To-do list:
- Since Slapstick Knows no Gender was merged with Slapstick, move any correct examples to the supertrope and remove other examples.
- Clean on-page examples and redirect the page to Slapstick when that's done. On-page examples have been moved to Sandbox.Slapstick Knows No Gender to track cleanup.
- Move correct wicks to Slapstick.
This trope is defined as "when a female character lacks the usual immunity to slapstick that comes with her sex and is thus regularly on the receiving end of physical comedy in a manner normally reserved for male characters."
This does not seem to be a trope. It's only defined as an aversion to something else, and tropes defined just as an aversion to other trope are usually not tropeworthy (especially when what it's an aversion to is defined as the absence of something.
Furthermore, there's no solid evidence that women are usually immune to slapstick. There are a lot of examples for this trope, and women have been on the receiving end as long as slapstick has existed. The trope description even says that female slapstick victims are becoming more common with time, so it may as well be the same as men being victims.
A wick check of 50 examples has only two examples that provided any sort of context for why this might be noteworthy ("the female character is One of the Boys" and "male characters get it more often"). The rest were written as just a standard Slapstick entry. Zero examples gave any indication that this trope is meant to be a subversion of women being immune to slapstick – it seems that this is just "slapstick but the victim is female".
Proposing a cut.
Wick check:
Slapstick Knows no Gender attempts to be "women are not Immune to Slapstick", which would only be noteworthy if they usually are. The sheer amount of examples for this trope indicates that this is probably not the case. The description even admits that this trope is becoming more and more common with time, so it may as well be no different from men being the victims of slapstick.50/50
- Inspector Javert: Emile Severin from Sire is an inversion, believe it or not. While he regularly beats up Susan for being a Jerkass, he still treats her and Anna as innocent due to not knowing they're guilty of murdering Paul. It doesn't hurt that he's related to the actual Javert, either.
- Iron Butt Monkey: Downplayed but otherwise played strait for Pam and Cheryl who are regularly subjected to low-grade physical abuse that never seems to really bother them. Mostly because Pam is legitimately tough enough to endure it while Cheryl is a raging masochist.
- Jump Rope Blunders: Can overlap with Amusing Injuries if they get hurt and Slapstick Knows no Gender if it's a girl.
- Messy Male, Fancy Female: Averted with the lead cats Danny and Sawyer in Turner Features Cats Don't Dance. Because Slapstick Knows no Gender in this film, both nicely groomed cats get messy for laughs, but usually keep their fur in place.
- Mud Wrestling: Also tends to overlap with Slapstick Knows no Gender.
- Ben 10: Villains (Original Series): Frightwig being a female (and not a really ugly one, unlike her teammates) didn't allow her to escape being Ben's punching bag like the others. In fact, she even gets one of the silliest beat up, including most notably when she tried to grab Ghostfreak, who merely phased through the ground while still holding her hair and forced her to hit her own head against it.
- Berserk: Other: Being a girl doesn't exempt her from being a major source of pratfalls and other slapstick jokes.
- Numberjacks S 2 E 5 Did You Notice Anything:
- Three falls down at the beginning.
- In Five's imagination, a girl falls off the Dancing Cow.
- A.P. Bio: Arm definitely has a knack for physical comedy.
- Aaahh!!! Real Monsters: Is just as prone to the receiving end of Amusing Injuries as her other two friends.
- Ace Attorney: Wright Anything Agency: Athena gets her fair share of slapstick sometimes, whether it's falling down the stairs or being attacked by Blackquill's hawk. Some of her reaction faces are even wackier than what Maya used to do.
- Aladdin Titular Protagonists: In the series, she's sometimes a victim of slapstick, such as getting hit by a wave which causes her to get fish in her pants in 'Elemental, My Dear Jasmine' and landing belly-first into a melon leaving an Impact Silhouette in 'Do The Rat Thing'. She also suffers a fair bit of comedic abuse at the hands of the children in Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams.
- American Pie: Annie goes through a lot of humiliating ordeals throughout the film.
- Amphibia: Anne Boonchuy: Anne is on the receiving end of many Amusing Injuries throughout the show.
- Brigadoon: Marin and Melan: She's a constant victim of this type of comedy.
- A Kind Of Magic: She isn't immune to slapstick moments, especially when it comes to her magic wand.
- A.N.T. Farm: Though she doesn't have it as bad as the main male cast.
- A.P. Bio: Arm definitely has a knack for physical comedy.
- Oddbods: Newt and Bubbles are just as likely to get hit with pratfalls as the guys.
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: Tibbie and Jonie are just as susceptible to Amusing Injuries as the male goats.
- The Toy Warrior: Ultimately, Jinoo is the one who receives more comedic punishment. But Sherbet is also hit many times for physical comedy, notably a couple of times they were hit together or because of bumping into each other.
- The Brady Bunch: No one can forget when Marcia got hit in the nose by her brothers' football.
Marcia: Hi guys! [gets hit by the football] OW, MY NOSE!!!
- The Amanda Show: The female characters get plenty of slapstick dished their way. A girl even gets punched in the face for comedy in The Literals sketch.
- That's So Raven: The main character, Raven, gets involved in a lot of slapstick, usually on the receiving end.
- Swashbuckle: Sinker is frequently on the receiving end of Covered in Gunge.
- Step by Step: Dana and Karen have a few moments of humiliations, sometimes playing straight Slapstick Knows no Gender.
- Stargirl (2020): The Cosmic Staff is very pushy with Courtney, and has an amusing tendency to pull her around, knock her over, and generally embarrass her.
- Some Girls: Part of the comedy stems from the girls' pratfalls that they find themselves in.
- Smack the Pony: It's definitely the girls doing the majority of pratfalls in this series.
- Sledge Hammer!: Poor Doreau got run through the ringer a lot, often while wearing her best suits and dresses. Her tailored suit shrinks by three sizes after Sledge drags her into a sauna to interrogate a perp. In order to detain a perp whose day job is mud wrestler, Doreau is dragged into the arena - in her trademark business suit - and deluged in mud and indignity as she wrestles the woman into the mud. (And wins, by the way.)
- Saturday Night Live:
- Aidy Bryant tends to get caught in the physical side of the comedy quite a bit, like the time she's blown across the landscape in the "Hello" parody. And then there's "Office Christmas Party".
"Carol from New Media just dove into the Christmas tree!"
- Vanessa Bayer tends to be subjected to something horrible in the "Gemma" sketches.
- Aidy Bryant tends to get caught in the physical side of the comedy quite a bit, like the time she's blown across the landscape in the "Hello" parody. And then there's "Office Christmas Party".
- Ressha Sentai ToQger: Kagura getting dragged around by the Rail Saber.
- Mio shoving Gritta aside when they're in each other's bodies.
- Raising Hope: Virginia and especially Sabrina are just as likely to suffer Amusing Injuries as Burt and Jimmy.
- Characters.Amphibia Earth: Bee almost always get the short end of the stick in episodes he appears in, from failing to break an egg into a pan, to losing his controller and ten hours of gameplay against a boss, to being left out of a group hug because he was the one driving the car. It's implied that a great deal of Anne's own slapstick moments in Amphibia are because she inherited this trait from him.
- Characters.Angel Beats: She's beaten up on by Hinata as frequently as she beats up on him, and her clumsiness often causes some painful moments for her, notably at the start of episode 4 and in episode 8.
- Characters.Animaniacs Rita And Runt: Notably in the "Rita and Runt" intro, Rita is the one who's on the receiving end of slapstick, not Runt. Not clear why this is notable
- Tantei Opera Milky Holmes: The eponymous are often at the brutal end of the slapstick routine.
- The Girl Who Leapt Through Time: It's Makoto, the film's female lead, who is most often the subject of slapstick comedy.
- Awesome.Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy: Note that Coco is more than just a skin of Crash, they've given her the same amount of characterisation and animations as him throughout the three games. She even has almost as many death animations as Crash (which is also an impressive case of Slapstick Knows no Gender).
- Characters.Dragon Ball Bulma: Bulma's a victim of a lot of slapstick towards her, being a Butt-Monkey and all.
- Characters.Dragon Ball Major Supporting Cast: Chi-Chi, gets her fair share of Amusing Injuries towards her, especially around Goku. Since she is not as strong as Goku yet strong enough to take physical harm; she has been slapped by Goku through the side of their house, through several boulders and a tree, and when he has healed from his heart disease and she went out to greet him, he accidentally threw her high into the air.
- Characters.Dragalia Lost Main Characters: The Summer 2021 preview shows Mym fawning over her "darling" Euden while everyone's playing beach volleyball, only to get beaned by the ball.
- Characters.Fena Pirate Princess: Her nose getting injured is a Running Gag.
- Characters.Final Fantasy VII Shinra Inc: She blames Cloud for Tseng's supposed death, and tries to punch him in Icicle Inn. If Cloud (easily) avoids her pathetic attack, she'll slip and go falling down a hill out of town.
- Characters.Fate Grand Order Pretenders: Fou has no issue with attacking her just as he would the other Merlin.
- Characters.Flushed Away: She suffers quite a bit of misfortune, such as having her pants fall down and expose her underwear.
- Characters.Food Fantasy Super Rare Souls S To Z: A lot of her in-game lines involve something bad happening to her.
- Characters.Food Wars Totsuki Academy: Usually disposed of in humorous ways by Kojirou whenever she annoys him.
- Characters.Frozen Wight: Elsa is subjected to plenty of slapstick, such as accidentally burning her tongue on hot chocolate.
- Characters.Friendship Is Magic Cozy Glow: And age, too. She definitely has comical misfortune befall her more often than not. She's injured by the explosion of her magic-draining bubble, literally flicked by Tirek, gotten Tirek falling on her, attacked by a snowball, spun around more than once, and overpowered and ambushed by the Mane Six.
- Black Jesus: Due to being One of the Guys, she gets about as many comical beatdowns as the rest of them.
- Slapstick Knows no Gender: It's more common for the male characters to get hurt, but even the female characters get this from time to time. This includes an episode where Jocelyne is repeatedly hit on the head with a frying pan, while Dominique gets hit on the hand by that same frying pan.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 4th 2022 at 10:41:03 AM
Paging ~nw09 to the thread.
Anyway, there are way too many inbounds to do a full-fledged cut, so I think we should either redirect to Slapstick or disambiguate between Slapstick and Immune to Slapstick if we get rid of this.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 4th 2022 at 10:37:35 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.I don't believe the page is about exceptions to women being immune to slapstick - rather, I understand it to be that slapstick as a genre is typically an exception to Beauty Is Never Tarnished.
It's difficult to say that that's a trope, though, without the noted problem of just listing actresses who did physical comedy. If I'm right, it might need to focus only on slapstick gags occurring in other genres where Beauty Is Never Tarnished is the norm, or else be incorporated into a description or Analysis/ page.
The Revolution Will Not Be TropeableEven if we restrict it that way, the page is still defined as an aversion to Beauty Is Never Tarnished, and isn't really meaningful on its own.
I lean towards redirecting.
Support disambiguating, since the idea behind the trope was related to Immune to Slapstick.
...not sure I understand, sorry. Are you agreeing with my second paragraph, or am I overlooking a distinction?
The Revolution Will Not Be TropeableWhat I'm saying is that even if we go by your definition, it's still not tropeworthy.
The problem raised in the OP is that the trope is basically an aversion to another "trope" (i.e. the perception that females are Immune to Slapstick)—and that's not tropeworthy because it leads to "Slapstick happens to women"-type examples that are The Same, but More Specific to Slapstick.
You propose that it's about "an exception to Beauty Is Never Tarnished" instead of the OP's definition, but it's still basically defined as an aversion to something else, and restricting the examples doesn't resolve the tropeworthiness issue. Redefining the page to "focus only on slapstick gags occurring in other genres where Beauty Is Never Tarnished is the norm" will still end up leaving examples that boils down to "slapstick happens".
Edited by Adept on Nov 4th 2022 at 11:53:34 PM
Yes, which is why I also suggested moving it to an Analysis/ page for Slapstick or Beauty Is Never Tarnished.
Edited by Noaqiyeum on Nov 4th 2022 at 4:57:17 PM
The Revolution Will Not Be TropeableI'll parrot the argument made at Would Hit a Girl, meaning for the past decade or two the aversions of "women can't get hurt" are no longer notable, so redirect/disambig is fine.
Edited by Amonimus on Nov 5th 2022 at 10:43:28 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupEhhh... I mean I get the logic but just because a trope is currently outdated doesn't mean it's not actually a trope. That's why we have things like Forgotten Trope and Discredited Trope.
The issue with this one is that it's just talking about the one genre where women getting hurt has always been seen as comical. Women have been getting hurt in slapstick since the days of I Love Lucy. It's weird to specifically call it out, though, since the point is that it is the norm in slapstick already and thus there's no point in having a separate trope for "slapstick, but a woman". All it really does is force people to split examples needlessly when discussing slapstick comedy in a work.
So, I agree with a merge, but on the basis of this trope and slapstick being the exact same trope with a needless gender split, not on the basis of the stereotype being outdated.
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure PurenessHalf of these are just "A Butt-Monkey that Happens to be Female"...
Provided that wasn't already a trope on its own
Edited by RobertTYL on Nov 5th 2022 at 4:22:08 PM
Butt-Monkey could go on the disambiguation page if we disambiguate this between the pages previously mentioned.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.agree with that logic and the merge
Trope Talk thread where I note that this is an exception to Wouldn't Hit a Girl.
Maybe I wasn't completely awake when I originally read WarJay's post, because I took another look at it just now and I agree with her argument that "Slapstick, but toward women" is The Same, but More Specific. Historical information regarding the depiction and/or perception of slapstick toward women instead of men can go on an Analysis subpage of the Slapstick trope page (which doesn't already exist) if necessary.
Edited by GastonRabbit on Nov 5th 2022 at 11:49:00 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.To clarify myself, I wasn't arguing that it became a Forgotten Trope, I think that "Slapstick but with women" isn't own trope in the first place, it was just easier to notice in early days.
Edited by Amonimus on Nov 5th 2022 at 8:26:11 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupI hooked a crowner regarding whether to merge with Slapstick. Note that the part about making an Analysis subpage for Slapstick isn't a requirement; I was simply mentioning that doing so is acceptable if the two tropes are merged.
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.i don't really have an objection to this specific case but i do actually want to push back on the general idea— it seems like there's a lot of push to de-gender tropes where gender no longer is a factor, but was previously— this seems like a bad idea?
like in theory we are supposed to document tropes in general, not just in 2022, and it seems like this recency bias makes it untenable to trope anything which doesn't apply in the modern day, including things which were clearly tropes at the time
I'm not sure i have a perfect solution, but I'd really like there to be some kind of explicit way to trope things like "this story rejects a near-universal convention for its era" which doesn't allow for examples from eras/ locations where it's not universal
Edited by Tremmor19 on Nov 7th 2022 at 6:20:36 AM
Again, the issue isn't that the gender stuff is "no longer relevant", it's that for slapstick in particular gender never has been relevant and so, since the dawn of the genre, this trope has always just been a pointlessly gendered version of Slapstick with no other difference or meaning.
Of course we don't want to get rid of tropes where the concept is outdated but was once a real thing... but we haven't really been doing that, we've only been targeting tropes that have decayed into meaninglessness or ones where the difference was always artificial.
Edited by WarJay77 on Nov 7th 2022 at 6:21:43 AM
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness^ yea, like i said I'm not pushing back on this one specifically (although i could see an argument for "within a single work, male characters are subject to violence and action in serious scenes, while female characters are only subject to funny violence with no lasting consequences"). but that would be a pretty significant narrowing imo so it might just be a new trope altogether
but mostly I'm discussing the overall trend
The wick check showing that it's a ZCE magnet is just another argument that it'd be difficult to keep.
I know there's a trend, but it's not the main reason.
Edited by Amonimus on Nov 7th 2022 at 2:24:47 PM
TroperWall / WikiMagic CleanupLike I said, I can't actually think of a time when we targeted a gendered trope that was an actual trope, especially on the basis of the gender split alone, you know?
Current Project: Incorruptible Pure PurenessI share Tremmor's concerns regarding recency bias (not in terms of de-gendering tropes specifically, but also towards treating deprecated or niche tropes as not thriving - this came up in the Tandem Parasite thread), but in this case I agree with Jay. The only way I can imagine handling this as its own trope is to show the contrast "Beauty Is Never Tarnished in dramatic scenes, but averted in comic scenes in the same work", and since that would mean purging all the examples that are actually from slapstick comedy it would likely need to go to TLP anyway.
The Revolution Will Not Be TropeableWe could always put any salvageable concepts in the Yard. But as it is, there's nothing usable from Slapstick Knows no Gender, especially since none of the examples seem to follow the definition outlined .
Crown Description:
Concerns have been raised that Slapstick Knows No Gender is The Same But More Specific to Slapstick due to its gender-specific focus compared to Slapstick itself. What should be done with it?
To-do list:
This trope is defined as "when a female character lacks the usual immunity to slapstick that comes with her sex and is thus regularly on the receiving end of physical comedy in a manner normally reserved for male characters."
This does not seem to be a trope. It's only defined as an aversion to something else, and tropes defined just as an aversion to other trope are usually not tropeworthy (especially when what it's an aversion to is defined as the absence of something.
Furthermore, there's no solid evidence that women are usually immune to slapstick. There are a lot of examples for this trope, and women have been on the receiving end as long as slapstick has existed. The trope description even says that female slapstick victims are becoming more common with time, so it may as well be the same as men being victims.
A wick check of 50 examples has only two examples that provided any sort of context for why this might be noteworthy ("the female character is One of the Boys" and "male characters get it more often"). The rest were written as just a standard Slapstick entry. Zero examples gave any indication that this trope is meant to be a subversion of women being immune to slapstick – it seems that this is just "slapstick but the victim is female".
Proposing a cut.
Wick check:
Slapstick Knows no Gender attempts to be "women are not Immune to Slapstick", which would only be noteworthy if they usually are. The sheer amount of examples for this trope indicates that this is probably not the case. The description even admits that this trope is becoming more and more common with time, so it may as well be no different from men being the victims of slapstick.50/50
Edited by GastonRabbit on Dec 4th 2022 at 10:41:03 AM
Patiently awaiting the release of Paper Luigi and the Marvelous Compass.