Bathos

Noisette, n'est-ce pas? ^note Translation: Nutty, ain't it?

"Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke."

— Joss Whedon

Bathos is a story-telling technique that follows serious ideas with the commonplace or ludicrous. The juxtaposition of these ideas creates humor.

It has its origins in poetry, where lofty prose would be followed with an anticlimax of sorts. It later evolved to cover any instance where the serious is mixed with the surreal or commonplace in order to provide humor.

The trope name comes from Alexander Pope, who wrote Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry in 1727, in which he mocks the abuse of tropes and figures of speech by bad writers. In it, he notes that juxtaposing the serious and the trivial creates unintentional humor, which sinks serious poetry. As such, unintentional bathos is considered Narm.

Bathos most often appears in intentionally comedic works or those with a comedic undertone, like that of Surreal Humor, although not always. On the Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, works of bathos either sit firmly in the middle or wildly slide up and down. Bathos may cause Mood Whiplash when it does not appear in an otherwise comedic segment of the work. On the other hand, it's also a useful tool to keep a Darker and Edgier series from getting too dark and triggering Too Bleak, Stopped Caring.

Compare Gallows Humor, where the comedy is used by characters within the story as a tension breaker, and Mood Dissonance. See also the First Law of Tragicomedies, a method of averting this. Also compare Failed Attempt at Drama when a character tries to be dramatic but fails hilariously. Compare Lightmare Fuel which mixes elements of horror with comedy. Related to Straight Man and Wise Guy, where the straight man provides the seriousness and the wise guy the wackiness, to general humorous effect.

Please do not place examples that better belong on Narm here or on any main page. Likewise, do not confuse with Narm Charm, where a dramatic moment still works, in spite of being unintentionally silly. In other words, only intentional bathos belongs on this page.

Sub-Tropes:

• Angst Dissonance
• Angst? What Angst?
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking
• Black Comedy
• Boogie Knights
• British Humour
• Casual Danger Dialogue
• The Comically Serious
• Crosses the Line Twice
• Deus Angst Machina
• Dramedy
• Expospeak Gag
• Failed Attempt at Drama
• Ignored Enemy
• The Mel Brooks Number
• Mundane Made Awesome
• Scheherezade Gambit
• Serious Business
• Sophisticated as Hell
• The Triple
• Wangst

---

Examples:

Advertising

• The Harry Nilsson song "Without You" might well be unintentional bathos. Using it as the soundtrack of dachshunds in hot dog costumes running towards people dressed as Heinz condiments, though...! (See it here.)

Anime & Manga

• Akiba Maid War is a Bloody Hilarious take on Work Coms and Yakuza films whose approach to parody involves playing yakuza tropes entirely straight with a cast of cute girls in themed maid uniforms. The result is a bunch of hardened criminals with hands soaked in blood fighting tooth and nail to survive and thrive in a bleak criminal underworld...wearing adorable animal-themed outfits and monologuing about what they think a maid should be.
• Asteroid in Love is mainly a comedic Slice of Life series, but the fact that it takes a Coming of Age Story angle of the Schoolgirl Series means it occasionally dabbles in slightly more serious storylines—but still putting gags throughout. For example, the latter half of Chapter 27 involves The Team having an emergency meeting over what looks like the Deuteragonist is getting on the metaphorical bus soon, which is one of the most serious scenes of the series. Yet, in 5 pages of manga, the author is able to put in 3 gags.
• Berserk absolutely thrives on contrasting the awful and tragic events of its Crapsack World with sudden moments of hilarity. A good example happens after the Eclipse, a demonic ritual in which Guts' best friend betrayed him, his companions were all eaten, his lover lost her sanity, and he lost his own right eye and left hand. In the chapter immediately following this horror, he wakes up in a cave and the first thing he sees is Godo's daughter Erica comically trip down the stairs when she comes to bring him food. In general the series has a lot of Mood Whiplash and rides a roller coaster up and down the Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness.
• Chainsaw Man is really good at this, and loves gleefully contrasting the violent, nihilistic cruelty of its setting with the grim mundanity of modern life and the libido-fuelled stupidity of its protagonist and title character, Denji. One of the best examples comes when, after the loss of their close friend and ally, Denji brings coworker Aki Hayakawa to where he's captured the man responsible, and encourages him to take his revenge on the defenseless killer...not by executing him, but by Denji and Aki hosting a competition between themselves to see which one of them can make him scream louder by kicking him as hard in the balls as possible. As a memorial to their mutual fallen friend. It's cathartic, hilarious, and a heartwarming bonding moment all at once.
• Senyuu. has more and more of this as the series goes on, culminating in a dead-serious confrontation with the Big Bad being resolved by Alba falling out of the sky onto one opponent, a knight-tank-princess randomly colliding with the other, and a ridiculously blatant semi-literal Deus ex Machina.
• Discussed in Bakuman。: Hattori advises Mashiro and Takagi that their works needs humor, but the kind that fits within their generally serious storytelling. The best example they could think up was Otter #11, in particular a scene where the titular character rams a truck into a building: it's played dead-serious, but undermined by the fact that said character is a human but with a photorealistic otter for a head.
• Code Geass has a surprising amount of this, as a work of entertainment where the creators knowingly combined tragedy and comedy. In fact, audience reactions range between realizing this and not (see Narm plus Narm Charm). Lelouch is very serious towards life and his quest, but sometimes his own misfortune was an intentional source of amusement for creators and viewers alike. His utter lack of physical skills was highlighted for comedic effect, not only while chasing a cat at school but also when he failed to land a punch on Mao during a dramatic moment. The staff came up with the term "Lulu quality" to describe how much they enjoyed teasing and bullying him. Another example would be Emperor Charles, as director Goro Taniguchi approved his larger-than-life character design because of its potential for hilarity, leading to the scene where he flies off like a rocket just before dying in a climactic confrontation, whose comedy value even the staff points out. The mad scientist Lloyd, whose voice actor was given total freedom to play the part, makes amusing remarks even during serious battle sequences, while Jeremiah "Orange" Gottwald goes from villain to audience-pleaser. Last but not least, the staff played around with Pizza Hut appearances more often than what the sponsor was asking for, even having the delivery bike show up.
• Fairy Tail: Lucy hung a lampshade on this at the end of episode 48.
  Lucy: Jeez, we finally have a touching ending and you had to go and ruin it!
• Goodnight Punpun never lets up on the surreal, slapstick, and anatomical humour that characterizes it, even as Punpun grows into an ever more miserable and twisted person. Even when the story takes its darkest turn, around the eleventh volume, you still have Aiko and God essentially cracking jokes. The story by and large conforms to the First Law of Tragicomedies though, and as the tension ramps up, the humour takes a darker slant.
• Hellsing generally cues a bout of this with a cartoony Art Shift, which can get dropped in at practically any time.
• Being part of the Ecchi Harem Genre with a Loveable Sex Maniac as our protagonist, High School D×D is inevitably going to have this:
  • Issei's Big Damn Heroes moment in Volume 2 to rescue Rias from her engagement to Riser is topped by "President Rias Gremory's virginity belongs to me!"
  • In Volume 4, Issei is still outmatched by Vali in combat, so Azazel encourages a dramatic power up by informing Issei that Vali will shrink Rias's breasts, prompting our hero to beat the shit out of Vali.
  • In Volume 6, when Issei goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge upon Asia's presumed death, Rias realizes that she will have to let Issei poke her nipples in order to save his life from his Deadly Upgrade.
  • In Volume 10, Asia, Koneko, and Akeno strip off their clothing to provide Issei with Intimate Healing in order to cure his ten volume long Heroic BSoD resulting from being killed on his first date, and despite the nudity displayed throughout, the You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech given to Issei by his harem is never undermined.
  • Also in Volume 10, when Issei is losing to Sairaorg, Irina leads the children in the stadium to cheer for Oppai Dragon by chanting "Oppai" repeatedly. It works.
  • Volume 11 has Rias transfer power to Issei with her breasts, causing them to shrink, and causing them to melodramatically declare their love for each other, prompting the Occult Research Club to defend the Sickeningly Sweethearts from the Khaos Brigade.
• The makers of Kill la Kill knew exactly what they were doing when they made a world out of ham and Serious Business. A student is brutally-yet-comically killed for stealing a school uniform, and Mako yells at the top of her lungs about how Ryuko will fail to navigate a gauntlet of deadly traps in time and will have a tardy on her permanent record! There's no Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness here, because the most ridiculous things are taken completely seriously and the most serious things are full of Black Comedy.
• My Monster Secret tends to runs on a mixture of this and Mood Whiplash. Either it oscillates between legit drama and absurdity, or it mixes them together by having the series' more ridiculous elements present while dramatic things are happening. A good example occurs in chapter 183 when Shirou gives Asahi an extremely heartfelt message from Youko... while wearing Shiho's Playboy Bunny costume.
• While not much of a bathos-themed series in general, in Naruto the story became increasingly serious during the Fourth Ninja War Arc, but at various points the tension was shattered by comedic moments. Notable is during the show-down with Kaguya when Naruto uses his gag Harem Jutsu as an actual attack and it works. For those not familiar with the series: he distracts a god with yaoi.
• NEEDLESS is full of this. It can best be described as sort of a Fist of the North Star parody stuffed with Postmodernism. There is a story arc called the Bloody Rain Arc, which is changed to the Mustache Arc after several characters notice how many characters with mustaches there are. Said arc is filled with Lampshade Hanging and mustache jokes. Then one of the said mustachioed characters proceeds to kill enough people to make it rain blood.
• One Piece:
  • The series as a whole is made of equal parts dark, violent drama and light-hearted goofiness, to the point that some fight sequences manage to include both at the same time. The author admitted himself that this is part of the reason why he gave Luffy Rubber Man powers; so that even serious moments could retain a touch of silliness and lightheartedness. This is especially apparent with Luffy's Gear Fourth form, which looks equal parts silly and badass.
  • For another example: Enies Lobby is about Robin's past catching up with her, causing her to succumb to guilt and lose her will to live, while the rest of the Straw Hats has to deal with her captors, a secret government black ops cell powerful enough that everyone needs to learn new techniques just to fight on even ground. Also revealed are the lengths the World Government are willing to go to to protect the secrets of the Void Century, including wiping out entire islands to a man. On the other hand, the members of said black ops cell include an overdramatic kabuki actor who keeps trying to commit seppuku, a huge blob of a man with a zipper mouth and a voice that doesn't fit his stature at all, a woman with the power to create soap bubbles and a giraffe man. Also included is a cola-powered cyborg Ace Ventura look-a-like who at one point tries to escape capture by inflating his ass, and Chopper's Monster Point, which transforms him into a gigantic, dead-eyed, berserk monster...with a pink top hat.
• One-Punch Man thrives on this, usually by contrasting the Monster of the Week's Motive Rant with Saitama telling them to speed it up.
• Overlord, somewhat comparable to the above due to the sheer overpoweredness of its main character, also gets a lot of this, although it's not a straight-up comedy. You can get a scene in which our protagonist utterly humiliates an entire army of powerful magic users, sucking a giant angel into a black hole,◊ and overall being a utterly terrifying badass... then in the very next scene you see his Dragon all but squeeing over how awesome he is.◊
• In Tokyo Ghoul the Oggai are an elite group of Child Soldiers employed by the CCG. The horror of their existence is contrasted with the hilarious sight of a group of them arriving on scene riding bicycles since they're all underage, as well as helmets because Even Evil Has Standards.
• Yatterman Night tends to use this a lot. A Happy Dance gets used as a completely serious Police State salute, clownishly dressed robots serve as nation police, people are being kept in a prison camp on "Cape Of-Course-It's-So-Ya", Our main characters are learning how to be better rebels from a children's picture book, the protagonists and antagonists ride into battle on completely ridiculous Humongous Mecha... the list goes on from there.
• Zombie Land Saga is a Horror Comedy about a group of young Idol Singers, celebrities, and entertainers (aspiring or otherwise) who died before they could hit 20, and are given a second chance at stardom when they're brought back as the living dead. That premise alone runs on bathos, but what stand out are the deaths of the girls themselves, which are rooted in Black Comedy, yet played completely seriously in how they affected the girls and their loved ones. This is fully intentional, as the creators didn't want such a heavy subject matter to clash with the comedy:
  • Sakura gets an introductory sequence that wouldn't be out of place in a Slice of Life high school comedy anime, which is abruptly cut short when a speeding truck smashes into her and sends her body flying while death metal plays in the background.
  • Saki died in a fiery blaze after she drove off a cliff in a Game of Chicken, and her motorcycle went up as if it were some kind of tanker trunk.
  • Ai was tragically struck by lightning in front of a crowd of adoring fans during a thunderstorm. The incident left her with a fear of thunder and lightning and a desperate need to prove that there's more to her life than how she died...but it also left her body blackened in soot like something out of a Looney Tunes production.
  • Junko was killed in a plane crash, and a flashback shows the plane sputtering and crashing for seemingly no reason whatsoever.
  • Lily died at 12 years old after getting overworked by her father during her television career, leading him to wallow in grief for years, but the straw that broke the camel's back is so ridiculous that Saki bursts out laughing over how stupid it is: the shock of discovering a single strand of hair growing on her face, on account of her being assigned male at birth, which also adds an extra layer of tragedy.

Asian Animation

• The Korean short Doggy Poo is a poignantly touching story about the ephemeral nature of life and delivers a wonderfully heartwarming Aesop about how everyone and everything has its own special place and purpose in God's creation. The title is not some sort of Dadaist abstraction, either; the main character is a sentient lump of dog poop.

Comic Books

• Neil Gaiman makes liberal use of this in The Sandman (1989), juxtaposing otherwise poetic and mythic language with common turns-of-phrase.
• Bone makes pretty good use of this. The biggest example is probably The Reveal of why the Hooded One is trying to get their hands on Phoney Bone: the stray parade balloon from Phoney's ill-fated attempt at running for Mayor of Boneville, the stunt that got him and his cousins kicked out of Boneville in the first place. The banner around it reading "Phoncible P. Bone Will Get Your Vote" was even damaged to read "Phoncible P. Bone Will Get You". Phoney is tied to a rock and is about to be sacrificed by the Hooded One when this reveal happens. Phoney's dialog just makes this horror hysterical.
  Phoney: Oh boy, Fone Bone is gonna be cranky when he hears about this....
• The Transformers (IDW) does this a lot, especially under the pen of James Roberts. One of the best examples comes in Dark Cybertron when Megatron makes a dramatic entrance in front of Prowl and Soundwave in the midst of their Darkest Hour. It's a legitimately epic moment, but at the same time, it's rendered hilarious because 1) Megatron has been bisected and is being carried by Bumblebee in a rather undignified fashion, and 2) Bee mentions that Megatron had him standing there for twenty seconds just to make sure his dramatic entrance was appropriately timed.
• This exchange from Runaways, when 12-year-old Klara Prast is discussing life with her abusive, much older husband to Karolina Dean and Molly Hayes, both of whom are from the present, and the latter of whom is Klara's age:
  Klara Prast: It is not so bad. It is just, when I come home so tired, and then he... I do not enjoy it... My... my marital duties.
  Molly Hayes: Oh my God... He makes you do chores?!?
• A grandiose example from a fanpage inside the Perry Rhodan pulps. The comic tells the life story of a balloon-like alien life form in the typical SF style known from the novels. In the next-to-last panel, the now geriatric alien ascends into the upper atmosphere, asking himself last questions like: "What's the meaning of life? Is there a God? Will everything be revealed now?" In the last panel: POOF! ^note OK, more Pop Goes The Alien. Just... poof. Never has overinflated bathos been popped more literally...
• Watchmen has a rather severe In-Universe example. In the original Nite Owl's memoirs he writes of an old employer of his named Moe Vernon, who discovers that his wife has been committing adultery and has just withdrawn all his savings and fled with her lover. He walks out of his office and announces this to his employees... unfortunately, Vernon was also an eccentric prankster and was so distraught that he didn't realize that he was doing this while wearing a comically oversized pair of novelty breasts. His employees can't help but laugh at him. He is promptly Driven to Suicide.
• Stan Lee commented that he was rather proud of the scene in the original Galactus trilogy in Fantastic Four where, during a brief lull in the course of the entire Earth being threatened with annihilation by a vastly powerful space demigod, Reed and Johnny take a moment to shave, because they've been dealing with the threat for days and haven't had a chance until now.
• Preacher: While the Allfather is delivering a dramatic speech in which he tells Starr how he knows all his deepest secrets (which causes Starr to shed tears), he is also sloppily eating huge cakes, and ends this important encounter by asking for a bucket to vomit in.
• If you come to think about it, Batman is this in spades. On one hand you have a billionaire who tragically lost his parents to violent crime and as a result, is driven to a crusade against crime that pits him against various psychopaths while his own sanity is put into question. At the same time he fights crime dressed as a giant bat and is aided by colorfully dressed Kid Sidekicks and among many of his enemies include a laughably monstrous clown and a criminal whose gimmicks are based on various holidays. This is especially prominent during his Silver Age days where he among other things is turned into a child and at one point owned a collection of different-colored Batsuits.
• Rat-Man (1989) thrives on this, inserting an immense amount of silliness in even the darkest situations. For example, the very first story has the villainous Buffoon kidnap an orphan... and then demand a ransom from the parents. It only gets weirder as the series goes on.
• This was the entire original joke of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Mirage). The artstyle, tone, and narration is a near-perfect replication of Frank Miller's Daredevil—a dark, noirish, gritty tale about brutal urban vigilantes, carrying out plots of revenge and rivalry—only all the main characters are anthropomorphic turtles with big noses and three-fingered hands, and it's all carried out in a comic with the stupidest name imaginable. Later on, the stories drifted more towards straightforward action—paradoxically becoming both lighter in tone and also more serious.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes does a pretty good job of summing up bathos in one strip:
  Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us?
  Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
  Calvin: I can't tell if that's funny or really scary.
  • The strip also uses Art Shift to achieve this technique, using a sudden increase in detail to highlight the characters' childishness. For example, when Calvin and Susie play house, they're rendered as adults in the style of a dramatic soap opera-type comic, but their dialogue is still the kind of thing a couple of six-year-olds would come up with.

Fan Works

• All Assorted Animorphs AUs:
  • "What if they saved Jake's family?" starts with the life-or-death situation of the Animorphs needing to evacuate their families before the Yeerks can get to them... juxtaposed against the Berenson parents' utter disbelief.
  • In "What if all the yeerks suddenly died? (Part 2)", Cassie crying about Aftran is juxtaposed against Tom's utterly awkward attempts to be reassuring.
• Blazen, The Abridged Series of Blazblue Alter Memory, plays out the beginnings of the scene where Nu-13 first appears very seriously, but quickly allows it to descend (still entirely in Machine Monotone):
  Nu-13: Subject, your existence is redundant. Recommending immediate self-termination.
  Mu-12: Recommendation rejected. Continued existence will be given top priority.
  Nu-13: Searching for response. Please self-terminate.
  Mu-12: Sincerity reading as false. Subject is being sarcastic.
  Nu-13: I am evidently the better unit. Your presence will only impair my image.
  Mu-12: At least I have peripheral vision.
  Nu-13: At least I have bigger breasts.
  Mu-12: [internal] Bitch. [spoken] I have a sweet hat.
  Nu-13: I can summon swords. How many swords can you summon?
  Mu-12: Fuck you. That's how many.
• Dog-Breath and Birdbrain is a mostly serious and dramatic story that, while a Helluva Boss fanfic, tends to be a lot more grounded than the Denser and Wackier source material. However, in their first scene, Agents One and Two are shown to have the same self-important eccentricity they demonstrated in Truth Seekers while interrogating Grace about what she's seen, but they still manage to be genuinely intimidating for her to speak to.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged often does this with more dark or serious scenes, at times veering into full-on Black Comedy. One example is Cell's introduction, starting with him appearing dragging a man while singing a creepy song, then having a tense staredown with Piccolo. Piccolo demands to know what Cell is, and Cell responds with "Let me answer your question, with another question... WANNA SEE ME DRINK THIS GUY!?", stabbing the man he's holding, and then cutting to the cheery episode intro music.
• The Dream SMP fic How to Sex Vol. 4–58 practically runs on this, with angsty and funny elements alternating practically every other line, much like its parent series. Of course, this is mainly to reflect on the protagonist's thought patterns in canon, because even with all the trauma and despair involved with a teenager's mental health deteriorating while held in solitary confinement after his best friend got murdered, the aforementioned teenager is still TommyInnit (the Dream SMP version), after all.

Films — Animation

• Pixar movies are known to deal with serious issues and handle them well, but in the end, they are still family movies that need some comedy in addition to the serious stuff to provide a little bit of levity.
  • In Finding Nemo, there's a very stressful scene of Marlin, having just lost his son, calling Nemo's name and looking all around, seeing nothing but open water in every direction. The intense moment is briefly interrupted by Marlin diving under the water to take a quick breath, before surfacing again and resuming his frantic calls, a momentary reminder that our hero is a fish.
  • This trope is common source of humor in The Incredibles, juxtaposing larger-than-life superheroes with mundane family life. For example:
    • In the memorable "Where's my supersuit!?" scene, Lucius spots a giant robot rampaging through the city and frantically begins rummaging around his house and arguing with his wife over the whereabouts of his missing supersuit.
      Lucius: YOU TELL ME WHERE MY SUIT IS, WOMAN! WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE GREATER GOOD!
      Honey: GREATER GOOD?! I AM YOUR WIFE! I'M THE GREATEST GOOD YOU ARE EVER GONNA GET!
    • As the superfamily rushes to save Metroville from said rampaging robot, they do what every family does on a long car trip: start bickering.
      Dash: Are We There Yet?
      Mr. Incredible: We'll get there when we get there!
  • Inside Out: Zig-zagged. Riley's depression is a legitimate concern, so it's played seriously and as a result of the characters (especially people's emotions) being totally out of their element. However, much of the humor comes from them being so over-the-top that it's funny. To whit, news of no dessert is treated as front page headline news inside Riley's mind. And Riley's father's decision to put his foot down with regards to her attitude is treated as if they (his emotions) were launching nuclear missiles, complete with simultaneously turning two keys to initiate the response. Justified in the children's case as their emotions are immature still.
  • As one of the studio's cartooniest films to date, Turning Red is filled of this. One of the most emotionally tense scenes is Mei calling out her overprotective mother and declaring that she's not her "perfect little Mei-Mei" anymore in a plea to make her understand that she's becoming her own person. But there's also the fact that they're both giant fluffy red pandas, with Ming being Kaiju-sized, and Mei is intentionally pissing her mom off by shaking her butt right in front of her. And despite how silly all of this may sound on paper, it still doesn't negate any emotional weight whatsoever.
    Ming: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! STOP MOVING LIKE THAT!
    Mei: What's wrong?! Is this bothering you?
• Frozen (2013):
  • Early on during the "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" sequence/song which sets up the relationship between Anna and Elsa. Very sad and serious, but with Anna being adorably hilarious at the same time... until the final part, that is.
  • There's a scene that takes place after The Reveal. Anna is current in the midst of a Heroic BSoD while Olaf comforts her and does his best to get her back up and going. Serious, but since it's Olaf who's comforting her...
    Anna: Olaf, you're melting!
    Olaf: Some people are worth melting for... [face begins to lose shape and he rushes to hold it together, muffling his voice] just maybe not this second.
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker was a deadly-serious movie and one of the darkest stories in the DC Animated Universe. And then it ended with Dee Dee being bailed out and lectured by their grandmother, and them responding with, "Shut up, Nanna Harley."
• This is common in The LEGO Movie and also The LEGO Batman Movie, mostly due to all the LEGO movies so far following the theme of being played out like a real child playing with LEGO would. When Bad Cop storms the saloon in the Old West, it's played as a tense scene, except for the fact that the horse he rides in on has no points of articulation, meaning the horse just... hops. And it has a huge flashing police siren on its head. Other examples include the top of Lord Business's tower coming off to fly to Bricksburg and begin Kragling it, accompanied by a break in the dramatic music and someone's voice making a soft propeller/flying-like sound from the first movie, or the fact that all gunfire is accompanied by "pew pew" sounds in The LEGO Batman Movie.
• One of the most iconic moments in Megamind is nerdy TV cameraman Hal, having decided to embrace his inner supervillain rather than try to be a hero, giving a vicious speech to Lois Lane copy Roxanne Ritchi. It's genuinely chilling and seems to be seriously affecting her... at least until he throws in a particularly absurd example of Eskimos Aren't Real.
  Titan: You're so naïve. You see the good in everyone even when it's not there. You're living a fantasy. There is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy, and there is no Queen of England!
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines: Rick has a rather painful realization of how his daughter sees him thanks to a scene in one of her homemade videos, featuring a pug with Fish Eyes dressed as a cop, talking to his sergeant, who is a sock puppet.
• Moana: This occurs when Maui is attempting to have a serious conversation about himself with Moana, except that he's accidentally turned himself into a Shark Man and hasn't realized it. Notably, Moana is finding this just as funny as the audience is intended to and struggling not to laugh.
• My Little Pony: A New Generation:
  • A giant robot, ready to wage war against the united ponies, threatening to squash them flat or ruin all they've worked so hard for? That's scary. The pilot pulling a string and honking this Humongous Mecha like a truck driver who's behind the wheel for the first time? That's hilarious.
  • In the middle of the fearmongering Angry Mob Song, the singers also take the time to point out some corn ("It's on the cob!") and a random pony nearby ("Uh, my name's Rob.") for seemingly no other reason than to rhyme with "mob".
  • One scene has a bunch of earth ponies, unicorns, and pegasi all arguing at once over who stole who's magic, which escalates until Sunny yells "NOPONY HAS MAGIC" which completely silences everyone. It's the first time in millenia that a group of ponies realize none of the groups are the "bad" ones, that all of them have lost their magic in their respective isolations, and it's an absolute Wham Line for everyone... save for one unicorn and his Verbal Tic from hearing "magic."
    Unicorn: Bing bong!
• ParaNorman does the same thing as the Incredibles example above. On the way to the grand finale, you get the awkward family car trip of doom. Though theirs includes a zombie.
• Sing: Buster Moon is at the absolute lowest point of his life, forced to do "The only other job [he] know[s]", washing cars on the street. It's absolutely depressing seeing him so dead inside. It's absolutely hilarious that the manner in which he washes cars is getting dunked in soapy water and swimming across the surface of the car. Complete with dramatic opera music.
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse:
  • Seeing Peter B. recount what led to his marriage to MJ breaking down is sad, but after him saying that he "took it like a champ", the Smash Cut to him crying in the shower still in his Spider-Man costume, is simply hilarious.
  • The part when all the various Spiders are comforting Miles Morales for the loss of his uncle and each telling about a person they lost along the way. It ends in the very somber line "Miles, the hardest thing about this job is you can't always save everybody." What pushes it into Bathos is it's Spider-Ham who says it, and he says it with complete, sincere conviction.
• Trolls World Tour: A number of serious moments, including the climax, have at least one humorous side scene or joke juxtaposed within them. This is different to how the first Trolls movie usually kept the dramatic and comedic parts separate from each other.

Films — Live-Action

• The Host (2006) revels in this. The main characters rolling around on the floor and crying together at a funeral is either the saddest scene in the movie, or the funniest, or both. Another dramatic and climactic scene is "ruined" when it turns out that the gun they were going to use to kill the monster is empty.
• The "death" of Wilson in Cast Away. You can't help laughing at Chuck bawling over the loss of his volleyball friend, but at the same time you fully empathize with him bawling at the loss of his volleyball friend.
• A particularly funny example in Blazing Saddles has former gunslinger "Waco Kid" Jim telling the woeful story of his career and how he reached a point where he nearly gunned down a six-year old boy who challenged him. He threw down his gun to end his career, at which point the "little bastard shot me in the ass!"
• Tim Burton loves to juxtapose the camp and creepy with the heartfelt and humorous throughout his career. One of the best examples comes in Batman Returns, where following an exceptionally goofy fight scene between Batman and the Penguin, we get the deformed villain's death scene. On paper, the scene in question (Danny Devito, in long johns, using his dying words to ask for a glass of ice water, and then being given a viking funeral by penguins) sounds like a total joke, but it's actually rather moving.
• Enemy Mine has a tense argument between Davidge and Jeriba ("Jerry") after they'd become reluctant allies. Jerry proceeds to call Davidge's deity "one big, stupid DOPE!" Luckily, Jerry believed that Mickey Mouse is a great Earth teacher, so while Davidge pretends to storm off, he's having to bite back a laugh — and Jerry later apologizes for the blasphemy.
• This is where nearly all the humor of Ghostbusters (1984) comes from. It is written like a lighthearted comedy about a group of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, a wiseass, an eccentric genius, a straight man, a working class everyman, and their Comically Serious secretary, who come together to start a pest control company... that is shot like a horror movie where said "pests" are ghosts. The irreverent way these knuckleheads deal with horrific world-ending abominations makes it one of the most memorable movies ever written, with scenes like when the Big Bad of the film Gozer needs a Destructor form and compels our heroes to choose one. They figure out the trick and blank their minds out... except Ray didn't. So now the giant monster that is attacking New York is... the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
• Life Is Beautiful: A running theme of both the movie itself and the In-Universe philosophy of the protagonist is the ability to laugh even in the most tragic of circumstances.
• Saving Private Ryan, despite its absolutely horrific subject matter, has this at least twice during the famously intense Omaha beach landing. One time is when you see a soldier with with his arm blown off walking across the battlefield, locating his severed arm, then picking it up and walking back with it like he'd left his phone at work and was coming back to get it. It should be horrific, but the way he's so utterly calm about the whole thing makes it oddly comical and Pythonesque. In another moment from the same battle, a soldier gets shot in the head...and survives, thanks to his helmet protecting him. He takes it off to stare at the huge dent, like he can't believe that it actually stopped the bullet, and immediately gets shot in the unprotected head. It shouldn't be nearly as funny as it is.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) pretty much runs on this. For example, one of the characters is a hardass criminal working as a Bounty Hunter, with 22 prison escapes to his name, love for and proficency in use of big guns, and a backstory of being created through immoral experimentation. His name? Rocket Raccoon.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 uses this during its shocking reveal. Peter has just discovered that Ego murdered his mother, and without a moment's hesitation, whips out his guns and shoots Ego to pieces. Ego instantly reforms himself and begins yelling at Peter for wanting to ruin his evil plan. It's both tragic and scary... except for the fact that for the first few seconds after Ego regenerates, he's played by David Hasselhoff. And you'd never believe how a character comparing someone to Hasselhoff would be totally heartbreaking.
  • Captain America: Civil War makes use of this during the Airport battle. Because none of the heroes want to hurt each other, they are pulling their punches constantly, and are constantly making jokes as a means to avoid dealing with the emotional fallout.
    Natasha: [while being pinned by Clint] We're still friends, right?
    Clint: Depends on how hard you hit me.
  • Much of the humor in Thor: Ragnarok is of the bathos variety.
    • Thor gives Surtur a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner right before summoning Mjölnir, though he mistimed it and it takes a couple seconds for it to reach him. Thor asks Surtur to give him a moment.
    • As he was leaving Dr. Strange's manor, he summons Mjölnir (in the form of an umbrella), and it again takes several seconds for it to reach his hand. This time, things are getting knocked down and glass is breaking as it travels through Strange's manor. Thor awkwardly apologizes as he's waiting for it to get to him.
    • In Valkyrie's introduction, she has a typical badass's introduction, taking a long slug from the liquor bottle in her hands before strutting down the ramp of her spaceship, but she drunkenly stumbles and falls off the side instead.
    • Hela introduces herself to Hogun and the armies of Asgard with a grandiose speech about her origins and her intent to bring Asgard back to its former state as a Galactic Conqueror civilization and offers them the chance to join her. Hogun rebuffs her and tells her that whoever she is, she should leave Asgard be.
      Hela: "Whoever I am?" Did you listen to a word I said!?
    • Thor is about to make his escape from Sakaar, telling Valkyrie that he's going to get back to Asgard and save his people, complete with the phrase "Because that's what heroes do", but he's interrupted when the object he threw at the window bounces back and knocks him to the ground.
    • Bruce Banner realizes the only way to defeat Fenris is to become the Hulk again. He leaps out of the spacecraft in a death defying leap of faith, assuming he'll change into the Hulk before he lands. He doesn't.
  • Avengers: Infinity War:
    • Thanos's applications of the Reality Stone are uncharacteristically whimsical; he turns weapons into harmless bubbles, comes up with cartoonish ways to non-lethally incapacitate the Guardians, and conjures an illusion of The Collector who behaves just as flamboyantly as the real thing — all of this alongside the genuine horror Thanos tends to unleash.
    • When Gamora is in Thanos's clutches, pleading with Quill to kill her before Thanos can use her, Quill can't help but harp on a bit about how she didn't follow his plan properly, to which she replies "Really? Now?" This characteristic Guardians-esque exchange of comedy serves to heighten the horror of the moment, as Quill is clearly hysterical.
    • The post-credits scene is quite frightening, showing the effects of the Snap on regular civilians, as people are dying and panicking, in horror and confusion. So it's the perfect time for Nick Fury to almost deliver one of Samuel L. Jackson's trademark F-bombs.
  • The last seconds of Ant-Man and the Wasp make use of this, as the Emergency Broadcast on TV, with all the noise it's usually accompanied by, is contrasted with an image of a giant ant playing on the drum kit.
  • Avengers: Endgame: Subverted when Thor calls for Mjölnir while in the past. It follows from the reunion with his mother, but repeats the joke from the earlier films about Mjölnir needing time to arrive. When it does arrive, however, Thor is elated to discover he is still worthy and the tone turns back to genuine.
  • Thor: Love and Thunder, made by the same team of Ragnarok, followed the same formula. Right after Jane is hospitalized as her cancer is getting worse, Thor raids a vending machine to get snacks for her, while declaring that "some idiot made a refrigerator with no door".
• In The Sixth Sense, the scene where Cole confesses to his mother that he can see dead people. Particularly the part where he says "Grandma says hi" and we get a brilliantly hilarious Double Take from Toni Collette. And yet it doesn't ruin the part where Cole gives her a message from Grandma which makes the scene a Heartwarming Moment.
• Toni Collette's own later horror film, Hereditary manages to use a Smash Cut to turn a mother's screams of anguish over discovering the decapitated body of her daughter into something like an Overly Long Gag, as if she were screaming non-stop from the discovery until the funeral.
  • Later in the story, she goes to a group grief counselling session and when asked to talk about herself, she is initially slow to reveal anything, but then she starts talking about her troubled past with her mother and brother. And she keeps going... and going... and going, and the whole thing is horrible yet almost funny in how terrible it all is and how much she is revealing to a bunch of strangers. Then it settles on funny when she stops and we get a reaction of everyone else who just stare, clearly not knowing how to respond to all that.
• The entire plot of Steps Trodden Black. A troubled teenager tries to accept himself and deal with the constant feeling of isolation and overwhelming anxiety when interacting with others, while his friends are picked off by a violent force and they try to hold the group together and keep it from falling apart into arguing while at the same time dealing with the shock and grief over the deaths of their friends. Its also a comedy with laser guns, aliens and a space ship.
• The Wicker Man (1973) has a scene when Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) and Miss Rose (Diane Cilento), both in evening dress and him at the Grand Piano duetting the absolutely filthy song "The Tinker of Rye" about a tinker fixing a woman's kettle.
• The Legend of Billie Jean plays Putter getting her first period both for drama and comedy.
  Putter: So when can I get a diaphragm?
• Oldboy (2003) thrives on this due to the nature of its story: ordinary people in mundane settings committing extraordinary acts of violence.
• The new Star Wars films have fallen into this on occasion:
  • In the opening scene of The Force Awakens, the menacing dark side warrior Kylo Ren burns down an innocent village, kills an old man in cold blood, and captures the heroic Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. All things appropriately sinister and dramatic, at least until Poe asks him "So who talks first? You talk first? I talk first?" and tells Ren that his heavy, face-obscuring mask makes it difficult to understand his speech. Annoyed at Poe's remarks, Ren orders the Stormtroopers to slaughter all the villagers (complete with screams for mercy) and takes him along for questioning.
  • Han Solo and General Leia are reunited for the first time in 30 years... then C-3PO literally leans into the shot and gasps "Goodness! Han Solo!" Han, of course, has an appropriate look of resigned annoyance.
  • Darth Vader returns to cinema screens in all his terrifying glory and reminds the viewers why he's so feared by casually brushing off the deaths of thousands of people killed by the Death Star, Force-Choking Krennic when he gets too uppity, and making a hilariously bad pun as he sends Krennic on his way.
  • The Last Jedi does this a bunch:
    • It sets the tone right off the bat: in the previous film, Rey has gone through Hell and back to find Luke, and the movie ends with a triumphant orbital shot of her holding out his lightsaber to him. The Last Jedi finishes the scene, with Luke taking the lightsaber and casually tossing it over his shoulder. It's simultaneously goofy and shocking, effectively communicating that this ain't your daddy's Star Wars.
    • A dramatic, intense confrontation between Kylo Ren and Rey through the Force is made funnier by the fact that Ren is shirtless and Rey's trying not to stare.
    • Kylo Ren murders his master Supreme Leader Snoke in one of the most jaw-dropping and unexpected scenes of the whole saga, but the entire epic battle with the Praetorian Guard that follows is rendered hilarious by the fact that the separate pieces of the body are lying there, with a goofily wall-eyed expression the entire time.
• The Martian:
  • The film tells a harrowing tale of an astronaut left on Mars to survive by himself. That doesn't stop the film from being very funny at points, mostly due to lighthearted dialogue.
    Mark Watney: [after trying to make water by burning hydrogen, still smoldering] So... I blew myself up.
  • When he writes a curse word in the message, he's informed that he's being broadcast live in front of NASA and the President. We don't see what words he types in response but it's a hilarious scene (he did a boobs joke in the book). What's he responding to? The revelation that none of his friends have been told he's still alive.
  • And of course, this classic pair of lines:
    Kapoor: Can you even imagine what he's going through up there? He thinks he's totally alone, he thinks we gave up on him. What does that do to a man, psychologically? What the hell is he thinking right now?
    [cut to Watney stepping out of the shower with Lewis's music playing in the background]
    Watney: I am definitely gonna die up here... if I have to listen to any more god awful disco music.
  • This is even better in the novel, in which Watney's response is to wonder why Aquaman can control whales. They're mammals.
• The Dark Knight: Only the Joker could be completely terrifying while dressed in a Naughty Nurse Outfit.
• Schindler's List is about the Holocaust, yet also includes a number of humorous moments and scenes, often under very dark pretenses. One example is a family of Jews being moved to shabby quarters muttering that it can't get any worse than this, only to learn that they have to share the place with several other families. Another involves Schindler threatening a hostile German soldier standing between him and his Jewish work force. After a cut, the soldier is frantically helping Schindler find the Jews.
• In the middle of the horrifying, heartbreaking ship-sinking sequence in Titanic (1997) comes a split-second moment where some poor bastard falls off the side, hits a propeller and bounces off in cartoonish fashion. It's awful and horrible and yet still completely hilarious.
• In The Village (2004), Kitty wants to marry Lucius and gives him an Anguished Declaration of Love. A cut to her crying her eyes out in her sister's arms tells us how well that went. You're both inclined to laugh at what a spectacle she made of herself, but the sequence of Ivy singing softly to comfort her still makes you feel sorry for the poor girl who just got her heart broken.
• In Carrie (1976), the gym teacher tells the girls they did "a really shitty thing". The Precision F-Strike causes a couple of the girls to giggle, but it doesn't break the tense mood — or negate the teacher's "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Fitting the page quote, Joss Whedon's film Serenity does this nicely, as exemplified by this round of dialog, as the crew is starting to question what they are doing in the face of a much greater threat than normal:
  Mal: You wanna run this ship?!
  Jayne: Yes!
  Mal: [flustered] Well... you can't!
• A lot of the comedy in The Big Lebowski comes from the fact that a deadbeat stoner and Vietnam vet with anger issues are stuck in the middle of a serious Film Noir plot.
• The Indiana Jones movies have something of a tradition of this, most famously in Raiders of the Lost Ark where an epic sword versus whip duel doesn't quite go as anticipated.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade has a scene where Indy has been captured but has already given the all-important grail Diary to Marcus Brody, who has yet to fall into the hands of the Nazis:
  Walter Donovan: Brody sticks out like a sore thumb. We'll find him.
  Indiana Jones: The hell you will! He's got a two-day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. He speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He'll blend in — disappear — you'll never see him again. With any luck... he's got the Grail already.
  [cut to a very flustered Marcus walking through an Arab town]
  Marcus Brody: Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?
• There's a brief moment of comic relief during the epic battle sequence in the climax of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, where Treebeard and the Ents march on Saruman's fortress at Isengard, one of the Ents is set aflame by the Orcs. Later in that same sequence, the Ents break the dam to flood the entire battlefield...and just as all the Orcs are being washed away into the pit, we get a great Visual Gag when that same Ent, still on fire, hurriedly rushes onscreen from the bottom-left corner of the frame and dunks his head into the water to put out the flames.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Man of Steel: The final battle to the death between Superman and Zod is dramatic, but at one point, Superman gets kicked into a sign on a building site that reads "This job has worked 106 days without accident". The "1" and "6" get kicked out of it, leaving it to read "This job has worked 0 days without accident".
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League: During the otherwise earnest scene of the rescue of Iris West from her deadly car accident by Barry Allen/Flash in slow-motion, Barry grabs a flying sausage from a hot-dog stand.
  • SHAZAM!: As Shazam and Sivana do Power Floats several hundred feet away from each other over the city, Sivana starts dramatically making a Badass Boast to Shazam about how he'll kill the hero... and Shazam, not having Super-Hearing powers, can't hear a damn thing of what he's saying.
• Joker (2019), being a film about the Laughably Evil villain's Start of Darkness inevitably pairs its depressing and nihilistic story with a few periodic gags to lighten the tone.
  • Arthur is at the hospital where his mother is being cared for after a stroke, and a pair of detectives come to question him about the subway murders. After a tense back and forth, Arthur tells them off and walks away to go tend to his mother. As he tries to get into the hospital, he slams into the automatic door, spends a moment trying to get the motion sensor to work while one of the detectives tells him that it's an exit door, and he goes through when an employee is leaving for the night.
  • Even after Arthur was fired from his job with them, Gary and Randall come to deliver a cake to Arthur in sympathy for his mother's passing. Almost immediately, Randall nervously brings up the gun he gave to Arthur and gets brutally murdered with a pair of scissors for betraying Arthur, leaving Gary terrified of making any move. Arthur politely encourages him to leave, and when tiptoeing past, Arthur does a fake-out lunge to scare him. Gary tries to flee, but being a dwarf, he can't actually reach the chain-lock and has to ask Arthur to open it for him. Before letting him go, Arthur kisses him on the head saying he appreciated his kindness. This is all exaggerated because Arthur is in his white face paint make-up.
  • Arthur (now completely embracing his Joker persona) brutally guns down talkshow host Murray Franklin on live television, he grabs the camera, apes Murray's catchphrase "And always remember, that's life!" before being cut off at "life" by the network and replaced by a technical difficulties screen with "Spanish Flea" playing.
• The Lighthouse is about two men maintaining an old lighthouse on an isolated island and going through Sanity Slippage. The movie is shot in black-and-white, it's dreary, it's cramped, and the island might be an Eldritch Location. It has all the makings of a horror story, but most of the time you're watching Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe engaging in epic, glorious Ham-to-Ham Combat. And farting, lots of farting.
  Winslow: [in the middle of an angry mental breakdown] I'm sick of your laugh, your snoring, and your Goddamn faaaahts! Your God! Damn!... Goddamn your fahts!
• Riders of Justice features a juxtaposition of a dark and bloody revenge story with absurd comedic moments. For example, when two techies arrive to tell the main character that they've discovered his wife's murderer, one of them keeps getting sidetracked by complimenting the man's barn. When they drive away, the man stares grimly at them as they clumsily struggle to back up and avoid hitting obstacles in his yard.
• Glorious: Ghat's very serious Cosmic Horror Story is repeatedly interrupted by Wes relieving himself in one of the urinals.
• Tár juxtaposes its very serious plotline of a renowned conductor getting accused of sexual abuse with scenes like Olga running down a hallway screaming with joy after getting a solo part, Lydia trying to annoy prospective homeowners of the apartment next to her by loudly playing the accordion and singing off-key about how they're all going to hell, Lydia face-planting into concrete and blatantly lying about where she got her injuries, and the ending, where Lydia's fall from grace from the classical music world is shown via her new job of conducting the Monster Hunter: World soundtrack to a bunch of cosplayers at a fan convention, a very long way from having run one of the most prestigious orchestras in the world.
• In the Bedroom containing a scene where Matt is puzzled by the Vanity License Plate of the car in front of him while at a traffic stop and another where Matt and Ruth's climactic, tense argument about their grief over their son's death being interrupted by a Girl Scout on their porch who wants to sell them cookies. Little Children, which is the most overtly comedic of his three movies, mixes a satirical look on suburban life (usually through the narrator's wry observations about everything) with genuine empathy towards its main characters' many dysfunctions, which are treated seriously.
• This trope drives a lot of the biting satire in the Robocop series, where this darkly horrid and brutally violent take on America Twenty Minutes Into Thefuture is intersected with silliness and humor. You'll laugh every time and feel like you're going straight to Hell for it. By and far the best example is the failed Robocops in Robocop 2: a tortured machine that Was Once a Man staggering out, screaming in agony and anguish, and killing the scientists responsible and then himself? A terrifying example of Body and Psychological Horror. The low-fi recording of stock police quotes like "YOU ARE UNDER ARREST" followed by his red and blues lighting up after he's died? Hilarious.

Literature

• An example of the trope that predates Pope's coining of the term comes from John Dryden in Albion and Albanius, where he writes:
  "The cave of Proteus rises out of the sea, it consists of several arches of rock work, adorned with mother of pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the sea, and parts of Dover pier."
• Pope himself used this trope deliberately in the mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock:
  Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heav'n are cast,
  When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breath their last,
• The Latin poet Horace jokingly warned poets to avoid starting out a poem in the grand old epic style, lest 'parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus' - "The mountains will labour and bring to birth a comical mouse." Of course, Pope was particularly influenced by Horace, as were most poets of his day. If there had been a 'Poetry Tropes' website in those days, 'ridiculus mus' may well have been the Trope Namer.
• Douglas Adams was quite fond of this trope. From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  Why are people born? Why do they die? And why do they spend much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?
• Stand-up comedian and author Lewis Grizzard uses this trope extensively in his routines and writing. From his memorial column for his dog Catfish:
  I don't know why I named him what I named him. He was all curled up in a blanket on my back seat. And I looked at him and it just came out. I called him, "Catfish." I swear he raised up from the blanket and acknowledged. Then he severely fouled the blanket and my back seat.
• Harry Potter notes at Dumbledore's funeral at the end of the sixth book that, when reminiscing, he's not sure whether or not he wants to laugh.
• Common throughout The Dresden Files. Top prize probably goes to asking a faerie hit-thing for a donut.
  Eldest Brother Gruff: Likest thou jelly within thy donut?
  Harry: Nay, but with sprinkles 'pon it, and frosting of white.
• Found throughout P. G. Wodehouse's work. A spectacular example is present in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, with a florid poem describing a sunset that ends with "I say / Doesn't that sunset remind you / Of a slice / Of underdone roast beef?"
• Woody Allen often used this. For example: "Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage." or "The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God's mind - a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you've just made a down payment on a house."
• Lord of the Flies invokes this intentionally at the end when the British Navy comes to rescue the children, in order to draw a comparison between learned civilised behaviour and the children's natural amorality.
• Rick Riordan often uses this technique in his works, especially when Percy Jackson is narrating.

  When he sat forward in his throne, shadowy faces appeared in the folds of his black robes, faces of torment, as if the garment were stitched of trapped souls from the Field of Punishment. The ADHD part of me wondered, off-task, whether the rest of his clothes were made the same way. What horrible things would you have to do in your life to be woven into Hades' underwear?

• Casey at the Bat. A minor league baseball game is described with all the pomp and portent of an epic poem, ending with one of the most memorable Anti Climaxes in all of literature.
• Similar to the aforementioned Douglas Adams series in tone (in that it's about a Very Normal person going through ridiculous things), the light novel series Haruhi Suzumiya has a lot of bathos in its narration. For example, in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya:
  I nearly bumped into Nagato who was coming out from the kitchen. In Nagato's hands was a stack of small plates, with chopsticks and a tube of ground mustard on top.
  "I am leaving. Sorry for intruding. See you."
  I was about to walk off, when I sensed a tug as soft as a feather on my arm.
  "..."
  Nagato was pulling my sleeve with her fingers. The tug was very soft, just like how much force one might use to pick up a newborn baby hamster.
• This is used frequently in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot, starting with comparing a sunset to "a patient etherised upon a table".
• The central point of the "Jake Strugell" poems by Wendy Cope, in which Strugnell falls under the influence of various poets ("Strugnell's Bargain" after Sir Phillip Sidney, "Strugnell's Rubaiyat" after Omar Khayyám and so on) but has no real grasp of poetic metaphor and sets everything in Tulse Hill, the London suburb where he lives.
  Awake! for Morning on the Pitch of Night
  Has whistled and has put the Stars to Flight.
  The incandescent football in the East
  Has brought the splendour of Tulse Hill to Light.
• In Toll the Hounds the very next scene, right after Anomander Rake's tragic death is the absurd mule-battle between Kruppe and Iskaral Pust.
• Bored of the Rings:
  In the eastern sky, Velveeta, beloved morning star of the elves and handmaid of the dawn, rose and greeted Noxzema, bringer of the flannel tongue, and clanging on her golden garbage pail, bade him make ready the winged rickshaw of Novocaine, herald of the day. Thence came rosy-eyeballed Ovaltine, she of the fluffy mouth, and lightly kissed the land east of the Seas. In other words, it was morning.
• Spike Milligan's parody poem Casabazonka does this deliberately; it starts with the dramatic first two lines of Casabianca, only to completely flip the mood with the final word.
• Nettle & Bone: The protagonist might be on a quest to assassinate an evil prince before he can murder her sister, but has her fair share of incongruously ordinary experiences along the way. Exemplified when she reaches the home of an infamous dust-wife to bargain for a weapon of regicide and finds that the dust-wife has chickens.
  It was hard to be frightened of the unknown when the unknown kept chickens.
• Animorphs: While the series is a surprisingly dark and violent deconstruction of Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World that goes into the ramifications of teenagers being forced to fight what amounts to a guerrilla war, there's also quite a bit of levity to help prevent things from getting too oppressive. Naturally, these elements converge sometimes. For example, one book is about the discovery that a certain substance can drive yeerks incurably and uncontrollably insane. The plight of a man controlled by one such yeerk is delved into and played for pathos, while the story explores the moral quandary of whether it's right to weaponize this knowledge... but the book still gets some yuks out of said substance being a specific flavor of instant oatmeal.
  • Two of the books involve an alien race called the Helmacrons. Although both of them involve just as much stress, trauma, and risk of death as any other mission the Animorphs embark on, this gets somewhat softened by the Helmacrons themselves, who are a fraction of an inch tall but believe themselves to be the greatest conquerors in the universe, making them the most hilariously extreme example of The Napoleon you could imagine. In their first appearance, the ever-intimidating Visser Three shows up in the climax, but the story is resolved when the Helmacrons are defeated by someone morphing an anteater.

Live-Action TV

• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The show's entire tone has this, as it is a musical with a lot of comedic songs, but at the same time is a deconstruction of romantic comedies through the eyes of a woman with severe mental issues. Examples include a song sung by an Adam Westing Josh Groban about how Rebecca's most recent actions have just completely messed up her life intercut with sad moments of her friends, a Whitney Houston-style ballad about how much Rebecca hates herself and her depression and Paula, Heather and Valencia over the top attempt to tear down Rebecca's bathroom door because they think she might try to kill herself again.
• One Foot in the Grave: Nearly every episode, a serious conversation was interrupted with something completely ludicrous, such as finding a wig in a loaf of bread, or Victor discovering that a workman planted a Yucca plant actually in the downstairs toilet.
• Firefly delved into this from time to time. In "War Stories", Mal and Wash have a very domestic argument while being tortured, much to the bemusement of the torturer. In this particular example, Mal was deliberately antagonizing Wash to keep him from breaking.
• In Community, Abed gives a breathtaking monologue about appearing on an episode of Cougar Town ^note he actually did, in which he questions his entire identity and the point of being interested in popular culture. The entire speech culminates with him "pooping" himself.
• Look Around You is a parody of 1970s BBC educational videos, using bathos for most of its humor.
• Wilfred, in both the Australian original and American remake.
  Ryan: You've lost your mind. It's like you've got some kind of...God complex.
  Wilfred: I'll let you in on a little secret, Ryan. I don't have a God complex. I am God! Thunder!
  [thunder]
  Ryan: How did you do that?
  Wilfred: ...Lucky coincidence!
• Farscape excelled at this trope throughout its run. One of the best examples comes right before John has to get frozen in stone for eighty years. John's anguish at having to say goodbye to everything he's ever known and wake up in a totally unfamiliar world is heartbreaking, and yet you can't help but laugh at his over-the-top delivery and severely Skewed Priorities.
  Crichton: Eighty... Cycles. M-my college loans will be delinquent. I'll miss the strippers on my 100th birthday. I-I'll get a utility bill... for three trillion dollars for a single porch light that I left on AND EVERYBODY I KNOW WILL BE DEAD! [...] Humans do not live as long as Sebaceans, or Hynerians, or Delvians. When I get back, everyone, my Dad, DK, my sisters, Cameron Diaz, Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be dead!
• Classic Doctor Who did this well, especially in the Hartnell era.
  • In "Marco Polo", for example, Kublai Khan is built up as this mysterious, terrible, almost godlike being... and then, he and the First Doctor become friends as they commiserate over the aches and pains of advanced age.
  • "The Myth Makers", one of Hartnell's wittiest, derives a lot of its humor from how mundane the semi-mythical Trojan figures are in personality, especially Paris — his attempts to talk Steven down from attacking him are almost Pythonesque in how anticlimactic they are.
    Steven: [in Shakespearian tones, pretending to be a Greek soldier] And must my Lord Achilles be roused to undertake your death, adulterer?
    Paris: Yes, well, I'm prepared to overlook that for the moment. I assure you I have no quarrel with you.
    Steven: I'm Greek, you're Trojan. Is not that quarrel enough?
    Paris: Yes, well — personally, I think this whole business has been carried just a little bit too far? I mean, that Helen thing was just a misunderstanding.
    [...]
    Paris: [having won the fight] Now, die, Greek, and tell them in Hades that Paris sent you thither!
    Steven: I yield.
    Paris: I beg your pardon?
    Steven: I yield. I'm your prisoner.
    Paris: Well, I say, this sort of thing is just not done.
  • The Fourth Doctor pretty much functions entirely on this. He's a dramatic, imposing, Byronic, swashbuckling alien with a gothic Victoriana motif, who wanders up to whatever unspeakable squirming Omnicidal Maniac horror he's pitted against this week, gives it a big grin and offers it a jelly baby.
  • The final words of the Seventh Doctor to Ace in "Survival", the final story of the Classic series before the show was cancelled:
    The Doctor: Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold.
  • The portrayal of the Nethersphere in Series 8. It's all very much like a soulless corporate city.
• This is sometimes used in Supernatural, such as in the episode "Wishful Thinking" when a young girl wishes for her teddy bear to come alive and ends up with a suicidal cynical giant stuffed bear. It's both weirdly tragic and gut-bustingly hilarious to watch.
  Teddy Bear: [miserably] It is a terrible world! Why am I here?!
  Audrey: [exasperated] For tea parties!
• The Charmed (1998) episode "Just Harried" has Prue inadvertently wrecking Piper's wedding. While it's still presented as a sad event, the scene itself still has a comedic edge to it. Holly Marie Combs gives Piper a semi-panic attack that is most definitely meant to be funny, along with her delivery of "the wedding is off!" — plus another small gag when Phoebe accidentally steps on her train.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Entropy" has the gang discovering a hidden camera planted by the Trio in the Magic Box. As they do this, Spike and Anya are having sex. The Trio are in the middle of shutting down their cameras when they spot this and get Distracted by the Sexy. Dawn also walks into the house and catches sight of it, Willow covering her eyes comically. Of course this doesn't change the fact that Xander and Buffy have just seen their respective love interests going at it — and it's still presented as a tragic scene.
  • In "Help", Cassie's speech about what she'd love to do in life — but can't because she knows she's about to die — is heart breaking. But there's also a funny line in there where she says she'd like to see her cousins grow up "because they're really mean and I think they're going to be fat". Even Buffy smiles at this.
  • The Season 3 Big Bad, Mayor Richard Wilkins III, is an immortal dark sorcerer with an ultimate goal of becoming a powerful ancient demon. And he approaches all of this with the demeanor of a 1950s sitcom dad, lists dark rituals on his to-do list followed by PTA meetings, thinks mini-golf is a cure all for assassins who failed to hit their target, is a germaphobe and will wipe his hands after killing someone, and engages his minions in conversations about their favorite newspaper comics (he prefers The Family Circus, his vampire henchman loves Marmaduke, and both look at the assistant mayor with mild disgust when they learn his go-to funny is Cathy... keep in mind the scene starts with the mayor casually pulling a Kleenex out of a cabinet that is filled with dark magic paraphernalia and wiping his hands and none of the three bat an eye). One of the few times he actually gets upset, it's when a new minion inadvertently kills a demon that the mayor has to sacrifice a human baby to on a recurring business. The minion thinks he'll be happy to be out of the deal only to discover that the Mayor is livid: while he doesn't like to make the payment, he ran a campaign on being an honest politician and he hates even the appearance that he's breaking a promise.
  • In "Fear Itself", Buffy and her team deal with increasingly horrifying nightmares caused by Crachnar, the lord of nightmares. Buffy errantly summons the demon, which starts to come forth... and it's only about 5 inches tall. Xander immediately begins to tease it, then Buffy steps on it. The punchline to the episode involves Giles re-examining the scary old book they first read about Crachnar in and kicking himself for not realizing that the caption under the picture, when translated, means "actual size".
• Band of Brothers:
  • In the second episode, Malarkey decides to run out in the middle of gunfire to raid a dead German soldier looking for a Luger — and doesn't get shot at because the Germans assume he's a medic. The way it's presented makes you both feel terror that he'll be killed and also laugh at the ridiculousness of it.
  • In the third episode, a stray bullet catches Winters on the leg. Although it's in the middle of a serious scene, he gives a look that says "oh, for crying out loud".
  • When Nixon receives news of his wife divorcing him, it's played both for drama and for comedy. This is a man who's being dumped while fighting a war, but he's fuming over the assets conflict - where he notes that she's even taking their dog. "It's not even her dog!"
• Happens often in Brooklyn Nine-Nine due to Jake's massive abandonment issues. In the Thanksgiving episode from the first season, Jake says all he wants to do is sit at home, watch the football game, and eat "mayo nuts" (peanuts mixed with mayonnaise), as he usually does on Thanksgiving, prompting a disgusted response from Captain Holt. It's then revealed that he does this because his dad was gone and his mom always had to work on Thanksgiving, and six-year-olds aren't very good at cooking...
• The whole comedic point of Drunk History. The narrators are retelling dramatic historical stories while completely shitfaced. The slurring and drunken accounts are re-enacted word for word by well-known actors acting the shit out of the drunken dialogue.
• Twin Peaks loved to juxtapose serious (even horrifying) drama with parodies of Soap Opera, Non Sequitur humor and even outright farce:
  • Laura Palmer's funeral is a powerfully tragic scene as the town reverend delivers an affecting, deeply personal eulogy — until the mentally handicapped Johnny Horne interjects in the eulogy, a fight breaks out between two of Laura's boyfriends, and Laura's father dives onto her coffin, which continually rises up then lowers down with him on top of it.
  • Ronette Pulaski, who was nearly murdered alongside Laura, finally comes out of her coma. Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman come to interrogate her, hoping to find new leads on Laura's killer — and spend five minutes trying to adjust the height of the hospital seats.
  • Agent Cooper is a preternaturally skilled detective with an unwavering commitment to bringing criminals to justice: his investigative technique consists of throwing rocks at glass bottles to guide him to the next lead. None of the other law enforcement officers question this.
  • In the Season 2 Premiere, Cooper bleeding out on the floor from two bullet wounds in the chest is a legitimately suspenseful scene, but it's both undercut and amplified by him spending an agonizingly long time trying to get the extremely senile, elderly waiter in his room to call the hospital.
  • In "The Return", the interrogation of Bill Hastings starts out horrifying, as a traumatized man has to recount the gruesome murder of his mistress by monsters from another dimension, and then spirals out of control as he wails about he never got the chance to go scuba diving with her and "SOAK UP THE SUUUUUUUUUN!" Made either funnier or more disturbing by the fact that Hastings is played by Matthew Lillard, a.k.a. Shaggy.
    Albert Rosenfield: Fruitcake, anyone?
• The Wire, as part of its ruthless deconstruction of the Criminal Procedural and Police Procedural genres, would occasionally interrupt its moments of cynical crime drama or violent main character deaths with goofy or absurdist comedy, which creator David Simon deliberately inserted because otherwise the series would be unbearable to watch. Particularly good is the moment where Wee Bey all but orders D'Angelo into his house at gunpoint with the lights off, and both D'Angelo and the audience are tensed up waiting for him to get whacked... only for Wee Bey to turn the lights on and explain that he brought D'Angelo in to show him how to feed his fish while he's out of town.
• iZombie has an early moment where Liv exists her ex-fiancé only to discover he's with another woman, who is sat in the living room cheerfully playing Dying Light. Liv had only very recently become a Revenant Zombie. Why yes, the show is very big on Black Comedy, how did you guess?
• Babylon 5 had "A Late Delivery from Avalon" where Michael York played a war veteran driven by trauma and grief into believing he was King Arthur. While the trauma the poor man has suffered and the tragedy of the war are played absolutely straight (and very tastefully), they are juxtaposed against Michael York running around on a space station wearing chainmail, cutting up space thugs with a longsword, and treating the sets like a starving man might treat a packet of peanuts, in that very special way only a trained Shakespearean actor with no directorial restraint can.
• The Good Place:
  • The Season 2 episode "Existential Crisis" features a flashback showing Eleanor Shellstrop's emotional breakdown after seeing a family pack of toothbrushes while shopping at a Bed Bath and Beyond. The scene is genuinely sad in that it shows Eleanor not only going through an existential crisis, but finally processing her grief over her father's death... but it's also hilarious in how she cries into a toilet plunger instead of the family-size pack of tissues offered by the Bed Bath and Beyond employee.
  • Meanwhile, the Season 4 episode "You've Changed, Man" a Bad Janet's parting words at the end of her road to redemption while facing the Judge of all creation and in a final stand to save humanity are... a long fart. Even more, she lets out a Single Tear while doing it, implying that to her this is as meaningful and personal as more conventional last words would be, making the whole scene a very emotional moment, but still hilarious.
• Barry: This is the main thrust of the show, contrasting a dark character drama about a Shell-Shocked Veteran turned Professional Killer with a rather wacky satire about Hollywood. The tone is prone to shifting rapidly between pathos and comedy.
  • An episode has Barry trying to eliminate someone by blowing up the house they're in, using a special app as the remote detonator. It's a very tense, high stakes scene, made all the more tense when the app doesn't work, leading to Barry calling the app's tech support and sitting in the car having a long conversation with a weirdly friendly bomb app customer service rep to troubleshoot the issue.
• "America Decides" is one of the most tense and harrowing episodes of Succession, meant to recall the massive stress and trauma felt among the American populace during the election nights of 2016 and 2020...and it also features a scene where a hapless polling analyst accidentally gets wasabi in his eyes, with attempts to fix it making it even worse since Greg pours lemon-flavored La Croix in his eyes and then tries to insist it "wasn't that lemony".
• The Key & Peele sketch "Aerobics Meltdown" leans into this, in which a finalist in a light-hearted and campy 80s aerobics contest has to keep dancing while being informed that his family was just injured in a hit and run. As he keeps dancing, he then slowly comes to realize his opponent in the competition was the culprit, leading to a confrontation on air.
• Dead Like Me runs on this trope, being a dramedy that usually involves at least one violent death per episode. The task of reaping souls, essentially being there at the (often traumatic) end of a person's mortal existence and escorting their immortal being into the afterlife, is treated as a crappy job by the main cast, which is purposely paralleled by the protagonist George having a day job at a soul-sucking temp agency. Profundity abounds on the show, usually in the musings of George as she learns life lessons or comes to terms with her experiences, but not an episode goes by without the dramatic elements being balanced out with some solid Black Comedy. Specific bathos is had in some of the hilarious ways people on the show meet their end, such as getting obliterated by a toilet seat falling from space, drilling a hole in their own head to try to get high, and the inventor of leg warmers getting strangled by one.
  • The first episode features George sending a message to her mother shortly after dying as a vague way of communicating that she has lived on. Her message? Spelling out the word "moist" in the fridge magnets, a word her mother earlier told her she hates.
  • In one episode George, distracted by her office crush, accidentally slices off her middle finger in a shredder, complete with loads of blood and shock from coworkers. As said crush is carrying her out to go to the hospital, she puts her finger back on just in time to gloat to her romantic rival by flipping her off on the way. A second laugh can be had when she realizes she put the finger on backwards and has to fix it.

Music

• The Attack on Titan filk "Don't Kill Us" involves the singers promising pie if the audience lets them live.
• In his 1997 book The Accidental Evolution of Rock 'n' Roll, Chuck Eddy introduced his "Gladys Knight and The Pips Rule": good songs should mix seriousness and frivolity. It was based on "Midnight Train to Georgia", where Knight's earnest, poignant lead vocal is juxtaposed with The Pips' rather silly-sounding backing vocal interjections.
• "Thor". Almost wholly. "Lighting strikes" especially.
• "Break" by Aphrodite's Child includes some lighthearted Scatting by Vangelis throughout the otherwise serious track.
• Hobo Johnson's music frequently juxtaposes very sad lines with mundane ones, lending humor to both. From "Subaru Crosstrek XV":
  "Nothing like crying in a Subaru Crosstrek. Life is a despair pit filled with sadness.
  My ex-girl's grandpa invented pinball. He had a lot of time on his hands."
• "Shia LaBeouf" tackles the silly concept of a blood-soaked Shia LaBeouf murdering and eating people in the woods by taking it completely seriously. In the performance video, none of the dancers or musicians so much as crack a smile.
• Bad Lip Reading's "Bushes of Love" is a Star Wars parody song that contains silly and nonsensical Word Salad Lyrics as is typical of any of BLR's output, but it's also surprisingly tragic and poignant. Case in point, while Anakin being killed by a "chicken-duck-woman-thing" and the nonchalant way Obi-Wan tells Luke about it is funny, the paranoid mess that Obi-Wan became as a result of watching his friend gruesomely die in front of him is decidedly not.

Professional Wrestling

• At one point during Triple H and The Undertaker's match at Wrestlemania 27, they send themselves flying through Michael Cole's little cubicle that he calls the "Cole Mine". Despite the serious tone that a match involving Undertaker would usually have, seeing Cole's property go to pieces makes you laugh just a little.
• Causing bathos is a favorite of many wrestling fanbases, especially WWE fans. The crowd is as much a part of the show as anything in Wrestling.
• Joey Daddiego's post match assault on Donovan Dijak at the first night of Supercard Of Honor X was not funny. Prince Nana running in fear from Taeler Hendrix while it went on did bring a little humor to what was otherwise a serious attempt to avenge Truth Martini's broken neck though (even if it was Hendrix who supplied to the weapon, as she had spent the past ten-twenty minutes chasing Nana or The Boys).

Theatre

• In the Vernon Sylvaine comedy, As Long as They're Happy, the Funny Foreigner psychiatrist Dr. Schneider explains thusly; when a man shoots himself, it is a tragedy. If he shoots himself in the pants, it becomes this trope.
• Iphigenia in Splott shoves the high culture associations of Iphigenia in Tauris against a working-class town with a silly name.

Video Games

• Mother 3 goes from hilarious and quirky to dark and depressing and back again more times than you can count. The same game that has bathroom signs as enemies, a boss that's a bass guitar that is jealous of a rock star's guitar, and a scene where an old man does a stupid dance in order to open a door, also has the main character's mother dying in the first chapter, a drug trip scene where the main character sees all of his friends and family tormenting him and trying to kill him, and the main character's brother commiting suicide after awakening from being brainwashed.
• LISA is equal parts grim apocalyptic nightmare, and absurd comedy. And it's a good thing too, because if it was played with even slightly less humor, the game would be an unbearable march into the dark. The game is cruel, but for every Player Punch you endure, you'll find a huge laugh elsewhere.
• In Ōkami during the second (of three) battle with Orochi. Nagi tries to look awesome, but it's hard to take him seriously when he's dressed in women's clothing... and even harder when he falls flat on his face jumping into battle. Nevertheless, he cleaves a satisfying victory.
• The player can intentionally create bathos in Resonance of Fate. Thanks to its Virtual Paper Doll-like clothing and accessories, you can have your characters wearing almost clown-like attire during the most serious of scenes. The weapon customization can also lead to some interesting results.
  • There's also some built into the game's setting to help set the world's tone. An early example is the Arena, known for making spectacles of bloodbaths for profit... and the delicious soft-serve from the concessions stand.
  • You can extend that to any game where you can put on joke costumes, and the costumes show during cutscenes.
• Most of Dragon Age II can be played this way if the player picks all the silly dialogue options. Sarcastic!Hawke doesn't really know when to shut up and gets called on it by the party (most frequently by Aveline and Carver).
• Similarly, there are a lot of dialogue options◊ in Devil Survivor 2 that turn the player character into a flat-out Cloudcuckoolander.
• Because The Secret of Monkey Island was originally planned as a serious game, all of the artwork is highly realistic and gritty. When the devs decided instead to go for comedy, providing both hilarious dialogue and absurd situations (such as the famous case of crossing a chasm by means of a rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-the-middle, lovingly drawn in the highest style 8 bit graphics had to offer), this contrasted with the game's appearance to heighten the humour potential. Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge continued in this style, but then creator Ron Gilbert left the company, and the games since have used a more overtly cartoony style, which the Video Game Remakes of the first two games switched to. Fans are hotly divided over which is best.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, the Naughty Nightwear item boosts your Speech skill by ten points, leading to cases where you're trying to defuse a hostage situation, talk your way into a restricted area, or decide the fate of the entire Mojave Wasteland... while wearing a set of cheesy leopard-print pajamas or a skimpy negligee, depending on your gender. And if your Speech skill is less than 10 points below making the check when not wearing the nightwear, wearing skimpy nightwear can be the sole deciding factor in deciding whether or not you convince someone.
• You can invoke this in Fallout 4 with the outfits your characters wear. You can have a serious, heartwarming conversation of finding your long-lost son while dressed in a bathrobe, or as Grognak the Barbarian. Paladin Danse removes his power armor when you go to confront him about being a synth and, if you removed his jumpsuit, he'll have this heartwarming and serious conversation in nothing but his boxers.
• Persona 5: After successfully stealing Okumura's heart, the party celebrate at the Persona universe equivalent to Disney Land, Destiny Land. Naturally everything goes to shit once Okumura suffers a mental shutdown and dies during a press conference they were watching all while the party were still wearing themed hats and fireworks are still going off in the background.
  • There is something so funny about the most responsible member of the Phantom Thief crew scolding the Playful Hacker member like she's her mom for breaking into the network of a foreign military base.
    Oracle, what have I said about hacking government networks?
• Metal Gear:
  • With the amount of surreal easter eggs and fourth wall breaking, this series may be the all-time champ. A great example would be choosing to wear kabuki facepaint and an orange jumpsuit covered in happy faces that makes goofy noises while wielding a cigar that sprays knockout gas...while fighting the tragic Anti-Villain final boss in one of the most heartwrenching moments in the video game medium.
  • Especially the case in any of the games that allow rewatching the cutscenes but with the ability to switch the characters/models used. Old ladies with assault rifles and handbags storming the freighter at the beginning of MGS2? Priceless.
  • Even the games on their own merits have plenty of this. Metal Gear Solid, just to name one (1) entry in the series, goes from you finding Meryl by staring at her ass, to her being Mind Raped into Psychic-Assisted Suicide which you have to stop, to her teasing Snake about "not being good with dogs", to her graphically being shot and laying on the ground bleeding to death over the span of about... 20 minutes. Then there's having to resist being tortured or else Meryl will die juxtaposed with Johnny running to the bathroom with his hands over his butt which happens several times if you don't manage to escape the cell. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes has even more, like zooming in on figurines of Mario and Yoshi during Otacon's depressing Heel Realization and Snake's solid 3 second delay between being clubbed in the head and losing consciousness after gunning down the woman who shot Meryl. That's not even mentioning all the pee and homoerotic humor intertwined with often depressingly serious plotlines... and the series only dials up the Bathos from here.
• Silent Hill, another Konami series, was once the darkest Survival Horror game on the market, but has always had a silly side through Easter eggs and old save bonuses. In the first three games, the tragic-to-bittersweet endings could be replaced with joke endings involving alien abduction, another ending in the second game revealing The Dog Was the Mastermind, a Magical Girl costume for the protagonist in the third, as well as alien karaoke, and, most absurdly, Pyramid Head cutting Murphy's birthday cake in Silent Hill: Downpour.
• In Poker Night at the Inventory, many of the interactions between your fellow players invoke this, mostly through the shocked reactions of the others. Examples include Tycho waxing lyrical about giraffes, or Heavy Weapons Guy's Engineer story.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a bit of this.
    • You can pick "funny'" dialogue options in even the most serious scenes, which tend to make Serah look like a ditz.
    • You can give your monsters absurd accessories, resulting in things like a massive, intimidating Behemoth wearing an Idea Bulb over its head.
  • Final Fantasy XIV allows for a lot of this as well. Even if you ignore the possibility of wearing silly and mood-breaking outfits into cutscenes, even in the most grim of circumstances regarding the story, the objective markers and descriptions for items will never drop their tendency to snark and poke holes in just about everything. Standout instances include the fate of Minfillia's father - mentioned almost in passing on the description of a journal from one quest as having been trampled to death in a "tragic" accident involving a goobbue breaking loose from a circus, only for later story developments to, with more seriousness, confirm that's actually how he died - and the quest "Bring Out Your Dead" (itself an example just from what they chose to name it after) where, shortly after you've returned to the Scions' headquarters being ransacked and everyone appears to have been captured or killed, the game has this to say about the corpses you're asked to drag out to take to a graveyard:
    (Noraxia's corpse) The sylph's peaceful expression belies the fact she no longer lives.
    (the other seven corpses) How you are able to fit this stiff Scion of the Seventh Dawn corpse into your bag is a mystery best left unsolved.
• The "Milkman Conspiracy" level of Psychonauts is loaded with this. Almost everyone you meet is a trenchcoat-clad secret agent in some sort of Paper-Thin Disguise (actually, no disguise; they're simply holding different objects: stop signs for a "road crew worker," hedge trimmers for a gardening husband/father, etc.) and most of the things they say to maintain the facade are Played for Laughs. Every once in a while, however, you'll hear them spout a line that would be pretty pathetic, even devastating, in other circumstances. "Over time, my husband will desire me less, sexually," says the rolling pin-toting "housewife." "Why, God? Why?" says the "grieving widow." It all stays relatively light, given the amusing context, but the tragedy subtext is there and it's fairly difficult to miss, especially since the level is a Journey to the Center of the Mind of an asylum-bound paranoid schizophrenic whose mental instability is being exploited to villainous ends.
• Both Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends have music that is deliberately made funny rather than epic, thanks to some of the...unusual instrument choices. Origins has a kazoo during the track "Shooter" as well as "Lums of the Water", a genuinely catchy jazz song...sung by the Lums (who sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks). In addition to including the aforementioned tracks, Legends has someone whistling along with the melody on almost every song.
• Perfect Dark. Aside from using cheat codes to, for example, give everyone big heads in this spy thriller, there's also the fact that every level has a hidden noncollectable wedge of cheese, even at the bottom of the ocean floor and on an alien planet.
• Both Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair like to pack the series' executions with as much ridiculous and Black Comedy-ridden imagery as possible. None of this detracts from the fact that one of the major characters just died, often in a very horrible manner.
• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: In addition to the Black Comedy of the executions, the fourth chapter's murder investigation is one long string of this. On the one hand, you have a suprisingly brutal method of death (slow strangulation) and one of the most tearjerking explanations for the murder in the series. On the other hand, the murder takes place inside a Virtual Reality simulation where everyone has Super-Deformed chibi-like avatars (which is constantly shown in flashbacks during the investigation and trial), and the murder weapon is an indestructable roll of toilet paper. The apparent silliness of the situation only underscores how emotionally taxing the whole ordeal is for everyone.
• Undertale is mostly silly, but can be this depending on how you play it.
  • A Genocide run, for instance, is a straight-up tragic borderline Cosmic Horror Story (and you are the Eldritch Abomination). A Pacifist Run is mostly lighthearted, but it has its own tearjerkers and one extremely dark and horrifying section with the True Lab. A Neutral run is ridden with this if you do decide to kill some monsters. Maybe you laughed at Papyrus' antics and spared him, but then battled Undyne and decided to kill her in self-defense... and then had to bear witness to this.
  • Even the Genocide run has its own darkly humorous moments, such as your conversation with Burgerpants, or the fact that after killing almost everyone in horrific ways, the Fallen Child wants some chocolate.
• The Legend of Zelda has always had some sort of bathos involved, ever since Link's Awakening. It's most evident in cutscenes:
  • In Majora's Mask, there's a scene where you encounter a dying Zora just off the coast of the beach. You push him to shore where he tells you how pirates had stolen his girlfriend's eggs and he tried to get them back but he was mortally wounded and is close to death. However, the way he tells his story is to get up and rock out on his electric guitar. After he's done, he promptly keels over and dies.
  • Another one is in The Wind Waker: Here, Link places the last of the goddess pearls he's collected up to that point in an ancient statue. At first it seems like it's about to explode but then it stops for a moment. Just as Link thinks it's okay to get close, it promptly explodes and launches him off the island. However, the statue also causes the Tower of The Gods to emerge from the waves. It's as majestic as it sounds... Until Link splats himself against the side of the rising structure.
  • Twilight Princess: at one point, you find yourself in an abandoned village, having been tasked to kill 20 Bulblins (orc-like creatures) in a western-style shoot-out in order to save the last resident (an elderly lady). This particular scene is also accompanied by a western soundtrack. Later on, you're given a similar task that's accompanied by the same music piece. This time however, you're tasked with talking to and befriending 20 of the old lady's cats.
• Susume! Bakabons, a Falling Blocks Licensed Game with Tensai Bakabon characters, has a creepy cutscene to introduce the first opponent, with pen-and-ink images of a creepy-looking woodland cottage and ominous music gradually quickening and building to a scream as the camera brings into focus... the street-sweeping screwball Lelele no Ojisan. The Gratuitous English intertitles, despite spoiling the twist early by including the character's catchphrase, capture the sequence's spirit:
  Scream from the DARK FOREST
  Walking in the BLOODY NIGHT
  This cottage is .... MYSTERIOUS
  Are you going out? LeLeLe NOLE!
• Star Stealing Prince has a sad if not outright tragic story, with terrifying bosses... who you can fight while wearing a beautiful red bow in your hair. Yes, even the guys. Bonus points for making serious and solemn Hiante wear it.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a grim horror game that only gets darker once you discover your character has been torturing innocent people at Alexander's urging. But then there's the diary entry when he describes the actual torture and mocks his victims' pleas for mercy, complete with a (probably-anachronistic) sing-songy "Myeh myeh myeh". It's kind of hard to keep a straight face through that.
• A trailer for Marvel Strike Force has a voice-over by a SHIELD combat medic, who is riding in a quinjet with Captain America, Elektra, Thor, and Drax, while Cap is performing maneuvers to evade enemy missiles. The voice-over makes the unnamed medic sound like a Badass Normal, who prepares to go into a hot zone alongside the others, despite lacking in special weapons or godlike powers. Then the ramp is lowers, he takes a step... and gets shot. Cue Drax laughing and pointing.
  Medic: I didn't go to medical school to be a hero, and I didn't enlist in SHIELD to save the world. I'm not like my teammates: no magic hammer, no ninja sai, no special shield. But we do have one thing in common: we made a choice, a choice to fight for what's right, to answer when humanity calls. Am I a hero? No. But today, I choose to— (shot and falls down the ramp comically)
  Drax: (points) Hah! He should not have gone first!
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The Enemy Within expansion, you can give a Cyborg soldier who had his limbs chopped off to fit in a Mini-Mecha battle suit a fedora straight from The '50s. It looks pretty hilarious.
• Graveyard Keeper has the Holy Inquisitor and his witch burnings. While his hunting down, torturing, and executing women who may or may not be innocent is treated as seriously and as grimly as it should be, his asking you to make flyers to advertise, and burgers and beer to sell during it is played for some EXTREMELY dark laughs. Bonus points if you made the meat using flesh from corpses.
• The Binding of Isaac is a very, very, oppressively grim and bleak game wherein a naked, terrified child delves deeper and deeper into his basement while being pursued by his homocidal mother and battled grotesque, mutated monsters, collecting power-ups that slowly mutilate and warp your character, and depending on the playthrough even breaking through into Hell itself, while there's not a single happy ending in the entire game, only increasingly more tragic ones the further you go. The game's also chock full of memes, Toilet Humor, and some of the abominations you have to fight are oddly adorable.
• The Like a Dragon series is steeped in bathos. Every game has a deadly serious Heroic Bloodshed main story, full of murder, passion, betrayal, intrigue, strong themes of father- and brotherhood, and muscle-bound hunks getting into fights to the death that are as much expressions of conviction, loyalty and commitment to ideals as they are brutal, bloody, knock-down, drag-out slugfests. In between story beats, your character goes off and does silly mundane things like sing karaoke, bowl, race slot cars, go fishing, play mahjong and help every weirdo in Tokyo with their dumb problems.
  • In Judgment, Yagami discovers the corpse of his horrifically murdered friend, Shintani, in a wardrobe in his office. But at the same time, a voicemail message is playing on Yagami's phone where Shintani introduces himself using a blatant, laughable Ace Attorney reference.
  • One side story in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth involves you having to help an old man make it appear to be snowing for his terminally ill wife before she passes away, because she wants to be reminded of their honeymoon in her last moments. To do so, you enlist the help of the Gondawara family, grown men roleplaying as infant children, complete with wearing diapers, and they don't bother to dress formally for such a serious job.
• While the Mass Effect series has a lot of both very grim stories and some light-hearted humor, Mass Effect 3 cranks up both. On the one hand, it's about the Reapers finally arriving, harvesting organic life by the billions, turning their own people to their way of thinking, death, destruction, tragedy, grief, sadness, and no end to the amount of grief inflicted on the galaxy. At the same time it's also one of the most side-splittingly funny entries, being referential, self-aware, and milking every possible character interaction/combination for all they're worth, adding some much-need levity to it all.
• This is what makes the One Night at Flumpty's games stand out among other such Five Nights at Freddy's Follow the Leader type games. It doesn't take itself even remotely seriously, the author has admitted he's consciously avoided having any serious lore or continuity beyond an Excuse Plot, the main antagonist is a Winnie the Pooh-sounding anthropomorphic egg, and it goes out of it's way to be as goofy as possible... while also heaping on genuine scares, gore, body horror, tension, and difficulty. Flumpty and his friends end up being outright Eldritch Abominations that are every bit as silly as they are terrifying.
• The Dead Rising series milks this for everything it's worth. It combines goofy over-the-top action-hero shenanigans, using everything from axes and firearms to benches and dildos as weapons, and being able to wear whatever the hell you want... with genuinely scary and oppressive zombie horror, protagonists who take everything deadly serious, and Anvilicious themes about how Humans Are the Real Monsters played somberly straight. Add some psychopaths who are every bit as silly and goofy as they are threatening and murderous, and somehow the whole thing gels into an incredibly memorable experience that careens wildly from hilarious to frightening and back without ever once feeling like anything is out of place. Just to name one example, you meet Brent Ernst in Dead Rising 2 who is devastated his Love Interest was killed, blames you for starting the outbreak, and delivers his lines with intense devotion and sincerity. This would be quite tragic... if he and his love interest's corpse weren't dressed like bobble-headed children's mascots and he didn't delusionally remain in-character as "Slappy", complete with a plastic cartoon head that muffles his voice, as he attacked you with water-pistols on roller-skates. Now that would completely undermine him as a threat... if the roller-skates didn't give him insanely lethal mobility and the water-pistols hadn't been modified into flame throwers. Cap it off with an Alas, Poor Villain scene completely ruined by Slappy signing off like the character he plays on TV... and you have a pretty typical Dead Rising boss fight.
• Choo-Choo Charles: The game is very much aware of how ridiculous its premise is and at times runs with it. Some mission names and NPCs can be downright ridiculous.^note The first mission name is called 'Baby's first Mission' and there's an NPC who is downright obsessed with pickles. That said, whenever dealing with Charles or the cult (as well as a certain side quest involving finding and collecting eight illustrated pages), the game will remind you why it's classified as horror.
• South Park: The Stick of Truth and South Park: The Fractured but Whole both run on this. On one hand, they're incredibly silly, look and sound just like an episode of the show, involve a bunch of kids LARPing, and constantly nonsensically blur the lines between what's real and what's just pretend. At the same time the kids take themselves deadly seriously, there actually are serious threats and consequences to be dealt with, the music is more epic than most serious games, and both are very competently made RPGs with indepth mechanics involving buffing, debuffing, item management, and a lot of tactical decisions beyond just "level up and button mash".

Web Animation

• The Cyanide & Happiness Show makes one of its primary gags out of introducing utterly ludicrous characters and concepts for the sake of a skit, and then keeping the skit going and pushing the initially stupid idea into some kind of actual drama. For instance, one episode features a lucha libre named El Reverso who does everything in reverse, with gags about him having his victory announced immediately upon his announcement, before he performs bizarre inverted wrestling moves on his opponent and walks backward out of the ring... and then the rest of the episode is focused on his decaying relationship with his wife and their inability to connect due to him speaking backward, culminating in a genuinely-played moment of reconnection when he manages to intelligibly tell her he loves her. Then El Reverso sticks around, appearing in multiple other skits, culminating in him managing to pull a Heroic Sacrifice by pushing a villain backwards in time to his youth as he himself ages into nothing.
• Some humour in GEOWeasel is derived from the combination of Weas's goal of world domination and the zany antics of his crew, such as when he carries weapons and a copy of Nickelodeon Magazine in the same bag.
• Helluva Boss: Maybe the most obvious example — though hardly the only one given the show's tone — is in "Exes and Oohs", when Crimson sends Moxxie away with a dire threat give more weight by the incredibly dark flashback of what had happened between them before... and then the view shows Crimson sitting surrounded by all the colourful dildos in the walls that he had installed as a mocking welcome for Moxxie, since Moxxie is "gay" (actually bisexual).
• In The Movie for The Thwomps, the two characters from the titular Mario species are able to defeat Bowser. Just before finishing him off... the movie parodies Tetris, using the Thwomps as Tetris blocks.

Webcomics

• Homestuck uses this very frequently, often in conjunction with Mood Whiplash. John makes a dramatic and somewhat Mind Screw-y discovery about his and his best friends' parentage—and then he uses the event to reenact the ending scene of one of his favorite movies. Scenes of well-loved characters dying are accompanied by shots of the dead body landing on a pile of bike horns, or references to an intentionally-bad comic-within-the-comic, or simply a blunt Unsound Effect "DEAD".
• In Paradox Space (a Spin-Off of Homestuck), the story "Indemnity Double Reacharound" features an extremely dark and gritty art style, a story involving a murder... and all the characters are brightly colored dragons with names like "Pumpkinsniffle" and "Berrybreath", odd Alternian words used in a serious way, and one of the characters speaks using slang that feels completely out of place in the Film Noir setting.
• A big part of the hero's personality in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! is that he responds this way to almost everything. A robot lion chases Bob around his yard, and his only complaint is it kicked over the pile of leaves he'd just raked. Spaceships keep crashing into his roof, and he wonders if other people put up screens to avoid this. He calms paranormal beings by sitting them down to eat some cheesecake or microwave pizza. He shows an alien conqueror that his whole motivation is flawed, and suggests he find a new hobby, like sudoku. And many other examples.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja has quite a bit of this, as one ludicrous situation after another is played dead serious, complete with lingering consequences. The author expressed how continually amused he was by the fact that the ninja hero would go always chasing after the fantastic menace of the week in his car... a very dull-looking Honda Accord.
• Digger runs on bathos. The most heart-rending and hilarious example being just after Ed's death, Digger is rescued by two lizards lighting their way with a bug on a stick.
• Used often in El Goonish Shive, especially during the Painted Black storyline.
• Questionable Content often adds comedic interludes to serious plotlines about the characters' lives, aided by the World of Snark cast. Lampshaded when Faye deals with The "I Love You" Stigma by getting sloppily drunk, is accidentally punched in the face, and is stuck stanching a nosebleed while she talks things out.
  Marten: [snrk] Sorry, sorry, it's really hard to have a serious conversation when you're all stuffy-sounding.
  Faye: I do lag a cerdain grabitas ad the mobent.
• The Little Trashmaid frequently runs on this, as it mixes the horrifiyingly sad displays of the contamination of the ocean while at the same time showing the adorably ditzy main character finding original uses for said trash.

Web Original

• Daywalt Horror likes to employ this as a way to change up their usual thing.
  • In "Meat", two rural men are driving a truck and talking about what to do with the thing they just hit and had loaded into the back, revealing halfway through that said thing was actually a Magical Talking Unicorn.
  • In "Vergel Geroth", it features a necromancer reading a spell from The Necronomicon, with a monster rising up in the background as he reads it, eagerly waiting to pounce... only for the summoner to pause and try to puzzle out the pronunciation of the last section. With the monster looking on in exasperation.
• Cancer? Not funny. Clown with cancer? Hilarious.
• Bathos is the engine upon which The Onion runs. Mundane events made to sound newsworthy describes a great deal of the content. It's also frequently used by its sister site, ClickHole.

Web Videos

• According to James Rolfe, this is what makes his Angry Video Game Nerd character work. He has explained how he makes a conscious effort to have the character take himself and the subject matter deadly seriously, while he "reviews" video games that are around 40 years old, overuses vulgarity and Toilet Humor, and utterly refuses to have any "important" topics like politics or current events. Doing things like powering up with Powered Armor made of NES accessories to destroy games, having to battle characters like Jason Vorhees and Bugs Bunny in order to review their games, having a torture chamber in his basement to punish bad games, and in one occurrence throwing his copy of Green Dog in REAL LAVA... just to pointlessly complain about games that have been out of print for decades is where all the humor of the character really comes from.
• Several highly climatic and emotional scenes on the Dream SMP have taken place near some fairly vulgar structures, including and not limited to a floating sign that said the word "CRY"^note It was first built by Tommy during the Election Arc to read "POG2020", but it got vandalized by the party's political opponents to read "ASS2020", then Eret changes it to "POGTOPIA" to show their support for La Résistance after Tyrant Takes the Helm in (L')Manburg, and finally Quackity gets rid of it on Schlatt's orders and rebuilds it to read "CRY" as a nod to the Manburg motto of telling people to "Cry about it". The floating sign has since been blown up by Tommy on his 17th birthday stream, another floating sign that said "YOU 💔 LITTLE PENIS"^note It used to say "I ❤️ ANDREA", but it got griefed several times over the months, and multiple penis statues.
• This is one of the entertaining aspects of Internet Historian, who talks about the utterly bizarre and hilariously goofy things that have happened on the internet with a calm, soothing, and utterly delicious sophisticated accent, and calmly go from speaking in an erudite way to using trashy slang and swearing without so much as skipping a beat. Even when he talks about rather serious events, like the Costa Concordia disaster, he's right there to lighten the mood with silliness like Metal Gear Solid music during the play-by-play of the sinking, or playing Ave Maria while plates of ravioli spaghetti go flying when the ship hits the rocks.
• The Jerry Seinfeld Program is a Deconstructive Parody of Seinfeld that gets progressively more bizarre, horrible, and absurdist... but the victims of this cruel universe are Jerry and George from Seinfeld.
• In Episode 7 of Meme House, Bulk Bogan is suddenly murdered by his friend. Due to the nature of the series, everything leading up to, surrounding, and following the event is this.
• Discussed near the end of this video, which points out that many attempts at bathos in modern cinema end up simply becoming badly-applied comic relief instead, because so many writers insist on shoehorning gags or snark into scenes that are supposed to be dramatic. As noted on the Angst? What Angst? page, using humor as a tension-breaker isn't always the best thing to do, since building and holding tension are frequently good things in storytelling, and humor can ruin them just as easily.

Western Animation

• In the pilot episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), Fuzzy Lumpkins accidentally pushes Bubbles' Berserk Button by hitting her hair with his transformative meat gun. What comes next is Bubbles delivering a vicious, prolonged beat-down on Fuzzy Lumpkins, while one of her pigtails is a chicken drumstick.
• In The Cleveland Show episode "Gone with the Wind", Cleveland is informed of the sudden death of his ex-wife Loretta. His sad sigh is immediately followed by a very similar sounding fart, the result of a high-fiber diet that has left him gassy all episode.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog played this trope like a maestro conducting a symphony. While it could easily be both tragic and terrifying at times, one of its most weirdly haunting scenes comes in the climax of "Human Habitrail" where a wacky, cartoonish chase scene on boats is scored by a heartbreakingly beautiful One-Woman Wail. It really must be seen to be believed.
• Family Guy uses bathos to fuel its "chicken fights." They start as fight scenes that wouldn't be out of place in your average summer blockbuster, and only increase in scope from there thanks to Serial Escalation… and they all involve Peter, an obese man who shouldn't be able to pull off half the stunts he does, getting in a huge, epic battle against a man-sized chicken for giving him an expired coupon.
• Futurama:
  • The Farnsworth Parabox has Farnsworth warning near the end: "Everything that ever was, is, and will be is contained in this box, and the actual box is probably worth something as well."
  • Future Stock: Near the end of the episode, "That Guy", the yuppie from the '80s with boneitis, finally succumbs to the disease in a sequence that would typically qualify as a Body Horror, except that it purposefully looks so utterly ridiculous, and that he was such a creep who brought it on himself by buying and liquidating the one company working on a cure in the '80s.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "The Return of Harmony, Part 2", Twilight Sparkle is pushed over the Despair Event Horizon by the failure of the Elements of Harmony, and sadly trudges back to the library in defeat... while thanks to Discord's influence, various ridiculous things happen around her, like pies falling upwards and ballet-dancing buffalo prancing by. It manages to be both funny and tragic at the same time.
  • "Luna Eclipsed" sees the Mayor of Ponyville using a spooky voice... only for her clown costume to utterly kill the effect. Lampshaded by Spike.
  • In "It's About Time", Twilight Sparkle's dead-serious proclamation of incoming doom comes close to being ignored due to the Groucho Marx glasses she's wearing due to a collision with a metric ton of party-supplies.
  • In "Equestria Games", Pinkie Pie was the only one in the crowd who enjoyed Spike's poor rendition of the Cloudsdale Anthem (he thought the Ponyville one would play); once the crowd goes into about six seconds of Stunned Silence before the commercial break, Pinkie cheerfully shouts, "NAILED IT!!!"
  • "The Mean Six" ends with the clones of the protagonists being graphically killed on-screen, in a scene that actually had to be toned down before release for being too brutal, in front of Queen Chrysalis while she rants about betrayal and revenge... and then abruptly cuts to the real ponies laughing about how it's the "worst day ever" and chipperly declaring they can do anything if they work together.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • This supplies one of the series' most memorable jokes:
  Sokka: My first girlfriend turned into the moon.
  Zuko: [unfazed] That's rough, buddy.
  • And caps off one of its most touching scenes:
  Zuko: How could you forgive me so easily? I thought you'd be furious with me.
  Iroh: I was never angry with you, Zuko. I was sad, because I was afraid you had lost your way.
  Zuko: I did lose my way.
  Iroh: But you found it again. And you did it by yourself. And I am so happy you found your way here.
  Zuko: It wasn't that hard, Uncle. You have a pretty strong scent.
• The Simpsons has always displayed a mastery of playing this trope for comedy:
  • In episode "Homer Loves Flanders" Bart tricks Homer into buying what he thinks are tickets to a highly-anticipated football game, only to find that he had actually bought a wig store coupon. He wildly careens from elated, to furious, to contemplative, to giddy, before finally settling on possibly aroused. This takes place over the course of about ten seconds. In the DVD Commentary, the show's staff discuss Homer's wild mood swings, coming to the conclusion that the character's ability to immediately return to a default-jolly state from any other emotional state is one of his most endearing qualities. They also observe that Homer, more than any other male main character in probably all of fiction, will burst into tears at the drop of a hat.
  • Several jokes over the years have taken a short break from a silly situation to mine Lisa's developing major depressive disorder for comedy. Usually, it's quickly acknowledged and followed by an awkward Beat, after which immediately returns to business-as-usual. An example from "Simpson and Delilah":
    Homer: And what does my little girl want?
    Lisa: An absence of mood swings and some stability in my life.
    Homer: G'uih, I... How about a pony?
    Lisa: [cheerfully] Okay!
  • In "Radio Bart", Bart is stuck down a well, but nobody wants to help him out on account of a dirty trick he played on them, and tearfully laments about the stuff he'll never do, like smoking a cigarette, having a fake ID and shaving a swear word onto the back of his head.
• Gravity Falls:
  • It is heavily implied that Pacifica was reared under some Pavlovian conditioning and seemingly obeys everything her father says at the ring of a bell. Cut to the hilarious complaint of her father when due to Character Development the bell doesn't work anymore.
    Preston Northwest: Dingly dingly! Is this bell broken?
    Pacifica: Our family name is broken! AND I'M GONNA FIX IT!
  • The epic and tragic Heroic Sacrifice of Big Henry in "The Golf War" is played for as much heartbreaking drama as humanly possible, even though it's the death of a golf ball gnome sacrificing himself so Mabel can get a hole-in-one.
• "Son of Stimpy" in The Ren & Stimpy Show revolves around Stimpy farting, then trying to prove to Ren that "Stinky" (the fart) "is not a fantasy! He IS real!" ^note "And I will find him!, only to find that the fart is gone, and he gets depressed over it.^note In other words, the episode really is that stupid, even by the show's standards. While still primarily a comedy, the entire premise of this episode is Played for Drama. John Kricfalusi did this on purpose, to demonstrate how "fake pathos" could substitute for real emotional development in any kind of work^note "And I didn't have to shoot anyone's mom, either", he once said on his blog., live-action or animated.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack is pretty much fueled by this trope. To quote the creator himself:
  Thurop van Orman: Comedy, or at least the kind of comedy I like, are the ones that make you feel a bit uncomfortable and then hit you with a great joke.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes had at least a few of these owing to the deliberately goofy looking art and animation, such as the end of "Rad Likes Robots", where Shannon breaks off her relationship with Radicles by marching out of frame behind the factory and exploding. Sad as it is, the sequence is intentionally rendered in such a kooky, two framed fashion it's hard not to giggle at the same time.
• BoJack Horseman is a famously tragic exploration of depression, repentance, and the perils of fame, among other heavy subjects. The cast is also halfway made of Funny Animals and filled to the brim with sight gags and puns related to that. Characters will often have deep discussions of their darkest feelings and complex relationships while in the middle of some ridiculous project or heist.
• Most kids' shows with a horror aesthetic are this by default, so as not to actually scare the target audience. See Scooby-Doo, Ruby Gloom, and Beetlejuice for examples.
• Rick and Morty has the infamous scene where King Jellybean attempts to rape Morty in a filthy bar bathroom. It's played disturbingly and uncomfortably straight, ends in a gruesome beating from Morty as he desperately escapes and ends up broken and traumatized, and even Rick is so repulsed by it he comforts Morty and murders the king without a second thought. That said, King Jellybean is a literal anthropomorphic cartoon jellybean who, pedophile tendancies aside, would look right at home in an episode of the Care Bears, making it simultaneously one of the silliest and most disturbing moments in the entire series.
• Love, Death & Robots: "Night of the Mini Dead" is a short about a Zombie Apocalypse acted out by squeaky-voiced miniatures.
• Codename: Kids Next Door pretty much runs on this trope, as while the stakes usually are extremely high and the danger is very often real, but it's hard to take seriously when every single threat is a blown-up childhood dislike or fear. "Operation I.T" is among the worst of it as the massive threat that is threatening to destroy the Kids Next Door and is pretty much holding every single operative other than Numbuhs 1 and 362 captive...are massive stocks of broccoli.
• This is what makes Samurai Jack so memorable. It has all the humor, comedic timing, and sometimes even plots and physics of a Saturday morning cartoon, and yet it also has fairly serious plots, fights with serious stakes, deep characters, and even deaths and Downer Endings. Even the villain Aku manages to simultaneously be a complete goof who once kidnapped children to tell them Fractured Fairy Tales about Jack so they'd like him instead, and also a being of pure evil who murders, enslaves, and tortures millions just for kicks, all the while voiced by Mako who tosses Large Ham, No-Nonsense Nemesis, and Cerebus Roller Coaster around like juggling balls. Sometimes the villain of the episode is a hillbilly pig sherrif who talks in vaguely Suthern sounding nonsense, and sometimes the villain of the episode is a retired killer robot who developed emotions, found peace, was forced to hunt Jack because Aku is holding his beloved dog Lulu hostage, and is killed in the end by Jack who assumed he was just another killer robot. Even individual episodes do this, such as with the Clenches simultaneously being among the most dangerous foes Jack ever faced while they argue about their messy divorce and Zeke's restraining order against Josephine, or Scaramouche slaughtering an entire village just to get Jack's attention only to attack him with a knife controlled by scatting.
• Watch either Batman: The Animated Series or Justice League with Closed Captioning on Netflix and you're in for a treat. Whoever was responsible for them felt it necessary to actually spell out sound-effects, which can take serious or intense action scenes and render them hilarious instead when you see "pew pew pew" or "badabadabada" instead of the typical (laser sounds) or (helicopter flying overhead) you'd see on most other shows.

---