There's a particular kind of dialogue that almost always reads as false, that always sounds as if the writer ran out of steam.
It's sometimes called Asked and Answered. Or Asked to Answer. Or Prompting Dialogue. I like to call it Eliciting Dialogue.
It's a line of dialogue whose sole purpose is to elicit a response from the other character. The point of the exchange is not the exchange, but the response. It's a mark of laziness, or over-attachment to a comic line, or devotion to an agenda at the expense of character logic and verisimilitude.
Most of the time the writer has conceived line B before writing line A. They need to get in a bit of information, or reach a punch-line.
In such an exchange Character A is a tool (literally) to get to Character B's line.
We've all done it. It's one way a scene get's from here to there, one way to break a block or finish the shape of a scene. But we must always be on the look-out for such exchanges and they must be the first thing cut/altered in a revision.
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