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Comically Small Bribe: Difference between revisions
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* Bribing people with [[We Have Those, Too|something they have in a great abundance]], like offering a rock monster a rock you just found on the ground.
Sometimes gets inverted; the initial bribe is very large, at least by the standards of the person offering it. The other character refuses it but accepts something comparatively worthless instead, maybe even making the reduced counter-offer themselves. This is more likely to be a dramatic example than the normal way around-- typically because the person taking the "bribe" has reasons of their own to do what's asked of them, but want to make a statement of some sort with the token payment. A specific example common in the real world is taking a single dollar (or local equivalent) as payment for services rendered; this is done because both sides have to give '''something''' [
Can also apply to unusually small payments, tips, or demands. Usually [[Played for Laughs]]. Contrast [[Worthless Yellow Rocks]], where the characters treat something as being less valuable than it is, rather than more valuable. Compare [[Not Rare Over There]], where something is valuable to someone, but only because they need it and can't find it.
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* On ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)|Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', Anya once tried to bribe a demon with promises that she would have sex with him, and the demon responded that he didn't find a human-looking creature like Anya to be sexually attractive (thus [[Averted Trope|averting]] the [[Mars Needs Women]] trope that has certainly been played straight elsewhere in the Buffyverse). Of course, Anya was insulted that her sexual bribery turned out to be a [[Comically Small Bribe]]. (There's a [[Double Entendre]] in there somewhere, but not quite as easily as if it were a male getting turned down.)
* On ''[[Blue Water High]]'', Anna once suggested Simmo keep Deb occupied by offering her vouchers to a PG-rated movie.
* In 1996 the town of Wahoo Nebraska started a campaign to become ''The Late Show with [[David Letterman]]'''s [
* ''[[The Office]]'': Michael tries to give a terminated employee a pack of coupons in an attempt to make everything cool between them. Especially given that Michael is only firing him so that he doesn't appear indecisive, this doesn't go over well.
** When Dwight was left in charge after Michael's departure in the Season 3 finale, he announced that employees would receive "Schrute Bucks" when they did something good. He said that 1,000 Schrute Bucks would earn the recipient five extra minutes of lunch time, and that one Schrute Buck was worth 1/100 of a cent in actual money.
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== Web Original ==
* [[The Angry Video Game Nerd (Web Video)|The Angry Video Game Nerd]] does its own spin on this. When [[Pat the Nes Punk]] {{spoiler|discovers a gold ''Nintendo World Championship '90'' cart in a game bundle the Nerd bought}}, the Nerd tries to trade it back for some very common/pack-in games, such as ''Combat'' for [[Atari 2600]] and ''[[Super Mario Bros]]''/''[[Duck Hunt]]'' for [[Nintendo Entertainment System|the NES]]. [[You Can't Thwart Stage One|It goes along as well as you'd expect.]]
* In ''[[Blogging Twilight]]'', when Dan reaches the part where Alice bribes a guard with a "thousand dollar bill", he is initially confused as to what currency that is exactly, seeing as there is no thousand dollar bill in either US currency or Euros. He ultimately concludes that it must be a thousand Lira which is worth about seventy-five American cents, noting "So this guard is either really stupid and doesn't know much about money, or he's very poor and needs whatever funds he can scrounge up to buy half a potato for dinner." (Presumably the text meant to suggest that Alice still had thousand dollar American bills, [
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== Real Life ==
* The German satirical magazine ''Titanic'' offered a cuckoo clock, sausages and ham to delegates of the FIFA World championship committee to support the German bid to host the 2006 [[The World Cup|World Cup]]. A $20 value for arguably the biggest sporting event in the world. [
* On November 8, 2009, Chad Ochocinco of the Cincinnati Bengals offered an official $1 during a replay challenge on one of his own catches. Even though he was joking, he got hit with a $20,000 fine.
* [http://notalwaysright.com/bribery-adjusted-for-inflation/502 This] [[Not Always Right]] entry has a customer, convinced that the cashier knows when the store will get more Wiis but is trying to keep it secret, try to bribe him with $20 for the info. As the cashier points out, even assuming he ''did'' have secret knowledge of the store's shipments, $20 is not worth the punishment he'd get for giving out such a secret.
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