World of Ham

Even the commute is scenery chewing for them.

Basically, a World of Ham is an entire universe populated by Large Hams and the Hot-Blooded, where everything that happens is extremely dramatic, and every activity is deadly Serious Business, where in every conflict everything is on the line. Not because of the treatment it receives, but because it just works when done that way! Moments of Awesome, Funny Moments, Heartwarming Moments, and Tear Jerkers happen almost one after another, giving works with this sort of setting unbearably high Holy Shit Quotients.

Every factor (characters, plot, pacing...) is configured to produce the maximum possible amount Emotional Torque, the more low-key scenes being used efficiently to make the more dramatic and action-filled scenes all the more breathtaking.

In such a world, you cannot merely act — YOU MUST OVERACT! Scenery… will be chewed — ground to fine dust. Giant cows will be milked to desiccation. Every single line of dialogue will be given as if it were a pronouncement from Heaven itself, or unto the Heavens themselves — WITH! ADDED! EMPHASIS! Every villain will roar, or perhaps sneer, at the pitiful worms who dare to crawl in their divine presence. Furthermore, there's a good chance that BRIAN BLESSED can be found STOMPING around somewhere. In this kind of world, it may seem like everyone's having a ball being as over the top as possible, but, in fact, it is the setting that requires, nay, DEMANDS it… and by GOD, its demands will be met!

Works that take place in a World of Ham tend to be Trope Overdosed, and contain Melodrama, as well as plenty of Ham-to-Ham Combat. They also preclude Evil Is Hammy, as that required just one side to be hams.

For a world actually made of hamlike substance, see Meat Moss. It'll probably be just as badass, though.

Compare Dark World, Crapsack World, Crapsaccharine World, World of Badass, Dystopia, Wretched Hive, Dysfunction Junction, World of Chaos, World of Snark, World Gone Mad, Layered World, Death World.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Osamu Tezuka: In his works, subtle delivery isn't exactly something his characters are fond of.

• Angel Beats! usually isn't this, but becomes one in the OVA due to "Operation High Tensions Syndrome", which translates to "be the most insane hams you can be".
  • It even has a meter on the screen constantly to measure exactly how hammy everyone is being at that particular moment. Turns out the meter can go Over 9000.
• Attack on Titan. It doesn't matter whether you're five or 50 feet away. Given that the overall theme of the series is Survivalism against the Titans, everyone who isn't a stoic generally shouts and screams at one another or themselves as if they are in constant overdose of adrenaline.
• Bleach: Even the most stoic ones can suddenly start screaming and practically every character is Chewing the Scenery. For example, Kenpachi Zaraki is a master of screaming and dramatic poses.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. It's a show based on Fist of the North Star but about hair. That is all.
• Code Geass is unique in that the acting for a lot of characters is more in line with the Super Robot series, despite being about Real Robots. Even the scenery is incredibly over the top, gigantic imperial halls and blazing shiny towers in the Imperial Enclave separated only by a railway from incredibly dirty and impoverished slums, on diametric opposites of the Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty, and soundtrack keeps pace too.
  • "Everything is Fabulous!"
• Dear Brother: As a melodramatic Shoujo from The '70s, it fits in very well. Especially in the anime, where we have dramatic thunderstorms, lots of Mood Whiplash and hundreds of both Repeat cuts and Pastel Chalked Freeze Frames coming from the Master of said Freeze Frames himself.
• Deltora Quest, or at least, the English dub. There's the villains, the guardians of the Gems, and a tribe of Neat Freaks, among other hammy things.
• Dragon Ball is full of hammy villains and heroes. Especially evident in Dragon Ball Z.
• Fairy Tail: The members shout half of the things they say on the top of their lungs, such as "WE ARE FAIRY TAIL!"
• Fist of the North Star. The excessive amount of drama and bloodshed MAKE HEADS EXPLODE!
  • Exemplified by Shigeru Chiba's iconically hammy narration. It started off as an inside joke — he began delivering his "next-episode" bits in an increasingly demented Hot-Blooded voice, just to see how long he could go on gradually cranking it up before someone noticed. The fans noticed, all right, to the extent that when he leveled it off (out of fear of wrecking his voice or giving himself an aneurysm) they would come up to him in the street and ask why he stopped.
• Hellsing. It's a series based on Rule of Cool with a whole lot of Large Hams, what do you expect? Particularly the OVAs, which at times seem to be nothing more than epic fight scenes followed by hammy speeches followed by even more epic fight scenes.
• Hetalia: Axis Powers makes countries into Anthropomorphic Personifications that, more than talking, actually yell at each other 90% of the time. That's pork and then some more.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure isn't called 'the glam rock version of Fist of the North Star' for nothing.
  • Why talk when you can SHOUT?! Why walk when you can SWAGGER?! Why jump when you can LEAP?! Why stand when you can POSE?! Why monologue when you can GIVE A SPEECH?!
  • The anime maintains the global hamminess. World of Ham + Talking Is a Free Action = someone is Chewing the Scenery every single line.
  • The power of Parts 1 and 2, Hamon (a.k.a. the Ripple) is literally a homophone for "jamón", which is Spanish for "ham"!
• Karakuridouji Ultimo seems to be this. It doesn't help that part of the writing is done by STAN LEE.
• Kill la Kill: Satsuki wasn't exaggerating when calling everybody "pigs in human clothing". Most lines are not spoken, but shouted. You don't open a door, you kick it across the room. The protagonist eats a lemon as you'd eat an apple, just so you can see how badass she is. Steal a school uniform? Get a gruesome death and have your corpse hung on display as a warning to others. The main character is the exception most of the time, but that's only so that she can really unleash the hog when the time is right.
  • Every time a new character is introduced, dramatic music and sound-effects blare out as their name and role flashes on the screen in HUGE BRIGHT RED BLOCK CAPITAL FONT! Even the wimpiest secondary character will tend to be introduced with maximum impact.
• The Legend of Koizumi (Mudazumo Naki Kaikaku) is made of this. They play Mahjong with tiles made of depleted uranium.
• Lucky Star has one of the best examples of this every time Konata goes to the Hot-Blooded anime store. You have not seen a true ham UNTIL YOU HAVE HEARD HIM SCREAM (and why he screamed).
  • What a lot of people don't realize was that was a cameo for the mascots of the Japanese anime shop, Animate.
• Medaka Box gets a mention for a scene that was all about OPENING A DOOR!!
• My Hero Academia: Most characters are incredibly campy, loud and intense, particularly All Might.
• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: The first 8 or so episodes are just one epic ham after another. They're being chased by a tank! Now they're on a battleship! Now a submarine! Wait, something about Atlantis? That thing is going to shoot Frickin' Laser Beams!?
• Naruto has perhaps the single least subtle ninjas in fiction. For some reason they feel the need to explain their tactics to the enemy, at length, in the middle of a battle with calls of "___ no Jutsu!", overly dramatic jutsus themselves and mad headbands.
• Nichijou: The world is equal parts Ham, Slapstick, and Moe.
• One Piece. The only show in which characters will treat declaring war on the entire world as a matter of fact. We're kidding you not: they actually did that. Usopp (then adopting the Sogeking persona) even took the opportunity to brag about his new slingshot.
• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: The only character that isn't made of unrelenting ham is Brief, and the universe constantly punishes him for it.
• Pokemon's anime, while capable of being hammy, generally does not reach this level. The same cannot be said of Pokémon Generations, where they have a lot less time to devote to things and must thus show off characters quickly. Quickly in their case means loads and loads of HAM! Characters ROAR at each other before battles, old sages BELLOW wise phrases into the sky from atop castles, dastardly plans are given while SHOUTING and GESTURING. This is most evident in Episodes 3, 8, and 13, though you can see the HAM in other episodes.
• Ranma ½ is all Martial Arts Mayhem involving Involuntary Shapeshifting and ham!
• REDLINE takes place in a very soft sci-fi one... Racing is apparently the galactic pastime, and lord is it Serious Business. Everyone has moments of ham, especially the announcers, and racers indulge in quite a bit of ham behind the wheel.
  Announcer: THA MAD BROZAZ LYYYYNCHUUMAN ANDO JOHNNYBOYAAAAA!
  Announcer: MIKI ANDO TODOROKIIAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

At this point, it sounds like the announcer is going into convulsions.

• Sailor Moon: About the only characters that aren't at least a five on the ham-o-meter are Sailor Pluto and Sailor Saturn (who go for the other extreme), Usagi's parents (incidental characters at best) and... maybe some background extras. It seems Histrionic Personality Disorder is just a natural side-effect of magic and super science. Even Ami eventually takes her hamminess up a notch with her character-based special about studying. Let's not get started on all the villains except for Saphir and Dimande.
  • Minako/Sailor Venus. In the main series she usually tones it down to not outshine Usagi/Sailor Moon, who is super hammy herself, but whenever she doesn't risk that... Well, she's so hammy that in one occasion the Monster of the Week protested she was being too hammy-and got hammily beheaded while he was protesting.
  • Then there was the anime episode where she had to impersonate Sailor Moon to make it appear it wasn't Usagi, who had been captured and got her Transformation Trinket taken away. She hammed it up so much that Kaolinite, Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were completely fooled and failed to notice the bad disguise and that Sailor Venus was not around. And Usagi was totally embarrassed by the time Venus was done.
• Saint Seiya. As one of the most famous and classic shonen mangas, full of Hot-Blooded characters who adore to make passionate speeches about The Power of Friendship and loudly scream the names of their special techniques, this is very much to be expected. At this rate, Saori/Athena and Shun/Hades are pretty much the only main characters who act somewhat low-key in a regular basis.
  • And the latter actually is hammy when he's not possessed by Hades!
  • To convey for Italian viewers the same sense of mystery and awe that classical mythology, which they are all too familiar with, inspired in the culturally distant Japanese, the Italian dub director cranked up the epicness of the dialogues, added quotes from classical Italian poems including the The Divine Comedy, and generally raised the stylistic level of all dialogues. The end result is one of the hammiest dubs in history... And the viewers getting the sense of epicness.
  • The Latin-American dub from Mexico was no slouch in this either. Led by the late Jesús "Chucho" Barrero as Seiya, both newbies and seniors were obviously having MASSIVE fun as they screamed their lines at each other and hammed it up like there was no tomorrow. There's a damn good reason the A OTRA DIMENSION meme came from the LA-Spanish fandom.
• School Rumble: A show that takes the standard Love Dodecahedron, misunderstandings, and big personalities of your typical Ranma ½-esque shows, and then ramps it up. Exemplified rather nicely by one of the main characters: "Thank GOD I was born stupid!"
• Sengoku Basara. The games are pretty hammy. The anime is made of bacon: while it has its share of low-key characters, the incredibly unrealistic (and very awesome, past the initial surprise) way the battles are rendered, the fraction of exceptionally Hot-Blooded or just batshit insane characters present, even for anime, and the high drama and gravity of the events there depicted, all with incredibly rousing music in the background, make this anime fall squarely into this definition.
• Soul Eater. All attacks must be called in the LARGEST POSSIBLE FONT, and explaining your strategy to the enemy mid-battle is expected. It gets to the point that enemies help each other in battle with their explanations. Interestingly, meisters tend to ALL be hot-blooded and hammy. Notable hams include: Black☆Star, Gopher, Asura(as of recent), Ox, Giriko, Kiddo, and, to a point, Maka herself.
  Soul: SOUL HACK!!!!!

• Space Patrol Luluco, a series where people fight by transforming into guns and even the Only Sane Man delves into the hamminess. It's to be expected given who directed it.
• Star Driver takes Code Geass's camp and ramps it way up. It is a series chock-full of stupid, stupid concepts, executed with such ham and panache and brio that you can't help but gape in awe. You know what the protagonist is called? GALACTIC Bishōnen! And when the villains scream it, they manage to make it sound threatening.
• Most of the Super Robot Genre, with special mention to GaoGaiGar, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The Real Robot Genre split off specifically by doing away with the ham.
  • Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann took this to another level in the second movie; the cast ham it up even more than they did in the original series. The best example is probably Lordgenome, who goes from saying "OVERLLOOAAAAD!" in the original series, to "OOOOOAAAVAAALOOOOWWAAHHHHDDDDAAAAH!!!" in the second movie.
  • Lordgenome is just the tip of the iceberg. While the Anti-Spiral was somewhat hammy in the original (as being hammy generally led to Spiral Power, which is against the Anti-Spirals), the movie took it up to 11. Case in point: "Interesting! Then... Anti-Spiral... Giga... DRRRIILLLL.... BREEEEAAAAAKKKKAAAAA!!!!!"
  • Essentially, Spiral Energy runs on hamminess.
  • Mobile Fighter G Gundam might just be even more full of Ham. Between all of the over-the-top martial arts cliches, the speeches given in between every punch, and the entire premise of fighting a martial arts tournament with giant robots to determine the next ruler of the world, it's impossible to not invoke this trope. That's not even including the fact that everyone and everything is Hot-Blooded (from the Wrench Wench main love interest to the stereotypically Knight in Shining Armor Frenchman to a horse).
  • There's also Giant Robo.
  • And Shin Mazinger, too; the narrator is probably the biggest ham in the show. In fact, maybe we should just say every Super Robot show directed by Yasuhiro Imagawa will be set in a World Of Ham.
  • Mobile Suit Gundam 00 is quite a World Of Ham, despite being more of a Real Robot series. Just look at Ali and Graham...
    • Setsuna gets pretty hammy in the final episodes, too: "Gundam Exia. Setsuna F. Seiei. SLASHING THROUGH THE FUTURE!". Then Exia body-slams the O Gundam into an asteroid.
• Toriko literally does this with food.
• In the world of the original ''Yu-Gi-Oh!'' manga by Kazuki Takahashi (Viz: first seven volumes, Duelist, and Millennium World), games and gaming in general are taken very seriously.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime series. Every series makes a children's card game a matter of life and death, but Yami Yugi plays every single card with the sort of drama normally reserved for parting the Red Sea.
  • Heck, English dub Yami Yugi manages to ham up drawing a card at the start of his turn (in fact, the introduction of Duel Disks for Battle City onwards seems partly so the characters can use more than just their upper bodies to flourish their card draws). He has to, as he is voiced by Dan Green.
  • Here's a video comparing English dub Yami Yugi and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series Yami Yugi. Looks like English dub Yami Yugi is extremely dramatic and takes things too seriously.
  • Rival characters often spice up the ham. Thunder strikes to declarations of their name, souls literally burning with flames as they speak, entering arenas by jumping out of dragon shaped aircraft: it's hard to find a series that doesn't add to the ham. Zexal comes close, but even then the rival characters start the series with eerie whistles and robotic jetpacks and end with super sentai transformations.
  • Yu Gi Oh ARCV is easily the hammiest series, given that main character Yuya Sakaki is also an entertainer. Then there's the Gongenzaka family, and Shingo Sawatari, who copies and trumps Yuya's hamminess, and Shuzo Hiragi, who is almost constantly shouting "burn!" and "hot-blooded!" And of course, the series MC, Nico Smiley. Even normally stoic Reiji Akaba hams it up at times. It's telling that when Jack Atlas shows up in series, he is not the hammiest character in series, though he certainly is quite a respectable platter.

Comic Books

• During the Silver Age, pretty much every comic book storyline happened in a World Of Ham, probably the best example being Marvel's Asgard: an entire Dimension of Ham!
  • This could be said of most things written by Stan Lee. Excelsior!
• And the Bronze Age brought us Jack Kirby's New Gods Saga, a senses-shattering cosmic god-war between two Worlds of Ham! With Earth, the Doomed Dominion, caught in-between!!! As a tribute to Kirby, John Byrne penned Darkseid vs Galactus: The Hunger, where all parties spoke as if performing in The Ring of the Nibelung. In this setting, it's quite appropriate.
• Sin City. Just about everything written by Frank Miller debatably exists in such a world, but Sin City particularly thrives on Refuge in Audacity on several levels.
• Nextwave. Plot? Dialogue? Sanity? OH NOES! If you can't accept it as it is, Warren Ellis shall kick you. And then you shall explode.
• Transmetropolitan. Halfway justified because the main cast are two halfway psychotic journalists/bodyguards, a bunch of politicians running for president, an editor-in-chief, and a cyberpunk Hunter S. Thompson.
• Scott Pilgrim has so many tasty, delicious moments of ultra-ham.

Fan Works

• Tokyo Mew Mew No Hope Left. Every character is a large ham. Even characters who are only mentioned for a sentence scream at the top of their lungs or burst into dramatic tears.
• Deserving. Exhibit A is Harry Potter Milking the Giant Cow and casting fireworks with his wand in order to comment on someone's birthday party. Then we have glorious dialogue such as "LUBE! Always lube. Don't make me repeat it." (... came the menacing voice.)
• Weiss Reacts: Everyone hams it up at least once. Everyone, even Weiss. The only non-ham is Raven Branwen, and even SHE'S The Comically Serious.
  • The universe it spawned, The Reactsverse, inherited the hamminess of its progenitor.
• The Italian remake of Battle Fantasia Project is a Magical Girl-centered crossover including, among many hammy series, the above-mentioned Sailor Moon and Ranma ½, and is being written by authors from one of the Real Life examples of this trope. It's a rather hammy story.
• Take Code Geass, with Hammy Mechas, Eye Powers, and People. Take Jojo, with Hammy Stances, Stands, and People. Mix the two together, and get Lulu's Bizarre Rebellion. Every major character eventually is consumed by the crazy ham. Everyone!
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: ATTENTION DUELISTS! The main character is voiced by DAN GREEN! Most abridged series enhance the ham, or even introduce ham where there wasn't any, for laughs. When the original material was already hammy to begin with, the results can be astounding.
• A Very Potter Musical and its sequel. To the point that they became the inspiration for Ham-to-Ham Combat.
• Mobile Fighter Evangelion; when the mercs from Team Fortress 2 are considered tame by the universe's standards, you know you're in for a ham buffet. For starters, Gendo thinks railguns are perfectly good for mail delivery and gardening (simultaneously), Misato considers ramping up the side of a building on a rocket powered motorcycle with nukes going off behind her a normal day's commute, Rei is a stoic badass who eats metal as an intimidation tactic, and Doctor Akagi is a Mad Scientist prone to psychotic bouts of laughter and declaring herself a god.
• Farce of the Three Kingdoms starts where Romance leaves off and escalates from there.

Films — Animated

• Fantasia 2000: Has freaking FLYING WHALES. Anyway, what did you expect from pieces such as the "Firebird Suite" or Beethoven's 5th Symphony? The original counts as well. This just proves that anything can become overly dramatic if you set it to properly bombastic music.
• The Disney version of Alice in Wonderland: pretty much all of Wonderland is quite hammy.
• The Fake-Out Opening to Toy Story 3. Imagine an Anachronism Stew Mega Crossover and lines like "Well, I brought My DINOSAUR, WHO EATS FORCE FIELD DOGS!" and "That's MR. Evil Dr. Pork Chop to you!" taken perfectly seriously.

Films — Live-Action

• Amadeus: Mozart's music is awesome by itself, but, as a soundtrack, it blows your mind. Salieri's attitude doesn't help tone things down either.
• Battlefield Earth. Copious amounts of Ham and Cheese from everyone.
• The Birdcage is set in the 1990s Miami gay community and revolves around the eccentric characters that populate the local drag scene. To put it in perspective: Robin Williams is The Straight Man.
• Death Becomes Her centers around two vain Beverly Hills women, one of whom (Meryl Streep) was a hammy actress to begin with, and another (Goldie Hawn) who even briefly becomes a large ham as seeing the other stealing her man (Bruce Willis enjoying himself profusely) drives her to compulsive eating. They become young again through a ridiculously over-the-top sorceress played by Isabella Rossellini, and turn into undead hams through Amusing Injuries.
• The Expendables. This is a movie which features Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in the same scene, and we are not even counting the rest of the cast. The film should have been named Ham-singularity, and then the sequels add Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wesley Snipes and Antonio Banderas. Ham-to-Ham Combat is inevitable.
• Pretty much everybody gets to ham it up in From Dusk Till Dawn.
• Gladiator. It’s Imperial Rome, for love of the gods! Oliver Reed! Russell Crowe! Richard Harris! Joaquin Phoenix chewing everything in sight when he’s not trying to chew Connie Nielsen and bellowing “Am I not merciful?” Chariots! Galloping horses! Giant arenas made of marble! Sweating slaves! Directed by Ridley Scott for Pete’s sake! Are you not entertained?
• The Producers. Let's just say this: Gene Wilder was the understated one among the lead characters, and his Establishing Character Moment had him screaming "I'M HYSTERICAL". Which his character is.

  I'm in pain, and I'm wet...AND I'M STILL HYSTERICAL!

  • When paired against Zero Mostel, one can't help but be a little understated.
  • The film adaptation of the Broadway adaptation is even hammier.
• Flash Gordon, which has BRIAN BLESSED in it, and a soundtrack by Queen.
  GORDON'S ALIVE?!
• Repo! The Genetic Opera is another notable musical example. It's a wonder any of the set was still standing after the cast was finished munching on it.
• The cast of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which is to be expected given that it features Alan Rickman and BRIAN BLESSED.
• Troy. Say what you will about the film, but even a resenter will have a bit of fun seeing Peter O'Toole, Brian Cox, Brendan Gleeson and even Brad Pitt compete in a scenery-devouring contest.
  • Consider this: Eric Bana is the quiet one?
• Rat Race. Besides Breckin Meyer, everyone hams up.
• 300. It is a world of ham. It is filled with PEOPLE OF HAM! DIALOGUE OF HAM! CREATURES OF HAM! THE VERY LAND ITSELF BLEEDS WITH THE BLOOD OF HAM! This is a world where it is apparently perfectly sensible to use the corpses of your enemies as construction mortar, where no-one questions the logic of a king who wages a losing war for the sole purpose of seeing a warrior Kneel Before Zod. Almost every single line, every single action, every single frame is overflowing with Ham.
  • This is Hamness!!
  • THIS! IS! HAMWORLD!
• The Ref is pretty much one hammy "The Reason You Suck" Speech after another.
• Braveheart : FREEEDHAAAAAAAAM
• Anything directed by John Waters is bound to be this, but his work in the 1970s deserves special mention. Waters knew absolutely nothing of how to write convincing or even realistic dialogue, yet had a cast willing to deliver said dialogue with absolute gusto and conviction.
• Star Wars. Just for starters, every installment has a Big "NO!".
• Anything with Bruce Campbell. You Know the One about "if thine eye offend thee, then pluck it out?" Well, in Evil Dead 2, his Evil Hand attempted to strangle him, so he cut it off with a chainsaw, declared the Chainsaw Groovy and grafted it to the stump.
  • Army of Darkness is the most popular Evil Dead film due to completely discarding the horror and concentrating on the ham. Undead, medieval, steampunk ham.
  • By the same token, Bubba Ho-Tep. Bruce Campbell playing the "late" Elvis... Ossie Davis as JFK; nuff said.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: Jude Law is Ace Pilot Joe Sullivan. He battles Humongous Mecha with his Do Anything Plane. There are Clockwork Nazi Robots and mouse-sized elephants. And two of every animal on earth being loaded into a rocket ship.
• Inglourious Basterds: There's Lt. Aldo Raine, the Bear Jew, Adolf Hitler, Dr. Goebbels, and probably more.
• xXx:
  • The movie opens with Vin Diesel BASE-jumping off a sports car that he's just driven off a bridge, and it just goes uphill from there.
  • Right before that, a Rammstein concert with obvious people of ham and a ham-spy dressed like James Bond...
• Moulin Rouge! Melodrama and absinthe trip-like musical numbers where the (wonderful) scenery is gleefully chewed.
  • "Like A Virgin" deserves special mention — to say nothing of the wonderful Ham-to-Ham Combat of the two main characters trying to outdo one another, but then the entire wait staff joining in in a way over the top dance number.
  • Also by Baz Luhrmann, Romeo + Juliet. Keeping Shakespeare's original text (see Theater, below) probably helped the cast to really liven up — Harold Perrineau being the best example.
• Speaking of musicals, Jesus Christ Superstar is The Passion set in a World of Ham and 60's counterculture. Every single line between Jesus and Judas is Ham-to-Ham Combat, sung in notes so inhuman few actors can sing them
  • "Actors" being the key word there; singers don't find those notes all that difficult.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula: Every actor is gloriously hamming it up except for Keanu Reeves, for whom overacting seems physically impossible. Also Richard E. Grant and Anthony Hopkins having a good time together.
• Harry Potter. Kenneth Branagh, Jason Isaacs, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Miranda Richardson, Brendan Gleeson, Ralph Fiennes, David Tennant (brief though his role may be), Helena Bonham Carter and even Jessie Cave (the girl who played Lavender Brown) have entire scenes devoted to their hamminess. Rumor has it that during Chamber of Secrets Isaacs, Branagh, and Rickman had an ongoing wager seeing who could get the hammiest takes into the final cut.
• You get your first taste of ham in The Rocky Horror Picture Show when the Criminologist begins explaining the plot in the most over-the-top fashion possible, but it's not until the Time Warp and Sweet Transvestite that the true depths of hammitude are revealed. Of course, at any good screening, the biggest hams in the movie will be the audience.
• The Princess Bride. Cary Elwes, Chris Sarandon, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, André the Giant and Billy Crystal in one film. It's as beautiful as it sounds.
  • Hey, what about Mandy Patinkin? He's got the coolest line of all time! Hello!. My Name Is Inigo Montoya. You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.
  • Cary Elwes vs. Mandy Patinkin — the duel is a glorious combination of Flynning and Ham-to-Ham Combat. I Am Not Left-Handed indeed.
  • Bizarrely, Christopher Guest's acting doesn't go to eleven. (His finger count does, though.) "And certainly NOT TO FIFTY!"
• Frequently played for fun in the Back to the Future trilogy. Few things are more delightful than Tom Wilson picking on Crispin Glover.
  • And Christopher Lloyd. 1.21 GIGAWATTS! GREAT SCOTT!
• Also played for fun in Short Circuit. All of the human characters except for Ben seem to forget what an indoor voice is.
• The comics were pretty hammy to begin with, but the film adaption of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World takes this trope even further.
• Excalibur. Example: During a siege, Uther asks one of his knights if he's seen Merlin. His response: "I HAVEN'T!!!"
  • Uryens has Excalibur and an off-screen knight crows "Keeeep it Uuuuuuryeeeens!"
  • Another good example is Merlin himself. John Boorman said something to the effect that the actor was capable of inflecting every vowel sound possible into a single syllable.
  "A dream...to some. A NEE-YIGHT-MAY-UH TO UH-THUHS!!!"
  • Wagner!
• The New York City of King of New York is a World of Ham.
• As is the Big Applesauce of Gangs of New York. With a mustachio-twirling, top hat-wearing Daniel Day-Lewis as the villain.
• Pirates of the Caribbean! Captain Jack Sparrow plus Barrrr-bossa plus Elizabeth ("I just wanted the pleasure of doing that myself!") plus Davy Jones ("A lost bird that never learned to fly!") plus Keith Richards... pure Ham-to-Ham Combat. Orlando Bloom playing it normal brings things down a bit though.
• Big Money Hustlas has plenty of this going around. But first, you gotta HYPNOTIZE THAT MOTHERFUCKA!
• The Fast and the Furious. A Rated M for Manly series that from jumpy cameras to cars flying down suspiciously empty streets to every girl dressed like a stripper to every other line of dialogue uttered REALLY intensely FOR no DISCERNIBLE reason.
• Pootie Tang is set in a world of Ham and Badass Belts.
• Conan the Barbarian (1982) is like day-old pizza: delicious, ridiculously cheesy, and you could catch ebola from it. Consider the ham pedigree: James Earl Jones (Star Wars), Max von Sydow (Flash Gordon), and finally Arnold Schwarzenegger (everything he's ever been in^note  as in cheesiness, not overacting). Even the opening narration by Mako. And then you have... Conan the Musical!
• The Wizard of Oz. Intensive Melodrama, helped by beautiful visuals and music, and everyone overacting at least once, with The Wicked Witch of the West being the best example.
• Network, which gives every actor a Character Filibuster at least once — and they all take full advantage. Justified Trope: They are all insane.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has both a literal world (as in a location), and a few movies that fit the trope.
  • Thor's Asgard. Visually stunning and basically every inhabitant is boisterous. Quite appropriately, Anthony Hopkins is the King of Hamminess. He manages to shut down one of Chris Hemsworth's No Indoor Voice speeches with a single line of dialogue. Thor: Ragnarok even manages to sneak in recursive ham, as Asgardian actors re-enact the climactic scenes from Thor: The Dark World, while Thor's hot-blooded attitude comes off as comically out of place on the junk planet of Sakaar, where most of the residents are effectively working stiffs and the ruler is an Affably Evil hedonist played by Jeff Goldblum.
  • The Avengers (2012) has this in noticeable doses, but it seems to be more a function of having six people with massive egos and over-the-top schticks (Tony, Natasha, Thor, Loki, Steve, and Fury) all crammed into a very small space under stressful conditions, while the only humble, normal people are kept out of the action (Hill and Coulson — not that the former can't overact...), sit on the sidelines snarking bitterly at everyone (Bruce), or get brainwashed and kidnapped moments after showing one of the most level-headed displays of reason in the first half of the film (Clint).
  • Come Avengers: Age of Ultron, and we add twins with an amusing accent (Pietro and Wanda) and a villain as hammy as Loki in Ultron, who shows robots are clearly on the next level of Evil Gloating.
  • And Captain America: Civil War features a lot of Ham-to-Ham Combat, because the Avengers are too busy hamming it up to actually discuss things quietly and rationally (well, except for one scene, which quickly devolves into Snark-to-Snark Combat instead).
• Ivan the Terrible: Everyone shouts a lot and gestures as if they are speaking from the other end of a football pitch, but Tsar Ivan is the supreme ham. "For the sake of the GREAT! RUSSIAN! KINGDOM!"
• Nearly everyone on the Con Air airplane (Nicolas Cage, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Danny Trejo, Ving Rhames, M.C. Gainey, the Camp Gay "Sally Can't Dance"), plus Colm Meaney as a federal agent, is clearly having fun on their roles:
  Cyrus: Don't move or the bunny gets it.
• The 1937 film The Great Garrick is an invoked example of this trope, as all the actors ( except for Olivia de Havilland) are playing very large hams who are engaged in a a spitting match over comments allegedly said by one of them. By the end of the film, there is very little scenery left as everyone except Olivia De Havilland gets a large taste of the sets.
• The A-Team. Highlights include firing the cannon of a falling tank in an attempt to fly it into a lake.
• Judge Dredd. "LAAAAAAAW!"
• Most of the kids in The Sandlot are big hams.
• The Man with the Iron Fists What do you get when a rapper makes a kung-fu film? Lots of Bad "Bad Acting" and Russell Crowe Chewing the Scenery. Nice cinematography but the dialogue is pure kung-foolery.
• The Warriors. Can you DIG THE HAM suckas?
• Streets of Fire might as well be the Spiritual Successor to The Warriors, which it is since Walter Hill is responsible for both movies.
• Sucker Punch in the fantasy sequences at least.
• The Goonies. Hollywood long ago decided that children communicate solely in shouts or screams and just never calm down. To some extent this is Truth in Television, but "to some extent" is parsecs below where this film is.
• Plenty of Troma movies, but especially Tromeo and Juliet.
• In The Hunger Games, the Capital is this. Aside from President Snow, everyone acts flamboyant and\or dresses ridiculously, with the standouts being Caesar and Effie.
• Everybody in Beautiful Creatures camps it up with great enthusiasm, with the champion of ham being Emma Thompson as Sarafine.
• Dune (1984) : The hammiest is Baron Harkonnen, but everyone else is close behind him.
• The Big Lebowski. Every major character has some lines that they repeat with increasing emphasis.
  Walter: This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass, Larry. [...] YOU SEE WHAT HAPPENS? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS! HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY! HERE'S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK! A STRANGER! IN THE ASS!
• The Fifth Element looks straight out of a sci-fi magazine, with colorful and\or downright ridiculous clothes, and features both Gary Oldman as the villain and Chris Tucker as a Camp Straight radio host.
• The Living Wake takes place in a Monty Python-eque world where everyone has some extreme quirk (or several), everyone is over-the-top and dramatic, and random dance numbers just happen sometimes. At one point, one character literally throws ham at another.
• Ocean's Eleven and its sequels. The thieves many times are bigger than life or forced into hammy impersonations. The villains are even worse (including Al Pacino in full "HOO-AH!" mode). And the second movie has Bruce Willis As Himself, profusely enjoying it.
• Mad Max: Fury Road. From the character design to the action to the performances, everything in the film is played over-the-top. As Spencer Hall might say, MAD MAX IS A MOVIE MADE WITH CAPS LOCK ON!
• The Huntsman: Winter's War. Charlize Theron and Emily Blunt are already tops for their work as a pair of warring evil magic queens in lavish gowns but then you throw in Chris Hemsworth as the hero and Jessica Chastain as his love with a crazy Scottish accent and it gets better.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Bob Hoskins is the only one who doesn't get in on the shtick until the end, but even he goes a bit over the top with his hard-boiled noir detective style. The toons are, of course, toons, and Christopher Lloyd is brilliantly nuts. The supporting cast alternates between depressed (when Valiant or Doom are around) to joining in on the cartoonish fun and games (when Roger is present), and Acme and Maroon are very nicely overplayed for such small roles.
• Breaker Morant is a legal drama where EDWARD WOODWARD plays the title character, Jack Thompson shouts about half of his lines, and Bryan Brown does a good job of playing a boisterous lout.
• Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine: Vincent Price and a bunch of Beach Party actors in a 60's Mad Scientist spy-spoof. Reportedly, Price was very disappointed when the producers scrapped their initial plans to make the thing a musical.
• Tevya: The acting isn't subtle. Tevye is hammy, Khave moans melodramatically, and the Orthodox villagers are, except for Fedye, cartoon villains.

Literature

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame, both the Disney film and the book.
• All the works of Alexandre Dumas' oeuvre. Especially The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
• Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the foremost philosophers of Romanticism, seems to think the world we live in should be like this. His style, which tends to reflect Scripture style, is so hammy, offensive and pretentious NO author has probably ever topped him afterward.
  • Only in The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the former case, he added a preface to the second edition of the book in which he explicitly repudiated the bombastic elements of his youthful style. In the latter, he wrote half-a-dozen books after it, and none of them came anywhere close to the histrionics of Zarathustra.
    • In the former case, he repeats the EXACT SAME PARAGRAPH in different words for Over 9000 pages.
• The First Dwarf King is a novel populated by Large Hams and hammy villains. Bonus points for the characters' arguing.
• Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire, by Neil Gaiman, is a short story about a writer living in a World of Ham, who tries to write "realistically", but fails — his attempts to depict life in the world of Gothic novels he lives in inevitably turn into parody (or is it satire from his point of view?). In the end he decides to write fantasy instead, and that's when he gets into normal family drama. Only to be interrupted by his long-lost brother jumping in through the window with a sword...
• Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, set In a World… where people go on being hammy even after they die, and where haircuts are Serious Business.
• The fact that The Lord of the Rings gets away with this to the extent that it does imply that we ourselves may be living in a World Of Ham.
  • The Silmarillion is included with the scriptures? Hmm... Considering it has a Rock Opera based on it,^note "Nightfall In Middle-Earth", sung in the Key of Ham and features an entire Götterdämmerung against hordes of demons and dragons through the magic of song... .
• Redwall. Name one character who hasn't had at least one hammy line.
  • Corp. Rubbadub (Long Patrol) only talks in beatbox, but that probably still counts.
• As an Affectionate Parody and satire of both opera in general and The Phantom of the Opera specifically, Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Maskerade qualifies. Discworld is a fairly hammy place to be in any case, but basically every trope from opera is taken and hammed up massively. This includes, among other things, a character who can sing in harmony with herself, a grandiose, emotional aria whose actual lyrical content is along the lines of "This damn door sticks! It sticks no matter what I do!" and the villain's death scene, which was played in true operatic style, right down to the sword being between his arm and his chest, rather than actually cutting him. He dies anyway, from the sheer density of ham involved in opera. Literally — he's so caught up he doesn't realize it's fake until it's too late.
• Jack Chalker's River of Dancing Gods books pretty much embody this, with everything but everything governed by THE RULES to ensure proper Swords And Sorcery action.
• William Shatner? Ham. Shatner at a Shatner-focused convention? The whole pig. A Shatnerquake with Shatner, Captain Kirk, T.J. Hooker, Shatner, Denny Crane, and just about every character William Shatner has portrayed? If that doesn't scream "World of Ham", nothing does.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, every main character is as Hot-Blooded as their creator, and not the least bit shy about letting the world know how they feel in the most bombastic manner possible.

Live-Action TV

• This is a defining trait of the Monty Python troupe. If a given skit, scene, song, what have you doesn't start with at least one character being a large ham, just give it a few minutes...
• ESPN. Even the straight people there have their hammy moments.
• Pick a Soap Opera. Any Soap Opera. But especially telenovelas (Mexican ones in particular; Brazilian dubbers often note how difficult it is to Lip Lock when everyone is so hammy!).
  • Passions deserves special mention, though: in what other show have you seen an old lady fight off a mountain lion while water-skiing? (We won't mention the orangutan-nurse's love scenes.)
  • However, there are some soaps that fall under World Of Dull Surprise. Fair City, I'm looking at you.
• 24 is like this.
• Power Rangers, particularly whenever anyone is morphed, and villains at any time. Especially in the early seasons.
  • Almost all Tokusatsu, really; since everyone is wearing rubber suits, they all compensate for lack of visible faces and occasionally freedom of motion by SHOUTING REALLY LOUDLY and using a lot of exaggerated body language. Those not in rubber suits ham it up too, probably so as to not be left behind. Even the original Godzilla!
    "Serizawa! SERIZAAAAWAAAAAAAA!!!"
  • Bringing this wonderful trope to a beautiful extreme is Kamen Rider Fourze, penned by the man who wrote the aforementioned Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. Not one episode goes by without mass scenery chewing, Milking the Giant Cow, bombastic characters or wild and out-of-control battle sequences.
• Star Trek is basically a Universe of ham.
  • The... TOS episode... Spock's Brain... isthe... absolute... EPITOME! OF! THIS! TROPE!
    • Ham and ham! WHAT IS HAM?!
  • Star Trek: Voyager had a Show Within the Show in the holodeck program "The Adventures of Captain Proton!", an Affectionate Parody of 1930s Flash Gordon-type serials; both the holodeck characters and any Voyager crewmember playing them ham things up as much as possible.
  • The same can be said of the James Bond Expy Julian Bashir: Secret Agent from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Evil!Sisko devours the scenery while Nana Visitor has too much fun with her bad Russian accent.
  • Qo'noS, the Klingon homeworld, is an epicenter of ham. Actually, anywhere Klingons go is guaranteed to be overflowing with ham. With the exception of Worf.
  • The Mirror Universe runs on Rule of Ham even more than the main universe does. In the main universe, generally only the villains, and the entire Klingon race, are ham. In the Mirror Universe, everyone is evil, so everyone is an enormous slice of ham.
  • The Tellarites, a race of pig-faced people, also deserve special mention. In-universe, the highest form of entertainment on their homeworld is EXTREMELY LOUD AND FURIOUS DEBATE — to the point where the government itself is basically a literal shouting match, with ideas being judged on the volume of the speaker. It's considered a point of honor to always respond with furious, immense passion and loudness when talking to a Tellarite — as one might expect, they often have trouble with the polar-opposite Vulcans.
  • Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has the episode "The Elysian Kingdom" which involves the crew getting turned into fairytale archetypes sans Dr. M'Benga, who acts as the Only Sane Man. The only other crew member not to be affected is The Stoic Hemmer, and even he gets in on the Ham! Especially notable though is the tough as nails La'an Noonian Singh as an over to top Princess Classic.
• The Blackadder franchise contains BRIAN BLESSED, Tom Baker, Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall, Rowan Atkinson, Miranda Richardson, Ronald Lacey a.k.a. The Baby Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells (and also Major Toht from Raiders of the Lost Ark), Hugh Laurie, Robbie Coltrane, Ade Edmondson, and many, many others.
• 'Allo 'Allo! is very similar to Blackadder in the amount of Ham. Virtually every actor was chosen for their ham qualities.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand features not only an enormous cast of naked, oily Large Hams battling to the death in the arena but also Lucy Lawless as a rare female of the species.
• Glee, and arguably Truth in Television as well, considering that the primary cast is a group of high-schoolers; theatrical, drama-nerd high-schoolers no less. And when you consider the fact that virtually the entire show takes place from the warped, surreal viewpoint of one character or another... yeah.
• Monkey, both the original Japanese series, and the BBC dub.
• Doctor Who has every villain of the week trying to out-ham the last, with the Doctor themself out-hamming them all.
  • The show has its own Large Ham page.
  • This especially applies during Tom Baker's era as the Doctor. Part of this was because the two genres that formed the bulk of his tenure were Gothic Horror and witty character-focused comedy, both of which reward unsubtle characterisation. Mostly it was because he was such a catastrophically powerful ham black hole that he would (and occasionally did) derail the show if he didn't have an outrageous and three-dimensional supporting cast to provide some balance. Robert Holmes went on record as saying that the writers had to spend a lot of time and effort providing these for him, and if Tom hadn't been so over the top, the era wouldn't have been one of the show's characterisation high points. The wilder he gets, the wilder everyone else gets, culminating in "The Horns of Nimon" where the entire cast reaches swivel-eyed panto levels of acting (and Tom still blows everyone else off-screen without making a visible effort).
• There's no doubting that Gilligan's Island was an island full of ham — and we're not talking about the wild boar.
• Zeke and Luther, where skateboarding is Serious Business.
• Babylon 5: Being an epic it pretty much has to be. But it is well done ham. This gets lampshaded early and often. In one episode Garibaldi attempts to have a Seinfeldian Conversation^note Specifically, if one should fasten the button on his pants before zipping it up, or vice versa with Sinclair, stating that "not every conversation has to be about the end of the world." In another, Ivanova accuses a character of having "the worst case of Testosterone Poisoning I've ever seen." And both these examples are just from the First Season.
• The Stargate-verse universe is one of these, where EVERY villain except the Replicators is incredibly bombastic (Jack O'Neil even reacts properly to one's introductory line). And maybe it's no coincidence that the SGC is headed by General HAMmond.
  Ba'al: You dare mock me!?
  O'Neil: C'mon, Ba'al, you should know me by now. Of course I dare mock you!
• The IT Crowd is this, except for the titular IT department. This was deliberate, the writers wanting the day to day office life to approximate a South American Soap Opera and to try and portray the IT department as Only Sane Man (for a given value of sane).
• While not one normally, the world of How I Met Your Mother often spontaneously morphs into one of these, due to the fact that everything that happens is either Ted's twenty-year-old, emotion-tinted, perspective-skewed memories, or Ted's extra-colorful retelling of twenty-year-old, emotion-tinted, perspective-skewed memories (or perhaps a blend of the two).
• The Aquabats! Super Show! There isn't a single character who isn't over-the-top.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Even the Lawyer and the Waitress have their moments.
• Arguably, Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego. A fun game would be for the viewers to try to pick the hammiest actor on the show.
  • It gets even better when you realize that the producers of the show fully expected the contestants to be just as involved as the host and other actors were. Whenever the Chronoskimmer was attacked, Kevin (the host) would go absolutely nuts, running around and screaming that they were in "big trouble" as alarms flashed and the camera shook like crazy. Half of the time, you'd see one or two of the kids on the show not reacting at all, or slowly swaying back and forth. It's understandable — they were kids trying to win a game show, not break into acting — but it's still great for some unintentional humor.
• SCTV evoked this trope with their parody movie trailers for such epics as "How the Middle East Was Won" and "The Man Who Would Be King of the Popes", starring the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Katherine Hepburn, and Peter O'Toole all loudly determined to outact each other. The SCTV characters themselves are all over the top.
• In Danger 5, every character is over-the-top.
• dads: "Over-the-top" is every character's default tone.
• Father Ted is notable for having many one-off characters who proceed to chew as much scenery as they can in their limited time onscreen. Honourable mentions go to the racist townsfolk from Are You Right There, Father Ted? ("Feckin' Greeks! They invented gayness!"), Henry Sellers ("Sack me?! I made the BBC!") and the particularly-hammy priest from the Christmas Special ("You must excuse me for my impetuous interruption!"). And this is on top of the regular characters, including Father Jack Hackett.
  Jack: RATS! HAIRY JAPANESE BASTARDS!
• Roseanne got like this quite often. Kind of a given when your main cast is Roseanne, John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf and the supporting cast includes Estelle Parsons, Martin Mull and Sandra Bernhard.

• WandaVision has within the throwbacks to old sitcoms a parade of overacting that wouldn't be out of place in the originals. Just look at the ever-changing opening, all of them with snippets of the actors mugging endlessly.
• Warehouse 13: In the episode "Savage Seduction," our heroes are transported by an Artifact into a Spanish Telenovela — quite literally a World of Ham. And it seems to affect the characters even when they're not "in character;" Pete's holding another Artifact that protects him from the effects of the Telenovela, but he's still chewing more scenery than he usually does.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? has consistently been a whirlwind of ham, and that's really part of the charm that's made it an enduring cult favorite over the years. Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie are a frequent source of Ham-to-Ham Combat, and Wayne Brady, being The Cast Showoff, frequently out-hams them both.
• The Borgias has hammy moments aplenty, as you could expect from a series that Jeremy Irons plays the main character in, but he isn't the only one serving up the ham. Several characters (Savonarola and late-second-season Juan especially) have No Indoor Voice or at least partake in Suddenly Shouting or Punctuated! For! Emphasis!.
• 7th Heaven: The show is notorious for this, with almost every character overreacting to the slightest thing.
  • Example: Annie overreacting over Ruthie managing to get her baby twin brothers to say their first words to her, rather than Annie.
  • Plus, Eric's overthinking about then-11-year-old Simon's "going steady" with another classmate, which he believes would feed into premarital sex and teen pregnancy.
  • Also, a man coming to the Camden home asking Annie to lift a "curse" she "gave" him.
  • Actually, most members of the show's hatedom believes that the entire show fell under this, with numerous "dramatic" moments becoming unintentionally hilarious, enough to make a comedy out of this supposed "drama".
• RuPaul's Drag Race invokes this as hard as a reality show possibly can. A reality TV competition of Drag Queens? Now you know you're gonna see some big personalities here. Any given season is filled to the brim with endless sass, Catch Phrases, Insult Comedy, Attention Whores (we're looking at you, Laganja Estranja), Motor Mouths (we're looking at you, Silky Nutmeg Ganache) and big, loud arguments. Hell, this is a show hosted by RuPaul, who's already shameless with this. (It should be noted, by the way, that by numerous accounts, the queens you see on the show are indeed a little less colorful when the cameras aren't on.)
• Gotham City on Gotham is so much this trope it may as well be called Goth Ham City. It comes with the territory of being a live-action comic book show that borrows heavily from the Narm Charm of the 60's Batman series. Every episode we have Robin Lord Taylor as the Penguin, Erin Richards as Barbara Kean, Cory Michael Smith as the Riddler, Cameron Monaghan as basically the Joker, Benedict Samuel as the Mad Hatter, Jada Pinkett Smith as Fish Mooney, and Michael Chiklis as the Executioner all gloriously hamming it up. It gets to a point where the sane characters are the minority, but it's all part of the fun.

Music

• A hallmark of the Romantic period.
• Most music by Celldweller fits here. Songs from 'Soundtrack for the Voices in My Head' often take it to the next level.
• Almost all epic movies, fantasy films, action movies, and science fiction films contain a hammy or bombastic soundtrack. Bonus points if the music was composed by Hans Zimmer, David Arnold, John Williams or Brian Tyler.
• All of Eminem's narrative universe: "You better LOSE/ yourself in da music...". Except for Recovery, in which he seems to have settled down into a much more "adult" persona, with the music changing accordingly, becoming much more understated but at the same time much more contondent. Returns in The Marshall Mathers LP 2.
• There are entire genres which exist for and through incredible levels of ham. Starting with The Power of Rock, through Power Metal and finally back to Tenacious D:
  • "AND HE SAID: "Be you angels?" And we said NAY, we are but MEN, ROCK!! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNN!!!"
  • Master Exploder. Just Jack Black's Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

• Every song written by Jim Steinman. They're all about extreme emotional trips of love and despair, typically require the singer to howl, and even his personal spoken-word piece "Love and Death and an American Guitar" is downright crazy ("So... I... took my guitar... and I SMASHED it against the WALL. I SMASHED it against the FLOOR. Smashed it against the body of a varsity cheerleader...")
  • Especially when said songs are performed by Meat Loaf. Reaches its epitome in "Bat Out of Hell":
    "Then like a SINNER... BEFORE... the GATES of HEAVEN, I'll come crawlin' on back to you..."
  • Steinman's work with Céline Dion is hardly low-key, either.
    "BABY, BABY, if I kiss you like this
    and if you whisper like that..."
  • Or Bonnie Tyler, whose ragged vocals match Jim's penchant for ridiculously over-the-top emotional lyrics in songs like "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "Faster Than the Speed of Night."
• Heavy Metal in general. Power Metal especially. Brilliantly parodied in This is Spın̈al Tap.
• Even though the pieces are lyricless, Gustav Holst's "The Planets" seems to indicate that we are living in an entire Solar System of Ham.

• Manowar. Practically every song is a Heavy Mithril battle epic that's not so much sung as roared, or an emotional ballad to departed comrades.

• Drum and Bass generally tends to be very hammy. Pendulum is one such example.
• Public Enemy — nothing is half-hearted, everything is full of passion and conviction. FIGHT THE POWER!
• The video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Tacky" manages to do this even though Weird Al is the only one whose voice can be heard, since every single guest star and Al himself have cranked up their strutting and posing to scenery-destroying levels. Jack Black is probably the most overacted though.
• Primus is made of ham. It's no coincidence that lead singer/bassist Les Claypool often performs in a pig mask.
• Ultravox under Midge Ure's leadership practically embodies Ham. The classical-infused compositions, with heavy uses of lentandos and crescendos, are the just the tip of the iceberg; the verses are just as over-the-top ("We Came To Dance" has dancers having to move in time 'cause they're being whip-cracked!) & Midge vocalises each lyric with the melodrama you'd expect from an opera singer. Hell, this band somehow managed to make a song about listening to someone's voice majestic!

Myths & Religion

• Holy scriptures. Any holy scriptures. ANYTHING involving Gods as protagonists. The Bible. The Qur'an. The Silmarillion. Greek Mythology. Norse Mythology. If a fictional character from any work is invoking the name of GOD (especially in cases of having the role of God), his speech shall reflect the poetry of the Bible or Qur'an, with overdosed injections of mythical allusions added in their sentences. And behold, that makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
  • Parodied in the South Park episode "Damien" where the eponymous character and in some cases Jesus himself talk in Poetic. Damien only gets mocked for it.
  • The Manga Bible actually succeeds in making it even MORE hammy. Not one character there can say anything without posing dramatically and bellowing his dialogue like he's at an amateur dramatics convention.

Pinballs

• America's Most Haunted, which grabs its schlocky premise in a lowbrow death grip and never lets go.
• Seen in WWF Royal Rumble, for obvious reasons.
• A large part of the humor in Medieval Madness is the sheer over-the-top hamminess of it all.
  Peasant: They took our SHRUBBERY!
• The Addams Family, thanks in no small part to having the movie's hammy humor concentrated on Raúl Juliá.
  Gomez: It has to warm up... so it can KILL YOU!
• Both Attack from Mars and Revenge from Mars feature over-the-top alien invasion scenarios and scene-chewing Martians galore. A mechanized Abraham Lincoln statue is considered tame.
• Red & Ted's Road Show: Two road-ripping rednecks with a bulldozer and dynamite — what else would you expect?

Pro Wrestling

• Pro Wrestling. The whole thing. All of it. No need to go into detail, because everything about it is a World of Ham. In most cases, a wrestler's position on the card is directly proportional to the amount of scenery they chew. As with the Power Rangers example above, this was originally a matter of practicality. If you're in the middle of a ring surrounded by thousands of fans, taking part in a largely non-verbal performance, you need to overact and be rather loud so that the guys in the cheap seats can see and hear what's going on. Granted, in the larger arenas, the cheap seats still won't be able to hear, but it's the effort that counts.

Puppet Shows

• Anything with The Muppets, from The Muppet Show to their movies, or even their guest spots on talk shows. The Muppets always bring the ham. And no, that's not a pig joke. "'Pig joke'?! I'll show YOU a pig joke!! HIIIIIIIII-YAH!!!" They also had some pretty over-the-top guests, most notably the late Zero Mostel, whose "Fears" sketch featured even his index finger overacting.

Radio

• The Navy Lark. Somehow, even on radio, the cast managed to chew enough scenery to keep a good-sized Shakespeare festival supplied for years.
• Most Radio Drama sounds like this to many accustomed to television, considering that the actors have to talk about what they're doing as the audience doesn't have any visual aids.
• Prairie Home Companion
• A March 1952 episode of The Jack Benny Program, which already starred the prosciutto-rich Benny and Phil Harris featured as guest stars Frank Sinatra, George Burns, Danny Kaye, and Groucho Marx, leading to perhaps the least kosher radio show in history.

Sports

• Soccer/Football. Every goal is celebrated like it won you The World Cup, and every "injury" is played up to draw a penalty. Bonus points if the ref doesn't buy it, and the player jumps right back up and joins the flow like nothing happened.
  • Enters a whole other dimension of ham with Spanish-speaking commentators, hot Latin blood and all that:
  Number 5! Number 5! Number 5! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO[cut for length]OOOOOOOOAAAALL!!!
• Professional ballroom dancing, particularly the Latin category. The costumes are skimpy, usually in flashy colors and covered in glitter and rhinestones. The dancers, even the men, wear tons of makeup and fake tans. Not to mention the always huge, even more fake smiles to display the whitened teeth.

Tabletop Games

• Virtually any tabletop roleplaying game has the potential to be this, depending on the inclinations of the Dungeon Master and the players.
• Warhammer 40,000, in whatever media form it takes. The game itself almost requires the player take on this sort of attitude. The novels are bombastically hammy. The Dawn of War game series is so hammy that it has become the subject of several internet memes https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Dawn_of_War#Soulstorm. Ham-to-Ham Combat is inevitable. The Imperium is based around being as ostentatious as physically possible in veneration of the Emperor ("Be faithful! Be strong! Be vigilant!"). Chaos is based around going beyond the physically possible, because the Dark Gods demand even more ("MAIM! BURN! KILL!"). Orks consider being LOUD AND MEAN to be valid battle tactics ("WAAAAAAAGGGGHHH!"). The Eldar and Tau are relatively sedate, but in a non-World Of Ham setting they would blow everyone away. The only factions that isn't pure ham and cheese are the Tyranids, who can't exactly speak, and the Necrons, who appear to be completely mute! (to their enemies; the wireless communication Lords and Crypteks use is given a long raspy tone in the Translation Convention)
  • Even then, the Necrons are magnificently hammy even without speaking. Necron Lords in every medium, stomp, not walk, stomp around the battlefield pissed they didn't get the Imperial March for theme music. The talking characters introduced later are so theatrical that they seem mildly resentful that they don't have a mustache to twirl. And the Tyranids? Well, somehow they seem to be a hammy Horde of Alien Locusts.
  • The presence of Tyranids can cause other people to get hammy in Apocalyptic Logs.
• Paranoia is all about this trope when it's done well.
• Dungeons & Dragons world Eberron is designed like this. "ACTION POINTS!"
• Exalted. This is a game where there are three base stats, three skills and an entire combat system governing your ability to make epic, bombastic speeches and generally persuade people via scenery-chewing. The game actively encourages you to do this and being sufficiently awesome will impress the gods of the laws of physics, convincing them to pull a few strings in your favor. (Seriously; this is how the fluff justifies stunting.)
• TORG has among its realities the "Nile Empire", inspired by pulp dime novels. A world full of stereotypical villains, dashing (super) heroes and distressed damsels.
• Teenagers from Outer Space demands this of its players:
  "You've just been grabbed by the foot by an unknown thing on an alien planet. If you aren't screaming like a cat dipped in Nair, you aren't grasping the seriousness of the situation."
• There isn't a single major villain in Rocket Age who won't monologue, attempt to lower someone into molten steel or try to blow up a world (or two). Heroes tend to slip into this as a defense mechanism.

Theatre

• Theatre itself is an entire world of ham, the original one, if only because all the techniques and traits associated with large hams originated from theatre. This is because it's mostly required by the constraints of the art form itself — the actors' performances must have impact on the audience in the back rows who are going to be some distance away and aren't going to see subtle nuances.
• Pretty much all of opera, be it Romantic or not. Inevitable when your medium is the narration of every little thing that happens to you via really loud singing while Orchestral Bombing plays in the background. The music isn't always hammy (see: Gluck, Mozart) but the characters are usually way larger than life; Chewing the Scenery with No Indoor Voice is standard practice due to overlarge theaters, no microphones, and inattentive audiences, thus forcing every action and word to be heavily telegraphed; and the plots are usually so far gone, contrived and over-the-top — often based in mythology — that there's really no other way to be. To say nothing of often having to jump the language barrier and still come across. Modern practice is making it a little more subtle and realistic with time, but there are still all the logistic and artistic problems to address. There's a reason that the genre Soap Opera uses "opera" in its title. And let's not even get started on any aria and solo parts.
• Richard Wagner, Lord High Kapellmeister von der Schinkenwelt. After all, he composed the Ride of the Valkyries, Music to Conquer Empires By. And his lyrics are just as Hamtastic, as in this from Die Walküre:
  Holiest longing's highest need,
  Yearning desire's searing demand
  Burns for me bright in my breast,
  Drives to death and deed!
  Needful! Needful I name thee, o sword!
  "Needful! Needful!" Envied steel!!
  Show forth thy sharpness's shearing fang!
  Come forth from thy scabbard to me!
• Carmen: Not only does the opera take just about every popular trope of the late 19th century (gypsies, Spain, tobacco, smuggling, dangerous women, soldiers, bullfighting, unrequited love) and turn it up a notch, it does so in the hammiest way imaginable. Escamillo's "Toreador Song" is a five-minute-long blast of ham in which he repeatedly compares his prowess in the ring with his prowess in bed. There is also "Écoute, écoute, compagnons", another hammy blast about how sneaky you have to be to smuggle cigarettes.
• Somewhat related: the J.G. Wentworth opera commercials.
• Hamlet, pun unintended. Macbeth a lot more so.
  • If given to the right actors, any of Shakespeare's plays. Done properly (enunciated, with stilted hand gestures and a very serious look) it can either be filled with Narm or exceptionally Hammy.
  • It can be argued that many of Shakespeare's plays were originally meant to be hammy. For much of his career the man had to compete against such traditional London pastimes as drinking, whoring and watching a bear fight dogs while getting jabbed with a pointed stick. He did it, successfully, with as much overacted innuendo, swordplay and comedy as he could cram into a show.
  • The 1996 Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Hamlet deserves special attention, with BRIAN BLESSED arguably turning in one of the most subdued performances of the movie. Wrap your head around that, if you can.
• Henrik Ibsen wrote a horny vikings play in 1859, while still a young man: The Warriors at Helgeland is excessively hammy from beginning to end, containing sword fights, badass boasting, and a cataclysmic climax where the designated heroine Hjørdis jumps off a cliff in the middle of a thunder storm only to be collected by the wild hunt. Ibsen never topped the amount of hamminess he achieved in this play.
• If Cirque du Soleil has taught us anything with its shows, it's that you don't need lots of intelligible dialogue/lyrics to be hammy. Gestures and expressions pick up the slack — and all on top of the often jaw-dropping feats the performers pull off.
  • Circus in general is an extremely hammy art form (not necessarily a Circus of Fear, though that can certainly qualify as well). When the entire soundtrack consists of a whistle, a brass band, maybe some clown horns, and a steam-powered organ so loud that it can be heard for miles, how can it all not be hammy in excelsis? In recent editions of the Ringling Bros. & Barnum & Bailey Circus, even the ringmaster sings and dances.
• Count the number of Broadway musicals that aren't this. The most egregious examples are from Gilbert and Sullivan, Mel Brooks, and Stephen Sondheim.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Phantom of the Opera, his most successful work, is a full-on balls-to-the-wall Melodrama in which several of the characters (including two of the three leads) are opera singers. If that doesn't bring the ham, nothing will.
• Pantomime is built on this trope, and when you have amateur actors involved, the SHEER EAR-SHATTERING VOLUME and Ham-to-Ham Combat can reach ridiculous (but hilarious) levels.

• Starship. Even the background is hammy when it needs to be.
• "Little Shop, Little Shop of Horrors! Bop shu bop, you'll NEVER stop the terror!"
• Peter Pan: Neverland is this, since it's the product of children's imaginations. The pirates especially tend to be enjoying themselves, with Captain Hook the hammiest of them all.
• In the 2013 stage adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, little Charlie and his parents are the only characters who don't ham it up at least once. Most everyone else hams it up as a way of life, none more so than Willy Wonka. Of course, in a world where there's scenery that can be literally chewed upon, can one blame them for indulging?
• In Shrek: The Musical, the entire cast qualifies, but Farquaad especially so.
• 1776 is particularly guilty of this trope, but it was intentionally invoked: composer/lyricist Sherman Edwards and librettist Peter Stone were deliberately attempting to shake up the image of the American Founding Fathers and the signing of the Declaration of Independence as stoic and composed. As such, the show opens with John Adams screaming at the rest of the Continental Congress, and the legislators singing in response ("SIT DOWN, JOHN! SIT DOWN, JOHN!"). It only gets hammier from there, from the Southern delegation dancing a minuet to the Committee of Five (who wrote the Declaration itself) having a rhyming battle to get out of actually doing the work to One-Scene Wonder Richard Henry Lee bursting onto the stage on horseback and bellowing "HELLLLLLLLOOOOOOO, JOHNNY!" The sheer hamminess of 95% of the show also helps to contrast the much quieter five percent, especially the somber Act I finale "Momma, Look Sharp," about a soldier in the colonial army dying on the battlefield and calling for his mother.
• Takarazuka Revue productions are generally melodramatic, lavish, and more stylized than what a Western audience might be used to. This is especially evident when comparing original productions with Takarazuka adaptations — acting, makeup, costume, sets, everything Zuka must be high-budget and often sparkly. The impression that a Takarazuka production ideally should make on the audience is that it is in its own "World of Dreams", separate from reality altogether. The actresses play highly idealized concepts of "men" and "women" as well, extending to their offstage gender presentation.
• As in the original film and the film of the musical, The Producers has nearly every character ham it up as much as possible, which is entirely appropriate for a show about an attempt to put on the worst Broadway show ever.

Video Games

• Baldur's Gate. For reference, Jaheira is probably by any standard the least hammy, most "normal" major character in the entire game. She goes around screaming "FOR THE FALLEN!" and "NATURE TAKES THE LIFE SHE GAVE!" in a fake-Russian accent. In most other circumstances she'd be the cast's Large Ham.
  • And, on the opposite side of the spectrum, we have Minsc. This man is undisputedly considered among the series' greatest hams. The man's mere presence is an Incoming Ham. What does he say for simply walking? "Stand back, FOR JUSTICE" at the top of his lungs.
  You point...I PUNCH!
  Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES! YAAH! *squeeek*
  SWORDS not words!
  SWORDS FOR EVERYONE!
  Buuuutt-kicking... FOR GOODNESS!!
  • In fact, once battle comes around, the curse of hamminess tends to find even your most level-headed companions. And as if proof was needed that hamminess makes no discrimination, it affects companions from all across the sliding scale of good and evil, law and chaos. A few samples:
  Dorn: Hah! I'll rip you apart, you whey-faced cur!
  Cernd: THE SILENCE OF NATURE WILL CLAIM YOU!
  Edwin: Your worthless lives end here!
  Korgan: Blood and glory, now you die!
  Keldorn: Good is on our side this day!
  Haer'Dalis: For the Doomguard, I strike a blow!
  Yoshimo: Pay attention... you will get no second chance!
  Nalia: If you fight, you die! You cannot match our power!
  Aerie: For all that is decent, I fight!
  Rasaad: I'll see you in the ground!
  Sarevok: Death comes for you; feel its icy breath!
• Much of the Borderlands series is pretty hammy, but a special mention must go to the second game's DLC Mister Torgue's Campaign of Carnage. As the plot of the DLC involves a tournament which is an affectionate parody of professional wrestling, this is to be expected.
• Champions Online: The initial training mission is an alien invasion which you complete by taking the superhero Ironclad (who is a ham of titanic proportions all by himself) and shooting him out of a cannon at the alien mothership. And it only ramps UP from there...
• Command & Conquer likes this trope in its settings. The Tiberium universe is less blatant about it, but it's a very hammy Crapsack World once you get past the in-progress apocalypse. The Red Alert universe, on the other hand... Red Alert 1 was hammy but sane. Red Alert 2 embraced the pork and experimented with some zany ideas. Red Alert 3 has Tim Curry, Jonathan Pryce, J.K. Simmons, and George Takei as major characters. It's worth noting that the Ham Acting is entirely intentional in the later game. You can see the big-name actors are having a lot of fun with it.

  • And with Tim Curry's character deceased in Uprising, Malcolm McDowell and Ric Flair are right there to yank the ham from his jowls.

  • By Tiberium Wars the Tiberium setting has upped the ham. Kane himself is hammy enough, but then you get Billy Dee Williams as the director of GDI and you know it's gonna be awesome.
  • Generals was relatively sedate, but the Zero Hour expansion was extra hammy to make up for it.
  • All three series have their hammy units and unit quotes, implying that the troops on the field are just as hammy as their leaders. Notable examples include the USA Paladin tank from Generals, The Nod emissary from the Tiberium Universe, and practically everything that can talk from Red Alert 3.
• Contra. Especially Neo.
• The Pocket Dimension of MORTAL KOMBAAT! is powered by Ham and FLAWLESS VICTORY.
• Devil May Cry. Even the sets manage to be hammy! But nothing can match the sheer hamminess of the series' main character.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness:
  • Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth! definitely takes the cake, but Laharl's attempts at being evil (not to mention his personal special attacks) are pretty hammy as well, and Flonne is, well... very enthusiastic about her heroism and The Power of Love. Vulcanus and Mid-Boss also get plenty of good posturing done, and Prinny Kurtis makes an entrance in style as well. Etna, of all characters, comes off as one of the most sedate during the body of the story — yes, the same character known for her over-the-top, wildly inaccurate chapter previews which rival even Gordon for hamminess.
  • The sequels all continue this trend, and every game has at least a few hams. Disgaea 2 has Rozalin and Axel, 3 has Mao and especially Mr. Champloo, and 4 features Axel again as well as Valvatorez, who has given up ham for "the power of SARDINES!"
• Dynasty Warriors, in which it's worth unlocking every single one of the characters just to find how many new and ham-tastic variations on "I DEFEATED AN OFFICER!" are possible. Particularly excellent is Zhang Jiao's shriek that "The Heavens have SPOKEN!!!"
  "Unnleash your raaaage, my CHOsen CHILdren. Unnnnleash-your-rage-upon-the-Han, and bring forth, THE AGE of the Yellow TURBANS!"
  "I don't belieeeeve in magiiiic... ONWAAAARD"
  "So, you summon-a-rainstorm, with your magic. Whahahat of it?"
  • Or his henchman Zhang Bao:
  "Feel the power of my MMMMMMAAAAAAGIIIIIC! You flaming idiots!!"
  "I AM LU BU!!!"
  DID YOU THINK THAT I'D RESPOND TO ALL OF YOUR TAUNTS?
  • Then there's Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, which even has the normally stoic Real Robot characters taking a cue from Domon and friends and abandoning Kosher. Say it with me now... "Camille's a man's name! AND I'M A MAN!!!"
    • Let's just hope they don't get too crossover-happy and do Dynasty Warhammer 40k... The world might not be able to handle so much ham.

• While well acted, Eternal Darkness certainly qualifies for its melodramatic script.
  MAY THE RATS EAT YOUR EYES!!!
• Gears of War 2's single player qualifies with Marcus' and Dom's outbursts. Otherwise it's just Testosterone Poisoning like its predecessor.
  Marcus: It's — it's a GIANT HAM! THEY'RE SINKING CITIES WITH A GIANT HAM!!!

• In God of War, even the rocks are Large Hams! Kratos spends most of the time killing everything, but when he speaks...
  KRATOS: ZEUS!! I BRING THE DESTRUCTION OF OLYMPUS!!!
  • The titans deserve special mention. Near the beginning of the second game:
  "YOU WILL PAY... FOR THAT... KRAAAAAAAATOOOOOOS"!
• Inazuma Eleven is a kids' game about soccer. The first game can get a little over-the-top for a middle school soccer tournament, But then we get to the second game. It's an Alien Invasion. With soccer. Suffice it to say, the overall tone of the series can be summed up as "Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann meets soccer".
• Fallout: New Vegas gives us the Old World Blues DLC set in BIIG MOUNTAIIIN!, where everybody talks like a hammy actor from a 1950's B movie. You can even indulge in some scenery-chewing hammery by channeling your inner Mad Scientist.
• The Metal Gear series has probably the highest concentration of ham in any media, ever! It's easier to list the characters that are not completely hammy. In the first four main games, there are more than 20 villains, every single one a Large Ham in their own right. They can even make a stoic Lady of War out to be a Large Ham.
  • And then there's Liquid Ocelot, the King of Ham, who out-hams all other characters in the game combined.
  Liquid Snake: I'm you! I AM YOUR SHADOW!
• Sengoku Basara, where even supposedly low-key strategy/planning scenes are filled with wall-smashing punches and epic, manly name shouting.
• The Soul Series is the unquestionable king of this trope. Every battle quote is as over-the-top and poetic as possible, and when a character wins a match they do a little dance with their sword, punch the ground/bend over provocatively, and SCREAM ABOUT THEIR BACKSTORY.
  • Rock is a World of Ham all of his own: "Spirits, grant me strength! I'LL CRUSH YOU! THIS IS THE END! BAAAAANGOOOOOOOOOOO!"
  • Nightmare is IN! A! LEAGUE! OF! HIS! OWN! GRAAAAAAUGH!! (It's to be expected, though, considering who he's voiced by).
    • "You will be in Hell...[dramatic sword sheath] ...long before me!"
• In Halo, everyone but the Master Chief seems to be a big ham.
  • Captain Keyes would only be a medium ham, but everything he says lets you know what a great officer he is.
  • Cortana has her moments, but in Halo 3 she digs into the ham for all that it's worth.
  • Sgt. Johnson is another Large Ham, and he knows it.
  • All of the Prophets count, but the Prophet of Truth easily steals the cake.
  • Though he pales a bit compared with the other characters, the Arbiter is a serious ham in his own right.
  • Shipmaster Rtas 'Vadum only has a loud ham voice and a calm ham voice, and nothing else.
  • And then there's Gravemind, the pure and awesome manifestation of hamminess. When it first reveals itself, its first words are "I am a monument to all your sins!"
• Street Fighter, OF COURSE!!!.
• Super Robot Wars especially due to how tongue in cheek the characters are. That, and the fact that you have a crossover of multiple Hot-Blooded, over-the-top Screaming Warriors from across the multiverse.
  • SANGER, SANGER ZONVOLT, THE SWORD THAT CLEAVES EVIIIL!
• As mentioned above, Dawn of War, in which everyone from the lowliest Chaos Cultist to the narrator to the fiery incarnation of the God of War and Murder is always hammy, all the time. Winter Assault is the absolute pinnacle, including the indomitable General Sturnn, the Ax-Crazy Lord Crull, and of course the Laughably Evil Warboss Gorgutz 'Eadhunter. When Gorgutz and Crull meet, it is truly a sight to behold.
  • The Soulstorm Chaos Lord's rant on metal boxes became incredibly popular for the sheer ham value. The video also has Lord Bale's infamous "SINDRIIIIII!" from the first campaign.
  • Soulstorm adds the Sisters Of Battle, more bombastic and strident than the orks. Build a flame-thrower tank and the driver will announcer herself with "Behold...THE IMMOLATOR! BURNING GLORY!"
  • The bloody Commissars. "FEAR ME, BUT FOLLOW!"
    • Which continued into Dawn of War 2. "Be like General Tarsus of yore, BULLETPROOF, AND FREE OF FEAR!"
  • Or the Space Marine Scouts: "FOOOO THE EMPRAH!"
  • The sequel's voice acting was more sedate, to the dismay of some fans. Probably why Araghast, the Chaos Lord in Chaos Rising, is so popular. "FACE ME, IF YOU DARE."
  • Evil Is Hammy is taken very seriously, as demonstrated here. FORCES OF CHAAAOOOOOOOSSSSSS, FiLL ME WITH POWWAAAAAAAAAAHRRRHRHGLGLHHH!!!!
  • Dawn Of War II: Retribution, in addition to Ascended Memes, bring back the ham by the herd. Orks, Chaos forces, everyone will ham it up at some point. Especially the Mad Mek.
    • "OI! TRESPASSAHZ! INVADAHZ! ‘OOLIGANS AN’ NE'ER-DO-WELLS! NOBODY, BU’ NOBODY, JUS’ POPS OU’ O’ THIN AIR ON THIS 'ERE SPACE 'ULK, WIFOU’ ME SAY-SO! NOW, PISS-OFF, OR I’M LIKE TO SAY-SO TO SOMEFIN’ NASTY!"
    • "Dem Orkz got a Mek for a boss! Dat's just sad, dat is."
• Diablo probably is a world full of hams. From the High Heavens above, we have the Archangels Tyrael, Imperius, and even Itheriel and Auriel when they speak. From the Burning Hells, we have the Three Prime Evils Diablo, Mephisto, and Baal. And so on and so forth with the player characters and among their followers. Even the funny Ghost of the Cow King himself is hammy...or rather, beefy.
• Power levels are very clearly defined by hamminess in Shin Megami Tensei games. Basically, the tougher the enemy is, the less afraid he'll be, the more boastful he'll be, and the more awesome and powerful he'll be.
• StarCraft, where everyone from Tassadar down to basic Terran Marines is overacted unless they have some kind of special reason not to be. The Zerg Overmind is perhaps the worst offender.
  • Warcraft III even more so. For example, Arthas is prone to proclaiming things like "Betrayer of the Light!" when you send him into battle. Even if said "battle" consists of bashing open a defenseless barrel...
  • StarCraft II takes the ham of the first game and up-hams it to almost unnerving levels. After a few hours of hearing one unit after another trying to out-ham all the others, it's actually nice to hear Mohandar's calm, soft voice for a change.
• Hyrule, as interpreted by The Legend of Zelda CD-i Games. It's accompanied with plenty of huge, unnecessary hand gestures.
• King's Quest: Mask of Eternity. Everybody speaks in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, even the peasants.
• Filgaia in Wild ARMs 4. When you have synchronized dramatic speeches, a guy wearing a rocket pack and wielding an anti-tank chainsaw, and another person punching out a missile followed by yet another dramatic speech, you might just live in a world of ham.

• The Star Fox games. Especially Star Fox 64 with its over-the-top voice acting.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • One of the Heavy Weapons Guy's sandvitch eating quotes is even "DON'T RUN, IT'S JUST HAM!"
  • What can you say about a world where Billy the Kid, Stonewall Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Nobel, John Henry, Nikola Tesla, Sigmund Freud, Davey Crocket, and Fu Manchu were the main characters' predecessors? (That someone dropped the ball by not sending Teddy Roosevelt back in time to join the fun.)
• Brütal Legend, which you probably should expect from a game created entirely from pure METAL!
  DECAPITATTIIIIIIIIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNN!!!
  • Given that it basically boils down to Jack Black VS Tim Curry in a world that has replaced physics with HEAVY METAL...
• Dragon Age: Origins. The only characters who aren't hammy are deadpan snarkers. Mind you, most are both. They manage to ham up being deadpan, it's amazing.
• Chewing the scenery is part of the Krogans hat in Mass Effect, which makes Tuchanka a Planet Of Ham.
• Bayonetta: The forces of both Heaven and Hell are loud and dramatic, and even the humans who form pacts with them get in on the ham when the action goes down.
• Outside of combat, the Valkyrie Profile series is closer to Narm Charm than this, but certainly has aspects of it, particularly in the "English" translation. In combat, the ham is so overwhelming, "It shall be engraved upon your soul!" (It helps that every playable character gets a fully voice-acted Pre Ass Kicking One Liner, Pre-Mortem One-Liner, called special attack, and Bond One-Liner.)
  • Every wizard has their chance to overdo their lines when they call down the Great Magics. Put a couple big casters in with the right weapons against Lezard Valeth and watch the Ham-to-Ham Combat with great glee.
• Sacrifice takes place in one of these. The gods lead by scenery-chewing example, and their devotees follow suit.
• Evil Zone: Just look at Danzaiver and Greg, add Setsuna and Midori as well.
• Nosgoth, the world where the Legacy of Kain games are set, has the ham flying in all directions. Between Simon Templeman's (justly) pompous, over-articulated delivery of Kain's lines, and Michael Bell's dramatic, simmering rendition of Raziel's voice, the ham gets delivered by the truckload, with all the other characters frantically trying to stack their ham higher than the protagonists. "But does one ever truly have a choice? One can only match, move by move, the machinations of Fate..."
  • Which makes for a funny moment in the Outtakes, where the director asks Rene Auberjonois to ramp the Ham UP. Michael Bell's reaction? "WHOA! License to kill! Let me and the scenery out of the room!"
• Kingdom Hearts. Good Lord, Kingdom Hearts. It's easier to list the moments when characters, particularly villains, aren't hamming it up than when they are.
  • DARKNESS!
• Touhou Project. The games have no voice tracks, but they have loads of over-the-top posturing. Special mention goes to the fighting game spin-offs, which have actual spriting for the cutscenes. Very theatrical spriting. Print works tend tone it down a bit, though.
  • An especially special mention goes to Toyosatomimi no Miko, who tends to carry herself with the air of a very hammy and affable supervillain, complete with the required amount of PRESENTATION! Seriously, her personality tends to shine through in every scene she appears in. Literally: She is often surrounded by Bishie Sparkles and tends to radiate blinding light!
• Whatever world that Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan and Elite Beat Agents takes place in is certainly a hammy one. Whether it's an overwhelmed babysitter, a ramen shopkeeper seeking customers, or Cleopatra trying to lose weight, the distressed victim is sure to emit a sky-filling scream... which promptly attracts the team of cheerleaders/dancers/agents, who immediately proceed to help solve the problem with The Power Of Dance.
• Castlevania. Most characters are either stupidly stoic or hams. And even the stoics say some overdramatic lines. It doesn't take itself too seriously though, and it has DRACULA for god sake. Dracula's always gonna be hammy. It arguably increases the series' appeal, especially Symphony of the Night. What is a man, indeed.
• F-Zero. When even the straight-laced, get-right-to-the-point Captain Falcon (note that he is not the Boisterous Bruiser as seen in Super Smash Bros.) breaks out some hickory-smoked scenery-chewing without even batting an eyelash, you know that the Ham levels are at an all-time high. It should also be pointed out that Card Carrying Villains (and that is to say, pretty much every villain aside of Deathborn and maybe Black Shadow) are more like Billboard Carrying Villains.
• Air Force Delta Strike turns it way up and serves up wholesale ham both in the Enemy Chatter in missions and in the stillshot character interactions between missions. The look on Almighty Mechanic Grandpa Bob's face when you crash a plane is priceless, but can be easily confused for extreme constipation.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited seems to be this way, with voiced NPCs chewing the scenery whenever possible. The DMs also tend to speak in a deep, ominous voice for no particular reason sometimes. And the WORST offender is Cellimas Villuhne, a cleric NPC you meet early on in the game. The ONLY line she delivers that isn't over the top is at the end of the first dungeon, when she offers a reward for your help. She only shows up in three dungeons, but the way she acts you'd think she chewed enough of the scenery to dig them all out herself.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising, so, so much. It's combined with Casual Danger Dialogue and No Fourth Wall, to boot! Everyone with a speaking role is a Large Ham, Deadpan Snarker, or (most commonly) both.
• Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal is an extremely poorly translated bootleg of Pokemon Crystal Version. Everyone in the game speaks in all caps, has very poor grammar, and comes off as very hammy.
  • There are little gems like this all throughout the game: "I AM VERY DISGUSTED WITH THE TRASHY MAN. IN SPITE OF THE MONSTER, AND THE COACH, ONLY TRASHY, I WILL BEAT DOWN THEM ALL. FOR THIS I MUST STRENGTHEN MYSELF. THE MONSTER IS THE SAME TOO. COLLECT ALL THE TRASHY, RIGHTEOUS FELLOW ALL ARE UNPARDONABLE! YOU DON'T AFFECT ME. THE TRASHY STROLLING IS AN EYESORE!"
• Hell is an Afterlife of Ham in the videogame Dante's Inferno. If people aren't screaming lamentations or cackling madly, something's wrong.
• To say that Undertale is filled with hammy, scenery-chewing moments would be an understatement. Nearly every character you encounter is super hammy, to the point of self-parody:
  • The Mad Dummy:
  "HEY GUYS! Dummies. Dummies! DUMMIES! Remember how I said NOT to shoot at me? Well... FAILURES! YOU'RE FIRED! YOU'RE ALL BEING REPLACED!!! Hahaha. Hahaha! HAHAHA!"
  • Don't forget THE GREAT PAPYRUS!
  • hOI!!!!!! I'M tEMMIE!!!!
• With the exception of Rachel Alucard, who is too busy being the Ojou to get hammy, every other character in BlazBlue is hammy to the umpth degree. And they come in all possible kinds of flavors, too, from Ragna The Bloodedge's cocky, shounen-heroic ham; Arakune's insane, gibbering ham and Hakumen's sheer badass ham to Bang who is simply a walking Large Ham scene (so much, in fact, that his Super Mode comes complete with a Theme Music Power-Up about how awesome he is)... And then there's Hazama / Terumi Yuuki, who outhams them all. Go ahead and look up a match on YouTube to get an idea. Just be sure to turn your headphones down before you do so.
• Asura's Wrath is full of this, with Asura himself and his mentor Augus being stand out examples.
  • Perhaps the best way to describe just how hammy it is this: It's Dragon Ball Z X God of War. Yeah.
• We can add yet another BioWare IP to the list. A wide variety of characters in Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 (particularly your cohorts in Storm of Zehir) merrily ham it up. And a sizable majority of the Player Character voices (even the ladies) seem to be channeling BRIAN BLESSED. And like BioWare's subsequent Dragon Age series, when they're not hams, they're deadpan snarkers, and sometimes they're both.
• Space Channel 5 doesn't just have a world of ham, it has a GALAXY of ham.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant is this in spades. It starts out fairly mild, with a few wacky folks like the tailors but pretty normal. And then comes Joachim Valentine and it goes from there. At one point Yuri and Roger Bacon are discussing losing something important to them with sad music in the background. It's about a porno mag.
• Dota 2. To fight for the Ancients, one must apparently be either a Large Ham or a Cold Ham, no exceptions. Notable examples include Axe ("I SAID GOOD DAY SIR!"), Clinkz ("I'll! See! You! BUUUUUURRRRN!"), Wraith King (who would like you to know that HE NOW HAS ALL THE SEXY), Brewmaster ("Three of me! HAHA!"), Storm Spirit ("BLOOOOOOOW THE MAN DOWN!"), Sven (whose responses are mostly battle roars), and Phoenix (who doesn't let a silly little thing like not having intelligible lines get in the way of scenery-chewing). To top it off, the game has an item that lets you eat trees. That's right, it allows you to literally chew the scenery.
• The world of Lollipop Chainsaw. You are a cheerleader with a chainsaw killing zombies, with the fashion accessory of your boyfriend's severed talking head on your belt. You kill zombies that moan that they have Katy Perry songs stuck in their head and spew rainbows when you kill them thanks to simply being awesome. Yeah, that's the normal stuff.
• The world of Tekken is incredibly hammy. Even the ninjas, animals, and non-speaking robots are overflowing with ham!
• Planescape: Torment joins the fine constellation of Dungeons & Dragons games which fit this trope. From a Chivalrous Pervert floating skull asking you to spare female zombies for needs a floating skull doesn't have a means of acting upon to a mad mage who is eternally on fire as a torment for being a pyromaniac — and enjoys it — nearly everyone is hammier than a Christmas ham wrapped in bacon on a bed of pork chops. Even the few apparently level-headed characters are just one or two conversation options away from a Heroic BSoD. But the hammiest ham is the Big Bad.
  Big Bad: "I can forge planes with my power — I can unmake you."
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: Stop the Rock! has so much ham, the only person who averts this is the news reporter.
• World of Warcraft
  • TRIFLING GNOME! YOUR ARROGANCE SHALL BE YOUR UNDOING!
  • Suffer, mortals, as your PATHETIC magic BETRAAAAAAAAAAYS yoouu!!!
  • MADNESS SHALL CONSUME YOU!!!
  • I am DEATHWING, the DESTROYER, the END of all things... unstoppable... indomitable... I! AM! THE CATACLYSM!!!
• Project × Zone. Even characters who usually aren't hammy get to ham it up in this game.
• Total War: Warhammer lives and breathes pork products, though a synthesis of the gloriously hammy Total War-franchise and the hammily glorious Warhammer-franchise could hardly be anything else.
• Resident Evil: almost all its villains are perfect examples of Evil Is Hammy and often Cold Ham as well. Albert Wesker, Alex Wesker (slightly less so than her brother, but that's not saying much), Sergei Vladimir, Alexia Ashford, Alfred Ashford, James Marcus, Ramon Salazar, Ricardo Irving... And some of the heroes get in on the act (especially Barry Burton, but Leon has his moments).
• Super Smash Bros. is not just video gaming's biggest crossover, but also one of its hammiest. Almost every attack is over the top to amazing extents (most famously, FALCOOON PUNCH!), every character has a taunt (three starting from Brawl) that has them either making a cheesy one-liner, gesticulating wildly, or acting out in other hammy ways. In the Smash Ball, each fighter gets access to a visually-satisfying Finishing Move that usually encompasses the entire screen, or in some cases, comes with its own cutscene altogether. Even the Announcer is a giant ham, best showcased in the 50 Fact Extravaganza.
• The world of Psychonauts double subverts this trope. In the "real world" there are a few hammy characters, but it isn't everyone. However, a significant part of the game is going into the Mental World of various characters, and almost universally the figures in there are over the top dramatic.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney series. Even the most serious and stoic characters have at least one hammy moment. One of the biggest running gags is the over-the-top mental breakdowns both the heroes and villains have. In fact, it seems like you can't make a decent rebuttal of someone's argument without shouting OBJECTION! or HOLD IT! even when outside of the court!
• The entire Shinza Bansho Series with all of its subseries are just an explosion of ham with a level of cheeky self awareness and honesty that is hard to find anywhere else. Everything from the writing to the voice acting to the music is all overly dramatic and over the top simply for the sake that it can. And even with all that said there are still characters that manages to out ham everyone else around them. This has really become a recurring trait in writer Takashi Masada's work.

Web Animation

• The Most Popular Girls in School. To quote Shay van Buren: "This is the worst thing that has ever happened to anybody ever!"
• RWBY is this, plus World of Badass.
  Nora: Hahahaha! I'm queen of the castle! I'm queen of the castle!
  Ruby: Justice will be swift! Justice will be painful! It will be DELIIICIOUSSS!
  Weiss, Blake, Yang: YYYEAAAAHH!
  Nora: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!
• In RWBY Chibi, everyone gets literally cartoonish — for instance, like the Food Fight quoted above there's a pillow fight (the soundtrack for the "death scene" is even named "Hammed Up Tragedy"). The bad guys in particular go from menacing to Card-Carrying Villain.
  Cinder: Quiet! I need to concentrate! This is a very delicate procedure. With the addition of this evil candle, voila! One deliciously evil cake, ready to explode! Any questions?
• Also from Rooster Teeth, Camp Camp. Everyone is either impressively quirky (not counting the campers, there is overtly cheery counselor David, bombastic owner Cameron Campbell, and the gravelly and mysterious Quartermaster) or compensates through sheer volume (Max and Gwen might be saner than everyone else, but they're prone to shout and swear).
• Following trend set by their game of origin, every character in Hades' Misguidance gets at lest one hammy moment. Even characters from other games get in on the ham when they guest star.
• The entirety of the main cast of Happy Tree Friends counts, although some characters do tend to ham it up more than others; Nutty, Cuddles, Lifty and Shifty, Lumpy, Russell, Disco Bear and Mime are the most prominent examples.

Web Comics

• Being a world ruled by Mad Science (badly!), Girl Genius is definitely a World of Ham.
• Homestuck has this from time to time, mostly in the form of Snark-to-Snark Combat. Though Hivebent is pretty much hammy throughout.
• DOUBLE K: five words — Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann Fan Web Comic. If that isn't a recipe for incredibly loud shouting, we don't know what is.
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, the Radical Land definitely qualifies, where "radical" and "ham" are pretty much interchangeable, and the main universe the work takes place in isn't far behind.
• Drowtales is packed to the BRIM with hams. Special note, however, goes to Quain'tana, Snadhya'rune, Kiel'ndia, Sil'lice, Tur'geis, Die'tra, Kalki, and any and all Kyorl'solenurn.
• Paranatural: Excluding Max, just about everyone in Mayview is their own brand of crazy and overdramatic.

Web Original

• TV Tropes:
  • THIS VERY WIKIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII! It IS THIS TROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPE! We tropers can get a bit... PASSIONATE about our FAVOURITE SEEEEEEERIEEEES!
  • Seriously... look at all the caps we've put on this page alone. We had way too much fun doing this...
  • This is especially obvious when someone who has... let us say a "more balanced attitude"... toward a particular work, or a particular genre, or a particular type of work (animation, horror movies, Korean comic books, whatever) makes an edit that, while inoffensive and normal in and of itself and made with all the best intentions, is taken as a purposeful affront by a fan of the work, genre, or whathaveyou because of the "anyone with any sense would be as fanatic about this Work/Genre/Type of Whatever as I am, and since you disagree you are EVIL!!!!!." (It helps to read that last word in Ernest Borgnine's Mermaid Man voice.)
  • Consider that as tropers, despite using English as a common tongue, we are all spread across the globe. As stated above, we are all hammy, or at least sometimes we tend to exalt ourselves when discussing our favourite subjects. Basically what I mean to say is: WE ARE THE VERY PROOF WE LITERALLY LIVE. IN. A. WORLD. OF. HAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!
  • BRIAN BLESSED is the only article on TV Tropes where bite marks are visible.
• The world of The Questport Chronicles.

Web Videos

• The Runaway Guys is made up of the already hammy Chuggaaconroy, ProtonJon, and NintendoCapriSun, together it goes beyond. And then they have guests sometimes... that also hams it up to ham galore!
• The Lost Boys has SullyPwns tune it down a bit as ZeldaMaster, MucingOrange, and not least the hugest of them all Johne Awesome are large enough hams to blow off the roof.
• 4 No Indoor Voice Childhood Friends, still being Bash Brothers? Loads of laughter and silliy antics? It's WiiLikeToPlay!
• Golduck Productions. Every single character in this So Bad, It's Good flick. "GOLDDUCK PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS ..." Get my point, the first link leads to the "Some Sucky Action Movie" and the rest simply link to the sequels and spinoffs. WE'RE ALLLLLLL GOOOOOOOOOOOOOONA DIEEEEEEEEEEE!" No Indoor Voice Indeed.
• That Guy with the Glasses, where lots of geeks got known for their over-the-top reviews of... well, everything. Even more in the anniversary specials...
  • The ''TGWTG Year One Brawl, where the site's reviewers and The Angry Video Game Nerd show they can't fight, except on the overacting field.
  • Kickassia, with the exception of President Baugh, who never raises his voice even when his country is invaded, and his family, who never look up from their books.
  • Then came Suburban Knights and To Boldly Flee. Helped by the fact that some of the reviewers are aping hammy performances.
  • Nella's "pony melodrama", which manages to include a whore teacher with a heart of gold, a polar bear as Jesus and family relationships getting torn apart.
• Since the release of Undertale, many fans have added voice acting. This rendition of the Mad Dummy is fantastically overacted and captures the Dummy's lack of an indoor voice perfectly.

• In The Fantastic Favio Bros, every character is a Large Ham, from the overly Chivalrous Pervert hero Favio and his Cloudcuckoolander brother Tony to the Obviously Evil villains who think that Everybody Must Get Stoned.
• EPIC!!! RAP!!! BATTLES!!! OF!!!! HIS! TO! RY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• Rooster Teeth's guys and girls sure have much fun, specially on Achievement Hunter (people going crazy while playing games) and the weekly RT Recap.

Western Animation

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: With a few exceptions, pretty much everyone gets a moment of ham.
  • Special mention goes to Pinkie Pie, Rarity, and Princess Luna. Rarity's scenery chewing is funny since she often does it. Fluttershy's Scenery chewing is funny since she almost never does it.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic guest-starred on the show to challenge Pinkie Pie to a Goof-Off. The result naturally was this.
• Apparently, in the near future according to Invader Zim, people don't have as much trouble with constant screaming nowadays. EVERY world in Invader Zim is a World of Ham.
  Zim: SOON I shall bring The Tallest close enough to WITNESS MY INGEEEEENIOUS EEEEEVIL! AH HAAAA HA HA HA HAAAAAAA HO HA HO HAAAAAAA I said evil!
  Dib: NOOOOOOOOOOO!
  Membrane: Son, there'd better not be any walking dead up there!
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold is run entirely on Rule of Cool, taking the 1960s Batman's hamminess and cranking it up a few notches. THE BATMOBILE IS A MECHA!!
  • Not just any mecha. It appears to be some kind of Ganman / Gunmen.
  • Then there's AQUAMAN!!! And then there's the Music Meister, who turns the hamminess up with a Musical Episode that features Batman's Rogues Gallery doing a Villain Song.
• The alternate reality seen in the Justice League episode "Legends", which took many aspects of the Adam West Batman show and the Superfriends cartoon, threw in a pastiche version of the Justice Society of America, and put them alongside the more serious modern Justice League. Cue Lampshade Hanging on everything from a police department consisting of two Irishmen, kid sidekicks, and villains leaving hammy clues for the heroes to follow.
• Most Transformers continuities take place in universes of Ham. Optimuses are especially notable — most of them are hammy even without trying to be dramatic, as their voices have Just. That. Much. Gravitas. Megatrons are more traditionally hammy, however. Beast Wars is especially hammy^note despite the one who actually turns into a pig not making it onto the show — it may have featured tigers, dinosaurs, and insects, but every bot there truly transformed into a heck of a ham, yessss.
  • David Letterman once did a Top Ten List of "things that sound cooler when being spoken by a giant robot." Movieverse Optimus Prime puts in an appearance. How well does it work? Even his "David, nice to be here" is awesome.
  • Honorable mention goes to Primus and Unicron, who are simultaneously tremendously hammy, and sapient worlds. Primus even has a particularly hammy robot population living on him. (They were created in his image, after all.)
• The Super Hero Squad Show. The entire Marvel Universe in Chibi Large Ham form in one city.
• Everyone in The Angry Beavers hams it up every thirty seconds or so. Except Oxnard Montalvo.
• Johnny Test. From Johnny, to Dukey, to Bling Bling Boy, to Brain Freezer, and the many whipcracks heard whenever a character even so much as moves a limb, everyone on the show loves to ham it up every now and again. The 2021 revival loses the whipcracks but the characters are still as dramatic as ever.
• Everyone on Ed, Edd n Eddy has had their moment of hamminess, whether it be Cloud Cuckoolanders like Rolf and Ed, or hot-headed characters like Eddy and Sarah, or the Obsessively Organized Double D, these children are very loud.
• El Tigre belongs in this category — THIS I SWEAR!!!
• Darkwing Duck had an episode featuring a planet populated only by costumed superheroes, and Darkwing, having no powers, became the designated "Ordinary Guy". Not that the Masked Mallard himself was light on ham back home. He was, after all, the Terror that Flaps in the Night.
• ¡Mucha Lucha! world. Well, what can be expected from a show about wrestlers with a tendency to call their attacks?
• The early episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force were very over the top. "Send Carl to THE HOME!!!"
• All of The Thief and the Cobbler. From over-the-top armies and war machines to giant brigands who treat a DICTIONARY as if it were the Holy Grail, the whole world is made of ham. "The BALLS ARE GONE! My KINGDOM will COME to DESTRUCTION AND DEATH!!!!"
• The clan of Scotsmen from Samurai Jack fit this trope perfectly. "SHEEP STOMACH STUFFED WITH MEAT AND BARLEY!!!"
• Just about everyone on Codename: Kids Next Door, being an Affectionate Parody of the Spy and Espionage genre.
• The Penguins of Madagascar is a world of yelling, exaggerated gestures and wild facial expressions. And yet, even in this world of ham, King Julien and Skipper stand out.
• Time Squad turned the ENTIRE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM into this!
• Family Guy has become this since its post-cancellation, merely due to the massive amount of Comedic Sociopathy, fighting, and general lack of control that now define nearly the whole cast.
• Metalocalypse is hammier than the hammiest ham... Times infinity.
• Robot Chicken. This show is filled to the brim with it, since many of the sketches tend to be notorious for overdramatic reactions to the slightest of actions.
• The Simpsons qualifies, as the entire town of Springfield can't go one day without stirring chaos or bringing an uproar into fruition, "Who Shot Mr. Burns" being a prime example:
  Moe: I lost my bar!
  Barney: I lost his bar!
  Lisa: He robbed the school of music!
  Skinner: He robbed the school of financial security!
  Tito Puente: He robbed the school of Tito!
  Homer: He can't remember my name!
  Marge: He's causing us all to yell!
• Adventure Time: WHAT TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME IS IT?
• Rocko's Modern Life tends to have some rather expressive characters, with even the titular character having his moments occasionally.

• Big City Greens has a colorful cast of characters, both in the literal and metaphorical sense. Becomes more prominent in episodes post-2019, where there are more wacky expressions and just loud characters in general.
• SpongeBob SquarePants also qualifies to a fault, at least most of the time. It's way easier to list the characters who don't have hammy tendencies rather than the ones that do.
• X-Men: The Animated Series: Damn near everyone in the entire series. Special shoutouts to Apocalypse (LOOK UPON THE FUTURE AND TREMBLE!), Graydon Creed, Fabian Cortez, Wolverine, Magneto, Mister Sinister and of course, everything Storm does. Lampshaded by Rogue:
  Rogue: Lighten up on the speeches, Sugar.
• Bob's Burgers due to the excessive amount of screaming from certain characters (Gene especially, Louise, and even from Bob) at least Once per Episode. For what they lack in expression, they make up for in volume.
• If Futurama is anything to go by, the 31st century will be one. From Shatner-esque space captain Zapp Brannigan to robot soap opera actor Calculon to extraterrestrial invader/news anchor Morbo to LRRR, RULER OF OMICRON PERSEI 8, the world of tomorrow is a world of ham.
• The Amazing World of Gumball combines this trope with World of Weirdness, especially in later seasons.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: When the setting is an Affectionate Parody of a bunch of action genres, overpopulated by heroes and Card Carrying Villains, and the narrative is filled with Shout Outs to anime and video games, it's hard to describe it otherwise. The characters gesticulate with so much intensity that they tend to become Off-Model.
• Everything in Chowder is loud, frantic and over the top, with the title character being the loudest of all.
• Wander over Yonder is full of ham. Being a Space Opera featuring a protagonist whose weapon is The Power of Friendship, his asskicking steed, a plethora of theatrical galaxy-conquering villains, and every location being a Planet of Hats, hamminess can be found everywhere in this galaxy.
• Practically everyone in Pet Alien is prone to going Large Ham over-the-top and yelling at complete random. Dinko, Gumpers, and Melba in particular are in full ham mode almost every time they're on-screen.

Real Life

• In some sections of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City, the use of intense speech patterns and a theatric eloquence at parties, among friends, or even during family squabbles is the norm.
  • "Young MAN, if I EVER see BEFORE ME this kind of MANIFESTATION of INSOLENCE from my own FLESH AND BLOOD again, you will regret the HONOR your parents GAVE YOU in ALLOWING YOU To! Be! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORN!"

• Nazi Germany: for an example, just watch Triumph of the Will. Hitler himself deliberately ate tons of Wagnerian ham for his propaganda techniques. In democratic countries you politely say hello; in the Reich you shout "HEIL HITLER!!! HEIL MEIN FÜHRER! SIEG HEIL! DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES! FÜR DAS VATERLAND!" as loud as possible. All speeches are as much as ostentatious theatrical rants of the FÜHRER praising the DESTINY OF THE ÜBERMENSCH. All architecture is decorated in Sigil Spam of swastikas, Imperial Eagles and generally Neoclassical aesthetics on steroid overdose, while everyday the earth itself is shaken by marches of a million Badass Longcoats goose-stepping and stomping the ground with their hardened jackboots, followed by supersized castles-on-tracks. Weapons design is based on Mad Science and Bigger Is Better (see also: Panzer tanks, the Schwerer Gustav artillery etc) and everyone is expected to express in the most ostentatious manner their storm of LOYALTY to the FÜHRER and the GLORY of the ÜBERMENSCH to CONQUER first EUROPA, tomorrow THE WORLD!!!
  • This was responsible for the stereotype that in Germany, everything sounds like Hitler Rants.
• Italy, especially southern Italy, and with the habit to mock everything, themselves included, combine this with World of Snark.
• Argentina.
  • Now imagine Iron Maiden live in Argentina: "[(relatively) somber] Fear of the Dark [ham] ARGENTINA!! Muhahahaha! [somber again] I have a constant fear that something's always near."
  • Also Brazil and Italy. Italians are so hammy they tend to not realize when not-Italians are being hammy.
  • VIVA MÉXICO, GÜEY!!!!
  • It's fair to say that pretty much every southern European country (or country colonized/influenced by a southern European country) is a World of Ham. This is especially prevalent in football matches.
• Sarmatism, a cultural movement in the 17th and 18th centuries among the szlachta, the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In theory, it was meant to emulate the customs of ancient Sarmatians (from whom the Polish and Lithuanian nobility claimed descent), but in practice, it was a nationwide exercise in creating a World of Ham. Heavy cavalry? Have them wear leopard skins and giant metal wings. A speech? Infuse it with so much Gratuitous Latin there's hardly any Polish left, and don't forget to cry. Political protest? Fall to the ground, block the door with your body, rip your shirt and shout you'll let no one pass. Funeral? Doesn't count if there's no fully-armed Hussar riding into the church in full gallop and breaking his lance against the coffin stand, and ritual demolition of the dead man's insignia of office.
• Older Than Feudalism: The fashion in Roman courts for opening and closing speeches in the 1st century BCE was the "Asiatic style", a long, thrilling Large Ham performance lasting several days, complete with florid hand gestures and Manly Tears. Every lawyer was supposed to do this at trial, meaning that the Roman courts were veritable festivals of ham for several decades. Then Cicero showed up in the trial of Verres with a different plan...
  • Ancient Rome itself is often considered by contemporary media to be a World of Ham, what with Altum Videtur, grandiose architectural projects, and a "Master Morality" ethics which puts emphasis on Ambition, Conquest and the acquisition of Glory. Conquerors such as Julius Caesar are celebrated in bombastic Triumphs.
  • Incidentally, the Italians, mentioned above, live in the ancient Roman heartland and claim to be the heirs of Rome. As far as hamminess goes, they're right. They were the culture from where Romanticism was named after all.
• The Māori people of New Zealand, especially historically. Funerals were dramatic affairs, with Manly Tears and Inelegant Blubbering galore, long, eloquent speeches were (and still are) a major art form, delivered either bombastically or stoically depending on the situation. The haka, a multi-function performing art, often involves Walking Shirtless Scenes, Milking the Giant Cow, and depending on the context and type of haka performed, can also involve shouting, the One-Woman Wail, and when opposing haka groups perform against each other, Ham-to-Ham Combat.
• The Philippines. Dear god, in that country, everyone is emotional and everything is Serious Business.
• Bergen, second greatest city in Norway, may be considered this, courtesy of the big percentage of Large Ham actors and some reporters coming from the area. On the actor side, Bergen houses the oldest theatre in Norway, and the city has served ham on the menu at least since 1849. It is not always wise to put more than two of them in the same production, because of their Ham-to-Ham Combat tendencies, and when an entire crime show covering five episodes was set in Bergen... hoo boy.
  • As for the reporters — well, some of them managed to break the sound barrier all by themselves.
  • When Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) produced a four-episode historical drama telling the story of the Norwegian Constituent Assembly in 1814, one particular scene presented no less than FOUR Bergensian actors hamming it up in a priceless Ham-to-Ham Combat. It is fair to say that one scene was the most noisy one in the entire episode, and the one person in the room who was not Bergensian (a Large Ham in his own right), almost faded out of the picture. That said, Northern Norway is a good runner-up for being an example in its own right.
• In Japan, people from Tokyo stereotype people from the Kansai region, such as Osaka, to be this. While Tokyo is a serene utopia wherein strict order, stoicism and etiquette are of utmost importance, in Osaka people tend to be loud, passionate, boisterous and express themselves freely. See also The Idiot from Osaka for this.

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