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"What should I know about the vast territory that lies beyond the confines of my little subculture of textbooks, Ramen noodles, coin-operated laundry and TV shows that seem to think they can skate by with random jokes about giant chickens that have absolutely nothing to do with the overall narrative? The boys at South Park are absolutely correct: Those cutaways and flashbacks have nothing to do with the story! They're just there to be... funny. And that is a shallow indulgence that South Park is quite above, and for that I salute them."
— Seth MacFarlane, in character as Stewie Griffin, Harvard Class Day 2006
"I'll go where the humor takes me, and if that happens to create gross inconsistencies, then so be it."
Any violation of continuity, personality, or even physics is permissible if the result gets enough of a laugh.
This is the comedy equivalent of the Rule Of Cool, and is accordingly weighted more in comedy shows. It can be used in more action-packed or dramatic environments as well, but if the audience isn't expecting humor in general, or (more likely) the specific kind of humor employed, the joke falls flat and all that's left is "that made no sense!" Due to the naturally subjective nature of humor, a series that relies extensively on Rule Of Funny usually slips into Your Mileage May Vary.
Usually, surprising things are funny.
Especially easy to invoke in humor-based American animation and webcomics, where people expect the lack of realism in the art to translate to other areas.
Compare Rule Of Fun.
Tropes existing purely due to the Rule Of Funny:
Examples
Anime and Manga
- A running sight gag in Azumanga Daioh is Sakaki, after winning a race, running with the ribbon held up by her (for a Japanese teenager) extremely large breasts. Of course, this means that the ribbon was chest-level on the tallest girl, putting it high enough that some of the contestants would have run right under it...but it's still funny.
- Sakaki generally bends down a little and kind of "scoops" the ribbon when she runs through. Although I didn't find it funny so much as mildly cool.
- Lucky Star deliberately invoked this trope as well, as noted by Genre Savvy Konata.
- Excel Saga, in a nutshell.
- One Piece uses this for a number of things (some of which later get a Cerebus Retcon), but one to note is Franky building a nice-looking wooden bridge out of scraps and rubble in less than a minute. It would be a Deus Ex Machina if Franky's insistence on the level of detail and craftmanship didn't make it hilarious.
- Luffy eating a cage he was trapped in certainly qualifies, especially because he's captured again before he achieves anything. The whole scene serves no purpose but Rule Of Funny.
- This is the only thing that keeps the shower scene with Baron Ashura in episode 5 of Mazinkaiser from being High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- In general, this trope applies to how the titular character beats enemies in Bobobo Bo Bobobo.
- Pretty much everything in Mahou Sensei Negima that isn't covered by Rule Of Cool probably falls under this.
- Seto No Hanayome. The only things that the show ever plays seriously is the relationships between San and Nagasumi, and even then, tongue is lodged firmly in cheek.
Comic Books
Film
- The Disney animation The Emperors New Groove repeatedly emphasizes its own ludicrous plot holes with lines such as "Now, what are the odds that trap door would lead me out here?"
Kuzco: No... It can't be! How did you get here before us?
Yzma: Ah- uh, how did we, Kronk?
Kronk: Got me. *pulls out a map, showing the two parties' paths* By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.
- The film Who Framed Roger Rabbit declares this to be an actual law of cartoon physics:
Eddie: You mean you could have taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?!
Roger: No, not at any time. Only when it was funny.
- In The Empire Strikes Back the Millenium Falcon malfunctions but Han Solo restarts the engines by punching the instrument panel.
- Any given Jackie Chan fight sequence.
- This is the entire point of Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter.
- The scene in Transformers where the Autobots hide in Sam's backyard doesn't make that much sense - why wouldn't Sam's parents hear them speaking? - but it's so damn funny it barely matters.
- Transformers Animated has a scene where Starscream, revived and granted immortality by a fragment of the Allspark, repeatedly tries, and fails, to kill Megatron. You'd probably spend the whole time wondering why the other Decepticons didn't try to get rid of him in any other way, were it not so amusing to see him getting blasted to crap and tossed into a river repeatedly.
- In Atlantis The Lost Empire a chalk map that rubs off on Milo's shirt is not reversed, as the gag of Milo having to stand in that position would have been voided. The directors were amused that test audiences complained more about that detail and its plausibility than in the following scene where a photograph whirs into life in a 1920's movie style.
- I thought it was pretty obvious that the "living photo" bit was Milo's Imagine Spot, triggered by looking at the real photo.
- Certain comedy films can't go one minute without violating all sanity for a joke. Consider Top Secret, featuring a very young Val Kilmer as a rock & roll star protagonist in a spy plot: this movie includes a motel called Gey Shluffen, a high speed action chase to change a radio station, and an underwater bar brawl. Or watch Airplane! for the sheer number of visual pun gags.
- Woody Allen's early films were very much of this order. Consider Take The Money And Run where Woody is imprisoned and punished by being locked in confinement with an insurance salesman. Or Love and Death where a battle scene is intercut with scenes of Woody as a cheerleader.
- Idiocracy. Bellisarios Maxim is writ LARGE across every element.
- Pavi Largo's accent in Repo! The Genetic Opera. He's the only one in his whole family with any kind of accent. It appears only to be there to make him hilarious. (It works.)
- "All of-a eet? OHHHH NOOOOOO!"
- Every Marx Brothers film revolves around this, to a varying degree. Many of their best routines have absolutely nothing to do with the plot
- The final scene of the 1960's version of Casino Royale is so completely nonsensical that it's impossible to describe. Allegedly, the scene is the heroes trying to get out of the casino before it explodes. So why the cowboys, indians, flying roulette table, bubbles, kinescope police dispatchment, gun-turret banister, etc.? It's funny...at least if you're high enough to write a scene like that.
- The climactic battle of Blazing Saddles, which features the characters leaving their soundstage and breaking up a dance number on another set, getting into a pie fight in the studio commissary, then (eventually) getting to the end of the movie by sneaking into a theater playing Blazing Saddles and watching it with us.
- Seltzer And Friedberg aim for this trope... with unfortunate results.
- More a violation of historical fact this one, but the trope applies- Kelly's Heroes. This film features what is essentially a hippy. In 1944 Normandy.
- I believe they had sort of hippies back then. They were called Beatniks. But, yes, he is more hippy than beatnik.
- Oddball isn't completely without precedent. If you listen to Cab Calloway or read Malcolm X's autobiography, it's apparent that many slang words that would later be used by beatniks and hippies, like "dig," "groovy," "pad," and even "reefer," were already being used by the black community in the '30s and '40s. There were some white guys who also talked jive, and in his book X called them "hippies." The Other Wiki tells me that the word "hipster" was coined in 1940. As for long-haired servicemen, if this photo
 of a British pilot is any indication then it seems that regulations were a little more lax back then.
- James Moriarty, formerly a Professor of Mathematics, being unable to perform long division, with decimals in The Adventure Of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother.
Literature
- Terry Pratchett, author of the Discworld series, has cited this rule in interviews.
- Tom Holt and Robert Rankin have based their entire careers on this. With Holt, you know the book you're reading is based on the same plot as the last five books of his you read - and you don't care; with Rankin...well...the closest description anyone's ever found to his books is The Goon Show on crack, and this is pretty much the only rule it abides by.
- Two Words: Bible spoilers!
Professional Wrestling
- CHIKARA Pro Wrestling, Incredibly Strange Wrestling, and Lucha Va-Voom practically run on it.
Television
- Any "plot" elements in Mystery Science Theater 3000. See the mantra.
- The title character of Angel could go from dead serious to goofball surprisingly fast.
- In fact, the entire point of "Smile Time" seems to be this trope. There is a mysterious bad guy, it could do anything. Why would it turn Angel into a puppet? Because it's hilarious, that's why.
- Red Dwarf has briefly flanderized Holly's senility for a joke multiple times, with the extreme being "White Hole" (in which (s)he was counting by banging her head on the screen). However, (s)he is shown to be much more lucid (if not necessarily brilliant) in other episodes, notably in "Queeg" with a well-planned hoax based on the idiot-perception and in "Back to Reality" when (s)he saves the entire crew. Also, "White Hole" itself establishes that the ship's power generation requires her input, making you wonder why something hasn't exploded yet.
- Although it could be that so much of Holly is required to keep the ship running that there's only enough left to communicate with the crew at idiot level. In which case, one has to wonder just how much of the ship had to be deactivated during the run of "Queeg"...
- Perhaps the flaw of the final two series where whole scenes seem to have been tacked on mainly for laughs. The most glaring are the tap dancing shuttle craft scene and the Tyrannosaurus rex, (of course) eating a giant curry. Pretty base stuff by the series previous standards and not helped by some not-very-convincing CGI.
- There's a glorious peice in the script book, where Naylor describes, step by painstaking step, just how complex the dancing Blue Midget scene was to do, then going on the messageboards and learning "the fans hate it, they think it's filler".
- Many of the "challenges" in Top Gear. Why turn a truck into an amphibious vehicle? Why launch a car on a rocket only to see it hit the ground and then explode? Why make James May try to drive fast? (Or why let him get lost—actually lost—on a race track? Because it's funny, durn it!)
- On The George Burns And Gracie Allen Show, George made it clear in his occasional asides to the audience that he would go along with anything as long as it was getting laughs.
- Pretty much one of the main reasons Adam as well as the Chuckleheads (Kari, Grant, and Tori) are around in Mythbusters is because they all fulfill the Rule Of Funny. Jaime and Adam admit they really aren't that fond of each other in real life - if it weren't for the Rule Of Funny, you can bet your bottom it'd just be two Jaime type people.
- The reason X Play was very fond of finding a quote they thought was amusing, then repeating it. Again. And again. And AGAIN!
Video Games
Web Original
Webcomics
- In 8-Bit Theater. Fighter and Red Mage regularly take actions that other characters realize should be completely impossible. The creator has said that the comic's continuity is whatever makes for the funniest joke at the time.
- Black Belt, who is notoriously bad at navigating, manages to get himself so lost that he goes back in time and encounters himself. Without any outside help. In a straight hallway. Yeah.
- Lampshaded recently when the character Drizz'l uses a joke to "break the ice". Literal ice. Everyone involved is amazed it worked. Drizz'l outright states he hates that it did.
- 8-Bit Theater isn't above having characters act completely out of character. At least, we've seen Fighter be intelligent and rational, Black Mage be cordial, and Red Mage briefly play The Straight Man.
- Sluggy Freelance lives and breathes this trope.
- This very much governs Brat Halla. It tends to hew surprisingly closely to accurate Norse mythology within the confines of its premise... except when it would be funnier not to. Thus, Tyr is a pacifist, Fenrir is a rock star, half the dark elves are poser goths and emo kids who hang around coffee shops, and the closest thing the comic has to a Big Bad is the eye Odin sacrificed to the Well of Mimir, imbued with sentience and severe abandonment issues.
- In Jayden and Crusader this is referenced by a simple Saxon/Norse superstition being used in the 21st century, and turning out to be true for only the comic in which it is mentioned.
- Later the Artist of J&C himself cited the Rule of Funny regarding his own work
- As does the webcomic Bob And George where this is called "The Gag Reflex".
- In Stickman And Cube, Humour is one of the main guiding forces of The Verse, the other being Necessity, that is to say, stuff happens according to what is funny or needed at the time.
- The The Wotch spin-off webcomic Cheer! features a pie catapult with an automatic targetting system designed to maximize laughs.
- Teen Girl Squad. "Wave o babies."
- In Order Of The Stick, Redcloak is able to summon Elementals based on the chemical elements even though no explanation is given for how he has come to learn of their existence in the first place.
- Questionable Content - "I have no idea whether this comic actually makes sense. All I know is I could not stop laughing as I drew the last panel."
- El Goonish Shive exists for this and Rule Of Romantic. Slightly prone to Cerebus Syndrome.
- A lampshade is hung on it in Nodwick, when Nodwick is asked to lift a five-ton obelisk.
- Apparently Donovan Deegan has been pretending to suck at orcish for over twenty years purely because of this trope!
Radio
- Why does Bluebottle in The Goon Show keep getting deaded by explosions even when he's in the middle of a desert on a different continent to the pile of dynamite he's fleeing, then come Back From The Dead to complain about being killed? Because it's funny. The same applies to...well...pretty much everything else related to the Goons.
Western Animation
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