Tablecloth Yank

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

A white tablecloth. A beautiful placesetting (bonus points for a vase of fresh flowers). Our Hero takes one corner of the cloth, and with a single pull whips the tablecloth off the table without disturbing the placesetting.

The Tablecloth Yank trick is a good, showy way to demonstrate that a character is a stage magician. It demonstrates that the character knows physics — the dishes and glasses are held in place by inertia.

When this trick fails, sending china, silver and glass everywhere, it's even more showy.

Examples of Tablecloth Yank include:

Anime and Manga

• A famous scene in the beginning of Black Butler.
• Asuna does this in Mahou Sensei Negima.
• In Revolutionary Girl Utena, when Anthy's dress disintegrates during a party due to a vicious prank, Utena whips a nearby tablecloth free (sending everything that was on the table flying in the process) and wraps it around her, making it into a new, toga-like dress to replace it.

Film

• Ghostbusters had the comedy version. Venkman tries to whip a table cloth from under a set table and succeeds in sending every item on the table except the centerpiece crashing to the floor.

Venkman: And the flowers are still standing!

• How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Done successfully by the Grinch when trying to retrieve a tablecloth... only for him to immediately run back to the table and knock everything over himself. The table included.

Literature

• Death does this in Thief of Time, in which it's a Phlebotinum Analogy for what the History Monks do; the table is still laid, but the tablecloth can now be reused. Susan points out that the salt's fallen over and the tablecloth is stained, and Death replies, "Yes. As metaphors go it is rather good, don't you think?"
• Gleefully averted in Wolf In The Fold, in which Fisher snatches up a tablecloth to cover the naked body of a dead man. The toppling crash of place settings is described in all its destructive glory.

Live-Action TV

• The MythBusters took on a viral video showing this trick being done on a banquet table, with a motorcycle. It didn't work.
• Captain Awesome did this on Chuck.
• Time Warp did both versions, showing you the secret to achieving both.
• Benny Hill from The Benny Hill Show has done Tablecloth Yank quite a few times and has sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed. In one of the episodes, he also did an inversion of a classic Tablecloth Yank.

Music

• The Literal Music Video of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" makes fun of the trope. (In the original, they're just messing up the table on purpose.)

Video Games

• One of the games in Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is exactly this.

Web Animation

• In the animation Dad's Home, the titular Dad successfully pulls this near the end, for no particular reason and on a table that had no reason to be where it was. He also kicks the table over immediately afterwards.

Western Animation

• Bender in the Futurama episode "Bender Gets Made": This is a double subversion, in that Bender succeeds in performing this trick, but his success was really a failure, since he meant to single-subvert the trope by just pulling everything off the table.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?", Robin knocks a thug standing on a table off his feet by pulling out the tablecloth. "I love that trick, but I can never make it work."
• In The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Tigger successfully pulls a cloth off Piglet's table without harming any of the dishes. Then he turns to leave the room:

Tigger: Ha, ha, thought they were all gonna crash, didn't ya? [slams the door and the dishes all shatter]