Not Hyperbole

"When someone says 'We've got people everywhere', you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!"

— M, after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, Quantum of Solace

It is a staple of fiction, and indeed casual dialogue in Real Life, to exaggerate when describing something. Everyone has heard it before: "I'm gonna hit you into next week!" "I'm the biggest baddest guy in town!" "He's the size of a house." We all know the people saying these things don't actually mean what they're saying. They're just using dramatic flair, that's all. It enhances the conversation or makes it funnier. So when the Mighty Glacier tells his opponent that he's about to be punched through a wall, he can't actually do what he just said.

Unless he then proceeds to do exactly what he just said.

That's where this trope comes in. Not Hyperbole is when exaggerations and hyperboles that we've all become used to in conversation is neither exaggeration nor hyperbole. The character means exactly what he just said and nothing less and usually proceeds to prove it.

Usually part of a Badass Boast. See also Literal Metaphor, and All of Them. Literal Ass-Kicking is a subtrope. "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer is a common variation. My God, You Are Serious! may follow as well if another character realizes that this trope is in play.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The Man Your Man Could Smell Like: In one commercial, Old Spice Man claims that Old Spice body spray "WILL MAKE YOU SO POWERFUL IT'LL BLOW YOUR MIND AWAY IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE!" Cue Old Spice Man's brain flying in front of his face and exploding, causing him to lose the ability to speak properly.
  Old Spice Man's Brain: Goodbye.
  Old Spice Man: OH NOOOOOOOO!!!
• A Sprite commercial from the late '90s involves basketball players walking towards the camera. The announcer remarks that people look up to them for one reason: They're tall. They're very tall.
• In a Quizno's TV spot featuring a pre The Big Bang Theory Jim Parsons, his character is eating an untoasted sub, making the Quizno's customer ask if the other one was raised Raised by Wolves. After seeing an aside with the character actually with wolves, he responds yes.

Anime & Manga

• Ayakashi Triangle: After Matsuri is split into a boy and girl, the boy says it feels like Suzu's gotten a lot closer to his female counterpart. Then the perspective changes to show Suzu is physically at arm's length from boy Matsuri and almost shoulder-to-shoulder with girl Matsuri.
• Chainsaw Man begins with Denji and his Adorable Abomination Pochita dying and merging together to resurrect the former. Denji assumes Pochita is still dead, but Makima assures him Pochita lives on inside him — and specifies she means that literally, as Pochita physically became Denji's heart (as in the organ). Ironically, Denji describes the situation to Power, who mocks him under the assumption he's speaking metaphorically, and he doesn't bother correcting her.
• Fairy Tail: When Juvia starts "crying waterfalls", this is no exaggeration. One time when she did this in relief of "her beloved" Gray's return, she flooded the guildhall.
• Fist of the North Star: If Kenshiro says that after he's through with you there will be not one hair left from you, he means it!
• An unintentional variation occurs for a bit of drama in Season 1, Episode 14 of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and only in the English-language track. Commenting on a recluse supposedly asleep in his bed...
  Major: I'm amazed this racket didn't wake him. He sleeps like a dead man.
  [pulls curtain; cue surprised look on her face; Togusa also looks]
  Togusa: That's 'cause he is. Looks like he's been dead for about three or four months.
• Mazinger:
  • Mazinger Z: In the first episode, The Professor Dr. Kabuto tells The Hero Kouji whoever pilots Mazinger-Z has the potential to become a god or a devil. As later retellings and versions of the history (especially Z-Mazinger or Shin Mazinger Zero) have proved, Dr. Kabuto was not exaggerating.
  • UFO Robo Grendizer: Danbei Makiba constantly yells he will hang with his bare hands whoever gets close to his daughter. Nonetheless, Kouji did not take his threats seriously... until Danbei attempted lynching him. Repeatedly.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, Evangeline doesn't have to exaggerate her threats:
  Evangeline: Ahahahaha! This is getting interesting! I'll finish this with a single blow! Hold the scum in place for me! [cue one-hit freeze]
• One Piece:
  • Basically anyone noteworthy enough to get namedropped has an epithet, which is usually a badass-sounding Red Baron title, like "Heavenly Demon" (Donquixote Doflamingo) and "Surgeon of Death" (Trafalgar Law), but often enough it's a blunt and quite literal description. "Straw Hat" Luffy wears one, "Pirate Hunter" Zoro turned in pirates for their bounties prior to becoming one himself, and all of the Four Emperors have non-exaggerated epithets: "Red-Haired" Shanks, Edward "Whitebeard" Newgate, and Marshall "Blackbeard" Teach all have the appropriate hair colours, "Big Mom" Charlotte Linlin is a giant of a woman and the mother of 85 children from 43 husbands (lampshaded by Brook), and "King of the Beasts" Kaido has an army of Zoan-type Devil Fruit users.
  • At one point, a samurai knocks over Sanji's soba cart, causing the chef to tell the man he's "gonna have to eat" the wasted soba. After beating the hell out of him, Sanji force-feeds the samurai all the spilled soba.
  • The filler character Carmen claims she had wanted a cooking battle with Sanji for ten years, but her assistants quickly clarify she only saw the article about Sanji ten days ago. At the end of the cooking battle, it's revealed Carmen actually had met Sanji ten years ago and was inspired by him, leading to her desire for a cooking battle.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, when Kyubey tells Madoka she could become a god, we're meant to assume he's exaggerating to convince her to make a contract. Even he seems shocked when she actually does it, making a wish that hacks the system so she becomes less of a Magical Girl and more of a combination Jesus and psychopomp.
• In the Samurai Pizza Cats finale, Big Cheese drains the royal coffers for his latest and greatest scheme. Unfortunately, this is noticed by the Princess, who says there isn't enough money left to buy an ice cream. When Big Cheese says she's surely exaggerating, she tells him no, her check bounced that morning.
• Space Patrol Luluco: The Big Bad mocks Luluco's crush on Nova as the most worthless thing in the universe. In his words, a foolish girl superficially Loving the Shadow of a person who is just as shallow (as in, he has no feelings whatsoever) produces an easily-reproducable gem called an Aflutter Jewel, which has no monetary or physical worth. However, because Blackholians desire worthless things, Luluco's Aflutter Jewels are especially coveted.
• Space Runaway Ideon: The opening theme tells that Ideon can rip apart the galaxy. Obviously an exaggeration, right? You keep thinking that if you live in that universe. You will live happier for as long as you have left.
• Spy X Family: In chapter 25/episode 18, Damian Desmond gets a call from his butler, Jeeves, who tells him that his father was very concerned after learning that Damian was punched on his first day of school. Damian, however, doesn't believe him, saying his father couldn't care less about him. Given that it's quite common for children and even teenagers to think their parents don't love them, one could easily dismiss this as typical child angst. It isn't. At all. When we finally meet his father, Donovan Desmond, in person, he makes a speech about how he considers even his children strangers, despite knowing full well that Damian can hear him.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has the Arc Words, "[Simon's] drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens". Obviously, this is a metaphor, right? But by the end of the series, it's not.

Comic Books

• Though it does not actually happen in this case, Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire has the Prime Mover warn a local Intrepid Reporter that, if she should ever so much as think about revealing the secrets of the events that had transpired that day, her head would explode. This threat is, with good reason, taken entirely at face value.
  Hyraxx: You're joking, right? I can't control my thoughts.
  Prime Mover: I recommend a lobotomy.
• Daredevil: Bullseye at one point comments that his jailors keep him on laxatives and stool softeners in the belief that he would murder his way out with a solid enough turd.
  "And I would, too... if for no other reason than just to say that I did. Because I'm like that."
• The Flash: Weather Wizard states that despite being a family man, he is not kidding about threatening to place a tornado into someone's belly, and actually carries it out.
  Weather Wizard: That was never an empty threat.
• Lucky Luke has multiple rumors, in-universe, about him being faster on the draw than his own shadow. They're all true, and just in case you think you can get him to expend his six rounds by outnumbering him...
  Lucky Luke: I also reload faster than my own shadow.
• New X-Men: When Quentin Quire apparently dies, Charlies Xavier realizes that he actually managed to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. This is how he explains it:
  Professor X: Quentin Quire was liberated from his physical cocoon and born into a higher world at 4:32 this afternoon. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but in this case, we believe it to be the literal truth.
• Preacher: When Jody says he's going to "pull yore Goddamn head off so ol' T.C. can shit down yore neck", it's going to lead to T.C. saying "I better do my part. Either've you got any Kleenex, or'm I gonna have to wipe with my hand?"
• Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man: Prologue 1 is described as "Another exciting episode in the Earth-shaking adventures of Superman!" Next to "Earth-shaking", there's an asterisk that leads to the following message from Carmine and Stan: And if you think that's just hyperbole, then, fella — hang on!
• Watchmen has Dr. Manhattan's approach to dealing with violent protestors:
  Dr. Manhattan: Pay attention. You will all return to your homes.
  Protester: Oh yeah? And what if we don't, ya big blue fruit?
  Dr. Manhattan: You misunderstand me. It was not a request. [Teleports all protesters to their individual homes]

Comic Strips

• Dilbert:
  • Alice will often follow through on her implausible threats, for instance when she stuffed Asok into his own shirt sleeve and punted him into the ceiling.
  • She's also promised to "punch someone into next week" (or next <insert day of the week here>), only for the last panel to show them emerging from a time portal. Several times.
  • She's also kicked an Elbonian into his own hat.
  • In another she threatened to punch a man so hard he'd have to drop his pants to say hello. The last panel shows a pair of arms sticking out of the top of a pair of pants, and Dilbert and Wally wondering what that odd "Melp, melp!" sound is.
  • On another occasion she threatens to punch someone with an MBA so hard that everyone else with the same degree feels it. Cut to Dilbert and Wally talking to a third guy who suddenly doubles over in pain.
  • When the Pointy-Haired Boss said that all the other departments were staffed with professional liars, he really meant it. Dilbert had to concede that it was no exaggeration.
• Garfield once kicked Odie into next week. True enough, Odie didn't appear until the following Monday, when he fell on Garfield.
  Garfield: Oh yes, I forgot I kicked Odie into next week, last week.
• In one Hägar the Horrible strip, Hagar is in bed, above him a log being sawn in half indicating he is sound asleep. Then in the next panels, the saw turns into an axe, then a lumberjack with an axe, then a two-man saw, then finally, a sawmill rotary blade, as he uncomfortably turns and then thrashes in his sleep. Finally, he wakes up, falling out of bed:
  Helga: How did you sleep?
  Hagar: Like a log.
• U.S. Acres:
  • Because of his allergy to flowers, Roy doesn't like it when Booker brings any to the chicken coop. One time, he said "Don't bring those flowers in here! You want me to sneeze my feathers off?!" Enraged, Booker picks a giant flower and brings it to Roy in retaliation. The sneeze is so strong that both Roy and Booker lose their feathers.
  • In one strip, Lanolin threatens to slap Roy's beak to the moon. She literally does that later.

Fan Works

• In this Good Omens (2019) post, Warlock as an adult becomes a stand-up comedian. He recounts an incident where he's in a car with Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis, and Nanny and Francis start arguing. Warlock describes how the air filled with sulfur and radiant light, and time stopped at a critical moment, which would sound like ordinary storyteller hyperbole if Nanny and Francis didn't demonstrate similar powers in canon.
• Tracy, in At The Food Court, tells his Love Interest that the fiftieth time Team Rocket tried to steal Ash's Pikachu, they ought to have been institutionalized. The love interest is convinced that Tracy is exaggerating, but he denies it, and says that after what happened to Ash he would never call anyone crazy as an insult, but only if they are genuinely insane.
• In A Boy, a Girl and a Dog: The Leithian Script, the Steward states three words is all the Captain needs to prove he is crazy. His colleague argues the Steward is exaggerating things since three words can't possibly be enough to give your nuttiness away. The Steward retorts with what the Captain said when they were saved from death's door by the arrival of reinforcements during a military operation: "Happy New Year".
• A Certain Droll Hivemind: Bounced around; due to her Literal-Minded nature, Misaka-11111 will often make a euphemistic statement, then stop and explain that this is hyperbole. The fact that this often involves casually mentioning some horrible way they died before is not hyperbole.
  This is intolerable.
  The previous statement is, of course, an example of the phenomenon known as 'hyperbole'. It is entirely tolerable. It does not hurt as much as when the Accelerator decided to play 'stop hitting yourself' with Misaka-2813's arms and legs, and we tolerated that. Even if it did take a long time for him to beat her to death with her own limbs.
• Child of the Storm: Early on in the sequel Ghosts of the Past, Wanda swears to find Sinister and make him pay for the abusive childhood he ensured Harry received by reducing him to screaming molecules, with the narration noting that she's being entirely literal in her statement. A few chapters later she keeps that promise, confronting and effectively melting him.
• In Code Geass: A Different Code V.V. claims that C.C. loves pizza so much you could set a box on top of a landmine, paint "land mine" on said box, and she'd still let herself get blown up to have some. Lelouch insists such a claim is ridiculous only for V.V. to respond that he actually did it once.
• Conversations with a Cryptid: In the sequel Kidnapping of a Cryptid All for One promises if Bakugou ever calls Izuku useless again or threatens him, he will either rip his fingers off or make something karmic happen to him. When Bakugou does so out of spite, All for One has Bakugou hit with Laser-Guided Karma for his bullying of Izuku by making Bakugou quirkless.
• A Courier For Kivotos: The titular character from the Mojave Wasteland makes plenty of truthful claims to the residents of Kivotos.
  • Vice-President Rin doesn't believe him when he claims that he's managed an entire city before arriving at Kivotos. Seeing as this version of Courier Six took the Independent Vegas route with Yes Man, it's certainly not an exaggeration on his part.
  • He tells Arona that he's been literally lobotomized before (courtesy of The Think Tank in Old World Blues DLC). She doesn't think it's a funny joke.
  • Fuuka is aghast when Sensei reveals that before Kivotos he's used to eating 200-year old preserved food from the Old World.
• When Xander says he's attracted to breasts in Crush, he's not saying that he finds them arousing (though he does); he's saying he's magnetically attracted to breasts. When Powergirl enters the room, Xander goes flying face-first into her cleavage. Powergirl flies upwards a few feet, only for Xander to remain stuck.
• A Diplomatic Visit: In chapter 12 of the sequel Diplomat at Large, Aria says the sirens once threw Squirk out of their territory, and they meant it literally — they levitated him out of the ocean and threw him over the horizon.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: From Writing Home:
  She had thought that the references to Boris' homeland being an outpost of hell now had been hyperbole. She was surrounded on all sides by sulphurous wastelands and blackened rock formations, broken up only by patches and rivulets of lava that gaped like open, bloody wounds in the landscape.
• In He Who Fights Monsters, Tsukune is deadly serious when he says his girlfriend will kill anyone who tries to steal him away from her.
• In I'm HALPING, Zachary literally punches Assault into the next state. (His kinetic energy manipulation means that he's not actually hurt). Lampshaded by Clockblocker.
• In Infinity Crisis:
  • Nebula mentions she and Gamora "tried to kill each other" and Black Siren assumes she means the usual sisterly arguments or minor fights. A glare from Nebula makes Siren realize she meant they literally tried to kill each other.
  • Constantine openly notes that when the Phantom Stranger talks of "the end of all that is," he's not just being dramatic.
• Few people who hear Ahsoka Tano (and later Aayla Secura) say she can't tell them Harry's secrets in I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For realize she means that she's incapable of it. Due to a Magical Oath, if she intentionally tells someone (and she physically can't do so accidentally or be forced to), she'll be stripped of her ability to use the Force/magic.
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World, Spectrem finds out that yes, Paul is genuinely invulnerable, as advertised:
  Spectrem paused again, now rather astonished as well as angry. "How tough are you?"
  Paul almost wanted to laugh, except he was too pissed off. "I'm invulnerable, or hadn't your spies told you that?"
  "Well, yeah, I know you're tough, or I wouldn't've attacked you, but even Andro would've been affected by all that, and he's three times stronger than you!"
  "Well, I haven't any idea why that's so," Paul snapped, though he was quite pleased to find out he was tougher than the Guardians' leader. "I'm sure you know much better than me about such things."
• In A Letter from Screwtape to Mr. Holland Manners, Screwtape advises Holland Manners on his dealing with Angel during the first season of the show, and also congratulates him on how he snared Lindsey McDonald into joining Wolfram and Hart willingly, while at the same time warning him not to make the same mistake that Mayor Wilkins made with Faith back in Sunnydale by loving Lindsey as a son.
  Perhaps in this, I am worrying without cause. After all, you were willing to sacrifice your beloved first wife on the altar of ambition. Fancy, too, that in some circles, that would have been a figure of speech.
• In Manehattan's Lone Guardian, Cocoa Mocha tells Statuette that "from disaster to death and everything in-between, I always come back". Statuette takes that to mean that a die-hard supporter of his will take the group's reins and lead it by following his ideals. She's wrong. At his death, Cocoa steals one of his grandchildren's bodies for his own use and returns to lead their group personally.
• A Man of Iron: Jane Seaworth is surprised that when Thor declared he would feast for seven days, he was not kidding and promptly does so, even going off to get more food when Dragonstone runs low on supplies.
• Balance reveals that Hela's claim about being the Goddess of Death wasn't just idle boasting. While still in the womb, she'd been empowered by the Soul Stone, granting her Complete Immortality and power over death.
• ''MLP: FML': Applejack threatens to "kick yer (Fluttershy's) little yellow ass eight months into next winter" if she doesn't take care of her apples. She makes good on her promise right after she finds out that Fluttershy fed them to the Parasprites and kicks her straight into the "Winter Wrap Up" episode.
• The narration in My Little Pony: Versus Equestria refers to Trixie and Rabbit as being "thick as thieves". This gets repeated after it's revealed they actually are thieves.
• After getting fed up with SG-1's insistence they sign NDAs before being told anything about what's going on in Not in Kansas, Kara threatens to drop kick O'Neill into the Atlantic Ocean if he doesn't start talking. When he still tries to get her to wait until everyone has signed a NDA, Kara asks if he'd prefer landing in the North or South Atlantic.
• An accidental variant occurs in On a Pale Horse. When the Order of the Phoenix decides to summon a hero from another world to defeat Voldemort, at one point during the ritual the entire room jerks, with Harry comparing it to a god yanking on reality. What he didn't know is that they were (accidentally) summoning Death and that's precisely what he was doing.
• Penny Saves Paldea: Clive tells Juliana that his problems with Team Star include their "actively destroying the very fabric of Paldea." Juliana asks if he means this figuratively, only for Clive to say that he's being literal; he believes the various bizarre phenomena occurring around the region have something to do with the team's actions.
• A Professor and a Student has Kukui assumes that mention of Ash's Pokemon using moves on him as a friendly greeting/training method is showing them at a safe distance or at very low power. He is flabbergasted when Lillie observes that this is not the case during his training of Rockruff.
• A Red Rose in the Blue Wind: When Sonic explains to Ozpin that Dr. Eggman has an IQ of 300, he makes sure to add that it has been offically tested.
• In Robb Returns, when Robert warned the Septon of Storm's End to not to attempt to damage the Weirwood sapling under pain of having his nose smeared all over his face, he was not joking.
• SAPR: Nora frequently tells wild stories about her and Ren’s misadventures pre-Beacon, with the latter often interrupting to correct her exaggerations. After one particularly outlandish story involving working for a broke circus and being compensated with exhibit animals, Ren admits that one was completely accurate.
• In Chapter 65 of Son of the Sannin, Tsunade wanted to force Jiraiya to dance with her until their feet bleed, then she'll heal them and they'll keep up until they bleed again. Jiraiya recalls she did the same in Shizune's wedding and the part about bleeding was quite literal.
• In Stand-Ins and Stunt Doubles, Tara tries to enter Xander's mind to help clear up leftovers from his various possessions but warns him that it requires complete trust between them and it's likely to take weeks for her to even approach the border between their minds. When Xander insists he trust her fully, Tara waves it off because it's easy to say such but hard to mean it. Then she finds herself smack dab in the center of his mind, causing her to realize Xander really does trust her completely.
• In Supernova, Luffy tells Arlong that he's going to feed the fishman his own nose for what he did to Nami. At the end of their fight, Luffy breaks off Arlong's nose and shoves it into his mouth.
• Tales of the Monkey Queen: Freeza claims at one point you could fill a planet with the number of children he's killed. Later he's shown working out the math and deducing that, assuming an average population and one moon each, you could populate five planets and their moons with the number of children he's killed.
• This Bites!:
  • Cross wonders if Hamburg is even human, Itomimizu tells him that's the multi-million beri question, then explains that's how large the ship's betting pool on the topic is.
  • When Cross threatens to turn Luffy into Greninja (that is, wrap Luffy's tongue around his neck like a scarf), he's dead serious.
• Top of the Line (Editor-Bug): When Tak says that people on Aggrage 9 work for peanuts, she means they're literally paid in peanuts.
• Vow of the King: When Bambietta claimed Candice's coffee was strong enough to eat through her mug, she wasn't joking and grouses that it had been her favorite mug.
• In Walking in the Shadows, when D'hoffryn refers to Xander as a "Paladin of snack foods", he's dead serious as demonstrated when Xander magically heals people emotionally with hugs.
• In The Writing on the Wall, Daring Do and her crew assume the titular writing is just a curse promising a painful death on grave robbers and proceed to excavate the tomb anyway. It's only after ponies start dying and the writing is properly translated that they realize the writing isn't a curse, but a warning of the contents within, complete with an accurate if simplified description of radiation poisoning.

Films — Animation

• Aladdin: Genie tries to convince Aladdin to use his third wish to become a prince again so he can marry Jasmine rather than wish for his own freedom:
  Genie: Al, you're not going to find another girl like her in a million years. Believe me, I know. I've looked.
• The Incredible Crash Dummies: When the heroes try to figure out who took the Torso 9000, Spin remarks that "It didn't get up and walk away". Dr. Zub then reveals an Impact Silhouette on the door, and answers that's precisely what happened; Junkman's head was attached to the Torso, which he used to escape the Crash Testing facility.
• My Little Pony: A New Generation: When Zipp tells Sunny her mother never takes off her crown, she means it; a quick montage shows Queen Haven wearing the crown while sleeping, showering, and swimming, even putting on a bathing cap over the crown before diving into the pool.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Used when the Wolf reveals why he's after Puss-in-Boots in the first place. It's because he's Death. And the Wolf clarifies that he does not mean it "metaphorically, or rhetorically, or poetically, or theoretically, or in other fancy way", he means it literally. Later on, Kitty admits to Puss that when he told her "Death was after [him]", she thought he was just being melodramatic.
• The Rescuers Down Under: After being sedated by a bush doctor mouse, Wilbur wakes up and moans "I feel like I got my head in a vice..." Then it zooms out to show Wilbur's head has been restrained by an actual vice.
• Shrek Forever After: After the Piped Piper's successful demonstration controlling the witches, Rumpelstiltskin tells them that it is time to pay the piper, meaning get his checkbook to pay the fee.
• Sing 2: Jimmy Crystal threatens to throw Buster Moon off the roof if Buster ever disappoints him. Buster tries to awkwardly laugh this off as apparently a morbid joke on Crystal's part. But when Crystal's daughter Porsha loses the starring role and mistakenly assumes she's been fired, Crystal tries to literally throw Buster off the roof for real, and then throws him off a catwalk later, which would have killed him if Rosita hadn't overcome her fear of heights and caught him. So Crystal wasn't speaking in hyperbole; he was completely serious about committing outright murder.
• Tom and Jerry: The Movie, after Robyn runs away, Evil Aunt Figg melodramatically tells the police, "I can't live without her!" Figg's Amoral Attorney Lickboot smugly points out that she really can't- Robyn is the heiress to a huge fortune, and the only way Figg can access any of it is by acting as Robyn's caretaker.
• Toy Story 2: When the Buzz Lightyear with Utility Belt and the rest of the gang attempt to break into Al's apartment, Rex asks what they should do. Buzz suggests that Rex use his head, meaning they will use Rex's head as a Battering Ram to bash through the vent.
  Rex: But I don't wanna use my heeaad!
• In Turning Red, Mei's father tells her that her mother's giant red panda form was quite destructive, big and almost took out half the temple. Given that Ming's panda turns out to be Kaiju-sized, he was underselling it.
• Wakko's Wish: Pinky and the Brain fly to the Wishing Star on one of Those Magnificent Flying Machines that works by Pinky pedal-power. As they fly, Brain encourages his partner with, "Pedal, Pinky! Pedal as if our very lives depended on it!" He looks down from the height they're at. "...Which may well be the case."
• Wolfwalkers: After Robyn turns into a Wolfwalker due to Mebh accidentally biting her, Mebh worriedly says her mother's going to kill her. Robyn, whose father Bill is a wolf hunter, replies that her father will kill her. Bill does indeed try to shoot Robyn both before and after this scene, not recognizing her in wolf form.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Addams Family Morticia reveals that the family motto is "We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us". In the following film, the school camp counselors that tried to subdue Wednesday and Pugsley and are last seen being roasted on a spit by Wednesday's accomplices.
• Austin Powers
  • At one point Austin pulls out his driver's license and shows it to Vanessa to make clear that his middle name, literally, is "Danger".
  • When Scott and Dr. Evil are in group therapy, Scott says that he thinks his father wants to kill him. The group director tries to assure him by saying that it is only a remark. Dr. Evil, unfortunately, confirms that he is trying to kill Scott but Scott's wily nature is making it difficult.
• Back to the Future:
  • At the end of Part I and beginning of Part II, when Marty is reunited with Jennifer after being in 1955, she says "Marty, you're acting like you haven't seen me in a week", to which he says "I haven't". For Jennifer, it'd been less than 24 hours since they were together, but for Marty, he really did go a week without seeing her, arriving on November 5, 1955 at 6:00 AM and leaving on November 12, 1955 at 10:04 PM.
  • In Part II, when Doc and Marty go back to November 12, 1955, Marty says "It's like I was just here yesterday.", to which Doc says that he was there yesterday. From the time Marty left 1955 at the climax of Part I (arriving on October 26, 1985, 1:24AM), to the time he returns with Doc to 1955 in the middle of Part II (leaving 1985-A at around October 27, 1985, 2:00AM), is a real-time passage of about 24 hours, though from Marty's perspective, since he spent three hours in 2015, only to travel back to about 10 hours after he left 1985, it's a bit less than 24 hours for him. Of course, from the perspective in 1955, another Marty had been there yesterday on November 11, and about five more days before that.
• The Banshees of Inisherin is about the dissolving friendship between two men, Padraic and Colm, with the latter suddenly deciding he no longer has time to spend on the former. Padraic, however, refuses to accept that this is how things will end between them and tries to make amends but Colm is having none of it and gives Padraic an ultimatum; if Padraic doesn't stop bothering Colm, he will cut off one of his own fingers for every time Padraic talks to him. Naturally, everyone who hears this believes Colm is just bluffing or at least exaggerating. As Padraic and his sister Siobhan learn the hard way, however, Colm is completely serious, and makes good on his ultimatum five times over. Of course, this ends up harming Colm more than anyone else, since it renders him unable to play the lute, the very reason he cut Padriac out of his life in the first place.
• Best in Show: When Gerry and Cookie recount how they first met, Gerry said he told Cookie that he couldn't dance because he has "two left feet", and Cookie said she thought he was kidding. It turns out that Gerry was actually born with two left feet (with the camera panning down to his feet to show that they both face left), and he mentions having to learn how to stop walking in circles while growing up.
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Grandpa Potts at first assumes that Baron Bomburst's threat to "stuff [his] head with cauliflower and feed it to the ducks" if he can't reinvent his son's car is either a joke or an exaggeration. However, the other scientists in the lab assure him that the Baron's threats are never jokes, giving some unpleasant descriptions of what he's done to them (a very tall scientist there claims he was a midget before they started using a stretch rack on him).
• The Chronicles of Riddick:
  • In The Chronicles of Riddick, when a couple of guards harass Riddick's friend Kyra, Riddick calmly informs one that he can kill him with a teacup. Then he does. Next, he holds up a key to a sardine tin and puts it down meaningfully in the same place where the teacup was — and the other two get the hell out of there.
  • It continues into the next installment, Riddick, where Riddick threatens the total asshole villain Santana that he is going to kill him with his own, shiny blade. Santana tells him "I would like to see that" while Riddick is tied up. Needless to say, Riddick quickly ends him.
• Coming to America: When Lisa finds out from her father Cleo that Akeem is not merely a poor African immigrant but the Prince of the African nation Zamunda, he says "When I say the boy has his own money, I mean the boy has his own money!", showing her some Zamundan money with Akeem's portrait on it.
• Hancock goes to prison and tells some prisoners to leave him alone or "your head is going up his ass". They don't leave him alone. The first one's head goes up the second one's ass. It is humiliating.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: After Harold gets arrested, he finds himself in a prison cell with a black man. Harold asks "What are you in for?", and the man answers "for being black". By that he means the police were after a black man wanted in a crime in another city and he got arrested, instead.
• From the John Ritter film Hero at Large, Steve is talking to his agent Marty about Marty not getting him any stage work (instead of all the commercials he's doing).
  Steve: Marty, how much can you do with, "That's what I call beer"? Marty, get me a play, any play.
  Marty: It's not like you never had one. Last summer, Shakespeare in the Park.
  Steve: I carried a spear. Marty, that's a joke. When an actor says he carried a spear, he doesn't mean he carried a spear. I. Carried. A spear.
• Highlander: When Sunda and Connor meet each other again, Sunda remarks that it seems like a hundred years have passed since they last saw each other. Connor responds that it has been one hundred years.
• In Hot Fuzz, Sergeant Angel is frustrated that the local townsfolk write off every suspicious death as an accident, saying "Accidents happen every day." It's only after he encounters the Evidence Dungeon that it's apparent The NWA have been murdering people on an almost daily basis, and the locals are so inured to the high death rate that they consider it normal.
• Kick-Ass 2: Mindy states at one point that she can kill a man with his own finger. As Black Death finds out the hard way during the final fight, she's not kidding. So when she says she is going to feed a guy his own dick, that is also true.
• Knives Out: Blanc and the other investigators assume Marta is being hyperbolic when she says she Cannot Tell a Lie because being dishonest makes her vomit. Then she tells a lie, and immediately has to go hurl into a flowerpot. Blanc is very apologetic, saying he didn't realize she really meant it.
• In the Richard Pryor comedy Moving, the protagonist buys a new home when his job forces him to move and the people who own it keep saying throughout the scene, with lots of laughs, that they will take it all with them when they go (the pool, the tiles on the walls, the lights, the doors, the windows, etc). To Pryor's character's horror, when he and his family arrive to the house later in the film, everything has been dismantled and taken away. When he calls the owner in a rage, saying that with all of the sarcasm being flung around he expected the owner to be kidding, the owner answers that he has a record of the conversation and he can legally prove that he said that he was going to do it, the only moment in which he explicitly said that he was kidding was when he mentioned that he was going to take the door hinges.
• In My Favorite Martian, the situation of Uncle Martin being stranded on Earth, made worse by the discovery of the I.S.S. aboard his rental ship, finally pushes him into depression. He tells Tim that he's falling apart because of it. Tim insists he's not, only to easily pull Martin's arm right out of its socket.
  Martin: On Mars, when we get depressed, we literally fall apart!
• The Nutty Professor:
  • Dean Richmond provides a memorable example in the Eddie Murphy remake:
    Dean Richmond: You won't. I know you won't. As a matter of fact, I know you're going to be perfect! Do you know how I know all these things? I know them because if you're not perfect, never mind the yelling, the screaming, and the firing. If anything goes wrong, for any reason... I'm going to kill you. And I don't mean that as a euphemism, I am going to literally kill you. I'm going to strangle you and choke off your air supply until you pass away.
  • Buddy threatens him with an Ironic Echo near the end of the movie.
• Used and lampshaded by M in Quantum of Solace, for the sheer Refuge in Audacity: Bond drags in a bad guy at the beginning of the movie who is resistant to interrogation. When the bad guy smugly informs Bond that, "Well, one thing you should know is that we have people everywhere." one of M's personal bodyguards pulls out his weapon and tries to assassinate her.
  M: When someone says "We've got people everywhere," you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!
• During Rambo: Last Blood, Rambo threatens to literally rip Hugo's beating heart out and show it to him as he dies. What sounds like just a badass threat is proven to be very literal during the climax when he does exactly as he threatened.
• Played for Horror in Serenity: the Alliance tested a nerve agent to increase docility amongst the population, the "Pax", on the planet Miranda. The test went horribly right; it did increased the docility of the population, and then utterly destroyed their will to do anything else. As both the crew of the Serenity and a medical ship that arrived before them and was massacred by the other result of the Pax agent, the Reavers describe (and Jayne asks before the crew finds the wrecked medical ship), the people of Miranda literally laid down and died.
• In True Lies, Harry Tasker explains how he will escape being tied up and kill his captors while on truth serum. They really shouldn't have been surprised at what happened.
• The Watch (2012): Bob threatens to rip his daughter's boyfriend's dick out with his bare hands. During the climax of the film, he does just that. The boyfriend is an alien, and that's where his brain was.
• X-Men Film Series
  • In The Wolverine, when Logan tells Noburo he has ten words to explain what's going on, he means ten words, actually counting them.
  • Deadpool 2: When Juggernaut says he's going to tear someone in half, it's not just a figure of speech, as Deadpool painfully finds out.
    Juggernaut: I'm gonna rip you in half now.
    Deadpool: That is such a Juggernaut thing to say!
    Juggernaut: [rips Deadpool in half]

Literature

• 1632: When Priscilla Totman, an uptime midwife, saves the lives of the wife and child of the Mughal sultan from a paticularly difficult childbirth, the sultan orders that Priscilla recieve her weight in silver for her services. Priscilla assumes he means "a lot of money" until she enters the throne room and sees a pair of human-sized scales and a very large stack of silver bars.
• Raymond Queneau's 1961 book One Hundred Billion Poems featured 10 sonnets (14-verse poems) whose verses could be perfectly combined with one another's, resulting in a number of possible combinations of poems approximately equal to the one read in the title.
• The Age of Fire's Red Queen once told AuRon that she couldn't be bothered to die. Thanks to her Cloning Gambit and Body Surfing abilities, this turns out to be true, even decades after her apparent death.
• The Belgariad: When Garion says that Master Poisoner Sadi "could poison one man at a banquet of a thousand people", he thinks he's exaggerating. Later, Sadi actually does just that by poisoning the target's spoon.
• Constance Verity Saves the World: To emphasize how unusual it is that Larry was kidnapped without her knowing how, Apollionia claims that their security is so tight that they know how many rats are in the building. When Tia rhetorically asks "how many", one of the henchagents lists them off their numbers (four, in two days eleven since one is pregnant), where in their nest is and how they live day to day.
• Discworld:
  • In Hogfather, mention is made of Biers, a bar where the undead drank. "When Igor the barman was asked for a Bloody Mary, he didn't mix a metaphor."
  • In Mort, Death's Apprentice Mort manages to piss off Death so he strikes him across the face. A later book presented Death's grand-daughter Susan, daughter to Mort and Death's adopted daughter Ysabell. Susan has three parallel skeletal-looking birth-marks on her left cheek — Death really did punch Mort so hard that his future children felt it.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In Dead Beat, a Black Court vampire, Mavra, once got away with successfully blackmailing Harry's friend Murphy, by having evidence that would destroy her. After nearly killing himself to ensure Murphy's protection, Harry tells Mavra in no uncertain terms that this will never happen again, and that if anything happens to Murphy, he's declaring war on her, personally, and that he use every shred of power at his disposal to end Mavra. Dead Beat is the seventh book in the series, and she doesn't reappear until book 17, and even then only with seven other Black Court master vampires and Vlad Drakul backing her up. And she does nothing to Murphy, and might not have even expected Dresden to find her!
  • Fast forward to Changes, and another vamp has kidnapped Harry's daughter. He picks the least bad of his options, becoming the winter knight, calls in all the cavalry at his disposal, and is more than willing to sell his soul and worse to get even more weapons. Then he proceeds to exterminate the entire Red Court of vampires. All of them. For the record, if he had to use worse options like the Darkhallow or the Denarius, he would have, he just happened to have a less evil option. Which is not to say he didn't pay a hell of a price for it.
  • Also in Changes, Harry tells someone "I have literally killed people I like more than you." He's not joking.
  • Mouse's bark has been described as loud enough it can be heard from a mile away. Later, in an odd turn of events, Mouse shows that he was holding back, and if anything, the entire cast underestimated him.
  • When Lara Raith starts getting a little too physical with Harry, Ebenezer McCoy threatens to wipe her off the earth and leave her family with nothing but a pair of five-hundred-dollar shoes to bury. Lara is a vampire. She is armed, surrounded by bodyguards and ready for a fight. She and everyone around her know that if the old hillbilly wanted to turn her into a charred, greasy smear, he could and he would and there is literally nothing she could do to stop him. Of course, he did just that in a previous book to an equivalently high-ranking Red Court vampire. (Except Ortega's shoes probably didn't survive in good enough condition to be buried.)
  • In Skin Game Harry muses that Mab will crucify him if he fails to follow through on helping Nicodemus steal the Holy Grail. He is not joking. In fact, if he doesn't follow through, he would be lucky to get off with just crucifixion. Harry's seen what Mab did to the last Winter Knight who displeased her.
• From Earth (The Book):
  Q: How many insects are there currently on Earth?
  A: 500 quintillion.
  Q: How rough an estimate is that?
  A: That is the exact number.
• In the Ender's Shadow series, the Russian military abducts a group of young military geniuses to serve as their military planners in the coming war. Realizing that a group of highly trained, super-intelligent tacticians is going to be hard to control, they put very aggressive security measures in place. While listing these measures, one character mentions "They weigh our bodily wastes. I'm not kidding."
• Harry Potter: Played for Laughs with Bertie Bott's Every-Flavour Beans, a brand of wizarding candy that comes in every flavour. That includes classical candy flavours like chocolate and peppermint, non-candy flavours like spinach and liver, and non-edible flavours like bogey and earwax. A box of Bertie Bott's is a game of Russian Roulette with your tongue.
• Heretical Edge gives us this completely literal Badass Boast from Bastet: “Perhaps I have not made myself clear. The only chance you have of harming these children is if any happen to be allergic to your blood or the dust of your bones as it fills this room.” She then proceeds to wipe out a dozen experienced Heretics without a single attack going uncountered.
• In Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown, Luthe tells Aerin, "I will love you until the stars crumble, which is a much less idle threat than is usual for lovers on parting." He is indeed not kidding: he's immortal.
• N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy: The eternally childlike Physical God Sieh extracts a promise from someone with a playful "Cross your heart, hope to die, stick a needle in your eye?", per the children's rhyme. When they break their word, he shows up with some very large needles. He gets talked down before following through on the threat, but only just.
• The Legend of Sun Knight: When Pink the necromancer asks to take Sun Knight on as an apprentice, he retorts that she can teach him when he's dead. His narration clarifies that this isn't a rejection; years ago, as part of a deal, he agreed to let her revive him as an undead creature after his death. Presumably, she would then teach zombie Sun necromancy.
• Moby-Dick: Borders on a running gag with Queequeg, starting with him literally being off selling shrunken heads as the innkeeper said.
• In the Night Huntress series, Bones has this as a character trait. He makes the usual threats such as "I ought to rip off your stones and feed them to you," but he is known to follow through on them quite literally. This is his way of making sure people take his threats seriously.
• In Pale, a spirit of war named John Stiles informs the main characters that if they call for his aid, he will be right behind them. As in, he will literally appear no more than 5 steps behind them and armed. Seeing as how magical users in the setting can't lie without losing their powers, as all magic is basically a contract with the spirits that make up the universe, he means it.
• In the historical fiction Sarum, the local priests tell Nooma, a stonemason, that they want him to build a giant temple out of 30-ton stones. Nooma tells them that their dream is impossible, and would require hundreds of labourers, anyway. They go, 'Okay, where do you want them?' (This was an era when people generally did not tell priests 'no'.)
• A minor case in Snow Crash, where in the opening chapter a sticker gets attached to Hiro's car, and he laments in the narration that getting it removed will cost him trillions of dollars. Later on in the book, we learn about the Ridiculous Future Inflation.
• The Wheel of Time has a woman break down in hysterics when she discovers the body of a man who's been murdered by the gholam: "However many times she had heard of a person torn limb from limb, she had never seen the results before."
• In The Witcher series of books, the current Nilfgaardian Emperor is also called "The White Flame, Dancing on the Barrows of his Enemies." The latter part of that is not metaphorical; he had all of his former political enemies and people who had crossed his family disinterred, and used their grave markers to tile the floor of his palace ballroom.
• In Words of Radiance, the second book of The Stormlight Archive, part of the reason Adolin is willing to enter an Arranged Marriage is that he has had horrible luck with women; his aunt even claims he has offended every eligible woman in the war camps. Throughout the book, every single time he runs into an eligible woman, she is personally annoyed at him. Every one. Up to and including the stablemaster, who nonchalantly gives a riding lesson while throwing rocks at him, despite the fact that Adolin doesn't even remember what he did to offend her.

Live-Action TV

• In Arrested Development Lucille is one of the world's worst drivers. Her clip from World's Worst Drivers showed her responding to a space she might have had to parallel park into by driving in vertically, leaving her car covering half the road.
• Babylon 5:
  • Londo claims about G'Kar. "I will kill him one day." Without prompting, he explains it isn't a threat, it isn't him being annoyed. Centauri have prophetic dreams. He knows that they will die strangling each other. Years later, they do. Although it doesn't go the way we originally thought it would: G'Kar mercy-kills Londo at his own request to free himself from a Puppeteer Parasite, and the parasite gains control just long enough to strangle G'kar to death in kind.
  • Marcus makes a Badass Boast when trying to get some thugs to talk, and then follows through on it when the thugs remained silent:
    Marcus: Because if you don't, then in five minutes I'll be the only person at this table still standing. Five minutes after that, I'll be the only person in this room still standing. So, who's in?
    [ten minutes and a room full of senseless, drooling thugs later]
    Marcus: Bugger! Now I have to wait for someone to wake up!
  • The words, "I'll never leave you, Delenn, not if the whole universe stood between us," read as textbook Romantic Hyperbole, right? Yeah, not when you're John Sheridan. The universe does, and he doesn't.
• In Community, Abed refuses to go to a restaurant because the manager hates Die Hard. The assumption is that Abed is overreacting by not wanting to associate with someone for not liking a movie, but it turns out the manager rants constantly to everyone he serves about how much he hates it.
• Used tragically in the Grand Finale of Dinosaurs. When Fran tells Earl that his plan to destroy an annoying infestation of flowers killed every plant on Earth, Earl dismissed it saying that a global-scale operation is bound to have casualties, but nothing that exaggerated. Until he looked outside.
• Doctor Who: Miracle weight-loss pill Adipose advertises itself with the slogan "the fat just walks away!" Turns out that for once it's not just advertising BS. It really does — the "pill" forms the fat into a baby Adipose.
• The Drew Carey Show: In "Drew Goes to Hell", Wick takes Drew to a sadistic themed bar actually named Hell. After getting disgusted, Drew starts to leave the room and heads elsewhere. Wick then informs Drew that if he leaves, he will be in a world of hurt, meaning that it is a another room actually called 'World of Hurt' with a separate cover charge.
• Everybody Hates Chris:
  • Chris imagines his mother slapping him into next week by showing the family at dinner with him missing. When asked where he is, his mother answers she "slapped him into next week. He'll be back on Tuesday"
  • Another episode shows Chris in a hospital after his mother literally put her foot in his ass (and left her shoe behind) after threatening to do so earlier.
  • Chris mentions that if he ever lied to his mother, she'd slap him into another nationality. One imagine has her slapping Chris for bringing a Playboy to school, turning him Asian.
    • Similarly, Chris finds Drew making out with a girl he likes and imagines himself literally slapping the black off of his brother, with paramedics carrying Drew away in a gurney with multiple patches of black missing.
• Family Matters:
  • In the Christmas Episode "Have Yourself a Merry Winslow Christmas", Steve says that he will tape the wallet (Laura's gift to him) to his heart. Then he lifts up his shirt to reveal he actually does that to keep bullies from shaking him down for money.
  • In "They Shoot Urkels, Don't They?", after a long stretch, Carl remarks that he could dance all night. After Steve looks out the window and sees the sun, he remarks that they have.
• Frasier:
  • In one episode, the title character's devious agent brags about her relationship with the station's negotiator.
    Bebe: Oh, we go way back, the Hammer and I. I know where the bodies are buried. (Beat) Usually, that's just a metaphor.
  • The episode where Roz learns she is pregnant ends with her freaking out over being a single mom, and Frasier starts a long passionate speech about her strength and how he will always be there for her, ending with:
    Frasier: ...and you will look down on little Bobby, or little Alice, or dare I hope little Frasier?
    Roz: Oh God, I’m gonna hurl.
    Frasier: [chuckles] well alright, you name your child whatever you want...
    Roz: No, I mean I’m gonna hurl! [sprints to the bathroom]
    Frasier: Oh! Um, I’m out here if you need me.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air:
  • In "You've Got To Be a Football Hero", Hilary tells Ashley that there are plenty of men in the sea. When Ashley asks if she meant fish, Hilary responds "No, I mean men. Fish don't own yachts."
  • In "Hilary Gets a Life", Hilary hides in the supply closet after spotting two of her socialite friends during a catering gig she is managing to avoid embarrassing herself. After a bit of time, Geoffrey knocks on the door and tells her that it is time to come out of the closet (meaning the supply closet she is hiding in). A party guest misunderstands this and gives an unrelated pep talk.
• Full House: In "Silent is Not Golden," Danny is telling Stephanie about an abrasive guest on his morning talk show. When Danny asks Rebecca is she remembered when he showed a different side of himself, she responded: "Yeah. He mooned us."
• The Golden Girls:
  • In "Beauty and the Beast", Rose describes a year in which she lost the Little Miss Saint Olaf pageant by saying she smelled a rat. When Blanche asked if she meant Rose realized the contest was fixed, Rose responded that her talent was actually smelling rats.
  • In "Yokel Hero" Rose tells the girls that the prior winner for Saint Olaf "Woman of the Year", Emma Immerhoffer, was disqualified for a skeleton in her closet. When Dorothy asked what it was, Rose responded that it was Mr. Immerhoffer.
• In The Good Place, Elenore gets the cliff-notes version of the Love Dodecahedron between several other characters by way of Janet.
  Elenore: I don't think I've ever meant this literally before, but that might be Too Much Information.
• Horrible Histories' Hitler Youth sketch:
  Adolf Hitler: Everyone is signing up. Don't miss out. You must join today. No, really, you MUST JOIN! It's compulsory.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Whenever anyone asked Barney what his job was, he'd only respond with a dismissive "Heh, please." In the final season, it's revealed that Please is literally his job title, and his job description is an acrostic of it. Provide Legal Exculpation And Sign Everything.
  • Barney lives and breathes this trope. One prominent example being when he and Ted reveal they made a bet that the first of them to get into a threesome would claim "the belt", which Lily thought was a metaphor. Then a flashback reveals Barney got an actual championship belt.
  • In "How Lily Stole Christmas", after Ted calls Lily a bad word (which he replaces with 'Grinch' in his explanation to his kids), Lily's lights go off, and Lily tells him he just ticked off 'the man upstairs'. Ted comments that he doesn't think it would matter to God, but it turns out that she meant her upstairs landlord, who threatens to turn off the water if Ted uses that language again.
  • Lily does this again by mentioning that Ted's relationship with Jeanette will be doomed when it all goes down in flames, in a literal sense. Cut to a few episodes later where that actually happened, with Ted's stuff being burned on the sidewalk.
• In The Micallef Program, Shaun introduces a guest with "My next guest needs no introduction" and then stares silently into the camera for a beat before the guest walks onstage.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, in the episode "Different Drum":
  Squatt: Gee, I'm so hungry I could eat a bug. Hey, not a bad idea! [reaches into a bag and pulls out a gift box with a nightcrawler in it] I was saving this for a special occasion, but too bad. [eats it]
• In The Munsters, a recurring joke is that when one claims they're so mad, they could go through the ceiling, they really do leap through the ceiling.
• Happens in one episode of NUMB3RS, when Alan wanders in while Charlie and Amita are working on the case of the week.
  Alan: Am I interrupting anything?
  Charlie: Just attempting to rescue a busload of tourists being held at gunpoint by four men demanding 18 million dollars. That's all.
  Amita: Unfortunately, he's not joking.
• In one episode of Parks and Recreation, Ron goes into a diner and asks the waiter to give him "all the bacon and eggs you have." When the waiter starts to leave, Ron stops him and adds:
  Ron: I'm worried that what you heard was, "give me a lot of bacon and eggs." What I said was, "give me all the bacon and eggs you have."
• Red Dwarf: In "Epideme", after some unwanted advances from Lister (who mistakenly thinks she was coming on to him a moment ago), Kochanski belts him in the face and declares she wouldn't sleep with him if he was the last man alive. A confused Lister points out he is the last man alive. Kochanski rests her case.
• Subverted in Sherlock: "A Study in Pink" has John Watson being kidnapped and confronted by an upper-class gentleman who claims to be "the closest thing to a friend that Sherlock is capable of having: An enemy. He would probably call me his Arch-Enemy." This is, however, just a ruse by Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock's older brother. However, another dialogue might suggest more than that:
  John: So, when you say you're concerned about him... you really are concerned?
  Mycroft: Yes, of course.
  John: And when you said it's a childish feud... it really is a childish feud?
• Smallville: Played for laughs in "Spell". The ghosts of three witches possessing Lana, Chloe and Lois turn Chloe's birthday party in the Kent barn into A Party, Also Known as an Orgy. Days later, Jonathan Kent finds somebody's misplaced brassiere in a haystack and queries Clark about it.
  Clark: It was magic.
  Martha: I'm sure it was.
  Clark: No, I mean it REALLY was!
• On Some Girls, the girls watch Amber compete in a football trial when Viva spots one of Saz's crushes cuddling up to a girl.
  Viva: Saz, don't look now, but Omar's there and he's snuggled up to Emma O'Brien.
  Saz: Why is Omar snuggled up to Emma O'Brien?
  Holli: Because he's dunking his Twix in her latte.
  Saz: Oh God, why do you have to be so dirty, Holli?
  Viva: She's not. He really is dunking his Twix in her latte.
• In one episode of Spin City, Carter gets aggravated that he can't get reservations at a fancy restaurant, claiming that in rejecting him, the restaurant owners are saying "You're not good enough for us" and "Screw you!". Caitlin believes he's just taking the rejection too personally, but Carter reveals those insults are actually on his voicemail.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Survivors", the crew encounters a godlike being living in self-inflicted exile: he had previously settled down on a planet with a human wife and when the planet was attacked by a hostile alien race known as the Husnock, his species' pacifist ways forbade him from fighting back...until his wife was killed, after which he used his powers to "destroy the Husnock". Noticing the crew's nonplussed reaction he clarifies: he didn't kill most or all of the attacking Husnock, he killed all 50 billion Husnock in the galaxy, literally "destroying" them.
• Star Trek: Voyager
  • In "Scientific Method", Janeway tells the Doctor that she's been suffering headaches for days, describing them as "like hot needles driving into my skull.". Turns out that's actually what's happening to her due to alien scientists secretly experimenting on her and the whole crew.
  • During a civil war in the Q Continuum, one of the other Q's has the John de Lancie Q clapped in irons and says he's been waiting an eternity to do that. Given that the Q are immortal, that's no doubt true.
• It happens several times in Supergirl (2015):
  • In "Livewire", Kara's opinion of chocolate pecan pie:
    Kara: Chocolate pecan pie is the best dessert in the galaxy. And as someone who's been to twelve different planets, I mean that literally.
  • In "Luthors", Kara describes Metallo, an android whose heart has been replaced with a machine:
    Kara: He literally has no heart.
  • In a crossover episode with The Flash (2014), Kara and her boyfriend make up, but she promises she'll drop a mountain on his head if he ever lies to her again:
    Mon-El: Figuratively?
    Kara: Geologically.
• Supernatural:
  • In "All Hell Breaks Loose Part Two", The Yellow-Eyed Demon tells Jake that if he does not obey him, Jake's mother and sister will be forced to eat their own intestines.
    "No Jake, I'm not bluffing".
  • There are some people who will claim that they're older than God. Death might actually be telling the truth. (Probably not though, as God and his sister claim that they're the first things there ever were, and the latter doesn't know who/what death is.)
  • Similarly, in "Dark Side of the Moon", Dean tells the men who are about to kill him that he'll come back and be pissed. Sure enough... Of course, Dean had already pulled that trick once before, and he knew that the angels wouldn't let them stay dead for long. Interestingly, when said men finally reappear seven years later, Dean dismissively says "We're good." Apparently he's forgiven them for killing him (and Sam) and they have more important issues now.
• On an episode of Taxi, Bobby's new agent is getting him great roles, in exchange for sexual favors. Leading to this dialogue:
  Tony: Bobby, you're sleeping with your agent??
  Bobby: C'mon! Don't tell the whole garage!
  [Louie picks up the microphone for the intercom and speaks through it]
  Louie: Wheeler's sleeping with his agent.
• Veep: In a Season 5 episode, Dan calls Selina to tell her that Jonah shot himself in the foot during his Congressional campaign. When Selina asks what Jonah did to screw up this time, Dan explains that Jonah literally shot himself in the foot with a hunting rifle while filming a campaign ad.
• The West Wing: During the final season, there is this quote about Republican Presidental Candidate Arnold Vinick:
  Leo: Ever see Arnie Vinick campaign, up close? He'll go into those high school gymnasiums in Iowa and New Hampshire and blow them all away. Shake every hand in the joint, kiss every baby, hug every widow on social security, and sound smarter and more honest than any Republican they've ever seen — because he is.
• The Wire:
  • In Season 3, all the police majors are rounded up in a meeting and dressed down by their superiors for letting the crime rates spike. On their way out of the meeting, the majors all exasperatedly discuss mundane ways of getting their stats down, while Bunny Colvin, in a moment that sounds like a joke but is actually foreshadowing, says:
    Bunny Colvin: Me? I thought I might legalize drugs.
  • When Daniels rebuilds the Major Crimes Unit in Season 4 with Lester bringing up the rear, Daniels jokingly (?) tells Lester "you can pick your own boss, for all I care." Lester ends up doing exactly that, installing Asher as head of the unit, because Asher is a do-nothing who is solely focused on planning his imminent retirement and demonstrably will let the MCU investigate whatever and whoever it needs to, however it wants to, a much-needed return to smart police work after the Marrimow debacle.

Pro Wrestling

• Mark Henry's nickname, the World's Strongest Man, wasn't hyperbole initially. He was actually a World's Strongest Man winner.

Puppet Shows

• In The Muppet Movie, Professor Krassman, the world's leading expert on mind control in frogs, promises a revelation so intense that the listener will have to hold on to his hat... and refuses to continue until Doc Hopper has a death-grip on his hat.
  Pr. Krassman: When a German scientist says hold on to your hat, it's not casual conversation! Hold on to your hat! Hat! HOLD!... Good!
• In Dinosaurs, when Richfield is angry about Earl's son Robbie dating his daughter.
  Richfield: They're sitting together in math class right now!
  Earl: How do you know that? You must have some sort of parental radar.
  Richfield: That's right! (Shows Earl a monitor with a satellite dish spinning on top) The latest in over-protective parent technology! That little blip is the apple of my eye!

Radio

• Dead Ringers: Apparently Alan Bennett once got into trouble because when he claimed he would "kill for a Viennese Whirl" he was not actually kidding.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978): The interstellar jets on Brontitall are so old and dilapidated Ford says they'll fall apart if someone so much as looks at them, and one of them does just that.
• Old Harry's Game: At one point, Satan tries using the "would sell his own grandmother" line when talking about Thomas Crimp, only to stop and admit Thomas did sell his grandmother.

Tabletop Games

• La Capitan from Sentinels of the Multiverse delivers one of these in the flavor text of one of her cards.
  I want their heads yesterday! Actually yesterday!
• The "Fall" part of the Fall of Netheril in the Forgotten Realms is very literal. Netheril was built on magically levitating islands, so when The Archmage Karsus accidentally tore apart the Weave... Well, things came crashing down in the most literal way.

Theatre

• At the end of Act One of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka sings to the Golden Ticket winners (as part of his Welcoming Song / "I Am Great!" Song "It Must Be Believed to Be Seen") "Your life's about to change now/So don't get left behind". In Act Two, as he leads them through the factory, this promise proves to be absolutely true for all the members of the tour group, as his world brings either catastrophe or happiness upon its visitors depending on their inherent natures.
• The Epilogue of Hamilton start with Hamilton's surviving Arch-Enemy and future President saying something about Alexander Hamilton's legacy.
  Thomas Jefferson: I’ll give him this: his financial system was a work of genius; I couldn't have undone it if I tried!… [sheepishly] and I tried.

Toys

• BIONICLE: At one point in the novel Time Trap, Teridax tells Vakama that "There are a thousand ways I could kill you right now. And 941 of them hurt."

Video Games

• From the Age of Empires II community: In his overview of the Persian civilisation, Spirit of the Law said that the Elite War Elephant is like a walking building. Complete with images showing that said Elephant's health and armour stats compare favourably to those of a house. Except this is a house that does trample damage.
• In Alan Wake's American Nightmare, psychopathic Serial Killer Mr. Scratch adopts Poets of the Fall's "The Happy Song," as his Villain Song. The lyrical Evil Gloating makes a point of Implying that the listener ought to have taken the singer's admissions about his mental state more seriously.
  You knew I'm a psycho
  Yeah, I told you I'm a psycho
  Why, why, why, why?!
  Cause really, I'm a psycho
  I told you I'm a psycho, psycho PSYCHO!
• Two brothers in Baldur's Gate III calls Auntie Ethel a "hag". They don't just mean "a mean old woman", they mean that she's an actual Green Hag, a kind of supernatural creature in the setting.
• Dark Souls III:
  • On the first glance, Aldrich's title "Devourer of Gods" is just a Large Ham Title, right? Turns out he literally devoured a god, and specifically, none other than Dark Sun Gwyndolin himself.
  • The Jailers are some of the biggest Demonic Spiders in the game, because they can drain your health just by looking at you. That isn't an exaggeration: if you're in their line of sight, your maximum health drains away until you're only one hitpoint away from death, unless you can kill them quickly.
• The first thing V says to Dante in Devil May Cry 5 is "I have no name, I am but two days old." He isn't kidding, Vergil split himself into V and Urizen just two days prior to this.
• Divinity: Original Sin: Jahan says that he became a demon hunter for a thousand reasons in general and one personal, private reason. If asked about the general reasons, he lists all 1000 — the dialogue box helpfully skips straight to the end.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition:
  • A literal incarnation of fear claims that he is your worst nightmare.
  • In a more humorous example, Varric threatens to hand the person ripping off his books to his editor. No, he's not referring to his crossbow, his actual editor. Who runs half the Coterie (the biggest organized crime group in his home city) and once killed a man over a semicolon. He never publishes a book without her.
• Duke Nukem 3D:
  • The second boss fight has Duke threaten to "tear off [his] head and shit down [his] neck." Successfully beating the boss leads to a cutscene where he actually does it.
  • He does it again with the third boss. At the end of Chapter 2, he says to the monster that sends a message to him "The last thing going through your mind will be my size 12 boot." So at the end of Chapter 3, he proceeds to punt the Cyclopean Emperor's eye as an American football through the goalposts.
• Duke Nukem Forever also keeps with Duke's bragging here and here, especially for the final boss. He makes a very crude boast, and you basically have to carry out the boast in order to beat him.
• God of War III: Just before he's brutally beaten to death by Kratos, Poseidon warns the Spartan; "The death of Olympus means the death of us all!" He's not kidding, either, since when his dead body falls into the ocean, it triggers a cataclysmic tidal wave that floods most of Greece (and it's implied the rest of the planet). It's all downhill from there with each Olympian's death.
• Hi-Fi RUSH: Before going into the boss fight with Roquefort, Korsica warns Chai that he's known around the office as a "wolf in sheep's clothing". Entering the boss fight quickly reveals that this was a very literal statement, as Roquefort transforms into a gigantic mechanical werewolf.
  Chai: Korsica...? That "wolf" thing... WAS NOT AN EXPRESSION!
• One intro in Mortal Kombat 11 has Shang Tsung almost laughing at Johnny Cage's claim that he took down Shinnok. Anyone who played Mortal Kombat X knows Johnny isn't making this up.
  Johnny: Once upon a time, I beat Shinnok.
  Shang Tsung: My, what a colorful imagination.
  Johnny: Look it up! I laid him out!
• Meta-ish example in Mount & Blade: Whenever someone says something in this game costs "A king's ransom" or more, it'd do well to take it at face value, as you can capture kings and ransom them, and the money you get will fall quite short of some of the most expensive gear in the game.
• In Off, the first boss Dedan boasts: "I'm the guardian of zone 1! It ain't nothing without me!" If you try to enter the zone after beating him, you'll find yourself in an empty landscape, devoid of color and (mostly) devoid of life. Enoch later confirms that the death of a Guardian causes his Zone and all its inhabitants to fade away.
• Planetary Annihilation clearly is just a continuation of Total Annihilation, showing that it's more about planets now, right? Wrong. Players can have great fun completely annihilating celestial bodies.
• In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, Team Galactic make vague threats in their appearances throughout the game not to interfere with their plans 'to create a new world'. It turns out that they aren't exaggerating. Their plan is to use the power of the Legendary Pokémon of either time or space to actually destroy the world and create a new one the way they want it.
• In The Secret of Monkey Island, Guybrush claims he can hold his breath for 10 minutes. When he finds himself trapped underwater, if the player waits exactly 10 minutes, he will drown.
• Sonic Adventure introduced three items/moves with "light speed" in their names: Light Speed Shoes, Light Speed Dash and Light Speed Attack. The first thing Tikal mentions when describing the Light Speed Dash to Sonic is indeed that it "lets [him] race toward rings at light speed". Even when their names were changed in Sonic Adventure 2 to remove the "speed" part, the description stayed the same.
• In Team Fortress 2, the Heavy loves calling his enemies "babies". In a spin-off comic, he calls a group of large bears this, just before their massive mother appears.
  Heavy: These bears were babies.
  Scout: Yeah yeah, everything's a baby to you.
  Mama Bear: RROARRR
  Heavy: No, these bears were babies. Her babies.
• Transistor: When the Spine keeps trying to crush Red with its tail, the Transistor is going a bit loopy and losing touch, and Red (whose voice has been stolen) finds a computer terminal and uses it to communicate by text, reassuring her Empathic Weapon that they'll get through this, and promising to defeat the Spine and break its heart. One of the awesome moments is just after the ensuing boss battle when Red literally trudges into the monster's body and slices its heart in half.
• Undertale: If you continue to spare Flowey during the Neutral Ending, he warns you that if you let him live, he'll kill you and everyone you love. It's hard to decide which is worse; the face he makes when he says that, or the fact that he isn't bluffing.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Late in the game, Nia outs herself as a Flesh Eater to Rex and confesses her love for him. Rex, who is in love with the currently-absent Pyra and Mythra, gives her a memetically infamous Bait-and-Switch Sentiment response, which an amused Nia brushes off. However, the ending of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 would show just how serious Rex was when he said that.

Web Animation

• Trope named outright in the Camp Camp theme song, in regards to the many, many, curriculum Camp Campbell has to offer: There's endless possibilities / And no, that's not hyperbole!
• In DC Super Hero Girls, Stellar Sapphire Carol Ferris was born flying. Literally.
  Carol: Take it from me, there's nothing to fear. And I should know because I was born flying. Literally. I was born in a private jet flying over the Atlantic because my parents were needed in London for a Ferris Air board meeting that could not wait. And neither could I.
• DEATH BATTLE!: In Omni-Man vs Homelander, when Omni-Man finds out that Homelander had murdered his wife, he calmly tells Homelander that "I'm going to feed you your own heart" before the fight starts. He makes good on that promise in the end in a most literal way, crushing Homelander's jaw so hard that it breaks out distended, plucking Homelander's heart out of his chest, shoving it into his distended mouth, and then crushing his head down with it.
  Omni-Man: Remember what I promised you...? Now swallow.
• In an episode of Pinchimono, he shows his favorite cereal Burger Flakes, which boasts to have "MORE flavor! So much it doesn't fit in the box!". Then in points to a small baggie of "extra flavor" stapled to the box.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • In an early season, Church recounts a time when Tex pulled out an enemy's skull and then beat him to death with it. Naturally, upon hearing this, Tucker declares, "What? That doesn't seem physically possible!" to which Church replies: "That's exactly what Jimmy kept screaming." Sure enough... ^note The first example is eventually subverted in Season 14. While Jimmy's last words were indeed "This doesn't seem physically possible!", it's because he had the Alpha A.I. — later known as Church — forcefully implanted in him. His body didn't actually die until Caboose killed it with the tank, though Jimmy himself was long gone, with a few fleeting memories merging with those of Alpha-Church's being all that was left of him. The one who caused this was not Tex, but rather Captain Butch Flowers, also known as Freelancer Agent Florida and the Director's man in Blood Gulch.
  • Earlier in the same scene, Church mentions one of the soldiers running around screaming bloody murder. The flashback shows a guy basically spinning on the spot and literally yelling "Bloody murder! Bloody murder!"
• In One Ring to Rule Them All, Sauron tells Wayne the goblin that he'll get a job as an evil henchman in 5 seconds. Literally.
• RWBY:
  • When teaching Ruby Rose about leadership in Volume 1, Professor Ozpin states that he's "made more mistakes than any man, woman, and child on this planet". In Volume 5, he reveals that he wasn't exaggerating. The gods made both Ozpin and Salem immortal for clashing reasons, which has led to their Forever War. After thousands of years of trying to earn humanity's redemption in the eyes of the gods, Ozpin really has made more mistakes than any normal human is capable of. However, he also assumes far more responsibility than is genuinely the case; this contrasts Salem, who assumes none and was the person responsible for humanity's fall from grace in the first place.
  • In Volume 2, Doctor Oobleck and Team RWBY are searching Mountain Glenn for signs of a covert criminal group, when an encounter with a sinkhole gives Dr. Oobleck his revelation: they've been searching for an underground crime network — they just didn't expect it to be literally under the ground.
  • In Volume 3, Qrow's disruptive entrance into Beacon Academy results in a frustrated Ironwood snapping that if Qrow was one of his men, he'd have him shot. Qrow retorts that, if he was one of Ironwood's men, he'd shoot himself. It turns out that this was neither a joke nor hyperbole. In Volume 7, Ironwood turns on the heroes and shoots Oscar at point-blank range. Oscar survives due to Ozpin's magic, but it unleashes Ironwood's dictatorial instincts; he goes on to shoot Councilman Sleet for objecting to martial law and almost shoots Marrow for lashing out against his more inhumane decisions (Winter saves his life just in time).
• In the spin-off RWBY Chibi:
  • One skit involves Ruby playing "the floor is lava" with her teammates (she's very disappointed when they just use their various powers to effortlessly cross the room without touching the floor). Then Roman Torchwick appears, she repeats her warning, but he doesn't believe her, steps onto the room's floor — and promptly melts, because the floor really was lava.
  • Another skit has Ruby and Ren attacked by Grimm pancakes, and Ruby says "I never knew it would end like this... really! It never would have occured to me!"
• From near the beginning of Tsum Tsum meets My Little Pony:
  Sweetie Belle: Well she better hurry! I'm about to climb the walls!
  Scootaloo: Oh, Sweetie Belle... [laughs]
  Sweetie Belle: You think I'm jokin', huh? [proceeds to climb wall]
  Scootaloo: I'm surprised you don't get a cutie mark for that.

Webcomics

• In Alice Grove, Alice gets angry enough at a fellow Ageless, Nigh-Invulnerable ex-Super-Soldier to threaten to melt the rock underneath her and bury her in it. Much later, she turns out to have meant it quite literally, and to have done it to the Ax-Crazy "Mr. Church" 5000 years ago.
• When two people in Books Don't Work Here talk about how you should still be polite while playing God here, it's practical advice.
• Cyanide and Happiness: Done several times. For example, a man is shown arguing with a woman. He concludes by telling her not to let the door hit her on the way out. When she walks out of the frame, an angry door on legs stomps by and right-hooks her in the face. See it here.◊
• Dragon Mango: Many years ago, a barkeeper bragged that his ale, Dragon's Breath, was potent enough to knock out a dragon. The visiting dragonslayers who are dragons disguised as humanoids took that as a challenge and soon learned the hard way that he wasn't exaggerating.
• El Goonish Shive: In response to her son's frustration at the laws that limit his ability to make a difference and protect others, Pandora promises to "destroy the world as it is now known, and replace it with another. A world where your restraints will mean nothing, and you can do as you please." When we finally hear back from her, it turns out that she has been working To Unmasque the World and Awaken the entire human race.
• In the finale of the Morth arc of Exterminatus Now, the gang muse over the prospect of being trapped in a Collapsing Lair.
  Eastwood: Oh, I assure you I'm pissing myself with fear.
  Virus: Well, I wouldn't go that far.
  Rogue: I would. Just noticed. Watch your step there.
  Virus: Oohh, right, NOT a metaphor.
• Girl Genius:
  • When Dr. Sun threatens to dismantle a battlemech with his bare fists, he means it.
  • Prince Vadim Sturmvoraus once said that he would eat his hat if a cathedral ever got built in Mechanicsburg. When the Heterodyne responded by building a cathedral, the prince by all accounts was true to his word. And that is why "The Prince of Sturmhalten's Big Bet" is the name for a hat sandwich.
  • During one of the radio plays, the announcer was supposed to say "...And exaggerated hyperbole is completly out of control!". However, he stumbled over the word "hyperbole" for a couple of seconds, meaning it really was out of control.
• Homestuck:
  • When Spades Slick says he made this town, he means that without him it would be a lifeless desert. This is because he's one of the Troll's session's Exiles and the town is in post-apocalyptic Alternia.
  • Cans, one of the members of The Felt, can quite literally punch people into next week. He also slugs Hearts Boxcars so hard that he ends up in a different calendar entirely.
  • On this page, Gamzee refers to his parental guardian as "the old goat". It later turns out said guardian is a giant goat-like creature.
• Lovely People: The term for people who have a very low social credit score, but haven't reached the "all social credit privileges revoked" status of Un-person quite yet, are called "garbage people". It turns out that they are still allowed inside the restaurant in which the main characters are seen at the beginning, but are seated in the "garbage section", which is right next to the restaurant's dumpsters.
• In Mindflayed the halfling just had to ask the wrong question.◊ Or a horribly right question, depending on how you look at it.
  Djaro: ...Would it be an understatement to say I was being sarcastic?
• Misfile:
  • Cassiel is described as the closest you'll get to the devil himself, which is then clarified as being because he's her uncle.
  • At one point, Vashiel threatens Cassiel with a slightly narmful Badass Boast... until you remember he's bound by an oath of truth, suddenly making his promise "not even your uncle will be able to protect you from me" much more impressive.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Named for Lien's little speech: Though it's not an example as the phrase is actually a simile.
    Lien: My parents were fishermen. When I was a little girl, I stood right here and learned how to clean the fish that they caught. I'm telling you this so that you know... when I say that if you take one more step, I will gut you like the Catch of the Day — it is NOT hyperbole!
  • In another strip, when Heroic Comedic Sociopath Belkar says, "I swear, I am going to rip off your stupid bug head and piss down your neck hole!", he happens to be serious.
  • It appears that one of these was the last straw in the marriage of Elan's parents.
    Tarquin: You sound like your mother. "Oh Tarquin, you jerk! When you said that you would liquefy every man in the tavern if one of them grabbed my butt again during my shift, I didn't think you meant it!"
• In one Penny Arcade strip, when Gabe recommends that the reader play TimeSplitters 2 over Red Faction 2, he also recommends playing the latter if they want a game that will give them leprosy. When Tycho asks how does he know that, it's shown that the game caused Gabe's arms to fall off.
• Used in Questionable Content. One person says it's hyperbole, the other insists it isn't.
• Tagon from Schlock Mercenary does this:
  Tagon: You know, for all I've threatened to do it in the past, this is the first time I've actually torn someone a new one with my bare hands.
• Shortpacked!: When your boss has the ability to somehow resurrect dead historical figures, conversations can get a little awkward.
  Ethan: I can't talk right now, Christmas shoppers are trampling Jesus. Manny, that's not a metaphor, Christmas shoppers are literally tramping Jesus.
• A characters in Zero Percent Discount says he is contacting the spirits of dead presidents, which turns out to be true.

Web Original

• In the TV Tropes page for Saved from Development Hell, it is stated that projects can stay in Development Hell for decades, and states that this is Not Hyperbole — and it isn't. Works finally emerging from Development Hell after 10 years or more are:
  • The film Alien vs. Predator (13 years)
  • Duke Nukem Forever (15 years)
  • Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar (20 years)
  • The Thief and the Cobbler (Over 30 years)
  • The Silmarillion (over 60 years — Tolkien worked on it for literally his entire adult life)
  • The John Carter film, in one form or another, for about 70 years.
• A couple from the Not Always series:
  • One Not Always Working story has a repair company treat a customer's claim that her ceiling fan is hanging by its wires casually, because they get a call for the same thing about once a month and it's usually less serious. The electrician they send is quite shocked to find out that in this one case, it really was hanging by its wires.
  • From Not Always Related, an elderly woman who had chronic lateness issues often joked to her family that she'd be late to her own funeral. And she literally was — her body had been sent to another parlor in another city, causing her funeral to be delayed a couple of hours.
• In Sean Bean Saves Westeros (in which the actor appears in White Harbor the same day Ned Stark is beheaded, and subsequently takes his place in the new world, as well as taking advantage of book foreknowledge to help Stannis win the war), Sandor Clegane threatens Littlefinger and Varys with pissing on their dead mouths if they do not shut up. When Littlefinger tries to get Sansa out of King's Landing and to the Vale, Sandor kills him and, to quote the story, "The last thing to go through Lord Petyr Baelish's mockingbird of a mouth was not a wry insult, nor pretty, manipulating words, but Sandor Clegane's piss."
• Whateley Universe: Several early stories had people joking about how one of these days someone would make Phase mad and suddenly the national economy would strike back. Turns out that was never a joke. In 'Ayla and the Great Shoulder Angel Conspiracy 6' Phase gets angry enough to sic the patent law departments at every single electronics company on two mad scientists who pissed him off, just to bankrupt them. He only calls it off because a friend came up with a nastier plan — namely unleashing a whole bunch of other angry Mad Scientists.

Web Videos

• Atop the Fourth Wall: Linkara describes his videos as "the place where bad comics burn." There have been instances, like the infamous Holy Terror, where Linkara has finished his review by setting the book on fire.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • Happens when Mr. Popo is acting out of character:
    Piccolo: ... Okay, what's up with him?
    Kami: Don't mind him; he just got through dropping a gallon of LSD.
    Piccolo: A gallon?!
    Kami: A literal gallon. Out of a milk jug. I don't even know where he got it from; he never leaves this place.
  • When King Kai is threatened by the Ginyu-less Ginyu Force, he just gets annoyed and tells them that they can all go straight to hell. Then Recoome has the gall to ask him "Who's gonna make Recoome?" and getting in his face. Cut immediately to the entire force crash-landing in actual Hell.
  • When Captain Ginyu retreives all seven Dragon Balls for Freeza, he declares he will perform the Dance of Joy. When Freeza tries to politely tell him he doesn't need to, Ginyu insists, and after some back and foth, points out that it's part of his contract.
    Ginyu: Now in celebration, I shall commence the Dance of Joy!
    Freeza: Oh, no, no, that won't be necessary.
    Ginyu: It is entirely necessary.
    Freeza: Uh, no, really, you don't have to—
    Ginyu: Actually, I do. I'm contractually obligated under your father to dance the Dance of Joy post every successful mission.
• In Episode 8 of Hellsing Ultimate Abridged, when Anderson forgives Alucard, the latter calls bullshit by saying only God has that right, to which Anderson agrees and offers to let Alucard "speak to Him". Alucard assumed this was just a Badass Boast by way of Implied Death Threat. However, sometime later, when Anderson's holy vines ensnare and immolate Alucard...
  God: Vlad Tepes of Wallachia... Son of the Dragon... the Impaler...
  Alucard: Oh, fuck me, he wasn't kidding! *ahem* Hello, God!
• Numberphile: "Graham's Number" opens with Tony Padilla stating that "If you actually tried to picture Graham's Number in your head, then your head would collapse into a black hole", and then clarifying that he means this very literally:
  Tony Padilla: The entropy of a black hole the size of your head carries less information than it would take to write out Graham's Number.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • In "The Retroville 9", during Jimmy's team's rematch against Butch's team, Butch declares that if Jimmy hits the next ball, he'll eat his hat. After Jimmy hits the ball, Butch quite literally takes a bite out of the lid of his hat and declares that it's actually not bad.
  • In "Sorry, Wrong Era", when Hugh is left with Jimmy's time control remote, he goes to the Candy Bar and while eating an ice cream cone tells Sam that he can eat it all day long. He then reverses time to un-eat his cone and eat it again, which disgusts the other patrons.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • In "The Laziest", Larry calls Richard "lazier than a rock". Larry is an anthropomorphic rock, and he lost to Richard in a laziness contest in 1983, so this is literally true.
  • In "The Quest", Anais calls Tina's house a dump. It turns out that Tina actually does live in a dump.
  • Implied in "The Tape" when Ninja George says he'll never raise his fist again, then eats a sandwich with his foot.
  • In "The Fraud", Gumball says he and Darwin have been ashamed so many times in their lives that they're now incapable of feeling shame. Darwin then takes apart Gumball's brain to show that he's run out of "shame-osterone".
  • In "The Void", Mr. Small says Janis could never go anywhere without him. It's true, not because Janis cares about him, but because Janis is his van. He's also not exaggerating when he says she "runs on good vibes"; gently patting the dashboard gives the van a tremendous speed boost.
  • In "The Faith", Alan says that despite all of his attempts to befriend Gumball, the latter still won't look him in the eye. As it turns out Gumball literally refuses to look him in the eye, because offscreen the top of his head has twisted itself to face away from Alan.
• Amphibia: In "The New Normal", Anne's father remarks that his daughter is the poster child for hating responsibility. To drive the point home, we see a drawing (that Anne made herself as a child) proclaiming that she hates responsibility.
• The Angry Beavers episode "Same Time Last Week" focuses on Daggett annoying his brother Norbert. Norb threatens to punch Dag into last week, and he does... only for Daggett to start annoying him all over again. It goes on and on, until finally when trying to avoid annoying Norb, he ends up getting punched back to the stone age.
• Archer:
  • This exchange:
    Cyril: I got the 50 million in bearer bonds.
    Spelvin: Unbelievable!
    Cyril: [smiling as if complimented] Well, I...
    Spelvin: No, I mean I literally don't believe you.
  • At the end of the fifth season premiere, after it's announced ISIS will shut down, Archer reveals they've been sitting on "Literally — not figuratively — a ton of cocaine."
  • Subverted when Cyril becomes a dictator and Cheryl claims he has a nuclear missile. Smash Cut to Krieger and his clones working on a giant missile. Then jump cut back to Cheryl, where she explains she was actually talking about his penis—the missile turns out to be something neither Cyril nor Cheryl knew about.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • There's a variation in the episode "The Waterbending Scroll". Iroh interrupts a fight between Zuko and a pirate captain (that he hired only for them to double-cross him), scolding them with "Are you so busy fighting, you cannot see that your own ship has set sail?" When Zuko dismisses it with "We have no time for your proverbs, Uncle!" Iroh retorts that "It's no proverb", and points out that the Gaang have just stolen the pirates' ship.
    Iroh: Maybe it should be a proverb...
  • In "The Boiling Rock Part 1," the Warden says that he would rather jump into the lake of boiling water surrounding the prison than let the track record of nobody escaping be broken. Part 2 reveals he means that. When the heroes try to escape on the gondola with him hostage, he tells the guards to cut the rope, knowing that would mean he would fall into the lake too.
  • When Toph says that she is the greatest earthbender in the world, you better believe she can back that claim up. This is the girl who duelled King Bumi, who literally had a hundred years of experience on her, and she fought him to a draw! At age 12! Even earlier, she figured out how to subvert a Weaksauce Weakness of Earthbending by figuring out Metalbending, which none in history had done before.
• BoJack Horseman: Sarah Lynn gets letters every day from boys telling her she was the first girl they masturbated to. "Literally! Every day!"
• In Breadwinners, SwaySway's eccentric distant grandfather rode a Tunnel Eater completely naked, claiming that "Duck naked is the only way to ride". Turns out this wasn't just crazy talk. Tunnel Eaters can't resist the soft down of ducks.
• In Castlevania (2017), after Dracula finds out the Church had his wife put to death, he tells everyone present that they have one year before he lays waste to Wallachia. It turns out that's how long it will take for him to summon enough demons for that purpose.
• In Chowder episode "Big Ball", Mung continuously says that scoring would ruin the titular game. Turns out he was quite literal as when Truffles's team wins the game, a giant Bowser expy throws the entire stadium in a trash can.
  Truffles: [to Mung] I thought you were talking figuratively!
• On an episode of Codename: Kids Next Door, Cree threatens to turn the treehouse upside down if Numbuh One doesn't tell her where her sister is. He tells her to go ahead and try it. Smash Cut to the treehouse literally turned upside down and a dazed and very bruised up Numbuh One stating he didn't think she could actually do it.
• In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Faux Chapeau", Dee Dee convinces Dexter to market one of his inventions as a hat, and his customers turn on him when it makes their heads all grow giant. In an interview, one man says "I can't leave my house", making it sound like he's experiencing Freakiness Shame, but then he adds "...literally!", as his head has now become too big to fit through his front door.
• In the first episode of Dog City, the Dogfather decides to work over Ace Heart to get info on the episode's MacGuffin.
  Bugsy: Dis is gonna hurt me more dan it does you.
  Ace: Thanks for the sympathy.
  Bugsy: What sympathy? I got pistol-whipper's elbow. This is really gonna smart!
• In an episode of Doug, Doug is repeatedly told that the candy bars he's trying to sell taste like cement. This, he later discovers, is entirely accurate; due to a serious mix-up at the factory, the bars actually are made with cement.
• In the DuckTales (2017) episode "The Last Crash of the Sunchaser", when the triplets' mother Della got lost in a cosmic storm, Scrooge stated he "spared no expense" to find her. His family took this as he spent as much as he could without putting a dent in his wealth. Turns out though, he meant it. He nearly brought his company to the brink of bankruptcy in his attempt to find Della, but the search was too futile and too expensive to continue.
• In The Fairly OddParents! episode "So Totally Spaced Out", this is how Cosmo inadvertently discovers the Gigglepies' weakness; when he says that they're cute enough to eat, he promptly stuffs one in his mouth, only to spit it out when he finds that they're made of manure. As manure is a Yugopotamian delicacy, Timmy wishes for the king and queen to have bibs, utensils, and empty stomachs to be able to eat all of them.
• The Flintstones:
  • In the episode "Dino Disappears", when Dino runs away, Fred finds a dog that looks a bit like him. Despite the dog's owner telling him otherwise, Fred stubbornly believes that dog is Dino, stating he'll sleep in Dino's doghouse for a week if it's not him. After going through a manner of hijinks including dognapping and getting arrested, Fred is shocked when the real Dino shows up. The episode then ends with Wilma bringing Fred his dinner...at Dino's doghouse.
  • In "Room For Two", when Barney tells Fred that half of his house's newly built room is on Barney's property, Fred doesn't believe it and calls the City Hall of Records to check it. Barney comments that Fred will raise the roof when he learns it's true. Sure enough, when Fred finds out that Barney does legally own half the room, he angrily yells so loud that the room's roof jumps.
• The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "The Buck Swaps Here" has the main cast going to a swap meet to shop for stuff. Early into the episode, Bloo gripes his disinterst in going, to which Mac teases him by claiming Bloo can buy himself a new brain. Everyone laughs at Mac's joke until Frankie confirms that they actually can buy real brains from the swap meet (for $10 no less).
• Futurama:
  • In the first episode, when Fry first meets Leela, he learns that he is designated to be a delivery boy. Having done that for most of his life, Fry refuses, but Leela tells him that everyone must follow their designated roles. Those who don't get fired... out of a cannon, into the sun.
  • When asked to bend some metal bars, Bender declares that Bending is his middle name. Then he further clarifies that his last name is Rodriguez^note part of a series-spanning joke about how Bender was assembled in Mexico and whether that makes him Latino.
• In the Garfield and Friends episode "All About Odie", while talking about Odie, Garfield mentioned that he liked to chase cars, and whenever he caught one, he'd bury it in the backyard, causing the entire audience to laugh at the ridiculous concept, to which Garfield stormed out of the lecture hall in a huff. Upon reaching home, he mentioned the humiliation he experienced to Odie while the two of them are walking through a yard full of half-buried cars containing annoyed drivers.
  Garfield: Boy, try and educate some people.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In "The Hand That Rocks the Mabel", when Gideon very publicly asks Mabel to a dance, Mabel clearly wants to gently let him down, but a crowd of onlookers begins commenting on how adorable the situation is and eagerly anticipating her saying yes, including one little old lady who remarks quaveringly, "If she says 'no', I'll die from sadness"... and then an actual doctor (in full scrubs, no less, even in a fancy restaurant) chimes in with "I can verify that will indeed happen."
  • In "Boyz Crazy", Wendy's claim that boy bands are "just a manufactured product of the bloated corporate music industry" (a perspective Dipper agrees with) turns out to be quite literal as Mabel's favorite band Sev'ral Timez is revealed to be clones that were genetically engineered by their producer to be perfect boys and treated like animals.
  • In "Northwest Mansion Mystery", upon finding Mabel and her friends talking about the upcoming Northwest Family Party, Dipper reminds them that "Pacifica Northwest is the worst. And that's not just jealousy talking, I'd say that to her face." Right on cue, the doorbell rings, and Pacifica is there to ask for help. Dipper dryly tells her "You're the worst" and slams the door in her face.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • In the episode "Scary Poppins", Grim says that "Careful" is his middle name. Literally.
    Grim: [under his breath] Oh, I never forgave Mom for that one...
• In He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021), while stuck with Teela for the night, Evelyn decides to sleep. When Teela asks why she'd feel safe enough to sleep around her Nemesis, Evelyn boasts that she sleeps with one eye open. While normally an expression that means someone's a light sleeper and can wake in an instant, Evelyn proves she literally sleeps with her right eye open, to Teela's discomfort.
• Kaeloo: Mr. Cat, who Hates Being Touched, threatens to kill Kaeloo and Stumpy for touching him in one episode... while holding a knife to Kaeloo's throat.
• LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures: When Zander tells Kordi a rich customer wants to hire them to replace his pod racing team, Kordi is reluctant until Zander tells her of the offered money and says she can't say "no" to this. She does try only to find out it's physically impossible.
• Looney Tunes:
  • "Muscle Tussle": Daffy Duck loses his girlfriend to a strong duck who threatens to pound Daffy's head so far down, he would need to unbutton his shirt to eat. Daffy laughs off this threat, on which the muscle-head proceeds to make good.
    Daffy: (dazedly unbuttoning his shirt to look out) One cheeseburger; hold the onions...
  • In the Sylvester cartoon "Hippety Hopper", Sylvester gets taken down by a mouse working with Hippety Hopper, the baby kangaroo. Spike, the house bulldog, decides to take the mouse down himself. After the mouse and Hopper kick Spike out of the house, the mouse announces, "And if you come back in, I'll pin your ears back!"
    Spike: Any time a mouse can pin my ears back, I'll take up ballet dancing. [enters house, gets knocked back with a clothespin on his ears]
    Sylvester: Well, I see you got your ears pinned back.
    Spike: C'mon, cat. [drags Sylvester into his doghouse, they then emerge in tutus] We're takin' up ballet dancin'. [dance and exeunt]
  • In the climax of "Knighty Knight Bugs", Bugs Bunny traps the Black Knight (played by Yosemite Sam) and his dragon, who has a habit of sneezing fire at the worst possible time (it got a cold because its fire ran too low), in the Black Knight's castle's explosives tower. Surrounded by explosives, the dragon starts gearing up to sneeze yet again. Knowing full well what's going to happen, the Knight freaks out and tries to cover the dragon's nose while yelling, "No, no! Don't sneeze, you stupid dragon, or you'll blow us to the moon!" Of course, it's all in vain as the dragon sneezes anyway, causing all the explosives to blow up at once and send the explosives tower rocketing into the sky toward the moon.
    Black Knight: Dragons is so stupid.
    Bugs Bunny: (calling up to the sky and waving) Adios! Have a nice trip! Bon voyage! Farewell to thee!
    (The Singing Sword in Bugs' hand vocalizes to "Alohe Oe")
  • In the special "Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island", Daffy laments being stuck on a desert island with Speedy Gonzales, with nothing to eat but coconuts, and cries "I'll go nuts if I'm on this place another minute!" When Speedy points out "It's a minute already," Daffy has a brief nervous breakdown.
  • The conflict between Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century is started by Dodgers' insistence that "there just ain't room enough on this planet for the two of us", which he repeats again at the end of the cartoon... after both of their explosives have reduced said planet to the size of a floating basketball the two can barely fit on.
    Duck Dodgers: As I was saying, buster, this planet ain't big enough for the two of us, so... [shoves him off] ...off you go!
• In Madballs: Escape from Orb, after Bruise Brother (one of Commander Wolfbreath's goons) makes fun of her hair, Freakella says she'd like to pound him flat, fold him into a paper airplane, and send him flying into a brick wall. Later in the cartoon, she catches him trying to ambush her in a dark alley and makes good on her threat.
• One episode of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack had Flapjack exile himself to a leper colony after the people of Stormalong Harbor ostracized him due to his adoption of a plague-ridden rat. After the rat abandons him for a mate, the Stormalongians return to bring Flapjack back home, claiming they can't live without him. On the boat, Captain K'nuckles explains they were being literal: the reason Flapjack never caught the plague is that he's naturally immune, and they need his blood to make a vaccine.
  Flapjack: Oh. Well, it's nice to be needed!
  Dr. Barber: [holding up a giant syringe] Don't you mean, needled?
• Metalocalypse: Deathklok are in a bad mood after being blamed for awakening a troll in Finland.
  Nathan: Aw man, I hate Finland. I need a hundred beers.
  [cut to a bar]
  Nathan: I need a hundred beers. Exactly. Exactly one hundred. Thank you.
• In one episode of Mickey Mouse (2013), Mickey is trying to get Ludwig Von Drake to help Donald with his temper, as he "has been blowing his stack at the drop of a hat". When Donald protests that he doesn't, Mickey takes out a hat and drops it, causing Donald to fly into a rage.
• In one episode of My Gym Partner's a Monkey, Adam decides to run for class president against Bull Sharkowski, but Jake tries to convince him not to, claiming "You'll get beat!" Adam takes this to meaning that Jake believes he has no chance of winning the election; yet after making a stirring speech, he succeds. However, what Jake meant was that the animals at the school attack the class president to prove dominance.^note including him The episode ends with Adam running for his life.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: In "Bright Lights, Part 4", during the climax, the Flutter Ponies sing about how they're "faster than a lightning bolt" while effortlessly dodging the lightning bolts the villain's shooting at them, proving it's no exaggeration.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • "Mare in the Moon": Rainbow Dash tells a skeptical Twilight she can clear the sky in ten seconds flat. If you time the clearing sequence, it takes her exactly ten seconds.
    • "Gauntlet of Fire": Spike meets the enormous Dragon Lord Torch, who laughs that he "could squish [Spike] with my pinky claw!" When Spike nervously laughs along with him, Torch snaps, "That wasn't a joke; it was a fact."
    • "Flutter Brutter": "I'm going to zap you with a storm cloud!" is no figure of speech when it's coming from a pegasus pony, as Rainbow Dash demonstrates on The Slacker Zephyr Breeze.
• This is used for a bit of Black Comedy in The Owl House episode "Elswhere and Elsewhen". While looking for a time pool that leads to the 1600s, Luz comes across one that shows three medival knights sitting around a campfire and one declaring that he's going to "revel [himself] to death". When she pulls her head back into the present day, she notices his desiccated skeleton nearby, still giving two thumbs up.
• In Phineas and Ferb episode "Bad Hair Day", Doofenshmirtz is shot in the butt with a tranquilizer dart and sings he'll "probably lose consciousness in 17 seconds", and indeed passes out exactly 17 seconds after singing the word "consciousness".
• Regular Show: Done unintentionally in "It's Time": when Mordecai and Rigby are hurtling through a time vortex on a microwave, Rigby calls Mordecai out for flaking on him to hang with Margaret. In a fit of rage, Mordecai yells I'll Kill You! and pushes Rigby off, and the vortex turns him to dust (he gets better).
• In the Robot Chicken episode "Two Weeks Without Food", the first "Great Moments in Dumb Kids History" sketch has a mother threatening her son that if he doesn't stop touching his sister, she'll drive the car into a lake. He touches his sister anyway, and the skit ends right as the mother is about to fulfill her claim.
• In the "Missouri Mish Mash" arc of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Kurwood, the Moon Man wizard who created the Kurwood Derby, said that its creation would "take a lot out of him". Turns out he was serious, for the ritual that created the derby ended up reducing him to two inches tall.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In "Unbalanced Load", Rocko declares that he needs to get some laundry done, because his bedroom looks like a pigsty. Then he sees an actual pig in his bedroom stuffing his face with pizza, and tells the guy to "Amscray!"
• Used both tragically and as a Wham Episode in the penultimate episode of Samurai Jack. Ashi and her sisters being called "the Daughters of Aku" wasn't just a title bestowed on them as his greatest warriors; they were literally spawned from their mother drinking Aku's essence.
• In the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode "Go Away, Ghost Ship", the gang sails through a bank of ominous fog, and Shaggy remarks "The fog's so thick, you could cut it with a knife!" Scooby tries it, and much to his surprise it turns out to be true.
• Sheep in the Big City:
  • One episode features a commercial within the show for a store called Les is Moore's Warehouse. Owner Les Wiggles tells viewers that his prices are "completely nuts!" — and he means it. A single battery costs $42,000, while a giant elephant is only sixteen cents.
  • General Specific runs afoul of this trope when the Angry Scientist tells him that he's cooked up a new plan to capture Sheep that "stinks." The general won't listen because he wants a good scheme, not a stinky one, so the Scientist explains that he wasn't exaggerating: the plan is to unleash a massive stink bomb into the Big City to drive Sheep out with the odor.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Ned 'N Edna's Blend" when Flanders and Mrs. Krabappel reveal that they're married, Bart reminds Homer that he said if Flanders ever remarried he'd eat his hat. His hat, in this case, was the Crown of Thorns he was wearing as Jesus in a play (long story) but fortunately for him, it's made out of licorice.
    Homer: Mmmm... sacrilegious.
  • In "Pokey Mom", after being injured in a prison rodeo, Homer said, "I can't complain." while in the infirmary, then points to a sign that says "No complaining". Upon being informed that only applied to the prisoners, he felt free to complain about his injuries and his life in general.
  • In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Barney comments that the people at Moe's had a good laugh when Moe said he'd need to send Barney's tab to NASA to calculate. Moe reveals that he did and the results have just arrived. Barney owes Moe $14 billion.
  • In "Worst Episode Ever", while Bart and Milhouse are taking care of Comic Book Guy's shop, Milhouse ends up buying a lot of comic books about a glasses-wearing superhero that proves extremely unpopular. Bart angrily says that they'll never sell them because "birds won't even use them for their nests". Right on cue, a crow comes in with a copy of the comic book, angrily shreds it with its talons, and leaves.
  • In "Take My Wife, Sleaze", the Simpson home gets invaded by a motorcycle gang, the Hell's Satans. When Marge offers to make breakfast for them, their leader, Meathook, replies "I'd kill for some waffles", with his friend Ramrod adding "He has. Remember that IHOP in Oakland?", which makes them both laugh.
  • In "A Star is Burns", Lisa is describing Jay Sherman as a possible judge for the upcoming film festival. Shortly after, Homer walks in and says "my ears are burning". Lisa promptly responds that she was not talking about Homer. Homer then responds that his ears were actually burning. He lit a Q-Tip to see inside his ears.
  • In "Homerazzi", Homer is selling his photos to a tabloid editor. The editor remarks that one of the photos has Page 1 written all over it, only for the viewer to find that Homer actually doodled the phrase "Page 1" on the margins.
  • In "Pygmoelian", Moe gets plastic surgery to become more attractive-looking, and when's happy with the surgery, he says "It's like I've gone to Heaven". Then, wondering whether this is too good to be true, asks Homer "I died on the operating table, didn't I?", to which Homer answers "Yeah, but just for a minute. It's a funny story, I'll tell you sometime.".
• In an episode of The Smurfs, the Trokkle King has an advisor, who he never listens to. When the advisor gets upset and complains that there's no point in a king even having an advisor if he never listens to advice, the king thinks that makes sense — and fires the advisor. Realizing he made things worse, the advisor fools the king into abdicating his throne to Brainy Smurf... But Brainy not only won't listen to his advice, he won't listen to anyone, so now all the trokkles decide to overthrow him. When the original Trokkle King finds out about this, he gets frightened and warns the other Smurfs, because he knows that when the trokkles overthrow a king, they throw him over a cliff, literally.
• South Park: In the episode "Douche & Turd", Sean Combs (then known as "P. Diddy") walks up to Stan (who does not wants to vote for a new school mascot, because the two options are a literal turd sandwich and a giant douche and are both atrocious options) and enforces his message to "Vote or Die" — as in, he pulls a gun on Kyle and threatens to kill him if he does not votes. When Kyle still refuses to vote and is exiled from town as punishment, Combs hunts him down and massacres the South Park chapter of PETA as collateral damage, which resolves the issue of PETA ordering South Park Elementary to remove their cow school mascot and makes the whole election a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Pizza Delivery", Squidward demands that SpongeBob drive to make the titular pizza delivery, assuring him that the customer's house is "just around the corner" from the Krusty Krab. It turns out that Squidward was not wrong; the customer's house was indeed an extremely short distance away from the Krusty Krab.
  • At the end of "Squid on Strike", SpongeBob has destroyed the Krusty Krab overnight (dismantled the establishment) and Mr. Krabs tells him and Squidward that they'll have to work for him forever to pay off the damages. This is followed by a card reading "One Eternity Later" and a shot of SpongeBob and Squidward's skeletons still working there.
  • In the episode "Club SpongeBob", when SpongeBob and Patrick start their own club, they say Squidward couldn't get in. Squidward, thinking they're snubbing him, forces his way into their treehouse. Turns out they were being literal about Squidward not fitting in. Their treehouse was so small, there was no room for three people in it.
  • In "Squilliam Returns", Squidward has to pretend the Krusty Krab is a five-star restaurant he owns. While convincing Mr. Krabs to play along, Krabs offers to play a sad song on the World's Smallest Violin. This sounds like sarcastic rejection at first, but then Krabs reveals he really is playing the world's smallest violin.
  • In "Sing a Song of Patrick", when Patrick submits a terrible poem to be turned into a song, the leader of the band doing the song says that they're going to do it if it kills them. Less than 5 seconds later, it's shown that finishing the song quite literally killed them.
  • In "Komputer Overload", Karen tells Plankton that without her, he probably wouldn't even remember to blink. A few seconds later, he does exactly that and Karen has to remind him to.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Mining the Mind's Mines", a distraught Tendi goes to Dr. T'Ana after failing to catch the captain's attention. T'Ana assures her that sometimes in life, a person faces adversity, like the guy she's currently seeing to whose foot is being eaten by a blob monster, which will require her to cut his foot off. Once Tendi is sufficiently reassured, she leaves, and the crewmember nervously asks Dr. T'Ana if the whole "removing the foot" thing was just a Motivational Lie... as she gets out a chainsaw.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Marco once threatens a knight that his face will hit every surface of a room and that said knight will wake up in the belly of a dragon. A few moments later he does exactly that (though by "in the belly" he meant "on the abdomen").
• In the Steven Universe: Future episode "I Am My Monster", Steven Universe has been corrupted into a monster due to trauma from his previous battles. White Diamond cries in guilt that this is all her fault, as she hurt Yellow and Blue, so they hurt Pink, and thus caused a Chain of Harm that hurt everyone in the universe. Coming from anyone else, someone claiming to have hurt "everyone in the universe" would sound like hyperbole, except that the Diamonds used to be intergalactic dictators, so White's claim is literally true.
• This conversation from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! episode "Plumber's Academy":
  Mario: I can't quit now, Luigi! I was born with a plunger in my hand!
  Luigi: I know. Boy, it was awfully hard on Mom.
• In Teen Titans (2003), Raven indicates during "Wavelength" that she'd rather drown in the underwater Collapsing Lair than go into the mouth of a whale (or Beast Boy transformed into one).^note At this point, she's been subjected to both once already. When the rest of the team goes to escape right after, she stays put as if fully intent on doing just that, until they pull her away.
• Tom and Jerry:
  • In "Love That Pup!", Spike the bulldog threatens to skin Tom alive if Tom ever bothered Tyke again. At the end of the story, Tom is wearing a Bankruptcy Barrel while Spike, Tyke, and Jerry are sleeping on a rug made of his skin.
  • In "That's My Boy", while teaching Tyke how to chase cats, Spike demonstrates on an unsuspecting Tom, claiming that sneaking up on cats always scares them out of their skin. Sure enough, when Spike started barking, Tom was so spooked he leaped out of his fur.
• Duncan on Total DramaRama claims that he was born in timeout. This is followed by a cutaway to his birth, where the doctor gave Duncan a timeout for slapping him.
• In the Uncle Grandpa episode "RV Olympics", Pizza Steve says that Uncle Grandpa can't tell the difference between a banana and a microphone. Sure enough, he's talking into a banana, then pulls a microphone out of his lunch bag, attempts to peel it like a banana and eats it.
• Wayside: Todd says he'd rather do anything than be Maurecia's boyfriend, including eat Miss Mush's Mushroom Surprise. He actually eats it, much to Maurecia's disappointment.

Real Life

• Werner Herzog once told Errol Morris that he would eat his shoe if Morris ever completed the film that he had been labouring over. When Gates of Heaven premiered, he did exactly that. He also told the cast of Even Dwarfs Started Small after two near incidents of Fatal Method Acting that if they made it through the rest of the shoot without any more injuries he would jump into a cactus patch and let them film him doing so. They made it through unscathed and he kept his word.
• This trope is inverted with the word "literal" as commonly used. David Cross explains the problem here.
• At one point during the 2013 Oscars, host Seth MacFarlane noted that "Our next presenter needs no introduction." He then simply walked off the stage — and was immediately proved correct when none other than Meryl Streep walked up to the microphone.
• In baseball, "knocking the cover off the ball" usually just means that the batter hit the ball really hard. Rarely is it meant to be literal.
• In 1943, the British, fearing a tea shortage after the bombing of Mincing Lane (the largest tea trading business centre of the British Empire), bought all the tea, as in literally every bit of tea that was available to be sold to them. They sent more tea to their troops in greater weight than anything, except for bullets. Pound for pound, they shipped more tea over to them than artillery shells.
• During the Apollo 13 mission, NASA had to put a square peg in a round hole to keep the astronauts alive. In context — the Lunar Module's CO₂ scrubbers weren't powerful enough to account for three astronauts.^note The LM's job is to ferry two astronauts down to the Moon's surface to collect samples and run experiments while the third astronaut remains in orbit in the CM, then to launch them from the surface back into orbit to rendevouz with the CM for the trip home. The Command Module's were, but its plug-in was shut down along with the rest of the module. Now, the obvious answer was to put the CM's scrubbers in the LM's plug, but they were incompatible — the LM's scrubbers were round and the CM's were square. So the engineers had to come up with a way to fit that square CM unit into the LM's round plugs, using only what limited resources the astronauts had on hand.
• The Exynos variants of Samsung's Galaxy S20 (and later Galaxy Note 20) series flagship smartphones have gotten a lot of flak for their many issues compared to their Snapdragon counterparts, such as overheating, throttling, and battery life, to the point that people aren't exaggerating when they say that even budget phones run better.
• One of Cards Against Humanity's Black Friday stunts was selling bullshit. Literal feces, from a male bovine.
• Telling someone to "Go To Hell" is not a figure of speech for a place called Hell in Michigan or a village in Norway.
• In 1995, networking pioneer Robert Metcalfe predicted that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" the following year, and promised to eat his words if it did not. In a 1997 conference, he blended a printed copy of that column with some water and ate it before a cheering audience.
• Three days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln gave an impromptu speech from the White House window where he discussed for the first time support for limited black suffrage. John Wilkes Booth happened to be in the audience and utterly revolted at the notion declared "That is the last speech he will ever make!". And indeed it was.
• CEO of small satellite rocket launch company Rocket Lab Peter Beck once promised to eat his hat if the company every shifted from single-use disposable rockets to attempting to design reusable rockets. When the company did exactly that Peter Beck filmed himself tossing his hat into a blender then giving it a taste.

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