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== [[Anime]] ==
* ''[[
== [[Comic Books]] ==
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* Sometimes seen in bad [[Fan Fiction]] as well; In Stephen Ratliff's '[[Marissa Picard (Fanfic)|Marissa Picard]]' stories, Marrissa Picard's pranks are seen in-universe as hilarious (except by the bad guys) but come across to many readers as banal or heartless.
** Plus, some would qualify as [[Too Dumb to Live]] if people were in character-- I mean, pulling a [[Proud Warrior Race Guy|Klingon warrior's]] pants down?
* The writer of ''[[
{{quote| '''Imperiled Friend of the Week''': "Your friends are all that, and a bag of chips.."<br />
'''B.C.''':"No..[[I Take Offense to That Last One|Nacho Cheese tortillas]], actually.." }}
== [[Film]] ==
* This is a problem in the [[Biopic]] ''The Life and Death of [[Peter Sellers]]'' -- the attempts by the film's writers and actors to distill Peter's work in ''[[The Goon Show]]'', ''The Millionairess'', the ''[[Pink Panther]]'' series and ''[[Doctor Strangelove|Dr. Strangelove]]'' aren't as funny as the real thing (no actual film clips of Sellers are used, unlike in ''Chaplin'' below), despite the in-film reactions to them. ''The Goon Show'' sequence especially suffers for this if you're unfamiliar with the show -- and most non-U.K. viewers are. Most of the rest of the movie relies on [[Take Our Word for It]], which is also problematic for viewers who don't know his early films up through 1959's ''[[
* Subverted the ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' skit "The Funniest Joke in the World" (later part of the film ''And Now For Something Completely Different''). There is a joke which, when read, kills people (they die of laughter). Subverted in that this joke is never read in English, but after being translated one word at a time into German, (one translator accidentally looked at ''two'' words, and fell into a coma for a month) it is broadcasted in German on a WWII battlefield, causing the German troops to, you guessed it, die laughing. When translated back to English by interested fans, the joke turned out to be [[As Long
* Absolutely and intentionally defied in ''[[Monsters, Inc.]]'' at all costs. Pixar had a very strict rule that they couldn't have any character laugh unless the audience is also laughing. As a result, a lot of the slapstick that causes Boo to laugh (and of course, her laughter is a major plot point) got considerably more violent and complex than it was in the storyboards.
* Lampshaded in ''[[Austin Powers]]'' where Dr. Evil and company's [[Evil Laugh]] goes on for so long, as if they are laughing at something genuinely hilarious, that it becomes a bit of an [[Overly Long Gag]].
* Used intentionally in ''[[
* Averted in the [[Biopic]] ''Chaplin''. The filmmakers use many actual clips of Chaplin's films, and Robert Downey Jr superbly matches Chaplin's physical capabilities.
* In ''[[Showgirls]]'', there is an overweight performer at the strip club who makes a string of self-depreciating jokes. While the patrons of the club are in stitches, the jokes themselves are painfully flat.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[
* One of the causes of the downfall of ''[[Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip]]'': the fact that characters constantly refer to the sketches in the [[Show Within a Show]] as hilarious, when more often than not, they fall flatter than Kansas to the people at home.
** This may be one reason ''[[30 Rock
* A helluva lot of Joey's routines on ''[[Full House]]''.
* Early episodes of ''[[Seinfeld]]'' would open and close with samples of Jerry's stand-up that typically weren't even ''close'' to the caliber of humor in the actual show, yet still had the audience in stitches.
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* In the final episode of ''[[Police Squad!]]!'', Frank Drebin goes undercover as a stand-up comedian for a nightclub. His jokes are pretty basic (and nowhere near as good as the material Zucker, Abrams and Zucker wrote for the rest of the show) yet the audience is falling out of their seats with laughter, and the management of the nightclub tells him that it was the best performance he'd ever seen.
** Most (all?) of what you see is Frank delivering punchlines, and most of those punchlines come from infamously filthy jokes -- the implication being that Frank works dirty, and he's really good at it. One can assume that it's really just a case of ZAZ [[Getting Crap Past the Radar]]; ''[[The Goon Show]]'' used the same trick.
* In a ''[[3rd Rock
* Played with in ''[[MASH|M*A*S*H]]'': Hawkeye tells BJ his favourite joke, "the funniest joke I've ever heard," but BJ is unimpressed by it. Later, Hawkeye learns BJ has been telling the joke to the rest of the unit, who all think it's the funniest joke they've ever heard.
* ''[[The West Wing]]'' [[Tough Room|is normally one of those shows where everyone is super witty and spends all day firing hilarious remarks back and forth, and hardly anyone ever cracks a smile]]. The teaser of the episode "He Shall, from Time to Time..." calls for the senior staff to be standing around laughing so that the mood can be shattered by the sound of the president collapsing with a crash in the other room. The joke that causes them to lose their poker faces for one of the only times in the series? Sam lamenting, "I'll never live it down!" in reference to a typo the president caught while rehearsing his State of the Union address. Ho, ho, ho.
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** Then there's the joke that's "the funniest joke ever", but only if you're a guy. "What's the difference between peanut-butter and jam?" Barney tells it to Lily, who is so disgusted that she refuses to see or speak to Barney for a month. The guys, while upset that the group has been divided, still think it's the best joke ever. The punchline of the joke is never uttered out loud on the show, but if you look it up on the web, it definitely fails to live up to hype: {{spoiler|"I can't peanut-butter my dick up your ass."}}
* Used rather well in ''[[News Radio]]'': Everyone keeps telling Dave that Lisa's ex-boyfriend Stewart is one of the funniest people they've ever met. When Dave and Lisa go out to lunch with Stewart, he gets her rolling with a number of inside jokes and references to things Dave (and the audience) has never heard of.
* There was an episode of ''[[Star Trek:
{{quote| '''Guinan''': You're a droid and I'm a 'noid (pronounced to sound like "Annoyed")}}
** It's even worse, As [[SF Debris]] pointed out in his review of the episode (The Outrageous Okona) the joke that appears is actually a rewrite, the original joke (which he actually reads out) is even worse: ''My job here places me under some obligations, like a vow of secrecy. I can't repeat anything I hear or see. Now the obligation of the patron is to tell the truth otherwise I'm being placed under a commitment to keep a secret about nothing. That's not fair, it's called wasted honour. Do you understand?'' Yeah really, that's the joke, check it [http://blip.tv/sf-debris-opinionated-reviews/tng-the-outrageous-okona-review-5167604\]. Its around the 10:40 minutes mark.
*** What makes this really bad is that Guinan is played by [[Whoopi Goldberg]]. Couldn't they have just asked her to adlib? Chances are it'd at least elicit a chuckle or two!
** On the other hand, Data's ''failed'' jokes, which are ''supposed'' to be unfunny to demonstrate his failure to understand humour, are, if not actually good, at least capable of eliciting a smile, and at any rate are better than the jokes that the audience is ''supposed'' to laugh at.
* ''[[Babylon
** Like the ''Robocop'' example above, this was deliberate. [[Word of God]] is that Rebo and Zooty were meant to reflect how standards of humor change over time, not to mention that a lot of humor is based on cultural references and mores that you have to be familiar with to get the joke, so that what's funny to a society in the future would be incomprehensible to present-day audiences (or to alien audiences).
*** Also lampshaded in the show by Rebo/Penn saying lines to this effect after he makes an incomprehensible joke that the Minbari find funny but nobody else even understands.
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* There was an entire episode of ''[[Arthur (
** The ''Arthur'' example might be a bit of playing with the trope; only a select few people thought the joke was funny, but Buster's imagination sure thought it was the reason Binky got a higher grade. It's revealed at the end that Buster studied the wrong topic for his report.
* An episode of ''[[Jimmy Neutron]]'' had Jimmy alter his father's brain to make him "500% funnier." An example of one of the jokes he told under said influence: "I can smell the learning, oh wait, that's Butch. Do you ''ever'' shower?"
** Well, 500% of 0.000001 still isn't much.
* An episode of ''[[Recess]]'' has a lot of this for a movie everyone except Vince has seen. Possibly justified in that Vince not knowing the context of the quotes is the driving force of the plot.
* The ''[[
** Particularly if one had seen the "real" Honey in the Bosko cartoons, who basically just prances around going "La,la,la!"
* Satirized in ''[[
** Well of course not. Her delivery was awful.
* In ''[[The Simpsons (
** Parodied in another episode. At the dentist, Lisa ends the episode by making a ridiculously cringeworthy "tooth/truth" pun. The rest of the family, and the dentist, burst out laughing as though it's the greatest joke ever told...at which point the dentist realises he's accidentally left the laughing gas on.
* Invoked intentionally in one [[Family Guy]]. Peter tried to impress [[Dan Ackroyd]] and [[Chevy Chase]] with a flat joke. The two comedians and Lois recognized it as unfunny, but absolutely everybody else in the show's universe thought it was the most hilarious joke ever.
{{quote| Here's John Wayne at the first Thanksgiving! "I'm john Wayne, pilgrims! Happy Thanksgiving, Pilgrims!"}}
* ''[[
** Jimmy is supposed to be a very funny stand-up comedian that all the other characters find hilarious. He has yet to tell a single joke that is funny. In the episode "Fishsticks," Jimmy coming up with (and Cartman taking all the credit for) what is supposed to be the funniest joke ever. It goes thus: "Do you like fishsticks ([[Don't Explain the Joke|fish dicks]]) ?" "Yes." "Do you like putting them in your mouth?" "Yes." "What are you, a gay fish?" The joke makes the rounds in all the talk shows and becomes a nationwide phenomenon. The only person not to get it is rapper [[Kanye West]], who is so self-centered that he takes it as being called gay and starts looking for the originator of the "rumors".
** The "Funnybot" episode features a robot that is programmed to be the perfect comedian, but it tells lame cut-and-paste tabloid jokes, mostly ending with the punchline "Awkward!" It sells out amphitheaters across the world. The Funnybot is so successful that the world's most famous comedians are rendered unemployed and destitute, and an angry mob consisting of [[Conan O
* The Joker played with this in ''[[Batman: The Animated Series
* This is mostly averted in ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents]]'' where Timmy wishes he was the funniest person on Earth: His dialogue doesn't change at all and everyone is simply magically forced to laugh at it. This trope shows up briefly with the jokes the supposedly funny kids tell at the start of the episode, though.
* Every single episode of ''[[Widget the World Watcher]]'' (not to be confused with a [[Widget Series]]) [["Everybody Laughs" Ending|ended with everyone laughing]] at some "cute" thing someone said that was distinctly not even remotely funny.
* ''[[The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack]]'' has an entire episode of this trope, beginning with Peppermint Larry telling some jokes consisting of truly awful puns and continuing into a joke-telling contest between Larry and another character. Eventually said other character speaks ''[[Rapid-Fire Comedy|entire sentences]]'' in [[Hurricane of Puns|nothing but puns]], soon after which it curves in on itself, implodes, then becomes genuinely funny.
* ''[[
** Not only that, but then Stacy -- who was laughing along with everyone else -- says she doesn't even know what airline food is.
* The ''[[Tom Goes to
* During an episode of ''[[
* Used deliberately in an episode of ''[[Dave the Barbarian]]'', where the extraordinary unfunny Ned Frischman, a man from the future, travels back in time to the middle ages in order to tell his jokes before they have turned old. He manages to become the funniest man in recorded history by using simple "Why did the chicken cross the road"-class jokes (recorded history having begun two weeks earlier).
* On ''[[Jimmy Two-Shoes]]'', Jimmy is described as being able to cheer up anyone and make them laugh, even in [[Hell|Miseryville]]. Yet the things he does seem like stereotypical grade-school stuff. It's [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] at the end of "The Mysterious Mr. Ten", when Lucius can't believe Jimmy is funny.
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