Wacky Fratboy Hijinx

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Hearts full of youth! Hearts full of truth! Six parts gin to one part vermouth! —Tom Lehrer, "Bright College Days"

"There's a time and a place for everything. It's called 'college'." —Chef, South Park

A movie in which much of the humor comes from fratboys getting highly intoxicated and doing incredibly stupid, risky, and dangerous things and getting away with it. Usually has the main characters as a bunch of loveable rogues pitted against the evil aristocratic old money frathouses or oppressive deans. Expect panty raids. Lots of panty raids.

Suffice to say, when this happens in real life people get excluded or neglect studying and drop out.

May overlap with THC Theater. Generally parallels with College Is High School Part 2. Almost always includes a Wild Teen Party, with college officials replacing the parents. Often set at a Strawman U. Compare All Guys Want Sorority Sisters, the stereotyped portrayal of the fraternity's Distaff Counterpart, the sorority.

Examples of Wacky Fratboy Hijinx include:

Film

• Animal House
  • And the TV series version, Delta House.
• Accepted, which features an entire college set up for this sole purpose (at first).
• Revenge of the Nerds.
• National Lampoon's Van Wilder.
• In Eurotrip a Five-Man Band of four high school graduates go on a wacky hijinx tour of an amazingly stereotypical Europe, culminating in nothing less than (accidentally) faking the death of and impersonating the replacement for the pope on live international television. And getting away with it.
• Old School
• PCU - Though the protagonists weren't technically a frat (the bad guys were, even though frats had been banned, forcing them to become a secret society scheming to reclaim their old house from the riff raff)
• Across the Universe has a bit of screen time devoted to Max's college antics. Put to song.
• College.
• The genre got turned upside-down in Sorority Boys.

Literature

• In The Pale King, the confrontation between Fat Marcus the Moneylender and Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist.
  • Didn't anybody at your school ever have names like Joe or Bill?

Live-Action TV

• The Happy Days episode "Hard Cover" has Richie, Fonzie, and pals trapped in a girls' dorm after curfew with much hilarity ensuing.
• The Spike TV series Blue Mountain State lives on this.
• In an early episode of Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett finds himself as part of a rowdy fraternity in the body of a popular football player (with two girls in bed when he leaps in).
• An episode of The Fall Guy has Colt Seavers hiding out in a frat house to escape a hitman, with a fair amount of this ensuing.
• Greek deals with this quite often due to the rivalry between the Kappa Taus and Omega Chi (with each house separately embodying a different side of the frat stereotype, the slovenly party boys and the uptight preppies respectively).
• That's My Bush! parodies this trope in an episode (A Poorly Executed Plan) by portraying George W. Bush's well-over-fifty year old friends as immature manchildren still engaging in stereotypical fratboy behavior.
• One episode of Community has Abed going through a college experience checklist filled with these sort of antics; Troy eventually goes along for the ride.
• CSI had one or two storylines that started out as this and ended up with someone dead by the start of the episode.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer had a few of these with supernatural twists. The frat boys were usually worshipping ancient demons that the slayer had to take care of.

New Media

• The Onion parodies it with Fraternity In Danger Of Losing House Launches Hairbrained Scheme To Fix Economy.

Tabletop Games

• In Paranoia there are no fratboys and wackiness is technically treason, yet the entire reason the Death Leopard society exists is to perform these hijinx, with high explosives, all the while talking in an excruciatingly Totally Radical fashion.

Video Games

• Kingdom of Loathing has Orcish Frat Boys as enemies. Most of their attacks and adventures are somehow related to this trope, whether fighting by spraying beer at you, hazing you, or stealing your underwear.
  • And as an aside, the element they're most associated with? Sleaze.
• The Delta Iota Omicron house in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.
• The fraternity households in The Sims 2 University can be played this way, depending on the player's inclination, and some of the game mechanics (i.e. toga parties) certainly invite it.
• The Spellcasting Series has this as part of the plot in the second and third games. The second game centers around the main character having to perform various hijinks as part of his frat initiation, while the third centers around the main character's frat competing against a frat from a rival university over who is king of the beach.

Web Animation

• Episode 40 of Bonus Stage is about a fraternity (played by the cast of Waterman) moving into the house next door. The initiation ritual involves dragging one's bed outside and peeing in it wearing a dress. Joel apparently mishears and instead pees in their beds. Then there are the frat party games: "Extreme Spelling Bee", "Bingo Pac-Man", and "Throw the Screwdriver at Someone's Face".

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive has featured an un-named "college party comedy".
• Exists even in fantasy worlds, as Roy Greenhilt has to learn in the The Order of the Stick prequel "On the Origin of PCs".
• Shredded Moose attempts to mix this with Refuge in Vulgarity and gets Moral Event Horizons.
• At one point in 'Schlock Mercenary the Toughs have to get information out of a computer center in a college library. While they're there, some frat boys decide to play a game of 'taunt the human'. Their leader gets the brilliant idea of punching a man who outweighs him roughly 3:1, all of it in muscle, starting a brawl in which the frat boys get clobbered.

Western Animation

• Parodied in a Futurama episode where Bender lives out this trope.
  • ROOBOT HOOOOUUUUSSE!
• Likewise parodied in an episode of The Simpsons, where Homer has to go back to college and complete his degree, and blindly assumes that college in real life is like college in the movies, going so far as to watch various Animal House knock-offs as "research". It isn't.
• Undergrads: Rocko engages in various kinds of these, particularly odd hazing rituals, to the embarrassment of his fratmates.
  • The irony is that Rocko is the only one that fills in the fratboy stereotype. His other fratmates don't go for drinking, ogling at girls, or pulling pranks (Well except for parties).
• Dudebro, on Code Monkeys, Dean did some cool stuff in college. What's up!

Real Life

• Hunter S. Thompson's entire life was like this. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is based on his real-life adventures, for example.
  • That's the only "gonzo" book of his published as fiction since, as he said, "only a fool or a linthead would admit to the hellbroth of felonies committed..."