[Loved Trope] The Comedy Suddenly Stops Joking Around

[u/MostInteraction3184]

There's nothing I love more than being in a comedy, and you get that one moment, usually a single look from a character, and all of the sudden we stop joking around. Whatever's going on from this point forward is played completely straight in stark contrast to everything that came before.

1). A moment from the comedy show Scrubs. Our man Dr. Cox is exchanging jokes with his best friend when he is asked "Where do you think we are?" Suddenly it is revealed Cox's best friend isn't actually there, and they are at his funeral.

2). An dark comedy called Haunted Hotel. The whole show specializes in dark humor with ghosts, demons, and plenty of death. But when near the end of season 1, it is revealed that always happy go lucky ghost Nathan died from suicide, everything slows way down. Suddenly the whole show gains this tiny bit of underlying seriousness they never joke about.

3). From an anime called Gintama. One two episode story arc involves an old alien dog that wants to conquer the earth now that his old owner is hospitalized. Near the end, suddenly all jokes are off as the two old timers struggle to avoid dying of old age as neither wants the other to feel lonely.

[u/PaperBullet1945]

Acrobatic Silky's backstory, Dandadan

Episode 7 of Dandadan interrupts your regularly scheduled sex jokes and tsundere love quarrels with a backstory so heartbreakingly moving it might as well have come from a Satoshi Kon movie.

[u/verdauxes → u/PaperBullet1945]

It’s so brilliantly executed. You have the contrast between the joy and love she feels for her daughter, and the struggle of her jobs and working as a prostitute to make ends meet. And over the course of the montage, the struggles sort of recede, still there but with more of the focus on her daughter. You see what she goes through to give her daughter a good life, see her borrowing and borrowing to give her daughter little luxuries. And the whole time, you’re just waiting for the turn, waiting for the moment where everything falls apart, because of course it has to. After all, you go into it with the knowledge that this woman is going to become a ghost with an irrational fixation on finding her daughter. You know it can’t end well. God, I’m actually crying just remembering it

[u/Embarrassed-Yard-583 → u/verdauxes]

And then, as if to cut any ambiguity and any shred of hope, she’s met with her daughter’s spirit unaged waiting for so they can go into the afterlife together.

[u/Vegetable_Swimmer514 → u/verdauxes]

I cry thinking about this scene. When I first saw it I thought she dies collapsing in the street chasing the car, then her spirit is doing the ballet on the surface of the water. In the manga it's a little more clear that she's still alive dancing on a rain covered roof top and then jumps to her death.