Good Smoking, Evil Smoking

Smoking might be the only interest they both share.

"These days, when someone smokes in the movies, it's either a psychopath or a European."

— Nick Naylor, Thank You for Smoking

Smoking is generally considered bad for you. Thus, smoking is portrayed by the villain, so as to drive home the Aesop that Drugs Are Bad.

It is almost never portrayed as "cool" in 21st century media, and even the badass seems to be quitting the habit. In children's cartoons, it's perfectly acceptable for a villain to smoke, especially if they blow it in somebody's face, but the hero thinks it's a disgusting habit, or they may be trying to quit. Alternatively, a heavy smoker may be shown as extremely affected by the smoke to show how bad it is.

The rule is suspended under very specific conditions:

• The smoker is someone wise or fatherly. This utilises a pipe. It's okay because nobody under 50 is going to stuff a pipe with tobacco nowadays.
• The smoker is sexy. And seriously so.
• The smoker is under extreme amounts of stress (usually associated with nervous pacing; think "father in a maternity ward").
• The smoker is incredibly badass. This often uses a Cigar Chomper.
• The smoker is celebrating; cigars are associated with "special occasions" because they are expensive.
• The smoking is correct to the era. This is why World War I movies have soldiers smoking: in that era, everyone smoked in the trenches to drown out the terrible smell.
• The smoker is French, and somebody wants to be stereotypical.
• The smoker is Native American, and only smokes a Peace Pipe as a cultural gesture.
• The smoker isn't really smoking, but rather blowing bubbles from a Bubble Pipe or something like that.
• The smoker is rich, and has enough money to blow on large amounts of cigarettes, cigars etc. (But note: if a prosperous older woman who doesn't seem to give a monkey's what anyone thinks is a heavy smoker, she will probably also be an inveterate liar.)
• The smoker is immortal, magical, undead, or otherwise immune to the negative effects of smoking.
• The character is The Stoner, and smoking is a part of their character. Of course in a lot of films with stoners, The Stoner gets killed so smoking is very, very bad for you indeed…

Also, what and how one smokes determines Good Smoking from Evil Smoking.

• A cigarette holder, especially the long ones, is an Evil Smoking indicator, usually reserved for evil bitches of all kinds. However, as symbols of class and elegance, a female using a cigarette holder could be either Good or Evil, depending on the time the work was made.
• Male users of cigarette holders are always Evil unless they're The Pink Panther, Hunter S. Thompson, or FDR (or an Expy thereof), who is allowed to use the holder by means of the Grandfather Clause.^note  (FDR himself once explained to a child that he used a cigarette holder because, "I promised my doctor that I would stay as far away as possible from a cigarette.")
• Long and fine cigarettes often indicate a bitch or a Depraved Homosexual.
• A character smoking several cigarettes at once indicates a rebellious character who has little to no regard for their health.
• A pipe is a Good Smoking indicator, usually reserved for grandfatherly gentlemen. If the character is younger, he is calm, collected and stoic, probably an intellectual, and probably a character in a period piece. A member of law enforcement, most often a detective (or private eye), is more likely to use a pipe in homage to a certain famous pipe-smoking detective. If they do, this also generally makes them a Good Smoker and not a Dirty Cop. Corncob pipes are also a Good Smoking indicator, but they have a different set of stereotypes, generally being associated with honest, plain-spoken, unpretentious salt of the earth types, especially farmers and sailors. If a woman smokes a pipe, she is inevitably old enough to be a grandmother, working class or dirt-poor and from a rural area. If she's none of those, she's probably the madam of a brothel. The exception is East Asian women, if they're not Westernized enough to smoke cigarettes; while not being Westernized obviously often goes along with poverty and/or isolation, there is also a certain tendency in Asia for the wealthy—especially wealthy women—to stick to traditional dress and habits. Western customs were partly adopted as a business expedient, after all, and the alternative therefore has gained connotations of luxury and leisure.
• Clove cigarettes are cool smoking. Alternately, they may be the sign of a pretentious hipster douchebag or Emo Kid.
• Smoking weed goes all over the place with this trope, mostly because works have differing opinions if Drugs Are Bad and if the people who use them are bad also. In stoner-friendly productions, a good smoker is someone that sticks to mostly soft natural psychoactives (marijuana, salvia, magic mushrooms, etc) and occasionally LSD, but this only applies when contrasted with someone that does hard drugs like meth, crack, heroin or PCP. Even then, the latter group may be treated with at least some sympathy, rather than outright disdain.
• Characters who smoke lots of cigars are some combination of badass, jerkass and rich. Generally, the Corrupt Corporate Executive or gangster will smoke cigars. If the smoker is out of shape and well-dressed, then they're evil or at least a self-important jerk (although they may simply be an Expy of Winston Churchill or Al Capone). If the smoker is muscle-bound and wearing rough clothing, they're generally either morally gray or heroic badasses. A woman who smokes a cigar is usually either The Vamp or rather butch. It isn't entirely clear-cut, but good characters will often smoke slender cigars, and evil characters fat ones. Since Cuba, until recently, was under a trade embargo from the US, anyone in American media who smokes Cuban cigars has often been depicted to be some stripe of sleazebag. See It's Cuban for more.
• Cigarillos are usually sleazy, low-level evil with a tendency to droop. Of course, there is Clint Eastwood.
• Gangbangers have a habit of smoking blunts, inexpensive cigars or cigarillos that have been hollowed out and filled with weed.
• Also an indicator of Evil Smoking is if they hold a cigarette in an unusual way. As Jim Jarmusch comments to Harvey Keitel in 1995's Blue in the Face:
  Nazis in movies. Why do they always smoke in some weird way like this? [puts cigarette between middle and ring fingers and speaking in German accent] "Ve have vays of making you talk!" Or this [holds cigarette with thumb and index finger] "Jah, we have seen vhat you've done!"
  • An exception to this is soldiers, who will sometimes be seen smoking cigarettes "squaddie-style", i.e. held between thumb and index finger with one or both hands, and with the palm or palms hiding the ember. This has the advantage of letting you warm your fingers and hiding the ember from vision (on a dark night, a cigarette ember is visible to the naked eye from half a mile away). Someone who smokes this way is usually an Old Soldier, Sergeant Rock, or someone else who has seen the elephant.

Not surprisingly, before the Surgeon General's report on tobacco use this trope was almost completely reversed. Non-Smokers were uptight and uncool, Smokers were just doing what everybody else did, and were perfectly normal, and made smoking look cool and perfectly healthy. It was more common for heroes to smoke than villains.

The critical change was in 1964 when the US Surgeon General released a damning report of the incontrovertible link between smoking and lung cancer, which convinced the public to gradually turn against tobacco. By The '70s, the No Smoking trope had gotten sufficient strength that tobacco advertising on American TV was banned and artists were encouraged to downplay tobacco such as in the TV series, Kojak, when the detective switched to lollipops and made them his trademark.

Sub-Trope of Good Flaws, Bad Flaws

See Also: Red Right Hand, Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness, Fur and Loathing.

Contrast Smoking Is Cool, Everybody Smokes, Smoking Is Edgy, and No Smoking.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An old Airwick commercial commented on "The Old Fogie Stogie", featuring an old man who laughingly blew cigar smoke at the viewer.
• Before the climate changed against smoking, Marlboro had a series of ads featuring The Marlboro Man, a cowboy who would invite viewers to "come to where the flavor is". Marlboro cigarettes were so popular that there was a billboard of the Marlboro Man blowing smoke rings on Times Square in New York until the late 80s.

Anime & Manga

• In 8 Man (1963), 8 Man (AKA Tobor the Eighth Man) had to smoke (or maybe eat) cigarettes to keep his powers running. Later versions of the character had him shoot up drugs instead.
• Black Lagoon's Anti Heroes mainly smoke cigarettes, with the main cigar-smoker of the cast being Balalaika.
• In a filler Case Closed case, there's an Upper-Class Twit who smokes. He ends up as the victim of the week. In fact, a guy who was jealous of him for fancying the same girl tried to use his smoking habits to go Murder the Hypotenuse by poisoning his cigarette filters. The twit had the habit of cutting said filters off, so he dodged death barely... And then he got killed by someone else.
• The three main characters of Cowboy Bebop frequently smoke cigarettes, with all of them leaning towards good. This is never mentioned by anyone in the show, giving the audience the impression that smoking instead became more commonplace in the future. Whether this is because the health issues are no longer a problem given superior medical technology or just because their line of work makes them unlikely to live long enough to worry about lung cancer is uncertain. The aesthetics of the show come from 1970's. Smoking is a part of the image.
  • Lampshaded in an Adult Swim bumper that theorized that in the Cowboy Bebop universe, tobacco is classified as a food group.
• Used unusually in Darker than Black. "November 11" is forced to smoke every time he invokes his contractor's power, and he hates tobacco smoke...
  • In another case, there's a VERY bitchy chain smoker who is one of the suspects for killing a loan shark. She's the Sympathetic Murderer, as she killed said loan shark for driving her boyfriend to suicide.
• Dragon Ball GT: The Dragon of the Black Smoke smokes a cigar and is literally Made of Evil.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Unlucky Everydude Jean Havoc is always smoking a cigarette, and is definitely a good guy. However, the real reason the author made him a smoker was just so he could throw Mustang a lighter in that ONE SCENE.
  • Pinako Rockbell, the Elric brothers' surrogate grandmother, smokes a pipe. As someone wise and grandmotherly, she is allowed.
• When Tsubaki Kasugano from Future Diary shows her true colors to Yukki and Yuno, she pulls out a pipe and smokes on it. Definitely evil smoking.
  • Lampshaded and parodied in the Abridged Series:
    Tsubaki : Yukiteru. There’s something important I have to tell you.
    Yukiteru: What is it Tsubaki?
    Tsubaki: I... have a pipe!
    [dun dun DUUUUUUUN! ]
    Tsubaki: Also I’m going to have the two of you killed.
    Yukiteru: No!
• Hijikata Toshirou of Gintama is known for his chain cigarette smoking, and falls under both the sexy and badass exceptions. The mayonnaise bottle lighter ruins the effect somewhat. Or enhances it, whatever works for you. Quite a few characters in the series smoke, including Otose who smokes almost as much as Hijikata. The main villain Takasugi Shinsuke however smokes a long pipe. Tsukuyo also smokes a pipe, but though she was introduced as a villain she soon became one of the good guys.
• In Great Pretender, Makoto takes up smoking as he geets deeper and deeper into the world of the yakuza, symbolizing his Becoming the Mask.
  • His yakuza boss Lady Suzaku also smokes.
  • Kim Shi-won is often seen with a cigarette, though in her case it's more that she's a Cool Old Lady.
• Mr. Fujisawa from El-Hazard: The Magnificent World smokes regular cigarettes - and drinks alcohol, too - despite being one of the protagonists. It should be noted that drinking and smoking are "bad" for him in El Hazard, but not just in the ways you'd expect - he's Made of Iron and has Super-Strength there, but both habits significantly inhibit his power; when he hasn't smoked or drinked in a while, he's a Nigh Invulnerable, unstoppable juggernaut.
• Sir Integra Hellsing is known for smoking manly cigars, both because she's a badass, and because she's a Bifauxnen.
• The Red King, Mikoto Suoh, and his second-in-command, Izumo Kusanagi, from K are the "sexy" and "badass" variety.
  • The Blue King, Reisi Munakata, is also both sexy and badass, and only smokes when he's stressed (and thinking about Mikoto).
• Alan of MÄR is a cigar-smoker who meets the "badass" exception.
• Mushishi protagonist Ginko is an unusual example of a non-badass good guy who smokes cigarillos - he's rarely seen without one. Likely more of a tool than a vice, though, as the smoke they give off keeps mushi from getting too close for comfort.
• Asuma from Naruto met every condition for the suspension, he was even going to be a father soon. Shikamaru however didn't quite make the cut and thus, his smoking had to be censored in the anime. He carried a lighter with him that he turned on and off in the deceased Asuma's memory instead.
• One Piece: Smokers who are Luffy's allies, such as crew member Sanji, smoke cigarettes. Those who are his enemies are more often the ones with cigars.
  • The obviously named Smoker has cigars strapped to his arms like machine-gun rounds (they're edited out in the 4Kids dub of the anime). He's seen smoking two or three at once sometimes, and while he is more a rival than an enemy, it's meant to signify "Badass". He also has the excuse of his Devil Fruit giving him smoke-based powers.
  • Sir Crocodile smoked huge cigars, and was THE antagonist of the Alabasta arc
  • Averted with Paulie, who's the only good character smoking cigars that doesn't oppose Luffy at all.
  • Capone "Gang" Bege, one of the Worst Generation, is a crime boss-turned-pirate. Still incredibly ruthless, to the point of stabbing an underling in the eye for talking back to him, and fond of smoking cigars. In a subversion, however, he shows himself to be a principled family man and an ally of Luffy's.
• Gilbert in PandoraHearts could fall under sexy smoking. In an omake, however, the other characters make fun of him for smoking. Then they make fun of him for trying to quit (eight times now, in fact). Then they make fun of him for failing to quit (...eight times). He gets a lot of abuse for everyone's entertainment.
• Gokudera from Reborn! (2004) is a chainsmoker and makes it look really cool - partly justified in that he needs it to light his bombs and cuts down when he gets new powers.
• Rurouni Kenshin:
  • At least one person per antagonistic unit smokes (with the exception of the Hiruma Brothers and Woo Heishin/the Su-shin).
  • Jin-e Udo not just smokes, but uses how long it takes him to finish a cigarette to determine how long it would take to defeat Kenshin as both Kenshin and Battosai.
  • The Tokyo Oniwabanshu's employer, Takeda Kanryuu, prefers the stereotypical rich man's smoke: cigars.
  • Shishio Makoto uses the more traditional kiseru, which fits more with the time period than an 'evil must smoke' cliche.
  • From the Jinchuu Arc, Otowa Hyouko of the Six Comrades uses a hookah, and in a flashback, the traitor I'izuka is seen once smoking a kiseru.
  • Saitou is just badass enough to be a 'good smoking' exception.
• Sailor Moon : In her original incarnation, Sailor Jupiter was to be the leader of a gang of female Delinquents, which included smoking. When the idea of her being a sukeban was scrapped, so was the idea of her smoking.
• Lots of characters in Saiyuki smoke (and indeed in Minekura's other works). It tends to be thematically related to "life"—as a way of savoring the moment or as a fuck you to mortality. Sanzo, Gojyo, Tenpou, Kenren, and Koumyou smoke or smoked, and are all good guys. Koumyou smokes a long-stemmed pipe rather than cigarettes for added traditionalism and fatherly benevolence. Tobacco products are far from the only anachronism in a series supposedly set in ancient China.
• Stein from Soul Eater is almost certainly a "badass" exception for good smoking. On the other hand, his addiction to cigarettes is also used as a metaphor for his insanity. So it's a mix of Evil Smoking and Evil Is Cool.
• The hero from Space Adventure Cobra is a cigar smoker of the badass variety. It is very rare to see him without a cigar in the mouth (though not always lighted). Note that his cigars often contains bondesque gadgets (like some allowing water-breathing).
• In Spirited Away, the villainous Yubaba smokes a cigarette and exhales billowing clouds of smoke right into Sen's face. Her nicer sister Zeniba is not seen smoking.
• Choji Suitengu of Speed Grapher does not just smoke long cigarettes. He smoked using rolled up 10,000 yen bills.
• Seishirou Sakurazuka from Tokyo Babylon and X/1999 is the perfect example of how adults who smoke can prove to be bad role models for teens by negatively influencing them with their habit. Of course, being a sociopathic Professional Killer Seishirou was never going to be a good role model by a long shot, but when he sees the once All-Loving Hero Subaru Sumeragi has taken it up since their last meeting 9 years ago, even he has a few words to say about the health risks.
• We haven't seen her smoke it yet, but Umineko: When They Cry's Beatrice habitually carries a long, old-fashioned pipe, similar to a cigarette holder, using it as a Magic Wand.
• Yuuko of ×××HOLiC smokes a traditional Japanese pipe a great part of her time at home. Later on Watanuki eventually inherits and uses the pipe himself.
• One of the more famous aspects of Doronjo in Yatterman is her habit of carrying a long, rather odd-looking pipe. In Tatsunoko Versus Capcom, she uses it as a weapon.

Asian Animation

• In Happy Heroes, Big M.'s commander is often seen smoking cigarettes and using a cigarette holder. He's one of the villains and the only character in the series who regularly smokes.

Comic Books

• Emperor Zombie in The Amazing Screw-On Head actually smokes a scholar to learn everything he knows. Miraculously, it actually works. The fact that he was smoking and killing a person at the exact same time kind of seals the deal on that one.
• In Astro City, this is played straight with Julius Furst, a Cigar Chomper of the old school. It is, however, subverted with his Badass Bookworm brother Augustus; Word of God is that the pipe he keeps in his mouth is actually a portable energy source, which is simply pipe-shaped for portability and habit.
• In Blake and Mortimer, our two heroes are often seen smoking their pipes. Olrik, their Archenemy, prefers with a cigarette holder.
  • As an Expy of Winston Churchill, Admiral Grey, the commander of the Makran naval base in The Secret of the Swordfish, is seen smoking a cigar .
• Dan Dare achieved the rare feat of being a young and dashing pipe smoker.
• DC Comics:
  • In the earlier days of the company, nearly every heroic character who was "respectable" (i.e., businessmen like Bruce Wayne or alien scientists from the future like Brainiac 5) was shown smoking pipes constantly. This remained the case for Dr Will Magnus, creator of the Metal Men, to the extent that when he became a Metal Man himself called Veridium, he still had the pipe, generated from his own veridium body.
  • Jenny Sparks is a chainsmoker. It gets to the point where she is seen with a cigarette almost 3/4 of the time. Jenny Quantum picks up the habit.
  • Batman has been seen smoking a pipe in his Bruce Wayne identity as late as 1980 in an issue of New Teen Titans. He was addressing Robin in a fatherly way while relaxing in his armchair.
  • Deadshot constantly chainsmokes whenever he's unmasked and not killing something. This is indicative of his Death Seeker status.
  • Lex Luthor is often shown smoking those evil cigars. Well, he is incredibly rich...
  • Manchester Black. His sister Vera also develops a smoking habit as she increasingly becomes convinced that he's inside her head.
  • A cigarette holder is part of The Penguin's iconic look.
  • Daily Planet chief Perry White was known to smoke cigars at one point. He was also a blowhard, but a good guy.
  • In The Sandman (1989), Desire not only smokes all the time, but he/she is apparently just lighting its cigarettes constantly. This is possibly a subtle Shout-Out to Oscar Wilde: "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." A perfect habit for the incarnation of desire.
  • When it was revealed that Terra was The Mole, she took to smoking. In this case, however, it was to provide a more mature look to the rather immature looking character.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • Volume 1: Prior to her Heel–Face Turn Paula von Gunther's smoking habit was so constant that her long stemed dragon cigarette holder was her Iconic Item, but after her daughter was returned to her and she swiftly dedicated the rest of her life to wrecking Nazis she gave up the vice.
    • One story features Art Fairdeal and his Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe versus his cigar chomping rival Josh Slicker.
• In the Donald Duck comicverse, Donald himself smoked until the climate changed. Now only bad guys such as Black Pete are seen to smoke.
• Fables has a wolf who smokes cigarettes and occasionally cigars to mask the scent of his One True Love and the general scent of the city. He's a heroic badass example, but unusual in that he has a specific reason for smoking.
• Frosty the Snowman, according to The Other Wiki.
• Hellblazer's John Constantine. Good badass smoker, and doesn't even have to worry about lung cancer thanks to his triple devil deal.
• Lucky Luke used to smoke until he quit and switched to a piece of straw circa 1983. The Prequel comic The Man Who Killed Lucky Luke shows how it happened in-universe (including why he picked the straw).
• German comic Lula und Yankee had gummy bear cigarettes at one point. As Lula commented, this was a case of decadent smoking.
• Marvel Comics:
  • On the evil side of the equation, Bullseye was often seen lighting up cigarettes before Marvel banned them.
  • In reprints of the original 1940's Captain America, Steve Rogers can be seen smoking a pipe. This gets the "correct to the era" exemption (probably why Marvel didn't photoshop the pipe out).
    • His Arch-Enemy the Red Skull smokes a cigarette on a holder, often using it to conceal his Dust of Death and use it on an enemy.
  • Dr. Stephen Strange, the man who eventually became Doctor Strange, is shown lighting a cigarette in the operating room immediately after performing a surgery. In context, it indicates how self-centered he was.
  • Before the climate changed against smoking, Reed Richards used to smoke a pipe.
  • The Thing has been known to chomp on cigars, as has Nick Fury. This was because their shared co-creator Jack Kirby loved cigars, and put elements of himself into both characters.
  • Howard the Duck had a cigar.
  • J. Jonah Jameson chomps on a cigar. He's a blowhard, but a good guy. Kinda.
  • Mob boss The Kingpin originally had a cigarette holder, but switched to villainous cigars after they went out of style. Naturally, he only selects the best Cuban cigars.
  • Ultimate X Men: Xavier, a wise and fatherly figure, smokes in a pipe. Wolverine smokes cigars and fills the room with smoke, just because he's so jerkass.
  • X-Men:
    • Gambit was known to smoke in his early appearances in the 90s.
    • Kitty Pryde only smokes when she's been somehow turned evil or possessed by something evil. The regular, non-possessed Kitty learned a long time ago that she had no interest in smoking after trying one of Wolverine's cigars in a moment of extreme frustration. A scene that Marvel would never allow in the modern era, since Kitty was only 15 at the time.
    • Wolverine used to smoke cigars, but eventually gave up the habit, specifically directly after losing his adamantium to Magneto's cruelty; his healing power got extremely taxed during that incident, which may have something to do with it (in-universe, at least). Paraphrasing:
      Wolverine: Time I gave those nasty things up, anyway.
• Great Detective from Germany, Nick Knatterton, smokes pipe. He's from The '50s.
• The Phantom's enemies often smoked to indicate they were evil. Whereas cigarettes and cigars were often prominent, cigarette holders were reserved for the incredibly pompous, egotistical blowhards, such as General Tara, a self-centered dictator who brandished one easily a foot in length. It was an effective touch by artist Sy Barry as the accessory was obviously intended to affect a superior, haughty air, and when used by a fat, barbaric paramilitary type, very effete. When he was feeling his most smug and content, he blew smoke rings, often while anticipating some sadistic act, such as torturing the Phantom's fiancée, Diana Palmer in "The Tyrant of Tarakimo." In the story's sequel, he huffs lazy smoke rings from a massively ornate throne to indicate his satisfaction after his henchmen successfully kidnap Diana, presenting her to him in harem outfit.
• Preacher. Jesse smokes constantly, even pausing to light up mid fight on more than one occasion.
• Scott Pilgrim has a personal aversion to smoking to the point that he believes smoking to be a sign of being evil.
• Sin City is filled with smokers:
  • Marv and Dwight both smoke cigarettes.
  • Gail smokes thin cigarettes that look like cigarillos but Dwight mentions that they're Russian.
  • Senator Roarke chomps down on cigars since he's rich, powerful, and evil.
  • Neither Wallace nor John Hartigan smoke and they're the nicest "heroes" in Sin City.
• Miss Misery in Sleeper (WildStorm). For her to stay perfectly healthy, she has to do bad things, which is why she's always seen smoking.
• Transmetropolitan: Spider Jerusalem forces his non-smoking assistant to start. He's the hero, kind of. At least he seems to keep a good supply of "anti-cancer traits" on hand, and always tells the new assistant where they are just after telling them to start smoking; so, at least within The City, smoking isn't particularly harmful. According to a flashback, his ex-wife smoked from an octodecuple (that's eighteen) cigarette holder.
• In Watchmen, The Comedian smokes cigars, while Laurie and other side characters smoke cigarettes, though they look vastly different from what we would know them to be, given the divergent technology; they're something akin to e-cigarettes, although nothing like that would exist for decades in real life.
• If a witch in Witch Girls or Witch Girls Tales is smoking, they're a wicked witch. Especially if they're a child at the time. Cigarette holders are favored, but not mandatory.

Fan Works

• In And So We Fight, Link's ally Ishaka uses a pipe, while Ganondorf prefers cigars.
• Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow, a psychopath who mind rapes people for research and sadistic gratification, is a chain smoker in Batman: Melody for a Mockingbird. Fareeha Huq confirmed smoking was a trait added to Scarecrow, along with a Deep South accent, to make him "as vile as possible." The heroes and Crane's cohorts both comment on how loathsome the fumes stink, and one of his dickish habits is blowing smoke in the face of whoever irks him. It turns out the cigs are more evil than they seem: His "special" tobacco is laced with diluted fear toxin. Yes, he's using his nightmare juice recreationally.
• Played with in Bad Future Crusaders where only Apple Bloom and Silver Spoon, a morally gray Shellshocked Veteran and an ostensibly villainous thief / assassin respectfully, are smokers. It's explained though that smoking is effectively unheard of in Equestria, with cigarettes themselves being outright unavailable and needing to be imported from elsewhere, and the two smokers happened to spend a good period of their lives in a country where smoking is apparently rather common. The story still gets it's Aesop in, though, when Scootaloo watches Apple Bloom light up for the first time:
  Scootaloo: That can not be good for you.
  Apple Bloom: It ain't. Pep always wanted me to quit.

Films — Animated

• Big Boss, The Big Bad Wolf of The 3 Little Pigs: The Movie, is the only character in the story who smokes, often seen around his inn with a cigar in his mouth.
• Carface in All Dogs Go to Heaven, who is practically an Expy of Warren T. Rat (mentioned below), does the same. If someone smokes in a Don Bluth movie, they're a villain.
• Warren T. Rat in An American Tail smoked cigars, blowing smoke rings and dollar signs to cue the audience in to the fact that he's really a villain and tricking Fievel.
• Mobster Salvatore Valestra in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is shown in flashbacks as a heavy cigar smoker. In the scenes taking place in the movie's "present", the cigars took such a toll on him that he's constantly wheezing and has to carry around an oxygen tank.
• Disney:
  • In 101 Dalmatians, Cruella DeVil not only smokes, but for added evil, uses a cigarette holder. Indeed, no animated film ever made smoking look more disgusting than this film with Cruella polluting the air with smoke and putting out her cigarette in a pastry. Roger smokes as well, but he smokes a pipe, and the smoke itself is natural white whereas Cruella's has a decidedly evil-looking green color as well as being much more villainously expressive. In addition, the quick scene where Jasper Badun contemptuously flicks cigar ash onto Horace's sandwich bread is even more stomach churning.
    • Disney released quit-smoking ads on their DVDs featuring clips of Cruella and her greeeeeen smoke. ^note Mid-2015 and up. In 2008-early 2015, a Pinocchio-themed ad was used. See the entry below.
  • In Alice in Wonderland, The generally mellow but rather unhelpful and slightly sinister Caterpillar smokes a hookah ominously, as he does in the book. He normally produces colorful smoke letters and other impossible shapes but when Alice manages to push his Berserk Button the smoke changes to grey. Also, the Faux Affably Evil Walrus smokes a cigar, while the Dodo Bird smokes a pipe.
  • Donald Duck, as much as people don't remember it now, was a sailor. He cursed up a storm (in duck quacks), he got mad, and yes, he smoked cheap stogies. Huey, Dewey, and Louie once got a taste of the 'forced excessive smoking' part of the trope above. Of course, it being Donald...
  • Practically everyone smokes in The Great Mouse Detective, including the hero, but seeing how the movie is set in the Victorian Era, it shouldn't really be a surprise. Basil, the quick-thinking Sherlock Holmes-esque detective, smokes a pipe, while Ratigan, the world's greatest... mouse and criminal mind, uses a cigarette holder. Later in the film, when infiltrating a Bad Guy Bar disguised as a sailor captain, Basil swaps out his pipe for a cigarette.
  • Hades, the villain from Hercules smokes a cigar, lighting it with his thumb. Since this movie takes place in Ancient Greece, this is an anachronistic example.
  • Jim Dear in Lady and the Tramp smokes a pipe.
  • Ariel from The Little Mermaid grabs the meerscham pipe on the dinner table when she sees it. Eric's guardian starts to tell her about it when she blows into it, thinking, because of Scuttle, that it would make music.
  • Sykes in Oliver & Company smokes a cigar and wears a suit. Fagin is seen choking on the smoke in one scene.
  • Captain Hook in Peter Pan, as well as in the book it was based on, combines multiple "Evil Smoking" indicators into one; if he had a cigar or a cigarette holder, it would've been enough, but the fact that he not only combines the two, but uses a custom double-holder to smoke two cigars at once, is just overkill. Meanwhile, the territorial but neutral Indians pass around a peace pipe after reaching an accord with the Lost Boys: the morally ambivalent Peter smokes it without any problems, while of his new guests, Wendy stops Michael from trying it and refuses to do it herself, and John immediately gets sick when he tries it.
  • Early in Pinocchio kindly old Geppetto smokes a pipe. That is the only smoking in the film that isn't evil smoking of some sort. Lowlife grifters Honest John and Gideon smoke cigars, and the demonically evil (and possibly a literal demon) Coachman not only smokes a pipe but also encourages the boys he takes to Pleasure Island to smoke the abundant cigars it offers; when they do so, it's a sign they've been ensnared by the park (and smoking makes Pinocchio sick to his stomach). As noted above, it was also later used in a quit-smoking ad.
  • In Song of the South, Uncle Remus smokes a corncob pipe, along with Brer Bear and one of the animated frogs.
  • Jose Carioca from The Three Caballeros also smoked a cigar, but he doesn't smoke one anymore in House of Mouse.
• One of the Sisters from Kubo and the Two Strings smokes a pipe. Whilst pipes are normally more of a good example, it's rather sinister looking and elongated like the more conventionally evil cigarette holder. She's also able to cast powerful smoke-based magic from it.
• In Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, only the nuisance Flip smokes and multiple characters including the title character order him to stop. In the early 20th century comic, Flip was far more amoral (though friends with the title character) and again the most prevalent smoker, never going anywhere without a cigar in his mouth (Nemo's mom thinks he is a troublemaker because of his cigars), though Nemo's father is shown smoking a few times too.
• In The Chipmunk Adventure, two villains, siblings Klaus and Claudia, are seen smoking cigarettes. Claudia even coughs from her cigarette at one point into her dog Sophie's face, making her cough as well. Inspector Jamal also smokes as well, as he seems to be villainous... until he's revealed to have been after Klaus and Claudia and succeeds in capturing them.
• Wreck-It Ralph: Taffyta doesn't actually smoke of course, but the way she handles a lollipop is clearly meant to evoke a cigarette.

Films — Live-Action

• Soldiers smoke in war movies. Grunts are generally seen smoking cigarettes, while colonels and generals smoke cigars.
• Cruella de Vil also has this habit in 101 Dalmatians (1996). The sequel, 102 Dalmatians, uses her attitude towards smoking as an indicator of her "Ella" personality (who now hated it) and the return of "Cruella" (who loved it).
• Everyone period-appropriate smokes in All About Eve but Addison DeWitt uses a cigarette holder, indicating evil and also possibly Depraved Bisexual.
• American History X: Good people are portrayed as victims of smoking (Derek's mom), evil people enjoy smoking (all dem neo-Nazis). Derek specifically criticizes Danny for smoking and gently criticizes his mother for the same.
  Derek: She's coughing her lungs out and you're blowing this shit in her face all day?
• Back to the Future:
  • Back to the Future: Lorraine, Marty's mother, is introduced in 1985 as an alcoholic, so when Marty's in 1955, he tells the teenaged Lorraine that she shouldn't drink or else she'll regret it. After being a bit peeved, Lorraine lights a cigarette, which shocks Marty more, asking "Jesus, you smoke, too!?", to which Lorraine responds "Marty, you're beginning to sound just like my mother...".
  • Back to the Future Part II: In the alternate 1985 where Biff is a corrupt and powerful businessman, the museum dedicated to Biff's life has a "smoking required" sign at the entrance.
• As noted in the comics section above, actors portraying the Batman villain Penguin have appeared with a long cigarette-holder in their mouths or hands, in order to play up the character's snobbery and moral degeneracy. Ironically, both actors who played this character in live action — Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito — were nonsmokers at the time. Rumor has it that Meredith's distinctive "waugh waugh waaaaugh" laugh was to cover up the cough that the herbal cigarettes caused.
• In the 1997 version of The Borrowers, Mr. Potter smoked a cigar while wearing a suit and being played by overweight actor John Goodman. Guess what his alignment was.
• In the 1961 version of Cape Fear, villain Cady smokes Scummy Bastard cigars, while heroic Bowden does not smoke.
• The Rich Bitch villainess of the 1995 live-action Casper movie smoked cigarettes.
• In Charlie's Angels (2000) Eric Knox and the Thin Man both smoke, the former only after he is revealed to be a bad guy.
• A subversion and a straight example feature at the same time in Chicago. "The Cell Block Tango": Velma Kelly being very sexy and smoking. But she's an incarcerated murderess who sings "HE HAD IT COMIN'!" about the victim, so she's also evil. So the smoking makes her more evil than all the non-smokers with Implausible Deniability.
• Constantine (2005):
  • Papa Midnite subverts the cigarillo trope by being a good/neutral witch-doctor turned bartender.
  • Constantine smokes excessively, only to find out during the movie that he has lung cancer. After Constantine willingly sacrifices himself to save the world (allowing him to enter Heaven), Satan ends up curing his cancer to keep him alive so he can claim him later. At the end of the movie, he's seen popping gum in his mouth.
• In The Core, Zimsky was the self-serving Jerkass through the entire movie, and had been denied his cigs by the rest of the cast. Due to the tendency of Disaster Movies to off the cast one member at a time, he finally ends up alone with his cigs, just in time for a Redemption Equals Death soliloquy.
• Die Hard:
  • John McClane lights up a cig in the limo in the first five minutes of the first movie.
  • Also notable in his scene with Hans. The fact that Hans — masquerading as an escaped hostage — holds his cigarette with his thumb and index finger is just one of the things that helps clue John in.
• Snake Plissken, tough guy badass from Escape from New York, smokes through that movie, and actually got the final shot with The Slow Walk and a cigarette. In Escape from L.A. he doesn't have access to cigarettes until the end, in which he illuminates his face purely with the light of his match. In fact, the film is supportive of smoking rights. John Carpenter himself is a chain smoker.
  • Really, most (if not all) of John Carpenter's films include at least one scene in which a major character smokes a cigarette.
• The entire cast of Event Horizon shares a cigarette early in the film, which works as kind of a "Three on a match" callback. Thing is, that includes both good and evil characters.
• In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raoul Duke (an amoral, Chaotic Neutral / The Hedonist character, at best, when he's away from his typewriter) constantly smokes cigarettes from a cigarette holder (which Depp stole from the real HST, after he followed him around to get his characterization down), just like the real Hunter S. Thompson. Several critics complained that the cigarette holder always clenched between Johnny Depp's teeth made some of his dialogue unintelligible. As an interesting side note, Duke holds the cigarette holder with a lit cigarette in it in his mouth constantly, but he is never shown actually smoking the damn thing.
• Which leads to For a Few Dollars More, in which Col. Mortimer's pipe (incidentally, a gorgeous example) makes him a Distinguished Gentleman Badass. Similarly Clint's character, Manco, also smokes cigarillos and continues to be an exception to the rule while the villain smokes marijuana which adds to his unstable image via Drugs Are Bad.
• In Ghost Rider (2007), the police try Good Cop/Bad Cop on Johnny, and the good cop asks if he can have a cig. Johnny indicates he doesn't mind, but the Ghost Rider powers are in ready mode, and the cop's lighter flares up wildly.
• The Ghostbusters smoke in the their first film. It's not necessarily cool, but it does help ground the heroes as working-class stiffs.
• The first sign of Henry's evil in The Good Son is that he smokes. And gets Mark to smoke too.
• Doubly inverted in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Angel Eyes (the Bad) smokes a pipe, but this makes him a Distinguished Badass rather than a Distinguished Gentleman. Of course, this is Lee Van Cleef we're talking about, so the Badass comes with the territory; Blondie smokes cigarillos, but is the Good (relatively, within the spectrum of Grey-and-Gray Morality).
• Hellboy is a heroic badass and smokes cigars.
  • The first film has a scene near the end which illustrates Hellboy's and Director Manning's grudging respect of each other with them bonding over cigars.
  • By the second film, Hellboy's loose adherence to the rules has reduced Manning to bribing him with Cuban cigars. There is even a disclaimer at the end of the credits (next to "this is a work of fiction" and "No Animals Were Harmed") explicitly stating that the film's depictions of smoking are for dramatic purposes only and should not be taken to imply anything positive about smoking in real life.
• In The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Mr. Nick is usually seen with a cigarette holder in his mouth.
• In Independence Day, Steve only smokes cigars at the end of any aerial dogfight he wins, because he's the hero. David, on the other hand, spends the whole movie as an over the top green type. He berated his father for smoking cigarettes. But after he and Steve have saved the world (and they light up Victory Cigars together), he cheerfully tells his father, "Oh, I could get used to it."
• Inglourious Basterds: SS officer Hans Landa's Faux Affably Evil personality is embellished by his huge and cartoonishly extravagant calabash pipe.
• In It Happened in Hollywood, heroic cowboy actor Tim Bart only smokes cigarettes he rolls himself; even turning down a pre-made one his agent offers him.
• James Bond makes his big-screen debut with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. Good guys and bad guys alike smoke a variety of cigars and cigarettes throughout the series (although this has declined in recent decades). Tomorrow Never Dies has Bond exploit this trope twice against the bad guys, who smoked.
• In Kill Bill Elle Driver smokes, and it is definitely evil smoking.
• After King Kong falls to his death in the 2005 remake, a man at the scene wonders aloud, "Why'd he do that? Climg up there and get himself cornered? The ape must have known what was coming," and another man—who has a cigarette in his mouth, while the other doesn't—callously dismisses the possibility, "He's just a dumb animal. He doesn't know nothin'." Not precisely evil, but it probably counts since this version goes out of its way to make Kong more sympathetic.
• Knives Out has numerous examples of symbolic smoking.
  • Great Detective Benoit Blanc is occasionally shown puffing on a long, slender cigar, which gives him an air of sophistication and adds to his folksy-yet-brilliant demeanor.
  • Morally-ambiguous Linda Drysdale is often shown smoking cigarettes, usually when she's upset or thinking.
  • Sleazy Jerkass Walt Thrombey smokes fat cigars, which his father disgustedly claims he can smell from the top floor of his mansion.
  • Bourgeois Bohemian Meg Thrombey vapes, which symbolizes her status as a shallow trend-follower.
  • Good-natured housekeeper Fran smokes weed in secret to deal with stress, and is known to share with others.
• This trope is invoked in the film version of The Lord of the Rings; even though only good guys smoke in the movies, Aragorn is made to look sinister in his first appearance by having him smoke in the shadows, with the fire glinting off his eyes.
• In the original M (1931), Inspector Karl Lohmann of the Berlin police smokes cigars using a holder.
• In Mars Attacks! Professor Donald Kessler spends several scenes with a pipe in his mouth (notably when he's discussing the possibility of the Martians being peaceful because they are a technologically advanced race) showcasing he's a classy old-school sci-fi Omnidisciplinary Scientist while Art Land puffs cigarettes like a chimney and is a complete asshole. His wife Barbara also starts to puff a lot after the Pahrump massacre (as well as binges on alcohol), but it's pretty obvious she's doing it to try to keep her nerves calm.
• In Mary Poppins, George Banks (who's an uptight workaholic but a Jerk with a Heart of Gold nonetheless) smokes a Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe, as one might expect from a Quintessential British Gentleman like him. We never actually see this, but he mentions it in "The Life I Lead":
  At 6:01, I march through my door
  My slippers, sherry and pipe are due at 6:02
  Consistent is the life I lead!
• Helena's Evil Twin in MirrorMask smokes (and snogs goth boys! Ick!), though never on screen. Even the commentary admits that this is a bit odd.
• Satine in Moulin Rouge! is shown smoking a cigarette in a holder (evil smoking, though she is secretly idealistic and ambitious). DVD commentary revealed it was Nicole Kidman's screen test for the character, which explains why Satine is never seen smoking except in that one shot.
• In Oldboy (2003), when the protagonist smokes his first cigarette after 15 years of imprisonment (during which he has become quite the badass), he takes it away from a gang member's mouth.
• In Peach Blossom Weeps Tears of Blood, a Rich Bitch mother refuses to allow her son to marry a poor peasant woman, even after the son has knocked the peasant woman up. The snobby, bitchy mother is frequently shown smoking from an elaborate cigarette holder.
• Davy Jones smokes a pipe during his introduction in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and damn if it doesn't make him about five times scarier. He lights the thing with a fuse of the type normally used for firing cannon, he's completely silent while lighting it and glaring into the eyes of a terrified doomed soul, he blows the fuse out with a gust of smoke from some sort of hollow tentacle breathing tube on the side of his face, and only then does he go into his "Do ye fear death?" spiel while blowing smoke into the guy's face.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark is granted the suspension for toughness. The tough heroine Marion Ravenwood smokes during her meeting with Todt in her saloon, and blows smoke in his face and makes him cough.
• Tough Guy Love Interest Carlos Oliveira in Resident Evil: Extinction, lit up a joint and took a puff, as the zombies were closing in on him. This was also his Heroic Sacrifice, only not so much as he was a Zombie Infectee and would've had to have been killed anyway. The previous film portrayed Jill as hard ass and bitchy, and smoked, in contrast to her more Good Is Not Soft portrayal in the games.
• Richard III shows its title character smoking. In real life, Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Richard, is a nonsmoker, but he remembered the "Abdullah" brand of herbal, non-nicotine cigarettes from advertisements he'd seen in his childhood. The props department found for him some of the last few surviving packs of Abdullah cigarettes in existence.
• In Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Santa Claus is depicted smoking a pipe in many scenes before being kidnapped by Martians.
• In Shredder Orpheus, Hades is frequently seen taking leisurely drags on cigarettes, with Persephone lighting one to celebrate their victory in the finale. In contrast, Orpheus's manager Linus only lights up under stress and isn't actually shown smoking.
• In Space Jam, Corrupt Corporate Executive Swackhammer smokes cigars.
• Starman:
  • In a subversion, Shermin is a good and gentle sort, who smokes a cigar. He's actually the one who arranges it so Jenny and her alien companion get away. And he blows smoke in the general's face to indicate he's glad he did it, even though it might well be the end of his career.
  • Jenny is also shown smoking in the opening scene, which helps establish that she is upset about her husband's loss.
• Star Wars:
  • Return of the Jedi: Jabba the Hutt, the Huttese gangster, is usually seen smoking on a hookah.
  • Attack of the Clones: When Obi-Wan and Anakin are in a Coruscant night club, an alien drug dealer walks over to Obi-Wan and asks "You want to buy deathsticks?", to which Obi-Wan mind-tricks him into leaving him alone, saying "You don't want to sell deathsticks" and "You want to go home and rethink your life".
• The Strawberry Blonde: As part of her faux-sophisticated act, Amy asks Biff for a cigarette. Later she admits that she only put one in her mouth once and didn't like it. At the end, Virginia asks Biff for a cigarette and smokes it, showing how coarse and hardened she's become.
• Norma Desmond stands out in Sunset Boulevard because she smokes her cigarettes in a weird finger-mounted holder. One of her least weird tendencies.
• In the 1970s Superman: The Movie Lois Lane not only smoked, but she smoked Marlboros. Because Marlboros are thought to be a manly cigarette, this was probably characterization for Lois Lane as a tomboy. Superman does warn her about the dangers of smoking as she does so, and in the distant sequel Superman Returns, actually blows out her lighter before she can light them. As a sign of changing times, Lois smoking is treated as a slightly bigger deal in Returns.
• One of Terry-Thomas' trademarks was smoking using a cigarette holder. He almost always played upper-class scoundrels.
• Thank You for Smoking (set in the early '90s) featured this prominently, pointing out the idea of Hollywood getting paid to advertise smoking, as Big Tobacco was trying to find a mass market appeal again while facing allegations that cigarettes cause cancer. For extra irony, the film never actually shows anyone smoking.
• Watchmen: Sympathetic characters' smoking was reportedly excised from the film adaptation due to an executive who strongly believed that Smoking Is Not Cool. Villainous (and European) characters were fair game though:
  • The Comedian chomps cigars, lighting one with the torch of his flamethrower, to show that he's a badass as well as a Jerkass.
  • Silhouette uses a cigarette holder as she does in the comics.
• The evil Smokers in Waterworld not only rely on smoke-spewing gasoline engines, but also seem to have an unlimited source of cigarettes.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit:
  • The era-appropriate exemption is played with, as Eddie Valiant either borrows or buys some cigarettes from some people he met on the Red Line trolley. The exemption is also thrown into sharper relief by the fact that it's a bunch of kids that supplied them.
  • Among the cartoon characters, Baby Herman (not really a baby) smokes a (real) cigar to show that he's a tough guy when not performing; one of the evil weasels, named Wheezy, is constantly smoking several cigarettes at once, giving him a weak, raspy voice; and Roger himself poses with a cigarette holder on a publicity photo seen in a newspaper to look sophisticated, as was the fashion back then.
• In xXx, only the bad guys smoke. One villain gets killed when his cigarette attracts a heat-seeking missile to him.
  Xander: I told him that cigarette would kill him some day.

Literature

• In one of the Alex Rider books, one of the characters smokes, and Alex specifically comments that he thought he would take better care of himself. He turns out to be The Mole.
• Artemis Fowl:
  • Commander Julius Root is well known for constantly having a cigar in his mouth, though his are not made of tobacco but of some unnamed (and nasty-smelling) fungus. He's pretty badass, but mostly he's Da Chief, so he's contractually obligated to have one.
  • In the third book, the villain Jon Spiro puts a cigar in his mouth, but doesn't light it. He's a Neat Freak obsessed with his health (to the point that he doesn't even drink non-decaf coffee), but he still has to keep up appearances.
• Everybody in Atlas Shrugged smokes and one of the very many filibusters in that novel is about how appropriate it is to smoke while thinking: this notorious "point of light" argument is one thing that Rand haters and Rand fans both generally agree on.
• Stephane Maturin of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series smokes a pipe on occasion. He also struggles with a laudanum addiction throughout the series, gets addicted to coca leaves in the later books, and experiments with various other drugs that he comes across.
• The Herdmans, the Worst Kids In the World from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, all smoke cigars. Even the girls.
• The Cat Who... Series: The first three novels were written back in the 1960s, and Qwilleran smoked a pipe, which was considered to add character. Flash-forward to the 1980s when new books in the series started being published again. A lot more was known about the dangers of smoking and Qwilleran was convinced to drop the pipe. Not only that, but once he stopped smoking, he developed an aversion to tobacco smoke in all forms.
• In The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley smokes a pipe. At the beginning of the second book, he is debriefed by a senior official who smokes cigars. He quits before the third book, and reflects that he normally doesn't miss it, but would have welcomed the feel of a pipe during a hard case.
• Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon shows its present-day protagonist becoming a smoker as part of his character arc, mostly as a way of implying that he's loosening up and adapting to a more varied and dangerous lifestyle. His girlfriend gets the toughness exemption, and one WWII-era protagonist the historical exemption. It was more that he would accept a cigarette when someone offered him one, rather than fretting about the health implications of one cigarette every couple of months or so; there is nothing to suggest he had acquired a pack-a-day habit.
• In The Dark Tower, Roland smokes. He thinks it's healthy. Given that he lives in an alternate world, it may very well be.
• Discworld:
  • The thoroughly badass Commander Samuel Vimes smokes cigars after he gives up drinking following his marriage to Sybil Ramkin in Men at Arms.
  • Adora Belle Dearheart, in Going Postal and Making Money, is clearly one of the good guys and an unabashed chainsmoker. She is also sexy, a badass, and cool to the point of chilliness.
  • On a minor note, the goddess Anoia^note Goddess of Things Getting Stuck in Drawers, but after Moist von Lipwig namedrops her for a bit of "providence" the spike in popularity has her tipped for Goddess of Lost Causes is also a chainsmoker, and smelling cigarette smoke is supposedly a sign that you're in her presence, but it doesn't come up much since she features most prominently in Going Postal and Making Money, and thus her presence is rather overshadowed by that of Adora Belle.^note A long-time follower of Anoia, and theorized to be her avatar. Justified because she's implied to have been a volcano goddess in prehistoric times.
  • It's also mentioned in Going Postal that the sort of craftsman who smokes a pipe, and is therefore prepared to go through the methodical processes of tamping down, knocking out, etc., can be relied upon to be methodical in his work as well. Coincidentally, in Real Life Bernard Pearson of the Discworld Emporium smokes a pipe.
• Fitz Kreiner from the Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures smokes a lot — he once admitted to smoking thirty a day. But he's from the 1960s and not altogether a paragon of morality, anyway. The writers go so far in demonstrating its ill effects on his health as to have him cough up Blood from the Mouth at one point ¹it's never brought up again, though, and other characters often tell him off for it ²he rarely smokes in the TARDIS because the Doctor disapproves, but whenever he tries to quit he falls Off the Wagon.
• The The Dragon Knight series manages a series of exceptions leading to one (brief) instance of heroic opium smoking. The protagonist is recovering from bubonic plague, local medicine is around the Dark Age level, opium is realistically the most practical painkiller available in the world, and once he's coherent enough to realize what he's been given he immediately checks with an expert on the issue of addiction.
• In Ellis Peters' Felse novels, Detective Inspector Felse likes to smoke a pipe when winding down after a hard day's work.
• In Forgotten Realms, one of Elminster's "trademarks" is a pipe spewing vile blue or green smoke. Justified: magic in FR requires material components (a burning pipe provides several) and Elminster is immune to mundane ailments like smoker's cough (...and some poisons, and the need to sleep). The pipe itself holds lots of enchantments (e.g. it's able to follow its owner, teleporting when necessary) and is the activation key to some others.
• Smokers in Harry Potter:
  • Mundungus Fletcher, Dumbledore's ear to the underground and a dealer in goods of questionable provenance.^note His name even means "foul-smelling tobacco"
  • Professor Grubbly-Plank smokes as well.
  • This may be a case of Writer on Board; J. K. Rowling is an admitted ex-smoker.
• Played with in Honor Harrington. Citizen Admiral Lester Tourville smokes cigars, as part of a carefully cultivated image of unprofessionalism that he uses to prevent the Committee of Public Safety from seeing him as worthy of their attention. Once the threat of the Committee has been done away with, Tourville realizes to his chagrin that he has become addicted and is unable to quit. His superiors, without comment, make a point of having his assigned seat at any given meeting be below the return vent for the ventilation systems, which he takes as a tacit acceptance of the practice.
• The character Halloween smokes cloves in Idlewild as part of his teenage rebellion. He is very cool. The character Pandora also smokes cloves, presumably for the same reason, perhaps because she loves Halloween and wants to share something with him.
• The James Bond novels ditch all the smoking tropes here. Good guys smoke, bad guys don't. If the bad guy does smoke, it's invariably cheap, low quality cigarettes. Bond himself smokes as an indicator of how little he cares about anything. He knows he's hurting himself by doing it, he just doesn't care.
• In Johannes Cabal the Detective Johannes says he only smokes to be anti-social, while the villain Count Marechal is constantly smoking-with Cabal thinking to himself 'I'm at the mercy of a demented chain smoker.' In a later chapter, Marechal is listening to Cabal talk for some time and is said to be on his eight cigarette of Cabal's speech.
• Kinky Friedman smokes cigars but badass may not be the best way to describe him.
• In The Lord of the Rings, smoking is not an indicator of good or evil but of culture, as smoking is not universally known or done.
  • Smoking is practised by the hobbits and men of the Shire and Bree-land, and by the Dwarves and Northern Dúnedain who adapted it from them. Elves do not smoke, and in the Southern human lands it is unknown. The actual smoking is done by pipe, and in the recreational-at-rest rather than the chain-smoking way. The hobbits are quite proud of the fact that, although they were not the first to cultivate pipe-weed, they can lay claim to the idea of smoking it.
  • Saruman is also a smoker, secretly picking it up after having seen Gandalf smoke, although in the open he ridiculed him for it. Amusingly, in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, the scene where Saruman berates Gandalf's smoking indicates that Saruman the Wise couldn't figure out the function or purpose of smoking without being explained; he assumed that it was a toy Gandalf had invented to make funny shapes with smoke. The idea of soothing herbs completely missed him.
• In Momo, the villainous Grey Men are never seen without a cigar. They make the cigars themselves, not out of any ordinary leaf but out of dried-up time that they have stolen from their human victims and use to extend their own lives.
• In the Newsflesh-verse, smoking is back in vogue, more-or-less. It can no longer cause cancer thanks to the Synthetic Plague, but it can still cause emphysema. So people smoking is no indication of their morality one way or the other.
• Peter Pan: Captain Hook is fond of cigars, and has a holder that lets him smoke two at once.
• Sherlock Holmes smokes a pipe in most adaptations of his story. Probably because the fact that he also used cocaine in the books made it a case of choosing the lesser evil. He also smokes cigarettes in the original stories, but that detail rarely makes it into other adaptations, probably at least in part because of the prominence of this trope.
• In The Stainless Steel Rat, the protagonist smokes cigars. He used to have an alternate persona (used to actually commit crimes) which smoked cigarettes.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Dannik Jerriko smokes in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and Galaxy of Fear. He calls it a disgusting habit, and persists all the same (one of the people whose brains he ate was a smoker so he ended up addicted). In Galaxy of Fear, he actually uses his smoking as an alibi, pointing to the amount of ash in his living area as a sign that he couldn't have been out murdering people.
  • In The Thrawn Trilogy, a well-known ship thief named Niles Ferrier smokes carabbaba tabac cigarras — think small cigar with beige smoke — and the smell of carabbaba tabac smoke is something various characters use to pinpoint the man's location. He's scum. The heroes use him, and Thrawn pays him to do various things, but no one likes him and it's not hard to see why.
  • Elsewhere in the Legends universe, Lando Calrissian occasionally smokes a cigarra, but not at all often. Possibly only when he was young.
• In his youth, Pufftail from Stray (1987) associated "smoke-breathing" with cruel, abusive humans. He didn't realize until later that humans smoke for various reasons.
• In the famous Christmas poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, Santa Claus smokes, and the smoke encircles his head like a wreath.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In Shards of Honor, Cordelia's creepy psychotherapist Dr Mehta lights up at the start of a therapy session — though she doesn't inhale because the smoke is actually a truth drug.
  • In The Warrior's Apprentice, Baz has to pretend he's a Drill Sergeant Nasty type, and insists that he can only do this if he has a cigar as a prop, since the man he's modelling his performance on was a Cigar Chomper.
• The Wheel of Time: Pipe smoking is a pastime of the heroes and many of their allies (and of the author), and the Arcadian Two Rivers region from which the protagonists hail grows what's generally agreed to be the world's finest "tabac".

Live-Action TV

• A majority of situation comedies prior to 1960 featured main protagonists who smoked cigarettes ... too many to list in their entirety, but a few examples:
  • The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show: George regularly smoked a cigar throughout each episode; Burns was a lifelong smoker.
  • Leave It to Beaver: It is implied Ward (the father) smokes a pipe, as he owns a collection of said pipes and has tobacco inside. In one episode, Beaver and Larry fill one of Ward's pipes with tobacco ash and light it – and Wally gets the blame! (The misunderstanding is cleared up, of course.)
  • I Love Lucy: A blatant example, where all four leads smoked on a regular basis, especially in pre-1956 episodes where Little Ricky became a prominent member.
• 7th Heaven had a one episode villain who smoked, and ended up accidentally burning down a house. Her response? "You have insurance." The message is "smoking is evil and you should never be friends with smokers".
• The Addams Family:
  • Morticia Addams subverted it. She'd ask, "Do you mind if I smoke?" then began randomly emitting smoke.
  • Gomez, on the other hand, smoked cigars.
  • They also occasionally share a Turkish hookah, even though Charles Addams's original descriptions for the characters said Gomez was the only one who smoked (although he did mention Pugsley trying the occasional cigar, so perhaps he just meant the only one who smoked regularly).
• All in the Family: Although depicted later on as unhealthful, Archie Bunker was a cigar smoker. This was virtually eliminated by the time the show was retooled as Archie Bunker's Place.
• American Dreams play this straight at first with only characters like Good Bad Girl Roxanne and troubled cop Pete being smokers but later subverts it with Helen the shows moral compass being revealed as secret a smoker.
• Both incarnations of Starbuck enjoy cigars (when they are available) on Battlestar Galactica, as an indication of their badassness and masculinity/Tomboyishness.
• The reimagined Battlestar Galactica has this in multiple episodes:
  • It usually arrives in the form of a victory cigar for Viper pilot protagonists Apollo and/or Starbuck. Some of the other pilots also smoke the odd celebratory cigar. Justified in that a common celebratory gesture after successful combat missions actually is a cigar.
  • Baltar smokes fancy cigarettes.
  • Doctor Cottle chain-smokes cigarettes in his own sickbay.
  • Bill Adama is implied to smoke (he carries a lighter his father gave him), and later is seen smoking a herbal blend with President Roslin.
• Blackadder:
  • The second season omitted the ubiquitous smoking of the Elizabethan Era (except in the first episode, shortly after Edmund learnt "Bob" was a girl), but the fourth season showed Lt. George smoking cigarettes and Cpt. Blackadder with a pipe.
  • The beginning of the Season 2 episode "Potato" had Blackadder remarking about how people were reacting to Sir Walter Raleigh's discovery of the potato, "people are smoking them, building houses out of them. They'll be eating them next". In the same scene Lord Melchett casually offers Blackadder a potato as one would a cigarette.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel:
  • Angelus smokes once over the course of both series -after he's just killed a prostitute and sucked the smoke directly out of her neck. In fact once Angel turns evil, one of the very first things he does after he teams up with the other villains is smoke a cigarette.
  • In "Redefinition", Angel, descending into Knight Templar territory, smokes a cigarette, which he subsequently tosses to the ground to ignite motor oil and set Drusilla and Darla on fire.
  • Angel also smokes in season 2 during a flashback.
  • Nearly every character seen smoking in the Buffyverse is evil, doomed, or under a spell.
  • Faith survived sharing a cigarette with Spike in season 7. Oddly, she smoked as an Anti-Hero but never as a full-on villain. Maybe it's to help with the extreme stress of allying with those who would be happy to see her dead, as well as, y'know, the saving the world thing. Also, when she was a villain it would have been the Mayor preventing her, since he wouldn't want Daddy's Little Villain engaging in such a nasty habit.
  • In "Band Candy", both Joyce and Giles smoke. Joyce lives for another two seasons, and Giles is killed in Season 8.
  • Spike smokes cigarettes throughout the series. He is already dead. Of course, given the extreme susceptibility Buffyverse vampires have towards Kill It with Fire, this makes him quite the badass by itself.
    • In Season 5, with Spike having moved from Villain to Anti-Hero, the writers humorously make a point that his smoking isn't stupid only because he's already dead: Xander says as Spike lights a cigarette, "Those things'll kill you" and Spike gives him a look as a reminder that he's already dead.
  • Harmony takes up smoking specifically because she's evil. Unfortunately, she's as terrible at smoking as she is at being evil.
  • Lorne seems to be the "only smokes when stressed" type.
• Averted. Practically everyone smokes in Caprica, to tie in with the general "1950s USA in space" atmosphere.
• Charmed: The Charmed Ones were shown smoking only twice in the series, both time cigarettes: adolescent Paige as part of her teenage rebel phase, and Phoebe in an alternate reality where she was trapped in a broken marriage to Cole, disillusioned about her life and associating with demons.
• Crusade, in an homage to The X-Files (in fact, as part of a whole-episode homage to that show), played with this by having the episode's villain, an alien Man In Black, lighting up a cigarette at the episode's climax after explaining to the heroes how they have managed to convince their people of a planet-wide Earthling conspiracy being responsible for all the evils and incompetencies of their government. Of course, he didn't anticipate that Captain Gideon would simply reveal the entire conspiracy, including a recording of his monologue, to the entire planet's population, purely out of spite at him for being such a dick.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Roger Delgado version of the Master smoked cigars.
  • And here's some bar trivia: The First Doctor lights up a pipe in his first story, which turns out to be an important plot point. The Fourth Doctor has a Turkish hookah in the TARDIS, although considering how much other stuff he picked up over the centuries, it doesn't imply he used it recently.
  • Countess Scarlioni in "City of Death" was rarely ever seen without her cigarette holder. And yes, she was a villainess of the supremely classy type.
  • In "The Enemy of the World", the Doctor's Criminal Doppelgänger, Salamander, is a heavy cigar smoker, which is used as one of the distinguishing points between him and the Doctor.
• The very nasty Thomas and O'Brien of Downton Abbey do their best plotting together on their cigarette breaks, while Benevolent Boss Robert smokes cigars.
• Jayne in Firefly smokes cigars. Whether this is because he's a bad rude man or a heroic badass is uncertain, but he is quite capable of getting through a bar fight without discarding his stogie.
• Lampshaded in an episode of Flash Forward: "Only villains smoke. We know this, right? You may call me Flosso, and I'm a villain."
• None of the main characters on Frasier is a regular smoker, and Frasier and Niles usually come down against cigarettes - they are doctors, after all. Their intolerance apparently does not extend to cigars, however, which Niles, Daphne, and Martin all enjoy puffing on in "Adventures in Paradise, Pt. 1". Frasier's fiendishly ruthless agent Bebe Glaser smokes cigarettes on the regular however, leading to a legendary Must Have Nicotine episode when she tries to quit cold turkey over a weekend.
• In The Handmaid's Tale, Serena Joy is often seen smoking. She's quite a bitch.
• Subject of a joke by Demetri Martin on Important Things: "A pipe is better than a bong...because when you're smoking one, you at least look like you're thinking about something."
• In the BBC series, Life On Mars, everyone in the police station smoked (in 1973). Future boy Sam, with his unending morals and 21st century views, was the only one not to smoke, except for one time when it served to aid him in some way. An obvious reference to real seventies cop shows, especially The Sweeney.
• Little House on the Prairie: Charles Ingalls regularly smoked a pipe. Michael Landon was a real-life smoker.
• Mad Men. Everyone smokes at some point, usually cigarettes. Regardless of moral status, actually. The main exceptions are Pete Campbell (it seems that Vincent Kartheiser has never been a smoker, and one of the rules of Mad Men is that only smokers or ex-smokers are permitted to smoke in the show, even though the cigarettes are herbal) and Bert Cooper (where it fits in to his rather eccentric personality, which also includes being a bachelor into old age and decorating his office in the Japanese fashion and requiring visitors to it to remove their shoes—all quite weird in early '60s America).
• Melrose Place:
  • When Sydney joined the show, she was shown smoking and with an ankle tattoo, the classic markers of a Troubled, but Cute Good Bad Girl.
  • Similarly, the darker side of Kimberly's Split Personality accessorizes with black nail polish and cigarettes.
• My Own Worst Enemy has an interesting example: The main character has been given a split personality. Ordinary nice guy family man Henry doesn't smoke. Bad Ass Normal spy guy Edward does.
• My Three Sons: Steve smoked a pipe. In several late 1960s episodes, Robbie also smoked a pipe.
• Pushing Daisies' Emerson Cod is a tough guy who smokes a cigar. He's got a decent streak, though.
• QI:
  • They had an amusing take on Good Smoking, Evil Smoking; comparing a builder gesturing with a pipe while discussing his plans (and thereby looking solid and reliable) with another gesturing with a cigarette (and thereby looking shifty and untrustworthy).
  • Stephen Fry mentions in one episode that he was the last person awarded Pipe Smoker of the Year. A gentleman if ever there was.
  • Bill Bailey would often whip out a pen and pretend to smoke it when he felt like doing a rather posh stereotype. He brought a real pipe a couple of times but hasn't for a while presumably because the BBC has lots of rules when it comes to smoking on TV.
• Clove cigarettes are a sign that Kochanski's ex is a pretentious douchebag in Red Dwarf, at least according to Lister. Then again, Lister also thinks the silly white hat he wears is a sign he's a pretentious douchebag, rather than a sign he's a chef.
  • In a complete subversion, Ace Rimmer is seen smoking a cigarillo (usually a marker of "sleazy, low-level evil"), before skyboarding out of an aeroplane on a crocodile, stealing a parachute in mid-air, wiping out a base full of Nazis and rescuing a princess.
• In Six Feet Under, Nate takes to smoking in secret as a way of rebelling against the constraints of his life.
• In the Small Wonder episode "Smoker's Delight", Jamie and Reggie experiment with tobacco in hope of becoming more popular in junior high school.
• In an homage to the 1978 Superman film, Smallville's Lois Lane is seen smoking in her debut episode, however she's trying to quit, and apparently does so because we never see her smoke again or hear it mentioned.
• Sarah Connor has quit smoking by time of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Prone to lighting up in T2, one episode shows her in a bar proving the habit well and truly kicked. Just as well for her, too, since one of the things she missed while time-travelling was California's smoking ban.
• In That Mitchell and Webb Look, Mitchell and Webb parody the Evil Cigarette Holder in this sketch.
• Twin Peaks:
  • Benjamin Horne, a Corrupt Corporate Executive, smokes cigars. He later quits after his Heel–Face Turn in the second season.
  • Josie Packard is shown smoking using a cigarette holder just before it is revealed that she is not so innocent and is scheming with Benjamin Horne.
• The X-Files relied on this heavily for nearly eight seasons, The Cigarette Smoking Man being the most prominent example. Then they introduced Monica Reyes, who admitted that smoking was "not very FBI of [her]" and seemed sheepish about her habit, often making up excuses to go outside when she needed a cigarette. She claims she is trying to quit and is not shown smoking in Season 9. It seems possible that, given the series' previous use of smoking as a clear marker of evil, the trait was intended to confuse viewers as to whether or not they could trust her until her character was better-established.

Pro Wrestling

• In WCW, The Giant (Big Show in WWE) would smoke cigarettes in the ring following a Face–Heel Turn late in his WCW run.
• R-Truth's 2011 WWE Face–Heel Turn saw him light up a cigarette after brutally assaulting John Morrison.

Roleplay

• Only rebellious characters in Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues are shown to smoke. There's Nadine and her girl gang of bullies, and then various members of Daigo's gang who are shown to smoke frequently. Less antagonistic characters that are still counterculture, like Hyeon, have been shown smoking to get high.
• Used to varying degrees in Dino Attack RPG. There were a number of characters who smoked for varying reasons. Cigarettes were commonly invoked by criminals or people with a shady past like Trigger, his partners, Snake, and Montoya, though granted they were also used by the comparatively more honest Detective Bogart. Clint Wayne often invoked the Cigar Chomper method which established him as a badass gunslinger, though also justified by him coming from a Western community. Meanwhile Angel Eyes likes to use the Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe.

Tabletop Games

• The One Ring: Player Characters, who are heroic by definition, can apply a skill specialty in Smoking to relax, concentrate, or grease the wheels of a social encounter with a nice bit of pipe-weed.

Theatre

• One example of Mike Teavee's Troubling Unchildlike Behavior in the 2013 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is that, according to his mother, he smokes cigarettes. His parents have managed to get him down to two packs a day.
• In City of Angels, when Femme Fatale Alaura Kingsley takes a drag on Stone's cigarette after making him an offer he can't refuse:
  Stone: Nasty habit.
  Alaura Only kind to have. [she returns the cigarette to his lips]
• In Damn Yankees, Applegate mentions that he's trying to quit smoking after demonstrating his trick of pulling a lighted cigarette out of the air. One wonders whether Fire and Brimstone Hell would stop smoking if he did.

Video Games

• In The Adventures of Lomax, Evil Ed (the game's Big Bad) keeps smoking a cigarette when seen on the world map between levels.
• Mr. Leland in Alpha Protocol is chewing a big, fat cigar throughout his debriefing with Mike, and if Mike accepts his offer and joins Halbech at the end, Leland gives him a cigar to seal the deal at the end of the game, signifying his Face–Heel Turn.
• Champions Online, despite the immense wealth of other costume part choices, does not have any form of cigar, cigarette, pipe, or anything else as a costume part - for either heroes OR villains.
  • City of Heroes does have a Cigar costume piece.
• In the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers Licensed Game for the NES, Fat Cat is the Final Boss. He is seen smoking a cigar, and attacks Chip and/or Dale by blowing cigar smoke at them.
• Some characters in Conker's Bad Fur Day, including mobster Don Weaso and Conker himself (during the It's War chapter) were seen smoking cigars. The fire imp in Bat's Tower (who is much more manic and crude than either of them), however, smokes a tab ^DefinitionLSD.
  • A straighter (or at least more common) example: Carl (The very obnoxious cog in Bats' Tower) smokes a cigar, while his sympathetic/upper-class-ish other half Quentin smokes a cigarette-in-holder.
• One of the items you need to lay the ghost of Matilda Fly to rest in Dark Fall: Lost Souls is a cigarette holder, which she's depicted holding in posters for her stage performances. Justified because she's from the 1940s and dressed to project a glamorous, sexy image.
• In Daughter for Dessert, the protagonist and Kathy are both hiding their failures to quit cigarettes, but when they smoke marijuana, it’s portrayed as positive overall, with no mention of an addiction.
• In Dishonored 2, interacting with a hookah pipe reveals that both Emily and her late mother Jessamine enjoyed the occasional smoke. By contrast, Mad Scientist villain Kirin Jindosh has a creepy prosthetic thumb that also serves as a pipe.
• The Convict in Enter the Gungeon is seen smoking and flicking her spent cigarette butts down into one of the bottomless chasms of The Breach while idle during character selection.Fitting for a former ruthless crime lord.
• Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII is most often seen with a cigarette. And keeps a pack held by his goggles. He actually uses them to light a stick of dynamite in one Limit Break.
  • Though his other major appearance has his smoking habit replaced with him holding a reed in his mouth, and he's not seen to do much smoking in Advent Children... but then he lights up a victory cigarette after blowing up a reactor in Dirge of Cerberus. This may be because in Advent Children he appears very briefly and spends most of the time killing a gigantic monster, and Kingdom Hearts is a Disney game. In the novelization of Kingdom Hearts I, however, he is described as smoking cigarettes.
• Final Fantasy Type-0: Dr. Arecia Al-Rashia, a member of Rubrum's Consortium of Eight and Class Zero's "Mother", smokes a cigarette in a long holder, with a tendency to throw it aside when someone pisses her off. As an Omniscient Morality License holder and the closest thing Orience has to a Big Good, she arguably qualifies for both Good Smoking and Evil Smoking.
• Elvis in God Hand constantly smokes a massive cigar and uses it to fight. When he dies, the cigar goes out.
• South African slaver Hoyt Volker in Far Cry 3 smokes Cohiba cigars. As he points out to Jason Brody, on the Rook Islands, "Cancer won't be what kills you."
• Most of the characters in Grim Fandango qualify due to the heavy Film Noir influences in the game's plot. The gentle Meche smokes to show you how hard and jaded her experiences in the Underworld have made her. But they're all dead, so...
  • Lampshaded in this exchange between Manny and literal Speed Demon, Glottis:
    Glottis: It's not just a job, it's what I was created to do! If I get any farther away from a car than this, I'll get sick and die! It's like I'm not happy unless I'm breathing in the thick, black, nauseating fumes!
    Manny: *takes a very long drag of his cigarette* I can't imagine...
• Halo:
  • Two notable characters both love the same brand of cigar and know John-117 quite well. Those two are Sergeant Avery Johnson and Senior Chief Franklin Mendez. In particular, Mendez was in charge of the Spartan-IIs' training.
  • Captain Keyes has a pipe he carries with him and chews on occasionally, but doesn't smoke it due to various reasons.
  • Any character in the Haloverse can get away with smoking now, since cancer is out of the genome for most people. If you do get it, it's easily cured.
• Gentleman Cho'Goth skin of League of Legends features a pipe to go with the monocle and glass of wine.
• Mass Effect:
  • An elcor businessman on Omega has a cigar in his mouth.
  • Two characters in Mass Effect: Andromeda can be seen enjoying a cigar-like item, a salarian "legitimate businessman" with a fondness for sitting in dark and grungy bars, and Kheema Dorgan, if she takes over running Kadara Port.
• Dr. Light from Mega Man (Classic) smokes a pipe. He's an Elderly Gentleman.
  • One of the arcade games has Dummied Out sprites of Heat Man smoking. While he is evil, the fact that he's based on a Zippo lighter probably has more to do with it.
• Metal Gear: Solid Snake is a lifelong cigarette smoker whose smoking habit turns in handy in several ways during the games, while his original nemesis Big Boss has been a fan of cigars since at least the 1960s.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: Big Bad Senator Armstrong is the only character in-game who smokes, and being a Corrupt Politician, he smokes cigars. He actually stops in the middle of his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown of Raiden to light up.
• Captain Price in Modern Warfare is shown smoking a cigar before the mission Crew Expendable. In in the sequel, Soap, who served under him, smokes a cigar before the mission Cliffhanger.
  • Big Bad General Shepherd in Modern Warfare 2 is not only an excellent case of evil smoking. After he shoots Roach and Ghost and dumps them into a ditch soaked with gasoline, he steps up to the dying Roach and throws his burning cigar at them.
  • Price also lights up a few times in MW3, most notably after he hangs Makarov from the ceiling of the Hotel Oasis.
• The Glukkons from the Oddworld series all smoke cigars, due to being a race of Corrupt Corporate Executives. Amusingly, General Dripik, one of the big bads from Abe's Exoddus, smokes a pipe with a cigar in it for some reason.
• You can tell producer Dee Vasquez in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is bad news because she uses a cigarette holder.
  • Played straight in a weird way in Ace Attorney Investigations where both are doing different methods used to quit smoking. The killer Sexy Stewardess Cammy Meele blows soap bubbles, while the heroic Hardboiled Detective Tyrell Badd uses lollipops.
• Sasha Nein of Psychonauts chain-smokes constantly. He's good—he smokes through the European (he's German) and badass exceptions. It also helps with his image as a fifties-esque super spy and G-Man.
• Ana from Rise of the Tomb Raider is a cigarette smoker. However, here this trope is deconstructed: Ana is Secretly Dying of cancer from all those cigarettes, which is why she's trying to find the Divine Source. Ultimately, however, as the above-mentioned Hoyt pointed out, cancer is not what kills her: it's a sniper's bullet through her head once Trinity decides You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• In the Japanese version of Skies of Arcadia, resident Badass Longcoat Gilder smokes a cigar. It's even on his flag; this was, in fact, the lone relic of smoking left in the localization. Vyse's generally badass father also has a cigar in the Japanese version.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters uses the Evil Smoking for Lobo, a Black Marketeer who has no compunctions, amongst other things with selling children for sexual slavery to corrupt people in high places like Hawthorne. There's also Christophe, who represents Good Smoking and has a pipe. The two are later revealed to be former friends.
• Tychus in StarCraft II smokes cigars, inside his helmet, and fits the Jerkass stereotype. Raynor on the other hand keeps a pack of cigarettes in his bandolier that he's only shown smoking a couple times, fitting with his "outlaw/rebel but good man" characterization. Straight-laced boy scout Matt Horner is only ever shown smoking a cigar once, when he and Raynor (with his own cigar) light up in celebration of exposing Mengsk's war crimes.
  • The 'smoking inside helmet' goes back to the original StarCraft as well, with a particular CGI cutscene. The characters in it didn't have much of a personality, but seeing as they are all Marines, they fit more or less into the same stereotype that Tychus is an extreme example of.
• Team Fortress 2. Smoking is era-correct, as it's set in the 60s, when smoking was cool.
  • A couple of servers make the Soldier a Cigar Chomper as he is in some of the short movies, for the express purpose of making him more badass, as the description for the thing says. Nowadays he has a misc items, a pair of mutton chops, this gives him a pipe, complete with a visible trail of smoke.
  • The Spy is rarely seen without a cigarette. One of his taunts involves flicking his cigarette onto his enemy's corpse! However, he is also French.
  • Sniper is also a cigarette smoker, although not to the extent that Spy is. His newest misc item, a sweater vest, gives him a pipe similar to the Soldier's.
  • When the Pyro's around, everyone smokes. Because they're on fire.
  • The Administrator is often smoking in the comics, the same goes for her Identical Grandmother, Elizabeth. This would be evil smoking.
• Yakuza: Reina, in the "Rich East Asian Woman"-mold, smokes a long slender pipe that manages to invoke a cigarette holder too.
• Mr. X in Streets of Rage is seen smoking a cigar in the second game before fighting you as the final boss.
• Bill in Left 4 Dead is always smoking and his cigarette is never seen out of his mouth. Considering that he and the other survivors are fighting for their lives in a Zombie Apocalypse, smoking is likely Bill's way of keeping a cool head.
• Resident Evil:
  • Chris Redfield in Resident Evil can be seen lighting and smoking a cigarette in his live action introduction. The remake drops this aspect and future iterations of Chris don't show him smoking.
  • In Resident Evil 4, Leon is the squeaky-clean hero and is explicitly a non-smoker, as he refuses one offered to him by one of the Policia and later rebukes someone asking for a smoke by replying all he has is gum. The police are assholes, but not bad people per se, and the person asking for a smoke is the morally ambiguous Luis who is eventually revealed to have been working for Saddler but pulled a Heel–Face Turn when he realized what his research was to be used for. Worth noting that neither smoker survives the events of the game. The cop (and his partner) are murdered by the villagers and fed to Del Lago, while Luis is Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by Saddler's tentacle.
  • In Resident Evil Village, Lady Dimitrescu is seen smoking a cigarette holder in one scene just before answering her incoming phone call. The Duke (the good merchant) is sometimes seen smoking a cigar. You can even find a cigar in Heisenburg's factory and sell it to the merchant for 3,000 Lei.
• Batman: Arkham Series
  • In Batman: Arkham Asylum heroic Commissioner Gordon has a Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe (though he never gets to smoke it), as a nod to the comics. He gets to light it in Batman: Arkham Knight.
  • The Penguin is shown enjoying cigars. Part of his characterization is that he thinks he's Wicked Cultured when he's really just a thug with delusions of culture, so its possible that his cigars aren't as high quality as the ones used by a true Cigar Chomper. In any case, rather than the typically "rugged manly badass" vibe, the cigar simply adds to his thuggish qualities. It also seems to affect his health, he's shown to have a voice box.
  • The hopelessly corrupt SWAT Team in Batman: Arkham Origins have desks with ash trays full of cigarettes and/or cigars.
• Kirtus Trent in Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness is first seen lighting and smoking a cigarette as he watches Lara Croft escaping from an explosion in a sewer pipe before he smirks and walks away while flicking away the cigarette. He becomes Lara's ally later on.
• Yotsuyu in Final Fantasy XIV is usually seen with an ornate pipe she occasionally smokes from, which fits her nature as a cruel tyrant of Doma. When she becomes a primal, she still has her pipe and uses it to blow big clouds of smoke as a part of her attacks on the players.

Web Comics

• In the "Bare Breasted Brawl" storyline of The Blonde Marvel, Victoria smokes a cigarillo to make her breasts larger.
• Dominic Deegan:
  • Dominic smoked a pipe until his younger brother accidentally healed his lungs.
  • This was a plot point in an early arc - Luna's mother cursed him to have a fish fall on his head whenever he smoked.
• In the first volume of The Easy Breather, the sorceress Karman McKnockside usually has a cigarette in her hand. In fact, part of the premise of the Easy Breather mythos is the heroine's campaign against tobacco and other air pollutants.
• El Goonish Shive uses the badass variant of Good Smoking very briefly and even then it seems to be used solely as setup to identify a character's silhouette.
• Donald Donlan from Gunnerkrigg Court has been seen with a pipe. Not to mention the stoner-like flashback from this page.
• Enkidu of Heroes of Lesser Earth is an Anti-Hero type who is always chomping on a cigar.
• Homestuck:
  • Mr Egbert is an example of Good Smoking - he smokes an old-fashioned pipe almost constantly (his online handle is even 'pipefan413'), and is portrayed as a Bumbling Dad and Doting Parent who genuinely cares about his son.
  • Snowman, on the other hand, is an example of Evil Smoking, complete with a cigarette holder she likes to stab people with because it is also a lance.
  • This being Homestuck, John's Dad's WALLET MODUS contains, among other things, a pile of pipes that is about the same size as John, as well as 10 tons of pipe tobacco.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: The Don Omun Vash smokes a water pipe on his throne while being interrogated about his criminal activities. Since his species has huge, elaborate nostrils in place of eyes, it's a memorable sight.
• Miriam from Out There smokes, and gets the sexy rule suspension. She's got a pile of character flaws, but not enough to mark her down as evil.
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: Ada Lovelace, while not a pipe smoker in reality, has been given one for the purposes of this comic. It does, however, represent Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 40-a-day cigar habit fairly accurately.
• If a character in Weak Hero smokes then high chances are that they're one of the antagonistic, crude delinquents that are opposed to Ben's gang. The only good character that smokes is Gerard, and he regrets how expensive and unhealthy it is for him.

Web Original

• The "pipe smoking=good" part of the trope is averted by Ask That Guy with the Glasses who is rarely seen without his pipe. The fact that he's frequently had sex with this same pipe is one of his least disturbing vices. Among his more disturbing ones include serial murder, rape, pedophilia, and cannibalism.
• SCP Foundation: SCP-4999 smokes cigarettes. He appears beside those who are Dying Alone and offers them One Last Smoke. If they accept, he puts the cigarette in their mouth, lights it, and lights one for himself; if they refuse, he smokes the offered cigarette himself. The cigarette is the only physical evidence he was ever there.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Tintin (1991): In the adaptation of King Ottokar's Sceptre, Professor Alembick's cigarette smoking habit was moved to his Evil Twin.
• Arcane: Vander smokes from a rustic looking pipe, lighting it with matches. It only adds to his fatherly look and him growing to love the "vile" taste neatly summarizes him becoming comfortable with his new role as peacekeeping bartender. Silco on the hand smokes cigars, complementing his well put together outfits to show his expensive tastes and fundamental desire to live like the wealthy in Piltover.
• In Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Commissioner Gordon is seen to smoke a pipe in the first three seasons, but The New Batman Adventures depicted him without it.
  • The Penguin was initially shown with his trademark cigarette holder, as befitting his Wicked Cultured Man of Wealth and Taste aesthetic. Much like with Commissioner Gordon, Penguin seemed to have given up smoking by The New Batman Adventures.
• In Bravestarr, Tex-Hex's henchman Scuzz smokes cigars, and it is clearly hurting him; he coughs and wheezes constantly. He's often the butt of many jokes about it, even by Hex's other henchmen.
  • Scuzz even gets an extremely rare villainous And Knowing Is Half the Battle speech, in which he admits that he wishes he'd never started smoking and advises the viewers to learn his lesson the easy way.
• Apparently supporting Bob Clampett's statement that Bugs Bunny was a take on Groucho Marx, the quazy wabbit has many times in his career been seen enjoying cigars.
  • At the end of "Herr Meets Hare," Bugs dresses up as Josef Stalin and smokes a big pipe. He says to the audience in Stalin's voice, "Does your tobacco taste different lately?" (referencing an ad slogan for a pipe tobacco company).
  • This was parodied in another Bugs Bunny cartoon, "Bugs' Bonnets". At one point, a general's cap lands on Elmer Fudd's head, which causes him to talk like General MacArthur and smoke a pipe, which is conveniently hanging from the brim ("I haaave weturned!"). Later, a mobster's fedora lands on Bugs' head, which causes him to talk and act like a mobster, including smoking an accompanying cigar, whose smoke he blows in Elmer's face while threatening to "rub [him] out".
• Father, the Big Bad from Codename: Kids Next Door, has a pipe, appropriate since he's patterned after a Standard '50s Father. Another villain, Mr. Boss, has a cigar.
• Disney is one of the heaviest pushers of this trope. See the Film example above.
  • The company eventually announced that smoking of any kind, by any character, would never again be depicted in a film released under the Disney Studios label.
  • Gravity Falls shows this in an episode featuring a living wax museum which includes a Groucho Marx who appears to be holding... nothing. He even lampshades this by asking, "Hey, why is there nothing in my hand?"
  • Phineas and Ferb shows they are holding true to that edict. In "Last Train To Bustville", we see Glenda the engineer with a pipe. It's a bubble pipe.
• Dan Backslide, the "coward-bully-cad-and-thief" of Chuck Jones's The Dover Boys, is first seen in a cloud of tobacco smoke (when he speaks, his first word comes out in smoky letters). Naturally he uses a cigarette-holder.
• Bender, the nominally evil robot in Futurama, is frequently shown with beer and a cigar, particularly in his more selfish and narcissistic moments. He explains to Fry that he needs the alcohol to power his fuel cells, but the cigar just makes him look cool.
  • Notably, smoking isn’t actually bad for Bender, given that he has no lungs to ruin. This doesn’t stop him from blowing smoke in the faces of characters who do. In a What If? segment where he becomes human, he’s particularly excited to have his vice become an actual vice.
    Leela: Bender, you drank and smoked when you were a robot.
    Human Bender: But now it’s bad for me!
• Paw Rugg from The Hillbilly Bears smokes a corncob pipe. So does his wife, Maw.
• King of the Hill:
  • Dale Gribble is a chain smoker; having done it since the third grade because he doesn't know what to do with his hands. Cotton Hill smokes cigars when he celebrates. Hank Hill smokes rarely and it's typically when he's under a lot of stress.
  • One episode had a big anti-smoking message, where even his wife and SON wound up addicted to it, so it was up to his non-smoker niece to smooth things over, even taking drastic measures by locking them in a room.
  • There is also the Debbie Grund two-part episode, where Hank takes up smoking in response to all the stress he is facing. At one point, Hank ends up smoking a marijuana cigarette by accident, which leads to a hilariously exaggerated reaction by Hank.
• Averted in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic where a background character was intended to smoke a corn cob pipe that was literally a cob of corn, and would pop into popcorn whenever he got stressed or surprised. However, and unsurprisingly, the higher ups were having none of that in a kid's show and the idea, ahem, went up in smoke.
• Next to spinach, the one item most iconic of Popeye the Sailor Man is the corncob pipe he smokes. When CBS produced The All-New Popeye Hour cartoon show for Saturday mornings, they retconned this in one of its short segments, which had Popeye speaking out against the hazards of smoking. ("I just uses me pipe for tootin'!")
• Cyril Sneer from The Raccoons is always seen with a half-smoked stogie in his mouth.
• Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog: Punch-Clock Hero Sam Sheepdog smokes a pipe, while Punch-Clock Villain Ralph Wolf smokes a cigarette which he holds between his thumb and index finger.
• In the first three seasons of Rugrats, quite a few one-shot characters would be seen smoking, typically villains or crooked characters, such as the cigar-chomping lawyer F. Lee Barnum whom even smokes his cigar in a courtroom (from "Pickles vs. Pickles"), the cigar-smoking manager of Greenstreet's supermarket (from "The Case of the Missing Rugrat"), and the bumbling crook Mike, whom always has a cigarette dangling in his mouth (from "Ruthless Tommy"). When the series was revived in 1996 after its' initial cancellation, Nickelodeon was beginning to enforce strict no-tobacco policies for their shows by that point.
• Tom and Jerry: Tom Cat occasionally smoked when he was trying to impress a female, which makes it a very early example of "only big dummies smoke".
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Dr. Girlfriend gets the "sexy" rule suspension...almost. She has a gravelly mannish voice from years of smoking.
  • Brock Sampson almost always has a cigarette in his mouth, and has the bad-ass exception in spades. He's also a parody of the super-spies and government agents that made smoking look cool.
  • Brock's mentor Hunter Gathers is one of the very few examples of someone who smokes with a cigarette holder who isn't evil or sophisticated. Of course, he's an Expy of Hunter S. Thompson.
  • Professor Impossible smokes a pipe. He's an expy of Reed Richards, but unlike his wise and heroic inspiration, Impossible is an uncaring, self-centered Jerkass who only comes across as wholesome because of his old-fashioned aesthetic, and he eventually undergoes a Face–Heel Turn. Professor Impossible's Evil Costume Switch is complete with him swapping his old pipe for a new one designed to look like a cartoony skull.
  • Monstroso chain smokes cigars and is a Corrupt Corporate Executive. He offers The Monarch a cigar three times in one minute, and again later, and begins their conversation by lighting up a cigar after he just put one out before they walked in.
  • Sergeant Hatred was very frequently seen smoking cigars back when he worked for the Guild, but ever since he made a complete Heel–Face Turn and joined Team Venture he seems to have dropped the habit.

Real Life

• At least one health care sharing ministry forbids its members to smoke but makes an exception for cigars and pipes as long as they're confined to special occasions.

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