Western Animation / The Ren & Stimpy Show

Happy happy, joy joy!

Ren: At last I have control of TV Tropes! Are you receiving me? Welcome to our secret headquarters.
Stimpy: Thousands of miles below the Earth's crust.
Ren: Shut up, you fool! How do we know we can trust - them?
Stimpy: We can make them take the oath!
Ren: Perfect, the oath! Put your hand on the screen, and repeat after me...
"I do hereby promise only to read The Ren and Stimpy Show page, to make under-leg noises during the good parts, to wear unwashed lederhosen, every single day, of the rest of my life!"
Ren: That's it! You're in our secret club. Alright, Stimpy, they're okay, show 'em the stuff.

Who in their right minds would give a mainstream animated series to John Kricfalusi, the erratic and enigmatic Canadian animator known for causing chaos throughout the '80s with his attempts in putting out a grotesque, almost obscene art style which played up every body hair, pimple, bulging vein, oozing sore, lump of unsightly fat, and pock-marked butt cheek, whilst proudly flaunting around showing off the most disgusting and disturbing parts of internal anatomy?

Well, Nickelodeon did, and the result was The Ren & Stimpy Show, which detailed the adventures of an inverted version of the cat and dog duo, consisting of a smart, yet mentally unbalanced and psychopathic chihuahua named Ren Höek (voiced by Kricfalusi in the first two seasons, with Billy West taking his place for the remaining episodes) and his feline sidekick, a cheery but Buffoonish Tom Cat named Stimpson J. Cat (West), who often makes Ren angry with his eediocy.

The show was over-the-top in every way imaginable. In its visuals, even traditional Animation Tropes were taken up a notch; characters frequently Temporarily Atomise things the size of a nuclear submarine, and Non-Fatal Explosions generally take out at least one state. Even its dialogue was pulled up to eleven — Ren didn't so much talk as scream threats and insults in other people's faces. And that's not even counting its macabre tone — in The Ren & Stimpy Show, even a standard sitcom plot such as "Ren is jealous that Stimpy has a fan club" could become a psychodrama laden with operatic angst and rage. And just when you thought you've seen everything, it gives us an almighty Frank Capra-esque Tear Jerker tale about a sentient fart cloud!

One of the first three Nicktoons, which premiered alongside Doug and Rugrats on August 11, 1991, Ren & Stimpy broke the mould in many ways. Kricfalusi and his crew were uncompromising in their ambition to diverge from the boring, cheaply-animated and moral-heavy programming they despised working on for years by setting out to make cartoons funny again. Plots for episodes were devised using storyboards rather than written scripts (modelled after how Golden Age cartoons had been made), and the layout stage was prioritised, allowing focus on visual humour and expressive character acting.

The show was an overnight sensation, and its approach inspired many other successful shows in its wake — such as Rocko's Modern Life, Dexter's Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, and Spongebob Squarepants — to follow its example, whilst its... ahem, infamous imagery pretty much invented the Grossout Show genre.

Aside from its innovations in the industry, the show is just as notorious for its haphazard production history; friction between Nickelodeon execs and Kricfalusi — mostly over Kricfalusi's attitude and penchant for late work — eventually led to his removal from the show in 1992, midway through production of the show's second season. Production was then absorbed by Nickelodeon itself via its inhouse studio Games Animations as a number of the original staff (such as major directors Jim Smith and Vincent Waller) left in disgust over Kricfalusi's firing, although several notable crew members (such as Jim Gomez, Chris Reccardi, Mike Kim and co-creator Bob Camp, who was subsequently promoted to showrunner) remained on the series long-term. The show was cancelled in 1995 after 52 half-hour episodes.

The series lived on through a Marvel Comic Book series published from 1992 to 1996, alongside a brief early-2000s reboot (with Kricfalusi and several alumni from the original show, such as Smith, Waller and story artist Richard Pursel, on board) for adult audiences called Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon", which was... well, polarising, to say the least.

A reboot of the show is currently in development at Comedy Central, being produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studios with Billy West once again voicing the titular characters; this will be the first Nickelodeon show produced for Comedy Central. In light of statutory rape allegations made against Kricfalusi in 2018, it was confirmed that he is not involved in the reboot.

An unauthorized tell-all by Thad Komorowski, entitled Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story, was published in 2013. A documentary, Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story, which features new art and animation by many of the original artists who worked on the show, was released in 2020.

Ren and Stimpy appear in Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl as a duo of simultaneously controlled playable characters, alongside Powdered Toast Man as a separate fighter.

General trope examples:

• Ship Tease

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Tie-in Media with their own trope pages:

• Cat Hairballs
• Sick Little Monkeys
• Have Yourself a Stinky Little Christmas

Happy Happy, Tropes Tropes:

Tropes A-H

• 13 Is Unlucky: Stimpy is extra cautious on Tuesday the 17th^note which is four days after Friday the 13th in "Superstitious Stimpy".
• Accidental Suicide: Implied in "No Pants Today". Victor and his father laugh after they kick Stimpy out of their car, and because of this distraction, they drive off a cliff and their car explodes offscreen. It's left unclear if they survived or not.
• Acid-Trip Dimension: The setting of "Black Hole."
  • Also Stimpy's belly-button in "Jerry the Belly Button Elf."
• Adam Westing: Gary Owens as Powdered Toast Man.
• Addiction Displacement: In "My Shiny Friend", Stimpy overcomes his TV addiction. However, he merely replaces that with an addiction to gambling.
• Adopt the Food: Taken to extremes in one episode, in which Stimpy falls in love with an uncooked chicken and decides to marry it, much to Ren's chagrin.
• Aerith and Bob: "Ren" is an actual name in real life, but "Stimpy" isn't. In fact, it's actually a nickname for his real name: "Stimpson." Which is also not a real name.
  • Stimpson is actually a recognised surname.
• Ambiguously Gay: Word of God is that the titular duo's sexual preference varies depending on what is needed for that story.
• And I Must Scream: In "Bass Masters", a fish reels Ren with a fishing hook and mounts him on a wall labeling him "Dumb Bass".
• Angry Guard Dog: Double subverted; Stimpy announces that a home the two plan to steal food from is not guarded by one of these upon being told by Ren to check for one. Ren then attempts the theft only to get mauled, with Stimpy then reiterating:
  "There's no dog... but there's a baboon!"
• Angry Item Tapping:
  • In "Stimpy's Cartoon Show", after Stimpy has placed several cartoons on a storyboard, director Ren comes in while tapping a belt in his hand, criticizes the images and rips most of them off of the wall, leaving the former in tears.
  • In "Stimpy's Invention", Ren approaches Stimpy while tapping a rolled-up newspaper and asking him what's behind his back. According to Word of God, the Nickelodeon censors wanted this part cut out of fear that it would upset viewers whose parents potentially did beat them with the morning paper.
• Animation Bump: The episodes done by Carbunkle Cartoons.
  • There are moments of this in the episodes animated by Mr. Big Cartoons as well, but they also have numerous instances of Limited Animation.
• Anti-Humor: Anthony's father delivers one in "A Visit to Anthony" to "prove" that he was just as funny as Ren and Stimpy:
  Father: Why did they bury the fireman behind the hill? (pause) Because he was dead!
• Anti-Villain: George Liquor in "Man's Best Friend", largely due to his overzealous belief in discipline begetting love making him more than willing to go over the line to enforce it, to the point where he plays cruel mind games with the characters just to assert his authority. This stems from the characters root's as a parody of ultra-conservative, right winger personalities (such as John Kricfalusi's father, according to Word of God).
• Aren't You Forgetting Someone?: At the end of "Ren's Pecs", Ren forgets to give Stimpy credit for his newfound fame and success.
  Ren: To the guy who made it all possible: Charles Globe!
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • In "Cheese Rush Days" after Ren double crosses Stimpy:
    Stimpy: He took all our loot. He trapped us here to die! But, worst of all...HE TOOK MY COOL MINER'S HAAAAAAATTT!
  • Another example is the ending of "Svën Höek" where, after gruesomely describing how he's going to tear Stimpy and Sven's lips out, then gouge out their eyes, then rip out their arms, Ren simply states he's going to hit them and then they're going to fall. Possibly averted because, by that line, the tension is so high, and Ren so calmly angry, that it comes across as the most disturbingly sadistic act. Must be how Ren says he's going to look down on them and laugh.
  • In "I Love Chicken", Stimpy is going through the groceries and deciding what to use to cook with. He tosses out various items such as soda, eggs, milk, a brain, an intestine and radishes.
• Art Evolution: The first season was done by a handful of studios, some of which didn't quite "get" the art style. Things improved dramatically in season 2 when then-newcomer Rough Draft Studios was hired to do animation. Additionally, Carbunkle Cartoons (who did the best work in season 1) was given more to do, showcasing some of the finest visual acting seen on TV in years. When Spumco was fired, Games Animation didn't use Carbunkle at all, instead relying heavily on Rough Draft (who admittedly, still did a fine job), as well as adding Mr. Big Cartoons in Australia and Toon-Us-In in LA's Chinatown (Wang Film Productions did a couple episodes as well). The art style got noticeably flatter and more UPA-influenced around this time.
  • Season 2 was also when the show switched to digital coloring for some of its shorts, which looked cleaner and sharper than the hand-inked/painted shorts.
• Art Shift: Stimpy's amateurish cartoon: "I Like Pink".
  • As well in its grotesque closeup stills of faces and the like.
  • The episodes that use digital ink and paint. "Hard Times for Haggis" is the one that stands out.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The art style is often described as reminiscent of cartoons from The '50s. What happens on-screen on the other hand would have had the show cancelled back in said era.
• Aside Glance: Mr. Horse gives one in "Dog Show" when he is shown a tiny yipping poodle.
  "...You're kidding."
• Ass Shove:
  • Occurs in "Son of Stimpy/Stimpy's First Fart," in which Stimpy does this to Santa.
  • "An Abe Divided" has Ren attempting to get inside the giant stone Lincoln through its nose and becomes stuck. Lincoln has a nose-picking feature. Guess where Abe's index finger goes?
• As the Good Book Says...: Subverted at the beginning of "Powdered Toast Man vs. Waffle Woman": PTM is in a church and begins to recite Psalm 23, only it's the intro to calling a number in Bingo.
  PTM: The Lord is my shepherd, but thou shalt want... B-11!
• The Atoner: Ren, in "Bell Hops", after hearing Mr. Noggin's sob story:
  Ren: (with tears in his eyes) You're right! I will mend my evil ways!... (normal) ...Starting tomorrow!
• Author Avatar: John K has admitted Mr. Horse to be heavily based on himself.
  • This is further solidified by "My Shiny Friend", which features Mr. Horse repeatedly saying "What are ya?" Apparently, "What are ya?" was a catchphrase of John K.'s. The "What are ya?" phrase is also heard in "The Scotsman in Space" and "Reverend Jack Cheese", although not spoken by Mr. Horse in those instances.
• Baffled by Own Biology: In "Son of Stimpy", Stimpy farts for what is apparently the first time and asks Ren why his butt made a sound and smelled weird. Ren is unimpressed and brushes him off, assuming he should know how this works by now. Stimpy then names it Stinky and goes out to search for it. True to the surreal nature of the show, however, Stinky turns out to be alive.
• Batman Gambit: Ren pulls one off in "Space Madness" after he goes insane. He tells Stimpy to guard the "History Eraser Button", which will cause a Cessation of Existence when pressed. Ren knows Stimpy won't be able to resist pushing it, and when he does, it causes The End of the World as We Know It.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: At the end of "The Scotsman in Space", a genie grants Ren a wish; Ren wishes for babes and a lot of money. Stimpy begs for a wish too, and Ren relents. Stimpy wishes that people be free of want (Ren's money disappears) and that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of race or creed (Ren's babes turn into men from different countries). He also wishes to be where it's always warm, at which point Ren and Stimpy are hurled towards the sun.
• Bee Afraid:
  • In "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen", Ren takes his and Stimpy's canteen from the latter and tries to drink all of the water out of it... but there is no water, and instead it's full of bees who begin attacking his tongue.
  • In "Lumberjerks", a hornet stings Ren in the eye.
• Berserk Button: Don't even think about overcooking The Scotsman's eggs, feeding Jerry the Bellybutton Elf lint loaf, or showing the Fire Chief any circus midgets. Ren himself is a walking Berserk Button.
• BGM: There have literally been THOUSANDS of unique stock music cues used in this show.
• Biblical Motifs: The ending of "Wiener Barons" parodies the story of Noah's Ark.
  • One episode begins with their house being a manger-esque on a starry night and a camel's head in frame, complete with a motif from "We Three Kings", even though it wasn't a Christmas Episode.
• Big Eater: Stimpy.
• Bigger on the Inside: Parodied to the extreme in "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball", which has Ren and Stimpy living in a birdhouse, yet there's plenty of room inside.
  • In that same episode, Stimpy himself. Ren's nephew Bubba is able to walk inside Stimpy's interior like a damp cavern in spite of being several times larger than him.
• Big "NO!": In "Sven Hoek" Ren lets one fly after he sees that Sven and Stimpy ruined his collection of rare, incurable diseases.
  • Haggis shouts this in "Hard Times for Haggis" after he sees his supposedly faithful sidekick dog viciously destroy a doll likeness of him.
• Big Red Button: "THE JOLLY, CANDY-LIKE BUTTON!"
• Big Sleep: Discussed in "Big House Blues":
  Ren: Hey, Jasper. Where's Phil?
  Jasper: I told you, they put him to sleep.
  Ren: So wake him up.
  Jasper: You don't wake up from the big sleep.
  Ren: The big sleep... The big sleep? The big sleep! The big sleep!! (curls up whimpering)
  Stimpy: What's the big sleep, Ren?
  Ren: [gets close to Stimpy's ear] ...He's DEAD!!! DEAD, YOU EEDIOT!! You know what "dead" is?! Just like we'll be if we don't get out of here!
• Bittersweet Ending: The series has very few clear-cut happy endings, but it just as often ends with this as it does downer endings. Examples include;
  • "The Big Shot" ends with Ren and Stimpy reuniting; only for Ren to snap when he finds out Stimpy gave away his 47 million dollars.
  • "Nurse Stimpy" ends with Ren getting cured of his illness, but at the price of Stimpy going nuts and getting ill himself, prompting Ren to "return the favor" for all that Stimpy did to help him.
  • "Fire Dogs" ends with Ren and Stimpy being treated as heroes and awarded for what they did; too bad their fire hydrant helmets prompt the nearby dogs (and the lady they rescued) to form a line for a bathroom break...
  • "Stimpy's Invention" ends with Ren freeing himself from the Happy Helmet and just about to lash out at Stimpy—only to discover that being angry is what makes him happy in the first place! Even Stimpy is surprised at this outcome.
  • "Ren's Toothache" has Ren getting a new giant tooth to replace his lost ones, although it's a donation from Stimpy.
  • In "Mad Dog Hoek", Ren and Stimpy win, but Stimpy, who is way too into the sport now, breaks character by going off on a truly insane, Ultimate Warrior-esque rant; even Ren is taken back at this!
  • "Fake Dad" has Kowalski getting hauled back to jail, but he has bonded with Ren and Stimpy by this point.
  • The ending to "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses". To elaborate: Ren and Stimpy had been starving for the entire episode, and when Stimpy finally retrieved some cheese that fit Ren's tastes, the cheeses transformed into milk curd princesses, whom they were both forced to marry. So while they lived "happily ever after", the duo never did solve their food problem and died from starvation shortly after.
  • "City Hicks" ended with Ren and Stimpy being saved by Dusty Claus from dying on the streets of starvation...except now they have to toil in his dust mines for the rest of their lives. Neither seem to mind, though, so maybe this is a Happy Ending instead.
  • "A Yard Too Far". The baboon has taken Ren's hand puppet as his unwilling bride, but the boys finally get to eat their hog jowls.
  • "In The Army"; Ren and Stimpy graduate boot camp and are inducted into the army, only to get sent right to the front lines of war! Not that they are discouraged by it.
  • "Rubber Nipple Salesmen" ends with Ren and Stimpy succeeding in making a sale; only for Mr. Pipe to abruptly throw them out of the house, where they fall on two bulls and ride off into the distance.
  • "Stimpy's Fan Club" ends with Ren finally getting a fan letter from Stimpy himself, which prompts Ren to realise how much of a jerk he was to be jealous of Stimpy.
  • "The Scotsman In Space" ends with the duo helplessly drifting into the sun and being incinerated on-screen; but before that, Stimpy did get his wish for equality for all mankind and freedom from want to be granted.
• Black Bead Eyes: Generally averted, though Stimpy was given these in one scene of "Breakfast Tips" as an animation error.
• Black Comedy: The show lapses into this whenever Ren undergoes a mental breakdown. Which is extremely often.
• Bland-Name Product: One of the perks of life as a hermit for Ren it that he can finally listen to his "Urethra Franklin" albums.
  • In "Ol' Blue Nose", the Louie Lungbubble Show is taped at NBS (a mix between NBC and CBS).
• Body Horror: Examples run the gamut from Ren plucking exposed nerve endings out of his mouth in "Ren's Toothache" to Stimpy removing a giant cyclops' toenail with a crowbar in "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses", to Ren removing a mole with a pair of pliers in "Dinner Party".
• Bolivian Army Ending: A good few episodes, but the "Commander Höek and Cadet Stimpy" episodes in particular make a Running Gag of the two facing certain death at the end of every episode.
• Book Ends: "Stimpy's Big Day" starts with Stimpy rotting his brain away watching TV. In storyboards for the unfinished Adult Party Cartoon episode "Life Sucks", it ends with Stimpy, crushed by Ren's pessimistic outlook, plopping down in front of the TV in denial, watching The Andy Griffith Show.
• Boot Camp Episode: "In the Army".
• Bottle Episode: "Rubber Nipple Salesman", according to John K. While it didn't have Ren and Stimpy locked in a room together (as do most examples), it did have them either in their truck or at the door of someone's house. This was done as a cost-saving measure, as actually animating them driving off or down the street would have put the show overbudget.
• Bowdlerise: Things censored in reruns range from somewhat understandable, such as extreme threats of violence and burning the Constitution (which may mean nothing to ex-pats and international viewers, but means everything if you're American) to mundane, like removing George Liquor's vestigial tail in "Dog Show" because it looked like a penis.
• Brain Theft: "Ren's Brain" has Stimpy remove Ren's brain to be the centerpiece of his weird brain collection, leaving his body as an idiot. Ren's brain ends up leaving and acting as if nothing happened, only to come home and be pissed off at Stimpy hanging with his body.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In "Prehistoric Stimpy", Wilbur Cobb describes the beginning of Earth as a hot world, and a wet world, and finally a hot, wet world.
• Break the Haughty: Happens to Ren in "Stimpy's Fan Club".
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Oath segments.
  • Ren also does this in "Dinner Party".
• Burping Contest: Done by two lummoxes in "Lair of the Lummox", with the best belcher winning a female lummox.
• But Now I Must Go: An adult Stimpy at the end of "I Was a Teenage Stimpy", after Ren is overjoyed to finally have an adult there to take care of him:
  Stimpy: Sorry, pops, the world needs me! Thanks for the grub, old man! I'll call you when I need money! (flies off) I'll write, if I learn how!
• Buffoonish Tomcat: Stimpy J. Cat.
• Butt-Monkey: Ren is probably one of the most horrifying examples of 90's animation. He suffers some of the worst luck, injuries, and mental breakdowns you'll ever see a cartoon character absorb. "Double Header" is probably the peak of this, where he tries in vain to break it off with Stimpy after years of misery, only to get hit by a bus and spend the rest of his pathetic life as a freak surgically attached to Stimpy, gets fired from his job and has to work at a circus being gawked at by rednecks and idiots, grudgingly comes to accept his lot in life only to be crushed by a meteor, go back into surgery, and now spend the rest of his life as nothing more than a face and a couple of legs cursed to be suffocated every night as Stimpy goes to sleep (on his back) and every day dangling over Stimpy's Gasshole. And just to really punctuate it, Stimpy somehow gets the rest of his body back after the surgery.
  • Stimpy can be this as well from time to time. In fact the music video for "Cat Hairballs" is practically one long Humiliation Conga for Stimpy.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Stimpy has a collection of boogers under his table, but for some reason, censors would not allow them to be called such, so the name "Magic Nose Goblins" was improvised for them.
• Call-Back:
  • The shocked bystanders watching Ren through the window, featured in both "Nurse Stimpy" and later, "Stimpy's Fan Club".
  • Remember when Ren would pray for huge pectoral muscles in season 1? Guess what he got in season 3's "Ren's Pecs"?
    • And earlier, in "Son of Stimpy", he prayed for Stimpy's safety, and even told God he'd give up asking for bigger pecs if it got Stimpy home safe.
  • Ren's dentures, first worn in "Ren's Toothache", make a return appearance in "Jiminy Lummox", when Stimpy uses them to scale a fish.
  • "Jerry the Bellybutton Elf" is loaded with cameos from secondary and minor characters at Ren's impromptu party.
  • Jasper and Phil, two minor characters from "Big House Blues", reappear as competing show dogs in "Dog Show".
• Canadian Western: Parodied this in the episode "The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen".
• Canine Confusion: Ren is often seen eating human food despite being a chihuahua (though he is anthropomorphic), and in "Pixie King", he lays lots of eggs. The latter is at least justified since it's in a fictional book that Ren is reading. Also, he is a dog with a rat-like tail.
• Can't You Read the Sign?: "Exact change ONLY!" at the end of "Black Hole", thereby causing Ren and Stimpy to be kicked off the bus back to Earth.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Victor the "professional bully" shows off his Bully Union membership card.
• Cartoon Cheese
• Catapult Nightmare: Stimpy jolts up and screams "MUDDY!!!" after waking up from his nightmare that Muddy Mudskipper ate him in "My Shiny Friend".
  • Ren pulls off a particularly spectacular one in "Robin Hoek" after dreaming that he married Maid Moron (Stimpy).
• Cat/Dog Dichotomy: The show reverses the Cats Are Mean and Dogs Are Dumb tropes, Ren the dog is an Jerkass, and Stimpy the cat is the simpleton.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: The premise of "Terminal Stimpy".
• Censor Decoy: One very devious way John K. got past the censors was showing storyboards with fake corrections to drawings on sticky notes pasted over potentially offensive drawings^note Since traditional storyboards usually have two panels per page, with a section underneath for writing in dialogue or other directions, artists tend to find it more practical to do a new drawing on a sticky note over a part of the drawing that needs corrections rather than redraw the entire thing on a new page (sometimes, they'd do this anyway, but photocopy the new panel or cut-out correction over the old one). This obviously fell out of fashion once digital storyboarding made making abundant connections much easier. to trick them into approving the offensive board, with the assumption that they wouldn't be paying close enough attention to remember exactly what they'd been shown once the episode aired and he could "prove" that they'd okayed it if they complained. Many staff noted that, after a while, Kricfalusi was more concerned with what he could get away with than actually writing an interesting story.
• Chainsaw Good: The ghost in "Haunted House" tries to scare the duo as a chainsaw-wielding masked killer.
• Character Catchphrase: "No, sir, I don't like it"; "YOU EEDIOT!"; "Happy happy, joy joy!" and others. The funny thing is that those weren't even intended as catchphrases.
• Character Development: In the earliest episodes, Ren was already abrasive and short tempered but was slowly built up into the psychotic tendencies he's most infamous for, and also portraying him more as a pragmatic, jaded guy, who could still have sympathetic qualities. Stimpy also went through this; in "Big House Blues", he was very one dimensionally defined as an idiot and barely had any lines, and by later episodes became the ditzy optimist we know him as. Surprisingly, the Games episodes even continued developing the characters; Ren became far less psychotic and far more of a selfish, abusive jerkass towards Stimpy. Stimpy, on the other hand, became far more patronising towards Ren, and was increasingly implied to be a Stepford Smiler who could snap if pushed to his limits.
• Chekhov's Gunman: George Liquor stars in "Man's Best Friend" and "Dog Show", and made cameo appearances in a few others. Years later, he gets his own webshow, complete with a supporting cast. It has recently been Uncanceled.
• Christmas Episode: "Son of Stimpy" and "A Scooter For Yaksmas".
• Circling Vultures: Invoked in the "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem":
  "And the buzzards they soar overhead,
  And poisonous snakes will devour us whole,
  Our bones will bleach in the sun!"
• Collector of the Strange:
  • Ren has a collection of used celebrity underwear in "Jiminy Lummox". Not to mention a collection of opera records, rare incurable diseases, and dinosaur droppings in "Sven Hoek". Ren also has a collection of autographed glass coffee tables in "Ren Needs Help" and a collection of celebrity wigs in "The Last Temptation".
  • Stimpy has a collection of "magic nose goblins", which are boogers.
    "I picked them myself."
  • Sven has a balled-up collection of used Band-Aids and a jar filled with his spit, as shown in "Sven Hoek". Made even funnier by the fact that he's Ren's cousin.
• Comically Cross-Eyed: Stimpy often takes on a goofy, cross-eyed expression, complete with Fish Eyes and/or a Maniac Tongue.
• Comically Oversized Butt: The size of Stimpy's butt is a frequent source of humor on the show. From things like Stimpy bouncing and jigging on it while dancing to "Happy Happy Joy Joy", to it getting painfully smashed by a punny "Grade A" stamp in both an episode and a music video, to swelling up and deflating in another. In "Ren's Pecs", he donates his buttcheeks to Ren to give him huge pectoral implants. It also tends to get a lot of close-ups and is sometimes drawn somewhat feminine-looking.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: From 1992 to 1996, Marvel put out Ren & Stimpy comic books.
• Concussions Get You High: One episode features Stimpy excusing himself because "It's time for my appointment". He walks over to a door in the wall, inserts a quarter and the door lifts to reveal a horse. The horse kicks him in the head, sending him flying. His reaction to this is almost orgasmic.
• Continuity Nod: Many of the more memorable songs from early in the show are heard in snippets later on in the series.
  • "Did you say "Log'?"
  • "Dinner Party" features numerous characters from across the show's run all attending Ren and Stimpy's dinner party. This includes Muddy Mudskipper, Powdered Toast Man, Haggis McHaggis, the Fire Chief, and even recent characters like Sammy Mantis.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: In "An Abe Divided", the punishment for disgracing the country by not being good security guards for the Lincoln Memorial is towel whippings.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: POWDERED TOAST MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!
• Couch Gag: There was a short-lived curtain call segment used at the end of the show before the ending credits. It lasted only for season 1 (except for two episodes) and one episode of season 2 ("Sven Hoek"). It involved Ren saying goodbye to the audience, with a worried Stimpy crying and asking what will they do until next time. Ren suggests two different wacky things he could do, but Stimpy doesn't like them. Ren then suggests a third idea, which Stimpy likes and ends up doing.
  • Interestingly, three of these variants were used on the 1996 VHS of "Nothing But Shorts" at the beginning and end of the video, as well in the middle serving as an intermission segment. All three versions have the dialogue entirely re-dubbed and serve as hosting segments to the video. (In the intermission segment, Ren even lampshades that they can "take it easy by recycling old jokes until the tape runs out", despite Stimpy protesting that it'll make them hacks.)
• Cradle of Loneliness: Ren gets very lonely when Stimpy goes off to be the Gritty Kitty mascot. At one point he is seen cradling a bag of kitty litter with Stomp's face on it.
• Crapsaccharine World: Ren and Stimpy's world looks as pleasant as a 60's TV cartoon, but when it's not being incredibly bizarre, it's not what you'd call a nice place to live either.
• Crazy Cultural Comparison: The entire premise of "Travelogue" is Ren and Stimpy partaking in the many odd cultural customs of Acroneglia, such as the back shaving ceremony, eating monkey brain soup, and dipping themselves upside down in hot boiling water.
  • Ren and Stimpy themselves have their own unorthodox holidays, like Yak Shaving Day.
• Crying a River: "The Littlest Giant" involves Ren telling Stimpy a bedtime story about a giant (portrayed by Stimpy) who's ostracised by other giants and a farmer (portrayed by Ren) whose well has run dry. The giant cries over how he's been treated and then it turns out his tears have filled the farmer's well.
• Darker and Edgier: Make no mistake, this show was this to just about every animated TV show of its' day. The reboot for adults managed to take it a thousand steps further.
• Deadpan Snarker: Ren is occasionally, when he's actually calm.
• Death by Irony: If only Stimpy had realized he had pocket change when he and Stimpy were on the bus in "Black Hole", and not after the bus had left and they were about to implode.
• Death Is Cheap: And how. In quite a few episodes, Ren and Stimpy are offed in different ways, ranging from being blown up and going to Hell in "Sven Hoek" to floating towards the sun in "The Scotsman in Space", only to come back in the next episode. And then there are other times where though death doesn't occur, they are ravaged to the point of being hardly better alive, such as Ren's lobotomy in "Ren Needs Help" or their mangled bodies being sewn together in "Double Header". One way of explaining away the repeated deaths and dismemberments is that each episode may not be what really happens, but only a comedy sketch with Ren and Stimpy acting out their death. This may be evidenced by the fact that after "Sven Hoek", there is an epilogue where Ren and Stimpy appear on a stage to bid the audience farewell, though there again, Ren bursts Stimpy with a pin when he blows himself up like a balloon.
• Deconstructive Parody: "Son of Stimpy" was deliberately made by John K. as a stealth deconstruction of pathos scenes in movies, using a deliberately ludicrous and stupid plotline that's Played for Drama, just to show how easy it is to make people cry at a scene if you use the right staging and music tricks. He discusses this at length in this post on his blog, John K. Stuff
  John K.: "I purposely made a cartoon that used some filmic tricks to make people cry just to show that it's not hard to do it. And I didn't have to shoot anyone's Mom either. I made people cry over the fact that Stimpy couldn't fart for a second time. I went out of my way to make the story have the most preposterous plot events in it-everything to undermine the seriousness of Stimpy's depression. Besides the mood tricks, I relied heavily on Stimpy and Ren's acting-the drawings of their expressions and their interactions. A lot of films will ignore this part of the pathos recipe. They rely on the filmic tricks and contrived story points."
• Deer in the Headlights: Ren and Stimpy, right before getting hit by a bus in "Double Header".
• Depending on the Artist: The entire look of the show could vary from cartoon to cartoon, largely based on who directed/storyboarded it.
• Deranged Animation: If Bob Clampett was the original king of Deranged Animation, his protégé John K. carried on the torch for him with this show, and took this trope to levels of Serial Escalation.
• Deserted Island: "Aloha Hoek".
• Destructive Saviour: Powdered Toast Man, full stop. For example, he shoots down and crashes a commercial airplane into a truck in order to stop it from running over a kitten crossing the street.
• Detachable Lower Half: One of the mutations in "Black Hole".
• Digital Destruction: The Season 1 & 2 DVD set had some issues with DVNR line thinning and art erasing, but nothing particularly bad.
• Dirty Old Man: Old Man Hunger.
• Dismissive Kick: In "Son of Stimpy", after the third attempt of trying to fart again results in Stimpy's butt cheeks bursting and deflating like a pair of balloons, Ren lightly kicks the limp, dangling remains before scolding Stimpy for wasting his time.
• Disney Acid Sequence: "Climb Inside My World" from "Jerry the Bellybutton Elf".
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Don't make the cut for the dog show. Mr. Horse feeds you to a giant bulldog.
  • Also, if you give Jerry the Bellybutton Elf lintloaf, he will murder you.
    Jerry: LINTLOAF!?! I... HATE... LINTLOAF!!!
• Distress Call: Powdered Toast Man gets these, naturally.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The Husk magazines in "I Was a Teenage Stimpy" (literally, pictures of corn stalks) are the show's equivalent of porn, apparently.
  • And Stimpy playing with his bellybutton in "Jerry the Bellybutton Elf" is almost definitely symbolism for masturbation.
  • "For I have a dream that one day, everyone... everywhere... will know the wonders of my nipples!"
  • Ren and Stimpy live together, sleep in the same bed, and sometimes conform to stereotypical husband and wife roles (i.e., Stimpy cooking dinner while Ren lounges with a sand martini in "Aloha Hoek"; Stimpy baking while Ren chops wood in "Ren's Retirement"). The pair's weekend at the cabin in "Snow Flakes" has the feel of a romantic getaway. Ren behaves in a domineering manner and frequently subjects Stimpy to physical and emotional abuse. Ren and Stimpy's relationship looks remarkably like an abusive marriage.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: "Ren's Bitter Half" near the end Ren's evil side decides to replicate himself so that the world will be full of Evil Rens, the first clone turns out to be female and they fall in love, near the end after they get married they playfully get into a fight, you will notice that none of his punches are able to strike her and she is able to beat him up all she wants.
• Downer Ending: Numerous examples (nearly all are Played for Laughs):
  • "The Boy Who Cried Rat" ends with Ren throwing in the towel on his scam, only to find out Stimpy ate the five dollars Mr. and Mrs. Pipe paid them — they promptly force them to do the dishes and a substantial amount of other housework to work off the debt.
  • "Black Hole" ends with Ren and Stimpy imploding in on themselves.
  • "Space Madness" ends this way with it showing Ren is still suffering from Space Madness (but hiding it and reinforcing his own delusions). And then the History Eraser Button segment comes, and Stimpy gives in to his urges and erases himself and his friends from existence.
  • "Sven Hoek" ends with Ren inadvertently blowing up the house. As a result, the explosion causes a deep hole in the ground where Ren, Stimpy and Sven are blown straight into Hell.
  • As per the old lady's will, Ren and Stimpy are killed and stuffed at the end of "It's a Dog's Life", so that they may join her in the "eternal salvation of the hereafter".
  • “Egg Yolkeo” ends with the titular character getting eaten by Stimpy.
  • "Jerry the Bellybutton Elf" has Ren and Stimpy get devoured alive off-screen by the titular elf's Superpowered Evil Side Adonis (Lord of Chaos). Although Adonis himself also meets his end when Muddy's obese wife eats Stimpy's bellybutton.
  • And of course, there's "Marooned", where Ren and Stimpy, having been swallowed by a giant space monster, are awaiting certain doom by other creatures the monster just swallowed. Even the prime directive says the two don't have a chance of survival.
  • And then there's "The Last Temptation", which is a downer ending to the entire series.
  • "I Was a Teenage Stimpy":
  Ren: They grow so fast, then leave ya! You just hope you raise them right. (waves goodbye to a now-adult Stimpy, who flies into the sun. Literally.)
• Driven to Suicide: The Ghost in "Haunted House". Subverted in that trying it makes him alive again.
  • Haggis contemplates jumping off a bridge in "Hard Times for Haggis" after Ren and Stimpy's popularity ruins him.
  • Ren is about to throw himself into a sewer tied to a brick in "Dog Tags" when he's unable to get into the dog club.
• Drool Deluge: In "A Yard Too Far", Ren's salivary glands sprout faucets upon him seeing a plate of hog jowls on a windowsill.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Stimpy goes to a bar in "Terminal Stimpy" when he realizes he only has one of his nine lives left.
• Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: In "Untamed World", Stimpy accidentally shoots Ren in his rear end with a Tranquilizer Dart. Ren starts speaking in slow-motion and the music slows down as well until Ren finally collapses.
• Dude, Not Funny!: Deliberately invoked (along with other tropes) in the "Son of Stimpy" episode in order to prove a point, as detailed under Deconstructive Parody.
• Dumb Is Good: Stimpy is the nicest character on the show, and also really dim.
• Dumb Muscle: Kowalski.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Sammy Mantis appeared in "Dinner Party", a few episodes before his official debut in "Sammy and Me".
• Easily-Distracted Referee: Parodied in "Mad Dog Hoek" when Ren's head is in a pair of pliers; the ref checks to make sure the hold is kosher, and the second he turns away, Ren's head is twisted in the pliers.
• Eek, a Mouse!!: "The Boy Who Cried Rat".
• Emotion Bomb: The Happy Helmet.
• Episode Title Card: Most were just a still image set to some music, but "Sven Hoek" was live action footage of a lederhosen-wearing, accordion-playing man. John K. abhors the latter, confirmed by his DVD Commentary.
• The Eponymous Show
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: "Eat My Cookies".
• Everything Explodes Ending:
  • "Ren's Brain" is such a Mind Screw that the audience is seen with their heads exploding, and eventually the Earth itself explodes.
  • "Sven Hoek" ends with Ren, Stimpy and Sven being blown straight to Hell after Ren pees on a game called "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence". Granted, Ren didn't know this.
  • Reversed on "Black Hole", which ends with Ren and Stimpy imploding.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: Ren gets some truly epic ones in the "Space Madness" episode.
• Expy: Sgt. Big Butt from "An Abe Divided" is more or less the same as the Sarge from "In the Army", except with a slightly different voice and sporting a wig and breasts.
  • The Bloody Head Fairy in "Haunted House" is intentionally modeled after Doug Funnie.
• Extra-Long Episode: The uncut version of "Marooned/Untamed World" is 26 minutes, 2-4 minutes longer than the usual episode length.
• Extreme Close-Up: "Son of Stimpy" has a couple in the first few minutes, and it's not the gross out kind. The episode opens with several up-close shots of Stimpy's butt, rendered in great detail right before Stinky's rather dramatic "birth". Moments later, when Stimpy tries to re-create the event, we see more close-ups of Stimpy's butt cheeks as they flex, strain, swell up, and deflate like balloons.
• Eye Pop: Very frequently. Besides the eyes, Ren's heart has popped out of his throat when shocked in one instance.
• The Faceless: Mr. and Mrs. Pipe, who are only seen from the neck down.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: In one episode, Ren and Stimpy attempt to rob a bank with a Scud missile instead of a gun. Particularly glaring since Ren and Stimpy are hoping to get arrested for "armed robbery".
• Family-Unfriendly Violence: The show is full of it.
• Fan Disservice: Old Man Hunger definitely qualifies.
• Fanservice: While this was much more pronounced in Adult Party Cartoon, occasional examples also appeared in the original run, such as Mrs. Pipes and the woman in the hairball dress.
• Fanservice Extra: The woman in the hairball dress from "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball". Justified, since she's supposed to be a fashion model.
• Fan of the Underdog: Despite the constant abuse he inflicts upon him, Stimpy is undyingly loyal and sympathetic to Ren. Revealed rather bluntly to the latter in "Stimpy's Fan Club".
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: "Blazing Entrails", when Ren traveled inside Stimpy to find out why he was acting abnormally stupid.
• Fat and Skinny
• Fat Best Friend: Stimpy.
• Fighting from the Inside: While Ren is wearing the happy helmet, there are many instances of him seemingly resisting the forced happyness pushed into his brain. This culminates with him exerting enough control to find and use a hammer to bash the helmet on his head until it breaks and he's free.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: The ending to "Sven Hoek":
  Satan: So, you whizzed on the electric fence, didn't ya?
• Firehouse Dalmatian: In the episode "Fire Dogs", as well as the video game based on it, the titular Chihuahua and cat paint themselves like Dalmatians in order to get jobs at the fire station.
• Flashback Cut: Ren & Stimpy never had an entire episode devoted to showing old clips, but the beginning of "Double Header" featured a brief flurry of clips from earlier episodes of Stimpy acting stupid.
• Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Seen in "The Last Temptation" and "Terminal Stimpy".
• Follow the Bouncing Yak: The second half of the Royal Anthem of the Canadian Kilted Yaksmen.
• Food Pills: Revealed by Stimpy in "Space Madness", which causes Ren to go berserk.
  • A variant occurs in "House of Next Tuesday"; instead of being used for food, a pill enlarges into a bed.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Stimpy once won 47 million dollars and instant celebrity as part of a television contest. When Stimpy finds that his newfound fame and fortune are meaningless without his best friend Ren he "gives away" all his money and returns home. Ren is less than joyous about this.
• Foul Medicine: In "Nurse Stimpy", Stimpy feeds a giant spoonful of medicine to Ren, who complains about the "icky-tasting stuff". When asked what kind of medicine it is, Stimpy looks at the label and sees it's "All Purpose Icky-Tasting Medicine".
• Freak Out: Happens so many times (usually by Ren) that it's not worth listing them all.
  • Stimpy occasionally gets one as well, such as his rant that he can't walk another step in "Road Apples".
• Free Prize at the Bottom: In one early episode, Stimpy pours all of the cereal in a box into a big bowl so he can get at the free Muddy Mudskipper cereal bowl caddy at the bottom.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": "Ren's Retirement", since Wilbur Cobb is giving the eulogy and initially mistakes it for a marriage ceremony.
• Funny Foreigner: Sven, Ren's cousin. He's pretty much Stimpy's clone, much to Ren's dismay.
• Fur Is Clothing: Ren And Stimpy have revealed their fur to be nothing but a suit in a few different episodes, by unzipping to take a bath or go skinny dipping.
• Gag Nose: Stimpy.
• Gainax Ending: Seen in several episodes.
• Gassy Gastronomy: At the very end of "Double Header", Ren and Stimpy get stitched together. A doctor hands Stimpy barbecued baked Boston beans, and Ren cringes in horror, knowing what'll happen next. The episode ends before we get to see the outcome.
• Genre Savvy / Wrong Genre Savvy: Zig-zagged by Ren: whenever he identifies a pattern, it promptly shifts out from under him. An example from "A Yard Too Far": When he's about to steal some hog jowls from the front yard, he states that in other cartoons, there's usually an Angry Guard Dog prepared to maul the everloving crap out of whoever enters the porch. Stimpy mentions that there is none present. He does not, however, mention the guard baboon.
• Genre Throwback: The show is one to The Golden Age of Animation in terms of its expressive animation, particularly the works of Bob Clampett and Tex Avery, along with the stylized, limited look of UPA and early 60s Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man:
  • Ren says this to Stimpy, who begs to talk at the next house in their rubber nipple-selling job.
  • Ren also does it to a yak in "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen", who's suffering a psychotic breakdown in the middle of the desert.
  • In "Double Header", Ren goes crazy near the end, and Stimpy slaps him, saying, "Pull yourself together, boy!"
  • In "My Shiny Friend", Ren slaps Stimpy (who is mourning the loss of his TV) and tells him to "SNAP OUT OF IT!"
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The happy helmet from "Stimpy's Invention" will make you happy twenty-four hours a day, against your will. With you being perfectly aware the whole time that you shouldn't be so damn happy.
• Good is Not Nice: George Liquor. He is not remotely evil and firmly believes in rules and discipline (hence his mantra "It's discipline that begets love!"), but he pursues it in such an aggressive, overzealous manner (going as far as to play mindgames with Ren and Stimpy in "Man's Best Friend"), that it makes him a force to be reckoned with when roused to anger.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Frequent with Ren:
  • In "Hermit Ren," he gets so sick of Stimpy he leaves to join a hermit guild. They provide him with a cave and a boulder to lock him in forever. Completely alone. It doesn't take long for him to lose his mind. He gets kicked out for creating imaginary friends.
  • His Recycled In Space counterpart goes insane in "Space Madness" when, confined to a spaceship on a long mission, he is deprived of all contact besides Cadet Stimpy. Interestingly Stimpy does absolutely nothing to instigate this as the only bit of mischief he causes in this episode occurs after Ren is long gone.
  • Ren goes more than a little nuts at the end of "Farm Hands" when he thinks he and Stimpy are the last survivors after a devastating tornado. However, it turns out the farm's cow also survive (and took a dump on them).
  • Ren and Stimpy both slowly lose their sanity in "Big Flakes" while they're trapped in the cabin.
• Gratuitous Panning: On the Crock O Christmas album, the conversations between Ren and Stimpy have Stimpy panned to the right and Ren panned to the left.
• Grin of Rage:
  • Mixed with Slasher Smile and Dissonant Serenity in "Sven Hoek". After completely snapping from Stimpy and Sven's antics, instead of shouting at them as usual, Ren creepily smiles, and calmly starts describing just how angry he is, and what he's going to do to them. Stimpy and Sven are rightfully terrified.
  • In another episode, "Stimpy's Invention", Stimpy creates a Happy Helmet that forces Ren to be happy. After he frees himself of it and has Stimpy in a stranglehold, Ren announces that he's never been so angry in his entire life. And then suddenly he smiles, because "I feel great! I love being angry!" The episode ends on a close-up of his face in a half-mad, half-delighted grimace.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: Beetlejuice may have started it, but this show popularized it, with more detailed gross-outs.
• Grossout Show: This show started it all.
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare: In "A Scooter for Yaksmas", Stimpy accidentally shatters the display window in a store and is accused of stealing a scooter. He ends up riding away on the scooter so that the police won't catch up to him. He has a nightmare that he's told off by several people (including Ren) for what he's done and later sentenced to infinity in prison.
• Hairball Humor:
  • In "Big House Blues", Stimpy coughs up hairballs all over Ren. At first he's angry, but then a little girl wants to adopt him because she thinks he's a poodle.
  • In "The Cat Who Cried Rat", Stimpy coughs up what looks to be a hairball but is actually Ren, who was in Stimpy's mouth after pretending to be a mouse.
  • In "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball", cats' hairballs become more valuable than gold. Ren sets up a production line so that Stimpy can cough up hairballs continuously, but eventually, he becomes unable to cough up any more hairballs due to being both tired and bald.
  • There is a song called "Cat Hairballs" where Ren sets up a conveyor belt for Stimpy to "hwarf" up hairballs onto while the former stamps them for approval and they sing about the things they'll make the hairballs out of. Halfway through, Stimpy is gasping for breath and has bald spots. At the end, he's completely licked clean and passes out on the conveyor belt. Ren says, "That's disgusting!" and stamps Stimpy's butt.
• Hair-Trigger Avalanche: Demonstrated in "Big Flakes", though playing against expectations, Ren isn't the one who sets off the avalanche which would bury their cabin. He shouts for Stimpy to shut up already, yet it's Stimpy's "AMEN!!!!!" which is the trigger which causes the avalanche.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Ren in the episodes post-Kricfalusi, when his anger and screaming traits were played up more, whereas in the earlier episodes he only broke down under the most manic and frustrating of circumstances.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Subverted by Stimpy in "No Pants Today". He suddenly realizes that he wears no clothes and feels ashamed about it.
• Hands in Pockets: Ren doesn't have a tail because John didn't like animating it.
  • It is actually removed in "Dog Show" by George Liquor using a rubber band and is never seen again.
    • But then it reappears when Mr. Horse passes Ren during the pre-judging (he even wags it in excitement). That's right. Negative Continuity is so strong in Ren and Stimpy that the character's physical attributes aren't even consistent between scenes in the same cartoon.
• Hanging Around: In "Out West", Abner and Ewalt hire outlaws Ren and Stimpy to steal a horse just so they can charge them with theft and have an old-fashioned hanging. When they get to the gallows, it turns out they ''can't'' be hung: Ren is so light that he just blows in the wind, while Stimpy has no neck.
• Happy Ending: There are a handful of times where an episode ends with a clear Happy Ending, even if's often offbeat or with one of the characters in a mild, but not particularly awful, disposition;
  • "Big House Blues" has both Ren and Stimpy getting happily adopted by a family, and Stimpy gets his first material possession—a litterbox (which Ren has the misfortune of getting stuck in).
  • "Robin Hoek" has an in-universe happy ending with Robin Hoek saving Maid Moron; of course, outside the story the episode has a strange "Was it really a dream?" ending.
  • "The Littlest Giant" ends happily with the Giant saving Wee Ren's farm and earning his friendship and residence, albeit the giant has Ren perform rather peculiar tasks for him such as being his personal backscratcher and put up with things like the giants sneezing.
  • "Son of Stimpy" ends with Stimpy reuniting with Ren and Stinky, the latter now having a rotting fish for a wife. They move inside Ren's nose.
  • "Dog Tags" has Stimpy invite Ren to a lodge club for cats, where the two (with Ren dressed as a cat) sing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" with a group of other cats. After all the abuse and denied access to his dog lodge, Ren having a good time is very nice to see.
  • Well, "Double Header" is certainly one for Stimpy, since he gets to eat his "favorite" food, "barbecued Boston baked beans". Ren, on the other hand...now has to deal with the..."result" of eating baked beans...
• Hard-Work Montage: "Stimpy's Cartoon Show". Stimpy makes a cartoon all by himself, but when he promotes Ren to producer, Ren cuts his budget. So Stimpy is forced to literally chop down trees to make the paper he needs to draw on. Stimpy also does every task involved afterwards, including photographing each frame, one by one. By the end, he's appropriately exhausted.
  • There's also the episode ''The Cat That Laid The Golden Hairball'' where Stimpy is being forced to "hwarf" up hairballs for Ren. Once things get started Stimpy quickly starts losing hair as it gets licked off and hwarfed into hairballs, gradually leaving Stimpy with less and less places to lick. Hwarfing itself also starts to become exhausting and eventually Stimpy passes out and gets accidentally stamped on the butt.
• Head Desk: In "Space Madness" Ren bangs his head on the table after seeing the Food Pills Stimpy presents.
• Heart Beats out of Chest: A variant in "To Salve and Salve Not": Ren's beating heart exits his mouth.
• Here We Go Again!:
  • Stimpy falling in love with a goat head at the end of "I Love Chicken".
  • Stimpy has finally curbed his TV-watching habits at the end of "My Shiny Friend", but he's now into gambling instead.
• Heroic RRoD: At the beginning of "Son of Stimpy," Stimpy tries to fart for Ren in order to prove that Stinky is real. After the first two attempts fail, Stimpy puts everything into the third try, which results in Stimpy's butt cheeks over exerting themselves, swelling up, then going limp and deflating complete with sound effect and Stimpy gasping in defeat.
• Hero-Worshipper: Stimpy's idol is Muddy Mudskipper.
• Hint Dropping: Stimpy drops a ton of hints to Ren that he wants a scooter for Yaksmas. Ren doesn't get the hint.^note Ironic, considering that it's usually Stimpy who doesn't "get the hint"...
  • By the end of the episode it's revealed that Ren did get Stimpy the scooter after all, it just didn't get delivered.
• Hollywood Healing: And how, given how much Ren and Stimpy are maimed in the show.
• Honest John's Dealership: Billy West in animated form, who first appeared in "Space Madness" as a narrator and "Dog Show" as a judge, appeared as this in a number of Games episodes.
• How We Got Here: "Who's Stupid Now?" is partially a flashback story, as it begins with fat Ren and spends half the episode leading up to how he got that way.
• Hypocritical Humor: Stimpy, on Haggis McHaggis: "He don't speak English none too good."

Tropes I-Q

• I Am Not Weasel: Ren is occasionally mistaken for a mosquito or rat. This could possibly be a lampshade, based on how he's drawn.
• I KEEL YOU!
• Idiot Savant: In the space-themed episodes, Stimpy is surprisingly adept at science, such as when he describes what imploding is to Ren in "Black Hole".
• In Another Man's Shoes: The premise of "Who's Stupid Now?" involves Ren becoming the fat one and Stimpy becoming the skinny one, in order to keep their TV show. Ren gains empathy by knowing what it's like to be the ridiculed one in the duo.
• Inflating Body Gag: In "Nurse Stimpy," Ren tries to get his blood pressure taken, but his head inflates instead of the pressure cuff.
  • A downplayed version also happens in "Son of Stimpy" when Stimpy tries to prove Stinky is real by trying to fart a second time. With each attempt Stimpy's butt gets just a little bit bigger and rounder. By the third attempt it has swelled up to its limit then suddenly bursts and deflates like a balloon, while Stimpy gasps in exhausted defeat.
  • In the Sven Hoek Ending Segment, Ren suggests Stimpy to blow himself up like a balloon. Stimpy blows on his thumbs and lumps pop out from his body before expanding like a balloon. Ren then pops him.
  • In Blazing Entrails, Dr. Brainchild pumps up Stimpy untill he's big enough for Ren to go inside him.
  • In Hair of a Cat, Ren got stung by a fly and swells up like a balloon.
  Ren: I think I'd like to go home now.
• Informed Species: Ren's design is such an extreme caricature of a chihuahua that he's barely recognizable as one, especially with his later redesigns. This is even acknowledged in "Stimpy's Fan Club", where a fan letter asks if Ren is a mosquito. Stimpy likewise barely has any resemblance to a cat.
• Insomnia Episode: "Insomniac Ren".
• Instrumental Theme Tune
• Interspecies Romance: Ren lusts after human women. In "I Love Chicken", Stimpy falls in love with a chicken.
  • Mr. Horse also had a girlfriend who was a sheep.
• In Touch with His Feminine Side: Stimpy enjoys knitting. Stimpy also usually plays the more stereotypically "feminine" rolls when the joke or episode calls for it. And in episodes like "Son of Stimpy" where it gets a lot of focus, Stimpy's butt is often drawn more full and feminine-looking.
• Iris Out: Cat Hairballs ends by irising out on Stimpy's butt, which had been marked with a stamp so that it had "Grade A" written on it, with the left cheek sporting the "Grade" while the right cheek sported the "A".
• I Take Offense to That Last One: Seen in "Who's Stupid Now?" when the boss insults Ren.
• I Will Show You X!: In a Ren and Stimpy episode dealing with the Stimpy facing his own mortality and going through various emotional phases. To illustate "Anger", there's a short bit where Ren is at the dinner table, ready to eat.
  Stimpy: (cheerily) Here's your breakfast, Ren!
  Ren: Hey uh... Stimpy? You forgot my toast.
  Stimpy: TOOAST??! HEEEERE'S YOUR TOOOOAST!!!! (slams toast into Ren's face and rubs it violently)
• I Will Tear Your Arms Off: In "Sven Hoek", this is one of the threats Ren gives Stimpy and Sven for messing up the house.
• Jar of the Bizarre: Ren collects, among other bizarre things, jars of rare incurable diseases.
• Jeopardy! Thinking Music: A Suspiciously Similar Song version is heard in "Out West" when Abner and Ewalt have blank expressions for a long time.
• Jerkass: Ren. He insults and beats up his own friend, is incredibly greedy, and has a Hair-Trigger Temper. Downplayed as he has a Hidden Heart of Gold.
• "Everybody Dies" Ending: "Ren's Brain" ends with the Earth being blown up, due to a chain reaction of everyone watching The Ren & Stimpy Show exploding.
  Narrator: And thus ended the Republican party.
  Ren: You EEDIOTS!!!
• Large Ham: A lot of characters. Most notably Ren.
  • POWDEEEEEEERED TOOOOOAAAAAST MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  • The JOLLY, CANDY-LIKE BUTTON!!!
• Later-Installment Weirdness: After the second season, John Kricfalusi was fired for not meeting episode deadlines and (according to Kricfalusi himself) going overboard with the show's violent content via the infamous oar-beating scene in "Man's Best Friend". Nickelodeon created its own animation studio (Games Animation), and Bob Camp took over as showrunner. The art style and designs were altered slightly and some voices changed (largely due to Billy West replacing Kricfalusi for certain characters), i.e. Ren sounding more breathy and less hammy. Ren went from a Jerk with a Heart of Gold to a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk, and Stimpy went from merely The Ditz to Too Dumb to Live. The Games staff even made an episode parodying the creation of the show and the change in staff ("Reverend Jack"). The tones of the episodes also changed; this was both at the request of Nick (who told Bob Camp, "no more psycho-dramas") and Camp himself, who didn't feel it was healthy to endlessly ask, "What would John K. do?" and instead just wanted to make funny cartoons.
• Law of Disproportionate Response
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble are among the guests at Ren's party in "Jerry the Bellybutton Elf," but we only hear their voices as they leave.
  Fred: Come on, Barney, let's blow this pop stand!
  Barney: Heh-heh-heh... right behind ya!
  • Also, Homer Simpson can briefly be heard saying "I hate having two heads!" while Stimpy is watching TV in "Jimminy Lummox."
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: "Haunted House" begins with Stimpy commenting on how the mansion is a great place for him and Ren to "kill twelve minutes." The total length of a Ren and Stimpy episode runs for exactly twelve minutes.
• Least Rhymable Word: In the "Billy the Beef Tallow Boy" bumper:
  "Hey hey Billy, can you deep fry the Buick? / Well, all right, but he'll probably pu-ick!"
• LEGO Body Parts: "Prehistoric Stimpy" has Ren and Stimpy saw off their heads and place it on each others bodies (offscreen) out of boredom.
• Leitmotif:
  • A Powdered Toast Man short is almost always accompanied by the heroic-sounding "Reach For the Stars" by Richard Harvey.
  • Hey It's That Guy! (including an expy in the form of a salesman fish in "Bass Masters") is always accompanied by "It's That Man Again" by Michael North.
  • When Mr. and Mrs. Pipe appear, Cyrill Watters's "Crepe Suzette" will usually play. Sometimes another one of Watters's stock music cues, "Willy Nilly," is heard instead. (Both cues are very similar in style.)
  • Wilbur Cobb is always accompanied by two pieces from Peter and the Wolf: The Cat and Grandfather themes.
  • "Kumbaya" is a recurring theme throughout "Hermit Ren".
• Lethally Stupid: Guess who? And no, it's not the psychopathic dog...
• Lemony Narrator:
  • Wilbur Cobb in "Prehistoric Stimpy".
  • In "Wiener Barons", the narrator flat out insults Ren and Stimpy when they don't do what he's describing.
    Narrator: And so, our heroes head north. (Ren and Stimpy, represented by a dot on the map, are moving west) AND SO, our heroes head NORTH, STUPID! (the dots begin to travel north)
  • In "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen", the narrator somehow seems to think the year 1856 is "thousands of years ago". In the same episode, the narrator says the world will never forget the main characters, whose names he can't remember.
  • In "Son of Stimpy", the narrator (who is only heard at the very beginning of the cartoon) contradicts himself by saying the true story he's about to show is all made up.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: Occurs in "Untamed World" when Ren is shot by a tranquilizer dart and runs slower and slower.
• Limited Animation: The very first few episodes, most notably "Stimpy's Big Day" and "The Big Shot". Averted with many season 2 episodes, notably "Son of Stimpy" and "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen" (both by Carbunkle Cartoons).
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: Humans and talking animals co-exist and outside of (maybe) acknowledging the difference in species, nobody thinks anything of it.
• Logo Joke: The Ren and Stimpy logos are played with in "Space Madness" and "Black Hole"; in the former, Stimpy pressing the History Eraser button caused R&S to be removed from the logo, while in "Black Hole", their faces are inverted due to the duo having imploded a few seconds earlier.
• Loony Fan: Stimpy is this to Sammy in "Sammy and Me".
• Loud Gulp: Stimpy, before eating monkey brain soup in "Travelogue".
• Luxury Prison Suite: The plot to "Pen Pals": Ren and Stimpy want to be arrested and thrown in jail, because a TV commercial paints it as a luxury residence. Their plan backfires, though, when a colossal inmate is put in with them, eating up all the free space in the cell.
• Lyrical Dissonance: The fireworks-inducingly regal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen's anthem jumps from the quasi-coherent first stanza to the following (second) stanza without any shift in mood:
  And the buzzards, they soar overhead,
  And poisonous snakes will devour us whole;
  Our bones will bleach in the sun.
  And we will probably go to *fart*,
  And that is our great reward
  For being the royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen.
• Malaproper: Stimpy often falls into this, such as in "I Love Chicken":
  Stimpy: Aren't you just the cat's B.O.!
  • Wilbur Cobb also certainly counts.
    Cobb: Rain? In Octember?
• Man of a Thousand Voices: Once Games Animation took over, Billy West did the vast majority of voices on the show, including many female characters.
• Man on Fire: In "The Great Outdoors", Ren tries to start a campfire with gasoline and a match. The gasoline of course explodes, setting Ren on fire.
• The Man They Couldn't Hang: "The scrawny one don't weigh enough, and the fat one ain't got no neck!"
• Marionette Motion: In "Stimpy's Invention".
• Midair Bobbing: Seen in "Haunted House" with the ghost, among other episodes.
• Mistaken for Santa: In "An Abe Divided", Ren and Stimpy are guards at the Lincoln Memorial. Stimpy mistakes the statue for Santa Claus and gets on its lap to tell it what he wants for Christmas.
• Mood Whiplash: So much your neck will hurt.
  • "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball"'s ending: Ren, Stimpy, and Bubba are all fighting back tears when it's announced that if Stimpy doesn't have his hairball gland, it's over. Suddenly, Ren and Stimpy gleefully state that it's over, and start dancing while happy jazz music plays. Biggest mood whiplash ever.
  • The opening titles of "Man's Best Friend" are relatively cheerful-looking and accompanied by a happy-sounding Raymond Scott piece ...and then VERY abruptly cut to an loud dramatic sting and a ominous-looking "Starring George Liquor" card.
  • "A Visit To Anthony" careens madly from childlike play to frightening grimness to outrageous laughter.
  • "Dog Show" is a fairly tame episode, until we learn that dogs who fail to pass pre-judging are eaten alive. This is not exactly Played for Laughs.
• Morality Chain: Stimpy is this to Ren, to an extent (but only to an extent). While more often than not Ren acts like an abusive jerk towards Stimpy, it seems like Stimpy's the only person he's ever been remotely nice to. Stimpy's also been able to calm Ren down somewhat (repeat: somewhat) when he's having one of his mental breakdowns, instill some sense of right and wrong in him, and get him to loosen up once in a while. It's implied that if Stimpy were to ever disappear Ren would go completely and irreversibly Ax-Crazy, and be overcome by his loneliness.
  • Except in episodes like "Double Header", when he'd rather put Stimpy on a bus to Ursa Minor than spend another minute with him.
• Ms. Fanservice: Women like this pop up from time to time. One example is Mrs. Pipe, in a "50's house wife" kind of way.
• Naked People Are Funny: The title characters and Old Man Hunger.
• Name and Name
• Nature Is Not Nice: The Spoof Aesop of "Lumber Jerks". After being shown - and injured by - the wildlife in a tree he intends to cut down, Ren comes to this conclusion - and that he's even meaner than nature is.
  Ren: I've learned that nature can be cruel... BUT I CAN BE CRUELER! AHAHAHAHAHA!
• Naturalized Name: Subverted. In "City Hicks", Stimpy changes an immigrant's name from the simple "Chad Jones" to the more complex "Bgayho Bagdasarian". Needless to say, Chad is not pleased.
• Nature Documentary: Parodied in "A Cartoon (Untamed World)", "Lair of the Lummox", and the unnamed short that followed "Hermit Ren" about senior citizens.
• Negative Continuity: Many episodes end with Ren and Stimpy dead or irreversibly maimed, but return alive and well in the next episode.
  • Additionally, each episode featured Ren and Stimpy living in a brand new home or being homeless. This kept things from getting too monotonous.
• Never Say "Die": Averted; the series frequently used the words "die" and "dead". One episode, "Terminal Stimpy", is even centered around the idea of death.
  • This also includes the pilot when Stimpy asks about "the big sleep":
    "He's...DEAD!! DEAD, YOU EEDIOT!! YOU KNOW WHAT DEAD IS?!! JUST LIKE WE'LL BE IF WE DON'T GET OUT OF HERE!!!"
• Newsreel: A Soviet version about advances in space travel appears at the beginning of "Space Dogged".
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • Ren's voice is basically Peter Lorre 's with a vague Mexican accent overlaid. Stimpy's is a slight variation on Larry Fine from The Three Stooges.
    • Word of God states that Ren is essentially the bastard love child of Lorre and Kirk Douglas.
  • Stinky Wizzleteats (the singer of "Happy Happy, Joy Joy") is a parody of Burl Ives.
  • The islander's voice in "Aloha Hoek" is based on Marlon Brando.
• No Ending: "Big Flakes" just abruptly stops. Do Ren and Stimpy ever make it out of the snowed-in cabin? Who knows.
• Noodle Implements: Just try and guess what the various "tools" in Stimpy's laboratory are for. Some of them make the sounds of real-life power tools, but how exactly a beaver can function as a drill is anyone's guess.
• Nose Nuggets: Stimpy has a booger collection that appears in multiple episodes, which he refers to as his "magic nose goblins"^note "I picked them myself!".
• Nothing but Skin and Bones: In an episode, the duo are starving and Ren opens his skin to show there's literally no fat, just bone. Then Stimpy opens his skin to show he's nothing but skin and fat.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The end of "Space Madness".
  • Not to mention "Double Header".
• Nurse with Good Intentions: "Nurse Stimpy".
• Nutritional Nightmare: Many of the fake commercials in the show have this. Sugar Frosted Milk (if you think about it) is literally just melted ice cream. Isn't that a healthy breakfast.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: A few of the music tracks feature this.
• One-Shot Character: The Drill Sergeant Nasty from "In the Army", Dr. Brainchild from "Blazing Entrails", the leprechaun from "A Hard Day's Luck", Mr. Noggin from "Bell Hops", the islander and crab family from "Aloha Hoek", Jerry the Bellybutton Elf, Jiminy Lummox, the head parasites from "A Friend in Your Face", and Bubba from "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball", among many others.
• Open Shirt Taunt: In the episode "Stimpy's Fan Club", Ren is so distraught at disappointing Stimpy that he tears open his fur and hands Stimpy a dagger for him to stab him in the chest.
• Overly Long Gag: Happens frequently on Adult Party Cartoon.
• Pain to the Ass: Happens on occasion. One notable example is when in "Son of Stimpy" Stimpy tries to fart a second time. During the third and final attempt Stimpy's butt cheeks strain, swell up, then bust and deflate like a pair of balloons, complete with wacky sound effects.
  • There's also the episode "The Cat That Laid the Golden Hairball" and the music video for Cat Hairballs, which have the same basic premise. In them, Stimpy is licking and hwarfing up hairballs onto a conveyor belt for Ren, who is stamping them. Eventually Stimpy is left gasping, over worked, and completely licked clean. Unable to do anymore Stimpy passes out on the conveyor belt, is rolled over to Ren and gets violently stamped on the butt. The music video makes this worse by 1. Ending with Stimpy unconscious and face down, 2. Adding a tortured hluarf sound effect as the stamp makes impact, and 3. Focusing in on the aftermath (a big "Grade A" branded into Stimpy's ass.)
• Papa Wolf: Anthony's father.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Ren and Stimpy in "Wiener Barons"; they're dressed as wiener inspectors to bypass the gate guard, but it's obviously them underneath the disguise. Additionally, the guard kicked them out before (and heard their voice, which they didn't distort when in costume), so it's hard to believe he fell for such a thing.
  • Ren's mouse act in "The Boy Who Cried Rat." He pretty much just dresses up like Mickey Mouse.
  • The attempt to pass for dalmatians in "Fire Dogs."
  • The monkey suits in "Monkey See Monkey Don't."
• Parental Bonus:
  • The newsreel montage in "Ren's Bitter Half" is actually a parody of the 1943 film "Victory Through Air Power".
  • No wonder Frank Zappa voicing the Pope was such a big deal.
• Parody Commercial: Log, Gritty Kitty Litter, Powdered Toast, Sugar-Frosted Milk, Dog Water, etc.
• Parody Episode: "Egg Yolkeo", which parodies Disney's version of Pinocchio specifically.
• Parody Name: In "The Last Temptation", Ren throws out all his worldly possessions, including celebrity toupees of William Shallert and Bazoo the Clone.
• The Pearly Gates: At the end of "Terminal Stimpy", Ren and Stimpy ascend to Heaven and are greeted by the Announcer Salesman at the gates.
• Performance Anxiety: Ren experiences this in "Dog Tags" when he is forced to clean himself in public to prove that he is a dog. After weakly licking his leg:
  Ren: I can't go through with it! I'm not a dog! I'm a mosquito...
• Pilot: "Big House Blues", one of the most gorgeously-animated made-for-TV cartoons of all time.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Parodied in "I Was a Teenage Stimpy", when Ren watches an old home movie of himself playing football with a baby Stimpy.
• Plot Allergy: Ren's allergic to Stimpy's shedded fur in "Hair of the Cat", though it takes him the whole episode to realize it. The solution? Have Stimpy live in a sealed jar.
• Polka-Dot Paint: To get jobs in the fire department, Ren and Stimpy use 'dalmatian paint' - one quick swipe each with a brush and they're white with black spots - Stimpy's tongue included.
• "Pop!" Goes the Human: A downplayed example in Son of Stimpy. After trying three times to re-create Stinky, Stimpy's butt cheeks swell up and burst on the third try, going all limp and deflated like a pair of balloons.
• Police Brutality: In "Pen Pals", Ren and Stimpy try to get into prison by robbing a bank. When they surrender themselves to the police, the cops simply blast them with a tank.
• Porn Stash: In "I Was a Teenage Stimpy", Ren hides numerous Husk magazines in his dresser. He realizes that it was Stimpy who stole the magazines when a single hair of his stuck to a piece of scotch tape.
  Ren: Someone has breached my security system...
• Potty Emergency: Ren, at the start of "Pixie King". Unfortunately for him, Stimpy is occupying the bathroom and won't be able to, erm, do his business, until Ren reads him a story.
• Pro Wrestling Episode: "Mad Dog Hoek".
• Pseudo-Santa: The Great Shaven Yak. He comes on "Yak Shaving Day" to deliver presents (shaving scum, mostly) to people who hang dirty diapers from the walls, fill their uncle's boots with coleslaw, and leave a pot of shaving cream next to the bathroom sink.
• "Psycho" Strings: Appropriately enough, during a Psycho parody in "Haunted House". The track is called "Scared Stiff" by John Fox.

Tropes R-Z

• Rapid-Fire Nail Biting: In an episode, Stimpy begins biting his nails excitingly when watching a commercial for a contest involving Muddy Mud Skipper. He keeps putting his hands further into his mouth until he's chewing on his arms.
• Recycled In Space: SPAAAAACE MADNEEESSSSSSSS...
• The Remake: "A Yard Too Far" is essentially a remake of the Yogi Bear short "Pie-Pirates". In fact, John K. had the crew watch and analyze "Pie-Pirates" before working on "Yard", as he wanted them to see a cartoon with basic but firmly-drawn character motivations and conflicts.
• Restraining Bolt: The Happy Helmet.
• Ret-Gone: What happens when you press the History Eraser Button.^note ...whatever that is.
• Retraux: The '50-'60s art style.
• Riding into the Sunset: "I Was A Teenage Stimpy'' ends with Stimpy literally flying into the sun (and sizzling up as a result).
• Rule of Three: In "Farm Hands" when Ren's going nuts:
  Ren: Do you hear me? ALONE! ALONE! ALOOOOONE!!!
• Scare Chord: The show owed most of its horrific atmosphere to this trope. This saw theme is a good example. Practically every episode has some of this, particularly whenever Ren went Ax-Crazy, which was often.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The History Eraser Button from "Space Madness."
  • In "Man's Best Friend", George Liquor tells the duo about discipline and explains at length why they they shouldn't sit on the couch. Then he tells them to go ahead and jump on the couch. Ren refuses to follow through, but Stimpy does. A few moments of false security later, Stimpy is subjected to George's discipline.
  • The board game Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence from "Sven Hoek." In something of a subversion, it's Ren, not Stimpy or Ren's Stimpy-like cousin Sven, who ends up urinating on the fence, despite the obvious, cartoony electrical charges emanating from it. When the resulting electrocution sends them all straight to Hell, the Devil immediately knows why they're there: "So, you whizzed on the electric fence, didn't ya?"
    • Can't accuse Ren of stupidity here - all he wanted to achieve was do something as horrible to Stimpy and Sven as they did to his beloved possessions. He probably didn't think much about it, considering he was really angry.
  • There's also the lever from "Double Header"^note "RED LIGHT!!!" "BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!".
• Scotireland: "A Hard Day's Luck" mixes up Scottish and Irish clichés.
• Scout-Out: In "Eat My Cookies", the Girl Scouts are re-named the Barrette Beret Girls.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: One of the show's main running gags, to such an extent that an episode without at least one good high-pitched scream feels incomplete.
  • Stimpy can do a very good one in the German dub.
• Secret Test of Character: Reversed in "Lumberjerks": Ren and Stimpy are supposed to chop down every tree in the forest, as ordered by their boss Pierre. But a disgruntled tree lobster grabs Ren and shows him what happens when he does so (such as birds losing their home). The crab fully expects Ren to have a change of heart, but all it does is make Ren want to chop down more trees. Just as the crab looks like it's about to kill Ren, the crab takes its mask off, revealing Pierre underneath, who said he passed the test.
• Serious Business: Dog shows in this universe. Dogs that don't pass pre-judging don't just miss the finals, but are literally fed to bigger, larger dogs.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The original proposed ending to "Space Madness", nixed by Nickelodeon editors^note Or nixed by John K. depending on who's telling the story., would have featured Ren and Stimpy going back in time and undoing the damage caused by Stimpy pushing the History-Eraser Button.
• Sexophone: Such a musical motif is heard in "Pixie King" when Stimpy poses in his pixie outfit.
• Sci-Fi Flyby: Parodied in the first "Commander Hoek and Cadet Stimpy" episode, "Space Madness". The opening credits play over a beautiful shot of outer space. Then the spaceship appears... and it's a cheap wind-up toy.
• Shave and a Haircut: This happens a few times in the song "Happy Happy Joy Joy", albeit without the "two bits" part.
• Shout-Out:
  • The first episode has Stimpy making several to the catchphrases of several beloved Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons, as well as Looney Tunes.
  • In the first three "Commander Hoek" segments, the TV signal title card (which has a native american on it) is a nod to the series The Outer Limits (1963).
  • In "The Scotsman In Space", Stimpy makes the scotsman haggis, which is made "From the Shamus Culhane recipe", a nod to the renowned Disney animator Shamus Culhane.
  • In "Ren's Pecs", Ren goes to have pectoral enlargement surgery. In the background you can hear over the hospital's loudspeaker, "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard..."
  • The scene of one of the yaks going insane in the middle of the desert in "Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen" is a pretty direct lift of a similar scene in the Bob Clampett Porky Pig cartoon Porky in Egypt, except with a yak instead of a camel. John K. even confirmed it.
  • "Happy Happy Joy Joy" is a salute to Burl Ives as it contains lines from his various songs and film roles quoted therein.
    • Burl Ives himself was reportedly asked to sing the song, but his schedule prevented him from collaborating. When John K. played the song for him later, he was disappointed that he'd missed his chance to be Stinky Whizzleteats.
  • Early in "Monkey See, Monkey Don't", Ren tells Stimpy that he's "seen every Tarzan movie ever made."
  • "Marooned" has Ren directly reference the Prime Directive from Star Trek, and the alien creature they encounter later on (whose fake appearance is that of something they desire) is a homage to the creature from the first Star Trek episode "The Man Trap".
  • The beginning of "Sammy and Me" is an obvious homage to The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, with Stimpy eagerly waiting at the mailbox for a special package to arrive, and then running at a lightning pace down the road to a secret spot to open it.
  • In "Superstitious Stimpy", one of the phrases Stimpy chants while praying to the beef carcass is Ub Iwerks.
  • It's rather subtle but in the scene from "Powdered Toast Man" wherein our hero saves the Pope, note that Muddy Mudskipper is wearing a top hat. ^note It's a nod to the cover of Trout Mask Replica, which Frank Zappa, the Pope's VA, produced.
  • One of the nonsense phrases Stimpy says in "Blazing Entrails" is "Want Some Sea Food Mama", which was the name of a song by the Andrews Sisters.
  • In "Lumber Jerks", a character resembling Fearless Leader appears from beneath the tree stump that Fifi pulls out of the ground.
  • In "City Hicks", Stimpy changes an immigrant's name to Bgayho Bagdasarian.
• Show Within a Show: Muddy Mudskipper and The Scotsman are a couple examples.
• Shrunken Organ: Stimpy's bean-sized brain^note Well, at least it's not "pea"-sized... accidentally falls off when he leans down. Ren's cousin Sven marvels at how big it is, and then shows Stimpy his own, pinhead-sized brain.
• Sick Episode: "Nurse Stimpy".
• Silence of Sadness:
  • In the episode "I Love Chicken", Stimpy gets too depressed to talk to Ren after the latter has eaten his beloved chicken wife until Ren angrily tells him to stop with his "bereaved chicken widow crap".
  • In "Son of Stimpy", Stimpy goes into a Heroic BSoD when he can't find his son (read: sentient fart). When Ren tries to cheer him up, Stimpy doesn't say much else besides "I don't care".
• Silly Prayer: The episode "Robin Hoek" opens with Ren and Stimpy saying their prayers before going to bed.
  Stimpy: And please bless Grandma and Grandpa...
  Ren: And please give me a million dollars, and a fridge with a padlock, and... Oh yeah, huge pectoral muscles...
• Singing Mountie: Brutally spoofed in "The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen". Ren and Stimpy are members of the aforementioned outfit and are on a suicide mission somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. They have been ravaged by the elements and the force of nature, and Ren can't take it anymore. Stimpy attempts to animate him by having them sing "the Royal Anthem of the Kilted Yaksmen". On the repeat, their yak mounts and the creatures of the wilderness around them join in. There is a strong dissonance between the rousing tone of the singing and the cynical lyrics, sung to the tune of "My Country 'Tis of Thee":

"Our country reeks of trees!

Our yaks are really large.

And they smell like rotting beef carcasses.

And we have to clean up after them

And our saddle sores are the best

We proudly wear womens' clothing

And searing sand blows up our skirts

And the buzzards, they soar overhead

And poisonous snakes will devour us whole

Our bones will bleach in the sun

And we will probably go to "BURP!" [hell]

And that is our great reward

For being the-uh roy-oy-al Canadian Kilted Yaksmen"

• Skinny Dipping: Ren and Stimpy take off their "skin" to go skinny dipping in "The Great Outdoors".
• The Sleepless: Ren in "Insomniac Ren".
• Sleepless Alarm Clock: In the episode "In the Army", Ren has just gotten back to the barracks after a hard day of training and is settling in for a good night's sleep... when he's suddenly jolted awake by the sound of Reveille. He has a psychotic breakdown and hacks his bed to pieces with an axe.
• Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness
• Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Ren and Stimpy fluctuate on this from episode to episode. Sometimes they’re both full on Funny Animals capable of holding down human jobs and owning their own house, while other times they’re depicted as Civilized Animals that are adopted by humans and do distinctively animal things like getting sent to a pound or entering in dog shows. However, they are both consistently shown with different Furry Reminders—for example, Ren frequently whimpers like a puppy when stressed or in pain while Stimpy is constantly shown using a litter box. Ren also occasionally scolds Stimpy for doing “human things” like brushing his teeth.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Played with in both the Spumco and Games eras of the the original show. It's actually vague as to what end it falls towards. On the one hand, you have the cynical Ren, and on the other you have the idealistic Stimpy, although being an "eediot", he likely doesn't know how to be anything else^note It's highly implied that he may not even know what the words "idealistic" or "cynical" even mean.... In any case, there are a number of cynical moments^note yes, even Stimpy's Despair Event Horizon when he can't his..."son"., but it also has plenty of lighthearted moments to balance it out.
• Slow Motion: We get a slow-mo scene of the Ren-lizard seen in "Untamed World" eating a fly.
• Small Reference Pools: Averted, as many of the classical music tracks used in the show aren't the famous ones heard everywhere. Who but classical buffs know about Frederic Chopin's Ballade No.4, or Josef Suk's "Asrael" symphony, or Claude Debussy's "Canope", or Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Francesca da Rimini"?
• Smart Jerk and Nice Moron: Ren is intelligent but selfish, violent-tempered and outright psychotic. Stimpy is dim-witted but good-natured and perpetually cheerful. In many episodes (particularly in later seasons), Stimpy borders as a slave for Ren and is verbally and physically abused on a regular basis. He rarely takes any of it to heart and thoroughly enjoys doting over Ren.
• Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter: In "Superstitious Stimpy", Ren, fed up with Stimpy praying to a beef carcass he's supposed to be cooking, mocks "juju" (which Stimpy believes in).
  Ren: I wave my shiny red keister in the face of you, and you "stuperstitions"!
  Stimpy: No, Ren! It's bad juju to blaspheme!
  Ren: Juju, huh? Oooh, I'm so scared. The big bad juju's about to get me. COME ON, JUJU, I'M CALLING YOU OUT! (struck by lightning)
• Snipe Hunt: Seen in "Eat My Cookies". Turns out a snipe actually exists, and devours Ren.
• Snowed-In: The premise of "Big Flakes".
• Something Person: Powdered Toast Man.
• Something We Forgot: In "Blazing Entrails", Ren hooks up with an amoeba and has kids. At one point he's in front of a fireplace with his kids, who want to know how he and mommy met. He starts to reminisce about how he was on a mission for Stimpy- (snaps out of it) "STIIIIIMPPPYYY!" (runs off to resume the mission)
• Sound-Effect Bleep: The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen's Anthem, which contains the verse "And we will probably go to hell" had the word "hell" masked out, quite fittingly, with a fart...
• Soundtrack Dissonance: "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" eventually devolves into this.
• Space Madness: Trope Namer; the trope takes its name from an episode title.
• Spin-Off: The Goddamn George Liquor Program, a webtoon which Nickelodeon had nothing to do with, but still uses a minor character from the series that John K. got the rights back to. Weekend Pussy Hunt, by proxy, is also this.
• Spiritual Successor: Countless examples, but Cow and Chicken, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, 2 Stupid Dogs, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and SpongeBob SquarePants which employed ex-Ren and Stimpy staffers. Some still do.
• Standard '50s Father: Mr. Pipe.
• Stealth Pun:
  • In "Prehistoric Stimpy", Wilbur Cobb starts talking about the "Treeassic Period". At first glance, it merely looks like a play on "Triassic", but the main pun comes from why that era got its name: Giant Stimpy dinosaurs who would sit on trees, and their dangling asses would keep cavemen warm.
  • Ren's Peter Lorre voice is almost certainly one. In Alfred Hitchcock's The Secret Agent, Lorre played a character known as "the Hairless Mexican" even though he was neither. As a chihuahua, Ren is both.
• Sting: Numerous musical stings were used in the show. Perhaps the most famous one is "Shock Horror (a)" by Dick Walter: Dun dun DUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNN!!!!
• Stock Footage:
  • "Farm Hands" reuses some animation from "Out West"; specifically, the scene where Abner and Ewalt get an idea and laugh goofily.
  • "Marooned" and "The Littlest Giant" also use truncated versions of the openings of "Space Madness" and "Robin Hoek", respectively.
  • Similarly, the "What'll We Do 'Til Then?" bumpers are mostly reused footage after the first instance.
• Storefront Television Display: In "Hard Times for Haggis", Haggis Mc Haggis sees a crowd of people laughing at a bunch of TVs in a window, and he thinks they're watching his show. He then learns, to his utter fury, that they're actually watching Ren & Stimpy.
• Straight Gay: The duo's sexuality remained ambiguous to fit in with the show's humour, until John K. effectively outed the duo as a gay couple in a January 28, 1997 interview with the ''San Francisco Examiner''.
• Sudden Anatomy: In "Superstitious Stimpy", Ren suddenly has a large birthmark on his face. Stimpy freaks out when he sees this, because it's a sign that he's cursed.
• Suddenly Shouting: In "Hard Times for Haggis", Ren and Stimpy's agent does this a couple times:
  Salesman: Uh, excuse me, Mr. Haggis, but wouldn't you be more comfortable, say.... OUT IN THE STREEEEEEET!!!
  • In "The Big Shot":
    Ren: I'll watch some TV. I'll help me to RELAX!
• Superhero: Powdered Toast Man.
  • Can also be considered to be a Super Zero.
• Super-Sargasso Sea: In "Black Hole", Commander Hoek and Cadet Stimpy go through a black hole and end up in a strange dimension, where they find a pile of all of Earth's missing left socks.
• Superstition Episode: "Superstitious Stimpy".
• Super Window Jump: Stimpy resorts to this in "Bell Hops" when he's protecting Mr. Noggin from Ren's camera.
• Surreal Humor, ocassionally verges on Surreal Horror.
• Take Our Word for It: Occasionally done when Ren is savagely beat up off-screen, such as in "Pixie King", though the end results are shown.
• Take That!:
  • The fifth season episode "Reverend Jack Cheese" has been theorized by some as being a subtle analogy/in-joke about original R&S creator John Kricfalusi and what it was like to work under him.
    • Confirmed by Bob Camp and John K., who also notes that Jack Cheese is named for an unrelated cartoon character he created in 1979.
  • The Games Animation splash, depicting Stimpy in a milkman's uniform, is a response taking ownership of John K.'s comment that handing the animation over to them would be like handing "an unedited show to the milkman and have him finish it for ya."
  • Stimpy's Cartoon Show was a massive confession of how much of a Bad Boss John K was, as opposed to the more favorable version that would've been made, apparently, had John K not been given the sack.
• Take That, Audience!: In the first episode, Ren berates Stimpy for being "a full-grown cat, still watching cartoons", and tells him that "cartoons will ruin your mind".^note Although, it's more likely a deliberate mocking of the idea, and the parents and Moral Guardians who (even now) still like to think that that really is what watching TV (let alone cartoons) actually does.
• Talking Animal: Ren, Stimpy, many of the other regulars.
• The Teaser: "Who's Stupid Now?" features a brief sequence before the title card where fat Ren disrobes in front of the audience, which is seen in context later in the episode.
• Tempting Fate: Part way through the video for Cat Hairballs, Stimpy (who is hwarfing up hairballs for Ren to stamp and send down a conveyor belt) reassures "Don't you fret/I won't run out/I've lots more hair to spare." This is not long before the video focuses on Stimpy running out of body parts to lick and starts desperately slurping and hwarfing, which has begun to take a physical tole on Stimpy. By the end, Stimpy is half dead and licked clean. And after a final failed attempt at hwarfing, passes out on the conveyor belt and gets violently stamped on the ass with a painful hularf sound effect, which leaves a butt brand across Stimpy's butt cheeks.
• Terrible Interviewees Montage: Happens in "Stupid Sidekick Union", when Ren tries to find a replacement for Stimpy.
  Polly: I'm Polly the Polyp, and I'm benign!
  Ren: Yeah, yeah, great, kid. Next!
  Barney Rubble Expy: Heh heh heh, heh heh heh...
  Ren: Been done. Next!
  Hillbilly: But I really want to di-rect.
  Ren: Next!
• Thick-Line Animation: The show uses it from time to time, depending on its animation studio. The episode "Egg Yolkeo/It's a Dog's Life" for example, along with the pilot episode named "Big House Blues".
• This Is Reality: In "Stimpy's Big Day", Ren tries to convince Stimpy that cartoons aren't real, "not flesh and blood like we".
• Those Two Guys: Guess.
• Three-Month-Old Newborn: Averted whenever possible. Any shots of newborn babies show them with translucent red skin, showing off veins and eyeballs for maximum ickiness.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: Out of all the show's characters whose faces (or bodies) would turn a different color, Ren seems to be the one who did that the most, most notably when infuriated. Episodes in the case of this occurring include:
  • "Svën Hoek": Ren, who's on his way out the door to work, gets red-faced as he turns around and is irritated by Stimpy and Sven's antics.
  • "The Great Outdoors": Ren is angered and turns red when he can't find the source of what's causing him to itch while he's trying to get a night's rest and he searches for it on various parts of his body. He then finds a mosquito, which with sadistic and malevolent glee, he swats and kills with his hand.
  • An exception of not turning red while in a rage is "To Salve or Not to Salve", with Ren instead turning some shade of blue and what looks like he's on the brink of decomposing, fighting to repress his rage after Hey! It's That Guy (a perpetually persistent salesman) shows up once more (this time from a toilet tank) to attempt selling the salve to Ren while Ren's almost done using the toilet.
  • "Stimpy's Cartoon Show": Ren becomes red-faced while ticked off at Stimpy's answer to his question.
  • "Jiminy Lummox": Ren turns a less intense shade of red when he finds what Stimpy is doing with his dentures after looking for them.
  • "I Love Chicken": Ren is steamed and becomes very red-faced when Stimpy still won't let him have the chicken for dinner (due to Stimpy having fallen for it).
  • In "Hermit Ren", Ren turns a deep shade of red when he notices his razor is missing and angrily asks Stimpy (who uses it as a hammer) where it is.
  • "The House of Next Tuesday": Ren turns red wholly from the heat and burn he receives, after viewing himself on screen as a lobster (which a chef drops in hot water) through a smell-o-vision helmet. As if he were the lobster (whose head Ren sees turn into his minus the long ears) and physically being dropped into the pot, as part of a cooking show. Then Ren himself has actually and physically been turned into a lobster.
  • "Pixie King": Ren turns deep red irately, when he struggles to prevent wetting himself as Stimpy delays his turn from using an outhouse.
  • "Ren Needs Help": Ren madly (both in terms of anger and mania) turns a slight shade of red after Stimpy drives him bonkers one too many times and finds Stimpy broke part of the former's favorite chair while golfing.
  • "Big Flakes": Ren turns intensely red after learning from Stimpy that the latter threw a moose's head (which was their dinner) into a lit fireplace and Ren becomes so ticked that he has Stimpy play charades with him, and after guessing correctly what Ren's about to do in response, he slugs Stimpy on the nose.
  • "In the Army": The duo are told by the sergeant to remove their gas masks. When Stimpy does, he turns green frontally from breathing in the poison gas, which causes him to cry hysterically and since he can't bear it, he flees outside for some clean air (this doesn't faze Ren due to using the cheating tactic of holding his breath).
  • "Dog Show": Mr. Horse's face turns red deeply, boiling over a poodle's imploration of not having to be subjected to getting inside a bulldog's mouth, as punishment for failing to pass the judgment.
  • In the banned episode "Man's Best Friend", which later and finally shows up as an Adult Party Cartoon episode, while repeatedly telling Stimpy to get on the couch as part of a disciplinary test and Stimpy does what he says, George grabs him and turns a deep red in the face, then a brighter shade of red, complete with eyes bulging and neck stretching with veins popping in response. Just as Stimpy thinks he's really in trouble for his disobedience, it turns out George is actually content ironically and he rewards him with a cigar. George also turns the same shades of color bodily, when he gets out of a padded suit that he wore while Ren flogged him with a boat oar.
  • "A Visit to Anthony": The episode's titular boy turns pale and starts to hyperventilate again getting knocked down by Victor.
  • "Who's Stupid Now": Ren and Stimpy's director becomes steamed and intensely red-faced with incense, snorting heavily and nostrils flaring when Ren (who has been forced to switch roles with Stimpy as the fat, dimwitted sidekick), fails to remember his exact lines.
  • "A Dog's Life": Stimpy turns blue frontally from asphyxiation while trying to eat a rock giving to him for his meal.
  • "The Last Temptation of Ren": Ren becomes blue-faced after choking on a cluster of oatmeal and passing away.
• Thumbtack on the Chair: Ren does this to Stimpy in "Jiminy Lummox".
• Title Confusion: The show is called The Ren & Stimpy Show, not just Ren and Stimpy.
• Title Drop: Lampshaded in "Marooned": Ren remarks that he and Stimpy are marooned.
  Stimpy: Just like the title of this cartoon!
• Title Montage: Every clip from the opening comes from "Big House Blues", which is rather unusual. Usually a montage opening uses multiple episodes' worth of clips.
• Toilet Humor: Since it's a show made by John Kricfalusi, it's to be expected.
• To the Pain: The end of "Svën Höek", Ren is so angry he's looped back into calm, and bluntly describes the various tortures he's going to inflict on Stimpy and Svën. It includes tearing out lips, gouging out eyes, ripping out arms from their sockets, and hitting them so they fall and he can laugh.
• Toothy Bird: The seagull in "Untamed World".
• The Tooth Hurts: "Ren's Toothache", natch.
• Tranquil Fury: Ren gets disturbingly calm while angry with Stimpy and Sven in "Sven Hoek", as he tells them about the increasingly creepy ways he's going to torture them.
• Tranquillizer Dart: Subverted in a cartoon parodying nature shows; Ren is accidentally shot with a tranq dart by Stimpy, and it takes a minute for him to go down. In the meantime, his voice slows down.
• Travel Montage: Seen in "Wiener Barons" when Ren and Stimpy head for Canada.
• Travelogue Show: Parodied in "Travelogue".
• Trivial Tragedy: The episode "Son of Stimpy" is a parody of shock value pathos, making a melodramatic plot that revolved largely around the fact Stimpy couldn't fart a second time.
• Tsundere: Ren.
• Two Decades Behind: Modern technologies and trends are virtually nonexistent in the series, except for in a few of the fake commercials (such as the video game briefly seen in the first Log commercial). In most cases, telephones are shown to all be wired and with rotary dials, television sets have fairly small screens and rabbit-ear antennas, people listen to music on record players, and many of the cars seen are fashioned off much older models. Though generally this is done for Rule of Funny. It got even more prominent during the later Games episodes, to the point where telephones are the old black candlestick variety and record players are old hand-cranked gramophones.
• Two Shorts: Though a few episodes also took up the full 22 minutes, such as "Stimpy's First Fart" and "Stimpy's Fan Club".
• Ugly Slavic Women: In "A Visit to Anthony", Ren and Stimpy leave their house (apparently located in Hollywood, Yugoslavia, according to the caption) and are kissed goodbye by their very masculine-looking wives, wearing a babushka and visible beard stubble.
• Unconventional Food Usage: In "Egg Yolkeo", Ren (as Renwaldo) makes a little person out of eggs, who becomes the titular Egg Yolkeo.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Ren in "Nurse Stimpy". Stimpy goes through hell to cure Ren of his illness, and when Stimpy becomes ill in the process, Ren's only thought is exacting revenge on Stimpy.
• Underside Ride: On their way to Canada, the two hitch a ride on a train, at first we see two figures in a train cart that would be Ren and Stimpy, but it was actually two random guys shaped like them, and the real two are under the cart with their heads bumping on the tracks.
• Underwater Fart Gag: In "Space Madness", Ren farts in the bath.
• Universal-Adaptor Cast: This is especially true for the space-themed shorts: "Space Madness", "Marooned", "Black Hole" and "The Scotsman in Space".
• Unmoving Plaid: The man who helps Ren and Stimpy move into Haggis's former mansion in "Hard Times for Haggis" has a shirt that features this.
• Unusual Euphemism: "DO YOU HAVE TO KEEP TAPPING LIKE THAT, YOU BLOATED SACK OF PROTOPLASM?!?!"
• Uvula Escape Route: In "The Boy Who Cried Rat", Ren is inside Stimpy's mouth. When a woman gives Stimpy some milk so that he can swallow Ren, Ren clings to Stimpy's uvula so he won't be washed down.
• Vague Age: Ren and Stimpy. In fact, one episode plays with this, by revealing that Ren is retirement age in dog years.
• Very Special Episode:
  • "My Shiny Friend"^note (Games Animation) is perhaps the closest the show comes to having one. It vaguely addresses addiction, presumably without trying to be too preachy (i.e., as far as the writers are concerned; especially about one certain subject in particular). While the (not entirely) ridiculous premise of Stimpy being "addicted" to TV^note As a result of Flanderization. may seem like the norm for this show, this episode is nonetheless being completely serious in addressing this problem, while at the same time, still being a comedy.^note Stimpy appears to be praying to be cured...only to pray for "his TV". Later, he appears to be "cured" of his addiction to TV...but is now addicted to gambling instead.
  • On the other hand, "The Littlest Giant"^note Which was made during the John K. / Spumco era. comes somewhat closer, as it essentially addresses bullying, and what kind of effect(s) it can have on people (let alone poor Stimpy).
  • On the other, other hand, as far as John K. himself is concerned, "Son of Stimpy" may as well be a meta example, as it addresses what he feels are cheap film tricks used to create what he sees as fake "pathos".
  • Another potential candidate is "Ren's Pecs"^note Also made during the Games era., which deals with body issues, and what can happen after getting cosmetic / plastic surgery. Case in point, in a reverse of "Stimpy's Big Day" / "The Big Shot", Ren becomes famous, but not only does he become a total jerk, there is no reunion, and Ren doesn't even recognize Stimpy when he (Stimpy) is working as a waiter.
• Vomit Discretion Shot:
  • Ren pukes in "Travelogue" when he sees a hair in his soup, but the vomit itself is never visible.
  • "Magical Golden Singing Cheeses" contains a partial subversion; Ren turns away from the camera to vomit, but you can still see some come out of his mouth.
  • In "Monkey See Monkey Don't", Filthy the monkey loudly vomits into Ren's hand, but off-camera.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: The camera never cuts away when Stimpy spews up hairballs.
• Wacky Sound Effect: Like many of the cartoons which inspired it, this is often employed. It ranges from classics such as the jalopy horn when Ren strangles Stimpy in "Stimpy's Invention" to more inventive ones like a jet turbine starting up as George Liquor grows angrier in "Man's Best Friend".
• Walkie-Talkie Gag, Over: In the prologue to the episode "Space Madness".
  Ren: Come in, Cadet Stimpy. Do you read me?
  Stimpy: Cadet Stimpy here. We read you. Roger.
  [a man appears next to them]
  Man: Roger here.
• Weeding Out Imperfections: In "The Last Temptation", when Ren temporarily dies and goes to "The Big Guy"'s house, he meets Wilbur Cobb, whom he assumes is the so-called "Big Man". Wilbur shows Ren weeds and a bug that represent his various vices, which are a spiky flower that represents his transgression (which he rips out of the ground), crab grass that represents his evil ways (that he poisons), and his greedy cigar beetle (which he kicks away).
• Welcome to the Big City: Ren and Stimpy in "City Hicks" are immediately beat up by thugs and have their sheep stripped upon entering the city. They also are informed they can't just shovel dirt right off the bat, as it's a union town and they have to start at the bottom first.
• White Gloves: Worn by Stimpy. Don't ask why he has fingernails on them.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "A Yard Too Far" is loosely based on the Yogi Bear cartoon "Pie Pirates". The crew even studied the short's structure before writing "Yard".
• Wild Take: This show helped bring them back into fashion.
• With Friends Like These...: The relationship between the protagonists bounces between this and Vitriolic Best Buds. One show description even describes them as "somehow [managing] to stay friends".
• Word Salad Lyrics:
  • The Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem.
    Our country reeks of trees,
    Our yaks are really large...^note And they smell like rotting beef carcasses!...
  • Also, the even more deranged psychedelic rock spoof "Crawl Into My World".
  • "Happy Happy, Joy Joy". Catchy, yes. Sane, absolutely not.
    If'n you ain't the grandaddy of all liars! The little critters in nature... They don't know that they're ugly. That's very funny: A fly marrying a bumblebee. I told you I'd shoot, but you didn't believe me! WHY DIDN'T YOU BELIEVE ME?! Happy happy joy joy...
• Work Off the Debt: "The Boy Who Cried Rat" ends with Ren and Stimpy doing chores for Mr. and Mrs. Pipe to earn back the five bucks Stimpy ate:
  Mrs. Pipe: And after you're done with those dishes, you can vacuum the rug, paint the lawn, mow the hedge, shave the chickens...
• Working on the Chain Gang: Ren and Stimpy's job as pixies in "Pixie King" is more or less this, especially since they're whipped by policemen if they slack off for even a second.
  Stimpy: Kissin' dew drops here, boss!
• World of Ham: It would be easier to list characters in this show who didn't overreact to everything or speak in screams.
• Worst News Judgment Ever: "Ren Hoek takes bubbly sponge bath"?!
  • Also shows up in "Powdered Toast Man vs. Waffle Woman": the top headline reads "Powdered Toast Man Lets Down Little Johnny!", while a smaller headline at the bottom of the page reads "World at War - Planet Doomed."
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: A variant in "City Hicks": The duo initially run a farm that grows dust that they turn into food. After being devoid of rain for so long, there's a storm in the middle of the night that washes the dust away and makes the field fertile, but they consider the resulting fruits and vegetables growing in it to be worthless.
• Written Sound Effect
• You Are Fat: The old "insulting their weight" insult is used in the crude Ben and Stumpy puppet show performed in "Hard Times for Haggis", with Ren's knock-off doing it in response to Stimpy's knock-off hitting him with a hairball.
  Ben: AARGH! You are fat!
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: The beatnik food items from "Eggyolkeo".
• You Mean "Xmas": Yak Shaving Day.
  • "Yaksmas" from the Crock o' Christmas album and the episode "A Scooter for Yaksmas" is also an example.
• Your Favorite: Ren loves hog jowls, as seen in "A Yard Too Far".
• You Fool!: Usually, it's a variant of this insult that Ren hurls at Stimpy-i.e "You EEEDIOT!!!" but he will play/say this straight too on occasion.
• Zany Scheme: "The Boy Who Cried Rat", which involved Ren posing as a mouse and Stimpy pretending to eat Ren so they could get $5 for rodent killing. Also "Big Baby Scam", which has Ren and Stimpy posing as babies so they could be pampered and not have to work for food or shelter.

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