W. E. Coyote's Law of Cartoon Inertia: Objects in motion tend to stay at the same altitude until gravity is noticed.
I know this defies the law of gravity, but I never studied law.
Oh! Gravity works!
Sometimes gravity doesn't work. Or doesn't work immediately. Or evenly. Or
fairly. This takes the following forms:
- Gravitational Cognizance: A character will not fall until they realize they should be falling. For example, running unknowingly off the edge of a cliff — or walking on the underside of a diving board. Especially dense or focused characters may need to have another character point out their vulnerability. In an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, the characters invoked this trope to pass over a gorge by stepping on thin air without looking down. Makes you wonder after a while why anyone looks down at all.
- ... Oh. Right...
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy flying is the art of deliberately (ab)using this trope.
- More specifically, throwing yourself at the ground and missing, and then making sure not to think about the fact that flying is impossible, or else gravity will notice you.
- Creeping Gravity: Also known as Gravity Waves. Gravity will affect a character's body in sections i.e. legs, then torso and finally head. The character will demonstrate neither tissue damage nor pain as a result of this distortion, only on hitting the ground.
- Varying Gravity: Characters will fall faster than a heavy object — ensuring that the object lands on them. Everything falls faster than an anvil. In fact, on more than one occasion in WB shorts, a character who was falling to earth gently via parachute was handed an anvil... by another character who was falling at the exact same rate... and immediately went into a terminal velocity plunge.
- Dramatic Gravity: Gravity can be suspended for just enough time to give one last comment to your opponent. For example, Yosemite Sam, after being tricked into falling off a diving board by Bugs, rose back up for a moment to say, "Ah hate yew," before plunging again.
- Gravity can also be suspended while a badly spooked character bobs up and down in mid-air while screaming, for example Tom of Tom And Jerry.
- Counterintuitive Gravity: Items which should fall don't, when items that shouldn't, do. The traditional case is a character chased up a tree and out onto a branch. Sawing the branch off will make the tree fall while the branch (and the character thereon) remains suspended in mid-air. Diving boards and bridges are also prone to this effect.
Named for a line in
The Tick (who complains about gravity working all too well, at the time. Luckily he is
Nigh Invulnerable). The author of which may or may not have stolen it from an earlier
Garfield strip), which itself is a riff on the title of the novel
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by
Robert A Heinlein. Which is in turn a play on the sailors' saying "The sea is a harsh mistress". Which
probably goes back to
The Bible "The Law is a harsh master" (Romans 7, 1-6). And then Cassandra Claire plagiarized it in
The Draco Trilogy.
See also
Variable Terminal Velocity. Compare
Gravity Is A Harsh Seamstress.
