Time was when comedy success was measured by the trademark one-liners like “Dyn-o-mite” and “What chu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”
Very ’70s.
Today, the minds behind prime time’s most talked-about shows are busy inventing entire new vocabularies for their characters — and die-hard fans.
When NBC bumped the new season of “Community” to February, outraged viewers immediately took to the web screaming the network had “Britta’d it.”
The made-up term, students of the show will tell you, is a reference to Gillian Jacobs’ gorgeous but indecisive character Britta Perry, on the show.
It’s frequently used on the comedy “when someone makes a small mistake,” writer Megan Ganz tells The Post.
But thanks to social media, “Britta’d” and other show-specific terms are finding their way into everyday speak.
On TBS’s “Men at Work” the mostly male lead characters discuss “lady kryptonite” (the crippling power of your ex-girlfriend) and “whorange” (the unnatural orange skin color found on promiscuous women).
And ABC’s “Happy Endings” has already coined more than two dozen words and phrases including “do-skies” (tasks to complete), “gayfety” (gay safety) and “brozilian” (a Brazilian wax for men).
“Most of the shows that I watch have their own certain language,” says “Happy Endings” executive producer Jonathan Groff.
“I worked at ‘How I Met Your Mother’ for a couple of years, and they had a sort of very specific language for the way that Barney talked. That kind of ‘bro-talk.’ (“Suit up!”) That show was kind of on the leading edge of that.”
Much of the new TV-speak is a reflection of modern colloquial shorthand in a generation that is encouraged to communicate in 140 characters or less.
The tendency to combine words — think Brangelina — “is a pop culture zeitgeisty thing that everyone seems to do,” Groff says. “Suddenly, quicksand becomes chick-sand.”
“Community” derives many of its laughs from a rhyming gag that started during its second season.
“We will say something like ‘What do you know, Henry David Thoreau?’ or ‘Nice try, Steven Fry,’” Ganz says. “It invites fans to make up their own little versions of that.”
Dropping terms like “streets ahead” and “pop pop” is also a way for “Community” fans to identify themselves on social networks like Twitter and Reddit.
“It is a way of letting other people know ‘I watch this show and I, too, know everything about it,’ ” Ganz says.
“I think our fans are so hungry for catch phrases, that even if we didn’t put any in our show they would find them. Just so they could identify with each other.”
The use of show-specific language goes as far back as “Happy Days,” but Groff credits “Seinfeld” (“yada yada”) with starting the trend among modern-day writers.
One of the sitcom’s most popular gags was to turn nouns into verbs: “Throw me a towel, let’s bagel” and “The woman she’s lesbianing with? Susan told me she’s never been with a guy.”
“I think if you look at shows about close-knit groups of people, those characters sort of develop their own back and forth,” Groff notes.
“On single camera shows you are trying to depict real character interactions a little bit. So for us it is less an attempt to coin a catch phrase and more of an attempt to coin language that they would use with each other.”