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Epic Fail

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/epicfail.jpg
Just...how did you even manage to do that?!?
"There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco. A failure is simply the non-presence of success. Any fool can accomplish failure. But a fiasco, a fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions. A fiasco is a folk tale told to others that makes other people feel more alive because it didn't happen to them."
— Opening narration, Elizabethtown

When a normal, run-of-the-mill failure just isn't enough, you need an Epic Fail.

This is when a task that should be fairly straightforward and typical for a character goes HORRIBLY wrong in a manner that defies the laws of probability, and occasionally the laws of physics. It's when a character seems to be facing a pass-or-fail situation, a do-or-die type of test, and then fate hands them a third option: failing in a manner that's so bizarre, it's almost impressive.

We're not talking "villain tries to shoot one of his mooks but misses." We're talking "villain tries to shoot one of his mooks, misses, ricochets the shot off two walls, smashes the control panel of his Doomsday Machine, causes said Doomsday Machine to topple into a structural support inches from the mook's head, breaks the structural support, brings down the whole base in a massive collapse that destroys the villain's lair entirely, and the mook that the villain shot at is the only survivor." It's a failure so ludicrously, unexpectedly bizarre that, despite its status as a failure, it manages also to be admirable for its uniqueness and irreproducibility.

At its best, the trope can give the viewer a much needed jolt out of a sense of boredom, it can produce a laugh out of something you wouldn't think could, and it can inspire a temporary sense of fate or dramatic justice. At its worst, it can become a Deus ex Machina, rescuing the writers from the fortress of logic they have enclosed themselves within with a Hand Wave of "luck".

Often used against those who are Tempting Fate, and sometimes as a demonstration of how monumentally screwed you are in a Final Boss Preview. When epic failures come in forms that shouldn't be possible, they can be examples of Beyond the Impossible. Often this trope comes with an Incendiary Exponent, possibly because of the Rule of Cool. Disaster Dominoes are a common part of such epic failures.

Can overlap with Only One Finds It Fun for when someone tries to please a whole group of people but only pleases one of them.

Compare Critical Failure (a game mechanic meant to represent the normal ever-present danger in any action) and From Bad to Worse. Too Dumb to Live is for when a character dies (or nearly dies) because of their own stupidity. This trope is the norm for Stupid Crooks, and a hallmark of the Disastrous Demonstration. If the Fail is so Epic that reality itself breaks trying to process it, then you've managed to make a Reality-Breaking Paradox. Contrast Flawless Victory.

Not to be confused with Epic Flail (or Epic Frail for that matter), though you can certainly commit an Epic Fail with an Epic Flail if you're not careful.

If you're looking for the trope that used to have this name, it's now Offscreen Moment of Awesome. Since this title refers to a dated 4chan meme from the early 2010s, it's unlikely to be used much anymore.

No Real Life Examples, Please!. There are loads of epic fail compilation videos out there, and we don't need to become a repository of such.

Example subpages:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Comic Books 
  • The final chapter of Batman: A Death in the Family has The Joker appointed ambassador to the United Nations by the Iranian government; the Iranians, who are Always Chaotic Evil in this story, plot to have the Clown Prince of Crime kill the U.N. General Assembly by gassing them right after making a speech. But Superman thwarts Joker's plan, causing the villain to flee the chamber with Batman in hot pursuit. The Joker hitches a ride on a helicopter with his gun-toting Iranian cronies, but Batman grabs hold of the aircraft just as it takes off and fights his way in to confront the cowering Joker. One of the Iranian gunmen panics and opens fire with his assault rifle. The result? It's bad enough that the gunman succeeds only in "harmlessly" nicking Batman's arm, but he also "manages" to deal a fatal wound to every person on board but Batman - including the pilot himself, whom he shoots in the back of the head! We are told that "the gunman immediately realizes his mistake," but he doesn't have long to regret it: Batman punches him out, knocking him unconscious and then diving into New York Harbor, leaving everyone in the chopper to die when it crashes into a nearby dock. (Well, except The Joker.)
  • Beagle Boys vs. the Money Bin features what might be the most embarrassing failure of the Beagle Boys' career; Thanks to discovering a passageway through a basement well, the Beagles succeed in infiltrating the Money Bin. However, one by one, they end up caught in awkward positions through their own fault; One Beagle gets stuck in a bookshelf in the Bin's library while trying to look up his family history, another ends up with a toilet seat jammed around his head. Succinctly put, an empty building caught the Beagle Boys.
  • Mortadelo y Filemón: In "Misión Triunfo", the Super sings a song meant to make people enjoy life. It causes the number of suicides to shoot up so much the cemetery workers have to do overtime.
  • Non-comedic example: In Secret Six, Black Alice admits that she tried to use Raven's powers to remove her father's asthma. She gave him cancer instead.
  • In one issue of X-Men Storm had one of these when it comes to dealing with her claustrophobia. The thing that set her off wasn't being trapped in rubble, having to fight in a small room, or anything like that. The villain was making threats against them, and used the word "tomb." Storm proceeded to flip. out., and spent multiple issues of the fight cowering in a corner. He wasn't even trying to prey on her phobia, he was just talking to them and accidentally incapacitated her.
    • When Storm finally managed to pull herself together and fight, her first attack sends a lightning bolt at The Juggernaut, which bounces off of him and strikes her, knocking her unconscious and back out of the fight. Despite the fact that Storm is immune to the effects of lightning. Needless to say, she's come far since then.
    • Also from the X-Men, Juggernaut once became even more unstoppable with the power of another evil god during the Fear Itself event. The X-Men try to stop him, trying ever grander plans that all fail epically. (One of them is getting a guy who can ignite a person's blood to try it on him. The result? The unstoppable Juggernaut is now unstoppable and able to set anything he touches on fire.)
  • Happens to members of Spider-Man's rogues gallery whenever their Villain Decay is played for laughs but Lightmaster takes the cake: in one appearance, he announces his appearance in front of the Wall-crawler, then immediately gets knocked out with a falling duffel bag full of money.
    • How did One Moment in Time explain Spider-Man missing his own wedding? A fat man fell on him and he couldn't get him off. No, really. It becomes a lot worse once you remember that Spidey has Super-Strength and should logically be capable of pushing off the man with ease— he's seen at one point throwing a car at somebody. One of his most iconic moments has him lifting a multi-ton piece of machinery off of him in order to save his Aunt May.
  • This is the basis of many gags in the Italian comic Sturmtruppen.
  • W.I.T.C.H. gives us Orube's attempt at learning how to cook: she somehow set the water of the pasta on fire!
  • The Terrifics: When a portal into the Dark Multiverse threatened to swallow Linnya's parents ship her parents tried to shoot her to safety in an escape pod, but a miscalculation on her father's part caused the ejection to push the ship away from the rift while firing Linnya directly into the Dark Multiverse.
  • Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The rogue Decepticon team are being attacked by the Decepticon Justice Division, 5 Cons, who kill failures cowards and deserters. Krok is grabbed by two of them, Vos and Kaon, and Misfire comes to his aid... by accidentally shooting him 3 times in the chest. In addition, Vos and Kaon are taller, and Vos was standing between him and Krok.
    • One better. So Fort Max has snapped, locked himself, Rung, and Whirl in Rung's office and is threatening to kill them both. It comes down to an attempt to take out Fort Max from across the way by Swerve. He shoots... and blows Rung's head up.
    • Swerve gets a lot of these—in another instance, he is at point blank range with Star Saber and could practically touch him with the barrel of his gun. Star Saber is also about four times Swerve's size. Swerve misses every single shot he takes at Star Saber from this range. That's almost to the point of impossible levels of inaccuracy; Swerve apparently has the targeting skills of a potato. In universe, it's explained that it's a combination of Swerve's small size making it difficult for him to hold and aim weapons built for larger Transformers combined with Swerve's natural lack of concentration.
  • In My Little Pony Micro Series Issue #3, once Rarity learns about the hippies' predicament, she does her best to get sure the production of "Goops for Stuff" is maximised to its limit, to get sure the product remains 100% natural, is made in a way that nobody gets their hooves dirty anymore and most important, not even a drop of it is wasted. She also gives the product a complete makeover to make it more attractive, and finally instructs the hippies about how to sell their products in a more efficient (and profitable) way so they could save their farm. After all of that hard work, the hippies and Rarity proceed to accidentally scare off their only potential customer.
  • In an early Lucky Luke comic, the Dalton brothers (the historical ones, not their horribly incompetent cousins) show off their ignorance by attempting to divide 10000 by 4 when sharing their loot and turning the simple operation into a complex mathematical formula with square roots and integrals.
  • In the very first issue of Loki: Agent of Asgard, we see Clint playing a video game intensely. Natasha commentates thusly:
    Natasha: Clint.
    Clint: I know—
    Natasha: You have the army after you and no health and you're falling out of a crashing airplane.
    Clint: I know, Nat—
    Natasha: It's a bass fishing simulator, Clint.
    Clint: I know! It just— It just happens!
  • Throughout The Adventures of Tintin, Captain Haddock getting drunk is certain to lead to this. His defining moment, in his debut The Crab with the Golden Claws, is when he, Tintin and Snowy are stranded on a lifeboat in the sea. Having just downed an entire bottle, the Captain's idea of keeping them all warm... is to light a bonfire. In a wooden boat. With the oars as kindling! It's the trope image for Alcohol-Induced Idiocy for a reason. The 2011 film's version of the scene tops this when the Captain realizes what he's done and, in his panic, tries to put out the fire with whiskey. It creates a fireball visible from a distance.
  • In the second issue of the Archie Comics reboot, we see Archie so bad at jobs, he sets fire to ice cream. All of the ice cream. Just the ice cream. The owner is naturally incredulous. See it here.
    • Following the incident that temporarily crippled Betty, Archie tried to help out Jughead by helping get Internet access to an old folks home. He somehow causes the entire complex to lose power. Jughead is equally incredulous.
  • In a comic book adaptation of Beetle Bailey, Beetle gets a job typing up orders at Camp Swampy by telling Captain Scabbard he can type and read at the same time. Unfortunately, his attempts to do so lead to some orders being bungled via spelling errors. Sarge orders a shipment of shirts, and gets a truck full of dirt. Fuzz orders new guns, but gets a herd of gnus. Ms. Halftrack advertises for a cook, and crooks start applying. Eventually, Sarge catches onto the problem after a 50-mile hike (that was supposed to be 5-miles) leaves him exhausted. (But not enough that he can't beat Beetle up for it all.)
  • In a crossover between All-New Wolverine and Spider-Gwen, the two heroines have swapped bodies. X-23-as-Spider-Gwen handles it fine. Gwen-as-Wolverine? She stabs herself in the face. With her own claws.
  • Cancrelune from Mélusine is this reincarnate. Once, she fell off her flying broom and Mélusine saved her by changing her into a bird. Except, even in bird form she fails to fly and end up crashing on the ground.
    • Another time Cancrelune climbed a tree and didn't realized she was climbing it upside down.
  • Exiles: During their involuntary visit to Mojoworld, the team try to find Longshot so he can help. So they grab a guy off the street and demand he tell them where Longshot's being imprisoned. He points across the street to a prison with a giant neon sign proclaiming "LONGSHOT'S PRISON".
    Sasquatch: Wow. Mulder and Scully, we ain't.
  • During Absolute Carnage, Spider-Man, Wolverine and the Thing are dealing with the symbiote Hybrid, who has Captain America in their clutches. Thing grabs Spidey for a Fastball Special, but Spidey panics as he is not ready at all for the throw and that Wolverine is right beside him. This leads to Ben throwing Spidey, who flies screaming and flailing until he slams into Cap, whom Hybrid casually tosses at him, leading to the other two heroes to wince in pain.
  • Heroes in Crisis may in fact be the biggest screw-up Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman have ever committed. Their intentions to create a place for heroes to receive therapy might've been noble, but their execution of the idea was a complete disaster.
    • There are no actual therapists or licensed medical professionals working at Sanctuary. All the work's done by a computer programmed with the supposed best traits of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.
    • All the patients are allowed to do when they're not in video confessionals or kept isolated from each other is relive their respective traumatic experiences in virtual reality chambers.
    • The Trinity are barely monitoring Sanctuary and just about anyone, even Harley Quinn, can waltz inside.
    • It's quickly shown the various patients staying at Sanctuary are not improving in any way, as the repeat performances of their trauma only wears them down. Lagoon Boy went through recreations of the Titans East Massacre over 300 times, while Wally West's spirit was gradually broken down over a few weeks. The Sanctuary AI does almost nothing to really help them, even though Wally's blatantly getting worse and Lagoon Boy's going through the massacre in what's clearly an attempt at self harm. Sanctuary was SO sketchy, that all the abuse Wally suffered through made him suspect this was all a scheme orchestrated by a bunch of supervillains. His hacking the computer made him experience everyone's respective traumas at once until he had a nervous breakdown and accidentally unleashed a burst of energy killing everyone around him. So yeah, Sanctuary was so poorly thought out its patients end up suffering more trauma than before they arrived and one patient honestly believed it was being run by villains to torment superheroes.
  • ''The Sanctuary Tree': At the beginning of the story, Donald Duck ends up being late on a date with Daisy because he was running away from a fat female guard, for fishing in a prohibited place. Daisy broke up with Donald and he buys a love potion to try to get her back. Donald is following Daisy when she decides to take a boat trip on the lake. He swims behind her... and somehow, swims in circles, and consequently ends up in the same female guard's boat instead of Daisy's, and it is the guard who ends up drinking the love potion and falling in love with Donald. And then Daisy catches the two hugging and kissing, and furious, ends the dating once and for all, leaving the unlucky Donald alone with the guard.
  • Lampshaded in an Achille Talon comic, where Lefuneste comments that anything Achille attempts to do eventually causes a disaster. They spend the whole page arguing about it before Achille goes on to adjust his TV aerial, which somehow causes a helicopter to crash on his roof.
  • Superman: Space Age has Superman's first outing, spurred by President Kennedy's assassination and a resulting missile crisis, be a failure on all accounts as he flies into a bird, is shot down by pilots, and almost causes the very disaster he was trying to prevent.

    Comic Strips 
  • Beetle Bailey:
    • Cookie manages to make soup that is too tough to cut with a knife... and steak that is too tough to cut with a machine gun and grenades. He also manages to fail to not include the kitchen sink — in food. No wonder he graduated 50th out of a class of twenty-five.
    • Failures in reading the map have led the soldiers to standing on thin air or upside down on the downside of a cliff — or, more explicably, in a river when Lt. Fuzz insists on following the blue line.note 
    • Zero has difficulties doing things right. When firing a cannon, he manages to do it wrong by making it go MOOB instead of BOOM. He also can't sleep in a tent right: instead of both legs sticking out at one end, he has one sticking out of each end.
  • Calvin and Hobbes:
    • When Calvin breaks his dad's binoculars, Hobbes asks, "Was the casing just chipped a little, or did the lens itself get cracked?" It turns out that, somehow, the binoculars have literally been ground into a fine powder.
      Calvin: Don't sneeze.
    • Subverted in the numerous strips where Calvin attempts to learn how to ride a bike. Getting your face stuck in the chain sounds like quite the failure... if it wasn't for the fact that the bike is actually alive and attempting to kill Calvin. His parents don't believe him though.
  • In one Dilbert strip, a generic co-worker decides to hide his boyish looks by growing a beard. Dilbert and Wally chuckle on how they don't think Ted is smart enough to grow a beard. In the final panel, we see that Ted has indeed grown a beard...out of his forehead.
  • Drabble:
    • Ralph once went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The first question: "Humpty Dumpty sat on a what?" Ralph can't think of the answer, so he uses the lifeline to remove two of the answers. He's now left with "wall" and "whoopee cushion" which were the two he couldn't decide between before. He then decides to poll the audience. After the entire audience claims that it's "wall", he dismisses the poll because he thinks the audience looks kind of stupid. He finally phones his son Patrick who starts to give him the answer only for time to run out. Ralph ends up walking away with nothing.
    • In 2016, Norman decided that Echo was the girl for him and he should finally stop pursuing Wendy. So, he sends Wendy a series of nasty breakup texts to finally let her know how he feels about the way she treats him. How is this an Epic Fail? He sends them to Echo by mistake. Worse yet, he mentions it to Wendy and she says he didn't need to break up with her because they were never actually dating. Fortunately, it appears his relationship with Echo will recover.
    • One week, the Polecat Lodge held a telethon. You know things are heading this way when No Neck forgets to get telephones for the telethon. The telethon eventually brings in a scant seventeen dollars...and Patrick manages to get more donations while trick or treating that Halloween.
  • The Far Side:
    • A Wild West gunslinger gets beaten to the draw.. by a sloth. One bystander mentions that the newly deceased wasn't exactly what you would call a "quick draw".
    • In another comic, a man in an orchestra is thinking, "This time I won't screw up! I won't, I won't, I won't..." He's holding a single cymbal in one hand- the other hand is empty. The caption reads "Roger screws up."
  • From FoxTrot:
    • Jason and Marcus are attempting to launch a rocket, but put the engines in wrong so it launches into the ground. When the second stage kicks in, fire starts shooting out of various spots in the ground in enormous columns, prompting this remark from Jason:
      Jason: Why can't my successes ever be as spectacular as my failures?
    • There's also Roger once being effortlessly defeated at Chess by a computer... after having Jason modify the chess program's code so that Roger had a King and fifteen Queens, while the computer had a King and fifteen Pawns.
    • Roger and the barbecue grill do not go well together. One time he lit it and the flames shot towards the ground, leading him to announced that he put the charcoal in upside down. Jason even says it would be impossible for anyone else.
    • Roger, in general, is a failure. One time, while playing golf, he finally makes a straight shot! Too bad it was in the opposite direction of the hole...and impacted into the windshield of his boss' car. In fact, the only time he can get a hole-in-one is when the golf course is flooded under 5 feet of water. Of course, he probably didn't even come close to the green but no-one wants to swim out and check.
    • Another is a strip where Roger is golfing and hits his first shot. The shot ricochets off of trees, yard markers, bounces on a sidewalk, etc. until, defying the laws of physics, it inevitably ends up right back on the tee Roger hit it off of. He implies that this is actually a ROUTINE occurrence.
    • Roger takes Walking Techbane to new levels. A single press of a button or a click of a mouse can destroy an entire hard drive. Fortunately, he rarely can find the on switch in the first place.
    • Also, a Pavilionplex worker ended up somehow mistaking the theater's internet server with the butter server and promptly washing it, explaining the reason for the long lag time for the Pavilionplex's site when Jason was ordering tickets for Attack of the Clones online.
    • How bad of an athlete is Peter? When he and his friend Steve were checking out who got cut from the football team, Peter's right at the top. Not only did he not actually try out for the football team that year, his name is pre-printed on the list.
  • Garfield
    Garfield: I told you to buy two of them!
    • In the July 15, 1998 strip, Odie starts to bury a bone and somehow ends up burying himself instead.
  • The Middletons once saw Grandma Middleton commenting on the stupidity of a game show contestant who's just asked to buy a vowel. Morris asks her to be more forgiving since Wheel of Fortune isn't an easy show. Grandma then tells him she's watching Jeopardy!
  • In My Cage, Jeff the land shark somehow got stuck inside the water cooler.
  • Peanuts:
    • Charlie Brown is well known for failing in ways that are utterly impossible through no readily apparent fault of his own. Blockhead.
      Lucy: That's the first time I've ever seen a kite explode.
    • His kite has also ended up down a sewer and in a mailbox slot. And of course, he tends to get tangled up in a tree with the kite a lot.
    • The arc that marked Peppermint Patty's first appearance involved her trying to help his sandlot team by taking over as manager. Despite hitting five home runs and pitching a no-hit game, they lost thirty-seven to five via unearned runs, which is when she decided she could not help them and left.
    • There was one arc where Charlie Brown helped Peppermint Patty sell popcorn while she pitched for her team. After badgering her by saying he can pitch the final out, he promptly gives up a fifty-run lead and her team loses.
      • Patty's reaction to hearing Charlie Brown blew a fifty point lead in the bottom of the ninth with TWO outs is priceless.
    • Also lampshaded in The Movie A Boy Named Charlie Brown, when the girls mock Charlie by singing the song "Failure Face". They quip that, if trying to fail were like running a race, Charlie Brown would actually win.
    • There is a line of Epic Fail T-shirts displaying his greatest failure moments.
  • Pearls Before Swine: The antics of the crocodiles of the Zeeba Zeeba Eata fraternity are guaranteed to result in this, namely when trying to kill and eat Zebra. Some of their more memorable failures involve attempting to kill Zebra... and end up killing several crocodiles in the process, usually with some form of I Just Shot Marvin in the Face.
  • In one strip of Piranha Club, a character tries to boil water for a home economics class, but somehow manages to freeze the water solid.

    Films - Animated 
  • As Caesar's fleet approaches Britain in the opening of Asterix in Britain, a signalman gets mad at a very annoying seagull and starts waving his signal flags wildly trying to get rid of it. What follows is the accidental self-destruction of a large chunk of the fleet as well as a Facepalm from Caesar accompanied by an exasperated "I came, I saw, and I don't believe my eyes."
  • The Bad Guys (2022): The gang is trying to pretend to become good and are given an exercise to prove themselves and avoid a jail sentence: save 200,000 guinea pigs from a laboratory. Their attempt ends so disastrously that the public believes the gang was assaulting the guinea pigs, nearly landing them in jail.
  • Brother Bear:
    Rutt: I can't believe you totaled a mammoth.
    Tuke: That mountain came out of nowhere. It was in my blind spot.
  • The Flaming Death scene from A Bug's Life was such an epic fail for the circus bugs that P.T Flea fired them all. Inverted when it turns out that the audience loved the act for the comedy.
  • In Cars, Lightning McQueen is having trouble making turns on dirt. Doc Hudson gives him some advice, saying when turning on dirt, he should steer in the opposite direction, in other words, turn right to go left. After sarcastically thanking Doc, McQueen takes the "turn right to go left" hint a bit too literally, and ends up swerving right into a cactus pit.
  • In Cats Don't Dance, the animals set up an audition with studio head L.B. Mammoth that is sabotaged by the villainous Darla Dimple far beyond what should be probable or even possible. Flooding the stage? Well, maybe. Flooding the entire studio? Pretty far-fetched. But wait, there's more: accidentally dragging L.B. himself behind you on your anchor as your prop boat floats through the streets, crashing into buildings? Ouch. Accidentally getting him tied to the mast when the boat sinks? Epic Fail.
  • Coco: Miguel's grito, which the Spanish word for "scream" and is used by Mariachi singers, is unimpressive at first, being a high-pitched, crackly squeak that makes even the otherwise happy-go-lucky Dante cringe. Luckily for Miguel, he manages to fix this before he gets on stage for the first time.
  • In Hercules, there are several instances.
    • As a teenager, Hercules crashes into a pillar. While stopping it from falling, he hits another which starts a domino effect, destroying a marketplace.
    • While training to be a hero, Hercules has to save a "damsel" which is portrayed as a dummy. The dummy was barely in pieces by the time his training was finished.
    • When Hercules confronts Nessus to save Megara, Meg didn't want to be saved. Then Nessus punches Herc into the water. Instead of his sword, Herc wields a fish, causing Nessus to laugh and punch Herc again.
    • After freeing two boys, Hercules unintentionally releases the Hydra from its cave. Then, while battling the monster, Herc realizes that his sword is missing and behind him. Then Herc throws a rock at the Hydra, who crushes it with its teeth and laughs at the hero. Then when Herc retrieves his sword, the Hydra swallows him whole. After Herc cuts his way out through decapitation, the Hydra grows more heads.
  • In The Incredibles, we have a slightly morbid example with the "No Capes" montage. This includes one hero flying too close to a jet engine, which their cape gets caught in and another snagging on something when taking off.
    • Then there is a villainous example where Syndrome showboats, allowing the killer robot he created to locate the remote control on his suit and blast it off, turning a fake disaster into a real one.
  • The Lion King (1994):
    • When Simba and Nala argue over whose idea it was to lose Zazu and who deserve credit for pulling it off, Simba tries to pounce on Nala only to be easily flipped and pinned by her. After he pushes her off him he immediately tries pouncing on her from behind while she's not paying attention. Unfortunately, he accidentally sends them both tumbling over a nearby hill in his attempt, and while he struggles to stay on top of her she is just laughing and having a blast. Shortly after they reach the bottom, Nala once again flips and pins him, and smuggles her victory in his face while all he can do is glare at her.
      Nala: Pinned ya again.
    • Scar's entire tenure as king was even more disastrous than one could have easily predicted, with the hyenas having hunted everything into nothingness, and the entire land now a desolate and barren wasteland. Not even the river was spared. As Sarabi stated, living under his rule had truly become a death sentence. His hyena lackeys actually complain that Mufasa was a better ruler, even if he did not allow them to live in the Pride Lands, which says a lot about Scar’s ineptitude as a ruler, and his total lack of interest in actually running a kingdom.
  • The Lion King 1 ½:
    • At the beginning of the film, Timon's so bad at digging (or at least his way of digging) that he ends up causing the entire tunnel system to collapse. And we heard this is the fourth time he's done it in a week.
      Random Meerkat: Who else can break a hole?!
    • Later on, when trying to break Simba and Nala up during the "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" sequence, Timon throws a beehive at them... only for the hive to go ahead and the bees to stay right above his head and chase him instead. Why this happened... the world may never know.
  • Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted: The circus's performance in Rome is a series of Epic Fail. Examples include Stefano choking on his balls, knocking a dog unconscious by accident, or Vitally simply moving the hoop to the opposite side instead of jumping through it, or a horse kicking another dog off a pyramid of dogs, or the balls the elephants were standing on deflating, or even the elephant accidentally sitting on a heckler and exiting stage left with the boy in his rear end.
    Skipper: Well, that was worth the price of admission.
  • The Mitchells vs. the Machines: Towards the end of the movie, Rick tries to subscribe to his daughter's YouTube channel. During his attempt, he somehow accidentally orders 12 Swiffers from Amazon.
  • Monsters, Inc.:
    • At the beginning of the movie, Bile tries to scare the child in the scare simulator. Bile ends up screaming when the child screams, leading to him stepping on a soccer ball which then hits his face, tripping on a skateboard, and sitting on a set of jacks, which causes him to run around the simulator screaming. However, none of these were his biggest failure: Before any of this happened, he left the child's door wide open, which is "the worst mistake any employee can make" because it could let a "deadly" child into the monster world.
    • In one of the outtakes, the scarers are walking to the Scare Floor as usual when, suddenly, Sulley trips and falls, which in turn causes all the other scarers to fall as well.
  • Monsters University: The incredibly slow yellow slug really struggling to get to class on the first day is revealed in The Stinger to not only have missed the class, but the whole school year.
  • Mulan: Mulan is getting ready for her first meeting with the matchmaker. It starts badly, then gets progressively worse. It involves a renegade cricket, some badly placed ink, a teapot, and fire.
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Friendship Games: Flash Sentry and Sweetie Drops enter a cake baking contest, but bake a loaf of bread instead.
  • In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Jack Skellington tries his hand at making a paper snowflake. He folds up the paper, snips bits of it away, and when he unfolds the paper, the result looks like a spider. Cue Double Take.
  • Peanuts:
    • In A Boy Named Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown loses the spelling bee when he misspells "beagle", a word you'd think he'd be very familiar with. (Snoopy is a beagle.) Even worse, he does it on live TV. Even worse than that, Charlie screams in frustration as soon as he spelled the word, meaning he knew the correct spelling and just plain screwed up.
    • It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown:
      • Marcie is told by Peppermint Patty to cook some eggs for egg coloring. First, she cracks them on a griddle. Second, she smooshes some with a waffle maker. Third, she tries placing one in a toaster. Fourth, she cooks the remains of the eggs in an oven. And finally, Peppermint Patty tells her to boil them. But Marcie even messes that up, because she cracks the eggs into the water.
        Peppermint Patty: Marcie, you've made egg SOUP! AAAAAAAUGH!!!!!!
      • At the end of the special, Peppermint Patty tells Marcie "We put salt on the eggs and eat them." Since Marcie has a salt shaker already in her pocket, she salts the egg and bites it. The only problem? She forgot to take the shell off.
        Marcie: Tastes terrible, sir!
        Peppermint Patty: [drops her own egg, does a facepalm and drops her head down to her knees]
    • In It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown "had a little trouble with the scissors" when making his Bedsheet Ghost costume and ends up with extra eye holes scattered all over it.
  • Rover Dangerfield:
    • Rover fails so badly at sheep herding that when he turns his back on them to be with Daisy they've somehow gotten stuck up a tree.
    • Later, Rover valiantly saves the farm's turkey from a pack of hungry coyotes... and it dies anyway from shock!
  • Shark Tale: Oscar manages to lose the pearl that could have saved him from debt, by gambling it on a seahorse race, where his chosen seahorse trips. Bear in mind that not only are the seahorses swimming, not running, but they also have no feet.
  • The Simpsons Movie: Homer, having alienated his family, and accidentally prevented the townspeople from escaping, angrily kicks the bomb...and accidentally halves the countdown time.
  • South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut:
    Doctor: (to Kenny) Son, we have some bad news. We accidentally replaced your heart with a baked potato. You have about 3 seconds to live. (Kenny's heart then blows up)
  • The Sword in the Stone: Kay loses a jousting match. Against a training dummy.
  • Tangled: Rapunzel has a montage of epic fails trying to get Flynn Rider into a closet. It should be noted that he was unconscious, and it only ends when Rapunzel decides having the doors closed with his fingers poking out is close enough.
  • The Thief and the Cobbler:
    • It can't get much more epic than how the Mighty One-Eyes's attempt to destroy the Golden City is ultimately foiled. All it took was a very, very, very fortunately aimed little tack and a (big amount of) dumb luck, and the One-Eye's improbable war machine of doom is destroyed by a hilarious chain reaction along with all the One-Eyes's army. All because of a tack. And mind you, the progressive destruction of the war machine gets more than fifteen minutes of screen time.
    • Though not as spectacular, the Thief's Wile E. Coyote-esque attempts at stealing the golden balls are crowned by some pretty epic fails too.
  • Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: At one point, while suggesting a way to get rid of Benny, Ratsputin pulls out a flail and starts giving it a few twirls... but ends up wrapping himself up in its chain.
  • Toy Story: At one point, Mr. Potato Head and Hamm play Battleships against each other, with Hamm winning. But look closely to see by how the game is going; Hamm has successfully hit every one of Potato Head's ships (All bunched together) without missing, while Potato Head's side is filled with white Miss pegs except the areas where Hamm's ships are.
  • Toy Story 2: "Prepare to meet Mr. Angry Eyes!" quoth Mr. Potato Head as he rushes to the attack in Al's apartment. After switching his regular eyes... for an extra pair of shoes. So naturally, he just runs into the furniture and looks like an idiot. Jessie's WTF facial expression makes it even better.
  • In Turning Red, during the opening, Mei steals Tyler's basketball and tries to make a shot. The ball not only misses the hoop, but actually bounces onto the road where it is subsequently run over and flattened. Tyler is appropriately ticked off.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: Felix is caught by King Candy and put into a jail cell. He tries to get out with his hammer note ... and ends up making the bars on the cell twice as thick.
    Fix-It Felix Jr.: WHY DO I FIX EVERYTHING I TOUCH?!

    Jokes 
  • Many creative ways of insulting someone's intelligence involve failure at tasks even though it's actually hard to fail at them even if you try. For example "can't pour water out of a boot even if there are instructions written on the heel" or "threw a rock at the ground and missed". Often coincide with Your Mom jokes.

    Literature 
  • A to Z Mysteries: In The Orange Outlaw, the trio and their friends try to catch the main antagonists by hiding in a garage, but Josh accidentally screws up by opening the garage button.
  • Aesop's Fables: In "The Tortoise and the Hare", the only reason why the Tortoise was able to beat the Hare in their race was because the Hare believed he could take a nap in the middle of their race and still win. If he hadn't done that, the Hare would have easily beat the Tortoise. Instead, the Hare loses to the Tortoise.
  • In David Eddings' The Belgariad, the character Lelldorin manages to extend an epic fail over the course of several weeks. When he announces that he's going to get back to the main group, his beloved refuses to stay behind. During the departure and trip, he manages to break her father's leg, run his cousin through the leg "just a little bit", punch out all of a priest's teeth, and cause enough assorted mayhem to get a bounty put on his head by the crown. And all of this was without trying. This is also an example of Disaster Dominoes.
    • He did successfully marry the girl in the process, though! He claims traveling alone with an unwed woman would have caused more trouble, but considering getting married involved punching out said priest's teeth...
    • In The Mallorean, Garion has to stop a war threatening to engulf the entire kingdom of Arendia. He magically summons a storm that helps him single-handedly stop two charging armies in their tracks, force an old friend to marry the love of his life, and resolve the dispute. He’s very pleased with his hard day’s work. A few chapters later, he finds out that he sparked off blizzards, hurricanes, droughts, and tornados right around the world, and even triggered a new ice age. It took the combined efforts of the Gods themselves and two of the most powerful sorcerers alive over six months to fix it. Needless to say, Garion is banned from touching the weather again for two thousand years.
  • In Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, Elijah Baley is investigating a murder and has a robot partner that appears physically identical to the murder victim. He goes to the people who reported the murder, announces his theory that the robot is, in fact, the murder victim, and gives an extended justification. The entire "murder" was a scheme, it was the robot that had been destroyed to produce the "body," and here are the point-by-point reasons why all the supposedly "robotic" actions of his partner actually match perfectly with a human impersonating a robot. All the while, his boss is watching via a teleconference. After the completion of the detailed and rational accusation, said alleged non-robot opens up his sleeve and then calmly opens his arm as well. Elijah faintsnote .
  • Codex Alera: The First Aleran Legion, before they have collectively Taken A Level In Badass, are prone to this. The single Knight Ignus is being treated for burn wounds, and while the Knights Aeris can fly up, they aren't very good at getting down again. They wind up getting the nickname "Knights Pisces," since they act more like landed fish than legionnaires.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Big Shot: Greg's team plays against Slacksville midway through the book. They score 2 points, while Slacksville gets 103.
  • Discworld:
    • Anything created by "Bloody Stupid" Johnson is likely to fall into this to such a degree it crosses over into Achievements in Ignorance. Anyone can create a garden fountain that doesn't work. It took Johnson to create one that creaked for half an hour and then shot a stone cherub a hundred feet into the air. Or crazy paving that committed suicide. A badly designed apartment block is easy. But only Johnson could draw plans so bad the resulting building warps space-time. Despite this his inventions usually work quite well, only at something entirely unrelated to their intended purpose such as the manicure device which makes a very handy automatic potato peeler.
    • A related level of "talent" can be found in Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler and his various international counterparts. The original's sausages inna bun have been compared to a B-movie—horrible but strangely compelling—but when he tried to branch out into cultural cuisine he got similar complaints from the other species of Ankh-Morpork, such as trying to sell stale rocks to the trolls.
    • The Counting Pines in "Reaper Man" believed that the reason humanity cuts down trees is because they want to see how old these trees are by looking at annual rings. Thus, they evolved to show their age on their bark, and within a year were nearly driven to extinction by the ornamental house number plate industry.
    • The River Watch are brought up at multiple points in the Vimes books, usually in the context of their boat having sunk. The river in question, the Ankh, is famous for its thick crust of miscellaneous pollutants; anglers have to jump up and down on their hooks, people trying to drown themselves bounce, dumped bodies are more likely to dissolve than sink and the estuary has evolved a unique species called the "shovel-nosed dolphin". Managing to sink anything in the Ankh once is an achievement; managing to sink it multiple times is probably medal-worthy.
  • Perhaps the funniest part of The Divine Comedy is the revelation that Adam and Eve were in Eden for about six or seven hours before they were kicked out for breaking God's very simple rules.
  • In A Feast For Crows, the book ends with a very dramatic reveal of a plot to marry Quentyn Martell, a prince of Dorne, to Danaerys Targaryen, overthrow the government, and put her on the throne. Late in A Dance with Dragons, a mysterious stranger arrives in Danaerys' camp, reveals himself to be Quentyn, and promises her love and a throne. She turns him down, although she hints that they can make an alliance or political marriage later. He is so desperate to return home with something to show for his gambit that he tries to abduct two of her dragons. They promptly burn him so horrifically that he dies blind and in agony several days later. Nobody Shoots the Shaggy Dog like GRRM.
  • Fiasco by Stanisław Lem. Full stop. It starts with young pilot named Parvis going on a rescue mission to save his mentor and fellow Chronic Hero Syndrome sufferer Pirx - this mission goes wrong and Parvis has to use an emergency procedure to become a Human Popsicle till he gets rescued himself. Two and a half centuries later. When they practically have to rebuild him, and he still gets retrograde amnesia so severe that he's not sure whether he's really Parvis - or Pirx (his rescuers don't know because of a bureaucratic screw-up). But that's only the beginning! The ship that's rescued him is on a mission to contact an alien civilisation which proves unable, unwilling, or both, to have any meaningful relationship with humanity. The First Contact attempts repeatedly fail, in progessively destructive ways, culminating in the entire planet, with probably-Parvis on it, getting destroyed because he got so engrossed he hadn't reported on time.
  • Harry Potter:
  • In Horus Heresy, often the greatest obstacle in the villain's path is the villain himself:
    • In Fear To Tread, Ka'bandha's plan is to confront the Blood Angels with his armies and amp up the Angels' tendency for Unstoppable Rage to the point that they'll do a Face–Heel Turn and start serving Khorne, the god of wrath. He apparently missed the memo that Unstoppable Rage is, well, unstoppable, and the infuriated Angels overrun his armies and get him killed before he's able to corrupt them.
    • In Vulkan Lives, Curze has Vulkan run through an ever-changing maze to the former's amusement, with the promised prize being a hammer with a built-in teleporter. Upon Vulkan finding the hammer, Curze shows up right in front of him to gloat about how the maze has anti-teleportation shields, and his teleporter is useless. Vulkan's response?
    You forgot about one thing, Konrad... It's also a hammer.
    • In Deathfire, the ship the main characters are travelling on is infested by a gang of daemons which take form of little girls to lure people into close quarters, whereupon they eviscerate them. On their hit list is a pair of techmarines repairing an airless, gravity-less area between two layers of the hull. Some time into the incursion, the main characters meet with the techmarines, and the conversation goes something like this:
    Numeon: There are daemons on the ship. They look like...
    Techmarine 1: Children, we know. We've shot one.
    Techmarine 2: We have realized there's something off when we saw it floating and talking to us without a void suit.
  • The Illustrated Star Wars Universe: In the Hoth chapter, a company owned by Durga the Hutt sets up what sounds like an easy plan to scour the asteroid field for valuable ore, namely by fully automated mining ships programmed to home in on large sources of precious mineral and harvest them until nothing remains. So, two huge Automated Mineral Exploiters are sent out to sweep the entire asteroid field from opposite angles... but nobody gave any thought as to what would happen when the two ships inevitably met in the middle of the field. Worse still, by the time their paths intersect, each AME is carrying around a huge quantity of ore in their cargo holds, so they both register as viable targets as soon as they detect each other. As such, the AMEs proceed to mine each other, annihilating both ships, scattering all their collected ore across space, and costing the company a fortune. Durga the Hutt is not amused, and the official in charge is not only executed for failure but has all traces of their identity erased from existence.
  • In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, Cynric the Sorceress apparently has a reputation for having failures as spectacular as her successes. While none are directly witnessed, Grail features a scene Mallory and Tristen quickly conclude that one particular disaster is not her fault because one of her screw-ups would have been a great deal more catastrophic.
    Cynric did not make merely human errors. Her mistakes were more on the epic scale, her failings those of demigods.
  • In The Kingkiller Chronicle, Kvothe tries to convince the Eccentric Mentor Elodin to teach him the secret magic of Naming, to Elodin's mounting irritation. Eventually, Elodin tells him to go jump off the roof... which Kvothe mistakes for a Secret Test of Character and does. He breaks three ribs, dislocates his shoulder, and convinces Elodin that nobody as foolhardy as he should be let anywhere near Naming.
    Elodin: Congratulations. That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Ever.
  • In Life of Fred: Geometry, two criminals try to rob a bank. Not only does their plan get leaked a day in advance, but despite them wearing masks, the bank teller identifies one because he wore a sweater with his name stitched on it, and learns the other’s name because the first one was dumb enough to say it. Then, when the criminals demand all the money in the till, the teller points out that they don’t have weapons, so he’s not obligated to do anything. One of the criminals asks a nearby bystander for a gun, and the bystander has one and was stupid enough that he would have given it to him, but the bystander accidentally fires the gun and the criminals think he tried to shoot them, so they put their hands in the air and beg for mercy. Then the police show up, and they get carted off to jail.
  • The Battle of Fondor in New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II — Jedi Eclipse. Bad intelligence predictions lead to the New Republic scrambling to respond to the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of Fondor. As part of the response, Anakin Solo takes control of Centerpoint Station (a Pointless Doomsday Device from The Corellian Trilogy), but then at his older brother Jacen's unexplained urging refuses to fire it (probably a result of the early books' poorly explained aversion to using leftover Imperial superweapons to fight the invaders). But the station is still active, so his cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo grabs the controls and fires it himself. The ensuing blast destroys half of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet, and the Hapan fleet that just arrived to reinforce the defenders, and smashes part of Fondor's moon, and clips the planet on its way past (cue Inferred Holocaust). The battle becomes a Pyrrhic Victory for the Republic (and that only because the opposing general withdraws in fear of further such attacks) and causes a political shitstorm in the Hapes Consortium that tips the balance of power to its Evil Matriarch Queen Mother Ta'a Chume, while the sudden death toll carried through the Force causes her daughter-in-law Queen Teneniel Djo to miscarry. Meanwhile Sal-Solo, who was the villain in his first appearance and did a stint in prison for an attempted coup against the Corellian system's New Republic government, is lauded as a war hero on Corellia and gets himself elected Governor-General (setting up part of Legacy of the Force). To cap it all off, Centerpoint Station is damaged to disablement by Sal-Solo's manhandling, and Anakin admits afterward that if he'd fired Centerpoint Station himself, he could have taken out the Vong fleet without causing all that damage.
  • The Reluctant King: Ruak the demon is sent to fetch Estrildis, a short, plump blonde woman. He returns with her handmaid, a tall and slender brunette.
  • In A Rising Thunder, the Solarian League sends several hundred of their most powerful warships to (they think) effortlessly curb-stomp Manticore after the Manticorans have suffered the twin setbacks of the Battle of Manticore and the Oyster Bay sneak attack, seriously depleting their military resources. Oh, someone gets curb-stomped alright... but it isn't the Manticorans. Or the rest of their Grand Alliance, for that matter.
  • David Weber's Safehold series features a triumphant example of this. The first book, Off Armageddon Reef, featured the Church of God Awaiting attacking the protagonist kingdom of Charis by creating an alliance of every single other naval power in the world. Unfortunately for them, thanks to Charis' own strong naval tradition coupled with Merlin Athrawes giving the galleon (among other things) to the Charisians, what actually happens is Fail so Epic it takes the Church two and a half books (a good two or three years in-story) to finally recover enough to make any kind of counterattack. That fails hard, too. Though not without a more sizeable cost from Charis' forces. Compounding their failure was the fact that most of the people planning the attack were accustomed to land battles and didn't take into account the realities of the weather, the limitations of the vessels they were using, etc. And one reason it took so long to recover is because they spent a good chunk of that building the wrong ships, as they were building a galley fleet after Charis' victories show how significantly galleons had come to outclass them as warships.
  • Shadow Games, book four of The Black Company, ends with the Company attempting to lay siege to the city of Dejagore. It goes so badly that the next two books deal almost exclusively with the Company picking up the pieces. It even results in the series' first change of narrators, because the original narrator is captured, but presumed dead.
  • There is a cookery book (called, logically, The Something Went Wrong What Do I Do Now Cookery Book) dedicated to correcting various kitchen emergencies. Naturally, it includes a chapter called "Total Failure". One piece of advice therein — if you've tried everything else, if you haven't got enough ingredients for an emergency meal and you have no other recourse, at least make it a memorable failure, one that will be recounted with awe through the generations.
    "If you've burned the house down, Mission Accomplished."
  • The Stormlight Archive:
    • The Way of Kings (2010): When Kaladin discovers his Surgebinding powers, it takes him weeks to learn how to draw in Stormlight intentionally. He spends most of that time staring at spheres filled with Stormlight, holding his breath. You draw in Stormlight by breathing.
    • Words of Radiance:
      • After Shallan is shipwrecked, she tries to use her Soulcasting abilities to transform some driftwood into a fire, and ends up arguing with a stick. And losing. It's still bothering her in Oathbringer.
        Shallan: You want to burn.
        Stick: I am a stick.
        Shallan: Think of how much fun it would be?
        Stick: I am a stick.
      • Once Kaladin finally understands his Gravity Master abilities and tests changing the direction he can fall, he tries to run up a wall and lands flat on his face. On the wall, so that worked, but still.
  • In his commentary on The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Albus Dumbledore describes the attempt at Hogwarts to hold a production of "The Fountain of Fair Fortune." Unfortunately, Romance on the Set led to a fierce Wizard Duel when the male lead dumped one of the actresses for another—and while this was going on, an ashwinder was busy setting the place on fire. Hogwarts has not attempted any stage productions since.
  • The backstory for the Wayside School series is that it was supposed to be a single-story building, with 30 classrooms in a row. What was built was a 30-story building, with a classroom on each floor. The builder said he was very sorry. What's more, there is no 19th floor. Except when there is.
  • The short story "Wolfie" by Theodore Cogswell is supernatural thriller meets caper gone wrong. A man in New York City goes to a sorcerer for help in murdering his rich cousin. His idea is to take the form of a wolf and rip his cousin's throat out. There is a slip-up at the veterinary hospital he has tricked a wolf blood sample out of; they give him a sample from an old, toothless, mangy poodle named Wolfie by mistake. To make failure even more certain, as a precaution to protect the witch doctor from You Have Failed Me at the hands of his familiar should our Villain Protagonist get cold feet or a Heel Realization, the would-be murderer cannot change back until he has tasted his cousin's arterial blood. In the end, he is put down by the Animal Rescue League.

    Manhua 
  • Most of the gags in Old Master Q run on this. For instance, one comic has Master Q trying to hammer a nail into a wall to hang a picture... only to accidentally knock a hole through it. A man-sized hole.

    Music 
  • Kids Praise: The eighth album is a typical 90s baseball story, except that the kids' first game has them lose to their rivals by over 40 points without scoring a single run themselves.
  • Nickelback's "Get 'Em Up", a single from No Fixed Address, is about a Bank Robbery that is foiled before it begins because the would-be robbers forget that banks close on Sunday. They're quickly caught by the police.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic:
    • In "Genius In France", he claims to have gotten a negative number on his SATs.
    • His "I Lost On Jeopardy" also counts as two other contestants mop the floor with him on the show. Al doesn't even get a copy of the home game.
  • Danny Kaye's Dodgers song is from the the Los Angeles Dodgers' perspective, but the bottom of the ninth inning is Epic Fail from the San Francisco Giants' perspective. The Dodgers are up to bat and the Giants lead 4-0. Two consecutive fielding errors land Maury Wills and then Jim Gilliam on base. Jimmy Davis gets a single, as does Tommy Davis (bringing Wills home). Then a third fielding error with implied major confusion turns Big Frank Howard's apparent sacrifice bunt into another four runs, and the Dodgers win it 5-4.
  • Ninja Sex Party: In the song "Dragon Slayer", Danny Sexbang is chatting up a girl at a party and trying to get her to go out with him by telling ridiculous tales about himself, such as claiming that he slew a dragon. In the end, the girl decides to go home with everyone except Dan.
    Danny: Oh, I see you've chosen the football player... and the scientist... and apparently the weightlifter as well... and the dragon... and Ninja Brian... and the Manticore? He wasn't even in this song!
  • The traditional Irish folk ballad "Lily the Pink" can be summed up with this trope, as everyone who tries her "medicinal compound" ends up with worse problems than they started with.

    Podcasts 
  • At the climax of season two in Acquisitions Incorporated, Binwin and Jim are down and the party is barely alive. Omin, as a final resort, tries to use an encounter power. And proceeds to roll a one. With some divine intervention from Aeofel, he gains a re-roll and tries to attack again. And then rolls another one.
  • The entire reign of the Roman emperor Didius Julianus, as portrayed in Totalus Rankium (and their historical sources). Julianus purchased the Imperial title from the Praetorian Guard, who had just murdered his predecessor, and spent his short reign panicking as the general Septimius Severus marched on the capital to take it off his hands. Several Zany Schemes (including, but not limited to attempting to train circus elephants to fight and hiring magicians to curse Severus) utterly failed, and Julianus was killed only two months into his reign. And There Was Much Rejoicing.

    Puppet Shows 
  • The Muppet Show:
    • In the Edgar Bergen episode, Gonzo the Great wrestles a brick blindfolded...and loses.
    • In the Nancy Walker episode, Kermit is home sick, so Fozzie is in charge; he proceeds to nearly blow the theater up, then delays the next act until the audience leaves - almost - and then messes up the introductions in a way that somehow causes "At the Dance" and "Veterinarian's Hospital" to go on at the same time. And this is just before the first commercial break...
    • In the Loretta Lynn episode, the Muppets try to perform a song titled ''The Rhyming Song''. Almost none of the lyrics they sing rhyme, and when they do, they rhyme ''song'' with ''song''.
    • In the Lynda Carter episode, in honor of Lynda's "Wonder Woman" character, Scooter and some of the other Muppets are inspired to take a correspondence course on "How to Be a Superhero." Scooter reads a chapter of the instruction manual, Invincibility Made Easy, that teaches about learning how to fly. After stating that all they need to do is believe that they can fly, Scooter encourages Gonzo, Link, Fozzie, and Lew Zealand to "step off the ladder and float to the ceiling.'' Cue all four Muppets falling flat on the ground.
    • Professor Bunsen Honeydew has Epic Fails all the time, much to the regret of his hapless assistant Beaker. In one episode, his fireproof paper proved even more flammable than regular paper, but even worse, his invention of flammable water (used by Beaker when he tried to put it out) worked perfectly.
    • Possibly the most epic fail of all was the one where the cast turned the show into a Birthday Episode for Kermit. Not only was it not Kermit's birthday, it was about four months later. (Not even close.)
  • Sesame Street:
    • In a Season 5 episode, Big Bird joins the adults for a game of hide and seek; he isn't good at hiding, so he becomes the seeker instead. However, once Big Bird finishes the count, he somehow ends up falling fast asleep, leaving the adults to continue without him.
      • You think that's bad, a later episode has just him and Elmo playing hide-and-seek, and Big Bird takes someone's suggestion to look "everywhere" literally. Resulting in Big Bird managing to somehow walk all the way to Alaska and back....on foot! Note that Sesame Street is part of New York City! One can only imagine how Elmo and Gabinote  aren't both dead of starvation by the time they're finally found.
    • Episode 1416 begins with Olivia and David building a new desk to surprise Luis as a renovation for the Fix-It Shop. They take the parts outside to build, Big Bird realizes this makes another surprise for the builders — after Luis arrives, the two realize since they built the desk outside, they are unable to bring it inside.
    • In Episode 1650, Big Bird hosts a "Meet Mr. Snuffleupagus" party as one of his many plans to get the adults to meet Snuffy and prove he's not imaginary; while everyone he invited does come to the party, he realizes he forgot to invite one important guest: Snuffy himself.

    Radio 
  • CBS Sports' weekday radio broadcast The D.A. Show, hosted by Damon Amendolara (9 AM - 12 Noon ET), always ends with the "Epic Fail," spotlighting the worst call-in of the morning.
  • In The Men from the Ministry after General Assistance Department's ends up with surplus of 75 pence, Sir Gregory demands that it must be lost or else there will be budget cuts. An attempt at getting rid of it ends up with the surplus of 800 000 000 pounds.
  • The Navy Lark gives us an example of epically failing trying to fail. Captain Povey was stuck with his mother-in-law for the weekend, when he desperately wanted to go out with the rest of the unit to a pub. So he "arranges" for Sub-Lieutenant Phillips to take HMS Troutbridge out for a run, with the confidence that Phillips will inevitably crash the ship, giving Povey the excuse he needs to escape. For once, Phillips can't hit anything, even with the rest of the crew trying to help by sabotaging the steering. He ends up circling another destroyer 42 times flawlessly. Then, Povey's mother-in-law gets laid up with the flu, and he is free to go. THEN, and only then, does Phillips manage to crash the ship.
  • This radio segment from This American Life is about a production of Peter Pan that becomes an utter fiasco in which the flying apparatus smacks the actors into the furniture, and Captain Hook's hook flies off his arm and hits an old woman in the stomach. By the end of the evening, firemen have arrived and all the normal boundaries between audience and actors have completely dissolved, with many in the audience hoping the performance gets even worse as it wouldn't be as fun otherwise.
  • Bleak Expectations: At the beginning of series 3, Pip Bin is abducted and tortured for a prolonged period by Mr. Benevolent, and his loved ones make no real effort to save him (Harry Biscuit does try to invent a means of saving him, but suffers "a touch of the old inventor's block"). Pip is utterly incredulous when he learns that Benevolent has in fact been torturing him inside Bin's very own home, in a room his sister had been using day-in, day-out the entire time. And, as Harry admits, they could hear him screaming for help.

    Roleplay 
  • During the battle royale in Yu-Gi-Oh! East Academy, Marcus screws up his entire strategy twice by misreading his own cards.
  • Destroy the Godmodder has many such events, the first notable one being the reapers. A massive army of them gets summoned, what happens? The godmodder mind controls them into changing sides. It isn't the worst offender either.
    • It turns into this for the godmodder later on, and everyone gets a slice of the action with the Glitch.
    • The Virus in game 2. Seems like a great idea, it gives the AGs a fair boost… and then gains self-awareness. And decides it wants to kill everything.
    • And then there's ninjatwist's Blood Pact charge, also from the second game. It would allow the godmodder a heal of 1 HP for dealing 150,000 damage to his own side and giving the player in question a permanent +1 bonus to his charges. This was done after the Game Master told him it wouldn't work and during Act Four, where the godmodder was invincible to attacks and capable of summoning and attacking that in one turn. It says something when the Game Master not only instantly gave a player a fourth action to kill him, but allowed everyone else to do so, marking the first time in the entire series a player was directly attackable outside of summoning themselves.
  • In this sadly truncated Doctor Who-themed Mafia game, the Weeping Angels come off very badly. How badly? The only player to die was their most powerful player. Their attempt to kill one player got busted because said player turned out to be the Doctor. Attempts to get in close with said player (who they didn't know was the Doctor) to bust open a potential good guy network killed the aforementioned most powerful player. Ouch.
  • In NobodysHome's run of the Pathfinder Adventure Path Rise of the Runelords, two natural ones and a Critical Failure deck resulted in Tsuto Kaijitsu knocking himself out with his own Stunning Fist and provoking opportunity attacks from the PCs. The group ended up painting Tsuto's miniature silver and giving it as an award to the worst fail of the session. Some recipients include:
    • Xanesha blinding herself, swinging the Curb-Stomp Battle the other way.
    • Two ghouls biting each other instead of their living prey.
    • Halek the barbarian knocking himself out, forcing the bard to risk his own life to pull him to safety. Honorable mention to the four trolls who botched their attempt to hide so badly the GM decided they'd covered their heads with fungus thinking "If I can't see you, you can't see me!"
    • A trio of annis hags blowing their saves and concentration checks when Hi's Fireball interrupted their Forcecage.
    • A zombie literally knocking another zombie's head off.
    • A stone giant fighting in a ritual challenge accidentally hitting the spectating paladin. Twice. The giant now had to fight the paladin and was promptly smote to death.
    • A Hound of Lamashtu tripping itself and hindering its two packmates, to the point where the bard could fight all three and win on his own.
    • A player laughing so hard at a reveal that he fell out of his chair.
    • A lich's right-hand zombie horribly failing a save-or-die, which scared the lich so badly he didn't dare confront the party.
    • A lamia running through a Blade Barrier, then knocking herself back through it.
  • In the first season of Critical Role, Vex is trying to retrieve a diamond at the bottom of a cliff, and enlists Keyleth's help. Due to a series of comically bad choices, Keyleth just dives from the top of the cliff, only barely missing the sheer edge. She turns into a goldfish, thinking it will somehow guide her towards the water. It does not, and Keyleth ends up splatting into the ground for 363 damage. For reference, this was more than double her maximum starting HP, which instantly killed Keyleth with No Saving Throw.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Sometimes, if the dice are with you and the DM has a sense of humor, it's possible to bring an Epic Fail right back around to an Epic Win.
  • Something not limited to any game, but especially in RPGs and war-games, would be the "wipe" or "total party kill", in which some way somehow you manage to lose every member of the squad all at once.
  • Practically any game in which there is Trial by Friendly Fire can result in this, though the most humiliating is the "Sleep" spell, which prioritizes lowest to highest health. So if you cast it when an ally is bloodied in the middle of a group of fully-rested enemies...
  • In Magic: The Gathering, this is pretty much the goblin race's hat. Expect them to carry grenades over to their enemies, launch themselves out of cannons, and other hilarious deaths. Oddly, this even applies to things like Skullclamp, where there's an assumption that the head has something in it before you crack it.
  • In Exalted's backstory, the Sidereals' desperate attempt to hide that they masterminded the overthrow of Creation's god-kings broke a constellation. It's worth repeating that: they broke a constellation. No one even knew that was possible, and it's a failure that has not been equalled since. (In canon, anyway.)
  • RuneQuest has a melee fumbles table, apparently based on the experience of reenactment groups. A surprisingly high number of rookie combats end when one of the duelists chops their own head off.
  • The Battle Reports in White Dwarf magazine often feature examples of hilarious fails due to very bad dice rolls.
    • A standout example was an Ultramarines captain in the inaugural battle report of Warhammer 40,000 5th Edition. He lost his first Wound when a tank he was about to charge exploded in his face, then decided to make up for it later in the game by taking on Abaddon. As he charged in, he rapid-fired his Plasma Gun... and proceeded to overheat with both shots. And fail both his saves. (That's four natural 1's in a row, by the way.) Yep, the Marine was dead despite that fact that Abaddon didn't do anything. The players joked he may well be scrubbed from the annals of Ultramarines history.
    • There was also that Apocalypse game where Cassius tried to lob a Vortex Grenade at Abaddon, only to miss horribly and hit his own Chimera.
    • Abaddon had his own when the Blood Angels got a Battle Report to celebrate their new codex. After a heavy volley of fire, only one hit landed on his unit. The player decided to have Abaddon roll the save (Abaddon's saving throws are what you expect for the strongest Chaos Lord in the setting)... and took a wound. This signaled the beginning of the end, as the unit was promptly wiped out by a single chaplain (to be fair, it was Lemartes), with Abaddon surviving only long enough to be smeared across the ground by the Sanguinary Guard.
    • There was a game where a Dark Eldar player fielded a Talos with the express purpose of using it to draw lascannon fire. During the Imperial Guard's first Shooting Phase, it took four lascannons to the face and died.
    • Then there was the infamous "Living Saint Debacle" from White Dwarf 294. In a battle report between the Sisters of Battle and the Tau Empire, the battle had been relatively even up to turn 3, but then the Sisters' assault began to hit home against the melee-vulnerable Tau. Their most powerful unit, Living Saint Justine, had not produced great results to this point, having already taken a wound from enemy fire, but she'd gotten stuck into the Tau Broadside Battlesuits, even if she'd only managed to kill a single Shield Drone in the first round. In the next round, however, the Battlesuits hit back. Unskilled, but Strong due to their Powered Armor, they managed to hit her twice on 5+ and wound her with both hits. Not a problem, she has a 2+ armour save and 2 wounds left. Snake eyes. Oh well, these things happen, but all she has to do is pass an unmodified leadership test on Leadership 10 and she gets to be taken off the field and placed in reserve for later redeployment instead of dying. Double 6. Oh dear. Finally she has the drawback that when she dies, the Sisters of Battle army loses D6 Faith points from their pool (used to power their Act of Faith abilities) AND if this roll brings the total Faith points to 0 or lower the Sisters cannot earn ANY more Martyr points from units dying for the rest of the battle. The Sisters player had exactly 6 points remaining at the time and by this stage everyone present KNEW what his roll would be. Yep, another 6. No more Acts of Faith for the rest of the game.
      Joe Sturge: What in the name of the Emperor happened? You really can't legislate for a 201-point special character being lost to an orgy of bad dice rolls. My plan had now flown out the window.
  • Warhammer:
    • There was the time a (reasonably large) unit of Dark Elf Spearmen not only lost a fight against a Goblin artillery crewnote , said crew actually managed to kill the unit's Sorceress!
    • And then there's the Tomb Kings versus the High Elves. The White Dwarf staffer playing the High Elves sends his spearmen (who took some losses in the first turn) to drink from a Wyrding Well. These wells have a 1-in-3 chance of poisoning you (costing that unit its action for the turn), driving you mad (giving the unit Stupidity and Unbreakable for the rest of the game), or healing you. He rolled poison. What makes this an epic fail is that both of his wizards were in the unit, costing him his Magic Phase. This act was singled out by both players as the move that cost him the game.
    • One of the highlights of the Skaven army is the number of things that can go hilariously wrong, perfectly illustrated in a particular battle report against the Empire. A Skaven Assassin leapt out of hiding to hurl a Warpstone grenade at a Steam Tank, fumbled the throw, and had to test on his ninja-high Initiative to avoid blowing himself up. The Skaven player made the mistake of joking "Anything but a one!" Despite such setbacks, the Skaven accumulated enough victory points to squeak by with a win, until the Skaven player remembered that one of his characters had a magic item that enhanced stats with the low risk of killing him post-battle. "Anything but a one!" The game ended in a draw.
  • Most chess players have been curb-stomped at least once. Some have even lost in four moves at least once. It takes a major dose of the Idiot Ball, however, to lose in two. Generally, almost any move marked with a "??" in algebraic notation is this.
  • BattleTech:
    • The community has a term for a series of improbably bad dice rolls — Hellbie dice. Named for JadeHellbringer, global moderator for the main forums for Classic Battletech and regular at the Battletech tables of several conventions. He has a history of the dice being against him. In one oft repeated instance, he played a game where he was given a 'Mech with ten Ultra autocannons. This type of gun can be fired normally, or with a double mode activated that doubles the firepower at the risk of the gun jamming itself into utter uselessness for the rest of the match. Any given gun has a 1 in 36 chance of failure (2 on a roll of 2d6) when fired on double mode. While firing all ten guns on their double setting, he managed to jam seven of them (a chance of about 1 in 700 million) on his first turn. After this little performance, Hellbie took the dice out into the carpark and "retired" them. With a pocket torch.
    • Another instance by the same man involved trying to run around a street corner on his mech and slipping in such a manner to utterly detonate its torso on impact and incapacitate the pilot before he had even engaged the enemy, who was in range to witness it all.
    • A variant of the Hollander seems to have been an Epic Fail in the making when it was being built. It is quite possible to destroy itself without receiving a single shot of enemy fire. The Heavy Gauss Rifle requires a piloting roll to stay standing if fired in a round when the mech has spent any movement points, and the rear armor is insufficient to withstand falling damage. If the pilot fails a roll and falls onto its back on the side with the gun, the gun can detonate, doing exactly enough damage to tear the 'Mech apart. An Epic Fail in both design and action.
    • When artillery rules were updated in the rules book Tactical Operations, the artillery miss chances were so bad that when using on-board artillery it was entirely plausible that a shot could be fired at an enemy 600 meters directly ahead of the unit and have it accidentally land on the the unit that fired the shot or even have it land directly behind that unit. The rules for artillery drift were quickly charged to make misses much less random.
    • The HV model of the Po Heavy Tank carries an experimental High Velocity Autocannon in its turret. High Velocity ACs have much better range than standard autocannons but on an attack roll of 2 they explode. While for 'mech this would be survivable, the rules for ground vehicles means an explosion will automatically destroy the tank and kill the crew. This means that every time it fires its main gun, the HV Po has a 1 in 36 chance of killing itself. Po Tanks are canonically deployed by the battalion, or a unit of 36 armored vehicles—this means that the very first salvo fired by a HV Po battalion is statistically almost guaranteed to have one of their number spontaneously explode afterwards. At least the Hollander II has a chance to avoid risking death by not moving when it's going to shoot and even if it falls, most of the time it won't even risk destruction. The HVAC's rules were eventually changed to remove the explosions.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! has its Card Game where players need to keep in mind the end goal: to win/make their opponent lose. Doesn't stop players from losing sight of the end goal and making stupid plays.
    • One player was playing a Deck in a major tournament that included the card "Caius the Shadow Monarch". The player used its effect to remove an opponent's card when if they removed the same monster it would have done enough damage to win the match, instead they lost completely. (To specify, if Caius' effect is used on a Dark monster, the opponent takes 1,000 points of damage. Caius itself is Dark, and its effect can be used on itself. If the player had done that, and not used the effect on his opponent's monster, he would have won.)
    • An alarming number of players report witnessing someone activating Dark Bribe (negates a Spell/Trap card, but lets the opponent draw a card) in response to the opponent's Upstart Goblin (lets the user draw a card and gives the opponent 1000 Life Points), essentially using a card that could have saved them in a tight situation to deal 1000 damage to themselves. Another commonly cited example is using the effect of Maxx "C" (for one turn, lets the player draw a card every time the opponent Special Summons a monster) in response to the opponent's Pot of Duality (which prevents the player from Special Summoning for one turn).
    • Yugioh card game also feature cards whose artwork depict monsters having their own Epic Fail moment, examples are monsters whose effect "captures" another monster, ends up being captured themselves or goblins falling to a trap hole after being lured with a girl.....doll, of all things.
  • In Munchkin, it's actually possible to be defeated by a range of Level 1 enemies. This includes the Potted Plant, Dirty Laundry, Graffiti, Footprints... and a Goldfish. Losing to some of them even has some quite nasty side-effects, since it's highly unlikely to lose to a level 1 monster: in the case of the Goldfish, all the other players are allowed to mock you. It's not impossible, of course, since with the game's monster modifiers in play you might end up fighting a Humongous, Ancient Goldfish and its Mate...
  • Eric and the Dread Gazebo, a fail so memorable that even That Other Wiki has a page for it. The titular Eric believes that a gazebo is a type of obscure monster, rather than a half-open structure typically found in a garden. Eric continues pressing the issue until the DM gets fed up with him, causing the gazebo to come to life and kill Eric.
  • In Mistborn Adventure Game, if you fail a roll, you can earn Complications, which cause a wide variety of penalties (losing Resiliences, losing Standing, losing a die from your next roll, your opponent adding a die to their next roll, etc.) if not bought off with Nudges. If a player gets three or more Complications on a single roll, the Narrator is encouraged to slap a penalty on the entire team instead of trying to find three different ways to punish you. So in Mistborn Adventure Game, you can fail so epically that just knowing you screws people over.
  • This is an inevitable result of playing Blood Bowl for too long: Sooner or later that 1 you roll won't just be a failure but the first step of a Disaster Dominoes of bad rolls. It is entirely possible for your level 7 superstar player to kill himself by running too fast and tripping, or by failing a three-die block on a snotling.
  • In the background of a Pathfinder Roleplaying Game module, ancient Azlanti astronomers attempted to use magic to Terraform the moon. Instead, they accidentally opened a portal to the Abyss that unleashed a cult of demons that turned the moon into their headquarters as they plot to take over the world.
  • The majority of plans in Fiasco end in some kind of disastrous failure, some of which rival this scale. To drive the point home, the page quote is actually cited within the text of the rulebook. This can be especially impressive if someone goes for an out-there Tilt result: someone's plan to steal bags of cocaine from the Mafia, or something, can end disastrously in a bear-related incident, for example.
  • In Anima: Beyond Fantasy, in order to invoke the Arcana "The World, Reversed", a character must have failed at every major undertaking in their life... and then fail the roll to invoke said arcana.
  • Dungeons & Dragons
    • This anecdote of a campaign shows that sometimes simple failures can turn into an Epic Fail under the right circumstances. The player's character belongs to a class that can cast spells accidentally. The character is in a town of magic-users and gets drunk and starts dancing. The character then accidentally casts a spell that renders anyone in the entire area unable to use magic forever. This is bad enough, but the town was keeping an Eldritch Abomination at bay with magic and now that the magic is gone, the monster escapes and starts destroying literally everything.
      "You don't understand! I T.P.K'ed... the universe."
    • One of these is the inciting event in Out of the Abyss, a campaign released for Fifth Edition. Gromph Baenre, the archmage of the ruling house of the drow city of Menzoberranzen, tried to summon a demon lord and bind it to his will. Vizeran DeVir, another drow wizard, calls that move a dumb enough decision all by itself, seeing as how the demon lords are just below the divine in terms of power. But Gromph's ritual ends up summoning all of the demon lords, causing them to wreak havoc throughout the Underdark, destroying part of Menzoberranzen, and causing a huge mess for Gromph's sister to clean up, since she's the Matron Mother of the ruling house. As to what happened to Gromph, his fate is left ambiguous, though it's implied that his chances of survival are fairly low. On top of that, Gromph's sister and all of House Baenre are all too happy to sweep him under the rug after he's gone, both out of embarrassment for how badly he screwed up and as a matter of politics to prevent word getting out that House Baenre is in any kind of trouble. It's later revealed that Lolth threw a Spanner in the Works for Gromph's ritual, but it remains true that Gromph's attempt at summoning a demon lord to become his slave was a spectacular failure.
  • The way F.A.T.A.L.'s rules are set up, it's entirely possible to cast a spell for something mundane like determining a character's pregnancy and instead cast a spell that ends all life in the game world.
  • The Springbok jigsaw puzzle A Short Round of Golf depicts a cartoonish miniature golf course. Hole 7 bears a sign reading "Beginner's Hole" while the hole itself is about five times the size of a normal one. Despite this, there's someone standing next to the hole saying "I missed."

    Visual Novels 
  • In Double Homework, almost everything Henry says and does tends to fall under this. He thinks the “Ivy League” is a gardening competition, “boy-boy stuff” is stuff that guys like to do, and “cirrhosis of the liver” will turn his liver into a cloud.
  • Can come up with the second guitar lessons that the protagonist of Melody gives to the title character. He gives Melody an instrumental piece to play, and the player can select the difficulty. If he picks a “hard” piece, Melody will completely bomb at playing it, notwithstanding that she has been playing guitar since childhood.

    Web Animation 
  • Red vs. Blue
    • Church's time-travel excursion. In his attempts to better the timeline, he ends up causing everything to go wrong. As he tries desperately, and fails miserably to shoot Donut, he sums it up fairly well:
      Church: Oh my God, I suck!
    • Caboose trying to cover Church with a sticky grenade in Reconstruction... and throwing it directly into the wall in front of him. Washington lampshades it by declaring it the "worst throw ever. Of all time."
    • Caboose setting fire to anything and everything in Relocated.
      Caboose: (running around whilst burning) Oh god, now i'm burning. That's much worse than other things burning!
      [a fire starts for absolutely no reason]
      Caboose: Oh, come on! How did that even start?
    • In Reconstruction, Church unloads an entire magazine at a guard standing still right in front of him without hitting the guy once.
    • The time Tucker ruined the Dynamic Entry on his Cool Bike by flying several feet over the bad guys and crashing into the wall.
  • Happy Tree Friends is fueled with Epic Fail. And Gorn. Lots & Lots of Gorn.
  • Homestar Runner:
    • The title character is apparently prone to these, if Strong Bad is any indication. One Strong Bad Email segment ("4 branches") discusses various examples of Homestar's stupidity, including getting himself stuck inside a water cooler... somehow.
      Strong Bad: J-Just explain to me what you were trying to do when this happened.
      Homestar: Well, I was in Barbados, hanging a picture on a wall...
      Strong Bad: Okay, that tells me everything I need to know.
    • The same email also mentions that Homestar has often done things so stupid it wraps back around to smart, like correctly describing Coulomb's law when asked the value of 2+2.
    • Strong Bad is prone to these as well. In the Strong Bad Email segment "2 emails", Strong Bad invites several women to the Ladies' Choice Awards, only to have none show up.
    • Also in "for kids", Strong Bad gets a Game Over in Peasant's Quest with a score of -45. It is impossible to get a negative score in the actual game.
    • In "death metal", there's a Cutaway Gag involving a band in the Teen Girl Squad-verse using "d-e- words" one should avoid when writing death metal songs, such as "Dentist!" and "Deli-style!". Afterwards, Strong Bad remarks that "Brainkrieg" got "last place" in the Battle of the Crappy High School Bands.
  • Battle for Dream Island has plenty.
    • The fifth challenge was to cross a bridge. And there's a backup one. However, no one has managed to cross it, and both bridges were destroyed.
    • In "Puzzling Mysteries", the Cherries are struggling to solve a 9-piece jigsaw puzzle. Problem? All the pieces are upside-down and they don't realize it. They were stuck doing that puzzle for a month.
      Pencil: Something tells me we're doinng something wrong. [holds a piece so that it's showing the right side to the viewer]
    • Another Name's performance in the second tiebreaker challenge of "Crybaby!". They fail in 5 seconds.
    • Another Name on the whole is a pretty bad team. They never won a challenge, and by the merge, the team consisted of one member.
    • Leafy and Ice Cube in "The Reveal". The challenge is to split into pairs and make catch the frisbee 3 times put together before the sunset (if you don't do that, you get a penalty). All the other pairs successfully managed to do this. Leafy and Ice Cube, however, weren't able to score a single catch, and lost 1000 pointsnote  for a penalty.
    • Iance's strategy of jumping to get the basket in "Getting Teardrop To Talk". Not only did it cause them to lose the challenge, the writers pointed out several times how ineffective this strategy is.
      Pencil: I got it!
      Match: Really, Pencil?
      Pencil: No, JK, still got half a mile to go.
    • Match's instructons seal the arguably worst team performance in BFB history so far.
      Match: Snowball, is your name Snowball?
      [Beat]
      Match: Well, stop it! All those Ls are gonna weigh, like, a flake-ton, and that's why you jump so low!
    • When Donut tried to punish Bleh for answering wrong 3 times straight, he shows them the audio recording of Four's screech. When nothing happens, he tries it on himself and gets stunned.
    • "This Episode Is About Basketball":
      • What does X do first when promoted to a host? He reads the cue colored cards with votes backwards, thus prompting Stapy to hear that he was eliminated first, and hop off before X even finishes reading his votes.
      • Beep. They have only 3 members with arms to help them in the basketball challenge. One is currently dead, one is too dumb, and the other is too scared to throw a ball. When Woody finally throws a ball, and succeeds, they celebrate - only to hear that getting one ball in wasn't enough.
      • Death P.A.C.T. is no better. Tree, who is apparently their best thrower, is stuck inside Bottle and can't throw any further than a few centimeters. And when Pen tries to use Black Hole to help, the result is that all the balls are sucked up.
        Pillow: Fantastic.
    • The entire team of Beep in season 4. All of their members are either disfunctional, useless, or both? Check. Awful challenge statistics? Check note . To add insult to injury, Leafy assembled them all because she thought they needed help.
  • X-Ray & Vav:
    • The very first episode has the titular duo obliterate their city trying to stop three robbers. X-Ray boasts that he's a master of Le Parkour but quickly proves he isn't.
    • Episode 9 of Season 2 has Dragonface fighting and losing to Dwayne. Dwayne is a rock no bigger than Dragonface's hand and isn't sentient or magical in any way. Hilda has to correct herself and say that that was much more pathetic than X-Ray and Vav's Let's You and Him Fight.
  • In Pokémon Rusty, this trope encapsulates Rusty's entire journey. He tries to teach a Zubat Surf and rides on top of it, shoves multiple Bidoofs into one Pokéball, and washes a Grimer down the drain, among many other examples.
  • ASDF Movie:
    • In the sixth movie, a guy is told carrots are good for his eyesight. He responds by jamming carrots right into his eyes.
      Guy: You lied to me.
    • One skit has a man threatening to punch another man in the face. However, since it's Opposite Day, he punches himself in the face instead.
    • There's also the guy who accidentally killed someone because he mistook a gun for a camera.
  • In the DEATH BATTLE! trailer revealing the animated looks for Wiz and Boomstick, it's revealed that the reason why the two were never seen on camera for seven-plus years was because Boomstick forgot to remove the lenscap off the camera.
    • In the Death Battle spin off Death Race, the final episode of season 1 has no less than three of the six racers fall victim to this, with two of them offing themselves:
      • Predictably the Scout Trooper ends up falling prey to Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy and fails to land a single fireball on Mario with the Fire Flower, and ends up being eliminated first, being unceremoniously thrown off the track when Mario rams into him with a Bullet Bill.
      • Second is Mario. In the final stretch, with Sonic hot on his tail, Mario throws a Bob-omb backwards to attempt to take Sonic out. He misses, and the Bob-omb gets fired out of the Barrel Cannon the two had just left, and ends up being shot straight back into the plumber, blowing him to smithereens, meaning Mario inadvertently offed himself. However, this leads right into...
      • ...Sonic being the third victim of this trope. See, right before Mario died to his own Bob-omb, Sonic threw a Blue Shell at him. Since Mario died before the Blue Shell reached him, the Blue Shell immediately changed targets to the racer currently in first. Sonic gives a short speech... right before his own Blue Shell blows him to smithereens, meaning that Sonic also inadvertently offed himself.
    • The Deep is the single worst performer in the show's history. His rundown is the shortest of all time, ending with Boomstick saying he sucks and even his own teammate Black Noir nodding in agreement. Come time for The Seven Battle Royale, A-Train kills The Deep before it starts. Even Michelangelo, the previous record-holder for quickest death, outlasted The Deep.
  • The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History:
    • The character named Epic Fail has several within the trailer alone, between going in the opposite direction of his objective, landing gracefully after crashing into a brick wall... on top of a banana peel that immediately causes him to slip and fall anyway, and then blowing up his toaster during The Stinger when he tries to warm up his DVD player in it.
    • Then there's his Evil Counterpart Ridiculously Epic Fail, who attempts to cause evil by blowing up a random box, only for the explosion to send him crashing into a button that causes a rain of kittens and sunshine, making the world a happier place.
    • During “Ten Steps to Saving the World that Totally Won’t Work”, Ridiculously Epic goes on a tirade about a specific strategy that he doesn’t want viewers to use to improve the world. During this tirade he outlines the specific details about how to make this strategy work.
  • In Animator vs. Animation:
    • In the Animation VS Minecraft short "Skyblock", there are multiple examples. After getting stuck in a skyblock world, the stickmen make an epic base... But one creeper explosion brings down the whole thing. Subverted with the failures at the beginning (losing both the chest and any chance at growing a tree), as the stickmen didn't need the lost resources from the island -they can make their own resources.
    • In "Build Battle", Green accidentally summons The Wither while building, and is left alone to fight it while everyone carries on. By the time everyone else is done, Green's build has been reduced to a flaming mess, ending his win streak.

    Web Original 
  • Twitch Plays Pokemon, an internet experiment that started on February 14, 2014. Over 70,000 players simultaneously enter commands to attempt to control Red. Somehow, they manage to defeat gyms while taking entire days to complete simple puzzles due to the wrath of the random number god and sometimes deliberate sabotage. Everyone else just watches the results of the fascinating livestream. Now it and its sequels have their own pages of fails.
  • The FailBlog, which includes both photos and videos, is in a similar nature to Attack of the Show!.
    • Amusingly, a lot of the contributors fail at understanding the concept of a fail, instead posting situations that are merely ironic or even triumphant. They've rectified that by designating some things Win or even Epic Win.
    • There's also Learn From My Fail, dedicated to oddly specific advice on situations from the mundane to the downright bizarre.
  • The blog Cake Wrecks features these.
  • The Darwin Awards are pretty much given to Epic Fails that ended in fatality. There are certain cases where the victim survived, but was left unable to pass on their genes. Even among Darwin Award winners, some manage to stand out in the crowd, dying in ways that don't even sound physically possible, never mind how idiotic they are (e.g. the man who was shot to death by a snake).
  • Rules of the Internet: Rule 16: If you fail in epic proportions, it may just become a winning failure.
  • Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG combines an Epic Fail with a Noodle Incident.
    1708. No bringing up the time we were nearly Total Party Kill'd by a jerboa.
    • One of the commentators on his Livejournal mentions the time one of their characters managed to miss when shooting a whale with a shotgun, from the inside.
  • Examples of the stories on F My Life:
  • This can happen quite often on Image Boards. For example, someone posting "Epic Fail Guy" in a "Marry, Fuck, Kill" style thread with the intention of killing him failed 13 times in a row.
  • SCP Foundation: SCP-1370 has the personality of an Omnicidal Maniac, but the body of an ordinary children's toy robot. It's so inept that when it tries to destroy a completely ordinary potted plant, the plant wins.
  • The "YOU HAD ONE JOB" meme. The implication is that the subject of the complaint had a very simple task to do and they messed it up in a manner that is so unbelievably stupid.
  • Let this be known, Madgie cannot make Kool-Aid [1]. To elaborate on the ingredients that she used, they were diesel, kerosene, butane, propane, Red Bull, and turpentine and, as to probably be expected, Bunny was hospitalized and being paralyzed down her left side for a week. The kicker? Madgie made said Kool-Aid as a way of being nice.
  • Rinkworks Computer Stupidities:
    • A man who fancies himself a computer demigod is called upon to fix a problem with the printer. His attempt to refill the toner ends up shorting out the printer and an air conditioner unit next to it. Then he makes it worse by trying to clean up the mess and smearing the toner all over and he washes the keyboard off with water. On top of all that, the printer wasn't out of toner, it was out of paper.
    • A computer used for sales suffers a motherboard failure and a tech support specialist calls in a technician to transfer the hard drive into a computer that is working. (The specialist can't do it due to being two thousand miles away.) However, the technician is completely unable to perform the transfer despite the instructions being printed on the inside of the computer being worked on. The specialist tries to walk the technician through the transfer several times, but the technician fails to comprehend the instructions and leaves. Afterwards, the little old lady who runs the shop decides that what the technician was doing didn't look too complicated and successfully performs the hard drive transfer. All the specialist has to do is walk her through getting the case back on.
    • A guy who runs a movie website receives an email on the subject of bad language in movies. After responding with his comments on the matter, the original messenger angrily asks him how he got a hold of the email since she intended to send it to the vice president of the United States. The guy points out that his email is nothing like that of the vice president and in order to send it to him by mistake, she would have to mistype around twenty-five characters in just the right way.
  • Kentucky Fried Politics: Hafez al-Assad of Syria, wanting things in the Middle East to return to pre-1978 Atlanta Treaty unrest, seizes the opportunity when an Israeli agent assassinates a radical in Lebanon's parliament (even though the two countries wanted to settle the matter peacefully instead). He declares war on Israel and rolls a Syrian tank battalion into the country to agitate things, only for all the other members of the treaty (even Palestine, at least tacitly!) to publicly side with Israel against Syria for the sake of their continued prosperity. Three days later, with only a handful of casualties, Assad recalls his troops, completely humiliated.
  • The first "Blunderdome" tournament on the tabletop gaming site Goonhammer had a simple premise. Eight players would attempt to construct the single worst Warhammer 40,000 army that any human being could create, then they would assign armies to players at random and play a tournament where you got points both for winning your game and for the list you built losing. The resultant armies included a Necron army built around three totally immobile gun pylons, a Tyranid army that spent 40% of its points on very fragile Action Bombs, a Chaos Cultist horde that was apparently miserable on every level to actually play due to a combination of sheer numbers and inconvenient weapon loadouts, and multiple armies that were incapable of actually holding objectives. The really impressive display of failure, though, was the Chase Garber vs James Grover match in round two: Garber, running Scott Horras's bad Astra Militarum tank list, lost to Greg Chiasson's T'au list, the worst-seeded list in the tournament, which took a Long Range Combatant faction and brought 65 non-damaging markerlights and only three actual guns.
    James Grover: @greg rekt
    Greg Chiasson: God fucking dammit
    Robert Jones: lmao are you fuckin serious
    Robert Jones: Tau list WON?
    James Grover: I went first, and chase had some of the most garbage dice I've ever seen

ARGH! Don't you hate it when that happens!?

 
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Video Example(s):

Baking Soda Volcanoes

Doofenshmirtz explains that in the past that when he tried entering a science fair with his first "Inator", he lost to baking soda volcano. He tried against in the next year with a bigger Inator, and lost again to baking soda volcano. He decided to give up on science fairs so he try his hand at poetry, but still lost a poetry contest to someone who made a baking soda volcano! So he decided to enter another science fair, this time with his self-proclaimed "world's largest baking soda volcano" to get back at all the times that he lost. During The Stinger, after Doof gets transported to Mars at the end of the former segment, the Martians walk up to him as if they are going to make him King of their planet (similar to how Candace becomes the Queen of Mars in the latter segment), but they end up giving the crown to a baking soda volcano, much to his chagrin.

Example of:
Always Someone Better

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Simulator Meltdown

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Gloria ruins Ne...

Alternative Title(s): Epic Failure, Doing It Wrong

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Baking Soda Volcanoes

Doofenshmirtz explains that in the past that when he tried entering a science fair with his first "Inator", he lost to baking soda volcano. He tried against in the next year with a bigger Inator, and lost again to baking soda volcano. He decided to give up on science fairs so he try his hand at poetry, but still lost a poetry contest to someone who made a baking soda volcano! So he decided to enter another science fair, this time with his self-proclaimed "world's largest baking soda volcano" to get back at all the times that he lost. During The Stinger, after Doof gets transported to Mars at the end of the former segment, the Martians walk up to him as if they are going to make him King of their planet (similar to how Candace becomes the Queen of Mars in the latter segment), but they end up giving the crown to a baking soda volcano, much to his chagrin.

How well does it match the trope?

4.5 (16 votes)

Example of:

Main / AlwaysSomeoneBetter

Media sources:

Report

Baking Soda Vol...

Krusty the Clow...

A Star is Burns

BLU Soldier's f...

"Got Him As Goo...

This IS a DVD!

Po Attempts to ...

Down in a punch

Kuma "Saves" Paul

That's cheating

The Eevster Str...

Burns falls off...

“Flag twirlers,...

"A BUTTON!"

TCNick3's Chanc...

Olive makes a b...

Barter By Combat

100-Point Corre...

"Louie" Cordio'...

Kevin Ridlon's ...

Squdina Can't F...

The Hubble Tele...

A fistfight?

Flaming Death

"What Madness I...

Lewis and Clark...

Malcolm Misses ...

Henya "Solves" ...

Not-So-Lucky Charm

Such! A! Bad! I...

The Middle of t...

Robbing Fort Knox

Big Bird's hide...

The Day

The Clock

"F**k the Polic...

Mission Failed ...

Wrath of Kite

Dunkey's Snake ...

Jack vs. Robot ...

Chief Edna and ...

"It's a Thing o...

Are you all rig...

Burning Cereal

Homer 'Builds' ...

The Staff Photo

Koyori Attempts...

Simulator Meltdown

Moon Home Alone

Gloria ruins Ne...