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Arson Murder And Jaywalking / Theatre

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Emmett: Therefore malum in se...?
Elle: Is an action that is evil in itself. Assault, murder, white shoes after Labor Day.
Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking in Theatre.
  • Older Than Feudalism: Two of Aristophanes' three extant jabs at the no-talent playwright Morsimus were of this sort:
    • In The Knights, "May Morsimus teach me his choruses" is part of an imprecatory oath taken by the chorus.
    • In The Frogs, after fraud, parent battery, and perjury is listed "cop[ying] out a speech of Morsimus".
  • In "Whatcha Wanna Do?" from Bat Boy: The Musical, Shelley and her boyfriend are singing about the various things they'll do to the title character, ending with "We're gonna chain your arm to an atomic bomb. And make you take your granmama to the senior prom."
  • "Big Jimmy's Big Tip," the third scene of Extra Pulp, names this trope verbatim when Big Jimmy lists his past crimes.
    Big Jimmy: Bank robbery, fraud, extortion, murder, arson... oh, and jaywalking.
  • In "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream" from The Book of Mormon, the spirits of Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler and Johnny Cochran appear, and each describes their claim to infamy. Cochran is the last to mention his crime, which was getting OJ Simpson free. Elder Price then tells them that leaving his companion was "way worse" than what they did.
  • Company: In Poor Baby, as Bobby is seen making love to April, the wives are shown saying that he ought to have a woman, but not someone like the woman he's with right now. They each state their criticisms of her, saying that she's "dumb", "tacky", "vulgar", "odd", etc. Joanne's complaint? She's "tall enough to be your mother".
  • Crimes of the Heart: She began drinking and smoking when she was only 14, she hardly made good grades, why, she never even made her bed!
  • In the Swedish musical Djingis Khan (Genghis Khan), the most famous number, "Härjarevisan" (Translation: "The Raiders' Song") is about how the Mongol hordes, led by the titular character, are excited to go raiding once more. The chorus includes a line describing what the raiders are going to get up to, including drinking, fighting, burning cabins, beating children, and... saying bad words. In one official recording, the "bad words" are mainly of the Gosh Darn It to Heck! variety. The song is also sometimes sung at student dinners and parties, with the "bad words" being names of other universities, professors, courses or whatever else the students in question dislike. Fitting with the trope name, the song makes references to arson and murder, though not jaywalking.
  • In the Jára Cimrman play Dlouhý, Široký a Krátkozraký the protagonists persuade the giant that a beautiful giantess is interested in him:
    Giant: Why doesn't she come to meet me?
    Prince: She's ashamed of you, because you eat people!
    King: And don't wash your feet!
  • In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack's list of reasons for not letting his ward Cecily marry Algernon starts off with Algernon having entered his home under false pretenses and tricked Cecily into believing that he was his brother Ernest and ends with Algernon's uncalled-for consumption of the muffins he had left out on a table.
  • In Stephen Fry's play Latin!, or Tobacco and Boys, the Chartham Park Prep School's "Black Hole" demerit is handed out for the "grossest breaches of school rules, such as armed robbery, genocide and masturbation."
  • Legally Blonde: The Musical: Emmett is helping Elle study for her class at Harvard Law. Upon being asked for the definition of malum en sae, Elle responds: "An action that's evil in itself: Assault, murder, white shoes after Labor Day…"
  • In Matilda, the title character is a Child Prodigy who tells Miss Honey, on her first day of school, that she's read "quite a few" books in the last week alone. When asked which ones, she lists some unexpectedly advanced titles to her increasingly astonished teacher.
    Miss Honey: What books did you read?
  • The Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "The Philosopher's Football Match" had an excellent moment of these. As a parody of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, it pitted the philosophers of Germany against the philosophers of Greece. At the end of the match, after Socrates scores a header, three Germans complain to the referee.
    Narrator: Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offsidenote .
  • In The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the protagonist presents a pseudo-psalm by the ghost of Solomo about space travel:
    Möbius: Even on Mars we were wolfed by the sun - Thundering, radioactive, yellow.
  • One production of Robin Hood contained the Sheriff reading off all Robin's crimes. These started with the obvious ones, such as deceit, thieving, and injuring/killing travellers and the Sheriff's men, and went right down to "laughing at the Sheriff in his purple pants" (meaning underwear, for you Americans), a reference to earlier in the play.
  • At the end of Guildenstern's Long List of Hamlet's "symptoms" in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:
    Guildenstern: "...stabbing his elders, abusing his parents, insulting his lover, and appearing hatless in public..."
  • In the stage adaptation of Singin' in the Rain, Lina Lamont has a line that goes "I'm calling my agent! I'm calling my lawyer! I'm calling my mother!"
  • At the 2018 Off-Broadway production Trainspotting, are parental warnings that the show contains "violence, strong language, nudity, splatter, adult themes, heavy drug use, needles, simulated sex, loud rave music, strobe effects, lasers, haze, Scottish accents, audience interaction, and the worst toilet in Scotland."


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