Excuse Me While I Multitask

"Look at me while I'm trying to kill you!"

— Bangladesh DuPree, Girl Genius, 3/12/12 strip

Two guys are fighting. One of them decides to show his superior fighting skill by:

1. Assuming a bored expression, not bothering to even look at the opponent while he fights.
2. Performing mundane tasks while effortlessly parrying his opponent's blows.

May coincide with Multi-Armed Multitasking or Master of the Levitating Blades, if the character would be capable of wielding many weapons at once. Sub-Trope of Just Toying with Them. Super-Trope to Combat Uninterruptus. Compare With My Hands Tied, Ignored Enemy, Badass Back, This Is No Time for Knitting, Epic Battle Boredom, The Snack Is More Interesting, Kinda Busy Here.

Can overlap with Flynning or even Coitus Uninterruptus. May involve Nonchalant Dodging or Juggle Fu. Can also be a relative of Offhand Backhand.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Assassination Classroom: Koro-sensei is capable of averting assassination attempts while doing other things such as trimming his eyebrows or giving a fighter jet a polish in midair. Later, he is seen giving individual classes to 28 different students at the same time while also resting outside.
• Black Butler: Part of what makes Sebastian awesome is his ability to do more than one thing at insane speeds. During one chapter, he's standing in front of a window when the maid, carrying a bunch of plates, trips — just as an assassin tries to shoot him. He dodges the bullet (merely to save his clothes), catches the maid as she falls, and then catches all the plates, without breaking a single one.
• Blue Exorcist: Mephisto Pheles. Keep in mind that the boy Mephisto is dragging is Rin Okumura, who wields what is explicitly described as Satan's power. Rin is going berserk. Mephisto is restraining him well enough to effortlessly sheath the kid's Koumaken sword. While engaged in semi-polite conversation. Multi-tasking, indeed. Justifed as he's the second in ranking Demon King, Samael Demon King of Time, and Rin's second eldest half-brother. As young and inexperienced as Rin is currently, he's not really a blip on his radar.
• Death Note: Since Light's home is currently under surveillance by L, he can't openly use the titular notebook and needs to find a way to use it, to keep the ruse up of Kira still doing his work while appearing innocent himself. Light does his homework with his right hand and has a bag of potato chips on his left. He periodically puts his left hand inside the bag, where a miniature TV and a piece of the notebook are located, and he writes down names of criminals with his left hand, before keeping up appearances and eating a potato chip.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: Izumi is shown fending off the Elric brothers during their training with her while reading from her notes (encoded in a cookbook) as she lectures.
• Girls und Panzer: Everyone from St. Gloriana Girls Academy makes it a point to "be elegant at all times"^note This is St. Gloriana's sensha-do and part of this is by making sure they do not spill the contents of their tea cups... while in the middle of a tank battle.
• Hunter × Hunter: The Grandmaster of the Hunter's Association challenges Gon and Killua to a game of basketball, promising them instant promotion to Hunter status if they manage to get the ball away from him. After a while, Killua notices that the old man is easily thrashing them while hopping around on one foot and only using one hand. Gon eventually claims a moral victory when he forces their opponent to stop holding back quite so obviously.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Yuuno holds off Vita while trying to break a barrier and preparing a teleport. Note that Vita had just trashed Nanoha handily. And that lacking a device, Yuuno has to work out all the complex mathematics of his spells in his head.
  • Played for Laughs during the First Movie Sound Stage when Vivio manages to have an existential crisis and complete her homework at the same time, much to her mother's shock.
    Vivio: Raising Heart's multitask exercises are nothing to sneeze at!
    • She's not kidding. Supplementary manga show that when Nanoha was that age, she and Raising Heart used to run combat simulations in Nanoha's subconscious during school, with Nanoha still doing her schoolwork at the same time. For extra challenge, she would even work two equations simultaneously in Math.
• My Hero Academia: Pro Hero Hawks' Quirk "Fierce Wings" in spades. His wings are comprised of feathers which are pretty much individual drones he can direct to do anything such as help citizens with heavy goods or stop criminals within the space of a conversation.
• Naruto:
  • The most well-known of Kakashi's character traits is to fight with one hand while reading dirty novels with the other. In Shippuden, after Naruto and Sakura have improved, Kakashi expresses his disappointment that he can no longer do this.
  • There's also Shikamaru, who tends to look bored and complains during any fight before the time skip. This is more just his personality, although he is shown to be one of the best strategists in the series, and is multitasking by planning the next few hundred moves while the opponent falls for the first couple. His capturing of Kakuzu shows this, by positioning himself, a Shadow Possession jutsu, and two projectile (Shuriken) Shadow Possessions to trap in midair, all so that he could get him somewhere that there was a waiting trap.
  • Later on, Killer Bee was writing up rhymes to his rap-tunes, while fighting Sasuke and Team Hawk. It's then subverted when Kisame comes to attack, and it looks like he's going to write down something the man he's trying to learn Enka from just said... but he was actually just pretending to, so he could catch his opponent off-guard and throw his vibration-enhanced pencil at him.
• One Piece:
  • Rebecca buys Luffy some food, planning to attack him, while other gladiators hold him, so she will face less people in the end of the tournament. He manages to get free and pin her to the ground, while eating.
  • During the same arc, Bartolomeo manages to take out the fishman Hack while relieving his bladder into the water surrounding the arena. (More to do with his unbreakable barrier than anything else)
• Puella Magi Oriko Magica: Kirika's first fight scene features her having a conversation with Oriko about how she wants her tea and arguing about being treated like a child.
• Ranma ½:
  • Ranma is once seen doing some Juggle Fu with a fishbowl (with a live eel inside) while fending off Ryôga's attacks.
  • He's also sometimes fighting with his hands in his pockets, either against very weak opponents or while sparring with Akane to rile her up. There's also the couple of times he is reading manga while sparring one-handed with Akane.
  • There is also the start of the "Martial Arts Delivery Contest" arc from the manga. In the Nekohanten, Cologne throws a volley of knives at Shampoo behind her back to demonstrate her great-granddaughter's skill. Shampoo deflects all of them without looking with her tray while still doing the service before the buggy-eyed patrons, never spilling any food. And the daggers end up pinning the two men Cologne was doing the demonstration for in a Knife Outline.
• Soul Eater: Stein starts things off by fighting both Maka and Soul and Black Star and Tsubaki, without getting up from his chair or using his arms. In a later episode, he takes on Maka, Soul and Black Star, as well as Ox Ford and Harvar, without ever leaving his chair.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Riding Duels is playing Duel Monsters on motorcycles known as D-Wheels, but the duels are usually done with auto-pilot, that's why the duelists don't need that much of concentration to perform both things at the same time. However, some duels are without the auto-pilot, with the WRGP being the most notable example, that's why good riding skills and dueling skills are required. Most of the time, the duelists are more focus on dueling while riding their D-Wheels is a secondary thing.

Comic Books

• Fables: Prince Charming in flashback sequences. He's simply so good at fencing he doesn't have to pay that much attention to his student, Snow White. He doesn't even bother with protection because she's simply not skilled enough to hit him.
• The Revenant in PS238 often manages to give Tyler detailed advice over a cell phone while fighting up to five other people. In fact, it's quite rare to see him on the phone when he isn't in the middle of a fight.
• Done for intimidation reason in Sin City. Dwight is interrogating two mobsters while Miho is kicking the crap out of an enforcer with the standard bored look on her face. The two mobsters decide that they'll kill Dwight and shoot Miho while her back is turned. Miho reveals that not only was she hearing the entire conversation, she casually tosses a single shuriken, slicing a mobster's cigarette in half before resuming her battle.
• Spider-Man: Spider-Man is able to do this. of course, we are talking about a guy who already fights while coming up with witty quips and insults...
  • An issue involves a rather sweet little scene where Spidey, up in the mountains and fighting an awful lot of goons, remembers that he was going to call his Aunt May and gets on a payphone to talk to her. He'd webbed most of the goons up before he picked it up, and proceeded to beat them up as they got free, still on the phone the whole time, reassuring her that he was taking care of himself.
  • This is part of Doctor Octopus's classic schtick. Since he does all his fighting with his robotic tentacles, he'll often be seen using his human appendages to do more mundane things like file his nails or eat a sandwich. There is one incident where Doctor Octopus battles Spider-Man in his laboratory while simultaneously working on a cure for AIDS. Spider-Man has no idea what Doc Ock is up to and so assumes it is something nefarious. Unfortunately the cure turns out to be a dud, at which point Doc Ock abruptly surrenders since the battle no longer has purpose.
• X-Men: A one-shot story in X-Men Unlimited (Vol. 2) #1 has Sage, the team's cyberpath, fight a martial arts master/head of security while she plays online chess. This annoys him to no end.
  Sage: If you want, I could pretend you have my full concentration.

Comic Strips

• A non-combat version, that seems nevertheless like the Trope Namer: when Dilbert goes to confront the literal monkey that had been hired as a programmer, he is incensed by the monkey continuing to author software behind its back, using its prehensile tail, while talking to him.
• One comic in Pyramid magazine's Murphy's Rules feature showed two swordsmen, one swinging away like mad while the other merely stood still, blocking every blow and idly glancing at his fingernails and thinking "Oh, parry, parry, parry, parry, *yawn* parry, parry, parry, parry..." The comic was depicting a Dungeons & Dragons rule that said any attempt to parry is automatically successful...^note Technically, the maneuver was always successful if attempted, but didn't automatically stop every single incoming attack — just made a character who gave up his or her own chances to attack harder to hit, as per later editions' and other games' "all-out defense" options. Still, the boost could be significant and potentially reduce an attacker to only hitting on a natural 20 anymore...

Fan Works

• Subverted in Amazing Fantasy. Peter drops in on the Rocket Racer Gang while carrying a steaming mug of coffee without spilling a drop. But he doesn't actually start fighting until he sets it aside. Played straight once he starts teaching Izuku how to fight, as he easily stops all of Izuku's clumsy attempts to hit him with a bored y''awn.
• HZD Terraforming Base-001 Text Communications Network: Aloy has a tendency to text while she's out in the field doing something else, such as riding. Or fighting. Her friends are slightly worried.
  Varl: I'm going to have enough trouble explaining all this to the Nora without "also, the Anointed daughter of the All-Mother got killed because she was texting too much."
  Aloy: I told you not to call me that.
  Varl: And I won't, if you stop multitasking.
• Naru-Hina Chronicles: In the flashback from Chapter 130, Yuko fought a trio of two-bit rogue ninjas claiming to be the Akatsuki. At one point, she kicked one of them in the face while reading scientific reports she just found in the base where the fight occurred:
  Yuko: Do you mind? I am trying to read, here.
• Shadowchasers: Conspiracy: At one point, Douglas faces Lord Voldemort in a game of Duel Monsters. Due to seeing the Muggle as beneath him, Voldemort controls his cards with his mind and barely even looks at or talks to Douglas, continuing his task of searching a library for a certain book. He's only forced to take Douglas seriously near the end.

Films — Animation

• In Kung Fu Panda, Master Shifu eats dumplings while training Po.
• Treasure Island: Dr. Livesey admires the scenery and casually smells a flower while effortlessly fighting three pirates at once with a rapier.
• In Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales' first confrontation with the Spot takes place while he's texting his parents that he's on his way to a school conference — which the Spot lampshades. Further deconstructed when this lack of respect (which the rest of the Spider Society shares) is the exact reason the Spot decides to escalate, by which we mean "become a Humanoid Abomination and decide to murder Jefferson Morales".
  The Spot: You're looking at your texts? You understand this is the fight of our lives, right?

Films — Live-Action

• In the martial arts kids movie, 3 Ninjas Kick Back, the titular ninjas are fighting a bunch of enemy ninjas set out to kill them, when their mother calls. They answer, passing the phone back and forth so she can talk to each of them, and tell her that they're watching a martial arts film, to explain the sound of them fighting off a pack of armed ninjas.
• Jackie Chan's uncle in Battle Creek makes a cup of tea and beats him with a cane while sitting. Later, he serves his uncle tea while besting him.
• Bulletproof Monk: The title monk shows off to his Odd Couple partner by fighting him while eating cereal and not spilling anything.
• The final duel between Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone in The Court Jester. Danny, hypnotized into believing he's the most skilled swordsman on the planet, shows his contempt for Basil's fencing technique by pouring himself a drink and quenching his thirst while parrying his enemy's attacks without even looking.
• Jen beating up Iron Arm with one hand at the beginning of the teahouse fight in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon while drinking her tea and looking the other way.
• Dragonheart: When Prince Einon is training, Bowen sits down, pours himself a drink, and doesn't bother looking at him, while he kicks his ass (literally at one point) and recites the old code to him. Given what Einon does later, maybe Bowen should have been paying more attention.
• In Drive Angry, Milton is having sex with a waitress in a motel room when she asks why he hasn't taken his clothes off. He answers, "I never disrobe before a gunfight", which is promptly followed by a several people breaking into their motel room armed with various weapons. He then proceeds to shoot them all without even pulling out of the waitress. Notably, the experience leaves her terrified out of her wits and quite possibly traumatized.
• Also briefly seen in Jackie Chan's The Legend of Drunken Master. Wong Fei-hung is engaged in a match against a merchant, but his step-mother calls him away. The merchant is still trying to fight him when Fei-hung shouts to his mother, gathers his things, and thanks the merchant for the match.

• Inverted skillfully in Kung Fu Hustle during the casino fight scene when the Landlord and Landlady attempt to fashion a giant megaphone from an antique bell whilst fighting back and taking hits from a deadly kung fu master known as The Beast. The Beast is more powerful than them but he doesn't realize that the bell will be used against him.
• Another Wong Fei-Hung example, this time from Jet Li's Last Hero in China: Master Wong is setting up in a new temple, and is invited to go take tea with the local authorities. While there, a dangerous Boxer "escapes", and Wong Fei-Hung beats him down while both his hands are occupied holding his tea.
• Machete: Machete is lured into a street fight. He calmly dodges his opponent's attacks while eating a taco, then tricks him into punching a pole and breaking his arm.
• In the final fight scene of the first Matrix movie, Neo becomes all-powerful after he realizes that he is The Chosen One, allowing him to see and influence the code of the Matrix. He blocks all of Agent Smith's attack moves first with both hands, then half-turns away with a far-away look on his face and continues to block with merely one hand while contemplating the Matrix and not even paying attention to Smith, as if the Agent has become utterly irrelevant.
• Parodied in Muppet Treasure Island when Captain Smollett has a swordfight with Silver, with one hand on his hip, humming to himself, and making quips like "Not bad for an amphibian!" Eventually, however, Silver realises that, despite scoring some Clothing Damage, Smollett is just Flynning, and continues to flourish his sword in the same way even after Silver's stopped fighting entirely and is just staring at him in disbelief. And then Silver says "Excuse me?" and the distraction means Smollett loses his grip and his sword goes flying.
• Parodied in A Night in Casablanca. Harpo eats grapes with one hand while fending off a German fencing master with the other. Later, Harpo decides to go ahead and take a little nap while still flawlessly defending himself.
• One of the sisters played by Lindsay Lohan does this in The Parent Trap. The twins haven't even met each other yet, but are fencing (with face-obscuring masks in place, of course). One leans against a tree and yawns while she parries the attacks.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: Elizabeth and Will Turner are getting married by Captain Barbossa while in the middle of a furious melee against the cursed fishmen of the Flying Dutchman.
  Barbossa: You may now kiss the— [turns and chops up an opponent] You may now kiss— [interrupted by another enemy] You may now kiss— [and again] Just kiss!
• Played for laughs in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. Remo's first assassination target is Master Chi'un himself, who just goes about his daily routines as Remo repeatedly tries to kill him, the goal being to show Remo how little he really knows.
• From Robin Hood: Men in Tights:
  Blinkin: [hands Robin a drink] Bit of refreshment, Sir?
  Robin: Thank you Blinkin! [takes a long drink while effortlessly parrying his foe's attacks]
  Blinkin: Sounds like we're winning, Sir!
• Used in Shoot 'Em Up. Smith and DQ are interrupted by Mooks while having sex, and Smith manages to make it apparently multi-orgasmic for her as he shoots up an entire tac team.
• So Close: One of the major fight scenes is Lynn fending off several mooks while she provides Mission Control to Sue on a mission gone wrong. Unfortunately the "multitasking" part leaves her open to getting killed by the mooks on a very important moment, when she decides to help Sue over protecting herself. As such, it is also a Last Stand and a Dying Moment of Awesome.
• Star Wars: In Rogue One, the droid K-2SO is seen firing on incoming Stormtroopers with one hand while typing on the Imperial Archive's control panel with the other.
• In Serenity, River holds a gun on Mal (without even looking at him) as she looks up Miranda on the ship's navigation system.
• Deconstructed in The World's End when Gary tries to finish his drink in the middle of a bar fight, and his opponent's attacks keep knocking it over.

Literature

• In the Discworld novel Interesting Times, Cohen fights off several ninja while rolling cigarettes.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Camicazi. Face to face with Norbert the Nutjob, she not only engages him in battle, but also picks up a piece of food and eats it with one hand while keeping him at bay with the other.
• In the Kingdom Come novelization, Power Woman barely looks up from her magazine while defeating a group of new-breed metahumans who get into a fight on her subway train.
• The Murderbot Diaries. The title character can do this because Robots Think Faster, and a Running Gag involves Murderbot streaming entertainment videos in the middle of a crisis.
• In Worm, Skitter of the Undersiders does this when a gang of thugs attack her territory, mauling them with swarms of insects while simultaneously sitting in her lair and sipping tea. In fact, Skitter's power makes her especially good at this—she can process and assign individual orders to each insect in her (massive) range simultaneously, out-multitasking an Artificial Intelligence with multiple parallel processors.

Live-Action TV

• At one point in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles and Wesley are fencing (probably for practice). Wesley is earnest and forthright. Giles is reading and sounds quite bored. It's later learned on Angel that Wesley's issue wasn't lack of skill (of which he has a tremendous amount), it was lack of self-confidence (due to an abusive father).
• The French kid show Club Dorothée has parodied this during a Conan the Barbarian pastiche. The Conan character is seen absentmindedly fending off the swords of half-a-dozen (off-screen) attackers while doing mundane things, like eating a banana, reading a comic or lounging and watching TV. Later, Barbarian Heroine Malaria is seen doing the same... while dating her boyfriend (who complains a bit).
• Dark Angel: Alec beats up a gang of Steelheads in "Two" while simultaneously taking a call from Logan, nonchalantly. The cheek enrages them.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Day of the Daleks", the Third Doctor is suddenly attacked by a terrorist. The Doctor throws him to the ground, finishes his glass of wine, strolls over to the table to put it down and straightens up in time to intercept the man's next attack.
  • In "The Sea Devils", the Third Doctor takes time out of a swordfight with the Master to eat a sandwich; the Master's sandwich.
• While Scourge in Final Deployment 4: Queen Battle Walkthrough goes out to save his ex-girlfriend from her Insectoid Alien boyfriend, he brings his smartphone to play Moonshaft, earning the "Multi-Task Master trophy".
• Averted on Grey's Anatomy to illustrate how lame Christina's new workplace is: When she walks into an OR to ask a question, everyone respectfully puts down their scalpels to listen to her, claiming "We find that multi-tasking leads to errors in hearing and errors in healing."
• In Healer while investigating the possibility that his father was framed for murder and then murdered and made to look like he'd committed suicide Jung Hoo get a call from Young Shin just as the trap he knew he was walking into starts turning into a fight. He nonchalantly talks to her while fighting for a bit but he's not up to his usual standards and quickly has to hang up to finish the fight.
• In Kaamelott episode "Le Paladin", the Witch Hunter attacks Kadoc with a greatsword, and the latter lazily parries while eating a loaf of bread, once while not even looking. Not much a show of skill, since Kadoc is basically a mental retard; on the other hand, the Witch Hunter never lifted a sword in his life and thinks that "God is doing all the work."
• In Merlin during the episode "Gwaine", Gwain helps Arthur and Merlin when they start a bar fight, he introduces himself while bashing heads and throughout the fight, drinks from various cups of ale, at one point taking a sip from a pitcher of ale before bashing someone's head in with it.
• The Professionals: In "The Female Factor", Bodie fights a drunk in a pub while holding a pint in one hand. Without spilling a drop.

Theatre

• In Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano composes a ballade while engaged in a swordfight. Each stanza ends with the line, "À la fin de l'envoi, je touche!" ("And then, as I end the refrain, thrust home!") Which he does at the end of the ballade. This also contains a French pun; the French "toucher" (conjugated "touche") can refer to a fatal blow struck during a fight, but also to the more direct cognate "touch". At the actual end of the fight, he grievously insults his opponent by maneuvering him into a position where he could kill him, and instead simply poking him on the nose with his finger (depending on the production).

Video Games

• Ancient Domains of Mystery: If you're completing a task that takes several turns, like reading a spellbook, the game will ask you if you want to stop when an opponent comes near or attacks you. You don't have to; if you're tough enough compared to your opponent, you can just avoid dozens of attacks while you finish doing something else.
  The wolf misses you. Do you want to go on smithing the red dragon scale mail (100 more turns)? — Yes.
  The wolf misses you (x100).
  You manage to improve the red dragon scale mail.
  You hit the wolf and slay it.
• Evolve: Bucket takes this above and beyond by controlling multiple systems remotely at the same time. In the middle of combat, he's also flying the ship, preparing the rations, and working in the lab.
• Answer from Guilty Gear Xrd REV 2 fights while chatting at the phone.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: In a Hopeless Boss Fight near the beginning, Desann purposefully makes Kyle Katarn feel infuriatingly powerless by mostly just standing there and deflecting his attacks effortlessly. The trick is that Kyle has given up his lightsaber and Force powers, while Desann is a full-fletched Dark Jedi against whom guns and explosives are nearly useless. It's no coincidence that Kyle goes out to reacquire his Jedi abilities in the next level.
• Kirby and the Rainbow Curse: The villain retreats to the background and reads a book during the final battle, stopping to laugh every now and then while Kirby is being attacked by the villain's creations.
• In various games of the Naruto franchise, while idle, Kakashi will do what he does in the manga, as mentioned above: take out a book and start reading. It is extremely frustrating.
• Touhou Project:
  • The battle against Yuugi in the game Touhou Chireiden ~ Subterranean Animism, which she infamously participated in without bothering to put down her cup of sake. This was even pointed out by Patchouli after Marisa won and boasted about Yuugi not being all that strong. Patchouli had noticed that Yuugi spent the entire battle simultaneously fighting and drinking, and yet she managed to not spill even one drop of sake while doing so. This resulted in the meme "Her sake not even drop."
  • Much like Yuugi, Suika (from one of the fighting games) also drinks during combat, during her guarding animations. She even lies prone during a low guard. Coincidentally, both Yuugi and Suika are very powerful oni.
• The World Ends with You: The player character wears headphones and listens to music all the time. When idle for more than a second during a fight, he'll close his eyes and start tapping his foot to the rhythm of his music.
• A lot of online games force the player to do this at times, especially co-op games. World of Warcraft in particular has created gamers with the ability to eat buffalo wings with one hand in the half-second lulls between cooldowns.

Webcomics

• In Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, Delilah kills an attacking mook while holding a conversation.
  Delilah: One sec.
• Everyday Heroes:
  • Jane tries out for a spot on the villains' team.
  • And Jane is able to do this herself... it's a superpower known as "motherhood".
• Girl Genius: Gilgamesh Wulfenbach has a habit of doing that:
  • Hearing a report from Dr. Sun while fighting against a pair of assassins sent after his father.
  • Making some difficult Mad Science preparation... while in the middle of a fight with Bangladesh DuPree. She's even unwittingly helping him.
• Implied in Kill Six Billion Demons. In the aftermath of a huge melee between assorted bounty hunters and mercenaries in a crowded marketplace, one of them, Auntie Maya, is shown to not have moved at all from the noodle vendor's stall where she was sitting at the beginning of the fight, and in fact has just finished her meal. But all around her seat are corpses and slash marks, as if anyone who tried to attack her while she was busy eating had been instantly cut down.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Xykon casually pelts the other good guys with magic missiles while having a conversation with Roy when they first meet. It works in game terms because Talking Is a Free Action.
  • Xykon later conducts a job interview while storming the Azure City castle.
  • Belkar manages to take time during a fight with a dozen rogues to make out with Jenny, a bard who is with them. He doesn't stop fighting to do so either, casually tossing his daggers into a rogue's chest without even looking up from what he's doing. And he is good enough to get her to want to go out/to bed with him.
• Penny Blackfeather: When the Adventurer and Penny fight against the mooks led by Victor, they carry on with their discussion, which annoys Victor greatly.

Web Original

• Journeyman of the Whateley Universe does a good line in this, organising the purchase of a Bag of Holding Utility Belt from Ayla over the phone, whilst beating up the Tong of the Black Madonna goons attacking Molly's parents' house.

Web Videos

• JonTron does this in his Star Wars Kinect video as a Take That! to the motion control gameplay doing most of the playing for him.

Western Animation

• The Creeper in Batman: The Animated Series episode "Beware the Creeper" is trying to hit on Harley all while beating up the Joker's mooks without ever breaking eye contact with her. Made even funnier when he pulls a Offhand Backhand on Batman.
• Code Lyoko: In the episode "Franz Hopper", the heroes have their powers boosted by Franz Hopper, who is in fact a specter controlled by XANA, and fight a bunch of Creepers with no effort at all. Yumi is seen casually blocking laser beams with her fan in one hand while checking her nails.
• In one episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Katz is able to drink tea while playing racket ball.
• The Fairly OddParents!: During a baseball game, Chester goes up to bat. The other team, knowing he's the worst, start doing things like cooking on a grill, sleeping in a hammock, reading Plato, and trimming shrubs.
• Family Guy: In "Gronkowsbees", Peter, Quagmire and Joe try to fight NFL player Rob Gronkowsky; in one scene, Rob is seen beating the three of them effortlessly with one arm while eating a subway sandwich.
  Gronk: [swallows a bite] Mm, you guys are bad at fighting.
  Joe: That's his third sub!
• Jackie Chan Adventures: Jackie Chan is sometimes seen fighting while talking on his cell phone. Invoked by Uncle in one episode when he calls Jackie's cell while the heroes are in the middle of a fight.
  Uncle: Jackie! Did you get the curry powder?
  Jackie: I'm busy trying not to get killed!
  Uncle: Learn to multitask!
• At the start of Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama, Kim is fighting off Drakken's mooks while chatting on her cell-phone with Monique.
• The Legend of Korra: Korra's "battle" against Toph consists mostly of Korra throwing wind at Toph, who doesn't so much dodge as kind of lean over, even turning her back on Korra to give her a free shot (and it still doesn't work).
• Parodied in the Looney Tunes short ''Bunny Hugged'. In a wrestling match, Bugs Bunny's hulking opponent plays Solitaire and Jacks while Bugs is attempting a leg lock.
• Peter Parker on The Spectacular Spider-Man tends to do this when Aunt May calls.
• In the first Winx Club movie, Bloom and Sky fight their way to one another on a ship overrun with evil clones of themselves, making conversation as they do. Then they kiss as they each Offhand Backhand one of the other's clones without taking much notice of them.
• Xiaolin Showdown: Chase Young in his first fight against Omi. He sips tea. Afterwards, he usually has the decency not to do this, but because he effortlessly parrys Omi's blows with one hand anyway, it's clear he could be multitasking if he wanted to. He even has a casual conversation with Omi on his martial arts skills while blocking each and every hit and sipping his tea.

---