Refuge in Audacity/Western Animation

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Yes, that's the Chocolate Rain guy shooting the bigger panda from the "sneezing panda" video as it devours the Tron guy. [1]
  • South Park wouldn't exist if not for this.
    • One Egregious example is the episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", which started with Cartman getting conned out of $16 by an older boy, and ended with Cartman killing Scott's parents. There might have been moral outrage if Cartman had just killed his parents and gloated about it, but then he ground them up and fed them to Scott in the form of chili and made his favorite band (Radiohead) call him uncool and a crybaby directly afterward. Then Cartman started licking off Scott's tears with unnerving delight, calling them "the tears of unfathomable sadness". It's generally agreed to be one of the best episodes of the series. [2]
    • Also, in South Park episode "The China Probrem" in which multiple people imagine Indiana Jones being raped by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and reacting to it as how people would realistically react to a rape.
    • Really, most examples of Take That South Park fall under this, which is why most consider them funny instead of self-indulgent soapboxing. For example "More Crap" is about Randy Marsh getting in actual crapping contest with Bono, who's shown as a smug ass obsessed with being better than everyone because he is the world's largest piece of shit, which somehow gained sentience. Before said Lucas/Spielberg episode, they had another one about them editing re-releases of their own work that ended with them dying after watching a remade Raiders of the Lost Ark in a similar way to the villains in said movie.
    • One episode involved three-year-old Ike Broflovski having an affair with his kindergarden teacher. It wouldn't have been nearly as funny if Ike were older.
    • In-story example: in Dances With Smurfs, Cartman accuses Wendy of slaughtering a Smurf village for Smurfberries to power the school. Her response? She goes with the story in a Batman Gambit that gets Cartman Kicked Upstairs and hoisted by his own petard.
    • Comedy Central told Trey Parker and Matt Stone that they couldn't say "shit" on TV. So instead they say it over one hundred times and make fun of standards and practices in the process. This seems to be a trend with them: if you tell them they can't do something they will take it to the extreme until you're begging them to do the thing they proposed in the first place rather than the alternative. And it works!
    • When you want to watch South Park online with a German IP, you get a popup with Cartman in Lederhosen and a tyrolean hat, with a link to the german South Park side. This would be quite offensive if it wasn't, ...well, Cartman.
    • The one in which Saddam Hussein plots to bomb Heaven with nuclear missiles. In a brilliant stroke of reverse psychology (or, rather, reverse-reverse psychology), he makes his nuclear weapons plant look like a chocolate-chip cookie factory. God, who rightly suspects that Saddam would never attempt anything as harmless as just making chocolate-chip cookies, points out that what Saddam is building looks an awful lot like a weapons plant to him. Saddam's response? "Look, if I were going to build a weapons plant, I wouldn't make it look like a weapons plant. I'd make it look like a chocolate-chip cookie factory, or something." God actually falls for this boneheaded line, and leaves Saddam alone to continue his project!
  • The title characters of the Disney Channel series Phineas and Ferb get away with a lot due to this trope. Their older sister constantly tries to expose their activities to their mother. Naturally, she refuses to believe that they built a time machine, or became pop artists, and almost all the time, due to the unintentional machinations of their secret agent pet platypus, everything is back to normal by the time she gets home.

"Aren't you a little young to be (doing whatever)?"
"Yes. Yes we are."
"..."

    • Unable to actually argue with that, the adults in question usually provide the boys with whatever materials they're asking and let them be about their business.
      • What really makes it strange is that except for their sister Candace, NO ONE seems to think there's anything wrong with any of the things they do, including their grandparents and on at least one occasion, "It's a Mud, Mud, Mud World" (where they build a Monster Truck stadium in their back yard) their father. In fact it's not even certain that their mother would actually care.
      • I wouldn't be so sure about that. In "She's The Mayor", when she sees the boys' pioneer village, even though everyone else there is having fun, she immediately scolds Phineas and Ferb and is about to punish them, but the entire episode's actions are reversed due to another of Doofenshmirtz's inventions being borked. Same deal in "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", and "What Did It Do?". So yeah, I don't think their mother would approve.
      • If anything, the mother would be worried in terms of the boy's safety as seem in "Quantum Boogaloo." Many instances show that the Phineas genuinely believes his mother will be be impressed and delighted with their inventions and wouldn't mind mother seeing them.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door, "Operation Hound", has Valerie (a classmate of Numbuh 5) getting away with preventing 5 from turning in her homework, because "Valerie's dog ate my homework" wouldn't fly with her teacher. (Though technically, 5 isn't exactly correct with her accusations...)
  • In one episode of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, K'nuckles tells Flapjack that the only way to survive when traveling to the tough side of town is to do "nothin' for nobody" and if that doesn't work, call them a sissy. When a street gang rolls a ball towards Flapjack to intimidate him, he throws it on a roof and calls them all sissies. Their jaws drop and eyes widen and only the sheer audacity of Flapjack's actions prevented them from tearing him to shreds.
  • In one of the more recent seasons of SpongeBob he agreed to get a birthday cake for Patrick. He went into the shop and asked to buy one but the lady informed him they had only one cake left in stock. SpongeBob asked if the message could be changed to say "Happy Birthday." The original message on the cake? The one that was shown clear as day on this children's television program for at least three seconds? "Sorry for the scabies." You COULDN'T make this up.
  • In an episode of The Fairly OddParents, Timmy and a juvenile-Catman skip school and are pursued by the authorities. Catman comes up with an idea to hide in Timmy's treehouse, based on the logic that it's so obvious no one would suspect it. It doesn't work.
  • Absolutely everything in Metalocalypse is based on this and parody of heavy-metal fandom.
  • Four out of five sketches on Robot Chicken get away with this. Lampshade Hanging in one sketch about the tooth fairy visiting a little girl in the middle of the night and overhearing the girl's abusive father murdering the girl's mother. The sketch featured Multiple Endings, culminating in the tooth fairy confronting the father and getting killed, the police arriving and arresting the father after a shootout, leaving the traumatized little girl alone in her bed, and then a marching band bursts into the room and boldly gives the Animated Actors a reward for the "darkest comedy sketch ever."
    • Darkest sketch, darkest sketch, DARKEST SKETCH!
  • Ditto Drawn Together
  • The classic cartoons by Warner Brothers (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies) and MGM (Tom and Jerry and the shorts Tex Avery created following his termination from WB Studios for controversy about the ending to "The Heckling Hare") run on this and Rule of Funny.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender
    • "The Runaway" starts with the Gang cheating a gambler that is also cheating out of a lot of money. Then they do the same to several gamblers who probably weren't cheating. Then from a strength contest on the street. Then they pull a Flopsy scheme where Toph pretends to be hit by a nobleman's carriage and Sokka (disguised as a guard) blackmails him into paying several bags of money to stay quiet. Though they don't succeed, they also try to turn Toph in for the bounty and break her out later. None of them thought there was anything wrong with this except Katara, who only cared because it would draw unwanted attention. The biggest thing is that, unlike all other children on TV, they get away with it.
    • Then there was the scene in which Sokka was waiting in his tent for Suki. In his underclothes.
    • There was an episode centered around literal Scenery Porn. You know the episode...
    • Minor example in Piandao being able to live openly in a big home in the Fire Nation, known in the local community, when he's clearly got history with the army. We're led to believe that they tried to get the deserter back once - with 100 men - and won't be trying again any time soon.
  • Family Guy's Prom Night Dumpster Baby. As well as, arguably, most of their later jokes, such as the "You Have AIDS" song.
    • Honestly, the show could be considered an embodiment of this trope.
    • Family Guy makes no attempts to hold back and takes jabs at nearly anyone and any group. In the episode "PTV", the show takes several stabs at the FCC for their overzealous censorship. What makes it even funnier is the people at the FCC reviewed the episode in question and found it to be extremely hilarious.
  • One of the villains from The Powerpuff Girls was a flamboyant, Ambiguously Gay Satan-like demon known only as Him.
    • And he is one of the most terrifying animated villains EVER.
  • The Animaniacs did an episode called "Hot, Bothered and Bedeviled" where the Warners go to Hell and meet Satan. The episode opens with a song and dance number where Saddam Hussein drops down a trap door and falls into a pit of fire (which actually wouldn't come true until later).
  • Superman: The Animated Series had one memorable scene in The Main Man where Clark Kent sarcastically confesses to Lois Lane that he's Superman, and only works at the Daily Planet to find out when disasters and crimes happen all around Metropolis. She thinks he's joking.
  • Superjail. It involves (in any given episode) officers of uncertain gender, a gap-toothed semiomnipotent childlike man in a purple suit, inmates getting brutally killed in inventive ways, Disney acid sequences... The entire series runs solely on the Rule of Funny, and damn all logic on the way there.
  • Throughout Moral Orel we've seen things up to and including Orel's belief that he should experience punishment for sin turning him into a masochist, convincing his fellow children to let him bathe in their blood in a misguided attempt to prove he is "Innocent," and inadvertently popularizing a song titled "I Hate You Jesus" which the Holier Than Thou small town proceeds to sing in church!
    • That's not even close to some other things he does:

- Check out a Necronomicon from the library to bring dead people back to life as zombies, because he misinterprets a sermon as claiming that dead people are rejecting God's gift of life.
- Believes that since masturbation is a sin, he must impregnate all the women in Moralton (which he actually DOES!) using a pastry bag.
- Sells his urine as an energy drink for the school sports' teams.
- Gets hooked on heroin.
- Unintentionally has the townspeople kill the dog that is very clearly made out to be the second coming of Jesus because he loves the dog more than Jesus and that's a sin!
- Orel going along with a bully in beating up two boys implied to be homosexual.
- Orel killing an old woman by pulling her life support plug when misinterpreting a sermon, thinking that since God is inside him, nothing he does can be wrong.
- Orel gets a penis piercing.
- Nothing scares Orel on Halloween, so he decides to make it a scary Halloween by breaking all ten commandments--including being somewhat responsible for an old man getting hit by a car (driven by Orel's own father!).
- Becoming an alcoholic based on his father's example.
- Prompting the denizens of Moralton to segregate between them and "Figurelli's"--Italian-American stereotypes--which results by the end of the episode in the entire town catching fire, except Mr. Figurelli's shop.
- Gets a normal kid branded as a mentally retarded student all because the normal kid was more interested in science than religion.
- Has a wet dream about GOD and joins an S&M club when he discovers he enjoys pain.

- Becomes conditioned to attack anyone who forms a fist with their hand, resulting in him savagely beating his own parents!
—Mistakingly unleashes a flood of STDs on the town when he begins bringing prostitutes in from Sinsville to "save the souls" of the people.
    • And that's just the first two seasons of the three.
  • Not quite (but nearly) Once an Episode, a human tells Pinky and The Brain that they don't look like whatever they're supposed to be disguised as. Brain invariably responds by saying that they're actually megalomaniacal escaped lab mice, which leads to the questioner to either laugh it off or brush them off as weirdos and let them go without another word.
  • Area 51 in Kim Possible actually contains everything the rumors claims that Area 51 contains, because Area 51 releases the facts as unlikely rumors in order to make the truth rumors.
  • Everything in the One-Episode Wonder show Korgoth of Barbaria depended on this. The entire show was an exercise in how many times it could cross the line while being completely awesome and funny.
  • In the King of the Hill episode "Tankin' it to the Streets", the otherwise Butt Monkey Bill Dauterive manages this while trying to return a tank he stole from his army base while drunk. A few miles short of their goal, they are pulled over by two police officers. Bill, his arm in a cast and wearing nothing but his boxers, emerges from the tank and convinces the two officers that they should forget ever having seen the tank. He even gets the female officer of the duo to go on a date with him.
  • Anything that happens on The Venture Brothers, which might as well be renamed Refuge in Audacity: The Animated Series.
    • One great example comes from the episode "Escape to the House of Mummies Part II"

Executioner: Give me the Hand of Osiris!
Dr. Venture: Give me head.
Executioner: You didn't just say that.
Dr. Venture: I absolutely did, what are you gonna do about it?
Executioner: I'm about to kill your sons.
Dr. Venture: Join the club.

  • In Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Cad Bane plans on this trope. Would anyone in their right mind take numerous senators hostage inside the Senate building? Surely not, but Cad Bane would, and succeeds. Would it honestly seem possible for a single bounty hunter to break into the holocron vault at the Jedi Temple and steal one without being caught? Cad Bane can do this and walk out the front door.
  • The FX series "Archer" is also rather fond of this one.
    • Archer takes this into "Crosses the Line Twice" territory. Typical examples include Archer taking a phone call from his mother while being straddled reverse-cowgirl style by a naked Lana, and having sex with a nurse while only an X-ray machine- that still shows their moving skeletons- blocks the view.
    • Another prime example involves breast cancer, normally a horrible thing to befall someone. Pam mocks Scatterbrain Jane about it the first time she it's mentioned, and then texts the whole office when Malory is suspected to have it. When it's actually revealed that Sterling (a man) has it, she calls it "cancer of the tits" to police officers.
  • The season two episode of The Mask "Flight As A Feather." Where else on children's TV are you gonna find a suicide bomber stripper, a corrupt politician, a character using the suicide bomber stripper's nudity to evade the police, a Camp Gay performance artist named after a brand of oil (Crisco), and a fight over s'mores at a golf course?
    • Most of the episodes of The Mask have The Mask becoming a hero (even though he's considered a menace by the city police), often by defeating a villain more maniacal (and less comedic) than he is.
  • Happy Tree Friends.
  • Cartoon Network's Time Squad: This cartoon packed enough Ho Yay moments between The Larry 3000 and Officer Buck Tuddrussell to make Ren and Stimpy look like Platonic Life Partners...and most of the Ho Yay was so subtle that viewers who remember the show (or have access to seeing it regularly) are still finding instances of this years after it's been cancelled...and the Ho Yay has successfully gotten past the censorship radar...AND this was all done in the span of a mere two seasons (as that's how long the show lasted).
  • In a story from Will & Dewitt, Will Ballantine is told to clean his room and given three boxes - throw away, give away and storage. He's told that he has one hour before his Mom checks in on him. He spends that time looking through his stuff without actually sorting it and when his Mom comes into his room, she says "This is worse. I didn't think that was possible." Will's response? "Anything is possible if you believe." Mom then comments "They can't all be your favorite toy." Will's answer for this - "Who's you favorite child?" Mom does not look amused.
  • Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy: The violence featured in the show borders on this trope. In one scene, Sarah throws a car on Nazz.
    • Other examples include Ed dropping a house on Eddy to one-up resident Butt Monkey Jimmy for sympathy, and the Eds taking over Johnny's house as a spa (and ultimately destroying it) after they break a steam radiator trying to fix a leaky faucet. Some of their scams rely on pure audacity to work, also.
    • When Nazz throws a pool party in "Pop Goes The Ed", the Eds go to the party... IN SPEEDOS. Later in the episode, the speedos fly off then the Eds rush to the pool and spend all day in the pool. In the tiny pool. Naked. Next to each other.
  • The pilot of the Black Dynamite series features: numerous F-bombs, Black Dynamite's penis (he was caught by The Man while having sex as a way to get a secret fried chicken recipe), a frog puppet that's also a pimp, kids with guns and other weapons and lots of violence against puppets. All in 11 minutes.
  • The song Birds of Prey from Batman the Brave And The Bold. It sneaks truckloads of innuendo past the radar by barely disguising it at all (much like Animaniacs and the last couple episodes of Time Squad have done).
  • The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, full stop. Racism, allusions to genocide, torture, religious zealotry, witch burning, sexual blackmail and attempted rape, hipocrisy, emotional and physical abuse, attempted murder of a baby who hasn't even reached the age of a year and one of the most family-unfriendly deaths imaginable. Because that's a kid's movie.
  1. ↑ Not that he's trying to protect the Tron guy; it's just that said guy's already severely wounded, so the panda's outlived its usefulness.
  2. ↑ This is actually a reference to Titus Andronicus, an early Shakespeare play.
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