What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?/Playing With
Basic Trope: The work in question is really bizarre, bizarre enough that the audience suspects that the creator was writing under the influence of some substance. The creator wasn't using anything at all, or at least denies it.
- Played Straight: Alice is the creator of a strange TV series that Bob insists had to be made while high. Alice proves not to do any drugs at all; her mind just works that way.
- Exaggerated: Alice made a work that seems straight out of an acid trip/Zardoz (is there a difference?). She is a devout and observant Mormon.
- Justified: Alice has Schizophrenia.
- Inverted: Alice is constantly high, yet her work is completely normal.
- Alternatively, the trippy show was made after getting sober/getting off some prescription drugs.
- Subverted: Alice wasn't high while making the show...which isn't to say she doesn't partake.
- Double Subverted: ...But she was high for that one episode Bob is asking about.
- Yes, she is on drugs: they calm her down and help her focus on her work. Which is truly crazy stuff.
- Parodied: Alice's work is an incredibly obvious Author Tract about the benefits of mind-altering drugs, down to the disjointed, psychotic narrator calling it LS...C. She still insists she doesn't do drugs.
- Deconstructed: Moral Guardians start saying the series is a bad influence on children (since lots of kids watch it)), because they think the creator uses drugs, and thus the show promotes drug use as risk-free and consequence-free.
- Reconstructed: Alice states in interviews with with entertainment news sources like Entertainment Weekly that she doesn't use drugs; her mind just works that way. Moral Guardians catch wind of these interviews and now knowing the truth, they shut up.
- Zig Zagged: The TV show is weird from the start, but initially Alice doesn't use drugs. She goes a bit insane from her fame and starts taking drugs to cope with the insanity. Ironically, the show gets a little more normal. She gets better and quits drugs, but the show gets crazier when she quits.
- Averted: Alice isn't on drugs, and her TV show isn't weird at all.
- Enforced:
- Lampshaded: See "Discussed."
- Defied: The show is mostly normal, despite the fact that Alice uses mental exercises to get strangeness into her ideas.
- Invoked: Alice works just to get the feeling that the creation was an acceptable alternative to hallucinogens.
- Alice is a fan of Lewis Carroll's style, as well as her parents apparently, but has a/many reasons not to use drugs so instead finds alternate ways to provoke oddness into ideas.
- Discussed: "Whoever wrote this had to be high."
- Conversed: "Hold on, you're telling me that that Dali never did anything stronger than Camembert cheese? Get outta here!"
As bizarre as it might seem, What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs? was not, in fact, made on drugs. Mostly.