Fawlty Towers Plot: Difference between revisions

 

{{examples}}

== Anime and Manga ==

* 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.

* 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...

{{quote|'''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?!!}}

 

== Film ==

* ''[[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]] ==

* 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.

 

* ''[[Fawlty Towers]]'', [[Trope Namer|quite]] [[Captain Obvious|obviously]].

* 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.

** 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 [[Noodle Incident|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 Savvy|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. {{spoiler|When her party ends up just as badly, the Crane family takes it as a rite of passage to become a Crane.}}

* 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 [[The Chew Toy|is determined to make him suffer]] by [[Can't Get Away with Nuthin'|refusing to let him get away with]] ''[[Can't Get Away with Nuthin'|anything]]''.

* 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:

{{quote|'''Lucy''': What lesson have you learned?

* 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 ''[[M*A*S*H (television)|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.

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

 

* [[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.

** 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]] ==

 

* A lot of ''[[Terror Island]]'s'' humor relies on a total inversion of this: the [[Cloudcuckoolander|characters]] give these sorts of convoluted explanations when they are either completely unneccesary or the explanations incriminate them more than the original lie would: [http://terrorisland.net/strips/146.html 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.

* 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.

 

* 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 ''[[Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends|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.

* [[Kim Possible]] wanted to go to the party in order to spend some time [[Die for Our Ship|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 Aesop]]s as a [[Big Bad|supervillain,]] [[Dragon|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)

* '''EVERY EPISODE OF''' ''[[Maya and Miguel]]''.

* ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|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 [[Keeping Secrets Sucks|drives herself crazy keeping the two sets of secrets a secret.]]

** 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 [[Invoked Trope|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.

 

* [[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 [[Arab-Israeli Conflict|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:

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Plots]]