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"You call that breaking my spine? You RED team ladies wouldn't know how to break a spine if- (CRACK) AAAAAAAAAGH! MY SPIIIIIINE!"
" AUGH MY SPLEEN!"
too many to list here.
Injuries in cartoons (and certain slapstick comedies) never have any lasting effects, are only painful for a short while, and are often a source of visual humor. Occasionally, you will see a character in traction or on crutches or sporting Instant Bandages; however, this is strictly for punctuating a gag or putting a cap on an episode, and will never last more than 10 seconds. Gunshots and explosives in particular can lead to Amusing Injuries; what would normally destroy a large chunk of someone's face in real life often does little more than blow soot all over a cartoon character.
This can lead to very jarring circumstances within a show. Like say when the plot of an episode rides on a character getting injured and taken out of an event, or when there's a character who's a physician of all things, or in the rare event that a permanent death actually occurs. It'll be treated at least somewhat seriously in that particular instance, but next thing you know it, they're back to jumping off cliffs and juggling chainsaws. ...Or trying to see if they can do both at the same time.
Sometimes, it can also involve a huge Double Standard. A male character will often suffer them at the hands of a female, who can punch/kick/beat/attack him as much as she wants and it'll be often taken as mere comedy. Try imagining the same situation with a gender flip... yeah, people will be up in arms.
Amusing Injuries are usually healed via Negative Continuity. Can overlap with Groin Attack and Ass Shove. Required for Hyperspace Mallet.
One special example: Cranial Eruption
Examples
Anime and Manga
- More in the filler than canon, Naruto often finds himself receiving bodily harm from Tsunade, Sakura, and the occasional anonymous female. This can be played off due to his Healing Factor but a normal person would most likely be rendered catatonic by just one of the beatings he gets from Sakura.
- Injuries to humans in Pokemon seemed to yo-yo between being funny and dark depending on what the plot needed. After the Charmander evolved into Charmeleon, it was a running gag for him to roast Ash's face; similarly, there was a running gag between James and his anarchic, face-eating Victreebell (and his overly- and painfully-affectionate Cacnea and Carnivine... what is it with James and Grass-types?). However, at other times in the story, Pokemon attacks were treated as genuinely harmful and dangerous, particularly the first episode in which Ash gets chased by a group of Spearow out for blood (No, this has nothing to do with Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds").
- Also when Meowth slices peoples' faces and red lines appear. They seem to heal after a couple of seconds though.
- Although the main protagonist Keitaro Urashima was invincible in both versions of Love Hina - he is frequently chased by a magical swordswoman, various Humongous Mecha, and the woman who gave the Naru Punch its name, all without sustaining any lasting injury - it is only in the manga version that the characters discuss it, and are genuinely surprised when he ends up with a broken leg.
- Note that it took a gigantic piece of masonry falling on top him like a cartoon anvil to even manage that.
- In the manga, both the story and the author's comments say outright that Keitaro is "invulnerable" several times. Which seems to mean Wolverine-style ability to recover from damage, not outright invulnerability...
- When Kanako prepares to launch Kitsune into outer space, all other girls protest with a hearty "she's not Keitaro! If you do that, she'll die!"
- And in the Christmas special OVA, Keitaro falls off the roof and sprains his ankle, putting him in crutches for the rest of the special. This is rather surprising considering he's fallen off that roof numerous times (and has had far worse done to him) without so much as a bruise before.
- Very common in the Full Metal Alchemist manga and parts of the anime, usually when Winry finds out that Ed has damaged his automail again. She brandishes her monkey wrench, and in the next frame Ed is lying in a bloody puddle on the ground, with Al crying in the corner and any bystanders looking horrified and frightened. The next frame, everyone is back to normal.
- Note that this really only applies to Winry's wrench hitting Ed. Whenever Ed (or anyone else) is hurt in a fight, it is treated seriously and they spends at least some time in the hospital recovering. We also see notable injuries like Havoc being paralyzed from the waist down after the fight with Lust that don't heal, and prove difficult for the characters because of it.
- Lampshaded and subverted in one episode of Hayate The Combat Butler: Hayate finds himself bleeding from the head, then shrugs it off saying that, since this is an anime, he'll be all better in the next shot. Then the blood starts erupting out.
- Rumiyo in the Pretty Sammy series gets constantly beaten up by his sister in over-the-top ways and never seems to take any permanent damage from it.
- The eponymous Kamen No Maid Guy is regulary beaten close to death with a nailbat as a form of amusing injury. The other characters are sometimes maimed pretty badly, too.
- Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan show the title character frequently pulping the male lead in very bloody and over-the-top ways that approach Happy Tree Friends levels of violence. Fortunately, she has a reset button, because she's really fond of him.
- Ranma 1/2, is powered solely by this trope. To list the injuries involved would take up most of the page.
- Much of the humor in Sailor Moon comes from this. One of the more creative ones was when Usagi's feet fell asleep during a tea ceremony and Chibi-usa punched her in the foot. One word: ouch.
- Subverted in Season S, where Uranus sustains injuries in battle. They don't stop her from fighting, but they are real and lasting.
- The eponymous protagonist from Excel Saga has been blown to bits numerous times, has fallen from tall buildings, and suffers more of such things multiple times per episode, without any lasting effects. The only exception is near the end of the show when the Great Will of the Macrocosm is not available to do the usual Snap Back and one particular injury sticks around for a while.
- Also, you know, Hyatt.
- Dr. Iwata is routinely beaten by his nurse sidekick in the manga, but never seems to take any lasting damage (why they didn't exploit this character in the anime is beyond me).
- Pretty much everyone in the anime and even the manga is pretty close to invulnerable, really.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu is made of this trope. There is not one episode where Sousuke doesn't shoot someone, blow someone up, tear-gas someone, or do something that would otherwise kill said someone. (However, in the first and third seasons, these things are usually very deadly.)
- Mahou Sensei Negima fluctuates in and out of using this, usually depending on the drama of the situation. Comically breaking a boulder over someone's head? Amusing injury. Arch-enemy impaling you with a stone spear because you happen to be in his way? You'll nearly bleed to death.
- How many times has Shinji Hirako been pummeled by Hiyori Sarugaki?
- Naga from the Slayers OVA's gets set on fire a lot...
- L and Light's punch-ups in Death Note are oddly lacking in consequence. They slam each other in the face while playing headgames to make sure the other party's caught physically unprepared, but seem to come out a bit dirty at best. Especially odd in a series that's all about tragic/fatal consequences for very small physical actions, like writing or thinking — yet there they are, whaling on each other to no real effect.
- This is largely because the arc with the punch-ups is mainly light relief (sorry) from the otherwise unrelenting darkness of the plot. L and Light fight on two occasions, hitting each other three times each. They never really lose control (they argue all the way through the longer fight), and the impression given is very much that both of them are too smart to really hurt the other.
Comic Book
- In one issue of the comic Gold Digger, the character of Stripe is repeatedly hit by various painful booby traps in an old temple. Due to his relative ability to take damage, he is merely put in increasing levels of Instant Bandages. (At one point, they forget to give him a hole to breathe through!) His wife Brittany, a werecheetah who can bench press Mack trucks, gets a little angry when she finds out.
- Wolverine occasionally comes in for this, thanks to his Mutant Healing Factor (TM). One of the more notable examples was a pitch-black parody about chainsaw-wielding midget mafiosos that culminated in the Punisher parking a steamroller on top of Wolverine.
- In Marvel Ultimate Team-Up, Spider-Man rescues a severely injured Wolverine and recommends a hospital, only for Wolvie to brush him off and heal up almost instantly, resulting the in hilarious line, "Oh my god I think I'm going to throw up in my mask."
- Basile always gets hurt in Leonard Le Genie, either because of his clumsiness or his master's sadism.
- Every single major character suffers these in spades in Mortadelo Y Filemon.
Film
Live Action TV
- Manuel of Fawlty Towers receives large quantities of injuries inflicted upon him by Basil Fawlty because of him misunderstanding his orders and generally not doing exactly as he says. One of the most popular examples is when, as Basil creeps around in the middle of the night, he mistakes Manuel for a burglar and then hits him over the head with a frying pan; this scene is so infamous because John Cleese actually used a real metal frying pan to hit Andrew Sachs as opposed to the prop one, but the scene still carried on.
- Basil gets a few injuries himself, but they are quite tame compared to anything Manuel is dished out. This makes the episode where Basil ends up in hospital because he was squirted in the face with a fire extinguisher and then bumped his head on a frying pan seem quite strange when Manuel has been able to take much worse without needing to be hospitalized.
- Played up immensely in Bottom with Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, where the main characters are thrown around and tormented with cartoon levels of injury with no major consequences except when it is required for the plot. For example in the first episode, Eddie (Edmonson) tries to yank out one of Richie's (Mayall) nostril hairs with a pair of pliers, throwing him around the room before dislodging them from his nose. Richie retaliated by ripping a cabinet off the wall and smashing it over Eddie's head. He barely flinches before hitting Richie right through the door.
- One of the most far-fetched is definitely in the episode "Gas" where they hit the gas-man over the head repeatedly with a frying pan and punch him, then (when they think he is dead) proceed to punch him some more, inflate him with a bicycle pump ("How does he look?" "Fatter."), electrocute him with wires, stick a fork in his groin after deciding to try eating him, jump up and down on top of him to flatten him down underneath the carpet and are then about to toss him out of the window on top of a bus when he wakes up, alive and well.
- One of the most cartoonish no-long-term-consequences moments is when Richie cuts both Eddie's legs off with a chainsaw. Eddie then sews them back on with an ordinary needle and thread, but gets them back to front. Richie then cuts them off with the chainsaw again and sews them back on the right way round himself. Apart from walking strangely for a few moments Eddie is unaffected.
- Highlander The Series, of all things, plays with this trope in "Money No Object," where it's justified by the series concept: Immortals can quickly recover from any injury except decapitation. (Although this wasn't true in the original film, in which some immortals carried centuries-old scars.)
- Immortals in the series can also carry long-lived scars, usually on their faces and necks (fan theory suggests this vulnerability is a side-effect of the whole decapitation thing), and there's a question of whether the Healing Factor will regrow lost limbs.
- 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.)
- Law And Order Special Victims Unit, after a shooting in a courtroom, Munch is being treated for a grazing gunshot wound in the ass.
- Most of the stunts in Jackass revolve around this.
- Heroes has plenty
 of this to demonstrate Claire's healing factor.
- Summarized rather well in a send-up of Last Of The Summer Wine, of all things, where the characters had realized that they had been "using the same script for fifteen years" and attempted to make their programme funny again. After one of them encourages the other to fall off a high fence:
Clogg: [Concerned] Did it hurt much?
Compot: No, not really.
Clogg: Well, it wasn't funny enough, then.
- In Firefly, "The Train Job," when Jayne is telling Wash they're going to finish the job or he's going beat Wash with the chain of command, then goes crazy and slumps over, unconscious. Tell me that wasn't hilarious.
- "I got stabbed, right here...."
- River slashing Jayne across the chest. Come on, that was hilarious.
- And in The Movie, River punching Simon in the throat and then knocking him out.
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The perfectly deadpan fight in the lift.
- Also, Cameron gets a face full of windshield from a moving car. Her only reaction is to look through the broken windshield at the shocked driver and say "Please do not be alarmed."
- In one of Ellen Degeneres's standup routines, she subverts this trope by poking fun at the fact that we're all supposed to laugh at our own injuries; she mimes accidentally running into a glass door and trying to make it sound like it was hilarious, then asks aloud "Is that my eye? I think I lost my eye! Ha ha ha!"
Tabletop RPG
- In Toon if someone runs out of hitpoints they "Fall Down". The character is out of the game for the rest of the scene, but after the "Cut" to the next scene, usually a few second later, he returns as good as new as all injuries were merely temporary. You can't kill a cartoon.
VideoGames
- The Fallout series play with incredible injuries in combat pretty well. Exploding heads, huge chunks blowing up out of a BB shot, bodies shredded to pieces by machine guns. Lots of fun. Even worse, the game had an option to make it even worse.
- The 'amusing' comes in the first two games from the running commentary, both from the characters and the combat log leading to such gems after shooting a woman in the groin as 'She took it like a man, that is to say, it fucking hurt'
- In Fallout 3, one can get blown across town if they stand next to a car when it explodes. Set the car on fire and walk away. Ten seconds later, you're watching your sorry ass fly.
- Pretty much the entire point behind Team Fortress 2. The exchange at the top of the page is from "Meet The Sandvich", which amps up the comedy by hiding it behind a Gory Battle Discretion Shot. The lines cut from the sequence implies that the Heavy deals out more comedic pain:
- While the setting is not prone to them (being a series focusing on murders) at a few point in the 3rd Ace Attorney, Godot throws his coffee at Phoenix and it is played for laughs. The fact that coffee is HOT never comes up the first time it happens. When it is commented upon Phoenix's thoughts reveal it is only hot enough for first-degree burns.
- And of course there's Franziska von Karma's neurotic whip, which afflicts absolutely everybody through the second game with no ill effects.
- These are actually a gameplay element in Sphinx And The Cursed Mummy. The Mummy of the title is already dead, so things that would normally kill him instead have... other effects. Being set on fire allows him to set other things on fire, getting smashed flat by Smashing Hallway Traps Of Doom makes him paper-thin and lets him slip through bars, and getting put through shredders turns him into three separate mummies. Though he doesn't get hurt, he definitely doesn't like being set on fire if you watch his Idle Animation...
- Related: The UK edition of Official Playstation Magazine had a semi-regular column where an actual ER Nurse would analyse a couple of different Amusing Injuries from some game -Ready 2 Rumble and Disney's Tarzan stick out in this troper's memory- and describe their Real Life consequences in precise clinical detail.
- In Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, the current captain of the Screaming Narwhal encourages you to try to roust him from the deck of the ship (thus becoming captain yourself) by any means necessary, because due to Flotsam Island's odd winds no one can leave, so it's become something of a game, and he has proven so skilled at beating all comers that no one's even tried for two years, and he's bored. Once you succeed, he congratulates you on your captaincy and cheerfully excuses himself to have the doctor see to his grievous internal injuries.
Webcomics
- Girl Genius alternates between playing this straight for laughs (Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer! being thrown out of a zeppelin, and it's stated that he's survived worse) and subverting it for character consistency (this strip is Moloch von Zinzer playing the epic klutz, but the last panel shows Agatha looking shocked and worried, possibly because the last time they had seen one another they were pretending to be lovers).
- More likely, because Othar is the only person in the series explicitly Made Of Iron (though the Jagermonsters come close - Dimo's severed arm is played for laughs, too). Moloch was lucky.
- Black Mage of 8-bit Theater, first and foremost, as he is the universe's Butt Monkey, Chew Toy and the Fall Guy in one person: He gets beaten up by White Mage and her giant hammer for being obnoxious numerous times, is used as part of a "Mage-Blade", accidentally learns a spell to eject his own entrails, is foolishly frozen in a block of ice and has his arms cut off and re-attached by crochet, has his lungs filled with taffy by Sarda as an example to the other Light Warriors, gets hit with Australia (Sarda at work again), gets hit with a tentacle monster, becomes the favorite target of Dragoon's spear, and lately seems to cling to life just to spite White Mage... the list is endless. Oh, and he's a bleeder.
- Gordon Frohman of Concerned (a comic based on, and made with, Half-Life 2) has survived just about everything that could possibly kill a player in that game, always played for cartoonish laughs. He was a zombie for a while, but Got Better then, too. Cruelly subverted at the very end of the comic, when he falls from the roof of the Citadel tower and is Killed Off For Real.
- This is because He had Buddha Mode activated the whole time and accidentally turned it off right at the end.
- Happens now and then in Sluggy Freelance, usually as a result of someone making Bun-Bun mad.
- Any harm involving Richard in Looking For Group. If he's the victim, expect a funny comment from him.
- Lampshaded in this [1] Chugworth Academy strip.
- Nodwick - Many strips begin or end with the titular henchman completely wrapped in healing duct tape (in lieu of actual bandages). It seems to be quite effective; his employers frequently use him as a projectile or monster chow.
- Averted in Megatokyo. The writer specifically says he didn't want characters to be able to just shrug off injuries, regardless of how ridiculous they were, so early on Largo breaks his arm in a classic "funny injury" moment - and actually does spend six weeks in a cast.
- Of course, due to the insane lengths of time between new pages, six weeks in the real world equals 4.037 seconds in the world of Mega Tokyo.
- A general rule of thumb for Las Lindas is that Miles + pain = instant comedy.
Western Animation
- "South Park" makes a running joke out of Kenny's horrific injuries. In this case, the character actually dies, and is revived each episode by Negative Continuity rather than by an unexplained recovery.
- In one two-part episode, he miraculously popped back into existence in the first few seconds of the second episode without comment.
- Daffy Duck in the course of his career was riddled with countless bullets usually only ending up bare and sooty with a humorously displaced beak. However, near the end of the 1953 short "Duck! Rabbit, Duck!", after getting shot in the face for the sixth time by Elmer Fudd, he finally snaps, and shouts "Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of burnt feathers, and gunpowder, and cordite! I'm an elk! Shoot me, go on! It's elk season! I'm a fiddler crab! Why don't you shoot me?! It's fiddler crab season!!!"
- However, not even Daffy can equal the sheer amount and variety of the (highly) amusing injuries inflicted on one Wile E. Coyote (SUPER-genius). Over the years, the hapless hunter has been on the receiving end of everything from catapults to earthquake pills and all possible variations of falling off of a cliff.
- Lampshaded in Darkwing Duck. In one episode when the plot involves a movie theater, Darkwing is hit by a heavy object and explains: "see the difference. A Movie figure would stand up and be okay now. I, on the other hand, am seriously hurt..." Funny because he actually behaves pretty much like those "movie figures" - and in this episode is OK 10 seconds later.
- Subverted in an episode of Family Guy where we see Elmer shoot Bugs Bunny down dead then snap his neck as he lies in a pile of bloody, mangled flesh.
- The series also has a habit of pausing the show to have characters provide drawn-out reaction to Amusing Injuries the way a real person would, invariably turning into an Overly Long Gag.
- "Thhhh...Aaahh...Thhhh...Aaahh...Thhhh...Aaahh...Thhhh..."
- Every episode of Drawn Together has at least one character getting a comically horrific injury, only to appear fine in the next scene (though sometimes, the characters remain this way for the remainder of the episode). There is not enough room on this page to list all of the injuries that the characters have gone through.
- This is the entire premise of Happy Tree Friends, although it is because the injuries are so gruesome and exaggerated that one can't help but laugh (or cry).
- However, the show often subverts this trope by depicting injuries realistically, provoking uncomfortable reactions.
- Subverted in a season 2 episode of The Simpsons, 'Bart the Daredevil' in which Homer falls down a cliff, hitting nearly every rock on the way down, only to land on the ground bleeding and with serious injury. It's still hilarious, though.
- Not to mention he hits his head repeatedly while being hauled back up. Then the ambulance crashes. Then his gurney rolls out and falls down the gorge ''again''.
- A later episode (the "Reality Show" one in season 11, titled "Behind the Laughter") jokes that he was in remission for a long time and became addicted to painkillers, which is what allowed him to perform the "bone-shattering physical comedy that made the show famous".
- Mocked, like everything else, in "The Onion" headline: Live-Action Simpsons movie on hold after 11th Homer stuntman dies.
- And of course, the Show Within A Show Itchy and Scratchy is the definition of this trope.
- The episode A Star is Burns parodies this trope as a video of a man getting hit in the groin by a football wins much praise at the film festival (twice).
- Played with in Transformers Animated; while the main characters themselves are subjected to realistic injuries, disposable household robots are frequently seen blown up or decapitated with hilarious results. There's also the "Starscream Death Montage".
- Tom And Jerry. If the violence on each episode was to be taken seriously, it would probably trump Happy Tree Friends.
- Animation historian Michael Barrier argued in one book that some of the violence in the very early T&Js was a little unsettling, precisely because the character designs and animation were too realistic. As the '40s progressed into the '50s and the designs became flatter and more stylized (following the lead of Tex Avery, who headed a different MGM cartoon unit), the violence got funnier and more "cartoony".
- Phineas And Ferb is a fairly standard example of this, however they also lampshaded it in Swinter. When Phineas, Ferb, and Candice are all riding on a snowboard and they crash into a snowman then a tree, Candice (on the back of the board) is the only one to hit these things. Phineas asks Ferb "How did we miss that?" Also lampshading Candice's status as the show's Butt Monkey. The majority of the shows cast never ends up as fodder for this trope, just Candice and Dr. Doofenshmirtz.
- Ferb is also fodder for this trope. He is specifically thrown around in Chronicles of Meap, and One Good Scare Ought to Do it. His mental state is the main target; likely because it's typically unalterable.
- Parodied in one episode. After Doofenshmirtz gets a new nemesis, the episode treats this like a break-up, complete with Perry and Doofenshmirtz appearing on a parody of Dr. Phil. Doofenshmirtz promises to hurt Perry "the right way: with cartoonish violence."
- In another, Perry is busy dealing with another crisis, so Doofenshmirtz decides to gloat to "Planty the Potted Plant", an actual potted plant with a tiny hat on it. Somehow, the plant beats Doofenshmirtz and wrecks his lair, and is officially hired by Monogram at the end of the episode.
- The toon in the vivisection parts of Monkey Dust has the standard cartoonish Amusing Injuries, then it gets subverted when he drops an anvil on the (less-toonish) doctor's head. It's not pretty.
- Daria is pretty realistic as far as cartoons go - When the school goes on a paintball-playing field trip (the episode "The Daria Hunter") the Running Gag is "Ow! Those paintball thingies hurt!"
- Ruby Gloom does this too. Misery, one of the main characters is always hit by lightning, only to say "ouch" and come back 10 seconds later in best shape.
- Inverted in one episode, where Misery isn't hurt at all. The other characters are getting hurt instead
- League Of Super Evil does this almost constantly with Doktor Frogg. Wether it's being crushed by giant doors, or eaten by Doomageddon. Then again he is the resident Chew Toy. So it's expected of him.
- Ren and Stimpy is full of this, frequent things that happen include large veiny bumps appear after getting hit on the head, skin would get sucked or ripped off, getting run over or smashed with a large object would reduce them to a puddle, sometimes a blow to the face would knock teeth out or make them shatter like glass, knock a brain out of the head, and leave an eyeball hanging out of the socket
- Sponge Bob Square Pants adores this trope, especially in the newer episodes. "The Krusty Krushers" is possibly 10 minutes of little more than Amusing Injuries and Spongebob style gags.
- And of course, there's the ever-popular "MY LEG!", predominantly from the earlier seasons.
- The Fairly Oddparents makes use of This. Timmy has fallen of cliffs, been mauled by dogs, and had several other potentially fatal things happen to him. And yet, he can take it.
- Watch out for that tree!
- Disney movies seem very fond of amusing injuries to the buttocks; from being bitten by a dog to landing butt-first in a briar patch to being stabbed there with a flaming arrow.
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