Cloudcuckoolander/Film



"Hubert: Everything makes me think of Love, Gracie. (she leans gently on his shoulder) What are you thinking about? Gracie: (sighs rapturously) Clams. Hubert: Aren't they beautiful? I hope I don't make you think of clams. Gracie: Oh no, no. I was just thinking, if we were clams, we'd never have to take our shoes off. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
 * Jordan from Real Genius is a hyperactive insomniac who in her second scene bursts in on Mitch in the bathroom to give him a sweater she made for him overnight, oblivious to why he might be made nervous by this. She also mentions that her former roommate went crazy and had to transfer schools, although she doesn't know if that had anything to do with her. As she develops into Mitch's Love Interest later in the film, her personality gradually becomes less hyper.
 * Gracie Allen's ditz persona frequently slipped into this type. Sample dialogue from College Swing:

"(reading newspaper headlines) Rex Kramer: Passengers certain to die! Steve McCroskey: Airline negligent. Johnny: There's a sale at Penney's!"
 * Johnny from Airplane!:


 * Just see for yourself. And The Sequel. He's credited as "Jacobs".

"Col. Gimpy: That really was a magnificent speech. You know, a man says nothing because he's wise, or afraid, or stupid. Which are you? Ace Martin: Wise as an owl. Col. Gimpy: An owl! You know, an owl in daytime, she can't see -- like this [blinks rapidly] -- but in nighttime, she can. [Pause] Goodbye..."
 * Leslie Zevo in Toys. But his sister, Alsatia, is even more of one. Even though it turns out, you have to be amazed that someone out-cloudcuckoolanded Robin Williams.
 * Henry Bullock from Splitting Heirs. It's proven by his first scene, where he shows up on roller-skates.
 * Brick from Anchorman veers between this and The Ditz.
 * Will Proudfoot from Son of Rambow is a sweet, innocent and idealistic dreamer whose dazzling and vibrant worlds of adventure are poured like rivers of color onto the pages of an old Bible in pencil and pastel. Sadly, this is also the only healthy emotional outlet he has from losing his father and being raised in an oppressively religious community.
 * Peter Lorre's character in Crack-Up, Colonel Gimpy, is a well-loved eccentric who becomes the "mascot" of an airfield he wanders around in, and later sneaks aboard the protagonists' airplane insisting he has a meeting with a European monarch. He's also given to quoting Byron and having exchanges like the following:


 * Since it's Peter Lorre, it turns out that

"I don't feel that I need to explain my art to you."
 * Harpo Marx's characters. Consider Duck Soup: despite being a spy, he walks around cutting things with scissors, ruining a Jerkass stallholder's business, and generally being, well, a Harpo character. Becomes even more Hilarious in Hindsight when it was eventually revealed that he was a covert government courier in Real Life. Seriously. Well, he wouldn't need to worry too much about making a Freudian Slip..
 * The film adaptations, more than the book-versions, of the Harry Potter series, show Bellatrix Lestrange as one of the few malevolent versions of this trope.
 * Luna Lovegood is a more benign example.
 * Jim Carrey's portrayal of The Mask is the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Rule of Funny. Makes sense, since his powers come from Loki, the Norse god of mischief. They manifest as if Tex Avery-style Cartoon Physics worked in Real Life. The Mask takes its chaos from the wearer's own mind. Stanley Ipkiss has a fondness for classic cartoons in general and Tex Avery cartoons in particular, so that's how he expresses The Mask. This is foreshadowed by showing lots of cartoon memorabilia, and a poster of Red Hot Riding Hood on his wall. When less harmless people end up wearing The Mask, the results are... bloody, and generally less slapstick. Always funny, at least for a given value of funny...
 * In the original Mask comic, the mask actually warped the mind of the wearer to the point where all their actions lead to gruesome, horrible, and sometimes hilarious murders. Stanly Ipkiss kills a lot of people. Remember the Tommy Gun? This time, the thugs are blown to bits.
 * Tommy Wiseau is this both in film and in real life.
 * Mark from Empire Records. It's not clear how much is the influence of drugs and how much is just him being special.
 * Who cares, he's Adorkable!
 * Oh, speaking of which, no matter how many drugs you eat, you will never see yourself get eaten by the world maggot during the video for "Saddam A Go-Go".
 * Lucas, though, doesn't have even drugs for an excuse.
 * AJ super glues coins to the floor and not one of his friends gives any indication that this is in anyway unusual for him.

"Lilo: My friends need to be punished."
 * Lilo. She feeds a fish peanut butter sandwiches because she believes that it controls the weather, and makes voodoo dolls of her so-called "friends" out of spoons.

"Melman: Hey! The bozos have the people!
 * A lot of the characters in Christopher Guest's Mockumentary comedies would fit this trope. To take but one example, Fred Willard's dog-show announcer in Best in Show goes from wondering aloud why one entrant isn't dressed up in a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat and pipe to asking which dog would make a good wide receiver on a football team. He later asks his on-air partner, apropos of nothing at all, to guess how much he can bench-press.
 * In fact, Fred Willard's primary role in Guest's ensembles is to be the most obvious Cloudcuckoolander in the cast; which is truly a feat, considering that nearly all of Guest's main characters qualify as Cloudcuckoolanders to varying degrees. According various people who have worked with him, he really likes to play this trope in real life as well. Christopher Guest described him on the Charlie Rose show as a man who "got into character twenty-five years ago, and has never gotten out"]].
 * Thick Kevin from The Boat That Rocked is this to a tee, epitomized when he comes to a Christmas party dressed as the Easter Bunny. Bob from the same movie is a slightly less flamboyant version, as he's mostly just a weird guy who's off in his own world.
 * Katie, the yellow baby yak from Horton Hears a Who, in spite of having only one line: "In my world everyone is a pony that eats rainbows and poops butterflies." The rest of the time she'll inexplicably: make a gonk face like she's choking, sit with her back to Horton (he's a kind of Baloo the Bear "teacher" in this adaptation), and finally . Fittingly, while the other young animals have parents Katie appears to be completely unique.
 * Frank, the paranoid lizard from The Rescuers Down Under is clearly off his rocker.
 * All of the lemurs in Madagascar seem crazy to some degree, but King Julien XIII is definitely the worst. He clearly comprehends all that goes on around him (which may be why he's King)...

Julien: They're up there. [points to some human skeletons hanging from parachutes snagged on the branches of a large tree] Don't you love the people? Not a very lively bunch though.

Alex: Oh. So, do you have any... LIVE people?

Julien: Uh, no. Only dead ones."


 * But he also has a worrying tendency towards conversations with himself...

"Julien: Shush! We are hiding! Be quiet everyone, including me. Shhh! Who's making that noise?! Oh, it's me again."


 * At one point in Madagascar 2 he argues with himself to explain the concept of sacrifice to the other animals...

"Julien: The friendly Gods eat up the sacrifice... (as god) Mmm very nice, thank you for that sacrifice... (as Julien) Please have another sacrifice! (as god) No No I've had enough for today... (as Julien) Look I will be very insulted if you don't have another sacrifice! (as god) I DONT WANT ANOTHER SACRIFICE OK?! (as Julien) Look at you, you look skinny! (as god) No, I said I've had enough, now clear off!"


 * In the 1st movie he uses a skeletal hand as a scepter. In the 2nd movie he goes through four different crowns.

"See, my father is Zozo, the dog at the gates of hell. Satan says you need more color!"
 * Allen from The Hangover does not seem to operate on the same wavelength as anyone else; it's heavily implied he's seriously mentally ill, though he appears able to function to a degree. He is, however, a genius at card-counting.
 * Stéphane from The Science of Sleep, his dreams and Image Spots are... interesting - he uses them to cope with reality.
 * Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is at first presented as this, since she's bored of living in a small town and finds escape in the books she reads. The townspeople find her strange because of this. In fact, one line in her intro song (sung by the barber) goes: "Her head's up on some cloud." We end up finding out that's she's really a strong young lady who doesn't hesitate to stand up to the Beast.
 * The real Cloudcuckoolander of the Disney Princesses is probably Ariel. She's a mild example by the standards of the trope, but compared to the other princesses she is positively wacky.
 * Every Ice Age film has one of these.
 * 1st has the Dodos, a species that plans to survive the Ice Age which even they themselves say will last for billions of years, with a stockpile of 3 watermelons. Possibly Fridge Brilliance though, because historically they survived much longer than mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers.
 * 2nd has Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she's a possum, despite the obvious size difference between her and her "brothers". She got better.
 * 3rd has Buck, the one-eyed weasel who most likely lost part of his brain when he lost his eye.
 * In Scrooged, the Ghost of Christmas Present fits this pretty well if not a prefect fit. Though she also has tendencies of the Jerk Sue minus the feminism.
 * Raven in Cecil B. Demented (she's always perky no matter what she says):

"Brian: I'll pretend I'm Jamaican! Thurgood: You have smoked yourself retarded."
 * Jay from the View Askewniverse lapses into this sometimes. Example: His Planet of the Apes fantasy in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
 * "There he goes. Homeboy fucked a Martian once."
 * Brian in Half Baked.

"Trent: Who do you like in this game, Jay? ...Jay? Jay: I like the Christmas babies, Trent! And I like the way my skin feels when I wearing my rainbow jacket! [starts making robot noises]"
 * Ed and Rafiki from The Lion King.
 * In The Love Guru, the sports commentator played by Stephen Colbert, whether o not he's on drugs at the moment, is a definite Cloudcuckoolander. On drugs:

"Jay: I would like to apologize for my behavior earlier. Trent: I know you're under pressure. Jay: The kids in school... Trent: ...you don't have any kids. Jay: I don't have any kids! And someday I'm gonna die..."
 * ...and then off the drugs:

"U.S. Bill: This is the basement. Want to see the furnace? Nightbird: That's okay. U.S. Bill: It's hot. Don't press your face against it for too long or you get red streaks on you for, like, a month."
 * U.S. Bill in The Specials.

"Brickman: The key to being a big league pitcher is the 3 R's: readiness, recuperation, and conditioning!"
 * Rubin Farr from Rubin And Ed (played by Crispin Glover, appropriately enough): Among many other instances, he dances around his cluttered bedroom to classical music while squeaking a cat toy, wears a hubcap on his head like a sunbonnet at one point, and interrupts a business seminar to announce "I am the king of the echo people" (it almost makes sense in context, but only because of a hallucination sequence from earlier in the film). He has the occasional surprising moments of deadpan snark though, and sort of gives Ed a "The Reason You Suck" Speech at one point.
 * Zuzu Petals from The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
 * Grandma Georgina in the most recent Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Justified by the implication that she can't really hear that well, so often has no idea what's going on. Doesn't make her character any less funny, though.
 * Willy Wonka in any version of this story, whether it's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
 * Alice from the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film starts off the movie as one of these, although this doesn't last that long since she immediately turns into the Unfazed Everyman upon entering Wonderland. While dancing with the man her parents mother had set her up to marry, she gets distracted by a vision of all the women in trousers and the men wearing dresses and subsequently by imagining what it would be like to fly. * Kitten (Cillian Murphy) from Breakfast On Pluto has definite Cuckoolander tendencies, despite dropping the occasional Deadpan Snark when vexed. She even lives in a "small elfin dwelling on Wimbledon Common" for some of the movie.
 * Jack Sparrow seems to be this, though he's actually pretty good at thinking up Indy Ploys.
 * Isn't the defining characteritic of an Indy Ploy precisely that you don't think?
 * Bettie Heslop in Muriels Wedding
 * In Down Periscope, Nitro definitely qualifies, from having "absorbed a lot of voltage" as an electrician/radio operator during his time in the Navy. E.T. "Sonar" Lovicelli is one of these as well, to a lesser degree.
 * Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky. She is kinda happy her bike was stolen, because she always wanted to get a driving licence. She also stuffs chicken fillets in her bra, because: "I like the way they make me feel. Like a natural woman."
 * Fred Kwan (Tony Shalhoub's character) in Galaxy Quest, with such lines as "That was a hell of a thing" after traveling through hyperspace for the first time, or, after sucking bad guys out through the airlock, "Sorry, I was - door was a little sticky. Did you see that? I'll get one of my boys up here with a can of WD-40."
 * Rookie of the Year has Phil Brickman, the pitching coach:

"Brickman: I wrap the cake up in my vomit bag, and Voila!... Breakfast!"
 * Also

"Brickman: Some guys ice down their arm after a big game...some say that heat's the way to go...but i have discovered the secret...HOT ICE...HOT ICE...I heat up the ice cubes...IT'S THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS..."
 * And

"Ernie: Mr. Carson's last year as Team Owner, he must be really depressed. Bob Carson: Oh Boy, Fish, look a decoder ring... I got it out of the Cracker Jack Box... look it fits on your finger. Larry Fisher: Yeah, Yeah that's great Uncle Bob. Larry Fisher: [Whispers to assistant] That man is turning into a cracker jack"
 * Also Bob Carson, Owner of the Cubs

"Agnes: I like him. He's nice. Edith: But scary. Agnes: -smiles- Like Santa.
 * Agnes in Despicable Me. ADORABLE though. She's also four.
 * Crispina from The Magdalene Sisters,."


 * For a charming/ sexy example, there's the titular character in Don Juan Demarco (played by Johnny Depp), who lives in a wonderful romantic world inside his own head... or is it?
 * Everyone in Dracula: Dead and Loving It has this to a certain extent, but Renfield is the most obvious one.
 * The Mystery Team has shades of this.
 * Marty, in Cabin in the Woods, begins the movie as a typical stoner whose statements and actions while high are Cloudcuckoolandic, but by the end of the movie, he is the only one who sees things clearly.