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My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. —Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in The Castle
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When a mundane conversation goes bad. You're winding up a boring conversation, and throw in one last thing in there. And that one last thing was praise for Adolf Hitler, or a plan to kill the Mayor, or an offhand comment that you pick your nose, when you had been talking about options for where to eat dinner or something.
"So yeah, we'll just run out for pizza, catch a movie, maybe go out for a couple drinks, and lynch that bastard. Sound good?" |
Bonus points for the listener asking with a horrified tone "What was that last one again?" and the last harmless option before the horrifying one being repeated instead.
A common variation has one additional, harmless (but often comically inappropriate) item tacked on to the end of the list. This allows other characters to react in horror — to the wrong thing:
"So yeah, we'll just run out for pizza, catch a movie, murder my next door neighbor, and, if we have time, go skydiving." |
A more subtle trick is when the Squick is revealed by a change in the camera shot.
The inverse of Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking, where the mood is lightened by including something silly.
Compare Breathless Non-Sequitur, Weird Aside. Subtrope of The Last of These Is Not Like the Others.
When this trope name is taken literally, see: Oh Wait, This Is My Grocery List.
Advertising[]
- There is a commercial for Pay As You Go phones, where a cell phone from the 1980s and a pink modern cell phone are the proud parents, extolling the benefits of their new baby cell phone and how it is going to help people save money on their monthly talk, text, and data plans. And then they walk off screen to go raise some bars, if you know what I mean.
Anime and Manga[]
- Revolutionary Girl Utena uses the camera shot version of this. A character (Our protagonist, Utena) lying in bed has what seems like a meaningless monologue about lunch until the audience realizes the scene is establishing that the character is having (or just had) sex. Then it shows with whom she had the sex (Akio, who's more or less her principal...and the villain of the series...and she's fourteen years old) which is where the squick really comes in.
- Occurs several times in the Elfen Lied manga. The most notable example involves the employees of the secret lab thing making idle chit chat as their superior (who seems a genuinely likable, if eccentric, person with a love for candy sticks). The final panel reveals that whilst the coworkers are chit-chatting and eating candy, a seemingly endless train of completely uncensored dismembered diclonii torsos — complete with dangling entrails — is trundling past the window. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
- Ryoko Asakura complains about how Haruhi Suzumiya is not doing anything interesting and talks to Kyon about whether or not it is alright to enact a change to get a result even if it is dangerous right before trying to murder Kyon with a knife just to see how Haruhi would react, all without changing the pitch in her voice.
- It's worse in the "genderbent version", where it is implied that Asakura intends to rape Kyonko.
- Parodied in one episode of Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei when discussing how people mention very important (and urgent) things in a casual tone. Examples included: "You're all held back for another year, see you tomorrow"; your parents explaining to your neighbor that you were an accidental child; finding out that your parents divorced last week, not bothering telling you and act like it's no big deal. The entire class decides to shout out meaningless trivialities in overly dramatic manners. Chiri decides it looks fun and joins in...By revealing she's been doping her sister with illegal injections in an overly dramatic manner, not only subverting the intent of the exercise but also revealing that doing so is apparently is a meaningless triviality to her.
- Fullmetal Alchemist gives us this...magnificent example. For bonus points, they're all true.
- In one episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ritsuko has to make emergency modifications at one of the three main computer cores. While Misato is trying to chat with her, she is cramped inside the computer, asking for several tools during their conversation. While they talk about their past, Ritsuko first asks for a wench and then a data-pad, and then returns to her electric screwdriver. And without any explanation she picks up a circular saw and starts tearing away a large part of metal plating inside the computer core.
- The English Gag Dub of Crayon Shin-chan has Shin's mother saying "You'll just waste your money on kiddy crap like trading cards, and video games, and crystal meth".
- Another episode had Ai's bodyguard having a team search a lake for a kappa, but instead found "600 catfish, 1400 minnows, a Loch Ness Monster, Penny's sister Caitlin, and 500,000 copies of Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time".
- In Death Note, L does this, all without so much as looking away from the evidence received from the tape sent by "Kira".
L: "Hair, food crumbs...oh, and by the way, if I die in the next few days, your son is Kira." |
- In the Girls Love manga Hanjuku Joshi, Chitose is out jogging when she bumps into her teacher Ran doing the same. She asks Ran a bunch of innocent jogging-related questions, and then concludes with "Does Sensei insert her finger when doing lecherous acts with girls?" Ran carelessly answers "Yes!" before she can process what the question is.
- In A Certain Scientific Railgun, two lab employees are the discussing the health of the latest Misaka clone, before ordering her to clean up about a dozen identicle-to-her corpses, just recently murdered.
Comedy[]
- The Pete and Brian sketch "Knock Knock" takes the classic "Priest, Rabbi and Shaman walk into a bar" joke and somehow turns it into being about how someone's Dad molested them within the space of a few sentences.
A priest, a rabbi, and a shaman walk into a bar! |
- You might know this sketch from AMV Hell 4.
Comic Books[]
- Ramona listing off all the teas in her pantry in the first book.
...Green Tea, Green Tea with lemon, Green Tea with Honey and Lemon, Liver Disaster, Ginger with honey... |
- Incidentally, according to Word of God, these are all real teas.
Fan Works[]
B'loody Mary was standing there. 'Hajimemashite gurl.' she said happily (she spex Japanese so do i. dat menz 'how do u do' in japanese). 'BTW Willow that fucking poser got expuld. she failed al her klasses and she skepped math.' (an: RAVEN U FUKIN SUK! FUK U!) |
- Someone decided to title their fic Lullabies, Anal Rape and Dental Hygiene. Said elements sadly don't even show up in that order.
- I can't believe I'm saying this but...link please.
- Thrill to your exploits. I'm not 21 yet, and the Birthdate Verificaion page on adultfanfiction looks awfully official, so I'm not sure if it works. See here for more information/a link that's not this one.
- Chapter one of The Exigence is called "Lights! Camera! Apocalypse!"
- Xaldin's description of Saix before he was wimpified in Those Lacking Spines is "stoic, collected, and mildly psychopathic with a sadistic twist".
- Chapter Eight of Free as the Wind has this gem, between the Hero of Time and Hero of Light:
Twilight Princess Link (about the two games' Zeldas): "One's blonde, and one's a brunette. One wears pink, one wears purple. One's got boobs, and one's still probably in a training bra." |
- In Trainings Camp, we get this gem:
"A kiss...? Just a kiss...? That was all? Ludwig thought it would be something like 'No more training!' or 'Pasta for lunch every day!' or 'Do me on the kitchen table now!'" |
- The Avatar: The Last Airbender fic "As It Should Be" features a rather upbeat example.
"It had been a rather simple plan: to clean Appa, buy some fruit, save the world, grow up, marry Katara, and live happily ever after with his new family." |
- In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, after the Yakuza Princess comments that she learned calligraphy because it's an important thing to know in "the business":
Haruhi: What else did you learn? Back to the beginning...I know you mentioned that you had some martial arts training, too? |
- This Axis Powers Hetalia Kink Meme fill, where Canada is complaining about America; “Never thinks about the consequences, whether it's picking fights, or spending, or eating, or invading his neighbor...”
- Also on the Hetalia kinkmeme is a Sucker Punch fusion, in which Arthur is showing new guy Alfred around and a non-funny version of BEMS shows up:
“Kitchens,” Arthur says. “Then the next room’s the canteen. [...] Toilets,” Arthur says, poking a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of where the washrooms might allegedly be. “Showers, too. Sometimes the dodgier orderlies spend time there. If you want something from the outside world, suck their cock. They bring you whatever you want if you do.” |
He realized it was really a lovely Sunday morning. The sky was clear, with only some little clouds showing here and there. It was getting warmer now, springtime was near. He had a nice little house, with two well furnished bedrooms, a comfortable bed, a simple but welcoming living room, coffee waiting for him in his convenient kitchen and a dead body at his front door. Everything was perfect. |
- Ichigo does this in the third chapter of The First Guardian while talking to his Zanpakuto about Rukia:
"It's basic Girl 101, you don't ask a girl for her age, or weight, or number of drinks needed for a successful date-rape." |
- Calvin several times in Calvin and Hobbes: The Series
- Describing the "lady things" his mother would shop for in :
"You know, makeup, lipstick, whips; that sort of thing." |
Calvin: Nice day today for a game of Calvin Ball. |
- Turnabout Storm: Phoenix's list of "unprofessionalism" he has faced in court.
Film — Animated[]
- Madagascar: King Julien complains about the Fossa.
King Julien: "The Fossa. They're always annoying us by trespassing, interrupting our parties, and ripping our limbs off-" |
- The Great Mouse Detective shows Fidget's list of things to get for the plan: "Tools. Gears. Girl. Uniforms."
- In Beauty and the Beast, The Beast asks Cogsworth for advice on what to give Belle. Cogsworth replies "Flowers, chocolates...promises you don't intend to keep..."
- Doubly awesome considering that David Ogden Stiers, Cogsworth's voice actor, ad-libbed this end to the line just to be funny. Expecting to get a laugh and then re-record it, the director loved it and kept it in.
Film — Live-Action[]
- WOPR in WarGames.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME? |
- This doubles as its own Crowning Moment of Holy Shit.
- Loretta in Moonstruck, making her weekly confession: "Twice I used the name of the Lord in vain, once I slept with my fiance's brother, and once I bounced a check at the liquor store. But that was an accident really."
- Valentine in Mirror Mask: "My mother always said, 'It's a dog-eat-dog world, son. You get them before they get you. Eat your greens. Don't embarrass me in front of the neighbors. I think it would be best if you just leave and please never come back again!' (pause) She wasn't even my real mother. She bought me from a man..."
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Willy Wonka starts to sing (badly) about their impending boat voyage, which ramps up and up until he's screaming about the gates of hell.
- There's a bit in The Aristocrats (which is Squick in its own right) where Sarah Silverman shares her "true story" of working in a theater troupe like the eponymous Aristocrats. Then she shares her account of rehearsing with Joe Franklin, a legendary vaudevillian agent who's been glorified throughout the work...but as the tale goes on, she eventually reveals, "Joe Franklin raped me."
- Hell, Sarah Silverman's shtick in general often involves this.
- In The Mask, when the eponymous character is being searched by the police. The items: really big sunglasses, Nerf ball, bike horn, small-mouthed bass, bowling pin, mousetrap, rubber chicken, funny eyeball glasses ("I've never seen those before in my life!"), and a bazooka. ((calmly) "I have a permit for that.")
- The cherry-on-top: a picture of the arresting lieutenant's wife, in lingerie with the words, "Call me lover" hand-written on the bottom.
The Mask: Uh-oh! |
- In The Waterboy, a flashback scene has Coach Klein pouring his heart out to his mother on the phone after a big loss for his team. The camera pans down as he speaks to show that the phone cord is unplugged and Klein is wearing high heels.
- American Pie: After several mundane (and utterly boring) stories from band camp, we are treated to this:
Michelle: "This one time, at band camp, I stuck a flute up my pussy!" |
- So that's how that sentence ends!
- Of course in this instance it's more accurate to call this Bread Eggs Milk Squee. If you're a friendless 14-year-old.
- From The Princess Bride:
Prince Humperdinck: Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work, but I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped. |
- The scene in Red Eye where Jack reveals his occupation counts, not so much in that it's a list of things, but because it comes up in the middle of an until that point very pleasant conversation.
- From the DVD commentary on Kick Ass:
"That's the Marc Quinn blood head, that's a Damien Hirst spot painting, that's a kid killing a man..." |
- Inverted with Austin Powers' list of things to do before (he) dies:
|
- The Wayne's World films contain a few examples of this trope. Almost all of Ed O Neill's character Glenn's dialogue in both films, in fact. From the second film:
Glenn: So Wayne, I hear you're putting on some kind of concert. That's good. People need to be entertained, they need the distraction. I wish to God that someone would be able to block out the voices in my head for five minutes, the voices that scream, over and over again: "Why do they come to me to die? Why do they come to me to die?" |
- Or, also in the second movie, from super-roadie Del:
Del: So there I am, in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, at about 3 o'clock in the morning, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass, or Ozzy wouldn't go on stage that night. So, Jeff Beck pops his head 'round the door, and mentions there's a little sweets shop on the edge of town. So — we go. And — it's closed. So there's me, and Keith Moon, and David Crosby, breaking into that little sweets shop, eh. Well, instead of a guard dog, they've got this bloody great big Bengal tiger. I managed to take out the tiger with a can of mace, but the shop owner and his son...that's a different story altogether. I had to beat them to death with their own shoes. Nasty business, really. But, sure enough, I got the M&Ms, and Ozzy went on stage and did a great show. |
- Also from the second movie, one scene has Wayne chatting with a Swedish secretary. He impresses her with his knowledge of Sweden obtained while writing a report in eighth grade, and then tells her how the next day at school, he had diarrhea on the trampoline in gym class.
- The song "Chromaggia" in Repo! The Genetic Opera starts as a sad-but-harmless Italian opera song. Then Mag switches to English, declares "Come take these eyes, I would rather be blind!" and tears out her own eyes onstage.
- Played straight in The Other Guys due to the fact that the police chief Mauch (played by Michael Keaton) is holding down a second job at Bed Bath N Beyond:
"First up: the new bath mats are here. Second: there's a serial rapist at Crown Heights...sorry, that's from my other job, ignore that. No wait, don't ignore it, especially if you live in Crown Heights. Walk in pairs." |
- In Cruel Intentions, Casanova Sebastian Valmont is temporarily forced to help out in an old people's home against his will. While sitting in an armchair and chatting idly with Ms. Sugarman, an elderly sufferer of Senile Dementia, he casually tells her that earlier in the day they played backgammon and that she won three times before adding "And I fucked your daughter." Ms. Sugarman says "What?" to which Sebastian answers with a Cat Smile, "I said would you care for some water?"
- In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun comes home and asks his friend Ed if they've had any calls. Ed answers that Shaun's girlfriend Liz phoned to make sure that Shaun had made plans to eat out, before adding "...then your mum phoned to ask if I wanted to eat her out."
- Blues Brothers: Jake's personal effects, handed back to him after three years in prison. "...One hat, black. One Timex digital watch, broken. One unused prophylactic. One soiled..."
- The Addams Family: As Morticia is doing inventory of the various sacks from a cupboard:
Morticia: Uncle Knick-Knack's winter wardrobe. Uncle Knick-Knack's summer wardrobe. Uncle Knick-Knack... |
- Pretty much every time an Addams starts listing something innocuous, they'll end here.
- In one of the Airplane! films, a client asks the airport shopkeeper for "Time, Newsweek and the third time bomb from the left?"
- Sadly, any of the film depictions of teen boys attempting to purchase condoms are largely more of the same... but in 1985, one can buy plutonium in any corner drugstore.
Literature[]
- Jamaica Kinkaid's poem "Girl" has a mother advising her daughter:
"This is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child" |
- Appears in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis numerous times, to great comedic and disturbing effect. A fine example:
Bateman: "I've heard of post-California cuisine. In fact, I've eaten it. No baby vegetables? Scallops in burritos? Wasabi crackers? Am I on the right track? And by the way did anyone ever tell you that you look exactly like Garfield but run over and skinned and then someone threw an ugly Ferragamo sweater over you before they rushed you to the vet? Fusilli? Olive oil on Brie?" |
- Mark Twain's The War Prayer, (the prayer itself), starts out like a standard, pious prayer, but quickly goes wrong when the petitioner prays to "help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds". A bit of an inversion, though; although the beginning and end of the prayer are normal, the bulk of it is completely twisted.
- In The Austere Academy Klaus's teacher makes her students measure various "ordinary objects: a frying pan, a picture frame, the skeleton of a cat."
- Of Cafe Salmonella (a restaurant that serves only salmon dishes), the narrator has this to say: "There's nothing particularly wrong with salmon of course, but, like caramel candy, strawberry yogurt, and liquid carpet cleaner, if you eat too much of it, you are not going to enjoy your meal."
- In Desperation by Stephen King, a state trooper (who turns out to be possessed by Tak) casually inserts the words "I'm going to kill you" into the middle of the Miranda rights he recites to a couple he arrested. And he does just that to the husband several minutes later.
- Also by Stephen King, this trope is the crux of the short story The Man Who Loved Flowers (published in the anthology Night Shift).
- In one chapter of his incomplete autobiography The First Third, Neal Cassady casually relates three episodes from his childhood and the lessons he learned from them. One was about thawing frozen hands with cold water rather than hot, the second was about using the bathroom, and the third was about how he just barely escaped being raped by a strange man on the way home from school by attacking him and running for his life. Much of the book reads like this, actually, with casual examined inserts about poverty and abuse slipped in between detailed descriptions of places and people he knew.
- One of the first things we hear about Lisbeth Salander, Anti-Hero of The Millennium Trilogy, is that she was once asked by her boss at the security and investigation company she was working for to prepare a standard report on a researcher for a pharmaceutical company. The report was supposed to take about a week but dragged on for over a month, with her ignoring repeated reminders. She then silently and without warning handed him a report that, without changing tone at all, segued from the usual information about the subject's life and background to the fact that he had visited a child prostitute. She had pictures. And an interview with the girl.
- A Study in Emerald contains a really creepy example. Our protagonist describes the three plays that make up The Strand Players' performance: a wacky Mistaken Identity comedy, a melodrama about a starving urchin who's Too Good for This Sinful Earth, and a historical epic about the Old Ones awakening and conquering humanity, with the human hero welcoming them and beating to death the one man who tries to resist. And the entire audience, including our protagonists, loudly applauds all three. It's this exact moment when you realize how completely alien this Alternate History is.
- Also by the same author,Only the End of the World Again features an overtly long example. Albeit it's more Bread, Squick, Eggs, Squick, Milk:
There was a note under the door from my landlady. It said that I owed her for two week's rent. It said that all the answers were in the Book of Revelations. It said that I made a lot of noise coming home in the early hours of this morning, and she'd thank me to be quieter in future. It said that when the Elder Gods rose up from the ocean, all the scum of the Earth, all the non-believers, all the human garbage and the wastrels and deadbeats would be swept away, and the world would be cleansed by ice and deep water. It said that she felt she ought to remind me that she had assigned me a shelf in the refrigerator when I arrived and she'd thank me if in the future I'd keep to it. |
Aelius Sejanus, the Praetorian Prefect, whose influence I mentioned earlier; now I shall lay out his origin, his character, and the crime with which he set out to seize power. |
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy starts like so:
At eight o' clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn't feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash. |
- It goes on, including lines like "The word bulldozer wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with. The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. He stared at it. "Yellow," he thought, and stomped back to his bedroom to get dressed." He eventually gets the picture and tries to stop the bulldozers from demolishing his house for a bypass.
- From Life the Universe And Everything:
On the way back (the people of Krikkit) sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms. |
- "This Is the Title of This Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times in the Story Itself" by David Moser:
"This sentence is telling you that Billy is blond and blue-eyed and American and twelve years old and strangling his mother." |
- From The Meaning of Liff:
Naction: The 'n' with which cheap advertising copywriters replace the word 'and' (as in 'fish 'n' chips', 'mix 'n' match', 'assault 'n' battery') [....] |
anyway, i really need this job, which means i can't do things like yell or pin my stupid name tag upside down or wear jeans that have rips in them or sacrifice puppies in the toy aisle. [sic] |
- The special nature-bending libraries of Discworld, mean that "the three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the date last shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality."
- Count and Countess provides this gem:
The bailey was exquisitely decorated: I had lights all over the brush and lutenists sitting up on the palisades, I had the best of the sweet soups served there on the clothed table, I had my pageboys, five of them, hoisted up on pikes, and yet I was abandoned by all of my companions, even Istvan! |
- In Death series: Purity In Death artfully describes Asshole Victim Chadwick Fitzhugh like this..."His hobbies were travel, fashion, gambling, and seducing young boys."
Live Action TV[]
- Mastery of the form is frequently demonstrated by The Kids in The Hall.
- "To good friends!" "To good times!" "And to ritualistic murder..." all:"TO REG!"
- "Whole lotta milk-a. Bil Bev Devoe. Your mother's cheatin' on me."
- There's also a sketch in which an actress accepting an award actually does thank Hitler.
- The West Wing: President Bartlet's rambling speech to his psychologist ends in mentioning that his father hates him.
- In Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a brainwashed Lee begins making daily to-do lists. One of these lists contains, amongst mundane items, the entry "Shoot Billy".
- On an episode of America's Dumbest Criminals, a man's house has been robbed, and he calls the police. He lists the various things that have been stolen: his wife's jewelry, his computer terminal, his TV, his VCR, his bag of dope...
- Daphne Moon in Frasier has a tendency to recall traumatic or unsettling details about her childhood and family life in a cheery, persistently upbeat tone at the climax of long, rambling stories.
- One excellent (and personal favorite) example—she decides to impart a lesson about generosity to the brothers Crane by telling them about an encounter with a poor old man on the street. Long story short, she helpfully tells him, "that's not how you spell 'fellatio.'"
- A food-serving alien under the control of a demonic figure in the Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet" is listing the menu of a space-station canteen when it casually mentions "The Beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war against God...Apologies. I meant I hope you enjoy your meal".
- The First Doctor serial "The Romans":
Vicki: Oh something else I forgot to tell you: I think I've poisoned Nero. |
- In "Closing Time", regarding Craig's infant son:
The Doctor: Yes, he likes that...Alfie. Though personally, he likes to be called Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All. [cue ominous musical sting, then the soundtrack continues normally] |
- This example is a bit odd, as it leads directly to a Weird Aside in which The Doctor reveals that he speaks baby.
- In Gilmore Girls, the episode about Spring Break had the following exchange between Rory (the daughter) and Lorelai (the Mom):
Rory: It was interesting, you know. We sat on the beach, went to a club, watched the Power of Myths, Paris and I kissed... |
- Bob Fossil's frequent examples of this in The Mighty Boosh. One of the best: The Hitcher's massive thumb's backstory, related while driving through the dark and ominous Forest of Death. His long and cheery reminiscence culminates with him smashing in the head of the shaman that helped him, just to get out of the bill.
- To be fair, it was 5 Euros. And you won't see penny one from me, boy!
- The immortal "Lumberjack Song" from Monty Python's Flying Circus devolves from a celebration of outdoorsy pursuits to cross-dressing, to the dismay of the chorus.
- In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Andrew went to the butcher shop and ordered a bunch of pieces of steak, some pork chops, eight quarts of pigs' blood (which he needed for an evil magical ritual), and a toothbrush. The butcher reacted with a scowl to one of these items, saying, "This is a butcher shop. We don't sell toothbrushes."
- At one point, Mayor Richard Wilkins III is shown holding a checklist containing several mundane tasks for a mayor (meet with PTA, etc.) with "Become Invincible" thrown in.
- And of course Principal Snyder.
This place has quite a reputation. Suicide, missing persons, spontaneous cheerleader combustion. You can't put up with that. |
- Angel: Doyle's ex-wife Harriet prepares to marry into a family of apparently humanized, peaceful demons who nonetheless make, um, unusual wedding preparations. Harriet's prospective father-in-law reads from the to-do list: "First we greet the man of the hour. Then we drink. We bring out the food. Then we drink. Then comes the stripper, darts, and then we have the ritual eating of the first husband's brains, and then charades." The demon family, of course, objects to the charades.
- The Crank Yankers intro. A shopping list on a refrigerator reads: milk—eggs—drugs. Trope Namer. Sorta.
- This is pretty much the formula for every call they make; start earnestly well-intentioned, and then gradually (or abruptly) take the call Off the Rails.
- Scrubs, JD's The More You Know daydream:
JD: You've had a tough day at the office, so you come home, make yourself some dinner, smother your kids, pop in a movie, maybe have a drink. It's fun, right? Wrong. Don't smother your kids.' |
- Elliot is pretty prone to this. "Maybe we can do something a little less girly, like bowling or paint ball or Fight Club..."
- Many of her stories of friends and relatives seem normal enough, but then end with the subject abruptly hanging themselves. Her friends have come to expect this.
- A Little Britain sketch has a tour guide of a rural area enliven his stories of the place by pointing out where he and his wife had their first kiss, and go on to tell where they first had oral and anal sex as well.
- In Modern Family episode 4, after a speech by Haley's boyfriend revealing his Hidden Depths, her family encourages him to play one of the songs he's written. The innocently titled "In the Moonlight", which he says he wrote for Haley, draws them in with an innocuous first verse before becoming blatant Intercourse with You.
- On the season one episode of Titus called "Mom's Not Nuts," Titus names off the three things that will get you out of a mental hospital: "good behavior, a clean psychiatric record...an axe." (the third of which is what Titus's mom used).
- Titus used this trope a lot, especially when his mother (a bipolar schizophrenic) is referenced. A season one episode has the cast eating a meal prepared by his mother. He lists his favorite dishes prepared by his mother:
Christopher (obviously under the influence of drugs): Nobody makes turkey dinner like my mom. Those little pilgrim cookies with the little chocolate suits, homemade candy, candied yams, yam covered ham, cranberry jam in the shape of a can...(takes a bite of food, and then spits something into his palm)...spit a pill into my hand. |
- In How I Met Your Mother, Ted recounts his attempt to get his upstairs neighbors to stop "playing the bagpipes," and then losing his nerve when he finds out they're an old couple: "I didn't have the heart to tell them to stop, so I talked with them for a while, had a hard candy, nodded politely at some racist comments, and then I left." A bit of an inversion since Ted, not the neighbors, is the one uncomfortable with the squick part.
- In the episode "Chain of Yelling", each character is giving Marshall advice on how to deal with his boss, who screams at him when angry. Lilly's advice starts off as a kind, kindergarten teacher approach to things, then ends with Marshall (actually Lilly pretending to be Marshall in a fantasy scene) and his boss talking about nailing his wife
- In the episode "Homewreckers" where Ted buys a house that needs a lot of fixing, his contractor mentions the expected: Mold, vermin, and water damage, before mentioning a hobo.
- In Fringe, Walter's lists of required materials for his various experiments are either this trope, Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking, or some other comic mixture of the variously esoteric and the incongruously mundane.
- Baseball, Root Beer, Darts, Atom Bombs. Little Green Men
- In Babylon 5, episode "Messages from Earth", Marcus Cole is beginning a fairly standard status report but when he notices that Ivanova is not paying attention to it he starts to derail it: "There's always the threat of an attack by say, a giant space dragon. The kind that eats the sun once every 30 days. It's a nuisance, but what can you expect from reptiles? Did I mention that my nose is on fire? And that I have 15 wild badgers living in my trousers?" [Ivanova glares at him] "I'm sorry would you prefer ferrets?"
- In Seinfeld's "The Yada Yada", Jerry's love interest Beth (Debra Messing) appears to agree with him on the superfluity of dentists...only to add that dentists were worse than "the blacks and the Jews". Afterwards, when Elaine asks Jerry where Beth is, he answers "she went to get her head shaven".
- Taxi:
Jim: Now come on, Heather, what's in the brownies? |
- Phoebe Buffay's back story speech in the first episode of Friends
Phoebe: You're welcome. I remember when I first came to this city. I was fourteen. My mom had just killed herself and my step-dad was back in prison, and I got here, and I didn't know anybody. And I ended up living with this albino guy who was, like, cleaning windshields outside port authority, and then he killed himself, and then I found aromatherapy. So believe me, I know exactly how you feel. |
- Phoebe uses this one fairly often.
Phoebe: I also have to find a new video store, a new bank, new adult book store, a new grocery store... |
Charlie Brooker: Which isn't to say the world itself is horrible. It's still full of sunshine and flowers and cuddly creatures you'd like to have sex with, like this rabbit. Cor, look at this rabbit... |
- The A-Team: In the Season 4 episode "Members Only", Murdock starts giving Hannibal a tour of a country club (Murdock goes there often as his psychiatrist's guest) and then discovers a plot point:
Murdock (sounding posh): The tennis courts are night-lit, there's an extra putting green there, that's the front nine, and that's Faceman chasing someone into the rough. * cut to Face running after someone* |
- The Psych episode "An Evening With Mr. Yang" does this with the pictures in the Psych office. Picture of Gus, picture of Shawn, picture of Gus and Shawn, TERRIFIED GAGGED VICTIM.
- The "Timeslides" episode of Red Dwarf has this lovely excerpt from the diary of one Adolf Hitler:
Kryten: I'll switch to translation mode...Stop milk, pay papers, invade Czechoslovakia! |
Parker: When you think of it, there are many ways to die besides on a plane. Car crash, electrocution, drowning, auto-erotic asphyxiation. |
- Glee:
Finn: Kids are busier than when you went here. We've got homework, football, teen pregnancy, lunch... |
- Suite Life On Deck: "I'm tired of you always putting me down, being rude to me, and putting live poisonous animals under my pillow while I sleep"
- Community:
Jeff: Yes, and I'm hoping that our friendship will yield certain advantages: academic guidance, moral support, every answer to every test for every one of the classes I'm taking... |
- There is another series of Saturday Night Live sketches that basically revolves around this trope. It features four men in a bar (or a car, in a recent one) who tell gradually more disturbing tales (all of them treating the stories as perfectly normal events) about where they were when they heard a popular song (such as "Danny's Song," "Garden Party," "To Be With You," and "Breakfast At Tiffany's"), culminating in them committing some unsettling atrocity in whatever setting they occupy.
- The first one on the season 32 episod hosted by Rainn Wilson ended with the quartet holding everyone in the bar at gunpoint, a la the gun-toting couple from Pulp Fiction.
- The second one on the last episode of season 34 hosted by Zach Braff ended with the men stripping in short pants.
- The third one on the season 33 episode hosted by Ashton Kutcher ended with the men dressing up as The Village People and dancing to "YMCA".
- The fourth one on the season 34 episode hosted by Paul Rudd had Jason Sudeikis's character finding a gun in the glove compartment and wondering if it's loaded. The gun goes off and hits Bill Hader's character instantly. Everyone laughs.
- The fifth one on the season 34 episode hosted by Bradley Cooper appears to take place at a bar during someone's wedding (the dialog makes it sound like the four guys are losing their friend to a controlling wife) but at the end...It reveals that they're at a funeral...and they've been drinking over the coffin and they are also the pallbearers and accidentally drop the coffin as they carry it.
- The sixth (and so far, last one) on the season 35 episode hosted by Ryan Philippe revealed that all four men are Tea Party members protesting against Barack Obama.
- One Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode had John Munch give a strange set of statements, "Yeah, and I want the troops home, the Kyoto Protocol signed, and a Tijuana oil job from Miss February." to a high school girl. He might have been playing up some I Take Offense to That Last One to the "old" part of being called a Dirty Old Man.
- Target Women:
The next time words fail you in trying to describe your genitalia, just turn to the world of nature: my chia pet, my fern, my gentle alpaca, my sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi. |
- Once Upon a Time, Rumpelstiltskin uses this with Belle.
"You will serve me my meals, and you will clean the Dark Castle... You will dust my collection and launder my clothing... You will fetch me fresh straw when I'm spinning at the wheel... OH! And you will skin the children I hunt. For their pelts."
"...That one was a quip. Not serious!" *giggles* |
Magazines[]
- In one of the Doctor Who Magazine "Space-Time Telegraph" spoof news columns, it was reported that World Distributors would be releasing a Torchwood Annual (a parody of World's Doctor Who annuals of the seventies; aimed at very young kids, and apparently written by people who'd once had the series described to them). Amongst the features listed were "Where's Owen?"; "Gwen's Spacey Space Quiz"; and "Jack and Ianto's Stopwatch Game".
Music[]
- "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Hardware Store" includes a long list of items that can be found at the eponymous establishment—including, apparently, "automatic circumcisers."
- Don't forget the matching salt 'n' pepper shakers.
- "Good Old Days". Presented as the sentimental nostalgic ramblings of the singer about his Norman Rockwell-style childhood, every verse ends with psychopathic assault against some innocent.
- "Why Does This Always Happen To Me?", when Al talks about disturbing things happening around him without those things being the concern of the verse.
- "I Remember Larry" recounts several pranks made upon the singer and the people of his town, which start out innocuous enough (okay, so the Ben-Gay in the jock-strap is kind of mean), and descends into somewhat less harmless ideas ("You know I couldn't help but laugh/Even though he treated me like slime/Remember when he cut my car in half?/Well, he really got me good that time!") and ends with the singer reminiscing cheerfully about his brutal murder of Larry, promptly followed by the disposal of the corpse. Funny song, mostly.
- Al's parody of "Complicated," which ends with the singer describing all of the problems that came after he decapitated himself on a roller coaster. (It was "quite a drag.")
- "You Don't Love Me Anymore", when Al casually—and sometimes nostalgically—recounts the various obscene and alarming actions made against him by, ostensibly, his girlfriend ("Why did you disconnect the brakes on my car? That kind of thing is hard to ignore").
- "Do I Creep You Out?" Which opens up as a sweet love song and keeps to the sweet tune while the singer confesses all the creepy, stalkerish things he has done to the subject of his affections (Taking her gum out of the garbage, following her home from work).
- Then there's also one of his older works, "Melanie", in which he romantically and passionately pleads for the girl of his dreams to finally pay attention to him and wonders brokenheartedly why she won't, especially when he recounts all the stalker-tastic things he's been doing around/in/near her apartment (and her). ("She lived across the street on the fifteenth floor of the Gilmore building/I saw her in the shower reaching for some soap/I knew she had to be the girl for me/And to think I probably never would have found her/If I hadn't bought that telescope"). And the telescope is just the beginning. ("How can you ignore me/When you know that I can't live without you?/I have to go through your garbage/Just to learn more about you)
- And of course "One More Minute", a nice swinging doo-wop number..."So I pulled your name out of my rolodex/and tore all of our pictures in two/and I burned down the malt-shop where we used to go/just because it reminds me of youuuuu"
- Aw, hell, why don't we just sum it up by saying "every single love song Weird Al has ever written (with the possible exception of 'Airline Amy')"
- Used long before by Tom Lehrer, in songs like My Home Town (which begins with idyllic reminiscences of his home town and quickly slides into recalling "the man who took a knife/and monogrammed his wife") or Be Prepared which exhorts Boy Scouts to be prepared for all situations...such as smoking dope and pimping out their own sisters.
- Don't forget 'I Hold Your Hand In Mine', which contains the lyrics "My joy would be complete, dear/If only you were here/But still I keep your hand/As a precious souvenir."
- Not to mention "I hold your hand in mine, dear/I press it to my lips/I take a healthy bite from your dainty fingertips".
- His song "The Old Dope Peddler" sings admirably of the cornerstone of any neighborhood, the Heroin Dealer.
- "I Wanna Go Back To Dixie" does this as well. It's mostly an almost sweet, happy song about wanting to go back home...but it's after he includes the line "Ol' times are not forgotten/Whuppin' slaves and selling cotton" that It Gets Worse.
- "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" starts off like a lovely ode to springtime and young love, but when he suddenly starts the chorus, the song takes a major left turn into this trope, along with some Soundtrack Dissonance due to the song still being sung the same way, despite the lyrics.
- Don't forget 'I Hold Your Hand In Mine', which contains the lyrics "My joy would be complete, dear/If only you were here/But still I keep your hand/As a precious souvenir."
- "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton starts as a slice-of-life love story where the nerdy narrator fails to attract the girl he loves. It ends with him returning home as a cyborg Mad Scientist and turning her into his robot bride (or rather, it ends with him daydreaming about it; it's implied that most of the song was the narrator's fantasy).
- JoCo loves this trope. "Better", "Betty and Me", and "I Crush Everything" all turn creepy partway through.
- Don't forget about "Re: Your Brains" which starts with the simple conversation, "Heya Tom, it's Bob from the office down the hall. Good to see you, buddy. How've you been? Things have been okay for me except that I'm a zombie now." The entire song is basically a mixture of soul-draining office lingo and a desire to munch on BRAINS!
- Stephen Lynch's "Best Friend's Song" starts off as friendly telling of the differences among friends, and decends into a confession of wanting to take part in violent sex with the other friend's pubescent sister.
- Stephen Lynch's whole career is built on that trope.
- "Like a Boss" by The Lonely Island is a list of events in the eponymous boss's average day at work. The events start out mundane ("talk to corporate, approve memos...") but grow increasingly disturbing and improbable as the song goes on, eventually ending with him turning into a jet, bombing the Russians, and flying into the sun. The person reviewing the boss correctly points out that he "chops [his] balls and die[s]" every day.
- But he does not suck his own dick every day.
- "After Party" is sort of a Spiritual Sequel to the above, where the narrator describes being caught in a cycle of living a lifestyle of debauchery, giving it up, then falling back into his old habits again — habits that start out with mundane things like drinking and partying but eventually involve drinking snake blood and slithering in the dirt or losing his hand in a game of craps. They even lampshade the similarities, since both songs refer to having sex with giant fish in sewers.
- Tim Minchin's song "If I Didn't Have You" features a claim that love grows with time, "like a flower, or a mushroom, or a guinea pig, or a vine, or a sponge, or bigotry...or a banana."
- Minchin has an entire song devoted to this trope: "If You Really Loved Me", which follows its title line with "you'd let me video you while you wee" and also includes this pearler:
We go together like crackers and Brie |
- Minchin's poem "Angry (Feet)" quickly descends into this as the somewhat shy narrative becomes marked with shouted expletives and Freudian slips, revealing that the narrator is a recovering mental patient with a hair-trigger temper, a much-despised family, and a love of guns and porn. The whole thing concludes with the point of the poem...this:
And my (QUACK!) Doctor would be proud |
- The Lemon Demon song "Ode to Crayola" begins as a cute tribute song to goofily-named Crayola crayons. Then it turns weird:
I'm gonna rise at dawn, with no clothes on, and color on my skin |
- The song "Diane" by Hüsker Dü surely qualifies. The first verse:
Hey little girl, wanna go for a ride? |
- The tone of The Decemberists' "July, July!" abruptly changes in the first verse:
"There is a road that meets the road that goes to my house |
- Also "The Chimbley Sweep", which starts as a tragic song about the hard life of, well, a chimney sweep, and suddenly veers into Shotacon-esque Bawdy Song territory in the final verse:
"O lonely urchin," the widow cried |
- And "Yankee Bayonet":
"Heart-carved tree-trunk, Yankee bayonet, a sweetheart left behind" |
- "Los Angeles, I'm Yours" starts out being about how wonderful Los Angeles is, and then starts talking about "the smell of burnt cocaine, the dolour and decay". Also, in the second verse:
"You ladies pleasant and demure |
- The Decemberists are the kings of squick in their songs in GENERAL. May I direct you to The Rake's Song.
"Charlotte I buried after feeding her foxglove |
- Not to mention the last verse of the same song, wherein the narrator insisted that killing his three children doesn't really bother him at all.
- "Nothing But Sunshine" by Atmosphere starts out discussing the narrator's troubled childhood and how he has developed into a well-adjusted adult nonetheless, until he mentions that he enjoys recreationally murdering cows with his bare hands. The song then becomes a brief skit in which we hear him do just that.
- "Weinerschnitzel", by Descendents, consists of a 13-second fast food order. The order seems normal enough, until the counter guy asks if the purchaser wants sperm with that.
- The song "Prayer to God" by Shellac:
To the one true God above, here is my prayer. |
- Logan Whitehurst's song "The Ice Cream Man" starts off innocently enough, with Logan walking down Main Street and looking for some ice cream. It just so happens that the eponymous ice cream man is there. Then this happens:
Then I hear the voices in my head |
- Youtube lists the gender and age of the 3 biggest audiences for each video under video statistics. Pretty much every music video by any female teen star will list the following 1: Female (13-17), 2: Female (18-25), 3: Male (35-44).
- Maybe more Fridge Horror, if you consider that the guys in category 3 are about the age that their daughters (and their friends) will belong in category 1.
- Simon & Garfunkel's "The Sun is Burning", which, for the first three verses is describing a nice day out in suburbia, but then...
Now the sun as come to earth/Shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death... |
- And the singing is still very calm and peaceful.
- Psychostick's song We Ran Out of CD Space includes this, as well as Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking in the previous verse.
What if guitars could shoot out sour cream/and nacho cheese/and pure sulfuric acid? |
- Before a live performance of "A Christmas Song", Ian Anderson does one of these:
"[Christmas] is not a time for heavy drinking, over-eating, and casual sex with farm animals, that's out of the question!" |
- Just look at the names of the members of the band Weezer: Brian, Patrick, Scott...Rivers?
- The Vandals' song "The New You", a story of how a guy's love has changed, does this quite horribly:
Well now you say that you like me |
- Australian band Tripod loves this trope. Examples include:
- In the Countryside, a touching tale of freedom and finding yourself and stockpiling weaponry
- Let's Take a Walk starts with the lines:
Let's take a walk, my love, |
- It's hard to tell what REM was singing about, especially at the time, but one song's narrator reminisces thusly:
I remember redwood trees |
Newspaper Comics[]
- In Candorville, Lemont is trying to sue for custody of his son from his evil ex-girlfriend, who has the advantages of being the kid's mother, white, and very wealthy (and possibly a vampire who wants to be a daywalker. When Lemont asks why she hasn't been served yet, he gets this in response.
- This [dead link] Meaning Of Lila Drew lost her baby in a car accident a few days earlier, which was apparently caused by her texting to Lila while driving.
- From the original Charles Addams The Addams Family comics, was a wardrobe filled with suit bags, each labeled as being another portion of Uncle Nick Nack's wardrobe. The last one (which bulged suggestively)? "Uncle Nick Nack".
- This joke was used in the Film.
Other[]
- In Hundreds of Heads's How to Survive Your Freshman Year, a teen self-help guide consisting of words of wisdom from current college students, one piece of advice (likely not condoned by the publisher) reads: "Bring extra lighting for your dorm room, a mattress in case a friend comes over, and a fake I.D."
- this receipt from Toys R Us.
Save all receipts. Staten Island, NY. Watch out for pedofiles (sic). A dated receipt is required for all returns and exchanges. |
Radio[]
- Andy Hamilton presented an extract from the minutes of a parish council meeting on the 7th November 2008 edition of The News Quiz, which can be seen in full here. The section as quoted on the show is as follows:
1. Another parishioner wished to know if the problems with the telephone directories have been solved yet. 2. Mr Neale said a parishioner had drawn his attention to overhanging foliage on the pavement on Main Street between Wellow Road junction and the Old School. Clerk to contact Highways Dept. 3. The missile launcher parked on Kirklington Road has caused comments from a number of parishioners. Clerk to contact Highways Dept. |
Tabletop Games[]
- Magic: The Gathering: The flavor text of Enormous Baloth; with the squick outnumbering the bread, eggs and milk.
Its diet consists of fruits, plants, small woodland animals, large woodland animals, woodlands, fruit groves, fruit farmers, and small cities. |
Theatre[]
- In Oliver! the song "I'd Do Anything" starts out with cute lines about the things the boys would do, like "Would you climb a hill? (Anything!)/ Wear a daffodil? (Anything!)" etc. Then in the third verse:
"Would you rob a shop?" |
- Frequently found in Cabaret. It's present both in "Tomorrow Belongs to Me", which starts off as a sweet little song about the future, then the camera pulls back to reveal a Nazi armband on the singer. To an even greater extent, "If You Could See Her", what starts out as a novelty act about a man dating an ape, and defending his sweetheart. And it ends, "If could could see her through my eyes . . . / She wouldn't look Jewish at all!"
- In the musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein, Frederick is going through the library and is surprised to find his grandfather doesn't have his medical books there, but instead things like "Black Beauty, Heidi, and the Kama Sutra."
- "By the Sea" from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a cheerful song where Mrs. Lovett describes, well, living by the sea to a rather uninterested Sweeney. Even if you manage to forget that she intends to finance all of this by baking people into pies, the Squick is invited right back to the party near the end when she says "And every now and then, you can do the guest in."
- From Hair (theatre): Sodomy...fellatio...cunnilingus...pederasty...
Video Games[]
- In Jade Empire, the majority of the Black Whirlwind's Backstory conversations go this way. An amusing mix of Ax Crazy and Boisterous Bruiser, the mercenary Whirlwind will often begin with an amusing war story about something he thinks is relatively harmless, then offhandedly mention cleaving innocent women in half, or letting wine-soaked rats get too close to a fire.
- One of the talk radio shows on a Grand Theft Auto game features a woman who saw her family murdered in front of her eyes, and is drugged up pretty high in an attempt to deal with the traumatic memories. Evidently the drugs aren't quite enough, as she has a tendency to reveal slightly disturbing facts about it out of the blue in an unnaturally perky tone. And towards the end of the show, the drugs begin to wear off...
- And from Grand Theft Auto III: I also like jazz, and cooking, and bestiality so the Internet is really good for my hobbies. Wait what?! Oh Chatterbox, you have such a deleterious effect on my driving skills...
- In the fourth game, minor character Bluesy St. John's cabaret performances end up like this sooner or later. Usually sooner.
- Style, sophistication, the ability to launch napalm into oncoming traffic. If these are the things you look for in an automobile, it's time you test drive Twisted Metal.
- Planescape: Torment has Vrischka's Curiousity Shoppe — most of the items are...less than ordinary, like a monster jug containing a real monster, a bottle of angel's tears and a demon's tongue. Then there's the baby oil.
Vrischka: "from only the finest mewling mortal babies!" |
- And she criticizes Grace.
- The Neverwinter Nights community module "Sanctum of the Archmage" contains a series of magic computers in the ruins that form most of the first chapter, with the option to play games on them. "Global thermonuclear war" is innocuously placed among the other, more traditional games (also a Shout-Out to WarGames, mentioned above).
- Dragon Age 2 has a particularly silly piece of advice on one of the loading screens:
Don't play cards with a Qunari, it's impossible to tell when they're bluffing. Don't play cards with an elf, they never pay their debts. And don't play cards with a dwarf, they'll kill you if they lose. |
- Portal includes this subtly in the confrontation with GLaDOS. One of the cores you handle is the Cake Core, which gives the recipe for the cake. It contains many of the ingredients you'd expect (flour, eggs), a few you wouldn't expect (fish...interesting), a few that are downright dangerous (explosives, carcinogenic preservatives), and some that are just plain wrong (licorice and rhubarb), fish shaped nuclear waste, sediment shaped sediment, and peanut butter covered in candy, shaped like fish, adjustable aluminium head positioner, slaughter electric needle injector...
- Earlier in the game, GLaDOS informs you that falling off the raised platforms will "result in an unsatisfactory mark on your record, followed by death."
- Mm, cross borehole electro-magnetic imaging rhubarb, an entry called "how to kill someone with your bare hands," twelve medium geosynthetic membranes, gas and odor control chemicals that will deodorize and preserve putrid tissue, nine large egg yolks, one cup granulated sugar, and a 20-foot thick impermeable clay layer.
- ...shaped like fish.
- "Deep penetration agents. Shaped like fish."
- In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing the cake is a lie.
- According to someone on the internet, if you remove all the ingredients that are nonexistent (cross borehole electromagnetic imaging rhubarb), obviously inedible (sediment-shaped sediment), or hopelessly impractical (rhubarb on fire), you actually get a pretty decent cake recipe. Then again, since the first ingredient is cake mix...
- The ending theme song: "Aperture Science: we do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us except the ones who are dead. *beat* But there's no sense crying over every mistake..."
- Later in the ending theme song: "I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive."
- And again with "I'm not even angry/I'm being so sincere right now/Even though you broke my heart/and killed me/And tore me to pieces/And threw every piece into a fire..."
- In Portal 2, Rick the Adventure core says he has a black belt in "karate, larate, jiu jitsu, kick punching, belt making, taekwondo...bedroom."
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion plays this with Weebam-Na describing a failed restaurant that specialised in meals made of rats (Of course, given that this is a town where about half the population are bipedal cats, this might have been a sound move. Might. If khajiit didn't prefer sweets that is.). Double-trope score for being a shout out to the Glimmer Man.
"First this guy decides he's gonna make a million, opens a fancy restaurant: Rats in a Cream Sauce, Rat Flambe, Rat Necrom with Bonemeal Gravy, Deep-Fried Rat, Lemon Rat and Wild Rice, Rat Ragu with Powdered Deer Penis! Of course, when the guards found out, they ran his sorry butt out of town, but they left the rats. Rats!" |
- Don't forget Falanu Hlaalu, the alchemist in Skingrad. In the middle of a typical, mundane Oblivion conversation, she drops this bombshell:
"I'm the only alchemist in Skingrad. Not much business here, but I can't go back to Morrowind. It's just like anywhere else in the Empire. By the way...do you happen to know what the fine is here in Cyrodiil for necrophilia? Just asking." |
- Even better, because the PC can respond, (Presumably equally deadpan), "Is it the first offence?" after recieving the reply, "Lets assume, no." The response becomes "Around 500."
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim got a rather brilliant one in the Dark Brotherhood questline. Nazir gives the Dovahkin the task of murdering the bride at a wedding and she's the cousin of the Emperor, and her assassination will spark a chain of events that lead to the Emperor's assassination. When he comments about it, he says "You'll have a lovely time. You'll mingle with the guests, have some cake, stab the bride during her reception, and leave with some favors."
- Team Fortress 2: It's the middle-ish part of a century a lot like the one we just had. A simpler time. There are three TV stations, one phone company, and two holding corporations that secretly control every government on the planet.
- In Meet the Medic, the Medic's conversation with the Heavy borders on this, with him entertaining his patient with a funny story about medical malpractice (the doctor stole the patient's skeleton), and finishing with "Anyway, that's how I lost my license." To make things worse, he's telling this story to a patient while in the middle of an operation. While the patient is conscious.
Heavy: Should I be awake for this? |
- In Mana Khemia, Jess' method of attack involves throwing items from her bag. In order: chemical tubes, potted plants, bombs, and a life-sized chariot. Yep, it's that kind of bag...
- In King's Quest II+, Ma Pumpkin's description of Hagatha combines this with Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: "You know her type...green warts, pointed ears, cannibalistic, doesn't put her trash out."
- Hugh Bliss manages to do this even when his actual words are nothing but Squick. The Bread, Eggs, and Milk are all in the bubbly falsetto with which he speaks the line.
- Psychonauts brings us the Rainbow Squirt Pledge of Purpose: "To promote niceness. To make the world prettier. To share candy with everyone. To obfuscate the true nature of the Milkman. To protect the Milkman at all costs. To destroy all who would harm the Milkman, or threaten to reveal his secret objective."
- Sonic Colors has this exchange.
Tails: ...oh there you are. Where'd you run off to? |
- Bonus points for Tails' reaction being "Oh, really? They've got shopping here too?"
- A few of Eggman's PA lines have this as well.
Please refrain from throwing coins, trash, or small children into the reflecting pools. |
- Played for laughs at one point in Kara no Shoujo. The notebook used for the game is an actual notebook kept by Reiji with a fairly professional attitude and style to it. However, under Yaginuma's character info there's a quiet little 'Still an asshole' there.
- In Dwarf Fortress, personal descriptions of dwarfs string together happy and sad events with no distinction for either, and so read:
"Urist McDwarf is happy today. He has seen a fine bowl. He has eaten in a legendary dining room. He has been disgusted by a corpse. He has slept in a fine bed..." |
- In Saints Row the Third, the Protagonist is discussing his/her concerns with Pierce, one of the Saints' lieutenants, about an imminent attack by an anti-gang organization called "STAG." Pierce, however, seems a bit distracted.
Protagonist:With STAG in town, we need to be careful, Pierce. |
Visual Novels[]
- As part of Riko's introduction in A Profile, we see a conversation between her and her stepson devolve from a straightforward relationship advice regarding him and his stepsister to her suggestion that he be careful not to get her pregnant. Do note that there's nothing like that between them. Well, yet.
- "Blah blah Command Seal Blah blah Caster blah blah magic blah blah and then I took all his clothes off." Thanks Shirou for your lovely demonstration of how to subtly check for Command Seals without raising suspicions. Tohsaka just stops and stares at him.
- A bit of a meta example, but go to the Visual Novel Database and read the entry for Matou Sakura with spoilers off.
Engages in: Cleaning, cooking, manslaughter. |
Web Comics[]
- Supermegatopia has this comic: "Red Warrior needs food!" "Blue Wizard needs food!" "Green Ranger needs a hard cock! Seriously, how long has it been, can you even remember...?"
- One Xkcd comic uses this trope when a stick-figure goes on about his (its?) dreams about his ex...and then the twist comes.
- And then there's "Penny Arcade Parody," which ends up being anything but.
- Awkward Zombie brings us this view of Advance Wars.
- In this Flying Man and Friends strip, Flying Man attempts to make hamburgers, only to run out of meat. Mr. Stinky returns, using his own body as the meat, with a bun and condiments laid atop it.
- This Subnormality strip, in which the receptionist at a health spa casually mentions ritual human sacrifice among the list of spa amenities.
- Almost every strip of A Softer World.
- The Awakened gives us this exchange. Chase, the Butt Monkey protagonist, starts off talking to his therapist about how his various issues may have started in kindergarten when a classmate refused to let him play with a toy dinosaur.
Therapist: That doesn't sound very traumatic, Chase. |
- Something*Positive: Ollie is saying goodbye to his deceased uncle at the funeral: "I never thanked you enough for all you taught me. You showed me the joys of theatre, art, and how not to gag on anything up to seven inches."
- Penny Arcade. Read what the pilot says very carefully.
- The list of additional costs in this The Way of the Metagamer comic.
- On this page of Blip, K follows up a long, meandering description of her best friends and her dog with a question to see if Bishop is really paying attention.
- The bug's bucket list: use a pun while beating up a bad guy, be a contestant on Jeopardy and give immature answers, and visit/attack France.
- When Laguna feeds some tissue samples into a machine for analysis, the results come out in the middle of a grocery list.
- In Gunnerkrigg Court one of the end of chapter bonus pages shows Bobby the robot sharing some fun facts about pigeons. The last of them is:
Bobby: One day I saw a pigeon fall from a tree, its body twisted and broken after an attack from somewhere above. It writhed on the floor in silence and eventually died. It had no expression, just as I have no expression. I have never relayed this story to anyone. |
- One time in SSDD Norman was making a "to-do" list involving murder and mayhem, then added "buy teabags."
- In this Questionable Content strip, in which Marten and Faye are moving into their new apartment.
Marten: Whew! Okay, the couch is officially moved in. What's left to bring over? |
- This Warehouse Comic.
- In this Order of the Stick strip, Tsukiko complains about paladins.
Tsukiko: All they do is boss you around and tell you what you can't do. "Don't walk on the grass, don't litter, don't rape the cycle of life with your unclean power." Blah blah blah. |
- Eight Bit Theater: Ranger in this strip, while checking on the contents of his fridge after being unexpectedly teleported home:
Ranger: OJ, purple stuff, my brutally murdered wife...' |
- In A Miracle of Science, while Caprice and Benjamin are rising into orbit on a gigantic air fountain, Caprice begins explaining the reasoning behind the air-fountain/space-elevator, notices that Benjamin isn't listening, and seques into something else...
Caprice: Mars has such low gravity that gas is lost to space more quickly than it is on larger planets like Earth and Venus. |
- In Minion Comics, Wendell tends to exhibit this trope:
Dingus: We're going to wear these gay hats. We're going to go through Spencer's boring agenda point by point. Then we're going to go find those pictures of that totally hot chick. |
Web Original[]
- This LOL-caption of Vladimir Putin.
- Yoda gets one in this clever screencap.
- Chester A. Bum of "Bum Reviews" does this quite a bit. A perfect example can be found with this line, from a Nostalgia Critic video where the eponymous critic paid Chester to finish his review of Follow That Bird:
Chester: ...and Cookie Monster ate his car because he thought it was a cookie! I once thought my car was a cookie! Only it wasn't a cookie. Or a car. It was MAN. |
- Humour of this type is also the bread and butter of Ask That Guy, where he frequently reveals disturbing facts about his personal life.
- Less often, but The Nostalgia Chick does this too. At one point, she was talking about bad Disney sequels and then ended up revealing that her uncle molested her.
- Dominic of "Video Game Confessions", when interviewing Fox McCloud, stopped him after hearing him casually state that "humanies" (the reverse of "furries") like him "like to get together and play games, and talk to one another, make jokes, sodomize one another, and then usually go out and have a bit of dinner."
- MikeJ also does this from time to time.
- Humour of this type is also the bread and butter of Ask That Guy, where he frequently reveals disturbing facts about his personal life.
I think you all know what's coming next...A fried kitten. Aww. |
- The Nostalgia Critic did this when he was begging the Tom and Jerry movie not to subject him to another song. Taxes and shaving someone's back are boring and icky, respectively, but whoring himself out has got to be overkill.
- Madamluna incorporated one of these into her gag story of how she and Deceased Crab met.
But soon, with a song and a dance and a demonstration of technology that could vaporize a bear at three hundred yards, he scuttled his way into my heart. |
- The various gag dubs churned out by My Way Entertainment use this trope a lot.
- Uncyclopedia's Worst 100 Ways to Deliver Bad News also consists largely of this.
- Wikitravel's summary of Dagestan on the North Caucasus page (walked back on the Wikivoyage version) described "Dagestan: An environment utterly exotic and alien to Russians of the steppe and woodlands, Dagestan boasts astounding cultural diversity, breathtaking and austere mountaintop villages, an ancient history, and a distinct possibility of being kidnapped, and as well as a target for terrorism from Chechnen rebels."
- From one of the Bionicle serials:
Vezon: Quite a collection. I prefer sea-shells, myself. Sometimes leaves. Oh, and the heads of my enemies, though those take up so much space. |
- The Green Team[1] sketch with from Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, and John C Reilly has a few, e.g "Biodegradable napkins, batteries, and glass dildos."
- derrickcomedy.com's "Bro Rape" includes a moment like this, when the Newsline reporter is going through the bag of a would-be bro rapist: "Six pack Natty Ice. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Big black dildo."
- Oh my god, that is sickening! Natty Ice?
- A Stalker with a Crush fangirl in an Official Fanfiction University, during a near-death experience, uttered the line "I don't wanna be dead! I'm only sixteen! I never got into college! I never took my driving test! Daniel Radcliffe never replied to the email proposal I sent him!"
- PPC: "The methods of the Department of Angst involve balloon animals, glitter rain, sunshine (produced by special lamps), origami and hard drugs". Also, the charge lists often contain either this or Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking; for example, the Video Game Division once charged a bad Parody Stu with deliberately poor writing, bad spelling/grammar/punctuation/logic, being annoying, and "being an abomination against nature due to being a sandwich that walks like a man." Similarly, his partner was charged with "being a nameless bit character, aiding and abetting a Stu, and having a grasp of reality so thin that you have no problem with a giant sandwich."
- Binder of Shame's Cheating Bastard once referred to the theft of milk crates as "a victimless crime, like tearing tags off mattresses, trading bootleg videotapes, and bestiality".
- The YouTube Poop fad "I am now going to assault your mind with subliminal messages" is built from this trope. Here's an example. (MILDLY NSFW))
- The Ferrets song is a perfect example.
- Alex from Awkward while filming his housemate/crush Lester under the pretext of a student film: "Teacher said, uh, make variety with camera angles. Like I wanna make a high shot, y'know, low shot...cumshot..."
- "The Harm Of Gaming: We Present The Facts" on Rock Paper Shotgun delivered a beautiful line — "turning instead toward shopping, DVDs and knife crime".
- Episode 1 of Llamas with Hats has Paul discovering a dead body in his house:
Paul: Tell me, Carl, exactly what you were doing before I got home! |
- Sister from Red vs. Blue is quite possibly this trope personified.
Sister: [having just been asked by Church if she'd ever had any kind of military training] Yeah, sorry. Doesn't sound like I have the skills you need. Unless you wanna see my ping-pong ball trick. |
- It's all in the title: Tea, Biscuits and Incest.
- In this Retsupurae of this video.
Chip Cheezum: "Name: Christopher. What can I say about myself? Um, dot dot dot. I like Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon...and vore. My dream *Ironicus' laughter* is that I'm in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game." |
- In this EPICMEALTIME video.
"SUSHI! FAST FOOD! SEX!" |
- This Let's Play of Baldurs Gate 2 describes the source of the protagonist's name with "If you really want to understand the joke in his name, have 2 and a half hours to kill, and don't mind developing cancer..."
- In one of Picnicface's videos, entitled "Near Death Experiences", the people being interviewed are describing how their mind flashed to field of flowers with a white horse that wanted them to ride it, etc., etc., until..."The horse raped me."
- Done quite literally in Team Four Star's Dragonball Z Abridged.
Frieza: Oh good. I'll stop by there on the way home. Pick up some space eggs, some space milk, and BLOW IT THE F**K UP! |
- Done in The Quest for Geekdom. The Eric Rosethorn Academy of Eloquent Supervillainny teaches class, ambition, and unbridled malice.
- The Roosterteeth Drunk Tank Podcast has an episode with this trope almost exactly: "It's like: bread, milk, beer, diseases."
- Sursum Ursa from Stuff You Like uses this in her short review of Roman Holiday:
Sursum Ursa: [Anne indulges in] comfy shoes, gelato, dancing with boys, a mischievous pixie haircut, and casual violence! |
- --->Yahtzee:"All games are about realizing a fantasy, whether it be the fantasy of being a courageous war hero, or the fantasy of being a future space adventurer, or, in the case of some Japanese games, the fantasy of possessing eight prehensile dicks."
- A guide for parents considering whether to let their kids see The Wicker Man (hint: no). It quite dispassionately details the variously suggestive and overt sexual scenes, scenes featuring alcohol and swearing, and right at the very bottom is a tiny spoiler box labelled "Frightening/Intense Scenes"...
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_t1i0Uo1WU&feature=relmfu.
Let's see now. If I throw in a little bit of sugar, some flour, two eggs... that should do it. Oh my goodness! I almost forgot my secret ingredient: Cyanide! |
- The disclaimer at the bottom of stan-wars.com: "This site is purely satirical. This site is not meant to be cited as a credible source of information. This site is not based on fact, logic, common sense or common decency, (but neither are most legitimate news sites). This site is a work of convoluted logic, contradictory opinions and satirical fiction. This site is not affiliated with any of the artists mentioned. The author of this site is currently under a psychiatrist's care for several mental disorders."
- In Cracked.com:
- 8 Mind-Blowing Realities of Our Future Full of Old People" compares making a home safe for senior citizens to childproofing.
- Plugs have to be covered, gates erected, breakables moved, cabinets locked, knives dulled, bullets replaced with blanks, etc.
- 8 Mind-Blowing Realities of Our Future Full of Old People" compares making a home safe for senior citizens to childproofing.
Western Animation[]
- Ned Flanders on The Simpsons:
Ned: "I don't like the service at the post office. You know, it's all 'rush rush! get'cha in, get'cha out!' Then they've got those machines in the lobby, they're even faster, no help there. You might even say, I hate the post office! That, and my parents. Lousy beatniks." |
- In another episode of The Simpsons, Lisa states that the reason her family got sick from organic food is because they're not accustomed to the "vitamins, minerals, and trace amounts of bug feces."
- Inverted wonderfully in "Summer of 4'2"", when Homer tries to buy illegal fireworks from a Kwik-e-Mart and they're the least suspicious item on the list, despite being the only illegal one.
Homer: Yeah, um, give me one of those porno magazines, a large box of condoms, a bottle of Old Harper, a box of panty shields, some illegal fireworks, and one of those disposable enemas. Eh, make it two. |
- Followed up later when Marge is unpacking the grocery bags and declares "Whatever you have planned tonight, count me out!"
- Marge advising Lisa on the difference between names for things in the US and the UK: "An elevator is called a 'lift', a mile is called a 'kilometer', and botulism is called 'steak and kidney pie'."
- In an episode of King of the Hill, Hank chides Bill for throwing up in the sandbox for kids. Dale then informs him that sandboxes are in fact made of several things listing feces and sand and then ending the list with animal feces.
- In Garfield and Friends, Garfield, to scare away another cat, forges a recipe for Casserole à la Arbuckle, whose ingredients are 1 cup milk, 2 tbsp. flour, carrots, potatoes, 1 kitty cat, add salt to taste. A bit of an inversion, since Garfield is doing this intentionally.
- In the episode "Feline Felon," they have an America's Most Wanted kind of parody and shows one of the criminals is wanted for buglary, stealing the Klopman Diamond, and using a small child for a bookmark.
- Although nothing he said can compare with most other examples on this page, Fry of Futurama, due to his Cloudcuckoolander status, had a tendency to ramble whenever he was allowed to talk uninterrupted, making various relevant but still disturbing remarks ("I don't like having disks crammed into me. Unless they're Oreos. And then only in the mouth!"). He is sometimes called out on this:
Fry: I had a car like that once. Well, actually it was my girlfriend's car. Actually it wasn't hers, it was her dad's. Actually she wasn't my girlfriend, she just lived next door and never closed her blinds. |
- Another fount of examples is Zapp Brannigan:
Brannigan: We've detected a vessel attempting to break the security cordon around Vergon 6. I'm anticipating an all-out tactical dogfight, followed by a light dinner: ravioli, ham, sundae bar. |
- And:
Brannigan: Perhaps I could paint a fence, or service you sexually, or mop the floor. |
- In the episode "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV", when Bender acts like himself in a TV show. Bender is an Anti Role Model (since he has no redeeming qualities) whom young viewers treat as a role model. Later in the episode he protests his own presence on TV and the blame placed upon him. Note that the proverbial last straw for Bender here is that the children who emulated his behavior stole his stuff.
Bender: It's the parents' fault! Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them? |
- Crocker from The Fairly OddParents, after giving Cosmo and Wanda coffee:
Crocker: Can I offer you anything with that? Cream, sugar, magic? |
- In an episode of Family Guy, Peter is telling a story about how horrible the Suck E. Cheese's he visited in preparation for Stewie's first birthday party was:
Rep: For ice cream, we have vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and people. |
- Also:
Brian: That's good, what's in there? |
- Played with when Quagmire is trying to find out if his dad is gay by questioning his old navy buddies. All of them say double entendres (ie: Your dad used to drink me under the table! If there was one guy you wanted in your hole, it was your dad), except the last one (Your dad had the best penis in the military!).
- And this little exchange when Lois and Meg were going through Meg's baby things.
Lois: Oh, look, Meg, it's your little baby booties. Oh, and your little bronze hat... And your tail. |
- In an early episode, when Peter acts a millionaire and greets other guests:
Good Day! Enchanté! Pasta fazool! |
- Check out this scene in “Breaking out Is Hard to Do”
(Courtroom)
Lois: Your honor, I am so sorry for stealin' all that stuff, I just couldn't control myself. |
- The Doctor Who animated special "The Infinite Quest" lands the Doctor and Martha in a maximum security space prison where a background scan find the Doctor guilty of 3,005 "outstanding convictions" including 1,400 minor traffic violations, 250 evasions of library fines, and 18 planetary demolitions.
- 2D, the slightly dim singer/keyboardist of Gorillaz, once introduced himself in a radio interview with "Hi, my name is 2D, and I'm the singer, and I need the toilet..." Murdoc calmly announcing during an interview that "I hit puberty at eight and lost my virginity to a dinner lady at nine and I've been in a bad mood ever since" possibly also falls under this heading, whether or not he was telling the truth.
- Invader Zim, "Gir Goes Crazy and Stuff": "Thanks for that. It was a real adventure. First your house, then the library, and then the intergalactic space battle on the way to this beach!"
- Metalocalypse:
Nathan: I know we don't know what to do right now with all these big, huge problems like making messes, not cleaning up after ourselves, and, you know, potentially starting World War III... |
- In an episode of Animaniacs, Dot (acting as a stewardess on an airplane) walks down the aisle offering refreshments: "Coffee, tea, monster".
"Monster?" |
- A similar example happens in "Sir Yaksalot": "Candy, gum, dynamite?"
- South Park likes this trope a fair amount.
Cartman: [talking about a photo he is showing the class] Yes! This is shot at a 5-6 aperture lens using a low light filter, you can see the grain from the high-speed film, there is sort of a penis in my mouth right here, and the low depth of field keeps the background soft. |
- "Now a couple a questions, what do you think of father Maxi? How would you describe his attitude? And has he ever tried to stick anything in your butt?"
- In "The Biggest Douche In The Universe", Stan goes into John Edward's house and looks at his books. They are called, "How To Be A Psychic!", "Cold Reading: The Trick of the Psychic!", "Make Women Believe You're Psychic! Then Have Sex With Them!", and "How To Sixty-Nine With Yourself!".
- At various points in Aqua Teen Hunger Force Meatwad watches a puppet show where a puppet sings a song teaching "This is your left," and "This is your right". One time, while singing the song, the puppet inexplicably throws in the line, "You're gonna die!"
- Danny Phantom:
Technus: Nothing like a lazy day of shopping, lattes, and terrorizing the minimum wage workers! |
- From "Maternal Instincts":
Vlad: I know, Maddie, and I have forgiven Jack for many things. Causing the accident that ruined my life, STEALING YOU, the backwash incident... |
- From the Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law episode "Guitar Control":
Birdman: The Dalton gang. Wanted for cattle rustlin', horse theivin', mischief makin' and...running a meth lab? |
- In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", Future!Candace's attempts to retroactively bust her brothers create a dystopia run by Moral Guardians which has swing sets turned into hospital beds, coloring books pre-colored in the lines, and children stored in People Jars until adulthood.
- In the fourth episode of Harley Quinn (2019) Harley and her "crew" are upset when their bank robbery doesn't make the news, which focuses on Batman foiling the Joker's heist of a credit union:
Dr. Psycho: Credit union? That's just a poor person bank. We robbed a real one, with a vault, and money, and predatory lending practices! |
The Other Wiki[]
- The Wikipedia article on African Currency has this line to start off the second paragraph: "In pre-colonial times African currency included shells, ingots, arrowheads, iron, human beings, salt, cattle, goats, blankets, axes, beads, and many others." What doesn't belong?
- Also from Wikipedia, their article on Kim Kardashian reads: "She is widely known for her appearances in Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Dancing With the Stars, and a sex tape with former boyfriend Ray J." (Though that may be more like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking.)
- The Other Wiki also brings an example on the page about Strathclyde Park in Motherwell: "Strathclyde Park contains many sports and leisure facilities and also has sites for bird-watchers, doggers and anglers." (For those who aren't unaware, "dogging" is British slang for 'having sex in public' or 'observing people having sex in public'.)
- From the Wikipedia article on Patty Hearst:
Patricia Campbell Hearst (born February 20, 1954), now known as Patricia Hearst Shaw, is an American newspaper heiress, socialite, actress, and bank robber. |
- Another Wikipedia example (this time about Calamity Jane):
A woman who exhibited kindness and compassion towards others, especially the sick and needy, who also was an alcoholic and traded sexual favors for money. |
Real Life[]
- There is a recipe from the Philippines that goes a little like this: carrots, potatoes, bell peppers, tomato sauce, and red ant eggs.
- This Craigslist ad.
Wanted: Pony "My kid is having a birthday coming up soon, and there'll be a lot of children around, so I figured I'd better get a pony. If you do have a pony you could sell, please contact me, and then immediately start putting barbeque sauce in its bedding or add some Lawry's to its salt lick — I like to marinade it early and long, so that the flavor is at its peak by the time I take possession." |
- That gag is probably based on a story familiar to anthropology students: A man in Samoa advertised he wanted to buy a pony for his son's birthday. A guy sold him a pony and watched in horror as he killed it and loaded it onto his truck to be roasted and served as the main course.
- Helen Doss, in The Family Nobody Wanted, said that she and her husband did a nativity scene with a live donkey when their first (adopted) kid was a baby. When they tried to rent the same donkey for a repeat the following Christmas, they were casually informed that it had been killed and made into salami. The kicker was that the owner claimed that donkeys made the "best kind" of salami.
- That gag is probably based on a story familiar to anthropology students: A man in Samoa advertised he wanted to buy a pony for his son's birthday. A guy sold him a pony and watched in horror as he killed it and loaded it onto his truck to be roasted and served as the main course.
- In The Other Wiki article listing Icelandic Magical Staves, it starts off with a rune to attract a girl, then- suddenly: "Necropants, a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead man that are capable of producing endless gold", squeezed between the rune for "To Win in Court" and "To Induce Fear".
- The article links to sites with more about Icelandic Magical Staves, which are not much better. For the curious: you get a man (has to be a man) to agree to let you dig him up and skin him from the waist down after he dies. Should you manage to outlive him, you do that, draw the rune on a gold piece, and put it in the purse. And yes, you must wear them.
- This picture.
- St. Julian the Hospitaller — Patron of wandering musicians, clowns, carnival workers, fiddle players, and murderers.
- Most crimes and sins (see also prostitution, below) have patron saints—they're prayed to to get people who commit them to repent.
- The better known St. Nicholas is the patron saint of children, sailors, and prostitutes!
- That makes sense. The sailors patronize the prostitutes which produces children. He's simply practicing Vertical Integration
- FOUND Magazine, and the affiliated website, has quite a collection of shopping lists or to-do lists that embody this trope, with a list of normal things like "pick up prescription" or "buy milk", with something weird tossed in. Like "Rob a casino".
- This shopping list, supposedly found in a Seattle parking lot. Literally a Bread Eggs Milk Squick in this case...well, more like Bread Milk Squick Eggs. (WARNING: VERY NSFW)
- This handy-dandy English language guide.
- TV Tropes is as good example as any, in at least 3 types of example.
- One would be a line that goes rather unabrubtly and disturbingly like this (fictional example): "Japan is well known for anime, J drama, J music, hard working people and so on. But this wasn't always so. It used to be a common act to disembowel people, eat dead babies and such.". Go on, say you haven't seen an example like this before!
- Alternately, on the above links: Main Entry, Quotes, Sugar Wiki, Wild Mass Guessing, Fetish Fuel, Nightmare Fuel...
- Also, from page to page, article-article-article-A Date with Rosie Palms-Cold-Blooded Torture...
- The list of Chowan University almuni include notable athletes...and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.
- Poor Jess. Poor, poor Jess.
- Ferret Steinmetz, co-writer of Home On The Strange, in an anecdote about growing up with unusually open-minded parents:
My Mom began to say things like, "Mail's in! Let's see....yep, your subscription to Boy's Life....the newest Nickelodeon magazine...and let's see, it appears to be Bo Derek on a horse in Playboy this month...." |
- This entry from (The Customer is) Not Always Right, which doubles as a Non Sequitur. A very, very disturbing Non Sequitur.
- Jared Lee Loughner, who on January 8, 2011 shot nineteen people including U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six, listed his favorite books on his YouTube account. Those included The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Gulliver's Travels, Through the Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
- Mark Twain, known for his wit and quotability, had quite a few of these.
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we." |
- The vegetable garden in Osama Bin Laden's Pakistan compound consisted of cabbage, potatoes and marijuana.
- This Damn You Auto Correct entry.
- Happens sometimes in Blind Idiot Translation, like this NSFW example [dead link].
- User 927. When AOL released confidential user search logs, one unidentified person was noted for their increasingly disturbing log including flower meanings, sick child hentai, mla citations, human mold, japanese child slave molestation and rape, and low carb calorie foods. Someone even made a play out of it.
- Winston Churchill allegedly once said that he preferred Italian cruise ships to British because, "There are three things I like about Italian ships. First, their cuisine, which is unsurpassed. Second, their service, which is quite superb. And then — in time of emergency — there is none of this nonsense about women and children first."
- He does have a point, though.
- The "Road To Health" booklet issued by the South African Department of Health. It included this advice on how to start your child on solid foods:
"Give mashed dried beans and locally available animal foods daily to supplement the iron in the breastmilk. Examples include egg, minced meat, fish, chicken, mopani worms." |
- Popular soap shop Lush, on how they achieved their environmental-friendliness award:
In the back of house, all the furniture is upcycled: the table is from ebay, the racking from a second-hand shop, the chairs have been stolen from our Mafia meeting room, and the flooring is non-PVC from Ovation Flooring. |
- The Chili Appreciation Society International specified in 1999 that, among other things, cooks are forbidden to include beans, marinate any meats, or discharge firearms in the preparation of chili for official competition.