Alcohol-Induced Idiocy



"Kyle: Dude, why is your store called the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store? Store owner: Well there was an indian burial ground here before I bought it. Stan: So you just built your store on an indian burial ground!? Store owner: Oh hell no. First I dug up all the bodies, pissed on them and then buried them again upside down Kyle: Why!? Store owner: Why? I don't know. I was drunk."

- South Park

Incidents of jaw-dropping stupidity brought about by a character's excessive consumption of alcoholic beverages.

This tends to overlap with In Vino Veritas: Often the character committing the act of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy will be an otherwise sensible and reasonably intelligent person when sober. If the character is normally dimwitted, getting drunk will make him even dumber. In both cases, the character's inebriation usually results in him being a danger to himself and others.

Someone who becomes a Drunken Master when intoxicated is the direct opposite.

Alcohol-Induced Idiocy can be similar to the Idiot Ball or any other plot device that depends on Contrived Stupidity. Thus, this trope is related to Plot Induced Stupidity, Too Dumb to Live, What an Idiot!, Out-of-Character Moment, What Were You Thinking?, and Phlebotinum-Induced Stupidity.

Can often lead to a character getting an Embarrassing Tattoo ... or doing something much, much worse. Some of the other results of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy are covered in the What Did I Do Last Night?, You Wake Up in a Room, and Sorry, Ociffer... tropes. May overlay Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb.

The Alcohol-Induced Idiocy trope can also be used as An Aesop about the dangers of over-consuming alcohol and drunk driving.

Unfortunately, instances of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy are so common that this is Truth in Television.

Comics

 * Captain Haddock of Tintin practically lives by this trope. Highlights include: knocking out an airplane pilot mid-flight for not letting him use the controls, lighting a bonfire in a lifeboat and exiting a space rocket to try to float back to earth.
 * Yeagar from Nodwick isn't the cleverest person even when sober, but some of his best (read:most disastrous) ideas usually come to him when drunk.

Film

 * At the beginning of Cool Hand Luke, the title character vandalizes some parking meters after imbibing too much. Things don't get better for him afterward.
 * The Fly (1986 version): in retrospect, Seth Brundle should've waited until he was sober before deciding whether or not to test his matter teleportation device on himself.
 * Both The Hangover and The Hangover: Part II obviously.

Literature

 * In Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles, Freckles is certain that Wessner will not have the courage to return, unless he's half-drunk.
 * Used a lot in Jeeves and Wooster. Apparently, it's a bad idea to try to steal a policeman's helmet when there's a policeman inside it.

Live Action Television

 * Auf Wiedersehen Pet has the wake up with an Embarrassing Tattoo version.
 * Lampshaded on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 'Beer Bad' with its Devolution Device plot that turns the college kids and Buffy into neanderthals.
 * How I Met Your Mother has this all over the place. Ted's apartment is above a bar and they spend a lot of their free time there drinking. From time to time, one or more of them gets really drunk and does something really stupid. Hilarity Ensues.
 * The "Home Wreckers" episode had a game where the friends had to guess whether Marshal was drunk or a kid when he did something stupid like putting fireworks in the microwave (Drunk) or when he tried to ride his bike down an extension ladder from the roof of a two story house (Kid).
 * A common occurrence on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
 * Trope is somewhat inverted on an episode of Monk where Stottlemeyer solves a crime because consuming booze actually makes him more intellegent. He just can't remember how he solved, and spends most of the episode trying to figure out what he did on his bender while fighting a hangover the next morning.
 * Many of the misdeeds that Earl Hickey is trying to correct involved alcohol.
 * On the second season premiere of Shameless, the family patriarch is clearly soused when he decides that making a $10,000 bet (when he can barely afford his current booze bottle) is a good idea.
 * Somewhere in the region of every third death on 1000 Ways to Die begins with the corpse-in-progress drinking.

Music

 * The Dead Kennedys: "Too Drunk to Fuck"

Myth and Legend

 * In some versions of the story about the sinking of Ys from Celtic Mythology and French folklore, the Princess Dahut gets drunk and opens the dike gate that protects the city from flooding at high tide during a storm.

Newspaper Comics

 * In Bloom County, Steve Dallas has a tendency to exhibit this after imbibing too much.

Real Life

 * The Darwin Awards would likely cease to exist were it not for this trope.
 * Everything that comes after someone saying, "Hold my beer and watch this."
 * Drunk driving. Dangerous, stupid, and illegal.
 * Many of the Wacky Fratboy Hijinks alluded to on Texts From Last Night apparently involved alcohol, drugs, or both. Some, however, were just perfectly sober people making poor decisions.

Video Games

 * One quest in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim seems to be a Shout-Out to The Hangover. A guy in Riften's tavern challenges you to a drinking contest. After four drinks, you pass out ... and wake up in the Temple of Dibella in Markarth, which is literally on the other side of the province. You then spend the next little while learning what you did last night due to Alcohol Induced Stupidity, and trying to fix things.

Web Comics

 * In Wizard School, drunken Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist Graham gets a tattoo to 'seal the deal' with an attractive a woman -- and promptly wakes up in a room with two children and a talking goat who inform him that he's The Chosen One.

Web Original

 * 'Questionable Content: Marten + taser + alcohol = forgetting basic taser safety knowledge.

Western Animation
"Dwight Conrad: I heard alcohol makes you stupid. Fry: No I'm... doesnt!"
 * Futurama: "Route of All Evil"

"Homer: Oh, Lisa, you and your stories: Bart's a vampire, beer kills brain cells. Now let's go back to that... building... thingie... where our beds and TV... is."
 * The Simpsons: happens frequently and is often displayed by Homer (and sometimes Barney).
 * In a flashback scene during the "El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Homer" episode, Homer, after drinking too much beer at a chili cook-off, decides to take off all his clothes and climb into a cotton-candy machine and pretend he's a "puffy pink cloud."
 * From one Treehouse Of Terror episode:


 * In an example involving Barney, the "Mr. Plow" episode features a flashback scene where we see a teenage Barney studying for the SAT when Homer sneaks in with a six pack of beer. After Homer pressures him, Barney reluctantly agrees to take a drink and, with one sip, we actually see his IQ drop sharply.
 * Parodied in an episode where Bart and Milhouse go on a squishee bender. The next day, Bart discovers he's joined Junior Campers, and Milhouse has a dirty word shaved into the back of his head.
 * In "Deep Space Homer", Barney, when selected by NASA to be an astronaut, swears off alcohol and successfully completes his training program with flying colors. Unfortunately, when he takes a sip of a congratulatory glass of champagne, his face immediately reverts back into its permanently soused expression as he proclaims, "It begins." He then steals a jet pack and careens drunkenly through the sky until it runs out of fuel causing him to crash onto a pillow factory roof and bounce onto the street below where he's run over by a marshmallow truck. The fact that it was non-alcoholic champagne says something about Barney's alcoholism.