History Main / RhetoricalRequestBlunder

->''"Will no one rid me of this {{turbulent priest}}?"''

* In [[https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1999/03/11 this strip]] from ''ComicStrip/Doonesbury'' (a deliberate parody of the page quote), while he is serving as aide to JesseVentura as Governor of Minnesota, Uncle Duke interprets one of Ventura's rants about Creator/GarrisonKeillor as an instruction to assassinate him:

-->'''Duke''': He said, "[[ThomasBeckett Will no one rid me of this human hemorrhoid?]]"

* An example crossed with HoistByHisOwnPetard in the fourth case of ''[[Franchise/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney]]''. Prosecutor Von Karma, convinced he has all but won the case, sarcastically asks Phoenix "Perhaps you'd like to cross-examine the parrot for some comic relief?" [[MakeTheDogTestify Phoenix takes him up on the offer]], and it turns out to reveal some vital evidence in his favour.

** In the episode "Homerpalooza", Homer becomes a carnival freak who withstands cannonballs. But he gets urged by [[OpenHeartDentistry a veterinarian]] to stop, otherwise it will kill him.

** A downplayed version is seen in the episode "Itchy and Scratchy Land," when Marge goes to pick up Bart and Homer who are being detained for harassing a guy in an Itchy costume:
--> '''Marge:''' I'm so embarrassed, I wish there was a hole I could just crawl into and die.
--> '''Guard 1:''' Okay, throw her in the hole.
--> '''Marge:''' Please, it was just a figure of speech!
--> *''They let her go''

* In the live action ''Film/ScoobyDoo'': Shaggy and Scooby come across a buffet of hot dogs in a forbidding castle (ignoring the suspiciousness of that, of course).

* In ''WesternAnimation/AvatarTheLastAirbender'' episode "The Painted Lady", the Gaang travel to a floating village in a bog polluted by the nearby Fire Nation factory. The Gaang are trying to keep a low profile and can't focus too much on time on helping the locals either due to having their own problems to deal with, much to [[ChronicHeroSyndrome Katara's chagrin]]. When Katara complains about it, Sokka sarcastically says that they could just blow up the factory and everything would be better. Later, when Aang discovers that Katara has been helping the locals as the Painted Lady, Aang decides to help her and suggests they do Sokka's idea. It works, [[DidntThinkThisThrough but the soldiers decide to attack the village in retaliation]]. When Sokka finds out they took him seriously, he's exasperated by their inability to take his [[SarcasmFailure sarcasm]] as it is.

* In ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' episode "Homerpalooza", Homer becomes a carnival freak who withstands cannonballs. But he gets urged by [[OpenHeartDentistry a veterinarian]] to stop, otherwise it will kill him.

* The TropeCodifier is, of course, a certain notorious incident in the history of English Church-State relations in the twelfth century. A raging-drunk [[UsefulNotes/HenryTheSecond Henry II]] was frustrated with Archbishop Thomas Becket, his former friend, and said something like (according to popular tradition) "Will no one rid me of this troublesome [or turbulent] priest?" or (according to a contemporary biographer) "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?" A couple of Mooks decided to take care of it themselves, by killing Becket. Henry II took it badly, as did many in England. The reason for Henry's frustration, namely Becket defying the wishes of the king who had nominated him [[note]]Henry II had been laying the foundations of the English legal system (which would, in its turn, become the foundation for the legal system of half the world). The Church objected to being expected, distinctly against the custom of the time, to obey national laws, in one of the pivotal clashes between church and state[[/note]], had alienated many who already regarded Henry as an outsider (neither an Englishman or even a Norman, but an ''Angevin'') who was subverting local custom and concentrating too much power in the central government. Becket's personal popularity and the fact that he was discovered to be wearing a hairshirt under his clothing (a rather serious act of asceticism, as hairshirts are about as comfortable as a shirt made of sandpaper) only added to the outrage that the national leader of the Church had been savagely and shamelessly hacked to death in front of a church altar; Henry had to perform public penance over the issue and Becket rapidly became St. Thomas.
* It's a common claim of UsefulNotes/AdolfHitler apologists that UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust was this. As in, his subordinates, having read ''Literature/MeinKampf'' and knowing how he felt about Jews, decided it would be a nice favor to him if they rounded up and killed all the Jews in Europe, while he was [[CaptainOblivious none the wiser]]. The idea comes from the book ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler%27s_War Hitler's War]]'', which not only had its own counter-book, but after a libel suit in court, said counter-book was proven true ''in a court of law''. While Hitler was hardly oblivious, the Holocaust being intended as a favor to him was real enough, which gives the lie to so very many of the lower-level Nazis' later claims that they were JustFollowingOrders. Hitler didn't give his underlings a lot of specific orders, and he didn't have to; his officers mostly just instructed their minions to "work toward Hitler" i.e. do whatever they thought he would want them to do for him. That the Holocaust proved to be their very accurate assessment of what he wanted absolves neither him nor them of their atrocities.

->''"Will no one rid me of this {{turbulent priest?}}"''

->''"Will no one rid me of this TurbulentPriest?"''

* Shizuo does this to some extent in ''{{LightNovel/Durarara}}'' when he jokingly promises to introduce Kururi and Mairu to his younger brother, a famous actor, if they ever manage to kill their older brother Izaya.

* The ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'' fic ''Mishaps and Misunderstandings'' has Adrien blow up at Nathalie over the amount of pressure his father is putting on him, which isn't helped by the fact that he keeps being woken up by akumas. "So if father is ''displeased'' by my work, well -- tell him to make the nighttime akuma attacks stop, and maybe I'll actually be able to get enough sleep to do a decent job during photoshoots!" When talking to Plagg later, Adrien assumes that this outburst is likely just going to get him in more trouble: "They're going to get mad at me for being 'emotional' and blowing things out of proportion, I just know it. Emotional and also being unreasonable at the end there. Like, out of everything in the city that my father can actually control, making the night attacks stop isn't exactly one of them." But as it happens, his father ''is'' Hawkmoth, and Nathalie assumes that Adrien must have found this out and chosen to keep quiet, so when she tells Gabriel this, he ''does'' stop akumatizing people at night. Several weeks later, Nathalie discusses Adrien's schedule with him and unwittingly blows Gabriel's secret to him, getting them both arrested in a matter of hours.

* In ''VideoGame/Persona4'', Yosuke signs up the girls of the party for the school festival's beauty pageant without their consent, thus angering them, since they aren't allowed to back out even if they didn't choose to sign up. The next day, Yosuke finds out that he, the PlayerCharacter and Kanji have all been signed up for the crossdressing pageant, at least partly as retaliation. He confronts Chie over this, but eventually submits to it.
-->'''Yosuke:''' We all end up in the same boat, without our consent... What kinda joke is this...?\\
'''Chie:''' Uhh... the exact same joke you pulled on us!

* A relatively benign example happened in TheEighties around the time Music/{{Madonna}} and Music/WeirdAlYankovic rose to fame. During an interview with the former, she jokingly asked when Al was going to do "Like a Surgeon" (a parody of her song "Like a Virgin"). Guess what appeared on Al's next album.

--->'''Tailor Bot:''' If you had a big bag rolled up inside you, how quickly could you climb inside it?

* ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'':
** This case:
--->''' Admiral Emm:''' Go ahead and pull them apart.\\
''' Admiral Emm:''' ...By which I mean "separate them from each other, but keep them individually intact."\\
''' 'Kweng:''' Oooh. I wish you'd said that to start with, Ma'am.\\
''' 'Kweng:''' It's okay. I still have all of the pieces.
** Lt. Ventura later [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-10-11 invokes this]] by suckering [[spoiler:Max Haluska]] into what can be interpreted as giving an AI the order to give her backdoor access -- which it did, because his hack left it too dumb to care about intent or anything else.
--->'''Para Ventura:''' Sometimes the back door is "you're an idiot."
** And [[http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2012-05-26 later]]:

** God would occasionally invoke this when He wanted to teach His people a lesson. Such as the time the Israelites were too frightened to conquer Canaan, even with God on their side, and declared that they wished they'd died in the desert rather than face this battle. So God lead them in circles in the desert until every man who had said that had actually died in the desert. In another case, the general Jephthah declared that if God brought him victory in battle, he would sacrifice the first thing he saw at his home when he returned as thanks. The first thing he saw was his own daughter (it is disputed whether he literally sacrificed her or if she was sent to work as a temple maiden and therefore made unmarriageable, as God was generally very much against HumanSacrifice). Even today many Christians will caution against swearing an oath to God unless you really, ''really'' mean what you say.

* In the Creator/BrothersGrimm fairy tale ''Hans My Hedgehog'', a childless man says: "I wish I had a son, even if it was a hedgehog!" And in ''Tom Thumb'' a childless woman says "If there were just one, and even if it were terribly small, only the size of a thumb, I'd be satisfied."
* Invoked in most tales about ''TillEulenspiegel''.

* In ''TheGift'', by T.J. Silverio, the human who is lucky enough to find the Genie in the Green Soda bottle agonizes over his one wish to the point where he prompts the increasingly impatient Genie into yelling at him [[spoiler: and inadvertently wastes his one wish on the utterance "I wish you'd stop yelling at me!"

* In the Literature/{{Discworld}} novel ''Discworld/AHatFullOfSky'', Tiffany says that the Nac Mac Feegle can be like this.

* An example crossed with HoistByHisOwnPetard in the fourth case of ''[[VideoGame/AceAttorney Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney]]''. Prosecutor Von Karma, convinced he has all but won the case, sarcastically asks Phoenix "Perhaps you'd like to cross-examine the parrot for some comic relief?" [[MakeTheDogTestify Phoenix takes him up on the offer]], and it turns out to reveal some vital evidence in his favour.

[[folder:Theater]]
* In ''TheGift'', by T.J. Silverio, the human who is lucky enough to find the Genie in the Green Soda bottle agonizes over his one wish to the point where he prompts the increasingly impatient Genie into yelling at him [[spoiler: and inadvertently wastes his one wish on the utterance "I wish you'd stop yelling at me!"
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Theatre]]