One-Joke Fake Show

Evidently he never thought of building a pants rack.

"They're saying, 'Coffin Flop's not a show. It's just hours and hours of footage of real people falling out of coffins at funerals. There's no explanation, just body after body busting outta wood and hitting pavement.'"

— I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson

Whenever a fictional TV show appears in a work, don't expect the writers to waste any witty writing or actual jokes on it. Instead, it will only feature (and be named for) one wacky catchphrase or stupid concept. Bizarrely, it'll often be an in-universe Long Runner. Usually done as a Take That! to live-action Sitcoms if the show is a different kind of comedy.

A Sub-Trope of Incredibly Lame Fun, and a form of Stylistic Suck. Compare Specific Situation Books. Expect the title of this Show Within a Show to be very descriptive of the only thing ever shown in this series, such as being the catchphrase of the characters.

Not to be confused with Shallow Parody, which is when a parody of an actual show has just one predictable joke.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Total Drama Do Over: Characters occasionally watch the show "Honey, Where Is The Remote?" which solely consists of a husband and wife asking where the TV remote is.
  Izzy: Season finale is next week. I wonder if they'll finally find that remote.

Films — Animation

• In The LEGO Movie, Emmett's (and most of Bricksburg's) favorite TV show is Where Are My Pants? wherein a husband shows up in his underwear asking his wife the titular question in an over-the-top way. In the climax Wyldstyle interrupts the broadcast while throwing a pair of pants at the lead actor declaring the show's over.

Films — Live-Action

• Idiocracy. The in-universe show Ow! My Balls! consists entirely of one guy being repeatedly subjected to groin attacks. Even when he makes public appearances all anyone wants to do is kick him.
• RoboCop: All we ever see of the in-universe sitcom It's Not My Problem is the protagonist shouting "I'd buy that for a dollar!" Characters watching laugh even though the audience never sees any joke.

Literature

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In the first book, Rowley creates a comic strip called "Zoo-Wee Mama!", where the punchline of every strip is a character shouting out the title phrase. Despite its repetitive premise, the strip becomes a major success at school and even gets published in the school paper.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock is ripe with these, from Black Frasier to God Cop. The glimpses we get of TGS would also qualify, as they're usually no more than a few seconds at a time.
• Drake & Josh has "Celebrities Under Water" which is a reality game show about...celebrities holding their breath underwater.
• Father Ted parodies itself this way. The characters watch a series called Father Ben consisting of one-line inanities.
  Father Brendan: God, Ben, I'm such an eejit, I've put the shorts on me head!
• I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson: In one sketch, the CEO of Corncob TV defends his series Coffin Flop, which consists of nothing but footage of bodies falling out of defective coffins, often nude.
• In Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a former recurring sketch was "Peripheral Vision Man", a superhero who could only see peripherally. In the one episode where it comes up its original writers shop it to Fox as a series.

Puppet Shows

• Dinosaurs. "The Smoo Show." Consists of people saying the Informed Obscenity "Smoo!" over and over again.
• In The Muppets (2011), one of the most popular children's shows is Punch Teacher, which consists of children punching a teacher for two hours. It becomes a plot point: the Muppets earn a time slot for their telethon because Punch Teacher gets cancelled (due to a completely unexpected protest by the teachers' union).
• Sesame Street has a SpongeBob SquarePants parody called "TriangleBob TrianglePants" which is just a man (Bob McGrath) with triangular patches on his pants, singing a song about his pants.

Radio

• Martin/Molloy had fake ads for lowbrow Brit Coms That's My Pint! and Ow! Me Plums!, all which ended with the protagonist saying his catchphrase, which was also the show's title, with the implication this was the only joke the shows had.

Video Games

• Illbleed has a recurring cartoon program called Fall-Down Bear. It's a show about a bear who falls down a lot. The ways this happen vary from Fall-Down Bear tripping over a pebble to getting an axe thrown into his head.
• In Parappa The Rapper 2, the opening cutscene for Stage 2 has Parappa having an Imagine Spot of watching a show called "Danger Tick", where the titular character dies at random intervals. Parappa feels left out because everyone else in the living room is laughing, and he has no idea why. Given how it's apparently an 'adults only' show, it feeds into his anxiety about being seen as a child.
• In Sam & Max: Freelance Police, there's the sitcom Midtown Cowboys ("They're probably hiding a cow!"), in which a pair of cowboys are keeping their herd in their no-pets-allowed apartment and have to hide it whenever the landlord drops by. It somehow becomes a smash hit in Germany.

Web Comics

• The Perry Bible Fellowship: "Catch Phrase" has a sitcom whose appeal seems to be the star yelling "Gee Golly Jeepers!" Said star commits suicide, and the catchphrase gets put on his headstone.

Web Videos

• Parodied in Caddicarus where while channel flipping, Caddy comes across an advert for "Don't Worry, That's Just My Boner!"
• SuperMarioLogan: In "Bowser Junior Sneaks Into a Movie", Cody and his Ken doll watch a movie called Happy Pony 4, which is just two ponies singing its title over and over again.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  • An early episode featured "Zork and Pals", Bakura's idea for his own spin-off series, where he and Zork talk about destroying the world as a whacky sitcom activity. It started off as a one-time joke, before getting more and more clips and finally a full length episode.
  • To a lesser extent the "Kill Your Family Show", which features Melvin chanting "KILL YOUR FAMILY!" A young Marik watching the show immediately gets brainwashed by it.

Western Animation

• In the Arthur episode "The Rat Who Came to Dinner", Arthur is seen watching a show called Dunce Patrol that consists of nothing but the characters saying "duh" over and over.
• An episode of The Cleveland Show has Cleveland watching the sitcom The Barf Family, who... barf.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: The most commonly seen Show Within a Show is Fish Bowl 2, which from what is seen consists entirely of fish swimming around with no dialogue or plot. Despite this the show is popular in the Cul-de-Sac.
• F is for Family has the sitcom Bruce Again! which seems to consist primarily of an effeminate man showing up at his neighbor's door with the eponymous catchphrase and the narrator yelling for him to Get Out!.
• Futurama has Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, which has no actual jokes. The entire show is the titular Hypnotoad against a white background, hypnotizing the audience into believing they are being entertained. Occasionally it will cut to the exterior of a suburban house, its one nod to the sitcom format.
  Fry: That show has been going downhill since season three.
• Gravity Falls has a number of TV show with ridiculous premises, including Duck-tective, a show about... a duck... who is a detective.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In one episode, the characters go to a movie theater to watch "Exploding Penguins 3: Total Annihilation", which simply shows a large group of penguins exploding one by one.
• Invader Zim has The Angry Monkey Show, which is nothing but a monkey glaring at the camera.
• Phineas and Ferb gave us "Horse in a Bookcase". All that is seen of the show is the theme song which is just "It's a horse in a bookcase..." sung over and over again. It is ultimately cancelled after 19 whole years.
• The Simpsons:
  • The only joke of the recurring cartoon The Itchy & Scratchy Show is Itchy the mouse killing Scratchy the cat in increasingly over-the-top ways. People who have worked on The Simpsons have admitted that Itchy & Scratchy would never work in real life because of this trope.
  • In "Homer to the Max", there's the show Admiral Baby, a Mid Season Replacement about the adventures of a baby who has somehow become an admiral in the U.S. Navy. Even Homer Simpson thinks the show is dumb.
  • In "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken", Bart and Lisa while under curfew try watching prime-time TV and find the line-up to consist mostly of such shows, particularly an adult sitcom named after its "zany" catchphrase, Don't Go There!
• "The Mr. Frog Show" from Smiling Friends consists of the eponymous character rapidly approaching the camera, announcing his presence, and eating a bug before declaring he loves his audience, all within ten seconds. And this is apparently how the show ran for forty-seven very popular seasons.
  Pim: You know, I've never seen The Mr. Frog Show. Is it any good?
  Charlie: I - I mean, you really only have to watch, like, season 4 through 17, pretty much. The rest you can just skip.
• South Park: Terrance and Phillip have only one joke: they fart and then laugh.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • A Running Gag in "Rock-a-Bye Bivalve" has Patrick laugh hysterically at an unseen TV show where the only joke seems to be a guy getting hit in the head with a coconut. One time does mix it up, though — the guy gets hit by two coconuts.
  • The Sir Urchin and Snail Fail Show consists of Snail Fail bashing Sir Urchin over the head with different objects. Sir Urchin gets mad and says "Why, you!", and Snail Fail shrugs and says "What I do?" SpongeBob and especially Patrick love it.
• Steven Universe:
  • Lil' Butler is a 1980s or 1990s sitcom about a Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense family who adopts a child to be their butler. The kid proves to be a Servile Snarker who mocks his family with the catchphrase "You people have too much money!"
  • The premise of Crying Breakfast Friends is in its name: The characters are sentient breakfast foods that cry constantly. (It's also an opportunity for the show's actual writers to poke fun at themselves. While Steven is a big fan of Crying Breakfast Friends, his dad doesn't see the appeal of a show about characters who "cry all the time"—which is only a slight exaggeration of how much the Steven Universe cast cry themselves.)
    Pearl: Do you understand that show?
    Greg: I don't understand anything anymore.
• Yin Yang Yo! has a movie called Who Stole the Cookie?, which consists of a detective accusing a kid who is blatantly eating a cookie, and said kid denying it through a mouthful of cookie. Despite the Captain Obvious Reveal, several characters react poorly to the spoiler that, yes, the kid did steal the cookie.

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