Butch: Alright. I'll jump first.
Sundance: No.
Butch: Then you jump first.
Sundance: No, I said.
Butch: What's the matter with you?!
Sundance: I can't swim!
(Butch starts laughing hysterically.)
Butch: Are you crazy?! The fall will probably kill you!
One character expresses some concern about a situation. Another character corrects them, telling them what they should
really be worried about. Not to be confused with
Skewed Priorities, which is about being disproportionately concerned over something comparatively trivial, or with
It's All About Me, which is about putting one's own interests ahead of everyone else's. This trope is about a character who has a legitimate fear that is then replaced with
another legitimate fear.
A subtrope of
Right For The Wrong Reasons.
Examples:
Advertising
- This
Castlemaine XXXX advert.
First fisherman: There aren't any sharks in here, are there?
Second fisherman: Nah. Crocodiles ate all the sharks.
Computer Games
Film
Literature
- When the Animorphs find themselves on a cliff on the meteor-wrecked Hork-Bajir planet, they notice the planet's molten core far below them. One character worries about the possibility of falling into the magma. Ax says that this won't happen — if they fell, they'd be vaporized by the heat long before they reached it.
- Making Money introduces the drink Splot, a sort of Klatchian Coffee Up to Eleven. People are often reassured when they hear Splot is nonalchoholic...until they're told it's because "alcohol wouldn't survive."
- And in The Last Continent, there are very few poisonous snakes in XXXX... because most of them have been eaten by the spiders.
Live Acton T.V.
Newspaper Comics
- Recurring joke in Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!. "[Planet Name Here]... Isn't that the planet with the giant poisonous snakes?" "Good heavens, no. Those were all wiped out by the giant poisonous tarantulas."
Webcomics
Other
- Peter Kay's standup act relates the story of a meal interrupted by a cellphone call from a child who's scared to go to sleep because of monsters in his cupboards. Our hero tells him he needn't worry about monsters in his cupboard - it's burglars breaking into the house he should be worried about.
