King of All Cosmos

We are most pleased to find a trope page named after Us.^note If it were Ours, We'd make it much bigger.

"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

— Henry Louis Mencken (and not Voltaire), although the original quote is a bit different: "Creator. A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.''

A deliberately bizarre or unusual portrayal of gods (especially the Christian God), usually without the intent of being deliberately offensive. This goes well past using a woman or a minority (or both — Whoopi Goldberg has played God at least once); the King of All Cosmos is essentially The Wonka on a grander, cosmic scale.

This may have something do with the cliches often associated with God, and the use is sometimes a soft commentary of humans assuming the nature of gods and the so-called superior place humans have in the universe.

The King of All Cosmos frequently mentions that they are not omnipotent.

This trope is named for the King of All Cosmos, from the game Katamari Damacy, who destroyed all the stars in the sky after a drunken bender and made his diminutive son, the Prince, help with replacing them.

Due to the secular nature of Japanese media, this typically translates to the trope being applied to nearly all kami at some point.

See also Celestial Bureaucracy and Crystal Dragon Jesus. Compare and contrast Mad God, where the deity is both eccentric and genuinely insane, and Almighty Idiot, where a character gains incredible power at the cost of their own mind being well and truly destroyed.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In 20th Century Boys, God is an old homeless guy who's obsessed with bowling and can predict the future. Granted, he probably isn't really God, but damned if you can convince his homeless buddies otherwise.
• Dragon Ball
  • King Kai introduced in Dragon Ball Z, the overseer of the North Galaxy (1/4th of the known universe), is a blue, obese, catfish-like being with a bad sense of humor, and quickly gets demoted from supreme being to comic relief. The Kais of the other three quadrants are equally eccentric, but we only really see them in Filler so they mostly just bounce off each other like squabbling siblings. Their boss the Grand Kai acts like an old man trying to be the "cool grandpa", being fond of rock music and classic cars while also trying to shirk responsibility whenever possible.
  • Averted with the Eastern Supreme Kai, who's fairly normal considering he's from a universe full of super-powered martial artist aliens. The same can't be said for his predecessor from 15 generations ago, the Elder Kai, who's a Dirty Old Man through and through (as are many mentors in the DB universe). The Supreme Kais from other universes are a mixed bag: Roh from Universe 9 is a boastful Jerkass, while Gowasu from Universe 10 is a fairly reasonable old man...who enjoys watching GodTube. His apprentice Zamasu, however...
  • The Supreme Kai of Time from Dragon Ball Xenoverse, a Genki Girl with curly pink hair.
  • Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods and Dragon Ball Super introduces the Gods of Destruction and their attendants (one for each of the 12 universes). The one we see most often is Beerus, who's a food-obsessed Lazy Bum who feuds with his twin brother Champa, the God of Destruction for Universe 6. Later on we meet the Top God Zen'ō, who's essentially a blue-skinned, football-headed child with power over all of existence.
• The Great Will of the Macrocosm, Excel♡Saga's Reset Button incarnate, is depicted as a night-sky-colored disc with two arms. In the show's typical zany style, she is actually the same being as Pedro's wife, on the grounds that they share the same voice actress.
• The Five Star Stories has some pretty weird gods & god-like beings. Amaterasu is an easily flustered hermaphrodite with an Oedipal complex & Lachesis is an airheaded teenager, although both of them can be surprisingly competent when they need to. It has also been implied that Amaterasu's insane court jester, Spector, is actually the creator god of their universe, or at least the titular stars.
• The Fox & Little Tanuki: The Sun Goddess is the de facto Top God who evokes reverence from almost everyone who beholds her... and who also enjoys being invited to parties, eating yakitori, and making jokes at her familiars' expense. Even her loyal underlings can't help but comment on how much of a goof she can be at times.
• Truth, the entity at the Gate in Fullmetal Alchemist, is a creepy jerkass with a fondness for cruel irony that appears as a blank white outline in the shape of the person who sees it. It also likes to steal body parts from people.
• In Fushigi Yuugi, the Creator of the Universe is a cranky little old lady.
• In Goodnight Punpun, God is an unhelpful grinning afro'd man who only seems to care about belittling Punpun and encouraging his destructive impulses. Later on, it's strongly implied that God is merely an imagined personification of Punpun's growing nihilism.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Haruhi herself is unaware that she has the power to reshape the whole world as she sees fit. To avoid this, her friends cater to every one of her whims, leading them to go on all manner of unusual adventures.
• In Heaven's Design Team God is never seen in person but is implied to be rather eccentric, making weird and sometimes rather vague requests (like an animal that's "adorably uncute" or "a horse that can fly"), and approving some very strange animals the Design Team comes up with (like the horsehair worm or Hallucigenea, which started as a weird doodle that Saturn's grandson Kenta made).

• If Kamen no Maid Guy is any indication, God has a thing for panty shots. Fubuki's panties in particular.
• Kamichu! depicts Japanese goddess Benten as an idol singer, along with the rest of the Seven Lucky Gods as a J-pop band.
• The Law of Ueki features a God who drinks, dresses like a Rummage Sale Reject, and is a womanizing Dirty Old Man. Once it turns out that he has a strong sense of justice, it becomes hard to tell if he's just faking the personality, or if he really is like that.
• In the manga version of Magic Knight Rayearth, the Creator of the Universe is revealed to be the bouncy rabbit thingy the heroines keep around as a pet/guide, and which regularly trashes Presea's office and trolls Umi.
• Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! does this to the Cthulhu Mythos (even moreso than normal; see Literature below); Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos takes the form of a cute silver-haired teen girl who loves Anime and Tokusatsu, has an obsessive crush on an Ordinary High-School Student, and is a Space Police officer-slash-Henshin Hero with no sense of restraint or mercy. And she's just the tip of the iceberg...
• A recurring character in Pani Poni Dash! is a cat-like creature with a Verbal Tic who claims to be God and likes to hide in vending machines (and torment the almost literal Chew Toy, Mesousa).

• The Great Old Ones from Soul Eater are immensely powerful god-like beings that are presented as the strongest beings established in the manga. Each of them were members of the Eight Shinigami Legions (or "Death's Eight Guardians" in the Funimation Dub) - even implying that all of the members were Great Old Ones - and fought to defend the Earth against evil as a precursor to DWMA. They seem immune to conventional methods of death and all possess a special type of soul wavelength that inflict madness onto the world at large should they choose to. Due to being literal Mad Gods, their behavior can come across as rather perplexing.
  • Shinigami-Sama/Lord Death was originally the leader of the Eight Shinigami Legions and is the only True God (his existence a necessity to the cosmos) and arguably the most powerful of them all. In modern times, he changed his appearance and personality into a more approachable, cartoonish form to appeal to children more. He is the eccentric, yet beloved founder and Dean of DWMA who acts like a buffoon, often missing the point of things or becomes distracted, when really he is a wise and impressive leader. He is also the embodiment of the Madness of Order, a madness that eclipses all human emotions and leaves only a mechanical cycle of only life and death, though his faith in humanity to make its own choices keeps him from using it. He is also able to reproduce asexually by fragmenting his soul, having created Asura and Death the Kid using this method.
  • Death the Kid is Shinigami-Sama/Lord Death's son and heir to his organization and his status as Death God. He also possesses a crippling OCD, having had an obsession with symmetry which is implied to be a side-effect of his latent madness wavelength.
  • Kishin Asura was created from the fragment of Shinigami-Sama/Lord Death's soul that represented his capacity to fear. He was unstable from the get-go, behaving suspicious and paranoid that unnerved his fellow Legions before he snapped, killed half of the other Legions and became a Kishin via devouring their souls before Death had to fashion a cage for him with his own skin. His soul emits the Madness of Fear, a powerful form of madness that is so potent that is can empower evil individuals and warp the very landscape.
  • Eibon is an Ultimate Blacksmith Sorcerer responsible for the creation of the Demon Tools, his research indirectly responsible for the creation of demon weapons. He is the embodiment of the Madness of Knowledge, a madness said to give the person under its influence absolute knowledge to the point where it overwhelms the mind into stop thinking all together.
  • Excalibur is an irritating... demon-weaponish individual that can take the form of a sword capable of synchronizing with anyone and can curb-stomp nearly any opponent. He is also so narcissistically annoying that no one is willing to stay within his presence before dismissing him entirely. He is the embodiment of the Madness of Anger, a madness that overwhelms the mind with irrational negative emotions.
  • The Great Old One of Power is a mysterious, amorphous Eldritch Abomination that lives within the Book of Eibon in a self-imposed exile. As the name implies it is the embodiment of the Madness of Power, a madness that reveals and incites another's inner Madness, resulting in them giving into their desires uncontrollably and making them unfettered by reason or restraint.
  • After completing their transformation into a Kishin, Crona gain a madness wavelength based upon the Madness of Boobs, a form of madness that influences an individual into having a much larger preference of female breasts and makes those under its influence fascinated with it enough to have the urge to repeatedly fondle, grab, or think of them often.
• Urusei Yatsura depicts Benten, the Japanese goddess of beauty and art, as a tough, chain-smoking biker chick.

Comic Books

• While the focus of Crimson is on reluctant-but-destined-vampire Alex Elder, and the various vampires, werewolves and hunters that surround him (as well as the incarnation of St. George), there are also a squad of archangels who cross his path, while Lucifer himself repeatedly intercedes on Alex' behalf. God is not seen... until Lucifer recognizes the young, black, mute, flower-selling girl hanging around in the background.

• A Fantastic Four arc sees the Four travel to Heaven where they are given the opportunity to meet the Almighty... who turns out to be a comic book artist. One who possesses a striking resemblance to Jack Kirby — and has an unseen 'collaborator'.

• In (what turned out to be) creator Steve Gerber's final Howard the Duck story, he finds Yahweh in a bar, along with Jesus and The Holy Spirit (who are described as manifestations of His "tripolar disorder".) "Yah" (as He prefers to be called) describes Himself as an ordinary slob like His creations, explains that He never created religion (other than Zoroastrianism as a practical joke), and that He created the universe as a work-for-hire - His employers don't pull the plug on existence because it is a popular tourist attraction.
• Scud the Disposable Assassin depicts a God that vaguely resembles the Judeo-Christian model, but is more of a force of nature than a sentient being - at the end of the series, Scud frees him from the prison his angels trapped him in, and God proceeds to run around like a wild animal, mauling and munching on his former servants.
• God's appearance when Johnny the Homicidal Maniac goes to Heaven (he just does, okay?), where God is a little fat man in a flying recliner who's "a little tired" from creating the Universe.
  • The Jhonen Vasquez solo story (yes, the creator sometimes stars), in which a late-night convenience store clerk denies him Cherry Ice Sucky. "You're the Devil, aren't you?" Jhonen asks. Yes. Yes, he is.
• The Sandman (1989) has the seven Endless. Immortal and almost all-powerful and knowing beings who have been around since the beginning of the universe. The oldest, Destiny, appears like a man in a hooded cloak carrying a large book and looks the most like a traditional God figure. The second one is Death, who is by far the most unusual by appearing as a Perky Goth who is one of the nicest and sweetest people you'll ever met (as well as the first and the last).
  • Several old gods show up during the course of the series (but not the Judeo-Christian one) and generally avert this trope, looking like humanity has always envisioned them. The exception to this is probably Lord Kilderkin, an avatar of the concept of 'order'. He looks like a cardboard box and communicates through spontaneously generating messages on small strips of paper from inside the box.
• The Italian satirical comic book Jenus has a field day with this:
  • Jesus is represented as a sarcastic, short-tempered and foul-mouthed prankster. Justified as he lost his memory when God gave him back his body too fast during the Second Coming and thus hit his head hard on landing, but it's implied the only difference from normal is that he would be polite and slightly more patient, and it's shown that Judas' betrayal was out of frustration at Jesus continuously pranking and humiliating him (just as planned: they needed Judas to genuinely hate him). He also was married with Mary Madgalene and had a healthy sex life, and didn't actually die on the cross: Doc Brown hated religion, so came back in time and ran over Judas and the guards from the Sanhedrin to prevent the birth of Christianity. To remedy that, Jesus threatened to turn all of Pilatus' wine into water if he didn't lend him the soldiers needed to make it appear he died on the cross and returned to life after three days;
    • A non-canon strip depicted his reaction to Erich Priebke's death and Germany, Argentine and many cities in Italy refusing to let him be buried in their territory: out of Christian charity, he dug him a grave and made him a gravestone-that doubles as a fully functional flush toilet. That's all the charity an unrepentant Nazi can get from a Jew.
  • God is Ronnie James Dio. And we don't mean he looks like him, we mean he recently came to Earth and became Ronnie James Dio (incidentally, Dio is Italian for "God");
  • Mary is shown as having become a violent and powerful fighter, leading a squadron of valkyries and trained by none other than Kenshiro. Also, she's not a virgin: while she didn't have sex with Joseph before the birth of Jesus, she had it after, as declared by none other than Jesus' sidekick the Lamb of God;
  • Apparently, since mankind stopped worshipping them the Greek Gods (or at least Eros) became drunkards, and Apollo's daughter Pollon (from Little Pollon) is addicted to cocaine (an old Italian joke on the protagonist having something that is described as "Looks like talcum powder but isn't it, it gives you happiness! If you eat it or breath it, it will immediately give you happiness!" Seriously!).
  • Muhammad has shown up in the non-canon strips, and is shown as a prankster on the same level of Jesus. He's also a Nice Guy.
• The Italian satirical comic book Suore Ninja is, if possible, even more dissacrant than Jenus:
  • God is a talking triangle with one eye. He's all-powerful, but he's also a jerk who doesn't care about mankind, somewhat mentally screwed up, forgetful (to the point that, upon coming on Earth to cause the Apocalypse, he forgot until someone mentioned the end of the world in a completely unrelated context), and not omniscient in the least, and has no idea who Jesus Christ is (but he could have forgotten) or why that guy named Joseph continues pestering him for supposedly having an affair with his wife. He serves as an unwilling Final Boss;
  • Also, the Virgin Mary had the habit of cheating on her husband, and apparently tried to seduce the Archangel Gabriel when he showed up for the Annunciation;
  • Speaking of Gabriel, he's a violent and dimwitted guy ready to murder anyone who wants to leave Heaven;
  • Not divine but close, the prophet Elijah is the Big Bad, a victim of an UFO abduction who, after realizing that the universe makes no sense, wants to kill God and make a universe that makes sense, and is gathering the means to do so and then, when ready, start the Apocalypse and thus summon Him to Earth (only, his secret weapon is neutralized by The Pope in person, thus stopping his plans... And then Jovanardi starts the Apocalypse anyway);
  • The Horsemen of the Apocalypse are immortal mercenaries working for the highest bidder... Who isn't God, as the Catholic Church has all his money;
  • God blamed Vishnu (because in this comic All Myths Are True) for the creation of Jovanardi, a bigoted, violent and idiotic politician (closely based on an actual Italian politician). He apparently thought it was a good idea.
• There's another even more blasphemous, raunchier and violent Italian comic book, simply titled Gesù ("Jesus"). God looks like a mafia boss suspiciously similar to Marlon Brando in The Godfather who forces His son to come back to Earth because nobody believes in Them anymore. Jesus is pissed off but then complies, by becoming a stand-up comedian. When he decides to change the monologues, being unsatisfied with the low standards of his brain-dead audience, his bosses (the network executives) have him shot on air. This (and His new vulgar monologue) finally sparks new interest in the Catholic doctrine. In this comic Jesus is bitter, quite the blasphemer Himself, not to mention in a homosexual relationship with a Camp Gay black man named Patrick. He also uses His godlike powers to blow up people He doesn't like and summon thuggish angelic bodyguards. It's also stated John Lennon was Him in a previous incarnation.

Films — Live-Action

• In Bedazzled (2000), both the Christian God and Satan are represented this way, though Satan less so. Satan, played by Elizabeth Hurley, is shown as beautiful, desirable, and even polite. Though she can be angry and cruel and appear as the traditional Satan, she only does so when it fits her goals, and she is legitimately not angry when a soul escapes her grasp. Meanwhile, God is played by Gabriel Cassius, and appears as a young black man in jail, offering very casual wisdom and hope for the main character without revealing anything about his identity.
• The Kevin Smith film Dogma features a God who at first appears in a bodily incarnation as a stereotypical old bearded man (who likes skee-ball). When freed from this body, God takes a true (or truer) form of a beautiful young woman who giggles, does cartwheels and seems to look at everything with childlike awe, played in one of the most audacious moves in Stunt Casting history by Alanis freakin' Morisette.
• Terry Jones' Erik the Viking portrays the Norse pantheon as a bunch of literal children, self-absorbed and petulant, who claim to have no particular influence over what mortals do to each other.
• Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter is one long, intentional play on this trope. A martial-arts and wooden-stakes-wielding Jesus... who shaves and dons modern clothing... and saves the lesbians of Ottawa from vampires... and sings and dances... and squeezes someone's ass. The movie also features the Virgin Mary talking through a nightlight, God talking through a Hooters bowl of ice cream and cherries, and a fabulous transvestite Good Samaritan. Oh, and the most saintly man on the planet is the legendary masked Mexican wrestler El Santo.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a vision of the magnificent Almighty appears in the style of Terry Gilliam cartoons. It is to be expected that Monty Python's version of God is offbeat. This particular God looks like famous cricket player W. G. Grace, and becomes hilariously irritable when mortals don't Dispense with the Pleasantries.
• The Oh, God! series portrayed him as the old vaudevillian George Burns.
• Time Bandits can be seen as predicated on the foibles of a rather inept and idiosyncratic version of the Christian God. Hilariously lampshaded in the little speech given by Evil about God's lack of interest in computers and technology. To give an example, the Supreme Being (in the movie) literally can not remember why he created evil when Kevin asks:
  Supreme Being: I think it has something to do with free will.
• In Xanadu, Zeus turns out to be a forgetful, flawed retiree who's perplexed by human emotions and our perspective on time.

Jokes

• An astronaut is sent into the center of the galaxy. When he returns, he secretly contacts the Pope.
  Astronaut: I've talked with God. I have a list of reforms you're going to want to implement if you don't want me to tell people about what I've seen.
  Pope: What? Why on earth wouldn't we want you to tell people you've met God?
  Astronaut: Well, for starters, She's black...

Literature

• In H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, the greatest gods are terrifying inhuman monsters whose form and thought processes (if they exist) are utterly incomprehensible. Depending upon how you look at it, either Azathoth or Yog-Sothoth is King of All Cosmos. Yog-Sothoth is an incomprehensible entity that is said to overlap all time and space that comprises all knowledge from all time (past, present, future, both known and unknown). Azathoth in particular is horrifying in that he is a mindless gibbering idiot, thrashing blindly at the formless center of infinity amid the maddening cacophony of drums and pipes, with some interpretations assuming him to be dreaming the universe in his sleep and his waking would cause all things to simply stop existing.
  H.P. Lovecraft: They danced insanely to the high, thin whining / Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw / Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining / Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
• In So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, while we are not shown the actual God, his Final Message to His Creation: "We apologize for the inconvenience."
• Harlan Ellison's short story "The Region Between" takes this to a Lovecraftian extreme: the maker of the universe is, by our standards, completely insane. The narration remarks that if this truly qualifies as "God," it's better to be an atheist.
• The entire Discworld pantheon.
  • Not only the straight deities who venture more into Crystal Dragon Jesus territory, like Blind Io and Fate, but the slightly odder ones, like the god of great ideas you forget to write down and will never remember again, the "Oh God" of hangovers, the goddess of the afternoon, the goddess of small dead things left half-digested on the porch (she has a cat head), the goddess of things that get stuck in drawers, and *cough* the Lady.
  • Meanwhile, the Creator of the Discworld is an absent-minded little guy who's basically an engineer working on spec, who laid down the terrain and then left it for somebody else to equip with life (not his department).
• Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia is Jesus in a form more suitable for Narnia. On Earth, which is dominated by humans, he took the form of a man. In Narnia, which is mostly populated by Talking Animals and mythical creatures, he takes the form of a giant talking lion who gives you rides on his back and lets you stroke his mane (but only when he allows it; he's not a tame lion, after all).
• Journey to Chaos: Tasio the Trickster, king of Tariatla's trickster gods and Number Two for the Top God, spends much of his time on practical jokes. When Eric sees him pretending to be Arachnidman, he exclaims to his girlfriend, "This is what you want me to pray to?"
• Through the Looking Glass: The Red King, if you believe Tweedledee and Tweedledum, is a sentient chess piece who spends all his time sleeping in their in the forest, and our entire reality — including Tweedledee, Tweedledum, and their home — is part of his dream.

Live-Action TV

• In the TGIF comedy Teen Angel, God has a unique intermediary to mortals: his cousin Rod, the giant, disembodied head of actor Ron Glass. Rod admits to being responsible for the Black Plague, The Chevy Chase Show, and killer bees (though at first they weren't called 'killer bees' they were called 'Fun Flies.' Then they started killing people.) His arch-nemesis is the Devil's cousin Neville.
• In one episode of Blossom Joey plays pool with a very nonchalant God.
• Largely the premise of Miracle Workers, which follows angels at Heaven Inc. as they try to win a bet with God to stop him from destroying a dysfunctional Earth and replacing it with a novelty restaurant. While he is genuinely stupid, it is later revealed that the reason Earth is much less functional than the planets and systems of other gods is that God gave humans free will.

Roleplay

• Open Blue's God is Zod, an expy of the God from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who loves drinking parties, and armwrestling with Kukulu (an expy of Cthulhu), and doesn't give a rat's ass about the hundreds of millions of humans praying to him.

Tabletop Games

• The Unconquered Sun from Exalted appears, at first, to be a fairly typical four-armed sun-deity...^note  The Unconquered Sun's true form is a vaguely dragon-shaped nuclear fire until you look closer and realize that he essentially started a war against the actual creators of the universe which wrecked 90% of Creation, simply to get his hands on the cosmic X-Box (which he and the other ruling deities are now addicted to the point of completely ignoring Creation itself.) And those actual creators, now trapped in Hell? Their head honcho is a crazy brass man/city with an embarrassing penchant for wild dancing. As mentioned on the game's own page, later releases clarified things a great deal and made him much less of this.
• In Nobilis, A God Is You, and the setting encourages very quirky, capricious, or grandiose characters (or all three whenever possible).

Video Games

• The Trope Namer himself comes from Katamari Damacy, where he regularly orders his son (and other family members) to roll up various sizes of objects on earth - or even the earth itself - in order to throw them up into the sky to fix the stars he knocked out of it during his drunken revelry. He's selfish, infinitely vain, campy in dress (but has a wife), and whisks you around with fabulous rainbows. He'd be a huge Jerkass if he wasn't so hilariously endearing.
• The main god EZI in Eternal Sonata is very much Played for Laughs. The party can collect a number of bizarre items bearing his name, most of them mocking him relentlessly (his face makes children cry, all candy associated with him tastes bland or terrible, he's apparently capable of laying eggs, etc.) and in one of them he's described as being an overweight man. People who worship him are also obsessed with the the number 321, and an altar to him gives you that much money when searched, and collecting all of the items with his name on them awards you with an achievement worth equally many Gamerscore.
• Polaris from Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 looks like a giant top (and then a giant egg-thing with weird arms).
• The Lord of Games (or L.O.G.) from Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, who's a computer screen (with a Pong theme) wearing a cape.
• Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Dainichi Nyorai is the creator of the entire universe according to Buddhist cosmology, has incredible powers and is the center of two realms, but is also a very quirky narcissist to the extreme, likes to dub himself a "superstar" and is highly petulant and immature.
• Amaterasu in Ōkami is a rather odd god. "Leap before you look" is her literal mantra (often jumping off of high, probably bottomless ledges just because they're in her way or picking fights when she doesn't really need to), and it's an ongoing joke that she has some sort of aversion to bathing. Within the first five minutes of the game, she falls asleep while someone's explaining why they need her help. Oh, and she's a wolf. That last one can be explained by the fact that "Okami" can mean both "wolf" or "great god." Maybe she likes puns?
• The Black & White series of games has the protagonist taking on this role. You can be good or evil, but either way, your avatar is a giant (Godzilla-sized) animal that poops everywhere, likes to dance around, and occasionally eats people. That creature might be seen as more of a pet of the god, but that's not as funny.
• In Spore, the great mystery at the center of the galaxy turns out to be a mysterious, all-knowing, all-powerful being who congratulates you on making it to the center, gives a grandiose speech about Life, the Universe, and Everything... and then is revealed to be a tiny UFO with a megaphone attached, named Steve (who then tries to sell you a timeshare on planet Earth).
• What does God need with a starship? Well, in Homeworld, God is a starship. Sajuuk, the Creator entity in the various religions of almost every race in the galaxy, is revealed in Homeworld 2 to be an incredibly powerful Precursor starship lying dormant at the center of the galaxy. Presumably, the name "Sajuuk" once belonged to the ship's former Unbound captain.
• In Sacrifice, Stratos, the God of Air, also known as "Lord of the Heavens", is a floating white robe with a tire for a collar and a yellow helium balloon with a smiley face painted on it for a head. Underneath his benevolent and somewhat nutty facade, he's also The Chessmaster Magnificent Bastard and the true "villain" of the game's pantheon.

• Super Mario Bros. has Rosalina. Known as "Mother of the Stars/Cosmos", she travels the universe in the Comet Observatory with her Ridiculously Cute Critter adopted children (who populate the universe with stars, planets, and galaxies), somehow carries the universe itself beneath her gown, and according to Mario Kart also happens to have a passion for motorcycles.
• Most of the gods in Kid Icarus: Uprising are this. To name three, Palutena is a shameless troll who constantly messes with Pit during gameplay, Thanatos is a campy shapeshifter who likes to transform into strange objects, and Viridi is a bratty Deadpan Snarker that stands out even in the game's World of Snark.
• In Epic Battle Fantasy 4, The Creator Goddess is a cat, fittingly called Godcat. She created cats in her image and humans as a slave race to them. But over the years, cats bonded too closely with humans for her liking, so she took away their arms and legs. Yeah... Though she does take a level in kindness after being defeated, and admits her fault.
• In Cargo! The Quest for Gravity gods are a trio or trinity of mechanical robotic heads all called Manipu, who claim to be at the same time both omnipotent and limited by what their programming allows. According to Robot Devil the reason gravity is not functioning properly is that Manipu decided to erase mankind and start over, because humans are always messing things up with their "free will". The method they chose was a Biblical flood. However, they couldn't figure out how to accomplish this following current laws of nature, so they weakened gravity to get around it. The beings Manipu created to replace humans are supposed to only have positive mental traits. Unfortunately, things like utter selflessness combined with lack of fear led to them having next to no self-preservation instinct.
• If the Legendary Pokémon count as gods - which many people believe them to - then they often dip into this trope when interacting with the player. Of particular note are: Mesprit, which decides to become a roaming Legendary simply to play with the protagonist, who has just saved it and the entire universe from destruction; Hoopa, which opened a bunch of portals leading to other Legendaries in Hoenn for no apparent reason; Solgaleo and Lunala, who spend most of their game as a misbehaving Cosmog which runs off at every opportunity despite having no way to defend itself; Silvally, which can be seen in the credits acting like an oversized puppy towards its Trainer; and Mew, which is the ancestor of all living beings but acts like a playful, divine-powered kitten most of the time. This is further extended when you take them into Pokemon Amie/Refresh, in which any Legendary will act playfully towards you so long as you're nice to them. You can tell the creator of the entire Pokemon world to headbutt yarn in exchange for cakes, and it will do it happily.

Web Animation

• "God" in Zero Punctuation is represented as a huge, ephemural ocleot (think a Fun Size leopard) telling whoever He appears to to "Kill the whores." It's implied He's nothing more than a hallucination to boot.

Webcomics

• Dinosaur Comics features God as a recurring character, audible only to T-Rex, with a rather bizarre personality. A good example can be seen here. The Devil (also only audible to T-Rex) also appears regularly and has something of a video game fixation.
• Angel Moxie portrays the "Grand Poobah" as an uncaring bureaucrat who cares more about the upcoming hockey season than he does the status of Earth.
• In the Goats comic strip, God went off to dress like a pirate, telling Woody Allen and a bunch of monkeys to take over writing new scripts for The Multiverse. Then two of the main characters tricked God into becoming a pork chop so they could eat him. This eventually places all existence in peril. Goats also features a guy with glasses and a mustache who may be Satan, although his name-tag originally reads "Stan".
• The Judeo-Christian God, as depicted in Sinfest, enjoys mocking His subjects using hand puppets and has a sense of humor approximating that of a fourth-grader (but His decisions are still Serious Business.) Buddha is depicted as an eternally cheerful cloud-riding-Cloud Cuckoo Lander. Jesus is frequently depicted as a super-hero (when he's not moping about the sins of the father visited upon the son.)

• In Problem Sleuth, Pickle Inspector ascends to godhood and becomes Godhead Pickle Inspector. Naturally, this happens since Pickle Inspector was pretty eccentric as a mortal. After retroactively creating the universe, he spends most of his time fondly regarding things that rhyme with "creation".

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
  • God is usually portrayed as a sapient sundial or a disembodied halo or something. True to the themes of the strip, while not intentionally malevolent, he is flighty, petty and impulsive, and has an... interesting sense of humor. There are several weird explanations as to why he created the world or some part of it the way it is, like the time the salesthing at the dimension store wondered why he'd even bother making a universe if he could only afford four dimensions, or when he made humans much less intelligent so that they'd look funnier when having sex. He also frequently answers questions from humans directly, usually giving some weird explanation for the way the world or the universe is. One comic had a priest asking why there is suffering. He responds that everything is getting better. The priest asks about suffering on a personal level... God realizes that he was looking a bit too big picture.
    God: Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, Africa!
  • There is an even weirder depiction, too: The Insane Space Monkey that Jesus prays to.
  • In strip 3403, it's revealed that life and humans on Earth were created by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien living in the centre of the Earth who only cared that "it's so erotic having these dumb carbon blobs scampering over my skin," doesn't even know one species is called "humans", and is just randomly called home one day.
  • In "Dear Science", Science takes the place of God and reveals that this life is a test of one's devotion to empiricism, with corresponding punishments and rewards in the afterlife (although what's considered a punishment or reward is reversed like everything else). It's simultaneously evidently absurd to everyone and not that different from what religious people might actually believe aside from everything being mirrored. Satire, in other words.
• Over Compensating has God and Jesus living in the Pearly Gates Trailer Park. They are rather eclectic.
• Breakfast of the Gods depicts God in the form of the Quaker Oats mascot.
• The Titans who created Erfworld are depicted as giant Elvis impersonators, both in the first panel representing the event and in in-universe iconography.
• The Creator in The Book Of Armless Theo is a weak, incompetent, and largely apathetic deity who cobbled together a world of his own from spare parts, stolen from worlds created by other gods, just so he could have a place to put life-forms that could worship him. His creations are even powered by wayward souls stolen from other afterlives, and instead of letting them reproduce sexually, the Creator just makes new fully-grown bodies for them when they die.
• In Holy Bibble, God seems a little off. He randomly offers angels ice cream and ecstasy, and one of the first things he created in the universe was a tiki-bar.
• In The Order of the Stick, Odin's head got messed up temporarily for centuries when his worshipers decided magic (which he's a god of) was nonsense for fools and simpletons. Now, he's a benevolent Talkative Loon, at least on a bad day, and may or may not deal out random prophecies that make no sense. Other gods have been shown in a weird light, too, like the god of beauty being a Brainless Beauty and the god of monsters being Stupid Evil. Thor, meanwhile, is shown as a Boisterous Bruiser who really doesn't think a lot about what he's doing, but in his later, non-jokey appearance, this side is largely downplayed by the fact that, being a god, he's highly intelligent and has had centuries and millennia to think about things by now. He's also somewhat been forced to take over the Top God role (along with his brother Loki) while their father recover.
• Oglaf has several similar depictions of God figures that resemble the Judeo-Christian God, and none of them are very impressive. (Don't even ask about the few original gods in the setting.) These range from the completely deranged Old Testament parody who inevitably annihilates His followers for some blasphemy or another to merely awkward versions like the one who gets accidentally tied up when someone gets carried away with Japanese rope bondage. One strip also has God getting really fed up with people who happen to put their hands together and say "oh God" while having sex, because it's technically praying and then He has to listen to them having sex. When what look like the Greek gods make an appearance, they rule rather weirdly and irresponsibly too.
  Zeus?: I mean, it's not like I could have done anything.
  Athena?: Not without effort, anyway.
  Zeus?: Exactly!

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: SCP-343 claims to be God. Considering He can walk through walls (and by extension, can't be contained) and knows everything about everyone (except SCP-682), nobody's really questioned Him on this. They're just thankful He's friendly. Except for that one doctor. Wait, what doctor?
• The Flying Spaghetti Monster. According to The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, He spent most of creation being drunk (or hung over), accidentally created land twice (due to being drunk and hung over), and generally rushed the whole thing. Due to the overwhelming amount of errors in creation, his followers have introduced the notion of "Unintelligent Design," a theory stating that, while omnipotent, the Creator isn't necessarily very bright.
• Ceiling Cat iz in ur ceiling watching u masterbate. He now can haz Baibel. Not everyone beleevz however.
• One of Lore Sjoberg's "Lore Brand Comics" posits the theory of Belligerent Design: the Universe was created to annoy him.
• Inglip is an eldritch abomination (and Memetic Mutation) that makes about as much sense as a random captcha. (Which is no accident.)

Web Videos

• In the Mr. Deity online shorts, God is essentially characterised as a George Lucas parody.

Western Animation

• South Park depicted God as a short-tempered hippo/monkey hybrid creature in "Are You There, God? It's Me, Jesus". Oh, and he's a Buddhist, but only Mormons go to heaven.
  God: What did you expect me to look like, my son?
  Mr. Garrison: ...Well, not like that!
  • Made weirder because Buddha is a member of The Super Best Friends (a parody of The Super Friends featuring Jesus, other religious beings, and an Aquaman parody named Seaman). That's right, God is a member of a religion based off of the teachings of one of his son's friends.
  • Though curiously, from a Buddhist perspective it would make perfect sense for the Christian God to be a Buddhist: the goal of Buddhism is to achieve a state with no desires, and God isn't exactly there yet, with His desires to grant salvation and defeat evil. Also Buddhism doesn't really entail a belief in any gods, so it's fitting that God would be an atheist, in so far as that He doesn't have a higher being to believe in.
• In the Futurama episode "Godfellas", Bender encounters a galaxy-shaped being who may or may not be God, and takes a rather laissez-faire view on divine intervention: his philosophy is "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all".
• Transformers has a Giant Robot God. Primus, while not always Mr. Nice God (at least in the comics, he comes across better when he appears in the cartoons), is in fact the creator of the Transformers, and their homeworld is his body. Surprisingly little goes on by way of religious ceremony, though he is connected to both the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and Cybertron's Omega Lock, and granted the Autobots the Spark of Combination in Energon, as well as the Cyber Keys from Cybertron being derived from his power. And all this while he's sealed away in a deep slumber.
  • Primus's opposite number Unicron is no slouch, either. He eats planets, created the Mini-Cons to give the Autobots and Decepticons something to fight over in Armada, and is directly responsible for the "hyper power" upgrades of most of Energon's Decepticons.
• The short-lived God, the Devil and Bob allowed God to be, well, God, but put him in sunglasses, t-shirts, and sandals. He looked a lot like Jerry Garcia, although it should be noted the show's producers actually used the stereotypical Christian image of God for their character, just with a different fashion sense. He also loves beer and Pop-Tarts.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The crazy-amazing gigantic living all-wise Lion Turtle island, which, based on the knowledge it/he gives to Aang, may be even older than both the Avatar and bending as we knew it.
  • Arguably, Aang himself also fits. The Avatar spirit is the fusion of a human soul with Raava, the ancient spirit of light and peace, continually reincarnating into human bodies... and in this incarnation, it's a twelve-year-old boy with giant arrow tattoos and a penchant for riding wild animals.
• Chowder features a parody of the King of the Cosmos from Katamari Damacy. The other characters don't seem to acknowledge him, though, much less worship him.
• In one episode of Beavis And Butthead, the titular characters meet God (or at least someone claiming to be him). In addition to slipping pop cultural references into his sermons, he's eventually revealed to be not too different from the duo themselves, watching porn and having a very similar laugh.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Princess Celestia and Princess Luna are not explicitly referred to as deities, but they control the sun and moon respectively and both seem to be immortal, so they might as well be. The former has enough of a trickster streak in her that she is not above pranking overly servile subjects or ruining a boring fancy dance because it's too boring, while the latter is a Fish out of Temporal Water who gets unusually excited at so much as doing good in a carnival game for foals.
• Adventure Time has an entire pantheon of these. There's "Grob Gob Glob Grod" as the main Deity of Ooo, who in his appearances seems pretty chill, he's not above taking selfies with other gods and having pool parties. Then there's "The Party God" who is a giant floating wolf head wearing a sideways cap, and is shown to be a neglectful boyfriend, "Prismo" an odd pink shadow in the form of a man who only exists while a certain human is asleep, and "The Cosmic Owl" who comes to people in their sleep to predict their death, and originally sounded like Dr. Phil. Finally, Abraham Lincoln himself who is the immortal ruler of Mars. (Would say Makes Sense In Context, but it really doesn't)
• Earthworm Jim had an odd pantheon of Gods. Such as "The God of Noseflutes".
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes has the President of the Universe, a Jive Turkey Physical God. In the penultimate episode of the series, he reveals that he created the glorbs that give people super powers so that everyone could have as much fun as possible. In short, he's the reason the series operates on Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun. There's also the recurring corn god that pops up, but it's never stated what his role is.

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