Face Fault: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

When shocked or surprised, often by an absurdity or non sequitur, the listener may fall over onto his face, his limbs in a twisted mass above him. In its typical form, the character in question has just heard someone else say something so incredibly stupid that it, quite literally, ''floors them''. A device usually limited to humorous anime, this may have been imported from a similar trope in [http://www.lileks.com/institute/comicsins/comics/jerry/1.html early American comic strips] called the "flip-take". A variation used mainly in films (as falling on one's own face in real life tends to be dangerous) has the characters briefly [[Fainting|faint]] backwards, as opposed to forwards.