. In The Tag, there is a knock on the door. It's a stranger returning Rachel's pillow.
  • In the opening scenes of the Red Dwarf episode "Stoke Me A Clipper", Ace Rimmer (what a guy!), his Nazi opponent and the villain's pet crocodile "Snappy" all fall out of an airplane while in flight. Ace manages to reach the villain and steal his parachute, only to land in a base full of more Nazis. He kills most of them, rescues the local captured princess and flies away on a sky-bike. Two surviving Nazis watch him go:

"He got away! I can't believe he got away!"
"That was Ace Rimmer! We're lucky to be alive!"
(Snappy falls out of the sky, crushing both of them.)

    • The original series' finale, Only the Good..., shows Rimmer arguing with a vending machine which claims that one day it'll destroy him. At the end of the episode, it triggers a chain of events which may or may not result in Rimmer's death.
    • Another one is from the episode Krytie TV, which opens with Lister's guitar being recovered and delivered to him in the Tank minus the strings (because they could theoretically be used as offensive weapons). Rimmer isn't keen on this idea. Much of the rest of the episode concerns Lister apparently appealing for freedom from the brig. Rimmer is keen on this idea and offers to help out. Eventually, the appeal - to be permitted strings - is successful. As Lister puts it, 'You've been a brick, man!'
    • A non-vital plot point from the second episode, Future Echoes, is finally explained almost two series later in Parallel Universe. Specifically, the enigma of how Lister could have children, and he claims there that it would be 'a lot of fun finding out', and it was - not for Lister, apparently for Rimmer.
    • In the Series III episode, Timeslides, Kryten recommends time traveling to Dallas in 1963 to say, 'Duck!'. In the Series VI episode Emohawk: Polymorph II, Kryten makes a comment that the crew are as guilty of a crime as the man behind the grassy knoll. Finally, in the Series VII episode, Tikka to Ride, they time travel to Dallas in 1963 and save JFK by killing Lee Harvey Oswald. However, the resulting alterations to history persuade them to become some of the men behind the grassy knoll.
      • Tikka to Ride contains another Brick Joke. The voyage to the past was originally so Lister could restock the ship's supply of food. This is forgotten once they arrive and get involved with the JFK events. At the end of the episode, Lister reminds the crew of this and gets beaten up by the other members.
      • Conversely, Timeslides contains another Brick Joke. Do you remember Hitler's lunchbox which contains a peanut butter and banana sandwich and a bomb planted by an assassin? Guess where Rimmer gets his first meal from after finally returning from the dead... and guess how long that lasts when the bomb finally goes off.
      • Actually, Lister drop-kicks the bomb back into the past as soon as they identify it as Stauffenberg's (it goes off shortly afterwards), and is later seen reading a paper with the headline "HITLER AVOIDS ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT". Although he eats Hitler's sandwich, Rimmer offs himself at the end of the ep by slamming his fists in joy down on a pair of crates that turn out to be full of explosives.
    • In the episode Polymorph, at one point the band fires heat-seeking bazookoid projectiles where Rimmer thinks the polymorph is... except that there's nothing there, so the missiles cast around and then lock onto the Cat. They chase him all over the cargo area before he manages to lock them into an elevator. In the climax, when the heroes are fleeing in terror, they open one final door and the missiles zip out past them and splatter the polymorph.
  • A variation in Pushing Daisies: In the pilot, Emerson uses the word "narcoleptic" when he means to say "necrophiliac". Three episodes later, the characters run across a narcoleptic woman, and Emerson says "That's a narcoleptic. Necrophiliac's the other one."
  • In the Seinfeld episode "The Marine Biologist", Kramer decides to hit golf balls into the ocean, then later returns to the apartment complaining that his swing had deserted him, as he only hit one good shot all day. At the end of the episode, George relates the story of how he saved a beached whale from suffocating by removing an obstruction which was lodged in its blowhole. He then pulls out the obstruction to show it to the group- none other than Kramer's golf ball.

Kramer: What, is that a Titleist?! (George nods) Well, a hole in one, huh?

    • Midway through season four, Jerry's father finds his wallet gone after a visit to the doctor, and accuses the doctor of stealing it. In the season finale, Jerry finds it between his couch cushions.
    • At the end of the series finale, Jerry gets in a Seinfeldian Conversation with George about how his shirt's buttons are positioned wrong, with the conversation ending with "Haven't we had this conversation before?" They had. It was the first conversation in the first episode.
  • In an episode of {Jonas}, Kevin, Joe, and Nick explain Hide and Seek to Frankie, who then runs away to hide. Midway through the episode, someone (not one of the brothers) goes to throw something in the garbage, and finds Frankie curled up in the cabinet. At the end, the boys realize that they forgot to find Frankie, who has been hiding in the cupboard for days, having their father bring him meals.
  • A literal Brick Joke: Father Jack's pet brick in Father Ted. First, Ted trips over the brick which Mrs. Doyle had placed in the middle of the floor following advice from a magazine. Father Jack lovingly adopts it as a pet ("I LOVE MY BRICK.") and moments later discards it ("FED UP WITH BREEEEECK.") towards Ted's head. It returns later on as a vital component of a plan to save Father Dougal from an explosive milk float and finally, thrown by the ensuing explosion, coming shooting down from the sky to wallop Ted on the head after the credits.

"THOSE WOMEN WERE IN THE NIP!"

  • In this clip, for perfectly rational reasons, Stephen Colbert sets a live mousetrap on his desk. Then he forgets it's there. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Malcolm in the Middle did a season long version of the gag. In an episode, Dewey learns that the class hamster that he is charged with watching for the weekend will go to the class bully (who makes a vague threat towards the hamster's life). So Dewy releases the hamster in a food pellet filled hamster ball, thus solving the problem. Later, as Malcolm and Reese leave a party towards the end of the episode, the hamster ball rolls by. After that, every episode in that season had, normally towards the end of the show, a hamster ball rolls by, unnoticed by anyone in the scene. It was last seen heading into the wilds of Alaska.
  • Home Improvement has a Once an Episode type of Brick Joke in which Wilson tells Tim something, and later in the episode, Tim gives a hilariously garbled version of it to someone else.
  • Bottom. In the episode "Hole", one exclusively for the in-studio audience when Ade Edmondson was doing his bit in the warm-up he threw his brick up by saying "I'd just to start by saying; fucking, cunty, bollocks! These are words we are not allowed to use in the show, so it's best to get them out of the way now." Then the brick comes down towards the end of the episode with this exchange between the two characters, which did make it to broadcast, albeit censored:

Richie: Hey, Eddie. We know how to swear don't we...?
Eddie: You fucking well hit the clit right on the nail there, you cunting bastard!

    • Digger -- Richie's evening with a noblewoman, funded by selling one of his kidnies, ends with her in his bed and Richie having a heart attack within two feet of losing his virginity...

Eddie: Oh and it wasn't your heart, no... You know that cheap surgeon I got for the kidney op...? Well, he wired your kidney and your bladder back--to--front and the whole system just backfired!

  • Monty Python loves this gag. Probably one of their less known examples, from an early Flying Circus episode, has a mock film opening with narration about an ordinary couple shown on screen. The couple are said to be average and perfectly ordinary in every way, and not the sort you would expect to get into anything exciting "so we'll leave them for now" much to the couple's surprise. The film shifts its focus to deal with an alien attack and completely different characters, and when all seems hopeless, the couple from the beginning shows up and saves the day.

Voice: Yes it was Mr and Mrs Samuel Brainsample, who, after only a brief and misleading appearance in the early part of the film, returned to save the Earth ... but why?
....
(The husband): We tried to tell you at the beginning of the film but you just panned off us.

    • Also (Spiny Norm): Dinsdale!
    • Also the Spanish Inquisition episode, where the sketch itself happens partway through the episode, and then during the very last sketch someone says "I didn't expect a sort of spanish inquisition" and the inquisitions from the earlier sketch are seen frantically trying to get to the courtroom, only to have the end credits cut off the end of their entrance.
    • Episode 12B, How to tell different types of trees from quite a long way away. "Number one, the larch. The larch." Starts off as a running gag linking sketches. Returns in the end credits.
      • Makes one more appearance seven episodes later.
  • Firefly: very early in "Jaynestown", there's a scene where Kaylee is poking fun at Simon for his apparent utter lack of cursing (he claims he swears "when it's appropriate"). The joke seems to be finished by his stunned silence at the mess Jayne's making in the med bay. Until...

Simon (having just discovered the statue of Jayne): Son of a bitch!

  • In Doctor Who, the newly-minted Tenth Doctor has his hand cut off in a sword fight, which he is able to regrow due to his Timelord-y Phlebotinum. It just seems a cute plot trick at the time, but the lost hand manages to turn up and be a useful McGuffin at least three more times - until the hand regrows itself a duplicate Doctor, who gets banished to a parallel world. This brick element spanned three series of Doctor Who and one of Torchwood.
    • A very notable Brick in Doctor Who is "Bad Wolf" which shows up in various places throughout the first series (Doctor #9) It ends up that Rose herself goes through time putting "Bad Wolf" various places so that she would be able to figure out how to save the Doctor in the season finale.
      • Especially fun example given that in the previous episode, The Doctor noticed how many times "Bad Wolf" has shown up, and when asked what it means, shrugs and says it's probably nothing.
      • In fact, New Who seems to be quite fond of this trope; in Season One you get the above mentioned "Bad Wolf". Season Two, "Torchwood" appears regularly. In Season Three, the name Harold Saxon crops up quite a lot, he turns out to be the Master all along, having stolen the Tardis at the end of Season Three. And in Season Four, many of the monsters, such as the lava monsters in Pompeii that appears are actually a side effect of the Dalek's endgame, namely stealing planets out of time and space and using them to build a multi-verse ending Death Star
    • Yet another one, not plot dependent at all, seems to be apple. In "The End of the World" the Doctor includes the word "apple" in the year (specifically the year 5.5/apple/26), and it's "Apple Grass" on New Earth.
      • These are still going: right after the Doctor regenerates into his Eleventh incarnation, he asks little Amelia Pond for an apple. She gives him one with a face cut into it, but he doesn't eat it. Much, much later in the episode, he shows the 19-year-old Amy the apple to prove that he really is a time traveller and that he really did only just leave her seven-year-old self.
    • Maybe the most impressive brick spans about 41 years. The First Doctor mentions in passing during the story line "The Crusade" (1965) that he would have liked to be knighted as well as Ian, one of his companions. The Tenth Doctor IS knighted by Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw" (2006) along with Rose.
    • In "Army of Ghosts", the Doctor laments that there's no one on the Torchwood staff named Alonso, because "Then I could say allons-y, Alonso!". In "Voyage of the Damned", he actually does meet someone called Alonso. Who will end up datin Torchwood leader Jack.
    • In "The Shakespeare Code", for reasons wholly unknown to the Doctor, Queen Elizabeth I wants the Doctor's head. Then, two and a half years later in The End of Time, The Doctor mentions in passing that he's fled from her, mentioning in passing that her "nickname is no longer accurate".
    • One that's 47 years in the making just hit, thanks to Time of Angels. You see, thanks to River Song, we now know that the noise the TARDIS makes when it goes flying means that the brakes are left on.
      • Which makes a throwaway line from Ace in Ghost Light funnier: "You're still a lousy parker."
    • In Smith and Jones, the beginning of the episode starts with Martha walking down the street talking on her cell, when the Doctor comes up to her, takes off his tie, and says "like so!". We ignore it. Flash forward to the end of the episode, where he's trying to convince the TARDIS can travel in time. He goes in, it leaves, he comes back with his tie off. Ta-da!
    • Speaking of River Song, when we first meet her, she's trying to figure out how much of their relationship has happened to the Doctor, and she asks him if he's already done the crash of the Byzantium. It sounds like a random phrase thrown in to sound cool, but next season, the Doctor meets River Song again, on board a ship named the Byzantium, which promptly proceeds to crash.
    • In "Robot", the Brigadier famously comments that just once, he'd like to face an alien menace that isn't immune to bullets. Fourteen seasons later, in "Battlefield", the Brig takes out the alien menace known only as "The Destroyer" with a silver bullet.
      • It didn't take that long. One season later, in Terror of the Zygons, the Brigadier shoots and kills the Zygon leader, Broton.
    • In the beginning of Series 1, Gwyneth see the future and talks about "the oncoming darkness." It doesn't show up again until the fourth season finale, when Rose tells Donna The Stars Are Going Out.
      • Actually, 'the darkness' is mentioned several times in passing over the course of the first four seasons.
    • One of the more memorable ones is from Colony In Space. Near the beginning of the first episode, the first time the Third Doctor manages to get the TARDIS off the Earth, the Brigadier walks into the empty room and demands that the "Doctor, come back at once". After six episodes of facing hostile ancient aliens, homicidal industrialists and a late arrival by The Master, they take TARDIS back to Earth... landing immediately after the Brigadier finished saying this line.
    • Or how about the recently solved mystery of who River Song is? She's Amy Pond's daughter, Melody Pond. The writers set us up for that one three years ago.
  • In Heroes, Volume One, we hear that Angela Petrelli has been caught shoplifting socks. In Volume Four, she confesses that she's stealing them to remember her sister who she thought was dead.
  • In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, while testing a space toilet, a chunk of meatloaf is shot into the ceiling, where it sticks. In the end of the episode, it falls down during dinner, much to the confusion of the cast. Not to mention that north Korean spy that they got deported-
    • In the recent episode "the Toast Derivation", Sheldon discovers Leonard is the social nucleus of their group of friends (meaning Raj & Howard are more willing to do what he wants), so he forms his own group of friends (that will do what he wants) consisting of Stuart the comic store owner, Penny's ex-boyfriend Zack, and Barry Kripke. He also mentions he invited LeVar Burton to join the group ("I Tweeted him") but he doesn't show, so the episode goes on as normal...until the end when Burton arrives at the guys apartment, sees Kripke, Stuart, & Zack singing along with a karaoke machine, and get's the heck out of there ("I need to quit Twitter").
  • In How I Met Your Mother, when Marshall wants to find out whether he's passed the bar as soon as the information is posted on the internet, but Barney holds him up while trying to show him video of a dog pooping on a baby. When Marshall discovers that he needs a password, which he lost, Barney suggests that they hack into the law school's database. Barney takes a CD, puts it into the laptop, types in some random stuff, and shows Marshall... a dog pooping on a baby.
    • The show likes the Brick Joke quite a bit. There was the episode where Barney said his name was Ted Mosby, and several episodes down the line it was revealed that the woman he slept with at that time founded a website about Ted Mosby being a jerk.
    • Another one in Season 3 revolved around Barney getting slapped by various women because he was being followed by someone he'd previously slept with and abandoned. He spent an entire episode trying to find out who it was. By the end, he hadn't figured it out but had learned an important lesson (that he is awesome). The audience thinks that's it, but several episodes later the concept is revisited and Barney finds his stalker.
    • And let's not forget the "five slaps for all eternity" Marshall earned the right to give to Barney in "Slap Bet": he gives the first at the end of the episode. Seven episodes later ("Stuff"), Marshall jumps up on stage in the middle of Barney's one-act play and slaps him senseless, saying "That's two."
      • And then they went and made a Brick Joke out of that Brick Joke in the third season. At the ending of the seasons premiere, Marshall informed Barney of a site called slapcountdown.com ...
    • In an episode late in the second season, Ted and Robin enter covered in pasta sauce. Asked about it, they say it doesn't matter and leave it at that. The audience puts it aside, expecting it to be explained later in the episode; instead, it is explained in the season finale, once they've completely forgotten about it.
      • And in that same timespan, Marshall and Lily get married. The episode before the marriage is the episode about Ted trying to write his "best man" speech. In the end of the episode, we see Ted performing his speech on the wedding, and Marshall is wearing a hat for some reason. Turns out in the next episode that he had a huge stress-related breakdown and cut his hair off.
    • In one episode Ted remarks about the five-word phrases of folly that all men say at some time; the one in question is "We should buy a bar", but he also references one moment from an earlier season ("I will win her back!"), one Noodle Incident ("I can jump that far") and one line from about thirty seconds earlier in the episode ("I can trust you guys"). Much later, in the season finale, the story behind the Noodle Incident is unexpectedly revealed.
    • And let's not forget about how the end of season three spends an entire episode building up a joke about a goat, only to have Future Ted remember at the end that he got it wrong and the goat didn't appear until a year later. Then the goat is forgotten about (except for one passing reference) until the season four finale.
      • Let's also not forget that the goat was first mentioned all the way back in the FIRST SEASON, with Ted saying he'd get to that story later.
    • Ted becomes the victim of a particularly cruel Brick Joke in season four. He loses a contract in one episode when a Swedish firm called Sven gives the client a design based on a Tyrannosaurus. After that, Ted gets fired and later tries to go into business for himself. He ends up with a request to design a restaurant which should launch his career. When he tries to present his design, the clients reveal they've decided to go with another design. They then show him the design they've chosen. It's a Tyrannosaurus wearing a cowboy hat.
    • In the episode with Barney's brother, Future Ted talks about how you can see when people are single at a party or in a relationship, one being that couples tire earlier. At the end of the episode a time-jump was made to one year later at a party, and Lily and Marshall say that they are tired and going home, Robin and Ted both say they will stay for a while, not being sleepy yet. This is a very subtle brick joke which at the same time reveals that Ted and Robin will break up within a year after this episode.
    • In an early episode in the first season, Barney makes fun of Marshall after Marshall and Lily told the rest of how they ran away from a mouse/cockroach in their apartment. More than a season later, about how Robin's feelings for Ted evolve in their relationship, there is a short flashback to Ted courageously catching a spider when Robin sees one in the apartment and freaks out. Guess who's also there and freaks out even more than Robin?
    • In "Three Days of Snow" Barney and Ted have the aforementioned five-word-phrases discussion. They're also having a running conversation about Party School Bingo, where Barney is trying to score with five girls in a row from Playboy's Top 25 party schools. He mentions that all he needs is Arizona Tech . . . which happens to be the school whose marching band has taken over the bar. At the end of the episode, the stinger is a half-naked Barney, stumbling out of a room with one of the girls, yelling BINGO!!.
    • On one cold Sunday night on CBS, "Barney" gave out his cell phone number in an ad during halftime of the actual, real world Superbowl. The very next night, he spent the entire episode responding to the barrage of SMS propositions from women who saw the commercial.
    • It took six years for a call-back to be made to the "cockamouse," a nigh-unkillable creature from the seventh episode of the first season; it is referenced in the season six episode, "The Perfect Cocktail." Apparently in the interim, it's made a home in the Arcadian.
    • The season two finale ends with Barney saying "This is going to be legen- wait for it...", and season three begins with him saying "-dary!"
  • Arrested Development has a few. In one instance, George Sr. (hiding in the house's attic) holds up a breast pump and asks Michael what it is. When Michael tells him, George Sr. said "Well, I certainly didn't use it for that." Eight episodes later, George Michael is looking through the attic to find an air pump, to which Michael replies "I had to take all pumps out of here a long time ago."
    • In mid-season 2, the Bluth banana stand is pulled out of the water with graffiti on the side saying 'I GET YOU BLUTH HELLO'. If you notice it at all, you'll dismiss it as random graffiti. The payoff that reveals the graffiti is a double brick joke isn't until the SERIES FINALE a season and a half later, where we learn that Annyong's real name is Hehloh and that in Korean, his name means 'someday'. Not only is the 'hello' at the end of the graffiti him signing his name, but it's also him saying that he'll get the Bluths someday, which he also does in the finale.
    • Annyong himself is one of these. His disappearance is mentioned in a throwaway line by Lucille, that she sent him to a boarding school for a reason she can't remember. He finally appears again in the middle of season three, at the very end of the "in the next Arrested Development" segment, and then is not seen until the end of the finale, where he plays a key role.
    • "I never thought I'd miss a hand so much!"
  • Eureka is another show that has a heavy emphasis on Brick Jokes. Most episodes contain a device invented by a member of the town which is largely forgotten about until the end of the episode, where Sheriff Carter puts it together that this device could potentially solve the episode's problem.
    • Chekhov's Gun, Chekhov's Armory, Chekhov's Gunman... Eureka even has Chekhov's Skill mastered down to the most minute detail in the extremely specialized jobs that almost everyone has at Global Dynamics, right down to "The Poop Guy".
    • A stealth brick joke just recently came to a head, when after 4 seasons of seeing buildings float away in the intro, someone finally robs, or more accurately, steals a bank by floating it away in episode 14. Sheriff Carter is incredibly happy about this until he actually gets to the scene of the crime.
  • Mr. Show is another sketch comedy show that did this to perfection. In two episodes in particular: "Oh, You Men" and "Rudy Will Await Your Foundation" they took it to a high art. In the first, Odenkirk and Cross open the show by inexplicably taunting the audience with a banana. Only at the end do you realize that a tape of the episode is eventually discovered by a race of spacefaring apes who go, er, apeshit over the taunt. In the second, Cross and Odenkirk open the show by one-upping each other with more and more embarrassing 'bloopers' from prior episodes, one of which has Odenkirk opening a box and immediately throwing up. Only at the end do we discover that the box holds Cross's excrement from an extremely fancy restaurant where you poo at your table, and they deliver it to your door later. Um, better than it sounds.
    • "It's a week late!"
    • Don't forget "The story of the story of Everest", opened by a strange man with gigantic flat hands, it isn't until the last sketch of the episode that his presence and hands make sense
  • Non-comedic Lost example: The four-toed statue was in a single scene in the second season finale and people decided that it was fairly minor and forgot it. Then in season five, it comes back suddenly in "La Fleur", seen from behind and then it shows up in full in the finale, both as a flashback and as a large part of the finale's plot.
    • In the very first scene of the show, Jack runs past a pair of white tennis shoes which appear to be nothing more than a piece of the scenery. But in season 4, we discover that Jack's father, each time he appears in a hallucination/vision, is wearing the white tennis shoes. Finally, in season 5, Jack reveals that when his father died, he felt he wasn't worth a new pair of shoes, so he just put two white tennis shoes on the body and called it a day. Ms. Hawking tells Jack that he has to give Locke's body something of his (Jack's) father's in order to properly recreate the original crash conditions. Jack gives the body a pair of his father's shoes. The ludicrousness of this idea is lampshaded by Jack, who says "Wherever you are, John, you must be laughing your ass off that I'm actually doing this."
    • Lost has been doing this a lot in Season 6. For example, Shannon's inhaler, a minor plot device that went missing in early Season 1 to set up the plot of an episode, was found by Jack and Hurley in a recent episode. Five seasons later. The hilarious part? Many joking fan theories suggested that finding the inhaler would unlock the entire plot of Lost, making this a Reverse Funny Aneurysm as well.
      • The inhaler was also part of a brick joke sent flying at comic con. In the 'Lost' panel, Jorge Garcia demanded answers about everything, so he brought up the inhaler. And what do you know, a few episodes in season 6, they walk past the caves, find the inhaler and just go: "Oh, look, we just lost it."
      • Season 3, the Others make Sawyer and Kate break rocks and establish a clearing for no discernable purpose. 2 Seasons later, a plane lands on the runway they built.
  • The House episode "Last Resort" begins with House fiddling with Cuddy's desk, and being interrupted by the hostage situation that makes up the plot of the episode. At the end of the episode Cuddy pulls out the desk drawer and all of her files fall to the floor - House had turned the drawer upside down.
    • It was also the reason that in the middle of the episode House tells Thirteen not to check the drawer for a lighter when the circumstances called for one.
    • The episode "Wilson" has House end a scene by humiliating a patient for not informing him that he was "a tennis pro." The camera follows Wilson out of the room, where a few minutes later, Wilson sidesteps Taub and Foreman running frantically towards the ER with the patient on a gurney. Taub's only remark? "It wasn't the tennis."
  • Supernatural has a Groundhog Day Loop where each day a certain character dies a different death. The beginning of the day always starts the same way. This day is moderately humorous in its enforced monotony. For example, when they go outside, they see movers trying to get a piano desk (look closer) into a building from the ground floor. At the end of one Tuesday, out of nowhere it drops on our hero and kills him. Turns out the movers had spent the rest of the day trying to get it in the window.
    • In "The Monster At The End of This Book", a receptionist at a publishing house mentions "Dr. Sexy, MD" as an example of the pulp romance dross that she says is so popular. In the next season, the writers turn the title into an actual TV show (which itself serves as a parody of [Grey's Anatomy])
  • In the first episode of The Adventures of Lano and Woodley, Frank goes to fly a model plane in the park. It doesn't respond to his control, and keeps flying in a straight line. We laugh at Frank's misfortune and forget about the plane... until it crashes through the window of their apartment just in time to hit Col and stop him from laying the smackdown on Frank.
  • In the beginning of one Scrubs episode, the Janitor and Todd are talking as the Janitor is working on something on the ceiling. Before the commercial break, JD, Turk, Kelso, and Todd are all sprayed by a broken water pipe with the Janitor stating "Sorry, guys. Thought I fixed that..."
    • In another, the Janitor is painting a yellow cross on the road halfway through the episode. At the very end, JD goes to drive home on his bike, which "someone" has chained up; he reaches the end of the chain, is vaulted off his scooter, and lands exactly on the cross the Janitor painted earlier.
  • JJ sets one up in Skins, when he drinks from a bottle of urine (to everyone's disgust) - and promptly uses it to breathe fire (to everyone's astonishment). He'd swapped the urine bottle for paraffin - eight months beforehand.
  • Shows up a number of times in Rome. The identity of Lucius's father proves crucial to the finale of the first season, threats made apparently idly by Antony halfway through the first season are carried out in the second, and the final conclusion of the series hangs on an apparently throwaway scene in which it's heavily implied that Pullo is Caesarion's real father.
  • In The Young Ones episode "Bambi", a seemingly random scene has a mad scientist going on about humans the size of amoebas, then hiding his cream bun from a visitor. At the end of the episode a giant cream bun falls on the main characters and the scientist groans and offers it to an animal.
  • In one episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Drew has a tape recorder and uses it several times to say "A thousand points." After the following commercial break, Wayne takes the recorder (Drew isn't there) and records it to say "My ass, my ass, my ass." Only toward the end of the show, Drew takes the tape recorder and says "Just for posterity's sake..." and plays it. Naturally, the audience goes nuts.
  • At the beginning of The West Wing's season one finale, Josh and Donna engage in a surprisingly long argument regarding Josh's broken chair; instead of fixing it in house, Donna is sending it to a friend who needs some work. The matter is resolved and forgotten. 35 minutes later, two different characters are arguing in front of Josh's office. Josh walks into the office. One of the character says, "I work in an office with the smartest people in the world!" At that moment, Josh tries to sit down in a non-existent chair and falls on his ass. As Aaron Sorkin proudly says in the DVD Commentary, "most people wouldn't write two pages of dialogue to set up a slapstick gag 30 minutes later. But I did it."
  • The "fight" in one episode of Harry Hills TV Burp is Smurfs vs Gorillas, these being the names of two rival boating teams. So a man in a Smurf costume comes in and attacks a man in a gorilla suit, cut to commercial break, joke's over. Except in the next episode of the season, there's a joke about an albino gorilla, who turns up to sing the ending song... and a Smurf bursts in through the door and wrestles it to the ground. "Somebody get this Smurf out of here!"
  • In the second episode of season two of Flight of the Conchords, during a routine band meeting, Bret and Jemaine order biscuits to be shipped in from New Zealand (to America), due to a lack of money for food. Three episodes later, their biscuits arrive, only for Jemaine to find out he didn't get any, due to filling out the necessary paperwork incorrectly.
  • An episode of Coupling has a two-in-one: toward the beginning, Susan says that just hearing Jane's voice makes her involuntarily grind her teeth. Later on, Susan complains about women's magazines and their inconsistent attitude to men--five articles about why all men are pigs followed by an article telling the reader she should wake her boyfriend up via oral sex. In the last scene, Susan visits the sleeping Steve in his apartment and starts to do just that, but then the phone rings, the answering machine picks up, and it's Jane saying hello... cue Steve screaming in pain.
    • "Sorry, doesn't her voice set your teeth on edge?" "(pained)...it will now".
  • Made in Canada - In the first episode, the executives are tasked with having to keep the starring actor of their "Xena ripoff" from leaving the show before they have 65 episodes which is the minimum needed in order to syndicate. Made in Canada only has 65 episodes itself, thus being a meta Brick Joke
  • The Star Trek: The Original Series episode, "The Tholian Web", ends with the USS Defiant (Constitution class, not the one from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) disappearing into a dimensional rift. All but forgotten, few expected it to pop back up 37 years (and 4 television series) later in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode, "In a Mirror, Darkly", where it is revealed that the rift hurled it not only 113 years into the past, but into the Mirror Universe as well.
    • Star Trek Enterprise had a few of these in the later seasons. For instance, they have an episode that explains why the Klingons looked like humans in some episodes of the original series.
    • Star Trek: TNG had this in "Clues". The characters suspect that they have experienced missing time, which causes Geordi to ponder aloud "Then why didn't our beards grow". Skip to near the end of the episode when it is explained that they were placed in some sort of frozen state, to which Geordi exclaims "That explains why our beards didn't grow!". I'm not sure if this was meant to be funny, but the enthusiasm of that line cracks me up every time.
  • Greek got one when Rusty tells Cappie that Beaver's pissing in his closet when he's not. Later on in the episode, Rusty stumble upon Beaver pissing in Cappie's closet.
  • The pilot episode of Black Books features a crowning example. In the A plot, Bernard is trying anything to get out of doing his taxes, to the point where he invites two Jehovah's Witnesses inside... and finds out that they have never been invited inside before, are very nervous, and have spent so much time going door-to-door that they are far less informed about bible stories than drunken, misanthropic Irishman Bernard, who enjoys explaining religion so much that he invites them to come back some time. In the B plot, hapless accountant Manny accidentally swallows The Little Book Of Calm and is sent to the hospital, where he absorbs it into his body and turns into a calm, bearded, platitude-spouting machine, lit from within by his own tranquility. He wanders out of the hospital in his bathrobe and slippers, has the calm beaten out of him by skinheads, is sort of rescued by Bernard, and agrees to do his taxes in gratitude. He then answers Bernard's door - to the Jehovah's Witnesses, who see Manny, scream and flee.
    • Grapes Of Wrath features a number of seemingly innocuous moments at the beginning of the episode. A massage machine creates a painful crick in the neck, Manny eats some toffee and cracks his tooth, and it's mentioned that he has a terrible pain in his leg when he gets stressed. After going off to their house-sitting and accidentally drinking a £3000 bottle of wine meant for the Pope, Manny starts getting stressed, and gets a horrible pain in his leg. Bernard tells him to use the massage machine, which then gives him a crick in the neck. He frantically chews toffee trying to work out his stress, which causes his tooth to hurt again. With a cackling Bernard trying to recreate the lost bottle of wine, he sends Manny to get some oak leaves. Outside, Manny gives him a branch (not of oak), at which point Bernard flies into a rage and begins beating a hunch-backed, lisping, limping Manny with the branch, as thunder and lightning roar and crackle about them and a passerby stares in what could only be called abject terror...
    • Not the only brick in this episode, either. At the beginning of the show, Bernard is eating toast and jam. He takes one bite, goes "Euch!" and throws it onto the ceiling, where it sticks. The last act in the episode has Bernard exclaiming "Oh my god..." revealing a newspaper with the headline "Pope killed by inferior wine, man held." He points at the date on the paper: "It's my birthday!" As this happens, the toast falls and hits Manny in the face.
      • This brick only appears at the end of the episode after the Cleaner has done his work. The the toast falling jam-side-down onto Manny's face, just after original setup for it came at the start when Manny saw a slice of bread stuck to the ceiling.
    • The passerby alluded to above is also the payoff to yet another series of Brick Jokes set up in the pilot. To recap; in the pilot, the C-plot involves Fran becoming increasingly fixated on a weird object she's found in her shop, to the point where she becomes so obsessed with figuring out what it is that she completely forgets that she's agreed to be the birth partner for a pregnant friend who is inducing labour that day. We see this pregnant friend later in the same episode, where she is giving birth, frantic about where her birth partner is, and subject to Manny's delirious Little Book Of Calm-inspired wisdom. Brick Joke one. However, this same friend is also the passerby who happens to be walking her baby when she witnesses Bernard and Manny renacting the Mad Scientist horror movie above.
    • In another episode, a customer comes into the shop and goes offscreen to hunt for a biography on Schubert. Bernard, Manny and Fran discover that the extremely loud building works going on next door are to continue for the next two weeks, and decide to go on holiday. At the end of the episode, upon returning two weeks later after an extremely circuitous series of plane transfers, they find the customer, desperately clutching the biography and driven half out of his mind by all the noise from the builders.
  • The first episode of Season 5 of The Wire has a scene where some journalists editing a co-workers copy tell her that she can't use the word "evacuated" to apply to people. ("A building could be evacuated. To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema.") All fine and pedantic, but then in episode nine, Det. McNulty does use the word to apply to a person, but this time in its proper context. His conversation with a rookie cop about the meaning of the word calls back to the journalists' earlier discussion, although he's much less eloquent than they were. ("He probably evacuated." "What, he left and then came back?" "No, he shit himself.")
  • Saturday Night Live: the season 35 episode hosted by Jon Hamm (for the second time; his musical guest this time was Michael Buble) had a fake commercial for the Closet Organizer, a guy in a blue spandex suit (played by Will Forte) standing in a closet hired out to store anything and everything you throw into the closet (including stuff normally not kept in a closet, like water, cheese, cream pies, and dirt). It seemed like a normal SNL fake commercial, with its frenetic, slapstick action and broad jabs at corny infomercial-type commercials for ridiculous products. One sketch and one musical performance later, another sketch takes place in a bar, in which guest host Jon Hamm's character thinks the guy next to him, played again by Will Forte, looks familiar. Finally, Hamm's character recognizes him... as the Closet Organizer guy!
    • On the Will Ferrell/Green Day episode from season 34, there was a funeral sketch where a wannabe comedian (played by Will Ferrell) interrupts a funeral to announce that the deceased wanted him to have his watch when he died and leaves a boot on the casket as a reminder to pick it up later. This piece of story info is forgotten as more and more weird speakers come to give their last respects -- until Will Forte's creepy blond anti-Obama speaker finishes his eulogy with, "I took the watch."
    • In the 70s, the "Weekend News" did take offs on two news stories from that week. At the beginning of the skit, they reported on Carter's secretary of agriculture Earl Butz making a racist joke on the press plane. (Relatively sanitized version: All blacks want is loose shoes, good sex, and a warm place to go to the bathroom.). At the end of the skit, they reported on Mohammad Ali retiring from boxing. According to the news broadcast, Ali said at the news conference, all he wants was loose shoes, good sex and a warm place to go to the bathroom. A particularly good brick because you didn't even see the brick being flung into the air.
  • In the episode "Jack Frost" of Mystery Science Theater 3000 , the hero of the movie comes across a gang of bandits. After fighting them off, he tosses a load of logs into the air that never come down and remarks with a grin that they'll "come back down next winter". After that, the rest of the plot goes on, lasts a year, and true enough, at the end the same bandits get clobbered by the logs.
    • The Rebel Set has a different variation. The episode starts with a lighthearted short called "Johnny At The Fair", but the main feature is a dark movie about a bank heist gone wrong. As the protagonist is led away to his cell in the end, Tom quips, "So, uh...all of this happened because Johnny got lost at the fair?"
  • Sports Night: At the beginning of the episode "Thespis," Dana is stressing about having to cook a Thanksgiving dinner, and she confesses that she is trying to thaw a turkey out by placing it in the light grid. In the second act, Dana is at her wit's end because so many things have gone wrong with the show, including water dripping on the anchor desk in the middle of live broadcast. During the next commercial break, she makes this little speech:

"For one hour every night, this is my little corner of the world, and nothing screws up here unless I screw it up. You got that?! Why is there still water dripping on this desk?" * frozen turkey falls out of light grid and onto anchor desk*

  • A fantastic example from the show "Look Around You". Occasionally people/animals used to assist on the show would be thanked by making a portmenteau of their name and the word 'thanks' (for example, "Thanks, ants. Thants." This seemed like just an odd quirk, but 2 years after it started, in the series finale, you realize it's all been building to "Thanks, Hanks. Thanks".
  • The IT Crowd s4-e1 'Jen the Fredo' In the first minute of the show Moss plays Jen a piece of mood music which she describes as "quite mysterious", Moss is disappointed as he was hoping for it to be "ruddy mysterious". 15 minutes later during the gangs RPG evening Moss press's play on his remote, the music plays and one of the players looks spooked and remarks "That's ruddy mysterious".
  • In a first season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles, wanting to get rid of Cordelia, only says the words "Your hair", and a panic Cordelia takes off, with a bemused Giles muttering "Xander was right". Skip to the next episode when peoples worst nightmares start coming to life, with a panicked Cordelia with frizzy hair that would put Shepherd Book to shame running about.
    • Way over on Angel, Cordelia loses her memories and believes she's a teenager again and is horrified by her new haircut. "The government gave me bad hair!"
    • Buffy has several other examples of this trope. In an early Season 3 episode, the adult population of Sunnydale starts to act like teenagers. In a later episode of the same season, Buffy gains mind-reading powers and finds out to her horror that her mother and Giles had sex during the incident. On the hood of a police car. Twice.
    • And then in Season 4, Buffy manages to convince Giles that she's been body swapped with Faith by mentioning several things, including that her mom thought Giles makes love like a stevedore.
  • In an episode of Jeeves and Wooster, Bertie Wooster is again forced on to pinch (steal) something. Part of the plan of attack involves gluing a piece of paper to a window with treacle, so the window will break silently. When Bertie pops the lid off the can of treacle, it flips up and sticks to the ceiling and doesn't come down. At the end of the episode Bertie is sitting in the same room and the lid falls into his hand.
  • In season one of Slings and Arrows, episode 2, Geoffrey has to take on the unpleasant task of getting Oliver's skull cleaned for use in future productions of Hamlet. So much happens that viewers (and Geoffrey himself) forget about it, until the show is underway on opening night in the season finale and Oliver reminds Geoffrey at the last possible moment, forcing him to race through the building and crawl under the stage to put it in place just before it's needed.
  • Another brick joke in Slings and Arrows spanned the entire series. In the last episode, out of the blue, Ellen tells Geoffrey that her answer is yes. Geoffrey doesn't understand what she's talking about, but she is replying to his marriage proposal of ten years earlier, which we saw in the very first episode when Oliver flashed back to that night. Geoffrey had proposed after they acted together in Hamlet. He had a nervous breakdown on stage the next night and never acted again, until circumstances force him to take part in King Lear in the final episode. Thus her answer comes after the next time they perform together, although a decade passes before that occasion.
  • On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart plays a clip related about a pep talk in which the coach screams at the teams that they "will go out there, and rip their heads off!" Later, when talking about a political candidate who believes illegals are leaving headless bodies in the Arizona desert, he wonders who is really doing it, and replays the clip.
  • Warehouse 13 has an almost literal example in the first episode when Pete and Myka discover the Long Distance Football, which when thrown will circle the entire planet and return to the thrower.
  • One episode of MythBusters begins with Jamie and Adam discussing the myth that you can mail an unwrapped coconut, complete with Adam sticking a stamp on a coconut. The rest of the episode passes without any further mention of this myth. Then, during the credits, there's a scene with Jamie and Adam sorting through the mail, and guess what they find? Myth confirmed.
  • In The Basil Brush Show the Cold Open of an episode features Mr. Steven being asked by a Darth Vader parody if he has seen his bees. The main episode begins and goes on with a different plot with no reference to the bees. Then during the credits, Basil and Steven hear a noise while in their beds and Steven checks under his covers when Basil asks him about missing bees...
  • One episode of The Office has Michael and Dwight drop a watermelon onto a trampoline for reasons that make perfect sense. It bounces off and hits a car, with Michael telling Dwight to find out whose car it is. The episode ends with Stanley at his now messy car, only able to stare confused.
  • In NCIS Season 5 when Vance and Gibbs are first seen together (ep titled "Internal Affairs") in a meeting, Vance slides a danish across the table to Gibbs and says something like "I bet you thought I'd forgotten" and Gibbs replies saying "No I didn't think you had" or some such (doing this from memory). And that's it - no explanation, no nothing. We never find out what that was all about and after some head scratching forget all about it. Then, THREE SEASONS LATER - on episode "Enemies Domestic" Season 8 Ep 9 has flashbacks to earlier times, including earlier days when Leon Vance and Gibbs were just starting out in NCIS (NIS at the time) and met each other for the first time. In that scene the young Gibbs is about to eat a danish when Leon Vance walks in and inadvertently destroys the danish. He promises he'll buy Gibbs another one and that he won't forget about it (Leon never forgets things apparently). So NOW we know what that first exchange was about!
    • Close, but not quite. Vance gives Gibbs an oddly precise amount of money (something like $2.97), counting it into his hand almost before he says anything else (in his first, apparent guest, appearance, and first scene with Gibbs.) Gibbs asks what it's for, and Vance says "For the danish." Gibbs replies "That was nine years ago." But he keeps the money.
  • In the Modern Family episode "Dance Dance Revelation," Phil, after being nonconsensually sprayed with cologne, snatches the bottle and ends up chasing the salesman around the mall, continually spraying him. Then, during the closing credits, Mitchell and Cameron invite to their home a friend who had a terrible day at work because some crazy man chased him around and kept spraying him with cologne.
    • Said fellow is named Longinus, and shows up in a later episode with Cam & Mitchell's group of gay friends.
  • In one of the more recent episodes of CSI, there's a subplot revolving around the "murder" of a couple who happened to own a cat and a parrot, with one member of the team convinced the parrot was somehow holding out on them. Late in the program, it was discovered foul play wasn't a factor; the pets just accidentally killed their owners by feuding with each other. This still left the mystery open as to how the wife managed to place a distress call to 911 seeing as how she couldn't possibly have made it to the phone before dying. Cue the parrot operating the phone with his beak to place a distress call, followed by said team member exclaiming, "I knew you were holding out on us!"
  • The Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode "The Long and Winding Shortcut" at the start has Salem moaning that he can't vote, stating he wanted to change the pronounciation of "Friday" to "frid-yah". At the end of the episode when the election results are over, Salem comes into the room and says "thank god it's frid-yah".
  • In one episode of The Last Detective, the episode opens with Butt Monkey protagonist Dangerous Davies responding to a car alarm going off at a home, leaving after giving the man there a warning, and it turning out that man wasn't the resident of the home- he was a car thief. At the end of the episode, Dangerous is walking on a street and hears the same alarm and proceeds to calmly walk into an adjacent store, and arrest the guy from the beginning of the episode.
  • Pretty much every episode of Jonathan Creek will have at least two incidents which seem unrelated to the general plot of the episode, one of which will often turn out to be the key to unlock the mystery; the other one will be a Red Herring and will come back after The Summation and prove to be the set-up to a (usually hilarious) brick joke.
  • One brick joke happens (along with somewhat of a brick joke) in the Cheers episode "50-50 Carla":
    • Towards the end of the episode, Same says he gave Woody a wristwatch from the lost and found (he says it was in there for 30 days) as a present before his community theater play opened. When he comes back after the play, Woody thanks Sam and Rebecca for the watch, saying he lost one like it about a month ago.
    • Also, halfway through the episode, Sam asks where Cliff is (he doesn't appear in the episode). A few minutes later, we find out that he's at the hospital having minor surgery. To get the joke, you have to had watched the previous episode, "Indoor Fun With Sammy and Robby" first, where Cliff got hit in the forehead with the 8-ball while watching a game of pool.
  • In the You Can't Do That on Television episode on revenge (first aired in 1985), Alasdair appears in a library skit returning an overdue book that literally costs him an arm and a leg. In a later library skit in that episode, another cast member appears without his right leg.
  • A sketch on The Kids in The Hall starts in the middle of a bar argument as to whether people have to live together if they are married. This gets interrupted when the Cincinnatti Kid enters a bar, throwing down a challenge to the Toronto Kid. Later, the Toronto Kid does in fact show up and the two are about to fight, but the fight gets interrupted by a phone message for the Toronto Kid, informing him that his wife has just had a baby boy (who will become the new Toronto Kid). After the Cincinnatti Kid leaves the bar to fight the newborn Toronto Kid, somebody asks the now Former Toronto Kid how he could not know that his wife was pregnant. He replies that they don't live together, prompting an "Aha!" from one of the people arguing at the beginning of the sketch.
  • An episode of Parks and Recreation begins with Leslie Knope finding marijuana in a community garden, and of course Hilarity Ensues as she institutes a stakeout to find the perpetrator, but the episode ends with no discoveries made. Eighteen episodes later, on a picnic, a former parks director reveals that he's planted marijuana in community gardens all over Pawnee.
  • iCarly: There is an episode which has Spencer break up with a girlfriend named Connie because she was 'juggling' for other guys. At the end of the episode the webshow contains a clip of a guy and his new juggling girlfriend. It's Connie.
  • In the Charmed season 1 episode "Love Hurts" Prue mentions Phoebe getting nicknamed "Freebie" after she made out with a guy under the bleachers in high school. Five seasons later in "Hyde School Reunion" Phoebe meets up with said guy at a reunion, and his wife (formely the Alpha Bitch) calls her "Freebie".
    • The Triad are set up as the Big Bad in the third season...and are promptly killed off in the tenth episode. They reappear in the final season as the puppet masters of the Ultimate Power.
    • The Angel of Destiny makes a one-off appearance in the season 4 finale, before being called back again in the eighth season to play a bigger role in the plot.
  • Near the beginning of a scene in the Frasier episode "Wheels Of Fortune", Frasier, doubting Lilith's half-brother Blaine going good, bets Blaine $50 he can name 3 of the 12 Apostles during his prayer before dinner. As the scene ends, Blaine names all 12 and takes the $50.
  • About two minutes into Paul Merton's Birth of Hollywood, a documentary hosted by Paul Merton in which he describes the origins of the American film industry, Paul visits New York and describes how it would have been back at the turn of the twentieth century, which he accomplishes by replacing the sounds of modern New York with the clip-clop of horses pulling carriages. Five minutes later, he visits about the third place he's been to since we saw him in New York, and a car happens to drive past. It makes a clip-clop sound.
  • Done in the episode titles of Conan. One episode had the title "Is Anyone Paying Attention To These Frigging Episode Titles?" The next episode: "Wow! You Do Care About These Episode Titles."
  • This cold open to the local Seattle show Almost Live!, which was followed by this cold open over a month later.
  • Every episode of Leverage contains a brick joke. Often will show something at the beginning of the episode with very little importance, only for it to be a major key to their con or help them out in someway by the end. Though this could be more of a Chekhov's Gun
    • One scene can defiantly be described as a Brick Joke, one episode has Eliot inform Hardison that he has a tell when playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. A season later, he mentions it again
    • The stuffed bunny Parker went after in the first episode flashback, is seen again in her so called "house"

copied from the front page - need to be checked for duplicates

  • In Malcolm in the Middle, Dewey releases the hamster in a ball full of food so he has a chance at survival and won't be taken care of by the class bully. Throughout the rest of the season, you can spot the Hamster Ball rolling in the background. By the end of the season, you can even see it roll by as Francis and Piama leave Alaska.
  • Seinfeld was full of these.
  • Father Ted, "Speed 3", has a literal brick joke - twice. Father Jack has become to be affectionate to a brick, which later Father Ted trips on because Jack left it in the middle of the room. This, however, gives Ted the inspiration to use the brick to hold down the accelerator of a milk trolley (rigged to explode if the trolley falls below 4 miles per hour) to keep it going. The trolley explodes. Post-credits, Father Ted is taking out the trash when he spots something in the sky—and is struck head-on by a charred and smoking brick.
  • Friends "The One With Frank Jr" has Ross consider adding Isabella Rosselini to his list of celebrities he can sleep with but eventually bumps her because she's "too international". At the end of the episode, guess who walks into the coffee house?
    • Also, in one chapter the girls are in the balcony, drinking and telling stories of older times, when Rachel accidentally drops a cushion to the street. At the end of the chapter, someone calls to the door, and Chandler opens. A man returns the cushion.
  • Mash: Near the start of the episode "It Happened One Night", Hawkeye puts a can of beans on a stove in post-op, to heat it up. At the end of the episode, after a busy night dealing with patients, and shelling, and other things, just as things are settling down, the can of beans explodes.
  • Community: A brick joke three years in the making: over the course of three episodes across three seasons, a certain word is said three times. Only on the third time does the brick pay off.
  • My Name Is Earl: While Randy is fishing junk out of the river that a storm drain flows into, he says, "Another dolls head, Earl! That makes four." Eight episodes later, in the next season, an orphan girl tells Earl, "I used to live in a storm drain, rain washed my doll heads away."
  • In one episode of That 70's Show, Jackie has Kelso reading Cosmo magazine, hoping that it would give him insight into women (specifically, Jackie, and what she wants at any given moment). A bit later, Eric is griping about Donna to Kelso, and Kelso spouts off some helpful wisdom, and, when Eric is incredulous, Kelso explains that he's been reading Cosmo, and offhandedly mentions that there are some diagrams to women's internal organs that look like a map to Six Flags. This isn't mentioned for the rest of the episode, until the very end...

Fez: Oh look! Six flags!

  • Doctor Who had a particularly long lasting one. At the end of the serial The Hand of Fear, The Doctor is forced to drop Sarah Jane Smith on Earth. When last we see of her, she realizes she isn't in her home city of Croydon. Cut to 30 years later, we find out that she'd been left in Aberdeen, Scotland instead.
  • The Dick Van Dyke Show did this in the third season premiere episode, "That's My Boy??" Mel's sister-in-law has just had a baby, which prompts Mel to make a Switched At Birth joke. Laura prods Rob into a Whole-Episode Flashback retelling of how, a few days after Ritchie's birth, he became convinced that they took the wrong baby home from the hospital. They contact the other parents—who have the similar last name of Peters—and invite them over to discuss the possibility. The doorbell rings, Rob opens the door and is stunned at the sight of them. Then he invites the Peters in. Their entry is the brick joke. They're African-American.
    • Kenan and Kel did an episode based on that Dick Van Dyke episode, but because the show is made up of African-Americans, the brick changed. The parents are Asian.
  • On How I Met Your Mother, Marshall's slap bet with Barney turned into a Brick Joke spanning the entirety of the series to date. As of season 7, Marshall has been granted three additional slaps (one of which he used immediately), leaving him with three slaps remaining.
    • There's a lot of them in How I Met Your Mother. In S2E02, Ted enthusiastically tells Robin that he found a 1945 penny in the subway. Many episodes later, we see a flashback of Ted and Robin buying ice-cream with the money they just got from selling a 1945 penny Ted found on the subway.
    • In "The Pineapple Incident", Marshall is curious about why is there a pineapple in Ted's bedroom. In "The Third Wheel", we see a flashback fom that night where Ted and Trudy are licking the pineapple while having sex.
    • Also from "The Pineapple Incident", Ted claims he's "vomit free since '93". In "Game Night", Ted confesses that he threw up on Robin's carpet:

Marshall: I knew you weren't vomit free since '93!

  • The cold opening for one All That episode has Kenan blowing up a scarecrow, causing the Big Ear Of Corn to be kidnapped by Elvis and professional wrestlers. Later on, Lori Beth Denberg (as Miss Fingerly) kisses a stuffed monkey despite the superstition about what happens... then Elvis and the professional wrestlers come out and beat her up.
  • The IT Crowd: Roy gets caught in the handicapped bathroom at a theater and pretends to be disabled so he won't get in trouble. He tells the theater staff and police that his wheelchair was stolen by a bearded, red-haired man with glasses. Later, the police see a man matching that description leaving the theater and quietly take him away. In the same episode, Moss is caught using the employee bathroom and is mistaken for a new employee. Later, Jen goes to a party at the theater to find Roy in a wheelchair and Moss tending bar.
  • On the last episode of Saturday Night Live's 36th season, Seth Meyers leaves for summer vacation with Bill Hader's Stefon character. About three episodes into season 37 (the episode hosted by Ben Stiller with musical guest Foster the People), Stefon returns and Seth mentions that the vacation they took last summer was bizarre (and when Stefon asked Meyers if his back was okay, Meyers quickly changed the subject).
  • One episode of Corner Gas had Davis and Oscar trying to catch a mouse in the gas station. Oscar was going for the traditional mouse trap, while Davis was advocating being humane and letting the mouse go. He mentioned that, once, he'd nursed an owl back to health and released it. At the end, they catch the mouse, they let it go, they watch it scamper off into the world...and the same owl Davis rescued swooped down and carried off the mouse.
  • Over three seasons, characters on Eureka occasionally refer to something called an "Einstein-Grant Bridge" until in the season four opener, when they accidentally pull Dr. Grant into the future from his original timeline in 1947. Thereafter, they use the term we normally use for that object, the Einstein-Rosen Bridge, thereby proving that the timeline they had been in was different from our own.
  • In the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Fifth Race", Jack spars with Teal'c in a boxing ring. Teal'c knocks Jack over with one punch. Fast forward to "Upgrades", where with the benefit of a bodily-capabilities-improving Atoniek armband, Jack KO's Teal'c.
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