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In the grand spectrum of media-depicted drug addiction, most junkies are seen as anything from piteous to terrifying. Tales abound of the superhuman strength of a PCP addict, or the despair of a crack addict, or the sheer horrors of a bad acid trip..
Not so much the pot smoker. Potheads are funny, mellow dudes interested in a good time wherein nobody gets hurt. Stoners are cool. They won't try to stab somebody because they think he's Dracula, or claw their eyes out because there are beetles in them. And it's not as if someone's going to complain, lest they get arrested for illegal drug use. The funny pothead can be seen as an updated version of the funny drunk, a trope that has become politically incorrect.
See also The Stoner, G-Rated Drug, Erudite Stoner.
Examples:
Anime & Manga
- The Driver from Black Lagoon, who was high as a kite when the gang got caught up in a car chase with a fire fight.
- Kakeru Otori from Ore-tachi ni Tsubasa wa Nai gets pretty baked from pot and some very peculiar scented candles.
Comics
- Matt MacLimore's stoner relative who pops up for a short period in Dork Tower and is never heard from again. His main claim to fame is smoking Matt's wargames terrain.
- Entire cast of Horndog.
Film
- The Cheech and Chong movies.
- Pineapple Express.
- Grandma's Boy.
- Brad Pitt played a funny stoner in True Romance.
- This trope is also the whole point of Dazed and Confused.
- The basis of the comedy in Dude, Where's My Car?.
- Leonardo Nam plays Roy, a comic stoner, in The Perfect Score.
- Half Baked.
- Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle.
- Michael McKean's character in Earth Girls Are Easy isn't actually seen smoking dope, but...
- Jay and Silent Bob.
- Ed the Good Burger guy.
- The eponymous alien in Paul.
- Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski.
- He's NOT Mister Lebowski. He's the Dude. So that's what you call him, you know...
- In Platoon, some stoners, including Johnny Depp, dancing with statues and "getting high". They're not so funny when it gets to fight.
- In Jackie Brown, Melanie sure fits in. Louis didn't like it.
- Reefer Madness tries to avert this trope, but proceeds to enforce it by being So Bad, It's Good.
- The Cabin in the Woods has Marty, obviously intended to be the comic relief character. And also the hero
- Some humour in Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood is provided by the Leprechaun trying out weed, and trying quell the munchies that follow.
- In Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a couple of teenagers in Leslie's target group are a couple of potheads credited as "Stoned Guy" and "Slightly More Stoned Guy".
Live-Action TV
- The main cast (but especially the four guys) in That '70s Show. Scenes showing them smoking pot (called the Circle) occur in every episode.
- That goes double for Leo.
- Played mostly straight on Bored To Death. Much of the show's humor derives from the fact that the protagonists are avid stoners, and while it sometimes gets them in trouble, it's still funny.
- How I Met Your Mother often uses this trope when it flashes back to the Main Characters' college years, though The Narrator always refers to the activity they take part in as "eating a sandwich," complete with the joints transformed into hoagie sandwiches.
- The Cold Open of the 2 Broke Girls episode "And the Cupcake Wars" has Oleg unable to do his job because he smoked some weed. A string of marijuana jokes ensues.
- Later that season, "And the High Holidays", develops this extensively. This time the joke's on Caroline, who apparently is one of those rare people who gets pessimistic and depressed when stoned (although in the episode, she consumes it from a spiked cupcake).
Fan Fics
Video Games
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
- Shaggy from Scooby-Doo may or may not be an actual stoner, but how can people not jump to that conclusion? He's always hungry (he eats dog treats, for crying out loud), he's always freaking out over monsters, he thinks his dog (Scooby) can talk, and he even looks and speaks like a hippie stereotype. Talk about Getting Crap Past the Radar.
- William Hanna and Joseph Barbera patterned the Scooby-Doo characters after the characters in The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis, a 1950s sitcom featuring Dawson casted "teenage" characters. Shaggy is an Expy of Maynard G. Krebs (played by a pre-Gilligan's Island Bob Denver), the show's resident beatnik. Freddy was Dobie, Velma was Zelda, and so forth. Not sure if drugs factored in either Shaggy or Maynard's lifestyles, but being "laid-back" didn't start with hippies. Of course, it being a 1960's cartoon with already ten-year old pop cultural references doesn't help matters...
- This was parodied, like so many other elements of the series, in the live-action film. One scene has smoke billowing out of the Mystery Machine while Shaggy and Scooby are inside, laughing and saying "talk about toasted!"... then we find out that they're cooking breakfast.
- Otto the bus driver from The Simpsons, though signs that he actually smokes pot didn't crop up until season seven. Prior to that, he was just some perpetual teenager who drove a school bus (despite not having a license), got along great with kids, and loved rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s.
- Trent and especially Jesse from Daria.
- Merlin of Shrek the Third is implied to be one of these.
Real Life
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