Major Injury Underreaction

Also note the pipe impaled through his chest.

Harry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge: [calmly] By God, sir... I've lost my leg!
Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington: By God, sir, so you have.

— Waterloo

In webcomics and cartoons especially, characters in great pain will demonstrate this pain by making frequently deadpan statements, along the lines of "The truck lodged in my stomach is a bit uncomfortable" or some such.

Often justified by the character being resistant to pain in some way or a badass or in speculative works because the character has Bizarre Alien Biology and/or a Healing Factor that means the wound isn't actually as bad for them as it seems. In Real Life, a person might not notice an injury right away due to adrenaline, shock, or panic, all of which can eclipse pain. Often, major injuries damage nerves, so they may not feel any pain. This may be used to make a Mortal Wound Reveal all the more shocking.

Contrast with Minor Injury Overreaction, which is a direct inversion of this trope. Compare Only a Flesh Wound, Belated Injury Realization, I Can Still Fight!, Obviously Not Fine, and Dissonant Serenity. If a character is going through a Meatgrinder Surgery, then it’s likely that they may have a reaction like this.

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Examples Subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Advertising

• An animated anti-smoking PSA has a crocodile representing the tobacco industry being interviewed by an unseen cameraman. The crocodile claims to have changed, yet when the cameraman asks if he's going to stop selling cigarettes, the crocodile goes berserk, implicitly mauling the cameraman with blood and all. And yet when the croc storms off, the cameraman replies with "just thought I'd ask" as if nothing happened.
• One "Got Milk?" commercial had a mother telling her kids to drink their milk when they refuse to. One of the kids tells her that their next-door neighbor, who was outside working, never drinks milk. Then, when the neighbor attempts to lift up a wheelbarrow, his arms snap off from their sockets. While the mother and kids scream in horror, the old man simply replies "Oh, that's not good..."
• A whole campaign for Mike's Hard Lemonade revolved around these.
  • One, for instance, had a guy impaled with rebar. It gets used as a bottle opener.
  • Another advert had two guys working at an aquarium. However, one of the guys had one of his hands bitten off by a shark, while the other guy watches. The second guy asks about the incident and the first guy responds "Talking about your bad luck" in a calm matter.
  • Yet another has a guy at the doctor, calmly discussing his life expectancy as a horrible alien parasite of some sort is visible on an X-ray (or something), gobbling down his internal organs.

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who: The Fifth Doctor performs one in Son of the Dragon.
  The Doctor: Peri, did you see that man that just brushed past us?
  Peri: Not really, was he someone important?
  The Doctor: In a way, I suppose, yes, I don't wish to alarm you, I suspect, in fact I am fairly certain he had a knife.
  Peri: A knife?!
  The Doctor: Yes, erm, and he, er, just stabbed me in the chest.

Comic Books

• Batman: Defused Tyke Bomb Cassandra Cain was prone to this. It was explained by her backstory.
  Tim Drake: How can you take a bullet and not bat an eye?
  Cassandra Cain: You know that... kid game, "Two for Flinching?"
  Tim Drake: Yeah. Oh, no. Don't tell me.
  Cassandra Cain: My... dad and I played something like that.
• In the Birds of Prey story arc where they go up against the Secret Six, Scandal Savage takes a .45 caliber bullet to the back from near point-blank range and spends a few pages apparently bleeding to death in the snow before rejoining the fight. Afterwards, when she's being helped into the back of their transport, she makes a muttered comment about how she hates regrowing organs. Plays with the Healing Factor tropes as well.
• Deff Skwadron: Quoth Killboy: "Beg pardon, sir, but you couldn't 'elp me with the take-off? Lost one of me arms in the crash again, an' I'm 'avin trouble usin' all the controls..." Justified, since he is also a Hollywood Cyborg and it's likely the arm he lost was clumsily bolted on in the first place.
• The eponymous character of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is perfectly fine when his 'spine explodes.'
• In one Lucky Luke issue, "Tenderfoot", a young British heir with a very stiff upper lip participates in a Flintlock Pistol Duel (only one shot). His opponent shoots first, but when he sees that he hasn't killed the Briton, who calmly stands still with his pistol firmly held in the right hand, he freaks out and surrenders, giving the Greenhorn victory by forfeit. When Luke asks the heir why he didn't shoot, he calmly responds: "I couldn't. He shot me in the arm and the pain is unbearable."
• Marvel Universe:
  • Thanos' reaction as he sees his own heart being torn out by Drax the Destroyer?
    Thanos: Interesting...
  • In his MAX series, The Punisher once lost — didn't break, lost — a rib to a shotgun blast. Didn't slow him down.
    Frank's monologue: That's a rib gone. Not broken. Gone. [keeps fighting]
  • Not so much an injury as a change, but when Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America (Bucky) are turned into frogs in one comic. Thor (to whom this has happened before) is annoyed, Iron Man freaks out, and Bucky, the least-experienced of the three, has no real reaction to it at all (his first comment is to tell Tony to relax).
  • When Jack Russell a.k.a. Werewolf by Night is run through with several silver katanas in Punisher vol. 7 #13, he tells his attackers: "Acupuncture. Tickles."
  • Deadpool, upon being impaled by an elephant tusk: "Gross, my body's never gone 'sploorp' before."
• In the horrendous comic Silent Hill: Dying Inside, Christabella is shot in the eye, but is only angry because the blast set her hair on fire. She also says that she doesn't mind the giant gash in her stomach, just the flies that constantly get on her and when dogs try to eat out of it in her sleep.
  • In NYX, Zebra Daddy's reaction to being impaled through the back by X-23's claws, and looking down to see them sticking out of his chest, is just a subdued "Aw, man," before he dies. However his response to her cutting off his hand earlier in the fight gets much more of a response.
• Sin City:
  • Stuka gets an arrow right through his body and seems entirely unconcerned, even though he states that "it's really starting to hurt". All of his friends seem unconcerned as well. They calmly read the note attached to the arrow, then file out of the room to look for the archer, leaving Stuka standing there, confused. In the film adaptation, this is followed up with an arrow to the head, to which he reacts only with mild annoyance.
    Stuka: I don't know, guys. Maybe I should see a doctor or something. I don't think this is the kind of thing you can just ignore.
  • Kevin from The Hard Goodbye is even worse. Marv beats the shit out of him and he never screams. Marv cuts his arms and legs off and he never screams. Marv sics his own pet wolf onto him and eats his genitals and he never screams. Even when Marv saws his head off and he never screams.
• The Transformers (IDW):
  • The Transformers: Robots in Disguise: Shockwave blows a hole in Dreadwing at the start of issue 17, killing him. At the end of the issue, Dreadwing comes back to life through the use of Shockwave's experiments. His reaction is a small "ow," asking for some warning next time, and then wondering what they're going to do next as the hole in his chest closes up.
  • The Transformers: Dark Cybertron: Galvatron tears Megatron in two. Megatron proceeds to shoot him and orders Bumblebee to take him away and bring his legs. He refers to the injury as a scratch and says he's had worse. If one's read The Transformers (IDW) they'd find this isn't an exaggeration; he has had worse, having been sliced shoulder to crotch (missing his spark, and thus a fatal blow, by inches) and one time being consumed by living explosions.
  • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Fulcrum wakes up while the Scavengers are stripping him for parts. He's, at most, slightly disturbed to learn that Misfire is holding what amounts to his still-beating heart in one hand. Notably, Fulcrum at this stage of his career isn't some unstoppable One-Man Army like Megatron, for whom shrugging off dismemberment would only be expected; he's a living bomb who was too cowardly to explode. Presumably the Rule of Funny energy around the Scavengers is just that strong.
    Fulcrum: I—wait a second. Is that my fuel pump?
    Misfire: What, this? Um...yeah. Can I keep it?
    Fulcrum: Well, I kind of need it. You know, for pumping my fuel.
  • Last Stand Of The Wreckers: Overlord's reaction to anything short of being reduced to a burning endoskeleton is generally somewhere between "amused" and "irritated", and even when he is reduced to a burning skeleton, he's mostly just upset because he'll need the rest of it put back on before he fights Megatron.
• Wonder Woman: Due to her healing factor, Wondy doesn't worry too much about medical care, and is pretty good at continuing to fight regardless of physical harm.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): When Diana is fighting Superman, who is under Circe's control, she keeps thinking about the fact that her arms and hands are being quite badly injured by punching him and it's going to take her a while to heal from it, but doesn't let up.
  • Wonder Woman (2006): Achilles reacts to getting stabbed through the heart by disarming and defeating the Amazon who stabbed him.
  • Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Diana uses getting shot by Maru to pinpoint Maru's location and neutralize the sniper.
  • Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman: In "Generations" Di's reaction to Cheetah lodging a spear in her shoulder is to yank it out and use it against the villain.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes did a parody of Dark Age comic books, in which a character having a huge hole blasted through his torso narrates: "I could feel my spine shatter. It hurt... a lot."
• Played for laughs in a one-panel comic in an early issue of Toy Fare Magazine. The comic depicted action figures of Cloud and Vincent from Final Fantasy VII pulling the arms off a Sephiroth figure. Sephiroth's response is simply "Y'know, once this sensory overload isn't overwhelming my capacity to feel pain, I'm gonna be screaming like a girl."
• One Zits strip pulls this immediately before its inverse.
  Jeremy: [on panel 1] I'm fine. I just fell out of a tree.
  Jeremy: [on panel 2] PAPER CUT!

Films — Animated

• Olaf the Snowlem from Frozen gets a lot of these. His reaction to accidentally walking into a needle-sharp icicle sticking out of a wall is a nonchalant "Oh, look at that. I've been impaled." Justified in that he's a snowman; about the only thing that can actually "kill" him is melting.
  Olaf: Hands down, this is the BEST day of my life! [starts melting] And quite possibly the last...
• In Hulk Vs. Wolverine, we get Deadpool, who lost an arm, and was stomped by Hulk. His reaction? A joke ("Could you give me a hand?") And "Ow..." Justified by his Healing Factor. All he has to do is reattach it. Deadpool is more depressed that Wolvie slashed his favorite gun than losing his arm.
• Isle of Dogs:
  • Early on in the movie, Chief tears the ear off of another dog while both dog packs fight over scraps. When one of the rival pack dogs remarks that Chief tore his ear off, the dog with the torn ear (named Igor) merely shrugs it off.
  • In a more serious example, when Atari lands on Trash Island when his plane crashes, he ends up with a piece of metal embedded in his brain. He carries on in spite of this. He gets another piece of metal embedded in his brain during the climax, and this time, it causes him to fall unconscious.
• Shrek: After Fiona fights off Robin and his Merry Men, both she and Shrek are surprised to discover he'd sustained an injury. Justified in that Shrek's thick skin wouldn't necessarily feel the arrow going in.
  Fiona: There's an arrow in your butt!!
  Shrek: [looks at butt] Oh, would you look at that.
• In South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, this is Invoked in one of the songs, "La Resistance":
  They may cut your dick in half, and feed it to a pig,
  And though it hurts you'll laugh, and dance a dickless jig!
• In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, a Koopa Troopa asks what would happen if Peach rejects Bowser's marriage proposal, to which Bowser responds by killing him instantly with his fire breath. The resulting Dry Bones only reacts with casual annoyance at his newly-undead state.
• Ringo gets hit with several arrows in Yellow Submarine but he just casually pulls them out of himself and doesn't seem to be in any pain at all.

Films — Live-Action

• Alita: Battle Angel: In the climax, Nova has this reaction after Alita stabs him with the Damascus Blade, remarking as he looks down at the injury, "Well, that looks fatal." Justified since it's not really Nova that's been stabbed, but rather his main minion, Vector, whom he was puppeting.
• Apocalypto Jaguar Paw is impaled on a javelin while running away from the Aztec city. He pulls it out right through his body and carries on running.
• Though it doesn't involve actually injuring, the reaction of our hero and heroine in Attack of the Puppet People to being shrunk, put into suspended animation and only being let out for the toymaker's amusement, as well as almost getting killed by the puppet maker in a murder-suicide due to the cops getting suspicious... Tell him to move out from in front of the door (which he does) and storm out of the room like he had insulted them.
• Avatar:
  • Grace looks down at her blood-drenched hands and the bleeding gunshot wound in her side. Voice deadpan, she says "This is gonna ruin my whole day." The only time she shows any pain is a flat "ouch" after being jabbed with a syringe. Truth in Television, as the body pumps a lot of adrenaline into the system to try and cope with the wound, plus the potential for shock.
  • Quaritch also only deigns to acknowledge that his shoulder is on fire once his walker is deployed.
• In Backdraft, an explosion throws Rimgale backwards into an iron fence. One of the decorative spikes goes into his back and comes out through his shoulder. His reaction is a deadpan:
  Rimgale: Kid? I think I got a problem.
• In Billy Madison we see a clown fall from stilts and drop to the floor, bleeding from his mouth like he's dying... a little later, in a sudden musical number, he comes back, full of energy.
  Clown: Hey kids, it's me!
  I bet you thought that I was dead!
  But when I fell over I just broke my leg
  and got a hemorrhage in my head! [chuckles]
• In the 1937 film version of Captains Courageous, Manuel suffers an accident. As he is overboard in the ocean, he calmly states that he is as good as dead, because his entire lower body is gone. He speaks in Portuguese because he doesn't want Harvey to know. A member of the crew who does speak the language quietly translates for those who don't, but Harvey is left wondering why Manuel didn't climb back into the ship.
• A bit of a dark Running Gag in Chopper is for the title character to do this. He expresses only annoyance when his ears are being hacked off as part of a prison ploy. When he's being shanked multiple times by his former friend, Chopper's only reaction is to talk about how hurt his feelings are that his friend is betraying him. "Jimmy... if ya keep stabbing me, ya gunna kill me, right?"
• Deadpool:
  • Deadpool (2016): Given his sense of humor, and the fact that his Healing Factor gives him a skewed idea of what constitutes a major injury, Deadpool gets a lot of these.
    • In the highway fight, Deadpool's only reaction to having a bullet-hole straight through his arm is to wiggle his finger through the bullet hole and curse at the guy who just put it there (to be fair, Deadpool was already planning to kill him, so there was little point in getting more angry).
      Deadpool: MOTHERFUCKER!
    • Deadpool starts making Tyrannosaurus rex jokes after busting both of his wrists trying to punch Colossus. Once he breaks a leg, he goes on about "the one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest". It gets to where he's lampshading the Black Knight with his limbs just being broken instead of gone, not that them being gone would be any more troublesome.
    • Wade is stabbed in the head with a knife, but when he sees his beloved Vanessa, he starts seeing cute animals surround her, makes romantic gestures and has Chicago playing in his head. This could also be happening because keeping the knife in is preventing his body from healing the brain damage and making him hallucinate.
    • Ajax too, being immune to pain, tends to react with nothing more than annoyance to life-threatening wounds, including being skewered by a katana.
  • Continues in Deadpool 2, where his response to being repeatedly shot by Cable while trying (and failing) to deflect his bullets is to just nod and say "Your bullets are really fast!"^note The original version of the movie had him saying ow in a more casual, yet a bit pained tone. Later on, he's mostly just annoyed when the Juggernaut literally tears him in half.
• Death Bed: The Bed That Eats:
  • In this narmful classic, one of the protagonists gets all the flesh melted off his hands when he foolishly tries to pull a victim out of the Death Bed. Instead of showing any sign of pain at all, he just stares at his skeletal hands in Dull Surprise for a long time and offhandedly remarking how the way the bones detach from the ligaments means the tissue's died. Gee, you think?
  • Another character remarks on being eaten alive in the same tone most people would note their shoe is untied.
• In Dirty Work, Mitch (Norm Macdonald) has this reaction to being raped in prison:
  Mitch: You fellas have a lot of growing up to do, I'll tell you that. Ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Can you believe these characters? Way out of line. Way out of line. Have a good mind to go to the warden about this. You know what hurts the most is the... the lack of respect. You know? That's what hurts the most. Except for the... Except for the other thing. That hurts the most. But the lack of respect hurts the second most.
• In The Hangover: Part 2 Teddy is more curious than concerned about his missing finger. What makes it worse is that he's a talented musician and training to be a surgeon, two professions that generally require skillful hands with all fingers intact. Not only has he irretrievably lost a digit — and could possibly have any number of infections from the wound — but his surgical career could well be in trouble.
• In The Hobbit, upon having his belly slashed open, the Great Goblin remarks, "That'll do it."
• Hilariously done during the climax of Hot Shots! Part Deux when an enemy soldier shoots at Topper Harley in the leg and he responds with an annoyed "Ow!" before causally riddling him with bullets.
• In Jason X, a teen gets his arm chopped off, has his wound sealed temporarily, and then is brought back to the medical bay to have the limb reattached. Granted, he's a bit of a stoner, and it's far enough in the future that painkillers are probably excellent, but seeing him carry his own arm back with him (and crack jokes about it while doing so) is definitely this trope.
• Jennifer's Body has a few, justified due to the title character being a demonically-possessed quasi-succubus. Near the end, she gets speared through, and this is all she has to say:
  Jennifer: [pulling the bar out] Ow. Ow. [drops it] [beat] Got a tampon?
• In Johnny Dangerously, a gangster gets shot, but his only reaction is to note that he's got a hole in his suit. Soon after, he keels over from smoking. Don't smoke, kids!
• Kull the Conqueror: Queen Akivasha reacts with boredom when one of her co-conspirators stabs her in the chest with a dagger after he realizes who's really in charge. He gets fired for his troubles.
• In The Last Circus Javier simply does not behave like someone who's recovering from internal bleeding and has several broken ribs, to put it mildly.
• Lone Survivor: While many of the SEALs reactions to getting shot would certainly count as this, the most extreme example comes from Matt Axelson after he took a round to the head. His reaction almost seems amused.
  Axe: Did they really shoot me in the fucking head?
  Marcus: Yeah, buddy.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Boromir merely grunts, drops to his knees, then gets right back up and keeps fighting after being shot with an arrow. It's not until the third that he stays down, and even then he's more concerned about failing the Fellowship than the fact that he has three arrows sticking out of his chest. Bear in mind that the shafts of these arrows were themselves a full inch in diameter.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Tony Stark in the first Iron Man movie is remarkably calm when he tells Pepper that she's just caused him to go into cardiac arrest. Though this might cross over into Danger Deadpan; he might just be trying to act unconcerned because if Pepper freaks out he's royally screwed. Even Tony's reaction to getting a shrapnel bomb explode into his chest is subdued, he unbuttons his shirt to check if his vest took the brunt of it, notices he's bleeding and just lets his arms go loose.
  • Iron Man 2: Played with when Tony's palladium poisoning is clearly causing him discomfort, but he chooses not to tell anybody about it, instead making subtler preparations for his death such as appointing Pepper CEO and letting Rhodey take the Mk II. Of course, Tony was going to make Pepper an omelet and tell her, but he never got a chance.
  • It's almost a Mythology Gag by the time of Avengers: Endgame as a time-travelling Ant-Man causes 2012 Tony to go into cardiac arrest as a distraction and after a brief seizure 2012 Thor restarts his heart and Tony, instead of being in shock at his near death, says, "That worked a treat... dude that was so crazy." In the same scene, presents day-Tony in disguise is only slightly winded at getting door-smacked by The Hulk, more concerned that he lost the Tesseract.
  • Thor's reaction to getting stabbed in the gut by his brother Loki in The Avengers is a slight wince before he wrecks his brother. We do see Thor slightly off-balance later but still no worse for wear compared to Tony, Cap, and Natasha who can barely stand; justified as he is an Asgardian and they aren't.
  • In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor just grunts in pain at Hela taking his freaking eyeball out with her blade.
  • Black Widow in Captain America: The Winter Soldier gets shot in the shoulder and despite clearly being in pain has entire expositional conversation with Cap and Falcon while captured. It's only towards the end of the scene that her friends notice how much blood she's losing and she gets saved and patched up shortly after.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy:
    • Thanks to being a Plant Person, Groot's reaction to Gamora hacking off his arms with her Cool Sword is only mild pain. If anything he just looks more saddened that someone would do that to him.
    • Similarly, Nebula being a Cyborg has no reaction to hacking off her own arm or resetting her jaw after it gets dislocated. Not to mention she's used to pain and torture from growing up as The Unfavorite under Thanos, who made her into a cyborg by removing a part of her body every time she lost a battle.
  • At one point in Ant-Man, Scott sics a bunch of bullet ants on one of the guards. The guy reacts as if he's been stung by a bee, rather than collapsing into a quivering mass of blinding pain and muscle spasms. The sting of the bullet ant is more than 100 times as painful as a honey bee sting and is about as painful as getting hit by a bullet. Maybe if the man had acted realistically, it would have seemed too cruel.
  • In Black Panther Killmonger's reaction to T'challa stabbing him in the chest with a spearhead.
    Killmonger: [breathing hard] Helluva move...
  • Played with in Avengers: Infinity War as Thanos's reaction to getting Stormbreaker lodged in his chest by a powerfully pissed-off Thor is clearly a pained one, especially when Thor pushes it in deeper. But the Titan still casually remarks to Thor that he should've aimed for the head before snapping his fingers and wiping out half the life in the universe. Straighter after Thanos casually takes Stormbreaker out, heals his chest and slips away through a portal.
  • In Captain Marvel, Nick Fury seems only moderately annoyed at Goose scratching his eye, apparently because he (incorrectly) assumes it will heal.
  • Spidey has a pretty big one in Spider-Man: Far From Home as he gets collected by a High-Speed Rail after getting tricked onto the tracks by Mysterio. Afterwards the worst he seems to have gotten from it is a slight limp.
  • In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda gets out from the Mirror Dimension with her limbs distorted and a lot of lacerations. She doesn't seem to notice the pain or being wounded in general, while she is rearranging her limbs and healing her wounds.
  • During the climax of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Raimi-verse version of Peter Parker is stabbed in the back by Green Goblin. Despite a brief fake-out that it might be fatal he survives, claiming it's no big deal as he's been stabbed before. He continues to put on a brave face until the MCU Peter leaves him alone with the Webb-verse Peter. The latter quietly says, "You're in so much pain, huh?", to which Raimi-verse Peter just smiles and says "I am."
• In The Matrix Revolutions Trinity is run through with a huge piece of rebar. There's little to no blood, she doesn't even cough or moan, just gives a quite but loooooong parting speech before finally dying. Neo is also commendably indifferent to the fact that his eyes have been burnt out.
• Mickey Blue Eyes provides a subversion. Frank is aiming a gun at Michael, and the latter asks if this is going to hurt. Frank says, "Not a bit." BANG BANG! Two red spots appear on Michael's chest, while he calmly says that it actually did hurt quite a lot. The subversion? They were practicing for a fake assassination. The gun was loaded with blanks, and the bullet holes were fakes rigged by a mechanism Michael was carrying.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
  • The Black Knight. He has all his limbs cut off one by one and the reaction each time is to deny that it would keep him from fighting.
  • As well as Lancelot's squire Concord, whom upon being tragically, fatally wounded by an arrow bearing a note, calls out "Message for you, sir!"
• In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a British officer based in Africa takes a very blase attitude about losing a leg to a tiger. However, part of that might come from the fact that he seems to believe that his leg will grow back.
• One of the police officers in Mystic River recounts a story about a guy who walked into the emergency room with a knife sticking out of his shoulder and asked the nurse where the Coke machine was.
• During Night at the Museum, Teddy Roosevelt gets cut in half by a wagon wheel. His response goes along the lines of "Well, that's problematic." Justified, as he is a wax replica, but it's probably how the real Teddy would've reacted to getting cut in half too.
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Cliff reacts to getting stabbed in the leg with mild curiosity and barely seems fazed by it, and is still able to pummel Katie to death before eventually collapsing. Of course, being drunk and tripping balls on acid, as well as in the middle of an adrenaline rush, probably helped a lot.
• Dr. Ferreiro from Pan's Labyrinth, when he is shot in the back by Captain Vidal; he doesn't even flinch and continues walking.
• Red from Pineapple Express sustains injuries that should, by all logic, kill him and only agrees to go to a hospital after breakfast, which may be several hours after the climactic fight. Though, he was stoned out of his mind so he didn't feel it.
• The Pink Panther: Whenever Chief Inspector Dreyfus suffers his accidental Amusing Injuries, such as stabbing himself with a letter opener or shooting his nose off, he gives surprisingly subdued reactions — mostly, calling to his assistant that "I seem to have just ____."
• Frequently justified in Pirates of the Caribbean, since it's usually happening to some kind of undead. Some of them follow it up with a one-liner.
• Pride has the main lion pride come out of fighting with the Wanderers, a band of rogue lions. In the aftermath, one of the lions (James) remarks that his fellow leader's ear had been torn off. Eddie responds by laughing it off and sharing a joke about it with James.
• In Pulp Fiction, immediately after a rape:
  Butch Coolidge: You okay?
  Marsellus Wallace: Naw, man. I'm pretty fuckin' far from okay.
• In Rubber, Lieutenant Chad asks to be shot in the chest twice and does not react at all. In fact, he doesn't seem to be actually injured at all. He does it to demonstrate to his fellow officers that they are all fictional characters in a film.
• The shock/panic variant of this trope occurs in Saving Private Ryan:
  • Sgt. Horvath gets shot several times throughout the final battle and it doesn't really even seem to slow him down. As he's running across the bridge, he takes one in the back and the bullet passes straight through him, which he brushes off with "Just got the wind knocked outta me, sir. I'm fine." He dies of that wound shortly afterwards.
  • A G.I. in shock on Omaha Beach picks up the arm that just got torn off his shoulder and walks away.
• In Scarface Tony Montana is shot a number of times through the torso. As he is currently high on cocaine, it just makes him angry.
• A Serious Man opens with a Jewish couple in 19th-century Poland being visited by an elderly acquaintance. The wife claims that the man died three years ago and that their visitor is a dybbuk, a demonic spirit possessing his corpse. To prove her point, she stabs the old man in the heart with an ice pick...and he simply laughs it off and leaves. Whether or not he really was a dybbuk or if something else was at play is not explained, setting the tone for the rest of the film.
• In Spider-Man, the Green Goblin, played by Willem Dafoe, spends much of the film chewing as much scenery as he can. At the end, when he is about to be impaled by his own glider, his only reaction is a soft "Oh".
• Played with in Starship Troopers. A number of the casualties are screaming in extreme pain on the battlefield or back at the base hospital. But at the end, Carmen has a four-inch diameter bug leg shoved through her shoulder and is fighting with a heavy combat rifle a short time later. By all rights, she shouldn't be able to lift her arm. As well, Lt. Rasczak has his entire lower half bitten off by bugs and seems to ignore the pain only seconds later. Rasczak at least has shock and major endorphins to keep him from feeling too much pain. Still no excuse for Carmen lifting a battle rifle.
• In Solo: A Star Wars Story, the Caper Crew is executing a Train Job when Ace Pilot Rio gets shot in the shoulder. He claims he's all right, but Beckett sees the way their AT-Hauler is wobbling and knows that he's not all right. Rio dies minutes later.
• Maximilian from Vampire in Brooklyn, being an invulnerable undead creature and all that.
  Maximilian: Interesting. I've been stabbed, and I've been hanged, and I've been burned. Even broken on the rack once, but I've never been shot before. Kind of itches a little!
• The shop teacher in UHF cuts off his thumb while demonstrating a table saw. His reaction, as (fake) blood sprays all over George: "Would you look at that? Just call me 'Mr. Butterfingers'. I think it's on the floor somewhere. Is my face red!"
• In Waterloo, toward the end of the battle, the British general Wellington and his Number Two Uxbridge seem to survive a near miss from a cannon shot intact when suddenly Uxbridge looks down...
  Uxbridge: [calmly] My God, sir, I've lost my leg.
  Wellington: My God, sir, so you have.
• In the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, Carol at one point rips off Douglas' arm. Douglas reacts to it in a tone of mild annoyance. Later on, he has a stick where the arm used to be.
  Douglas: That was my favorite arm!
• In Wrongfully Accused, Hibbing Goodhue is shot several times by an assailant. His response: "Ouch." He then tries to get a Band-Aid while he continues to be shot. His final words are "Have you quite finished?"
• In Zombieland, Bill Murray reacts to the buckshot to the chest in an "oh, this is unfortunate" sort of tone and goes out pretty calmly. Being high as a kite might've had something to do with his nonchalance.

Jokes

• And, of course, the classic old joke, which is also about Stiff Upper Lip:
  Two young subalterns are sitting in the officers' mess, talking about what wonderful chaps their troops are, how brave and hard-working and loyal to Queen and Country. And sitting nearby, the grumpy old colonel looks up and tells them: "Nonsense. You young whipper-snappers don't know quality. Why, I remember when I was at Poona in '76, after a battle I found one of my men pinned to a tree. One of the enemy horsemen had driven his lance clean through the fellow's belly. He was still alive, poor fellow."
  "Good God, man," I said to him, "does that hurt?"
  "Only when I laugh, sir."
• Ardal O'Hanlon does a bit about how people are not as tough as they used to be and older folks have a higher tolerance for discomfort even when terminally ill.
  "How have you been?"
  "Oh, not bad."
  "What about the terrible searing pain?"
  "Well, it helps to pass the time."
• A lawyer is parking his BMW on the street. He's about to close his driver's side door when he hears the honk of an oncoming semi-truck. He presses against the side of the car and watches in horror as the truck barely misses him, shearing his car's door off in the process. As the truck drives away, he yells at a nearby police officer, "Officer! Look what that guy did to my Beemer!" The officer looks at the lawyer and responds, "Shouldn't you be more concerned with what he did to your arm?" The lawyer looks down at his arm, which is now a bleeding stump. "Shit!" he shouts. "That guy got my Rolex too!"
• Jeff Foxworthy has a joke about how men are conditioned not to cry, and gives this example:
  Foxworthy: A man could saw his leg off at the knee, and he would just hop around like "I'm alright! I'm alright! Just toss that leg in the cooler and grab me a beer, I'm alright!"
• Similarly, Denis Leary talked about how much of a man's man his dad was, and how, when he accidentally took his thumb off with a circular saw, he taped it back on with electrical tape and drove himself to the hospital, having denied his wife driving him instead because being seen in a car driven by a woman was too much of a threat to his masculinity. Subsequently, he and his brother realized they would never have the right to complain about something after witnessing that.

Literature

• Ai no Kusabi:
  • Iason Mink doesn't even wince when his legs are cut off just above the knees. Justified, as Iason is a member of a race of "engineered" men, and, among other things, it isn't exactly a given whether they feel physical pain at all.
  • Riki is rather calm and even understanding when he wakes up to find out that he got an impromptu penectomy.
• The main character of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan says something like "I wish you'd stop doing that!" every time his head is ripped off... and immediately resurrected. An even more outrageous reaction we get at one point is, while his head has been ripped in half, his mouth remaining, and the stump is spewing blood in a geyser-like fashion, he thanks Dokuro for saving him from the other angel trying to kill him.
• In Catch-22, Snowden literally has his guts blown out of his body after being hit with anti-aircraft fire. His only reaction is to moan softly, "I'm cold, I'm cold", over and over again.
• Chrysalis (RinoZ): To a certain extent this is justified, given how much can be accomplished with monster Healing Factors and healing magic. Still, Mendant is unimpressed with how blasé Anthony is about being blown up and sliced apart to the point where what's left of him has to be carried into the hospital.
  Anthony: Some sort of laser thing. Absolute rubbish. Anyway, spot of healing, I'll be fine. Hit me up Mendant and I'll be on my way.
  Mendant: You'll be here for at least a day. I'm assuming your healing gland is empty?
  Anthony: I think it needs to regrow...
• Codex Alera: Aquitainus Attis matter-of-factly describing his mortal injuries to Amara and Ehren in excruciating, even slightly snarky, detail. Justified here by magic: Metalcrafters have the ability to suppress their own feelings, including pain.
• In Companions Codex, Tos'un Armgo is folded in half when his dragon mount crashes on a mountainside, even musing on how his buttocks have hit his shoulderblades and his hips are pulverised. After the fact, he lies in the snow and watches Afafrenfere fight Aurbangras without so much as a groan of pain. It is implied, however, that he's in shock since he starts feeling pain some time afterwards.
• Dave Barry's Guide to Guys: "Guys always say it's 'just a sprain,' because this way they can avoid falling into the clutches of medical care. A guy could have one major limb lying on the ground a full ten feet from the rest of his body, and he'd claim it was 'just a sprain.'" To illustrate this point, Dave Barry offers an anecdote about a guy who broke his ankle while on a fishing trip with some other guys, and neither he nor they noticed the seriousness of his injury until the next day, when his wife observed that one of his legs had become so swollen he could hardly walk.
• This image◊ from the 1965 dinosaur book Dinosaurs of the Earth. The dinosaur blog Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs dryly comments:
  ...although [Monoclonius] looks rather unconcerned about the whole thing, just standing idly by while T. rex takes a nibble.
• The second of Jenő Rejtő's Dirty Fred books starts with the Jimmy, the main character, looking for his knife, and finding it in the back of the guy he was asking. The guy insists on keeping it there or replacing it with a bigger one to prevent any bleeding until he gets medical attention. He got better.
• Discworld, Men at Arms:
  • Detritus is injured. The fact that he's injured at all is remarkable, as he's made of stone. When asked if it's normal for his cracks to be oozing a thick liquid, his only reaction is "Dunno, sir. Never oozed before." Later followed up with "Ain't got time to ooze."
  • Vetinari tries to dismiss the gunshot that's just shattered his thigh with "No need, it's just a flesh wound."
• The Dresden Files:
  • In White Night, Ramirez looks down and says, "There's a knife in my leg", then "There's a knife in my gut", then "Holy crap, they match". Justified, because he's in shock.
  • Later on, in Cold Days Mac gets shot in the stomach. He just looks mildly perturbed for a Beat, then seems to remember this should incapacitate him and drops to a knee. This could be foreshadowing, depending on what WMG one subscribes to regarding Mac's identity.
  • There's a double instance also in Cold Days. Thomas, Harry, and Butters talk for several pages after a fight, while Butters stitches up Harry's wounds. Harry doesn't even notice having a three-inch gash in his ribs stitched up without anesthetic, a side effect of the Winter Knight mantle. After finishing, Butters finally notices Thomas had been walking around and talking for close to an hour with a gunshot wound in his torso.
    Butters: You've been shot!
    Thomas: Well. A little.
• In Genocidal Organ, a Super-Soldier gets his legs blown off but is able to keep fighting thanks to Emotion Suppression and nanomachines controlling the injury, only taking note of his mutilation in an abstracted manner.
• Drake from Gone might as well be the poster boy for this trope. We see signs of it in book 1 when he gets his arm cuts off, and the only real result is his Combat Tentacles. But it doesn't really show up until Plague when he leers while pulling a knife out of himself and shows no sign of pain while being literally cut to bits. It was pretty creepy.
• In His Dark Materials, Will Perry's first reaction to seeing his severed fingers on the ground is to note their resemblance to a bloody quotation mark and laugh.
• Somewhat subverted with Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when the activation of the Infinite Improbability Drive causes him to lose an arm and overreact... because he won't be able to operate his digital watch. (The old kind, with red LEDs which only light up when you press a button.)
  Arthur: That's all right, I've got them back now... granted, they're longer than I usually like them, but...
• In the final battle of Katanagatari, when Shichika fights Emonzaemon once becoming a Death Seeker after Togame's death, he doesn't even flinch from the many bullet wounds he's taken, and in fact has resolved to simply take all the bullets just to get an opening to attack. It reaches a head in the final exchange, where Shichika gets shot in the face and simply keeps going forward, allowing him to initiate the combo that allows him to kill Emonzaemon.
• Lockwood & Co. has Quill Kipps's reaction to his Belated Injury Realisation of a gaping abdominal stab wound — "Well. That's a mess. Typical. And I was feeling so chipper."
• In Lolita, Quilty is shot several times but continues to speak to his killer Humbert politely while dying.
• Ysbaddaden the Giant in the Mabinogion displays this several times. Early in the story, he throws three poisoned javelins at the protagonists, who catch them and throw them back at him, piercing him through the kneecap, chest, and eye (the last one going right through his head). Instead of screaming, passing out, or dropping dead like a normal person, he just yells a little about how much pain he's in. Even more so near the end, he finally gets his "shave" when a minor character with a grudge shears the flesh from his face. While obviously not happy, he doesn't even yell this time, but speaks to Culhwch pretty calmly before being dragged off to be beheaded.
• Martín Fierro: In Song III of the First Book of this Narrative Poem, Martin Fierro describes the Mapuche and Ranquel Indians (Natives from Argentina) as men who, when they spill his guts for a wound, don't even worry and will stuff them back in a moment.
• In The Outsiders, Ponyboy takes part in the huge greaser/Soc fight and then hitchhikes to the hospital to see his dying friend. On the way, the driver comments that Ponyboy is bleeding all over the car's seat. Ponyboy, who hadn't even noticed the injury, looks at the blood and dully apologizes.
• Penryn and the End of Days: In Angelfall, after a few days, the amputation of his wings doesn't seem to bother Raffe much, at least physically.
• The Fire Swamp scene in The Princess Bride is much darker than in the film. After being attacked by a trio of R.O.U.S.es, Westley begins packing mud onto his wounds, lest more of the creatures smell the blood and come after them. He screams at Buttercup (to pull her out of her shocked stupor) to help him. As they continue their journey, she asks about his wounds.
  Westley: I'm in something close to agony, but we can talk about it later.
• Pump Six and Other Stories: Thanks to "weeviltech", humans from "The People of Sand and Slag" are virtually indestructible. The story opens with the main character jumping off a speeding aircraft without a parachute, breaking half of the bones in his body and smashing most of his internal organs... and getting up as if nothing happened. The story then examines how this kind of ability would affect humanity as a species.
• Rebuild World: The dubiously sane Cyber Ninja Nelia, due to being a Full-Conversion Cyborg, isn't bothered much by being shot until the point she's just a head, with this contrasting to Akira's Why Won't You Die? frustration. Later on, being chopped into Half the Woman She Used to Be also doesn't faze her.
• In Redliners, a character mentions that a bad sunburn can cause more pain than some combat injuries, doubtless due to the sunburn being restricted to nerve-rich skin.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: Sofia dies in so many painful ways — crushing, burning, poison, dismemberment, high-speed impact, the works — and revives so many times, that she becomes rather inured to mere injury.
  Sofia: Ripping out an eye certainly wouldn't be the worst thing I've done to my body, not by a long shot, but it does make me a bit uncomfortable, somehow...
• The Scavenger Trilogy: Several characters maintain cool, sophisticated conversations after traumatic injury.
• In the fourth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the character Phil gets his leg crushed. He reacts to this with, "Well, this isn't too bad. My left leg is broken, but at least I'm right-legged." Somebody comments, "Gee, I thought he'd say something more along the lines of 'Aaaaah! My leg! My leg!'
• In the third book of The Seventh Tower, Milla stabs Shadowmaster Sushin through the chest with her sword. His response? He laughs it off, yanks the sword out, and proceeds to go about his business for the rest of the series ignoring the hole in his chest (greatly unsettling his minions, who do their best not to stare). Justified; he was possessed by Sharrakor at the time. Milla didn't actually injure the intangible Sharrakor, and he could make Sushin's body continue to function no matter how beat up it got, so why should he have made a big deal about it?
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Greatjon insults Robb Stark and has two of his fingers bitten off by Robb's direwolf. Defeated, the Greatjon grips his bleeding hand, makes a wisecrack, and laughs it off. Bran, who watches the whole thing, is flabbergasted.
• In Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch, the heroes are attacked by a murderous flock of Creepy Crows. One tears a strip of flesh off the face of one of The Men in Black, who just remarks "Ouch" before fighting back.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, X-wing pilot Hobbie Klivian, disabled in combat, has a shot fired through his cockpit that takes off his hand. He sighs, the narration says that it's been quite some time since he had a real left arm, and sticks the sparking stump into the new hole in the ceiling so that his pilot's suit will seal off the hole. Then he sticks his right foot into the new hole in the floor, and although his boot gets sucked off this gets sealed too. At some point, he collides with something and thinks that his foot may have just been sheared off, but that's okay. It's been a long time since he's had a real right foot.
  • In Darklighter, Hobbie is utterly nonchalant about losing his entire left arm and needing an artificial one. In the same issue, he ejects only to have a passing TIE fighter swipe off his leg. His reaction?
    Hobbie: I lost — I don't believe this! — My right shin and foot got clipped off! My suit's self-sealer worked... the wound's frozen already. No bleeding, minimal pressure loss. But it's starting to hurt.
    • And very soon after that, after a medpac was applied to the stump, he helped steal X-Wings by flying them out of storage. After that, he got a horrible infection, but again, he reacted very minimally. Hobbie is very prone to this sort of thing.
• Amoridere plays with this in her poem Syrup on Pancakes. The subject's injuries aren't too severe (only bad enough to need stitches) but she makes the titular comparison while she's bleeding from a head wound. Though, she's already dazed, so who knows what her reaction would have been.
• Truth or Dare: Patrick, a boy who died mysteriously decades ago, never reacted to being hit, according to his sister Joanna. Once another child threw a rock at him and left a large gash on his temple. His only reaction was to tilt his head so that the blood fell into the stream rather than onto his shirt, because he'd get in trouble for staining his clothes.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Rand's reaction to having one of his hands burned off is remarkably casual, which the other characters find very disturbing.
  • Talmanes indulges in some Gallows Humor in the last book of the series after he gets stabbed by a Myrddraal's blade, which is always fatal. He gets better, thanks to timely Aes Sedai intervention.
    Talmanes: Oh, that? I'm dying, unfortunately. Terribly tragic. You wouldn't happen to have any brandy, would you?
• In David Feldman's Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, a cartoon accompanying the entry on why paper cuts hurt so much depicts a man yelping after getting one while the woman on his left reacts to the knife sticking out of her back with a quiet "ouch".
• At one point in Worm, Taylor's reaction to having her arm crushed is to think "I just got a new one." At another time, she muses that she thinks her incredibly high pain tolerance is due to having been caught in one of Bakuda's bomb blasts early on; the bomb had the effect of causing maximized excruciating pain in anyone it hit. Having really experienced "true 10/10 pain", Taylor doesn't react as strongly to injury as many people would.

Live-Action TV

• One episode of The Amanda Show sees inept security guard Barney fall through a trapdoor that Penelope Taynt has created backstage. The hole goes all the way to a family's house in Beijing, China, which means that Barney must have passed through the center of the Earth itself—but his only response is to get up, ask for his location, and, noticing the family having lunch, say "Whatcha eatin'?"
• The Amazing Race:
  • In one season, Gretchen fell down in a cave and was shown with blood on her face from a head wound. Her response was more of "I always wanted a facelift."
  • Season 17 had Claire trying to topple a knight's armor with watermelons thrown from a slingshot. One of the watermelons backfired and hit Claire point-blank in the face. It didn't slow her down one bit as she and Brook ended up finishing second during that race.
• In Angel season 4, after he gets fatally shot by Wesley through a broken spot in his armored skin, Skip simply deadpans, "Well, that ain't right," before dropping dead.
• Breaking Bad: Upon being caught in the explosion of a homemade bomb, Gus has half his face blown off to the bone. His only reaction is to calmly walk out of the room and adjust his tie, before dropping dead.
• The Brittas Empire gives us this exchange in "Reviewing The Situation":
  Mr. Brittas: Colin! You alright?
  Colin: Fine, thank you, Mr. Brittas. I've just been shot through the head, that's all. Well, as they say, a mere flesh wound. I'll be back to work on Monday, can't let the side down when we're understaffed, eh?
• A dramatic example comes from the Battlestar Galactica (2003) episode "Faith". A Number 6 encounters Barolay who had tortured and killed the 6 on New Caprica. After an exchange of insults, the 6 gives Barolay a brutal beating, including grabbing her head and slamming it to the side of a Raptor. After the fight is broken, Barolay gets up and says "I'm ok. I'm ok" before collapsing and dying of a fractured skull.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "What's My Line, Part 2", Oz gets shot in the arm and comments, "It's odd. And painful."
  • In the episode "Consequences", Mr. Trick is staked by Faith before he can drain Buffy. His last words?
    Mr. Trick: [indignant and mildly shocked] Oh. No. No, this is no good at all...
  • In "The Freshman", when Sunday is staked, she looks at the stake sticking out of her chest, rolls her eyes, and puts her hands on her hips in annoyance as she turns to dust.
  • This is a Running Gag with Glory, a Nigh-Invulnerable Physical God who takes the form of a self-obsessed blonde. Every attempt by the Scoobies to punch her, shoot her with crossbows, or hit her over the head with crowbars results only in Glory griping over how rude they are or that they're messing up her hair.
  • In "Seeing Red", Tara has a Fatal Injury Underreaction when Warren unintentionally shoots her through the heart after trying to kill Buffy. She has just enough time to frown in confusion and say "Your shirt" when seeing the blood spatter on Willow's blouse before collapsing and dying.
  • Willow's evil selves have a habit of doing this. In "Doppelgangland", Vampire Willow's reaction to being shot with a tranquilizer dart, perilously near her heart, is a whiny "Bitch!" at her prime self. Dark Willow does it twice, once when Warren axes her in the back trying to get away in "Villains" ("Axe? Not gonna cut it.") and when Giles blasts her across the room with magic in "Grave" ("That was... rude! I forgot what I was saying!").
• Chicago Fire has a particularly spectacular example in the episode where the crew have to deal with the aftermath of a tornado. A teenage boy comes running up to the fire truck to let them know that his mother is trapped in a partially-collapsed house. They take some further details and are getting ready to send a couple of firefighters to the address to assess the situation when one of them happens to look the right way... and sees a shard of plate glass sticking out of the boy's back. Sheer adrenaline had prevented him from even feeling it.
• This Description Cut from Corner Gas:
  Emma: Knitting never hurt anyone!
  [Whip Pan]
  Old Woman: [with knitting needle driven completely through her arm, confused] Now how did I do that?
• In CSI: NY a bike courier pedaling at top speed was stabbed, resulting in a severed artery and a hairline fracture of the pelvis. He was so high on adrenaline he didn't even notice he was bleeding out.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Tenth Doctor's reaction to having his hand cut off in "The Christmas Invasion" is a mildly annoyed "You cut off my hand!" Of course, he immediately proceeds to grow himself a new one, which probably accounts for his lack of concern (though you'd think it would still hurt).
  • Auton Rory gets one when relating his own death when he reappears to the Doctor's shock in "The Pandorica Opens".
    Rory: Well, I died. And then I was a Roman. It's very distracting.
  • This seems to run in the family. Rory's daughter River Song reacts quite similarly throughout "Let's Kill Hitler". She gets shot in the chest and doesn't tell anyone for minutes, before finally saying, "Hitler. Lousy shot." Later, after regenerating, she gets riddled with bullets but just smiles smugly at the Nazi guards.
    River Song: Here's a tip. Don't shoot a girl when she's regenerating!
• In an early episode of ER, "Blizzard", a young black man nonchalantly walks up to Dr. Doug Ross with a loose bandage around one hand. Dr. Ross removes it, to find the man's thumb missing. He is keeping it in a small plastic bag. Doug has Malik wheel him straight upstairs to surgery.
• When Cotyar gets shot in the stomach in the season 2 finale of The Expanse, he doesn't even notice until Bobbi points it out to him.
• Friends:
  • In "TOW All The Thanksgivings", Phoebe has a flahback to a past life where she was a nurse during the American Civil War. As she's tending to a patient, an explosion blows her left arm clean off just below the shoulder. Nurse "Phoebe" reacts with a mildly annoyed "Oh, no" when she sees the damage.
  • In the Alternate Universe of "The One That Could Have Been", Phoebe is a high-strung workaholic stockbroker who gets a heart attack, but treats it as more of a minor inconvenience.
• The Greatjon, in Game of Thrones, has two fingers bitten off by a direwolf when he draws his sword on Robb Stark. He then has the presence of mind to de-escalate the situation before it gets further out of hand by making a joke at his own expense while he stands there with a bleeding maimed hand.
  Robb: My Lord Father taught me it was death to bare steel against your liege lord. Doubtless, the Greatjon only meant to cut my meat for me.
  Greatjon: [holding a hand with two ragged stumps] Your meat... is bloody tough. [laughter]
• Whenever James May is injured on The Grand Tour, he lets out a deadpan "ow." Even when he gets a dumpster dropped on him while sitting in his car. Or when his co-presenters are working him over with sledgehammers. Or when his car goes off the edge of a cliff and down the side of a very steep mountain with him still in it...
• Haven: Thanks to his Feel No Pain Trouble, Nathan invariably has this reaction to very serious injuries. In one episode, he's impaled by half a dozen industrial nails. At his partner Audrey's horrified reaction, he casually tells her he's fine and the wounds will bleed less if the nails are left in until the case is over.
• The related shows Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess had most of the protagonists be incredibly tough because they are half-gods or hung around with and battled half- or full-gods, so most injuries that are less than lethal are usually shrugged off as par for the course. One of the more specific incidents involves Xena having her shoulder dislocated mid-battle; she doesn't even notice until someone points it out, bangs against a wall of the cave they are in (strongly enough to cause a tiny tremor) to pop it back into its socket, and then continues on without breaking pace. At least everyone around had the decency to have "did that just happen?" expressions on.
• The Hexer: When group of witchers get ambushed by hungry elves, one of them takes half a dozen of arrows in his chest and is still fighting back. The other is practically dying, but still beheads his attackers, get back to Kaer Morhen and gives a report without as much as a squirm. Right after that he succumbs to his wounds.
• One episode of House opens with a girl receiving a compound fracture in her leg during a car accident. When asked if she's hurt, she looks down, sees the shard of bone sticking out, and declares "I'm fine." Justified here in that she has Congenital Insensitivity to Pain.
• In The Invisible Man, Darien and Hobbes come across a young woman who has been injected with a retrovirus designed to make her smarter. In addition to her tattered clothes and off-putting manner, the fact that she's walking across glass barefoot without noticing makes it clear that something is very wrong.
• In Justified's Season 3 finale, Big Bad Robert Quarles has his arm severed by Elston Limehouse's meat cleaver. His reaction is to stare at it in shock and then try to grab it back from Raylan Givens, who is holding it. Likely justified by the number of pain killers in Quarles' bloodstream at the time, coupled with his blatant insanity.
• Kamen Rider Dragon Knight:
  • Kit's reaction to being vented is first just dazed what and then slightly shaky assurance that everything is ok, while it's obviously. Shock may have been at play.
  • Chris had similar reaction upon being vented himself.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid plays with this as while the delivery is far from deadpan, it is also far from appropriate reaction. The aftermath of Taiga Hanaya losing a fight against Graphite is one of the most gory scenes that had transpired in the main continuity tv-series (not counting V-cinema, spin-off and so on) in quite a few years. He is bleeding all over, in great pain, and coughing up blood. He is aware of his state enough to try and deter other Doctor riders from providing him with first aid, knowing he doesn't have very long to live. Yet, this doesn't seem to bother him as much as that he lost the aforementioned fight and is going to leave Nico on her own. Whether shock has been at play depends on the interpretations as this actually fits him perfectly.
  Taiga: ...sorry, I can't take care of you anymore.
• Lost: In "Sundown", Sayid stabs "Locke" right in the chest; his reaction?
  "Locke": Now, what'd you go and do that for?
• Mad TV plays it for Black Comedy in "Paul Timberman's Workshop". Paul Timberman is a horribly inept handyman hosting a DIY show. He maims himself while using tools, then hastily bandages the injury to keep the show rolling. Doesn't matter to him if his blood spurts all over his latest project...
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: The "Appeal for Sanity" sketch features the Reverend Arthur Belling, who seems largely unperturbed by the axe stuck in his head.
• Invoked in the Mork & Mindy episode "Mork's Mixed Emotions", where Mork demonstrates to Mindy that he has subdued all of his emotions by hitting himself in the hand with a blunt object, at which (having developed a bit of a Creepy Monotone) he affirms, yes, you bet that hurts. "Ow."
• This is how Mystery Science Theater 3000 interprets the Humphrey Bogart-type getting shot in "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank".
  Mike: I guess I'm more disappointed than shot.
• MythBusters: In keeping with his role as The Stoic, Jamie Hyneman is prone to these. Example from the "Exploding Jawbreaker" myth:
  Jamie: Ouch. Okay, that's really hot. Yeah, you could get a serious burn from that. [beat] In fact, I think I just did.
• In an episode of NCIS, "Ducky" Mallard is suddenly attacked by a knife-wielding assailant while examining a body at a crime scene. After the attacker is stopped, Ducky dismisses his own injury as "just a defensive wound." The knife is still impaled in his hand when he says this.
• Patriot: When John is on his way to steal the pistol of a grocery clerk, he provides narration in the form of a folk song about how easy it's going to be, and that he'll probably have beers with his friends afterwards. In the grocery, John and several of his friends get shot at before they manage to take the clerk down and grab his pistol. The group then calmly exits and walks down the street nonchalantly. With no change in the song's pitch, John's narration suspects that several of his friends have been shot, and he's pretty sure that he's missing two fingers. The song concludes that they probably won't be getting beers.
• In the Person of Interest episode "Relevance":
  Shaw: We need to move. Now.
  Cole: [suffering from multiple gunshot wounds, and seconds from bleeding out] Ah, that's gonna be tough.
• There is a particularly harsh example in the German Crime Series Polizeiruf 110, where a bomb explosion in a crowded Munich pedestrian underpass throws a brick against the back of the head of a young woman. In the minutes following the detonation, she stumbles around among the dead and dying, nonchalantly looking for her purse. A few minutes later, she is dead herself.
• Played for Drama in Prison Break when Charles Westmoreland is stabbed by Brad Bellick. He can't go to the infirmary or he'll blow the escape plan, which seals his fate, but he's able to stay alive and conceal his injury long enough for the Fox River Eight to enact their escape plan.
• Red Dwarf:
  • This exchange in "Quarantine":
    Lister: Kryten! Are you OK?
    Kryten: I have a medium-sized fire axe buried in my spinal column. This sort of thing can really put a crimp on your day.
  • Also, the last words of waxwork Noel Coward after being shot in the chest in "Meltdown":
    Noel Coward: Oh, shot!
• Scrubs:
  • In one episode, Jordan gets her face Botoxed so much that she isn't able to make facial expressions. At one point, another character accidentally hurts her and she says with a straight face (and a fairly monotonous voice): "I think you separated my shoulder. The pain is excruciating."
  • Similarly, when Cox tests this by asking her to show him "funny, sad, etc". When he asks for angry, she kicks him in the nuts and he remarks "you got angry down" as he falls.
  • There was also a brief sequence in an earlier episode in which a Japanese chef with a butcher's knife embedded in his shoulder flatly replies to the obvious question: "Does what hurt?" This is part of a series of examples of how different people deal with pain differently, another example given was a husband standing next to his wife who is in labor when he happens to bite his lip and exclaim "Nothing has ever hurt this much!"
  • The first appearance of Ben has him act nonchalant despite having accidentally nailed his hand to a plank of wood. In fact, it's actually J.D. who faints at the sight of it. Dr. Cox mentions doping Ben up with drugs so he wouldn't feel it, but he's still fairly blase about the whole thing, at one point even telling JD to lick the tip of the nail.
  • In one fantasy sequence, Janitor cuts off J.D.'s arm with a circular saw. As blood comically squirts from the wound he simply replies "Aw, man... Give it back" while Janitor slaps him in the face with his own hand asking him "Only after you tell me why you're hitting yourself".
• In one episode of Sirens (US) Johnny, Hank and Brian respond to a call at a construction site where one of the workers has been impaled by a piece of re-bar. Impaled Guy, however, is more concerned about his coworker who fainted after witnessing the impalement. He also expects to receive a big payout from the city over the accident and talks with the paramedics about the bar he plans to buy all the way to the hospital.
• In the Smallville episode "Nemesis", Clark is weakened enough by Kryptonite dust that his left arm is skewered by a piece of shrapnel, but doesn't even notice it until Lex calls his attention to the blood running down his arm.
• Jack O'Neill, Stargate SG-1. The episode where Carter and O'Neill discover the second Gatein Antarctica. When Carter sets O'Neill's broken leg, he groans, "Jagged bone grinding into nerves hurts. Who knew?"
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Samaritan Snare", Captain Picard relates the story of how he received his artificial heart, explaining that when he was a rebellious cadet, he got involved in a bar fight and ended up getting stabbed through the heart. Strangely, the thing he remembers most about it is wondering why he started laughing?! This is later shown in a flashback in "Tapestry", where even Q seems oddly disturbed by this bizarre reaction.
• In one episode of Supernatural, Castiel takes the brothers back in time, a difficult feat at his current power level. Upon landing in the past with a Psychic Nosebleed, Dean asks if he's okay, and he says he's fine, and a lot better than he expected. He then immediately spits out blood and collapses against a car. Which begs the question of what he expected...
• One episode of Todd and the Book of Pure Evil has a girl get her heart ripped out. She just says "Hey! I need that!".
• In the fifth season of The Wire, a homeless marine suffering from PTSD tells one of his war stories that haunts him to a reporter. The story is about a friend of his being wounded by an IED and having both his hands blown off. The friend responds by laughing hysterically and shouting "Look, ma! No hands!"
• One clip on World's Dumbest... features a skateboarder who falls and severely breaks his arm. However, rather than crying out in pain, his only reaction is a deadpan "Dude, I broke my arm. Look how gnarly it is."

Music

• Eminem uses this joke frequently in Slim Shady EP and The Slim Shady LP to keep the violent material from getting too heavy.
  • In "Low Down, Dirty", Slim has a bullet hole in his neck. That he put there.
  • In "My Name Is", the pedestrians Slim's running over in a spaceship shout back "let's just be friends!" ^note This was originally the voices of some lesbians he was raping, but it had to be altered in order to obtain the sample clearance.
  • In "Brain Damage", Slim's mother hits him so hard his entire brain falls out of his skull and lands on the floor. He yells some abuse at her, picks it up, sews it back into his head, and puts "a couple of bolts" in his neck.
  • In "Role Model":
    Will someone please explain to my brain
    That I just severed the main vein with a chainsaw and I'm in pain?
  • In "I'm Shady", Slim tells you to shoot him "25 times in the same spot", then announces, "Ow."
• From the final verse of "ECNALUBMA" by They Might Be Giants, still sung in John Linnel's deadpan tone:
  Help me out, I can't seem to get this window open
  Never mind, now it's open
  I think my hand is broken
• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • In the third verse of "A Complicated Song", the narrator gets his head knocked off by a roller coaster and complains that being decapitated is "a major inconvenience".
  • In "Jurassic Park", the narrator remarks that being disemboweled makes him "kind of mad".

Myths & Religion

• The Thebaid: Tydeus walks into the palace of Argos shining with the joy of victory, so absorbed in pride that he barely notices the excruciating pain of all his bleeding and pulsing battle wounds.

Podcasts

• The protagonist of The Lost Cat at various times gets turned inside out and loses his skull. Neither fazes him much, probably because he lives in a very surreal world to begin with.
• Sargas from Sequinox gets stabbed by Summer in the middle of his opening monologue about how it's nice to be humanized despite being an undying star. He finishes the monologue before even noticing.

Pro Wrestling

• Professional wrestlers have a concept called "kayfabe," originally meaning the portrayal of the events as real, but has come to mean the ability to stay in character despite anything that might happen, including horrific injuries that should lay someone out for months.
• 5 Reasons Pro Wrestlers are the Best Actors in the World
• Akira Hokuto broke her neck during a tag team match in 1987. She went on to finish the match holding her head in place with her hands. She would also incur a number of other painful injuries (broken ribs and smashed knee, to name a few) where she would either wrestle through the pain or the match would be stopped by the promotion itself.
• Mick Foley made a career out of this sort of thing.
  • His 1994 WCW feud with Vader was exceptionally brutal, yet Cactus Jack never stopped. Highlights include a broken nose and dislocated jaw, another broken nose, a severe concussion, and losing a chunk of his right ear during a 1994 house show in Munich to the inordinately tight ring ropes.
  • During his Hell in the Cell match with The Undertaker, he suffered: a dislocated shoulder, a concussion, had a tooth pop out through the roof of his mouth and get stuck in his nose, a hole torn in his lower lip, and he had dozens of thumbtacks stuck in his body by the end of the match. His reaction to all of that was not having one.
• Not to be outdone, Vader's All Japan/New Japan match with Stan Hansen started with Hansen breaking his nose with an errant swing of his bullrope and then later thumbing Vader's right eye out of the socket during an exchange of punches. He popped it back in and continued. Vader and Hansen are notorious as the stiffest workers in the history of the business.
• This was one of Sabu's claims to fame, or infamy as the case may be. He was known for doing things like unwrapping the tape around his wrist to instead put it around his head hold his broken jaw shut, seriously injure a leg/knee/ankle and STILL do a half dozen jumping moves, or nearly cut his entire stomach open and just run out to the ringside and superglue the wound shut, or seeing his bicep torn open on barbed wire and looking merely displeased (and seems not to notice Terry Funk give him a neckbreaker through two chairs, focused as he is on taping up his arm). The only time he actually seemed to care about being hurt was when he realized he broke his *neck* taking a back body drop wrong... And just left the ring long enough to be sure he wasn't completely paralyzed and then finished the match.
• At the Beyond Wrestling Armory Amore on September 30, 2012, Charade botched a double moonsault and landed on his head, fracturing his skull. He attempted to continue the match, kicking out of Black Baron's first pin attempt, but not the second. It was only his third professional match. Fortunately, he recovered in six months and now wrestles for Chikara as Shynron.
• Shane McMahon was well-known for his willingness to do crazy stunts, but one relatively mundane one - being thrown through glass — messed up in a big way in his match against Kurt Angle at King of the Ring. The glass was supposed to be sugar glass, which is easily breakable... it was actually plate glass. After two attempted suplexes, resulting in landing on his head on concrete, Shane kept insisting they do the spot, going through on the third attempt. He insisted the same for the next pane of glass as well.
• Finn Bálor dislocated his shoulder during his Universal Title match at SummerSlam 2016 against Seth Rollins. What makes this a Major Injury Underreaction is the fact that it turned out it was way more severe than a torn labrum, but Finn simply pulled his arm back into place and got back on his feet to finish the match. Unfortunately, he had to relinquish the title on Raw the next night since he would require surgery and thus be out of commission for the next several months.

Puppet Shows

• Dinosaurs: Baby Sinclair's only reaction to being flung across the room or set on fire is usually a cheery "Again!"

Sports

• In March of 1989, Buffalo Sabres goalkeeper Clint Malarchuk was involved in a goal-crease collision with another player, which resulted in his jugular vein being sliced open via errant hockey skate and blood pouring out onto the ice. The paramedics were racing him to the hospital when Malarchuk asked them, "Can you have me back for the 3rd period?"
• When Kevin Ware completely broke his leg in a college basketball game in 2013, he was quoted as telling his teammates "I'm fine, just win the game". They did and even won the championship.
• Adriano Malori crashed on stage 11 of Giro d'Italia 2014 and ended up looking like this. He not only completed the stage but the entire race.
• Happens often in professional cycling. The Other Wiki explains this about stage 6 of the 2012 edition of Tour de France:
  "Vacansoleil-DCM's Wout Poels, who tried to ride on for 10 km but eventually had to abandon; he was later diagnosed with a ruptured spleen and kidney, as well as three broken ribs and bruised lungs. After completing the stage, Team Katusha's Óscar Freire (broken rib and punctured lung), Imanol Erviti of the Movistar Team ("loss of muscle mass"), and Maarten Wynants of Rabobank (broken ribs and punctured lung) had to withdraw as well."
• Lawson Craddock broke his collarbone in the first stage of the 2018 Tour de France and managed to finish 3 WEEKS LATER. In last place, but still. the only reason he stayed was because of the fact that he could be helpful to his leader... Who retired in stage 8.
• Bart Wellens broke his wrist in the first lap of the cyclocross world championship in 2007. He came in fourth in the end.
• Chris Juul (Tinkoff-Saxo) crashed during the 2015 edition of Milano-San Remo (mid-March) and broke his wrist. While he didn't complete the Italian race, he went on to complete the entire season (including Ronde Van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix), one he considers his best season ever^note He rode amazingly during Giro d'Italia, gaining the interest of Aussie team Orica GreenEdge team for which he later signed. He also won the Danish time trial championship and Tour of Denmark, before getting the required surgery to fix the wrist pains.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Captain Alessio Cortez of the Crimson Fists, the least killable Space Marine in the Imperium. There's maybe two bones in his body that haven't been broken at least twice, he once disarmed an ork warboss by letting the weapon get stuck in his ribcage, received seventeen wounds in a single battle (including a stab through a heart), led a defense of a breached wall with a broken back, and then there's his reaction on being told he was missing an arm:
    Alessio Cortez: I haven't lost an arm, brother. It's over there.
  • Justified with the orks as they lack most of the major organs other biological races have, and they recover from wounds incredibly fast. making it possible for procedures such as head transplants to be performed on them.

Theatre

• In at least one version of the script of Othello, Cassio's line "my leg is cut in two" is written without an exclamation mark, making him seem like he's just plainly stating the nature of his injury instead of having an actual emotional reaction. Justified by the shock he would've been in.
• In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio is mortally wounded from a duel with Tybalt. When asked of the wound, he sarcastically responds, "No, 'tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but 'tis enough, 'twill serve." He dies moments later.

Visual Novels

• In Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth, Shi-Long Lang gets shot in the leg and doesn't even acknowledge it.
• Danganronpa:
  • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair: In Chapter 2, Akane shows up for the girls' trip to the beach despite having a bloody head wound from an impromptu sparring match with Nekomaru. Ultimate Nurse Mikan insists on rushing her into the bathroom of the diner to look at the wound and clean the blood off her.
  • Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: While investigating, Kokichi trips on a floorboard and slams his head on the ground. Instead of seeking medical attention, he plays dead as Shuichi arrives, shocking the detective before announcing it's a lie while blood pours down his face.
• As said above, Emiya Shirou in all the Fate/stay night routes tends to not worry overly much about incredible bodily harm, due to an extremely potent Healing Factor—although even before he knew he had one, he didn't have the slightest care about his own body. However, in one route wherein he doesn't have access to said Healing Factor, he gets caught in a kind of mana explosion and panics for a moment because he can't feel anything... then realizes that "all" that happened is his left arm got blown off. Rather than freak out about that, he expresses great relief. It's still treated as a life-threatening injury, though, which has consequences for the rest of the story since it's replaced by someone else's arm.
• Sakazaki Yuuya of Hatoful Boyfriend is so much more concerned about the people he wants to protect than he is about himself that he successfully hides pain of any sort, including physical. In Holiday Star he shoves the protagonist out of the way of a tank shell and is burned in the process to the point where he smells delicious and can't stand, but he downplays it and is more concerned about her.
• Kengo in Little Busters! is awfully calm about the whole arm being broken thing, and even insists on still playing baseball with the other Little Busters, claiming that he can still swing the bat with one hand. Later, it's revealed that he was faking it so he could get out of having to do kendo anymore.
• Slay the Princess: In several of the routes, the Princess will lose her right hand. Regardless of how she loses her hand, the Princess never reacts to what should be agonizing pain, another sign that the Princess may not be all that she appears to be.
• In Umineko: When They Cry Episode 7: Requiem of the Golden Witch, the following exchange:
  Lion: Will... your left arm!
  Will: Ah, right. Must have forgotten it. It'd be a pain to go back and get it now.
• Your Turn to Die: In one of the recordings of the First Trial, one of the participants, Ranmaru Kageyama, lies slumped against a wall with a massive stomach wound. He says that, strangely, he doesn't even feel any pain and that it doesn't even feel like he's really dying.

Web Animation

• ASDF Movie:
  • asdfmovie:
    • After one man invites another to smell his flower, an alien bursts out of his chest. The other man just says "LOL!" and the first is completely unfazed!
    • At the end of the movie, a man calls another man gay. In response, the second man stabs the first one through the chest with a sword. The first guy just grouses, "Oh, come on!"
  • asdfmovie 2: A guy tricked into looking at the word "gullible" on the ceiling just utters, "Oh, you stole my lungs."
  • asdfmovie 5: A man says to another man, "Here, hold this," and stabs him. His reaction? Nothing.
  • In asdfmovie 6, a man tells another man that carrots are good for his eyesight. His response is to jam carrots right into his eyes. His only remark is, in a dark voice, "You lied to me."
  • In asdfmovie 9, a boy asks his pregnant mother, "Can Suzy come out to play?" The mother says "Sure," and the baby then casually bursts out of her torso and runs off with the boy. The mother stands there and watches them with a smile, completely ignoring the hole in her belly.
  • In asdfmovie 12, a guy gets stabbed with a knife. His reaction? "A knife! My favorite!"
• Code Ment:
  • Marianne's reaction to a hail of bullets? An agitated "That smarts!".
  • C.C. gets shot by Mao and only remarks "Oh, ow" in response.
• Dreamscape: In "A Curse or a Blessing", Betty ends up getting horizontally bisected, but due to having a mechanical lower half, she doesn't feel a thing.
  Dylan: BETTY!
  Betty: Oh relax, like I haven't had my legs and body separated before.
• Eddsworld and the Halloween Episode has the gang run away from an Ax-Crazy murderer. Then there is this exchange:
  Tom: I think we've fooled him. [sword impales him] What the...? Since when do axe-carrying maniacs carry swords?
• Epithet Erased:
  • When she thinks her fight with Sylvie has ended with him passing out, Mera - whose Epithet has a lot in common with osteogenesis imperfecta - dismisses him by saying, "Did he just pass out from the shock? What a weenie. Half of my bones are broken and you don't hear me complaining! ...much."
  • For a variation, in Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic, when Giovanni comments that Molly is really light, she cheerfully says, "That's malnourishment!" Giovanni is appropriately disconcerted.
• In The Gaston Trilogy, Gaston shoots the Beast in the knee. He turns around, glares briefly, and then turns back saying, "Nah, never mind."
• This is often common in GoAnimate videos, wherein someone is injured and the text-to-speech voices just say "Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow" or "ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch" and "waa-ahahahahahahahaha-aaah-ahah" in entirely monotone voices when the character is supposedly hurt, sometimes only increasing the volume of the voice to imply that they are shouting. This is especially weird when some of these injuries include severely broken legs, burning by scalding hot water, traumas that result in body casts, internal decapitations, and sometimes legs broken so badly they are permanently broken.
  • In this video, Carly Rae Jepsen (just roll with it) gets a desk thrown at her with such force that she flies off the screen and, in her normal speaking voice, says "oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch ooh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh."
  • Peppa's teacher is apparently injured so bad that her leg is "Permanently" broken. Surprisingly she just responds in her normal speaking voice after dinosaur beats her up.
• While the characters in Happy Tree Friends tend to react realistically to being injured, the short "In Over Your Hedge" has Lumpy not being phased much by Fliqpy impaling him with lawn flamingoes, only screaming when he sees the latter running toward him.
• Hellsing Ultimate Abridged: in episode 6, while the Wild Geese are attacked by Zorin's illusion, in the midst of many mercenaries screaming in pain over their apparently missing limbs one of them casually states that his arm was ripped off and that "high fives are gonna suck now". Then, when Seras dispels the illusion, this is the same mercenary's reaction:

  Mercenary: HOLY SHIT MY ARM'S BACK!

• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Powered by The Cheat short "New Boots", The Cheat pours hot soup on Homestar's face. Homestar's only reaction is to say, in the same monotone voice he always uses in a PBTC cartoon, "Okay, hot soup is on my eye."
  • In the Cheat Commandos cartoon "Let Us Give TANKS!", Blue Laser Commander complains of being unable to tell his identical minions apart, and solves the problem by throwing a fork in one's eye. It doesn't elicit more from the unfortunate minion than an "Ow!".
• Joecartoon:
  • From "10 Pump BB-Gun", Joe Mamma's reaction to his eyes getting shot out. First at 2 pumps...
    Gerbil: You know what they say about them BB-guns, don't ya'? [throws pellet back] They'll poke your eye out.
    [Joe Mamma's left eye gushes out; blinks empty socket]
    Joe Mamma: [flatly] That hurt like a m*therf***er.
  • ...and then again at 3 pumps.
    Gerbil: Those who cannot remember the past... [throws pellet back] are condemned to repeat it.
    [Joe Mamma's right eye gushes out; blinks both sockets]
    Joe Mamma: It is as though I have slain a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and had my eyes plucked out in vengeful retribution.
• Meet the BLU Sniper has the aforementioned Sniper taking up a similar position to his RED counterpart, but this time he had shots actually hit him.
  Sniper: [an arrow goes through his forehead] I think his mate saw me. [another arrow goes through his chest, calmly looks down] Oh my god, I've been shot.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Sarge is shot in the head. Upon appearing in the afterlife, he is only annoyed that he didn't get to screw with Grif one last time. This situation also fits because Grif's response to the injury is to perform CPR, which strangely works. Sarge berates Grif once he regains consciousness.
    Sarge: Grif... Why in hell would you give somebody CPR for a bullet wound in the head? That don't make a lick of sense. I mean, it's all so damn inconsistent! What would you do if they stabbed me in the toe? Rub my neck with aloe vera?
  • Note that when first told he was revived with CPR he was relieved and amazed someone thought up such a brilliant idea — until he found out it was Grif who did it.
  • Mysterious Blue Guy/Agent Florida gets an axe to the chest. He's briefly incapacticated, but gets back up and throws the axe back.
• RWBY: Adam Taurus goes out by being impaled at the front and back by Blake and Yang each with a fragment of Gambol Shroud. His only reaction is a muted "Oh."
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: At the end of "Doomsday but Mario is Okay", Luigi is caught in a nuclear explosion that reduces him to a skeleton. His response?
  Luigi: Owww...
• Zero Punctuation: Yahtzee criticized the plot of Grand Theft Auto V, saying nothing spectacular happened and it was just people doing stuff. He also admits that that's a fairly weak argument, as technically World War I was just people doing stuff, but at least losing your leg would give you something to write home about. "Dear Mum: Remember when my dance instructor said I had two left feet? Well, I've managed to redress the balance somewhat. P.S.: FUCKING HELL! AAAAAAAAAAUGH!"

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater:
  • During the Air Orb quest, Red Mage responded to being set on fire by attempting to powergame it. To be fair, he did cast a bunch of resurrection spells on himself first, but he seems incredibly casual about the agonising pain, to the point where his speech bubbles describing it have less Bold Inflation than him describing how it would work under Dungeons & Dragons rules.
    Thief: Doesn't it worry you to be, you know, aflame?
    Red Mage: Are you kidding? This is great. This is like if Burning Hands was a seventh level spell. Maybe sixth... And anyway, it's auto-hit to boot! I could hug you for 3D4 (damage) per turn, Thief. Per turn. No, I'd be an idiot to give this up, thanks.
    Thief: Of course. What was I thinking?
    RM: [dies and is resurrected]
    Thief: That doesn't hurt at all?
    Red Mage: Hm?
    Thief: The spell that brings you back.
    Red Mage: Oh, it's quite excruciating. At least it isn't as bad as the burning.
  • Our "heroes" have... "acquired" some holy weapons, which harm any evildoers that try to wield them. When Black Mage grabs one of the weapons... "I appear to have come aflame."
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: Dan McNinja sets himself on fire to escape other ninjas, and you would expect someone as badass as him to be able to shrug it off, and he did, but his son seems genuinely worried about him being set ablaze.
  • Subverted in that Dan's ninja uniform is fireproof. However, the cropduster pilot forced to wear it and then getting shot down and set on fire definitely counts.
  • Then there was the time the Doctor was shot to death, then kicked Death's ass and got back up. He was pretty defiant at the time, but when he returned to the office, he calmly scolded the gorilla and velociraptor fighting there.
    Doctor: Now, I'm not mad at you two... But I am disappointed. I'll hold out on lecturing you until after I get my transfusion stash out of the fridge. I think my body has just enough blood to keep a kitten alive right now.
  • Most recently done by the Doctor again, after being stabbed by Donald McBonald using a mimed sword. His reaction after knocking Donald unconscious is to comment that the rest of his mission is going to be a lot less easy now.
• Archipelago:
  • Captain Snow is an undead pirate and the current user of an insanely powerful magical artifact that rebuilds him bit by bit as he loses limbs. But if a simple annoyed sigh in response to dragonfire burning his arm away is not an underreaction, then nothing is.
  • Snow's first mate, Lucinda, has made a Deal with the Devil to become an Emotionless Girl. This is what she says when her shoulder is bleeding from the kick-back of a powerful magical cannon, and someone frantically offers to patch her up. With Dull Surprise.
  Lucinda: Thank you. It is incredibly painful.
• Axe Cop irritably declares "This is the worst day of my life!" in response to having his head chopped off.
• Batman: Wayne Family Adventures:
  • In "Recovery", Bruce is left injured after an apparently brutal fight that we're told little about. His injuries were bad enough that, according to Damian, he almost bled out. Despite this, he gets shirty when Alfred puts him on a few weeks' worth of bed rest, and spends the rest of the issue trying to get to the Batcave and go on a patrol.
  • In a later issue, he goes to the Justice Leage HQ with a broken leg, saying nothing about it and simply going about business as usual. This injury, admittedly, isn't as severe as his other Batman-related injuries, but this time he uses this trope because he's embarrassed about how he injured himself. He was trying out Tim's skateboard by going down the halls, did so flawlessly, then tripped on his own feet while going down the stairs.
• In Charby the Vampirate a smarmy jock's last words end up being a complaint about his shirt being ruined when Charby tears open his torso with a pair of large hooks.
• Clan of the Cats: The wizard councilor Timon, Back from the Dead after having his throat slit, remarks he's done worse damage shaving.
• From Concerned: Quick, pull this pipe out of my midsection! It got stuck there when I accidentally shot myself in the hip and then fell off a ledge!
• Darths & Droids has Ponda Baba reacting this way after his arm gets sliced off.
  Ponda Baba: What the hell are you doing? I was just messing with the kid! That arm's gonna take me hours to grow back!
  Obi-Wan: Uh... I'm sorry... but...
  Ponda Baba: Nah, just kidding. It's gone forever. And it hurts a lot.
• Digger brings us its eponymous protagonist's reaction to being shot in the shoulder with an arrow: "I can feel the thing wiggling around. It's reasonably excruciating."
• Dominic Deegan gives an interesting version, in that the person who gives the injury underreacts just as much. Given that they're both damned souls in Hell, this is understandable.
  "This really hurts."
• Dragon Sanctuary: Merno spends a good chunk of time not worrying about the gaping wound he receives during the eclipse attack, instead comforting Dean and ordering a few drinks.
• Played for Drama in Drowtales:
  • Rann'dirk gets a hammer directly to his (helmeted) head and keeps fighting right up until his opponent detonates a golem core as a kamikaze attack, and once the action has ended he takes off his helmet and is bleeding profusely and horrifies his comrades due to the fact that he doesn't feel it. While he's been "tainted" or subject to a procedure that naturally dulls pain this is pretty extreme and foreshadows that he, like most of his clan, was giving an intentionally faulty procedure that will eventually kill him.
  • Happens to another character later, this time one who's not tainted, where she barely notices that her hand is dangling by a thread from her wrist after getting hit by the blast of a mana cannon and shows far more reaction to the state of her companions, one of whom has the top half of her head blown clean off. Again, likely justified by shock.
• Dungeons & Doodles: Tales from the Tables: In Episode 6, Redwen casually talks to Eriawynn as the cleric tries to cure the tomahawk stuck into Redwen's cranium.
• El Goonish Shive: Grace has a nightmare in which Sensei Greg gets one of his arms eaten and reacts to it by informing her of the consequences of it with only mild annoyance.
• Girl Genius:
  • It takes four panels for Higgs to react to getting stabbed straight through his torso (Needless to say, gore warning.) Of course, this is the "Unstoppable" Higgs, Ambiguously Human Airman Extraordinaire.
  • A pretty hilarious case when Lucrezia in Agatha's body runs Oggie through Zeetha's sword. Jägers are already Super Soldiers, and Oggie is boosted by a Super Serum at the time, so the worse it does is making him... nostalgic.
    Oggie: A sword? Right through ze chest...
    Lucrezia: That's right! And I—
    Oggie: Hoo! Dot takes me back, yah! Iz just like how hy met my vife!
    Lucrezia: Hu—
    [Oggie knocks her out with an elbow jab]
    Oggie: Miz Zeetha? Hoy, vake up, sweetie — ken hyu take hyu sword back now? Hy... hy gots to go lie down a leedle.
• The Gunshow strip "On Fire" features a dog in a burning room serenely insisting that he's okay with his current situation and that "things are going to be okay"...while his body melts.
• In Homestuck:
  • Alternate Dave only has one response to a slashed throat:
    TG: welp
  • Also, Tavros, when he gets paralyzed.
    AT: vRISKA JUST PUSHED mE OFF A CLIFF
    AT: tHAT'S REALLY ALL THERE IS TO SAY ON THE MATTER.
  • Much later on, Brain Ghost Dirk attempts to tear out the soul of Aranea, but he fades away along with Jake's hope aura just before he can finish. After screaming their head off for the past couple of panels, how does the victim react?
    ARANEA: Good grief, that was painful.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: Being grim reapers and not really alive, neither Scarlet or Brook react much to lethal injuries. When Scarlet gets her arm and leg ripped off, she's even surprised it doesn't hurt. Brook doesn't react much when his body gets ripped to pieces, leaving only his head behind.
• Learning with Manga! FGO has a scene (faithfully recreated in the animated special) where Jeanne and Tamano both get stabbed by Jack the Ripper. Jeanne flinches in surprise, then pulls the knife out, while Tamano doesn't seem to notice at all and just leaves it stuck in her head for the rest of the scene. (In the game, both have a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors advantage against Jack's class, and really would take minimal damage from her.)
• Leftover Soup: Jamie realises he doesn't actually need his arm to be in a cast, which it is thanks to an Ambulance Chaser lawyer, and tries to cut it off with a chef's knife. "I'm absolutely sure I don't-" *SLICE* "Okay, now I need medical attention."
• Whenever something like this happens to Richard in Looking for Group, he nearly always makes a snarky comment or just ignores it unless it gets utterly annoying. Loses both his arms? Steals a bear's. Gets his back full of arrows? "Is there something on my back?" Axe in his forehead? "Good was shot a that. Toast. HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE!" (he then goes on with his day as such). Justified because he's undead. When something actually hurts him. it's a sign that he needs to recharge his powers.
• This Nerf NOW!! strip has the female engineer rather nonchalantly and seductively asking the Pyro if he could help her. While on fire.
• Done several times by the title character of NIMONA, who doesn't even notice the arrow sticking out of her leg until her boss points it out to her — to which she responds with a flat "Oh." This gets a lot less funny and a lot more suspicious when she shows Ballister exactly the same nonchalance a week after having her head chopped off and apparently dying.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Elan manages this by virtue of sheer ditziness:
    Durkon: How badly are ye hurt, lad?
    Elan: That depends. [holds organ] How important is one of these?
  • Similarly in this. How does a demon roach react after being impaled by a jail bar during O-Chul's prison break? "Ah, crap."
  • Early on in the strip, Roy throws Xykon into an Epic-level protective barrier. Just before he explodes, Xykon calmly states "Y'know, actually, this isn't that bad." Justified because he's an undead lich and regenerates from his phylactery over the next few days.
• Nancy from Ow, my sanity gets a little annoyed when you cut her in half.
• Penny Arcade:
  • When Cliff Bleszinski is being burnt at the stake: "The heat is tremendous. I believe it is fire-related."
  • Tycho demonstrates in this strip.
    Tycho: 911? I've cut off all my fingers. They're all gone. It is excruciating, yes! Please send an ambulance to... Oh. Well, yeah. They should definitely finish their quest first.
• In PvP: "What was that?" "That was the sound of a broadhead arrow piercing my arm and embedding itself into my humerus."
• Sarilho: Mikhail runs around after losing an arm for quite some time. Until he bleeds out. Similarly, Nikita walks around with half of his face covered in shattered glass and apparently doesn't care much for that.
• In Schlock Mercenary:
  • Captain Tagon treats his ocular cutlery (read: fork in eye) with nothing more than mild irritation. The practice comes in handy when someone gives him more ocular cutlery with much more malicious intent.
  • After being sniped with a headshot, Sergeant Ebbirnoth starts making snarky commentary. As an Unioc, his brain is in his pelvic cavity, so the only thing he's actually lost is his vision, but the Casual Danger Dialogue is a welcome distraction from how much it hurts.
  • Soldier-boosts and future medical technology make this a fairly common trope.
    Kevyn: Casualties?
    Shodan: Sergeant Wenzi and Private Ng are stable. No other casualties to report, sir.
    Kevyn: Really? What about your arm?
    Shodan: I'm currently left-handed.
    Kevyn: Your right arm is missing.
    Shodan: It is not missing. It's fused to a bulkhead on deck twelve.
• Sleepless Domain:
  • When one of the unnamed, shadowy Big Bad's victims manages to stab her through the eye as a parting gift, she calmly remarks, "Huh. Odd." before slinking away. The next time she appears, there is a gaping hole where her eye should be, and the entire right side of her face is visibly sagging — yet she eerily doesn't seem to notice or care.
  • Anemone's reaction to Tessa Alter's monster piercing her stomach is to glare at her and say "that hurt, you little brat".
• Riff from Sluggy Freelance has one of the most extreme examples.
  Riff: Nobody panic, but I may have just killed myself. Let me check my notes.
• Swords: All in all, Krog (the first human) takes rather cooly being impaled through the chest by a Trisabertops.
  Krog: Krog okay! Dinosword miss all of Krog's vital organs. Heart not vital, right?
• Sebastian of True Villains suffers an injury to his aura that will cause him to wither and die without constant effort to suppress it. His reaction? "... Well. Crap."
• In Unsounded, the undead Duane can repair or replace any pieces that fall off and Feels No Pain unless his bones are damaged, so he ignores most injuries and reacts to the rest with minor irritation.
  Sette: ...Something come off?
  Duane: And then a horrid bird tried to escape with it.
• In Whither, we don't even learn Finn was wounded until he starts passing out.

Web Original

• "Oh my God, there's an axe in my head!"

Websites

• SCP Foundation:
  • Dr. Gears has this. It's almost a superpower.
  • Played for horror with SCP-1981, a video of Ronald Reagan giving a twisted, nonsensical version of his "Evil Empire" speech and hardly reacting as unseen forces mutilate his body.
• In What If? #133, a person's reaction to having his arms torn off while trying to catch a flagpole at falling speed is just "Dang".

Web Videos

• Dream SMP: Played for Drama in the Exile Arc, where Dream would beat Tommy with bare fists or an axe if he refused to follow orders, or even if he wasn't quick enough in following them. At first, Tommy would scream in pain whenever he was hit, but over time, he became so apathetic that he stopped reacting to Dream's beatings at all.
• When Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane attempted to teach Jesse Cox how to play Minecraft, Lewis falls in lava while explaining spelunking. His reaction?
• Pirates SMP: A supernatural variant, which ends up being equal parts horrific and hilarious. While under the curse on the gold from a special adventure quest, Shep spends much of his time brushing off its effects, even when being indefinitely hit with the Hunger status debuff in full force (i.e. his in-game Hunger bar draining from full to zero in seconds), and insists that he's only cursed if his dog starts speaking to him. When faced with the curse's ominous countdown, he just claims that his out-of-universe stream chat is overreacting; he only throws away the cursed gold to calm them down, thinking there's no inherent issue with the gold just yet to panic, and altogether remains skeptical about there being a curse on the gold at all.
• At the end of the Rooster Teeth Short Paper Cut, Geoff Ramsey is standing there with a giant axe in his head... and complains about getting a paper cut and a gray hair.
• Happens often within the Scott The Woz series. Scott can get his hands bleeding all over (which happens a lot) or a gunshot wound on his leg, and he'd only be slightly irritated.
• TomSka's Russian Roulette, where Tom manages to survive several bullets to the head and a stab wound to the hand out of nearly childlike stubbornness to win at the titular game. Also somewhat of a deconstruction, as his casual willingness to keep at it naturally terrifies his opponent, causing the poor guy to forfeit and run off in tears.

  Tom: [slurred] Five-Finger Fillet! Me go! [*shunk*] Ow.

Real Life

• There's a bit of science behind this in real life. When seriously injured, your body releases endorphins, in order to keep the pain under somewhat manageable control (conveniently enough, this lasts just long enough for medical aid to arrive).
• The last words of Franz Ferdinand of Austria after getting shot by Gavrilo Princip were: "It's nothing. It's nothing."
• In the Battle of Gettysburg during The American Civil War, Union General Dan Sickles' leg was shattered by a 12-pound cannonball. In order to inspire his men to keep fighting, Sickles showed virtually no sign of pain in reaction to this. He relinquished command to General David Birney, and then calmly smoked a cigar as he was loaded onto a stretcher and carried away from the field.
• Leprosy degenerates the nerves in the extremities of the body i.e. fingers, hands, toes, feet. Skin sores, high infection, and no pain is just a recipe for unintentional gangrene; which is the actual cause of lost limbs. This was exploited by the Order of Saint Lazarus, which was originally an order of knights infected with leprosy. They had a reputation for being extremely hard to kill since they did not feel most of their wounds.
• A Reader's Digest story was submitted wherein a teacher at a school warned the kids about how high they were climbing in a tree. Sure enough, not long after she walked away, one of the kids fell a good six meters out of a tree (around twenty feet), landed on his back, and ran over screaming because of a cut under his fingernail. When she pointed out that he was bleeding all over his leg, he just said "Oh. That too."
• An anecdotal occurrence came from The Napoleonic Wars — specifically near the end of the Battle of Waterloo, with the British command staff observing the French attacks from a hilltop. Cannons fire, and Lord Uxbridge exclaims, "By God, Sir! I've lost my leg!" Uxbridge was then taken to his headquarters away from the battle and had the remaining stump of the leg amputated with no painkillers of any sort, as anything other than a leather strap to bite had not yet been invented. What's more, according to his aide, Col. Thomas Wildman, he remained composed enough to smile through the operation, stating, "The knife appears somewhat blunt."
• After the Battle of Trafalgar, a British sailor's injury was so grave as to require the amputation of his leg. Said sailor's reaction was: "Never! Where shall I find another match for this one?"
• Horatio Nelson did this several times. When he was blinded in one eye at Calvi by debris struck by a gunshot, he wrote to Lord Hood, "I got a little hurt this morning; not much, as your lordship may judge by my writing." When he was fatally shot in the back at Trafalgar, he said: "Why, my dear Hardy, I do believe they've done it at last. My backbone is shot through. Take care of Lady Hamilton for me."
• The Memoirs of Baron Larrey, chief surgeon of the Imperial Guard, give many examples of soldiers who had wounds requiring immediate amputation... and shrugged them off, asking Larrey to please amputate their neighbours first.
• While campaigning for re-election, US President Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest and the bullet went through his steel glasses case and the folded speech he was about to give before it hit him, but by that point, it had been slowed enough to not be a life-threatening wound. Declining suggestions that a hospital visit might be in order, Roosevelt instead proceeded to give a 90-minute speech, opening with the lines:
  Roosevelt: Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. ^note The Bull Moose was the mascot of his political party and is an animal with an apparently tough hide. Of course, being an avid outdoorsman, he'd likely know exactly how hard it is to kill a Bull Moose.
• Leon Trotsky, formerly Vladimir Lenin's #2 man, was seeking asylum in Mexico City. An assassin sent by Josef Stalin broke into his home and buried an ice axe in his head. Trotsky stood up, ice axe in head, spat on his assailant, and then fought off the assassin before he was subdued by his bodyguard. He was rushed to the hospital and died a day later. "Hopefully he lived long enough to fire his bodyguards..."
• During one of the world wars, a pilot was hit six times and managed to land the plane through the rush of sheer adrenaline. The story goes that he got out of the plane and basically died on the spot.
• "Crashed slow-rolling near ground. Bad show." This was Douglas Bader's logbook entry on the plane crash that cost him both of his legs. (Being dosed up on a large amount of morphine at the time was probably doing a lot to help him maintain a Stiff Upper Lip.) When the sheer scale of his injuries sank in, Bader reacted to his predicament about how you'd expect someone would in Real Life: badly.
  • After recovering from his Heroic BSoD (and getting back his flight status), he eventually had another crash that he survived only due to having previously lost both legs: His artificial legs were pinned in the plane, and it took a considerable time to free them. While walking away from the wreckage, he noticed his legs didn't seem to be working properly. It turned out both lower leg sections had been crushed. Had they been his original legs, he would likely have bled to death before he could have been freed.
• After John Hinkley's attempt on his life, Ronald Reagan was unaware that he'd been hit by a bullet ^note contrary to popular belief, Reagan was not actually directly shot during the incident — one of Hinckley's bullets had ricocheted off of the bulletproof windows of the Presidential limo and bounced into Reagan until he started coughing up blood on the way back to the White House.
• Following the 1985 Tampa Bay Buccaneers season, punter Frank Garcia was diagnosed with a broken leg. He'd been playing that way for half the year.
• During his No Cure for Cancer special, Denis Leary relates how his father, an Irish immigrant, reacted to injury, like, during a visit home, Denis saw his father shoot a nail through his hand with a nailgun, and, without missing a beat, pulled it out with his teeth. Then there was his reaction to nearly cutting off his thumb with a circular saw. Mainly, patching it up with electrical tape and driving himself to the hospital because his sense of masculinity wouldn't let him let himself be driven there by a woman. Denis then says the following:
  I turned to my brother and said "Hey pal, forget about crying, okay? Crying is over. We're never gonna be able to cry about anything ever, okay? Our father figure is a man who could sever his own head with a chainsaw and he'd staple gun it back on *staple sound effects* 'Fuckin head came off!' *staple sound effects*"
• This Cracked article has 5 rather notable real-life cases of this trope.
• In 2009 actress Natasha Richardson hit a tree while skiing and whacked her head. She felt OK and sent the medics away. An hour or so later help was summoned again due to increased pressure from the bleeding in her brain, but by then it was too late and she died in the hospital. This is actually the classic presentation of an epidural hematoma, which Ms. Richardson died from, and one of many reasons why they are almost always fatal — the person genuinely feels okay initially and only as time goes on do the symptoms worsen, by which point it's too late to save the person.
  • Bob Saget also died in a similar fashion in 2022, having bumped his head before shrugging it off and going to bed where he died in his sleep from the hemorrhage.
• Empress Elisabeth of Austria was stabbed in the heart by an assassin. She fell over but was able to get back up and stated that she felt no pain, believing that he had simply missed (in reality, the 4-inch blade had gone all the way in). Later when she removed her clothes she promptly died from her wound, her corset being the only thing keeping her from bleeding out.
• While not nearly as serious as some others on the list, Sean Bean was assaulted and stabbed with a broken glass bottle in a bar fight. His response? He refused medical attention, patched himself up with the bar's first aid kit, and ordered another drink.
• Subverted in one StoryCorps interview — the interviewee's father had a wooden leg which broke one day while he was working on a farm. The man cried, "Oh darn, I think I broke my foot!" and then just snapped it back in place and kept working. The person who was helping him didn't know the leg was a prosthetic, and turned white as a sheet and later called the man "the toughest man I've ever seen."
• New Zealand rugby player Wayne Shelford had his scrotum torn open during a ruck, leaving his testicle dangling. He simply told the medic to sew it back up and continued the game until he was knocked out later by a blow to the head.
• A man named William Striler pulled a revolver from his coat outside a courthouse and fired six shots at 53-year-old attorney Gerry Curry. Despite being covered in blood from several gunshot wounds to his upper body, Curry just walked away, shrugging.
• A man shoots himself accidentally in the arse, apologizes to the people around him, and drives himself to the hospital.
• Tablesaw blades are so fast and so sharp that by the time you cut your entire hand off with one the sensation hasn't even reached your brain.
• In Virginia, a gymnast misjudged a distance and rammed her foot into a metal strip so hard three toes stopped moving. She looked at it, debated on whether she could keep going, and went so far as to ask her friends what they thought. When told to go home, she sat down, waited to see if her toes would start working again, and was forced to go home by the instructor. She didn't even limp as she left. The toes never worked quite right ever again.
• A possibly extreme example was the drummer of X Japan, Yoshiki Hayashi, who, during a 1995 show, suddenly stopped playing drums, reached up to rub his neck and shoulder, tried again but looked confused in a second when he couldn't move or hit the kicks, then collapsed. It seemed like his usual dramatic stage collapses for show until the show was stopped and he was removed from the stage and taken away in an ambulance. It was later determined that he'd broken his neck, sustaining the split cervical spine discs that never would heal properly and required surgery years later - and most likely only avoiding death or quadriplegia out of sheer luck as to which split.
• Army Cpl. Josh Hargis suffered the aftermath of a suicide bomber. Through his injuries were bad enough to be in ICU and was on a respirator at the time, Hargis fought back against the doctors, who was trying to keep his hand down, as he gave a salute upon receiving a purple heart, given to soldiers injured in the line of duty. When other soldiers saw this, they were left in tears.
• Although he wasn't actually harmed, making this a downplayed example, Michael Jackson was driving his Rolls-Royce down the Ventura Freeway in California and was apparently so absorbed thinking about the lyrics to 'Billie Jean' that he didn't notice his car was on fire.
• Any injury or condition that damages the nerves badly enough, such as leprosy mentioned above or third-degree burns, will result in this.
• Crossing over with Blessed with Suck, there is a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, wherein the person feels no pain when they hurt themselves. The problem is that people with this condition (particularly kids) never learn to protect themselves, so they will unthinkingly burn themselves by sticking their hands in hot water or will not notice that they're bleeding from irritation from too-tight headbands. A good profile on the condition can be found here.
• Some years ago, an elderly docent at the International Printing Museum was struggling with a malfunctioning Linotype machine during a special event. His frustration overcame his common sense, and he put his hand in harm's way, in one of the few places where one can get seriously injured on a Linotype. A fingertip was partially severed, but he calmly shut down the machine, before being hauled off to the emergency room.
• On August 6, 1915, after several failed attempts to capture the Russian Osowiec Fortress, the German army resorted to pumping it full of chlorine gas. The Russian troops in the fort did not have a sufficient number of gas masks, forcing them to resort to covering their faces with water or urine-soaked rags and undershirts in a desperate attempt to get some sort of protection from the deadly fumes. The German army then sent in 12 battalions of troops equipped with gas masks to capture the fort. Walking past mountains of Russian corpses in the outer ring of Osowiec, the German soldiers casually approached the fort, expecting no further resistance, only to be shocked to see the surviving members of the Osowiec garrison come out to attack them. With faces covered by blood-soaked rags and undershirts, and many troops literally coughing pieces of their own lungs, the Russian troops somehow managed to re-man their machine guns and artillery pieces, while the remaining soldiers launched a bayonet charge, sending the German army fleeing in panic. The retreat was so disorganized that many of the men were trampled into the ground by their fellow troops or entangled in their own barb-wire emplacements as they fled back to their trench lines. This event would become known as "The Attack of the Dead men" since the Russian troops who launched the attack were so badly injured from the poison gas that they looked like walking corpses and a large portion of them ended up dying later.
• During WWII, American Lieutenant Daniel Inouye was shot in the stomach and had his right arm blown off at the elbow by a German machine gunner while preparing to throw a grenade. His reaction was to yell to his platoon to keep back, pry the grenade out of his own severed right hand with his left and toss it into the machine gun nest. He did not pass out until being shot again later in the same battle.
• Sean Connery once explained on a talk show in 1996 that he had a persistent but vague pain and weakness in his wrist that was bothering him for years. Upon finally going to get it checked out, he learned that he in fact had a broken wrist caused by none other than Steven Seagal, who was training him in martial arts on the set of Never Say Never Again and broke his wrist out of frustration because he was stronger than he was.
• The brain doesn't have pain receptors so when a nail gun recoiled near his head, Dante Autullo failed to realise it had gone right through to his brain. After heading to the hospital after experiencing severe headaches, he learned that had it passed just slightly to the left or right, he would have been permanently disabled. Fortunately the nail was safely removed and Dante recovered with no lasting effects.

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