"What is that horrible smell!? Is Patrick thinking again?"
— Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob SquarePants, "Sing a Song of Patrick"
Sometimes, a character needs to think hard. In a lot of media, this is indicated by smoke coming out of the character's head, as if their brain is overheating from all that hard thinking. This tends to be done for comedic effect.
Commonly done in visual media, but it is by no means exclusive to them.
There are two opposite intellectual extremes to this trope:
- When a stupid character has to think hard about something, the usage of this trope implies the brain is not used to being used that much.
- When a smart character is thinking, as if to imply that them overclocking their brain is the reason they're smart.
This trope can be justified if the character in question has an artificial brain of some sort, but most media just invoke the Rule of Funny when using this trope.
Compare Idea Bulb and Thinking Wheels for similar tropes about thinking characters, and in fact, this trope can easily overlap with those two tropes. See also Burning with Anger and High-Pressure Emotion for when it is emotions that cause a smoking head.
Despite the name, this trope has nothing to do with the tropes in The Smoking Section.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Asteroid in Love: After Misa hears her younger sister Mira complaining about the difficulties the latter has in memorizing all the formulae used in high-school physics, she suggests that Mira should just derive them herself. Mira immediately gets Blank White Eyes with steam coming out from her skull...
Suzu: Misa-nee! Mira's gonna explode!
- Hunter × Hunter: In Knuckle's duel with Gon, he takes the time to explain how his power, A.P.R., works before they start. The short version is that Knuckle "loans" some of his Battle Aura to his opponent by punching them, and if they can't repay the debt by hitting him with an equal amount of aura in time (plus interest), they go "bankrupt" and lose their powers for 30 days. The long version, which is what Knuckle gives Gon, is so tedious that smoke begins pouring out of Gon's ears as he struggles to keep up with the flow of numbers and calculations Knuckle is spouting.
- SPY×FAMILY: Yor was depicted with steam coming off her head when she tried to watch an opera and despite all her effort to pay attention could make no sense of it.
- Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun: When Ameri asks Iruma what his dreams are, he thinks about it so hard he overheats and gives off smoke, not used to thinking about what he wants.
Comic Strips
- Crabgrass: In the March 29, 2026 strip, Miles tells Kevin there are six billion people in the world, and claims the human mind can't imagine such a huge number. Kevin sees this as a challenge, so he goes from picturing 10 humans, to 100, to 1000 etc, but his mind overloads when he gets to ten thousand, with smoke coming out of his ears.
Kevin: Do you... smell something burning?Miles: Only a few million neurons.
Fan Works
- Heir of the Hound: When Ais tells Bell she was thinking very hard about what to do for their training, Bell thought he could see smoke coming out of her ears.
- Is It Wrong To Solo Level In A Dungeon?: Anya is generally considered a moron by her fellow waitresses, and they're right. When Syr asks her if she learned anything about the boy she's trying to meet, she thinks so hard about her encounter with him that the other waitresses could see smoke coming out of her ears.
Films
- Jupiter Ascending: A robotic version. In the process of heping Jupiter regain her titles, Intergalactic Advocate Bob is so overwhelmed and confused by the bureaucratic process and Catch-22 nature of some of the requirements that at one point he has small puffs of smoke and sparks come out of his exposed computer parts.
Jokes
- There is a standard joke where one person says they have been thinking, and another person quips they thought they smelled something burning:
Person A: I've been thinking.Person B: I thought I smelled something burning.
Literature
- In the picture book Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, the titular poem about Frankenstein's Monster making a sandwich involves him thinking "until his brains were sore" of what he should do, which shows smoke coming out of his ears.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: The Original Series episode "I, Mudd". The Enterprise crew members overload the androids' minds by making them think too hard about the humans' bizarre, contradictory behavior. When they use a paradox on Norman, the android leader, he has smoke come out of his ears trying to process the paradox just before he suffers a mental breakdown.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive: When Diane learns from Noah that the creator of the Dewitchery Diamond tried to kidnap a fellow student whose identity Noah did not know, Diane makes several connections to other facts she did know, and has a "Eureka!" Moment where she correctly concludes that Ellen is a duplicate of Elliot created through the diamond. The comic panel where she processes the revelation has a lot of smoke around her.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle: By circumstance, Rocky and Bullwinkle happen upon the Kirwood Derby, an odd little hat that somehow makes its wearer smarter. The derby even works on Idiot Hero Bullwinkle, though wearing it for more than half a minute at a time makes smoke come out of the moose's ears. Wisely, he takes it off before he fries the few working neurons he has.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In the episode "Sing a Song of Patrick", Patrick thinks so hard to come up with his song that the Thinking Wheels in his head start smoking. It produces so much smoke that Squidward, who is next door, realises Patrick is thinking again.
- Tom Terrific is an animated segment seen on Captain Kangaroo that was produced by Terrytoons. Whenever the boy hero thinks of an idea, his body contorts oddly until his funnel hat pops off his head, ejecting a cloud of smoke or steam. This is the visual signal that Tom has devised a solution to his current problem.