5 Sitcom Episodes Guaranteed To Leave You In Tears

Sitcoms: So funny! So comforting! So... capable of truly devastating emotional gut-punches!

TV comedies draw us in with their lovable characters and easy laughs, which only makes it all the more brutal when something sad happens during the course of the show. And boy, have the sitcoms on the list below destroyed us when they chose to take a brief detour into the tragic!

The list below features a handful of comedy episodes that'll get your tear ducts going. Scroll down to see the best sitcom episodes guaranteed to make you cry.

The Matt Groening-created animated sci-fi sitcom "Futurama" has endured plenty of heartbreak, both in-universe and through several cancellations and restarts, but there's nothing in the show's history that hurts more than "Jurassic Bark." This Season 4 episode follows Fry (Billy West) after he finds the fossilized remains of Seymour, his pet dog from his 20th-century life, on display in a museum exhibit. Professor Farnsworth (West) offers to clone Seymour and even imbue the clone with the original dog's memories, and Fry is thrilled to have his best friend from the previous millennia brought back to him. When Farnsworth informs Fry that Seymour died at the age of 15 — twelve years after Fry accidentally froze himself — Fry decides to let Seymour rest in peace, because the pup probably found a new family and a new life. 

We then find out that Seymour actually waited for Fry, because that was his last command to the dog before disappearing. Seymour was loyal to the end and spent 12 years of his life just waiting for his best friend to come back. The final shot of Seymour as a very old dog, still waiting, is utterly heartwrenching, and made all the worse by knowing Fry actually had a chance to see him one last time. The episode is infamous for a reason, but it's also excellent storytelling that's easily the biggest tearjerker in all of "Futurama." 

An animated dog waiting for the rest of its life to see its owner is one kind of sad, but live-action sitcoms can dig into real-life heartache just as powerfully. Long before he became a major movie star, Will Smith was known as a talented rapper who used his charisma and Bugs Bunny-like energy to propel himself to stardom on "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air." Some episodes of the 1990s series are pretty awful and way too silly, but occasionally, the show taught some painful life lessons. While the episodes on gun violence and racial profiling by police are both pretty grim, the "Fresh Prince" episode that showed off Smith's powerhouse acting chops and primed the audience for tears was Season 4's "Papa's Got a Brand New Excuse."

Will's father, Lou (Ben Vereen), reappears out of the blue after 14 years, saying he wants to be a part of Will's life, and the two plan a trip together. The young man even saves money for a present for his dad, but then Lou lets him down again, postponing the trip "for a week or two," though Will knows it will be indefinitely. He doesn't say anything to Lou, but when Uncle Phil (James Avery) tries to talk to his nephew about it, Will lets loose with a powerful monologue about not being wanted, prompting Phil, his true father figure, to embrace him. Will's pain is heartbreaking, but Phil's love for him is heartwarming. Where are the tissues?!

You might not expect a sitcom like the NBC hospital series "Scrubs" to pay homage to the M. Night Shyamalan horror classic "The Sixth Sense" and break your heart in the process, but that's what they did with the Season 3 episode "My Screw Up." In the episode, Dr. Cox's (John C. McGinley) partner Jordan (Christa Miller) and her sister Danni (Tara Reid) are preparing for the first birthday party of Cox and Jordan's son, Jack. Ben (Brendan Fraser), Jordan and Danni's brother and Dr. Cox's close friend, returns after two years to visit and reveals that while his leukemia is in remission, he hasn't been getting his routine check-ups. 

After one of his patients dies, Dr. Cox stays at the hospital for two straight days, and Ben begs him to go to the event Jordan and Danni are planning. Eventually, we discover that the event isn't Jack's birthday party, but Ben's funeral, and that the Ben Dr. Cox has been seeing is either a ghost or an element of his guilty conscience. After getting to know Ben as a guest star for two other great episodes, it was genuinely devastating to lose him in such a shocking way. When you add Fraser's charm and acting chops to that, it's all the more brutal, and "My Screw Up" is an emotional sucker punch.

"Scrubs" isn't the only sitcom that uses a last-second twist to deliver a wallop: The CBS sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" did it with an episode that's absolutely hilarious — until it isn't. In the Season 6 episode "Bad News," Marshall (Jason Segel) is waiting on the results of a fertility test after he and his wife, Lily (Alyson Hannigan), have been having a difficult time conceiving. Throughout the episode, we see a series of numbers as a kind of "countdown" to Marshall getting the "bad news," but most of the episode is really funny, with a subplot about their fertility doctor looking just like their friend Barney (Neil Patrick Harris). 

Then, in the final few minutes of the episode, Marshall gets good news from the fertility doctor and is thrilled to rush and share the news with Lily. She's distraught, however, and tells him that his father has just died after a heart attack. It's a shocking reveal made all the more painful because of Segel's performance: He wasn't made aware of the plot twist until the moment they shot the scene. He improvised the line "I'm not ready for this" as he sobs, and it's so earnest and raw that it's hard not to start crying yourself.

Finale episodes of sitcoms can always be a bit sad, because it's so hard to say goodbye to our favorite characters, but the series finale of the classic Korean War sitcom "M*A*S*H" was depressing for entirely different reasons. The feature-length episode partially followsbthe crew of the 4077th as they prepare to go home at the end of the war, but the lovable Hawkeye (Alan Alda) is nowhere to be seen. Instead of living up his final days in Korea with his friends, he spends the finale having a nervous breakdown and is put into a psychological institution, where psychiatrist Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus) helps him get to the root of what's bothering him. 

We see Hawkeye misremembering a moment when he told a South Korean woman with a chicken to be quiet so that nearby North Koreans wouldn't detect their location. The woman smothers the, but it's eventually revealed that she actually had a crying infant that she suffocated, leading to Hawkeye's total mental collapse. He eventually recovers and goes back to his hometown in Maine, but it's a brilliant bummer of a finale. Like "Scrubs," the amazing "M*A*S*H" often blurred the line between comedy and tragedy — to great effect — but the finale is just absolutely devastating and hard to forget.