Overly Narrow Superlative

No, Oliver, I don't want your autograph!

Duff: Aye, but now they call me Roboduff! The world's deadliest golfing cyborg!
Kim: Wow, now that's a mouthful.
Ron: And really, how many other golfing cyborgs are there? It cannot be a crowded field.

— Kim Possible, "A Sitch in Time"

This trope covers situations where something seems to be highly praised, and it's relative to an extremely small — or intrinsically awful — group (often a group of one), rendering the praise meaningless. Sometimes the intent is for the praise to be taken seriously (in which case it becomes a version of the Sharpshooter Fallacy), but the more frequent implication is that there isn't any larger category relative to which it can apply, making it a Stealth Insult (if the backhandedness of the compliment is not immediately obvious) or a form of Damned by Faint Praise (if it is). Sometimes the joke is that, even in such an incredibly narrow category, the thing being discussed still isn't first.

Creators may describe their own works this way as a form of humorous Self-Deprecation; it can also be a way to imply that a work, while bad, at least has a unique premise — it's better than any other of its type because there is no other. Sometimes it derives additional humor from the recipient taking it as a genuine compliment, either because they're dumb or because we the audience know something they do not.

The stock piece of dialogue that fits this trope goes something like:

Alice: Bob, you've always been my favorite son.
Bob: I'm your only son.

Contrast Mathematician's Answer, which is equally meaningless because it's too broad, and Suspiciously Specific Denial, where the specificity is worrisome because of everything it doesn't cover. Compare Everything Except Most Things, Trivially Obvious, Damned by Faint Praise. Also compare the Low Count Gag. ("Wow Alice, all your fans are out there!...All two of them.") See also Medal of Dishonor, which may be given out in cases like these. May figure in the plot of a Guinness Episode.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Fox Sports Detroit commercial heard one year in May: "Winner of more Emmys than any mid-Michigan sports network this year."
• Blue Emu advertises their products as "America's number 1 emu oil-based topical pain cream".
• Almost every TV show is number one in some way. They'll mention usually the genre (#1 new comedy), time (#1 new show of the year), location (#1 show on cable), and any combination of these, getting more and more specific as you go.
• The tagline for season 2 of the Clone High revival is "One of the top clone-based high school shows on television. Period."
  • Countdown With Keith Olbermann, while on MSNBC, was very proud of being the #1 cable news show not on Fox News.
  • Spanish TV channel Telecinco promoted itself for about two years as the "leader of private television", which really meant that public TV channel TVE1 was the first TV network in Spain and Telecinco was the second one.
• Used in an advert for ITV Digital. Monkey tells Johnny Vegas that he's "the funniest person sitting in that chair".
• A TV ad for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer proclaimed the game to be "Probably the greatest action game based on a movie based on a superhero comic of the year." Seriously. (Well, at least it's above Spider-Man 3?)
• A print ad for the launch of The WB had Michigan J. Frog telling viewers to "Make the leap to America's #1 network!". The phrase was accompanied by an asterisk that led to the notice, "Based on a random sampling of heads of frog households and women over 50 who don't watch TV. Your results may vary. Actually, we went into business today. If we get over ten viewers, we'll be very happy."
• Tentacle Grape:
  • The most delicious hentai soda on the market!
  • Calling it a "unique glass collector's bottle" in this case is probably another example of this trope.
• A Fall 2011 commercial for the X-Men Film Series on Time Warner On Demand advertised the "Top 5 X-Men Movies". At the time, there were only five X-Men movies (unless you count the one with Generation X).
• Casillero del Diablo is advertised as "America's favorite Reserve Wine from Chile". Made even stranger by the fact that there is technically no such thing as "reserve wine" in either Chile or the United States.
• Played for laughs with the iOS version of You Don't Know Jack, which Jellyvision flaunts as "the #1 game in the world that contains both fart noises and trivia about Shakespeare."
• Many car commercials advertise the car as "Best in its class", without defining the class in question. Some of the same commercials describe the car as "in a class of its own".
• Apple Inc. likes to advertise their iPhones as "the best phone we've ever made" ... which is less impressive once you realise that it just means "it's better than all our previous models", and you'd rather hope that this year's product isn't going to be worse than last year's product.
• A Swedish campaign for the relaunch of Cuba Cola ran with this, proudly proclaiming, "The market leader^note referring to the period April-May 1954 is back!"
• Many "No Artificial X!" claims can be read as "We have other things in the product that are artificial, but not the one or two things we're calling out".

Advertising — Films

Done all the time unironically in film advertising the week after a film opens at the box office. Film ads that week will try to claim their picture was "the #1 film in America!" Anytime that isn't actually true, the ad will narrow the superlative down by genre, like "the #1 comedy in America!," "the #1 thriller in America!", etc. This is especially egregious when it's a time of year where it has little competition.

• Films released in January or February will frequently unironically trumpet the one review calling them "The best film of the year!"
• "[Not-very-good movie] is the Citizen Kane of [tiny or inherently bad genre]" has become something of a snowclone.
  • The Boston Globe memorably described Shakes the Clown as "the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies."
  • There's a Netflix user review of Lifeforce (1985) that calls it "by default, the Citizen Kane of naked space zombie vampire movies."
• The tagline of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is "He's the best there is! (Actually, he's the only one there is.)"
• One of the best of these was for Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, which proclaimed in large letters, The #1 Movie in America! 'that's a comedy written by a Canadian who's left-handed'.
• Uwe Boll's BloodRayne II: Deliverance DVD release was promoted boldly as a sequel to the "Best-selling Live-action DVD of 2006!" A claim footnoted with "for films that made less than $5 million at the box office."
• An interesting subversion is Cold Pursuit, whose French poster◊ had the critic quote "By far the best movie where Liam Neeson kills everyone". That this isn't overly narrow shows how typecast Liam Neeson has become.
• Eight Legged Freaks was advertised as "the biggest, nastiest mutant spider movie of all time."
• Free Birds was advertised as "the greatest turkey movie of all time!"
• Gymkata has its tagline declaring that star Kurt Thomas is the master of the titular martial art. As at least one vanished review of the film points out, he's also the inventor and only known practitioner of gymkata, too. Of course he's the master.
• The DVD cover of Happy Gilmore has a quote referring to it as "the best golf comedy since Caddyshack!" This presumably means that it's better than Caddyshack II and The Accidental Golfer.
• The trailer for The History of Future Folk proclaims that it's "probably the only alien folk duo sci-fi action romance comedy movie ever made which totally makes it the best alien folk duo sci-fi action romance comedy movie ever made."
• The theatrical trailer for The Incredible Mr. Limpet has the announcer proclaim it to be "the most incredibly delightful movie about a man who turns into a fish that you'll see this year."
• Spoofed by the makers of The Naked Gun: "The Naked Gun 2 ½, the highest grossing movie ever made with a fraction in the title,"◊ surpassing 8½.
• Netflix has promoted Olympus Has Fallen as "the best White House-under-siege film of the year." Unlike most examples, this one is actually justified, because White House Down was released the same year.
• On the DVD cover of The Straight Story, Michael Wilmington of The Chicago Tribune declares the film "The Sweetest and Most Compassionate Movie [David] Lynch Has Ever Made."
• The UK DVD cover of Thunderpants has this gem: "The best British kids film of the last five years."
• One tagline for Wasabi is "Quite possibly the greatest French-language, English-subtitled, Japanese action-comedy of all time."

Alternate Reality Games

• Omega Mart: Omega Mart proudly markets itself as "The World's Most Exceptional Grocery Store." Not that they are wrong but who goes around classifying grocery stores?

Anime & Manga

• GaoGaiGar has Guy constantly referring to himself as "The World's Strongest Cyborg". There can't be many of those, especially not built for combat. It gets better in GaoGaiGar FINAL, where he has been upgraded to an Evoluder and starts calling himself "The World's Strongest Evoluder". The only other Evoluder in the world is his girlfriend. ^note Maybe that's because he keeps calling her "boluda"...
• In Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, Kensei Ma assures Miu that he'll make sure Kenichi stays safe. "After all, he's our number one disciple! Of course, technically he's our only disciple, but let's not get bogged down in small details like that."
• Played with in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. In the last episode, Reinforce claims to be the happiest magic tome in the world. However by that point she has a very good reason to feel the happiest, not mattering if she is the only magical tome shown in the series.^note The Book of the Azure Sky, Bible of Silver Cross, and the Tome of the Purple Sky could also count, but only the former two are canon.
• Similar to the Kenichi example above, Charanko from One-Punch Man is the number one disciple of S-class hero and master martial artist Bang. He's also the only disciple of Bang's martial arts school, the others having left due to the former number one disciple going on a rampage and injuring every other student before he got expelled.
• Early into the Advanced Generation saga of Pokémon: The Series, Meowth proclaims himself and his teammates as the best Team Rocket operatives in the Hoenn region. James has to point it out to him that they are the only Rockets in the region.
• A Running Gag throughout the first act of the first Slayers movie is people claiming to be the Xth Strongest Man on Mipross Island. Mipross Island isn't very large, and none of them last longer than a few minutes against out-of-towner Lina — she even one-shots the eighth, seventh and fifth strongest simultaneously — mere moments after having bested the tenth.

Audio Plays

• KPNYRadio:
  • Lampshaded with the Once per Episode statement by Air Waves at the start of each show.
    Air Waves: Welcome to the Inventory here on KPNYRadio, Ponyville's radio. And remember everypony, if you're not listening to the radio...

    Becomes a misnomer by Season 2, when thanks to the Quantum Entanglement Dish, their broadcast is reaching a far larger audience that includes Manehatten and Earth. They keep the phrase because Boss Pony likes it.

Comedy

• Jimmy Carr is called "the hardest working man in comedy", which he said "is like being called the most attractive man in the burns unit." It was less offensive in context — until he made the "they stick together" joke.
• Drag performer Cashetta calls herself "The world's most fabulous drag magician". And follows with, "And the genius of that is that you've got nothing to compare me to!"
• According to Double Act: A History of British Comedy Duos by Andrew Roberts, one act doing the rounds of working men's clubs in the sixties billed itself as "The world's greatest clairvoyant hen". A footnote asks the obvious question.
• One of ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's most popular puppets is "the most beloved terrorist throughout the world", Achmed the Dead Terrorist.
• Judah Friedlander has a special titled America Is the Greatest Country in the United States.
• During Jake Johannsen's This'll Take About an Hour, he talks about buying Masters of the Universe action figures:
  "I just got a new one, Leechor^note Actually, the character's name is "Leech"., Evil Master of Power Suction. Which I had to buy just for that title. I mean, I didn't even know there was an opening in Power Suction! Already this Leechor is the evil master! So, it shows you what you can do if you find your niche and fill it!"
• In The Very World of Milton Jones, Milton Jones is often introduced as "Britain's funniest Milton". Narrowly beating Milton Keynes.
• In the roast of Jeff Foxworthy, Lisa Lampanelli praised Bill Engvall for being the best-looking comedian on The Blue Collar Comedy Tour... then added, "That's not difficult, that's like being the prettiest one on The View."
• Marcel Lucont boasts himself as "easily the greatest UK-based French comedian around".
• Brazilian comedian Geraldo Magela describes himself as the "best blind comedian in Brazil".
• Tim Minchin's So Live DVD describes him as "without a doubt one of the top 7 pianist-singer-songwriter-comedian-actor-pervert-wannabe-rockstars born in Western Australia in the mid-seventies".
• At the beginning of The Muppets All-Star Comedy Gala in Montreal, Kermit called the city "the greatest island-based French-speaking city of over 2 million people... in all of Quebec".
• A routine by O'Brien and Valdez regarding a lie detector starts with a woman assuring Valdez that he's her "first". After the lie detector goes off she quickly amends it to, "first blind Mexican this week."
• Christopher Titus used (and lampshaded) this trope when describing his then-wife, Erin, and him in high school, where she was part of the Popular crowd, while he "was in the 'Outcast Losers Who Fell into a Bonfire' group. Very exclusive group."

Comic Books

• 52 has Jaded Washout Daniel Carter (distant ancestor of Booster Gold) sarcastically brag about how, despite his brilliant football career having gone nowhere after his Career-Ending Injury, he still managed to become the fifth-best term-life salesman at Evergreen Insurance Company... out of six.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender – North and South, Toph describes the Beifong Metalbending Academy as "the most prestigious metalbending school in the world". One of her students points out that they're the only school, but she sees it as the point since they do something that used to be considered impossible until she learned how to do it.
• The DCU: Detective Chimp sometimes refers to himself as the world's greatest chimp detective.
• Golden Lad issue No.1◊: Golden Lad's Most Astounding Adventure!
• Iznogoud: Tahbari al-Tardi is described as the best artist in the Caliphate. It's also stated that he's the only artist in the Caliphate.
• The first issue of Venom: The Enemy Within promises that the second issue will have "arguably the greatest fight ever between two super-beings in an underground gallery surrounded by hooting goblins several miles below San Francisco during a quarantine!"

Comic Strips

• In one Blondie (1930) strip, Dagwood is bummed that he's not good at par golf. Blondie comforts him by saying that at least he's "the very best office manager in the history of J.C. Dithers & Co."
• The Boondocks: Caesar brags about being the best freestyle champion in Woodcrest, which Huey points out is not that hard to be.
• Dilbert:
  • Dogbert is acting as a shady, bribe-collecting movie critic, and a customer wants to know how much the review "Best movie so far this year" will cost for a film released on New Year's Day.
  • Inverted in another strip where Dilbert's company manages to claim that their engineers are paid above the median salary for their industry by defining their industry more and more vaguely until the average salary drops below what they're paying their employees. Dilbert's company is officially in the industry of "High technology, textile workers, teenagers and dead people."
• Garfield:
  • Garfield once says: "Jon! My favorite person! In this room... at the moment."
  • Garfield describing Jon in one strip:
    Garfield: Jon is the most interesting guy I know.
    Jon: I just sorted my socks!
    Garfield: He's the only guy I know.
  • One strip has Garfield declaring June 19th, 2020 as his best birthday ever and acknowledging that he's "forgotten all the other ones".
• The Outrageous World of Alex and Charlie: In one strip, Charlie calls Alex (his twin sister) his favourite twin after she scares away Garth trying to get him to hold Princess.
• Peanuts: "Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you're the Charlie Browniest!"
• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: this comic, when Phoebe wants to believe she is unique she asks Marigold how many humans ride unicorns to school. When Marigold answers 910, Phoebe keeps narrowing it down further until she gets to human girls with freckles who play the piano and are named Phoebe Howell, of which she is the only one.

Fan Works

• The Inquisition's librarian tells Varric, in Beyond Heroes: Of Sunshine and Red Lyrium, that he's "the most famous and only author who is a member of the Inquisition itself".
• In the Legend of Korra fanfic Book 5: Legends, while visiting Kyoshi Island, Bolin introduces himself as "the best lavabender in the world". Opal then quickly points out that he's the only lavabender in the world. Bolin dismisses this as "semantics".
• Hobbes invokes this sarcastically in Calvin & Hobbes: The Series:
  Hobbes: There, there, Calvin. I'm sure you can break the record for the longest skid mark made by a face in a six-year old's room.
• Asuka in A DIC-less SI apparently has a Running Gag about mentioning that she has the largest breasts in the world. Given that she's one of two women, and only four people, in the entire world, it's not much of an accomplishment. It gets a Continuity Nod when Kasumi and Nodoka visit and one of the others points out Asuka is now one of the least busty women in the world.
• Emerald Flight Book Two: Conqueror:
  Sirius: Ah, Harry, can't a godfather see his favorite godson?
  Harry: You do realize that I'm your only godson.
  Sirius: Yeah, but doesn't that springboard you up the rankings to number one?
• The Flash Sentry Chronicles: When Twilight gushes over Flurry Heart and calls her her "favorite niece", Fire Heart reminds Twilight that Flurry's her only niece.
• In Grease & Lightning Harry and Snape visit an establishment which describes itself as "Cumbria's premier Filipino restaurant".
• In Harry Potter and Future's Past, Harry mentally comments to Hermione about her having her "favorite husband to chat with".
  Hermione: Favorite one? Since you're my only one, it also means you're my least favorite as well.
• Harry Potter and the Dream Come True:
  Sirius: Do I need a reason to visit my favorite godson?
  Harry: I'm your only godson.
  Sirius: True enough. And a pity, I must say. Imagine how many children are out there wishing that they could have Sirius Black as a godfather. You lucky boy, you.
• In I Must Be Going, Dorian tells Varric that "you're my third favorite author in a five-foot radius." Varric isn't exactly flattered.
• In I've Got Your Back, Pearl's dad mentions her being his favorite daughter. She replies that she's his only daughter.
• LadyBugOut: Chloe points out that Alya's bragging about hers being the best Ladybug-centered blog doesn't mean much when she's currently the only one operating such a blog. Ladybug herself decides to change that after Alya attempts to use that exclusivity to justify deliberately deceiving her audience for the sake of attracting more views.
• The Last Straw:
  Harry: You know you keep promising to cook for me. But all I've seen is your prowess with takeout menus and sandwiches.
  Tim: But you have to admit that I make the best peanut butter and jelly you've ever tasted.
  Harry: Only because you've made the only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches I've ever eaten.
• In The Maretian, after the ponies spend a sol grooming for photos sent to NASA, Mark Watney proudly claims, "I am, after all, the most popular and exclusive spa host on the whole planet." Remember that they are stranded and alone on Mars.
• In Rise Above, James says that he and Amber are "the most popular royal twins in all the kingdoms". By Amber's admission, there's "just one other pair" and "they're not much".
• Royal Business: Upon being personally summoned to court, Spike says: "Guess she's finally realized just who is the Number One Dragon around here!" Immediately lampshaded by Twilight Sparkle, resulting in this exchange:
  "Spike," Twilight chuckled, "you're the only Dragon around Ponyville."
  
  "And thus the Number One," he replied with impeccable logic.
• In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans crossover fanfiction A Shadow of the Titans, this is sort of played with:
  Master of Games: Kitty, daughter of Killer Moth. The nastiest girl in... any high school in all of America!
• Speed and Purpose: Sonic brags that he's the fastest hedgehog in his Zone, but that isn't saying much since there are only two hedgehogs in the Zone.
• In The Very Secret Diaries, Legolas dangles Pippin over a cliff until he'll admit that Legolas is the prettiest elf in the Fellowship. Pippin diplomatically doesn't point out that he's the only elf in the Fellowship.

Films — Animation

• Barbie as Rapunzel: Rapunzel considers Prince Stefan the most handsome man she's ever seen. Given her upbringing, she hasn't seen many men before.
• Encanto: Mirabel calls Dolores her favorite older cousin while trying to wheedle information out of her, though she only has one other older cousin (she doesn't seem to count Camilo, since he's not that much older than her). In some dubs, she narrows it further by calling Dolores her favorite older female cousin (of which Dolores is the only one), since those languages have separate words for "male cousin" and "female cousin".
• Koati: Pako says that Nachi is "the coolest Koati this side of the river", and Nachi clarifies that he is "the only Koati this side of the river".
• In The Lion King (1994), Scar mentions wanting to look out for the well-being of his favourite nephew. Simba's response: "Pff — yeah, right; I'm your only nephew."
• Scuttle the seagull, who is wrong almost every time he opens his mouth, invokes a variant of this in The Little Mermaid (1989):
  Scuttle: Have I ever been wrong? I mean, when it's important?
• In the Novelization of Turning Red, Mei refers to herself as Ming's favourite daughter. She is an only child.
• In Zootopia, Duke Weaselton's bootleg DVD for Floatzen 2 lists it as "Best film of the year starring a moose and otter," sourced to Legitimate Movie Review, and Pig Hero 6 is described as "The best animated film on this DVD, guaranteed."

Films — Live-Action

• Box office records often come down to this. As noted by the advertising folder, some movies have to find disclaimers that make them stand out — genres, rating, non-franchise/adaptations, or in the case of The Force Awakens, "highest grossing film that wasn't directed by James Cameron". The top three highest grossing movies of 2020 (as of the year's midpoint) were... Bad Boys for Life, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Dolittle, a very far cry from the Disney, Lucasfilm, and Marvel-dominated toppers of years past. Of course, given the COVID-19 Pandemic shut down theaters before the Dump Months were over and how almost all potential blockbusters for the year were delayed indefinitely, it's not exactly something that can be boasted about. This is also evident in how much the movies grossed, all of which were in the mid-to-low hundreds of millions, in contrast to the billion-dollar hits of years prior.
• According to Wikipedia a critic for the Florida Times-Union commented that Blood Waters of Dr. Z "could very well be the best film ever made about a mutated catfish."
• In Brokeback Mountain, Jack's wife Lureen makes the following comment:
  Lureen: You're the best combine salesman we got. You're the only combine salesman, in fact...
• Brüno (2009) boasts that his show Funkyzeit is the biggest fashion show in the entire German-speaking world, except Germany.
• Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny has an inverted example not unlike the one from the jokes section. When the warrior Silent Wolf meets several martial artists in an outdoor restaurant, four of them start introducing themselves:
  Flying Blade: I am Flying Blade, famed in Shantung.
  Thunder Fist: I am Thunder Fist Chan, famed in Zhejiang.
  Silver Dart Shi: I am Silver Dart Shi, famed in Fuzhou.
  Turtle Ma: And I am Turtle Ma, famed in... this tavern.
• Dead Snow has been called "The best Norwegian Nazi-zombie movie ever made".
• In Demolition Man, upon learning that he's eating a rat hamburger, John Spartan shrugs and states that this is the best hamburger he's had in years. Although he does actually sound impressed, the current society is vegetarian, and he spent a few decades as a Human Popsicle.
• From Down with Love: "Oh, Vikki! You're the best friend a girl from Maine who wrote a book and came to New York could ever have!" Subverted, as Barbara actually does think that Vikki is a good friend.
• Good Morning, Vietnam has been labeled as "The best military comedy since M*A*S*H".
• Guardians of the Galaxy:
  • Peter Quill notes that he always keeps his promises, when they are made to musclebound wackjobs who will kill him if he doesn't.
  • In an out-of-universe example, fans have also dubbed the movie the best Howard the Duck film ever made (out of two, and Howard only appears in The Stinger of this one - later upped to five, with Howard still only getting one-scene cameos in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Avengers: Endgame).
• Holly Slept Over: Noel says Audra's expression looks like the reaction someone would have after they learned someone they've not seen for years suddenly died, assuming this was what happened with Holly at first. She's incredulous that such a specific look can exist.
• In Bruges throws a bit of a lampshade on this one when it came to a white dwarf's coke-fueled, racist rant.
  Jimmy: You have no idea how much shit I get from black midgets!
  Ray: That's... undeniably true.
• In Travis Betz's Lo, the waiter assures the protagonist that he is the best bartender in that room. Said room currently contains them and a demon rat.
• The Martian: While grumbling about the fact that Mission Control are trying to micromanage his improvised farming setup from back on Earth after several months of successful work with only his own ingenuity to guide him, Mark Watney jokingly points out that he is, "the greatest botanist on this planet." The planet in question is Mars, and he's not just the only botanist, but the only person on it. (Of course, by that same token, he's also the worst botanist on the planet.)
• In Mr. Baseball, Tom Selleck's baseball has-been, Jack Eliot, resorts to one of these to try to avoid being traded.
  Jack Eliot: I'm a World Series MVP!
  Skip: That was four years ago, Jack. Last season, you hit .235.
  Jack Eliot: Last season, I led this team in ninth-inning doubles in the month of August!
• The Muppets:
  • The Muppet Movie:
    • During their dinner together, Kermit and Miss Piggy get served some Sparkling Muscatel, "one of the finest wines of Idaho!"
    • Doc Hopper tries to brainwash Kermit into shilling for his restaurant with the help of Professor Krassman, "the world's leading expert in mind control on frogs".
  • In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit's Criminal Doppelgänger Constantine likes to brag about being "The World's Most Dangerous Frog". As Miss Piggy points out right before she wipes the floor with him, "You may be the world's most dangerous frog, but you're still just a frog!"
• Phantom Soldiers has the Russian cook, erm, Cook, boasting that he's the best cook in the base. He's also the only one.
• James Cameron is known for describing his directorial debut Piranha Part Two: The Spawning as "the finest flying piranha movie ever made."
• The makers of Rat Race were happy to point out that their film was the first to feature two black Oscar winners in the same scene: Cuba Gooding Jr. and Whoopi Goldberg.
• Saved! opens with the protagonist's mother being named "the number one Christian interior decorator for the entire region."
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World does this a few times:
  • Knives Chau gushes over Scott, telling him that she's never dated anyone so talented. Scott correctly surmises that she hasn't dated that many people in general.
  • Ramona tells Scott that he's the nicest guy she's dated yet. Considering that her dating history consists of the Seven Evil Exes...
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): At one point, Tom tells Robotnik, "Raccoons have the cleanest mouths of any animal that regularly eats garbage."
• In the title song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical State Fair, we're informed that "It's the best state fair in our state!"
• The protagonist of Mel Brooks's remake of To Be or Not to Be is frequently described as "World famous in Poland."
• A Running Gag in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is the description of Al's career as "not technically the best, but arguably the most famous accordion player in an extremely specific genre of music".

Jokes

• A common saying:
  • "Isn't this like being the best football (soccer) team in Greenland?"
  • Or the best-looking girl in Wales.
• The standard backhanded compliment, "You're the funniest person in that chair."
• Inverted in this joke: A village is home to three witches. One witch puts up a sign in front of her house reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the world!" A second witch sees the sign and puts up her own, reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the UNIVERSE!" The third witch sees both signs and puts up her own sign reading "Here lives the most powerful witch in the village." There is also a variant with three tailors on the same street.

Literature

By Author:

• As Ephraim Kishon wrote, because a state of Israel didn't exist for 2000 years, they had for some time the first anything in Israel in 2000 years. The first driving school, the first broom factory, and he himself wrote the first collection of humorous short stories in 2000 years.

By Work:

• Aubrey-Maturin: Jack defends his old ship, the aged, decrepit fifty-gun H.M.S. Leopard, as "The finest fourth-rate in the fleet." However, at the time of the setting, there were only two fourth-rates in service, and the other one (H.M.S. Grampus, for those interested) was even more overtly horrible.
• Cradle Series: Subverted. Yerin and Lindon are adopted by the Aurelius family and begin training as outer disciples. Eithan proudly tells them that they are the first and second-ranked outer disciples, respectively. Since they haven't met a single other outer disciple and Eithan is The Gadfly, they assume they're the only outer disciples at the moment. But when the police demand their ranks and Lindon explains, he is informed that there are thousands of outer disciples in the Aurelius family, and assume he's screwing with them. He's not, and judging by the progress the two make, Eithan wasn't either.
• The New Yorker reviewed Jeff Lindsay's Dexter novels by saying "Dexter Morgan is one of the most likable vigilante serial killers in recent literature."
• Cory Doctorow on his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: "The book has outsold every first sf novel publishing in 2003 for which I have figures."
• Dragonlance: The New Adventures: Sindri declares himself to be the greatest kender wizard ever... he's also the only one ever.
• Enemy Coast Ahead is a memoir by WW2 bomber pilot Guy Gibson. The last day of peace finds him in a boat with his girlfriend Ann. "Windy, my all-swimming and all-flying cat, who had put in more flying hours than most cats, lay purring in her lap." Since most cats have zero flying hours, having more than most cannot have taken Windy very long.
• As they climb Mt. Everest, the characters in Gordon Korman's Everest trilogy amuse themselves by coming up with superlatives that allow them all to break their own records. One character might be the first 31-year-old Jewish man to reach the summit, while someone else might be the first African American from Oklahoma to reach the summit. This is in contrast to Dominic Alexis, who aims to break Ethan Zaph's actually valuable record of youngest person to summit.
• In the Doctor Who Expanded Universe New Series Adventures novel Ghosts of India, the Doctor claims that Cleopatra was not the most beautiful woman in the world, but might have been the most beautiful woman in her bedchamber, if the handmaidens had the day off.
• The Guinness World Records books are full of "standard" records, like world's longest beard, but it also has gems like the world record for cycling backwards with a violin. They also called Silent Movie the sound film with the least spoken dialogue: A single one-syllable word ("no," spoken by French mime Marcel Marceau).
• The back of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) says that "if there's a better book than this, I haven't written it!"
• From P. G. Wodehouse's first Jeeves and Wooster story, "Extricating Young Gussie":
  Take him for all in all, dear old Uncle Cuthbert was as willing a spender as ever called the family lawyer a bloodsucking vampire because he wouldn't let Uncle Cuthbert cut down the timber to raise another thousand.
• From one of two reviews of the novel KKXG: KING KONG VS GIGANTOSAURUS:
  Anyone who'd like a good, suspenseful adventure novel about a giant lizard and a big gorilla who fight at the end will get enjoyment from it.
• James S.A. Corey says that after reading Leviathan Wakes, George R. R. Martin said that it was "the best book about vomit zombies he'd ever read".
• In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lucy tries to cheer up a guilt-ridden Tumnus by saying that he's "the nicest faun I've ever met." She kindly neglects to mention that he's the only faun she's ever met. He even suspects that she hasn't met many. This actually may have helped motivate his heel-face turn, later.
• Inverted in the blurb on the back of The Lump of Coal by Lemony Snicket: "Is there a more charming holiday tale to behold? Probably, but Lemony Snicket has not written one."
• The Lying Ape lists an unintentional example — a man was asked to review a book and completely bashed it, giving it overall an extremely negative review. This being early January, he ended the review ironically with "Best book I've read all year." Guess which single line out of his entire review they put on the back of the novel?
• Mrs Bradshaw's Handbook states that the bar at the Green Crown Hotel, Big Cabbage, boasts that it has "more varieties of cabbage wine and brassica distillations than any other establishment in the world". Even on the leafy-green-vegetable-obsessed Sto Plains, that is not a claim many people would be interested in challenging.
• In the Christmas mystery/romance novella Masters In This Hall, John and Ivy Garland call each other "best of cousins". They also happen to be each other's only cousins (although by the end they're more sincere).
• Paddy Madigan from Naked Came the Stranger is believed by many to be the finest left-handed fighter ever to contend for the light-heavyweight championship of the world.
• Played with in The Phantom Tollbooth with the smallest giant, the tallest midget, the thinnest fat man, and the fattest thin man — all the same ordinary man.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events has Esmé Squalor, the city's sixth most important financial advisor.
• In Vorpal Blade, Lt. Commander Weaver mentions, in a discussion of impromptu refilling of oxygen reserves for the titular spacecraft, that they have the finest jury-riggers in the star system that they're exploring. The Executive Officer points out that they're the only intelligent life in the system, which Weaver then says is his point.
• In When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris ponders how sometimes the sins we haven't committed can be all we have to cling to, and some people really need to reach to find sins they haven't committed: At least I never killed anyone with a hammer.

Live-Action TV

• Fan-tweet read out on America's Test Kitchen: "@cpkimball is the sexiest man in a bow-tie with a cooking show on public television." While amusingly phrased, this is genuine praise. Christopher Kimball is definitely good looking even as TV chefs go, while also dressing like the 11th Doctor (only replace the fez with an apron).
• In one of the cartoon segments on The Aquabats! Super Show!, the Aquabats are menaced by "Space Bees! The deadliest bees in space!"
• Inverted in Arrested Development when Lucille calls Michael her "third least favorite child." However, since she has four children, that's still kind of an insult.
• Hamish and Andy deliver this one during their Asian Gap Year:
  "This was going to be the greatest thing we had ever seen... at a Thai rocket festival."
• Barney & Friends:
  • In the Season 1 episode "My Family's Just Right for Me", when the kids are showing paintings of their families to Barney, Luci compliments her younger sister Tina on her painting, which leads to this exchange:
    Luci: Oh, Tina, you made me look lovely!
    Tina: Of course! You're my favorite sister!
    Luci: You mean I'm your only sister.
    Tina: Well, you're still my favorite!
  • The Barney's Adventure Bus UK VHS describes Barney as "the world's favorite purple dinosaur".
• Inverted in one Blandings episode when Freddie The Unfavorite begs his father for money and urges him to think about how much this means to "Your only son-besides the other one."
• In Brothers & Sisters, the following exchange happens:
  Saul: Why are you so obsessed with my social life?
  Nora: Not obsessed. You're my favorite brother.
  Saul: Only brother.
  Nora: In this family, you never know.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  Kendra: That's me favorite shirt! That's me only shirt!
• In the Castle episode "Heartbreak Hotel", from a disgruntled Esposito: "Worst impromptu bachelor party while on case ever."
• In the Charmed episode "The Courtship of Wyatt's Father", Paige refers to Chris as "one of my two favorite nephews." At this point in her life, she only knows that she has two nephews (and Chris himself hasn't even been conceived yet).
• Community:
  • Greendale Community College often gets a variant, where they aren't the best despite the overly narrow superlative. It's been described as the second most prosperous school on the Greendale campus, and once failed a popularity poll on its own website. That said, it did have "the most advanced typing class in the south-western Greendale area", according to a commercial from the 1990s.
  • Britta describes Barenaked Ladies as "the most celebrated Canadian alt-rock band of the mid-90s."
• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: Upon learning that Todd was in the glorified garage band Mexican Funeral, Tina gets excited and tells him, "You were a god of the mid-2000s Seattle alt scene!"
• On Doc Martin:
  PC Penhale: Right now my only ambition is to be the best policeman in Portwenn.
  Martin: You're the only policeman in Portwenn.
  Penhale: Oh, you're just saying that.
• A variation in Downton Abbey. After Jimmy leaves (fired after being caught in bed with a female guest), Molesley asks Carson if he is now the first footman. Carson agrees, since Molesley is the only remaining footman. For the next several episodes, Carson keeps giving Molesley extra work, pointing out that, since he is the first footman, it's now his job. By the end, Molesley wishes that he hasn't said anything.
• In one episode of Due South, Ray Kowalski claims that his current boxing protégé is the best fighter he's ever trained. Francesca forces him to admit that he's the only fighter he's ever trained.
• In the first 2010 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Ellen proclaims to her audience, "you are the best audience of the year," and adds "no, you are the best audience of the decade!" The audience starts off laughing at the joke, and then cheers for themselves.
• Fort McGee of Enlisted bears the title of 2nd best Irish Named Army Detachment In Southern Florida.
• The pilot episode of Extras has Ben Stiller play up his own career with "I mean, yeah, I make Along Came Polly, it opens to $32 million, one of the biggest Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday holiday opening weekends ever".
• Frasier:
  • From the episode "Don Juan in Hell":
    Frasier: Mmm, well, I can honestly say that is the best canned cheese I've ever had.
  • Inverted in "Door Jam", when the Zany Scheme involves Niles pretending to be Frasier's upstairs neighbour at a spa, and for some reason he thinks that this means that he has to do the voice:
    Frasier: Would you stop talking like that? That's the worst impersonation of Cam Winston I've ever heard!
    Niles: You've heard another one?
    Frasier: Of course not!
    Niles: Then it's the best.
  • In "Lilith Needs A Favor", Daphne, her mother, Roz, and Roz's daughter Alice go to Canadian Fun Country, touted in something Niles read as being one of southeastern British Columbia's best amusement parks.
• Friends:
  • Rachel claims that Ross is, like, the toughest paleontologist she knows.^note Though ironically, the real-life basis for Indiana Jones was paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews.
  • In another episode, again Rachel claims that the "Soapy", an award Joey has been nominated for, is the third most important soap opera award there is. She's very excited this time.
• Get Smart: Maxwell Smart's many catchphrases include "That's the second biggest (unlikely big thing before him) I ever saw!"
• Syfy advertises Ghost Hunters as "Television's #1 Paranormal Reality Series".
• In The Golden Girls, Blanche does this when she's competing with Rose and Dorothy for the attentions of a sculptor for whom they're all posing.
  Blanche: I've always said Lazlo is the greatest Hungarian sculptor of our time.
  Dorothy: And I say that if you can name two other Hungarian sculptors of any time, I will eat that statue.
• In The Good Place:
  • Jason describes Jacksonville as "easily one of the top ten swamp cities in northeastern Florida."
  • Shortly after this, there's an inversion. Tahani decides that she has to throw an amazing party in order to save Eleanor from eternal damnation, and describes it as "the fourth most important party I've ever thrown."
• The Graham Norton Show: Graham Norton once described a guest's movie as "the best British-based Salsa rom-com I've ever seen".
• In the second series of The Grand Tour, they started doing timed laps with celebrities again, in the "Celebrity Face-Off" segment, with two competing for such titles as "The World's Fastest Golfing Enthusiast".
• From Have I Got News for You:
  BRIAN BLESSED: This is Gordon Brown's worst week in politics since last week.
• On Have You Been Paying Attention?, Tom once introduced Lloyd Langford as "our favourite jazz-loving Welshman", before admitting it's a very narrow field.
• The History Channel had a documentary on The Black Death where one analyst referred to it as "Surely one of the most important events in European history where over fifty percent of the population died in such a short time." (Yeah, there's probably supposed to be a comma after history...)
• On Home Improvement, during a special episode of Tool Time, Tim thanks the audience for making it "Michigan's fourth-highest-rated cable tool show."
• On How I Met Your Mother Robin leads the bar in congratulating Ted on getting a big job.
  Robin: To Ted. The youngest architect to design a skyscraper over thirty stories in Seattle. Probably.
  Crowd: PROBABLY!
• iCarly: "iCarly Awards" includes awards for things like "The Most Interesting and Yet Frightening Tongue Video" and "Best Milk Squirting from Eye Video".
• I'm Alan Partridge: Alan Partridge frequently boasts of hosting "the fourth-highest-rated show on Radio Norwich".
• Jeeves and Wooster: When Bertie calls Pauline Stoker "one of the nicest girls I've ever been engaged to," it sure sounds like an example of this trope. Given his tendency to get engaged at the drop of a hat, though...
• On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert reviews a wine, and declares it "definitely the best cabernet sauvignon produced by Foghat that I have ever tasted."
• The theme song of LazyTown describes Robbie Rotten as "the town's laziest villain". While a number of the town's inhabitants are somewhat jerkish, Rotten appears to be the town's only actual villain.
• Liv and Maddie: Happy Carrot is the biggest carrot-based franchise in Wisconsin.
• On Major Crimes, an episode of Badge of Justice which "Lieutenant Mike" [Tao] co-wrote wins a Platinum TV Choice Award, for Best Teleplay for [deep breath] Non-Serialized 60-minute Episodic Police Procedural on Basic Cable!
• Malcolm in the Middle:
  • Lois refers to her favorite baseball player as "the first Polish-American from the tri-county area to play three complete seasons in the majors."
  • There's also Hal slipping out of having to punish the kids for ruining a party (where the hosts had treated Lois like crap the entire time) by abusing this.
    Hal: You boys are on notice! If you ever drive a golf cart over a catered dinner and into a swimming pool again, there will be consequences, diiiiire consequences!
• On M*A*S*H:
  • In the 9th-season episode "The Best of Enemies":
    Col. Potter: We're the best mixed-doubles bridge team in the entire Show-Me State.
    Charles Emerson Winchester III: That is roughly the equivalent of being the finest hockey player in all of Ecuador.
  • In the 11th-season episode "Who Knew?":
    Col. Potter: The best damn cartoon strip in the world is Li'l Abner.
    Charles Emerson Winchester III: That is roughly comparable to being the finest ballerina in all of Galveston.
• The Masked Singer:
  • Joel McHale, a guest judge, said that one song was "the best song he'd ever heard sung by a deer in a gas mask."
  • In season five, roughly halfway through the season, the show held a Breather Episode in which contestants were given awards, many of which were exactly this sort. The Maskie Awards included such incredibly detailed categories as "Best Song Performed By an Inanimate Object That Brings Me Back to the 90's Slumber Parties" and "Best John Legend Cover By a Cyborg Covered in Sharp Quills".
• The Mighty Boosh:
  • Howard Moon is Britain's leading cream poet.
  • This trope is a running gag in the audio commentary. "This is one of the top five dwarf-based arctic sick jokes" and "He's one of the great London tent-shakers."
• From Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  News Announcer: It's been a quiet day over most of the country, as people went back to work after the warmest July weekend in nearly a year.
• Most Extreme Elimination Challenge: The tagline of MXC hailed it as "The World's Toughest Competition in Town!"
• In the opening sequence for the 2013 MTV Movie Awards, James Franco informs Rebel Wilson, "you'll be the greatest Australian female host in MTV history!"
• Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  • Mike Nelson once described Road House (1989) as "The finest American movie ever made by Rowdy Harrington." Though he would later avert this by referring to Road House as "the single finest American film" in Mike Nelson's Mega Moviecheese.
  • In "Bride of the Monster", Dr. Forrester describes Ed Wood as "one of Hollywood's leading cross-dressing directors".
  • In "The Land That Time Forgot", Jonah and the bots have this exchange about the titular film:
    Jonah: This is my fourth-favorite submarine movie.
    Servo: Really?
    Jonah: Well, I only know of three others, so it's also my least favorite submarine movie.
• One episode of NCIS has an undercover set up blown apart by the FBI. Fornell and Gibbs start in on each other about it before heading off to Gibbs's "office". The FBI agents worriedly mention to the NCIS team that they haven't seen Fornell this mad since... the last time they saw him.
• The Office:
  • Jim: Dwight was the top salesman of the year at our company. He wins a little prize money and gets honored at some convention. It is literally the highest possible honor that a northeastern-Pennsylvania-based mid-size paper company regional salesman can attain.
  • Michael makes the mistake of saying "He [Jim] is in love with a girl he works with who's engaged", when pressured by Toby and Angela to explain why he used his company credit card at a Hooters, which can only mean Pam and therefore reveals Jim's crush on her to the office.
• Party Down has Soup 'R Crackers, the fastest-growing non-poultry, non-coffee franchise in all of Southern California.
• Psych:
  • In an early episode, Shawn says the following about Lassiter: "...he is an exemplary public servant, and arguably the finest detective mind in the lower western Santa Barbara county area... over the age of 35."
  • In "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion", Gus refers to a fashion model as being "one of the most popular models in the entire Santa Barbara downtown area."
• On the QI episode "Kit and Kaboodle", Australian panelist Colin Lane laments that Australia never has the biggest in the world of anything; it's always the biggest "in the Southern hemisphere". For example, Stephen had just said that Sydney has the world's biggest IKEA, then had to correct it to the biggest in the Southern hemisphere. Colin then helpfully points out that it's at least the biggest one in Sydney. Ross Noble then relates that Narrandera has "the Southern hemisphere's second-largest playable guitar".
• In The Red Green Show's "I Don't Know" segment, Harold will often introduce Red's guest as his "best friend in the whole wide room."
• In an episode of Reno 911!, Junior honors the Sheriff's memory by calling him the "best Pollack sheriff" they've ever had. He goes on to say that he isn't deprecating the Polish, he just wasn't a particularly good at his job.
• On RuPaul's Drag Race, Season 5 contestant Jinkx Monsoon described herself as "Seattle's premier narcoleptic Jewish drag queen." After winning the season and becoming a fan-favorite, she later dubbed herself the world's premier narcoleptic Jewish drag queen.
• Saturday Night Live: Invoked when Colin Jost was named "World's sexiest comedy writer."
  Pete Davidson: Being named the world's sexiest comedy writer is kinda like being named the world's smartest horse.
• Scrubs:
  • The Janitor tries this and fails.
    Janitor: We're the best hospital employee a capella band around.
    The Worthless Peons: Oh, really?
  • Ted unintentionally does this when he's talking to Gooch:
    Ted: I mean you're the most beautiful, perfect ukulele player I've ever seen! I know that's not saying much because they're usually fat Hawaiians...
• The Spike Video Game Awards have voice acting awards for "Best Performance By A Human Male" and "Best Performance By A Human Female". In 2012, during the pre-show, this caused Jennifer Hale (who was nominated that night for her role as FemShep) to respond, "Well, I tried out for Best Alien Female, but..."
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Whom Gods Destroy", Garth's lover Marta boasts about being the most beautiful woman on the planet; Garth quickly snaps back that she's the only woman on the planet. (The episode takes place in an asylum built on an inhospitable, uninhabited world; there are only seven people there total.)
  • On the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Ensigns of Command", Ard'rian McKenzie describes Data as "the most incredible android I've ever seen." His interest piqued, Data asks, "Have you seen many?" Ard'rian replies sheepishly, "Actually, no. You're the first."
• That '70s Show:
  • After losing her virginity to Eric, Donna says that the sex was "the best I've ever had."
  • In the Wonderful Life episode, Eric "brags" to Donna about how he's the assistant manager of the second-largest mattress retailer in the tri-county area.
• Top Gear:
  • Host Jeremy Clarkson usually gives a guest that isn't near the top of the time chart bragging rights by declaring them "The fastest blank to go around our track", with blank replaced with things like Welshman or person with a senior citizen's bus pass.
  • All the antics of Top Gear Stunt Man. Everything he does is really just a huge failure that everyone had seen coming right from the beginning, but they always try to make it into some type of success. He successfully created a new record for the longest car jump in reverse gear, since nobody ever claimed that title before.
  • The time they set the record speed for a car indoors also counts. To their own surprise, it wasn't all that high in the first place.
  • James May is "the first person to go to the North Pole who didn't want to be there."
  • Hankey Bannister: Third-best whisky in Northern Burma.
• Utopia (2014): In "Mission Creeps", Scott announces that the pilot for the NBA's new podcast had debuted at no. 4. In the public infrastructure category.
• Web Soup includes a segment called The Greatest Web Video Ever... This Week.
• What We Do in the Shadows (2019): Lazlo likes to brag that when he was mortal he was the most beautiful man in his city, to which his wife quickly points out that everyone had leprosy and Lazlo was just lucky that it didn't affect his face. So Lazlo was the most beautiful only in the sense that he was the only one without leprosy on his face.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? has a few examples:
  • An episode of the British show featured a duet which host Clive Anderson called "the best song about cat litter I've ever heard."
  • In the American version, Drew Carey called the show "the second most popular show on ABC where the title asks a rhetorical question." Yes, there really was one rated higher.
• WKRP in Cincinnati:
  • Perhaps lampshading the station's creaky financial status, one of more prominent advertisers is recognizable by their spots' catchy slogan, "Red Wigglers: the Cadillac of Worms."
  • Les Nessman's farm reporting awards, the Silver Sow and the Buckeye Newshawk Award (given to "the best news story dealing with or related to taproot vegetable production in the tri-state area and certain parts of northern West Virginia").

Magazines

• In Doctor Who Magazine #474, Alan Barnes calls Bill Nighy's role in "Vincent and the Doctor" "the greatest uncredited appearance of an instantly recognisable actor playing an art critic in a Parisian gallery in Doctor Who, ever." The joke being that this is great praise once you remember that the other one was John Cleese.
• A regular feature of Nintendo Power was the "Top 10 Games" (or Top 5, or Top 20, etc.) lists for the current Nintendo consoles and handheld systems. For a brief time, there was even a Top 5 list for the Virtual Boy games, despite there only being 14 games available for the system in North America. The Angry Video Game Nerd lampshaded it in his Nintendo Power video.
  AVGN: That's hilarious. That's almost the entire library of games for that piece of shit!
• SFX:
  • The magazine's review of Feet of Clay describes the book as "the best Terry Pratchett book of the year," then argues that this is a greater compliment than it sounds like, considering how fast Pratchett puts new books out. Okay, he did publish three other books that year (1996) — Hogfather, Johnny and the Bomb, and The Pratchett Portfolio — but still...
  • A subversion appears in magazine's review of Burying the Ex, which says, "If you only watch one movie about a girlfriend returning as a zombie this year ... don't make it this one", instead recommending Life After Beth.
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker was called "The Most Violent Game with Peace in the Title" by Shonen Jump.

Music

• Alice in Chains' MTV Unplugged concert has this exchange between Layne and Jerry:
  Layne: I would have to say that this is the best show we've done in 3 years.
  Jerry: Layne, it's the only one we've done in 3 years.
  Layne: Well, it's still the best.
• Some program notes for P.D.Q. Bach's Pervertimento note that, since its discovery, "...P. D. Q. Bach must be considered history's greatest late eighteenth-century Southern German composer of multi-movement works for bagpipes and chamber orchestra."
• One of Beatnik Turtle's Songs of the Day is titled "This Is The Best Song That I've Written Today".
• Billy Hill and the Hillbillies, a music/variety act at Disneyland, often describe one of their members as "the fastest speed fiddler in the entire... Frontierland area."
• The introduction to The Blanks' live show includes referring to the band as something along the lines of "The best a cappella group ever to sing in the halls of a fictional hospital."
• Julie Brown, "'Cause I'm A Blonde": I'm so proud to be chosen this month's Miss August.
• The Cake song "World of Two" has the line:
  It's not that I don't think you are
  Two of the most
  Perfectly
  Beautiful
  People in your world
• Childish Gambino has this lyric on "Bonfire" (off his 2011 album Camp):
  Man, why does every black actor gotta rap some?
  I don't know - all I know is I'm the best one

  It's a good line, but the pantheon of black actors who have successfully transitioned to rapping is not that big to begin with. In fact, the list is mainly just Childish Gambino and Drake. Most other successful black rappers known for acting (like Will Smith) rapped first.

• Sammy Davis Jr. used to describe himself as "the world's greatest one-eyed, black, Jewish entertainer."
• One introduction for The Faint describing them as "the hottest dance-electro masters in all of Omaha, if not the entire state of Nebraska" is either a barbed Take That! or the result of a very clueless host.
• Flight of the Conchords:
  • When they are performing for an audience that's unfamiliar with them, they'll usually bill themselves as some variation of "formerly New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo a capella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo." The third most popular is a Flight of the Conchords cover band. They play all the same songs, but they're just slightly better.
  • "The Most Beautiful Girl (In the Room)" is this trope from beginning to end.
    And when you're on the street
    Depending on the street
    I bet you are definitely in the top three
    Good-looking girls on the street
    Depending on the street
• Flogging Molly has a song called "The Worst Day Since Yesterday".
• An announcer once described Gorillaz as "the most successful animated band ever." (Take that, The Archies!)
• Northern comedian and folk singer Mike Harding once opened a gig with:
  "Nice to be back in Heckmondwyke tonight. Me and the band are just back from a massive world-wide tour of Finland... ^note Harding had indeed just returned from a folk festival in Scandinavia.
• Space-rockers Hawkwind once opened a gig at UEA Norwich with this magnificent reference to a rather disappointing support act:
  "Be appreciative of our warm-up act. They are the very best hard rock band to be found in any part of Norfolk! Only the best!"
• In one memorable TV interview with Dick Cavett, Jimi Hendrix responded to being called "one of the best guitarists in the world" by saying that he was "one of the best guitarists sitting in this chair."
• The Housemartins claimed they were only the "fourth best band in Hull" (the three other bands they thought were better than them? Everything but the Girl, The Gargoyles and Red Guitars). This is referenced in the name of their 1986 debut album London 0 Hull 4 (as in Hull has four great bands, as opposed to London's zero).
• The Brazilian band Mamonas Assassinas has a song titled "Uma Arlinda Mulher", where the singer tells a girl that she's the most important thing that ever happened to him at this moment in his whole life.
• Joey Fatale claimed his band, MiniKiss, was the world's best dwarf KISS tribute band. There were two, though experts argue that TinyKiss, founded by Fatale's rival and former bandmate Tim Loomis, was disqualified by the presence of a 350-pound nondwarf woman as one of the band members.
• the Mountain Goats have a song called "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton". This seems like less of an example if you know that Denton, Texas has a pretty big music scene for a town its size, but what it doesn't have is a lot of death metal, so they still aren't up against much competition.
• No FX's greatest hits album is entitled The Greatest Songs Ever Written (By Us!)
• The music video for Paramore's "Ain't It Fun", filmed on December 2, 2013, was the band's video submission to set the recordsetter.com world record for "Most World Records Set in a Music Video". It therefore consists of them winning nine highly specific categories they originated themselves, such as "Fastest Time to Run Backwards Holding Stuffed Animals While Blindfolded for 30 Feet" and "Most Vinyl Records Broken by 3 People In 1 Minute" (Pun definitely intended), plus the "Most Records" category, which brings the total to ten. Later, in an interview with Paul the WebGuy from iHeartRadio on January 31, 2014, band members Hayley Williams and Jeremy Davis got "Most Balloons Popped by Two People During A One-Minute Radio Interview". Record Setter is a website created to invoke this trope by encouraging people to invent their own records, and provide rules with their submission so that others can try to break them. As of June 21, 2022, six of the eleven records originated by Paramore have been broken by other challengers.
• The comedy group Pig with the Face of a Boy describe themselves as "[The] world's best neo-post-post-music hall anti-folk band."
• Norwegian humour band Salhusvinskvetten brags about "Northern Europe's Widest Low Country Tunnel" (translated) in one song.
• Asthmatic Kitty's press release for Sufjan Stevens' 2006 release Songs for Christmas:
  Wow! It's the stocking stuffer of the century! Which isn't saying much, considering the century is still so young!
• In "Room for Improvement" by The Stupendium, he assures us that he's the "Greatest decorator in an eighth mile radius". That's eighth mile, 1/8 of a mile.
• In an interview, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants responded to the fact that TMBG was at the time the most successful independent band in America by saying, "Well, that's kind of like being the world's tallest midget."
• Brazilian rock band Titãs has a song titled "A Melhor Banda De Todos Os Tempos Da Última Semana", or "The best band of all time of last week".
• One lyrics website describes "Sweet Jane" as "possibly the most commercially viable song ever recorded by [Velvet Underground]".
• Keith Moon of The Who once uncharacteristically had a hard time nailing down the drum pattern for "Music Must Change" while the band were working on the album Who Are You. ^note it was a symptom of the drug and alcohol abuse that would kill him only a few weeks after the aforementioned album was released; eventually the final version of the song lacked drums except for a cymbal crash Finally he shouted, "I am still the best Keith Moon-type drummer in the world!"
• Organist Jukka Gustavson, of the Finnish band Wigwam, said that "We are the best Jimmy Smith-influenced progressive rock band in Finland", in a humorous attempt to invoke this trope.
• Sparks' Ron Mael described Sparks offshoot Gleaming Spires' 1981 album Songs of the Spires as "...the best Gleaming Spires album...ever" on said album's back cover. At this time, this was the only Gleaming Spires release.

Podcasts

• Escape from Vault Disney!: The description of the episode about Unidentified Flying Oddball says, "I think we can all agree that out of all the Mark Twain adaptations in which the director of Beverly Hills Ninja plays both a horny robot and a time-traveling incel, this is probably one of the top ten."
• How Did This Get Made?: In the show's review of The Hottie and the Nottie, Paul Scheer reveals that advertising for the movie in the United Kingdom billed it as "The Number One Film", with smaller print revealing that it was number one in the "Internet Movie Database's Bottom 100", which was true at the time.
• In episode five of Mystery Show, celebheights.com is said to have "the Infinite Jest of Jake-Gyllenhaal-height-related discourse."
• RiffTrax calls the Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie "the best live-action Mario property that doesn't contain Captain Lou Albano".
• In Episode 10 of Shelfdust Presents: The War Effort, Al Kennedy describes Secret Wars (1984) as "the twelve-issue comic from 1984 that some people are calling the best comic ever to be written by Jim Shooter, via Marvel, in 1984, that's twelve issues long." In the following episode he calls it "one of the greatest comics ever to be called Secret Wars". (There's a choice of three, and few would argue that Secret Wars II was in the running.)

Pro Wrestling

• Kevin Owens called himself the greatest Universal Champion of all time when he was only the second person to hold the title and the first (Finn Bálor) had to relinquish it the night after winning it.

Puppet Shows

• One of the awards during the first Annual Muppet Awards in the Phyllis George episode of The Muppet Show is for Best Comedy Performance by a Bear, which the comedy-impaired Fozzie is just about the only person to qualify for. Keyword being "just about"; he still ends up losing to bit character Billy the Bear.

Radio

• In the Cabin Pressure episode "Yverdon-les-bains", Douglas writes a recommendation for Martin, calling him the second-best pilot at MJN Air. Martin and Douglas are MJN's only pilots.
• A running bit on Dan Cole's radio show on KFAN is to state that a given show is "one of the top five shows on the station." There are only five shows on the station.
• In the Jeremy Hardy Speaks to the Nation episode "How to be a Good Citizen", Jeremy calls Gordon Kennedy "the most famous Scottish person in Wilsden." (Wilsden is in West Yorkshire, England.)
• Christian radio host Bob Larson often called his audience "America's #1 live radio prayer family." The only other stations that could fit that description are KCMS and Relevant Radio.
• Back in the XFM days of The Ricky Gervais Show, Ricky attempted a bit of Self-Deprecation by noting that at least XFM was the best radio station in the building. At that point he remembered that the Capital Radio building was shared with several more popular stations, so even that statement was not narrow enough.
• Says You! often closes with the joke "More radios are tuned to this program than any other appliance!" When the show become available as a podcast, their plug for it noted that this may no longer be true.
• Lo Zoo Di 105: In a sense. The sketch based on Maccio Capatonda's ever-sad character Mariottide, Casa Mariottide ("The Mariottides"), has "The world's saddest sitcom" as its subtitle. And since when sitcoms have ever been sad to begin with?
• That Gosh Darn Hippie Show: According to one of the Ad Bumpers, the show is "the best classic rock show hosted by DJ Hippie."
• Tom Petty claimed his SiriusXM Buried Treasures show was recorded at Rick's Airport Recorders, offering the best sound in the Los Angeles Airport area.

Sports

• St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck said of Eddie Gaedel, who had a single plate appearance in 1951, "he was, by golly, the best darn midget who ever played big-league ball. He was also the only one."
• Also in baseball: Statistics guru Bill James once called Ken Griffey Jr., who received the highest percentage of votes in a Hall of Fame election until 2019, "the second-best left-handed hitting, left-handed throwing outfielder ever born in Donora, Pennsylvania on November 21." How could this be? Well, the best way across the Monongahela River to enter town is the Stan Musial Bridge.^note Musial was born on the aforementioned date in 1920, Griffey in 1969.
• In an effort to fill 24 hours of straight sports, ESPN will often cite some comically over-adjectived record in order to make simply good or mediocre performances seem like a big deal. If you watch long enough, sooner or later they'll claim some pitcher just recorded the most strikeouts before the fifth inning in the second game of a double header at Fenway park by a visiting, left-handed pitcher since 1984, or some such.
• In Australian Rules Football, when their side cops a rough umpiring decision early in the match, fans will inevitably scream that the umpires "have been doing it all day!"
• Happens in sports all the time. Want to make that middle-tier so-so quarterback look good? Just mention that he's got the highest third-down conversion percentage when facing a defensive line composed of Penn State alumni.
  • The Minnesota Wild did not lose a home opener until 2013, the team's 13th season in the league (not counting the 2004–05 season that was canceled by a lockout). That particular game was tied at the end of regulation and overtime, with the Wild losing in the penalty shootout. They lost in overtime in their 2017 home opener, and in a shootout in 2018, but it wasn't until 2019 that they lost a home opener in regulation.^note They did lose as the designated home team in their 2010–11 season opener... in Helsinki. The Wild won their first true home game that season.
  • In 2013 Matt Prater kicked a 64-yard field goal, breaking the NFL record of 63 yards first set by Tom Dempsey in 1970, then later equaled by three other kickers. However, Dempsey still holds the record for "longest field goal by a kicker born without any toes on his kicking foot".
• Ran NFL has quite a bit of this, especially when Roman Motzkus (former GFL player), who loves statistics, gets to rattle off some statistic he has learned. Any debate on "greatest ever" in the German Football League or among non-North American players will likewise invoke this a lot, as Americans who just couldn't make professional ball west of the pond still enjoy a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond effect in the GFL.
• Arizona Cardinals tight end Zach Ertz and US Women's National Team midfielder Julie Ertz are the only couple where the spouses have won a Super Bowl (LII for him, when he was with the Philadelphia Eagles) and a World Cup (2015 and 2019 for her). Granted, those are significant achievements.
• Similarly, Nomar Garciaparra, best known for his years with the Boston Red Sox, and USWNT striker Mia Hamm are the only couple with a World Series ring (2004 for him) and a World Cup (1991 and 1999 for her). However, unlike Zach Ertz, Garciaparra didn't actually play in that World Series — he was dealt to the Chicago Cubs on the trade deadline and missed out on the Bosox' playoff run. His former teammates nonetheless agreed that he'd get a ring and a full Series winners' share.
• During an Australia vs. England Cricket match, Mark Waugh (twin brother of Australian captain Steve Waugh) told James Ormond "There's no way you're good enough to play for England". Ormond replied, "Maybe not, but at least I'm the best cricketer in my family."
• Baseball pundit Dan McLaughlin once said that "Nate Schierholtz is by far the best MLB player from Nevada not born in Vegas." That's a category that includes just 17 players in all of MLB history (Schierholtz was born in Reno).
• Colombian football coach Francisco Maturana once referred to player Victor Aristizabal as "the best footballer in the world without a ball", a non-sequitur which raised even more questions as to what the hell he meant by that, even when his intention was to praise Aristizabal for his ability to easily get past defenders before receiving the ball. Aristizabal is still referred to as such, half fondly, half mockingly.
• In 2021, Penn State University's football program Twitter posted the following image celebrating PSU football alum playing in the Super Bowl - with the overly narrow qualifier in teeny tiny print. Social media and news outlets promptly tore them to shreds.
• Crypto Fight Night, a regular series of boxing cards features persons affiliated with cryptocurrency, has been called "one of the biggest sporting events in crypto".

Tabletop Games

• A Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 edition splatbook presents the Razing Strike feat. Description: "You have mastered the art of delivering precise strikes against nonliving creatures while channeling spell energy through your melee attacks."

Theatre

• William F. Buckley considered Gary Wills's description of Lillian Hellman as "America's finest female playwright" to be this. According to Buckley, "That's like celebrating the tallest building in Wichita, Kansas."
• A common Stock Joke in British panto is to conclude with something like "You're the best Thursday-night audience we've had this week!"
• In 1776 : Martha Jefferson, upon meeting Adams and Franklin, says that she is honored to meet "The two greatest men in America." Franklin replies, "Certainly the two greatest in earshot."
• The song "Gloria" from The Body Beautiful, the first Broadway musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, begins: "Gloria, darlin' Gloria, you're the only girl I love named Gloria."
• In Guys and Dolls, Nathan Detroit runs "the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York." There is even a song about it.
• In "Beautiful" from Heathers, Veronica has this to say about Kurt Kelly:
  Veronica: Kurt Kelly. Quarterback. He is the smartest guy on the football team. [beat] Which is kind of like being the tallest dwarf.
• After the "wall" has finished his speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream:
  Demetrius: It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord.
• From the opening of Ragtime The Musical: "And although the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906... and there were ninety-four years to go!"
• The opening song of Young Frankenstein is about how happy the people who lived near the recently deceased Dr. Victor von Frankenstein are over the fact that he's dead and won't be making any more monsters (and that his heir Frederick lives thousands of miles away and is highly unlikely to ever travel to Transylvania to make one himself). The song is entitled "The Happiest Town in Town".

Video Games

• A description of The Adventures of Bertram Fiddle Episode 1: A Dreadly Business includes the following quote:
  "It is quite possibly one of the finest point-and-click comedy murder mystery adventure games set in Victorian London you will play today" – Bertram Fiddle
• Aviary Attorney: Self-described as "The hottest bird lawyering game to come out of 1840s France!"
• In Batman: Arkham Origins, a pre-Harley Quinn Dr. Harleen Quinzel is the most senior member of the Blackgate Medical Staff... who is working the night shift on Christmas Eve. Given how junior she is, it's entirely possible that she's the only member of the medical staff working the night shift on Christmas Eve.
• Dead Rising 2 contains a group that makes a show called "Tape It Or Die", which is "the number-one duct-tape related zombie-killing survival web-series today."
• In Detectives United: Darkest Shrine, the spectral Richard Gray (from the Grim Tales series of games) addresses player character Anna as "my favorite daughter." She's actually not his only daughter, but you don't know that unless you've played the Grim Tales games; if the player is only familiar with the characters from Detectives United, it comes across as this trope. Then again, it's Richard talking, so there's no way to know if he's being serious or sarcastic.
• The Dink Smallwood mod Dinky Dimensions 1: FIAT:
  Hotel clerk: Welcome to the Magik Inn. We are the finest establishment in the Magik Isles.
  Dink: Isn't this the only one?
  Hotel clerk: Yes, it is.
  Dink: Wouldn't that mean that it's also the worst establishment?
  Hotel clerk: Erm, I'd have to speak to the manager to verify that, sir.
• Disney Magic Kingdoms:
  • When Hamm asks Bo Peep for her opinion on his jokes in "Comedic Timing", she tells him that he's the funniest piggy bank she's ever met. He soon realises that he's the only piggy bank she's ever met.
  • In "Home of the Mug of Meat!", Pacha calls Mudka's Meat Hut the "[b]est greasy spoon in this part of the Andes", before admitting that it's the only greasy spoon in that part of the Andes and that that's probably the reason it's still in business.
• Dragon Age:
  • Seen in the Dwarf Noble Origin of Dragon Age: Origins. The PC in this origin is the second of three children of King Endrin, with an older brother and a younger brother. A female PC can have a conversation with younger brother Bhelen in which he calls her "my favorite sister" — she is, of course, the only girl in the family. A male NPC has the only marginally less dubious honor of being Bhelen's favorite brother, and considering that he doesn't get along with Trian, it's not much of a competition.
  • In Dragon Age II, when they're trying to get Leandra's sleazy brother Gamlen to help them get into the city, one of Hawke's possible dialogue options is to ask, "Would it help if I said that you were my favorite uncle?" Take a guess as to how many uncles Hawke has. Gamlen does at least chuckle at the quip.
• In Edna & Harvey: Harvey’s New Eyes, one character is described by the narrator as "the most depressed looking man in a bee suit" the main character had ever seen.
• The box art for Extreme PaintBrawl 2 boasts that it's the sequel to "the #1 selling paintball video game."
• The promotional website for Game & Wario describes Ashley's minigame as "the best game where you guide a child witch through a world made entirely out of candy while dodging obstacles".
• Goat Simulator's GoatZ expansion touted itself as "The first survival game on Steam not in Early Access", which was more of a Take That! at the glut of Early Access survival games on Steam than it was a factually correct statement.
• Early on in God of War Ragnarök, Sindri refers to himself and his brother Brok, two dwarves who have helped Kratos and Atreus since the previous game as the father-son duo's "favorite dwarves." After a beat, he asks if this is still true, and Atreus quips, "You're still the only dwarves we know."
• The radio programs Grand Theft Auto occasionally use these:
  • In Grand Theft Auto III, the radio ad for the in-universe game Pogo the Monkey highlights that a game review magazine called it "The best springin' simian game since Bouncing Bananas".
  • In Vice City, the host of VCPR defends his old career as a birthday clown, "Saul the Wheat-Free Clown", by claiming that his act was voted "Best Up-and-Coming Dietary-Restricted Comic Act" in Vice City once. The Sleazy Politician being interviewed cuts in to point out that he actually didn't win; "Mary the Meat-Free Mime" did.
• Graveyard Keeper, released in 2018 on Steam, billed itself as "the most inaccurate medieval cemetery sim of the year".
• The English site for Hatoful Boyfriend dubs the game "the world's greatest pigeon dating sim."
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep is widely described as "the best Kingdom Hearts game on the PSP" despite being the only PSP Kingdom Hearts title. It's widely considered to be a good game, though. It is more likely that the commenters either weren't aware of the game being the only one (thus far) released for the PSP, or they meant it was the best game of the franchise that happened to be released for the PSP.
• Kingdom of Loathing uses this joke a few times, like describing the gummi belemnite as "It's not the best gelatin cephalopod-precursor you've ever eaten, but it's definitely on your top ten list."
• In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Irene claims to be the most talented witch in her generation. The only other witch in the game is her grandmother.
• One April Fools' Day TAS submission for NetHack purports to be a run for the "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" branch.^note The April Fools' Day joke here being, one of the co-authors of an in-progress "fastest gametime" run decided to prank the other one by submitting the run before it was properly complete, which necessitated the speed-TASing of the remaining gameplay. The rejection comment lampshades this:
  Mothrayas: ...it would be perfect if it were not for a slight little problem. That problem being that "spend ~900 turns preparing for fastest gametime, then speed-TAS the game in 6 hours focusing mostly but not entirely on realtime" is not exactly doing hot as a category.
  
  Reasons for why this is the case are not definitive yet, but some factors that are speculated to be involved include the facts that this is an incredibly arbitrary category, and is only really a mask for the fact that the run's goal switched completely midway through the run...
• Not the Robots is described by its developers as "This year's most exciting Roguelike Stealth Furniture Eating Simulator."
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: In the DLC case, which involves a murder on a blimp used for a wedding reception, Phoenix resolves to prove the bride's innocence.
  Phoenix: We can't let this go down as the saddest flying wedding reception in history.
• In Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Chobin does this to himself when he describes himself as the local Mad Scientist's best assistant. "Chobin is only assistant, so Chobin must be best assistant."
• Lose a DMV race as Bart in The Simpsons Hit & Run and Patty/Selma might comment "You've gotta be the worst ten-year-old driver in town." At least, we can only hope it's overly narrow.
• Skyrim: "Not only is the Winking Skeever the best inn in Solitude, it's the only inn in Solitude!"
• In the Facebook game The Smurfs and Co, if you talk to Timber Smurf, he'll call himself the best lumberjack in all of Smurf Village. You'll respond by saying that he's the only lumberjack in Smurf Village.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Compared to his other, more impressive, title "the fastest thing alive", it's a little underwhelming for Sonic to be more commonly referred to as only "The world's fastest hedgehog". Then again, the few other hedgehogs in the series do prove themselves competent speedsters from time to time.
  • Shadow the Hedgehog, in one of his game's Multiple Endings, promises to become the most powerful hedgehog in the universe!
• South Park: The Fractured but Whole: Scott Malkinson, alias Captain Diabetes, touts himself as the strongest diabetic superhero in the world. Neither the game nor the South Park universe itself have any other diabetic superheroes, which makes his only real competition the notoriously incompetent Captain Novolin. At least Captain Diabetes does have genuine Super-Strength.
• In the demo for The Stanley Parable, the Narrator tries to come up with cheap compliments for the player, one of which is "Of all the people I know who are playing this exact demo at this exact moment, and standing in this exact room, your performance is easily in the top five thousand."
• Tales of Lagoona 3: Frauds, Forgeries and Fishsticks' "It Takes Tuna to Tango" quest description, in part:
  You just wait. I'll be the best tango dancer in East Lagoona south of the grotto under the age of 20 excluding tunas.
• In Tales of Phantasia, Chester gives Amy an apple.
  Amy: You're the best big brother I've ever had.
  Chester: Amy, I'm the only big brother you've ever had.
  Amy: Yes, but I love you anyway!
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The game is described by its developers as "the world's #1 war-themed hat simulator."
  • The Demoman claims to be the last Black Scottish Cyclops. He'll admit that they've got more f-*three second-long bleep*-s than they've got the likes of him, though. Granted, the comics show that he comes from a long and storied line of black Scotsmen who tend to lose an eye or two doing the family business... which still isn't saying much.
  • The blog held a Soldier vs. Demoman propaganda poster competition and gave out a whole slew of runners-up awards for categories such as "Most Likely to Get Us a Cease and Desist Order From Bethesda", "Most Disturbing Use of the Most Primitive Computer Art Program Available", "Best Attempt to Make Soldier Look Melting", and "Most Convincing Argument for Learning How to Contract by One Pixel in Photoshop".
• A slightly different version: Cirno of Touhou constantly proclaims that she's the strongest and smartest fairy in Gensokyo. She probably is, but considering normal fairies are idiot mooks, it's generally accepted this doesn't really mean much at all. She narrows it down even further if she beats herself in Phantasmagoria of Flower View: "When it comes to me, I'm the strongest!"
• In Undertale, during a certain optional conversation, Papyrus will describe Mettaton as his "favorite sexy rectangle". Mettaton is indeed rectangular, and is regarded as Mr. Fanservice in-universe, but is the only character to have either of those as a notable character trait.
• Valkyria Chronicles II was stated by a reviewer as being "(...) as good as any other Turn-Based Strategy game mixed with a third person shooter for the PSP," of which there is only one other (Valkyria Chronicles III).
• In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a dialogue option causes the player character to describe Therese as the most powerful vampire in Santa Monica. While this sounds impressive at first, as far as the player character knows, there are only four vampires in Santa Monica.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner uses this gag a fair few times:
  • The Strong Bad Email "record book" takes the time to poke fun at oddly-specific records in the Guinness Book of World Records: Coach Z tries to set a record for hopping on one foot with nine pieces of gum on your face while singing the "I'm Just Me" song (as does Homsar), while Strong Mad gets into the book for the record "Most Macaronis Nailed To A Paper Towel Tube By Strong Mad", with one piece of macaroni nailed to the tube.
  • In "buried", Strong Bad introduces his Taranchula Black Metal Detect-or as "America's coolest children's game show consolation prize".
  • In "hremail3184", Strong Bad gets an email asking about the coolest explosion he's ever seen. Apparently Strong Bad has seen (and caused) enough cool explosions that he asks Kelly to be more specific, like "the coolest-looking explosion I ever rigged up in Strong Sad's org-ethnic breakfast pouch on a Tuesday".
  • In "kids' show", Strong Bad describes Homsar as "America's favorite blue midget Homestar."
  • In 8-Bit Is Enough, Homestar remarks that Strong Bad is the "eleventh best friend a guy can have." Which is a lot less impressive when the series has twelve main characters, and Homestar is presumably not counting himself as one of his friends. Although, with Homestar, one can never be certain.
• My Cafe: Felicia, after looking at some designs Ron showed her, says that it would have won first place if the town ever hosts a contest for "fashion designed by a football team captain", but not without saying that Ron would be the only contestant.
• Zero Punctuation:
  • Yahtzee's "Best and Worst of 2013" described Star Trek: The Video Game as "Least Bad Science Fiction Movie Tie-In on this List". In this case, there was one other item in the category.
  • His "Best and Worst of 2015" described SOMA as "the second-best atmospheric-narrative-horror-game-with-philosophical-themes-set-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-with-an-existential-plot-twist-in-it of all time", second in this case to BioShock.
  • He described Tunic as "...the best game since The Sacred Armour of Antiriad to be named after the entire contents of the main character's laundry list."

Webcomics

• Axe Cop is (in a parody-fashion) sometimes referred to as "The best web-comic written by a 6-year old and his 29-year old brother".
• Comic number 377 of Bonobo Conspiracy is possibly the second-funniest comic strip ever made about part X.1, paragraph 204.2(1.1)(b) of the Income Tax Act of Canada.
• Zip in DDG is told:
  Matrisse: You're the nicest dead transvestite not good enough to move past the afterlife.
• Used in one◊ Dresden Codak stickman comic, which describes TRON as "Easily the greatest Jeff Bridges Sci-Fi film of the early '80s."^note The only possible competition in the category is Starman, which, being released in 1984, is better described as a mid-'80s Sci-Fi film.
• According to The Rant in it, one El Goonish Shive strip contains "at least the third-most subtext-filled request for illusory carrots in the history of comics."
• Flaky Pastry: Trivine calls Arlen and Cassean her two favourite brothers. Arlen points out that she only has three brothers, and the third one is Tares, who — as the cast page puts it — is a stuck-up meanie. The Alt Text jokes, "And you, Trivine, are my favourite blonde sister!" (Trivine is the only blonde sister in the family.)
• Sam Starfall, from Freefall, possesses a mug marked "World's Best Squid Captain". He is, in fact, the only member of his species on the planet.
• Barry Deutsch describes his webcomic Hereville as being "Possibly the best comic about a troll-fighting 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl that you'll read all week."
• Nukees won the Spleen award (best comic named Nukees).
• The Order of the Stick:
  • #831: "Oh man! I haven't seen him this mad since the last time I saw him!" Though actually he was pretty mad then.
  • Vampire Durkon is the High Priest of Hel. Also the only one. Until he starts "recruiting".
• Penny Arcade likes this trope:
  • Some PS3 fans claimed that the game Lair doesn't fit existing genres and is, in fact, its own genre. This caused Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade to call it "...a really shitty genre," and mockingly refer to the game as "The best 3D dragon-based shooter with Sixaxis controls."
  • Penny Arcade has also repeatedly referred to Kolibri as "Arguably the finest hummingbird-based shooter for the 32X"; this has since become a minor internet meme.
  • Their own We're Right Awards assigns these to the various games at the ceremony. For instance, Sly Cooper was awarded the title of "Best raccoon game since Ringtales on the Super Nintendo", and Tearaway is referred to as the "Best game you won't play because you don't have a Vita, because no one has a Vita".
• The extra in one Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip declares it "the funniest vagina needles comic ever". SMBC does this a lot.
• Shortpacked!: The Avengers: the best movie Jesus Christ has ever seen.^note (Out of a sample size of The Avengers, Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2).
• From Skin Horse: "Still, this is easily the best centipede-made credenza I've ever seen."
• According to its about page, "Spatula Drama is a constrained comic that tells the tale of two lovers, Vincent Bruno and Trish, who are drama-prone spatulas. It is probably the world's best example of this premise."
• Touhou Nekokayou: "You are the guiltiest HELL-RAVEN with the power of a CROW with the power of THE SUN in the entire UNDERGROUND!"
• Unshelved characters got the best vegan root beer float ever.
• The Whiteboard is "Alaska's Coolest Paintball Webcomic!" In The Rant to an Irregular Webcomic! strip, David Morgan-Mar calls this "a claim not to be sneezed at, because I've looked at Alaska's second-coolest paintball webcomic, and it's not bad."
• As Wondermark blogged about Cathy being called "the first widely syndicated humor strip by a female cartoonist" —
  ...being the first at something is a powerful branding tool, and with enough qualifiers, anyone can be the first at something.
• xkcd does this a lot:
  • "I love you most out of all the girls in all the world who love me back."
  • The Alt Text for "Online Communities 2" mentions that FarmVille is "the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the world", which is actually true.
  • "Electorial Precedent" is an entire series of increasingly narrow categories in which a presidential candidate can be the first, ending with the comic wondering which of the streaks "democratic incumbents never beat taller challengers" and "no nominee whose first name contains a "K" has lost" will be broken first.
  • "Stargazing 3": "That star is Vega. At magnitude 0.03, it's the brightest star I'm currently talking about."
  • "Geographic Qualifiers" explores how adding qualifiers such as "east of the Mississippi" add instant mystery to any record, such as "the tallest statue of a skateboarding squirrel in the northern hemisphere".

Web Original

• Someone once compiled a list of the Top 5 movies about arm-wrestling. Over the Top came in at #3... despite being the only movie on the list.
• The Squatty Potty ad has been described by Adweek as "The Best Ad You'll See Today With a Unicorn Who Poops Rainbow Soft-Serve".
• The Agony Booth's description of Degrassi Junior High:
  — ...the most beloved teen drama ever made! ...In Canada. Between the years of 1987 and 1989. Of all time!
• Amazon.com does this automatically with its best-seller list, narrowing the category until it puts the product whose page you're on in the top 100. "#61 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Comedic Fiction > Talking Animals > Wombats > Southern Hairy-Nosed."
• The synopsis for Tears of the Black Tiger at Badmovies.org describes it as "probably the best violent cowboy shoot 'em up ever made in Thailand."
• The BuzzFeed article about UHF titled 29 "Reasons 'UHF' Is the Greatest Weird Al Movie About a Fake TV Station Ever".
  "Weird Al" Yankovic: Lesbian Nazi Hookers abducted by UFOs and forced into weight-loss programs. All this week on Town Talk!
• From CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com: "I think your site is one of the funniest sites about cats that look like Hitler that I've seen this week."
• The Christian Post review of Frozen:
  But in an email statement to The Christian Post, Alex Wainer, associate professor of communication and media studies at Palm Beach Atlantic University, wrote, "Of the two Disney animated fairy tales with past-tense single verb titles, this is no Tangled."
• Cracked:
  • The site presents to us a look at the film Quigley, with the article titled "The Most Insane Christian Movie Starring Gary Busey as a Pomeranian... Ever".
  • According to "8 Brilliant Pieces of Comedy Hiding on YouTube", "Thomas The Tank Engine Crash Compilation" is "the darkest, most brutal video about anthropomorphic trains ever. Admittedly, that's a pretty specific category, but when you watch this thing, you can't help but admire how horrifically violent it is."
• Destroy All Movies describes Love Bites as "The best shot-on-video gay vampire comedy of 1988."
• Dread Central reviewer Scott Foy has repeatedly stated that because of director Ulli Lommel's filmography, Uwe Boll is not only not the worst director in the world, but "he's not even the worst German director whose name begins with the letter 'U'."
• Websites like Fark often contain links to items such as "The most amazing picture/video of (extremely specific object or event that you aren't likely to see ever again) you'll see today."
• One Forbes article named Zootopia, at the time the 41st highest grossing film, the "second biggest wholly original movie ever behind Avatar", apparently even discounting Titanic for being an adaptation of a historical event.
• GameCentral gave us "what may well be the most in-depth review of Garbage Truck Simulator 2011 you will ever read on the website of a national newspaper."
• The satirical Genius Guide to Jazz has this to say about The Who's Keith Moon (as mentioned above, this is a genuine quote):
  While no one will ever accuse him of being one of the greatest technicians of the instrument, Moon understood both his strengths and limitations and rightly proclaimed himself "The greatest Keith Moon-style drummer in the world."
• David Ehrlich of IndieWire memorably declared Titane "the sweetest movie ever made about a serial killer who has sex with a car."
• io9's article on Roswell dubs it "the best late '90s alien teen soap opera on The WB EVER".
• Jay Pinkerton had one possible result for the online quiz "Which Sex Pistols studio album are you?", a graphic that read "You are 'Nevermind the Bollocks'. It is the only Sex Pistols studio album." Most of the other parody quiz results operated around similar jokes, i.e. "Which sex are you?"
• Several user-made lists on Letterboxd can count. For example, "Movies in which a highly respected auteur filmmaker processed their own real-life divorce by depicting Scarlett Johansson in a deteriorating relationship with a man who is a content creator of some kind" (there are three films listed: Marriage Story, Lost in Translation, and her).
• In the Spanish Más respeto, que soy tu madre, one of the characters is the world champion of a sport invented by himself.
• NFL Quarterbacks On Facebook had this exchange during their "Secret Santa" thread from 2013.
  Alex Smith: Hey Nick Foles. I got you a very special Secret Santa Gift.
  It's a custom-made plaque that reads, "Congratulations on your record-setting performance this season."
  "Of all the QBs who have thrown 7 TDs in one game during 2013, you are definitely the most recent, the youngest, and the most normal-shaped-headed of them all."
  Nick Foles: Cool, thanks.
  Peyton Manning: GET FUCKED, ALEX SMITH!^note In the 2013 season, Peyton had a 7 td game in week 1 against Baltimore, Foles had one in week 9 against Oakland.
• The Onion:
  • The Onion News Network released a clip posing as a North Korean propaganda piece about bringing the Moon down to North Korea as a trophy to put on display for the glory of the nation. What to put it on, though?
    Reporter: [subtitled] The People's Great and Harmonious Moon Hand of Kim Jong-Il will be the largest moon-hand pedestal ever constructed.
  • One horoscope listing also lampshaded this trope: "You're not sure how to react when people refer to you as 'The John Sherwood of Sailor Moon fanfiction'." (There's a lot of Sailor Moon fanfiction. It's just that — since most of it is crap — it's a lot easier to be good at it.)
  • And a headline on the site: "Best Falafel In Western Montana Kind Of A Hollow Victory".
  • The AV Club review of the Gravity Falls episode "Dipper vs. Manliness" claims that "Dipper's freakout over the woman looking for the 'mailman' has to be the best pun-triggered emotional breakdown of 2012."
  • An article about the PlayStation 5 launch lineup noted of Bugsnax: "Looks like shit honestly but for a window of several weeks it will be one of the nine best games for the PS5." Seemingly taking it in good humor, an ad for the game quoted The Onion as having said "Looks like[...]honestly[...]one of the[...]best games for the PS5."
• Rotten Tomatoes refers to Norm of the North as "a pioneering feat in the field of twerking polar bear animation."
• The Sacramento News & Review film critic gives us this gem: "The Brothers Grimsby will almost undoubtedly end up as the best film of 2016 in which the heroes are attacked by giant penises while hiding in an elephant's vagina, although Terrence Malick still has a couple more movies due out this year."
• Of Good Morning, Vietnam, Seanbaby said, "Being considered the funniest movie about Vietnam is like winning the contest for best-looking child molester. You only won because nobody else entered, and it probably shouldn't have been held in the first place."
• As part of their annual collection of honest posters for Oscar-nominated movies, UK movie site The Shiznit described◊ Zero Dark Thirty as being "from the Academy Award-winning writer and director who is a woman".
• Apogee of Fear was described by space.com as "the best science fiction film ever made in space."
• Stupid Comics' comment on a panel in a comic book called Guardians of Justice & the O-Force was "This is the kind of perceptive insight that made the O-Force the number one color-coded, letter-based super crime fighting force in Bay City."
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was described by a Television Without Pity commentator as only the second-best key-focused children's film released in 2011.
• TV Tropes:
  • Someone defended the group The Lonely Island as being "probably the most successful comedy rap group currently performing".
  • In several places on the wiki, we refer to the line "Exit, Pursued by a Bear" as "the most famous piece of stage direction ever."
  • Kain Highwind of Final Fantasy IV has been referred to as "the coolest hero ever to have a negative Will save."
  • The page on Crack Fic describes Tetris Porn as "the greatest work of pornography ever written. About Tetris."
  • The page for Clue calls it "possibly the best movie based on a board game ever made in 1985". Possibly. It used to simply be "possibly the best movie about a board game ever made", but then Battleship happened.
  • The page for Ghostbusters refers to it as "the greatest Lovecraftian comedy of the 1980s".
  • The page for North calls it "The classic boy-travels-world-to-find-less-neglectful-parents film."
• The We Are Movie Geeks review of Waiting for Superman calls it "the second best documentary I've seen this year that ends with low-income families nervously awaiting the outcome [of] a lottery determining whether their child gets a coveted spot in a charter school." (And the reviewer is serious, going on to say that The Cartel is the best, and there's even a third film which would qualify in that category which he has not yet seen.)
• Wikipedia:
  • The Other Wiki describes Billy Ocean as "the most popular British R&B singer-songwriter of the early to mid-1980s."
  • The German-language version describes Johannes Heesters (1903–2011) as having been "the second-oldest man living in Germany," narrowing the aspects of rank (only 2nd), sex (only among males), country of residence (only in Germany) and discounting citizenship (he was Dutch, maybe an Austrian too). A much less narrow superlative on the other hand was his nature as the worldwide oldest active and longest-serving artist.
  • The page for Eureka, California calls it "the largest coastal city between San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, and the westernmost city of more than 25,000 residents in the 48 contiguous states." It has a population of 27,000.
  • The page on Boone, North Carolina has long said that Boone "has the highest elevation of any town of its size (over 10,000 population) east of the Mississippi River."^note elevation 3,333 ft/1,016 m
• The World Socialist Web Site pays tribute to "South Asia's foremost Marxist of the second half of the 20th century."

Web Videos

• One man sold personal finance software... for the Apple ][. In 2013. In the auction page, he boasted:
  "I guarantee this is the best personal finance software for the Apple IIe that will be released in 2013!"
• Atop the Fourth Wall on Sonic Super Special: "Congratulations, Sonic Super Special, you have the best out-of-nowhere reference to The X-Files since Sinnamon #11!"
• The Banjo Kid, "the greatest banjo-playing anime critic on the net".
• Brows Held High's Beauty and the Beast (1946) review features Some Jerk with a Camera referred to as "the greatest white, male, Jewish, overweight, long-haired, bespectacled theme park reviewer over 30 the world has ever known!"
• In the commodoreHUSTLE episode "Suspicious Doings", Graham describes LoadingReadyRun as the "seventeenth most popular Canadian flatulence-based internet comedy troupe".
• Cute with Chris often calls his site/show, "The number one cat website on the Internet today... with the word 'Chris' in the title. So proud."
• The Cynical Brit described "Zombie Bowl-a-Rama" as the best zombie game he had played that week.
• Diamanda Hagan describes Zombeak as "the world's worst zombie chicken movie". Only one other exists. And it is amazing.
• DigitalRev's YouTube page describes it as "The most subscribed and viewed photography show on the interweb, presented by an Asian dude with British accent."
• The top comment for the Friendship is Witchcraft video "Foaly Matrimony":
  That was the most beautiful song about horse incest I have ever heard.
• The Game Grumps throughout The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker often mockingly invoke this on the King of Red Lions as if the title were literal. They even go so far as to call a random blue beached boat that is part of the scenery on an island the "King of all Blue Boats" just to further drive home how little meaning the title has.
• Gamers Nexus: In HW News from August 28, 2022 Steve says that Corsair markets their Xeneon Flex monitor as "The world's first 45 inch 21:9 OLED gaming display".
  Steve Burke: Just like we're the world's first computer hardware review channel named Gamers Nexus. If you specify it enough, you can always be first.
• Gggmanlives's video review and Steam curator writeup for Call of Duty: Ghosts snarks that "it's the best Call of Duty game released in 2013".
• Mike Stoklasa of Half in the Bag invoked this in his praise for Overlord (2018), saying "How much better can you make a Nazi Zombies movie than this?" (Although they immediately provide multiple other examples of the same subgenre.)
• H.Bomberguy discusses this extensively in ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 when talking about Tommy Tallarico's alleged Guinness World Records. As he notes, GWR's business strategy involves invoking this trope for anyone willing to pay, finding a new record for them to break (giving Canon's printing of the world's longest digitally printed photograph as an example) and then publicising the event. This practice is thrown into sharp relief when Tommy Tallarico's record for "Most Videogames Worked On in a Lifetime" is called into question; rather than give the record to its actual holder, GWR responds by changing Tommy's record to "most prolific composer of game soundtracks" (though Tallarico still claims the record is for "Most Videogames Worked On in a Lifetime"). After noting two other dubious records Tommy has, HBomb's discussion ends by noting that the record was purged from the database after his producer, Kat Lo, asked some very basic questions about it to GWR.
• Honest Trailers:
  • Pitch Perfect is congratulated for being "the best movie of all time about making noises with your mouth".
  • Jaws and Gone Girl are called the best-directed, well-acted, most shining examples of their genre... except said genres are respectively Cheesy B-Movie and Lifetime Movie of the Week.
  • Divergent is "the second-best franchise about a teenage girl revolutionary whose name ends in -is."
  • The trailer for Wild Wild West has a running gag where the announcer keeps coming up with overly narrow superlatives only to realize that even within such narrow categories there's still at least one better movie.
  • Minions: The Rise of Gru is noted as being the second best movie of 2022 featuring Michelle Yeoh and a rock with googly eyes.
• In the documentary Internet Scamming in Ghana (available on YouTube), Socrate Safo, the director of sakawa-related films, is described as "The Martin Scorsese of Ghanian internet fraud-based gangster films."
• The conclusion of Cleolinda Jones's Twilight recaps: "It was the best series starting with a teenage girl in love with a mysterious boy in her class that ended up with a teenage girl defending her growth-accelerated mutant hybrid baby from an ancient clan of evil vampires with her magical psychic shield that I ever read."
• Inverted when JonTron explains that Titanic: The Legend Goes On isn't even the only Italian-animated Titanic film that features talking mice (or refers to the Titanic disaster as if it were a legend instead of a real-life event).
• Most Kiwami Japan videos are titled along the lines of "Sharpest ______ Kitchen Knife" where the blank is filled with something implausible to make a knife out of, such as pasta, smoke, bread, chocolate, or milk. Regardless of their actual sharpness, due to how few knives are made of these materials, his knives are almost certainly the sharpest of that material by default.
• In the legendary "CARD GAMES ON MOTORCYCLES!" video by LittleKuriboh, Hokage compliments Sensei on his camcorder-captured completely improvised One Piece Abridged on being "the best One Piece Abridged [he's] ever seen."
• Movie Bob mentions that the scene where Poirot rants in the snow in Murder on the Orient Express (2017) is "the Gold Winner in the Category of 'Kenneth Branagh Directing himself Hamming it up on top of a snowy mountain'", taking the first place from his "My Thoughts be Bloody!"-monologue in 1996's Hamlet.
• The Rap Critic's show "The Worst Lyrics I've Ever Heard... This Month". (Even more when considering that the March 2012 episode came out on March 2nd...)
• In their video "Worst Console Ever Made 3", Rerez calls one game "the worst frisbee-shooting game on a golf course I've ever played". Though they do admit it's the only one they've ever played.
• James Rolfe sometimes does this in his reviews. Examples include "the worst commercially-sold VHS tape to feature such high-profile monsters" and "the craziest, most absurd scene in a horror film to feature two actors who would go on to win Academy Awards."
• RTGame's Team Fortress 2 server currently has the highest killstreak ever achieved by a train.^{Then again...}1000+ kills also means nobody's gonna be breaking that record anytime soon.
• During The Runaway Guys' Let's Play of New Super Mario Bros. U, Josh declares that he's the best Yellow Toad they've ever had. The guys are quick to point out he's the only Yellow Toad they've ever had.
• The Saturday Morning Glory review of Mister T calls the show "the greatest cartoon to star Mr. T ever made."
• Sorted Food: Parodied:
  ... they will go head-to-head-to-head in what will later be called the eleventh-greatest Japanese and sake food pairing battle in east London... on a Sunday!
• Television Without Pity does this occasionally:
  • They described The Vampire Diaries as "probably the best vampire show on now", though that's not as narrow as it sounds these days.
  • They also described Top Chef: Just Desserts as "everyone's favorite competitive pastry reality show."
• Tobuscus got invited to livestream a playthrough of the Xbox Live Arcade game Bloodforge on its release date. He brought his mom along to the show and invited her to play for a few minutes. Shortly thereafter he called her "The best mom who ever played Bloodforge in the first hour of its release."
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: While livestreaming 007: NightFire on the Game Boy Advance, Derek is amused when a review is found for the game calling it "The 3rd best GBA FPS."
• The Brazilian channel Trasheira Violenta once did a video on somehow discovering seven bad sanitarium horror movies from 2013 (and they even found an eighth one, which they gave up on halfway through, finding it a cynical excuse for the director/writer to play an irredeemable sociopath).
• Yuriofwind says in his Gaming Mysteries on Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards that the aforementioned game is the best Kirby game for the Nintendo 64. He follows that up by saying that while it may seem like an unfair thing to say, since it wins by default, that's the best kind of victory.

Western Animation

• In one episode of The 7D, Hildy is accidentally zapped by her own spell and turned into a slug, and wails about how she's hideous. Grim implores the queen's magic mirror to tell her that isn't true, and so the mirror replies, "All right. You are the most beautiful slimy slug I've ever seen." Hildy is not comforted.
• In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic (unsurprisingly) fails to lift Tails's spirits when he's down in the dumps on one occasion by saying that he's the fastest, coolest two-tailed fox he knows.
• All Grown Up!: In "Bad Aptitude", when Chuckie tries his hands at being a daredevil, like his aptitude test told him he should, Tommy attempts to promote him as "the fastest kid on Earth". When Chuckie points out that may not be true, Tommy changes it to "the fastest braces-wearing, red-headed, nearsighted kid on Earth!"
• In the American Dad! episode "Rabbit Ears", Alistair Covax introduces his pianist Charlie as "sincerely one of the best white, non-union jazz pianists in the entire city... top five." Poor guy isn't even number one in such a narrow field.
• Animaniacs:
  • In an episode of the original series, Yakko Warner describes an overly Avant-Garde black and white French film as "The worst French film I've ever seen! It's also the only French film I've ever seen."
  • Animaniacs (2020):
    • A news scroller mentions that "Wakko's Wish now the highest grossing Animaniacs movie of 1999". It's the only Animaniacs movie they made that year... or that decade, for that matter.
    • In the segment "Fear and Laughter in Burbank" Dot comforts a freaked-out Yakko by claiming that he's on the "top two" of her funniest brothers and Wakko (who doesn't even have a second brother) says the same applies to him.
• In an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Kite-man boasts, "I'll be the most famous kite-related person in history!" Given that the only other famous kite-related person in history is Ben Franklin, and that Franklin is a household name not just in America, but the world over, that is actually aiming quite high for a third-tier gimmicky villain.
• In the Beavis and Butt-Head episode "The Pipe of Doom", the boys watch the Salt-N-Pepa video "Whatta Man". Butt-Head responds to the line "He is the cutest brother in here!" with "He's the only brother in here!"
• Bob's Burgers:
  • In "Bob and Deliver", Bob refers to Tina as his "favorite eldest daughter". Arguably justified in that he's primarily referring to how he likes her the way she is. And even if he were trying to play favorites, his other two children are right next to him (one of whom secretly looks up to him), meaning he'd have to be very careful in his word choice.
  • The episode "Hawk & Chick" describes the titular movie series as "featuring the most celebrated father-daughter traveling barber samurais in the history of Japanese cinema."
• Subverted in Codename: Kids Next Door. During the Villain Choice Awards in "Operation: A.W.A.R.D.S.", The Toiletnator is happy because only he can receive the "Best toilet-themed villain of the year" award... except that the winner is a new villain named Pottymouth.
• Jay Sherman of The Critic is described as "New York's third most popular early-morning cable-TV film critic."
• In Daria we have Ms. Li, the principal of Lawndale High, who was once named fourth runner-up for Principal of the Year by the tri-county chapter of the Asian-American Women in Education's Caucus.
• Darkwing Duck: In "Dead Duck", Darkwing tells Launchpad that he was the best sidekick he ever had. He then comments that Launchpad was the only sidekick he ever had.
• In DuckTales (2017), Flintheart Glomgold boasts that he's "the world's most beloved Scottish billionaire duck". It isn't even technically true, as Glomgold is actually South African.
• In "Burrowing Owl Girl" from Elinor Wonders Why, Bibi calls Elinor's father her favorite son upon his, Ranger Rabbit, and Elinor's arrival. He points out that he's her only son.
• Futurama:
  • A lot of the title screen captions do this. One of the DVDs has a list of unused opening captions for episodes as an Easter Egg. These include "The best show you're watching right now."
  • One ad campaign run for the show on [adult swim] described it as "The action-comedy-scifi-drama that redefined action-comedy-scifi-dramas."
  • Dr. Zoidberg has been known to refer to himself as "the most important doctor at the delivery company where I work."
  • The Land Titanic, which Amy refers to as "the biggest and only-est land boat ever constructed."
  • In one episode Fry laments the loss of his "lucky" pants, stating that a few times he'd been lucky while wearing them. He then adds that they're also his only pants.
  • In "Bendin' In The Wind":
    Beck: Bender, that was the best forty-minute washboard solo I've ever heard. The parts where I was awake blew my mind.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Cartoon episode "Green Dean Goes Out of His Bean" ends with Mrs. Slotnick being given an award for "the most beautiful exotic flowers growing on a former weed that ate up a supermarket".
• From A Garfield Christmas:
  Jon: Doc Boy, how's my favorite brother?
  Doc Boy: Don't call me Doc Boy. You've probably forgotten I'm your only brother.
• Harley Quinn (2019): King Shark is fond of these, such as saying that Cinderella's mouse is "the mouse that smoked the most unfiltered cigarettes made for humans" that King Shark has ever seen or calling Mr. Freeze "the most woke ice-themed villain in all of new New Gotham".
• In Hey Arnold!, Phil often calls Arnold his "favorite grandson", with Arnold always correcting him with, "I'm your only grandson".
• In an episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes, Samy calls Super Slugmeister "the greatest slug ever!" Lucius notes that that's not a very high bar.
• KaBlam!: The KaBlammy for best acting while impersonating an egg goes to Loopy from "Life with Loopy" and the award for best supporting monkey goes to "Prometheus and Bob".
• Kaeloo: Pretty says that Eugly is her favorite sister, but acknowledges that Eugly is also her only sister and therefore her favorite by default.
• Kim Possible:
  • Future Duff Killigan's description as "[t]he world's deadliest golfing cyborg" in "A Sitch in Time (Part Three: Future)" is the page quote.
  • Shego invokes a variation on the theme when Drakken vents about a run of bad luck (even by his standards) in his confrontations with Kim:
    Drakken: I'm serious, Shego. Kim Possible has foiled my plans for the last time!
    Shego: Yeah. The last time today, maybe.
• In an early episode of King of the Hill, Hank compliments Luanne's "Manger Babies" show as "The best Christian puppet show I've ever seen!"
• Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness:
  Taotie: You're the greatest son in the world!
  Bian Zao: And you're the greatest dad in... the family!
• The Legend of Korra:
  • Subverted in an episode when the crew is hiding in the sewers with the Beauteous Bush hobo. He gives them gruel which he made from food he scavenged from dumpsters. Bolin cheerfully says that it's the best street gruel he's ever tasted, which sounds like this... until you remember that he was a street rat for a good chunk of his life. That's actually a genuine compliment, coming from him.
  • Played straight and lampshaded by Toph when she tells Korra, "Of all the Avatars I've worked with, you are by far the worst. I know that's only one other Avatar, but still..."
• LEGO Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures: There are cups describing Palpatine as the best Emperor in the galaxy. Upon receiving one from Darth Vader, Palpatine points that out he's the only Emperor in the galaxy.
• In The Magic School Bus, Janet refers to herself on more than one occasion as "Arnold's favorite cousin," to which Arnold replies, "You're my only cousin, Janet."
• In Marvel Rising: Chasing Ghosts, the doughnut shop owner claims to have the best vegan donuts on the Upper-Middle-Lower East Side.
• In the Mike, Lu & Og episode "The Hunter and the Hunted", Mike attempts to cheer up Og's father Alfred by telling him that he's the bravest hunter she's ever known. Alfred replies that he's the only hunter she knows.
• In Milo Murphy's Law, Milo's parents tell them about the time that they lost a competition with "Pete and Tina, the best 70s-style roller-disco dancers in all of Danville."
  Milo: How many roller-disco dancers were there in Danville?
  Martin: Seven, but you're interrupting the narrative.
• Molly of Denali: In "A Song For Lola," Molly claims that all the gifted songs she's seen were really serious, though she's only seen the song that was gifted to Merna.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In "One Bad Apple", when Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo introduce Babs seed to their club, the Cutie Mark Crusaders:
    Scootaloo: We're its founding members.
    Sweetie Belle: Technically, we're its only members.
  • In "Inspiration Manifestation", Rarity tells Spike that he's her favorite dragon. It's not like the competition's very strong, since every other dragon Rarity's ever met has been a "ruffian", by Rarity's standards.
  • In "The Parent Map", Spike says that Sunburst can ask him for advice about friendship quests, since he's been on his fair share of them. Twilight points out that Spike's only been on one; Spike replies, "And that's my fair share!"
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • In "Phineas and Ferb's Musical Cliptastic Countdown", Doofenshmirtz gets frustrated when Perry the Platypus shows up to thwart his evil scheme yet again.
    Doofenshmirtz: I swear, of all the aquatic mammals I hang with, you are truly the most uncooperative!
  • In "What Do It Do?", a young Doofenshmirtz isn't particularly fond of the eponymous song, even after putting it in one of these:
    Doofenshmirtz: Eh, it's in my top seven, eight favorite songs about reverse engineering.
• In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Holidays in Boxwood Terrace", Jet calls Mitchell "the best detective he knows". Mitchell is the only detective Jet knows, and Jet even lampshades it.
• Rugrats:
  • In "Baseball", Stu and Lou win tickets to a baseball game by answering the trivia question "Who holds the record for the most homeruns hit on the second Tuesday in April." This is likely intentional, as the answer is the team's star player, who reads the question on air.
  • In "Reptar on Ice", the papers say that the aforementioned show is the show to see if you see just one skating-dinosaur spectacular that year.
  • In "I Remember Melville", Chuckie mourns Melville, commenting that he was the best bug he ever had. Phil notes that he was the only bug Chuckie ever had.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • In one episode, this is Velma's excuse for stealing a pair of skates.
    Velma: I'm the best figure-skater in my country! [trip] ...It's a very small country?
  • In Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, Professor Pericles brags that he is "The Smartest Criminal Parrot in the World".
• In a Sheep in the Big City sketch, there's "Dinky: The Superiest Turtle in the Universe!" "He's slightly faster then most turtles, but still relatively slow."
• Shimmer and Shine:
  • In "What a Pig Mess", the titular characters watch a car race and Shimmer says that it's the best one she ever watched. By her own admission, it's the only one but still the best.
  • In "Volcano Drain-o", Shimmer describes Mount Navine as the biggest volcano in Zahramay Falls. It's the only volcano in Zahramay Falls, but Shimmer says it's still the biggest.
• Sidekick:
  • Played with in "The Spark is Gone", where Vana brags about how Uni-Cyclops is the third-best unicycle-riding one-eyed superhero in all of Splitsboro. Still, this is a lot better than Static Clint, who's only the ninth-best static electricity-themed superhero of his kind, (he later gets demoted to twelfth). At least Static Clint still lives in the number one best hand-shaped building in all of Splitboro.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular", Troy McClure describes the Simpsons as "America's favourite non-prehistoric cartoon family." Of course, that's not as narrow as the alternative.
  • In "Curse of the Flying Hellfish", Abe Simpson describes the Flying Hellfish as "the fightingest squad of the fightingest company of the third-fightingest battalion in the army."
  • In "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", Homer's friends watch the first episode of Itchy & Scratchy where Homer appears as Poochie, and they don't want to tell him that it was terrible. Ned Flanders says: "Homer, I can honestly say that was the best episode of Impy & Chimpy I've ever seen." As he doesn't even know the title, it's pretty clear that his experience with the series is bordering on nil (he did watch an episode in "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily", but he hated the show and probably forgot about it altogether).
  • In "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" after the Love-Matic Grampa's advice results in Moe getting a bowl of food dumped on his head, Moe calls him the dumbest haunted love tester he has ever met.
  • In "Bart Star", when Flanders becomes coach to Springfield's pee-wee football team, Homer won't even wait for the first game before claiming that Flanders is the worst coach the team ever had. As Marge points out, Flanders is the only coach that team has ever had.
  • In "Lisa the Simpson", Lisa probably doesn't intend it as an insult, but at one point, she says that Yertle the Turtle is "possibly the best book ever written on turtle stacking." In the same episode, one of the successful female Simpson relatives describes herself as the "regional manager of the third-largest distributor of bunk and trundle beds."
  • In "Midnight Rx", Bart tells Lisa that Mr. Burns is one of the nicest men he ever met. When Lisa asks how many men he knows, he says it's basically Burns and Homer.
  • In "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore", when Richard Dean Anderson of Stargate SG-1 makes a personal appearance at the Android's Dungeon comic book shop, Comic Book Guy tells him that of the four major Star franchises (Wars, Trek, gate and Search), "yours is - easily - my third favorite", to which Anderson replies "I get that a lot".
  • In "Springfield Up", Ned Flanders says that Homer is "the kindest, sweetest, most generous man to ever drive through my living room."
  • In "Homer of Seville", Homer meets one of the three tenors and says that he's his second favorite among them. Homer then remembers about the other guy and changes the position from second to third.
  • In "I Don't Wanna Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", Lisa is awarded the Student of the Millennium Prize. She admits that it's not as big a deal as it sounds, as we're only about a decade into the new millennium... but still, they picked her!
• Sofia the First: In "Buttercup Amber", Amber says that Mossy has the sparkliest swamp monster eyes she's ever seen. Those are the only swamp monster eyes she's ever seen.
• Stargate Infinity: In "The Look," Stacey says that Gus is her favorite uncle, causing him to remark, "I'm your Only uncle.
• Steven Universe:
  • In "Now We're Only Falling Apart", Rose Quartz hugs a newly-emerged Amethyst.
    Rose Quartz: Look at you! You're beautiful! Welcome to Earth.
    Amethyst 8XL: That is the first, and nicest, thing anyone has ever said to me.
  • In "Shirt Club", Sour Cream describes a shirt as "the coolest thing I've ever been hit in the head with".
• In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Dog Hand", Starfire introduces herself to Trigon as Raven's "best female friend within the Teen Titans".
• The Tick episode "Grandpa Wore Tights" includes "Zee largest secret army of atomic robot zombie men... in zhe vorld!" ^note An unsubstantiated claim. If there was a larger secret army of robot zombie men... in zhe vorld, would he know?
• Done subtly in the Transformers: Animated episode "Mission Accomplished", where the Autobots ask Captain Fanzone to be Sari Sumdac's legal guardian because of the disappearance of her father Isaac and an order from the Autobot Elite Guard to leave Earth. When Fanzone asks why he has to be Sari's guardian, the Autobots reply that it's because he's number one on their list of humans they trust the most, but they quickly add that the list isn't very long and that it includes Meltdown and Nanosec, both of whom were villains who antagonized the Autobots.
• An episode of The Weekenders focuses on yearbook superlatives. The yearbook has a space for "Best Tino" — and main character Tino failed to even get that.

Real Life

• During World War II, the trope was invoked and played with by USAAF fighter pilot Wah Kau Kong ^note  also known as Richard Kong in an interview with an Army public relations officer: "Well," he said, "you could announce that Kong is without question the handsomest Chinese fighter pilot in the ETO (European Theater of Operations)." When it was pointed out that he was the only Chinese pilot in the ETO, he replied, "Well, we could drop the (word) ETO and eliminate the Chinese. There's a story, the handsomest pilot."
• The Bassett Street Hounds, central New York's finest (and only) mixed-sex Border morris dancing team.
• Outside an Australian leagues club, their sign reads, "Watch the game on the coast's largest 102" television!" One wonders in what important way all the other 102" televisions on the coast are smaller...
• Technology writer Andy Ihnatko has referred to himself as "America's 42nd most beloved industry-figure and "Possibly not the least-beloved technology pundit in the land!"
• Records and firsts are getting increasingly specific. "First woman to do X". "Fastest 100-meter dash by a bipedal robot". "First openly gay driver to compete in a national event on the National Hot Rod Association racing circuit"...
• Arnold Schwarzenegger is the best gubernatorial candidate in the cast of Predator. Some may disagree on whether he's truly better than Jesse Ventura, but the funny thing is, no matter which of them you prefer, neither of them is the worst. That distinction goes to Sonny Landham.
• Retainer Brite — The World's #1 Daily Orthodontic appliance cleaner.
• American computer scientists like telling people that the American ENIAC, finished in 1946, was the first-ever working, fully^note apparently, the 1500 electro-mechanical relays didn't count electronic computer. European computer scientists like to point out that the "fully electronic" part makes this an Overly Narrow Superlative, only necessary so they can avoid mentioning the working electro-mechanical computers that existed in Europe five years prior, most notably the Zuse Z3. Not to mention mechanical analogue computers — the oldest known example is dated to around 150 BC.
  
  Another Overly Narrow Superlative is such a big deal that it rather cancels the over-narrowness, though. ENIAC was the first computer known to be Turing Complete during its operational life. The Z3 was Turing Complete, but this was only demonstrated in 1998, using programming techniques not available in its time. The Mark I (appeared after the Z3 and before the ENIAC) was also Turing Complete, proven in 1998. The Zuse Z4 from 1945 was not Turing Complete right from the start — the conditional jump instruction was added after 1945 (possibly in 1950). Coincidentally, the ENIAC also lacked a conditional jump instruction at first and was not Turing Complete, until it was "hacked" to allow for some sort of conditional execution.^note Back in these days, few people cared about whether a computer was Turing Complete or not. Usually, the problems the computers had to solve did not require Turing Completeness.
• Illinois Senator Roland Burris (known primarily as Illinois State Comptroller and as a short-term replacement after Barack Obama was elected president) has a huge gravestone already put in place, with a list of accomplishments carved in marble. He's particularly fond of listing personal "firsts". So his gravestone boasts, apparently seriously, that he was the first African-American to transfer from Southern Illinois University to the University of Hamburg.
• Port Washington, Wisconsin is the host of "The world's largest one-day outdoor fish fry." This suggests that somewhere out there is a town with the world's second largest one-day outdoor fish fry... or an even-larger fish fry, that happens to be indoors and/or doesn't last (only) one day...
• Some of the more obscure scholarships out there for students can get maddeningly specific, narrowing the qualifications down to things like, "half-Hispanic female student from _____ County, attending _____ University, in the Poultry Science program".
• The bigger New Orleans crawfish festivals distinguish themselves by being both overly narrow and overly superlative — they will call themselves the "best/biggest/wildest (optional qualifier: Cajun) crawfish boil in the world", but there aren't many crawfish boils outside of New Orleans.
• A quote by Dan Quayle (frequently attributed to George W. Bush):
  Dan Quayle: We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world.
• The (now long defunct) Springfield News of Springfield, Oregon had a handful of regular movie reviewers, one of whom opened every review with a variation on the line "The best {X} movie since the last one."
• Some obscure dog breeds are guaranteed to win a "Best of Breed" ribbon at dog shows, simply because nobody else entered, say, a Peruvian Inca Orchid.
• Mark Kermode's review of Le Quattro Volte called it "the best silent goat-herding movie of the year so far" (definitely not damning with faint praise in that case — the film did end up very high up in his top-ten films that year — along with a bunch of non-silent, non-goaty films).
• Scripps College boasts the Motley Coffeehouse, the largest all-female-run coffeehouse west of the Mississippi.
• The Wright Brothers were not the first people to travel by air — they were preceded by hot-air balloons, for example. What Orville and Wilbur are credited with is "the first powered, heavier-than-air machine to achieve controlled, sustained flight with a pilot aboard" according to the Smithsonian. Which sounds narrow, but that's just a detailed way of saying the first practical airplane. Every one of those qualifiers is necessary; each had been achieved by someone else before 1903. Also note that the exact wording is the Wrights' Take That! to the Smithsonian, which had long claimed that its own Samuel Pierpont Langley had made the first powered man-carrying flight a week before the Wrights.
• You probably didn't know there's a meteor crater under Manson, Iowa. It's several miles across, and completely buried under glacial till. In order to maintain its superlative status (it was briefly hoped to be the impact that killed the dinosaurs, before it was found to be too small), it's described as "the largest and best preserved impact crater on the mainland United States". Others that are larger are either deformed or offshore. Never mind that Manson's crater is completely buried. That's why it's so well preserved!
• Teachers will inform your class when asked which class is the favorite, "You're my favorite 6th period class!" though sometimes have no shame in pointing out "you're my favorite disruptive and obnoxious class", which can indeed be true if there's another class more disruptive than yours. Or they flat-out say that you're the best class, but say that to all of the other classes as well. Or, to avoid lying or being rude, a teacher may say something along the lines of "you're my favorite class of 2007" or "you're the best fourth period I've had all year."
• Calling something the best whatever of the year smacks of this trope any time before August or so. Or when the "Best Whatever of the Summer" comes out in May.
• Megan McArdle boasts of being the "world's tallest female econo-blogger".
• After Jimmy Kimmel Live! featured a skit parodying Kanye West, the irate rapper called up Kimmel and threatened him with, among other things: "You will never be able to show your face at a 14-year-old's high school football game and be cool again!"
• Soda Drinker Pro, an indie game for the Oculus Rift, was described by KillScreen as "the greatest soda drinking simulation ever created."
• When reporting on the scandal created when Toronto mayor Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack, CBC News took a moment to talk about a similar story from twenty years back: Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Berry being caught on video smoking crack. They said, "This video remains the most-viewed video of a mayor smoking crack ever." One wonders why that needs to be said, given that the only competition it has is Ford's own video, which wasn't made public until after his death.
• Major League Baseball places such heavy emphasis on stats that many of them fall into statistic version of this trope. Some statistics include any particular batter's average against any particular hitter. A pitcher's ERA might be measured in situations where there are two outs or the bases loaded. ^note There are three outs in baseball for those not in the know and "bases loaded" exists with three men on base. This puts the team in an immediate position to score.
• It's not unheard of, especially in small communities, for someone to win first prize in a competition because only one person qualified to compete in that particular category bothered to show up.
• Car companies do this all the time, stating that their vehicle is "Best in Class", then defining the class to exclude other vehicles above a certain weight, or size, or number of seats, and so forth.
• Pacific Park in Santa Monica advertises their West Coaster as "The only West Coast, oceanfront, steel roller coaster located on a Pier over the Pacific Coastline."
• East Germany had the best standard of living... of the entire second world communist bloc and despite being placed right next to its western counterpart, which had one of the best standards of living in the first world. Still, it has a much better rep in former East Germany than other communist regimes in their nations.
• Mercer Island, Washington (pop. 24,000) is the largest US city located on an island in a lake (its only competitors are a handful of tiny communities in the Great Lakes).^note Grand Island, New York (20,000) and Grosse Ile, Michigan (11,000) don't count because they're in rivers that connect lakes—the Niagara and Detroit rivers respectively.
• MeTV, America's #1 all-classic-TV network. While there is a field of all-classic-TV networks in America, none of them have particularly high ratings.
• The 2014 edition of "The Good Schools Guide" (an annually-published guide to schools in Britain) described Harrow School as being one of the best all-boys, all-boarding schools in Britain that it was hard to surpass. This becomes substantially less impressive when you discover that, including Harrow, there is a grand total of four all-boys, all-boarding schools in Britain (the others being Eton College, Radley College, and Winchester College).
• When Turkish Airlines Flight 981 crashed on March 3, 1974, killing all 346 passengers and crew, it was, at the time, the deadliest aviation incident ever.... until March 27, 1977, when the Tenerife disaster claimed 583 lives, becoming the new worst aviation disaster ever (a title it still holds as of 2020). However, that crash involved two Boeing 747s. Thus, THY981 was now the deadliest single-aircraft incident... until August 12, 1985, when 520 people were killed in the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123. However, there were four survivors on that plane, so THY981 was still the deadliest crash with no survivors... until November 12, 1996, when the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision claimed the lives of all 349 people aboard both aircraft. Thus, THY981 remains the deadliest single-aircraft crash with no survivors... for now.
• When American Airlines Flight 191 crashed on May 25, 1979 on takeoff from O'Hare International Airport, killing all 271 passengers and crew plus two people in the ground, it was the deadliest aviation disaster in the United States. It held this title until 9/11. As 9/11 was a terrorist attack and involved four aircraft, AA191 is still the deadliest single-aircraft crash and deadliest non-terrorism aviation disaster to have happened in the United States.
  • Similarly, post 9/11, the 1977 Tenerife disaster, in which 583 people were killed when two jets collided on a runway, has to be qualified as the "deadliest aviation accident in history."
• When Duke Kahanamoku, who popularized surfing as a sport, used his surfboard to save eight men from a capsized fishing vessel in California, the local police chief described it (unironically) as "the most superhuman surfboard rescue act the world has ever seen."
• Ware County is the largest county in Georgia. There's a local saying that the county seat of Waycross is the largest city in the largest county in the largest state.... east of the Mississippi River.
• Slavoj Zizek was once described as the world's second most famous Slovenian plagiarist, with the most famous being Melania Trump.
• Robert J. Sawyer at one time declared himself "English-Canada's only native-born full-time science-fiction writer". Canadian science-fiction writers aren't a rare breed, but Sawyer's overly-narrow definition neatly excluded Canadian genre writers such as Jo Walton (born in Wales), William Gibson (born in North Carolina), Spider Robinson (born in New York), Charles de Lint (born in the Netherlands, and really more of a fantasy writer), Robert Charles Wilson (born in California), Judith Merill (born in Boston, and more active as an editor than as a writer by the time she moved to Canada), Cory Doctorow (born in Toronto, but largely works out of London and later Los Angeles), John Clute (born in Canada, works out of the US and England), S. M. Stirling (born on a Canadian air force base, but in France; has worked out the US since the early 2000s), Gordon R. Dickson (born in Edmonton, but lived in the US from the age of 14), Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens (both born in Canada, but work out of the US), Tanya Huff (more of a fantasy writer), Peter Watts (technically not a full-time writer, as he also works in research and teaching positions, and as a marine-mammal biologist), James Alan Gardner (also not "full-time" as he both teaches and works as a technical writer), and Margaret Atwood (frequently writes material other than science fiction, so while a full-time writer, not a full-time science fiction writer).
• The town of Marietta, Ohio is known as the first settlement founded by American pioneers outside the original 13 states, founded in 1788. Some settlements already existed in Kentucky and Tennessee by then, but they were parts of Virginia and North Carolina at that time, so they don't count. Vermont, Maine, and West Virginia had yet to break off of their original states too, but they're east of the Appalachians (or, in the case of West Virginia, in the Appalachians) and so don't count either. Even then, the Northwest Territory was still inhabited by Native Americans, English fur traders who retained their citizenship after American independence, and settlers from the former New France, so Marietta can only be the first pioneer city if one discounts everything else.
• When it comes to measuring roller coaster statistics, The Beast at Kings Island is the longest wooden roller coaster in the world. However, the second-longest wooden roller coaster in the world, The Voyage at Holiday World, is the longest wooden roller coaster in the world with one lift hill.
• The Guardian food critic Jay Rayner has mentioned an establishment that advertises itself as "the most authentic Northern Indian restaurant in North Wales".
• It's no longer there, but a restaurant used to have a banner: "Best Sushi in Town" ...which is not a very impressive claim in Deer Park, Texas.
• Many national and regional governments have laws against passing legislation that only benefits one city or town. They still get around this by passing legislation that helps cities that meet an extremely specific criteria. For example, you'll see bills to improve the public transportation systems of cities founded between 1833 and 1835 with a population between five and six million and have names that begin with the letter E.
• Mara Wilson once made the following tweets:
  Hey, who's your favorite short, half-Irish and half Jewish (but secular), dark-haired light-eyed former child actor with a severe nickel allergy who played the title character from a beloved British children's book about a child with magic powers? Me, right?
  DAMMIT RADCLIFFE
• While speaking at the 2006 AFI Life Achievement Award ceremony for Sean Connery, Mike Myers said "Of all the iconic Scottish superstar actors of the last 50 years, Sean Connery is definitely in the top 5."
• In 2019, Papua New Guinea's prime minister set a goal to become the world's "richest Black Christian nation".
• As one Redditor pointed out in this thread from r/AskReddit what people are in the 1% of, "You can be the 1% of anything, if specific enough".
• The Daytime Emmy Award, because of its qualification restrictions, often will only have a handful of shows to draw its nominations from. This especially counts for the Drama (i.e. Soap Opera) categories, because, since 2014, there are only four network soaps remaining (NBC moved Days of Our Lives to Peacock in 2022, but it's still eligible. Since then, The Gates was announced to premiere in January 2025, but pending any eligibility period changes, it won't be eligible until the 2026 awards).

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