Meaning

The humor here is immediate: deja vu already means the feeling that something is happening again, so adding "all over again" is completely redundant. Yet that redundancy is the whole point. By doubling up the repetition, Berra actually intensifies the feeling he is describing. The listener laughs at the grammar and then realizes the phrase perfectly captures the exhausted, slightly absurd sensation of watching the same thing happen one more time. It is funnier than the correct version would ever be.

Context

Berra reportedly used this phrase to describe a moment in a baseball game when a familiar sequence of events seemed to be replaying itself. It quickly escaped the world of sports and entered general conversation, used whenever someone wants to name the eerie or tiresome experience of history repeating. Writers, commentators, and ordinary speakers borrowed it because it manages to be both a grammatical error and a more vivid expression of the feeling than a carefully constructed sentence would produce.

About the author

Yogi Berra was one of the most accomplished catchers in the history of professional baseball, spending the core of his career with the New York Yankees during a period of sustained success for the franchise. He was later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in recognition of his playing achievements. Over time, his fame broadened well beyond the sport itself. His stream of paradoxical and self-contradicting remarks, collected under the name Yogi-isms, gave him a second life as a kind of accidental philosopher beloved by fans of language and humor alike.