Visual Innuendo



"Tea: Wow, look at all the phallic imagery!

(montage of monsters growing horns, getting existing horns enlarged, and a knight with a long hard cold lance)

Joey: What're you talkin' about, Tea? There ain't anything remotely suggestive about this duel!

Yami: Now watch as my mighty lance penetrates your moist cocoon!"

- Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series

Visual counterpart to Innocent Innuendo. Someone does something that is innocent on the surface, but can have very dirty connotations.

It generally has several common forms:
 * A man holding something cylindrical in front of his crotch.
 * It can also include pairs of ball-shaped objects.
 * A woman holding two spherical objects at chest level.
 * Anyone eating anything with a remotely phallic shape.
 * Something phallic rising up

See food examples under Erotic Eating. If done without the innuendo, then it's often a case of Scenery Censor.

Once again, Freud Was Right.

Art

 * The foundation stone of classic commedia dell'arte. Capitano's big sword was always placed suggestively, and Pantalone often caressed his low-hanging moneybags.
 * This cartoon about The Duke of Wellington's alleged womanising.

Anime and Manga
"Kei: Oh look… a train! Gee… I jush love watchin' a train enner a station… don' you? It reminsh me of someth-- ?!"
 * FLCL is of it.
 * It's amazing how kneading dough in a bakery can have such perverse connotations.
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has drills everywhere. Some of it is due to the fact that Freud Was Right, but some of it, notably the Hot Springs Episode (with Simon running around naked; his crotch obscured only by his drill) had to have been intentional.
 * Through the course of the series Kamina has: a metaphorical 'drill' erection, a laser erection, a Boota erection, a sword erection and whatnot...
 * Let's not forget the design of the Dai-Gurren, an aircraft carrier with legs which is basically a huge robot with a ship that comes out from the junction of its upper and lower body with a curved, bladed bow.
 * This is lampshaded in the Beach Episode, when the bow takes damage from a torpedo and the male characters on the bridge clutch at themselves in empathetic agony. Hilariously, Leeron doesn't flinch then, but jumps when something hits the robot from below.
 * 's black Latex Space Suit has red Tron Lines going about it. The concentric circles on her breasts easily remind you of something.
 * Excel Saga shows a lot of suggestive imagery (train entering a tunnel) while he hear Excel's comments as she is raped by a little girl android.
 * Eiken has a bunch of this.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima has a really risque Kiss of the Vampire / Furo Scene with Evangeline going into vamp territory on Negi. Weasel Mascot Chamo happens to be positioned right in front of Negi as this happens, and well...just look. NSFW, obviously.
 * Chamo's introduction also had a winner in the fifth panel of this page. It's so blatant that it barely qualifies as innuendo.
 * Also this; with Negi riding his staff with it protruding between his legs. While water drips off of it. He's even holding a naked girl, for crying out loud.
 * In Yakitate!! Japan, when Spencer cooks bread dough he's wrapped around a bamboo rod, nearly every panel has him holding the rod right in front of him rather suggestively. With dialogue to match.
 * Code Geass: The shadow cast by Mao and his chainsaw. Jarring as it is, it makes sense, given Mao's motivation and his backstory.
 * Ranka's pair of breastlike tuna buns in Macross Frontier episode 3.
 * In Sakigake Otokojuku, Momo berates a woman for being fickle while pouring a glass of milk (which inexplicably appeared from nowhere) over her head, leaving her looking shocked with white liquid dripping from her face. Subtle it ain't.
 * In The Dirty Pair: Dangerous Acquaintences, Kei and Yuri are on vacation on a non-United Galatica planet. They see an attractive guy and start talking to him:


 * But right then, Kei sees that a wanted criminal who she has a grudge against is boarding the train, and runs off in pursuit.

Comic Books

 * The alien squid in Watchmen (the comic version) vaguely resembles a woman's crotch, legs spread. Because the resemblance is vague and grotesque, the squid is dead, and there are also a lot of dead human bodies lying around, this is also a case of Fan Disservice.
 * Dan and Laurie fight off a gang of muggers. Their actions afterward are to stand there panting and sweaty, briefly look at each other, and then look away, whereupon one of them lights a cigarette. Sadly less obvious in the movie, thanks to the removal of Laurie's smoking.
 * In a For Better or For Worse strip set during Michael's early teenage years, his friend Gordon has what he calls "hormone attacks", where anything that could be taken as sexual causes him to pass out. When their gym teacher holds up two basketballs at chest height...
 * Another, single-panel gag has the memorable line from his little sister Liz, as they both cloud-gaze, "I see Mickey Mouse['s ears] in the clouds...what do you see?"
 * Empowered has some example. Look at Thugboy and his gun at the cover of #1.

Film (Live Action)
"Jack: Whose boons? Your boons?"
 * Office Space does this when Lawrence is talking about how he'd do two chicks at the same time: He's sitting down and holding his beer bottle against his crotch.
 * The third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had Barbossa banging on a table with a chain shot (two cannonballs connected by the chain) for emphasis. Later he stands up and we have a perfectly framed shot of his legs, with the two cannonballs dangling in between.


 * Also, the scene with the telescopes.
 * In Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, there's a scene where Austin and Felicity are packing and unpacking inside of a tent, but to the horrified soldiers watching outside, it looks a lot different...
 * The scene is repeated in Goldmember, where Mini Me first acts as a prehensile wang and then a demonic birth.
 * The opening scene of 1941 where a skinnydipping woman finds herself clutching the upthrusting periscope of a surfacing Japanese submarine (also serves as a hilarious Jaws take-off).
 * Robin Hood Men in Tights. The moonlight serenade scene. Robin's sword.
 * The film Ghost should've gotten rated R for the wet clay and the potter's wheel.
 * In the Percy Jackson and The Olympians movie, the Hades poster has a silver hand on his belt. And the hand looks like it's groping his crotch.
 * Spaceballs Did this with lightsaber stand-ins, as is pictured above.
 * The Caine Mutiny has Captain Queeg's pair of little steel balls he fiddles with when he is nervous or uncomfortable.
 * Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen gives us Devastator, who sports a pair of wrecking balls between his legs. Which none of his components have in vehicle mode.
 * This is also lampshaded.
 * In Airplane!, the stewardess must inflate the automatic pilot by blowing on a tube on his belt buckle...when someone looks at her from behind it looks like oral intercourse. The effect is only accentuated when Otto (the automatic pilot)'s previously bland and stoic expression changes into a big, wide-eyed grin once she's finished...
 * In Bridget Jones Diary, Bridget's mother gets a job shilling an "As Seen On TV" gizmo at the mall. It automatically shells a hard-boiled egg. Just put in the egg, then work the shaft and out pops an egg! Then some white liquid.
 * The suntan lotion scene in After the Sunset.
 * Starship Troopers 3: Marauder has this happening to cute Holly Little. Sprawled awkwardly after getting a faceload of alien goo, a suddenly-appearing crack in the earth points directly up her skirt, then a penile-like claw bursts from the ground between her legs, whereupon she and Jolene Blalock are seized by a gigantic man-eating vagina with delusions of grandeur.
 * Blazing Saddles had the Governor trying to put a pen back into its holder. Hedley Lamarr just tells him, "Think of your secretary," and he gets it right into the little... place it's designed to go.
 * Dr. Strangelove, filled as it is with weird sexual innuendo, starts with a scene of two airplanes refueling in midair, but the way it's filmed makes it look like they're having sex. Which was brilliant, because the footage was not shot for the movie: it was Stock Footage. All Stanley Kubrick did was play an instrumental version of "Try a Little Tenderness" over it.
 * The Starfighters also features hot Stock Footage of in-flight refueling, which were a source of constant merriment on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
 * In Down With Love, two characters are having a phone conversation at the same time as engaging in various activities. A split screen makes these activities simulate sex. For instance, when the man is on the top of the split screen, he is shown doing push-ups while the woman is on her back on the bottom of the split screen. They even simultaneously have a "post-coital" cigarette at the end of the scene.

Film (Animated)

 * The film The Thief and The Cobbler includes a scene where the thief steals some balls, and hides them in his clothes.
 * The Wallace and Gromit movie has Totty standing behind two chest-height watermelons, just as she says that her suitor has never taken interest in her produce.
 * Not to mention a naked Wallace in a box with the words "May Contain Nuts" on it.
 * Kronk's New Groove features a scene where he and his love interest bake bread, which turns into an extended dance sequence. Which includes a shot of Kronk behind Miss Birdwell and... um... helping her knead bread dough.

Literature

 * Terry Pratchett does this with landscape in Lords And Ladies. At one point, Nanny Ogg and Casanunda have to visit the Long Man, three large burial mounds in the forest. One long with two round ones at one end.
 * It also gets one of the heaviest lampshades possible.
 * A Wizard's staff has a knob on the end.
 * In Unseen Academicals, Glenda points out to the wizards that with the placement of two large letter U's on their uniforms, they'll "look like they've got bosoms!"

Live Action Television
"Simon: It's not my fault. I'm innocent. Everyone else, out there, are the dirty-minded ones. I can only attest to being an innocent person."
 * The Whedonverse has a lot of these. The stake in Hush, Wesley's arm-blades in Spin The Bottle, and Buffy (hilariously) crushing Warren's *ahem* magic orbs.
 * In the episode when Buffy discovers her post-Angel rebound guy Riley at the vamphouse, the scene opens with him and a female vampire kneeling before him, shot at an angle (and with sound effects) that makes it unclear just what she is sucking, but that there is definitely sucking going on. Then the camera pans around to show that it's just blood from his arm.
 * Not to mention Buffy's erotic dream in the Season eight comics, where she's in between Angel and Spike and all around them are gushing volcanoes, trains entering tunnels, stakes, flowers.. you name it that panel had it.
 * An accidental version occurred in the third season of the UK version of The Apprentice, where one of the contestants had to sell a trampoline on a shopping channel. It might be a bit NSFW.
 * This made the "The Apprentice: The Worst Decisions Ever" special.


 * The design of the building in this clip also qualifies. Yes, that's the same candidate.
 * In one of the episodes of Samantha Who, the title character (who has experienced amnesia) is trying to remember what sex is like and the next scene shows her boyfriend repeatedly putting a pencil into a mechanical sharpener.
 * In The Stand, Larry is trying to get some gas and gets Nadine to help put a hose into the floor as they talk about how Joe needed a surrogate father as well as Nadine. They feel very awkward as they realize the symbolism here.
 * An episode of Two Pints of Lager and A Packet of Crisps featured Jonny polishing a long, thin pepper grinder in a very... suggestive manner, without quite realising he was doing it.
 * In Robin Hood, Little John totes around a large staff, and in the episode Treasure of the Nation, meets one of the Queen's bodyguards, who has an even bigger staff, with a large wooden knob at the end of it. Little John spends a good part of the episode eyeing it nervously.
 * Benny Hill had several sketches where Benny is a gardener watering plants with a hose held up at crotch level. It's placed so that you don't see the hose at first, just the water coming out.
 * A frequently-run ad for Andromeda has Dylan Hunt using a force lance, a laser-flashlight that expands into a six-foot staff. He holds it right at crotch level, in profile, and lets it grow. Seriously, I'm amazed it even got on the air in prime time, let alone run all day when kids could see it.
 * The Media Watchdogs descended upon the Super Bowl XLI halftime show, when Prince played his guitar (shaped to look like his symbol) behind a drape in silhouette, making it look as if the neck is...well...and oh, yeah, a piece of the body stuck out below the neck to look like...oh my.
 * It's Prince. The man could do his taxes with an abbacus and make it look sexual.
 * In Life On Mars, Gene and Sam are visiting a comatose girl in the hospital when they start a fight. They whale on each other for a bit, and then the camera cuts to them sprawled on the floor at the end of the bed, slightly the worse for wear, breathing heavily, and with Gene smoking a cigarette as they have a heart-to-heart conversation.

Music Videos

 * The music video for Devo's "That's Good" has a bluescreen background that, on occasion, shows a french fry going into the hole in a donut, followed a naked woman from the shoulders up writhing in ecstasy. It's...fairly unsubtle. (Then the fries start breaking as they go in, and the woman begins looking downwards with a sigh of frustration...) MTV refused to air the video before either the french fry or the donut was removed.
 * Queens of the Stone Age's "Go with the Flow" video has lots of Visual Innuendo tucked behind the more overt examples.
 * The animated Music Video for Tobuscus's I CAN SWING MY SWORD! at timestamp 0:33. Doesn't help that his eyes are bugging out either.

Real Life

 * The Old Spaghetti Factory serves the Meat Lover's Treat: a plate of spaghetti with Sicilian meatballs and a whole Italian sausage. Your dinner companions might rearrange the exact placement of above meat items if you spend too long in the bathroom.
 * There was an Alitalia poster on bus stops in New York for a while that showed a closeup of a woman suggestively eating a cannoli.
 * Several French restaurants have independently invented a dessert called Rêve de jeune fille ("young woman's dream"). It's made up of two spherical scoops of vanilla ice cream with a peeled banana standing right between the two. For additional naughtiness, serve with cream on top of the banana. For additional naughtiness, serve without a spoon.

Web Comics

 * Exterminatus Now has one strip early on where a beam sword (think lightsaber) is held in front of one guy's crotch and activated, as two demons shapeshifted into scantily clad women make out in front of him.

Web Original

 * Superdickery.com has an entire gallery of such things, starting.
 * In Chapter 10, Act 2 of the web animation series Broken Saints, when Sandra talks about wanting to do field work at a naval base with hunky sailors, a little animation features her moving her pencil to and from her lips. It's not much, but its been confirmed by Word of God to be intentional.

Western Animation

 * In the Family Guy Star Wars parody, Herbert's lightsaber is limp until he spots Chris.
 * In the Looney Tunes short "Russian Rhapsody" when the gremlins make their entrance a fat one stands near the edge of the plane engine and another gremlin's very long nose pokes out from between his legs.

Video Games

 * The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind - in one Dwemer ruin, under a bed there is a Lost Technology tube, some oil, and a few piles of ash...
 * To clarify, the ash piles are
 * In Snatcher, Gillian sees an underage girl in his apartment, using his shower. She freaks out and sprays him with her showerhead. He spends the next scene looking damp, flushed and shocked with fluid dripping down his face.
 * In No More Heroes, the main character Travis recharges his Beam Katana by shaking it. But, the behind the back camera makes it look suspiciously like something else...
 * The Grand Theft Auto games... for example, practically any bowling-alley you can find, will have a sign prominently featuring two bowling-balls and a pin.
 * Metal Gear Solid: Vamp licking Raiden's white blood off of his crotch knife.