YEE-HAW!
So Sgt. McKickass has a cigar in his mouth, and brings up a stick of dynamite; lighting the fuse off his cigar. A puff of smoke from his mouth, a sly grin, and he's off walking forward, tossing the dynamite behind him. Usually includes McKickass performing an Unflinching Walk.
Can also be done with a cigarette or (conceivably) a pipe, but cigars just look cooler.
Occasionally it may be done inadvertently by carelessly tossing a still-smoldering smoke into an ill-placed box of dynamite or fireworks and igniting the fuses.
Not to be confused with Explosive Cigar. A means of subverting Hard-to-Light Fire. Couldn't Find a Lighter is the inverse. Compare to Reusable Lighter Toss.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Chapter 177 of GTO: The Early Years, Kashiya knocks over Takagi's bike and flicks his cigarette onto it, causing it to explode.
- This is how Shikamaru sets off a huge array of explosive tags during his fight with Hidan in the Naruto manga.
- In the One Piece anime, this is how the Whitebeard Pirates' 15th division commander Fossa ignites his sword.
Comic Books
- In Grimm Fairy Tales 2019 Holiday Special, a gang of bullies use a cigarette to light the fuse on a firecracker that they then use to blow up a young boy's snowman.
- Jonah Hex has done this on occasion, usually just before blasting outlaws out of an otherwise unassailable position.
- Jo, Zette and Jocko: In The Valley of the Cobras, Ramahjuni inadvertently lights the fuse of a stick of dynamite by throwing away his cigarette butt.
- Destination New York combines this with Explosive Stupidity: the warden of the Deserted Island that Jo & Zette crash-land on is smoking a pipe. He inspects some barrels that have washed ashore, but because his nose is bandaged up following a crab attack, he can't smell anything. It turns out what's leaking from one of the barrels is fuel. Kaboom!
- In Sherwood, Texas #1, Gisburn uses a cigarette to light the fuse on the dynamite he uses to bury Rob Hood in the old copper mine.
- In Sillage, one of the Armada agents does it while on a mission on an alien planet, with the two fuses tied in front of his chest and a swivel gun under each arm. And riding a local equivalent of a pterodactyl.
Fan Works
- Dead-Eyed Tsuna: What Gokudera uses in order to light his dynamite more effectively. It doesn't help that it fits his idea of a mature, suave Mafioso.
- In Muffet The Mom, Muffet often puts her tremendous stogie to good use by lighting fuses, candles, and other flammable things with it.
Films — Animated
- The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie (1981). Sylvester the Cat hides Tweety under an empty can. When the mobster Rocky finds Tweety under the can, he lights a firecracker with his cigarette and places under the can for Sylvester to find ("Catty Cornered").
- In The Three Caballeros, Jose Carioca lights the fireworks on Donald Duck's bull costume with his cigar.
Films — Live-Action
- Clint Eastwood has done this on several occasions, such as in Two Mules for Sister Sara and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
- Dan Aykroyd does this in Coneheads when he lights the fuse to a tiny homemade firework, leading to a Moment of Awesome.
- In Cowboys & Aliens, after one of the bandits drops all the matches off a cliff, he asks how he's going to light the dynamite. The answer is the lit cigarillo he's been smoking the whole scene.
- "Crocodile" Dundee 2: Mick does this at the beginning of the film when he's in a boat, lighting a rolled cigarette that he then uses to light a stick of dynamite. After he tosses the stick into the water, it's revealed that he's blast fishing in New York Harbor.
- Dead in Tombstone: Washington does this when the Blackwater Gang storms the prison at the start of the film, and Guerrero does as he is escaping from the mine on a wagon.
- The Deserter: Despite being shot and fatally wounded, the Chaplain uses his dying strength to touch his cigar to the fuse to set off the dynamite to trigger the avalanche. He even enjoys one final puff on it before the explosion.
- The final scene of Django Unchained has the title character lighting the fuse on some dynamite he's rigged to blow Candyland sky-high using the cigarette holder belonging to the late Calvin J. Candie.
- In A Fistful of Dollars, Ramone uses a cigar to light the fuse on the dynamite that blows up the wall around the Baxter house.
- In The Gatling Gun, Lt. Malcolm has makeshift black grenades made out of gunpowder and bean tins. Malcolm, Runner, Tin Pot, Jim and Bolland throw them into the Apache camp: using Bolland's cigars to light them.
- Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: While translating the tablet, Helena takes Dr. Voller's lit cigarette off him and takes a puff. She then holds it behind her back where Indy is able to touch it to the fuse of the stick of dynamite she has hidden in her pocket.
- The Magnificent Seven (2016): Faraday does this with a stick of dynamite just before he blows up the Gatling gun, and himself.
- In Sabata, Carrincha uses his his cigar to light the fuse on the dynamite after they have trapped Stengel's men in the box canyon.
- Sky Bandits: While robbing banks, Barney lights a dynamite fuse off his cigarette. Much later, he rides through the German base on a bicycle, smoking a cigar and casually lighting fuses and tossing the dynamite behind him.
- Porthos does this during the assault on the Tower of London in The Three Musketeers (2011).
- Treasure Hunter have one such moment in the desert chase. Fat Comic Relief Pork Rib finds a sack full of dynamites at the back of the jeep he's escaping in, but couldn't find a lighter. His partner, Master Hua, in the driver's seat then hands Pork Rib his lit cigarette telling him to "blow those bastards up".
- The hero in the Bollywood film Trishul lights the fuse to some dynamite using his cigarette.
- Comrade Sukhov in White Sun of the Desert does the inverted version: He lights his cigarette off a dynamite fuse.
- In The Wild Bunch, Pike uses his cigar to light the fuse on a stick of dynamite when threatening the general.
Literature
- In "The Six Maledictions" in The Hound of the D'Urbervilles, it's noted of Irish revolutionary bomber Tyrone Mountmain that if he's smoking a cigar, his dynamite is ready to hand.
- In Jerry of the Islands by Jack London, Van Horn has a lit cigar in his mouth for this purpose.
- Done by bad guy Santone in Rio Guns by J.T. Edson.
- Richard Sharpe borrows a cigar from another officer when he has no slow-match to light fuses with.
Live-Action TV
- In the Angel episode "Redefinition", currently Unfettered Angel uses the cigarette he's been smoking to show that he's in a morally-questionable mood to set Darla and Drusilla on fire with petrol.
- The A-Team:
- In one episode the team jury-rig a flamethrower, but fail to jury-rig a pilot light. Instead the instructions are: throw the cigar in front of you, then open up.
- In "The Children of Jamestown", Murdock was flying a helicopter and dropping sticks of dynamite that he would light with a cigar.
- Yet another had the team captured and Face was put in front of a firing squad, where he requested a last cigarette. As the baddies prepared to kill him, Hannibal and company puncture a hole in a large gas tank, which Face lit by spitting out the cigarette at it.
- Robert Culp lights a Cartoon Bomb off his cigarette in the opening credits of I Spy.
- The 'lighting a pool of gasoline' variant was tested on Mythbusters at one point. While they were able to demonstrate that a lit cigarette does burn at the temperature necessarily to ignite gas, their best efforts couldn't make it actually work. Thus, it was deemed 'Plausible' rather than 'Confirmed'.
- The Pretender: In the episode "Homefront", Jarod adopts the persona of an arms dealer, and takes up chomping enormous cigars. Near the end of the episode, he uses his cigar to light the fuse on a diversionary explosion, then throws it away and is cigarless thereafter.
Newspaper Comics
- Parodied in an old comic called Crock: We see this guy lighting a bomb with his cigar and throwing something in the next panel. Then, there's an explosion and the following dialogue ensues:
"What have you done?!""... Hit the enemy with my cigar?"
Tabletop Games
- Call of Cthulhu supplement Terror from the Stars, section "Field Manual of the Theron Marks Society". Theron Marks himself is stated to always have a lit cigar in his mouth during adventures in order to light sticks of dynamite.
- Ogre leadbelchers in Warhammer.
Video Games
- The cannon crabs in Alice: Madness Returns all do this.
- Sheriff Lonestar from Awesomenauts. Lonestar is a great fan of shooting things, but sometimes bullets just won't cut it. So to make sure it stays down, Lonestar will chuck cigar-lit sticks of dynamite at his foes!
- Slight variation in Call of Juarez: Gunslinger: Henry Plummer uses his pipe to light fuses.
- In Final Fantasy VII, one of Cid's Limit Breaks has him do this.
- Western-themed Half-Life 2 Game Mod Fistful of Frags also uses this for when the player is throwing dynamite around, despite none of the character models being seen with a cigar at any other time. They look exactly like the stogies favoured by Clint Eastwood's character from the "Dollars" trilogy, which is probably not coincidental.
- In Half-Life: Opposing Force, the HECU Engineer does this with a cutting torch.
- In Game & Watch: Mario's Bombs Away, this can happen by mistake to the bomb Mario's holding thanks to a careless fellow troop if he doesn't watch out.
- Left 4 Dead: Bill can be seen doing this with a molotov cocktail in the trailer for "The Sacrifice".
- In Mad Dog McCree, Mad Dog straps the Prospector to a barrel of TNT and uses his cigar to light the fuse. The player must shoot the fuse to save the Prospector.
- A boatman does this to a light a box full of pipe bombs in the Dark Water level of Metro: Last Light.
- Outlaws: The player character can chuck dynamite around. Alt-fire lights the fuse, and the animation consists of the PC removing his stogie from his mouth and applying it to the fuse.
- Skullgirls: 'Toon fighter Peacock does this with her level 3 No-Holds-Barred Beatdown super attack: She wraps her enemy in a burlap sack and calls on a group of her personal Mook army to help her smash the living daylights out of the opponent. She then walks away, puffing on a cigar as a Cartoon Bomb crony continues to beat the sack with a baseball bat. She then invokes this trope by casually tossing the cigar over her shoulder, detonating the bomb underling.
Webcomics
- Referenced in Concerned when Gordan Frohman meets his fellow rebels (who all introduce themselves by their character archetypes). One of them claims to be a demolitions expert who'll do exactly this.
Western Animation
- A Cool Cat cartoon had the title character confronted by Col. Rimfire and as a last request asks for a light for his cigarette. The Colonel obliges, not knowing that Cool Cat's cigarette is actually the fuse for a rocket he's planted against the Colonel's back.
- Love, Death & Robots. Played with in "Blind Spot". One of the robots is a cigar-chomper with a lighter built into his thumb. He later uses this thumb lighter to ignite a stream of fuel.
Real Life
- Silent movie star Harold Lloyd was holding what he thought was a prop bomb and lit the fuse with a cigar. It wasn't a prop, and he lost two fingers on one hand when the bomb exploded. Safety Last! indeed.
- Fairly common for grenadier soldiers from mid-17th century and until hand grenades with fuses became obsolete. Though they usually smoked pipes, not cigars. And yes, those grenades were about equally dangerous to friends and enemies.
- This actually is a much safer and recommended way to light consumer fireworks than using a lighter or matches, which may spark. Although you are recommended to bring the cigar to the firework, not the firework to your face.
- Multiple videos from the Syrian Civil War show regime soldiers in helicopters and cargo aircraft lighting the fuses of barrel bombs with a lit cigar before rolling them out the back ramp. This is out of necessity, as the draft of the wind often extinguishes matches and lighters.
