Silly Simian

He may be an ape, but he sure is making a monkey out of himself.

"More fun than a barrel of monkeys!"

— Old proverb, setting the bar impossibly high

Some people find apes, monkeys, and lemurs inherently amusing, probably because they go 'ooh ooh', swing through the trees and stereotypically eat bananas. Perhaps it's also the fact that they mirror humanity so closely while still maintaining the visage of a wild animal, perhaps it's also just easier to anthropomorphize them, or maybe people just like poop-tossing jokes? Whatever the reason, there's a cyclic period of people being fascinated by primates that always seems to take the world of fiction by storm.

This has long been noted by comic book authors, who, during the Silver Age, took every opportunity to insert, turn people into, or otherwise add gorillas to a superhero story. (In fact, DC Comics had a policy at the time limiting the number of "monkey" issues per month, to prevent everybody from doing it.) The use of primates as a source of humor has also been associated at times with the tastes of the Lowest Common Denominator, who view the ultimate form of entertainment as a top-hat-wearing, diaper-wearing, cigar-smoking chimp riding a tricycle.

One consequence of this trope is the tendency in media to refer to great apes like gorillas or chimpanzees as monkeys, as even though they're technically not monkeys in the popular sense, the word "monkey" is simply funnier. It should be noted that apes are cladistically a specific type of monkey - they are the sister group of the Old World monkeys, together forming the catarrhine clade of simian primates. In other words, apes (including humans) are more closely-related by descent to Old World monkeys than Old World monkeys are to New World ones, so any use of "monkey" to include Old World and New World monkeys but exclude apes is paraphyletic and arbitrary from a scientific perspective. Some Talking Animal works make light of this distinction by having a great ape be called a "monkey", only to either correct whomever called them that or to take offense (such as, for instance, a certain librarian or an expectant chimpanzee father). By logical extension, this trope also extends to prosimians (a term traditionally used for primates that aren't monkeys or apes, e.g. lemurs such as King Julien) being employed for comedy, despite not being technically monkeys in the cladistic sense.

The image of the peaceful, childlike, and funny caveman, usually a member of the Neanderthal species, technically belongs in this trope. For that matter, one could say a cast of comedic humans or extinct hominids qualifies, but this trope tends to focus on non-Homo primates.

See also Apes in Space, Killer Space Monkey, Maniac Monkeys, Mischief-Making Monkey, Monkeys on a Typewriter, Sea Aping and Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot (which invokes this trope quite often); also check out Quacking Up and Goofy Feathered Dinosaur for the equivalents of this trope for avians and kin. See Cymbal-Banging Monkey for a common exception to this trope. For more mythically mysterious monkey-ish beings, see Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In the The '90s, on French TV, there was a series of very popular commercials for laundry product OMO starring actual chimpanzees in human clothing and "speaking" in silly words, enacting stereotypical ads where they get clothing dirty and have them clean again with OMO. The commercials were popular enough to increase sales of the product by 25%.
• According to panelists from The Gruen Transfer, it's something of an industry in-joke to do an ad with a monkey in it.
• A very well-known series of adverts for PG Tips Tea in Britain involved a group of trained chimpanzees who acted in the roles of a suburban family, with dubbed voices. Despite their popularity, these were axed in the 1990s over fears of animal cruelty allegations. They have since been replaced with the sock monkey (or Muuuuun-keigh! as Johnny Vegas pronounces it) inherited from ITV Digital, allowing a thematic continuation.
• The latter arises from a series of adverts by Vegas (playing a character called Al) and the Muuuunkeigh for ITV Digital, which went under despite giving away free sock monkeys with every subscription (some people signed up purely for that reason). The Al-Muuunkeigh combo was briefly transferred to The BBC for Comic Relief, then bought by PG Tips.
• There's something inherently hilarious about a belligerent gorilla swinging a sleeping man around by his hair in this classic Wella Shock Waves ad from The '90s.
• A Dodge Automobile commercial advertising a new sale has Michael C Hall say, "This event could not be more amazing. Oh, wait, there's a monkey." Cue a small chimpanzee dressed like Evel Knievel walking into the lot and pushing down on a plunger that blasts a small amount of confetti. Hall then says, "I stand corrected." In response to PETA's complaints about using a monkey, Chrysler produced another commercial that was almost exactly like the first one — but now with an invisible monkey. "Unbelievable."

Anime & Manga

• In 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, Marco's older brother Tonio gives him a white and tiny pet monkey named Amedio before he leaves to Argentina. Amedio's antics tend to add comedy to a rather melodramatic story.
• In Animal Crossing: The Movie, Cesar the gorilla and Champ the monkey are the resident non-human primate villagers. Cesar is a cranky villager who serves as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, while Champ is a jock villager who's always seen exercising. Both of them provide comedic relief through the story.
• In Ask Dr. Rin!, one of their four Ridiculously Cute Critters is Tenshin, a monkey that does nothing but squawk and eat candy, but due to being something of a mascot for the series, gets a lot of screentime.
• Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan has a student transformed into a recurring monkey. Said monkey's head was made using stock real life photos.
• Buster Keel! has Keel, a Dragon Ape, stuck in human form.
• Cromartie High School has a gorilla who frequently shows up at the school, and is said to be smarter than many of the delinquents who go there (which isn't that hard to believe when you see the rest of the cast).
• Digimon Adventure:
  • Etemon, the comedic "breather" (well, not really) villain.
  • Other ape Digimon include Apemon and Gorillamon.
• Dragon Ball's protagonist Goku has a monkey-like tail, and turns into the Oozaru, a giant were-monkey, when he looks at the full moon. He shares these traits with his entire race, the Saiyans. Though in this case, everything is not better with monkeys: Goku and his son Gohan turn completely feral and lose control when they turn into Oozarus, and while Vegeta can remain in control in Oozaru form, he's still evil (and by the time he makes his Heel–Face Turn he's lost his tail, and with it the ability to go Oozaru).
• Eyeshield 21 has one of the main characters, Raimon Tarou, follow a monkey motif. This includes adhering to stereotypical monkey traits such as running on all fours, climbing high trees, handling objects with his feet(he caught the football with his feet in a dream, and main character Sena actually believed it was Raimon's new technique), and snacking on bananas, his favorite food. He even cries "Mukyaa!", which in Japanese is a monkey's cry. Despite all this, he still gets incredibly offended when someone calls him a monkey.
  • In a poll for the manga, he won over a real monkey for "most monkey-like".
• Get Backers has monkeys popping up in the two Hot Springs Episodes and breaking havoc on the cast.
• In Gintama, the author of the manga Gintaman is revealed to be an ordinary gorilla. The Author Avatar later ends up being a humanized gorilla, and Kondo, who has the nickname of "Gorilla", ends up being transformed into one in a particular story arc.
  • In one arc, the Yorozuya gang and others decide to play a MMORPG called Monkey Hunter in an attempt to gather some information on some aliens who had them unwillingly modified into screwdrivers. The game is essentially the same as what it's a parody of, just with nothing but giant monkeys as the enemies.
  • Another arc has Kyubey tasked with watching over a pet monkey, whom she proceeds to give an Overly Long Name.
• In a Naruto filler arc, Kakashi placed a genjutsu on a bunch of monkeys so they would look like his team, confusing his tail. Apparently said tail found monkeys highly entertaining, as it took him half an hour to figure out they weren't human.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt episode 1 Angry Ghost has an Ace Attorney monkey.
• In Saint Seiya Shaka is prone to make monkey jokes at the expense of his enemies. Some actually laughed at them.
• SD Gundam World Heroes has main protagonist Wukong Impulse Gundam, who’s based on the classic monkey-themed legendary figure, Sun Wukong. There’s also his Gouen Form, although that form is the exact opposite of this trope.
• Slam Dunk: No actual monkeys in the show, but the main character Sakuragi is described as a "redheaded monkey" and Akagi's nickname is literally "Gori" (short for Gorilla). In fact, any excessively big and manly guy is referred to as a gorilla. Whenever Shohoku is chibified, they're usually portrayed as monkeys being led by a gorilla (except Rukawa whose a fox). From different teams we have Kyota, an equally Hot-Blooded rival, that is called "Wild Monkey" while Akagi's rival, Uozomi (who also has big stature), is nicknamed "Boss Monkey".
• Space☆Dandy: Dr. Gel appears to be a giant bearded gorilla who wears a G-shaped monocle (or possibly an eyepatch) and periwig. He is the series' Butt-Monkey in an almost meta sense, and on at least one occasion, the series uses him as a joke because of his animalistic nature.
• Speed Racer has the Team Pet Chim-Chim. The movie had not one but two chimps taking turns playing Chim-Chim. Whenever either one of them was on screen, they threw shit, and also got behind the wheel of a vehicle.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • "Do the words 'robot monkey' mean anything to you?"^note Honda/Tristan had his body stolen and his mind stuck in a tiny and adorable robot monkey in the virtual world
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX had one episode featuring an experimental dueling monkey with a monkey deck. In the dub he's named Wheeler as a callback joke to a comment Kaiba made in the original series about Joey being a "dueling monkey".
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, the Dark Signer Demak had the Dark Signer Birthmark of the Monkey, his Deck had monsters that were primarily Monkeys/Apes... and, of course, Earthbound Immortal Cusillu.

Comedy

• One of Dane Cook's stand up routines includes a tangent about how awesome monkeys are. He claims having a pet monkey would be Better than Sex, or being a part of a heist... with the monkey driving the van.
• Monkeys are a fairly common theme in Ross Noble's comedy as well, particularly on his 'Unrealtime' DVD.
• Nick Swardson tells a story in Seriously, Who Farted?!! about how he ended up giving $300 (mostly in small bills) to a monkey in Las Vegas who gives high fives. He was drunk at the time but still...

Comic Books

• Many, many superheroes and supervillains in American comic books are intelligent apes of some sort, most of which created during The Silver Age of Comic Books, when sci-fi stories featuring gorillas in the covers were thought to sell better. Notables include:
  • Congorilla: Sacred golden gorilla who serves as the alter ego of Congo Bill, a British adventurer, courtesy of mind-swapping rings.
  • Detective Chimp: Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A member of Shadowpact, Bobo T. Chimpanzee would like to remind you that Batman is merely the World's Greatest Human Detective.
  • Gorilla Grodd: Psychic would-be world conqueror from a hidden city of superintelligent gorillas. Gorilla City's actually kind of a big deal in DC; King Solovar was an important figure in the original Crisis Crossover.
    • Voiced in Blackest Night with an undead Solovar:
      Professor Zoom: You know what makes everything better?! GORILLAS!
  • The Mod Gorilla Boss: He's one hip swinger, Clyde, and you'd better believe that he's the big man behind the criminal underworld in Bludhaven. And that he thinks vertical stripes are cool.
  • Doom Patrol villain Monsieur Mallah: Superintelligent machine-gun-toting communist revolutionary homosexual French-speaking gorilla surgeon in love with a (male) Brain in a Jar. Yes, really (it might help explain things to know he was first created in the Silver Age — and then Grant Morrison came along).
  • Sam Simeon: Comic artist and half of Angel and the Ape. No points for guessing which half.
  • Titano: Giant chimp with kryptonite-laser-shooting eyes.
  • The Ultra-Humanite: Psychic Mad Scientist who had his brain surgically placed in a mutant gorilla's body.
  • Arkhampedia has an article on the subject.
  • Primaul: An intelligent vampire ape with fascist leanings. Which is to say, he's a Nazi. His real name is Julius, as a Shout-Out to Julie Schwartz.
  • Beppo the Super-Monkey, who is a Kryptonian monkey who is super.
  • In his first appearance, Brainiac of all people had a pet white space monkey named Koko. Many years later, as a Mythology Gag referencing this, Brainiac Five got a pet albino monkey named Koko.
  • In Wonder Woman (2006) Gorilla Knights, including Tolifhar, Rhanda and Mirada, ally themselves with Diana after being banished from Gorilla City for what they did under Grodd's sway.

Note that all the above examples are from DC Comics. Around 1940, DC fell head-over-heels in love with gorillas and has never recovered.

• Marvel has at least one example of its own: Gorilla Man, a soldier of fortune who got turned into an immortal gorilla.
  • And a different Gorilla Man, who has a human head and a gorilla's body. While he's technically a scientist, he's rarely portrayed as anything but the dumbest, most single-minded thug scientist ever.
  • Not to mention how Beast's original thing was his incredibly simian physique, causing him to look like a shaved gorilla. Then he became something akin to a blue-furred gorilla with a bizarre Wolverine-ish hairdo. Later he lost the gorilla-like traits to become cat-like, though.
  • And the Red Ghost's super-apes; a gorilla with Super-Strength, an orangutan with Voluntary Shapeshifting, and a Gravity Master mandrill. They all gained their powers (as did the Red Ghost, who gained Intangibility) from the same cosmic ray storm that gave the Fantastic Four their powers.
  • And there is also Initiative member Gorilla Girl, The Gibbon, Gorr the Golden Gorilla, and the Beasts of Berlin.
  • Julius Schwartz was parodied in J2 by the gangster-turned-talking gorilla Big Julie.
  • This doesn't apply to every ape, though; Giant monster-turned-regular-sized-monster Gorgilla is actually kind of a loser, like the rest of his teammates in the Fin Fang Four. And Moon Boy (of and Devil Dinosaur fame) is just too goofy to be cool. It's not entirely clear exactly what Moon Boy is, but at one point he's believed to be an example of Homo habilis (an early human species from back when humans were much more ape-like).
  • Then there's the Hit-Monkey, which is basically what it sounds like, a Noble Demon hitman monkey with the ability to shoot with his feet and only kills hitmen, mercs, and other crooked types. First showed up in the pages of Deadpool, where he chased after the Merc with a Mouth.
    "Let's be clear: HITMAN MONKEY is the harrowing tale of a Macaque monkey from the mountains of Japan who, though fate and circumstance, is transformed into the world's deadliest assassin," [Axel] Alonso continues. "I fail to see what could be funny about-oh. I see your point."
  • The original Squadron Supreme (a team of JLA Expies from an alternate universe) have an expy of Gorilla Grodd in their rogues gallery: a female cyborg ape named Ape-X (like "Apex").
• Nearly every superhero during the Silver Age was turned into a gorilla, at one time or another. The best way to tell if someone's doing an homage or Affectionate Parody of the Silver Age is to see if there are any gorillas around.
  • Legend has it that this trend began when a DC Comics executive noticed sales spikes during months where monkeys and/or apes were on the cover. Whether or not this is true is unknown, but Peter David, in the same foreword on the quotes page, insists that it's true, and even names the exec: Julius Schwartz, creator of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, among others.
    • Of course, this all culminated in the crossover JLApe: Gorilla Warfare!, where the entire Justice League were turned into gorillas, even in their own comics. Before you ask, it was actually in the late nineties. Also, it turns out that red-haired and blond gorillas (such as the ape versions of the Flash and Aquaman, respectively), are really weird looking.
    • Later mimicked by Marvel Apes, an alternate universe where everyone is a monkey except the Inhumans and Sue Storm. (Note that the Marvel Apes version of Spider-Man, who has a tail, is not an ape, but a spider monkey. He actually calls himself "Spider-Monkey".)
    • DC eventually got their own JLApe universe in Dark Nights: Metal.
• Ambush Bug: Year None # 5: "Apes on covers sell comics. Apes on covers sell comics. Apes on covers..."
• A particularly long-running take on the above occurred in the Eclipse comic Zot!. Due to an early run-in with a deevolutionary cult, one of the characters turned into a chimpanzee every time he visited the alternate earth of the titular character. He didn't mind as much as you'd think.
• From the New Crusaders we have a talking alien chimp named "Dusty", a.k.a. Uruk Ak'hak.
• The third collection of The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius, "Monkey Tales," involves: a superintelligent other-dimensional gorilla, a tribe of sasquatch, and a hyper-Ebola monkey. (That's three separate stories, mind.) In the fourth collection, "Gorilla Warfare," the characters travel to the dimension the superintelligent gorilla came from, where he (the gorilla) is worshiped as a god.
• Chris Sims' Exterminape is a tongue-in-cheek example, where the main character is a talking gorilla who discovered firearms shortly after learning how to use simple tools and quickly became a badass assassin who likes to show human women his "jungle love".
• The graphic novel Grease Monkey features biologically uplifted gorillas working on a space station, undergoing preparations for an alien invasion.
• Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy, has admitted he likes drawing monkeys. Especially gorillas with bolts in their neck, which is why Hermann von Klempt has a series of enhanced gorillas ("Kriegaffen", or "war apes") as aides. In addition, Count Guarino is turned into a chimpanzee during "Box Full of Evil". A monkey that carries a pistol and tortures Abe with a burning poker.
  • "Is that a monkey?" "He's got a gun!" *BLAM BLAM*
  • The comic book series Proof about a Bigfoot who is a paranormal investigator is just "Hellboy AS A MONKEY!"
• In I Feel Sick by Jhonen Vasquez, the main character Devi, an artist who is working on cover art for a book, is instructed to put a monkey on the cover. The book in question features no monkeys, it is about children who get evil powers from gnawing on contaminated aluminum siding, but research shows that people love monkeys and a monkey on the cover will just about double sales.
• Mega City One in Judge Dredd has a simian ethnic enclave (named Apetown), and an Orangutan named Dave was once elected Mayor of the city. He ended up being assassinated.
• Matt Fraction's Mantooth is about a super-spy gorilla who's a super-smooth ladies man.
• The Savage Dragon features Brainiape, an evil gorilla with a Brain in a Jar attached to his head. That has Psychic Powers. A crossover with the aforementioned Hellboy revealed that the brain in Brainiape was... Well, given that Hellboy was in it, Take a wild guess.
• Squirrel Girl thinks that everything is better with monkeys.
• In The Umbrella Academy, one of Reginald Hargreeves' inventions was a way to give chimpanzees sentience. They show up everywhere as detectives, soliders, hobos and even one hooker. One of these intelligent chimps is Hargreeves' assistant, Pogo. ^note No, really, EVERYTHING'S Better With Monkeys in Gerard Way's mind
• The Filth has Dmitri, a talking chimp who also happens to be a Soviet assassin. He offed JFK.
• In Secret Six, Ragdoll used some of his mercenary money to buy "a monkey house and a variety of little monkey outfits" for his monkeys. He dressed them up as his team members, covered himself with monkey chow and giggled as they attacked him.◊ It was unsettling and hilarious.
• Gaston Lagaffe once gave Fantasio (of Spirou & Fantasio) three circus-trained chimpanzees as a birthday present. They proceed to wreak havoc in his office.
• Monkeyman and O'Brien is about an intelligent gorilla from another dimension.
• The Norts in Rogue Trooper once attempted to counter the Southers' GIs with part-human-part-gorillas, who like the GIs could breathe the atmosphere of Nu Earth. They failed when Rogue beat their leader in one-on-one combat, becoming the new commander and persuading them to rebel against their evil masters.
• The megalomanical Doctor Vulter is the villain of the early Mickey Mouse story Mickey Mouse and the Pirate Submarine, a Captain Nemo Expy Mad Scientist with a High-Class Glass and a penchant for Putting on the Reich (well, it was published in 1936...). He has returned in European Disney Comics several times since then, and has been a Funny Animal gorilla since the beginning.
• In Requiem Vampire Knight, Thurim's sex life gets better with gori-mandrills! For those thoroughly squicked: Aiwass actually turns back to her true vampire babe form to do the deed... and if this repels you, what are you doing reading Requiem in the first place?
• In All Fall Down, the shape-shifter, Phylum, spends the book as a chimpanzee as a result of losing his powers.
• In The Multiversity, Nix Uotan is assisted by Mr. Stubbs, a buccaneer monkey.
• Jo, Zette and Jocko: Jocko is the children's pet chimpansee and he always gets caught up in mischievous adventures.
• Jommeke: Choco is the pet chimpanzee of Annemieke and Rozemieke.
• Astro City has Sticks, an intelligent gorilla who abandoned his militaristic gorilla nation to pursue a dream of becoming a rock drummer. Regarding Sticks' first appearance, Kurt Busiek commented, "I've always said that a superhero universe that doesn't have talking gorillas in it simply isn't finished yet, so it's good to get such an essential element established here, after almost twenty years."
• The titular character of The Chimp With The Brown Hat is a chimpanzee with a brown hat and a robotic arm traveling through The Wild West.

Comic Strips

• Liberty Meadows' artist Frank Cho chooses to depict himself as a chimpanzee. Trope referenced directly in this comic.
• German comic Nick Knatterton has one story about two chimps who were taught to steal. One of them ends up as Nick's "housemaid", having learned to do that job.
• Monkeys are a recurring topic in Get Fuzzy, being a particular obsession of Bucky Katt. Specifically, he wants to eat one.
• Dilbert has Zimbu the monkey, who can speak English and does a good job of making Dilbert look like an inferior worker.
• Pearls Before Swine often features them. Stephan Pastis even says that if you can't make a monkey joke funny, it's time to retire.

Fan Works

• The Second Try: Subverted. Aki thought that monkeys were cute and funny. So did their parents... until three monkeys tried to kidnap their daughter.
• Ripples in the Pond: After King Kong, a vervet monkey, beats up Fullbody, Evan decides to take him along as his partner and convince Luffy to let him join the Straw Hats.
• Becoming a True Invader:
  • For some reason, the loading screen on Zim's computers features a monkey eating berries.
  • The Heboadians look like cyborg monkeys.
  • A monkey appears from the portal in Dib's head on Heboad, and proceeds to take over flying the Dibship. It later turns out to be the Alternate Universe Keef's partner.

Films — Animation

• The Disney Animated Canon has a couple examples as well:
  • Aladdin had Abu as Aladdin's mischievious Non-Human Sidekick.
  • Tarzan was based on Tarzan of the Apes, but Disney did work the monkey trope into a wacky lather in the film, particularly with Tarzan's loud-mouthed female gorilla sidekick Terk, her not-too-bright buddies Flynt and Mungo, and the mischievous baby baboon Manu. On the other hand, some primate characters are completely serious (i.e. Kerchak, the stern silverback and Kala, Tarzan's loving foster mother) or are more threatening than funny (the baboon horde).
  • The Lion King had the shaman-type, Rafiki, who was an African vision-having kung-fu mandrill. He provides both comic relief and wise advice as an Eccentric Mentor.
  • King Louie, an eccentric musical orangutan from The Jungle Book was Disney's original addition to the movie, yet arguably, feels very much as if he belongs to Mowgli's world. The original book does, however, have a scene where the monkeys try to make Mowgli their leader, and won't let him go. He was later transplanted to TaleSpin.
  • A few Disney geeks have a theory: this trope is the only acceptable reason why there are "lemurs" in the Late Cretaceous period in Dinosaur.
  • Gorillas and monkeys appear as background characters in Dumbo. A gorilla during the circus parade ferociously shakes the bars of his cage but comically drops the fierce act when he accidentally breaks the cage bars.
  • Averted in Zootopia. Despite taking place in a Worldof Mammals, Wordof God confirms that primates are among the various mammals that don't exist in this world because they are very way too similar to humans in real life.
• The Barrel Full of Monkeys game monkeys make brief appearances in each Toy Story film (sometimes only during the credits), and they're usually used for quick, silly gags. Escalated in Toy Story 3 with DEATH BY MONKEYS.
• The monkey sidekick in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
• Monkey from Kung Fu Panda is a laid-back and somewhat mischievous kung-fu master.
• The Madagascar film franchise has a ring-tailed lemur (King Julien), a mouse lemur (Mort) and an aye-aye (Maurice). And two chimps, Phil and Mason. All five can also be found in the spin-off TV series The Penguins of Madagascar, which ups the count even further by adding two Dumb Muscle gorilla characters, Bada and Bing.
• The Rugrats Movie has the babies getting lost in a jungle where they meet a troop of escaped circus monkeys, and it seems this way when they start dancing with them. That is, until Tommy opens up Dil's banana-flavored baby food, at which points do not become better with the monkeys.
• Space Chimps, which as the title makes clear, is a revival of ape astronauts!
• In Kubo and the Two Strings, Kubo has a wooden charm shaped like a monkey that comes to life to protect him, simply named Monkey. She's actually Kubo's mother, who transferred her spirit into Monkey when her human body was killed by her sisters.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the protagonist has a well-trained pet monkey that he often dresses in a matching outfit. Taken a bit too far when said protagonist and said monkey are seen together in the trenches of World War I, with the monkey in a little soldier's uniform.
• Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back had the titular duo adopt an orangutan for some reason. (This was hinted at back at the end of Mallrats, where the last scene shows Jay and Silent Bob heading off into the distance with the orangutan, named Suzanne, in tow. No explanation is given for this, nor was the ape ever seen prior. It seemed to be an excuse to shoehorn Weezer's "Suzanne" over the ending montage.) Sexy jewel thieves were involved.
  • A similar sequence also appeared in the Jay and Silent Bob comic-book miniseries and the Clerks cartoon.
  • Lampshaded in the film. In one sequence, we see Shannen Doherty in a Scream-esque scene, in which she is attacked by Ghostface but manages to knock him out, and unmasks him. It's the orangutan:
    Shannen: What?! Fucking Miramax... CUT!
    Wes Craven: What?
    Shannen: A fucking monkey? Jesus, Wes, are you even trying anymore?
    Wes: But the research says people love monkeys!
    [Jay and Silent Bob take the monkey and run)
    Jay: We love this monkey!
    Wes: See?
• Clint Eastwood's Every Which Way but Loose and its sequel Any Which Way You Can was about a long-haul trucker and his pet orangutan. Eastwood once told a joke about that film (in which the ape was a chimp, according to him); he enjoyed the ape's company so much that he attempted to buy it after filming was completed. The animal's keeper asked how much Eastwood made, and upon learning it was $5,000 a day or some such, replied "Well Mr. Eastwood, the ape likes you too. But he makes $6,000 a day, so perhaps he should buy you".
• Outbreak unashamedly features a cute little monkey who is the plague bringer of doom (albeit unintentionally).
• 28 Days Later combines this with the Uncanny Valley-esque effect of a humanoid animal to make one scary-ass scene. Test animals unnerve us, monkeys amuse us, but-"The chimps are infected".
• Indiana Jones:
  • A scene of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has Mutt Williams getting stuck in a tree, and being discovered by monkeys that due to having the same "hair" as his, decide to show Mutt vine-swinging and then help him attack the Dirty Communists. Opinions were divided between "it's stupid" ("I used to joke that you could make any movie better by adding monkeys or explosions to it. I take back the part about the monkeys.") and "it's fun" ("What I want is goofy action -- lots of it. (...) And throw in lots of monkeys.").
  • A monkey appears in several scenes of Raiders of the Lost Ark until its greed gets the better of it.
    Sallah: Bad dates.
  • The characters eat chilled Monkey brains in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
• Time of the Apes (like Planet of the Apes, only Japanese and terrible). The film was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, as was Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which involved the main character temporarily inhabiting the body of a baboon as therapy.
• Two 1990 films gives us Dodger the Capuchin monkey and Dunston the Orangutan.
• The 2 directors of American Pie insisted on having a monkey in it somewhere as "any film with a monkey in it is twice as good as the same film without a monkey".
• Ronald Reagan never quite lived down his role opposite a chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo.
  • Reagan even lampshaded this role in a comment he made to Clint Eastwood, after Clint was elected mayor of Carmel (referring to Clint's role in Every Which Way but Loose): “What’s an actor who played with a monkey in a movie want to be doing in politics?”
  • Supposedly Reagan once autographed a Bedtime for Bonzo publicity photo of him and Bonzo with the inscription "I'm the one with the wristwatch."
• Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls has a scene with Ace joining a bunch of chimps in a mass exodus from a building, and doing a pretty fair imitation of their movements. Also, gorilla rape to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". The latter is a case of Rule of Funny, as gorillas, by and large, have much smaller penises than humans. It also introduces Spike, Ace's monkey sidekick who gets more screentime in the animated series.
• In The Fall, Charles Darwin (yes, that one — sort of) has a monkey "assistant" that he takes with him everywhere. The monkey dying is the point in the movie when things in Roy's story start to get very dark, very quickly.
• Inspector Clouseau's first scene in The Return of the Pink Panther proves that his accent gets even funnier when a "minkey" is on the scene, as he argues with an accordion-playing beggar about his pet.
• Charles Gemora is another actor who made a career of playing gorillas in older films and movie serials.
• In Monkey Business (1952), a monkey breaks into a chemistry lab and accidentally creates a batch of Screwball Serum.
• There is a lovable little monkey in the movie The Testaments, of One Fold and One Shepherd, her name is Chio.
• A monkey in a cage plays a part in the finale of the comedy Trading Places.
• Jumanji, TWICE. Mischievous, violent monkeys] are released early on, and later, one of the characters starts slowly transforming into a monkey-like creature as a penalty for cheating.
• Buster Keaton would appear to agree.
  • In "The Playhouse," he impersonates a performing orangutan.
  • In The Cameraman, he acquires an organ-grinder's monkey as a Non-Human Sidekick.
• While Planet of the Apes (1968) mostly plays the apes very seriously, it can't help but fall here when they do the Monkey Morality Pose.
• Project X 1987.
• In The Return of the King, the orc skeleton which Frodo trips over in Shelob's lair appears to be that of a chimpanzee.
• The monkey in Sunset Boulevard is deceased. Norma Desmond sees to it that it's buried in style.
• In Night at the Museum, we see the protagonist Larry Daley interacting with monkeys, to the point that he gets into an argument with one of them which eventually ends with a face slap fight.
• Born To Be Wild is a boy and his gorilla.
• Part of Stacee Jaxx's entourage in Rock of Ages is Hey Man, a primate of some sort. He's loud, crude, and prone to property damage.
• Open at Night: Luigi and Faeza steal an ape (they need him for a stage production), who is introduced leafing through a book as he is reading it. The ape lights Luigi's cigarette with a lighter, then calmly sits with Luigi and Faeza at a bar, drinking juice from a glass. This gag is brought to a screeching halt when the ape is Killed Offscreen, hit by a car—but the ending reveals that the ape wasn't actually injured and is perfectly fine.
• Jack the undead monkey from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is a comical Non-Human Sidekick of the villains.
• Mona the monkey helped keep Commander Draper company in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (and also helped him find food and water).
• Stop! Look! And Laugh! has the Marquis Chimps appear as the characters in Paul Winchell's bedtime story of Cinderella.
• Ed, a movie with Matt Le Blanc and a baseball-playing chimpanzee.
• Deconstructed in Nope. The film features the Show Within a Show Gordy's Home, a sitcom that ran off the gimmick of the main character being Gordy the chimpanzee, done to draw in family audiences by exploiting the popular conception of nonhuman primates as silly. However, despite seeming tame on-set most of the time, Gordy is still a wild animal, and one of the most aggressive ones known to man, which ultimately leads to him literally going ape after being agitated and startled and mauling the cast and crew.

Literature

• Carl the monkey (who is disturbingly savvy and prone to shooting everyone the bird) has shown up in Janet Evanovich's Numbers cycle (the Stephanie Plum series) and is also in the Sins spin-off books, Wicked Appetite and Wicked Business, alongside Diesel, who is fairly put out by it. Monkeys make the books better, but NOT Diesel's day, as a rule...
• Hanuman from the Sanskrit epic Ramayana. Not only is he the king of all monkeys in India, he is also a legendary hero and a demigod. Unable to find a rare healing plant on a mountain, he just brought the entire mountain back. Then he helped his friend Rama find his kidnapped wife by jumping from the Indian mainland all the way to Sri Lanka to scout the capital city of the Rakshasa demons. When he was captured and the demon king Ravana had his tail set on fire, Hanuman escaped and jumped from roof to roof, setting the entire city on fire.
• Sun Wukong from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, a super-strong, super-fast, regenerating monkey with magic powers who was also a Sociopathic Hero. Also a textbook example of a munchkin. He was likely originally inspired by the above Hanuman.
• In L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the winged monkeys. They're more complex characters than those represented in the film, and have more backstory.
• In Max Brooks' World War Z, the one scene with a monkey popping up is one of the few light moments of the book.
• The killer apes from Michael Crichton's Congo, trained to crush the heads of humans who approached the lost city. Crichton's novel Next features a talking monkey pretending to be a kid with a skin condition. Really.
• Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book had a bunch of monkeys, the Bandar-log, most of whom were eaten by Kaa.
  I have taught thee all the Law of the Jungle for all the peoples of the jungle — except the Monkey-Folk who live in the trees. They have no law. They are outcasts. They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above in the branches. Their way is not our way. They are without leaders. They have no remembrance. They boast and chatter and pretend that they are a great people about to do great affairs in the jungle, but the falling of a nut turns their minds to laughter and all is forgotten. We of the jungle have no dealings with them. We do not drink where the monkeys drink; we do not go where the monkeys go; we do not hunt where they hunt; we do not die where they die. Hast thou ever heard me speak of the Bandar-log till today?
• Dean Koontz's Christopher Snow books, Fear Nothing and Seize the Night, feature a tribe of monkeys that are escaped lab animals.
• In Animorphs, Marco's favorite battle morph was a gorilla. Chimpanzee and monkey morphs show up as well, although the monkey morphs were sario rip morphs and unusable after the end of the rip.
• H. P. Lovecraft's "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn And His Family". The title character eventually realizes that he is a Half-Human Hybrid.
  • Though to be more precise he's a thirty-one thirty-secondths human hybrid. As it turns out, most Caucasians in Lovecraft's universe are probably the result of interbreeding between ancient African tribes and degenerate albino ape-things.
• In Edgar Allan Poe's first tale of Detective Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the murderer is an escaped orangutan.
• According to some sources, the Librarian of the Unseen University from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels was turned into an orangutan because it was the funniest thing Pratchett could think of. But for God's sake, don't call him a monkey! Orangutans are apes. Great Apes, to be exact.
• Terryl Whitlatch's The Katurran Odyssey. It's pretty much a given when the whole story focuses on sapient monkeys and their unique civilizations, though the protagonist is a lemur.
• A pair of monkeys show up in the early chapters of the second The Kingdom Keepers book, for no other reason than to foreshadow The Animal Kingdom.
• The front cover of Earth (The Book) has Jon Stewart pose with a chimpanzee.
• The Hank the Cowdog series has one book where Hank finding a monkey in a crate and using him as his own personal servant, inflating his ego in the process. The monkey later starts talking and usurps Hank's command, calling himself the Pasha of Shizzam. But it turns out that part was All Just a Dream.
• Curious George, a child-like chimp that thus often behaves in a very silly way.
• Chuck Bass in Gossip Girl has a pet monkey named Sweetie. He brings Sweetie with him everywhere and dresses him in outfits that match Chuck's own. On the TV show they settled for giving Chuck a dog named Monkey.
• The teacher in Ishmael is a telepathic gorilla. No reason is given for this.
• Esphyr Slobodkina's 1938 children's book Caps for Sale includes mischievous monkeys.
• Muggle-Wump and family from The Twits.
• Zig-zagged in Sideways Stories From Wayside School. When Mrs. Jewls becomes the new teacher of the classroom on the top floor, she thinks all the children look too cute to be human. This causes her to mistake them for monkeys. However, she admittedly doesn't think it seems fun to teach a classroom full of monkeys.
• Singh uses a trained chip to demonstrate his work to Arthur in Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits.
• The protagonist of the 1940 story "The Whispering Gorilla" is a man trapped in the body of a gorilla, but retaining human intelligence. He gets away with it by pretending to be wearing a costume.
• Sans Famille: One of Vitalis’ animals is a monkey named Joli-Cœur.
• The old pulp serial Six Gun Gorilla, which features a gunslinger ceaselessly chasing a gang of murderers through the Wild West... oh, and yes, said gunslinger is a trained gorilla who happens to be just intelligent enough to shoot like a pro.
• In About Vera and Anfisa, the titular Anfisa is a monkey and Non-Human Sidekick to her owner, the five-year-old Vera.
• Welcome To Wonderland: The second book, Beach Party Surf Monkey, features Kevin the Monkey, a YouTube star who's videos help support the primate sanctuary he lives at. In the book, he's one of the stars of a movie being shot at the Wonderland Motel.
• In XL by Scott Brown, Will interns at the zoo in the primate department, primarily working with gorillas, whose behavior often parallels experiences Will is going through.
• Inverted in The Neverending Story. A monkey named Argax is the "steward" of the City of Old Emperors, and neither he nor his domain are very pleasant or fun.
• Isaac Asimov's "The Gentle Vultures": The vast majority of intelligent life in the galaxy is primate-based. The Hurrians, current rulers of the galaxy, are herbivorous chimpanzees.
• In Butt Out!, Baboon is a happy and care-free monkey who goes around town naked flaunting his behind for everyone to see, despite their protests.

Live-Action TV

• Our Miss Brooks:
  • In "The Little Visitor", the Conklins are expecting to play guest to Mrs. Conklin's sister's pet monkey. Harriet and Mrs. Conklin are excstatic, Mr. Conklin is miserable. Miss Brooks jumps to the conlusion the Conklins are expecting a new baby. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Miss Brooks often mentions Mr. Boynton taking her to the monkeyhouse at the zoo, both on radio and on televison. It's said to be one of his favourite places. In "The Frog", Miss Brooks mentions her intent to change this because "as a schoolteacher, I can't afford to buy Taboo by the quart".
  • At the end of The Movie Grand Finale, Miss Brooks having just finally recieved Mr. Boynton's proposal of marriage, finds Mr. Boynton feeding the monkeys at the zoo. Mr. Boynton finds an engagement ring in a box of cracker jacks. With This Ring is interrupted by Chiquita, a female money who chooses this moment to steal the ring. No matter, Mr. Boynton and Miss Brooks walk away arm-in-arm to their future home.
  Miss Brooks: (winking to Chickita) I hope it doesn't take as long for you as it did for me.
  Chiquita: (winks back)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In the Season 5 episode "Into the Woods", Anya wants to watch a movie about monkeys playing hockey because "The ice is so slippery and monkeys are all irrational".
• Paul the Gorilla from The Electric Company (1971) and its reboot. Companion of Jennifer of The Jungle. No, not that kind of companion...
• On Double Dare there were several physical challenges where a person getting messy had to dress like a gorilla (a few episodes even featured Robin dressed in the costume). Marc would often give the other player in such challenges a Fay Wray wig, meaning if you were told to wear that you were safe from the mess; however, he once pulled a Bait-and-Switch by telling a girl to put the wig on and then having her also put on the gorilla outfit and receive the messy end of the challenge. 2000 featured a chimp mascot named Brooks in a few episodes.
• The comedy action series B.J. and the Bear was essentially a ripoff of Every Which Way But Loose; it was about a long-haul trucker and his pet chimpanzee.
• Subverted in an episode of Boston Legal, in which a lawyer attempted to use a case study involving a monkey in one of his closing arguments, but the judge was not impressed.
• Tracy, the team ape of Filmation's Ghostbusters, who was also carried over to the animated series.
• The entire premise of Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, a spy fiction parody featuring actors doing voice-overs for footage of trained chimpanzees ("Get that Ape!"), which was apparently based on a series of British commercials for PG Tips Tea — see Advertising.
  • A more recent example could be TBS's "Monkeyed Movies" shorts (featuring chimps doing parodies of popular movies) and its 30-minute follow-up/spin-off The Chimp Channel from the 1990s.
• Tin Man's Mobats were a new spin on the Winged Monkeys. Only thing better than flying monkeys? Flying monkeys that spawn from the tattoos on the hot Wicked Witch's boobs!
• Super Sentai and Power Rangers frequently include gorillas and other apes when doing an animal theme. Gorilla-themed Rangers appear in Gingaman/Lost Galaxy, Go-Busters/Beast Morphers, and Zyuohger; and Gaoranger/Wild Force and Gekiranger/Jungle Fury also have gorilla mecha in them. Kakuranger/Mighty Morphin' Season 3 also has an ape mecha and Shinkenger/Samurai has a monkey.
  • Also, in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger, Grifforzer was supposed to be a griffin (hence the name), but was referred to as a "space monkey" and given a more monkey-like voice when he became Goldar in the American Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
  • During the premiere of Power Rangers Turbo, Bulk and Skull were turned into chimps by Elgar and remained stuck that way for half the season.
  • In Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, evil pirate Basco has a pet monkey named Sally. It's a guy in a rubber suit, but one that generally acts like an actual monkey rather than a Monster of the Week.
• "As You Were," an episode of M*A*S*H, has Hawkeye and Trapper livening things up at the 4077th during some downtime with gorilla suits.
• Me and the Chimp was a short-lived CBS comedy on CBS about a dentist who watches after a chimpanzee his two children find. Hilarity Ensues.
• The premiere episode of The Middle Man featured superintelligent genetically engineered lowland gorillas.
  Wendy: Oh no. It's Gorilla Grodd.
• Kelso on That '70s Show thinks that if a Monkey had a loaded gun would be an awesome premise for a TV Show.
• Mork & Mindy had Mork rescuing (or so he thought) a chimp from the zoo. Twice. The first time was just a gag at the beginning of an episode, but the second time was an entire plot.
• Professor Bobo, the semi-intelligent chimp from MST3k. Sort of subverted in an earlier episode. A gorilla appears at the Hexfield Viewscreen. He doesn't really do anything. Everybody's understandably confused.
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun Doctor Liam Neesam, played by John Cleese, tries to turn the entire population of Earth into monkeys to turn Earth into "Super Monkey World" as an amusement attraction for the rest of the Universe.
• Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. In the episode where he tackles the evil Monday haze his second (or third) attempt was
  Moze: "Monkey Mondays?"
  Ned: "Monkeys make everything better."
• Legends of the Hidden Temple: The infamous "Shrine of the Silver Monkey" room is one of the few obstacles on the show that lasted through the entire show's history.
• A first-season episode of Rescue Me included a subplot in which Tommy Gavin's Uncle Teddy wins a bet against a zookeeper, and Tommy's father (who is living with Teddy at the time) is at pains to keep the animal from ruining the house.
• Kratts' Creatures spinoff Zoboomafoo featured a lemur as a main character. For a few seconds each episode, he'd be an actual lemur, for most of the rest, he'd be a puppet, but then there'd also be these stories with him depicted in claymation.
• A sketch in Monty Python's Flying Circus had a gorilla being interviewed for a librarian's position. He is thrown out after he is forced to admit he's really a human librarian wearing a gorilla suit ("...trying to deceive us in order to further your career!").
• The title character of the short-lived '80s sitcom Mr. Smith was a talking orangutan who worked as a government advisor in Washington, D.C..
• Gerald the Gorilla, in one of the best known Not the Nine O'Clock News sketches. Taken onto a talk show by Professor Fielding, to demonstrate how he has taught a wild animal to talk, they quickly descend to bickering like a married couple, while the interviewer looks on in bemusement.
  Professor Fielding: Look, can we get this into some sort of perspective? When I first met Gerald he was completely wild...
  Gerald: Wild? I was absolutely livid!
• Lampshaded and discussed in Community. Troy gets a monkey in "Contemporary American Poultry" when the study group starts controlling chicken finger business at the school, mirroring mafia movie plots. The monkey escapes and cannot be found. It resurfaces from time to time. The monkey named Annie's Boobs lives in the college air ducts with a trove of stolen goods.
  Jeff: Why do you have a monkey?
  Troy: It's an animal that looks like a dude, why don't I have ten of them?
• David Letterman often makes jokes about monkeys. Cue that vintage clip of a chimpanzee washing a cat.
• Ray from Everybody Loves Raymond seems to have a deep appreciation for monkeys. The best example is when he mentions this one time when he and his family were at a zoo, and he was watching a man with a monkey, and Debra simply gave him the "don't even think about it" look just for thinking it might be fun to have a monkey in the house.
• In Never Mind the Buzzcocks, host Mark Lamarr once got bored reading out the current joke so said "Never mind, here's a video of a monkey on a tricycle."
• Saturday Night Live: If Dieter allows you, you may touch his monkey.
  "Touch him, love him! LIEBE MEINE APSCHMINKI!"
• The Monkees have a stuffed one at their beach house.
• Averted in the Medium two-parter "Four Dreams", where one of the creepy prophetic dreams involves an animated monkey mother and her child fleeing a home invasion. It's as silly as it is disturbing.
• In The Big Bang Theory, Amy owns a cigar-smoking capuchin monkey. Although, to quote her, he's a bit of an ass.
• Cesare gets a monkey in an episode of The Borgias but he doesn't have it for long because it eats poisoned food. This is why Cesare brought a monkey to the banquet in the first place.
• Marcel, Ross's pet from Friends. It was illegal and the gang got in trouble when Marcel ran away. Later Ross gave him up to a zoo, and then they found out he got into showbusiness. Ross in season 6 pointed out this was a stupid storyline ("What was I thinking?").
• The revived Upstairs Downstairs had Maud's pet monkey, which eventually met an unfortunate fate due to the stupidity of Mr. Ultimate Job Security himself, Johnny the footman.
• On their spinoff series, The Lone Gunmen come to the aid of a chimpanzee who speaks with the voice of Edward Woodward.
• Chimp J. Fred Muggs, alongside Dave Garroway in the earlier days of the The Today Show.
• How I Met Your Mother features monkeys a few times:
  • In one episode, Marshal gets mugged by a small monkey. (Or not. He never tells anyone once and for all if he actually just invented that story.) Barney finds this just hilarious. And at the end of the episode, the little primate is reenacting King Kong.
  • In another episode, Robin temporarily moves to Japan, where the co-host of her news show is a chimp.
• The Flash (2014) includes Gorilla Grodd as one of the Flash's recurring enemies, but as you might expect of a pissed-off gorilla, he's not funny at all.
• One of the celebrity guests on World's Dumbest... was Crystal, the monkey from The Hangover Part II. Mike Trainor became fast friends with her, calling her "Party Monkey".
• The Garth Marenghis Darkplace episode "The Apes of Wrath" featured the hospital staff (except for Reed and Dagless) regressing back into monkeys, thanks to tainted water. Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.

Music

• George Michael's "Monkey" ("Why can't you do it? Why can't you set your monkey free?") is about drugs.
• "Mechanical Ape!" by The Aquabats! is about, as the name suggests, a Humongous Mecha shaped like a gorilla.
• The Barenaked Ladies song "Another Postcard" is about a man who cannot escape an endless stream of anonymous international postcards — all of which feature allegedly humorous photos of chimpanzees in various costumes and poses: "Another postcard with chimpanzees / And every one is addressed to me..."
  • And, of course: "If I had a million dollars / I'd buy you a monkey! / Haven't you always wanted a monkey?"
• Beastie Boys - "Brass Monkey" ("Brass monkey, that funky monkey"). Which, as many people don't even realize (but is obvious in the context of the song) is a kind of cocktail drink.
• Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" has a video featuring the band in monkey suits.
• "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey", by The Beatles. Although that song could either be about heroin or about Yoko.
  • Title echoed by the song "Me and My Monkey" by Robbie Williams, in which the protagonist and his talking monkey friend go to Las Vegas.
• Chuck Berry - "Too Much Monkey Business"
• The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band's first album was called Gorilla, featured a man in a gorilla suit on the cover, and was dedicated "to Kong who must have been a great bloke".
• Elvis Costello - "Monkey to Man"
• Jonathan Coulton:
  • "Code Monkey", a sympathetic take on the slang term referring to software developers whose work involves no creativity.
  • "My Monkey," about the narrator projecting thoughts and feelings onto his monkey butler.
  • "De-Evolving", where the narrator starts turning into a monkey.
  • "Skullcrusher Mountain" has the mad scientist narrator attempts to woo the object of his affection with the gift of a pony, enhanced by the addition of several monkeys.
  • This trope plays into [JoCo]'s music so much that when he posted "Space Doggity" — a song about the first dog in space — to his blog, he wrote, "I almost went with the first monkey in space, but I didn't want to be accused of going overboard with the monkeys."
• Counting Crows - "Monkey" ("Hey monkey, where you been?")
• Darling Pet Munkee's almost-eponymous song "Darling Pet Monkey", about an actual mail-order ad for live squirrel monkeys (see the "real life" section). Since their main shtick is writing songs about Mail-Order Novelty ads that reflect the ad's tone and not what the actual product was like, it makes getting a monkey in the mail sound much cooler and less dangerous than it really would be.
• Flight of the Conchords subverts it in "Think About It"; people on the streets are getting diseases from monkeys.
• Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey", the video of which featured a chimpanzee.
• The Funky Gibbon - the greatest novelty hit of The Goodies.
• "Monkeys clapping" are actually part of Eugene's wedding party on the Gogol Bordello song "Dogs Were Barking".
• Gorillaz.
• Honey Cone - "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"
• Jethro Tull - "Steel Monkey"
• Brazilian band Jota Quest's second album, and the lead single out of it, was called De Volta ao Planeta, "back to the planet"... the planet being◊ the Planet of the Apes. (the lead singer even made a sunglasses-wearing ape tattoo!◊)
• The Kinks - "Ape Man"
• Major Lance - "The Monkey Time"
• Inverted in the Lemon Demon song "Fiberglass Monkey", which is about a guy having reoccurring nightmares about a fiberglass monkey statue.
• The music video for Bruno Mars's "The Lazy Song".
• Steve Martin's video for Marty Robbins's "El Paso".
• Dave Matthews Band - "Shake Me Like a Monkey" ("Love me baby shake me like a monkey")
• The video for Megadeth's "Public Enemy Number One" has chimps on both side of the law. The crook ape gets to fire a Thompson machine-gun.
• The Monkees.
• The eternal struggle of Monkey versus Robot.
• Ookla the Mok's monkey rock opera, Smell No Evil. All of it.
• Martin Page's "Monkey In My Dreams", although it's probably about drugs.
• The Pixies - "This Monkey's Gone to Heaven"
• Placebo's "Space Monkey" ("Space monkey in the place to be")
  • And John Prine's song of that title.
• Professor Elemental's butler is an orangutan.
• Reel Big Fish - "Monkey Man"
• Smokey Robinson & the Miracles - "Mickey's Monkey"
• The Rolling Stones have the song "Monkey Man" and Greatest Hits Album GRRR! has a gorilla on its cover.
  • Bill Wyman's solo album, Monkey Grip
• David Lee Roth's "Everybody's Got The Monkey".
• Rush - "The Main Monkey Business"
  • Also, on the DVD for the Time Machine Tour, a video montage plays in the background during Tom Sawyer. Part of the montage includes monkeys playing the song.
• Saves The Day - "Monkey" ("The monkey will bite / better eat your poultry")
• Bruce Springsteen - "Part Man Part Monkey"
• The punk/alternative band Sprung Monkey.
• Steely Dan - "Monkey in Your Soul"
• Ray Stevens - "Harry the Hairy Ape"
• James Taylor's "Gorilla".
  • Bruno Mars has a song with that title too... albeit it is comparing his sex performance to the great ape.
    • He does have guys in gorilla suits in the video for "The Lazy Song," though.
• Rufus Thomas - "Can Your Monkey Do the Dog?"
• The song "Monkeys and Playbills" from [title of show].
• The original cover of Mouse on Mars' Niun Niggung album depicts a gibbon swinging from a branch. Given the upbeat, playful nature of the album (and the band's Signature Style in general), it's very fitting.
• The Traveling Wilburys - "Tweeter and the Monkey Man"
• An important theme in Roger Waters' Amused To Death album involves a monkey watching television, and, well, amusing himself to death...
• Inverted with Logan Whitehurst's "Monkeys Are Bad People." Dude really hates monkeys.
• Widespread Panic - "Sleepy Monkey"
• Warren Zevon - "Gorilla, You're A Desperado". A zoo gorilla forces Warren to trade places with him. The gorilla ends up depressed, divorced, and playing Warren's guitars.
• Debbie Reynolds' "Aba Daba Honeymoon" featured a romance between a monkey and a chimp.
• "Hockey Monkey" by The Zambonis.
• Strange But True, an album by Jad Fair & Yo La Tengo, is a Concept Album where all of the songs are inspired by tabloid news articles, and three of those songs also happen to be centered around monkeys: "Helpful Monkey Wallpapers Entire Home", "Retired Woman Starts New Career in Monkey Fashions", and "Minnesota Man Claims Monkey Bowled Perfect Game".
• "The Monkey Speaks His Mind" by David Bartholomew, in which some monkeys discuss how the theory that humans evolved from monkeys is insulting to monkeys.
• Megadeth's video for "Public Enemy Number One" stars a chimpanzee.
• The Aquabats! - "Mechanical Ape!". The ape is a Humongous Mecha, and it comes with a pair of fuzzy dice in the cockpit.

Pinballs

• One of the game modes in Pirates of the Caribbean (Stern) is centered around Jack the Monkey.

Pro Wrestling

• Why else would you call him Gorilla Monsoon?
• CHIKARA featured the wrestler USApe, who's your standard All-American Face in a gorilla suit. At Here Come the International Invaders: Attack of the Phantom Sith, August 17, 2007, he defeated MosCOW the Communist Bovine. They also teamed up with Dragon Dragon in a losing effort against the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple (Crossbones, Hydra and UltraMantis Black) at Bruised on October 26. Cows are quite funny, too.
• Jimmy Jacobs was part of a tag team with Gregory The Gorilla called Ape Of The Falls in the NWA.
• Jim Nye and Space Monkey, a tag team known as The Theory Of Evolution

Radio

• During the NFL season, Tony Kornheiser's radio show has a regular segment called "Jaws versus the Monkey". In which football picks made by ESPN analyst Ron Jaworski are set against picks made by "Reginald the Monkey", from the DC Zoo.
• Karl Pilkington's "Monkey News" and the short-lived "Cheap as Chimps" segments from The Ricky Gervais Show.
  Ricky: "Ohhh, Chimpanzee that! MONKEY NEWS!"
  • Karl loves monkeys in general. When discussing aliens, Ricky points out that Karl would love if the aliens looked like monkeys and, if anything, he would want to go to the planet from Planet Of The Apes.
• Victorian businessman Thomas Bin thought so, to the extent he had a hotel made out of monkeys, who were stacked together to form a 'rigid but flexible framework'. And it actually worked, until someone set up a peanut-butter and banana treat factory next door, causing the monkeys to go berserk and attack everyone nearby, including Bin himself, who then goes missing. Incidentally, the man describing Bin's fate to his children, who just happens to be his business partner, has no idea why someone would put such a factory there, before offering them some peanut-butter and banana treats.
• In New Dynamic English, some kids, including Max's son John and a girl named Karen wanted a pet monkey.
• From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  Arthur: Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys out here who want to talk to us about this script for "Hamlet" they've worked out.

Tabletop Games

• One faction in the tabletop miniatures game AT-43 are the Karmans, who are gorillas in Powered Armor.
  • Who smoke cigars.
• Feng Shui includes among its factions the Jammers, which are intelligent cybernetic monkeys and apes working in concert with the few humans immune to the influence of Chi. Their aim is to destroy every feng shui site in existence so humanity can be "free" from the "tyranny" of Chi, something which may have very bad consequences for the world.
• The Magic: The Gathering joke set Unhinged featured monkeys, alongside donkeys, as the two major creature types featured. Monkey Monkey Monkey!
• The Magic: The Gathering design team for Alliances thought that continuity's idea for a race of sentient gorillas was silly, so they made fun of it by putting the word gorilla in every card's name. For example, Force of Will was originally called "Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla Gorilla (Stop That)." As an homage to this, the card Sol Grail's name is an anagram of "gorillas".
  • Of course, some of the gorillas (and references to them) still made it into the set as actual cards. In all, nineteen distinct Ape cards have been printed to date (most recently four reprints in the ninth edition of the main set)...not counting those which simply have all creature types.
• Kroot from the Warhammer 40k use a species called the "Krootox" as a battle and pack animal, it is essentially a big beaked gorilla. More interestingly, the Krootox were once a normal kroot Kindred ("tribe") that used the kroot ability to absorb genes from food to bulk up, eventually becoming non-sentient and stuck in that form.
  • There's also the Jokaero, who are intelligent orangutans...In SPACE. Though not as prevalent as they once were, they are still important due to their feats of engineering, and aren't even sapient so what they will make is entirely based on the Jokaero's own whims and survival instinct. They are the Imperium's only source of "digital weapons", miniature one-shot versions of full-sized weapons normally used by the Imperium that can be worn on a finger.
    • And now, thanks to the new Grey Knights codex, it's possible to field an entire army consisting of them (plus one Inquisitor), colloquially known as the "Barrel of Monkeys" army build.
• Rifts features Ape-Boys (genetically-enhanced apes and monkeys) as a playable race.
• The fourth set of Monsterpocalypse, "Monsterpocalypse Now", introduced the faction "Empire of the Apes".
• Dungeons & Dragons has the howler wasps, more popularly known as Monkey Bees◊
  • Monkey bees... my God.
  • Monkey Bees DO NOT make everything better.
  • On a more pleasant note, there are the Ramayana-inspired vanaras, a playable race introduced in Oriental Adventures.
    • There have actually been lots of monkey- and ape-based creatures in D&D over the years. Listing all of them could probably double this page's length.
• Pathfinder has its own arrangement of monkey monsters, most notably the Sikari Macaques — swarms of monkeys infected with a form of monkey rabies that leaves them as unhinged killers. This leaves them vulnerable to healing magic — a remove disease spell will halve the swarm's current hit points.
• Doctor Silverback, from the Champions Universe (and brought over to Champions Online), is a superhumanly-intelligent gorilla.
• The serie of Flash Games Bloons Tower Defence put the player in charge of an army of ridiculously cute monkeys hell-bent on destroying their mortal enemy: balloons.Which they fight with darts at first, but then escalates quickly as they bring on bombs, flamethrowers, warlocks, spiked mines and much more.
• Evil Hat Productions games frequently feature Gorillas, in particular the pulp styled game Spirit of the Century has Gorilla Khan, a sentient gorilla mastermind with many gorilla minions, and The Dresden Files RPG. A spin off company 'One Bad Egg' produced a whole setting seed and race of intelligent apes for Dungeons and Dragons 4e.
• Meta example for Exalted: The team of freelance writers calling themselves the Ink Monkeys, who nearly everyone agrees make everything they touch a thousand times better.
  • Keep in mind however, that some fans (some more rational than others) think they dialed down the brokenness too much, and now the game is a little underpowered. Most of those admit that the game is more playable, now (and the official boards won't like you very much if you bring up that criticism).
• Mutants & Masterminds has "Earth-Ape" which is protected by The Primate Patrol. The classic adventure, "Time of Crisis", features the heroes arriving here during a cross-dimensional mission.
• The comedy RPG Stuperpowers had "Mighty Joe Jung" as a villain. Make a wild guess.
  • Evil gorilla psychiatrist?
• Eden Studios once published Terra Primate, an RPG not unlike their better-known All Flesh Must Be Eaten, but with apes instead of zombies. Most "Ape Worlds" (e.g. settings) were reminiscent of the Planet of the Apes franchise in one way or the other.
• In Rocket Age Venus' original sapients are the Lizard Monkeys. Unintelligible, one metre tall and not thought to be sapients by most, they nonetheless have a very developed culture and belief system. They're very popular 'pets'.
• On FUMBBL, a popular website to simulate online Blood Bowl games, there are three teams listed on the CRB teams page which are not actually included in the tabletop rules. Two of them, Daemons of Khorne and Bretonnia, were codified by Cyanide and approved by Games Workshop for the official video games (Khorne for Blood Bowl: Chaos Edition and Bretonnia for Blood Bowl 2). The third team consists of (presumably) sapient bonobos, orangutans, chimps, and gorillas with no basis in Warhammer Fantasy lore, unlike every other team. This trope (as well as a genuinely fair and mechanically interesting play style, YMMV) is the main reason they're included on the roster.

Theater

• In the opera Der Junge Lord (The Young Lord) by Hans Werner Henze, scientist Sir Edger introduces his 'son', Lord Barrett, to the upper dignitaries of a German town. The young Lord's strange speech and eccentric behavior become a source of fascination: he is much admired and imitated, even catching the eyes of a young noble lady — until he flings off his clothes during a dance, revealing himself as an ape.
• The only possible explanation for the "monkey motif" in the Show Within a Show in The Drowsy Chaperone. It starts off small, and then goes up a notch in "Bride's Lament". Even the Man in the Chair admits that it's labored.

Theme Parks

• At the Disney Theme Parks:
  • Jungle Cruise includes many primates, such as orangutans and gorillas; the latter is shown ransacking a campsite.
  • The Mystic Manor at Hong Kong Disneyland involves a mischievous monkey among the supernatural stuff.

Toys

• The Beanie Babies line has several basic monkeys, a couple of chimpanzees, an orangutan, and a baboon named Cheeks. And a bushbaby.

Video Games

• Obviously, in Super Monkey Ball, several monkeys roll in a transparent ball, and eat bananas as they’re trying to reach the goal gate in many mazes.
• A monkey drives and conducts the train in Animal Crossing.
• A ridiculous number of video game mascots are apes or monkeys of some sort: The mascot for the rhythm action game Samba de Amigo, the cast of Super Monkey Ball, and Donkey Kong, among others.
• Aladdin (Virgin Games) has bonus levels that actually let you play as Abu the monkey.
• Subverted in Asura's Wrath, with Gohma Howlers, which are anything but nice, as they kill humans without hesitation in packs.
• In Baldur's Gate, the canonical ending for Jan Jansen (spoiler tagged for obtrusive wall of text):
  • Jan Jansen's life following his association with CHARNAME was typically convoluted, the barest of details hidden amidst his half-truths and whole lies. According to his published memoirs, "A Jansen in Every Port," after a short prison term for monkey smuggling, he returned to his first love... monkey smuggling. This led to the now infamous Gibbon Riot of '72, a tumultuous and altogether unclean event that seemed to center on the estate of the Shadow Thief Vaelag. Jan would deny that he had planned the downfall of the rogue, but he was unable to explain what practical application he had intended for a horde of knife-wielding simians. Nevertheless, the death of the admittedly disliked and generally suspect Vaelag could not be attributed to the young gnome. Strangely enough, Jan had alibis for each and every second of the day in question, and what a day it must have been! Relatives from across the Realms came forward to say that he had stopped in for tea and turnips. At his later wedding to Lissa, Jan was asked how he managed to be in so many places at once, and yet still so far from the scene of the crime. "Well," Jan would say, "when you have that many monkeys, anything is possible."
• Banjo-Kazooie features a monkey named Konga, who returns in the sequel as a circus ringmaster.
• One of the main characters of Beyond Good & Evil 2 is an uplifted cockney chimp named Noxxie. With a grapple gun arm.
• In Bible Adventures, one level of Noah's Ark had you gathering a pair of monkeys; another level had monkeys throwing fruit and coconuts for you to scavenge.
• Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg: Saltim, the fifth boss, is a funny clown monkey, who is a breather from the difficulty of the game, and is considered to be a simple boss.
• The Bloons series and its More Popular Spin-Off Bloons Tower Defense are allegedly inspired by carnival games where you throw darts at balloons. Why they made the playable characters monkeys is anyone's guess, but probably because dart-throwing monkeys are funny.
• Cartoon Network featured a Breakout clone on their website that featured six of their monkey characters trying to impede the player's progress- Magilla Gorilla, Bingo, I. R. Baboon, Monkey, Mojo Jojo, and Blip.
• Contact features a white-furred monkey that turns out to be the antagonists' Team Pet.
• The reason why Crunch wouldn't take off his NV Helmet in Crash: Mind Over Mutant. "Sooo awesome! Monkeys!"
• A Cymbal-Banging Monkey in a claw machine is an Optional Boss in the casino level of Cuphead.
• Apparently there were real monkeys on the set of The Deadly Tower of Monsters. Unfortunately they were known for flinging their feces all over the place.
• Deus Ex describes the Grays as (possibly) being genetically engineered hairless monkeys. This doesn't stop them from being the most annoying enemies in the game. Note that these are psychic monkeys.
• In Doctor Lautrec and the Forgotten Knights, the titular doctor has a pet monkey named Nico who hides in his top hat.
• Don't Starve:
  • Splumonkeys, monkeys that dwell in caves and live inside barrels. They rob players of their inventory and throw manure in combat. If a Splumonkey manages to steal a hat, it'll wear the hat.
  • In the Shipwrecked DLC, the Prime Apes function as a friendlier version of the Splumonkey. Differences are that they live aboveground, take only items that are dropped, and are a form of "indifferent" mob which can be befriended. (They still wear stolen hats.)
• In Dubloon, your crew's Team Pet is a monkey named Ricky.
• The Mother series has more than a barrel full of monkeys factoring into the plot.
  • In EarthBound Beginnings, Ninten and the other travel through a underground passage filled with monkeys who give off random false facts as they make their way around.
  • In EarthBound (1994), a bubblegum-chewing monkey is the key to getting across the river at Winters; another point in the game requires the party to give and receive gifts from several monkeys to proceed.
  • In Mother 3, the third chapter of the game is played entirely by a monkey named Salsa. Fassad makes him his slave by threatening his girlfriend (whom Kumatora dubs the "love monkey") and then fitting him with an electric collar.
• One of the main villains in Earthworm Jim is Professor Monkeyforahead, a mad scientist who shares his head with an upside-down monkey. The monkey's name is Monkey Professorforahead.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • The Imga are a race of sentient "great apes" from Valenwood, the forest homeland of the Bosmer (Wood Elves). They are known for their reverence to the Altmer (High Elves) and seek to emulate them in dress and, sometimes, even going as far to shave their fur. Ironically, the most famous Imga in the series' lore is Marukh, known as the "Monkey Prophet," who was the leader of the 1st Era Alessian Order. The Order was extremely human-supremacist and extremely racist toward all races of Elves. They've yet to appear in the series (though the lore-friendly Skyrim Mod, "Moonpath to Elsweyr", adds them in as Giant Mooks to the Altmeri Thalmor.
  • The Tang Mo are a race of "monkey folk" who hail from the continent of Akavir, far to the east of Tamriel. They are described as kind and brave, but also simple and mad. Despite this, they are capable of raising armies and have successfully defended themselves against their hostile and more aggressive neighbors (including the Kamal "Snow Demons" and the Tsaesci "Snake Vampires"). They've recently (relative to when Mysterious Akavir was written) allied themselves with the Ka Po' Tun "Tiger Folk".
• Enemy on Board: Monkus, one of the crewmembers you can play as is a monkey in a spacesuit.
• Far Cry has mutated monkeys known as Trigen that run straight at you, can leap at you from more than a dozen feet away, and can kill you in just 2 or 3 hits. They were widely considered Demonic Spiders and an unexpected Genre Shift from the game's previously tactical combat against human mercenaries.
• Final Fantasy:
  • A Side Quest in Final Fantasy X-2 involves acting as matchmaker for a group of lonely, single monkeys. The Trainer Dressphere for Rikku provides her with a monkey named Ghiki for a battle companion.
  • Zidane Tribal, protagonist of Final Fantasy IX, has a monkey tail. He's also one of the most beloved main characters of the series, probably only behind Cloud. Better with monkeys indeed!
• Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich has the Kill-a-Rillas, half-human, half gorilla experiments created by Bliztkrieg.
• In Granblue Fantasy, the "Handsome Gorilla" event has this trope as its central Rule of Funny theme. From the title alone, the eponymous drinking supplement, the side-effects of acting and speaking like Gorillas, to the worst case scenario of mistaking everyone as Gorillas. And oh, did we mention the new gacha summon that was released alongside this event? Nothing else, but a Gorilla!
• Apparently, the developers of God Hand decided that the hilarity of gorillas was only increased by training them in the art of Lucha Libre, and was increased to nearly fatal levels by throwing in groin shots complete with a laugh track. It worked, mostly due to the fact that the whole game is so absurd that they don't seem too weird in comparison.
• Zombie monkeys also showed up in the original House of the Dead.
• Justice League Heroes: The Flash follows the trend of DC comics and has The Flash villain Gorilla Grodd as the first boss fight, and his gorilla army serves as some of the variety of goons throughout the entire game.
• Kingdom of Loathing has a few monkey familiars (the Howling Balloon Monkey, the Cymbal-Playing Monkey, and the Hobo Monkey) and a few pieces of monkey-based equipment (the sock monkey, mad scientist's sock monkey, and Borg sock monkey, off-hand items available from Crimbo 2005, 2006, and 2007 respectively, and the rhesus monkey, the familiar-specific equipment for the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot).
• At one point in the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, your character gets mindswapped with a monkey. In a cage. With an amorous monkey of the other sex.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: You need to pay a monkey to open a dungeon door for you.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: A monkey appears in southwest of Kanalest Castle, and is part of the game's Chain of Deals. He's also important to fight the Chain Chomp you happen to be walking.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: A group of monkeys inhabit Southern Swamp; though mischievous, they're well-mannered and have memorized the patterns of the local Woods of Mystery. They ask Link to rescue an innocent monkey from implied death in Deku Palace, for which he'll also have to rescue the Deku Princess in Woodfall Temple.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Monkeys feature heavily in an early part of the game, namely within Faron Woods and the residing Forest Temple, and show up later. One Mini-Boss is even a baboon (acting under pest control), who then helps Link during the battle against the first boss, Diababa.
• The Lego adaptations of Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean. Both franchises had monkeys to begin with, but the Lego games, as full as they are of Affectionate Parody and Silliness Switch, decided everything was better with more monkeys. Trading bananas to monkeys so they'll give you a tool you need is a frequent game mechanic, and there are other gags involving monkeys.
• Live A Live: Gori the prehistoric gorilla in the Prehistoric chapter is Pogo's ally, provider of slapstick comic relief, attacks with his own natural arms and some farts he produces, and he sniggers like Muttley when it's Pogo's turn to get involved in slapstick he didn't cause.
• The African Warlords in March of War use trained gorillas as shock troops.
• Mega Man:
  • The original Mega Man series had Buster Rod G. of the Genesis Unit. Both he and Hanumachine from Mega Man Zero are shout outs to Sun Wukong from Journey to the West.
  • Mega Man X series had Spark Mandrill and Soldier Stonekong. More recently there's Purprill the Mandroid from Mega Man ZX.
  • Mega Man Legends have the recurring character of Data, a cute robot monkey sidekick.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater included the minigame entitled "Snake VS Monkey". It's almost exactly what it sounds like. It's a Shout-Out to Sony's Ape Escape series which, in return, featured a minigame in Ape Escape 3 called "Mesal Gear Solid: Snake Escape", an Affectionate Parody of the MGS games.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has a monkey in the actual game — apparently the character it hangs out with wasn't "interesting enough" on his own. Fortunately Raiden's Motion Capture actor was pretty good at imitating a monkey, and Kojima liked the imitation enough that he decided to Throw It In!.
• Metal Slug 3 allows the player to get a cute monkey armed with a deadly Uzi as a sidekick. Metal Slug 4, in the other hand, allows the player to transform into said cute machine gun-wielding monkey.
• In MindJack, the corporate military have cybernetically enhanced gorillas and bonobos in their army. In his otherwise-bile-filled review of the game, Angry Joe singled this out as the only positive thing he could mention about it.
  "Y'know, I'm trying real hard to find one good thing about this game. But I can't! I can't! Oh! Oh! There are monkeys! Everyone loves monkeys! You can even create a little monkey-minion-army! Monkey minions! Monkey Minions! WOO! ONLY TO HAVE THE GAME FREEZE FIVE SECONDS LATER!!!!!!!! "
• Monkey Island. Better yet, three-headed monkey.
• The Curse of Monkey Island (the third in the series), obviously taking advantage of this trope, advertised having more monkeys in it than the previous two games combined. Also the awesome parody of the THX logo in it with increasingly louder monkey sounds and the ominous text "The monkeys are listening".
• Nazi Zombies has the Monkey Bombs; cymbal-banging monkey toys that play music to distract the zombies and deal significant damage to them, perfect in aiding downed teammates or getting a horde off your back. In the inversion sense, some of the maps have a few monkey enemy variants.
• In Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2, one of the bonus missions involves the Ouendan helping a stuffed monkey and toy soldier who were accidentally thrown away return home. The BGM? The theme song to the 70's TV show, Monkey Magic.
• One of the playable characters in Overwatch is an uplifted gorilla with powered armor and an electric gun named Winston. He comes from a colony of gorillas that live on the moon.
• A number of Pokémon are monkeys and other primates.
  • Ash has captured some of them in the anime: Primeape, Aipom (traded to Dawn and now an Ambipom), and Chimchar (now an Infernape).
  • Pokémon Black and White feature a trio of monkeys of the Fire, Water, and Grass types. The first Gym Leaders and countless trainers after use them (for Triple Battles or otherwise) for no other reason than to execute this trope.
• The main reason for the character of Skrunch in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal (in this case, a cyclopean alien monkey). And of course, the series wouldn't be complete without a gun that turns enemies into monkeys, which appears in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time as the Chimpinator. Enemy robots? Cymbal banging monkeys.
• The Eliminators from Resident Evil 0 are zombified lab monkeys. However, everything is not better when these little assholes are around.
• Jep, a monkey you can befriend in Return to Mysterious Island, is an implausibly-clever helper that uses inventory items for you.
• A rather large number of minigames in all four Rhythm Heaven titles feature monkeys in some form or another, from a girl tap-dancing alongside two monkeys, to a pop star's cheering audience of monkeys, to even a wristwatch (and a clock tower) that relies on tiny, high-fiving monkeys to tell the time. Megamix lampshades and invokes this in the description for the minigame "Pajama Party" ("Everything, including pajama parties, is better with monkeys"), and features a challenge where you play a string of monkey-based minigames in a row.
• Double Subversion in Runescape. There's an island populated by intelligent monkeys but it's a Death World to humans. Things get better when you get an item that turns you into a monkey.
• Ryzom both inverts this and plays it straight — there are "Primitive" variants of each of the four Homin Races (three — Gibbaï, Cutes, and Frahars — that actually appear ingame, and a fourth, Momos, which is extinct) that like to attack you on sight (and can hit like a ton of bricks if you're a lower-level character), but there are also "Intelligent" variants of these (Gibads, Fraiders, and Cuzans) which are relatively friendly and are grouped as Tribes that you can earn Fame with.
• The Sengoku Basara series has Keiji with his little monkey friend Yumekichi.
• The first mascot of the SNK games company was a cute monkey named Ukee. He's later seen as the pet of Terry Bogard.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Speaking of enemy robomonkeys, the Kikis of the Sonic Adventure series.
  • There's also the robot monkey Coconuts featured in both Sonic the Hedgehog 2 for the Genesis and Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as some of the Sonic-based comics.
• Spelunky features monkeys who leap on your back and randomly inflict one of several possible annoyances on you. (Knocking you out, stealing something from your inventory, lighting the fuse on one of your bombs...)
• Averted in Star Fox — with the exception of a single specimen all simians are evil. And at least one is creepy.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario 64: At Tall Tall Mountain, Ukkiki the monkey steals Mario's hat with glee.
  • Mario Party 5: The minigame Chimp Chase has all the characters retrieve the mischievous baby Ukikis to their color-coded parents (brown, red, blue and white). Catching an Ukiki is tricky enough, due to them running fast, so it's advised to focus on those closest to their breed's teritory. Each Ukiki retrieved is worth 1 point but, after a while, a gold-colored Ukiki appears, which runs faster and can be grouped with any of the four families, being worth 3 points instead of one. The character with the highest score after 30 seconds wins.
• System Shock 2 had monkeys with cryokinesis and pyrokinesis.
• Tamarin: The Player Character is a Tamarin out to save his homeland and family from invading giant bugs.
• Thief: The Dark Project and Thief II: The Metal Age include ApeBeasts among the Trickster's minions. In the second game, some of them have blowpipes.
• Monkeys have become the de facto mascots of the TimeSplitters game series.
  • TimeSplitters Future Perfect included ninja monkeys, zombie monkeys, and cyborg monkeys (which the game describes as "Inevitable, really"). Multiplayer includes "Monkey Assistant" mode, in which the losing player is lent help by a pack of monkeys with rocket launchers.
  • The easiest way to describe the series (especially 2) is like this: GoldenEye on speed with monkeys!
  • The 4th entry to the series will reportedly have a Master Chief monkey and a Big Daddy monkey.
• In Tomba! there is Charles a monkey with a parasol and a lot of banana-related quests.
• The player's party in Treasure Hunter G includes a monkey that wields Black Magic.
• Trombone Champ advertises that it has a lot of hidden baboons in it, presumably because baboons are inherently funny animals.
• Nathan Drake certainly thinks this in Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, when he pauses in a Malagasy market to play with a pet ring-tailed lemur. Unless of course he's bought an apple from a market stall earlier, in which case the lemur makes off with the apple.
• WarioWare: Touched!: There's a monkey which steals a bunch of bananas from Kat and Ana. It's a peaceful, yet mischievous primate whom the sisters look for during their story chapter. When found and cornered, the monkey make suse of its cuteness to be spared. He becomes their pet and is named Numchuck.
• World of Warcraft:
  • The Hozen are a race of sapient mountain- and tree-dwelling monkeys. They are noted as having mentalities comparable to a fourteen year-old boy, made only worse when their new Horde allies give them rocket launchers and machine guns.
  • For a while, World of Warcraft had an inverse to the trope. Despite their toughness and useful area-of-effect ability, gorillas were the least popular Hunter pets, due to their scarcity, lack of skills, and fussy diets. Fortunately, later patches corrected this.
• Your Non-Human Sidekick in Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure is Wiki: a hovering golden monkey that can magically transform into a bell that Zack can use to transform animals into specific tools to solve puzzles.
• Monkeys and apes are very well-represented in the roster of species available for Zoo Tycoon 2, especially if you include the Endangered Species and African Adventure expansion packs.

Web Animation

• In If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, Lord Inquisitor Coteaz's tactic against Descius' ministers are barrels of Jokaero, intelligent orangutans.
• RWBY gives us Sun Wukong, a Monkey King Lite Faunus with a simian motif and a Prehensile Tail, whose comical antics and fighting skills really do make everything better. On the other hand, a Killer Gorilla Grimm called a Beringel shows up in the Volume 4 promotional short.
• DSBT InsaniT: Averted with Mibirds. Like in Real Life, they are portrayed as unpredictable and quite dangerous.
• In the "Medimoji" series by ZDoggMD, the primary care doctor is a monkey. He's usually pretty friendly, (except when he did start flinging poop when he got matched to a hospital he didn't want to go to), and is something of a Butt-Monkey, as (being a Jack of All Trades), family medicine is considered something of an acceptable target within the medical community.
• Heroic simians in Gaming All-Stars include Donkey Kong, Diddy Kong, and Amigo in The Ultimate Crossover and Remastered, all of whom become part of the ultimate team of heroes near the end of both versions.

Webcomics

• Imagine suddenly finding a dojo in your room. Now see this Least I Could Do strip. See? Better.
• A recurring villain (despite a brief Heel–Face Turn) in It's Walky! is Monkey Master, a Humongous Mecha created by Head Alien. Monkey Master will take every opportunity to point out that he is in fact shaped more like an ape; at one point, Robin wrote the word "Munky" all over him in a split second just to goad him (or rather, at the time, her).
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Dr. McNinja employs a gorilla named Judy as his secretary.
  • According to Word of God, Judy is the proud possessor of one of the few immutable laws of the universe:
  Gorilla + rocket launcher > giant ninja. Seriously.
• Some children have a monster in their closet. Max, from Bitmap World, has a monkey in his closet. Later in the comic, there's a whole storyline involving monkeys.
• Churd Thomas from DEMONARCHY. He even plays go-fish.
• In Schlock Mercenary, various Terran species have been ascended to sapience. Of these, apes are prominently featured. Also elephants.
  • When the crew are going undercover in a circus, the ringmaster wants to know what a sentient elephant and an ape could do that would be impressive. Isn't it obvious?
  • And now, we have a headless monkey. Originally meant to be used for torture, it turns out to be more important than that. It's a Chekhov's Monkey!
  • "One of the best uses for a monkey is to make everybody pay attention to the monkey."
• Kismetropolis: featured a tryptophane trip involving a recipe for Monkey Bread.
  Jamie: There's NO monkey in the monkey bread. Swear. Guys? Seriously! No monkey!
• In Dominic Deegan, Everything's Better With Fire Monkeys.
• Gwynn from Sluggy Freelance owns several monkeys who are enchanted to attack and humiliate anyone who irritates her. The monkeys themselves don't appear that often, but a lot of mileage is gotten out of the gag that the other characters pretend "monkeys" is Gwynn's nickname for her breasts. "I've done something bad with my monkeys (...) If we don't do something my monkeys are going to be all over her in front of everyone (...) be on the lookout for my monkeys and grab them if you see them. They could pop up anywhere."
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal uses a monkey dressed as Hitler as part of a proof that fiction is stranger than truth.
• The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage features lots and lots of monkeys in "Lovelace and Babbage vs The Organist." In part nine, Ada Lovelace has to negotiate a room full of sleeping monkeys belonging to the titular organist and his minions. It's a subversion for the protagonist, though — everything is far worse with monkeys.
• In Balderduck, monkeys seem to have played a huge part in making Shakespeare's works better.
• My Roommate Is an Elf. Griswold's familiar, Glen, is a talking monkey.
• PvP's Francis Ottoman believed that monkeys were an important component in a wacky plan.
• It's eventually revealed in Freefall that Florance's genius creator Dr. Bowman is an uplifted chimpanzee whose brain is hard-wired an extremely short temper.
• One strip of Square Root of Minus Garfield put this to the test, with the aptly titled "Is Everything Better With Monkeys?".

Web Original

• Superdickery has a section titled Everything's Better With Monkeys, usually featuring Killer Gorilla attempts that end up falling headfirst into this trope.
• Purple Monkey from lonelygirl15, the purple monkey puppet.
• Never one to miss a comics trope, The Descendants has recurring character Lucian the Ape Knight and has had some one shot demonic baboons.
• Bruno, Vatsy's bodyguard/handyman/gopher in Vatsy and Bruno, is a chimp. Subverted somewhat in that, unlike most chimp characters, he's pragmatic, stoic, and content. To quote the work:
  He'd found that a level tone, an open stance, a patient mind and a large-bore double-barreled shotgun solved most problems almost effortlessly. His philosophy could be almost described as Taoism, if Taoism had a little-known subclause about the prudent use of firearms and arson.
• In Doctor Steel's propaganda video, "Building a Utopian Playland", Dr. Steel talks about his plans for world domination, then distracts his audience with a monkey puppet, saying, "Now... who wants to see the dancing monkey!"
• The SCP Foundation disagrees with this trope.
  • The two non-human primate SCPs are a Cymbal-Banging Monkey that plays tricks on its owner, and an over-evolved chimp that wants to destroy human society.
  • A case that seems silly but gets horrifying is SCP-983, a mechanical monkey that comes to life when someone touches it on their birthday, sings a song that ages that person for a year for each verse and won't stop until they're either dead or sing along with it until it's satisfied. If the person sings well enough, the candy it produces afterwards reverses any aging caused by the song and might even ultimately make the person younger: however, if the song is sung perfectly, it's implied that the candy makes them Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, which may or may not be what they wanted.
  • The biggest case isSCP-050, a monkey statue that automatically appears in the possession of the person to play the best prank.
  • And also played straight with Dr. Bright, who can inhabit any body but is usually an orangutan.
• Joe Cartoon's short subject "Look At My Monkey" is a pun on the phrase, "spank the monkey." But the monkey gets his own back in the end.
• Hero House has Optimus Primal show up in his Gorilla form. He immediately proceeds to kick arse, being one of the most effective heroes to date.
• In The Nostalgia Chick's list of top villainesses, she places The Wicked Witch of the West as #2, but admits that other than the flying monkeys, there's not much to say about her. So instead, the Chick just says "here's some monkeys" and shows videos of chimps dancing to "Yakety Sax" for the next ten to fifteen seconds.
• Subverted by The Nostalgia Critic in his Dunston Checks In review, who actually interrupts his own opening catchphrase to say "MONKEYS AREN'T FUNNY!"
• An episode of What the Fuck Is Wrong with You? regarding weird news with monkeys had Nash discussing this trope, especially on how monkeys turn anything funny.
• The Monkey King certainly thinks so in the Whateley Universe. Some of the people he decides need a little pranking, like Phase, may disagree.
• The League of S.T.E.A.M. once has to deal with invisible ghost monkeys.
• Psycomedia features some amazing experiments with a monkey with a robot arm, or monkeys using poop-throwing the way humans use speech.
• The Bad Movie Beatdown review of Night at the Museum II uses this trope by name to describe a gag involving two monkeys slapping the main character.
  Film Brain: You see, it's exactly the same joke as in the first movie, except it's now with two monkeys. Because everything is better with monkeys!
• Brian Phelps of The Brian & Jill Show expressed this sentiment after co-host Jill read a news story about a man trying to smuggle a monkey in his pants.
• Occasionally, YouTube spits out this amusing error message: "Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation."
• M. Asher Cantrell's The 10 Biggest Password Mistakes People Make cites a study claiming that half a percent of English-speaking Internet users have "monkey" as a password on an online account and suggests it may be related to the word's status as an Inherently Funny Word.
• In World Domination in Retrospect, the Villain Protagonist has faced an intelligent, talking, jetpack-wearing gorilla named Gorilla Awesome. He also once faced off against Gorilla Awesome's leather jacket-clad cousin who wields his chain belt as a weapon, Gorilla Badass.
• One April Fools' Day, Cartoon Network gave its entire website an ape-themed makeover and released a new game called Brick It. Said game seems like a straightforward brick-breaking game... except with just about every simian from CN's shows as obstacles (Magilla Gorilla holds the paddle in place, Mojo Jojo lays extra bricks, etc.). In the game's own universe, it might be inverted — Everything's Worse with Monkeys.
• In The Last Podcast on the Left series on Jonestown, the crew is highly amused by the fact that one of Jim Jones' early means to raise money was selling spider monkeys door to door and they cannot stop laughing when they play a clip from a Peoples Temple follower's deadpan testimony of her first having met Jones when he sold her a monkey to replace her previous one which had hung itself. Later on, Henry relates how Peoples Temple eventually got a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs as their mascot, whom Henry imagines as an Only Sane Man communicating his displeasure at the madness around him via a Congo style voice synthesizer.
• In the April 1981 episode of '80s All Over, Drew McWeeny ponders why film and TV believed in this trope as it applied to orangutans at the turn of the 1980s (Every Which Way but Loose, Cannonball Run II, etc.) when he and Scott Weinberg discuss Going Ape! Did people just discover their existence at that time and that's how it became the go-to funny animal?
• I Like Monkeys: The man himself states "I like monkeys". It seems to be that way at first, until they start causing trouble, but he still likes them.
• A popular meme, "Return to Monke", concerns a desire for humans to de-evolve and become primates, all played for humor. This is illustrated particularly well by a memetic video where the process of evolution is shown, only for the man to declare he wants to become a monkey again, which is followed by the man de-evolving and a humorous video of a monkey spinning around a log set to "DK Mountain & Dino Dino Jungle", accompanied by text reading "Reject Humanity Become Monke".

Western Animation

• One of the Aesop's Film Fables shorts, "Day at the Park", features a monkey who, for no apparent reason, resides inside a tree in a local park, and it causes Farmer Al Falfa a good deal of trouble.
• In the American Dad! episode "Stan of Arabia part 2", Stan is at the American embassy trying to secure his wife's release from prison, despite having renounced their American citizenship. Trying to explain his lack of passports he says it's a "funny story," and is met with a number of monkey themed scenarios from an official, who assumed that any "funny story" must naturally involve "nature's clowns." Later, after he explains that Francine is in real danger, a monkey randomly pops out from behind his desk, making the official crack up.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Momo is a flying lemur Mix-and-Match Critter, used for comic relief and as the Team Pet.
  • There's also a recurring incredibly ugly ruby-encrusted monkey statue. It creeps the hell out of Katara, but Iroh thinks it's "handsome" enough to buy.
• Babar has Zephyr the monkey as Babar's best friend. It occasionally features other monkeys and apes as well.
• Gorilla Grodd is a recurring villain on Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Detective Chimp showed up in a teaser, but in one episode, those two show up, plus Monsieur Mallah and Gorilla Boss join up with Grodd to form a group called G.A.S.P. (Gorillas and Apes Seizing Power) and turn everybody into monkeys. The episode's name? Gorillas In Our Midst!
• Spidermonkey from Ben 10: Alien Force is just what he sounds like; a monkey with Spider-Man powers. Though his species is called "Arachnichimp". His Super Mode in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien is apparently a gorilla with spider legs.
• Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot the CEO of the company that created the titular boy robot had a sidekick/business partner who was a sarcastic talking monkey. Voiced by The Drew Carey Show's Mimi, no less.
• The '80s cartoon Bionic Six had a robot ape. It wasn't part of the 'Six', it was more like a Team Pet/helper.
• Comedic animated show Camp Lazlo stars a quirky monkey.
• Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers has a variety of primates at hand, too, ranging from chimpanzees (Heebie and Jeebie in "An Elephant Never Suspects") to a gorilla (Kookoo in "Gorilla My Dreams").
• Clerks: The Animated Series: Jay and Silent Bob decide to get a monkey. When asked why, Jay replies "To teach it to smoke. Duh." Randal thinks it's infected like in that Dustin Hoff... Al Pacino movie. It isn't.
• The 2015 reboot of Danger Mouse has the recurring villain Isambard King Kong Brunel, a monkey. He doesn't have malicious intent like the rest of Danger Mouse's Rogues Gallery; he's just a comical Bungling Inventor whose creations have a tendency to Go Horribly Wrong.
• Danny Phantom had one episode with the near extinct fictional Purple Back Gorilla named Samson. Later revealed to be a female, Samson played a part in the plot by kicking the main villain's ass.
• "Dial M For Monkey" shorts on Dexter's Laboratory, where one of Dexter's test animals is secretly a super-powered crime fighter.
• In Dinofroz, one of the creatures Tom can turn into in Season 2 is a massive, trash-talking, hard-hitting gorilla.
• Dora the Explorer has a monkey, Boots, as a sidekick.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • "Abra-Catastrophe!" flips the entire cartoon's universe into one populated with monkeys as the dominant species, complete with an alternate, monkey-and-banana-centric credits sequence.
  • "You know, if it weren't for the fact that all of this is historically accurate, I would think that someone was making up incredibly lame puns." This is specifically in response to a history lesson about how the "Founding Alpha Males" signed the "Declarapetion of Independence" to create "The United Apes of America", but there are more ape related puns. Many, many more.
  • The show paid homage to Space Ghost in "Channel Chasers," when Cosmo turned into The Monkey.
• In a few episodes of Family Guy, it was shown Chris had an evil monkey in his closet. No one else believed him. It was apparently one of the writers' favorite running gags. Later, it turns out the only way he was evil was that he was squatting there the whole time, accidentally terrorizing Chris with poor communication skills.
• Futurama provides us with Simian 7, an entire planet populated by sapient monkeys and apes descended from Earth's genetic experiments. The show also had two primate characters — Guenter, a monkey with a hat designed by Professor Farnsworth that makes him as intelligent as a human, and Dr. Banjo, an orangutan zoo and museum curator who believed in "Creaturism", the 31st century version of Creationism.
• George of the Jungle in both movie and animated form had George's best friend/"brother" as "an ape named Ape." As voiced by John Cleese in the film.
• In Get Ed, the word "monkey" is used as slang for "cool".
• Hanna-Barbera worked this trope handily during the '60s and '70s.
  • The Herculoids had a rock ape named Igoo, and "The Beaked People" had flying monkeys.
  • Space Ghost's sidekicks, Jan and Jayce, had a monkey named Blip as their sidekick.
  • Magilla Gorilla, which, in addition to its own primate star, had a secondary cartoon called The Adventures of Peter Potamus and So-So. So-So, Peter's sidekick, was — you guessed it — a monkey.
  • Beegle Beagle and The Great Grape Ape.
  • The Super Friends' Wonder Twins have a monkey named Gleek, effectively making Gleek, as Blip before him, the sidekick's sidekick. Technically, Gleek is indeed a space monkey, but not, as far as we know, a Killer.
  • On the Around the World in 79 Days segment of The Cattanooga Cats, there was Smirky, the minion and accomplice to Crumden and Bumbler.
  • Bananas the gorilla is a friend and accomplice of The Hair Bear Bunch. He's none too bright but easygoing, yet when he tries to prove he can be tough he winds up scaring himself.
• Filmation's Ghostbusters had an anthropomorphic ape called Tracy.
• I.R. Baboon in I Am Weasel, though he's a literal Butt-Monkey.
• Invader Zim features The Angry Monkey Show and GIR's Monkeydance most notably, but just you try to find even one episode that doesn't feature monkeys as a sound effect.
• At the end of Johnny Bravo's opening theme, the titular character exclaims "Do the monkey with me!" and the cast does a monkeydance with him.
• In Justice League Unlimited episode "Dead Reckoning" Gorilla Grodd reveals his master plan is to use Gorilla City's cloaking shield generator to produce a carrier wave that will magically turn every man, woman, and child on Earth into an ape. Lex Luthor and the other supervillains were less than amused. And by "less than amused," we mean "Luthor shot him in the face." Even the heroes were underwhelmed; Wonder Woman's response upon seeing her transformation: "Oh, come ON!"
• Kenny and The Chimp: Chimpy the chimp is a trouble-making monkey wearing a diaper. More-so for Kenny though, as he demolishes the lab and gets him hit with several containers.
• Monkeys and apes are a recurring joke throughout Kim Possible, with them being the source of Ron's mystical kung-fu powers (which usually don't work until the Grand Finale), as well as his greatest fear and the source of power of his personal archenemy, Monkey Fist. Two words: monkey ninjas.
  • There was also Josh Mankey, a character that Ron formed a conspiracy theory around, based on his last name being one vowel away from "monkey." And Camp Wannaweep, the camp Ron went to as a young boy, had a chimpanzee for a mascot. Ron was forced to bunk with said mascot, and this is where he developed the phobia.
  • When geneticist villainess DN Amy fell in love with Monkey Fist, she stalked him with the help of her samurai gorillas.
• Julius Jr. has the titular character. Who is a Child Prodigy and generally believes in The Power of Friendship.
• A monkey participated in many of the Prometheus and Bob shorts on KaBlam!.
• The King Kong Show was produced by Videocraft which became Rankin-Bass. Yes, THAT Rankin-Bass.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Averted. Scarlemagne's not at all friendly or helpful, and neither are the apes serving under him.
• The half-hour film adaption of The Little Engine That Could includes a monkey named Jeepers, an assistant to Rollo the Clown.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012) has the excitable and easily distracted Minka Mark, a cute pink female monkey.
• Looney Tunes: Bugs Bunny dealt with gorillas a few times, notably in "Gorilla My Dreams," "Hurdy Gurdy Hare" and "Apes of Wrath." Also, a gorilla terrorizing some supermarket wares denizens in "Goofy Groceries" stops long enough to demure "Gosh. Ain't I repulsive?"
• MAD has an episode where monkeys take over the show writing, making an entire episode of monkey and ape related sketches.
• Mr. Bogus:
  • The second act of the episode "Beach Blanket Bogus" showed Brattus having fun with an organ grinder's pet monkey.
  • The episode "Hipster Tripster" featured a trio of monkeys who Bogus plays around with at the zoo in the first act, but in the second act, they turn into Maniac Monkeys when Bogus releases them from their cage. The first act also featured a gorilla who grabs up Bogus, but he was able to tickle the gorilla into letting him go.
• My Gym Partner's a Monkey uses a spider monkey named Jake (not to mention a whole cast of Funny Animals) to spin the Fish out of Water trope. There was also Winsor Gorilla, another of Adam's friends and the most intelligent of the bunch, and Mr. mandrill, the school's Hippie Counselor.
• Ni Hao, Kai-Lan has Hoho (a hyperactive monkey) as a regular character.
• The Phineas and Ferb opening theme mentioned "giving a monkey a shower." They actually do this after getting stranded on a deserted island in "Swiss Family Phineas".
  Candace: (incredulously) You're giving a monkey a shower?!?
  Ferb: Yep, had to be done.
• Planet Sheen has Nesmith, a highly intelligent chimpanzee frequently dumbfounded by the title character's actions.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Their first nemesis is an evil monkey called Mojo Jojo.
  • In the episode "Meet the Beat-Alls", they disguise a monkey named Michelle as Yoko Jono to break up Mojo's villainous team.
  • The Movie, which shows his origin, in which Mojo got together an entire monkey military primate posse simian squad lemur legion orangutan order baboon battalion rhesus regiment ape army catarrhini corps tamarind troop gorilla gang.
• Mr. Twitchy in Rated "A" for Awesome is the team's cameramonkey.
• In Recess, the gang's favorite cartoon is Beany McChimp, about an (apparently) anthropomorphic monkey. The series is so popular, it has a live-action series, a video game, and tie-in bubble gum, "Beany McGum"
• The Ren & Stimpy Show had the Baboon as a recurring character.
• Rocket Monkeys stars Gus and Wally, a pair of dimwitted simian astronauts getting into various outer space shenanigans.
• Samurai Jack: In one episode, Jack comes across blue apes along with a Wild Man among them who teach him how to jump high.
• The Simpsons has used the primate gag a couple dozen times over its long run.
  • Most delightfully in "Homer the Great" when Homer becomes the leader of a Stonemasons-style secret organization and decided that the best way to use his new-found power was to get a bunch of monkeys together and re-enact the Civil War.
  • The chimps that were sent into space came back super-intelligent from "Deep Space Homer".
  • There's Mr. Teeny, Krusty's cigar-smoking chimp sidekick.
  • There's that time Flanders's house got taken over by a radioactive baboon. He was seen slapping Flanders while the latter was driving and trying to understand his commands.
  • In "Girly Edition", Apu gets a helper monkey, and Homer craves one too. He is told helper animals are only for the disabled and feeble, so he brings Old Grampa with him to get Mojo and Homer of course usurps him. He gets him to do fun stuff like watch TV, eat and drink to excess, steal donuts, etc. "Pray. For. Mojo."
  • Title on the multiplex cinema marquee: "Sing, Monkey, Sing."
  • An in-universe example: Homer always finds monkeys (or actually, chimpanzees) hysterically funny whenever someone dresses them in human clothes. It helps that he's easily amused in general, but for his entertainment value, nothing beats chimps.
  • "He's... Editor in CHIMP!"
  • Come on, Lisa! MONKEYS!
  • "That's what you get for not hailing to the chimp!"
  • In "Simpson Safari", when the Simpsons went to Africa and became hopelessly lost, Homer reassured them that he had a map. He gets out the box of Animal Crackers that started it all and finds an outline of Africa on one side with a picture of a chimp as the only decoration on it. Homer: "He, he, he. Monkey." They were still lost.
• The enemies in Skunk Fu! are monkey ninjas.
• South Park:
  • In "Sexual Harassment Panda" , Johhny Cochran implores the jury to "look at the silly monkey" during his closing argument. The jury (minus the one whose head explodes) rule in favor of his client.
  • Plus there was Phonics Monkey from "Hooked on Monkey Fonics", who killed Kenny...
  • And Dr. Mephesto's (genetically engineered?) four- and five-assed monkeys.
• Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!: An Affectionate Parody of the Action Hero Five-Man Band, but with monkeys. And although they're the heroes of the show, they technically are killer monkeys from space.
• Superman: The Animated Series, Episode 026: "Monkey Fun". Featuring Titano, it's basically an entire episode dedicated to this trope.
• Tak and the Power of Juju had the chief of the tribe act like a monkey under a voodoo curse.
• Monsieur Mallah, mentioned up in Comics, also appeared in the fifth season of Teen Titans as The Dragon. Considering that the show was aimed at kids, no mention of his sexuality was made.
• Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic had Kiddles the monkey.
• Optimus Primal of Transformers: Beast Wars. The whole Optimus-Gorilla vs. Megatron-Tyrannosaurus Rex thing was, of course, in reference to King Kong.
  • He's not the only one though. Other Transformers getting up to monkey business include Beastbox and Apeface from Generation One, and Optimus Minor, Apelinq, Primal Prime, B'Boom, and Apache from the beast era. Though to be fair, two of those are derived from toys of Optimus Primal, and the last two are nigh identical, but separate, characters using the same toy.
  • However, not everyone thought it was good.
• Titan Maximum features Leon, the monkey janitor, as the pilot of the green fighter that makes up the giant mecha's left leg. Inverted in that Leon is usually shown reacting with a calm world-weariness to the antics of his human teammates.
• The Walter Lantz cartoon characters Meany, Miny and Moe.
• Xiaolin Showdown has the Monkey Staff, which turns humans into monkeys.
• In Young Justice, Beast Boy stays partially transformed into a monkey whenever he's not in any other animal form, seemingly for this reason.

Other

• MAD had a one-panel feature for a brief period of time called "Monkeys Are Always Funny". The article consisted of a serious, often tragic picture from real life with a monkey digitally added in — and yes, for some reason the monkey was always funny. They also did an entire issue "written by" monkeys. It didn't work as well as you'd think; when every single punchline is "MONKEY!", it loses its effect.
• The greatest TV pitch in history: "She's the Pope. He's a chimp. They're cops."
• As they're all improvised it gets hard to really pin it down, but around 30% of Ross Nobles shows will involve monkeys.
• The Penn Jillette radio show had a regular feature called "Monkey Tuesday", in which monkey news and monkey-related discussion would open the show, and callers would call in with stories of their personal encounters with primates. It all started with a story about a monkey and a dwarf (part 1 near the end, part 2, and next week it was a trend.
• Freeware 3D program Blender has the head of a monkey (named "Suzanne," as a Shout-Out to Kevin Smith) as one of its basic models. It's often used for test renders.
• Here. A monkey for blow-drying fingernails after you've applied nailpolish.
• Chunky Monkey ice cream
• A notice for Monty Python and the Holy Grail that appears on the book of the script is from Guy the Gorilla: "Made me want to eat my own vomit."
• Averted in the Furry Fandom, where primate anthros are among the more uncommon species. This could be because the fandom is based around anthropomorpism, and that primates are already so humanlike that they can't be anthropomorphized to the same extent as other species.

Real Life

• It is worth noting that, while apes and monkeys may be cute, charming and even harmless as babies, when they reach adulthood they tend to become aggressive, unpredictable and often physically stronger than humans. They may even potentially carry a number of deadly diseases that can infect humans. This combination makes many non-human primates very dangerous animals. This is why it is illegal to keep any monkey or ape as a pet in many countries.
  • Zookeepers and wildlife experts have stated that chimpanzees are among the most dangerous animals to work with. They're programmed by evolution to have high levels of aggression and dominance; keeping one as a pet means that sooner or later the chimp will start challenging you in subtle ways that an untrained person will not pick up on. One day, a switch in its brain will get flipped and it will basically say to itself: "There's room for only one boss around here, and I'm pretty sure that I can take you."
  • Gorillas and (female) orangutans, however, are straight examples of this trope, as they both fall into the Gentle Giant category despite their menacing appearances. If you harm them or their families or challenge them, though, you will see why they have no natural predators.
  • Monkeys are also known to steal from people; while this can be a minor inconvenience if they steal food, they are known to steal bags, phones or anything that they can take with them. They can also break them out of anger or discard them when they lose interest in them. Some have even learned to hold these useless items as ransom since their owners desperately want them back and will exchange them for something more desirable to the primate.
  • At zoos and in captivity, apes have been known to mess around with the humans watching them for their own amusement. From hiding out of sight and then leaping out with a roar to cause a Jump Scare, to flinging poo at people that annoy them. Indeed, you'll find many videos of apes playing harmlessly with viewers, such as knocking on the glass back at people who knock on it at them, but you'll find just as many videos of apes trolling people.
• Do a search by interest on any popular blog site for monkey and another word. Hit counts are highest for "mad monkey sex" or "mad monkey love" or "crazy monkey sex" or "crazy monkey love".
  • Some species of monkeys take promiscuity to a very high level. Brother–Sister Incest does occur. Plus there's the whole gorillas/harems thing.
    • The "monkeys" most often mentioned in terms of sex studies are the Bonobo apes. They use sex as recreation and it is not limited to same-gender pairing. They've also exhibited rudimentary fetishes.
• Monkeys are being trained to assist disabled people.
• The monkey god Hanuman was named chairman of an Indian business school. No, seriously.
• Due to the depressing nature of the credit crunch, the front page of the BBC website currently reads "Sick of hearing about stock slides? Never fear, we have the solution — monkey waiters."◊
• The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim introduced an unofficial mascot in 2000 which they dubbed the "Rally Monkey". It began as a gag by two of the team's video board operators who would play a clip from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective of a white-haired capuchin monkey jumping up and down with the words "Rally Monkey" superimposed over it when the Angels were losing against the San Francisco Giants by one run in the bottom of the ninth. They then scored two runs to win the game. The Rally Monkey became so popular among fans that the Angels hired an actual monkey to shoot clips to be used in later seasons, and the Monkey made its reappearance in 2002, the year the Angels won the World Series (once again to San Francisco's chagrin).
• Oh dear, the Lake Superior State University has added the word to their "List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness", specifically because of this trope. I think we broke it [1].
• The Daily Show had a lot of fun with this one in relation to Congress' "monkey bite bill".
  Jon: Boy, we've all been there. I just inherited $45,000. I could get a few years of tuition for my kid...or a monkey. I don't know, my cat's pretty dirty...
• The late Michael Jackson's best friend, Bubbles The Chimp.
• A man in China trained some pet monkeys in rudimentary Tae Kwon Do to entertain passersby. In December 2009 the monkeys turned on him. (For the record, the trainer overcame the monkeys and restrained them before they could do any real harm)
• Fox News (erroneously) reported in 2010 that the Taliban was training "monkey terrorists" to shoot and kill American soldiers.
• Some 50 years ago, people actually put up ads selling monkeys in comic books — this could not be a good idea at any level.
• In Spain, to call a young child "mono/mona" (basically, calling them a monkey) is a compliment, basically saying that they are very cute.
  • In England, a small child being referred to as a 'little monkey' is not quite so complimentary: it means they're mischievous, but conveys to other adults that they're adorably so, and is sometimes used affectionately. Which more or less sums up this trope...
• In 1988, two Brazilian comedic newspapers (who would later join forces and have a TV show) launched a mayor campaign for a chimpanzee who was very popular in Rio's zoo. Over 400,000 people voted for him, (or rather, wrote his name in the ballot as protest) which would have landed him third among twelve candidates! And the chimp's death in 1996 led to official mourning by the city!
• Only one animal on Earth has mastered fire, sailed the ocean blue, eradicated some of the world's deadliest diseases, landed members of its species on the moon and created the internet. That species, Homo Sapiens, is a primate.
  • Only one other animal began to master fire, make clothes, learn to speak language, and sailed across the seas. That species is Homo erectus, the ancestor of Homo sapiens.
• The Ikea Monkey, a baby snow macaque in a winter coat that wandered around the front of an Ikea store in Toronto, Canada. It became an Internet sensation due to the sheer absurdity and adorableness. Although the monkey had to be taken into custody since owning a pet monkey is illegal in Canada.
• For many years, the NBA's Phoenix Suns has had a gorilla as its mascot.
• Koko, who has her own website, was a peaceful Western lowland gorilla who liked human company and had her own sign language that people began picking up on. Sadly, she passed away in mid-2018 at the age of 46 (which, impressively enough, is way past the average life expectancy for a Western lowland gorilla).
• Chimpanzees are capable of empathy to some extent despite being aggressive animals. In one episode of Escape to Chimp Eden, a chimp is released into an area enclosed by an electric fence. It touches the fence and gets shocked. What's really astounding is when its friend is released into the area with it the first chimp repetitively keeps it from the fence, trying to herd it away from the fence whenever it gets close. It understood the fence would harm the other chimp and actively tried to protect it.
• YouTuber Mattias Pilhede tells the story of how his maternal grandfather got owning monkeys and other exotic animals as pets illegal in Sweden.

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