Fawlty Towers Plot

""It's always better to lie than to have a complicated discussion!""

- Chandler, Friends

In a Fawlty Towers Plot, one of the characters tells an initial lie, then other lies must be told in order to sustain the original lie, until the entire construct of falsehoods becomes too ridiculous and convoluted to hold together, and comes crashing down upon its creators in the most destructive and humiliating way imaginable.

A standard sitcom plot since the days of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, it was perfected in 1975 and 1979 by John Cleese and Connie Booth for the Fawlty Towers television series. It is a specialized form of Farce.

The Fawlty Towers Plot Lie is usually exacerbated when a suspicious significant other chooses to Pull the Thread. May lead to the need to Maintain the Lie. Compare Snowball Lie where the lie drags others into the scheme, willingly or not.

If this kind of plot is executed badly, or is misapplied in a dramatic context, it can become a glaring example of Poor Communication Kills.

Anime and Manga
"Takahiro: What do I do, Usagi?! Even after I told him I was a bear-morphing Martian bestowed with the military order to save humanity, and for that had to leave behind his precious family and friends, when a distortion in the time-space continuum led to a time rip back to the age of civil war where aliens were hiding, and in order to defeat them, had to take up alliance with a panda-morphing Saturnian...!! Now...now, he won't believe me again! Why?!!"
 * The entire plot of the anime Uta Kata is based on a Fawlty Towers Plot. However, instead of going for comedy, the life of lies that the main character is forced to lead causes her to hate herself more and more as the series goes on.
 * Love Hina, episode 25: To avoid having to take up the leadership of her martial arts style before she thinks she's ready, Motoko forces Keitaro to masquerade as her boyfriend. In her school, falling in love renders her ineligible to take up the leadership, as it had her elder sister, who gave it up to marry. It backfires when her examiner, her elder sister, uncovers the plot, and forces Motoko to either win a duel against her, or actually marry Keitaro!
 * Motoko does not learn her lesson, for late in the manga when she fails her university admission tests she does it again... to the same sister... with similar results.
 * Not to mention the basic plot of Love Hina is based on this trope - namely, that Keitaro is a Toudai student, when in reality he's a dropout trying desperately to make it there to meet the girl he made a childhood promise to to get in there with that he hasn't seen in over 15 years. This lie is unraveled before the second manga volume, but it's still basically what gets the story going.
 * One should keep in mind though that it was the girls, particularly Kitsune, that pushed this on him before he had a chance to explain himself when he first arrived. All he did was mention "Tokyo U" and they generally assumed he was a student from there.
 * Welcome to The NHK's protagonist does this, frequently. Despite that fact that clearly nobody believes him, he tries to go with it anyway.
 * In the Junjou Romantica manga, Takahiro convinces Misaki to obey him by telling him he's a tanuki who will have to leave if Misaki makes him too sad. As Misaki becomes more and more skeptical, Takahiro creates bigger and bolder lies, until...

Film

 * The Birdcage starts off with a small lie about a woman's soon-to-be in-laws to get the ball rolling. A pair of gay nightclub owners now have to hide their identities from an ultra-convservative US senator who's looking to make sure her in-laws are a "wholesome" family after a controversy involving the senator's colleague dying in bed with a prostitute. You had better believe Hilarity Ensues.
 * This is the basis of Goodbye Lenin, where a woman in East Berlin misses the fall of the Wall while in a temporary coma, and her family try to keep the news from her for fear the shock would kill her. They go as far as making fake news segments and digging through garbage for communist goods. It ends with
 * Another German film, Wahrheit oder Pflicht (as in "truth or dare"), has a girl who fails school but pretends to still attend. Things go downhill from there.
 * The plot of Fargo is a Deconstruction of the Fawlty Towers Plot, playing it almost as much for drama as for very dark laughs.
 * Just Go with It is about a plastic surgeon's assistant pretending to be his soon-to-be-ex-wife in order to avoid coming clean about his womanizing, which spirals out of control, eventually involving her children, his cousin, her old college rival, and a semi-impromptu Hawaiian vacation.
 * Sex Drive is basically made of this trope, with more than half the characters spending more than half the movie lying, and frantically stacking lies on top of lies.
 * Easy A is also based heavily on this trope, with the entire film revolving around Olive attempting to keep her lies concealed, which eventually builds to ridiculous consequences.
 * Meet the Parents rests on Greg trying so hard to impress his girlfriend's family that he ends up telling little lies that lead to more complicated problems when those lies have to be better explained and Greg just ends up digging himself a deeper hole. One particular instance had him claiming to have grown up on a farm and leads to him telling a story of how he once milked a cat.

Literature

 * This is basically Cersei Lannister's hazy idea of being The Chessmaster, in practice.
 * Nimrod Pennyroyal in The Hungry City Chronicles.
 * Miles Vorkosigan of the titular Vorkosigan Saga becomes Admiral Naismith through just such a chain of lies, inventing a mission in order to find a role for a Barayaran deserter, pretending to be a mercenary leader when he gets caught smuggling arms, building the pretence when he gets caught in a war... and then it all goes horribly un-funny when he realises that the end of his lies is that he's acquired a private army, which is the worst form of treason for a Barayaran Lord. Drama ensues.
 * This is far from the only example, mind you. The stories often show Miles getting more and more perturbed as he wades deeper and deeper into the mire of lies he's making, even to the extent of nearly neaving a nervous breakdown in the story above. He generally relies on "forward momentum" (more lies) to get out of trouble.
 * Used in the Jennings books far too often to list examples.
 * Subverted/averted in a few of the historical mystery Brother Cadfael series by Ellis Peters, in a few ways. One, the truth always outs to at least Cadfael, and often to his friend the sherriff and his abbott. Two, at times women need a place to hide/escape and the head of the convent is willing to mislead people by telling parts of the truth. Justified in that marriage by rape- or even the scanadal of attempted rape- would cause harm to many.

Live-Action TV
"Jeff: I've got the key to the gates of paradise... but I've got too many legs!"
 * Fawlty Towers, quite obviously.
 * This was the basis for the Thanksgiving episode of Small Wonder: Jamie claimed that his parents had separated, hoping to get himself and Vicki into a Thanksgiving ski trip for latchkey children.
 * In an episode of Only Fools and Horses, Del Boy sends a painting Rodney created as a teenager to a competition. When it wins the children's prize (a holiday for the child and his parents), he confirms that Rodney is fourteen. This necessitates other lies, such as not telling Rodney and Cassandra why it's a holiday for three until they've arrived, claiming he and Cassandra are Rodney's parents, and preventing Rodney and Cassandra from exposing his scheme by insisting to them both (separately) that the other is really enjoying the break.
 * And paid off brilliantly when, at the end of the episode, Del is in possession of a winning lottery ticket - but is forced to give up the money because the ticket is in Rodney's name, and local law states that 14-year-olds are not allowed to gamble. At this point they are unable to break the lie, because Del went to the trouble of forging all their travel documents.
 * Happens a lot in Friends. And I mean a lot. Adding examples would overtake the page.
 * As with Friends, adding Seinfeld examples would clutter the page. It mostly involves George.
 * It happens a lot in Curb Your Enthusiasm, especially when the lie is being kept from Cheryl or Susie. They always find out.
 * About 75% of all pre-teen and teen oriented comedies have these plots for a majority of their episodes. Notable offenders are Saved by the Bell and the Disney Channel original series such as Hannah Montana.
 * In Glee, Mr. Schuester's wife Terri's fake pregnancy becomes one of these very fast. She even manages to gain the compliance of her OB/GYN. Her need to produce an actual baby leads her to Quinn, whose (actual) teenage pregnancy is something of a Fawlty Towers Plot itself. Eventually Mr. Schuester catches on, however, depriving the audience of seeing how she would manage faking labor and birth.
 * In The Adventures of Lano and Woodley episode "One Simple Task", Frank tells a series of ever-increasing lies to hide the fact he forgot to book a place at a caravan park, which ends with "I am an alien!"
 * Coupling does this a lot. Chief example: Patrick lies to his current girlfriend, who's bisexual, about how he has no interest in Sally, his old flame, because she's a lesbian (she is no such thing). Cross talk ensues.
 * Jeff is also a master of this - on one occasion his Digging Yourself Deeper ends up with him claiming to have a false leg, she gives him a key to her flat and implies there will be .. goings on .. later, but of course he can't take off his trousers and ...

"Daphne: Wait! You don't understand! We're not the horrible people you think we are! Frasier: No! The truth is, we've been lying to you all night!"
 * Subverted in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, which hinges around a single, simple, fully successful white lie told by Leonard to Penny about not attending a play she was the lead in (due to her horrific singing). Sheldon then (once more) assumes that the rest of the world thinks like him, and proceeds to create an overly intricate series of lies involving a fictional drug-addict cousin (with backstory and a series of internet pages) because it is, in his opinion, 'airtight'. It actually works perfectly, but Leonard leaves to watch a video of Penny's performance (and singing) in the play because it's the lesser option to watching Sheldon argue with the Theater/Physics double major he hired to play the part of 'Lee', Sheldon's fake drug-addict cousin, who at this point is trying to work adolescent abuse at the hands of a priest into Lee's backstory. The lie never crashes.
 * Played with in the American version of The Office, in which Michael Scott's initial lies are always painfully obvious to everyone, but he nonetheless tries to support them with more lies and stall tactics, each more transparent and pathetic than the last.
 * Frasier had a lot of these, and hung a lampshade on it by having Daphne suggest (during one between Frasier and Niles in "Rivals") that they just agree to sit the other down and have one open, frank conversation. Frasier shoots her down.
 * Subverted, however, in one episode where Daphne's ex-boyfriend re-enters her life, clearly itching to propose marriage to her despite their five-year separation. In desperation to let him down gently, Daphne claims that she's married to Niles. Over the course of the episode, Frasier's apartment becomes Daphne and Niles', Frasier becomes the infertile husband of Roz, who becomes Maris, and Martin becomes an ex-astronaut. Incredibly, despite the complete implausibility of everything he's being told (thanks to Martin who - annoyed at being patronised - has delighted in making things much more complicated than they have to be), Daphne's boyfriend believes every single word he's told, and eventually storms out not because he discovers the truth, but because he's become so convinced by their lies that he's convinced they're all horrible people. Leads to this classic line of dialogue:

"Lucy: What lesson have you learned? Lee: To always be honest and truthful. Now, get out there and pretend I'm blind, Tim's disabled, Daisy has amnesia and you've got Tourette's."
 * They eventually lampshade their use of the trope in the 10th season episode "Daphne Does Dinner". The episodes starts at the crash of one of these plots, and although we never get to see it, it apparently involved Frasier having Tourette syndrome, flaming kababs, a burning Toupée, Martin as an Italian count, and a goat in the kitchen. In a rare case of Genre Savviness Daphne claims that the constant party complications comes from the involvement of the titular character(and his brother), and decides to to ban him from any involvement in the party she's planning.
 * Happens often in The Worst Week of My Life. If Howard ever tells a lie—even if it's a small, little white one—things will rapidly get out of hand and collapse in on him at the worst possible moment. It's just one of the many ways in which the universe is determined to make him suffer by refusing to let him get away with anything.
 * Subverted in an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine where Garak notes the true fault behind a Fawlty Towers Plot collapse: "don't tell the same lie twice!"
 * An episode of Not Going Out did this, with Lee and Tim having to make up more and more ridiculous lies, culminating in this (slightly paraphrased) quote:

"Annie: Well, we could just get a new DVD, record fake commentary for it and- Troy: (shouting) DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY TV SHOWS HAVE DONE THAT? BECAUSE ABED DOES AND HE'LL FIND OUT!"
 * An Everybody Loves Raymond episode features Ray and Debra lying that they didn't have dinner with Marie since they were making sure an important football game for Ray to write about was taped properly. Frank then asks to watch the tape, and things build from there until their washing machine is destroyed from Frank's attempts to fix it ("This one part won't go back") and Marie easily figures everything out.
 * In Mash, Hawkeye uses his imaginary friend Tuttle to sign off on donations to an orphanage. Then people want to meet Tuttle for themselves, with Hawkeye trying to avoid it or convince them they already had. Ultimately, Tuttle "dies" of a parachuting accident when he is to be presented with an award.
 * The best part of this episode is how everyone gradually claims to be good friends with Tuttle, in order not to feel left out.
 * Or at the very end, where Hawkeye creates another imaginary person to take Tuttle's place.
 * Or during the credits, where the lie went meta, and Tuttle was credited "As Himself."
 * In the Fraggle Rock episode "Boober's Quiet Day", Boober lies in an attempt to get out of caring for a pet monster, and through a series of escalating lies, eventually winds up impersonating the Old Gypsy Lady.
 * Subverted in Better Off Ted when Ted tells a lie about the jabberwocky project and everyone is sucked into it by the corporate machinery. Ted wants to tell the truth. He is then reminded that if it turns out there is no jabberwocky project, they are all going to lose their jobs.
 * House plays this for drama in "Instant Karma," wherein.
 * Seriously, people, doesn't every episode of Threes Company use this trope?
 * The show's premise is built on this trope; Mr. Roper (and later Mr. Furley) only allow Jack to stay with the girls because they think he's gay.
 * One of the more memorable instances of this trope in the show was an episode in which Jack persuaded Teri to tell "just one little lie" to a coworker she feared was creepily interested in her and that one little lie culminated in Jack having to wear a cast and pretend to be Teri's husband and Larry and Janet having to pretend to be a French-speaking couple.
 * In the The Suite Life on Deck episode "The Defiant Ones", Cody misses a homework assignment due to having spent a romantic evening with Bailey the night before. Unable to bear the shame of receiving a single bad grade, he fabricates the excuse that he was caring for Bailey, who'd injured her ankle. This leads to Bailey reluctantly faking an injury, and eventually the entire student body of Seven Seas Highs being drawn into a web of lies that is increasingly complex and ridiculous. It all comes crashing down the next day when Cody misses yet another assignment, having been too busy maintaining the farce.
 * Another episode features Zack lying to Maya about how he'll attend her poetry reading even though he intends to be at a video game night with Cody, Woody, and Moseby. His efforts to be in both places at once predictably fail, but Maya takes it pretty well, all things considered.
 * Naturally a staple of That's My Bush!, since the series was an Affectionate Parody of sitcom cliches.
 * The Nanny episode "The Butler, The Husband, The Wife and Her Mother" has Fran Fine making Niles, the Sheffield family butler, pretend to be Maxwell Sheffield and married to Fran as an attempt for Fran's mother Sylvia to one-up her in-laws.
 * In an episode of Green Wing, in an attempt to pass herself off as a social-conscious activist, Caroline tells her co-workers that she breaks into pig-farms at night to free pigs. When questioned further, she reveals that she hides them at her sister's apartment, which is like a farm "in the air" and takes them for walks in the weekend. By the end of the episode she's trying to get in touch with a petting zoo in order to hire out a pig so she can take pictures of it with herself in a balaclava to prove her claims.
 * In a non-comedy example, there is the plot of Season 2 of Sons of Anarchy, in which Gemma is attacked and raped by a rival gang. She doesn't want to tell the club about it for two reasons, one is that she is too nervous, and the second is that she is scared that they will do it again if they find out she's told them. She tells a number of characters as well as the police but does not tell her husband. It is only when her husband and son fall out that she tells them. After a long wait, ass is kicked.
 * The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: Todd's blatant and escalating lies drive most of the plot. Among other things he insists: His father died last week, He grew up in Leeds (a city he picked at random based on an an album cover), he is allergic to nuts (going so far as faking anaphalactic shock and taking unnecessary epinephrine shots), and he lives in the houses of Parliament (he claims it has apartments now).
 * Completely routed in Community after Annie accidentally breaks Abed's one-of-a-kind DVD of The Dark Knight.


 * This is played for drama in Coronation Street, starting when John Stape lies about his identity so that he can teach. It Gets Worse.

Theatre

 * Older Than Steam: A common plot of Shakespeare, particularly his comedies (although not exclusively: Romeo and Juliet would probably qualify).
 * Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, drew up a magnificent Fawlty Towers Plot in Volpone, about a man who pretends to be dying so he can swindle people, who think that giving him gifts will make them his heirs.
 * Jonson's slightly less famous "The Alchemist" is even better: three con artists have half a dozen customers all expecting different magic/alchemy jobs to be done for them, each of them by a different persona of all three grifters; the customers start dropping by the house at the same time, creating collisions between multiple Fawlty Towers Plots with people being stuffed into closets—and then when somebody else hears them yelling, they're told it's the moaning of the spirits.
 * Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest plays with this as the two male protagonist characters both lie about their name, calling themselves Ernest. The two female protagonists both think they are dating the same man named Ernest, and react initially badly when the truth is revealed. The play subverts the trope in that the lie told by Jack is not actually a lie, his given name was Ernest, but having been lost as a baby by his nanny, he did not know it.
 * Of course, the revelations themselves also take place one after the other, flipping the plot around as much as the initial lies. On realising that he was an orphan, Jack's fiance's guardian would refuse to allow them to marry...if not for the fact that she has just now realised that Jack was the child lost from her years ago, making her much happier about Jack marrying his fiance...despite them being legally brother and sister now.
 * Although the farces by Georges Feydeau led this kind of convoluted plot to the top of its refinement, the french Ur Example is to be found in Pierre Corneille's 1643 comedy Le Menteur ('The Liar').

Video Games

 * In Clannad, Sunohara is trying to convince Tomoyo to hurry up and tries saying that if they don't go faster, their parents will get worried. Tomoya points out that Sunohara's parents live in Hokkaido, so he backtracks and says he means Misae. Which might have worked if he hadn't tried covering that up by saying he reminds her of her son (Misae is 23) then having it pointed out that she's single. Sunohara claims the son is illegitimate and has to come up with a name for the son that isn't Misao. This marked the birth of Sagara Missile. Sunohara is a terrible liar.

Web Comics

 * A lot of Terror Island's humor relies on a total inversion of this: the characters give these sorts of convoluted explanations when they are either completely unneccesary or the explanations incriminate them more than the original lie would: this is a good example.
 * Subverted in a Questionable Content strip: to avoid his ex, Sven claims Faye is his girlfriend. Faye promptly quashes the attempt.
 * Hitmen for Destiny has this in spades, mostly from Fusk, Vorte, and Jymre. There are examples where the web of lies doesn't "come crashing down" but is [awkwardly] stabilised. In particular,
 * In El Goonish Shive Justin is finding himself in one of these after trying to explain his connection to Cheerleadra. Mr Verres has since told him that the best answer to all such questions is simply "I don't know", not a convoluted explanation that you need to keep spinning. Despite this advice, when it turns out his boss suspects Cheerleadra is really Elliot, his immediate reaction is to devise a Zany Scheme involving Grace shapeshifted into Elliot while Elliot is Cheerleadra. He gets talked out of it, though.

Western Animation
"Butters: Now gosh darn it, you! You listen here! Now I am sick of these harmless lies and l-little white lies. You know, you can call a shovel an ice-cream machine, but it's still a shovel, Mom and Dad. Ah, and you can call a lie whatever you want, but it's still a no-good stinkin' lie! And when you start coverin' up one lie with another lie, now that's when you get into real trouble! Boy I've, I've just about had it up to here with you two!"
 * On an early Family Guy episode, Peter doesn't want to tell Lois that he's lost his job, which leads to a Fawlty Towers Plot.
 * The episode "Bus the Two of Us" on Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends has this, with Bloo stealing the Fosters bus for a joyride and getting Wilt and Coco to come up with lie after lie to make sure no one else realizes this.
 * An Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy episode had one of these, where the Eds accidentally break Kevin's window and Eddy blames it on a group of mysterious creatures called "Monkey Boys". Naturally, everyone else decides to investigate, leading to the Eds going to increasing lengths to fabricate evidence the Monkey Boys' existence. In a slight variation, Edd is Genre Savvy enough to know that this can only end badly and tries to no avail to convince Eddy to confess the truth.
 * Kim Possible wanted to go to the party in order to spend some time with the boy she liked, so in order to go to that party she lied to Ron about spending time with her parents, and she lied to her parents about spending time with Ron. Inconveniently, the Phlebotinum of the episode was activated by stress...such as her telling a lie. The episode ended with a Lampshade of Broken Aesops as a supervillain, personal assassin and an assassin for hire all act disgusted at the thought of somebody lying to their friends and family - while being arrested for theft, assault, etc.
 * The Flintstones. At one point, Fred lied to Wilma so he could go out to a poker game and won a decent amount of money, which he claimed to have found. Then things sort of snowballed. (In the end, he manages to get out of the deep stuff with yet another lie - but loses the money anyway)
 * The Simpsons had a lot of fun with this in the short segment in "22 Short Films about Springfield" where Principal Skinner accidentally burns the dinner he hoped to impress Superintendent Chalmers with and tries to pass off fast food hamburgers as his own cooking. ("I thought we were having steamed clams." "Oh, no, I said steamed hams. That's what I call hamburgers.") It ends with him trying to pass off a kitchen fire as the Aurora Borealis.
 * Subverted in the sense that.
 * South Park take it Up to Eleven in Pinewood Derby, where Stan and his father lie about cheating at a Pinewood Derby, and it ends up with.
 * Another South Park example is in Butters' Very Own Episode, where Butters' mother "kills" Butters and his family comes up with a lie to cover up the "murder" and his father's infidelity. It leads to a Calling the old man and woman out scene for Butters:


 * In the Fanboy and Chum Chum episode "Sigmund the Sorcerer", Kyle lied to Sigmund about being a skilled, successful wizard, not having foreseen that Sigmund would invite himself into his house for dinner. In desperate attempts to impress him, he tells several more lies in the process, including claiming that Fanboy and Chum Chum are his "elf servants", not human friends. Sigmund later suggested buying them, for the price of Kyle returning to the Milkweed academy for wizards (which he has been expelled from) and Kyle agreed - at least until he learned that Sigmund intended on blowing them up. After that, he admitted to not being as high-achieving as he painted himself at first.
 * EVERY EPISODE OF Maya and Miguel.
 * My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, "Green Isn't Your Color": Fluttershy becomes a fashion model, and Rarity tries to be supportive, despite secretly being insanely envious of Fluttershy's success. Meanwhile, Fluttershy is secretly growing tired of being in the spotlight, but keeps up with it because Rarity's being so supportive and she doesn't want to disappoint her. They both confide their true feelings in Twilight Sparkle, who drives herself crazy keeping the two sets of secrets a secret.
 * Subverted in "Sweet and Elite." Rarity has to keep lying to people in order to get into high-society, and eventually, attend two parties at once. Her lies become increasingly blatant and nonsensical, such as "I have to go do the thing with the stuff." However, in the end she gets away with most of the lies, and doesn't suffer any repercussions apart from stress.
 * There's also "Party of One" where everyone but Pinkie are very, very obviously lying to her in order to cover for something, until Pinkie gets suspicious. The excuses were studying (Twilight made a giant pile of books she claimed to be behind on right in front of Pinkie when there weren't any books out of place beforehand), picking apples (Applejack was hauling in a very large harvest of apples already, but she's a terrible liar), and washing one's hair (upon Pinkie observing that Rarity's hair looked fine, she dunks her head in a full trash can). And then the best one of all was that Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy had to house-sit for a friend, who happens to be a bear with a nice cave, so nice in fact it feels like a house because he's fixed the place up so well, who's vacationing on the beach because he likes to "play seashells and collect volleyball" (not a typo, that's what they actually said). Pinkie actually believes the one about the bear, but is very suspicious of the other excuses.
 * The Regular Show episode "Grilled Cheese Deluxe": Mordecai and Rigby hold a contest to see who the better liar is. It starts with them convincing people that they're astronauts to cut in line. By the end, they nearly cause an antimatter machine to malfunction and explode.

Real Life

 * Charlie Brooker has a story about how he once tried to get out of trouble for not paying attention when his girlfriend was talking by claiming that he couldn't hear her because he was completely deaf in one ear. Of course, he then had to keep up the absurd pretence for months, occasionally forgetting what ear exactly he was supposed to be deaf in.
 * The Six-Day War of 1967 comes out like this to someone who understands the events. You see, despite what both sides' Propaganda Machine has told you, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had no interest in fighting Israel, at least not in the short run, as it was a lose-lose for him and his pan-Arab vision: win, conquering Israel, and he would lose the main pan-Arab rallying point and thus all his leverage against the real enemy, the conservative Arab monarchies (like Saudi Arabia and Jordan) who opposed his vision; lose, and lose credibility as leader of the Arabs (and thus lose leverage against the conservative Arab monarchies). However, Nasser had to pretend like he wanted war in order to maintain that selfsame credibility. From there, the war—already understood to be a farce conducted by gibbering idiots—looks like an episode of Fawlty Towers. To wit:
 * 1) The USSR informs Egypt that Israel is massing troops to attack Syria. Israel is in fact doing nothing of the kind, but Egypt doesn't bother to fact check and immediately informs the Syrians and announces a big mobilization and public march on the Sinai, hoping to scare the Israelis into backing down.
 * 2) Since Israel was not in fact massing troops, this move instead scares the Israelis into mobilizing. At about this time, Egypt learns that the USSR had at best been mistaken and at worst been lying.
 * 3) Finding himself in an embarrassing bind, Nasser tries to avoid war with another tactic: he publicly demands that the United Nations peacekeeping force separating Egypt from Israel "redeploy" (whatever that means). This fails: The UN Secretary-General, to save his own ass (we wish we could explain why!) gives Nasser an ultimatum: either the peacekeeping forces withdraw entirely, or they don't move. Since he can't be seen to be weak, Nasser opts to expel the force. Now nothing stands between Egypt, Israel, and war—and a few weeks later (thanks to all manner of dilly-dallying on both sides), Israel does indeed attack, devastatingly.