Smoking Is Not Cool

"Ugh! Back to the Loch with you, Nessie!"

Luis: Okay, I just have one very important question: you got a smoke?
Leon: Got gum.

— Resident Evil 4

You think that Smoking Is Cool, don't you? That smoking will always automatically make you a badass?

Not necessarily. Plenty of characters are perfectly capable of being tough or cool without lighting up. In fact, to emphasize this point even further, characters can be made more unlikeable or unattractive by having them smoke. This can happen by having them taunt a non-smoker into lighting up, because otherwise he's a "wimp." Or by blowing Second-Face Smoke in his face. Or just by having an ugly, obese, badly dressed, lazy, or otherwise degrading character light up a cigarette or a cigar. Or just out and out try to Scare 'Em Straight, by having the smoker display all the negative symptoms of life-long smoking: respiratory problems, bad skin, yellowing teeth, and maybe even cancer, even if the person in question couldn't realistically have been a smoker for long enough for these problems to occur.

Truth in Television, since tobacco smoke really smells repulsive when you're a non-smoker. Also, smoke coming out of someone's mouth can really account as a Gross-Up Close-Up when you really look at it. And, more seriously, exposure to secondhand smoke can be seriously detrimental to infants, children, and anyone with even a slightly dodgy respiratory system (e.g. asthmatics).

A character who doesn't smoke may be The Teetotaler (if they also aren't an alcoholic).

See also Do Not Do This Cool Thing and Good Smoking, Evil Smoking. Sub-trope of Drugs Are Bad. No Smoking is this trope as a censorship application. Compare Smoking Is Edgy, which is when smoking is not portrayed as "good" in the traditional sense but still has edgy and cynical associations.

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Examples

Advertising

• Superman vs. Nick O'Teen teaches that smoking is dangerous and damages your body, and Nick O'Teen, who tries to convince others to smoke, is a low-down villain.
• Yul Brynner, dying of lung cancer due to his smoking, arranged a Public Service Announcement with the American Cancer Society to tell the public not to repeat his folly.
• In the Philippines, a 90s anti-smoking campaign by the Department of Health gave birth to the mascot Yosi Kadiri (literally Smoke Disgusting), who indeed looks disgusting to hammer down the message. The mascot proved to be so popular and memorable that he was revived in the 2010s.
• The Truth Initiative has a series of ads campaigning against smoking and vaping:
  • Their "It's A Trap" ad, which uses live-action versions of memes from the 2000s to dissuade teens and young adults from cigarette smoking and/or vaping. The ad was released in 2016, which makes those memes dated.
  • Their anti-vaping ads feature puppets that talk about the subject. One particular ad has two puppets about to kiss when one of them barfs up cloth upon the other, saying that vaping weakens your immune system.
  • Their "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Dick" ad, which suggests that smoking causes impotence in young men and possibly makes men go out with other men.

Anime and Manga

• FLCL: Samejima Mamimi is the only character in the show who smokes, but it's not seen as a positive thing by the other characters and Mamimi herself is a little too damaged to carry off the look. Additionally, whenever she starts chain-smoking, it's usually a sign that her mental state is on a downward curve.
• Shadow Star:
  • Shiina's estranged and emotionally abusive mother Misono is a smoker.
  • Shiina takes up smoking after she and Mamiko go Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds and pretty much destroy humanity together. When Mamiko finds out, she scolds Shiina since the two of them are pregnant and the toxins could hurt Shiina's baby.
• Kimagure Orange Road has Kyousuke getting very angry at Madoka when he sees her smoking. She slaps him in return.
• In Doraemon, Nobita's father, Nobisuke (redubbed as Toby in Viz's English dub), is a smoker, and tries to quit several times but always fails.
• Dear Brother: Rei Asaka AKA "Hana no Saint-Juste". While she's one of the three most admired girls at school and she does smoke on a regular basis, her smoking is not portrayed as cool, as it is a sign of her Broken Bird personality and her self-destructive behaviour to show how really messed up she is.

Comic Books

• Batman: Longtime supporting character Commissioner Gordon was shown with an alternating fondness for cigarettes and a pipe and Superman character Perry White was a Cigar Chomper—until the 1990s, when it bit them in the ass in the form of, respectively, a heart attack and lung cancer. While both men recovered, they also gave up smoking—at least for a while.
• Idées Noires: One gag has people scolding a smoker about the dangers of his habit. He eventually gets so scared of what they tell them him that he finally commits suicide. The others' comment: "Another victim of tobacco."
• De Kiekeboes: In De come-back van Dédé ("The comeback of Dédé") the vicious criminal Dédé La Canaille escapes with the aid of his chain smoking friend Jim Menace who has developed a smoker's cough that causes him to cough all throughout the album. The police are eventually able to trace Dédé and Jim because they discover his cigarette butts lying around.
• Marvel Universe: Back in the 80s, Marvel produced a Very Special Episode team-up comic of Spider-Man, Luke Cage (who was still going by Power Man at the time), and Storm where they had to confront a supervillain called Smokescreen whose Evil Plan was to hook a track star on cigarettes so that he could make money betting against the kid when all that smoking started affecting his performance. Smokescreen had the power to generate clouds of cigarette smoke that he could blow at people and make them choke, allowing him to somehow overcome Storm. And then after he was defeated, Spider-Man delivered an Anvilicious talk about how awful smoking is and how you should never, ever do it to the reader. This was when Wolverine, Ben Grimm, Nick Fury, and other heroes were still shown smoking in almost every appearance.
• The Question: 52 shows the ramifications of Vic Sage's smoking habit. The lung cancer he had contracted killed him off, allowing Renee Montoya to take over his title.
• Spider-Man:
  • Smoking big, smelly cigars is one of the most annoying habits of J. Jonah Jameson, Peter's Mean Boss at the Daily Bugle. Employees often call him "Chimney Lungs" behind his back, and often wonder if the habit contributes to his Hair-Trigger Temper.
  • Peter's former wife Mary Jane Watson smoked as a teenager to "look cool" and quit later, but when Carnage first appeared, she started smoking out of stress, which only got worse when Peter's long-thought-dead parents showed up. After several arcs where she tried to "cope" using them, Peter used some "shock therapy" taking her to visit his one-time foil Nick Katzenberg, who was in the hospital with terminal lung cancer. (Having lost weight to the point of being gaunt, lost most of his hair due to chemo, coughing up blood — very typical of a cancer patient.) It was enough for her to quit cold turkey.
• Superman & Batman: Generations: Lois Lane takes up smoking in 1939, claiming it to be as harmless as eating breakfast in the morning. By 1969, however, Lois is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and tells her daughter Kara Kent that smoking is what also ended up killing Perry White. By 1979, Lois is in the hospital and on death's door. Thankfully, that wonderful Dr. Holurt has taken over her treatment.
• Ultimate X Men: Toad lights up a lot, and that doesn't add to his already disgusting aspect.
• Wolverine: Wolverine could well have been the poster boy for the opposite Trope most of his career, rarely seen without a cigarette or occasionally a cigar; his mutant Healing Factor let him smoke without it hurting him. However, in one 80s story arc, he lost the healing factor for a short time, and trying to light up almost made him sick. It was enough to convince him to quit. In an '80s issue of Uncanny X-Men, Wolverine and Kitty are sitting on the steps of Kitty's college, talking over the problem of the issue. Wolvie has a cigar that is constantly making Kitty cough. Finally having had enough of it, she snaps, takes the stogie from Wolvie's mouth shouting "GIVE ME THAT!" Wolverine replies "Your funeral, Pun'kin," as she takes a puff to spite him. She breaks out in a coughing fit and gets sick to her stomach. Wolverine merely replies "Warned you." She asks how he could tolerate something like that, and he says it's an acquired taste, along with his healing factor protecting him from the harmful effects, reminding Kitty that she doesn't have either of those. She says "No fear of that. This is one vice I'll skip... Assuming I live..."

Fan Works

• Becoming Female features Ron the Death Eater becoming "Ron Raper", apparently a parody of Don Draper from Mad Men. As part of the parody, "Ron Raper" is always smoking an "unhealthy cigarette" because "he was too dumb to know smoking was bad for you".
• In Chrysalis Visits The Hague, the protagonist Estermann likes to smoke, but even he admits he can only do it because he has a deathwish and because 'he's not pregnant'. Also Lyra Heartstrings, despite her best efforts to like it, doesn't.

Film — Animated

• 101 Dalmatians: Cruella DeVil, an incredibly thin and unsympathetic fur enthusiast, is shown smoking from a cigarette holder and being thoroughly disgusting with it. Jasper Badum is equally repellent with his cigar.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm sees mob boss Sal Valestra smoking in the time shortly before Bruce Wayne became Batman. During the present, set during Batman: The Animated Series, his health has gone down the crapper, needing an oxygen tank to breath at times and even has an Incurable Cough of Death. That said, his death is the result of pissing off the Joker, a former hitman of his, while trying to get help to deal with Batman, not his smoking.
• Pinocchio: Lampwick, who is already being portrayed as a cocksure idiot, taunts Pinocchio for not smoking properly. In an example of Scare 'Em Straight, he then literally transforms into a donkey. Pinocchio immediately throws his cigar away.

Film — Live-Action

• Meet the Feebles: The rat character is seen smoking a cigarette at times.
• Flodder: Mum Flodder is a middle-aged, obese, grouchy woman who smokes cigars.
• Muriel's Wedding: One of Muriel's sisters is an obese cigarette-smoking couch potato who often scolds her.
• Being an anti-smoking special, 1996's Smoke Alarm: The Unfiltered Truth About Cigarettes puts an emphasis on cigarettes being gross and unhealthy.
• While the original comic book showcases Good Smoking, Evil Smoking, Executive Meddling reportedly insisted on this trope in the film adaptation of Watchmen. Hence, Laurie's smoking is cut, but the repulsive Comedian remains a Cigar Chomper, and Moloch is still smoking as he faces imminent grisly death from lung cancer.

Literature

• In Blubber by Judy Blume, the main character, Jill, pressures her mother into quitting smoking by pointing out the health risks every chance she gets. In the same author's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, the main character, Tony, gets his crush, Lisa, to give up smoking by relating the story of his grandmother, who had her larynx removed due to throat cancer (although he neglects to mention that his grandmother never smoked at all and that her cancer was just one of those freak things).
• In Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth, Greg discusses how, during his health class the previous year, there was an anti-smoking unit. The teacher's choice of wording (that anyone could try to give you a cigarette, including your best friend) made Rowley too paranoid to walk with Greg to school for a month, and Greg notes that the lesson didn't do too much for him because he'd already been put off of smoking after walking in on his grandpa doing it in the bathroom.
• This trope is the entire premise of another young adult novel, Give It Up, Mom (1989) by Mary Robinson. Assigned a school project with the aim of making a difference in the world, middle-schooler Rayne decides her project will be to help her mother, Laura, quit smoking. Rayne is so enthusiastic about the idea that she goes so far as to hand out fliers with pictures of her mother on them to local store clerks, asking them not to sell Laura cigarettes (which naturally does not go over well with Rayne's mother). Despite the rocky ride she's in for, with her mother's constant grouchiness and having to deal with several relapses, Rayne is determined to stay on her mother's back for as long as it takes.
• Night Shift: In Quitters, Inc., the main character has a serious smoking problem, and becomes a client of the titular company that helps people quit. It is really telling something that in spite of the extremely cruel methods used by the company (such as electrocuting the protagonist's wife when they caught him smoking), the wife was eventually grateful to them because they finally managed to make her husband quit.
• This Side of Paradise: Myra is not at all pleased with Amory's smoking habit when he tells her about it, giving her an unpleasant image of Amory suffering from the negative side effects of smoking. She insists Amory drop the habit, telling him that it'll stunt his growth. Amory tells her that he doesn't care and that he had seen some horrible things. Later on, Myra still tells him to stop smoking and that she cares after Amory responds that nobody cares about smoking.

Live-Action TV

• Faux Pause, a Game Show Network-produced Mystery Science Theater 3000 knockoff where the hosts ripped (mainly short-lived) game shows. One of the most infamous episodes mocked Hot Potato, hosted by Bill Cullen, and the steam-spewing sign, the hosts saying (more or less) the steam was the result of someone smoking a bunch of cigarettes at once and then exhaling. A Dude, Not Funny! moment as Cullen died of lung cancer as the result of heavy smoking almost his entire adult life.
• The Brady Bunch: "Where There's Smoke," where Carol is part of an anti-smoking committee at Greg's school at the same time he is seen experimenting with smoking due to peer pressure. Greg ultimately decides he doesn't like it, but when another parent sees him with a pack of cigarettes (from a buddy's coat, which he took by mistake), things look bad.
• Diff'rent Strokes: In a Season 6 episode, Arnold and his buddy, Dudley, experiment with cigarettes until Dudley's adopted father reveals that he is a chronic smoker and is about to undergo a lung transplant ... and that might not even help to save his life.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • Pembleton's smoking is treated as one of just another quirk, but he's frequently chided for it by other characters. He's eventually forced to quit after having a stroke.
  • Kellerman's introductory season established he had recently quit smoking. Once he Took a Level in Jerkass and became a more unlikable character, he started smoking again.
• Sister, Sister: One episode had a girl taunting one of the twins because she didn't smoke, but near the end of the episode, the bully eventually got her comeuppance.
• Keeping Up Appearances: Onslow's couch potato appearance is made even more degrading by the fact that he drinks and smokes in front of the TV.
• The Royle Family: The entire family looks downright disgusting, not least because some of them are seen smoking.
• Absolutely Fabulous: Patsy and Edna are two middle-aged cynical women who still try to look young and are both heavy smokers.
• You Can't Do That on Television dealt with the topic of smoking in two episodes, which, while they focused at length on the health risks and "grossness" of the habit, did so in the show's typical satirical fashion. The first episode, made in 1981, is arguably the better-written and more intelligent of the two and even features the show's man of many characters, Les Lye, coming out of character at the end of the episode to deliver an anti-smoking message. The second of the two smoking-themed episodes (made in 1989) posited the theory that the show's trademark green slime is actually mucus scraped from smokers' lungs.
• Seinfeld: Smoking is a huge turn-off to Elaine; she ends her romantic relationship with baseball hall-of-famer Keith Hernandez after discovering that he's a smoker.
  • Kramer, who is normally portrayed as being all but irresistible in-universe, becomes "hideous" after he turns his apartment into a smoking lounge, with his face becoming leathery and his teeth turning brown. He ends up working with lawyer Jackie Chiles to take tobacco companies to court for destroying his looks.
    Jackie Chiles: The man's a goblin. He's only been exposed to smoke for four days. By the time this case gets to trial, he'll be nothing more than a shrunken head.
  • When George is trying to get out of his engagement with Susan, he tries to take up smoking to get her to break up with him. Susan is disgusted, just as planned - unfortunately, George is just as disgusted, and he is unable to keep up the habit convincingly.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has Quark, his brother Rom, and his nephew Nog discuss this in the episode "Little Green Men", while they are being held captive by the US government in 1947.
  Quark: What's that disgusting smell?
  Nog: I think it's called "tobacco". It's a deadly drug. When used frequently, it destroys the internal organs.
  Quark: If it's so deadly, then why do they use it?
  Nog: It's also highly addictive.
  Rom: How do they get their hands on it?
  Nog: They buy it in stores.
  Quark: They buy it? If they'll buy poison, they'll buy anything!
• Thanks: When relatives from Jamestown introduce Plymouth to tobacco, it's portrayed as a disgusting habit. When their supply runs out, all the smokers suffer from withdrawal and storm the Winthrop house in anger.
• Played for Laughs, of a very Black Comedy kind, in Chewin' the Fat. A whole family of smokers has had to get themselves fitted with electronic voice boxes because of their throat cancer. Their postman also has a voice box!
• How I Met Your Mother: "Last Cigarette Ever" reveals that all five main characters are former smokers, but Ted kept this from his children out of embarrassment. The episode shows how smoking negatively affects them all: Lily's throat gets so bad she sounds like Harvey Fierstein, Ted struggles to climb a few flights of stairs, Barney burns a hole in his beloved tie, and Marshall's boss (with whom he started smoking to impress) has a heart attack. They all try to quit, suffering drastic withdrawal, and the episode ends with Ted explaining how they all quit eventually, with Ted's last cigarette being two weeks after he started dating his future wife.
• Friends: Chandler was confirmed to have been a chain smoker when he was younger, and in the earlier seasons several episodes featured the rest of the gang trying to make him quit smoking, making it a point to tell him how gross it is. After he quit smoking, he picked up the habit again when the stress of being caught in the middle of Ross's and Rachel's nasty breakup became too much too handle, much to the chagrin of the rest of the gang.
• Horrifically Played Straight with two heavy smokers in The Sopranos, Johnny Sack and Bobby Bacala Sr.
  • Bobby Bacala Sr. is dying from lung cancer after decades of smoking, and every scene he's in has him coughing his lungs out and struggling to speak. His One Last Smoke isn't satisfying or cool, it just looks painful, and he can barely even inhale. It ends up killing him.
  • Johnny Sack being a chain-smoker is one of his defining traits, and even he knows it's not good. This is implied to be one of the reasons why he accepts Ginny's obesity because he also has a self-destructive habit that's hard to break. But still, he ends up getting terminal lung cancer in season six, and his death is one of the saddest moments in the series.
• Hallo aus Berlin: More like "Underage Smoking is Not Cool"^note Before 2007, the smoking age in Germany was 16; In "Schule", Arno (who is 14) is caught smoking in the school bathroom and has to sweep the smoking corner as punishment.

Music

• "Pimper's Paradise" from Bob Marley's Uprising
  She loves to smoke, sometimes shifting coke
  She be laughing when there ain't no joke
  A pimper's paradise... that's all she was now
  • Given that second line, it might not have been tobacco she was smoking.
• The music video of Eminem's "My Name Is" had two low-life partners watching television when Eminem first appears on TV. The man is an obese couch potato, while his equally unattractive female partner has messy hair and smokes a cigarette. In one Gross-Up Close-Up, she's even seen blowing smoke at the camera.
• Mike Shinoda's Fort Minor has a song called "Cigarettes", which compares the lies told in the rap game to the lies told by tobacco companies to consumers.
• In Relient K's song "Deathbed", the singer starts drinking and smoking cigarettes at 14. His alcoholism and habitual drinking lead to a lot of misery, cultivating in lung cancer. It ends on a Bittersweet Ending, however, as he became Christian and went to Heaven in the end.

Newspaper Comics

• Calvin once asked his mom if he could try smoking. Much to his surprise, she agreed to it without argument and even told him where to find some cigarettes around the house. Naturally, when Calvin lights up outside and tries taking a nice big pull on it, he finds himself choking and coughing up the smoke. His mom then steps out and asks if he learned his lesson. Calvin takes away that trusting his parents can be hazardous to his health.
• In Curtis, the only time Curtis's dad's smoking is ever mentioned is when Curtis is trying to convince him to stop.
• In Dilbert a tobacco lobbyist talks about wanting to spread the image of sex appeal that smoking brings while she herself is a withered husk in a suit.
• Doonesbury had this come up to Mr. Butts, the sycophantic mascot of the tobacco industry of all characters. As part of a promotion, Butts comes up behind a guy who exudes coolness and asks if he smokes. The guy, never turning around to see who is asking, simply replies, "No, smoking is for idiots."
• Pearls Before Swine: Stephen Pastis is a non-smoker in real life but his Author Avatar in the comic is a heavy smoker in order to, in Pastis's words, make him look more like a "degenerate loser".

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: In the North American version, Traveling Matt encounters people smoking cigarettes and cigars, which he thinks are tubes they use to light fires inside their mouths. He notes that, judging from the way they cough, it can't be healthy. Matt throws a pitcher of water on a man smoking a cigar to keep the "fire in the man's mouth" from getting "out of control."
• The Noddy Shop: In the Grand Finale "Closing Up Shop", some of the characters convince Seymour Polutski not to buy out NODDY's by telling him that smoking is bad.

Video Games

• In Batman: Arkham City, the Penguin has had to attach a voice box to his neck because of all that smoking he does.
• Bloodwings: Pumpkinhead's Revenge: There's a Joke Item in the first level, a pack of cigarettes, which if you try to use them will kill you.
• Played for Laughs in Deathwish Enforcers with Diana, when she enters doors with rapid-fire power-ups. While her fellow Action Girl Cleo lives up to the Smoking Is Cool ideal as per the game's 1960s setting, Diana smokes until she's green in the face, clearly showing that she has no experience with this.
• Devil May Cry:
  • Dante was explicitly designed with this in mind, Word of God declaring that he's "too cool to smoke." His Continuity Reboot counterpart in DmC: Devil May Cry was initially shown smoking in the first trailer, but again, Word of God states that he did smoke before but has kicked the habit.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, Nero dislikes Nico's smoking habit, though he'll light a cigarette for her. V shows he dislikes it too by fanning away the smoke. The game also has a message in the intro/Mission 1 cutscene stating that the game does not promote smoking.
• The Detective in Disco Elysium thinks Smoking Is Cool (and during his youth, it perhaps was), but it's wrecked his lungs, aged him from the strikingly handsome Precinct 'rock star' he was in his 30s to a sad, bloated old man, and turned his fingers brown. Klaasje chain-smokes menthol cigarettes, and it's slowly ruining her movie-star good looks (the Detective notes that Klaasje's glittery disco catsuit, close-up, is covered with burn marks from the cigarette ash). The Deserter smokes and it's part of his overall joyless, miserable old age; and while Kim smokes, in part because he loves the cool image of it (and Harry praises how cool he looks while doing so), he is also ashamed of himself for falling for the affectation, notes how unhealthy and pointless it is, and limits himself to exactly one cigarette a day.
• Metal Gear: Solid Snake and Naked Snake/Big Boss will inevitably get criticized by at least one member of their supporting teams for their smoking habit. Averted in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, in which just about every member of Big Boss' MSF smokes or otherwise uses tobacco. Most of the series relies on Do Not Do This Cool Thing to get this trope across, but Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots plays this painfully straight as Old Snake keeps losing his cigarettes or getting them confiscated and, at one point, is coughing away with an oxygen mask and still asks for a smoke. It's a powerful moment when he decides to give it up after learning he no longer has to fight.
• The news reporter in Perfect Vermin is seen smoking cigarettes off-screen between levels as indicated by his ashtray. His Jerkass behavior, Gonkish appearance, and discolored yellow and rotting teeth do not paint a cool image of him. He's also dying of lung cancer as a result of his addiction.
• Resident Evil:
  • Zigzagged with Chris. He smokes in the uncut intro of the first game; no mention is made of it for years afterwards, but circumstances lead to him chain-smoking in Resident Evil 6. Piers is quick to call him out on it.
  • Leon Kennedy takes measures to follow this. In Resident Evil 4, he turns down a smoke when offered, and, as shown in the page quote, offers Luis Sera gum when he asks for a smoke. His early character concepts from 2 did depict him as a smoker (with the only evidence in the final game being that his personal item is a Zippo lighter), so he presumably quit at some point.
• Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon is a Contra-esque shooter in the form of an Edutainment Game that eliminates the tobacco-induced ailments from a dying smoker's body to teach him (and us) that smoking is bad.
• Rise of the Tomb Raider: Ana is dying of terminal lung cancer, and even this doesn't stop her from smoking cigarettes. Ultimately, what kills her is not cancer but Trinity deciding You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and sending a sniper to shoot her.
• Sam & Max, Sam and Max need to defeat Jurgen by destroying his reputation in front of his zombie army. One of the methods is to turn the Very Special Episode of Midtown Cowboys into an ad for Garlic Clove Cigarettes. The result is Jurgen smoking a cigarette only to end up in a coughing fit.

Webcomics

• Batman: Wayne Family Adventures: Cass picks up on a goon being a smoker from his stained teeth, then uses his reduced lung capacity against him in a curbstomp fight.
• In Yokoka's Quest, Grace gives Mao a pack of cigarettes. After lighting one up, he immediately looks disgusted and starts coughing.

Western Animation

• This is the subject of the "Sonic Sez" segment at the end of the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode, "Full-Tilt Tails", wherein Grounder smokes a cigarette and makes Tails do the same. As Grounder ends up choking on his cigarette and turning a pale green, Sonic explains to the viewers that smoking is bad for your health and stains your teeth.
• Bravestarr rams this message down your throat. Big Bad Tex Hex had a toadying lickspittle named Scuzz who smokes cigars and is always coughing and hacking up a storm. The other villains despise him, and in one Knowing Is Half The Battle segment, even he admits that he regrets having started the habit in the first place.
• Family Guy: The entire plot of the episode "Secondhand Smoke" revolves around this. Peter takes up smoking to have an excuse to quit working, and quickly becomes addicted; the episode does not pull any punches on how much havoc Peter's wreaking on his body and health by doing so. Eventually, the episode ends with Peter wondering how things will turn back to normal for him. Lois tells him the effects of smoking can't be overturned. Peter just asks for a cutaway gag, but when it returns to him, he is still in the same worse shape, causing him to say: "Oh, crap!". Cue the end credits.
• As early as 1938 (when most of the world would reject this trope) Porky Pig starred in a Looney Tunes commercial called Wholly Smoke that emphasized the dangers of smoking and made the habit look about as "cool" as self-mutilation.
• Pinky and the Brain: In the Very Special Episode "Inherit the Wheeze", Brain gets addicted to smoking after being used for animal testing of the effects of nicotine, and Pinky starts to worry his friend has a "monkey in his pants". Brain's latest scheme to Take Over the World involves becoming the Joe Cool-esque mascot for a tobacco company, and all the executives at the company are shown as sleazebags with terrible smoker's coughs. Hell, the company president is a wheelchair-bound invalid who looks like he's pushing a hundred even though he's only in his forties. Brain gives up on the scheme and vows to kick the habit when he sees the execs plan to use him to market cigarettes to kids.
• A Robot Chicken sketch involves several famous cartoon characters being treated for lung cancer in a hospital. These include The Pink Panther, the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, Olive Oyl (who suffered from secondhand pipe smoke from Popeye, who ironically built up an immunity to lung cancer from the antioxidants in his spinach), and Fred Flintstone (who speaks through an electrolarynx as a result of smoking too many Winston cigarettes).
• Schoolhouse Rock!: The Multiplication Rock song "Naughty Number Nine" is about a cigar-smoking Fat Cat who plays pool with an unwilling mouse as the cue ball. The people behind the show had to fight the censor to get the cigar on the air to show how "Naughty" the character was. In The Official Guide, they admitted that in modern times, the cat would probably take his stogie outside to smoke.
• The Simpsons
  • Patty and Selma, who are already very ugly and downright unpleasant company, smoke heavily. In fact, a flashback in "Three Men and a Comic Book" suggested they used to be nicer and their voices were far more feminine until they took up smoking.
  • Krusty the Clown, an egotistical and careless entertainer, is so addicted to tobacco that even being covered in nicotine patches doesn't prevent him from licking a patch on his elbow.
  • In "Lisa the Beauty Queen", when Lisa feels depressed about her appearance, Homer enters her in a Beauty Contest sponsored by Laramie, a cigarette multinational that bald-facedly admits it only sponsors events for the intent of advertising its product on TV, which Lisa ends up winning after the first-place winner gets struck by lightning. When Lisa realizes she is being exploited by the company, she immediately rebels against them and uses her influence to provide more socially admirable messages, such as making a stance that government money could be used for better education instead of spending it in sports (which caused a football team to be chased out by angry nerds).
• The Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Life in the 90s" had a segment called "Butt Out", which was a seven-minute long anti-smoking PSA. Babs attempts to enjoy her carrot cake, but is constantly bothered by Roderick and Rubella Rat from Perfecto Prep who are smoking cigarettes despite being in the non-smoking section of the restaurant. She tries to be nice, but when they refuse, of course, y'know, This Means War!
• Probably the only unattractive thing about Dr. Girlfriend in The Venture Bros. is her masculine, gravelly voice. After a few seasons (and some transphobic jokes), the show settled on the idea that this just came from smoking a lot.
  Jefferson Twilight: Do you smoke cigarettes or do you eat them?

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