text:
To say that a thing is shaped like itself is a tautology, a truthful phrase with no informational content, an unnecessary repetition of words meaning the same thing: "free gratis" or "I can see it with my own eyes" or "It is what it is."
Sometimes, this is just used as a joke, but it's often also used to describe something as boring. Calling a sofa sofa-colored, for instance, implies that its color is generic and unremarkable.
Usually the redundancy has a purpose though. Sometimes it's for intensification (e.g. "kills bugs dead"), for clarification (e.g. "pin" and "PIN" sound identical, so adding "number" makes it clearer), or for calling attention to the property of a thing, even if it's inherent (e.g. "he draws beautifully round circles"). Other times it's just a more concise and glib way of phrasing things (e.g. compare "the state of being of this object is permanent and any attempts to modify its state are futile" with "it is what it is", and "once you overcome your initial reluctance and complete this task, you will enjoy the benefits of its completion" with "if you do it, it will be done"). Furthermore, sometimes the concepts being used are not actually identical (e.g. "Not only am I very intelligent, I'm also very smart!"). So, many apparent tautologies are worth thinking deeply about, as they often contain surprising insights.
The name comes from William Shakespeare, who used tautologies a lot. In Antony and Cleopatra during a drunk scene:
Antony: It is shap'd, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth; it is just as high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.
Lepidus: What color is it of?
Antony: Of its own color too.
Lepidus: 'Tis a strange serpent.
Antony: 'Tis so. And the tears of it are wet.
This article was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department, the Department that brought you this article. Since it is 100 percent true while imparting no new information, this is a subtrope of Mathematician's Answer, which is a supertrope of this. Related to A Dog Named "Dog", Recursive Acronym, Captain Obvious, "El Niño" Is Spanish for "The Niño", Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep", Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and The Trope Without a Title, which are some articles to which this one is related. Can often overlap and sound the same as Buffy Speak (see the numerous examples below).
Illustrative Examples:
- Electronic Videogames Which Can Be Played Via Digital Apparatuses (Video Games)
- The Non-Fictitious Real World That is Real (Real Life)
- The slogan for Raid insecticides has long been, "Kills bugs dead."
- "Healthy Choice Fresh Mixers taste fresh."
- A Dutch commercial for Heinz Pasta Sauce ended with the phrase "Heinz Pasta Sauce: sauce to put on pasta."
- A radio station in Chicago once advertised: "Of all the radio stations in Chicago... we're one of them."
- An advertisement for the City Rail 14 Day Rail Pass in Australia: "14 Day Rail Pass. Like the 7 Day Rail Pass, but lasts twice as long."
- Australian brewery Carlton & United's slogan for its flagship Carlton Draught: "Made from beer."
- Milo ad campaign : "That's not cool, but MILO with cold milk's cool, 'cause it's made with cold milk."
- A new apartment block overlooking Slough railway station—on a major commuter route to/from London—carried a hoarding making the sensible observation: "If you lived here, you'd be home by now."
- "...And bored out of your mind."
- The same slogan was also used to advertise a new apartment block overlooking Ruislip Underground station, likewise on a major route into and out of London.
- Spoofed in a set of ads for Nationwide Insurance, featuring "The World's Greatest Spokesman in the World!"
- The You Don't Know Jack shop page (apparently no longer functioning) is called the STORE-Mart, and features the catchy slogan "We Sell Various Items To You".
- Local Liquor's slogan is "There's one near you". Which works great for TV ads. Emblazoned on the store that you're standing in front of? Notsomuch...
- A McDonald's ad. "This new Zesty Mango McMini is really zesty." This is then emphasized by a trio of women who sing the word "Zesty" in a motown style.
- A particularly bad example is the radio ad campaign for South African Airways Business Class. For some reason they thought it would be a good idea to end each ad with this: "So, fly South African Airways Business Class. Business Class: 'For Business'." You don't say!
- An oddly provincial advert for broadband Internet informs us that a Yorkshireman's word is "rock solid, like Yorkshire stone!" Well, maybe, but how solid is their rock? (And more to the point, what the hell has it got to do with broadband?)
- According to a TV advert for Donkey Kong Country Returns, DK "rampages through your living room like an ape rampaging through your living room."
- Apple's 2011 iPhone campaign stated that "If you don't have an iPhone.... well, then you don't have an iPhone."
- "Our bank's debit card gives you the security of a Personal PIN Number!"
- Nabisco was originally called National Biscuit Company before they shortened it to Nabisco. Much later, they decided that Nabisco now stands for Nabisco Biscuit Company. Which, when you think about it, stands for Nabisco Biscuit Company Biscuit Company. Which stands for Nabisco Biscuit Company Biscuit Company Biscuit Company... You eat the red Ritz, and I'll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
- Often in commercials we are told "If you are not completely satisfied, return it, but keep X as a free gift." Have you ever heard of a gift that wasn't free?
- Red Dog beer once got in trouble because consumers assumed it was red in color. They launched an advertising campaign to correct this misapprehension: "Is it red? No. It's regular colored."
- Red Rock Cider: Defied "It's not red, and there's no rocks in it."
- There is a Dr. Pepper ad where the head of a biker gang asks some guy what Dr. Pepper tastes like. The guy can only describe it as, "It tastes like Dr. Pepper." The biker is not amused. After beating the guy up, the biker drinks some Dr. Pepper and agrees, "This DOES taste like Dr. Pepper."
- According to the commercials, Jack in the Box's "Munchie Meals" each come with "a drink you can drink". As opposed to the ones you can't.
- Back when mail-order computer retailers were still a thing, magazine ads (instead of crediting all the various trademarks to their respective companies) would say "Trademarks are the property of their owners".
- "It's a pillow, it's a pet... It's a Pillow Pet."
- Chrysler Superbowl 2014 commercial: "Is there anything more American...than America?"
- The slogan for the Bank of Chile is... "The Bank of Chile."
- A 2015 commercial for AT&T U-Verse Internet features a family in a house where everything is unreliable and breaking down—except their Internet. The slogan mentions that U-Verse has "reliability you can rely on".
- Radio station identification: "This is WJZ New York. No other station can make that statement!"
- An old Cartoon Network "We'll be right back" bumper for Ed, Edd n Eddy had Ed announcing "When we get back from where we are going, we are going back where we were. I know people there."
- Fate/stay night:
- "People die if they are killed." It was supposed to be something like "People who are killed are supposed to stay dead." Makes a bit more sense in the context of the next line, "That's the way it should be."
- The Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works] anime brought this line: "The Archer class really is made up of Archers!" Archer, who does favor twin shortswords over bow and arrow, suspects that Rin was mocking him in saying this.
- Also from Unlimited Blade Works is Shirou's "Just because you're correct doesn't mean you're right!", which in context is probably supposed to mean "just because you've got your facts correct doesn't mean your conclusions are right".
- The Japanese is more to the effect of, "Just because you're (logically) correct, doesn't mean you are (morally) right!". In context, Archer is telling Shirou to give up on his idealistic but impossible dream that will only hurt him in the future when he fails. Shirou acknowledges that it's impossible, but continues by insisting that just because it's impossible doesn't mean it isn't beautiful.
- In Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon finds himself slipping into this:
Kyon: What does Haruhi Suzumiya mean to me? Haruhi is Haruhi, and nothing but Haruhi... great, I'm using tautology to dodge the question.
Haruhi: Summer should be like summer, so we have to do summery activities.
- Also, in "Endless Eight":
- Kokoro Connect: The gang is being harassed by an alien who uses mind-control to make them do embarrassing things. In Iori's case, nobody notices a difference.
Inaban: They seemed to write it off as Iori being herself.Iori: That was the worst part! If everyone thinks I'm being myself when I suddenly shout "Yahoo!" in the middle of class, what does that say?Taichi: That you're the sort of person who likes to shout "Yahoo!" in the middle of class.
- Serial Experiments Lain: "Lain is Lain... but am I really myself?"
- From Neon Genesis Evangelion: "That which is, is.", "I am myself." (though it's meant to be intentional mindscrew and symbolic.)
- Lucky Star;
Konata: What's a Blue Hawaii?Kagami: It's... uh... Blue-Hawaii-Flavored, I guess...
- This◊ example from Shakugan no Shana.
Kazumi: It's called a school festival. It's a festival organized by the school.
- Pardonable since Japanese has a special word for "school festival" ("gakuensai") that can't be produced by saying either "school" ("gakkou") or "festival" ("matsuri").
- In Naruto, the legendary Sannin (lit. "three ninja") are often called "the Three Sannin" in translations.
- Something between this and I Am Not Shazam is referring to the nine-tailed demon fox as "The 9-Tailed Kyuubi" (or other tailed beasts in a similar manner) as if "kyuubi" was a proper name, but it just means "nine tails" and we don't learn the real name of it (Kurama) or any of the other tailed beasts' names but Shukaku until very late in the series.
- Kaitou Tenshi Twin Angel becomes redundant when the title is translated — Thief Angel Twin Angel.
- Many anime subtitles will translate the sentence "hitori wa sabishii" as "being alone is lonely."
- As pointed out elsewhere on this wiki, "being alone is lonely" technically isn't a tautology, since you can be alone but not lonely.note Still awkward as hell.
- The Translation Notes in Vol 23 of Mahou Sensei Negima! has this wonderful bit where the Publishers explain a censored Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of XX-puta.
We won't tell you what it is but it starts with L and rhymes with "Laputa".
Ako: No, no, no, that's not okay! That's just...not okay!
- There's also Ako's "No. Just... No" Reaction moment when Yuuna talks about giving her father a deep kiss:
- A moment in the beginning of ×××HOLiC encounters this:
Watanuki: What's a Mokona?Yuko: A Mokona's a Mokona. You count them one Mokona, two Mokona then you stop because there's only two Mokona.
- It's a small running gag that, whenever Watanuki calls Mokona something (i.e., an animal), his reply will be "Mokona's not an [animal], Mokona's a Mokona!"
- K-On!: "Fun things are fun."
- Cowboy Bebop: The Cloudcuckoolander Edward's description of herself: "But... Edward IS Edward!" It Makes Sense in Context in that she's a Third-Person Person.
- In Dragon Ball:
- before the hotly contested translation of "Saiyan", the race that Goku et. al belong to were often referred by the English fandom as either "the Saiyajin peoples" or "the Saiyajin race" despite the fact that "-jin" means "people/race".
- Also in Dragon Ball, Goku's master is known as "Master Roshi" in the English dub of the anime. Quite a tautology if you have in mind that "Roshi" means "Master" or "Teacher" in Chinese; so his name would be "Master Master."
- The Crunchyroll sub of the first episode of Galaxy Express 999 includes the line "Let's just do all that we can. That's all we can do."
- The dub of Fist of the North Star has the line: "GOD'S ARMY IS THE ARMY OF GOD!"
- In the Sailor Moon Stars manga, Usagi asks Chibi Chibi who she truly is. Chibi Chibi responds with something among the lines of "I am I." Usagi contemplates it seriously for a moment before getting annoyed that Chibi Chibi completely dodged the question.
- In Mahoraba the six year old personality goes on a large tangent of this: "Nanako is Nanako. Nanako is Nanako so it's Nanako. If Nanako wasn't Nanako then Nanako wouldn't be Nanako but Nanako..."
- GaoGaiGar: "The power of The Power..." This is because the latter is Gratuitous English, so it originally went "ZA PAWAA no chikara..." (Still, who knows why didn't they use "strength" or something)
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei inverts this; the final episode's Suspiciously Specific Disclaimer states that any resemblance between this show and itself is purely coincidental. It's Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei. They weren't lying.
- In Higurashi: When They Cry at the end of Onikakushi-hen, you get this:
Keiichi: "Manager"...who is that?Mion: Kei-chan, you don't know? The Manager is the Manager.(...)Keiichi: I mean...who is the "Manager".Rena: The Manager is Manager-san.Keiichi: So, WHO IS IT?!Mion and Rena: AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
- In the Axis Powers Hetalia Paint it White movie, while having a picnic with Liechtenstein, Switzerland says of the sandwich he is eating "I think it taste like sandwich".
- A Gag Sub in Girlsund Panzer gave the fans this: "Panzer vor means Panzer vor."
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha INNOCENT had this precious line from Precia in Chapter 3, which shows why you shouldn't let Doting Parents commentate on their children's matches if you want any useful information:
Precia: Allow me to explain. "Paper Fan Smash" is Alicia's super-cute paper fan technique. ... That is all!
Amy: That didn't explain anything...
- The Pokemon in Pokémon that don't have formal names are all technically examples of this. For instance, Ash has a Pikachu named Pikachu.
- One episode features a band of Diglett thieves known as "The band of Diglett Thieves". They used to have a more creative name, but the old geezers that they harassed could never remember it.
- In the English dub for Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, Halekulani commands a group of dangerous thugs called "A Group of Dangerous Thugs".
- In the second episode of Kuroko's Basketball we get a visual example◊ where the speaker and the article he's reading from are translated at the same time.
- Ask yourself, what does the DC in DC Comics stand for? It stands for Detective Comics, the name of their first and once bestselling series. Now think about that for a moment. Detective Comics Comics. A letters column once explained the logic behind the company still being DC Comics, stating that news of a new "DC launch" might upset some of our foreign friends. While the company is officially DC Entertainment now... one of its subsidiaries is DC Comics.
- Runaways
- The hideout is in the La Brea Tar Pits, where "La Brea" is Spanish for "the tar". These are found both in Real Life Los Angeles and in the comic book Runaways. The redundancy is also commented upon within the pages of Runaways, where the the tar tar pits appear.
- Also, while Molly is pushing against a giant monster's foot:
Molly: His foot smells like feet!
- The stupid, stupid rat creatures in Bone occasionally use this:
"Do something quick, small mammal, before we are all killed to death!"
- Countdown to Final Crisis, which counted down to Final Crisis, has Superboy-Prime treating the Monarch with the Buffy quote below.
- Buck Godot. Most of the reasons for the Winslow's importance. "The Winslow is the exact shape and size of the Perfect Lizard of Love, which, of course, is the Winslow."
- Hellboy (He's a boy from Hell): "When I do you, you're done!"
- From Villains United, a comic about a union of villains:
Scandal: Cheshire is a liar! She lies!
- In D.R. & Quinch stories, things are often described in this manner by whichever character is narrating. For example, the hatchway of a spacecraft is described in one story as opening "with a sound just like the sound of a hatchway opening."
- One issue of The Simpsons shows Bart, Milhouse, and Martin looking over all the new summer comics in the comic-book shop - and, of course, most of them feature snarling renegade "heroes" or impossibly buxom super-women on their covers. Two of the comics have the titles "Deathkill" and "Killdeath" - which qualifies as a double example.
- In The Sandman issue "The Hunt", a character tells a fairy story in which one of the strange objects the hero accumulates is a small bone he had carved into the shape of a small bone.
Celeste: A small bone that he had what?Grandfather: Carved into the shape of a small bone.Celeste: But it was a small bone already.Grandfather: He carved it into the shape of a different small bone, all right?
- Scott Pilgrim plays with this.
Stephen Stills: The first band we're up against is Crash and the Boys.Scott: Oh, aren't they that one band with Crash... and those boys?
- In one of the page-long stories of Rychlé ípy, the most popular old Czech comics, Rychlonoka needs the services of a clock-repairer, whose shop is however closed at the moment. When you look closely, the "Closed" sign actually reads "When I'm not here, I'm away."
- This Drawn Together fanfic contains the line "Sweetcakes believe in efficiency. You get more done that way."
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, (The Abridged Series of Yu-Gi-Oh!):
Marik: Foolish fools!
Yami: Only one duelist can be the star of this movie, and it's not the duelist that's not me!
- Used by Yami and Anubis in Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Movie:
Anubis: You're going to die! And then you'll be dead! Because I killed you!
- This fanfic for Death Note had this description:
The smoke was flying around his head and it shone in the sun like a shiny cloud of smoke.
- The infamous My Immortal had this:
He didn't have a nose (basically like Voldemort in the movie) and he was wearing all black but it was obvious he wasn't gothic. It was...... Voldemort!
- In another scene, Ebony asks for a four-letter word for dirt.
- Obviously the answer is soil...
- In another scene, Ebony asks for a four-letter word for dirt.
- In Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami, Blud enjoys eating "blood bananas" that are made out of blood.
- Also, many other examples. Including the "nuclear bom went off like a bom", though perhaps this could be saying that it went off like a bomb but not a nuclear one, since all it really does is scratch the paint on Soichiro's car.
- Dark Secrets has the following Narmful line before Coitus Ensues:
" Are you sure? " [Draco] asked, making sure this is what she wanted.
- Dialogue tags that reiterate the dialogue they're describing are infuriatingly common in fanfic, especially when Said Bookism is also in play.
- "Gay, Bejewelled, Nazi Bikers of Gor" frequently employs tautologies to mock the original author's redundant writing.
The meal consisted of busk meat, which is a manly meat taken from the busk, those large, shambling animals used by Goreans for meat. In addition I had eaten several vulo eggs, these being the eggs of the birds that the Goreans call the vulo, and which the Goreans keep so they can eat their eggs. This was as well in addition to the so-turgey bread I had eaten with my busk meat and vulo eggs, the flour for this bread being taken from the so-turgey plant, which is grown on Gor by the peasant caste.
- In Jeffrey Wells's Narbonic fanfic ''A Brief Moment of Culture", the killer yogurt proves beyond Artie's powers of simile:
We stood before the slucking mass of yellow-tinged white yogurt that draped and spilled over the gerbil pens like some kind of ... obscene mutant dairy product or something.
- Admiral Awesome's introductory line in Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure:
Im Admiral Awesome Yonasomun Armageddon, leader of the U. S. Army Saijin Brigade. said Awesome Yonasomun Armageddon, leader of the U. S. Army Saijin Brigade.
- The original dialog is paraphrased briefly in a Star Trek story here
- At one point in Magnetism! Fluttershy hands Rainbow Dash what is described as a peach colored peach.
- Literally done in this page of Twilight's First Dance.
Twilight Sparkle: "I'm totally not square! I'm me-shaped, not square."
- In Came Out of the Darkness Draco Malfoy complains about the impossibility of getting a girl alone to ask her to the Yule Ball.
Draco: Don't understand why they keep grouping together like... groups of things that group together.
- Aveyond fanfic Uncertainty Principle - A Runaway Bride involves a mystery box challenge, where the box was described as being a "very boxy box. Very, exceedingly, box."
- In Harry Potter and the Marauders of the Mind Draco Malfoy is referred to as "irritating Malfoy-shaped company."
- I'm Not Going:
Dumbledore: I must question you about the troll. Tell me about it.
Harry: It was troll shaped. And smelt bad.
- In Animagus Mishap a tan-colored potion tastes...tan.
- In The Sanctuary Telepath when Janine is asked to explain her relationship with James Watson:
Janine: James is my... James.
- In To Reach Without a purple potion tastes purple.
- In White Knights and Dark Lords Xander calls Willow "my Willow-shaped friend."
- Black, White, and Red All Over:
Willow: Buffy, Faith, can you head down and pick up Harry's stuff? I'd do it, but it's like super heavy.
Buffy: Is that all we are to you, Willow? After all we've been through, are we really just pack mules to you?
Willow: No, not just any pack mules. You're super special friend-shaped pack mules who I care for very much!
- In some Anthropomorphic Personification or Moe Anthropomorphism circles, humanity tends to get personified as... a human. This gets a little awkward in situations where concepts on a larger scale get turned into people like planets or countries, leaving the personification of the very source of their form to be a little out of place (and often having the larger scale personifications wondering what they're supposed to be based off of).
- A total inversion of this trope occurs in this joke from classic Greek philosophy times: "This is the portrait of Menodotis...which resembles about any Crethi and Plethi...in fact, everyone except Menodotis." Shades of Null-A...
- Another inversion is the urban legend of celebrity X (insert adlib) appearing incognito on a celebrity X similarity contest. And getting the Y-th prize, where Y>1.
- Shakespeare in Love: "That woman... is a woman!"
- Scott Pilgrim vs. The World:
- "A gig is a gig is a gig. Is a gig. Don't you think you can put your history to the side, for the band? For the band? For the band?"
- "You cocky cock!"
- Plan 9 from Outer Space:
Paula Trent: ...A flying saucer? You mean the kind from up there?Jeff Trent: Yeah, either that or its counterpart.
- "Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and somebody's responsible". This might be justified considering something could have been responsible.
- "And remember my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future."
- "Visits? That would indicate visitors."
- Although nonsensically averted with "Modern women. They been that way all down through the ages."
- "A small town, I'll admit, but nevertheless a town of people." As opposed to the other types of town.
- Or Paula Trent's response to her husband seeing a flying saucer:
- Hot Shots! Part Deux: "I will kill you until you die from it!"
- The term "Murder-death-kill" from Demolition Man.
- The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, an Affectionate Parody of '50s B Movies uses this a lot for humorous effect:
Dr. Paul Armstrong: Seriously, Betty, you know what this meteor could mean to science. If we find it, and it's real, it could mean a lot. It could mean actual advances in the field of science.
- MirrorMask: "I shall slip unnoticed through the dark, like a dark unnoticeable slippy thing."
- The Happening: "Elliot's resilient."/"Yeah, he never gives up."
- The Show Within a Show CSI parody in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, starring Sarah Marshall, is called Crime Scene: Scene of the Crime.
- A Few Good Men: Colonel Jessup believes all danger is grave danger.
- Kung Fu Panda:
- The opening narration: "Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung-fu skills were the stuff of legend."
- The secret ingredient of the secret ingredient soup.
- The thousand demons of Demon Mountain.
- Master Shifu. "Shifu" means "master" in Chinese.
- Chor Ghom Prison. Guess what 'Chor Ghom' means?
- When Eric catches up to T-Bird in The Crow, it takes a while for T-Bird to realize who he is. This is doubtless partially due to the makeup Draven wore, but it might also have been denial, as when he realizes it, he's so confused and frightened he fires off five of these statements in a row.
T-Bird: ... I know you. I knew I knew you; I knew I knew you... But you can't be you. This is the really real world. We killed you dead! There ain't no comin' back..."
- The Continuum Transfunctioner from Dude, Where's My Car? The Continuum Transfunctioner is a very mysterious and powerful device. Its power is exceeded only by its mystery, and its mystery is exceeded only by its power.
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gives us this classic Lucasism: "Their treasure was knowledge; knowledge was their treasure."
- The 1976 mystery spoof Murder by Death (a title that itself qualifies) includes this exchange early on:
Dick: It sounded as though somebody snipped the wire.Dora: What did it sound like?Dick: Snip.
- The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension: "No matter where you go, there you are."
- The title of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters.
- A trailer for a Brazilian B-movie: "A killer assassin!"
- A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Blame that on Executive Meddling since they thought people would think the I was a 1. Yes, they thought we'd wonder if they'd made a movie about steak sauce...
- In the romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, the main character is a member of the National Organization of Marital Attorneys, Nationwide (in other words, he's a divorce lawyer). This is for no other reason than for the organization to have the acronym N.O.M.A.N. The organization's motto is "Let N.O.M.A.N. put asunder."
- The La Trattoria from Mickey Blue Eyes. Heavily lampshaded when they hang a lampshade on it.
- In Pootie Tang, Chris Rock's character has a friend who repeatedly ruins his rants by Explaining The Joke like this. For example, one rant ends with the line "And they won't let air in. [...] That's how exclusive a Biggie Shorty party is." His friend's response: "You know what else? It's hard to get in, too."
- The classic Mikey quote from The Goonies: "Because it's their time! Their time! Up there. Down here, it's our time — it's our time down here!" Martha Plimpton (Stef) even made fun of it in the cast commentary: "We reiterate that!"
- The movie title, Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo. Aren't all gigolos male by definition? Considering how much that movie does a weird gender inversion of anatomy-naming (e.g. shenis, man-gina,) this use of the trope was probably intentional.
- This exchange from Uwe Boll's House of the Dead:
Rudy: You created it all so you can be immortal. Why?Mad Scientist: To live forever.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
- "...so any help you could give us would be most helpful."
- "Yes, shrubberies are my trade. I am a shrubber. My name is Roger the Shrubber. I arrange, design, and sell shrubberies."
- "Three is the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four thou shalt not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out."
- And yet, Arthur still gets it wrong.
- Back to the Future Part III: "You got a backdoor to this place?" "Yeah, it's in the back."
- Flowers for Algernon's film adaptation Charly had Charlie Gordon give Ms. Kinnean a phrase from Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable to punctuate: "That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is."
- "Manos" The Hands of Fate. As manos is Spanish for "hands", the title when fully translated means, "Hands the hands of fate".
- In the test Spock is taking at the beginning of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Spock is asked to give Kiri-Kin-Tha's first law of metaphysics. "Nothing unreal exists" is the answer.
- Once in every Austin Powers movie.
- International Man Of Mystery: "Allow myself to introduce... myself."
- The Spy Who Shagged Me: "You're one groovy baby... baby."
- Goldmember: "What do you know... about... my father's where... about... s."
- From a deleted scene: "The plan will go ahead as... planned!"
- The contract scene in A Night at the Opera. ("The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part...")
- How Forrest Gump introduces himself to Benjamin Buford "Bubba" Blue: "My name's Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump."
- Shortly before the Inglourious Basterds attempt to meet a double agent in a bar in a cellar:
Aldo: Fighting in a basement presents several difficulties, the first of which being, you're fighting in a basement.
- From Snatch.:
"Boris the Blade? As in, Boris the Bullet-Dodger?""Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?"beat "Because he dodges bullets, Avi."
- California Carlson in the Hopalong Cassidy films insists that "El Camino Real" is Spanish for "The Real Camino", to hide the fact that he has no idea what a camino is. (Or "Real", for that matter, which means Royal.)
- From What's New Pussycat?
Wife: Lascivious adulterer!Fassbender: Don't call me that again until I look it up! [He looks it up] Ah, a lascivious adulterer is a man who is a lascivious adulterer! What kind of book is this?
- From Attack the Block
Sam: "What's Ron's Weed Room?"Brewis: "It's a big room full of weed and it belongs to Ron."
- Commodus, in Gladiator: "It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed."
- End of Watch: When asked why a gangbanger is named "Big Evil," he replies, "Because my evil is big!"
- Sharknado 2: The Second One, which might have the most obvious subtitle ever.
- The Bobo, starring Peter Sellers in the title role (Spanish for 'fool') ends the opening captions with a quote "It is said in Barcelona 'A Bobo is a Bobo' - Gipsy proverb XCVIII"
- A Muppet Family Christmas: Doc tells Swedish Chef when he is bothering Sprocket "I don't care if the turkey says the dog is the turkey! The turkey is the turkey, you turkey!
- Captain America: The First Avenger, after being captured and being served a meal, Zola is worried about being slipped a Truth Serum. Colonel Phillips fully enjoys invoking this trope in response:
Zola: What's that?
Phillips: Steak.
Zola: What's in it?
Phillips: [cheerfully] Cow!
- During one scene in Amazing Grace and Chuck, this trope is used to explain what an NFL Linebacker is to a little girl.
Reporter: That's Mad Dog, the line backer. Do you know what that is? Well, uh, (points at Mad Dog again) THAT is a linebacker.
- Bruce Almighty: "It's a funny thing about pleasure, it can be quite PLEASURABLE!"
- Movie Movie: [colonel to pilot] "If you won't go up, then by God, sir... you'll stay down."
- Avengers: Infinity War: When Thor needs to hold open a forge powered by a star, something that is out of bounds for even his Nigh-Invulnerability.
Eitri: It will kill you.
Thor: Only if I die.
Eitri: Yes...That's what...killing you means...
- Life, the Universe and Everything
Ford: I won't disturb you with the details because they would...
- This Arthur/Ford exchange:
Arthur: What?
Ford: Disturb you.
- Not to mention the title of the book itself.
- The book presents a greatly abridged list of rules for Brockian Ultra-Cricket (since the full set of rules is literally too large to exist in print). The final rule is: "The winning team shall be the first team that wins."
- Arthur finds himself in a room carved out of the inside of a mountain that looks like it was carved out of the inside of a mountain.
- Mostly Harmless gives us this pearl of zen wisdom:
"Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesnt necessarily do it in chronological order, though."
- A particularly egregious example is found, in all places, in a poem by Wordsworth titled "The Thorn" where he describes a mossy mound as, "like an infant's grave in size." Later, he tells you, "The little babe was buried there." Why yes, William, an infant's grave has very similar dimensions to an infant's grave.
- In the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, there was a tunnel Mrs. Frisby was walking down described as "dank and damp".
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: "You must be a very intelligent man." "Not only am I very intelligent, I'm also very smart!"
- Though not commonly used in modern speech, there is a difference in meaning between intelligent (able to process information efficiently) and smart, which can mean either intelligent or wise (having acquired knowledge). But given who said that, it was unlikely he knew the difference either.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events does this a lot with its embedded definitions matching subsequent descriptions. "The restaurant, which was very 'gaudy' (a word here which means 'filled with ugly neon lights') was filled with ugly neon lights."
- Essaysin Idleness offers an Older Than Print example:
Once, when this abbot saw a certain priest, he dubbed him the Shiroururi. Someone asked what a shiroururi was. He replied, 'I have no idea, but if such a thing existed, I am sure it would look like that priest's face.'
- James Bond
Colonel Smithers looked exactly like a man named Colonel Smithers.
- Used with great effect in Thunderball. In it, to describe the room that Bond was given in the Shrublands health clinic, Ian Fleming worded it thusly: "It was a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture and dainty curtains."
- Also used in Goldfinger. Bond is briefed on the intricacies of the global gold market by one Colonel Smithers, who is described thusly:
- Subverted in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with "The Monster Book of Monsters", the title of which seems superfluous until you realize that the book, itself, is a monster. Though it could also have just been a Doorstopper.
- And don't get them started on The Invisible Book of Invisibility...which is invisible.
- Discworld has numerous examples, Terry Pratchett seems to love this trope.
- It's very common in Ankh-Morpork, where a previous Patrician of Ankh-Morpork banned all similes that cannot be proven true, a law Lord Vetinari still enforces—even a relatively benevolent dictator must have his fun. When "She had a face that launched a thousand ships" without historical evidence lands you in the crocodile pit, writing "She had a face that looked like a very beautiful face" is safer.
- In Soul Music, just after Imp y Celyn meets his bandmates, Lias tells him that "rock" is speciesist slang for "troll" in Ankh-Morpork. "Free advice what I am giving you gratis for nothing." Then again, he's a troll in the relatively warm Ankh-Morpork—not good for the brains of a silicaceous species.
- Neither is Scrape, a particularly wretched troll drug, which (combined with boyish shyness) might account for this flash of insight from the drug-addled Brick (in Thud!):
- Unseen Academicals: "They're pies, sir. Made of... pie."
- Also, "The ball shall be called the ball", Glenda's favorite football rule, which the characters take advantage of later in the book.
- From Night Watch:
But Rust was always a man to interrupt an answer with a demand for the answer he was in fact interrupting.
- A convoluted example appears in Hogfather, when Ridcully asks the Senior Wrangler why they always hang up mistletoe at UU's all-male Hogswatchnight dinner. The Wrangler's improvised answer, as Ridcully points out, is essentially that the mistletoe is an important symbol ... of mistletoe.
- There's been a monster or two in the Discworld books with eyes the size of very large eyes.
- In Making Money, Moist describes the Pink Pussycat Club as "an ogling establishment. For oglers."
- The beginning of Guards! Guards! has "thieves thieved, assassins assassinated, and hussies hustled."
- At the end of Snuff, when Sam and Young Sam are eating winkles, the Lemony Narrator notes that it's very important to have plenty of salt and vinegar, so the winkles taste of salt and vinegar. Because otherwise, they taste of winkles.
- The novel The Phoenix Guards has a particularly egregious example in Bengloarafurd Ford, which due to a long history of changing hands in the endless Easterner/Dragaeran border skirmishes has a name that translates from several different dialects as "Ford ford ford ford". Finally a bridge was built, which was named Bengloarafurd Bridge.
- The Dufflepuds in The Chronicles of Narnia do this a lot.
Chief Duffer: You don't see us. And why not? Because we're invisible.
- The first line of The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror by Christopher Moore begins: "Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing..."
- Principia Discordia, in a section describing the organization of the Erisian church, notes that "A POEE Cabal is exactly what you think it is."
- Dave Barry Slept Here:
- "The Decline of Spain" is explained in a single sentence: "On October 8, 1565, Spain declined."
- Millard Fillmore's name "has become synonymous, in American history, with the term 'Millard Fillmore.'"
- According to another chapter, though Walter Mondale's campaign for President foundered, his running mate Geraldine A. Ferraro would become a footnote to history. This passage comes with a footnote: "Geraldine A. Ferraro."
- Dave Barry In Cyberspace: "OK, here it is, page 367: A "BIOS ROM AUTOCACHE FORMAT ERROR" message indicates that there is an error in the BIOS ROM autocache format. That clears THAT up!"
- The MacGuffin in Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse is only referred to as the MacGuffin (until the very end), and it is only ever described as this.
- P.J. O'Rourke describes the events of the 1991 post-Soviet revolution in Georgia, concluding "If none of this makes sense it's because — believe me, I was there — none of this makes sense."
- Another one from O'Rourke, writing in Car and Driver magazine about Hawaiian cuisine: "Poi is a taro paste that tastes like paste made from taro."
- Many things in The Lord of the Rings have names in Elvish. Sometimes, translations were provided. They were often arranged so as to sound like part of the name; if you translate all the Elvish, you discover characters called Greenleaf Greenleaf (Legolas) and Shipwright the Shipwright (Círdan), as well as a place called the plain of Battle Plain (Dagorlad).
- Many of the Rohirrim have names like this, but in Anglo-Saxon. Théoden just means "king", for instance. So when other characters call him "Théoden King", they're calling him "King King".
- In The Silmarillion, there is a region in Doriath called, well, Region. Subverted in that Region is Sindarin for "land of hollies", not for "region".
- Actual names of zaddiks in Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim often consist of a word in Hebrew and its equivalent in Yiddish (ex. Zwi-Hirsch)
- From The Fisherman and his Soul by Oscar Wilde: "They tempt me with temptations".
- By Gertrude Stein: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose...
- Ernest Hemingway's reply: "A bitch is a bitch is a bitch is a bitch." Roddy Woomble adds, "Gertrude Stein says, 'That's enough.'" (from the song "Roseability", by Idlewild)
- "Let things have been as they have been, nonetheless they've been somehow; so far it has never been that things would be nohow." - that's only one of the many golden thoughts by Josef vejk, the main character of Jaroslav Haek's opus magnum The Good Soldier vejk.
- The Bible: God identifies himself to Moses as such: "I am what I am" (or "I am that I am"; the passage has led to many translation and interpretation issues).
- Gerald Durrell's Three Singles To Adventure, one of his many autobiographical volumes, had this exchange during the purchase of a crab-eating raccoon in British Guyana:
Ivan: Sir, this boy says he has a crab-dog.
Durrell: What's a crab-dog?
Ivan: It's a sort of animal like a dog that eats crabs.
Bob: That's what I like about Ivan, he's so lucid.
- This trope was a standard literary device in the Roman literary repertoire. The best example is from The Aeneid, where Vergil writes sic ore locuta est - thus she spoke with her mouth.
- The title of Al Franken's book, "Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)"
- In the novel Flora Segunda, the main character at one point describes "the monstrousness of [another character's] face in all its monstrousness".
- In the sixth book of the Captain Underpants series, it is discovered that "organic orange-flavored oranges" are effective weapons against robotic booger monsters, since the booger monsters are apparently held together with cold viruses which are destroyed by Vitamin C.
- The ending formula of German Fairy Tales goes: "If they haven't died, they're still alive today."
- The page quote is Willy Wonka describing his lickable wallpaper in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Granted, this isn't quite the same as other examples; he's saying that licking the image of a snozzberry — whatever that might be — on his wallpaper results in the taste of a real snozzberry. Still amusing, though.
- Dracula has quite the morbid Crowning Moment of Funny when Van Helsing opens Lucy's coffin, revealing it empty, to try to prove to Dr. Seward that she's now a vampire.
Dr. Seward: I am satisfied that Lucy's body is not in that coffin, but that only proves one thing.Van Helsing: And what is that, friend John?Dr. Seward: That it is not there.Van Helsing: That is good logic, so far as it goes.
- Kim Stanley Robinson describing a Space Elevator in Green Mars: "Just to the south of them, the new Socket was like a titanic concrete bunker, the new elevator cable rising out of it like an elevator cable ..."
- There's a book about The Peter Principle in which one man tells this story:
"When I was a kid, I thought the Earth was flat. Then I learned in grade school, it was round. In high school I learned, it was a sphere. On college I learned, that it actually was a sphere flattened at the poles. On the university, I learned that it was a geoid. I looked up the word and found it meant 'Earth-shaped'."
- A character in Take a Thief is referred to as having a "face-shaped face." This time, the lack of information itself conveys useful information: the character has no particular identifying traits and is easily lost in crowds.
- In William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, the protagonist is asked "So how was Tokyo?" and responds "It's more like it is now than it ever was."
- In The Lorax, the Once-ler describes knitting his first Thneed "with great skillful skill and with great speedy speed."
- A Georgian Poet wrote in his poem something like "And the Mother of god was coming... like the mother of god". As he later said in an interview, he couldn't find any suitable comparison for her.
- Confessions of a Mask:
Friend: Proust was a sodomite...Narrator: What's a sodomite?...Friend: A sodomite's a sodomite.
- The Way of Kings (first book of The Stormlight Archive): Quoth Syl: "They'll be fine. You worry like a worrier."
- In Count Zero, Bobby's condo in Barrytown has carpet-colored carpet and curtain-colored curtains.
- Grey Murphy from the Xanth novels is The Nondescript, so much so that his driver's license lists his hair as "hair-colored".
- How Not To Write A Novel offers the following advice to writers unsure whether they know a word: "Ask yourself: 'do I know this word?' If the answer is no, then you do not know it."
- In Tina Fey's book Bossypants, she describes a cruise on a ship that had a fire and says the following about the next day:
The guys are back playing the steel drums by the pool bar, but now the music seems creepy, like when children sing in a horror movie or when guys play steel drums on a cruise ship that almost sank.
- From John Marsden's The Great Gattenby: "It's big for its size". It referred to a building.
- Book 4 of War of the Spider Queen has:
She pressed her lips against his, kissing him.
- Murderous Maths: In the "gangster" section in Numbers: the Key to the Universe, Chainsaw Charlie opens his chainsaw-shaped suitcase and takes out a chainsaw-shaped chainsaw.
- Children's book Alright Vegemite contains the following limerick:
There was a young man from PerthWho was born on the day of his birthHe was married they sayOn his wife's wedding dayAnd died on his last day on Earth
- According to an old Dave Barry column, the Jurassic period "gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly Jurassic period."
- At one point in The Left Hand of God, Thomas Cale tells someone "Remember: revenge is the best revenge."
- In The Phantom Tollbooth, the package Milo gets containing the tollbooth is described in part by saying:
...for its size it was larger than almost any other big package of smaller dimension that he'd ever seen.
- Micromegas: "Nature is like nature. Why look for comparisons?"
- Lewis Carroll: "Begin at the beginning, the King said, very gravely, and go on till you come to the end: then stop." Since Lewis Carroll is Lewis Carroll, you can also find inversions in his work. Remember "The Aged Aged Man"?
- 3rd Rock from the Sun: "Dick disappoints me. I find him... disappointing."
- All Aussie Adventures' Russell Coight does this a lot:
"Australia. A land as ancient as it is old."
"The symbol of this land, the majestic wedge-tailed eagle, named for its wedge-shaped tail and the fact that it's an eagle."
- On All That, Ed the Good Burger Guy thought that a girl was "as pretty as...as a girl who's pretty."
- Seattle sketch comedy show Almost Live! had a skit where a man was sent to "Simile School" because he kept falling victim to this trope. "It's as great as... something that's really great!" "It's as slippery as... something that's really slippery!"
- Arrested Development has GOB Bluth (pronounced "Jobe"). His first name actually stands for "George Oscar Bluth", and he was named directly after his father.
- In "Shock and Aww", Maeby's failed retaliation to Steve for not allowing Annyong into their high school's Diversity Dance (the real reason was because he didn't attend the school):
Oh, so you're not letting him in because he doesn't share your perfectly shaped nose, your round eye-shaped eyes, your strong square jaw...
- In "Shock and Aww", Maeby's failed retaliation to Steve for not allowing Annyong into their high school's Diversity Dance (the real reason was because he didn't attend the school):
- On Arrow:
Felicity: What's the League of Assassins? And don't say "A league made of assassins."
- From A Bit of Fry and Laurie (that show with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie):
"We may be stupid, but we're not clever!"
Hugh Laurie, whose real name was Hugh Laurie, was better known by his stage name, Hugh Laurie.
- While eulogizing Hugh, Stephen comes out with:
- Blackadder: "Disease and deprivation stalk our land like... two great stalking things."
- And, of course, Mrs. Miggins bakes a pie in the shape of an enormous pie.
- We can't also forget the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem that err jump!
- Two things must ye know about the Wise Woman!
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
Raymond Holt: Are we going to add a velvet-voiced drunkard to our caroling group or are we going to lose miserably like a bunch of miserable losers?
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Willow: Well, last night was the night before the full moon, traditionally known as... 'the night before the full moon.'
- Harmony is worried that Buffy is coming for her, and cries to Spike, "She'll kill me to death!"
- One episode is actually called "Killed by Death".
- The first episode had this exchange:
Buffy: Dead?
Cordelia: Totally dead. Way dead.
Xander: Not just a little dead, then?
Cordelia: Don't you have an elsewhere to be?
- The third episode has Buffy, all loopy from a spell, telling Xander "...you're my friend. You're my Xander-shaped friend!"
- The fifth episode has Buffy and Xander discussing her failed attempt to date her broody classmate Owen:
Xander: You're acting a little overly, aren't you? I mean, you could have any guy in school.
Buffy: He's not just any guy. He's more... Oweny.
Xander: Sure, he's got a certain Owenosity, but that's not hard to find.
- "Phases" has a bunch of them.
[And also]
Xander: You're Buffy. Eradicator of Evil. Defender of... things that need defending.
[Willow reporting that Oz is a werewolf]
He said he was going through all these changes. Then he went through all these... changes.
- In the pilot, Buffy tells Giles that she's taken an early retirement, and suggests that if he's so keen on slaying, why doesn't he go slay vampires instead? Giles protests that he's a Watcher and his duty is to... "Watch?" Buffy pipes up.
- After being inducted into the Scooby Gang ("The Harvest"), Xander and Willow are left discussing their new knowledge while the rest of the school parades around innocently. "It's like we got this big secret!"
Willow: [beat] We do. That's what a secret is, when you know something other guys don't.
- Jenny Calender had a similar reaction to Giles demanding to know details of their "secret" date. ("Lie to Me") Unluckily for him, it was a monster truck rally.
- To Willow's question about when the Reconstruction began, Buffy tries to focus and replies, " Um, Reconstruction...uh, Reconstruction began after the...construction, which was shoddy so they had to reconstruct." ("Angel")
- In the same episode, Giles sits at Joyce's sickbed and chats about Buffy. Giles confesses that Buffy is having trouble in history class because she "lives very much in the now. And, um... history, of course, is very much about the, uh... the then."
- In "School Hard", Buffy and Willow scurry around trying to keep Joyce and Snyder from exchanging words. Buffy, seeing Snyder coming, babbles that Joyce hasn't seen the boiler room yet.
Buffy: "The boiler room is really interesting! What with the boiler being in the room and all."
- Oz complimenting Cordy's Halloween costume, which consists of a black unitard with cat ears and drawn-on whiskers. "You're like a big cat."
- Ms. Calender apologizing to Giles for spying on him for over a year. ("Passion")
Jenny: I know you feel betrayed.
Giles: Yes, well, that's one of the unpleasant side effects of betrayal.
- In "Anne", Cordelia seems to have a feeble grasp on what being "The Bait" entails.
Cordelia: What's the plan?
Xander: The vampire attacks you.
Cordelia: And then what?
Xander: The vampire kills you. We watch. We rejoice.
- In "Earshot", one of the headlines in the school newspaper reads, "APATHY ON THE RISE NO-ONE CARES."
- Brazilian comedy group Casseta & Planeta loves this trope. Examples from their first movie: "the Cup was conquered not only in definitive, but also forever", "women of the feminine sex" and "a just and filled with justice country".
- Another Brazilian group, "Melhores do Mundo", has "He auto-self-suicided himself!"
- During the coverage of the Boston bombing, one CNN anchor, Susan Candiotti, made the following astute observation on-air:
Susan Candiotti: It's as though a bomb had dropped somewhere.
- Sean Hannity once infamously claimed that America is "the single greatest best country that God has ever given man on the face of the Earth". This was given a complex Venn diagram on The Colbert Report to explain how it was neither Department of Redundancy Department nor this trope.
- The "Comedians of Comedy" tour.
- From Community:
Abed: "9/11 was pretty much the 9/11 of the falafel industry."
- In a 2005 segment on avian flu, The Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry described the disease thusly: "A fatal killer that, when lethal, can be deadly."
- One episode of Deadwood had this piece of dialogue as Merrick the newspaperman tries to write his newspaper:
Merrick: "The vaccine will be distributed gratis."
Al: Free gratis.
Merrick: Free gratis is a redundancy.
EB: Does that mean "repeats itself"?
Al: Then leave gratis out.
Merrick: What luck for me Al, that you have such a keen editorial sense. "Free. Distributed Free. Period."
- Doctor Who:
- "Doctor Who and the Silurians":
Third Doctor: He's just frightened, that's all.
Liz Shaw: So was I. What's made him like this?
Third Doctor: Some kind of fear.
- "The Deadly Assassin". All assassins are deadly, unless they are not good at their jobs (originally, it was titled "The Dangerous Assassin", which is not so much a tautology as a massive understatement). This was parodied with Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death. According to the DVD production notes, Robert Holmes, the story's author, didn't believe the title to be tautological as there were many incompetent assassins. The assassin in question actually manages to kill his target, never a sure bet when the person you're trying to kill may have 13 lives.
- A character assassin would actually be pretty bad at their job if they were deadly.
- From the Mockumentary Oh Mummy. Sutekh the Destroyer shows his varied interests, including entomology.
"Abase yourself! Before me you are nothing but an ant, you... ant."
- "Rose":
The Doctor: So it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.
Rose: What does it look like?
The Doctor: Like a transmitter! note
- "The End of the World": Crossing over with Department of Redundancy Department:
Rose: They're just so alien. The aliens are so... alien. You look at them... and they're alien.
- "The Girl in the Fireplace": "You're Mr. Thick Thick Thickety Thick-Face from Thicktown, Thickania. And so's your dad!"
- "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky":
The Doctor: The ATMOS System could make things worse.
Rattigan: Yeah, well, you see, that's a tautology, 'cause ATMOS stands for Atmospheric Omission System, so you're saying "Atmospheric Omission System System". Do you see, Mister "Conditional Clause"?
- In "The Unicorn and the Wasp", when Donna is asked what she meant by a giant wasp, she answered, "I mean a wasp, that's giant!" She then expands on that thought: "When I say giant, I don't mean big, I mean flipping enormous!"
- "Midnight": "That's the headphones for Channels 1 to 36; modem link for 3D vidgames; complimentary earplugs; complimentary slippers; complimentary juice pack; and complimentary peanuts. I must warn you some products may contain nuts."
- "The Time of Angels": Amy asks River what the Doctor is like in the future, and River says that "the Doctor... is the Doctor". Amy is unimpressed.
- "Doctor Who and the Silurians":
- A variant from The Dukes of Hazzard:
Bo: We'd better get there quick. Couldn't have been more than a gallon of gas in that can.
Luke: Really? In a one-gallon can?
Bo: Yeah, I can't believe I said that, either . . .
- One of the segments on the sketch comedy show The Edge was entitled "What the really bad author is doing RIGHT THIS MINUTE," wherein we would watch a writer compose such similes as "The rat ate the cheese like a rodent devouring fermented cow's milk."
- Engine Sentai Go-onger: "Why are pathetic people so pathetic?"
- From Firefly:
Mal: Well, looks can be deceiving.
Jayne: Not as deceiving as a low down... dirty... deceiver.
- Jayne tends to do that a lot.
Jayne: She'll turn you in faster than you can say... "Don't turn me in, lady."
- Jayne tends to do that a lot.
- From an episode of Frasier, after Frasier's father has suggested the city is like a woman:
Frasier: "A city is not like a woman—it's like a city!"
- In one episode of Friends:
Rachel: Y'know what, you are mean boys who are just being mean!
- Chandler and Joey insist that Rachel and Monica follow through with the terms of a rashly made bet and swap apartments with them:
Joey: You bet on a bet, and if you lose, you lose the bet!
- In the same episode, Joey tells them why they can't get out of the bet's terms:
- Game of Thrones with its less than subtle dialogue makes use of this trope from time to time.
Cersei Lannister: Power is power.
- Northern Irish sit-com Give My Head Peace features two characters forming a loyalist pressure group called the "Protestant Loyalist Organisation for Protestants" after realising that the acronym of their first choice was already in use by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.
- Also a Fun with Acronyms, as it turns their group into PLOP.
- From a series 19 episode of Have I Got News for You
Angus Deayton: Well, elephants would be elephant-sized.
Paul Merton: Would a baby elephant be elephant sized?
Angus Deayton: Well, that would be the size of a baby elephant.
- Angus also mocked a national newspaper for describing a squirrel as being "the size of a small cat", by suggesting that it would in fact be the size of a squirrel.
- Moss in The IT Crowd bursts out with one now and then.
Moss: You stole it?
Roy: Well... yes.
Moss: But that's STEALING!
- Kamen Rider Decade turns his fellow Rider, Kamen Rider Blade, into a BFS called the Blade Blade. There is a slight difference in pronunciation between the two words when they're written in katakana, though - the name is written as ブレイドブレード (Bureido Burēdo).
- In the LazyTown episode "Rottenbeard", Robbie Rotten describes a treasure chest as "All locked up with locks".
- Molly Connell, in the Leverage episode "The Carnival Job", she doesn't really have anyone to talk to these days. Except "Daria... our eastern-European housekeeper. Talking to her is like... talking to an eastern-European housekeeper."
- From Look Around You comes the following on the brain: "Think of it as a kind of modified heart, only with a mind, or brain."
- In a flashback on the first season of Lost, Shannon is asked by Sayid to watch his bag and instead decides to report it as unattended. Leading to this:
Shannon: Some Arab guy left his bag downstairs.
Security Guard: Can you describe him?
Shannon: Um... Arab?
- Malcolm in the Middle: When Malcolm made himself dumb: "I can't believe the awesomeness of how awesome this is!"
- On one episode of The Man Show, Adam and Jimmy ask several guys what they nicknamed their penises. Most names are rather creative, but one guy in the line-up gives his penis's name as "Penis".
- Radar on M*A*S*H does this all the time, a running gag the actor invented for himself.
Radar: I'm looking for Mrs. Henry Blake. She's pregnant... with a baby and everything.
- The Mentalist - in the first episode the mentalist Patrick Jane says of an over-enthusiastic crime scene person at the scene of the crime "He irks me. He's irksome."
- Merlin has made at least one notable use of this trope.
Merlin: It's very...swordy.
- Monk occasionally says these sorts of things: "She was your sex mistress."
- "Mr. Monk and the Psychic":
Monk: It's a small pebble — about the size of a... small pebble.
- "Mr. Monk Is At Your Service":
Monk: What are you talking about? I'm not going in there alone. That would be like... me, going in some place alone.
- In the episode where Adrian Monk discovers the joys of the internet:
Monk: It made me "L-O-L" out loud.
- "Mr. Monk and the Genius":
Monk: To me, quitting would be like giving up.
- "Mr. Monk and the Psychic":
- A sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus warning of the threat of penguins:
"Now, if we increase the size of the penguin so that it is the same size as the man, we see that the penguin's brain... is still smaller. But, and this is my point, it is LARGER than it WAS!"
- In another sketch, nearly every word out of one character's mouth is an exploration of this trope: a dinosaur expert, Miss Anne Elk, being interviewed for television, repeatedly claims ownership of a theory in various tautological ways ("Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine... is mine") and finally allows the interviewer to actually drag the Shaped Like Itself theory from her ("All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle and then thin again at the far end. That is the theory that I have and which is mine and what it is, too.") Eventually the interviewer has to shoot her to keep her from going over the entire trope yet again with a second theory.
- A Vox Pops from another episode had the following gem:
Vicar: I agree. If there were fewer robbers, there wouldn't be so many of them numerically speaking.
- In a Mr. Show sketch, after being forced to go see Coupon: The Movie, two patrons played by Mary Lynn Rajskub and Jack Black have this to say about it:
JB: We saw "Coupon!"
MLR: The woman totally used a coupon to buy some socks!
JB: Yeah, and it was a movie!
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 featured a parody of Narmy love songs titled "When Loving Lovers Love."
- The Aquabats actually do have an excellent song, that is excellent, called "Lovers of Loving Love".
- "Manos" The Hands of Fate
- The Giant Behemoth. The British title was "Behemoth, the Sea-Monster", but someone thought the American release needed further clarification.
- In one host segment, Joel and the Bots created a team of parody superheroes. At one point, they created, "Man-Man! The Man with the proportionate strength of...a Man!"
- There's also "Nummy Muffin Cocool Butter" a song about a "friendly little friend."
- MythBusters:
- After Jamie has driven Adam blindfolded to a secret location:
Adam: Where are we?
Jamie: We're right here.
- The narrator in "Thermite vs. Ice" says, when Adam expresses some doubt, "Adam thinks this myth is, well, a myth."
- After Jamie has driven Adam blindfolded to a secret location:
- During its first season, NCIS was actually titled "Navy NCIS" until the producers realized that was redundant. Oops. (NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service, so there's no need to tack "Navy" in front of it.)
- The subtitle for the first season was, egregiously, "Naval Criminal Investigative Service."
- Not so egregiously, at the time CSI was very popular and they wanted to distinguish themselves apart so viewers wouldn't mistake them for either the show itself or a spin-off.
- A running gag throughout the show is the number of people they have to explain this to, because they've never heard of it, so the subtitle could be allowed. "Navy"... no.
Airport officer: NCIS? Is that like CSI?
Dinozzo: Only if you're dyslexic.
- Which itself became redundant after the show's popularity took off, which made the NCIS initialism so well known, it's now one of the best known government agencies, matching the FBI and CIA in identifiability.
- The subtitle for the first season was, egregiously, "Naval Criminal Investigative Service."
- Parks and Recreation:
Andy: In order to think like one of these guys, you have to think like them.
- This line from Andy Dwyer:
"We will begin the show by starting it."
- Perd Hapley has these lines:
"There is such a thing as journalistic integrity. And it is something I have as a journalist with integrity."
"For a female perspective on this scandal, we turn to a woman."
"Up next is my introduction to the next segment, and my introduction to the next segment is as follows: here's the next segment."
- A few examples from Pushing Daisies:
- The town of Coeur d'Coeurs. It should be noted this is French for "Heart of Hearts". Still redundant, but also not an Ass Pull on the part of the creators.
- Heroine Charlotte "Chuck" Charles and her deceased father Charles Charles.
- Boutique Travel Travel Boutique.
- The Darling Mermaid Darlings.
- Uber-Life Life Insurance and the Wish-A-Wish Foundation.
- Red Dwarf: Holly's description of the Stasis Leak from the eponymous episode:
Holly: A stasis leak is a leak, right, in stasis. Hence the name 'a stasis leak'.
- On Saturday Night Live, Chris Farley's "motivational" speaker character Matt Foley had the Catch-Phrase "You'll have plenty of time for [fill in the blank] when you're LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!" In his first appearance, the character played by guest host Christina Applegate became Genre Savvy.
Matt: Young lady, what do you want to do with your life?
Stacy: [sarcastic] I want to live in a van down by the river.
Matt: Well, you'll have plenty of time to live in a van down by the river when you're... [dramatic pause] ...LIVING IN A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER!
- In the ninth season premiere of Scrubs Dr. Cox mentions that he can't stand when med students make him reiterate things "especially when I have already iterated them".
- Seinfeld
- In "The Keys", Jerry and George are in Elaine's apartment, looking for Jerry's spare keys. George asks what they look like, to which Jerry responds: "Keys George, they look like keys. They look exactly like keys. (Mockingly) What do they look like."
- In another episode we have Elaine's Big Salad, which is "like a salad... only bigger."
- In an episode of 'Shaun Micallefs Mad As Hell, Bovina Jhizquax reports on an explosion in Melbourne's western suburbs, and takes issue with Ian Dream's description of the event:
Ian: I heard this almighty explosion. It sounded like a bomb going off.
Bovina: A bomb had gone off.
Ian: Yeah I know, I heard it.
Bovina: So it sounded exactly like what it was?
Ian: Well yeah, but I didn't know what had happened.
Bovina: Why wouldn't you have thought a bomb had gone off?
Ian: Well, it sounded like a bomb had gone off, but I didn't know what actually happened.
Bovina: Why couldn't it have been a bomb going off?
Ian: It only sounded like a bomb going off. It could have been anything.
Bovina: What else could it have been, other than a bomb going off, that sounds more like a bomb going off than a bomb going off?
Ian: I don't know, I've never heard a bomb go off.
Bovina: Yes you have, about an hour ago.
Ian: Yeah, yeah, but before that.
Bovina: If you'd never heard a bomb go off, how did you know it sounded like a bomb going off? [beat as Ian struggles to answer.] You couldn't have, could you?
Ian: ...No.
Bovina: You're a liar, Mr. Dream. [Ian gets taken away by a police officer.] Back to you, Shaun.
- Smallville
Clark: Lois is so...
Chloe: Lois?
Clark: Yeah.
- Stargate SG-1 looks on the surface to be an example, because "SG" does stand for "Stargate". However, SG-1 is the name of the Four Man Band that goes through the stargate itself (as distinct from the other teams, SG-2 through SG-25), so this is, while slightly confusing, at least a partial aversion.
- In Atlantis, there's a brief flash of a computer screen in the episode "McKay and Mrs. Miller" when we see the power levels of the ZPM Module. ZPM stands for Zero Point Module.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Defiant", Commander Sisko offers Gul Dukat his assistance in tracking down and neutralizing the USS Defiant, which has been hijacked by a terrorist and brought into Cardassian territory.
Sisko: I helped design it. I know its vulnerabilities, and its weaknesses.
- Although like the Intelligent/Smart comparison above, a vulnerability can be different than a weakness. For example, the battleship Yamato was one of the most heavily armored warships ever built. Had she ever engaged in a one-on-one fight with an American battleship, her heavy armor would have allowed her to withstand a substantial amount of fire from the 16" guns on the largest American battleships (the Iowa-class). She did possess a weakness however: Her larger 18" battery relied on manually acquiring a target, aiming, and range-finding, whereas her American counterparts possessed sophisticated radar-controlled target acquisition, range-finding and fire direction, providing them with much greater accuracy. This made Yamato no more vulnerable to enemy shell fire, but it was a glaring weakness in that her opponent would be able obtain a firing solution more quickly and could better evade return-fire from Yamato's more powerful battery (at the Battle of Surigao Strait the American battle line had the Japanese battleships targeted before they even knew they were there).
- Rules of Acquisition #16: "A deal is a deal." One-upped by RoA #17: "A contract is a contract is a contract... but only between Ferengi." And since a contract is simply a deal that is documented...
- Similarly, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, at one point, Picard refers to the Klingon Imperial Empire. As opposed to those non-imperial empires out there.
- Worse: there are empires in Star Trek that, in certain senses, are non-imperial. At the time, the Klingon Empire was one of them.
- Star Trek: Voyager. An alien inventor describes his graviton catapult as "a device that can catapult a vessel across space, in the time it takes to say 'catapult a vessel across space'."
- Supernatural, "Repo Man":
Sam: Demon summoning! What for?
Lucifer: To summon a demon, jackass!
- That '70s Show... Oh, that Kelso:
"Angie's so pretty. Looking at her is like looking at... something else pretty"
"25 years! Man, if you were dogs, that would be... 25 dog years"
- In episode 2 of The Tudors Henry has received a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince from an Italian noble and is discussing it with Thomas More, and comes out with the rather... insightful comment "It is not like your book Utopia. It is less... utopian."
- Used in the second ever episode of The Twilight Zone, "One for the Angels".
Lou Bookman: "Number one, I find you a very devious sort. Number two, I think that you're dishonest. Number three, why don't you say what you mean?"
- The title of the series Unsolved Mysteries — well, if they were solved, they wouldn't be mysteries. Although perhaps the adjective is to distinguish it from the more common detective stories, which are labeled "mysteries" even though they end up solved.
- The West Wing:
Abbey Bartlet: ...and I think that making a big thing out of it is what makes it a big thing!
Oliver Babish: Really?
Leo: You have a very unusual conversational style, you know that?
- Also Leo when interviewing Ainsley:
Ainsley: It's a nervous... condition.
Leo: I used to have one of those.
Ainsley: How did yours manifest itself?
Leo: I drank a lot of scotch.
Ainsley: I get sick when I drink too much.
Leo: I get drunk when I drink too much.
- One episode of Wheel of Fortune had a puzzle where the category was Place... and the answer was SECRET HIDING PLACE.
- Whose Line Is It Anyway? has its fair share of this for laughs, an example in one of the most famous sketches, The Cat (Improbable Mission: The laundry), has this little conversation:
Ryan: What was it?
Colin: A burnoose!
Ryan: Any idea what it looks like?
Colin: It looks like... a burnoose!
- Xena: Warrior Princess, "A Comedy of Eros":
Xena: No, Gabrielle, this is crazy. You can't be in love with Joxer. Wh- he's Joxer!
- The X-Files, paraphrasing Shakespeare (and speaking about senators), but to a different effect:
Cancer Man: They're all honorable, these honorable men.
- Yes, Minister:
Joan Littler: What does "inert" mean?
Sir Humphrey Appleby: Eh, it means it's not... ert.
Bernard Woolley: Wouldn't 'urt a fly.
- Young Blades: In the first episode, as the Musketeers are in the middle of dungeon cleaning duty:
D'Artagnan: You know what I hate about hard work?
Siroc: It's hard?
D'Artagnan: Exactly.
- In The Young Ones episode "Summer Holiday" Neil asks Mike:
"Don't you think robbing a bank is, well, tantamount to stealing, really?"
- Similar to the "Kills Bugs Dead", Brad Paisley's "Letter to Me" has a line saying that if his younger self fails algebra "Mom and Dad will kill you dead."
- Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' song "O'Mally's Bar"
Well Jerry Bellows, he hugged his stool
Closed his eyes and shrugged and laughed
And with an ashtray as big as a fucking big brick
I split his head in half
- They Might Be Giants' song "Whistling in the Dark":
There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you
Be what you're like
Be like yourself
- Another example from their song, "Yeah, The Deranged Millionaire": "And people from miles around were miles away."
- Sublime's "Foolish Fool".
- Cheech & Chong's "Basketball Jones". "That basketball was like a basketball to me!"
- Similarly, "Albuquerque" by "Weird Al" Yankovic: "That snorkel's been just like a snorkel to me!"
- The song "King of Spain" by Moxy Früvous has the line "a palatial palace, that was my home".
- The song "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)" has a tautology in its title (as well as chorus), though it seems to be paraphrasing Shakespeare (see above).
- "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton talks about "building inventions in my space lab in space". (The title line, "It's gonna be the future soon", may also be an example.)
- Another one by Coulton is "That Spells DNA," with it's chorus "And DNA, baby, that spells DNA."
- The song "Lady Aberlin's Muumuu" makes reference to being "shaped like a lady is shaped".
- "Betty and Me" refers to a procedure being "legal in the states where it wasn't banned."
- "Friends", by Ween. "A friend's a friend who knows what being a friend is!"
- "Dirge" from "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum";
Miles Gloriosus: Light the pyre!
Pseudolus: What kind of pyre?
Miles Gloriosus: A pyre of fire!
Pseudolus: Ohh, a fire-pyre!
- This is even more tautological once you remember that "pyre" is the Greek word for fire, meaning that Pseudolus essentially said: "Ohh, a fire-fire!"
- One line from the America song "Horse With No Name" goes "The heat was hot."
- P!nk's "Family Portrait" contains the lyric "Your pain is painful". An especially unfortunate case of Narm because it occurs very early on in a serious ballad about a child whose parents are getting divorced... Since it's written from the child's point of view, it might be deliberate.
- "Epic" by Faith No More: "What is it? It's it!"
- Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs offered Paul McCartney a Certificate of Redundancy Certificate for the line "But if this ever-changing world in which we live in..." in "Live and Let Die" (it's argued to this date if the lyrics are that or "in which we're living")
- There's also the borderline-meaningless credit often found in the liner notes of 80s-era rock albums on the Geffen label — "John Kalodner: John Kalodner" (Kalodner was from Geffen's A&R, and explains the origins of this credit here)
- Weezer did this with their "fifth member" in the credits of Pinkerton: "Karl Koch: Karl Koch".
- British band The Happy Mondays credited one of their line-up as follows on Pills and Thrills and Bellyaches: "Bez:Bez". For those not familiar with their oeuvre, the main musical contribution of Bez (Mark Berry) was comically inept dancing and a bit of tambourine.
- The intro to Queensrÿche's song 'Empire':
It hit me like an, uh...ten ton...heavy thing
- "Hat Shaped Hat" by Ani Difranco. "...in walked a man in the shape of a man holding a hat-shaped hat..."
- Paramore's "We Are Broken" has: "Your arms, like towers, tower over me."
- Phil Collins expresses an idea this way in "Two Hearts":
But if you don't put faith in what you're believin', it's getting you nowhere
- Which was then reiterated by his 1999 song "Two Worlds"
- Put your faith in what you most believe in. Two worlds, one family.
- In 1966, Folk Music singer/songwriter Len Chandler recorded a song called "Keep on Keepin' On". That phrase was later also used in songs by Steve Miller Band, Michael Nesmith and Bob Dylan.
- "Killed By Death" by Motörhead.
- Arlo Guthrie begins his famous "Shaggy Dog" Story "Alice's Restaurant" by informing the audience that "this song is called 'Alice's Restaurant.' It's about Alice, and the restaurant, but 'Alice's Restaurant' is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song. And that's why I call the song 'Alice's Restaurant.'"
- Flight of the Conchords' "Rambling Through The Avenues Of Time" includes the line "her eyes were reflections of eyes".
- Spamalot has 'The song that goes like this'.
- In the U2 song "Who's Going To Ride Your Wild Horses", Bono sings about someone who "left my heart as empty as a vacant lot".
- Mika's melancholic ballad "Any Other World" contains the Narm-worthy line, "I tried to live alone, but lonely is so lonely alone."
- The debut album from Strapping Young Lad is titled "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing."
- David Bowie's "Changes" has the line "Strange fascination, fascinating me".
- In "Get With the Times", Cool Calm Pete (which is a pretty redundant name in and of itself) advises the listener to "pray for your fake phony facade."
- "All You Need Is Love"
There's nothing you can do that can't be doneNothing you can sing that can't be sung...
- Tenacious D's song "Tribute":
All of a sudden there shined a shiny demon
- An older version at least made it "shone a shiny demon", which is just as redundant, but shined was probably funnier, because it sounded more redundant.
- Spinal Tap's classic "Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight":
Tonight I'm gonna rock you (tonight I'm gonna rock you)
Tonight I'm gonna rock you (tonight I'm gonna rock you)
- Van Halen had on "Why Can't This Be Love": "Only time will tell if we stand the test of time".
- All-4-One/Christina Aguilera, "I Turn To You": "For the strength to be strong".
- In one Tom Chapin song, two girls tell the other kids not to play with Bruno because he's "a dweeb". When pressed for the definition of "dweeb", they define it as "like Bruno".
- In Rebecca Black's "song" "Friday", we get gems like "Yesterday was Thursday/Today it is Friday", and "Gotta have my bowl/Gotta have my cereal"
- In the course of Da Vinci's Notebook's Uncle Buford Mega-Mix, "Uncle Buford" asks, "You ever eat worms? They taste like... worms."
- The B-52s: There's a moon in the sky... called the moon.
- "She'll be comin' round the mountain when she comes."
- Clint Black's "Wherever You Go"..."there you are".
- Laibach: the songs "God is God" and "Life is Life (Leben Heist Leben)"
- "Flight" by Van Der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill:
He say nothing is quite what it seems
I say nothing is nothing.
- "After the Fox", written by Burt Bacharach and Hal Davis, and performed by the Hollies: Who is the Fox? I am the Fox! Who are you? I am me! Who is me? Me is a thief!
- Blake Shelton's "The More I Drink" has the observation "The more I drink, the more I drink."
- The Songs to Wear Pants To song, "Captain Obvious Theme":
sung: Captain Obvious to the rescue! Captain Obvious: he will state the obvious!"spoken: His power is that he will state the obvious!spoken, different voice: My power is that I will state the obvious!
- The song title and chorus of Hüsker Dü's "Ice Cold Ice"
- The closing line of "No Rival" by Wolves At The Gate: "Lord, You have changed me, and I am not the same"
- The song "Sugar" by System of a Down has the lyric "Every time I try to go where I really want to be it's already where I am `cause I'm already there."
- Their song Lonely Day also includes "Such a lonely day. It's the most loneliest day of my life".
- Depeche Mode would like to let you know that "People Are People".
- Lee Brice's "Parking Lot Party" has the line "And after the party's the after-party."
- Mumford and Sons' "Timshel" has "you are the mother of your baby child, the one to whom you gave life." It fits the meter of the song best, but still sounds redundant, especially with "baby child".
- Judas Priest's 1978 song "White Heat, Red Hot" managed to have four of these in a row:
White heatRed hotBurns deepThe heat's hotBurns a lot
- Aerosmith's "F.I.N.E." has two terms for a Raging Stiffie in a row: "I get an EMHOnote woody"
- In Beastie Boys' "Hold It Now, Hit It", Adam Yauch states "I come from Brooklyn 'cause that's where I'm from".
- Among the alleged messages in "Stairway To Heaven" when it's played backwards is "Here's to my sweet Satan...whose power is Satan."
- The Dr. Demento 80s favorite "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard" by Blotto:
I - I - I wanna be a lifeguard!I - I - I wanna guard your life!
- German rappers Fettes Brot's "Crazy World" has the lines "Und an der Ecke steht ein Hochhaus, so groß wie ein Hochhaus/ Innen drin wohnt ein Elfjähriger, so groß wie ein Elfjähriger/ Und auf seinem Shirt steht 'Crazy World'", which roughly means: "And on the corner there's a skyscraper, as tall as a skyscraper / inside lives an 11-year-old, as tall as an 11-year-old / and his shirt says 'Crazy World'"
- "Spill the Wine" by Eric Burdon & War: "I could feel hot flames of fire ..."
- The children's song 'Eggs' has been sung on Play School. Most of the lyrics are a straightforward description of eggs and the creatures that lay them but there is the line "they're egg-shaped, 'cause they're eggs".
- From the Commodores' "Sail On": "Good times never felt so good"
- From Hellyeah's "Human": "I defy your defiance".
- In the song "The Comedy-Music Life", Devo Spice declares, "I'm the best funny rapper 'cause I'm better than the rest."
- Keith Urban and Carrie Underwood's "The Fighter" includes the lyric "'cause your precious heart is a precious heart".
- The Magnetic Fields' "A Pretty Girl is Like..." ends with the line "a pretty girl is like a pretty girl", the takeaway being that a pretty girl is ultimately inexplicable.
- Suzi Quatro's "Skin Tight Skin".
- One Dilbert comic strip had the eponymous character mention "The TTP Project", where "TTP" stands for The TTP Project.
- Peanuts:
Lucy: You're not afraid of a little pain, are you?Linus: Of course I am. PAIN HURTS!!
- Popeye:
- One of the supporting characters in the comics was George W. Geezil, a local cobbler. George hated Wimpy, often stating that Wimpy "should be killed to death". This carries over into the live-action film.
- Popeye himself has been known to wax philosophic about "wimmen of the opposite sex."
- Hägar the Horrible once asks Lucky Eddie how it feels to be so thin. The answer is that it feels about the same as being fat... only thinner.
- Garfield
Jon: I think that cloud looks just like a cloud.Garfield: Which one?
- In one strip, Garfield and Jon and lying on their backs in a meadow looking at the sky:
Garfield: Clouds are fascinating. There's a cat cloud, there's a dog cloud...(Starts to rain.)Garfield: And I do believe that one's a rain cloud...
- In another one, just Garfield is watching the sky:
- Eroge (a Japanese abbreviation of "Erotic Game") are sometimes referred to as "Eroge games" in text.
- Cracked:
- The 5 Creepiest Things Ever Done With a Fake Medical Degree: "A healthy booty is attractive to some people, but an ass that looks like Billy Barty with his ankle clamped in someone's asshole trapped in a net of yoga pants looks like exactly what I just described."
- The 6 Most Horrifying Product Recalls in China begins, "China has a population of all the people in China, and that is a hell of a lot."
- Adam Tod Brown's "The 5 Biggest Lies Everyone Tells About the Super Bowl" cites a Nielsen poll stating that the Super Bowl is not even among the top five alcoholidays despite that "football and beer go together like football and beer."
- During The Rock 'n' Roll Express\The Midnight Express feud, Jim Cornette proclaimed Ricky Morton's father was a "drunk alcoholic".
- Ken Patera faced Bobby Heenan in a debate over his prison sentence and remarked, "I had a lot of time to think about the Bobby Heenan types of this world. Types like yourself!"
- After turning on his brother Bret Hart, Owen Hart, as is custom, cut a promo explaining the motivations for his FaceHeel Turn. Which he ended with a now-famous botched line, "And that's why I kicked your leg out from under your leg."
- Back when ECW was an independent wrestling company, they had the website ecwwrestling.com. ECW wrestling. Extreme Championship Wrestling wrestling. That's been a rather common thing with many wrestling companies with the words in their abbreviations. All WWE broadcasts end with the WWE logo and underneath it "WWE Entertainment", which comes out to "World Wrestling Entertainment Entertainment".
- When Ultimo Dragon divorced Toryumon Japan from Toryumon Mexico and made the name an exclusive trademark of the latter, Torymon Japan renamed itself Dragon Gate. For those that don't get it, Toryumon means "climbing up dragon gate".
- CM Punk looks like a punk.
- Chikara's International Invasion Of The International Invaders
- When he was still Mr. Kennedy (before he left WWE and became Mr. Anderson in TNA), Mr. Kennedy once introduced himself, perhaps referencing Austin Powers, by saying "Please allow myself to introduce myself!"
- WWE's Jack Swagger's Red Baron is "The All-American American". It has been parodied a couple of times. Most memorably when Shawn Michaels described Swagger as the "All-American American American American American". (Swagger, whether out of fondness for Michaels or amusement at the joke, has since adopted the term.)
- Austin Aries would join with the All Night Express in Ring of Honor to form The Pantheon Of Gods!
- At NXT Takeover Chicago, one of Hideo Itami's (KENTA Kobayashi) moves was called Kobayashi-style by an announcer.
- British comedian Simon Munnery, in his stand up show Hello illustrates a point with a Venn diagram, consisting of two overlapping circles, one labelled Diagrams, one labelled Overlapping Circles and the overlap labelled Venn Diagrams.
- Aziz Ansari: "Could you imagine blowing a guy (for a half hour!) for sold-out concert tickets and then finding out they're selling them at the door? That'd be like blowing a guy for a half hour for sold-out concert tickets and then finding out they're selling them at the door. There's no other way to complete that analogy 'cause that's the shittiest thing that could ever happen to you."
- One of comedian Frank Caliendo's more famous routines is his John Madden impersonation routine, which uses Madden's own predilection for this and Captain Obvious combined with an impersonation both vocal and using body language to create comedy.
"You see, if the quarterback, if he catches the ball...in the other team's end zone, then that's gonna be a...that's gonna be a touchdown."
- David O'Doherty (and possibly other comedians): 'My mum has taken to text messaging like a duck to text messaging' (Also a Bait-and-Switch).
- Eddie Izzard in "Dressed to Kill" comments, "I'm very positive on the French. My family way back was French. I go with it but they are kind of fucking French at times."
- Robin Williams in "Live At The Met": In the dictionary under 'redundancy' it says 'see redundancy'.
- In ventriloquist Jeff Dunham's Halloween-themed concert film "Minding the Monsters", his Grumpy Old Man puppet Walter tells him that one thing that scares him now is when his wife asks him, "Does this thong make my ass look fat?", and he made the mistake of answering her.
"I said, 'No, the thong doesn't make your ass look fat, your fat ass makes your fat ass look fat! The thong is the victim.'"
- Also, another of his puppets, Achmed the Dead Terrorist, has been known to take his Catch-Phrase "I keel you!" and expand it: "I keel you 'til you're dead! And that's worse."
- Adventures in Odyssey:
Whit: I'm amazed that two grown men can't sit down and discuss their problems like... like two grown men!
- Eugene temporarily moves in with Bernard while his dorm room is being fumigated, and its not long before they're at each other's throats.
- Incompetent police officer David Harley puts on a lengthy, detailed presentation about how the leading cause of juvenile delinquency... is young people.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
- Zaphod lands in a cave made out of marble, and tries to compare it to the slipperiest thing Ford can think of. Unfortunately, the slipperiest thing Ford can think of is the marble, leading to the statement "This marble is as slippery as this marble."
- Slartibartfast's workshop contains a chair that looks like it was made out of the ribcage of a Stegosaurus. "It was made out of the ribcage of a Stegosaurus," Slartibartfast explains.
- There's also apparently a blue policeman that's "shaped like a policeman!"
- "The Cricket Song" from Episode 15: "Our lovely world's so lovely. . ."
- A guest on an NPR program once described "MRE meals". Meals-Ready-to-Eat meals.
- The Goon Show: The episode "The Nadger Plague" features this opening narration: "It was in the year 1656 that the dreaded nadger plague swept across Europe like the Dreaded Nadger Plague of 1656."
- An old music program at Czechoslovak Radio started with the following announcement (a parody of the time signals): "It is exactly the time that it is right now. If your watch reads more or less, it is not our fault, because we always start on time."
- A sketch on BBC show Recorded For Training Purposes has a writer calling a producer about a sketch he wrote, which is about a writer calling a producer about a sketch he wrote. The punchline is the writer realising that the sketch needs a punchline.
- Warhammer 40,000's fluff for the orks states that orks who have themselves wired into Killa Kans find that the biggest downside to being permanently sealed inside a giant metal can is being permanently sealed inside a giant metal can.
- In Exalted, the Ebon Dragon's previous form was The Dragon's Shadow, which was the shadow of himself. His current form is the Dragon he was once merely the Shadow of. Should he ever be killed, he will rise again as a new Neverborn, The Dragon That Was.
- The rules of Fluxx can be summed up thus: 1. The person who goes first is the person who goes first. 2. The person who goes second is the person who goes second. 3. The winner is the first person to win. All other rules will be in full view at all times that they are in play.
- Magic: The Gathering:
Doug: Phyrexians, generally speaking, look like Phyrexians.
- The game has some pretty hefty and thorough wording in its comprehensive rules, one of which amounts to: "the winner of the game is the sole remaining player that hasn't lost the game." Despite sounding pretty ridiculous, it actually serves to clarify that under normal tournament rules, there can't be more than one winning player or team. If something would knock out all players at the exact same time, then nobody "wins".
- It also serves as the default way for a winner to be declared, as there are card effects that can outright declare a player the winner, as well as card effects that can declare that a player loses.
- There's also the card Platinum Angel: "You can't lose the game and your opponents can't win the game." It's worded that way because if it just said "you can't lose" then your opponent could still win via a card effect that declares them the winner, and if it just said your opponents couldn't win then you could still lose by having your life reduced to 0 or having a card declare that you lose (which would cause the Angel to be removed from play and allow your opponent(s) to win).
- Even worse, it's necessary that the card specify "the game" and the rules clarify what the term means, as (while this should never happen in a tournament setting) there are ways in which you can be forced into playing additional games against the same opponents and there are ways in which a card played by somebody who isn't even in your game can affect it. It's still theoretically possible to start a game, play Platinum Angel at some point before that game ends, and lose the game without Platinum Angel having left play... but the text makes it as difficult to arrange as possible.
- This is also seen one of Doug Beyer'snote quotes:
- The game has some pretty hefty and thorough wording in its comprehensive rules, one of which amounts to: "the winner of the game is the sole remaining player that hasn't lost the game." Despite sounding pretty ridiculous, it actually serves to clarify that under normal tournament rules, there can't be more than one winning player or team. If something would knock out all players at the exact same time, then nobody "wins".
- Can be done in Apples to Apples. You can match "Fuzz" to "Fuzzy" or "United States of America" to "American."
- Cards Against Humanity. "What do old people smell like?" can be answered with "Old people smell"
- One of the most powerful darklords in Ravenloft is Azalin Rex, king of Darkon. "Azalin" is actually a distorted rendering of "king" in his ancestral language, which means he's been called "King king" ever since the first locals he met mistook his self-proclaimed title for a personal name.
- William Shakespeare wrote several examples:
Polonius: Your noble son is mad:
- Antony and Cleopatra is the Trope Namer, as shown in the exchange at the beginning of this page.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2:
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?Hamlet: Words, words, words.
- Redundant speeches were pretty much Polonius' shtick when he wasn't busy being self-contradictory.
- Also, in Act II, scene i, Hamlet and Polonius have this little exchange:
- Romeo and Juliet, complete with Lampshade Hanging:
Juliet: What must be, shall be.
Priest: Well that's a certain text.
- Twelfth Night also has a bunch of these:
Sir Andrew: To be up late is to be up late!
Feste: For, as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is is;" so I, being Master Parson, am Master Parson; for, what is "that" but "that", and "is" but "is"?
Olivia: What kind o' man is he?
Malvolio: Why, of mankind.
- As does Timon of Athens:
Timon: If there sit twelve women at this table, let a dozen of them be as they are.
Apemantus: Where liest o' nights, Timon?
Timon: Under that's above me.
Where feed'st thou o' days, Apemantus?
Apemantus: Where my stomach finds meat; or, rather, where I eat it.
- Dogberry's Disorganized Outline Speech from Much Ado About Nothing:
Don Pedro: Officers, what offence have these men done?
Dogberry: Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
- Also Don Pedro's reply: "First, I ask thee what they have done; thirdly, I ask thee what's their offence; sixth and lastly, why they are committed; and, to conclude, what you lay to their charge."
- Macbeth: What's done is done.
- Julius Caesar's assassins proclaim: "freedom, liberty and enfranchisement."
- "For Brutus is an honorable man; So are they all, all honorable men."
- Measure for Measure's Angelo helpfully declares: "Blood, thou art blood."
- The play Murdered to Death! by Peter Gordon, a parody of Agatha Christie murder mysteries.
- The musical Curtains has one character describe a song as "kinda lackluster. It lacks... luster."
- From Caesar, a play by Jan Werich and Jiří Voskovec from the Liberated Theatre (along similar lines to the Josef vejk example above):
- Jan Werich: Once a man is, he should make sure he is. And once he makes sure he is, and is, he should be what he is, and shouldn't be what he's not, as is often the case.
- A Man for All Seasons includes the line "Holy writ is holy," bringing to mind a certain meme.
- If This Isn't Love, from Finian's Rainbow, starts with a girl singing that she has "a secret kind of secret".
- "A mental mindfuck can be nice!"
- A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Justified in that Pseudolus was trying to conceal the fact that he couldn't read.
- Soldier: You know what this is, of course?Pseudolus: Of course I know what this is. This is... writing. And a pretty piece of work it is too.And Later:Pseudolus: I know what it says here: Words!
- In the Last Supper scene of Jesus Christ Superstar, Jesus expresses his contempt for Judas's treachery by exclaiming, "You liar! You Judas!"
- In Art by Yasmina Reza, Serge describes "a man of his time" as "a man who lives...in his own time."
Yvan: If I'm who I am because I'm who I am, and you're who you are because you're who you are, then I'm who I am and you're who you are. If on the other hand, I'm who I am because you're who you are, and if you're who you are because I'm who I am, then I'm not who I am and you're not who you are.
- Later, Yvan shares an insight from his therapist:
Marc: How much do you pay this man?
- The reprise of "It's Your Wedding Day" from The Wedding Singer The Musical Comedy includes the line, "People called him the wedding singer/He sang at weddings and so the name was apt."
- This one's from A Chorus Line's "One":
She walks into a room and you know she's uncommonly rare, very unique
- In Mean Girls the musical, the chorus of the song "Revenge Party" does this twice:
"It's a revenge party with your two best friends. It's like a party with revenge is what it's like.""It's a revenge party with your two best friends. It's like a party with revenge is what we're throwin'."
- There are a few Homestar Runner examples:
The Cheat Theme Song: Who's the man that looks like The Cheat? The Cheat! The Cheat!
Strong Bad: My internet's crawling along like... something... funny... that crawls along.
Homestar Runner: If I had to pick one word to describe myself, it would probably be... Fluffy Puff Marshmallows. Or Homestar. Either one, really. They both fit.
- Or
Strong Bad: I dunno. Maybe he's just going to the ATM machine.
Strong Mad: THAT'S REDUNDANT!
- "Teeeen Girl Squaaaad! Teenage girls between the ages of thirteen and nineteen!"
- How about "Count Longardeaux's Strong Badian Jerktionary Fo' My Own Words!", or "Count Longardeaux's Strong Badian talkwords for saying from your mouth" for short.
- Or
- Zero Punctuation: "If you find the Japanese offensive, then you'll find this game offensively Japanese."
- To be fair, what he means is that the game in question is Japanese to a potentially offensive degree; it's like saying "If you like the colour red, you'll find this pleasantly red" to indicate that something is quite red indeed.
- "Clive Barker's 'Clive Barker's Jericho' by Clive Barker".
- Space Tree the space tree (in space)!
- Retarded Animal Babies:
Cat: 4 is for... tha-that's what it is.
Hamster: Splunge is for Splunge.
- Cat Face, he's got a big cat face. He's got the body of a cat and the face of a cat. And he flies through the air 'cause he's got a cat face. CATFACE!"
- From asdfmovie 2:
"I baked you a pie!"
"Oh boy, what flavor?"
- Brain POP's slogan: "The more you know, the more you know".
- This is how nearly all of Sarge from Red vs. Blue's secret words work. His password is "password", his code word is "code word", etc.
- asdfmovie:
I baked you a pie.What flavor?Pie flavor.
- Scary Go Round does this a few times. "You are my loved friend whom I love!"
- Gunnerkrigg Court Chapter 10 is titled: "Doctor Disaster Versus the Creepy Space Aliens from Outer Space". Doctor Disaster himself feels the need to specify:
Dr. Disaster: Spacemonauts! The evil Enigmarons are threatening the Earth from their moon base on the moon!
- 8-Bit Theater had The Elven Royal Crown Of Royalty and the Picturesque Forest of Trees. And many of the main characters.
- The Order of the Stick:
- Most place names in the comic are either this trope or Exactly What It Says on the Tin, if not both:
- The Wooden Forest
- The Sunken Valley
- The Zenith Peak
- The Rupture Ravine
- Fissure Gap & Passage Pass
- Elan tells Haley he would like to see her come back from a dangerous fight "in one big Haley-shaped piece."
- When Xykon gives a lecture about the nature of true power, he says that spells don't equal power, but: "You know what does equal power? Power. Power equals power. Crazy, huh?" The point is about the difference between having real power and only pretending to. ("But the type of power? Doesn't matter as much as you'd think.")
- A line from the mentally unstable Crystal:
Crystal: Our thieves are only allowed to steal from the people that our thieves are allowed to steal from!
Bozzok: My employee's circular logic notwithstanding, she is correct.
- Most place names in the comic are either this trope or Exactly What It Says on the Tin, if not both:
- Dinosaur Comics devotes an entire comic to defining and demonstrating pleonasms: "Hey, T-Rex, do you want to drink some cola-flavored Coca-Cola brand carbonated cola beverages? Perhaps afterwards we'll take the public transport large road vehicle bus and buy with money or credit some submarine sub sandwiches?" Also, in T-Rex's book for children: "Happy Dog the happy dog is the happiest dog on his street!"
- From Absurd Notions: The cloud-shaped cloud.
- Poked at in Real Life Comics, with a truck that someone insists is "made of truck" that he apparently thinks is an element.
- Concerned:
- In the notes for this strip. Amazingly, seagulls are the size of seagulls.
- This other strip: Boy, it seems like it happened an hour ago... Probably because it happened an hour ago.
- Raven from Questionable Content seems to be prone to this.
Raven: Faye, you're my friend but if you steal Sven away from me I'll murder you so hard you'll die from it.
- And this marvelous gem from VG Cats.
Padme: MY LOVE FOR YOU IS LIKE A LOVELY RIVER OF LOVING, LOVE.Anakin: Ooookay, gettin' creepy.
- xkcd:
- This comic describes itself.
- It's a bit more complicated than most examples of this trope though as each panel doesn't describe just itself, but the whole comic.
- There is the Tautology Club, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- This is a very interesting example of this trope. It is true if you interpret it either as a polar or a cartesian plot.
- A link to a series of self-referential quotes.
- This comic describes itself.
- From the Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name cast page:
Primarily known as the guy who looks great in suspenders and ticks an awful lot, Ples is the guy who [unsurprisingly] looks great in suspenders and ticks an awful lot.
- From the comic itself we have the fantastic "If you're dead, I'M GONNA KILL YOU!"
- The eponymous Kyra from Full Time Ink's "Uh-oh, it's a Dinosaur" often speaks in this manner, such as "MEEP MWOP! It's big like a big room!" and "I haven't eaten since the last time I did."
- This crap tastes like crap.
- Schlock Mercenary got a mysterious murder case:
Der Trihs: Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the killer committed the crime and made it look like a shark attack because the killer was hungry, and happened to be a shark?
(Beat Panel)
Policeman: You obviously know nothing about police work.
- For this, Massey hit the local police with what he calls "the 'impersonating a police force' suit". In other news, Serge failed to realize why "the crew-mullet" is called so (and is still here).
- Bug once explored Hitler's immunity to Godwin's Law.
- Aerith of Ansem Retort gave us this gem:
I feel like I'm on a bad reality show, which is ironic because I am on a bad reality show.
- Chaos Pet is "updated every day that it is updated."
- A pie chart in a notebook found in Girl Genius tracks how much pie the notebook's original owner had eaten.
- Consolers has this:
Tecmo: I will NEVER forgive you for this unforgivable insult."
- The Evil League of Evil, in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
- In Commentary! The Musical, Felicia Day describes art as "magic as a magic thing" and "lovely as love."
- Atop the Fourth Wall
- Linkara's Top 15 Worst Moments of Countdown to Final Crisis declares the number 1 moment to be Countdown itself, justified by saying that Countdown will undoubtedly go down in comics history as nothing more than a moment.
- In Silent Hill: The Grinning Man, he responds to a character claiming to be happier than a pig in shit by stating himself to be as bored as a person that's bored.
- In Red vs. Blue, the evil AI O'Malley gives this speech:
O'Malley: "You fools have fallen right into my hands! Only now do you realize the folly of your follies! Prepare for and oblivion for which there is no preparation!"
- DrudgeReport logo: leans slightly right; DrudgeRetort logo: leans slightly left.
- From Dad Cop 2;
Dad Cop 2: "Mr. Kill would always murder his victims... until they died."
- Happy Floppy Bunny was the happiest and floppiest bunny in Happy Floppy Bunny Land.
- Autotune the News #10 contains the gem: "Nepotism is strictly prohibited, except for family members.note "
- One Retsupurae of a Navgtr review of Xenogears makes sarcastic comments like "The problem with this RPG is that it has RPG elements!" and "This video game is too much like a video game!"
- Doctor Who and the CURSE OF FATAL DEATH!, which includes the Master's "Deadly Vengeance of Deadly REVENGE!"
- National National Awareness Month Awareness Month is held in February, and is dedicated to being aware of our awareness observations.
- This parody of Rebecca Black's "song" Friday, mocking the repetition of the original.
- "Alarm goes off cause it's an alarm"
- "When I wake up I open my eyes/Keeping them closed makes it dark inside/so I need to open them cause that's what I do/When I wake up I need to do that"
- [1]: Senator Lindsay Graham on why he likes a song.
'Graham: See, what happened there is you guys caught me singing "Judy Moonlight." ... Because, Judy Moonlight is the one the song is about.
- "[Death is] responsible for 100 percent of all recorded fatalities worldwide..."
- When The Nostalgia Critic reviewed The Thief and the Cobbler, he parodied the extremely generic studio-mandated songs with his own song, that went something like this:
"My heart will love a loving love love, but only in my dreams. But because I sing with singiness, the dreams I'll dream I'll dream!"
- Z! True Long Island Story presents: Broskis on Broadway The Musical, "a show so inspiring, Newsweek magazine calls it so inspiring."
- Many, many pages on Uncyclopedia.
- 27b/6: "The product, misrepresented as 'Natural Black' instead of 'Astro Boy black', turned my hair as dark as an adequate simile describing just how black it actually was and stained my forehead and ears purple."
- Yo dawg, I heard you like shapes...
- HowToBasic delves into this sometimes. For example, the instructions on how to make beef jerky included dropping a generous amount of pre-packaged beef jerky into the mess.
- Shadow of the Let's Play show Super Playify said, of Arnval in Otomedius Excellent, "Seriously, she looks like Ann from Busou Shinki". To be fair to him, the conversation (including the name he used for her) showed that he was only familiar with the anime, not the toy line, and the whole point of Super Playify is that the players go in canonblind, so he couldn't have known that Konami stuffed a lot of characters from their other properties into it.
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
Sketchbook: What's your favourite idea? Mine is being creative!
Yellow Guy: How do you get that idea?
Sketchbook: I just try to think creatively.
- A Movie About Itself is a short film that is somewhere between a documentary and a mockumentary, and is built on this whole idea.
- Hello From the Magic Tavern:
Arnie: Different things mean different things
- This article on Batman Begins describes how Batman & Robin "failed like a big giant failing thing".
- From the aborted Buffy the Vampire Slayer animated series. "There are things in the dark. Dark things."
- Popeye. "That's all I can stands, and I can't stands no more!"
Olive: AAAH!! Swee'Pea went into the factory! He'll be killed to death!!
- "I yam what I yam, and that's all that I yam: I'm Popeye the Sailor Man."
- In one of the Paramount shorts, when Bluto is carrying off Olive, she yells, "Let go of me you... you you, you!"
- In the Fleischer short, Lost and Foundry:
- A good example of a pleonasm is He-Man. Of course, they couldn't just call him Man. Of course, "he-man" did have the advantage of being a real word.
- Dr Zoidberg pulled a truly spectacular five-hit combo on Futurama: "My next clue came at 4:15, when the clock stopped. And another came two hours later at 4:15, when I discovered the murdered body of Amy's dead, deceased corpse."
Fry: You know what the worst thing about being a slave is? They make you work, but they don't pay you or let you go.
- And in another episode:
Fry: I'm literally angry with rage!
- Subverted in the episode "Crimes of the Hot", where Professor Farnsworth receives a Polluting Medal of Pollution, whose name appears to be redundant but actually refers to the fact that it's a pollution-related medal that releases pollution itself.
- The New Justice Team from "Less Than Hero"
Go, go, go New Justice Team
Go team, go team, team team team
Who's that newest Justice Team?
The New Justice Team
Captain Yesterday is fast
Also he is from the past
Not just fast but from the past
Captain Yesterday!
Super King has all the powers of a King
Plus all the power of Superman,
Also he's a robot
Ain't it cool? Super King you rule!
Cloberella beats you up
Cloberella beats you up
Who does she beat up? You!!
Citizens, never fear
Crazy do-good freaks are here
Until they run out of steam...
Miracle cream, miracle cream
Gives the power to the team
Its effects wear off for sure
So they just slop on some more.
The New Justice Team!
- Also, in the first "Anthology of Interest" episode, when Fry causes a rift in the time space continuum after not falling into the cryogenic freezer:
Al Gore: You fool! You foolish fool!
- "The Deep South" has:
Farnsworth: Fry, you half-mad, half-insane maniac! Be reasonable!
- In "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings," after Bender protests to the Robot Devil that he is unwilling to make a deal:
Robot Devil: Really? There's nothing you want?Bender: Hmmm. I forgot you could tempt me with things I want...
- Ranger Park, The Park Ranger from "Spanish Fry"
Ranger Park: I'm Ranger Park, the Park Ranger.Fry: I get it!
- In "Xmas Story", Leela tells Fry "I'm lonely, and you're lonely, but together, we're lonely together."
- The Couch Gag in one episode reads "From The Makers Of Futurama".
- In "Bender Gets Made", The Donbot tells Bender "we'll be committing crimes that may be illegal".
- From "A Pharaoh To Remember":
- And in another episode:
- Mojo Jojo's elliptical and recursive dialogue in The Powerpuff Girls frequently visits this territory, sometimes with an overnight bag in hand.
"I do not talk like that! The way I communicate is much different. I do not reiterate, repeat, reinstate the same thing over and over again. I am clear, concise, to the point!"
"Yeah. We were flying to Mojo Jojo's house. I like flying. Oh, and then there were these really pretty clouds. And there was one that was shaped like a heart, and there was this one that looked like a pretty pony, and there was one that looked like a cloud..."
- See also this little speech from Bubbles:
- And then there was the time when Bubbles suffered from Easy Amnesia and thought she was Mojo...
- Brick: Man, beating up people for fun is really fun!
- Spongebob Squarepants
- From the pilot "Help Wanted":
Mr. Krabs: Do you smell it? That smell. A kind of smelly smell. The smelly smell that smells... smelly.
- In the same episode, SpongeBob calls the Krusty Krab "the finest eating establishment ever established for eating".
- From the episode, "The Bully":
SpongeBob: Do not cheer me, fellow adult students. Flatts is the real victim here. A victim of a society that's going down a violent road to nowhere... a road I call... Violence Road.
- From "Big Pink Loser":'
Patrick: Hey SpongeBob, guess what? I got an award!SpongeBob: That's great, Patrick. What's it for?Patrick: See for yourself.SpongeBob: "For outstanding achievement in achievement."
- From "Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy III":
Mermaid Man: Prolonged exposure to the orb of confusion will give you... confusion!"
- Thinking of Mrs. Puff alone and afraid in jail makes SpongeBob think of...Mrs. Puff being alone and afraid in jail.
- From the pilot "Help Wanted":
- Thumbtanic: "She's neekid... and she ain't got no clothes on neither!"
- American Dad!: "I am a sex offender. I like offensive sex. I offend people with the sex I have," said by a sex offender. In American Dad.
- Invader Zim: In one episode, Gir dons a human-like robot disguise to save Zim, uttering the words: "I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me."
- "It's a government android!"
- "They locked up their fortress...with LOCKS!" line by Zim.
- Dib says at one point: "I know. The philosophical implications are quite...philosophical"
- Gir goes on a waffle-making spree.
Zim: Hey, these aren't bad. What's in 'em?Gir: There's waffle in 'em!
- The Venture Bros.:
- "You have a picture of a shrink ray ON the shrink ray gun. That is totally retarded."
- "It's a walking eye. It does walking eye stuff."
- The Tick featured a villain who called himself the Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight (yeah, baby!).
- With the immortal line "An object at rest cannot be stopped!"
- Minoriteam... "BALACTUS DEVOURER OF WORLDS IS READY TO DEVOUR WORLDS!"
- Doug has "Man-O-Steel Man", a Captain Ersatz of Superman.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: This exchange in "An Ed in the Bush".
- Jonny: (handing Rolf a badge) Here you go, Rolf.Rolf: (hands Jonny a badge as well) And here's your "Bringing Me My Badge" badge.
- Dr. Director, Director of Global Justice in Kim Possible.
- Also lampshaded in "So The Drama":
Drakken: My new death ray is killer!Ron: Dude, isn't that redundant?
- Also Ron's martial arts instructor Master Sensei.
- Also lampshaded in "So The Drama":
- South Park:
Randy: If we're still alive in the morning, then we'll know we're not dead.
- King of the Hill has Dale Gribble yelling about his father, who kissed Dale's wife on their wedding day:
Dale: "I loved my Dad like a father, and he betrayed me like a betrayer!"
- Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons firmly believes that "Fun toys are fun!"
Chief Wiggum: Behold, the two headed dog, born with only one head! And behold, out of the mists of time, the legendary Esquilax, a horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body...of a rabbit.
- Did you know that his cat's breath smells like cat food?
- His father once ran a booth in a renaissance fair that featured amazing mythical creatures.
Air hostess: Due to our policy of overselling flights, this flight has been oversold.
- From "Fear of Flying":
Homer: "This bar is like a Tavern to me."
Moe: "I'm just gonna die lonely and ugly and dead."
- From "Dumbbell Indemnity":
Lyle Langley: So "mono" means "one" and "rail" means "rail."
- "Call Mr. Plow, that's the name / That name again is Mr. Plow."
- From "Marge Vs. The Monorail":
Homer: "You see, fame is like a drug. But what was really like a drug were the drugs."
- From "Behind the Laughter":
- Phineas and Ferb
- In the episode "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", the song "Little Brothers" manages to be both touching and hilarious because of the refrain:
You will always be my little brothers
Because you're younger, we're related
And you're boys
- In "The Ballad of Badbeard", Dr. Doofenshmirtz has a pair of crocodiles, both named Susan, in his new evil lair. "I named them after each other!"
- "Not Phineas and Ferb" brings us "Space Adventure! It's an adventure in space!"
- In "Skiddley Whiffers", Dr. Doofenshmirtz claims "Fire is the leading cause of fire."
- In "Ask a Foolish Question", after trapping Perry in a block of cement, Doofenshmirtz says "Welcome, Perry the Platypus. How do you like your trap? That's super quick drying cement. See? (Knocks on the cement) Solid as a, uh... I dunno, some rock-like substance. Cement, maybe!"
- In the episode "Phineas and Ferb Get Busted", the song "Little Brothers" manages to be both touching and hilarious because of the refrain:
- In the Disney version of Robin Hood, a group of two boys and two girlsnote has this chant:
Spider, snakes and a lizard's head
If I tattletale, I'll die till I'm dead.
- Carmine, a parasitic talent agent who lived in Zorak's throat on The Brak Show did this a lot.
Carmine: That voice of yours is a goldmine. That's right, a mine fulla gold!
Carmine: Mansionland, that's right, a land fulla mansions!
- Early Cuyler and most of the other characters on Squidbillies are prone to this from time to time. With such lines as "Worky jobs" and "money checks".
Early: And I was gonna ventilate yo head brain with this here gun bullet.
- "TV lookity-box"
- "Thirty five dollars a month?! Monthly?! Every month?!"
Lerm: Gun bullet, heh, that's redundant.
- From El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, "We got you a present, for you to have."
- From The Emperor's New School, "His nose is as plain as the nose on his face."
- Finding Nemo:
Bloat: You're from the Big Blue? What's it like?
Nemo: Well, it's, uh, big, and it's blue.
Bloat: I knew it!
- The Latin-American translation is funnier because Bloat instead of replying "knew it" He says "that's weird."
- Clone High: JFK's attempt at being threatening to Abe and Gandhi in the bathroom.
JFK: I will see you there! And by will, I mean won't! (Laughs and leaves)
(Returning) Cos you're not invited. I, er, wasn't sure if I was clear earlier. So... you're not. Invited, that is. (Leaves)
(Returns) To my party! (Leaves)
(Returns) Forgot to wash my hands!
- 12 oz. Mouse: "Then aspirin was invented, the common cure for things that aspirin cures."
- The wonderful thing about tiggers, is tiggers are wonderful things. And Tigger is the only one.
- When introduced to "The Black Raven" in Wakfu, Yugo immediately points out that all ravens are black, and he and his friends attempt to find him a better name.
- In The Lion King, "Simba" translates to "lion" in Swahili. So they effectively named the lion in The Lion King "lion".
- One of the best-named cartoon villains ever is WordGirl's Lady Redundant Woman.
- Mr. Big claims The Thing is "scientifically designed by scientists."
- Justice League Unlimited
- Invoked by The Question in episode "Question Authority", to prove the whole conspiracy behind Lex Luthor's presidential campaign (harkening back to the parallel universe from "A Better World", in which Luthor had become President and killed Flash as part of his plans):
Everything that exists has a specific nature. Each entity exists as something in particular and has certain characteristics that are part of what it is. "A" is "A"... And, no matter what reality he calls home, Luthor is Luthor.
- This makes more sense if you realize that "A is A" is the Objectivist law of identity (and the rest of it is basically just an expansion on that). The character in question (sorry) was created by an Objectivist and, in the original comics, would usually say it at least once a story, so it's more of a Shout-Out.
- And Galatea.
"Boredom is my kryptonite. Well, actually, kryptonite is my kryptonite."
- Invoked by The Question in episode "Question Authority", to prove the whole conspiracy behind Lex Luthor's presidential campaign (harkening back to the parallel universe from "A Better World", in which Luthor had become President and killed Flash as part of his plans):
- In the Maryoku Yummy episode "The Ninth Wish," when Shika confiscates the eponymous wish (as wishsitters are only allowed to watch eight wishes at a time), Fij Fij worries that Shika won't let it have any fun, and Ooka adds, "Or give it any hugs!" This prompts Maryoku to say, "Without fun and hugs, that poor little wish will be... without fun and hugs!"
- In "Scatterday," Shika reads the rules for Scatterday, the second of which is "The first one to find the Scatter Crown is the first one to find the Scatter Crown."
- Family Guy: "If you were to cook any slower... why you wouldn't be cooking very fast, now would you?"
- The quirky speech pattern that is the Verbal Tic of Angela Anaconda.
- The Point "And needless to say, business was brisk, and the competition was...competitive."
- "He's a very industrious industrialist."
- A common feature of Julien's dialogue in The Penguins of Madagascar, e.g. "It is I, who is me!" and "What is up with the un-big tiny littleness of my royal estate?"
- Teen Titans
Starfire: I came here to notify you about the Brotherhood of Evil. They mean to harm us all. They are quite evil.Argent: Hence the name.
- The Hobbit: "Enough! I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means... ME!"
- Beavis and Butt-Head:
Butt-Head: It's me, you bunghole.Beavis: Um, what's a bunghole?Butt-Head: You're a bunghole, bunghole!Stuart: Hey, cro-magnon, you can't use a word to define itself.Beavis: Yeah. Cro-magnon.Butt-Head: I can too, bunghole.
- In the It's a Wonderful Life send-up from the Christmas Special, Butt-Head visits Beavis and Stuart at a soup kitchen, and tries to get Beavis to remember him.
- When the boys are watching Journey's "Separate Ways" video, Butt-Head says "This video, like, like, if it was a turd, it would, like, be, like, the same thing."
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- "May the Best Pet Win":
Rainbow Dash: "This can't be happening! Forever is way too long to be trapped in Ghastly Gorge. I mean, it's like... forever!"
- "Too Many Pinkie Pies":
Pinkie Pie: "The water's great; it's totally wet and everything!"
- Maud's poem in her debut episode, "Maud Pie":
Maud Pie: Rock / You are a rock / Gray / You are gray / Like a rock / Which you are / Rock
- "May the Best Pet Win":
- According to its theme song, the plot of Ben 10 started when an alien device "did what it did".
- From The Batman, we get the line, "Only Alfred sounds that much like Alfred."
- In Sanjay and Craig: "Doors are for people who use doors."
- Two words: Overgrown man-child.
- Peter Pan offers this bit of Indian language:
Hana Mana Ganda
Hana Mana Ganda
We translate for you.
"Hana" means what "mana" means
And "ganda" means that too!
- The Steven Universe episode "Giant Woman" has a somewhat subtler example:
Steven: If you give it a chance/You could do a huge dance/Because you are a giant woman!
- The nonsense quote at the beginning of the Clarence episode "Rise and Shine", which ends with the line "Also breakfast is an important part of a nutritious breakfast."
- In the 3-2-1 Penguins! episode, "Trouble on Planet Wait-Your-Turn", Jason asks how he's supposed to fit in their spaceship when he's much bigger than they are. Zidgel answers, "Ah, too big, too big. When I was your size, I was twice your size!" Cue Jason's Aside Glance.
- The villains from the TaleSpin episode "Flying Dupes" give us this line.
"We take whatever we want! And whatever we want, we take!"
- Rocko's Modern Life has this reaction of Rocko when he discovers every room of his house has been built into a bathroom.
- Rocko: My living room, it's a bathroom. My closet is a bathroom. My basement is a bathroom! My ballroom is a bathroom!! EVEN MY BATHROOM IS A BATHROOM!!!!! (beat) Well, I guess that's okay.
- Looney Tunes: In the short "Super-Rabbit", Bugs encounters rabbit-hater Cottontail Smith, who says "If there's one thing I hate more than a rabbit, it's two rabbits!".
- The Beatles: In "I'm Happy Just To Dance With You," after the boys find themselves in an Italian street festival:
Ringo: I love festivals. They're so...festive!
- Gravity Falls: In "Irrational Treasure", Quentin Trembley: "we appear to be trapped in some sort of crate-shaped box!"
- On Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, Devin sees Crimson "un-Gothed" and comments, "Wow, your skin is so...flesh-colored."
- In the pilot of Sheep in the Big City, Farmer John mentions that he named the sheep Sheep because he looked like a sheep when he was born.
- From The Adventuresof Super Mario Bros 3: "That's Prince Hugo the Huge, the new ruler of Giant Land! They say he's the biggest, toughest, bravest prince ever, even for a giant! He's a giant."
- TV Tropes:
- When a pothole is found in a page and leads to the same page.
- There are also several times where a pothole is just the trope name, except with the caps removed, ex: Suspect Is Hatless as "suspect is hatless". Some tropers work on cleaning those up.
- The Citizen Kane article dubs the movie the Citizen Kane of film.
- YKTTW entries as well, such as "Gesturing with a Weapon: Somebody gestures at people with a weapon".
- That Other Wiki's disambiguation page for "Japanese" helpfully provides a link to "Japanese language, a Japonic language spoken mainly in Japan." The same template probably appears for many multi-purpose demonym-national adjective-language name words, but would be at least marginally more informative when not concerning a language isolate.
- That Other Wiki also features a List of tautological place names
- "The war crimes in the Kosovo War were a series of war crimes committed during the Kosovo War..."
- SCP-2364 of the SCP Foundation is literally this as a concept with physical form