Brick Joke/Theatre
Examples of Brick Jokes in Theatre include:
- Derren Brown's stage show Something Wicked This Way Comes relies on this trope: throwaway lines throughout the show that the audience barely notices at the time come together at the end to reveal that he's been leading them towards a certain conclusion. Namely, picking the word "Influential" out of a page of a random newspaper. At least, that's how he claims the trick works.
- In his third show, An Evening of Wonders, during the show broadcast on TV, he played a game of 20 Questions with several members of the audience. One, he sent back, saying he was too unsure of her object (brick number 1). Later, he performed the "Oracle Act" (it's billet reading). Seems one teenaged boy, on a dare from his friends, had written only the word "cock" on his billet, much to everyone's amusement (except Derren's, obviously) (and, by the way, brick number 2, although unintentional). Both bricks pay off at the end of the show, when he unrolls a big scroll that had been in a box since the beginning. On the scroll, he had written the word "bracelet" three times, and the lady that he had sent back revealed that she had thought of a bracelet during the 20 Questions segment. Upon finding this out, Derren said, "That kid's right, I am a cock!"
- And then in his fourth show, Enigma, at the beginning of the show, he asked people in the audience to write down a list of their three favorite things, and he would have a member of the audience draw one, and then by the audience member saying random words, Derren would guess the items. The first item that was written down on the chosen slip, he guessed was a favorite band, but couldn't identify the band. Upon finding out that the band was McFly, he simply said, "Never heard of them." Guess who performed a song revealing one of his predictions at the end of the show?
- A wonderful near-literal example: The rock that floats away during the clowns' "space" adventure in Cirque Du Soleil's La Nouba falls to the stage as the clowns are about to exit at the end of the curtain call.
- There's a minor one in Big River. Near the end, Tom and Huck are contemplating ways to bust Jim out of jail. Tom thinks of several disjointed ridiculous ideas, including baking a rope ladder in a pie and sending it, as well as writing a note using tears and rust. 20 minutes later, when interrogating Huck, Uncle Silas asks him what "the pie with the rope ladder" and "secret African writing" was, showing Tom really did go through with such ridiculous things.
- Spamalot has one about the shrubbery. After encountering the Knights of Ni, Arthur says "Where are we going to get a shrubbery?" Patsy says "We can build one. Out of cats." Arthur says "Where are we going to get cats?" Later, during Always Look On the Bright Side of Life, a woman with a shrubbery comes over, and she says "I'm throwing it out. The cat won't leave it alone."
- The Norman Conquests is a Farce that spans three different plays in the same time frame. When a character exits one room, he appears in another scene in a completely different play. As a result, 70% of the laughs come from repeat audiences who catch the elaborate brick jokes.
- Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors: Aegeon and both sets of twins are accounted for from the beginning of the play. But it isn't until the last act that the Abbess appears and turns out to be Aegeon's long lost wife and the Antipholi's mother.
- In "Tradition," the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye says that one of these traditions in his village, Anatevka, is that the men always wear their hats and prayer shawls to show their constant devotion to God. When he rhetorically asks how this tradition got started, he admits that he doesn't know. Then, shortly before the final number of the show, "Anatevka," after the Jews are forced to leave Anatevka, we have this conversation.
 |
Man: Our forefathers could be thrown out of any place at a moment's notice. |
 |
- The old man from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, an initially minor character who is told randomly to walk seven times around the mountains, then forgotten by everyone, hobbles across the set every few scenes announcing how many times he's up to and then in the end he's revealed to be a very important character.
- The comedy pair Rahmens uses Brick Jokes in their routines.
- The best example is probably this one:
|
(about namehage) "Who drove the demons out of Akita?" |
|
- It is indeed revealed about 14 minutes later. A pun reveals it was Momotaro.
- Back to Brick Joke