"I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-kiri Rock. I need scissors! 61!"
A Non Sequitur (Latin for "it does not follow") in fiction is an event or line of dialogue which comes out of nowhere, bearing no relevance to the subject at hand. It is a staple of surrealism and humor, and often establishes a character as The Ditz or a Cloudcuckoolander. I like bananas.
Can also refer to a type of logical fallacy; see Non Sequitur Fallacy.
A newspaper daily strip of the same name is here.
Compare Red Herring, when a distraction is used to divert attention; related to Insane Troll Logic.
Subtropes include:
There are several in The Room. The most infamous being:
Mark: "How was work today?" Johnny: "Oh, pretty good. We got a new client at the bank. We'll make a lot of money." Mark: "What client?" Johnny: "I can not tell you, it's confidential." Mark: "Oh, come on." Johnny: "I can't. Anyway, how is your sex life?"
Live Action TV
The "Captain Jim & Pablo" skits from early '90s Saturday Night Live come to mind, with just about everything Pablo (Adam Sandler) says qualifying:
Pablo (Spanish accent): One time I threw a stick at a monkey...
Subverted and Lampshaded in Scrubs. J.D. always appears to the other characters to be saying these, because he constantly imagines something related to the issue at hand and then makes a comment about his fantasy that winds up sounding totally nonsensical to the other characters. Generally, the longer and more elaborate the fantasy, the more removed his comment will be from the situation that triggered the fantasy in the first place.
Precious Roy: This is Precious Roy, and you kids better pay for that lap dance!
Sifl: Precious, we're talking about the Civil War Corpses...
Precious Roy: APPLE... CIDER!
Sifl: ... What?
Precious Roy: Suckers!
Music
In the song by Andrew Huang, each word is a non sequitur, even though there never had been a real point to rabbit-trail away from other than the statistics at the beginning. This how many of his other songs tend to be.
In Jack Sparrow by The Lonely Island, the guys have a recording session with Michael Bolton, who mentions at the beginning of the video that he had just finished watching a marathon of Pirates of the Caribbean. They all proceed to sing about being gangsters at a club...until Bolton goes off and starts singing about Captain Jack. It eventually descends into completely-unrelated mentions of Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, and Scarface, one after the other.
Andy Samberg:(annoyed)...Turns out Michael Bolton's a major cinephile...
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas: CJ's girlfriends repeat the same non-sequiturs ad nauseum during car trips. CJ feigns interest.
Throughout the series, NPCs can have conversations with each other. However, these conversations consist entirely of random voice clips, so they are literally nothing but a series of strung-together non-sequiturs.
Scarface: The World is Yours is stuffed with lines of dialogue. That sometimes doesn't flow together quite well. Tony would ask a girl to clean his pool and she demands they go shopping. Then he asks why she hangs around all the time, even though he invited her to live there. Then Tony starts talking about murdering his enemies, sometimes even after they are dead.
This is a large part of why the Lets Playerraocow is as popular as he is.
raocow: You are not the unicorn of my love, football Charlie! You are merely a pawn in the great game that we like to call... Mario World. Although you are one of the important pawns. You are like, that one pawn in the middle that you start in the beginning of the game in order to, like, capture the whole world and stuff.
Lisa: Hey Ralph, want to come with me and Alison to play "Anagrams"?
Alison: We take proper names and rearrange the letters to form a description of that person.
Ralph: My cat's breath smells like cat food.
About 50 percent of everything Ed says from Ed Edd N Eddy says is a non sequitur. Often, when he's asked a question, his response is "buttered toast" or "gravy" and he randomly shouts "I love chickens" even when there aren't any chickens present.
In the Grand Finale of Generator Rex, right after the Obfuscating Insanity Van Kleiss explains how to do something spoilerrific not particularly relevant to the trope, he randomly asks if anyone has seen his socks.
In Phineas And Ferb, when you're shot with the Dull-And-Boring-Inator not only do you become...well, dull and boring, you also gain the tendency to talk like this. Examples include:
"I always liked pointing."
"Did you ever notice that the side-walk is filled with little sparkly bits?"
Gerald: (singing, after everyone else has stopped)Courteney Cox, I love you; you're so hot on that show...
Kyle: Dad... Dad? We're singing about a dreidel.
SpongeBob SquarePants has some as well. One of them involves SpongeBob trying to get Mermaidman and Barnacle Boy out of the retirement home. He attempts to reason with them, then Mermaidman gets fed up with it and says the following:
Mermaidman: "If you don't get out of here, then by the power invested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife!" Orderly: (walks into the retirement home's main room) "What is going on in here!?" Mermaidman: "You may kiss the bride!!!"
Veggie Tales: The verses in "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" by Larry the Cucumber, who follows two pirate-themed verses with lines about never having kissed a chipmunk or painted daisies on a big red rubber ball. The other two go on to lampshade the hell out of it.
On Clerks: The Animated Series, while trapped in the freezer Randal sees an old lady shoplifting and he yells "The weeds of crime bear bitter fruit, you old hag!" We then see a flashback to the last time he said that, where it comes out of nowhere and makes no sense.
Other
Seen on a button:
American Non-Sequitur Society—We don't make sense, but we do like pizza
