Basic Trope: A partially or wholly unscripted show whose purpose is for the audience to point and laugh at the cast.
- Straight: A daytime Talk Show has the topic "My Girl Is a Slut," where men bring in promiscuous wives and girlfriends, each more promiscuous than the last. The audience jeers at the women for not adhering to the Double Standard, and at the men for not dumping these women in favor of someone more "respectable," or controlling their women better. This is a regular occurrence on the show.
- Exaggerated:
- Some of the (dis)honored guests are so over-the-top that one has to wonder if they're for real, or just actors.
- One woman is dragged onto the show for having been raped.
- A woman’s husband/boyfriend defines "promiscuous" as "slept with one guy before me."
- A woman is stripped naked and coaxed into dancing for the audience.
- Two women are stripped naked when their boyfriends accuse them of cheating and are coaxed into having sex with each other in front of the jeering audience.
- Downplayed: The show's topic is "My spouse has a sex addiction!" And the host of the show is an actual therapist, albeit one who tends to use Brutal Honesty.
- Justified: The audience (and probably the host, too) is biased in some way.
- Inverted: The men who bring their promiscuous wives and girlfriends onto the show are cheered by the audience, as are the women. Even the audience at home has to admire the women for being Good Bad Girls.
- Subverted:
- The host actually is qualified and trying to help the guests with their problems.
- A celebrity guest is brought on who had some problems in the past, but has since cleaned up their act.
- One of the women gets up and gives the audience a big "The Reason You Suck" Speech, about how she has every right to use her vagina as she sees fit.
- The show is completely scripted, and the characters are 100% fictional.
- Double Subverted:
- He's still a Jerkass uses Brutal Honesty to shame the guests.
- That celebrity guest will Never Live It Down, and the audience jeers at him/her.
- The audience becomes even more hostile towards her, calling her a Straw Feminist.
- The audience still doesn't like at least one of the characters, maybe even all of them.
- The audience does not know that the show is scripted.
- Parodied:
- The show is about pointing and laughing at producers of point-and-laugh shows. The show brings on its own producer Once per Episode.
- The show's idea of a promiscuous wife/girlfriend is someone who said "hi" to the mailman once. The host, audience, and even the woman herself all treat it with the same severity as if she'd actually cheated.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes, the show delves into "trash" content, and sometimes they focus on more erudite topics.
- Averted:
- The show focuses on something other than people with dysfunctions.
- The show focuses on people with dysfunctions in a way that doesn't humiliate and demean them for entertainment. The audience never jeers them.
- Enforced:
- "Let's get more Ratings by chasing after the Lowest Common Denominator!"
- The only people who watch TV during the day are unemployed Lower Class Louts with nothing better to do.
- Logical Fallacies
- Poe's Law
- Yank the Dog's Chain
- Lampshaded: The host or a guest points out that episodes of the show never do much beyond showcase dysfunctional people to be laughed at.
- Invoked: On a non-Point & Laugh Show, the host starts shaming the dysfunctional person in a way that'll get the audience to join along.
- Exploited: Alice has cheated on Bob and he knows it, but pretends he's none the wiser until they've been invited to the show as supposed viewers. Bob and the host use that opportunity to expose Alice to the world as a cheater while the rest of the audience jeers her, ensuring she'll never get another date again.
- Defied: The host handles the problems of the dysfunctional guests in a tenacious and classy way. Whenever a guest behaves immaturely or an audience member jeers, he promptly shames them for it and removes them from the premises.
- Discussed: "I can't believe Bob brought Alice onto that horrible show! I mean, yes, what she did was awful, but he's not much better."
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- The humiliation and hurtful comments don't help the person on the show. They may even drive him/her to suicide.
- In the Internet age, even if the show doesn't release any information beyond their name, it's all too easy for Jerk Asses with too much time on their hands to Google up their contact info, and harass them or their families at home, at work, or in public, or stalk them.
- Someone brought onto the show could end up getting fired from their job (if they have one) for detracting from their company's public image. That makes it harder to get a "real" job.
- Played For Drama: One of the humiliated guests brought onto the show later plans an assassination of the show's host.
Back to Point-and-Laugh Show.
