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I Am One of Those, Too: Difference between revisions
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== [[Film]] ==
* Somewhat related is the whole Winchestertonfieldsville scene in ''[[Mr. Deeds]]'', in which every lie Winona Ryder's character makes up about her childhood ends up actually existing.
* In a similar fashion, the framing device for ''[[Y Tu Mama Tambien]]'' is a road trip to the (fictional, as far as the protagonists know) beach of ''Boca de Cielo'' ("Mouth of Heaven"). It's actually just an excuse to try and get the female lead to sleep with one or both of them, but then they actually reach it...
* In ''[[Maverick (film)|Maverick]]'', Bret Maverick wants to expose/embarrass the con woman "Mrs. Bransford".
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* Done in ''[[Catch Me If You Can]]'', when Frank's new girlfriend's father is trying to prove that he is lying about which school he went to. The father asks about the name of a certain professor's dog, knowing that Frank can't possibly know it -- Frank manages to evade it by saying the dog died.
* In ''[[There's Something About Mary|Theres Something About Mary]]'', a crude, low-class private detective is trying to impress Mary by pretending to be a suave architect. Cue her architect friend. {{spoiler|Who was also only pretending.}}
* In ''[[Kate and Leopold]]'', Kate's boss is trying to impress her by claiming to either have an impressive manor in England or know someone who does (we don't hear this claim, only the reaction). Leopold immediately points out that such a manor doesn't exist. Kate tries to say that Leopold could be wrong, but Leopold is adamant. He grew up there, and he'd know.
** Leopold further shatters JJ's pretensions by pointing out the errors he made in trying to fake familiarity with ''[[La Boheme]]''.
*** Even more ironic when you realize that the filmmakers themselves don't know the opera very well: [[Did Not Do the Research|it premiered in 1896, and Leo is from 1876.]]
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'''You:''' That's the one. }}
* The [[Discworld]] novel ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'' does a Reverse on this trope. Rincewind runs into someone from the place he's pretending to be from, and being [[Genre Savvy]] enough to know that his challenger is going to try to trip him up by asking him about a fictional person or location, calls him on it-- only instead the man asked him about a real person whose identity would be very obvious if Rincewind's story was true.
* Used by [[Sherlock Holmes]] in the short story ''The Three Garridebs'', in which he tests his suspicions of a con man posing as American by casually asking after the nonexistent mayor of the con man's claimed Kansas 'hometown'.
* A joke found in an issue of ''Readers' Digest'' (and possibly a real incident) referred to a man who liked to pretend he'd had the same operations that other people had been through so that he could share in their complaints. Eventually carelessness resulted in a pair of women asking him, "Really. When did you have your hysterectomy?"
* Linnea Sinclair uses this in ''An Accidental Goddess''. The time traveling protagonist claims to be visiting from another spaceport, which in her day didn't have a lot of traffic. Unfortunately, the woman sitting next to her at the bar is from there, and is suspicious when the protagonist doesn't recognize the name of a local bigshot. Fortunately, the protagonist is also telepathic, and can pull the relevant details out of the woman's mind.
* In ''[[Catch Me If You Can]]'', con artist Frank Abagnale pretends to be a lawyer who studied at Harvard, which works fine until he meets someone else who actually ''did'' study there. The guy asks him a load of awkward questions, gets suspicious, and Frank soon has to cut his losses and disappear. Which makes this [[Truth in Television]].
* Donald Westlake's unlucky criminal John Dortmunder once, under pressure, claimed his name was "John Diddums," and then started to use it as a regular alias. Whenever people asked about the name that sounds like babytalk, he'd tell them, "It's Welsh," and they'd be embarrassed for questioning it. And then he ran into a British gentleman who remarked, "I know a Diddums family near Caernarvon. Might you be a relative?"
* Used and played with in [[Josepha Sherman]]'s ''The Shattered Oath''. A prince of the Sidhe has been exiled into ~9th century AD Ireland, claiming to be an exiled prince from Cathay (China). Naturally a trader who's been in Cathay comes calling. Played with because, even then, China was a huge country. Ardagh, the prince, cannot answer the trader's questions...but the trader, who does know how big Cathay is (generally at least), also has to admit to not knowing how to answer Ardagh's questions, nor having heard of his family or even dialect (actually the Sidhe tongue).
* In the first [[Confessions of Georgia Nicolson|Georgia Nicolson book]], Georgia walks up to a cute guy on the street, pretending to have a limp, and starts speaking to him in fake French ([[It Makes Sense in Context]]... or, well, as much sense as [[Cloudcuckoolander|Georgia]] ever makes). The guy, in an attempt to help her, leads her to a restaurant nearby whose waitresses speak French.
* In Gregory Benford's short story ''Doing Lennon'', a man from the twentieth century hatches a plan to live out his dreams of stardom by having himself frozen and upon being revived in the future, claiming to be John Lennon. The plan hits a snag when he meets another cryogenically-frozen person claiming to be Paul [[Mc Cartney]].
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* For complicated reasons Monica in ''[[Friends]]'' has claimed her name to be Monana, which she also claims is Dutch. Too bad the person she's trying to deceive is from the Netherlands, and starts speaking in Dutch. At least Monica can recover from this amazement by specifying Pennsylvania Dutch instead.
** A variation is used when for complicated reasons Ross is at the wedding reception for complete strangers and is posing for a picture at the rostrum. People start clinking their glasses to demand a speech. Ross pretends to be working for the hotel, saying that a certain car will be towed. A guy rushes up nervously. He has that ''exact'' make, model, and color of car. What are the odds?
** In another episode Phoebe found a lost police badge, which she then starts flashing around to intimidate people. Eventually she tries to pull it on a real cop and tries to bluff her way through his questions, like which precinct she works at. After a while he seems to believe her, then he asks "So where did you find my badge?"
* An episode of ''[[Coupling]]'' ("the man with two legs") has Jeff for various reasons claiming to a woman he fancies that he has only one leg: It's too bad her brother also lost a leg.
* Happens to [[Seinfeld|George Costanza]] all the time; since he's always making up more interesting jobs for himself -- to the point that he has studied up on how to pass himself off as an architect.
** In one memorable example he tries to pass himself off as a marine biologist, and then he's asked to save a beached whale. {{spoiler|He saves it, but then admits he was lying and is dumped.}}
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** Played straight when Newkirk attempts to pass himself off as an expert forger. The head of the forgery operation asks him if he's familiar with a certain forger and certain machine and Newkirk claims to know both intimately. Of course, one's a composer and the other's a piano.
** Another is a test Colonel Hogan uses to see if escapees are actually German spies, asking if they know certain people from the unit they claim to be from. All of these people are fictional.
* Subverted in the ''[[30 Rock|Thirty Rock]]'' episode "Reunion." Jack is mistaken for a popular former student at Liz's [[Class Reunion|high school reunion]], and after his initial denial is muffled, he plays along. Then he meets what appears to be the man's ex-girlfriend from high school. He manages fine in not giving away any details until the woman asks, "Say to me what you said that night." Jack looks her straight in the eye and says, "No." From her reaction, ''this was exactly what she wanted to hear''.
** The ruse only falls apart when {{spoiler|the ex-girlfriend decides that it's the opportune time for Jack to meet "his" son.}}
* In an episode of ''[[Will and Grace]]'', Will pretends to be a professional tennis player (because being a lawyer at a party kills conversations), and then panics when he finds out there's an actual professional tennis player at the party. {{spoiler|Who is also a fraud due to his real job being an even worse conversation killer: IRS agent.}}
* In an episode of ''[[Criminal Minds]]'', the female FBI agents are out at a bar having a night out drinking. A guy tries to impress one of them by telling them he works for the FBI, but can't talk about his job. They ask him if it's a dangerous job, and generally puff him up with softball questions, before showing him their FBI badges and telling him to buzz off.
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* In one episode narrated in ''The Colditz Story'', a pair of British escapees pretending to be Flemish ("As Flamands we could pass off our bad German and our bad French -- a useful nationality!") were in a bar when a genuine Flamand came up. Fortunately, they were able to bluff their way through by bursting into laughter at the man's (presumably) hilarious story, buying him a drink, and quickly departing.
* [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32145277 Man impersonating police officer pulls over a real uncover cop car]. Some people have all the luck.
* Numerous stories on [[(The Customer is) Not Always Right]] have a scammer or angry customer impersonate a lawyer or someone with knowledge of law. Only to have a customer behind them step forward and reveal they are a lawyer as well, then disprove the customer. Which leads to the customer fleeing the store in shame. Another common variant is for the customer to angrily claim to be a friend of the owner, only for it to be revealed that they are actually ''speaking'' to the owner -- who has, of course, never seen them before.
** Several examples have had the employee/sane customer ''also'' lying about being the owner/lawyer, but successfully scaring away the troublemaker
* Stanley Johnson, [[Like Father, Like Son|father]] of British politician [[Upper Class Twit|Boris]] [[Cloudcuckoolander|Johnson]], used to be a spy. Supposedly, the first time he tried out his cover story -- that he was working in the Foreign Office as the desk officer for the Sudan -- it was at the Foreign Office, to the actual desk officer for the Sudan.
** [[Too Dumb to Live|Runs in the family, then.]] Or...[[Obfuscating Stupidity|does it run in the family, rather, what?]]
*** In complete fairness, constructing the cover story would have been his superiors' responsibility.
* Physicist Richard Feynman, according to Ralph Leighton's ''"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"'', liked listening to Italian radio programs so much as a boy, despite not understanding a word of the language, that he came up with his own form of "mock Italian," which he used successfully on numerous occasions. ("...maybe it's Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.")
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