Fork Fencing

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Getting the last meatball? Serious Business.

The Shoveller: You're the master of cutlery. You can't throw a knife sometimes when someone's trying to kill me? The Blue Raja: No, I can't. You can't use a rake sometimes? The Shoveller: No, I'm the Shoveller. The Blue Raja: Well, I'm the Blue Raja. I'm not Stab Man. I'm not Knifey Boy. I'm the Blue Raja. —Mystery Men

A form of Improvised Weapon. Occurs when, for any reason, a character or characters in a story resort to fighting with basic kitchen silverware. Can be used to sickeningly devastating effect in the hands of someone skilled/determined enough.

May be part of the fighting style of the Chef of Iron, whose armaments may also include various cutlery, the Frying Pan of Doom and even food itself. Normally played for laughs, but if the chips are down, things can get pretty ugly.

In real life, this was once deadly serious business. Louis XIV, the Sun King himself, banished pointed knives from the tables in an effort to reduce violence at rowdy dinner parties. The humble dinner knife has since saved many aristocrats from death or dismemberment. And according to legend, Confucius invented chopsticks for the same reason.

Subtrope of Improvised Weapon.

Examples of Fork Fencing include:

Anime & Manga

• Slayers, the Trope Namer. The first episode of Slayers NEXT has Gourry and Lina literally fork-fencing at super speed over the last bits of food on the table. Neither of them end up getting it, as a fight breaks out in the tavern and their table is knocked over. Lina's response? Well...
  • Fighting over food is common for media from Japan, where meals are traditionally served in communal plates. For example, in Trigun Vash and Wolfwood fight over an enormous plate of spaghetti during the course of an argument.
• Sebastian uses silverware as weaponry in Black Butler. Then again, he is a Battle Butler, so he can do some pretty wicked things with tableware.
  • By which we of course mean using them as throwing knives and taking on an angel by holding them as wolverine claws.
• While Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star didn't use any forks, his incarnation in Fist of the Blue Sky used a whole bunch of them to take out a bunch of evil gangsters who were viciously mistreating his sworn brother. And in the anime adaptation of the manga, he uses Kenshiro's famous Kiai for the Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken ("AHHHHTATATATATATATATATATATATA!") from the previous series while he's throwing those forks.
  • Or in the French Gag Dub, the infamous "Hokuto de cuisine".
• While not exactly while fencing, Chloe in Noir was killed by Kirika with a fork. Over Mireille. Make your own conclusions about the symbolism of that scene.
• Katekyo Hitman Reborn The Vongola IV used a fork as his main weapon.
• In Darker than Black, second season, Hei uses a knife to pin the hand of a government official to the table, preventing him from setting off a bomb. A bit squickier than you'd think, since he jams it in sideways, rather than lengthwise as you'd expect.
• CLAMP in Wonderland 2 has a scene between Fuma the anti-Christ and Kamui, the Christ figure, duking it out over a stolen waffle... with spatulas!
• In the martial arts dining story arc in the manga of Ranma ½ Soun and Genma duel with forks.
  • At other points, mostly early in the manga/anime, Genma and Ranma fight with chopsticks over the dinner table.
• In the first episode of Chrono Crusade, Rosette attacks the Elder with silverware when he sneaks a peak up her dress. The dub even adds a line of her threatening to "kill you with this spoon!!"
• Miharu Shimizu, the Psycho Lesbian Schoolgirl Lesbian of Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu attacks the lead character with throwing forks for daring to lust after the target of her affections.
• Mahiro Yasaka in Haiyore! Nyaruko-san uses forks as stabbing or throwing weapons when especially irked with the extraterrestrials who've become a not-entirely-welcome part of his life (including the ones who want him to father their children). Mahiro apparently inherited the "power of the fork" from his Hot Mom, a professional "monster hunter." The Other Wiki notes that "He appears to attack so fast that currently no alien has been able to dodge yet." And his mother is better at it. For her, they're not Improvised Weapons, but her normal arsenal.

Card Games

• An obscure card game, Let's Kill!, has one of these as a murder weapon. "You really have to put your back into it."

Comics

• Rorschach tries to do this at one point in Watchmen.
• In Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin magnificently won a fork duel with a greenish, seemingly gelatinous glob of something that was supposed to be food, before the thing cheated and used a spoon to run him off by lobbing pieces of itself at him. In his further defense, he was the one who said they should call out for pizza to begin with.
• WildStorm's Friday the 13 th has a scene where Jason kills a guy by stabbing him in the face with a two-pronged grilling fork.

Films -- Animation

• There are two sequences in Kung Fu Panda where chopsticks are used as weapons.
• In the final scene of Corpse Bride, the hero uses an oversized fork as an Improvised Weapon.

Films -- Live-Action

• Pick a Horror Films, any horror film, and you'll usually find someone running around with kitchen cutlery, sometimes even the Big Bad.
• In the first Pirates of the Caribbean, the heroes use cutlery when they run out of cannon ammunition. Hilarity Ensues when an enemy pirate gets stabbed in the fake eye with a fork.
• The Blue Raja from Mystery Men is an expert fork- and spoon-thrower (but, for no adequately explained reason, refuses to have any truck with knives).
• Combined with Eye Scream, entirely for laughs, in Hot Tub Time Machine.
• In the Brandon Lee vehicle Rapid Fire, Lee's character beats a couple of corrupt FBI agents who are planning on killing him to unconsciousness and death... with a kitchen.
• In Richie Rich, Cadbury is attacked by a knife-wielding bad guy. He tries to grab something to defend himself, fumbles with an armful of metal implements, and ends up with... a spatula.

Literature

• Vimes' butler Wilikins in Discworld.
• Tyrion Lannister uses this early in the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire to annoy a particularly humourless member of the Night's Watch. When the knight leaves in a huff, Tyrion claims his share of dinner.
• At the end of The Stepsister Scheme, Tali - AKA 'Sleeping Beauty' - fights a TROLL using a knife-and-fork set. The twist being that she just grabbed that silverware off the table of a powerful member of The Fair Folk, and as such, they're magical enough to penetrate the troll's defenses. End result: The troll goes down with a table-knife in his throat.
• Cal Leandros starts stabbing his friend Robin with a fork, repeatedly, after a case of amnesia.
• A Confederacy of Dunces features a fight between Ignatius J. Reilly and Clyde, his boss at Paradise Vendors (pushing around a hot dog cart), in which Clyde uses the long, two-pronged fork he uses to prepare the hot dogs and Ignatius uses the plastic sword that is part of his pirate costume. Yes.
• Perry Dawsey in Scott Sigler's novel Infected. "Fork you, buddy."
• A character gets slashed to death with a razor sharp fork in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dreamspawn.

Live Action TV

• In Malcolm in the Middle, Malcom and Reese duels with their forks over the last piece of meat in one opening. Then it fell on the floor. Then the two just scramble to the floor wrestling over it.
• In the Angel episode "Just Rewards", Angel kills the villain's butler with a spoon. By throwing it at him so hard it lodges in his forehead. Spike is appropriately incredulous.

"A spoon?! That's just -" (Butler pulls spoon out, looks murderous) "Well, okay, that's more- " (Butler falls over, dead) "Disappointing, really."

• • In "Harm's Way", Harmony and another vampire both grab chopsticks in a fight in the cafeteria. Harmony eventually stakes the other vamp with her chopsticks.
• The Drew Carey Show: Drew Carey was at one point coming to blows with someone, and took up a fork, claiming that it would be a deadly weapon in his hand, since, with it, he would "never miss." For you see, he is fat.

Music Videos

• Weird Al Yankovic parodied Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (featuring two gang leaders in a knife fight) with "Eat It". The leaders were instead fighting over a chicken, and armed... well, one had a fork, the other a spoon.
  • What's even better is that the spoon and fork are propped as switchblades.

Stand-up Comedy

• Ed Byrne once joked that banning things like nail clippers on planes was unnecessary, since he was certain that another individual armed with a pair of tweezers could probably take it back, commenting "There's a duel I'd like to see".

Tabletop Games

• While forks are not in the book, cover art of Forgotten Realms regional sourebook The Moonsea by Danilo Gonzalez. A warrior (whose dinner apparently was rudely interrupted) parries another's sword with a fork, while stabbing him in the neck with a baguette .

Video Games

• Kingdom of Loathing features utensils of various stripe as weapons, including "foons". Think the opposite of "spork". And why does my spellcheck think "spork" isn't a word?
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has an escape sequence where a fork is available to the player.
  • You also get an unloaded Single Action Army, which you can get ammo for the moment you step out of the prison. Though the SAA makes a loud bang and can't be silenced, making the fork almost a weapon of choice.
• In Final Fantasy IX, Quina's weapon of choice is a giant fork spork.
• In Rule of Rose, your starting weapon is a dessert fork. It's about as effective as it sounds.
• In Improbable Island, four of the weapons available to new players are bits of cutlery, from the humble Spork to the half-decent Kitchen Knife.
• In Dwarf Fortress because of their tiny contact area, they're a great weapon.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind has The Fork of Horripilation.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner. In the Cheat Commandoes Thanksgiving special, Blue Lazer Commander uses this to differentiate between his two cronies by jabbing a fork into one crony's eye.

Web Comics

• In Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, Buck's uncle Frakkus is skilled with the Hoffmanite Throwing Fork.

Frakkus: Don't make me use the spoon.

• Still with Phil Foglio, in Girl Genius it is cranked up to eleven, as can be expected of Sparks, with Gil's Hand-cranked Runcible Gun.
• Jane Crocker of Homestuck uses a spoon capable of morphing into a fork as her Weapon of Choice.
• Referenced in Questionable Content with the Indonesian Fighting Spoon, which can scoop out a man's lungs in the blink of an eye. Note that while that turns out to be just another one of Faye's jokes, the Malaysian Battle Spatula IS real...

Web Original

• The pilot episode of Cause of Death has the battle continue into the kitchen, where the slob grabs a knife. The killer grabs a granola bar. And owns.

Western Animation

• At the beginning of an episode of the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe remake, Prince Adam balked at learning table etiquette, leading Orko to challenge him to a flatware duel. Randor is not impressed.
• In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer wins a knife fight against a mobster using a pair of table forks. Giving us the truly groanworthy quote:

Mark Hamill: H-Homer... Use the for... Homer Simpson: The Force? Mark Hamill: The forks! Use the forks!

• Tom and Jerry once do battle using knives from a fancy banquet table.