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Pwned.

Peter Parker: I used to be so much better at this whole secrets thing...
Betty Brant: Don't kid yourself, Peter. You always sucked at it. We were all just too blind to put it together.

Clark Kenting is the process by which a Secret Identity and/or cover story is maintained — goofy and obvious in execution, but ultimately and sometimes infuriatingly successful.

Someone has a secret they want or need to keep from somebody else. It doesn't matter whether the Secret Keeper or the kept-from are individuals or groups, nor does the size of the groups matter. It can be a small group that's forming a secret club, or an entire town performing a masquerade for the benefit of one person. It doesn't have to be the Masquerade, though. It can just as easily be a disguise the villains are putting on for the heroes.

The secret and any associated cover story are presented in such a way that (a) the truth is transparently obvious to the audience/reader/player, and (b) there seems to be no apparent reason why it is not transparently obvious to the kept-from.

Bonus points if the kept-from, someone in the kept-from group, or someone associated with the kept-from goes to the effort of finding the truth out ... but then just rejects the truth out of hand. Makes you wonder why they bothered searching in the first place.

Takes its name from Clark Kent, Superman's alter ego, who basically looks like Superman in a suit and glasses. His nemesis Lex Luthor once even hired a private investigator to find out Supe's identity, but later fired her because he didn't think someone as powerful as Superman would take such a wimpy alter ego. It has been claimed that, as Clark Kent, Superman unconsciously used a mild form of super-hypnosis to make himself appear un-Superman-like, although this explanation was eventually dropped because it raised more questions than it answered. The first episode of Lois And Clark provides the alternate explanation that the tightness of Superman's shorts keeps onlookers from taking too much notice of his face. Less tongue-in-cheek was a similar explanation — offered by Ma Kent in an early Post Crisis story — that the big, bold "S" design on his chest tends to draw the eye away from his face. And one comic proposed that the thick glasses blurred what were very intense and almost literally blazing eyes. Most Superman canon, from the 1970s to the current batch of comics, puts forth that the disguise is in a great deal of things that simply aren't conveyed on a comics page, and that he uses utterly different body language, mannerisms, and tones of voice as Clark Kent, making his acquaintances think he was just some guy who kind of looked like Superman (Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman runs with this to great effect, and anyone who watched Christopher Reeve in the movies knows it can be effective). In addition, in Post Crisis continuity, Superman and Clark Kent have been seen together at the same place and time several times (thanks to shapeshifters and the like), thereby making Clark Kent = Superman that much harder to put together.

Furthermore, it is also suggested that the Kent disguise works in part because no one really knows Superman has a secret identity in the first place; after all he does not wear a mask like most superheroes, which suggests to most people he has nothing to hide. (As opposed to the Silver Age when everyone just seemed to know he had one.)

Mind you, when a master actor like Christopher Reeve plays the identities, the disguise feels much more believable. It also helps if the superhero in question is constantly being Mistaken For An Imposter.

See also Sarcastic Confession, Paper Thin Disguise, Cassandra Truth, Awkward Ability.

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