Closet Shuffle

I seem to be spending a lot more time in closets since I got 'ere.

—Bleu the BLU Spy, Cuanta Vida

Someone has to hide some person from parties out searching for them, and so quickly herds the person into a closet, into an adjoining room, under a bed, or some other place (the more cramped and uncomfortable the hiding place, the more Hilarity Ensues).

A classic screwball comedy usage is to have this keep on happening, with new hiding places becoming harder to find or more obvious.

Close cousin to Curtain Camouflage.

Examples of Closet Shuffle include:

Anime & Manga

In the 7th novel of Suzumiya Haruhi, Mikuru from one week in the future drags Kyon into the broom closet to hide from her present-time self. Bonus points in that her present self is actually undressing and she's trying to prevent Kyon from seeing.
In the "Cupid's Day" episode of Code Geass, when Lelouch looks in horror at the ~~crowd~~ stampede of girls charging towards him, Rolo immobilizes everyone with his Geass and drags Lelouch into the closet right behind him to make it look like he just disappeared into the air.
- Lelouch shoves CC under his bed just as Suzaku enters the room in a sound episode from the first season, and in the school festival episode of the second season he pushes her into a basin of tomatoes to keep Shirley from seeing her.
Happens on the Class Trip in Toradora!. Taiga and the boys in the closet hear things they weren't supposed to hear; drama ensues.
In The World God Only Knows: Keima Katsuragi uses his (quite real) sickness to make Ayumi fall for him, but when Chihiro unexpectedly arrives he hides her right next to him , under the bedsheets, and then proceeds to romance Chihiro. He even manages to make them both fall more for him at the same time, but not without making Ayumi pass out covered in sweat due to his hotness. The scene is a lot funnier than it sounds.

Fanfic

A Textbook perfect example occur's in Claymade's The Dark Lords of Nerima with Genma posing as Tofu trying to hide Ryouga from the Senshi and all the time being interrupted by people who will be recognised and blow the whole gaffe whom Genma has to hide while distracting the Ami so she won't notice.
In the Glee fanfic All New, the Warblers go on a school trip to Europe to visit the show choir at a German school. The first day there, they are split into groups and assigned guides from the German choir. Kurt and two of his fellow Warblers, Adam and Simon, end up hiding from their guides inside a toilet cubicle. Hilarity Ensues.

Film

Used by the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera and Horse Feathers.
- And Monkey Business!

Thelma Todd: What are you doing in that closet?
Groucho: Nothing - come on in!

Four Weddings and a Funeral did this.
The Man with the Golden Gun: James Bond puts Mary Goodnight in a closet so he can make time with Andrea Anders. Ms. Goodnight is not pleased.
The Fifth Element has a rather spectacular example of this trope involving multiple people and a truly improbable selection of hiding places (including a freezer and a self-making pull-out bed). None of the people he hid enjoyed their hiding places very much. Leelo got wet and cold when the shower began its self clean, the military guys got frozen, and the preist nearly suffocated under the plastic that the bed wraps itself in.
In the movie Confessions from a Holiday Camp (which has appeared on the IMDB Bottom 100 list), a character tells one of his lovers to hide in the closet because someone's coming. Shortly afterwards, he sends the new arrival into the same closet to hide her from yet another visitor. The process repeats until the closet is completely full of people that are supposed to be hiding from each other.
Non-comedic example: In The Faculty, while breaking into the teacher's lounge looking for a scoop, Casey and Delilah hide in a broom when they hear teachers approaching. It's from there that they witness the school nurse being taken over and discover a dead body.
Another spectacular example can be found in the 1949 film The Inspector General: two in a closet, one in a chest, one under a bed, and one on top of a canopy bed. Although the last one didn't work out so well...
What's New Pussycat takes this to absurd levels, climaxing in a hotel where all the guests (except the protagonist, he hopes) is hiding an illicit affair with someone else.
- At one point, in fact, Victor (Woody Allen) lets a woman hide in the closet of the room he's in with his date...then does the same with the man chasing her.

Date: Oh, Victor! I can't let you make love to me with someone in the closet!
Victor: Oh really, how many people in the closet do you need?

In Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo, several people hide in a house when Antoine appears. Deuce's 'male madame' T.J. pulls Kate's blind roommate Bergita into a closet. When they emerge from the closet minutes later, they're rumpled and post-coital, and Bergita's blindness has been cured! "You're black? *grins* I knew it!"
The original Pink Panther movie features this done with Clouseau's wife trying to hide two people from Clouseau. Of course, he doesn't notice, even as their hiding places get less and less hidden.
Blue Velvet, only it's not Played for Laughs but played for horror.
In Zorro: The Gay Blade, the governor's wife makes a pass at Don Diego in his bedroom, then gets shoved in a coffin-like box when her husband arrives. Conversing with Diego, the governor has a fit of temper and runs the box through with his sword, but his wife is unharmed when Diego checks on her once they're alone.
La Reine Margot hides her lover the Duke de Guise in her closet when her husband makes a surprise visit. It shouldn't be a surprise given its their wedding night, but she pretty much forbade him to come to her.
A mild-mannered zookeeper in Fierce Creatures winds up in a closet with a half-naked girl and a live sheep.

Literature

In one of the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson books, the entire Ace Gang are forced to hide from "Wet" Lindsay in a toilet cubicle, and struggle not to crack up as they hear her talking to her friends.
In Lord Byron's Don Juan, Juan's first lover hides him from her husband, his lawyer and a mob of the town's menfolk... under a scrunched-up blanket. It works. Alas, they didn't hide his shoes...
In Jennifer Crusie's Faking It, Davy and Tilda meet when they are both hiding in someone else's closet.
In one of the Flashman novels, the titular protagonist reminisces that he once had to hide under a bed when a lady he was with heard her husband coming. He found a private detective already there, and they both had to wait under the bed while the lady and her husband occupy themselves above them.
Once La Reine Margot hides both her husband and her lover in the same cabinet, at the same time.

Live Action TV

In an episode of Friends, everyone except Rachel and Ross ends up hiding in Monica's bedroom as Rachel and Ross break up in the lounge room.
- Later subverted when Rachel and Ross had another highly emotional fight with the other four characters trapped in the same room. Joey, in a rare moment of planning ahead, stashed a box of food, drinks, a deck of cards and other entertainments in the room after the last time, just in case. He also included condoms, "just in case [they] had to repopulate the Earth." (And quoth Chandler, "And condoms are going to help us do that?")
- Ross is also trapped under sofas and beds in multiple later episodes.
This happens all the time on Desperate Housewives, but the most memorable was when tiny Eva Longoria managed to hide in a suitcase. Not even a very big suitcase.
In the episode of The Burns and Allen Show "Silky Thompson; Gracie Writes 'My Life with George Burns'", Gangster Silky Thompson is hidden in the closet to avoid the police. Just then Harry Morton comes in looking to hide from a man he sold a swamp to.

Gracie: That's a shame, Harry. Had you come only a minute sooner you could have had a nice spacious closet, now you'll have to make do with the bedroom upstairs.
George: Make a reservation next time!

In Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm hides under his girlfriend's bed to avoid being seen by her father. When the father asks what's going on, she gives a Sarcastic Confession. He then sits her down for a heart-to-heart on top of the bed, leaving Malcolm to be tortured in silence.
The I Love Lucy episode "Drafted" involved a misunderstanding which caused Ricky and Fred to think the women were pregnant and Lucy and Ethel to think the men had been drafted. Accordingly, they plan a baby shower and a going away party, respectively, for each other. To keep the parties secret until the right time, they all shove all of their guests into the Ricardos' tiny closet—giving them a huge human knot to untangle at the end of the episode.
An episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody includes a scene that is a direct homage to the closet scene from A Night at the Opera.
In Against the Wall, Abby has to hide under the bed when her drunken brother comes over to visit Brody with whom she is in a Secret Relationship.
Inadvertant example in The West Wing when Ainsley, getting a bit stressed while waiting in Leo McGarry's office to meet President Bartlet, has a bit of a panic attack moments before he arrives and flees into what she thinks is a bathroom, but is in fact Leo's closet. Bartlet is, needless to say, a bit bewildered.

Bartlet: Why's she in the closet?
Sam: She thought it was a bathroom.
Bartlet: Then why's she still in the closet?
Sam: That's a mystery to us all, sir.

Doctor Who: Due to time travel, the Doctor is forced into this with three versions of River Song and one older version of himself. Played for Drama a bit, when the Doctor realises that one of the Rivers is on her very last date with his older self before she'll die.

Music

Trapped in the Closet.

Oral Tradition

A joke: a burglar is robbing a house when he hears the owner coming. He flees into the closet, but it turns out the owner is a singing instructor, and she's working with a less-than-promising student. Partway into the lesson, the burglar stumbles out and demands, "Call the police!"

Theatre

In The Matchmaker and Hello, Dolly!, Cornelius hides in a coat closet and Barnaby under a table in an attempt to avoid Vandergelder. Hilarity Ensues.
In Maurice Ravel's opera L'heure Espagnole (The Spanish Hour), a clockmaker's wife hides her two lovers inside grandfather clocks when an inopportune customer comes along. After many charades and clocks moving around, the customer becomes her third lover!
In The Marriage of Figaro, Susanna, not wanting to be caught alone with him, hides the infamously flirtatious servant Cherubino (who had wanted to tell her all about his troubles after hitting on the count's wife) under her bed when the count knocks on her door to tell her about all the troubles he's having with Cherubino hitting on his wife (and he's there to hit on Susanna, too). The count is talking to her when the music teacher, Basilio, decides to come visit her to tell her all about the local news (mainly Cherubino's exploits). However, she doesn't want to get caught alone with the count, either, so she hides him as well. Of course, by the end of the song, all are discovered.

Video Games

In the Clock Tower series, this is your primary way of evading Scissorman or other pursuers: hide behind a couch, under a bed, in the closet or bathroom or whatever else you can find, and pray the killer doesn't catch on.
Metal Gear Solid lets Snake hide from soldiers via convenient empty lockers.
Ditto Resident Evil Outbreak, which also lets the characters hide under beds. Some characters, like Mark, are even too big/fat to utilize the lockers.

Webcomics

The BLU Spy in Cuanta Vida. See the quote above.
A particularly nasty varient occurs in CRFH with more and more people added to the closet in stead of moving someone around. It starts here and ends here.

Western Animation

Two Looney Tunes examples:
- In "Racketeer Rabbit", Bugs Bunny does this twice to a mobster named Rocky (based on Edward G. Robinson), once as a prank and once for real.
- In "Tom Turk and Daffy", Daffy Duck does this repeatedly to hide a turkey from a hunter, then the turkey "helps" him the same way.
Frequently used in Chicken Run, as Rocky constantly begs, "Hide me!" to Ginger.

Real Life

During the development of the original Macintosh, the engineers wanted to use a floppy drive made by Sony, but Steve Jobs thought it would be too expensive, and instead contracted another company to make a cheaper version of the Sony drive. The engineers secretly kept working with Sony, though, and on one occasion, they had to hide the Sony representative in the closet when they heard Steve coming.