Basic Trope: A person makes an underwhelmingly simple request after going to great lengths to negotiate for it.
- Straight: Bob is holding several hostages in a bank, but his only demands are a few dollars and a 25 milliliter bottle of Merlot.
- Exaggerated: Hundreds of workers at an office go on strike, demanding the management change the brand of table salt supplied in the break room, because the current brand tastes like chalk.
- Downplayed:
- After striking a billion-dollar deal with a megacorporation, Bob casually asks them to pick up the bill at the restaurant they are dining at. Unlike most other implementations of this trope, it is mentioned in passing rather than being played for laughs.
- Bob agrees to testify in court against the local mob boss in exchange for a plea deal... and a decent cheeseburger. The plea deal is a pretty big request on its own, but Bob has been in jail for 30 years and has been eating nothing but prison food for a very long time, so he may as well ask for a little something to sweeten the deal.
- Justified:
- Bob seeks a Humble Goal and the demand would help him accomplish it.
- The demanded item is Serious Business to Bob.
- Bob is an idiot who is aiming too low.
- Bob knows he already is in hot water over the chain of events that have led to him being able to make a demand, so he decides to get a reward that hopefully won't make things get any worse.
- It's proof of the power Bob holds over everybody else.
- Bob knows Timmy only owns a penny, so taking it as his fee to bodyguard Timmy from bullies is a purely symbolic transaction.
- Bob's moral compass and common sense, the things that would normally yell at him that maybe he should ask more, are that screwed up.
- Inverted: A despot with twenty nuclear weapons at his disposal blackmails the government for more money than the total global economy.
- Subverted:
- Bob agrees to sell a painting for a fraction of its worth, until a friend advises him to increase the price. The painting ends up selling for a reasonable amount because of this.
- Bob is actually putting together a complicated plot with the requested objects and the hostage situation is just misdirection.
- $50 back then is $5000 today.
- Double Subverted:
- Bob raises the price of the painting but it is still ridiculously low.
Bob: I'll sell it to you for one hundred dollars!
Alice: That seems... awfully low. You realize this is a Picasso original, right?
Bob: Hey, you're right! That is pretty low. I won't sell it for less than two hundred dollars!
Alice: facepalm- The complicated plot is just a way to extort someone else for three hundred dollars.
- Doesn't matter when it happens, spending $100 for a $50 payoff is still a loss.
- Zig-Zagged: The villain rambles his list of demands for several minutes, which ranges from a private jet to an all-expenses-paid visit to his favorite fish joint. The gag lies in the sheer length of the list rather than its contents in particular. And the one that sounded most humble (the visit to the fish joint) ends up costing the government one and a half million dollars because of the villain's endless hunger.
- Averted: the Big Bad has no demands or goals whatsoever and is being evil just for the hell of it.
- Enforced: Alice will only agree to help save to world if the government gives her a refreshing ice cold Pepsi®™. A more blatant form of Product Placement.
- Lampshaded: A mook, while delivering a ransom message to the heroes, comments on how low their demands seem to be, and wonders if he was delivering the right message.
- Exploited: Bob explains to Alice, a friend, his reasoning behind his small demands:
Bob: You see, if the first demand is small and inconsequential, they let their guard down and don't take you seriously. That's when you strike.
- Discussed: Bob is being trained by Alice on how to be a villain. Alice tells Bob that all great villains make strange demands in order to confuse and unnerve the government.
- Conversed: When watching an action movie, Bob and Alice comment on this.
Alice: Shouldn't he be asking for a lot more money than that?
Bob: Nah, all the bad guys do that. Maybe they're crazy, or maybe they don't care. Maybe both.
Alice: Probably both.
Bob: Nah, all the bad guys do that. Maybe they're crazy, or maybe they don't care. Maybe both.
Alice: Probably both.
- Implied: We don't hear Bob's demands, but Alice reacts to them with a "...that's all you want to ask? C'mon, pal, you have them by the balls, dream bigger!"
- Deconstructed:
- The fact Bob is using his advantage to get Nickelback concert tickets and an autographed copy of A Feast for Crows is seen by everybody else, civilian, hero and villain alike, as proof that Bob is a complete idiot (especially if what has allowed Bob to make his demands is something cruelly disproportionate like a hostage situation) and react quite accordingly.
- Uncle Ebenezer is one of the richest and most powerful men alive and asked Bob (who he owes his life to) if he wants anything… anything at all… and Bob just asked for a nickel. And made clear that that was it, that was all he wanted. Even if Uncle Ebenezer is a hard-core miser, he is outraged instead of pleased, because Bob is squandering Ebenezer's gratitude in something so little.
- Reconstructed: On the other hands, after the latest barrage of villains coming out of the woodwork with demands as obscene as one hundred billion dollars or the extermination of certain political figures (demands that not only cannot be obtained at all, they definitely can be seen as proof that the villains just wanted to cause a lot of mayhem for mayhem's sake and were not going to be bought off), the fact that Bob makes clear he will stand down if he's given a Diet Coke is actually a relief.
- Played For Drama: The "comically small demand" is only comical for the asshole demanding it. Sure, Bob is only demanding Jerry to hand over his tickets to Metallica in exchange for his girlfriend's life, but Jerry spent all of his life savings buying those tickets and he wouldn't have bothered buying them unless he wanted to woo said girlfriend who is a hard-core fan.
- Played For Horror:
- Bob is The Sociopath and his absurdly petty demand is just more proof of it. After all, how many people are willing to take hostages (the whole nine yards, including executions as a show of force) for a bottle of champagne? Nobody is safe, and nothing is sacred to him.
- The comically small demand is one more step in his grand plan to take over the world (or ending it) and nobody knew until it was too late. How were they supposed to know that a Susan B. Anthony Dollar was a required step for summoning Nyarlathotep?
I will destroy the world, unless you return to Comically Small Demand
