A character either witnessing a nauseating sight, or describing something nauseating, is completely unbothered by it. Bonus points if it makes another character nauseated. Frequently Played for Laughs.
Often leads to a Vomit Discretion Shot or Vomit Indiscretion Shot.
See also Autopsy Snack Time. Additionally, the Vomiting Cop is frequently found with a more jaded cop who isn't nauseous.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- In Rurouni Kenshin, when Aoshi exhumes Kaoru's grave to make sure that it's really not her, he reaches inside the cadaver and pull out the puppet-string mechanism. The other characters are nauseated by it, but Aoshi is A-OK.
Comic Books
- In the Warren Ellis comic Fell, the coroner presents a rotten corpse to Detective Fell while eating a sandwich. After taking a bite, a piece of tomato falls into corpse's chest cavity. The coroner reaches in.
Fell: If you retrieve that piece of tomato from where it fell and then put it in your mouth I will shoot you.Coroner: ...I was simply going to remove it. I have to go over the bridge for organic tomato, you know.
Fan Works
- In Episode 23 of A Wild Badfic Appeared! Commentaries's MST of Supper Smash Bros: Mishonh From God, Ike, being a mercenary and former general in and veteran of two wars, very casually reminisces about the many gruesome ways he'd seen people killed, mauled, hacked apart, and mangled by him, his comrades, and his enemies while on the job. While eating popcorn, at that. It Makes Sense in Context. However, about half the party isn't disturbed by it either, especially Chrom, Robin, Ness, and Samus, the former two also being soldiers and the latter an intergalactic bounty hunter.
Films — Live-Action
- In The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan is aboard a very turbulent plane to the USS Enterprise. Jack hates flying due to turbulence, but the navigator goes into excrutiating detail about a past mission:
Navigator: Some turbulence, eh, Commander? You don't like flying, huh? Aw, this is nothing! You should've been with us five, six months ago! Whoa! You talk about puke! We ran into a hailstorm over the Sea of Japan. Everybody's retching their guts out! The pilot shot his lunch all over the windshield, and I barfed on the radio! (takes a bite out of his candy bar) Shorted it out completely! And it wasn't that lightweight stuff either, it was that chunky industrial weight puke! (offers him the candy bar he's been eating) Hey, you want a bite?Jack Ryan: (muttering to self) Jack, next time you get a bright idea, just put it in a memo!
- Dirty Harry:
- The first Dirty Harry movie involves Harry telling someone who is considering jumping off a building that he wants the guy's name, because the mess of a splattered body often makes people hard to identify. The guy says he thinks he's gonna puke, and Harry, who doesn't seem nauseated at all, says "don't do that, not with all those people down there looking up."
- In Magnum Force, Harry is called to the scene of a murder with his partner. One of the cops there comments on how the inside the victim's car is just filled with all kinds of brain parts (the audience doesn't see this) and generally goes into the most gross bodies he's seen. Harry, who has seen more than a few sights like this, is unaffected but his partner looks at the body and then turns to go puke.
- In National Lampoon's Vacation, after the Griswolds discover their dog had peed on their sandwiches, everyone starts spitting their sandwich out except Aunt Edna, who just keeps eating.
- In Pitch Perfect, the Bellas get into a huge argument, and Lilly gets knocked into a giant pool of vomit. After just lying there in shock for a few moments, she begins to make puke-angels by waving her arms and legs.
- Subverted in Fargo when the cheerful, domestic, heavily pregnant policewoman Marge joins her partner at the site of a homicide and starts to gag — then, when the morning sickness passes, continues calmly assessing the crime scene.
- Independence Day: David gets airsick on Air Force One, and an especially bad case is triggered when his father innocently babbles on about how unaffected he is.
Julius: "Look at me, like a rock." (gesturing) We could go backwards, we could go forwards, we could go side to side—"David: (stops him, pulls a face, and hurries to the restroom)Julius: "...what'd I say?"
- Main Street Meats: Near the end of the movie, when everyone is barfing and running away upon finding out that Main Street Meats has been serving them people meat, we see one guy standing around and looking at his bun... and then he goes right back to eating it.
Live Action TV
- In the Married... with Children episode "Hot off the Grill," everyone at Al's cookout reacts with disgust when they learn that Kelly added the ashes of Marcy's dead aunt to Al's grill. Everyone, that is, except Steve, who hated said aunt...and starts grinning as he eats his "Bundy-burger" with even more enthusiasm.
- This comes up from time to time on Bones, where Brennan and the other squints at the Jeffersonian are unfazed by decaying corpses and whatnot while other characters get squicked to varying degrees, including having to vomit.
- Dirty Jobs has this happen all the time. There was an episode where a cameraman literally stood under a shower of condensed raw sewage and didn't even flinch.
- On the American version of The X Factor, the first act of one episode featured a flasher who got on stage just to expose himself to the judges. While 3 of them were totally fine, Paula went to the bathroom to vomit for about 15 minutes.
- Kari Byron, of Mythbusters fame, would gag and choke at the sight of the pig corpses the team would use for ballistic analogues while the boys were happy to carve and lift it with bare hands. She's gotten better about it, though.
- An episode of CSI has Catherine send the rookie officer escorting her out because of this trope (she doesn't want vomit contaminating her crime-scene). The suspect turns out to have been hiding, and attacks her.
- Lampshaded by Warrick in another episode, when Sara admits that she's being nauseated by a boxer's spit bucket. He'd seen her working on decomposing bodies or feces without complaint, but saliva turns out to be her personal Blow Chunks button.
- Both played straight and subverted on The X-Files with Mulder and Scully. They run across some pretty gross unknown stuff in their cases, including one case in which a mutant made a home entirely out of newspaper and bile. Scully is grossed out. Mulder sticks his fingers in it to see what it is. Meanwhile, in autopsy...Scully is the calm pathologist, while Mulder tends to look a little green around the gills (unless said corpse is rumored to be an extraterrestrial...)
- Cheers: Parodied. Woody is unperturbed by Carla's graphic description of how varicose veins are removed - while eating spaghetti no less! - but is disgusted when Frasier loudly exclaims about an article about psychological distress full of technical jargon, unable to eat anymore.
- Firefly: When the crew come across a derelict ship whose crew had been mutilated by Reavers, most of the crew, even the hardened war veterans, are noticeably disturbed. Simon volunteers to... clean up the dead and prepare them for a Burial in Space, specifically saying that bodies don't bother him (he was a trauma surgeon before coming to Serenity). Shepherd Book also volunteers to help, and say some funeral rites over them. He too doesn't seem too disturbed, another hint that he was involved in sinister things in his past.
Visual Novels
- In Fate/stay night, when an attack on the school leaves almost all the students in a near-death state, Tohsaka is horrified and is visibly fighting back nausea. Shirou, on the other hand, calmly inspects the students and determines they're not dead... at least not yet. Tohsaka demands to know how he can remain so calm in this situation, and Shirou replies that he's seen lots of corpses before, which disturbs Tohsaka even further.
Western Animation
- In the King of the Hill episode "My Own Private Rodeo", when Dale recounts how he caught his father, Bug, kissing his wife Nancy on their wedding day, his story starts off catching Bill puking in the bathroom, and afterwards, nonchalantly heading straight to the kitchen, where he caught Bug in the act.
- In the Futurama episode "Parasites Lost", after learning there are worms inside Fry's body:
Hermes: (eating popcorn) It's nauseating, mon! (eats more popcorn) Is there no way to get rid of the disgusting maggots?
- Happens a lot in Superjail!, where disgusting and violent deaths are commonplace enough that none of the employees are bothered by them.
- On The Penguins of Madagascar, Rico has been given a gag reflex suppressant and thus cannot produce a Time Bomb in his Stomach of Holding. One of the tactics to get him to vomit it out is to show him a nature documentary of leopard seals eating penguins. But while the others react accordingly, Rico actually seems to be enjoying it.
Real Life
- It's Truth in Television that people can grow desensitized to disgusting elements due to overexposure. This is especially common among people who either are compulsive hoarders, own pets, or have poor living conditions, as they are constantly surrounded by bad smells and/or general filth that they can become oblivious to them.
- There's a real-life phenomenon known as Anosmia (AKA scent blindness or variations thereof), where a person may be unaffected by any smell within their vicinity. Yes, including foul smells.
- Medical personnel build up resistance pretty quickly. Autopsy Snack Time is, after all, Truth in Television. A similar rule applies to biologists, particularly those who work with dissections, parasites, or decomposition.
