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Breaking Bad News Gently: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|"Do sit down, Sergeant. Shocks are so much better absorbed with the knees bent."
|'''Lord Summerisle''' ''[[The Wicker Man]]''}}
Bad news is of course hard to tell to other people (unless someone is feeling malicious), which means it's preferable in those circumstances to try to break the news as gently as possible.
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A [[Super-Trope]] to [[Bad News in a Good Way]], [[Good News, Bad News]].
{{examples}}
* A man goes on vacation and his friend is watching his cat. A few days in the man calls to check up, and the friend says "your cat fell off the roof and died." The man says, "Ouch! Couldn't you have said it more gently, like 'Your cat climbed up on the roof, there was a loose tile, she fell, I rushed her to the vet, but there was nothing they could do?' " The friend apologizes and a few months go by. The man goes away again, and calls to check in. His friend says "Your mother climbed up on the roof..."▼
== [[Film]] ==
* Used in ''[[Facing the Giants]]'', when Coach Grant Taylor gets a call informing him that {{spoiler|his team will be allowed into the playoffs after all because the team they lost to in the last game cheated.}} You only hear Grant's end of the conversation, but he repeats the callers question of "Am I sitting down?" with obvious confusion.
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*** [[Black Comedy]] being ever popular, it eventually inspired a [[filk]] song. In which it's a call to Soviet nuclear submarine on power trial from the deputy minister. He's told that the screwdriver got broken, but other than that all is well (and we still got a whole crate of alcohol!). Why, it got broken because it fell into a switchboard and got incinerated… It turns out that their radar spontaneously shut down at the start of missile launch test, so they tried to aim manually, sank their own supply ship, the commander angrily hurled a still-burning cigarette butt into the open hatch, then ammunition went off, stern took water, the submarine began to sink, reactor didn't take excessive trim difference well, an engineer decided he's going to be a hero and save everyone, but got a screwdriver knocked out of his hand by a spark — so expecting the reactor to go boom very soon, they escaped in a liferaft, and are rather close to a NATO base by the way. But other than that, "all is well"!
** ''[[Tintin]]'' had [//lachansonfrancaise.net/2014/06/08/tout-va-tres-bien-madame-la-marquise/ a drunk character sing] a fragment of ''Marquise''.
== [[New Media]] ==
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== [[Radio]] ==
* Done in ''[[The Navy Lark]]'' between [[Cloudcuckoolander|Mister Phillips]] and the ship's Chaplain in a very confused conversation about a pregnant racehorse (which the Chaplain thinks it is a girl Phillips has got knocked up due to how Phillips broached the subject), with the Chaplain being so shocked that after having had to sit down he declares "I think I better stand up again".
== [[Recorded and Stand Up Comedy]] ==
▲* A man goes on vacation and his friend is watching his cat. A few days in the man calls to check up, and the friend says "your cat fell off the roof and died." The man says, "Ouch! Couldn't you have said it more gently, like 'Your cat climbed up on the roof, there was a loose tile, she fell, I rushed her to the vet, but there was nothing they could do?' " The friend apologizes and a few months go by. The man goes away again, and calls to check in. His friend says "Your mother climbed up on the roof..."
== [[Web Animation]] ==
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