Stoners Are Funny

In the grand spectrum of media-depicted drug addiction, most junkies are seen as anything from piteous to terrifying. Tales abound of the superhuman strength of a PCP/methamphetamine addict, or the despair of a crack addict, or the sheer horrors of a bad acid trip...

Not so much the pot smoker. Potheads are funny, mellow dudes interested in a good time wherein nobody gets hurt. Stoners are cool. They won't try to stab somebody because they think he's Dracula, or claw their eyes out because there are beetles in them. And it's not as if someone's going to complain, lest they get arrested for illegal drug use.

The funny pothead can be seen as an updated version of the Funny Drunk, which is a mostly Discredited Trope due to changing awareness of alcoholism.

See also The Stoner, G-Rated Drug, Erudite Stoner, and G-Rated Stoner. Compare with 420, Blaze It, another funny thing associated with weed.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Leigharch, the driver from Black Lagoon, who's high as a kite on either cocaine (manga) or marijuana (anime) when the gang gets caught up in a car chase with a fire fight. Hilarity Ensues. Eventually, he overdoses and is put in a psych ward.
• Kakeru Otori from We Without Wings gets pretty baked from pot and some very peculiar scented candles.

Comedy

• On his 1978 album Bill's Best Friend Bill Cosby delineates the difference between a stoner and a drunk.
  Bill Cosby: Dope smokers support half of Disneyland. You don't know that... they love to get ripped and go to Disneyland! [acts out taking a toke] "Oh, man...a giant mouse! What's happenin,' mouse? This your missus?" Drunk people do not support Disneyland. They think they're getting the D.T.'s again.
• George Carlin made this his stock in trade early on with Al Sleet the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, his 1974 album Toledo Window Box and subjects like "High on the Plane."
  George Carlin: I used to smoke up in the forward lavatory because I figured the mirror was two-way and the crew was watching. Always offered the crew a hit, naturally.

Comic Books

• Matt MacLimore's stoner relative who pops up for a short period in Dork Tower and is never heard from again. His main claim to fame is smoking Matt's wargames terrain.
• Entire cast of Bob The Dog.

Fan Works

• Everyone at Station 51 in the fic "The Buzz" minus Roy and Johnny. A grateful rescued lady brings pot brownies to the firehouse. Chet and Marco are found outside in their underwear, firing their hose at the neighboring refinery, Cap does voodoo to try and get McConneike and Mike is playing on the phone. But, when Brice is called in to watch the guys til it wears off, he eats several brownies and is found on a table, doing an Elvis impersonation.
• Barret in the Final Fantasy VII fic Time Paradox.
  Barret: SPYDAHS!!
• Elladan and Elrohir in Bag Enders. Their exploits include getting tricked into traveling across Siberia, selling "special Lembas", and driving an ice-cream van around a block 12 times while looking for the Fellowship's house (with their buddy Dave out cold in the back.)
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Reefer Mareness runs on this trope.
• Much like in the source material, The Simpsons: Team L.A.S.H. portrays Otto Mann as a comic relief character who mostly just exists to say silly non-sequiturs.

Films — Animation

• The druggie from Sausage Party, full stop.
  "The bath salts are showin' me the real world. IT'S FUCKIN' LIFTED THE VEIL OF NON-REALITY!"
• Merlin of Shrek the Third is implied to be one of these.
• Yax in Zootopia acts like he's slow-minded and perpetually stoned. On top of that, he works at a nudist resort club.

Films — Live-Action

• Spicoli and his buddies from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Upon seeing Specoli entering the American History class, one student comments "That guy's been stoned since the third grade."
• The Cheech & Chong movies.
• Pineapple Express.
• Grandma's Boy (2006).
• Brad Pitt played a funny stoner in True Romance.
• This trope is also the whole point of Dazed and Confused.
  • There's really only Slater who's a classic stoner. The rest smoke a lot, but are not particularly goofy.
• The basis of the comedy in Dude, Where's My Car?.
• Leonardo Nam plays Roy, a comic stoner, in The Perfect Score.
• Half Baked.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.
• Michael McKean's character in Earth Girls Are Easy isn't actually seen smoking dope, but...
• Jay and Silent Bob.
• Ed the Good Burger guy.
• The eponymous alien in Paul.
• Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski. He's NOT Mister Lebowski. He's the Dude. So that's what you call him, you know...
• In Platoon, some stoners, including Johnny Depp, dancing with statues and "getting high". They're not so funny when it gets to fight.
• In Jackie Brown, Melanie sure fits in. Louis didn't like it.
• Reefer Madness tries to avert this trope, but proceeds to enforce it by being So Bad, It's Good.
• Rollercoaster: Two hippie park guests debate about whether it was marijuana that made one of them see a dog (part of the bomb squad) on a rollercoaster track.
• The Cabin in the Woods has Marty, obviously intended to be the comic relief character, introduced exiting his car accompanied by a huge cloud of weed smoke. This hides the fact that he's actually The Hero.
• Some humour in Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood is provided by the Leprechaun trying out weed, and trying quell the munchies that follow.
• In Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a couple of teenagers in Leslie's target group are a couple of potheads credited as "Stoned Guy" and "Slightly More Stoned Guy".
• This pot smoking scene in Where The Boys Are '84.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas phases between this and "junkies are terrifying", depending on what illicit substances Raoul Duke and his lawyer consumed most recently.
• Smiley Face features an example of a rare female lead.
• Radagast the Brown is depicted as a stoner in The Hobbit in everything but actual herb of choice. He's a Cloud Cuckoolander that really, really enjoys puffing on his pipe filled with mushrooms (type unstated).

Live-Action TV

• The main cast (but especially Kelso, Hyde, Eric and Fez) in That '70s Show. Scenes showing them smoking something that's very obviously pot but is never officially confirmed as pot (called the Circle) occur in every episode. (Almost) all of them are hilarious. That goes double for Leo... played by Tommy Chong from the Cheech and Chong movies.
• Played mostly straight on Bored to Death. Much of the show's humor derives from the fact that the protagonists are avid stoners, and while it sometimes gets them in trouble, it's still funny.
• Broad City is built on this trope, and it's one of the only "stoner humor" TV shows to have women as the main characters.
• As Disjointed takes place primarily in a marijuana dispensary, this is only inevitable. Pete, Dank, and Dabby are the most prominent examples.
• GLOW (2017):
  • Stacy and Dawn, two middle aged hairdressers who are hired partly for their comedic chops as a duo, spend time at the motel smoking a bong and making crank calls to the other wrestlers. Later, the bong also is passed around as the cast brainstorms ideas for their KDTV finale, and Carmen gets the idea to have an in-ring wedding.
  • Rhonda and Melrose are also prone to sharing joints and pondering weird hypotheticals.
• How I Met Your Mother often uses this trope when it flashes back to the Main Characters' college years, though The Narrator always refers to the activity they take part in as "eating a sandwich," complete with the joints transformed into hoagie sandwiches.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In-universe in one episode, where the others find it hilarious when Frank smokes a bong and turns into a Talkative Loon.
• 2 Broke Girls:
  • The Cold Open of the episode "And the Cupcake Wars" has Oleg unable to do his job because he smoked some weed. A string of marijuana jokes ensues.
  • Later that season, "And the High Holidays", develops this extensively. This time the joke's on Caroline, who apparently is one of those rare people who gets pessimistic and depressed when stoned (although in the episode, she consumes it from a spiked cupcake).
• In Supernatural Andy is the comic relief among the special children and he is also the only one shown using pot.
• In 1000 Ways to Die, one of the most tragicomical deaths went to two stoners who stole a saguaro cactus. They started hallucinating that the saguaro loudly called them out for their theft, then ran away without looking... very literally. And it was almost wholly Played for Laughs.
• Rev. Jim Ignatowski from Taxi, a former hippie who never recovered from the 60s. His excessive drug use over the years rendered him Cloud Cuckoolander. During his hippie days, he changed his name from Caldwell to Ignatowski, believing it was "Starchild" spelled backwards, and wrote his college term papers in fingerpaint.
• Trailer Park Boys: the main cast are all smokers, a lot of the plot and comedy center around weed.
• The stoner couple from the 2nd episode of The X-Files, one of whom uses his hamburger to portray a hovering UFO.
• There have been fictional and real-life examples of TV reporters getting high while reporting on drug busts involving burn-offs:
  • BBC reporter Quentin Sommerville, while reporting on a narcotics bust in Afghanistan.
  • New Zealand comedian Billy T James during the 1980s.
  • This parody news report in Drop the Dead Donkey.
• Feel Good: One of Mae's fellow comedian regulars at the club wears a suit emblazoned with Marijuana leaves, and is constantly high.

Music

• Napoleon XIV (the man behind "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!") gave us "(I Owe A Lot To) Iowa Pot."
• The Cab Calloway song "Reefer Man" has it straight up.
  Have you ever met the funny Reefer Man? Have you ever met the funny Reefer Man?
  If he trades you dimes for nickels and calls watermelons pickles, you know you're talking to the Reefer Man.

Video Games

• The Truth in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Web Animation

• This is Chase's shtick in Tomorrow's Nobodies, especially considering the episode he's introduced in is a Whole-Plot Reference to Half Baked.
• Jenna Dapananian from The Most Popular Girls in School, Season 3 onward.

Web Comics

• Subverted in Homestuck, where Gamzee Makara (who is The Stoner, but from a Fantastic Drug) is treated this way at first. Later, he runs out and realises the drug was actually rotting his brain, and in addition to having his religion mocked, this makes him flip his shit and become an Omnicidal Maniac Monster Clown.
• Times Like This: In this strip, Matt has some fun with stoners in The '60s.
• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff plays this every so often, or at least tries to - we wouldn't really know if not for the stooned imagery everywhere. SUDDENLY WEED DREAMS◊.
• Main Premise of Drugs And Kisses, practically the entire named cast are stoners.
• Essentially Kingston's entire role in S.S.D.D.. There's also an arc where he offers his landlord, Richard, a rather long toke in an attempt to get out of paying rent, Hilarity Ensues.

Web Original

• That High, which is basically FML, but for stoners instead of unlucky people.
• Tiffany from Less is Morgue is a stoner so extreme she seems fully out of touch with reality.
  Riley: Jesus Christ, Tiffany, I knew you were a little blazed but did I miss you getting into meth?
• The Onion:
  • The article Everyone Involved in Pizza's Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High.
  • Resident columnist Jim Anchower.
• Bum Reviews: Chester A. Bum often gives hints on being a stoner.
• The higher the Highcraft players get, the more nonsensical and hilarious their antics become.

Western Animation

• Norville "Shaggy" Rogers from Scooby-Doo may or may not be an actual stoner, but how can people not jump to that conclusion? He's always hungry (he eats dog treats, for crying out loud), he's always freaking out over monsters, and he even looks and speaks like a hippie stereotype.
  • William Hanna and Joseph Barbera patterned the Scooby-Doo characters after the characters in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, a 1950s sitcom featuring Dawson casted "teenage" characters. Shaggy is an expy of Maynard G. Krebs (played by a pre-Gilligan's Island Bob Denver), the show's resident beatnik. Freddy was Dobie, Velma was Zelda, and so forth. Not sure if drugs factored in either Shaggy or Maynard's lifestyles, but being "laid-back" didn't start with hippies. Of course, it being a 1960's cartoon with already ten-year old pop-cultural references doesn't help matters...
  • This was parodied, like so many other elements of the series, in the live-action film. One scene has smoke billowing out of the Mystery Machine while Shaggy and Scooby are inside, laughing and saying "talk about toasted!"... then we find out that they're cooking breakfast.
    • And further lampshaded by Shaggy's love interest, Mary Jane. When he meets her, he says "Like, that's my favorite name of all time!"
  • Real-life effects of pot aside, Scooby's ability to speak is a great source of Epileptic Trees. ^note The fact that he can eat loads of chocolate (which would kill a real dog) supports the theory that Scooby is a part of Shaggy's split personality and the rest of the gang is either humoring him or outright making fun of him ("Does 'Scooby' want a snack?").
• Otto Mann, the Springfield Elementary bus driver from The Simpsons. Signs suggesting he actually smokes pot didn't crop up until season seven. Prior to that, he was just some perpetual teenager who drove a school bus (despite not having a license), got along great with kids, and loved rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s.
• Trent and especially Jesse from Daria.
• Towelie on South Park is a deconstruction of this trope; he's actually pretty resourceful and alright to be around when not high. However, when he is (which is extremely frequently), he rapidly becomes sedate, boring, and useless.

Real Life

• The late Mitch Hedberg.
• Bill Bailey, very much so.
• Cheech & Chong.
• Wendy Rieger
• Real life stoners in general really. Especially if you are one of them.

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