Produce Pelting

Rigatoni felt the ham on stage could use a salad.

"Why is there always someone who brings eggs and tomatoes to a speech?"

— The Penguin, Batman Returns

A displeased crowd is throwing stuff at speakers and artists according to the Rule of Funny. Eggs, lettuce and vegetables are generally favored, with tomatoes an all-time favorite. Originates from way back in the 19th century, when audiences and working-class theatergoers would often carry these things into the (very rowdy by our standards) theaters, and chuck them (or chairs and such) at bad performances. Look for an Honest John-type character to have a cart filled with said rotten vegetables for sale for this particular purpose. Usually followed by a Vaudeville Hook yanking the bad performer off-stage.

See also Stock Punishment and Defiant Stone Throw. Related to Egging, Pie in the Face and Food Slap. A subtrope of Food Fight and Edible Ammunition.

Compare Proj-egg-tile.

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Example Subpages:

• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Art

• Played for Drama in The Problem We All Live With, where a presumably racist protester (from the viewer's point of view) throws a tomato at Ruby Bridges walking to school.

Advertising

• A TV commercial for the radio duo of Steve Dahl & Garry Meier showed a billboard advertising them being hit with a giant tomato. There was also a real Steve & Garry billboard with a tomato attached, as well as Steve & Garry t-shirts.

Anime & Manga

• In the first episode or movie of any adaptation of Boys over Flowers all the students gather around Tsukushi and nail her with rotten eggs and other stuff. The Korean adaptation even added a flour Bucket Booby-Trap to deliver some extra humiliation for the Plucky Girl.
• Food Wars!: During the Cooking Duel against Ikumi Mito, Soma reveals that to compete against her incredible expensive high-grade beef, he got some Brand X cutlets he bought from a common supermarket. The audience becomes so infuriated at his audacity that they begin to pelt him with litter, which he blocks with his frying pan.
• In Kaji Ryuusuke No Gi, this happens to Ryuusuke when he angers a crowd of farmers.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya!: In "Labor Daze", a Cappy throws a tomato at Tiff, while she’s protesting outside Dedede’s factory, due to its poor working conditions.
• This was also used in Episode 12 of the Little Lulu anime. Lulu and the others did this to a picture of Wilbur's butler that was drawn on the side of the clubhouse, after he snobbishly put them off the activities that they normally did.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica The Movie: Rebellion (really): Homura's own familiars pelt her with tomatoes after she successfully imprisons Madoka in the universe. It's implied the familiars are acting out Homura's true desires...and at least some of the audience would want to do that to her, too.
• At one point in Urusei Yatsura Ataru, grieving about how messed up his life has become since Lum decided they were married, asks the readers if he really deserves such torment. He is immediately covered in a pile garbage as off-panel voices declare "NO, YOU IDIOT! You deserve more!"

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: In episode 184, the wolves are mad at Wolffy and throw several objects at him, including a few tomatoes.

Comedy

• Lampshaded in a Mitch Hedburg comedy bit.
  Mitch: I'm worried about doing bad on a performance, and people, throwing tomatoes. But then I think "Who'd bring a tomato?"
• Before they were stars, The Marx Brothers did a tour of England, where the tradition was to throw pennies at bad acts. After getting pelted Groucho said, "we came all the way from the United States to perform for you. Could you at least throw shillings?"
• Given in Portuguese egg is "ovo", the conflation between that and applause is the basis for a joke:
  Friend: How did it go, did you get a standing ovation?
  Artist: A standing ovation, tomatation, and oranjation.

Comic Books

• In "Masked Mayhem" of the Adventure Time Graphic Novels, Ice King's palace gets egged and Marceline gets a pie in the face.
• Asterix:
  • In Asterix and the Great Divide, both Majestix and Cleverdix get a tomato to the face when they try to entreat the other's followers.
  • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, once Cacofonix has no voice to sing, the angered crowd throws onions and tomatoes at him.
• Beetlejuice gets bombarded with rotten sandworm eggs in "Get Me to the Church on Slime".
• Bone: After Phoney's scheme to rig the cow race is ousted, the villagers tie him to a pole and toss hundreds of eggs at him.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
  • In a Donald Duck comic, poor Donald was once at the receiving end of this. Various types of fruits were thrown at him - including a ridiculously huge watermelon!
  • In one-page comic starring Scrooge McDuck, he gains some money with this. Step 1: Perform a purposely bad performance in a talent show. Step 2: Catch all vegetables thrown at him. Step 3: Sell them. Step 4: PROFIT!!
  • In an Italian story, Donald finds out that in one occasion he was at the receiving end of this because Scrooge was there selling rotten vegetables.
  • In "The Pauper's Glass", Scrooge has lost his memory and begun taking over his own companies. The Duck nephews try to find him by visiting the remaining factories, only to arrive after the amnesiac Scrooge has taken ownership. As such, the Ducks end up getting barraged by whatever the company was making, such as getting pelted by walnuts, globbed with yogurt, and covered in tar. Eventually, Donald chooses the next factory solely on whether they make something painful.
• In an issue of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the audience entrance of a talent show has a barrel of free rotten vegetables.
• In FF the Yancey Street Gang hack their way into getting all the tickets for Darla Deering's concert and pelt her with vegetables and eggs because they think she's trying to replace Ben Grimm.
• Happens to a political candidate in the Oklahoma album of Lucky Luke. He's actually happy getting so many vegetables for free.
• A two page Fozzie Bear strip in The Muppet Show Comic Book with a Pictorial Speech-Bubble gimmick:
  Waldorf: <picture of tomatoes>?
  Statler: <picture of the bag he's holding>
  Fozzie: !
• Robin: In "Joker's Wild" the fans at the Gotham Giants football game start throwing their drinks and food at the Jumbotron when Joker has the hacker he kidnapped hack in so he can disrupt the game while delivering his demands to the city. (For the curious weather or not Gotham has a pro-football team is up to the writers' whims, though they always have a baseball team, the Knights.)
• In an issue of Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics), Anti-Tails pelts a turtle with tomatoes. Later on, an angry Knothole Village mob scapegoats Sonic and the Freedom Fighters and proceeds to throw produce at them.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: In #32 Wonder Woman stops some hecklers who are throwing old vegetables as some street musicians whose instruments aren't tuned and who are playing off key.
• Zipi y Zape: In one short history, Zipi y Zape become musicians to feed their family due to the eye-watering prices of the former. All goes well, until one of the chords of the violins they're playing brokes and everyone discovers they had a hidden cassette player. Both are pelted with edible vegetables that carry back home, much to the happiness of their mother.

Comic Strips

• It's a running gag in Garfield, where the cat likes to perform at the fence. Once he was pelted with a pillow, an alarm clock and a flowerpot in short order. He took the stuff with him and was happy.
  • Other things that he's been pelted with include a watermelon, a basket (which is what they threw at him when they ran out of fruit), and a giant stone wheel (he told a scout troop from Booga-Booga that the only thing they were allowed to throw was money. Apparently, that's the only form of currency in Booga-Booga).
  • Garfield once dodged every fruit the audience tried to pelt him with and asked what they'd do. Someone hits him with a smartphone that has a virtual banana.
• Peanuts: Charlie Brown has been pelted with baseball props by his Little League team out of anger over many a lost match.
• Sherman's Lagoon: When Fillmore does a musical performance of his poetry, Thorton throws an olive at him because it's the only vegetable he had.
• In one Thimble Theater strip, Mr. Kilph tricks Popeye into signing up for a boxing match with a full-grown gorilla. Worried for the sailor, the children Popeye tells stories to go to Kilph's house and lob ripe tomatoes at him.

Fanfiction

• Alex (MovieVillain): Marceline (from Adventure Time) gets thrown with rotten tomatoes after her opponent, Alex, exposes what she did in "What Was Missing". She even lampshades it.
  Marceline: Why is it that people have a tendency to throw tomatoes at anyone they're displeased at?
• In The Arrangements students throw house elf-supplied eggs at the new Charms professor after he's fired for sexually harrassing Harry and being a poor teacher.
• In The Band Ron and Harry start a band. At their first and only school performance they're showered with conjured fruit.
• Getting Back on Your Hooves has this happen to Trixie when she attempts to make a public apology to Ponyville for the Ursa incident. Justified, as the pelting was performed by the Big Bad, Trixie's sister Checker Monarch, who came with the expressed intention of publicly humiliating her. Checker tries again at Trixie's charity play, but is blocked by Twilight.
• Hans Von Hozel:
  • The Glee club gets pelted by bananas.
  • Hannah Montana gets pelted by tomatoes in another of his fics.
• In It All Started With a Visit to Gringotts the Malfoys are hit with rotten eggs and tomatoes when they visit Diagon Alley after Voldemort's defeat.
• In Jedi Potter people in Diagon Alley throw rotten fruit at Dumbledore after he's revealed as a dark lord in disguise.
• In Knowledge is Power an irate crowd covers Minister Fudge in conjured tomatoes.
• In Loved and Lost, Princess Celestia is overthrown when Prince Jewelius manipulates the entire Canterlot into blaming her for the Changeling invasion by pointing out that her putting her trust in the wrong ponies directly contributed to said invasion occurring. One week later, as Celestia waits for her Public Execution to commence, she gets an egg thrown in her face by a filly whose her parents were attacked by the Changelings and are still in the hospital. While thankfully nothing else but insults are thrown, the crowd is still unsympathetic toward Celestia until she manages to dispel the public hatred towards her with a remorseful apology speech where she takes full responsibility for her failures.
• In Nothing Stays The Same after Dumbledore's misdeeds are posthumously discovered, his portrait is set up in one magical area after another so people can throw fruit and veggies at it.
• In One Dreaded Curse Dumbledore spends his afterlife in chains and being pelted with tomatoes because he cursed Harry and Hermione to ignore their soulmate bond for thirty years.
• Played for Drama in the final episode of Princess Trixie Sparkle. When the stage musician Trixie is forced to experience nothing but insults and accusations by Astelle, one of the scenes shows her on stage. She's being pelted with tomatoes while being mocked with things like "Nopony likes you" and "You aren't even talented".
• In Total Drama Legacy, Drew gets pelted with food twice: once in "No Business Like Show Business", when the boys throw food at him during his Shakespearean soliloquy, and once in "Campfire Emblem Awake-ening", when his teammates pelt him with marshmallows.
• Witching Hour:
  • When Gaz is at Bloaty's Tavern and a kitchen worker named Nick accidentally bumps into her and makes her spill her drink, she has him locked in a pillory and forces everyone to throw rocks at him.
  • Later, when Gaz is assumed to be a witch due to being caught in the middle of what looks like a Satanic ritual surrounded by slaughtered animals, the villagers lock her in a pillory and throw rocks, rotten fruit, and vegetables at her.

Film — Animation

• Happens to Tanya Mousekewitz in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, even though she has a Beautiful Singing Voice. Mama Mousekewitz just scoops the produce off the walls and into a skillet to prepare the dinner, and Papa jokes that she should keep singing so that the hecklers (who just hear it as musical squeaking) will literally throw in dessert as well.
• In A Bug's Life, Manny receives this abuse from the fly hecklers who don't like his mystical spiel.
• In The Care Bears Movie, one sign of the Spirit turning people hateful is when they attack the Bears and Cousins with tomatoes.
• At the end of the final race in the first Cars movie, Chick Hicks gets hit with tires from the crowd for violently ramming The King and sending him into a horrible wreck.
• In Coco, Ernesto de la Cruz gets this reception after being outed as a murderous fraud via Engineered Public Confession.
• Happens to Davey in Eight Crazy Nights when the crowd disapproves of his officiating at a youth basketball game.
  Davey: You don't like that? How about you throw something at me? I dare you!
  Spectator: With pleasure! (he and the crowd throw concessions at Davey)
• The Great Mouse Detective. Done for a Rule of Threes in the Bad Guy Bar, with the fruit being quickly followed by everything else they can get their hands on, including daggers. The villainous customers then ready more objects to throw at the next performer, but the curtains open to reveal a hot singer/stripper who quickly has them eating out of her hand moments before the Bar Brawl breaks out.
• A non-comedic example happens to an unlucky Quasimodo in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They finally stop when Esmeralda frees Quasimodo and calls Frollo out for his abuse and racism.
• After the climactic Battle of the Bands of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks, once the Dazzlings have lost their magical voices, the Canterlot High students reward their last attempt at singing with booing and throwing fruits and sandwiches at them.

Film — Live-Action

• In Animal House, in the scene where the Deltas are vetting prospective pledges in a slide show, the members throw fruits or drinks at the screen when the socially-inept Kent "Flounder" Dorfman appears. When Otter stands up to defend him (with Dorfman being a legacy after all), the other Deltas pelt him with empty beer cans.
• The Penguin, the Villain with Good Publicity from Batman Returns, trots out the above quote (which is a pretty good question, in fact) when his former supporters start throwing eggs and tomatoes at him after Batman exposes him for what he is by means of an Engineered Public Confession. This example also comes with a rare retaliation as he opens fire on them with his umbrella machine gun.
• In The Blues Brothers, the Blues Brothers perform in a country bar to a crowd that doesn't appreciate their normal style of music, which they express by throwing empty beer bottles at them and booing. The band then changes their style to something more to the crowd's liking (the Rawhide theme and Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man"), which they express by cheering — and throwing more beer bottles. Thankfully, the band is protected by a chicken-wire fence, indicating this is a normal occurrence.
• In Braveheart, when the hero is rolled in for his execution, the raving crowd throws vegetables at him.
• This is ultimately how the US soldiers stationed in Italy end up having to drive Captain America off stage in a USO tour gone sour in Captain America: The First Avenger (that, as well as a soldier mooning him). Fortunately he's got his shield to block the vegetables, but the humiliation is another matter, inspiring Cap to stop acting as a propaganda symbol and start being the One-Man Army he's meant to be.
• In Colette, friends of Missy's ex-husband begin throwing peanuts at Colette and Missy during their performance at the Moulin Rouge. This then escalates to bottles and furniture.
• Tomatoes are used in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (A'yoy) as means of cultural education.
  Mother: [handing her son a tomato to chuck at Johann and Lolita] Good taste has to be taught during childhood.
• At the end of Duck Soup, Firefly, Chicolino, and Pinky do this to Trentino after they capture him. After Trentino surrenders and Mrs. Teasdale triumphantly sings the Freedonia national anthem (again), they start throwing fruit at her.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial has the titular alien get drunk and toss one of his beer cans at the TV screen after seeing Jerry scorching Tom's tail in a cartoon.
• Gangs of New York has this happen to a play depicting Lincoln, but the audience is throwing cabbage as they're too poor for fruit.
• In Buster Keaton's The Haunted House., a traveling opera company gets this treatment after making a hash of Faust.
• In A Knight's Tale, William is put in the stocks where the crowd pelts him with rotten vegetables. Chaucer puts in an attempt at Shaming the Mob to protect him, but only gets out three words before the crowd starts pelting him too.
• In Mary Poppins Mrs. Banks, preparing for a suffragette meeting, has the maid pack rotten eggs in her bag for this purpose.
  Mrs. Banks: After our meeting at the Albert Hall, we're all going down to Downing Street to throw things at the Prime Minister!
• Although technically a Food Fight, the fact that the uptight teacher was constantly being hit by food, almost a gang up, in the movie Max Keeble's Big Move makes it more comparable to this trope.
• In Mrs. Doubtfire, Daniel (as Mrs. Doubtfire) throws a lime at his ex-wife's new boyfriend when said boyfriend calls him a loser. When he turns around, Mrs. D claims to have witnessed the whole thing.
  Mrs. Doubtfire: Oh sir! I saw it... some angry member of the kitchen staff, did you not tip them? Oh... the terrorist ran that way, it was a run-by fruiting!
• In It Runs in the Family (1994), Mrs. Parker goes to the movies every week because they're giving away dishes, but there's a screw up and all they ever have is gravy boats. Finally, as the MC is once again trying to assure the crowd the other dishes are coming, Mrs. Parker throws her gravy boat at him. Cue the other women in the audience following suit.
• Implied in a song in Newsies:
  And the world will know that this ain't no game
  That we got a ton of rotten fruit and perfect aim
• In A Night at the Opera, the bad-guy opera singer tries to steal the good-guy opera singer's thunder and is pelted. When he angrily objects to apples thrown at him, Groucho explains "Well, watermelons are out of season!"
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? had the audience, when becoming fed up with Stokes' interruption of their play due to their ruining a Klan rally and their being convicts, start pelting food at him after his microphone is shut off by the recording studio. It gets worse for him later when they decide to run him out of town on a rail.
• In Mel Gibson's The Patriot (2000), Benjamin Martin tests the suitability of potential recruits by walking into a rough tavern and shouting "God Save King George!" The patrons immediately hurl things at him (including a giant knife). Martin says, "This is the place."
• Prehistoric Women: After Queen Kari orders the slaves food tipped on to the ground, the rebellious slave girl picks up a cooked chicken and hurls it at her.
• In the Minor Kidroduction of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Dastan throws a fruit at the soldier who socks the other boy for making his horse balk.
• This happens to Sylvester (Bob Hope) in The Princess and the Pirate when he performs his variety act at a Bad Guy Bar.
• In Regeneration, an unsatisfactory violinist is driven off a vaudeville stage by a hail of garbage from the audience.
• After Robin loses an archery contest in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, everyone gets pelted.
  Blinkin: Oh, good. They opened up the salad bar.
• In Silent Tongue, the Medicine Show is run out of town by a pack of unappreciative townsfolk pelting them with stones.
• In Skippy, cute little kids Skippy and Sooky are putting on a little backyard variety show, but mean-spirited kid Sidney brings an array of produce which he starts flinging at the performers. Skippy takes care of this by getting his own tomato, throwing it from backstage, and nailing Sidney right in the face.
• In Tin Men, Tilley does this to BB, and BB has him arrested for assault. The cop typing out the complaint feels embarrassed when he has to enter "eggs and tomatoes" as the weapon used.
• Young Frankenstein. During Frederick and the monster's performance. Definitely a parody of the trope, as the posh, well-to-do looking men pull the rotten cabbages straight out of their dress suits.
• Zombieland: Double Tap: One item the people of Babylon drop on the zombies below is watermelons.

Literature

• In Beyond the Western Sea, Horatio Drabble performs Shakespeare on the Liverpool streets and gets produce thrown at him.
• In Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, a particularly bad pun would be met with a shower of peanuts.
• Discworld:
  • In Soul Music, Glod tries to catch the fruit they throw at him. Musicians have got to eat, ya know.
  • Discussed about the Mended Drum (The Librarian in particular has to be pleased).
  • In Small Gods, a character recalls a crowd working through a whole list of things with which to pelt a missionary from a neighboring nation led by a Corrupt Church.
  • Lords and Ladies mentions Librarian has firm opinions about what makes good theatre, and a very accurate way with high-velocity peanuts, so it's generally agreed that putting a slapstick scene in a dramatic tragedy is better than your lead actor being deaf in one ear.
• Discussed and averted in the second book of the Everworld series. When the protagonists and their captured Viking allies are brought into New Tenochtitlan as prisoners of the Aztecs, they are instead pelted with ash, bones, and feces. Jalil surmises from this (and the malnourished frames of the people doing the throwing) that the people are starving and so they throw what they can. It's this that leads the heroes to realize what awaits them after they are executed.
• A bit character who brings Pel some useful information in Five Hundred Years After makes a living cleaning the footwear of stage actors who, being routinely cast as the villain, regularly get subjected to this trope. It's a disgusting dead-end job that pays starvation wages, but he lives for the theater and wouldn't dream of quitting.
• Jack Finney's From Time to Time mentions a vaudeville performer called Sparrow who actually makes this the focus of his act by tossing oranges and other soft foods into the audience and inviting it to throw them back at him so he can try to catch them on the fork in his mouth. Trouble is, some of the people who've seen it before bring their own produce and throw harder things like turnips.
• Played seriously in the Hand of Thrawn duology — two men inciting a riot in an already-angry crowd start by screaming for justice and throwing produce. Once the mob is pelting the building with food, they introduce rocks. After that's been going on for a while, they throw a grenade into the crowd and get out of there.
• In Huckleberry Finn, the villagers take rotten veggies to the theater after realizing that the Duke and the King's play is a scam.
• In Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World, protestors from Clean Seas shout "Killer!" at Karen, who owns a tuna fishery. One of them throws a tomato, which hits her in the eye.
• In Mr. Revere and I, American colonists throw dead fish and vegetables at the redcoats.
• In Stephen Manes' The Obnoxious Jerks four of the Obnoxious Jerks enter the school talent show. Instead of the act they auditioned with, they play a deliberately-bad kazoo rendition of "Roll On, Griswold". At a prearranged point, several other Obnoxious Jerks in the audience throw tomatoes at them, followed by lemon meringue pies.
• In the Rainbow Magic series, in Ellie the Electric Guitar Fairy's book Rachel and Kirsty pelt goblins with rotten fruit to make them drop the magic guitar.
• The Riftwar Cycle: Discussed in the novelization of Betrayal at Krondor: James explains to Gorath that this is done to speakers who the audience doesn't like, and being a dark elf Fish out of Water in human civilization, Gorath thinks it's insane.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: when the universally hated Queen Cersei Lannister is forced to walk through the streets naked as punishment for her crimes, the smallfolk of King's Landing Come to Gawk and pelt her with garbage, rotten food, human and animal refuse, and at least one dead cat.
• Happens several times in P. G. Wodehouse stories.
  • The Jeeves and Wooster story "The Metropolitan Touch", where the finale of a show is supposed to involve the chorus throwing balls of wool (representing oranges) to the audience. On the night, the villain of the piece substitutes real oranges, and the show promptly devolves into an all-out fruit fight with the audience caught in the middle.
  • Ukridge's Accident Syndicate ends with the traitorous Teddy Weeks being at the receiving end of a perfectly-timed tomato to the face.
• Mentioned in XWing: Starfighters of Adumar. When reflecting on their massive drop in popularity, one pilot of Red Flight says that at least the Adumari haven't erected statues of them to throw rotten produce at. Another pilot says to give them a couple days.

Live-Action TV

• In the 227 fantasy episode "Low Noon", Rose's character is subjected to this when she tries to entertain the saloon's customers by singing opera. When she meekly asks if they always do that, the saloon's owner tells her "If they like you, they throw money", prompting her to put on a very sassy act instead.
• In Blackadder the Third, Edmund invites Prince George to star as the title character in his new play: Thick Jack Clot Sits in the Stocks and Gets Pelted with Rancid Tomatoes. George, of course, readily agrees.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • A flashback to the time before Anya became a vengeance demon shows a bunch of villagers attacking Olaf by throwing "fruits and various meats" at him.
  • In "Nightmares", Willow, in her forced-to-sing nightmare, backs off a stage where the booing patrons are throwing tomatoes.
• Doctor Who: In "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", a drunk decides to throw his salad at the alien hunter Tzim-Sha while telling him that Your Costume Needs Work. This ends badly for the drunk.
• In the "Everybody Hates Elections" episode of Everybody Hates Chris, Chris is running for class president and finds himself in a debate against his opponent (the biggest bully on campus). Chris is really liking how his opponent is winning over the crowd, so he starts emulating him. One line Chris likes is "_____ now, _____ tomorrow and _____ forever." Problem is, he fouls up and ends up saying "Detention now, detention tomorrow and detention forever.". Cue about 200 pounds of mainly lettuce and tomatoes, with lots of other fruit and veggies mixed in, being tossed right at him.
• The Goodies:
  • In "Double Trouble", The Goodies are trying to win the Nice Person of the Year Award, so ride around on the trandem throwing flowers. They realise something is wrong when little old ladies out shopping start throwing vegetables back at them. Turns out some doppelgangers are trying to discredit them by doing evil deeds.
  • In "The Goodies Rule — OK?" it's revealed that The Beatles stole their songs and look from an early attempt by The Goodies to break into the music business as The Bootles, which ended when the audience threw produce at them. When the Beatles become famous the Goodies attempt to do the same, only for the Beatles audience to turn on The Goodies in outrage and throw more food at them. This starts a gag of The Goodies coming up with soon-to-be famous songs only to be pelted with produce. Eventually they start getting pelted before they've even started singing.
  • Happens to the xylophone player after he is tossed on to the scrap heap in the episode "Snow White 2".
  • And in "Rome Antics" it becomes a Ho Yay moment when, among the other produce, an unseen heckler throws a suggestively shaped vegetable at the Emperor.
    Emperor: WHO THREW THAT? Cheeky!
• The first episode of Get Krack!n with a live studio audience ends with the audience (and the warm-up guy) pelting the Kates with lollies and then storming out.
• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: In "Honey, the Play's the Thingie", the audience are searched at the door in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent this.
• Jeeves and Wooster called this "getting the bird", presumably because it involved things flying at you. In one episode, Bertie is nervous to see people in the audience passing around produce while he's singing "Sonny Boy." One of his friends is able to calm them down, but the vegetables in question still fly for Tuppy Glossop and Cora Bellenger. In fact, the reason for this is that "Sonny Boy" was performed twice before Bertie arrived.
• Played with on an episode of Wayne Brady's version of Let's Make a Deal: A contestant got zonked with a ton of rotten tomatoes, and Brady offered the contestant cash if she could hit the announcer, Jonathan Mangum (who was standing onstage next to the Zonk) with a tomato.
• Lucifer (2016): In "The One with the Baby Carrot", Lucifer comes to Dan's stand-up comedy routine armed with a bunch of tomatoes, which he gleefully — and unapologetically — throws at Dan, despite the whole thing being a set-up to lure out a killer.
• The Brazilian show Macho Man, about a gay man who becomes straight after being hit on the head by a shoe, has one episode in which he has to visit his birthtown, which openly approves of homosexuality. One Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? moment later, all the townsfolk were pelting tomatoes at him.
• Merlin (2008) spends a lot of time in Camelot's stocks getting pelted by the local children with lettuces and anachronistic tomatoes. In something of a subversion, he takes it with remarkable cheer, and everyone else seems to view it as good clean (if slightly mean-spirited) family fun.
• Midsomer Murders: Jones gets pelted with tomatoes while he is is undercover in a cult in "The Oblong Murders".
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: In "The Bicycle Trip", Mr. Gulliver (Terry Jones), due to a head injury, assumes the personalities of singer Clodagh Rodgers, then Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and then chanteuse Eartha Kitt — while in a performance in post-revolutionary Russia, his personality abruptly changes to then-PM Edward Heath, angering the audience of commissars who pelt him with produce. Another blow to the head reverts him to his old self.
• The Muppet Show:
  • In the Danny Kaye episode, Statler and Waldorf bail quite early on and are replaced by Floyd and Janice from the Electric Mayhem. It's revealed that they were concealing a bag of fruits and vegetables, which are speculated to be part of a plan to throw a party.
    Janice: Well this much food won't go very far.
    Floyd: Well they only wanted to throw it as far as the stage!
  • Played straight during the Diana Ross episode where the crowd was unruly, being riled up by Statler and Waldorf grading the acts (poorly, as usual)- they tossed rotten vegetables at Gonzo, cutting his act before it even began.
• Murdoch Mysteries: The vaudeville episode "The Keystone Constables" features this. Crabtree, Higgins and a young W.C. Fields are among the targets.
• Mexican comedy show Puro Loco had the sketches about the leader of a worker syndicate known as the OGT. They always ended with him revealing that his "great news" or "great proposals" are anything but and he gets booed off the podium under a rain of lettuce, along with his bodyguards and occasionally hostesses and whatever worker walked onstage to ask questions.
• Starsky & Hutch: In "The Golden Angel," the audience boos and throws lettuce at a heel when he walks into the arena.
• In a Running Gag on Svengoolie, whenever the horror host makes a particularly bad joke, he gets pelted with rubber chickens.
• A scene in the bio-pic VH1 did for Meat Loaf has Jim Steinman perusing the script to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jim's reaction is "This movie's so terrible, people are gonna throw things at the screen!" Little did he know...
• Strange Hill High: When Mitchell is accused of being a thief in "The Lost and Found Boy", he made is made to sit in the corridor with a sign around his neck inviting to the students to pelt him with produce. Naturally they do so.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): The Tar Valon citizens throw vegetables at Logain as he's paraded through the streets.
• The Witcher (2019): The Bard Jaskier is introduced getting pelted with pieces of bread by an unappreciative audience, which he gathers up and stuffs down his pants for later.
• In the You Can't Do That on Television episode on "Generosity", Jill Stanley is pelted with tomatoes because the audience didn't like her solo.

Music

• Akon was hit by a water bottle thrown by a teen while performing a concert. He retaliated by having the audience bring him to the stage where he physically picked him up and threw him off.
• Barenaked Ladies had this problem in their live performances of "If I Had a Million Dollars"; during the verse "We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner," audience members would throw boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at them. The band would discourage this practice by placing donation boxes for local food banks at their concerts and encouraging fans to place their Kraft Dinners there instead.
• The Beatles song "With A Little Help from my Friends" originally started "What would you do if I sang out of tune? / Would you throw ripe tomatoes at me?". Despite their intention to not do any live concerts in the near future, Ringo (who sings the song) still requested that the line be changed lest fans take it as an cue to actually throw tomatoes at him.
• In one fabled incident, someone threw a live chicken onto the stage at an Alice Cooper gig. Cooper picked it up and, thinking it would fly away, launched it back over the audience. It fluttered down into the crowd, which promptly tore it to pieces.
• The Foo Fighters stopped playing "Big Me" for a while because of this. And Hilarity Ensues when Dave Grohl has a desire to burn the Mentos...
  "Mentos - That fun little hard candies that people tend to chuck at the band during shows due to the 'Big Me' Video. Please don't do it, if you like foo don't throw stuff at them."
• Toby Keith recreates the chicken-wire-as-pelting-preventer bar setup in "I Love This Bar".
• Traditionally, the first band on Monsters of Rock at Donnington Park gets pelted off the stage. Fans really go all out — one year, an entire stale Christmas cake was thrown. The Comic Strip made use of this, putting their fictional band Bad News on first and filming them getting pelted.
• Nickelback was stoned (as in actual stones were thrown) during a festival in Portugal, forcing them to cut their performance short.
• Music-hall song "The Night I Appeared as Macbeth":
  They jeered me, they queered me
  And half of them stoned me to death
  They threw nuts and sultanas, fried eggs and bananas
  The night I appeared as Macbeth.
• Also in the UK, Reading Festival traditionally has lots of people tossing fruit or bottles, no matter who played. Brandon Urie was downright KO'd by a bottle once. A Twisted Sister documentary, which highlights their 1982 performance where people actually stopped for a while because Dee Snider called out on the pelting feeling the audience in the front would be hit rather than the stage, downright describes every Reading concert as "40,000 people, 10,000 rocking out and 30,000 throwing stuff".
• Spooner (the band in which Butch Vig and Duke Erikson played in the 1980s) was scheduled to precede the Greg Kihn Band in the 1981 Summerfest in Milwaukee. A cancellation put them before Iron Maiden. The metalhead audience was not receptive to the New Wave band and showered them with beer cups.
• The Stooges live album ''Metallic K.O." has Iggy Pop being pelted with beer bottles thrown by the angry truckers he invited to the final Stooges show.
• Tears for Fears: In-Universe in the song "Sowing the Seeds of Love", this is how angry protesters express their dissatisfaction towards a politician: "There's egg on your face and mud on your shoes".
• Occurs in-universe in a German Volkslied. The other (i.e. not the children song) musicians from Swabia who are so inept that this treatment is actually mild: "Laurels were too costly, oak foliage we didn't get, they threw rotten eggs and tomatoes in our face."
• Before "Weird Al" Yankovic's career took off, he opened for Missing Persons in 1982. He was pelted by "anything that wasn't nailed down" for 45 minutes.
• The Vocaloid song Apotropaism by umbraticforest and GHOST) had its name abruptly changed to “apple the pagan’s son” sometime after release.^note This is not uncommon for songs GHOST has worked on, and the names are almost always unrelated to the songs, such as “COLORBARS” being changed to “Megalovania” and then again to “bar”.
• Woodstock 99, one of the most troublesome festivals ever, had many cases of flying bottles — which were one of the things making people angry, given the place was scorching hot and yet water cost $4. Reportedly, it started with Kid Rock asking the crowd to start tossing anything "that can't hurt each other" as his show ended (it says something that once things start flying, Joe C. yells "what the fuck?"), and are very visible in The Offspring's concert, as just after calling out how bad people are behaving, the singer is hit in his face!
• When the art design team Hipgnosis were coming up for the design for the Yes album Yes Tor, someone either in the band or from Hipgnosis themselves (depending on who's telling the story) threw a tomato at the painting with the design. The effect was incorporated into the artwork and the album was dubbed Tormato.
• For a while, it was a tradition in music festivals set in Brazil — most notable case being Carlinhos Brown being pelted with water bottles at 2001's Rock in Rio III, both for his music not pleasing the audience and Brown asking the organizers to stop spraying said audience with hoses (a solution to counter the scorching summer weather), leading to an increasingly disgruntled and sweaty crowd to take their rage on who made their experience worse.
• Justin Timberlake got water bottles, muffins and other random trash chucked at him during his performance at a 2003 benefit concert in Toronto. Another Justin was also infamously pelted with water bottles.

Pinballs

• Fred Flintstone does this in the "Water Buffalo" mode of The Flintstones, although his weapon of choice is a bowling ball.

Pro Wrestling

• Multi time champion of the North American divisions Sucio Dutch Mantel was so reviled in the Puerto Rican CSP\WWC promotion that random people would throw trash at him even when he wasn't at shows and was just walking the street. At the shows enterprising fans made a business of selling things to throw at him and similarly hated heels such as Ox Baker.
• Ray Gonzales was among the native islanders infamous for being pelted with produce in CSP/WWC, particularly in a match with Carlos Colon where Gonzales stalled for two straight minutes, leading fans to attempt to "push" him back into the ring.
• Fans threw garbage at André the Giant and Bobby Heenan as they approached the ring at Wrestlemania 3.
• During their mask vs mask match in September 1990, EMLL's 57th Anniversary on "Super Friday", Cien Caras at one point gained an obvious advantage over Rayo de Jalisco Jr. and continued to press his attack as pieces of trash from the audience bounced off of him.
• Hulk Hogan got pelted with trash after his shocking heel turn at WCW Bash at the Beach 1996, wherein he turned into Hollywood Hogan of the New World Order.
  • This was a frequent theme in WCW, where Nitro crowds often threw trash at the NWO at the end of almost every episode. Other notable instances of trash pelting include Goldberg defeating Hogan for the WCW Championship, the Fingerpoke Of Doom, and David Arquette winning the title on Thunder.
• This incident touched off a trend of WCW fans throwing stuff at the ring. Classless at the best of times, the fad arguably reached its nadir on the 1 December 1997 edition of WCW Monday Nitro, when referee Randy Anderson got hit in the eye with a golf ball during a match between Curt Hennig and Diamond Dallas Page.
• The fans threw garbage in the ring in protest at the end of the New Blood Rising PPV in August 2000.
• Ivory got this after Tough Enough III during a bikini contest at a house show, which she competed in to show fans stripping wasn't anything special and that the hardworking kids from the contest deserved to be on shows more than the no talent "divas" who could only appeal to people by being half naked. Ironically, Ivory's Heel–Face Turn would occur not long after she managed to get so much heel heat from an unexpected source.
• Ring of Honor had this happen on a few occasions. Nigel McGuinness and the Age of the Fall frequently drew so much ire with their victories that fans threw empty bottles and whatever else was on hand into the ring.
• ROH fans had a special hatred for Jimmy Rave, and showering him with toilet paper in place of streamers usually thrown at wrestlers they like. This really came into play when ROH officially banned toilet paper from its shows and fans continued to sneak it in anyway.
• Austin Aries started throwing his popcorn at the number one contender to his title belt, Tyler Black, when it looked like he was going to beat Aries's Generation Next stablemate Roderick Strong.
• Fighting Spirit trainee Kris Rex got trash thrown at him after his very first appearance in Valkyrie Women's Pro (the fans weren't too interested in seeing a man, much less one that wanted to hijack the show)
• Hijo del Dos Caras got hit with a paper towel the second time he interfered with the 2015 WWC Lockout match between Alberto Del Rio and Ray Gonzales.
• Happened when Big Show defeated Rob Van Dam for the ECW Championship during a WWE ECW broadcast, just before the latter was suspended for his DUI bust. That was bad enough, but Paul Heyman turned heel to help Show win. That it happened at ECW's hometown in Philadelphia didn't help at all, with Joey Styles remarking how the arena was descending to near-riot conditions as trash was being thrown at a celebrating Heyman and Show.

Radio

• Used in The Goon Show episode "The Great Spon Plague" during a conversation between Neddie Seagoon and "Mate".
  Mate: I saw you last week at Coventry. 'Ere, you do all right for fruit, don't you?
• A radio broadcast from Glastonbury about an annoying girl duo Daphne & Celeste being pelted with absolutely everything that came to hand: fruit, vegetables, mud, bottles, refilled bottles. They didn't seem to mind, saying the audience had been lethargic before and "they woke up to hate us!"

Sports

Sports fans can fall into this, especially if there's some controversial call against them made by the referees. Oftentimes they can move up from soft edible stuff to stuff more solid and painful, like iceballs, bottles, and D-cell batteries.

• During Game 7 of the 1934 World Series, angry Detroit Tigers fans pelted St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Joe "Ducky" Medwick with food, bottles, seat cushions, etc., bringing the game to a halt and forcing the sport's then-commissioner to bench Medwick for his own safety. (At that point, the Tigers were losing 10-0 and Medwick had spiked one of their players sliding into a base the previous inning).
• April 30, 1988: During a Cincinnati Reds game, umpire Dave Pallone learned the hard way that throwing Pete Rose out of Riverfront Stadium was like throwing the President out of the White House. Fans immediately littered the field with garbage, and they continued when Pallone tried to take the field again. Pallone had to be escorted off the field for his own safety so the game could continue.
• August 10, 1995, St. Louis Cardinals visiting the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodgers held a promotion that day where they gave away free souvenir baseballs to fans before the game. Some innings, lots of beer, several close calls against the Dodgers, and two ejections later, fans showed their displeasure by throwing thousands of said baseballs onto the field. Play was initially suspended so that the balls were cleaned up before being resumed, but then one fan threw another ball to center field and the umpires immediately forfeited the game to the Cardinals - as of 2022 this was the last forfeit in Major League Baseball. (The Dodgers have given away baseballs since, but now it's after the game.)
• Week 14 of the 2001 NFL season, the 6-6 Cleveland Browns hosted the 4-8 Jacksonville Jaguars trying to stay alive for a playoff spot. Late in the 4th quarter, the Browns are down 15-10 but were driving for the go-ahead touchdown. On a 4th-and-2 at the Jacksonville 12, Browns QB Tim Couch throws a three-yard pass to WR Quincy Morgan for an apparent first down, then the Browns hurry to spike the ball and stop the clock as Morgan had been tackled in-bounds. Couch spikes the ball, but then the head referee Terry McAulay announces that the catch to Morgan was being reviewed by instant replay. [[note]]Under NFL rules, once the next play has taken place, under no circumstances can any previous play be reviewed, but McAulay's explanation was that he was buzzed by the replay official, the only one allowed to initiate a replay review with less than 2:00 left in the 4th quarter before Couch's spike. Upon further review the call was overturned, and the Browns turned the ball over on downs. The Dawg Pound was incensed by the apparent jobbing by the refs and threw plastic beer bottles and other objects onto the field, causing the refs to declare the game over for safety reasons with 48 seconds left - NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue overrode the decision and brought the teams back out for two Mark Brunell kneel-downs to make the game official about 20 minutes later, still under a hail of debris from angry Browns fans.
• Game 6 of the 2003 National League Championship Series. The Chicago Cubs had not even made the World Series since 1945, a drought popularly attributed to the Curse of the Billy Goat, but in 2003 they were up in the best-of-seven series three games to two, and Cubs fans could smell their ticket to the World Series and the end of the curse that night after the Cubs were up 3-0 against the Florida Marlins with one out in the top of the 8th inning. Then came Luis Castillo's pop-up foul ball to the edge of left field, which Cubs fan Steve Bartman inadvertently knocked away from Cubs left fielder Moises Alou, who otherwise had a good chance of catching it for the second out of the inning. The Marlins proceeded to score eight runs that inning, and angry fans in the vicinity began chanting "Asshole!" and death threats, blaming him for the team's sudden collapse. They eventually graduated to throwing beer, bratwursts, pizza, pretzels, and other debris as Bartman had to be led away by security for his own safety. The Cubs lost the game 8-3, and lost Game 7 the next night as well - it wouldn't be until 2016 when the Cubs returned to (and won) the World Series.
• Subverted in general when it comes to ice hockey — hats are traditionally thrown onto the ice out of respect by fans after a player scores his third goal in a game (i.e. a hat-trick). And let's not forget the octopus in Detroit (which Nashville followed with catfish, given their logo is a sabretooth tiger). Though ever since the "Year of the Rat", where Florida Panthers fans used to throw toy mice on ice with each goal (the season opening game had a player killing a rat in the dressing room before scoring two goals, including the game winner, which was coincidently the year of the Rat on the Chinese Zodiac calender) — reaching absurd levels in the Finals — the NHL was forced to change the rules regarding debris onto the ice, which could even ensure in penalties for the home team.
• For cases of objects thrown in protest, there's always jerseys, while in 2010 the Toronto Maple Leafs warranted waffles.
• Fans throwing money has become a protest means if the grievance is over the millions, possibly billions, being sent around as sports has become such a massive industry.
  • During The '90s there were a couple of incidents in the NHL with fans of the Quebec Nordiques^note who would move to become the Colorado Avalanche a couple years later and later the Florida Panthers.
  • The era of free agency and massive contracts means players following the money over other things like loyalty have become more common, though that didn't stop Johnny Damon from being intensely vilified by Boston Red Sox fans in 2006 after signing a four-year, $52 million contract with the hated New York Yankees.^note His departure was especially galling, since Damon had previously made several statements professing his loyalty to the Red Sox. When he went to take his position in center field on the Yankees' first trip to Boston that year, several fans threw paper currency onto the field - the TV commentators saw at least one $20 bill.
  • In 2015, with FIFA President Sepp Blatter having to resign over the huge corruption and bribery scandal stemming from the bidding process of the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup, one comedian managed to get into a FIFA press conference and threw money at him before security could intervene.
• During the 1960s and 1970s, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, fans would often throw oranges onto the football field after the first Nebraska touchdown of the game. Unlike most other examples on this page, this was a form of applause; at the time, Nebraska was part of the Big 8 conference, and the Big 8 champion always played in the Orange Bowl. Oranges on the field were a way of saying "We're going to the Orange Bowl!" Oranges on the field also caused a mess, especially after Nebraska installed artificial turf in 1970, and for at least half the season were likely to be frozen solid (thanks to Nebraska weather) before they were thrown, with obvious risks. The university finally managed to convince fans to just stick with the traditional balloon release to celebrate the first touchdown.
• The Guardian remembered many cases of this starting with how Philadelphia Eagles fans are infamous for throwing batteries (although their real Once Done, Never Forgotten act was hurling snowballs at Santa Claus).
• The rivalry between Colgate University and Cornell University ice hockey teams often ends in this. Visiting Colgate ice hockey players are often pelted with toothpaste^note It's not a coincidence — this "Colgate" refers to founders of that Colgate.. Likewise, visiting Cornell ice hockey players often get Big Red gum thrown at them, with "Big Red" being that school's athletic nickname.
• After a disappointing performance in the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the South Korean team arrived at the airport and a disgruntled fan tossed toffee at them, referencing a local insult.
• Lane Kiffin got this with golf balls when his Ole Miss team played UT at Neyland Stadium. Clearly, Vol fans haven't forgotten how he took only a year to start their team's post-Fulmer Audience-Alienating Era.
• January 16, 2022: After the Dallas Cowboys were controversially eliminated by the San Francisco 49ers in an NFL Wild Card game, fans threw trash onto the field. Dak Prescott, the Cowboys' quarterback, criticized fans who did this because of the risk of hitting somebody. Upon being told that the fans were aiming for the referees, Prescott said "Credit to them, then." He eventually took it back and was ordered to pay a $25,000 fine.
• Australian Rules Football: Prior to the 1998 AFL Qualifying Final between Essendon and North Melbourne, Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy referred to two North Melbourne staff as "marshmallows", meaning they were soft. North Melbourne won, and their fans pelted Sheedy with marshmallows after the game.

Tabletop Games

• There's a longstanding gamer meme that anyone who annoys or angers the group too much risks being pelted with thrown dice. This is only a meme, not an actual practise among gamers.
• Stormbringer supplement Demon Magic: The Second Stormbringer Companion, adventure "The Velvet Circle". If the customers at the House of Melodac don't like the singer's performance, they end it in a shower of fruit and vegetables.

Theatre

• Gypsy references this in an extra verse of "Together Wherever We Go":
  When the audience boos,
  We don't drop our cues.
  We always can use what they throw.
  The fruit may fly, but why complain?
  Tomato sauce goes great with chow mein.
• Alluded to in the song "The World Will Know" from Newsies:
  And the world will know
  That this ain't no game
  That we got a ton of rotten fruit
  And perfect aim.
• In Something Rotten! the Bottoms are implied to be so poor that Bea went to a public shaming to scavenge the cabbages the crowd was throwing.

Toys

• Nexo Knights: An episode where the knights are impersonated by Jestro's monsters has the real knights subjected to this whenever they turn up after their imposters have been and gone. Axl, at least, doesn't mind, since he likes the food that gets thrown at them.

Video Games

• The Binding of Isaac: In the Repentance expansion, one of the new items introduced is the Rotten Tomato. It gives Isaac a chance to fire a special tear that "marks" an enemy, which causes the other enemies to start attacking it. Oddly enough, it seems that Isaac does this by putting the rotten tomato itself inside his mouth and firing pieces of it.
• This happens in the Tiny battle in the remake of Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped in Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy; if you try hiding in the corner during the lion charge section, the audience pelts Crash with cheese, which can be hazardous if Crash slips on one and falls into a lion. After Tiny is defeated, the audience starts throwing tomatoes at him.
• A rather bizarre subversion of the trope happens in Cuphead: in the final phase of Sally Stageplay's fight, the public (who think this whole fight has been a play) start cheering and throwing roses on the stage. However, the roses will damage you if you touch them.
• Future Cop: L.A.P.D. intro: After a barrage or rockets and machine-gun fire a single ripe tomato is thrown.
• The Gremlins 2: The New Batch Licensed Game for the NES had a genetically altered tomato as one of Gizmo's weapons.
• In Growing Up, some failure animations in studying subjects or practicing non-academic skills have the protagonist being pelted with tomatoes by the audience for their poor performance.
• Hello Neighbor: The Neighbor will throw tomatoes at you, which will cause your vision to blur and turn red.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: When Aloy arrives at Mother's Heart for the Proving, a representative of the Carja steps forward and tries to read a greeting from his tribe. Since the Carja had, up to that point, a reputation as murderous slave-takers, the assembled Nora tribesfolk begin pelting him with tomatoes. Before they can escalate to rocks and spears, Erend talks them down.
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: In the first xeno wrangling competition, Cal complains about animal cruelty and throws watatoes at the rodeo participants.
• One of the many silly weapons in Jets'n'Guns is the Tomator Deluxe, a cannon that fires tomatoes at a very high rate of fire. The Flavor Text states it was originally used by disgruntled ex-fans of an in-universe rock band to express their displeasure with the band's new sound.
• In Kangaroo, the monkeys throw apples at your mother kangaroo, which you must avoid.
• One puzzle in King's Quest VI requires you to get a minor character to throw a rotten tomato at another one.
• Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals: If Larry doesn't dance on stage, the crowd gets annoyed with him and starts chucking tomatoes and green vegetables at him, which results in Larry dying of embarrassment.
• Mega Man Rock Force has Charade Man's stage, with two areas that resemble a stage with performing mooks. The second of these has a constant stream of exploding fruit that is thrown on-screen at your character.
• Happens a few times to Johnny Cage in the Mortal Kombat series:
  • In Mortal Kombat 4, a booing crowd throws fruit, bottles, and cans at him during his ending.
  • One of his new Fatalities in Mortal Kombat 11 has him tear his opponent's torso off, then do a (bad) ventriloquist/stand-up comedy impression with it, with the end result being tomatoes being flung at him, with one of them hitting the corpse in the face.
• Pajama Sam 3: You Are What You Eat from Your Head to Your Feet: After a failed failed attempt at comedy, Mickey Hollandaise gets a pumpkin tossed his way.
• In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the battles take place on a theater stage. If you're doing badly (or if the crowd is just feeling mean), then they'll start throwing rubbish at you. You can counter this by going into the crowd and smacking them with a hammer, but be careful, since they can also give you helpful items. Or, you could wait until they throw the rubbish at you and switch characters. This will prevent damage done AND keeps your audience count the same, even though you would lose just 1 doing it otherwise (and usually that one is quickly replaced). This is a less viable option if a bunch of X-Nauts decide to throw rocks at you at once—and they do so often enough for it to be a concern. If your character up front has already went though, you'll have to finish selecting an attack or smack them. Luckily, you can find a badge to switch without losing a turn. The baby Yoshi qualifies with flinging eggs at those who chuck things on the stage.
• In the Point-and-Click Game Pink Panther's Passport to Peril, Pink Panther has to give a performance in a Chinese opera. However, if the player makes him walk onto the stage without the required costume and/or make-up, the audience will start throwing tomatoes at him.
• In the Pinocchio Licensed Game for the SNES and Sega Genesis, in the third level, Pinocchio must copy the dance moves of the puppets in Stromboli's puppet show by pressing the right button combinations. If he succeeds, the audience will cheer and throw money and power-ups, and if he doesn't, the audience will jeer and throw tomatoes, which drain his health.
• During the Title Defense match with Aran Ryan in Punch-Out!! Wii, he taunts you between rounds — and then gets pelted with garbage. He turns in his seat and starts threatening the crowd. Super Macho Man gets pelted as well, but he takes it in his stride and Pec Flexes the tomato stuck on his chest off. It happens due to the former being a dirty cheater and the latter a weapons-grade douchebag.
• The Rainsdowne Players is a casual RPG about a struggling theater troupe, and naturally one of the minigames involves having to dodge things thrown by an unruly audience, including (but not limited to) tomatoes, bottles, and dead fish.
• Rune Factory 3 allows the player to do this to monsters. As an attack. It's more useful if you throw status-effect-causing food, rather than ordinary crops, though.
• RuneScape has several areas where you can throw rotten tomatoes at things. For example, in Botany Bay, while bot using players were on trial, other players could hurl tomatoes at them.
• The Simpsons: Virtual Bart has a level where Bart must throw tomatoes (and later eggs) at his classmates so he will look good in the class photo by comparison. The game ends when he runs out of tomatoes (or eggs), runs out of time, or hits one of the adults (though he can hit Principal Skinner when he is crouching).
• In The Sims Medieval, Sims in the stocks can have tomatoes and eggs thrown at them (if the Sim you're playing is on the receiving end of this treatment, it increases the negative buff they get from the stocks).
• Spelunky players can attempt to beat the game with The Eggplant: ridiculously fragile and weak against all enemies except Yama, whose head turns purple and dies instantly to one hit.
• Tiny Toon Adventures games:
  • In Babs' Big Break for the Game Boy, each playable character has their own unique food to throw. Buster tosses carrots in an arc, Plucky tosses pineapples that bounce off the floors and/or walls, and Hamton bowls using watermelons.
  • In the western level of Buster Busts Loose for the SNES, the Coyote Kid (from the TV series episode, "High Toon") tosses tomatoes at Buster.
  • In Buster's Hidden Treasure for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, there are several enemies that toss food at Buster, including Ravens that drop apples, and Trolls (from the short, "Day for Night" from the TV series episode, "Brave Tales of Real Rabbits") that toss tomatoes.
• In ToeJam & Earl, the title characters can use tomatoes which can either be thrown or launched from a slingshot at Earthlings. Chickens can also shoot tomatoes at you and there is a present that can cause tomatoes to rain from the sky. There's even a spin-off game, "Ready, Aim, Tomatoes!", which is one of the six games included in the cartridge that comes with the Sega Menacer peripheral. This game involves using the peripheral to shoot tomatoes at the enemy Earthlings.
• In WarioWare: Touched!, after thwarting a chase by her musical rival Vanessa, Mona performs at a concert only to run off when she remembers she has pizzas to deliver. Vanessa takes the opportunity to dress as Mona and get on stage claiming to be her, but the audience isn't fooled because of her green hair and purple outfit and throw garbage at her.
• We Who Are About to Die: If the crowd gets bored or pissed off, they'll start tossing produce and assorted garbage at you and the other gladiators, aiming for whoever's the most boring or hated. The hits don't do much other than distract, but it's a sign you're not gonna get much Favor at this rate.
• in World of Warcraft, random NPCs will throw rotten fruits at your character the first time you visit Stormwind or Orgrimmar as a Death Knight. The advent of the Brawler's Guild in Mists of Pandaria allowed players to become the pelters. Throwing cheap vendor bought objects at other players as they fought, or at NPC spectators, complete with achievements for pelting rowdy spectators.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Played for Horror when Monokuma wrongfully executed and brutally tortured Kaede to death by hanging by her by a rope and smashing her entire body rapidly on a big spiky thorny piano, bruising her to death, and destroying her mutilated corpse afterwards.

Web Animation

• In Episode 70 of The Most Popular Girls in School, this happens to Deandra after her cringingly-bad singing performance. She actually takes it pretty well.
• My Story Animated: Jenny, from "I Was Born In The Forest, I've Never Seen People Before", starts throwing eggs and tomatoes at protesters, although we only see the eggs.
• OverSimplified:
  • In "The War of the Bucket", the townspeople of Bologna pelts a visiting Bishop with fruits and vegetable after he remarks that their beloved bucket "is just a bucket".
  • In "The First Punic War", the Carthaginians are panicking due to the Romans besieging them, and that they're being starved to death. Their leader tries to tell them that everything will be okay because he still has some food... for himself. Angry, the citizens throws tomatoes at him, but the leader simply eats them all.
    Carthaginian Leader: Whoa! You're wasting your tomatoes! And you idiots wonder why you're starving?! OH WELL, IT'S JUST MORE FOOD FOR ME!
• In the Volume 2 opener of RWBY, Team RWBY and JNPR are eating together, and Nora Valkyrie is throwing grapes for Yang Xiao Long to catch in her mouth. After Yang gives the truly atrocious pun "I always start my semester off with a Yang!", Nora throws a tomato which hits her square on the nose. Things escalate from there. A lot.
• In the Strong Bad Email "alternate universe", Strong Bad interrupts Old-Timey Strong Bad's magic act at a bad time, resulting in both Strong Bads getting pelted with "shades of grey tomatoes".

Webcomics

• In one Arthur, King of Time and Space modern arc strip, Arthur tells Kay he's got a role in the church play. Kay says he'll be sure to bring tomatoes, and Arthur comments that the admission fee might actually be a donation to the food drive.
• When Malachi organizes a talent show in Camp Weedonwantcha, a group of "ropes course" campers bring along a bunch of tomatoes in preparation for this. Subverted in that the "tomatoes" are actually rocks that have been painted red. Also subverted in that all of the performances gain applause from the rest of the audience, so they leave dejectedly.
• In a El Goonish Shive filler strip, Dan, feeling sick, decides to phone-in a comic update. According to the very lengthy title, the readers get enraged by the extremely low quality and throw fruits and vegetables at him. Ironically, this ends up providing him with the nutrition to recover but also some ends up going up his nose resulting in going on sick leave for 6 months.
• Geminiman from L's Empire ends up getting hit with tomatoes when he puts on a concert to pay for the rent, leaving him to wonder where everyone got them. Turns out that Void was selling them, resulting in them making a net profit.

Web Original

• In Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged, as the team heads to the Northern Crater to confront Sephiroth, Cloud announces that they will "make Sephiroth's dream of becoming a god his... final fantasy. He is immediately attacked with tomatoes for such an incredibly lame pun. At the very least, his tomato-plastered menu portrait sporting a Dreamworks Face smirk shows it was totally Worth It.
• Rotten Tomatoes is named after this.
• The SCP Foundation brings us SCP-504; tomatoes that launch themselves toward poor attempts at comedy. The amount of force used is proportional to how bad the joke is.
  Item: One mature SCP-504 tomato
  Subject: A portable computer playing a pre-recorded engineering joke.
  Transcript: "2009 is going to be a complex year. We already know the real part; we still have to find the imaginary part".
  Result: Supersonic blast detected; computer was completely vaporized by the tomato's kinetic energy. Sensor readings indicate an approximate speed of 3500 km/h (2174 mph).
• Uncyclopedia reports that throwing produce is merely a more primitive version of the Staple Gun.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series. An inadvertent version occurs in "Day of the Samurai". Kyodai Ken has a hostage tied up on the couch while he's practising his swordplay by throwing vegetables into the air and chopping them in half, causing her to be pelted with the remains.

Real Life

• The practice of throwing things at despised public figures dates back further than anyone can remember. According to the ancient Roman biographer and historian Suetonius, when Emperor Claudius had some trouble supplying Rome's granaries at one point (when famine and storms disrupted their supply lines), an angry mob of hungry Romans gathered and furiously pelted him with stale bread crusts. In response to this crisis, he immediately enacted laws insuring grain ships against loss and granting the suppliers with various tax advantages in order to keep the supply lines flowing. Suetonius goes on to say those laws remained in force forever afterward to his own time.
• The term "peanut gallery" originates from audience members who heckled performers by throwing exactly that.
• Muntadhar al-Zaidi, Iraqi journalist who expressed his hostile opinion of George W. Bush by throwing his shoes at him (Bush dodged both). He was arrested and tortured for that, though many of Bush's enemies in the Middle East and the West alike hailed him as one of their heroes (the sources for the "torture" claims are questionable at best, however). The practice of throwing shoes as a form of heckling (common in Arabic and similar Middle Eastern cultures, as the bottom of one's foot is considered the most ritually and physically unclean part of one's anatomy) preceded and followed him. Numerous people around the world have thrown shoes at people they despised from Israel to Taiwan. Perhaps somewhat fittingly, some of al-Zaidi's critics threw shoes at him too.
• Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had a statuette of Milan Cathedral thrown at his face, which broke his nose and two of his teeth.
• A heckler once threw a cabbage at US President William McKinley while he was giving a speech. McKinley caught it and said, "it seems that one of my detractors has lost his head," without missing a beat.
• During the worst days of The Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover had to endure people aiming anything (often rotten fruits and vegetables) at him (or his vehicle) at almost a daily basis, especially during his re-election campaign in '32.
• Many renaissance faires feature a tomato-throwing game, where one can pay to throw squishy old tomatoes at an actor dressed like a medieval crook, typically in the stocks.
• Two actors from cast of Lemonade Joe (1964) represented the film at a festival in Eastern Germany. The film was widely lauded and received several festival awards, but that particular German audience did not like it at all, and Kveta Fialova (The Chanteuse Tornado Lou) and Josef Hlinomaz (The Gunslinger Grimpo) reminisced how they had got empty bottles and cans thrown at them.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger had an egg thrown at him during one of his campaign speeches. He took it in good humor, saying that the person who threw the egg now also owes him bacon, because you cannot have eggs without bacon.
• The website "Tomato Casual" explores the history of pelting people with tomatoes.
• Allegedly, one Brazilian politician claimed that the economical situation has significantly improved during his term, because he used to be pelted with rotten tomatoes and eggs, but now his clothes were full of stains from considerably more expensive and fresh food.
• During France's 2017 Presidential Election, not one but two controversial candidates - Manuel Valls and François Fillon - had cups of flour thrown at them. A third, the ultimately successful Emmanuel Macron - had an egg thrown at him. John Oliver joked on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver that he doesn't know if the French people are any closer to picking a President, but they're halfway through making a decent crêpe.
• In the wake of the 2019 shootings in New Zealand, controversial Australian senator Fraser Anning stated that the victims "deserved it" for being Muslims. The following day, an upset teenager smashed an egg on Anning's head for his racist comment; Anning responded by punching the teen in the eye. Australians still shocked from the shootings came out in support of the teen for standing up to racism, leading to the hashtags #Eggboy and #EggANazi gaining popularity on Twitter. Anning would lose his seat two months later.
• Super Smash Bros. Melee player Hungrybox got pelted with a whole, raw crab after a victory with High-Tier Scrappy Jigglypuff from an upset fan.
• Similar to the New Zealand egging incident mentioned above, "milkshaking" has emerged as a protest tactic against the far right, with figures such as Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and Carl Benjamin all being splattered by milkshakes. A protest by the Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, had the far right planting false rumors about antifa activists putting quick-drying cement^note Even concrete marketed as 'quick-drying' still takes a couple hours to set up, because the world doesn't run on Cartoon Physics in milkshakes, which were then repeated verbatim by the Portland police and then picked up by the mainstream media.
• The New York Post reported, and the NYPD Commissioner repeated, a story that paper coffee cups filled with concrete had been found near a protest site, clearly evidence that protesters were trying to disguise concrete as chocolate-chip ice cream and throw it at cops. Sharp-eyed readers quickly identified the cups, and the notes written on them, as samples of decorative concrete from a construction site.^note The paper cup is used because it can be easily torn away to examine a cross-section of the concrete, and because there's usually plenty of coffee in the office trailer.
• The Cherry Sisters did a notoriously bad vaudeville routine during the late 1890s. Throwing of eggs, tomatoes & etc. was so common that they eventually had to erect a wire mesh screen during performances.
• A positive example with Pan Yue, a poet from the Western Jin dynasty known for being incredibly handsome. He was reportedly pelted with fruits by women as a gesture of admiration for his beauty.

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