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"Finding out I had herpes was quite a shock! #pikachu"

When hashtags are used for comedic purposes. It is mostly used in these two scenarios:

Can overlap with #EngineeredHashtag if the advertised product or Show Within a Show is self-aware or a deliberate parody of the practice. Compare Trade Snark, the corporate version that predates the Internet, and Faux Computer Code, which were used in the pre-Twitter days of the internet. Also compare to Clickbait Gag, another appropriation of an internet trend for comedy's sake.

No Real Life Examples, Please! We don't really want to hear all the clever puns that your friends posted last week on Twitter. You can still post them directly on the Creators pages.


#Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    #Comics 
  • In Amazing Spider-Man Vol 3 #1's story "Lucky to Be Alive", Peter ends up naked after confronting Gypsy Moth who unraveled his suit, minus the mask and a made-on-the-spot webbed underwear. The surprised bystanders start taking pictures of him and posting them online, one girl coining #SpideyWhiteys.

    #Fanfics 
  • In Episode 8 of Hellsing Ultimate Abridged, after laying down how many souls Alucard has taken into him to realize Release Level Zero and how he got them to Seras, Integra says, "He calls it his...(sigh)...#LifeHack." Seras's response? "He would."

    #Films — Animated 

    #Films — Live-Action 
  • In the Deadpool movie, Wade farts while passing near his roommate Blind Al, and remorselessly declares "#DriveBy".
  • Ted 2 has examples where the tag is actually what Ted and John are using while posting embarrassing photos of the other (John drenched in semen samples: "#GrrrMondays"; Ted smoking through a penis-shaped bong: "#MyAmazingSummer"; John hit by a used diaper: "#ShitHappens").
  • Kim Possible: Drakken tags a photo on Villainstagram with "#cutecats", "#skim-milk", "#90sdoodads", and "#coolstuff". None of these tags have anything to do with the photo itself, which is of Kim Possible.

    #LiveActionTV 
  • In the revival of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, during some games a hashtag for the gag in play appears. For example, one Newsflash depicting dentistry is accompanied with #DentalFears.
  • Barney on How I Met Your Mother uses hashtags with a hand signal for a hash in the air. #burn
  • iZombie:
    • In the episode "Physician, Heal Thy Selfie", Liv becomes obsessed by social media after eating the brain of an "online influencer" and spends the episode posting pictures online and tagging them (or even her spoken phrases) with ridiculous hashtags such as #BrainFood, #CoveringMyAss, and #bootyhadmelikewhat?
    • In the episode "Cape Town" one of the local superheroes named himself Hashtag. In order to call him, you just have to #HashTag.
  • Lucifer (2016): When Amenadiel confronts Malcolm for not executing his orders, the latter answers that he knows that the angel has no actual means of pressure on him and ends up mockingly saying out-loud "#TeamLucifer", which is also the title of the episode.
  • Jane the Virgin parodies this with Jane's vain celebrity father Rogelio, who frequently uses hashtags on Twitter. Sometimes they're relevant to the plot of the episode, others are just for laughs. (#RogelioMyBrogelio) The Lemony Narrator often chimes in with the chyrons.
  • John Oliver sometimes does this on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
    • When he mentions the movie Fifty Shades of Grey he will say that the actor Jamie Dornan is #NOTMYCHRISTIAN (i.e. not a good choice to play the role of Christian Grey in the film).
    • Tagging #FEMINISM to anything is basically a Running Gag now, combined with tags such as #OSAMABINLADEN, #BEARPLEASURE, #CRACKPIPES or #HITLER ("Adolf Hitler, or as I like to call him: Mister Eva Braun. #FEMINISM #HITLER")
    • While complaining about corporations making offensive tweets about social issues for advertising purposes, he unveiled the hashtag "#WeUnderstandThatAsCorporateEntitiesOurPresenceInCertainDiscussionsIsNotAlwaysRequired SoWeWillStriveToLimitOurActivitiesToJustSellingYouShit." It's even right 140 characters long!
    • In an episode about Donald Trump, he started #SHUTDOWNTHEFUCKBARREL
    • In reference to an old Dave Matthews tweet that read simply "Shart Party", John asks people to go wild with the concept, while also raising the hashtags #SHARTPARTY and #CRASHINTOMEWITHSPIDERFARTS.
    • He'll also mention when the exact meaning of his hashtag isn't entirely clear, e.g. in the episode on guardianship, he had "not all foxes" hashtagged as #NOTALLFOXES, noting that it might get mistaken for "no tall foxes".
  • The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has #HeWhoShallBeNamed for giving various funny names for former president Trump.
  • Cobra Kai has Johnny go on a Twitter rant about an impending rematch between him and Daniel. ...except that he doesn't know what a hashtag is or how it works.
    Johnny: "IT'S ON: LAWRENCE-LARUSSO REMATCH! hashbrown dead meat"

    #Music 

    #VideoGames 
  • In Dicey Dungeons, the Witch's repeated usage of #blessed is a bit of a Character Catchphrase.
  • Since 2015 and under the influence of a new PR team, the Sonic The Hedgehog social accounts started posting more silly and self-aware posts, as well as being more involved with their fans. On their Tumblr account, the posts are usually followed by funny tags telling how their office life is, asking the followers to send drawings of their coworker "Angry Sandra", or teasing the development of Big's Big Fishing Adventure 3.
  • Splatoon:
    • Splatoon's Tumblr blog "Live from Squid Research Lab" sometimes adds some funny hashtags to the usual ones such as #insert octodad joke here and #He was a skater squid.
    • An in-game version occurs in Splatoon 2. For reference, Marina is an Octoling:
      Pearl: How do you make an octopus laugh? Eight tickles!
      Marina: #FIREPEARL
  • A minor one in Ratchet & Clank (2016). Wendell Lumos, CEO of Gadgetron, tells Ratchet to post about his experience with the Hologuise to "the social medias" (since the kids love their social medias), ending the conversation with a spoken "Hashtag Gadgetron!"
  • One of Johnny Cage's battle quotes in Mortal Kombat X is "#YouSuck". And his daughter Cassie's Brutality closer in 11 is "#You'reDead", and the name for one of her Fatalities is "#GirlPower".
  • In Until Dawn, Ashley scolds Chris when he misses the "ghost" that she keeps seeing.
    Ashley: You were on your phone, you dip! What were you tweeting? "Hashtag there's a freaking ghost after us"?
  • During Batman: Arkham Knight, you can hear this bit of Enemy Chatter from the Scarecrow-backed militia occupying Gotham.
    Mook: We did good; the attack's trending! #CityOfFear! Everybody upload your pics!
  • Teseo of Azure Striker Gunvolt has a habit of dropping hashtags in his dialogue.
  • The Touhou Project game Hifuu Nightmare Diary ~ Violet Detector has Sumireko Usami doing this ad nauseum (she's posting her photos on Instagram after all). These include #DoggiePhoto, #MyPhoneGotZapped, and #MYEYESSSSS.
  • In Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! after Tiny Tina spoils the ending of the Sword-Chair Trilogy for Brick:
    Deal with it, deal with it, #DealWithIt
  • Much of @twitter's dialogue in The Closer: Game of the Year Edition has hashtags before certain words, with a good few being full of snark or otherwise humor. It just wouldn't be the personification of Twitter otherwise.
    @twitter (in response to the Closer getting a trivia question regarding marsupials right): I know that #kangaroos would have been trending during the 1980s, thanks to the hard work of Paul Hogan and Mel Gibson to bring the #Outback to the USA. And think of all the hilarious Crocodile Dundee #parody accounts that we missed out on. I am LOLing and SMDHing at the same time. If only I had been created 30 years earlier #ImproveTheWorldIn9Words
  • In Bloons Tower Defense 6, one of the expert maps is called #ouch. Its shape is also literally a hashtag, being made of two pairs of parallel, short paths, which makes it one of the hardest maps in the game. #ouch indeed...
  • The Hex: One of the members of the Twitch chat watching the Secrets of Legendaria livestream (bandito7) gives the player answers to questions that would otherwise be impossible to solve, resulting in him getting banned for backseating during a blind playthrough. The other members of the chat rally against him getting banned via the hashtag "#freebandito".
  • Disney Speedstorm has an AI character named Arbee that loves to end her sentences with hashtags. One of her in-game prompts reads as follows:
    Press when the boost bar is full to boost!
    #pedaltothemetal

    #Webcomics 
  • During the "Openbound" segment of Homestuck, Meenah uses hashtags in her conversations (it's implied that everything she says is also posted to the Homestuck equivalent of Twitter).
  • Grrl Power: When Decolete talks about Maxima's personality and her feelings towards men, along with Air Quotes on Page 577:
    Decolete: Hashtag "Not all men"

    #WebOriginals 
  • One of Black Nerd Comedy's most recurrent Running Gag is #SmoothDonatello, which Andre sings each time Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) makes something to impress his crush April O'Neil. Eventually, he started to sing variations of the hashtag each time a character hits on his/her love interest (with the appropriate font color).
  • Game Grumps' "I Burgie Burgie" shorts feature several parodic Engineered Hashtags such as #RelishShits, #BurgerFeels, or #beefy (the latter coincidentally being also used by a gay porn website, which makes it even funnier in meta-hindsight).
    • During the infamous sequence where Arin pitches a "lovable, quirky sitcom" about a character named Laura Schmidt, this returns, when Laura uses the phrase "ROFL" and Dan suggests that "#ROFL" would appear in the corner of the screen.
  • Reviewing the song "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke, Todd in the Shadows suggests to replace the hash from the music video (which even adorns our #EngineeredHashtag page) with #RAPEY because of the questionable lyrics or #NOT A RHYME.
    "This is probably the most blatant of the way pop singers try to trick people into promoting them on Twitter. Personally, I can think of many other things that would trend before #BLURREDLINES, based on this video, like maybe, I don't know, #LAZY or #STUPID or [click to see the full rant/hashtag]  ."
  • Another "Blurred Lines" parody, in this case by Bart Baker, also spoofed the #Thicke and #BlurredLines hashtags that popped out randomly in the music video. In this parody we can see hashtags such as #Douchebag, #Creep, and #NutShot. The whole thing escalates to the point that a hashtag cop appears and threatens to arrest Thicke for hashtag abuse.
  • In RWBY Recaps, Neo (who is mute in the original show, but has communicated through text messages) has a Verbal Tic where all of her dialog is hashtags.
  • In The Spoony Experiment review of the Ultima: Runes of Virtue games, the Black Knight succeeds in his plan to annoy Spoony by spreading the hashtag "#SpoonyHatesEverything". Spoony pulls out his cellphone to confirm, and is quickly ranting. The Black Knight has succeeded, which is more than a lot of the villains on the show can say.
  • When announcing the Cell Games in Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Cell tells the audience to be part of the conversation at "#CellGames", and half a second afterward (considering that the Games decide the fate of the world and all) he's already trending.
  • Episode 14 of Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged has the celebration for Rufus Shinra's ascension to President of Shinra Corp. The hashtags are #NewPrez to celebrate the occasion, #GP4Lyfe as part of a Gold Saucer contest running that same day, and #YouHad1Job to mock Cloud for his abysmal street-marching performance.
  • Features prominently in Tales From Dev Null's Aesop 2.0 stories
  • The premise for the Foil, Arms and Hog sketch 'Hashtag'.
  • When Vinny of Vinesauce used his ROM corruptor on Metal Gear Solid, one of the changes was the random insertion of pound-signs in the dialogue text. Vinnie ran with it, jokingly suggesting making the hashtags viral. Some of them actually made decent hashtags (#TheManBehindTheLegend), while others didn't (#DesignedYourSOCOMRadar).
  • During Roahm Mythril's run of Pokémon Yellow, he remarked on his difficulties dealing with the game's frequently seen Flying-types and ended his thoughts with "#AlwaysTheBirds", causing said hashtag to flourish in the video comments. He later adopted it as a variation of one of his catchphrases.

    #WesternAnimation 
  • DC Super Hero Girls 2019 has all of its episode titles as a hashtag, e.g. #TheLateBatsby.
  • In the We Bare Bears episode "Viral Video", the bears upload a video and while typing the description, they each throw in hashtags.
    Grizzly: #RIGHTEOUS #HOLLA
    Panda: #PandaSingle
  • The Gemina-equivalent comes up when the Mysticons try to track down Gawayne by following his posts on Snapdragon. When he uses the hextag "Blessed", Zarya mocks him by commenting "Hextag AnnoyingKing."
  • OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: One of the eponymous pests in "We've Got Pests", Peej, likes to prefix her statements with the word "hashtag". When Enid gets tired of the pests' antics, she calls Peej out on it.

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