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This trope is being considered for renaming. Please feel free to contribute to the discussion .
A snappy, one-liner comment just before the commercial break or opening sequence. Often takes this form:
"Chief, we found the guy's body. Cause of death is electrocution." "Electrocution... then I guess you could say he's been-" *pause to let our hero don his trusty shades* "-discharged."
The cut 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 Sanders, 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 Sanders 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:
Film
Internet
- A meme on the general-interest Tabletop Games website RPGnet has forum posters doing this when somebody gets banned.
- It's been nipped in the bud. Or if you prefer... [puts on sunglasses] ... it critically failed. Yeeeeaaaaaahhh!!
- A similar tradition on gray hat hacker boards is to mock permabanned with the circumstances of their banning, generally through a quip or Incredibly Lame Pun.
- The Onion's AV Club forums have a commenter who calls him-/herself David Caruso and posts nothing but CSI-style one-liners, with Glasses Pull and YYYYYEEEAAAAHHHH, pertaining to the topic of the thread.
Live Action TV
- 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.
- In the season 7 episode of CSI "Meet Market" is an example of what might be called Lampshaded Subversion. With Grissom on sabbatical it is left to someone else to pick up the slack.
As Phillips and Keppler wheel out this week's corpse...
Stokes: Hey. You know what Grissom would say here, don't you?
Phillips: Something ironic, I'm sure.
...but we do not cut at this point. Instead we move to the autopsy where Hodges and Keppler discover that there are several foreign objects inserted into the body. After removing and opening an umbrella which covers Hodges in blood...
Keppler: That's bad luck, isn't it?
- 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 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".
- The Grissom One Liner was somewhat Lampshade Hung in the episode "Crow's Feet", when Catherine Willows, who had reported to the scene and therefore got the chance to quip, stated "it's my turn now" before the credits rolled.
- In another episode, the characters are all being filmed in a cops-esque derivative. Grissom delivers his one liner, and there's a pause, and then the producers ask him to repeat it because they didn't catch it. Roll commercials.
- In "A Space Oddity", Hodges and Simms are at a sci-fi convention when a corpse is found. Hodges calls up Captain Brass, holds his phone tricorder style and says "He's dead, Jim".
- CSI:Miami does this. A lot. So much so, you could argue a case for a separate Caine One Liner Trope.
- Jim Carrey makes fun of this for several minutes on Letterman.
- He's not the only one. This Troper has seen people outside of TV Tropes making fun of David Caruso's character for his sheer narminess, so much so that it's become a meme.
- So much so that Caruso's practically stopped doing it on the show.
- What makes this so Narmy as compared to Grissom's, has as much to do with Caruso's shades and deadpan delivery, as it does with the start of the theme music serving as almost a sort of laugh track or "Applause" light. On the other hand, when Grissom did it, he delivered it in a "I feel your pain" kind of way.
- 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."
- Dead man found dressed as a giant cigarette; "Let's just say it now to get it over with, Smoking Kills." This was shamelessly lifted for Grind House: Planet Terror, though, of course, the delivery style was entirely different.
- Lampshaded on the 21 March 2007 episode, when Det. Flack responds to Messer's failed attempt at a Grissom One Liner by giving it a numerical grade like an Olympic judge.
- Body discovered sitting peacefully at a park bench; when Mac's partner tries to figure out what happened and connect the clues they have there, Mac promptly tells her "Not everything's connected", grabbing the corpse's cleanly decapitated head and lifting it off its body.
- A forearm and thigh are found in separate locations. In the autopsy lab, Lindsay walks up to the others and says "Let me give you a hand", before presenting Sheldon and Sid with the dead man's hand.
- Man found buried in a potting bed with a buzzard picking at him. Mac's response: "I thought that the only vultures that lived in this city worked on Wall Street".
- Yesterday's episode, "Hammer Down", pulled off a two-person Grissom One Liner:
Stella: Looks like the end of the road for her.
Mac: And the start of the line for us.
(I'm not sure if I quoted it correctly, but that's the gist of it.)
- Not even Cold Case is immune to this; one example is from the episode 'Wings', when they find a winged pin that means the victim was a flight attendant.
Lilly: Looks like someone clipped her wings.
- The Teaser on Law And Order shows often features such a line. During Jerry Orbach's tenure, it was usually Lennie Briscoe's line. By chronological precedence, in fact, this should probably be called the Lennie One Liner.
- Before Briscoe joined the cast, it was generally Mike Logan who delivered the one-liner. In the latest seasons it's usually Cyrus Lupo.
- Every two-man team on LO must have at least one Deadpan Snarker. No exceptions. When Lennie Briscoe left, his partner automatically became the designated snarker.
- These lines can also be delivered by other characters. An episode opens with two runners, one of whom falls down. The other asks him "Are you okay?", and the fallen runner 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?"
- Parodied in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk gets Lotto Fever", where Randy Disher repeatedly tries (and fails) to pull a snappy one-liner off. Though really, the phrase "Randy repeatedly tries (and fails) to say something clever" could be applied to any episode he appears in.
- And smashed into pieces in "Mr. Monk and the Birthday" when Stottlemeyer does a couple one liners about a body followed by Monk describing how the man would probably have been alive as his body was sliced up and crushed.
- Long before most of these shows, Kojak had several in his show.
- An example from the show: Seeing a young woman's dead body. "Baby, Why'd you have to go get yourself killed and ruin both our mornings?"
- How I Met Your Mother parodied this in one episode with Ted having been analysing the 'crime scene' of his apartment for evidence of a fight between Lily and Marshall and determining the cause was leaving the lid of the peanut butter, explained with CSI intenseness and use of shades.
Ted: Lily left the lid off (puts on sunglasses), and Marshall blew his.
- Stargate Atlantis, episode Vegas, is set in an alternate reality, where Sheppard never joined the SGC. "Detective John Sheppard" pulls a one liner at the end of The Teaser.
- In an episode of Stargate SG-1, a tv producer pitches a number of show ideas, including T'ealc P.I. featuring a scene where the one liner is simply. "Indeeeeed."
- On The Dukes Of Hazzard, the narrator (Waylon Jennings) usually employed one of these to accompany each Commercial Break Cliffhanger.
- Bones mocks this trope in "The Beaver in the Otter". After describing how a corpse had been shot with a cannon filled with bric-a-brack, pelted by a crowd, and set on fire at a pep rally:
Cam: Now that's what I call team spirit. (Vaziri and Angela stare at her) I'm a wise-cracking pathologist with a dark sense of humor. (cut)
- With a subversion in "The Priest in the Courtyard" where Bones makes a quip about consecrated ground and has a complaint filed against her for it.
- Parodied in Supernatural, where the boys were Trapped In TV Land.
Dean Winchester:I say...Jackpot!
- This trope was referenced and criticized in an episode of Murder, a reality series where two teams of three amateurs try to use forensic techniques to investigate and solve recreations of real life crime scenes. One of the members in one team kept making quips about the crime scene, causing the host (an actual police detective) to berate said contestant saying that real cops are not supposed to joke around during an investigation since doing so is highly unprofessional.
Video Games
- 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.
- Used by The Spoony One in his Lets Play of Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh:
Well, Frank, I think we'd better check her purse for receipts, because somebody...just overcharged her.
- In the Crash Course level of Left 4 Dead, Zoey had just shot the group's (infected) helicopter pilot, causing the helicopter to crash. When approaching his dead body, she has a chance of saying:
Zoey: Pilot's license... revoked! Dun Dun Duuun!
Webcomics
Web Original
Western Animation
Radio
- ''The Men's Room, a radio show based out of 99.9 KISW in Seattle, features a daily "Shot of the Day", where the hosts will tell a brief story about some notable person with an interesting story that's funny in some way. Typical sources include minor news stories, Cracked, etc. After reading through the story, each of the hosts will usually try to come up with an Incredibly Lame Pun to describe the situation, each capped off with the "Yeeeeeeeeagh!" stinger. Especially lame or just plain unfunny puns will receive a long vocal stinger from Journey.
—It seems we've reached the end of the page. What do you make of that?
—YEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
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