Word.ws English Dictionary

sight gag

sight gag noun: a visually presented action or device which causes a humorous response without requiring any accompanying commentary or other speech.

Noun

sight gag (plural sight gags)

  1. (stage performance) A visually presented action or device which causes a humorous response without requiring any accompanying commentary or other speech.
    • Dragged suddenly before a formal dinner honoring the women's dean of Toledo University, he wowed his audience with a sight gag—he kissed the guest of honor.1947 October 31, Gene Handsaker, “Hollywood Sights and Sounds: Bob Hope”, in Prescott Evening Courier, retrieved 01 Oct 2012, page 2
    • In the good old ricky-tick days when movie directors wore riding breeches, a favorite cinematic sight gag was to reverse the film, which suddenly sent the actors waddling backwards through doors that closed behind them, putting their hats on instead of taking them off, and shoveling food out of...1969 June 28, “Cinema: Happy End”, in Time

Examples of sight gag in a sentence

  • In the opening sight gag, a guy in leisure wear shows up at his office only to find everyone in S&M clothes.2005 March 10, Virginia Heffernan, “TV Review: The Hollow Men—Four Well-Groomed Britons, Trying Hard to Be Naughty Boys”, in New York...
  • The sight gag had the psychiatrists roaring.2008 October, Paul Scott, “Was the Prozac revolution all in our heads?”, in Men's Health, volume 23, number 8, →ISSN, page 146:

Forms of sight gag

pluralsight gags

Questions about sight gag

What does sight gag mean?
Sight gag means a visually presented action or device which causes a humorous response without requiring any accompanying commentary or other speech.
How do you use sight gag in a sentence?
In the opening sight gag, a guy in leisure wear shows up at his office only to find everyone in S&M clothes.
What part of speech is sight gag?
Sight gag is a noun.
What is the plural of sight gag?
The plural of sight gag is sight gags.

Words near sight gag in the dictionary

  1. sight bite
  2. sight bites
  3. sight draft
  4. sight drafts
  5. sight for sore eyes
  6. sight gag
  7. sight gags
  8. sight glass
  9. sight glasses
  10. sight hound
  11. sight impaired

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sight gag (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “sight gag.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sight_gag. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.