Idiot Houdini: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|'''Frank:''' God, I've had to work hard every day of my life, and what do I have to show for it? This briefcase, and this haircut! And what do you have to show for your lifetime of sloth and ignorance?
'''Homer:''' What?
'''Frank:''' Everything! A dream house! Two cars! A beautiful wife! [[It Makes Sense in Context|A son who owns a factory]]! Fancy clothes and (sniffs air) lobsters for dinner! And do you deserve any of it? No!
'''Homer:''' (gasps) What are you saying?
'''Frank:''' [["The Reason You Suck" Speech|I'm saying ''you're'' what's wrong with America, Simpson. You coast through life, you do as little as possible, and you leech off of decent, hardworking people like me. Heh, if you lived in any other country in the world, you'd have starved to death long ago.]]
'''Bart:''' He's got you there, dad.
'''Frank:''' You're a fraud. A-- a total fraud. (walks out, pokes his head back round the doorway, and speaks to Marge and the kids) It was nice meeting you.|''[[The Simpsons (
This is what happens when a character who is known for making consistently poor judgments never has to answer for them. In fact, nearly the exact opposite happens: Whatever mind-numbingly stupid idea they've come up with this episode, it will work. If he sells the party's material possessions for some magic beans to give to a Nigerian prince he met over the Internet, we can be rest assured that at the end of the episode a Nigerian prince will come solve the conflict with a [[Deus Ex Machina]]. The
Characters will sometimes notice this bizarre disparity inside a story. When they do they almost always find it a serious cause for concern, although since the
Depressingly, there is a certain amount of [[Truth in Television]] to the latter portrayal, as any rudimentary analysis of pop culture fixtures indicate that, yes, for some people no matter how badly they screw up, they're so famous that they'll always get a second chance.
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*** Which really just shows how much people hate Ohgi since he started as a bit generic but not terrible yet bad decision after bad decision later he lives happily ever after. He isn't even affably, he just is.
* Vash the Stampede in ''[[Trigun]]'' [[Obfuscating Stupidity|appears to be]] this from time to time:
{{quote|
'''Villager 2''': Dodging? That dumbass doesn't know he's being shot at! }}
* Easily Kamina of [[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]], {{spoiler|at least before his death, anyway}}. Almost everything he does is outrageously stupid (such as attempting to hijack an enemy mech with zero idea of how it works or any of its security codes), yet he gets away with it thanks to sheer [[Refuge in Audacity]] and [[Rule of Cool]]. He operates entirely off of [[Indy Ploy
== Film ==
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** On the other hand, they ''were'' smart enough to repair the damage they did to the dome experiment.
* Inspector Clouseau from the ''[[Pink Panther]]'' movies shows crime-solving skills that make the Scooby gang look good.
{{quote|
'''Clouseau:''' Not anymore. }}
* In ''[[Go (
{{quote|
== Live-Action TV ==
* Nearly everyone in the Bluth family on ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]]'' falls into this trope. Gob, Lindsey, Buster and their mother all live high-class lifestyles despite the fact that none of them have any useful skills or even common sense. [[It Got Worse|It gets worse]]. We find out in the first episode that the family patriarch is similarly idiotic: The only thing he ever actually seemed to do effectively was break the law in order to steal company money, to the point that the viewer is genuinely surprised he wasn't arrested much sooner.
** Later we meet prosecutor Maggie Lizer, who's a successful lawyer in spite of the fact that she's spent several years doing a [[Blind Mistake|very, very poor imitation]] of a blind person. The only rational explanation for how she wasn't found out sooner is that she's never met anyone who had seen a real blind person before. And even when Michael tries to expose her she [[Karma Houdini|wriggles out of it]] because she had temporarily lost her sight, when she should have been disbarred.
* [[Greg the Bunny
* Ashley Abbott on ''[[Young And The Restless]]'' falls into this pattern chronically. Her characters arcs tends to follow a simple pattern. Make an extremely poor decision. Then, get mad at other characters when they point out why what she's doing is a bad idea. When she finally realizes how stupid she's been, she then gets mad at other characters for offering advice and decides to deal with her problems by going it alone. Rinse and repeat.
** This doesn't even get into her ability to screw up other people's plans simply by being involved in them. On one occasion, while speaking with Abbott arch-nemesis Victor Newman, she gets a phone call from her brother Jack about an important business deal. So, naturally, she excuses herself so she can talk about it without Victor over-hearing. Which room does she go to? The nursery. [[What an Idiot!|She left Victor in the living room with the baby monitor.]] It's hard to miss the fact that, in a show where many of the main characters are business executives, Ashley stands alone as the one whose business sense is clearly an [[Informed Ability]].
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== Web Comics ==
* Ethan's devolution to this in ''[[Ctrl
== Western Animation ==
* [[The Simpsons (animation)|Homer Simpson]] at first showed reasonably poor judgment, but repeated encounters have gradually turned him into this trope. A good example is the episode "Homer Defined" that features Homer saving the nuclear power plant from a meltdown, and becoming a hero because of it; but in reality he simply hit the override button by going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo." When this is discovered, the term "Homer" thus becomes a trope of its own in the episode, for whenever someone does something good on just plain dumb luck. Magic Johnson even said, "Looks like I pulled a Homer!" when he won the game by accident.
** This aspect of his character was deconstructed in the eighth-season episode "Homer's Enemy" featuring Frank Grimes, an orphan who had to struggle and work hard all his life just to reach the lower middle class. He is perplexed and disturbed by how successful Homer is despite the fact that he's incompetent at nearly everything. Grimes finally snaps when, after tricking Homer into entering a future nuclear plant model contest for children, the crowd cheers and applauds Homer when he wins the competition by building a scale model with minor efficiency tweaks and stripes going down the towers.
*** Of course, it is worth noting that Homer is also one of the show's prime [[Butt Monkey
* [[Scooby Doo]]. He has NO detective skills and in fact is a dumb coward but he ''always'' manages to catch the [[Monster of the Week]] by accident and gets congratulated by everyone at the end of each episode- in some of the spinoffs he's even famous for it!
** If you're a dog and you solve mysteries and ''talk'', you can be sure that's going to get some attention at least. And it doesn't matter if you solve them through hard work or by complete accident, if you solve the mystery, ''you've solved the mystery.''
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* [[Family Guy|Peter. Griffin.]] Should not be able to ''survive'', much less thrive.
** The show occasionally lampshades this. At the end of "Tale of a Third-Grade Nothing", Peter actually goes to jail for blowing up a hospital earlier on. Naturally, he gets released just in time for next week's episode. Often combined with [[Karma Houdini]] due to Peter's frequent high scale [[Jerkass]] tendencies, though it is sometimes hard to define which trope he plays on occasion (being a [[Psychopathic Manchild]] has that way).
* ''[[
* The latter half of fellow [[Nick Toon]] ''[[
* To an extent, the entire Planet Express team of ''[[Futurama]]'' tend to cause endless problems in their botched deliveries. Of course [[Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist|many of them]] (especially [[Villain Protagonist|Bender]]) fluctuate between this and an outright [[Karma Houdini]] at times. Nibber, the [[Team Pet]], seems to undergo this trope due to being a mindless animal (until falling for the above stated [[Unfortunate Implications]] when he is revealed to be [[The Mole]] for a super intelligent race playing dumb).
* Deedee from ''[[
** Of course, this can be explained by Dexter not wanting to tell his parents she broke some stuff in his ''secret laboratory''.
* The flock from ''[[Shaun the Sheep]]'' qualify. No matter how stupid of an act they do, they're saved by the end, it inconveniences the Farmer in some way.
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== Real Life ==
* Timothy Dexter, who became wealthy after marrying a wealthy widow, was persuaded by his friends to invest his wealth into all sorts of ridiculously dumb things. When Dexter sent mittens and warming plates to the West Indies, the mittens were bought and shipped to Siberia, and the warming plates were sold as ladles to the molasses industry. When Dexter shipped coal to Newcastle (the British capital for coal mining at the time), it arrived during a strike and was bought quickly for a great price. When he played the stock market by buying stocks at random, all of them went up. When he wrote a book called "A Pickle For The Nowing Ones"
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Characters As Device]]
[[Category:Idiot Houdini]]
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