alt title(s): Bathos
"
Holy mother of unintentional comedy!"
A Narm is a moment that is supposed to be serious, but due to either over-sappiness, poor
execution, excessive
Melodrama, or the sheer
absurdity of the situation, the drama is lost to the point of becoming unintentionally funny. It can be extremely subjective.
It is named for
the famous scene
in the last season of
Six Feet Under, where the main character Nate suffers a brain embolism. He suddenly grabs his right arm and repeats "Numb arm!", but it quickly becomes "N'arm! N'arm!" Despite being the climax of one of the best shows HBO has ever created, the scene was overwhelmingly found by fans and reviewers to be funny rather than sad.
Were you to discuss this phenomenon in a scholarly work or literary circles, the word you would probably use is "
bathos". Though all the implications of the technical term do not match up exactly, it's a fairly good fit. If you're talking to non-tropers and don't want to have to make fun of the unintentional comedy of brain embolisms,
that's probably the word you want to use.
Not to be confused with the
Funny Aneurysm Moment, in which something wasn't meant to be upsetting but is, thanks to later events or unfortunate
Reality Subtext.
Narm often stems from a failed attempt to pull off a
Crowning Moment Of Awesome, a
Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming or a
Tear Jerker. Alternatively, a good performance in a bad movie will evoke Narm because the actor
Took The Bad Film Seriously. Anything that falls under
Wangst and
Deus Angst Machina runs the risk of falling under Narm, as what is
intended to be angsty and dramatic can instead come across as over-the-top ridiculous and absurd. In subtitled
anime, Narms are often created through the use of
badly used English, with
Totally Radical dialog in general being another rich source of Narm. In dubbed anime, Narms are more likely to result from the combination of a budding
William Shatner reading an
overly-literal translation.
See also
Nightmare Retardant and many cases of
Snark Bait, as well as
Fetish Retardant for erotica (of which
the Swedish home furnishings variety is a particularly good source of Narm). Not to be confused with
'Nam (
which is generally slightly less funny) or the
Narn.
Keep in mind that
Narm is
subjective, as one person's
cheese is another person's
charm. However, Narm is
not when something simply falls flat or "doesn't work".
A number of examples of
Narm become
memes.
Contrast with
Narm Charm, where somehow, the drama still works.
Examples:
