"I Like Monkeys" is a Black Comedy short story originating from e-mails and blogs that started at around 1994. It is about a man who decides to buy 200 monkeys for an extremely cheap price. At first it seems like a good deal, but eventually, the consequences of his greed are evident when the monkeys die and he has to get rid of them.
The story has had some spread over the years, with one notable example of such including the text being hidden in the code of games like Hot Wheels: Velocity X and The Hobbit (2003).
It can be read here
and it's recommended to do so before reading the trope list as it's rather short.
This story provides examples of:
- Arc Words: "I like monkeys", which shows up three or four times.
- Black Comedy: The story has a gross yet bizzare and ridiculous plot. Some guy buys 200 genital-punching monkeys at an extremely cheap price. After all the monkeys suddenly die, the rest of the story are the humorous ways he tries to dispose of the 200 monkey carcasses that lie about house.
- Book Ends: The story starts and ends with the words "I like monkeys".
- Dead Guy on Display: The man is forced to do this for a while with most of his dead monkeys, pretending that they're just decorative stuffed toys. Unfortunately for him, decomposition soon puts a stop to it.
- Disposing of a Body: The man tries to get rid of the dead monkeys' bodies by flushing them down the toilet, putting them in a freezer, burning them, and putting them out for garbage. None of the methods work.
- Groin Attack: The monkeys punched their own genitals, which caused the man to laugh. Then they started punching his, and he stopped laughing. It seems like he learned from that, as he decided to punch his friends' genitals when they weren't satisfied when he gave the dead monkeys to them as gifts.
- Kill It with Fire: The man tries disposing of his dead monkeys by setting them alight, but makes the slight error of burning them on his own bed. He's ultimately just left with 197 dead, charred monkeys in a pile.
- Percussive Therapy: The man decides to severely beat up one of his dead monkeys when he got agitated at his inability to dispose of his monkeys or to use the bathroom. He felt a bit better thanks to it.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: Or rather, protagonist. The man refers to Sigmund, a monkey who he lets drive his big car on the way back to his house, with an ableist slur.
- Potty Emergency: The man is left badly needing to pee halfway through the story, but cannot due to the dead monkey he stuffed down the toilet earlier and being too embarrassed to phone a plumber.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: On several counts. The monkeys don't adapt well to their new environment after the man purchases them — screeching and hurling themselves off the furniture and slamming into the walls repeatedly, ultimately dropping dead two hours later — and none of the man's methods to get rid of the corpses work. They don't flush down the toilet, freeze or burn particularly well, and the local authorities also don't accept them when he tries to put them in the garbage.
- Too Dumb to Live: The man falls for an extremely suspicious deal (who would think that 200 monkeys for 5 cents each would be anything but a rip-off?), got a monkey stuck in the toilet trying to flush it away, had to eat all the food in the freezer to place some monkeys in (potentially risking overeating or other diseases) and tries burning them, not thinking that his bed would be flammable.
- Ungrateful Bastard: Played for laughs. The man sees his friends as ingrates for not really being happy with being given dead monkeys as gifts, so he decides to punch them in the genitals.
- You Get What You Pay For: The man bought 200 monkeys for five cents a piece, even though they would typically cost a couple thousand dollars apiece in both the zoological and exotic pet trades. This works about as well as you'd expect, since they all quickly drop dead.
