Just the Introduction to the Opposites

"Yes, I'd like one large sofa chair with extra chair, please."

"Over these houses, over these streets, hangs a pall of fear. Fear of a new kind of violence which is terrorizing the city."
"Yes — gangs of old ladies attacking defenseless, fit young men."

— Monty Python's Flying Circus

A lot of comedy comes from switching around expectations. This trope is about a specific kind, where the roles in an interaction or relationship between X and Y are reversed. But unlike "Freaky Friday" Flip, Prince and Pauper, and Swapped Roles, no explanation or justification is given, and the context remains identical as though said roles were never reversed at all. The comedy is more about the absurdity that arises from this type of situation than what happens to the characters.

Let's say hypothetically, a princess, wearing in full regalia (Pimped-Out Dress, tiara and ermine-lined cape) walks down a hallway one way, while her servant, in a French Maid Outfit, walks the other way, carrying some food. The princess bumps into the maid, causing the food to fall on the maid, but the princess begs for forgiveness and tries to wipe off the maid's dress, while the maid hysterically snaps at the princess for being clumsy, and complains about how much her dress cost.

Occasionally this trope is used for drama and/or Satire, where the situation is meant to be thought-provoking instead of funny.

A Super-Trope of Gender Flip and Fantastic Fantasy Is Mundane. Often overlaps with Faeries Don't Believe in Humans, Either. Compare Hourglass Plot, Opposite Day, Persecution Flip, Stereotype Flip, Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad, and Russian Reversal.

See also Inverted Trope.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A 1970 Smokey Bear PSA involves a family of bears having a picnic in front of a human family's suburban home, taking apart their fence for firewood and letting the campfire burn when they leave.
  Announcer: You wouldn't want bears to be careless with fire in your home. So don't be careless in theirs.

Comedy

• Foil, Arms and Hog's "An Irish Intervention" sketch, in which a family of drinkers hold an intervention for the son being a non-drinker.
• Stewart Lee "Later on I'll be explaining how my tragic and ultimately fatal heroin addiction helped me overcome my previous dependence on Born-Again Christianity."
• Towards the end of his one-man show, Norman Rockwell Is Bleeding, Christopher Titus imagines what would've happened if his mother's mental institution had had an open mike night:
  Christopher Titus: Things could've been different for mom. She'd have her own TV show and you'd read about me in the paper as her heroin-addicted son. Well, a man can dream, can't he?

Comic Books

• Judge Dredd:
  • Recurring character Max Normal, one of Dredd's informants, is a young man who is always impeccably dressed in a pinstripe suit — which marks him out as a rebel in a time when Apunkalypse fashions are the norm. Dredd has been known to express a wish that Max would grow his hair out and get a real job.
  • A story centered around an athlete who garnered massive controversy and criticism by doing well despite no pharmaceutical or bionic enhancements.
• normalman is the only non-superpowered human on the planet Levram.
• In Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!, one Villain of the Week is a "wuzwolf" (he wuz a wolf, now he's not), a wolf who turns into a legendary monstrous creature know as a "human".
• Any Silver Age Superman story set in Bizarro-World is all over this trope.
• In Asterix in Spain, a spectator at Hispania's Gladiator Games describes the event in very similar terms to a bullfighting fan — except he's saying you can't be sentimental about the people being killed by the animals.
• One reality visited by Excalibur during "The Cross-Time Caper" showed Britain as the Wild West, with Native Britons in Braids, Beads, Buckskins and Bowlers, defending their territory from the American settlers.
• Peter Porker the Spider-Ham was originally a spider bitten by a radioactive pig, mutating him into one, rather than the other way around that you'd usually expect knowing Spider-Man's origin.

Films — Animation

• The Aristocats: Roquefort the mouse runs after Scat Cat and his fellow stray cats as he leads them to help save Duchess and the kittens. A man drinking wine at a café who sees the mouse chasing a bunch of cats pours out the rest of his bottle in response.
• Interstella 5555 starts with the premise that humans from Earth are kidnapping aliens.
• This is the premise of Planet 51: An alien lands on 1950s suburban America, whose appearance spreads panic among the paranoid populace and attracts the attention of the military... except the "alien" is a human astronaut, and the "humans" are stereotypical, green-skinned humanoid aliens.

Films — Live-Action

• Little Man Tate contrasts the titular Tate, a very mature child, with his childlike, immature mother.
• The film The Wrong Guy had a subplot of a greedy, ruthless farmer threatening the meek, struggling-to-get-by banker with closing his business down.
• The Jerk starts with the character explaining he was born "a poor black child," only to discover his white roots when he first hears swing music on the radio.
  Navin: "This music speaks to me!"
• ¡Three Amigos! has a scene where Chevy Chase's character is trying to blend in with the banditos as their leader reminisces about the good times they have had. He offers a few suggestions such as the time they "raped the horses and rode off on the women."
• As part of the gradual narrative breakdown of Too Many Cooks, animated name and title cards re-enact the sitcom credits sequence. As the camera pans over each one, the human the cards represent briefly appear overlayed on top of them, screaming in confusion before fading back to wherever they go.
• Top Secret! has the Funny Background Event of three humans descending from the sky to relieve themselves on a statue of a pigeon.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • One scene in Moving Pictures parodies King Kong (1933); a giant woman^note actually a Dungeon Dimensions creature in disguise holds a normal-sized ape (the Librarian) in one hand while climbing a tall building. Earlier in the same book, the Librarian has an idea for a click about an ape who grows up in the city, and learns to speak the language of humans.
  • In Jingo, Corporal Nobbs recounts a story about how his uncle was a sailor who was press-ganged after a plague. A bunch of farmers got him drunk and he woke up the next morning tied to a plough.
  • In The Colour of Magic, amongst the bizarre occurrences that happen in strange corners of the multiverse as a result of quintillions of atoms moving to another universe, that universe trying to pretend they were there all along, and them then moving back again, we're told that "[i]n the cometary halo around the fabled Ice System of Zeret a noble comet died as a prince flamed across the sky."
  • In Feet of Clay and subsequent books, conservative dwarfs, who think all dwarfs should hide their gender, which means looking male by human standards, are horrified by an "openly female" dwarf who wears a skirt. The result reads as a riff on conservative views of gender nonconformity, but with the dwarfs outraged by (from a human perspective) gender conformity.
• "Disobedience", by A. A. Milne, is about a three-year-old boy whose mother wanders away from his supervision and gets lost. Possibly better known as a Chad Mitchell Trio song usually called "James James Morrison Morrison" after the first line of both the song and the poem.
• In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, there is a poem about five Golgafrincham princes who, amongst other things, "rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses".
• In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kilgore Trout's science-fiction stories, titled "Gilgongo!", is set on a planet where rare species of animals and plants are multiplying so prodigiously that the people are celebrating their extinction rather than their conservation.
• In Early Riser, being fat is considered a survival boost during the deadly winters, so characters partake in "gain weight quick" diets and exercise is perceived to be selfish and lazy.
• Kim Newman's "The Pale Spirit People" is about a group of nomadic tribesmen After the End who are cursed because they situated their burial grounds on the remains of a suburban development.

Live-Action TV

• You Can't Do That on Television is the Trope Namer; such sketches would often involve children being rewarded for bad behavior and punished for good, or put the kids in a position of power over the adults.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus did this a lot:
  • The sketch "Northern Playwright" flips the "Billy Elliot" Plot on its head, featuring a father behaving like a stereotypical worker, his no less stereotypical yuppie son, and the predictable tension between them. Except it turns out that the father is a famous playwright and the son is a coal miner. Just watch it here.
  • There was another sketch where a woman let an encyclopedia salesman into her home because he said that he was a burglar. Could have also been a Take That! toward door-to-door salesmen: "I'd rather be robbed than suffer through your spiel!"
  • As well as one sketch about a world where everyone is Superman, but one of them is secretly... THE BICYCLE REPAIRMAN!
  • The "Hell's Grannies" sketch, about a gang of old ladies terrorising innocent youths.
    • Later in the same sketch, we see "The Baby Snatchers" — gangs of men dressed up as babies who kidnap adults.
      Woman: I just left my husband out here while I went in to do some shopping and I came back and he was gone. He was only 47!
  • "Scotsman on a Horse", where the Scotsman crashes a wedding and absconds with the groom.
• The point of Absolutely Fabulous, where the daughter is the one telling the adults to turn the boom box down and to stop drinking so much. The show grew out of a sketch on French & Saunders called "Modern Mother and Daughter", which presented this as being somewhat Truth in Television.
• In an episode of Grace Under Fire, a middle-aged dad was staying at his son's house, they have a fight, and the dad storms into his room and starts blasting swing music. The son pounds on the door and tells him to turn it down.
• The weekly murder mystery Castle has the mystery-writer main character (played by Nathan Fillion) dealing with his party-girl cougar of a mother and his sage, sensible teenaged daughter, who also acts as his Watson. When the daughter jumps a turnstile at a subway one night because she's out of cash, she not only goes back the next day to pay, but she also demands that her father ground her. He's perfectly willing to let it slide, but she's insistent.
• Rutland Weekend Television:
  Presenter: Hello. Are people difficult bastards or not? To clear this up, I have with me in the studio one really difficult bastard...
  Difficult Bastard: Hello, good evening.
  Presenter: ... And the bishop of Summerset.
  Bishop: Get lost.
  Presenter: Can I turn to you first, bishop?
  Bishop: Shut up.
• A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look where a husband and wife are arguing because he's just returned from a business trip and she finds a bra in his suitcase. She asks, mildly annoyed, if he's cheating on her, which he cops to absentmindedly. The fight escalates as she brings in other "minor" issues such as her desire to have a baby and secret gambling addiction, all of which are attended to in the same bored-but-mildly-tetchy fashion until she suddenly bursts into tears and he figures out what this is really about, and passionately tries to beg forgiveness for... that time he left the fridge door open and a whole quiche and some milk went bad.
• Done as a Take That! on A Bit of Fry and Laurie, when Laurie's character walks into a convenience store and requests EIGHT PACKETS OF CONDOMS, PLEASE, loudly specifying brands and styles, and furtively asking for Jason Donovan's latest single in between.
• An episode of Scrubs had Elliot's boyfriend Keith upset with her because he wanted a committed stable relationship, and Elliot just wanted him for sex. Dr. Kelso treats their argument like an entertaining TV program: "It's like he's the chick and you're the dude!"
• An episode of Boston Legal opens with a shopkeeper nervously eyeing a couple of tough-looking teenagers, fingering the silent alarm button as they step up to the register. One of them reaches into his jacket...and pulls out some cash. They turn to go, revealing Betty White standing directly behind them. She pulls a gun.
• You're Skitting Me has a series of sketches where a pair of teenagers treat their parents like they were teenagers.
• Goodness Gracious Me:
  • The famous "Having an English" sketch: A bunch of Indians in Mumbai always end up in an English restaurant after a hard night of drinking, where it is considered good form to order "the blandest thing on the menu". This satirizes the stereotypical behavior of English patrons in Indian restaurants.
  • The one white guy in the drama department of the Indian Broadcasting Corporation tries to get white people portrayed as something other than stereotyped tourists and diplomats. "Why not a white shopkeeper?"
  • An Indian family bemoans their son saying he wants to be a doctor instead of a pop star, made even worse when they're coincidentally accurate about him being a heterosexual.
• Two Will & Grace examples:
  • When Grace and her boyfriend Nathan get a little too affectionate while sitting near Jack, he protests and says that he feels uncomfortable. Nathan smiles in amusement and tells him, "We're straight, we date, get used to it."
  • Will and Jack want to move out to a nice suburban neighborhood but decide against staying in a particular house. The locals are actually thrilled about the idea of having gays live there, as they bring a lot of art and nice coffee shops and the like with them, and when Will and Jack say they want to leave they break the window with a loaf of banana bread with a note that reads, ‘Gays, don’t go home!’ Later on, they come over with a marching band playing ‘We Are Family’ as Will and Jack run off.
• In Friends, Phoebe's Canadian husband has to "come out" as straight. He's an ice dancer who'd been passing as gay to blend in with his Always Camp friends.
  Phoebe: Have you told your parents yet?
  Duncan: No, not yet. I think they're going to be cool with it, though. My brother's straight, so...
• The premise of the sitcom Family Ties was built around such an inversion of a classic age stereotype, that of the younger radical and the older conservative. Here, the parents Steven and Elyse Keaton were former hippies who grew up into staunch liberals, while their teenage son Alex is an equally staunch Reagan Republican who dreams of working on Wall Street when he grows up.
• A brief gag in The Flash (2014) episode "Love is a Battlefield", when an argument between divorced villains Amunet Black and Goldface turns to their vinyl collection. It turns out the African-American Goldface is into Radiohead, who the extremely English Amunet considers "overrated"; conversely, she claims he didn't even know who N.W.A were before they met.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "First Contact" (not to be confused with the movie) has Riker on a reconnaissance mission to an industrial pre-warp world that goes wrong. The twist is, it's largely told from the perspective of the planet's natives, creating an alien-on-Earth storyline, only not on Earth and with an Earth human as the alien.
• A recurring sketch from The Catherine Tate Show features a young, working-class Irishman named John who is gay. His mother is not only understanding and fiercely protective of him; she also is constantly outing him to the neighbors. At first they look as if they're offended or even about to break into violence, but instead they wind up being supportive and asking him for advice on stereotypically gay things (interior decorating, fashion tips). John, on the other hand, enjoys football and other "masculine" pursuits and just wants to lead a quiet life.
• In Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the host of an interior design show is hiding his sexual orientation from the public, which is to say that he is a straight man who has cultivated a gay persona that has become integral to the show.
• The Australian sketch show Full Frontal (the follow-up to Fast Forward) had a sketch in which a man desperately tries to convince his wife he's been having sex with prostitutes and not, in fact, playing for the Sydney Swans. He's able to talk her around until she tosses him an object from a short distance and he fumbles it.
• Get Krack!n has a Weather with BekJut segment that ends with the Kates objectifying the very masculine BekJut with the exact same lines that typically lead to sexual harassment lawsuits. For extra clarity, they don't even switch up the pronouns.
  Kate McCartney: And BekJut you look absolutely stunning this morning. Who had the pleasure of dressing you?
  BekJut: Champion Outlet. Smith Street. Half off.
  Kate McCartney: I'd like to see her take half off!
  (Both Kates laugh)
  Kate McClennan: Oh, I don't know about that! (laughs) I'd like to see it too! (laughs) No, you're a good guy. You've got a daughter.
  Kate McCartney: I've got a daughter.

Music Videos

• Against Me!'s video for "Thrash Unreal" features a group of well-dressed, respectable looking adults going to a party... which immediately devolves into a mosh pit when they get hammered off the wine.

Puppet Shows

• The Jean-Pierre Rampal episode of The Muppet Show has a skit based on The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Following protests from Rizzo, in this version Hamelin is a town of rats which pays Rampal to lure away a ravenous horde of human children.

Radio

• In Acropolis Now, set in Ancient Greece, homosexuality is the norm and sex with girls is something only done for reproductive purposes. Straight characters are seen as a bit weird.
• Used on the Martin/Molloy radio show. After a news story about two pensioners who were arrested after an argument over a poker machine turned into a violent punch up, Mick Molloy launched into a spiel about how old people today had no respect for authority and how teenagers were sitting at home at night, too scared to go out because of the gangs of old people roaming the streets, and how what old people needed was another dose of national service.
• A recurring character in the 2020 radio version of The Lenny Henry Show is a black man who keeps calling the police because he's seen a group of white people and immediately assumed they must be criminals. There is also a one off sketch where Henry plays an office worker who keeps asking a bewildered white collegue "Yes, but where are you from really?"
• John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme:
  • A heavily lampshaded example in one episode, as Patsy Straightwoman discovers the special caff for lorry drivers on a ferry is a witty cocktail party.
    Patsy: A group of people one might stereotypically assume would display one set of attributes, had in fact displayed the stereotypical attributes of another group of people entirely!
  • Often done for a quick surreal gag in the Storyteller sketches, for instance saying that as a child he wanted a cat, but his parents told him they had too much space, so got him a horse instead.

Tabletop Games

• One of the big conflicts among the Imperial Inquisition of Warhammer 40,000 is between "puritan" inquisitors, who uphold the strict, dogmatic, xenophobic credo of the Inquisition to the letter, and "radical" inquisitors who play fast and loose with the rules, often believe that the ends justify the means and have a tendency to question authority and orthodoxy in all matters. A puritan, for example, upon uncovering the activities of a Chaos cult, would launch a straightforward purge and burn them all at the stake, no questions asked. A radical might very well try to infiltrate the cult, learn what they're doing and subvert their activities — possibly even taking their daemon-cursed artefacts to turn against their creators. So far so good — and in line with modern cultural expectations we might expect that the inflexible puritans would tend to be the old-fashioned fuddy-duddies, while the radicals are the dynamic fresh blood who can see beyond the stifling hidebound dogma. But thanks to the nature of the job it very much tends to be the young, freshly-appointed inquisitors who are the puritans and the older, grizzled, seen-it-all-before veterans who are the radicals. They hit the galaxy as fiery dogmatics (the general default state for Imperial citizens), but decades or centuries of seeing how complicated and clandestine the Imperium and its enemies are tends to give them a more nuanced, less black-and-white outlook. The Gregor Eisenhorn trilogy of tie-in novels takes this transition as its major premise — following the career of the young, puritanical Eisenhorn as his experiences gradually turn him into the most radical of radicals.
• A sidebar in the Discworld Roleplaying Game chapter "Going Shopping" says that some players see shopping as an essential part of the adventure "more fun than fighting princesses or rescuing monsters". It goes on to say that if this becomes a problem, the GM should remind them that the princesses aren't going to fight themselves, and maybe even have shopkeepers refuse to serve them until they've saved that poor monster everyone in the town loves.

Video Games

• Two minor NPCs in Final Fantasy XIII are a father and son. The player first meets the father, who complains that he lost his son and his son told him that he should always stay in one place if they get separated, while the son is nearby complaining about his father getting lost. When father and son meet up, the son chastises the father for not staying in one place as he was told. Considering the tiny number of NPCs and otherwise standard NPC dialogue in the game it's rather odd that they would bother to add this bit of characterization in an area where many gamers will miss it (one must explicitly intentionally backtrack to hear the final conversation between father and son).
• The manual for Kingdom O' Magic mentions that "The Good, Old-fashioned Quest" is about how you have to rescue the dragon, steal the princess, and slay the treasure. (It is in fact a lie — there is no princess, and you deal with the dragon and the treasure in the traditional way, insofar as calling a mob hit on the dragon counts as "traditional".)

Webcomics

• In Questionable Content, Pintsize once created hentai about schoolgirls raping the tentacle monsters. At least 18 volumes.
• Similarly, the starting strips of Ghastly's Ghastly Comic are about a Japanese woman with a strong tentacle fetish trying to entice a tentacle monster into raping her, while the latter would very much prefer cuddling.
• Everyday Comics: Typically, The Seven Deadly Sins are portrayed as embodiment of their vices, save for Lust, who's drawn as a hot woman to invoke that vice in the observer. In this strip, the sins are portrayed as hot women to invoke desire of their vices (desire for food, desire for anger, etc.), while Lust is instead portrayed as the type of mousy, nerdy person who'd embody it.
• In Exiern, the protagonist Tiffany observes her current predicament and concludes that she's a brave damsel about to save the beautiful dragon from the firebreathing knights. She then wonders exactly when the universe turned inside-out.
• This Sandra and Woo strip has Cloud and Yuna be embarrassed by their parents acting immature in a restaurant.
• A Running Gag in early Skin Horse was Sweetheart the Uplifted Animal spitz and Unity the zero-attention-span human-looking zombie having a relationship not unlike a human and a dog, only with Sweetheart as the human, trying to train Unity and giving her validation when she was a good bio-weapon. This included a pastiche of The Far Side's "What you say/What your pet hears" strips.
• In this Something Happens strip, a Corrupt Corporate Executive unexpectedly enters a Magical Land where the elven locals pay their employers an hourly wage to make them (the payers) work, which is "a rare 'n' pricey privilege". He takes advantage of this off-camera, as in the last panel, three elves are seen working at a tech support call center.
  • In another, the first four panels depict a commercial featuring scantily-clad women posing with cars and even name-drops the Sex Sells trope. The commercial is actually for poseable female mannequins, as it takes place in a world where cars are sentient.

Web Original

• The Onion has done this a few times:
  • This video from The Onion News Network portrays AA as a life-destroying addiction which can only be countered by consumption of alcohol.
  • The article "Gay Teen Worried He Might Be Christian"
  • In 2004, US politician James McGreevey came out as gay and stepped down from his elected position. This was reported by The Onion as "Homosexual Tearfully Admits to Being Governor of New Jersey".
• A number of Twitter feeds satirise unconscious and institutional bias by reversing it, for instance Man Who Has It All, which assures men that they can have a family and a career; Jew Who Has It All, explaining the Christian minority to a Judeonormative America; Neurotypical Research Inc, which pathologises and categorises neurotypicality (although she's dropped that gimmick now); and a lengthy thread by the Kenyan writer gathara, reporting on "Sub-Scandinavian Europe" and "Far Western America" in the same way Western media looks at Africa.

Web Videos

• In these two CollegeHumor sketches, a male gamer is bullied and sexually harassed by Gamer Chicks. (Warning, audio is Not Safe for Work.)

Western Animation

• In the Codename: Kids Next Door episode "Operation: H.O.T.S.T.U.F.F.", Numbuh Three turns her house's thermostat up so high her house turns into a volcano. This drives her father Kani out of their home and into Sector V's Treehouse, and Numbuh Four/Wally is left in charge. As a joke, Kani starts acting like a shiftless, lazy kid, which results in Wally acting like an overbearing father.
• The plot of the Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode "The Fast and the Furriest" revolves around Splinter stealing the Turtle Van for a joyride and getting punished by the turtles for it, as an inversion of the typical 'rebel teenage kids steals the parents’ car for a joyride' plot.
• Rick and Morty: In "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind", the duo escape into various bizarre dimensions with the Council of Ricks hot on their tracks, three of them being similar ones with the same situation playing out: Anthropomorphic pizzas ordering people over the phone while sitting on chairs, phones ordering chairs over the person while sitting on pizzas, and chairs ordering phones over the pizza while sitting on people.
• Robot Chicken has a pair of sketches about a grey alien getting randomly abducted and "anal probed" by a gang of hillbillies in a (flying) pickup truck.
  Hillbilly: This is in the name of science, boy. We're gonna conduct an experiment up inside Uranus. Now squeeeeel like a pig!
• The Simpsons:
  • "Radioactive Man" sees a Hollywood production team shooting in Springfield, getting exploited by local politicians for made up taxes, and being driven back to Hollywood where they can rely on others to get them through hard times.
    Mickey Rooney: Well, I hope you're all satisfied. You bankrupted a bunch of naive movie folks, folks from a Hollywood where values are... different. They weren't thinking about the money. They just wanted to tell a story: a story about a radioactive man, and you slick small-towners took 'em for all they were worth.
  • In "The Old Man and the Key", Grandpa is staying at the Simpsons' place and borrowing their car for dates, annoying Homer to the point that he grounds Grandpa, who storms up to his room and starts blasting big band music. Complete with Lampshade Hanging:
    Homer: He has to learn! Just like my father taught me!
    Marge: He is your father!
    Homer: [Beat] Cosmic.

  The trope is utterly screwed with when Homer says:

  Homer: Oh sure, when he's in trouble he's my father!

• South Park:
  • "Gnomes": The family-owned small business manipulates children into giving them unpaid work. Meanwhile, the megacorp has one guy working by himself without breaching any ethics.
  • "Rainforest Schmainforest": The environmental activist demonstrates her ignorance of the rainforest when she takes a group of children into unspoiled territory. The loggers on the other hand care about the children's safety and are well aware that the rainforest isn't there for humanity's leisure.
  • "The Entity": Kyle's naive cousin comes from the city to the country.
  • "The Death Camp Of Tolerance": The titular camp forces its prisoners to not show prejudice towards any group that have been persecuted by Nazis.
  • In "Red Man's Greed", the Native Americans are Corrupt Corporate Executives who invade South Park and set up casinos, with the intent to bleed them dry. They give the white people SARS via contaminated blankets and the traditional white trash panaceas (Dayquil, Campbell's chicken noodle soup and Sprite) cures it. Stan goes to an old man in a trailer park, who sends him on a vision quest by huffing paint thinner in a paper bag.
  • "Butt Out": The cigarette companies are an innocent business staffed by healthy people while the anti-smoking lobbies are heartless capitalists run by a junk-food addict. Played to the hilt when the anti-smoking lobby knowingly resorts to murdering a child for personal gain.
  • In "Smug Alert" it's the hybrid cars (or rather, the vanity from people who drive hybrid cars) that create emissions so intense they cause a climate catastrophe.
  • From "Hell on Earth 2006":
    Satan: Oh God, what's happened to me? I've never been this terrible before. By trying to have a party like those spoiled rich teenage girls on MTV, I've become like one of them.
    Minion: Satan, don't be so hard on yourself. You're not as bad as they are.
  • The "Go God Go" duology features a future where not only has noted atheist Richard Dawkins has become a prophet, but his followers have split into factions and waged war over which side is the better follower.
  • "Elementary School Musical" has a reverse "Gender-Normative Parent" Plot in which a kid wants to play basketball, which his flamboyant singer father disapproves of.
  • In "The Poor Kid", Kenny is shipped off to a foster home run by abusive fundamentalists. Except they're not Christian fundamentalists. They're agnostic fundamentalists.
    Man: IS THERE A GOD!?!
    Child: No! No!
    Man: YOU HAVE NO WAY OF KNOWING ONE WAY OR THE OTHER! [proceeds to drench child in Dr. Pepper]
  • "Informative Murder Porn" has the children acting like Moral Guardians who blame cable TV (specifically the I.D. channel) for corrupting their parents. Minecraft was brought in as an attempted distraction (namely, the channel block has a Minecraft-centered question, which the parents figured out when a kid taught them Minecraft). This is very hilarious when one recalls the Season 1 episode "Death", in which the parents target Terrance and Philip.
    Randy: You're a lousy kid! I wish Jaden Smith was my son!
    Randy: Jaden Smith lets his parents do whatever they want. You know what? The guys at work, they took a bet on who would win in a fight, you or Jaden Smith, and they all said Jaden Smith could kick your ass! He does movies and he can sing, and he's totally cool to his parents!
    Stan: Well then maybe you should go live with Jaden Smith, Dad.
    Randy: I wish I could! I wish I could live with Jaden Smith so I could be rich and I wouldn't have to live in a boring sexless marriage where all your mom and I do piss each other off!
  • In "Stunning and Brave", we have Moral Guardians being lampooned by having them portrayed as violent, drunken frat boys.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "I, Excretus", the crew of the Cerritos undergo a series of holographic evaluations based on situations encountered by previous Starfleet crews. Tendi's evaluation is to handle the ethics of a paraplegic Klingon's wish for an assisted suicide. The program, it turns out, expects Tendi to grant his request. Where this trope comes into play is after she hesitates and the patient falls out of his biobed trying to take the ritual dagger back from her. Two other surgeons rush over and demand to know why he isn't dead.
  Surgeon 1: We have to give this warrior an honorable death, stat! Get me 300ccs of any type of poison!
  Klingon: I have to die!
  Surgeon 1: They have giant hearts... so many backup organs.
  Surgeon 2: Sir, it's done. There's nothing else we can do. [Holds up his tricorder showing stable vitals.]
  Surgeon 1: Damn it! Call it.
  Surgeon 2: Time of life, 0900.
  Klingon: Noooooooooo!

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