Taunt

Taunting causes Peppino to strike a pose, freezing in place for 20 frames. Once the taunt ends, Peppino will return to whichever state he was before performing the taunt and restore any vertical and horizontal speed he had before. Taunting also has several properties that give the move a surprising number of practical applications.

Taunts cannot be canceled into anything, but it can be used to buffer several actions, such as a High Jump and Instaturn.

Fast Wakeup

Taunting near a stunned enemy will cause them to recover immediately. If they're able they will also immediately attack you or sound the alarm in Don’t Make a Sound. This property is quite useful whenever you need an enemy’s “cooperation” to progress quickly.

Parry

Probably the most notorious application of the taunt is how it doubles as a parry. If Peppino would be hurt while performing a taunt, he will instead retaliate, allowing you to kill your aggressor or reflect projectiles. This can be useful to tackle entrenched enemies head-on or avoid damage at the last moment.

Every single attack, projectile and hazard in the game (damaging or non-damaging), as well as every damage source in the game can be parried, with only the following exceptions:

• Electricity outlets.
• Cows.
• Vigilante’s Dynamite^[1].
• Crust Cove's water and water currents.
• Kicking machines.
• Grandpa Pepper.
• Fake Peppino’s grab.
• Fake Peppino’s headless run, but only from his clones
• Fake Peppino during the chase.
• King Ghost’s electricity outlet traps.
• King Ghost’s anchor traps.
• King Ghost’s kicking machine traps.
• Don’t Make a Sound’s monsters.
• WAR’s plane bombs^[1].
• Pizzahead’s jump.
• Pizzahead's sumo stomp earthquake.

^[1]The attack itself is intangible, but the explosion it causes can be parried.

Interestingly, the following can also be parried:

• Bombs thrown by Pizza Box Goblins or picked up from bomb spawners, even though doing so does nothing
• Fake Peppino’s headless run, but only from the real boss.
• Pizzascare’s Ghost Cheeseslimes, though doing so will not kill them even while under the effects of the cross powerup.
• WAR’s Pizza Soldier’s bullets, even though reflected bullets do not kill enemies and can still hurt Peppino.
• Pizzahead’s sumo stomp attack, which has a hitbox on the boss itself that can be parried.

Supertaunt

After getting a 10+ combo, you will gain access to Peppino’s super taunt. You can tell that you have a super taunt available if you can see an electric effect around Peppino. You can then perform the move by pressing UP and TAUNT, killing all enemies currently on the screen. Note that enemies on the edges of the screen may not always get caught.

After having used a super taunt, you can obtain another one by killing 10 more enemies in the same combo, not counting the ones that you killed with your previous super taunt. This can be repeated any number of times.

Stalling

Performing a taunt freezes you in place for a brief moment. This can be used to extend the air time of a jump, or done during a dash to halt your movement for a moment without having to stop completely.

Animation Shortening

When you perform Taunt on the same frame as another action (ie. Uppercut, Shotgun Shot), it will randomly skip between 0 and 10 frames of the other action, allowing you to recover faster or even perform Updoor in places you otherwise could not. However, due to the limited impact and sheer unreliability of this trick, its currently known applications are very limited.

Technical explanation

All of Peppino's different taunt sprites are stored as a single animation. Whenever you perform a taunt, the game picks one of those sprites at random and freezes it for the 20-frame duration of the taunt. This seems to make it so which of these 10 taunts is randomly chosen and how far along it happens to be in this "animation" causes other moves to be shortened by a corresponding number of frames.

TODO: Taunts list