"blackout gag" meaning in English

See blackout gag in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: blackout gags [plural]
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. Head templates: {{en-noun}} blackout gag (plural blackout gags)
  1. A rapid-fire joke in slapstick comedy. Categories (topical): Comedy

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for blackout gag meaning in English (1.8kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "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.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "blackout gags",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "blackout gag (plural blackout gags)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
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          "source": "w"
        },
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          "parents": [
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            "Entry maintenance"
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        },
        {
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          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
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          "source": "w"
        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Comedy",
          "orig": "en:Comedy",
          "parents": [
            "Drama",
            "Theater",
            "Art",
            "Entertainment",
            "Culture",
            "Society",
            "All topics",
            "Fundamental"
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          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2015, Henry Jenkins, “Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation”, in Andrew Horton, Joanna E. Rapf, editors, A Companion to Film Comedy, John Wiley & Sons, page 159",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A rapid-fire joke in slapstick comedy."
      ],
      "id": "en-blackout_gag-en-noun-to~SU0Qf",
      "links": [
        [
          "rapid-fire",
          "rapid-fire"
        ],
        [
          "joke",
          "joke"
        ],
        [
          "slapstick",
          "slapstick"
        ],
        [
          "comedy",
          "comedy"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "blackout gag"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "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.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "blackout gags",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "blackout gag (plural blackout gags)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with topic categories using raw markup",
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2015, Henry Jenkins, “Mel Brooks, Vulgar Modernism, and Comic Remediation”, in Andrew Horton, Joanna E. Rapf, editors, A Companion to Film Comedy, John Wiley & Sons, page 159",
          "text": "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.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A rapid-fire joke in slapstick comedy."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "rapid-fire",
          "rapid-fire"
        ],
        [
          "joke",
          "joke"
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        ],
        [
          "comedy",
          "comedy"
        ]
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "blackout gag"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-26 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (93a6c53 and 21a9316). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.