Isn't it nice? You can do a drug that makes you talk to people you normally wouldn't talk to and talk about silly things you'd never even say in daylight!
— Robin Williams, A Night at the Met
Regardless of whether they're legal or illegal, stimulants naturally induce an intense surge of energy and enthusiasm, and that sometimes results in users becoming talkative, especially in social settings when there's nothing urgent at hand. Of course, it's not the only mental symptom... unless, of course, you're in Fictionland.
In fiction, stimulants — especially illegal ones like speed, cocaine, and methamphetamine — are popularly stereotyped as magical conversation starters for drug addicts, inducing an irresistible urge to talk non-stop at high speed for hours on end, often about the most inconsequential things on the face of the Earth. In users who have been hit hard by the surge of confidence that comes with all that energy, it's not uncommon for them to rant grandiosely about their plans for the future — especially if the user has no intention of acting on these plans once they're sober. And sometimes, if high enough, the user might end up getting more honest than they'd have liked.
Darker, more realistic portrayals of stimulants like meth may emphasize other notable symptoms alongside the ranting, namely aggression, emotional instability, paranoia, or even psychosis. A hallmark of the Addled Addict, the drug-fueled screeds are not automatic but prompted by something that happens to draw the user's ire and is accompanied by anger, mean-spiritedness, and even violence.
But of course, examples of this trope in action don't have to involve drugs that you wouldn't dare take through an airport: there's a whole host of legal stimulants that feature extreme loquaciousness as a side-effect, from prescription drugs to over-the-counter products. Certain kinds of Truth Serums may also result in this, especially the ones who work a little too well. Even caffeine may feature this symptom, Klatchian Coffee being a popular variant.
A Subtrope of Motor Mouth, though it should be emphasized that while the average Motor Mouth can ramble on for hours at high speed, they can still talk about things that are genuinely important. By contrast, the Chemical Chatterbox will talk for hours on end about the state of the wallpaper and nothing else.
Compare the Talkative Loon, who doesn't need any drugs to speak in rapid-fire nonsense. A sister trope to Sugar Causes Hyperactivity, the G-rated version.
Examples:
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Fan Works
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Never Give a Filly Coffee
, a young Twilight Sparkle says the "Sunshine, Sunshine" rhyme unusually fast due to having drunk coffee.
Films — Animated
- The Iron Giant: When Hogarth gets a caffeine rush from espresso, he starts talking rapidly about his school life.
Films — Live-Action
- The Black Phone: Max has been doing his own coke-fueled amateur investigation of the Grabber child abductions, and babbles off his theories to the cops, who ignore him. It takes him a while, but he's spot on, and is happy to ramble through how he solved the case only to get an axe in the head from his brother, who was the Grabber all along.
- George of the Jungle: George is left at Ursula's apartment and watches a TV advertisement for "coffee that brings you together... when you're in love". Taking this as instruction to make himself attractive to Ursula, George chomps down half a can of coffee grounds from the pantry and promptly starts bouncing off the walls from the caffeine. The gag ends with George staring at the camera going "Javajavajavajavajavajavajavajavajava..."
- In Bruges:
- After stealing from Chloe's drug cache, Ray shows up at a bar high on some of the purloined coke, talking at roughly a thousand miles an hour and warning Ken that he might be about to have a heart attack.
- Not long after this scene, a snorting session with dwarf actor Jimmy turns sour as a coked-up Jimmy starts rambling on about his belief in an upcoming race war. Ray is still high as a kite, so he naturally proceeds to nitpick the living bejesus out of the idea, much to Jimmy's annoyance.
- Layer Cake: The Duke and Slasher are both encountered doing lines of coke early in the film and probably do more offscreen given that both are prone to going on extremely loud, fast-paced rants at the slightest provocation. Mounting stress only makes them even more coke-addled and mouthy, especially once the Serbian gang they robbed sends an assassin after them. In their emergency meeting with Gene, Slasher goes off on a screaming rant that ends with her loudly and repeatedly threatening to go to the police, almost sounding like she's stuck on a loop. It gets her shot in the head by Gene's bodyguard, who then guns down the Duke for good measure.
- Requiem for a Dream: Anxious to fit into her red dress for a TV appearance, Sara Goldfarb tries losing weight with some heavy-duty diet pills heavily implied to be amphetamine. Consequently, when Harry comes to visit her, he can't help noticing just how exuberant and talkative she seems, asking him if he wants anything to eat or drink so quickly that he can barely keep up with her. Less amusingly, while still under the influence, Sara ends up confessing to how lonely, purposeless, and miserable she is without something to hope for. As she ups her dosage over the next few weeks, she becomes more and more talkative, even when people clearly aren't interested, until she's finally taken to a mental hospital with amphetamine psychosis.
- Scarface (1983):
- Omar Suarez immediately distinguishes himself as a fast talker who's more than happy to swing the conversation towards insulting Tony when prompted and even pulls a gun on him before his bodyguard calms him down. It's not until he avails himself to a quick snort of coke in each nostril that the audience figures out exactly why.
- Tony Montana himself begins to exhibit this once he starts Getting High on Their Own Supply, though he substitutes high-speed conversation for protracted rambling and screamed diatribes. In particular, after taking a bump just prior to the car-bombing mission from Sosa, Tony begins quietly ranting once he realizes that there are two children in the car until he loses composure and starts screaming at Alberto. Then he shoots Alberto in the head before he can trigger the bomb and continues shouting at the man's corpse.
- Starsky & Hutch: Starsky accidentally puts cocaine in his coffee instead of sugar and spends the rest of the night babbling endlessly.
- Superbad: After Evan goes to a side room to use a phone, a group of older guys enter the room without noticing him and start doing blow. Once they notice him, they mistake him for the brother of a friend, and the ringleader of the bunch goes on a spiel about how he needs to sing for them.
- Trainspotting: Spud deliberately tanks a job interview with a little help from a packet of cocaine (AKA Morningside Speed) to make himself so hyperactive and over-eager they won't want to hire him. As a result, he spends the interview gibbering on about schools he went to and going on lengthy digressions that don't endear him to the interviewers, meaning that he fails the interview in a way that makes it look like he genuinely tried, so he continues to get dole money.
- T2 Trainspotting: Fresh from the pickpocketing victory at the Unionist pub, Sick Boy celebrates with a line of cocaine and goes on to join Renton in a furiously paced overlapping rant about music, football, and McDonalds to an utterly baffled Veronika. For good measure, Sick Boy follows this by hoovering up yet another line.
- The Wolf of Wall Street:
- Very early on, Mark Hanna attributes success as a stockbroker mainly to cocaine because it allows him the energy to talk non-stop for hours on end, and true to form, he can very suddenly amplify his volume and speed when properly fueled — even leading Jordan Belfort on a bizarre warmup exercise in the middle of a restaurant, scant minutes after availing himself to a tiny minispoon of coke.
- Jordan follows his example, for though he's more of an Undiscriminating Addict, it's clear that he uses cocaine for the power to rant and ramble over the course of his workday. Among other things, he's seen honking a veritable train track of Colombian marching powder through a rolled-up dollar bill right before embarking on another weekly speech before his brokers, and such speeches often feature him getting both impressively motormouthed and incredibly bombastic.
Literature
- In Venus Prime, Blake is injected with a drug designed to compel him to speak, in hopes of interrogating him about the whereabouts of Sparta. He manages to escape but spends a whole night talking uncontrollably.
- In the Vorkosigan Saga novel "Brothers In Arms", Miles is captured by Komarran freedom fighters and interrogated under fast-penta. The drug ends up making him talk, but instead of answering questions, it ends up making him speak of any subject that comes to mind from what he hears his interrogators say. Finally one person comments that this will take all winter, Miles connects that to the phrase "Now is the winter of our discontent", and ends up reciting the entirety of Richard III from memory, at which point they throw him back in his cell. Note that fast-penta is actually a sedative, Miles just has messed-up drug reactions from his screwy medical history.
Live-Action TV
- 1000 Ways to Die: In "Micro-Whacked", Dennis the junkie tried a random combination of drugs every night, including cocaine and crystal meth. After taking a drug cocktail that drastically slows down his perception of time, Dennis is shown talking on the phone at high speed. The Narrator even comments that people couldn't keep up with him. Astonishingly enough, it's not the drugs that kill him, but his attempts to make his lava lamp go faster by heating it up in a microwave, resulting in an explosion.
- Boardwalk Empire: Al Capone is seen snorting coke at various points in the series, and as his usage increases, he can frequently be found ranting on at high speed, usually accompanied by several loud sniffs. By the time of his meeting with Luciano in "Cuanto", Capone can barely stop sniffing or talking, even while showing off a newsreel of his most famous crimes, indicating his mind is beginning to suffer as a result. note
- Breaking Bad:
- From his first episode onwards, Tuco Salamanca frequently gets high on the meth he's supposed to be distributing, and not only features a very volatile, talkative personality, but he's also prone to ranting at high speed after every snort and shouting things that make sense only to him. Screaming "Tight! Tight! Tight!" is probably the least bewildering thing that he says under the influence.
- In "Thirty-Eight Snub", Badger and Skinny Pete get back on meth at Jesse's insistence, and immediately start rambling on about depictions of zombies in video games, to the point that they're left too high to notice that Jesse is clearly in the middle of a mental breakdown.
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
- Invoked and played straight in "The Bank Job". Jake and Rosa plan to give corrupt cop Melanie Hawkins real coke, hoping she'll get sloppy and give something away when under the influence so they can catch her. When Adrian Pimento accidentally snorts coke three times attempting to demonstrate how to fake-snort coke, he gets so high he takes off his shirt and starts talking nonstop.
- In "The Big House", Jake accidentally gets high on Blizz (aka meth), since Romero smuggled it into the prison as soap that Jake used. This makes him go off on tangents about crown molding, lose track of what he's talking about, and accidentally say his thoughts out loud without realizing it.
- Exaggerated in "The Honeypot", when Jake, Rosa, and Holt accidentally drink too much cold brew from the new machine. This causes them to see everyone else as moving too slow, while to everyone else they are talking way too fast (particularly notable since Rosa and Holt are generally The Stoic).
Jake: [rapidly] If you're not going slow, that means we're going fast. Are we going fast? Can anyone tell if we're going fast?Rosa: [rapidly] I don't think we're going fast at all in any way whatsoever. I feel like we're going slow in every way whatsoever.
- Debbie steals a bunch of cocaine from the evidence room, and the episode "Debbie" opens with her acting high-strung and asking a bunch of weird questions. Because of her suspicious behavior, everyone in the precinct figures out that it was her almost immediately.
- CSI: Miami: In "Dispo Day" Calleigh begins talking non-stop after accidentally inhaling cocaine while working a crime scene where the drug has been hidden. She even answers a polygraph examiner who asks if her name is Calleigh Duquesne with "Yes. And my nickname is 'Lambchop'. But only my Dad calls me that!" then apologizes, saying she knows she's only supposed to give "yes" or "no" answers.
- Farscape: In "Dream A Little Dream Of Me," Chiana spends all night seducing one of the witnesses in the hopes of getting information out of him and is left hungover the following morning. Rygel gives her some stimulant pills to get her through the next stage of Zhaan's trial, warning her to take only one for every third of the day. Chiana, being Chiana, takes all three at once. She spends the next session completely hopped out of her brain, gibbering high-speed nonsense at the witnesses and frequently going on wildly unnecessary digressions.
- Feel Good: When Mae and Maggie go for coffee, Maggie is displeased with the strength of the coffee, and goes behind the counter to brew more. In the next scene she and Mae are talking excitedly about all the ways to avoid addictive cravings, and after they leave the table we see a pile of empty coffee cups.
- House: In "Resignation", House spikes Wilson's coffee with amphetamines, resulting in him conducting conversations at a thousand miles an hour, being unable to stay on one topic, and frequently getting tripped up by what word to use. It's not until he belatedly notices his own erratic behavior that he takes stock of things, finds that he now has a heart rate of 185 bpm, realizes what's happened, and goes to confront House about it — resulting in the now-memetic line "I'm not on antidepressants, I'm on speeeeeeeeeed!"
- Discussed in an episode of Life on Mars (2006): A suspect dies from a heart attack while in custody due to heavy cocaine use; at first, Gene thinks that the suspect had taken cocaine before his arrest, but Sam notes that the suspect wasn't talkative or jumpy during the interview, which means he must have taken it after he was taken into custody.
- Saturday Night Live: The digital short "Great Day" by The Lonely Island features Andy Samberg as a man who emerges from his trashed house with a telltale white smear below his nose. He sings about his optimism despite losing his job and his marriage, and then pauses to snort more cocaine, which makes the song speed up into double time. His ramblings include moving to Spain, curing all diseases, and living in The Matrix.
- Spaced bicycle messanger Tyres O'Flaherty is a raver, who suffers from side effects of long-term stimulant abuse, which include dancing to random repeating sounds like ronging phones and traffic light beeps, and of course, talks like a storm.
Tyre: Last night was an A-1, tip top clubbing jam fair. It was a sandwich of fun on ecstasy bread, wrapped up in a big bag like disco fudge. It doesn't get much better than that, I just wish sometimes I could control these FOCKING MOOD SWINGS!
- Stargate Atlantis: In the episode "The Hive", Rodney gives himself an injection of Wraith enzyme to overcome the guards keeping him from reaching the Stargate, and he manages to get back to Atlantis just as the mental symptoms really take hold... and unlike Ford, the other major enzyme user encountered, the mental symptoms feature Rodney babbling like a cocaine addict and being unable to focus on anything other than the two guards he beat up.
- Top Gear (UK): During the South America special, Hammond nibbles on some coca leaves from a convenience store in Bolivia. Shortly afterwards, it cuts to him in his car chattering away at double speed.
Radio
- GTA Radio:
- In keeping with his energetic sports fan persona, Derrick Thackery of The Tight End Zone spends most of his show erupting with enthusiasm at Mach 3, and it's heavily implied that he's managing this due to cocaine, as he can be heard letting out a few conspicuously loud sniffs while one of his more talkative callers rambles on in the background. For good measure, he has a tendency to go off on tangents that have very little to do with sport.
- Marvin Trill of Area 53 heavily implies that he's on cocaine, talks almost non-stop about increasingly illogical conspiracy theories, and has been known to swing wildly off-topic over the course of a single sentence.
Standup Comedy
- Bill Bailey will infrequently joke about cocaine usage, which usually features the intoxicated character talking about everything at high speed, usually while going on insanely energetic walks. In Cosmic Jam, his version of the Nativity features Mary and Joseph's donkey doing a line of cocaine, getting them to Bethlehem in record time, and spending the rest of the stay with a massive nosebleed, all while holding a sheep in a headlock and repeatedly babbling "You're family, you are!"
- George Carlin had a routine about big pharma making drug use socially acceptable. Diet pills marketed to housewives had a stimulant side effect that caused rapid speech. Carlin mimics a son wondering why his mother is behaving oddly: "What's this, Mom? Shopping at midnight?" The reply is a flurry of syllables that explain everything, including contingencies, in less than ten seconds. Then, *zip* Mom's out the door and gone.
- In his post-relapse special "Baby J", John Mulaney slyly admits that his past stage persona was very much helped by constant covert cocaine use and describes some more manic moments from his heavy use days, like when he negotiated the purchase and resale of a Rolex watch to get cash, and his response to an intervention by his friends and colleagues.
- Robin Williams demonstrates a lot of this during his skit on drugs in A Night At The Met, having personal experience with cocaine use. Among other things, he wonders if there are any professional athletes who don't end up on Hookers and Blow and suggests that golfers are among them. He then follows up by imagining a coked-up golfer furiously charging through a course at lightspeed, and then descending into a gibbering rant about the commentator talking too slowly, interrupting himself to warn people that there might be snakes in the holes.
Video Games
- Grand Theft Auto III: The drug "SPANK" appears to be a stand-in for both cocaine and methamphetamine, and one of its side-effects appears to be diarrhea of the mouth: one addict calls Chatterbox with a claim that SPANK isn't bad for you at all, only to demand why Lazlo hasn't answered him in the space of a second and call him a pansy, before ranting about how toothpaste is used to control the masses. Less amusingly, the mission "Kingdom Come" features the player being attacked by SPANK-crazed suicide bombers who scream nonsense as they swarm you from all angles.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Returning character Ken Rosenberg spends his first few scenes too crushed with anxiety to say anything until encouraged by Kent Paul. However, after getting back on cocaine a couple of missions later, he's talking at a million miles an hour and able to deliver non-stop exposition, interspersed with the occasional loud sniff. Plus, he's easily distracted by "my beautiful wall" during his initial rant.
- Mass Effect 3: the Citadel DLC reveals that Kaiden Alenko turns out to be a tad dependent on coffee in the mornings, and in sharp contrast to his sober, responsible usual self, the caffeine makes him babble at high speed to anyone else who might want coffee — interspersed with queries of "am I being too loud?"
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner: In the sbemail "caffeine," a viewer suggests to Strong Bad that he slip Strong Sad some caffeine to make him less whiny. He stirs a few heaping spoonfuls of Sanka (which is decaf) into Strong Sad's orange juice, which makes him hyperactive, twitchy, and chatty.
Strong Bad: So, Strong Sad, tell me. How do you feel?Strong Sad: I feel great! I feel great! I feel great! I feel bad. I don't even watch football. I don't even watch football. I can't remember my legs!
- PONY.MOV: While high on cocaine in public, Pinkie Pie starts randomly yelling about digital piracy to random strangers.
Pinkie Pie: You know what I can't stand?! Internet piracy! How would you like it if musicians stole from you? (to a green pony with sunglasses) What if Cannibal Corpse stole your precious glasses? (to Octavia) And you! What would you do if Ringo Starr just waltzed into your house and stole your... um... favorite dress?Octavia: I think I'd mostly just be confused?
Web Comics
- Grrl Power: The villains inject a captured Halo with a truth serum to get inside information on ARCHON, except it backfires spectacularly. As it happens, using a truth serum on a Motor Mouth Cloudcuckoolander with ADHD only results in an absolutely non-stop blabbering, stream-of-consciousness run-on sentence devoid of any useful intel (except maybe for the dating status of some members)... which threatens Sydney with passing out from lack of oxygen, and possibly worse judging by her independently dilating pupils.
- Girl Genius: Agatha's first exposure to coffee sets off her Spark, causing her to start speaking a mile a minute, read (and proofread) a book in a matter of seconds, and then disassemble and rebuild the coffee machine from scratch. Her guardians actually expected that something like this would happen, which is why Agatha had never had caffeine until leaving home.
Web Video
- Atop the Fourth Wall: the review for New Guardians #2 introduced the short-lived comic villain Snowflame, whose superpowers are fueled by cocaine. A version of the character, played by Linkara's friend then became a recurring character on the show, doing bombastic, nonsensical rants, often starting or ending with a dramatic "SNOWFLAME!"
- CollegeHumor's "The Roast Of Weed" gives us a depiction of a bag of cocaine, personifying the drug as a very fast talker and taking deep breaths in between sentences. After being well for about 20 seconds, it eventually faints after the rapid-fire roasting it gives weed.
- What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?: In the "Rainbow Cringe" episode, Nash and Tara cover an incident in which a man was caught smuggling twenty-three pounds of cocaine through an airport via his wheelchair. While reflecting on how stupid the guy must have been to think that TSA personnel wouldn't search his wheelchair, Nash speculates that he must have been on cocaine when he came up with the idea and when he went through the airport — and was probably caught because he was trying too hard to look sober. Nash and Tara then provide their best impression of the perpetrator babbling on about the colour of his wheelchair and sniffing loudly.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: In "Stannie, Get Your Gun", Bullock keeps for himself a magic machine that transforms water into cocaine. When the other CIA agents wonder where he's been since, we cut to a near-naked Avery in a broken-down hotel room filled with empty water jugs, rambling on to the junkie sitting on the bed.
Bullock: Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Listen to me. Charlie? CHARLIE! ...what was your name again?
- Archer:
- During the Archer Vice arc, Pam gets addicted to the cocaine they are trying to sell and becomes very talkative and irritable, not to mention prone to decidedly irrational outbursts.
- After Lana becomes the new boss, the Agency is tasked with destroying a cocaine processing plant in Ibiza. When Archer and the other field agents abandon the mission to live undercover at a local fishing village, Lana goes undercover as a night club owner looking to purchase a large amount, to which the dealers respond by making her test the wares, which leads to Lana going on a fast-paced rant about how her employees "at the nightclub" are worthless.
- One episode of BoJack Horseman sees BoJack, Todd, and Sarah Lynn take a lot of drugs, including cocaine, in order to try and bang out BoJack's memoirs ahead of a deadline. They spend much of the night rambling on about whatever is on their minds instead, and by the end of the night, the resulting memoir includes five different, contradictory theories about September 11, twenty pages of erotic Doctor Who fanfiction, and a recipe for soup.
- Family Guy:
- In "The Thin White Line," Brian ends up accidentally getting exposed to cocaine while working as a police sniffer dog and quickly descends into addiction. Consequently, he shows up at dinner while high and fires off a thirty-second-long monologue that begins with the awful things he saw at work and ends with a bizarre digression on "a damn oil spot on your cracked driveway, staring at you", resulting in a Stunned Silence.
- Halfway through the road trip to San Francisco in "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story", Stewie gets hold of some "West Coast Turnarounds" from a trucker to keep him awake on the journey to San Francisco. Unfortunately, after being advised to only take one, Stewie takes the entire bottle, then goes offroad. Consequently, Brian finds him so hopped up on amphetamines that he can only communicate by screaming at the top of his lungs at an absolutely furious pace, rambling on about how they share the Manifest Destiny spirit of the pioneers.
- In "It Takes A Village Idiot, And I Married One", a Cutaway Gag features Peter doing cocaine, after which he spends several seconds asking if they have enough napkins at high speed, anxiously looks around the room, then repeatedly asks if the framed painting on the wall behind him is straight until he Deteriorates Into Gibberish and smashes it in a fit of rage.
- Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In "Babyfier", the eponymous experiment turns the adults (alien or otherwise) into babies. Baby Jumba creates a cure for the transformation, for which one of the ingredients involves coffee beans. He and baby Pleakley get some from the local coffee shop and use them to revert back to normal. However, Pleakley ends up jittering and talking without end due to the caffeine.
- Total Drama: "The Am-AH-Zon Race" uses a more G-rated version when Gwen tries to retrieve Cody's EpiPen and accidentally gets the needle stuck in her hand. He reassures her that it'll just be like a big shot of adrenaline, but she spends the rest of the episode with her eyes bugging out and rambling incoherently.
