Limburger Cheese - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• Limburger cheese is mentioned in several novels by P G Wodehouse.
• Limburger cheese is a main plot device in the 1877 short story "The Invalid's Story" and the posthumously produced play "Is He Dead," both by Mark Twain.
• In the 1918 movie Shoulder Arms, private Charlie Chaplin receives Limburger in a package from home. We know what kind of cheese it is because a title screams: "Limburger!" The smell is so pungent Charlie has to wear his gas mask.
• In the 1978 movie Marathon Man, Rosenbaum calls Szell's brother – who is blocking the street due to car trouble – a "Limburger-loving schmuck" after repeatedly yelling at him he should move.
• As a child, Charles Lindberg was given the nickname “Cheese” by local neighborhood boys as a taunt about his last name.
• Limburger was featured in various gags in the comedy shorts of The Three Stooges and in the The Little Rascals and Our Gang comedies. Typically, a sick character would accidentally replace a jar of salve with Limburger cheese. This led to the cheese being spread on the character's chest instead of the salve. The character would then walk in public only to be shooed away because of the stench while the character was oblivious to the fact that he just smeared Limburger cheese on himself. Limburger was also a commonly-used device in Golden Age cartoons, for example in the Warner Bros. cartoon Porky's Pastry Pirates. In another Warner Bros cartoon Sylvester the cat is tricked by Speedy Gonzales and is trapped in a storage room filled with Limburger cheese. Sylvester quickly becomes ill and turns green from the odor of the cheese.
• The 1979 song "Dance This Mess Around" by The B-52's features the repeatedly shouted line, "Why don't you dance with me?! I'm not no limburger!" in reference to this cheese's pungent odor. In the Pepe LePew Cartoon Really Scent a female cat which has an hereditary strip on her back like a skunk goes to a Limberger Cheese factory in order to attract Pepe. He has gone to a perfume factory to remove his scent and becomes accutly aware of hers causing a reversal of the usual order with Pepe running away instead of chasing. *A character in Samuel R Delany's The Mad Man describes the putrid sperm in his foreskin as "really first class Limburger".
• One of the many cheeses asked for in the Cheese Shop sketch by Monty Python.
• Lawrence Limburger is the name of a character in the animated TV series Biker Mice from Mars.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, Gwendolyn Novak surreptitiously places a piece of Limburger in a ventilation duct in the office of Station Administrator Sethos, turning down the thermostat so that the odor will not become apparent right away. When the office becomes uncomfortably cold, Sethos will turn up the heat, causing the cheese to melt.
• In William Dana Street's fanciful short story Giant Grummer's Christmas, the eponymous villain lives in a castle constructed entirely of Limburger cheese.
• Mighty Mouse's weakness is Limburger cheese, a la Superman's Kryptonite.
• In the 2001 game Luigi's Mansion, one of the boos is called Limbooger, a pun on Limburger.