Paper-Thin Disguise/Literature

"There, you see? Count Olaf has one eyebrow. Coach Gengis has a turban. They look nothing alike."

—Vice Principal Nero, The Austere Academy

Examples of Paper-Thin Disguises in Literature include:

The film and books A Series of Unfortunate Events spoofed this, via the villain "Count Olaf" appearing in countless bad disguises, with no one but the main characters able to recognize him. Ironically, in the film, actor Jim Carrey has been made up to the point where he's almost unrecognizable. This was parodied even further in Mad's spoof of the books, where Count Olaf's disguise of choice was a T-shirt that read "I am not Count Olaf". And it worked perfectly.
- Hilariously subverted in the last book though. While on an uncharted island, Olaf tries to fool the natives by disguising himself as a pregnant Kit Snicket. The orphans expect the island's residents to fall for the disguise immediately, especially since they don't know Olaf at all and thus have no idea what he normally looks like. They aren't fooled for an instant.
Justified Trope in John Buchan's spy novels, at great length: pretending to be someone else with a heavy disguise is taken to be nowhere near as effective as becoming someone else in every way: mannerisms, way of thought, bearing. See Paper-Thin Disguise/Real Life for a real life example.
All the Grinch from How the Grinch Stole Christmas needs to be indistinguishable from Santa Claus is a red coat and hat. Then again, the only person who saw him in that disguise was a two-year-old girl.
Discworld:
- Even the normally-competent Carrot falls prey to this trope, being too honest at heart not to bungle such a deception. When required to appear in disguise, he dons a fake nose/glasses/mustache set from a joke shop, which Angua points out is actually intended for a potato. Subverted in that he fools no one at all, and is snidely addressed by another character as "Mr. Spuddy Face".
  - The dwarves of the Disc in general are unable to lie and are quite Literal-Minded, so Carrot, having been raised as a dwarf, isn't quite able to grasp deception.
- Conman Moist von Lipwig from Going Postal and Making Money has a particularly unmemorable face, and he only needed to wear a fake mustache or something similar to disguise himself. People would remember the disguise, but couldn't remember his face. (This is a strategy of real-life con men.)
- Played straight and subverted at the same time in Moving Pictures. The staff of Unseen University are attending the grand opening of CMOT Dibbler's film. The problem is, they simultaneously wish to use their prestige as wizards to skip to the front of the line and also not let it be known that wizards would be interested in something so pedestrian as a motion picture. The solution is to stick blatantly obvious wires in their beards, hooking over their ears so as to make it look like they are wearing paper-thin wizard disguises.
In Caress of Twilight, one of Laurel K Hamilton's Merry Gentry series, Rhys puts on a fake beard for disguise.
Sometimes HP Lovecraft's stories can unfortunately drift into this territory, as it's hard to believe that a walking mass of maggots wrapped in a cloak, or an alien fungus in a bathrobe and stolen human face, could fool anyone over the age of three.
- To be fair, the fungus was in a dark room, and the observer did get the feeling there was something amiss.
There is a Hungarian fairy tale about three con men who somehow got a tamed bear and decide to use him for a con. They don him the clothes of a deliriously drunk rich man, go to a merchant and claim that the bear really was the baron of the gypsies who wanted to buy a feast for his marriage. (They taught the bear to say the word "Igen", Hungarian for "yes", so the con goes like this: Con Man: "Sir, should we buy this barrel of beer?" - Bear: "Igen, igen.") The merchant really is fooled.
Apparently all the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood needs to pass off as Red's grandmother in front of the girl herself is the woman's night cap and gown.
- Gahan Wilson did a cartoon showing that this worked because Red's grandmother just happened to look an awful lot like a wolf.
- Terry Pratchett makes fun of this as well; see the Anime example above.
In Watership Down, El-ahrairah's companion Rabscuttle passes for a divine messenger by sticking leaves in his ears, dyeing his tail red, and holding a cigarette in his mouth. Justified because for a rabbit, this is quite an elaborate disguise, and the primary goal was to confuse the (rather gullible) audience.
One of The Adventures of Samurai Cat books has a Lovecraftian monster trying to hitch a ride ... by "disguising his hideousness with kerchief, raincoat, and black nylons." A truck driver actually offered him a ride, but—turned on by the nylons -- got fresh with the monster, who called him a beast and beat him to death with his own truck.
In contrast to the Latex Perfection of the film adaptation, the disguise in Madame Doubtfire is simply the costume of a pantomime dame the father used to play. That the mother didn't immediately recognise her ex-husband is puzzling enough, but it becomes downright baffling when it is revealed she actually took the children to see the very show the character featured in, using the same name no less.
Subverted in Lois Bujold's novel Brothers in Arms, where Miles Vorkosigan is forced to assume his covert role as mercenary admiral Miles Naismith and occupy his real rank and role (a lieutenant in the Barrayaran military) at the same time. On the same planet (Earth). Miles worries that two identical, very short, hyperactive nonresidents appearing at the same time will raise eyebrows in various intelligence services, but his cousin Ivan scoffs that on a planet like Earth, they have to have six of everything. Ivan was wrong; they had three. Miles' cloned evil twin is also on planet. "Admiral Naismith" manages to talk his away out of a perceptive reporter's suspicions by pretending to be his own clone, justified in-universe.
Subverted in George Martins's "Tuf Voyaging", Tuf wears a paper thin disguise on a world where all the natives were half a meter shorter than him. He believes the disguise is working until another off-worlder explains that the natives are too polite acknowledge his identity when he obviously wanted to be left alone. On his second visit, the world famous Tuf wears a new disguise only to have his Dramatic Unmask fizzle, since he looks nothing like the actor who plays Tuf in that world's movies.
In A Song of Ice and Fire, Jaime Lannister makes a pretty good effort at a disguise by growing a scraggly beard and shaving his head. However, no one who's ever seen him before is fooled for an instant.
Pooh, pretending to be a small black cloud by covering himself with mud and dangling from the end of a blue balloon. And singing a little Cloud Song, such as a cloud might sing.

Pooh: "What do I look like?"
Christopher Robin: "You look like a Bear holding on to a balloon."
Pooh: "Not," (Anxiously) "--not like a small black cloud in a blue sky?"
Christopher Robin: "Not very much."

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