Sometimes a comedic piece, rather than a punchline, will have everything suddenly explode instead. The randomness combined with the coolness factor of explosions is guaranteed to get some laughs.
This is an example of
Stuff Blowing Up. Also compare
Drop The Cow.
Examples:
- Seen in many, many, youtube poops, usually in the form of a 'WTF Bomb'
- This
episode of SMBC Theater.
- Some Old Spice commercials, like this one.
- This Edds World cartoon, at least before The Stinger.
- Sealab 2021 ends (nearly?) every episode with Sealab exploding. Sometimes justified by the plot, sometimes purely for Once an Episode Rule of Funny.
- Used to the point of a Running Joke on Bigger Than Cheeses.
- Everything that sings in Charlie The Unicorn.
- Several skits end that way in Monty Python's Flying Circus.
- The Secret Life Of Machines's ending sequence is usually a bunch of the machines du jour exploding while "Take Five" plays.
- The endings of the deliberately bad games Gorillaflop, P.I.: TO CATCH A PLANETTHIEF and Gorillaflop: Episode 0.555647: P.I. Investigates: The Moon Man Moon Heist: Gorilla in Spaaaaace.
- Almost every episode in the later seasons of Mythbusters.
- The end of the pilot and the end of the series finale of The Young Ones.
- The Sponge Bob Square Pants episode "Dying For Pie" ends with the exploding pie completely destroying Bikini Bottom, using footage from the Bikini Island nuclear tests as said explosion.
- The Demented Cartoon Movie ends with those two stick figures on the chairs being stuck to their faces and their chairs, falling apart, causing their city to collapse, and finally unleashes a missile that knocks the Moon out of the sky, which destroys the Earth.
- The punchline to the MacGruber skits on Saturday Night Live, where the room that the eponymous character and his partners are trapped with always explodes, due to MacGruber's incompetence.
- A favorite of The Muppets. Jim Henson is on record stating that whenever he can't think of an ending for a bit he just has everything explode.
- Ren and Stimpy:
- One episode is such a Mind Screw that the audience is seen with their heads exploding, and eventually the Earth itself explodes.
- "Sven Hoek" ends with Ren, Stimpy and Sven being blown straight to Hell after Ren pees on a game named "Don't Whiz On The Electric Fence".
- Reversed on "Black Hole", which ends with Ren and Stimpy imploding.
- The Tom and Jerry cartoon "The Missing Mouse" has Tom scared by a lab mouse that swallowed a powerful explosive. By the end a radio announcement declares that the mouse will not explode and Tom gives it a good kick. It explodes anyway.
- Looney Tunes
- Duck Dodgers In The Twenty Fourth And A Half Century ends with Dodgers and Marvin blowing up Planet X.
- "Captain Hareblower" has Bugs Bunny blowing up Yosemite Sam's ship by throwing a lit match into the gunpowder room. Sam tries to get even by doing the same to Bugs' ship, but Bugs doesn't even try to stop him and Sam makes a hasty retreat. Turns out it was the other kind of powder room (the ladies bathroom), yet it explodes anyway, to Bugs' surprise.
- The result of the Gainax Ending existence failure in the James Rolfe parody film The Wizard of Oz 3: Dorothy Goes to Hell.
- The Three Stooges used this ending in quite a few shorts.
- "Mass Effect 3" - not a comedic ending
