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It's even funnier if you're familiar with Constance Bay.
When a mundane conversation goes bad. You're winding up a boring conversation, and throw in one last thing in there. And that one last thing was praise for Adolf Hitler, or a plan to kill the Mayor, or an offhand comment that you pick your nose, when you had been talking about options for where to eat dinner or something.
"So yeah, we'll just run out for pizza, catch a movie, maybe go out for a couple drinks, and lynch that bastard. Sound good?"
A more subtle trick is when the " squick" is revealed by a change in the camera shot.
The inverse of Arson Murder And Jaywalking, where the mood is lightened by including something silly.
Has nothing to do with this. Or French Toast. Unless you really try hard.
Compare Breathless Non Sequitur. See also Arson Murder And Jaywalking.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- Revolutionary Girl Utena uses the camera shot version of this. A character lying in bed has what seems like a meaningless monologue about lunch until the audience realizes the scene is establishing that the character is having (or just had) sex. Then it shows with whom she had the sex (Akio, who's more or less her principal...and the villain of the series...and she's fourteen years old) which is where the squick really comes in.
- Occurs several times in the Elfen Lied manga. The most notable example involves the employees of the secret lab thing making idle chit chat as their superior (who seems a genuinely likable, if eccentric, person with a love for candy sticks). The final panel reveals that whilst the coworkers are chit-chatting and eating candy, a seemingly endless train of completely uncensored dismembered diclonii torsos — complete with dangling entrails — is trundling past the window. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
- Asakura complains about how Haruhi Suzumiya is not doing anything interesting and talks to Kyon about whether or not it is alright to enact a change to get a result even if it is dangerous right before trying to stab Kyon with a knife to get a rise out of Haruhi, all without changing the pitch in her voice.
Comedy
- The Pete and Brian sketch "Knock Knock" takes the classic "Priest, Rabbi and Shaman walk into a bar" joke and somehow turns it into being about how someone's Dad molested them within the space of a few sentences.
A priest, a rabbi, and a shaman walk into a bar!
But there's no rabbi and no shaman *laughs*and it's actually my eighth birthday and the priest is molesting me.
And the priest is my dad and he's not a priest.
...
My dad molested me... a lot.
- You might know this sketch from AMV Hell 4.
- Andy Hamilton presented an extract from the minutes of a parish council meeting on the 7th November 2008 edition of The News Quiz, which can be seen in full here. The section as quoted on the show is as follows:
1. Another parishioner wished to know if the problems with the telephone directories have been solved yet. 2. Mr Neale said a parishioner had drawn his attention to overhanging foliage on the pavement on Main Street between Wellow Road junction and the Old School. Clerk to contact Highways Dept. 3. The missile launcher parked on Kirklington Road has caused comments from a number of parishioners. Clerk to contact Highways Dept.
- There is another series of SNL sketches that basically revolves around this trope. It features four men in a bar (or a car, in a recent one) who tell gradually more disturbing tales (all of them treating the stories as perfectly normal events), culminating in them committing some unsettling atrocity in whatever setting they occupy.
- A recent one appears to take place at a bar but at the end...It reveals that they're at a funeral...and they've been drinking over the coffin and they are also the pallbearers and accidentally drop the coffin as they carry it.
Fan Fic
- My Immortal:
B’loody Mary was standing there. “Hajimemashite gurl.” she said happily (she spex Japanese so do i. dat menz ‘how do u do’ in japanese). “BTW Willow that fucking poser got expuld. she failed al her klasses and she skepped math.” (an: RAVEN U FUKIN SUK! FUK U!)
“It serves that fuking bich right.” I laughed angrily.
Well anyway we where felling all deprezzed. We wutsched some goffic movies like Das niteMARE b4 xmas. “Maybe Willow will die too.” I said.
“Kawai.” B’loody Mair shook her head enrgtically lethrigcly. “Oh yeah o have a confession after she got expuld I murdered her and den loopin did it with her cause he’s a necphilak.”
“Kawai.” I commnted happily . We talked to each other in silence for da rest uv da movie.
Film
WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?
FALKEN'S MAZE
BLACK JACK
GIN RUMMY
HEARTS
BRIDGE
CHECKERS
CHESS
POKER
FIGHTER COMBAT
GUERRILLA ENGAGEMENT
DESERT WARFARE
AIR-TO-GROUND ACTIONS
THEATERWIDE TACTICAL WARFARE
THEATERWIDE BIOTOXIC AND CHEMICAL WARFARE
GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR
Literature
Live Action TV
- Mastery of the form is frequently demonstrated by The Kids In The Hall.
- "Whole lotta milk-a. Bil Bev Devoe. Your mother's cheatin' on me."
- There's also a sketch in which an actress accepting an award actually does thank Hitler.
- The West Wing: President Bartlet's rambling speech to his psychologist ends in mentioning that his father hates him.
- Daphne Moon in Frasier has a tendency to recall traumatic or unsettling details about her childhood and family life in a cheery, persistently upbeat tone at the climax of long, rambling stories.
- One excellent (and personal favorite) example — she decides to impart a lesson about generosity to the brothers Crane by telling them about an encounter with a poor old man on the street. Long story short, she helpfully tells him, "that's not how you spell 'fellatio.'"
- A food-serving alien under the control of a demonic figure in the Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet" is listing the menu of a space-station canteen when it casually mentions "The Beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war against God... Apologies. I meant I hope you enjoy your meal".
- Bob Fossil's frequent examples of this in The Mighty Boosh. One of the best: The Hitcher's backstory, related while driving through the dark and ominous Forest of Death. His long and cheery reminiscence culminates with him smashing in the head of the shaman that helped him, just to get out of the bill.
- Monty Python's immortal "Lumberjack Song" devolves from a celebration of outdoorsy pursuits to cross-dressing, to the dismay of the chorus.
- The trope is actually doubled in this case when you realize one of the lines is, "I wish I'd been a girlie, just like my dear Papa".
- Inverted on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Andrew went to the butcher shop and ordered a bunch of pieces of steak, some pork chops, eight quarts of pigs' blood (which he needed for an evil magical ritual), and a toothbrush. The butcher reacted with a scowl to one of these items, saying, "This is a butcher shop. We don't sell toothbrushes."
- Your Mileage May Vary, however: animal blood is a food ingredient in many cultures.
- Evil ritual? Are you sure he wasn't just making a black pudding? Mmmm.
- He also added condoms to that list, apparently out of habit.
- This was almost certainly a reference to the film American Graffiti, in which an underaged character tries to buy alcohol by slipping it into a list of other purchases.
Terry: Let me have a Three Musketeers, and a ball point pen, and one of those combs there, a pint of Old Harper, a couple of flash light batteries and some beef jerky.
- Also in Buffy, at one point Mayor Richard Wilkins III is shown holding a checklist containing several mundane tasks for a mayor (meet with PTA, etc.) with "Become Invincible" thrown in.
- Angel The Series: Doyle's ex-wife Harriet prepares to marry into a family of apparently humanized, peaceful demons who nonetheless make, um, unusual wedding preparations. Harriet's prospective father-in-law reads from the to-do list: "First we greet the man of the hour. Then we drink. We bring out the food. Then we drink. Then comes the stripper, darts, and then we have the ritual eating of the first husband's brains, and then charades." The demon family, of course, objects to the charades.
- The Crank Yankers intro. A shopping list on a refrigerator reads: milk — eggs — drugs. Trope Namer. Sorta.
- Scrubs, JD's The More You Know daydream:
JD: You've had a tough day at the office, so you come home, make yourself some dinner, smother your kids, pop in a movie, maybe have a drink. It's fun, right? Wrong. Don't smother your kids.'
- Elliot is pretty prone to this. "Maybe we can do something a little less girly, like bowling or paint ball or fight club..."
- Many of her stories of friends and relatives seem normal enough, but then end with the subject abruptly hanging themselves. Her friends have come to expect this.
- A Little Britain sketch has a tour guide of a rural area enliven his stories of the place by pointing out where he and his wife had their first kiss, and go on to tell where they first had oral and anal sex as well.
- In Modern Family episode 4, after a speech by Haley's boyfriend revealing his Hidden Depths, her family encourages him to play one of the songs he's written. The innocently titled "In the Moonlight", which he says he wrote for Haley, draws them in with an innocuous first verse before becoming blatant Intercourse With You.
- In How I Met Your Mother, Ted recounts his attempt to get his upstairs neighbors to stop "playing the bagpipes,"and then losing his nerve when he finds out they're an old couple: "I didn't have the heart to tell them to stop, so I talked with them for a while, had a hard candy, nodded politely at some racist comments, and then I left." A bit of an inversion since Ted, not the neighbors, is the one uncomfortable with the squick part.
Magazines
- In one of the Doctor Who Magazine "Space-Time Telegraph" spoof news columns, it was reported that World Distributors would be releasing a Torchwood Annual (a parody of World's Doctor Who annuals of the seventies; aimed at very young kids, and apparently written by people who'd once had the series described to them). Amongst the features listed were "Where's Owen?"; "Gwen's Spacey Space Quiz"; and "Jack and Ianto's Stopwatch Game".
Music
- Weird Al Yankovic's song "Hardware Store" includes a long list of items that can be found at the eponymous establishment—including, apparently, "automatic circumcisers."
- "Good Old Days". Presented as the sentimental nostalgic ramblings of the singer about his Norman-Rockwell-style childhood, every verse ends with psychopathic assault against some innocent.
- "Why Does This Always Happen To Me?", when Al talks about disturbing things happening around him without those things being the concern of the verse.
- "You Don't Love Me Anymore", when Al casually — and sometimes nostalgically — recounts the various obscene and alarming actions made against him by, ostensibly, his girlfriend ("Why did you disconnect the brakes on my car? That kind of thing is hard to ignore").
- "Do I Creep You Out?" Which opens up as a sweet love song and keeps to the sweet tune while the singer confesses all the creepy, stalkerish things he has done to the subject of his affections (Taking her gum out of the garbage, following her home from work).
- "I Remember Larry" recounts several pranks made upon the singer and the people of his town, which start out innocuous enough (okay, so the Ben-Gay in the shampoo bottle is kind of mean), and descends into somewhat less harmless ideas ("You know I couldn't help but laugh/Even though he treated me like slime/Remember when he cut my car in half?/Well, he really got me good that time!") and ends with the singer reminiscing cheerfully about his brutal murder of Larry, promptly followed by the disposal of the corpse. Funny song, mostly.
- Then there's also one of his older works, "Melanie", in which he romantically and passionately pleads for the girl of his dreams to finally pay attention to him and wonders brokenheartedly why she won't, especially when he recounts all the stalker-tastic things he's been doing around/in/near her apartment (and her). ("She lived across the street on the fifteenth floor of the Gilmore building/I saw her in the shower reaching for some soap/I knew she had to be the girl for me/And to think I probably never would have found her/If I hadn't bought that telescope"). And the is just the beginning. ("How can you ignore me/When you know that I can't live without you?/I have to go through your garbage/Just to learn more about you)
- Used long before by Tom Lehrer, in songs like My Home Town (which begins with idyllic reminiscences of his home town and quickly slides into recalling "the man who took a knife/and monogrammed his wife") or Be Prepared which exhorts Boy Scouts to be prepared for all situations...such as smoking dope and pimping out their own sisters.
- Don't forget 'I Hold Your Hand In Mine', which contains the lyrics "My joy would be complete, dear/If only you were here/But still I keep your hand/As a precious souvenir."
- Not to mention "I hold your hand in mine, dear/I press it to my lips/I take a healthy bite from your dainty fingertips"
- His song "The Old Dope Peddler" sings admirably of the cornerstone of any neighborhood, the Heroin Dealer.
- The Future Soon by Jonathan Coulton starts as a slice-of-life love story where the nerdy narrator fails to attract the girl he loves. It ends with him returning home as a cyborg Mad Scientist and turning her into his robot bride.
- Stephen Lynch's "Best Friend's Song" starts off as friendly telling of the differences among friends, and decends into a confession of wanting to take part in violent sex with the other friend's pubescent sister.
- Stephen Lynch's whole career is built on that trope.
- "Like a Boss" by The Lonely Island is a list of events in the eponymous boss's average day at work. The events start out mundane ("talk to corporate, approve memos...") but grow increasingly disturbing and improbable as the song goes on, eventually ending with him turning into a jet and flying into the sun. The person reviewing the boss correctly points out that he "chops [his] balls and die[s]" every day.
- Tim Minchin's song If I Didn't Have You features a claim that love grows with time, "like a flower, or a mushroom, or a guinea pig, or a vine, or a sponge, or bigotry... or a banana."
- Minchin has an entire song devoted to this trope: If You Really Loved Me, which follows its title line with "you'd let me video you while you wee" and also includes this pearler:
We go together like crackers and Brie Like racism and ignorance Like niggers and RnB
- The Lemon Demon song "Ode to Crayola" begins as a cute tribute song to goofily-named Crayola crayons. Then it turns weird:
I'm gonna rise at dawn, with no clothes on, and color on my skin
Colors of life and love, from Heaven above, absolve me of my sin
New Media
- This LOL-caption of Vladimir Putin.
Theatre
Video Games
- In Jade Empire, the majority of the Black Whirlwind's Backstory conversations go this way. An amusing mix of Ax Crazy and Boisterous Bruiser, the mercenary Whirlwind will often begin with an amusing war story about something he thinks is relatively harmless, then offhandedly mention cleaving innocent women in half, or letting wine-soaked rats get too close to a fire. Whirlwind strikes this editor as something of a grown-up Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant.
- One of the talk radio shows on a Grand Theft Auto game features a woman who saw her family murdered in front of her eyes, and is drugged up pretty high in an attempt to deal with the traumatic memories. Evidently the drugs aren't quite enough, as she has a tendency to reveal slightly disturbing facts about it out of the blue in an unnaturally perky tone. And towards the end of the show, the drugs begin to wear off...
- Style, sophistication, the ability to launch napalm into oncoming traffic. If these are the things you look for in an automobile, it's time you test drive Twisted Metal.
- "Blah blah Command Seal Blah blah Caster blah blah magic blah blah and then I took all his clothes off." Thanks Shirou for your lovely demonstration of how to subtly check for Command Seals without raising suspicions. Tohsaka just stops and stares at him.
- Planescape Torment has Vrischka's Curiousity Shoppe most of the items are... Less than ordinary, like a monster jug containing a real monster, a bottle of angel's tears and a demon's tongue. Then there's the baby oil.
Vrischka: "Made from only the finest mewling mortal babies!"
- And she criticizes Grace.
- Portal includes this subtly in the confrontation with GLaDOS. One of the cores you handle is the Cake Core, which gives the recipe for the cake. It contains many of the ingredients you'd expect (flour, eggs), a few you wouldn't expect (fish... interesting), a few that are downright dangerous (explosives, carcinogenic preservatives), and some that are just plain wrong (licorice and rhubarb).
- Adjustable aluminium head positioner, slaughter electric needle injector...
- Earlier in the game, G La DOS informs you that falling off the raised platforms will "result in an unsatisfactory mark on your record, followed by death."
- Mm, cross borehole electro-magnetic imaging rhubarb, an entry called "how to kill someone with your bare hands," twelve medium geosynthetic membranes, gas and odor control chemicals that will deodorize and preserve putrid tissue, nine large egg yolks, one cup granulated sugar, and a 20-foot thick impermeable clay layer.
- ...shaped like fish.
- "Deep penetration asians."
- That's "agents".
- In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing the cake is a lie.
- Oblivion plays this with Weebam-Na describing a failed restaurant that specialised in meals made of rats (Of course, given that this is a town where about half the population are bipedal cats, this might have been a sound move. Might. If khajiit didn't prefer sweets that is.). Double-trope score for being a shout out to the Glimmer Man.
"First this guy decides he's gonna make a million, opens a fancy restaurant: Rats in a Cream Sauce, Rat Flambe, Rat Necrom with Bonemeal Gravy, Deep-Fried Rat, Lemon Rat and Wild Rice, Rat Ragu with Powdered Deer Penis! Of course, when the guards found out, they ran his sorry butt out of town, but they left the rats. Rats!"
Webcomics
- Supermegatopia [1]◊: "Red Warrior needs food!" "Blue Wizard needs food!" "Green Ranger needs a hard cock! Seriously, how long has it been, can you even remember...?"
- One xkcd comic uses this trope when a stick-figure goes on about his (its?) dreams about his ex... and then the twist comes.
- Awkward Zombie brings us this view of Advance Wars.
- In this Flying Man and Friends strip, Flying Man attempts to make hamburgers, only to run out of meat. Mr. Stinky returns, using his own body as the meat, with a bun and condiments laid atop it.
- This Subnormality strip, in which the receptionist at a health spa casually mentions ritual human sacrifice among the list of spa amenities.
- Almost every strip of A Softer World.
- The Awakened gives us this exchange. Chase, the Butt Monkey protagonist, starts off talking to his therapist about how his various issues may have started in kindergarten when a classmate refused to let him play with a toy dinosaur.
Therapist: That doesn't sound very traumatic, Chase.
Chase: Well, when I asked to play with it, he said no in a really mean voice. Then he stabbed me in the face with a concealed switchblade, and after that repeatedly pummelled me with the dinosaur until I finally passed out from blood loss, at which point I think he might have raped me in the ass with its tail.
Therapist: Oh.
- Something Positive: Ollie is saying goodbye to his deceased uncle at the funeral: "I never thanked you enough for all you taught me. You showed me the joys of theatre, art, and how not to gag on anything up to seven inches."
- Penny Arcade. Read what the pilot says very carefully.
Western Animation
- Ned Flanders on The Simpsons:
Ned: "I don't like the service at the post office. You know, it's all 'rush rush! get'cha in, get'cha out!' Then they've got those machines in the lobby, they're even faster, no help there. You might even say, I hate the post office! That, and my parents. Lousy beatniks."
- In another episode of The Simpsons, Lisa states that the reason her family got sick from organic food is because they're not accustomed to the "vitamins, minerals, and trace amounts of bug feces."
- Although nothing he said can compare with tmost other examples on this page, Fry of Futurama, due to his Cloud Cuckoo Lander status, had a tendency to ramble whenever he was allowed to talk uninterrupted, making various relevant but still disturbing remarks ("I don't like having disks crammed into me. Unless they're Oreos. And then only in the mouth!"). He is sometimes called out on this. For example:
Fry: I had a car like that once. Well, actually it was my girlfriend's car. Actually it wasn't hers, it was her dad's. Actually she wasn't my girlfriend, she just lived next door and never closed her blinds.
Leela: Fry, remember that conversation we had about you finishing your stories a sentence early?
Fry: "It's like that drug trip in that movie I saw when I was on that drug trip."
- Another example comes from Zapp Brannigan (again of Futurama):
Brannigan: We've detected a vessel attempting to break the security cordon around Vergon 6. I'm anticipating an all-out tactical dogfight, followed by a light dinner: ravioli, ham, sunday bar.
Brannigan: Perhaps I could paint a fence, or service you sexually, or mop the floor.
- In an episode of Family Guy, Peter is (falsely) recalling talking to a creepy party palace rep, and the rep tells him about the ice cream:
Rep: For ice cream, we have vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, and people.
Peter: What was that last one?
Rep: Chocolate.
- The Doctor Who animated special "The Infinite Quest" lands the Doctor and Martha in a maximum security space prison where a background scan find the Doctor guilty of 3,005 "outstanding convictions" including 1,400 minor traffic violations, 250 evasions of library fines, and 18 planetary demolitions.
- The Fairly Oddparents does this to hilarious effect:
Crocker: What can I get for your coffee? Cream, sugar, magic?
Wanda: What was that last one?
Crocker: Sugar
Web Original
Real Life
- There is a recipe from the Philippines that goes a little like this: Carrots, potatoes, bell peppers, tomato sauce, and red ant eggs.
- And I for one welcome our new insect-eating overlords.
- The Wikipedia article on African Currency has this line to start off the second paragraph: "In pre-colonial times African currency included shells, ingots, arrowheads, iron, human beings, salt, cattle, goats, blankets, axes, beads, and many others." What doesn't belong?
- Ingots, obviously. Way too much work to move those things around.
- Yes, Ingots (Iron should be included as it can be an ingot) and Salt can be used as currency because they can be divided into small portions, can be of uniform easily-definable quality, and do not expire readily. The others cannot.
- Tho' shells and arrowheads last a lot longer if you put them in ziplock bags.
- This Craigslist ad.
Wanted: Pony "My kid is having a birthday coming up soon, and there'll be a lot of children around, so I figured I'd better get a pony. If you do have a pony you could sell, please contact me, and then immediately start putting barbeque sauce in its bedding or add some Lawry's to its salt lick — I like to marinade it early and long, so that the flavor is at it's peak by the time I take possession."
- The optimal outcome would be to notice that he has an ad in the Crafts section asking how to make a decorative unicorn's horn.
- Least by how it's listed in The Other Wiki article on Icelandic Magical Staves, it starts off with a rune to attract a girl, and suddenly "Necropants, a pair of pants made from the skin of a dead man that are capable of producing endless gold", squeezed between the rune for "To Win in Court" and "To Induce Fear". WTF?
- It's not much better on the site that article sends you to if you want to know more about Icelandic Magical Staves. For the curious: you get a man (has to be a man) to agree to let you dig him up and skin him from the waist down after he dies. Should you manage to outlive him, you do that, draw the rune on a gold piece, and put it in the purse. And yes, you must wear them.
- From the Wikipedia article on Patty Hearst:
Patricia Campbell Hearst (born February 20, 1954), now known as Patricia Hearst Shaw, is an American newspaper heiress, socialite, actress, and bank robber.
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