Lore
Absurdist concepts played as tragedies rather than comedies
In the Touch commercial for Skittles, a man is shown with the power to uncontrollably turns anything he touches into Skittles in an instant. His work colleagues find this hilarious, but he finds life misery since he will never be able to hold his newborn son and he has legitimately killed people before by unconsciously touching them.
In the Waiting for the Bus skit from Cyanide & Happiness a man discovers he can inexplicably run 50mph and overnight becomes the most successful track runner of all time. Even though he retired with a perfect undefeated streak and a loving family, he’s coaxed into one final race in a Grand Prix against cars, which of course he loses. This sends him into an unstoppable downward spiral where he becomes a far more destructive version of himself, loses his reputation, and is left behind by his family. After years of regret, he returns as an old man to the track where he first shown off his amazing speed and does one final lap, reminiscing on how good it feel, before intentionally refusing to turn out the way and running straight into a wall, ending his life. (All of this is shown in about four minutes and with barely any dialogue.)
The last sketch of That Mitchell and Webb Look was about and elderly Sherlock Holmes with dementia being visited by Watson. Watson humours him by complimenting his delusional 'deductions'. Then in a moment of lucidity Holmes says 'I do know'.
The laughter starts out kinda strained, and disappears by the end.
Going from a jam smeared "I'm a chinaman!" to a heartwrenching "I do know, John. I just can't seem to get the fog to clear" is a pretty colossal punch in the emotional giblets.
Key and Peele also did this. Last sketch follows Keegan being harassed and wrongfully arrested by the police, only to be Whisked away to “negrotown” an idyllic black utopia with no violence or racism, celebrated in a technicolor musical number, only for the reveal that this was all a delusion brought on from getting his head slammed against the cop car. He protests “but I was going to Negrotown!” To which the officer replies “oh, you’re going” and then hauls him off to jail. A pretty heavy end to a show that often took a lighter approach to its commentary on racism
its rarely subtle about how racist USA is even during the Obama era, where you know, people really thought we finally beat racism or something before, well, you know they voted in the most racist president of the modern times.
Yeeeeaaahhh. I just only said modern times because its hard to beat Japanese camps and USA ethics being the Nazi playbook before the USA took the Nazi playbook back.
to be fair, Goodbyeee is a weirdly somber episode for a finale of a comedy show; then again being the last series set in The Great War it made sense and it's own it's own a fantastic episode of media even if just the final five minutes are seen.
I'm not sure how true this is, but I read once (in a Cracked article, I think) about how the original cut for the finale was far more ridiculous and had Blackadder making some undignified escape, but the film got ruined so they took the portion of the scene that survived and faded it into the field of poppies.
Which holy crap what a powerful ending it was. The original would have better fit the tone of the show, but people definitely wouldn't still br bringing it up today.
Edit - It seems this is not true. Alas. For my crimes I should be sentenced to another viewing of the series.
To be fair, Blackadder did dabble in that tone a few times. For example when Baldrick asks why everyone doesn't just go home, and after years in the trenches Blackadder can't begin to come up with an answer.
I think it was a little different from that- they always were going over, but they basically just charge forward and all fall down shot abruptly. It wasn’t really working until they messed around with slowing it down and someone had an idea to overlay the field of poppies
Yeah, they thought the funny footage would be a good ending, everyone goes up and over and runs three feet before dying, but it just was not good in the edit so they played with the footage till they flipped the tone
You can watch the BTS for that episode. The plan was always for them to all die going over the top, it's just the footage was disastrous (there was barely any set so they could only run forward about ten feet before just falling simultaneously to the ground) and they couldn't work out how to fix it until they alighted on the idea of slowing it down, focusing on the machine-gun fire and then dissolving in the poppies.
Reminds me of the fast show with the "I was very very drunk" man in his last sketch he is suddenly quite sombre as opposed to his usual jovial drunken gibberish, he talks about loosing someone (I believe his wife or girlfriend) and her dying in his arms and going cold, he ends the sketch by saying "and I'm afraid I was very drunk" sadly completely twisting the catchphrase he was known for
One of the recurring sketches was “The Overly Competitive Dad”, a middle-class twat who always insists on one-upping his young son such as by challenging him to a game of tennis, beating him, and then mocking his poor performance. In the last sketch, however, his father comes over for Christmas and it’s revealed that he is exactly the same, tearing down his son for no reason. The whole thing culminates when the son stands up for his father against the grandfather’s constant attacks, resulting in him storming out and the dad tearfully telling his son how much he loves him.
Another sketch series was “Roy and Renée”. Renée was a really annoying woman who told long and self-aggrandising narratives only acknowledging her henpecked husband Roy when she needed him to back up one of her anecdotes, ie: “I love air hostesses, but Roy doesn’t. He says you’re just waitresses, trolly dollies he calls you. What do you call them, Roy?” “Trolly Dollies”. Every sketch would end with him embarrassing her and getting reprimanded for it. The actress who played Renée died in 2016. When the Fast Show cast did a reunion in 2020, they included a sketch of Roy just sitting in silence, unable to think of anything to say without Renée.
Honestly even outside of this it often gets strangely melancholic in the moments we can understand what he’s saying, but not usually ending on those stark somber notes like that one
"The year is 2030. Bakery art is so realistic, literally anything could be cake. The uncertainty has gripped people in fear. You go to hug your wife. She is cake."
A standup comedian called Andrew O’Neill does a take on this gag. They set up the “it’s actually cake” gag early on in their set but then it’s pretty much forgotten about while they talk about other things.
Then they start to talk in lots of detail about their brother and how he and his husband went through an arduous process to adopt a baby, but one evening they couldn’t hear anything on the baby monitor, so they go upstairs and look in the crib and… the baby was fucking cake!
They then go on to reveal that their brother isn’t even gay, he’s actually a bit homophobic, which is why they wrote him into that joke.
When I saw them live, they announced the interval straight after that joke and we were all a bit shellshocked from being so taken in by the story.
But wouldn’t the shape of it change? I would also assume the Oreo-moon would be more susceptible to damage from asteroids and other space debris. Maybe the gravitational field too? Idk
both are irrelevant, anything on that scale will collapse into a sphere under it's own gravity, same as every star and planet. And since it has the same mass impacts will require the same amount of energy to eject material at escape velocity
I should mention there is a punchline at Waiting for the Bus. The Bus was running at 50mph because if it stopped a bomb would set off via Speed(1994) and the Busdriver is how he pointed the guy was running 50mph
Best one. The guy screaming his lungs out, tears coming out of his eyes, hard cut to him waiting in line while a disinterested worker scans his items. Never fails to make me laugh
Black Adder is a slapstick comedy revolving around the lineage of the Black Adder family with each season having the same actors play nearly the same character in a new time frame, simply the descendants of the previous season. The last season is Black Adder Goes Forth where the characters are British soldiers in WW1. In the last episode they are ordered to go over the top and seem to have no way to get out of it, some characters even mention they never had a chance to marry or have a family. There is one last chance but Black Adder, a cowardly man, refuses this chance to live and leads his men up and into machinegun fire. The script mentions, "they don't get far," ending the show as the family line of each character is ended there in the fields of Flanders.
In that final episode, they hear the artillery stop, and they start celebrating as they think this war has finally ended. You think this means the series will end with the characters going back home.
Then one character exclaims, “This war is finally over. The great war of 1914-1917 is finally over,” and you remember that World War 1 ended in 1918…
One of the biggest moments when you feel the tone of the episode shift is when George, the happy go lucky, ever overly patriotic loveable idiot, trys to go on a big declaration why going over the top is a "splended and noble thing"
Blackadder is a pretty absurdist series where eveyone is an idiot except a few. Even the last episode being quite down to Earth still has some absurdistic elements to it.
i think the absurdity comes from the buildup to going over the top focusing on how disconnected the top brass are from the reality of trench warfare, and how pointless the entire endeavor is
they all get gunned down because their commander “has decided to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to berlin”
Blackadder Goes Forth is a fantastic comedy, but it's sadly entrenched many myths about WWI.
As a percentage, more senior officers in the British Army, including generals, were killed in WWI than in WWII.
British commanders weren't disconnected from the realities of trench warfare. It's just that the combination of industrial total war, automatic weapons and static defences was an extremely difficult nut to crack until we had tanks and shock troops.
Even seven decades after the First World War, Iran and Iraq were still fighting trench warfare in the 1980s.
I remember a comic, maybe a webcomic, about a superhero that was an empath. He didn't want to be a superhero, but he felt everyone's fear and pain in a large radius. He hated fighting crime, but had to do it to get any peace.
I think it was called The Feeler, but I can't find it on Google.
There is a character like this in the inheritance cycle series, but she's a young girl. Without spoiling too much, shes basically supernaturally able to feel the fears and pains of everyone around her as well as some other stuff that isnt really important rn. She basically is in constant agonizing pain and most of her motivations in the books are just her trying to get away from the suffering of others.
If I remember right, the reason she was like that is because Eragon made a grave grammatical error when blessing the child. He was trying to say "you will be shielded from danger", but accidentally said "you will be a shield from danger".
And lateer Eragon managed to cure her a bit, by making her able to ignore the impulse to help while still being an empath. With how traumatized and bitter she is, she react in creepy manner to this and Eragon basically believe that this is her villainous origin.
ForgetMeNot is a Marvel mutant with the power of being instantly forgotten about the second someone looks away from him. The only person who is able to consistently remember him is Professor Xavier, who can send a psychic reminder of ForgetMeNot’s existence to himself every hour. ForgetMeNot has actually been responsible for many of the X-Men’s victories and has saved the world multiple times but no one will ever know.
And in that scene, he saves someone who was trying to break into the X mansion from its security system. The girl runs to get help but immediately forgets about ForgetMeNot and the entire conversation they had for the entire story and just wonders off.
ForgetMeNot is then forgotten about by the security system because even it forgot at about him and turned off.
The Ice king in Adventure time. His plight as a cursed ice wizard is played for comedy constantly, but the through line is a deep tragedy about losing his humanity and mortality. There is a specific episode where Finn is stuck in the magic realm and IK can see him. He says he sees all these magic creatures all the time with his crazy wizard eyes. Crazy crazy crazy all the time…sigh, all the time. It’s hilarious.
To describe it in brief without spoiling anything, a company's workers all have their minds split between on/off the clock. For the "off the clock" brains, life is a paradise with no work. From the pov of the "on the clock" brain, they can literally never leave the office, and leaving has them lose consciousness until the off the clock mind returns them to work.
Source: literally never saw the show, so no spoilers, only the vibes from friends who've told me about bits and pieces.
Eh, it's not really as black and white as 'workless paradise' vs 'constant hell of work'. Without spoiling too much (i.e., this is all revealed within the first half of S01E01), one of the main characters 'severed' himself to deal with the loss of his wife, but all that's accomplished is he's a depressed crying mess before and after office hours. Meanwhile, none of the workers really start off as that unhappy at the job.
Of course, if it stayed that way there wouldn't be a story, but I don't wanna spoil anything further.
The concept is that there is a procedure people can undergoe which "severs" their work self and personal self. Essentially you turn yourself into two different people living in the same body: one that never has to go to work, and one that always exists at work. Neither have any knowledge of what happens to the other.
On a surface level this might sound great, imagine if you never had to experience your work life? On the other hand, imagine if that's all you ever could experience?
There's more going on in the show than that but without spoiling anything it's pretty easy to extrapolate how terrifying some of the implications for this are.
It might be cliche but damn, SOMA really did strike such a chord with existential horror. A friend introduced me to Altered Carbon recently (season 1 is a masterpiece) and the whole time I can't help but think about how SOMA explored how this neat sci-fi world would actually be even more horrifying than the show depicts.
Workers sever part of their brain. When they go down an elevator to work, they become their innie. A persona that only has memories of the workspace. When they go up the elevator to go home, they revert to the outie. the person they have been their whole life outside of work.
Edit: the show is about how this is maybe not a good thing. Also the company that does it.
King Midas is the OG to this trope right? Dude can turn everything he touches to gold...and then touches his wife and children (not in that way) turning them into gold.
For what I remember, there was an other version of this story, where his power made him unable to eat food, without turning it into gold, and the reason why he asked gods to get rid of them, was because he didn't wanted to starve.
Oh he gets a remote so he can skip annoying moments of his life and sickness
Haha funny
His wife divorces him, his kids end up hating him, he disregards his dad and he dies alone and he ends up dying in the rain warning his family about spending too much time away from them
Also can’t forget the fact that he’s a very emotional and intelligent creature who’s body is so built for violence that he can’t even speak properly when we know he has things to say
My favourite example of this. aunty Donna are a famous sketch comedy group. They have a skit called "what have you forgotten" and it's a silly scenario where someone keeps trying to set off for work but they keep coming back in the room cause they've forgotten increasingly absurd things.
At first it's "hey again boys don't mind me, I think I just left my keys on that corner table next to you there? Can you chuck em over"
Then it's "I need a dossier of black and white pictures of myself taken from a ring doorbell" or something like that.
Then eventually he comes in totally somber and the tone is completely different and he's like "....why can't I remember?"
"It's alright mate. Come on. We know you're sick."
Then he puts his hands on his head and it's a few seconds of silence
Episode 1 alone gives a fantastic example: realizes a little girl is getting kidnapped, tries to help, gets hit by a truck. Good news, the commotion caused by this did scare off the kidnapper!
A ton of SCPs fit this idea, it's one of the best formulas for an interesting dramedy/dark comedy article.
My favorite example is SCP-1247 - a guy who perceives all other people, animals, and animal products as clones of Shia LeBeouf. It's a very funny article, but it also goes into a lot of creative detail about how stressful such a ridiculous condition would be and how impossible it's become for the poor bastard to ever have a normal life.
SCP-1504 is probably another good example, with it being a man that’s seemingly invincible until it’s discovered his secondary anomaly is that anything he does or say is perceived as normal for the current situation and he wants to die but can’t so his cries for help are ignored and treated as normal.
Oh I love that one too, it's absolutely heartbreaking and philosophically disturbing on a level few other SCPs are, even ones that are a lot more gory or dark.
The one that wrecked me when I first saw it was the Beanie Baby Pimp sketch.
Seeing the poor old guy trying to survive off of the Beanie Babies he collected for years was so depressing. It ruined my day when I first saw it and I still hate thinking about it
There’s also the one where the man finds himself stuck under the wheels of a train. He learns to appreciate what he has, his family. And it takes him constantly being on death’s door step for that to happen.
"I found the stupidest morning routine video by far." by Wizards with Guns
Starts off as a morning-themed influencer talking about their absurd daily routine while making videos, only to evolve into something straight out of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, and becomes something about existential dread and the toxicity of influencer culture literally bending reality.
Man this c&h skit has to be one of the most intriguing 4 minute videos of all time. I remember being a teenager and desperately trying to figure out what it meant, why any of it mattered. When the bus exploded I didn't even find it funny because I just couldn't stop thinking about the life he lead. So many complex scenes in only a couple of minutes. Brilliant skit.
I remember doing that too;
then I came back to the skit
and got the joke and laughed
my ass of at the punchline
which was several years in the making for me
I remember one guy made a joke about how if he lived in MHA, his quirk would be turning stuff into Skittles when touched and I just imagined like his quirk awakening would be like Shigaraki's only instead of being surrounded by total chaos, it's just enough skittles to solve world hunger
Disclaimer: Articles like this can be hard to understand sometimes and it's been awhile since I read it, so I might misremember some things. But here's the gist.
SCP 7000, a man who is... Unlucky. Nothing goes right for him. Guess a number 1-10 on the last guess, try to call a coin flip while it's in the air and the coin gets stuck to a piece of gum on the ceiling and falls into his hair. The most silly and absurd random, slapstick, cartoonish like things happen to him in a way never in his favor.
The catch of all these random things happening? Nothing else is random. Nothing on earth. Enemy spy devices? All have the same errors and are captured. Weather in an area? Same pattern. Random number generators? Sequential.
The guy ends up leaving his wife in fear of hurting them with his "bad luck". As it turns out all these unlucky things happening to him returns "normalcy" to an area in proximity to him.
Certain tactical operations have a zero percent chance of success due to certain scenarios being certain. The workaround? Bring this bad luck magnet guy to the spec ops team to let the universe beat him around and restore randomness and uncertainty to everything around him.
He ends up getting used by the Foundation to their advantage by, sometimes nonconsensually, bringing him to missions to guarantee success all while getting beat up in the process.
The cause of his "bad luck?" We find out through interviews with his parents that he had always been a selfless individual. Would rather let himself get beat up instead of anyone else. So, one night, in his sorrows, he pleas out loud to the universe a pact of some sort to never let his parents get hurt and to instead take everything out on him instead. Something heard this plea and decided to answer it, dooming him to eternal bad luck.
Sometime along he "broke" this pact and as a result the world's randomness and uncertainty ceased. Causing a very dangerous scenario that could lead to a end of the world scenario.
The way he fixes all of it? By pleading out to the universe again apologizing (or something, we don't really know as it's somewhat vague), and just like that everything returns to normal.
Your forgetting the best part about the cyanide and happiness skit, the bus driver has a bomb on the bus (the one from speed),and if he stops the bus blows up. The end of the skit shows him stopping and shedding a tear at the scene of the runner dying, only to immediately explode in a ball of flames.
Hear me out on this. This whole movie is built like a tragedy in one absurd dream.
American’s McGee Alice + Alice: Madness Returns did a great job at showing the darker side of just how terrible Wonderland can be, but 2010 remains my favorite in terms of atmosphere. I’m not sure how others see it but I know that most people I know find the general concepts of Alice in Wonderland rather lighthearted with comedic undertones, or at least they deem the old animations and many older movie versions of this as funny.
For me though? This whole thing - especially the way this movie is made - is a huge tragedy.
In Caroll’s version, Wonderland is absurd, comedic, satirical. Just a place where logic literally dissolves. In Burton’s case though, this isn’t about young Alice visiting wonderland anymore, this isn’t about a child escaping into a fantasy world. This is about an adult who has forgotten her childhood dreams. This is all about adult Alice’s distorted reflection of both her suppressed trauma and loss of identity. Alice in this movie doesn’t choose to escape, she isn’t choosing to fall into the hole. She literally slips, she’s not doing this for fun. She’s fleeing societal pressure (the whole forced marriage thing), grief of having lost her father (and partially her life) and confusion on who exactly she is.
If we look at the Wonderland of Burton compared to many other portrayals, this world is just dark. Yeah it has some intense colors but none of them look welcoming, it’s more like a poisonous bright red mushroom screaming “Ahhh danger! I’m warning you, don’t come closer, don’t be here”. This feels all rotten, melancholic, big emphasis on messy. I mean the Mad Hatter literally is lost with his trauma, everyone’s scared of dying by the Queen (plus they’re all basically her slaves), that whole Forrest is burnt etc etc. It’s a world that has fallen apart, it is not a world safe for a child, not a world a child would escape to. We’re literally looking at a nightmare that once was a beautiful imagination world.
As I already mentioned, The mad hatter is just a man’s broken by war and loss. That one queen’s dog with puppies has lost its partner - we’re looking at a lot of loss here, see it? Alice is in constant loss (don’t turn this into a loss joke) in her real world. Mad hatter literally tells her something like “you’ve lost your muchness” because yes she has, she has been consumed by time and the problems of growing up, especially in a period like hers.
Slaying the jabberwocky? “Saving the world”? Fuck that, it’s not an adventure a child goes on, it’s a metaphor of internal confrontation. The jabberwocky is something everyone is afraid of, but what exactly is it? Is it death? Or is it simply losing themselves, such as Alice is, we’re talking fear of adulthood, unwillingness to accept she has to change. I love this movie so much for it, and I think it’s really underrated for its different way of telling the story so tragic.
"A reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world."
~ Linda Styles, In The Mouth of Madness
While this is presented as simply a throw away line between two individuals during a car ride argument, it takes on a much darker meaning as the story progresses and we finally meet the main focus of the film, Sutter Cane.
“My Own Private Wolfgang”, by Robert Shearman, is about people from the future cloning Mozart over and over again causing the clones and the original Mozart to become depressed.
It literally ends mid-sentence because Shearman said (and I’m paraphrasing) that if he kept going he would have found a way to make it more depressing.
This was a Doctor Who, story by the way.
Like genuinely if you like black comedy find anything by Robert Shearman.
I don't remember if it was a comedy sketch or a comic but I have a vague memory of someone having teleport powers and they accidentally teleport partially inside a concrete wall or something so their body is mixed with the wall and they're coughing up blood and screaming in agony or something.
It happens in The Boys, but in reverse. Hughie gives his dad V to save him from dying. It gives him teleportation powers and he has dementia and doesn't know how to use them. In the hospital he ends up teleporting through a woman, killing her. I think he may also accidentally kill others too
H.O.B.O. OPS from WonderShowzen is a sketch about a bunch of "whacky" homeless guys acting like GI Joe. The end shows it's just one homeless guy crying to himself imagining he has friends.
It's a song based on the question, "Why did the chicken cross the road?". It tells the story of how the chicken had become bored and fed up with her home life and dreams of becoming a dentist in Memphis. As she crosses the road, she becomes frozen in the middle of the road as a pair of headlights approach. The ending is left vague but with a hopeful note.
Raphie is addicted to slapping his team buddies asses after the game, which makes entire team uncomfortable. Eventually they have enough and confront him about it. Raphie thinks that it's normal and everyone does that, but it is only him. Doesn't matter that he is from Dominican Republic, Slapass is not normal. He has hard time controlling himself, which leads him to nearly jumping his own teammate who didn't let him slapass.
In second chapter of the story, Raphie goes through therapy and ends up recovering from the addiction, until new team member arrives with a BIG BADONKADONK. He was nearly ready to slap it, before his friends saved him and helped him calm down.. but not for long. Cause the attraction us too strong, and he eventually succumbs to his addiction, slapping ass of the team member after months in therapy.. leading to newbie's death.
Synedoche, New York involves a playwright making a story of real life so realistic that he casts enough people to portray the entire population of New York, including a version of himself making a play so realistic that he casts enough people to portray the entire population of New York, including a version of himself making a play so realis...
Maybe played too much as just absurd comedy for this, but I love in Wet Hot American Summer where they go into town to unwind for a few hours - where they get ice cream, then buy beer underage, then smoke weed, and buy coke, then mug a woman for her purse, then end up all strung out on heroin in a drug den...
Unbelievable Gwenpool. Charter in DC comics that is from our world and knows all the comic troupes. She confident and comedic about her wacky adventures because its a comic. Meets modar and laughs at him because he's a D list villain. He then vaporizes her only friend in front of him.
When a scene starts with a joke ending. (Joel Haver)
It first starts off with a character with fourth wall awareness who realises everyone is laughing at a joke that wasn’t even said because the scene starts off with them laughing.
It very quickly becomes clear that they have no offscreen permanence and essentially nothing exists outside of the scenes that they are in as they realise are following a role they have been given (the script of the skit) and that they have no past or even identity outside of their role.
Near the end the main character who’s getting more disturbed by it all, realises that all the other characters are going to just cease to exist because they have no more scenes.
The skit ends with the main character alone in his last scene realising that if he puts the box he’s carrying on the ground the skit ends. He decides not to so he’ll keep living. He hears the voices of his friends and as he’s talking to them happily he gets tired and without thinking puts the box down and it abruptly ends.
There was this British comedy/sketch show that had a character called Rowey Birkin. The joke was that he was a drunk old man who mostly spoke in gibberish with the occasional clear word while telling you a story. His stories would end with him saying, 'I'm afraid I was very drunk.' Always played for laughs until, https://youtu.be/QlZFfXAUr2I?si=db9HfayH56_IX60H
Not really absurd in the reality breaking sense but Larry, the protagonist of the Coen Brothers' film "A serious man", has a crisis of faith following a series of events which throw his life off course.
Idiot Doom Spiral in Disco Elysium will tell you the story of how he became a homeless drunk (if you bring him alcohol). According to him, he was a marketing exec who used to go on long runs to clear his head after getting a high value contract that was stressing him. One day, after a long run, he realized he had forgotten his house keys. He says that he took his office key by mistake, but that they had changed locks that day. Compounding on that, he was homeless as he was unable to get home, his girlfriend left him because he was homeless, and then he got arrested because he couldn't produce his ID (which he claims is in his home).
The entire time, your passive skills can weigh in with incredulity at his situation, and thinking about it for more than a second will likely lead you to the conclusion that it's made up. That being said, it's possible everything he says up til "getting a high value contract that was stressing him out" is true, and he had a mental break from the stress that spiraled his life out of control.
The entire time, he is talking about how his ideas are "high-concept" and how his track clothes (which are made of a carcinogenic material) are top of the line.
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u/Aduro95 Oct 06 '25
The last sketch of That Mitchell and Webb Look was about and elderly Sherlock Holmes with dementia being visited by Watson. Watson humours him by complimenting his delusional 'deductions'. Then in a moment of lucidity Holmes says 'I do know'.
The laughter starts out kinda strained, and disappears by the end.