Sham Ceremony: Difference between revisions

{{quote|''"Listen, [[Strange Pond Woman|strange women lyin' in ponds]] distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some [[Trope Namer|farcical aquatic ceremony]]!"''|'''Dennis''', interrupting King Arthur's speech about how he is king because the [[Enigmatic Empowering Entity|Lady of the Lake]] gave him Excalibur (right before experiencing [[Inherent in Thethe System|the violence inherent in the system]]), ''[[Monty Python and The Holy Grail]]''}}

* ''[[Spaceballs (Film)|Spaceballs]]'' starts and ends with a marriage ceremony that [[Zig -Zagging Trope|ZigZags]] between pure [[Farcical Aquatic Ceremony]], the real thing and a in-between in the form of a [[Arranged Marriage]] bordering on forced marriage. It was all [[Played for Laughs]], but the part that makes it fit this trope is when the princess is trying to escape the forced marriage and this escape is presented as if it was a official part of the ceremony.

* In ''[[The Princess Bride (Filmfilm)|The Princess Bride]]'', a [[Shotgun Wedding|Forced Wedding]] turns into a [[Farcical Aquatic Ceremony]] when the villain, stressed out by the arrival of the [[Big Damn Heroes]], rushes the priest to finish the ceremony without wasting time on pesky details such as the "I do" part.

* [[Dichter Und Denker|German philosopher]] Oswald Spengler claimed in ''[[The Decline of the West (Literature)|The Decline of the West]]'' that Monarchy is this (necessarily) in the age of democracy - and parliamentarianism in the age of [[The Empire]], like the late Roman republic.

* ''[[Babylon Five|Babylon 5]]'': {{spoiler|President Clark}}'s installation ceremony.

* In ''[[The Order of the Stick (Webcomic)|Order of the Stick]]'', the characters are made to stand trial, to be judged by an angel "Of Pure Law And Good". It's all fake, however, designed to trick an order of paladins.

* On ''[[Adventure Time (Animation)|Adventure Time]]'', the Ice King is always kidnapping princesses to be his wives. One episode has him getting married to one who appears to be willing, but on closer inspection, Finn discovers that he had cursed her into marrying him.

* The famous [[wikipedia:Sokal Hoax|Sokal Hoax]].The physicist Alan Sokal once had a bullshit article published in a the [[Post Modernism|postmodernist]] journal ''Social Text'', which for reasons that [[It Seemed Like a Good Idea At Thethe Time|seemed good at the time]], was not peer-reviewed. The article was named "Transgressing The Boundaries: Towards A Transformative Hermaneutics Of Quantum Gravity", and it was designed to point out a number of flaws with [[The Nineties|'90s]] postmodernism's somewhat peculiar and quite often hostile take on modern natural science. That he was able to publish an article that by his own admission was something he crapped out relatively quickly by simply using as many hip and pretentious polysyllabic words as he could was used by him as evidence that the whole "[[wikipedia:Science wars|science wars]]"--'90s High Postmodernism's bizarre-in-retrospect quarrel with the natural sciences--was at best a highly questionable enterprise.