Idiot Houdini / Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • Deconstructed in "The Finale", as the Wattersons are looking through their family photo album and reminiscing, the unhappy residents of Elmore come up to their house and remind them of the damages incurred throughout the series:
    Richard: Hey, Hector's mom, what brings you here?
    Mrs. Jötunheim: Do you remember the time when your kids wound up my boy and he went on a rampage?
    Richard: Oh yeah, I remember... [flashback transition, clips from "The Colossus" are shown, Hector is seen destroying the town. The flashback is interrupted by Mrs. Jötunheim.]
    Mrs. Jötunheim: Enough flashbacking! If you remember well, seventy-five percent of Elmore was destroyed and somebody has to pay for it!
    Richard: You mean it didn't all end well like it always does?
    Mrs. Jötunheim: [takes out a sheet of paper and hands it to Richard] Here's your half of the bill for the reconstruction work.
    [Richard gasps as the sheet of paper unfolds, revealing a long list]
    Mrs. Jötunheim: Why are you looking so surprised? Did you really think we lived in some sort of fairy tale? 'Cuz wake up buddy, we don't.
    [Mrs. Jötunheim gets on her broom, and flies away, then disappears. Someone clears their throat. Richard sees that Principal Brown has appeared.]
    Richard: [whispering] Weird, that lady gnome seems to think that things we've done in the past have consequences now.
  • Principal Brown breaks the news that Gumball and Darwin have to go back to kindergarten because their disruptions tend to prevent the other students from receiving a decent education, followed by a phone call from the police department:
    Richard: Oh, hello officer. Really? I don't remember any reckless driving. [A quick montage of all of Richard's terrible driving is shown.] Right... well I think I just won't pay the fines and wait for this to all blow over. Bye. [hangs up]
    Anais: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. If you don't pay, they could send you to jail.
    Richard: That's exactly what he said, but don't worry. I've been imprisoned heaps of times. They put you in then straight away you're just not in there anymore.
    Nicole: This bill is eight hundred thousand dollars. It says if we don't pay by tomorrow, then they can take our house away. What is going on today?
    Anais: It seems the results of all our reckless actions are finally catching up with us.
    While in jail, the Wattersons start to devise a plan:
    Anais: I think Gumball was on to something. Up until now, every bad situation has gotten worse and worse until it somehow just fixed itself. There's only one solution left.
    Richard: What is it?
    Anais: [hands out papers containing charges against them] Everyone take a problem, part ways, and produce a problem more problematic than a problem of that proportion should probably be.
    Gumball, Darwin, Nicole and Richard: Huh?
    Anais: Just do what you do best. [evilly] Make things worse.
  • Later, when the episode is about to conclude and the Wattersons are being confronted by an angry mob:
    Richard: [poking people with a broom] Somebody think of something, I can't hold 'em off forever!
    Nicole: No! This is it! It's all over! The end of the Wattersons!
    Gumball: The only thing that can save us is reality being completely reset by some kind of magic device!
    [The episode ends abruptly.]
• American Dad! has Stan always making poor choices or having a lapse in judgment that usually results in someone getting hurt in some way while he doesn't get it until the last minute. Since Stan never retains anything he learned and karma's laser rarely strikes him, he goes back to making idiotic choices at the expense of others. One great example of this is when the town gets flooded from a hurricane and the whole house gets washed away. Stan makes several bad decisions in a row that results in Hayley being attacked by a shark, getting the house flipped upside down, and simply not evacuating the town just to prove that the hurricane isn't as bad as people made it to be. Stan eventually breaks down and grows too afraid to help his family after realizing what his bad choices resulted in, but Klaus encourages Stan to do better and help out. Stan attempts to do so, but things only get worse from there.
• The title characters of Beavis and Butt-Head to an extent.
• Both Todd and Mr. Peanutbutter on Bojack Horseman, although Todd's is more powerful: When Mr Peanutbutter is in a skiing contest, and relies on his luck to win, Todd wins instead, even though he wasn't in the race. They both seem to be completely aware of this, too, and follow whatever random thought crosses their minds in the explicit expectation that it will pay off later. It's most dramatic in the third season, where a string of bizarre business decisions over the course of the season ends up with them having the exact combination of resources and employees needed to save the day from an absurd disaster. Princess Carolyn calls Todds' status in this trope as "Failing Upwards", where he somehow always gets higher up the food chain in his schemes.
• CatDog has Dog. His brainless antics frequently make his conjoined twin Cat's life unbearable.
  • The show nearly always plants things in Dog's favor in the end. Granted Cat isn't the soundest of people, but not really to deserve what he suffers from his twin, especially since there are times this converts into a Karma Houdini and Dog gets away with being a genuine Jerkass himself.
  • Particularly bad in an early episode where all Cat wants to do is watch a TV event at home that he paid for (the jerkiest thing he did was not let a housemate watch too). Dog physically forces him to stay by a fire hydrant because another dog marked it. The end result is not only Cat missing his TV event, but his house and everything he owns in the world being burned to the ground leaving him only to laugh insanely that his life couldn't possibly get any worse. Then, to hammer Dog's side in even more, when their house is burning down and Cat calls the fire department, Dog refuses to let them use it to save their house, even when Cat begs him in tears that if he values Cat in any way he'll let them use the hydrant. He doesn't. The episode ends with Cat laughing in insanity and Dog laughing along, not actually knowing what's going on.
  • In another episode where it's found that they are responsible for each other's teeth (Cat's good dental habits give Dog good teeth, while Dog's horrible habits give Cat a dentist's nightmare) Dog doesn't make any efforts to stop any of his bad habits for the sake of his brother, and even getting angry when he finds Cat tricked him into cleaning his mouth, yet takes offense when Cat starts giving as good as he gets. It ends with both of them escalating in tooth damage and getting false teeth, yet Dog doesn't really get punished for his clear lack of caring for his brother's wellbeing.
  • Deconstructed in one episode where Dog gets an intelligence boost, but as a result of his huge brainwaves, starts draining Cat's own brain matter from him. Thus, still unintentionally causing misery for his brother, but no longer having the excuse of being too dumb to know any better. It is poetically this particular circumstance which reaches Cat's Rage Breaking Point and has him beat the living shit out of Dog until their IQs are evened out again.
• The Darkwing Duck episode "Inside Binkie's Brain" has Binkie Muddlefoot attempt to make St. Canard safe, only to cause havoc and even hinder Darkwing's efforts in stopping Megavolt. She doesn't get punished for her actions solely because she's too dumb to know that her actions are causing problems.
• Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory. She normally means to be playful, but always destroys everything Dexter works hard for with nearly no comeuppance at all. Of course, this can be explained by Dexter not wanting to tell his parents she broke some stuff in his secret laboratory, and that said laboratory, despite containing an arsenal of supposedly powerful weapons and tools, remains more or less defenseless against one (pre)pubescent child.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Cosmo, notably when he was the cause of Crocker losing his fairies, twice. Once when his past self-revealed himself as a fairy godparent, and again when his present self and Timmy travel back to the 70's to prevent this from happening. While Timmy stopped Crocker's fairies from revealing themselves, present Cosmo notices a switch that turns the microphones on, and Crocker's secret is accidentally blurted out by Timmy out loud, thus making him the indirect cause. Timmy was punished by being forbidden to travel to March of 1972 ever again (though he's allowed to visit every other month of the year if he doesn't meddle with President McGovern's elections), and yet nobody called Cosmo out on his actions.
  • Timmy's parents, too. They almost always neglect him and, aside from Mr. Turner's occasional Butt-Monkey moments, never receive any comeuppance for it.
• 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). Peter exploits this trope in "Petarded". After being declared "mentally retarded", Peter proceeds to do whatever he feels like because no-one will press charges against someone with a mental disability. This ends up biting him the ass when he hospitalizes Lois during one of his stunts and Child Services takes his kids away, since they don't have a guardian who's mentally fit. Meg actually lampshades it in "Seahorse Seashell Party," remarking that Peter should be in jail for most of the things he's done.
• Futurama:
  • The entire Planet Express team tends to cause endless problems in their botched deliveries. Of course many of them (especially Bender) fluctuate between this and an outright Karma Houdini at times. Nibbler, the Team Pet, seems to undergo this trope due to being perceived as a mindless animal.
  • If not for his ridiculous stream of good luck, Zapp Brannigan would have died several times over but he always seems to survive by the skin of his teeth, just in time to get another commendation from the Democratic Order of Planets for doing nothing intelligent or strategic. In at least one case (when sitting in on a hearing to consider his reinstatement), Leela even reinforces it by agreeing to every single bald-faced lie he told just so he and Kif can be out of her hair.
• The entire premise of Grizzy & the Lemmings revolves around intellectually challenged lemmings ruining a bear's day when he's just minding his own business and often getting away with it.
• Invader Zim: Zim was The Millstone on his own planet but became this after being Reassigned to Earth. If anyone suffers from Zim's plans, it's usually Dib, the one person who knows (or cares) that Zim is an alien.
• King of the Hill:
  • Peggy Hill is very much this. Being tricked into smuggling cocaine into prison, check. Kidnapping a Mexican child because she's in denial about how little Spanish she actually speaks, check. She even once kidnapped a bus full of voters and either held them against their will for a day or dropped them off far enough away that the poll booths were closed by the time they got back.
  • Doubled subverted in the episode she kidnapped the Mexican girl. Her highly overestimated grasp of the Spanish language made her make the situation that much worse. However, in the end the Mexican jury rules that's she's not guilty as they realize that Peggy has no idea what she was doing or what the Mexican girl (or anyone else speaking Spanish, for that matter) was saying and did not fit the Mens Rea part of the crime, i.e., she didn't intentionally commit a crime, she thought the Mexican girl was just another one of her students.
  • Also played with for smuggling cocaine — she was duped into doing it in the first place because the guy played to her ego (he wrote her a letter talking about how she inspired him when she was a substitute teacher for one of his classes, then later reveals he wrote the exact same letter to several dozen substitute teachers in the area - Peggy was the only one dumb and egotistical enough to believe it), then once the con is revealed she's coerced to keep doing it by the knowledge that the convict can turn her in for what she's already provided at any time, such as if he's about to get in trouble for it (or whenever he feels like). Also, while Peggy doesn't end up with any real consequences from it, and in true Peggy fashion refuses to admit that it was her ego that got her in trouble, she does spend a good portion of the episode clearly on edge.
• A variant is one of the core rules of the Looney Tunes and their various spin-offs, reimaginings and derivatives: a protagonist's ability to retaliate against an antagonist is directly connected to the antagonist's intelligence. A recurring plot point is a protagonist being forced to defend themselves against a character who causes them harm through either ignorance or naivety, and which thus prevents them from using the slapstick violence they normally freely dispense to anyone else who upsets them.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: The titular character is a rare example where the main protagonist himself is The Fool. Despite being good-natured or rather because of being extremely naive, he does cause a lot of disasters on the show such as playfully tricking two people into thinking a sea monster was attacking Stormalong and unwittingly getting them banished, keeping a filthy rat that went on to infect the whole harbor with a plague. It turns out that his guardian, Bubbie believes that Flapjack is an angel who can do no wrong and doesn't even bother with explaining to him when he does something wrong. K'nuckles meanwhile basically serves both as Flapjack's bad influence and whipping boy at the same time, getting all of the punishments for Flapjack's mishaps in addition to his own which by contrast he never manages to dodge.
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero has Principal Larry. Not only is he ditzy, extremely weird, and downright creepy sometimes, he doesn't seem to know much of anything. Whenever he's around, all he does is be extremely long-winded and tell stories he never finishes. What is Larry's life like?? He won the lottery 32 times. He lives in a giant mansion. His butler has a butler. He genetically modified an elephant to stay small and cute forever. And at the end of his A Day in the Limelight episode, he wins the lottery again.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • Bubbles in "Neighbor Hood", when she gets away with stealing money to donate to her favorite show.^note Pretty weird considering that Blossom did something similar to that in "A Very Special Blossom" but did get her comeuppance.
  • Bubbles again in "Him Diddle Riddle", wherein she scores the highest on a test out of her sisters by drawing on it.
  • Bubbles for a third time in "Bubblevicious". She spends the whole time beating the shit out of people for minor stuff and gets away with it.
• The flock from Shaun the Sheep qualifies. No matter how stupid of an act they do, they're saved by the end, it inconveniences the Farmer in some way. Well, being a farmer, that flock is his livelihood, so he kinda has to keep them around. Though as he's oblivious to the wacky hijinks the animals on his farm get up to, he never realizes that they're the reason for his misery in the first place (except for the frequent times when it's caused by an error in judgment on his own part).
• The Simpsons:
  • Homer Simpson at first showed reasonably poor judgment, but repeated encounters have gradually turned him into this trope. His consistently stupid decisions and awesome luck balance out into keeping him in his status quo (which is also consistently portrayed as awful) while other people lose it all. 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, even though the previous entry by Martin was an actual fully functional miniature power plant that was powering the lighting in the room at the moment, which he also demonstrated.
  • Bart Simpson pulled this to a lesser extent. Especially when he is in a rivalry with Lisa.
• Pick any adult on South Park, and chances are they'll have been this at one point or another.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob and Patrick starting with season 12. Episodes like "Squid's on a Bus", "Plane to Sea", "Squidiot Box", "Jolly Lodgers", and "Squidward's Sick Daze" entirely revolve around one or both of them tormenting Squidward and getting away with it. Individually, Patrick gets away with knocking an entire park of pets and their owners unconscious by bashing them with a rock in "Pet the Rock", and SpongeBob spends most of "Yellow Pavement" being a complete moron who gives Squidward increasingly severe injuries.
• Wander of Wander over Yonder. For example, in "The Pet," he attempts to train an alien monster that is heavily implied to have killed someone in the past, and it just barely fails to kill Wander too. Furthermore, Sylvia tries to get rid of the monster by activating self-destruct on the ship they're all on (when she thinks the monster devoured Wander when it was actually a teddy bear Wander gave him), and Wander doesn't try to evacuate (or even seem to notice) until Sylvia rescues him.