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alt title(s): Crossing The Line Twice 
You might want to play a different game, guys...
Rayne: I crossed the line there, didn't I?
Noel: You told the line to go fuck itself. Then got its mom pregnant. Then aborted the resulting baby.
"At first it was funny, then it just got sad, but then it got funny again..."
"Pain is funny. Therefore, more pain must be even funnier!" Thus goes the logic in a lot of comedy shows and a few adult cartoons. Sadly, that's not the case. The line separating The Three Stooges-style painful fun from outright villainous squicky sadism varies from person to person but is definitely there; crossing it makes one man's "Nyuk nyuk!" another man's Guilty Pleasures.
However, if a show goes far enough with its violence, it may end up crossing the line not once but twice, as it goes around the planet and crosses it again. This second crossing takes the violence from sick back to funny in its ridiculous extremes. Similar to So Bad Its Good, but done quite intentionally.
This isn't as easy as it sounds. Shows attempting to be Darker And Edgier with their humor this way straddle the line between sadism and comedy, and it's easy to make a mistake and fall on the wrong side of the S.S. Tightrope. Rather than cross the line a second time, the show makes a wrong turn at Albuquerque and breaks the audience's Willing Suspension Of Disbelief. Some people just don't have a second line to cross in their minds, and will dislike any turn into sadism or vulgarity.
This can also apply to things other than violence for funny's sake. Some shows go over the top with action in order to make a scene cooler. Others go so far over the top that it shatters the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief like so many windows in an episode of The A Team. Others take the over the top so over the top that what was before unbelievable garbage is now heart-wrenching, adrenaline rushing, undiluted AWESOME. Of course this form of the trope is just as subjective as the last, so be careful what you put down as an example.
See also Black Comedy, Dead Baby Comedy, Refuge In Audacity, Dude Not Funny, Refuge In Vulgarity, Bloody Hilarious. Part of the Sliding Scale Of Comedy And Horror.
For the (mostly) nonvulgar variant, see Overly Long Gag.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Hellsing. Nuff' said.
- The anime Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan bases much of its comedy on brutal and over-the-top violence.
- Similar to Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, the animé Dai Mahou Touge relishes in the protagonist's sheer brutality in applying wrestling submission maneuvers for much of its comedy. This is contrasted with the fact that she usually acts like the typical sweet Magical Girl (whose spells cause just about as much havoc...)
- Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. EVERYTHING about it.
- Most things Gates did in Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid can be classified as this. The biggest of them being the time he danced and bounced around a dead girl's body, using a mech, in front her sister. Added points for his shaking the corpse to try and 'wake it up' and for the body's arm snapping when he shook it too hard.
- Excel Saga: Although on the whole not too bad, but the final episode was entitled "Going Too Far", it was intentionally so violent, obscene, and long (it had a running time 1 minute longer than the standard episode format) that it wasn't allowed on Japanese TV.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a perfect example of the second form of this trope. The world's physics run on pure Rule Of Cool and heaping amounts of emotion. Every episode crosses the line twice, sometimes three or four times.
- In summation, GALAXY. SIZED. MECHS. And you gleefully watch every second of it.
- Baccano!'s Claire Stanfield doesn't cross the line so much as he plays double-dutch with it. In any given episode he appears in, he can come off as over-the-top Badass, disturbingly psychotic, or any combination thereof as many as five or six times depending on the gratuitous amount of Gorn he churns out. Most people end up filing him under Ax Crazy Awesome and call it a day.
- Some would disagree, but Captain Kurotsuchi of Bleach has practically skip roped with the line since the Soul Society arc and comes of as all the more amusing for it.
- One Piece has Boa Hancock literally kick an adorable kitten that happened to be in her way to indicate that she is, in fact, a villain. Later, and after pulling a Heel Face Turn, she kicks a puppy and a baby seal at the same time to turn it into a gag.
- Fullmetal Alchemist: "That's one way of saying it. Another is that I made women and children go boom."
- Hell Teacher Nube: The Buddhist nun who ate mermaid flesh and became immortal, thus becoming The Chew Toy for grisly punishment of all kinds and magnitudes is one thing. But then there's Minki's introduction: annoyed at boys from Doumori Elementary, and feeling particularly vindictive, she turned them all into panties. How to remove the spell? The girls had to wear them. This Is Wrong On So Many Levels that Hiroshi suffers a spectacular breakdown, looping back to heroic and trying to charge back into battle. Yes, that's right. Hot Blooded, heroic panties.
- The ludicrous exposition in Speed Racer does this often and unintentionally.
- Gintama stomps and poops all over the line.
- Mai-chans Daily life is one big crossing of lines, any of the series.
- Hiruma's creative and liberal use of his Hyperspace Arsenal on his teammates (and everyone else) in Eyeshield 21.
Comedians
Comic Books
Film
- LEXX Movies and series are based on this trope. Everything always ends with destruction of everything that appears in path of our protagonists. Like in this joke: Stan: That planet is uggly. Lexx, destroy this planet after 1 minute.....(after some bargaining with planet inhabitants) Stan: Ok, cancel my command. BOOOOM.. Lexx: Sorry, what does word cancel means?
- On the other hand, out of all the mischief the crew unwillingly did, this one the only one to haunt Stan, especially the robot on the planet. But while talking about LEXX and the carnage it left behind, let's not forget being responsible for the destruction of countless (they were counted, but I forgot how many) planets AND THEN an entire universe.
- In RoboCop, the prototype ED-209 enforcement drone malfunctions during a demonstration in the OCP boardroom and rips a young exec apart with an extended and OTT heavy machine gun burst, while technicians desperately try to shut it down. Most of the censored versions cut this to a short burst, and make the scene look more clinical and horrifying.
- The joke is further emphasised once the shooting is (finally) over when a single meek voice asks "should we call a medic?"
- Averted, in that respect, in the murder of Alex Murphy (who goes on to become the titular Robo Cop), who is blown to bits with shotguns and then takes a Desert Eagle .50 AE round to the temple.
- However, played intentionally straight in Robo Cop 2, in a scene that is even more disturbing (and hilarious), where two Robo Cop 2 prototypes are rolled out. It is implied that Ommi Consumer Products, the company that created Robo Cop, is purposely putting the best of the best on the police force onto the streets and helping gangsters to kill said police officers in extraordinarily gory manners similar to how Murphy died, in order to make new Robo Cops. Out of the two prototypes that were taken all the way to a final showcasing, one went berserk and shot the scientists in the room before committing suicide, and one pulled off its own helmet, showing little more than a skull and some electronics before collapsing with an unearthly wail. The higher-up viewing videos of the aforementioned facepalms and mutters about the tremendous loss that the two failure represent: "Ninety million [dollars]". Video here
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- The Black Knight scene in Monty Python And The Holy Grail. One severed limb is appalling; four severed limbs is hilarious (the second line in this case probably falls at three). In the Monty Python HBO interview special, they say that's exactly what they were going for. John Cleese said the scene would be heartless and sadistic if not for the fact that the knight shows no pain and doesn't really care what happens.
- They also used humorously gratuitous violence in their sketch "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" (from the TV series), which brought fountains of High Pressure Blood to a picnic scene.
- Although it doesn't involve violence on more than a slapstick level, the naked fight in Borat attempts a version of this trope. Two guys fighting naked in a hotel room is already borderline after nearly a minute, taking it out into the hall is just excessive, sending them charging into a conference room... well, it depends on each viewer where you stopped laughing and whether you started again.
- The intended (and failed) effect of Tom Green's film Freddy Got Fingered. Opinions on the film lie somewhere between "a fit of twisted genius" and "why the hell did I watch this?" Beware, some of the film's more outrageous moments listed below are definetely NSFW. You have been warned:
- In fact, this is a signature of The Joker in almost any media - the one from Tim Burton's Batman made us laugh as he gassed a roomful of people... to music. The Animated Series Joker generally didn't get much of a body count, but funnily blowing up empty buildings (like the hospital from The Dark Knight) was well within his reach, and in The Movie Batman Beyond:Return of the Joker, he makes a few really funny one-liners while revealing that he tortured a child until his identity was broken and believed himself to be the Joker's son. Listing all the sociopathic hilarity that the Joker has unleashed on the world of comics would fill several pages this size.
- In The Dark Knight, Joker blows the line straight to Hell before asking if you want to know how he got those bloody scars.
- Several gags in the film Airplane! are only funny because they manage to cross the line twice.
- "What's this day of rest shit? What's this bullshit? I don't fuckin' care! It don't matter to Jesus. But you're not foolin' me, man. You might fool the fucks in the league office, but you don't fool Jesus. This bush league psyche-out stuff. Laughable, man - ha ha! I would have fucked you in the ass Saturday. I fuck you in the ass next Wednesday instead. Wooo! You got a date Wednesday, baby!"
- "Do you see what happens, Larry, when you FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS?"
- This is why The Proposition's Jellon Lamb is such a delight, especially when he gets to lines like "What is an Irishman but a nigger turned inside out?"
- An overwhelming number of scenes in Peter Jackson's Bad Taste contain slapstick violence taken to a ludicrous extreme.
- "A headshot's the only true stopper!" Cue two point-blank cranium-destroying headshots with a large revolver.
- Same with Dead Alive. Lawnmower + zombies anyone?
- "Riki-Oh", also known as "Story of Ricky", is a movie devoted to this concept, whether or not the makers intended it. Every single fight scene in the movie includes something horrifyingly violent done in such an over-the-top manner that it becomes hilarious. Picking out highlights is hard, but Ricky punching a hole in a fat man's belly, a guy's skull getting smashed like an eggshell, and the one guy trying to strangle Ricky using his own intestines stand out as Memorable Moments.
- Not to mention the scene near the end where Riki pushes an oni into a meat grinder.
- The scene in Team America World Police with the vomiting puppet. The dramatic music takes it over the top.
- Not to mention the sex scene. Just in general.
- The Aristocrats. Any half-decent rendition should cross the line at least a dozen times, in every direction.
- Inglourious Basterds does this a lot, but the most awesome one is the assassination plot, where they bust in, shoot down Hitler with MP 40's, and empty their clips into the body of Joseph Goebbels. Then they reload, and shoot the entire subsequent magazine's worth into Hitler's face.
- Anything by John Waters.
- The maximum bloody Crazy 88 fight scene in Kill Bill Vol 1. At first the blood is a powerful and startling effect. But after a while the ridiculously high pressure and copious volumes of blood from even minor wounds, combined with the sheer number of bodies piling up at The Bride's feet become a source of gory amusement. Note that the high pressure effect was used in O-ren's backstory anime to good dramatic effect.
- Film: The Brother's Grimm - During a torture scene involving a large spinning blade, an adorable white kitten startles the villain's dragon/redeemed villain, who accidently kicks it into the torture device and its guts fly everywhere. The scene is so psychotically funny that I couldn't help but laugh out loud.
Literature
- Nearly the entire output of author Edward Lee was written purely to evoke this trope.
- Candide by Voltaire has horrible things happening to almost all of the characters. Several times one character is forced to flee abandoning others to gruesome deaths. But as they often manage some to survive in some incredibly improbable way as it progresses the horrible events become funny.
Live Action TV
- Strangers With Candy. The episode involving syphilis crossed it three times and wrapped back around to genuinely disturbing when a teenage boy suffered brain damage from the disease and became little more than a lurching zombie.
- Bottom has more than its fair share of these - sometimes feeling like a live-action Tom and Jerry. One episode has Richie chainsawing Eddie's lower legs off...twice.
- The Office is a veritable master of this trope, particularly when in comes to Michael's cluelessness. He often says things that are crushingly painful and way out of line, that slowly become too awkward not to laugh... So Yeah. While the show may not involve actual physical violence for comedic effect, it certainly brings the pain.
- Similarly, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm also crosses the line and goes back again so fast it is dizzying. Weather it be a mistaken erection, or who is the ultimate Survivor he knows how to make the pain into the funny, but doesn't know when to stop.
- Supernatural runs with this trope quite a bit:
- The episode "Wishful Thinking" features a wishing well that grants warped wishes. Aesop aside, one little girl wishes for her teddy bear to be real. What she gets is a giant, hard-drinking, skin-mag-loving bipolar mess who eventually tries to commit suicide by blowing its brains out. Problem: the bear doesn't actually have brains. All you see is a line of stuffing fly through the air accompanied by a gunshot, and the bear starts crying as it realizes that it doesn't have the option of suicide. Your Mileage May Vary.
- The episode "Mystery Spot" is a fan favorite at least partially because of this trope. A being called the Trickster causes the same Tuesday to repeat over and over, each repetition triggered by Dean dying. His first two deaths are horribly depressing, but as Sam's frustration mounts, the comedy and gruesomeness of Dean's deaths rises as well. But, in a fine moment of Mood Whiplash, after the loop is broken, Dean is shot by a mugger (on Wednesday so it's for real), is dead before Sam even gets on the scene, and we're back to the depression.
- The scene in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Hush" where Buffy attempts to mime staking the Gentlemen and ends up miming another action entirely shocked the network, but they kept it in because it was just so damn funny.
- In the first episode of Red Dwarf, Lister's shock at being the sole survivor goes from tragic to funny as he persists in asking about specific people, only to be told that yes, they were counted in "everybody".
- From a scene in Firefly, in which Malcom wins a duel with a truly obnoxious and stuck-up opponent that had it coming:
"Mercy is the mark of a great man." *stabbity* "Guess I'm just a good man." *stabbity* "Well, I'm all right..."
- The there's the whole "Kaylee's dead" form the pilot which Simon sums up best:
Simon: That man's psychotic
- Several of the sketches on Mr Show. Making fun of religious beliefs? That's just stupid and rude. Doing it with America's Funniest Home Video style sound effects and graphics? Hilarious.
- Riffing on the East Coast/West Coast rap fued mere months, maybe even weeks after Tupac's death? WAAYY too soon. Replacing rappers with ventriloquists? Now THAT'S funny.
- It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. When one episode involves two characters getting addicted to crack to get better unemployement benefits...
- Charlie answering the door, eating a banana, wearing a Nazi officer's uniform.
- Summer Heights High. All of it. Repeatedly. In fact, one part, involving a girl who died from a drug overdose, caused an incident when the details coincided too close to a real incident that happened earlier in the year, leading to a disclaimer at the beginning of all subsequent episodes saying that the series is fictional (which is undone when the next title proclaims that it was indeed real).
- The Brass Eye Paedophilia Special crosses the line twice... then crosses it again back into being horrifying, then back into hilarity several times per minute. Gags include a (fake) advert for a reality tv show featuring a hundred children and a single paedophile trapped on an island covered in cameras, and a paedophile being burned in a twenty-five foot long wicker phallus shortly after being released from prison. The rest of the series could qualify for this too, although not quite as much.
- Australian Panel Show Good News Week thrives on this, usually instigated by host Paul McDermott or regular Mikey Robbins. Hell, everything Mikey Robbins says tends to fall into this.
- Podge And Rodge... Oh dear oh dear oh dear, Podge And Rodge. click here to see them try to coax a coherent sentence out of Johnny Vegas.
- The Master gassing the Cabinet in Doctor Who. A blatant act of multiple murder, yes, but it has freakin' hilarious dialogue right before the actual killing.
- Not to mention his siccing the Toclafane on Vivian Rook. The Master and Lucy run out of the room while Vivian screams, and slam the door. The Master opens it, and she's still screaming. He winces and closes it. Opens it again three seconds later - and she's still screaming.
- The Chasers War On Everything usually crosses the line just once, but a recent episode crossed it twice. In a skit, it showed the Ku Klux Klan wearing pink robes to support breast cancer awareness. One klansman says that his pink robes were accidental, and was due to something red getting in the wash, and adds that "it's just another reason why you should never mix coloreds with whites!"
- A more recent sketch, the infamous "Make a Realistic Wish Foundation" sketch, was meant to, in the words of the Chaser team, "be so over the top nobody would take it seriously". It, ah, didn't work.
- And then there's the ads for their "Red Button Edition" pay TV appearances, which were funny the first couple of times...and consist of Osama Bin Laden saying "If you press the red button, you'll get special commentary. That's pretty lame. When I push a red button, I want something to blow up."
- This Sprite commercial. Warning, it's NSFW and banned in germany.
- Then again, what isn't?
- Actually, it isn't, as you can see in the link above. Generally sex isn't the problem in Germany, it's violence they crack down on.
- Confirmed to be fake (as in, not made by Sprite).
- Blackadder has this on a few occasions, including this gem from series 3:
Blackadder: People say Mrs Miggins that verbal insults hurt more than physical pain. They are of course wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork in your head.
- A lot of the deaths in Pushing Daisies arguably fit this, but perhaps the best example is that of Harold Hundin, the dog breeder. He drank coffee that has been laced with arsenic, and when he succumbed to the poisoning, he fell onto a sharp dog brush handle in a box, stabbing him. It doesn't end there, though, because the floor was wet so, he kept slipping and falling onto the dog brush again and again, stabbing him repeatedly. Seriously, it's hilarious.
- Similarly, many of the less probable accidental deaths on Bryan Fuller's earlier show Dead Like Me, beginning with that of the protagonist (who was killed by a falling toilet seat from a deorbiting Russian space station). Most had their souls "reaped" first, though, leading to dumbfounded souls watching their bodies die in horrific/ridiculous ways.
- Robin Williams' appearance on the penultimate Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, a Crowning Moment Of Awesome that just happens to cross the line several times. If the crotch-grabbing and Tiger Woods marriage counselor joke weren't bad enough, irking Conan in the process, his Irish folk tune cranks it Up To Eleven with Conan and Robin eventually doing the jig.
- Frankie Boyle on Mock The Week. There's no point in listing examples, if he's drawn breath chances are he's crossed the line a few dozen times.
Music
- Many of Tom Lehrer's songs, with particular mention of "I Hold Your Hand In Mine" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park".
- Tom Lehrer said of "I Hold Your Hand in Mine" that "of all the songs I've ever sung, that's the one I've got the most requests not to."
- There also is the ""Masochism Tango".
- And "We Will All Go Together When We Go", in which the description of the effects becomes steadily more gruesome (sung most cheerfully).
- Seeing as it's a Christmas song, "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" probably qualifies.
- In a similar vein, Weird Al's song "The Night Santa Went Crazy", where Santa holds his elves hostage, kills (and eats) his reindeer, and (in one version) is shot in the head by the SWAT team. Giving Santa a gun is doing one thing.
- Jingle BOMBS
- The musical piece Ya(c)kety Sax, better known as the theme for the Benny Hill show, has been said to "make anything funny".
- Pretty much anything by Stephen Lynch. Grandfather gets a special mention.
- I see your "Grandfather" and raise you a "For the Ladies".
- A challenger may have appeared in the form of the Stephen Lynch-inspired Bo Burnham.
- The music video for Warning by Green Day does something like this. It follows a young man doing every single thing you have ever been warned not to do. After some point you stop yelling at the man to "Don't eat that raw meat!" and things like that, and just start laughing at how amazing it is he's managed to survive this long.
- A lot of stuff by The Vandals. example? The song "Fourteen"; lyrics include "I can't make love to you because you're fourteen", and "there will come a day when love like ours is not a crime, just give it time". Sick. Also funny. Also the christmas album "Oi to the World" which includes the songs "My First X-Mas (As A Woman)", "Christmas Time For My Penis" and "Hang Myself From The Tree"
Short Films
Tabletop Games
- Da Orks of Warhammer 40000 do not live this trope; they are this trope. Psychotic, belligerent monsters (in a galaxy already filled to the brim with the psychotic, the belligerent and the monstrous) taken so far past the utter screaming extreme that they become endearing instead, not at all hurt by their ridiculous Funetik Aksents or their treatment of warfare as a cross between a mass migration, holy war, looting party and pub crawl, with a bit of genocide thrown in for good measure. Deyz show all deze udder gretchin gitz 'ere 'ow itz don'. Follow me, ladz! WAAAGH!
Toys
- This chess set◊.
- That destroyed the line. There was no crossing, it just blew it up.
- I find that incredibly offensive! The black king and queen are reversed (the king is always the higher of the two pieces) and the board is orientated the wrong way. The bottom right corner should always be white. HOW DARE THEY!
- Er...no pun intended, right? Also, there exists a chess set, probably still in Corning, New York, of Jews versus Christians.
Video Games
- Bad endings in the Fate/Stay Night game. Getting your stomach obliterated by a crazed giant? That's one of the better choices.
- The ridiculousness of some of the deaths (you have to actively try for a few) is lampshaded in the post-death 'Tiger Dojo,' which coaches you on what to do differently next time. When Saber kills you, she appears super-deformed, angsting in the background - unless you got that death from pure stupidity, in which case she's nowhere to be seen, no matter what she did to you ("she doesn't get depressed if the fault isn't all hers").
- Don't forget the infamous ending in Tsukihime where you get eaten by a shark. On the top floor of a hotel.
- I Wanna Be The Guy is something like this, except the line is between "frustrating" and "funny", rather than "vulgar" and "funny".
- Madworld not only crosses the line twice, it stomps all over the line, rubs the line into the dirt, and smears a bloody gangster corpse across the line just to obliterate it even further. When one mini-game involves using a spiked baseball bat to chuck mooks at a giant dart board for points...
- You forgot the Black Baron. Does the fact that he isn't actually black, just in blackface, make it more, or less, offensive?
- On a somewhat related note concerning the Baron, his voice actor would later go on to voice Mudflap, whose offensiveness is on par with (if not higher than) the Baron's. He did not get away with it, which tells something about Madworld.
- Ninja Gaiden II, the 360 one, has bloodshed to such ridiculously over-the-top extents that it avoids being offensive or disturbing.
- Not from the game itself, but from one of the World Of Warcraft forums: the brother of a player called Nano logs into Nano's account to tell everyone that Nano has passed away, they've had the funeral, "he was a good person and I'm sure many of you would agree".
loroldonfarm: Did he drop any good loot?
- The GTA Radio is this in spades. One great example from Vice City Public Radio:
Maurice Chavez: Dios mío, you shot him! There's blood!... and pubic hair!... all over the studio!!
- The ability to have the likenesses of the late Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash sing any song in Guitar Hero 5 is one gigantic, disrespectful disgrace to those two people's legacies. Still, put either of them as the singer and then just try keeping a straight face as they rap, do big gay dances, and cover Bon Jovi and Rammstein songs, among other things.
- Prototype is simply Bloody Hilarious, and the hapless way civilians get tossed aside when Alex does a Foe Tossing Charge is almost certain to bring a smile to your face.
- Conker's Bad Fur Day was one of the earliest games to do this. You think climbing up the side of a giant mountain of literal shit was bad enough? Wait until you go inside and fight The Great Might Poo in a showdown of musical proportions. This game does everything offense and rolls with it to absurdity.
Web Comics
- VG Cats recently ran a strip in which Aeris goes back in time to abort Leo. He got a bit of backlash for this, so his next strip had Pantsman introduce a toe-tapping dance routine... the Fetal Five. Consisting of four bloodied fetuses.
Pantsman: Well that was good, but where's the fifth member?
*Next panel shows a cat with a bloodstained mouth.
Pantsman: Bugsy!...
- Any given strip of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal crosses the line at least twice. This one probably crosses the line about fifteen times.
- This one may have set the record for most line-crossing in a comic ever. And it did it in ONE PANEL. [1]
- Xykon of The Order Of The Stick is a Complete Monster, and yet... What he did to the Sapphire Guard (drove them insane with a magical symbol inscribed on a superball, leading them to slaughter one another) crosses the line so many times that Your Mileage May Vary on whether the end result is hilarious or horrific. The same goes for the various tortures he's inflicted on O-Chul.
Redcloak: And again when I found out about the Basilisk Staring Contest. Xykon: Technically, the paladin won that one. Jirix: He never blinked.
- This Rooster Teeth comic features this - draw your own conclusions on whether it crosses the line, or is telling people to start stepping back.
- This Shortpacked! strip. Anything with the words "rape therapy" in it, in fact.
- For that matter, pretty much everything Mike does in Shortpacked!, and most of what he does in Roomies! and It's Walky! too. This is a sterling example.
- Pretty much anything involving Black Mage of 8-Bit Theater, like how his Hadoken spell works.
- Hellbound regularly Crosses The Line Twice, like in this strip for example.
- Randy Milholland of Something Positive often goes here. When you start out like this, you're only going to go further and soon you're writing strange super-powers. And that's without looking for the storyline where Kim rapes Davan.
- In this and the following Loserz strips, the line is crossed twice. At least.
- In Sluggy Freelance, much of the demonic rampage shown during "That Which Redeems" is played this way.
Sweral: You did kill and eat Reakk's cat.
Tryka: It looked like my mom!
- This strip is probably the best example, though. Demons invading Canada and eating a young boy alive? Horrific. The American news media digitally inserting "eh?" at the end of boy's screams so he sounds more Canadian? Hilarious.
- Really, a lot of the strip came off this way in the early years; Seinfeld Is Unfunny hit hard in the new millenium.
- Ansem Retort.
- Wonderella's home planet having blown up? Quasi-tragic. Finding out that it is actually still around? Heartwarming. Finding out that it's actually a hallucination caused by your mum so she can arrange a surprise party. Priceless.
- How have we gone this far without mentioning Cyanide and Happiness?
- Sexy Losers pretty much runs on a combination of this, Squick, Refuge In Audacity, NSFW, and Fan Disservice.
- The undead, firewielding warlock Richard from Looking For Group, unlives this trope; See his big musical number "Slaughter Your World".
- In his first encounter with the allegiance conflicted elf Cale, he tries to make Cale realize and give into the Always Chaotic Evil nature that his race are notorious for by defining evil as not "helping an aged dwarf woman across the road" but instead "shooting her in the face with arrows until it stops being funny".
- Shortly after Cale and Richard's initial meeting, they walk into a village that Richard apparently has visited once before. According to the guards, he burned down an orphanage during his last visit. According to Richard, that was an act of self-defence, the orphanage attacked him first.
- Burning the head off a gnome guard because he just denied you the authority to pass any further: Not very funny. Painting eyes and lips on your hand, placing it slightly above what remains of said Gnome's charred neck and making good use of your ventriloquism skills to have the gnome give you authority to pass, and apologize for his earlier rudeness, on the other hand...
- Concession: The casual, petty murders barely even blip anymore as far as webcomics are concerned... but then comes the sex with crossdressing ten-year-olds. And a girl is eventually introduced with a harem of them.
- Tomoyo42'sRoom: A story about Sakura and Tomoyo. This has everything, from baseball practice with aborted fetuses to a girl taking her recently decapitated dog and squeezing it to squirt her friend with blood. It's heartwarming.
Web Original
- Happy Tree Friends in all its gory glory. But don't take our word for it. Be warned, not for the initially faint of heart. Also, beware over-saturation; violence does desensitize.
- Don't forget babies falling onto rotating helicopter blades, characters having their skin pulled off, pulled backwards through the kitchen sink with the garbage disposal running, beaten by a shovel or this crowning moment of sadistic majesty: a squirrel scout dying spasmodically as the two beaters on an electric egg beater enter her eye sockets and turn her brains to jelly (which then leaks out of their head).
- The video for Fall Out Boy's "Carpel Tunnel Of Love" is one Happy Tree Friends gag after another. So-gory-it's-funny moments include: bee-sting in the eye (done twice), screams of pain synced to "Whoo-hoo"s in the music, impalement, decapitation (of the band's cartoon dopplegangers, no less), and two characters having flying pipes shoot through their heads. All this in a music video of a band whose average fan is about 13 years old.
- Possibly BECAUSE the band's average fan is 13 years old.
- This video combines a disturbing scene from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni with the song "What Is Love" by Haddaway. The scene was utterly fucked up in the original; it's gut-bustingly hilarious with the musical accompaniment.
- Survival Of The Fittest has a recent rampage by Wade Wilson, along with Carson Baye's death.
- This video of Euphemia from Code Geass killing "Elevens" to Caramelldansen.
- Bastard Operator From Hell basically has a Magnificent Bastard that utterly devastates the lives of all around him for his own amusement and self-profit. Sometimes, it delves into pretty dark territory (at least relative to the fact that it's an ostensibly realistic series based around a business workplace).
- While this "commercial" (from The IT Crowd) starts out serious and rapidly shows its comedic underpinnings, the route it takes is a little questionable... up until the line "And then steal it again," at which point it has properly crossed that second line.
- Mileage must vary because I was laughing as soon as it hit "You wouldn't steal a baby."
- This mash-up of the Omaha Beach scene from Saving Private Ryan using sound effects from Team Fortress 2. This version using Finding Nemo might also qualify, but Your Mileage May Vary.
- Derrick Comedy videos use this a lot. It mixes this and Overly Long Gag in kp
- Mario! Wario! Lucario!
- Sweethearts. Aww...
- The Nostalgia Chick's video "Top 10 Disturbing and Inescapable Christmas Songs" featured Alan Jackson's "Please Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas)", accompanied by clips of a man assaulting his wife in case you didn't get why the song is so disturbing. After repeatedly smacking her to the ground and curb-stomping her, he starts hitting her with her own arm and saying "Why're ya hittin' yerself? Why're ya hittin' yerself?" and giving her noogies. It stops being disturbing by this point.
- Related is a collaboration video that the Nostalgia Chick did with the Spoony One, appropriately titled "Spooning with Spoony." It pretty much involves the Chick waking up next to Spoony and That Chick With The Goggles in bed with no idea what just happened, though she pretty quickly figures it out. It rapidly goes from disturbing to hilarious as the video progresses. And then Benziae shows up in nothing but a bowtie.
- And there's every episode of Ask That Guy With The Glasses, where his horrifically nonsensical answers benefit greatly from deadpan delivery and the way everything piles up on itself until you can't possibly take it seriously.
- On the same site, this Facts About Germany video.
Yeah, OK, so we have Wissenschafts prisons. So what? It's all for the sake of science. They do very useful tests and experiments with the prisoners there. For example, they once tested how many wigs a man must eat before a wig comes out of his ears. They also tested what happens to a man if you knot his penis and let him drink 10 gallons of water. And last year, they tested how long you have to leave two men in a room until one man eats the other one. Could you live without the answers to these questions? I don't think so. Yes, I know it sucks to do science experiments with prisoners, but the good news is, um, we are also making the best porn movies in the whole world.
- Also pretty much the regular schtick of Video Game Confessions. So far we we have a masochistic, Stockholm Syndrome-afflicted Princess Peach, a raving drug addict Sonic, a Camp Gay Link who keeps hitting on women despite his best efforts, and a sadistic Groin Attack-happy Samus Aran.
- Tickle Me Amy. A deadpan childlike voice demanding increasingly vulgar sex acts including "shit on Amy's face" and "give Amy golden shower" is made hysterical due to ostensibly coming out of a cute monkey doll. Doug's expression of frozen horror helps a lot too.
- On his Siskel and Ebert tribute, he shows a rapidly scrolling list of the "religions he's prejudiced against". This is pausable and most of them can be made out. Some of those include m Baha'i Faith, Confucionism, Catholic, Muslim, Shinto, Zoroastrianism, The Force, Druze Jainism, Methodism, Taoism, Wicca, The Movement, Mandaeans and Sabians, Unitarian, Universalism, Hellenistic, Left-handed path science, Whatever religion the Oompa Loompas practice.
- On a related note... Keyboard Kid.
- This Ace Combat video. PJ getting killed? Not funny. PJ getting killed followed by Mor- sorry, AWACS Thunderhead being revealed as the perpetrator, who was just trying to get them to "cut the chatter"? Hilarious overkill.
- It may be argued that "2 Girls 1 Cup" crosses the line twice. Of course Your Mileage May Vary.
- Dr. Tran, anyone?
- This Teen Titans hentai parody (obviously Not Safe For Work). BOOYAH!
- The infamous "No Russian" mission from Modern Warfare 2 crossed the line even for many gamers. For others? MO-MO-MO-MO-MONSTER KILL!!!
- Slug Bait! I'd ruin it if I were to tell you what happened. Watch it for yourself. And read the lyrics, most importantly.
Western Animation
- Metalocalypse. The whole show.
- SuperJail is about the same.
- In Bender's Big Score, their Take That against Fox Network starts out funny, but then just gets petty. But when the Professor claims that the executives were ground into a powder, which the Professor then pours down his pants to stop the burning? Back to funny again.
- In the Futurama movie Bender's Game miners of dark matter in Alaska are effecting the environment. A white rabbit is barely visible in the snow and then a truck passes covering it with grime and it has the saddest little face. Then when your starting to feel bad, it gets eaten by a polar bear.
- Nothing compared to the third-season episode, "Amazon Women In the Mood", where the plot focuses on several main characters being raped to death as a punishment. (Though to be fair, the characters who where being "victimized" did not seem to unhappy about it... aside from Kif who avoided being raped)
- Avatar The Last Airbender has a non-violent example in the episode "The Ember Island Players", when they were re-enacting Jet's death. Making fun of what is probably the most tragic event in the series where a Government Conspiracy kidnapped, brainwashed, and killed a teenager? Dude Not Funny. Representing his Brainwashed nature with crazy hair, hooks for hands, googly eyes, and droning "Must... serve... Earth King" while his death is depicted with a hollow rock prop falling on top of him that the actor fails to get into properly? Hilarious.
- Don't forget the flower in his mouth, or the actor's beer-belly. Zuko and Sokka's responses to the reenactment didn't detract from the funny either.
- Not to mention that they made Actor!Zuko's famous last words Honor!!!
- South Park, "Scott Tenorman Must Die": After a series of petty torments, Cartman takes a revenge that crosses the line so many times it's difficult to know whether to be horrified or not.
- Family Guy- Stewie beating the crap out of Brian when he owed him money becomes funny again about when Stewie pulls out a gun and shoots him in the knees. (The line, of course, varies. Other didn't find it funny in the slightest until the flamethrower...)
- It makes the after-effects even better. Brian is allowed a single "revenge strike" on Stewie, redeemable any time, and of course Stewie slowly goes insane in fear of what it will be until Brian finally shoves him into a speeding bus at the end of the episode. Awesome.
- There's also the episode when Peter claims Chris is dying so his favorite show can come back on the air. When the charity points out they've bought the rights to Chris' death, Peter says he healed him. Fast-forward to people dancing on the Griffin's lawn asking for Peter to heal them. Lois, who still doesn't know about Peter's flimflam, wonders if that's chanting she's hearing. Peter assures her that's ridiculous, while edging towards her holding a table lamp. Yes, the implication is that Peter was about to commit murder over a TV show. Or at least assault.
- The whole show has become this ever since around the season 4-6 era.
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force occasionally waddled into the deep end of the pool, killing Carl in horrible ways, turning him into an eyeball monster, or with horrific clones and grisly murders.
- Drawn Together has a number of these. An example is in Captain Hero's childhood montage where he falls off of his training bicycle and scrapes his leg in a stereotypically childish manner. When he reveals his "scrape", it turns out that a chunk of his leg is missing.
- Crossing the Line Twice is basically the whole point of Drawn Together.
- The cartoon Korgoth Of Barbaria frequently demonstrates that it is one of the most violent and gory cartoons ever made (some of the violence puts even shows like Happy Tree Friends and Elfen Lied to shame). Over the course of the pilot episode, at least 20 characters are brutally killed in comically over the top, graphic, and creative ways.
- Invader Zim employs this trope for almost everything the titular character does. For example, stealing a major organ from each of his classmates in order to perpetuate his Masquerade is horrifying, but stealing too many organs and becoming a ridiculously bloated blob of stolen organs to the point where an intestine rolls out of his mouth like a tongue is hilarious.
- The Itchy and Scratchy Show.
- Wonder Showzen tried to do this with almost every sketch, sometimes even crossing the line a third time.
- In an episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot, XJ-9 (aka Jenny) is accidentally sent to kindergarten. Because of her... lack of want to be there, and the teacher's complete and total obliviousness to what she really is, Jenny becomes the black sheep of the class. It all comes to a head when she is repeatedly hit with a ball at recess while trying her hardest to be nice. The result? Jenny takes the ball, and plays hardcore- dodgeball/pinball on all the 5 year olds present, demolishing the class, possibly causing many concussions. ( Don't worry, they got better.)
- The Power Puff Girls had an even more violent dodgeball incident on the Gangreen Gang.
- Monkey Dust lives (or rather lived) off this trope what with the suicides, pedophile jokes, drugs abuse and random sex scenes in it. Most people never managed to cross the line a second time.
- Robot Chicken. Here's a shining example.
- the fact that the link is to a site that features amateur pornography is a nice touch.
- The Boondocks has managed to milk comedy out of Exorcisms, Prison Rape, beating up blind people and important historical figures using derogatory words, just to name a few.
- Recent Sponge Bob Square Pants episodes. Especially "Krusty Krushers". Like Spinning around Spongbob and Patrick to pieces (Your Mileage May Vary). Cementing the two in the ring. {either the first or second cross). Autographing the wet cemented remains with," Jim was here", on Spongbob and "My foot was here", on Patrick. (Hillarious either way). Or earlier, them getting gargoled only to be returned to normal with a toliet plunger.
- In a scene in The Venture Brothers, Brock is torturing an enemy henchman for information by squeezing his testicles, then abruptly stops when he feels a lump. The henchman is distressed at the news. This somehow turns the scene from "nasty" to "hilarious".
- A non-violent example is often invoked in Freakazoid!, where a joke that starts off funny is purposefully dragged on until it would become boring, and then labored even further, bringing it around to being funny again (or just being even more stupid). A perfect example is the Hand-man segment in the first episode, noted as such on the DVD commentary.
Other
- A news story about a man butchering his wife? Terribly not funny - crosses the line once. Said story combined with the absolute creepiest picture that's even been taken? Crosses the line one-and-a-half times. Said story and picture, combined with the reporter cracking up, followed by her colleagues intentionally broadcasting the picture again to make her utterly lose it? The jury's still out on whether or not that's an even number of line-crossings.
- Many Internet Radio shows do this in terms of sheer vulgarity since there is virtually no censorship; wonder how far it can go; this line says it all: "Oh god they said that Jesus gave it to his mother!"
- Witness Divine Interventions, a website that deals in religious-themed sex toys, including a Baby Jesus butt plug. You heard me.
- The cartoons in The Rejection Collection crossed the line once when they were rejected by The New Yorker, but crossed it a second time when they were funny enough to be published in this book.
- Bringing guns into an NBA locker room and threatening a teammate with them? Crossing the line. At a game, pantomiming shooting his teammates as a joke? This trope. Nice job, Gilbert Arenas.
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