In that scene no humour was needed whatsoever.
Puns and one-liners are something of a staple in many action movies and theyre certainly not uncommon to the superhero genre. Imo, theyre over-used and if thats your general complaint then Im with you. But you seem to single out the Can you drive stick? line as especially cringe-worthy. In the grand scheme, I dont think it is. Basically, you can take or leave its humor; the line, itself, efficiently conveys (in four words) important information: Batman expects Gordon to drive the Tumbler.
In thinking about bad one-liners, Id put Bad vibrations? from
STM or any number of jokes from
BF or B&
R well ahead of anything uttered in
BB.
Generally, I think Nolan was getting his footing with
BB and he resorted to the one-liners as safe, genre expectation. By
TDK, he was much more assured and the jokes were dialed back and more context appropriate.
But it was like Goyer felt he had to put some joke every x seconds. And, naturally, such formula felt forced.
Again, Im not sure how you can categorically single out Goyer for blame. For all we know, he was the voice of restraint and it was Nolan (or maybe the studio) who wanted to lighten things up in spots.
You quote Nietsche for this? Don't you think it's a little... what was the word you used...?
Apart from the phrase (which has become a simple term of reference), I didnt quote Nietzsche. Nor did Nolan. But there seems to be more than a coincidental connection between Ducards lesson to Bruce and the Nietzschian philosophy that supposedly inspired the Nazis. In other words, the allusion denotes a certain degree of intelligence with regard to themes. And if someone wanted to argue that
BB was guilty of poor writing, this wouldn't be the best example to cite.