Grossout Fakeout

Andy: Excuse me. Can you help me find the toilets?

Hippie: Looks like it's a bit late.

Andy: What do you mean?

(The hippie points to the front of Andy's pants, where kids have sprayed him with squirt guns)

Andy: That's not what you think it is.

— Andy Griffiths' Just Series, "Just Stupid", "Busting"

There has always been a fine line between disgusting and hilarious. Things like poop, farts, butts, and that sort of thing are a frequent source of comedy. However, sometimes you don't want to get too disgusting, and that's where the Grossout Fakeout comes into things.

A Grossout Fakeout is any situation where it looks like something disgusting is happening, but that isn't the case. There are three basic ways of playing this.

The first type is a variation on Bait-and-Switch — the audience is set up to believe the gross thing is happening, but then it's revealed that it's perfectly innocuous. For instance, someone asking if the swimming pool got warmer is followed up by a reveal that the heating was turned on, or someone steps in something brown which is then revealed to be chocolate ice cream.

The second type is a form of Dramatic Irony — the audience knows that it's perfectly innocuous, but someone else thinks it's something gross and freaks out. For instance, Alice spills soup on herself and Bob comes in, thinking she threw up. These scenarios also often qualify as Not What It Looks Like as well.

Finally, the third type is for when someone deliberately makes it look as though something gross is happening, as a lie or a prank. This might involve pretending to throw up as part of Playing Sick, being very graphic in a Bathroom Search Excuse, or using a Whoopee Cushion or fake dog poop to prank someone.

Compare A Bloody Mess, Innocent Innuendo, Less Disturbing in Context, Mistaken for Masturbating, Suggestive Collision, Accidental Pervert, Mistaken for Pedophile, Stab the Salad.

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Examples:

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: In one strip, Calvin pranks Susie by stuffing pasta up his shirt, then lifting his shirt and pretending it's his intestines spilling out.
• Garfield: In one Sunday strip (which was later adapted for Garfield and Friends), Odie creates a puddle of drool in Garfield's bed, causing Jon to assume the worst and put Garfield in a diaper.

Fan Works

• Zigzagged in The Loud House story All's Fair in Pranks and War. Lynn sits on a chocolate bar and thinks Luan did it as a prank to make it look like poop. Actually Lincoln left it on the seat by accident.
• Anger Management:
  • Zigzagged when Lynn flushes the toilet while Lincoln's in the shower. It's unclear if she's actually pooping or just pretending to.
  • When Lincoln says, "Oh boy!", Clyde thinks he needs to go to the bathroom but he's just excited.
  • When Lynn and Lisa are talking in the bathroom, the former tells Lynn Sr. that she "had to go a bit more than she thought".
• In this untitled Happy Days fanfiction, the Cunninghams, Fonzie, Potsie, Ralph, and the title characters from the spinoff Laverne & Shirley eat dinner together, but the sauce is bad. Laverne and Shirley go off to chew out Lenny and Squiggy, who cooked the sauce, claiming that they needed to "powder [their] noses". Marion takes this the wrong way and assumes that the food poisoning they all acquired from the sauce has made them need the bathroom. Luckily, though, everyone is only a little nauseous, nothing more.
• Lucy's Secret:
  • Not only does Lucy pretend the bedwetting diapers she's buying for herself are actually for her baby sister Lily, she claims that the reason Lily needs more diapers is because she's "feeling really sick".
  • When Lucy is making an excuse for why she's at home and not at Haiku's house, where she pretended she was going, she pretends that she and her sister got food poisoning and threw up, and that she had to go home as it was making her nauseous.
• In The Worst Witch fanfiction PMS Potions, the girls pretend they had food poisoning to try to explain why all five of them are up late.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Pound and Pumpkin Cake's Adventures (and Misadventures) in Potty Training, the chapter "The Exploding Diaper" begins with Scootaloo asking Mr. and Mrs. Cake if they've ever heard of an exploding diaper. The Cakes are shocked, but then Scootaloo explains that it only exploded because the twins tried to inflate it with helium.

Films — Animation

• Finding Nemo: When the underwater mines explode, one of them causes a bubble near a pelican. Another pelican thinks he farted and flies away indignantly.
• In Flushed Away, Roddy is flushed down the toilet and ends up holding onto a brown lump. He recoils, but then it turns out to have been a chocolate bar.
  Roddy: Phew!
• Ice Age: When Sid takes off baby Roshan's cloth diaper (thinking that he went to the bathroom), he holds it as if it was full of excrement. He waves it around like he's losing his balance, and then flings it into the air as if he tripped. The diaper unfolds and lands on Manny, only to be revealed that it's completely clean.
• In Ice Age: The Meltdown, when the main characters wake up in a puddle resulting from the melting ice, Eddie mistakes it for pee and berates Crash for drinking before bed.
• The Iron Giant: When Hogarth is in the bathroom, struggling to get the eponymous robot's hand out the window, Mrs. Hughes and Kent Mansley overhear his grunting and think he's pooping. Kent even thinks Hogarth is constipated as a result of not chewing his food properly.
• In The LEGO Movie, the main characters are in a submarine, when Vitruvius asks, "Why are my pants cold and wet?". Wyldstyle takes this the wrong way and says, "Eww!", but it turns out that the sub is leaking.
• In Shark Tale, Oscar thinks the whale he's washing is about to throw up from indigestion, but she just burps instead.
• Tarzan: When the animals hear a gunshot in the distance, Tantor thinks somebody farted and says "It wasn't me, I swear".

Films — Live-Action

• Several variants of this trope were used in the Austin Powers trilogy; most notably Austin's fight in a toilet stall with O'Brien in the first film (the man in the stall next to him thinks Austin is constipated), and the two "silhouette gags" in the latter two movies (a scene with Austin and Felicity in a tent in the second film makes it look like Felicity is preforming a series of Ass Shoves, while in the third film Austin and Mini-Me are behind a privacy screen and make it look like Austin has a Gag Penis).
• Caddyshack: Happens when one of the caddies drops a chocolate bar in the club's pool, making people think someone pooped in it. When Carl drains the pool to investigate, he realizes it's a candy bar and takes a bite of it, causing one onlooker to faint.
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, Greg goes to church, having sat on a candy bar. A little girl notices the stain and exclaims, "Poop! He's pooped his pants!". Greg tries to prove that it's just chocolate by licking some of it off of his behind. This just disgusts the churchgoers more.
• In ET The Extraterrestrial, Andy pretends to throw up on the phone by gagging and then spilling Coca-Cola.

Jokes

• A professor of medicine is teaching a class on the importance of observation. He demonstrates this by putting on a glove, going to the medical cadaver, shoving a finger up its ass, then slowly licking his finger. Talking over the disgusted groans of the class, he picks a volunteer and tells him to do the same thing. The unlucky student puts on a glove, shoves his index finger up the cadaver's ass and is about to lick it when the professor yells at him, asking what the hell he's doing. The baffled student say he's doing what the professor did; the professor turns to the class and reveals that he did indeed insert his index into the cadaver, but licked his middle finger. Thus concluding the lesson on the importance of observation.
• A man has a wheelbarrow full of cow manure. A second man asks why he has it, and the first man replies that he wants to put it on his strawberries. The second replies, "I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, we put cream and sugar on our strawberries."

Literature

• Amelia Bedelia: In one book, characters serve foods with gross-sounding names that are actually safe, edible and tasty. These include "ears" (actually dried apricots), "kitty litter cake" (actually made with crumbled-up cookies), and "eyeballs" (actually peeled grapes).
• Andy Griffiths' Just Series:
  • In "Just Stupid", the story "Busting" has some kids spray Andy in the crotch with squirt guns. When he asks a hippie for directions to the toilets, the hippie says, "Looks like it's a bit late."
    Andy: That's not what you think it is.
  • In "Emergency Spew Relish", Andy tries pranking an old woman by pretending he's eating his vomit and using it as shampoo when it's actually corn relish. As it turns out, though, she's blind, so the prank doesn't work.

• Blubber: Linda, who has been given the insulting nickname in the title, claims her classmates made her eat a chocolate-covered ant, causing her to vomit. In reality, the confection in question is just a regular yummy chocolate truffle candy. The girls just told Linda it was an ant so she’d lose her desire for it, because Linda’s not supposed to be eating sweets, being how she’s on a diet and all.

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • In "The Long Haul", a raw cinnamon roll explodes in the hot car, and when Rodrick gets some on his head, he thinks it's his brains. When Manny starts licking the dough off his fingers, Rodrick screams.
  • In "Rodrick Rules", Rodrick and his friends put fake throw-up on strangers' cars.
  • In "The Last Straw" Greg accidentally sits on Manny's chocolate Easter bunny, making it look like he pooped his pants.
  • In "The Ugly Truth", during the school sleepover, some boys pretend to fart behind the curtain. One of them even uses a tuba.
• In a Fly Guy book, Fly Guy is anticipating eating something sticky and brown. It turns out to be pie.
• In the children's story Going on Holiday, a girl thinks she's going to throw up, but when she gets out of the car, she's fine. Her family suspect that she just needed fresh air.
• In the short story "Licked!" by Paul Jennings, a boy grosses out some visitors by smearing dried fruit on a clean flyswatter and then licking it in front of them.
• In the children's novella More Naughty Stories for Good Boys and Girls, one of the stories involves Kevin embarrassing his sister Belinda by pouring a glass of water into her bed to make her visiting friends think she wet the bed.
• In the Paul Jennings story "A Mouthful", this is zigzagged. First, a man pranks his daughter and her friend by putting fake cat poo on the pillow and pretending to eat it, but then later the daughter and another friend trick him into eating real cat poop.
• Ramona Quimby: In "Beezus and Ramona", Ramona puts her friends off their food by claiming there are worms in the cookies.
• Reuhurinteen ala-aste: In one story, the classroom appears to be full of rabbit droppings, but in the end it turns out that it's just dog food that Ryyni spilled all over the classroom.

Live-Action TV

• The IT Crowd: In "Fifty-Fifty", Roy is in a taxi with his date, and hasn't noticed a suspicious-looking brown smear on his forehead. The date is grossed-out and tense, pointedly not looking at Roy as he tries to talk. She gets out of the taxi at her house, finally telling him "You've got poo on your head!" when he tries to talk his way inside. Puzzled, he wipes the stuff off his head and declares, "It's chocolate!" He and the date laugh, relieved... but she's still too grossed out to invite him in.
• Seinfeld: In "The Pick," Jerry's new girlfriend Tia sees him scratching the side of his nose, but as she's only seeing his profile as he's driving, it looks like he's picking his nose. She gets disgusted and breaks up with him, not believing that he was actually just scratching.
• In one version of the Title Sequence to The Commish the Commish unwraps something that appears to be body parts—and turns out to be lunch meat.
• SAS: Rogue Heroes. During the Benghazi raid the SAS are trying to bluff their way past a checkpoint without identity papers. Major Stirling notes that immaculate appearance of the Italian officer in charge, so pretends to have dysentery so he will rush them through rather than let Stirling take a dump behind his tent as he asks.

Poetry

• Downplayed in the kids' poem "The Worm". The protagonist does put a worm on their tongue, which is kind of gross, but their mother thinks that the protagonist actually ate it.

Puppet Shows

• In The Book of Pooh episode "The Words are Out", Piglet has laryngitis and is using charades. Tigger mistakenly thinks that Piglet needs to use the bathroom.
• Dinosaurs: In "Nature Calls", Earl is changing Baby and is suddenly sprayed in the face. It's subsequently revealed that Baby was spraying him with a squirt gun.
• Sesame Street:
  • In one episode, baby Natasha keeps crying and repeating, "Hoongie!". Maria and Zoe, who are babysitting her, wonder if this means she needs a diaper change, but she doesn't.
  • In "Elmo's Potty Time", Grover says that his "body is trying to tell [him] something". Elmo thinks this is a euphemism for needing the bathroom, but actually he meant he was hungry.

Web Animation

• In the Strong Bad Email "Secret Recipes", Strong Bad tries to invoke this trope on the King of Town by eating white chocolate out of a deodorant stick.... Only for this to backfire when he walks in on The King of Town actually eating deodorant.

Web Comics

• Zigzagged in a Pebble and Wren strip. Pebble allegedly mistook Wren's doughnut for a growth that grows in the armpits of a creature. However, he could have been making that up to put Wren off so he can eat it himself.
• In this online comic, a woman sees another woman drinking cranberry juice and instantly assumes she has a UTI.
• Sluggy Freelance: "Stick Figures in Spaaaaaace" has a scene where Torg and Riff suspect a member of their crew being an android and take him away to check. Then it shifts to a view of them with a knife looking over a gory mess and going, nope, no android parts in him. Then Torg even experimentally eats what looks like an intestine. Then it turns out the mess is just the guy's spaghetti and meatballs, which they stole because they thought he was an android and wouldn't care. (And they saw he had no android parts because they put him in a scanner.)

Web Original

• Seeing as Drawception is similar to the Telephone game, it's no surprise that some of the misinterpretations involve mistaking a drawing of some innocuous substance like chocolate for another, grosser one like poop. This even led to the unofficial site rule: "Even if it's brown, it's probably not poo".
• In Neopets, one type of "gross food" is actually banana rice cakes labelled as fingers.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: In "How Will I Clean My Fur?", there is a tsunami of thick, white gunk that is said to come from Ned Flanders. However, the narration confirms that the substance is "a completely fictional liquid and not what it was implied to be".
• Several from this list of "not what it looks like" moments:
  • One man sits on some water, then tries to get rid of the wet spot on his pants by mounting the hand dryer, only for the CEO to walk in.
  • One man had some chocolate in his back pocket, but when he reaches to get it, it's melted all over the seat of his pants and on his hand.
  • One story is of a man stinking up the bathroom, then another person goes in and pees, but a woman then enters and assumes the second person took the dump.

Web Videos

• In one Buzzfeed video, Zach accidentally walks in on Justin changing. He spends most of the video embarrassed, and at one point, he sees Justin eating a banana and, due to how it's positioned, thinks Justin is pantsless again.
  Zach: [screams]
  Justin: It's just a banana.
• Critical Role: When the Mighty Nein are getting ready to infiltrate a hospital, it's up to Mollymauk to create a distraction. He first uses his disguise kit and some old breakfast food to make his genitals look like he's got a horrible STD, then uses some of that same breakfast food to create fake vomit. He and Fjord then walk into the hospital where Molly proceeds to fake-vomit all over himself, starts rolling/crawling around on the ground, and cuts himself with one of his swords to add a fair amount of blood to the mix, while screaming that he doesn't need medical attention. This ends up working a little too well — Molly ends up restrained and locked in a room by several nurses, and has to jump through the window to escape.
• Jack Vale Films:
  • In the "Pooter" pranks, Jack uses a machine called a "pooter" to pretend he is farting.
  • In the "Eating Goldfish" pranks, Jack eats gummy goldfish but positions a fish bowl to make it look as though he's eating live goldfish.
  • In one video, Jack uses a spraying toy to pretend his dog is peeing on everybody.
  • In "The Farting Puppy", Jack uses his pooter to pretend his dog is farting.

Western Animation

• In the American Dad! episode "Iced, Iced Babies", Stan gets a vasectomy and upon finding out, Francine, who wants to have another baby, heads to a cold storage center to get Stan's frozen sperm samples. When Stan tries to stop her, Francine pulls out a gun and shoots a huge storage tank, resulting in Stan seemingly being washed away by a gigantic wave of semen... until she realizes that she accidentally got the wrong room, and was at a milk research center, with the sperm bank being in the next room.
  Francine: Wait a second... milk! Well, that's much less disgusting.
• Arthur: In "Dear Adil", Arthur reads a comic in which Turkish people eat lambs' eyes. He assumes that real Turkish people, including his pen-pal Adil, must eat lambs' eyes too, but they don't.
• Bob's Burgers:
  • In "Hamburger Dinner Theater", Mort uses fake intestines for the Belchers' murder mystery show. Unfortunately, it looks too realistic and the audience ends up calling the police.
  • Subverted in "Synchronized Swimming", when they have to empty out the pool because it looks like someone pooped in it. Bob is impressed because he thought Louise pulled a Caddyshack... as it turns out, Louise never saw Caddyshack and it was indeed real feces.
• Clarence: In "Pretty Great Day with a Girl", Clarence says that he has to pee while he and Amy Gillis are standing on an erratic. A stream of liquid from offscreen starts to spray Belson. Amy briefly assumes Clarence is urinating on him, until it's revealed that Clarence was spraying him with a water bottle.
• Classic Disney Shorts: In "Father's Day Off", Goofy takes care of the housework while his wife is away. In one scene, while Junior takes a bath and creates a flood, Goofy sees a small puddle of water near the bathroom door, assumes the dog peed there and throws him out.
• The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants: Once upon a time, a kid named Theodore Murdsley sat in some chocolate pudding, earning him the Embarrassing Nickname "Ted Turdsley". Many years later, in the episode "The Flustering Mindless Woe of the Flushable Memory Wipes", George and Harold do the exact same thing, garnering a similar reaction.
• The Fairly OddParents!: In "Dog's Day Afternoon," Timmy has switched bodies with Vicky's pet dog Doidle. Timmy in Doidle's body comes across one of Vicky's teenage magazines lying on the floor and raises up one of his legs, ready to pee on it. The very next shot is a close-up shot of what appears to be urine splashing on the magazine, but then it zooms out to reveal it's actually a commercial for a liquid weed whacker formula appearing on a TV that Doidle in Timmy's body is watching.
• Little Princess:
  • In "I Didn't Do It", the Princess spills some water on the ground. The adults see it and think Scruff peed on the floor.
  • In "I Can Keep a Secret", the General is keeping a secret and the Princess thinks it's that he wet the bed.
  • In "I Want Baked Beans", the Princess thinks that her baked beans look like rabbit droppings, then wonders if maybe they are rabbit droppings and the rabbits climbed through the window.
• The Loud House:
  • In "Along Came a Sister", Lincoln returns Luan's fake dog poop. She says she doesn't have any fake dog poop, which grosses out Lincoln... but then Luan reveals that she was only kidding.
  • In "Jeers for Fears", Bobby shows Lincoln and Clyde some fruit salad that he used as fake intestines for Halloween.
  • In "Lucha Fever with the Casagrandes", Ronnie Anne spills soup on the floor to pretend to throw up, so that her neighbour doesn't come into the apartment.
  • In "Missed Connection", Lana thinks that the pizza which arrived is shaped like a butt, when it's meant to be a heart.
  • In "Kings of the Con", Clyde is behaving frantically and Lana assumes he needs to use the bathroom.
  • In "Potty Mouth", Luan pretends that Lily needs a change to swap her for Lisa.
• In the Milly, Molly Animated Adaptation, Marmalade the cat knocks over a vase into Milly's dad's chair. When he asks why it's wet, Milly tries to explain, but only gets as far as explaining that Marmalade was responsible before he cringes. She quickly explains that it's just water from a vase.
• Peg + Cat:
  • In the episode "The Butter Problem", a cow is squirming because her udder is sore from not being milked. Cat mistakes her squirming for a Potty Dance.
  • In the episode "The Scrap of Map Problem", Peg hears Baby Fox Blowing a Raspberry. She asks Cat if he made the sound, and he says that he probably didn't, although he may have farted without realising it.
• PJ Masks: In "Catboy's Cloudy Crisis", when the heroes arrive at the school, a fart sound is heard and Catboy and Owlette think it's Gekko before finding out that it's Luna Girl's cloud machine.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Pee Pee G's", the girls think that one of them is wetting the bed, but it turns out that Mojo Jojo poured water in their bed as a prank. Then, he laughs and appears to wet himself, but he claims he broke his water bottle. He did sound as though he was lying, though.
• Rugrats:
  • In "Baby Power", the babies think they've turned Dil into a superpowered monster and try to get him back to normal by spilling water on him. Didi picks Dil up and notes, "Your diaper is wet, sweetie. And so is your head?! When you have to go, you have to go!"
  • In "All's Well That Pretends Well", the babies eat vanilla ice cream and Didi mistakes the ice cream on their faces for snot. Needless to say, she is highly disgusted when Betty recognises it as ice cream and tastes some.
  • Downplayed in "Baby Power", where the babies think Dil is going to poop, but he farts instead.
  • In "Man of the House", Dil's rattle breaks, so he cries. This confuses Didi, and at one point, she thinks he has a dirty diaper.
  • In "Day of the Aquarium", the babies see a fountain. Chuckie says, "The floor's going potty?".
  • In "The Big Flush", the babies go to a pool and mistake it for a giant toilet. When Chuckie notes that the pool water tastes bad, Tommy says that it's because it's "potty water".
• In The Simpsons
  • In the episode "Yokel Chords", Bart tells the story of Dark Stanley, suddenly the lights suddenly go off. When they come back on, the kids get horrified at the apparent sight of a dead Bart with his brains spilling out of his head. After they run off screaming, Bart gets up, revealing that the "brains" were actually spaghetti.
  • In "Skinner's Sense of Snow", Wiggum looks to have pee'd in the snow and spelling his name in urine. He then asks Lou to "shake out the last few drops" which Lou obliges... revealing that Wiggum was emptying out his thermos.
    Lou: Seems like a waste of good coffee.
• Stickin' Around: In "Return Your Seats to an Uptight Position", Bradley gets airsick and appears to vomit, but only pretended so he can annoy Stacy.
• What's with Andy?:
  • In "Emergency Spew Relish", Andy pretends to throw up, using corn relish.
  • In "Busting", some kids spray Andy in the crotch with squirt guns. When Lik and Leech see this, they ask him if he's had a "little accident".
  • In "Don't Eat the Yellow Snow", Andy uses lemonade to pretend some ice sculptures of dogs peed.

Real Life

• There's a type of candy called the Sour Flush, which is powder from a plastic toilet that you eat with lollipops shaped like plungers.

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