"Balls" Gag

"No one can resist my Schweddy Balls."

— Pete Schweddy, Saturday Night Live

The word "ball" has many definitions, including:

• A spherical object for amusement or athletics
• The part of the foot just behind the toes
• A formal function that often involves dance in a titular ballroom.
• An antiquated expression of fun (i.e. "having a ball")
• Having guts (i.e. "having balls", "brass balls"), based on the below meaning.
• A statement that something is nonsense (again, based on the meaning below).
• To do something with great abandon or to put all your effort into it (i.e. "going balls out")

But of course, there's also...

• A slang term for a specific portion of the male anatomy in the groin region.

As such, the word "balls", along with other slang terms for the testicles (such as "nuts", "family jewels", etc.), can be used for innuendo — often resulting in a case of That Came Out Wrong if the balls being referenced are covered by any of the other definitions above. Especially if the size of said balls are in play too.

Not to be confused with actual ball gags, or the notion of said balls being comprised of hard metals.

See also Groin Attack.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The memetic line from the Slap Chop ad? "You're gonna love my nuts." The Spanish version of the ad has similar wordplay involving the word "huevos" ("eggs", a Spanish slang term for the testes).

Anime and Manga

• In Yaiba, there's an arc dedicated to a quest for the "Legendary Orbs" (And before you ask, they're not orange). The heroes are mugged by the revived monk Benkei who shouts "If you want to proceed, give me your balls!!" Cue to embarassed looks and Sayaka says "Oh No!! I don't have balls!!". Not amused, Benkei corrects them.

Fan Works

• Guys Being Dudes: On the drive to Team GO Rocket HQ, Spark and Arlo discuss this in reference to Pokeballs.

Films — Animation

• Kung Fu Panda 3: A curious panda cub asks Ping about various parts of his anatomy, with the last one being his dumplings, to which he holds up a basket full of freshly steamed dumplings.
• The Thief and the Cobbler has fun with its MacGuffin, a set of golden balls that are supposed to adorn the highest minaret in the city, but are stolen by the Thief. There's a shot of them under the Thief's robe, and when the Evil Vizier steals them back from the Thief and is attempting to use them in his own plot, he says "Now that I have the balls, I'll go see the King."

Films — Live-Action

• James Bond
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Even while posing as Sir Hilary Bray, Bond can't resist making a comment about how he has more byzants (i.e. gold balls) than the average man.
    Bond: I brought a book on the subject. There's a picture of my own coat-of-arms...which includes four of them. (Gasp! from the ladies) If you'd care to see them...
  • Moonraker has this exchange as Bond enters Q's South American lab to find him testing a new weapon:
    James Bond: Balls, Q?
    Q: (unimpressed) Bolas, 007!
• Kicking & Screaming: Buck Weston's sporting goods store has the slogan "We've Got Balls!" At the movie's end when he co-owns the store with his son Phil, he changes the slogan to "We've Got Balls...And Vitamins!"
• In The Nutcracker in 3D, a film featuring Nazi and Holocaust imagery, there's still time for Gielgud to cry out in pain, "my bananas!" after the Rat King falls unconscious and somehow hits his head into Gielgud's... well, like he said, his "bananas".
• In The Pink Panther franchise, Inspector Clouseau's longtime disguise provider is Professor Auguste Balls, whose marketing slogan is "When duty calls, look no further, you've got Balls!"
• In Space Jam, Michael Jordan is shown the Looney Tunes' training facilities, a dilapidated old gym. When Sylvester mentions that "We've got balls!" (meaning basketballs), Jordan responds "You sure do."
• Done on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in a Subverted Rhyme Every Occasion format.
  Eddie Valiant: I'm sick of taking falls / And bouncing off the walls / Without that gun / I'd have some fun / I'd kick you in the... (gets hit by falling vase)
  Roger Rabbit: Nose!
  Smartass: Nose? That don't rhyme with walls.
  Eddie: No, but this does. (kicks Smartass in the groin)
• Police Academy IV has a pretty epic example of That Came Out Wrong when Cpt. Harris catches Proctor fooling around with the Newton's Cradle on his desk:
  "Don't touch those! Don't you ever touch my balls without asking!"
• The Gray Man (2022). Lloyd Hansen captures Sierra Six and demands to know where the MacGuffin is. Six holds up a grenade pin and asks if this is it. As the grenade hits the floor between them, Hansen says in a rather admiring fashion, "Balls!" before diving out the window. Given the amount of homoerotic cracks that Hansen makes during the film, it's definitely this trope (that the grenade is question is a literal ball of steel doesn't hurt either).

Literature

• In Discworld, the Dances and Balls meaning sets up one of these. Lord Vetinari is extremely serious and ascetic, not given to the sort of partying that characterized his predecessors. Hence "Lord Vetinari seldom had balls. There was a popular song about it, in fact."
  • Another variation shows up in The Truth:
  Mr. Tulip: We ---ing love policemen.
  Mr. Pin: If there was a policeman’s ball, we would be among the first to buy a ticket.
  Mr. Tulip: ’Specially if it was mounted on a plinth, or a little display stand of some sort, 'cos we like beautiful things.
• Do You Want to Play with My Balls?, a children's book parody by Matthew and Christopher Cifaldi, has children talk about playing with balls. Pretty much all their statements are obvious innuendos referring to the more vulgar meaning of "balls."
  When I play with Sally, I always end up with blue balls.
• British comedian and satirist Willie Rushton wrote an idiosyncratic overview of sporting pursuits called Pigsticking - A Joy For Life. He notes that he has managed to get halfway through the book without mentioning a certain piece of equipment even once, and chooses to kick off Part Two with a full-page cartoon about Royal Tennis - in which a courtier faces a glowering Henry VIII and announces Balls, my liege!
• In one of the Phoenix Force novels, the eponymous force is figuring out how to scale a mountain fortress, without making noise from hammering in pitons that will draw the attention of the guards.
  "We can use our nuts."
  "Our what?"
  "Did you two rehearse this act?"

Live-Action TV

• In 'Allo 'Allo!, René gets alarmed while smooching an Action Girl from the Communist resistance group.
  Rene: What is that I feel between us?
  Louise: (removes a Luger from her trousers) Oh, it's only my pistol and a couple of hand grenades.
• In the later seasons of Arrow, Rene makes repeated references to Curtis's T-Spheres as "his balls", only for Curtis to try to correct him. Early on, probably accidental, but done on purpose by season 6.
• Doctor Who: In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", Rory Williams' dad Brian ends up having a Triceratops sniffing at him, so the Doctor asks him why:
  The Doctor: Don't have any vegetable matter in your trousers, do you, Brian?
  Brian: Only my balls.
  (Rory facepalms)
  The Doctor: ...I'm sorry?
  Brian: Golf balls.
• Hollywood Game Night came up with a game where, as it went on, one person has to manage holding more and more sports balls (beach balls, basketballs, footballs, etc.) until they can't any more. The game is naturally called "Hold My Balls" and milked for all the innuendo it's worth.
• Played with on an episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon: an Audience Game invited a contestant to solve a rebus puzzle, guessing "Tickle My Balls". Turns out the answer was actually "Play My Sports".
• David Letterman's jokes about the squirrels in Central Park on Late Show often involved this.
  "The weather's so cold in New York right now. And when I walked through Central Park this morning, I saw a squirrel warming up his nuts."
  "You've got to protect yourself from catching the flu. They say the best way to do this is to wash your hands frequently and use plenty of hand sanitizer. In fact, today in Central Park I saw a squirrel putting sanitizer on his nuts."
  "It was so hot today I saw a squirrel using barbecue tongs just to handle his nuts."
• British game show Lucky Numbers chose its contestants from the audience by launching large balls with their seat numbers from a bingo machine. Before this segment began, host Shane Richie invited the audience to "show me your balls!" With a chuckle, of course.
• Most Extreme Elimination Challenge referred to an obstacle involving wrecking balls as the "Nards of Doom".
• Penn & Teller: Bullshit! From the episode on Manners: "Why don't snakes have balls?" "Because hardly any of them know how to dance!"
• This quote from Psych:
  Shawn Spencer: Good morning detectives, collecting money for the Policeman's ball?
  Carlton Lassiter: We don't have balls.
  Shawn Spencer: I honestly have no response to that.
• Saturday Night Live had a "Delicious Dish" sketch (a parody of stereotypically "dull" public radio shows) in which Pete Schweddy (Alec Baldwin) promoted his bakery's holiday foodstuff, "Schweddy Balls". You can even get them in a "Schweddy Ball Sack". Besides the innuendo, the humor of the sketch came from the fact that the hosts (who speak in a very deadpan monotone at all times) did not break character at all.
  • Baldwin later returned to do a follow-up about his "Schweddy Weiner", while a one-off revival of the sketch in 2010 did a Spear Counterpart with Betty White as Florence Dusty with her "Dusty Muffins".
• The iconic obstacle of the TV show Wipeout and its regional variations - especially the UK version, Total Wipeout - are the "Big Balls", a series of four, red, inflated balls that contestants must bounce across. Given their prominence, the co-hosts are aware of the potential for ball-related wordplay whenever the Big Balls are brought up, or, well, any other time a round on the show involves balls. Lampshaded when John remarks during a game with dodgeballs, "Oh, you and your ball gags."
• On an episode of Have I Got News for You, when they'd somehow got onto the subject of Double Entendre in Panto, Maureen Lipman quipped "I do declare, the prince's balls get larger every year!"
• In the Blackadder Goes Forth episode "Corporal Punishment", Blackadder's jailer is impressed at how calm and relaxed he is about his firing squad (because he thinks he's going to be reprieved).
  Jailer: I have to admire your balls.
  Blackadder: Perhaps later.

Music

• AC/DC's song "Big Balls" uses double entendres by using ballroom and costume parties to obviously refer to Bon Scott's testicles.
  He's got big balls, and she's got big balls,
  But we've got the biggest balls of them all!

Sports

• During a nationally-televised news conference, Tom Brady was discussing allegations that the New England Patriots had used under-inflated footballs during their conference championship. Of course...
  "Everybody has a preference: some guys like 'em round. Some guys like 'em thin. Some guys like 'em tacky. Some guys like 'em brand new. Some guys like old balls. [...] I don't want anyone touching those balls after that. I don't want anyone rubbing them, uh, you know, putting any air in them. To me those balls are perfect..."
• In his capacity as a sportscaster for CBS, Dizzy Dean allegedly described a pair of Make-Out Kids in the stands of a baseball game thusly: "He's kissing her on the strikes, and she's kissing him on the balls."
• Sports commentator Brian Johnston notes this as an occupational hazard in his memoirs, and gives several famous examples, including the one about the cricket commentator who, in the lull before the start of a game, announced that there were some small boys out on the field playing with their balls.
• There is a notorious Urban Legend about the wife of a famous golf player innocently saying during a live TV interview that she kisses his balls for luck.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Jasper Carrott has a joke about going to meet his girlfriend's parents for the first time, only for the parents' dog to start humping his leg. The mother tells him to just kick his balls. Jasper thinks "Oh, well" and acts out doing exactly that. There is a Beat and then mother says slowly "I meant his balls on the lawn".
• Played with regarding Richard Belzer. Belzer, a testicular cancer survivor, titled his critically acclaimed 1997 HBO comedy special and accompanying CD Another Lone Nut (in regards to both that and his reputation as a Conspiracy Theorist).

Toys

• Nerf recently released the Rivals blaster line, intended as high-end adult blasters using harder foam balls instead of darts for ammo. The official terminology is "rounds", but a Deadpool-themed limited edition box set has the box apparently vandalised by the Merc with a Marker, replacing every mention of "rounds" with "BALLS".

Video Games

• Ballz had plenty of innuendo to do with their title, in the tagline ("To be the champion, you gotta have Ballz!"), advertisements ("Tell Santa you want to have Ballz for Christmas"), manual, and even the suggestive opening theme.
• Duke Nukem is known for, among other things, bragging that "I've got Balls of Steel!" Which, thanks to pranks involving a soundboard of Duke quotes, including one memorable incident where "BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS BALLS" cropped up repeatedly, has become a staple of Duke-related humor. It doesn't help that Duke's voice actor thinks it's hilarious. It also became the name of a pinball game by the same creator.
• In the Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues expansion, Dr. Borous has set up the X-8 Research Center to look like his old high school, and rants over the intercom about his traumatic teen years.
  Dr. Borous: Down at the end of the hall is ball storage. For jocks who like balls, like Richie Marcus. Do you hear me, Betsy? Richie likes balls.
• There's a more technical variation in Mass Effect 2 where the quarian admiral Zaal'Koris Vas Qwib-Qwib (quarian names are structured like so: [Personal Name] vas [Ship] nar [Birth Ship]) laments his ship's name and comments that he's thought of requesting a transfer to a ship with a more respectable name, like "Defrahnz" or "Iktomy". 'Vas Deferens' is the part of the male anatomy that connects the testicles to the urethra, and a vasectomy is a procedure in which the vas deferens is cut.
• Pokémon: In the Japanese versions, the "Nugget" item (one of several objects in the franchise whose only real purpose is to sell for a high price) is known as "Kin no Tama", literally "golden ball"—which is Japanese slang for the testicles. The thought of a stranger giving a 10 year old their "golden balls" becomes quite hilarious.
  • Inverted in French, when "Se faire des couilles en or" ("to make oneself golden cojones") means getting filthy rich in a short time.
• In The Sexy Brutale, Trinity does this twice at the start of the afternoon, which is appropriate since she was trying to play the roulette wheel. First, she asks the staff member "Are you going to drop it in or are you going to fondle that ball all day?" After he drops it and the ball rolls away, she tells Clay "Someone really dropped the ball on that one."
• Halo 3: ODST: As Sergeant Buck watches his ex-girlfriend Captain Dare prepare to cross enemy lines with a fugitive alien driving a garbage truck, he muses to the Rookie, "You ever date a woman, make sure she's got balls." The Rookie looks at him with confusion.

Web Animation

• Your Favorite Martian did a song about "My Balls", filled to the brim with ball puns and ball boasts.
• hololive streamer Ayunda Risu (who is a kemonomimi squirrel) established "Nonstop Nut November" as her response to "No Nut November" (a meme challenging people to not masturbate during November), wherein she posts videos on her YouTube channel about nuts with tons of David Letterman-style double entendres.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: When Grace is challenged to a volleyball spiking contest, her response is "Let's smash balls!". She's confused why the room suddenly got quiet after.
• VG Cats has a Pokemon parody where Ash tells off Team Rocket for always attempting to steal his one free-range Pikachu, whereas in the meantime he's captured so many Pokemon he's "tripping balls".

Western Animation

• Multiple examples from Beavis and Butt-Head:
  • A particular incidence of note is when the pair hit on the idea of finding and selling golfballs and Butt-Head declares "We need to get more balls", prompting Beavis to laugh.
  • One episode has them discover someone left a bank card in the ATM and they use it to steal money from the account. We later see an interview with the card's rightful owner, a basketball player, who says he can't figure out how the two knew his password was "balls" because he's a ball player.
• Futurama episode "War is the H-Word" has a whole plethora of them, as the main opponents are ball-shaped aliens.
  Zapp Brannigan: You'll be negotiating with the balls' mysterious leaders, the Brain Balls. They've got a lot of brains, and they've got a lot of chutzpah.
• Regular Show:
  • In "Fuzzy Dice", Benson has the gang get ready to play skee-ball in order to win a pair of novelty fuzzy dice at a Suck E. Cheese's.
    Benson: So, I want everyone to line up, and when the balls drop...
    Mordecai & Rigby: (giggle uncontrollably)
    Benson: Ugh! When the game starts...
  • In "TGI Tuesday", Benson shows off the Parkside Lux ballroom.
    Benson: This ballroom held the most elegant balls in its day.
    Rigby: Woah, were they big?
    Benson: Oh, they were huge!
    (Rigby starts snickering, until Mordecai smacks him in the back of the head)
• A sketch in the Robot Chicken episode "Celebrity Rocket" had an overweight gym teacher shocked to find his basketballs, footballs, and soccer balls have all been squashed, exclaiming "My balls! What happened to my balls? Why would anyone do this to my balls?" We then see two children observing his reactions, one of them sarcastically remarking "This show is so clever".
• The Simpsons: Principal Skinner was trapped in a bag of dodgeballs, so he summoned the school's hamster Nibbles and commanded him to "chew through my ball sack." Cue a Flat "What" face from Nibbles.
• South Park: Chef's Image Song "Chocolate Salty Balls (P.S. I Love You)"
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Mary Jane suggests that Peter and Gwen celebrate the New Year at Times Square, where they can "watch the ball drop." And she says this with a wink.
• One episode of Archer has the title character unable to resist adding on the word "balls" whenever the character Benoit's name is mentioned (it's a pun on ben-wa balls, to which the name "Benoit" is identically pronounced), much to the latter's annoyance. This is reversed to hilarious effect after Benoit is revealed to be the Villain of the Week and Archer has to chase him down:
  Archer: "BENOOOOIIIIIT!"
  Benoit: "Balls!"
• In an episode of The Loud House, Lynn has to share a bedroom with Lincoln; when he starts complaining about her messing everything up, she interrupts with "I'm noticing a complete lack of balls in this room." Since she's the family jock, she was of course referring to sports equipment.
• A not-inappropriate variant happens in Steven Universe: Pearl says that Pink Diamond used to throw balls (as in fancy parties) for the other Gems in Homeworld, but Steven misinterprets her word choice and assumes she meant that Pink Diamond was a talented juggler — though Pearl quickly confirms that that part is also true.
• Comes up in the Family Guy episode "Quagmire's Dad", where Glenn Quagmire's transgender mother Ida tells her son that he's ruining the ball and remarks "You know how much I love balls."
• Total Drama: During the song "Wake Up", Alejandro's part includes the phrase "When you couldn't find your balls... tranq balls, that is!" (which are used for the episode's challenge). The fact that he sings this to Heather makes it even more inappropriate out of context.

Real Life

• As mentioned, the New Year's ball drop in Times Square, New York all but invites this, given that it's a gigantic ball, and "ball drop" can definitely refer to something else...

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