Regardless if it's your nose or your friend's, don't pick it with a knife.
"You delicately insert the lockpick into your left nostril. Unfortunately, you push it in too far, causing yourself a cerebral hemorrhage. Guess you should have been practicing on less difficult locks."
— Quest for Glory I, upon being commanded to "pick your nose"
Children and those operating on a childlike mental level will often push objects into their own noses and ears, often resulting in a hospital trip. The favored item seems to be crayons, though anything small enough to enter the openings in question can be used. Alternately, shoving items into other people's facial orifices in anger also occurs commonly, with the goal of cutting the skin or breaking the cartilage and bone. Sometimes the implement can be shoved far enough into the nose to pierce the brain, killing the victim. Also related to Nose Nuggets and Orifice Invasion.
It goes without saying, but this should not be done in real life. Inserting an object into your nose can cause a nosebleed, or worse, a rupture of the delicate nasal membrane. It's also possible for objects or liquid entering your nose to end up in your ears. Seriously, don't shove anything into your nose or anyone else's, unless you're a qualified professional doing it for a medical necessity.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Episode 1 of The Daichis - Earth's Defense Family, Dai shoves cucumber sticks on both sides of his nose and one on his tongue and attempts to make Mamoru laugh however it fails as a result of this, Dai sighs and eats all the cucumber sticks from his mouth.
- GTO: The Early Years: Maruyama shoves pencils up Saejima's nose, as revenge for Saejima doing the same to him. Then Fumiya shows up and slams Saejima's head into the floor. Some 150-odd chapters later, when Fumiya gets out of juvie, Saejima is obsessed with getting his revenge. He crawls on the ground with two fistfuls of pencils to pencil-nose him back, but made the mistake of holding them right in front of his face. Fumiya steps on his head and they go right up Saejima's nose.
- One vengeance target in the third season of Hell Girl gets turned into a living power strip with all of a house's electronics plugged into him before being sent to Hell proper. At one point, the plug for a hairdryer is shoved up his nose.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Battle Tendency: Joseph beats a Dirty Cop by punching one's finger through his own nose.
- Stardust Crusaders: During the Egypt arc, Hol Horse shoves his fingers up Polnareff's nose as part of an assassination plot against him and the other Crusaders per Boingo's orders via his Stand, Thoth.note
- Space Patrol Luluco: In Episode 10, when Luluco isn't waking up, Over Justice suggests that Midori try stuffing tissues up their nose.
Comic Books
- Evil Dead: In Army of Darkness: Shop Till You Drop Dead, Ash gets his artificial hand from the film replaced with a highly advanced cybernetic hand when he accidentally time-travels into the future. Each of the fingers has a different futuristic weapon, except for the thumb, which has "Atomic nose-hair trimmers." When his other fingers are destroyed in the climax, he kills the Big Bad by sticking his thumb up his opponent's nostril and activating the nose-hair trimmers, which are somehow powerful enough to destroy the deadite's head.
- Preacher: A particularly grisly example occurs early in the series, courtesy of Jesse Custer. He starts a fight by shoving his fingers into a guy's nose, then ripping them up and out through the sides. The poor bastard's nose is practically destroyed.
- The Simpsons: Ralph Wiggum tells the reader that one Christmas, he sent Gollum and Aragorn into a cave, while the panel depicts Ralph stuffing two action figures up his nose. When his mother brings him to the hospital, it turns out that Homer also needs action figures removed from his own nose.
- Strangers in Paradise: The comic has two variations. The first is when Katchoo is harassed by a Dirty Cop, and puts him in what another character describes as a "bodacious nose lock", where she has him face-first on the ground, sitting on his back while pulling his nostrils back as hard as she can. The second is when we see David's past, and he deals with a Yakuza wannabe who is insulting him by jamming his fingers, palm-down, into the guy's nostrils and practically lifting him off his feet.
Comic Strips
- Garfield: Happens several times. The first time was when Jon had a camera shoved up his nose by Garfield and Odie, the second was when he had a rubber mouse shoved up his nose, and the third was when he got a miniature uniform shoved up his nose. Jon also mentions that in high school, he had a mad crush on the head cheerleader, which didn't end well: "Ever had a pom-pom shoved up your nose?"
Fan Works
- In Harry Potter How Bong Bong got his name
Angelina, disgusted at having half-chewed food spat on her, hexes Ron's mouth off. In an attempt to continue eating, he shoves a chicken leg up both nostrils.
- The Homestuck fanfic Hivefled includes Terezi trying to teach Dave to smell colours by sticking crayons up his nostrils.
- This kid AU of Steven Universe has Blue Pearl putting a green crayon up her nose, much to Pearl's disgust.
Films — Animation
- Hoodwinked!: During the Schnitzel song, a boy shoves a schnitzel stick up his nose.
- In the climax of Megamind, Megamind defeats Titan by shoving the infuser gun up his nose before defusing his powers, which he did since the original projectile that gave him powers had gone up his nose.
- In Toy Story 3, a toddler is shown sticking Mr. Potato Head's eyes up his nose.
- In an earlier version of Turning Red, Mei would have had a fly go up her nose, causing her to transform in panic.
Films — Live-Action
- The same thing happens to Jake Gittes in Chinatown, only then Roman Polański slashes the nostril open.
- In Cop Land, when Figgsy gets angry about a remark Jack made, he shoves him against the wall, grabs Jack's hair with one hand, and then with the other, takes a dart and sticks it up Jack's nose.
- In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), after a large inmate threatens Peter, Rocket has Groot shove his fingers up the criminal's nose. Groot's fingers keep protruding into the inmate's nostrils to the point he lifts the alien off the ground and completely breaks his nose.
- Guest House Paradiso features an argument between the two protagonists that descends into this trope versus a Groin Attack.
- A douche is rammed up a prostitute's nose in Hanger.
- Invasion U.S.A. (1985): After cutting a deal with a local drug lord to obtain weapons, Big Bad Rostov kills the guy and his girlfriend, slamming the latter's face onto a tabletop while she's snorting cocaine and driving the metal straw bloodily into her nose before tossing her through a window.
- In Kite (2014), Sawa kills Thornhill by shoving a sharpening steel up his nose into his brain.
- In the blooper reel for The Little Rascals (1994), Courtland Mead, the actor who portrayed Uh-huh, is seen putting a pencil in his nose.
- In Mission: Impossible III, Davian likes to fire pill-sized timed explosives up people's noses to kill them.
- In One Fine Day, Sammy is fond of putting objects up his nose, which Jack doesn't find out until it happens. Melanie admits later she's often had to take Sammy to the doctor because of that.
- The Osterman Weekend: Fassett's wife is killed with a lethal injection administered by inserting the hypodermic needle up her nose.
- In Pacific Rim, Hannibal Chau shoves a knife blade up Newton Geiszler's nose.
- In Total Recall (1990), Douglas Quaid has to shove the business end of a self-guiding pincer up his nose to extract the ball-shaped tracking bug that has been implanted in it. Particularly squicky, since the golf ball-sized implant has to come out of his nostril too.
- In When Evil Calls, an overachieving student—Driven to Suicide by the prospect of The B Grade—kills himself by inserting sharpened pencils up his nostrils and then slamming his face into his desk: driving the pencils into his brain.
- A character has a spike shoved up his nose in Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings.
Literature
- Animorphs:
- In Animorphs: The Experiment, the Animorphs have to get past some Gleet Biofilters, which fry unauthorized life-forms, warding the entrance to a slaughterhouse. They have Ax and Tobias morph cattle. The others become flies and get as far up their cow noses as they can as that will keep the filters from detecting them.
- In Animorphs: The Journey the tiny Helmacrons return, leave their ship, and get into Marco's nose. They're so small that their laser guns sting skin painfully without doing much damage, but could still do a lot of damage to his insides. So the Animorphs do the only logical(?) thing: use the Helmacron's shrink ray and follow them. Hijinks Ensue.
- Big Nate: Nate writes down that Chester offered a trade for this kid's sandwich. The kid declined, so Chester stuffed a hot dog up his nose.
Nate Wright: Did I mention that Chester's kind of a psycho?
- Franny K. Stein: In The Fran That Time Forgot, Franny breaks free from the grasp of one of the elephant monsters created by her evil future teenage self by ordering her voice-activated cheese cannon to shoot some cheddar and then shoving the cheese up the elephant monster's trunk.
- Going Postal: The dim-witted Smug Snake Crispin Horsefry doesn't know much about the game of Thud except that he got a piece stuck up his nose once when he was a kid.
- Harry Potter:
- During the fight with the troll in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry accidentally but usefully sticks his wand up the troll's nose.
- When Lupin finds Peeves the poltergeist stuffing a broom closet's keyhole with chewing gum Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he casts a spell that makes the chewing gum fly up Peeves' nose.
- When Harry and the Weasley family go to St. Mungo's on Christmas Day to visit Arthur, who's still recovering from his snakebites, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry witnesses a witch with a walnut jammed up her nostril at the lobby.
St. Mungo receptionist: Family argument, eh? You're the third I've seen today. Spell damage, fourth floor.
- Journey to the West: Sun Wukong defeats the Old Elephant Monster/Yellow-Tusked White Elephant by showing his staff up the monster's nostrils when the latter tries to grab him with his trunk and pulling him around. After this treatment, the monster speaks with a pronounced nasal lisp.
- Star Wars Legends:
- A background character in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi is fleshed out a bit. Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina establishes him as an Anzati, a kind of vampire that uses a pair of probosci on either side of his nose to shove up into the nostrils of prey and consume what he calls their "soup". What "soup" is is never clearly established but it's not blood or brains, and he thinks the soup that's been "on the shelf" for longer tastes better than... fresh soup. A story in Tales from Jabba's Palace completely undercuts the menace in his two POV stories, though, as a guard thinks of him as a "snot vampire" and covers his own nose with his hand while near him.
- In the X-Wing Series a superstitious pilot thinks that his horse-faced comrade Runt sneezing during a briefing is a bad sign. Runt's friends immediately start doing a bit, claiming that Runt's actually been training to be able to pack his sinuses with ball bearings and fire them at enemies to lethal effect.
- The Langoliers: Nick Hopewell, after telling Craig Toomey off and trying to disengage from his rant, grabs Toomey in a nose hold, threatening to break the man's nose because Toomey would not take the hint and leave Nick alone.
- The Talisman: The judge who sent Jack and Wolf to Sunlight Gardner's Orphanage of Fear commits suicide by stabbing himself in the brain through his nose.
- Vorkosigan Saga: Gregor, Miles’ childhood playmate and emperor of three planets, threatens to shove a pastry up his nose during the denouement of The Vor Game.
Live-Action TV
- The Adventures of Pete & Pete: An episode shows little Pete shoving the miniature heads of US Presidents in his nostril, with one (Martin Van Buren) getting stuck.
- Played with in an episode of Are You Being Served?. Mrs Slocombe is annoyed by Captain Peacock's wagging his finger at her. She complains to Mr Rumbold that "Captain Peacock's wiggling finger got right up my nose!" As usual, Mr Rumbold takes things literally and admonishes Captain Peacock not to put his finger in Mrs Slocombe's nose.
- The Big Bang Theory: Sheldon Cooper recalls having a Mexican peso shoved up his nose by a schoolyard bully. To the best of his knowledge, it's still there.
- An episode of The Bill took place entirely in a police van full of bored uniformed officers, acting as backup for a protest march in case of a riot. One of the officers falls asleep, and a female colleague pushes two pipe cleaners up his nose. Becomes a Brick Joke when a call goes out to the van; as everyone gears up for action, the officer concerned can be seen awake and glaring at the pipe cleaners.
- Happens more than once on Bottom. Eddie gets a pencil shoved up his nose by Richie, later having to explain its presence to a police officer.
Eddie: I've been "sleep-doodling". I'm very bad at it.
- Call the Midwife holds a child pulling this with a Lego brick instead of the traditional dried pea to be a sign of the changing times.
- An episode of The Colbert Report has an abductee stating that the aliens probed his nose (Colbert was desperately trying to get him to shut up until he said it, too).
- Friends: Chandler points out that Joey shoves pennies up his own nose, despite the fact that he is (physically) an adult.
- In one episode of Fringe, Peter is tortured via electrodes shoved up his nosenote .
- In the House episode "Mob Rules", a man repeatedly brings a toddler to the clinic because he keeps shoving stuff up to his nose. House eventually realizes that the toys (policeman, fireman, and fire truck) have something in common. He gets a strong magnet and gets out the first toy, a small metal cat. The kid was "sending in teams to save the cat".
- Midsomer Murders: In "Lawn of the Dead", Victim of the Week Wilf Worrell is murdered by having a pair of measuring calipers inserted up is nose and into his brain.
- Mr. Bean gets an electric shaver stuck up his nose while shaving in preparation for a dentist's appointment. This causes him to be late for the appointment.
- In the "Alien Abductions" episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, the two show a silver-painted dildo to an "abductee," who states that the aliens inserted a similar device into her sinus cavity.
- A little boy in an episode of The Pitt is brought into the ER by his father after jamming beads up his nose while making bracelets with his sister. He actually has a reason for having done this - he was going to shoot them back out to make his sister laugh, but they got stuck.
- A pair of characters portrayed by Billy Crystal and Christopher Guest on Saturday Night Live would compare painful experiences incurred while jamming unthinkable objects into body orifices.
- In the first episode of Squid Game, Gi-hun's creditors torture him in this way with an icepick.
- An episode of 30 Rock revolves around Tracy Jordan recovering his sense of smell after a ring he shoved into his nose as a child is finally removed. When he becomes emotionally overwhelmed by a scent that reminds him of his absentee father, though, he returns to the doctor and has a troll-head pencil topper shoved into his nostril in order to remove his sense of smell again.
- Some of the idiots featured on World's Dumbest... have filmed themselves shoving various objects up their noses, sometimes to set some kind of record. And then Danny Bonaduce has to try it for himself.
- The pilot episode of The X-Files has small, unidentifiable capsules recovered from the nasal cavities of apparent alien abduction victims.
Music
- In "Fish Fight Song" by Da Yoopers, the female lead threatens to shove the husband's fishing worms up his nose if he shrugs off his duties as a father in favor of fishing again. She then implies an Ass Shove with the spoken line "Somewhere else, too".
- Heather Dale's song "Don't Put It In Your Nose" is all about the importance of not shoving things up your nose.
- In the "Weird Al" Yankovic song "I'll Sue Ya," the singer files a Frivolous Lawsuit against Duracell after shoving one of their batteries up his nose.
- In "My Own Eyes", one of the disturbing sights that the narrator wishes he could unsee is a pair of drag queens shoving crackers up each other's noses.
Stand-Up Comedy
- The Cheech & Chong comedy sketch "Up His Nose" from the album Los Cochinos has a father bring his son named Jaime to the doctor because he's been shoving lots of things up his nose — including bullets. The doctor tries to extract them with a pair of pliers, but ultimately decides on just using a hammer, and the bullets explode, supposedly also taking the boy's face with it. All the father could do at that point is rejoice and tell the doctor to "keep the change".
Theatre
- "Never Say No" from The Fantasticks:
Why did the kids put beans in their ears?
No one can hear with beans in their ears.
After a while the reason appears.
They did it cause we said no.
Video Games
- As seen by the quote, in Quest for Glory I you can die when attempting to pick your nose if your lockpicking skill is too low.
- According to the Team Fortress 2 blog, somebody on the development team shoved an M&M up their nose. (The picture that went with the blog was an angry Medic using a pointer to indicate said M&M on a head x-ray.)
Webcomics
- Kevin & Kell: Rudy gets Lindesfarne's electronic diary shoved up his nose as punishment when she catches him trying to read it.
Fiona: (over the phone) Please tell me it's at least one of the new small ones.
Lindesfarne: It's not.
Web Original
- Binder of Shame: For reasons he never adequately explains, Blobert Smith once plays a character who "deals with his post-traumatic stress syndrome by putting porridge up his nose on moonlit nights".
- Bum Reviews: Discussed in the review of The LEGO Movie;
Chester A. Bum: And the best thing is, millions of children around the world will now think that they can make movies with stop-motion LEGOs... until they realize two minutes in that it's really boring to do and then they'll just stick them up their nose. I stuck LEGOs up my no... oh, wait. No, I didn't. That'd be infantile. I just melted them and smoked them. They taste like a life wasted.
- RWBY Chibi once adapted a Dumb_RWBY comic where Ruby asks Weiss "want to see me eat a cookie through my nose?"
- SCP Foundation: SCP-108 "Extradimensional Nasal Cavity" is a woman who was training to perform the "Human Blockhead" magic trick. After hammering a nail into her nasal cavity, she lost her grip on the end and dropped it inside her nose, accidentally opening a portal from her nostril to a sealed disused Nazi bunker.
- Jeffy from SuperMarioLogan has a pencil shoved up his nose. The reason why he shoved it in there was that he thought it was what his nostrils were for. In "Smart Jeffy", the pencil gets lodged in his brain, suddenly making him smart.
Western Animation
- In the Camp Lazlo episode "Never Bean on the Map", the Jelly Bean trio tries to get Camp Kidney on a restaurant placemat by having Scoutmaster Lumpus compete in a Mega Meal Challenge, as it's cheaper than paying for the advertising space. When Lumpus struggles with eating the gigantic steak, they resort to shoving some of it up his nose, as there's no rule on how he has to eat the steak.
- Chris from Family Guy once shoved a toy up his nose. It poked his brain, and he claimed that he forgot math as a result.
- The Gravity Falls short, "Mailbox", involves a videotape of Mabel shoving gummy worms up her nose.
- Home Movies: When baby Josie sticks marbles up her nose, Brendon makes a video warning about putting marbles up your nose, but it backfires in a Do Not Do This Cool Thing way.
- During one episode of King of the Hill, Bobby goes in to have plastic beans removed from his nose. A flashback shows he'd been stuffing them in there as a means of cheating at Don't Spill the Beans.
- The Bakshi Mighty Mouse episode, "Don't Touch That Dial", has an air traffic controller eating krinkle-cut French fries, when he passes one through his nose when the Cow (in a rare Heel–Face Turn moment) flies by.
- Rick and Morty: In "Rickfending Your Mort", Rick tells Morty to shove his tongue into an Apeborg's nose claiming it will save the universe, except it was part of a bet he made with other Ricks.
- Rugrats:
- According to a Noodle Incident in "Tricycle Thief", Chuckie once put a penny in his nose.
- In "Angelica's Birthday", Angelica decides to dress and act like a baby to avoid the responsibilities that come with getting older. However, this backfires since she can't play piñata with her friends. As Angelica watches her friends hit the piñata, Chuckie tells her that she can't have any little candies since they're too dangerous for babies. Angelica asks him why, and Tommy tells her that they might put them in their noses.
- In "Angelica Nose Best", Angelica gets a bump on her nose, which she believes is the result of her lying. When she asks the babies for advice on what she should do about it, Phil suggests that she let her nose get even bigger so she can keep her cookies in it.
- The Simpsons
- One episode had Homer's stupidity be the result of a crayon having become lodged in his brain after he shoved it up his nose as a kid. In fact he shoved sixteen crayons up his nose, and then sneezed out fifteen of them. Removing it makes him smarter and allows him to get along much better with Lisa, but alienates him from society since it turns out that even a man with average intelligence is still too smart to fit into today's world. He asks Moe to shove another crayon up his nose and into his brain to make him stupid again.
Moe: No problem. The ol' "Crayola Oblongata".
- In another episode, Bart whacks Ralph on the head, causing coins and milk to fall from his nose. "My milk money!... And my milk!" Ralph has also played the flute by sticking it up his nose.
- One episode had Homer's stupidity be the result of a crayon having become lodged in his brain after he shoved it up his nose as a kid. In fact he shoved sixteen crayons up his nose, and then sneezed out fifteen of them. Removing it makes him smarter and allows him to get along much better with Lisa, but alienates him from society since it turns out that even a man with average intelligence is still too smart to fit into today's world. He asks Moe to shove another crayon up his nose and into his brain to make him stupid again.
Real Life
- Truth in Television in the case of young children.
- Sideshow geeks sometimes hammer a nail into their nose, with little to no adverse effects because there's a sinus back there the average person doesn't know about. Sylvester McCoy used it routinely prior to becoming the seventh Doctor.
- Speaking of Doctor Who actors, here's McCoy's successor Paul McGann with the sonic screwdriver up his nose.◊
- Speaking of Doctor Who actors, here's McCoy's successor Paul McGann with the sonic screwdriver up his nose.
- This is the second most common method of securing an open airway on a patient being transported by EMTs to the hospital, called a nasopharyngeal airway or NPA, after an oropharyngeal airway or OPA where it instead goes through the mouth. An NPA is generally only used when a patient cannot or will not let you use an OPA, and while the experience is pretty unpleasant, it doesn't trigger the gag reflex the way an OPA is likely to and also, you know, is intended to help save your life. The device is also sometimes called a "trumpet" due to it having a flared end to prevent it from getting lost in someone's nose, though almost every EMT has a story about it happening anyway despite this.
- At age 6, Andy Norton had shoved a LEGO piece in his nostril. When it didn't come out, he tried to get it out with a minifigure, hoping it would click onto the piece and pull it out. It only resulted in the head getting stuck. While his mother pulled out the head with tweezers, the other piece remained in his nose for 26 years, which gave him congestion, asthma, and sleep apnea. One day, when he blew his nose in the shower, the piece finally came out.
