What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?

Otto: Whoa! A talking dog! What were you guys smokin' when you came up with that?

David X. Cohen: We were eating rotisserie chicken.

—The Simpsons

Any work whose creation seems to have involved large amounts of hallucinogens, cocaine, crack, or any other illicit substance that makes people think really weird ideas are also really good ones. The plot hinges on bizarre transformations, freakish-looking creatures, and nonsensical actions that only seem to make sense in realms of logic far removed from your own. That it was the product of a deranged mind looks like a foregone conclusion.

And then you find out that it most certainly wasn't.

The creator claims that they weren't taking drugs—or at least weren't taking them then—or the creator just doesn't seem like a person who would take drugs of any sort.

Note that in real life, composing any work of art (or doing anything more complex than opening a door, for that matter) is borderline impossible when tripping on hallucinogens like DMT or mescaline. Sufferers of manic disorder exhibit symptoms that are similar to those of drug intoxication, and quite a number of magna opera are created under such circumstances. Most admitted users of entheogens tend to do their work between trips, not during. And stuff like cocaine doesn't actually make you hallucinate or think trippy things, though it does make doing more cocaine sound like a fantastic idea. However, if a creator does manage to produce a work while (or shortly after) being under the influence of a mind-altering substance, this is the equal and opposite trope, Made on Drugs.

Commonly uttered in response to a Widget Series, Non Sequitur Scene, or Dada Ad. Compare with Mind Screw and of course This Is Your Premise on Drugs. See Made on Drugs for when it really was. Can also overlap with Better Than It Sounds. And enjoy this Onion AV Club inventory of notably trippy children's shows.

Examples of What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs? are listed on these subpages:

What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?

Examples of What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs? include:

Art

Salvador Dali, despite what one might think from his paintings, made a point of not using psychoactives of any sort. He simply stayed up until he started hallucinating from sleep deprivation, then painted what he saw.
- "I don't do drugs. I am drugs."
- Although Dali sometimes made use of a mild (and legal) hallucinogen. He went to sleep very late after eating a Camembert cheese.
- The other story was that in the evening Dali would sit in his favourite chair holding a set of keys over a dinner plate. As he started to drop into sleep, his grip on his keys would loosen and the resulting clatter would wake him up, leaving early dream images (which can be very weird) in his mind.
Joan Miró, a Surrealist painter and colleague of Dali, was initially inspired by the hallucinations that he would endure from poverty-induced starvation. Talk about taking lemons...
Quoth M. C. Escher, "I don't use drugs--my dreams are frightening enough."
Zdzislaw Beksinski's eerie, surrealist paintings are based on his dreams (or more likely nightmares from living in Poland during WW 2).
The pictured artist, Vladimir Kush, just has a thing for metaphors.
Artist and webcomic creator Ursula Vernon has done exactly one painting (Toadback Road) inspired by ideas she got when smoking pot. The rest of her work, no matter how weird, plays this trope straight.

New Media

The Let's Play of Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition. The game itself is drugs.
Raocow's various Let's Plays of Super Mario World ROM hacks. Most of his more recent ones can be found on Dailymotion here, though there may be a few videos missing that are probably on Google video.
- Raocow is also straight-edge, meaning that he simply has a bizarrely appealing thought process.
  - Raocow does comics, too. The art to a.t.x.s. does raise some suspicions,...
To anyone who has heard some of Alan Maxwell of KIPM's stuff. The Serpent Princess Tiamat is a wonderful Sci-fi story; the God, Illuminator of Our Lives broadcast? Downright out there.

Other

Everything made by Rob Zombie makes you wonder how he ever came up with it under any kind of sobriety.
Algebra formulas.
- Statistics are even worse, since the hypothesis of many statistical distributions makes you wonder if Statistics is math on drugs.
- Topology, where a mug and a doughnut are the same thing (a surface in the three-dimensional space with one hole somewhere, to put it bluntly).
Quantum mechanics. This is a theory so unutterably strange that one of the creators of the theory, Niels Bohr, has been quoted saying that "those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it." And yet it is the best description of particle physics currently in existence. This is the same theory that says anything can spontaneously happen (albeit under extremely strict circumstances).
- The true story of how Schrödinger (of Schrödinger's Cat fame) invented quantum physics: he stocked up a cabin in the mountains, which he stocked with enough supplies for several months. After three months of complete isolation, he returned to civilization with complete theories that worked perfectly. Nobody but Schrödinger knows what happened up there in the mountains, and nobody else ever will.
- And by extension, String Theory.
  - One criticism of/joke about String Theory is that it really should be possible for the public to differentiate between science and the ramblings of crazy people on park benches.
Cryptology - the study of how to write and solve codes. The field involves all fields of mathematics, and is very interdisciplinary. Where traditional maths are taught in a linear path of lessons that increase in difficulty, cryptology is like a professional contortionist that requires much much mental flexibility.
Pick almost anything made by Mike Patton. For an example, watch this and remember the man who wrote it takes nothing stronger than caffeine.
- If you ever get a chance to play the video game The Darkness, the titular demon/spirit/pure bloody evil Darkness is voiced by Patton. His vocal performance was done entirely without effects in his home studio.
Say what you will about Jack and Kage, the director and co-writer of the Tenacious D movie, musician/director Liam Lynch is most emphatically not on drugs. Same goes for his skit and music videos podcast, Lynchland, which is even more surreal.
As Eddie Izzard once said, "People think I'm on drugs, but I'm not, really. Just a little coffee... put me on drugs it has the opposite effect! I start going: 'Oh! Pensions! Very sensible. And car insurance, yes...'"
Doug TenNapel's work is usually seen as very weird and surreal by a mainstream perspective, and therefore people tend to assume he's on drugs. Contrastingly, he's a rather conservative Christian who admits to being offended by the assumption that anyone would need drugs in order to create something weird.
Andy Kaufman is another example of a 1970s performer whose work, from Foreign Man, to bringing a sleeping bag out on stage and taking a nap, to his various Worked Shoots, to his posthumously published writings, would suggest he was on something illicit when he conceived them. But since childhood he had been prone to eccentric behavior (he conceived routines such as "Mighty Mouse" then), and his drinking and drug use as a teen hardly figured into his artistic equation. As an adult he was a near-health nut who practiced Transcendental Meditation.
Tim Allen sold far more drugs than he ever took.
Cartoonist John Kricfalusi, who is best known as the creator of The Ren and Stimpy Show which is known for its Deranged Animation was asked in an interview if he used drugs. He replied, "Of course not, I don't need them".
Comedian Bill Bailey is eager to point out that watching someone on acid is boring in response to TV show pitches along the lines of "It's X, but on acid!").
Seth MacFarlane used to smoke pot, but stopped because it made him paranoid. He once got so high that he was convinced one night that if he stopped moving his body, he would die.
Political cartoonist Joel Barbee made some pretty bizarre cartoons. Looking at them beforehand, you'd probably never guess them being drawn by an old conservative who wasn't on any known drugs.
The German comedian, actor, director, author, and musician Helge Schneider uses non-sequiturs, absurdistical actions and statements, weird behaviour and voices, exaggerations, purposefully bad playing, sheer stupidity and mundanity mixed with rather insightful contents. He stopped taking drugs as his career went upward.
As serious as the SAT is for many students, College Board's Test Day Simulation video is really bizarre. Apparently, pencils and snack foods are going to rain from the sky, you will take the test in a room made of cardstock, and old, vintage-looking cartoons will appear in the window. Yeah.
What about dreams? They can get pretty funky from time to time.
- Quite a few entries on this page were inspired by- or were recreations of dreams the author had. Salvador Dali also induced dream-like hallucinations on himself by going without sleep for extended periods of time, then painted the results.
David Cross has noted that he's offended when people ask him how high he was when he wrote a piece of comedy. He insists that all his comedy comes from hard work, not drugs.
Bosozoku, a kind of Japanese biker gang/street racing culture make illegal modifications to bikes and cars. In most street racing cultures, this means nitrous oxide, underglow and such. For the Bosozoku, they defy any explanation.