Misused: Hilarity Ensues

Hilarity Ensues is defined as "things are played for comedy despite being dangerous and/or illegal in real life". However, people have been using it to just mean "something funny happens", which is superfluous considering we have Funny Momnents, Played for Laughs, and Comedy Tropes.

It doesn't help that when people mention "hilarity ensuing" off-wiki, it really does mean "something funny happens" or "...and then a bunch of funny things happened, but we won't tell you what they were because that would be a Spoiler."

Wick Check

So, unless I made a mistake, out of 101 wicks, 21 are correct, 56 are incorrect, and the rest I can't tell. Please don't let this be all for naught as it took a lot of work to do the wick check!

Opening.

Never considered this trope before. Guess I just filed such situations off under Rule of Funny.

Edited by eroock on Dec 28th 2020 at 8:35:58 AM

This trope name is awful and should just redirect to Played for Laughs.

We should consider if there's a trope for "doing something dangerous or illegal For the Lulz". If so, move examples there; if not, rename this page and use it.

I mean, there are a lot of correct wicks in the wick check.

to redirecting it to Played for Laughs and launching a new page for "dangerous things are made funny".

There are plenty of wicks that use it correctly. My idea is to either have a cleanup, redefine Hilarity Ensues, or make Hilarity Ensues a disambig.

Edited by ImperialMajestyXO on Dec 27th 2020 at 3:17:37 AM

That would be a monumental undertaking. It's easier to conform to the misuse and move valid examples elsewhere.

In addition, in the thread for Reality Ensues, I said the easiest solution would probably be to take the proper definition of Hilarity Ensues to TLP and give up on the wicks that misuse the old name, a la what was done with Incredibly Lame Pun wicks after it was moved to Lame Pun Reaction. (I know that sounds pessimistic, but I'm not joking or trying to be snarky by saying to give up on those Hilarity Ensues wicks; we've had at least one mod statement that Incredibly Lame Pun sinkholes got so out of hand that the staff gave up on getting rid of them.)

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 27th 2020 at 5:47:49 AM

Stock Phrases Are Not Tropes. This is used primarily as a Pothole Magnet, which was missed in the wick check, so we shouldn't keep this title.

Also, the OP missed an important part of the definition — the trope description refers specifically to dangerous situations Played for Laughs being harmless, although most examples are likely to fit this extra criterion. Call this new trope Comedy Armor, perhaps?

I mean, pothole magnets and stock phrases are two different things, so I'm not seeing what you're saying with the title.

Stock Phrases Are Not Tropes is a redirect to No New Stock Phrases, which is mainly about how new tropes and trope names can't be stock phrases. That policy came to be in 2011, and Hilarity Ensues has existed since 2007 (or maybe longer; it's possible that page creation dates weren't recorded until 2007 and that the page is older than that, but I joined in 2008 so I wouldn't know).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 27th 2020 at 7:14:41 AM

Well, part of the reason why we have No New Stock Phrases is because the old ones tended to have issues such as these here. So I wouldn't necessarily stipulate a grandfather clause.

That.

It's not grandfather clause if the title isn't a stock phrase. Which this isn't.

The problem here would be that the trope name is more akin to a pothole magnet/stock line than something that defines a trope.

That I agree with, obviously. It's just weird to throw around the stock phrase rule here when the situation isn't the same. It's not a stock phrase. It's a pothole magnet.

The reason I didn't call it a pothole magnet was because, as far as I know, people name-drop it by outright saying its name, rather than potholing, most of the time. I could be wrong, though.

I'm aware that there's no Grandfather Clause for the existence of pages for Stock Phrases; I previously argued in favor of cutting ones like In Theory and Go Figure. I was referring to dialogue-based names for tropes that aren't dialogue-based themselves, such as how Let's Get Dangerous! is about silly and/or incompetent characters taking action rather than the phrase "let's get dangerous" itself. (Then again, I've seen a couple of cases of that trope getting misused to refer to characters who were already serious/competent, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Edit: Also, I agree with the above post from Unicorndance. Wicks that misuse Hilarity Ensues tend to display the name as-is instead of potholing it (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen it potholed instead of displayed as-is). That's as opposed to something like Captain Obvious sinkholes, which tend to bury the wick in a pothole to something the writer thinks is obvious.

Another edit: This post and my previous post might have been kind of poorly thought out, since I've had a cold lately and I wrote my previous post while tired (I've taken a nap since then).

Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 28th 2020 at 5:10:04 AM

Get well soon!

Back on topic, I agree with renaming it to Comedy Armour and redirecting the old name to Played for Laughs.

^ That redirect would only work for use of Hilarity Ensues in flow text, not in example lists.

And then those "examples" would just have to get removed.