Basic Trope: Someone is punished with something crazy.
- Straight: Alice is impertinent to her boss Bob, so as a punishment, she must hold a block of ice while her boss recites bad poetry.
- Exaggerated:
- Holding ice and listening to bad poetry at the same time is considered as bad as (if not worse than) torture.
- Bob has a lot of incredibly bizarre punishments for just about every offense in the book.
- Downplayed: Bob makes Alice clean the bathroom, which is a pretty normal punishment, but he makes her wear a clown suit while cleaning it.
- Justified:
- Bob is not allowed to get violent like last time, but he needs to make sure that Alice doesn't do it again, so he has to be creative. And the weirder the better since Alice surely wouldn't want to go through that again.
- Alice is too much of a stubborn jerk (or idiot) for any other kind of punishment to work — Alice even enjoys many of them.
- Inverted: Alice is rewarded for doing a good job at work by being allowed to ride a horse through her workplace.
- Subverted:Alice: Oh no! You're not going to make me hold a block of ice while you recite bad poetry, are you?!Bob: What? That's crazy!
- Double Subverted:Bob: ...I was planning on having you drink tea with pepper in it.
- Parodied: Alice is ordered to sit in "the Comfy Chair!" every time she misspells a word in the report. Eventually Alice comes to like it a lot, too.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is considering different ways of punishing Alice, which include making her hold ice while he recites bad poetry, making her clean the bathroom, making her drink tea with pepper, and making her write lines.
- Averted: Bob either lets Alice off with a warning or gives her a normal punishment.
- Enforced: "We want Bob to come across as a Mean Boss, but we don't want him to seem too mean, and we want to keep this comedy show funny. Let's have him punish Alice in a goofy way!"
- Lampshaded: "Well, sir, you're nothing if not creative even if this does suck."
- Invoked: The lame punishment is supposed to be lame — not every peccadillo can have a risk of demotion and/or redundancy dangling over it.
- Exploited: Alice figures out that Bob doesn't actually know how to discipline his employees, so she starts testing the limits of what she can functionally get away with.
- Defied:
- Bob makes sure his punishments don't get too weird lest his employees come to think he's insane.
- Bob's approach to leadership: All Crimes Are Equal and all are punished with instant firing.
- Discussed: "What's he gonna do? Make me hold a block of ice while he recites bad poetry?"
- Conversed: "Being made to hold a block of ice while your boss recites bad poetry would be a pretty bad punishment, but it's so ridiculous that I laughed!"
- Implied: Alice is seen remarking to her husband Charlie that she got punished at work, then she says that Bob is a terrible poet.
- Deconstructed: Even if it is something as bone-headed as creating secret handshakes with everybody else in the building but the guy who screwed up, punishment is punishment and it will cause some kind of backlash if it goes for too long, goes too far, if third parties see it as too disproportionate or petty, or if they failed to do their research to avoid hitting any Trauma Buttons or Freudian Excuses that are (unknowingly) turning them into (very unfunny) torture.
- Reconstructed: Punishment, like crime, sometimes has to seek Refuge in Audacity.
- Played for Laughs: The "cool and unusual punishment" is the latest Faux Horrific meme like a marathon of Sixties rock concerts (in the Reggaeton / Auto-Tune era). It depends on what would be funnier if everybody in the cast reacts to that in the regular "tearing my ears out would be less punishing" fashion (except for that one guy who is Too Kinky to Torture, or rather too lame) or it's just a single character who turns out to have an Absurd Phobia.
- Played for Drama:
- Because of a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, the "lame and unusual" punishment turns out not to be "lame" at all. Whether it's death metal or a constant loop of Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good", if you place a pair of headphones up to eleven and duct-tape them to someone's head for twelve hours straight, they will end up deaf anyway. The punishing party, which kind of hoped the "lame" part would let them get away with Refuge in Audacity, gets arrested.
- Alice's boss is a Vogon. So much for "lame poetry".
- The "cool and unusual" punishment was supposed to be lame and a joke, something to use as a slap on the wrist for very minor misdemeanors in the office, but Alice turns out to have an Absurd Phobia to the elements of the lame punishment (and the reason that phobia exists is pretty dramatic itself) and the resulting revealing Freak Out leaves someone hurt.
- Alice files a report on HR about how she found the punishment offensive (for reasons that are true or made up, depending on how sympathetic she is meant to be), leading to a schism in the office between those who thought it was a "cool" and those who thought it was an awful punishment and Bob in hot water.
- Played for Horror: It's a "cool and unusual punishment" ... in the eyes of the Complete Monster, and Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor.
NO! Don't make me edit the Cool and Unusual Punishment page!!
