running joke

plural running jokes

1. An ongoing joke, one that is regularly repeated or continued.

   Her obvious favoritism has become a running joke among the staff. A joke that I'm the butt of. She's at least twenty years older than me, not to mention married.

   2013, Colleen Hoover, This Girl, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   “I Love Lisa” opens with one of my favorite underappreciated running jokes from The Simpsons: the passive-aggressive, quietly contentious relationship of radio jocks Bill and Marty, whose mindless happy talk regularly gives way to charged exchanges that betray the simmering resentment and disappointment perpetually lingering just under the surface of their relationship.

   2012 August 5, Nathan Rabin, “TV: Review: THE SIMPSONS (CLASSIC): “I Love Lisa” (season 4, episode 15; originally aired 02/11/1993)”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 23 Oct 2013

   These deadpan repeated phrases that cannot quite decide whether they are part of a running joke or a half-abandoned philosophical dictum produce, as Michael Wood has argued, a comedy of the intellect that becomes a comedy of ignorance: […]

   2012, Laura Salisbury, Samuel Beckett, Edinburgh University Press, →ISBN, page 37

   Synonyms: running gag