Suicide as Comedy: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Finn:''' "Thanks guys. Your blood oath is now fulfilled."

'''Balloons:''' "YAY! To the Mesosphere! '''FINALLY, WE CAN DIE!"'''|''[[Adventure Time]]''}}

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

 

{{examples}}

* 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).

* 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...

 

* 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. [[Death by Irony|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 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.

 

* ''[[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 [[Values Dissonance|a bit off-putting]], especially since we're told the boy has serious psychological issues.

* The Burt Reynolds comedy ''The End'' centers around Reynolds' [[Your Days Are Numbered|terminally ill]] character attempting to off himself multiple times and failing horribly.

* [[Penn & Teller]]'s 1989 [[Black Comedy]] ''[[Penn and Teller Get Killed]]'' ends with a string of suicides, the motivation for which gets [[Up to Eleven|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 [[Crowning Moment of Funny|hilarious]].

* 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]]'', {{spoiler|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 {{spoiler|at which point it's revealed that the gun's not designed to kill, but [[Mind Manipulation|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 {{spoiler|Watson is dead.}}

 

* 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).

 

* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaE6CMuT5qc 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.

* 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.

 

* 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 [[Feghoot|bad pun]] at the end.

* [[Frank Zappa]]'s "Suicide Chump", "Be sure to get it right the first time, cuz nothing's worse than..."

* [[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.

 

* ''[[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.)

 

* 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.

 

** In another Christmas episode, the same clerk tries and fails to do it again.

 

* [[The Musical]] version of ''[[The Full Monty]]'' has a scene where Jerry and Dave sing "Big Ass Rock," a [[Lyrical Dissonance|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 [[Leave Behind a Pistol|given a pistol to take to their room]], which would be marked unoccupied after the offstage shot was heard.

 

* Clem and Crystal, the [[Yandere|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 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).

 

* ''[[Asdfmovie]]'':

** "Quick, shoot me in the face!"

** The cake jumping off the table.

 

* ''[[Ansem Retort]]'' deliberately invokes this trope when, after being confronted by a patient he turned into a cookie, [[Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate|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 [[Fan Nickname|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.

 

* [[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 [[Tear Jerker|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.

* [[The Spoony Experiment|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.

** In one recent commentary, though, he notes that he's retired from this sort of humour after [[Tear Jerker|one of his fans really did commit suicide]].

* [http://xninjared.deviantart.com/art/Cho-reads-My-Immortal-152293752 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.

 

* Scamper the rabbit from ''[[Igor]]''. He often succeeds, but his [[Healing Factor]] prevents him from staying dead for long.

* Moe from ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'', to the point where one of his Christmas traditions is his annual suicide attempt.

** [[Dude, Not Funny|Disturbingly averted]] by Bart in "The Boys of Bummer".

{{quote|'''Bart:''' Wonder how Richie died.

'''Lisa:''' Perhaps he realized how hollow the pursuit of money really is and took his own life.

** 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 [[Meaningless Lives|a lot of lives to go through]]. He was talked out of ending his last life.

* ''[[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.

[[Category:Comedy Tropes]]

[[Category:Choosing Death]]

[[Category:Dude, Not Funny]]