Related: “The talent simulation device was broken! That performance was real!”
Simpsons and Futurama has both subverted this by someone pointing out the device was actually working, in Futurama’s case at triple power.
I’ve heard a rumor that Tod Browning played with an ending like this for Mark of the Vampire, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
Arrested Development had one of the best parodies of this. The character Gob (Will Arnett) is an incompetent amateur comedian who has rigged a device to let him seem to walk on water. In one episode a mentally retarded character played by Charlize Theron walks across the water (an homage to the end of Being There). Jason Bateman is at first stunned then remembers his brother setting up the trick, to which Gob replies “But I never set up a trick…”.
Roll credits.
After credits blip:
Gob: It’s not a trick… it’s an illusion!
Actually, there was more to the Arrested Development gag:
During one of Gob’s “illusions”, Tobias got set on fire (it was implied the trick had done to same to Michael’s late wife at an earlier event) and we can hear him screaming "Why am I not sinking? Why am I not sinking?!
ISTR at least one “Night Court” Halloween episode using this, I want to say the one in which Harry fines a “ghost”.
In an L.A. Law episode, C.J. Lamb and Tommy Mullaney sue on behalf of a client seeking recission of a house sale contract after discovering that the house is haunted. Improbably, the judge lets this claim go to trial; impossibly, the judge grants C.J.'s motion to conduct her closing argument on-site, at the house. At night.
At a particularly scary moment in her closing, the lights suddenly go out. The judge and jury, frightened, leave quickly, and we can assume that they will deliver a verdict for Lamb’s client… and then Tommy comes out of the house holding a fuse, and we learn that he shut off the electricity at the proper moment. They congratulate each other for their fraud on the tribunal.
Then CJ looks up and sees a light on in the house. “How is that possible?” They leave quickly, nervous about the prospect of an actual haunter. The End.
Pretty sucky. Thanks again, Rick Warren and Patricia Green, for utterly fucking over a great TV series. It’s been 20 years, but I don’t forget.
Um… Rick WALLACE and Patricia Green.
Rick Warren is a pastor who has never, to my knowledge, fucked up a great TV series.
Wasn’t this a staple of Scooby Doo?