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Makes Just as Much Sense in Context

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For the record, the two preceding panels of this comic don't help explain this, either.
"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."
Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw (in response to the line "We may need you to play twing-twang;"), Zero Punctuation, "Heavenly Sword Demo review"

...as in, little to none.

Sometimes, when describing an event in a work, we resort to It Makes Sense in Context.

Sometimes, though, an event is just as nonsensical in context as it is when summarized (maybe even more nonsensical), and we say it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context, no matter how much the author tries to present it as Fridge Brilliance.

Even the characters in the work usually don't know what's going on, usually reacting with surprise/confusion/shock/horror (unless, of course, this sort of thing happens so often that they've just decided to roll with it). A few fans, thought, might wonder what the creators were thinking when they made that scene. Though, sometimes it's Truth in Television; after all, life can be pretty weird sometimes.

Closely associated with Mind Screws, Gainax Endings, and Ice Cream Koans. See also Cloudcuckoolander, a character who lives this trope.

Compare these related tropes:

  • 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.
  • Fridge Logic occurs when something appears to make sense in context until you examine it more closely. This fails to make sense in context, and when examined more closely.
  • Voodoo Shark is a Sister Trope; a patch over a plot hole creates another plot hole. This trope doesn't require that the weirdness be an attempt to fix an earlier weakness.
  • Quirky Work is the whole show; this is just one case.
  • 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.
  • A Gainax Ending is when the ending of a work makes no sense in or out of context; this trope doesn't have to be at the end.
  • When The Plot Demanded This Index, something happens to push the story because logic can't.
  • A Noodle Incident is when the context behind something is left to the viewers' imagination. Here, the context is actively shown.
  • If the entire work is like this, it may be a Random Events Plot.
  • A character whose words, actions, or motivations seem irrational or incomprehensible may be a Cloudcuckoolander, Chaotic Stupid, or follow a Blue-and-Orange Morality (or any combination of those); Insane Troll Logic may arise when a character tries to justify their actions, or chooses their goals, in an irrational manner. However, while any of these tropes may lead to It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context events (and usually do), it isn't automatically this trope.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • This applies to any of the scenes in Azumanga Daioh involving Chiyo's father. This scene, for instance, makes equal sense before and after seeing/reading the work in full.
  • 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 handguns that sacrifices itself to stop a giant moon-destroying caterpillar.
  • Durarara!!: The entire series makes little to no sense and cannot be explained accurately in one sentence. There's a headless fairy called Celty looking for her head in Ikebukuro after it was stolen by a mad scientist and given to a pharmaceutical company. A boy named Seiji became infatuated with the head and his sister, Namie, was infatuated with him. Celty ended up living with Shinra, an underground doctor for twenty years, during said time he had a crush on her. Three different middle-schoolers started color gangs, one of which, made by Mikado, being a ridiculously large internet-based gang. A girl named Anri's parents were killed by a demon sword that possesses people and makes them into knife-wielding zombies. Shinra became friends with Shizuo, a man with super strength and an incredible temper in elementary school and later Shinra became friends with Izaya, who went on to manipulate Mikado as well as his friend, Masaomi. Oh, also a vampire became an idol and there are multiple, evil pharmaceutical companies. Please note that that was only a small part of the premise.
  • Being a Gag Series, Gintama is frequently subject to this (And it almost always gets lampshaded by somebody).
    • In the Gender Bender arc, Kagura is transformed into a male by a light, but she turns into an old man, with a scar. When Gintoki asks 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 off, 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..!
    • In the "Freaky Friday" Flip arc, the gang spends much of their time chasing a formerly dead cat that was brought back to life when half of Gintoki's soul accidentally flew up its butt, which also granted it sentience and the physique of a bodybuilder. Then Hasegawa as Sadaharu gets his soul transferred into a pile of poop, only somehow transforms into an anthropomorphic pile of poop with arms, legs, and his face after he gets his sunglasses back. Then after putting mosaics on top of mosaics, everyone other than Gintoki and Hijikata becomes a pile of poop.
  • Near the end of the first Hellsing anime, the main villain catches one of 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.
  • The Mochi strips in Hetalia: Axis Powers, 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, 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.
  • More or less the entirety of Humanity Has Declined, which features such bizarre sequences as skinless chickens plotting to Take Over the World. The scarier part is when some of the things that only looked like this trope suddenly start to make sense on the fourth rewatch.
  • As would be expected from a series with such a title, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has these crop up every once in a while.
    • In Golden Wind, when Giorno first meets mob boss Polpo, the latter idly chews off two of his own fingers, only for them to reappear seconds later. His Stand, Black Sabbath, however, turns out to have the ability to move instantly through shadows. The actual reason behind his finger-eating and subsequent regeneration is never explained.
    • Stone Ocean: The first appearance of Big Bad Enrico Pucci sees him apparently using his Stand to put Jotaro and Jolyne into a trance while they're slowly dissolved by a thick white fluid. The problem: Pucci's stand Whitesnake's power is to extract the memories and Stands of others and store them in the form of CDs. Nowhere is any mention made of trance-making or white acid.
    • Both of them may be Early-Installment Weirdness caused by Araki not having decided the Stand's power yet, which tends to happen a lot in the series.
  • Magical Circle Guru-Guru: The nineteenth episode of the 2017 series has Raid, in his dragon form, after capturing Kukuri, looking at a photo book of Kaya which is filled with him doing "sexy" poses. This freaked Raid so much that it turned him back to his humanoid form.
  • Marginal #4 has schoolboy idols making out with a bust of Pythagoras. Context? It's part of an idol competition. Yeah, doesn't make much sense that way either... but it's funny.
  • A panel in the official translation of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid shows Elma asking "You want me to eat you?" Out-of-context, it's something of a bizarre non-sequitur (even knowing that she's obsessed with food). In context, though, it's just as strange: she's saying it to a bear that just roared at her while she was looking for the kids she was supposed to be watching. That the bear itself seems shocked and baffled by her question just adds to its weirdness.
  • The general absurdity 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.
  • A chapter of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You ends with Rentarou stripping down to nothing but a loincloth in order to shout encouragement to one of the girls during baseball practice. Then the next chapter opens with everyone at the game and Rentarou fully dressed, with no one mentioning the loincloth incident or what happened between chapters.
  • 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".
  • We Without Wings: Episode 7 has Karura bent on world domination, throwing cakes at people in the streets because he wants to ejaculate, but was unable to.
  • Zombieland Saga makes a Running Gag out of Kotaro's wacky Once per Episode entrances. One such instance would be in episode five, with Kotaro wearing a beret and carrying a sack of ISO-Standard Urban Groceries, leading into a Baguette Beatdown after Ai thinks he's an idiot.
  • Studio Gainax. If someone is trying to explain any of their series 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.

    Comic Books 
  • Pretty much everything in Suore Ninja. For example, Pope John Paul I did not have a heart attack nor was murdered, but was eaten by a time-traveling Tyrannosaurus rex. That happened because the current Pope, Constantin Vitalian, grabbed two holy relics that together give the power of Time Travel and tried to use them to cheat at a lottery but accidentally traveled in time to the Late Cretaceous, and when he traveled back forward in time he instead arrived at the day of John Paul I's death and the Tyrannosaurus had managed to come with him. In fact, when Constantin Vitalian solved the case about the death of the cat Maramao (the protagonist of an old Italian pop song), the strange thing is that it did make sense in the context.
  • Cowboy God in The Umbrella Academy.

    Comic Strips 
  • Heathcliff: Garbage Ape shows up periodically to Heathcliff's evident delight and knocks over the neighborhood trash cans. That's all that's ever explained about him.

    Fan Works 
  • To Love Ru: "To-Love-Carnage" features a conversation where the two main characters heavy imply they actually know they are in a fanfiction. It comes out of nowhere and never is explained. But then again, that'll make sense knowing it's a Crack Fic.
  • The sequel to the trollfic Half-Life: Full Life Consequences has this line: Gordon Freeman is in no way, shape, or form John's hands, nor is he the dead people's hands mentioned immediately before in the narration.
    John: Gordon Freeman is now these hands...
  • Astarte is a constant source of these in It's Curtains. Like thinking the plastic Halloween spiders were alive or responding to Seymour thinking they're all dead and in hell by concluding that maybe they're actually zombies... noting that they can still eat cake... and amending it with "cake zombies."
  • After Kitsunegasaki finally gets to be badass and makes amends with Juzumaru and all is seemingly well at the end of entry #3 of Tales of the Undiscovered Swords, it decides to reveal in the penultimate line that Mikazuki actually knows who Kikkawa Tomokane is for some reason. Even with the context of the Running Gag of Kikkawa Tomokane's being an obscure historical figure, it still neither makes any sense nor contributes anything meaningful to the ending.
  • Tends to happen with Pinkie Pie in Twilight The Third, as shown with her sax: (Then again, Pinkie's a pretty big Cloud Cuckoo Lander in the source material.)
    "I bought my sax from somepony in Shetland. It was raised by bagpipes and still tries to sing as they do."
  • Most of Northstar Pokeshipper's stories have this to a degree (due to his habit of trying to mesh real-world elements into the fictional world, or vice versa), but the one that takes the cake might have been Chapter 29 of his 151 Pokeshipping Stories (later deleted due to backlash). A riot breaks out in Pallet Town, caused by supporters of AmourShipping (AshxSerena) which results in the death of Tracey Sketchit, because he tried to defend PokéShipping (AshxMisty).

    Film — Animated 
  • The Mind's Eye series doesn't feature much in the way of context to begin with, being a collection of animations from different animators spliced together. That said, even some of the sequences when taken as a self-contained event don't make a lot of sense.
  • The infamous rapping dog 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.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Antichrist has a ton of stuff that makes no sense: the talking fox, the biblical allusions, the constellations that don't exist, the ending with faceless women, the very title... If you wandered into this Lars von Trier film, get used to it.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: In Wonka's flashback, he decides to run away from home after an argument with his father. Wilbur responds, "I won't be here when you get back." When he returns to his address, he finds that not only has Wilbur left, but he's taken the entire house with him.
  • Not unlike the below Rubber example, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is much, much weirder than its title suggests, mixing horror, sexploitation, surrealism, and arthouse tones with wild abandon. The director claims to have no memory of directing it.
  • Detention starts out as a comedic version of Scream and then introduces a time-traveling bear mascot, a Jerk Jock with insect blood who vomits acid, a "Freaky Friday" Flip and aliens.
  • Ernest Goes to Jail: Whenever Ernest gets an electric shock he temporarily becomes a living magnet. When he gets electrocuted on the Electric Chair he temporarily gains lightning powers. The only part of that to actually make sense (in context) is why he went to prison and got the chair in the first place.
  • Basically the entirety of the early Jackie Chan film Fantasy Mission Force. For starters, it's... not really a Chan movie (he's in maybe fifteen minutes of it), and his main contribution to things is to turn up, beat the hell out of everyone, and wander off again. It opens up with Allied generals in what is presumably World War II being captured by... the Japanese? The Nazis? It's... sort of unclear. And one of the Allied generals is Abraham Lincoln, something that is never commented on. And when they're captured, the generals are arguing about where the Nazi presence is, and indicating Baffin Island (part of Canada that's above the Arctic Circle) as to where they are. Then it cuts to a bunch of Allied officers (all of whom are Chinese) who are trying to assemble a team to rescue the captured generals, passing over Rocky Balboa, Snake Plissken, James Bond (Connery version), and Hercule Poirot as being otherwise occupied or unsuitable for military action, before settling on... well, it superficially resembles a Dirty Dozen knockoff, but opens with a musical number (which is never explained and is interrupted by bounty hunters looking to capture the guy leading the number, only for that to be derailed by the bounty target buying the gun off the lead hunter, and...), and continues onwards as you feel your sanity slowly unraveling. Mere words cannot do it justice, it is possibly the greatest awful movie ever made. If you have the time, and the desire to experience the cinematic equivalent of an out-of-body experience, or possibly just a bad acid trip, it can be seen in its entirety on YouTube here.
  • In The Hangover, the rooster was never explained. (Word of God is they got it to feed the tiger, though).
  • Hydrozagadka was deliberately made as silly as possible. The bad guy's plan is to steal all the water in Warsaw using fridges suspended on balloons. There's also a superhero. And a crocodile. Yup.
  • 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 Diddley, 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.
  • Rubber is about a tire named Robert that comes to life and kills people with his telekinesis. While being watched by spectators who act like they're watching the movie themselves. No, it's not an Attack of the Killer Whatever-style B-Movie horror film, it's an art film.
  • Tammy and the T-Rex has the premise of a mad scientist stealing a guy's brain so he can use it as a test subject for putting human brains into robot bodies. No explanation is given for why this robot body is shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex, why it moves on its own before the transplant, or why he promises it immortality.
  • Troll 2: The grandfather's ghost 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 Wicker Man (2006): This infamous montage of clips. Watching these scenes in their proper context doesn't subtract from how ridiculous and nonsensical they are and possibly just makes them sillier. Contrast the original, which still has a lot of very weird stuff going on as part of the island's pagan fertility rituals, but it's pretty internally consistent.
  • Zardoz has an infamously nigh-incomprehensible plot and surreal imagery everywhere, such that the entire movie essentially fits this trope. When a movie starts with a giant, flying stone head pronouncing that "The gun is good, the penis is evil" and vomiting guns on its worshipers, you know you're not in for a standard filmgoing experience. While John Boorman does at least remember that he directed it, he candidly admits in the Director's Commentary that there are particular scenes he doesn't remember filming because he was too stoned at the time.
  • The early surrealist films of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Being surrealist, they are intended to be symbolic in a sort of incomprehensible dream logic way.
  • Anything by David Lynch.
  • Creator Thumbprint of WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Sikora. For example, the turtle in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (A'yoy) can only be explained thus. Also the Olympic runner in the same movie.

    Literature 
  • TheFruitOfEvolution While in the underworld note  the main character's mother and father say:
    • "Let's take a picture with it! Can we?" "Of course!" Dad started to root about in his pockets. "Wait, I think I left my phone back in our Underworld..."

    Live-Action TV 
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The fourth season finale "Restless" is a gold mine for this trope, but particular mention goes to the man who wanders through the main characters' dreams discussing, demonstrating, and wearing cheese slices. In the commentary, Joss Whedon says this is because every dream has some element that simply makes no sense.
  • COPS (1989): There was a very strange case 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!"
  • 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 "Hurley" bird in Lost was only explained in the DVD-only epilogue.
  • Half of any given episode of The Monkees is this. For instance, "Art for Monkees' Sake", which begins with Peter painting doorsnote  and only gets weirder from there, culminating in a sequence where Liberace is seen demolishing a piano with a sledgehammer, for no good plot reason.
  • Describe a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus... Any skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus... Does it make sense in context? Yes? Then stop talking about Doctor Who reruns and describe a skit from Monty Python's Flying Circus, instead.
  • The Prisoner, a much-lauded spy show from The '60s, 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.
  • Most events on Sam & Cat sound bizarre when discussing them anyway, but "#BrainCrush" takes the gold - the B-story has Cat putting on a one-woman play. Fair enough, she goes to a school for the performing arts and though her specialty's singing they do all sorts there... but it's about Abraham Lincoln. If Abraham Lincoln was a woman. Complete with a long red beard and a short skirt. Luckily, Ariana Grande is too cute for it to come off as Fan Disservice, but still. Oh, and...
    Nona: Why is she speaking in an English accent?
    Dice: No idea.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: The infamous "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. note  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. Small wonder, then, that the people in charge of the series, including the scriptwriter for that episode, officially disowned that episode.
    • 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. (This had been done once before; it was TNG that introduced the warp scale that tops out at Warp 10. In the original series, Warp 10 was achievable but somewhat unsafe for the Enterprise under normal circumstances, and significantly exceeded under a few abnormal circumstances.)
  • 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.
  • The Young Ones: From the airplane crashing into the house, random unexplained time travel into the middle ages, vampires (who turn out to be video shop employees) in the post, random cartoon violence often resulting in massive head trauma, a genie in a kettle that is boiled alive when one of them makes tea, Macbeth witches in the hallway, a University Challenge team being crushed by an éclair, Buddy Holly hanging from his parachute in the rafters, the very random cut scenes that don't have any meaning and the loose, often prosaic plotlines: all factors that combined to create both one of the most well-loved UK TV comedies of the '80s and one of the most bizarrely set sitcoms ever broadcast.
    Matchbox: Don't look at me, I'm irrelevant...

    Music 

    Pinball 
  • Lights... Camera... Action! sets the player as a movie Director filming an action movie, with the lead characters named after various playing card ranks. That still doesn't explain why you need to collect their "cards" to build winning poker hands while filming...

    Podcast 
  • RiffTrax had this when riffing The Star Wars Holiday Special during Diahann Carroll's number:
    Kevin: Hey, they stole the Family Affair background! Wait until Mr. French finds out about this!
    Mike: They'll find out why they call him "Mr. French".
    (long Beat)
    Bill: (giggling) I don't know what that means!
  • Much of Welcome to Night Vale. A few examples include:
    • Wheat and wheat byproducts being illegal after they all turned into deadly venomous snakes
    • The mysterious cloaked figures that gather in the dog park (which, as we all know, is off limits to dogs and to people)
    • Cecil apparently having the ability to summon music from out of nowhere whenever he starts talking about the weather
    • Hiram McDaniels, who is literally a five-headed dragon
    • Khoshekh, the not-quite-a-cat that hovers in a fixed position a few feet above the sink in the men's bathroom of the radio station and his similarly floating kittens
    • Megan Wallaby, a young girl who is actually the disembodied hand of an adult Russian man

    Theatre 
  • Be More Chill: The activation for the SQUIP is Mountain Dew, and the deactivation is Mountain Dew Red.
  • At least once a show by Team Starkid.
    • A Very Potter Musical: Draco dreams of leaving Hogwarts and instead going to Pigfarts, a wizarding school on Mars run by Rumbleroar the talking lion. Also, one of Voldemort's horcruxes is a Zac Efron poster.
    • Me and My Dick: The entire premise of the show is a world in which people's genitals and hearts walk around next to them and have their own personalities. There are also secret societies called "The Council of the Pussies" and "The Land of the Dicks" where these body parts go without their humans.
    • A Very Potter Sequel: Draco's biological father is actually Dobby the house elf, and Peter Pettigrew has turned himself into a Taylor Lautner poster. Also, Harry and Ron are obsessed with Red Vines.
    • Starship: Commander Up was chopped in half (top down; hot dog, not hamburger) and no longer has a dick.
    • Holy Musical B@man!: Superman has the ability to reverse time by flying around the earth in the opposite direction. Also, apparently Batman's butler Alfred is Spiderman.
    • A Very Potter Senior Year: Voldemort HATES Snickers bars.
    • Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier: The Sultan has an inverted penis, and this is how Ja'far figures out that the Princess is his daughter.
    • ''The Trail to Oregon!': Grandpa (Tittymitty) fought his own personal war against the lobsters in 1812. The leader of the lobsters, Cornwallis, was in love with his wife, so the two fought. That war is the reason Grandpa's face is on the million-dollar bill. The rest of the characters chalk this up to a story Grandpa made up, but at the end, Cornwallis returns to pay back his debt to Grandpa and saves the family from a waterfall.
    • Firebringer: The tribe worships a duck, and Chorn is an alien/god/all-powerful-being. It is never fully explained.
    • The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals: Professor Hidgens's best friend (and possible lover?) is an Amazon Alexa.
    • Black Friday: The In-Universe film Santa Claus Is Going to High School! plays in the Hatchetfield movie theater. It follows Santa disguising himself as a high schooler and dating a teenager. No one knows why Santa is in the high school, least of the characters watching it.

    Video Games 
  • Castle Crashers has a particularly bizarre ending to a bizarre game. The fourth princess turns out to be a clown. She then does a silly dance to the tune of "The Sailor's Hornpipe" while penguins, pink weasels, and love hearts cover the screen. No explanation for this is ever given. note 
  • The Beethoven Level from Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp. It starts off with Dirk being chased by a cat around Beethoven's house. Seems OK, right? Well, then the piano starts flying, the cat turns into a fire-breathing demon-cat, Beethoven briefly turns into Elton John, you have to scramble over flying violins and music notes, and before everything comes crashing down Beethoven's coat is set on fire. And there is no explanation whatsoever.
  • 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. What makes this even weirder is this is the ending heavily implied to be what becomes the timeline of NieR.
  • The ending screen to Ghostbusters on the NES is one of the epitomes of A Winner Is You, but special mention has to go to "And prooved the justice of our culture". Even among one of the worst video game endings of all time, this sentence stands out as making absolutely no sense whatsoever. How does completing a video game "proove" the justice of our culture? And to whose culture is it even referring? Japan's culture? America's culture? The Ghostbusters' culture? Who knows!
  • Most of the reasons you're given to go out and roll things up in the Katamari Damacy series.
  • Kingdom Hearts is known by non-fans for being notoriously dense, but most of its events make perfect sense if you follow the plot threads from the beginning. And maybe ignore the retcons. However, there are some notable exceptions that even die-hard fans have trouble accepting.
    • Chain of Memories: Riku spends quite a bit of time claiming the ability to "smell darkness." This is never explained, nor is it ever brought up again.
    • Dream Drop Distance is considered the worst offender by some, including such things as introducing a time-travel mechanic, using said time-travel to answer questions nobody was asking, and giving the Big Bad the ability to track people by planting an X on them, such as in their name (explaining why all of Organization XIII had their Meaningful Rename) or just giving them X-shaped suspenders.note  In hindsight regarding that last one, the entire plot could have been avoided if Sora had just changed his shirt, but no one in-universe had any reasonable way of knowing this until it was spelled out to them.
  • A lot of scenes from Mother 3 would leave you scratching your head, but if you play the whole game from beginning to end, you'll probably be even MORE confused. Why does Ionia hold Lucas' head underwater near his crotch to teach him PSI? Why do the Oxygen Supply Machines look like big-lipped male mermaids who supply oxygen via a kiss and why are there land-based Oxygen Supply Machines that look like big-lipped hunky centaurs? Why is there a living bass guitar in the attic of Club Tittiboo that attacks you for no reason? The list goes on. And on.
    • Arn's Winter Quest (a hack of Earthbound), in its entirety.
  • The New Yankee in King Arthur's Court series has plenty of nonsense throughout, but most of it actually does make sense in context. However, there are a couple instances of this.
    • In the eleventh game, the companions are at a loss to understand why the major goal of one level is disenchanting and then collecting four giant rubber ducks which are floating on the ponds. Bran the raven says that he's pretty sure they belong to the Lady of the Lake, and the gang should take them in case they're ever needed for leverage, but they never get mentioned again in the game even when they actually do run into the Lady. They do end up being something of a Chekhov's Gun in the next installment, but not the way the narrative of this game suggests, and in the meantime they're very much this trope.
    • Also in the eleventh game, a penguin officiates at the wedding at the end of the main campaign. No explanation is offered as to why; we can only hope the penguin was properly ordained first, or at least got a certificate online.
    • In the twelfth game, the heroes encounter a character who ultimately turns out to be a Long-Lost Relative. The details of how she was lost in the first place are baffling and make no sense even when they're explained.
  • Being what it is, Omega Labyrinth Life features a lot of systems that make absolutely no sense, aside from all being purely for Fanservice. Some prominent examples include: your character grows more powerful by absorbing Omega Power from fallen monsters, which is stored in their chests, and makes them grow as a side effect; you identify unknown items by putting them into an Ambiguity Crystal, then rubbing it with a character's breasts to infuse it with Omega Power, making it grow larger and longer until the excess power erupts from the top half; and Tit-for-Tat, which is rock-paper-scissors only with breasts instead of hands.
  • Panty Party is a third-person shooter fighting game in the style of Virtual-ON. Except that the characters are all animated underwear.
  • Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal is a poorly translated bootleg of Pokemon Crystal Version; as a result, many of the very odd quotes that the NPCs say make little or no sense. See the quotes page on this game for some examples.
  • 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 within walking distance. Not to mention that half the time, people attack each other for no good reason!
  • Rhythm Heaven:
    • "Donk-Donk", one of the minigames in Fever, is so bizarre that the description in the North American 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. The characters don't even have official names; they're referred to in the credits as "Uh... These guys?" And on top of all that, the music is in 3/4 time instead of 4/4 time like most of the other songs in the game.
    • "Working Dough" is arguably just as weird. Four sentient blobs of dough work in a factory with Mr. Game And Watch, head bumping power pellets onto a conveyor belt to give a spaceship 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 spaceship is now a large tea-sipping geisha doll, and the space rabbits from the GBA installment appear.
  • The ending to South Park: The Stick of Truth. Why does farting on Nazi Zombie Princess Kenny's balls result in a World-Healing Wave that restores everyone who had been turned into a Nazi Zombie back to normal? Your guess is as good as mine!
  • Super Mario RPG: The Bundt boss fight. A giant wedding cake comes alive and starts attacking the protagonists. How and why is never explained.
  • Tales of Berseria has the standard Tales Series formula of Previous Player-Character Cameo Optional Bosses show up. This time it's Xillia's Jude and Milla. The weird part is how, for absolutely no reason at all, Jude is turned into a pengyon (except for the boss fights).
  • Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 features a giant eyeball attached to a stitched body. How was this abomination born? Well, in the Neversoft logo, the eyeball discovers the body lying on the ground and takes control by jumping into where its head would be. Yeah.
  • In Wild ARMs 3, you can find a Porn Stash. That's not unusual. In order to open said stash, you need to find 18 Migrant Seal items. That's... less logical, but the number at least makes sense. Once you open it, you have to fight the porn stash. Everyone in the party reacts like they just skimmed through the books rather than be attacked by it. To add onto how baffling this is, your reward is one of the children's adventure books used in a collection sidequest.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, when the first culprit goes into a Villainous Breakdown, he suffers an Accent Slip-Up and ends up saying things that are increasingly hard to understand, forcing Monomi to translate. At one point, when confronted about how he hid the murder weapon, he blurts out "Avrillavignnnnnne!" which Monomi translates as "Avril Lavigne!" and Fuyuhiko accuses him of "saying random shit to fuck with us."
  • Hatoful Boyfriend: The heroine brings something to her teacher during the summer holidays and he asks if she'll stay to help him with some work. The heroine can choose to either stay and help him; go to the library... or say that she has to claim her spoils of war and head to the distant land of Macedonia, to obtain her reward from the king. There is just no explanation for that line.
  • The characters of Little Busters! are prone to this. Most notable is Haruka, who spouts odd lines all the time. Other examples include Kengo summarizing Masato's life as "I brought you mayonnaise", Masato somehow interpreting things as being about muscles and just about everything Kyosuke says.

    Webcomics 
  • Awful Hospital contains copious quantities of this. Perhaps the most famous example is anything and everything to do with the Glumdroodler, including the Glumdroodler itself.
    BBQ Girll: It's weakening! Consider tubes! Consider them harder than you've considered them ever before! Harder than cones!
    note  Glumdroodler: Tubethought? NOOOOOO! [ceases to exist]
  • The First Word has no dialogue until the first word appears at the very end, so lack thereof can to some pretty confusing, difficult-to-explain scenarios. For instance, all of the evolution getting summarized midway through the comic, a girl whose mind can time travel, and a caveman's glowing blue penis.
  • 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.
  • 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 realize 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 is Sburb players, the event doesn't seem to take place in Sburb anyway, and the whole thing was never foreshadowed beforehand nor alluded to afterward...so it really doesn't make any more sense in context at all.
    • 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 John sees the event from Skaia and wonders what the hell he's looking at.
    • Much later, this scene gets a Call-Back, when in one of the walkaround games, Rufioh Nitram (a minor character based entirely upon Rufio from Hook), mentions that Andrew Hussie's self-insert (always referred to by characters as "the orange guy") tried to kiss him once:
      RUFIOH: just the other day, get th1s... some orange guy 1n a green sh1rt jumped out of some bushes and tr1ed to k1ss me... and 1'm l1ke whaaat... step off jolly man, haha...
  • Describing the premise of Lookism goes from 'Ah! That's easy! It's about a guy with one Bishōnen and one Gonk body, and he changes between the two each time one of them falls asleep!' Beat no… it's not easy to explain at all, how did it even happen?! Where did the Bishōnen body even come from?!
  • Oglaf: Ivan wakes up one night to find a giant spider giving him a blowjob. It apologizes, saying that it usually bites him first to paralyze him, then jumps out the window. Oglaf is already a weird sex comic, but even things like the Lizard of Guilt and Sexy Fruit Vikings are given more explanation than that.
  • The page image is from Two Guys and Guy. TGAG being a status quo gag-a-day webcomic, we never do learn the context.

    Web Original 
  • In The Nostalgia Critic, Rob is sometimes a dinosaur.
    Rob: I'm a dinosaur.
  • In Boring Trousers, Three Year Anniversary Special, Adam and CJ try to explain to Joe what he missed Cool Collar Bro, in which an LPer explains why he wears a dog collar. The explanation ends up sounding like the premise of a Shōnen Anime — to the point where it perhaps would have been wiser to have not given an explanation at all:
    Adam: All you really need to know—because he doesn't specifically say it again—is he believes he harnesses power from the moon with a dog collar that his grandfather gave him.
    Joe: *stunned silence*
    CJ: Basically.
  • Onision. His most well-known example is probably the Banana Song, in which he combines an Ear Worm, a banana costume, and as many wacky video filters as possible.
  • Harry Partridge is never thinking what you're thinking. Oh, and all hail Stephen, king of the lesbians!, as well as The Justin Bieber Show.
  • 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.
  • The entire series of asdfmovies are this, probably because it's a blend of Rapid-Fire Comedy and Surreal Humor.
    "I AM PUNCHING YOUR SALAD!"
    "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"
  • The RubberFruit video "Soldier thinks the sentry is american" described as:
    "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 Face 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."
  • Often the case of the stories on What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?. Especially the live episodes.
  • While the vast majority of Code MENT is certainly absurd in its humor, it is simple in its explanation. The suicidal Oompa Loompas on the other hand, are just there.
  • JulianSmith.tv, "You In Five Minutes": Julian finds clones of himself who claim to be him a few minutes in the future. The clone who claims to be Julian in an hour is black, looks nothing like him, and unleashes magical powers in fury upon learning Julian's mail package is empty. Cut to Julian in a car with friends, with no mention of the clones at all.
  • In one episode of Oddity Archive, Ben cuts to a clip from SCTV of five guys singing "Who Made The Egg Salad Sandwiches". If you watch the original sketch, the song is just as much of a non-sequitur as it is on OA.
  • Many of the things that happen in Stampylongnose's Quest and Den series are this trope. Especially Quest's morning routine, which involves Stampy and his friend iBallisticSquid shooting arrows at each other form the top of giant statue-houses of themselves, flushing themselves down a giant toilet, then kissing a snow-golem, then pretending to sell ice cream to each other. This routine has been known to take up an entire twenty-minute episode.
  • Game Grumps has a number of out-of-nowhere jokes that made no sense. One example, which the community found particularly hilarious:
    Egoraptor: How much ass do you think Mega Man gets?
    JonTron: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
    Egoraptor: Seven asses?
    JonTron: Seven asses.
    • From Super Bonk:
    Arin: [Apropos of nothing, while running aimlessly around the SS Anne] Oh no! Not the lever! Don't pull it! Aaaaaaaahhhhhh!
    Danny: The fuck is wrong with you-
    Arin: I'm ha- Nooooooo! Don't let loose the marmoset!
    • Yet another, from their half-awake playthrough of Yoshi's Cookie:
      Arin: At age six I was born without a face.
    • During Mega Man 6, Arin tells the story of how, when he and Dan were seventeen and twelve respectively in Kansas in 1942, eight-year-old Dan (a two-year-old serial murderer, at the time) and Arin, a young child of seventy-seven, went to a Dairy Queen, where Dan proceeded to shit himself seventeen times in a row.note 
  • Sonichu creator Chris Chandler's "I Got a Fish" video, which features Chris dancing and singing "I got a fish, would you like to make a wish?" (added via a deliberate Hong Kong Dub) several times over. Many people who see this in YouTube Poop or similar videos assume it's part of some longer clip in which it makes much more sense. It isn't, and it doesn't.
  • Homestar Runner: In "Best Caper Ever", Strong Bad and The Cheat send Homestar to the Arctic (to which they inexplicably have live satellite feed) by having The Cheat pee in Homestar's melonade. Due to not remembering all of the details of their caper, Strong Bad and The Cheat are at a loss trying to figure out how it happened.
  • Every HowToBasic video ever made. Normal thumbnails, normal names like "How to make lasagna", but everything goes straight to hell the second you click play...
  • So many of the happenings in SMPLive, but notably...
    • Schlatt and AntVenom's argument over banning Barack Obama from the KFC Dome.
      Ant: So long as Obama is banned from the KFC Dome, you enjoy dick and balls.
    • Schlatt and Connor trapping Michaelmcchill in wool and threatening to burn him alive because they think he's Herobrine.
  • SBI Rust lives and breathes this trope.
    • God is named "Piss Wizard" and flies around spraying people with a squirt gun and playing music. He once created a gun out of thin air and shot a helicopter down with his god powers.
    • There's a cave goblin that's invented a slur for people who walk on grass. He's best friends with god.
    • There's a guy who is entirely dedicated to being Kanye West. He goes around killing people.
  • Pro and Noob: Josh and Cotton frequently start talking about things wholly unrelated to the game they're playing. For instance: Josh going on and on for minutes on end about how he fantasizes about a game show based around polar bears and showers. Cotton is just as confused as the rest of us.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time:
    • The end of "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 Lumpy Space Princess is in the space background, riding on a donut. All of a sudden, it cuts back to the castle, where Finn cringes, and the episode ends.
    • The whole episode "A Glitch is a Glitch", appropriately premiered on April Fools' Day. It's done in glitchy-looking CGI graphics instead of the show's usual art style and revolves around reality falling apart because the Ice King released a computer virus into the "universal source code", as part of a misguided attempt to get Princess Bubblegum to go out with him by making sure he's literally the only other person in the Land of Ooo. And the climax involves Finn and Jake recreating a Shock Site video where a woman eats her own hair.
  • Cyber Six:
    • One of the first things you see in the opening credits is a strange bug-eyed gremlin-tadpole-thing floating in a tube of green bubbling fluid. It's one of the few clips from the opening scene that's not taken from an episode, this creature never appears in any episode, and it's never even so much as implied what in the hell this thing is supposed to be. One could assume that it's possibly an infant Cybersix, but as this is one of those shows that really doesn't like to explain a lot (which makes sense, considering the very child-unfriendly comic this kid's show is based on) there's never even a shred of actual evidence to prove this.
    • Terra is a strange episode. Von Reichter creates a Blob Monster made of mud and Jose bungles finishing it, resulting in a Non-Malicious Monster with the mind of a toddler at best. It manages to get its hands on Cybersix and starts draining her energy when a glowing orb comes out of her and into Terra which gives it the ability to speak and makes it start asking her what love is. Furious about this, Jose mutates the creature into a truly malicious entity that grabs Cybersix again, drains her energy again, making another glowing orb come out of her and makes the nice love-happy Terra try to come out again. Feeling bad for it Cybersix hugs it and one of her tears touches it, which makes it glow blue and cures it, fully turning it back into the "good" Terra. Confused? You should be, since none of this makes any sense In-Universe or is even addressed. What the hell the glowing orb was and Cybersix's healing tears are never explained and never appear in the series again.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy: "1+1 = Ed". From ed.wikia.com: "In this episode, the Eds embark on a learning spree, disassembling various objects and eventually stumbling into a bizarre universe that defies the laws of physics."
  • Gravity Falls: Insane Reality Warper that he is, much of what Bill Cipher comes up with in the environments where he has control (mostly the mindscape, the dream world and during the finale all of Gravity Falls) is utterly nonsensical horror. Notable examples include:
    • "DEER TEETH! FOR YOU, KID! AHAHAHAHAHA!"
    • "You deserve a prize!...Here, have a head that's always screaming!" (Bonus points for Bill graphically dismantling the head from the outside in like an onion)
    • Can't forget the beginning of the "penthouse suite" scene in the final episode: rather disorienting for the viewer and a complete Mind Screw for poor Ford. Bill rises out of the floor with a piano and plays and sings "We'll Meet Again", and that's just the beginning.
  • Invader Zim: GIR is this personified. Here are a few examples of him at his looniest.
    • "I'm in a bear suit!"
    • "It was meee! I was the turkey all along!"
  • Jimmy Neutron has an example of this mixed with Insane Troll Logic. In the show's Christmas Episode, Jimmy doesn't believe there is a Santa Clause, stating its impossible for anyone to deliver presents around the world in one night. Later, when he visits Santa's Workshop in the North Pole, Jimmy (still not believing in Santa) opts to deliver all the presents the Elves made for Christmas, stating that if he can successfully do so with his science, then Santa's Elves would be forced to agree that there is no Santa Clause. Just try to make sense out of Jimmy's line of thinking.
  • While My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic doesn't have anything nonsensical in it itself, one of its foreign dubs (the Croatian HRT dub) managed to somehow insert nonsense by accident anyway.
    • The recap from the beginning of "A Canterlot Wedding Part 2" for the most part has randomly jumbled voice recordings that most certainly weren't playing during the displayed clips from the previous episode, resulting in a mishmash of dialogue that is very confusing and inconsistent with the visuals and thus becoming nonsensical even within context.
    • For reasons unknown, the Croatian HRT "Cranky Doodle Joy" song was entirely replaced by a single spoken line of Pinkie's (and one that had played earlier, too), and the new line is completely out of place and holds no meaning.
    • Heck, even in the original there's Discord's shenanigans, which include drinking a glass of chocolate milk (the glass, not the milk, which came from a cotton candy cloud and filled the glass from the top down) and then tossing the milk behind him where it explodes. Granted, he is a Reality Warper, but only someone as insane as him would use those powers in that way.
  • Oggy and the Cockroaches sometimes has moments like this such as in the episode "Up to No Good", an otherwise straightforward episode where Oggy has to climb a mountain that grows out of his yard. At some point in that episode, he encounters a disco-dancing yeti that lives in a broken cable car (which seems to be much bigger on the inside). It becomes even more nonsensical when you consider that there's a rope that connects the cable car and a nearby city as if it's been there for a long time despite the fact that the mountain has just formed at the beginning of that episode.
  • Phineas and Ferb: In "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 it's 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.
    • Another realistic giant baby, but with a full body, appeared as a gag in an early episode coming from a normal-sized and typically cartoonish designed mom, no explanation was given.
    • And then there's Klimpaloon, the Magical Old-Timey Bathing Suit Who Lives in the Himalayas.
    • In a compilation of odd moments, there's one clip of Linda and Lawrence with evil expressions going "Keekeekeekeekee!". All of the other moments had at least some content in their respective episode, the last one was made specifically for this.
  • Pinky and the Brain: Any of Pinky's answers to the question, 'Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?'
    • We actually get to see how he comes to those weird answers in an episode shown from Pinky's perspective. He barely listens to what Brain is saying and his mind wanders off on odd tangents until he is thinking about things that seem completely unrelated to the conversation to anyone but him.
  • The Simpsons: At the end of "Burns, Baby Burns", Larry Burns (Rodney Dangerfield) randomly announces a party in the middle of the street. Not only does everyone present immediately join in the celebration, but Journey's "Any Way You Want It" begins blasting out of nowhere. Marge lampshades this, only for Homer to tell her to stop worrying and enjoy the party.
  • South Park: In "A Million Little Fibers", Oprah's anus and vagina argue with each other (they each have a different British accent) until one of them pulls a gun and takes some people hostage.
    • Supposedly, it's a callback to a scene from "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society" where Bebe's breasts start talking to each other about plotting to rule the world by taking over the boys' minds, only to wake Bebe up and convince her to cover herself in order to break the influence they have over the boys in her class.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants: In "The Chaperone", at one point a giant apple chases a woman. The context? SpongeBob and Pearl were doing a dance at the latter's prom called "The Sponge", which simply consists of bouncing on one's butt. Everyone else has trouble doing it and ends up injuring themselves and each other until the whole prom gets destroyed.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Storm the Castle", an Italian unicorn who did not appear at an earlier point in the series offers to repower Star's wand. This may also be a Mind Screw.
    • At least until the season 3 episode "Deep Dive", which implies the unicorns are from the dimension that all magic in the multiverse flows from, having one in the wand is what powers it, possibly turning this into a case of Foreshadowing. It's not any less weird (for starters, none of the other unicorns speak Italian, none of them have a removable horn they store in a suitcase, and it's unexplained how the Italian unicorn got outside the realm of magic, but neither is anything else in the show.
  • Pretty much everything about the Cartoon Network show Uncle Grandpa. A Manchild Reality Warper who is everyone on earth's uncle and grandpa travels in a flying RV with his friends — a wisecracking slice of pizza, a deadpan Godzilla-like lizard, a giant realistic flying tiger who farts rainbows, and a talking belly bag— to save kids from dangers such as talking mustaches and hot dog monsters. Good morning!
  • The Venture Bros. has Billy come face-to-face with... The Nozzle during his recruitment to O.S.I. It comes out to serene meditation music, ominously aims at his face, calibrates, and then just leaves without doing anything whatsoever. Billy is scared shitless and even Hunter Gathers has no clue what in the hell The Nozzle does.
    Billy: What was that thing?!
    Hunter: I have no idea. Standard, uh, so how do you like your new body buddies?
  • Everything about Xavier: Renegade Angel is a complete incomprehendable Mind Screw.


 
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Alternative Title(s): 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, Even With Context

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The Goose Cannon

"I had this terrible dream: I was in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and then the goose turned into Eminem."

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