Funny Aneurysm Moment/Other Media

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


...no matter how hard you press the brakes.

Examples of Funny Aneurysm Moments in Other Media include:

Advertising

  • The commercials for the Ayds appetite-suppressant candy (which, yes, died slowly during the 1980s because of the rise of AIDS combined with its unfortunately similar name. Back then the disease was called "GRID", short for Gay Related Immune Deficiency before it was renamed in the 80s.

"Thank goodness for Ayds!"
"Why take diet pills when you can enjoy Ayds?"
"I lost weight because I have aides, and I think every obese person should have aides."

    • It gets even worse when you hear about the mad scramble the company made to save the brand -- they tried renaming it "Aydslim," only to find that in those early days, AIDS was known as "the slim disease" in some parts of Africa. They've also tried renaming it "diet Ayds".
    • The worst part is, AIDS (the disease) actually causes weight loss.
  • Commercials for health insurance, of all things, hosted by the late Billy Mays.
  • A Federal Express ad with Steve Irwin dying of a snake bite because they used the wrong service gets darker when considering the causes surrounding Irwin's death.
  • In 1997, Sarah Ferguson appeared in a commercial for Weight Watchers where she was being hounded by reporters, and she says, "Losing weight can be harder than outrunning the paparazzi!" A few weeks later, her sister-in-law Diana (former Princess of Wales) had a run-in with the paparazzi that ended poorly.
  • On September 11, 2001, NBC showed a McDonald's commercial with the slogan "We love to see you smile." Right after that, The Today Show began their coverage of the 9/11 attacks.
  • A TV spot for the film Godzilla opens with the message "It's time to say goodbye to something that holds a special place in our hearts...NEW YORK", before cutting to the dramatic action. A lot less funny after 9/11.
  • A 1979 ad for Pakistani International Airlines has the shadow of a plane over two towers. After 9/11/2001, it gets another whole new and way darker meaning.
  • Toyota's slogan "Moving Forward" has become a lot more uncomfortable ever since the 2010 recalls, since people have reported that their Toyota vehicles accelerate suddenly and uncontrollably, and don't respond to the driver pressing the brake pedal.
  • Not too long ago, Greyhound unveiled a series of billboard ads with the phrase "There's a reason you've never heard of 'Bus Rage'", mere weeks before a passenger was murdered and beheaded aboard a Greyhound bus in Canada.
  • In 1968, London Weekend Television was due to start broadcasting. During the final weekend of their predecessor ATV London's broadcast, they ran a short trailer [dead link] with a letter giving a positive review of the programming for the upcoming first weekend. The announcer noted that the letter "seem(ed) a bit premature", and indeed it was — the first weekend (and several more afterwards) ended up being wiped out by strike action.
  • A 2000 Super Bowl ad has a presenter who mentions how "in 2004, the tide was turned against AIDS", in 2006 ("two years later", according to the ad), there were "great strides against cancer, and most notably, a "remarkable breakthrough against spinal cord injuries", which featured the CG-enhanced Christopher Reeve walking onstage. Sadly, Reeves would die in 2004, and we haven't seen so much progress in all those areas.
  • An ad for bendable eyeglass frames that aired until fall of 2001 showed a metal skyscraper ducking out of the way of an oncoming airplane.
  • The T-Mobile ads where the T-Mobile girl sticks it to AT&T's poor service are no longer amusing now that AT&T is buying out T-Mobile.
  • In an old NES commercial for Tetris, a man envisions the Twin Towers as tetrominoes.
  • A 2009 commercial for the MTV Video Music Awards features Taylor Swift singing about the 2009 VM As and how good it will be, including the line "There'll be no teardrops on my guitar." At the actual show, Kanye West happened...
  • There used to be a chain called Chapter 11 Bookstores with the motto "Prices so low, you'd think we'd go bankrupt!".
  • There was a funny commercial in 2008 where Chavs are destroying Britain and a family takes shelter to watch TV without any worries. Fast forward to 6 August 2011, and the London tragedy, and this isn't a laughing matter anymore.
  • In late 2011, one of the ads in the long-running Ashton Kutcher Nikon Coolpix campaign featured the man using his camera to seduce a bunch of women and lead them up to his hotel room. Around that same time, his marriage to Demi Moore was dissolving thanks to a very public affair.
  • Mattel Electronics' commercial for Burger Time, which ends with Mr. Hot Dog saying "We are closed now!" as he slams the window shut on the drive-thru, came out months before Mattel Electronics closed down.
  • As if the Mr. Bucket commercial wasn't bad enough by itself, it gets even worse after reading Homestuck. Buckets are very inappropriate in troll culture.
  • A 1980s lamb commercial has a woman turning down the opportunity to have dinner with Tom Cruise because her mum was cooking a lamb roast that night. Nowadays, it seems like a perfectly rational decision.
  • The Target pharmacy ads would be a little more convincing if they didn't look so much like Dexter's ads minus the blood.
  • During the '00s, Washington Mutual ran a series of ad campaigns focused on how great it was for its bold new business practices that were so great for consumers, like loans for borrowers that other banks considered risky. The campaigns featured WaMu's hip spokesman contrasted against a bunch of old and stodgy executives from their competitors, all of whom would declare that WaMu's new innovation would never catch on. Then WaMu went bankrupt...because of loans to risky borrowers.
  • Apple's '1984' advert, depicting IBM as a 1984-esque Big Brother figure, while these days, Apple are HUGE champions of Digital Restrictions Management and locking down devices so users can't use devices they own to their full capability.
  • This 2011 Advert for Audi, about an escape from an Ultra Rich Prison seem to have lost some of its comical value thanks to a teenager got probation after getting busted his role drunk driving car crash that killed 4 people. Yea ever heard of affluenza or had it… thought so?
    • That’s not all, there are some prisons known as “pay-to-stay” where inmates who can afford it can get a premium cell included Flat-Screen TV, Luxury Foods, and Game tables… though it mostly for minor offenses.

Professional Wrestling

There's no holding me back
 I'm not driven by fear, I'm just driven by anger
And you're under attack...

    • In addition, pretty much everyone stopped laughing at Kevin Sullivan, who in 1996 wrote TV depicting Benoit as trying to break up the Sullivan marriage - which is what happened in real life and what led to Benoit meeting the wife he would murder.
    • Benoit's titantron goes from shots of Benoit screaming in rage, to a close up of his freakish Slasher Smile, and finally, and most chillingly of all, him patting a young boy on the head.
    • During Royal Rumble 2003, Kurt Angle and Chris Benoit put on a wrestling clinic. Fairly early in the match Cole states that "(Benoit) has sacrificed his family. He's sacrificed his own life." Intended as a statement about his determination. It now takes a different meaning.
  • At One Night Stand 2005 during the Mike Awesome (who was reviled by ECW fans for jumping to WCW without warning, while he was still the ECW World Heavyweight Champion) vs Masato Tanaka match, Joey Styles commented, "Suicide dive by Mike Awesome, and it's a damn shame he didn't succeed in taking his own life!" In February 2007, Mike Awesome committed suicide.
  • In 1995 or so, the WWF featured a character named Rad Radford, an attempt to cash in on the then-hot (well, more like then on the way out, but never mind) Grunge Music fad. He was booked as the ultimate Grunge musician and was hinted to be romantically involved with Courtney Love. All goofy fun from wrestling's Dork Age, until you realize that Louie Spicolli, the young, up-and-coming wrestler who played Radford, later died of a drug overdose, much as many prominent Grunge musicians did, at the age of 27, the same age Kurt Cobain was when he committed suicide.
  • The "plotline" where Vince McMahon himself was supposedly blown up in his limo, which became an example of this trope mid-plotline and was called off after the Benoit family murder/suicide. Then the WWE had to take it further and intentionally invoked a Reverse Funny Aneurysm Moment in order to set up McMahon's "illegitimate child" arc.
  • Eddie Guerrero's title match against Brock Lesnar. Throughout the match, Lesnar is heard to clearly yell "Just die Eddie". Eddie would be found dead just over a year later in his hotel room.
    • An equally chilling moment can be found on the "Cheating Death, Stealing Life" DVD, where Dean Malenko says (having told management of Eddie's substance abuse problems) that he didn't want to "be told my friend is dead in hotel room somewhere".
    • The Wrestling Fan's Great American Bash 2005 recap included mention of Vickie Guerrero's backstage promo with Eddie in which she claims that he "has a big heart". The recapper then mentions that maybe he should get that looked at by a doctor, as it could be dangerous. Eddie's official cause of death was heart failure, and an autopsy revealed he did have an enlarged heart.
    • A commercial for Wrestlemania XIX features the announcer mentioning that all people will eventually die...over a shot of Eddie in the locker room. He also said "We are all mortals" over a shot of Chris Benoit.
  • Owen Hart, as the Blue Blazer, cut a promo on a 1989 Saturday Night's Main Event where he said he'd fly from the rafters if necessary.
  • At the 2001 Royal Rumble, Jim Ross made a comment about the ring looking like a hurricane had hit it. The event was held in the New Orleans Arena. We all know what happened next.
  • As part of his Face Heel Turn, CM Punk claimed his straight-edge lifestyle made him better than a drug addict hippie. Then Jeff Hardy, whom Punk had just finished feuding with, was arrested for charges of drug dealing and drug use. Guess the Pepsi swilling smart mark favorite had a point.
  • Part of Stone Cold Steve Austin's Heel Turn in 2001 included him mistreating his wife and manager, Debra [1]. This happened little more than a year before Stone Cold was arrested for domestically abusing her.
  • In a recent case, Rosa Mendes faced WWE Women's Champion in a match on WWE Superstars. She cut a promo before the match, stating "Beth Phoenix's days of being champion are coming to an end". Beth ended up tearing her ACL in that very match and had to drop the title on the next edition of Smackdown!.
  • A 1993 episode of Raw has Jerry Lawler referring to the hart family as "producing more tragedies than Shakespeare". Though originally a shot at the Hart Family, considering the real life tragedies the hart family would go through years later the line takes a different tone now.
  • This picture. At the time, it was considered a high point of both careers. But the lifestyles they led, that they had to live as wrestlers, played into their untimely deaths.
  • Shortly before Eddie Guerrero's untimely death, his nephew Chavo was portraying a character called Kerwin White, a white bread golfer with a caddy named Nick Nemeth. Had Eddie never died, this gimmick would likely be continuing today. The creepy part? That caddy would go on to be known as Dolph Ziggler, and be romantically involved with Eddie's widow.
  • All of the fat jokes and insults Jerry Lawler hurled at Molly Holly during 2002 take on an even harsher note if you watch her shoot interview where she talks about how that encouraged the entire locker room to poke fun at her and it began eating away at her. The sad part is that she initially had no problem with the segments with Trish - she honestly felt the jokes were funny - but it was Jerry Lawler's commentary that hurt her.
  • Britain's domestic professional wrestling scene was nearly wiped out in a quite literal example of this, after a finishing move in a match between Shirley "Big Daddy" Crabtree and Mal "King Kong" Kirk resulted in Kirk's death from heart failure.
  • In kayfabe, Taylor Wilde defeated Awesome Kong to win the Knockouts Championship and $25,000. Taylor later revealed in an interview that while she was Knockouts Champion she had to work a minimum wage job at Sunglass Hut.
  • In a promo leading up to their match at Wrestlemania XXVIII, in a 'Rock Concert', The Rock said Cena would end up getting a divorce for making out with Eve and that divorce lawyers would be hounding him. Come May 10, 2012, John Cena files for divorce and his wife hires the same attorney Hulk Hogan's ex-wife hired for their own divorce.


Radio

  • Gordon Ramsey asks Irish Broadcaster Gerry Ryan if he's had his heart checked. Ryan died of an apparent heart attack sometime afterwards.
  • An episode of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue from 1995 where, after they both try to speak at once, Willie Rushton says to Barry Cryer, "No, you go first, you're likely to die sooner than me". Willie Rushton died the next year.
    • During a game of predictions in 1986, Willie predicted -- to much laughter -- that one of the sad events he foresaw for 1996 was his own death that January; he died in December.
    • In 1995, Tim Brooke-Taylor predicted that a 2010 Radio Times would include a listing for "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue with Humphrey Lyttelton, Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden, and Tim and Samantha Brooke-Taylor." Willie, the only one of the regulars left out, died the next year, while the others were all alive up to Humph's death in 2008.
    • Willie often complained about the "___'s Ball" games full of punning names about various subjects. At his last ISIHAC recording, the chosen subject was "Undertaker's Ball," full of puns about death and burial.
  • On an episode of Fibber McGee and Molly from March 20th, 1945 where Fibber is trying to fix the radio, Molly says "I hope you fix it in time for Roosevelt's next inauguration!" Franklin Roosevelt died 23 days later.
  • In one early episode of the Bob & Ray show, Ray explains that he was off yesterday due to 'a sharp pain in my lower back', joking to the effect that since he's in radio, he didn't know if it was a cold (ie., a kidney infection) back there or a knife. In hindsight... he's evidently joking about a very early symptom of the kidney failure that would kill him years later.
  • The special 25th anniversary edition of I'm Sorry Ill Read That Again ended with David Hatch reading the credits and finally saying "I hope to see you all again in 25 years' time", to laughter and cheers from the audience. As of 2011, every original performer is still alive -- except David Hatch.
  • Anything said about GMG Radio's portfolio and Real Radio becoming Heart (a Global Radio brand) online now seems uncomfortable to read rather than comedy; given that their Christmas Day schedule is only 4 hours (6am-10am) local this year, compared to previous years, all due to syndicated programming. However, Real Radio still retains its "wacky DJ" personality which Heart does not have.

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

  • In the Eddie Murphy standup special RAW, the comedian talks about the problems with marriage. In one (extremely politically incorrect) part, he details how he would court and marry a poor impoverished African woman as opposed to an American one, as all American women are interested in are "half" of a man's net worth; but he notes that, in the US, the African woman would soon be interested in the same thing. Then in the movie Coming to America, Murphy plays a prince of an African kingdom who comes to America to find love because all of the women in his kingdom only want him for his status. In Real Life, Murphy married an American woman, who eventually divorced him, and fathered a child with a British singer (Scary Spice).
  • Standup comedian Louis CK did a routine in his 2008 stand up special "Chewed Up" where he described his marriage as "almost done". Later that year, he and his wife divorced.
  • In his stand-up routine at the 2005 Melbourne Comedy Gala, Jimeoin briefly joked that Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin was dead. A year later, Steve Irwin was attacked and killed by a wild animal.

Tabletop Games

  • The core rulebook for White Wolf's Vampire: The Requiem includes, in a passage about storytellers embellishing the "dark and gritty" elements of the World of Darkness, a description of the differences between the real World version of New Orleans and the World of Darkness version; this was an example for the book. The last paragraph detailed how the street level was just below the water level of the Mississippi River and that the water was held back by levies that were ill-kept. Vampire: The Requiem was first published in 2004, one year before Hurricane Katrina caused the canal levies in New Orleans to break and flood the entire city. That has been described as the worst natural disaster in American history... The street level of New Orleans was, and still is, several feet below the water level of the Mississippi. And the canal levees were not especially well kept at the time of Katrina; they were made to withstand a category 3 hurricane's flood, but unfortunately not a category 5's.
    • The real clincher? There was a sidebar describing how, if you really wanted to shake up the political situation of the Kindred of New Orleans, have a hurricane sweep through, break the levees, and cause devastation, no doubt destroying a few elders when their havens are destroyed and the sunlight comes streaming in. The books detailing the individual clans then had to follow through on this chain of thought in detail when real life decided to step in...
  • A fairly (in)famous example would be the "Terrorist Nuke [dead link]" card from Steve Jackson Games' 1995 CCG Illuminati: New World Order. Granted, it's implicitly a bomb going off rather than an airplane crash, but they even got the positioning right.


Real Life

  • Herbert Viana, the lead singer of the Brazilian band Paralamas do Sucesso, finished an interview in 2001 by saying all he had bought a new plane, and all he wanted to do was fly (he was a pilot). Months later, he crashed the plane into the sea, in an accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and killed his wife.
  • In a bizarre historical example, there is a medieval story written by Alfonso the Tenth about a Jewish family where the son is given a communion wafer and decides to become Christian as a result of it. So the father decides to punish him by burning his son alive in a bread oven.
  • The New Hampshire state quarter, initially circulated in 2000, depicts The Old Man of the Mountain, which was a state landmark. Three years after the quarter was released, the Old Man naturally collapsed.
  • Every joke about Dick Clark's eternal youthfulness has suffered from this since Clark's stroke in late 2004, which rendered him...somewhat less youthful.
    • Now even less funny come 2012, since Clark has passed away of a heart attack.
  • Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 on a business trip. He was 2 miles away from the epicenter of the blast from the atomic bomb that was dropped on that fateful day. He survived with some injuries, and decided to quickly return home. To Nagasaki. Reportedly, the day that bomb was dropped, his boss was insisting to him the reasons that a bomb could not destroy an entire city, and was convinced Yamaguchi was making it up. To top things off, Nagasaki wasn't even the original target. It was a last-minute choice after not only one, but two, other target cities were too obscured by clouds to attack with any accuracy. And despite suffering from cancer, Yamaguchi lived to the age of 93: this guy was nuked twice and became a dedicated anti-nuclear weapons protester. This man was a reminder that nukes are not magical devices.
  • From "The Good War" -- the massive set of WWII-based interviews by historian Studs Terkel (the brackets are part of the title, by the way): The interviewee, Maurice E. Wilson, talks about an apparently white man called Robert Brooks in his unit whom Wilson often called Nig on account of his features and hair. After Brooks died, it emerged that he was black and had lied about his race (he was pale enough to pass for white) to get into a white outfit.
  • Jim Fixx, the guy who made jogging popular, died of a heart attack while he was jogging. This looks ironic on the surface, but the heart problem was known, and was actually the reason Fixx took up jogging. It likely extended his lifespan.
    • Similarly, James Rodale - a writer and publisher who advocated for organic foods and healthy living in such publications as Prevention magazine - died of a heart attack at 72 while appearing as a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Just minutes earlier, Rodale had predicted he would "live to be 100".
  • Providence radio DJ Doctor Metal of the hard rock station WHJY threatened not to go see Metallica play during the summer (even though he supported them on the air since they were still in the underground) if their new album wasn't good. He then qualified the statement by saying he doesn't know what'll happen and he could be dead by then. Shortly after that, Doctor Metal died in the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island in February 2003. Oh and that next album, St. Anger? It wasn't good.
  • In a documentary about countries that aren't internationally recognised, the crew's translator talks to the Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia, and says that, if fighting begins, they will take off their peacekeeper badges and help fight for South Ossettian independence. Three years after the documentary was filmed, fighting did break out in South Ossetia...
  • There is a show on the History Channel called Wild West Tech, hosted by David Carradine. A 2005 episode featured him detailing the differences between two noose knots. It gets better. At the end of the segment, he signs off: "Don't try this at home." The reruns since 2009 are...uncomfortable.
  • When Dr. Guillotin presented his killing machine to French Convent (the ruling body during the Revolition), he joked: "With this machine. I could cut your heads off, and you wouldn't notice!". Most members of that Convent were later executed by guillotine, though not Dr. Guillotin himself.
    • Even worse, that part about "you wouldn't notice?" Later testing with the guillotine during the Reign of Terror suggests that the head stayed alive for some time after being sliced off, and modern research has confirmed that from the perspective of the brain, the only difference between decapitation and sudden cardiac arrest is that there is no possible way to reverse decapitation. It is well known that cardiac arrest victims remain conscious for twelve seconds before collapsing, and the same can be said for victims of decapitation.
  • After a would-be terrorist tried igniting a bomb in his shoe in 2001, some comedian quipped, "...so now the government is looking in people's shoes. Thank god he wasn't trying to light a bomb in his crotch." Yeah...
  • Captain Morgan rum is named for privateer Henry Morgan, who died of liver failure from drinking too much rum.
  • The name "Hiroshima" translates literally, and uses the characters for "Spacious Island"...
  • When Sandra Bullock appeared on David Letterman to promote The Blind Side, the music they played when she walked out was "I Wish That I Had Jessie's Girl."
  • Leni Riefenstahl once denied that Kristallnacht happened. How was she to know? She was in America at the time and hadn't been to Germany since.
  • The fourth reactor of the Fukushima Dai'ichi plant is the one with the most radiation emissions. And what do they teach you about the Japanese language in the first week?
  • According to his childhood friend Asher Wright, Nathan Hale had a mole on his neck and as a boy he was teased about by other boys who said it meant he would be hanged. One day he and Asher were out sailing and a storm blew up. Nathan laughed and said cheerfully, "Don't worry, I know I won't be drowned today. I'm going to be hanged, you know."
  • Inverted with Serene Branson's infamous mess up as she was reporting the Grammys. At the time people were worried she'd had a stroke but it turned out it was just a migraine so it became ok to laugh at the incident. There's even a remix of it on Youtube.
  • When Amy Winehouse was a guest on Never Mind the Buzzcocks some of the jokes told by Simon Amstell included: "you want us all to sit here while you drink yourself to death?" "This is not a popquiz anymore, this is an intervention. [...] We used to be close, what happened?" Amy's response? "She's dead, let it go Simon"
    • Also on Mock the Week a Kevin Bridges during the segment ;Scenes We'd Like To See' came up with this:

Dear Ms Winehouse, congratulations on turning 100, best wishes, the Queen.

  • Davy Jones quipping "You know I used to be a heartthrob, now I’m a coronary" in an interview in August 2011.
  • At 2005 MTV Video Music Awards, Eva Longoria made a joke about a small hurricane in Miami wasn’t going to stop her. The event was held on August 28 of that year. At the time, a Category 1 hurricane did hit Miami, which later turned into a Category 5 hurricane known as Katrina, and New Orleans would feel for her wrath hours later.
    • The MTV VMAs for Latin America was canceled due to what another Category 5 hurricane called Wilma at South Florida in October of that year.

Politics

  • February 22, 1861: Just over a week before his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln stated in a speech at Philadelphia's Independence Hall that he "would rather be assassinated on the spot" than to surrender the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
  • October 23, 1872: Unusual one from the US election — the legendary cartoonist Thomas Nast published in Harper's Weekly (the Time Magazine of its era) a cartoon featuring newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, then running for President, being carried back into his home like a corpse. One week after the cartoon was published, Greeley's wife died. On November 29, Greeley himself died.
  • For a public political figure, having a publicity photograph taken with someone admired in a local scale is a great way to gain respect amongst people. However, it can become a complete nightmare if you are the First Lady of the United States and you are photographed shaking hands with John Wayne Gacy who, at the time of the photograph, was admired as a local volunteer.
  • 1910: A postcard features an ancient Hindu good luck symbol and an associated verse explaining its significance and wishing the recipient well. A few decades later, the symbol in question would take on a much darker meaning thanks to Hitler. It's still used quite a bit in India and in many other places around the world, where it's been used for thousands of years, but then it becomes sort of poignant and touching that it can still be used innocently by millions of people and Nazism's perversion of the symbol hasn't completely ruined it. It's like a testament to Hitler's failure, or perhaps a dadaist testament to his prior roaring successes.
  • Before Trotsky was a Bolshevik, he claimed that if Lenin was to rule Russia then he would be a tyrant and a veritable Spiritual Successor to Robespierre. Fast-forward to 1917, and look at what Lenin's doing — and who's standing next to him.
  • 1918: In a political cartoon, two dejected German soldiers ride home after the war. One says "Vell, it didn't pay" — referring, of course, to the war. The other soldier says "Not this time."
  • The Olympic Greet Statue from Gra Rueb in Amsterdam may have been fine and friendly during the 1928 Olympics, but looks a touch suspicious after Those Wacky Nazis.
  • A famous political cartoon depicts how the leaders of the victorious forces from WWI leave the Versailles peace conference which preceded the outbreak of World War Two by twenty years. The weeping child in the background has "1940 class" (that is, the child will be old enough to be conscripted in 1940) written over its head.
  • November 1963: "If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's." The person who said this was President John F. Kennedy. Two days later, his assassin was shot and killed on live TV.
    • Another notable example from JFK — when discussing the pros and cons of picking Johnson for his vice-president, he apparently said "It really does not matter that much; I am 42, I am not going to die in the office". Of course, he was lying. It wasn't publicly known at the time, but JFK was suffering from both Addison's disease and hypothyroidism, which he himself privately confessed made it unlikely he would survive more than a single term in office.
  • 2000: Anchorage International Airport was renamed to Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, a highly unusual move as Senator Stevens was still among the living at the time. As of August 11, 2010... not so much. Cause of death? A plane crash.
  • December 2007: Although obviously written before, Parade Magazine ran a cover story about Benazir Bhutto running for Prime Minister of Pakistan, calling her something like "a shining beacon of hope for the Middle East"... a couple of weeks after she was assassinated.
  • March 31, 2010: President Obama announces his decision to expand offshore oil drilling. Less than a month later, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion happens.

President Obama: It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.

  • May 2010: Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama was celebrated as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the world. He resigned about two weeks later due to a controversy over a US military base.
  • There's a lot of Latin on the seal of the state of South Carolina. One piece of Latin is "Quis separabit?" (South Carolina was the first state to secede.)
    • Speaking of Confederate symbolism, while The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan is offensive enough, it has an Ambiguously Jewish Eastern European character with Funetik Aksent who sympathizes with the protagonists. In 1920, the Ku Klux Klan would be revived, this time targeting Jews as well.

Sports

  • Many Americans are familiar with Rollen Stewart, more commonly known as the "Rainbow Man" who attended many sports games from the 1970s and 1980s wearing a cute rainbow wig and carrying a sign that simply said "John 3:16." This caught the attention of the cameras, and sports fans from that time period watching games on television would invariably see Rainbow Man, guaranteeing him a positive place in American pop culture. That was, until he was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 for kidnapping and terrorist threats.
  • All those highlight-reel moments of Dale Earnhardt's failures in the Daytona 500. Especially the last lap blow-out in 1990 that happened yards from where he crashed and died on the last lap eleven years later.
    • Comedian Jeff Foxworthy had a joke where he was discussing Red Necks' love of commemorative plates,and NASCAR, referring to a "Legends of NASCAR" plate with Dale Earnhardt. Foxworthy's redneck says "That's Dale Earnhardt, he wasn't in a wreck or nothin', that's just catsup on the plate"
  • In 2007, NASCAR driver Jeremy Mayfield was sponsored by 360 OTC, an over the counter prescription line for 10 races. This sponsorship takes on a whole new meaning considering his suspension from NASCAR for testing positive for methamphetamine, or his recent arrest for drug possession.
  • Rob Moroso was named the 1990 NASCAR Rookie of the Year, despite dying in a DUI accident earlier in the season. The scary part to this is that his first sponsorship in a NASCAR race was Old Milwaukee beer! This is even more frightening if you consider that for the two races he was sponsored by Old Milwaukee, he was only 17!
  • The development of Nomex firesuits in the 1960's for race car drivers was brought on by the deaths of three drivers due to fire, and the lackluster protection drivers were offered at the time. The first driver to die was a NASCAR driver by the name of Edward Glenn Roberts Jr. His nickname? "Fireball Roberts!"
  • This Subway commercial features an American football referee with a number 85 shirt admitting to missing a call. In 2008, referee Ed Hochuli admitted to missing a call to the San Diego Chargers coach, which ended up costing the Chargers the game. Hochuli's shirt number? 85.
  • At the age of 25, college basketball legend "Pistol" Pete Maravich stated in an interview, "I don't want to play 10 years in the NBA and then die of a heart attack at 40." A leg injury necessitated his retiring from basketball after 10 seasons. And he died of a heart attack, at 40.
  • In a Take That to the accusations of rules violations regarding overseeing his players' academic progress that led North Carolina State basketball coach Jim Valvano to resign in 1990, he titled his autobiography Valvano: They Gave Me a Lifetime Contract, and Then They Declared Me Dead. The book came out in February of 1991. Valvano was diagnosed with cancer in June of 1992 and died less than a year later.
  • Eugene Robinson was a longtime free safety who joined the Atlanta Falcons in 1998 after having appeared in the previous two Super Bowls with Green Bay. The morning before the 1999 Super Bowl (the third consecutive he appeared in), Robinson, who had been outspoken about his Christian faith, received the Athletes in Action Bart Starr Award for outstanding Christian character. That night, Robinson got arrested for soliciting a prostitute who turned out to be an undercover cop. Robinson returned the award, but his distraction was made obvious when Bronco wide receiver Rod Smith burned him for an 80-yard touchdown pass near the end of the first half.
  • In September 2009, troubled former NHL player Theoren Fleury began a much-publicized attempt at a comeback by signing a tryout contract with the Calgary Flames. On September 25, though making an admirable effort to return to the game after recovering from alcohol and drug addictions, he was released from his contract. Even worse for Fleury? An article about his comeback published by Canada's largest sports network TSN was titled "Snuffed Out." Given Canada's obsession with the game of hockey, this being just an oversight is... well, unlikely.
  • French-Canadian Formula One driver Gilles Villeneuve called the Belgian Zolder circuit "a good killer" in an interview in early 1982. (meaning it would be extremely tiring in the hard-sprung cars of the time). He was killed in crash at that track later in the same year.
  • Before the 1999 British Grand Prix, Martin Brundle on his gridwalk spoke to Damon Hill, and urged him to "Break a leg mate". Damon didn't, but Michael Schumacher did, literally.
  • Jochen Rindt, upon winning the 1970 German Grand Prix at Hockenheim, claimed that his car was so easy to drive that a monkey could have won the race. 2 races later and Rindt was dead, having crashed the very same car.
    • Rindt was advised a year before he died by his manager (one Bernie Ecclestone); "If you want to win, join Lotus. If you want to live, join Brabham". He joined Lotus.
  • A columnist writing for the San Jose Mercury News joked in his October 17, 1989 column that, as the two teams contesting the World Series were from California (San Francisco and Oakland), an "earthquake could rip through the Bay Area before they sing the national anthem for Game 3". The Loma Prieta earthquake, the most intense earthquake in California for 35 years and in San Francisco for 80 years, struck at 5:04pm that day... during the warm-up for Game 3.
  • Declan Sullivan, a Notre Dame student, had a job filming the school's football practice from a hydraulic scissors lift. On an extremely windy day, he tweeted, ""Gusts of wind up to 60 mph. Well today will be fun at work. I guess I've lived long enough." During work that day, the lift collapsed and he died.
  • "I will never have a heart attack. I give them." - George Steinbrenner
  • "I probably won't be alive to see it (his record 88-game winning streak broken)" - John Wooden (Died June 2010, record was broken by University of Connecticut (Women's) in December.)
  • "This is gonna be a spectacle. This is a great way to go out." - Dan Wheldon to ABC during pace laps of the final race of the 2011 Indy Car Series, commenting on the scale of the event and his shot at a $5,000,000 prize in Las Vegas. He would be killed from injuries sustained in a mass accident 11 laps into the race.
  • Every time a sportsman appears in the cover of the argentinean sports magazine "El Gráfico", something bad happens to him:
    • Lucas Viatri, who plays for the soccer club Boca Juniors, appeared in the October 2011 issue. Later that month, he's injured and spends the rest of the tournament out of the fields.

      The same is also true for Nicolás Colazo, who appeared in the cover of the February 2011 issue, later he's injured and has to spend 6 months under recovery.
    • Boca's players aren't the only ones suffering "El Gráfico's curse". In March 2012 issue, Sergio Agüero, Manchester City's, appears in the cover of the issue. Later that year, he's injured by accident.

Still Other Examples - Unsorted

  • An Alternate Reality Game based on Numb3rs called Chain Factor revolved around a flash game designed by a villain with the goal of forming an algorithm to destroy the world's economy. The ending revealed that the plan succeeded, though it would be impossible to tell when it would go into effect.
  • In January 2009, Cinema Blend did an article on the 100 People most likely to die in 2009. It said that Michael Jackson would die of "the wind blowing him over". Other people on that list that died in 2009 are Ed McMahon and Ted Kennedy. Several other people on the list are dead, but they didn't die in 2009 (Gary Coleman, J.D. Salinger, Peter Falk, Senator Robert Byrd, etc.)
  • In the Riff Trax of Batman and Robin, when Bane is charging through Arkham Asylum with Mr. Freeze's Power Armor in a shopping cart, the joke that's made is "Just like Wal-Mart on Black Friday." In 2008, a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death on Black Friday.
  • The online magazine W*E*N*N once poked fun at actor Tim Curry for being rather chubby. It seems pretty humorous at first, until you realize the main reason why Tim had put on weight in the first place was due to being so creeped out by his more "rabid" Rocky Horror fans.
  • 1976: A column by Mike Royko noted that some viewers were irrationally offended by the appearance of an elderly Mary Pickford on the Academy Awards telecast. He wrote: "If you turn your head away from Mary Pickford, and find it all so distasteful, then there's something wrong with you, kid, because it's perfectly normal. It happens to all of us, unless we croak first. We get old. Take Margaux Hemingway, the tall stunner who was on the show. One of these days she's going to wrinkle up, and maybe her teeth will fall out, maybe even her hair, and her knee joints will go crackety-crack. Is that too terrible to face -- Margaux Hemingway's knee joints going crackety-crack?" As it turned out, none of that happened to Margaux Hemingway; she died of a drug overdose at age 42.
  • A video created for the 5th anniversary of the Spirit rover's landing on Mars used a song with the lyric "She's run aground, she's run aground." Shortly thereafter, Spirit got stuck in a sand dune and can no longer, um... rove.
  • Actor Corey Feldman has a tendency to make jokes about what a trainwreck his career is, the irony being that his friend Corey Haim was doing even worse. And now he's dead...
  • Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan was a book published at the beginning of the 1900s about a massive luxury liner named Titan that sank, killing thousands because there were too few lifeboats. Not long afterward...
  • The Universe of Energy at EPCOT was once sponsored by Exxon and while it discussed clean energy at length, it also ended with a long celebration of Exxon and their wonderful, wonderful oil tankers. This...didn't go over well after a certain incident in Alaska and the show was changed...
    • ...into a new show that might as well be renamed "I Love Fossil Fuels". It was probably unfunny to start with, but people were apparently leaving the theater after the gas crisis and the show plays even worse now. (As of yet,[when?] there are no stated plans to change anything.)
  • Observe this board game from the 1970s, branded with BP's logo, all about managing an offshore oil rig.
  • Averted by Mad Magazine, who halted plans to publish an issue with a cover image of George Bush burning the American flag (the flag had Alfred E. Neuman on it). The issue in question ended up coming out right before Desert Storm, making the publishers glad they didn't use the "flag" cover.
    • Averted again in 2001, when a cover showing Alfred running the NYC marathon and breaking through security tape at a crime scene. The issue was scheduled to come out a month or so after 9/11. The cover of course was drawn months before, but ended up being withdrawn and replaced with a close-up of Alfred's face, with the gap in his teeth being replaced by an American flag.
    • Played straight, however, in 2009. In Mad's "20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things" for 2008, Amy Winehouse's destructive behavior was listed at number 11. The end of the entry stated: "It makes us wonder if her next full-house appearance will be at a funeral home." About two-and-a-half years later, Winehouse was found dead in her London flat at age 27.
  • This fan-made poster for a live-action Fairly Oddparents movie is pretty hard to find funny now that the film in question is actually being made after being on the planning board for a long time. That Other Wiki claims that Wishology may have actually been originally planned as a cinema movie.
  • On the first of March of 2011, adoptable pet website Chicken Smoothie released a line of adoptable dogs themed after Japanese woodblock prints, including the famous and iconic "The Great Wave off Kanagawa", colloquially known as "The Tsunami." This ended up being the worst timing ever, after the earthquake later that month ended up rocking Japan with its worst earthquakes and tsunami in more or less its recorded history.
  • The Formspring Question of the Day on March 10, 2011 asked something to the effect of what you would do if you had 24 hours left to live. Unfortunately, that wasn't a hypothetical situation for many people...
  • In the webcomic adaptation of Christian Humber Reloaded, Normalman's Author Avatar appears in a cameo at the end of Part 1, talking about how he plans on writing a web comic about Christian Humber Reloaded even if it humiliates the kid who wrote it. Vash himself responds by saying that he "sound(s) like an asshole". Not long into Part 2, the Humber family heard of the comic and complained, which resulted in Normalman stopping work on the comic.
  • In January 2009, the National Enquirer claimed that Michael Jackson had six months to live. They were right.
    • I also remember seeing a National Enquirer sometime in early 2009 that Ted Kennedy "wouldn't live to see Labor Day". Kennedy died about a week before Labor Day.
  • This Jewish joke: Two shnorrers are standing at the roadside and watching some workers repair the street. One of them muses: "Today, we have a bad life... but soon, The Messiah will come, and then everything will be exactly the opposite." The other one thinks about it and states then: "You mean - we will repair the street, and they will watch us?"
    Definitely becomes unfunny when you think about that some time after this joke was made, The Nazis made the Jews do all kinds of forced work, incl. street repairing, while Germans would oversee them.
  • Canadian model Tanya Melissa Makse (whose profile can be found on a certain model website), mentioned on her official Facebook page about Wigan/Bolton/Bury council's planned budget cuts for 2011, speculating about them. The date?? April 2010. Fast-forward to now, and it seems incredibly Harsher in Hindsight, not to mention eerily prophetic.
    • Although Tanya herself has become, ironically, somewhat popular in Northern England.
      • Incidentally, although her Facebook page still exists, her modelmayhem.com profile disappeared (but if it will return is another issue!)
      • Now she's back on modelmayhem.com, but as Tanya Makse, dropping her middle name.
  • Possibly this essay from George Lucas on preserving films.
  • In a 1967 issue of the New Yorker (see here), they quote a TV Guide entry: "The Nov. 5 entry of ABC's Discovery, dealing with the preservation of our natural resources, will feature Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and his family." Underneath, they joke, "They're second only to the Grand Canyon." Considering what happened to members of that family in the future....
  • In this rare stand-up footage of Chris Latta (using his birth name Chris Collins), known for voicing Starscream and Cobra Commander, refers to himself as "a psychotic who managed to market his psychosis". He later died of cerebral hemorrhage.
  • Nintendo Power's Player Pulse section in volume 72 (May 1995) featured a list of "Top 10 Crime Games". #10 was "Super Bomber Man 3: The World Trade Center". Let that sink in for a moment...
  • Time‍'‍s highly positive cover story on the Xbox 360 in 2005 showed the console with two red lights glowing on its power ring. Looking at it now that we know what the "Red Ring of Death" is, it doesn't look quite so positive.
  • In Kyon: Big Damn Hero's prologue Kyon tells Ryoko that she is the most reasonable person to ever try to kill him but that he remembers that time she stabbed him all too well. This becomes hilarious later on when we learn another two of his classmates tried to kill him during separate occasions, and when he's fighting for his life against some Yakuza.
  • According to the One Piece Wiki, a recurring trend in fanfiction was to have an attractive female join the Straw Hats as their musician (since Luffy always wanted a musician for the crew). Then the crew finally got a musician in-canon... which isn't exactly an attractive female.
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