It Was A Dark And Stormy Night - Television Tropes & Idioms

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
— Paul Clifford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Edward Bulwer-Lytton was three things — an author, the inventor of such popular phrases as "the pen is mightier than the sword", "the great unwashed" and "the pursuit of the almighty dollar", and possibly a Nazi. (Now the paragraph's over.)

Although he is not publicly remembered as a writer or the inventor of those phrases, he is remembered for the phrase "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night", which has become a touchstone for convoluted Purple Prose. Thanks to the power of lightning, opening on a stormy night scene or at least featuring one had been a Horror trope since Universal's Frankenstein and before.

The phrase has been so thoroughly mocked since then it would be a Dead Horse Trope if it were not an Undead Horse Trope: it's much too much fun. In fact, a yearly writing contest

(and another yearly writing contest

) is held in Lytton's honour.

Examples:

Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The opening segments to the first few seasons opened with Stock Footage of Dr. Weird's castle.
Gentlemen... BEHOLD!
- Surprisingly enough, the footage for the castle exterior actually came The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest.
The intro to some of the Scooby Doo cartoons.
- The GameCube game Scooby Doo: Night of a Hundred Frights parodies this: Some of the upper levels of the haunted mansion are called A Dark and Stormy Knight. Naturally, this is where Scooby encounters the Black Knight.
  - That was the name of the first episode of the show itself.
Peanuts: Mocking this phrase perhaps began with, and was certainly popularized by, Snoopy's incarnation as World-Famous Author (basically, a typewriter atop the doghouse). He eventually managed to string together an entire 'novel' out of banal dramatic clichés, including the oft-heard opening line: "It was a dark and stormy night...Suddenly, a shot rang out!"
- His book was even called It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.
  - The first "dark and stormy night" Snoopy strip was in 1965, and according to Word Of God, the original joke was that you have a dog doing something incredible like using a typewriter, only to type such a notorious cliché. From there Charles Schulz built it into a Running Gag.
- For the record, the rarely-quoted full opening of Snoopy's perennial novel was:
  It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up. Part 2: A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day. At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery.
- After which he fears that he may have written himself into a corner. He does manage to weave this together (the intern finds a comatose patient has awoken — the sister of the boy from Kansas, who loves the girl with the tattered shawl, the daughter of the maid who escaped the pirates). Then Linus asks "But what about the king?" and gets a typewriter to the head.
  - Lucy, having read a draft of the aforementioned novel, tells Snoopy that his writing lacks subtlety. His new draft commences with: "It was a kind of dark and sort of stormy night..."
  - Lucy tells him he has to focus on the characters more, and create an iconic hero protagonist. So he changes it to "He was a dark and stormy knight..."
  - Lucy complains that he's never tried to write anything romantic, Snoopy changes "Suddenly, a shot rang out" to "Suddenly, a kiss rang out". Funnily enough, the latter actually became a pun in the German version (shot=Schuss, kiss=Kuss...)
  - Lucy wonders if "suddenly" is the right word in this instance. Snoopy changes it to "Gradually, a shot rang out."
  - Snoopy attempted to write a sequel to Gone With The Wind, focusing more Rhett and Scarlett's relationship. He got as far as "It was a dark and stormy marriage" before deciding it was a bad idea.
A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle is a popular and critically acclaimed novel known for starting with the line.
Meme Cat: "It were a dark n stormie nite".
The Simpsons episode #7F04 Treehouse of Horror opens on a dark and stormy night.
The opening narration to Animorphs #2 chapter 16 reads as follows:
It was a dark and stormy night.
Sorry, I've always wanted to write that. But it really was a dark and stormy night.
The very first chapter of Good Omens (Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman) begins "It was a nice day. All the days had been nice." Then, after quickly covering Man's Fall from Eden, the short chapter ends with "It was going to be a dark and stormy night."
- It then proceeds to shamelessly mock the phrase during the next chapter, with the following quote:
  "It wasn't a dark and stormy night.
  It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime."
Children's author duo Janet and Allan Alberg have a truly excellent picture book that is titled for this trope and deliberately uses it. It's about Talking The Monster To Death.
Despite being in a visual medium, Wild ARMs 3 opens with the words "It was a dark and stormy night," overlaid on animated storm clouds. Unironically.
Part of the solution to the murder in a short story this editor once heard- the gardener was the murderer, and obviously so because he gave his alibi as "watering the plants". However, because of the way the plot was set up, by the time the storyteller asks, "who was the culprit?" the listener has long forgotten the setup was a stormy night. Two things: that's one very stupid gardener, and can anyone tell me the name of this story?
One of John DeChancie's Castle Perilous books opens on a college campus, with the line "It was a stark and dormy night..."
- And then, in the same novel (Castle Murders) he uses the line "It was a dark night of Sturm und Drang." Lampshade Hanging anyone?
One of Stephen Leacock's early-20th-century parodies of Bronte-style romantic literature, the short story Gertrude the Governess: or, Simple Seventeen, begins with a parody of this opening:
It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland. For the matter of that the weather was just as bad on the East Coast of Ireland.

But the scene of this narrative is laid in the South of England ...
- Some people might argue that "a dark and stormy night" is pretty standard weather for the west of Scotland — even at midday in the middle of summer.
Ray Bradbury's detective novel Let's All Kill Constance begins with the unnamed narrator giving this line, then apologizing to the reader and giving a more original and detailed description of the truthfully dark and stormy night.
Golden Sun begins this way, with Isaac and Garet waking up at night in a storm to avoid a giant crashing boulder.
Bunnicula, a series of Affectionate Parody horror novels about, well, a vampire bunny who vampirizes fruits and vegetables begins its third story thus:
"IT WAS NOT a dark and stormy night. Indeed, there was nothing in the elements to foreshadow the events that lay ahead."
Webcomic Achewood features a pulp romance novel written by Ray: Danger at 2 1/2 Feet. The opening paragraph is shown, a complex mess of purple prose subclauses, shoehorning backstory into every word. The alt-text is IT WAS A DARK AND RAUNCHY NIGHT.
A Zits strip where the punchline was the character Pierce perched on top of Snoopy's doghouse in the final panel, texting "It Wz a Drk N Strmy Nite" or something along those lines. Anyone who can track this down will earn her eternal gratitude.
The official English version of Mahou Sensei Negima translated the title of chapter 68 into a pun based on this: "It Was a Dark and Stormy Visitor". And yes, it does take place during a dark and stormy night.
In one Order Of The Stick episode, Elan lampshades this trope by pointing out that rainstorms always begin when a dramatic event is about to occur. And he's right.
Quoth Crow T. Robot when Pod People used a lightning shot: "It was a dark and stormy night. I had just taken a creative writing course..."
- Lampshaded in The Hellcats when Tom is typing up his diary during a host segment right before commercial sign: "It was a fortnight ago, and it was... a — hey! — a dark and stormy night! Ha ha ha!"
Subverted, of course, in the Rocky Horror Picture Show: "It seemed a fairly ordinary night when Brad Majors and his fiancee Janet Weiss, two young, healthy, normal kids, left Denton to visit a Doctor Everett Scott, ex-tutor and now friend to both of them." Though, how dark and stormy the night actually turns out later, can hardly be a matter of debate.
The opening of Ace Combat Zero: "It was a cold and snowy day..."
The opening of Jack the Bodiless (first book of Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy) is: "It was a dark and stormy night, as so many nights were on Denali, where topography and climate conspired to produce some of the Galaxy's worst weather."
A comedy/mystery stage play written by Tim Kelly is entitled It Was A Dark and Stormy Night.
Lampshaded in Animal Crossing: Wild World:

"It was a dark and stormy night. A single figure stood alone in the downpour... Huh huh huh! It's like the opening to a really good bad movie."

Time Pressure by Spider Robinson begins with this sentence, then has a paragraph about how yes, it really was a dark and stormy night, and he's saying it even if it's cliche. He then returns to his sentence: "It was a dark and stormy night—when suddenly the snot ran out . . ."
In Once Upon a Mattress, the Minstrel sings that the Princess came to the castle "on a stormy night." He later notes, in correcting this "not quite accurate" version of the fairy tale: "That, of course, is utterly untrue. It didn't storm that night at all. In fact, it wasn't even night. And the princess only looked as though she'd come in from a storm."
It's the opening line to the trashy novel Hotel Royale, a simulation of which traps several characters in a Star Trek The Next Generation episode. Picard comments on how it's usually a sign of This Is Gonna Suck when he asks the computer to read the novel to him so they can figure a way out.
Mentioned a couple of times in Discworld, the follow-up gag usually being along the lines of "I'm sorry, but it was, a scene like this just demands it, okay?"
In Borderlands, Marcus beings the introduction to the Zombie Island of Doctor Ned DLC with this quote, followed by what sounds like surpressed laughter. Seeing as the entire DLC is an affectionate parody of zombies and horror, the phrase is quite fitting.

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