...Better leave him a good tip.
"We hope you enjoyed the ride! Ha ha!"
— Johnny Cab (right before the explosion), Total Recall (1990)
Maybe he's a Cloudcuckoolander, maybe a Serial Killer... either way, once you're in his cab you're in serious trouble.
The Deranged Taxi Driver is a Sub-Trope of The Driver, defined by their deep-down craziness. This can take many different forms: maybe a Conspiracy Theorist who babbles to their customers while stuck in traffic, or even The Sociopath who uses the job as an excuse to collect victims. Odds are he Drives Like Crazy, but often is strangely efficient at getting someone from Point A to Point B. It's getting them there in one piece that's the hard part. In the US, taxi driving is a common occupation for new immigrants so the driver may be a Funny Foreigner. In Britain he's more likely to be a Lower-Class Lout.
Just as unpredictable is their effect on the plot; the driver may be part of a Trauma Conga Line for the protagonist, the actual Big Bad, or even form an Odd Friendship with the protagonist if they turn out to be helpful. May overlap with Not My Driver and the "Hostile To Hitchhikers" variant of Hostile Hitchhiker. Compare Buses Are for Freaks.
Examples include:
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Anime and Manga
- Jin the Taxi Driver, an episodic character from Canaan, is entertainingly deranged in that he is completely unfazed by danger and will take the most insane routes to get his passengers to their destination despite any and all opposition (which includes The Triads and the Tongs and international terror cells). His unhinged, yet entertaining image is further enhanced by his voice actor, Joji Nakata, who hams it out the entire time while Jin is on-screen.
Comedy
- Jerry Seinfeld has this bit from his act:
And the way they drive. You can see they're upset. I don't know what it's like to drive a cab. It must be very difficult because they're very upset, these people. Sometimes, you just want to lean over that seat and ask "What is happening in your life and your mind that is making you drive like this? Take it easy!"
Comic Books
- Downplayed in From Hell with Netley the coachman (a Victoria-era version of a cab driver). He comes off as an average working Joe, and even shows some resistance to the story's more sinister themes. It doesn't make him any saner for his current fare: transporting Dr. William Gull, AKA Jack the Ripper, as he commits his infamous murders.
- The Zen Cabbie from Top 10 wears a blindfold and Drives Like Crazy, justifying it as "I don't drive the cab, the universe does" (even in a city where Everyone Is a Super, he still comes off as a loon). Considering the fact that he picks up his passengers wherever they need transportation the most and they arrive to wherever they need to go Just in Time to accomplish whatever they need to do, he may have a point.
Film — Live-Action
- The Big Lebowski: The Dude complains about the Eagles playing in the taxi taking him home from Malibu; the cab driver responds with a Cluster F-Bomb and throws him out on the side of the road.
- Conspiracy Theory: Jerry Fletcher is a paranoid New York cab driver who rants and raves about conspiracies to any passenger who will listen (and anyone who won't). His home is basically a survivalist's bunker, even armed with a self-destruct system. It turns out that he has a good reason for his erratic behavior; he may have been an MK Ultra subject, brainwashed into being a sleeper assassin and now fighting his programming.
- Deadpool (2016): Dopinder the Taxi Driver befriends Deadpool after the latter gave him some questionable romantic advice. In attempting to follow said advice, he ends up kidnapping his romantic rival and stuffing him in the backseat of the cab. In Deadpool 2, he starts trying to become a mercenary like Deadpool attempts to join the X-Force.
- Ernest Saves Christmas: Ernest P. Worrell starts the movie as a taxi driver, and applies the same work ethic as all his other jobs. We see him swerving around the freeway (at one point so hard the passenger falls out), accidentally sending the cab through the air, and eventually loading his catatonic-from-fear passenger onto a luggage conveyor by accident.
- Escape from New York: The Cabbie is a friendly, enthusiastic Cloudcuckoolander who seems to have no problem being trapped in a city full of violent criminals, driving an armored taxi and using Molotov cocktails to drive off crazies who threaten his customers; when he meets Snake Plissken (an infamous gunfighter and thief) he reacts like a little kid meeting his football hero. At the end, when the President shows little regard for Cabbie and others who died getting him out of New York, an enraged Plissken humiliates him by tricking the President into playing Cabbie's copy of "Bandstand Boogie" at a summit instead of a tape about nuclear fusion, while Snake destroys the real tape.
- For a Good Time, Call...: Kevin Smith has a cameo as a caller to the main characters' phone sex line, a cab driver pleasuring himself while on duty. Then we see he even has a passenger in the back seat waiting for him to finish.
- The Game (1997): Nicholas Van Orton is trapped in a cab with a grinning man who Drives Like Crazy, before leaping from the cab as it drives into the river, taking Nicholas with it (he manages to escape). Subverted at the end when we see the driver among the many actors employed by CRS for the Game Nicholas is trapped in; the entire incident was staged.
- Ghost Dad: Elliot makes the epic mistake of catching a ride with Satanist taxi driver Curtis Burch, who drives erratically and screams about obeying his "Dark Master" (Elliot pretends to be Satan and commands him to stop, causing Burch to drive the cab into a river). When he runs into Burch again at the end, Elliot orders him to go straight to hell and Burch ecstatically drives off.
- Mentioned in Men in Black when K reveals to J that many Manhattan citizens are aliens in disguise, most just trying to adapt and make a living:
J: Cab drivers?
K: Not as many as you'd think. - Downplayed in Pulp Fiction with Esmerelda Villalobos. She's perfectly lucid and transports Butch with no trouble... but she's also very interested in discussing how it felt when he beat a man to death in a boxing match.
- Rat Race: Incompetent NFL ref Owen Templeton catches a ride with a seemingly friendly cab driver while racing to get to a cash prize; unfortunately, he doesn't realize the driver lost a bet on a football game because of Owen's botched call. The driver ends up stranding him in the middle of the desert in his boxers.
- In Scrooged, the Ghost of Christmas Past takes the form of a sinister, cackling cabbie who drives like he's in a demolition derby.
- Probably the most famous (and infamous) example in cinema: Travis Bickle, the Anti-Hero of Taxi Driver. A disturbed, moralistic Vietnam vet, Travis makes a living out of driving a cab for passengers almost as crazy as he is. Driven to the edge by the urban decay all around him, he buys an arsenal of guns and begins an obsessive journey to save a teen prostitute from the men exploiting her.
- The page quote is provided by Johnny Cab from Total Recall (1990), an android cab driver who gets hijacked by the hero, Doug Quaid. Johnny actually functions pretty well up until Quaid declines to pay his 18-credit fare ("Sue me, dickhead."), at which point Johnny snaps and tries to run him over, crashing the cab into a concrete wall and exploding.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Benny is a Deranged Taxi, a toon cab with no concern for the laws of traffic or physics. He gets the heroes out of several scrapes, usually while shouting about which sports team he hates.
Live-Action TV
- CSI: New York: A four-episode arc revolves around the Cabbie Killer who locks people in his cab, poisons them with carbon monoxide and carves "L2729" onto the backs of their necks. When he is finally captured, he is revealed to be a religious fanatic who sees his victims as sinners to be delivered to the underworld, with L2729 being a reference to Leviticus 27:29.note
- How I Met Your Mother: A subtle example, but one episode opens with narrator and protagonist Ted musing about how his life would have changed if he had gotten into a different cab than the one he rode one fateful day. One of the cabs he considered was a junker that was clearly an unlicensed cab that just had "taxi" spray painted on it. Later in the episode, a character is reading a newspaper with the headline "Nude Cabbie Vows To Kill Again."
- Mad About You: Paul and Jamie encounter two Deranged Taxi Drivers during a night spent trying to get to the movies. One is a Russian woman who spends her time arguing over the radio with the dispatcher (her husband) and eventually abandons the cab with them still in it. The other is an Indian man who repeatedly screams at them to tell him which side to park on.
- Ninja Sentai Kakuranger: Oboruguruma, while normally just a peaceful youkai turned taxi driver, has a Hair-Trigger Temper and violently attacks anyone who makes him angry. Eventually, he snaps and decides to destroy the entire city in rage ("Humanity's going to pay for how it's treated me all these years!") until he's destroyed by the heroes. His Power Rangers counterpart, Crabby Cabbie, is an insane psychotic taxi turned Monster of the Week who channels Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, complete with New York accent.
- In the 1998 Dutch Foreign Remake of British Edutainment show Police, Camera, Action!, there was footage from 1996 of a deranged Dutch taxi driver doing 204 km/h (125mph) on a motorway near Hengelo, the Netherlands. Apparently, he was in a rush to get his fare to the airport on time, but that still didn't explain why he needed to do 125mph. Borders on Refuge in Audacity as well.
- Sherlock: In the first episode, "A Study in Pink", Holmes' investigation into a Serial Killer leads him to a terminally ill cabbie who forces his victims into a sick game of Russian Roulette involving poison pills. Sherlock almost plays the game with him just to see if he's smart enough to deduce the right pill, but Watson sharpshoots the cabbie before he can.
- Taxi is a sitcom about the struggles and friendships of a cab company whose drivers were flawed but normal people... and also the Reverend Jim Ignatowski, whom the 60's left with about two working brain cells (which rarely worked at the same time).
- Downplayed in the French-Canadian series Taxi 0-22. The Working Class Politically Incorrect Hero driver Rogatien Dubois Junior is an obnoxious Jerkass, but he's pretty much harmless, has his nice moments and goes through Character Development throughout the series.
Music
- David Bowie: In the music video for "I'm Afraid of Americans", Bowie gets on a cab to escape from a chasing Trent Reznor. On the cab, Bowie realizes Reznor himself is the driver, including an official NY taxi driver ID that mysteriously replaces the original one from the previous driver. Bowie tries to escape only to find Reznor on the sidewalk who then starts to shoot at the cab riddling it with bullet holes. A scared Bowie then looks up and realizes that Reznor is gone, and the vehicle looks completely fine.
- Red Hot Chili Peppers: In the music video for "By the Way", Anthony Kiedis is kidnapped by a bizarre cab driver who seems to be an obsessed fan, playing the song on the cab's radio as he drives like a maniac through Los Angeles, culminating with the driver doing a creepy dance in a tunnel while Kiedis is Forced to Watch. Kiedis gets a message to Flea and John Fruscianti, and they chase the driver until Kiedis can break the cab's window and leap into their truck. Shortly afterward, we see the driver pick up a new unsuspecting passenger.
Video Games
- Crazy Taxi: The object of this game is to try and get your passengers to their destination on time — no matter how many rules of the road have to be broken. Crazy stunts increase the fare received. As for the individual cabbies, many of them are characterized as being temperamental or adrenaline junkies.
- Elite Beat Agents: Jack is a cab driver who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Whenever he presses the meter, he turns into a daredevil hell-bent on setting world records for fastest taxi rides. Once he reverts to his original, meek personality, he is horrified and regretful that the experience has traumatized the passengers.
- Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards: The taxi driver in Los Wages. If Larry does not have the fare needed to pay for the ride, he'll beat the crap out of him and drive over him out of anger. Additionally, if Larry enters a taxi with a box of wine in the inventory, he'll steal it, guzzle it down, and end Larry's life with his drunk driving.
- Road 96: Jarod is a serial killer who uses his cab's trunk to transport his victims, often alive and screaming for help. He has never learned to cope with his daughter's death and is prone to violent mood swings from bland apathy to screaming rage. It is entirely possible for the Hitcher to get murdered by him in several of his sequences, in one case burning them to death on suspicion they're a Black Brigades member.
- The Twisted Metal series: Charlie Kane appears in the first game and Black, driving the weaponized taxi Yellow Jacket. While he starts as a lonely and odd but fairly normal man, by his last appearance he's become a biomechanical zombie, remote-controlled by his insane son.
Web Videos
- Danny Gonzalez: One skit sees Danny in the backseat of a taxi when he spills coffee on himself. The driver calmly hands him a gun to clean up the spill with, and then says that "the guy in the back isn't too bloody" if he needs a change of clothes.
