History Main / Understatement

''(Panel shows outside of the courthouse and a shout of ORDER! ORDER!)''

* ''ComicBook/UltronUnlimited'': "Ultron. We would have ''[[http://myhumblereview.blogspot.com/2011/10/avengers-vs-ultron.html words]]'' [[Comicbook/TheMightyThor with thee."]]

--->'''Garfield:''' ''(mangled up)'' That sign was somewhat understated.

* In ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/18907975 Gold and Sapphires]]'', as [[Manga/JojosBizarreAdventureVentoAureo Giorno]] comes to realize that his upbringing has given him a pathological fear of weakness of any kind, a near-inability to have normal interpersonal relationships, and an unhealthy standard of perfection for himself, describes it as "Okay, he's got some psychological issues. Maybe. That's...something."

-->'''Phoenix:''' ''(A "TAD"!? It sounds like you just had an aneurysm!!)''

-->'''Jiminy Cricket:''' Gesundheit!

-->'''Jiminy Cricket:''' Perhaps!?

--->'''Ming:''' Our ancestors had a mystical connection with red pandas. And what was a blessing became... ''(smiles sheepishly)'' an inconvenience.

* ''{{Film/Ghostbusters 1984}}'' -- "[[ForbiddenChekhovsGun Crossing the streams would be bad]]." And earlier, just after annihilating a cleaning cart, "Okay. Successful test."
* ''Film/{{Ghostbusters 2016}}'': It is stated during the confrontation with the BigBad that, once the portal to the Other Side is opened, the dead will return to 'pester' the living. Erin points out that this doesn't sound so bad. The BigBad clarifies that this 'pestering' will take the form of torture, death and carnage. The Ghostbusters then remark that 'pester' is a poor choice of words for what he's describing, and 'apocalypse' would probably be a more fitting one.

* ''Film/FightClub'': "You met me at a very strange time in my life."
* ''Film/MajorLeague'': "Juuuuuuuuuuuuust a bit outside..."

* The {{tagline}} to ''Film/CitizenKane'' was "It's terrific!"

'''Forrest:''' *narrating* But somebody thought that it wasn't.
* The opening narration of the [[AfterTheEnd Post-Apocalyptic]] B-movie ''Hell Comes To Frogtown'' exposits that some years prior to the events of the film there was a "disagreement." Cue footage of a nuclear explosion.
* ''Film/{{Primer}}'': "At this point, there would have been some... discussion."

* ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'': [[NotInKansasAnymore "Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."]]

"Hang on, this is gonna be bad." ''(cue T. rex attack)''

* ''{{Literature/Discworld}}''

* In ''Literature/DrumsGirlsAndDangerousPie'', the parents are loudly arguing when the mom see the children watching.

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'':

* ''This is The Way The World Ends'' by James Morrow: "Chapter 5 -- In Which the Limitations of Civil Defense Are Explicated in a Manner Some Readers May Find Distressing." This is the chapter in which, well... [[spoiler:[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin look at the bloody title.]]]]

* ''Series/HannahMontana'' usually answers such a line with, "Ya ''think?"''

* [[WordOfGod The creator]] of ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'' has said:

* ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'': Prepare for unforeseen consequences.
* ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys2'': "Hello? Hellooooo? Well, if you're hearing this, then chances are [[CaptainObvious you've made a very poor career choice.]]"

* Jack in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2'' has a doozy when she's telling Shepard of all of her various crimes, one of which is [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking vandalism]]. When pressed she explains that by 'vandalism' the Hanar mean she [[ColonyDrop dropped a starbase onto a moon]], and it was their favorite moon at that.

* [[http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff2000/fc01955.htm This]] ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}'' strip.

* ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'' couples this with OhCrap in [[http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/19980926 this]] strip.

* [[spoiler:"It's a bit late to hear this exactly from myself, isn't it?"]] This is the exact words from [[spoiler:Frelean Maleau]] in the beginning of ''Literature/ChaosFighters II-Chemical Siege'' after she [[spoiler:confessed her love to Enrei before she dies]].

* The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hplCJo5FU2s developer commentary]] of the ''VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys'' fan game ''VideoGame/OneNightAtFlumptys'' explains the reason the player is even at the eponymous Flumpty's: Flumpty has kidnapped them and they are trapped in his nightmarish fun house. Success means you live to see another day. Failure means that [[EyeScream your eyes are pulled out of your head and fried]]. Why does the egg-abomination Flumpty do this? Because he's bored and wants to make friends by playing a game with them. The problem is that the game tends to involve terror, anxiety, and people dying horribly. As explained by the creator himself:

** In "Zoom In Zadie,: Quique says that Mr. E is struggling just a little bit painting squares. He says this while [[{{Manchild}} Mr. E is throwing tantrums]].

** In ''Literature/TheFifthElephant'', Drumknott is surprised that the absence of Vimes, Carrot and Angua, and the resulting strike by the Guild of Watchmen over the tyrannical leadership of Sergent Colon hasn't led to a noticable increase of crime. Vetinari explains that the criminals all know Vimes is ''coming back'', and when he comes back to ''this', he "will not be happy".

* The ''{{Literature/Discworld}}'' novel ''Literature/SoulMusic'' features a ruthless Troll crime boss, Chrysoprase: "People tended not to speak to Chrysoprase in case they said something that offended him. They wouldn't know it at the time. They'd know it later, when they were in some dark alley and a voice behind them said: Mr. Chrysoprase is ''really upset''."

* Early in ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'', upon being told that Earth has been destroyed and he can't go home again, Arthur Dent says "Look, I'm a bit upset about that".

* A brief one in the ''Literature/BattleTechExpandedUniverse'' novel ''Assumption of Risk'', where Galen Cox is asked to describe the impromptu Solaris honor duel he was just in, fighting two SmallNameBigEgo Mechwarriors alongside [[TheAce Kai Allard Liao]]. In the fight, he had jumped his ''Crusader''--far and away the smallest and most fragile of the four 'Mechs partaking in the duel--between two heavily armed enemy Assault 'Mechs, landing on an elevated platform barely five meters wide (which is about the width of his ''Crusader''). He proceeds to describe his choice of position as 'a bit narrow and a tad warm.'

* ''Literature/LeftBehind'': "[[{{Narm}} To say the Israelis were taken by surprise is to say the Great Wall of China is long.]]"

Contrast FelonyMisdemeanor.

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* From the final level of ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'':
--> '''Soldier:''' "... Are you ''immune''? Have you encountered the infected?"\\
'''Coach:''' "''Encountered''? Boy, I am covered in zombie blood and puke and eyeballs and twenty other parts I don't even recognize. We are immune as SHIT."

* The ''VideoGame/SleepingDogs'' DLC "Nightmare In North Point" has Wei run into the ghost of [[spoiler:Vincent]] who died during the main game. He describes being dead as "a drag".

* In ''Film/{{Sonic the Hedgehog|2020}}'', after Sonic sets off an EMP that knocks out power for a good portion of the country, the government wants to do something about this blackout, and Vice Chairman Walters suggests sending in a "lab rat with teeth" to handle it. They quickly realize that Walters means Dr. Robotnik, who quickly proves to be an absolute nutcase of a BigBad.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* During a foreign trip in 1958, British Prime Minister UsefulNotes/HaroldMacmillan referred to an incident as a "little local difficulty". The incident was the resignation of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and two other finance ministers. Such high level resignations could have been enough to bring down his government.
* On the return journey from the South Pole in Captain Scott's expedition, Captain Oates was injured so decided to commit suicide to give his companions more chance. Suicide was -- genuinely -- easy, since he just had to leave the tent and quickly die of exposure. He announced his intentions with the words "I am just going outside and may be some time."
** Well, not that easy, given that the tent was laced together tight with (frozen!) ties to keep the drift out and Oates essentially had no working fingers. Some, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, have speculated that it would have been utterly impossible for Oates to go outside on his own, and the friends who knew he was a goner regardless helped Oates on his way.
* Captain Eric Moody on [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BA_flight_009 BA Flight 009]] said. ''Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. We have a small problem. [[OhCrap All four engines have stopped.]] We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. [[StiffUpperLip I trust you are not in too much distress.]]" Fortunately his efforts to save the flight [[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome met with some measure of success]] -- all four engines restarted, and the aircraft landed safely. Some years later he remarked that "It was, yeah, a little bit frightening." He isn't the only one, either. All airline pilots are told not to talk to the passengers about an emergency unless they know they can sound perfectly calm. Fictional reflections of this gave rise to the DangerDeadpan trope.
* When Australian Olympian Janine Shepherd appeared on [=TED=] talks she spoke about how her life changed after being hit by a truck during a bike ride, after cataloguing her injuries, including her spine being broken in ''six places'' she concludes: "I was having a really bad day"
* The NFPA diamond is a label giving a brief representation of the hazards of a substance. It is divided into 4 sections, with numbers 0–4 in them or special symbols. The blue section represents health risk, the red one flammability, the yellow one reactivity, and the white one reserved for special hazards like acid or oxidation. A handy guide for the number scale for each section lists yellow 4 as "may detonate". This led to the following conversation with a supervisor: "'May detonate'? Under what conditions?" "[[AllOfThem All of them.]]" This rating is reserved for [[MadeOfExplodium nitroglycerin, nitrogen triiodide, chlorine dioxide, and similarly temperamental chemicals.]]
* Similarly to the NFPA Diamond, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics [[note]]essentially a real-life GreatBigBookOfEverything for scientific and engineering data[[/note]] has a section devoted to safety which begins with a table of "Incompatible Chemicals". "Incompatible" in this case meaning that when mixed they [[MadeOfExplodium explode]], [[MadeOfIncendium burn]], produce other things that explode or burn, and/or result in [[AteTheSpoon otherwise]] [[DeadlyGas hazardous]] [[MakeThemRot substances]]. (Generally, several of these options simultaneously.)
** For elemental fluorine, the entry on said table simply reads "[[NotHyperbole Everything]]".
* Astronomers classify the interstellar medium, the gas and dust that fills galaxies, into three "phases", roughly equivalent to the three phases (solid, liquid, and gas) on Earth. They're called "cold", "warm", and "hot", and all are {{understatement}}s. The "cold" phase is made up of molecular clouds at 10 Kelvin (just shy of '''absolute zero''') and atomic clouds at 100 Kelvin (still ''far'' below freezing), the "warm" phase is about 10,000 degrees Kelvin (hotter than the Sun), and the "hot" phase is about '''one million''' degrees Kelvin.
* "We have had an anomaly. We just had an anomaly of the Delta 2 Launch Vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Station." Statement from launch control regarding the aforementioned Delta 2 Launch Vehicle [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_aHEit-SqA exploding spectacularly]] and raining debris and toxic fuel byproducts over several square miles.
* "We have just had a major malfunction." The 'major malfunction' was the explosion of the space shuttle ''Challenger'' 73 seconds after liftoff.
* In Japanese history, the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honno-ji_incident Honno-ji Incident]] refers to the forced suicide of UsefulNotes/OdaNobunaga by one of his retainers, as well as the burning of the castle he was in and the death of all his bodyguards. Nobunaga was in the final stages of reuniting Japan, and his death threw his forces into a civil war amidst the civil war. An incident, indeed.
** Japan seems to have a habit of calling events like this "incidents". Imperial Japan had such minor events as the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident Mukden Incident]] and the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre Nanking Incident]].
** In August 1945, the Emperor made a radio broadcast, for the first time ever, to say that "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage". Some listeners were left unsure whether he was announcing Japan's surrender. To be clear, the "situation" was that Japan's militaries were practically nonexistent at this point, with their army having lost the majority of the territories they'd gained in Southeast Asia and their navy mostly sitting on the bottom of the Pacific (or in some cases sunk at their moorings by American bombers). What few islands in the Pacific they had managed to hold onto were so cut off by American submarines that they were more like self-governed P.O.W. camps ''for their own forces'' than fortifications, and the blockade of the Japanese mainland was hitting the civilian population just as hard as Japan itself was being encroached upon by the Americans from the east and the Russians to the west. Oh, and they had just been '''''[[UsefulNotes/AtomicBombingsOfHiroshimaAndNagasaki nuked twice]]''''' (and the cities that ''hadn't'' been nuked had almost all been burned to the ground by conventional firebombing earlier in the year). So, no, it really ''wasn't'' working out to Japan's advantage.
* Back in the early days of NASA, astronauts Alan Shepard and John Glenn witnessed the launch of an Atlas rocket (the machine that would be taking Glenn into space).[[note]]Shepard instead flew on a smaller Redstone launch vehicle.[[/note]] The rocket blew up a few seconds later. Shepard turned to Glenn and calmly said, "I sure hope they fix that."
* British understatement nearly lost a major battle in the Korean War. Whilst being over-run by Chinese forces outnumbering his men nearly fifty to one, a British brigade commander reported to his American general that "things are getting a little bit sticky here." ''He'' meant "We'd quite appreciate reinforcements." The American heard the laconic unworried voice of his subordinate, and reasoned that the British had things well under control. Reinforcements only arrived very late in the battle, allowing the remnants of a British regiment to withdraw undefeated.
* On September 11, 2001, Michael Hingson was on the 78th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. His guide dog Roselle escorted him down 78 flights of stairs, through the chaos in the streets, and finally home to safety, all the while never losing her cool. When the pair appeared on Larry King Live a few weeks later to share their story, King summed it up in four words: "She's a GOOD dog."
* In 2017, a British insurance firm did a survey to find the country’s best understatement. In 3rd place was Captain Lawrence Oates (see above), in 2nd was the BA crew of Flight 009 (also see above), and number 1 was this exchange between the Earl of Uxbridge and the Duke of Wellington, after the former had his leg blown off by a cannon:
-->'''Uxbridge:''' By God Sir, [[MajorInjuryUnderreaction I've lost my leg!]]\\
'''Wellington:''' By God Sir, so you have.
* In the hours leading up to the death of [[UsefulNotes/ElizabethII Queen Elizabeth II]] it was announced by the palace that Elizabeth was under medical supervisor after doctors became concerned for her health. While the British public and government understood it to mean the Queen was in critical condition and likely in the last hours of her life, foreign audiences were initially confused by the reaction of the British and the Royal Family since to such audiences it sounded more like something had happened with her health and that she was in stable condition.
* When [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert-Francois_Damiens Robert-François Damiens]], who had been arrested after an attempt on the life of King Louis XV of France, was taken from his prison cell on March 28, 1757, to be executed, he had only this to say: ''"La journée sera rude."'' ("The day will be hard.") [[CruelAndUnusualDeath The execution in question was a horrific one]], involving torture by red-hot pincers, burning with sulfur, drenching with molten wax, lead, and boiling oil; drawing and quartering (the last such execution performed in France); and finally having his torso burned at the stake. To put it in perspective, His Majesty himself thought it a bit much ''even for a regicide''.
* The famous quote from the Apollo 13 mission, which failed almost disastrously. "Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here."[[note]][[BeamMeUpScotty more often quoted as]] "Houston, we have a problem."[[/note]] An oxygen tank's failure had essentially killed the craft's life support and power generation capability, forcing the crew and Mission Control to abort the mission and spend three days jury-rigging one solution after another to make it back to Earth alive.
* Many survivors of the sinking of the ''Titanic'' recalled how the stewards and stewardesses (as well as any other ship crewman who regularly interacted with guests) maintained a sense of calm as they tried to get people to the lifeboats. Several were quoted as saying that the lifebelts and evacuation to the top deck were "merely a safety precaution" and that there was no need to worry. The ship's band even went on deck and played popular music in an attempt to keep people calm. [[HeroicSacrifice Very few of these crewman made it off of the ship,]] [[FaceDeathWithDignity and it is said that the band played a hymn as the ship began to really go down]].

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* The Website/ThatGuyWithTheGlasses sketch "How I Quit My job" ends on one. This after having played "Music/AlsoSprachZarathustra", ripped open his shirt revealing "I QUIT!" written on his chest, and leaving to the end of {{Music/Queen}}'s "Bohemian Rhapsody" while being chased out of the building (and through the parking lot) by security:

-->"They make a hell of a mess."