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Of Corpse He's Alive: Difference between revisions
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A serious version of this is the [[El Cid Ploy]]. See also [[The Fun in Funeral]]. Compare [[Mummies At the Dinner Table]] and [[Dead Pet Sketch]]. The opposite situation, usually played seriously, is [[Faking the Dead]]. [[Dead Person Impersonation]] is when a living person assumes the dead one's ID and doesn't bother with the body.
{{examples
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== Fan Fiction ==
* "[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/11845/1/Caretakers/Caretakers Caretakers]" (''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Animation)|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]''): Lyra and Bon-Bon do this with Granny Smith when they presume her to be dead, with Lyra moving the corpse with her telekinesis and [[Man of a Thousand Voices|Bon-Bon]] providing the voice.
== Film ==
* The trope was [[Trope Codifier|made famous]] by ''[[Weekend At Bernies (Film)|Weekend At Bernies]]'', where a pair of losers find that their deceased boss has ordered a hit on them, to be carried out once he ditches them. Out of sheer audacity, they start hauling the corpse around to convince everyone he's still alive. {{spoiler|Except the hitman actually killed their boss, and all they're doing is drawing attention to themselves, and freaking the hitman out...}}
** No discussion would be complete without mentioning ''[[Sequelitis|the sequel]]''. Yes. They made a sequel. With [[Hollywood Voodoo]] and a [[Treasure Hunt]]. The series maintain a fanbase to this day (The Smirk is iconic) simply because it's [[So Bad
** ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' parodied this movie in the Digital Short ''Party at Mr. Bernard's'', only {{spoiler|everyone immediately realizes that Mr. Bernard is dead and the two guys are put on trial for fooling around with a dead body -- until they find Mr. Bernard's video will which stipulates that when he dies, he wants his assistants to carry him around and fool people into thinking he's alive}}.
* Another borderline example: [[Alfred Hitchcock]]'s ''[[The Trouble With Harry]]'' has a group of townspeople discovering a body out in the woods and attempting to hide it from the authorities. Some of the hiders did it because they thought ''they'' had accidentally killed the man, and others did it to protect a person whom they ''thought'' had killed the man. The corpse gets buried and dug up three times each. {{spoiler|It turns out no one killed the man: his death was from natural causes.}}
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** ''[[Discworld (Literature)/Soul Music|Soul Music]]'' parodies the ''[[Beau Geste]]'' example when Death joins the Klatchian Foreign Legion. As they're outnumbered, they do the same thing with their dead to make it look like they've got more soldiers...but because the [[Grim Reaper]] is on their side, the dead soldiers ''start fighting''.
* A serious example in ''Violet Eyes'' by Nicole Luiken, {{spoiler|at the end, when the heroes try and convince a group of 'buyers' that their captor is alive and they are dead.}}
* A semi-serious [[Dead Person Impersonation|variation]] happens in ''[[X Wing Series|Wraith Squadron]]''. When the Wraiths captured an enemy corvette, they managed to do so before the corvette could get a message off, meaning that the enemy was completely unaware that it had been seized. They decided to try [[The Infiltration]], passing as the crew of the corvette to get close to the enemy. The captain - "a petty guy who reached his ultimate level of usefulness driving a minelaying barge for a warlord and then had to be scraped off the floor", according to Face - was killed and his body made unrecognizable, but he had such a [[Small Name, Big Ego|massive ego]] that he kept a full-holo [[
{{quote| '''Face''' (After a session where he deflects the suspicions of the petty captain's superior): "Thank you, thank you. Performances every hour, on the hour. Imperial madmen a specialty."}}
** A similar version is done in the ''[[Honor Harrington (Literature)|Honor Harrington]]'' series, when Honor, having been captured and sent to a hellish prison, has the inmates take over. The Warden, a [[Complete Monster]] like pretty much everyone who worked there, was naturally brutally murdered by the inmates that he'd been abusing the whole time, so Honor's crew use his holographic logs as a stand-in when they get visitors, including a messenger boat. This ends up getting turned on them, when the receiver of the message notes that the 'Warden' didn't send his play-by-post chess move, and moves in to investigate. Unfortunately for ''them'', [[Curb Stomp Battle|Honor has commandeered a small fleet of her own by then]].
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* In one episode of ''[[Father Ted]]'', Father Jack takes an extra large (and accidental) dose of Dreamy Sleepy Nighty Snoozy Snooze (a bran-based chocolate-flavoured sleeping aid banned in most European countries), preventing him from playing as the star player in the Annual All-Priests Over-75 Football Challenge Match (Against Rugged Island). In response to this [[Lampshade Hanging|completely ludicrous situation]], Ted concocts a plan involving a remote-controlled wheelchair and a pair of fake arms.
* A variant of the posed-dead-soldiers is used in the [[Sci Fi Channel]]'s miniseries adaptation of ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]''. Unusually, the White Knight who sets them up is a [[Cloudcuckoolander]] who ''talks'' to his skeletal "allies", and praises their courage when they stand fast in the face of the enemy bombardment.
* ''[[Kamen Rider Double]]'' does this on occasion, since to become the eponymous superhero, [[The Spock|Phillip's]] consciousness leaves his body and enters [[The McCoy|Shotaro's]] (unless they use [[Mid
* In the ''[[Leverage]]'' episode "The 10 Li'l Grifters Job", [[The Mark]] is killed during his own murder mystery-themed dinner party. Nate, realizing that he would be the prime suspect, tries to pretend that the really obvious corpse on the ground is a lifelike dummy, and that the whole thing is actually [[All Part of the Show|all part of the game]], while figuring out who actually did it.
* In the ''[[Bones]]'' episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed", Bones and Booth load a corpse upright into the back seat of a car. When Bones expresses concerns about how exposed the corpse is, Booth reassures her that he'll just look like he's drunk. This scene also features dialogue-driven [[Product Placement|product placement]].
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*** Not exactly, he posed as its head and moved the rest of the body. As a result, he managed to have an entire conversation with the cop, even convincing him that he was colleagues with his brother.
* ''[[Stoked]]!'': In "A Prank Too Far", Bummer pretends to be dead in order to teach the groms a lesson. The groms then lug Bummer's 'corpse' around to convince an investor that he is still 'alive'.
* In the ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (Animation)|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' episode "Family Appreciation Day", Applebloom is worried about Granny Smith embarrassing her in front of her classmates at an upcoming presentation, and her fellow Cutie Mark Crusaders try to get her out of it. One of the efforts involves puppeteering a napping Granny Smith in order to convince the teacher, Cherilee, that she can't make it.
* ''[[Regular Show]]'' has an episode referencing the most famous example of this trope, titled [[Weekend At Bernies|"Weekend at Benson's."]]
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