Bloody Hilarious

FATALITY!!

"My blood! He-he punched out ALL MY BLOOD!"

—The Scout, Meet the Sandwich', Meet the Sandvich

Blood is something you don't want to see. It indicates injury and mortality. But not always. Sometimes it Crosses the Line Twice and turns into comedy. May involve High-Pressure Blood, a shower of Ludicrous Gibs, or a serving of Chunky Salsa, but whatever the details the victim is certain to be Overdrawn At the Blood Bank.

See also Gorn, Bloody Murder. Especially common in Black Comedy.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Bloody Hilarious include:

Advertising

  • The 10:10 "No Pressure" commercial features people and children being exploded bloodily because they can't or won't come up with ideas for reducing carbon emissions, and is intended to be humorous this way. Unfortunately very few people saw the humor (it also starts very seriously, and the people-bursting comes completely out of nowhere, creating definite Mood Dissonance) and were deeply offended or disturbed instead.
    • See No Pressure (film) on That Other Wiki for details, since the Youtube version may have been edited.

Anime and Manga

Chisame: GYAAAH!?
Rakan: (sweatdropping) This is bad.

    • There's also the time where Rakan wanted to test Negi's strength by having Negi punch him as hard as he could. Cue a dramatic Smoke Shield moment...and then Jack coughs up a torrent of blood and socks Negi for punching too hard.
    • At one point, Kaede gets slammed into a wall after getting blindsided by Ku Fei during a training exercise, prompting Anya to wonder if she was still alive. She then emerges from the rubble unharmed... except for a large fountain of blood from the forehead, which she ignores.
  • This is one of Izumi Curtis's shticks in Fullmetal Alchemist. She's got nasty internal injuries, so often, in the middle of a Badass speech or right after beating up her students, she'll puke blood and have to be comforted by her husband. It's used dramatically too.
  • Soul Eater often plays characters getting serious injuries (and usually shooting blood all over the place) for comedy. It helps that they're generally perfectly okay a minute later.
    • Some fights go between comedy and serious; Stein fighting Crona, for example, as it starts with the child getting stabbed through the chest, clearly and rather abruptly.
  • Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo: The Axe Crazy protagonist Fumio's reaction to getting sprayed in the face after taking down someone standing between her and her target, the ex-boyfriend Takumi, could be taken as innuendo for a different kind of fluid.

Fumio: "Ahh... But I had really wanted Takumi's blood to be the first on me."

  • In One Piece, Sanji's many instances of Nosebleed are, without exception, played for laughs. Even when the blood loss almost kills him.


Comic Books

  • Sin City often ventures into this camp, whether it's Marv grinding someone's face into the pavement as he drives, Jack Rafferty gradually being hacked up, or Shlubb and Klump being brutalized. The violence goes so over the top that it's just fun to watch. Sometimes.
  • This is the main point of the Sinister Spider-Man mini-series from Dark Reign. The title character is secretly Venom... who eats people. For fun. At one point, Venom half-digests a bad guy.
  • In Finder, there's a memorable scene where Jaeger, the hero, is suffering from auto-immune problems due to his overactive Healing Factor not having had enough to do for a while. He ends up secretly cutting himself in his girlfriend's bathroom, and gets carried away, leaving himself sliced to ribbons and the bathroom soaked in blood. At this point the girlfriend comes home unexpectedly, and he frantically and hilariously tries to wipe up the mess with towels, before panicking and jumping out of the window. The girlfriend muses sadly that she never had anybody kill himself and run away from her before.


Film

  • The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail would not have been as funny without the geysers of blood sprouting from his severed limbs.
    • In their movie, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, two men set about harvesting organs from a donor... A perfectly, healthy, conscious man who is quite unhappy about the whole affair, to say the least. Five minutes of horrific screaming and spurting blood manages to cross the line so many times, we lost count. And from his point of view, with his hands occasionally coming into shot to grab back at the organs as they are ripped away.
  • Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam also made Jabberwocky, set in the Middle Ages, with many examples of this trope. Most memorable was the king and princess getting repeatedly splattered with blood while observing a jousting tournament from the royal box and calmly discussing the outcome with a royal advisor.
  • This is the entire point of the Evil Dead sequels. Especially the second movie.
    • "Who's laughing now?!" We are, Ash. We are.
  • Speaking of Sam Raimi, Drag Me to Hell has a high-pressure nosebleed that results in a Crowning Moment of Funny.
  • Several deaths from Hot Fuzz, in particular, when the florist is stabbed in the neck, and when the church spire crushes the journalist.
    • Though the best is Simon Skinner's fate: impaled on the spire of a scale model church... through his chin. He survives.

I'm... going tho needh fome.. ife cream...

Harker: There's so much blood!
Van Helsing: She just ate!

    • Doubly funny because of the actor's reaction—he had not been told he would get drenched with 750 liters of blood.
  • Kung Pow: Enter the Fist has the scene where master Betty cuts off a man's toe and blood sprays out like this when he is walking. Compare this with the scene at the start of the movie where the Chosen One punches a clean hole in a man with no blood whatsoever, the surprised narrator commenting on this for the next minute and a half.
  • The first The Addams Family movie, when Wednesday and Pugsley do a scene from Hamlet, spraying prop blood all over the audience.
  • Some have had this reaction to the throat-cutting scenes in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The juxtaposition of the violent action and the gentle song was funny enough, and the unrealistic geysers of blood just made it sillier.
  • 28 Days Later can cause this reaction in some people, particularly those who... er... know how much blood is actually in a person.
  • Pick a Tarantino film of your choice. Well, except Reservoir Dogs. Maybe.
  • Speaking of Robert Rodriguez, he indulged in this on the Sin City film, when the Neo-Nazi enthusiast of a torture specialist's work manages to get speared through by one of Deadly Little Miho's arrows, ask plaintively for medical assistance as the baddies read the attached note and make plans, then sigh in disgust as he's deserted and promptly shot through the head with Miho's follow-up shot.
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera has 'Mark It Up', in which one half of the comic relief duo brutally stabs one of the women in his employ in the stomach for a minor offence. Throughout the scene, she's thrashing around, bleeding, choking, and dying in agony. Meanwhile, her murderer and his brother bicker in song over which of them will inherit their dad's company, throw human organs at scantily clad nurses, and flirt with other women, who are apparently neither surprised nor concerned that one of their co-workers is dying at their feet. In fact, she goes completely ignored. This is widely considered to be the funniest scene in the movie.
  • Peter Jackson's Braindead/Dead Alive, supposedly the inspiration for the term "splatstick."
    • Which, according to IMDB is the bloodiest movie of all time, one scene having fake blood pumped at 5 gallons per second for a total of 300 liters (Two different listings). In a Crowning Moment of Awesome, the protagonist slings a lawnmower over his shoulder with a rope and (almost literally) wades into a room full of zombies...
  • The geyser of blood from the bed of Glen (Johnny Depp's character) in the first A Nightmare on Elm Street movie.
    • Which continues to flow on the ceiling. Epic.
  • Hong Kong film Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. Source of the infamous "head crush" clip from The Daily Show.
  • German Scare'Em Straight workplace-safety parody film Forklift Driver Klaus descends to this at the end. One poor guy gets cut in half, survives...and gets cut in half again!
    • Made only funnier by the reaction shots from the headless forklift driver.
  • In the commentary for Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton admitted that he attempted to find as many opportunities as possible to have Johnny Depp's character sprayed in the face with blood.
  • There's a scene in the otherwise mediocre and forgettable werewolf movie Cursed that has a bitchy cheerleader trying to crawl away from the site of her crashed car/werewolf attack. When she notices that she's not getting very far, she looks down at her legs to discover... she's been ripped in half.
  • The Cutaway Gag in the tv-movie Dark Night Of The Scarecrow when the first revenge victim falls into a running woodchipper and the scene abruptly cuts to a closeup of a blob of strawberry jam landing on a plate.
  • Shaun of the Dead definitely deserves a mention on this page.
  • Piranha 3D, 'nuff said.
  • Points to zombie bloodstain on Shaun's shirt* "You've got red on you."
  • District 9 is a totally serious film, albeit laced with a dark streak of black humour. This does not make the effects of alien weaponry on people any less hilarious. Or AWESOME.
  • When "Machete" rappels down the side of a building.... with a mooks' intestines
  • The first part of A Serious Man involves a fauxlk tale of a man who invites another man in... only to find that his wife had heard that the man he was supposed to be had died. Believing him to be a dybbuk, she stabs him. The humor comes from the man treating this as a mere social slight as blood comes out of his chest. Knowing when he isn't wanted, he gets up, and leaves into the night.
  • Cannibal! The Musical goes into hilariously graphic detail of members of the Donner Party eating each other.
  • Galaxy Quest has a rather graphic transporter failure in which an alien creature is beamed aboard the spaceship with most of its parts in the wrong places. It survives for a little while before exploding, which does nothing to reassure a crew member that the transporter will work on him.
  • Pick a Troma film. ANY Troma film.
  • Tokyo Gore Police cranks this Up to Eleven.
  • Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy has Channel 2's news anchor losing both arms.
  • The imagination scene in Superbad.


Live Action TV

  • Scrubs: In the season three episode "My Tormented Mentor," when Cox and Kelso fight over Dr Miller, they are shown tearing off her arms and beating one another with them. She looks unimpressed as blood pumps from the stumps.
  • Friends: in the season five episode "The One With All The Thanksgivings," Phoebe has two past life flashbacks involving being a nurse in a war. In both, her left arm is blown off, and we see copious blood pump from the wound as she shouts for more gauze.
  • An old Saturday Night Live sketch has a Julia Child parody "cut the dickens out of [her] thumb," and subsequently bleed all over the set while trying to continue as though nothing had happened. As with most classic SNL, very funny.
    • Acupuncture gone wrong
  • Breaking Bad did it in particularly graphic fashion (being a cable show and all)... Jesse tries to dispose of a body by placing it in a bathtub and dissolving it with acid. When the bathtub dissolves instead and what's left of the body falls through the ceiling, what was once a human corpse has been reduced to liquid form. The camera lingers on the gory mess long enough that there is some Squick factor, but I defy you to watch the scene and not laugh.
    • In the next season, we get to witness a junkie's head getting crushed by an ATM.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus has the Sam Peckinpah version of "Salad Days", followed by "Philip Jenkinson" getting machine-gunned to death in slow motion for sniffing too much. Which, just to cool things down a bit, was followed by two minutes of waves crashing against a beach (although that was ostensibly to fill out the time after the episode ran short).
  • Mad Men also does it rather graphically in "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency," when the person who is supposed to replace Layne Pryce gets his foot run over by a riding lawnmower, splattering several bystanders with blood.
  • Mad TV has Paul Timberman, a woodworker that constantly injures himself using tools. And boy does he injure himself.
    • A later season skit has John Madden do this to himself while assembling a birdhouse using ordinary handheld power tools.
  • Victorious In "Tori Gets Stuck" Robbie picks up a bag of blood Tori just donated only to drop it causing it to explode and splatter the both of them.
  • The relationship between this trope and Crosses the Line Twice is discussed by comedy writer Matt Albie on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip—he complains about an (unseen) sketch, "Quentin Tarantino's Hallmark Movie 'Turkey Won't Die'", that a clueless special-effects guy ruins by curtailing the scripted excessive blood;

Matt: If geysers of blood are gushing out, then I get the Tarantino joke, and it's funny. If it's just a 'realistic' amount of blood, then it's extremely disturbing!

Music

  • That's how "Duck Grinder" by Powerglove begins.
  • The song Schlaflied (Lullaby) by german band Die Ärzte is all about this. While it's entirely in the style of a nursing rhyme and is constantly getting more bizare and gorier.


Myth and Legend

  • In Norse Mythology, part of the creation story can be viewed this way, making this Older Than They Think. When the frost giant Ymir is murdered for no particular reason, he bleeds so much a race of giants drown in his blood. Except for two, because they had a boat.
    • Then Odin and his brothers used the flesh and blood of Ymir to make Midgard. They made the sky from his skull. The blood? We call that the "ocean".


Tabletop Games


Video Games

  • The entire purpose of the Bloody Mess trait/perk in the Fallout series, and a good amount of combat besides. In Fallout 3, even without the perk, a grenades or gunshots can blow limbs or faces off, and the first time a headshot blows a person's entire head off or away (It seems to work like this: limbs are torn off by a fatal attack being delivered to that area on the target, and they explode if said area was crippled. With the Bloody Mess perk, dismemberment happens just because.), it's rather grotesque. After a few times seeing eyeballs rain down, though it quickly launches into the humor category.
    • Especially when you have done this by launching a teddy bear at them.
    • A personal favourite is Bloody Mess + Dinner Plate = the victim's limbs and head exploding in different directions.
    • In Fallout 3 Moira will eventually give you a chemical that was supposed to drive off molerats. Instead their heads explode.
    • Presenting "Forty Frag Mines and One Old Man". Hi-larious. See also Video Game Cruelty Potential.
    • The Fallout 1/2 animations were even better. Blowing someone up with a shotgun would shoot a gigantic hole in the target that disintegrates the arm and turns the torso into a crescent-shaped mess. It really has to be seen to be believed.
  • MadWorld has violence so over the top it's impossible to take seriously. Jam a pole through a mook's face? Sure! Throw him into a dumpster with spikes on the edge, which then drop and bisect him? Why not! Take his friend and slam him on a spiked wall five times? Go ahead! And don't forget, the more horribly you maim them, the better you score!
  • American McGee's Grimm just loves its ridiculously bloody cartoon violence.
  • The sheer, unbelievable quantity of gore in Rise of the Triad with the Engine Killing Gibs cheat activated qualifies, especially with severed hands wagging their middle fingers flying across the screen.
  • The Mortal Kombat series in general tended in this direction. The blood was so copious from every single punch that a few seconds would be expected to exsanguinate the player, and fatalities were often so over the top it became hilarious. Self parodied with the Babalities and Animalities.
  • Dwarf Fortress Adventure Mode: The game where you can beat dragons to death with a sock or go on a genocidal rampage with a severed elf leg.
    • Toady's developer log is great resource for this:

"During the test (a 20 sword free-for-all), a guy got stabbed in the lower body twice, his guts popped out, and then a third guy came up and severed his exposed guts, so that all seems to be working."
"The dwarf Zach had selected didn't have any surgical experience. As I was watching, blood splattered on the walls and floor, and another dwarf ran over to diagnose the patient again, while the dabbling surgeon moved between repairing the compound fracture and trying to stop bleeding from malpractice. Eventually it was time to suture up the wound, and the dabbling surgeon did this... then again... then again... our poor patient had four sutures in his left wrist before I got the bug figured out."

  • This can happen with a little effort (or luck) in a few of the Jedi Knight games. By activating the dismemberment cheat, enemies who have their hands cut off by your lightsaber will fall to their knees and grab their severed wrist in agony for a few seconds, before falling down dead. If you quickly severe their head during that animation, the now-headless body will continue lamenting the loss of its hand.
  • There was a tiny little game called Jump'n'Bump, featuring very cute little rabbits that the players controlled. Very cute, until you realised the point of the game was to jump on top of the other rabbits, resulting in an explosion of bloody rabbit parts.
  • Gears of War has always had some downright brutal deaths, but Gears 3 features a unique execution for the Locust where they tear off their victim's arm and beat them to death with it.
  • Dead Rising features a few ways, though most notable is The Excavator. Impale a zombie with it, and let the laughs ensue as you walk around, spinning zombie corpse beating down other zombies with its flailing limbs.
  • Team Fortress 2 often takes this route, most notably when your character meets an explosive death and the game enthusiastically points out where your scattered bits are in the subsequent screenshot. Several of the "Meet the Team" sketches also wander into this trope's territory, such as "Meet the Sandvich," from which the first of the two page quotes was taken. What makes the deaths even funnier is that the characters all look like they're from a Pixar movie.
  • The whole point of MadWorld is to kill enemies in the most creative, elaborate ways to score more points. The gore is so over the top that things that would normally be morbid just run right back into funny. The executions of the bosses, often with their own weapons, are particularly ridiculous.
  • Much like MadWorld, Bulletstorm combines this with The Joys of Torturing Mooks. You get points for turning enemies into human fireworks, feeding them to local wildlife, bowling them over with cannonballs, kicking them into spikes, live wires, off cliffs... If you're brutal enough, the other mooks stop to gawk. It's a rather samey FPS, if you play it like an actual shooter and not a Murder Simulator.


Web Animation

  • Happy Tree Friends is the ultimate embodiment of this trope. Watch an episode, and Bloody Hilarious is absolutely guaranteed.
  • Goodbye Kitty is similar to the above, except it's always one character (Black Kitty) who suffers the abuse.


Web Comics

  • 8-Bit Theater does this a lot, usually either to or because of Black Mage. To be fair, though, BM had nothing to do with the geysers of blood resulting from Black Belt's second death.
    • Except indirectly - he was the one who turned BB to stone.
      • And dumped his body head-first into a lake of Mountain Dew.
  • Chopping Block. After all, there's bloody good some reason why it was named so. "Butch always felt the term 'gallows humour', while accurate, was redundant."
  • In many of the comic strips featuring Taro in his job as a butcher in Sakana he cuts fish with such a vigor that the blood splatters all over the place. And it ALWAYS leads to hilarious situations.
  • Penny Arcade does this occasionally. The best example has to be Gabe's soulution for the hiccups.
  • Done many times in Sluggy Freelance. It helps when half of all violent acts are represented by the sound effect "Glitch!"
  • Bloody Hilarious gets mixed with Gorn in Carnies.
  • Richard in Looking for Group—way too many examples to list.
  • Bob and George uses this trope in one series of strips.

Proto Man: For Christ's sake! Doesn't this room have a drain?!

Bandit: Well, look at this. Little girl got herself a sword. I say we take her back-- AAAAH!
War-Weasel Handler: Kill, my pet. AAAAAHhhh
Arduna: Guess their passage spilled out here, too. Sorry. Guess I shouldn't say, "spilled out."
Corva: Can I have my hatchet back?


Web Original

  • Ruby Quest combines this with a subversion of These Hands Have Killed during the last run to escape, when Tom encounters Filbert while carrying Jay - Tom thought that was pretty cool.
  • The "Teen Girl Squad" segments of Homestar Runner are prime examples - crudely-drawn stick figures being killed in ridiculous ways.
  • In Italian Spiderman, whenever the eponymous hero kills with his hands, the wounds he inflicts are ridiculously over the top. In one instance, he gorily decapitates a Mook with one hand.
  • YouTube videos like Tha Cliff
  • Juliet Starling advertises Zom-B-Gone. This gag commercial was something of a preview for Lollipop Chainsaw, which was released two months later.

Western Animation

"My anus is bleeding!"
"Yaaaaaaaay!"

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