Bathos is an anticlimactic descent from the elevated to the trivial, intentional or accidental.
Alexander Pope introduced 'bathos' in his satirical essay 'Peri Bathous, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry' (1727), as the deflationary opposite of 'pathos'. He meant it as a diagnosis of bad writing — the attempt at sublimity that collapses into the absurd. But comedians and ironists immediately recognised its uses. The Romantic and Victorian periods loved staging deliberate bathos for laughter; modern comedy lives on it. A line like 'For God, for country, and for snacks' works because the third term sabotages the seriousness of the first two. T.S. Eliot used calculated bathos to undercut his own grandeur ('I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'), and the device remains essential to stand-up routines, sitcoms, and almost anything written by Douglas Adams or P.G. Wodehouse.