Violent Glaswegian

Principal Skinner: You Scots sure are a contentious people.

Groundskeeper Willie: [Bangs on Skinner's desk] You just made an enemy for life!
—The Simpsons

A violent or menacing character on British television, especially if a raving drunk or a mad homeless man, is likely to have a Glasgow accent, since Glaswegian is a very good accent and dialect for uttering threats.

The character often uses headbutts (also called "The Glasgow Kiss"), knees in the crotch and other unsportsmanlike fighting methods. The "Angry Scotsman" occasionally makes an appearance in American media, (though the Irish sometimes get a similar treatment, since as far as the Hollywood Atlas is concerned, they all come from Scotireland anyway).

A connected stereotype is the "Ned" (said to stand for "Non-Educated Delinquent") - a young Glaswegian hooligan who wears tilted-up baseball caps, lots of gold bling and tracksuits, travels in packs, drinks Buckfast by the gallon, and is impossible to understand.

To some degree, this is Truth in Television—Glasgow is the murder capital of Britain and was until very recently the murder capital of Western Europe (it has now been overtaken by Limerick). You tryin' tae say we're saft or summat, yer gettin' chibbed fir that! It's worth mentioning that the royal motto of Scotland is "nemo me impune lacessit", Latin for "nobody attacks me with impunity".

Glasgow also had in the past groups of thugs called "razor gangs", who used razors to slice up people's faces in fights (this was a time when hanging was still in use, so using a firearm was a no-no). When the cheek is cut open from the mouth, this is called a Glasgow Grin. You might have seen one in The Dark Knight Saga.

See also Brave Scot, Brooklyn Rage, Southies.

Examples of Violent Glaswegian include:

Advertising

  • One Castrol motor oil ad campaign has a demented Scot flogging people with a dipstick while uttering his catchphrase "Think wi' yer dipstick, Jimmy!" No, really.
  • Hilarious customer-made "Mockumercial" for Utilikilts "Excuse me. Are you wearing a skirt? [dead link] "
  • Irn-Bru, a Scottish beverage that glows an unusual shade of orange, knows and loves this trope. Watch to the end for a Glasgow Kiss from a vending machine.
    • As mentioned in the video, Irn-Bru is said to be made from girders, and actually does contain ammonium ferric citrate.
  • This spoof election campaign by British newspaper The Guardian portrays then-prime minister Gordon Brown in this way. Brown is Scottish (though not actually Glaswegian) and was often nicknamed 'Irn Broon' after the drink mentioned above ('Broon' representing the way 'Brown' would be pronounced in a thick Scottish accent). Despite being an April Fools' joke, the poster caught on, and many people considered it to be superior to the real election campaign.

Anime and Manga

  • Anime dub/manga translation example: English language interpretations of violent Church Militant Alexander Anderson from Hellsing have conferred a Scottish accent on him even though he has no official nationality and works at an Italian orphanage.
  • A probably unintentional example is Yammy Rialgo from Bleach. He surely is violent, and got that red hair pair of eyebrows to help the Violent Glaswegian image, but doesn't mean he's necessarily Scottish or something similar.
  • A more PG-13 version exists in the form of Johnny McGregor, the Scottish member of the European "Majestics" team in Beyblade. He's got the red hair and the attitude, and is described as a "True Scotsman", playing Tennis and Golf as well. He's even described as "The Gladiator of Glascow".
  • In Axis Powers Hetalia, Scotland is an unseen character who was said to bully England, his younger brother. A popular Original Character took this reference and ran with it (see Fan Works). Years later, however, this was subverted as Scotland was described by Word of God as "friendly and brave" and a cat lover.


Comic Books

  • Francis Clunie, The Bogie Man, is a mad and violent Glaswegian, but he speaks with a Fake American accent due to his delusion that he is Humphrey Bogart.
  • Cameron Spector in The Filth is a violent Glaswegian whose speech is written in phonetic Glaswegian dialect, thus making her indecipherable to many of the comic's readers.
  • Another indecipherable comic example: Middenface McNulty from Two Thousand AD's Strontium Dog.
  • Also from 2000 AD, Judge Dredd stories have, on occasion, featured a Scottish comic book artist Kenny Who? (yes, the question mark is part of his name) who, in his first appearance, is driven to violence by his frustration with life in Mega-City-One and the comic book industry.
  • Header from the Comic Book Hellblazer.
  • In the comic V for Vendetta, one of the minor antagonists is Harper, a violent Scot - who, while he prefers killing with knives - is also an arms dealer, strangely enough (given the above description).
    • Not only that. The comic makes several references to Scotland not being entirely under the control of the Norsefire government. Just think about that for a second. The comic has the UK surviving nuclear war, the subsequent environmental disaster, and the rise of a totalitarian government, and you still can't keep this trope down.
  • Similarly, in the Alternate History Scarlet Traces, following on from The War of the Worlds, Scotland (and much of the north of England) has been reduced to a starving industrial hellhole by the south, causing mass civil unrest. In the third book, a Scottish suicide bomber fighting for Scottish Independence blows up the BBC.
  • The second (and most well-known) Mirror Master is one of these at times, especially when he's high on cocaine. Not coincidentally, Grant Morrison was the one who reintroduced him to the modern age of comics...
    • However, this is subverted by Morrison in Animal Man (the first series in which he makes appearances) and JLA. He refuses to kill Buddy's wife and kids, and threatens Lennox when Lennox tries to get info on the family from him. In JLA, he ends up betraying the villains after Bruce Wayne triples his pay and leaves a donation to the orphanage McCulloch grew up in.
    • Mirror Master did begin his career as a merc/assassin in Glasgow, though it's unclear if he actually grew up there.
    • Also subverted by him getting his ass handed to him by a housewife in his first Post-Crisis appearance.
  • In one issue of the Simpsons comic, the family is on vacation in Scotland and runs across Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, who fight to the death over who was the better X-Men writer.
  • X-Men character Proteus was a psychotic Scottish shape-changing villain. Not technically from Glasgow I believe, but the island he came from was fictional so it doesn't matter a whole lot.
  • Scrooge McDuck, in any incarnation.

Fan Works


Film

  • Billy's dad from Billy Elliot, even though the rest of the village are all from County Durham.
  • Trainspotting: Begbie. Although this violent sociopath is from Leith, actor Robert Carlyle portrayed him as (in his words) "a cartoon caricature of a Glasgow hard man." Renton explains the psychology of the Violent Glaswegian in the Trainspotting novel. He says that Begbie is like that because "he believed his own - and it must be said, our - propaganda about him being a total psychopath".
  • Fat Bastard from Austin Powers.
  • Sid from Children of Men is one of the many extremely violent policemen in the film's Crapsack World version of Britain. Early in the film, he likes to toy with and scare people, and eventually we see him turn quite psychotic.
  • Thanks to a slipping accent, Gerard Butler's role in Three Hundred. The Spartans all speak in a broad British accent, and it's interesting to note that some translations of Ancient Greek literature give Spartans a Scots dialect, due to similarities in the way Spartans and Scots have been portrayed.
    • Interesting enough, American translators will sometimes give the Spartans an Appalachian or "Hillbilly" accent. Maybe a parallel between the Glasgow stereotype in the UK and the redneck stereotype in the US.
      • Actually a good example of Fridge Brilliance, since the stereotype of Spartans in Ancient Greece, especially among Athenians, was that they were humorless bumpkins. The word "laconic", meaning having a dry wit, came from Laconia, the region where Sparta was located.
      • Even more interesting in that most of Appalachia was colonized by, you guessed it, the Scots.
        • A slipping accent? As far as this half-scottish Troper is concerned, he spoke in a Scottish accent through the entire film.
        • THIS. IS. PAISLEY!
  • The mercenary Celts who attack Robin Hood and his Merry Men in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves are certainly violent and all red-haired.
  • Many of the Scots in Braveheart, most specifically Hamish, the huge Boisterous Bruiser who likes to show people his affection by ponching them in th' heid. His elderly dad's an even tougher nutter.
  • According to Mike Myers' character in So I Married an Axe Murderer, the Scots have their own form of martial arts called "Fuh'kew" which is comprised of "...mostly headbutts, and then kicking the other person when they're on the ground."
  • Whenever the Mad Hatter started getting a tad more intense, Johnny Depp's accent changed to Scottish.
  • Casino Royale 1967 has a bunch of tough Scotsmen who challenge David Niven to a game of catch with stone cannonballs, a Highland marching band that roughs up Peter Sellers in a programmed hallucination, and Scots henchmen in Woody Allen's underground lair. Also, French police officer Mathis speaks with a Scots accent, which worries him.

Literature

  • Discworld equivalents: Wee Mad Arthur and the Nac Mac Feegle, who almost literally squeeze six feet of anger into a six inch package. This fits the general impression that the shorter a Scotsman is, the more dangerous he is.
    • Well, six feet of violence, at any rate. They don't generally fight out of anger, but because it's what they love to do. Along with drinkin' and stealin'.
    • Also referenced in The Discworld Companion:

"[Ankh-Morpork and Klatch are] the kind of inveterate cultural enemies like England and France, the North and South of the United States, Western Australia and the rest of Australia, Scotland and Scotland, etc..."

  • Irvine Welsh has his novels filled with Violent Glaswegians. A few examples: Dozo Doyle from Glue (tortures guard dogs to death), Alex Setterington from Maribou Stork Nightmares (ringleader of a horrific gang-rape), and, of course, the aforementioned Begbie.
  • Author Christopher Brookmyre, who sets many of his books in Scotland, uses this one frequently.
    • Interestingly, probably his most violent Glaswegian - in full neck-snapping, brain-shooting, eye-gouging glory - is an extremely petite South Asian woman. Glasgow has a large South Asian community, which contributes some of the local MPs
  • Sergent Shadwell from Good Omens is a prime example - refers to everyone as a "southern nancy boys", and when about to take on the Devil, uncovers a weapon "known and feared wher­ever street-fighting men were gathered together": his head.
    • Although he may not actually be Scottish; his accent is said to wander across any area of the British Isles known for bad-tempered old men, and the people he refers to as 'nancy-boy southerners' is said to lead by inference to him hailing from the North Pole.
    • Good Omens also describes the Scots as being locked in eternal war with their archenemy, the Scots.
  • Malakai Makaisson in the Gotrek and Felix novels has the accent down pat (the author William King is a native of Stranraer). Plus he's a Slayer, and the type of guy who invents things like Airships, Rocket Launchers, and a rapid-fire axe-thrower.
    • The inventive Scotsman is a real-life trope, interestingly enough.
  • In Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake, one of the main power blocs is the 'Bloody Carlyles' a family of Glaswegian junk-men, drug dealers, and assorted petty criminals who lucked into a way of travelling to the stars after the Singularity.
  • Alex Kilgour from the Sten series is a more...focused version. He's a a very highly-trained military operative, and prefers to do the violence with explosives. He's from a heavy-gravity world though, so when he does hit things, they tend to die painfully.
    • Alex tells a joke about the days when the Romans were trying to hold Hadrian's Wall, and one newbie was terrified of his first encounter with some heavily armed, scowling, cursing Scots. But they passed by without killing him, and he commented to a veteran that the Scots weren't so bad after all. The older Roman replied, "But later tonight, when their men get done drinking, we may have some trouble."
  • Then there's the fearsome Angus McAllister, head gardener at Blandings Castle, who has a Clydeside accent and a face like a dissipated potato. 'It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine,' Wodehouse observed.
  • In Notes From a Small Island, Bill Bryson reminisces about his days as a journalist for The Times in the mid-1980's, describing the editor as "a terrifying Scotsman" and gives this rendition of his typical speech:

"We're sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae get on ma tits, then mebbe I'll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D'ye have any problems with tha'?"

Live Action TV

  • Russ Abbott's "Jimmy" character.
  • Rab C. Nesbitt.
  • Black Jock McLaren from Porridge (also a Scary Black Man and a Scary Minority Suspect).
    • Actually, I seem to remember a line in one episode stating he was from Greenock, though the actor (Tony Osoba) is from Glasgow. You don't want to go around confusing Greenockians with weegies.(Not those Weegees).
  • Vyvyan's hamster, SPG, from The Young Ones.
  • Robbie Coltrane is a Glaswegian who often plays tough, but not necessarily violent, characters. Sometimes he plays against type: In The Fruit Machine, he's a Camp Gay transvestite with a Glasgow accent, and in the Harry Potter films, he plays Gentle Giant Hagrid, and speaks with a Westcountry accent. On the other hand he had the title role in the Live Action Adaptation of The Bogie Man (see Comic Books, above).
  • The title character from Blackadder III finds himself having to fight a duel with the psychotic Duke of Wellington, so he tries to recruit his equally psychotic, Glaswegian-esque cousin MacAdder (who looks uncannily like him) as his replacement.
  • Any Professional Wrestling fan worth his salt remembers how Rowdy Roddy Piper made a career (both in and out of the ring) as the embodiment of this trope in the 1980s.
    • That said, Piper wasn't so much deliberately violent as he was utterly insane. It's a commonly-held belief that if you remember Piper making ANY sense at all when he talked, you're not remembering correctly.
      • "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass! And I'm all out of bubblegum!"
  • Taggart is set in Glasgow, so probably has a few examples.
    • At least one an episode, generally as a red herring (they're the obvious ones to have murdered someone, after all, so they can't ever actually do it).
  • The "Neds" from the Glaswegian sketch show Chewin the Fat, and its Sitcom Spin-Off Still Game.
    • However, they're usually quite unlike the trope, which mainly manifests itself in the form of 'the lone Scottish psycho against the universe'. Neds are usually only tough in groups, especially when the group contains the one member who does meet the trope requirements. Individually, based on some Neds of my acquaintance, a number are basically pretty decent and quiet (albeit with major drink, drug and 'property ownership' issues).
  • An episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus portrayed Louis XIV XV XVI of France this way. Needless to say, hilarity ensued. As it turns out, it wasn't Louis XVI, just a Violent Glaswegian impersonating Louis XVI.
  • Sue White from Green Wing.
  • "Scotch Mist." The Scotsmen are portrayed as violent enough to come back from the dead to murder people, and when they are engaged in conversation, subtitles are helpfully provided.
  • Most of the jokes that Frankie Boyle makes on Mock the Week invoke this trope.
    • How often are police in Glasgow called out to deal with a pregnant woman attacking a rottweiler with a sledgehammer?
      • Although he himself (a teetotal family man) is an aversion.
  • The British Game Show Interceptor had Sean O'Kane, from just outside Glasgow, playing a madder than a box of frogs, black leather-coated villain with a line in gratuitous insults and a clear desire to head butt someone if he'd been allowed to.
    • He once requested his helicopter pilot "Mikie" to land a helicopter on a contestant's head (he did not do so) and on another occasion Mikie stated he would mine a stretch of river for him.
  • Desmond on Lost fits for awhile, before Character Development. He spends most of his first two centric episodes drinking and raving, and a third flashback episode mentions a past as something of a drunken soccer hooligan.
  • Ashes to Ashes has a visiting Glaswegian journalist who manages to be cheerfully violent despite being heavily pregnant. In defiance of all TV traditions, she also manages to get through the entire episode without giving birth.
  • The homeless man The Inbetweeners meet in London: while he isn't violent, he speaks with a Scottish accent, and Will claims that he 'really scares' him.
  • Jamie and Malcolm from The Thick of It and In the Loop epitomise this trope.
  • Hengist and the Mercians in Merlin. Yes, Hengist was the leader of the Germanic tribes in England, and Mercia is the modern English Midlands. It's Merlin.
  • Doubly Subverted on Stargate Universe: Dr. Nicholas Rush (played by the aforementioned Glaswegian actor Robert Carlyle of Trainspotting fame), a Engineer Exploited For Evil and (self-proclaimed) leader of the group stranded out in space, is a native Glaswegian who won a scholarship to Oxford while working two jobs. However, in the second episode when a soldier he's paired up with refuses to give him some water, Dr. Rush gets violent. And then gets his ass kicked by the soldier.
    • He's still bad-tempered, although this is explained by going cold turkey from caffeine. He actually gets into physical fights fairly often, he just tends to lose, given that his opponents are usually military personnel and he's an astrophysicist with the physique of Robert Carlyle.
      • Then came "Space", where he rather graphically strangled an alien to death. The Violent Glaswegian was in full swing there, though completely justified given earlier events. And to say nothing of what he does to Simeon.
  • Chibs from Sons of Anarchy.
  • Roughly every third Mike Myers character in Saturday Night Live.
    • Most of which he "borrowed" outright from Dave Thomas on SCTV.
  • On a Good Eats episode on oats, Alton Brown dresses like a fourth-string extra from Braveheart to demonstrate how to make haggis. He reinforces his instructions with the admonition "Or I'll give ye the back o' my HAND!"
  • Kenny Mc Blane from The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
  • Brighton Belles, the short-lived Trans-Atlantic Equivalent to Golden Girls, made Sophia's character a Glaswegian, Josephine.[1] Not only did Josephine have a nasty temper herself, but her late husband was implied to have been a Glaswegian criminal (in the same way as Sophia's was implied to have be a New York gangster).
  • Callum Finnegan in Brookside. A huge shock to the Scottish audience, who associated Gerard Kelly with mildly camp comedy roles.
  • Flynn from Power Rangers RPM...maybe. He's The Big Guy, uses "This is how we do it Glasglow style!" as a battle cry in one episode, and bellows "I'm SCOTTISH!" when asked what his role in the Five-Man Band is by Tenaya 7. On the other hand, he has perhaps the least issues of anyone on the team, and is a Genius Bruiser, fitting the "inventive" trope mentioned above.
  • Jamie, companion of the Second Doctor of Doctor Who, is a kilt-wearing, simple-minded Scot who primarily resorts to brute strength and violence to solve problems.

Music

  • Singer Alex Harvey (of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band) was notorious for singing cover versions in a menacing Glaswegian accent. When he sang 'Delilah' he sounded demented enough to have actually committed the murder the song talks about.
  • The founding of Franz Ferdinand subverts this. Nick McCarthy drunkenly stole Alex Kapranos'bottle of vodka at a drunken party in (where else?) Glasgow. On the edge of a fight, Kapranos asked McCarthy: "Can you play the drums"? It turned out he really couldn't, but they switched things around, and a band was born.
    • There are rumours that there was an actual fight for a bit, and then there was the question, and then the fight segued into a makeout session.
  • Nothing averts this trope like Glaswegian indie/BaroquePop band Camera Obscura, which sounds—at its hardest—like this.
    • Or the twee pop band Belle & Sebastian, who are so soft and cuddly their fan base is stereotyped as being cardigan-wearing, tea-sipping picnic organizers who all become instant friends after spending a single afternoon hanging out with each other.

Professional Wrestling

  • "Rowdy" Roddy Piper is one of the most popular ones in wrestling. He was even billed to come from Glasgow, Scotland (He's actually a Scot-heritaged Canadian).
  • Drew McIntyre, a Scottish wrestler depicted in Kayfabe as having an explosive temper and a bit of a sadistic streak.

Video Games

  • The Demoman from Team Fortress 2 is a black, one-eyed Scottish psychopath. His weapons are bombs, another kind of bombs, and an empty bottle of scotch. See this in his "Meet the Team" interview. His first three unlockable weapons; yet another kind of bomb, a massive Claymore (which is haunted and craves heads) and a shield which allows him to make berserker style charges. His other unlockable weapons include more swords and a high yield explosive on a stick used as a melee weapon.
  • Rockstar Games, the creators of the Grand Theft Auto series, often complained about for being excessively violent et cetera... Was originally a Scottish company. Rockstar North—the division responsible for Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt—still is.
  • Realtime Worlds, known for developing Crackdown and APB, was founded by former DMA employee David Jones, who incidentally co-founded the aforesaid Rockstar North. They are, however, based in Dundee. The development team for Crackdown 2, Ruffian Games, was founded by 2 ex-Realtime Worlds employees, and is also situated in Dundee.
  • Magnus Armstrong from No One Lives Forever. Very Scottish, very violent, very drunk. True Glaswegian Icon. Kate herself is Scottish, although how violent she is depends on the player. Magnus does make her prove her "Scottiness" by besting him in a fistfight.
  • Though the game takes place in the Forgotten Realms, Korgan Bloodaxe from Baldur's Gate 2 seems to fit the role well.
  • The Scottish accent in Advent Children was allocated to Cait Sith, of all characters. Whilst it technically makes sense due to his name being a reference to Scottish and Irish fairytales, it is stil hilarious funny to hear him say "YOU'RE THE CHIPS AND GRAVY" in a overblown accent.
  • Space Colony has 'Nailer' Mc Bride a football hooligan with bad habit of punching tourists and staff.
  • The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has Sheogorath, the God of Madness, who speaks with a Scottish accent and lives in a Scotland-like realm.
  • Captain MacMillan in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare averts it nicely - being understandably stressed under the circumstances, but otherwise fairly lucid. Captain "Soap" MacTavish on the other hand...
    • Well, MacMillan may not be a very angry man, but he sure as hell is violent. He won't go put on a kilt and charge someone with a claymore while screaming at the top of his lungs, but that doesn't stop him from cracking skulls with the butt of his rifle, putting bullets through people's eyes at 300 meters, or intercepting attack helicopters with nothing but a few well placed shots. He also advices the player to use claymores of a different kind, and will not stop fighting even after both of his legs are crushed by the aforementioned helicopter crashing on him. Yet despite all of these, he does remain remarkably calm and collected (at least for the circumstances), which suggests he's more then used to such violent situations.
    • Soap's pretty cool, considering the situations he gets into, except when it comes to dogs. He hates dogs.
  • Video Gaiden's God Hand review played with this trope: "The genius of God Hand is that it's just a game about punching people!"
  • O'Chunks from Super Paper Mario is one violent scottish henchthug that works as the brawn to Count Bleck's brain.
  • Aran Ryan from Punch-Out!!.
    • Not quite this trope, given that he's actually Irish. Still aggressive and fond of the Glasgow kiss besides, though.
  • Fleetus from Brutal Legend.
  • General Mayhem, the lawn gnome general in zOMG!'s Village Greens area, is a Violent Glaswegian lawn ornament.
  • Jimmy Wilson in The Darkness II's Vendettas mode is a walking, axe-throwing personification of this trope.

Western Animation

  • The Simpsons: Groundskeeper Willie on , whose belligerence and sociopathy leads to him declaring Scots to be the natural enemies of Englishmen, Welshmen, Japanese, and even other Scots, in the quote at the top of the page. Willie has been identified as a Glaswegian ("...the ugliest man in Glasgow...") on at least one occasion, but has an accent of indeterminate origin and had been, at various points in time, said to hail from Edinburgh, Loch Ness, and "North Kilt-Town", before Willie himself finally cleared things up by declaring that he was actually from Kirkwall in Orkney.

Groundskeeper Willie: "Ach! They call this a football riot? Let's take 'em to town, lads!"
(gets up with a couple of other obviously Scottish men and a lead pipe)

    • Unfortunately this is very nearly Truth in Television - if there's anywhere in the world you need to find a good football riot in a hurry, it's Britain, where we love football so much, we deliberately go to football matches to fight over it.
      • Appropriately for this trope, one of the most temper-flaring rivalries is Celtic vs. Rangers, the derby match between the two largest Glasgow teams.
        • To clarify for non-UK tropers, the Celtic/Rangers rivalry is intimately tied up with religion and politics, and considered legitimate grounds for murder in many parts of Scotland and Ireland.
  • Donald from Thomas the Tank Engine is probably the most family friendly example out there. Although he still killed a piece of rolling stock for getting his brother into trouble.
  • The Scotsman from Samurai Jack is more or less this trope's personification. Naturally, the first time he and Jack meet, he turns a minor issue that Jack was willing to compromise on into a full-on sword fight to the death that lasted a third of the episode and obliterated most of the surrounding landscape right up until it was interrupted by Aku. He has a machine gun built into his prosthetic leg.
  • Shrek subverts this. He's bad tempered, but not all that violent.
  • Kim Possible villain Duff Killigan, a golfer who was banned from every golf course in the world for his temper tantrums. Yes, even mini-golf courses.
  • Freakazoid! 's mentor and driving instructor, Roddy McStew
  • Numbuh 86 from Codename: Kids Next Door, a rare female example.

Web Comics

Real Life

  • In a rather amusing example of Truth in Television, during the 2007 terrorist attack on Glasgow Airport one of the terrorists was quickly bundled to the floor and restrained by several bystanders. The terrorist was subdued by (among other things) a kick to the groin that was so powerful that the kicker sprained his own foot. Many mentions of this trope in the local media swiftly followed.
    • If that wasn't enough, both terrorists were both in an Unstoppable Rage and on fire.
    • A collection was set up for the grateful public to buy the kicker a pint. It bought him 1400.
    • Worked into a stand-up routine by Australian comedian Adam Hills (contrasted with the London attacks, of which he says that the English prefer to fight the war on terror using boredom, annoyance and bureaucracy). See it here.

Who attacks Glasgow?! One of the suicide bombers was rugby-tackled! How tough do you have to be to watch a car plow into a building on fire, a guy gets out in flames, runs across the terminal, and you go [turns to imaginary companion], "Fuckin' watch this!" [lunge]

This sums up why Glasgow, and in fact Scotland in general, should never be a terrorist target. There was a guy being interviewed, one eyewitness being interviewed on the news after that attack in Glasgow airport, and I, he said the word Bleep instead of a swearword but I'm going to edit in the swearword that I think took place. This is what he said, he said:
Glaswegian: "The car came into the airport, the guy fell out of it, he's rolling around on the ground on fire. I turn to the police officer next to me, I said, "should we help him?" He said, "No. Beat, Let the fucker burn."

  • Glaswegian comedian Billy Connolly is popular for acting like the "Glasgow hard-man" most of the time, his comedy acts often being outrageous and offensive (such as his comments during the Ken Bigley hostage situation, in which he called on the terrorists to "get on with it"). He also wrote and sang a song called "Evil Scotsman" with such lyrics as "I'm a mean motherfucker, I was born that way/And just because I wear a skirt, don't think I'm fucking gay!"
    • Billy Connolly likes to spend a lot of his time playing merry hell with this one, both in and out of his stand-up acts. He's got a strong love of both history and travel, is quite soft-hearted, and tends to look slightly unusual, to say the least. For a significant proportion of his recent career he's had a dyed-purple goatee, and he has a tendency to run around in the buff given the slightest opportunity. To date, locations for this include the Australian outback, a beach in New Zealand, Trafalgar Square in London, and the Arctic!!
      • Admittedly he also developed a reputation for punching journalists if they asked him prying quesitions about his absent mother. Also, he once chased a reporter the length of a street and tackled him over an article he had written.
    • One memorable subversion was on Not the Nine O'Clock News where he burst into a pub, and demanded (in a typical Violent Glaswegian voice) to know if a number of hard men were there. Upon finding out they weren't, he ordered a Campari and Soda in a Camp Gay voice.
    • Ron White stated that he had a taxi cab ride with a Scottish nationalist in 2007.
    • Actually, 'Evil Scotsman' was written by Rockin' Jock.
  • George Macdonald Fraser's semi-autobiographical McAuslan series is, in many ways, a paean to a post-war Highland battalion comprised largely of these characters.

Religion in the Scottish mind -- or in the Glaswegian mind, anyway -- is inextricably bound up with sport, to such an extent that I have seen an amicable dispute on the offside rule progress, by easy stages, through Rangers and Celtic, to a stand-up fight over the fate of some ancient martyr called the Blesséd John Ogilvie, in which Private Forbes butted a Catholic comrade under the chin.

  • Serial Killer Ian Brady is a Glasgow native.
    • May not actually count, though. He only went after little kids, the wimp.
  • According the the Independent, the life expectancy for a male in the UK as a whole is about 76, while in a certain area of inner-city Glasgow...it's 54.
    • This probably has to do more with social reasons rather than violent death (although that is still a factor). The fact that these areas frequently have levels of poverty associated with third world nations and high risk of death from heart failure (in the West, poor people die from too many calories...) - yes, even higher than elsewhere in the heart disease capital of Europe - leads to a higher number of youthful deaths.
  • This predates Glasgow itself, and is Older Than Feudalism. Hadrian's Wall, just south of the Scottish border, was considered the limit of Roman civilization. Anything north of the Antonine Wall (in what is now south-central Scotland) was too much bother to conquer.
  • The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars prove that even Glaswegian Ice Cream (among other things) salesmen have a nasty side to them.
    • Given that DMA Designs were based in Scotland, many suggest that this was the inspiration for the ice cream vans in the Grand Theft Auto games.
  • Thoroughly averted by the "Tartan Army", the fans of Scotland's national football team, who have an international reputation for being sporting, amiable guests, and have been formally awarded for their commitment to good behaviour and non-violence.
    • This, unfortunately, seems to come at the cost of the actual football team being a bit rubbish.
    • On the other hand, DO NOT get into any sort of argument involving the Rangers and Celtic if you want to live.[2] This was probably the biggest sports rivalry in the world at one point fueled mainly by the fact that one team was predominantly Catholic and the other one was Protestant. Bonus Points since both teams actually are based in Glasgow.
  • In a subversion, archetypal Kindly Vet James Herriot (Alf Wight), was raised in Glasgow, and occasionally references his thick Glaswegian accent and the beautiful weather of Scotland. Perhaps because of this trope, though, his Scottish accent and upbringing are both left out of the TV series "All Creatures Great and Small".
  • PC gaming news website Rock, Paper, Shotgun runs a regular column on board games written by glaswegian Robert Florence. It features board games, insults, cursing, threats of bodily violence and LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS
  • Amazingly inverted during the riots of 2011—while rioting kicked off in major cities and towns in England, Glasgow remained a bastion of calm. There is a slight subversion in that a few eedjits north of the border tried to incite rioting using social media, but to the relief of Scots everywhere, the police acted quickly to quell these attempts and make arrests.
    • Though played straight during the royal wedding that same year: while much of the UK had street parties to celebrate, Glasgow held a celebratory riot.
  • There is a museum in Portsmouth that houses the figureheads of Royal Navy ships from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it notes that these were usually designed to fit the name of the ship, such as ships named after places in India being given figureheads that look like Indian princes. Appropriately, HMS Glasgow had a Violent Glaswegian soldier rushing forward with his sword out as its figurehead.
  1. ↑ Actually, she grew up in the Highlands, but she had a Glaswegian accent
  2. ↑ NOT the New York Rangers and Boston Celtics, thank you!
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