Overheard a writing teacher say dialogue should sound like a tennis match

I was sitting near a table at a coffee shop downtown where a writing teacher was coaching a student, and he said dialogue should feel like a tennis match with each line hitting back something unexpected. He gave an example where one character asks a simple question and the other responds with a completely unrelated observation about the weather. Has anyone else tried this approach to make their conversations feel more real?

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lee_butler7h ago

...but I was literally just texting my buddy Josh about this exact thing. He's been trying to write a short story and kept complaining his characters sound like robots reading a script. So he tried the whole tennis match thing where one character asks about dinner and the other goes 'did you see that weird bird on the porch?' It actually made the conversation feel way more real, like how people actually talk when they're not trying to get to the point. He said his beta readers finally stopped saying the dialogue felt stiff.