Funny Money: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|"''[[Weimar Germany|They're saying starting next year we're gonna have to start paying our taxes in gold. You know your money's bad when the people who print it don't want it]].''"

|''[[Fullmetal Alchemist (anime)|Fullmetal Alchemist]]: [[The Movie|Conqueror of Shamballa]]''}}

 

 

Jokes about the worthlessness of [[Ruritania]]n currency are a comedy staple. Sadly, with the advent of the Euro and the retirement of the Italian lira, some favorite targets have gone. Other currencies lost include the Belgian Franc and the Slovene tolar.

See also [[Ridiculous Future Inflation]]. For the ''other'' kind of "funny money", see [[Counterfeit Cash]].

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Axis Powers Hetalia]]'', Germany is in ''a lot'' of debt to France and all his money is worthless. So Germany gets [[The Ditz|Italy]] to make cuckoo clocks for him, and pays him to do so. Italy is ''thrilled'' to receive all this money, even though he knows it's worth less than the paper it's printed on.

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* "Awful Flight", a [[Funny Animal]] parody of the Canadian supehero team ''[[Alpha Flight]]'', has one of the team excitedly point out a dollar on the ground. When the others ask what the big deal is, he explains that it's a ''US'' dollar! They're rich!

 

* In ''[[Canadian Bacon]]'', Bud (John Candy) and co. get pulled over for driving a truck covered in [[Completely Missing the Point|Canadian insult graffiti]] written in English, but not ''French''. The fine is $1,000 Canadian, or $10 American... and they have to add the French translations to the truck.

* The film version of ''[[The Dukes of Hazzard]]'' has this exchange between the Dukes and a college kid they've suckered into analyzing a core sample they've given him: "How does 24,000 yen a year sound?" "Sounds like 40 bucks."

** They are Bison Dollars. Each one shall be worth 5 British Pounds. [[Narm Charm|For that is the exchange rate the Bank of England will set once he kidnaps their queen!]]

 

* In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[The Number of the Beast]]'' it notes that the alternate-future U.S. went through a huge hyperinflation, and one New Dollar is worth 1,000 "old" dollars.

* In ''[[Snow Crash]]'', most world currencies are exchangeable, with the exception of Federal Reserve Notes, which are used pretty much exclusively by employees of the almost-defunct US Government and considered effectively worthless by everyone else. The remains of the US government draft a memo to prevent old billion-dollar bills from being used as toilet paper, because a single square of toilet paper is worth more more than a $1bn bill.

* In [[Lois McMaster Bujold]]'s ''[[Vorkosigan Saga|The Warrior's Apprentice]]'', the protagonist, Miles Vorkosigan, is paid in millifenigs. They are described as making "an eye-catching toilet paper"' and become a swear word within a page of their introduction.

* In one of the adventures of ''[[The Mad Scientists' Club]]'', the club members manage to extract a concrete plug from a Civil War-era cannon in the town square in order to get a bag of money stashed in it by a fleeing criminal years before. The bag is indeed in there, and contains a fortune -- in ''Confederate bills''.

 

* ''The Renford Rejects'' featured a joke about the Italian lira.

{{quote|"I've just won 10,000 lira!" "That's £3.50".}}

* The Canadian dollar being Funny Money was a running gag on ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?]]'', mostly because regular Colin Mochrie was Canadian.

 

* There's an Art Brut song called "18,000 Lira" about a failed bank robbery, which concludes: "sounds like a lot of money."

 

== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==

* In one strip of ''The Piranha Club'' (back when it was ''Ernie'') sleazy con man Sid Fernwilter tries to pay with various rather obviously phony credit cards; the proprietor of the store refuses. He wants to write a check; the proprietor, who knows Sid's reputation, refuses. Finally Sid asks if the proprietor would except "cold hard cash" and confirms that this is "actual money". The proprietor accepts... and is paid in 30000 "Irkutskian Slobotniks".

 

* When the New Zealand dollar was going really strong a little while ago, the morning news made some jokes like this at the expense of the U.S. dollar... even though the NZ dollar was still only about 85 U.S. cents.

* Since the British pound sterling is one of the largest units of currency in the world, jokes like this come up from time to time in British comedy, along the lines of, "I know a couple of people who just made $100 million US, which I think, if I've done the maths correctly, is roundabout £7.50"

* One comedian's bit on pesos: "I love shopping in Mexico. It's like a giant dollar store. At what point does your money become so worthless that you just say 'Okay, we have to go back to trading chickens; this just isn't working.'"

 

* In the ''[[Shadowrun]]'' campaign "Virtual Seattle", the setting is a somewhat post-apocalyptic America where the currency is the New-Yen [[Japan Takes Over the World|and the dominant global economy is Japanese]]. In one event, the players are trying to steal information from a military ship when a Russian submarine unrelated to either party attacks. The Russians, if communicated with, will offer to pay the [[Player Character|PCs]] one million Rubles if they join forces and let the Russians keep the ship once the PCs get the information they are after. Even though there was no published New-Yen to Ruble exchange rate, the players all assumed it was a Funny Money offer and declined the alliance.

** Funnily enough, The Sourcebook "Shadows of Asia" has the exchange rate, as of 2064, as 1 Ruble =.33 Nuyen. That's still 330,000 nuyen, which isn't a small amount of money.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* ''[[Something*Positive]]'' had a gag where PeeJee gave Davan her lucky (Canadian) quarter. It didn't work—and PeeJee and Aubrey got mad, his apparently negative karma having killed the coin's good luck. Davan shoots back that it's "not like it was real money anyway", to which Aubrey grudgingly agrees.

* In [http://danbooru.donmai.us/pool/show/718 this] ''[[Touhou]]'' [[Doujin]] [[Yonkoma|4koma]], Reimu convinces Marisa to donate to her shrine through use of one of her birds. Marisa drops a bill for 10,000 Zimbabwean dollars into Reimu's donation box (not even worth a single yen). The next strip has [[Oh Crap|Reimu going on the warpath]].

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* During the 1997 Asian Currency/Financial Crisis, the Indonesian ''rupiah'' was devalued to the point that Indonesian students pulling part-time jobs in McDonald's could go home after a few week's work and trade in those Singaporean Dollars for millions of rupiah. ''Work in Singapore in a cheap job, go home and be a millionaire.''

** This hasn't changed much. In October 2009, a million rupiah is worth about US $106.

** While living costs are ridiculously low compared to developed countries (a KFC meal set consisted of a wing, a riceball, and a cup of Pepsi will cost you US$0.9), prices of imported goods varies from cheaper ($45 for a brand-new [[Play Station 3]] game, roughly half of locally mandated minimum monthly wage) to highway robbery ($1000 for an iPhone 4 ''on contract'') .

* The South Korean Won is at approximately 1,000 Won = $1 US. Unfortunately, the largest size bill available to the general public is 10,000 Won, which with the varying exchange rates tends to be about an $8~$11 bill at most. Now Korean landlords, when renting to Americans, like their rent for the year up front, in cash...So every year to two years, a number of Americans are seen with large brown paper bags full of 10,000 Won bills. To give an idea, my family was living in a 4-bedroom apartment that cost 5,000,000 Won a month.

** It's a [[Did Not Do the Research|common misconception]] that hyperinflation was caused by the Weimar Government attempting to pay off its war debts by just printing money. The actual cause of hyperinflation was the 1923 Ruhr Crisis, when the Weimar Republic missed a payment on its war reparations, prompting a joint French-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. The Ruhr was Germany's industrial heartland, so when the German Government called for a general strike in opposition to the French, it crippled the German economy. Cue massive hyperinflation.

*** Actually, the Weimar's default on its payment was just one a ''long series'' of defaults in which Germany ''deliberately refused'' to pay reparations, despite the fact that it was well within their power to do so. This is what eventually prompted the occupation of the Ruhr. When the workers in the Ruhr went on strike, the German government decided to keep paying them with printed currency in order to reward them for "passively resisting." Cue massive hyperinflation.

** There is a popular urban legend (attributed to many times and places) about two women who try buying bread at a bakery. They had a huge pile of worthless Marks in a wheelbarrow outside. When they went back out someone had stolen the wheelbarrow but left the money on the floor.

** Another one involves someone going into a restaurant and ordering an egg and coffee, which was (say) 7,000 marks. An hour later, when the bill came, the price had risen to 10,000.

* The early-90s Yugoslav dinar ([http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:500000000000_dinars.jpg image]) holds the record for the most zeroes printed on a banknote.

** That is until Zimbabwe created a 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill in mid-January 2009.

*** After going through a long period of hyperinflation (at one point the inflation rate was over 230 ''million'' percent, and the money supply was growing by 658 ''billion'' percent) and three revaluations, the Zimbabwean dollar was suspended in January 2009, and finally abandoned in April 2009. Before the third revaluation, the exchange rate was 300 trillion Zimbabwean dollars to 1 US dollar. ATMs were unable to cope with the amounts of money people needed to withdraw, producing overflow errors. One 2005 Zimbabwe dollar was worth 10 ''septillion'' (10^25) 2009 Zimbabwe dollars.

* The French franc was replaced in 1960 by the new franc (nicknamed 'heavy franc') at a hundred to one. See the ''[[Casino Royale]]'' novel for an example of what it was like before. Old people in France used to think in "old francs" until the euro was introduced.

 

=== North America ===

** It isn't funny to Canadian business that export to US, either. Stronger Canadian dollar means that Americans need to spend more for Canadian products; thus the American buying power (of Canadian products) decrease.

*** This put the RPG company "Guardians of Order" out of business. Paying for almost everything in Canadian dollars (they were based in Canada) and being paid for your product in American dollars (it's a much larger market for tabletop gaming) was nice under the older exchange rates. When the US dollar tanked, they wound up taking IIRC a 30% cut in income, and couldn't sell enough to make up the difference.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Currency Tropes]]

[[Category:Money Tropes]]

[[Category:Truth in Television]]

[[Category:Sublime Rhyme]]