Kinky Role-Playing

"Do I have insurance?"
"Oh yeah, baby! Full coverage..."

Connie: I'm talking about role play.
Maury: Oh! Kinky sexy fuck-fuck with hats and costumes?
Connie: Yeah. It's community theater, but for sexually active people!

— Human Resources, "Rutgers Is for Lovers"

Is life in the bedroom getting a bit dull? Maybe you feel insecure about your attractiveness, or you just want a distraction from real life. Maybe the solution is to pretend to be something else entirely.

One way for couples to add some spice to their sex lives is to act out sexy scenarios before doing the deed. Common setups include a hot delivery guy and his client, a sexy nurse and her patient, a Teacher/Student Romance, or characters from a popular franchise. This often involves BDSM elements, showing off who's the boss in the bedroom with an elaborate power fantasy. In comedic works, the characters will often act out an oddly specific fetish that most people probably wouldn't find sexy... or so we assume. The role-playing scenario may be a reflection of the characters' everyday interests, or it could be an opportunity to act completely antithetical to how they usually are, which adds an interesting new layer to their relationship.

This can be quite fun for characters who are actors in everyday lives, but they may get so Lost in Character that it gets in the way of the actual sex part. It can also be awkward if an onlooker walks in and mistakes the role-play for reality (especially if someone seems to be in danger and the onlooker tries to intervene); this can also be used to Bait-and-Switch the audience by revealing that a seemingly tense situation is just a couple playing around.

Occasionally, a character will engage in a sexual role-play outside of the bedroom, whether they have a partner or not, eliciting strange looks from everybody around them.

Subtrope of Fetish, and usually an opportunity for some Fanservice. Sometimes used to show that Fetishes Are Weird. Often overlaps with Comic Role Play. Compare and contrast Power Dynamics Kink, when some real-life power dynamic (teacher and student, master and slave, mage and muggle, etc.) serves as the erotic "turn-on". Contrast Cowboys and Indians, The Dreaded Pretend Tea-Party, Playing Doctor, and Playing House for the more innocent, childish role plays. Usually has nothing to do with Role-Playing Game. One could consider this a sexy version of LARPing.

Many people engage in this in real life, but we really don't need to hear those details, so No Real Life Examples, Please!

---

I'll be the naughty examples list, and you'll be the lonely troper with too much free time on their hands:

Anime & Manga

• Played with in chapter 3 of Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says. Rookie hentai Sequential Artist Toda and her editor Tanaka go to an Amusement Park to take reference photos of the inside of the Ferris wheel car, where Toda's characters have sex. Toda goes so far as to re-enact the scene with Tanaka, partially stripping and climbing on top of her for a photo. It causes the workers to wonder if the two actually did have sex.
• Martian Successor Nadesico: Megumi asks Akito to join her in the ships Holodeck, where she has loaded a program for a high-school setting. She also conveniently tweaked the settings to make sure she had an impractically short skirt, and then attempted to engage in a bit of roleplay, clearly hoping to lead to this trope. Akito, however, isn't up for it and tries to stave off her efforts in character by saying they're both too young.

Comic Books

• One Batman comic features an amnesiac Batman (having fallen out of a window) trying and failing to stop crime, being easily taken out by gang members who comment on his potbelly and lack of skill... and then the real Batman shows up. It turns out the first one was role-playing a Rescue Romance scenario with his wife and fell out the window. Batman requests that the next time they do this, they go with a Superman costume instead.
• The Ultimates: After he's kicked out of the Avengers for abusing the Wasp, Henry Pym is forced to join the C-list Defenders team. He gets into a brief relationship with Valkyrie, who has a fetish for making him cosplay as Thor.

Fan Works

• There are some strong shades with this in "Spider-Man's Bathtime Lifeguard Love", where MJ is pretending to be Peter's lifeguard while he's taking a bath.

Films - Live-Action

• In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, this turns out to be the relationship Etta and Sundance have; when she first comes home, Sundance is waiting for her, and he forces her to strip at gunpoint, but it turns out this is a game they play, which Etta reveals when she complains Sundance is always late.
• Don't Look: When Nicole and Alex go to Kelley's and Sherri Baby's place, they catch them partaking in... some kind of bondage fantasy role-playing, with Kelley wearing bunny ears, and Sherri Baby as a topless cowgirl.
• In A History of Violence, the first time we're shown Tom and Edie having sex, she dresses up as a cheerleader, and pretends she and Tom are sneaking a night out without their parents knowing, which is presented as the kind of fun thing they do to make their relationship so good. The second time we see them have sex, after Edie finds out who Tom really is, things take a much darker turn.
• Kagi: The first time that Anzai has sex with his wife while she's drunk and semiconscious, it's implied to be Dude Shes In A Coma, complete with her calling out a different name. But it's eventually revealed to be some deeply unhealthy role play, as she keeps passing out "drunk" in the tub, he keeps taking her to bed, and she keeps calling the other man's name (among other things Anzai has a cuckold fetish).
• In The Producers, we are introduced to Max Bialystock as he flirts with a Dirty Old Woman client (known only as "Hold Me, Touch Me") who wants him to play such games as "the innocent milkmaid and the naughty stableboy" and "the contessa and the chauffeur."
  "Hold Me, Touch Me": And after that we'll play "The Abduction and Cruel Rape of Lucretia" ... And I'll play Lucretia.
  Max: And I'll be Rape!
• Rat Race: Harold, the casino owner's personal secretary, invites a prostitute and presents her with a rather creative proposal. After she names a price for this particular "date", it turns out that Donald Sinclair and his clients were all placing bets on it.
  Vicki: So Harry, what can I do for you?
  Harold Grisham: Okay... here's what I want. First we both get naked.
  Vicki: So far so good.
  Harold Grisham: Except... we're both wearing sailor hats. Then we get into a jacuzzi filled with Pepto-Bismol, I clip your toenails, and you shave my buttocks.
  Vicki: Pardon me?
  Harold Grisham: Naked, Jacuzzi, Pepto-Bismol, toenails, shave my buttocks. How much would that cost?
  Vicki: Harry, you have quite an imagination.

Literature

• A Dance with Dragons: During Asha's sex scene with her lover Qarl, he's rough with her, shoving her on the bed at knifepoint and ripping her clothes off, while she puts up a bit of a fight and insults him, giving the initial impression he's forcing himself on her. However, it quickly becomes clear they're actually role-playing him taking her by force and she's an enthusiastic participant, with the couple being all lovey-dovey with each other afterwards and Asha thinking how she would gladly marry him if he weren't lowborn. It overlaps with Power Dynamics Kink, as Asha is a higher-ranking noblewoman and Qarl's captain but enjoys letting him dominate her in the bedroom.
• Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation: Mo Dao Zu Shi: In the extras, Wei Wuxian really likes to get creative like teasing Lan Wangji with rape fantasies during sex. His husband usually follows his lead, though is not interested if he's not the one on top.
  Lan Wangji: What do you want me to do?
  Wei Wuxian: When I hold you down, you're gonna push me and not let me get on top of you, and squeeze your legs together and struggle as hard as you can, at the same time scream for help.
  Lan Wangji: Making noise is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.
  Wei Wuxian: Then you can call for help lightly. And also, when I rip your clothes apart, you should try your best to resist and protect your chest.

Live-Action TV

• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Happens between Sheldon and Amy when the girls are invited to Dungeons & Dragons night with Howard as the Dungeon Master. The others find it hilarious to draw the normally stoic Sheldon out of his comfort zone by having him and Amy's characters act out an intimate moment. It's Amy, however, who finds this most upsetting, not liking that her peer group views her relationship with Sheldon as some fantastical joke. Ultimately Sheldon goes to comfort Amy, and the two engage in a little private role-playing session, away from their friends' prying eyes. Amy finds this much more acceptable. When the girls get Disney Princess makeovers both Leonard and Howard are very keen to play the role of Prince Charming (Sheldon not so much). Penny also plays a sexy scientist for Leonard simply by using a pair of glasses and Amy dresses as a schoolgirl for Sheldon in the hope of another spanking. Bernadette also informs Penny that she and Howard play a game where he wears his astronaut outfit and she assumes the role of a lonely Russian cosmonaut and also a sexy cardiologist.
  • Sheldon is hosting Dr. Elizabeth Plimpton. She turns out to be a voracious sexaholic, as she first seduces Leonard. Later, she's at Raj's place, and she suggests a scenario where the guys pretend to be from various businesses, and she doesn't have the money to pay any of them. The guys consider going along with it until Leonard points out that they'd all be naked in front of each other. Howard and Leonard make their escape by claiming they're going out to come back in and better set the mood. Raj, however, decides to just go for it once his pals are gone.
  • Stuart confides in the boys that his girlfriend likes to dress as Wonder Woman and say "Who wants a ride in my invisible plane?"
• The Boys (2019). Superhero Popclaw is behind on the rent, but her landlord is a huge fan so she roleplays that her landlord is a thief and she's going to sit on his face until the cops arrive. Unfortunately she's high on Super Serum and crushes his head with her thighs during her orgasm.
• Breaking Bad: In the first minisode, Marie cuffs Hank to the bed and shows up in a sexy policewoman's uniform. It goes well at first until Hank (who is a DEA agent in real life) gets caught up in making sure her arrest details are right, then suggests switching to a "terrorist and interrogator" scenario. A frustrated Marie leaves him cuffed and storms out.
  Marie Schrader: Nice goddamn Valentine's Day this turned out to be!
• Broad City: In the first episode, Abbi and Ilana accept a Craigslist request to clean a man's apartment in their underwear for money. The man dresses and speaks like a baby (diaper included). He refuses to pay them, insisting he's "just a baby," so they destroy his apartment and steal his alcohol, hat, and fur coat because babies also don't drink or wear fur. As soon as they leave, he answers his phone and speaks like a normal businessman, implying the "baby" thing was just part of his strange fetish.
• The Brittas Empire: It's revealed in "At the Double" that ever since he returned from the dead several episodes prior, Brittas has not noticed Helen that much on a sexual level. When she mentions this to Penny, she suggests spicing up the sex life through the use of costumed role-play. Naturally, when Brittas' Identical Stranger Vlad comes to the centre, Helen thinks he's putting on an Indiana Jones getup for the purpose of sexual role-play and prepares herself to have sex with him until Brittas shows up. She later repeats this mistake with a bear that had gone loose in the centre.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • A very squicky example in "M.E. Time," when Jake hooks up with a hot medical examiner who's a little too enthusiastic about her work. It's never stated if she does anything to the bodies in the morgue, but she does have Jake pretend to be a corpse during sex. Amy and Rosa are revolted, and Jake later declares Let Us Never Speak of This Again.
    Rossi: [wearing her stethoscope and very little else] Oh, what do we have here?
    Jake: [laying sprawled on the floor] A 34-year-old Caucasian male who is dead. Very dead.
    Rossi: Mmm. Cause of death?
    Jake: Initial assessment, blunt force trauma.
    Rossi: But what do I find when I probe a little farther?
    Jake: Bruising around the neck, and ocean water in the lungs.
    Rossi: Ooh, how long have you been dead, body?
    Jake: Four days.
    Rossi: [shaking her head] Gross. Bloating, odors.
    Jake: Oh, uh... 24 hours.
    Rossi: Perfect.
  • On their honeymoon, Jake and Amy try some role-play, with Jake dressing up as the creator of the Dewey decimal system, which really gets Amy going, and her dressing up as the love interest from Jake's all-time favorite movie, Die Hard. While they both find the costumes extremely sexy, they think keeping in-character is exhausting and more trouble than it's worth, and decide to just skip to the part where they get naked.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • In "Crush", Spike gets his vampire girlfriend Harmony to dress up as The Slayer for some roleplay and roll-in-the-hay. In "All The Way" Anya comments that Xander sometimes dresses up like a fireman or pirate for her and she as a shepherdess and Charlie's Angel for him.
  • Buffy also promises Riley "outfits" in "The Real Me" for taking care of Dawn. In "Bad Girls" Faith recounts dressing as a cheerleader, nurse and schoolgirl for her ex-lover(s) who liked to whip her, having previously informed Angel in "Consequences" that "Safety words are for wusses!".
  • In "Dopplegangland" Willow jokes that she and Oz dress up and play "Mistress of Pain" every night sending the other Scoobies into a "Scary visual place", Oz later commenting that what really impresses him in a girl involves a feather boa and the theme from "A Summer Place".
  • Subverted in the episode "Killed by Death". Willow mentions that she and Xander used to play Dr. Xander clarifies that Willow actually played as a Dr, diagnosing him with diseases and injuries. Willow: "Wrong? Why? How did you play doctor?"
• Castle: In "Vampire Weekend", Ryan tells how he once dated a girl who was into vampire LARPing but they broke up.
  Esposito: What happened, did the relationship suck? [grins at Castle]
  Ryan: Deal-breaker for me, she wanted to have sex in a coffin. I'm... open-minded. I'm not that open-minded.
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: At the end of the episode "When Do I Get to Spend Time with Josh?" Rebecca role-plays with Josh where she chases him around while holding a pen. What Josh doesn't know is that Rebecca had chased her new boss Nathaniel around the office with a pen earlier that day, foreshadowing that Rebecca is developing feelings for him that affect her relationship with Josh.
• Criminal Minds:
  • "Pleasure is my Business" had a High-Class Call Girl killing off her clients. She's introduced in lingerie and a cowboy hat, apparently engaging in themed roleplay, before her victim's poison kicks in and she drops the playfulness and the accent.
  • An episode featured an unsub with a cuckold fantasy, forcing married victims to sleep together before stepping in to rape the wife to "prove he does it better." Turns out it was his favorite consensual roleplay scenario with his wife until one of the lovers he picked for her got her pregnant.
  • "Pariahville," set in a planned community of sex offenders, has a woman killed in a cheerleading outfit. Both her husband and her killer had a fetish for cheerleader roleplay. The killer then opts to go for actual high school cheerleaders and forces one victim to go through her routine before killing her.
• CSI-verse: Sexual roleplaying going horribly wrong (and by which we mean "someone gets killed") is an occasional Subculture of the Week focus. To provide some examples:
  • CSI:
    • The dead body of the episode "Fur and Loathing" was a Furry Fandom roleplayer who got poisoned with Ipecac by a crazy jealous guy in a "yiffing" orgy taking place backstage in a convention (with everybody in animal outfits and thus acting animalistic), then dumped by his girlfriend (who thought he was drunk) on the side of a backroad, and then accidentally shot by a farmer who confused him with a coyote.
    • In the episode "Unleashed", the victim was a woman who did "human pet" role-playing with her psychiatrist and a Nosy Neighbor, assuming that it was some kind of spousal abuse, performed a bumbling "rescue" that ended with the roleplayer accidentally tossed off the neighbor's car as it was doing 60 and eaten by a mountain lion.
  • CSI: Miami:
    • In the episode "Extreme", the investigation on the death of a rich teen girl leads to the investigators discovering an "extreme" roleplaying company that specialized in fake kidnappings with the idea of getting an adrenaline rush of going through the motions of a hostage thriller (this was done with full consent of all parties and things ending on the couple doing "rescue sex" was seen as just a natural result). Unfortunately, mid-rescue sex, the girl's boyfriend (already a crazy adrenaline junkie as it is) decided to see how it felt to murder someone and suffocated her.
  • CSI: NY:
    • There's a "rescue sex" example in the Big Apple as well. A woman who left her "boring" husband gets her new lover to fake-kidnap & fake-rape her for the excitement. Unbeknownst to them, her ex spies on them sees the "rape" happening, rushes in & kills the guy. The woman gets so turned on by his heroism, that she immediately has sex with him, too, then helps cover up the crime.
    • One of the dog owners at the dog show in "Recycling" has a dog fetish. She likes for her and her partners to pretend to be dogs when they have sex, even to the point of having one of them bite her on the thigh during the act. She lets her real dog watch, too.
• Doctor Who: Implied in "A Christmas Carol", where Amy and Rory emerge out of the Honeymoon suite wearing their police officer and Roman Centurion costumes respectively. When the Doctor asks why, they explain that they were having "fun" in the suite.
• Frasier:
  • "A Midwinter Night's Dream" has Niles trying out sexual roleplay as a means of spicing up his relationship with Maris again - with said attempt involving Niles hiding in a closet (naked except for a suggestively-placed eyepatch) and a treasure map meant to lead Maris to his hiding place. Unfortunately for Niles, one of the maids accidentally finds him in the closet, and after the maid freaks out, Maris finds them, immediately assumes the worst, and kicks Niles out. In the same episode Roz tells Frasier how she and one of her boyfriends did the "go to a bar and pretend you don't know each other" roleplay. When they tried it a second time the boyfriend got carried away and went home with another woman.
  • In "Don’t Go Breaking My Heart", Niles is worried about the results of his cardiology exam, and Daphne suggests he get a second opinion with "a house call from Nurse Naughty." (In a later scene we see that this does indeed involve her wearing a Naughty Nurse Outfit.)
• Friends: In "The One with the Princess Leia Fantasy", Ross reveals to Rachel that he has fantasies of the scene from Return of the Jedi with Princess Leia in a gold bikini, and they end up attempting to role-play it, with Rachel dressed up like Leia. Unfortunately, Ross imagines his mother wearing it instead, screwing up the fantasy for them.
  • Ross also dresses up as a naval officer for Rachel and Monica appears turned on when Chandler dresses up as Santa Claus for Christmas, assuring him her father never wore the same outfit (as they were Jewish).
• The Golden Girls:
  • Implied. In one episode, Dorothy puts out an ad for a freelancer position, but Rose accidentally sends it to the personals column, prompting strange men to arrive at Dorothy's house as she said she'd do anything for eight dollars. The first man just asks Dorothy to refer to him as "Toto" for the time being, implying some strange fetish for The Wizard of Oz role-play.
  • Subverted in "Rose: Portrait of a Woman" when Rose describes how she and Miles once began to make love, but due to the radio setting off their Clapper lights, Miles started pretending to be King Kong and Rose pretended to be Godzilla. They "wrestled" and "got all sweaty," but never actually got around to having sex.
  Blanche: If you didn't make love, what did you do?
  Rose: Destroyed Tokyo.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • "Everything Must Go" has Marshall suggesting Lily "sell her stuff" (as in, her possessions) to help pay for renovating their apartment. Lily thinks he's referring to prostitution and tells him, "Baby, that's just a game we play in the bedroom."
  • While helping Marshall and Lily sort out their stuff as they are moving to Italy, Ted finds a gorilla suit and a blonde wig and asks them if they ever use them last year. Cue the flashback scene where Lily is wearing the gorilla suit and Marshall is tied up in bed wearing the blonde wig and calling Lily "Queen Kong" in a high pitched voice. Back at present, the two deny ever using them.
  • When Barney recounts a story of him seducing a beautiful female motorcycle cop who has stopped him for speeding Marshall comments that his tale is such a porn chiche that he and Lily have played it out themselves.
  • In "The Ashtray," Marshall panics about Lily stealing an expensive ashtray from the Captain, noting that, despite roleplaying conjugal visits in the bedroom, he doesn't want one of them to actually be in prison.
• In Inside No. 9 episode "To Have and to Hold", the couple engages in role plays to get the husband's lions up again. In one scene the wife slips into a Naughty Nurse Outfit and starts massaging him in pivotal areas. It doesn't work. There is a dark twist later revealing that the man's impotence is caused by him routinely engaging in sex with a female sex slave he keeps in a Secret Room behind the basement.
• Las Vegas: many guests engage in living out their fantasies at the Montecito but Danny and Delinda are also fans, indulging in games such as "The desperate job applicant and the mean boss" and "The helpless patient and the naughty night nurse". They decide to keep the French maid uniform Delinda dons for an undercover role for Valentine's day and take the Santa Claus outfit from the casino's Christmas grotto home for the night. Sam also informs Delinda that she likes to play the naughty schoolgirl.
• Lucifer: Detective Chloe Decker once sneaks into Lucifer's private quarters to investigate him and finds a strange woman tied up in his bed. The woman is annoyed at the "rescue", assuming Lucifer unilaterally invited Chloe to join their scene.
• Married... with Children: Marcy and Jefferson role-play so much, they start looking for weirder and weirder scenarios, eventually sneaking into Al and Peg's house while they were out of town and spending the weekend pretending to be them.
  Marcy: Who would've ever thought it would be fun to pretend to be them?
  Jefferson: I'm starting to understand why they're still together.
• M*A*S*H: Mentioned in an episode where Margaret decides to chase a promotion by making her nurses the most efficient unit in the Army; she's crestfallen when the general she tries to impress only wants to transfer her to his command for some games of "escaped convict and the warden's wife."
• Modern Family: Phil and Claire's preferred role-play characters of Clive and Julianna become a Running Gag throughout the series, with them getting into character during multiple Valentine's Day episodes. One Valentine's Day, they get a hotel room and decide to role-play as strangers cheating on their spouses. They get so into it that Claire even removes her dress and underwear under her coat as foreplay... which leads to problems when she gets her coat stuck in an escalator.
• One of John and Jane's targets in Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024) is into puppy play. They briefly go along with it to get him alone and close enough to inject with truth serum.
• Parks and Recreation: Implied. April and Andy enjoy dressing up as a rich widow with a terrible secret, Janet Snakehole, and FBI agent Burt Macklin for fun, and get extremely into character. Most of what we see is basically just two free-spirited adults playing pretend, but it's implied a few times that they also find it hot, with the characters having Foe Romance Subtext because April and Andy are extremely Happily Married.
  Andy-as-Macklin: I know you boosted those paintings.
  April-as-Janet: Maybe it was me, but I'll never tell you where they are. And you'll never have my body, either! [runs away]
• Room 104: One episode has a pizza boy caught up in a strange psychosexual game between an apparently unstable man and his wife... except it turns out to be their audition for a role-playing escort service run by the "pizza boy," who is impressed by their performance.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • Parodied in a recurring sketch where a couple tries to spice up their sex life by talking dirty and role-playing. However, the girlfriend keeps taking the scenarios to weird places and turning off her boyfriend, such as by role-playing as a dirty third grader or pretending to be the Elephant Man.
    Boyfriend: I want you.
    Girlfriend: Yeah you do, you little bitch.
    Boyfriend: Ooh, you're so mean to me.
    Girlfriend: Because you're my little brother, bitch! Now scram!
    Boyfriend: What?
  • A parody of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" has Daddy watching Mommy and Santa Claus kiss as part of a cuckoldry fetish, and then when Santa tries to leave, Mommy and Daddy choke Santa out. Luckily, this is all part of an elaborate role-play they organized on Craigslist.
• Subverted in Scream Queens (2015). When they first met, Pete had a huge crush on Chanel, and she took him back to the sorority house for sex. She told him that her kink was him dressing up and acting like a Native American warrior, so he ran into the room naked and acting like a fool... in front of the other Chanels, because the whole thing was just a scheme to humiliate him, and she wasn't interested in the role-play at all.
• Scrubs: Dr Eliot Reed appears to be a big fan of this. When her boyfriend Sean is too shy to voice his fantasies she immediately suggests they play the naughty schoolgirl and the stern headmaster, commenting they need to buy her a schoolgirl uniform as soon as possible as she has work in the morning. With Keith Dudemeister she acts out the tale of an orchard owner who catches a Mexican apple thief, sometimes employing JD in the role of a mute peasant who witnessed the crime. She also describes to JD a game she and Keith play where she is a lesbian wrestling coach and he the hunky athlete who "turns" her.
• SpinCity: Caitlin tries to seduce Mike by using a "sexy janitor" fantasy he had previously outlined to her.
• Succession: Confronted by his girlfriend Tabitha over their lack of a sex life, Roman gets her to pretend to be a corpse while they have sex. He's turned off because she's too active and not convincingly dead enough.
• 30 Rock: Liz Lemon starts an affair with one of her cast members, Danny, realising that as chief writer /producer on the show she can create sketches where he's dressed as her sexual fantasies (Grizzly Adams and a California Highway Patrol motorcycle cop) and act out the scenarios later.
• Trailer Park Boys: Randy and Mr. Lahey are Forced Out of the Closet when they have to evacuate Lahey's trailer in the middle of some activities involving Indiana Jones and skimpy bumblebee costumes. Lahey tries to pass it off as a rehearsal for a play, but Randy confirms that they're in a relationship.
  Randy: We weren't "rehearsing for a play"... It's not Halloween. We're not "doing community theatre". We're consenting adults, and what we do in the privacy of our own home is fine, Mr. Lahey.
• Vous Les Femmes has a recurring gag where Judith Siboni thinks of ever new scenarios to get her husband interested in sex. The problem is that she gets so wrapped up in the role that she loses sight of the reason why she is role-playing in the first place. Dressed as a French Maid, she is distracted by a stubborn stain in the carpet and ignores her husband to get the cleaning kit out. Dressed as a stern teacher, she delivers a long and tedious classroom lesson in an abstract academic subject.
• Played for laughs in the sitcom Whitney, when Whitney and her boyfriend try to engage in some sexy nurse/patient roleplay. Whitney dresses up in a sexy nurse outfit... and then makes her boyfriend fill out a voluminous set of paperwork. He's particularly perplexed when some of the paperwork asks for his work address.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Gary Gulman has a routine where he talks about his attempts at roleplaying a Teacher/Student Romance with his girlfriend, with him taking the role of a "firm but fair" professor and her being a student who wants to sleep with him to get better grades. He gets Lost in Character and ends up more interested in helping her pass his class than sleeping with her.

Theatre

• Characters Welcome has a bit where a feminist girlfriend tries to role-play with her boyfriend, but sets up scenarios that put the woman in power. For example, he's the principal and she's a student, but she's 19 and he's very young, and she's in the principal's office because she burned down the gym for not letting her play basketball. In another scenario, he's a Russian general and she's the American spy who uses sex to steal government secrets.

Video Games

• KGB: One of the options for paid sex with Natasha is having Maksim pretend to be a sick patient and her be the nurse, despite the situation taking place in a hotel room.
• Shantae: Risky's Revenge: After getting the second Magic Seal, the child NPC in the port layer of Scuttle Town will tell Shantae: "My mom dressed up as the pirate lady for dad. But I'm not allowed to say such things".
• In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt can encounter a guard threatening a strumpet while wandering around Novigrad. Geralt can leave them alone and this will continue, or he can intervene by threatening the guard or using Axii on him. In any case, the strumpet angrily inform Geralt that this was intimate role-play purely to get them both in the mood, which Geralt has now thoroughly ruined.

Webcomics

• Cyanide and Happiness often parodies this trope:
  • Parodied in a strip where a man named Charlie wants to try role-playing with his wife... but he wants to bring in a woman named Sophie to role-play as his wife.
    Charlie: C'mon, Sophie's career really needs this.
  • In one strip, a woman role-plays as a nurse with her lover being her patient. She promises to make him feel "all better," and he asks if he has insurance. She assures him, "Full coverage." This is enough to make him climax.
  • A woman wants her lover to role-play as a bus driver who slows the bus down to a stop... because it's the only way she can get off.
  • One woman has her husband act out her ideal fantasy: he role-plays as a doctor telling her that her husband is dead.
  • A man tells his girlfriend to act out the scene from Return of the Jedi with Leia and Jabba the Hutt. Much to his apparent pleasure, instead of dressing up in Leia's gold bikini, she dresses up as Jabba.
• Discussed in El Goonish Shive, when Elliot and Sarah mention "We're going to be one of those couples with a cache of costumes, aren't we?"
• This is the focus of several Sorry to Interrupt moments in Fanboys, with Paul walking in on Lenny and Sylvia as Link and Midna, Banjo and Kazooie, etc. Then comes the reversal...
• Kevin & Kell: Rudy walks in on his parents playing Little Red Riding Hood.

Web Videos

• The Nostalgia Critic: In his review of The Room (2003), the Critic jokes about Johnny and Lisa engaging in this during one of the movie's many sex scenes.
  Critic: [as Johnny] Let's roleplay. You be Sonya Blade and I'll be a terrible actor.

Western Animation

• Big Mouth:
  • When Jay has sex with his pillow, he pretends to be a famous 40-year-old magician. This causes confusion when his pillow turns out to be alive, she gets pregnant, and she actually thinks Jay is forty instead of thirteen. He also pretends to be 40 when hooking up with Jessi, which creeps her out since she's also thirteen, which makes Jay look like he's role-playing as a pedophile.
  • In "Steve the Virgin," Steve tells Jenna that he's a virgin, but she thinks he's just "playing games" and that he wants her to pretend to teach him. Steve doesn't get that she's playing and thinks she really is teaching him (since he genuinely needs someone to teach him how to have sex).
• Family Guy:
  • In "Sibling Rivalry", Lois blames a Pregnancy Scare on when she and Peter tried role-playing:
    Lois: [dressed in a schoolgirl's uniform] Oh, I need a spankin'. I'm a bad, bad girl.
    Peter: I'm a paladin with 18 charisma and 97 hit points. I can use my helm of disintegration and do one D4 damage as my half-elf mage wields his +5 holy avenger.
    Lois: Paladins can't use the helm of disintegration.
    Peter: Oh. Okay, then I'm a Black guy.
  • In "Prick Up Your Ears", Lois tries to start a role-playing scenario by donning in a Grimace costume, but Peter, who had just taken a pledge of abstinence, isn't up for it.
    Lois: Here comes Grimace! Ya got some burgers I can steal, huh?
    Peter: [not amused] Lois, the Hamburgler steals hamburgers. Grimace is Ronald McDonald's retarded friend.
  • In "Boopa-Dee Bappa-Dee," Peter mentions how he and Lois played a game of "Mysterious Stranger" in bed, in which Peter slept with another woman while Lois watched from the shadows.
• Human Resources:
  • In "Rutgers is for Lovers," Maury and Connie try role-playing in the bedroom to spice up their boring relationship. Maury dresses as a cowboy (though his character actually works at a Dairy Queen) named Bogart Saint-Humphrey while Connie dresses as a spy named Cleopatra Dickins, looking for a serial killer who's been "murdering pussy." They act this scenario out in the local bar, but Connie has to break character to help a very drunk Sonya. Unfortunately, Maury refuses to break character.
  • In "International Creature Convention," Lionel begins an affair with another Shame Wizard who wants him to kill her abusive husband. Lionel's murder attempt fails and he's knocked out. When he wakes up, he learns that he's gotten caught up in a cuckoldry role-play scenario between the Shame Wizard couple. He goes along with it, even shooting the husband again... except this time he wasn't wearing his bulletproof vest, so Lionel actually kills him.
• Inside Job: In "Ghost Protocol", Glenn reveals that he once ghosted Ann Coulter because "She made me role-play as a liberal just so she could drink my tears."
• Implied, in a G-rated manner, in the Phineas and Ferb Halloween Episode "Druselsteinoween". Linda dresses in a nurse's outfit and Lawrence dresses as a gorilla who chases her around the house.
• Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon": At the end of "Onward and Upward," Ren dresses up in a baseball uniform and asks Stimpy if he's ready for a "speedball." Stimpy gets very excited (with his nose swelling up) and turns around, revealing a baseball glove attached to his butt. Ren throws the ball right into the glove, knocking Stimpy into bed, which leads to the two making love. This is a Call-Back to an early discussion they had about Stimpy being the "catcher" while Ren is the "pitcher."
• The Simpsons: In "Grandpa vs. Sexual Inadequacy," Homer and Marge get stuck sleeping in a utility room at a Love Hotel. Homer pitches that they could still make the most of it if he roleplays as a janitor and Marge roleplays as his wife, who has to live with him in the utility room.
• South Park:
  • At the end of "Informative Murder Porn," Randy and Sharon arouse each other by playing out murder fantasies on Minecraft.
  • In "Insecurity," Gerald pretends to be a UPS delivery man while having sex with Sheila. Unfortunately, Ike sees them from the doorway, and later draws a picture of his mom having sex with a UPS man, making everybody think an actual UPS man is having sex with Sheila, and that delivery men will have sex with their wives.
• The Venture Brothers: In "Fallen Arches", the Monarch, still wounded from his breakup with Dr. Girlfriend, hires a prostitute to dress and talk like Dr. Girlfriend does, Larynx Dissonance and all.

---