And Stay Out!



You've Seen It a Million Times. Alice has had enough of Bob's crap. She tells him off, turns on her heel, and marches out of his life for good, announcing "I'm leaving" as she slams the door behind her. A moment later, Bob bellows, "And Stay Out!"

This is a Stock Phrase and the archetypal example of an entire range of behaviors which boil down to attempting -- usually unsuccessfully -- to save face by recasting a negative consequence of one's own actions as a deliberate positive effect, in a kind of Xanatos Gambit-after-the-fact. Unfortunately, such attempts are often immediately obvious for what they are, and will come across to anyone else as just lame attempts to look good. This is most frequently used a Comedy Trope, but can have its place in drama as well, where Bob's attempt to save face may involve something more (and/or more drastic) than just yelling at a person who's no longer there.

Note that an instance of this trope does not have to be based around a literal door slam -- it can be any kind of attempt to save face in the wake of a disappointment or embarrassment. Typical phrases other than the trope namer shouted in moments like this include things like "No one walks out on me!", "You'll regret this!", and "You'll never work in this town again!" A less angry variation might be along the lines of "I was just testing you."  Sometimes the speaker is trying to convince anyone watching... and sometimes he's trying to convince himself.

The "Just Joking" Justification is a specific case of this trope.

Compare "You Can't Fire Me, I Quit!" Contrast Screw This, I'm Outta Here, which depending on the context, may prompt an instance of this trope.

Not to be confused with another stock phrase, "Get out and stay out!", which lacks the hypocritical context and overtones, and is in fact a genuine case of Bob tossing Alice out on her ass.

Literature

 * In Robert A. Heinlein's The Number of the Beast, Lazarus Long's obnoxiously high-handed and patronizing behavior offends the Burroughs-Carter family, who leave in a snit. Hilda Burroughs then proceeds to read him the riot act and is applauded by Lazarus' own family, who've apparently been waiting for someone to finally put him in his place. Lazarus then tries to brush it off by claiming it was a Secret Test of Character and he doesn't respect anyone who won't stand up for themselves.

Music
"I guess I showed her How much she had to lose Showed her, who was really who I know she's hurtin' now ''Looks like I showed her"
 * The phrase isn't used in Alabama's song "I Showed Her" about a man whose wife walked out on him, but the trope is there:

"I ain't missing you at all since you've been gone away I ain't missing you, no matter what my friends say"
 * Similarly, John Waite's "Missing You" expresses the trope without using the exact phrase, as the singer tries to convince himself that his love's departure affects him not at all:

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

 * The Bible: If one accepts the Alternative Character Interpretation that Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden more or less voluntarily because once their eyes were opened they realized it was completely and utterly dull, Genesis 3:24 ("So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life") becomes an Older Than Dirt case of this trope.

Web Comics

 * Invoked by name in this Irregular Webcomic! instalment, which provides the page image.

Web Original

 * Frequently seen on TV Tropes in 2012, when various wiki contributors made it known they were leaving because they did not approve of the measures the wiki management had chosen to impose in the wake of The Second Google Incident. Fast Eddie or other staff would routinely lock the accounts of such departing users and blank their troper pages as "punishment" for quitting the wiki.
 * Fast Eddie's abrupt and unilateral change of TV Tropes' license from Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) to the incompatible Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) within days of learning that the wiki content had been scraped and forked in early July 2012 can also be seen as an example of this trope. It did nothing to undo the fork or stop competing wikis from using the legally-acquired content -- it was nothing more than a "door slam" whose only purpose was to give Fast Eddie the illusion that he had any control over the situation at all.

Western Animation

 * Invoked in the Simpsons episode "Santa's Little Helper", when Homer lets the cat out, and slams the door behind it while bellowing, "And stay out!"
 * Similarly invoked for comedic purposes in the episode "Pest of the West" of SpongeBob SquarePants, where as SpongeBob rides out of town, the local Dastardly Whiplash character shouts "And stay out!"
 * My Life as a Teenage Robot: Jenny shouts this to the partygoers in "Party Machine".

Real Life
"“When we reached out to Donald Trump’s office early this week about the reporting we had, and also the details in this newly revised CIA book,” [Fever Dreams co-host Asawin Suebsaeng] relates, “he tried to convince us that his current lack of post-presidency briefings is all his own decision. It was all by his own design… “It has incredibly huge ‘You didn’t dump me, I broke up with you first’ energy.”"
 * According to the December 1, 2021 "Fever Dreams" column/pocast on The Daily Beast news website, former American President Donald Trump -- who was banned by his successor Joe Biden from receiving traditional post-Presidency intelligence briefings after the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt -- has begun claiming that he wasn't banned, he instead actively refused to accept those briefings: