http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarWorm

Irving Berlin "The song has ended, but the melody lingers on."

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This is the song that doesn't end... It goes on and on in one's head.

"Ear Worms" (from the German phrase Ohrwurm) are those songs that weasel their way into one's head like uninvited guests and then proceed to stink up the inside of one's cranium by playing themselves there over. And over. And over. And over. They're those songs that just get stuck in one's head, and no amount of screaming, pounding, protesting, and banging one's head into one's desk will get them out. They will check out any time one likes, but they will never leave.

This phenomenon is well-known in Real Life, so it's no wonder it frequently comes up in fiction as well.

Characters infected with an Ear Worm may find themselves prone to bursting out into the song in inappropriate places and shown liking the tune because it's irresistibly catchy. They can end up distracted in the middle of conversation (or other important activities) by the continuous snatches of song wavering between their ears. However, soon they'll be profoundly annoyed by it and tugging at their ears in fury. And it's only a matter of time before, like Darryl Revok, they drill a hole in their forehead to let the voices out.

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Ear Worms are frequently the tool used to produce Psychic Static. Especially powerful ones can also serve as a Brown Note. If the repetitive music that is the cause of someone's woes is not just in memory but ongoing, it's Incessant Music Madness.

Not to be confused with the mind-warping parasites from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or mind-controlling parasites from Animorphs or Earwig in Real Life.

Although many of us have had experiences with Ear Worms, please stick to listing examples where a song's catchiness is commented on or demonstrated in-universe. Describing what makes a song catchy is almost impossible for most people who aren't music theory experts, meaning that the odds of subjective examples being Zero-Context Examples are extremely high (as was the case with a past version of this trope).

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Anime & Manga

Comedy

Comic Greg Warren has a bit about a crazy woman on the subway who kept repeatedly singing "ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A FIIIISH! SANDWICH!", and that weird little ditty has been stuck in his head ever since.

Comic Books

Adam "Empowered" Warren did a short arc for Gen¹³ which featured Caitlin as the Only Sane Woman in the face of an unnaturally infectious and insane pop song.

In Sandman: At Death's Door by Jill Thompson, Delirium deals with the demons that crash Death's party by infecting them with Ear Worms.

In a Justice League story, the League encounters a created being that sucks up memories. Once they manage to reverse the effects, the Atom leaves it one memory: the Ear Worm that's been stuck in his head the whole issue. "Ziggy Stardust". The kicker: he couldn't remember the whole song.

In Harley Quinn's own comic, an Ear Worm is an actual worm that hibernates for 363 days a year; the two days it is awake — Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — it curls up in a human's ear and sings very, very annoying Christmas songs like "Jingle Bells" and "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Harley is its latest victim, but she is cured by — who else? — Santa Claus.

Comic Strips

Rat does this to mess with Pig in a Pearls Before Swine strip by singing John Denver's "Country Roads, Take Me Home" near him. Rat even admits that he's doing it to plant an Ear Worm in his friend's head.

Tom Tommorrow's This Modern World once introduces a superhero named Anagram Man, but for the purposes of this entry we must take note of his sidekick, Song-In-Your-Head Boy.

One Nemi strip features an Ear Worm taking over a bus. Much to the annoyance of the main character. Cyan: [humming away] Hey, do you hear it too?

Nemi: [visibly straining] No! I'm hearing " Raining Blood " by louder ! [humming away] Hey, do you hear it too?[visibly straining] No! I'm hearing "" by Slayer ! Louder, and louder and

Norm from My Cage once got a song stuck in his head; when pressured to tell what song it was he finally admitted it was the FreeCreditReport.com jingle. Norm: Advertising has salted my soul. Nothing good can grow there again.

A Sunday strip of Zits has Hector confessing to Jeremy that he has a show tune stuck in his head. After much pestering from Jeremy, it is revealed to be "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria" from The Sound of Music, at which point Jeremy gets it stuck in his head as well.

One Sunday strip of Garfield had Jon whistle a very odd tune (shown in a musical staff), which gets stuck in Garfield's head as a result. He ultimately gets rid of it by passing it onto Odie.

Fan Works

Films — Animation

Films — Live-Action

In the movie Thoughtcrimes, Brendan doesn't believe in Freya's telepathic abilities until she mentions that he'd had the Scooby-Doo theme song stuck in his head all day.

In Wayne's World, Wayne has the song "Hey Mickey" stuck in his head. He and his girlfriend sing it to expel it.

In the movie Pontypool, the Ear Worm comes in the form of infected phrases in the English language that spread through understanding.

In The Night They Saved Christmas, "Jingle Bells" is such an annoying one that even Santa Claus himself is sick of it. ("Sing any other Christmas song you want," he yells to his elves. "Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, White Christmas, any of those! But NO MORE JINGLE BELLS! "

" In EuroTrip, Scotty's ex-girlfriend Fiona's new boyfriend's song, "Scotty Doesn't Know" (about Fiona cheating on Scotty), becomes something of an Ear Worm for the entire cast — starting with Scotty's best friend. Not only that, but it becomes a major hit all over Europe.

"Pocketful of Sunshine" becomes an Ear Worm for the main character, Olive, of Easy A, after she receives a birthday card playing it.

The catchy song from Three Magic Words, a short riffed on by RiffTrax, is declared an ear worm by a despondent Bill Corbett after it continues on past the short itself.

In Deep Rising, Joey starts singing the elevator's music under his breath while the group is sneaking along a corridor. Everyone stops and points flashlights and/or guns at him, so he sheepishly explains that it's stuck in his head. Amusingly, even the hardened mercenaries don't push the issue and simply resume walking.

Jokes

You can find a few. For example: Patient: Doctor, doctor! I keep getting these two songs stuck in my head: "The Green, Green Grass of Home" and "Delilah"!

Doctor: Oh, you've got

Patient: Is that rare?

Doctor: It's Not Unusual. Doctor, doctor! I keep getting these two songs stuck in my head: "The Green, Green Grass of Home" and "Delilah"!Oh, you've got Tom Jones syndrome.Is that rare?It's Not Unusual.

A joke about pest control by an individual pretending to take a popular phrase literally suggests a remedy: since many people use poisons of various forms to eradicate household and farmyard pests, songs with the word "poison" in the title or lyrics (or anything by a musician who has recorded such a song) might be used to control ear worms, depending on individual tastes in music. An example for one who favors classic rock: Bartender: Name your poison.

Patron: Well, the poison would depend on just what kind of pests I'm trying to get rid of. So let me see, I think I'd use d-Con for rodents, RoundUp for weeds, Raid for insects... Name your poison.Well, the poison would depend on just what kind of pests I'm trying to get rid of. So let me see, I think I'd use d-Con for rodents, RoundUp for weeds, Raid for insects... Alice Cooper for ear worms...

Literature

Live-Action TV

Music

Podcasts

Rifftrax parodied this in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when Khan implants some Cetan eels in a pair of officers. Mike: Honest-to-god ear worms. They'll have "Party in the USA" playing in their heads for days, poor bastards.

Poetry

The Billy Collins poem "More than a Woman" features a narrator describing how a song has been playing uncontrollably in his head all day. Although he says, "It is a song so cloying and vapid I won't even bother mentioning the title," the poem's title clearly tells us that it's The Bee Gees song from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

Puppet Shows

"The Chicken Song" from Spitting Image. This was a parody of "Agadoo" by Black Lace. Characters in the show were heard singing snatches of it throughout the episode before it was performed by the ensemble at the end. And then it was released for real as a single. Now that you've heard it once

Your brain will spring a leak,

And though you hate this song

You'll be humming it for weeks!

Lamb Chop's Play-Along with Shari Lewis, Lamb Chop and Hush Puppy: It used "This Is the Song That Never Ends" (a.k.a. "This Is The Song That Doesn't End") as the closing theme. It's a recursive ear worm, so you can't even get rid of it by singing it all the way through... Any kid who grew up in the '90s has been annoyed by some kid on their camp bus starting a sing-a-long with this song, as well as "I know a song that gets on everybody's nerves". Worse, if you were a camp counselor in the '90s and they started a sing-a-long and you had to try to get them to shut up. You can not call yourself an American if you don't know this song. Lampshaded on the show itself, in which Shari Lewis cries out in horror when people begin to sing it, and then sends them away so she doesn't have to hear it anymore. This is the song that never ends

It just goes on and on, my friends

Some people started singing it not knowing what it was

And they'll continue singing it forever just because

This is the song that never ends... And it gets worse, because now it has a PokeLatin dub. Good luck getting this out of your head: Zjït sois au canc zjü neü finamt

Ro tü au ou et ou, mok amt

Au païkan hajït cancüt ro, et deüt reüzjon

Et ka weüt joj cancüt ro kotangard kibuston...



Tabletop Games

An end to a rather strangely named ARG has this happen to a former shadow government official/cultist turned power-hungry God. Thanks to the players, another, more powerful and more moral God throws him into a dark cellar, and blasts "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper and the covered versions over and over. He really, really hates it.

In GURPS, sufficiently powerful message-carrying psi-bombs can lodge a short sentence or rhyme in a person's mind for several minutes. For obvious reasons, this can be a more terrifying prospect than similar tech that can rip out someone's soul and store it in a jar.

Dungeons & Dragons: 3 rd Edition has a bard spell called insidious rhythm that consists of a catchy, silly tune that stay stuck in the mind of the target. This imposes a penalty on all activities involving reflection and concentration, and can even make a spellcaster flub his incantations. One 2 nd edition Forgotten Realms priest spell, known only to the clergy of Milil, would cause a similar effect by getting part of an Ear Worm stuck in a target's head, leaving them unable to concentrate as they struggle to either get it out of their head or come up with the missing next line.

Sufficiently Advanced has a program called the Mental Repetition Override Lens, which can be installed in a properly-wired brain specifically to suppress the memory of a song that you can't get out of your head.

The digital version of Sentinels of the Multiverse has Missing Information , the theme for when The Mole Miss Information wins. The fact that she's basically taunting you doesn't help.

, the theme for when The Mole Miss Information wins. The fact that she's basically taunting you doesn't help. A magical version appears in in Invisible Sun with the Insidious Song, a disease in musical form that lives in the mind of a thinking being, its simple but catchy tune echoing over and over. It is impossible to get the song out of your head once it takes hold, barring some kind of curse removal magic. The Insidious Song is highly contagious and tries to get those in its grip to hum or sing enough of the tune so it also spreads to other minds.

Video Games

Web Animation

Jonti Picking (a.k.a. Weebl, creator of Weebl & Bob), big provider of Ear Worms, eventually lampshaded this with "Annoying" , which has an annoyingly catchy tune about an annoyingly catchy tune: Oh my word, this tune is annoying,

Yes I know, it's really annoying

I can't get this song out of my head!

Make it stop, this tune is annoying

I gotta go to work in the morning

Now I'm gonna be humming it in my bed!

, which has an annoyingly catchy tune about an annoyingly catchy tune: Vocaloid: Some PVs for "Alice Human Sacrifice" (as well as the music itself) imply that Kaito's songs of madness were Ear Worms with lyrics that stray away from the melody and emotions put in the song.

Web Comics

Web Original

Web Videos

Western Animation

Ha! Now we've got you singing it!