Pepper Sneeze

Gesundheit.

"I want to cover every inch of your gorgeous body with pepper, and then sneeze all over you!"

— General Melchett, Blackadder

When a character's nose is doused with black pepper, it causes the victim to explode in an exaggeratedly violent sneeze. The origin is uncertain, and although consuming amounts of pepper on food can make eyes water and cause sneezing, it probably has more to do with how recognizable a prop pepper shakers are.

There is some Truth in Television, as you actually can sneeze from inhaling pepper and other fine particulates, although if you directly inhale pepper you'd feel more like coughing than sneezing.

Often used in conjunction with the Ill-Timed Sneeze or the Sneeze of Doom. Sometimes Anti-Sneeze Finger is used to attempt to stop this sneeze.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Sansho-kun from Anpanman is a living pepper container (filled with sansho, a mild green peppercorn commonly sprinkled on barbecued eel). He's managed to weaponize using this by sprinkling his pepper onto Baikinman, leaving him sneezing for enough time to distract him from the other heroes.
• In Doraemon: Nobita's the Legend of the Sun King Doraemon and gang faces one of Ledina's minions, the Medicine Master, who specializes in using his illusions to fool the heroes into believing they're being attacked by gigantic monsters. But after locating the Medicine Master hiding on a tall ledge above them, Doraemon then puts his automatic antenna on a nearby stone hand, place a pepper shaker on it, and gave the controls to Suneo, the RC expert, who then makes the stone hand fly towards the Medicine Master and blast his face with pepper. Cue the villain sneezing uncontrollably before losing his footing and falling off a ledge. (This happens only in the anime adaptation, the manga uses a different tactic.)
• A filler scene in Dragon Ball has Krillin accidentally do this to Lunch, causing her violent alternate personality come out.
• The Great Mission to Save Princess Peach!: When caught by a Piranha Plant, Mario uses a pepper shaker to make it spit him out after sneezing.
• In episode 46 of Jewelpet Twinkle☆, Kaiya uses magic to create a big pepper sprinkler and use it to make Akari and Ruby sneeze. Akari and Ruby, who are pretending to be a cloud to catch a sleeping Flora, wind up plummeting to the ground after sneezing.
• Usopp from One Piece has his Pepper Star, which explodes into a huge cloud of pepper causing the enemy to sneeze. Usually goes hand-in-hand with his Caltrops Hell.
• Ranma is briefly cursed in one chapter/episode of Ranma ½ to hug anyone who sneezes. Naturally, Shampoo follows him home with a shaker of black pepper. Hilarity Ensues when Akane develops a cold in the same episode.
• At the beginning of The Testament of Sister New Devil, Basara rescues Mio from a group of delinquents and uses pepper to cover their escape, causing them to sneeze.
• In To Love Ru, Ren/Run carries pepper to fling at his/her nose to change gender when the need arises. First seen when, upon learning that sneezing is the Ren/Run's transformation trigger, Lala chases Ren with a pepper shaker trying to get Run to come out and play.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio adventure Doctor Who and the Pirates, the Sixth Doctor attempts to hide from a bloodthirsty band of pirates in what he thinks is an empty barrel. However, when he gets the lid off, he finds the barrel is full of pepper, which causes him to sneeze and reveals his presence to the pirates.

Comic Books

• In the Tintin book King Ottokar's Sceptre, while stealing food, Tintin throws pepper around on the ground behind him as he runs to put tracking dogs off his scent, making them and their handlers sneeze.
• In the comic book variation of the Wacky Races story "Free Wheeling to Wheeling" (Gold Key #3, May 1971), the racers have to tread carefully through a canyon where giant boulders are delicately balanced. Dick Dastardly sends Muttley up in a balloon to sprinkle pepper on the other racers so they'll sneeze and disrupt the boulders' balance. Muttley lets the canister of pepper slip out and it lands on Dastardly. You can guess what happens next.

Fan Works

• Anger Management: Invoked when Lynn deliberately puts too much pepper on her food so she'll sneeze on Lincoln.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager parody "The Killer Dame", Neelix (brainwashed by the Hirogen into believing he's a Gestapo agent) tortures Harry Kim by pouring black pepper into his nose till he sneezes.

Film — Animation

• In Yellow Submarine, loose pepper causes the Headlands to sneeze the Beatles and Jeremy into the Sea of Holes.

Film — Live-Action

• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: Caractacus sneezes from the pepper while making breakfast during the song "You Two."
• Hot Shots! Part Deux: Topper Harley is trying to get some keys hanging above a sleeping guard's head using a broom handle. Unfortunately, he keeps hitting everything except the keys, including several clattering things on the table, a radio (which switches to rock music, almost rousing the guard before turning it back to "Rock-a-Bye Baby") the guard himself (repeatedly), a shaker of pepper, and a fan (turning the broom handle to a stake afterward). The guard sleeps soundly through all this, until Topper gets the keys, at which point a small mouse wanders by on the desk, sniffs the pepper, and lets out a barely audible, high-pitched sneeze. The guard wakes up with a start, and Hilarity Ensues.
• In Laurel and Hardy vehicle Robinson Crusoeland, Cherie dangles a flower under the nose of the guard...one that has been dosed with pepper. When he sneezes she clocks him on the back of the head, and thus she is able to free Stan and Ollie.

Gamebooks

• Invaders from the Big Screen have one Primate Versus Reptile scenario where you come across a giant ape battling a huge serpent. You can choose to help the ape by grabbing some pepper plants and dousing it's contents on one of the combatants. Make the ape sneeze, the subsequent impact will rip the snake into half and freeing the simian. Try it on the snake and it doesn't work - the book even lampshades where you wonder "do snakes even sneeze"?

Jokes

Bob: I know a woman who uncontrollably orgasms every time she sneezes.

Alice: Oh dear. How debilitating. What is she taking for it?

Bob: Pepper!

Literature

• Alice in Wonderland features a scene with the Duchess, a sneezing boy, pepper and the verse: "Speak roughly to your little boy / And beat him when he sneezes. / He only does it to annoy / Because he knows it teases."
• Played for laughs in Shel Silverstein's poem "Always Sprinkle Pepper". Why should you always sprinkle pepper in your hair? Because if a hag tries to eat you, when she sniffs your head to see if you smell good, she'll sneeze because of the pepper, decide you're not worth it, and let you go.
• In Karma Wilson's picture book Bear Snores On, the titular Bear sleeps as other forest animals take shelter from the snow and have a party in his lair. But then the pepper from the stew they're making causes him to sneeze himself awake.
• Once word gets out in Ankh-Morpork that there's a werewolf on the Watch, the Discworld's criminals start carrying pepper bombs to put her off the scent just in case.
• In the Father Brown story "The Salad of Colonel Cray", a key clue to the mystery is some unexplained sneezes heard near the scene of the crime. It is eventually explained that the criminal sneezed when throwing away to the dustbin the pepper that could have been used to counter the action of the poison he was planning to use.
• In The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, the titular girl's first mistake (besides falling down earlier) is accidentally grabbing a pepper shaker to juggle instead of a salt shaker. When juggling the shaker, her pet hamster Hubert, and a water balloon, the pepper makes Humbert sneeze, which startles him into grabbing, and so popping, the water balloon.
• Discussed in How to Eat Fried Worms. Joe tells Alan how fun it would be to pepper a worm that Billy's going to eat. The sneezing fit would render Billy unable to finish the worm. Ultimately, they don't go through with it.
• In The Littles whenever the title family has to go anywhere armed the middle child, Lucy, carries a pepper shaker to cause this to happen to any creature that might attack them.
• John Taylor of the Nightside series has weaponized this trope to such a degree that he uses it against gangsters, sorcerers, supervillains and all other manner of Nightside riffraff. Never leave home without condiments.
• The Planeteers: In "The Brain Stealers of Mars", Rod Blake sneezes when exposed to pepper. This clues Ted Penton into the fact that he is the real Rod Blake, since he figures that the Voluntary Shapeshifting aliens couldn't have spontaneously imitated such a complicated reflex as sneezing.
• The Pusadian Series: In The Tritonian Ring, when an Evil Sorcerer is about to kill the hero and his servant with a summoned fire elemental, the servant throws a satchel of pepper in his face, causing him to sneeze uncontrollably, losing the required concentration and finding himself on the wrong end of the elemental's wrath.
• In The Riftwar Cycle novel The King's Buccaneer, Nakor and Anthony defeat the villain, an evil sorceress, by throwing pepper in her face and then hitting her with a sack of apples. They then run like hell.
• In The Scarlet Pimpernel, the eponymous hero sneaks some pepper into Chauvelin's snuff box; when Chauvelin sniffs it, he is incapacitated by the intense sneezing attack.
• In The Small Bachelor by P. G. Wodehouse, Officer Garroway finds himself unable to stop sneezing after Mrs. Waddington throws the contents of a pepperpot in his face.
• In Temeraire, guns that shoot pepper are used to keep dragons from getting too close to the ground during battles.

Live-Action TV

• Bassie & Adriaan: In "Het geheim van de schatkaart" (the secret of the treasure map), Bassie and Adriaan eventually find the treasure, but before they can open it the crooks also show up, force the two protagonists to back off, and open the treasure chest instead. Unfortuantely for them, the chest is filled with black pepper (which was still a very valuable spice in Europe back when the treasure was hidden), and it sends all three of them into a sneezing spree.
• Bear in the Big Blue House: In "Smellorama", when Bear describes the episode's subject of smells, he mentions that spicy smells like pepper make him sneeze. As this happens, an animated pepper shaker sprinkles pepper on his nose, causing him to sneeze.
• Blackadder. The mad General Melchett is shown rehearsing his pickup lines in the mirror, including the line; "Darling, I want to cover you in pepper and sneeze all over you!"
• Faerie Tale Theatre: In The Tale of The Frog Prince, when the castle chef is preparing to cook the frog's legs, he shakes salt and pepper onto him. The frog has a sneezing fit, which blows the pepper back at the chef, causing him to sneeze too.
• Mr. Bean smashed up some pepper with his hankie for a sandwich, and then, while using the same hankie as a bib, dropped his sandwich after sneezing.
• Referenced in Muppets Tonight, with Miss Piggy and Billy Crystal parodying When Harry Met Sally.... When Piggy demonstrates how a woman can fake a sneeze to get out of a date, the woman at the next table says "I'll have what she's having ... but with less pepper."
• In Mythbusters, they used pepper to test whether or not you can hold your eyes open while sneezing (and if there are any adverse effects of doing so).
  • A later episode has them using tobacco snuff instead, since pepper proved to be unreliable in producing sneezes. In case you're curious, they were testing how far/fast the spray from a sneeze can go.
• Used in Mystery Science Theater 3000, in the episode, Indestructible Man; during a host segment, Joel and the Bots hold their "Undersea Kingdom" parade. Gypsy sneezes when the Pepper Institute float (a giant pepper shaker) passes under her, causing Tom Servo to burst into flames.
• The second episode of Ultraman Taro has Kohtaro, with a young boy and a boy's puppy, being Swallowed Whole by the Monster of the Week, Live King. The ZAT managed to come up with a rescue plan by dumping a ton of pepper from atop their planes on the monster, causing Live King to sneeze out both Kohtaro, the child and the puppy.
• Referenced humourously in an episode of Wizards of Waverly Place. Zeke comes over to Harper and says that they should take the next step in their relationship (their First Kiss).
  Harper: Let me guess. You want to see if we can keep our eyes open while we sneeze? I'll get the pepper.

Toys

• Both Shopkins and The Grossery Gang, both blind-bag toys by Moose Toys, have characters that are self-sneezing pepper shakers. Shopkins has Peppe Pepper (pictured above), while The Grossery Gang has Snot N Pepper, a salt and pepper shaker pair where one's about to sneeze, while the other's already splattered with snot. The Grossery Gang also has Grot Pepper Sauce, a bottle of pepper sauce that has also already sneezed, splattered in snot as well.

Video Games

• In American McGee's Alice, the cannibalistic Dutchess uses a pepper grinder as her weapon. When defeated, she accidentally gets a faceful of pepper and sneezes with such force that her head bursts. In Alice: Madness Returns, the same pepper grinder becomes one of Alice's ranged weapons, also used to shoot pepper at the giant Pig Snouts scattered through the levels, making them sneeze to unlock secret paths and collectibles.
• BurgerTime has the player collect pepper doses, which could be used to temporarily stun the mooks chasing him, presumably as they were paralyzed by a sneezing fit.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: Conker jumps into the Uga Deity's nostrils where Conker shakes some pepper into its nose to make a sneeze happen.
• Cuphead: The final boss' second phase in "The Delicious Last Course" summons pepper shakers that sneeze projectiles.
• At the end of The Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush defeats LeChuck by making him sneeze with pepper, breathing fire onto a rope connected to a rum barrel, making it explode and trapping him under falling ice.
• In Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, after the battle with Genocide Jack results in her changing back into Toko, the Servant walks up and throws pepper in Toko's face. This is a bit of a problem, as Toko swaps personalities whenever she sneezes.
• The Beat 'em Up Die Hard Arcade (originally Dynamite Cop / Dynamite Deka in Japan) includes the occasional pepper shaker as a weapon. You shake it, a little cloud of pepper comes out, and anyone it reaches starts sneezing for a second or two, leaving them open to attack. Oh, and it deals about as much damage as a kick and can defeat an enemy, meaning the terrorists you're up against can sneeze themselves unconscious. Yeah, it's that kind of game.
• Death Road to Canada has an event where a character has to sneeze. One option is to make them open a bag of spicy crisps and take a big whiff off of that, whereupon they sneeze inside the bag and have to eat it. At least you get a morale increase.
• Freddi Fish 4: The Hogfish Rustlers of Briny Gulch features three spice dispensers that can be found in a boat in all versions. One of the spice dispensers contains pepper, and upon clicking on it, Luther will consume an entire mouthful of pepper, which causes him to sneeze and blow himself around. Freddi even blesses him the first time it happens. The version with the spice shaker allows you to carry some pepper with you. You can use it on Luther to make him release a slightly different-sounding sneeze. Besides saying the "Bless you" from when he first sneezed and a more emphatic "Bless YOU!" there's a chance Freddi will actually say "Gesundheit!" Oh, and Freddi herself sneezes from the pepper when you use it on her. She takes out the spice shaker and tries to open it, but has a little bit of trouble doing so. And when she finally pops the lid off, a cloud of pepper will emerge, causing her to sneeze and blow herself backwards. Luther will say either "Bless you!" "Gesundheit!" or "Wow, that was a good one!" The spice shaker, however, is actually important to this version of the game's plot. The only way to get rid of it is to go over to the mine where the blowfish is and use the pepper on him. After he puffs himself up, Freddi shakes some pepper onto his face, and just smelling the pepper is enough to make him sneeze and blow himself away.
  Freddi: Gee, I hope he's okay...
• In the Home Alone Licensed Game for the Sega Genesis, one of the homemade weapons Kevin can assemble is a pepper bazooka, which causes Harry and Marv to go into a sneezing fit if he uses it on them.
• One of the three ways to get out of Arnold in the The Magic School Bus explores the human body is this — the other two are sweat on Arnold's skin or a hot pepper in his mouth (to make him spit the bus out).
• La-Mulana has a puzzle involving using pepper to make a statue sneeze and give up its treasure.
• A major plot point for the third case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All. Acro wanted to kill Regina Berry (a lion tamer) because she'd put pepper on his brother's scarf, unintentionally causing a lion to sneeze when his brother had put his head inside the lion's mouth.
• Dr. Loboto from Psychonauts uses this to extract his victims' brains. Yes, that's right — pepper doesn't just make you sneeze, it makes you sneeze so hard your brain flies out of your head and hits the wall with a splat.
• In the unlockable Show Within a Show in Spongebob Squarepants Lights Camera Pants, this is how the villainous Sneaky Hermit is defeated: he has a handful of pepper thrown in his face, causing him to sneeze uncontrollably. In the console version, it's a Logical Weakness, as it causes the enormous tower of stolen items he's carrying to topple over, crushing him; in the PC version, it's more of a Weaksauce Weakness, as the exact manner in which it defeats him isn't shown.
• The first Streets of Rage has occasional shakers of pepper that you can find and toss at enemies, causing them to halt in place and go into a sneezing fit. They have a small area of effect, too, letting you affect multiple thugs at a time. They make a reapperance in the fan-made Bomber Games remake.
• Tomodachi Life: A dream in the prequel, Tomodachi Collection, lets you shake a giant bottle of pepper onto a Mii, causing them to sneeze.
• The Wizard Sniffer: If you shake the pepper shaker, everyone in the room will sneeze.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends:
  • Happens to Sniffles in "Tongue in Cheek". Except merely tasting pepper is enough to make him sneeze, as opposed to just smelling it.
  • "Letter Late Than Never" has Lumpy try to use a pepper grinder against a dangerous turtle (which kills him at the end of the episode), but all the pepper does is make Lumpy sneeze.

Webcomics

• In Commander Kitty, after CK ends up with Fluffy up his nose after a Teleporter Accident, Mittens employs this to get her out.
• In one El Goonish Shive strip, Magus briefly contemplated exploiting this trope to trick Ellen into sneezing in the hopes that she would then shoot Elliot with her Transformation Ray powers after he saw her accidentally use those powers on herself when sneezing. He then realizes how stupid this sounds, and abandons the plan.

Web Video

• In the video, "Workplace Safety", JonTron wondered if there is any truth to this trope or if old cartoons just made it up. So he decides to test it out by snorting pepper. He instantly regrets doing so, however it did not make him sneeze (at least not on-camera).
  Jon: All my... all my passages are burning up. It's a never-ending feeling of my inner world... on fire. This was dumb.

Western Animation

• In an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius Sheen does this to get himself and Jimmy out of Carl's body.
  Sheen: Like my dad always says: "When in doubt, break out the pepper!"
• One episode of Angela Anaconda was about the titular character getting pepper up her nose, causing it to itch. She doesn't sneeze the pepper back out until towards the end.
• In DFE's The Ant and the Aardvark short "Ants in the Pantry", the aardvark inhales a large amount of pepper and sneezes hard enough to go flying out of the house through a brick wall. When he sneezes again, he re-enters the house through the same hole.
• Classic Disney Shorts:
  • Happens in the Disney vignette "Mickey and the Beanstalk" when Willie the Giant sprinkles pepper on the sandwich Mickey is hiding inside, causing Mickey to blow his cover.
  • The short "The Simple Things" had this happen to a clam stuck in Pluto's mouth.
• Craig of the Creek: In "Too Many Treasures", Craig helps a kid with his head stuck in a tree branch by smearing lip balm around his head and then blows pepper at him to make him sneeze his way out.
• In two episodes of Darkwing Duck, pepper is used as a weapon against, as Gosalyn puts it, "those brain-sucking alien hats". The hats are sentient aliens that need to sit on someone's head if they want to use the host's body, and the only way to dislodge them is to make them sneeze; pepper is the quickest way. However, the second time around, the hats are prepared for pepper, using clothespins to block their noses. Hair oil is used instead to prevent the hats from grabbing on.
• Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: In "Stop That Pigeon" (part of episode 5 on the DVD set), the Vulture Squadron chased the pigeon with a pepper gun to make him sneeze, due to Klunk having built a sneeze-seeking missile. As usual, things don’t go to plan, and the Vulture Squadron find themselves on the receiving end of the pepper gun and sneeze-seeking missile.
• Doug: This kicks off the plot of "Doug on the Trail." When the Bluff Scouts are heading out on their camping trip, Doug carries both the navigational computer and a pepper mill, but the pepper makes him sneeze and he drops and breaks the computer. This forces Mr. Dink to leave the camp to go get the spare computer, leaving Roger in charge.
• In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy had Billy accidentally spill some salt at a diner and when he tried to throw some over his shoulder to prevent bad luck, he accidentally threw the pepper instead, causing everyone behind him to sneeze. This turns out to be important, as Billy's proceeding bad luck was brought upon by a "catastrophe snail" that went inside his head to give him nothing but bad luck. Billy would have sizzled it by throwing salt over his shoulder as it was entering his ear had he not panicked and picked up the pepper instead.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): He-Man used it in one episode. He was surrounded by many mirror reflections of Skeletor. In order to find the real one, He-Man sprinkled some special pepper around. The mirrors shattered, Skeletor remained.
• A Heckle and Jeckle cartoon had Heckle unscrewing the top of Chesty the bulldog's nose and pouring pepper in it to make him sneeze and make the various objects he was balancing come crashing to the ground.
• In Here Comes the Grump, the Grump's dragon has a sneezing problem. The trickster hero Terry uses pepper to trigger the dragon's allergies to slow down the Grump. Sneezes of Doom and Ash Faces result.
• House of Mouse: In the short "Donald's Shell Shots", Donald is tasked with taking a photo of Baby Shelby, who is tucked into his shell, and tries to get him out by pouring pepper into it. This causes Shelby to make a powerful sneeze that blows off Donald's feathers.
• In one episode of Invader Zim, a scientist (in a movie that GIR is watching) demonstrates an alien invader's weakness to germs by inhaling a handful of pepper and sneezing into a tube attached to the alien's holding tank. The alien immediately explodes.
• Used practically in Iron Man: The Animated Series: Julia uses pepper to make Hawkeye sneeze out Iron Man and Ultimo, who had been shrunken and were inside Hawkeye's body at the time.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes used it to get a child to drop his ice cream For the Evulz.
• In Laff-A-Lympics, Wally Gator uses black pepper to make the whale sneeze out the Yogi Yahooeys team so they can win the speadboat race in Acapulco.
• Little Bear: In "The Garden War", Little Bear uses some bellows filled with pepper in an attempt to flush out a mole that has been digging around in his garden and scaring No Feet. Unfortunately for them both, they ends up releasing so much pepper, that they themselves end up sneezing.
• Looney Tunes:
  • In the short "Bedevilled Rabbit," the Tasmanian Devil captures Bugs Bunny and prepares to cook him, trussing him up like a pig with an apple in his mouth, then shaking salt and pepper all over him. But the pepper makes Bugs sneeze the apple out of his mouth, which lets him talk to Taz and, of course, con him into setting him free.
  • In 1943's "Flop Goes the Weasel," a baby chick, thinking a thieving weasel is his mother, wants to play tag. He suggests salting his tail to catch him; he gives the weasel a canister of pepper which he tries to douse on the chick, but the chick accidentally turns on an electric fan which blows the pepper back at the weasel. The weasel spends the rest of the cartoon sneezing from the pepper.
  • In "Early to Bet," a cat is made to perform a series of penalties after losing to a bulldog at gin rummy. One is "The Gesundheit," where he is forced to chew some bubble gum, blow a huge bubble, then have pepper sprayed in his face so he'll sneeze and pop the bubble causing him to be covered in gum.
  • In "Porky's Hare Hunt," Happy Rabbit sprinkles pepper over the barrels of Porky's rifle, causing it to sneeze. It blows the rabbit's hiding place (a tree) as a result.
  • Viking Sam's elephant in "Prince Violent" (or "Prince Varmint," based on who aired it) has this happen. Sam is using him to fire boulders with his trunk at the castle Bugs is guarding. Bugs sprinkles pepper at the elephant which causes his next shot to go directly at Sam upon sneezing.
• Used in an episode of The Magic School Bus to get the bus out of Ralphie's nose.
• Although a handful of dust was the typical go to thing for a forced sneeze, pepper sneezes do come up in Monster by Mistake!.
• Madagascar: A Little Wild: In "Melman at the Movies", when the animals go to the movie theater to see Good Luck Truck, Melman tries his best not to sneeze. Unfortunately for him, a girl comes in with a pepper shaker to season her popcorn.
  Marty: Oh no! Is that pepper?
  Alex: Who brings their own seasoning?!
• In one episode of Muppet Babies (1984), "Journey to the Center of the Nursery," an Imagine Spot sees the kids forced by a villain to work in a "pepper mill," a parody of a salt mine that makes them all sneeze uncontrollably as they try to mine the pepper.
• In the Muppet Babies (2018) episode, "The Great Muppet Cook-off", when Piggy tries to make a meatball pizza better than the Swedish Chef's, she decides to add an entire shaker of pepper to it. Summer warns her that if she uses that much pepper, it will make everyone sneeze, but Piggy ignores her. Sure enough, Summer is right, as the pepper makes her, Gonzo, Fozzie, and Camilla sneeze.
• The Perils of Penelope Pitstop: The Hooded Claw did this to Penelope in "Tall Timber Treachery".
• A weird version on Phineas and Ferb ...since it was induced on a robot/mecha. Heinz gives Perry a platter of various dishes (because he doesn't want to be rude and have his nemesis just watch him), and starts putting some pepper on it: "Say when!". Of course, since Perry can't talk, after the pepper has become a big pile on his plate, he blows on it and it causes the building/robot/mecha they're occupying to sneeze.
• The Popeye cartoon "Spree Lunch" deals with Popeye and Bluto as competing diner owners fighting to keep Wimpy as their diner customer. Bluto pours pepper blown by a fan toward Popeye to make him sneeze at Wimpy, pushing him to Bluto's diner.
• In an episode of Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, an Italian trader was offered one of the kittens as a gift to repay him for a kindness to the Magistrate. Sagwa and Dongwa cover themselves in pepper to dissuade him; this backfires as they neglect to do so for baby sister Sheegwa, making her his selection because she's adorable, treated him nicely and doesn't make him sneeze.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf: Scrappy uses pepper to force a monster to sneeze and spit out Shaggy and Scooby.
• The Secret Saturdays: Happens to Fisk during the Diner Brawl in "Cryptid vs. Cryptid".
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants special "Truth or Square" this happens to Patchy the Pirate after he gets swallowed by a whale, except it is not pepper that sets the whale off, it's smoke from a malfunctioning projector.
  • In the episode "Unreal Estate," Squidward uses this on SpongeBob to make him think he's allergic to his pineapple house.
• Taz-Mania: In "Food for Thought", Taz sprinkling pepper on an egg causes the alligator inside to sneeze and hatch out.
• Considering Tiny Toon Adventures has a character named Li'l Sneezer, it's only appropriate that this happens to the little guy at least once.
• It happened a few times in Tom and Jerry:
  • In "Cannery Rodent", when Tom is about to be eaten by a shark, Jerry steps in and uses this method to save him, but rather than the through the nose, he pours the pepper into the shark's mouth. Jerry, however, ends up getting one of these in the nose while pouring it into the shark's mouth. After the shark sneezes Tom out, the force of the sneeze launches him into the canning factory Tom and Jerry ended up in earlier, where it is then sealed into a large can and is seen with a sad look on his face. It is unknown if he survived after the fact.
• Total Drama:
  • Trent spills pepper on his breakfast in "Beach Blanket Bogus", which he takes as a variant of spilling salt and to avert the bad luck coming his way he tosses a pinch over his shoulder. It flies straight into Heather's face, causing her to sneeze uncontrollably.
  • The treasure chests the campers have to pick from to know what their challenge will be in "The Bold and the Booty-ful" are booby-trapped. When Gwen opens hers, a cloud of pepper is shot in her face and she sneezes.
  • In "Three Zones and a Baby", Max aims to sabotage the Pimâpotew Kinosewak with pepper to get them to sneeze during a challenge that requires stealth. Just as he is to blow the spice into the other team's faces, Sugar startles him, which causes Max to throw the pepper up in his own face. He starts sneezing and gets shot himself by Chef.
• Wacky Races (1968): In "Idaho A-Go-Go ", Lazy Luke is in the lead, and asks Blubber Bear to make him a parsnip sandwich with extra pepper for their victory. Blubber creates a huge cloud of pepper which causes him to sneeze the Arkansas Chug-a-Bug backwards and into the racers behind them.
• Wild Kratts: In "Platypus Cafe", a captured and miniaturized Chris being used as a side dish for a salad with platypus eggs as a garnish taunts Gourmand by saying that his penchant for knowing what seasoning goes with what food doesn't work all the time. The Evil Chef counters by saying that his nose is never wrong, and Chris decides to make him prove it by asking what seasoning would go with him. As Gourmand is sniffing Chris, he pushes a pepper shaker over to him, causing him to inhale some of the pepper and begin launching into a sneezing fit that distracts him long enough for Chris to attempt to take back Platty and Platter. It doesn't work, as Gourmand catches him before he can even get into the bowl holding the two platypus eggs.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: In "I Am Zora Neale Hurston", one of Zora's stories is about a pepper shaker who keeps on sneezing and interrupting weddings.

Real Life

• You know Sneezing Powder, that hilarious practical joke? It's pepper. Before that, though, the powder used to be one of a number of toxic (or carcinogenic!) chemicals, either from a plant or an industrial process. Pepper isn't nearly so good at making you sneeze, but at least it doesn't do you any other harm. People have died from what they used to put in Sneezing Powder.
• A more serious use for sneezing pepper is to avoid being tracked by scent, e.g. by search dogs. Thieves, saboteurs and commandos used to sprinkle their tracks with herbal powders containing pepper, tobacco and other irritant plants to knock out the olfactory senses of any dog that tries to track them.

---