Sadist Show: Difference between revisions

[[File:sadist 7860.jpg|link=Garfield (Comic Strip)|frame|Life is funny...if you enjoy pain.]]

 

 

There's a German word, ''[[Schadenfreude]].'' It means "the joy you get at seeing other people's misfortune" (Schaden = "damage", Freude = "joy"). The '''Sadist Show''' is built on it. In this kind of show, there are no sympathetic characters whatsoever, and nobody will ever [[Pet the Dog]]. Everybody is both obnoxious and incompetent, beyond even the [[Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist]]—the audience can't really root for them. The fun is in seeing the characters [[Deus Angst Machina|suffer more than they deserve]], more than Job, [[The Chew Toy|more than possibly everybody in the history of the human race combined]]. In short, it's a comedy, but not in the Shakespearean sense.

 

{{examples}}

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* ''[[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]'' plays this for drama.

* Pick a harem series. Any. You'll be lucky if it ''isn't'' this trope.

* ''[[School Days]]''. Maybe the ONLY harem series that takes itself seriously.

* [[Its Not My Fault That I Am Not Popular]]!, the semireal tales of a mangaka who went through a loss of humiliation and abuse.

* [[Keroro Gunsou]]. Being a space frog with inferiority complex, while trying to take over Earth, only to be at the mercy of the pink-haired Natsumi Hinata, who you live under and forces you to do chores can suck big time.

* [[Paranoia Agent]]. This applies to the lives of nearly every main character that is featured in each episode, up until Lil' Slugger comes by and puts them out of their misery.

* [[Jigoku Shoujo]]. That. is. all.

* '''D. Grayman's''' Allen Walker is the universe's chew toy whose rather depressing life is played off for laughs.

 

* The comics in ''Mad Magazine'' featuring Monroe, a whiny, ugly teenage loser. His stories often end with something nasty and painful being done to him.

* Also Mad's ''Spy vs. Spy'' by Prohias. Unlike in the golden age cartoons such as [[Tom and Jerry]], one of the two spies always died a horrible death.

** How pathetic can it get? There was a three issue run in the early 90s where, because Peter had been so busy with superheroics ''and'' his mundane life, he forgot to do laundry and had to fight crime in a dirty, slightly mildewed costume. ''Everyone'' he encountered commented on the smell and made remarks about his personal hygiene.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Pretty much any of Paul Verhoeven's movies. Even the 'heroes' are unlikeable and amoral, tending to use sex as a weapon against others. Bad things happen to his characters, and you can't really find a reason to care. (The SFX are usually pretty entertaining, though.)

* ''[[The Passion of the Christ]]'': Subverted in ''[[South Park]]'', "it only shows a man being tortured for 2 hours".

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* ''Justine'' by the [[Marquis de Sade]] is nothing but a Sadist Show punctuated by philosophical monologues. The world is not just indifferent, but actively malevolent. Justine is consistently punished for her decent behavior while her persecutors experience nothing but boons for their cruelty and selfishness.

 

* The [[Ur Example]] for this in television might be the game show [[Queen for a Day]], on which five female contestants described in excruciating detail their horrible [[Real Life]] problems (such as deaths in the family, cancer, job loss, poverty, homelessness, even ''mental illness'') in order to win prizes, the host viciously belittling and ridiculing them as the audience laughed at their predicaments. When the winner was announced, the other contestants were ushered off the stage and given ''nothing'', not even bus fare home. This passed for family entertainment for ''twenty years'' on American TV.

* Teen soaps are prone to this half of the time, apparently to show you that some [[Teens Are Monsters]]. [[Nickelodeon]] usually leads this trope, as well as [[Dan Schneider]] shows that employ [[Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male]]/

** The [[Dan Schneider]] shows ''[[iCarly]]'' and ''[[Drake and Josh]]'' are poster-children for [[Comedic Sociopathy]], each having a massive [[Karma Houdini]] in the form of Megan, and Sam with their targets [[Drake and Josh]], and Freddie.

* It's arguable that the humor in Australian mockumentary ''[[We Can Be Heroes]]'' derives from the patheticness of the characters.

* ''[[Everybody Loves Raymond]]'', to some extent. There are no more than token efforts to solve the [[Dysfunction Junction]] situation. Ray is a wuss when it comes to standing up to his wife and mother, although he does get better at this in the later seasons; Frank is an insensitive [[Jerkass]]; Deborah is a mean, overly angry housewife; Robert is a self-loathing whiner who expresses [[Wangst]] despite the fact that he's in his forties; and Marie is simply the personification of the devil who uses guilt to get what she wants in addition to being meddlesome.

** From the same network, a lot of the "Food Network Specials" basically consist of the audience waiting for the cake to fall over.

** Or shows like ''[[Chopped]]'' and ''[[Cupcake Wars]]'' which is a stage by stage elimination show where 3 out of 4 chefs dreams gets crushed one chef at a time.

* And then there's ''Cheaters''. The show's purpose is to be a private investigator service for people who think their significant other is being unfaithful. [[Dissimile|Except without the "private" portion.]] If the SO is indeed cheating, you don't have to pay any fees for hiring the show, but you are expected to confront them and the Other (Wo)Man in public with the host and camera crew trailing behind like [[Ambulance Chaser]]s, getting in the broken-hearted peoples' faces and asking "How do you feel?" Never once have they shown an investigation that exonerated the SO or had a happy ending. Is it any wonder the host was once stabbed on-camera by an enraged man?

* ''[[Naeturvaktin]]''/''[[Dagvaktin]]''/''[[Fangavaktin]]''/''[[Bjarnfredarson]]'' are about a [[Dysfunction Junction]] [[Comic Trio]] unintentionally (and occasionally intentionally) making each others's lives worse in a [[Crapsack World]]. ''[[Dagvaktin]]'' is the most extreme, dealing with the cast committing or enduring rape, murder and child abuse, as well as embarking upon a [[Mushroom Samba]] and breaking the index finger of a [[Jerkass]] surgeon with million-dollar hand insurance.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

** Technically, Thief does get his comeuppance when he loses everything he has ever stolen when his bag of holding is frozen, then is shattered into a million pieces in order to kill one of the fiends. He is catatonic for several strips afterwards.

** It's true, he rarely gets his comeuppance, so it's just that more hilarious when Berserker strangles him with his own intestines. He has savagely attacked Thief at least 3 times by now.

* ''[[Nana's Everyday Life]]'' is basically about how long you can keep a character alive without putting her out of her misery...

* Every protagonist in ''[[Contemplating Reiko]]'' is a sadistic demon girl.

* "Hello, I'm the [[The Nostalgia Critic]], I remember it so ''you'' don't have to!" He's even said once that he can't stop torturing himself. Also, he's [[You Bastard|cursed the audience]] for [[The Chew Toy|just wanting to see him suffer]].

** Like [[The Nostalgia Chick]], it's not just a case of being [[Suckiness Is Painful|hurt with a bad movie]] anymore. He's a frequently unhappy, lonely man who only reviews because he has nothing else and that's the only thing he can be proud of.

* [[The Angry Video Game Nerd]] is all about watching the titular Nerd play through [[So Bad It's Horrible|craptastic]] games just to show us everything that's wrong with them. Doing so must cost him his sanity and self-respect.

* [[The Nostalgia Chick]] will dip into this, especially when she reviewed the [[Interquel]] to her all-time favourite Disney movie, ''[[Beauty and the Beast]]''. She didn't have fun.

** Increasingly so as the character develops, really taking off with her [[All Take and No Give|casual abuse of her best friend]]. The Chick has coalesced into a geeky shut-in [[Closet Geek|in denial about her nerdy nature]], and an insecure [[Know-Nothing Know-It-All]] who [[Inferiority Superiority Complex|needs to beat down her friends to boost her]] own [[Broken Bird|broken self-esteem]]. The "Dark Nella Saga" tried breaking her down instead, but she was too oblivious for it to work.

* ''[[Happy Tree Friends]]'': Everyone gets killed horribly in every episode.

* ''[[Mari Kari]]'': It’s like the paranormal ''[[Beetlejuice (animation)|Beetlejuice]]'' meets the vulgar, blood and guts & mayhem of [[South Park]].

{{quote|-- The Theme Song of Mari-Kari.}}

* ''[[You Suck At Photoshop]]'' is about an [[Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist]] going through a complete mental, emotional and life breakdown, while making faux-snarky Photoshop tutorial videos because being able to Photoshop is all he has.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** This one's worth elaborating on a bit, because there's something special about just ''how'' all these characters come together to create the amazingly unfortunate (for the characters) milieu of this show. Vasquez has managed, through no small amount of effort in both writing the show and fighting to get his ideas aired by the censor-happy Nickelodeon network, to create a world wherein ''everyone'' fails at ''everything'' they try '''all the time'''. The only ones who come out okay are the ones (read: Gaz and...pretty much just Gaz) who do. Not. Give a shit. About anything. Dib tries to foil Zim's latest plan to destroy Earth? Dib probably succeeds, Zim's plan fails, ending up with Zim learning nothing, Gir having destroyed half the lab (again), Dib taking the blame for whatever damage Zim wrought on the world, and Gaz rubbing salt in his wounds by calling him a kook. [[Pyrrhic Victory|Pyrrhic victories]] all around, nobody grows, and the world is worse off. In ''every goddamn episode''. Vasquez is a misanthropic ''savant.''

* ''[[Family Guy]]'' - From about season 4 and onwards.

* ''[[Moral Orel]]'' - Especially in the third season, when it stopped pretending to be a comedy.

* ''[[Sealab 2021]]''

* ''[[Frisky Dingo]]''

* When ''[[Drawn Together]]'' isn't about taking the piss out of [[Reality TV]] (the original premise which it pretty much dropped in the second season) or [[Animation Tropes|cartoons]], it's about heaping abuse on the dysfunctional housemates. Fortunately, they all retain strong [[Jerkass]] tendencies, so there's little room for sympathy save for Captain Hero, who was originally the biggest of the Jerkasses but developed into the most sympathetic character.

** ...and then developed into a [[Heroic Sociopath]].

** And [[Cosmic Plaything|if you're unlucky]] you [[They Killed Kenny|will continue to die in very horrible ways]] only for [[Laser-Guided Amnesia|no one to remember]].

* From it's second season and onward, ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends]]'' often wound up being this.

* ''[[Total Drama]]''. It's even hosted by a sadist!

* ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'' seems to have become this in it's later seasons, due to [[Seasonal Rot]].