Refuge in Audacity/Real Life

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World War II

• Jack Churchill, in World War II, once took a German bunker by rushing it with a Claymore sword, with bagpipes on his hips, and screaming "COMMANDOOOO!!!!"
  • Jack Churchill was this incarnate. He was captured (while playing said bagpipes) and sent to a prison. He just walked out. He was captured again. Once again he walked out and made it back to England.
    • And upon his arrival, he demanded to be put back on the front lines. Unfortunately for him, the war was over by that point... which also explains how he was able to walk out of the prisons. He was in Yugoslavia fighting as a British liaison among partisans, and formed a thousand-man strong partisan army to raid an island in the Adriatic. He was the only man in his unit not to ultimately be killed, and the Germans found him playing a mournful tune on his bagpipes. Existing in the company of Partisans was a kill-on-sight offense for the Germans, but they thought he was of more use alive, and so interrogated him in Berlin before consigning him to Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen the concentration camp. Sachesenhausen, the infamous concentration camp. Sachsenhausen, the infamous concentration camp designed to be able to be effectively and securely guarded by one machine gun if necessary due to the camp's panopticon design. He escaped. He was recaptured, and was transferred by the SS to the Tirol with 139 other high-value prisoners. There, a regular army unit, concerned that the SS would execute the prisoners out of hand, intervened to save their lives, and after the SS decided not to contest the issue, set the prisoners free. Churchill and a companion walked down German-occupied Northern Italy, finally being rescued by an American armored unit in the last days of the war. After recuperation, he was to be sent to Burma, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki intervened. His reaction? "If it wasn't for those damned Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another ten years." This man was certainly a walking, talking breathing example of Refuge in Audacity.
• Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg rescued as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported to the concentration camps using nothing more than a printing press, his expense account, and sheer audacity. He rented buildings in Budapest, declared them to be auxiliary embassy facilities—technically Swedish territory, and therefore off limits to the Hungarians and their German allies—and used them as safe houses. He also printed up thousands of "protective passports" identifying the bearers as Swedish citizens, and handed them out to every Hungarian Jew he met—even, on one occasion, those locked in the boxcars on a train departing for Auschwitz! At one point he ran on top of a train carrying Jews to be killed and stuffing papers into the cars that the Jews could use to semi-legally escape. While Nazis shot at him.
• While not as outrageous as Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler's similar work on behalf of the Jews deserves recognition here. Schindler's Crowning Moment of Awesome was successfully ordering Nazi soldiers to return a trainload of Jewish children en route to the death camps, through sheer force of personality, by declaring the children to be "essential workers" (a protected class of Jews with skills vital to Germany's war effort) in his munitions factory. A munitions factory that he operated for several years using (and protecting) many Jewish workers, while deliberately never producing a single working artillery shell. Yes, this is the same Schindler that Steven Spielberg wrote a film about.
• Giorgio Perlasca is the incarnation of this trope: he was an Italian businessman who posed as the Spanish consul-general to Hungary when Spanish embassy was moved to Switzerland. Apparently him and Wallenberg were the ones going constantly saving people (Perlasca was in Budapest too). He saved thousands of people without any authority at all and managed to fool the Nazis, the Hungarian government and everyone else. For three months. His best Crowning Moment of Awesome was naming himself Spanish consul, but another memorable one was saving two children from Adolf Eichmann, throwing them in his car and saying the car was Spanish jurisdiction and taking them would have caused a diplomatic incident between Spain and Germany. Even Wallenberg was without words, and that means a lot.
• More war stories; Juan Pujol managed to convince the Germans that he was a highly placed British spy with inside information on shipping movements and an extensive network of agents. In actual fact, he had never been in Britain in his life and all the information he gave the Germans was based on film footage and library research. He created a fictitious network, just so the Germans would believe him and he'd be able to work for the British cause as a double agent.
  • For his efforts Pujol was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire ... and received the Iron Cross, becoming one of the very few people decorated by both sides in WWII.
• On a much darker note: the Nazis used this trope to conceal the Holocaust. They deliberately made the concentration camps sufficiently horrific that anyone who told another country about them would be assumed to be exaggerating irresponsibly...
  • In a newspaper article dated 5 years before WWII started, in which Hitler announced to the world that if they didn't accept the Jews deported from Germany, every one of them would be killed.
  • Hitler was probably also counting on the "once bitten, twice shy" reaction that the world had had to the mostly false reports of German atrocities on the Western Front during World War I (stories such as Belgian nuns having their breasts cut off by the Hun, for instance) and probably assumed that they would not so easily believe another series of reports, even if these turned out to be all too true.
  • One of the real tragedies of that approach is that reports of the atrocities early in the war were accused by prominent Jewish figures of being nothing more than anti-German propaganda. Individuals reporting the atrocities were often denounced for creating such unbelievable exaggerations, and accused of harming their own cause; because no sane person could possibly commit such monstrous acts.
  • There were also anti-German groups and groups supporting the Jews who took ill to actual survivors of the camps telling them about their experience - again, monstrosity on such a scale simply couldn't be anything but fantasy...
• Hitler described the tactic of the "Big Lie" in Mein Kampf—claiming something enormously, outrageously false as true, because people are used to lying about minor things, but they find it hard to believe that anyone would lie about something major. (Being Hitler, he insisted that it was a tactic of the "international Jewish-Communist conspiracy," you know, the one that not even the Soviet Union's archives document.) What makes this Refuge in Audacity is that, having described the tactic in so much detail, he used it himself—and got away with it until the Western Allies started physically overrunning concentration camps.
  • When using a Big Lie, it helps immensely to talk oneself into believing it. Hitler apparently managed to do that with his "international Jewish-Communist conspiracy"—although some of his lieutenants had rather more sense.
• This was also how Hitler got the drop on Stalin in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin was planning his own surprise attack, and as a prelude to that, he had filled Nazi territory with GRU spies. (The Gestapo was much less good at its job than they wanted you to believe.) The GRU was—still is!—a very professional organization, so they assumed that no sane leader would attempt to invade Russia, even in the summer, without making preparations for the winter: slaughtering enormous numbers of sheep for coats, and, in the Nazi case, adding antifreeze to the gasohol mix they burned in their tanks (and to their soldiers' rifle oil). They were correct: no sane leader would have even tried it. Read all about it here.
• Some of the escape attempts from various POW camps in World War II were utterly ludicrous yet (on occasion) successful. At Colditz alone one man almost escaped by crossdressing (being foiled alas by a fellow-POW's politeness), others nearly made it out via a tunnel exiting in high-ranking German's office and one man simply vaulted the wire acrobatically and legged it. And the glider built by a group on inmates including Douglas Bader (a man worthy of many a trope himself) near the end of the war.
  • In fact, just go read The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse (another escape book that really happened). The sheer audacity and cunning of the prisoners is worthy of any fictional character.
    • The TV show Hogan's Heroes (and the play and film that inspired it, Stalag 17) was, in part, inspired by real-life POW exploits. The authors of the original play had, themselves, been captives of the Nazis.
• Operation Chariot where in WWII, a group of British Commandos and sailors had to destroy the gate of a German-controlled dry dock in France by ramming it with a disguised, obsolete destroyer filled with explosives. The estuary they had to pass through to reach the dry dock was so heavily defended that the army, Royal Navy and RAF command believed it to be impossible, and it would be a waste of resources. The commandos, the naval personnel and Lord Mountbatten (Head of the Combined Operations Headquarters) believed that it was the impossibility of the operation that made it possible, as the German soldiers defending the dock wouldn't believe anyone would have the audacity to try it. Indeed, the destroyer sailed down the estuary virtually unchallenged until just a few hundred yards from it's target, rammed it successfully and later exploded a few hours behind schedule. Despite a catalogue of errors, leaving most of the commandos and sailors dead or captured, the mission was considered by all to be a success as it rendered the dry dock useless to Germany's larger and more fearsome ships.
  • So daring was the raid, along with countless incidents of Crowning Moment of Awesome, five Victoria Crosses were awarded to the raiders, more than in any other operation.
  • Operation Chariot aka The Saint Nazaire Raid is taught today at military academies (but otherwise virtually unknown) and is called The Greatest Raid of All Time
  • When a large group of commandos were ready to leave, they saw that almost all of the small escape boats had been destroyed and decided on the spot to fight their way through the town, through several thousand heavily armed German troops, and make their way to Spain. It was in the process of this that their dwindling group decided to charge across a well-defended bridge, while the majority were low on ammo and seriously wounded. The Germans, awestruck by such audacity, couldn't keep them back. When the fighting was over, the Germans congratulated the plucky Brits for their guts.
• The hits just keep on coming with this: Lieutenant-Commander Beattie, who had gallantly guided the HMS Campbeltown into it's target while under heavy fire, was being interrogated by an English-speaking German officer. Just as the German officer was telling him how futile it was to use such a flimsy ship to ram such a great and strong dock, the several tons of explosives hidden in the ship's bow and which the Germans still didn't know about, exploded and blew the office windows in.
  • This is a man who, when successive people were being shot at the helm and replaced five or six times, continued to stand at the conning position and calmly give helm orders with a complete lack of excitement. Total sangfroid and utterly nails.
• This, combined with What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic appears to be Japan's next bid for the Olympics after two or three failed attempts since Nagano: They want Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be co-host cities for 2020 games despite the fact that co-hosting isn't allowed by the IOC.
• When the Nazis gained power and began cracking down on the German film industry, Jewish actor Peter Lorre and one of his friends drove out to an isolated area to destroy various documents that "incriminated" their friends as prime blacklist material (or worse). When a policeman caught them burning the documents, Lorre successfully convinced the cop that they were filming a scene for his next movie and asked for his help. The policeman happily helped them destroy all the documents and left with an autograph. The best part? The pair had no film equipment with them whatsoever.
• Almost anything involving the phrase "World War II" and the word "destroyer." (Where did the "World War II destroyer captains" section of Crowning Moment of Awesome get off to, anyways?)
• In the Battle off Samar, a Japanese fleet consisting of numerous battleships, cruisers, and destroyers managed to sneak around the main US fleet protecting the troops transports and supply ships. They weren't expecting any serious American resistance, especially from a handful of dinky destroyers and escort carriers. The seriously outmatched American task force fought back so hard and so valiantly, that the Japanese admiral was convinced that the American forces were more powerful than he initially thought and called for a retreat.
  • So fiercely did the Americans fight that when a destroyer was finally sunk it was listed by the Japanese as a cruiser.
• One group of German prisoners in an internment camp during WW 2. They weren't allowed to have radios, but wanting to know how the war was going, they built a radio into the seat of a chair. The camp commander suspected they had a radio and had their rooms searched repeatedly. Each time, the commander came along to see that the search was done properly. Each time, the prisoners offered him a chair - the one with the radio in it. Each time, the chair wasn't searched, because the commander was sitting on it. After the war, one of the ex-prisoners told the commander how it was done; the commander apparently thought it was pretty funny.
• The Producers (again).
• Vaclav Havel, Czech President, famously prescribed his way of dealing with living under the insanity and irrationality of communist oppression in the '70s and '80s: he said that regardless of what the communists attempted to impose on him, he lived his life as if he were truly free.
• Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, and his outrageous list of suggestions for cutting costs on his airline. One of the best was the idea of increasing the number of passengers by replacing some of the seats with standing room. When this was mocked in the press as being utterly ridiculous a spokesman responded by saying it was just a joke, but one gets the impression that if it had been better received there would be people standing for their plane journeys right now.
• Scandalous far-right Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. There is no more fitting description of his entire career and political tactics than "refuge in audacity". Just read the many controversy sub-sections in his WP page, and rest assured that it is woefully incomplete. Did it work out for him? Well, his party has won parliamentary elections once in the past, and after a major decline remains the third largest party in the country, while Zhirinovsky has once climbed to the second place in the polls prior to a presidential election.
• All of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's characters - Ali G (a white guy pretending to be black who does interviews in character with very important political figures), Borat (a clueless and, let's face it, tactless most-of-the-time news reporter from a fictional version of Kazakhstan), and Bruno (a Flamboyant Gay fashion reporter for Austrian Gay TV); most of the sketches focus on real people not in on the joke taking their outrageous statements at face value. Since no one living above ground is taken in anymore, Cohen no longer uses them in public.
  • King Julien XIII
• This and Bavarian Fire Drill were Frank Abagnale's bread and butter. Exploits include taking charge of his school's French class on his first day, and bluffing the agent chasing him by, when asked for his identification, giving him a wallet filled with soda bottle labels and chatting with him as he walks right out the door. All when he was a teenager.
• Vassilis Paleokostas. Greek bank robber and kidnapper for ransom. Escaped from prison with a helicopter. Twice.
• Many of the attempts to cross the Berlin Wall would fall under this category. Such attempts included leaping over low parts of the Wall in broad daylight, stealing an APC and driving it through the Wall, using a sports car modified to pass under the checkpoint barricades at full speed, and building ultralight planes and hot air balloons to fly over the Wall.
  • Special mention to the guy who used a power line as a zip-line.
    • And the two guys who escaped over a different wall out of Communist Eastern Europe, using home-made chairs that ran along high-voltage power lines (the kind you find up the tall steel towers). (The just had to climb up the last tower before the border, hook on the chairs, cross to the next tower, and climb down in a different country. The first half of the trip across was easy. Getting up the slope to the other tower, not so much.)
• Barack Obama makes an appearance at a Buffalo, NY restaurant; patron goes up to him and says, "You’re a hottie with a smokin' little body."
• A German student "mooned" a group of Hell's Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said. The use of this trope is probably how the guy managed to escape the bikers.
• When Henri IV of France and Navarre was excommunicated by the pope, he retaliated by excommunicating the pope. Which is technically completely impossible. Possibly the most epic use of, "No, you are!" in the history of the world.
  • Nope. That one is easily topped by the Pope and the Patriarch excommunicating each other after a spat, resulting in a rift between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches that has continued to the present day.
• Read Silvio Berlusconi's Wikiquote page and marvel at how he stayed in office as Italian Prime minister for 17 years. And the probable ties with the Mafia and multiple scandals. One gets the feeling that if he hadn't been voted out, a good number of his countrymen wouldn't really have minded too much if someone invaded them on a mission of liberation from the man trope.
  • Also, from Wikipedia:

After the family of Eluana Englaro (who had been comatose for 17 years) succeeded in having her right to die recognised by the judges and getting doctors to start the process of allowing her to die in the way established by the court, Berlusconi issued a decree to stop the doctor from letting her die. Stating that, "This is murder. I would be failing to rescue her. I'm not a Pontius Pilate", Berlusconi went on to defend his decision by claiming that she was "in the condition to have babies",[89] arguing that comatose women were still subject to menstruation.

• • You forgot this gem, said during the Sme trial.

"All citizens are equal (in front of the law) but maybe the undersigned is a bit more equal than the others, since the 50 % of Italians gave him the responsibility for governing the Country”

• • At the opening of the European Food Authority in Parma, June 21, 2005, asked to explain how Italy managed to get the support of its biggest competitor (Finland) over the EU Food Authority dispute, he claimed: "I used all my playboy skills and courted the Finnish President". The Finnish parliament took the claim rather seriously and questioned the President about it. Berlusconi then attempted a saving throw by using this very trope... only to make it worse. He said something in the line of: "Of course I was joking, I mean look at her: do you seriously think I could...?".
• This was the essence of Attorney General Philander C. Knox' advice to Theodore Roosevelt when TR asked him to come up with a legal justification for America's having assisted Panama in gaining her independence:

"Mister President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality."

• Apparently, Bradley Manning (a US soldier of second-to-lowest rank) could successfully access and smuggle out hundreds of thousands of classified intelligence documents of devastating international importance, just using his workstation and a Lady Gaga CD and acting normal, for Wikileaks to publish online. Bonus points for his choice of artist, being gay under DADT.
• You'd be surprised how much you can get away with just by telling people what you're doing. Stealing a stapler? Okay. Taking their car that they let no one else drive? No problem. Just act like it's just a normal, routine thing, and you can get away with a lot. Note: requires confidence and balls.
  • You'd be surprised what parents will swallow, if you pass it off as a joke. "Whatcha doin', kiddo?"
  • "Oh, I was just gonna get stoned and party naked until I pass out from sexual exhaustion" *Laugh*
• Eric Raymond advises in hacker culture, particularly in open source mailing lists, that because subtle emotions don't carry well in text, it's better to flame so openly and over the top ridiculously, if you're going to flame at all, so that everyone knows you're just being silly. Haha, only serious.
• This exam answer.
  • Except not, because the answer below it is marked with the same checkmark, while it is clearly wrong (has a total of 6 roots listed for a 5th-degree polynomial).
    • It's clearly right, provided there's more that's cut off at the bottom of the image. There can be any finite number of possible rational roots.
• The Three Toed Sloth, one of nature's better animals. Mr. Sloth harbors no less than four separate kinds of algae in his fur, causing him to mold green during the wet seasons, allowing plenty of delicious ecosystem for bugs, moths and worms that decide to infest his fur. Even better, the sloth's digestive system is slow that he's just a mobile compost heap wrapped in a moldy sweater... how does this crazy critter survive living in the Amazon, where there are more predators than leaves? Simple: No predator would ever want to eat Mr. Sloth, due to his extremely revolting niche lifestyle.
  • Unfortunately, sloths have evolved against every conceivable predator except cars. They are being roadkilled out of existence. To be fair, there are anecdotes of people trying to move the sloths out of the road that didn't end well. Nobody expects to hear "sloth" and "disemboweled the guy" in the same sentence.
    • Then again, the algae in its fur probably will wind up making the perfect biofuel for future cars—but only if it's grown in the sloth's fur, meaning that they'll have to be farmed carefully.
• A corollary to this trope is something too crazy not to be true. This was used to advantage in Ancient Athens, when the tyrant Peisistratos managed a comeback by dressing a tall woman up as Athena and then riding into the city in a golden chariot with her, fooling the masses into thinking he had the goddess' favor. (Peisistratos then failed in that particular coup. He was forced to retreat, invest in gold mines, and use the money to hire a private army to take back his tyranny.)
  • "O.K., let's try it without the goddess..."
• The book Cops: Their Lives In Their Own Words has one interviewee mentioning that middle-class juries would acquit people simply because they couldn't believe human beings were capable of the things they did ... like a mother sewing her baby's rectum up because she got tired of him defecating all the time.
• Giuseppe Garibaldi lived by this trope, and actually achieved quite a few CMOAs thanks to that.
  • During the Uruguayan Civil War, the Uruguayan army was crushed at the battle of Arroyo Grande, in December 1842. Garibaldi, living in Uruguay at the time, led the defense of the Uruguayan capital Montevideo with a few thousand newly-freed slaves and a few hundred immigrants, against the victorious troops of Argentina's caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas and former Uruguay's Manuel Oribe. Garibaldi led the city's defense for 6 years remaining undefeated, and his side eventually won the war, causing, among other things, the fall and exile of Rosas.
  • The Spedizione dei Mille: Garibaldi attacked the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with 999 underarmed men and one underarmed woman, against an army of over 100,000 soldiers. He won the war in the space of five months. He, and all his soldiers, were wearing red shirts at the time.
    • Actually, that's precisely why it did work. The defenders thought they were facing the British (famous for their red uniforms).
  • The Franco-Prussian War: In this war, tactfully summarised as "The German states play the role of drunken fratboy to France's ugly girl home on a Saturday night", Garibaldi raised a volunteer legion to fight for the new French republic. The reason there was a new republic was that the Emperor had already been captured by the Germans, along with most of his army, and they were setting off to besiege Paris and proclaim their own empire. In Versailles palace, too, just to rub it in. Sounds like a less-than-ideal time to pitch in with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits? Well, he didn't quite save France, but Victor Hugo called him "The only undefeated "French" general of the war".
  • Although he was turned down, the fact that when, offered a position as a Major-General for the Union in 1861, he demanded total command of the US Army serves as a good example of his Modus Operandi.
• OJ Simpson's Sarcastic Confession.
• Ralph Fiennes having unprotected sex with an air hostess in the bathroom of the plane on his way to an AIDS awareness convention as their spokesperson. And he was allowed to continue being their spokesperson.
  • She got fired, though.
• The Chaser managed to get through the heavy security at the 2007 APEC summit using nothing but a Canadian flag, fake passes which actually said "fake" and "it's pretty obvious this isn't a real pass", and a heavy helping of this trope.
• Stephen Colbert. Through sheer audacity, the man managed to get his DNA digitized and sent into space.
  • Had several animal species named after him.
  • And deftly managed to convince NASA to name space equipment (namely the space station's new treadmill) after him. He almost got his name on a node of the Space Station, but failed. His sheer audacity is one of the things that make him an appealing performer.
  • Tried running for President of the United States in 2008, pretending to be sponsored by Doritos, in South Carolina only.
  • He also got Richard Branson to name a plane after him and almost got the Hungarian government to name a bridge after him.
    • It turned out that you had to be Hungarian and dead in order to qualify. Colbert had the Hungarian ambassador come on his show; he greeted him in Hungarian, and the Hungarian ambassador said that he'd passed the first criterion—and if he'd care to come see the bridge, the ambassador was sure that the second could also be arranged!
  • And was summoned by congress to speak about illegal immigrant workers on farm, citing him being a specialist on the topic for having worked ONE DAY like an illegal worker.
    • He ended his opening remarks with a sarcastic jab saying, (paraphrased): "I know that you will get back to working for the betterment of the American people, as you always do". It then gets depressing as one of the congressmen laughed after he said that... *sigh*.
  • Now he has a Super PAC. It's just become that much more outrageous.
  • In 2012, Colbert was named #69 on Maxim's Hot 100 list. Celebrities get named to lists of hot people all the time, but it takes a special kind of chutzpah to force your way onto a list of beautiful women despite having a Y chromosome.
• John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman. Merely griping about a longtime friend when you're chosen to speak at his memorial service? Not funny. Saying "Good riddance, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries"? Funny! The best part is that Cleese knew that Chapman would have never forgiven him if he hadn't said it.
• Many scams - a recent example is Bernie Madoff. As one commenter said: "The SEC is very good at rooting out sophisticated fraud, especially in accounting gimicks [sic]. But they, like most human beings, are simply not that good at identifying accounting statements that are simply made up out of whole cloth."
• In 168 BC, the Egyptians petitioned the Romans to aid them in fighting off the Syrian Empire. The Romans sent a small delegation headed by Gaius Popilius Laenas, who traveled to the Syrian camp and demanded an audience with Antiochus IV, the king of Syria. There, he wordlessly handed him the Roman Senate's ultimatum: Withdraw, or face war with Rome. To make sure that Antiochus understood the stakes, he then took a branch, and drew a circle around Antiochus, telling him that he could have all the time he needed to think, but that he had to reach a decision before he left the circle. The Syrians decided to heed the warning of the Senate and withdrew from Egypt.
  • He probably would have left anyway though Rome was the most powerful state in the world at that point and had proven it during the Punic Wars.
• In February 2009, a young man walked into a Chicago police station and worked a shift despite having no badge or identification.
  • That same kid, 14 years old at the time, was later arrested for driving off with a Lexus from a Lexus dealership. He was caught three hours later after a car chase ending in a crash against a telephone pole. He tried to get away by grabbing a stroller and casually walking away.
  • Darius McCollum, who was obsessed with the New York transit system. At 5, he had memorized all of the routes. At 15, he hijacked a train and drove it along its ordinary route. Passengers did not notice. To this day he is still being arrested for impersonating transit workers.
• Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham balances his entire act on this. A character named "Achmed the Dead Terrorist" sounds like it should be horribly offensive... but a skeleton with Big Ol' Eyebrows who laments about having killed his son by taking him to Take Your Child to Work Day? Hilarious.
  • Ironically, it somehow backfired on his short-lived TV show. It was canceled after 6 episodes, partially due quickly slipping ratings, and partially due to critics claiming it was racist. They forget that Carlos Mencia got away with much worse on Mind of Mencia simply because Mencia was a minority.
• Absolutely everything Frankie Boyle has ever said, ever. For him it's not so much a refuge as a home.
• Tentacle Grape.
• The creator of Scie- Happyology revels in this trope, and has cited it as a defense against its critics.
  • The "Miss Blood" incident is the most famous example of this.
• Happyology's Sea Org contract goes for a billion years, including future reincarnations. An NCAA (all sports, not just football) contract for the use of a player's image lasts "forever and throughout the universe". At least the college won't sue the player if they decide to leave...
• Josef Fritzl successfully imprisoned his daughter and their eventual seven children in the basement of his house for 24 years without his wife or their other children or neighbors noticing anything. Really, the idea is so outlandish and monstrous that no rational person would ever entertain the idea of someone doing it. To be fair, apparently his wife is 95% deaf and has cerebral atherosclerosis, so not all there either.
  • When asked where did his daughter disappear, he answered something like: "She had joined a (Satanic) cult". In front of rural, devoted Catholics. Nobody asked any more questions after such an answer.
• Two people escape from maximum security prison in a helicopter. That isn't what makes it an example, what makes it an example is that they were in prison awaiting trial for doing it BEFORE. The fact that you can get away with having a fan club for the two of them says a lot.
• A German Prisoner had escaped from prison via... hiding in a Cardboard Box.
• Chutzpah has been defined as "clever audacity, for example a child killing both parents and then asking the courts for mercy because he's an orphan."
  • Actually, in Yiddish chutspah or khutspe is more assholish, moronic audacity. Clever audacity is called seykhl. And now you know. And Knowing Is Half the Battle.
• In the late 1950s, the Navy was determined to launch the first US satellite with their Vanguard rocket. Which meant that even though Wernher von Braun had built better rockets for the Army, he couldn't launch anything into space, only launch tests. So, without getting permission from his supervising officer, von Braun moved one of his rockets out to the pad and decided he'd launch it into space and then go "Woops, it was an ACCIDENT!" The supervisor found out before he could actually do the launch, but man, that took GUTS!
• One entry on FML runs that the poster was eating lunch in a park in New York City, when Steve Martin walks up to him, grabs his sandwich, takes a bite, then leaves, saying, "Nobody will ever believe you!"
  • Steve Martin's comedy routines are based on audacity.
    • For that matter, a good half of the stories on FML are so astoundingly horrible or outlandish that you're never quite sure whether they're true.
• Spaced: "...and was subsequently apprehended on Space Mountain."
• In an example from the animal kingdom, this. A mouse, caught on camera, stealing meat from a leopard. Right in front of the leopard.
• The UK is much more liberal when it comes to swearing on television and radio, but is generally frowned upon before the 9pm watershed. But when one hears, for instance, the word "wanker" in an episode of tea-time gameshow Countdown, or the word "bullshit" on The News Quiz at quarter-to-seven, one tends to brush it off as if nothing happened. Or maybe the Media Watchdogs are just watching the wrong shows.
  • The Wankers on Countdown was recorded but not broadcast and The News Quiz is a radio show and the watershed only covers television.
• Every scheme listed here is flat-out insane. This did not stop people from trying them. See if you can spot which ones are simply stupid and which are stupid yet take cojones.
• Zhuge Liang was a general in China's Three Kingdoms period with an unparalleled for audacious feats of strategy that always caught the other army off-guard and always worked. Then he gets caught off-guard: Sima Yi, an opposing general, managed to annihilate the forces tasked with protecting Zhuge Liang's flank and marched an overwhelming force to the gates of the city Zhuge Liang was in. There was no way to win the battle. Zhuge Liang walked out of the city, unarmed, and sat down in front of the walls in full view of the army and started playing his lyre without an apparent care in the world. Convinced that Zhuge Liang had some nasty trick up his sleeve and he was facing annihilation, Sima Yi turned his army right around and went home without even attempting battle. Which he would have easily won.
• There's an old story of two strangers sitting at a table and eating their lunches. Alice looks up and notices Bob is eating a cookie from her bag. So Alice reaches out and takes another cookie, with a meaningful stare. Bob helps himself to another cookie. Alice takes another. They go all the way to the bottom of the bag, and there's one last cookie. Bob breaks it in half, gives Alice half, and leaves. That's when Alice looks again in her lunchbox and sees her own, untouched, package of cookies. She was eating Bob's cookies all along.
  • My friend is Bob. Alice is now his wife.
    • See also So Long And Thanks For All The Fish in the Literature section. Douglas Adams claimed it happened to him.
• T. E. Lawrence based his entire military career upon this principle.
• Napoleon Bonaparte, when he returned from his exile to Elba island. He essentially decided one day that he'd had enough of this 'exile' silliness and caught a boat back to France, where he gathered an army of volunteers while heading for Paris. When Louis XVIII sent his army to kill the renowned general, Napoleon left his own forces behind, walked up to the attacking army and asked if they were really thinking of trying to kill him. He captured Paris two weeks later.
  • On an earlier occasion, Napoleon's army needed to seize a vital bridge that the Austrian army was preparing to blow up. Two of Napoleon's marshals, Murat and Lannes, ride up and demand to know what the Austrians think they're doing. Didn't they know that this bridge had been ceded to the French under the terms of the armistice? One Austrian sergeant on the scene did realize that they were bluffing, but Mut then demanded of the Austrian officer if he took orders from sergeants. Suffice it to say that the French were able to seize the bridge.
• This was the only reason why Skippy, from Skippy's List, wasn't beaten up, court martialed, or drummed out of the army, according to him.
• When it was first proposed, Quantum Physics was this. Or, as Niels Bohr put it:

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

• In 2007, Timothy Rouse escaped from jail in Kentucky on some very serious charges by having a friend send a fax from the corner grocery store claiming that a court order demanded his release. The 'order' was incorrectly formatted, on plain paper, with no identifying marks or seals. He was promptly released from jail.
• In social-engineering attacks, the easiest way to break into a secure facility is to act like you belong there. If there's a "code of the day" system, strike preemptively by asking the other person for the password. Someone broke into an army base by dressing as an officer and ordering his way in.
• Phillipe Petit, when arriving in America with his equipment to walk between the Twin Towers, was asked by a customs official what it was for. He responded that he was going to use it to put a wire illegally between the Twin Towers and walk across. The custom official laughed at him, wished him luck, and called for the next person.
• A more disturbing rather than awesome example: As documented by United 93, one of the chief reasons the FAA and the military were slow to react to the 9/11 hijackings was that a hijacking was simply absurd. It had been decades since the last one, and no one anticipated a hijack on that day, much less four.
• This bash.org quote.
• John Giles, the Alcatraz escapee who verifiably made it to dry land before being intercepted. While washing military clothing in the prison laundry, he managed to purloin a complete Army uniform one piece at a time; thus disguised, he simply stepped onto a military launch as if he belonged on board. Had his absence from the prison not been noticed immediately, or had the launch not been bound for Angel Island rather than the mainland, Giles would've been the guy Escape from Alcatraz was written about.
• In the case "R. v. Sharpe", Canadian Chief Justice openly admitted that "person" has a clear definition given in the Canadian criminal code, but that she will impose a separate definition for this one law.
• Darkly averted in recent news: a Qatari diplomat traveling into the United States snuck cigarettes aboard his plane and started smoking in the restroom. Eventually, one of the air marshals noticed smoke drifting out through the door and asked what he was doing. The diplomat's response? "I'm trying to light my shoes on fire."
  • Yeah, while we're at it: DO NOT attempt Refuge in Audacity with airport security. Ever. Seanbaby put it best when he wrote: "Federal regulations require them to have no idea you were only joking as they riddle your body with bullets."
• Sad but true with atrocity-committing dictators and terrorists-turned-public-figures being given little more than a judiciary "slap on the wrist" (if that) because slaughtering people by the village-load and establishing a military junta apparently makes you untouchable. As the saying goes, "You kill 1 person, you go to prison. You kill 20 people, you get institutionalized. You kill 100,000 and you're granted political asylum."
  • Not if Mossad has anything to say about it, though.
    • Many [alleged] Mossad operations qualify for this trope.
    • Gordon Thomas' "Gideon's Spies" details an interesting mix of fact and speculation about the Mossad.
  • The reasoning is understandable. Often enough a dictator's victims would like to kill him but even more want to just be rid of him. Dumping him in the care of some state that will take responsibility for his security while he spends the rest of his life in hedonism is a compromise and one might be pardoned for thinking it less bad than getting a few extra brave men killed just for the satisfaction of revenge.
• Roger Ebert was fond of relaying an incident in which Mel Brooks was stuck on an elevator with an old woman who was griping about how The Producers was vulgar, to which he very seriously replied with some hauteur, "Madam, it rises below vulgarity." (Not to be confused with Refuge in Vulgarity: be sure to read the description of that trope.)
• The state of Georgia finally caved into the pressure to change its state flag in the early 2000s because of its depiction of the Confederate battle flag. After a very lame interim flag was chosen by an unpopular governor, it was then replaced with an even newer flag is simply a recreation of the less-famous Confederate national flag with the state seal within the blue field of stars.
• In an interview, Johnny Depp recounts a story in which he buys some paint with the intent of defacing a billboard with his face on it because he doesn't like the picture. He is caught by a security guard, who, upon realizing who he is, tells him to get on with it.

"That's ... you!" "Yeah, I know!" "....Hurry."

• • From that same interview:

"On rollerskates... It's such an absurd thing to do, you have to try and top yourself."

• Halloween relies on this. It is the only time of year who can dress in sexually charged and/or bloody costumes without getting arrested.
• An Arizona restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill has food items like the Quadruple Bypass Burger or Flatliner Fries, dresses their servers as sexy nurses, and bears the slogan "A taste worth dying for." Its YouTube commercial offers the warning that side effects "may include sudden weight gain, repeated increase of wardrobe size, back pain, male breast growth, loss of sexual partners, lung cancer, tooth decay, liver sclerosis, stroke, and an inability to see your penis. In some cases, mild death may occur."
  • A man recently had a fatal heart attack there.
• eBay sellers that charge something like $100 for an item or more when there are others selling for way less. Possibly justifiable if you're the only one who ships internationally or something, but otherwise, who do they think they're trying to kid?
• this. it takes Breathless Non-Sequitur Up to Eleven.
• A house was stolen.
• John Wilkes Booth managed to escape capture at the Ford Theater due to the simple fact that what he did was so outrageous nobody realized what he'd done. He had time to jump onto the stage, breaking a leg, deliver a Bond One-Liner, and then limp to his horse on the aforementioned broken leg before riding off into the night... while the majority of the theater was still trying to figure out what he'd done. (That is, shooting Abraham Lincoln.) He even did this while there were military personnel at the theater!
• It seems the Pakistani government may be attempting one of these. The world's #1 terrorist is found a couple hundred yards from their largest military academy, in a massive house on an even more massive lot, surrounded by 10 to 18 foot high barbed wire topped walls with no phone lines, in a city full of retired military officers 30 miles from their capital city and they had no idea.
• Hizzoner Da Mare Richard J. Daley of Chicago could have listed an example every day. His son, Richard M. Daley, as mayor, wanted to get rid of Meigs Field airport on the lakefront, so he could reclaim it as parkland. The owners of the airport protested, and eventually brokered a legislative compromise to keep the airport operating for the next 25 years—however, the final vote on it stalled in the Senate. Before things could go back for another round of legislation Daley sent bulldozers to the runway in the middle of the night to carve huge Xs into it, rendering it unusable. This circumvented a restraining order that prevented him from closing the active airport, and allowed him to condemn the now-unusable site.
• One anecdote tells of a white undercover FBI agent who managed to successfully infiltrate a black gang in Los Angeles and get them all busted for drug trafficking. Later interviews established that the gang members trusted the agent because they didn't think the police would be stupid enough to send a white guy to infiltrate a black gang.
  • The same agent was also famed for keeping a country music tape in his car that contained a song with the lyrics "He's an undercover agent for the FBI" in it and ensuring that as many people as possible got into the car and heard that song.
• Quite a lot of internet phishing (not to be confused with hacking) relies on Refuge in Audacity. Not as common now that the average joe knows about scam letters and phishing methods, but in days when the average AOL'er and secretary was less savvy, it was quite common for accounts or entire systems (occasionally very big systems) to be compromised simply by someone calling/emailing pretending to be a serviceman asking for their information. They did it by burying their intentions under technical jargon and functioning on the premise that it was assumed that no one with bad intentions would simply call and ask for your password or to be keyed into your system.
• Copyright-lawsuit outfit Righthaven, after losing a case because the 'right to sue' that they had obtained from their parent company cannot exist under law, as you need to hold the copyrights before you can sue over them (a thing called 'standing'), then argued that, as they lacked standing, the court lacked standing to order them to pay defendants' costs. The judge didn't find their arguments persuasive, surprisingly.
• Game designer and rampaging egotist M Dickie justifies making a game depicting a heavily edited version of the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad with an essay that boils down to, "Doing this isn't blasphemy because I don't want it to be. Also, the taboo against depicting Muhammad is the real blasphemy, because that way I'm actually an iconoclastic religious hero to a faith I don't subscribe to."
• An unintentional example ensued when a minister at a local church recovered from an illness. It was the custom to post messages to the parish on the church bulletin board using stationery inscribed with the message "God Is Good." Underneath this was written "Dr. Hargreaves is better."
• Steven Jay Russell, the con man who inspired the movie I Love You Phillip Morris, certainly counts. It takes some balls to fake your own death from AIDS in order to escape from prison.
• Ricky Gervais' hosting duties during the 2010 Golden Globe Awards would have been enough to get anyone, regardless of their star power, blacklisted in Hollywood for eternity. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, desperate to get its ratings back up, hired Gervais to host the ceremony. Gervais then proceeded to mock every Hollywood institution in the room - he made jokes about The Tourist (right in front of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp), heavily indicated that awards could be bought from the HFPA, mocked Mel Gibson (who was facing charges of abusing his then-wife and child under the influence of alcohol) right in front of him, pimped his own film The Invention of Lying, drank several glasses of beer during the telecast, told everyone that he would never host again and generally mocked the entire concept of the award ceremony. To the HFPA's surprise, ratings went through the roof, and Gervais was asked to come back and host the 2011 awards (where he did more of the same).
• This attack by Anonymous, known as "Military Meltdown Monday." Not only did Anon break into the US military's database and make away with some 90,000 military email usernames and passwords, they also left an invoice for their "audit" of the security company's encryption, totaling to $310.
• In January 2011, a man in Russia managed to get off of being charged with armed robbery for stealing a truck containing a shipment of vodka by arguing that he was stealing the Vodka and that the truck just happened to be how he was transporting the Vodka.
• The (fake) sale of the Eiffel Tower. Conman managed to convince several moguls that the (then) pre TV/Radio landmark was a costly waste of money, space and metal. And government JUST realized this. So the government was quietly looking for buyers to get rid of it. Bonus for making it a believable con because he asked for bribes, which was taken as proof that he was genuine because everyone knows the government is corrupt.
• On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched a no-hitter—one of the hardest things to accomplish in baseball—while under the influence of LSD.
• [HitmanForHire.net]. If it hadn't been for a terrified woman going to FBI after the "hitman" tried to blackmail her, they might have never realized the man behind it was soliciting actual offers.
• In his Dress to Kill show, Eddie Izzard points out that "[Hitler] was a mass murdering fuckhead as many important historians have said. But there are other mass murderers who got away with it. Stalin killed many millions, died in his bed. Well done there. Pol Pot killed 1.7 million Cambodians, died under house arrest, age 72. Well done, indeed. And the reason we let them get away with it is because they killed their own people. And we're sort of fine with that. Oh, help yourself, you know we've been trying to kill you for ages, so you kill your own people... Seem to me Hitler killed people next door. Oh, stupid man. After a couple of years: well we won't stand for that, will we? Pol Pot killed 1.7 million people. We can't even deal with that. I think we think that if someone kills someone that's murder you go to prison. You kill ten people, you go to Texas they hit you with a brick, that's what they do. Twenty people, you go to a hospital and they look through a small window at you forever. And over that we can't deal with it. Y'know? Somebody's killed 100,000 people, we're almost going 'well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning.'"
  • If there was a likelihood of Pol Pot making a serious effort to Take Over the World then he would have gotten different treatment. And Stalin was a big worry in his time when he was suspected of that. The reason people cared about Hitler was that he might try to kill them, or someone they were related to, not that he killed people in the generic sense.
  • To put it another way, aside from the fact that Hitler was a direct threat to the US, there were a lot of Americans descended from, British, Poles, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Dutchmen, and Jews. Cambodians just arrived on the scene after Pol Pot and when they did America had had all the war it wanted.
  • Then too Hitler's Germany was conquered and thus its dirty laundry was aired out in public by it's enemies. Only a few of the worst camps were in Germany ("Not in my backyard" applied even in the Third Reich) and most were in Poland (primarily because the Germans wanted to make Poland a giant concentration camp anyway so having a super concentration camp there was logical, if you want to call it that). However the advancing Russians were usually willing to show nasty stuff to the press unless they had something of their own to hide. And the Americans and British found enough slave camps and one or two extermination camps on their front.
• The BBC/Discovery documentary Human Planet is about the extremes of humans living in nature. Many of the examples in the episodes go this far.
  • In Cambodia a man traverses shallow water in a small boat with his young son to gather hundreds of snakes to sell. When he gets home, his wife implores him to give some snakes to the girls to play with. The segment ends showing the girls wearing living snakes as bracelets and necklaces.
  • A tribe in Indonesia that builds tree houses over 100 feet high. Once built they carry their dogs and pigs all the way up and let their toddlers wander freely because they "know the limits of how far they can go". The tree house is considered finished when they light a fire in it.
  • A man in the Himalayas wants to give his children a good education. This involves a seven day hike through frozen mountain passes and thawing rivers. When they reach the town with the school, the children are properly dressed in their school uniforms.
  • Perhaps the most clear case of this is the Dorobo people in Kenya. An older man takes two younger men out to teach them an ancient method of getting meat. Said method turns out to be to find a pride of fifteen lions eating a wildebeest, walk up to them, cut off a leg, heft it over his shoulder and walk home. The lions apparently didn't believe it either.
• While ultimately unsuccessful the arguments put forth by Charles Guiteau during his trial for the murder of President James Garfield, ranging from accusing the latter's doctors of the actual killing to seeking the intervention of President Chester A. Arthur on his behalf in return for the raise he got due to Garfield's death, essentially defines this trope.
• Cracked.com has an article on the ballsiest con artists of all time.
  • And for a list of less selfish, but no less ballsy exploits, see here.
• Some of Sir Richard Branson's ad campaigns for Virgin fall under this.
  • When The Full Monty premiered on Broadway, Branson and the show's cast advertised Virgin cellphones by suspending themselves over Times Square, dressed only in "nude" bodysuits, with prop cellphones covering their "business."
• Rodrigo Duterte was once quoted as cussing at Pope Francis when he recalled about being stuck in traffic due to the Pontiff's visit in the Philippines in 2015. As the Philippines is predominantly (and historically) Catholic, this didn't sit well with the faithful who view the obscene gesture as an irreverent insult, with one priest lamenting how Filipino values have "gone down the dregs", but somehow Filipinos still rooted for him to be elected president. Some of these supporters (who happen to be Catholic) either let that episode slide and looked more into what Duterte would bring to the country, or simply did not care at all.