Basic Trope: Somebody thinks they are drunk/drugged/high and starts acting accordingly.
- Straight: Alice is a fourteen-year-old girl who has never had any alcohol but wants to try some. Her friend Bob, as a prank, gives her sparkling grape juice and tells her it's champagne. Alice drinks it and begins slurring her words, falling over, and acting uninhibited.
- Exaggerated: She actually starts having the physical effects (hallucinating, throwing up, etc).
- Downplayed: She acts a bit 'looser' than usual, but doesn't seem drunk.
- Justified:
- Alice acts uninhibited because she believes that since she's "drunk", she has an excuse to do whatever she wants and she's slurring and falling over because she's too excited about being able to do whatever she wants to bother speaking correctly and watching where she's going.
- the Placebo Effect made Alice believe she drank real alcohol.
- Inverted:
- Carol gives Alice actual champagne, which gets her drunk, but Bob just has to tell her that she's sober and she starts acting sober.
- When Alice thinks she's drunk, she actually acts more sensibly than when she knows she's sober.
- Subverted:
- Alice starts slurring, but then she reveals she was just joking.
- We first meet Alice drinking sparkling grape juice, slurring, and making a fool of herself. Carol asks, "What's with your friend? That's not alcohol." and Bob replies, "Oh, Alice has always been a clumsy go-getter and she has a speech impediment."
- Bob then realizes that he accidentally did give Alice champagne.
- It turns out that Alice is an alien, whose species reacts in that way from grape juice.
- It turns out that Alice knew from when she tasted it that it was grape juice, but she decided to play along.
- It turns out that the grape juice has started to ferment… while it may not have become wine, it's definitely alcoholic now.
- Double Subverted:
- When she drinks more grape juice, she thinks she's drunk and actually acts drunk.
- Then, Dave, who isn't like Alice, starts acting drunk from the grape juice also.
- Bob only thought he accidentally gave Alice champagne, or he accidentally gave Alice a non-alcoholic champagne.
- Alice was only joking about being an alien, or someone thought she was one but was wrong, or Alice was wrong about her species being affected by grape juice; it's actually apple juice that affects them.
- Carol, who Bob also pranked, on the other hand...
- Parodied: Alice thinking she's drunk somehow causes her to fail a breathalyzer test.
- Zigzagged:
- Alice fluctuates between acting drunk and sober when she thinks she's drunk.
- Alice thinks she's drunk/high/drugged several times in the series and she behaves differently every time.
- Bob does his champagne/grape juice prank on his whole class, some of whom aren't fooled, some of whom think they're drunk but don't act drunk, and some of whom think they're drunk and do act drunk.
- Averted:
- No one thinks they're on drugs.
- People do think they're on drugs, but they don't behave as if they are.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded: "The placebo effect shouldn't be that strong."
- Invoked: Bob deliberately makes Alice act drunk when she's not in order to embarrass her or to make her face a fear she ordinarily wouldn't have.
- Exploited: Bob can pretend Alice is drunk so that he can gain access to something.
- Defied:
- Discussed: "If someone thought they were drunk but they weren't, would they act drunk?"
- Conversed: "Why are those characters acting drunk if they only think they are?"
- Implied: Bob gives Alice the grape juice and pretends it's champagne, then we end up seeing a bunch of items she's knocked over.
- Deconstructed:
- Reconstructed:
- Played for Laughs: When Alice finds out that she wasn't really drunk, she gets embarrassed in an amusing way.
- Played for Drama:
Back to Fake High.
