Gross-Out Show

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Now was that funny or just disgusting? I don't know, I'm asking."

—Dog, Oh Yeah! Cartoons

Animated show that relies heavily on ugly animation, displeasing concepts and extreme close-ups of things such as hairy, warty green tongues, stink-line-laden sewage sandwiches, and toilets that haven't been cleaned in a long time.

Pioneered by John Kricfalusi with The Ren and Stimpy Show, this type of show dominated children's animation in the late 1990s. The animation house Klasky-Csupo and the studio Spumco specialized in animation of this style. Many of these clones failed to realize, however, that the success of Ren and Stimpy was also due to excellent writing, not just to the presence of icky, stinky things.

Examples of Gross-Out Shows include:

Anime and Manga

Fan Works

Film

Literature

  • The Barf-O-Rama series of children's paperbacks was based on this trope.
  • Captain Underpants, a series where just about 95% of the characters, plots, and events have something to do with Toilet Humour.
  • The Australian children's novel The Day My Bum Went Psycho (Butt in North America) and its sequels, Zombie Bums from Uranus, and Bumageddon: The Final Pongflict. The titles should be a dead giveaway.

Live Action TV

Periodicals

  • Many of the comic strips featured in Mad Magazine. Actually, pretty much of anything in Mad; they were doing gross-out humor before it was considered funny.
    • Like this.
    • Probably the most infamous of these was 'The Zit'. Drawn by Tom Bunk (go figure), it resulted in a lot of letters to the editor's desk.
    • Its carried over to the cartoon version too.

Tabletop Games

  • About the only example of a Tabletop RPG in this genre: Low Life, where among the playable races there are worms, roaches and walking piles of poo.
  • FATAL most certainly falls under this category, intentionally or not. In no other Tabletop RPG will you have a need to calculate oriface sizes. Or has detailed rules for rape.
  • HOL includes its fair share as part of its parody of high-level hack-and-slash powergaming.

Video Games

  • Boogerman: a superhero whose powers all involved farting, belching, and snot-flicking. Oddly enough, his foes were the type Captain Planet tended to fight, the type that polluted the world on purpose.
  • Postal 2 features plenty of pissing and vomiting. Three objectives actually require the player character to urinate.
  • Limbo of the Lost. It's very surprising to find such a macabre game that, in only its first half-hour of gameplay, throws worms pulled out of ears and snot at you as integral parts of puzzle solving.
  • Stupid Invaders, the gross moments are even nastier than Space Goofs
  • The Binding of Isaac is very generous with this when not making Biblical references—giant mounds of poop are a common obstacle, there's a boss called Peep who spreads toxic urine everywhere, and pretty much anything involving Isaac's abusive mother is given a Gross Up Close-Up.
  • Earthworm Jim contain a level called "Snot A Problem!"

Web Original

Western Animation

Edd: Oh my...Ed, there's a new invention called soap. Have you heard of it?!