Examples to trample,
Of Rhymes on a Dime,
In Live-Action TV, worth just a fraction of thee.
- One Russ Abbot sketch featured the character Monty Monologue, who much to his wife's mounting frustration speaks only in rhymed couplets, with a double drumbeat at the end to mark the punchline.Wife: Your dinner's ruined!
Monty: Now there's a tasty dish I see, is that my dinner burning?
Why not give it to the dog, and then he won't need worming! [boom-boom] - A magic mirror in The 10th Kingdom speaks entirely in rhyme and will only answer questions that are put in verse as well. This leads to Tony and Virginia having to come up with... interesting questions on the spot."Our mirror's smashed, what can we do? Where the hell are the other two?"
- 3rd Rock from the Sun featured Laurie Metcalfe as a character who always rhymed her sentences with whatever someone else had just uttered. Dick found this charming at first but later discovered it was incredibly annoying and made it impossible to carry on a normal conversation with her.
- Simms in Adam Adamant Lives! would often compose spontaneous limericks about the situation.
- In the Adventures in Wonderland episode "Rhyme-itis," the titular disease makes whoever catches it speak only in rhyme. It spreads throughout Wonderland, much to everyone's annoyance, until the Queen finds good use for it when she needs to think of a rhyme for an advertising jingle she's writing. It's humorously subverted in the final song of the episode, in which the White Rabbit, who suffered the most from the illness, deliberately messes up every verse just because he can.
- A one-time sketch on The Amanda Show featured a "gifted class" full of teenagers with special powers. Josh Peck played Billy, a boy with the gift of "super-rhyming" ("Yeah! I do it all the time...ing."). This led to such couplets as:Lisa: You're giving us a pop quiz?!
Billy: If you spill a soda, you have to...mop fizz.
Student: Come on, guys, let's go eat.
Billy: You don't need shoes if you got no feet! - Are You Afraid of the Dark? had the Carnie from "The Tale of Laughing In The Dark", who played the trope for all the creepiness it was worth:Carnie: It's the most fun in the park, when you're laughing in the dark.
Carnie: Pick the right door and you'll go free, pick the wrong door and there he'll be. - The A-Team: This happened to Murdock in "Black Day at Bad Rock", where he had to give an injured B. A. some of his blood. Murdock uses this new tendency to try to convince B. A. that he will go insane after receiving the blood.Murdock: You'll start hearin' thing you don't see, and rhymin' your words...just like me." *cheeky (and slightly maniacal) smile*
- Doctor Who:
- "Smith and Jones" features the line "Judoon platoon upon the Moon", put in by the writer because David Tennant had a hard time saying "oon" sounds in the English accent he used for the Doctor without sounding Scottish.
- "The Shakespeare Code": The witches, whether they're incanting or not, rhyme in couplets.
- "The Name of the Doctor": The Whisper Men who accompany Dr. Simeon/The Great Intelligence only speak in rhymes.
The trap is set. The Doctor's friends
Will travel where the Doctor ends.
This man must fall as all men must
The fate of all is always dust.
The man who lies will lie no more
When this man lies at Trenzalore.
The girl who died, he tried to save
She'll die again inside his grave. - The Doodlebops: Razz, the eponymous band's manager for Season 1, spoke like this.
- In Frank Herbert's Dune, the Baron Harkonnen as portrayed by Ian McNeice has a habit of concluding with verse when discussing his Evil Plans."By the time the traitor is fully revealed, the fate of Atreides will already be sealed."
"Then let the Emperor mock House Harkonnen; call us swine. Because in the end, his throne will be mine."- In Children of Dune the dwarf spy Bijaz does this as a Character Tic."Bygones, bygones. Let bygones fall where they may. This has been a dirty day."
- In Children of Dune the dwarf spy Bijaz does this as a Character Tic.
- In a The Electric Company (1971) "Spidey Super Stories" sketch the Birthday Bandit speaks like this.
- The following exchange from the Friends episode "The One Where No-One's Ready":Ross: We can't be late. It starts at eight.
Phoebe: He could not, would not, want to wait. - This is a trait of Jervis Tetch in Gotham, initially most frequently while hypnotising his marks. However, after his sister killed herself to get away from him, he started undergoing some serious Sanity Slippage and the rhyming began to bleed into his normal speech. Jim Gordon was able to exploit this at one point in interrogation by speaking in rhyme to him, tricking him into inadvertently dropping hints about who Jim was looking for:Tetch: Nothing! Nothing! I'll tell you naught; his name shall be neither spoken nor taught! He'll cut and he'll crush and the blood will run thick, though from healer to killer is no easy trick!
- Alvie roomed with House in the loony bin, busted rhymes so basic and thin, needed Heezy's help in the talent show, and when Heezy walked out that do', he decided he didn't want to be crazy no mo'.
- An episode of Season 9 of How I Met Your Mother featured Marshall telling his son Marvin stories in order to calm him down on a crowded bus. Naturally, the entire episode is spoken in rhyme (making it sort of a spoken-word Musical Episode), and featured Lin-Manuel Miranda (at that point best known for his musical In the Heights) as a passenger on the bus. Notable moments of the episode include when one rhyme only works with the subtitles on, and a moment where Marshall can't come up with a rhyme for "Canada", prompting Miranda's character to launch into a full free-style verse and use the slant rhyme "janitor."
- Mrs. Benson in iCarly has a series of silly, and occasionally morbid rhymes to help her through her daily life.Mrs. Benson: You won't get respect if your back's not erect.
Mrs. Benson: When temperatures get too high the elderly start to die. - Alton Brown of Iron Chef America often delivers his closing address in poetic, or at least rhyming, style.
- In an episode of Legend of the Seeker, all women are expected to do this in the presence of the Margrave. To do otherwise would be disrespecful. Cara, at first, has trouble doing this when pretending to be a princess whose skill at poetry is legendary. She does spout a few rhymes later (mostly about torture and murder) and another one later, while turning the Margrave into a punching bag. Zedd, dressed up as a duchess, has no trouble rhyming. Even more impressive, the Margrave's sister is able to rhyme while sobbing at the top of her lungs.
- Moonlighting, in which Agnes DiPesto does this when answering the phone. In the It's a Wonderful Plot episode, she runs a greeting card firm and makes her employees speak in rhyme.
- And one epic scene with David and Maddie and a bouncer at a party:David: We're looking for a man with a mole on his nose.
Bouncer: A mole on his nose?
Maddie: A mole on his nose!
Bouncer: What kind of clothes?
Maddie: What kind of clothes?
David: What kind of clothes do you suppose?
Bouncer: What kind of clothes do I suppose would be worn by a man with a mole on his nose? Who knows?
David: Did I fail to mention, did I bother to disclose, this man we're seeking with a mole on his nose, I'm not sure of his clothes or anything else, except that he's Chinese—a big clue by itself.
Maddie: How do you do that?
David: Gotta read a lot of Dr. Seuss.
Bouncer: I'm sorry to say, I'm sad to report, I haven't seen anyone at all of that sort. Not a man who's Chinese with a mole on his nose with some kind of clothes that you can't suppose. So get away from this door and get out of this place, or I'll have to hurt you—put my foot in your face.
David: Oh.
Maddie: Time to go.
David: Time to go.
- And one epic scene with David and Maddie and a bouncer at a party:
- Eulabelle the black maidservant, from Horror of Party Beach (Mystery Science Theater 3000), uses occasional but ubiquitously pointless rhymes as homilies:
- "You don't see me sittin' around moanin' and groanin' all day."
- "What are y'all doin' sneekin' and peekin' in the dark for?"
- Granny Duck from The Noddy Shop talks like this. For example, in the final episode, one of her quotes is "Of all the words spoken that cast a sad spell, the hardest to say is the wish of farewell."
- In Power Rangers, there have been a few rhyming MOTWs, some better at it than others.
- At least once in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, we get a Lampshade Hanging: The Yellow Ranger isn't succumbing to the villain's Hate Plague, and we get...Hate Master: Would you give in already?! Doing this is no snap! It really isn't easy talking all the time in rap!
- The Rangers also had an ally who did this, Quagmire from the "Isle of Illusions" two-part episode. (Although, not all his rhymes made complete sense. For example, he referred to Madame Woe, a Monster of the Week who appeared in a previous episode, as a "nightmare queen" who Billy fought in a "realm of dreams", which really didn't describe Madame Woe—beyond the fact that she was a rare female monster—or the actual battle at all).
- At least once in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, we get a Lampshade Hanging: The Yellow Ranger isn't succumbing to the villain's Hate Plague, and we get...
- The basic objective of the 1975 ABC game show Rhyme and Reason. A couplet is presented, and two contestants secretly write down a word that rhymes with the last word of the couplet. They select a celebrity on a panel (of six) and the celebrity completes the couplet. Matching the contestant's word scores points.
- One Russ Abbot sketch featured the character Monty Monologue, who much to his wife's mounting frustration speaks only in rhymed couplets, with a double drumbeat at the end to mark the punchline.Wife: Your dinner's ruined!
Monty: Now there's a tasty dish I see, is that my dinner burning?
Why not give it to the dog, and then he won't need worming! [boom-boom] - How could we possibly avoid mentioning Professional Wrestling great "Superstar" Billy Graham, the sensation of the nation and the number-one creation? He was filled with the desire to inspire, and took on all contenders and pretenders.
- On The West Wing, one of the signs that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is getting senile is that he tends to write opinions in verse. This is Played for Laughs the first few times it comes up:President Bartlet: (reading) "Fear of cancer from asbestos ... fuzzy science manifestos ..."
- Due to the improvisational nature of a show like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, any game that involves singing ends up becoming this. It's most obvious in Hoedown, where you can tell that the guys are struggling to come up with rhymes as they're singing.
- Wizards vs. Aliens features a powerful magical creature called a hobbledehoynote , which not only speaks all in rhyme, but can only understand other people if they do so as well. Inability to finish a rhyme can actually kill them.
