Mood Whiplash in podcasts.
- Sequinox:
- Episode 10 spends its time clapping between various other dimensions and seeing the whole Sequinox team get into zany situations when they're forced to be cowgirls, or spies, or greasers. But the last dimension is one where they're all wearing evil costumes, Vivaldi is ruthlessly telling the girls to kill Castor as she begs for her life, and the entire city is in ruins.
- Episode 12 goes the other way, moving from a film noir world where Ethan is being held for ransom by his father and the girls witness Gemini become darkly protective of one of her stars to a Circus world that starts with Chell getting launched out of a cannon.
- Interstitial: Actual Play: While Edith sits stunned at the spot where Roxanne died, clutching a genuine gun and numb to anything else around her, Criss suddenly asks: "Where is my car?" Answer: it exploded when Edith and Marche drove it at a dragon.Riley: Smash cut to a smoldering fire, twisted metal everywhere, and a dove flying past.
- The Adventure Zone is full of this, mostly due to the McElroy Brothers' complete inability to take anything seriously, and their constant goofing off in the middle of very dark scenes. However, the final third of the Balance-arc saw a bad case of Cerebus Syndrome, leading the boys to stop goofing around and take everything pretty seriously, meaning the whiplash more often than not came in the Tear Jerker-variety.
- The Last Podcast on the Left:
- In the Aum Shinrikyo episode, for example, they give an extremely comical discussion of the utterly goofy "comedy of errors" that was setting up the Matsumoto incident
, such as their being delayed because the main planner overslept, the combined weight of their equipment and cultists caused their van to only reach a top speed of 30 mph, they screwed up the chemical reaction to produce the sarin gas which filled their van with highly irritant hydrogen chloride and the wind direction changed at the last second away from their target, and then reveal that the attack still led to 6 deaths, over 100 injuries and Aum succeeded in their goal of getting a lawsuit against them dropped. - In the introduction to Robert Hansen, Marcus Parks narrates a rundown of Hansen's deeds while sounding like a serious true crime show narrator... then asks the listeners to imagine the man he just described sounding like Elmer Fudd in reference to Hansen's legitimate speech impediment.
- Marcus describes the lead-up to Rasputin's assassination in precise and dramatic detail, going so far as to include a sample of the music that was playing at the time... which turns out to be Yankee Doodle Dandy.
- Marcus lavishly describes the horrific experience that the Forlorn Hope of the Donner Party had in trying to cross the Sierra Nevadas, with three people dying of hypothermia... and then heaves a deep sigh, as he knows exactly what he's going to say next, as it's a line that has featured in the show's opening since the beginning.Marcus: (completely monotone) ...and that's when the cannibalism started.
Henry: Yaaaaaaaaaay!
Ben: He said it!
- In the Aum Shinrikyo episode, for example, they give an extremely comical discussion of the utterly goofy "comedy of errors" that was setting up the Matsumoto incident
- The Magnus Archives has this in spades, but especially the season 4 finale, "The Eye Opens". The episode starts out as a Breather Episode, with the Fan-Preferred Couple (possibly an Official Couple, after the previous episode) hanging out with each other in a cottage in Scotland. The episode ends with one half of the Fan-Preferred Couple being mind-controlled by the Big Bad into ending the world.
- Mom Can't Cook!: After both hosts rattle off a variety of 50s-ish Jive Turkey for Alley Cats Strike, Andy claims he's got polio, because that's another 50s thing.
- Thus far, the Juno Steel storyline of The Penumbra Podcast has placed each season's most lighthearted episode right before the season's darkest episode, leading to a notable case of this.
- Season 1 places "Juno Steel and the Train from Nowhere", a wacky Heist Episode in which Juno and Peter pose as a married couple in order to rob a train, right before "Peter Nureyev and the Angel of Brahma", in which Juno and Peter are captured and tortured underground by Miasma and Juno learns about Peter's Dark and Troubled Past.
- The first episode following the Season 2 midseason intermission is "Juno Steel and the Time Gone By", in which Juno helps the woman who saved him from the desert reunite with her estranged lover and proves to himself that he's still capable of doing good after "The Promised Land". The second episode following the intermission is "Juno Steel and the Monster's Reflection", possibly the darkest episode of the series (in which Juno, via hallucinations, relives the events leading up to his mother murdering Benzaiten over and over again).
- Pretending to Be People, as a Horror Comedy podcast, does this quite a bit. For instance:
- A scene where the heroes are fighting Fish People is interrupted by them singing in harmony. They use this singing to summon up a colossal fish-monster from the tank, which nearly kills Keith.
- Cathy Piston is brutally murdered when one of said fish people plants a scythe in her brain. In honor of her, the players begin singing Jason Derulo's Whatcha Say, of "Dear Sister" fame, in an entirely-appropriate falsetto.
- In the space of a single episode - Deep Breaths - Wolf 359 turns from a lighthearted romp through a poorly-managed space station with wacky characters to something much more sinister. There are serious moments before it, and plenty of funny moments after it, but the tone shifts, and shifts fast, with the characters' realization of the true scope of their predicament.
- All over the place in Find Us Alive, given its tendency to intercut clinical narration with snippets of wild action. Especially noticeable in Episode 00, during Harley's drunken lament to Overwatch Command.Harley: I miss the sun. Is it too much- (leaning away from the mic) Is it too much to ask to get a copy of the sun in here?!...oh, shit. I just realized there are people working here who have kids on the outside. Oof.
