Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Someone is having an extraordinarily difficult time doing a simple task with a mundane product.

  • Played Straight: At the beginning of the commercial for the Brush-O-Matic, Alice gets her hairbrush stuck in her hair and screams.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is banging the brush (the non-bristled side) against her tangled mass of hair like a crazed chimpanzee before the above happens.
  • Justified: Alice has some kind of mental or physical disability that makes even the simplest tasks difficult for her. Bonus Points if the Brush-O-Matic actually is marketed towards the elderly and/or disabled.
  • Inverted: Alice seems to be getting on perfectly fine with her ordinary hairbrush. Her super-high-tech Brush-O-Matic does, we're told, keep her hair shiny and clean for longer (by folliculating its nanokeratoids), but it looks like a hell of a lot of hard work to use.
  • Subverted:
    • Alice is having trouble with her hairbrush, but soon figures it out.
    • An advert shows Alice struggling with some incredibly basic household chores... and turns out to be an advert for a nursing home.
    • "If you find ordinary hairbrushes a chore... then this probably isn't for you. If anything, it's more complicated. But if you're a human being of normal intelligence, you need a Brush-O-Matic!"
  • Double Subverted: The problem is, she was using the non-bristled side!
  • Deconstructed:
  • Reconstructed:
  • Parodied: Alice's Bad Hair Day culminates in her ripping out all her hair, thus making the Brush-O-Matic completely useless to her.
  • Lampshaded: "Is brushing your hair with an ordinary hairbrush difficult?"
  • Averted: Alice has no trouble brushing her hair with an ordinary brush.
  • Zig Zagged: Some people in the commercial have trouble brushing their hair with an ordinary hairbrush, others have no trouble.
  • Enforced: Viewers are Morons; let's sell our product to them!
  • Invoked: Alice really wants a Brush-O-Matic, so pretends her hairbrush is impossible to use.
  • Defied: The marketers of the product don't wish to insult the intelligence or ability of potential customers. They just market the product as a convenience product.
  • Discussed: "Do you hate adverts that assume you're a complete moron? You need TiVo!"
  • Conversed: "Why do all these people have trouble using a friggin' hairbrush?!"
  • Played For Laughs:
  • Played For Drama:

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