"Now, I don't want to get off on a rant here..."
— Dennis Miller
People ranting about their political opinions, religious beliefs or similar usually don't intend to be entertaining. Some, however, have realized that serious messages can't be distinguished from parodies anyway — so why not make the most of it?
And thus, some comedians, propagandists, and other characters chose to present their opinions with a lot of attitude, making rants designed to be entertaining while still communicating a serious message.
Not to be confused with The Rant, the writer's comments alongside a webcomic.
Index of performers and shows that are (fully or partially) designed this way:
- Adam Ruins Everything
- A Dose of Buckley
- The Amazing Atheist
- The Angry Video Game Nerd
- Atop the Fourth Wall
- Benthelooney
- The Best Page in the Universe
- Lewis Black: Both his standup act and his "Back in Black" segments on The Daily Show are this.
- Brain Dump
- Charlie Brooker
- Adam Carolla, most notably on The Adam Carolla Show, has a curmudgeonly persona and often gets into angry rants about things that annoy him. One recurring segment on his radio show was "What Can't Adam Complain About?" in which he was given benign topics and challenged to find some way to rant about them.
- The Cartoon Hero
- Climate Town
- Count Dankula
- Das Sporking: Varies between this and MSTs
- Ben Elton
- The Editing Room
- Frock Flicks, usually in written form.
- Froghand: Froge will casually drop thousands of words on whatever subject he feels necessary, including eight thousand words on a Spongebob game, or whatever games disappoint him. You may also enjoy the all-too-often positive rant.
- George Carlin: Ranting about pretty much anything. Some of his rants were reasonable in themselves, other were parodies designed to be unreasonable but directly or indirectly contain some form of wisdom.
- GradeAUnderA: A minimalist British animator who makes videos on a wide variety topics. He mostly makes videos on grievances and pet peeves he encounters in every day life but also has videos on politics and YouTube drama. Whatever the subject, he always does it his signature crass No Indoor Voice.
- Grotesco
- Heartlessbitches.com
- Bill Hicks made ranting about modern society a central part of his act. A bootleg of one disastrous performance, sometimes called I'm Sorry Folks, has him break from his set to rant angrily at a hostile audience for the better part of 45 minutes.
- Hitler Rants
- James Lee
- Jimquisition
- Zinnia Jones: Ranting about homophobia, sexism, religious fundamentalism, etc.
- Juvenal makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- Sam Kinison
- Dennis Miller: During the final episodes of his canceled late-night talk show The Dennis Miller Show, Miller began throwing out the scripts and ranting about political and social topics that were irritating him at the moment. His humorous diatribes became so popular that he made rant comedy a central part of his follow-up show, Dennis Miller Live, in which he ends each opening stand-up segment with a rant that begins, "Now, I don't wanna get off on a rant here, but..."
- Miniminuteman
- David Mitchell in his webcast "David Mitchell's Soapbox" and his column in The Observer. He'll rant elsewhere too, but those are the official channels.
- Mumkey Jones
- The Necro Critic started out with a (long-since deleted) series of random comedic rants called You Know What Pisses Me Off?. Nowadays, he incorporates those types of rants into his review videos.
- Neurotically Yours has a side-series where Foamy the Squirrel rants on about anything and everything. Not that the other episodes are about anything else.
- The Nostalgia Chick is especially good at seeming like she doesn't need to breathe.
- The Nostalgia Critic
- The Now Show (Marcus Brigstock's segments and sometimes John Holmes or Mitch Benn. Also "stand-in Marcuses" like Lloyd Langford)
- Penn & Teller: Bullshit!: Ranting about anything they consider "bullshit". Each episode is about something that, according to them, either is bullshit in itself or is plagued by bullshit in one form or another.
- Greg Proops
- The Rageaholic
- A staple of The Rick Mercer Report is "The Rant" in which Rick rants about whatever has caught his ire that week. This is a carryover from Rick's stint on This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
- Scott The Woz is mostly known for his rants and reviews on "stupid Nintendo games", as he himself puts it.
- SF Debris is famous for its ranty reviews of Star Trek: Voyager episodes.
- Sheep in the Big City - The ranting swede / the angry scientist
- Siblings
- So This Is Basically...
- Doug Stanhope oh so very very much.
- Thought Slime
- The Unusual Suspect
- 2, the Ranting Gryphon
- TV Trash
- Whatever Love Means
- xkcd: Ranting about stupidity in general.
- You Know Whats Bullshit
- Zero Punctuation
Non-index examples (scenes in shows that otherwise aren't this, and shows that are this but don't have their own TV Tropes pages).
- In The Order of the Stick, Belkar used to do this, using Refuge in Audacity to get away with having evil values.
- In Scrubs, Dr. Cox likes to incorporate actual points inside long funny rants.
- Cyberwolf087 has made not only rants, but also YouTube Poops, game reviews and other videos.
- Coupling usually had one Once A Series, when Straight Man and Author Avatar Steve would really break into stride and dish out an epic rant leaving every other character in stunned silence.
- A Running Gag in Aqua Teen Hunger Force is for Master Shake to go off on a long-winded, deranged rant about his latest bizarre theory or whatever's bothering him filled with Insane Troll Logic.
- "...of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."
