Needs Help: Fundamentally Funny Fruit

A couple of problems that I found with this one:

1. This is a mashup of a trope and a Useful Notes page. Should that list of fruit in the description be moved to a separate page or removed?

2, The description basically says 'these (see list below) fruit are funny'. Think it maybe a case of People Sit On Chairs, and leads to:

3. Looking at the examples, some of them are "(fruit) appears in this work". Should I jsut remove those regardless of any other changes?

edited 18th Mar '17 12:20:58 AM by Pagani800

Opening and clocking.

I'd say "fruits as comedy" is a passable trope though a lot of the examples are very much PSOC ("X fruit appears in Y work") or fall into another trope.

Could use a cleanup, though I'm wondering if that's going to leave it with much actual examples left.

I really can't envision this as an actual Trope. Aside from WesternAnimation.Veggie Tales, there's no way to make an apple or a banana into a character. That eliminates the Character-class tropes. And it'd be an awfully short story writing about a grapefruit or some such. This eliminates the Plot-class tropes. There might be something to mine from WesternAnimation.Sausage Party, but trying to define what constitutes "funny" has confounded scholars for centuries. Useful Notes, perhaps; Your Mileage May Vary certainly. Plus, let me ask: is it the fruit itself that's funny, or how it's used? A banana, straight = what's funny about it? A banana peel on hardwood floor, now, that's a Trope!

Except quite a few of these tropes actually do exist. We've got Anthropomorphic Food for general purpose "food as a character". I wasn't necessarily saying "fruit as comedy" as in "the plot revolves entirely around fruit". Also, various food-based tropes that may be involved in some aspect of the plot, whether it be in only a single scene, episode, or revolves around the series in general, are already covered in Food Tropes.

And for what its worth, I'd say comedy is objective enough in the sense that if a work is classified as 'comedy', then there's a good chance that a scene involving fruit has the intention of trying to make you laugh, regardless of how its being used.

I'd say for Fundamentally Funny Fruit, it'd probably end up being a trope with quite a bit of overlap with other tropes. Taking the banana example, its uses range from slipping Banana Peel, banana guns that may or may not actually be weapons, straight innuendo when it's compared/passed off as a penis, or the characters might just find the word silly and have a scene where they laugh about how silly 'banana' sounds. As such, anything comedic is likely going to involve some trait of the banana itself.

edited 18th Mar '17 1:50:08 PM by YourIdeas

~Pagani800, as OP you need to do some sort of Wick Check to see how it's being used or misused outside the main page. With only 92 wicks, it should go quickly (50 is the minimum guideline). "Fruit appears in a work" is a Zero Context Example. I'd hold off on fixing them until the thread decides what to do. (I am not a mod).

Personally, this seems like a valid trope, and possibly a supertrope to the fruit-specific tropes (Banana Peel, etc). Fruit may not be funny by themselves, but in works certain fruits are used to convey weirdness or humor. But again, context in examples is needed to be more than a ZCE.

Also, Here is the Archived Ykttw. The page came a long way from the version at launch.

edited 18th Mar '17 1:23:22 PM by pokedude10

IIRC, this trope was made to address the issue of Everythings Better With Eggplants (and such tropes).

Is this even a trope?

It's just a list of random things doing jokes involving fruits that someone decided were inherently funny objects.

I could second that, making this page an index for comedy tropes involving fruit like the Banana Peel Gag

edited 18th Mar '17 5:17:51 PM by shoboni

I feel like there's something worth keeping here, but it's buried under a grocery list. The example list being organized by fruit is also kind of irritating, though I'm not sure if it's necessarily wrong.

It's also clearly not thriving considering that it's been around for 8 years (or at least the redirect has been) yet has less than 100 wicks.

So basically this a Garnishing the Story trope meant to be a more generic version of another Garnishing the Story trope?

Eh? I don't think I suggested making this an index? I just said it might be a supertrope for other fruit-based tropes.

Some of those fruits don't have any examples on them. I think we should at least remove any fruit that doesn't have an example or three.

Potatoes, for example, has garnered no examples since 2015. Kiwis haven't accrued anything since, I guess, the page was launched (can't find it being added in the history). Watermelons haven't either (since 2013).

That all said, I do think that this is a trope akin to Inherently Funny Words. I think this could be a supertrope like pokedude suggested, where tropes like Fruit of the Loon, Banana Peel, and other comedy-related fruit tropes could be listed in the description (in a "does indexing" sort of way).

Hmm. I like the idea of trimming fruits from the page that aren't fresh (sorry, I couldn't help it). But I wouldn't want to eliminate cases and make the trope narrower than it should be. I think at at it's core, the trope is trying to say "fruit is funny/bizarre". But I also think it's trying to be more than one thing, like a subtrope of Inherently Funny Words, and a subtrope of Fruit of the Loon. (Looking of Fot L, I feel like that covers most of this trope minus the fruits name.)

Honestly, taking a look over the page, I think fixing the formatting regardless would help considerably. Right now there's a section for each fruit, and only one section is actually folderized. I'm not sure what specific formatting would fix it. Ideas?

I dunno, I think they're ripe for the picking (haha... ha... it hurts). Joking aside, that's a good point. I just mean to ask "How can it be inherently funny if there are no examples of it being funny at all?"

I think Fruit of the Loon is more character-focused (this character is quirky or crazy and the reason the audience can tell is because of this person's interest in fruit), whereas this trope is trying to be more gag-focused ("the joke"-focused? idk how to phrase this).

Ok. So I started Sandbox.Fundamentally Funny Fruit and began commenting out ZCE's. I think we need to drill down to what the core trope is, if there is a core trope beyond "an odd/funny fruit appears."

As for evidence... I think I'm going to go ahead and start a wick check myself. I might not get to all 90 wicks, but I'll get at least 50. What I want to check for in usage is:

• ZCE's as "fruit appears"
• ZCE's as "fruit is named"
• Good explanations why the fruit is funny in the work, which would also count appears/named if they give fair explanation.
• And I guess "character's hair looks like fruit" (Yes, there was a whole section on the page about that...).

Anything else I should look for?

Based off the list in the description:

• Garnishing the Story (specifically, that Worms example where one of the weapons is the "Banana Bomb")
• "The fruit just happens to be part of a gag"? (a la Banana Peel)
• "The fruit is a funny word" ("How many na's in Banana")
• Useful Notes-like information? Characters discussing the fruit?

Maybe not saying enough here, but it appears to be something after all. But there's a lot of subtropes/sister tropes too. Maybe this should be a supertrope? Also, I'm still not sure if we need the list there, and if we're altering the list, then the format of the examples needs to be looked at too.

I add any wick or examples that should be to a different trope.

edited 22nd Mar '17 12:27:04 AM by Pagani800

Ok. Done with a wick check of 50 random wicks.

• Fruit appears - 27
• Fruit is named - 4
• Gag (visual, joke, or prank) - 10
• ZCE - 2
• Good example (explains well why the fruit is funny in the context) - 3
• Useful Notes style - 1
  • Mortadelo y Filemón: Eggplants. Ibáñez likes to draw eggplants lying around, just because they're funny.
    • There's more to it than just being a "funny fruit". In Spain, the word "berenjena" has several other uses in coloquial language: a "berenjeno" is someone who likes to argue for stuff that is pointless or totally irrelevant, a "berenjenal" (strictly, the place where eggplants are planted) is an imbroglio or other kind of trouble and a "discusión de berenjenas" (lit. "eggplant argument") is an argument where neither side makes sense or even sees the point at hand.
• Other trope - 3
  • Dog with a Blog: While Bennett and Ellen are reliving a play they did when they were younger, Bennett uses a banana as a gun.
  • 2: The boss of the Stone zone, Banaan, is a banana that throws puke lasers at you. It also screams every time it gets hurt—unleashing a huge wave of lasers—until it's defeated.
  • R.I.P.D.: Nick's Spirit Gun looks like a banana

So... It looks like most of the usage is "a funny fruit appears." I cast a wide net for what would be a "good" example, but most of the examples, ZCE's or not, simply didn't explain why the fruit was funny in context.

"Fruit appears" doesn't look like a trope, but I think there's another concept that the trope is trying for. If Fruit of the Loon focuses on the character, then is this focusing on absurdity of fruit in a normal situation? Maybe the trope is supposed to create the reaction "why fruit?"

edited 22nd Mar '17 7:48:00 PM by pokedude10

More like "fruit appears because it's inherently funny". Like Inherently Funny Words.

Agreed, I think that's what the examples are trying to convey. "A banana appears because... banana's are funny". But that seems like a weak trope. It requires an assumption that some fruits are inherently humorous.

Even if I make that assumption it asks me to, that still leaves a good number of examples essentially "a fruit appears in this scene." If it's Played for Laughs, it works. If it's the end of a gag (banana peel) or joke, it works. But as it is, I'm not sure that it works to just assume that a fruit is inherently funny.

I do think there's something here worth salvaging, but I'm not sure what.

Anything new on the sandbox? Also I think the examples should be listed using the standard format.

Just updated the examples on the sandbox per your suggestion. I think that will help weed out the bad examples. Feel free to trim or fix bad examples, or make edits to the description.

Honestly, looking through the examples and the description, I'm not sure how we can best define this trope to prevent examples that are just "fruit appears". I thought about trimming down the description and removing notes on individual fruits (They don't really explain why they're funny), but that leaves a very bare description.

Also, what would ya'll think about putting No Real Life Examples Please? Most of the real life section amounts to trivia about the fruit. I even commented out what looked like a troper tales

Yes to NRLEP. Per the parlance of NRLEP, fruit existing and being funny would be, imo, "too common."

Honestly, this one is so bad on a percentage of bad wicks to good, that I honestly think we should just cut it and if there's an actual trope here, it would be better off going through the TLP from scratch.

I'm motioning a cut.

Seconding a cut.

I finished up the sandbox reorg in case someone wants to run it through TLP. I think there is something there, but I don't know what it is.

I agree, with this level of misuse, it's not salvageable.

edited 4th Apr '17 5:08:37 PM by pokedude10