Furry Denial - Television Tropes & Idioms

Something's not right here...

"That's human nature for you. Even if you're a penguin."

— The Narrator, The Three Caballeros

Ever hear a Funny Animal say, "I'm only human."?

Weird, ain't it? This may indicate that a Funny Animal is unaware that he is an animal. This may also apply to actions, such as a dog eating ice cream or chocolate without getting sick, or a weasel having a romantic relationship with a human with no comment whatsoever. Most likely, it implies that the creator views the character's appearance as simply cosmetic; as far as the setting is concerned, they're just as human as you, no matter what they might look like. Ever wonder Mickey Mouse was never shown with cheese? Disney himself forbade it!

"Cheese makes Mickey seem like a mouse. He's really not a mouse, you know, he's really more a human."

Sometimes, of course, this simply happens because Most Writers Are Human. Can be combined with Furry Reminder for comedic effect. Related to Furry Confusion and Anthropomorphic Shift. Not to be confused with denying you are part of the Furry Fandom. If a non-human is knowingly and ironically referring to himself as human, it's In The Original Klingon.

Contrast Furry Reminder.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

This often happens to Meowth in Pok�mon.
- A particularly funny example was in the episode where Meowth, Team Rocket, Ash and Misty have a Pok�mon tournament to decide who gets to keep Togepi. When it's Meowth's turn to duel, he realizes he has no Pok�mon. After failing to get Team Rocket to lend him one of theirs, it suddenly dawns on him that he's a Pok�mon and can thus act as his own trainer. Hilarity Ensues.
In One Piece, Tony Tony Chopper is a reindeer that ate a Devil Fruit called the "Human Human Fruit" ("Hito Hito no Mi" in Japan), which gave him human awareness and intelligence, as well as the ability to transform into a human (although he looks like a Beast Man in that form) and a hybrid form that's a cross between the human form and his original reindeer form. This trope is mostly averted, as Chopper is fully aware that he's still a reindeer, but on at least one occasion during the Fishman Island arc, Jinbe exclaimed that Luffy and the Straw Hats shouldn't fight the New Fishman Pirates. Chopper (along with Franky) wonder why and ask "Is it because... we're humans?", to which Sanji replies:
Sanji: Don't you two say it!! That just makes things more confusing!!
- Not cool, Sanji. He isn't exempted from being a human for being a cyborg!
- There's also Pappug the starfish. When he was young, he thought he was a human, because he confused the word "hitode" (which is Japanese for "starfish") for the word "hito" (Japanese for "human"). Averted as he grew older and realized he was a starfish all this time. Now, he's a full-fledged Funny Animal.

Film

Played with in the Special Edition of Star Wars: "Jabba, you're a wonderful human being." When the scene was originally shot, Jabba was a human being. Lucas decided not to use the scene until the Special Edition where he could replace the human actor with a CGI Jabba. It wound up being somewhat serendipitous since the line comes off as slightly sarcastic and quite fitting for Han Solo's character.

Literature

A sort of third-person variant. In the Discworld series, the other wizards, and most of Ankh-Morpork, have gotten so used to the Librarian's form (he was turned into an Orangutan early in the series), that it's mentioned if an outsider had told the Wizards they saw an orangutan in the library, they'd probably go and ask the Librarian if he'd seen it.
In-universe example in the X-Wing Series. Apparently "We're only human" is a phrase there, too, and a non human character pointedly states that while the speaker is human, he is not.
The Sesame Street tie-in Picture Book "A Monster at the End of this Book" is probably this for Grover. Grover spends the entire book trying to stop readers from encountering a monster at the end of the book, only to find that he is that monster.

Newspaper Comics

Garfield once forgot he was a cat and shaved off his facial hair.
In a Peanuts comic strip from 1991, Snoopy was about to drink from a water fountain at Charlie Brown's school when a girl saw him and said, "Hey! There's a dog in the hall!" Snoopy looked around and replied, "Where?"
- In an earlier story, Sally is doing a report on animals. Snoopy is initially reluctant to help her because he claims that "I don't know any animals" (this means that he doesn't consider birds to be animals, either).
The Dog from Footrot Flats has also once said this. As his name implies - he is a dog.
In Calvin And Hobbes, while hiking, Calvin scares Hobbes by shouting, "LOOK! A TIGER!"
Given that Bill Watterson cites Pogo as a major influence, perhaps it was based on a similar joke in a Pogo strip, between Howland Owl and Albert Alligator:
Howland: Do you know what el legarto means?
Albert: (indifferently) A cigar?
Howland: 'An alligator'!
Albert: WHERE?!

Video Games

In the "Black Velvetopia" level of Psychonauts, one of the artist dogs mentioned that he's forced to hide in the alley "Like a lowdown dog". One of the lines you have the option of replying with is "Okay, promise you won't take this the wrong way, but you ARE a dog".
The Sam And Max Freelance Police episode "The Penal Zone" has Max, an anthropomorphic rabbit, telling Sam, an anthropomorphic dog, that his psychic powers make him the next stage in "our" evolution. Whose evolution, exactly?
- The comics give us this intentional example:
Sam: Who knows what effect it had on civilisation?
Max: Maybe it's a planet of talking animals ambling about on their hind legs like humans!
Sam: Oh, that's just silly.
- Played with in Sam & Max Hit the Road, where they buy a coloring book. Sam can ask Max if he wants to do any coloring, and Max points out that he's colorblind. Sam then realises, "Me, too." The coloring book can still be used with what are explicitly Max's crayons, and there's several puzzles in the game which rely on colour codes.

Web Comics

A Girl and Her Fed includes in its cast Speedy, an intelligence-enhanced koala.
Speedy: I didn't fall out of the eucalyptus tree yesterday, kitten. If I want to be jerked around, I'll find myself a zoo. So shut your yap and mind your manners and we can pretend that we're both real human beings.
In Femmegasm, Sonic the Hedgehog does this.
The furry enthusiasts in Untitled were told by a Furry to get a life.
Very prevalent in Nature of Nature's Art, as seen above. In fact, it's explicitly stated that animals took the name "man" for themselves.

Western Animation

The Cartoon Network series I Am Weasel uses this trope frequently. A rather hilarious example may be when Weasel said something along the lines of, "They may only be baboons, but they're still human!"
In one Looney Tunes cartoon, Sylvester (a Talking Animal) is trying to catch and eat a bluebird, much to the dismay of his son (a Funny Animal). The following exchange occurs:
Sylvester Jr.: Oh, father. You're just not human.
Sylvester Sr.: Of course I'm not human - I'm a cat!
Futurama had a rather funny example of this:
Bender: C'mon, Fry, I really wanna see [Past-O-Rama]. You know how I yearn for a simpler time. A time of barn dances and buggy rides, before life was cheapened by heartless hi-tech machines.
Leela: But, Bender, you are—
(Bender holds his hands to his ear units and shakes his head.)
Bender: LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA!
- Also, we have this:
Bender: You're my best friend, Fry, I'm sorry I treated you so badly.
Fry: Apology accepted. After all, you're only human.
(They pat each other on the backs)
Leela: Wait a minute! You did it all backwards.
(Fry and Bender stop and look towards Leela)
Leela: Fry's the one who should be— Oh, never mind!
In the first Scooby-Doo movie, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, Scooby was chasing cats when their owner told Shaggy to stop his dog. Scooby's response? "Rog, Rhere?"
Mutant League: When primary hero Bones Justice (a living skeleton-like mutant) suffers a loss of confidence in his abilities and becomes a dick about it, his scaly friend Razor Kid works to bring him out of it. After recovering by the episode's end, a now confident Bones quotes Razor's own words back at him. "Hey, I'm only human. Sort of."
When's the last time anyone on Family Guy acknowledged that Brian is a dog?
Peter: Holy crap! You can talk!
- There was a recent episode where Brian campaigned for equal rights for dogs, only for all the humans around to treat him like an idiot. This was presumably because, other than Brian and rare, one-off characters like his gay cousin Jasper, every other dog in the show's universe is an ordinary animal.
- Family Guy likes to play with this phenomenon, by having all the characters treat Brian as human (including the women he sleeps with), but then occasionally jarring the viewer with some reminder that he has at least some canine qualities.
Far too many times to list on Arthur
In the Donald Duck short "Early to Bed", he quips "Maybe I'm just a duck, but I'm human."
- In the Carl Barks comic "The Trail of the Unicorn", Scrooge McDuck sends for Donald to help capture the one animal he is missing from his zoo, but the nephews take this the wrong way and interrupt his exposition with the following protest:
Huey: You can't lock Unca' Donald in your old zoo!
Dewey and Louie: And, besides, he isn't an animal!
- Both Don Rosa and Carl Barks famously claimed that Donald is rather a man that happens to look like duck.
- In Mickey's Christmas Carol, Scrooge McDuck, who's playing Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol is referred to as an "Englishman", despite being a duck, let alone a Scottish one.
Willie The Giant (as The Ghost of Christmas Present): Fe! Fi! Fo! Fum!
I smell. I mean, I smell.
A stingy little Englishman!
I think I do.
Ralph Bakshi's reasoning for why the anthropomorphic characters in Fritz the Cat and Coonskin never act like animals is that it would ruin what he was trying to create, which was a more realistic and mature form of animation. This is specifically the reason why a scene in Fritz the Cat where Duke the Crow saves Fritz was changed from R. Crumb's comic; Crumb had Duke flying Fritz away from a car crash, whereas he grabs a railing in the film. Bakshi admits that he wasn't entirely satisfied with the solution, but it kept him from using any "animal" behavior to further the plot.
In South Park, Cartman's attempt to prank Butters by disgusing himself as a robot goes out of hand, and he ends up captured by government officials who believe he's a robot with memories and consciousness and has this trope in effect, a belief which lasts up until his Unrobotic Reveal.
In The Looney Tunes Show episode "That's My Baby" Tina Russo's sister's baby, Zachary, is never referred to as a duckling even though he is one. He is instead always referred to as a baby as if he were a human baby. Also, he's drinking milk, which human and other mammal babies drink, not ducklings or any other baby bird for that matter.
- In "Daffy - The Commando," Daffy Duck wears a shirt labeled "Human Cannon Ball" when he flies into Berlin, Germany.
In one Top Cat episode, TC leaves one of his gang as collateral for a loan. The lender is perplexed: "A human collateral?" Then again, the only time in the entire series when the gang actually behave like cats is when they spend the winter at Dibble's, and they all jump into the only bed, crowding Dibble out and pushing him onto the floor: anyone with a cat knows what THAT's like.
This happens quite often on Goof Troop. In one episode, a bystander said that PJ "can't be human". They also make frequent references to things being "humanly possible". Everyone in-universe seems to be some sort of cat (Pete and P.J.) or dog (every other "anthro" character) except for occasional cameos (which aren't human either).
One episode of Thunder Cats 2011 has Lion-O speak of someone losing their humanity, even though there are no humans ever featured in the series.
Mickey Mouse, besides the ears and tail, is barely a mouse himself. Walt Disney wouldn't let him be shown eating cheese. However, House of Mouse, created long after Walt's death, actually does show him having an affinity to cheese.