Appliance Defenestration

"That'll teach you to ruin my life!"

"If ever you're not satisfied with one of our tires, please feel free to bring it back.
[old woman throws tire through window]
Thank you."

— Discount Tire Co. commercial

A Comedy Trope. There are few visual images that better convey a character's explosive anger with an alarm clock, videogame, phone call or TV set than said character hurling said object through a closed window. Crash!

Said action is most always viewed from the outside, only indirectly showing the violent pitch or punt that launches the object. It's funnier that way, especially if the appliance is illogically heavy. (See Offscreen Crash.)

While it usually applies to household appliances, other objects can also be featured, as long as someone is propelling them through the window.

Doesn't count if the character's main intention was to break the window; the focus of the destruction must be on the object.

Keep in note that throwing broken appliances like TV, video game consoles, laptops, etc out of the window in Real Life may cause injury or death to bystanders and pedestrians or damage vehicles below (along with broken shards of glass that follow); and the thrower of said appliance may be held legally accountable for any injuries and damages because of said thrown appliance. So Don't Try This at Home if you have a broken appliance.

Can be a form of Percussive Therapy and/or Percussive Shutdown in some cases.

Compare Agitated Item Stomping, Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!, Defenestrate and Berate, and Shoot the Television.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Shout laundry detergent:
  • The commercial opens when an angry housewife somehow manages to pitch her washer and dryer out a second story window to the driveway below.
  "I hate set-in stains!"
  • Her across the street neighbor one-ups her by throwing the washer THROUGH THE ROOF!
• Tossing the washing machine out the window. Think it was a Maytag or Sears commercial. Having bought the right kind of washing machine, the woman and her mate are happy again... then see a washing machine fly out of a neighbor's house and say they better go tell Sue (or whatever the name was) about the brand they just bought.
• The Discount Tire Co. commercial quoted above, featuring a disgruntled old lady hurling a tire through their shop window.
• Happens in an ISP commercial when a computer is implied to spend an entire day near 40% and actually jumps back a small percentage.
• This TV commercial for Gamefly, a videogame rental service, shows a man hurling a TV out of his bedroom window after he discovered that he had bought a bad game.
• A 90s-era ad for Compaq computers shows people walking in the streets wearing helmets, because people throw away all the stuff that their brand-new Compaq computer replaces: typewriters, filing cabinets, older computers.
• An early 2000s ad for Snickers Cruncher shows a car alarm going off loudly at night. Without warning, a massive sofa, easily the size of the car, falls into the shot, completely crushing it and silencing the alarm. We then see a woman looking outside of her window dusting off her hands in satisfaction. (Fridge Logic sets in as to just how she threw the sofa out the too-small window without damaging either.) The sofa then slides partway off the car and onto the hood of the one parked next to it, setting off its alarm.
• A Bud Light commercial had an office meeting, with the workers being asked for suggestions on how to save money. A guy suggests they stop serving Bud Light at the meetings. Cut to outside as a chair goes flying through the window—with the guy who made the suggestion in it—and landing on the ground outside the building.
• A 1980s advertisement for Amstrad wordprocessors showed now-obsolete typewriters being thrown from office windows into a skip.
• A commercial for a weight loss supplement features a woman throwing her radio out the window when she hears it say that women are more likely to gain unneeded weight. The radio, while flying, tells her to eat right and exercise, as well as drink the advertised supplement. She is then showing pulling it back in by the cord, saying, "Now you tell me!"
• There's a turkey commercial where the woman is struggling with the frozen turkey [which is huge and heavy]. She miscalculates the amount of effort to toss it into the sink. So it overshoots the sink, breaks through the window and brains a man outside [her husband?]
• A 2018 commercial for DirecTV NOW shows a woman throwing several TV props out of her apartment window before ending by throwing her satellite receiver out.
• A commercial for a fast internet provider from the early 2000s' went like this: A young boy (no more than 12 years old) logs on to the internet and types "how to talk to girls," the computer is agonizingly slow in providing search results, and the screen fades to black. We next see the young boy sitting in front of his monitor with a black eye, and the computer still loading the results. We then see a shot of the exterior of the house, and the computer monitor crashing through the bedroom window, and smashing into bits on the ground.

Anime & Manga

• Good Night World:Taichiro throws his VR visor out the window over his onlie friend Pico seemingly abruptly cutting contact with him after promising to start a new version of the Pirates together, not knowing she's one of the A.I.s Kojiro needed to delete to make the very dangerous Black Bird more manageable. By pure luck, this happens while his mother Miyabi is coming back to the house for the first time a in while and she brings it back inside before it can get even more damaged.

Comic Books

• In Silverblade #1, Jonathan discovers Milestone watching a videotaped plea for money from his third ex-wife and rips the VCR off the top of the television and hurls it through the closed window.

Comic Strips

• Dilbert:
  • In one strip, Dogbert gives a variety of strange solutions to problems with everyday life. For the problem of television evangelists, he suggests throwing your television out the window. His theory is that if everyone does it, someone will get lucky and brain a passing evangelist.
  • Alice is prone to this. A lot. Some examples include "Code Rage" and "Try rebooting your computer."
• One episode of The Far Side, where a scientist is launched out of the window of the Stress Institute. From inside: "Hey... I feel better already."
• In one Gaston Lagaffe strip, Prunelle gets overly angry at the titular character for destroying two coat hangers and violently throws the remaining piece of one out the window. As it is shaped like a boomerang, hilarity ensues.
• Played straight in page 1 and page 2 of the What's New? with Phil and Dixie comic in Dragon magazine #63 (July 1982), in which computers are hurled through open windows by owners frustrated with fantasy RPG programs.
• In one Channel Chuckles comic a television is thrown out the window.
  Man on TV: Of course, some of you folks may not agree with these political views, however...

Fan Works

• Mocked in an NCIS parody. Gibbs goes storming into Vance's office (as per usual), but Vance's weary resignation towards the interruption leaves Gibbs unable to express how angry and passionate he is. So he opens a window and chucks a random appliance out.
  Vance counted it as a win that the window had been open.

Films — Animation

• In Kung Fu Panda 2, Lord Shen wistfully regards the throne promised to him by his parents before his exile. The next shot is of said throne flying out the window.

Films — Live-Action

• In the Disney film Candleshoe, Jodie Foster's character gets frustrated while searching for a clue in a book and nearly throws it out the window only to realize that the clue was referring to the church graveyard she can see from it.
• In the Mexican movie No Manches Frida 2, when the protagonists' wedding video goes viral after he screwed it up. When he goes back to the high school where he teaches, he finds two of his students laughing at it and calling him an idiot. When he walks up to them, he tells them he can now laugh at the video, takes the cell phone, and flings off the second story and onto the floor of the lobby of the administration building.
• Played seriously in Pink Floyd – The Wall, where the character Pink, in the throes of Sanity Slippage during the segment of "One of My Turns", a) throws a TV out the window of his hotel room and b) smashes another one in with an electric guitar.
• In an homage to many real life stories regarding rock band, Rock Star has an angry Steel Dragon member throwing a TV out the window after being dumped by his girlfriend.
• During Johnny's rampage at the end of The Room (2003), he throws a television out of a window. The scene is not meant to be comedic, but is because of Narm. He lifts the television with little effort, making no attempt to handle it as a real television and not a lightweight prop. The film then cuts to the television crashing onto the sidewalk.
• Shortcut to Happiness: When his typewriter breaks as the last piece of a Humiliation Conga, Stone snaps and flings the machine out his window. Where it kills an old woman walking by on the street below.
• In a cross with Throw the Book at Them, Silver Linings Playbook has Pat chucking A Farewell to Arms out the window once he finishes and dislikes the Downer Ending.
• A scene in A Streetcar Named Desire involved Stanley dunking a radio through a window.
• Take the Money and Run: Virgil's cello is thrown out a window, presumably by someone fed up with his horrible skill with the instrument.

Literature

• In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry mentions in a letter to Sirius Black that in the course of a tantrum over being put on a diet by his parents, Dudley Dursley threw his PlayStation^note an anachronism because the scene takes place in the summer of 1994 and the PS1 didn't come out in Europe until Fall 1995 out the window. "Bit stupid, really. Now he's on a diet and has nothing to take his mind off it."
• Subverted in Nightside: Hell to Pay, where John Taylor gets bored waiting for a ditzy socialite to pay attention to him, and starts fingering all the knick-knacks in the room. Fortunately for the knick-knacks, she makes time to talk to him before he needs to act out his next attention-getting tactic: tossing them out the windows.
• In the sequel to Peeps: The Last Days, people infected with the Vampire-like parasite go crazy and start throwing things they used love out windows all over New York City. The book begins with two of the protagonists saving a classic Stratocaster from hitting the ground.
• The War Against the Chtorr: The protagonist finds himself imprisoned on a Missing Floor by the mysterious Uncle Ira group. To protest he throws all the furniture out the window.
  "Ceramic lamps are very nice. So are beer kegs. And almost any liquid-filled bottle. Chairs and mattresses are impressive, but dull."

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has an episode where the team's hacker in the van outside is told to get ready to receive a "large file transfer." Cue an entire filing cabinet full of hard-copied data being thrown out the window.
• In an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos a clip is shown with two guys dropping an extra large TV out a second-story window of their house with Tom Beregeron remarking "I'm sure a lot of people feel like doing this when our show gets preempted."
• Happens to a TV in the title sequence to Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe.
• The Drew Carey Show had an episode set to the Da Vinci's Notebook song "The Gates" where Drew throws his laptop off the office building roof after it breaks down just like the song.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • In the Season 2 First Look Scene, on the upper floor of the de la Croix mansion, a chair is thrown at a closed window (presumably by a vampire while attacking a human) and the glass shatters on impact.
  • In the Season 2 trailer, Madeleine hurls a flat-iron at her store window after a swastika is spray-painted on it.
• Kitchen Nightmares featured an episode where a chef was cooking all of the meals in a microwave. Guess what Ramsay did when he took "Chef Mike" to the second floor window overlooking an alleyway?
• Mad About You had a Thanksgiving Episode with a Running Gag that the couple tried to get a turkey without their families noticing after the dog ate the first. The second time, once everyone is approaching Jamie, she throws it out the window! (and showing the dangers mentioned in our lead, it is followed by car horns, meaning a huge cooked bird disrupted traffic...) Eventually the guy at the store already has another turkey waiting for them when they rush in for yet another replacement.
• In one episode of Mad Men, Pete performs a variation of this to demonstrate his anger with Trudy, by throwing the Christmas turkey out the window.
• Spoofed in Malcolm in the Middle. When Malcolm gets enraged over a The Sims knockoff, he opens up the window... only to find that the computer's too heavy, so he just shoves it off his desk instead.
• M*A*S*H:
  • One episode had Winchester turning into a total slob, leading to a scene where he, Hawkeye and BJ trash one another's areas in the Swamp. During the scene, Winchester threw Hawkeye's mattress through the wall of the tent.
  • Also in an earlier episode just after Frank Burns is sent home because of his mental breakdown, he calls Hawkeye to say goodbye. During the conversation, he mentions he has been promoted from Major to Lieutenant Colonel and put in charge of a veterans hospital in Fort Wayne. Hawkeye listens calmly, but as soon as the conversation's over, he rips the phone and throws it outside of the tent in a fit of rage.
• One Parks and Recreation episode has Ron Swanson learn about the lack of privacy on the internet, leading him to toss out his computer and monitor (although he does it straight into a dumpster rather than out his window.)
• On Scrubs, Dr.Cox does this when an old hospital computer is giving him trouble.
• The opening credits for SCTV begins with a montage of people defenestrating their TVs in rage because nothing good is on...until now (the announcer goes, "Tired of ordinary television? Don't touch that dial! SCTV is now on the air!"). Buildings the TVs were thrown out of include high-rises, suburban tract houses, mansions, and a grass hut (probably referencing the African nation of Togo, a running joke on the show).
• In the Smallville episode "Rogue", corrupt cop Sam Phelan learns of Clark Kent's powers and blackmails him into serving him. At one point, when ordered to break into an office and steal from a safe, Clark instead rips the whole safe out and throws it out the window, where it lands on and disables Phelan's car. Clark then super speeds away and leaves him to the arriving cops. Phelan manages to escape and get Clark under his control again. Clark is ordered to help him steal from a museum. Clark pulls the same trick again by throwing an artifact that Phelan touched and got his fingerprints on out the window, then speeding away and leaving him to the guards that were alerted by the commotion. This time, Phelan gets gunned down when he angrily tries to attack the guards, leaving Clark's secret safe.
• Still Game shows you don't have to break the window to defenestrate something—Big Innes lands Isa's cooker square in the skip on street level from her high-rise flat in "Big Yin".
• The short-lived UPN show, The Watcher (an anthology show hosted by Sir Mix-A-Lot) had an episode with a band called Pandemonium (played by the members of Cheap Trick) doing a run of shows in Las Vegas. The singer complained that the other band members had gone soft, unable to party down like they used to, and vowed to replace them all with other musicians. To show they could still "live it up", the other band members threw a TV out the window—only for it to land on the singer!
• Inverted in The Young Ones: Vyvyan attempts to throw the TV out the window... only for it to bounce off the glass.
  Mike: That I did not expect.
• Young Sheldon: In "A Frankenstein's Monster and a Crazy Church Guy", when they panic over how to stop the trading program, Sheldon, Evan and Joaquin agree there is only one option. Cut to the computer being thrown out the dorm window. Sheldon then notes that they could have just unplugged it, with Evan adding that they should've opened the window first.

Music

• The Big & Rich song "Six Foot Town":
  You know from two stories up, a Zenith makes a big boom!
• In "The Gates" by Da Vincis Notebook, a malfunctioning laptop (that eventually causes the protagonist to hunt down Bill Gates himself, hence the title) is thrown off the roof of an office building. "And when it arrived, seven stories below, it really made a mighty fine sound-o."
• St. Vincent suggests doing this in her song "Digital Witness":
  People turn the TV on and throw it out the window, yeah.
• As they were leaving a hotel, Keith Moon of The Who demanded that he return to the hotel because he had forgotten something. What he had forgotten to do was to throw the TV out the window.
  • According to their road manager, Keith was very fond of throwing TVs out the window, and he would bring long extension cords on the road so, when he threw the TV out the window, it would keep playing up until the moment it hit the ground.
  • Keith Moon probably could have been the Trope Maker for this category. His destruction of hotel rooms was legendary. Supposedly, one hotel the Who was staying in was undergoing renovations, so they put the band in the area to be renovated and told him to do whatever he wanted to.
  • In 1976 in New York, Keith once paid some NYC cab drivers to block traffic on the street in front of the hotel so he could throw the entire contents of his hotel room out the window.
  • Roger Daltrey said that while just throwing a TV out the window was fun, it was even better if you could find enough extension chord to make sure the TV stayed on all the way to the ground.
  • In his book, Kenney Jones told a story of a time when their bands were on tour together. Keith called him and invited him out for a drink, but told him to come up to his room first. When he got there, Kenney saw Keith had ten snare drums around the room. Keith picked one up, said "Watch this" and threw it at the window. It crashed through the glass, and the two drummers ran over to watch it shatter as it hit the ground.
  • Their docu-biopic, The Kids Are Alright, features a sketch from Saturday Night Live where host Steve Martin extols the virtues of the hotel chain he's advertising, while Keith is destroying the hotel room.
• Keith Moon wasn't the only rock star who liked this:
  • As documented on the never-to-be-released-until-everybody-in-it-is-dead The Rolling Stones documentary Cocksucker Blues, Keith Richards and Bobby Keys dropped a TV from a balcony at the Andaz West Hollywood in 1972.
  • Ozzy Osbourne pushed a hotel TV out the window simply because he had never done it before.
  • Led Zeppelin also liked to throw TVs, and when a desk clerk asked what it felt like, the band manager added some extra to the "hotel damages bill" so the clerk could toss one himself.

Music Videos

• Happens in the music video for Green Day's "Basket Case."
• Played hilariously in Kelly Price's video for "Should Have Told Me," where she's dating a man who wishes she were thinner. The video ends with her throwing a treadmill out the window where it lands on his car.

Radio

• This is generally how Sir Philip deals with whatever bizarre Steampunk gadget Sourquill has brought with him in the Framing Story for each episode of Bleak Expectations.
• Conversational troping in The News Quiz, when Sandi says she missed the Britain's Got Talent finale because she can't watch ITV, in case she accidentally sees Keith Lemon and has to throw her TV out the window.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: Early in the beginning when Ann is walking out of her apartment, one of the nearby residents throws their computer out the front door.
• Inverted in Wing Commander: Privateer 2: The Darkening. According to the flavor text for the Galactic Gourmet Hotel on Hephaestus, one particularly snobby guest was so annoyed at only getting an eight-room suite that, instead of throwing the TV out of the hotel, he threw the hotel out of the TV. Apparently, this could only be accomplished with the aid of a hypercrane and a small local reality manipulation generator.

Web Comics

• In Homestuck, this is actually a science called Dark Fenestrology. However, in this universe, Appliance Defenestration can be used, in special conditions, to send objects across dimensions.
• An adding machine is defenestrated in this Lackadaisy strip twice.
• One Penny Arcade strip has someone throw his computer out the window just as Gabe and Tycho are walking by. Gabe finds a CD in the ruins and remarks "Myst IV. Yeah, that's about right."

Web Original

• Dragonbored has Karl hurl a witche's head he found in his oven (Jimbroth said that is has some mystical abilities and mistook the stove for a chest to store it in) from his apartment balcony into the nearby fishing pond.
• Such an occurence caused an accidental off-screen death (e.g. an old lady happened to be under the window) in Noob. Let's just say that Hair-Trigger Temper and incompetent guildmates don't mix well.
• Scott The Woz:
  • The first episode opens with a Wii U flying out the window.
  • 62 episodes later, in "Nintendo Before Video Games", Scott parted ways with an inflatable gator he bought by similar means, although the gator (or at least the box it came in) is on his desk in all episodes since. He also threw his high school diploma out the window in "Nintendo Labo | Adventures With the Variety Kit".
• Smosh: At the end of the "Meat In Your Mouth" video.
  "The rest of the video was damaged when Wilshire Farms threw the video out the window."
• Vine: There is a humorous example of this in an installment of Clayton Farris's series of "Toss Me the Keys" videos. He asks a woman on the second floor to throw down the keys, only to have the coffee machine land near him.
  Clayton: I said "keys"!
  Woman: I thought you said "coffee machine"!

Western Animation

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In the episode "PDA", Shake tosses his chair out the window after convincing himself that someone stole his unowned PDA.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In the credits of "Operation Couch", Numbuh 4 throws the couch out of the treehouse after some Daves steal the remote and popcorn.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • Courage throws his (sentient) computer through a closed window after the computer demands a hamburger in order to cooperate.
  • He also does this when the Snarky Inanimate Object makes a crack at Courage to "Insert 25 cents or your call will be interrupted."
    Computer: Some people just can't take a joke.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy throws his computer through his window after having difficulties with homework.
• In Gravity Falls, Grunkle Stan throws his TV out of the window at the end of "The Inconveniencing" when he gets... a little over-invested in the soap opera he's watching.
• In The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, Wendy does this to her birthday presents and cake at the beginning of "Reptiles in the Rose Garden".
• In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy episode "Everything Breaks", when Billy is served cereal at breakfast instead of pancakes he throws the bowl out the window, after which the bowl explodes.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Cop Out", Mike Brickowski, disgruntled ex-cop, who blames the Powerpuff Girls for his firing (ignoring the fact that he did absolutely nothing but sleep and eat donuts), gets enraged when the news presents a story on the girls and tosses his TV out the window.
  Brickowski: Startin' tomorrow, you girls ain't gonna be on the air no more!
• The Simpsons:
  • A bedside lamp suffers this fate when Homer is flummoxed by its inability to respond to his clapping, immediately after his claim that fighting a nuclear war is as easy as turning off a light.
  • Bart does this to a radio while Dr. Demento was on the air. Unlike most examples of this trope, he actually did this out of fear instead of anger. Apparently Demento is one of his "mortal enemies".
• Handy's window vision in The Smurfs (1981) episode of the same name gets thrown out of a few Smurf houses because they can't turn off the show with its most annoying host — Brainy!
• WordGirl: In the episode "The Ballad of Steve McClean", Dr. Two-Brains discovers through the Wordgirl Weekly Supervillain Countdown on TV that he's been dethroned as the #1 supervillain in Fair City by newcomer Steve McClean. He is so outraged by this that he promptly throws the TV out the window of his warehouse hideout.

Real Life

• Dave Barry wrote of how his college band, the Federal Duck, ended. He and his roommate threw his amplifier out the dormitory window while chanting "The Who! The Who!" As much as he'd love to believe it was a meaningful gesture, he really just wanted to know what it would sound like. It sounded OK.
• Pranksters in Whitehorse, Yukon managed to convince a guy to throw the TV and the fridge in his hotel room out the window—in the middle of the winter.
• A particularly infamous protest march turned Angry Mob of British university students upset about their tuition costs being tripled ended up doing this to most of the furniture in the offices of the Conservative Party, among other things.

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