blackout gag

noun

Etymology

In reference to burlesque and vaudeville, when the lights were quickly turned off after the punchline of a joke to accentuate it and encourage the audience to laugh.

Definitions

  1. A rapid-fire joke in slapstick comedy.

    • In some cases, Brooks could construct an entire sequence of nothing but blackout gags, as in the prehistoric sequence of History, which depicts the first artist and first critic, the discovery of fire, the invention of music, and so forth.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for blackout gag. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA