While in an elevator within the
Spiders From Mars casino,
Jet informs
Spike that they are in a
no smoking area. Spike responds by swallowing his lit cigarette, leaving Jet
nonplussed. Shortly after exiting the elevator the two have another exchange which Spike concludes by spitting the
coffin nail into an elaborate casino ashtray.
Later in the episode Spike suprises Faye by swallowing the casino chip she thought he was going to give her. After returning to the Bebop and interrogating Faye, Spike once again coughs up the foreign object.
Cartoon character shenanigans, right? Well if the usenet post I found today is to be believed, both of these tricks are actually possible. The person who wrote this post compared the following incident to the two I just described from this episode:
I used to work moving office furniture way back when (circa 1990) and there was a guy who had spent 20 years in the Navy and was now working with us. He was a peculiar sort of chap and one night after a 16 hour move, we all sat around at the office drinking beer and this guy swallowed a lit cigarette, talked clearly for about 5 minutes and then spit it back up. He did the same trick with some nickles and pennies.
This was posted to a binaries group, so you won't find it in Google's archive. The author seemed pretty convinced that the guy who did this actually kept the objects lodged in his throat. Even if it was just prestidigitation though it's still a neat trick and an interesting piece of trivia.