Follow TV Tropes

Following

Slobs Versus Snobs
aka: Snobs Vs Slobs

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/11142856_800_1066.jpg

"We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude."
— Eldar Philosopher Uthan the Perverse (on da Orkz), Warhammer 40,000

Odd Couple, indeed.

One is well-groomed, clean, stylishly dressed, and treats those around as inferior, be it at a Renaissance court or a slum. The other is scruffy, dirty, dressed entirely from the used clothes discount pile, and acts like boorish rabble, rolling their eyes at the uptight.

They will usually be in close proximity, at least in the same neighborhood, city, or space sector. And of course they fight. The scale of the conflict can be any size, be it a clique vs. clique social power struggle in a school, a street brawl between rival gangs, or two species or even Planet of Hats at war. It can cross into armed revolution, or either Kill the Poor or Eat the Rich.

Beyond the superficial dichotomy, this conflict is one of lifestyle and worldview. The Snobs are at their best epicurean, refined, and educatedbut can occasionally also be classist and vain, while Slobs are often honest, revelrous and dionysianbut possibly violent and dangerous.

As a narrative device, Slobs vs. Snobs rarely presents both sides equally. More often than not, the Slobs are presented in a more sympathetic light than the Snobs. Every once in a blue moon however you do see a Snob-sympathetic angle where the Slobs really are Insufferable Imbeciles. Even then, there are often good and bad attributes associated with both positions, and many uses of this trope end with An Aesop that Both Sides Have a Point and can learn from each other to become better people. Occasionally, though, they’re both shown to be equally terrible.

On the Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty, Snobs would be shiny and Slobs would be gritty.

Compare/see also Elves vs. Dwarves, Fur Against Fang, and Tanuki/Kitsune Contrast, where the Snobs will be elves, vampires, or kitsune, and the Slobs will be dwarves, werewolves, or tanuki respectively. (Though vampire elves and werewolf dwarves aren't out of the question, nor for that matter are Elven Vampire Werewolves). The trope Rich Suitor, Poor Suitor is what happens when you mix slobs vs snobs with a love triangle and their financial status is proportional to their classiness. Technician vs. Performer is a similar trope in the entertainment world. Rock is Authentic, Pop is Shallow is a similar trope in the music world. Theatre Is True Acting compares screen acting (often the lowbrow "slob") to stage acting (often the classical "snob"). When the Slobs are men and the Snobs are women, it's a Girls vs. Boys Plot. See also Wunza Plot.

For a character that embodies the positive qualities of both the snobs and slobs see Self-Made Man; for one who embodies the negative qualities of both see Nouveau Riche.

Super-Trope to Academia Elitism. Subtrope of Harmony Vs Discipline, Foil, and Red Oni, Blue Oni.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • A car commercial had a skier and a snowboarder coasting down the slope side by side. The snowboarder shouted "Dweeb!", to which the skier responded "Delinquent!"

    Anime & Manga 
  • In Death Note, this isn't the core of the conflict between Light (snob) and L (slob), but the contrast is certainly played up. Their allies also tend to fit; stylishly dressed Knights Templar vs. Defective Detectives. Ironically, Light is middle class, while L is ridiculously rich enough to buy a skyscraper.
  • In Beelzebub, this happens when the protagonist and his True Companions, who hail from a delinquent ridden Inner City School, clash with the Absurdly Powerful Student Council of the posh private school they are transferred to.
  • In the Conviction arc of Berserk, a socio-religious stratification is presented between the upper-class Knight Templar Holy Iron Chain Knights of the Holy See who resided within the castle town of St. Albion and the impoverished, hedonistic pagan refugees who lived in shantytowns outside of St. Albion. Their strife escalates when our two ill-fated Weirdness Magnets Guts and Casca are added to the mix, and all hell just breaks loose after that.
  • In Café Kichijōji de, the competent yet obsessive Neat Freak supervisor Taro is always arguing with the laidback, disorganized slop Maki.
  • In Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!, the Conquest Club (snobs) are up against the Defense Club (slobs).
  • Shinsengumi as slobs and Mimawarigumi as snobs in Gintama.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid has Delinquent leader Harry/Halley/Hallie Tribeca and The Ojou Victoria Dahlgrün, who despite sharing the same set of friends, hates each other's guts and general demeanor with a passion.
  • One Piece: The clash of the Marines (Snobs) and the Pirates (Slobs), though we see aversions on both sides. For example, the rough-and-tumble Garp for the Marines and suave and stylish pirates like Sanji or Robin. Played straight with the aristocrats known as the Celestial Dragons, who wear special suits so they won't have to breathe the same air as commoners, vs — well, everyone else.
  • Rebuild World: Played for Drama. The Rival Katsuya and his friends, are mostly well off teens pampered by their Private Military Company Drankam, who praise them no matter how bad they mess up because they are marketable, making them arrogant. This contrasts to Street Urchin protagonist Akira who has to suffer greatly for any scrap of advancement, along with the hunter gang he slowly builds up in the slums. Despite Katsuya being handed everything, the rivalry is mainly driven by Katsuya being a Green-Eyed Monster over Akira both earning the respect of the veterans in Drankam who bully Katsuya, and the attention of the women Katsuya likes. Katsuya is proud and idealistic, chafing against the humble and cynical Unscrupulous Hero Akira.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • In Codename: Sailor V and the Sailor Moon manga, Minako's dislike for the police has sides of this, with her remarking more than once that she sees police officers as arrogant snobs and taking on normal criminals just to rub in their face how the slobbish girl in a ridiculous costume (Minako considered her Sailor V outfit as ridiculous) could do their job better than them. To underline this aspect, Minako had absolutely no problem when she found out her friend and fellow idol fan Natsuna Sakurada was the Superintendent-General of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police (the single most important police officer of Japan and commander-in-chief of Tokyo's police), and in fact gave her a few pointers to avoid getting lynched by other fans.
    • In the manga, Minako and Rei started with a mild version of this, as the blunt and tomboyish gyaru ante-litteram that is Minako and the aristocratic and feminine Yamato Nadeshiko that is Rei are so different they barely understand each other, and mistake each others' attempts at being friendly for insults. By the end of the manga, they have overcome their differences, and their relationship is implied to be a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
  • Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs: This is the form of most conflicts in the franchise, with pretty, spoiled, haughty, and often bullying nobles being broken down by the foul mouthed lower class Jerk with a Heart of Gold protagonist Leon and whatever Ragtag Bunch of Misfits friends he can scrounge up. This applies, from the petty conflicts, up to multiple climactic Big Badass Battle Sequence.

    Audio Play 
  • Ome Henk: This is one of the recurring themes in this Dutch series of Audio Plays. Henk, the titular character, is an antisocial boorish man who lives on social welfare. His neighbor Floris Jan van Fleppensteyn is a rich snob who associates himself with the high society. Their contrasting ways of life is a frequent source of (mostly violent) conflict between the two.

    Comic Books 
  • The Beano:
    • This UK comic book had Dennis the Menace (UK) (not to be confused with the US version) who was a catapult wielding tearaway against the more nicely brought up Softies.
    • Lord Snooty and his family versus the Gasworks Gang. Most of Lord Snooty's close friends were also commoners, though; in the first issue, he decides they're more fun than his posh friends.
    • Posh Street School is one of the two schools that has a rivalry with Bash Street in The Bash Street Kids. (The other being Blob Street, which is more or less the same socioeconomic status as Bash Street.)
  • The old UK comic book Smash! had a series called "The Swots and The Blots" that was neat preppy kids verses the scruffy troublemakers.
  • The Dandy had "The Jocks and the Geordies". Interestingly in this one, the Geordies are the snobs, despite being archetypally cast as the Slobs/the hard guys (even before Viz came on the scene).
  • The Nutty had two families living next door to each other, actually called "The Snobs and the Slobs".
  • Cor!! had Ivor Lott and Tony Broke. Sister comic Jackpot had their Distaff Counterparts "Millie O'Naire and Penny Less". When both comics were merged with Whizzer and Chips (and later Buster), the male and female versions teamed up.
    • Viz parodied this with Ivor Better & Tony Worse which ended with Tony getting depressed and shooting himself with Ivor matching it by shooting himself with a bigger gun. The final panel has them in a Fluffy Cloud Heaven with Ivor sitting on a bigger cloud.
  • The Toffs and the Toughs: The reader was expected to side with the poor characters (common, as comics sell disproportionately to working-class children.) Another similarly named and themed strip from the same publisher was called Smarty's Toffs and Tatty's Toughs. This in fact appeared to be a merger of The Toffs and the Toughs with Smarty Pants and Tatty Ed. British comics loved this trope.
  • Class Wars: The premise was children of different social classes mixing in the same class at school. The name was later toned down to Top of the Class. In this case, both sides had their moments, and they sometimes joined forces against their teacher - and even he was allowed the occasional last laugh - but the commoners were more usually the heroes.
  • On Minimonsters, we have Frank's gang (The good ones) and Morty's gang (The evil ones). They are complete opposites and hate the other gang deeply. While Frank's gang is good and they help the other people in the town; Morty's gang are "delinquents" and they are dedicated to humiliating Frank's gang and the others.
  • It's a Nice Life: A comic strip version of The Good Life. It played up the snobbery of the conservative family and made the self-sufficient family much more loutish— thereby completely missing the point of the original series which was that both couples were very much middle-class householders - Tom and Barbara could only embark in their life of self-sufficiency because they owned a house with quite a large garden, after all. It also missed that the couples in the original series mostly got on fine — Jerry and Margo didn't understand why the Goods were doing this, but they were still friends.
  • Toffee Nose: A hugely "stuck up" girl from a very "common" family and Posh Claude, a character in Cheeky who always put on airs.
  • The idea comes up in the first Nikolai Dante storyline.
    Jena: I was trained in the arts of war by the finest military commanders in the empire.
    Nikolai: And I learned to fight in the sleaziest bars in the thieves' world. Let's get it on!
  • A US variant, The House Next Door had a smart All-American capitalist family living next to the more run-down home of a Russian communist family.
  • In Gravity Falls: Lost Legends, it's revealed that young Stan and Ford had rivals in the snobbish Siblings Brothers.
  • While Alfred is the member of the immediate Batfamily, other than Cass, that Tim gets along the best with, and with whom he shares all of his secrets, Tim's slob-like tendencies and disastrous mess of a room are clear and constant points of contention with due to Alfred's proper and tidy preferences. note 
  • In Get Jiro!, The Farm are the slobs while International are the snobs. The Farm is made up of punkish, faux-revolutionary vegans who prefer instilling fear and brutality in both the populace and its members. International are high-class establishments set in colorless, minimalist and modernist establishments that believes fanatically in traditional cooking.
  • The first Lowborn High strip in 2000 AD's "Regened" all-ages issues set up Wychdusk Manor as the posh Wizarding School, in contrast to the eponymous Good Old British Comp of the world of magic. The second one actually pits them against each other in competition, with the captain of the Wychdusk team being particularly obnoxious, such as suggesting the Lowborn kids should be cleaning his changing room.
  • Wonder Woman (1987) gives Diana a second mission besides bringing peace to man's world by breaking the amazons into two rival tribes, one living on the island of Themyscira, while The Bana-Mighdall live nomadically. Those on Themyscira preferred to pretend the other tribe did not exist until Diana discovered them and forced Themyscira to acknowledge them. Even still Themyscira amazons view themselves scholarly warriors set apart from corruption of man's world, and see The Bana-Mighdall as disgraceful brigands they should have wiped out if not for need to travel into man's world to do so. The Bana-Mighdall in turn see Themyscira's amazons as prissy layabouts they should conquer if not for fighting men being more important. In Wonder Woman's absence the two tribes end up at war, but the conflict is softened in Wonder Woman (Rebirth), where two cosmic retcons have removed the wars from the timeline and the two tribes are limited to sabre rattling, fistfights and inconsequential wagers.

    Comic Strips 
  • Madam & Eve: Eve Sisulu is a blue-collar housekeeper working for two comfortable middle-class "madams". Downplayed in that while Eve is a Professional Slacker, she isn't particularly slobbish, and the Andersons have a low-key austere lifestyle with a vaguely undefined fortune.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Accepted: The frat boys of B.K.E. vs. the rejected masses of S.H.I.T.
  • Played for Drama in the Mexican film Amar Te Duele, which shows the prejudices and discrimination between the Mexican upper and lower class.
  • American Honey zeroes in on the wide wealth gap in the American midwest as the mag crew travels to affluent and poorer neighborhoods. At the home of a wealthy woman, Jake lies and says he needs the money from magazine sales for “college credit points.” When asked what he is majoring in, Jake says he’s studying politics. The woman condescendingly remarks Jake doesn’t look like the type to be studying that subject.
  • Animal House practically codified the collegiate version of this with the clash between houses.
  • Played with multiple times over the course of Annie (2014).
    • Stacks starts out the movie a germaphobe, disgusted with the people he's trying to make nice with because he's running for mayor. He is so germaphobic he doesn't just use hand sanitizer, he squirts it into his mouth. He also has no game face of any sort, so when he tries the mashed potatoes he's feeding the homeless, he ends up spewing them in disgust all over the people lined up. They look at him in disgust for doing it.
    • Lou, the bodega owner, allows Annie to "work" for him in exchange for favors and merchandise. But the work he has her doing involves wiping out the real expiration dates on milk and juice and putting in fake ones that are further out. Lou also puts to rest the "poor people are dumb" idea many wealthy people have. He may not have book smarts, but not much gets past him.
    • Hannigan spends the majority of the movie protesting that she deserves better than her present lot, and treats her foster girls like maids.
    • The woman who works in social services is disgusted by Annie, and won't even touch her hair tie full of money to pay for her background check.
    • At the Guggenheim museum event, it's a formal black-tie event. In the center of it is Annie, wearing an amazing red dress, and eating/playing with her food in the way you might expect a ten-year-old child to do when bored at such a to-do.
    • The foster parent inspector seems nonplussed by Hannigan's flirtation. Guy, on the other hand, seems offended at having to come into Harlem at all to talk to her and is so disgusted by Hannigan that he literally blocks her from trying to kiss him when they make their deal.
  • Babylon (2022): Jack's dialogue with his third onscreen wife Estelle is primarily about how she (an esteemed Broadway actress) finds his silent film acting populist and lowbrow, and the film circles he runs in debauched and uncouth. Near the end of their marriage, Jack retorts that film's populism means it has value, as it brings joy to exponentially more people than the stage does.
  • Back to School inverts the typical class distinctions. Thorton Melon is a Nouveau Riche Self-Made Man who buys his way back into college, where his irreverent personality grates on stuffy academia.
  • Big Business (1988) is a twist on The Comedy of Errors with a pair of Switched at Birth twins, one pair from a wealthy family and one from a poor family. When they're all grown, the poor pair try to save their town from the snob pair's land development.
  • The title characters from The Blues Brothers find one of their old band members working as maitre d' at a fancy restaurant. They act like total slobs and threaten to come back every day unless the guy comes with them.
  • In Braveheart, the English are led by sophisticated Anglo-Norman aristocrats, while the Scots are led by hairy, kilted Highlanders. However, The Protagonist, William Wallace, is well-educated and speaks several languages.
  • Caddyshack invoked the trope as a tagline, as the movie is set in a country club (full of snobs) being annoyed by a slovenly outsider.
    • The sequel likewise has a snobby country club being in conflict with a nouveau riche developer of low-income housing, who despises snobs and fits in right at home with his construction workers. Of interest is the man's daughter who is desperately trying to become a snob, only to realize how shallow they are at the end.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy used this in its depiction of corruption in Gotham city. It is most evident in the third and final entry, The Dark Knight Rises as Bane uses the class warfare between the spoiled wealthy elite and the hard-working lower-class blue-collar citizens to destroy Gotham from the inside.
  • Demolition Man: The slobs (led by Edgar Friendly) vs. snobs (enslaved by Dr. Cocteau.) While the title Demolition Man identifies more with the slobs, he tells them "you are going to get a lot more clean" as opposed to telling the snobs "you're going to get a little dirty". Of course, the "slobs" were forced to live in the sewers upon refusing to conform to Cocteau's immensely restricting mandates, and the bulk of their possessions come from what they manage to scavenge or steal, so they don't really have the ability to live a clean lifestyle.
  • Illustrated in The Devil's Brigade as the slovenly Americans break out into a free-for-all brawl only to be shown up when the put-together Canadians crisply march into camp. The Canadian officers can only look at their American counterparts with disdain.
    Major Crown: God save the King.
    Captain Rose: God save us all…
  • Dirty Dancing not only has this between the wealthy resort guests and the poorer staff, it happens among the staff—the waiters were recruited from Ivy League schools and are practically ordered to court the girls while the entertainment staff is just as sternly ordered to keep their hands off of them.
  • Wendover clashes with Captain Spratt throughout Doctor in Trouble. Wendover believes it's because Captain Spratt thinks he's common, while Captain Spratt only hates him as he finds him irritating.
  • Eden Lake: Steve and Jenny are both middle-class (Jenny is a teacher, Steve is an office worker), and are both the heroes (though Steve has some jerkish qualities), while they're set upon and brutally tortured by lower-class teenagers and their parents.
  • The snazzy restaurant scene from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, from the incredibly snooty maitre d', to Cameron crunching on the ice from his water. However, this is more a case of age and attitude than class, since all the main characters come from wealthy families.
  • Ford V Ferrari. Ford is an American industry giant that churns out millions of consumer vehicles for the mass market out of a grimy, utilitarian factory that only twenty years earlier was cranking out the military hardware that won World War II. Ferrari is a prestigious Italian manufacturer that builds fast, pretty, and luxurious cars for discerning wealthy customers out of a repurposed barn where artisan engineers make every component by hand. Their battleground is Le Mans 1966, and Ferrari has won the last five meetings consecutively, 1960 to 1965. Enter Carroll Shelby, a Southern-Fried Genius who has been hired by Henry Ford II to design a car that will go to Le Mans and feed the pompous Italians some humble pie.
  • The Hairy Bird: The Flat Critters, a ragtag local group of quirky Beatniks, infiltrate a school dance between the private prep schools Miss Godard's and St. Ambrose Academy.
  • The Houseof Yes has a one-man slob army in the form of Leslie, having to square off against her fiancée's horribly stuck-up, wealthy family.
  • The Hunger Games franchise displays the separation and exploitation of the underprivileged and downtrodden population outside the Capitol city by the depraved inhabitants of the Capitol city.
  • Inglourious Basterds: On one side, a team of sociopathic heroes. On the other, the most Wicked Cultured Nazis of all time.
  • In Johnny Tsunami, Johnny Kapahala is enrolled by his parents into an elite private school, whose students like to ski on the nearby mountain. He soon meets a guy from the nearby public school, whose students snowboard on the other slope of the mountain. As a rule, skiers are not allowed on the snowboarding side, and vice versa. Johnny himself, being a champion surfer from Hawaii, enjoys snowboarding and has more in common with the laid-back public school kids than with the snobby private school students. Naturally, the movie culminates in a race between Johnny on a snowboard and his main preppy rival on skis over the right of snowboarders to use the much better skiing slope. However, it turns out that both sides of the mountain are owned by brothers, who also exhibit the trope (one went to college, the other didn't). The competition inspired them to make up and open up the entire mountain to both groups.
  • In Jumping the Broom, the main conflict is between Jason's working-class mother, Pam, and his fiancée Sabrina's wealthy family. Sabrina's mother Claudine sees Pam as low-class, and Pam sees Claudine as uppity.
  • On numerous levels in Kingsman: The Secret Service:
    • Eggsy's involvement in the Kingsman training program receives no small amount of prejudice as the organization traditionally garners its members from the upper crust of British society. Eggsy's father was also a Kingsman and killed on his first assignment, which Arthur takes as an indication that such people are not cut out for the job.
    • Eggsy gives it the other way when Harry first talks about how he's wasted his potential, going on a brief rant about how the upper class owes their position to being born privileged and the working-class people are just as capable if not more. Harry counters that there's both good and bad in both the upper and lower class (compare Harry, Charlie, Eggsy, and Dean).
    • The Kingsmen versus Valentine can also be viewed as thus. The Kingsmen are trained to be impeccable well-dressed quintessential British gentlemen (and -women too). In contrast, Valentine wears a baseball cap and a sweater in public appearances and offers hamburgers and fries at a formal dinner.
    • Then there's the actual endgame of the movie where a lot of the rich and powerful readily agree to use a superweapon on the rest of humanity. Apparently Valentine's pitch that anybody who is not them is a virus is quite convincing if you're affluent.
    • It also follows into the sequel, though in this case, the snobs had to work with the slobs. It also portrays the slobs as tougher than the snobs, considering Tequila whooped Eggsy and Merlin's butt handily, and it took Eggsy and Harry to bring down Whiskey in the final battle.
  • La vie est un long fleuve tranquille by Etienne Chatiliez combines this with Switched at Birth.
  • In The Last Witch Hunter, it shows up when working-class witch Chloe meets rich Femme Fatale sorceress Danique. The two women start slinging insults at one another, with Danique calling Chloe "second-hand" and Chloe mocking Danique's obsession with youth.
  • Chet Keefer, from the film The Marrying Kind, thinks that everyone is judging his blue-collar background, especially his rich brother-in-law. Averted, since it turns out that it's Chet’s insecurity that makes him feel this instead of class prejudice.
  • The Marx Brothers were practically the kings of this trope. Every movie was an excuse for them to infiltrate society and make the aristocrats suffer.
  • Meatballs has the slobs from Camp North Star versus the snobs from Camp Mohawk. Bill Murray gives an iconic speech just before the climactic showdown admitting that beating the snobs won't matter since even in defeat they'd still be rich.
  • All of The Mighty Ducks films. The 3rd one really plays it up as the Ducks get scholarships for a prestigious school and instantly butt heads with the current students there.
  • Nocturnal Animals: Susan is a gallery owner who receives a novel written by her ex-husband Edward, in which a man called Tony has a disastrous road trip.
    • Susan’s family is clearly rich, and in a flashback, Susan’s mother seems to object to Edward for not being rich.
    • In a dramatised scene from the novel, there is definitely an edge of class resentment in the confrontation between Tony’s middle-class family and Ray’s gang.
  • In O.C. and Stiggs, it's the lower-middle-class title characters versus the nouveau riche Schwabs. (The rivalry turns up in the original story, but only in the film is it the central plot.)
  • One Crazy Summer has a bunch of slobs in Nantucket trying to save a local's house from snobby land developers.
  • In Out Cold, a group of working-class snowboarders attempt to save their beloved small town from a businessman who wants to turn it into a snooty resort town similar to Aspen, Colorado.
  • Played with in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Khan and his followers are the slobs, forced to scrounge together anything they could find after Ceti Alpha VI's destruction ruined Ceti Alpha V's environment. Kirk and Starfleet are the snobs, wearing clean, orderly uniforms, with the twist being the "snobs" are the heroes.
  • Prom Wars: Both Selby and Lancaster are exclusive prep schools with upper class students, but Selby has more scholarship students and their strategy meetings have many moments of Nerds Are Virgins awkwardness. The Proud Elite Lancaster students by contrast run their meetings like military planning sessions while enjoying Conspicuous Consumption.
  • In Starship Troopers, this trope is combined with Interservice Rivalry. Carmen and Zander have a fairly glamourous life as pilots in the Fleet, while Rico and Dizzy are the poor bloody Mobile Infantry who do the fighting on the ground.
  • In Stripes, Bill Murray's character alludes to slobs triumphing over snobs during a speech he gives to the other enlisted men.
    John Winger: We're Americans... That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts! Here's proof: His nose is cold! But there's no animal that's more faithful, that's more loyal, more lovable than the mutt. Who saw "Old Yeller"? Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end? Nobody cried when Old Yeller got shot? I'm sure. I cried my eyes out. So we're all dogfaces, we’re all very, very different, but there is one thing that we all have in common: We were all stupid enough to enlist in the Army. We're mutants. There's something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us. Something seriously wrong with us — we're soldiers. But we're American soldiers! We've been kicking ass for 200 years! We're 10 and 1!
  • The Three Stooges as well — Depression-era comedy was pretty keen for Break the Haughty situations involving rich people.
  • As in the original novel, Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine (1960).
  • Trading Places: The movie's plot is centered around the contrast between Billy Ray Valentine (a streetwise hustler from a lower-class background) and Louis Winthorpe (a snooty, preppy commodity broker). Winthorpe's bosses, the Duke brothers, manipulate events so the two will swap lives.
  • Troop Beverly Hills: The film inverts the typical class associations. The fairly neglected children of fantastically rich parents are the slobs, while a militantly buttoned-up and cheerless troop of middle-class jerks are the villains.
  • An interesting example is the British film Tunes of Glory, set in a Scottish regiment in the post-WWII era. The story involves Alec Guinness, as a rough-hewn Scottish battalion Major, being superseded by upper-class martinet John Mills. The movie's something of a deconstruction of the trope, as both officers are extremely damaged individuals whose personalities reflect their inner flaws.
  • Underworld (2003): the vampires all wear stylish, clean black suits and gorgeous sexy cocktail dresses when at leisure, and leather trenchcoats when hunting werewolves. Their hair is always flat and oily, curls are always cosmetic, neat, and hang down. Werewolves, on the other hand, are always in grungy brown leather, shirts that look like they haven't been washed in months, and have hair that generally defies combs to come near.
  • Invoked and Subverted in Withnail and I. Whilst Withnail is from an extremely wealthy family and has a priveleged background; they've cut him off for his chosen career as an actor. Due to his subsequent poverty, and his Upper-Class Twit nature meaning he's never been taught how to look after himself, the man is absolutely filthy and his flat-share is more squalid than your average refugee camp. The scene in the tea room most eloquently evokes this, as the very snobbish patrons are disgusted by Withnail & I's slovenly appearance under the influence, even when it becomes apparent that they are far more cultured than they are.

    Jokes 
  • Seen in many, many different variants, replacing slobs and snobs as whichever targets you don't like: A slob and a snob go to the restroom at the same time. The slob finishes first and starts to leave without stopping at the sink when the snob pointedly remarks that they're taught to wash their hands. The slob instantly shoots back that they're taught not to get piss on themselves.

    Literature 
  • Book #11 in The Baby-Sitters Club, Kristy vs. The Snobs (as well as Episode 2.01 of the 2020 series) has Fish out of Water Kristy struggle to adapt to living in a wealthy neighborhood since she's not a rich kid like the "snobs" around her.
  • Bad News Ballet basically has nearly every book be a conflict of some kind between the awkward main gang and the snooty Bunheads. The second book is titled Battle of the Bunheads, due to the conflict between the titular bunheads and the gang.
  • In The City Who Fought, Simeon is decidedly more of a slob, and his new brawn Channa is more of a snob. They get on the wrong foot before even meeting because Simeon's upset about his old brawn retiring and tries to smear all the potential replacements and destroy their reputations, dashing Channa's hopes for an assignment that she'd really wanted. When they actually meet, Simeon hits on her, which she doesn't appreciate. She then starts a thorough inspection of the entire station, citing safety as she repeatedly finds shortcomings in the ways he and the other personnel have run things. Channa refuses to allow Simeon to manipulate her, humiliate and undercut her, or to ignore her professional opinions. Simeon starts out thinking of her as a bitch, and she thinks of him as a Manchild. Gradually he learns to respect her and she mellows, helped along when they find a Commonality Connection in their shared appreciation for classical and opera music, and find a balance that's affectionate even if they sometimes bicker. They need both Channa's rigor and thoroughness and Simeon's fluidity and comfort with chaos to deal with the rest of the plot of the book.
  • Discworld:
    • In Going Postal, the last two Post Office employees are also room-mates. Stanley Howler and Tulliver Groat share accommodation which is divided straight down the middle with a very definite painted dividing line. It even runs down the middle of the table, save for a circular "neutral space" housing the cruet set. Stanley's half is insanely neat and ordered to the point of making an OCD sufferer look like a vagrant. Groat's half of the room... isn't.
    • This is mirrored later on with the members of the clacks-hacking collective, the Smoking Gnu. There is an ongoing simmering war between one who stores his tools and even his nuts, bolts, screws, and nails by size in dedicated jars and drawers, and one who prefers to chuck it all into the same box and have a good rummage.
    • In Thud!, the werewolf Angua has to team up with a vampire — which she resents. Werewolves hate vampires, because vampires have style, and make werewolves look like low-class mutts. As Carrot points out, she's gorgeous and doesn't have anything to worry about. Nevertheless, it's something that's ingrained into the psyche of the two species. The werewolves are very much members of the political "establishment" in Uberwald, and Angua's brother Wolfgang is very much a case of Putting on the Reich while her father, not so much.
    • The wizards are generally the Snobs to the Slobs of the city watch, adventurers, or ordinary Morporkians. Due to the nature of the books' changing viewpoints, this is seen from both sides. In a wizard-centric book, the Wizards will be fat and goofy, but capable and wise, whereas the citizens and guards will be an ignorant rabble who doesn't know what they're messing with. In a commoner-centric book, the wizards will seem like a load of pompous, out-of-touch bureaucrats while the commoners are the ones holding everything together. Unseen Academicals, which focused evenly on the wizards and their working-class servants, proved there's some truth to both viewpoints.
    • Hogfather features an argument between the Senior Wrangler and the Dean, based on the fact that the Dean's family hung up pillowcases for the Hogfather, while the Wrangler's hung up very small socks. The Dean's family also bought their holly instead of collecting it themselves, and had "la-di-da posh dinner in the evening" and a big Hogswatch tree in the hall.
      "I can't help it if my family had money," the Dean said, and this might have defused the situation had he not added, "And standards."
    • Vimes and the other nobles are this after his marriage (and shortly after that, promotion to Commander). They still see him as a dressed-up slob.
    • In the suplementary material such as the diaries, the students of the Assassins Guild and Thieves Guild are traditional rivals. The young Assassins are mostly the sons of gentlefolk, with the Guild school being closely based on Eton, while the Thieves are mostly street kids. It's also suggested that Scholarship Boys at the Assassins Guild (those who are accepted to the school despite low birth due to innate skills) are given a hard time by their fellow students. (Although, given those innate skills, generally not for long.)
  • The Outsiders: With upper-class Socs (Socials) vs. lower-class Greasers. Neither group is entirely unified.
  • Harry Potter:
    • The family rivalry between the impoverished Weasleys and the high-society Malfoys. The Malfoys look down on the Weasleys for being poor and associating themselves with Muggles. The Weasleys, on the other hand, disdain the Malfoys for their intollerance towards Muggles and their possible ties to the Dark Lord Voldemort.
    • The Weasleys are also often compared to the Dursleys. The Weasleys are a scruffy bunch with a kooky house and an overgrown garden. The Dursleys live in an overly tidy normal house and are generally obsessed with appearances.
    • The series uses a little bit of this in its depiction of conflict between the Hogwarts houses. The Slytherins, especially the present day ones as represented by Draco Malfoy, are portrayed as being from wealthy "pure blood" families while the other three houses — Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff — are generally portrayed as being from more blue-collar middle-class families financially speaking.
  • In H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, there's the conflict between the ineffectual Eloi and the savage Morlocks. Fittingly, the Eloi are descended from posh humans, while the Morlock sprang from the working classes.
  • Robert Westall's Futuretrack Five has very clear elements of this. The aristocratic, smug Ests are the Snobs and deliberately segregate and control the scruffy, violent, uneducated Unnems.
  • A very mild version plays out between Peter Wingfield and Roger Trembling in Fred, Alice and Aunty Lou from the Break of Dark anthology. Wingfield is unkempt, scruffily dressed, a chronic smoker, and lives in a dilapidated old house full of mouldering antiques and dying pot plants, which Trembling refers to as "The Haunted Mansion." Roger lives in an ultra-modern villa with Modernist furnishings and chrome kitchen fittings, works for a computer company, and plays squash every week. Peter refers to his house as "Mission Control."
  • Cold Comfort Farm is one of the few times that the Snobs win, with Flora Poste bringing order and modernity to the Gothic Starkadders, in the process greatly improving their lives.
  • Played With in A.L. Phillips's The Quest of the Unaligned, which features the dual conflict between Caederan's technological ignorance (Slobs) vs Tonzimmiel's modern civilization (Snobs) and Caederan's tradition of community and proper respect for nobility (Snobs) vs Tonzimmiel's intense and abrasive individualism (Slobs).
  • Journey to Chaos:
    • There is enmity between the Dragon's Lair and Roalt Castle along these lines; mecenaries care little for social mores or polite behavior while the coutrier's revolve around them. This shows up in numerous ways.
    • When Blue-Collar Warlock Basilard is hired to assist the Court Mage of Ataidar with his research, the result is a shouting match.
    • Working-class Kallen stirs a hornet's nest when she joins the Young Scepter Competition, which is filled to bursting by nobles and other high society types.
  • Space Marine Battles novel Malodrax takes shades of this when the plot begins to concern itself with conflict between the dour, industrialist, and militant Iron Warriors (Slobs) and the extravagant, hedonistic, and theatrical city of Shalhadar (Snobs).
  • In Safehold, the rivalry between Dohlarans and Desnairans is partly built on this. Dohlarans mock Desnairans for being posh, full of self-righteousness, and completely out of contact with the real world (Snobs), while Desnairans think of Dohlarans as their poor, unfashionable cousins (Slobs).
  • The political conflict behind the plot of The Dinosaur Lords is between religious sect of Garden of Beauty and Truth, which adores art, culture, and beauty above all others, and Life-To-Come, which believes that all pleasures will come in the afterlife, so one shouldn't feast, enjoy themselves or, for that matter, bath.
  • The Guns of the South: One of the recurring themes in the book is how slavery interacts with other aspects of Confederate culture. When Generals Lee and Forrest run against each other in the Confederate presidential election, Lee adopts an anti-slavery platform which causes Forrest to accuse him of being a Snob, attempting to high-handedly steal the property of poor whites. On the other side of the coin, Forrest's representative gets laughed offstage in Nashville for attempting to sell "Lee's gonna take yer slaves" to an audience who are far too poor to even think about owning slaves, and think that Forrest's focus on courting slaveowners makes him the Snob.
  • In Class Dis-Mythed, Skeeve's class of student magicians consists of three classy-but-naive Pervish college girls and a mixed trio of boys with humble or delinquent backgrounds. They only learn to work together when the girls learn to respect the guys' practicality, and the boys, the ladies' breadth of knowledge.
  • The Night Circus: The conflict between Hector and Mr. A.H— is illustrated by their personalities. Hector is the Slob, having a more informal attitude, using vulgar language, and having a messy and disorganized living space. He's also more prone to shocking and violent actions, like cutting Celia's fingers to teach her to heal herself. Mr. A.H— is the snob, being cold, aloof, and apathetic to the point of being haughty. However, he values education and culture, unlike Hector.
  • Spy School: In Spy School: Project X, two pairs of assassins (a well-dressed Battle Couple with lots of experience and a pair of bumbling Midwestern hunters partaking in their first attempted murder) get captured at the same time. The experienced assassins spend a while insulting the inexperienced ones.
  • The Witch of Knightcharm: This dynamic quickly takes hold in the new class of the evil Wizarding School which the protagonist Emily finds herself in. The slobs are represented by Alejandra and Julia Medina, two necromancer twins who never had any money or family besides each other and who dress in rags, and the snobs are represented by the extremely rich (and well-dressed) Lily and her clique of witches. Lily and the Medinas despise each other, as they make clear very early on.
  • Savvy from You Have a Match is a rule-following neat freak. Her long-lost sister Abby is messy and impulsive. On Abby's first day of camp, Savvy gives her a demerit for chewing gum, which has been banned, according to the rules which Abby didn't bother to read. Abby shouts "Are you shitting me?" and ends up with kitchen duty for a week.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Who, Sir? Me, Sir?: A sports contest between snobs from a private school and plucky underdogs who attend The Good Old British Comp.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Spur of the Moment" used this setup where the girl is about to marry the rich boy, but the passionate poor scruffy guy ends up talking her into marrying him — years later we see Scruffy is a lazy bum who makes her life miserable.
  • The Odd Couple often pitted Felix (snob) against Oscar (slob) in this matter.
  • Frasier: This is the central conflict between Frasier, Niles, and Martin; the boys are stuffy epicures who are frequently dismissive of their down-to-earth, slightly slobby father. The crux of this is Martin's old chair, which clashes poorly with the rest of the room.
  • Cheers contrasted blue-collar characters like Sam, Carla, Cliff, and Norm with the more upscale characters like Diane, Frasier, Lilith, Robin, etc. Then there's Rebecca, who's essentially a Slob trying to ascend to the Snob world (and failing repeatedly).
  • The The Young Ones episode "Bambi" features this. The cast represent "Scumbag College" on "University Challenge" and are set against the snobs from Footlights College, Oxbridge .
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air used this in some of the earlier episodes as a source of conflict between Will and his cousin Carlton. As the show wore on though, Carlton got dumber and dorkier until there was no more point in conflicting with the paragon-of-coolness Will.
    • Notably, it was also a rare subversion in that it depicted how, despite their wealth, the Bankses could still suffer from racism (such as being stopped by the police when they weren't doing anything wrong) from white people while also being accused by fellow blacks of being Category Traitors and "sellouts" because of their status. Uncle Phil gave a notable Shut Up, Hannibal! reply to one woman who accused him of this, reminding her that he participated in the civil rights movement and that he was there when Harlem was burned by violence.
  • True Blood plays with this trope in later seasons:
    • In season 2, Mary Ann Forrester and her dirt-eating revelers are often positioned in direct contrast with the more "refined" vampires, particularly with Queen Sophie Ann.
    • Season 3 appears to be going for the full-on war: Sam's birth family is portrayed as "trashy", sitting around shirtless drinking beer in the middle of the day. Promos show the Were community as Badass Bikers, contrasted with the King of Mississippi's "equestrian toffs" aesthetic.
  • In Red Dwarf we have Rimmer, who keeps his underpants on coathangers, and Lister, who, well...
    Lister: No way are these my boxer shorts! These bend?
  • Middle-class snob Thelma and working-class reverse-snob Terry in Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads?, with poor, working-class-with-asperations Bob caught in the middle.
  • Steptoe and Son pitted the unreconstructed slobbishness of Albert Steptoe against the aspirational snobbishness of his son Harold.
  • The old conflict between Kryptonians (Snobs) and Daxamites (Slobs) in Supergirl (2015). When Mon-El shows up, he and Kara argue about their respective people; Kara claims that Daxamites are all hard-partying, violent slackers, while Mon-El responds that all Kryptonians are arrogant, self-righteous elitists. Both of them eventually admit to being unfairly prejudiced.
    Mon-El: A girl from Krypton and a boy from Daxam. Who would've thought?
    Kara: Why? Because you come from a planet of partiers?
    Mon-El: No, because you come from a planet of snobs.
  • Keeping Up Appearances is another, even better Brit Com example, with social-climbing übersnob Hyacinth contending with her gleefully slobby sisters.
  • long-running Dramedy Heartbeat has this, with Greengrass, David, Aunt Peggy and Vernon Scripps on one side and Trisha Penrose and the various past and present members of the local constabulary and medical profession in the other
  • In The Cape Scales, a lower-class British smuggler, gets into a feud with the villain Chess partially because he feels Chess and his business associates are looking down on him.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Inverted throughout the series with Starfleet (Snobs) vs. Klingons (Slobs).
    • The episode "Up the Long Ladder" is based on the trope.
  • Babylon 5:
    • The cultured, decadent, and brutal Centauri are snobs, the uncultured, crude, and brutal Narn are slobs. The Narn are collectively more sympathetic for most of the series since they get kicked more (and usually by the Centauri), but the Narn are only sympathetic as underdogs, and are more than happy to punt puppies through windows when they think they can get away with it.
    • Among the Minbari, the Religious Caste are always snobs, the Worker Caste are always slobs, and the Warrior Caste are seen as slobs by the Religious Caste and the position of the Worker Caste is unknown because they never show its POV.
  • One of the keys to the appeal of Columbo. Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD was perpetually rumpled. He wore cheap ties and an ancient raincoat (regardless of the weather); in an early episode, one character says he looked like "an unmade bed" and in another episode, he was mistaken for a homeless man. The murder suspects that Columbo investigated were always rich and successful: millionaire businessmen murdering faithless lovers, arrogant aristocrats murdering blackmailers, Corrupt Corporate Executives murdering people who knew how corrupt they are. Part of the fun of Columbo lays in watching Columbo the slob take down the Snob Of The Week.
  • Yes, Dear had a bit of this, with uptight yuppies Greg and Kim contrasted with the more laid-back and downscale Jimmy and Christina.
  • The middle and later seasons of M*A*S*H had this when Charles Emerson Winchester III, a Boston blue-blood with a Harvard education, arrived at the 4077th.
  • Dharma & Greg had Dharma and her hippie parents frequently butting heads with Greg's rich WASP parents.
  • Happens most of the time in soap operas especially in the Philippines and a few other countries. A slob, usually depicted as belonging from a poor or impoverished family, would be oppressed and bullied at by a couple of snobs, sharply dressed and speaking in a stereotypically "conyo" vernacular. A dozen slapping, hair-pulling and ranting scenes later, and the formerly-oppressed would eventually find his/her way and be introduced into high society, but not without a dozen more rounds until either the slob ends up seeing the snob getting killed by his/her own foolishness or jailed, or the snob reforms and makes amends with the person(s) he used to bully. The masses are used to it and are glued to watching Mara slap Clara, but some find either cliche, repetitive and detrimental. Naming each and every Latin American and Filipino drama serial that conforms to this would end up in a Wall of Text of sorts, but Annaliza, the aforementioned Mara Clara and Marimar are classic examples of this.
  • In Firefly there is the refined, upper-class Simon Tam who is forced onto a space ship full of outlaws while running from the law. One of the subplots has Simon trying to adjust to living with the "slobs" and especially his conflict with barbaric and uneducated Jayne. This serves to illustrate the rift between the polished, hi-tech core worlds and scruffy, wild-west rim worlds.
  • Parodied in an episode of Mr. Show in which a sketch about Buddhist monks suddenly warps into a slobs-versus-snobs Olympiad between the monks and rich kids from a neighboring fat camp.
  • Greek: Kappa Tau (slobs) vs. Omega Chi (snobs).
  • The Vampire Diaries, with a single notable familial exception ( the Lockwoods), portrays the Fur Against Fang fight as this.
  • The Tates and the Campbells of Soap.
  • In Parks and Recreation the main characters live in the city of Pawnee (slobs). Pawnee has a rivalry with the neighboring city of Eagleton (snobs), which was actually formed when all the rich people of Pawnee took their money and fled the city.
  • The source of much of the comedy in George & Mildred, with the decidedly lower-class Ropers moving in next door to snobbish Fourmiles.
  • Seinfeld
    • Jerry and Newman. Jerry's a successful and well-paid comedian who's known for his fastidiousness, while Newman's a slovenly postman who's so unhygienic he actually carries fleas. Their thinly disguised contempt for one another is one of the show's trademarks.
    • This is also the relationship that Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer have with most of the rest of society, although neither side is depicted positively at all. The slobs (Jerry and co.) are immature, irresponsible and unwilling to bend to the unwritten laws of society while the snobs (everyone else) are stuck up for following said laws, but also mature enough to generally not stir up more trouble. And both sides have only their own interests in mind.
  • Subverted on Starsky & Hutch. The clash between Hutch's well-educated, sophisticated, refined, intellectual tastes and opinions and Starsky's uneducated, unsophisticated, lower-class, rougher ones is a longstanding running argument between them. Also, Starsky generally wears faded, skimpy jeans and a tattered brown leather jacket ancient enough to have been around since World War II, while Hutch usually looks like he just stepped off the cover of GQ. However, Starsky keeps a scrupulously clean apartment and a sleek, meticulously well-maintained car; while Hutch's apartment is in a state of perpetual untidiness and he drives a dilapidated, hideous old junker whose backseat is always crammed with a huge amount of trash, ranging from empty yogurt cups to random giant wooden wheels, which Starsky frequently bemoans.
  • This is part of the amusing culture clash between our hunter heroes and the Men of Letters on Supernatural. Our protagonists are the brutish, flannel-wearing, blue-collar-coded American hunters. The Men of Letters we meet in the present day are British with everything that goes along with those stereotypes and even the older American Men of Letters (before they all died) were shown to be men of culture and learning who disapproved of the sloppy hunters of their day. Dean and Sam get to live in their nice bunker because they're technically legacies.
  • Subverted on Trailer Park Boys in that most of the protagonists and antagonists were all residents of the same trailer park, or at least closely connected to it. People with more education and income were usually either impartial observers, such as the documentary film crew, or victims of the main characters' criminal schemes.
  • Upper Middle Bogan has the bogan Wheelers and the upper-middle-class Margaret Denyar, with their daughter (adopted by the latter) Bess trying to make them get along, with some degree of success.
  • Vikings: The show presents the pagan Vikings as slobs compared to the Christian Europeans they raid. Vikings are earthy, fur-clad warriors who hail from the Grim Up North while Saxons and Franks have advanced technology, learning, and wealth.
  • One of the ongoing subplots on Mortified is the clashes between the Frys (slobs) and the Flunes (snobs). In one episode, the Flunes hope to buy out the Frys so they can demolish the Frys house (which they consider an eyesore) and turn the Frys block into their extended garden.
  • The Nanny is about the lower-middle class Fran Fine from Queens, NY working for the Sheffields, a Blue Blood family who lives in Manhattan, with her romantic rival being Maxwell Sheffield's business partner C.C. Babcock.
  • The late '80's Made-for-TV Movie Class Cruise (one of a slew of All-Star Cast movies NBC released during this time) featured a bunch of preppy rich kids versus a bunch of kids from the Wrong Side of the Tracks, plus an inevitable "Romeo and Juliet" subplot.
  • The Good Place uses this as a contrast between Eleanor (the slob) and Tahani (the snob). Eleanor was born to a pair of Lower Class Louts who were often negligent to downright abusive and had to claw her way through life to get to a somewhat comfortable existence, which contributed to her cynical worldview. Tahani, on the other hand, was a socialite born to a rich family and while her parents were horribly abusive in their own ways by playing blatant favorites between their daughters (with Tahani being The Unfavorite), she nevertheless got to enjoy the perks of an upper-class life including being friends with multiple celebrities. The Reveal at the end of the first season shows this was even an Invoked Trope because Michael planned to have the humans torture each other for eternity while making them think they were in the eponymous heavenly afterlife and used their differing backgrounds as a starting point for making the two grate on each other. Tahani was literally set up to become Eleanor's Sitcom Archnemesis basically.
  • 18 to Life: Jessie's parents are free-spirited and do not believe in societal constructs of marriage or organized religion. They have a refugee from Iraq living in their basement. Tom's parents are traditional white-collar sticklers for rules. Tom's father is a judge who converted to Judaism when he married and his mother is a homemaker. They are neighbours, and Jessie and Tom just got married. Hilarity Ensues.
  • A French parody of Family Feud by Les Inconnus pitted a family of snobs against a family of slobs. The latter get a comfortable lead since the "right answers" are drawn from a poll, itself heavily dominated by slobs.
  • On Rupauls Drag Race, "Pageant Queens vs Comedy Queens" is shorthand for the frequent rivalry between polished, serious, fashion queens and crass, low-brow, campy queens, with a roughly-equal number of season winners on both sides. However, this trope is also deconstructed a bit, since Ru and the judges want to see versatility and queens willing to step outside their comfort zone. Thus, pageant queens are encouraged to ham it up in acting challenges, while comedy queens are expected to deliver at least one outfit on the runway that's pure glamour with no gimmicks.
  • WKRP in Cincinnati began to set this up in the early episodes, describing it as "the suits vs the dungarees". The idea was that Herb Tarlek, Mr Carlson and Les Nessman(the three businessman) would be at constant odds with the more laid-back members of the staff. However it was rather quickly dropped in favor of the ensemble cast working together rather than against each other.
  • Sherlock: Mycroft straightens Sherlock's doorknocker, has a well-organised office, and works with powerful government agencies and their clandestine spy networks. Sherlock's flat is a complete mess and he works with a "homeless network" of his own design which is loosely kept together by bribes. John also tries to keep to the Snob side but gives up on 221B.
  • This played a major role in the dynamic between Pembleton and Felton in Homicide: Life on the Street. Felton, who comes from a rough working class background, despises the uptight and snobby Pembleton, while Pembleton in turn hates Felton for his boorishness and casual racism. Both sides were depicted as equally sympathetic and flawed, and the two ultimately bond with each other while investigating a particularly horrific case.
  • Would I Lie to You? gets a lot of comedy from the contrast between the team captains: high-strung, upper-middle class, Oxbridge-educated Southerner David Mitchell; and laid back, working class, Northern, plate glass university graduate Lee Mack.
  • Gilmore Girls: Lorelai is a Defector from Decadence who lives a middle-class lifestyle, and her worldview, values, and tastes are often at odds with her Old Money family, particularly her mother. Emily finds Lorelia's style and house to be garish and tacky, while Lorelai finds her childhood home to be suffocating with its museum-like decor. The younger Gilmore home has a lived-in look, while the elder Gilmore home is impeccably upkept by a rotating cast of maids. This is usually Playedfor Laughs, like when Rory introduces her baffled grandmother to their Charlie's Angels dinnerware, but is just as often Playedfor Drama, like when Emily discovers Lorelai raised Rory in a shed for 10 years after running away from their home, working her way up from maid to manager at the Inn it belonged to.

    Music 
  • "Respectable Street" by XTC.
  • "The Eton Rifles" by The Jam. Paul Weller was inspired to write the song by an incident in Slough, where Eton College cadets heckled a Right To Work protest march. The protesters, thinking they could put 'posh schoolboys' in their place, were provoked into physical violence against the cadets, only to be outclassed by the military-trained cadets.
  • "Whatareya" by TISM (which translates the trope name into Australian as "Yobbos" and "Wankers"
  • Shows up in rival subcultures: Punk (slobs) vs metal (snobs), rockers (slobs) vs mods (snobs), and so on.
  • In Ole Ivars's "Kongen av campingplassen" ("The King of the Campsite"), the King (snob) cares a lot about having the biggest, coolest, most expensive stuff... but he puts himself in debt to get it, and he can't really enjoy it because no one (except maybe his fat wife) wants to put up with his constant bragging and putting down others. Meanwhile, the narrator (slob) has a crappy old caravan and drinks moonshine, but he's happy because he gets to barbecue with his friends.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • The common man Dusty Rhodes vs The Stylin and Profiling Ric Flair. The son of a plumber Dusty Rhodes vs The Million Dollar Man Ted Dibiase.
  • In mainstream Mexican Lucha, this describes the rivalry between AAA and CMLL. Triple A has drawn the largest crowds on record in Mexico and in all of North America the only promotion to successfully out draw it is WWE. CMLL meanwhile typically draws smaller crowds but boasts the highest at the gate draws as far as revenue is concerned in the nation's history, WWE again being the only company on the continent that comes close.note  CMLL is the comparatively more serious of the two, its angles being much more down-to-earth and its presentation as a sport more formal, while AAA has had angles involving murder by volcano and lots of over-the-top Gimmick Matches involving ladders or referee shenanigans. CMLL is also slightly more family-friendly, as blood is shed less frequently as a consequence of its more subdued gimmick matches and increasingly few of the matches it has that do feature bloodshed have aired on its TV program unedited. Before AAA, the same could be said of EMLL and LLI/UWA, except those promotions got along much better.
  • Following the JWA split, this was zigzagged between All Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro-Wrestling, depending on what one was looking for, All Japan being more traditional in the vein of its "parent" company but New Japan being more serious when it came to match structure itself even if the pre and post-match shenanigans were less restrained. They in turn acted as middlemen for this debate between FMW, which were the slobs concerned with blood, guts and burn marks compared to the two more traditional promotions and the Universal Wrestling Federation, who were the snobs concerned with all strikes and holds being done as hard and plausible as possible compared to the more traditional promotions.
  • Mainstream joshi was similar to their male puroresu counterparts, except All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling managed to stay around unlike the JWA and served as the middle ground between the "slobs" most concerned with being entertaining in JWP and the "snobs" most concerned with being plausible and hard in LLPW.
  • The Universal Wrestling Federation were the extreme snobs, being even more formal than All Japan Pro Wrestling until Giant Baba tightened up the booking and doubled down on clean finishes anyway, and more realistic than New Japan in that UWF did away with the traditional collar and elbow tie ups and tests of strength. They didn't even have technical wrestling displays for the sake of them, going for other tactics like kicks at the earliest convenience. Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling by contrast were the extreme slobs to all mainstream Japanese pro wrestling, All Japan, All Japan Women's and New Japan, intentionally all at once. While FMW didn't pay quite as much attention to UFW, the company was named by Atsushi Onita with UWF in mind and did parody their style for its earliest shows before finding its own voice. And FMW's voice was the bang of barbwire rigged explosives.
  • The WWF and WCW rivalry began as something like this. The WWF was a Northeastern "sports entertainment" federation that liked to portray itself as the elite of the wrestling world, while WCW was a Southern "rasslin'" promotion who cultivated the image of being "old school" and down-to-earth. This was slightly reversed from the WWF vs NWA days, where the NWA was realistic and serious compared to the WWF's mix of live-action cartoon show and violent soap opera.
  • In WCW The Four Horsemen reunited to fight the ever-expanding New World Order. The Four Horsemen were big money lounge and limousine guys who drank expensive wines and wore fancy suits. The nWo were a cross between Gangbangers and a motorcycle gang and thus dressed in a hodgepodge of plain street clothes and biker gear. Masahiro Chono's nWo Japan was the exception though, as Chono was too cool not to dress cool and a legitimate businessman on top of that.
  • The feud that turned the tide of WWE and led to them winning the Monday Night Wars fit this bill. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin was a foul-mouthed, beer-swilling Texas redneck who would beat up anyone just because he felt like it, while Vince McMahon was the billionaire owner of the company, lording over everyone in it.
  • The feud between ODB, a bodybuilder from a trailer and Katie Lea, the "cultured" foreign national in Ohio Valley Wrestling.
  • The roster split in Big Japan Pro Wrestling between "Strong BJ" and "Hardcore BJ" is a more amicable version of this. Strong BJ fight to show they are the most technical, most precise striking, most athletic, most conditioned pro wrestlers of their time, while Hardcore BJ are mostly concerned about proving they are the scariest garbage wrestlers alive.
  • Pro Wrestling NOAH vs Pro Wrestling ZERO1 was like this, while their rivalry lasted. NOAH was supposed to be a new millennium update to All Japan's "dignified real sport" presentation of pro wrestling and had a new governing body known as "The Global Honored Crown" made up of several world-renowned pro wrestlers like Harley Race, who would sanction title matches. Mitsuharu Misawa started NOAH, and rarely ever lost on its shows, but the show wasn't all about him as it scouted new wrestlers from sumo, judo, and the amateur wrestling All Japan Championships. Zero 1 was a transparent vehicle being used to revive Shinya Hashimoto's career and continued to place him front and center even after it was clear he had regained his popularity. And in contrast to lofty GHC of NOAH, pretty much anything could happen on a Zero 1 card, especially the parts of the card that didn't involve Hashimoto. Like the All Japan-New Japan rivalry, the male Japanese native regulars of Zero 1 tended to wrestle in more realistic, or at least plausible ways than NOAH's, especially the heavyweights, but unlike New Japan Zero 1 was just fine with putting Joshi of all sorts of styles in the ring and crossing over with any other company it could, be it realistic pro wrestling, a real sports league, a garbage fed, lucharesu or a food vendor, and showcase all kinds of gimmick matches with odd stipulations.
  • The American Wolves as well as the Wolves' two offshoots Team Ambition and Dojo Bros, had this sort of rivalry with The Briscoe Brothers in Ring of Honor. Davey Richards, Eddie Edwards, and Kyle O'Reilly all had MMA training with people like Dan Severn and wrestled in MMA gear. The Briscoes, being chicken farming, dog breeding emu rearers with a love for beer, cigarettes, and firearms, well they didn't exactly appreciate that "serious MMA shit". Roderick Strong and Adam Cole were guilty by association.
  • Presumably the reason The Quincy Punk Christina Von Eerie is targeted by the "classy ladies" Made In Sin (Taylor Made and Allysin Kay). Explicitly the reason Von Eerie is targeted by classy lady Kimber Lee in CZW.
  • Traditional home-style country cook and Mountain Dew enthusiast Greg Excellent vs Health Guru Pepper Parks and Classy Lady Cherry Bomb, another from CZW.
  • This is where Satan disagreed with Truth Martini when the latter staged an unauthorized Ring of Honor event and invited the former. Satan may have created temptation, he may have been into taking souls, but believed referees without pants, lap dances, and transvestite lumberjacks were beneath him.
  • This is the big dichotomy of Triple H's career. He debuted in WWE in 1995 as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, an elitist blueblood snob gimmick. He then switched to the slobs side as part of D-Generation X, and is only on the slob side when DX have been faces.

     Radio 
  • Season 66, Episode 6 of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue had a "Gentlemen vs Commoners" version of Mornington Crescent, with Mr T. Brooke-Taylor OBE and Miles Hugh Barret Jupp Esq. playing Barry "Baz" Cryer and Jeremy "Socialist Worker" Hardy. Barry questioned two of Tim's moves and was first told "That's a mistake your kind often make" and then "Yes, you're right. But life isn't fair for people like you."

    Theater 
  • A Streetcar Named Desire, with southern belle Blanche vs. working man Stanley. At first, Stanley looks like a figure of liberty, but then we see that he has an insane obsession with bringing everyone down to his level.
  • Our American Cousin, the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot, was an early example, featuring a boorish American who has to meet with his snooty aristocratic British relatives to claim an inheritance.
  • The New Zealand play Foreskin's Lament, where the main character, a non-conformist liberal, has to deal with his reactionary rugby-mad mates.
  • Keating! The Musical: Bob Hawke is a slob, Paul Keating is a snob, as Hawke's lyrics in "My Right Hand Man" demonstrate:
    In fact, he's quite peculiar
    If that's for me to say,
    A little un-Australian
    In his own endearing way
    I take him to the footynote 
    But his eyes aren't on the ball
    And in his private parlor,
    He plays the works of Mahler
    The strangest sounds cascading down the hall
    It doesn't sound like Billy Thorpe at all!

    Tabletop Games 
  • This is the dynamic between the Orks and Eldar in Warhammer 40,000. The Orks use Cockney Funetik Aksents, the Eldar use Spock Speak. The Orks have bombastic Boisterous Bruiser personalities, the Eldar are The Stoic. The Orks wield gritty, oversized choppas and shootas, the Eldar wield sleek, advanced-looking weapons such as shuriken catapults and power swords. The Orks ride smoke-belching and garishly-decorated trucks and buggies note , the Eldar use skimmers with organic curves. The Orks wear leather jackets and Improvised Armour, the Eldar wear colourful Badass Longrobes and ornate body armour. The Orks view the Eldar as pansies, the Eldar view the Orks as vermin. Taken further in Dawn of War, due to the dialogue between the two. Heck, Kaptin Bluddflag of Dawn of War II: Retribution even refers to Eldar as "posh little runts".
    • Another version in the history of the universe is the Space Wolves versus the Thousand Sons. The Space Wolves, culturally, were vikings who liked women and booze between battles and had a reputation for brutality that shocked the other armed forces of the Imperium. They had even earned the moniker of "the Emperor's Executioners" and served as the occasional Internal Affairs force of the Imperium. The Thousand Sons, on the other hand, had a high culture and were scholastics and mystics as much as they were soldiers, wielding shocking psychic power with impunity and seen as staring too much into the psychic realm. Partly because they were too isolationist for their own good, partly because even regular psychics were regarded with justifiable fear, the Thousand Sons were seen by most other Imperial forces with deep distrust, and the rivalry between the Wolves and the Sons was one of the most bitter. Ironically, they weren't as different as they appear, when you get right down to it. Despite the Wolves' outer appearance, both forces were comprised of very intelligent and very professional soldiers who were fiercely loyal; they even shared in the sins of practicing the psychic arts after they were banned and concealing mutations within their ranks.
    • Another minor rivalry involves the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels. The Space Wolves are generally seen as reckless berserkers who charge into battle without planning things out, while the Dark Angels are highly trained warriors who are highly disciplined and have specific battle plans in any combat situation. This minds set started when they fought alongside the Dark Angels in one campaign, and their Primarch Leman Russ ruined his brothers plan by rushing in and messing up the cohesion of the two legions. This frustrated the normally stoic Lion El'Johnson so much that he walks up to Leman Russ and knocks him out with a punch. This event was remembered by both Chapters that whenever they meet up, they each have one of their champions fight each other in a duel to commemorate the event.
  • Legend of the Five Rings has the sophisticated (effete) Crane Clan and the practical (crude) Crab Clan. They really don't like each other. They also have this rivalry with the Lion Clan, as the Crane are mostly well known as diplomats and courtiers, and the Lions are the Proud Warrior Race Guy.

    Video Games 
  • Wario (slob) vs. Count Cannoli and Carpaccio (snobs) in Wario: Master of Disguise.
  • The business rivalry between Half-Life's Black Mesa Research Facility, who generally behave like legitimate scientists, and Portal's Aperture Science, who, in the words of their founder, are "just throwing science at the wall and seeing what sticks". Though aesthetically, Aperture's clean white Apple-esque everything look plays the snob while Black Mesa's actual science-going-on look plays the slob. In the older areas of Aperture seen in Portal 2, we see that they designed according to whatever looked "cool" for the given time period.
  • Startopia: Although mostly unseen, certain races don't get along. For example, Salt hogs, who prefer to work when possible and sleep, eat, bathe when needed, can get into arguments with gem slugs who prefer the most exotic of foods and luxury hotels on your station.
  • EverQuest and EverQuest II:
    • The Erudites, a race of evolved humans who's society revolves around science, magic, and magic in the pursuit of science. Compared to the Erudites, any race (excluding possibly the high elves) could qualify as slobs. The Erudites share an intense racial hatred with the Kerrans, a race of ancestor-worshipping shamanistic cat people who consider the Erudites to be psychotic, soulless mutants.
    • Although High Elves and Wood Elves generally get along fairly well, this comes to play in their relationship. High Elves think the Wood Elves lack proper elven dignity and morality, and Wood Elves think that High Elves are too haughty and self-righteous.
    • On the evil side of things, this comes into play with most evil races. Dark elves and Arasai play the snobs and see all the other evil races as savage brutes to be manipulated or worthless sneaks. Iksar view themselves as the snobs, looking down on dark elves and arasai for being decadent and the others for being savages or sneaks. Likewise, Ratonga and Gnomes view themselves as the snobs, looking down on the others as big oafs who aren't as smart as they think they are. Ogres and Trolls, however, consider themselves the slobs and are damn proud of it.
  • Final Fantasy XIV
    • Faezahr thinks himself a more sophisticated counterpart to Brithael, owing to his more eloquent tongue and sharper business instincts. In reality, his vice (spending inordinate amounts of money on commissions he then gives away in an attempt to woo female gladiators) is simply less publicly embarrassing than Brithael's (spending those commissions getting sloshed at the tavern).
    • Of the two Lalafellin men vying for Kokomo's affections in the Weaver questline, Wawarukka is the sweet, bumbling, and dirty slob to Mamajaru's prim and proper Jerkass snob. Wawarukka is constantly dirty due to working as part of the Miner's Guild and is a constant Rummage Sale Reject who is head-over-heels for Kokomo. Meanwhile, Mamajaru sees her as a Trophy Wife and demands she obey him after her father arranges for their marriage to secure their finanical futures.
  • Fire Emblem:
    • Classism has always been an element in play, but the Tellius duology of Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn magnifies it. The beorc are a race who focus on knowledge and invention, while the laguz focus on brute strength. This racial divide is so steep that they might even attack each other on sight. The laguz are shown in a far more sympathetic light, for the most part, with the racist beorc townspeople often ending up dead.
    • Amongst the beorc, there is this issue as well, with Ike and nobility sharing mutual dislike of each other. In order to command the Crimean army to save the kingdom, Ike reluctantly accepts peerage but after the kingdom is won, he says he only will stick around until everything is settled, and he renounces his title in the time between the two games.
  • Starbound has the intense rivalry between the tribal, savage and cannibalistic Floran and the refined yet stuck-up and arrogant Hylotl races.
  • In Tyranny, the two main armed forces are the Disfavored and the Scarlet Chorus. The Disfavored are highly trained, disciplined, loyal to a fault, fearless but not reckless, battle-hardened career soldiers, drawn from family lines of those who served before; also deeply bigoted against anybody not of the same culture and known for Disproportionate Retribution against defeated enemies. The Scarlet Chorus is unsanitary and chaotic, irreverent, undisciplined, only very loosely organized, takes all comers, place little value in one another's lives, rely on an individual's natural talent for killing rather than any training, willing to go at each others' throats if they think it'll benefit them personally, and have nothing but disdain for tradition and formality. The Culture Clash as well as the fact that their respective leaders hate each other and are constantly plotting their rival's downfall kicks off the plot.
  • Played for Drama in Frostpunk. The Refugees scenario has the player presiding over a city made up of working-class refugees who managed to commandeer a ship meant for the wealthy lords of London and reach the generator first. Eventually, the aristocrats will arrive at the city, still resentful that they had to make their gruelling, frostbitten journey on foot, and the refugees will still be resentful about being left to die, so now the player has to manage the delicate tensions between the two groups and stop things from getting out of hand.
  • In The Sims Medieval expansion Pirates and Nobles, the primary conflict between the Pirates and Nobles of the title is that each side's leader believes the other side to have kidnapped their son/daughter, but there are a lot of dialogue options where you see that the Nobles also look down on the Pirates for being rowdy and unkempt, while the Pirates mock the Nobles for being uptight and prissy.

    Visual Novels 
  • There's an example in Fatal Hearts that is unusual for this trope because it portrays both slobs and snobs sympathetically. The werewolves are the "slobs" and the vampires are the "snobs". Here's why they're both sympathetic: The vampires constantly look down on the werewolves and/or the masses in general and sometimes treat them badly, so the werewolves have good reason to dislike them. The vampires tend to look on life from a lofty perch and they don't care who gets cast aside as collateral damage. But the vampires' behavior has a good reason behind it at least where the werewolves are concerned because while the werewolves are egalitarian with no classes, they're also excessively violent and tend to solve problems by committing murders, including the murder of a woman whose husband wasn't even a vampire yet, and if they got their way, art and education would completely disappear, since the werewolves have no personal use for it, thus making the vampires' elitism partially justified since it allows them to preserve the best of civilization.

    Webcomics 
  • Daily JoJo was at one point marketed as "office slob and office snob". The "slob" is Eunjo Lee, a clumsy Ridiculous Procrastinator who doesn't really care about how she looks. The "snob" is Wan Jo, the new guy and a Professional Butt-Kisser who puts painstaking effort into projecting a perfect image. Eunjo is very welcoming, but Wan is initially put off by her and takes a while to warm up to her. When the mask mandate comes around, they switch roles, as Eunjo realizes She Cleans Up Nicely with the help of the mask and Wan starts Dressing Down with Eunjo's encouragement after realizing nobody cares about how he looks. They eventually revert to their old selves and become romantically involved.
  • This is the biggest source of conflict in Drowtales. The Sharen and several other established clans see their bloodlines as inherently superior to everyone else's, especially lowly upstart commoners like the Sarghress, and believe all should naturally serve under them as a matter of "destiny". The Sarghress believe everyone should have the chance to prove themselves and are willing to fight and kill to prove this.
    • The Sloppy Vloz'Ress believe in the promotion of demonic summoning research in hopes of achieving ascension, while the Snobby Kyorls would like to kill all the slobby Vloz'ress screwing it up in public so they can be the sole practitioners of the science in secure testing facilities. Having a goddess who resorted to demonic rituals really screwed their society up.
  • Erfworld features a war between the ideals of Royalty and Toolism. The Royals are "descended" from the original units that the Titans left in charge. They go to great lengths to enforce their perceived superiority and tend to gang up on any non-royal that gains too much power. Stanely, meanwhile, believes that the Titanic Mandate has been transferred to those attuned to a set of artifacts called the Arkentools, and is set to destroy any side that refuses to acknowledge this.
  • One of the many problems between Gil and Tarvek in Girl Genius. Tarvek is a total snob, and sees Gil as a complete slob, thanks in part to a few overlapping adventures in Paris. Gil simply sees Tarvek as a priggish wet-blanket.
  • A religiously-themed example can be found in a Cockeyed Comix

    Web Original 
  • The Brows Held High review of Beauty and the Beast (aka La Belle et la Bête), in an attempt to parody Belle's role as a book-smart loner who is assumed to be a weirdo by the townspeople in the Disney adaption. Oancitizen plays a pretentious snob who is looked down on for being so pretentious and in return, looks down on the other critics for not understanding True Art when they see it. While Some Jerk with a Camera and everyone else plays uncultured overly Caustic Critics.
  • Epic Rap Battles of History has this as a recurring theme:
    • Benjamin Franklin boasts of being wealthy and "an educated gentleman" while denigrating Billy Mays as an annoying loudmouth who makes kitschy commercials.
    • George Washington brags about his upscale clothes and ballroom dancing skills, and is described by his opponent as a "powdered prick" in a "little blousy outfit." Said opponent, William Wallace is portrayed as a violent, foul-mouthed revolutionary. In real life, however, this was the opposite: Washington was known among his fellow Founding Fathers as a pretty rough-and-tumble guy, while the real William Wallace was a wealthy nobleman.
    • The season 3 finale had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — sentient reptiles who live in the sewers, eat pizza, and speak in Totally Radical slang — face off against Leonardo da Vinci, Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Donatello di Niccolò — world-famous Renaissance artists, scientists, and mathematicians who brushed shoulders with the Italian upper-class (Raffaelo in particular brags about being friends with the Pope.)
    • Bonnie and Clyde, notorious gangsters from the American south, once faced off against Romeo and Juliet, Shakespearean lovebirds who hail from aristocratic families.
    • Jack the Ripper describes himself as "an infamous, notorious delinquent" while his opponent dismisses him as a thug "covered in more piss than kitty litter." Said opponent is none other than Hannibal Lecter, the Trope Codifier for Wicked Cultured who described himself as "the bon vivant of violence, a licensed psychiatrist who dines on highest society to the sound of violins".
    • Steven Spielberg and Alfred Hitchcock each see themselves as snobs and each other as slobs, which is similarly true of Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick. Meanwhile, Michael Bay makes no bones about being a slob and dismisses the rest as snobs.
    • Shaka Zulu, "a brute with no discipline", versus Julius Caesar, the guy at the head of the world's greatest empire.
    • Season 5 opened with the raunchy, vulgar George R. R. Martin versus the more uptight and nerdy J. R. R. Tolkien, with his tweed jacket and Distinguished Gentleman's Pipe.
    • Charles Darwin versus Ash Ketchum has this vibe as well: Ash's adventures have left him unimpressed by Darwin's intellectual work, while Darwin boasts of his teachings breaking scientific and cultural ground while dismissing Ash as an unrefined idiot.
    • "Theodore Roosevelt versus Winston Churchill" plays with the trope. Both participants are well-dressed and as well-spoken as a rap battle will allow, on top of both being respected and well-educated world leaders from wealthy, connected families; that said, since Churchill openly admits to being a chain-smoker and apparently came to the battle drunk, he comes off looking like less of a snob than Roosevelt, who boasts about his physical fitness and military experience. Amusingly, this makes a rare instance of the American cowpoke being the snob while the Quintessential British Gentleman is the slob, when it would usually be the other way around.
      Theodore Roosevelt: Don't go toe-to-toe with me, you bloated, drunk old man!
      Why don't you do-si-do on over to a 12-step program?
      Winston Churchill: You're no man; you're an overgrown Boy Scout!
      I should stuff you in a pram just so you can throw your toys out!
    • Jacques Cousteau, a pipe-smoking ship captain, inventor, and award-winning documentarian, battled Steve Irwin, a "chunky" television host and self-proclaimed wild man who's not afraid to get his hands dirty tussling with the very animals he features on his show.
    • Vlad the Impaler boasts about his cruelty and the terror he invokes in people and regards his opponent as a pathetic effeminate weakling. His opponent, Dracula, emphasizes his subtle, sexy method of killing and elegant looks and manner against Vlad's excessive bloodshed.
  • Freshy Kanal:
    • "Hannibal Lecter vs. Leatherface" has the Wicked Cultured Hannibal Lecter rapping against the hillbilly Leatherface, with both backgrounds reflected in their lines and being used as disses.
      Hannibal Lecter: Love the suit; Must be the best thing to come from your entire worthless town
      Leatherface: Fuckin' artsy prude, going on trips and shit
      Livin' high class lifestyle — White meat privilege
    • "Bakugo vs. Inosuke" does this as well: Bakugo mocks Inosuke as an unrefined freak with poor social skills as a result of his upbringing in the wild, while Inosuke claims that Bakugo's pampered lifestyle has caused him to drastically overestimate himself to everyone else's detriment, on top of just making him an obnoxious Jerkass who only cares about the publicity that comes with being a hero.
    • "Edgar Wright vs. Wes Anderson" has Wright dismiss Anderson as a "hipster freak" whose movies are pseudo-intellectual pander-fests, while Anderson lambastes Wright's films as so mind-numbingly formulaic and simplistic that his fans could easily be mistaken for zombies.
    • "Boris Johnson vs. The Penguin" casts the former as an Upper-Class Twit with Delusions of Eloquence and the latter as a brash Cockney thug who wears a disheveled suit and Hates Rich People.
  • Help Not Wanted 2: Frigid Fornication has the rivalry between the goblin quartet and Selmeena's team of drako knights. The former consists of a small, scruffy, lewd team of goblins who don't prioritize hygiene, care little about fighting fair, and are nothing more than a few small-time contractors trying to gain some fame and money. Meanwhile, Selmeena and her crew are all haughty drakos who see goblins as being inferior and constantly talk down to them. All of them are prominent heroic figures within the Drako Federation, they're well-groomed, wear armor, and fight with broadswords and claymores.
  • In RWBY:
  • The episode "The Masquerade" of Tales From the SMP features a Cast Full of Rich People who share disdain towards the poor... and an nudist Lower-Class Lout named Drew P. Wiener. Naturally, this causes a lot of tension among the attendees of the masquerade party, with some people refusing to even touch Drew while playing Duck Duck Goose, and when Drew is the first person to get murdered, most of the cast considered him too poor to matter.

    Western Animation 
  • SpongeBob SquarePants'':
    • In "The Battle of Bikini Bottom", SpongeBob SquarePants once fought a "cleanliness versus sloppiness" war with Patrick Star, with Patrick being the slob and SpongeBob as the snob.
    • Squidward Tentacles's snobbishness and pretension often clash with SpongeBob and Patrick's obnoxious silliness and lack of sophistication.
  • In the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Great Divide", the neat and snobbish Gan Jin tribe had a long-standing feud with the slobbish Zhang, stemming from a single incident in the past. Aang would later claim to have been present at said incident, which according to him, was a simple children's game that has been grossly exaggerated by both sides over the years. In fact, he was lying to try and end the feud. The clean/dirty issue was just an expression of their feud; in fact, it's possible they became clean and dirty to distinguish themselves from each other. ("Gan Jing" is Mandarin for "clean" and "Zhang" is Mandarin for "dirty", which makes the tribe names somewhat less than imaginative.) This rivalry caused problems when the two groups had to cross a huge canyon together. Unlike most examples, neither side held a clear moral high ground.
    • In the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, this is the main, if simplified, cause of strife between the Southern (the Slobs) and the Northern (the Snobs) Water Tribes. That is until Northern chief Unalaq's real agenda comes to light...
  • Big City Greens:
    • The majority of the series has the country-born Green family (slobs) competing against Chip Whistler and Wholesome Foods (snobs).
    • In one episode where the Greens go to a seafood diner, Bill (slob) encounters a waiter (snob) who takes advantage of him, treating him like he doesn't belong.
    • In another episode, Tilly (slob) tries to sit at a table with a popular girl (snob).
  • The Simpsons:
    • The episode "A Tale of Two Springfields" had Homer Simpson divide the town in such a feud...because half the town's phone numbers had a new area code. (The "rich" part of town kept the old area code while the rest had to learn a new one.) Then the people on Homer's side soon went to the other side of town because they were low on supplies, and only the Simpsons were left.
    • This trope was portrayed inconsistently in the case of the "Springfield versus Shelbyville" ongoing town rivalry. In the relatively early episode "Lemon of Troy", it is revealed that the current inhabitants of Springfield are descended from wholesome, all-American frontier stock (well, by the show's standards, anyway) while the Shelbyvillians are descended from a renegade band of pioneers who broke off from Jebediah Springfield's party because he would not allow them to practice cousin marriage; the "inevitable" result is that the modern-day Springfieldians are normal (again, by the show's standards) and the Shelbyvillians are inbred hillbillies who view the Springfieldians as over-civilized weaklings. But in the much later episode "The Seven Beer Snitch," the stereotypes are reversed and now the suddenly "sophisticated" Shelbyvillians scorn the Springfieldians for being "uncultured" and stupid. (The fact that all of the show's stereotypes had been exaggerated by that point certainly didn't help the confusion.)
    • All very much a case of Springfield geography, considering that Cletus Spuckle and his family appear to be local residents.
    • "They Saved Lisa's Brain" could also count, but that's more "The smart people of Springfield vs. the idiots of Springfield".
    • In "Highway To Well", the staff of Well + Good are the "snobs" who claim to elevate the image of cannabis to the masses, even going so far as to have a cannabis wellness spa for the rich and influential, while they look down on Homer selling cannabis in the style of a sketchy backroom drug dealer (the "slobs").
  • The entire premise of The Oblongs was this, with the dirty (and physically deformed) Valley at odds with the wealthy and immaculate Hills.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door: The Kids Next Door are the heroic slobs; the Delightful Children from Down the Lane are the villainous snobs (raised by the even more snobbish Father and Grandfather).
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Applejack and Rarity had a feud like this that lasted most of the episode "Look Before You Sleep", though the two are still somewhat at odds with one another. This comes back in a later episode, "Simple Ways" where Rarity wants to be a slob to impress a guy who falls for Applejack's unrefined charm. Applejack in turn acts like a snob to try and snap her out of it. note 
    • The Ponyvillians in general when contrasted with the Canterlot elite. The Canterlot Elite are usually presented as stuck-up jerks with no redeeming features contrasting our Fish out of Water heroes who are well-meaning. Ironically, they also embody the destructive aspects too, as while the Canterlot elite might make you feel bad or unwelcome, the Ponyvillians have completely trashed two major national events.
  • Camp Lazlo has the rivalry between the Bean Scouts (Slobs) and the Squirrel Scouts (Snobs).
  • Monster High did this in the Fright On special: The Vampires were snobbish, being raised in more sophisticated lifestyles (of course Draculaura has been the ditzy underdog of the group). Meanwhile, the Werewolves were slobbish, with their more commoner type clothes and more animal-like behavior.
  • South Park:
    • They have this a fair bit. Interestingly, they are not afraid to depict the "slobs" in a negative light too, showing them as being just as capable of small-minded bigotry and terrible judgement.
    • The episode "Chickenpox" has Kyle's dad be insensitive to the plight of the poor and ends up getting his ass handed to him by Kenny's dad. However, Kenny's dad is depicted as a small-minded, abusive drunk.
  • DePatie-Freleng's 1975 cartoon show The Oddball Couple, with Spiffy (a neatnik cat) and Fleabag (a slovenly dog).
  • Gravity Falls:
    • There's the rivalry between the goofy, free-spirited Mabel Pines (Slob) and the snooty Alpha Bitch Pacifica Northwest (Snob). Oddly enough, after the events of "The Golf War" and "Northwest Mansion Mystery" the two started becoming friends.
    • Halfway into season two, Stanley Pines (slob) meets his long-lost brother Ford (snob).
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks: "Kayshon, His Eyes Open": Jet and Mariner sort of reflect this type of conflict, with Mariner being the slob (goofing off on the mission) and Jet being the snob (doing things by the book). In the end, neither of them were fit to lead, and they deferred to Tendi's and Rutherford's idea.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil: In "Game of Flags", we meet some of the rest of Star's family. King River's side of the family, the Johansens, are a clan of brutish and boisterous barbarians (Slobs), while Queen Moon's side of the family, the Butterflies, are a band of foppish royals (Snobs). Needless to say, the two families don't get along much.
  • The Loud House has the Polar Opposite Twins Lana (slob) and Lola (snob).
  • The Owl House has Luz Noceda (slob) and Amity Blight (snob). We also get Eda Clawthorne (slob) and Lilith Clawthorne (snob).
  • Crashbox inverts the traditional dichotomy during the "Revolting Slob" segments. The titular slob is a very ugly man with no hygienic or social skills whatsoever. Meanwhile, the off-screen narrator is the voice of reason, calling out the slob for his bad behavior while teaching viewers vocabulary words to describe his daily routine.
  • Ready Jet Go!: "Earth Camping" shows that Jet and Carrot are the Slobs to Mitchell and Mr. Peterson's Snobs. Jet is more laid-back and actually loves making mistakes and playing around. Mitchell is more uptight and serious, especially when he chastises Jet for folding the map into a hat. Mr. Peterson is uptight and takes himself way too seriously. Carrot is more laid-back, silly, and open-minded, which results in Carrot being a much happier person than Mr. Peterson. In the episode, they clash due to Carrot's inexperience with camping on Earth vs. Mr. Peterson's seasoned experience.
  • Subverted in Inside Job (2021). At first glance, Rand is the drunken, boorish Slob to his ex-wife Tamiko's cultured, vain Snob, but he was actually a wealthy CEO before falling from grace, and he's shown to be just as classist and narcissistic as she is, if not worse.

    Real Life 
  • An Older Than Feudalism example. Aristippus, father of the Ethical Hedonism and the court philosopher of the tyrant Dionysius, once met Diogenes as the latter was washing himself some lentils for lunch. So Aristippus said "Diogenes, if you knew how to get along with tyrants, you wouldn't have to live on plain lentils". Diogenes looked at him and said "Aristippus, if you knew how to live on plain lentils, you wouldn't have to get along with tyrants".
  • Mods (snobs) and Rockers (slobs) in 1960's England. The two warring subcultures were notable for unleashing moral panic by getting into some vicious public brawls. Ironically, many Mods actually came from working-class backgrounds.
  • In Mexico there's the Naco (slob) VS. Fresa (snob).
  • In England there's a divide in sports. Rugby league and football were traditionally played by working-class men, while the rich private school children played rugby union and cricket.
  • One of the strongest of these dynamics is the rivalry between Princeton University and Rutgers University. Barely 20 miles apart along Route 27 in Central New Jersey, Princeton is the most self-consciously exclusive and elite Ivy League school, while Rutgers is a state school (though it hasn't always been) that generally kept its doors more open (which was true even before the State bought it in 1949). Naturally, Princeton people look at Rutgers with disdain, while Rutgers call Princeton snobs. You can even tell with the towns; Princeton and New Brunswick have such different vibes that when visiting one after the other, you're not entirely sure you're on the same planet, let alone in the same state.
  • Less pronounced—and more one-sided—is the rivalry between the University of Pennsylvania (another Ivy League school) and Temple University (a state school) in Philadelphia. Mostly, UPenn ignores Temple (they prefer to focus their ire on the area's parvenu private schools like Drexel and Ivy League rivals like Columbia and Princeton) while Temple (of course) regards Penn as stuck-up. The geography of the colleges (Penn and Drexel share West Philly; Temple on its own dominates swathes of North Philly) encourages this relationship.
  • This type of conflict emerged in the Gambino crime family after Paul Castellano took control. Unlike his predecessor Carlo Gambino, he viewed himself as a businessman first and foremost and looked down his nose at the blue-collar criminals in the family. His opinion of capo John Gotti was especially negative, viewing him as little more than a crude thug. For their part, Gotti and his blue-collar faction saw Castellano as a pretentious, overprivileged Spoiled Brat who never actually earned anything and became boss through luck and nepotism. This conflict eventually turned lethal: Gotti had Castellano and his underboss Thomas Bilotti murdered while they were on their way to a meeting at Sparks Steak House.
  • The New York Yankees/Boston Red Sox rivalry in Major League Baseball became more of this in the 90's and early 00's. The Yankees management demanded (and still does) a clean-cut, clean-shaven look from every player which gave them a cold and corporate image, while the Red Sox teams were composed of long-haired, bushy bearded wild men (Red Sox infielder Kevin Millar even described them as "idiots" in 2004). The Yankees have tended to get the better of the Sox, though it's definitely not a one-sided affair.
  • Historically, this is the case with the fanbases of the New York Jets and New York Giants. While there are exceptions with both teams, the Jets fanbase has generally consisted of blue-collar union workers and first responders, while the Giants fanbase has primarily been white collar professionals and members of New York's upper class.

Alternative Title(s): Slobs Vs Snobs, Snobs Vs Slobs, Snobs Versus Slobs

Top

Brandy and Mr. Whiskers

60 seconds is all it takes to get the full gist of our heroes' complicated dynamic.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (5 votes)

Example of:

Main / ExpositoryThemeTune

Media sources:

Report