Smelly Feet
"Marguerite, go wash your feet
The Board of Health is across the street."—Nursery Rhyme
Feet can smell bad. From the beginning of time, people have had foot odor.
But there is something oddly entertaining about the idea of smelly feet and it's been one of the most common tropes in family-themed media. Children find the concept of smelly feet to be humorous, as evidenced by the popular children's song "Trick or treat/Smell my feet/Gimme something good to eat."
Even babies seem to find smelly feet funny; a common game parents sometimes play with their babies is to pretend to smell their baby feet and booties.
And, of course, foot fetishists exist too, and some of them also like stinky feet.
Many of these example will overlap with Foot Focus, but this is a different trope. Here the humor comes not from seeing feet by the fact they smell bad.
Anime and Manga
- In Crayon Shin-chan, Shin's father Hiroshi is known to have very stinky feet and socks which can be used as a weapon against foes.
Film
- The 2003 film Holes revolves greatly around stinky feet. Henry Winkler's character is trying to find a cure for foot odor, and as a result is obsessed with collecting and smelling shoes. He even asks his wife to smell one at one point. We are also told the whole hallways smells like stinky feet.
Live-Action TV
- On Full House, one of the central running gags was that Kimmy Gibler had smelly feet. Every time she takes off her shoes, the other characters can't stand her. Apparently this runs in her family, as she mentions in one episode that DJ probably won't want to spend the night at her house since her father has just run out of foot deodorant.
- Married... with Children arguably had some of the most creative stinky feet jokes in history. Al works in a shoe store and is regularly surrounded by smelly feet, plus has them himself. In one episode, Peg uses his stinky socks as a weapon to get out of a restaurant where then they can't pay the bill. Another time, when Al finds a "shoe groupie" in his bed, he takes off his shoe, to use his foot odor as a weapon. The groupie doesn't seem to mind it, but Peg yells from downstairs "Al, are your shoes off up there? For goodness sake, they're people breathing down here." Eventually, one episode revealed that the source of Al's severe foot odor was a curse placed on his ancestor five hundred years prior in England. The Bundy family then take a trip to England and the joke comes up several more times. At one point, Peg uses Al's shoe to knock a Royal Guard unconscious. And, in one of the most famous scenes of the show, Al dips his bare feet in a lake and ends up killing all the fish, plus knocking out an assassin in scuba-gear who was coming to kill him.
- Round the Twist had this as a Running Gag, eventually culminating in an episode where Bronson reveals he's intending to use the pong as a weapon to stop Gribs, Rabbit and Tiger from killing a turtle.
Music
- Jim Cosgrove, a singer/songwriter of children's tunes is known as "Mr. Stinky Feet" as his signature song is called "Stinky Feet." In the sing, he sings about foot odor and asks children to sing along.
Western Animation
- In The Penguins of Madagascar, the penguins try to cure Mort of his obsession with hugging King Julien's feet. One of the tactics they use is prolonged exposure to one of zookeeper Alice's boots, which they handle with tongs while wearing gas masks.