Basic Trope: Something that sounds deep and meaningful but is just nonsense.
- Straight: Alice tries to cheer up a sad Bob with the "advice" of "When life gets you down, you have to move on down."
- Exaggerated: Alice tries to cheer up a sad Bob by saying, "When life gets you down, you have to cat watermelon pogo stick."
- Downplayed: Alice tries to cheer up a sad Bob by telling him, "Believe!" While this could be inspirational depending on the context, its meaning is unclear in this context.
- Justified: Alice was deeply saddened by seeing Bob sad and desperately wanted to cheer him up, but she couldn't actually think of anything to say.
- Inverted: Alice says what sounds like a Non Sequitur but is actually code for something deep and philosophical.
- Subverted: It turns out that Alice comes from a town where "move on down" is a common idiom for "face up to life's challenges."
- Double Subverted: But when they visit Alice's hometown later, nobody else uses this term.
- Parodied: "Inspirational" posters say things like "Keep iguanas and vacuum on", and "Meow in there, seismologist!" Characters treat these as the deepest sayings ever.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice says a lot of allegedly-deep things, with varying levels of actual meaning.
- Alice and Bob visit her hometown, where nobody says "move on down" to mean "face up to life's challenges", but she learned it in a different town.
- Averted: Alice gives Bob a legitimate pep talk.
- Enforced: Test audiences found the scene with Bob to be too sad and downbeat, so the producers added in a joke to lighten it.
- Lampshaded: "Move on down? That would be inspirational if I only knew what the heck it meant!"
- Invoked: Alice, knowing Bob is The Ditz and/or too sad and desperate for reassurance to challenge her, thinks up a "maxim" on the spot to say to him.
- Exploited: Carol, knowing Alice is a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, feeds her several of these as a joke.
- Defied: "When life gets you down, you have to move — wait, no, that doesn't make sense, let me start again."
- Discussed: "Alice is my best friend, but sometimes her so-called deep sayings don't make sense."
- Conversed: "When this show tries to be deep, I always end up scratching my noggin."
- Implied: We hear Alice promising to cheer up Bob with some deep insight, then we cut to Bob looking confused.
- Deconstructed: Since it doesn't mean anything, Bob isn't cheered up one bit and thinks Alice is shallow.
- Reconstructed: He doesn't hold it against Alice — coming up with something deep to say is hard, after all.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's "advice" is clearly just the first text she saw in the area, such as "No Trespassing" or "Now Open on Sundays".
- Played for Drama:
- The fact that Alice can't think of anything to reassure Bob shows how little she actually cares about him.
- Alice's struggle to cheer up Bob is genuinely distressing her, to the point that she'll try anything just to make him feel better.
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