Stoner film
subgenre of comedy films
Stoner film is a subgenre of comedy film based on marijuana themes, where recreational use often drives the plot, sometimes representing cannabis culture more broadly or intended for that audience.
Genre
The midnight movie scene in theaters of the 1970s revived the hectoring anti-drug propaganda film Reefer Madness (1936) as an ironic counterculture comedy. The broad popularity of Reefer Madness led to a new audience for extreme anti-drug films bordering on self-parody, including Assassin of Youth (1937), Marihuana (1936), and She Shoulda Said No! a.k.a. The Devil's Weed (1949).
The duo Cheech & Chong established the archetypal "stoner" comedy throughout the 1970s, taking their antics to the big screen for Up in Smoke in 1978, establishing the contemporary stoner film genre.
High Times magazine, founded in 1974, began sponsoring the first Stony Awards in 2000, celebrating stoner films and television, recognizing a broad scope of noteworthy cannabis media.
The enduring influence of Reefer Madness led to a musical comedy remake in 2005.
Common elements
Many stoner movies have certain elements and themes in common. The template involves protagonists who have marijuana, are attempting to find marijuana, or have some other task to complete.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Stoner film” as subgenre of comedy films. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as subgenre of comedy films. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q457832. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1937, 1949 and 1978.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stoner film” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.