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Similar to the Deadpan Snarker routine but without the emotional range. These are gags sneaked into the middle or ends of conversation without changes in inflection or pacing. The delivery should be matter-of-fact, not sarcastic (usually). For obvious reasons, the more outstanding or shocking the statement, the better.
The point is to move the conversation to the next subject before the audience has time to react to what just happened. This can help make a Dead Baby Comedy more palatable by pretending the Dude, Not Funny! jokes never occurred. Did you just hear what you thought you did? No, don't be silly. We're talking about something else now. These aren't the jokes you're looking for. Move along.
Pretty much the antithesis to using a Laugh Track. Compare Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, Distracting Disambiguation and Rapid-Fire Comedy.
Examples:
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Advertisements
- Vince Offer, of the Shamwow and Slap-Chop ads, uses this a fair bit.
- "Here's a hard-boiled egg, one chop, you add the pickle, you add the green onion, and what you can do is you can mix things together, you add the ham, and you're gonna love this... You don't have to make breakfast, breakfast to go. You're gonna love my nuts. Watch this."
- "Fettuccine, linguine, martini, bikini" (things that you can use the Graty for)
- "Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. I'm on a horse."
- A recent series of commercials for the Orbitz travel website seem to be taking after the Old Spice commercials. "With Orbitz, I know what to expect from my vacation. Bless you; cannonball."
Anime and Manga
Films
- One of the signatures of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker style of parody, its seen throughout Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and the Abrahams series Hot Shots!. Sometimes, the other participant follows them down this road a bit and then they swerve it back into the main conversation with no net effect.
Ramada: I didn't want to, Topper, but I had to, it was a sequel.
Ramada: Oh Topper, you're just using this whole casting thing to distract from what's really bothering you.
- Woody Allen's Sleeper:
Miles: I'm a nice person! I have healthy life drives and good goals. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I would never force myself sexually on a blind person.
- In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Raoul Duke uses a great one amidst his generally meandering internal monologue:
Duke: I was a relatively respectable citizen — a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.
- Julia Roberts delivers a beaut in Notting Hill.
Anna: I'm sure you meant no harm, and I'm sure it was all just friendly banter and I'm sure you all have dicks the size of peanuts. Enjoy your meal the tuna's really good.
Live Action Television
- Happens continuously throughout Arrested Development. A prime example:
Barry Zuckercorn: Oh, I could kiss you on the [bleep].
Michael: Yeah, fine — What!?
- On The Colbert Report, Stephen discussed the possibility of a giant space spider merging with his DNA (It Makes Sense in Context) having "Stephen Colbert's cunning and taste for human flesh"; in the midst of such a crazy monologue, you could blink and miss that.
- On Scrubs:
The Todd: Doctor Turk should be chief because he's skilled technically, he's super efficient, he's got an awesome dong, he's great with laparoscopic procedures, uh, patients love him—
Dr. Cox: (whistles sharply) What was that middle one?
The Todd: Laparoscopic?
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Season 10 finale:
Liz Donnelly: I can't believe that son of a bitch had the nerve to come after me! You pull him out of that jail cell, don't bother bringing him to Court! I want to kick his ass myself!! You didn't hear any of that.
- Firefly has Simon give a very calm explanation to Jayne that despite the latter's behavior toward the Tams "he is always safe" on Simon's operating table. After he leaves, River follows up with "Also I can kill you with my brain."
- Couldn't nearly anything River says fit into this trope?
- During a flashback to Reverend Jim's straitlaced college days on Taxi, his girlfriend tries to hide the special brownie ingredient this way.
Jim: Now come on, Heather, what's in the brownies?
Heather: Sugar, eggs, chocolate, marijuana, flour, and walnuts.
- In Season 3 of 24, Tony is interrogating Nina Myers. After he finishes demanding the information they need on Marcus Alvers, whom it became obvious that she knew quite well despite her claims, she replies, "Your neck is bleeding".
- The Saturday Night Live character Mr. Subliminal (played by Kevin Nealon) hinged on rapid firing of these into a normal monologue.
- Brittany from Glee is made of this trope.
Music
- They Might Be Giants' They'll Need A Crane:
Don't call me at work again no no the boss still hates me
I'm just tired and I don't love you anymore
And there's a restaurant we should check out where
The other nightmare people like to go
Tabletop Games
- In these sorts of games, the sourcebooks being text-based as they are and thus subject to the speed of the reader, these are usually meant to be obscured in the middle of the text and only caught on a careful read-through, and may even need referencing to make sure.
- For example, in describing a particular series of overly-chatty droid, one of the commentators in Star Wars Saga Edition's Scavenger's Guide to Droids, the supervisor droid who has worked with a wide variety of model, casually notes that she had to rip out its vocoder to get it to shut up. She also comments on how a particular droid of another model that failed its master would have been turned inside out by her. This is explained if you paid attention to the text and saw that she was an EV-series droid, a supervisor droid model detailed in the book, described as having a number of units accidentally getting a torture droid's motivator installed. (The head of Jabba's droid retinue in Return of the Jedi was an EV-series droid.)
- The West End Games' Imperial Sourcebook has a bit in the fluff describing the myriad problems that occurred in getting the first Star Destroyers built. "The Navy loved it, of course, and through a combination of bribes, political pressure, and a rash of mysteriously-crushed tracheas, it slowly brought others into line."
- Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Dungeons Masters guide has this one from a table of '100 random traits' "No sense of humor, see #24". Of course, the list only contains 99 items. Guess which one is missing.
- The Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook contains a very long list of powers. One of these powers, called "Deja Vu," is listed once in its proper placement alphabetically, and again a couple of pages later (still in the D's, so it is quite possible, while skimming through, to think neither is out of place).
Video Games
- GlaDOS from Portal. By the time you figure out what she just said, you're stuck in the middle of another Death Trap.
- Cake and grief counseling?
Web Original
- Zero Punctuation consists largely of this trope.
- When The Nostalgia Chick reviewed Disney's Pocahontas, of course there's a point where she mentions some of the discrepancies between the movie and actual history: "...and needless to say, he (John Smith) was a short, portly brown-head, not the golden-haired Adonis that we see before us in the movie. Also, Pocahontas was twelve."
- Pretty much everything out of Raocow's mouth is this. He just rambles and doesn't stop, and it often results in some very, very bizarre Let's Play commentary.
Western Animation
- Family Guy, and Seth MacFarlane shows in general, are well-known for this.
- Danny Phantom has a few examples. Here's an exchange from the episode Maternal Instinct, where in one scene, Vlad is attempting to convince Maddie to ditch Jack:
Maddie: Wait, what was that last part?
Vlad: The backwash incident?
Maddie: No, before that.
Vlad: Causing the accident that ruined my life?
Maddie: (frustrated) IN. THE. MIDDLE.
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