Suicide as Comedy

Everybunny's gotta go someday.

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp;
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

— Dorothy Parker, "Resume"

In Real Life, Suicide is a very serious matter. People generally complete (or attempt) suicide because they are simply unable to cope with life and with their emotions. Overwhelming negative feelings such as anger or depression have become too much for them to bear, making suicide seem like the only feasible option. It is a tragic thing that happens all too often and is extremely traumatic for the victim's friends and family, who are left behind to grieve. When someone commits suicide, their loved ones are often wracked with anguish and guilt, wishing they had done something before it happened. They feel that if they had taken some action to help the person when they had the chance, their dearly departed loved one would still be alive.

In the land of fiction, whether gruesome and brutal or romantic and painless, it's a huge source of drama. Right? Well, usually.

Some shows aren't so serious. Frequently, they'll have one ridiculously depressed character who is either constantly on the verge of suicide or keeps attempting it. If it's the latter, expect Interrupted Suicide or Bungled Suicide to come into play. These characters are sometimes Driven to Suicide by the slightest thing (like their favorite TV show getting cancelled), or else are so disillusioned that their lives are one long string of attempts to, well, cut that string. They see everything as a means of self-destruction. If the suicidal character is a Deadpan Snarker, expect protests along the lines of "Oh, just let me die already!" And in the event that their suicide succeeds, expect it to be an Undignified Death. Part of the joke may be that it looks like they're going to off themselves, but were actually doing something that didn't involve killing themselves at all.

See also Black Comedy. Compare Seen-It-All Suicide, Black Comedy Rape. If the show playing this trope involves anthropomorphic animals, lemmings will always be the first choice. As with many Black Comedy tropes, this may evoke objections of "Dude, Not Funny!".

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Examples Subpages:

• Live-Action TV
• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Advertising

• General Motors had this Super Bowl commercial, highlighting how reliable its warranty is (since its cars are so well built it could last the entire warranty). The commercial follows a robot who fails to properly insert a screw, forcing his dismissal. He's then forced to work several menial jobs, such as holding a sign or operating the drive-thru speaker, though every time he sees a GM car he gets depressed. Eventually, the depression reaches the point where the robot is seen jumping off a bridge into the water, killing himself, until the commercial cuts to the fact It Was All A Dream. The episode in its original format, while generally well-received, was criticized for being insensitive by suicide support groups, forcing GM to change the ad where, instead of the robot jumping to his death, he's forced to work as a grocery store stock boy.
• This Geico ad compares the unbelievable savings from switching your insurance to Geico to the unbelievable fact that a Hollywood Tone-Deaf guy at an Antarctic research station brought his karaoke machine with him and is singing the Backstreet Boys song "I Want It That Way". Badly. So badly that one of the other researchers tries to walk out into an ongoing blizzard rather than continue listening and another one has to drag him back from trying to kill himself.
• The PIC Mosquito Repellent Coil advertisement often played at Drive In Theaters featured a scene where after the announcer explains how to use it, one of the cartoon mosquitoes holds one in one of his hands and lights it, saying "So if you don't want our company ever anywhere, just light PIC and...see what I mean?! Bye!" and drops dead (complete with suddenly holding a flower once deceased.)
• A Hyundai ad showed a man attempting to kill himself by using a hose to fill a car with carbon monoxide from its exhaust system, only to walk away dejected because the car in question runs off of water emissions. Unsurprisingly, this ad was quite controversial.

Anime & Manga

• No Longer Allowed in Another World: Sensei's suicidal tendencies are always Played for Laughs, whether it's him ingesting the nearest poison he can get his hands on, to spending all his time lying back in a coffin while his companions drag it behind them.
• Nozomu from Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei attempts to kill himself Once an Episode. In the beginning, anyhow. The suicide jokes decrease over time (though don't disappear entirely) as other forms of comedy pop up (like Chiri's increasing homicidal tendencies).
  • Katteni Kaizo's protagonist does that at one point as a shout out to Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei.
• In an extra chapter of The Dangers in My Heart, Yamada plays pretend as a zombie and goes after Kyōtarō. He hesitates at first (Admittedly because she gets so close to him) but goes through with "shooting" her. Kyōtarō then imagines her as an actual zombie dead on the ground and "shoots" himself in the head.
  Kyōtarō: If Yamada dies, I'd die.
• In D.Gray-Man, Miranda Lotto uses her powers to repair a damaged ship. Everyone stares at her in amazement, but she immediately thinks she's messed up and tries to off herself by jumping into the ocean.
• Paranoia Agent has the episode "Happy Family Planning". Three people are trying to commit suicide, with two of them trying to keep the third from doing so because she's too young. And it's easily the goofiest episode in the series.
  • Ends with it turning out that they had been Dead All Along (after the carbon monoxide poisoning, after which you never see their shadows again.
• Grelle Sutcliff from Black Butler tended to attempt suicide over the littlest mistakes she made in the earlier episodes. At first, the cast is willing to stop her but it annoys them so much they decided to no longer do so.
  • Of course, this was when she was posing as a hopelessly incompetent butler and shortly before she was revealed as a psychopathic Grim Reaper, a job to which suicide is a prerequisite.
• Saint Young Men, playing up the Christian and Buddhist stories on how animals like quails and rabbits were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the higher power, has Jesus and Buddha constantly being plagued by animals willing to give themselves up for food whenever one of them makes so much as a small comment on how hungry they are. Cats jumping on plates while carrying matches, turtles trying to dive into boiling pots, turkeys knocking on the door while they were preparing a Christmas feast...
• Ai Ebihara's suicide attempt over a broken heart in Persona 4: The Animation is played almost completely for laughs. Almost, because after Narukami (the MC) talks her out, we learn her Freudian Excuse as a Formerly Fat girl who was harshly bullied in the past, and liked Kou because he treated her well.
• This episode of the Lupin III: Part II series features a "Suicide Beam" used as the main weapon against Lupin and his gang. Lupin gets hit with the beam and continues to lightheartedly attempt suicide, only to be stopped by Jigen or Zenigata each time. Zenigata also gets hit with the beam two times and tries to shoot himself in the head. He misses. Both times.
• The first episode of Humanity Has Declined has this with self-loathing robotic bread.
• In Inu × Boku SS, Soushi's attempts to convince Ririchiyo to commit his Seppuku when she doesn't need him anymore and wants to dispose of him are Played for Laughs.
• Kumadori from One Piece is a very loud and flamboyant character, and has a habit of trying to commit seppuku over minor issues. Unfortunately for him, he knows a skin hardening technique that he instinctively activates every he tries to stab himself. He laments at not being able to take his own life, much to Jabra's exasperation.
• In Haikara-san ga Tooru, Benio Hanamura's suicide attempts are Played for Laughs. (Even when the circumstances pushing her to do it, well, aren't funny at all.) She once tried to put her head in a bowl of water, but was saved; then she got inside a water tank... which was full of sake, so she "only" got drunk.
• Ramen Fighter Miki, being a deconstruction of the Fighting Series Played for Laughs, uses this at the beginning of episode 4A, Kayahara sensei mentions to eat "her last ramen" and "To continue this pitiful life of a teacher... I'm already tired of it." Later we discover that Kayahara Sensei is not talking about suicide, but to quit her job as a teacher. However, Miki invokes it to solve her problem with a student that wants to quit Kayahara's class:
  Miki: Imagine, if she committed suicide because of you, she'll haunt you for sure!
• Amelia from The Voynich Hotel constantly wants to off herself, but can't without taking someone with her. (It's what she tries to do in her very first appearance, by the way.) When you find out just how awful of a life she had before becoming the hotel's chef, and the horrifically funny crap she has to put up with as part of her job, you can't really blame her.
• In the manga of Mahoraba (but not the anime), Sayoko regularly tries to hang herself, but always fails due to the rope or branch snapping, or other comical mishaps.
• Bungo Stray Dogs:
  • Dazai's main character trait is his desire to kill himself, which he constantly attempts. It's almost always played for laughs. The very first time he's seen is after the protagonist Atsushi interrupts one of his suicide attempts, where he tried to drown himself in a river. You can guess his reaction. Throughout the series, we're casually shown Dazai attempting suicide a number of times.
    Dazai: I love suicide, but I hate pain and discomfort.
  • Aside from that, Dazai likes to sing about suicide, read books about suicide, flirtatiously propose double suicide, and constantly drops lines referencing suicide. And it's never, ever played the least bit seriously. What makes this especially dark is that all of the characters in the series are named after either classical authors and poets or major characters from classical literature, and the author he's named after was famously suicidal and ultimately drowned himself.
• The notoriously So Bad, It's Good Hentai anime Bible Black has a scene where a teenage girl's dramatic suicide is undercut by a completely comical overreaction. You can see the scene here (WARNING: NSFW!)
• At one point in UQ Holder!, Kirie attempts to kill herself after losing a bunch of money on the stock market. Of course, this would just cause her Save Scumming powers to kick in, so it also doubles as a case of Time Travel for Fun and Profit.
• A Running Gag in Irresponsible Captain Tylor involves Admiral Mifune trying to commit seppuku when he gets enraged, and having to be physically restrained by someone else.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: An earlier Running Gag of the series revolves around Ishigami putting his foot in his mouth, causing others (usually girls) to react negatively and hurting his feelings. Depressed, he then approaches Shirogane and requests to go home so he can write his will. Shirogane's response is always "S-sure, but please don't die." Then, Ishigami shows up just fine in the next episode.

Asian Animation

• In episode 15 of Happy Heroes, Big M. fakes wanting to kill himself in order to convince Smart S. to give him a stray cat that he has under his care. Little M. gets in on the ploy by actually bringing out a gun to kill Big M. with; Big M. understandably does not appreciate it. The whole thing is played for laughs.

Comedy

• Part of Bo Burnham's routine in "Make Happy." He attempts to imitate Katy Perry-esque inspirational songs and devolves into imploring his audience to kill themselves, before apologizing, discussing how suicide is a serious issue, and that if you're desperate enough to take words of wisdom from pop music, you should kill yourself. Burnham realizes the gravity of the issue he's joking with and goes as far as to immediately apologize for the song, begging listeners to not complain about it on their blogs.
• Irish comedian Frank Carson had a joke about how a man had a nasty fall and would have broken his legs if it weren't for the rope around his neck.

Comic Books

• The British adult comic Viz has the character Suicidal Sid who is suicidally depressed and in every story continually tries to kill himself only for every single attempt to fail. It isn't until he regains the will to live that he finally dies.
• In Nextwave, Dirk Anger is constantly seen trying to commit suicide due to an extended Villainous Breakdown, though he was never psychologically stable to begin with. The most notable example is trying to shoot himself with a pistol that has a barrel curved backwards in a U-shape and is larger than a car. Finally, he accidentally hangs himself, only to come back as a zombie.
• In one Lucky Luke story, a man is distraught by a company teetering on bankruptcy. "I put most of my fortune in its stock!" He tries to shoot himself but the gun fails to work. His butler then informs him that the rest of his money is in the maker of that brand of gun.
  • Another story had a man who is a horrible shot, yet his girlfriend won't marry him unless he becomes sheriff. Feeling he can't live without her, he puts the gun against his head and fires. And the shot misses!
• In one Spirou & Fantasio story, the stock market crash suicides are milked for every possible laugh. First a Chinese peddler sets up a shop outside the New York stock market, selling lucky charms, and when the place closes later, he moves to the backdoor selling revolvers. Another joke from the same album informed an ex-millionaire intending to shoot himself but learning that the debtors already took his revolver. His butler, suddenly rich from his own stock investments, suggests that they switch parts. A bit later on, the ex-butler is in turn bankrupt, and the ex-millionaire, now a butler informs that rather than wasting his money on stocks, he invested it on a revolver and lends it to his master.
• The Book of Bunny Suicides by Andy Riley is a collection of (mostly) one-panel drawings of assorted means of self-termination attempted by very determined and creative bunnies.
• Arseface from Preacher deserves mention here: his pre-series attempt to mimic Kurt Cobain and the speech impediment, partial lobotomy (resulting in an unshakably cheerful personality) and namesake deformity he received from the shotgun blast were repeatedly Played for Laughs, at least until his Ensemble Dark Horse Woobie status resulted in further character development and a happy ending for him.
• In Tomorrow Stories, Jack B. Quick's science-based hijinks and meddling in Things Man Was Not Meant to Know eventually drive his folksy parents into depression and suicide. Their suicide attempts are frequently relegated to a Funny Background Event.
• Noob has a real-life scene in which one of the players keeps a random teen from jumping off a building... over a celebrity couple breaking up. The teen in question finds the will to live again after noticing some Celebrity Resemblance in the guy who saved her.
• The Transformers (IDW):
  • Used as an example of how interminably stodgy Prowl is in The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers. He had a captured Decepticon commander at his mercy and spent the better part three days going over every single one of the Decepticon's many violations of the Tyrest Accord in excruciating detail. It was the end of day three before anyone realized that the Decepticon had been dead for about twelve hours, having preferred to shut off his own Spark (the equivalent of willing one's heart to stop beating and wiping out the soul in the process) rather than suffer through any more tedium by listening to Prowl. In other words, Prowl has successfully bored someone to death.
  • A mentally unstable ex-soldier with suicidal tendencies is in the middle of a session with his court-mandated therapist when a Shell-Shocked Veteran who's having a disastrous personal breakdown smashes through the door and takes them hostage. Under normal circumstances, this would not be particularly funny. In The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, though, the mentally unstable ex-soldier is Whirl, who manages to imbue his attempts to egg on Fortress Maximus to shoot him with a significant amount of very dark comedy by choosing phrases like "Please just skip to the end and kill us."
    Rung: Everyone please - just stay calm. Max, please lower the gun. I know what this is about - what this is really about. Lower the gun and we'll talk, yes?
    Whirl, staring down the barrel: Don't listen to him! It's a trick! Pull the trigger!
• The horror comic Dylan Dog once ventured in this: a terminally ill man had sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for revenge on the killers of his family only for the Devil to tell him he'd do while he's in the hospital about to die just to deny him the satisfaction and then to Baba Yaga who delivered immediately, resulting in him being unable to die until the Devil and Baba Yaga can solve the issue of his soul while still suffering for his illness and the Devil thwarting his attempts at just committing suicide (stabbing himself with a knife resulted in the blade falling down, putting himself on the rails resulted in the Devil derailing the train and kill anybody on board but leaving him alive, throwing himself from a palace had him bounce back where he jumped from, etc.).
• Recurring Extra De Suicidis from Alan Ford is a desperate man who's always trying to kill himself for unclear reasons but no success, no matter how hard or imaginative the attempt is (hanging himself, jumping in a river, face a bull in a corrida with no training, join a suicide mission in the Foreign Legion, use a contraption to smoke a whole packet worth of cigarettes at once). To add to the Black Comedy, nobody does try to dissuade him (in his first appearance Alan even advises him to look for a better spot along the bridge to jump from).
• Mortadelo y Filemón: If a mission involves something extremely dangerous (like one of Bacterio's inventions and they just can't run away, they'll likely try this.
  • Their fame as Walking Disaster Areas is such that people they are meant to protect are liable to jump out of a window and fasten the process.
• The first story in the twelfth and final issue of Tom Strong's Terrific Tales has a Dick Tracy expy blow his brains out because of remorse from peeping on Tom's daughter Tesla.
• At the start of the "Bright Lights, Big City" arc of Harley Quinn volume one, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy take over a woman's apartment in Metropolis when she responds to their arrival by casually walking away to hang herself over her love for a man not being reciprocated.
• Amalgam Universe had a suicide joke featured in the letters page of Magnetic Men: Featuring Magneto where someone writes a suicide note to Amalgam Comics over cancelling his favorite comic, spitefully informing the publisher that their decision to cancel the comic means that it will be their fault he killed himself. What especially makes this humorous instead of tasteless is that the person turns out to have changed his mind about killing himself at the last minute after hearing about the new comic that will be replacing the comic that got cancelled.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes:
  • In one story arc where Calvin accidentally breaks his dad's expensive binoculars, he asks Hobbes whether he should commit hara-kiri or run away from home. Hobbes suggests both.
  • In another story arc where Calvin accidentally floods the bathroom, he starts looking for cyanide in the medicine cabinet to avoid having to face his parents' wrath.
  • A few times, Calvin's grotesque snow creations include a suicidal snowman, such as a snowman killing himself with a hot water bottle on his head, a snowman about to jump from the roof, and a snowman about to hang himself.
• Garfield:
  • Garfield tries to stick his head in the oven when Jon considers getting him declawed... only to find it's electric, not gas powered.
  • This strip,◊ in which Garfield attempts suicide, is rather dark for a piece of family-friendly media, much less a newspaper comic strip.
  • One strip has Garfield meet a mouse whose mother was a lemming, a creature he describes as "a gerbil with suicidal tendencies." After a couple of strips of the mouse uncontrollably hurling himself off of the table, he ends up deciding to drown himself in Garfield's water bowl. Though the strip doesn't say anything conclusively, he's never seen again and the entire thing is Played for Laughs.
• There was a Mickey Mouse comic story (Yes, that Mickey Mouse) where Minnie leaves him and as a result shows him making a number of failed suicide attempts.
• Pearls Before Swine:
  • The strip used to have Alphonse the depressed porcupine do this, but author Stephen Pastis discontinued the character because of too many Dude, Not Funny! responses. (Despite the fact that the window Alphonse was threatening to jump from was, visibly, on the first story, and barely any taller than the character himself. And yes, he only had time to try it once before the fandom backlash forced him out of the strip.)
  • This is also the idea behind the suicidal lemmings. They always gather at a cliff to carry out a Suicide Pact, but either don't quite carry it out or find some creative way of doing so (such as the one who catches a football pass mid-jump and shouts that he just won the Super Bowl).

Fan Works

• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Fluffershy has Fluttershy attempt seppuku with a carrot after she walks in on her friends watching her cameo appearance in a porn movie. Pinkie talks her down after assuring her that they're not judging her.
• While Bittersweet portrays Pinkie's suicide as tragic, Rainbow Dash Presents Bittersweet puts it squarely in this trope, between Pinkie deliberately doing it to get back at the healthcare system that charged outrageous sums for her diabetes medicine, Pinkie being thrown off a bridge only to find the stream's barely deep enough to cover one's hooves, and Rainbow Dash being too distracted by lying to her parents about school to get advice on how to stop Pinkie from dying. And even the funeral plays it for laughs, with Rarity gloating that she totally called Pinkie committing suicide.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
  • Cell uses Android 17's voice to try and convince his sister, Android 18, to let Cell absorb her, as opposed to 18 killing herself. The comedy comes in the fact that Cell gives 17 a Totally Radical vernacular.
    Cell: Come on sis! You gotta chill yourself before you kill yourself!
  • Episode 34 reveals that in Trunks' timeline, Yamcha, instead of dying to the androids, hanged himself after learning that Bulma was pregnant with Vegeta's child.
    Goku: Dark.
• The MLP Loops: Due to the fact that time is looping infinitely, the loopers all know that death is temporary. While suicide is generally a sign of severe mental instability even for loopers, it still shows up on occasion, usually as a way to get out of especially bad variants.
  • In one loop, Twilight and her friends wake up as dinosaurs—with half of them carnivores. They immediately jump in the nearest volcano and just deal with the Punishment Loop.
    After all, whatever its other drawbacks, the school cafeteria in the Eiken world served pretty good food... none of which knew her on a first name basis or vice-versa.
  • There's one loop that seems normal... until Twilight realizes that Pinkie Pie has been replaced by Dolores Umbridge. She promptly blows up the sun, killing herself and crashing the loop.
    Twilight: Birch this loop. I'm done.
• This is the basic premise of the Ranma ½ story Akane the Suicidal, an Alternate Universe Fic where Ranma arrives at the Tendo Dojo to find Akane is, rather than the hot-tempered Tsundere she is in canon, a cheerful, friendly girl who is constantly trying to kill herself in various ways. These attempts (and the fact that the Tendos shove the duty of stopping them off on Ranma) are the story's main source of humor.

Films — Animation

• Scamper the rabbit from Igor. He often succeeds, but his Healing Factor prevents him from staying dead for long.
• In Twice Upon a Time, after Synonamess Botch throws out Scuzzbopper's manuscript for "the great A-Murk-ian novel" and tells him to get back to work writing nightmare scripts, Scuzzbopper is found by our heroes hanging from a noose in the basement. Fortunately he's still alive, and dryly admits to Flora he might have taken Botch's criticism too harshly.
• In the Kung Fu Panda holiday special, Po, in his duties as the Dragon Warrior, has to host a formal dinner for all the Kung Fu masters in China, and has to choose a chef. Unfortunately, due to the extreme formality of the dinner in question, a wave he gives to Monkey is misinterpreted as a dismissal of the first chef, a bunny named Wo Hop, whose name and family and village are now disgraced for all eternity. He believes the only way he can regain his honor is battling the Dragon Warrior in a fight to the death, even if that death is his own. Hilarity Ensues, and Po eventually helps him regain his honor without dying.
• The whole point of The Suicide Shop, where life has become so meaningless, are rampant. And suicides become so normal that no one bats an eye when they happen, or even when they discover that a friend wants to kill themselves. And the happiest and most colourful place of all is, of course, the suicide shop.

Films — Live-Action

• Accidental Hero has a scene where Intrepid Reporter Gale Gayley is interviewing a businessman who proceeds to tell her about the positive outlook of the nearby future before the camera pans out and the man jumps to his death from the ledge they were standing on. She then proceeds to quickly ask her cameraman if he got it on tape.
• In the sequel to The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, after realizing she's stuck in the world's brightest, cheeriest summer camp, Wednesday slowly raises a bottle of poison to her lips.^note The Addamses are notoriously difficult to kill, so it's possible Wednesday wasn't attempting suicide so much as she was trying to drug herself into a stupor.
• One of the running gags in Airplane! was the people who were Driven to Suicide rather than listen to Ted Striker reminisce about his past.
• The comedy Better Off Dead is about a high-schooler attempting suicide multiple times after his girlfriend leaves him. The director Savage Steve Holland claims he based the story on a depressive streak he went through as a teenager. In particular, the garage scene where Lane reconsiders hanging himself but loses his footing actually happened to him. [1]
• The French film L'Emmerdeur (called A Pain in the Ass in English) features a suicidal salesman who ends up getting a hotel room next to a professional assassin. Wackiness (and multiple suicide attempts) ensues.
• Bless the Beasts & Children has a scene where a timid, bullied little boy proclaims his intentions to commit suicide and the rest of the characters mock him for it. It's a bit off-putting, especially since we're told the boy has serious psychological issues.
• The Burt Reynolds comedy The End centers around Reynolds' terminally ill character attempting to off himself multiple times and failing horribly.
• Harold and Maude plays Harold's regular apparent suicides for dark humour.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian: At the end of the movie, Brian is almost saved by Big Damn Heroes, but the moment gets subverted again and again. One of those failed heroes are the Judean People's Front crack suicide squad. Who all stab themselves. As Brian desperately watches them.
• Penn & Teller's 1989 Black Comedy Penn & Teller Get Killed ends with a string of suicides, the motivation for which gets increasingly ridiculous. The first couple can be taken perfectly seriously, and individually most of them probably could, but when they're all in a row like that, they become absurdly over-the-top.
• The Lonely Guy: Larry, the protagonist, discovers that his friend Warren is about to jump off a bridge. Larry tries to talk him down...but he's comically bad at it. (When asked to name one thing Warren has to live for, the best he can come up with is "Not dying".) Meanwhile, other suicidal people are jumping off and plopping into the water at a truly ridiculous rate.
  Suicidal guy: Excuse me. Are you using this railing?
  Warren: No.
  Suicidal guy: Thank you.
  Warren: You're welcome.
  [Guy jumps off the railing screaming]
• Harold Lloyd:
  • In one film, Harold attempts suicide by gunshot. It turned out to be a water pistol. He then stood in the way of a trolley — which took a different track. This was quite common in silent films.
  • Never Weaken derives most of its comedy from Harold's various Bungled Suicide attempts after mistakenly thinking his girlfriend has run off with another man. The most major one comes from when he sets up a pistol by tying it to a doorknob so that it will go off when someone opens it. A light bulb falls, making him think he's been shot, and then a steel girder from the construction zone next door carries his chair out the window with him on it.
• In the French film Delicatessen, one of the characters repeatedly attempts suicide using large Kafkaesque machines; however these attempts always fail.
• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Zaphod tries using the gun hidden by Deep Thought on himself, after learning he's responsible for obliterating his own chances at fame and fortune from discovering the Ultimate Question. Ford wrestles it away but accidentally aims it at himself at which point it's revealed that the gun's not designed to kill, but to force the target to think from the shooter's perspective.
• In Without a Clue, Kincaid bungles it badly when he tries to hang himself when he believes that Watson is dead.
• The Bank Dick opens with W. C. Fields's family bemoaning his shiftless, scandalous nature. His eldest daughter melodramatically wails that she'll commit suicide by starving to death, sobbing "It isn't hard..." then continuing in a cheerful chirp "I tried it yesterday!"
• When the protagonist of High Stakes is in jail, his Evil Uncle hands him a noose through the bars.
  "You could use this."
• The main characters of The Full Monty, Gary and Dave, help a young lad who's having some car trouble... then realise he's run a hose from the exhaust pipe. Oh, Crap!.
  • Then, when he yells at them for saving him... Dave tries to stuff him back into the car.
  • The musical doubles down on this with a trio about different ways to commit suicide that include the two heroes telling the suicidal guy to shut up, it's not about him.
• In Hook, Captain Hook is disappointed to find out that Peter Pan has grown up into a pathetic adult who's forgotten everything about his past, so he puts a pistol to his head, saying "This is it. Don't try to stop me this time, Smee. Don't try to stop me this time, Smee. Don't you dare try to stop me this time, Smee, try to stop me. Smee, you'd better get up off your ass. Get over here, Smee!", and Smee stops him.
• The comedy Top Secret!. While performing a concert Nick Rivers sings the song "Spend This Night With Me". While singing he pretends to try to commit suicide with various props, including a noose (hanging), sticking his head in a stove and turning it on (gas/asphyxiation) and lying down on railroad tracks. Watch it here.
• Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind ends with Chuck Barris describing an idea for a game show: three old men are given loaded guns and look back on their lives.
  "The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator."
• "Crocodile" Dundee: In the second movie, Mick talks to a guy who wants to jump from a skyscraper because Love Hurts. Mike pretends he just wants to walk past him to enjoy some fresh air and subtly tries to talk him out of it. The unhappy man is actually gay which surprises Mick — who almost falls down himself.
• Scary Movie: The first movie, a guy in on the edge of a building about to leap. Out comes Cindy who, paranoid about the killer and thinking he/she watching them, starts screaming "What are you waiting for?!", inadvertently egging the guy into jumping to his death.
• While Deadpool 2 uses Wade's suicidal tendencies following Vanessa's death to fuel a lot of drama, his suicide attempts are mostly milked for Black Comedy since, being Deadpool, he just can't die as long as his Healing Factor is active. Especially the one framing the opening's How We Got Here, where he lies upon a dozen of gas barrels and explosive while ranting against Wolverine stealing his R-rated movie schtick by dying in Logan, before blowing himself up. And then his severed arm rises up, flipping the bird.
• Happy Death Day 2U shows Tree going through a Failure Montage, where she tries to help a group of university eggheads close a "Groundhog Day" Loop. As they look for an algorithm to do so, each failure ends with Tree offing herself to reset the day. Among these suicides include drinking drain cleaner fresh from the store shelf, an Electrified Bathtub (complete with wild hairdo when she wakes up), running full-speed and jumping head-first into a woodchipper run by Biff's Tree Removal while wearing an 80's style runner outfit, and skydiving in bra and panties... landing right in front of Carter, her boyfriend in her original loop, and Danielle, her bitchy sorority leader.
• In Sabrina (1954), Sabrina attempts suicide over David spurning her affections by running every car in her father's garage; she nearly wakes him up, one of the cars starts Blowing Smoke Rings, and ultimately she opens a window before Linus interrupts her.
• On the Count of Three is a Black Comedy about a Suicide Pact, so it's throughout the entire film as Val and Kevin alternately mess up, talk about, and joke about committing suicide.
• Jake the tiger's attempt at suicide due to his terrible double vision, headaches and nausea in Dr. Dolittle is largely treated humourously. Dr. Dolittle tries to talk him down, but has problems when Jake asks him to name a famous tiger and he can't come up with anything, forcing the dog Lucky to come up with "Tony the cereal tiger." He then tries to sing the song "Eye of the Tiger," but is so badly off-key that Jake tells him "That's it, I'm jumping." He pleads with him not to jump, but a couple of rats down on the ground below start heckling him like they did earlier in the film, this time shouting at the tiger "Jump, ya big pussy! I'll catch you! ... ... NOT!" Dolittle shouts at them to take a break and finally manages to talk Jake down, saying that he's a doctor and he can help him. If not, then he can eat both him and Lucky.
  Lucky: Or just him.
• Zig-zagged in Trading Places. After Louis learns that the Dukes don't want anything to do with him after his downfall, he takes out the gun he bought earlier in the movie, puts it to his head and pulls the trigger, but it jams. Dejected, he tosses the gun aside and it shoots offscreen. Afterwards, when he's back in Ophelia's apartment, he locks himself in the bathroom and tries to overdose on pills, but Ophelia and Billy Ray find him in time and he's later saved by a doctor, and this is played completely seriously.
• The Three Stooges: In the short Back From The Front, Moe, disguised as Hitler, orders the Nazi officers to shoot themselves. The Nazis are so stupid it almost works, until Moe’s fake mustache falls off.
  Moe: You fail to catch three spies! Blow out your brains!
  Captain: But, mein Führer, we're Nazis. We have no brains.
• Raising the Wind: When Jill tries to think up a way to stop Mervyn losing his scholarship, he thinks up three ideas - hanging himself, shooting himself, or throwing himself in the river.
• RoboCop
  • RoboCop 2 has this happen with two failed RoboCop II prototypes who both end up doing themselves in when shown in their presentation videos. The first one dies from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, while the second tries to remove their helmet and ends up severing their life support.
  • RoboCop 2 has an in-universe ad for OCP's data communications service where a man is distraught over choosing a cheaper data provider and losing an account with a customer over the slow response. He then picks up a Walther PPK handgun and inflicts a Boom, Headshot! on himself off-camera.
  • RoboCop 3 features two OCP employees who are laid off; the first one has a video call to his wife active while he jumps out a window and lands behind a discretionary wall to the shock of pedestrians nearby. That window suicide is noted as the fourth in a month. The second one eats his gun off camera with the deed being indicated by a gun sound.
• In Hellzapoppin', a cameraman promptly shoots himself on being told that they are going to kepp working on the film till it is finished.

Jokes

• A blonde joke has the blonde come home to find her husband in bed with another woman. She's so shocked, she takes a gun out of her purse and puts it to her own head. Her husband begs her not to kill herself and she replies "Shut up. You're next."
• A joke told by a person who jokes about suicide frequently: "I never joke about suicide. I'm completely serious."
• A woman comes home from work to find her husband dangling from a rope tied under his arms.
  "What the hell are you doing?"
  "I've had enough of people calling me an idiot all the time. I'm hanging myself!"
  "You know the rope's meant to go around your neck?"
  "I tried that, but I couldn't breathe!"

Literature

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy:
  • In some versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Marvin manages to kill off the trigger-happy cops who are shooting at the heroes. He does it by explaining his philosophy of life to their life-support computer, as a result of which it commits suicide.
  • He's good at this. Rare is the occasion when a machine enters a conversation with him and doesn't come out the other side at least severely cynical or depressed. In fact, the one occasion this didn't happen in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the machine in question instead got driven into a rage by poor Marvin's general situation, and blew out the floor beneath it, falling to its death. All Marvin has to say about it is, "What a depressingly stupid machine."
• Arto Paasilinna's Collective Suicide is a whole novel about some people arranging to kill themselves together in a neat, organized fashion. Hilarity Ensues (no, really, it does).
• The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg: The book is told in two different styles. One is the transcripts of an interview between a Priest and the title character. The other style is told through the various suicide letters of Rimberg. It's a dark comedy.
• Dorothy Parker's poem "Resume" lists six ways of committing suicide, but also states why they are all bad ways.
  Razors pain you,
  Rivers are damp;
  Acids stain you;
  And drugs cause cramp.
  Guns aren't lawful,
  Nooses give;
  Gas smells awful,
  You might as well live.
• A family of eight (somewhat insane) hillbillies in Gautrek's Saga is so shaken by a series of trivial or imaginary mishaps that, by and by, all of them opt to follow the proud family tradition of jumping from Family Cliff — or, as they put it, "going to Odin". Eventually, Snotra is the only one of them left alive.
  The young people helped their parents to pass on over Family Cliff, and off they went, merry and bright, on the way to Odin.
• It's mentioned in Wicked that Boq's wife Milla hates living in Nest Hardings and routinely tries to kill herself. Fiyero states that Boq's yearly Lurlinemas letters "annotate her failed attempts at killing herself like a sort of annual family report".
• Unseen Academicals: At the big dinner at Unseen University one of the football captains, Dustworthy Swithins of the Cockbill Boars, gets a little too drunk and a little too chummy with Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Vetinari decides to go easy on the man, and makes some small talk about the Boars' standings in the mob football leagues. After Swithins passes out, Vetinari casually remarks that someone should take him home and look after him, mainly so he doesn't try to commit suicide when he wakes up in the morning and realizes he got smart-mouthed with the most powerful man in the city.
• The Book of Bunny Suicides (pictured above) is a collection of cartoons about rabbits finding strange and inventive ways to kill themselves. This can range from drilling a hole under a bottle of acid, shooting themself out of a cannon(and through a set of blinds), or convincing The Terminator that they're Sarah Connor.

Music

• Given the silly title of Da Vinci's Notebook's "Window Washing Cowboy", you don't expect it to be the story of a guy who met the girl of his dreams, found her already in a relationship when he got up the nerve to ask her out, and committed suicide over it... But it's alright, it's Played for Laughs. And with a bad pun at the end.
  He loved windows, but he couldn't stand the pane.
• Frank Zappa:
  • "Suicide Chump" from You Are What You Is, probably the funniest song ever written about suicide:
  Now maybe you're scared of jumpin'
  And poison makes you sick
  And you want a little attention
  And you need it pretty quick
  Don't wanna mess your face up
  Or we won't know if it's you?
  Aw, there is so much to worry about
  Now what you gonna do?
  Go ahead on 'n' get it over with then
  Find you a bridge and take a jump
  Just make sure you do it right the first time
  Cause nothing is worse than a suicide chump
  • The last track on Cruising with Ruben & the Jets is titled "Stuff Up the Cracks" and is about the singer deciding to kill himself by putting his head in the oven and turning on the gas in response to his lover leaving him, all sung in the style of a 1950s doo-wop single.
  Stuff up the cracks
  Turn on the gas
  I'm gonna take my life!
• Gravediggaz' "1-800 Suicide". The album version at least. The music video had a different version which promoted a suicide prevention hotline.
• Insane Clown Posse's Violent J as a suicide hotline phone operator encourages a caller to kill himself and insulting him, in a skit preceding their song "How Many Times?" on the album The Great Milenko. We hear a gun go off, but it turns out the caller missed when he tried to shoot himself.
• Megadeth's "Skin O' My Teeth" and "99 Ways To Die" both comment humorously on different ways Dave Mustaine has supposedly tried to kill himself. Mustaine's anger about being kicked out of Metallica led him to suicidal thoughts on occasions, as did the time he almost lost the ability to play guitar in the early 2000s, but his ego was always too big to actually manage it.
• "Jumper" by Odds is a colourful, tongue-in-cheek song about a guy threatening to throw himself off a bridge.
  I think I can fly!
• The Lonely Island's "Like A Boss" has the titular boss hit on a fellow worker only to get rejected. Long story short, the resulting depression leads to him trying to trying to plug a bullet into his mouth, only to "pussy out LIKE A BOSS!"
  Aw, fuck, man, I can't fucking do it, shiiiiiitttt!!
• The Steely Dan song "Black Friday" begins with this:
  When Black Friday comes
  I'll stand down by the door
  And watch the grey men as they dive from the fourteenth floor.
• In Eminem's "Stan", the title character's suicide is portrayed rather seriously, except for his last words (spoken into a tape recorder before he drives off a bridge):
  Well, gotta go. I'm almost at the bridge.
  Oh shit! I forgot! How am I supposed to send this shit out?
• As a tonal shift away from his standard Sweet Dreams Fuel style, Parry Gripp's "I Got No iPhone" tells the tale of a person who wants to end his life... because he doesn't have an iPhone, which should be a requirement in 2009.
• The Lyrical Dissonance of The Police's "Can't Stand Losing You" can be traced down to Sting summing up the song as being "about a teenage suicide, which is always a bit of a joke." (namely, a boy singing to his ex that their breakup is driving him to kill himself... played with the same upbeat reggae rhythm of "Roxanne")

Podcasts

• Random Assault: All the hosts will commit suicide (and even the listeners) when Random Assault hits 1,000 episodes.

Print Media

• MAD:
  • "Duck Edwing Contemplates Suicide" in Issue #286 features cartoonist Duck Edwing coming up with creative ways for someone to commit suicide. These include a woman eating a ton of unpopped popcorn and then wrapping herself in an electric blanket (making the kernels pop inside her until she explodes), and a man shoving his feet into a noodle press and then setting a weight on his head, thus causing his body to be extruded through the press like spaghetti.
  • Issue #386's back cover features an ad parody with Dr. Jack Kevorkian selling his own line of assisted suicide-themed versions of popular children's books.

Pro Wrestling

• The Lunchtime Suicide sketches, in which former referee Tim White tried to kill himself in a new way each week. WWE never bothered to air these on television (network censors would have had Vince McMahon's head) airing one at the Armageddon 2005 PPV and streaming the rest on their website. Considered by some to be insensitive with the sudden death of Eddie Guerrero a month prior to the first sketch.

Radio

• One Christmas episode of The Jack Benny Program had Jack shopping for presents. A clerk helps him with a gift and message, but Jack keeps recalling the gift so he can change the message. Finally, Jack decides to return the gift and get a cheaper version. The increasingly frazzled clerk (Mel Blanc, at his hysterical over-the-top best) ultimately leaves to shoot himself. Jack hears the gunshot, then realizes he'll have to make his own change from the register.
  • In another Christmas episode, the same clerk tries and fails to do it again.
  Mel Look't what you made me do! You made me so nervous, I missed!!!

Tabletop Games

• Used for a Black Comedy Burst in Pokéthulhu. The Chaos cards require players to perform various goofy things from the fictional anime, like jokes or belching, to do goofy things like cause rains of fish or teleport people to the nearest shopping mall, but one of the trigger conditions is to quote "Randy's way of talking Derleth out of killing herself at Waite's Point" in order to change a nearby creature's type. This card is nestled between one where you quote the Infamous Bloated Corpse Joke to turn an item yellow, and one where you cite "any of the Things You Never Say To A Polyp"^note one is cited earlier in the rules as being "Hey, were you going to eat that toast?" to cause someone to believe the next three words you speak, even if they're something as absurd as "you are coleslaw".

Theater

• In The Magic Flute, Papageno decides to hang himself after the priests separate him from Papagena. The whole scene is Played for Laughs, as he keeps putting off the deed and waiting for someone to come along and stop him, which the Three Boys finally do.
• The Musical version of The Full Monty has a scene where Jerry and Dave sing "Big Ass Rock," a lilting tune about how they'll help Malcolm kill himself because they're his friends.
• "On the American Plan" by George S. Kaufman and Howard Dietz, a comedy sketch about a suicide hotel. Some guests complained about not getting rooms high enough to make a fatal leap from, or that their cyanide was too bitter to drink. Others were just given a pistol to take to their room, which would be marked unoccupied after the offstage shot was heard.
• Alan Ayckbourne's Absurd Person Singular has Eva attempt various forms of suicide for the whole of the second act.
• One of Improv Everywhere's sketches featured a suicidal businessman threatening to jump off a ledge. This is played for drama — at least, as much drama as you can get when the ledge is about three feet off the ground.
• In Caryl Churchill's Owners, there is a Running Gag that Marion's employee Worsely is trying to kill himself and never succeeds. And he does try: he says he has tried it six times during his first scenes and other attempts appear throughout the play. Methods he tries or considers trying include cutting his wrists, jumping, explosives, using a gun, poisoning, setting a house on fire, etc.
  Clegg: But do you intend to be dead?
  Worsely I try to. My doctor says I'm so safety prone I must have a lifewish. I have a sense of humour about psychiatrists.
• The Eighteenth Century play Love Xithout Stockings, has this as a comical premise. Every single character on stage commits suicide, all of them using the same knife. The knife, and a bowl of stuffed peas, is passed around between them. In short: The hero couldn´t get married because he had no stockings. He stole them from his rival and is Driven to Suicide on his wedding day because this is revealed. His bride-to-be commits suicide because she cannot live without him. The rival commits suicide because he cannot live without her, the best friend of the bride commits suicide because it is all her fault, and the last man standing, the friend of the rival takes his life because everybody else did.
• Joey from the musical Me and My Dick attempts to commit suicide after an embarrassing attempt to propose to the hot little Jewish girl Vanessa. He is about to go through with it when his friend walks in. This wouldn't be funny if Joey's Heart wasn't played by an actual person, but when Heart states in a quiet, devastated voice, "I'm going to squeeze my left carotid artery, Joey" it became hilarious.
• It's a plot point in The Mikado that Nanki-Poo decides to hang himself when he believes he won't be able to marry Yum-Yum. This is played purely for laughs.

Video Games

• Action Taimanin: In the Nightmare on Christmas event story, Nagi Momochi gets brainwashed into Felicia's servitude. Once she snaps out of it, she scolds herself for serving someone other than Kotaro and no longer sees any point in living and tries to convince Kirara to behead her and later tries to stab herself in the stomach. Kirara stops her, and while they both acknowledge they are all in a dream, Nagi vows to behead herself once she wakes up. It takes Kotaro to order her to not kill herself over such matters for her to calm down.
• Borderlands 2:
  • In Thousand Cuts, there is a bandit named Face McShooty, who gives you the quest "Shoot This Guy in the Face". All while loudly demanding to get shot in the face.
    Face McShooty: Maybe you're weighing the moral pros and cons but let me assure you OH MY GOD SHOOT ME IN THE GODDAMNED FACE!
  • In one side-mission, Scooter sends you to take photographs to give him inspiration for a love poem he's writing for a woman. When you deliver it to her, she goes into her home and shoots herself with the pistol she was previously holding.
    Scooter: Everyone's a critic.
  • There's also a side mission where the Big Bad pays you to jump off a cliff. If you go through with it, he'll pay you some Eridium but call you a bitch and a sellout. Alternatively, you can use a nearby phone to call a suicide hotline; you won't get any Eridium and he'll call you a coward, but you will get more experience. Of course, respawns are a thing that exists in-universe (more or less), so even if you decide to go through with it you don't really lose anything but a bit of dignity.
  • Another sidequest has you help a Goliath escape from Pandora. His plan involves stealing a beacon for a Hyperion Moonshot container (a giant shipping crate fired from their space station in orbit that impacts... violently with the ground). When you recover it, his masterful plan is to activate the beacon, stand on top of it, and let the Moonshot hit him square in the chest and blast him to red mist. Well... he got off Pandora after all.
  • In the Commander Lilith DLC, you can find an ECHO for FL4K, one of the playable characters in borderlands 3 and in that ECHO, a bandit kills another bandit for claiming to have talked about the former bandit's mother. No one talks about his mom. Except he just talked about his mom. And rules is rules.
• Clem and Crystal, the perpetually peppy, borderline insane, definitely obsessive cheerleaders from Psychonauts, are trying to commit suicide together. Apparently as part of some ritual.
• In Soulcalibur 2, there's Yoshimitsu's suicide attack. He commits Seppuku, complete with Bloodless Carnage. If the opponent is behind him, they take massive damage, but more often than not, they're in front of him, so he just spins around with the blade sticking out his back to kill his opponent. And then he decides he still wants to live, pulls the sword out, and recovers.
• The Susanoo has the same kind of attack in Gundam Extreme Vs.
• The Interactive Fiction game In The End 2 is about the player character's attempts to commit suicide, all of which fail in more or less ridiculous ways. It was written as a parody of In The End, in which the player is railroaded to a Downer Ending.
• The immortal protagonist of Planescape: Torment can suggest that if a priest is so eager to go onto the afterlife, he should kill himself. When the priest replies "you first," the protagonist is free to call his bluff. He can also exploit his immortality to convince an emo-esque suicidal teenager that there's nothing good beyond the grave because you've already checked, or to make a quick buck by letting a bored rich lady stab you to death.
• The Spiritual Successor to Planescape: Torment, Torment: Tides of Numenera, also has a protagonist, the Last Castoff, who just won't stay dead and gleefully exploits it. In fact, dying is sometimes the quickest way to take a trip to the Labyrinth. Which leads to a variety of creative suicide methods. Especially notable is the discovery of a drink that causes you instant death; after the first death, you can return from the morgue to the same bar to order the same drink from an utterly incredulous bartender.
• The series Five Minutes to Kill Yourself (hosted by [adult swim]) is all about playing an iso-pixel character trying to commit suicide in interesting ways to get out of something (work, a family outing, a wedding).
• A depressed novelty salesman in Day of the Tentacle attempts to kill himself by shooting himself in the head, except he's using a "Bang!" Flag Gun instead of a real one. He then gets more depressed, saying he can't even properly kill himself.
• Karoshi is all about super convoluted ways to kill yourself. Every time you do, you go on to the next level.
• In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, we hear this on the radio:
  James: Hello, you're on "The Wild Traveler". Where are you?
  Caller: I'm on a cliff.
  James: How romantic!
  Caller: I want to jump!
  James: Yes, I know what you mean. Jump into the unknown. How can it be a sin if it feels good? Anyway, why are you calling?
  Caller: Why am I here?
  James: I don't know. Why are you there? Where are you? Kenya?
  Caller: No, I'm in Verdant Bluffs.
  James: Loathsome place. I'd jump if I were you.
  Caller: I want to go to Hell.
  James: Me too! Buy a refrigerator magnet when you get there!
• Saints Row 2 has a series of phone numbers you can dial on your cell phone. One of these is a Suicide Hotline. If you dial it, you hear a gunshot.
• Deadpool shoots himself in the head when Cable's dire warning from the future bores him too much, after an extended sequence of him seeming to dejectedly, profoundly suffer. "MAKE IT STOP!" *sobs* He gets better, natch.
• Typically in Source engine games, the "kill" console input causes the player to die and ragdoll; the "explode" command is the same, except instead of ragdolling, the player's character explodes in a shower of Ludicrous Gibs. Both can be bound to a key just like any other control command, creating what is commonly known as a killbind. Less serious players that are just messing around tend to use the heck out of these whenever it's fittingly funny; one common instance is when they see something exceptionally weird. Because no funny in-game situation can't be made even more hilarious when someone goes "bleh" for seemingly no reason.
• The Last Nyanmurai from Yo-kai Watch is obsessed with committing seppuku, but this doesn't hurt him because he's already a youkai.
• In a game from Ikiki called Tobioriya, you need to "save" suicidal people who throw themselves from the building... By shooting them with a bow and pinning them into the wall of the building.
• In Who's Your Daddy?, one player is a baby whose objective is to die in ways a baby might die in an unsafe house, such as drinking bleach from an unlocked cupboard or sticking a fork in an electrical outlet. The other player is the baby's father, who naturally has to prevent the baby's death.

Web Animation

• In Battle for Dream Island Again, Yellow Face self-terminates in BFDIA 5e when Coiny and Bomby can’t get Yellow Face out of the slush.
• In "Suicide Face", a cartoon series on Something Awful's The Flash Tub, an idiotic woman beats herself to death with a hammer in order to play a prank on her boyfriend and gets sent to Hell. She then tries to make a deal with The Devil's brother-in-law Phil to make it back to the mortal plane, but the series ended on a cliffhanger at the third episode.
• ASDF Movie:
  • "Quick, shoot me in the face!"
  • "Goodbye, world" "Okay, Jim, see ya 'round. Hey, where ya going cause *gunshot* Oh! That's not what I thought he meant by that at all!"
  • The cake jumping off the table.
  • The trumpet playing guy. "Hey, you got a licence for that?" "YOU'LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE" *Florida Manet sound*
  • The muffin (played by the voice of Catbug): "Why won't you let me die?"
  • "Don't jump! You have so much to live for!" "Everybody do the flop!" *flop* *Beat* *splat*
  • On a similar note: "No! Don't jump!" (pulls out a camera) "Okay! Now jump!"
  • One of the skits in asdfmovie11 has a doctor inform a patient that he only has one year left to live. The patient responds by laughing, retorting "Oh, yeah?" and shooting himself.
• In RWBY, Jaune Arc has been feeling bad about his terrible performance in his classes so Pyrrha Nikos takes him to the roof. Jaune glances over the edge and mentions he isn't that depressed. Pyrrha takes a second to figure it out, then quickly pushes him away from the edge. In this case, the comedy doesn't come from the act of suicide, but rather Pyrrha's horrified reaction to its implication.
• Near the end of Heavy is Dead, due to the idocy of the situation, the spy declares "Well, off to hang myself!" and commits suicide, which is treated as a joke. This also leads into the joke of everyone except the heavy being dead at the end. This evetually got it a content warning from YouTube.
• In AOK's The Fairly OddParents! parody series Very Off Parents, one short has Timmy Turner wish he had a job so he didn't have to go to school, which results in him being stuck working in a Chinese sweatshop. After his attempts at getting away fail, a girl working there offers him a way to escape, which turns out to be jumping off the building to one's death.
• Stupid Kids: Jigglypuff signs up for the Nova Talent but is denied. After the titular trio won instead of Jigglypuff in the talent show a newspaper reads Jigglypuff commited suicide and a left a note reading "Jigglypuff" in És mind nekem tapsol (And they all clap for me); the paper even has ":(" emoticon on it.

Webcomics

• A recurring joke in Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, such as a suicide by gunshot being noted as considerably less sombre, because the blood splatter accidentally spelled out the word "butt" on the wall behind the corpse. Another has a guy hanging himself, writing in his suicide note that he's "too cool for life", at which point the viewer sees that he died with toilet paper hanging from one of his shoes.
• Ansem Retort deliberately invokes this trope when, after being confronted by a patient he turned into a cookie, Zexion declared that if he slit his wrists right then, it'd be "the tastiest suicide EVER."
• In Because I'm Depressed, Diego's constant attempts to end it all are always played for laughs. Even his roommates no longer take his suicide attempts seriously, as evidenced by them throwing a congratulatory party for Diego on his 100th attempt.
• Suicide for Hire occasionally does one-shots that are like this, but the story arcs are more serious (unless the client is a complete asshole).
• Sexy Losers:
  • The suicide girl strips. She usually stops because a guy jokes about raping her corpse, except he isn't really joking. She eventually bought a gun, so she could kill him first, only to step out of the shower and die mistaking the gun for a hairdryer. She goes to heaven because her premature suicide was technically accidental. He steals her corpse, stuffs it, and turns it into a sex doll. Then things got really weird.
  • Shiunji's habit of announcing his necrophiliac ambitions to suicidal people and accidentally dissuading them from committing suicide is a running gag.
• Channel Ate could easily be renamed "The funny suicide webcomic" and still make sense without changing anything else.
• The "Suicide Fairies" (though that's a misnomer since suicide is cheating) of Gunnerkrigg Court are constantly trying to get people to kill them. It's rather entertaining.
• Nuzlocke Comics's White version storyline has Ruby finding that Hilbert hanged himself in the closet to get away from Cheren and Bianca.
• Freefall: A robot programmed with the works of William Shakespeare who works at an amusement park as Jar Jar Binks is eager to scrap himself, until offered the option of helping Blunt and Edge test Gardener in the Dark.
• The Bird Feeder: A failed attempt by Terry occurs in #73, "Rice." Terry has heard that eating rice makes birds explode, and after eating some is disappointed to find out that it isn't true.
• One of the Running Gags in MS Paint Adventures is a guy prepared to shoot themself after witnessing something ridiculous in the plot. Most of the time the guy is an Audience Surrogate, but the very first instance as seen in Jailbreak played the scenario for very Black Comedy — after a pair of prisoners escapes the titular jail, one of the two bleeds out while the other is too depressed to go on without him.
• The Draw Play: When the Author Avatar and a group of concerned citizens ask a suicidal man on the roof of a building if he wants to see the day controversial sports commentator Colin Cowherd is taken off the air, the suicidal man replies that jumping off means that he could stop listening to Cowherd sooner. Cue the entire group on the ledge, ready to jump off on the count of three.
• One of Irwin Cardozo's webcomics has a man put a gun in his mouth after learning that the woman he just slept with has AIDS.
• Gone with the Blastwave: GWTB's comedy is pitch dark at the best of times and its handling of the cast's nigh-omnipresent death wish is no exception, such as the main characters' total non-reaction to watching a member of a rival faction blow his own brains out right in front of them.
  Blue Soldier: Hey guys! I found a way out! [bang]
  Crosshairs: Well, that was kinda depressing...
• Rosianna Rabbit has occasionally done suicide jokes, with the first strip even consisting of Rosianna attempting to leap to her doom all because she was laughed at for ripping her panties, only for her attempt at ending it all ruined by her torn panties getting caught on a pipe, resulting in further humiliation.

Web Original

• This amusing piece from Superdickery really says it all.
• This comic is about a boy who wants to kill himself after reading My Immortal by hanging himself with his tie.
• 4chan, and by extension Encyclopedia Dramatica, coined the term "An Hero" as a humorous euphemism for suicide. This was named after a MySpace eulogy dedicated to Mitchell Henderson, which contained many grammatical mistakes as well as praising him as a courageous hero for doing the deed. 4chan trolls and ED later erroneously claimed that Mitchell did it because he lost his iPod.
  He was such an hero, to take it all away. We miss him so, That you should know, And we honor him this day. He was an hero, to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back, And now he's on our minds. Mitchell was an hero, to leave us feeling like this, Our minds are rubber, our joints don't work, Our tears fall into abyss. He was an hero, to take that shot, In life it wasn't his task, He shouldn't have had to go that way, before an decade'd past. Now he sits there in my heart, this hero of mine, Always there to make me smile, Make me feel just fine. He had courage, that boy did, courage in his heart. To take that shot, To end his pain, To tear us all apart. But in the end, he died in courage. Lacking, nevermore, He died an hero, Mitchell did, And we'll love him forevermore. We love you like an brother. We miss you so much. We will always love you, kid. Rest In Peace Mitch.
• Farce of the Three Kingdoms plays almost every death for laughs, so the suicides are included. Characters who commit suicide are usually trying to impress the death scene judges, so they're either overly melodramatic or done with almost no provocation. Dead characters also tend to argue with the judges to get a better score.

Web Videos

• The Nostalgia Critic is always seen contemplating suicide as a result of the movie's he's watching, though this usually says more about the movie than the Critic.
  • And like Linkara before him, he averts this tearjerkingly near the end of his "Commercials Special". If it hasn't been for his He's Back! moment after, it's made pretty clear that he would have died out of depression.
    Critic: There's nothing left for me anymore.
  • In his The Master of Disguise review, Rachel actually attempts to take his suicide contemplations seriously by helping him along, to his own frustration — he didn't really mean it.
• Game Grumps: The "Rugrats in Paris" episode ends with Arin asking Jon to get him his gun after the monotony took him over. Then there is graphic audio of Arin shooting himself, moaning in pain, and Jon telling him to stop bleeding all over his "designer Gucci glasses...and [his] Gucci purse!"
• Atop the Fourth Wall:
  • Linkara's magic gun also doubles as a suicide gun. One famous instance has him attempting to slit his wrists with the gun and wailing "Why doesn't it work?!"
  • Averted in Silent Hill Dead/Alive, when he realistically attempts suicide in horror when he is told he killed his daughter.
• The Spoony Experiment: Spoony tends to have suicidal tendencies over the later editions of Final Fantasy. One version of Spoony kills himself at the very mention of reviewing FFX. However, he decided to stop making these kinds of jokes after receiving a letter from a fan who planned to commit suicide and did so before Noah could get in touch with him to try and talk him down.
• The Obscurus Lupa review of The Room (2003) ends with "Tommy Wiseau" showing up, actually seeing what a terrible film he'd made, and killing himself in a send-up of the Narmful climax.
• Jayuzumi has made a few jokes along these lines, although it isn't quite a Running Gag. The players, in a somewhat heartwarming moment, do try to discourage him when they think he's actually going through with it; in reality, he's playing Bender from Futurama and has cooked a grenade.
• The Filthy Frank Show makes so many of these almost ALL of Frank's videos contain at least one Suicide joke.
• When Musical Hell reviewed Lost Horizon (1973), the scene where the wise man talks a woman out of jumping from a window, Diva instead adds in "That's the crappiest inspiration speech I've ever heard, bye! AAAAAUGH!"
• The Music Video Show has an episode where the entire video is making fun of the music video for Inside The Fire by Disturbed.
  "If you can't laugh at suicide, then the terrorists win... and the Titanic was an inside job."
• There are many YouTube Poop videos that consist of Billy Mays hosting commercials for products that can be used by the customer to kill themselves, the most famous being mark3611's Suicide Putty.
  Billy Mays: Suicide Putty! The easy way to kill yourself! Simply knead, apply, and die. And if you act now, you can get six sticks of Suicide Putty, so you can kill yourself SIX TIMES.
• Chris Ray Gun makes quite a few jokes about killing himself, ranging from wearing a shirt that says "Kill Me", to his "1000 subscriber special" culminating a huge Bleach-drinking gag, in which he wandered around LA drinking from a Bleach bottle. ^note He was drinking water, of course.
• On SF Debris' Star Trek: Voyager reviews, Harry is interpreted as becoming increasingly suicidal as the show goes on, primarily due to his constant humiliation, subservience to (and torture by) Mad Scientist Janeway, and unrequieted gay attraction to his best friend Tom Paris.
• Extremely common in SMPLive. Goes hand-in-hand with death being cheap due to respawning. This most frequently occurs as a comedic overreaction to a minor inconvenience or annoyance.

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