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troperville

Greenslade: Into this complex world of crime, of move and counter move, stepped a man of great ingenuity, daring, resource and brains.
Eccles: Ain't me, folks.
—The Goon Show

You know how when someone describes something they actually tell you about the thing itself? Well, this is not that trope.

Subversion distilled to its purest essence: you directly build up the audience's expectations with an elaborate description of something, then tell them that you're actually talking about something else — often the exact opposite of everything you've just said.

Closely related to Dissimile, where the simile is broken down by successively removing all the crucial elements.

Most often a Comedy Trope, but can be Played for Drama if done correctly. Compare Analogy Backfire, Bait-and-Switch Comparison. Related to Bait-and-Switch Credits.

Examples:

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Comic Books

Watchmen:
Moloch (to Rorschach): You know the kind of cancer you ultimately get better from? ...That ain't the kind I got.

Fan Fiction

From chapter 8 of Rob Haynie's Ranma ½ fic, Girl Days:
The walk back was uneventful.
No, sorry, that was a different walk back. THIS walk back was something other than uneventful.

Film

A Series of Unfortunate Events opens with in Sugar Bowl (not that one) with a sickenly sweet musical number and an adorable dancing elf. It's cut off by the narrator.
Narrator: I'm sorry to say that this is not the movie you will be watching.
The Incredibles uses this trope seriously:
Helen: "Remember the bad guys, on those shows you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well, these guys are not like those guys. They won't exercise restraint because you're children. They. Will. Kill you if they get the chance. Do NOT give them that chance."
One of the trailers for the 2011 Muppets movie sets it up to look like a generic Rom Com — until the Muppets show up halfway through. The characters look as surprised as we are.
- Bookended with the final trailer, which inverts the previous joke by advertising the Muppet movie... then having the Muppets be surprised that there are humans in the movie too.
The trailer for Monty Python and the Holy Grail starts by talking about how there are some movies that change the film industry forever, like Seven Samurai and Ivan The Terrible. Then it mentions that there are also more run of the mill movies, like Herbie Rides Again and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After going on about how the movie is rather silly instead of serious fare, it then segues into a commercial for a Chinese restaurant for no particular reason.
"If that's the kind of movie you've been searching for, to share with those you love, then you probably don't want to see [scream] `Dirty Rotten Scoundrels'."
A deleted scene from We Were Soldiers has a group of soldiers chatting about their new Sergeant Major, a mean fellow by the name of Basil Plumley. One of them used to be stationed with Plumley, and tells the others a story related to him: A brand new lieutenant orders all of his men to put all of their ribbons and medals on their uniforms, so he can see what kind of men he is leading. One of his senior NCOs comes out without having done so, and the lieuteant chews him out, without the sergeant visibly reacting. The sergeant goes back to the barracks, and comes out buck naked, save for a pair of boots, his ribbons and medals pinned directly to his chest, and a Medal of Honor. *
That guy worked for Sergeant Major Plumley, and was scared shitless of him

Literature

Done twice in Piers Anthony's book Under A Velvet Cloak. First he describes the story of King Arthur and follows it up with "This is not that story." Then he describes the story of a girl who would be an ancestor to many Incarnations and says "This is not that story either."
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place...

This is not her story.
- Even this subversion is subverted a few books later, in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It opens up the same way as Hitchhiker's Guide, then says, "This is her story."
- There's also a sequence where Arthur asks Ford about how the universe was born, and Ford goes off on a tangent about buying a bathtub, filling it with sand, then watching all the sand drain down while filming it, and then playing the film back in reverse. Which, he adds, is nothing like how the universe was born.
"Maybe once in a lifetime, there comes a book with such extraordinary characters, thrilling plot twists, and uncanny insight, that it comes to embody its time. Atlanta Nights is a book." � Adam-Troy Castro
The winner of the 2007 Lyttle Lytton Contest freeform challenge:
"Scaling Everest was, by far, the most amazing and transformative experience of my life. Unfortunately, this is a thesis on context-free grammars."
The Adventures of Pinocchio opens with one: "Once upon a time, there was a king! No, there was a piece of wood."
Used at the start of Stephen Leacock's short story Gertrude the Governess:
It was a wild and stormy night on the West Coast of Scotland. This, however, is immaterial to the present story, as the scene is not laid in the West of Scotland. For the matter of that the weather was just as bad on the East Coast of Ireland.
But the scene of this narrative is laid in the South of England...

Live Action TV

On Malcolm in the Middle, Lois tells Reese, "Some people have book smarts; some people have street smarts. You have neither."
One of the sketches on Monty Python's Flying Circus featured a narrator who would introduce various on-screen characters in detail, only to remark that they were not going to be the protagonist and move on to someone else they run into. This happens several times.
- Subversion: The "Science Fiction Sketch" begins by introducing Mr. and Mrs. Brainsample as a "perfectly ordinary couple" and promptly disregards them as being too ordinary to be of interest. Then they reappear at the sketch's climax to help resolve the plot.
- "Mount Everest. Aloof, terrifying, the highest mountain in the world. (Camera pulls away from a poster of Everest to show a travel agency's office) No, we don't fly there."
- "In 1943 a group of British Army officers, working deep inside enemy lines, carried off one of the most dangerous and heroic raids in the history of warfare. [Beat] But that's as may be. And now..." (segue to the Army Protection Racket sketch)
In the Wonder Showzen Season 1 DVD, we have this:
Know that famous Street where all the sunshiney happy kids go to watch quality TV and learn stuff? THIS AIN�T IT!!!
In the Charmed episode "The Wedding from Hell":
Prue: Have you ever seen that television show where there's the woman who's an angel and she helps strangers every week?
Allison Michaels: I love that show.
Prue: Don't get too excited, I'm nothing like that.
On Roseanne: "Mark, remember all those times you screwed up? This ain't one of them!"
In one episode of Hogan's Heroes, an American prisoner is brought to camp, and Hogan notices he's got a black thimble lens. When he looks into it, Klink asks him what he's seeing:
Hogan: You know that famous picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware?
Klink: Yes, I'm familiar with it.
Hogan (grinning): This ain't it.
The Doctor (especially the 11th) does this a few times, using an analogy then saying immediately after (or after a convoluted explanation that goes nowhere) that the analogy is actually completely wrong.
Used memorably in the pilot of My Name Is Earl:
And if you took the time to really get to know me, find out what kind of person I really am instead of just stereotyping me because of the way I look... well, you'd be wasting your time. 'Cause I'm exactly who you think I am. Hell, I'll pretty much steal anything that's not nailed down.
An episode of the Scottish sketch show Naked Video had a Radio Times listing that went something like "Today Tony Sopernote
Founder of the BBC Natural History Unit
will be looking at the many kinds of wildlife and birds that can be found in the South East of England. Unfortunately, he's not on TV. We are. Sorry, Tony."

Music

The Tenacious D song Tribute is about an encounter between Tenacious D and a Demon, who threatened to take their souls if they did not perform the Greatest Song In The World for him. After singing about it for the entire song, they reveal that the song you have been listening to sounds nothing like that song, as "this is a Tribute" to that song. *
The guitar riff at the end of the song has lead some to believe that the Greatest Song In The World is in fact "Stairway to Heaven".

Radio

Often done with the introductions on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. "People come to this theatre from far and wide to watch the greatest performers of the age. Other times, they come to see our teams..."
- Celebrating the 30th Anniversary Special:
"For a show such as this to have lasted thirty years might be thought achievement enough in itself. But to have brought joy and laughter to thousands of listeners ... might at least have been worth a try."

Real Life

Some schools of philosophy and theology hold that since certain concepts (such as God) are beyond human understanding, the only way one can describe them is by stating what they aren't. (e.g. "immortal", an attribute commonly given to gods, literally means "not mortal".)
Aristotle uses this trope frequently in the Metaphysics. To introduce new concepts, he will begin with an inaccurate-but-simpler version of whatever concept he wants to discuss, and once that is understood, he moves on to more-accurate-but-harder-to-understand iterations.

Web Original

FreakAngels kicks off with variation of this trope: "23 years ago, Twelve strange children were born in England at the exact same moment. Six years ago, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next."

Western Animation

Computer Animation Showcase, a collection of computer-animated shorts, started one of them with this voiceover: "Every once in a great while, a movie comes along that touches everyone's lives. *beat* Eh, but not this one.
In one Animaniacs episode, the Warner siblings are being chased off. Soon enough, they start climbing back into the water tower, and Yakko sobs, "I know when we're not wanted." When the antagonist is gone, he adds, "And now is not that time," and climbs back down.
From the first episode of Freakazoid: "Only one hero can track down Cave Guy. Only one hero has the heart to fight this fiend. That hero is... On another network. Thus, we have no choice but to turn to... (zip pan to Dexter Douglas) this fellow."