catchphrase

A phrase used by a character in some work (generally a TV show) that the character uses every week in order to guarantee some quick and easy laughs.
Most certainly overused, but lots of sitcoms couldn't get by without them.
Of course, lots of sitcoms can't get by with them.

Catchphrase is an electronic word game, a combination of cluing games with hot potato. An even number of people (works well up to about 10 or 12) are divided into two teams which sit in alternating positions around a circle. One player starts the Catchphrase device and tries to clue the word on the device to his teammates. When they guess it, he passes the device to the next player who presses a button to get the next word.

Clues are pretty free-form, but you can't say the word or part of a phrase that you're cluing, you can't say a rhyming word as a sounds-like clue, or any other similar way to try to get around these rules.

All the while, a partially random timer is running in the device, counting down with a series of beeps which get closer and closer together as time is running out. When time runs out, the opposing team of whoever is holding the device scores a point. That team also gets to make a single guess as the word that was being clued, and if they get it right they score an additional point.

The first team to reach seven points wins the game.

There are 10,000 words in the device, divided into 10 categories such as history. But in all the games I've played, people always just play the everything category, which uses all the words.

A catchphrase is a short phrase that is widely recognized and repeated.

While somewhat difficult to define strictly, they are very much a part of our culture, and a few examples make the concept obvious, if no less difficult to define:

• Here's looking at you, kid
• Say hello to my little friend
• I'm loving it
• Phone home
• Can you hear me now?
• May the force be with you
• What's up Doc?
• Just do it
• Great googly moogly
• We have met the enemy and he is us

They are, essentially, linguistic earworms, a free pass to a conversational turn, and a way to share cultural connections. These can last for generations (or longer; e.g., let them eat cake), or can pass in a flash (on fleek), can be quite long (But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?) or short (sad). Some just become part of the language; pass (as in to pass one's turn) was listed as a catchphrase coming to us from game shows in the 1995 Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, but probably does not especially hold that context for most people now. Likewise, a large portion of our language started out as colorful and slangish linguistic tricks; unmentionable, critter, zillion, burgle, google, tongue-tied, and a million others could be argued to be catchphrases when they first appeared, although suddenly popular words are sometimes called vogue words rather than catchphrases.

Catchphrases overlap significantly with a number of other categories; you'll have noticed that many of these are lyrics, slogans, and slang. Most are very much tied to context, which includes place; you may not recognize that a phrase is a catchphrase if you aren't part of the ingroup, although the rise of broadcast media has made the spread of catchphrases ever more universal and uniform, with many spreading quickly across the English-speaking world; at this point in history language barriers largely contain catchphrases, although as translation services improve this may not be the case much longer.