Obfuscating Stupidity - Television Tropes & Idioms

The absurdly skilled leads (both Badass Longcoats) in Trigun and Trinity Blood often deliberately give off an air of incompetence and cowardice.
- ...which only serves to make it even more awesome when they finally cut loose at the height of their powers.
Raiha and Joker in Flame of Recca.
The titular character of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, who constantly kept everyone (including the audience) wondering whether he was a tactical genius or just incredibly lucky.
- There are strong reasons to think (and many fans do so, indeed) that he actually is an illuminated bodhisattva. If this interpretation is correct, the surreal opening animation actually shows the moment of his Buddhist epiphany, and Tylor's real ultimate goal all along the series would be to bring enlightenment to his crew. (Especially to Yamamoto, an impressive success!)
Himura Kenshin in Rurouni Kenshin tried to pass himself off this way in the first episode, but was eventually found out.
- Just the first episode? He continues to act like an idiot whenever he's not fighting at least for the first half of the series. He usually manages to maintain the masquerade until someone familiar with his past tries to force him to fight properly.
Arguably Genma Saotome from Ranma 1/2. He behaves like a lazy, thieving, sadistic, cowardly, gluttonous, etc etc and a total waste of space. And maybe he is. But the one time Ranma seemed about to outpace him, Genma asserted dominance over Ranma with psychological attacks (the "Hell's Cradle Technique"). Also, Genma managed to create two new martial arts forms from scratch that would be at home in the Dragonball stories, and once managed to prove himself the near-equal of his evil master Happosai by manifesting Godzilla-scale powers for a brief moment.
Lt. Colonel Hughes from Fullmetal Alchemist hides his deadly skill with knives and investigative intelligence behind a public persona of a ditz who's always shoving pictures of his daughter in front of anyone and everyone. Or maybe he just is a ditz who adores showing pictures of his daughter and is an awesome investigator at the same time.
- To an extent so is Major Armstrong in the anime, though he hides his intelligence and investigative skills behind a meat head persona rather than the classical ditz.
  - It is no ordinary meathead persona. It is a meathead persona THAT HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG FAMILY LINE FOR GENERATIONS!!!
- Führer King Bradley beats them both, though, especially in the manga. While those who served in the Ishbal conflict know or at least have a hinted clue just how vicious he can be, he starts out being presented to the audience and the two protagonists as being a harmless kook who likes avoiding work and giving people melons as gifts, which makes the revelation of his true personality and the combat skills that go with it that much more terrifying.
- Roy Mustang. A good-looking soldier, who only cares for promotions and has sworn to protect his comrades and underlings using his position and power. He dates several girls at the same time, using this so that people wouldn't notice him too much. He constantly goes to a brothel/pub with a lot of girls, (to gain information from the girls. Also, the pub owner is his mother. He uses military phones to call his girlfriends, in order to direct the 'girlfriends' in coordinated attack. Finally, his assistant has to keep him in check, read: stop him from going too far with his idealism. Sounds like a bastard, doesn't he? Too bad, he isn't
- Ling is sort of like this in the manga, although his undignified goofiness does seem like a natural part of his personality that he just deploys strategically.
- Manga-Hohenheim. This trope and Crouching Moron Hidden Badass pretty much embody all of his character before his immortality is revealed and he pretty much turns into a Badass Bookworm with a side order of awesome.
Xellos from The Slayers tends to give an impression of amusing if annoying harmlessness as long as his eyes remain closed, hiding his true, sinister nature.
- Notably, Gourry is the first person to realize that Xellos is REALLY evil. He doesn't tell the others because he thought it was obvious.
  - Gourry himself would be the textbook example, especially in the original novels, where he's a Deadpan Snarker who likes to pass as a Dumb Blond for fun and profit. In the anime — not so much.
- The inspector in Slayers Revolution seems to be approaching Too Dumb To Live territory in the beginning, until it is revealed that it is all just an act to capture his real target.
In his first appearance in Naruto, Kakashi "falls" for Naruto's juvenile prank, making his charges think he's a moron. Of course, he proves them wrong later in the episode...
- Think he actually really did fall for it. The point is that, despite what Sasuke thought, being hit by a duster hidden atop a door does'nt mean your are not an excellent ninja; it means the guy who put is there is stupid. The Dub (surprisingly) portrays it best- "Hmm...My first thought about you guys is.....your a bunch of idiots".
- And while that put him out of the "stupid" category, Kakashi's next four opponents (counting Haku, who observed and tried to deconstruct his fighting style so that Zabuza could later kill him) all fatally underestimate him in three different ways, just to drive the point home that Kakashi has whole layers of this going just by force of habit. Given that Kakashi is fairly infamous among Konoha's enemies, the fact that he's still able to get enemies to underestimate him is rather impressive.
- There's also Shikamaru, who's a borderline case. He really is smart, and when he wants to buckle down, he's an unparalleled strategist, but he's extremely lazy. According to his sensei, Asuma, he felt that even moving his pencil in his class was too much trouble. When Asuma got Shikamaru to play a game that was actually a hidden IQ test, he discovered Shikamaru has an IQ of over 200 (for comparison, Albert Einstein had an IQ of 186, which made him smarter than 99.9999% of all humans). Still, a standard battle involving Shikamaru usually plays out like this: Shikamaru gets his ass handed to him for 95% of the battle, and just as the enemy is about to close in on him, he reveals that he's known their plan all along, and was just messing with them.
- It was recently revealed in the manga that Tobi, the Akatsuki's comic-relief member, has been using this tactic since his first appearance. He's really Madara Uchiha, one of the co-founders of the Leaf Village.
  - Maybe... after showing his face to Kisame, and only Kisame so far that we know of though he tried with Sasuke and failed, Kisame believes Tobi to be either a former or the current Mizukage. So the lovable masked character is racking up quite a bit of names people think he is. Of course, if he's really Madara, that means he's been around long enough to have assumed plenty of other identities.
  - Kisame addresses him specifically at Madara when he calls him the Mizukage
- Rock Lee's debut featured him also pretending to be an inexpert rookie moron so Team Guy can go around before the Chuunin exams without standing out. But when a fight breaks in, Lee can't help himself and promptly stops the fisticuffs, leaving everyone surprised at how an apparent weakling was so skilled.
  - To a lesser extent, Lee's teammate, Neji. Though an Arrogant Kung Fu Guy(to the point where he's practically the Trope Namer) in his early appearances he hid the fact that he had managed to master many of his clan's most advanced techniques and even improve on them, just on basic theory alone.
Hige from Wolf's Rain
Dark Magical Girl Ninja (yes) Freesia Yagyuu of Jubei-chan 2 hams up her Half-Russian heritage with broken Japanese and a vapid demeanor. In reality, she speaks perfect Japanese, and is frighteningly intelligent.
Kumiko from Gokusen swings back and forth between The Ditz and the Action Girl as a scene requires, even throwing in a little Clark Kenting to clue the viewer in as to which one she's trying to be.
Rika Furude from Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni is proven to be this in season 2, though in the original sound novel her intelligence is hinted at much earlier in the TIPS.
- Also, Rena gives off the clumsy, ditzy feel, but she may just be the smartest of the gang. She shows incredibly, almost absurdly, good detective skills when Satoko and Rika disappear in Watanagashi-hen and made up an almost believable theory about Hinamizawa in the Atonement chapter... until she lost it and started talking about aliens.
- Keiichi is also an example of this as before he moved to Hinamizawa he was an Insufferable Genius with no friends that was picked on constantly in school (which lead to his unfortunate stress reliving activity). After moving he decided Dumb Is Good and began acting like he is known for in the series; however his intelligence sometimes shines through his act and he appears simply Book Dumb.
- Rena again. She is shown to actually be quite serious, and almost the opposite of her "regular" self, although she's mostly like what she appears to be when she's happy.
Another shonen protagonist of this persuasion is Taikoubou of Houshin Engi. In almost every situation he adopts a manner that is either agonizingly lazy or comically bizarre, but he is in truth an adept and cunning tactician.
In Bleach, Ichigo's father seems totally oblivious to the fact that his son has become a Shinigami, regularly leaves his body to go fight hollows, and has had up to four sentient stuffed animals in his room, in addition to having a girl living in his closet. We then find out that Ichigo's father is actually a Captain-level Shinigami himself, and was fully aware of his son's exploits.
- Also in the same show, Ikkaku seemed like a pretty average-level shinigami most of the show, until we see that he achieved bankai (something his own Captain has yet to do) in the fight against Edorad, and that the only reason he isn't a Captain is that he doesn't want to leave Kenpachi's command. Nor is it a recent occurrence; Ikkaku had achieved bankai decades before the start of the series, and had been secretly training his friend/kohai Renji in how to achieve bankai as well.
- Again, Urahara puts on the personality of Mr. Hat and Clogs, an eccentric shop owner, to cover for his real self, a ridiculously skilled scientist and inventor and a former Shinigami Captain.
  - And according to the flashback arc, he's been at it for over a hundred years.
- In a recent chapter, Squad two lieutenant Omaeda - who looks and acts like an Upper Class Twit - fights against one of Barrigan's fraccion. During the fight, he manages to use his apparent stupidity to trick his opponent into using his resurrécion ability, then demonstrating exactly why he's second in command of what basically amounts to the Soul Society special forces.
- Of course, someone else was pulling this for quite a while too. The nerdy, soft-spoken captain with glasses named Aizen Sousuke? The one who got killed all of a sudden? He's alive. And he's the Big Bad.
- Pesche and Dondochakka might count too - despite their usual goofy behaviour, they were Nel's fraccion back when she was the 3rd Espada, and claim to have been training even further since then. Szayel even admits that their Combination Attack would have killed him if he hadn't had a chance to analyze their powers beforehand.
Haruko Haruhara from FLCL uses the façade of a goofy policewoman from space so that no one questions deeply what she's doing here in the first place and what her goals are. In the last episode she finally reveals what she was planning, to absorb the powers of Atomsk, the Pirate King.
In Idaten Jump we're introduced to Arthur, a mild-mannered and geeky-looking painter with Nerd Glasses who enters the MTB tournament and becomes a Butt Monkey among fellow competitors. It turns out that Arthur is not only a very handsome blond, he's an excellent biker and a good friend of the local Wrench Wench Yuki, who pretended to be dumb to hide his identity as a member of the guerrilla against Gabu, the child dictator and leader of the Shark team.
He's a lazy, tanned Buddhist monk in his late 30's with a stubble, whom his wife treats like a younger brother and his kids (both 12-year-old son and 19-year-old niece) treat with not too much respect, and who often ogles attractive girls much to others' embarrassment. But give him a racket and/or bring him to a tennis match... He'll either beat the crap out of you at the courts or give you the most acute comments about the current game. That's Nanjiroh "The Samurai" Echizen from The Prince Of Tennis to you.
One early look at Mai-HiME's Midori Sugiura would likely lead one to think: "Clumsy waitress...ditzy teacher...I could probably take her in a fight". However, once she gets into her Element, she can (and will) kick ass with flair, occasionally exhibiting leadership qualities that would make Storm proud.
In Full Metal Panic!, Melissa Mao reflects back to her initial encounters with Sousuke and Kurz: she was sent to scout the training camp they were in for candidates to recruit to Mithril. Both Sousuke and Kurz, mistrustful of the mysterious organization sponsoring their training, deliberately underperformed: Sousuke was content to maintain a level of careful mediocrity, but Kurz went the extra mile and staged an attempted sexual assault on Mao to make sure she'd strike him from her list. When a mission came in and most of the other members were captured, however, both of them were obliged to demonstrate the full level of their considerable skills.
Thorkell in Vinland Saga has such a goofy grin on his face most of the time you can easily forget he's a killing machine. That, and his good natured ribbing of both friend and foe make him come off as down right harmless. Until he splits a man in two with a single blow, or crushes a guy's skull for speaking out of turn. Just look out if you make him really angry. Yep, a bag of laughs that Thorkell.
Konoka Konoe of Mahou Sensei Negima tends to play The Ditz, and while there's no denying that she's a bit flaky, she often seems to know a lot more than anyone gives her credit for. For example, when her love for Setsuna causes her ridiculously powerful healing magic to suddenly manifest at the end of volume 5 of the manga, she acts as if she has no clue what just happened, even though we saw her summoning up magic for a spell (which she aborted) early in volume 4.
- And then we have Jack Rakan. Sure, he's powerful, but he's just a overly rambunctious skirt-chaser underneath all the muscle, right? Wrong. So, so wrong. That happy-go-lucky attitude is born from the fact that he's been involved in brutal, life-or-death combat for over forty years, so he can afford to act goofy because there is honestly nothing that poses a serious threat to him at this point. His actual intellect is shown off fully in the magical world tournament: after Negi develops a technique that literally let him turn into lightning, increasing his speed to unbelievable levels... it takes Rakan exactly one observation of said move to analyze it, find all the flaws, and devise counter-techniques which allow him to effortlessly and utterly kick the crap out of 'invincible thunder god Negi'.
Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi (Much more obvious in the light novels) often appears as a Book Dumb student no better than a janitor. Granted, he cannot comprehend Koizumi's theories (Can you?) or Haruhi when she's at deducing and solving math problems. He doesn't even want to (Did he ever meet O'Neill?) listen. However, he usually knows exactly what's going on, especially if it comes to figuring out other characters' hidden motives and feelings. Being the Unreliable Narrator he is, he may even fool the reader. Also made more clear through Little Professor Dialog; he drops a suspicious number of references to concepts he claims to know nothing about.
- To quote the man himself, when he alone solves the fake murder (In the novels):
  Kyon: "And I may not look like it, but I do pay attention to things that matter. [...] Don't underestimate me."
  - It's strongly implied throughout the anime at least that he's just too lazy to act smart.
- The whole SOS brigade sort of counts here.
  - Kyon suspects Koizumi of doing this.
  - Koizumi suspects Mikuru of doing this.
Suzuko Tashirou aka Norie Otobe from Glass Mask. Who would think that the nerdy girl with glasses and a Kansai accent would be such a cruel Manipulative Bitch, able to play a frighteningly good Xanatos Gambit to have Maya Kitajima kicked out of the acting scene? Unfortunately for her, Maya's rival Ayumi Himekawa was NOT amused when she found out...
Mrs. Ketchum (Ash's (hot) mom) in Pokemon is another borderline case. She's been a single mom for as long as the anime has been on the air, but it's later revealed she was a student of Professor Oak's, and an exceptional one, at that. Chances are she just comes off as uninformed since she had to put her studies, etc. behind once Ash was born.
Though more of an Extreme Doormat subversion, almost all of the characters in Revolutionary Girl Utena believe that Anthy has absolutely no thoughts of her own. Right...just like Akio's a good guy...
Kenichi of all people pulls this off in chapter 307. He already figured out that Kushinada is a member of YOMI. He's trying to win her over without a fight because he Wouldnt Hit A Girl, especially not a 13 year old.
- Also in Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, there's Apachai Hopachai, who despite his childish personality, can and HAS murdered dozens of people with his bare hands, being a master of Muay Thai. In fact, it has been explained that he completely lacks the ability to hold back, and striking with lethal force is reflex for him. He may act like a baby, but hope to god that you don't find his Berserk Button.
- With Apachai, it isn't so much Obfuscating Stupidity as a huge case of Crouching Moron Hidden Badass.
Bit Cloud, of Zoids: New Century Zero makes it hard to tell whether he's a Bunny Ears Lawyer or Crouching Moron Hidden Badass or even Idiot Hero, but the most common diagnosis is Obfuscating Stupidity. Interestingly, his guise is to act as a Genius Ditz, with the incredible knowledge of Zoid parts and mechanics a scrap merchant should have but without the practical knowledge to survive a more difficult fight or even the complexities of living in the same building as the Tsundere Girl With Psycho Weapon. Then he starts beating skilled opponents through complex strategies like wasting ammo on a cliff face to force a long range focused opponent into melee, and he starts looking practical in battles through luck or otherwise, even if he'll eventually find himself on the wrong end of a Weasel Total Assault. Then the team's tactician realizes that said Tsundere only fights best when firing missiles at wherever Bit is standing.
Nineteen-year-old Emperor Shi Ryuuki in Saiunkoku Monogatari is initially called "stupid emperor" by members of his court disgusted by his complete lack of interest in ruling his empire, and his habit of spending his days hiding from court officials and spending his nights sleeping with other men. When properly motivated, however, Ryuuki reveals that he has a much defter hand for political intrigue than anyone suspected, and that there's a very good reason that he is the only one of six brothers to survive the imperial court long enough to take the throne; he cultivated the "stupid emperor" image as a survival mechanism, and refuses to rule in the hopes that his exiled older brother Prince Seien will return to take his place.
- When Shuurei convinced him to get serious about governing Saiunkoku, Ryuuki kept playing the idiot so that Shuurei would stick around for a while longer to tutor him. As you can imagine, Shuurei was furious when she found out.
Conan of Detective Conan repeatedly makes a very awkward use of this to disguise his investigations and artificial Creek Moments. In general, he gets away with it more because of him looking like a child than his questionable acting skills.
- Also, Jodie (the undercover FBI agent pretending to be a teacher) pretends to be far less fluent in Japanese than she actually is; Heiji picks up on this and calls her out on it.
Dr. Shamal from Katekyo Hitman Reborn comes off initially as being a rather ditzy, womanizing lech that is completely incompetent. And then it's later revealed that he's strong enough to have managed to inject a virus into Hibari at the exact same moment Hibari hit him without Hibari even noticing.
- Rokudo Mukuro also does this to some extent during his first meeting with Tsuna, pretending to be a helpless boy who was captured by... Rokudo Mukuro.
Dr. Stein from Soul Eater plays this trope during his first appearance and meeting with the protagonists. The way he appeared didn't exactly impress them, rolling his chair backwards out the door and falling over. And then doing it again. Of course, he turns out to be a super badass with sadistic tendencies.
Prince Parion of Orguss 02 feigns idiocy for the first few episodes of the OVA - until he orchestrates the murder of his half-brother and the Evil Chancellor who killed his father, assuming the throne himself. He then goes on to attempt a global ~~takeover~~ omnicide using a Humongous Mecha.
Czeslaw Meyer from Baccano! does a bit of this, deliberately playing up a Cute Shotaro Boy image, to mask or downplay the fact that he's at least two hundred years old ("What? Did I just say something that wasn't very child-like? You must be thinking too much").
Ukyo in Samurai 7 seems an idle, childish, vain hedonist...and he is, only he is also brilliant enough to successfully earn the right to be the Emperor's heir when all the Emperor's other clones had failed. Clever enough, ruthless enough, to assassinate and usurp the Emperor afterwards, and no one suspects him.
Commander Doolittle in Mars Daybreak comes across as being either extremely lazy, extremely incompetent, or both. However, he comes the closest to actually trapping the Ship of Aurora, and didn't need an entire fleet to do it.
Ma Gangryong from Veritas spent his first few weeks at Ninja School mouthing off to people stronger than himself, and then getting beat up. He later reveals that he mouths off because it makes the highly refined fighters around him angry, and thus sloppy, which is his style. He also points out that after having lost so many fights, everyone thinks he's weak, and that they'll continue to think so long after he's surpassed them.
In One Piece, Luffy does do some pretty silly things once in while (OK, almost all the time), but he has shown an amazing insight into certain things. Like with Alabasta, he pointed out that in order to stop the rebellion, they should stop Crocodile and not the pawns that he tricked into rebelling. Then, at Thriller Park, with some of the crew having lost their shadows and worried about confronting their own shadows, Luffy simply reminded everyone that by beating Moria, everyone's shadows will come back. Which also sorta counts as When All You Have Is A Hammer since he's pointed out that all pirating skills are beyond him, he just has to be able to apply his one skill the best: beating the crap out of the strongest guy who happens to be in their way.
- Zoro too has his moments. Usually, he's seen sleeping, drinking or off fighting. But at Alabasta, he was the one who thought of the white bandage for them to separate them from the enemy. But the real brillance comes when there was a symbol of an X underneath the bandage. If one of the enemy pretending to be them can't do that, then they would know it's the enemy. Even Sanji calls him out on it, thinking that it was a little suspicious that someone like Zoro was able to think of something so clever like that.
  - While Luffy and Zoro more have screwy personalities that make it seem impossible they actually possess any form of brain, Sanji perhaps is the only one who puts on the stupidity intentionally. The best strategical mind on the Strawhats, he often looks just far enough ahead to pull a vital string that ends up saving the lot of them down the line. See in Water 7 when he realized Robin would be leaving via sea train and ran off early to stow away when everyone else was still messing around trying to figure out what to do. Ask him what he was doing beforehand? "he has to go see about a lady" Faced with the second best fighter in Croc's posse, and confronted as to whether or not he was the code-named orchestrator of the Strawhat's escape? No, he's "just a simple sea cook." He stays out of sight, doesn't give his name, and acts like an idiot and generally ends up, as Zoro pointed out mockingly, in the convenient position of being a badass (Zoro left that part out) who everyone takes to be "pirate A" That does have the unfortunate side effect of his bounty poster though.
In Axis Powers Hetalia, during the WWI scene, Germany thinks that North Italy is trying to use this on him. He's wrong, because North Italy really is The Ditz.
Hellbat in Transformers Victory acts like a devoted and none-too-bright servant, but is in reality is waiting for just the right moment to overthrow Leozack and Deathsaurus. Since Leozack also wants to overthrows Deathsaurus...
It's a mystery how Shigure has escaped mention for so long. Most of the time, he seems to just be a lazy, lecherous idiot of a novelist whose hobby is playing evil pranks on his poor editor in order to avoid his deadlines. As a matter of fact, it turns out he was actually a Manipulative Bastard all along. And possibly also a lazy, lecherous idiot. His acting is so convincing it's tough to say just how much of it was Obfusicating and how much was real.
Someone watching Darker Than Black who doesn't know about the second-episode plot revelation is likely to be thinking something like "What the... Li is the Black Shinigami?" when it rolls around. It also works on other characters.
Recently, in Kampfer Kaede has been shown constantly as the Innocent Bystander that always gets into trouble and likes female-Natsuru, but she is actually in league with the Moderators and has been manipulating almost everyone into doing her bidding.
While not as intelligent as Magnificent Bastard Light or genius L, Misa Amane of Death Note is smarter than your average blonde ditz. Although her impulsiveness almost gives her away and irritates Light, she did take reasonable precautions in an attempt to not leave evidence and is even arranges the meeting between her and Light right in front of L's nose. She even realizes that Light doesn't love her and that he is using her and will possibly kill her, she just doesn't care; unlike the calm and collected Kiyomi Takada.
Sakamoto Tatsuma from Gintama appears to be a fool almost every time he is on screen. But how can that be, when he is one of the most successful businessman in the galaxy? Not to mention that a flashback shows him to be a serious, intelligent former resistance fighter.
Mr. Berlitz commissioned Ignor and Phool to watch over Platina, who mistook Diamond and Pearl for her bodyguards (I&P were supposed to be the bodyguards in the first place). Given their antics in the time you see them, coupled with their names being variants of the word "idiot", you'd think the man was a baka himself. Per this trope, looks belie talent, and the two are very capable battlers with their Burmy and Buizel, as Saturn had the misfortune of discovering at the Lost Tower. Burmy's leaf coat was knocked off and it was isolated from it, but I&P used the damage to their advantage with their Pokemon conducting a whirlwind attack - the end result of which smothered the lens of Saturn's droid with leaves, effectively leaving the Galactic Admin blind and his Pokemon hopelessly outmatched.
Pokemon: Okay, it's not really by choice, but this was Psyduck's whole schtick when he was in the show. 90% of the time, Psyduck was borderlining on mentally handicapped. But when he gets bonked on the head, his retardation goes away and he becomes totally badass with his powerful psychic attacks. Then it eventually wears off and he's handicapped again.

Calvin is apparently a user of this trope, as he once told Susie that it's far easier to keep people's expectations low, and wow them every now and again, then to keep them high and wind up disappointing at some point.
Arguably deconstructed in Watchmen (well, what isn't?): instead of playing dumb, as Batman is famous for doing, Ozymandias is sure to let the entire world know just how smart he is. It works just as well in avoiding suspicion when he kills millions of people to prevent a nuclear war, because no one could imagine the world's smartest man would be behind it.

And speaking of Clark Kent, some incarnations of Superman (especially the iconic portrayal by Christopher Reeve) had their Clark Kenting rely almost completely on Clark Kent being a clumsy, timid stick-in-the-mud (albeit not stupid), so nobody would seriously entertain the notion that this farm boy could be the Man of Steel. Indeed, it was a running joke throughout the Golden and Silver Ages that Clark couldn't get a date with Lois Lane because she was only interested in the brave, physically-capable Superman.
- This tactic is hardly unique to Superman; Batman relies quite strongly on his public persona of "Bruce Wayne, idjit." Averted in the Animated Series, where he's portrayed as the head of the Wayne Enterprises and a shrewd businessperson, but still having a rather... enthusiastic attitude towards social activities.
  - Also averted in the ''Batman'' TV Series, where Bruce Wayne is known throughout Gotham for his philanthropy and upstanding citizenship, and has even been approached to run for mayor. These attributes get turned up to eleven when he's Batman.
- Also mostly averted in Superman The Animated Series. In it, Clark Kent comes off as an arguably competent human being, and could probably get around just fine in the world even if he didn't have his Superman powers.
  - Arguably competent? Lois Lane becomes increasingly exasperated that "Smallville" is fast becoming a better reporter than she is, and the friendly sniping between them puts Clark Kent on an even footing with her.
It's also true of Peter Parker. In the early days, no one would have suspected bookish, shy Peter Parker of being the web-slinging, wise-cracking Spider-Man. This remained true as he ended up a science teacher.
- Not anymore! Muahaha!
  - In a way you could count old Spidey himself. Given a fighting style centered around agility and dodging and the habit of acting like he is goofing around and being annoying and distracting, much like Deadpool, most people would not believe he is a genius level scientist, and even without that, people also seem to forget he constantly holds himself back. Of course, if you seriously piss him off beyond his restraint levels and he drops his Friendly Neighbourhood persona... well.... lets just say you better pray he regains his incredible restraint.
Grunge of Gen13, both pre and post-Worldstorm. The post-Worldstorm versions works very hard to give the impression that he's a stupid slacker, due to bad experiences when he was younger and still extremely nerdy. Pre-worldstorm, he takes the same advanced biology classes as the team's resident genius, Fairchild.
Grimlock of Transformers (at least in the Marvel comics) was depicted as affecting his speech impediment to both make opponents underestimate him and because of his own belief that intellectuals are inferior. He was like a Dubya that actually knew what he was doing.
While it's not always clear that he's doing it on purpose, it's been said more than once that one of Deadpool's "superpowers" is actually the ability to distract and confuse people by rambling on and on about stupid things until you either want to surrender or commit suicide from all the inanity - and yet, the whole time he's rambling, he's efficiently killing or otherwise getting on with whatever task is at hand. Often people underestimate him as a complete idiot because of all the talking, although occasionally someone will say he's an idiot but not underestimate his fighting abilities. For his part, Deadpool has occasionally implied that he knows the effect the constant rambling has, but most of the time it appears to be just one of the traits that make him crazy ol' Deadpool.
- Both. His constant, irritating, non-sequitur monologuing and erratic behaviour is exactly why he could beat the crap out of The Taskmaster. Not only because Taskmaster became so irritated by the constant flood of inanity that he got all distracty, but also because he couldn't copy Deadpool's unpredictability and insanity. And Deadpool knew precisely what he was doing by unleashing it in spades. But yeah, mostly he's just nuts.
- During Civil War, he used the phrase "addled moron that I am (or pretend to be)". This being Deadpool, it's entirely possible the "or" should be taken at face value, and he's genuinely too crazy to know how intelligent he is at any given moment.
From Garfield: Odie, probably. Or he might be Genius Ditz.
- This is deliberately shown in one strip, when Odie watches Jon, then Garfield exit the house with a wicked smile... only to settle down in a smoking-jacket, pipe, in a plush recliner, watching a show on Classical music with a copy of War & Peace nearby.
11-year-old Molly Hayes, the youngest of the Runaways, seems to have the mentality of a six-year-old most of the time. However, she sometimes reveals herself to be at least as mature as her teammates, who are all in their mid-to-late teens. At one point, Molly's telepathic father states that she "acts childlike to lower people's defenses", but actually has "a ferocious intellect".
- Reaches its funniest point when time-displaced Geoff Wilder calls her on it.
  Molly: Please, mister! Don't hurt me!
  Wilder: Skip the waterworks, kid. Your cloying Rudy Huxtable routine is just an act you put on to get attention from your older friends. Why don't you behave like the bright young woman we both know you are?
  Molly: Fine. Your son took after you, you know. He was a total frickin' failure.
Booster Gold acts like a publicity-seeking fool to cover up the fact that he's been tasked with protecting the timestream. (Although he's not exactly a genius.)
- One of the better examples of this is when Booster Gold takes the first punches from Doomsday during the Death of Superman story. The team later realizes that Booster, being from the future, knew that Doomsday was destined to kill Superman, but fought him anyway.
- But that also means Booster knew he would come back.
Plastic Man is usually portrayed as being genuinely a bit dopey. During "World War III," Grant Morrison's final story arc for JLA, however, he reveals that, thanks to his longtime friendship with a C List Fodder hero named the Red Bee, he knows just about everything there is to know about "apian management." Since an alien Evil Overlady named the Queen Bee is taking over New York City, and all the big-name heroes are busy on the Moon, Plastic Man ends up masterminding their victory. Big Barda even mentions how out of character this is for him, remarking, "This almost seems like a plan." To which he responds (while disguised as a big clown), "I only act dumb, sister."

During the late '90s, Usagi of Sailor Moon practically ruled this trope. It was all the rage for fanfic writers to make Usagi into a God Mode Sue who was only pretending to be an idiot, often by leaving the Inners and dropping the act. That she still can't write proper hiragana as queen and routinely swipes her kid's candy in the canon is conveniently ignored.

Bill Cosby: Himself
Bill: (on being incompetent fathers who use incompetence to get out of chores) You see, we are dumb, but we're not so dumb.
Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates Of The Caribbean. You might think he's quite a harmless fellow when you lock him in chains, but if you start a 10 minute long conversation with him, he'll probably talk you into opening his chains, steal your pistol and threathen you with it, make a break for it and steal the ship you should be guarding before you can even realize what the hell just happened. And when you reach out for your pocket to get the whistle and call the guards you'll notice that your wallet is also missing... the quotes below give great examples:
Norrington: "No additional shot nor powder, a compass that doesn't point north... (looks at Jack's sword) And I half expected it to be made of wood. You are without doubt the worst pirate I've ever heard of."
Captain Jack Sparrow: "But you have heard of me."
—>(shortly after, when their ship is stolen by two people, including Jack)
Lt. Groves: "That has to be the best pirate I've ever seen."
Norrington:(acidly) "So it would seem."
- In At World's End, referring to Jack again,
  Lt. Groves: "Does he plan it all out beforehand, or just make it up as he goes along?"
- Ragetti, who is revealed to know more and more as the movies go on.
If you watch The Wizard Of Oz closely, you will notice that the "brainless" Scarecrow is the one who has all the ideas, comes up with the plan to sneak into the witches' castle, and even (at the climax) manages to think quickly enough to use the Tin Man's axe to drop a chandelier on the witches' soldiers. This is even more pronounced in the original book, where he comes up with clever solutions to nearly every obstacle and monster that the Witch of the West and Oz itself throws at them.
- Of course, that was rather the point - the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man also always had the traits (bravery and heart) that they wanted the Wizard to grant them, which is why he gave each of them nothing more than an item to act as confidence builders.
- In Wicked, the musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz, it is implied that the Scarecrow, actually a transformed Winkie prince, knew he was the most intelligent of the group, but faked stupidity so that he could join up with Dorothy and return to Elphaba.
Zatoichi, in the series of movies of the same name, posed as a harmless blind masseur (he really was blind) until it came time for either intimidation or the mass slaughter of the Evil Minions.
- In at least one movie he actually can see, but pretends to be blind in order to gain a blind person's insight. Seriously. It makes more sense when he says it.
In the 2006 Pink Panther remake, it is revealed that Inspector Clouseau could speak Chinese all along and figured out who the killer was when the Chinese woman named "Yu" was brought in for questioning. His rant about actually knowing Chinese turned out to be true.
Budd from Kill Bill is depicted to be a drunken redneck who works as a bouncer for a titty bar. Nonetheless he has shown a philosophical side and was able to take down (but not kill) Beatrix Kiddo by faking unawareness that she's hiding around his trailer and blasting her with rock salt when she busts through his door, all other Deadly Vipers having died (or been blinded) by the hand/blade of Kiddo. He then proceeds to paralyze her with an injection, and reveals he was planning to capture her all along.
- Budd is the only of the vipers not to be killed by The Bride.
- Not to mention the Bride acting like a dumb American tourist when she first meets Hattori Hanzo and his assistant, who themselves have a double act as the harmless, jovial old sushi chef and... his assistant.
Silent Bob, from Kevin Smith's View Askewniverse appears to be little more then Jay's silent companion, only less exuberant and dumber. It turns out that he's quite knowledgeable. Your Mileage May Vary; Silent Bob may seem smarter than Jay because his friend is very loud.
The cat's been out of the bag for a while now, but many people were probably surprised to learn that the annoying little green monster in Star Wars: Episode V was actually Jedi Master Yoda when they first saw the movie.
- And then there's the fight scene in Episode II with Count Dooku. A power-hungry, arrogant noble? Perhaps. He can also spank two of the finest Jedi in the order single-handedly and hold his own against one of the greatest Force-users of all time.
  - He is acknowledged in the novelizations to have been a particularly powerful Jedi before he was turned. He returned to his estates when he (formally and openly) left the Jedi Order. His superiority to Anakin and Obi-Wan is explained in the novelizations by the fact that Qui-Gon Jinn was his Padawan and he was therefore well attuned to anything Obi-Wan or Anakin might throw at him - at least until such time as they cooked things up between them and completely changed their personal fighting styles so as to be a better match for him.
Jackie Chan tends to play these kinds of characters, particularly in Rush Hour, when he allows Chris Tucker's character to believe he doesn't speak English. Tucker gets him back, though, when he reveals that he can speak Chinese just fine.
- The Screwups Reel makes it quite clear, however, that Tucker himself can't.
- Given that Carter's Chinese proficiency disappears in the second movie (set in Hong Kong, no less), the most likely explanation is that he only knew enough to talk to the stewardess and prank Lee at the end of the first film.
In the 1940 film The Mark of Zorro, Diego de la Vega plays the featherbrained fop to lull the corrupt Governor Quintero, while, as the masked swashbuckler Zorro, trying to frighten Quintero out of the country.
- Also done in the 1920 film by the same title.
- And the 1974 made for TV movie with the same title. Frank Langella's portrayal of foppish Diego de la Vega is the greatest bit of the film...
The janitor in the horror film Disturbing Behavior pretends to be mentally handicapped because it causes people around him to drop their guard and become "interesting."
In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Glenne Headly plays an extremely ditzy poor little rich girl who is an obvious target of the two cons, Steve Martin and Michael Caine. Turns out that she was counter-conning them from the beginning.
Doofy, the killer, in the first Scary Movie.
In The Usual Suspects, Keyzer Söze and (seriously, don't look if you don't already know) Verbal Kint. Or, more appropriately... Keyzer Söze.
- Seriously?
In Superman III, villain Ross Webster's assistant and girlfriend Lorelei acts the part of the Dumb Blonde but is secretly highly intelligent (when alone she reads Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and disputes one of Kant's arguments). As a result she's able to outwit Ross and his sister.
In Horse Feathers, Connie plays up her football ignorance to try to get Professor Wagstaff to share his secret signals. She overdoes her childlike ditziness, so either he sees right through the ruse or he thinks she needs to snap out of it.
Roger Rabbit spells it out in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and implies that obfuscating stupidity is second nature to a toon:
Roger: (to Judge Doom and the Weasels) We toons may act idiotic, but we're not stupid!
Subverted in The Court Jester: some of the villains, believing the title character is either an assassin they hired or a Robin Hood-esque resistance leader, believe he's doing it. In fact, he's actually a carnival performer who really is that twitchy and bumbling.
Sir Roger Moore's James Bond uses this several times.
Lampshaded in Scream 2, when Dewey claims he is using a form of this trope:
Dewey: "How do you know that my dimwitted inexperience isn't merely a subtle form of manipulation, used to lower people's expectations, thereby enhancing my ability to effectively manuever within any given situation?"
(a brief pause, then Gale starts laughing)
Samantha "Sam" Sparks in Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was secretly a nerd in her school days but hides her brains behind the facade of the pretty, ditzy weathergirl for fear of being stigmatised. It adds another layer to the character that she is voiced by Anna Faris who is more well known for playing genuinely ditzy characters.
In Mr. Baseball, Tom Sellick plays an American baseball player who signs up with a Japanese team. The team's manager appears not to know English through most of the film, causing grief for Sellick's character when he finally finds out.
True Lies does this beautifully several times, though it borders on ridiculous when Harry calls the obvious nuclear warhead an espresso machine...

Folk legends of various European peoples speak of entire towns and villagesof unusually smart folks who purposefully feign stupidity. This article on the Other Wiki sums it up pretty well.
The story of Hamlet is based on the legend of the Danish Prince Amled, whose father was murdered by his Evil Uncle Fenge. Amled took to sitting near the fire and carving wooden hooks all day, telling everyone that he would use them to avenge his father. Fenge thought he was crazy - until the night where Amled used the hooks to pin down Fenge and his men under their sleeping blankets and burn down the palace over their heads before they could get free.

Hamlet and its sources are a variant on this. In the original Amleth, the main character feigns madness and an irrational obsession with sharpening sticks. Eventually, he uses these sharpened sticks to help pin down the woollen hangings in a dining hall, setting fire to them and letting his enemies roast alive.
- Actually, its never quite clear whether Hamlet is faking being insane, or if he really has gone whackadoodle.
Fizban, a wizard in the original trilogy of Dragonlance books often casts spells wrong, is completely senile, and often poses a danger to himself and the heroes whenever they encounter him. Although he does take on a completely different (and scary) personality when angered AND rides a gold dragon, he puts up a particularly hare-brained Dumbledore facade so convincing it has even the reader fooled until near the end when it's revealed that he's actually Paladine, Head god of the good-aligned deities on Krynn in mortal guise.
- The same character returns as "Zifnab" in The Death Gate Cycle by the same authors.
  - Well, almost the same character. He's actually old enough to remember our world, and deliberately acts out roles from stories familiar to the readers, and mentions many others. While the Fizban-performance is his main schtick, he's also fond of playing James Bond.
  - Also, while some of Zifnab's weirdness is of this variety, most of it seems to be genuine, while Fizban is one form of a god who seems to like using weird avatars, but the specific forms this takes are only assumed and vary from form to form.
Several characters in the Discworld series:
- In Maskerade, Nanny Ogg is described as having "a mind like a buzz saw behind a face like an elderly apple". She may be the ultimate example of this trope, as her "genial old biddy" facade is so perfect that she's even got Granny Weatherwax fooled.
  - Speaking of Maskerade… Walter Plinge.
  - That one might be more a case of multiple personalities - one of which was genuinely stupid while the other was brilliant.
  - Speaking of Nanny Ogg, in Thief Of Time she showed some of her real genius by keeping up with even Susan Sto Helit.
- After Death is fired in Reaper Man, he moves out into the country where his unerring skill at darts earns him the dislike of the other villagers. He quickly uses his exceptional skill to play "badly" — for example, bouncing the dart off a post and hitting the hat of the man behind him — thus winning everyone over.
- Arguably, Captain Carrot of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. While usually portrayed as a genuinely uncomplicated character who takes everything at face value, it is observed that "someone has to be very complex indeed to be as simple as Carrot". You can almost see the transition of Captain Carrot from Crouching Moron Hidden Badass to this trope in Men at Arms. He goes from a person unable to detect irony and having trouble with metaphors to reaching "agreements" with Vetinari and deception. Angua notes in Thud! that
  that was Carrot at work. He could sound so innocent, so friendly, so...stupid, in a puppy-dog kind of way, and then he suddenly become this big block of steel and you walked right into it.
  - A little more than arguably, really. For example, in Night Watch he manages to figure out that Commander Vimes has traveled through both time and space, scant seconds after being given a lot of very big words from a Ponder Stibbons, resident Rocket Wizard. This upsets Stibbons because he never expected someone who wasn't a wizard, much less a watchman, to catch on that quickly.
- Although Rincewind really is an incompetent coward, some characters are convinced that he's faking it since he has survived multiple situations where, by all rights, he should be dead. If he saw it as something to do as a routine and not a survival tactic, his penchant for running would probably mean he'd get on well with the Archchancellor, who is quite fond of morning jogs.
  - Though he is revealed as a linguistic genius (in the novel Interesting Times), capable of begging for his life in languages that have only been shouted at him for a few minutes. Turned into a running gag by translating his grunts and shouts of pain into random-ish curses from various countries he's been run out of. Despite his penchant to run away from everything, he is still one of the most frequent survivors of the Discworld to date. In fact, he's so good at not-dying that, in The Color of Magic, a girl from Krull with a clearly very powerful weapon and a distinct advantage over him is quavering in fear, because she knows that most people who underestimate him end up dead or regretting it.
  - It should also be mentioned that Rincewind is so good a staying alive that one of the spells in the Octavo hid in his head, figuring it was the safest spot it could find. Also, it is important to realize that one reason Rincewind survives is that The Lady (Lady Luck) favors him, because it is so unlikely he could survive.
  - It's worth reminding that Rincewind's survivability is so ingrained that even Death has no idea when he'll finally die. Rincewind's lifetimer looks like an hourglass made by a glassblower with hiccups, and sits on Death's desk as a curio.
  But Rincewind in full flight had catlike, even messianic abilities. The water barely rippled under his feet as he bounced off the surface and headed away.
- Detritus the troll. His basic reasoning may be tied to the ambient temperature (trolls, having silicon-based brains, run hot away from their mountain homes) that puts him squarely in Crouching Moron Hidden Badass in low temps but he has developed more than a little guile over the course of several books. So much guile that he has been known to remind people of the stereotypes they are supposed to expect from him: No worry I are just der big dumb troll nevermind dis here notepad I am just countin' ma toes.
  - Ankh-Morpok's most famous "Legitimate Businessman", Chrysophrase, is also smarter than your average troll, and while he does show off this fact, he has been known to disguise just how much smarter he is, such as intentionally using Hulk Speak when he's fully capable of speaking normally. According to Vimes, he's managed to outthink and outmaneuver all of Ankh-Morpork's native crime lords even when not sitting in a pile of snow.
- Camels are the most intelligent creatures on the Disc, or at least the most gifted mathematicians (long desert travel being good for producing such), and smart enough to not show it to humans. How do you think they can spit so accurately?
- Lu Tze, aka "The Sweeper", a superlatively multi-talented member of the Monks of History who goes everywhere and sees everything as an apparently brainless old floor sweeper. He makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in several books, in places where something big is about to go down(such as the Temple of Offler in Going Postal).
- For someone who is loud and boisterous, oblivious and thick as a brick, Mustrum Ridcully is a remarkably skilled wizard who somehow manages to make Unseen University run despite keeping wizards under control being akin to herding cats. In many cases he seems to let other people think out loud for him while he works out the solution and is frequently Crazy Prepared. Also his personality radically shifts to a quiet, polite and mature gentleman wizard when he gets to spend personal time with Granny Weatherwax.
  - He manages to point out in The Last Continent that going back in time to tread on ants is perfectly fine because in a linear universe history 'relies' on you having already done it, which show that under all that obfuscation there is indeed a powerful intellect.
- Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer, plays the Funny Foreigner aspect of stereotypical Uberwaldian vampires to the hilt in order to make humans forget the fact that, if so inclined, he could easily rip them limb from limb.
- Lieutenant Blouse appears repeatedly to be a useless, incompetent officer who exasperates the experienced Sergeant Jackrum in every scene, yet astounds William De Worde by extrapolating the mechanics of the Clacks system without even seeing them up close
  - He is also able to disguise himself effectively as a washerwoman. Getting passed guards who stopped the rest of the troop despite the fact the were all women, who were for the majority of the book pretending to be men (Blouse was incidentally completely fooled).
Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot frequently represents himself to suspects as a vain, obsessive-compulsive, language-mangling Belgian emigre — a more outlandish version of himself, in other words — in order to give them a false sense of superiority over him.
"It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say - a foreigner - he can't even speak English properly. It is not my policy to terrify people - instead, I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! An Englishman he says often, 'A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that cannot be worth much.' That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. And so, you see, I put people off their guard."
Miss Marple, also in Agatha Christie's books, passes as a doddering old lady, but has a mind like a razor—or, as one police official put it, "like a bacon slicer".
Gerda Christow in Christie's The Hollow is rather slow-minded, but realized that life is much easier if she pretends to be dumber than she is, because nobody expects anything for her.
Sticking with Golden Age detectives, Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey does "a perfect imitation of the silly-ass-about-town". It's a sign that he's either "bored or detecting something."
Another variation has the character introduced as insane ("mad") until they're revealed in the climax, either as a hidden Mac Guffin, or a Deus Ex Machina. Tad Williams' novel Tailchaser's Song does this to great effect. Less skilled authors may make the "mad" character so annoying that nobody cares during The Reveal.
Orr from Catch-22 is portrayed as one of the crazier members of the 256th Squadron, who becomes far more proficient at crashing the airplanes he flies than actually flying them, until it's revealed that he was deliberately crashing at sea as practice so he could fake his death and desert to a neutral country.
In Funeral in Berlin the English spy, No Name Given, appears to be not very bright, at least to amateurs. When the assistant to Colonel Stok (a professional Soviet spy) mentions this, Stok tells him that is the height of professionalism.
Simon Mead and Hugh Pierce in the Selena Mead stories both do this.
Ward of Hurog, protagonist of Patricia Briggs' Hurog Duology, started feigning brain damage as a young boy to protect himself from his abusive father. As Ward is officially next in line for his father's title, his apparent incompetence becomes something of an obstacle later on.
In Loretta Chase's romance novel Mr. Impossible, Loveable Rogue Rupert Carsington loves acting like a "great dumb ox" around the intelligent heroine Daphne, and frequently makes outrageously stupid comments just to enjoy the sight of her in a temper or, in more serious situations, to prevent her from crying or fainting by focusing her energy on rebuking him.
Hendricks, in The Dresden Files. Made clear in "Small Favor", though many fans suspected him as far back as "Storm Front".
- Also, Thomas the White Court vampire:
  "Don't look at me. I'm a drunken, chemical-besotted playboy who does nothing but cavort, sleep, and feed. And even if I had the mind to take a bit of vengeance on the Red Court, I wouldn't have the backbone to actually stand up to anyone." He flashed me a radiant smile. "I'm totally harmless."
- Based on a couple comments by Lara Raith in Blood Rites that White Court vamps do this all the time.
Jim Butcher is fond of this one: Fade, in his Codex Alera, fits perfectly as well: he appears to be merely Tavi's simpleton slave, who follows him around but doesn't do much. Until he defeats dozens of talented warriors with only his sword, including the man known to be the best swordsman since Araris Valerian died. Turns out, he is Araris, hiding in shame. After that scene, he goes back to being merely Fade, the simpleton slave; only Tavi knows otherwise.
Jim Butcher is VERY fond of this one: In the Spider Man novel he wrote "The Darkest Hours", Rhino, who has a normal level of inteligence, pretends to be dumber than he is so the rest of Spidey's villians, many of whom are of genius level intelignce, will underestimate him.
Sun Kai, in the Temeraire series, uses a form of Obfuscating Stupidity to trick the main characters into ignoring him when he's in their presence. It later turns out that he is in fact an ally.
Lou Ford, the narrator of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, comes off as a cornball country bumpkin sheriff with a penchant for faux-philosophical musings ("The child is father to the man") and not an ounce of insincerity in him. He's actually fluent in at least three languages, has virtually memorized his late father's extensive library of scientific and historical literature, does academic-level math problems for fun and annoys people with the hayseed act mostly as an outlet for his psychopathic sadism (the novel soon provides him with a better one).
Jupiter Jones from The Three Investigators is the smartest person in the group, but because he is a former child actor and a little plump, he can act unintelligent in order to disarm people and get information from them that he wouldn't get otherwise.
The classic example of The Scarlet Pimpernel, of course. The Pimpernel's public identity of Sir Percy Blakeney is a total fop (which even his wife believes to be his real self) - a facade to misdirect suspicion that he might be the hero who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine.
Admiral Lester "Cowboy" Tourville from Honor Harrington series affected a persona of a brash, loud, and apparently apolitical, well, cowboy, that helped him survive several rounds of State Sec purges in the notoriously unfair Havenite Navy. All that despite being a brilliant tactician and rather ambitious person (the prime targets of said purges), who had a significant role in the plot that overthrew Saint-Just regime. He still acts it now, but mostly out of habit.
- Obfuscating drunkenness is part of Kevin Usher's defense against the aforementioned State Sec ( well, that and being owed a favor by the aformentioned Saint-Just, for his role in the conspiracy to overthrow the Legislaturalists).
  "Lesson number—what is it, now?—eight, I think. A reputation for being a drunk can keep you out of as much trouble as being one gets you into." [Usher] padded to his couch and sunk into it. "I've got a high capacity for alcohol, but I don't drink anywhere near as much as people think."
The Ender's Shadow series, the quartet spinoff of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, features layers upon layers of geniuses allowing themselves to be underestimated, even by other geniuses who should have known better. The best example would have to be Peter's parents, who were well aware of his and Valentine's political shenanigans in Ender's Game and feigned ignorance so they wouldn't interfere with their childrens' development. Peter's mother even chews him out about it, being so arrogant in his own brilliance that it never occurred to him he might have inherited it from anybody. To his credit, he's humbled by this when he realizes how obvious it should have been, had he not been so self-absorbed.
- This even applies to whole nations, especially when counseled by former military child geniuses. Topping them all might have to be the old USA, which wasn't just a wishy-washy loudmouthed former worldpower in the pocket of China's massive economy, as everybody believed. It was pretty much running the International Fleet all along, and could have made a bid for world domination had it chosen that road. Instead, it used those resources to build and support the first waves of human interstellar colonization, sending humanity (i.e. Americans) out for GALACTIC domination.
This tactic was sometimes employed to great effect by Sherlock Holmes (most successfully in The Adventure of the Reigate Squires).
Emperor Sarabian of David Eddings' Tamuli: the entire court in Matherion was convinced he was either an utter dolt, a harmless fop, or a simple fool easily distracted by his silly hobbies. He reveals the truth to Ehlana, Sparhawk, and the others, and eventually proceeds to overthrow his own government, take proper control of the empire, single-handedly remove all the corrupt courtiers involved in a failed coup, and become a wise and effective ruler. And he has such a delightful time doing it.
Simon Templar, The Saint, often uses this technique. He pretends to be a wealthy foppish sucker, and an easy mark for confidence tricksters. He then turns the trick around, and persuades them to give money to him.
Lee is the smartest character in East of Eden, but practices the pidgin Chinese and servant position expected of him. When questioned about this, he answers that the servant position gives him safety and power (he runs the house). Although he was born and raised in San Francisco, and well educated, he speaks pidgin English, because most white people expected it, and wouldn't understand him if he spoke correctly.
In the Destroyer, Remo is stupid, but this trope applies since he could kill you a hundred different ways, despite looking like a weakling.
The reader is told on the first page that Fyodor Karamazov is muddleheaded, and yet was extremely shrewd. Later on, the reader can see this for himself.
Despite his nickname, Ivan "You Idiot" Vorpatril from Bujold's various Miles Vorkosigan books is rather brighter than average (although probably not as bright as his aformentioned cousin). He is also somewhat lazy, distinctly unambitious, and widely regarded as being a few heartbeats from the throne of Barrayar; the latter of which makes him rather loathe to seem more than an idle cad of marginal competence. He habitually avoids any heroics he can unless he is blatantly a lackey bullied into assisting more overbearing/proactive sorts, and as for politics....
... it was not that he ran screaming when the loaded subjects arose; that would attract too much attention. Saunter off slowly, that's the ticket.
- He's definitely on the par with his cousin, It Runs In The Family, after all. There's not a single person in Vorkosigan/Vorpatril(/Vorbarra) clan who isn't a genius, including their spouses from outside of The Clan. Batshit crazy — as much as you wish, especially on the Vorbarra side. Stupid, or even just ordinary — never.
  - And Miles has been put onto the right track by his "idiot cousin" asking the right "stupid question" at the right time a little too often for it to be entirely a coincidence.
In The Bible, David (of David and Goliath fame) was forced to flee (from Saul) to the court of the King of Gath, who happened to be an enemy of Israel. In order to protect his life, David pretended to be a raving madman, causing the king to think him harmless.
In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, an early book, The Courtship Of Princess Leia, introduced and killed villain of the book Warlord Zsinj, a hammishly over-the-top fat egocentric idiot who somehow happened to command a large fleet. Books in the X Wing Series, written later but set before, Ret Con him into being much more competent and deliberately putting on a faintly absurd act, knowing that most of the people he was around could see through it and would be a bit confused. It's effective enough that he was the first character considered dangerous enough for The Alliance and The Empire to work together against.
- Meanwhile, in the Hand Of Thrawn duology, Moff Disra had a very bland military aide, Major Grodin Tierce. Disra, looking up his aide's records, found that he was actually a Royal Guard - that is, the best of the best, a really good fighter - confronted Tierce about it, and... well. As part of a Big Bad Diumvirate, Tierce dropped the clueless act, letting people see him as a dangerous fighter, but whenever Pellaeon was around he took it up again. Tierce is a human clone with a little of Thrawn's mind in him.
  Suddenly the diffident and marginally competent Major Tierce who’d served as his military aide for eight months was gone. In his place stood a warrior. Disra had once heard it said that a discerning person could always recognize an Imperial stormtrooper or Royal Guard, whether he stood before you in full armor or lay dying on a sickbed. He’d always discounted such things as childish myths. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.
  - For that matter, the third member of the triumvirate had it pretty much in reverse. He could pull off a Thrawn impersonation to the point of having Thrawn's powerful, regal air, but his tactical knowledge was that of a con artist. When only the other members of the triumvirate are around he drops it.
- Survivor's Quest has the slavetaking nomadic Vagaari passing themselves off as Geroons, one of the people they took as slaves. As Geroons they fawn all over the Chiss and the Jedi and act like harmless cowards. But the Chiss know what they really are, and with the Jedi's help Out Gambitted them handily by the end of the book.
- Onimi, the real Big Bad of the New Jedi Order books, uses a variant of this. He pretends not so much to be stupid as to be insane in ways that make him annoying but harmless, when in fact he's insane in ways that are anything but.
I Claudius:
Pollio: Do you want to live a long and busy life, with honor at the end of it?
Claudius: Yes.
Pollio: Then exaggerate your limp, stammer deliberately, sham sickness frequently, let your wits wander, jerk your head and twitch with your hands on all public or semi-public occasions. If you could see as much as I see, you would know that this was your only hope of eventual glory.
In Crime And Punishment, detectiv Porfiry pretends to be a dumb clown. He isn't.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen verse by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont is full of these characters. Notable examples are Kruppe an intellect gods fear and resepct, Tehol Beddict and Bugg, himself actually an elder god. Possibly also Iskaral Pust, although he might just be genuinely mad.
In Raymond E. Feist's Riftwar Saga, there are several characters who fit this trope, namely Nakor, who nearly every single character he encounters makes a comment about him being "more than he appears." He comes off as a doddering old fool at times, a conniving gamblers at others, and one of the four most powerful magicians in the world at others, but is so clearly fighting for the side of good that nobody ever questions him in the least bit. However, it remains a question to be argued over whether he (or Banath) was fighting for good, or just playing around for fun.
In The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery two of the three main characters, a very precocious 12 year old girl and a middle aged, also brilliant, concierge are both hiding their abilities. The third main character is the catalyst that brings them to each others' attention, and helps them accept their gifts.
Genji in Cloud Of Sparrows acts like a wastrel lord who only cares for women and sake, and goes to view cranes just after the British navy bombards his Edo residence. Turns out he knew (almost) exactly what Kawakami was planning and who was intending to betray him.
It's disputed, whether the titular protagonist of The Good Soldier Švejk uses this, or he's just stupid.
The Seventh Tower has Ebbitt, who is believed by everyone to be insane (and he very well might be), but who also has some of the most extensive and accurate knowledge of the Chosen, their Castle, and light magic in existence. He mentions in passing that he once "chatted" with the Codex of the Chosen (a magical encyclopedia, essentially), which may explain where all his knowledge came from.
In Dune, Count Hasimir Fenring definitely counts as one of those. 'Umm-ah-hm-mm-mm', indeed! (He completely loses the affect/speech impediment when in private conversation about the Emperor's orders with the Baron.)
- It should be noted that in other books he does this on purpose, both to annoy people around him and to communicate secretly with his wife, who is a Bene Gesserit.
- The baron also describes him as "a killer with the manners of a rabbit ... the most dangerous kind."
- It is revealed in Heretics of Dune that the Tleilaxu have been doing this for thousands and thousands of years simply waiting for the right moment to ascend to power.
In Redwall, Matthias tricks the sparrows into believing he isn't a threat by pretending to be insane. King Bull Sparra does the same by pretending to be moronic.
On Zaphod Beeblebrox, from The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy:
"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distiguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted somebody else to do it for him, pretending to be outragiously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn't understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid."
- or:
  "He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which."
Artemis Fowl manages to rob one of the most secure banks in Europe by pretending to be a snotty teenager.
- Subverted in that everyone already knows Artemis is a genius, but according to one quote he never lets anyone know exactly how intelligent he is because they would be too scared.
In the two-volume Mordant's Need series by Stephen R. Donaldson, the hero King Joyce apparently became senile shortly after having done the usual saving the kingdom/world fantasy hero thing, and everyone keeps remarking that if he were his old self, he'd surely be able to come up with a way to deal with the mess they find themselves in today. (Yes, he's faking it; it wouldn't be listed here if he weren't.)
In The Heritage of Shannara segment of the Shannara metaseries, it is revealed that Cogline, the crazy old man first introduced in the original trilogy, is actually an extremely long-lived ex-Druid and a master of the old sciences who was only faking insanity for the sake of his own survival. Apparently he almost actually did go mad, but somehow stayed sane, and later became Walker Boh's mentor an close friend.
Employed by the American Indian narrator of One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest.
In the Judge Dee novel The Chinese Gold Murders, one character is a scribe who is known as Brilliant But Lazy- he is finance savvy, but is also a drunkard and is given to reciting poetry at any opportunity and seems like Plucky Comic Relief. However, circumstances soon appear which presents him as a Diabolical Mastermind in fact, he is on the side of the good guys and is a Master Of Disguise- he's actually a finance minister who is the twin brother of the novel's murder victim.
In Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, Eddie Dean starts off this way because of his crippling self doubt and a lifetime of making himself intentionally stupid/weak in order to protect his bid brother's ego.
Prince Nahrmahn of Emerald in David Weber's Safehold series is known to be far more intelligent than he allows himself to be credited for.
The Westing Game has two: Otis Amber, the 62-year-old delivery boy with definite Cloud Cuckoo Lander tendencies, is really a competent and professional (and sane) private investigator, though not all of his giddiness is an act. The real surprise is that Sandy McSouthers, the not-too-bright former boxer, is Sam Westing himself, and he manages to fool everyone, even the people who had met him in person as Sam Westing, until almost the very end.
The Lepar are an entire species made of this trope in The Damned Trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.
The p-p-p-poor st-st-st-stuttering Professor Quirrell.
- Ron Weasley was also fond of this trope particularly when it involved getting Hermione to do his homework
G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown has a tendency to stumble around acting dimwitted or like a Cloudcuckoolander (or, in The Blue Cross, simply acting memorably erratic - a tactic to get an inspector to follow him to the criminal) before suddenly whipping out the solution to the case.
Verin Mathwin from The Wheel Of Time certainly qualifies as using this. Not only is she a member of the Black Ajah (a secret society of Aes Sedai devoted to the Dark One) who only joined their ranks to ferret them out and betray them, but she is so good at hiding this very fact that she can do it in chapters of the books that are written from her own point of view. Her final admission of her membership, handing over of everything she'd found out, and subsequent death qualifies as a Crowning Moment Of Awesome in its own right.
Eugenides in the Queen's Theif series plays this differently in every book, fooling the reader for almost the entirety of the first book, and then proceeding to fool people who really, really should know better including, in the third book, the entirety of the country he'd single-handedly defeated in the previous book.
In The Kennel Murder Case, Liang tries to pull this off with his "can barely speak English" act, and it's implied that he succeeded as far as the Coe household went. Philo Vance saw through the act immediately — Liang was educated at Oxford.

The fact that The Amateur Transplants often affect a stage persona reminiscent of ignorant chavs just makes it all the more impresssive & hillarious when they rattle off lengthy amounts of obscure medical terms in their songs.

Subverted in the Trojan War. Odysseus really does not want to go to war in Troy, and attempts to invoke this trope by acting insane, such as by sowing and ploughing his fields with salt. Palamedes sees right through the ploy, and ensures that Odysseus doesn't attempt to dodge the draft by dropping his baby boy Telemachus in front of the plough's path. Considering what happens to him afterwards, though...
- The worst part is that in some versions, he gave Menelas the idea and authority to draft everyone else should Helen be abducted.

Lt. Columbo, famously. Maybe the single most well-developed example ever on television.
Used every few episodes by Detective Sledge Hammer: he is written off by everybody as a violent idiot, but then manages to crack the case, with a sudden admission that he had been taking notes all along — even if in most other episodes he was just a lucky idiot. This is even given a spot of Lampshade Hanging in one episode, when a game show host killed off a competitor who was getting close to the top prize. He avoided having to do this before by only recruiting idiots. When the sidekick is confused how someone that smart got on the show, Sledge enlightens us with this line: "You see, he looks dumb, but turned out to be a genius; a trick I’ve used myself."
Cordelia Chase in Buffy The Vampire Slayer initially appeared to be The Ditz, but a throw-away gag in Season Three revealed she was actually rather bright when she aced her SATs, and a minor sub-plot later in the season further established her academic creds. Her later appearances in Angel followed up on this development, showing her as far more intelligent than she had originally seemed (not that this was difficult).
- While many other Buffy characters can be guilty of Obfuscating Stupidity, one of the most glaring examples is "Comfortadore" Xander Harris, a bright, resourceful young man with all the potential in the world. He was also lazy, self-absorbed, and childish, and spent the first five seasons making stupid mistakes — many of them ghastly — then trying to cop-out of the responsibility by claiming to be a moron. Thankfully, he grew out of it.
In Doctor Who The Doctor, particularly in his second and fourth incarnations, often used to play the fool to lull his enemies into a false sense of security ("Would you care for a jelly baby?"). Most recently, in 'Family of Blood' whilst pretending to be still human, his blundering nervousness lulls the Family into such a state of arrogant superiority that they don't notice that the buttons he's 'accidentally' pushing will destroy their ship until it's much, much too late. This was occasionally subverted, as well, with the enemies realising that this was what he was doing - most notably in 'City of Death', in which Count Scarlioni's understanding of the Doctor prevents him from being deceived.
- The Seventh Doctor also has his moments of this, seeing how he often appears to play the buffoon only to continually outwit the enemy without effort. Particularly highlighted with his 'adjustment' of old quotes.
  The Doctor: "A stitch in time... takes up space."
- Dalek Caan in the new series' season 4 finale. He had been puttering away in the corner for much of the episode, before dropping the facade and revealing that he had been the one to lead the Doctor to the Medusa Cascade, manipulating events so that he would destroy the last of the Daleks and put an end to his own race. None of which makes a lick of sense, not least because they were already gone and thought beyond being revived even through time travel when Dalek Caan brought them back so they could be ended.
  - Shh!
  - Dalek Cann didn't intend to bring them back. He accidentally made an emergency temporal shift into the Time War and unwittingly provided a means of escape.
- The Dominators demonstrated what happens when this trope combines with Ham And Cheese. "The clever ones tell us what to do, you see!"
- To be fair you could name millions of these in Doctor Who alone, but the essential one's gotta be Smith and Jones, surely! "I must appear to be human..." "Well you're very welcome to come home and meet the wife, she'd be honoured. We can have cake!"
Other characters accuse Constable Benton Fraser of Due South of this, disbelieving he really is that polite, honest, and noble and it's not an act.
In Studio 60, we discover that Chinese businessman Zhang Tao has been pretending that he can't speak English because "it's fun". Jack Rudolph is not impressed.
President Logan on 24.
Lauren Graham (of Gilmore Girls fame) pulled off this stunt while participating in the second tournament of Celebrity Poker Showdown. Despite being known as a fairly intelligent woman, she would flip her hair and say generally stupid/sarcastic things ("So many numbers!") to throw off her competition. Not only did the other players fall for it, but Lauren went on to the Championship Game of the season, losing only to former co-star Maura Tierney.
Bull Shannon on Night Court, though only occasionally.
One episode of Jack Of All Trades revealed that George III was feigning his legendary madness in order to confuse Napoleon.
In 30 Rock, Kenneth is seen as the bumbling Polly Anna of the show, yet Jack thinks that "In five years we'll all be working for him... or dead by his hand."
- Tracy might be an example of Obfuscating Insanity. Although he is clearly quite genuinely nuts at times, he is also well aware of how much his fame and fortune rely on this fact. So he makes sure to act as bizarrely as possible, and gets offended when mistaken for normal. "If I'm normal I'm boring, if I'm boring I'm not a movie star."
Jayne Cobb on Firefly. While still not the highest caliber shell in the magazine, he acts thicker than he really is, as established in the very first episode.
- Mal exhibits this to some extent also, though it's an in-universe trait; the viewers know he's more intelligent than he lets on. Mal and Jayne reveal more in the episode where Malcom figures out that it was Jayne that sold them out to the Alliance during a heist. Jayne then shows a much deeper personal side when he asks Mal that if he's gonna kill him for betraying the crew, please don't tell anyone that's why he died; he'd rather they remembered him as the abrasive idiot than as a traitor.
- Another example of Jayne's intelligence is seen when he's asked by Mal to interrogate a prisoner. When the prisoner tells him a convincing lie, Jayne sees right through it and accuses the prisoner of not even trying.
Likewise, Colonel O'Neill on Stargate SG-1, while far from a rocket scientist, usually presented a snarky persona that appeared much dumber than he actually was, often to fool his enemies or simply to annoy his allies. Or maybe the other way around.
Otoya Kurenai from Kamen Rider Kiva combines this with his savant-level violin playing to pretty much get whatever he wants. The problem is that it works a little too well, and when he tries to tell people what's really going on the results are somewhat predictable.
Vila Restal from Blake's 7 is a genius safecracker/pickpocket who spends the majority of his time acting like a cowardly imbecile. While he is a coward, he isn't stupid.
- Very, very good at both obfuscating stupidity and drunkeness. He once managed to simultaneously tell the rest of the crew what difficult and dangerous technical feat they had to do to save the ship, and convince them he was FAR too drunk to do it himself.
  - Another time he figured out he should hold on to a looted sidearm because the guy whose hospitality they were sharing kept his booze under lock and key. Vila, a drinking man, found this very suspicious.
  - Some fans have speculated that Avon actually sees right through it, and his grudging respect for Vila's skill in bringing it off is the reason he never could bring himself to get rid of Vila once and for all.
Most everyone on Burn Notice uses this at some point, being a spy show it is what they do. On many occasions Bad Ass Michael has had to allow himself to be beaten up as part of his Batman Gambit. At one point he went all out and walked with a lanky stride, had matted and greasy hair, talked about two pitches higher then normal and came complete with an inhaler.
- For that matter, Michael's normal personality (or generic one when he's working a cover) when he isn't on the job has some elements of being a snarky idiot just to put people at ease.
- Sam basically embodies this completely. The initial impression one gets of him is a slightly overweight womanizer who chugs beers and has about as much insight as a sixth grader. While the first part is still completely true, one learns over the course of the series that he's a former Navy SEAL, has numerous contacts across multiple government agencies, and can be just as manipulative and technologically proficient as Michael or Fi.
In an episode of Unhappily Ever After, Tiffany tests the hypothesis that guys prefer stupid girls by playing the part of two people—a smart person with glasses and a Ditz without—for the same guy.
- A similar plotline was also used in an episode of The Love Boat (female Hollywood Nerd starts acting ditzy and vapid to get a date).
Robert Goren on Law and Order: Criminal Intent's unassuming demeanor and odd mannerisms tend to actually become the frightening point about him when he corners the criminals.
Lauren "Am I bovvered" Cooper from The Catherine Tate Show appears to her teachers to be a dim, rude, and dismissive teenage layabout. She is rude and dismissive, but certain sketches have revealed her to be smarter than she appears. She can recite from memory obscure Shakespeare, she has memorized at least part of the Periodic table of elements, and can converse in fluent French. It seems she is pretending to be dim as to not be alienated by her much dimmer friends (while been smart enough to manipulate them).
Andy Pipkin from Little Britain, who onscreen is shown to be a monosyllabic dolt, however in many of the sketches, when Andy says he wants (to do) something he doesn't like, Lou will remind him that he expressed a negative opinion of said thing, some of which make him sound like a philosopher.
Lou (to Andy): But I thought you didn't like tattoos. You once told me they were nothing more than graffiti over God's work.
- Mind you, in a season three episode Andy responded to Lou saying something along those lines with "stop paraphrasing me".
In Star Trek Enterprise's "In a Mirror Darkly," Mirror Hoshi pulls it on both the characters and the audience. She seems like nothing more than a willing consort for whoever her captain is at the moment, then at the end she poisons Mirror Archer and declares herself Empress of the Terrans.
Tony DiNozzo in NCIS comes across as an immature Jerk Jock Handsome Lech who spends far more energy goofing off, chasing women, and giving his teammates a hard time than he does actually investigating. When he has to get serious, however, he quickly proves that he is not only a highly skilled investigator, he's also an effective leader, and particularly following the fourth season it becomes clear that most of his immature behavior is a front under which he is a lot smarter and more capable than he lets on.
- There are many scenes that point to this, usually beginning with Ziva berating him for seemingly goofing off. When Gibbs asks for updates, Ziva and McGee usually have minor or incomplete information but Tony always has thought a step ahead and has comprehensive research to present to Gibbs.
- Also, during the season 2 episode "SWAK", surveillance footage shows that he came back to NCIS long after everyone else had gone home to review evidence, and the lack of surprise this gets from the team shows that it's not unusual behavior.
  - Gibbs comments that DiNozzo does his best work after dark. He meant reviewing case files at midnight. Get your mind out of the gutter.
- But really, I'd think one'd need to be somewhat smart to even become a federal agent.
- Tony deliberately invokes Obfuscating Stupidity as part of his crime-solving arsenal: his favorite method of interrogation is annoying suspects into saying too much. Tony even manages to provoke Eli David, the director of Mossad, into revealing something he shouldn't... while Tony was the one being interrogated.
- Gibbs outright admits it in "Flesh and Blood" to DiNozzo's father, stating outright that Tony's womanizing, hedonistic, and downright irritating persona is a front that hides the best special agent he has ever known.
In one episode of The Mentalist, "Flame Red", the killer is an intelligent young man named Tommy who has been pretending to be mentally retarded for some time, ever since he it got him out of a parking ticket because of the magical words "he didn't know any better." He gets angry after someone he knows is killed for greed, and gets revenge.
Michael Guerin, in early episodes of Roswell is one step up from being a high school drop-out, playing truant and skipping classes as often as not. In conversation with Maria, his eventual love interest, he claims his favourite book is James Joyce's Ulysses. She scoffs and doesn't believe him... so he recites a very long passage from said book from memory.
Megan in Drake And Josh pretends to be an innocent little girl in front of her parents so they won't believe her brothers when they go to tattle about the not-exactly-harmless pranks she pulls.
Mohinder Suresh of Heroes has many moments of real stupidity, which means his occasional forays into Obfuscating Stupidity can still catch the audience and other characters off-guard. In particular, he successfully pretended to have no idea of Sylar's real identity on an eight-hour roadtrip, even going so far as to invite him into his home and cheerfully offer him tea — which Sylar accepts, silently gloating that he's got Mohinder so completely fooled, only to find himself passed out on the floor five seconds after he actually drinks the "tea."
- Mohinder also convinced Bob he had been outsmarted by the Haitian, even though his real goal had been to locate, cure and release the Haitian all along.
  Bob: "Where is the Haitian?"
  Mohinder: "In... Haiti?"
In Bones, it's been observed in-show that Seeley Booth's Obfuscating Stupidity serves the dual purposes of making people underestimate him and allowing Brennan to be "the smart one" (Granted, she is the smart one, but he lets her think the gap between them is even larger than it is).
- Bones is guilty of this as well as several conversations and episodes imply or state outright that she knows perfectly well how smart/dumb Booth is. Later episodes expand the idea as her playing dumb to his particular skills so that he can have his thing.
Arguably Murdoch in The A Team. Despite being in a psychiatric hospital, he has no problems helping the team out and often comes up with plans that match Hannibal for genius.
Like in the earlier films, the '50s Zorro television show had the title character disguise his secret identity with stupidity; however, instead of being a rich fop, his alter ego was a bumbling Zorro sympathizer who supposedly lacked the skills of his idol.
- Sergeant García, while never the sharpest sword around, would sometimes "accidentally" help Zorro or some else who had been wronged.
Power Rangers Ninja Storm: Lothor, who had spent the season being one of the silliest villains in the franchise history, reveals in the finale that he's been playing dumb all season — even his constant losses have been part of a massive Xanatos Gambit to fill ~~hell~~ the abyss of evil so full with monsters that he could burst it open and unleash ~~hell~~ evil on Earth.
Dollhouse: Alpha. The character's reveal gave cold shivers, considering how convincingly the actor had been selling the goofy one-off hilarious fanservice guest star part up to that point in the episode.
During his early TV career, British presenter Louis Theroux ruthlessly exploited a put-on faux-naïf persona to lull his subjects into a false sense of security. This was a surprisingly effective interview technique, though it seems that people eventually caught on, and he doesn't do it much now.
A large part of the modus operandi of rookie lawyer protagonist Kuryu Kohei in Hero is to act ditzy and excitable, hiding his brilliant mind.
Used by a rookie defence lawyer in Law And Order: After letting all the State's witnesses go unchallenged, he lays out a case basically saying finding his client guilty is questioning the will of God. After the Judge shoots this down, he then changes his client's plea to not guilty by reason of mental defect. Normally this wouldn't be allowed at that stage of the trial, but he then reveals his client will have a solid appeal on Sixth Ammendment (right to a fair trial) grounds, using his own incompetent defence up to this point as evidence. All to catch the prosecution off guard with the plea change.
Judge: Either you are a brilliant strategist, or you are the biggest jackass to step foot in my courtroom.
Denny Crane seems like a senile, self absorbed wackjob and he usually is... until he steps into a courtroom.
Dave, the truck driver who doused Alex in superpower-inducing chemicals in The Secret World Of Alex Mack, puts his own safety on the line by foiling the greedy and evil Danielle Atron's schemes to find out Alex's identity. Dave pretends he has no idea who the victim of the accident was, but reveals in the last episode that he knew it was Alex since the beginning, yet had hidden it all those years.
- Not quite: he had discovered the secret in his A Day In The Limelight episode where he used the skills learned by a rather goofy "How to be a spy" course on tape. He decided to keep quiet in accordance to said course's last lesson: "Whenever you discover a secret, no matter how big it is, it's best to keep it for yourself."
In the Saturday Night Live sketch "Masterbrain," Phil Hartman portrayed then-president Ronald Reagan as a doddering-yet-genial goofball when presenting himself before the press or the public. Behind closed doors however, Hartman's Reagan revealed himself to be a Machiavellian manipulator in full command of the issues of the day.
- Another sketch had Marilyn Monroe acting the Dumb Blonde she was known for in public, while behind closed doors showed her as the brains behind JFK's presidency while He was a moron who only acted smart in public.
On one episode of The Steve Harvey Show, Lydia (with encouragement from Romeo and Bullethead) dumbs herself down when her boyfriend Arthur starts to lose interest in her because she aced a chemistry exam.
Whitley plays with this trope on an episode of A Different World. When she and Dwayne are partners in a quiz bowl, Dwayne tells her that their kiss on a previous episode meant nothing and that he was in love in Kinu. He also alludes that Whitley is not very smart and that she is spoiled. Whitley becomes angry and sabotages the second half of the game by giving wrong or flat out stupid answers, and at one point not giving any answers. She even files her nails in one scene. Of course Hillman is elimated from the tournament.
Carla's brother from Scrubs pretends to not have learned English so as to play with Turk's head, whom he's had a rivalry with ever since Turk mistook him for a valet at Carla's mother's funeral. This is only revealed to Carla when Turk provokes him enough for him to yell out in English, "That's it, you sonofabitch!" (starting at 3:30)
To some extent, Dean Winchester from Supernatural also fills this role. His younger brother, the family genius, has sniffed at Dean's lack of education but we've seen Dean do some fairly impressive intellectual feats of his own. Dean put up with Sam's (usually good natured) teasing about his smarts for years, but as of season four has shown a growing level of irritation whenever Sam shows genuine surprise at Dean displaying any hint of his actual intelligence, including a dirty look and an offended "What? I read!" in the episode Sex and Violence. Depending on the writer, this comes across as either Dean hiding his own intelligence to better allow Sam to shine or Dean being a GeniusDitz at best.
- Prior to the beginning of the show Dean seems to have depended on his father to tell him what to do, and when John disappears that repsonsibility falls to Sam. Due to the events of seasons three and four Sam's judgement can't be trusted, and Dean has to start thinking for himself.
Mr. Eldridge on Remember WENN usually comes off as The Ditz, but in the episode where he wins the lottery he manages to use his winnings to buy a controlling interest in the station and save his own job.
The Avengers: John Steed, almost every episode. In-universe example.
The title character of Merlin does have his moments of cluminess and cluelessness, but sometimes he may use it to his advantage.
On one episode of All In The Family, Mike is spouting off about how clueless Archie is when Edith tells him, "If you were really smarter than Archie, you would be smart enough not to let him see that you're smarter than him." (Which offers a tantalizing hint that Edith's ditzy exterior might be at least a partial application of this trope in its own right.)
Eliot from Leverage. Ostensibly just the dumb heavy, he's actually quite intelligent and enjoys activities such as gourmet cooking. In the Zanzibar Marketplace Job, he ends up running the entire con-slash-rescue mission. Prompting Maggie to say "You know, people underestimate you, Eliot." And Nate to point out "That's kind of the point."

Also in Shakespeare, in spades. King Lear's Fool, Feste in Twelfth Night, Touchstone in As You Like It, and many other jester-like characters. Casca in Julius Caesar, of "it was Greek to me" fame, acts like a moronic clod when around people with questionable motives - when around people who he knows are trustworthy, he becomes an intelligent, potent member of the conspiracy. Hamlet is probably the lord and master of this trope. He plays everyone but Horatio for saps. And depending on how far you're willing to interpret it, he basically orchestrates the entire play.
In Stephen Schwartz' musical Wicked, Galinda has got more smarts than she lets on (though she still doesn't nearly match Elphaba), and the villains of the piece (including the Wizard of Oz himself) keep up their doting, jovial personas to prevent anyone from antagonizing them.
In Hairspray, Corny Collins doesn't act stupid, but rather resigned to the fact that his hands are tied, while secretly prepping events for Tracy and co to revolutionize everything for him.

Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney has a number of these characters.
- In the original game, the supposedly beyond-senile Yanni Yogi (a Shout Out to Yami Yugi) faked permanent brain damage for fifteen years before trying to exact revenge and get away with it. Case 5, in the DS remake, has Police Chief Gant. His guise of a lovable, laughing buffoon hides not only a razor-sharp mind, but his true personality of a ruthless genius willing to kill one of his own officers, and blackmail another by framing her sister, in order to put away a serial killer.
- In Justice For All, Ini Miney from case 2 and Matt Engarde from case 4 are both smarter (and more sinister) than they appear to be at first glance. In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright himself shows a bit of this trope.
- Dahlia Hawthorne from Trials and Tribulations. a VERY devious girl who hides her true self behind a sugary sweet personality, and not once but twice in the game. And bar in mind she's dead by the second encounter.
Zelos from Tales Of Symphonia is highly intelligent, skilled at manipulation, and has severe self-loathing stemming from some severe Parental Abandonment, not to mention being a triple agent who's playing the party, Cruxis and the Renegades against each other to ensure he's got a shot of joining whoever's the victors. He hides all of this under a facade of being a happy-go-lucky Handsome Lech who seems to have made it his life's mission to hit on every female in existence and antagonise Sheena.
When Raven joins your party in Tales Of Vesperia, he presents himself as a goofy but skilled middle-aged Handsome Lech who imparts nuggets of wisdom that no-one asked for and constantly complains about how he can't keep up with the other, much more youthful party members. In fact, he's The Mole for the local Smug Snake. His true identity is that of a cunning, experienced and suave knight who, under his "Raven" persona, managed to infilitrate the highest levels of the Dahngrest government over ten years.
Levin from Soul Nomad And The World Eaters appears to be a complete idiot... up to the point where he stabs your Old Master dead out of the blue and reveals he's the last world eater; he's helped you because you've been killing off — or given him an opening to kill — everyone who was ever a challenge to his future bid for godhood.
Resident hungry ghost Yuyuko Saigyouji, of Touhou Project, definitely fits the bill during her appearance in Imperishable Night. Although that's arguably more a case of Obfuscating Gluttony...
Guildmaster Wigglytuff in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness: a Cloudcuckoolander who looks like a big pink bunny... and one who gives Team Skull a well-deserved beatdown.
Shuji Ikutsuki relies heavily on this to fool Persona 3's protagonists into bringing about the Fall for him. A harmless character known for bad jokes becomes The Chessmaster in one fell swoop..
- And in Persona 4, Adachi plays much the same role. People who have played Persona 3 will probably be instantly suspicious towards him because of it.
- Actually, a video of Ikutsuki in FES shows that he genuinely thought those jokes were funny, so it's more of a subversion.
Dark Adonis aka Midboss and Seraph Lamington from Disgaea. The first appears to be a foppish Recurring Boss whose sole purpose in the story is to get his ass kicked by Laharl. The second appears to be a hands-off sort of boss content to just walk around his garden while his subordinate plans a coup to conquer reality. In the end, it turns out Lamington was aware of everything all along. In addition, the entire game is essentially a Secret Test Of Character masterminded by Lamington and Midboss to make Laharl a great and compassionate Overlord. Midboss is also heavily implied in the end to be the temporarily reincarnated form of Laharl's father the previous Overlord.
Asmodeus from Painkiller, an easy-going imp who followed Daniel around for most of the game only to reveal that he was Lucifer himself, digging holes to allow demons into Purgatory from Hell.
Don't forget a certain character in Devil May Cry 3:
Arkham: You failed, Vergil, because you underestimated humans\
And this little gem hammers it in:
Jester/Arkham: I even went so far as to dress up like a complete idiot!!
Grobnar in Neverwinter Nights 2 is either this or a complete idiot. It's hard to tell.
- Actually, it's very easy to tell. Look up his intelligence score.
Flay from Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Alrevis has flunked the academy three times, yet he is the one who plans almost all the hijinks that the nakama get into. And they work... sometimes...
Knox Harrington in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines first appears as a vampire's excitable, none-too-bright servant who's gotten in over his head while following a target and needs the player character's help. Turns out with the right questions and mental stats (or Malkavian insight) that he's actually a competent former bounty hunter and his job all along was to get your character to go after the target.
Florian Greenheart in Overlord II pulls this, acting like an Ineffectual Sympathetic Hero Antagonist when in truth he's also Emperor Solarius, ruler of The Glorious Empire. He states that he keeps up the Florian guise after becoming Solarius in order to subvert the efforts of Queen Fay and the Elven Sanctuary.

David 'Walky' Walkerton in It's Walky!; while part of his scatterbrained playfulness was due to brain damage and psychological manipulation, it was also at least partly intentional; at one point, Joyce points out that he had been an honors student in high school, which he immediately denies.
Depending on how one interprets his general tactics and his speech in the prequel book Start Of Darkness to Redcloak after tricking the goblin into killing his own brother, Xykon also applies.
- Xykon is more Competent But Lazy, he goofs off a lot of the time due to his arrogance, and incredible power level. He just takes advantage of people underestimating him when it occurs, often to do a little Hannibal Lecture here and there
- When he first turns Xykon into a lich, Redcloak uses his holy symbol as Xykon's phylactery. He plans to use it to control him, and reasons that Xykon is too stupid to realize it. Then, we he threatens to destroy it, Xykon reveals that he knew about his plan all along, and that destroying his phylactery won't harm him unless his body is destroyed.
- Right-Eye (Redcloak's brother) has a daring plan to kill Xykon for what he's doing to the goblins under his command. Redcloak kills him rather than let him destroy Xykon, since he needs Xykon for his plan to work. The it turns out that Xykon knew about Right-Eye's plot, had a magic ring to protect himself from it, and didn't stop him before because he wanted to see if Redcloak was loyal enough to do it for him.
- Don't forget Elan. At the beginning of the comic he was genuinely stupid but over the years, perhaps as a result of gaining a level in badass (literally) and being Dangerously Genre Savvy Elan has become an actually valuable member of the team, though he sometimes still (likely mostly unintentionally) puts on a show of being quite bonkers.
- Um,Shojo. Why is he the last to be added? The man spent years pretending to be senile to trick his nobles into believing themselves to be competing Men Behind The Man so he could rule himself without fear of assassination.
Liquid Snake of The Last Days Of Foxhound was initially a somewhat arguable case. It had been implied that despite his borderline idiotic behavior he was in reality a killing machine who has only been reduced to his current idiotic state because he suffered brain damage just before the start of the comic. Later it became less arguable as Liquid recovered somewhat and continued playing the dupe until he could attempt a revolt. Even towards the end of the comic he still falls short of his original portrayal in Metal Gear Solid, where he pulled this off quite well.
Helene from Avalon is a Clingy Jealous Girl, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her boyfriend, Alan, just wants to get rid of her (not to mention his interest in Ceilidh). In one of the last drawn strips, she tells Joe that she's known Alan's feelings the whole time, but the fact that he hasn't told her makes her think that he cares about her enough to be won over, and after being forced to admit this, gives up on him.
The interpretation of madness given in Narbonic explores this trope at length.
This 8-bit Theater comic makes one wonder about Garland...
- And this makes one wonder about Red Mage, and these two makes one wonder about Fighter. Of course, actually being as dumb as Fighter would be a far greater feat than pretending to be that dumb.
  - The second possibly shows a variant of this - he's not as dumb as he appears to be, he just never feels the need to actually think about anything beyond his whimsical Cloud Cuckoo Lander ideas, one of which, remember, worked like a charm ("sword chucks, yo"). A fighter actually using his brain is a threat to be feared.
  - The possibility of Fighter pretending to be dumb is lampshaded in this strip.
- Red Mage is well....a Red Mage (3rd highest Int stat in the first Final Fantasy game), of course he is too much an eccentric, stat obsessed, narcissist to concentrate on doing anything remotely competent for a prolonged period of time.
Bun-Bun wonders whether Torg is using this tactic or not in this Sluggy Freelance strip.
A Jaeger lampshades this trope in this strip of Girl Genius:
"You cannot possibly be as stupid as you act."
"...Ken if I vants to be!"
- Also used by Gil to hilarious effect in these three pages.
- Used very well by Zola "Heterodyne", with a side helping of Dumb Blonde, right here.
The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja - Doc's younger brother Sean "Dark Smoke Puncher" McNinja, who is a bona fide Gadgeteer Genius and all-round geek but hides it behind over-the-top hip-hop affectations, since his parents don't want a second Badass Bookworm in the family
This strip of Darths & Droids reveals that Jim, the rather dim-witted player doing Qui-Gon Jinn, is in fact studying geophysics. He acts as stupid as he does roleplaying because he uses it as downtime and turns off his brain.
Penny of Penny And Aggie, as the comic's Libby, often acts ditzy in front of others. (She tells her friends, for example, that math is "fundamental" because one day you might find yourself stranded on an island "with a bunch of numbers that don't mean anything.") However, she's one of the school's top scorers on the practice SAT.
- Cyndi, particularly during "The Popsicle War," acts like a celebrity-obsessed airhead to conceal her Manipulative Bastard nature.
Felicia in Ozy And Millie is shown to be quite smart, despite trying to act dumb to be with the "in crowd".
- Avery also fits this trope, as demonstrated when he showed insight into Thomas More's Utopia.
Raven in Questionable Content. First noted here. Of course, she mixes this up with plenty of genuine ditziness, e.g. here. Lampshaded here.
In the "Tumbledowns" story in Tales Of The Questor, Guardsman Mulharney seems a hardass constantly on Quentyn's case while he's going undercover to recover his stolen sword to the point where the young Questor was forced to physically attack him to maintain his quest. However at the end of the story, Mulharney admitted that he knew who Quentyn and correctly guessed he was doing something important from the start. Therefore, he played dumb to give the kid street cred to accomplish whatever he was attempting against the street gangs he was infilitrating.
Ollie in Something Positive.
Buck Godot has a rather shocking case of this in the person of the Winslow, as revealed at the end of the Gallimaufry storyline.
Looking For Group has Richard. He may seem like the insane character foil of Cale, but it's been revealed that he's really much smarter (and maybe less insane) as we've been led to believe. I mean, he figured out that his rabbit was the Archmage, something nobody could have guessed and he's apparently been following Cale since the very beginning, not because of boredom, but because he knows the guy is going to become something big..
In Bob And George, Mega Man, despite being a genuine idiot, is a tactical genius in battle. He even used his stupidity to distract Ring Man long enough for Mega Man to charge up his next attack.
- He is, in fact, programmed for this. His primary objective is to "Defeat Wily and the robot masters", and his secondary objective is to "be an idiot". Guess which one takes precedence in a fight?
Miss Mab from Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures. Waaay smarter than she lets on...
As it turns out, Dominic Deegan's father Donovan has been able to speak Orcish prefectly for the past twenty years. He's been mangling it the whole time simply because it was Funny.

A favourite trick of Sarah's in lonelygirl15 and LG15: the resistance. Chapter 3 of the resistance is a good example. Furthermore, while she appears to be The Ditz a lot of the time, she's arguably the smartest member of the TAAG.
Although most of the time Homestar Runner seems just plain dumb, in the Strong Bad Email "stupid stuff", he tricks Strong Bad into using reverse psychology in order to win a bet and make Strong Bad lose his.
- Then, in "Kick-A-Ball" he seems to have made an outrageous scheme to use Strong Bad's own cheating against him. When they were picking teams at Kickball he picks Pom Pom and whispers Strong Sad as well, which appears to be his wacky nonsequitur. However, he then goes on to go through nine innings with himself and Pom Pom alone and is two points ahead with only one out left. He gets Strong Sad to hold out his arms and catch the last ball of the game because Strong Bad didn't know he was on Homestar's team. This only works because Strong Bad cheated a long time ago by adding "double side-mouth whisper drafts are totally legal!" to the rules. Homestar has officially stolen Strong Bad's claim to Magnificent Bastardry.

In Avatar The Last Airbender it's unknown exactly which parts of Bumi's behavior are Obfuscating Stupidity and which (if any, or all) are genuine weirdness.
- Iroh might also count. Tea-obsessed old man, yes, but also the Dragon of the West and one of the show's most badass Badass Grandpas, which is saying something. Also, when he was imprisoned in Book Three, he pretended to be insane while secretly doing exercises in his cell so that, after a while, all of his fat appears to have been replaced with sheer muscle.
- It could also be argued that Sokka acts goofy on purpose so that the enemy will not take him seriously. As the series progresses more and more of his intellect, particularly in mechanical areas, is revealed.
Quinn Morgendorffer (Daria) is a canonical example of the fake-ditz variant. However, it is implied through the series that she hid her intelligence even from herself, for fear of emulating her perpetually unpopular yet brilliant sister Daria.
It's occasionally hinted that Nelson's ignorant thug persona in The Simpsons is at least partially an act to cover a more sensitive and intelligent soul.
- This applies to all the bullies. Kerney, despite being a teenager and the father of a teenager, apparently is competent enough to pull his weight at church meetings, for instance.
- In the episode "Summer of 4 Ft. 2'', Lisa tires of her usual bookworm self and while on summer vacation plays the part of an average anti-intellectual "cool" kid to win friends. She occasionally slips up, however.
  Lisa: Ah, a gift from my favourite crustacean! (Gulps)
  Rick: Hey, did you learn that word from a teacher for something?
  Lisa: No...I...heard it on Baywatch.
  Other kids: Oh yeah!...Baywatch!...David Hasselhoff, man.
- Bart has unashamably played this card many times and in many different ways, usually for his own benefit. Although a bit dense and not nearly as smart as his sister, it's clearly shown many times that Bart is far from stupid. A testament to his devious nature.
- A very unusual moment of Obfuscating Stupidity comes from the episode "Mother Simpson"; unusual because it comes from the usually dense-as-brick Chief Wiggum. It's revealed by the end of the episode that Wiggum intentionally led the FBI astray in order to help Homer's fugitive mother Mona escape Springfield, leading one to wonder whether the stupid things he did in the episode were genuine or to just throw the feds off track.
- Attentive Simpson watchers and tropers with a good memory alike will tell you that most of the cast of this show has had at least more than a couple "smarter than they let on" scenes, primarilly in the series' earlier years and most of its glory days. Although mileage may vary on the definition of putting on an act... a wide range of characters ranging from Bart, Moe, Barney, Chief Wiggum, Homer, to even Ralph Wiggum himself have all had times where their stupidity is treated more like ignorance and/or haggardness than genuine one-dimensional stupidity. Some might even speculate that at one point the series had very few cookie-cutter stupid characters, perhaps as an underlying satire that most human stupidity is rarely involuntary or a natural trait. Homer could have been a man of high class and wealth...but a few mistakes and an unplanned pregnancy later and he sort of "gave up"...making him the oaf we all know today. This aspect of the show however is largely forgotten now, replaced with canned joke-esque stupidity and Homer having a crayon stuck up his nose. Many fans believe the unfortunate loss of this trait to be one of the biggest reasons why the show just doesn't seem as sharp as it once was.
- This spills into many other tropes, from the aforementioned Book Dumb, to Genius Ditz, to possibly even one named after Ralph and many others.
Sargeant Hatred of The Venture Brothers pretends to be a bumbling and friendly villain through season three because he knows being nice to Doctor Venture is the best way to get at the Monarch without violating guild rules.
Madame Foster from Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends uses her (partially faked) senility to hide how canny she can sometimes be.
In the Disney cartoon American Dragon Jake Long, there is Spud (an apt name, considering his displayed personality). Spud has the personality of your average idiot (and sometimes worse), but once, when tricked into doing an aptitude test, he gets a perfect score and is sent to a school for geniuses, where he also is far smarter than any of those people too. Spud explains that he does so because he doesn't want the pressure of having to perform to live up to the expectations others might have toward a young genius. He'd rather enjoy life as an easy-going goof.
Baloo from Tale Spin (and to some extent, the original Jungle Book as well) often seemed very dense and unsophisticated, suffering from endless financial problems and even having trouble spelling correctly. However it was shown many, many times that Baloo is probably a certifiable genius, and it's not just his flying skill (which would put him in line with the Genius Ditz) although that alone is certainly something to boast. Baloo shows an uncanny knack for geography even when navigator Kit isn't around, seeing through deception, insight, philosophy, and even mechanical skill and an abstract understanding of machines (though not to Wildcat's extent obviously). All the more impressive when one realizes that he does all of this based off of instinct, as his denseness is mostly attributed to being largely uneducated (which was somewhat more common in the 1930s when the series takes place anyway), as well as his own lazy nature.
Sarah Palin, in South Park's take on the 2008 US election, proves to be far more intelligent when outside the public eye.
According to Epileptic Trees about Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable is just acting as bumbling as he is, because if he didn't, Kim would be devastated that Ron is better at life than she is. Cue Evil Ron, who gets to be completely Bad Ass.
In Justice League Unlimited, the Question's conspiracy nut persona is probably an act. At the very least, he isn't entirely imagining things, or having delusions of grandeur about his ability to gather info - this is highlighted by the fact that Batman asks him to ferret out a link between Cadmus and Luthor. When he attempts to assassinate Luthor to stop Superman from doing so, he notes that the Justice League's reputation will survive this otherwise unconscionable action because he is, in his words, "a well-known crackpot".
This was Bugs Bunny's strategy in Barbary Coast Bunny after Nasty Canasta stole his gold; pretend to be a hopelessly naive hayseed visit Canasta's casino, and promptly bankrupt it by effortless winning big at every game of chance.
In The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, a new kid named Bobby takes over Billy's position as the stupid kid because everyone was sick of Billy, as it turns out Bobby is only pretending to be stupid in order to replace him at his house hold.
The Darker And Edgier GI Joe: Resolute premiere has Cobra Commander stating he was pulling this trope in earlier series, but it didn't work so he's dropping the disguise and getting serious.
- It's notable that Cobra Commander kills a lot more people and is much less tolerant of his subordinates attempting to pull crap on him, but otherwise acts just as bonkers as his previous 1980's incarnation, which at least suggests the possibility that he's just saying that to save face.
  - He's certainly Genre Savvy enough to have backups for BOTH the super weapon and communication jammer, and a bomb shelter that can resist a blast from said super weapon. He is still surrounded by incompetents who when to the Storm Trooper Academy for Accuracy or mouthy psychotics like Zartan and Storm Shadow. They only failed because GI Joe were slightly more competent and accurate.
  - It's quite a different kind of bonkers though; in the old cartoons he'd have some idiotic plot to rule the world by rigging a mayoral election or tricking some rich old man into marrying The Baroness using mind control perfume. In resolute? He destroys Moscow without warning and hacks his own troops apart.
- Although this is crossing into comic book territory, it should be noted that Cobra Commander's original comic-book persona... predating even the original cartoon...was ruthless and crazy since the beginning. From secretly brainwashing his own high command incase they turned on him, to managing a Cobra that actually manages to kill more than a couple of established GI Joes, to even killing his own son Billy in later comics...it's easy to see why the Sunbow cartoon had to tone him down into the bumbling fool we all knew and loved as kids. You don't mess around with Cobra Commander in the comics! As "Resolute" attempted to go back to his original persona more, the speech about pretending to be a bumbler could be considered something of a nod to this extreme difference.
Bobbys World played with this from time to time. While Bobby was, for the most part, genuinely naive, there were times when he would overplay it to cause problems for Derek or Kelly, while appearing innocent. One notable example was when he repeated everything Kelly had said about her ex-boyfriend (who she still liked), in front of said ex-boyfriend (who had come to apologize after their fight), while pretending to not know what it meant (needless to say, he ceased to be apologetic).
Steve's friend Barry from American Dad he is generally seen as a very unintelligent individual but in some episodes he is shown to be very good with mechanics when asked about this he replies that he doesn't know how he did it, another episode reveals that he isn't as stupid as he seems he is actually a very intelligent psychopath who takes pills to control this side of him.

In the Legend Of The Five Rings franchise, this is the the basis of the Scorpion Clan's modus operandi, as revealed to their founder Bayushi by the great sage Shinsei. Shinsei told Baysuhi a parable that Bayushi believed he already knew, about the scorpion and the frog, which normally ends with the scorpion stabbing the frog while they're crossing the river and both of them drowning because it's the scorpion's nature (this parable also appeared in the Star Trek Voyager episode 'Scorpion'). However, at the end of Shinsei's version the scorpion's answer is different: "I can swim."
The Space Wolves in Warhammer40000 are not as stupid as they act, especially their Chapter Master Logan Grimnar. There is a reason he ends up running most of the wars he gets involved in, even if its from the sidelines.
- The Wolves don't really act stupid. It's just that they're entirely Boisterous Bruisers.

Probably the Ur Example in Western history: Lucius Junius Brutus gained his cognomen (Brutus) by acting slow-witted in front of the last king of Rome, to not attract attention. Brutus eventually overthrew him, and established the Roman Republic.
- And while we're on Rome, Claudius managed to stay alive through a series of purges and assassinations during the reigns of Tiberius and Caligula by seeming too dumb and useless to be a threat. When Caligula was finally assassinated, he became Emperor (by virtue of being the only man in the family still breathing) whereupon he turned out to be not so dumb after all. Or rather this is a popular interpretation/fictionalization of the historical facts made famous by Robert Graves.
Elizabeth "Crazy Bet" van Lew feigned insanity to conceal her work as a Union spy in Richmond.
Socrates, who outright claimed he knew nothing. Of course, by his own philosophy, knowing that single fact was better than knowing anything else you might care to name...
- In fact, in The Apology, Socrates claims that the whole reason he practices philosophy is because the Oracle of Delphi told him he was the smartest man in the world - clearly that couldn't be true, as the politicians of Athens must have been smarter than him, and he had been questioning them to try to prove it.
- Socratean Irony is mostly dependent upon Obfuscating Stupidity, making your opponent state their viewpoint and then asking about it from an ignorant's point of view to expose flaws in his/her reasoning.
A particularly sinister example is Idi Amin, who played the fool with the foreign press so that they would laugh off his horrific human rights abuses.
Just about every US President - indeed, just about every US politician or candidate for office at any level - has been accused of employing this at one time or another. And, of course, many of them do, whether to encourage their opponents to underestimate them or to reassure the electorate that they're "just folks". We know for certain that it was a favorite tactic of Lincoln and Eisenhower, for instance. As for some of our other politicians... well, let's just say there are many instances where this trope can be subject to Alternate Character Interpretation and move on.
Sun Tzu was once nearly killed by a mortal enemy; he pretended that he was insane and ate manure to convince the man that he was harmless. He went on the write the Art of War.
"Warfare is the Tao of deception."
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
The 27th of the Chinese Thirty-Six Stratagems essentially talks about this.
Oda Nobunaga acted like an irresponsible fool from the moment he inherited his father's domain until his closest adviser committed seppuku in protest. He earned the epithet "Fool of Owari," but he had to in order to survive having several dozen powerful warlords surrounding his tiny fiefdom. The rest of Japan fell for it (those who knew were either on his side or dead) until the Battle of Okehazama.
It's impossible to know for sure if the Belgian politician Michel Daerden is a Cloudcuckoolander, a Genius Ditz, or an extreme case of Obfuscating Stupidity. Probably a mix of the three. It's hard to tell when he's drunk or just pretending and whether he prances around making stupid or plain weird statements because it's what he's really like, out of self-irony, or so that people can identify with him. Most people who just watch videos of him on You Tube and Daily Motion think he's just a bumbling, drunken idiot, but he's actually (or also) a crazily talented Minister of the Budget with a rare gift with numbers, and his hard work and efficiency as well as his closeness to the local people (who call him "Daddy"!) have repeatedly gotten him reelected as the mayor of 'his' borough since the 1980s. Whatever he is, few people can deny Daerden is quite the phenomenon!
British politician Boris Johnson. ...we hope.
- Johnson is more of a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He's certainly very intelligent, arguably competent at his current job (for the sake of not starting a political argument, let's just say he hasn't actively screwed it up) but also very eccentric and buffoonish.
Paris Hilton, and the amount of people who'll disagree with this shows how good she is at the act.
- One of the first TV reviews of The Simple Life mentioned that "Someone who agrees to doing a show this stupid and damaging to your public perception must be really smart." Or she is just smart enough to realise acting the way she does in front of a camera will continue to bring her fame and fortune. When someone as nice as Tina Fey chews her out, it can't all be just an act.
  - British TV presenter Fearne Cotten recently interviewed her for a new series. One question essentially boiled down to "when are you going to get a clue?" Paris pointed out that by living up to her public image and generally acting like a stupid spoilt party animal, she would earn vast amounts of money that she could never have by (for example) working at the family firm.
Oddly enough, this is subverted in the business world, Peter Principle and Dilbert Principle aside. If the person using this tactic has a long string of successes to his or her name it won't fool anyone, because nobody is going to believe a person that successful in the business world could be that stupid.
Former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien may be an example. Claiming to be little more than "Da Little Guy from Shawinagan", he often received flak for making idiotic remarks; for example, when questioned during a trip to Israel as to the the signficance of his visiting disputed East Jerusalem, he said, "Right now I don't know whether I'm in North, East, West or South Jerusalem," to the consternation of both Jews and Arabs. Similarly, asked about pepper spray used on protesters of an OPEC conference, he said, "Me pepper, I put it on my plate." It was also frequently said of Chrétien that he managed to be fluent in neither of Canada's official languages. On the other hand, he was a shrewd manipulator who, for example, subtly managed to undermine rival Paul Martin's career every chance he got, and he got re-elected twice...So Yeah.
- In a final "Screw You" to his longtime rival, Chrétien stepped down halfway through his third term, letting Martin take the reins...Approximately three seconds before a big scandal hit and crippled the party. Chrétien all but vanished, but some say that, on cold, quiet nights, his maniacal lopsided chuckle still echoes through the halls of Parliament...
  - More recently, when reporters asked him about a hot issue surrounding the Liberal party, his response was simply "je ne parle pas l'anglais."
Adolf Hitler himself wasn't taken seriously when he first started out; Western leaders ridiculed his silly little mustache and ranting behavior. Hoo boy was that a mistake.
- But Hitler wasn't really a genius. He was an effective rabble-rouser and perhaps even skilled at political maneuvering, but poor military strategist.
- By 1945 he was moving divisions on the map, planning counter-attacks. Said divisions were non-existent and the Russians outnumbered them greatly. Did I mention that said Russians were marching to Berlin? Arguably, if he had any IDEA about warfare, we would be all speaking German now. Just look up the Me-262 plane.
  - Two words... Gloster Meteor... It wasn't as successful a jet as the Me-262, but it did exist and served the RAF perfectly well. Of course, there weren't ever enough of either plane to make a real difference anyway... Really, I think if Hitler had been a genuinely confident man he wouldn't have tried to take over the whole world in the first place. And even if he did, history shows us that brilliant commanders do not always a war win. Not only were there men like Rommel in World War II, but in the Civil War, there wasn't anything general Lee, brilliant as he as, could do about the Union's superior numbers and superior manufacturing capacity, just as Germany couldn't do anything about the fact that there were more M4 Shermans alone than there were main battle tanks of ALL German types (Panzer III - Panzer VI) and that Panzer II Is and I Vs were only about as good as Shermans anyway, leaving Germany with just 8,000 or so Panthers and Tigers as MB Ts that were actually superior to the Sherman... And that's even before one considers that there were more T-34s than Shermans and that T-34s were suprior to Shermans as well... So yeah, even if Hitler has been a genious, Germany and Japan didn't have the numbers or the resources to take over the entire world...
Acting like you're stupid in order to mess with people who really are is arguably the whole point of 4chan, especially /b/.
King Juan Carlos of Spain. Juan Carlos's father was the Count of Barcelona and rightful heir to the Spanish throne but Franco feared (correctly) that he would try and re-introduce democracy. The dictator skipped a generation and groomed young Juan Carlos into a dutiful puppet who would carry on Franco's vision of Spain. Or so Juan Carlos led him to believe. No sooner was the dictator dead than the new king showed his true colours and swept away Franco's state in favour of the modern Spanish democracy.
Prince Phillip of England. At least, we really, really hope so.
There have been some social studies that show that some women does this around men. Other studies show that teens do this as well. For the women it boils down to not "scaring" guys off, and for teens it's about acceptance.
- It stems from an old anecdote: student girls discuss the quantum mechanics. "Boys on the horizon! Everyone, talk about clothes!".
Vincente Gigante, a crime boss, took up the habit of wandering around Greenwich Village at odd hours in a bathrobe and mumbling to himself, smoking cigarettes picked up off the ground and shouting to the wind, etc. in order to convince the police he was too mentally unstable to lead a crime syndicate. He started acting like this in 1969, and wasn't arrested or charged until 1990, and they couldn't make anything stick until 1997.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned Josef Stalin yet? This was possibly the principle tool in his armoury before Lenin's death.
- Maybe because he didn't actually fool Lenin. Maybe because controlling the workflow to the point of sabotage was much more important tool for him anyway.
- There's a reason he was called the "grey blur" by his (then) comrades before outmaneuvering them and purging the party with his power.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, possibly partly unintentionally. Schwarzenegger was an extremely shrewd businessman, managing to become a millionaire by the age of thirty (well before he became a Hollywood hit) and proving very canny in his early movie choices. Despite this (and his eventual political success) Schwarzenegger has become a Stock Parody of Dumb Muscle characters thanks to his heavy accent and rigid acting style.
- Schwarzenegger just recently managed to show how good he is at this in a veto notice to the California State Assembly. The first letter in each line of the veto spells out "Fuck you." His office is passing it off as coincidence.
- One might also mention Jesse Ventura, former wrestler and governor of Minnesota.
is a world-class martial artist with several European championships, was captain of the 1996 US Olympic Pentathlon team, has a Masters Degree in Chemical Engineering, was offered a Fullbright Scholarship to MIT and speaks multiple languages. He simply thinks acting in B-action movies is fun.
- When the script calls for something more than scowling and punching things, Lundgren generally proves to be a more than adequate actor.
News reporter Nellie Bly faked insanity in order to be thrown into a sanatorium and expose the abuses committed on patients there.
Larry The Cable Guy.
- Debatable. Anyone who stars in movies like Delta Farce has some pretty big stupid in them.
  - Money Dear Boy
Margaret Dumont, the famous foil for the Marx Brothers, had long had the image of being a stuffy lady who could not understand the Brothers' humor. However, take a closer look at her career and you'll learn about a longtime comedy veteran who knew a good gag when she saw one.
"Fools-for-Christ" in Russian Orthodox Christian tradition. They deliberately became "insane" in order to grow in holiness. One such fool (Basil) openly criticized Ivan the Terrible for his atrocities.
- Fools are much older than that. There were accounts of early priests outraged by Fools. The tradition just remained with minor tweaks after the people gradually converted.
A subversion occured in the VH 1 Reality show, "I Love Money 2" Where a contestant simply referred to as "It" floated into the final episode because he was likeable, physically nonthreatening despite his size and just one more vote for the main alliance. Channelling Johnny Fairplay of Survivor fame's "Dead Grandma" ploy, claiming he had a sick/dying grandfather won him the sympathy to reach the Final 3 where he revealed it was a lie, he doesn't need glasses and dropping his Uncle Tom Foolery speech pattern, making it seem like he really would become the show's winner... only to get lost, lazily reach a challenge the other two contestants were almost finishing then not even bothering to finish and simply ordering food and to cap the Humiliation Conga, he dropped his plate on the ground.

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