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Amusing Injuries / Live-Action Films

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  • The climax of Animal House feels a lot like a live-action cartoon. For instance, one character gets flattened as if he were a cartoon character.
  • Done multiple times to the title character in Deadpool, due to his powerful Healing Factor and nigh-immortality. For example, when he tries to attack Colossus, Deadpool ends up hurting himself in such a ridiculous manner that even the normally moody Negasonic Teenage Warhead can't keep a straight face.
  • Played with in Death Becomes Her. Two women had taken an eternal youth potion. But being unable to die, well, one falls down a staircase and ends up with many injuries (the ER doctor makes a list of them and shortly later has a heart attack), the most prominent a broken neck; and the other is shot by the first in the stomach, leaving a fist-sized hole clear through her torso.
  • Desperados: Wesley ends up getting electrocuted, punched, falling off dangerous heights, getting scratched by a cat, and even getting slapped in the face by a dolphin's penis.
  • Edge of Tomorrow. William Cage has picked up the invading aliens' ability to Ground Hog Day Loop every time they die. He makes contact with Rita Vrataski, who once had the same thing happen to her. Rita trains Cage (a rear-echelon PR officer who's never been combat-trained) using some training robots with No OSHA Compliance. Worse, whenever he's too injured to go into combat, she shoots him in the head to restart the time-loop. Cue Failure Montage of various Amusing Injuries and subsequent Boom, Headshot!. One time Cage has had enough and suggests he just transfer the power back to her.
    Rita: I've tried everything. It doesn't work.
    Cage: Have you tried... you know... all the options?
    Rita: Oh you mean sex? Yeah, tried it.
    Cage: How many times?
    Rita: All right. [pushes button — robot slams Cage across the room]
  • Played straight in Fool's Gold with Matthew Mcconaughey's character, who should have died from intracranial bleeding 30 minutes into the movie.
  • Larabee gets a paper stapled to his head twice in the Get Smart movie by Agent 23 as retribution for not unjamming the photocopier.
  • In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, during the flying lesson, Ron's broom springs up and baps him right in the face when he tries to command it to fly up to his hand. Even Harry and Neville can't help laughing at his failure. If you pause at the right time, Ron looks like he's going to laugh as well when he says "Shut up, Harry."
  • Bifur from The Hobbit trilogy has a piece of a pick axe embedded in his skull, as seen here. Also Dwalin's right ear looks like someone or something took a large bite out of it.
  • The Home Alone movies and other family comedies written and produced by John Hughes practically ran on this trope, subjecting Harry and Marv to traps that would have killed or maimed them very badly. Wrestler and author Mick Foley, who loves Christmas and everything related to it (the first two films happen on Christmas), once had a doctor review Home Alone 2: Lost in New York with him. The doctor concluded at least half of the traps/injuries the villains experience would likely have killed them instantly in real life.
  • In HOUBA! On the Trail of the Marsupilami, any damage inflicted on the soldiers fighting the Marsupilami is purely for laugh. One of them get slammed into the ground head-first... and then makes this muffled comment: "Hey, there're moles...."
  • In the climax of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the main characters dangle off of a fire escape and then all fall down in various painful, and yet very funny manners. Also, Mrs. Marcus's tripping on the banana peel, but this is because she's a horrible shrew.
  • The James Bond movie Live and Let Die has an amusing death scene at the end. Bond pops a compressed air pellet into the mouth of the villain with alarming and jarring effects: he literally swells up like a balloon and hovers up into the air, where he continues to expand until he explodes with no gore whatsoever. Such a sudden, cartoonish moment in a movie that has so far been at least vaguely grounded in the laws of physics was a bit hard to stomach for most. It's no surprise that this was Roger Moore's first Bond movie, signifying the beginning of a sillier, more outlandish Bond than before.
  • Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Sing in Kung Fu Hustle can receive grievous injuries from his efforts at being intimidating, and be fine in the next scene. Justified; his incredible Healing Factor is a sign of his very real potential to be a kung fu master.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Iron Man:
      • Tony Stark sets the suit's thrusters to ten percent power, and is slammed against the ceiling hard enough that, realistically, he should have broken at least a few bones... from that or from the subsequent face-first fall on the floor before getting sprayed by an automated fire extinguisher.
      • Then, there's the scene when Tony's assistant, Pepper Potts, walks into his lab just as he's testing one of the repulsor beams in the suit's gloves. The recoil throws Tony offscreen and you hear him hit the far wall a couple seconds later. Pepper's reaction, mainly her complete lack of concern for his safety, is what really sells it.
    • Loki, poor Loki. In The Avengers, during the battle near the end, he tells the Hulk about how poorly he thinks of him. Hulk doesn't like it, and proceeds to smash him around, turn around and call him "puny God". Bonus points for Loki waking shortly thereafter, captured but instantly alert and snarky, in a Loki-shaped depression in the floor.
  • Laurel and Hardy lived this trope in their movies — though one scene in The Music Box looks genuinely painful: Stanley, pushed once too often, pokes a finger in Ollie's eye — then, staggering in pain, Ollie steps on a nail in a board that sticks to his foot. Gaaah.
  • The Mermaid pulls this off repeatedly, being a Stephen Chow film. The titular character, Shan, in her repeatedly botched attempt to kill Liu Xuan, gets a folder, an ashtray, and sea urchins flung into her face, has a door slamming into her, accidentally skewers her hand and gets decked by a golf club in a long scene where she repeatedly hurts herself, which is Played for Laughs. There's also her mentor, Brother Octopus (a mer-octopus like the name suggests) who poses as a chef in a Korean seafood restaurant, only for the other chefs to mistake his exposed tentacles as calamari, leading to his limbs being chopped, mutilated, and ground alive.
  • The duel scene between King Arthur and the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Classic example of escalation of comedy violence.
    King Arthur: Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left.
    Black Knight: It's just a flesh wound!
    [and later, the Black Knight no longer has legs]
    Black Knight: I'll bite your legs off!
  • Happens in a part of Naked Gun 33-1/3. A seedy truck driver attempts to hit on Jane. She fends him off first with a can of pepper spray, and then with a taser that shocks him with violet electricity, and then she puts clothes pins on his nipples, and then he gets hit by a passing semi truck. A few scenes later, Jane tries to call Frank, and the truck driver gets up and says "Aw man, that hurt."
  • In Norbit, this trope is the only way to explain how Norbit can still be alive even though he is smashed by Rasputia every night at the bed.
  • In Ogginoggen, young girls Ida and Klara stuff jellyfish down their shirts to create big boobs. Of course, then they both get stung, sending them running off to the showers.
  • Our Miss Brooks: On occasion Miss Brooks suffers from acute klutziness around Principal Osgood Conklin. This leaves the choleric Mr. Conklin the victim of a variety of slapstick indignities. In The Movie Grand Finale, Miss Brooks goes so far as to accidentally dropping a barbell on Mr. Conklin's foot!
    Mr. Conklin: It's alright Miss Brooks. I have another one!
  • The protagonists at the end of The Producers are all sporting these, including a most unfortunate finger splint.
  • This is a Running Gag with George in Scary Movie 3. Among others, Cindy comes home to find him slumped down on the table and has to shake him awake. She asks him what happened and he says that he and her son Cody were playing a fun game when... then he looks down and... "Ooh, Yahtzee!" (stands up and bangs his head on a shelf) Also, later when he meets the aliens, they choke him because it's how they say hello. And then there's how they say goodbye.
  • Space Jam uses it not only with the Looney Tunes, but with the live-action actors — Michael Jordan is curled into a ball, and Wayne Knight is crushed flat.
  • The Three Stooges were famous for getting into goofy slap-fights and otherwise injuring each other (and themselves) in an amusing fashion. (Joe Besser, for some years working with them, claimed that the left side of Larry Fine's face was noticeably coarser than the other side, which he attributed to Moe's less-than-staged slaps.)

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