Funny Aneurysm Moment/Literature: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Examples of [[{{TOPLEVELPAGE}}]]s in [[{{SUBPAGENAME}}]] include:
* In the novel ''[[Jumper (Literature)|Jumper]]'', the main character {{spoiler|drops a terrorist from the World Trade Center. He catches him before the man can die, but still...}} Brr...▼
* Early on in ''[[The Catcher in The Rye (Literature)|The Catcher in The Rye]]'', the main character Holden quips "This is my people shooting hat. I shoot people in this hat." This was a harmless bit of sarcasm for decades until the book became associated with John Lennon's assassin and John Hinckley, attempted assassin of Ronald Reagan, respectively.▼
▲* In the novel ''[[Jumper (
▲* Early on in ''[[
* This happens in (of all things) ''[[Dave Barry]]'s Guide to Guys''. While talking about a mechanic he knew who was ''deeply'' into fireworks, Dave writes, "If those radical Muslim fundamentalist terrorists had had Ed on their team in 1992, the World Trade Center would now be referred to as the World Trade Pit." This was probably funnier in 1995, when the book was written, before a pair of precision-aimed airplanes created a World Trade Pit. Hey, those skyscrapers collapsed all the way down -- and had underground levels and a subway connection.
** Another moment based around the same event: The movie [[Big Trouble]], based on another of Dave Barry's books, was one of several that had their release delayed because of 9/11, due to the plot involving terrorists breezing through airport security.
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* In the late [[Douglas Adams]]'s books:
** There's the scene towards the end of the fourth ''Hitchhiker's'' book, ''So Long and Thanks For All the Fish'', in which Marvin reads God's Final Message To His Creation ... which turns out to be 'We apologize for the inconvenience'. Given Douglas Adams' [[Author Existence Failure|sudden death from a heart attack]], leaving the sixth book unfinished (now being written as a posthumous sequel called ''And Another Thing...'' by Eoin Colfer), that message takes on a whole new meaning.
** From ''[[Dirk
*** There is also a bit in the same book about Dirk and the police officer experiencing 'a chill as the dead man's voice filled the room' while listening to an answering machine message. Not too bad... except when the author reads those lines on the audiobook.
** His final Hitchhiker's Guide book ''Mostly Harmless'' introduced The Guide Mark II, an effectively omniscient and omnipotent version of The Guide, existing singularly in the entire multiverse. (The rest of this entry is a spoiler for Mostly Harmless, a Funny Aneurysm Moment, and [[Fridge Brilliance]] all rolled into one. You have been warned.) The device is revealed as a Vogon plot to destroy Earth once and for all, and prevent its resurrection in any parallel universe by the expedient of collapsing quantum timelines so that its final destruction is truly final. Anyone that The Guide Mark II can use to further its goals will think their life to be going swimmingly, until the Guide has finished using them, at which point they'll probably be killed. The author's most spectacular example is Agrajag the Ever-Murdered, who trapped Arthur Dent before Arthur Dent visited Stavromula Beta (actually Stavro Mueller's "Beta" nightclub) and ducked an assassin's bullet which slew Agrajag yet again. This ensured that Arthur Dent would survive anything the universe threw at him until this event happened. This was orchestrated by The Guide Mark II to ensure Arthur Dent was on Earth when it actually blew up. Did The Guide Mark II ensure Douglas Adams would complete and publish this, and then ensure Douglas Adams would not alter the fate of Earth?
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** This is an odd, creepy sort of subversion- he ''meant'' that the last few times he included it. He knew his health was on the decline but stayed at work until the end. He went out of his way to make sure there were enough notes for somebody else to finish [[Wheel of Time]] if he didn't quite make it. Brandon Sanderson was chosen to finish the final book.
** Like with any author of a long series of [[Doorstopper|DoorStoppers]], there were plenty of jokes about Jordan dropping dead before finishing the series. They all became suddenly much less funny when he was diagnosed as fatally ill.
* From ''[[
{{quote|
** There's also the time they made an entrance to the yeerk pool by stealing a plane and flying it into a building.
* In [[Stephen King]]'s book ''[[The Running Man (
** Also his first book under the Bachman pseudonym ''[[Rage (
* In the "appreciation by Maurice Sendak" that accompanies the Yearling edition of ''[[The Phantom Tollbooth]]'', Sendak notes how the monsters and obstacles in the book are "prophetic and scarily pertinent" to modern living and how Juster's "allegorical monsters have become all too real".
* [[Christopher Brookmyre|Christopher Brookmyre's]] book ''[[A Big Boy Did It and Ran Away]]'' describes an attempted terrorist attack on the 6th of September 2001. While the book was published on October 4th of the same year, the writing took place before the events of September 11th. To make this even more cringeworthy, the tagline of the book was "Terrorism, it is the new Rock'N'roll". Needless to say that some re-wrapping was needed after that. Brookmyre's universe tends to incorporate real-world events into the canon established by his previous titles; thus, more recent titles, such as 2008's ''[[A Snowball in Hell]]'', consider the unfortunate co-incidence of timing and the resultant impact this has on the characters involved.
** Also, in his first book, ''[[Quite Ugly One Morning]]'', a character reflects that a doctor character who has quietly been killing elderly patients for years (and who is finding it hard to tell which of the doctor's patients have died naturally and which were murdered, or even for how long this has been going on) whose death toll is in the double if not triple figures is the worst serial killer in British history. And then, [[wikipedia:Harold Shipman|just two years later...]]
* While editing her Kiesha'Ra series, Author Amelia Atwater-Rhodes had a webcomic series called <nowiki>ihme*</nowiki> (Short for I Hate My Editor), which parodied the events of Kiesha'ra. It delved into possible alternative skylines, freely played with [[Flanderization]], and makes humorous events out of what would actually be traumatic and disastrous in the series' canon.
* ''[[
** ''[[
** In ''[[
** It's not as horrible as Sir Terry's current condition, but descriptions of the lack of rain in ''[[
*** Um, [[A Million Is a Statistic|that one might become as horrible]] if it keeps up.
*** At least that one has a happy ending when Rincewind and the Librarian finally summon the rain. [[wikipedia:Queensland floods 2010-2011|Thousands of years worth all at once.]] Gets you coming and going, doesn't it?
** ''[[
** In ''[[
* In ''[[Grendel (
* One of [[Dorothy L. Sayers]]' [[Lord Peter Wimsey]] novels, written sometime in the early-to-mid 1930s, features a scene where a few of the characters discuss politics. The [[Funny Aneurysm Moment]] comes when one of them makes an approving offhand mention of Hitler doing "interesting social experiments" in Germany.
* In ''The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest'' from Stieg Larsson's ''[[The Millennium Trilogy]]'', there is an incident where a newspaper editor {{spoiler|drops dead of a heart attack at his desk}}. It's very difficult to read the passage for anyone who knows how Stieg Larsson died.
* In ''[[The Great Gatsby]]'', set in [[The Roaring Twenties]], features a Jew named Wolfsheim who owns "The Swastika Holding Company".
** In addition, {{spoiler|upon (the Jewish) Gatsby's death from a madman}}, the narrator ends the description of the scene with "...and the holocaust was complete."
** Fitzgerald seems to be astonishingly unlucky with these. In ''The Beautiful and Damned'', Anthony meets a disagreeable character who happens to be Jewish:
{{quote|
* In [[Albert Camus]]' ''[[The Plague (
* An [[In
* In a case of either this or [[Hilarious in Hindsight]], depending on how you handle your childhood memories being perverted): In 1971, Roger Hargreaves started the ''Mr. Men'' book series, the third of which was titled "Mr. Happy". The titular character was a very happy little yellow man. Ten years later, guess what [[Robin Williams]] decided to nickname his penis? (And his action [[I Call Him "Mister Happy"|became a]] [[Trope Namer]].)
* The last word that Will Rogers wrote before he died was the word "death".
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* ''[[Literature/A Man In Full|A Man In Full]]'' by Tom Wolfe has a sex scene in which the characters do "that thing with the cup". Wolfe has admitted that he himself [[Noodle Implements|has no idea what they're doing.]] Nowadays, an [[wikipedia:Two Girls One Cup|infamous]] [[Shock Site]] turns this into [[Nausea Fuel]].
* Saki's story "The Unrest-Cure" involves a practical joker in pre-WWI England (near Saki's "present day") convincing a sedate gentleman that he's planning to "massacre every Jew in the neighborhood." The gentleman exclaims that it will be "a blot on the Twentieth Century!" but the story ends with the century "unblotted." Later on, the century got good and blotted.
* Prior to the release of the fifth ''[[Harry Potter]]'' book, a filk of "Cell Block Tango" from ''[[Chicago]]'' that contained various fans' predictions on who would die in that book was posted on the ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131009183826/http://www.harrypotterfilks.com/ Harry Potter Filks]'' website. The irony of the filk lies not so much in the fact that the character that ''did'' die in that book was not among those listed, but that two books later, three of the ones listed did after all. [http://www.harrypotterfilks.com/places/theorybay.htm#Death_Row_Tango Read at your own risk] if you haven't finished the series yet.
** Another Potter one: Back in ''[[Harry Potter and
** Early in ''HBP'', Ron and Harry are talking about hoping that the new DADA teacher, {{spoiler|Snape}}, will succumb to the trend of DADA teachers leaving after only one year. Harry flippantly says something along the lines of "I'm hoping for another death". Well, {{spoiler|Snape}} certainly leaves the post after another death...
** Almost every scene with Sirius and Dumbledore.
*** Especially then scene with the Mirror of Erised in the first book. Warm pair of socks, anyone?
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*** Same with Cedric "That'll be something to tell your grandkids Ced. You beat Harry Potter!"
**** Everything Amos Diggory says to or about Cedric involves him living to a ripe old age. One can only assume Rowling did that on purpose.
** In ''Goblet of Fire'': "If the Hogwarts Express crashed tomorrow and George and I died, how would you feel knowing the last thing we heard from you was an unfounded accusation?" {{spoiler|As of ''Deathly Hallows'', jokes about Fred dying are [[Harsher in Hindsight|rather unfortunate]]...}}
** Even worse, the last thing
** Harry near the end of "[[Harry Potter and
** In
** After the anthrax scare following 9/11, it's more than likely that more than a few insensitive fans have made at least one inappropriate joke about Rita Skeeter sending prank mail infested with anthrax spores to Hermione (an incident from ''Goblet of Fire'').
* In ''Sewer, Gas and Electric'', a [[Twenty Minutes Into the Future]] [[Cyberpunk]] parody from 1997, the Empire State Building has been replaced by a mile-high skyscraper called the Phoenix. The original building had been destroyed by a colliding airliner. No longer funny in hindsight.
** Given how the building had already had a plane crash into it in the past, it probably had this effect on some at the time it was written too.
* ''Three Men on the Bummel'' by Jerome K. Jerome is a lighthearted Victorian comedy about a bicycle tour through Germany. The narrator laughs about the German love of order and deference to authority. The last chapter is extended chuckling about totalitarianism and authoritarianism: the German citizen will do anything the police tell him, makes the perfect soldier when you give him a uniform and march him into another country, and just might come into some trouble under a bad government.
* Buzz Aldrin's novel "Encounter With Tiber" has a Space Shuttle failing to make orbit and crashing set within two years of the 2003 Columbia re-entry breakup.
* [[
{{quote|
* [[Tom Clancy]]'s Executive Orders. Bioterror and a Jet crashing into a crowded building at the same time leading to war in the middle east. Apparently Tom Clancy in 1996 figured out the plot to 2001-2005
* In ''[[X Wing Series|Wraith Squadron]]'', Wedge Antilles beats one of his pilots in a race. She complains that he cheated, and he responds by laughing and saying
{{quote|
"No, sir."
"What will you say?"
"I won't say anything. I'll be dead." }}
** And, in the climactic battle at the end, guess how she dies?
** Well, it wasn't a laser... {{spoiler|it was the Star Destroyer she was flying around inside of dropping onto the moon and self-destructing.}}
** The [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] is fond of these. Mostly they deal with Han and Leia's children. First there was Luke's vision of them. The [[Jedi Academy Trilogy]] gave us Jacen Solo holding off Exar Kun's minions. Then there was Master Ikrit's view that Anakin Solo would become the greatest Jedi; he gets [[Killed Off for Real]] in the [[New Jedi Order]]. More recently, we had [[Young Jedi Knights]] have Jacen say "What's the difference between a Jedi Knight and a Jedi Master? Ask me in about twenty years!" Nearly twenty years later, he's a Sith Lord.
* In the novel ''[[
** Though in all fairness, the novel could've been written in the aftermath of or inspired by the then-recent Exxon Valdez oil spill (occurred in 1989), which was until 2010 the worst oil disaster the United States had ever seen, with "destruction of [wild]life" being constantly reported on in the news and "disaster for years to come" predicted by all the experts.
* The ''[[Tales of the City]]'' books have many of these. There's just something about cheerful, [[Utopia|utopian]] gay-themed romantic comedies written in the 1970s.
* [[Star Trek: Articles of the Federation]] ends up having one within the context of the wider [[Star Trek Novel Verse]]. The novel ends with a somewhat upbeat comment from President Bacco's Chief of Staff and prime supporter, Esperanza Piniero, pointing out that while the first year of Bacco's term has had its ups and downs, at least the Federation is still intact. Given that Bacco herself praised a former president earlier in the novel by stating that if you complete a term with the Federation still intact, you've done the job, this is somewhat heartwarming. Two months after this novel ([[In
* In the second [[Temeraire]] novel, there's an amusing little subplot where Laurence hears about a nasty cold going around the English dragons, and many jokes are made about how dragons are such big babies when they're sick. Temeraire comes down with the cold, and it's played largely for laughs. In the fourth novel, it turns out that {{spoiler|the "cold" is a form of dragon tuberculosis that's slowly and painfully killing every dragon in England. If they hadn't stopped at exactly the right port in Africa and prepared exactly the right mushroom for Temeraire on a whim, he and every other English dragon would have died. For that matter, since Temeraire was on his way to China when he came down with the "cold," all of the Chinese dragons would probably have died, too.}}
* Reading [[Piers Anthony]]'s references to his family life in his early works' Author's Notes, and especially the dedication to his daughter Penny, "Heaven-Cent", becomes a [[Tear Jerker]] when you know that {{spoiler|Penny died of respiratory distress following brain surgery in 2009}}.
* In-story example in Sarah Water's ''[[Tipping the Velvet]]'': a minor character chats up another by saying something along the lines of "Are you Sue Bridehead? I'm Jude Fawley" -a reference to Thomas Hardy's ''Jude the Obscure'', then being serialised. {{spoiler|Jude and Sue both end up having horribly unhappy lives. In context, it's a terrible line.}}
* On the commentary for ''[[Fight Club (
* Listening to a certain children's story by [[Dick King-Smith]] is rather uncomfortable with hindsight. Renaming a cat you've found out is female? Okay, yes, female cats are called queens. the cat's a queen. So we get this line:
{{quote|
* In Suzanne Brockmann's ''The Unsung Hero'', the main character, a Navy SEAL on medical leave, imagines reporting to his superior officer:
{{quote|
** Funny in 2000, when the book was published. Much less funny a year later, when two killer planes took off from Logan on 9/11.
* In [[Ayn Rand]]'s ''[[Atlas Shrugged]]'', the entire world ends up socialist by the novel's end. Two of the first countries to elect socialist leaders are Guatemala and Chile. The US government completely supports this. Much fun is had at the expense of the Chilean ambassador and his wife, who are referred to as a pimp and a prostitute and given filthy habits. Over a decade after the book's publication, Salvador Allende became president of Chile, and appointed the poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda as an ambassador. Neruda died an agonizing death from cancer a few days after Allende's US-backed murder and replacement by the fascist Augusto Pinochet. Thousands would be killed, and Rand's teachings would shape Pinochet's economic policy for years.
* ''[[Operation Chaos]]'' opens in the midst of [[World War II]], in which the "Moslems" invaded America.
** Moslems is more a case of [[Spell My Name
* One edition of ''Uncle John's Bathroom Reader'' includes an article with a list of strange unofficial holidays. One of them is "No News Is Good News Day". Date: September 11. At first you might think it's just a bit of tasteless [[Black Comedy]]. But the copyright date is 2000.
** In another edition, published in 2003, there's an article on humourous church bulletins. One of them is "Visitors are asked to stay seated until the end of the recession." Depending on your point of view, that's either this or [[Hilarious in Hindsight]].
* In Catherine Alliott's 1999 novel ''Rosie Meadows Regrets'', the titular character is wistfully musing that her life would have been much better if she'd married someone else other than her alcoholic, bigoted, mentally abusive, uncaring and unsupportive husband. The celebrity she specifies? [[
* ''Sisterhood'' series by [[Fern Michaels]]: In the book ''Fast Track'', Jack Emery brags to reporters Ted Robinson and Joe Espinosa that the ''Post'' is going to be sold to a new owner. Joe turns green upon hearing this, because that means he and Ted could lose their jobs. At that point, it seemed like a brilliant and cool way to upset the apple carts of those reporters, who had been thorns in the Vigilantes' sides. Then, in a later book titled ''Under The Radar'', Ted explains to the Vigilantes why they can trust Joe. Joe is the only son out of eight kids. His father died early on, leaving his mother to take care of all of them. He's the youngest in his family. The family managed to get enough money to send Joe to college. He's the only one in the family to have a college education. Joe is a citizen of the United States, and he sends every cent of money he can back to his people in Tijuana. Joe cannot afford anything to live in except a one-room dump, and his immediate family has 37 members in it! Also, his family supports the Vigilantes quite strongly, and his salary combined with some other jobs he moonlights as help his family, but it's not nearly enough. His family is not lazy, but the economy in that area sucks. Boy, that not only explains why Joe turned green at the possibility of losing his job, but it makes Jack's bragging come off as a [[Kick the Dog]] moment!
* ''No Country For Old Men'' by [[Cormac McCarthy]]: The novel takes place in 1980, and in it Ed Tom Bell mentions the recent murder of a federal judge in San Antonio, TX. He's referring to the murder of Federal Judge John Howland Wood, who was assassinated outside his townhouse by a contract killer named Charles Harrelson on May 29, 1979. In 2007, Woody Harrelson (yes, the son of Charles) would co-star in the [[No Country for Old Men|film version of the novel]].
* Vlad Dracula and Elizabeth Bathory in ''[[
* In one ''[[
* ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'': In one of Bran's chapters in the first book, he remarks that "Theon Greyjoy had once commented that [[Dumb Muscle|Hodor did not know much]], but no one could doubt [[Verbal Tic Name|he knew his name]]." The line appears to just be using Theon's [[Jerkass|Jerkassery]] to launch a humorous tidbit from Old Nan that his real name isn't even Hodor, it's Walder. In the fifth book, {{spoiler|after Theon is tortured into insanity, he's forced to take on the name Reek. He can't even bear to think the name Theon until well into the novel, and doesn't say it aloud until his very last line.}}
{{quote|
* ''[[Someone Else's
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