From as long back as the 1940s, casino slot machines have been symbols that invoke themes of luck, chance, and playing into the unknown. In today’s cinema landscape, slot machines are mostly used to set up funny scenarios where characters stumble into luck, get themselves into ridiculous situations or misfortunes.

The humor, often overstated for emphasis, captures the confusion and commotion reminiscent of a casino floor—hence, slots are perfect props for directors looking to infuse some levity into their productions.

The Hangover: An Unexpected Win

This isn’t just a recent slot machine pop culture classic; the movie is The Hangover (2009). One of the bachelor party guys in the group, who eventually loses a missing groom, is Alan, the socially inept and clueless character played by Zach Galifianakis in this film set in Las Vegas.

He wakes up after this crazy night with no idea how to play games of chance and, inadvertently, stumbles into a casino. Still knowing nothing about how gambling works, he finds himself in front of a slots machines, gives the lever one pull—and wins the jackpot.

A sense of humor in the scene builds up from Alan’s total ignorance of the complete procedure, and that makes his win feel totally improbable and absurd. That’s what they’ve shown in the scene, though, the unpredictability of the slots; you can win it so easily while their very nature is ironic since, of course, Alan has no idea of this.

Ocean’s Thirteen and Their Slot Machine Scheme

Everyone knows Danny Ocean and his crew are masters of heists. Ocean's Thirteen (2007) is more heist thriller than anything, but it does have one iconic slot machine gag to bring some comic relief to the proceedings.

Late in the film, we see Ocean’s crew go about rigging the casino’s slot machines to pay out huge jackpots at a given time. It’s just one step in their master plan of casino sabotage, but it also features, quite surprisingly, a source of humor for most of the film’s ‘victims’ who are clueless casino patrons.

Humor in the scene is achieved through the hyper-organized crew’s interaction with totally oblivious patrons. As ridiculous as what happens when the machine begins to pay is thrilling, it’s equally light.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Wild Slot Machine Adventure

In the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas from 1998, the slot machine scene appears much more surreal and psychedelic, a better match to the bizarre narrative of the film itself.

Directed by Terry Gilliam, this film is a hallucinogenic journey through Las Vegas, with the slot machine scene embodying the chaotic, drug-fueled state of its protagonists. It makes it seem like a surreal, almost hallucinogenic visual experience, as if the particular warping of those images would lend life to those reels as they spin.

Humor here is not based on the usual punchlines and jokes but on nonsense and sight gags. This is weirdly combined with the exaggerated neon-lit colors of the animated reels in the bizarre scene, all fitting into the much bigger framework of the chaotic tone in the film.

Casino: Jackpot Frustration

While Casino (1995) is for the most part a crime drama, there are intermittent moments of dry humor, and this comes through the mise-en-scène present in the casino environment itself.

One of the funnier scenes in the movie plays out when an old lady wins a fortune on a slot machine that had been taking up space in Rothstein’s casino. Here, the scene sets out to demonstrate the high levels of control attributed to casinos against chances, which turns out to be a main aspect of the operations of slot machines.

All humor here is strictly situational and relatively subtle, particularly in the contrast between the rigidly controlled operations at the casino and something ‘complicated’ out of the blue

Showgirls: Slot Machines as Vegas Backdrop

In Showgirls (1995), while the movie isn’t devoted to slot machines, the flashy appearances of them feed into the absurd, kitsch flair that characterizes the movie. Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls is a willfully exaggerated vision of life in Las Vegas, and with the profusion of slot machine appearances in the film, it simply compounds the kitschy, humorous tenor of the film.

So, Vegas is exaggerated, and the constant slots add that layer of absurdity to up its cult status. It’s not some single gag or moment, but this whole set of background created by the slot machines that adds to the camp value of the thing.

Ultimately

Comedy has, for many years, been another venture that has heavily borrowed from the use of casino slot machines to portray that aspect of unpredictability that comes with gambling.

Whether it’s as hilarious as winning a jackpot by accident in The Hangover, the rigged chaos at the slots in Ocean’s Thirteen, or the psychedelic experience with a slot machine in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it is quite a flexible comic device.