"Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here..."
People ranting about their political opinions, religious beliefs or similar usually don't intend to be entertaining. Some, however, have realized that serious messages can't be distinguished from parodies anyway — so why not make the most of it?
And thus, some comedians, propagandists, and other characters chose to present their opinions with a lot of attitude, making rants designed to be entertaining while still communicating a serious message.
Not to be confused with The Rant, the writer's comments alongside a webcomic.
— Dennis Miller
Index of performers and shows that are (fully or partially) designed this way:
- Adam Ruins Everything
- A Dose Of Buckley
- The Amazing Atheist
- The Angry Video Game Nerd
- Atop the Fourth Wall
- Benthelooney
- The Best Page in the Universe
- Lewis Black: Both his standup act and his "Back in Black" segments on The Daily Show are this.
- Brawlmaster 08: Mostly known for his rants, he is a well-known ranter.
- The Cartoon Hero
- Charlie Brooker
- George Carlin: Ranting about pretty much anything. Some of his rants were reasonable in themselves, other were parodies designed to be unreasonable but directly or indirectly contain some form of wisdom.
- Das Sporking: Varies between this and MS Ts
- The Editing Room
- Ben Elton
- Grotesco
- Heartlessbitches.com
- Bill Hicks
- Zinnia Jones: Ranting about homophobia, sexism, religious fundamentalism, etc.
- Juvenal makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- Greg Proops
- Sam Kinison
- David Mitchell in his webcast "David Mitchell's Soapbox" and his column in The Observer. He'll rant elsewhere too, but those are the official channels.
- Neurotically Yours has a side-series where Foamy the Squirrel rants on about anything and everything. Not that the other episodes are about anything else.
- The Nostalgia Chick is especially good at seeming like she doesn't need to breathe.
- The Nostalgia Critic
- The Now Show (Marcus Brigstock's segments and sometimes John Holmes or Mitch Benn. Also "stand-in Marcuses" like Lloyd Langford)
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Ranting about anything they consider "bullshit". Each episode is about something that, according to them, either is bullshit in itself or is plagued by bullshit in one form or another.
- The Rageaholic
- Rage Quit
- A staple of The Rick Mercer Report is "The Rant" in which Rick rants about whatever has caught his ire that week. This is a carryover from Rick's stint on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
- Jimquisition
- SF Debris is famous for its ranty reviews of Star Trek: Voyager episodes.
- Sheep in the Big City - The ranting swede / the angry scientist
- Siblings
- Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage
- The Archfiend
- The Unusual Suspect
- 2, the Ranting Gryphon
- TV Trash
- Whatever Love Means
- xkcd: Ranting about stupidity in general.
- You Know Whats Bullshit
- Zero Punctuation
Non-index examples (scenes in shows that otherwise aren't this, and shows that are this but don't have their own TV Tropes pages).
- In The Order of the Stick, Belkar used to do this, using Refuge in Audacity to get away with having evil values.
- In Scrubs, Dr. Cox likes to incorporate actual points inside long funny rants.
- Cyberwolf 087 has made not only rants, but also Youtube Poops, game reviews and other videos.
- Coupling usually had one Once A Series, when Straight Man and Author Avatar Steve would really break into stride and dish out an epic rant leaving every other character in stunned silence.
- "...of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."