"My first thought when I heard that was, 'I am so going to quote that out of context,' but on reflection it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in context either."
The former trope "I Am Not Making This Up" covered anything surprising (the trope was scrapped due to being thrown around like confetti, applied to anything even remotely unusual). This covers the much narrower context of stuff that is nonsensical both when summarized, and in context. To provide one example, Cantor's proof of the existence of the Transinfinite fell under IANMTU, but because it makes sense when the context is described and is a fairly logical result, it wouldn't be this.
A Big Lipped Alligator Moment is the intersection of this and padding. A plot point that Makes Just As Much Sense In Context may or may not be padding; it could be vital to the plot.
This is a touch more extreme than Fridge Logic; in Fridge Logic, it appears to make sense in context, until you examine it more closely. This fails to make sense in context, and when examined more closely. If it doesn't make sense until you examine it more closely (or makes more sense when you examine it more closely than it does on first glance) it is Fridge Brilliance.
Voodoo Shark is a Sister Trope; a patch over a plot hole creates another plot hole. Sometimes it falls under Fridge Logic, and thus is a separate trope; for example, the second order Trope Namer of Voodoo Shark (the Star Trek: Voyager holodeck problem note Short version: The ship was dealing with a long term power shortage. The Holodeck was said to be on a separate power supply. The problem: Why not hook that supply up to the main ship, which was badly in need of power?) was a straight up case of Fridge Logic, but not this.
Giant Space Flea from Nowhere is when a game's boss has no relationship to anything else included in the game or its backstory, generally being blatantly out of place, setting, and even genre.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
This ad where the students are calculating the root square of something when a Mexican wrestler randomly emerges to tell them that the cookies he eats are not square but round.
Anime & Manga
Near the end of the first Hellsing anime, the main villain catches Alucard's bullets with his head by phasing it. He then sends the bullet flying back down the barrel of the gun, somehow causing it to explode all the bullets into Alucard and reduce him to a pile of blood. Then again, this is a show about gun-wielding vampires.
Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is already pretty bizarre, but there's this one scene where the eponymous teacher, Itoshiki Nozomu, walks on a beach towards the ocean, looks up, sees a giant squid with Big Ol' Eyebrows emerge from the water ... and tenderly mumbles "Mother".
The Mochi strips in Axis Powers Hetalia, which feature Estonia's new pets: rice cakes that look and (sort of) act like other nations. In one strip, Mochicanada ate Mochimerica's daddy, a Lettuce that wanted to take over the world, and was proclaimed to be "The greatest country!". And that was one of the less nonsensical strips! There's also the end of the Hetalia Bloodbath 2010, which managed to be this, heartwarming, and awesome at the same time. Also, Godzilla-sized Rome singing opera. And regular-sized Rome distracting aliens with The Power of Rock.
The generally absurd nature of One Piece makes it a frequent sufferer of this trope. e.g. "The geezer-tree and... a unicorn are having a drink!" And sometimes putting things in-context makes them even worse. Except when you actually read them themselves.
Dead Leaves pull a few of these at times. At one point, Pandy fights off her opponent by giving birth to a winged baby with sunglasses and handguns.
Pretty much anything from Studio Gainax. If someone is trying to explain anyoftheirseries and you find yourself confused as all get out, don't worry. They often don't make any more sense to the person explaining them.
In Gintama, Kagura is transformed into a male by a light, but she turns into an old man, with a scar. When Gintoki ask her how she even got that scar since it doesn't make any sense, she says she got it when she realized that she had something ugly between her legs when she woke up from her nap, and she ripped it of, which caused her to get the scar, it's over her eye not between her legs! Then she wants to warn a friend of hers, and Sadaharu, her male dog, has become a horse..!
Film (Animated)
The infamous rapping dog scene from Titanic The Legend Goes On is this in spades. The uncut edition vaguely justifies it by having the dog rap about how the animals are going to throw a party and he wants them to steal food for it (which we see the animals doing in later scenes), but the announcement for the party and the fact that it's expressed via a rap number comes right the flip out of nowhere.
Also where the dog got the basketball jersey from, why the background is suddenly a city in some of the shots, why all the other animals were suddenly there...
Film (Live-Action)
This infamous montage of clips from The Wicker Man remake. Watching these scenes in their proper context within the movie doesn't subtract from their sheer randomness and ridiculousness at all.
If anything it just makes them make less sense.
In Willy Wonka's flashback in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy decides to run away from home after an argument with his dad. Wilbur responds, "I won't be here when you get back." Neither is the house.
In Troll 2, the ghost of the grandfather stops time to allow the protagonist to urinate on his family's dinner (the need to keep the family from eating the dinner is properly set up, but it's never been hinted that the ghost had this power). This may make some viewers wonder why he didn't just toss the food out.
Or the wooden man being chainsawed in the crotch and laughing. Or the love scene where two people eating corn together makes it start popping. Really, a lot of the movie seems out of place when lined up with the actual plot.
The rooster in The Hangover was never explained (Word of God is they got it to feed the tiger, though).
The movie Rockula is about a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire who needs to stop his girlfriend from dying and being reincarnated every 22 years, only to be constantly murdered by a pirate with a rhinestone peg-leg wielding a ham bone. He also starts a rock band with Bo Diddly, gets blood deliveries from the Red Cross, can turn into a Muppet-bat, his mother is Toni Basil, and he has a sentient talking reflection that may or may not be the trapped ghost of Elvis.
The "Hurley" bird in LOST was only explained in the DVD-only epilogue.
There's got to be a reason why the entirety of one Jam sketch was two men in underwear shooting each other in the ass, but no one can think of one. And the rest of the sketches don't make a whole lot more sense.
The infamous Star Trek: Voyager episode Threshold, in which traveling at warp 10 causes people to mutate into large salamanders and have salamander babies together before being returned completely to normal. There's something about "evolution" in there, but beyond that...
It actually makes even less sense in context, given that among other things, the fictional science of Star Trek warp drive says that warp 10 is infinite speed (achieving it would mean occupying all points in the universe simultaneously) and thus requires infinite power output. Yet somehow an underpowered shuttlecraft is able to do it, with no explanation as to how. And then there's the opening scene of the episode, in which they run a computer simulation of the warp 10 test...even though given that nothing has ever reached warp 10, there should be no data to enter into the simulation.
Even worse, the distant finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which was written long before Threshold) shows ships exceeding warp 10 without any lizard-people or infinite energy, though this probably signifies a renumbering of the scale.
There was a very strange case on Cops where a man walked in on his mother having sex with his wife. As if this itself isn't ridiculous, he doesn't know how to react, so he calls the police hoping they can do something about this. His mother, seeing that he's calling the police, stabs him in the hand. When they get there, they arrest his mother while his wife screams after the car "She's 61 years old! You can't do that to her!"
The Prisoner, a much-lauded spy show from The Sixties, always had a weird, psychedelic feel to it, but nobody was prepared for the finale. If you really want it spoiled, you should know that everyone dances to "Dem Bones", the villain turns out to be a chimp who turns out to be the hero, and then there's a gunfight set to "All You Need Is Love", a rocket takes off, and the hero teams up with a supporting villain, a little person, and a mod and they steal a truck. The kicker is that if you pay attention to it in terms of themes, rather than plot, it's not without meaning. It's just... very peculiar in how it communicates those themes.
Ah, Twin Peaks. Sure, for the most part, it was a reasonably straightforward murder mystery with soap opera aspects. But then every so often there'd be a denim-clad demon named BOB (all caps) and his former best friend who cut off his arm to get rid of a tattoo he didn't like and the arm turned into a little person who dances a lot, a teleporting horse, an extradimensional conspiracy revolving around creamed corn, a murdered woman's soul getting caught inside a dresser drawer, a seemingly-crazy woman whose best friend is a chunk of wood which is implied not only to be sentient, but also to have psychic powers, and David Bowie and Chris Isaak as FBI agents who accidentally travel through time. And the normal stuff just made the weird stuff seem even weirder.
"Donk-Donk", one of the minigames in Rhythm Heaven Fever, is so bizarre that the description in the English version of the game admits it's hard to describe. It involves what appear to be anthropomorphic tuning forks piloting a rocket propelled by their own rocking motion across a landscape of giant flowers and pink clouds, with a green cartoon octopus stuck to the underside of the rocket along for the ride. That's weird even for a Widget Series.
"Working Dough" is arguably just as weird. Four sentient blobs of dough work in a factory with a Game And Watch, headbumping power pellets onto a conveyor belt to give a space ship enough power to escape Earth's gravity. "Working Dough 2" is even weirder, as it takes place in a bamboo forest with the dough blobs resting in teapots, the space ship is now a large tea-sipping geisha doll, and the space rabbits from the GBA installment appear.
Puyo Puyo is this unleaded. For instance, SUN's plot is about green-haired Satan enlarging the sun so he can have a longer summer and be surrounded by women in bikinis. In Fever 2, Primp Town apparently has a forest, an ocean, some ruins, and a desert all in walking distance. Not to mention that, half the time, people attack each other for no good reason!
Most of the reasons you're given to go out and roll things up in the Katamari Damacy series.
Drakengard has a real doozy. After fighting their way through 3 different endings, each varying in serious levels of depressing, the player has a chance at experiencing the fourth ending. Rather than confront the final boss of the game, the boss' brother crushes her, causing the Gods possessing her to destroy the world... with giant, terrible infants. The characters remarkably take this in a fair enough stride, all things considered, although the ending is not positive.
And after collecting all 65 weapons hidden within the game (each often with their own horrible requirements to get), the player finally gets to experience the fifth and final ending of Drakengard. Where the same as above happens, but the main character and his dragon wind up dragging the true final boss through a dimensional gateway. To Shinjuku, Japan. In 2003. And then they engage in a rhythm battle above Tokyo in a game that had once been hack-and-slash gameplay. Even the relevant characters wind up seriously confused for the few lines of dialogue they have.
Visual Novels
The characters of Little Busters are prone to this. Most noteably is Haruka, who spouts odd lines all the time. Other examples include Kengo summarizing Masato's life as "I brought you mayonaisse", Masato somehow interpreting things as being about muscles and just about everything Kyosuke says.
Web Comics
Homestuck is extremely fond of things that Make Sense In Context, but when Andrew Hussie feels like trolling the fans, sometimes we get this trope. A great example is an extended sequence in which, immediately after another character had died, Rufio from the movie Hook dies and Andrew Hussie's Author Avatar tearfully mourns his death...by kissing his corpse on the lips. The whole thing might make a bit more sense when you realise that it's a well-established law of Sburb that if one player kisses a dead player with a live dreamself they come back to life, but neither of them are Sburb players, the event doesn't seem to take place in Sburb anyway, and the whole thing was never foreshadowed beforehand nor alluded to afterwards...so it really doesn't make any more sense in context at all.
Not an example, but worth noting is that during an archive binge, Rufio's actor read that part of the comic while drunk. The reaction was priceless.
Also immediately lampshaded in-series, as God!John sees the event from Skaia and wonders what the hell he's looking at.
Frederick The Great loves this trope. One story arc consists of the heroes attempting to rescue the German version of Arthur Sullivan from wage slavery in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in order to prevent a Cthulhu-worshiping version of W.S. Gilbert from exploding Ireland.
In "Ultimate Muscle Roller Legend", two gay men in their underwear ride each other like scooters and segways chasing down a girl driving a transforming steamroller. They finally blow her up by pulling down their underwear revealing a baby head that shoots lasers. This is all that's given as a description:
Deep in the forest lived Billy and his charming companions. They peacefully honed their bodies and listened to music there. But a wave of development came upon the forests. One who would turn all to road. Kagamine Rin had come. Billy must stop the construction before all is turned to road.
"A young Engineer has just built its first sentry, and is very proud of himself. However, he is interrupted by the appearance of a Stupid Faice Soldier. The Soldier insists that the sentry is an American, but the Engineer disagrees. This enrages the Soldier, who eats the Engineer with the help of a special bacteria called Francis. Attracted by the commotion, a Pedospy appears and attempts to hump the Soldier to death. Before he can do this, however, the mother Engineer returns and eats them both."
While the vast majority of Code Ment is certainly absurd in its humour, it is simple in its explanation. The suicidal Oompa Loompas on the other hand, are just there.
Rainbow Dash Reads Homestuck: Rarity decides to join the blog. This was set up as expected. What was not set up was the askers spontaneously deciding she was a taco and driving the poor mare temporarily insane.
Later Rarity accidentally gets Rainbow involved in an argument between two alternate universe Twilights on whether pillows are adequate sexual/romantic partners. Granted, this happened on April Fool's day...
Western Animation
In the South Park episode "A Million Little Fibers", Oprah's asshole and vagina argue with each other.
The concept of Towlie in general, a talking towel who comes out of nowhere and gets high all the time, qualifies too.
In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Moon Farm", the main characters decide to fly an army of cows to the moon because of an ancient scroll containing a lost verse to "Hey Diddle Diddle" which claims that ice cream made from moon cow milk is the greatest in the universe. We don't know, and its clear that many of the characters don't either.
Also, Candace's running gag of hallucinating (possibly) a talking Zebra that calls her Kevin.
The cameos of The Giant Floating Baby Head also make no sense at all.
At the end of the Family Guy episode "Blind Ambition", Peter saves the owner of The Drunken Clam from a fire that the bar was on. The next scene shows him being led to receive a medal or something. Makes sense enough; what doesn't make sense, is that most of the spectators are characters from Star Wars, and the episode ends with the scene zooming out into space.
That's a(n admittedly random) parody of the final scene from Star Wars A New Hope.
The ending of the Adventure Time episode "The Other Tarts". The psychotic Tart Toter bursts into the castle, brandishing a chicken and a squirrel in place of tarts, foaming at the mouth. He says: "This cosmic dance bursting with decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively, but... If sweetness can win, (and it can!), then I'll still be here tomorrow to high-five you, yesterday, my friends. Peace." As he says this, the camera zooms in on his deranged, foaming face, and fades to the Tart Toter's delusion of drifting through space, surrounded by sweets, and LSP is in the space background, taking a donut. All of a sudden, it cuts back to the castle, where Finn cringes, and the episode ends.
Real Life
There is an educational video made by the Spitzer Space Telescope PR people where a woman gets eaten by a giant anemone.
After a rash of shark attacks off of the Egyptian coast, a high-ranking member of the Egyptian government declared that it was the work of Mossad (think of it as the Israeli CIA), who he claimed had planted Mind Control chips in the sharks' brains to attack Egyptian civilians in revenge for the Egyptians having too many tourists. Even his colleagues had a Flat "What." moment.
Note: When Egypt has to defend Israel from a statement you made you know it was stupid.
Incidentally, if this is the same rash of attacks I'm thinking of, it eventually was discovered that someone had been hand-feeding the sharks, which led to the fish biting other tourists in order to figure out where they kept food on their person.
alternative title(s): Makes Spanish Hat Balloons In Whistle Side; Makes No More Sense In Context; It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context; Makes No Sense In Context; It Makes As Much Sense In Context; Makes As Much Sense In Context; Makes Even Less Sense In Context; It Makes Even Less Sense In Context
, Zero Punctuation
