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"When do we get to the ride?!"
"This IS the ride!"
"Why would you want to watch TV when you can watch a snail crawl for hours on end?"
Sinclair, Futurama, "Obsoletely Fabulous"

This is when a character or group is easily amused by a game, pastime, or hobby that would normally be considered boring and lame. It is usually used to show that these characters are immature, dull, weird, or have no exposure to real fun — or sometimes just because it's funny.

A Subtrope of Indubitably Uninteresting Individual. Compare A Good, Old-Fashioned Paint Watching, Fun for Some, Only One Finds It Fun, Plain Palate, the Museum of Boredom, The Compliance Game, and Boring Vacation Slideshow. Related to Nerds Love Tough Schoolwork.

Characters that often fall into this trope are The Ditz and the Cloudcuckoolander.

Truth in Television, of course, but it's always worth mentioning that what's considered fun and what's not is subjective; for some people, finding a rare or antique elevator to ride is on the same level of enjoyment as others may find gaming, reading or watching television.

Not to be confused with the redirect for Pun, "Incredibly Lame Pun". Nor should it be confused with TV Tropes.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • Princess Jellyfish: Tsukimi is fascinated by jellyfishes and everything related to them. That's also the only thing she draws, before Kuranosuke arouses her interest into creating dresses. She is painfully conscious that she is the only one with such love for jellyfishes, though, since an embarassing day she took college friends to an acquarium, but the girls ditched her when they noticed the place displayed only jellyfishes.
  • Squid Girl has Ika with ants. The hard work, the bullying from other ants, feeling sadness for the ant and yelling at kids that were destroying the ant's house so that the ant can return to its colony. Before she knew it, it was already sunset. Also with umbrellas and anything ordinary that amazes her.
  • Dragon Ball: North Kai, the lord of worlds, enjoys counting individual blades of grass and driving an admittedly robust Chevrolet in a complete circle. Following the Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods reveal that Kai have the ability to restore planets, Whis and Goku point out he never uses these powers to undo the damage Goku and Beerus do to the planet the Kai himself resides on, to which he replies (under his breath) that patching things together by hand passes more time.

    Comic Books 
  • In The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
    • Ultra Magnus considers several months of "cripplingly intense" study (his words) fun. Or would, if he could actually say fun. At a later point, he tries to join in a casual conversation, starting by mentioning his love of statistics (Swerve was quoting Blurr's track records).
    • The Scavengers have precisely three forms of entertainment on their ship: playing nerf gun battles (which is actually pretty awesome), watching recordings of former Decepticon-turned-stand-up-comic Skullcruncher's routines, and playing Jenga with a set that's missing pieces.
  • In Judge Dredd, the horribly overpopulated Mega-City-One has at worst 98% unemployment rate. Its people have found some utterly asinine ways to pass the time, such as pointlessly washing dishes, catching eggs launched at themselves, trying to grow the biggest nose in the city, or eating.
  • Robin (1993): Tim, Ariana and Callie go to a universally reviled and horribly bad production of a modernized Hamlet for extra credit in their English class. Ives accompanies them despite not needing the extra credit, in order to have fun arguing about the play and making commentary on it.
  • Alt★Hero: In "The Dark Hunt", Dr Nano offers to liven up a road trip with an audiobook critiquing popular conceptions about primitive societies. Even better, it's implied to be a real book published by Castalia House.
    Nano: At least you learned something.
    Rainbow: Yeah, never let you pick the audiobook.

    Comic Strips 
  • Garfield:
    • Occasionally used to show how boring a life Jon's family has in the countryside, since the most mundane things excite them such as watching the washing machine instead of the TV ("Here comes the red sock again!"), counting every brick in the wall of the house, taking a trip to see the new flush toilet, going to the airport to watch the planes take off, etc. This extends to stupid and dangerous things; Jon and his brother Doc Boy mention that one of their favorite games as a kid was called "Touch It, You Wimp!" and involved touching an electric fence.
    • Garfield and Jon are not immune to this, since their lives are pretty boring too. In one strip, he is watching television when the announcer says, "And now we present, Watching Paint Dry!" Garfield responds with, "Rats! They preempted Watching Grass Grow!"
    • In a later strip:
      TV announcer: Welcome to Watching Paint Dry Theater!
      Jon: It's a rerun.
      Garfield: Don't tell me how it turns out!
    • In another strip:
      Jon: Watching the paint dry, Garfield?
      Garfield: I hope he doesn't think that my life is so totally devoid of excitement that I am reduced to that. I'm waiting for it to peel.
    • Jon makes toast... for fun. *pop* "Yee Haaww!"
    • Also:
      Jon: I've got an idea, Garfield! I stuff my face full of bananas... then you tickle me!
      Garfield: We are the bored.
  • Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's Dad deliberately chooses vacations and hobbies that build character.
    Calvin's Dad: Ahh, what a day! Up at 6:00, a 10-mile run in the sleet, and now a big bowl of plain oatmeal! How I love the crazy hedonism of weekends!

    Fan Works 
  • In The Silmarillion fanfic A Boy, a Girl and a Dog: The Leithian Script, the Captain prefers to watch water freezing than play chess. It isn't that he dislikes chess; it's he thinks the former activity is genuinely entertaining.
    Beren: I thought you liked kingstone, sir.
    Captain: Oh, as a diversion it's all right. But it isn't my preferred diversion, if others are to be had. Like watching ice form, for one.
    [pause]
    Beren: Oh. — That boring, huh?
    Captain: Ice crystals are quite fascinating, the way they sheet over a pond.
    Beren: Yeah, but you usually watch stuff like that when you're waiting for something to actually happen.
  • In Sword Art Online Abridged, most of the roleplayers who have flocked to Alfheim Online prefer to engage in the "#RaceWar" between its fairy kindreds, but Episode 15 reveals that some of them like to pretend to run a "fairport," complete with customs checks and a guy running a pretzel stand.
  • The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: In the omake for chapter 25 of the sequel Picking Up the Pieces, it's revealed that Shining Armor, despite being dead, finds doing miscellaneous, never-to-be-turned-in paperwork to be relaxing.

    Film — Animated 
  • From Igor:
    Brain: Our work here is done.
    Scamper: Our work? You spent the entire time playing with a piece of ribbon.
  • A Goofy Movie:
    • The Principal suggests some "fun" activities the students can engage in to keep their brains sharp over the summer. They include Science Slumber Parties.
    • And the tourist trap locations that Goofy himself picks on the road trips include "Lester's Possum Park" and the World's Biggest Ball of Yarn.
  • In Plucky and Hamton's sub-plot of Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, Plucky tags along with Hamton's family on their way to the HappyWorldLand theme park. The Pig family like to pass the time on their trip with family-friendly songs and Car Ride Games such as "Spot the Car" (any kind of car, as opposed to a specific type) and holding their breaths in tunnels. Double Subverted even in that they agree going to HappyWorldLand, one of the best theme parks in the country is a fun thing, but not only is the trip hellishly boring (and hellish in general) for Plucky, but once they arrive, they refuse to ride any of the attractions so there'll be suspense for next year's trip.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • The TV show from RoboCop (1987). The person watching the movie might find the show's humor asinine; the characters in the movie watching the show find it hilarious.
    Dave: I'd buy that for a dollar!
  • The movie Ass in Idiocracy won multiple awards. It is just a close-up of some guy's ass with the occasional fart sound effect. The filmgoers laugh uproariously. Actually based on a real movie, "Taylor Mead's Ass", by Andy Warhol.
  • The mockumentary The Compleat Al claims that "Weird Al" Yankovic's mother spends her evenings repeatedly folding and unfolding clothes, while his father's hobbies include filming freeway traffic.

    Literature 
  • Animorphs: At some point, Ax learns how to steal cable. While he enjoys watching sitcoms and cartoons, his favorite show is "These Messages," better known to humans as the commercial breaks.
  • Bruce Coville's Book of... Monsters: In Momster in the Closet, the narrator and Kenny's father is mentioned to enjoy watching the flag waving on the screen while the national anthem plays as a TV station goes off for the night.
  • Discworld:
    • Trolls gamble by tossing something up and then betting on whether or not it will come down. To be fair, there's definitely some parts on the Disc where it's a legitimate toss-up.
      Troll gambling is even easier than Australian gambling.
    • In The Last Continent it's mentioned that the young Ponder Stibbons was the only child in history who actually got hours of fun out of a mix-and-match picture book promising hours of fun.
    • At some point during the time-skip between Going Postal and Making Money, Moist von Lipwig took up "Extreme Sneezing" in his free time to stave off the post-victory ennui. Exactly what that entails is not specified, but Lord Vetinari considers it a sign that Moist needs a fresh set of challenges in his life.
    • In The Science of Discworld: The Globe, Rincewind's first scene is sorting the rocks left behind by the previous Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography. Since this is an activity that doesn't involve fleeing from life-threatening danger, he's having a blast.
  • The Wonder Spot:
    Over Christmas, she took a trip to India, and now she’s in love with what she calls the simple life. She gets serene talking about it; her speech slows and her eyes glisten when she describes an Indian boy who amused himself for hours with a piece of string.
    I nod, but I think, You watched somebody play with a piece of string for hours?
  • The Star Trek novel "Immortal Coil" expounds on what the android Ruk (from one Original Series episode) was doing during its long time alone: picking up two rocks of similar composition, putting one in each hand, and squeezing until one is reduced to powder, then adding a point for that specific hand. When plot starts happening, Ruk had reached the point of considering removing a finger from the hand that had won the most often as a handicap.
  • In the novel Underground by Andrew McGahan, main character Leo James ends up getting imprisoned in the abandoned House of Representatives with nothing to do rifle through whatever the evacuated members left behind. As such, the nearest thing he has to reading material are the copies of Hansard, but because his only other entertainment involves being tortured by CIA agents, he grows to enjoy reading Hansard and can write quite passionately about it by the time he gets around to the Apocalyptic Log Framing Device. For those of you not in the know about Australian politics, Hansard is a massive set of verbatim transcripts of parliamentary sessions.

    Live-Action TV 
  • From The Big Bang Theory: In the episode "The Reclusive Potential", Penny throws Amy's bachelorette party according to what she thinks Amy likes best... a quilting bee. Amy is not pleased.
  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine
    • Captain Holt lives and breathes this trope. His favorite meal is plain, dry toast, he attends a painting class where he paints nothing but still-life images of the same rock over and over, and his idea of a romantic trip (one shared by his husband) is an hours-long drive where they both sit in complete silence for the entire duration. He was like this as a child as well, flashbacks show him playing with a model train and actually waiting an entire forty-five minutes for the schedule and he once made a macaroni graph of crime statistics during the Hoover Administration.
    • Amy Santiago is very similar. She adores bureaucracy, likening it to a puzzle to be solved, where finding the solution is like seeing the face of God. She loves doing paperwork, and will happily spend hours shopping for new filing folders and creating binders and schedules for every activity.
  • Cheers: In "Friends, Romans, Accountants", Norm tries throwing an office party in the bar. The other accountants remain entirely still and quiet, except for a bunch in the backroom, who are reciting area codes. Even Diane thinks this is ludicrously square. The only other person who thinks it's fun is Coach.
  • Frasier:
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The idiot Orson Lannister and his pastime of squishing bugs.
    • Daario and Grey Worm's contest of holding swords on outstretched arms.
  • The Golden Girls: Dorothy just doesn't understand why her students don't find diagramming sentences as fun as she does. Sophia is quick to suggests that this is why she doesn't have many second dates.
  • Greek: Part of Lizzi's...er, charm...as a ZBZ National rep is that her idea of a fun activity is a book club. Casey would manage to talk her into having a book-themed party, though she had to enlist Cappie's help to subvert Lizzi's restrictions to make it a good party.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000:
    • Lampshaded numerous times during shorts such as "What to Do on a Date," which suggests awesome events like weenie roasts and taffy pulls, or "Uncle Jim's Dairy Farm," where the quote-unquote fun activities amount to little more than back-breaking chores.
    • During the episode covering Devil Doll, Mike and the Bots spend the first two host segments trying to throw a weekend college dorm bash, with beer and speakers set up in the window. Unfortunately, due to budget shortfalls, all they could afford was the window, but they try to make do. At least until Crow gets Lost in Character, finds some Nanite microbrewed beer, and punches through the window while drunkenly ranting about "DEBBIE!"
      Servo: (beatboxing) Energy efficient, thermal barrier, custom-fitted, wash it from the inside!
  • Parks and Recreation
    • Li'l Sebastian the miniature horse is treated like a celebrity by the townsfolk of Pawnee, Indiana. It's lampshaded by one character from out of town who doesn't understand the appeal; everyone else treats him like he's crazy and he eventually resigns himself to faking it in order to avoid conflict.
    • From the same show, this is why Jerry keeps coming out of retirement and later gets a job in the National Parks service. The tedious grunt work like filing and stuffing envelopes that nobody else can stand is the part of the job he loves. In the last season he becomes a notary public as a hobby and is utterly giddy about it.
  • The crew of Red Dwarf have been stranded in space long enough to have some very odd ideas of how to kill time.
    • Rimmer was apparently always that boring, enjoying such hobbies as Hammond Organ music, morris dancing, studying 20th century telegraph poles, and recounting the events of his Risk game move-by-move.
    • The others have engaged in such pastimes as watching laundry spin (it was Kochanski's, so this is the closest any of them has to a sex life).
    • Kochanski herself had a rather sheltered upbringing, with perfect computer generated friends, so her idea of a fun game is humming the various arias of The Magic Flute, and guessing what song it is.
    • Kryten is a cleaning mechanoid, so he sees laundry and vacuuming as enjoyable activities.
    • The Cat plays with his food. And by that, we mean pretends his food is alive and he's playing with it like a cat with a mouse.
    • But the king of this has to be Lister, who spent days crossing the huge ship to get some tomatoes, because he's allergic to them and eating them makes him sneeze, which allowed him to use his snot to iron laundry in order to gross out Rimmer. All that work just to get a ten second rise out of someone. In fairness, they've been stuck on the ship long enough that there probably isn't a whole lot else to do by that point.
  • JD and Turk of Scrubs have some odd hobbies, like playing "Finger or Toe" in which one of them closes their eyes, the other sticks a finger or toe under their nose, and the first must guess which it is. They also considered switching chairs at their apartment at set intervals to be a major event.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Picard loves ships in bottles and can't understand why none of his senior staff share his enthusiasm. When O'Brien pipes up that he likes ships in bottles, Riker glares at him, silently accusing him of being a suck-up, but O'Brien innocently insists that he was telling the truth.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Number One and La'an learn that most of the crew calls the pair "Where fun goes to die". They confirm this trope in the following scene, where both are looking forward to refreshing the duty roster and refitting the artillery, respectively. They do end up having some actual fun during the episode after learning of "Enterprise Bingo", a game played by ensigns and below involving breaking the rules. But they do admit that many of the items on the list aren't as fun for them because, as senior officers, they aren't actually breaking the rules.
  • Stargate SG-1. When Jonas Quinn arrives on Earth, he becomes fascinated by the Weather Channel and watches it for hours, to which Carter responds that there are at least five hundred other channels.
  • The State had a sketch where two characters play strip poker. Since they're both male and straight, they don't find it all that interesting.
  • On Stella, when the boys can't go to the amusement park, they decide to improvise fun rides with what they had at their home; naturally, their alternatives don't quite match up to the real thing, but they make do.
  • Stranger Things: Bob Newby's characterization as a boring goober is aided by his fondness for things that the main cast find dull. In one scene, he's cracking up watching Mr. Mom while the rest of the family looks bored.

    Music 
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic:
    • The song "Hardware Store" is about someone being super-excited about the opening of a new hardware store.
    • "The Biggest Ball of Twine In Minnesota" is about a family going to see Exactly What It Says on the Tin and how they decide they're going to go back every year.
  • "Flowers on the Wall" by The Statler Brothers is about a guy assuring his friends that he doesn't need to go outside because he has plenty of fun staying in his room and counting the wallpaper flowers, playing solitaire and watching children's TV shows.

    Music Videos 
  • Bubble Butt: The three cyan-haired women in the apartment spend their time listening to dolphin noises and standing around half out of it. That is, until Buttzilla shows up, inflates their asses, and turns their apartment into a dance party.

    Puppet Shows 
  • Sesame Street has Bert, who loves all sorts of boring pastimes such as watching pigeons and collecting paperclips. He even likes to read books like Boring Stories. Bert seems especially dull compared to Ernie, who is Fun Personified, especially for Sesame Street's' target audience (Ernie likes playing with traditional toys and loud games). Their polar-opposite personalities are the whole point, as they teach kids An Aesop about how even though people can like different things and have fun in different ways, it is possible to be best friends.
  • Fraggle Rock features the character of Boober Fraggle, whose favorite pastimes include laundry and watching paint dry.
    • In the episode "Fraggle Wars," the Cave Fraggles' idea of fun is dusting.
  • One episode of Dinosaurs has Grandma Ethyl literally sitting around and watching the grass grow...on television. Subverted in that it's not because she's enjoying it, but because the episode wants to emphasize she's wasting what's left of her life.

    Radio 
  • Cabin Pressure: Martin's idea of a relaxing time in a pilot's longue is talking aviation theory, or even writing papers on aviation theory, or going over Health and Safety guidelines, despite the obvious fact that five minutes with the only other pilot at MJN Air would make perfectly clear this is a non-starter. Gets heartbreakingly deconstructed in "Kuala Lumpur", as Martin's total inability to enjoy typical "blokeish" activities leads to him being frozen out by the airport crew, and the establishment that this has been happening to him his entire life.

    Theme Parks 
  • In The LEGO Movie: 4D — A New Adventure at LEGOLAND, while Emmet's friends all get cool attractions at Brick World that they enjoy, Emmet gets stuck with "Emmet's Breakfast with a Plant Merry-No-Round", which is a recreation of his apartment where he sits on a stationary couch and watches a replica of Planty dance around slightly. Wyldstyle notices that Emmet is unhappy with his ride, so she takes him with her on the much more exciting "Wyldstyle's Super-Cycle Mega-Coaster" instead.

    Video Games 
  • Destiny 2 has the Warlock Vanguard leader Ikora Rey indulge in this for a lore bit when it's revealed she authored a 12-volume anthology titled On Circles, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin... and yet most of the named characters (including known musclehead Lord Shaxx, but not Fun Personified Cayde-6) consider it peak literature in both academia and entertainment. Five real-world years later, it ends up being justified when Hunter Chalco Yong ribs on Ikora over the book, her response implying the game's interpretation of paracausality (read: magic) works by bending mathematical principles — though this also means the game's Big Bad was telling the truth about how the Destiny universe was created in one of its earlier communications.
  • Mass Effect:
    • At the end of the wild version of the party in the third game's Citadel DLC, the player can stumble upon Tali and Samantha Traynor reciting the periodic table of elements. When they get distracted and Garrus points out that element 69 is thulium, Tali calls him a nerd.
    • The Citadel's video arcade includes the Towers of Hanoi, which Shepard flat out refuses to play. (A self-depreciating joke by the developers, as it appears in lot of games, especially Bioware games.)
    • According to Javik, the Protheans had staring contests that lasted for hours.
  • Three normal paper NPCs in Paper Mario: The Origami King get together for a "canned food par-tay", which involves them sitting at a table eating tinned ravioli and tuna while listening to the Mariachi Guy.
  • Psychonauts 2: While exploring an abandoned tourist trap, Raz is delighted to find they have a funicular railwaynote  and takes great delight in riding it once he gets it running again, even though it's really just a painfully slow train ride at a forty-five degree angle.
  • The demo for The Stanley Parable contains the "eight game". You push a button labeled "8", several screens light up with "8", and a voice says "eight". You can do this repeatedly, and the Lemony Narrator will get mad at you. The "eight game" makes a reappearance in Ultra Deluxe, after the Epilogue, if you close and reopen the game enough times to make the sequel number "8".
  • A troll in Ultima Underworld II plays "White Rock Black Rock," in which the object is to correctly pick the white rock. From a pair of rocks in plain sight of both players.

    Web Animation 
  • Helluva Boss: In "OOPS", Stolas claps his hands and hoots happily upon seeing an entire stack of papers from Crimson's lawyer.
    Stolas: This will be fun! I love words.
  • Homestar Runner:
    • In the Strong Bad Email "extra plug", Strong Bad finds his brothers, the Cheat, and Homestar amusing themselves during a blackout by watching "a picture of Andy Griffith's head taped to the TV".
    • According to "slumber party", the only video game Homestar is allowed to play is "Clapping Party", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Inverted by the Easter Egg, where you can unlock Blistergeist Mode.
    • Homestar invented the game "Sid Hoffman or Sid Frenchman?", which consists of guessing which of the above names he's about to say. And yes, he cheats.
    • In the short "79 Seconds Left", Homestar and Strong Sad amuse themselves as members of the "Wet Knee Gumption Club" by pouring water on their knees.
  • In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Rogal Dorn's idea of a bedtime storybook is Ten Books on Architecture.
  • Satina Wants a Glass Of Water:
    • Satina having the time of her life at Dave's workplace in "Bring Your Demon To Work Day".

    Webcomics 
  • Hannelore in Questionable Content thinks that she'd probably find watching paint dry fascinating. Hanners is a certified mega-genius, so big surprise about that whole rant she runs through there.
  • Scarlet in Sequential Art enthusiastically played noughts-and-crosses with herself and watched for hours how a washing machine works, before "setting sockies free", not that she wasn't established as a Cloud Cuckoolander already.
  • xkcd: A character in strip #324 finds that tapping different parts of a desk results in different pitches. "So what did you do all afternooon?" "Hung out." (Subverted in the Alt Text: "Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.")
  • If Belkar of The Order of the Stick was speaking the truth, the hobbits in his village played games like "throw the stick", "throw the rock" or "Throw the rock and then the stick shortly thereafter".

    Web Original 

    Web Videos 
  • Jenny Nicholson's "Top 10 Lame Things To Do At Disney World" is a list of unpopular or obscure attractions at Disney World, with her explaining why they suck and also why they're her favourite things to do. Just in case you think it's sarcastic, it's intercut with clips of her at Disney World cheering for or just genuinely enjoying all of the things listed.
  • In the Scott The Woz episode "Wii Channels", Scott screams in utter excitement as he fiddles around with the display theme setting option on the Nintendo Switch's settings menu.

    Western Animation 
  • Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: Buddy’s eternal enthusiasm occasionally bubbles over onto things that no reasonable person would ever be enthusiastic about. Take this scene from “Solo On The Slide”:
    Buddy: Do you guys know how many planes have flown over the House Of Jam this morning?
    Buddy: 38!
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • At the start of "Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost", SpongeBob and Patrick play a game that consists of doing, well, whatever non-sequitur goes through their minds.
    • In "Mid-Life Crustacean", Mr. Krabs hangs out with SpongeBob and Patrick because he feels old. They end up going to the laundromat, reading at the library, sitting in a kiddie pool, et cetera. Of course this is subverted at the end when they suggest a panty raid. But it turns out to be Mr. Krabs' mother's undergarments...
    • In "The Idiot Box", SpongeBob and Patrick buy a large TV so they can play inside the box. They use their imagination to enjoy it so much, Squidward wants in.
    • Subverted on another occasion; SpongeBob gets a "useless" piece of paper from Squidward and then uses it to play all sort of games, plus swimming/flying around. When Squidward is jealous and gets it from him, he realizes he cannot do all those fun things, because Squidward is not imaginative, creative, or optimistic like SpongeBob is.
    • One reason SpongeBob wants to come back to work at the Krusty Krab — he misses the sound of two pickle slices rubbed together. By show's end he's rubbing two pickle slices together and looks ecstatic.
    • In one episode where SpongeBob visits other people's dreams, Patrick's dream just consists of him riding a stationary kiddie ride. Even when SpongeBob points out Patrick can do anything in a dream, Patrick just sticks with his kiddie ride. When the ride stops and Patrick loses his last coin, he just sits there doing nothing.
    • While attempting to convince SpongeBob to come outside in "I Had an Accident", Sandy and Patrick list various fun activities. One of Patrick's suggestions? Washing an old person.
    Sandy: Patrick, that's not fun!
    Old Man Jenkins: It is for me!
  • The Fairly OddParents!: Timmy's parent's idea of a fun amusement park isn't a normal amusement park... it's Escalator Land, a park where every ride is a normal escalator.
    Timmy: Dad, when do we get to the ride?!
    Dad: This IS the ride!
    Dad and Mom: Yippee!!!
  • The Simpsons:
    • Homer Simpson does this a lot, like playing with the adjustable hospital bed in "Homer's Triple Bypass": "Bed goes up, bed goes down! Bed goes up, bed goes down!"
    • Milhouse with the cup and ball. A joke Family Guy then did years later.
    • Marge actually gets thrills out of monotonous activities such as household chores and evening walks (of which she tends to prefer the dullest route). She once imagines herself being as flexible as a Cirque Du Soleil acrobat... and using that flexibility to clean hard-to-reach spots on her bathroom. On the episode Itchy and Scratchy Land, the family trip she had already planned for the family involved going to some bird sanctuary just because a new feeder had been installed (this actually made Bart and Lisa look at her in horror... and later on we find out that it's a good thing they didn't go to the sanctuary even when Marge thinks otherwise, because the birds escaped and rampaged in a manner similar to The Birds). The family actually tends to find doing Marge's ideas of fun more unbearable than Homer or Bart's trouble-making (and a chunk of Marge's "Day in the Limelight" episodes are her rallying against other people's ideas of entertainment because she cannot find the fun in it, so she won't let anybody else enjoy it). However other episodes have her being aware or how dull and boring she can be and how it can cause her children to not want to spend time with her in favor of their dad, and during Jaws Wired Shut when Homer starts acting less reckless, she finds the house so unbearably boring that she joins a demolition derby out of desperation for some excitement.
    • Lisa's idea of "fun" involves expanding her mind and her culture and standing for her beliefs (so we are talking Nerds Love Tough School Work, going to museums, watching documentaries and going to protests, for example). Even Marge has a hard time stomaching this, occasionally. Though she's also been shown to be Not So Above It All and will ocasionally join Bart's more destructive antics.
    • Seymour Skinner is this trope personified. When Bart forgets his field trip permission slip, he has Bart lick envelopes all day and suggests to make a game out of it by counting how many he can lick in an hour and then try to beat that record. It's so dull that it makes time go slower and skip backwards one second. He also believes a box factory is a perfectly good place to take the students to...repeatedly. And on the episode "Skinner's Sense of Snow", when all of the teachers refuse to teach because it's a snow day, he forces all of the kids to see a movie called "The Christmas That Almost Wasn't But Then Was" that is, from what little we (mercifully) see and the kids' reaction to it (that Skinner doesn't care about—he enjoys the movie), the very definition of "godawful".
    • Bart can get in on it as well. He considers visiting a screen door factory to be a fun thing to do in Delaware.
    • And of course, Ned Flanders has made his kids enjoy all sorts of lame things like sitting quietly during trips, clapping with songs and watching bread. They also showed a huge amount of joy at having a Christmas with imaginary presents.
      "I got a pogo stick!" "I got a hula hoop!"
      • The Flanders family also have season passes to the Cider Mill, which left Homer bored after just twenty minutes.
    • Martin Prince is an uber-super-duper-nerd to a degree that hits this. That thing about the cardboard box factory visit mentioned above? He's the only student that is enthusiastic about going there. In "Grade School Confidential" his parents hire a magic-themed mathematician for his birthday party instead of an actual magician. Even Lisa thinks the party is too boring and pretends to have food poisoning just to have an excuse to leave. He's also seen enthralled with an arcade game based on My Dinner with Andre which only has three controls: "Tell Me More" (which he selects), Trenchant Insight, and Bon Mot.
  • In the South Park episode "Here Comes The Neighborhood", while the rich kids play polo, the "normal" kids amuse themselves by running around and kicking each other in the balls.
  • Dexter's Laboratory:
    • In "Old McDexter", Dexter visits an Amish community. When he tries to explain "fun", the Amish lads can't think of anything more exciting than the butter churn. When DeeDee (who got to go to Space Camp) arrives, she adds insult to injury by agreeing that churning butter really is the best thing ever.
    • "911" centers on Dexter's TV show being interrupted by an emergency test pattern and trying to solve every possible emergency to get rid of it. Whenever he comes back to his house, he finds Deedee (and at one point his parents) completely absorbed in what they react to like various TV programs, but is actually still just the test pattern.
  • Fanboy and Chum Chum: In the "Night Morning" episode, Fanboy invites his whole class to watch Chum Chum do his morning routine... AT NIGHT!
  • Invader Zim: GIR enjoys a lot of activities others wouldn't, like hiding inside a cooked turkey for hours.
  • Phineas and Ferb: The title characters' activities are usually the exact opposite of this trope, but in "Phineas and Ferb Interrupted" they get hit with Doofenshmirtz's "Dull-and-Boring-inator" and spend most of the rest of the day doing stuff like playing with lint rollers and watching grass grow.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Twilight Sparkle considers things such as shelving library books or "a crazy weekend of studying" to be the height of entertainment. In "Lesson Zero", it's revealed that her favorite toy growing up was a "Smarty Pants" doll, which comes with accessories like a notebook and pen so you can pretend that she's studying. Twilight considers this the most awesome toy ever. In particular, the plot of "What About Discord?" is kicked off by the fact that Twilight holes herself up in her house for three days to re-organize her books rather than spending that time with her friends.
    • Maud Pie, sister of Pinkie Pie, is only interested in rocks. This, combined with her perpetual Dull Surprise expression, makes it incredibly difficult for Pinkie's friends to bond with her.
    • Silver Stream, a hippogriff introduced in Season 8, gushes over a lot of things, but she gets gets particularly worked up about relatively mundane things like stairs and plumbing (as a result of having spent the majority of her life underwater).
  • Numbuh Four of Codename: Kids Next Door loves getting buried up to his head at the beach. He even has a little song for it. And when his dad gets him a pool for the backyard, he ends up filling it with sand (the fact that the pool was a portal to a mirror universe and that Numbuh Four can't swim also helps).
  • Kaeloo: A lot of Kaeloo's games are seen as "boring" by her friends, who would much rather watch TV or play video games.
  • The Loud House: "Making the Case" has Lincoln compete in a video contest against the one in the lead, Hamstacam, which is just a video of a hamster running in its exercise wheel. When the video ends up taking first place, the video's ending shows the hamster tripping up, crashing into its drinking bottle, and getting sprayed in the face, which is probably why it was popular.
  • In The Crumpets episode "Sticks Stink", Pa likes the idea of mikado sticks as the family's birthday present for Li'l One (who accidentally suggested it while disguised as one of his brothers). In the ending, despite his children helping construct the sticks, Pa is playing the sticks outside and finds himself alone.
    • Also for Pa, in "Li'l One All Alone", he leads a forest excursion and enjoys nature as his children are incredibly bored.
  • Central Park:
    • In Season 1 "Episode One", Owen is the only person in his family and the park who's excited about the Hot Lips Turtlehead flower blooming in Central Park.
    • In Season 1 "Rival Busker", Owen brings his family to a tree where the Natural History Museum will be live streaming an owl nest. Paige and Molly are unimpressed, but Cole likes it due to being an Animal Lover.
    • In Season 1 "Live It Up Tonight", when Owen and Paige gets some alone time, the first thing they think of doing is catching up on chores and housework. When they realized what they were doing, they decide to go out on a date night. After their audit adventure, they decide to go back home and resume their housework, but not without drinking some champagne and lighting some candles.
  • Certain stories involving Rabbit from My Friends Tigger & Pooh focus on the fun he finds in household chores, particularly washing dishes. "Funny Rabbit" in particular is about the Super Sleuths thinking that Rabbit simply doesn't know how to have fun. After trying everything they can think of, they discover him having his own fun counting seeds for his garden and learn An Aesop that everybody has their own idea of what fun is, and isn't.
  • In Tuca & Bertie, Bertie and Speckle ask each other what their favorite porno movies are in an attempt to liven up their sex lives. Speckle's shows a perfectly normal bluebird couple having completely vanilla sex, while Bertie's is a perfectly chaste British drama.
  • Bob's Burgers: In "Vampire Disco Death Dance", Tina's friends invent a game called "drinking or not drinking", where you make people guess if you're drinking through a straw or just pretending. Her family members think the game is incredibly boring, but her friends think their game is wonderful, to the point where they sit in a theater's lobby playing rather than watch the movie they bought tickets to. This trend continues in "FOMO You Didn't" where their new past time is to cut class and hang out at a dirty half-demolished house making lame conversation, which Tina negatively compares to the nice time she was having work with Susmita on a photography project.
  • In one episode of CatDog, Cat tries to invoke this trope when he and Dog go to an amusement park. Dog wants to ride an incredibly dangerous and terrifying roller coaster called the "Butt Buster." Cat is afraid of the coaster but doesn't want to admit it, so he tries to find other "fun" activities to do instead. In a twist, once Dog finally does get them on the Butt Buster, he ends up hating it...while Cat declares it the greatest experience of his life.
  • The Mr. Frog Show from Smiling Friends inexplicably has 47 seasons, loads of merchandise, and a massive fanbase despite its incredibly barebones premise of the titular star running onto the stage, introducing himself, eating a bug, and proclaiming the episode's conclusion.
  • One of the sources of humor from King of the Hill is Hank Hill's fascination with utterly mundane tasks. He considers handiwork and lawn care fun, his idea of pranking one of his friends is to drive his car then fill up the gas tank, and he considers a jury duty summons to be a good thing.
  • Rick and Morty: Jerry has a game on his phone which involves popping balloons as they scroll by. Nothing else, just popping balloons. It underwent Defictionalization as "Jerry's Game", with the added touch of characters from the show cheering you on at specific intervals, and is actually kind of hypnotic.
  • Work It Out Wombats!: Mr. E considers things like organizing items on shelves, shaking boxes of paperclips, and sitting inside a laundry hamper to be entertaining.
  • The Patrick Star Show:
    • "The Lil' Patscals" opens with Patrick absolutely obsessed with watching The Traffic Light Channel, which just consists of footage of a traffic light downtown. He cheers when the signal changes.
    • In "Get Off My Lawnie", a show about an old man painting his fence quickly gains a dedicated fan following.
    • In "The Patrick Show Cashes In", the kids in the Bobby Babbington toy commercial have fun using it to fill out paperwork. It also comes with its own built-in pen and stapler, which are highlighted as awesome features.
    • In "The Commode Episode", Cecil says that "there's no greater thrill in life than installing a new doorknob!" after he just finishes it.
  • In the Tom and Jerry short Safety Second, it is the 4th of July. Nibbles keeps trying to light off his rather huge arsenal of fireworks but Jerry continues to confiscate them throughout the cartoon and instead force Nibbles to play with some harmless noisemakers. Jerry ends up changing his mind after Nibbles saves him from Tom by repeatedly attacking Tom with said same fireworks.
  • The Secret Scouts ask the Dinosaucers how they celebrate Fern Day, a Reptilonian holiday where violence is forbidden. Dimetro mentions a game called "How Far Can You Throw a Mud Ball".note 
  • The Owl House: When Lilith begins to learn glyph magic in Season 2, she expresses great excitement at watching the paint dry on the glyphs she inscribed. She also finds the evolution of balusters across the ages to be fascinating.

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