Suicide as Comedy

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Panel 1 Dan Kim is asking his character Cupcake what she wants to be for halloween. Panel 2 Cupcake says "Real. I wanna be real, daddy." Panel 3 Cupcake is giving a hopeful smile. Panel 4 is Dan Kim sitting at his desk, gun hanging in his right hand and the top of his head splattered on the left wall. There are police investigating the room. If you look closely, the art on his desk is the the same as the comic as a whole, with the exception of the 4th panel of the desk comic being blank.

Finn: "Thanks guys. Your blood oath is now fulfilled."

Balloons: "YAY! To the Mesosphere! FINALLY, WE CAN DIE!"

In Real Life, suicide is a very serious matter. People generally commit suicide, or attempt suicide, because they are simply unable to cope with life and with their emotions. Overwhelming negative feelings such as anger or depression have become too much for them to bear, making suicide seem like the only feasible option. It is a tragic thing that happens all too often, and is extremely traumatic for the victim's friends and family, who are left behind to grieve. When someone commits suicide, their loved ones are often wracked with anguish and guilt, wishing they had done something before it happened. They feel that if they had taken some action to help the person when they had the chance, their dearly departed loved one would still be alive.

In the land of fiction, whether gruesome and brutal or romantic and painless, it's a huge source of drama. Right? Well, usually.

Some shows aren't so serious. Frequently, they'll have one ridiculously depressed character who is either constantly on the verge of suicide or keeps attempting it. If it's the latter, expect Interrupted Suicide to come into play. These characters are sometimes Driven to Suicide by the slightest thing, or else are so disillusioned that their lives are one long string of attempts to, well, cut that string. They see everything as a means of self-destruction. If the suicidal character is a Deadpan Snarker, expect protests along the lines of "Oh, just let me die already!"

See also Black Comedy. Compare "Seen It All" Suicide, Black Comedy Rape.

No real life examples, please; Real Life is not a scripted comedy. It's Real Life.

As a Death Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Suicide as Comedy include:

Anime and Manga

  • Nozomu from Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei attempts to kill himself Once an Episode.
    • In the beginning, anyhow. The suicide jokes decrease over time (though don't disappear entirely) as other forms of comedy pop up (like Chiri's increasing homicidal tendencies).
  • In D.Gray-man, Miranda Lotto uses uses her powers to repair a damaged ship. Everyone stares at her in amazement, but she immediately thinks she's messed up and tries to off herself by jumping into the ocean.
  • Paranoia Agent has the episode "Happy Family Planning". Three people are trying to commit suicide, with two of them trying to keep the other from doing so because she's too young.
    • Ends with it turning out that they had been Dead All Along (after the carbon monoxide poisoning, after which you never see their shadows again.
  • Grelle Sutcliff from Black Butler tended to attempt suicide over the littlest mistakes she made in the earlier episodes. At first the cast is willing to stop her, but it annoys them so much they decided to no longer do so.
  • Saint Young Men, playing up the Christian and Buddhist stories on how animals like quails and rabbits were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the higher power, has Jesus and Buddha constantly being plagued by animals willing to give themselves up for food whenever one of them makes so much as a small comment on how hungry they are. Cats jumping on plates while carrying matches, turtles trying to dive into boiling pots, turkeys knocking on the door while they were preparing a Christmas feast...
  • Ai Ebihara's suicide attempt over a broken heart in Persona 4: The Animation is played almost completely for laughs. Almost, because after Narukami (the MC) talks her out, we learn her Freudian Excuse as an ex-Fat Girl who was harshly bullied in the past, and liked Kou because he treated her well.
  • This episode of the second Lupin III series featured a "Suicide Beam" used as the main weapon against Lupin and his gang. Lupin gets hit with the beam and continues to lightheartedly attempts suicide, only to be stopped by Jigen or Zenigata each time. Zenigata also gets hit with the beam two times and tries to shoot himself in the head. He misses. Both times.

Comic Books

  • The British adult comic Viz has the character Suicidal Sid who is suicidally depressed and in every story continually tries to kill himself only for every single attempt to fail. It isn't until he regains the will to live that he finally dies.
  • There was a Mickey Mouse comic story (Yes, that Mickey Mouse) where Minnie leaves him and as a result shows him making a number of failed suicide attempts.
  • In Nextwave, Dirk Anger is constantly seen trying to commit suicide due to an extended Villainous Breakdown, though he was never psychologically stable to begin with. The most notable example is trying to shoot himself with a pistol that has a barrel curved backwards in a U-shape and is larger than a car. Finally, he accidentally hangs himself, only to come back as a zombie.
  • In one Lucky Luke story, a man is distraught by a company teetering on bankruptcy. "I put most of my fortune in its stock!" He tries to shoot himself but the gun fails to work. His butler then informs him that the rest of his money is in the maker of that brand of gun.
  • In one Spirou and Fantasio story the stockmarket crash suicides are milked for every possible laugh. First a Chinese peddler sets up a shop outside the New York stockmarket, selling lucky charms, and when the place closes later, he moves to the backdoor selling revolvers. Another joke from the same album informed an ex-millionaire intending to shoot himself, but learning that the debtors already took his revolver. His butler, suddenly rich from his own stock investments suggests that they switch parts. A bit later on the ex-butler is in turn bankrupt, and the ex-millionaire, now a butler informs that rather than wasting his money on stocks, he invested it on a revolver, and lends it to his master.

Film

  • Meet the Feebles.
  • One of the running gags in Airplane! was the people who were Driven to Suicide rather than listen to Ted Striker reminisce about his past.
  • The comedy Better Off Dead is about a high schooler attempting suicide multiple times after his girlfriend leaves him.
  • The French film L'Emmerdeur (called A Pain in the Ass in English) features a suicidal salesman who ends up getting a hotel room next to a professional assassin. Wackiness (and multiple suicide attempts) ensues.
  • Bless the Beasts And Children has a scene where a timid, bullied little boy proclaims his intentions to commit suicide and the rest of the characters mock him for it. It's a bit off-putting, especially since we're told the boy has serious psychological issues.
  • The Burt Reynolds comedy The End centers around Reynolds' terminally ill character attempting to off himself multiple times and failing horribly.
  • Harold and Maude plays Harold's regular apparent suicides for dark humour.
  • We are the Judean People's Front crack suicide squad!
  • Penn & Teller's 1989 Black Comedy Penn and Teller Get Killed ends with a string of suicides, the motivation for which gets increasingly ridiculous. The first couple can be taken perfectly seriously, and individually most of them probably could, but when they're all in a row like that, they become so absurdly over-the-top that they become hilarious.
  • In one film, Harold Lloyd attempted suicide by gunshot. It turned out to be a water pistol. He then stood in the way of a trolley—which took a different track. This was quite common in silent films.
  • In the French film Delicatessen, one of the characters repeatedly attempts suicide using large Kafkaesque machines, however these attempts always fail.
  • In the film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod tries using the gun hidden by Deep Thought on himself, after learning he's responsible for obliterating his own chances at fame and fortune from discovering the Ultimate Question. Ford wrestles it away but accidentally aims it at himself at which point it's revealed that the gun's not designed to kill, but to force the target to think from the shooter's perspective.
  • In Without a Clue, Kincaid bungles it badly when he tries to hang himself when he believes that Watson is dead.
  • In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the Judean People's Front's suicide squad shows up when the protagonist is in peril. They chase off romans, then open up the window in the center of their armor and stab themselves through it.

That showed 'em, huh?

.

Literature

  • In some versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Marvin manages to kill off the trigger-happy cops who are shooting at the heroes. He does it by explaining his philosophy of life to their life-support computer, as a result of which it commits suicide.
    • He's good at this. Rare is the occasion when a machine enters a conversation with him and doesn't come out the other side at least severely cynical or depressed. In fact, the one occasion this didn't happen, the machine in question instead got driven into a rage by poor Marvin's general situation, and blew out the floor beneath it, falling to its death. All Marvin has to say about it is, "What a depressingly stupid machine."
  • Arto Paasilinna's Collective Suicide is a whole novel about some people arranging to kill themselves together in a neat, organized fashion. Hilarity Ensues (no, really, it does).

Live-Action TV

  • An early episode of the classic kids varieties show You Can't Do That on Television had Motor Mouth Ditz Lisa sent to the principles office as punishment ‘’for him’’ because according to the teacher it was the closest thing to hell the school board could think of. She later came back and said the principle had pulled out a gun while she was talking to him and shot himself so he would not have to hear her. While she was talking the teacher and other students pulled out guns and pointed them at there own heads, until the teacher seemed to have an epiphany decide to put their guns to a different use which could probably be classified as Homicide as Comedy
  • Ted the lawyer, from Scrubs, falls in the Interrupted Suicide category. He occasionally gets up on the hospital roof, trying to build the courage to jump. However, he is actually TOO pathetic for it to be taken serious, putting him clearly in this trope.
  • Neil in the pilot episode of The Young Ones has built a gallows in the toilet that plays "Rock Around the Clock". Unfortunately for him it just pulls the overhead cistern over and he gets soaked. Meanwhile when the other three Young Ones hear it playing "Rock Around the Clock" Rick mutters, "Well, that's put the rent up by a third."
    • And again when Rick melodramatically attempts to kill himself by grabbing a bottle of pills and shoving a fistful in his mouth.

Neil: Is it possible to kill yourself with laxatives?

  • There are a few jokes in Father Ted about Jack trying to top himself.
  • Supernatural turns this into a Crowning Moment of Funny when a giant, existential teddy bear that's been brought to life by the wish of a six-year-old-girl attempts to kill himself (complete with a suicide note written on a toy blackboard). Hilarity Ensues. This is serious Mood Whiplash however, when compared to how depressingly straight the show portrays death and suicide otherwise.
    • YMMV. It's Nightmare Fuel after we see him shoot himself and still walking around just in pain and a hole in the head.
    • Also we have the episode where anyone who asks for the truth is told it... by everyone... continuously... until they finally kill themselves. Depending on how you take Dean's Death Seeker behavior, the show's Mood Whiplash, and whether you are a fan of very Black Comedy, this can be pretty funny. Be warned: YMMV.
  • The first episode of Late Night With Conan O'Brien had an opening of him walking down the street, in the office, at Starbucks, etc., everyone saying to him "You'd better be as good as Letterman", and "You're under a lot of pressure!" He took it in stride, then went to his office and cheerfully set up a rope to hang himself, and had in fact placed it around is neck when there was a knock at the door, telling him, "You're on Mr. O'Brien!". Conan: "Now, or do I have a minute?" (I seem to remember it being funnier than it sounds).
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus.
    • The Kamikazee Scotsmen sketch.
    • One of Terry Gilliam's animations had a man threatening to kill himself. He eventually shot himself in the head and knocked out one of his eyeballs.

"Now, I've had the managing director of Conquistador to see me this morning and he's very unhappy with your campaign. Very unhappy. In fact, he's shot himself."
"Badly, sir?"
"No, very well."

  • The short-lived Sitcom The Powers That Be focused on a US Senator and his dysfunctional family, including a suicidal son-in-law (a member of the House of Representatives). One memorably darkly funny bit had the son-in-law reading Final Exit (a book detailing various methods of suicide) with commentary ("tried it, tried that twice, like that's going to work,....")
  • On Buffy, supervillain Spike was captured and surgically prevented from acting out aggression of any kind against humans. He promptly attempts to throw himself on a stake.
  • If you're from Chile, the Soap Opera Sucupira gives you the pharmacist from the Sucupira coastal village, Don Segundo, considering/threatening/trying to commit suicide MANY times over his insecurity about his hot wife Olguita Mar ía's fidelity. I.e: He tires to hang himself, blow his brains out, throw himself in front of a train, etc.
  • At one point in Charmed, Cole repeatedly tries to kill himself because Pheobe doesn't love him any more. He tries fire and even a Guillotine (he gets stopped before he can use that one though).
  • Used in The Vicar of Dibley with the death of Frank's parents due to boredom. That was never proved!
    • In the episode where Frank lay preaches in Geraldine's stead for two Sundays in a row, Jim comments on how the length and sheer dullness of Frank's preaching drove at least one parishioner to commit suicide right there in their pew.
  • Ryan Stiles on Whose Line Is It Anyway? gets a lot of mileage out of his "hanged himself" act for this reason.
    • And don't forget the game of "Superheroes" in which Brad Sherwood plays "Suicide Boy." Trust me. You won't.
  • In the Ripping Yarns episode Roger of the Raj, there is a scene at a regimental dinner where various officers express controversial opinions (such as passing the port to right or even allowing women to stay and drink port with the men). This leaves them with no choice but to do the honourable thing and they each leave the room in turn to administer the shot or in one case, two shots - the first having missed.
  • One episode of Cheers had Woody making a film to send back to his parents to convince them to let him stay in Boston. One segment was filmed in Frasier's office, and upon replay they see someone falling past the window. Frasier notes that he'll have to tell one of his colleague's, whose office was on a higher floor, that he needs to keep the windows in his office locked.

Music

  • Given the silly title of Da Vinci's Notebook's Window Washing Cowboy, you don't expect it to be the story of a guy who met the girl of his dreams, found her already in a relationship when he got up the nerve to ask her out, and committed suicide over it... But it's alright, it's Played for Laughs. And with a bad pun at the end.
  • Frank Zappa's "Suicide Chump", "Be sure to get it right the first time, cuz nothing's worse than..."
  • Gravediggaz' "1-800 Suicide". The album version at least. The music video had a different version which promoted a suicide prevention hotline.
  • Insane Clown Posse's Violent J as a suicide hotline phone operator encourages a caller to kill himself and insulting him, in a skit preceding their song "How Many Times?" on the album The Great Milenko. We hear a gun go off, but it turns out the caller missed when he tried to shoot himself.

Newspaper Comics

  • Pearls Before Swine used to have Alphonse the depressed porcupine do this, but author Stephen Pastis discontinued the character because of too many Dude, Not Funny responses. (Despite the fact that the window Alphonse was threatening to jump from was, visibly, on the first story, and barely any taller than the character himself. And yes, he only had time to try it once before the fandom backlash forced him out of the strip.)

Professional Wrestling

  • The Tim White suicide sketches. WWE never bothered to air these on television (network censors would have had Vince McMahon's head) airing one at the Armageddon 2005 PPV and streaming the rest on their website. Considered by some to be Too Soon with the sudden death of Eddie Guerrero a month prior to the first sketch.

Radio

Mel: Look't what you made me do! You made me so nervous, I missed!!!

Theatre

  • The Musical version of The Full Monty has a scene where Jerry and Dave sing "Big Ass Rock," a lilting tune about how they'll help Malcolm kill himself, because they're his friends.
  • "On the American Plan" by George S. Kaufman and Howard Dietz, a comedy sketch about a suicide hotel. Some guests complained about not getting rooms high enough to make a fatal leap from, or that their cyanide was too bitter to drink. Others were just given a pistol to take to their room, which would be marked unoccupied after the offstage shot was heard.

Video Games

  • Clem and Crystal, the perpetually peppy borderline insane definitely obsessive cheerleaders from Psychonauts, are trying to commit suicide together. Apparently as part of some ritual.
  • In Soul Calibur 2, there's Yoshimitsu's suicide attack. Completely hilarious.
  • The Interactive Fiction game In The End 2 is about the player character's attempts to commit suicide, all of which fail in more or less ridiculous ways. It was written as a parody of In The End, in which the player is railroaded to a Downer Ending.
  • The immortal protagonist of Planescape: Torment can suggest that if a priest is so eager to go onto the afterlife, he should kill himself. When the priest replies "you first," the protagonist is free to call his bluff.
  • The series Five Minutes to Kill Yourself (hosted by [adult swim]) is all about playing an iso-pixel character trying to commit suicide in interesting ways to get out of something (work, a family outing, a wedding).
  • A depressed novelty salesman in Day of the Tentacle attempts to kill himself by shooting himself in the head, except he's using a flag gun instead of a real one. He then gets more depressed, saying he can't even properly kill himself.

Web Animation

  • In "Suicide Face," a cartoon series on Something Awful‍'‍s Flash Tub, an idiotic woman beats herself to death with a hammer in order to play a prank on her boyfriend and gets sent to Hell.
  • Asdfmovie:
    • "Quick, shoot me in the face!"
    • "Goodbye, world" "Okay, Jim, see ya round. Hey, where ya going cause *gunshot* Oh! That's not what I thought he meant by that at all!"
    • The cake jumping off the table.

Web Comics

  • Ansem Retort deliberately invokes this trope when, after being confronted by a patient he turned into a cookie, Zexion declared that if he slit his wrists right then, it'd be "the tastiest suicide EVER."
  • Suicide for Hire occasionally does one-shots that are like this, but the story arcs are more serious (unless the client is a complete asshole).
  • The suicide girl strips of Sexy Losers. She usually stopped because a guy joked about raping her corpse, except he wasn't really joking.
    • She eventually bought a gun, so she could kill him first, only to step out of the shower and die mistaking the gun for a hair dryer. She went to heaven because her premature suicide was technically accidental. He stole her corpse, stuffed it, and turned it into a sex doll. Then things got really weird.
  • Channel Ate could easily be renamed "The funny suicide webcomic" and still make sense without changing anything else.
  • The Suicide Fairies (though that's a misnomer, since suicide is cheating) of Gunnerkrigg Court are constantly trying to get people to kill them. It's rather entertaining.

Web Original

  • The Nostalgia Critic is always seen contemplating suicide as a result of the movie's he's watching, though this usually says more about the movie than the Critic.
    • And like Linkara before him, he averted this tearjerkingly near the end of his "Commercials Special". If it hadn't been for his He's Back moment after, its made pretty clear that he would have died out of depression.

Critic: "There's nothing left for me anymore."

  • Linkara's magic gun also doubles as a suicide gun. One famous instance had him attempting to slit his wrists with the gun and wailing "Why doesn't it work?!"
    • Heavily averted in Silent Hill Dead/Alive, when he realistically attempts suicide in horror when he was told he killed his daughter.
  • Spoony tends to have suicidal tendencies over the later editions of Final Fantasy. One version of Spoony kills himself at the very mention of reviewing FFX.
  • The Obscurus Lupa review of The Room ends with "Tommy Wiseau" showing up, actually seeing what a terrible film he'd made, and killing himself in a send-up of the Narmful climax.
  • This comic is about a boy who wants to kill himself after reading My Immortal by hanging himself with his tie.
  • Joey from the musical Me and My Dick attempts to commit suicide after an embarrassing attempt to propose to the hot little Jewish girl Vanessa. He is about to go through with it when his friend walks in. This wouldn't be funny if Joey's Heart wasn't played by an actual person, but when Heart states in a quiet, devastated voice, "I'm going to squeeze my left carotid artery, Joey" it became hilarious.
  • Encyclopedia Dramatica has an entire portal dedicated to suicide humour, labeled "An Heroes" after Mitchell Henderson.
  • Suicide Putty! The easy way to kill yourself! Simply knead, apply, and die. And if you act now, you can get six sticks of Suicide Putty, so you can kill yourself SIX TIMES.
  • YTMND's "MySpace Suicide" fad satirised a teenager's suicide note posted on his MySpace profile as well as the Emo subculture of the mid-to-late 2000s. Some users were understandably uneasy about the idea of mocking the victim's act of self-harm, though.

Western Animation

Bart: Wonder how Richie died.
Lisa: Perhaps he realized how hollow the pursuit of money really is and took his own life.
Marge: Kids, could you lighten up a little?

  • Family Guy:
    • In "The Kiss Seen Around the World," what Tom Tucker hopes to do to a story about teen-ager Neil Goldman threatening to jump of the roof of city hall, accomplishing it by adding "object falling" sound effects in post-production and humorous commentary to the narrative. Thwarted when Meg overhears this and tells him he is a vile, amoral man for even thinking about trying to encourage a suicide to create a story he hopes will amuse the audience, and when Meg's body breaks Neil's fall.
    • When the Grim Reaper is injured, Peter realizes that nobody can die so he and eventually everyone else start to perform ordinarily lethal stunts for amusement.
    • In a Manatee Gag, Stewie is playing frisbee with a still-living Casper. When he reappears as a ghost, Stewie apologizes, but Casper says he planned to off himself in a few days anyway.
  • The Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Dumber Dolls" featured a doll named "Happy Time Harry" who is so depressingly cynical, he causes the perpetually optimistic doll Jiggle Billy to lose hope and commit suicide. Jiggle Billy's head assures Meatwad that he isn't actually dead, but he is still depressed.

Meatwad: Ya know, Happy-Time, just bein’ around you kinda makes me wanna die...

  • A Looney Tunes cartoon has Porky Pig admonishing his hunting dog for failing to catch a groundhog. The dog tries to kill himself with a water pistol.
  • Chuck Jones' Cheese Chasers has mice Hubie and Bertie unable to look at cheese after binging on it - they decide there's nothing to live for and try to get Claude Cat to eat them. This freaks out Claude, who, when he realizes he'll never eat another mouse, decides he needs to end it all. A remake of sorts of Life With Feathers, with a lovesick lovebird and Sylvester.
  • During a flashback in Yvon of the Yukon some royal soldiers throw themselves at the king's fireplace to act as fuel for the fire. It was rather creepy.
  • King of the Hill had Bill's periodic bouts with depression turn so bad that he became suicidal. Bill's suicide attempts were played seriously, but his neighbors' reactions to it were not. Hank was annoyed by having to take time off of work to go on "suicide watch", Dale didn't care if Bill died or not and was eager to steal his stuff, and Boomhauer was tired of it eating up so much of his time.
    • His initial suicide attempt was played straight, but the rest? I don't know how you can get more Played for Laughs than having Bill try to kill himself by putting his head in an ELECTRIC oven, then trying to just slam his head in the drawer repeatedly until Hank stop him (all of this happening over the theme to The Odd Couple playing merrily in the background).
  • One episode of Drawn Together saw Xandir commit suicide 99 times - as a Video Game character, he had a lot of lives to go through. He was talked out of ending his last life.
  • You probably didn't think you'd see Rugrats mentioned on this page, but in one episode, Grandpa Boris gets so fed up with Stu's home movies, he picks up the phone and asks for Dr. Kevorkian.[1]
  • Futurama - Two words, "Suicide Booth"
  • Ren of Ren and Stimpy once tried to end it all by throwing himself into the garbage disposal in the sink after Stimpy destroys his prized moose chair.
    • The episode "Haunted House" ends with a ghost committing suicide, which inexplicably causes him to come back to life.
  • South Park has a disturbing fondness for this trope, with graphic depictions of suicide - all played for comedy - occurring on a regular basis.
    • At the end of "Coon vs Coon & Friends" Mysterion tired and wants to go to sleep, so he shoots himself since doing so causes him to wake up in his bed the next day.
  • Adventure Time mentions this in passing with a group of suicidal helium balloons.

Yaay, to the mesosphere! Finally, we can die!

    • Clarence kills himself on-screen in the episode "Ghost Princess." He is so depressed that he takes to drowning his sorrows in squeezy cheese. Eventually, he becomes so broken he decides to just put his mouth to the cheese nozzle and gorge himself on the stuff until his body fills up, like a balloon, with cheese, until he explodes. It's both hilarious and disgusting. His famous last words? "MY LIFE IS LIKE A FAAART!!!"
  • In the episode of Regular Show "Death Metal Crash Pit," Muscle Man is locked in an RV as an awful death metal band plays on top of said RV. Muscle Man desperately tries to break out of the RV, screaming desperately: "HELP! This music SUCKS!" Eventually, he drives the RV into the crash pit (a big hole where Muscle Man drives broken down cars for fun), and everyone dies. And it's hilarious. The scene ends with Muscle Man as a ghost, high-fiving his friend High-Five Ghost (who was already a ghost), saying: "Best crash pit EVER!"
  • In the episode of SpongeBob SquarePants "Dunces and Dragons," the guard standing by the door of the jousting tournament says, "Right this way." Spongebob, getting into character, friendlily chides him, "Don't you mean, 'righteth this way?'" Spongebob and Patrick go inside. Meanwhile, the guard holds his own spear to his neck and winces, cringing... then sighs, puts his spear down, and says, "SOME DAY... but not today."
  • In the Kung Fu Panda holiday special, Po, in his duties as The Dragon Warrior, has to host a formal dinner for all the Kung Fu masters in China, and has to choose a chef. Unfortunately, due to the extreme formality of the dinner in question, a wave he gives to Monkey is misinterpreted as a dismissal of the first chef, a bunny named Wo Hop, whose name and family and village are now disgraced for all eternity. He believes the only way he can regain his honour is battling the Dragon Warrior in a fight to the death, even if that death is his own. Hilarity Ensues, and Po eventually helps him regain his honor without dying.
  • Invader Zim, true to the dark and twisted nature of the show, has this joke in Dib's Wonderful Life of Doom. After Dib confronts Zim, Zim just gives up and tells GIR that it's been nice working with him, but to self destruct. GIR responds with "FINALLY!" and promptly explodes.
  • In an episode of The Oblongs, one of The Debbies is disfigured in an accident and tries jumping off a bridge in The Valley. Milo tells her she can't do it, and she does - sinking into the mud. Milo clarifies to her that everyone in The Valley has tried before.
  • The end of the Looney Tunes short Tortoise Wins by a Hare.
  • The end of Red Hot Riding Hood.