Funny Aneurysm Moment/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


It sure was. [1]

Examples of Funny Aneurysm Moments in Live-Action TV include:

  • The Trope Namer from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In early season four, Buffy is commenting on how her mother would react to the price of her text-books, stating flippantly, "I hope it's a funny aneurysm." Next season, her mother has a brain tumor removed, and later suddenly dies of a side-effect of surgery: an aneurysm.
    • Another Buffy the Vampire Slayer example: In an early episode of Season 7, Buffy kills a flesh-eating demon named Gnarl by poking his eyes out with her thumbs, a sight that Xander responds to with understandable and amusing disgust. (His exact words are 'Eww, thumbs?") Several episodes later, psychotic preacher Caleb drives his thumb into Xander's left eye.
    • Way back in the Season 3 episode, "Dead Man's Party," Buffy said to Xander, "Didn't anyone ever warn you about playing with pointy sticks? It's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye."
    • The season six episode "All The Way," in which Xander dressed as a pirate, complete with eyepatch. (Xander's first line after he loses his eye mentions that pirate costume).
    • "Bad Girls", in which Xander covers his eye to keep Buffy from seeing his post-sex-with-Faith twitch, and "Something Blue", in which Xander asks to be blind along with Giles after watching Spike and Buffy kiss.
    • Cordelia comments to Giles in the season 3 episode "Gingerbread" that he was going to "wake up in a coma" on account of all the head traumas he had received. At the end of season 4 of Angel, Cordelia was left in a coma; she died without ever waking up.
    • The season five episode "The Replacement," in which Xander is split into two versions of himself. At one point he says to Anya that "very soon you won't be worrying about growing old!" Roughly three years later, Anya is killed in the Final Battle.
    • The Columbine High School massacre occurred one week before the original planned air-date of the season three episode "Earshot," which was about preventing a school shooting. It included this line by Xander:

"Who hasn't idly thought about taking out the whole school with a semi-automatic?"

      • After Buffy glares at him, he adds, "I said idly."
      • Even The Stoic Oz would later have cringed over the comment about school shootings becoming trendy, since...well...they did.
    • In the cold open to the second season episode "Bad Eggs", Joyce asks Buffy if she thinks of anything other than boys and clothes. Buffy responds that she thinks about saving the world from vampires. Then we get to season six, "Normal Again", where we learn that Buffy was once institutionalized for telling her parents about vampires. Joyce's exasperation in "Bad Eggs" takes on a much darker tone.
    • For few episodes late in Season 6, Xander is shown drowning his sorrows a bit too much and later mentions "hitting bottom." Two years later, Nicholas Brendon revealed that he's an alcoholic.
    • In the season 5 episode "Triangle", Anya makes Xander promise that if he ever leaves her she wants lots and lots of warning, including "big flashing red lights and one of those clocks that counts down like a bomb in the movies and there's a whole bunch of coloured wires and I'm not sure which is the right one to cut but I guess the green one and then at the last second no, the red one, and then click, it stops, with three tenths of a second left, and then you don't leave." Next season, he leaves her at the altar with basically no foreshadowing. Finally, in season seven, she is almost killed by a bomb like the one she described.
    • The mostly-lighthearted song 'I'll Never Tell' between Anya and Xander from Once More With Feeling, in which they sing about their fears for the future becomes Harsher in Hindsight twice over: Anya's line "I know that come the day I'll want to run and hide" after Xander leaves Anya at the altar nine episodes later, and Anya's fears about growing older when she dies in season 7.
    • John Ritter fans will find "Ted" very hard to watch since it involves him coming back from the dead.
    • Faith screwing Xander's brains out in The Zeppo where he singlehandedly stops a plot to blow open the hellmouth? Funny and awesome. When it's revealed men are less than nothing to her? It stops being awesome. When Willow finds out and is in the bathroom crying it stops being funny. And Faith later trying to rape then kill Xander makes it this trope.
    • "Lover's Walk" where the viewer is made to believe Cordelia died. Compare that with the Angel episode "You're Welcome" where the viewer is made to believe Cordelia is alive.
    • Anya in "Selfless" tells Buffy that it will take more than a sword through the chest to kill her, foreshadowing how she dies in the finale.
    • An in-universe example and lampshading occurs in the 07x07 episode "Conversations with Dead People":

Holden: Hey, you remember Jason Wheeler, you know, "Crazy J"?
Buffy: Oh, yeah.
Holden: He always had that shtick of [waves hands around] "Yeah, I'm crazy, I'm crazy!"
Buffy: How is he?
Holden: Crazy. He's been in the chronic ward since graduation. *Beat* Not really that funny, I guess.

    • One that fits well enough to be mentioned: in Family, when Tara asks Willow how she can make her feel the way she does, and Willow responds "Magic." In light of the fact that Willow later erases Tara's memory to make her feel love instead of anger towards her with magic, it is incredibly sad.
    • Season One's "I Robot, You Jane" ends with Buffy, Willow, and Xander bemoaning how hard it is to have a nice, normal, happy relationship on the Hellmouth. It's fairly lighthearted as none of the character's failed relationships to date were actually that traumatic, but considering all that happens over the next seven seasons it's really painful. It also seems like a Lampshade Hanging when, just after the characters have finished saying how hard it is to have a happy relationship, the episode closes out to Joss Whedon's Executive Producer credit, but given that Whedon wasn't really known for putting characters through hell just yet, it's probably unintentional.
      • And that's not even considering the fact that that episode is Jenny Calendar's first appearance.
  • Angel: In the episode where Cordelia gets her haunted apartment, she utters the line "How come Patrick Swayze is never dead when you need him?", a reference to the movie Ghost. However, since his death in 2009...
    • In "Ground State", as Fred goes on an uncharacteristic rant about her increased responsibilities, Gunn jokes he doesn't know what kind of "alien female thing" has replaced her. In season five, she is replaced by an alien female thing, and it is heartbreaking.
      • Similarly, Gunn's argument with Angel in "The Price" is almost word for word what Gunn himself did that contributed to Fred's death.

Gunn: This is because of you, what you did. Messing with scary ass mojo no sane person should be messing with.
Angel: I did what I had to do
Gunn: You did what you want to get what you want, to hell with the consequences.
Angel: My son--
Gunn: Is dead. Fred's not.

  • In episode 13 of Season 2 of Charmed, Prue and Piper end up transporting a hostile venomous snake and hostile rabbit respectively. When Prue asks "Why do I get the snake?", Piper's jokey response is "You're the oldest; you've lived a full life". When Prue dies a season and a half later at the age of 30, this becomes less funny.
  • In one episode of Hearts Afire, due to a mix-up at a doctor's office, John Ritter's character thinks he may have a previously-unknown medical condition that will kill him suddenly. Death imitates art.
  • While introducing his infamous Blind Black White Supremacist sketch on Chappelle's Show, Dave said "I haven't been canceled yet. But I'm working on it." Not as funny when you know about all the drama surrounding the end of his show.
    • There's an even worse one during the "Nigger Family" skit, a skit about a white family whose last name happens to be Nigger, allowing the character to make a whole host of n-word puns. Chappelle's character follows up a collection of n-word puns by saying in a humorous tone, "This racism is killing me inside." Guess why he left the show?
    • Trading Spouses was a sketch on an early episode of Chappelle's Show. About a year later, Trading Spouses was defictionalized.
    • In the "Negrodamus" sketch, Negrodamus, a black Nostradamus was asked whether Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver's marriage would last, to which he predicted no. Come 2011, that marriage is indeed ending.
  • News Radio: One of the more severe examples comes from the Titanic episode. At the end of the episode, Phil Hartman addresses the audience as Phil Hartman (rather than his character Bill McNeal), and explains that no one in the cast really died, at which point the rest of the cast show up and explain that Dave (Foley) drowned while filming the last scene. Hartman then explains that "Okay, so only one person died..." This was Hartman's last scene ever: he was killed soon after this episode aired. This scene was removed in syndication, probably for this reason, but kept in the DVD release.
    • The last in-character scene of that Titanic episode ended with the implication of, as Phil Hartman put it, "Matthew and I eating each other". Matthew was played by Andy Dick, who Jon Lovitz claims indirectly caused Hartman's death by re-introducing Hartman's wife to the cocaine that contributed to her murder-suicide.
    • Another cringe-inducing moment comes in an earlier episode where McNeal is arrested, and Dave concludes that the only way the police could have dealt with him would have been to shoot him.
    • The Halloween one, where the whole B plot revolves around Bill being depressed that a psychic tells him he's going to die 'so soon' (for him, although it was still far in the future) but ends when the psychic gets tired of him and tells him he'll live a ridiculously long time. Funny then, but in retrospect...
    • Then there is references to Bill's crazy ex-girlfriend Linda and Bill is oblivious to her behavior as being abnormal. (Ep. 218 "Led Zeppelin"). In Ep. 410 "Look Who's Talking", the woman he was seeing tried to set fire to his hair while he was sleeping.
    • Lest anyone think Phil Hartman's death is the only FAM material on News Radio, the Aborted Arc with a character played by Lauren Graham being brought in as Mr. James' "Plan B" for the station became a little cringe-worthy in 2009 when Lauren Graham replaced News Radio alumnus Maura Tierney on Parenthood after Tierney left to undergo treatment for breast cancer.
  • Friends: In one early episode, Chandler jokes about being abducted by aliens, saying, "They did experiments on me! I can't have children!" Later, Joey thinks Chandler has gotten Monica pregnant, and upon learning Monica is not pregnant, replies, "Slow swimmers?" In Season 9, Chandler learns his sperm have low motility and he and Monica are unable to conceive a child. This earns double painful points, due to Courteney Cox-Arquette's long real-life battle with infertility.
    • That last part was most likely intentional - it was revealed courtesy of discovery from a discrimination lawsuit leveled against the writing room that her infertility was a regular subject of mockery by the writing staff. But we didn't know that at the time.
    • The Thanksgiving episode of season eight guest-starred Brad Pitt (then married to Jennifer Aniston) as a friend of Monica's from high school who fervently hated Rachel. Given the couple's highly publicized and painful divorce, this episode is hard to watch without cringing.
    • The storyline of everyone trying to get Chandler to quit smoking, given Matthew Perry's later substance-abuse problems.
      • By extension, Monica mocking Chandler's weight in a season 2 episode while offering to be his personal fitness trainer. Not so funny now after witnessing Matthew Perry's wildly fluctuating weight throughout the show's run, resulting from his aforementioned addiction to opioids, amphetamines, and alcohol.
  • Scrubs: Michael J. Fox playing a doctor with OCD is lent extra weight by his later commercials showing the effects Parkinson's has had on him. (The Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder was originally added to explain the already-apparent tics.)
    • In one of John Ritter's appearances as JD's father, he utters the line "Heart murmurs? I love those things!" Ritter died of an aortic dissection, an undetectable heart condition. The character died, as well, of a massive heart attack.
    • In the fourth season episode "My First Kill", Dr. Cox tells J.D that every doctor eventually kills a patient. When asked if he's ever killed a patient, Cox replies, "no, but I'm the exception that proves the rule". Next season, he ends up killing three patients and becomes almost catatonic with guilt.
  • Of all the sketch comedy shows out there (past and present), none have more FAMs than NBC's Saturday Night Live. Some can be interpreted as a darkly funny Hilarious in Hindsight moment; others completely kill the joke. Some examples:
    • The infamous "Don't Look Back in Anger" short film that showed an elderly John Belushi as the last living member of the original "Not Ready for Primetime" cast who ends up dancing on his cast mates' graves. This was funny in the late 70's because John Belushi was known for his hard partying lifestyle, while (most of) the rest of the cast were not. Not so much after he became the first original cast member to die. A video clip is available here.
      • There was also an opening with John Belushi in a wheelchair, due to a knee injury. His doctor is there, telling Lorne Michaels to let John do the show. The doctor then threatens to cut off John's drug supply if he doesn't do the show, which motivates John to do the show.
    • A lesser known example from the "Not Ready for Prime Time" era is in a sketch known as "Least-Loved Bedtime Stories." Michael O'Donoghue narrates a story called "The Little Engine that Died," where he says "I think I can...I Think I Can...HEARTATTACK...OHMYGODTHEPAIN!" In 1994, "Mr. Mike" woke up, felt what was thought to be a severe migraine headache, and screamed "OH MY GOD" in pain and later died from cerebral hemorrhage. Michael O'Donoghue was an SNL writer known for his sadistic humor and his frequent migraines, making this death a literal "funny aneurysm moment" and a Karmic Death.
    • On season 5 (the 1979-1980 season), Strother Martin hosted SNL. One of the sketches he was in was about a dying man who recorded a video will. In August of 1980, Strother Martin died, not only making the episode (Martin's last acting gig, mind you) he hosted a Missing Episode, but making the video will sketch a lot less funny.
    • Any time Chris Farley faked a heart attack during the Chicago Superfans sketches. Also, the one-off sketch where Farley plays a man called "The Relapse Guy" who keeps going on and falling off the wagon.
    • The final sketch on the season 19 finale hosted by Heather Locklear where Phil Hartman sings a lullaby to Chris Farley. It was meant to be sweet and signal the end of the season, but with both Farley and Hartman dead, it's now too depressing to watch.
    • On the season 11 premiere hosted by Madonna, there was a cold opening where then-NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff announces that he's subjecting the 1985-1986 season cast to mandatory urine tests for drugs (this sketch was later Edited for Syndication, as the censors in the 1980s thought that the idea of urine testing was too taboo for late-night TV at the time -- never mind that SNL is supposed to be the vanguard of edgy, late-night TV humor). One of the cast members during the 11th season was a 20-year-old Robert Downey, Jr., who would later spend all of the 1990s being more well-known for his drug abuse and arrests than his movies (though it was playing addicts that gave Downey a Career Resurrection in the 2000s. Go figure).
    • When Phil Hartman came back to host for the second time (in season 22 -- the 1996-1997 season), he says in his monologue that he bought his family's affection with the money he makes from being on "News Radio" and "The Simpsons." Apparently, it didn't work, when you consider what happened to Hartman a few months after he hosted.
      • In May of 1993, during an episode hosted by John Goodman, there was a sketch that ended with a preview for a fake COPS show taking place in Little Rock, AR. This ends up being a scene of the Clintons (played by Phil Hartman and Jan Hooks) where Bill was being abused by Hilary. This alone is cringeworthy given that it seemed as if Phil was in an abusive relationship in real life, but the kicker was when one of the cops (played by Kevin Nealon) said something along the lines of "She's gonna keep doing this. And one day, she's going to kill you" So yeah...
    • In 1991, Quantum Leap aired a episode called Permanent Wave which focuses on the recent murder of a off-screen character. And guess what? The victim's name is Phil Hartman.
    • The episode hosted by Charlize Theron on the 2000-2001 season had a cold opening called "A Glimpse into Our Possible Future," a sketch showing what would happen to America if George W. Bush were President (and later, if Al Gore were President and if Ralph Nader were President). While the sketch did exaggerate how far George W. Bush (played by Will Ferrell) would run America into the ground (like setting the Great Lakes on fire or giving Texas to Communists), lines like, "I hope I get a war. Wars are like executions supersized," and "I killed Dick Cheney in a hunting accident" (and the fact that his new map of the United States shows several flooded states starting in Louisiana and pooling in the Midwest and California as a flaming wreck) now don't seem so funny.
    • When she came back to host the last episode of season 30 in 2005, Lindsay Lohan is visited by "Future Lindsay" (played by Amy Poehler), who tells her to take it easy with the partying. Cut to five years later, and jokes about Lindsay Lohan becoming a drunken, drugged-out mess with no career aren't so funny anymore.
    • On the Seth Rogen/Phoenix episode from season 34, Seth Meyers (the Weekend Update anchor) did a report on how during Michael Jackson's summer world tour, he would bring his son onstage, who would be accompanied by a police officer who would have Michael Jackson arrested. Unfortunately, the concert (and the punchline to the joke) would never come to pass due to Jackson's death two months after the episode originally aired.
    • Then there's that SNL Digital Short where Bill Hader plays a man who writes a letter to his sister and his friend (played by Andy Samberg) shoots him, leading to the shooting deaths of another man (played by episode host Shia LaBeouf), the sister (played by Kristen Wiig), and two police officers (played by Fred Armisen and Jason Sudeikis). Two days after the sketch aired, the shooting at Virginia Tech happened, which was one of two reasons why the sketch never appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live web page, which has video highlights of past and present sketches (the other reason being that NBC never cleared the copyright to the song used in the sketch). What a shame that everyone overreacted to a simple parody of The OC. As it was, the short became one of the first from the show's to be unofficially popularized on YouTube. Memetic Mutation followed; the Imogen Heap song which SNL couldn't get cleared has now been sampled for a hip-hop beat.
    • The SNL episode from season 35 hosted by Blake Lively from Gossip Girl had a Weekend Update segment where Abby Elliott plays a looped-out Brittany Murphy who thinks she's hosting SNL with musical guest Blink-182 (Quick note: Brittany Murphy actually did host SNL during its 28th season in 2002, only the musical guest was Nelly, not Blink-182). The Blake Lively episode aired on December 5th, 2009, fifteen days before the real Brittany Murphy would suddenly die of cardiac arrest. Because of this, Hulu.com pulled the video of this segment and the NBC TV rerun of this episode does not include this part.
    • Here's one that doesn't involve death, but still became controversial after the fact: On the Anne Hathaway/The Killers episode, there was a sketch about the assorted deadbeats and greedy people who would benefit from the economic bailout at the time. One of the people was a couple by the name of Herbert and Marion Sandler (played by long time cast member Darrell Hammond and 2-year feature player Casey Wilson), who screwed Wachovia Bank out of a lot of money and personally thanked the Congress for not holding them responsible for their corrupt activities. Who would have guessed that Herbert and Marion Sandler were an actual couple that actually did this (according to show creator Lorne Michaels, he and the other writers had no clue about this until after the sketch aired)? Because of this, the Internet video version of the CSPAN Bailout sketch and the NBC rerun of the Anne Hathaway episode edited out the entire part with the Sandler couple.
    • When Al Gore hosted a Christmas episode in season 28 (2002-2003), the monologue showed how Al Gore picked his running mate, rejecting John Kerry (Seth Meyers) and John Edwards (Will Forte). Gore then remarks that "one of them would make a great Vice President someday." Kerry and Edwards would team up to run for President and Vice-President in 2004, only to be beaten by Bush and Cheney (who were running for re-election).
      • A "Meet the Press" sketch on the episode hosted by Senator John McCain (the genuine article, not a cast member impersonation) in 2002 had McCain denying that he would run for President in 2004. McCain was right; he didn't run in 2004. The 2008 election was a different story, and, depending on your political leanings, the fact that McCain ran and lost is either an aneurysm moment or Hilarious in Hindsight.
    • From the Jean Doumanian era, at the end of the first episode (hosted by Elliot Gould), Gould introduces the cast again and tells the audience, "We're gonna be around forever!" Eleven episodes later, all but Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo were fired after the F-bomb debacle on the episode hosted by Charlene Tilton and most of the cast members from that season have all but disappeared from the limelight.
      • There's another way to look at the "We're gonna be around forever!" line as an Aneurysm Moment. If you're a fan of the original 1970s SNL, the line comes across as a prediction/warning that SNL will never be canceled (no matter how much it's come close), but it won't be the same as the original.
    • From the late 1980s episode hosted by John Larroquette, there was a fake commercial for an album about an alcoholic country singer (played by Larroquette). Funny, right? Not after you realize that John Larroquette actually has struggled with alcohol abuse.
      • Also, a country singer, Keith Whitley, would die from complications due to alcohol poisoning seven months after the episode aired.
    • An in-sketch example: "The Carter 'N Sons Barbecue" fake commercial from the Taylor Swift episode, which was supposedly filmed in 2002 and didn't air until 2009, which was when the H1N1 ("swine flu") virus was much-talked-about. The "commercial" was plastered with disclaimers stating that "swine fever" (an appetite for Carter 'N Sons brand barbecued pork) wasn't associated with the H1N1 virus (followed by a disclaimer reading that the management regrets naming their Sausage and Ribs Sampler platter "S.A.R.S").
      • And speaking of SNL and the swine flu, a lot of the second season jokes and sketches about the swine flu outbreak in 1976 don't really come off as dated anymore now that there's a round two.
    • In the 1985-1986 season, there was an episode hosted by Pee-Wee Herman that had two (count 'em two) Aneurysm Moments:
      • The cold opening where Pee-Wee Herman performs a tightrope walk across the World Trade Center towers and falls, screaming the show's opening line. Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, whatever humor can be mined from this sketch has been tainted from tragedy (like everything else made before 2001 that shows New York City with the World Trade Center towers as part of the skyline).
      • Then, there was a sketch where Pee-Wee Herman is thrown in jail and meets the Pathological Liar, Tommy Flanagan (played by Jon Lovitz). Pee-Wee Herman (or rather, the actor who plays him [Paul Reubens]) would actually find himself on the wrong side of the law in the 1990s and early 2000s (both for sexual offenses). The fact that Pee-Wee is screaming, "I'm innocent! I'm innocent!" lends more to the cringe factor of rewatching this sketch.
      • Speaking of Pee-Wee Herman and Funny Aneurysm Moments on SNL, the SNL Digital short for the season 36 episode hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow with musical guest Cee-Lo Green had Andy Samberg and Pee-Wee Herman (as himself) going out and getting drunk one night. While walking to the next bar, they see Anderson Cooper (also playing himself) and whale on him with a chair (and appear later in the sketch with a bandaged head, complaining that Pee-Wee and Andy almost damaged his Blue Eyes). Less than a week after this episode aired, Anderson Cooper really was assaulted while covering the uprising in Egypt.
    • The Christmas episode from season 28 (2002-2003 season): in the cold opening, Al Gore is worried when he can't find his wife, Tipper, then when he finds her, they kiss so long and so hard that it takes a taser for them to separate. It took eight years, actually: on June 1, 2010, Al and Tipper announced their separation.
    • In the Colin Firth/Norah Jones episode from season 29, Darrell Hammond as Bill Clinton remarks that John Edwards is like a "boring version" of himself, stating, "This guy might have sex in the Oval Office, but he’d probably do it in the missionary position - with his wife." Thanks to the Rielle Hunter affair and the sex tape scandal, that line rings very hollow.
    • A sketch on the Topher Grace episode from season 30 (2004-2005 season) called "The Not Incredible Adventures of the Down-And-Out Dollar" parodies the fact that the U.S. dollar had reached an all-time low by having a tiny dollar bill (Amy Poehler) being mocked by currencies from other countries, one of which is a Euro (played by episode host, Topher Grace), who brags that he's doing well in every country in the European Union. That would prove to be so very false five years later with news of several European countries suffering from economic meltdown (what's worse is that the Euro mentions that Greece was doing better than America economically in 2005, which isn't all that true now).
    • Back in the early 80s, there was a show hosted by Drew Barrymore - fresh from ET the Extraterrestrial and Firestarter, all smiles and curls, and seven years old (making Barrymore the youngest host SNL has ever had, beating out Jodie Foster, who was 14 when she hosted in 1976) - who finished her monologue by asking for a drink. "After all," she declared with a broad wink, "I am a Barrymore." Her family legacy of alcoholism and self-destructive behavior would catch up with her for real, and in a big (bad) way, not long after. Subverted in that there is a happy ending to all of this: Drew Barrymore did manage to climb out of the same pit of drugs and despair as her ancestors did and has come back to host a few more times, now becoming SNL's most frequent female host as of October 2009.
    • When Betty White hosted SNL on season 35, she states that Facebook is a waste of time for people her age because if she wants to talk to old friends, she wouldn't use a social network site; she'd use a Ouija board. Less than a month later, Rue McClanahan died, and White became the last living Golden Girl.
    • A commercial parody featuring advertised a drug called Homocil for parents ashamed of their children's homosexuality. Playing the father of an effeminate boy who liked to cook, a worried looking Tracy Morgan popped several of the pills chased with a swig of beer. Pretty funny, until June 2011, when Tracy Morgan was criticized for comments that he would stab his son to death if he were effeminate, among other inflammatory remarks about gay people.
    • When Chris Farley hosted in 1997, both the cold opening and the monologue was about Chris Farley being unreliable, on account of his drug-problem, but Tim Meadows and Chevy Chase, who is his sponsor in this sketch, both vouch for him and Lorne reluctantly allows Farley to host the show, if Chris Rock promises to stand by, in case Farley screws up. It is not as fun, when you realise that Chris Farley died of a massive overdose a little less than two months later, and that Lorne really did have Chris Rock in the studio all week, in case something went wrong with Farley. Rock had a back-up monologue and a few sketches ready, should it become necessary.
    • On the December 3rd, 2011 episode, "The Miley Cyrus Show" sketch had Maya Rudolph impersonate Whitney Houston. She is supposed to be convincing Miley Cyrus to stop smoking weed, but instead makes jokes about weed barely being a drug at all, talking about how minor is is compared to all the other drugs she's done. About two months later, she drowned in a bathtub due to the drugs present in her system, which included cocaine and marijuana. Cringe worthy indeed.
  • Seinfeld: The episode "The Blood" features Elaine's friend Vivian, who is having health problems and wants Elaine to look after her son if she dies. Vivian was played by actress Kellie Waymire, who later died at age 35 of a heart condition.
    • Despite its status as THE classic Seinfeld episode, it's hard to watch "The Contest" and not wince a bit during the John F. Kennedy Jr-related parts following his fatal plane crash.
    • There was an episode where Kramer had a black girlfriend, and at the end of the episode, he shows up at her apartment with a very thorough tan, prompting her father to say "I don't see no white boy, I see a damn fool!" Michael Richards (the actor famous for playing Kramer) actually would anger people with racist implications of his stand-up at the Laugh Factory in 2005.
    • One episode filmed roughly a year prior to the OJ Simpson murders had Elaine trying to get her latest boyfriend to change his name from Joel Rifkin because that was the name of a notorious murderer. She goes through a list of suggested new names....including OJ.
      • Note that it wasn't just a random name; she was pulling names from a sports magazine. And she practically begged him to pick OJ.
    • Another episode in season 8 opens with Jerry and George discussing prison grooming habits and noting how fascinating they find life incarcerated. Kind of hard to watch in retrospect.
    • An episode where Uncle Leo is believed to have died in an explosion becomes harder to watch after Len Lesser's death.
    • Same with "The Diplomat Club", when Ian Abercrombie's character thinks Elaine tries to kill him.
    • In "The Slicer", Kramer pretends to be a doctor who examines George's boss, Mr. Kruger. Kramer tells George something along the lines of "Kruger's life is on the line". Recently, Daniel von Bargen (the actor who played Mr Kruger) shot himself in the temple, really putting his life on the line.
  • The Price Is Right had episodes filmed immediately before Hurricane Katrina in which contestants were offered a package containing both a luxury boat and a trip to New Orleans. After the hurricane struck, CBS raced to pull these episodes before they were shown, but in some cases and some time zones they were unable to do so in time.
    • The Cliff Hangers pricing game also had a Funny Aneurysm Moment: On the '70s nighttime version, Dennis James jokingly called the mountain climber caricature "Fritz" on the first playing of the game. The contestant lost the game, causing the caricature to topple over the cliff with a crashing sound, and James added "There goes Fritz!" Janice Pennington, one of the show's models in the later Bob Barker version, lost her first husband Fritz Stammberger (a famed mountain climber) in 1975 in an apparent mountain-climbing accident.
      • Maybe this is why Drew Carey just calls him Yodely Guy.
  • From Bones: In an early appearance of Dr. Sweets, Booth makes one of many digs on his apparent inexperience and youth, wondering if he ever had serious problems in his life. We later learn that he did [2]. Made worse because several characters have asked him where his parents are and joked about him still living at home.
    • Also, in "The Hole in the Heart", Dr. Brennan enlists her intern, Vincent Nigel-Murray, in a reenactment of one of the deaths. She goes to great lengths to explain all of the skills and training their killer, Jacob Broadsky, has that make him so dangerous. Vincent flippantly comments that he has "a feeling [he'll] be dead very soon". And is shot and killed by Broadsky later in the episode.
  • CSI In season 8, Warrick Brown, who was already deep in trouble with Grissom for his lack of responsibility, gets drunk while working on a case; on that same night, it is strongly implied that the exotic dancer he slept with slipped him a few drugs to knock him out. In early May, 2008, Gary Dourdan (who plays Brown) was arrested for possession of narcotics.
    • And with the events of the most recent season of the show, some viewers will remember an earlier episode that ended with Gil Grissom telling Warrick something to the effect that when he (Gil) left, he'd be gone like a ghost, but Warrick would still be there to replace him. No such luck on either count.
  • Mystery Science Theater 3000 isn't immune. In the infamous Hobgoblins episode, Tom Servo makes a joke about a handgun saying "If found, please return to Hunter Thompson." Back then, it was just referring to the fella being a gun enthusiast, but Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide by shotgun in 2005.
    • In the episode The Horror of Party Beach, Mike, tormented by bad '50s beach music and white people dancing poorly, says that he agrees with the Taliban that dancing should be considered a crime. The episode was first aired in September of 1997, four years before 9/11.
    • In the Gamera episode, Crow gets annoyed at Joel and says to him, "We can replace you with Leno, ya know."
    • Julie Andrews' singing was occasionally mocked on Mystery Science Theater 3000 years before the ability to sing was taken from her.
    • The host segments of The Incredible Melting Man where Crow's pet script is butchered beyond recognition and has awkward casting decisions forced upon by the Mads was originally a reference to their experiences with The Movie. However, the following year, Crow's voice actor was replaced by Bill Corbett who also had a pet script of his own which would eventually be made into a major motion picture...and to which the exact same thing happened, with the end result (Meet Dave) ending up reviled by audiences and critics.
    • The extremely popular song "Let's Have a Patrick Swayze Christmas" seemed slightly less funny during the 2009 holiday season, three months after Patrick Swayze died. But Swayze himself got a kick out of the sketch, which makes it okay, if a bit wistful.
  • While the internal Mood Whiplash of Supernatural's "Mystery Spot" made Dean's joke deaths slightly less funny, his being Killed Off for Real (at least until the 2008 fall season premiere) made them, and all of his other deaths and death wishes, unbelievably painful to watch during the summer of 2008.
    • The Trickster's antics in "Tall Tales" (one of their breather episodes) become a hell of a lot less funny when you learn just how cruel the Trickster can be--specifically, that he could kill Dean over and over again to stop Sam from thinking that he could save him.
    • Sam pleading with the Trickster to bring back Dean, and using the reason that Dean's his brother becomes a lot more tragic when you consider that the Trickster is really Gabriel, who loves his brothers but left because of the fighting.
      • Not to mention when you find out that the Trickster knows how it feels to have your family ripped apart, but still does it anyway to try and teach them a lesson.
    • The angel-inna-whorehouse sequence in season 5's "Free to Be You and Me" is funny. But the next episode, "The End," involves a burnt out, heavily stoned version of that angel, who apparently holds orgies on a regular basis. It Got Worse.
    • The hunter accusing Sam of bringing about the Apocalypse is a lot less funny when you realise that he actually does end up bringing about the Apocalypse, albeit accidentally.
    • Dean's banter with Bela about her father becomes a lot less funny when we learn later that she was probably sexually abused as a child.
  • Absolutely anything that Richard Hammond says in episodes of Top Gear relating to "flying through the Pearly Gates backwards in a fireball" (or similar) that was recorded before his miraculously non-fatal high-speed crash.

Richard: I love that vision of just blasting through the gates, backwards, in a flaming Swedish supercar! "Yes! I'm here! Where are the women?"

    • Well, clearly doing it upside-down in a rocket car at 288 mph is the only way to top that.
    • Similarly, there is a clip of Jeremy Clarkson saying that "no series would be complete without an earnest attempt to kill Richard Hammond"; the BBC had to remove that from its website some time after the crash.
    • Reruns of the episode where Hammond managed to roll his van during the police chase challenge have omitted Clarkson's "Well, we've just killed Richard Hammond. If you'd like a job presenting Top Gear, please write to the BBC..." gag.
      • In a particular irony, that van show (S08-E08) was the last aired episode of Top Gear before Hammond's accident, which (had it not gone wrong) was intended to have been a feature in series 9. The footage was still shown in S09-E01, but it wasn't the footage they expected to have.
    • There was even a real time Funny Aneurysm Moment when the crash footage was aired: The entire studio audience, plus co-presenters Clarkson and May, winced when the videotaped Hammond (in what was meant to be the lead-up to an uneventful segment) described the 10,000hp afterburner on the Vampire as "possibly the biggest accident you've ever seen in your life." Clarkson unfailingly pointed out that the fateful line was meant to be funny.
    • In a double whammy for this show and Ashes to Ashes, the crossover Richard did with the cast of Ashes to Ashes for Children in Need becomes this when you find out in the series finale that Ashes to Ashes takes place in a purgatory for dead and dying police officers. Granted, Richard's not a police officer, but still. Creepy.
    • Of course, since the Hammster returned to filming, they have gone right back to making jokes. Including jokes related to how badly injured Hammond was.
  • In the fifth season of Babylon 5, Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin, complained about an episode where a character nearly died of a heart attack, since there had been no previous indications that the character had any kind of heart problems. Producer J. Michael Straczynski countered that many people live their whole lives with heart problems with no idea they're there until they suddenly strike. At the end of the series, Biggs came back asking why Franklin didn't get a big sendoff scene like G'Kar, played by Andreas Katsulas. Straczynski replied that he always saw Franklin as the type who would just leave with no warning, without saying goodbye, while G'Kar was more the type who would make a big production over his departure. A few years later, Biggs was killed instantly by a previously unknown congenital heart defect. A couple years after that, Katsulas died after a long battle with lung cancer, during which he got all his friends and family together for one last big party.
  • The famous running gag of Fred Sanford faking a heart attack on Sanford and Son is painful to watch now since Redd Foxx died of a heart attack years later while relaxing between takes of The Royal Family. He might have survived had everyone around him not thought he was just doing his old schtick. (It's the source of the above image.)
  • During the 1993 Academy Awards broadcast, Billy Crystal joked that cult leader David Koresh, holed up with his followers at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas at the time, would be performing "Friend Like Me" (from Aladdin) via satellite ("You ain't never had a friend like me!"). Given the gruesome outcome of that standoff, the joke isn't as funny now.
  • House did this subtly with Amber's death in season 4. In episode 12, "Don't Ever Change," House confronts Wilson about why he is dating Amber (since he usually only dates extremely needy women, and Amber is anything but) and asks, jokingly, if she's dying. Wilson's response is a sigh and a "Yes".
    • And Amber's first words to Wilson were "I was never here." Cute at the time because she was acting like a sneaky little CTB, but after she died? Not so much. (Events near the end of season 5 don't help either.)
    • They also use the metaphor of being hit by a bus when discussing danger and unexpected deaths.
    • In a Season 3 episode, Wilson is asked by Cuddy why he's late, and he loudly snaps, "The buses suck!" (He was forced to take the bus to work as Detective Tritter impounded his car). Considering bus-related incidents in the next season, the line isn't quite so funny...
    • They got two Funny Aneurysms for the price of one in "Mirror, Mirror": Kutner and Amber are arguing over which one of them their patient will imitate when they notice that the patient's blood has gone solid. Kutner quips, "I'd say he's mimicking whichever one of us happens to be dying." That doesn't narrow it down.
    • They did it again in season 5. The reason for Kutner to get the cat to go peeing on House's chair? To quote the man himself: "Blood on my face." Technically it was cranberry juice, but he, uh, fixed that inconsistency two episodes later.
      • Even more poignant in the same episode, when the cat that is said to foretell someone's death strolls around Kutner's legs, House remarks sarcastically:

"Oh my god! The death cat is attacking your legs! You're gonna die!"

    • In the episode "Painless", the patient of the week attempts suicide, and the fellows argue over his mental status. When Taub attributes Kutner's position on "right to die" to Kutner's tragic childhood, Kutner argues that his past makes him less likely to commit suicide. Figures don't lie -- but liars figure.
    • Unintended example: A case is caused by a father accidentally passing his supplemental testosterone on to his children (He made contact with them when it was dissipating from his body). The FDA has recently issued a warning about exactly this, with exactly the same effects.
    • "The Itch," an episode that aired in the first half of season 5, had as one of its plots House trying to convince Wilson that he really is getting bitten by a mosquito and not imagining it. He is right in the end - he kills the mosquito. Then, in the season finale, it turns out that House hallucinated the sex with Cuddy he had in the previous episode - and was also hallucinating that he had the evidence of that encounter, a lipstick that was really a Vicodin bottle. This at best makes the resolution of that plot "The Itch" a Funny Aneurysm Moment, and at worst destabilizes it altogether.
      • This was probably intentional foreshadowing.
    • Some dialog from Season 3, episode 23, regarding treating the patient of the week with magic mushrooms:

Cuddy: I assume you've considered he could have a psychogenic experience. Possibly suffer a fit of severe paranoia.
House: Well, I have now. Yeah, it's definitely better that the Dean of Medicine prescribes it instead of an unhinged doctor with a history of drug use. Takes the stink off if the patient decides to put on a cape and fly off the roof.

    • The above lines become quite the Funny Aneurysm Moment when watching this episode after seeing the premiere of Season 6, in which one of House's fellow patients at Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital does jump off a parking structure, believing he is a superhero and can fly. *** And it doesn't help that House made it possible for that fellow mental patient to get into that position.
    • Chase-related example: season 1, "Damned If You Do," Chase admits to having lost his faith, and the nun the team just cured tells him he'll find his way back to the church someday. Season 6 -- Chase finally does, out of desperation, try to return to the church -- about one month too late.
    • In a season two episode of House "Forever". When House is asking why Chase is working in the NICU and Chase say's he can't deal with all the patients lying House says, "Nothing more honest then a dead baby". Not so funny when later in the episode the baby Mikey dies.
  • In the first season episode "One Shot, One Kill" of NCIS aired in 2004 a marine recruiter is talking to two young men about joining the marine corp. About the possibility of being deployed to Iraq he says:

"What with boot camp, S-O-I, follow on schools... we're talking over a year and a half of training. Iraq will pretty much be over by the time you boys graduate."

    • In the second season episode "An Eye for an Eye", Tony tells Kate to "Work smarter not harder - you'll live longer." Six episodes later, Kate is killed on the job.
  • In the second episode of Samantha Who, Samantha goes to a prescheduled doctor's appointment, assuming he's a neurologist, only to find out halfway through that he's a plastic surgeon whom, pre-amnesia, Sam had planned to go to for breast implants. The year after this episode aired, Christina Applegate, who plays Samantha, was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a double mastectomy.
  • In the Thirty Rock episode "Jack Meets Dennis", Pete wonders if they'll be preempted by a national news event and says "how's Gerald Ford's health?" Gerald Ford died less than a month after the episode aired. The line was edited out of the DVD release.
    • In the unaired pilot episode (NBC-only screener copy), Rachel Dratch plays the role of Jenna DeCarlo (she was later renamed), who excitedly tells Liz, "I got that apartment! [...] I'm living in New York, I have my own TV show. I mean, dreams do come true, right?" When Thirty Rock was picked up for a full season, Dratch was replaced by Jane Krakowski. While Dratch hasn't been out of work (and even briefly reprised some of her SNL characters in the first season), the line already Foreshadowing an impending retooling to her own show takes on an additional unfortunate meaning.
    • The whole Josh storyline in "Hard Ball", in which he and his agent have to negotiate a new contract to keep him on the show. We even get Liz insisting they can't do the show without him and, when Jack says everyone is replaceable, she replies "he's not replaceable as my friend." Fast forward a few seasons and it turns out they could do the show without him and Liz apparently wasn't so attached to him after all. He spent most of the third season Out of Focus and, at the start of the next season, was almost immediately Put on a Bus after Hanging a Lampshade on the fact that he still exists. This time, no one, including Liz, seemed to care about Josh being gone. Oh, and a few episodes after being put on a bus, Josh made a cameo, his last appearance ever on 30 Rock, in which he fails to get his old job back and reveals he's been reduced to doing gay porn. This after "Hard Ball" featured Jack and Liz sabotaging his offer from The Daily Show to keep him on TGS. Ouch.
    • The episode in which Tracy has diabetes and Kenneth tries to get him to eat healthier becomes more uncomfortable in light of the kidney transplant Tracy Morgan had due to his real diabetic condition.
    • In Emanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land Liz's British date Wesley says how he doesn't want to go back to England saying that he doesn't want to suffer through the London Olympics. He says "You saw the Beijing opening ceremonies, we don't have that kind of control over our people." This line has become a lot more tragic in the wake of the London riots.
  • The episode of The Muppet Show hosted by Zero Mostel contains a skit where he recites a poem about his fears, ending with his greatest fear: something for which he himself is only a fear that can be erased by that realization, upon which he vanishes into thin air. Mostel died suddenly before the episode aired, which must have made the scene pretty eerie.
    • And then there's the scene in Peter Sellers' episode where Kermit finds him dressed in a bizarre mix of costume pieces in his dressing room. ("I was trying to do Queen Victoria, but I've forgotten what she looked like.") When Kermit responds that it's okay for him to be himself on the Muppet show Sellers replies, "That would be impossible. There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed." The scene has since been quoted many times as summing up Sellers' view of himself as doomed to be seen only as his various characters and not his true self. In fact, he contributed to the sketch in lieu of the show's usual scene of the guest star out of character backstage, due to his discomfort at being seen out of character.
    • One of the show's best moments was Harry Belafonte singing "Turn the World Around" accompanied by African mask-inspired Muppets. The song is upbeat, but it's hard not to cry when you know Belafonte performed the same song at Jim Henson's memorial. The lead-in to the song--which talks about how life is very brief but we can change the world if we care about each other--only makes things worse.
    • In one episode Dr. Bunsen Honeydew enlarges a virus to make it easier to study. (Beaker, of course, gets overwhelmed by it) The virus is specifically mentioned to be a streptococcus virus. Jim Henson would die of a streptococcus infection a decade later.
  • More recently with the Muppets: The 2008 Christmas Special A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa features Nathan Lane as a sadistic TSA officer. He decides he doesn't like the way the Muppets look and pulls them into an interrogation room, planning to perform cruel and humiliating security searches on them. In 2008, it was funny. Jump to 2010 and all the pat-down incidents...
  • Bernie Mac's untimely death now makes the episode of his TV show about getting old horribly depressing.
  • Back in season 3 of Stargate Atlantis, when Rodney was blasted by some weird Ancient technology and worrying about the effects it could have on him, Elizabeth jokingly asked Dr. Beckett, "What are the chances it could make him more pleasant?" Then, in season 5, Rodney contracts a brain parasite whose effects are to take away his memory, drastically reduce his intelligence, and make him much friendlier.
  • In Stargate SG-1, one of the wacky, self-referential Milestone Celebration episodes had Martin Lloyd mention that it had been suggested that he go with a younger, hipper version of his fictionalized SG-1 for the movie he was making. We get an Imagine Spot to a hilarious soap-operatic version of Stargate, with Teal'c as The Pornomancer, people stopping to randomly make out during scenes when they really shouldn't, and Vala randomly telling Daniel she's pregnant. Then all other Stargate Verse projects are flushed in favor of Stargate Universe, which... seems like they used that scene as a blueprint for a new series without realizing it was supposed to be a joke. Now that SGU has failed (it lasted less than two seasons before its unceremonious cancellation), all other Stargate projects are on indefinite hiatus. Suddenly, 200 isn't nearly as funny as it was when it came out.
  • Firefly: The episode "The Message" has this exchange that isn't so amusing after The Movie:

Jayne: You'll read over me when it's my time to shuffle off, won't you preacher?
Book: Oh, I'm sure you'll outlive us all.

    • Another Firefly example - in the pilot, when the federal agent falls apart early on in Jayne's interrogation of him, Jayne laments "I was going to get me an ear, too," while playing with his knife. Later on in the series, Niska's interrogator cuts off Mal's ear with a knife as "compensation" for Zoe.
    • The scene in "Shindig" where Wash jokes about reading a poem at Zoe's funeral. It's a genuinely sweet and funny scene, until Wash ends up dying in the Big Damn Movie.
    • The part in "Heart of Gold" where Zoe and Wash are talking about having a child, and Zoe says, "I want to meet that child someday." Cue tears.
    • The still flying scene at the end of the (originally unaired) Pilot is slightly depressing now that the show has been canceled.
      • Of course, this could alternatively be seen as Heartwarming in Hindsight, because even if they don't make new episodes, this show Will. Not. Die. And still continues to bring in new viewers and sell DVDs ten years later.

"I'm thinking we'll rise again" (The Train Job)

  • D'Argo jokes in Farscape that he hopes his half-Sebacean son has grown to have "his mother's nose." His son is later revealed to have mutilated his own nose to look less like his father's out of shame at being a hybrid.
  • The West Wing, "The Birnam Wood": After President Bartlet fires Leo McGarry, Leo wanders off into the woods around Camp David and has a massive heart attack. Though he survives, it takes until the morning for security to find him. During the filming of the seventh season, John Spencer, Leo's actor, died quite suddenly of a heart attack, necessitating the killing off of his character (by the same method).
    • In addition to that, when Leo returns to work after his heart attack, the rest of the senior staff pitches in to buy him a present: A defibrillator. Not quite so funny now...
      • The clearest example, though, is in the first episode of season 7. Leo suggests that maybe he shouldn't be Santos's running mate, to which Santos replies, "I'm not gonna fire you. You wanna get out of this, you're gonna have to drum up another heart attack or something." Of course, Leo dies of another heart attack and does "get out of" being VP.
    • Also in the episode that aired directly after John Spencer's death, which had been preceded by a message from Martin Sheen relaying the news, Toby Zeigler has the line "Disappointed to reach me? Somebody dead?" when Josh complains about how hard it was to reach him by phone.
    • This was a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as John Spencer was having heart problems before he died; they wrote all those in as a way to reduce his screen time.
    • The first season finale is a twofer-- the plot both concerns reentry problems with the Space Shuttle Columbia and has the President half-seriously threaten to invade Baghdad.
  • The Grey's Anatomy episode where Meredith describes the attempted suicide of her mother to her shocked therapist is dramatic, but also slightly cringe-inducing because the actress playing Meredith, Ellen Pompeo, states her earliest memory to be when she was 4 and her elder siblings were trying to wake her mother, who had accidentally overdosed on pain meds, and killed herself. Wonder if the writers knew that when they wrote it.
    • When Izzy was convincing Alex to take a chance on her after his traumatizing experience with Ava, she promised him passionately that she "wasn't going to go crazy." Later that same season, she began hallucinating her dead fiance due to a brain tumor. So much for that promise...
    • In the final two episodes of Season 5; when the gang finds out George enrolled in the army, they start joking about how he'd die. They talk about him over a John Doe that got hit by a bus...and then the bombshell that John Doe is George, who'd left early to start his basic and saved a girl from being hit by that bus, taking the blow himself and dying.
      • In the second season, when the nurses are on strike, George refuses to cross the picket line, stating that "Dad's a truck driver, mom's a teacher - if the evening news shows me crossing a picket line, they'll outlive me just to pee on my grave." (Although his father died in S3, his mother did outlive him.)
      • In the second season, when George and Derek are quarantined in the locker room, George begins to panic about the possibility of dying from the plague.
      • In the second season episode "17 Seconds", after a shooting at a local business, Derek remarks "Can you imagine, you're at work, just doing your job and somebody come in and shoots you.". Fast-forward to season 6 finale where Derek is at work, and someone comes in and shoots him.

George: You know, you're an ass. You've lived, you've done things. And you got the hair and the hot wife and the beautiful ex-mistress who pines for you.
Derek: She's pining for me?
George: My point is, you've lived! If you die, who cares? If I die - what, this is it?!

  • The episode of Chuck where the Buy More employees were being prepared for the chaotic stampede that would ensue on Black Friday, complete with plans for an emergency evacuation if necessary, was a lot funnier before a Wal-Mart store employee was trampled to death in just such a situation on Black Friday.
  • On an episode of Family Feud, the question was something along the lines of "Name something people think of when they're depressed/have a problem." One of the unrevealed answers wound up being "suicide", which is disturbing in and of itself (though logical); but the real shock comes because the episode was hosted by Ray Combs... who later committed suicide after a string of show-business failures. During the show, he even remarked, "No one should think of suicide." Bad survey group! Bad!
  • There's a scene in the Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth where Jack and Ianto attempt to get some alone time and try to make the most of the time they have together, but it's prevented because Rhys is making beans. The scene goes from funny to sad when Ianto dies in the next episode.
    • Gwen in "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang": "Maybe you didn't realise: you can beat, shoot, threaten and even poison us and we'll keep coming back, stronger every time." Yeah...
    • In a way, the show's opening monologue makes the grade: for the first two series, viewers were told at the start of each episode that Torchwood would "be ready" for the challenges of the 21st century; series 3's miniseries Children of Earth effectively proved that the team was anything but ready.
      • Although it's actually an aversion too. The almost-arc phrase, "The 21st century is when everything changes", comes true. The 21st century IS when everything changed for the team. It just took a couple of series for it to happen.
  • In an episode of Doctor Who, the Tenth Doctor absorbs high levels of radiation. When companion Martha Jones asks if that's likely to kill him, he light-heartedly replies "Nah, it's only Roentgen radiation. We used to play with Roentgen bricks in the nursery". Ironic and sad seeing that he ended up regenerating (dying) by absorbing radiation a few series later
  • In an episode of Desperate Housewives, a flashback reveals Gabriel making a joke referring to shooting herself in the head and the person who would later commit suicide doing just that, sitting next to her right in the middle of the scene. They're beating a dead horse, but within the show's continuity, it still counts.
    • In the episode where Carlos's mother awakes from a coma but dies anyway, Bree remarks upon seeing the ensuing ostentation, "You have to hand it to the Catholics, they do grief better than anyone". Pope John Paul II died a day before the US airing, so the line was changed to "Gabby and Carlos" in place of "Catholics" (there was not enough time to bring Marcia Cross back into the studio to overdub the line, so the audio was pasted from another instance where she had used the phrase). The original line is used in syndication - this wasn't a Funny Aneurysm Moment for long.
  • In the last series of Coupling, Susan is pregnant, and the dialogue sometimes dwells with relish on the potential gruesomeness of the process. Kate Isitt (Sally) was pregnant for real at the time. Even in the context of the show, every time Susan would say something particularly gruesome (specifically the episiotomy) Sally would faint and go to her safe place.
    • An even "better" example is the episode in which Jeff, for reasons of typical Jeff-ness, has ended up pretending that his girlfriend is dead. A great episode is horribly dampened when you realise that Lou Gish, the actress playing said girlfriend, died prematurely from terminal cancer a few years ago. Especially when, all flu-ed up, she says to Jeff "don't mind me ... I'm dead."
  • A while ago, there was a reality show called Murder in Small Town X. The game was ultimately won by Angel Juarbe, a New York firefighter. The MiSTX finale airdate? September 4, 2001. Angel died in the attacks one week later.
  • Lots of the early M* A* S* H episodes have scenes or bits with Henry Blake that have a new meaning now that we know the character's ultimate fate. In "Cowboy," Henry survives repeated attempts on his life by a disgruntled chopper pilot; in "Showtime," his wife back home gives birth to a son whom Henry will never see in person; in "O.R." he mentions his reluctance to go home, as he's done the best work of his career in Korea; and so forth.
    • Hawkeye also reassures him at one point that he'll die an old man in his bed. Ouch.
    • Let's not forget the superbly hilarious early episode, "Bananas, Crackers and Nuts", in which Hawkeye attempts to fake insanity to get some rest away from the camp. A few years later (in real time it was more like 13, but to Hawkeye that's probably more what it felt like), Hawkeye is sent to an institution after plowing a jeep through the mess tent.
    • Also, when he has yet another breakdown in "Hawk's Nightmare", Radar expresses surprise at his behavior because he was apparently coping with the war better than anyone. Even before the finale, that really wasn't the case anymore.
    • Believe or not, there is another example that doesn't have anything to do with Henry's death or Hawkeye's sanity: Margaret's excitement throughout Season Five over marrying Donald is pretty hard to swallow when you know how quickly the marriage went sour, ending up in divorce.
    • Another example unrelated to Hawkeye or Henry: the Season Nine episode "Blood Brothers" tells the story of a GI who can't give blood because he has terminal cancer. The GI was played... by Patrick Swayze.
  • Though it was only ever very darkly funny in the first place, the scene in early season 3 of the new Battlestar Galactica where Ellen sleeps with Cavil to get Tigh out of prison becomes a lot more disturbing after it's revealed in season four that Ellen was the head of the team that built Cavil, thus making the scene toaster-incest. And the toaster's design was based on her father.
    • Made even more disturbing when you realize that, while Ellen was unaware of the connection (and that she was a Cylon), Cavil was fully aware of it and definitely thought of Ellen as his mother figure. That scene gets even worse because Tigh later kills Ellen for "collaborating" with the Cylons, only to discover still later that HE'S a Cylon.
    • Another in-canon example -- in the very first episode of the series, Baltar quips to Six, "Well I'm sure someday, if you're a good Cylon, [God] will reward you with a lovely little walking toaster of your very own." Caprica Six had a devastating miscarriage of her full-Cylon baby in season four.
    • Dee and Billy are the subjects of Adama's line "They better start having babies" in the Miniseries. Both die childless, and not together.
    • A textbook example of the trope comes in Season 4. Kara jokes to her husband that if he turned out to be a Cylon, she'd shoot him in the head. Later on in the season, she find out that he is a Cylon, but doesn't do anything. Then someone else comes along and literally shoots him in the head, leaving her in grief for the rest of the season.
  • The entirety of Flipper can become one of these once you learn that the dolphin who usually played Flipper died - possibly even committed suicide - in the arms of her trainer, Ric O'Berry, and that O'Berry now campaigns heavily against dolphin captivity.
  • Kids Incorporated - "Space Case". During "Space Week" at the P* lace, the kids are all writing to NASA, petitioning them to put a kid into space. Mickey mentions that NASA is "going to start taking regular people into space." This episode was filmed in 1984, and what Mickey's referring to is the then-recent announcement of the Teacher In Space project. The fruition of that project was the 1986 shuttle mission STS-51-L, which ended 73 seconds after launch with the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger.
    • Also, the number of times over the years these prepubescent kids mention how much they want to be like Michael Jackson.
  • The Nickelodeon game show |Double Dare was centered around making huge messes, with tons of wet, gooey multicolored slime getting everywhere. So it's a bit unsettling to watch after the show's host Marc Summers revealed he had pretty severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially considering how often he got covered in muck during the show's run. Seriously; go back and watch an episode where the team completes the obstacle course and embrace him, while covered in muck, then go watch him line up the fringe on a throw rug. Very unnerving.
  • Also, a FedEx commercial featuring Steve Irwin in which he "dies" from a snakebite because the antidote was being delivered by another company. Y Eah....
  • In a confessional, Rachel from Season 2 of Hells Kitchen jokingly pantomimed shooting herself in the head. She died of a gunshot to the head about a year later.
  • A syndicated episode of That '70s Show parodying Charlie's Angels, including the boys' giving their reason for watching- "the hot blonde with the big rack"- happened to air the day Farrah Fawcett died.
    • A good in-universe example of an almost immediate funny aneurysm moment:

Eric: You know, it wouldn't kill you to be nice once in a while.

    • At one point Red fakes a heart attack to get Kitty to get off his ass about something. A few seasons later he actually has one.
  • Battlebots example: During on of Surgeon General's fights, the announcer opened with "Do you believe in life after death?" Julio Roqueta, Surgeon General's driver, died a couple years later.
  • On Lost:
    • Pilot Frank Lapidus successfully lands a commercial plane on a small runway on the island when the plane undergoes instrument failure as a result of jumping through time. This episode aired a few weeks after (but was clearly written and filmed many months before) Sully Sullenberger became a national hero for successfully landing a commercial jet on the Hudson River with no loss of life. Since no one died, this is thankfully a less disturbing version of a Funny Aneurysm Moment.
    • Unfortunately, the same can not be said for Air France Flight 447. When this passenger jet crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, some pointed out the loose similarity with Lost. However, as the days passed, more and more eerily Lost-related coincidences began to appear, including the discovery of the plane's tail section (Losts Flight 815 lost its tail section during the crash), the statement that the plane was found on the bottom of the ocean with bodies (Charles Widmore hides a fake Flight 815 and bodies on the bottom of the ocean to throw off investigators), and, most disturbingly, a Spanish pilot's claim that he saw a "flash of bright light" where flight 447 disappeared (Losts flight 316 disappeared in a flash of time travel-related light). Finally, conspiracy theorists began pointing out that the area where flight 447 vanished is known for heightened electromagnetism as one of the infamous "vile vortices;" flight 815 on Lost was brought down in an electromagnetic incident. Sure enough, the claim that unusual levels of electromagnetism were in the area on the day of the disappearance was backed up by imaging reports from independent researchers.
      • The last sentence could be rephrased to say, "The crash took place in the vicinity of thunderstorms which were picked up by American and Canadian weather satellites".
  • This appearance by Robert Blake on The Tonight Show, on New Year's Eve 1976, includes a discussion about what happens when Blake fights with his (then) wife, Sondra Kerr: "The blood flows," he says. In 2002, Blake would be arrested and tried (though ultimately acquitted) for the murder of his second wife, Bonnie Lee Blakely.
    • Don't forget Blake's appearance as a satanic figure (or embodiment of wrath and violence...or whatever...freakin' David Lynch...) in the film Lost Highway, which is primarily concerned with a man who is arrested for murdering his wife.
  • In Star Trek: The Original Series, the Enterprise crew goes back in time for the episode "Assignment: Earth." Spock mentions that an unnamed important person is supposed to be assassinated on that day. Since the episode was meant as a "backdoor pilot" for another show, this was not elaborated upon. However, six days after the episode aired, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered.
    • This episode ended up being a lot more eerily prescient than just that. It's not that far ahead of Robert Kennedy's assassination either, and on top of that, Gary Seven was attempting to stop the launch of a nuclear weapons platform into orbit. On the same day as MLK's assassination, NASA also launched a Saturn V rocket (Not, however, carrying nuclear weapons) which suffered a malfunction and ended up going way off course, and was covered up in the Star Trek universe. Spock's prediction of an uprising in Asia is also sometimes tied to a coup in Iraq, but that was over three months later.
  • An episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation featured David Ogden Stiers as a scientist who starts a relationship with Lwaxana Troi, but despairs that it's too late for them to truly be together as he turns sixty in a few days, which is when his species undergoes compulsory euthanasia. Stiers came out of the closet at age 66, expressing his regrets that keeping his homosexuality secret for so long had prevented him from having any kind of stable relationship, and that he hoped to finally have one in his remaining years.
    • That's nothing compared to the episode of Frasier that David Ogden Stiers guest-starred in. He plays a research scientist called Leland Barton who was a close friend of Frasier's mother Hester, and Frasier's father Martin becomes worried that due to Leland sharing the same hobbies, tastes and mannerisms as Frasier and Niles that he might have had an affair with Hester and be Frasier and Niles' biological father. Martin confronts Leland with this at the end, and Leland admits that he loved Hester - but only platonically, because he's gay, and she was very supportive of him when they worked together in the 1950s and it wasn't possible to be open about homosexuality.
    • Star Trek Generations twisted the final moment of the TNG episode Family from a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming into this kind of moment. The final scene shows Picard's brother Robert and his wife Marie looking out their back window at their son Rene as he sits gazing at the stars. At the time, it implied Rene might follow in his uncle's footsteps. No he won't, since Generations reveals that he and his father both died in a fire offscreen. (And that final scene in "Family" even has a blazing fireplace in the background!) Poor Marie. I wonder how she coped. I guess I shouldn't care. The writers didn't.
    • Still on Star Trek, the protesters against the current regime in Thailand could not have chosen a less prophetic name.
  • Yet another Star Trek example, this time from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The two part episode "Past Tense" sends Sisko, Bashir and Dax back to San Fransisco in the year 2024 by way of a transporter malfunction. They are separated when Sisko and Bashir get taken to a Sanctuary District, a walled off part of the city where the city's homeless and destitute are left to live in squalor. The reason these places exist in the first place is because of widespread joblessness due to a wrecked economy, with hints of anarchy in Europe. The references to the economy are particularly cringe inducing, given the current state of our own. Fortunately for our heroes, all of these conditions force tension in the Sanctuary Districts to come to a head. Riots break out, and through a series of events the normal timeline is restored, and so is the Federation.
    • Not only that, but as the episode was filming, the Mayor of Los Angeles proposed moving the homeless population into walled off districts, much like in the episode. The producers were understandably freaked out.
    • Now about that anarchy in Europe...Yeah.
  • On VH-1's I Love the New Millenium, while discussing Rihanna's "Umbrella", the commentators note how she was discovered by Jay-z. Cue the joke about how Beyonce will probably want to beat Rihanna with an umbrella.
  • The final scene of the last episode of Father Ted was initially going to show the titular character, driven to despair with his life, climb out on a ledge with the implication that he was going to commit suicide. The scene was played for laughs. Not long before the final series aired Dermot Morgan, the actor who played Ted, died from a heart attack.
    • The scene was changed post-production to a montage celebrating the series in tribute.
  • One of the final episodes of I Dream of Jeannie was "Mrs. Djinn Djinn", an episode where the other characters mistakenly believe that Jeannie is pregnant and shower her with baffling gifts and praise, all while trying to coax out her (non-existent) secret. In real life, Barbara Eden was struggling with infertility. Her second child (conceived shortly after the cancellation of I Dream Of Jeannie) died in utero and she was forced to carry it to term despite knowing the child was already gone. She kept the tragedy a secret, and endured two months of strangers congratulating her and asking when "the little genie" would be born without saying a word... the trauma eventually broke up her marriage.
  • In a similar vein, the episodes of Married... with Children where Peggy is pregnant are a little uncomfortable to watch, knowing that Katey Segal's pregnancy ended in a stillbirth.
  • The Soup made hay with an Alternative Character Interpretation of reality show Jon and Kate Plus 8 that portrayed Jon as a henpecked husband to needlessly bossy Kate; one skit took an argument over coupons and ended it with him committing suicide. As it turns out, the marriage was indeed miserable, and while The Soup -- irreverent by nature -- kept up with the show and its stars even after they officially filed for divorce in June 2009 (the show continued for a while as Kate Plus 8), one episode joked that it was "just kind of sad now".
  • A mid-May 2009 web-exclusive segment of Australian advertising program The Gruen Transfer featured ad-man Todd Sampson quipping that in the future, Michael Jackson could be the new face of Touched By an Angel. While at the time, it was a crude joke about his history and his inevitable death, it takes on new elements of Dude, Not Funny after his unexpected June 2009 death.
    • Why? He didn't become an angel.
    • Your milage may vary- This could also be hilarious in hindsight
    • They also did a segment about old ads that involve the World Trade Centre. One ad advertising a tour to the WTC roof observation deck had the tagline "The closest you'll get to heaven."
  • The Colbert Report had a segment on Obama's health care plans done in the style of a infomercial. At one point, Stephen mentions faking a cardiac arrest. The episode aired the same day that Michael Jackson died. Worse, it was originally reported that Jackson died of a cardiac arrest. (In reality, nobody actually dies of a cardiac arrest: the heart stopping is a result of whatever causes the death, not the actual cause.)
    • Actually, nearly everybody dies of cardiac arrest, it's the cause of the cardiac arrest that's usually listed as "cause of death." Emergency medicine is centered around correcting the cause of the cardiac arrest before it becomes irreversible.
    • Since it was done infomercial style, it hit again as it was aired a day before Billy Mays' death.
    • Another incident, shared with its sister series The Daily Show, followed reports that journalist Robert Novak hit a man with his car in slow-moving traffic, dislocating the man's shoulder, and was completely unaware of it until witnesses approached him after. Both shows used the opportunities to mock Novak's age (77 at the time) as the reason behind his driving and memory loss. The following Monday, it was reported that Novak had been diagnosed over the weekend with a brain tumor, the actual cause of the incident. Jon Stewart responded on-air by apologizing and wishing Novak luck; Stephen explained during that night's show that the news reached him just in time to scrap a planned segment on Novak, and after wishing Novak well, proceeded to fill the remaining time with an "improvised" segment, where he took calls from people thanking him for his courage to not talk about Novak (trust me, it was less offensive than it sounds). Novak died a year later.
  • On an early episode of Pitchmen, Anthony Sullivan is looking over recorded footage of Billy Mays driving for a commercial spot. When remarking on Billy's acting (as it's obvious he's not really driving), Anthony exclaims "It looks like he's about to have a heart attack!" Two months after airing, Billy Mays died of a previously unknown heart condition.
    • In a later episode, when Billy Mays was pitching for a life insurance commercial, fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan quips before filming, "Ok, Billy. Proud father, and loving husband.... I'm reading your obituary." And then....
  • The Very Special Episode of Diff'rent Strokes dealing with child molestation featured a line where Mr. Drummond says that he's going to have a "hand to butt talk" with Arnold after learning that the boy has been drinking wine. Normally, the line would be a funny allusion to spanking, but considering the subject matter of the episode...
    • The actor that played Dudley recently admitted that he was actually being molested by a family friend while filmimg the episode.
  • The Thick of It: Chris Langham oozes sarcasm as Hugh Abbot. "What, Hugh Abbot as Home Secretary? But the man's a social spastic and probably a registered nonce." Not such a funny line in light of later events.
  • In Whose Line Is It Anyway?, one episode featured Weird Newscasters. Wayne Brady, who is doing the sports, becomes Michael Jackson, who is trying to show that he can still perform even if he is 100 years old. On June 25 2009, he only lived half this age.
    • In another episode, also for the skit Weird Newscasters, Ryan was to do the weather as "Siegfried and Roy whose act is going dangerously wrong." In October of 2003, Roy was mauled by one of their male white tigers, Montecore, during a performance in Las Vegas.
    • Featured in a few episodes, especially during the Film/Theatre/TV styles skits, is an innocent mockery of the show The Crocodile Hunter. In September 2006 The Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin, was killed when a sting ray's barb-covered stinger pierced his heart.
    • In several episodes, Wayne Brady would impersonate Gary Coleman in various skits. Since Coleman's recent death, the jokes just aren't as funny anymore.
    • "Hey, I didn't mean to cook your dog. But hey, these things just happen..."
  • A lot of 1970s sitcoms, like Mork and Mindy and Taxi, feature scenes where characters extol the virtues of O. J. Simpson. The Saturday Night Live episode he hosted is completely unwatchable now because of this.
  • Speaking of Mork and Mindy, at one point in the episode "Mork The Practical Joker", Mork is acting overly-dramatic to Mindy's practical jokes and gasps "Oh, oh my heart", which is extremely cringeworthy after Robin Williams' heart surgery in 2009.
    • Not to mention "Mork And Mindy Meet Rick And Ruby" where Mork sings a song called "This Heart Is Closed For Alterations". Actually it was opened for alterations. (All right, all right, I'm sorry!)
  • In the first episode of Dad's Army, during his introduction, Private Joe Walker says something along the lines of "I won't be around for long.". Then at the end of season six, he disappeared, due to the sudden death of James Beck, his actor. He wasn't around for long.
  • Beloved BBC Radio DJ John Peel's 2002 appearance on Room 101 made for a very sweet and funny episode... which is also very sad to watch now, since one of his nominated items was death, and he spends a lot of the time talking about his eventual death and how he would or wouldn't like to go. He died suddenly in 2004.
  • A season 1 episode of Extras has Kate Winslet, playing a very conceited version of herself, offhandedly tell Ricky Gervais that the key to winning an Oscar is to be in a Holocaust movie. Cut to a few years later when Winslet wins an Oscar for her performance in The Reader, where she plays a Third Reich prison guard who committed war crimes during the Holocaust.
  • Any episode of I Love Lucy that involves a joke about philandering, or Lucy and Ricky's marriage being in trouble, or both.
  • The Kids in The Hall have a sketch that Hangs a Lampshade on this (with a healthy bit of Gallows Humor thrown in): Mark McKinney (still living as of this edit) is the guy in charge of a PBS-style fundraiser and he talks about how everyone should call in and send money...

"Unless this is a rerun. In which case I wonder if I'm dead?"

  • There was a segment done about the Challenger space shuttle, that was written and filmed before it exploded, but because of the incident, the segment aired after the disaster. Eerily prescient was a line by the reporter about the fame given to Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who went into space, in which he said something like, "She was just another teacher, who became famous for being selected, but soon, it will all be over."
    • In an pre-flight interview, the Commander of the Challenger on that flight, Dick Scobee, said "By the time the next mission takes off, everything that happened on this flight will have been forgotten."
  • The original airing of the launch of the Challenger shuttle ended in one of these. Many, many students gathered to watch what they thought would be a routine shuttle launch, special only because of who was on there. It went up, and up... and then it went up in flames...
    • Made more heartwrenching still when you know Christa McAuliffe's daughter Caroline begged her mother not to go because "something bad will happen and I'll never see you again."
  • In the penultimate episode of season 2 of Veronica Mars, Weevil tells Cassidy (who is helping him with algebra, long story): "If this is your idea of terms I'll understand? I'm going to kill you. Or myself. It's a toss up." One episode later, Cassidy commits suicide.
    • "Ain't No Magic Mountain High Enough" contains two painful FAMs, given the solution to the season's mystery: Dick, relative of the perpetrator mocking Jackie, daughter of who he thinks is the perpetrator, and Dick's "You gonna pop his cherry?" speech, given the truth of Cassidy's backstory.
    • Season 1's "Like A Virgin" features someone pretending to be Veronica sending an email to Duncan, saying she had VD when they were dating. Late in season 2 it is revealed Veronica has chlamydia... which she contracted being raped by Beaver, on the same night she slept with Duncan. It sucks to be Veronica.
    • Also in "Like A Virgin", the plot becomes darker when you realise just how bad Meg's parents really would have taken it.
    • Again, there's the rather odd discussion of Chlamydia/Crazy Bitchy Teacher between Veronica, Gia and Dick, which is a bit uncomfortable to watch given Veronica got chlamydia being raped by Dick's brother, who got it being molested by Gia's father.
  • An episode of Big Wolf on Campus featured a parody of the film Ghost in which a ghost Merton spoofs the famous "Vase Scene" and tells Lori to "Feel the Swayze". Since Mr. Swayze passed away, the joke isn't as funny.
  • Six Feet Under : Brenda at one point makes fun of what was likely an embolism that Nate had during his sleep. Nate responds by jokingly suggesting that he got a brain tumor from formaldehyde exposure. Oh dear.
  • The District: Ella Mae the character was dying of brain cancer. Lynne Thigpen the actress died of a cerebral haemorrhage a year before the show's cancellation.
  • Roseanne: An early episode has Roseanne and Dan planning out what will happen after they die, climaxing in Dan reassuring as distraught DJ that he's going to live for a long time/looks forward to seeing him getting married one day/everything fictional parents usually say when they're reassuring their kids that they won't die. Sweet at the time, but becomes painful when you remember that Dan ends up dying while DJ is still just a teenager.
    • In another early episode, Roseanne gets a call from the school that D.J. has been neglecting his school work, his excuse being that Dan died, and he has so many responsibilities at home now.
    • In another one, Roseanne gets a call from the school that D.J. had obscene materials, and Dan goes there, and since they haven't seen Mr. Connor before, he jokes that he's her oldest son and Mrs. Connor's a widow. Cue the Gainax Ending. Also, given that he died of a heart attack, any joke about Dan's weight qualifies.
  • Night Court: (set in New York City, albeit well over a decade before 9/11) Mac's TRS80-esque computer starts picking up air-traffic control data. Right after he announces that he fixed it by wiping the information, everyone hears the roar of a jet engine. Dan looks out the window to deliver the punchline "You should see the looks on their faces!"
  • Beverly Hills: 90210: Way back in season 2 (1991) Kelly's mom made a joke that she'd end up "dying from skin cancer". She later died of breast cancer in the 90210 reboot (2009).
  • Bill Cosby Himself: is one of the best stand-up comedy films ever. He covers a wide range of topics, most having to do with his role as a husband and father. Sadly, on at least two occasions he refers to his son, Ennis's, probable death by a member of his own family. The first time it was mentioned was the possible end result of a sibling rivalry with his four sisters, "He's 11 now I don't think he'll live to be 12." The second, by Bill's own hand, as instructed by his over worked, exasperated wife. "I want you to go upstairs... and kill the boy." Tragically, in 1997, Ennis died in an attempted robbery while helping a stranger change a tire. Reality took an otherwise touching scene of a loving father proudly discussing the trials and tribulations that come with raising a son, and made it very difficult to watch as the boy he's describing will be lost to violence in fifteen years time.
  • Gilmore Girls: In season 5, Lorelai is going through a pregnancy scare after a night of unprotected sex with Luke. Rory asks if she considered telling Luke but with the two of them realizing that it could drive Luke away. Guess what caused the show to Jump the Shark in season 6?
  • That episode of How I Met Your Mother where Marshall is seduced into accepting a job from a corporate firm because he finds out that Patrick Swayze was one of its clients. He says "Damn you, Swayze!" while looking up at the sky.
    • From "The Wedding", Barney quips Claudia had to be drunk to hook up with her fiance Stuart. In later seasons, we're treated to an episode with Stuart's alcohol intervention.
    • In "Ted Mosby, Architect", the guys spend some time talking about how awesome Field of Dreams is. Particularly at the end, when the guy gets one last game of catch with his dad. Barney says, "Can we stop talking about this?" Ha ha, Jerkass Barney being emotional. Then we learn he never knew his father, has always sought father figures, and has serious issues as a result.
    • In "Big Days," Marshall and Lily argue about the fact that Marshall told his father they were trying to get pregnant. Lily suggests Marshall tell his father they aren't having a baby and Marshall replies "You want me to give the old man a stroke?" Guess which character is Killed Off for Real and how the next season.
    • Throughout the first six seasons, it's made very clear on numerous occasions that Robin is uncomfortable around kids and doesn't want to be a mother. It's a steady part of her character, and is the source of numerous jokes and part of a few humorous subplots (e.g., Not A Father's Day). Then, in "Symphony of Illumination", she learns that she's actually infertile, which devastates her because her choice in the matter is abruptly taken away before she can truly consider it, not to mention the fact that she doesn't feel like she has a right to be sad, since she didn't ever want them in the first place. And to completely close off all hope, Future!Ted confirms that she never became a mother. Cue every single one of those earlier jokes becoming horrifically heartbreaking over the space of one half-hour.
      • The absolutely most devastating one has got to be the Crowning Moment of Heartwarming at the end of "Little Boys", where we're treated to a montage of Ted's son and daughter's crayon drawings of them and their Aunt Robin taking them to the beach, the zoo, etc. Adorable right? Emotionally-stunted, kid-phobic Robin doting on her best friend's kids? After Symphony of Illumination, we know she doesn't do it just because she can't help but love her friend's kids -- it's also because she doesn't have, and can never have, any kids of her own.
      • And in "Glitter": Robin promising Lily that even though she doesn't like kids in general, she's gonna love Lily's kid "so much". The kid Lily's pregnant with when Robin gets her bad news. Jesus.
  • One episode of Wild West Tech, hosted by David Carradine covered the topic of the Death Penelty; the section on hangings takes on a whole different feel in light of Carradine's death.
  • In the first episode of 16th season of The Amazing Race, the team that finished the leg first won the prize of a trip to Vancouver, including an opportunity to use the Whistler Sliding facility. The episode aired 2 days after an Olympic luge competitor was killed on the track, which was widely decried as being too dangerous.
  • A recent episode of Wheel of Fortune put up a disclaimer before one puzzle about "TV Titles" saying that the episode was taped before the recent Late Night feud with Conan and Leno. The answer? The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien.
  • On the last week of Late Night With Conan O'Brien Nathan Lane sang a version of Your Way to Conan. The final verse had such lyrics as:

Go West! you'll find a place,
and if you're not the ratings victor,
you'll live inside a car with Andy Richter...
Don't ever stop, and if you flop, you'll do it your way!

    • Not quite how it went down, but eerily predictive. Conan sure did leave The Tonight Show his way.
  • And then, the first episode of The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien featured Will Ferrell as a guest. At the end of his segment, Ferrell sings a farewell song for Conan as a joke, who is bewildered as it is only his first night on the job. Ferrell explains that considering how fickle the networks are, they could pull the plug on his show any time. Ferrell was also Conan's final guest on the show, sending him off with a proper goodbye song this time.
  • One of Charles Barkley's running gags on Inside the NBA centered on narrating a particularly bad highlight from the game, usually featuring poor fundamental basketball, with "__________ is turning in his grave", where the blank was filled in by a former NBA player who was proficient in that fundamental and who was very much still alive. Until Barkley chose former Seattle and Boston point guard Dennis Johnson...the day before Johnson's death at the age of 52.
  • In an episode of Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm and Dewie are attaching Jamie's dirty diapers to balloons and releasing them over a crowd, where they then pop them. For one of the diapers, Malcolm says "This one's from when Jamie had swine flu".
    • At the end of one episode, Malcolm questions Lois's authority and asks if she intends to control his life when he's 30 years old and married. In a separate entire episode, he spends the entire episode pondering what he wants to do with his life, but at the end of the episode, decides he'll just continue being a kid while he still is one. As the last episode reveals, the question from the former episode was "yes", and the point of the latter was moot to begin with, because his whole family planned his future out for him from the very beginning. (Could be either this or Hilarious in Hindsight.)
    • Less than a week after Daniel von Bargen's (the man who plays Commandant Edwin Spangler) attempted suicide, a UK television channel aired the episode "Dewey's Dog", in which Spangler shows up drunk and suicidal saying he has nothing to live for. Ouch...
  • Summer Heights High had this hit before the episode had even aired, with an extended Dead Schoolgirl Comedy section. A Real Life schoolgirl with the same name died in the same way eleven days after the episode was filmed, just close enough to the airdate that they didn't have time to reshoot any of the scenes.
  • Reaper's second episode features Andi joking with Sam about how "at least we're in Hell together, right?" The joke becomes less funny and more cringe-worthy with the end of the series, where Andi has given up her soul as well, and Sam just lost the battle with Satan to free them both. It was meant to be a plot hook for the third season, which never materialized, leaving the series with what could be described, at the most charitable, as a Gainax Ending.
  • In an early second season episode of the X-Files, Mulder is telling a woman about testimonies of alien abductees, trying to shock her; he asks her if she would like to know what they do to a woman's ovaries (she really doesn't). The end of the same episode sees Scully abducted, an experience which she later finds out leaves her unable to have children; her ova were extracted as part of the experiments she was subjected to.
  • Deadliest Catch - at the end of the king crab fishing in season 3, the crew of the Cornelia Marie are harassing Captain Phil's son, Jake, as Phil looks on and laughs. Jake gets after his father, saying things like 'One day, I'm gonna be taking care of you, you'll be in a retirement home, we'll have you chained up in the basement'. Captain Phil never made it to retirement.
  • ER's season 12 (2005) episode shows Maura Tierney's character Abby Lockhart struggling with the idea of getting a mammogram, finally seen going for one at the end of the episode after admitting she's never had one and is at high risk for breast cancer. These scenes are particularly difficult to watch now as in 2009 Tierney was diagnosed with breast cancer (treatment of which forced her to drop out of the TV series Parenthood).
  • Diff'rent Strokes star Gary Coleman died of an intracranial brain hemorrhage.
    • It's worth noting that in the episode "Goodbye Dolly," Coleman's character was told that he would be able to fall asleep without his doll. In response, he quipped "The only thing I'll be able to do is fall awake." His fatal hemorrhage was caused by him falling and hitting his head.
  • A 1990s episode of the British children's puppet series Sooty and Co features a constant running joke where Soo criticizes Matthew for his bad taste in music - with Matthew arguing that his music isn't in bad taste as he's a massive fan of Gary Glitter. At one point he even turns to the audience, says: "I do like Gary Glitter, don't you"? and winks. Oh dear, Matthew. Oh dear...
  • In Season 2 of Queer as Folk, when Ted temporarily becomes "addicted" to porn, his best friend Emmett admonishes him that, "You're not sucking me into your black hole of depravity." When Emmett tells the others that they need to stage an intervention, Brian sarcastically guesses that Ted is addicted to crystal meth. In a later season, Ted really does become addicted to crystal meth, and tragically self-destructs while coming very close to dragging Emmett down with him.
    • What is especially funny-turned-cringeworthy is Brian's comment that Ted is a schmuck who couldn't even get a decent addiction.
  • There's an episode of The Golden Girls where the plot revolves around one of Sophia's friends being transferred into a really terrible nursing home, and the girls' efforts to find a place where she can receive proper care. At the end of the episode, they wonder what's going to happen to them as they get older, and make a promise to always take care of each other. After a pause, a worried looking Rose comments, "What happens when there's only one of us left?" This goes from simply sad to heart-breaking when viewed recently. Since Rue McClanahan's recent death, Betty White (who played Rose), is the only one of the four actresses still alive.
    • Even worse, after Rose says that line, Sophia responds with a simple "Don't worry, I can take care of myself." Estelle Getty, the second youngest of the actresses, who logically (one would think) would be the last survivor, was the first to die.
  • Rik Mayall had just finished filming an episode of "The Comic Strip Presents..." in which his character is hit by a car, but between filming and airing, he was in a quad bike accident which caused a massive brain hemorrhage and left him in a coma for over a week. The producers were wary about airing it, but went ahead with the blessings of Rik's wife.
  • iCarly: In iPilot, Carly and Sam make fun of Ms. Briggs's "crazy pointy boobs", yet Mindy Sterling herself is a breast cancer survivor who underwent major treatment in 1998.
    • In "iPsycho", Gibby said he had no other summer plans other then watching "Different Strokes" reruns and the episode actually aired barely a week after Different Strokes' star Gary Coleman's death.
      • They realized this in post production, and added an AWW sound after Gibby's line.
      • In the same episode, a clown dies of aneurysm, which sets the tone for the rest of the episode. In 2012, a clown at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade meets this fate thanks to a heart attack.
  • In the short-lived sitcom The Class, we are told in the sixth episode that Yonk only eats meat. Richie's sarcastic response was that it wasn't a heart attack waiting to happen. Twelve episodes later, Yonk has a heart attack.
  • In The Reveal of Ashes to Ashes Gene mentions that he kicked down a door to confront the home invaders who end up shooting him in the face and killing him. Knowing this, Gene's tendency to kick down Sam's door in Life On Mars just makes you cringe.
    • In Life On Mars, there's a conversation in which Gene says he hopes he's dead before surveillance becomes a major part of police work. Knowing that Gene is already dead at this point makes this an example, but Sam's suggestion that Gene probably will be is the icing on the cake.
  • The Dana Carvey Show, which aired in 1996, had several segments based on Princess Di were cringe-inducing in the wake of her death in 1997. Among these are Carvey as the Church Lady giving the Top 10 Ideas for New Titles for Princess Di (including "Queen Orgasmia," "Slut Slut Slut," and "Princess Di-ing to Get Laid") and Carvey as Prince Charles singing a song about how he wants to behead Di. This ended with Carvey chopping off the head of a dummy version of Di with an axe.
  • Season One of Blakes Seven has this quote:

Cally: My people have a saying: "A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken."
Avon: Life expectancy must be fairly short among your people.

    • That joke gets a lot less funny during Season Three, and even less funny during Season Four. Avon even points it out.

Kerr Avon: "A man who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken." Cally once said that was a saying among her people.
Dorian: Who's Cally?
Kerr Avon: Cally was murdered. So were most of her people.

  • This video, the opening to an August 1987 episode of "Late Night With David Letterman", features two massive Funny Aneurysm Moments. The first one is the camera flying through the air towards the world trade center towers, but the other one is a little more subtle, see if you can find it...
    • "From New York, where I'm in trouble because I told some punk network page to drop dead...turned out to be Brandon Tartikoff...". Brandon Tartikoff was the president of NBC at the time, and he actually did "drop dead" in August 1997, from complications from Hodgkin's Disease, exactly 10 years after this episode aired...
  • An episode of Over the Top featured Tim Curry's and John Ritter's characters competing for an acting job. At one point of the episode, Tim Curry is seen in drag. This normally would be hilarious, if one didn't realize that the episode was made in 1997, and that at the time, Tim Curry was very uncomfortable about his role as the cross-dressing Dr. Frank N. Furter due to some rather obsessed fans.
  • A 2007 episode of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (US version) had Ramsay exclaim to New Jersey-area restauranteur Joseph Cerniglia that his business was about to "swim down the Hudson"...became quite the prophetic Funny Aneurysm Moment when Cernilgia apparently jumped off the George Washington Bridge in September 2010 and was found floating in the Hudson.
  • In Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Billy had numerous one-off female love interests. Over a decade later, his actor, David Yost, admitted he was gay and that he was often harassed by the crew.
    • Also, in one episode, they're making a time capsule, and Kimberly imagines the future as "a world without racism, or crime, or war".
  • An episode of Leverage deals with the team trying to stop a plane, which was carrying an assassin and a bomb. (Yes, this was written and aired after 9/11). Parker mocks the survival rates of water landings, and the pilot later lands on a freeway rather than making one. This was a few weeks before the famous "Miracle on the Hudson".
  • This intro to British game show Strike It Lucky features a clip of a man thrown into a swimming pool. Just ten years later, the show's host Michael Barrymore would have his career ruined due to an incident where a man died in Barrymore's pool after a party.
  • On The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, one character incredulously asks another "You're STILL sending money to Haiti?!" This was clearly meant to be a reference to the Haiti earthquake that happened almost a year before the episode aired. Unfortunately, the episode ended up airing a mere 2 days after the beginning of a cholera outbreak in Haiti.
  • Ellen Degeneres' epynonymous show Ellen featured an early episode in which Ellen falls all over herself trying to get the romantic attention of a hunky firefighter. Originally an amusing episode in classic Lucille Ball sitcom fashion, the show took on a tragic air when the character Ellen came out as a lesbian (a fairly short time after the comedianne herself did the same)--suddenly, the episode was a tale of a woman desperately trying to convince herself of her own heterosexuality by pursuing an unobtainable male.
  • The OC. One line: "I'll be okay Kiki. I'm like the Gulf Region. What's one more hurricane?" Turns out things could get a lot worse for the Gulf Region.
  • The Big Bang Theory. In Season One Penny gets the chance to appear in a stage musical and the boys cheerfully tell her to "break a leg", during Season Four the actress really did break a leg in a horse riding accident which is why she isn't in two episodes.
    • In the episode "The Griffin Equivalency", after Raj ditches them for fame and fortune, Leonard, Sheldon and Howard are debating appropriate qualities for a replacement friend, including trustworthiness and loyalty. Leonard jokingly suggests Iron Man. Yeah, about that. . .
      • In the same episode, Raj, when stating that he's going to be in People's Magazine, he tells the patron next to the table they usually sit at. Said patron turns out to be Charlie Sheen, and his response is "Yeah? Call me when you're on the cover." This patronizing remark turns a lot darker around late 2010, early 2011, where Charlie Sheen does indeed appear on the cover of various entertainment magazines, and not in a good way.
  • Dexter. Shortly after season five ended, actors Michael C Hall and Jennifer Carpenter, who were married in real life but play brother and sister Dexter and Debra on the show, announced their divorce. This adds a new dimension to certain parts of the season five finale, such as Dexter removing his wedding ring, or Debra saying to Dexter "You must be glad now that this is all over".
    • Extra funny in light of season 6's ending.
  • Glee. April gives Kurt alcohol. When Emma questions him about his breath, he stares at her and says: "Oh, Bambi... I cried so hard when those hunters shot your mommy!" before throwing up on her shoes. If you ignore the fact that Kurt is a teenager who really shouldn't be drinking, that line is quite funny... until you realize that Kurt would've been the age to watch movies like Bambi right around the time when his mother died.
    • Holy crap, when I figured that out recently I literally started crying.
    • Another moment for poor Kurt. For a good part of Season 2, and especially when he and Blaine finally hooked up, fans joked about Kurt and Blaine running for Prom King(s)--at least partially because Quinn's obsession with being Prom Queen was getting kind of creepy, and some people thought anyone would have been better than her. With Kurt's love of tiaras, the idea morphed into Kurt being Prom Queen. Come "Prom Queen" airing, Kurt attends the prom as a normal student and has an awesome time until Figgins announces that the Prom King is Karofsky and the Prom Queen, who'd won by a landslide, is... Kurt Hummel. Seeing as Kurt wasn't even running, the only conclusion is that this was a homophobic prank. Cue every single viewer staring in horror at the screen.
    • During Kurt and Blaine's duet in "A Very Glee Christmas," the song they happen to sing is "Baby it's Cold Outside," which includes the rather macabre lyric "if you caught pneumonia and died...". Guess the cause of death of Sue's sister, Jean in the episode "Funeral".
    • Another YMMV one, but Kurt and Blaine singing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" seems particularly harsh in light of the episode "The First Time," in which Blaine seriously overstepped his boundaries in the car, attempting to start his and Kurt's sexual relationship while he was drunk in the backseat of Kurt's car, and not stopping even after Kurt said "no" several times.
    • In "Heart", Mercedes sings "I Will Always Love You". Whitney Houston died three days before the episode aired.
  • Good News Week have one recently when Paul Mc Dermott joked about New Zealand. A day later, An 6.5 earthquake hits Christchurch in New Zealand.
  • Following Paul Merton and Caroline Quentin's divorce, and the revelations of Angus Deyton's private life, it's hard to watch early Have I Got News for You, with its running gag of Caroline and Angus having an affair, without wincing. (Especially the one which started it, in which Caroline is a guest panelist and Angus deadpans in the Missing Words round "The answer's 'Divorce Row', fittingly enough.") Then again, it's hard to watch any early episode of Have I Got News for You without wincing, once you know Ian and Paul's twitting of Angus wasn't friendly banter; they really didn't like him much.
  • At this point, the entire genre of tokusatsu might count as a funny aneurysm. In most seasons of Super Sentai, Kamen Rider, and most other entries in the genre, it's fairly common to watch the Big Bad cause destruction in whatever Japanese city the heroes happen to be in. Now that an earthquake and tsunami 1-2 punch have devastated Japan in real life, it's difficult to watch.
    • Well, I was under the impression that the whole thing with cities getting leveled by the bad guys was drawn from past Japanese experiences, such as other earthquake/tsunami episodes in the past, not to mention that unpleasant incident at the end of WW 2.
    • For a more specific example, 2010's Kamen Rider Double depicts a street performer's music as so horrendous that everyone nearby him scrambles for cover, and his off-key caterwauling actually causes an earthquake.
  • In a fifth season episode of Three's Company entitled "Dying to Meet You", Jack fakes his death in order to evade the wrath of a girl's jealous boyfriend (played by Terry Kiser of Weekend at Bernie's fame). I think Cindy tells the boyfriend that "Jack's heart gave out". This is especially creepy and depressing knowing that John Ritter would 22 years after this episode aired, die of an aortic dissection.
  • In an episode of The Middle which aired about 6 months before Japan's devastating tsunami, the family is thinking about taking in a Japanese foreign exchange student, which Frankie describes as "This is about making a difference. We'd be like a pebble, that makes a tiny ripple which becomes this wave, which begins in Orson and becomes bigger and bigger all the way to Japan," which Mike snarkly responds with "those are called tsunamis, and the Japanese don't like them."
  • Ian Hislop in a 1996 episode of Have I Got News for You, talking about Diana Spencer being at an open heart surgery. "It's a bit ghoulish. Makes you wonder what Diana's going to do next. Road accidents? 'Let me through, I'm the princess of Wales!'"
    • What makes it worse is the fact that Dermot Morgon (A.K.A. Father Ted) was a guest panalist. He died of a heart attack.
  • The final two-parter of series 4 of The Sarah Jane Adventures was entitled "Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith". At the time, another series had been greenlit. However, Elisabeth Sladen, the actress portraying Sarah Jane, died in April 2011 with the current state of series 5 unknown.
  • A Bit of Fry and Laurie: Series 4, Episode 2 featured a vox pop in which Stephen Fry played a depressed character who attempted suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in his car. The original airdate of the episode was 19th Feb 1995. In the early hours of the next morning, Fry made an unsuccessful suicide attempt using that exact method.
  • Everybody Loves Raymond has a minor in-universe example. Robert's eating quirk of always touching food to his chin before he eats it was seen as humorous and odd. It becomes sad later when he explains how his quirk started; whenever he got food on his face, Marie (his mother) would pause whatever she was doing with Raymond to wipe it off. Getting food on his face was the only way for Robert to get any real attention from his own mother, and he's been compulsively touching food to his chin ever since.
  • A March 26, 1981 episode of Barney Miller shows an optician named Corbett who's eager to go on the space shuttle (get it? Tom Corbett, Space Cadet?) and who's just been told he might qualify as a mission specialist. As he's about to leave, this happens:

Dietrich: And listen, don't worry about the tiles.
Corbett: What tiles?
Dietrich: The heat protective tiles that cover the shuttle. There was a problem with them falling off. And, of course, critically placed tiles during the actual flight could cause the interior of the shuttle to be exposed to temperatures of 2,800 degrees during re-entry.
Corbett: And I burn easy.
Dietrich: Wear a hat.

  • Pretty much everything said by Ryan Dunn in this clip from the Jackass Gumball Rally episode, seeing how he died in a high speed car crash. http://youtu.be/2OnhZLHSECo
  • Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Sabrina's evil twin being named Katrina takes on a darker tone when you think about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina (which happened two years after the show ended).
  • At the end of Aerodynamics of Gender, someone says "Who's in charge of making sure Pierce doesn't OD?" Jeff doesn't call 'not it.' It originally seems like a throwaway joke, but the Valentine's Day episode makes it a FAM. Well-played as always, Dan Harmon.
  • There was a particularly brutal one in an episode of Saved by the Bell. Kelly, who is running for homecoming queen, says that she's always wanted to be a princess. Lisa's response: "Well, if anything ever happens to Princess Di..."
  • In this 1992 Sesame Street clip, Elmo pretends to be an obnoxious wind-up toy. Six years later comes Tickle Me Elmo, among other merchandise.
  • The pre-empt gag for the 1989 You Can't Do That on Television episode "Age" was "Michael Jackson Gets Old and Wrinkled"...
  • In an episode of You Can't Do That On Television about Commercials, a shady alleyway salesman portrayed by Les Lye makes a remark about jumping from the top of the World Trade Center. Ooo...
  • An in-universe example in Frasier: Frasier Crane, when attending a Catholic charity as part of his apology about the weather (makes sense in context), decides to make a new joke about a fisherman and a priest. This joke ends up being significantly less funny than he had hoped when he told it because the Archbishop was unable to return to Seattle because he got lost at sea (he wasn't aware of the news because he was in the bathroom rehearsing the joke when the pastor announced it). Ironically, the fisherman and the priest joke he planned to tell was penned because he wanted to make a more tasteful joke because a Nun complained about a joke the last person who attended one of their charities told that was implied to be the same one Frasier planned to tell.
  • In Everybody Hates Chris episode "Everybody Hates My Man," when Julius is asked if he wants another job, present-day Chris Rock narrates "That's like asking Amy Winehouse if she wants another drink!" Years after the episode aired, she died of an overdose.
  • A Season 5 episode of Smallville revolves around a young girl called Maddie who can control glass with her mind. Halfway through, her biological father, missing since her childhood, shows up and kidnaps her.

Clark: "I don't understand, who'd want to kidnap Maddie?"

  • In an episode of Chocolate News, during David Alan Grier's segment "Have You Lost Yo Damn Mind?!", he talks about the propensity of black stars to die sooner than white stars, saying "Amy Winehouse shoots heroin and smokes crack, but she gets to wake up every morning and live?!". Actually, not anymore, since she passed away in 2011.
  • A strange subversion: in an episode of Home Improvement, Wilson, played by the late Earl Hindman, gets hopped up on caffeine and turns into a Motor Mouth, at one point remarking "Does anyone else feel like their heart's about to leap out of their chest?" After the actor's much-mourned death, this line now makes many people wince...except that he didn't actually die of a heart attack.
  • During Comedy Central's Roast of Charlie Sheen, there were numerous cracks directed towards Patrice O'Neal in regards to his weight and being a diabetic. These particular jokes are know extremely awkward in light of O'Neal's recent stroke.
    • It Got Worse. Patrice passed away in late 2011 after that stroke.
  • All those jokes about Carol Seaver's weight on Growing Pains lose whatever humor they had after reading about Tracey Gold's struggle with anorexia, which eventually led her to leave the series to get help.
  • Used in-universe in Community, where the pottery class teacher has a "No Ghosting" rule, marked by a poster of Patrick Swayze with a big red slash through it. He essentially invokes this trope when he points it out.
    • On a more serious note, Jeff says in the first episode of Season 3, "Biology 101," that "this is the year that we all die." Two-thirds of the way through the season, in "Basic Lupine Urology," Starburns is suddenly and unexpectedly killed off.
  • In All Creatures Great and Small, Siegfried lectures his brother Tristan on the dangers of smoking. Brian Sinclair, the inspiration for Tristan's character, actually did die of lung cancer.
  • In the Only Fools and Horses episode "Thicker Than Water", the Trotters' ne'er-do-well father returns, with a scheme that involves tricking Del into believing he's not his son. Four years later, we learn that Rodney's father is Freddie the Frog Robdal.
  • In Highlander, Richie asks Duncan somewhere in season 2 if they'll ever have to fight each other. Of course, they did fight each other in a manner of speaking-and Richie lost his head.
  • The Late Show with David Letterman. 1993: in the third episode Dave makes a joke about Chinese food being not as healthy as everybody thinks. "My fortune cookie said, 'you will need triple bypass surgery.'" Six years later, Dave gets a quintuple bypass.
  • Arrested Development has a running gag where Lucille makes comments about how fat Lindsay is. Obviously intended to show how cruel and uncaring a mother she can be, but it's a bit uncomfortable when you realize that Portia de Rossi had suffered from anorexia. (She had, fortunately, recovered by the time of the show.)
  • A combination in-universe and out-of-universe one in the Modern Family episode Leap Day. In-universe, Mitchell's plan for a Wizard of Oz extravaganza for Cam's birthday goes wrong when Cam reminds him that his family is still recovering from a tornado. Meanwhile, the two actors playing the flying Monkeys introduce themselves with "Hey." "Hey, we're the monkeys?" It aired the same day Davy Jones died of a heart attack.
  • An episode of Hannah Montana has Hannah disappointing the little children in the audience of a talk show she is guesting on for admitting she hated carrots, with parents accusing Hannah of being a poor role model. After trying to talk her way out of the situation, she delivers An Aesop that her young audience didn't have to copy her every move so loyally, and that they should make up their own minds about their own decisions. The episode takes on a weird new light as Miley Cyrus took on an edgier, somewhat more mature image a few years later, to the dismay of many Moral Guardians and the media.
  • Morton Downey Jr. of The Morton Downey Jr. Show had a trademark habit of chainsmoking and blowing smoke into guests faces. This is a bit darker looking back knowing that Morton died from lung cancer, and that even later in his life he regretted 'making smoking look cool'.
  • In an episode of Kaamelott, King Arthur finds the two inept knights Perceval and Karadoc trying to break a rock barehanded, and before they inevitably end up breaking their own hand he tells them something which amounts to "You know, for someone like me who often suffers from depression, what you are doing right now is really welcome". A few seasons later, Arthur actually suffers from depression, and tries to kill himself.
  • Any of Lauren Goodger's appearances on The Only Way Is Essex qualify as this now given her break-up with Mark, and the fact that she has become something of a media sensation now. Lampshaded on a few British football forums.
  1. ↑ Redd Foxx died of a heart attack. And it was right in the middle of filming another television show, no less.
  2. ↑ he was abused as a child, and his loving foster parents recently died
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