Incessant Chorus

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"We promised to sing the Birdie song 10,000 times, didn't we? Well, we've got 5,276 to go. So sing!"
Ursula, Bye Bye Birdie

They have one song to sing, and they'll sing it in practically every scene they're in. This may annoy the audience, and even annoy the characters if they do it several times in one scene.

Examples of Incessant Chorus include:


Anime and Manga

Film

Literature

  • The sheep in Animal Farm. "Four legs good, two legs bad!"

Live-Action TV

  • The Vikings from the Spam sketch. "Lovely Spam, wonderful Spaaaaam..." "Bloody Vikings!"
    • Done also in the "Cheese Shop" sketch, where there's a Greek band playing a song in the background, until Cleese turns around and screams "WILL YOU SHUT THAT BLOODY DANCING UP?!"
  • Used as a running gag in an episode of Muppets Tonight. The characters keep mentioning Istanbul and Constantinople as though they were two different places, and every time they do, a band of rats dressed up as Turks pop up from nowhere to sing the penultimate verse of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)".
    • Another episode had a chorus of Whatnots pop up to sing a variation of "Whip It Good"
  • Father Ted once featured a disco where the DJ for the night has forgotten his records, leaving him with just "Ghost Town" by The Specials, so he can only play that tune over and over, even in lieu of the national anthem.

Opera

  • Gilbert and Sullivan have a few examples:
    • The bridesmaids in Ruddigore keep on bursting into their chorus ("Hail the Bridegroom--hail the Bride!") until Robin angrily orders them to leave.
    • In HMS Pinafore:

And so do his sisters and his cousins and his aunts ...

Theatre

  • The bridesmaids' chorus in Ruddigore (Gilbert and Sullivan) fits this trope in spades. Whenever any of the other characters suggest that a marriage might be made, the bridesmaids pop up to sing "Hail the bridegroom, hail the bride!"
  • "Follow The Fold" from Guys and Dolls.
  • In Bye Bye Birdie, Conrad Birdie's fan girls keep on singing:

"We love you, Conrad, oh yes, we do
We love you, Conrad, and we'll be true
When you're not near us, we're blue
Oh Conrad, we love you!"

    • Fans of The Beatles completely missed the point and made their own version for John, Paul, George, and Ringo. And sang it to them. "We love you, Beatles..."
  • In the musical Wonderful Town, Ruth wants to interview a group of Brazilian sailors, but they want her to teach them how to do the Conga first. She shows them how, and then starts rattling off her questions (in song), but is interrupted every fourth line by their shouts of "Conga!" and increasingly wild singing and dancing. She tries to get them to stop and listen to her, but is in the end literally carried away by the Crowd Song.
  • The town gossips in The Music Man: "PickalittletalkalittlepickalittletalkalittleCHEEPCHEEPCHEEP..."
  • A possibly accidental example in Jekyll and Hyde with the five times "Facade" is sung by the chorus. Even more egregious by the fact that the song is meant to hammer home the very concept of the play that "If we're not one, but two, are we evil or good? Do we walk the fine line that we'd cross if we could? Are we waiting to break through the façade?"

Web Original

Western Animation

"Oooooohhhhhh... We're the boys of the Chorus
We hope you like our shoooowwww
We know you're rootin' for us
But now we have to gooooooo!"

  • The Buddy Bears from Garfield and Friends.
  • The national anthem of Anvilania in an Animaniacs cartoon, which is such a boring dirge that it is used as a weapon later on.
  • "A Spark Inside Us", from The Princess and the Goblin. It's a song about singing, but it helps that singing is a highly effective weapon.
  • The final scenes of The Flintstones episode "The Hot Piano" involve Barney and a troupe of policemen who keep singing "Happy Anniversary" to Fred and Wilma, much to Fred's annoyance.