Obfuscating Stupidity/Recorded and Stand Up Comedy
Examples of Obfuscating Stupidity in Recorded and Stand Up Comedy include:
Jokes
- One joke recounts the tale of a kindly shopkeeper and a little kid named Billy. On many an occasion, the shopkeeper would witness older boys teasing Billy by offering him a choice between a nickel and a dime, then laughing at him choosing the nickel, supposedly because the nickel was larger and Billy was too slow to realise that the dime was worth more. Eventually, the shopkeeper took pity on Billy, and took him aside for a quiet word on the matter... only for Billy to reveal that he was playing this trope all along: he knows very well how much the two coins are worth, but he's not going to pick the dime and thus stop the older kids playing the prank any time soon when he gets a nickel out of it every time.
Stand-Up Comedy
- Brian Regan may act like an idiot on stage, but if he were really that dumb, he would not be such a brilliant comedian.
- Norm MacDonald does this smiling, stuttering, dopey weirdo routine on stage and in interviews, but a brilliant quip is just around the corner. He won half a million for charity on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, too.
- The late English magician/comedian Tommy Cooper was an undeniable master of using Obfuscating Stupidity in his magic acts. He intentionally botched his own tricks and acted incompetent 90% of the time until he'd pretend to foul up yet another, only to pull off the trick perfectly.
- Ray Romano suggests that guys screw up shopping as badly as possible so they're never asked to do it again. "They were out of lettuce, so I got a hammer."
- Similarly, in "Chocolate Cake for Breakfast", Bill Cosby so horrified his wife by going along with the titular request that she told him to go back to bed.
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Bill: Which is where I wanted to go in the first place. So you see? We are dumb, but we are not so dumb. It takes great thinking and work to keep from working. |
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