Cloud Cuckoolander - Television Tropes & Idioms

Mihoshi from the various Tenchi series seems like a complete airhead, but manages to save the day on several occasions. This is usually the result of her outrageous luck, but it's also indicated that Mihoshi is much smarter than she seems... at least in the OVA continuity.
Osaka from Azumanga Daioh is another example. She has a tendency to say and do strange things out of the blue, drift off into daydreaming from which she is very hard to shake, and at one point apparently suspected that Chiyo's pigtails were detachable. Or when she decided to wake up Yukari with a frying pan. How that knife got in her hand no one could explain, least of all Osaka. She expressed mild astonishment. Yukari, well, didn't. Don't forget this creepy little moment.
- This may also be a generous part of why Mr. Kimura's wife is able to tolerate him — she can get so focused on a discarded soda can that she runs directly into a lamppost.
- Fans of the series would doubtlessly recognize Chiyo-chichi, the cat... thing. Who sees him the most? I'll give you a second to guess. Have an idea? Yes? Okay, were you thinking Sakaki? No. You were thinking Osaka, weren't you? Well, Sakaki sees him the most. Her tendency to bond with stuffed animals and the fact that she doesn't seem to notice that Chiyo-chichi was a dream makes some people think Sakaki is weirder than Osaka. Yeah...
  - Don't forget the "daddy hats", which even Osaka found weird.
  - Let's put it like this: Sakaki is weirder than Osaka when it comes to cute things and stuffed animals, but Osaka is weirder at everything else, and she's still pretty weird with stuffed animals too. Plush ~~people~~ ~~chimneys~~ ~~buildings~~ cities, anyone?
- Though not not as much as Osaka, Sakaki definitely counts, especially when it comes to animals and cute things.
Orihime from Bleach; on one occasion, asked to draw what she thought she would be like in the future, she drew a rather unnerving picture of herself as a giant, highly destructive robot.
- Since everybody who knows Orihime is aware of her overactive imagination, she's able to give truthful accounts of her activities, and the ordinary humans think she's just making crazy stuff up again.
- When asked what Orihime would do on a date with Ichigo by Tatsuki, it start innocently enough with a simple race to a see saw that starts to get pretty heated, which is then interrupted when some black track star comes out of nowhere, which then logically leads to a boxing match and then an assassination attempt. Which she is all acting out as she imagines it. Tatsuki is confused naturally.
  - The anime makes that scene even worse; it doesn't show Orihime's line of thought, just her acting everything out.
- She also happens to be voiced by the same voice actress as Ayumu "Osaka" Kasuga. Coincidence?
Masaru Hananakajima from Sexy Commando Gaiden definitely qualifies; he practices an entire martial art based on the idea that a confused, unsettled enemy cannot defend themself. His usual technique to produce that state involves groaning "Ahhhhh" while reaching to unzip his pants.
Similarly, Bobobo Bo Bobobo, in the show of the same name, while supposedly using a martial art based around his nose hairs, usually wins his fights by confusing the enemy into surrender. Then again, everyone on that show but Beauty likely qualifies for this trope.
- You could argue that Beauty is the only character who qualifies. All the others are off in their own little reality, but she's normal and thus the exception.
  - Beauty's pretty much the only sane girl of that anime.
Gedatsu in One Piece is a villainous example; he often forgets that his mouth needs to be open to talk, or to unreverse his eyes to see, and apparently isn't even able to cross his arms properly without advice. He kills his own Mooks by accident. The main character who faces him doesn't get it and finds his behaviour utterly terrifying, though.
Nene Mori of Princess Nine always dreamed of being the manager (gofer/janitor, not coach) of a high school baseball team, just like in all the manga she read. Since she was sent to a private all-girls school, this just wasn't going to happen. Once a girls baseball team is formed, Nene sees it as her destiny. Unfortunately, while she is very Genre Savvy, she only knows what a manager does, not how to do it (her family's filthy rich, she's never even done laundry), so she mostly exists to Hang A Lampshade on the more obvious clichés the writers embrace, by suggesting them. Fortunately, she has a good heart, and a butler (and access to lots of resources).
Jeri/Juri Katou from Digimon Tamers.
- This trope is depressingly subverted when it becomes less "Aww that girls got a friend!" to her broken minds only way to communicate in any functioning way... Yeah.
Tsukasa from Lucky Star, apart from randomly spacing out for no discernable reason, finds balsamic vinegar strangely fascinating.
Tsukasa: Strawberries smell like strawberry shortcakes!
- Konata also falls into this at times.
Marie from Haré+Guu can be kind of out it from sometimes.
Fuura Kafuka from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei combines this trope with being a big-time pollyanna to incredibly creepy extents; for example, she believes that nobody could ever want to hang themselves, and those who do are simply trying to "make themselves taller". She then cheerfully goes on to describe how her father went and tried to make himself taller... Repeatedly. No-one is sure if she's deeply disturbed, in heavy denial, or both.
- Her forced cheerfulness extends to every aspect of life, even inanimate objects. When she sees a garbage can, for example, she refuses to accept that something as unpleasant as garbage could possibly exist. Thus, she decides that a garbage can is actually "a treasure chest for the homeless."
- Taro Maria Sekiutsu can be considered one too, especially considering she comes from a country where apparently massacres happen regularly. She's upbeat, cheerful, and makes little to no sense usually. Unsurprisingly, she gets along great with Kafuka.
- Oora Kanako is especially noteworthy in that she managed to walk into a newly thrashed, blood sprayed classroom, sit down by her desk, which their homeroom teacher, the victim of the recent assault, was lying on none the less, and then stare off into the distant nothingness with a vacant smile on her face... The next episode, she's still sitting like that and her classmates comment on that she's been sitting like that for a whole week.
The titular character of Suzumiya Haruhi who rants about dumping all her previous boyfriends because they weren't aliens, time travellers, or espers, seems to fit this trope at first... until her criteria turn out to be less farfetched than they seem....
- She may still qualify, though, as she never realizes she's attending Uncanny Valley High.
  - Hell, even without the the reality warping powers, she still does some pretty odd things — believing that wearing a Playboy Bunny suit at school to advertise her new club is a-okay, among other things.
Ed from Cowboy Bebop. Though as a hyperactive teenage super-hacker, she also qualifies as a Genius Ditz.
- This may be hereditary, given how her father acts. Among other things, the man is dedicated to the goal of mapping out the newly altered terrain of Earth, a task which is explicitly stated as impossible due to the vast amount of debris still in orbit — any given map is only valid for two days, tops, before a new meteorite hits and rearranges things again. His favorite food is raw eggs sucked out of their shells, and he's such a skilled fighter that he effortlessly disarms Jet Black with a thrown egg, dodges Spike's kickboxing and knocks Spike head over heels with a single open-palmed punch. He instantly recognizes Ed when she makes an appearance, but is uncertain as to her gender and was the one who left her behind in the first place. While he rewards Spike and Jet with a big basket full of eggs as thanks for taking care of her, he immediately abandons her again to chase after a new meteorite crash landing.
Shiro from Tekkon Kinkreet has a tendency to lapse into daydreams or delusions at random. He also tends to use nonsensical metaphors and gibberish in his regular speech.
Milly Thompson from Trigun is an almost stereotypical example. She once nearly threatened a shopkeeper with her Really Big Gun when in search of pudding... and got it. Only to drop her grocery bags a few moments later to emphasize a point midconversation.
Dita from Vandread is the resident Cloudcuckoolander for the show. Despite having deep feelings for the main character Hibiki, she seems to forget his name, calling him Mr. Alien instead.
Ichijou, the Class Representative from Pani Poni Dash, is weird even for a thoroughly Widget Series. She also appears to have inexplicable (and unexplained) powers that ignore the laws of physics, reality, and sanity.
- Himeko also seems particularly unconcerned with anything remotely approaching reality, though in a much more energetic way than Ichijou.
Yotsuya from Maison Ikkoku continuously annoys the main male protagonist with his outlandish behavior, including but not limited to extortion, theft and housebreaking. He is very polite about it, though.
Mutsumi Otohime from Love Hina.
Nia Teppelin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann; at first due to her sheltered up-bringing but it quite clear she isn't all there in the head when even after 7 years in the outside world she still surprises everyone with her quirky misunderstandings. Simon even remarks that he has a hard time understanding what she says.
Emperor Fred from Samurai Pizza Cats, the eccentric ruler of Little Tokyo who largely communicates by saying his name ("Fuh-red!") and scat-singing ("Doo-wah!"). In one episode he caught a bad cold, and instead of becoming delirious with fever, he became sane with fever:
Princess Violet: He's speaking aloud back there, as if he had a mind of his own!
Al Dente: Oh no, then he's very sick!
Hohenheim from Fullmetal Alchemist has a way of looking and acting as if he came straight from another planet. A scene in the manga even shows him mumbling to himself while Ed yells insults and accusations at him on Trisha's grave then out of the blue, comparing Ed to "a little boy who has wet his bed and hidden the sheets" in a fairly threatening way. This might partly be a case of Obfuscating Stupidity though, as when he does get serious, he reveals that he's understood the situation way earlier and better than anybody else. Plus, some of his apparent non-sequiturs actually contain important hidden messages and information. Still, pretty much everybody notices how ''weird'', socially awkward and absent-minded he is.
- A scene of the anime in which he talks with Winry on Trisha's grave (and shocks her when he tells her totally non-ironically that "It's sad" that her parents were killed during the Ishbal genocide) suggests that he has spent several entire days and nights in the graveyard.
- In the manga, Al is disturbed by Hohenheim's body language and way of making terrifying or ridiculous confidences with an impenetrable face and Scary Shiny Glasses — and Al himself is practically a suit of armour.
- In a key scene of the manga, "Father", the homunculi's boss, starts acting like a caricature of Hohenheim, complete with non-sequiturs, creepy staring, senile mumbling, suddenly standing uncomfortably close to people, and pensive beard-twisting. Ed proceeds to yell at him, "LISTEN TO ME, ALIEN!" An official Yonkoma even shows him letting Ed persuade him to get a 200-years subscription to a Central City newspaper. In the last panel, Bradley / Wrath calls him a "naive Hikikomori with no knowlege of the world."
  - At one point, during a pitched battle, he even suddenly moves uncomfortably close to Scar and politely asks him a question.
  - Returning to the subject of Hohenheim, the central reason as to why he is a cuckoolander is revealed, he's spent the last century or so getting to know all 500,000+ souls in his head on a first name basis. Hohenheim really does have a "world" in his head to be lost in.
In Hayate No Gotoku, Saginomiya Isumi has really impressive command over the non-sequitur and is generally completely spaced out, leading to such scenes as her asking a construction worker if the subway involved getting dinosaurs into bullet trains. As a result, Isumi's the only one capable of following Nagi's utterly nonsensical attempts at creating manga.
- Of course, Isumi doesn't even begin to compare to her mother or her grandmother in this trope. As an example, in her introductory scene, her mother couldn't remember which button to push on the intercom to the front gate of her own house, despite the fact that there was only one button.
Izumi, one of the Nadesico's Aestivalis pilots, is notable for her bad poetry and her even worse puns (though she laughs uncontrollably at them), and often seems to be off in a world of her own. This doesn't stop her from being a competent pilot.
Yuichiro Tajima in Ookiku Furikabutte is a baseball prodigy with expert peripherial vision and incredible accuracy when batting. When off field, he's borderline hyperactive, has the tendency to loudly discuss his masturbation habits and at least once almost stripped naked in public just to work on his tan.
Kotomi from CLANNAD is very awkward, lacking all but the basic social skills, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that she is a genius. She also tends to space out and come up with totally non sequitur responses, which she often combines with a deeply seated fear of bullies. Nevertheless Tomoya drafts her for the drama club, where her sweet and thoughtful demeanor makes her very popular with its members — as long as she refrains from playing the violin.
- Perhaps justified in that Kotomi was traumatized by her parents' death, and she promised to do better and follow in their footsteps. She said that she'd read many books and that she'd become smart like them. With such motivation for Kotomi, it's no surprise that she lacks social skills when she's busy with what she promised her parents that she'd do.
  - Various flashbacks in the anime show that she was already like this (kids avoided her because of her intelligence and Tomoya was her first and only friend). The death of her parents (and the fact that Tomoya avoided her afterwards) definitely made things worse, though.
- Fuuko is also a total space-cadet. At one point she tells Tomoya she's warmed up to him, explaining that she likes him more than sea slugs (but not as much as starfish). Tomoya doesn't understand the rankings.
  - And Fuuko even manages to top this in the ~After Story~, where her behavior is very bizarre indeed, especially in response to Ushio's cuteness.
  - She also denies her tendency to trance out when thinking of cute things for long periods of time then snapping out of it to finish whatever sentence she was saying.
- Also Kappei, who is apparently incapable of remembering names or faces. And tells a touching story about a person he think he may love whom he lent his handkerchief... while talking to that same person. Also expects to be served tea during a job interview.
Dolce in Geneshaft is also a genius, this time in computer programming. She keeps a calm and quiet appearance herself, but communicates loudly and obnoxiously through her puppet.
Ryou and Fuu from Sketchbook are always together, seemingly living in their own world which only slightly touches upon reality. They do appear to understand each other perfectly though, which is already the case in the manga and which gets exaggerated in the anime so they seem to have some sort of two-person hive mind. They love to play pranks on the other students and often function as some sort of off-beat narrators to the show's events. Still, they will help out their friends in times of need — albeit in their own fashion.
Shinobu Morita from Honey And Clover, who also has the tendency to disappear for days in a row.
- Well, that is for work. He still qualifies, mind, especially in the way he treats Hagumi.
Hotaru of Samurai Deeper Kyo can't remember his own mentor's name and so calls him Yun Yun, insists on moving caterpillars out of the way before fights, asks directions from Mauve Shirt villain Kubira, and is off in his own world when he's not fighting. And that's just a short list.
Finland from Axis Powers Hetalia shows signs of this; he thinks that "Blood-smeared Flower Egg" is a perfectly acceptable name for a puppy. Italy combines elements of this with The Ditz.
- And Finland's first choice of names for the puppy was 'Go For It! Bomber!' Another suggestion was 'Sardine Picnic'. I wish I was making this up.
- In fact almost every character can be one, like America trying to befriend whales (and succeeding).
- Poland, hoo boy Poland.
You'd think Usagi of Sailor Moon is a clear candidate, but the Cloudcuckoolander, at least in the anime, is definitely Minako with her infamous malapropisms.
Minako: Mi o sutete koso, ukabu setomono mo are! (Along with throwing your life away, you throw away floating pottery.)
The real quote is "Mi o sutete koso, ukabu se mo are!" (Along with throwing your life away, you throw away your chances.)
Many of the odder villains in Gash Bell fall under this trope. Victoream will drop everything for a melon, and usually sing a song about it afterwards. Koral Q will drop everything if you missed his awesome transformation, and usually sing a song about it afterwards. Kiees will drop everything if you ignore his brilliant Beethoven mishmash, and... well you get the idea.
- Gash also acts this way in the better half of the first season, especially when he's unaware of his powers. (He loses consciousness when Kiyomaro reads spells and at first thinks lightning came from the sky when he uses them.)
Filler character Yuukimaru in Naruto Shippuuden seems to be one of these. S/He appears rambling about flowers while Sasuke simply stares. Kinda funny, actually.
- And don't forget his flower-freak monologues.
- Although not a Cloudcuckoolander at all, Shikamaru had a couple of scenes. First when he, in the midst of his Chuunin exam battle against Temari, sits down and stays looking at the clouds while he thinks he would like to be as free as them. Not much later, he got surrounded by Sound Ninjas during the invasion and the only thing he is capable to do is thinking about what did he want to do with his life.
Soul Eater has several, most prominently Patty.
- Anime example only. "The sky is blue, motherfucker!"
FLCL's Mamimi, who among many Cloudcuckooland moments, mistakes a television-headed robot for an angelic deity from her favorite video game, and continues to treat him as such throughout the series. It's implied that her cloudcuckoo perspective is a deliberate front, and that she eventually gets better.
- Just about everyone from that show is, including the show itself.
Isaac and Miria from Baccano! share a train of thought that has to be seen to be believed. For example, they once decided to steal an entire museum, building and all, for the sheer hell of it. Then they realized it was impossible... so they stole the entrance instead.
- Not to mention, they plan a train robbery which "means going to the destination by train, then committing a robbery, then jumping on a train again to run away."
- It also took them 70 years to realized that they were immortal.
Shiro from Deadman Wonderland. Pretty much nobody except possibly her grandfather (who she ends up killing anyways) understands what in the world she's saying.
Kohsaka from Genshiken.
"Astronomy would be good for me. People are always saying I've got my head in the clouds... though I never remember what I see there."
In Full Metal Panic, a more disturbing example is Gates. Most of the things he says don't really make sense, and the people who employ him have a hard time understanding what in the world he's talking about. In fact, the last thing he does when Sousuke obliterates his AS (and kills him) is to play with his hair and say, "Maybe I cut it too short?"
- That was a call-back to a comment several episodes earlier — when his AS shrugs off an attack by the enemy he declares, mockingly "That might have hurt me, if my sideburns had been shorter!" But Gates really is disturbed — he watches a nature film on squirrels while naked for recreation in one episode.
- Sousuke could also qualify as well. Honestly, even for everyone else in the military, none of them think quite like him. He's more paranoid than the rest, and continually misinterprets what others say. He can't see anything possibly wrong with bombing, planting land mines, or shooting around the school. And the conclusions he draws can... sometimes be rather outlandish.
  Sousuke: [[Chidori]] seems to be bothered by something. Either that or she's been abusing drugs.
  Kyoko: Er... I don't know about that...
Code: Breaker has two: Nenene, who loves to randomly grope Cute Bruiser Sakura's breasts (and even names them) and Yuuki, another Code: Breaker. Not only is Nenene Sakura's sempai, she's somehow a member of the student council. Her dad being the prime minister of Japan and head of Eden (the Code: Breakers' organization) probably had something to do with it. Yuuki, on the other hand is one of the most powerful of the Code: Breakers in The Organization due to his control of sound. For some reason, his nonsensical behavior annoys the hell out of the usually lackadasical Toki who happens to be Nenene's estranged brother. Naturally, Nenene is easily distracted as Sakura says "This is your brother!" while standing in front of a guy with the same hair and Boat Lights as her. To his (or his handlers') credit, Yuuki uses his nonsensical ideas ("He's a middle-aged mushroom suffering from depression") to become the chief of a multi-billion dollar toy empire, although all he really wants/needs are friends.
Though not a regular Cloudcuckoolander, Makino from the manga version of Hana Yori Dango has at least one time when she does this. In volume 33 when she's given up on Tsukasa because of Umi she compares her situation to the plot in The Little Mermaid (the real story, without the Disneyfication) and ends up ranting about how she doesn't want to become bubbles (or something to that effect) in front of her little brother who's very confused.
Hikari from Amanchu! arguably qualifies. She blows on a pea whistle everywhere she goes (including during class) and jumps from a big rock in a way divers jump from a boat—even though there's no water. Whether her mild flirting with Futaba, another girl from her class, is simply part of her off-beat attitude or perhaps something else is up to interpretation.
Minami-ke's Hosaka is so caught up in his own little world he ends up acting his fantasies out in real life. People tend to think he's off his rocker as a result. Further, being a master of the Imagine Spot, we the viewers tend to actually see what's going through his head at the time.
Franken Fran, which shows what happens when you give a well-intentioned Cloud Cuckoolander the skill, mind, and reputation of a Black Jack level surgeon. Hint: It's not pretty.
Combine a hefty helping of this with a Stoic Spectacles Bishounen and you get Kairi from Nightmare Inspector. He's the owner of a building called the "Delirium," a literal Cloud Cuckooland — getting locked in a room there means you get to live all your wildest fantasies until you die (or until you realize that it's just a hyped-up daydream, whichever comes first). Kairi himself is always sitting behind the desk, staring off into space, and daydreaming about all manner of weird things. The reader actually gets to see some of his trips to Cloud Cuckooland...
Miki "Nodamiki" Noda from GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class is living in her own little world compared to her friends. She believes that she can remove mold from paint with her "aura" and has started impromptu mini theaters on at least two occasions (once with a collage, once with a can of paint). She is quite boy crazy to boot, to the point of believing that random guys have a crush on her. Still, she seems to know quite a bit about what's going on.
Hikari from Haibane Renmei, who once used the halo mold for making donuts.
Noda Megumi "Nodame" from Nodame Cantabile, who is a brilliant pianist, but often has strange notions about things.
Kaoruko Odagiri from Saitama Chainsaw Shoujo. Upon seeing the results of Fumio's heartbreak driven chainsaw massacre in the school hallway, she gives her friend a stern lecture... about how she should really be more careful, since blood can be so hard to wash out of your hair.
Ellie from Rave Master. As a child, she told her father she wanted to grow up to be a bug. Perhaps because that is impossible, she settles for being the greatest dancer in all the land.

Close Anime & Manga

Steve Martin
Robin Williams
Steve Wright, as referenced in the page quote.
Mitch Hedburg.
Eddie Izzard.
Zach Galifinakis
Ellen DeGeneres, queen of the non-sequitur.
Ross Noble. Bless.

Close Comedy

Ambush Bug is the epitome of this Trope: he's crazy, Genre Savvy and regularly breaks the fourth wall.
Ambush Bug: Hello, room service? Send up a plot and three pages of dialogue right away! The weekly grind is tearin' me apart! Fifty-two!!!
The eponymous Lenore of Roman Dirge's comic is a rather dark take on the Cloudcuckoolander, as her inattentiveness, tenuous grasp on reality, and near-nonexistant understanding of the concept of mortality leads her to frequently inadvertently cause the deaths of the people and animals she deals with. She could be considered Ax Crazy, but she's not truly insane, and usually doesn't intentionally mean to cause harm.
Delirium from The Sandman graphic novels sometimes comes close to this trope — since she's the Anthropomorphic Personification of insanity, it's probably reasonable to assume that she is genuinely crazy, but nonetheless she does have at least one moment during the series where she pulls herself together and becomes briefly 'sane', though it's made clear that she finds it very difficult to do this. She also has a few other moments in which she seems to become temporarily slightly more lucid, and comes out with a very perceptive or useful comment before reverting to her usual chaotic self.
- Shivering Jemmy also qualifies. She's an agent of chaos (But not like that.
Deadpool.
Ragdoll. The self castrating, dead friend stuffing, sister fancying, weird phrase spouting, limb contorting freaky-pants of Gail Simone's fantastic Secret Six series. He's quite possibly the only person in the DCU who can make the Joker appear sane by comparison.
Ragdoll: I'm buying a monkey house and a variety of little monkey outfits.
"... the man trying hard not to hump your TV is The Drummer."
"First name The, second name Drummer."
"You'll regret being so damn abusive when the electric UFO gods transphase in from Dimension Ten to appoint me Manager of the Universe.... I said that out loud, didn't I?"
Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, a blue collar surrealist superhero who suffered brain damage from reading 5,000 comic books in one sitting, wears flippers constantly (in case he has to swim) and fights crime because he "needed the exercise."
In Curtis, Gunk exhibits various odd behaviors and abilities (explained by the fact that he's from some place called "Flyspeck Island"), as required by the plot.
Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes possesses such a runaway imagination — he truly lives in Cloudcuckooland.
Ms. Wormwood: Calvin, pay attention!! Now, what state do you live in?
Calvin: Denial.
Ms. Wormwood: (sighing) Well, I suppose I can't argue with that...
- The very fact that he sees Hobbes as real and everyone else doesn't (which often makes them suspect that Calvin is insane) also establishes him a place in this trope.
- There was also the time where he comes into his class dressed as his superhero alter-ego, Stupendous Man. His classmate's facial expression's are the natural reaction anyone would have toward a Cloud Cuckoo Lander.
Jon Arbuckle from Garfield, since the late nineties, has gone from a slightly-dim, arrogant loser to a full-fledged Cloudcuckoolander in some strips, with lines of pure insanity like "I think my feet are jealous of my hands because they get to point at things." This without even getting into the surrealistic brilliance of Garfield Minus Garfield and other projects to improve the strip.
- Garfield himself had his moments in the strips (before he got Flanderized into a full-time Deadpan Snarker). Remember when he became Banana Man? Or Amoeba Man?
- The animated special Garfield's Feline Fantasies was all about his mind wandering off into fantastic stories.
Krazy Kat. S/he thinks that getting bricks thrown at her/his head is a sign of affection.
Get Fuzzy: Both Bucky and Satchel occasionally display these tendencies, and many of Bucky's feline visitors really do.
Perhaps the ultimate funny-pages example of this type is the title character from Kevin McCormick's Arnold.
Mento of Doom Patrol fame sometimes qualifies as this when wearing the psionic helmet that gives him his powers. It enhances his mind in many ways, but the consequential increased mental activity makes it difficult for him to concentrate. When the helmet malfunctions, it make him fairly eccentric and at one point gave him cancer and dementia.
Professor Calculus (Tournesol in the original comic) from Tintin. The world is collapsing around him, but all he'll pay attention to is that pendulum.
The Frenchman and The Female in The Boys. Apparently, they understand each other's private moon logic quite well. Well enough to play Monopoly on a Cluedo board, anyway.
The entire Dick Tracy comic, since Max Allan Collins left. Bad guys getting squashed by steamrollers or having their eyes gouged out; businessmen (both good and bad) who dress like playing cards; characters being incinerated in giant fireballs; hillbillies defending themselves with bear traps; and every once in a while, something that seems to make sense. Rarely.
The Adventures Of Tintin: Professor Calculus in Red Rackham's Treasure. In all the other books, his hearing problem leads to simple, albeit comedic, misunderstandings. In Red Rackham's Treasure, though, it's so bad that he's completely off in his own little world. Like all good examples of this trope, he even spouts random non-sequiturs out of the blue. Any of the Calculus scenes could be considered a Crowning Moment Of Funny
Airtight from GI Joe is described as that weird kid nobody wanted to be around, grown up even weirer. This guy keeps scorpions as pets and eats peanut butter and tomato sandwiches, you guys.
Bart Allen, especially as Impulse as he appeared in Young Justice, is a perfect example of this trope. He was raised at superspeed in virtual reality in the 30th Century, so it's kind of unavoidable.

Close Comics

Tristan from Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series is a combination of a Cloudcuckoolander and a Ralph Wiggum. Almost every line that he gives is an illogical non-sequitur, such as his randomly given cry of "Burn the witch!" and "Take off your clothes!"
- The sad thing is, these two examples are him being coherent in the context of the scene.
Momoko from Wedding Peach Abridged:
Jamma-P: HEY, I DIDN'T WRITE THIS SCRIPT SO DON'T COMPLAIN TO ME!!!!!
Yuri: Wow, someone needs a nap.
Momoko: Is it me?
Yuri: No. No, it's not Momoko.
Nappa of Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
Vegeta: Nappa! No! It's a trick!
Nappa: But Vegeta! Trix are for kids...
Major Raikov in the Metal Gear Solid fanfic Stray is "always the type who took sanity more as a suggestion," to the extent that Ocelot considers Raikov's Psycho Electro boyfriend to be the stabilizing influence in the relationship.
Raocow takes on a persona like this in his Lets Play entries. See: his Kamek's Revenge Lets Play, where he declares a fear of circles and refers to a flower that spits items when fed an egg or enemy to be "an altar to our dark flesh god".
- He has weird names for the characters of Super Mario World. He calls Yoshi "stupid horse" even though he is a dinosaur. He calls the Charging Chuck "Football Charlie" because they are in football player uniforms.
Demykins from the Kingdom Hearts fanfic Those Lacking Spines behaves in this manner, with a multitude of his lines as shoutouts to other media; when he doesn't quote from various works, he ignores the situation altogether.

Close Fan Works

Gracie Allen's ditz persona frequently slipped into this type. Sample dialogue from College Swing:
Hubert: Everything makes me think of Love, Gracie. (she leans gently on his shoulder) What are you thinking about?
Gracie: (sighs rapturously) Clams.
Hubert: Aren't they beautiful? I hope I don't make you think of clams.
Gracie: Oh no, no. I was just thinking, if we were clams, we'd never have to take our shoes off. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Johnny from Airplane:
(reading newspaper headlines)
Rex Kramer: Passengers certain to die!
Steve McCroskey: Airline negligent.
Johnny: There's a sale at Penney's!
- Just see for yourself.
Leslie Zevo in Toys. But his sister, Alsatia, is even more of one. Even though it turns out she's a robot, you have to be amazed that someone out-cloudcuckoolanded Robin Williams.
Brick from Anchorman veers between this and a Ralph Wiggum.
Will Proudfoot from Son Of Rambow is a sweet, innocent and idealistic dreamer whose dazzling and vibrant worlds of adventure are poured like rivers of color onto the pages of an old bible in pencil and pastel. Sadly, this is also the only healthy emotional outlet he has from losing his father and being raised in an oppressively religious community.
Peter Lorre's character in Crack-Up, Colonel Gimpy, is a well-loved eccentric who becomes the "mascot" of an airfield he wanders around in, and later sneaks aboard the protagonists' airplane insisting he has a meeting with a European monarch. He's also given to quoting Byron and having exchanges like the following:
Col. Gimpy: That really was a magnificent speech. You know, a man says nothing because he's wise, or afraid, or stupid. Which are you?
Ace Martin: Wise as an owl.
Col. Gimpy: An owl! You know, an owl in daytime, she can't see — like this [blinks rapidly] — but in nighttime, she can. [Pause] Goodbye...
- Of course, since it's Peter Lorre, it turns out that it's all a ruse to cover his true nature as a cold-blooded foreign agent.
Harpo Marx's characters. Consider Duck Soup: despite being a spy, he walks around cutting things with scissors, ruining a Jerk Ass stallholder's business, and generally being, well, a Harpo character.
- Reverse Funny Aneurysm when it was eventually revealed that he ~~spied for the CIA~~ was a covert government courier in Real Life. Seriously.
  - Well, he wouldn't need to worry too much about making a Freudian Slip. ^*
    ^{Yes, Harpo spoke all the time off-camera, but consider the Rule Of Funny}
    .
Jim Carrey's portrayal of The Mask is basically the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Rule Of Funny. Makes sense, since his powers come from Loki, the Norse god of mischief. They manifest as if Tex Avery-style Cartoon Physics worked in Real Life.
- It should be noted that the Mask takes its chaos from the wearer's own mind. Stanley Ipkiss has a fondness for classic cartoons in general and Tex Avery cartoons in particular, so that's how he expresses The Mask. This is foreshadowed by showing lots of cartoon memorabilia, and even a poster of Red Hot Riding Hood on his wall. When less harmless people end up wearing The Mask, the results are... bloody, and generally less slapstick. Always funny, at least for a given value of funny...
Mark from Empire Records. It's not clear how much is the influence of drugs and how much is just him being special.
- Oh, speaking of which, no matter how many drugs you eat, you will never see yourself get eaten by the world maggot during the video for "Saddam A Go-Go". Not that I'd know, or anything.
- Lucas, though, doesn't have even drugs for an excuse.
A lot of the characters in Christopher Guest's mockumentary comedies would fit this trope. To take but one example, Fred Willard's dog-show announcer in Best In Show goes from wondering aloud why one entrant isn't dressed up in a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat and pipe to asking which dog would make a good wide receiver on a football team. He later asks his on-air partner, apropos of nothing at all, to guess how much he can bench-press.
Thick Kevin from The Boat That Rocked is this to a tee, epitomized when he comes to a Christmas party dressed as the Easter Bunny. Bob from the same movie is a slightly less flamboyant version, as he's mostly just a weird guy who's off in his own world.
Katie, the yellow... something from Horton Hears A Who, in spite of having only one line: "In my world everyone is a pony that eats rainbows and poops butterflies." The rest of the time she'll inexplicably: make a gonk face like she's choking, sit with her back to Horton (he's a kind of Baloo the Bear "teacher" in this adaptation), and finally float off into space... in spite of being a hoofed mammal with no wings. Fittingly, while the other young animals have parents Katie appears to be completely unique.
Frank, the paranoid lizard from The Rescuers Down Under is clearly off his rocker.
King Julien XIII. from Madagascar.
Allen from The Hangover does not seem to operate on the same wavelength as anyone else; it's heavily implied he's seriously mentally ill, though he appears able to function to a degree. He is, however, a genius at card-counting.
Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is at first presented as this, since she's bored of living in a small town and finds escape in the books she reads. The townspeople find her strange because of this. In fact, one line in her intro song (sung by the barber) goes: "Her head's up on some cloud." Of course, we end up finding out that's she's really a strong young lady who doesn't hesitate to stand up to the Beast.
Every Ice Age flim has one of these.
- 1st has the Dodos, an entire species that plans to survive the Ice Age which even they themselves say will last for billions of years, with a stockpile of three watermelons.
- 2nd has Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she's a possom, despite the obvious size difference between her and her "brothers". She got better.
- 3rd has Buck, the one-eyed weasel who most likely lost part of his brain when he lost his eye.
In [Scrooged] the ghost of Christmas Present fits this pritty well if not a prefect fit. Though she also has tendencies of the "Jerk Sue" minus the feminism.
Raven in Cecil B Demented(keep in mind, she's always perky no matter what she says):
See, my father is Zozo, the dog at the gates of hell.
Satan says you need more color!
Jay from the View Askewniverse lapses into this sometimes. Example: His Planet of the Apes fantasy in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back.
Brian in Half Baked.
Brian: I'll pretend I'm Jamaican!
Thurgood: You have smoked yourself retarded.
U.S. Bill in The Specials.
U.S. Bill: This is the basement. Want to see the furnace?
Nightbird: That's okay.
U.S. Bill: It's hot. Don't press your face against it for too long or you get red streaks on you for, like, a month.

Close Films

Luna "Loony" Lovegood from the later Harry Potter books seems to suffer from a mild-to-medium case of this. As her father publishes the Wizarding World's equivalent of the Weekly World News (without the "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer), this may be understandable....
The Bursar from Discworld is something of a Cloudcuckoolander. Since the overbearing Mustrum Ridcully took office as Archancellor of Unseen University and the various weird things that happened since then (including the movies-influenced invasion of Things from the Dungeon Dimension in Moving Pictures and the incident with Windle Poons becoming a zombie in Reaper Man), the Bursar's nerves have been worn threadbare, and given him a tendency to do and say odd things under pressure. Thankfully, his skill with numbers remains no matter how detached from reality he gets, and with a steady diet of dried frog pills, he consistently hallucinates that he is sane (just like everyone else...) and is able to function reasonably well. Though he still sometimes thinks he can fly, and him being a wizard, gravity isn't about to say otherwise.
"The Bursar was, as he would probably be the first to admit, not the most mentally stable of people. He would probably be the first to admit that he was a tea-strainer."
- Discworld magic-users, as a rule, seem to cultivate a touch of Cloudcuckoolander-ness. One of the minor wizard characters at Unseen University has an office where the furnishings are entirely constructed of piled-up books, while a young witch-in-training from the Tiffany Aching series pins her hair back in a bun with a knife and fork.
- Carrot Ironfounderson, with his unshakable conviction that people are basically good at heart, is frequently thought to be one of these by other characters. They'd be absolutely right about that, if he didn't make it work.
  - From about The Fifth Elephant he stops. Better example is Leonard da Quirm, who designs war machines but believes that no ruler in their right mind would have their army use such horrible weapons. The bad news is, Havelock Vetinari is the only ruler in his right mind on the Sto Plains by these standards, realizing that war and empire-building are more trouble than they're worth; the good news is, Vetinari has Leonard safely locked away and working for him.
The entire Harpell family of wizards in the Drizzt Do'Urden books. List of "experiments" include trying to cross a horse with a frog; turning themselves into dogs permanently; physically relocating their brains to their buttocks; separating their eyes from the rest of the body and getting stuck that way; believing double initials to be important omens, etc., etc. All the while beaming happily. The really weird part is that their experiments tend to have successful side effects — the one who turned himself into a dog, once turned back, ended up a werewolf; the one who tried to cross a frog and a horse succeeded (he dubbed the result "Puddlejumper"); and the brain-switching was actually with purpose, as it was done to fight against brain-eating aliens. This may mean the family hinges on being a clan of The Fool.
In Garcia Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba, the grandmother appears completely crazy and delusional; she takes out the jewelery and says she wants to get married, then appears cradling a lamb as if it is her baby. Yet she occasionally says what all the other characters should be thinking, and is the first to voice her protest against Bernarda's tyranny.
In Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, fictional Nobel laureate Felix Hoenikker, "father of the atomic bomb", was so easily distracted that, at one time, he completely abandoned the development of the atomic bomb to study the skeleton of turtles... his wife suggested his desperate colleagues to simply remove anything turtle-related from his laboratory, and he'd forget about his fascination with them completely (they did, he did).
Most characters in Alice In Wonderland count, but the Cheshire Cat is arguably the most famous. He's also a recurring character in the Thursday Next series, where he's portrayed as smart enough to manage a library containing every book ever written pretty much single-handedly, but still spends most of his time asking bizarre and irrelevant questions.
In Patricia C Wrede's The Seven Towers, the sorceress Amberglas is somewhere between this and Obfuscating Stupidity; her constant rambling digressions seem to be genuine, but she's much sharper (and more powerful) than she gives the impression of being, and frequently she has important things to say if you can sort them out from the nonsense.
George Manor, from The Lonely Winds, has a huge number of strange quirks and habits that do everything from amuse to enrage the monster hunters he works with. He makes strange jokes (often at extremely inappropriate times), launches into long-winded speeches at odd times, has a ritual whereby he sends the squad on a mission by giving them pep talks while dressed in random outlandish costumes, etc. He's also a certifiable genius, the brains behind the entire operation and definitely knows a lot more about what's going on than he's telling.
A popular Older Than Television example that helped define this trope is James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". The titular hero is a mild, unassuming man who's prone to spinning off into elaborate heroic fantasies at the slightest real-life suggestion.
Valentine Michael Smith from Stranger In A Strange Land is this trope played seriously, a Fish Out Of Water that confuses everyone immensely because he is clearly not stupid, and probably an outright genius.
Derk in Dark Lord Of Derkholm. Hell, the man makes flying pigs and invisible cats.
Animorphs: Tobias is one of those up until the end of the first book. After that his mind is much more 'down to Earth', the irony of course being that a lot of the time his head is quite literally up in the clouds, because he's a bird.
The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed is nothing but this trope. Understandable because the author is an AI.
Awareness is like consciousness. Soul is like spirit. But soft is not like hard and weak is not like strong. A mechanic can be both soft and hard, a stewardess can be both weak and strong. This is called philosophy or a world-view.
Holden Caulfield is more Cloudcuckoolander than Emo Teen.
In Alison McGhee's Falling Boy, everyone is a Cloudcuckoolander to some extent or another. With the Only Sane Man being a 16-year-old going through a major life crisis, the book consistently refers to "(character name) World". So Yeah...
Almost every charater in Work Shirts For Mad Men has some elements of this. The narrorator often comes off as one to other characters.
Percy Jackson And The Olympians has Tyson, the 6-foot-something cyclops who acts like he's about 3 years old.
Angela of the Inheritance Cycle comes out with random nonsequiturs frequently. In her spare time, she tries to prove that toads don't exist.

Close Literature

Since the Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon adaptation turns Minako into The Stoic, Usagi herself becomes a bit more of a cloudcuckoolander. But the cloudcuckoolander prize really goes to Usagi's mother Ikuko, who seems to live in her own crazy, genki world, complete with wildly different hair styles and colors practically every time she's onscreen, and a fantasy life that, among other things, reimagines her audition as a fitness reporter into a World War 2 battlefield.
Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live, who gave us such "Deep Thoughts" as:
"If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone."
- Also from Saturday Night Live, Tracy Morgan's sketch character named Brian Fellow who interviewed various animal trainers and made inane comments about the animals. Usually at the end, he would have a daydream about the first animal in the sketch that sometimes was completely random. For example, at the end of a sketch featuring a bunny, he imagined a bunny cutting its hair. And then he reacts to the delusion—in a way that his real second guest can hear!
- Will Ferrell's Harry Caray certainly counts as well. As the host of an astronomy show, he asks his guests if they would eat the moon if it were made of spare ribs (he would) and proclaims the sun to be his favorite planet, which is why he stares at it. After a guest asks him about his death, his only response is, "What's your point?"
Reese from Malcolm In The Middle.
"Yeah I like clouds. I call them Sky Kittens."
- Dewey as well.
- And Hal
Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld. Although, his problem isn't that he doesn't understand what's going on around him, or what is or isn't considered acceptable by society, but rather that he doesn't care, and thus behaves as if he were oblivious.
Dougal McGuire from Father Ted has to keep a list of things that don't exist, including "non-Catholic gods", "the Phantom of the Opera", and "Darth Vader". In the very first episode, he had a diagram explaining the difference between dreams and reality, and still got confused.
Richie and Eddie from Bottom start off in this situation and descend occasionally into Ralph Wiggum territory. When they think they've killed a gas meter reader, Richie suggests they eat the corpse in order to dispose of it; when they go camping, Eddie lights the Sterno without inserting the valve and almost sets himself on fire; and then there's the following exchange over a crossword puzzle:
Richie: Hey, I'll tell you what... Why don't we think of another word that means "ironmonger" but only has six letters?
Eddie: Heh! Well, that'd be cheating, wouldn't it?
Richie: Who's to know?
Eddie: Hah! You're right, me old pal! We get through a few scrapes, don't we?
Richie: Yeah, so, where are we?
Eddie: Er, right. "Ironmonger", six letters.... Oh, got it! "Harold."
Richie: Harold?
Eddie: Yeah, well, he's an ironmonger, isn't he? Harold the Ironmonger, remember? We ate his dog!
Richie: Oh right! Yeah, we bloody won that bet, didn't we?
Eddie: ... Uh, no, we didn't. That's why we had to eat his dog.
J.D. from Scrubs, who, when faced with problems outside medicine, keeps coming up with solutions involving monkeys, gnomes, or his head being independent of his body. Sometimes his statements sound more bizarre to the other characters than they are, because they didn't hear the Inner Monologue leading up to it, but more often, knowing what he was thinking just makes it weirder.
- There's also Molly Clock, a season four guest character for a few episodes. She's a renowned psychologist... who also happened to be a space case.
  Molly: So, where were we?
  J.D.: We weren't talking. We haven't even met.
Phoebe Buffay from Friends is probably the most well-known example for a mass-media audience, though most of the characters have "Cloudcuckooland" moments at one time or another, as does Rachel's sister Amy.
Mad About You has Ursula, the waitress at their usual restaurant, who is played by the same actress who plays Phoebe from Friends. (The characters are twin sisters.) The food must be really good. Also note that Ursula showed up on Friends a couple of times, and that Phoebe was the smart one.
Dwight Schrute from The Office is someone who, while his behavior is mostly predictable, seems to have motivations and an internal monologue that indicate that he is one of these.
- Creed from the same show is another good example.
Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers typically understood about one-third of any conversation that didn't involve the game of cricket. His cognitive skills usually failed at a critical juncture of one of Basil's schemes. He once went to a remembrance service, but didn't remember it.
Trudy from Reno 911! tells a story of how she mistook a goat for a Turk (or maybe vice versa), and seems to think that she's in a relationship with the openly gay Lt. Dangle.
Power Rangers: Bridge of SPD is definitely one of these. Of course, basically being a human tricorder and having no way to really turn it off will do that to you. One episode revolves around his weirdness actually being an asset. In Operation Overdrive's Reunion Show some seasons later, the only one who really got him was Overdrive's resident Cloudcuckoolander Dax. The others look on in astonishment.
- Chip of Mystic Force is milder than the other two, but his personal Cloudcuckooland is filled with superheroes and fantasy stories, so it works in his favor. He still has his moments:
  Chip: (regarding being a superhero) I mean, no one's more excited than me to finally get to wear a cape.
  Xander: "Finally"? If I remember correctly, you used to come to school with a pillowcase pinned to your back.
  Chip: Yeah. But that was a long time ago.
  Xander: That was last week, mate.
River Tam of Firefly, while she is actually insane, does have her lucid periods, during which she is endearingly unpredictable. Notable examples include her deciding to imitate Badger's accent while deconstructing his gangster facade and her attempt to "fix" Shepherd Book's Bible. It's difficult to tell how many of these moments are due to Cloudcuckoolander-ness and how many are actually because she's kind of a genius.
- My favorite one of these was in the Episode "Trash"
  Jayne: As a rule I say girlfolk ain't to be trusted.
  River: Jayne is a girl's name.
- Or saying this completely randomly during one of her more lucid moments in "Safe".
  River: The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
  - To which Mal responds that he has no problem with "morbid and creepifying" as long as she does it quietly.
  - Not completely randomly; right before she says that line, Mal talks about bleeding from the ears. She probably responded to that.
  - Plus Joss happened to have made another show in which people's blood was seemingly able to be drained in a very short amount of time....
- Parodied in xkcd: supposed, Summer Glau is like that in Real Life:
  Racer: Summer Glau! Wow, you were the best part of Chronicles.
  Summer Glau: I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
  Nathan Fillon: ... Yeah, there's a reason she only plays strange roles.
  Summer Glau: I'm part of the floor now.
- There's also Jubal Early, who goes off on random tangents for little or no reason, though it is implied that he does it to keep his "audience" off-balance.
  - Does that seem right to you?
In Green Acres, everyone in Hooterville except (maybe) Oliver Wendell Douglas seemed to be a Cloudcuckoolander.
- Which would make Hooterville Cloud Cuckooland, wouldn't it?
- Or would it make Oliver the Cloudcuckoolander? Most of the characters on the show thought he was nuts, especially when he starts speechifying about the nobility of the American farmer.
- Definitely the latter, in a kind of subversion of the trope. The people of Hooterville operate on their own weird plane of illogic that, nonetheless, seems perfectly normal to them (and works, in a surreal little town where the laws of phsyics, cause and effect, etc. seem to be suspended). Ditzy Lisa fits right in and is attuned to their mindset (she even understands Arnold the Pig's grunts, as do the townsfolk). It's Oliver who in this bizarro world is the Cloudcuckoolander — his appeals to logic, science, law, and "common sense" are viewed by Hootervillains as somewhat "out there."
Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad had Amp: "Am I a space cadet, or what?" Turns out he wasn't kidding about that, though.
Reverend Jim Ignatowski of Taxi.
Cliff Clavin of Cheers occasionally drifts into this territory.
- Many times.
  Frasier: Hello in there, Cliff. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?
- Many, many, times.
  Norm: Okay, Cliff. At what point in your life did you come to the fork in the road, where sanity was to the left and you took a hard right?
Margaret in One Foot In The Grave sometimes lapses into this despite usually being the Straight Man (er, woman). Every now and then she will make some wild claim that makes very little sense, sometimes seeming a bit out of character. For example, when talking about friends who have died to her husband Victor, she mentions someone who apparently died of a terminal disease:
Victor: What, measles?
Margaret: Well she died, didn't she?
Victor: ... She fell off a cliff!
Margaret: Only because she went to the seaside to convalesce!
Cat of Red Dwarf.
Cat: I hate to get all technical on you, but: all hands on deck! Swirly thing alert!
Station owner Jimmy James from News Radio often showed signs of being a Cloudcuckoolander. However, this may or may not have been cover for the fact that he was actually a Genius Ditz, a Trickster Mentor, and/or a Magnificent Bastard.
Tracy Jordan of 30 Rock has a rather tenuous hold on reality, perhaps best summed up here:
Tracy: I do not want to disappoint my Japanese public! Especially Godzilla. Ha Ha Ha, I’m just kidding. I know he doesn't care what humans do.
Mork from Ork. Granted, he's an alien, but the reason he was sent to Earth in the first place was because he was considered weird even by Orkan standards. (And, judging by the other Orkans we meet in the series, especially Orson, they're right.)
Buster from Arrested Development:
Buster: I love it here. And the language these guys use. Rough! One of the guys told me to take my head out of my bottom and get back to work. (Cackling laughter.) My bottom!
Wendy's neighbor Noser from The Middle Man seems to do little else but sit in the hallway with a guitar and quote lyrics and pop culture references to Wendy.
Cassie from Skins.
"Oh, it's cool. I wear a white dress and now I can eat yogurt, cup of soup, and hazelnuts now. I'm not sick if they let me play with the cats. Yeah, it's like... hazy days, y'know?"
- In the series 2 episode "Jal", she uses this sort of thing as a way of trying to help Jal make a decision regarding whether or not to tell Chris about her pregnancy or to abort it. So, she may be using it as a ruse sometimes as well.
Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys, who lives in a shed with his many cats. Bubbles may actually seem retarded because of his awkward gait and absentmindedness, but he actually seems to be one of the smartest people on the show.
Walter Bishop from Fringe is still a brilliant scientist, but spending more than a decade in a mental institution has given him a few quirks like obsessing over certain foods and constantly forgetting the existence or just the name of one particular member of the team.
- I think the fact that, during the 70s and 80s, he regularly tested the psychological and neurological effects of LSD on himself as well as doing it recreationally might have contributed.
Who could forget Rose Nylund of Golden Girls and her frequent tales of the complete insanity of her hometown of St. Olaf, Minnesota?
Lowell on Wings sometimes takes extra-long strides to avoid "Cosmic Potholes," for fear he'll be lost in time.
French Stewart's Harry Solomon in Third Rock From The Sun; actually, when he was repeating the voices in his head (from the Big Giant Head q.v.) he sounded much more reasonable than he usually did, albeit officious and megacorporate.
Detective Sergeant Luke Harris from Stingers Undercover slips into this. Not that surprising given he's on the bipolar express.
Cameron from The Sarah Connor Chronicles has an odd tendency to go off on random spiels and discussions without any warning, including one instance where she starts measuring the exact center of the house to determine when it will need to be repainted in a couple of decades, or when she randomly goes off quoting Bible passages. Of course, in her case, its actually quite justified, as her processor is damaged and thus renders her slightly unpredictable.
Spending years in prison for a crime he didn't commit seems to have made Detective Crews slightly unhinged. He says things that make his partner ask if it's a "Zen thing", has an odd fruit fixation, and has a decidedly offbeat manner in dealing with the public.
Shawn Spencer of Psych uses this for Obfuscating Stupidity, as it throws off those around him, allowing him to bring his extraordinary observational skills to bear. That and he doesn't want to act like an adult.
Jessica Tate from Soap. Prone to uncontrollable fits of laughter at the slightest things. Also a bit dim.
Synclaire from Living Single. Her bohemian weirdness was one of the things that attracted Overton (not exactly a conventional thinker himself) to her in the first place.
Jane from Coupling.
Jane: I once went on holiday and pretended to be twins. It was amazing fun. I invented this mad, glamorous sister and went around really annoying everybody. And d'you know, I could get away with anything when I was my crazy twin Jane.
Sally: But you're Jane.
Jane: Kinda stuck. It's a long story.
Most of the characters on the original The Electric Company, perhaps with the exception of J. Arthur Crank. Fargo North, Decoder counts as both a Cloudcuckoolander and a Genius Ditz.
A very large percentage of the characters from Monty Pythons Flying Circus would fit this trope.
- "A very large percentage", in this case, would be 100%.
Alice from The Vicar Of Dibley. Come to think of it, the majority of the show's cast.
Lewis of The Drew Carey Show fits squarely under this trope.
Lewis: Well, I just want to say one thing. "Earl" minus L is ear. How much more clear could it be?
Drew: Lewis, "clear" minus "cl" is ear.
Lewis: No, now you're reaching.
"Howling Mad" Murdock from A-Team. Each new chapter comes with new personality/distorted reality. Still he's a remarkable pilot and as skilled as the other member in most areas.
Drusilla and Fred from the Buffyverse are both this because they've been driven nuts by Angelus and Pylea, respectively. Fred gets better over the course of the series and her Cloudcuckoolander status mostly fades away. Dru stays crazy the entire time.
Angel: Fred here might be able to help us with that. She knows a lot about portals.
Fred: Not a lot. The trionic speechcraft formulation/modification has to alter the dynamic reality sphere... Lutzbalm predicted it at Zurich in '89 — laughed him off the stage — although this slavery and degradation's no laughing matter...(laughs) ... it's no Crug-grain and Kalla berry breakfast all right!
(beat)
Angel: She's been here a while.
Drusilla: All in your head. I can see it. Little bit of ... plastic, spiderwebbing out nasty blue shocks. And every one is a lie. Electricity lies, Spike. It tells you you're not a bad dog, but you are.
- It should be noted that It Makes Sense In Context. A lot of Dru-speak does, in fact. But yeah, still nutters.
- Illyria acted like this too, beneath the arrogance and depression. Mostly due to being a bored Eldritch Abomination.
Wesley: She's either counting oxygen molecules or analyzing the Petri dish she just put into her mouth. Or sleeping. I can never quite tell.
Zora from Sonny With A Chance.
The Doctor sometimes has shades of Cuckoolander-ness in certain incarnations. Four springs to mind, and perhaps Ten.
"It goes DING when there's stuff!"
Many characters on The Young Ones have a touch of this, but the top candidates for Cloud Cuckoolander on the show would be some of the Bulowskis, particularly Reggie ("Hello, Mr. Pussycat! What you doing in a bucket?") and Brian ("...a helicopter, a hundred thousand pounds, a complete set of steak knives, some of those little black rubber things...").
Tyler from My Hero, one of the few characters who knows about George Sunday's alter ego Thermoman. This isn't the crazy part; the crazy part...what is the crazy part? The tea parties with Frodo Baggins seems the most likely candidate.
Parker from Leverage. She has very little social skills and often makes inappropriate yet accurate comments. However, she is very skilled in other areas such as improvisation when it comes to thieving.
John Crichton in Farscape. Apparently, it's what gives him his edge.
Dave from Titus. Once got so high he remembered being born.
The Muppet Show. Gonzo the Great. Well, what did you expect from a guy named Gonzo?
Mason from Dead Like Me. He's relatively functional, but at various points has believed that college is a plot by bacteria, there's a giant dust cloud in China stripping the flesh off cows, money from parking meters goes through underground tunnels, and if you drilled a hole in your head it would increase the amount of blood in your brain and get you really high. (He died of that last one, and after forty years he still seems to be unaware that was a really stupid thing to do.)
Emma from Glee is pretty Cuckoolander-ish. Interestingly, she also has OCD.

Close Live Action TV

WWE wrestler Al Snow became most famous as a Cloudcuckoolander who has "HELP ME!" inexplicably written backwards across his head and gets advice from a mannequin head (appropriately named "Head"). One particularly memorable storyline had him thinking that Head betrayed him and stole the Hardcore Championship from him, so he started using Pierre, a taxidermied deer head, to substitute for Head. Another had Al winning the European Championship, and deciding that, in order to better represent "the citizens of Europea", he would dress in the traditional garb (and come out to the national anthem of) a different country each week (including, inexplicably, a '50s style greaser outfit for Greece). And then there was his tag team with Steve Blackman, WWE's resident Unfunny, in which he insisted that Blackman wear a hat shaped like a wedge of cheese so they could call themselves "Head Cheese", and that they make their entrance surrounded by midgets holding sparklers... and his infamous hardcore match with himself... yeah, Al Snow was one weird dude.
- The explicability is obvious! Where else would greasers come from?
Jeff Hardy, full stop. Doubly so because it's not just his TV character. His TV character is in fact considerably more normal than he is in real life. His closest friends claim that one of his favorite activities outside of wrestling is "digging holes and filling them back in." His sculpting material of choice is aluminum foil. Also, there's his alter-ego Itchweeed (which is in fact the correct spelling)...well, just look...
Colonel Cossack of the TWF.
Haaghiuaheydtrihaoivuhyarwehtoiuhadvhaiherr—Deliroius.

Close Pro Wrestling

Most of the Muppet characters on Sesame Street would qualify. Yes, even Straight Man Bert, who has an unusual obsession with bottle caps and paper clips. Being a Nerd doesn't mean you're sane.
The entire cast of the highly surreal Norwegian puppet show Reparatørene Kommer (The Repairmen are Coming), later renamed Pompel & Pilt after the two main characters. If Cloud Cuckooland is an actual land, this show takes place in it. Pompel & Pilt is Norwegian television's most beloved Nightmare Fuel.

Close Puppet Shows

The Goon Show has several, perhaps the entire cast at times. Eccles is the most obvious through:
Eccles: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up, Eccles!! Shut up, Eccles!! Oh, that's me!
- The Goon Show has Eccles first and foremost, and the SCRIPT as well. Characters like Grytpype Thynne and Moriarty exemplify the latter. Other Goons such as Bluebottle are more like a Chew Toy.
  - Ned Seagoon and Henery Crun are full-bore Cloudcuckoolanders too. Bluebottle and Minnie Bannister aren't quite full Cloudcuckoolanders, but are fairly close (and don't try to say Bluebottle is sane, he was found at one point singing a map.)
A great many of the characters portrayed by Bob And Ray would qualify.
Private-Eye Harlow Doyle from Adventures In Odyssey. He's actually a step up from his spiritual predecessor, the bumbling Officer David Harley, who hadn't gone over well.

Close Radio

Foxbat from the Champions setting is completely convinced that he is a great, powerful comic book supervillain.
Some of the Malkavians from VampireTheMasquerade could get this way. Of course they tended to be really scary at the same time.

Close Tabletop Games

Rosencrantz from Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead is an excellent example, though he's also more canny than he lets on. Probably. (Guildenstern also has his moments.)
- For that matter, Hamlet himself is frequently considered to only be pretending at insanity; that he is "not in madness/ but mad in craft", i.e. not insane, but angry.
Harper the Valium-addicted Mormon housewife from Angels In America, who has various interesting hallucinations, several of which include her imaginary travel agent, Mr. Lies.

Close Theater

In Bionicle Vezon was Flanderized into a Cloudcuckoolander.

Close Toys

Cysero from many of the Artix Entertainment line of games is somewhat an example of this trope. While very coherent and attentive to a problem at hand, he sometimes slips into Cloudcuckooland, which inevitably means something weird is going to happen or is already in the works when he gets involved.
Subverted in Psychonauts: Shegor appears to be a Cloudcuckoolander under the delusion that her kidnapped pet turtle can talk and has the answers for everything. When you finally rescue her turtle, after it just sits there for a while... it actually does start talking and its plan does solve everything — at least for the moment.
- But also played straight with... well, about half the cast, give or take.
The legendarily bizarre ranger Minsc and his "Miniature Giant Space Hamster" Boo from the Baldurs Gate series.
- Edwin is seemingly his Evil Counterpart, a self-important wizard with a strange obsession for calling everyone monkeys, and constantly talks to himself in such a way that everyone hears him - and is shocked that people can do that.
GlaDOS of Portal, despite being an all-powerful AI, seems to have a very loose grip on reality. She regularly makes childish insults at the player in later portions of the game and even tries to convince you that one of the puzzles is impossible to test your resilience in an atmosphere of "extreme pessimism". She also instructs you to take the infamous Weighted Companion Cube (a box with hearts on all its sides) with you on one of the tests, then asks you to euthanise the inanimate object at the end by dropping it in an incinerator.
Phoenix Wright: Justice for All has Regina Berry, who demonstrates that a Cloudcuckoolander can be the cause of tragic circumstances in a (mostly) realistic setting. Due to being raised in a circus, she has a fairly substantial disconnection from reality. She doesn't understand, for example, how her putting pepper on Bat's scarf led to him being bitten by a lion... or that he may never recover from the resulting coma. Bat's brother, Acro, was so infuriated by her lack of remorse that he decided to kill her.
- The whole Phoenix Wright is chock full of less tragic 'landers, including Maya Fey's laughably bad grasp of technology, Ema Skye's utterly bizarre "scientific theories", and Trucy Wright (who had a rather... interesting exchange about how 'Revolver' and 'Wonder Bar' sound the same).
- Let's not forget the Judge, whose grasp on reality is just firm enough to give the right verdict every time — but no firmer.
Manah in Drakengard, when she's not trying to be actively evil, has all the charm of a cute little girl playing with imaginary friends.
Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines allows you to play one in the form of a Malkavian. Funny dialogue choices, even funnier if you've played the game before and know what the dialogue is normally like. You also get the chance to have an argument with a stop sign. ("No, you stop!")
- And you can even spread your insanity to other people, like convincing a guard that you're a keyring so you should be given the keys. And it works.
Aldanon in Neverwinter Nights 2 is basically a wizard equivalent for the absent-minded professor stereotype, exhibiting qualities like lapsing into rambling doublespeak with metaphors abandoned halfway, changing subjects mid-conversation, forgetting his own orders, or mistaking a prison cell for his own house.
- At one point, he begins listing off a number of RPG tropes that he claims your team will have to perform, complete with "reforge the broken key" and "acquire some rare, arbitrary items." Only to be almost immediately shot down by one of his servants, who he had commissioned to do the exact thing he supposedly needed the arbitrary items. Then he congratulates himself on a job well done.
Sheogorath, the Daedric Lord of Madness from The Elder Scrolls is of course obliged to follow this trope.
"I've been waiting for you, or someone like you, or someone not like you."
"Well, looks like the cat's out of the bag now... who puts cats in bags, anyway? Cats hate bags."
"But enough about me. Let's talk about you. I could turn you into a goat. Or a puddle. Or a bad idea. I could make you eat your own fingers. Or fall in love with a cloud. Perhaps... I could make you into something useful."
"I once dug a pit and filled it with clouds... or was it clowns?... Come to think of it, it began to smell... must have been clowns. Clouds don't smell, they taste of butter. And tears.
- His butler also confirm the "pit full of clowns" story was true.
- Many other characters in that expansion could fit the trope. For example, Big Head, once you give him the Fork of Horripilation he was searching: "Happy day! Happy day! The blind shall see! The lame shall walk! The short shall tall! Forks for all!"
  - Considering that the Shivering Isles pretty much is Cloudcuckooland, this is hardly suprising.
Banjo-Tooie had a bunch of literal Cloudcuckoolanders, as one of the stages was named Cloud Cuckoo Land. To say the place was crazier than an asylum is an understatement.
Para-Medic, one of the Mission Control characters in Metal Gear Solid 3 is definitively a Cloudcuckoolander, deciding that the person she never saw before (Actually the Player character wearing a Latex Perfection mask) must be an alien — "A Venusian, not the crab kind".
- Arguably, everyone else in the damn game has a tendency to dip into this, the creator of the above mask decided that making a mask blink is more important then making the mouth move, Naked Snake discussing how being in the box brings inner happiness, among other things.
Wigglytuff from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness is the leader of the Pokemon guild, but is unbelievably flighty.
The Touch Detective games has Penelope. A banana loving girl who is a Cloudcuckoolander to the point that her very hair is soft and fluffy and cloud-like. A good example of her air-headedness is displayed in a conversation between protagonist Mackenzie and shopkeeper Daisy.
Daisy: Well, she's been pretty quiet lately. But, I really didn't give it any thought. I mean, it's Penelope. She could wake up and say, "I'm not talking today!"
Mackenzie: She's done that. In fact, she didn't talk for a week.
Daisy: Really? Even to herself?
Mackenzie: Well, she pantomimed to herself.
Daisy: She pantomimed to herself!? She's madder than a hatter.
Subverted with Princess Sapphire Rhodonite in Disgaea 3. At first she appears to be a slightly out-of-it Rebellious Princess who is easily distracted by things that are small and cute (like Raspberyl, as she uncomfortably learns). It's not much later that we get a glimpse into her head and discover that she prepares plans in her head on how to most efficiently kill anyone she meets, should the time come. Kinda like if Osaka was raised by Machiavelli.
- In the first Disgaea manga, we've got Lamington. "Do you want to talk to my bonsai?" (Not to mention that he constantly seems to be baking cakes...)
Charmy Bee from the Sonic The Hedgehog games.
Charmy: Oh, flower, pretty flower, come to me and I'll sting you...
Some of the villagers in the Animal Crossing games tend to be like this — particularly the villagers with the "lazy" personalities. For example, the following conversation between two villagers in City Folk:
Jeremiah: ... growwwlll... (Jeremiah's Catch Phrase at the time)
Lobo: Oh no.
Jeremiah: I wonder... would a crowbar taste better if you soak it in soy milk first?
Lobo: ARGH!
- And speaking of Lobo, him and others of his personality sometimes compare looking at a model of a room to looking into someone's home through the window. Lazy-type males still hold the crown, though, with Big Top once deciding that a snail's classification was "food" (on the basis that snails were delicious). In context, he was asked what it was if it wasn't an insect, and came up with that response.
Arcueid from Tsukihime has mild case of this. This only applies to her game character, however, since her anime counterpart lacks this and is therefore far less lovable.
Psymon Stark from the SSX series. Apart from a noticeable facial tic, Psymon's... condition is just that; He's had a long history of mental illness ever since he tried to jump some power lines on his bike. His in game dialogue only makes his lack of lucidity all the more apparent, with lines like "Knock knock who's there!?" and "Oh sweet, sweet pain...", and his gold medal cutscenes show him yellng things like "You're all crazy!" or "Hurt me, hurt me!" Overall, he's a natural disaster just waiting to happen, and spectators, competitors, and event organizers alike all anxiously watch Psymon compete in fear that this is the year he'll go too far. Oh, and his signature move, the Guillotine, is so suicidally dangerous (as you might expect from the name) that you'd have to be crazy to even think it up.
Sakura in Street Fighter IV qualifies with this with most of her victory quotes, such as asking Chun-Li if they could switch outfits for a day for fun. After beating the snot out of her.
- Chun Li wearing a schoolgirl outfit? Heck yeah.
- Rufus could also count, with his victory quotes often being nothing but random ramblings about his life, confusing opponents for Ken or occasional Lampshade Hanging on character traits like Chun-Li's Hartman Hips. Again, after beating the snot out of people.
The Soldier of Team Fortress 2 fame acts like this a lot. His version of history includes the dubvious fact that Noah was actually Sun Tzu, the animals were bought via fight money, and after they were on the boat, Sun Tzu beat them all up. ("And from that day forward, anytime a bunch of animals are together in one place, it's called a zoo! ...Unless it's a farm!") This was discovered during a Drill Sergeant Nasty speech to a collection of severed heads. He also joined the World War 2 effort — in 1949, in his backstory. But then, a lot of the cast goes into this a little; the Heavy is under the impression that both his BFG (lovingly called Sasha) and sandvich are people, and talks to them a lot.
- All of the characters in Team Fortress 2 are disturbed or insane in some manner, but the Soldier does seem to have the weakest grasp on reality and also personifies this trope with his rapid changes in subjects. I personally think he's psychotic too!
- Likely but unconfirmed in the case of the Pyro since nobody has a clue what he (or she) is saying.
- This fanfic goes into detail about it.
You could make a case for the Mr. Saturns in EarthBound and its sequel. Their grammar is off-the-wall and punctuated by words like "boing" and "zoom", the font they speak in looks like a young child's handwriting, one in Mother 3 busied itself by staring at the ceiling.
Rin in Katawa Shoujo rivals Osaka for sheer out-of-touch-with-reality-or-possibly-just-on-a-different-plane-of-it-ness.
- There's also Kenji, Hisao's Conspiracy Theorist dorm neighbor, though his paranoid ramblings about the world in general and the so-called feminist conspiracy in specific are less "harmlessly insane" and more "holy crap, this guy's going to snap and kill somebody one of these days".
Moe in Da Capo has issues. Apart from sleepwalking to school while playing the xylophone (yes), being obsessed with hot pot and being very disconnected in general from life around her, she is apparently convinced kisses are supposed to taste like lemons, so she eats a lemon drop right before kissing Junichi in her route.
Agitha of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess probably classifies. She's the self-proclaimed Princess of the Bug Kingdom, is seemingly ignorant of the fact that most people have no particular desire to bathe in snail slime, and demands that the Legendary Hero Chosen by the Gods go fetch bugs for her ball. Oddly enough, she's one of the most popular NP Cs.
- And apparently, she cheerfully chats with wolves, in a world where most people just run like hell. While referring to them as puppies.
Grune from Tales Of Legendia takes the cake — she doesn't even realize that she's fighting for her life, instead thinking that everybody's on a picnic. Somewhat justified in that she's got Laser Guided Amnesia and can only remember her name (just barely) and how to speak, but still. "I'm going to give it my all ! Charge !"
Colette Brunel from Tales Of Symphonia often falls under this, especially during the skits.
Regal: Why does the subject of the conversation seem to go out the window when talking to Colette?
Kirby! He's just a happy-minded person who always thinks of food and sleeping. Particularly notable is Kirby Squeak Squad, where Kirby only saved the world because his cake was missing. There's also Captain Waddle Dee, who works for Meta Knight...
Axe Knight: Kirby is moving along the base of the ship.
Captain Vul: Not much we can do to him there... but the wind is strong.
Waddle Dee: And it's cold.
Mikey Thomas of Backyard Sports qualifies.
Laguna in Final Fantasy VIII. That dude said the randomest things.

Close Video Games

The Homestar Runner universe has a number of these:
- Homestar Runner is usually The Ditz, but his energetic, active stupidity often results in some surreal dialogs (or monologues).
  "Say, you got a girlfriend? Well, what if your girlfriend was a wooden spoon and an orange plastic bowl? That'd be really weird, man. What kind of screwed-up kid are you? We don't recruit your kind! Get out of here!"
- Homestar is often naive to the world around him, so he often needs Pom Pom to help him... too bad Pom Pom is The Unintelligible.
  Homestar: (upon walking into a cemetery) Oh man, Pom Pom, this is gonna be so great! First, we'll hit Space Mountain, then over to Mr. Toad's, then Tom Sawyer's Island, and don't forget, we parked in the Goofy lot!
- Homsar, on the other hand, is the Lord Mayor of Cloudcuckooland. He communicates largely in non-sequiturs with only the flimsiest connection to the topic at hand, and his disconnection from reality is so strong that he breaks the laws of physics (by levitating either himself or his hat) every time he speaks. He also somehow managed to survive having a Heavy Lourde dropped on him.
  Homsar: Oh no! You shanked my Jengaship!
  Strong Sad: I shanked your Jengaship? We're playing Connect Four.
  - It's been heavily rumoured that said Heavy Lourde dropping was what made him this way, since he had no dialogue before this occured, but he could not be removed from the storyline, according to the characters.
  - Until you count that he managed to say something coherent while thanking Marzipan for the flowers she gave him while he was in the "hos-spee-tal".
  - "Strong Badia the Free", the game of the series shows that Homsar is apparently just speaking his own incomprehensible language rather than being a true Cloudcuckoolander. Strong Bad can temporarily understand Homsar, who is actually quite articulate to those who can understand him. To anybody else any conversation those two have ends up as a series of confusing rambling.
- Then there's Senor Cardgage, a creepy-old-man-with-a-combover version of Strong Bad who constantly ~~mispronounces~~ "invents" new words and refers to men (and robots) as if they were ladies, among other things.
  "Home Lawn, Escrow, Re-Financin'; you name it, we've got it! Come along down for a free canceltation with one of our handsome-talking experts. (Points at an empty chair.) One o' them said they'd buy me lunch, but I don't see nobody taking me to Chick-Fil-A."
- And Marshie is just dadaist Nightmare Fuel.
  "You better believe it's new Fluffy Puff Malloween orange and black flavored marshmallows! "They Taste the Same, but Loo—" [violent coughing] Sorry. Must've got a toenail caught in m'throat!
- Coach Z has his share of weirdness as well:
  Marzipan: Coach Z, might I ask why you're buying up all the "great for baby" items?
  Coach Z: I'd prefer that you didn't...
- One can safely say that there's also a Cloudcuckoolander Ball being tossed around constantly in the Homestar Runner universe, with Bubs,Strong Bad and Marzipan being prime recipients for it.
  Marzipan: Oh, these [crayons] don't actually color anything, so no "life blossom" feels more special than the others.
Fred of Fred The Monkey.com acts this way on occasion.
Red Vs Blue's Caboose started off as a profoundly stupid recruit, but between Flanderization and mental trauma from possession by a rogue AI, he quickly loses much of his grasp on reality. He thinks his commander is a gay robot, plans to use his Purple Heart and future medals to build an entire purple person ("and we will be best friends"), is in love with a tank, and good friends with a bomb. Journeys to the center of his mind reveal that it's inhabited by wildly inaccurate avatars representing the rest of the cast: Red Team's leader talks like a pirate, the one in ~~pink~~ lightish-red armor is a girl, and Blood Gulch's newest arrival is "from the part of the plane that crashed on the other side of the island." Naturally, Caboose is one of the most popular characters.
The world of the Charlie the Unicorn shorts appears to BE Cloudcuckooland.
Daffy Duck, the early years. 'Nuff said.

Close Web Animation

Largo from Megatokyo at first finds it hard to tell the difference between the real world and the videogame world. Then it turns out the Megatokyo world is indeed a conglomeration of anime and videogame tropes. Which just shows you can be Genre Savvy and a Cloudcuckoolander at the same time; in fact, it can be an advantage if the situation you're in is itself insane.
Roger and Lily Pepitone in College Roomies From Hell!!!
Every single character (save for Jame and maybe Liln) in Terror Island. Sid and Stephen (the main characters) are especially bad, what with the groceries and all that.
Stephen: It's strange how we have an invisible postal worker who delivers the mail by altering history so it was always here.
Sid: We don't. We have a normal mailman who comes by before you're awake.
Stephen: Same thing.
Ethan in Ctrl+Alt+Del.
- And don't forget Chef Brian.
Chef Brian: Yes, Clancy! My existential shell is filled with the dreams of wild chipmunks! Thank you for asking!
- Chef Brian has been seen in the sillies, reciting a haiku: "Lemon pie puppet. In love with his socks with teeth. I am made of beef." Riiiiiight.
Cube, from the Stick Figure Comic Stickman And Cube, occasionally drifts into this territory. For instance, on Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007:
Cube: Pirates give me gas.
Ellen from Questionable Content, but Raven seems to have officially taken over that role recently.
- Hannelore might also qualify on occasion.
  - Word Of God has it that she's channeling Osaka.
T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics.
Kwerki in Ghastly's Ghastly Comic. She started off seeming Raised By Wolves, but quickly turned into a chatty little loon who believes citrus fruits squirting juice in your eyes is an S&M thing for them, among the other crazy and not-particularly-worksafe theories she has to explain equally mundane things.
- The best (though not work-safe) example, in my opinion, is her wedding toast... At a reception she wasn't invited to, and most likely doesn't know anyone at. And it involves a rather 'unique' use of a bottle as a prop.
Wonderella from The Non Adventures Of Wonderella. And her sidekick, Rita, is even more of one.
Red Mage of 8-bit Theater is convinced his world runs on Tabletop Games rules. He carries around a character sheet, rolls twenty-sided dice to see if he succeeds at things, and is obsessed with manipulating these rules to his advantage. If he were in another webcomic, this would make him Genre Savvy. However, the world of 8-Bit Theater doesn't actually run on Tabletop Games rules; it runs on the Rule Of Funny instead. That means he's just a Cloudcuckoolander, except when it would be funnier for him to be right. He's simply insane all the time, in his own special way, and often oblivious to logic, warping reality with his own bizarre ideas. Just because his crazy schemes occasionally briefly succeed (like the Chocobo breeding experiment) doesn't make him sane. You would never ever think of Red Mage as "the only truly sane person of the group".
- Since Red Mage took mild forms of insanity as character defencts in order to maximize his skill points it is totally possible for him to be both insane and yet totally correct in his perception of the universe.
- Fighter has to count as well.
  - No, Fighter is just plain out stupid and retarded.
  - He has a few Cloudcuckoolander traits, but is generally closer to a Ralph Wiggum.
Elan of The Order of the Stick. For instance, when Haley argues that, as they are adventurers, everything they do counts as an adventure... he takes off his shirt, covers himself in jam, stands on one hand, hangs a lantern from one foot, puts a squirrel on the other and plays with a paddle-ball with his free hand. And shouts "I'm on an adventure!"
- In a slightly-more-coherent example from an earlier strip, Elan found out that wearing armor incurs an armor-check-penalty on certain skills, including Hide. Therefore, he decided that removing all his clothes would increase his Hide skill to the point of invisibility. Hilarity Ensued.
  - Hey, it worked didn't it? Nobody would look at him!
  - He much later concluded, when a newly resurrected Roy was standing naked in front of him, "You're invisible!"
Richard of Looking For Group is a combination of Heroic Sociopathy in the vein of Black Mage from 8-Bit Theater and Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, bearing most of the humor of the comics currently due to Cerebus Syndrome.
Fluffmodeus, aka Little Blue Friend, in Something Positive, especially his first appearance.
"And and and and this other time? I was at the zoo and the man at the zoo was all 'You can't feed animals here' And I was all 'But why not?' And he was all 'Cause there's no one to feed 'em to.' HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA It's funny, new friend! It's so funny! ...it only takes seven pounds of pressure to crack open a man's head... from the inside. Kisses now!"
- Come to think of it, Fluffmodeus is actually pretty scary.
Schlock Mercenary's Lieutenant Pibald turns into one of these when he forgets to take his medication, acquiring delusions of having hyperbolically exaggerated status or talents which he doesn't. This wouldn't be as serious a problem as it is if his hobby wasn't homemade explosives... that metastasize and form colonies.
Eddie from Emergency Exit is nothing "but" this. He is obsessed with traffic cones, thinks chickens are out to take over the world, collects distractions, and just generally acts like a insane seven-years-old on an eternal sugar rush. He also wields a Hyperspace Mallet, and uses a "coolness enhancer" that enhances whatever it's attached too. Anything. He also has a fully stocked Mad scientist laboratory, although the whether the stuff he makes is powered by science, magic, or some combination of the two is anyone's guess.
- Thing is...even though Eddie sounds crazy, if you've actually seen what he's describing (I've found the thing with the stuff! You should use the use the thingy majig to find that one thing with the other stuff!), it makes sense.
Captain Fang from Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is arguably insane and stupid (though who can tell for sure with him?), but he's the ultimate king of absurd non-sequitur. A few examples.
Most characters in Sore Thumbs slip in and out of this; Harmony is firmly cemented in it.
In UG Madness, Wizards Of The Coast R&D director Mark Rosewater is portrayed as this. He's also an imp. The author claims this to be a true and accurate portrayal. Many who have read Mr. Rosewater's articles might agree.
Torg from Sluggy Freelance does this quite a bit, such as when he declares "I will find us a new place to live!" He doesn't actually make any effort to find a new apartment; he thinks making the big dramatic statement should be enough.
- Or when he promises to paint Zoe's apartment, and takes that as liscense to do a nude portrait of her on the wall of her living room. And doing a painting of Rodin's "The Kiss◊ on her bathroom ceiling. Using pictures of her parents as models.
Quilt from Dominic Deegan literally has no brain (he's a necromantic golem, a la Frankensteins Monster), and thus can be a little... out there. When told to keep his eye on someone, his response was to take his eye out of the socket and point it at the subject. But this is probably where he exhibits the trope the most.
Lord Sykos from The Wotch is, as his name suggests, completely insane. Example: "Sorry, but no one goes anywhere 'til I'm done with my little investigation. 'Cept for you. You need to get me a taco. I don't know what they are, but I want one." His Perky Female Minion Aimee is pretty strange, too.
- Jo in Cheer!. Too ditzy to be fooled by the Agents' Somebody Elses Problem Fields, completely Genre Savvy without even knowing it, and she thinks she's a Magical Girl. And talks to squirrels, which talk more like CATS.
  - Also too ditzy to have been affected by Miranda's mind-altering magic, and thus retains all of her memories of being Colin.
Bass in Bob And George, very much unlike his video game version. He's not evil at all, and spends most of the comic wondering what's going on while staring blankly, and unlike Mega Man, never has moments of clarity.
The eponymous character of minus would normally qualify, dubbing herself Warrior Queen of the Ant People and wanting to grow up to be an elephant, if she weren't an omnipotent Reality Warper (with a dash of Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant) who ensures all her fantasies become reality.
Snooch from Two Lumps, although alcohol is often a factor.
Hugh, the CEO of Angst Technology fits this trope quite well, mistaking a monkey for a small child, singin hilarious mangled lyrics of songs during karaoke, and playing make-believe space cadet and western characters with the office supplies of canned air.
"We are men of vision. Like when Magellan crossed the Sahara, or when the Persians first made cheese in a can. We are living in an advanced age where man can look to the stars and walk on Uranus. I foresee a future for this company when our products are as popular as Frogger, or even... dare I say... Burger Time. It is our destiny, gentlemen, to forge ahead like Marcel Marceau and to take charge like that fellow Charles... who was apparently in charge. Look to the future men, for we may never see it again!"
iddy pop (not to be confused with a certain Stooges singer) from My Life In Blue lives and breathes this trope.
In the Triquetra Cats spinoff Polonian Tales, the character of Nalaynee was specifically modeled after Osaka.
In Least I Could Do, we have the main character, Rayne. He does stuff like this.
Inquisitor Eastwood from ~~Sonic 40K~~ Exterminatus Now takes refuge in Cloudcuckooland sometimes when giant spiders show up. To protect his fragile brain from the shock, he has been known to begin calculating the number of teapots a walrus could eat while juggling George Clooney and David Hasselhoff.
Scary Go Round: Shelley Winters and Ryan Beckwith are like this pretty much all of the time, although their brands of oddness tend to vary. Shelley's detachment from reality seems to manifest in her bizarre thought processes, Ryan has his interesting grasp of history and both of them love a good non sequitur every now and then.
Fletcher Apts: Kia is the cute ditzy girl who seems to be in her own world all the time, and any jokes told to her or aimed at her just fly right over her head.
Sylvester from A Game of Fools:
"Pfft, it's not aliens you should be worried about. It's the carrot people."
Tesrin Stepford-Brown from All Over The House:
"I'm going to upload my brain onto the Internet and live in perpetual electronic bliss."
Franky, from The Life Of Nob T Mouse:
"Have you tried counting sheep? When I couldn't sleep, I walked all the way to the nearest farm to count the sheep. By the time I got there I was so tired, I nodded off right away!"
Summer Glau's recent portrayal in XKCD. Sample dialogue: "I can extrude hair, but I can't retract it."
Brad from Fur Will Fly fits the bill of a classic Cloudcuckoolander almost perfectly, complete with boubts of Fridge Brilliance. The sequel, Coming Up Violet, expands on the mahem with his doughter Beatrice, who is a chip off the block in almost every respect.
As one of the quotes implies, Leo from VG Cats has been known to go from "it's so hot out" to "there's a face growing out of my butt, if you touch it you can see the future" within seconds. This is when he isn't being a full-on idiot, though.
Hamony of Sore Thumbs definitely qualifies and Ceceania comes very close.
Buwaro from Slightly Damned due to a childhood that's best described as Raised By Wolves minus the wolves, forest, life or anything but brown rocks within many miles radius. His condition is currently improving.
The Cyantian Chronicles: Subverted and generally bent into a pretzel by Quinn Akaelae. She can actually teleport into another dimension and often speaks with two residents of said dimension, who can only be seen by her.
Rob from Rob And Elliot is this in the extreme. He talks to fruit, harasses Elliot for looking at his bum (as in hobo, not his rear) and trains dogs by threatening to kick them in the balls. He is always coming up with zany new schemes.
Pretty much everybody in the web comic Redmeat.

Close Web Comics

Survival Of The Fittest's Mitch Gunter. The following quote is all of the explaination required.
Mitch: Dog eat dog. Dogs don't eat dogs, they eat birds and cats and Kibblebits if they have a family. Those words are silly. But I would have gotten that right if that silly glasses boy hadn't answered before me. Yes, I would have gotten it right.
- See also Sven Kekule from V1.
The Mad Scientist Wars. Well... Everyone, at some point or another. Particularily if in the middle of going Mad.
The titular character from John Dies At The End. His antics include: Creating an elaborate system of coded phrases that sound even more incriminating than the messages they are intended to conceal; Leaving random and often inappropriate comments on customer's files at his work; Threatening to "dick-slap" random strangers; doggedly reusing the same tired pun multiple times throughout one fight; and refusing to abandon a gimmick which he thought up several years prior at four in the morning while drunk. His status as a Undisclosed's resident Cloud Cuckoolander is one of the main reasons he is able to blog about all the supernatural stuff that happens to him without bringing down The Masquerade.
- If there was ever any doubt as to whether John was truly the god of Cloudcuckoolanders, it disappeared with this update.
- Speaking of Cracked; Daniel O'Brien, or at least his fictionalized alter ego, has tried to do things like challenge Google to a death race and believes that establishing dominance is an important part of cooking.
Some of the op-ed columnists at The Onion would easily fit this trope.
Julia's boss Justin Credible from KateModern, in a way that veers back and forth between creepy and amusing. To give you some idea, he puts his clothes on backwards, makes his office in a toilet and plasters the walls with photos of Lee dressed as a jockey and Julia in a bikini, "forgets" to pay his employees and keeps coming up with bizarre ideas for TV shows (all of which are awful).
The Wallflower Report is a blog written from the point of view of (fictional) Cloudcuckoolander Ariella Rasputin Wallflower. Her two most recurring 'landerisms are her disbelief of trees (atreeism) and her paranoia concerning squirrels.
Internet wrestling parody Brawlers On A Budget has Coma, formerly half of the Head Trauma Boys. Due to taking too many chairshots, he communicates entirely in non sequiturs, and is known to wear such outfits as a toga with a tutu. His current tag team partner, Hallucination Boy, sees everything as oncoming trains.
Coma: Fly fishermen at thirty paces! Invert the muskrat!
The lines from "Booya" in a Lets Play of UFO Aftermath, which are more often than not followed by other members of the group...well...
Booya: It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Except instead of a gun you're using dynamite. And the fish aren't particularly smart either. With a bad sense of pattern recognition. And the dynamite has some sort of fish seeking technology.
Everyone Else: ...
Ash from Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin qualifies.
To sum it up in twelve words-"CHANGE! YA GOT CHANGE! Oh, c'mon, help a guy out here...CHANGE!"
- "I was an Asian boy-scout once! Boy was that a weird week...."
Severin from Fragile is very much a Cloudcuckoolander. (Especially in the first bit, where he's at the grocery store, talking to himself about soup cans.) Though, this is kind of explained by his mental disorders (Asperger's Syndrome, although he claims he's also got hypomania).
Broken Saints has Masayuki, a slightly off-kilter young egg farmer who the aged Shinto priest Kamimura encounters early on in his journey. He relates to Kamimura a lesson about eggs and poop that his father once told him, which, naturally, turns out to be a metaphor for one of the main messages of the entire epic series, and is called back to in the Grand Finale.
Clara from The Guild could be considered one as well.
Codex: He's in my bathroom. Pooing evidently.
Clara: Oh. I hate poo...
Ginny from Dangerous Lunatics quite definitely qualifies. Turns out she actually CAN make walls melt, though.
"My daddy makes toasters for a living! I like to look at the MOON!"

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If one were to examine GIR from Invader Zim, one would inevitably find a "Made in Cloudcuckooland" label. On one memorable occasion where we got to see the world from his point of view, a quartet of cows became talking sausages with top hats, canes and dinner jackets, which propositioned GIR to dance with them "into oblivion". Seriously. Possibly justified, as he's assembled from random bits of garbage.
Xander Crews from Frisky Dingo is a good example, mainly because he lives in his own world without consequence, eventually adopting the alias of Barnaby Jones when he gets in trouble, and generally says ridiculous things
Killface: This is hopeless.
Xander: ook, don't worry man. At his age, I was like, chronic masturbater. Kinda, kinda still am. But the point is — I like it. I would like to masturbate right now in this car. You know? If I had my stuff with me. I would! What are we even talking about?
Killface: I'm talking about searching for Simon!
Xander: Oh.
Captain Murphy from Sealab 2021 is like an unusually clueless child. He thinks you don't have to pay for things bought by credit card, and never quite gets what people want from him. ("If trenches are what Hollywood Actor Beck Bristow wants, then trenches he shall have!")
Blitzwing in Transformers Animated always seems to basically know what's going on but in his Random persona he seems to just not care, occasionally bursting into song, dancing, or going off on tangents about servo salad becaues for some reason he feels it's situationally relevant. The rest of him usually compensates, though, and in total he's a functioning person.
Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force is selfish to the point of absurdity, and justifies himself with reasons that seem natural only to him ("I should not walk, so that a child may live... well, that's what it does!"). He also shows a profound gift for jumping to conclusions — e.g. convincing himself that a threatening cell-phone call is not coming from inside the ominous bus parked at the curb, but from the bus itself.
- That wasn't a bus, that was a reverse vampire, which crave the sun. The tires are the markings.
- Meatwad is quite possibly the biggest Cloudcuckoolander ever conceived in fiction. The poor guy really will believe anything he's told.
Meatwad: I ain't got no job, my wife left me, bills pilin' up, I got child support payments, and I don't know if any of what I just said is true, but I believe it.
- Lampshaded later, after a standard Master Shake random association session:
Frylock: What's your point?
Shake: I never had one. And that makes you crazy, doesn't it?
The titular character of The Tick, with his odd proverbs ("That's trouble with a capital troub!"), odder lapses of knowledge (Spanish is a "crazy moon-language") and even odder Spoof Aesop a minute, as well as his battle cry of SPOON!
The titular character of Spongebob Squarepants.
Mr. Krabs: I didn't want to say this in front of Patrick, but that hat makes you look like a girl.
SpongeBob: Am I a pretty girl?
Starfire of Teen Titans frequently acts this way. It's unclear, however, what part of this is her cultural upbringing as a literal alien from another planet, and what part's her own unique personality. (The mustard-drinking incident seems to lean toward the "unfamiliarity with Earth" explanation, plus is probably a good example of Bizarre Alien Biology.) Considering her more savvy sister, it would most likely seem to be a result of her personality, plus it made for easy laughs. On the other hand, on the episode we see her homeworld, they acted more like Starfire than her sister, so the sister may actually be the odd one amongst her people.
Mitsuki on Kappa Mikey. (You might think Gonard too, but he's more of a ditz.)
Ty Lee of Avatar The Last Airbender.
Ty Lee: Hey, look at that dust cloud. It's so... poofy.... Poof.
- There's also the "nomads" in "The Cave of Two Lovers":
  Chong: We're nomads, happy to go wherever the wind takes us!
  Aang:: You guys are nomads? That's great! I'm a nomad.
  Chong: Hey, me too.
  Aang: I know... you just said that.
  Chong: Oh. (looks at Sokka) Nice underwear.
Ed of Ed Edd N Eddy bounces wildly between Ralph Wiggum, Cloudcuckoolander, and The Ditz, occasional bouts of surprising genre savviness not withstanding.
- Jonny 2x4, whose best friend is a piece of wood with a crude face drawn on it, is also an apparent expatriate of Cloudcuckooland.
- Given Ed's immense strength and the rampage he went on while in a bad mood in "Little Ed Blue", this is probably for the best. Not to mention the episode where he believes he is an alien monster, and then, through massive strength and surprising cleverness manages to practically become an alien monster and begin picking off the children in a horrific manner.
Crystal Zilla of My Dad The Rock Star is a Pink-haired New Agey sort of Cloud Cuckoolander, who is also Closer To Earth on occasion. But she's a mother, and her husband is rock star, so maybe it's a defense mechanism.
Fry from Futurama has at least one foot in Cloudcuckooland at all times, most obvious when...
- He is asked a "yes or no" question:
  Gypsy: Have you heard of the Monks of Deshuba?
  Fry: I've not heard of them.
- He thinks he's being asked a question:
  Leela: (feeding her pet) Aww... somebody likes snouts!
  Fry: (overhearing) Is it me?
- He tries to explain something from his frame of reference:
  Fry: It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came and the grasshopper died and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?
- Or he tries to formulate a plan:
  Fry: Okay, I've gotta break down that gate, beat up those three guards, steal that chopper and rescue Bender.
  (Leela beats up the guards)
  Fry: Yay, I did it!... Wait, that's not me!
- And let's not forget his recognition of his friend's individuality:
  Fry: Hey, look on the screen, it's that guy you are!
- Or his unique way of finishing a story:
  Fry: ... So then, I unfroze myself, and then I came over here, and then I told you the story, and then it was now... and then I don't know what happened!
- Somewhat explained that due to being his own grandfather, Fry lacks the "Delta Brainwave", and his thought processes consist of a number of other brainwaves patched together. (Yes, it makes no sense, just go with it.)
  - And given this, the fact that what's left of his brain is powerful enough to function at all would logically make him an absolute genius.
Violet from Word Girl seems to have a mild case of this. She's described by creators as one who is too lost in thought to notice on-coming traffic. She nearly gets stomped on by a giant robot because of stage-fright, and is very disoriented after giving a loud, incoherent speech on stage. However, true to the trope, often she senses problems and finds solutions faster than the title character due to her disposition.
Pinky of Pinky And The Brain is a notorious Cloudcuckoolander, most commonly during the Are You Pondering What Im Pondering exchanges.
- One mini-episode that was done entirely from Pinky's perspective (to the point of having his snout in the camera view at all times) revealed the train of thought that led to one such exchange. It didn't come across any less weird for the explanation.
- Many of the Brain's schemes seem to originate from Cloudcuckooland. I mean, a giant clothes dryer?
Many, many Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends characters: Bloo's insane theories, Madame Fosters strange actions and speech patterns, Coco's occasional inexplicable behaviour, Cheese's spastic jabbering and Goo's... entire personality. Of course, most of them are products of the fertile imaginations of young children.
- It's implied that Goo's parents may be the same, since they were unwilling to rein in her imagination (in spite of the fact that it regularly produced hundreds of imaginary friends) and apparently allowed her to name herself shortly after she was born (Goo claims her name is short for "Goo-goo-ga-ga").
Wakko, Yakko, and Dot from Animaniacs takes this trope to extremes, as even their theme song is filled with non-sequiturs and bizarre references.
- Wakko, however, seems to be the most extreme of the three. In one episode where the kids visit a shopping mall, he walks the wrong way on an escalator and declares "Mine's broken." Yakko explains it as "middle kid syndrome." Also, Wakko has a pseudo-Liverpudlian accent for no apparent reason.
  - It's because Wakko's voice actor was a fan of the Beatles. He chose to imitate Ringo because Wakko is the shortest of the Warner siblings.
The predecessor series Tiny Toon Adventures had Gogo Dodo, a literal resident of Cloudcuckooland (here called Wackyland), in which self-control is a high crime.
- And his predecessor/mentor, the original Dodo, from the Porky Pig short Porky in Wackyland.
The same can be said about Freakazoid from Freakazoid.
Many characters on Family Guy, especially Mayor Adam West. West brings his own creamed corn to the theater because the creamed corn they have there is too crunchy. He once dispatched the entire Quahog police force to Colombia to rescue the heros of Romancing the Stone.
Adam West: My God! Someone's stealing my water!
Meg: But it just went down the drain.
Adam West: They hit when you least expect it.
In The Critic, Jay Sherman's father Franklin is a very much a 'Lander. Among other things, Franklin has been shown to see the world as a game of "Donkey Kong", imagined himself to be Quick Draw McGraw's alter-ego El Kabong and requested that President Bush Sr. make him "Secretary of Balloon Doggies" (later insisting that the balloon doggies demanded it). When Jay went missing temporarily, Franklin set up a press conference — so he could announce that if he could be any type of vegetable, he'd be a carrot.
- He also claimed to be the first black female head of the Ku Klux Klan, invented the "fishbabywhirlmajig", imprinted on a goose and followed her, quacking.
  - He was originally one of America's greatest minds, but had never had a drop of alcohol. One taste, and he was Larry Fine.
Dory, the blue tang from Finding Nemo, fits this trope to a tee, thanks to her short-term memory loss. Among other things, she uses a deadly jellyfish as a trampoline, frequently misremembers the name of the title character, and believes she can speak the language of whales (this one turns out to be true, though). She even mumbles non-sequiturs in her sleep:
Dory: Careful with that hammer... sea monkeys got my money... yes, I'm a natural blue....
- An example of perfect casting with Ellen DeGeneres.
The Question has his bizarre moments in Justice League, doing everything from going through everyone's garbage to believing in an over-arcing conspiracy involving boy bands and Starbucks. Most of the time he seems completely insane and dangerously paranoid, but when he's right, he's right.
Bessie, the main character in The Mighty B, is an example. She's a brilliant if absent-minded inventor, and seems to be completely ignorant of the attempts of Porscha, the local Libby, to make fun of or belittle her.
Phil Ken Sebben from Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law must have gotten his license to practice law from the Cloudcuckooland bar. Aside from prefacing every Double Entendre with "HA HA!", he once believed furniture he didn't actually have was being stolen, causing him to issue "threat warnings" consisting of such levels as "Blackwatch Plaid" and "Rush's seminal Moving Pictures album".
- Phil's voice actor (Stephen Colbert), on the commentary for that episode, was of the opinion that Phil was trying for Insurance fraud.
The eponymous Chowder takes this trope to heights never before experienced.
Chowder: Why does Shnitzel always get so happy on fivesday? Is it the day he makes a poo?
Izzy of Total Drama Island fits this trope to a T.
- I believe you mean E-scope.
Hank from The Venture Brothers is not only Too Dumb To Live, but he tends to lose his grip on reality easily, especially when facing the prospect of adventure. Contrast with his more down-to-Earth brother Dean, who's also rather dim but isn't nearly as crazy.
- Dean does have one moment (in the episode "Showdown At Cremation Creek") where he goes way off in a sort of Dune/Lord Of The Rings reverie.
- Not to mention the Monarch, especially in the first season, the Orange County Liberation Front, the Ünterland resistance and generally about a quarter of the cast of the show.
- The show's ultimate example is Doctor Venture himself, especially when he's drugged up:
  Brisby: The drugs must be interacting with something in his system. The man's a pill-popper, you know.
  Doctor Venture: Which one of you strapping young men is gonna catch my fall? (crashes on floor)
"I am Wreck-Gar! I DARE to be stupid!"
Stimpy of Ren And Stimpy is an example of this. When he gets an idea, it's usually very farfetched but due to the nature of the show sometimes it's plausible; these are evident with his theories on a simple question like, "why do kids go to school?" He responds with the answer that the kids' parents are aliens, "And while you're at school, they shed their human skins and breathe dryer lint!" When Ren hears about some of these ideas, he usually slaps him or tells him he has too big of an imagination.
Beavis And Butthead, but especially Beavis.
- Beavis even sometimes takes on a seperate identity (which personifies this trope even more than ordinary Beavis) when he consumes large amounts of sugar or caffeine.
  Beavis: I am the Great Cornholio! I need TP for my bunghole!
Ceasar from Beethoven The Animated Series fits this trope to a T.
Space Ghost in his talk show incarnation seems to fit this trope more and more throughout its run.
As Poe's Law dictates, there is not much of a difference between resident Cloudcuckoolander Cathy Smith from Monster Buster Club and a parody of a Cloudcuckoolander. Though there are various reasons to believe Cathy is a deliberate parody of Aelita, a character from Code Lyoko (who is not a Cloudcuckoolander, per se, but could easily be regarded as one).
Sheen from Jimmy Neutron is definitely one of these, albeit the harmless, ADD-type.
- Hugh Neutron also seems to be one. His obsession with ducks and pies is just the start.
Homer Simpson frequently tends toward this.
- Perhaps most notoriously in The Simpsons Movie where he's imagining a cymbal-banging monkey... and even THAT tells him to pay attention to what Marge is saying.
- Although Ralph Wiggum has his own trope on dim-wittedness named after him, he actually frequently strays into this trope. In fact during the show's most prolific years (Pre-season 9), Ralph basically was a Cloudcuckoolander rather than flat out empty headed. The humor of the character came more from the awkwardness of his situation rather than pure non-sequitur until the effects of Flanderization kicked in and exaggerated his more dumber traits tremendously. Though even today, he often drops in on this trope. Some even debate every now and then whether it's right to call Ralph truly stupid, or whether he's just that detached from the world and is simply loopy. That difficulty in classification is probably why he has his own trope (And why some others in the Ralph Wiggum trope are on this one as well I might add.)
Dale from Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers is often portrayed as one.
Tobey from Three Delivery may come off as this sometimes.
Even by the standards of an Adult Swim character, Xavier really takes this trope to lethal new levels.
Xavier: Yin. Yang. This world is stitched from a ballet of opposing forces. What's the opposite of day? Night! What's the opposite of black? White! What's the opposite of salt? Pepper! No, they're just two spices trying to get by. Slam! You got me! You're so smart! So —
The entire point of Albie's World.
How has Cosmo from The Fairly Oddparents not been mentioned yet?
Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory was pretty much born in Cuckooland, sometimes leaning more to The Ditz, but, in other cases, just a Cloud Cuckolander. It is especially evident when she tells Dexter her bedtime story while she's sick, mixing a variety of common childhood nursery rhymes and stories.
What, noone's mentioned Bobby from King Of The Hill? The boy fell in love with a wig dummy! To name just one instance.
No one's brought up Billy yet? Or Fred Fredburger for that matter?
Spud from American Dragon Jake Long does have a case of Obfuscating Stupidity, but that doesn't mean his head isn't genuinely in the clouds. One episode has Jake read his mind, so we know he wasn't faking anything.
Spud: No matter where you go, if you try to hide, the moon will always find you.

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