1000 Ways to Die/Tear Jerker

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Despite it being a show about death, this show actually averts the trope by showing the victims as jerks and deviants who deserve to die. Then, there are the handful of deaths in which the victims were more-or-less innocent and didn't deserve what was coming to them:

  • #1: Ichi-boned: The story about Serika and Hitoshi, the Twice Shy Japanese couple who died of a heart attack while having sex for the very first time (they were so sexually repressed that they've never experienced an orgasm prior to their being married) after trying several times to consummate their marriage and failing. Being a Tear Jerker (and, according to the narrator, the least horrific and most awesome way to die), it's probably why it's listed as number one on the list.
  • #96: Poi Vey: An Orthodox Jewish rabbi who had a crush on a hula dancer, got rejected by her, and died when he drunkenly stumbled into a Hawaiian torch ceremony. His attempts to woo her were invasive [1], but getting burned alive for it is a bit harsh.
  • #146: Belly'd Up: A belly dancer training for a competition accidentally hangs herself on a moving ceiling fan. Other than leaving the ceiling fan on while practicing, she didn't seem to be a bad person (she even put herself through veterinarian school with her talent). At least she died doing what she loved.
  • #171: Nite Capped: A random man is killed when a group of revellers having a New Years' barbecue several miles away fires a gun into the air. The bullet came down and killed the random man on impact.
  • #196: Radium Girls: A group of female workers from the 1920s discover that the radioactive paint that they use for the watches they detail can make skin glow in the dark (one of the workers uses this as glow-in-the-dark Body Paint during sex). Overtime, the radioactive paint gets absorbed in their bodies and causes bone cancer. Some of the girls died; those who survived filed a lawsuit against the company and pushed for better safety standards in the workplace.
  • #208: Semi-cide: Frank, who got cut into two while working on his car at a gas station. Not only his death was among the ugliest in the bunch (and both halves were sent to different hospitals by mistake), but there was nothing that suggested he was a Jerkass or anything. Worse still, the story was set up with the viewer thinking that a honeymooning couple who made a pitstop were the ones that were going to die (whether by a gas station explosion or one or both of them getting hit by a car that didn't see them on the road).
  • #232: Nine Inch Nailed: A trio of cleaners at a local dump slack off, deciding that it'd be more fun to roll down a hill in a giant tire with a ramp at the bottom. When one of the men rolls down and hits the ramp, the ramp collapses and exposes two nine-inch framing nails from the ramp that puncture through the tire and sever the man's spinal cord. You may be saying to yourself, "These are the typical idiots that appear on 1000 Ways, so why is this in the Tear Jerker section?" Shortly after, one of the men let's out an anguished Big No, and cries as he cradled the now-deceased man in his arms, wailing that "he was like a brother to me!" DAMN.
  • #393: Deep Sleep (Walk): A woman sleepwalks off a dock into the water and drowns before she can wake up. Nothing indicated she was a jerk or an idiot [2].
  • #444: Deadliest Munch: A lesbian chokes to death on her lover's edible G-string. Neither was a particularly bad person (the worst thing either of the girls did was ruin dinner by leaving the roast in the oven for too long, and she wasn't even the one who died).
  • #518: Jake-N-Baked: A metal worker who suffered from narcolepsy and ended up sleeping inside a curing oven and getting burned to death. Other than constantly falling asleep in unusual places (like the bathroom or at his work station), he seemed like a pretty okay guy.
  • #645: Amish-Tinguished: It features Jebediah, a Naive Newcomer in his Rumspringa, gets caught in the middle of Halloween celebrations, seems to be having a good time... only to get drunk and die for it for something that was completely out of his reach (being born without an enzyme that processes alcohol, making the chemical act like literal poison when ingested). Poor dude!
  • #832: Lesbocution: A young woman who has been in a bad string of relationships with men goes on her first date with a woman. Coming out of a club, she stops at a crosswalk to remove her uncomfortable high heels (something many woman have done after a long night out) and accidentally steps on an exposed wire in her bare feet. She wasn't drunk or behaving irresponsibly, and she died because of someone else's negligence.
  • #1000: Premature Endings: Much like "Ichiboned," this segment featured a death that wasn't caused by stupidity or accident or a freak medical condition. The death was an elderly man (seen as a caring, hard-working, and faithful man to his family and friends) dying peacefully in his sleep while his adult daughter stayed by his bedside, sad that he's about to die, but understanding that he's been sick for a while, he's lived a rich and full life, and it's his time to go. As he dies, the narrator notes that the show, as a whole, is more than just a lurid docu-fiction on strange and brutal deaths; it's a show about how to live, summed up in this Aesop: You can either end up like the idiots, freaks, and JerkAsses in the hospital waiting room (or, worse, like all of the people who have died in past episodes) and end up as a 1000 Ways to Die story, or you can just watch the show as entertainment, try and live a good life where you use your common sense and brains, and get rewarded by dying of natural causes with your family and friends at your side. Considering the show's content, that's pretty deep.
  1. and who hasn't been in a similar situation of being so infatuated with someone that you'd do stupid and crazy things to win him or her over, and it ends up being all in vain
  2. though if she were more aware of her somnambulism, she wouldn't have made her home anywhere where she could be wandering and end up injured or dead, i.e., living near water