Voice1: So it looks like the pilot was shot in the back.
Voice2: I guess his flight was delayed.
Pants Man: Oh Lenny, your callous disregard for life makes me chuckle so.
A snappy, one-liner comment (often with a bad pun) just before the commercial break. For example, the characters find a decapitated corpse. Character says "Looks like this fellow lost his head." Cut to commercial.
The cut to commercial is what differentiates this from a standard
One Liner.
In
CSI, Gil Grissom has these so frequently that they must be contractually required. In the episode "Iced", this was somewhat mocked when Greg Saunders,
The Lab Rat, spoke after Grissom delivered his one-liner. The other characters appeared visibly surprised by the interruption. Grissom still gets the last word, but is forced to use a less poignant line. In fact, in a bit of
Lampshade Hanging, whenever Saunders tries to execute a
Grissom One Liner, it falls so flat that it disgusts his colleagues, most notably when he told a suspect, apropos of a urine analysis, "Urine big trouble." Its
Miami spinoff also features such one liners, by Horatio Caine; unfortunately, David Caruso's deadpan delivery and frequent sunglasses-flipping tends to turn this moment into a
Narm.
Only when a show uses these very regularly can they pull off a "null"
Grissom One Liner: the audience has been trained to expect one, and we cut to the relevant character, who says nothing. This indicates that the situation is very disturbing indeed, if even Grissom
doesn't have anything smart-assed to say about it.
Examples:
- Grissom One Liners have been used so often in CSI that they were even parodied in the episode "Fight Night": Grissom delivered the usual quip and the credit music started... then his cell phone rang, the credit music reversed, and the teaser went on for five more minutes before the real credits started.
- Later, at the beginning of another episode, one of the characters (with Grissom nowhere to be seen) asks their team if they knew what Grissom would say upon discovering the body in their case; one of the coroners replies that it would be "something ironic, I'm sure", Lampshading the classic One Liner.
- The Grissom One Liner is sometimes subverted, apparently just to give a little variety. In the episode "Grissom's Divine Comedy", the leader ends with a shot of a very ill Gil Grissom at home, making himself chicken soup and coughing into his handkerchief. When his cell phone rings, calling him in to handle a case, Grissom says nothing... he just sighs in frustration. Roll credits.
- Lampshade Hung and subverted in "Two and a Half Dead". After finding a dead comedy actress with a [1] rubber chicken stuffed in her mouth (it's a long, complex and hilarious story), the lab techs ask Grissom why he hasn't done a One Liner, suggesting "I suspect fowl play" and "This is poultry evidence". Grissom goes for neither, instead going for "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard".
- CSI:Miami does this. A lot.
- A CSI: New York example -- on discovering that a corpse that has fallen from the Empire State building has had its brain go out of the hole in its skull, Stella opines, "Looks like a no-brainer."
- The Teaser on Law And Order shows often features such a line. During Jerry Orbach's tenure, it was usually Lennie Briscoe's line.
- Every two-man team on LO must have at least one Deadpan Snarker. No exceptions. When John Munch left, his partner automatically became the DS.
- These lines can also be delivered by other characters, like in one episode that opens with two runners. One falls down, the other asks him "Are you ok?", and the other runner then says "Yeah, but he's not." and the camera cuts to a body.
- This was referenced in an episode of Joan Of Arcadia in which a police officer makes a quippy comment about a crime scene, followed by a Law And Order-esque musical sting. Her partner gives her a bewildered look, to which she responds, "What? Too Law and Order?"
- Heavily parodied in this Weebl And Bob cartoon, as part of a general CSI: Miami parody.
- Lampshaded on the 21 March 2007 episode of CSI New York, when Det. Flack responds to Messer's failed attempt at a Grissom One Liner by giving it a numerical grade like an Olympic judge.
- Billy Baldwin gets some memorable ones in his part on the Show Within A Show Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. One example: "She's going to have a hard time reentering the pageant...without a face."
- Lampshaded and/or a case of Sarcasm Failure in the computer game S.W.A.T. 4: The Stetchkov Syndicate, where in a particularly gruesome shooting in a subway, normally smart-alecky Officer Fields has nothing to say, which is mockingly mentioned by Officer Reynolds, the veteran of the group.
Reynolds: Nothin' to say, Fields?
Fields: There's nothing funny about this.
Which in itself is odd as he's joked about stuff like shootings in churches.
