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Bungled Suicide / Western Animation

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  • Played for very dark, Mood Whiplashy laughs on Adventure Time in the episode "Princess Cookie". The episode deals with a rogue cookie named Baby Snaps that is holding children hostage in a store demanding Princess Bubblegum's crown, due to his aspiration to make people happy as a child leading to him wanting to become a princess. As a child, he told the princess, who giggled at him, which he took the worst way possible. Jake, after hearing his Freudian Excuse, feels sorry for him, and helps him to escape. This leads to them running away from the Candy Guards and when they reach a cliff, Baby Snaps thanks Jake for making him happy and jumps off the cliff. Cue him on the ground in pieces being recovered by Candy Guards yelling "I GLUBBED UP!" ...Yeah.
  • Surprisingly happens in the very first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon. Depressed that he can't make a friend, Casper decides to let himself get run over by an oncoming train, apparently forgetting that as a ghost, he's already dead. The train just goes right through him.
  • Family Guy:
    • In the "Viewer Mail #2" segment "Fatman and Robin", Peter gains the power to turn people into Robin Williams. The next day, they eventually start annoying Peter and he tries to get out by shooting himself in the head, but his power now also affects inanimate objects and his gun turns into a miniature Williams. As he runs away from an endless swarm of Williams clones, he attempts to jump off a cliff and impale himself on a sharp rock, only for his fall to be cushioned when the rock turns into Mrs. Doubtfire.
    • In "Lois Comes Out of Her Shell", Meg tries to kill herself by OD'ing on sleeping pills, but Stewie's evil turtle Sheldon replaced them with Alka-Seltzer tablets, so all that happens is that she lets out a long burp.
    • In "Mom's the Word", after deciding that life is pointless if you're just going to die eventually anyway, Stewie tries to off himself in several ways. First, he tries to hang himself, but can't due to the shape of his head, then he attempts Suicide by Cop, but the cop he gets is Joe, who is equally depressed and wants Stewie to kill him too, then he tries an Electrified Bathtub, which only turns him into a toast-themed superhero.
    • In "Christmas is Coming", Stewie fills his winter coat pockets with stones and tries to drown himself in a mall fountain, only to find that the water isn't nearly deep enough.
  • Kaeloo: A Running Gag with Stumpy, who fails at everything, is to have him try to kill himself and fail.
  • An episode of King of the Hill has Bill becoming increasingly depressed over the Christmas period. Eventually, he tries to end his own life by jumping off the roof of his house, which isn't really that high. To bungle it up even more, Bill simply lowers himself from the roof, hanging onto it with one hand before dropping into his garden! Later on, he attempts to gas himself with an electric oven.
  • Looney Tunes:
    • In the Daffy Duck cartoon "Plane Daffy", a soldier tries to shoot himself after confessing a military secret to a spy. He goes outside to the hallway, closes the door, we hear a shot, then he opens the door again and says: "Uh... I missed!"
    • The Porky Pig cartoon "Porky's Romance" sees Porky, distraught over being cruelly rejected by his selfish love Petunia, hanging himself on a tree branch in one of the sadder scenes to be found in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Of course, this being Looney Tunes, Mood Whiplash comes into play when the branch snaps off under his weight.
    • In "Bear Feat", Pa Bear trains himself, Ma, and Junyer for a circus bear act after finding a want ad for it in the newspaper. After suffering a series of Amusing Injuries, Pa decides the family is ready to perform, only to find out that the newspaper with the want ad is 21 years out of date.note Pa then decides to end his life by jumping off a cliff, but his life is saved when Junyer catches him in a tub of water. Pa retaliates by punching Junyer in the face.
    • In Cheese Chasers, two mice named Hubie and Bertie try to commit suicide by stepping into Claude the cat's mouth while he's asleep but only succeed in driving him to suicide as well. Claude punches a bulldog named Marc Antony in an attempt to get Marc to massacre him. Instead, Marc is driven to suicide as well, chasing a dog catcher's truck while begging it to wait for him.
  • Moral Orel: The man Orel witnesses trying to kill himself jumps off a bridge, only to find out it's only knee-deep and he only breaks his neck. He's then arrested because suicide is a federal offence in Moralton.
  • In one episode of The Oblongs, Debbie Klymer is driven to suicide when she sees that her beautiful face has been horribly scarred. Milo tries to stop her from jumping off a bridge, but she does it... and the water is way too shallow. That's actually why Milo wanted to stop her — everybody in the neighborhood has tried it at one point, it just doesn't work.
  • Rick of Rick and Morty attempts this in "Auto Erotic Assimilation". After being dumped by Unity for being a destructive and negative influence on everyone around him, he attempts to vaporize his head with a heat beam. The attempt fails because he passes out on the last second and falls out of the beam's path.
  • The Shivering Truth: A man repeatedly tries to kill himself and every attempt just causes good things to happen. Try to hang himself, the ceiling above him collapses and reveals two Bound and Gagged girls. Ingest multiple drugs, he makes himself healthier than ever and his blood becomes a potential component for a Cure for Cancer. Jump to his death, he falls on and kills the man who kidnapped the girls from earlier.
  • A running gag with chronically depressed Moe Szyslak of The Simpsons.
    • Moe apparently succeeds in doing this in "Treehouse of Horror XIV". Unfortunately, Homer has just killed the Grim Reaper, so no one can die and Moe's left hanging there. "If I had known it would've taken this long, I would've put on the TV".
    • In "We're on the Road to D'ohwhere", he relates how he tried to hang himself, but the rope broke, so he sued the rope manufacturer, who gave him a huge cash settlement... and a new rope, which is already tied into a noose.
    • In "The Last of the Red Hat Mamas", Moe attempts suicide via a fall from thousands of feet up. As shown at the end of the episode, he survived by landing on a hot air balloon, and tried again with the same results.
    • In "Simpsons Christmas Stories", Moe makes three consecutive attempts: he hangs himself with a popcorn string that snaps under his weight, rides a sleigh into heavy traffic only for every single vehicle to miss him, and shoots himself in the ear, only for the gun to send a "Merry Christmas" flag out the other ear. Finally, he asks Barney to kill him as a Christmas present; however, Barney has already bought him a hat, so the heartwarmed Moe decides to live for the time being, making this an Interrupted Suicide of sorts. At the very end of the episode, however, he tries the sleigh-through-traffic method again, heading towards a loaded tractor-trailer, which of course misses him ("All eighteen wheels," as he notes bitterly).
    • Homer's attempted suicide in "No Loan Again, Naturally" is also played for laughs. He attempted to hang himself from a tree, but the tree gives way, sparing Homer and wrecking his car.
    • Another one played for laughs is Mr. Burns' in "The Fool Monty", where he survives an airplane hitting him, then slamming against pine tree branches and whacked away by a bear.
  • South Park:
    • In "Night of the Living Homeless", the scientist decides it's Better to Die than Be Killed, but each attempted shot (except the last) destroys his head a little more without killing him. By the end, he is writhing on the floor disgustingly, gargling and bleeding. Ick.
    • In "Britney's New Look", Britney Spears blows half her head off with a shotgun, but survives (looking like Mike the Headless Chicken afterward). She finishes the job at the end of the episode.
    • In "Elementary School Musical", Cartman tries to commit suicide (over High School Musical's popularity) by sitting in his mom's car in the garage with the engine running. This doesn't work, since his mom drives a hybrid.
    • In the "Coon and Friends" story arc, Kenny, aware of his immortality, sometimes shoots himself in front of his friends in the frustration of them not being able to remember his deaths. In fact, when he and the other heroes are sent to R'lyeh by Cthulhu and Cartman, he fatally falls on a spike because he'd escape R'lyeh by waking up back home. At the end of the episode, he says he's going to go to bed by shooting himself in the head, knowing that he'll just wake up in his bed the next morning.
    • In "Bass to Mouth", Cartman tricks Jenny Simons into eating a laxative filled cupcake, causing her to defecate herself in class. Jenny is so humililated that she attempts suicide by jumping off the school roof. Jenny survived the fall, but fractured her pelvis. A year prior, Cartman had bullied Corey Duran, who also publicly soiled himself, to the point of suicide, and his setting up of Jenny was to get heat off of another kid named Pete Melmam who crapped himself (as Principal Victoria made a deal with Cartman to ensure that Pete doesn't kill himself, but Cartman interpreted this as only Pete not committing suicide).


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