Refuge in Audacity/Live-Action TV

• Main
• Laconic
• Quotes
• All Subpages
  • Theater
• Create New

• Megan from Drake and Josh, who gets away with everything, never receiving anything but rewards for her horribly contemptible behavior. Many viewers no longer/never found this funny and intensely hate her. At the end of The Movie, she and the title characters accidentally catch some counterfeiters, but not before she steals tens of thousands of dollars in fake bills, which we are left seeing as some divine force rewarding her for committing an extremely serious crime.
• The X Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" used this in the following way. So, you've seen a UFO, and that's semi-believable. And then The Men in Black showed up and tried to warn you from telling anyone, and that's stretching believability. Now, the Men In Black knock this over the believability threshold into the area where nobody will believe this by... looking exactly like Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight now that Jesse has his own show, Conspiracy Theory, with Jesse Ventura, since it has him trying to find the truth behind conspiracy theories. Irony at it's finest.
  • The parody book The Extra-Terrestrial's Guide to the X-Files, written as an instructional manual for aliens newly arrived on Earth, suggested this as a convenient way to discredit witnesses. "No really, after they abducted me and did their tests, the aliens stood together, sang some Broadway showtunes, forced me to drink a bottle of bourbon, and then dumped me on the side of the road beside a strip club!"
• Subverted in an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry, George and Elaine are waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant. Jerry dares Elaine to go to one of the tables and snatch somebody's eggroll with no explanation. She goes, but chickens out, maintaining a ventriloquist's grin for Jerry's benefit while trying to talk the diner into selling her the eggroll.
• Everything Shawn Spencer does. Everything. From naming his "psychic" detective agency Psych and defrauding the police department, to haunting Gus's boss's house to keep the team together, to arming a bomb, in the middle of a police cordon, to find out who designed it.
• iCarly: Wade Collins calling everyone a "hobknocker".
• An episode of The Drew Carey Show has Mimi making Drew late for work by getting a cowboy to tie him up. Just as planned, Drew's boss doesn't even consider believing his excuse. To be fair, he initially suspects his British colleague as well; it's only when Mimi imitates the cowboy's "Ma'am" that he finds the real truth.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor. Leaving aside all the audacious plots he's came up with largely on the fly that have worked, let us say merely this; in one body, he walked around in a scarf that was twice as long as he was. In another, he wore a multi-coloured patchwork coat and yellow trousers.
  • Don't forget the sprig of celery on his lapel!
  • The entire premise of the TARDIS cloaking system seems to work on the fact that most people, when presented with a large blue police box incongruously parked in the middle of a major tourist attraction or thoroughfare, will simply ignore it.
    • The 10th Doctor explains that this is the perception filter at work.
  • And when you land said blue box in the middle of the Oval Office, and then while having a small army of Secret Service agents train their guns on you, what do you do? You sit in the President's chair and start barking orders like you own the place. And demand a Fez.
  • As of "Let's Kill Hitler", River Song owns this freaking trope thanks to this immortal line:

Well, I was on my way to this gay gypsy Bar-Mitzvah for the disabled when I suddenly thought, "Gosh! The Third Reich's a bit rubbish. I think I'll kill the Führer." Who's with me?

• Absolute Power. In 'Crash and Burn', after their client beats his pregnant girlfriend in an IKEA carpark, they get him out of it by inventing a disease to explain the attack. It works so well everyone's surprised, until Charles tries to convince Alan to fake a heart attack to secure the film rights to his life and Alan backs out and tells the media.
• In one episode of Father Ted, Ted has to kick Bishop Brennan up the arse as a forfeit sent by Dick Byrne. however, if he does so, Bishop Brennan will most certainly send Ted to a parish even worse than Craggy Island. Eventually, Dougal suggests that Ted could get away with kicking him if he kicked him, then acted like nothing had happened, as Bishop Brennan wouldn't think that Ted would ever do anything like that, as he is so afraid of him. Photographic evidence as big as a house, however, leads to Teds downfall.
• In Legend of the Seeker, Cara is forced to impersonate a princess in the episode "Princess." The court she's visiting has a strict rule that any woman addressing the Margrave speak in rhyming couplets. Further, she's in a competition with another woman to win the Margrave's charms; notably, she doesn't have to win, but her competitiveness starts getting the better of her early on. About half way through, though, she stops trying to win on the Margrave's terms, and plays by her own, starting by composing a whole poem about torturing a slave to death, then following up by shooting a man-eating beast in the face and eating its raw liver while wearing a pink, frilly dress. Naturally, it works.
• In Burn Notice Michael, Sam, and Fiona get what they want just through the sheer audacity of Plan B, as Plan A usually never pans out.
• Everything that comes out of Sue Sylvester's mouth in Glee is based on this. In particular, her "Sue's Corner" news segments, where she advocates positions such as supporting littering and wanting to re-legalize caning.
  • The fact that Straw Man Has a Point is in full effect makes for some of the most surreal dialog ever to grace Public Television. Case in point:

"You know, there's a question I get asked a lot. Whether I'm accepting an honorary doctorate or performing a citizen's arrest, people ask me, 'Sue, what's your secret?' Well, I'll tell you my secret, western Ohio. Sue Sylvester's not afraid to shake things up. You know, I'm tired of hearing people complain, 'I'm riddled with this disease!' or 'I was in that tsunami!' To them, I say 'Shake it up a bit! Get out of your box! Even if that box happens to be where you're living.' I'll often yell at homeless people. 'Hey, how's that homelessness working out for ya? Give not being homeless a try, huh?' You know something, Ohio? It's not easy breaking out of your comfort zone. People will tear you down, tell you you shouldn't have bothered in the first place, but let me tell you something. There's not much of a difference between a stadium full of cheering fans and an angry crowd screaming abuse at you. They're both just making a lot of noise. How you take it is up to you. Convince yourself they're cheering for you. You do that, and someday, they will!"

• A lot of auditioners for Britain's Got Talent, America's Got Talent, and so on try for this... some even succeed. Memorably:

"They don't call me Poppycock for nothing, dear."

• Fawlty Towers is quite often like this -- Basil Fawlty, a hotel owner, gets away with a lot of what he says/does to his guests because he is so offensive that he either a) cows people into not complaining or b) they don't quite believe what they just heard -- but at one point the Major has a line which is described elsewhere on this wiki as: "So jaw-droppingly offensive, and delivered with such panache that you can't help but die laughing." Censored for appalling racist slurs:

Major: No, niggers are the West Indians. These people are the WOGS!

• • The episode "Basil the Rat" uses this trope in the literal sense. The rat they've been trying to hide from the health inspector all episode long gets into a box of biscuits and is offered to the inspector as an after-meal snack. Basil very calmly asks the inspector "would you care for rat?" This actually seems to work, as the inspector doesn't respond, Basil acts as though he'd simply declined a biscuit, and the inspector goes into a Deer in the Headlights BSOD. We don't quite know if it worked, because the series ended.
• Alec Hardison on Leverage any time he has to improvise in character - throwing himself a birthday party to distract everyone in the office building in "The Mile High Job" and convincing the police that bank robbers want 25 large pizzas and the equipment to hold a tail-gate party in "The Bank Shot Job", to name but a few examples.
• Hi, I'm Dr. House.

"Hello, sick people and their loved ones! In the interest of saving time and avoiding a lot of boring chitchat later, I'm Doctor Gregory House; you can call me "Greg." I'm one of three doctors staffing this clinic this morning. This ray of sunshine is Doctor Lisa Cuddy. Doctor Cuddy runs this whole hospital, so unfortunately she's much too busy to deal with you. I am a board ...certified diagnostician with a double specialty in infectious disease and nephrology. I am also the only doctor currently employed at this clinic who is forced to be here against his will. But not to worry, because for most of you, this job could be done by a monkey with a bottle of Motrin. Speaking of which, if you're particularly annoying, you may see me reach for this: this is Vicodin. It's mine. You can't have any. And no, I do not have a pain management problem, I have a pain problem. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm too stoned to tell. So, who wants me? And who would rather wait for one of the other two guys?"

• • Then there was the time he shot a corpse.
  • Early on in the series House wants to continue a diagnosis that everybody but he ruled out. He was on the bad side of almost every main character at the time (more so than usual), and each and every one of them violently objected to continuing the diagnosis testing. After Cuddy makes it violently clear to the entire staff to not let House perform tests on the patient, he takes a unauthorized sample anyway and proceeds to just walk over and ask a lab staffer to run those exact tests on that same sample. House saying nothing of the sample's origins, the staff member just assumes that the unmarked sample can't possibly be the patient's (it's early in the series), and performs the tests anyway. House later has the sample reports on a clip board, so it's assumed the staff member just reported back to him afterwards, and is to this day still completely oblivious.
  • House uses this trope all the time. For instance, how do you stop a surgery that's going to cause irreparable (probably fatal) damage to the patient? Simple. Spit on the surgeon.
• A Venezuelan Telenovela author managed to get his newest soap titled "¡Viva la Pepa!" (a phrase which in Spanish can be interpreted as either a reference to lazy characters or a genuine admiration for a certain part of the female anatomy) by claiming that the "Pepa" in the title referred to the three main heroines, all with names derived from "Josefa" who all took variants of the unusual diminutive "Pepa" (itself a female variant of the usual shortening "Pepe" for men named José) as nicknames. However, there is a reason, at least in Venezuela, about why very few women would take those particular nicknames...
  • RCTV, the network for whom the above soap author worked, has a period of using these kind of titles for its novelas. Besides the above mentioned Viva la Pepa, they also had ¡Que buena se puso Lola!, a double pun in the most common diminutive of the name "Dolores" (besides the infamous one), and the most used local jargon for "boobs". After this, the consensum was that they weren't even trying anymore.
• Life On Mars:
  • Gene asks his DS Ray Carling to arrest the landlord of a bar so they can use the bar for a stakeout, telling Ray to 'make something up'.

Gene: In a bizarre twist of fate the landlord was arrested this afternoon... on suspicion of cattle rustling.

Ray gets a round of applause from the whole of CID.

• • This little gem (among many):

Gene: Now. Yesterday's shooting. The dealers are all so scared we're more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma's about as lively as Liberace's dick when he's looking at a naked woman, all in all this investigation's going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory... What? Sam: ... Think you might have missed out the Jews.

• Top Gear had an episode where the trio competed in driving challenges with their German counterparts (the hosts of the German show D Motor) in Belgium. Clarkson said the BBC had told them not bring up the war. During the course of the film, they proceed to make at least a dozen references to said war, including arriving in two-seat Spitfires, having an Axis v. Allies drag races (with Clarkson cracking a joke about the Italian car switching sides mid-race) and having 633 Squadron as background music. Twice.
  • The guys also engage in some rather audacious cheating, including in that contest, passing The Stig off as James. It worked because they were losing, so no one really cared. (strictly speaking The Stig is credited as a Presenter of the show)
  • Clarkson had a car pull this on him. A challenge issued by the producers required the trio to drive from Switzerland to Northern England on one tank of gas, a distance of about 750 miles, essentially an exercise in hypermiling. Hammond and May chose cars that were already extremely fuel-efficient. Clarkson showed up in a Jaguar. While May and Hammond practiced hypermiling as much as possible, Clarkson declared the challenge impossible and set out carefully to manage his fuel consumption so he would run out of fuel close to his home (so he could spend that evening with his family). Despite the fact that he should have run out of gas after four hundred miles, Clarkson not only made it to the finish line, he even beat May to it and could won easily had he not tried to lose early on. He doesn't believe it to this day.
    • The really audacious part is that, after he made it, they examined the fuel system of the car and determined he had another 100 miles or so worth of fuel left!
  • Also, the V8 powered blender. That is, a blender powered by a Corvette's V8 engine! Clarkson uses it to create "a manly smoothie". Ingredients: raw beef (with bone!), chillies, Bovril, a lot of Tabasco, and a brick for added bite.
    • And James May drinks it!

James May: I have a name for it: the Bloody Awful.

• • Clarkson seems to be resigned to the fact that people will be offended no matter what he says, so he just goes for the funny.

Hammond [on a new vehicle called the Skoda Scout]: So presumably ... it pitches up on your doorstep once a year to ask for a pound to clean itself. May: So I suppose every summer it goes off and sort of stays in the countryside somewhere and is... touched inappropriately. Clarkson: No, no James. That's the Skoda Catholic Church.

• Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia utilizes this trope in spades. Episode titles include "The Gang Gets Racist", "Charlie Gets Cancer", "Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom", and "Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare".
• Father Ted has the episode "Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse". Due to a bet Father Ted has to do exactly that, and eventually Dougal suggests this plan: Kick him, then pretend nothing happened, because the bishop would never believe he would dare do it. The bishop spends the next several hours in a state of near catatonic shock before realizing what happened and storming out of the Vatican and back to Craggy Island, at which point Ted still manages to convince him that he must have imagined it. Until he sees the giant photograph of Ted doing it that he had drunkenly commissioned.
• In the Farscape episode "PK Tech Girl" D'Argo is able to bluff some hostile aliens into backing off long enough to get a forcefield up and running, simply because the aliens refuse to believe a Luxan warrior isn't armed to the teeth. At the end even the alien captain salutes his efforts. "You had nothing, but you used it well."
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! can sometimes be almost nothing but this trope.
• In Scrubs, The Janitor loses his job. He then appears working again, having dressed up as a doctor and told the replacement janitor that he was fired. He then continues working in the hospital, despite not being employed, under the philosophy of "everything will work out for me", and then when the paychecks are handed out, he asks where his paycheck is, and the woman apologizes to him and goes off to get him one. When he does get it, he says that he was normally paid twice that amount, which evokes another apology.
• Victorious: "Robarazzi" runs on this, between Robbie's shootings of the group in unique situations that lead others to believe bizarre things about them (such as Andre having a ketchup problem). And then there's the sub-plot with Cat's addiction to the Sky Store catalog. When her Snowbee splatters fake, toxic snow all over the group's food, Tori's only reaction is, "So...what made you buy a machine that poisons people's lunches?" Most of the other things she purchases through Sky Store are met with similar responses.
• Brass Eye is a show that runs almost purely on this trope. In any other show, the interviewers likely would have laughed the production out, but Chris Morris and his team somehow managed to convince several major British celebrities and political members to read off ridiculously absurd facts and lines (simply by paying them an appearance fee), under the guise that it's part of a documentary series. The outrage from the celebrities and the (hypocritical) UK newspapers were just the icing on the cake.
  • Speaking of "cake", when you invent a fake narcotic, give it an unlikely name, persuade celebrities to read out factsheets on camera including such facts as it is a made-up drug (meaning it's made from chemicals, not plants), then that is not quite enough. What do you do? Persuade a politician to actually ask a question about this made-up drug in Parliament and be immortalised in legislative history.
  • "It works on a part of the brain known as "Shatner's Bassoon" ... A boy was knocked over by a car because he thought he had a week to cross the road."
• In one highly memorable episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway, the director actually comes out to censor them so they can't use Hitler in one of their improv skits. What do they do? Fill the episode with Hitler jokes. The director gives up almost immediately.

(Skit: how the cast of Baywatch would react to an actual emergency) Wayne Brady: "I'm falling!" (pinches imaginary boobs so they inflate and bounce off the ground) Drew Carey: "We can do that, but whatever you do, don't [BLEEP]ing make fun of Hitler." Wayne Brady: *immediately re-enacts the scene in fake German, complete with inflating boobs* (Later, after a skit that involved Native American references) Drew Carey (sarcastically): "I love that, let's make fun of the Native Americans all we want, who gives a [BLEEP] about them."

• • Another episode once had a Party Quirks game where Colin was investigating whether people were really the sex they claimed to be. This happened. He'd probably have gotten written up for sexual harassment if it wasn't so incredibly blatant. As it turned out, everybody involved thought it was awesome.
• NCIS does this in several episodes. Such as the first episode, in which Gibbs steals Air Force One, and then later steals evidence (including the body of the victim!) in order to have his department head the investigation. They didn't think to actually inspect the body when Gibbs handed it over, because no one expected him to lie about who he was handing over.
  • The only sensible reception to his hanging up on Director Vance during the Weatherman episode is something along the lines of "This man has balls of cold steel."
  • In the season three episode "Jeopardy" the team must rescue Director Shepard who has been kidnapped by a drug dealer demanding the return of his brother, who NCIS is supposed to have in custody. Unfortunately, the brother was inadvertently killed by Ziva earlier on. Their solution? Dress the corpse, slap a pair of sunglasses on him, and tape his hands so he appears to be driving while Tony hides and drives with his hands. And it works.
• Titus lived on this. What makes it even more daring was that a lot of the stories on the show are based on real events that happened in Christopher Titus's life (living with a hard-drinking, Jerkass father who crushed his self-esteem and went through women like normal people go through Kleenex, having a mom who was a beauty queen, a concert pianist, a Supreme Chef, and a violent, mentally-ill alcoholic whose mental illness ranged from being a paranoid schizophrenic to manic depression to multiple personalities, surviving a drunken fall into a bonfire, dating a short, Jewish girl who physically abused him, and dealing with his (now ex) wife's equally dysfunctional family). A really good example though, was in the episode "Deprogramming Erin," where Titus tries to get Erin to love him again despite that his hot rod shop closed down , and comes up with a plot that was kidnapping. He sends Dave over to distract her. When Erin asks what he wants, Dave deadpans "I'm here to distract you while Titus sneaks up behind you." Erin starts to laugh, until she notices he's not laughing with her. She turns around just in time to see Titus throw a burlap sack over her head.
  • This show also has Refuge in Audacity in the form of crossing the line twice (and sometimes more than that). On the episode, "Errr," Titus walks in on Erin's niece Amy trying to kill herself by swallowing pills and drinking some vodka. After holding her upside down to shake the pills out of her, Titus goes to yell at her...not just for trying to kill herself, but for stealing the vodka and pills out of his dad's earthquake kit.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has several of these most of what Garak says is either this or some sort of euphemism .The straightest example would be the genetically enhanced "Jack Pack" escaping from their space age looney bin and traveling halfway across the galaxy to one of the most secure outposts in the quadrant in the middle of a war, simply by donning Star Fleet uniforms, making one of their own an Admiral and having him answer any and all questions with "That's a stupid question".
  • Played straight in "Emissary" when Sisko claimed the station was heavily armed to scare away a Kardasian attack force. It worked, and the station turned out to be armed with sensor-deceiving illusions. Later inverted in "The Way of the Warrior" when a Klingon attack force is given a similar warning, and the commanders assume that it's an attempt to intimidate them into leaving backed by more illusions. Unfortunately, they forgot that Sisko knows enough about Klingons to know you can't bluff one with a mere threat of violence. He's not bluffing. It goes POORLY for the Klingons.
• How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson is this trope personified. He'd be an incredibly offensive and nauseating character if it were possible to take him seriously, but since he's so over the top ....
• Firefly: the whole Ariel episode but especially Simon's famous Drill Sergeant Nasty on the incompetent doctor.
  • As early as "The Train Job", Mal's hilarious subversion of a Mook's attempt to The Last Thing You Ever See.

"Darn."

• • Mal, sitting on a rock. In the desert. Naked. And that's the beginning of the episode. Getting there (via flashback) is even more interesting!
  • River in "Objects In Space". So, you've got a Bounty Hunter sneaking onto the ship and threatening your crew. You do the last thing anyone expects: you use your Psychic Powers to merge with the ship, read the bounty hunter's mind and screw with his head and completely flip over everyone's perceptions regarding reality. Then, just when he starts to realize that maybe you're feeding him a line of bullshit about the entire thing to screw with him, you let slip a single word that makes him realize that you hijacked his ship right out from under him. The sheer audacity of the repeated mindscrews and flipping the tables on the hijacker is enough to turn him from a confident predator to a nervous wreck, but the real kicker comes afterward, when, despite being in total control, River surrenders, and the desperate bounty hunter is so off-guard that he just takes this sudden swerve by the crazy psychic ninja-girl at face value, which leads him right into your ambush.
• In the Supernatural Season 4 episode "Monster Movie," which is a hilarious Affectionate Parody of old monster movies, the Shape Shifter does this by turning into various old B-Movie monsters, such as Dracula, The Wolf Man, and a cheesy mummy. The murders are such a giant Cliché Storm that no one, not even Sam and Dean, can believe that they happened. Going even further, the shapeshifter wants to take on Dracula's identity, picking out a pretty blonde to be his Mina Murray (and calls her that); when Dean starts to fall for the girl, the shapeshifter dubs him "Harker" (Jonathan Harker, Mina's fiance); he even calls Sam "Van Helsing" (like the Professor, not the Hugh Jackman character). He also built a giant dungeon out of wood and cardboard in his basement.
  • In another episode, the boys are in a mental hospital and break into the morgue. When they're caught, Dean drops his pants, throws his hands into the air and jubilantly yells "Pudding!"
• Captain John Hart in Torchwood. "Beautiful... She's stunning. Oh, that one's gorgeous!" "That's a poodle!"
• Everything John Safran does tries to invoke this trope: whether it succeeds or not depends on your point of view. In chronological order, he tried to join the KKK (he's Jewish), he went door-knocking to preach atheism in Salt Lake City, was exorcised on national television, helped donate Palestinian sperm to an Israeli fertility clinic and donated his own (Jewish) sperm to a Palestinian fertility clinic, dug up his mother's grave in order to perform a Kabbalah ritual, and fake married a bin Laden to see how his family would react to him marrying a non-Jew.
• On the sixth-season finale of Survivor, Jeff took the votes for the winner, went down to the shore and got on a jet ski. Then he's seen riding the jet ski past a freighter on the open ocean, then riding it up to Manhattan, where the reunion was about to be held. There's no WAY anyone actually believed he crossed the ocean on a jet ski, but that was the whole point. It was so audacious the audience couldn't help but love it.
• The A-Team From driving a garbage truck through the wall of a Mob-boss' club (and dumping the contents on the floor), to turning a forklift into a tank that shoots lumber, to fashioning a hot-air balloon out of a vacuum-cleaner and trash-bags to break out of prison, practically all of the A-Team's plans go like this. As explained in-universe "Hannibal's plans never work like they're supposed to. They just work."
• Boston Legal Nearly every episode features the audacious antics of Allan Shore and Denny Crane. The latter of the two has come very close to having his name taken off the door because of his hi-jinx, despite being a founding partner, while the former wins most of his (usually unconventional) cases by "pulling a rabbit out of a hat" (Denny's "life advice"). As explained in-universe by Mr. Shore, "the conventional ones won't have me".
• Though they never actually sent it, here's the word-for-word text of a letter The Young Ones wrote collectively, to persuade Neil's bank manager to give him an extension on his overdraft:

"Darling fascist bullyboy, Give me some more money, you bastard. May the seed of your loins be fruitful in the belly of your woman, Neil"

• The crew of the Liberator in Blake's 7 repeatedly escaped sticky situations in space by flying straight though them. (Examples include pursuit ships, a gravitational vortex and a black hole.)
• From an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street:

"Someone committed a murder in the morgue?!"

• Saturday Night Live's humor is all about this trope, whether it's taking something offensive (i.e. racism) and making it socially acceptable (i.e. the "Racist Word Association" sketch on the season one episode hosted by Richard Pryor) or taking something innocent and sweet (i.e. a kids' show) and giving it a dark, sleazy side (i.e. "The Happy Smile Patrol," "Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood," and "The Tizzle-Wizzle Show"). Then, you have sketches like this one that just seem too insane for network TV, but apparently made it on as a probable Censor Decoy or just the fact that the censors just don't care when it comes to late-night TV.
  • The problem is, they take it so far that they just don't know where to stop, and things sometimes get ugly really quickly. The absolute nadir had to be the late '90s, when we were "treated" to skits like "A Bear Ate His Parents." It's exactly what it sounds like: Horatio Sanz is a bawling, psychotic wreck who's still tormented by his parents being devoured over 20 years after the fact, to the point that when he sees someone else at a party dressed up like a bear, he promptly commits suicide. All for laughs.
  • Then there was the "cobra" skit from season 23 (1997-1998), which must have gotten NBC a crapload of hate mail. It's all about a family of creepy albino cobras (and yes, they have red eyes) slithering their way onto a plane full of tourists bound for Hawaii and slowly biting and poisoning every single one. Textbook Black Comedy played for all it's worth - but there's more. The snakes also bite the pilot, causing him to imagine psychedelic visions like a Magical Native American who orders him to crash the plane - which he does. The ending of the skit is pure Nightmare Fuel, with the aircraft smashing to the ground in a colossal inferno and the leader of the albino cobras (a female cobra, and with an "innocent" girl voice that makes her all the more freaky) standing against the backdrop of the hellish flames and taunting and laughing at the audience. Brrrrr. If you weren't afraid of snakes before....
    • Doesn't help that years later (eight years, to be exact), the premise of snakes attacking airline passengers would become a movie and would be revered as a Memetic Mutation.
• Community: Episode "Debate 109" has a Jeff and Annie's kiss leading to Jeremy Simmons, who is disabled, being unceremoniously dropped on the floor by Jeff, would be a lot more offensive if it wasn't wrapped in various levels of humour, Simmons' previous behaviour as a huge asshat, and the fact that the whole thing was the convoluted outcome of a college debate-club event being taken to ludicrous levels of Serious Business.
  • Deliberately invoked by Vice Dean Laybourne when he kidnaps Troy to try to convince him to become an air conditioning repairman - he has an astronaut making paninis and black hitler in the room so that nobody will believe the kidnapped students if they try to tell anyone what happened.
• A defense attorney in Law and Order. A mother confessed to murdering her infant daughter. The legal aid attorney assigned to her, his first murder case, starts pulling the most audacious stunts ever pulled by someone who isn't Jack. His opening statement: my client didn't do it, it was God. In chambers, he then changes the plea to not guilty by reason of mental defect, then protests his own ignorance when told that such a plea requires 60 days notice. Then he tells the judge that, if this change isn't allowed, that his client will have grounds to appeal based on incompetent council, saying he'll write up an affidavit enumerating the 12 grievous errors he's already committed.

Jack: Legal incompetence as a defense at trial. You're kidding. Judge Stein: Either you are a brilliant strategist, Mr. Feinman, or you are the biggest jackass ever to set foot in my courtroom.

• While True Blood plays with this trope on any given episode, what stands out is the season four finale, which doubled as a Halloween Episode. Arlene's daughter Lisa, who's like ten, dresses as a pregnant tramp--baby bump, Jail Bait outfit, and five gallons of makeup--because she loves MTV's Teen Mom. Arlene's response was "Don't Ask".
• Monty Python's Flying Circus had many moments like this - most notably by Graham Chapman, who John Cleese described in his eulogy to him as "the prince of bad taste". The best example was the "Royal Episode 13 (or: The Queen Will Be Watching)", which has two straight sketches on cannibalism (in the eulogy, Cleese recalled how Chapman suggested the punchline for the second).
• The Haven 1st Season episode "The Trial of Audrey Parker", in which Audrey and Duke, unarmed, defeat two armed men, one of whom could read minds, by having Duke do outrageous things - such as stripping to his underwear and lamenting that he'd never done the Electric Boogaloo - all directed behind the scenes by Audrey. The poor psychic finally went crazy trying to predict what Duke was going to do next, and Duke and Audrey defeated them easily.
• Round the Twist is an Australian kids' show that was almost banned at the time of its premiere because it contained a lot of things deemed Harmful to Minors, such as death, nudity (including references to genitalia), underwear, incest (Kissing Under the Influence), mild sex references (a lot of the stories have to do with supernatural female characters in search of a human male to be an unwilling groom and one episode -- "Lucky Lips" -- centered on a magic tube of lipstick that attracts females... and not just human females, either), and your typical gross-out humor staples (body odor, Toilet Humor [both urination and defecation] and plenty of vomit). It still got away with it, and became one of the most iconic and successful children's programs ever made in Australia.
• The Mentalist - Patrick Jane's twisted methods include interrupting a funeral to check a casket for a 'second' dead body; convincing about two hundred people, including Lisbon, that they are all going to die in a few hours, and to say their goodbyes and their prayers; getting a suspect thrown in jail by inciting him over the phone to bash up a police officer, so that he can question him because Jane himself is also in jail for illegal eavesdropping; and then breaking out of said jail using only a mouse, a pen, a Bible and a cranberry muffin.