Suicide As Comedy / Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • A Running Gag with Moe. One of his Christmas traditions is his annual suicide attempt.
  • A classic from "Three Men and a Comic Book," when Bart and Lisa discuss the resemblance between Casper and Richie Rich.
    Bart: Wonder how Richie died.
    Lisa: Perhaps he realized how hollow the pursuit of money really is and took his own life.
    Marge: Kids, could you lighten up a little?
  • In "Homer Goes to Prep School" a solar flare knocks out all the power in Springfield. When it cuts off the power to the disco rink, Disco Stu puts a revolver to his temple.
  • "Beyond Blunderdome" when Homer discussed Mel Gibson's movies with him:
    Homer: Lethal Weapon showed us that suicide is funny.
    Mel Gibson: That really wasn't my intention.
  • In "Homer Scissorhands", after Homer grows tired of being a hairdresser and his attempt to sabotage his career fails, he decides to commit "barbicide" by drinking a bottle of chemicals. When nothing happens, he despairs, "Aww, why doesn't anything kill me?"
  • In the Futurama crossover "Simpsorama" when the rampaging Bart gremlins rip off Scruffy's mustache, he decides that life without a mustache isn't worth living and blows up his head with a laser handgun. His headless body is shown cleaning up during the end credits.
  • Grampa Simpson attempts assisted suicide when the town blames him for losing out on an NFL franchise. He's hooked up to a machine called a diePod and he chooses Glen Miller Orchestra as music and as visuals, hippies being beaten by cops.
  • In "Love is a Many Splintered Thing", Marge kicks Homer and Bart out of the house and they go to a hotel full of men whose wives have left them. In the pool, Bart finds the skeleton of a guy who drowned himself by tying a cinder block around his neck.
  • In "Holidays of Future Past", a flight attendant is casually offering suicide pills for customers.
  • In an Itchy & Scratchy short in "The Girl Who Slept Too Little", Scratchy goes to watch a production of Cats and is instantly so bored that he pulls out a giant revolver and blows his head off.
  • In "'Tis the Fifteenth Season", when the family is driving through the homeless part of town, Gil is shown about to hang himself using a Christmas light chain as a noose.
  • At the end of "Them, Robot", Homer is fishing with robot worker A63 and orders it to take the boat out to sea, despite its objection that it can't turn into an outboard motor. It sticks its head in the lake and pretends to be a motor before pressing a button that blows its head up.
  • Even Homer's attempted suicide in "Homer's Odyssey", which is otherwise played darkly and tragically straight, isn't completely immune to this. He ties a boulder to himself and drags it all the way across town to a bridge... only for there to be an identical boulder sitting right there that he could have used to save himself the effort. Ha ha...?
  • In "Let's Go Fly a Coot", upon hearing that he'll never have a birthday again, Bart pulls out his slingshot and prepares to shoot a rock down his throat.
  • At the beginning of "Treehouse of Horror XXI", when Professor Frink accidentally fast-forwards too far and spoils the rest of the episode, he declares himself unworthy of wielding the remote and uses it to rapidly age himself into dust.
• Family Guy:
  • In-universe in "The Kiss Seen Around the World," in that Tom Tucker hopes to do to a story about teenager Neil Goldman threatening to jump off the roof of city hall, accomplishing it by adding "object falling" sound effects in post-production and humorous commentary to the narrative. Thwarted when Meg overhears this and tells him he is a vile, amoral man for even thinking about trying to encourage a suicide to create a story he hopes will amuse the audience, and when Meg's body breaks Neil's fall.
  • When the Grim Reaper is injured, Peter realizes that nobody can die so he and eventually everyone else start to perform ordinarily lethal stunts for amusement.
  • In "Stewie B. Goode", a Cutaway Gag shows Stewie playing ball with a still-living Casper. Stewie throws the ball into the street, causing Casper to get hit by a car. When he reappears as a ghost, Stewie apologizes, but Casper says he planned to off himself that Tuesday anyway.
  • In Season 6's "I Dream of Jesus," both Chris and Stewie insert (presumably) loaded revolvers into their mouths, driven to that point after Peter incessantly plays the Trashmen's surf-rock classic "Surfin' Bird".
  • Season 12's "Grimm Job," where in the end, it is implied Meg hung herself. Peter ignores this, simply tenderly telling her good night.
  • At the end of "Into Harmony's Way", Peter gets on a bus and shoots himself in the head. His silhouette is briefly made visible in the window by the flash from the gun.
  • One cutaway has Meg talking to her stuffed animals before they spring to life and escape out the window as soon as she leaves the room. When she tries to convince her Care Bear to come back, it offs itself by jumping into the grill of a passing truck.
  • In "German Guy", one of the hobbies that Peter introduces Chris to is stamp collecting. Shortly after they begin, Peter becomes so bored that he shoots himself in the head despite Chris reasoning that they could just stop at any time.
  • One Cutaway Gag has Lois asking Peter if he wants to join her book club. He faux-cheerfully says “Okay!” and snaps his own neck.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The show has an unnerving fondness for this trope. Characters have killed themselves numerous times.
  • The episode "Dumber Dolls" featured a doll named "Happy Time Harry" who is so depressingly cynical, he causes the perpetually optimistic doll Jiggle Billy to lose hope and commit suicide. Jiggle Billy's head assures Meatwad that he isn't actually dead, but he is still depressed.
    Meatwad: Ya know, Happy Time, just bein’ around you kinda makes me wanna die...
  • Shake in the episode "Video Ouija"; he overdoses on sleeping pills, then slits his wrists in an electrocuted pool of piranhas while sucking on an exhaust pipe. And all so he could haunt a video game and scare Meatwad. And that backfired: Meatwad had lost interest in the game by then.
    Frylock: Meatwad, Master Shake is dead.
    Meatwad: That's cool.
• Looney Tunes used this gag a lot:
  • "One Meat Brawl" has Porky Pig admonishing his hunting dog for failing to catch a groundhog. The dog pulls out a gun halfway through the chewing-out, turns it on himself and pulls the trigger. Turns out it's a water pistol.
  • In "Tortoise Wins by a Hare", Bugs has made himself a turtle costume so he can beat Cecil Turtle in a rematch race. A group of rabbit gamblers, having bet on Bugs, mistakes him for Cecil (aided by Cecil donning a rabbit costume) and delays him, allowing Cecil to win the race. When Bugs finally makes them realize that he is the rabbit, they all say "Eh, now he tells us!" and blow their brains out.
  • Chuck Jones' "Cheese Chasers" has mice Hubie and Bertie unable to look at cheese after binging on it - they decide there's nothing to live for and try to get Claude Cat to eat them. This freaks out Claude, who, when he realizes he'll never eat another mouse, decides he needs to end it all and searches out a bulldog to massacre him. That said, the meat of the comedy is not so much that attempting suicide is funny, but the reaction from Claude (and later the bulldog), who won't aid or abet Hubie and Bertie because he's sure it's a trick (i.e., they must be poisoned).
  • Cartoon "Life with Feathers" had a lovebird trying to feed himself to Sylvester after his mate kicks him out of the nest.
  • "Plane Daffy":
    • After a messenger pigeon discovers he's blabbed too many secrets to Hata Mari and Hitler, he puts a gun to his head and slowly goes outside. Lots of gunfire is heard, then he comes back in and says, "Eh... I missed." He goes back out to finish the job.
    • The cartoon ends with a military secret reading "Hitler is a Stinker" - Hitler, seeing the message, screams "Zat is not a military secret!" Goebbels and Goering chime in "Ja - everyone knows zat!", realizing what they said in front of the Fuhrer, and shooting themselves.
    Daffy: They lose more darn "nutzis" that way!
  • The bull in the Daffy Duck cartoon "Mexican Joyride" is on the verge of committing suicide after losing a bet with Daffy (who is a matador in this). Daffy conveniently has a butcher shop set up.
  • An Itch In Time and Horton Hatches The Egg apply this with the line "Well, now I've seen everything!"
  • The Grey-Hounded Hare has Bugs trying to "save" a mechanical female rabbit that he believes is real from being "chased" by the greyhound racers, which befuddles the announcer, who says, "Now I've seen everything!", and a gunshot is heard offscreen, implying that he killed himself.
  • "Cross Country Detours" shows you a frog croaking (KA-BLAM!) (disclaimer about gruesome pun).
  • In Porky's Romance, after Petunia rejects his proposal, Porky attempts to hang himself from a tree, but the branch snaps, and while unconscious, he has a nightmare about his future Awful Wedded Life as a Henpecked Husband, which causes him to decide that Petunia isn't worth the trouble after all.
• During a flashback in Yvon of the Yukon some royal soldiers throw themselves at the king's fireplace to act as fuel for the fire. It was rather creepy.
• The King of the Hill episode "Pretty, Pretty Dresses" had Bill's periodic bouts with depression turn so bad that he became suicidal. Bill's suicide attempts were played seriously, but his neighbors' reactions to it were not. Hank was annoyed by having to take time off of work to go on "suicide watch", Dale didn't care if Bill died or not and was eager to steal his stuff, and Boomhauer was tired of it eating up so much of his time. Hank eventually snapped and broke Bill entirely by destroying his gifts to Lenore, causing him to think that the only way to be back with Lenore was to become her, much to Hank's disturbance.
• One episode of Drawn Together has Xandir committing suicide - as a video game character, he had a lot of lives to go through. He was talked out of ending his last life.
• Rugrats (1991): In "Home Movies", Grandpa Boris gets so fed up with Stu's home movies, he picks up the phone and asks for Dr. Kevorkian, an assisted suicide advocate.
• Futurama:
  • Two words: "Suicide Booth". They resemble phone booths and cost one quarter per use. The booths have at least three modes of death: "quick and painless", "slow and horrible" and "clumsy bludgeoning", and it is implied that "electrocution, with a side order of poison" exists as well. The eyes can be scooped out for an extra charge. After a mode of death is selected and executed, the machine cheerfully announces, "You are now dead. Thank you for using Stop-and-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008".
    • An extra gag is used in the first episode when Fry meets Bender in the booth with the latter intending to use it. Ever the scammer, Bender has tied the quarter to his finger with string in order to get it back out of the slot, right before his intended death.
  • In one episode, Hermes gets his job as a bureaucrat put into serious jeopardy, and his plan... is to jump off the Planet Express building. That alone would be extreme, but putting it over the top as his coworkers plead for him to stop, Bender simply shouts "Do a flip!"
  • Bender himself is prone to either threatening to —or actually trying to— commit suicide. In fact, this is what he's doing (standing in line for a Suicide Booth) when he first appears in the pilot episode. Naturally, as a robot, this is a pointless exercise. Furthermore, he is often just as cheery as his normal self while doing so.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show:
  • Ren once tried to end it all by throwing himself into the garbage disposal in the sink after Stimpy destroys his prized moose chair.
  • The episode "Haunted House" ends with a depressed ghost committing suicide by drinking poison after he keeps failing to scare Ren and Stimpy, which inexplicably causes him to come back to life.
• Beany and Cecil - In "Ben Hare" a stork grows so weary of constantly delivering a steady stream of new rabbits to the Hare-igan family that he shoots himself after his most recent visit.
• South Park has a disturbing fondness for this trope, with graphic depictions of suicide - all played for comedy - occurring on a regular basis.
  • At the end of "Coon vs Coon & Friends" Mysterion is tired and wants to go to sleep, so he shoots himself since doing so causes him to wake up in his bed the next day.
  • In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Conan O'Brien's jumper suicide is played for laughs. Especially when he crashes into and destroys a car parked on the street below, and the owner walks up to turn off the car alarm.
  • Suicide is a Running Gag at the conversion camp to which Butters is sent after expressing bi-curious tendencies. Every few minutes someone opens a door to reveal another camper who's hanged himself.
  • In the episode “Put It Down,” Cartman leaves Heidi a voicemail telling her that he’s going to kill himself. She shows Stan, who… then proceeds to show it to his friends. They all laugh at Cartman, due to how insincere his voicemail sounds and how he’s trying way too hard to sound desperate.
    Kyle: You sound like a dying pig!
• Adventure Time:
  • In "What Is Life?", Finn calls in a "blood oath" he extracted from some talking balloons by getting a ride to the Ice Kingdom and back. After he gets home, he lets the balloons float off. They're apparently looking forward to eventually bursting from the lack of air pressure in the upper atmosphere.
    Finn: Thanks, guys. Your blood oath is fullfilled.
    Balloons: Yay, to the mesosphere!
    One Balloon: Finally, we can die!
  • In the episode "Ghost Princess", Jake finally recalls how Clarence died. He was so depressed after killing his star-crossed love Warrior Princess that he took to drowning his sorrows in squeezy cheese. Eventually, he became so broken he decided to just put his mouth to the cheese nozzle and gorge himself on the stuff until he exploded. It's both hilarious and disgusting. His famous last words? "MY LIFE IS LIKE A FAAART!!!"
• In the segment "Death Metal Crash Pit" of the Regular Show episode "Terror Tales of the Park", Muscle Man is locked in an RV as an awful death metal band plays on top of said RV. Muscle Man desperately tries to break out of the RV, screaming: "HELP! This music SUCKS!" Eventually, he drives the RV into the crash pit (a big hole where Muscle Man drives broken-down cars for fun), and everyone dies. And it's hilarious. The scene ends with Muscle Man as a ghost, high-fiving his friend High-Five Ghost (who was already a ghost), saying: "Best crash pit EVER!"
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In the episode "Dunces and Dragons", the guard standing by the door of the jousting tournament says, "Right this way". SpongeBob, getting into character, friendlily chides him, "Don't you mean, 'right-eth this way-eth?'", then they go inside. Meanwhile, the guard holds his own spear to his neck and winces, cringing... then sighs, puts his spear down, and says, "SOMEDAY... but not today".
  • "Are You Happy Now?" sees a depressed Squidward teasing a suicide attempt twice: once by standing on a stool with a rope, only to reveal that he's hanging not himself, but a cage for a pet scallop^note  scallops play the role of birds in the show's underwater setting, and another by putting his head in an oven, only to pull out brownies. Both false attempts are prefaced with "I just can't get happy."
  • Squidward contemplates suicide in "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy IV". SpongeBob accidentally shrinks Squidward using Mermaid Man's shrink ray, and temporarily leaves him in Patrick's care. Patrick treats the shrunken Squidward like a toy doll, and at one point Squidward looks down from Patrick's hand and says, "I wonder if a fall from this height would be enough to kill me."
  • "One Coarse Meal" had Plankton getting annoyed at SpongeBob bothering him while he's waiting to be run over by the bus, then asks the sponge to step on him.
  • In "Something Smells", a couple of fish are so offended by SpongeBob's bad breath that they both bite onto a fishing hook and let it pull them up.
• Invader Zim, true to the dark and twisted nature of the show, has this joke in "Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom": after Dib confronts Zim, Zim just gives up and tells GIR that it's been nice working with him, then orders him to self destruct; soon, GIR responds with a cheerful "FINALLY!" and explodes.
• The Oblongs:
  • In "Disfigured Debbie", Debbie Klimer is made to live in The Valley after being disfigured in an accident and tries jumping off a bridge in The Valley. Milo tells her she can't do it, and she does - sinking into the mud. Milo clarifies to her that everyone in The Valley has tried before.
  • "Pickles' Little Amazons" has Milo dressing in drag so his mother Pickles can reach the required number of girl scouts she has to be denmother towards as part of her community service. Milo's dad Bob is worried about the implications of his son dressing as a girl and at one point responds to Milo showing an interest in crocheting by asking if he can crochet him a noose, implying a desire to hang himself over his son pursuing non-masculine activities (one can only guess how Bob can do that, given his lack of limbs).
• "Blue Cat Blues", the infamous Tom and Jerry cartoon:
  • It starts with depressed Tom sitting on the railroad tracks, bent on suicide and waiting for a train. Watching from a bridge above, Jerry laments his old friend's state and tells a story of unhappy love.
  • At the end of the episode, Jerry finds out his girlfriend has just married another mouse. Utterly dejected, he joins Tom on the trail as a distant train whistle blows while the short irises out.
• A 1940s Popeye cartoon "Happy Birthdaze" introduces Shorty, a little shnook of a sailor who's about to shoot himself because he has no friends. The cartoon begins with a Paramount Studio in-joke: when Shorty is about to shoot himself, Popeye tries to stop him with a compliment by saying he looks like Bob Hope; horrified, the former puts a HUGE gun to the head forcing the latter to stammer, "I mean - Bing Crosby!" Popeye befriends him and takes him to Olive's house to celebrate Popeye's birthday. Shorty perpetually screws things up there and attempts to shoot himself a couple more times, finally ruining things so completely that Popeye shoots him!
• American Dad!:
  • In "The Best Christmas Story Never Told", Roger becomes rich in the past when he invents disco after Stan goes back in time and a mixtape falls out of his pocket. When disco inevitably dies out and Roger goes broke, he attempts to jump through the window of his high-rise, only to find that it's reinforced.
  • "Live and Let Fry" has three CIA agents trying to get used to eating foods without trans fat. The third looks at his meal and puts a gun to his head, then the camera pans to Stan before he pulls the trigger.
  • In "Killer Vacation", Stan's attempt to kill a war criminal is botched by a suicidal lemur who tries to get Stan to kill him instead. When the guy tries to shoot Stan and Francine as they're fleeing (using Stan's gun that he was attempting to shoot the guy with), the lemur jumps in front of his bullet in slow motion, then gives a thumbs-up as it dies.
  • In "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone and His Boy Jabari", following Stan's nihilist tirade about him forcing himself to trudge through his twilight years, Steve's teacher declares "Life dismissed." and jumps out the classroom window to his death.
  • In the future as depicted in "No Weddings and a Funeral", Stan is divorced from Francine and has only a cat for company. The cat attempts to shoot itself in the head, but Stan tells him to wait until he can afford a second bullet so they can both go out.
• In The Legend of Korra, there's Varrick gleefully and hammily deciding to blow himself up with a Fantastic Nuke due to a mixture of being betrayed and wanting to keep the technology from falling into the wrong hands. Even as he sets to work, he's cracking jokes as ever, saying that his name will become synonymous with suicide even as his former ally's becomes synonymous with betrayal: "he Varricked himself because some girl Zhu Li'd him!"
• Moral Orel:
  • Orel is interrupted in his attempt to walk on water by a man deciding to jump off a bridge...only to find out the pond it covers is only knee-deep. Then he's carted away by the ambulance, first to the hospital for a broken neck, then to the prison for the broken law; turns out suicide is a federal offense in Moralton.
  • After an accidental near-death experience causes Orel to think God's trying to communicate with him, he tries killing himself to have more near-death experiences. He and his friend Doughy look pretty cheerful when Orel electrocutes himself. It decidedly turned very unfunny later on, as a) the last attempt nearly did kill him, and b) it produced some of the darkest and most disturbing imagery seen on Moral Orel (and that's saying a LOT) leading to Orel's gnostic revelation. And then Clay literally beats the revelation out of him so that he can keep up with the town's status quo on God and Heaven.
    Doughy: [as Orel electrocutes himself and falls unconscious] That was easy!
• Robot Chicken:
  • A running gag in early episodes was that the host of the Bloopers sketches would off himself at the end of every one. In the show's first episode he simply hangs himself, then later sketches show him OD'ing on prescription drugs and immediately chasing with alcohol, suffocating himself with a plastic bag, and getting in a bathtub before dropping a toaster in.
  • One sketch based on the My Buddy doll consists of Parody Commercials for three spinoff dolls: My Stalker, My Ex-Girlfriend and My Friend I Once Experimented With at Summer Camp. The last one has the doll get yelled at by a man who doesn't want anything to do with him now that he has a wife and kid, afterwards the doll somehow shoots himself in the head.
• Kaeloo:
  • A Running Gag is to have Stumpy try to commit suicide and fail hilariously.
  • In one episode, Mr. Cat gets so annoyed by Stumpy's stupidity that he hangs himself. Of course, since Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, he's back by the next scene.
  • In Episode 215, Mr. Cat convinces everyone in Smileyland except Kaeloo that the end of the world is coming, causing several people to kill themselves to save themselves from the oncoming apocalypse.
• Gravity Falls went all the way with this trope in its "Lefty" short, which has an onscreen mass suicide of tiny little alien entities piloting a human-shaped robot that can only be seen from the left. One of them even barks "I have a family!" before wharfing down his suicide pill—all of it in the vein of the show's usual Black Comedy.
• The Crumpets:
  • This tends to apply to Caprice, who contemplates or attempts suicide more than any other character in the show. A good deal of the fourth episode has her attempting different forms of suicide when it seems that her family doesn't love her, like getting struck by lightning, eating toxic grass, or getting Buried Alive. In other episodes, she threatens to kill herself if she can't live in her house, wants to be left to die when her birthday party game has flopped while being stuck in a giant gelatin dessert, or lay on the ground Playing Possum and soon joined by her friend Cassandra after failing a trial placed before they can travel independently.
  • In "Super Pfff", when the Weather Girl perceives that both of her love interests don't like her anymore, she attempts suicide by driving her car to the tornado created by the spinning of T-Bone the dog.
• The short Donald's Dilemma chronicles Daisy's breakdown after her boyfriend Donald leaves her, all played humorously. One part shows her almost attempting suicide. Not only does she have a gun to her head, but she's also prepared a noose and has a bomb, knife, grenade, and bottle of poison on the table in front of her.
• In one scene of As Told by Ginger, the characters watch a humorously melodramatic soap opera where a woman jumps out a window on her child's birthday party because her boyfriend left her. She survives.
• The first Felix the Cat short, Feline Follies, ends with Master Tom (Felix) gassing himself because his girlfriend has given birth to dozens of kittens.
• Like in Looney Tunes, it also happens in Tex Avery MGM Cartoons.
  • The end of Red Hot Riding Hood has the wolf choose to kill himself rather than accept Granny's affections.
  • In George and Junior's final cartoon "Half-Pint Pygmy", it happens to George and Junior themselves after loosing the world's smallest pygmy.
• Steven Universe: In "Buddy's Book", Buddy places his head in Lion's mouth and asks Lion to eat him.
• In the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "The Bride to Beat", a depressed raindrop Imaginary Friend tries to jump off the top of the house after his creator grows up and abandons him. Bloo accidentally throws him off the house, twice in a row, but he survives because he was holding onto an umbrella.
• In The Flintstones episode "Little Bamm Bamm" (Bamm Bamm's introduction episode), after losing the custody battle for Bamm Bamm, a heartbroken Barney feels life isn't worth living without him and attempts to jump off a bridge into a river with a big rock. Fortunately, Fred stops him in time and tells him the good news: since it turns out the other family is expecting their own baby, they allow the Rubbles to have custody of Bamm Bamm. A happy Barney then tosses the rock away...unfortunately, Fred was still holding onto the rope and goes over.
  Barney: Thanks for saving my life, Fred! I almost made a big mistake!
  Fred: (Sitting in the river) Yeah, and saving your life was my big mistake!
• The Xavier: Renegade Angel episode "Xavier's Maneuver" begins with Xavier seeing a window cleaner and thinking he is about to jump to his death, so he starts trying to talk the man out of suicide. Instead, the man is convinced by Xavier's speech to off himself and promptly leaps to his demise, splattering onto the ground in a grisly mess.
• In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, Sperg has a severe case of acne, for which the doctor slaps a brown bag over his face and states that "everyone always wants plastic.".
• The Fairly OddParents! features a suicide joke in "Farm Pit", where Timmy jumps into the tornado that took away Cosmo and Wanda in hopes that this will help him find them. He notes that this action is equally likely to kill him, which he sees as a win/win because he's found the farm work he's had to do unbearably grueling.