Suckiness Is Painful

"Ouch, that was painful. So very, very lame."

— Momoko Hanasaki, Wedding Peach Abridged

Something really bad, such as horribly out-of-tune singing or violin playing, bad poetry, a terrible movie, or Puns to traumatize those exposed to it, distract an opponent, punish someone, or even, in extreme cases, weaponized. The horribleness of it can range from hurting ears or eyes to giving nightmares, to blowing up cities.

Can take the form of a Brown Note, but there can be other effects than that trope. Sometimes this can be invoked with using the horrible thing as Cool and Unusual Punishment.

In Real Life, it's fairly common to at least describe a very bad movie as being "painful to watch", or to say that it "hurts to read" a bad book. The concept of an "eyesore" isn't limited to English either; Japanese has migurushii (見苦しい), literally "painful to look at".

Can overlap with Anything but That!, Faux Horrific, Comical Overreacting, Dreadful Musician, Even Evil Has Standards (if a villain decides a work would be too horrible to inflict). A Critic Breakdown will often to invoke this regarding the offending piece. Many a Lame Pun Reaction involves retching in pain.

Compare/Contrast Awesomeness Is Volatile.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A 1980s advert for Castela Classic cigars featured comedian Russ Abbot going fishing in a rather unusual way. He put on a record of Des O'Connor's Greatest Hits and lowered a speaker into the water, then sat back with his cigar. As he watched, the horrified fish leapt out of the water and into his net.

Anime and Manga

• Blink and you'll miss it, but in Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, Itoshiki-sensei's suicide kit, filled with poisons, pills and all manner of lethalities, also contains an Enya CD (though it might also just be relaxing suicide mood-music).
• In CLANNAD, Kotomi Ichinose's violin playing is so terrible that people collapse into the fetal position clutching their heads in extreme pain whenever she plays. She's oblivious to this and thinks her playing sounds beautiful.
  Tomoya: [to students, after interrupting Kotomi's introduction] And her weapon is the violin: it only takes 0.2 seconds before sound waves come out from the moment she takes position. The number of people she's felled is countless.
• Kujibiki♡Unbalance: Tokino's singing goes beyond Brown Note territory, as it is shown to cause vomiting, babies crying, flowers blooming and dying in a matter of moments, car crashes, cats becoming angry, cardiac arrest, rats fleeing en masse, glass breaking, birds dying, plane crashes, and explosions.
• Doraemon: Takeshi Gouda is so bad a musician that his singing can do serious damage to his environment. It does not help that the guy believes the opposite.
• Chapter 25 of Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun has Sakura and Nozaki reacting badly to Kashima's tone-deaf singing, to the point that they're crawling on the ground in agony.
• Shirogane's singing in Kaguya-sama: Love Is War approaches Brown Note levels and has been compared to having sea cucumber guts shoved in your ears on multiple occasions. That's not even getting into his rapping, which caused Fujiwara to collapse and start foaming at the mouth.
• In Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, the main characters convince Doumeki to be the sound consultant for their anime project by demonstrating how amateurish their current sound effects are. Doumeki, who considers audio and sound design to be Serious Business, is so distressed by their mediocre sound effects that she throws up offscreen twice.

Comic Books

• In Asterix, Cacofonix's music is so bad, it's the only thing that can teach the meaning of fear to the Normans. In fact, short exposure to it mentally scars them. It also summons thunderstorms and drives the wildlife away.
• Ren and Stimpy's "U.S.Ohhhhhh Noooooo!": The army has Ren and Stimpy drag a horrible comedian on a platform with speakers through a battlefield, causing their enemies to run in fear while one of them clutches his ears and shouts "Oh the Humanity!"
• Mortadelo y Filemón:
  • Crappy music and films are used as a method of torture. The title characters are tortured by their boss with an LP of Spanish blockbuster songs (apparently repeated ad infinitum). They are driven mad, and other characters talk about the cruelty.
  • Also repeated speeches by a politician. In later albums these are often replaced with whatever sensationalist TV show or politician speech Ibáñez seems to have a problem with at the moment.
• Superlópez: In Los Alienígenas, captured alien spy Xonxa boasts that her shape-shifting species is virtually unkillable:
  Xonxa: Our bodies are like rubber! My people only die of old age or boredom.
  Superlópez: Funny you should mention that: we happen to have this big collection of Manolo Escobar films...

Fan Works

• In the incredibly long author's introduction to My Inner Life, Jenna fails to understand hyperboled criticism that claims this.
  Jenna: Also as a side note, I NEVER physically hurt ANYONE with this story. I got one reviewer that said. "Oh God please stop writing, your hurting everyone." Now I want to know where I physically touched that person. I want to know how I'm twisting anyone's arms to read this. I have never done anything of the sort in any way, shape or form and I DO NOT appreciate being accused of that!
• The last thing the ghosts scare the heroes with while on the tunnel to Threed is a copy of Superman 64. Doubles as a Take That! to the game.
• In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series Marik being forced to watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua was so horrible it drove him to evil.
• Not this time, Fate: Jaune's guitar solo is described as utterly horryfying and downright painful to listen to. Somewhat justified, as Jaune is actively trying to play awfully, as to annoy everybody present.
• A Diplomatic Visit: As described in chapter 8 of the third story, Diplomacy Through Schooling, yak amateur poetry. The yaks used to force criminals to listen to it as punishment, though they discontinued the practice centuries ago. In the present day, after some PVE members decide to cause trouble around the borders of Yakyakistan, Prince Rutherford vows to bring this punishment back and use it on any PVE members who show their faces around his country again.

Films — Live-Action

• The song "Puberty Love" in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is so bad, it defeats the tomatoes. Not that they were weak against music, but that this song was so awful, that even the sheet music had this effect.
• In the Big Time Rush hour-long feature, Gustavo and Kelly are tortured by the British government by having a guy sing the band's songs horribly, but they hold out.
• Similar to the Killer Tomatoes example, in Mars Attacks! Slim Whitman's song "Indian Love Call" causes the Martians' heads to explode.
• In the movie Top Secret!, after the Nazis have been psychologically and physically torturing Nick Rivers only for it not to break him...
  "Do you want me to break out the LeRoy Neiman paintings?"
  "No. We cannot risk violating the Geneva Convention."
• Subverted in Funny Farm. Liz indeed starts crying when she reads Andy's manuscript and sees just how bad it is, but it's not so much because his book sucks as it is her realizing that it will never sell to a publisher, so all the crap they've put up with since moving to Redbud (so that Andy could focus on his new career as a novelist) has been for nothing.
• In Ghost (1990), Sam's ghost gets Oda Mae to cooperate with him by singing (excruciatingly badly) "I Am Henry the Eighth, I Am" over and over till she can't stand it anymore. When told of this, Molly reveals that Sam did the same thing to get her to go on their first date.
• Airplane! and Airplane II: The Sequel has Ted Striker deliver long, rambling stories about his life to various people. These stories are so excruciatingly boring that people keep killing themselves just to stop listening, while one woman literally dies of boredom and is reduced to a skeleton by the time Ted's done.

Literature

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Vogon poetry, which is used in-universe as a torture device, Vogons having no illusions about the reputation of their poetry, and the poetry of the Azgoths of Kria, which has literally killed several listeners. There's a poet on Earth, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings, who's worse than both of them, but we are mercifully spared its effects (the poet named after Paul Neil Milne Jennings, a friend of Douglas Adams).
• Similarly, the Discworld's Nac Mac Feegle have Gonnagles, bards whose poetry is so bad that it's used on the battlefield. They are presumably named for the legendarily-bad Scottish poet William Topaz McGonagall.

Live-Action TV

• The "plot" of Mystery Science Theater 3000 involves a Mad Scientist attempting to find a movie so bad it could be weaponized. And while they haven't yet succeeded, they've come close a few times:
  • Monster a-Go Go and The Castle of Fu Manchu are two top candidates for the worst movie ever featured on the show, on a technical level. The hosts never really went that nuts, but quite a few viewers did.
  • Manos: The Hands of Fate was so god-awful that Dr. Forrester and Frank actually apologized to Joel for making him watch it.
  • Invasion of the Neptune Men was such an ordeal that Mike and the 'bots had to take turns stepping out of the theater for a few moments. It might have done the job, had it not been for a surprise visit from Krankor cheering everyone up.
  • Hobgoblins was so painful that Pearl frequently used it as her go-to threat, against the hosts or her henchmen — just mentioning "the movie" made Bobo scream. She kept it in the Ark of the Covenant to try to mitigate its power. When she finally breaks it out on the hosts, the 'bots start trying to flee during the opening credits, then made cardboard cutouts of themselves to try to sneak away.
  • Lost Continent's "rock climbing" segment was so dull and monotonous that just mentioning it in later episodes would make the 'bots shudder.
  • Hercules Against the Moon Men's sandstorm sequence was also painfully boring. The Mads knew exactly what they were doing and presaged it with the phrase, "Deep huuurrrting!!"
  • Star Force: Fugitive Alien II was so terrible that Tom Servo's head exploded less than thirty minutes in.
  • Red Zone Cuba came the closest to actually inflicting mental harm on Mike and the 'bots — but it was equally as effective on the Mads themselves.
• Averted in MST3K's Spiritual Successor The Film Crew, where Mike, Kevin and Bill work for a Cloudcuckoolander CEO who thinks the bad movies are just awesome. The guys themselves never despair — at worst, they suffer Brain Bleach moments with a giggle.
• A story arc in Kamen Rider Double features a street musician whose singing (a rock-rap fusion he calls "spilk") is so horrible it kills birds in mid-flight and causes an earthquake. The conflict comes from his winning an American Idol-style TV show despite his competition including actually competent singers (as well as members of AKB48 in Real Life), who hire the detective protagonist because they're sure the guy's cheating.
• This is the constant reaction to Sophie's Bad "Bad Acting" in Leverage. Eliot once called one of her performances the "worst night of [his] life," a statement that was juxtaposed with a flashback to him being forced to play Russian Roulette alone by some unsavory-looking brutes. As Parker once said, quoting a reviewer:
  Parker: "Never before has a production of The Sound of Music made me root for the Nazis."
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • "Fool for Love". In one of Spike's flashbacks, an aristocrat says of his poetry, "I would rather have a railway spike rammed through my skull than listen to that drivel." Considering that when Spike was first introduced, Giles had mentioned that he was infamous for impaling people with railway spikes, he may well have been Tempting Fate.
  • An earlier episode showed Giles grimacing his way through Talent Show auditions, particularly Cordelia's rendition of 'The Greatest Love of All.'
• "Nossan", the Blue Ranger of Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger is known for his bad puns. While they usually tend to only conjure a tumbleweed when used, there was an instance where his jokes were so bad they gave the monster responsible for the last great Ice Age a case of the chills.
• Red Dwarf: When imprisoned in season 8, Lister and Rimmer find that the inmates of Red Dwarf's secret prison are forced to watch god-awful B-movies (such as Attack of the Giant, Savage, Completely Invisible Aliens, which openly admits in the trailer that it's "horrible"). Rimmer speculates that it's a deliberate effort on the staff's part to sap their morale.
  Rimmer: Next month is George Formby season. [in an imitation of Formby] Git yer hang'ing rope while there's still some left! Hey-hey!
• In 'Allo 'Allo!, Madame Edith's singing is god-awful enough that it can cause Nazi officers and hardened resistance fighters alike to flee the building (or at least to stuff cheese in their ears). The only thing worse is a sensual song-and-dance by her eighty-year-old mother Fanny.
• In "The Royale" from Star Trek: The Next Generation, an Apollo astronaut is the only survivor of an alien kidnapping, and the aliens tried to create an appropriate environment for him to live out the rest of his days in as an apology because they didn't actually mean to kill his crew-mates. Unfortunately, they base their re-creation on the text of a novel called Hotel Royale that he had taken with him on the journey, and he is forced to live out the rest of his days in a re-creation of a "badly written book, filled with endless cliché and shallow characters." He welcomes the death that eventually comes in his sleep.

Music

• A music critic reviewing the 1978 soundtrack album for the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band movie (with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) was quoted as saying that if you play it backwards, you can hear Paul saying "I wish I was dead." ^note Serves as a Mythology Gag as it refers to the "Paul is dead" conspiracy during the Beatles' twilight years.

Radio

• In Old Harry's Game, writers in Hell are forced to listen to dialogue from Jeffrey Archer's books.
• Bleak Expectations:
  • When Pip Bin winds up in Hell, Mr. Benevolent tortures him by tying him up, then putting a cat on his lap so it will claw him incessantly, summoning a wren to peck out his spleen, tying his belt too tight, and placing in Pip's view a TV showing Holby City. Pip Bin considers this an even worse fate than all three of the other tortures combined.
  Sir Phillip Bin: A cat was clawing my lap, a bird was pecking out my spleen, my belt was too tight, and an unconvincing medical drama was on.
  Pip Bin: Ah, cat! Ah, spleen! Ah, trousers! Oh, for goodness' sake, that's not how a real person talks in a medical emergency!
  • A few episodes later, Mr. Benevolent abducts Pip's wife Ripely, and makes her read celebrity autobiographies. She laments the simplistic "yet clearly ghostwritten" prose, and worse, the terrible puns every title has.
  Pip Bin: Surely it can't be that bad.
  Ripely: (acidly) You try reading Florence Nightingale's From Bad, to Nurse
• John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: In one Storyteller sketch, he is advised not to make an incredibly obvious joke by his boss on the grounds that his boss is an old man, and the joke is so bad it might actually kill him.

Tabletop Games

• The villains of the Paranoia adventure Clones in Space are aliens with a finely developed aesthetic sense. Their torturers primarily make use of human pop culture (country music, the Three Stooges) to extract confessions. The Troubleshooters are unaffected, while the torturers (and Game Master) cover their ears and writhe in agony.

Video Games

• The Curse of Monkey Island: Exaggerated when singing all possible shanties to Van Helgen in a optional conversation causes him to have a mild stroke.
• Psychonauts:
  Sasha: Say something hideous and horrible jumps out at you, something so disgusting that it simply must die.
  [he pushes a button; a tiffany lamp appears]
  Sasha: Ach! So... tacky... can't... look... directly at it...
• Inga Wagner's singing in No One Lives Forever. Mooks are relieved when she "punishes" them by forcing them to miss her singing performances.
• In Sonic Heroes, Team Chaotix' Team Blast, "Chaotix Recital", lives up to its name by having Espio, Charmy and Vector perform music extremely badly. They don't even seem to be coordinated with each other; Espio plays a shamisen and sings an edgy song about the ninja's creed, Charmy bangs on a drum and sings an upbeat song about himself, and Vector takes lead vocals and yells into the microphone, and not in a Rock & Roll kind of way, instead just shouting and laughing like a goofball. Like all other Team Blasts, this destroys all the enemies in the surrounding area, purely from the awfulness (and possibly the volume) of the recital.
• One of the books you can study in Persona 4 is a "ploddingly-written romantic comedy about a girl on her first day of school in a new town. Vampires are involved.". The narration explicitly says "the content of this book was almost physically painful for you to read". It boosts your Diligence stat, presumably for pressing through and finishing the whole thing despite how bad it is.
• In Fallout 2, after finding out that a minor villain calls himself Frog Morton because "he croaks people," your only choice of response is "Ohhhh. Ouch. That's terrible. The pain, the pain!" The person who tells you it says that a pun that bad is another reason to kill him.
• Undead Warlock Tehd Shoemaker in World of Warcraft: Legion has this reaction to the Burning Legion's slapdash efforts in summoning more demons for their invasion.
  Legion: This physically hurts me and I haven't felt real pain in decades.
• Borderlands 2:
  • The sidequest "Out of Body Experience" has you finding an A.I. core from a Hyperion robot and trying to find it a new body. However, every time you put it in a new body, it tries to kill you. Even when you install it in the radio in Moxxi's bar in Sanctuary, it tries to torment the patrons into suicidal despair with terrible country music.
  • Another sidequest has you helping Scooter compose a love poem. The result (with lines like "You are a diamond in the rough / or a flower surrounded by shrapnel and stuff") is so awful the intended recipient calmly walks back into her house and blows her brains out.
• in Crusader Kings II, characters with the 'Poet' trait can torture their prisoners by declaiming bad poetry. This has a small chance of driving the prisoner insane.
• In Disco Elysium, one of the ways you can potentially die is by reading "Sixteen Days in Coldest April", a book of depressing, wordy, incredibly worthy literature that deals not only morale damage, but health damage over and over as you read it. (At high levels, your Pain Threshold skill, who encourages you into suicidal masochism, will love it and beg for more.)
• Kirby's Mic ability gives three uses to do a ton of damage to enemies. Minor enemies are defeated immediately, while minibosses will be internally begging for a quick death after the first use to spare themselves from the puffball's atrocious singing.

Visual Novels

• Inverted in Morgan’s epilogue in Double Homework when Uncle Tommy, Morgan, and the protagonist play in a punk rock concert together. As the protagonist notes, nobody cares how bad they are; in fact, they all seem to enjoy it.
• Idol Hakkenden: Kooky King's pose is so idiotic it tends to drain other characters' strength or make them fall to the floor.

Web Comics

• Astos in 8-Bit Theater was taken down by a combination of Red Mage and Black Mage's corny attempts at a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
• In the version of Videoland we see in Captain SNES: The Game Masta, Garth Brooks is this, as shown by Proto Man threatening to force Dr. Wily to listen to his music if the former ever even suspects the latter is planning to be a Vice-President Evil after running beside Mike Haggar for President of Nexus, regardless of whether Wily really is hatching such a plan, prompting Wily to call Proto Man a monster just for making such a threat.
• Dean & Nala + Vinny: Nala is writing a birthday card for Dean's grandmother and reading it to Vinny:
  Nala: "Happy Birthday, Gran. Feeling old? At least you are not a Greenland Shark with eye parasites." No, wait... "at least you don't have eye parasites?"
  Vinny (feelers bending downward in despair): Dear God.
• In Minion Comics one of the torture options is a Comedy Central special: George Lopez: It's Funny Because He's Hispanic.
• The Order of the Stick suggests Céline Dion as a weapon of torture. Never used, since Nale is still civilized.
• Inverted in this Cyanide and Happiness strip. A character's drunkenness is cured by a bad joke.
• One of the attempts to scare the protagonists by the ghosts in The Chosen Four was a copy of Superman 64
• In El Goonish Shive, Elliot looks up an unnamed movie (stated by Word of God to be Jack and Jill) on Rotten Tomatoes, and finds that it's only listed as 4% fresh. However, the important thing is the one visible review: "I'd rather have my wisdom teeth removed again..."

Web Original

• Channel Awesome: This is kind of the Nostalgia Critic's whole schtick, except when he's reviewing something that's actually good or doing a top-eleven countdown. A lot of the reviewers on his site, in fact.
  • When The Nostalgia Critic reviewed Junior, he saw the baby dream with the greenscreen face of Arnold on the baby, and it made him scream like a girl, and then vomit all over the place.
  • Linkara in Atop the Fourth Wall, driven mad by a bad pun ("Re-Todd") in Countdown to Final Crisis: "ANTI-LIFE JUSTIFIES MY HATE! Anti-life justifies my haaaaaattteee... [breaks down sobbing]"
  • In Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie, a Cutaway Gag shows the Nostalgia Critic couldn't make it to Linkara's birthday party because he traumatized himself by watching The Garbage Pail Kids Movie again:
    Calluna: For the love of god, Critic! Why did you watch Garbage Pail Kids again? What were you thinking?!
    Critic: I don't know! I thought it would get better with age!
    Sage: Critic, open the door before you are permanently traumatized!
    Critic: I don't know what happiness is anymore! Joy is a lie! A LIIIEEE!!!
  • Angry Joe accuses Sonic Free Riders of "Assault in the First Degree to knowingly inflict bodily harm."
  • Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas was so hard on The Nostalgia Chick that she'd rather go through "seven holocausts" than watch it again.
  • The 4Kids version of the One Piece theme song reduces MarzGurl to angrish and crying.
  • Todd in the Shadows:
    • He writhes in pain at a musical number of Hannah Montana: The Movie.
      Todd: I've seen Grease 2. I saw that Sgt. Peppers movie with The Bee Gees. I've seen two High School Musicals. But this ought to be the worst musical number ever.
    • "Break Up" by Mario feat. Gucci Mane and Sean Garrett makes his hair fall out in clumps and his nose bleed. Later he claims he's lucky it didn't give him cancer.
    • Parodied in his review of Rihanna's "S&M", saying he doesn't get BDSM and likes the song even though he thinks it's a very flawed song without any virtues, only to realize he likes the song because he's a masochist.
  • Diamanda Hagan follows the cast of Project Million into the "It's a Small World" ride. She doesn't take it too well.
  • Spoony of The Spoony Experiment has a few videos listed under the title of "Experience BIJ", Bij being Klingon for "punishment"^note The term and the opening credits come from the Star Trek: The Next Generation — A Klingon Challenge VCR board game; the videos themselves largely consist of whatever Spoony has seen on the internet which is horribly annoying, and the goal is to see how long you can watch the videos without pausing, going to another window, or muting it. Few can make it.
  • The Cinema Snob:
    • He experienced this in the aftermath of watching Video Violence — about three years later, as he was reviewing its sequel, he had just recovered from the debilitating effects.
    • Gross Out manages not to set him off with its Vulgar Humor antics... but the lead actress's horrible performance makes him vomit.
    • Also, Nukie. The entire episode. The only one where Snob seems in more pain is To Catch a Yeti.
  • Oancitizen of Brows Held High shouts out "OW!" after The Reveal in Zardoz that Zed's religion is based on The Wizard of Oz.
  • JesuOtaku once stated that attempting to watch Ikki Tousen left him "in physical pain".
• Observing the effects of bad writing on a 'verse can cause Agents of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum to spork their eyes out, Go Mad from the Revelation, or get a headache.
• This is the reason The Agony Booth named itself after the pain device from Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Pretty much the central theme of the Banana Phone flash animation.
• The resident Pungeon Master of the Spoiler Warning Let's Play group occasionally makes puns so bad they make the other members groan.
• Of the Freelance Astronauts, Ferr is usually the one making painful puns (pipes!: "Solve my maze!" Ferr: Well, it's on fire, so maybe you should salve it first. Evek: I'm in physical pain!), but occasionally, Maxwell gets in on it. Witness the final boss fight of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Master Quest, where he tells the others that Ganondorf "really puts the 'try' in 'Triforce'."
  Evek: That was fucking painful!
• The Angry Video Game Nerd:
  • During his first attempt to review Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde for the NES, the Nerd spoke about it being so bad that it traumatized him, and had a hard time bringing himself to playing it.
  • Later, he would go to review Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, and said this about the ending:
    Nerd: What's the best way to end a shitty movie? With a shitty ending. One so bad that it leaves me scarred for life.
  • The AVGN Movie and episodes leading up to it established his phobia of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He couldn't even stand to look at the cartridge, and vomited after watching a sequel of it for a few seconds.
• In Alex Navarro of Gamespot's video review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, he never says a single word. For 2 minutes he just stares at the gameplay footage in disbelief, occasionally just shaking his head or face-palming, before standing up, walking outside, and lying down in the middle of the road.
• TV Trash: Chris "Rowdy" Moore is scarred by the pilots for "Heil Honey I'm Home!" and "The Groovenians". The former sends him into a depression, and the latter has him taking pills.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-504 enforces this. A tomato that will fly at high speed toward the source of bad humor. The worse the pun, the harder it hits.
  Item: Three mature SCP-504 tomatoes, one for each test subject.
  Subject: After the introduction to the following news item, 'Bomb blows hole in Lenin statue', the three following jokes were made.
  Test Subject 1: Ooh, that's gonna leave a Marx.
  Result: Tomato number one "twitched", but did not displace from its original location.
  
  Test Subject 2: BBC is just Stalin the good news.
  Result: Tomato clocked at 152 mph. Chipped tooth and hairline jaw fracture.
  
  Test Subject 3: That blows.
  Result: Tomato clocked at [REDACTED]. Subject is hospitalized with a massive skull fracture.
• SF Debris:
  • Reviewing the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Angel One": The perfume scene is met with cries of "Oh, for the love of God! Five, there are five lights! Five!", calling back to the torture scene from "Chain of Command".
  • In Comic History 8, he puts forward the idea that Rob Liefeld put forth a comic so bad that it actually gave Marvel Comics editor Mark Gruenwald a fatal heart attack.
• The Two Best Friends Play enjoy using this trope. Pat in particular has 'died' several times over the course of playthroughs of terrible games, such as during the Broken Bond LP (Woolie brought him back with a ressurection jutsu) and in the Omikron playthrough he simply continued talking from beyond the grave.
• PatTheNESPunk:
  • In the review of Action 52, he starts this trope and expanded on it more and more as the review went on. He started out self-confident, trying to find a decent game in the compilation. As the review went on, he started praying to find a decent game. At the very end of the review you can see him literally faint.
  • The antagonist in Pat the NES Punk's M82 madness hoped that Pat would achieve the same effect when he would review "awful" games on his M82. Sadly, most of those so called "awful" games turned out not to be as awful as the antagonist thought they were, with Pat even saying that those games weren't even bad, which only made the antagonist more angry.
• The That Post Gave Me Cancer meme.
• Woolie Versus: During the Death Stranding playthrough, Woolie suffered a Heroic BSoD as a result of the game's Hurricane of Puns and stated the wordplay was physically painful.
• The Mysterious Mr. Enter has strongly reconsidered using the words "painful to watch" after his review of an episode of The Problem Solverz; that is, in no way, implying that his Animated Atrocities subjects wouldn't qualify for the phrase in the metaphorical sense, but the aforementioned episode's bright and constantly-shifting coloring made the episode physically painful for him to watch, even worsening his myopia.
• HFIL introduces us to the Ginyu Force's newest dance, the twerkarena - a hybrid of the macarena and twerking. Just seeing it is enough for Cell to want to get out of there, but that's not the worst part. In life, Frieza hired these guys as his secret police, meaning he knew of their quirks, and yet here he calls their practice sessions "terrifying" before shuddering at the thought, as if they became even kookier in death.
• Mad Because Small:
  • In "2.56", Urianger's Flowery Elizabethan English speech is so painful it causes everyone to die
  • In "3", Fordola and Lyse's "sick dance off" causes Alisaie to die from the lameness again.
• Kitboga is a scambaiter popular on Twitch and YouTube.
  • After about an hour and twenty minutes into "Buying Hot Dogs Instead of Gift Cards (For Scammers)," Kitboga can't help but note that the scammers still having managed to pretend to send any money to his bank account and can't figure out the screen-sharing software they're using and are trying to install another. He points out that while he's trying to waste their time, the whole thing is just getting a bit ridiculous that they're so incompetent they're wasting their own time.
  • In "When Scammer Think You're a Bitcoin Millionaire," Kitboga tricks a group of refund scammers into believing that his character has just over a million dollars in Bitcoin. After leaving them on this, he ends the call for the day. When they call back the next day, he's astonished to the point of near speechlessness and having to compose himself of the fact that instead of coming up with anything even remotely creative, they just try to run the standard refund scam, and rather badly too. The fact that he ends up spending nearly 7 hours total on the phone with them is a testament to their sheer persistence more than anything else, as he tries to simply end things with them several times due to not wanting to waste time on ineffective scammers.
• Cinematic Excrement has many cases, specially once Smeghead decided to look up the Golden Raspberry Award winners. He agreed that Dirty Love deserved to be chosen as the worst picture of 2005 because "it hated me and wanted me to suffer", and his review of The Love Guru opens with an exhausted Sean admitting watching the Worst Picture nominees was taking its toll on him.

Western Animation

• Happens the in Danny Phantom episode, "Fanning the Flames", where Danny weaponizes Tucker's horrible Hollywood Tone-Deaf singing to break Ember's Magic Music trance on everyone watching her televised concert.
• South Park:
  • In one episode', the Ewok-filled special edition of Raiders of the Lost Ark was so horrible it had the same effect as the ark in the actual movie, killing George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. Spielberg and Lucas came back in a later episode, though.
  • "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining": The boys go on a camping trip that is apparently so painfully dull that it killed Kenny (as in, Kenny literally dies of boredom).
  • Russell Crowe's singing in one episode is so bad that Tugger shoots himself to avoid having to listen to it any longer.
• On The Critic, Roger Ebert was interviewing a potential new partner and showed him the kind of bad movies he'd have to watch. A version of Mrs. Doubtfire with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role fully skeletonized him.
  • And when Roger starts up his next review, Sylvester and Frank Stallone in "Yo! Godot! I'm Waitin' Here!", the corpse's skull falls off.
• The poetry of PedXing in Dave the Barbarian has this effect on everyone but Dave and Princess Irmaplotz.
• An episode of SpongeBob SquarePants revolves around Patrick's self-composed song, which is so awful that it actually kills the band that records it. Also, there's Squidward's clarinet skills.
  • Squidward's dancing is unbearable to watch that it hurts people's eyes, and makes some throw up. His art doesn't fare much better, seeing how it literally burns people's heads off.
• A cutaway gag for Family Guy. Peter and a young girl stand in the living room, and she hands him a tape but warns him that if he watches it, he will die. Peter plays it on the VCR. The tape in question turns out to be Mannequin; in the next scene Peter dies with a contorted appearance, similar to victims of The Ring.
• At one point in Futurama, Bender auditions for a part on the Show Within a Show when a role opens up. His lousy "Spanish accent" prompts this response from Calculon (who is a robot):
  Calculon: That was so terrible, I think you gave me cancer!
  • Calculon's acting, meanwhile, is so bad that when he does a one-bot show, it hospitalizes twelve people. Nine of them were expected to recover. And the Robot Devil (who gave Calculon his acting "talent" in the first place) regards it as worse than the torments he inflicts on the damned.
• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius episode "One of Us", this trope is how Jimmy describes The Happy Show Show after his hypnotized friends convince him to watch it.
  Jimmy: I thought my TV would explode! I thought I might faint from the show's supreme stankiness!
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie's "You Gotta Share, You Gotta Care" song. It is so awful that two warring tribes only strengthen their resolve to go to war after she performs it once. The second performance, when the tribes are RIGHT on the precipice of a truce immediately before commencing battle, makes the chief of one tribe so enraged that he leads his people into battle simply because the song pissed him off so much.
  • In "Maud Pie", Pinkie's sister Maud comes to visit, and the rest of Pinkie's friends find her stoic, anti-social, and only interested in rocks. At one point, Twilight asks Maud about her poetry and Maud provides a sample. Twilight's reaction shows how bad this poetry is, and it's only the tip of the iceberg.
• The Yogi's Treasure Hunt episode "Yogi's Heroes" had Dick Dastardly and Muttley capturing Snooper and Blabber and forcing them to watch episodes of Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Blabber even states that it will turn their brains to mush.
• On Star vs. the Forces of Evil, while Star likes her crush Oskar's keytar music, in his first appearance his terrible playing causes everyone else to writhe on the ground in pain.
• Ed's violin music in the Ed, Edd n Eddy episode "Pain in the Ed" is literally painful to listen to since it's able to peel bark and crack stone from the sound alone. Even better, a musical note manifests itself from Ed's violin and caves in Eddy's face like a dropped bowling ball!

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