Basic Trope: A character who normally is a Deadpan Snarker or tells irreverent one-liners is struck speechless, either by the seriousness or the sheer idiocy of the situation.
- Straight: Tim, a detective who has been quipping to black at dead bodies the whole series, remains silent when the body is a little kid, suffocated with a teddy bear.
- Exaggerated: Tim breaks down crying.
- Downplayed: Tim gives an Aside Glance, but can't go any further than that, and it's left to interpretation what the Aside Glance means.
- Justified:
- Tim is the Friend to All Children.
- Some things cannot be joked about.
- Hey, you can't always have a quip ready whenever you need one.
- Inverted:
- The normally-humorless Ted suddenly gets in a good Black Comedy-style zinger when he sees the body.
- The utter bleakness of the situation freaks Tim out so badly that he becomes even more sarcastic and irreverent than usual. "Looks like playtime is over! I know, I'm just unbearable today."
- Subverted: Tim suddenly says, "Heh, you know, I could joke about this, but it would be just too much to ...stand."
- Double Subverted: Whereupon he starts weeping.
- Parodied: Tim tries to get in a one-liner, only to be constantly interrupted by someone else doing it instead.
- Zig Zagged: Sometimes Tim is speechless at particularly horrifying events, sometimes nothing escapes his wit. He just can't seem to find any consistency — which he himself remarks upon.
- Averted: Tim delivers a one-liner as usual.
- Enforced: The editors ruled "Dude, Not Funny!" on the proposed joke, so they took it out.
- Lampshaded: Ted, who's been normally humorless for quite some time, cracks up a little, and remarks, "Tim? Are you actually speechless for once?"
- Invoked: Tim is assigned a case that the higher-ups know he won't be amused by, just to get him to quit it with the sarcasm.
- Exploited: Tim became a Deadpan Snarker just so that the others would be more affected by the times he couldn't crack a joke.
- Defied: Tim is mortified by the dead child, but forces himself to keep up the caustic wit to maintain his reputation.
- Discussed: "I don't think even Tim could possibly make a joke about this."
- Conversed: "Watch, they're gonna make it clear the audience is supposed to be mortified by having Tim not even make a joke. Just you wait, it'll happen."
- Deconstructed: Tim uses his sarcasm as a coping mechanism, and when he realizes that he's lost the one last barricade against the trauma to which he has been witness, he has a complete breakdown.
- Reconstructed: After a little episode when he failed to make a quip, Tim realizes that hiding behind sarcasm isn't a healthy way of coping with his stress, and tries to learn a healthier method of dealing. That doesn't mean he won't still have a clever one-liner ready for when it's actually appropriate.
- Played For Drama: The victim is a child. Tim doesn't joke because the situation is too tragic.
- Played For Laughs:
- The victim turns out be a grown man who's died in a bizarre S&M accident involving the insertion of a cucumber too far up an orifice where whole cucumbers normally should not be inserted. Tim tries to get a joke off the ground but fails because the situation is too crazy even for him.
- The Ditz says something so mindbogglingly stupid to Tim that all he can say is "I'm... not quite sure how to respond to that."
- Implied: We don't actually see Tim's reaction to the murder, but a friend notes, "I wanted him to shut up, but not like that."
Not going back to Sarcasm Failure is a fantastic idea!
Oh... Oh my...
