Follow TV Tropes

Following

Vulgar Humor

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/1024px_spy_urinal.jpg

Peter: Patches, are you sure that this is completely necessary?
Patches: "Necessary"? Is it "necessary" for me to drink my own urine?
Peter: Probably not.
Patches: Naw, but I do it anyway because it's sterile and I like the taste.

This is when shock value meets Rule of Funny.

Normally, when we see such shocking stuff, we cover our eyes in disgust. However, when used right, it gains a humorous shading to it. Whether it gets a laugh depends on the audience and how it's done. When done right, it's hilarious. When done wrong, it just offends the audience. It all goes back to the execution, Tropes Are Tools, after all. But some people just don't enjoy this type of comedy no matter how well it's done, and may as a result consider all vulgar humor inherently low effort.

Tropes that often, but not always, fall under this:

Compare Crosses the Line Twice. See Bottom of the Barrel Joke for when this is an excuse for lazy writing.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • The entire point of John Roecker's 2006 stop-motion animated Live Freaky Die Freaky. For the unaware, Roecker, inspired by the prolific number of copies of Charles Manson's Helter Skelter, crafted a stop-motion animated musical comedy about the misadventures of the "Hanson cult", as read by a 31st century post-apocalyptic nomad who believes his discovered copy of Vince Bugliosi's ''Helter Skelter'' is The Bible. Relevant examples include multiple ludicrously long scenes of puppet sex, a very pregnant Sharon "Hate" singing a profanity-laden song about how much she hates the environment, and more puppet sex. The Washington Post said that it was like the below mentioned Pink Flamingos, only more surreal and for an even smaller audience.
  • The Haunted World of El Superbeasto. Jokes about sex, flying gore, constant nudity, it's all in there.
  • Don't even get us started on Sausage Party, with its raunchy humor, sexual innuendos, and countless F-bombs. But considering that it's a film co-produced by Seth Rogen, this should not at all be surprising.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • This is the whole point of Pink Flamingos, a movie that is still untoppable in its offensiveness almost forty years after it was made.
  • Problem Child 2 had a lot of crude humor compared to the first.
  • The Scary Movie films are often criticized for relying far too heavily on this (the least vulgar is the third, which even tries to do so by focusing more on nonsense and slapstick). Date Movie (starting Seltzer and Friedberg's directorial "careers") is said to be even worse. And then there's Epic Movie (2007), Meet the Spartans, and Disaster Movie (2008)...
  • Your Highness takes this trope to the extreme. It's a comedy film with endless vulgarity, all Played for Laughs.
  • The WCW movie Ready to Rumble.
  • Several critics have described Semi-Pro as falling victim to this trope, with some of the funniest moments in the movie also being the ones that could just as easily have gotten by in a PG-13 comedy.
  • Transformers Film Series:
  • Me, Myself & Irene:
    • The movie trots this trope out in the guise of Charlie's three "sons" — geniuses who seemingly can't speak a sentence without "muthafuckin'" showing up somewhere in it. Subverted in that the humor comes from watching them discuss particle physics or how to hotwire a helicopter while swearing a blue streak a mile wide.
    • A further example would be Jim Carrey shitting on his neighbour's lawn, or urinating all over the shower curtains due to morning glory.
  • Some of the other Farrelly Bros films can qualify, such as There's Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber.
  • The entirety of The Underground Comedy Movie directed by Vince Offer. Its Spiritual Successor (originally envisoned as a sequel) inAPPropriate Comedy too.
  • Much of the fun in the The Rocky Horror Picture Show Audience Participation routines seems to be in shouting obscene call lines at the screen (and sometimes at other audience members). Generally, though, these remarks are clever at the same time as being gratuitous. Audience lines that fall under this trope are often the mark of an inexperienced "participator".
  • About 3/4 of Italian television. Vulgarity is so widespread on the mainstream channels that even certain shows or cartoons that aren't particularly vulgar where they were produced (most notably The Simpsons) have numerous sexual innuendos and bad words. The Italian comedians Cristian DeSica and Massimo Boldi's "Christmas Holidays" series is especially gross, featuring mainly naked women, explicit sex, bad words, farts and belches, with the films numbering in the dozens (all considered "family movies". God knows why). After the duo split up, they both started making movies like this every Christmas, doubling the rate of production.
    • This trope applies more to the movies who aren't directed by Carlo Vanzina. His movies (like the original Vacanze di Natale or Vacanze Di Natale 2000) actually avoid toilet humour and gratuitous nudity for most part, focusing more on Love Triangle plots and comedy-of-error style. Nevertheless, expect some Fanservice.
  • Freddy Got Fingered. The movie's very name should tell you enough.
  • The Movie of the Saturday Night Live sketch MacGruber practically lives and breaths this trope.
  • The 1996 remake of The Nutty Professor took quite a bit of refuge in rather crude humor. One example was the constant use of the word "ass" throughout the move, most of it being used during the dinner with the Klumps, as well as Papa Klump loudly farting at the table in response to Mama Klump's suggestion of getting a colonic, and doing it up to six times (with Ernie Jr, their grandson, even managing to mimic his grandpa's farting once), with the sixth time having him leave the table apparently due to soiling his pants. The sequel was even worse in that regard, with more of Grandma Klump being a Dirty Old Woman and stuff such as rape by giant hamster.
  • The Hangover had some... while the sequel is basically fueled by vulgar content (hermaphrodite prostitutes, drug dealing/smoking monkeys, cut fingers).
  • The gentlemen's club scene in Mystery Team, as well as the one immediately following it, qualifies for this.
  • The menstruation joke in Superbad.
  • The Aristocrats. That's the point of the joke.
  • Gross Out. This film's so bad with it, that The Cinema Snob had to put a warning in front of his review, something he didn't do with Nekromantik, Salo, or even Pink Flamingos!
  • That's My Boy and The Watch (2012), both R-rated comedies of summer 2012, are fueled pretty much entirely by vulgar content. Despite the big stars that were headlining them, neither were particularly popular among most people for this reason.
  • Movie 43. It's essentially one skit after another that attempts to be as vulgar and offensive as possible in some way or another. If you get through the whole thing, it's likely that you've witnessed every single trait of R-rated raunch used to it's full potential. And for the sake of keeping this entry appropriate, that's as far into detail as we're going to get. Amusingly, the aforementioned inAPPropriate Comedy got released just a few months after it.
  • Strays (2023) is full of it, including an entire montage of dogs pooping.

    Literature 
  • In Ariel (Block) Ariel and Erskine, both twelve, have become good friends, and while Erskine cracks crude sex jokes all the time, they agree that they don't really want to have sex, because they are friends.
  • Voltaire's Candide has a lot of examples, including a woman who is missing half a buttock due to cannibalism.
  • Lesser known Spanish book for kids / teens Los Lagartijos LOVES this. While the first one is quite vulgar,it eventually stops doing it. The sequel, in the other hand, cranked the vulgarity up.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies insists on making a double entendre out of the word "balls" whenever it's used.
  • Go the Fuck to Sleep presents itself as what appears to be a children's book through the illustrations, but the entire book is an Affectionate Parody of the genre since it was made for adults that can relate when their child just won't go the fuck to sleep while many F bombs are dropped. It gets taken up to eleven when the audio version is voiced by Samuel L. Jackson. And then there's the sequel, You Have To Fucking Eat along the same lines but with kids who won't eat anything.
  • The entire reason for the existence of The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard.

    Live-Action TV 

    Music 
  • Anti-Nowhere League's "So What?".
  • EVERY SINGLE HOLIDAY, A DICK IN A BOX.
    • Just about every song by The Lonely Island fits this trope. The punchline of most of the songs is that the first line or title is vulgar: "I just had sex," "Dick in a box," "Jizz in my pants," "I'm on shrooms," or every line of "Natalie's Rap".
  • hide loved this trope on occasion, usually in lives or promotional videos, but occasionally in lyrics as well. A few good examples would be the squirming naked people in cages in one televised live of "Dice" from 1994, the live-only "Natural Born Onanist," the lyrics to "Bacteria" and "Doubt," and almost ANY live of "Rocket Dive," and its album cover, which makes it quite clear the song is not about spaceflight in a spaceship...
    • "Rocket Dive" also could possibly double as Shout-Out and Ho Yay - if you're familiar with the X Japan song "Standing Sex" (another example of this trope) where Yoshiki Hayashi in writing the lyrics referred to his "rocket."
  • Two Brazilian bands were experts in this, Raimundos (their first hit was a man expressing desire to become the seat of a bicycle; another one, achieved through "found poetry", is named "I Ejaculated On a Lever") and Mamonas Assassinas (who also had a "found poetry" song about what soap does to your pubic hair, and had one song consisting on just dirty "facts" about animals).
    • The above-mentioned "Sabão cra cra" basically sings the praises of soap. The lyrics say that (spoilered for, ya know, explicit lyrics) soap does not do any of the following things to the hair on your balls: it does not make it roll up, it does not make it stand up, it does not make it fall out, it does not make it knot together, and most importantly, it does not make it get tangled up with the hair on your asshole.
  • Passenger of Shit, and anything associated with him, probably because it's funny.
  • Flanders&Swann lampooned this tendency back in the 50's in "P** P* B*** B** D*** "
  • Wesley Willis was particularly fond of this, interestingly not only for humorous intent, but also to deal with his "mean schizophrenic demons". He basically knew he was schizophrenic and wanted to tell his demons to engage in bestiality in hopes that would make them leave him alone.
  • Eminem's entire career.
    • The only singles he has released that don't have the word "fuck" in them are "Just Lose It" and "We Made You".
    • "Kill You" is an extremely funny track, Played for Laughs, that is about him raping and murdering his mother.
    • His album Encore combines this with Toilet Humour to deliberately-dumb effect.
  • The entirety of Blaze Ya Dead Homie's "Nasty". Among the things referenced in the lyrics include reusing Anybody Killa's condoms, sex with chickens, swimming in a portable toilet and things that are too graphic to describe here.
  • Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.
  • GWAR has everything under the sun; gratuitous swearing, toilet humor, blasphemy and obscene violence. They also bring dead politicians and celebrities back to life to kill them again, just to keep up with the bad taste.
  • Mindless Self Indulgence. Songs like "I'm Your Problem Now," "Backmask," and "Panty Shot" are prime examples.
  • Maximum the Hormone. Have a look at their album covers and song titles some time.
  • Half the fun of Goregrind music is the band and songs' disgusting, offensive and overly long titles. Examples include Vomit Erection's "Warm Diarrhoea Blasts On My Face" and the Meat Shits' "Excrement Infection of the Male Urethra".
  • Mojo Nixon does this on some of his songs, perhaps most gratuitously on "Tie My Pecker to My Leg" which, aside from the title, gives us lines such as "Yeah her asshole is tighter than a steel drum/And I'd eat a yard of her shit to watch her cum" and "I need a woman six foot ten/She's gotta be that tall so I can get it all in."
  • blink-182 have several short and extremely vulgar tracks, the best known being Family Reunion (a 36 second song made up entirely of profanity) and F**k A Dog.
  • Iron Maiden's B-side "Nodding Donkey Blues", a Spinal Tap-like song about a Big Beautiful Woman.
  • Platypus by Green Day, the bridge consists of the following:
    Dickhead, fuckface, cock-smoking, motherfucking asshole, dirty twat, waste of semen hope you die - hey!
  • Frank Zappa frequently indulged in this. If you want examples, try his 1979 rock opera Joe's Garage, which contains, among other things, songs about sexually transmitted infections, Prison Rape and hard sex with robots.
  • Ben Hoffman's Country Music side project Wheeler Walker Jr. all but runs on this. His very first album was titled "Redneck Shit", it had a pre-release preview on PornHub, and was one of the few albums to have topped both the Billboard country and comedy album charts.
  • PSY loved this trope too when he debuted during Turn of the Millennium. However, this was downplayed when he returned in The New '10s, with his music having some parodied Accidental Innuendo.
  • CupcakKe effectively built her entire career out of rapping about extremely explicit and raunchy topics with a sassy, tongue-in-cheek, and wildly (yet intentionally) unsubtle approach.

    Pinballs 
  • Fully embraced by America's Most Haunted at every opportunity.
    Misty Moon: "I sense you're actually a coward... and impotent."

    Podcasts 
  • The Scathing Atheist runs on this. Listen to any episode and Lucinda gives a warning at the beginning that there's obscene content in the show. It's not unlikely that she'll actually use the f-bomb to demonstrate that it will be fucking offensive.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Virtually anything involving WWE's Attitude Era. DX's "sophomoric" antics of sexually-charged humor and foul mouths; The Rock's Ass Shove Catchphrase ("... and stick it straight up your candy ass!"); "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's infamous "Vince 3:16" bit with Urine Trouble; the Divas and their "object-of-choice" on a pole and Bra and Panties matches... On the one hand, the Attitude Era had the highest ratings in WWE's existence showing Tropes Are Not Bad. On the other hand, it was this sort of attitude that lead to the simulated necrophilia of the Katie Vick angle, almost universally considered the low point of the company's writing.
  • Bastion Booger (real name Mike Shaw), who wrestled in WWE in the early 90's was meant to be this; a fat, disgusting, unwashed, smelly slob. However, he generally came across as pathetic rather than disgusting.

    Tabletop Games 

    Theater 

    Video Games 
  • The Binding of Isaac features a naked protagonist trying to kill his fundamentalist mother using his own tears, urine and blood, while collecting powerups such as a half-formed conjoined twin, a dead pet, his mother's used menstrual pad and panties, an aborted sibling's ghost and rotten milk. It's also done in the style of Meat Boy.
  • literally every fnf mod ever: Part of the Little Man song is filled to the brim with gratuitous swear words as a gag.
  • The Postal series, especially starting with the second one. This is a game where you can chop people to bits and burn them to a crisp, trick cops into eating urine-soaked doughnuts (which makes them vomit), use live cats for silencers, and get a sledgehammer stuck up a cow's rectum. Oh, and there's an attempted rape on the protagonist as part of the main story.
  • Don't Shit Your Pants, a game revolving around creative ways to shit yourself... or not.
  • Just about any Game Mod released on Badderhacks Dot Net is bound to feature drug references, feces, and/or copious 8-bit nudity in some capacity.
  • Bad Day L.A. is full of lewd jokes such as "Mud Butt" and even political satire.
  • The Urinal Game is about urinals and it gets especially vulgar with the option of sharing them.
  • Pokémon Clover is a ROM hack created by members of 4chan, so it unsurprisingly has a lot of this. The Pokédex for the region contains Pokémon based on menopause, the September 11th attacks, Muslim suicide bombers, dried semen, Greedy Jew stereotypes, Klansmen, Jesus Christ, and a literal HM slave, plus two vaguely related mons called Hofucno and Motherfuck. And in the postgame, you can find a box full of Bad Dragon dildoes in your mother's basement. Which is also a Pokémon.

    Visual Novels 
  • In Daughter for Dessert, this is a staple of Moe Mortelli’s. In fact, it’s not clear that he has any other type of humor.
  • Possible when the protagonist and title character of Melody go grocery shopping together. But the protagonist loses points if he gets too vulgar.

    Webcomics 
  • Almost all of Neurotically Yours, although he has a number of not-so-vulgar ones, too.
  • Penny Arcade used to do this occasionally, but it's gotten a lot less like this for the past few years.
  • Shredded Moose most certainly does. Seriously, how else do you explain the borderline porn and blatant misogyny that's even worse than Cerebus the Aardvark?
  • VG Cats does this a lot as well. Apparently the creator, when he can't figure out a good punchline, figures throwing bodily fluids around is the next best thing.
  • Obscure webcomics on a little nothing forum you've never heard of (Garphuck and Oakfable) are built on a firm foundation of this, Refuge in Audacity, and Stylistic Suck. One could say it's a deconstruction of playing vulgarity and audacity for laughs... but it's probably not.
  • Sexy Losers. To quote the article "It was the highest scoring entry on the List of Potentially Offensive Webcomics, having been awarded six "toilets" out of a possible five (not a typo)."
  • Oglaf first shoves Author Appeal in the readers' faces and then leaves those faces glazed with its vulgarity.
  • Jailbreak could be adequately summed up as 50% nonsensical Random Events Plot and 50% various unpleasant bodily fluids.
  • Cyanide and Happiness, anyone?!?! That comic lives off this trope! (And they manage to do it without being excessively gross or offensive, yay!)

    Web Original 
  • A lot of The Angry Video Game Nerd's act involves not just Cluster F Bombs, but scatological comments in a mix and match manner. He also tends to visualize things being defecated on — when he isn't physically defecating on them himself.
  • azuritereaction swears a lot in general, and reaches Cluster F-Bomb level when he's raging.
  • This is the reason why the parody videos by El Bananero are so popular and funny. The man trows so much vulgarity, scatologic terminology and the Argentinian Spanish equivalents of Cluster F Bombs, it became hilarious because of this.
  • The extremely cruel parody site Encyclopedia Dramatica frequently uses crude humor in its articles. The reboot, Oh Internet!, tried to rectify this, resulting in a largely SFW site and sparking a fierce revolt by the majority of it's userbase who restored the original and abandoned the remake which went under in less than a year.
  • Fat, French and Fabulous:
    "We are dazzling satirists. Upon our wit we paint the world."
    "Ha ha, semen!"
  • Arin Hanson of Game Grumps lapses into sexual and/or scatological humor quite frequently, much to his partner Dan Avidan's confusion and disgust. In the Zelda's Adventure series Arin openly admitted that he loves doing it because it's an easy way to get a rise out of people.
  • Kakos Industries wouldn't be such a successful company of evil if it didn't have gracious amounts of sexual humor, swearing, and bodily fluids used in all the worst ways.
  • Lobo (Webseries): Lobo does a lot of raunchy jokes. He even compared the Snake's face to his "Johnson with herpes".
  • The Charlie Brown Gag Dubs on mostoffensivevideo.com take classic Peanuts shorts and dub over the cast so they all talk like n-bomb-dropping ghetto stereotypes. They're so offensive it's hilarious or so offensive it's awful, but either way note the constant; they are offensive.
  • QSMP: Virtually all but two people on the server are not family-friendly, and once the Qlobal Translatornote  is implemented, it doesn't take long for a group of creators to test out the mod by repeating "semen" on end.
  • Retarded Animal Babies veered into this territory in a hurry. This was to distinguish itself from Happy Tree Friends, and the more criticism comparing the two, the more lines it'll find to double-cross. So if you don't think it's vulgar enough, simply tell the author how he's ripping off of Happy Tree Friends.
  • The Tankmen series will always find a way to put cock jokes and other comedic references to the human male phallic organ in their dialogue, and is in fact infamous for it.
  • Nearly every scene in the Whateley Universe featuring Miasma. His superpower? Farts. It's inevitable.
  • The Yogscast song "Carrot for a Cock" is essentially a four-minute-long penis joke, with some very strongly implied sexual innuendoes to boot. Given how it was penned by Simon Lane, Turpster, Hat Films and Sparkles* of Area 11, none of whom have a reputation for being that mature, it's not surprising.

    Western Animation 
  • Family Guy in later seasons tends to use such things as rape and violence for comedy. In the episode "PTV", when Peter, Brian, and Stewie sing a song complaining about the FCC, some of the more "obscene" scenes from previous episodes are cropped and strung together in a short montage during the song.
  • Drawn Together:
    • In one episode, they meet the queen of Mexico, and she complains she is the only queen who has to go to the bathroom outside the palace. And then we see her doing so.
    • Two words: "...with sausage!"
  • South Park does it a hell of a lot because the main characters are small children at exactly the age when small children become obsessed with vulgarity. Even if watching the children act realistically childish (contrasted with the TV-childish we all expect) wasn't funny, it would still be far more realistic than any other portrayal of children on TV.
  • Lobo (Webseries) uses a lot of over the top sexual, profane and violent humor. Most of it with bloody deaths and alien swearing such as "Frag off!"
  • Kapitan Bomba, a Polish series with South Park-esque graphics, tells a story of a space crew defending the galaxy from aliens - many of which are genital-shaped. Or like sniffing crap to the point that it's used as currency. And all the planets have vulgar names. And the only tactic the heroes seem to use is a combination of Cluster F-Bomb and More Dakka.
  • Another Polish production, Włatcy Móch, relies on very similar humor, though stronger on the Cluster F-Bomb aspect.
  • When the writers of Popetown got bored with taking Refuge in Audacity or crossing the line twice, they headed straight for this trope. "I made my own paint!"
  • Robot Chicken:
  • The Simpsons has as well, to a lesser extent, but it should be noted that it was considered this back in their early days, when the Animation Age Ghetto was much stronger. Just to be seeing a television cartoon with "so many" jokes about swearing, sex and drugs was shocking for the audiences back then.
  • Brickleberry. The preview alone contains a bear drinking out of a urine-infested river, a man cheering over two animals humping, a woman's vagina being photographed by tourists, and a black man shown just having sex with two elderly women. No surprise that it was created by Daniel Tosh.
  • Futurama has been a bit more prevalent in this ever since its revival on Comedy Central. "Attack of the Killer App" is probably one of the most notable cases of this, which involves Fry and Bender making a bet where the loser has to dive in a pool of diarrhea and vomit from an alien goat and the revelation that Leela has a talking boil on her ass named Susan.
  • The Ren & Stimpy Show had a lot of this with its off color, violent, and sexual humor.

    Real Life 
  • Eddie Murphy mentioned on Raw how offended he was that Bill Cosby, relating to Eddie how his son saw his act, basically thought that this was his whole act. See here.
  • The Aristocrats Joke. A classic tradition with Stand-up Comedians is how inhumanly disgusting you can make the joke before ending it. This of course includes the movie about it.
  • Bob Saget's Refuge in Audacity stand-up career. In this case, Refuge from the Squeaky-clean image he got doing Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos. Saget was always that way, though. He made his national TV debut on the same HBO's "Young Comedians' Special" that famous vulgar comedian Sam Kinison did (who is himself another brilliant example of this trope). It was said that Saget was so vulgar during his act that he managed to shock Kinison. And that was just Bob Saget getting started.
  • Dane Cook is very big on this. He'll tell maybe seven or eight jokes through an entire routine, filling in the spaces with energetic swearing.
  • Averting this trope is one of the things Brian Regan is known for, along with being clean in general. He does swear occasionally, but it's never very strong, and always for a Precision F-Strike.
  • Roy "Chubby" Brown, Britain's rudest comedian. His material is so blue that he's not allowed on television. He was the first comedian to say "cunt" onstage, an act that drew such outrage that he was nearly assaulted for it.
    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My wife's got two cunts and I'm one of them.


 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Nob Gag, Refuge In Vulgarity, Vulgar Humour

Top

I Gave You a UTI

A man sings and dances about giving someone a UTI. Sexually, no less.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (3 votes)

Example of:

Main / VulgarHumor

Media sources:

Report