Shot in the Ass

Th-th-th-That hurts, Folks!

"Running away won't help! I'll just shoot you in your asses!"

—Dominic Santiago, Gears of War 2

"Last time I got shot in the arse! I am in mourning for my arse!"

—Izzy Buttons, The Mummy Returns

Exactly What It Says on the Tin - a character takes a bullet to the hindquarters. The ultimate in Amusing Injuries which, as well as being Only a Flesh Wound, is an assisted Literal Ass-Kicking by a bullet to the buttocks. Or an arrow. Or a bolt of lightning. Or anything. Usually Played for Laughs because, seriously, a bullet to the ass?

In Real Life, any gunshot can kill, especially if left alone long enough to get horribly infected. But those who get buttshot are relatively fortunate—the hindquarters are a large, fleshly target without many blood vessels, and it's not too close to any major organs—a wound is unlikely to cause permanent damage provided the round wasn't ridiculously large. (And gentlemen, we don't mean those organs, however dear to you they may be; we mean really vital things like your heart and lungs).

If you happen to deliver one of these, a "turn the other cheek" one-liner is always good form.

Examples of Shot in the Ass include:

Anime and Manga

• Full Metal Panic!:
  • In Full Metal Panic!, Gauron disguised himself as a member of Mithril and made his way to his Arm Slave (Mecha). When Mardukas sent people to stop him, he turned around and opened fire on them. All of them managed to run away safely, except for one poor sap that was crouching in a corner. He, literally, got shot in the ass.
  • Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: The trope is Played for Laughs. The boys are trying to spy on the girls while they are in the hot spring, Kurz is shot in the buttocks with a laser and loses the ability to to go on and must leave it to Shinji to protect the male honor.
• Mad Bull 34: Happens to Sleepy during a gunfight, just when he mentions how it's fortunate that he's wearing a bulletproof vest.
• A running gag in Gintama, where every so many episodes the bad guy (Zenzo or Gintoki) is disabled by a poke or shot in the ass from a kendo sword or projectile weapon.
• Happens to Amata in Aquarion Evol a few times to stop him from floating/his emotions getting out of control.
• In one City Hunter story, Ryo gets shot in the rear by the person targeting the Idol Singer he's been hired to protect.

Film

• Forrest Gump: Forrest gets shot in the buttocks in Vietnam, and then shows the wound to LBJ. LBJ laughs—which is exactly the sort of thing LBJ would do.
• Easy Money. Just when Rodney Dangerfield has given up on his effort to quit drinking/smoking/carousing (in order to inherit ten million dollars), his daughter's estranged husband shows up with a gun, and this happens—putting Dangerfield in the hospital and saving the inheritance.

Doctor: It looks like trauma to the gluteus maximas.
Dangerfield: Ha, your wrong Doc, he shot me in the ass!!

• Blazing Saddles: After being in a whole series of gunfights against a bunch of wannabe gunfighters, the Waco Kid hears a voice from behind him shout "Reach for it, mister!" and turns around with his guns drawn to see his challenger: a six year old with a set of revolvers. At this point Waco goes to throw down his guns and walk away, but the "little bastard shot me in the ass."
• At the end of the first shootout of Bad Boys II, Mike, who was using two guns, accidentally shot his partner Marcus in the ass while trying to get the last KKK guy who had gotten the drop on him.
• Shrek gets an arrow in his ass in the first film. Fiona forcefully yanks it out, much to his discomfort.
• Who's the Man has Samuel Jackson getting shot in the ass, where in the next scene, he tries to get on a plane, but a metal detector prevents him from doing so because the bullet is permanently lodged.
• Cradle To The Grave, Anthony Anderson congratulates someone for shooting a Helicopter in the rear via "YEAH! YOU SHOT HIM IN THE ASS!!!"
• In Mystery Men, the Spleen (whose superpower is farting) gets shot in the ass. He does a "systems check" afterward to make sure it hasn't affected his abilities.
• The pilot in The Mummy Returns claims he's gotten shot every time he's worked with O'Connell—most recently in the ass.
• In the movie New In Town one of the main characters gets shot in the rear when a gun goes off by accident while they are hunting crows.
• In the old Russian movie The Caucasian Prisoner, when the main villain tries to escape from his house by the window, but is shot it the behind and falls to the ground. The shooter reveals he shot him with... salt. Cut to the court room where the man's hearing is in process. While everybody sits down, the man remains standing with a straight face, until someone points out he can't sit down and giggles.
• The Pink Panther Strikes Again. While Clouseau is in England he accidentally causes a shotgun to shoot a Scotland Yard official in the behind. A later scene shows the official having the shotgun pellets painfully removed.
• In Training Day, towards the end Jake is holding Alonzo at gunpoint after he survives Alonzo's betrayal. Alonzo, not believing Jake will shoot him, calmly and slowly turns his back to pick up the gun that he's dropped, and Jake shoots him in the ass as more or less a warning shot.

Alonzo: Ooh you mooooootherfucker! You son of a bitch! You shot me in the ass!
Jake: Yeah, and the next one will kill you.

• A Scottish pikeman gets this treatment in Braveheart. Turns out mooning the English archers wasn't such a good idea after all. (As well as being one of many of the violations of historical fact depicted in that film.)
• In Crank, Chev catches a bullet in his ass during his visit to the hospital. It results in an amusing line, and is then swiftly forgotten. Clearly, it takes more than a butt-shot to even inconvenience a dedicated Badass like Chev Chelios.
• In Billy Madison when Eric threatens the audience at gunpoint when losing the decathlon to Billy, he gets shot in the ass by a man Billy called earlier, saving the day.
• The protagonist of the 51st State is shot in the arse by a suddenly less dangerous high velocity rifle. It appears to be about as damaging as an airgun, despite having killed a bunch of guys moments before. Even Improbable Aiming Skills couldn't really pull that one off.
• Spaceballs: Princess Vespa shoots a trooper in the arse.
• In the Western That Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, the heroine continually shoots at her no-good boyfriend—only to perpetually hit the town judge in the butt.
• In Bird On a Wire, Mel Gibson takes a bullet to the behind, which makes it necessary for him to visit his veterinarian ex-girlfriend for extraction.
• Used as a joke in Good Morning Vietnam when Garlick is telling Robin Williams's character about a Comically Serious NCO he'll be working with:

Garlick: "Plus, I think he got shot in the ass, but I can't confirm that."

• In A Christmas Story, during Ralphie's daydream where he runs off Black Bart and his minions, he shoots all of them in their asses.
• Not bullets, but in the movie version of Captain Correlli's Mandolin, Mandras gets hit in the ass by rocks shot from a cannon. Leads to a funny moment with John Hurt as the village doctor.
• Two unfortunate townspeople take some buckshot in a scene from Lightning Jack.
• In Jumpin Jack Flash Terry Dolittle (Whoopi Goldberg's character) gets shot with a tranquilizer by the bad guys in one scene.
• The premise of the film Protocol is that the main character saves a visiting Arab emir this way.
• In Shoot Em Up, Mr Smith places a bullet in a goon's behind. When the goon complains about this to his boss, Paul Giamatti places a bullet in the other cheek as well, just to even things out.
• In Dragonheart, with an arrow however instead of bullets as this was set during the medieval era; Brother Gilbert shoots one of the evil king's men in the ass; he even says "Turn the other cheek, brother".
• One of the sheriff's men got shot in the ass in Black Christmas when he went on one old man's property.
• This often happened to The Three Stooges, who reacted to it in about the same way a cartoon character would.
• After sodomizing a man with a handgun, one of the main characters in Baise Moi finishes him by firing it several times, while it's still rammed up his asshole.
• In the movie Gotcha!, after fighting a battle on his college campus against KGB agents armed with only a tranquilizer gun, Anthony Edwards shoots a blond college student in her ass with a dart.
• Two from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back one only threatened:

Whillenholly: Fire a warning shot into his bulbous ass.
Sheriff: One rectal breach comin' up.

• • And one much later that is successful, by a monkey no less:

Willenholly: Oh my God. I'm paralyzed! That monkey shot me in the ass and paralyzed me! Oh sweet irony!
Justice: You're not paralyzed. It was just a tranquilizer.

Literature

• In the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dr. Watson says in some stories that he was shot in the arm, and in others that he was shot in the leg. One of the sillier fan theories to explain the discrepancy is that he was really shot in the behind and was too embarrassed to say so.
• In Sharpe, the titular protagonist shoots a particularly cowardly and incompetent Upper Class Twit in the arse during a duel. It was nearly subverted, in that Sharpe was actually aiming for the man's belly (which would lead to a prolonged and agonizing death), but missed.
• In Carl Hiassen's Skinny Dipping.
• Honey West is shot in the butt in This Girl for Hire.
• In Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, there's a completely ridiculous moment where Lancelot is accidentally shot in the behind by a woman out hunting. That Malory's narration is completely matter-of-fact throughout just makes it funnier.

And ... she put a brode arow in her bowe and shot at the hynde - and so she overshotte the hynde, and so by myssefortune the arow smote Sir Launcelot in the thycke of the buttok [...] And the wounde was passynge sore and unhappyly smytten, for hit was on such a place that he myght nat sytte in no sadyll.

• In The New Rebellion, someone tries to shoot Han but misses, mostly. The blaster bolt grazes his buttocks.

Chewie chuckled.
"It's not funny, furball. It hurts."

• In Danny, the Champion of the World Danny's father tells Danny of how keepers like to shoot poachers from behind—not to kill, but to wound. Danny switches between being amused and horrified at the descriptions:

"Many's the night when I was a boy, Danny, I've gone into the kitchen and seen my old dad lying face down on the table and Mum standing over him digging the gunshots pellets out of his backside with a potato-knife. [...] Towards the end, he was so covered in tiny little white scars he looked exactly like it was snowing."


"I don't know why I'm laughing," I said. "It's not funny, it's horrible."


"Poacher's bottom they used to call it," my father said. "And there wasn't a man in the whole village who didn't have a bit of it one way or another. But my dad was the champion ..."

• Happens to Porthos's servant Mousqueton in The Three Musketeers. In the sequel Twenty Years After, when he's older and much more dignified, d'Artagnan suggests that he show the scar to a cowardly younger servant who could use an example of bravery. And in a fight scene some chapters later, Mousqueton is wounded "in the other".
• Michel, Flick's French Resistance husband in Ken Follett's book Jackdaws gets shot in the buttocks in the first chapter and is embarrassed every time Flick tells anyone.
• In Flash For Freedom!, Flashman is shot in the ass by slave hunters while crossing the Ohio river with a fugitive slave (and accidentally inspiring Uncle Tom's Cabin.) Most of Flashman's battle scars happen to be in the rear, for logical reasons.
• City of Thieves, where it's not played for laughs.
• Jason gets shot in the butt (and groin) quite a few times Friday the 13 th: Hell Lake.

Live Action TV

• All in The Family: Archie has shrapnel in his "kiester" from WW 2.
• An episode of Family Matters featured Carl getting Shot in the Ass, forcing him to share a hospital room with Urkel.
• ECW wrestler New Jack told a story of being stabbed in the ass, and the knife was left there for quite some time.
• In the Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode "Raw", after the courtroom is shot up by Neo-Nazis, Munch tells Tutuola he suffered this trope.
• Band of Brothers: This happens to two characters. Popeye Winn is shot in "Day of Days". Buck Compton is shot in "Replacements"—the infamous one bullet, four holes.

Penkala: Yeah, kind of an Easy Company tradition, getting shot in the ass.

• • Not to mention Perconte in "Breaking Point".
• Arrested Development: when Buster learns Gob was responsible for his loss of a hand, he sticks his hook in Gob's ass.
• Discussed in The Wire while Omar's in court testifying against Bird.

Omar: That wasn't no attempt murder. ... I shot the boy Mike-Mike in his hind parts, that all. Fixed it so he couldn't sit right.
Levy: ...why'd you shoot Mike-Mike in his hind parts, Mister Little?
Omar: We had a disagreement. Mike-Mike thought he should keep that cocaine he was slinging, and the money he was making from slinging it. I thought otherwise.

• NCIS: Gibbs inflicts on a poacher. It's strongly implied it's on purpose.
• NCIS: Los Angeles: Deeks presumes this happened to Kensi when she won't tell him where she was shot.
• MASH: Happens to a couple of people. Including Colonel Potter.
• One of the best lines from the MSTing of The Final Sacrifice: "Ow. You shot my butt. What the hell, you shot me in the butt!"
• MythBusters When testing the myth that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would kill anyone it hits, Jamie adapted a staple gun to fire pennies at their terminal velocity. Adam volunteered for a butt shot. He wasn't injured, Myth Busted.
• In an episode of NYPD Blue, Andy Sipwics is shot several times by an enemy and left for dead; as a parting-shot, the enemy then shoots him once in each buttock as a final insult. Sipowics lives, but he's forced to sit on an inflatable donut for some time.
• In the Stargate Atlantis episode "Sateda", McKay gets shot in the rear end with an arrow, in a CMoF.

Rodney McKay: THAT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN!
[Later, in infirmary] Dr. Carson Becket: You have an arrow, Rodney, in your gluteus maximus.
Rodney McKay (on Morphine): Gluteus maximus... Gluuuteus maaaximus... Oh my god! That's my ass isn't it?

• In The Sopranos season 6, an aspiring rapper actually asks Bobby Bacala to shoot him non-fatally to increase his street cred. Guess where he's shot...
• My Name Is Earl: Earl tried to make up for #147 on his karma list: "Shot Gwen Waters in the ass with a BB."
• Nash Bridges: Nash was accidentally shot in the rear by Caitlin once. The episode's title? "Shoot The Moon".
• Happens to Tom Hanson in 21 Jump Street. They try to trace the bullet that hit Tom, and find out the culprit was his partner, Doug.
• Accidentally happens in the outtakes of Firefly; In one scene, an actor playing a bandit shot a blank round at Alan Tudyk (Wash), and the paper wad shot out and hit Alan in the buttock.
  • "How'd ya like a bite o' this green apple, America?"
• Jim from According to Jim got shot in the backside by an arrow fired by a TURKEY.
• Kelly from Married... with Children was practicing her archery in one episode and shot a "bird" this way—her father dressed as an owl.
• In an episode of Cheers, Sam shoots himself in the butt with a pistol he took off an enraged husband. The situation spirals out of control when he attmpts to explain the injury by claiming he got shot in an attempted hold-up.
• Buffy accidentally shoots Giles in the butt with a tranquilizer gun in the episode "Beauty and the Beasts."
  • Jenny Calendar also shoots him either in or very near the rear end with a crossbow bolt in "Ted".
• In Chuck Versus the Frosted Tips, we see an ego-inflated Morgan (who has the Intersect in his head) getting tranquilized in the ass, right after Chuck pulls down his pants for a distraction.
• In Get Smart, Max is wounded by a KAOS officer in just such a location. He breaks the news to 99 rather delicately.

Max: What happens when you jump into a pool that's too shallow?
99: You hit bottom.
Max: So did they.

• In the second episode of The Finder, Bullets, Walter is searching for a decades-old missing bullet which can clear a death row inmate, a former cop convicted of killing another cop. Walter ends up shooting a corrupt former internal affairs officer in the ass. The reason? The internal affairs officer was the real killer, but the wrongly convicted officer had gotten a shot off when the murdered officer was gunned down. That shot had ended up in the internal affairs officer's buttocks, and had never been removed, causing him to sit uncomfortably. And so, Walter 'finds' the bullet by shooting the man in the same cheek, so that when the new bullet is dug out, the old one will be as well.
• In an episode of Home Improvement, Tim accidentally shoots his old shop teacher Mr. Leonard (who's making a guest appearance on Tim's show Tool Time) in the butt with a nail gun.
• During one of Tim Conway's "Old Man" sketches on The Carol Burnett Show the Old Man is an old west sheriff who's "quick" draw ricochets several times before hitting him in the rump.
• Grey's Anatomy: "You shot Dad in the ass, are you happy now?!"

Newspaper Comics

• A Far Side depicts a medieval soldier being carried away on a stretcher with several arrows in his butt as another soldier tells his buddy "So then I says to Borg, 'You know, as long as we're under siege, one of us outa moon these Saxon dogs.'"

Video Games

• Mercenaries 2, your former employer, instead of properly paying you, wants you dead and tries to kill you. You get shot in the ass. The enemy mooks even call you the guy who got shot in the ass.
  • The theme song from the ads, "Oh No You Didn't", sings about it, too.
  • It's worth mentioning that getting shot in the ass actually drives the plot for the entire game.
• If you managed to land a shot on an enemy's buttocks in Perfect Dark, they'd do this awesome little hop and stagger about awkwardly for a few seconds.
  • The same thing happens to mooks you shoot in the ass in Golden Eye 1997 and Medal of Honor.
• In Kingdom of Loathing, the creators gave a unique arse-shooting crossbow to a player. Strangely, the "Shot in the Arse" effect it bestows is beneficial. It even comes complete with a Braveheart reference:

This crossbow looks like it'd be perfect for shooting people in the arse. Y'know, like that one scene in Braveheart where that guy gets shot in the arse? Like that.

• Bulletstorm has doing this to a stunned mini-boss as one of the many skillshots you can perform. It causes flames to shoot out said mini-boss' ass. Funny, but worth less points and harder to set up than just leashing the mini-boss' head off.
• In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the owner of the "Drunken Huntsman" explains the name of his shop as coming from an incident when he and his brother had gone hunting after consuming "a bit too much mead." When they separated, his brother, in his inebriated state, mistook him for a deer...and shot him in the "rump" with an arrow.
  • At least it wasn't his knee.

Web Original

• A ridiculously poorly-written story on a porn archive contains the rather implausible line "I shot his ass in the back of his head".
• In Red vs. Blue, Tucker finally gets to use the sniper rifle and immediately uses it to check out Tex's ass. And accidentally pulls the trigger.

Western Animation

• Boris gets shot in the rear more than once in Rocky and Bullwinkle.
• In Futurama, when the Planet Express crew goes on a fishing expedition, Leela brings out a harpoon. Bender scoffs:

Bender: Harpoon, my ass!
Leela: Okay. (And she does.)

• Daffy Duck has his tail feathers blown off more than once, a la the above picture.

Real Life

• During the Lewis and Clark expedition, Lewis got hit in the buttocks by one member of the party while they were hunting. It got infected, but he recovered a few weeks later. Notable in that he actually used the words "shot me in the ass" in his journals.
• In the Behind-the-Scenes for Shaun of the Dead, Nick Frost gets a shot in the ass. By shot, we mean a syringe, which, according to him, was for the cold. There's even footage and everything.
• In To Hell and Back the Real Life story of Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy, Audie's friend asks him where he got shot.

Audie: "In...the hip."
Friend: "Yeah, but where'd it come out?"
Audie: [pause, then laughs] "You know where it came out!"

• A surviving victim of the Copycat Zodiac was shot in the ass.
• Sometimes doctors have to administer a vaccine in the buttocks area, i.e. give you a shot in the ass.
• Benito Mussolini was shot in the ass during World War I.
  • So was George Patton during one of the 1918 offensives, after he fell off the tank he was riding on.
• U.S. soldier James Bumgarner (later actor James Garner) was wounded during the Korean War.
• Lee Marvin was given a medical discharge from the US Marines after being wounded in the buttocks by machine gun during the battle for Saipan (June 1944).
• George Canning in his duel with Lord Castlereigh. Standard histories say he was hit "in the fleshy part of the thigh". Natural Historian/essayist Steven Jay Gould claims he has it on good authority "he was shot in the ass". From which we get the title his essay "George Canning's Left Buttock", which notes how this minor duel (both participants survived) impacted both US (concerning the treaty of Ghent) and natural history (concerning Darwin's Beagle voyage).
• One of the victims of the Kip Kinkel school shooting was hit in the ass by a stray bullet that ricocheted off the ground.
• This is a common battlefield injury for infantrymen. When one is lying prone and starts to crawl the natural inclination is to raise one's butt. Soldiers are trained not to do this, but it's easy to forget when they're under fire.
• On September 25, 2006 at the Mustang Motel in Los Angeles, a woman was shot in the ass after an attempted robbery. According to Sgt. Daniel Ellerson of the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest Station, the woman ran away without handing over any money or property. As she ran, the suspect fired his gun about five times, once hitting her in the buttocks, Ellerson said. Paramedics treated the woman at the scene for her wound, which was not significant enough to require hospital treatment.