So Bad It's Good - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): So Bad Its Good

"It is so bad that a kind of grandeur creeps into it."

— H. L. Mencken, on Warren G. Harding's English composition

You see, movies don't necessarily have to be good to be awesome: When you hear that George Romero or Bruce Campbell's made a movie, you're pretty much obligated to go see it, not because you know it's gonna be a good movie, and certainly not because it's going to be any kind of artistic achievement, but because it's gonna be fucking awesome!

— Noah 'Spoony' Antwiler, on why he likes to watch bad movies.

Once in a while, a Wall Banger gets so bad, it creates a disruption in the badness continuum, and wraps right around to good. Maybe the hubcap-on-a-wire flying saucers are cute, or the spontaneous brothel scene goes on for so long it's hilarious, or the technically oriented find humor in the way the hacker can suborn the traffic lights of New York with no perceptible effort.

Whatever the reason, a truly horrid piece of work can become an unintentional riot and even get its own fandom

for its very lack of quality. This can well be an ongoing process as attitudes change, budgets grow and cynicism increases.

On occasion, the writers may intentionally try to pull off this trope. Of course, this almost never actually results in something that fits because it's hard not to "wink at the camera", so to speak.

Something which is So Bad It's Good has a high probability of becoming a Cult Classic. Many are heavy on Camp, therefore falling far onto the silly side of the Sliding Scale Of Silliness Versus Seriousness, and are often considered Guilty Pleasures, although neither is necessary. See Narm Charm. This is also often seen in Memetic Mutation, when people combine two or more horrible things (or pieces thereof) into something good. Leeroy Jenkins, for example.

If someone just keeps on churning out work that's So Bad Its Good, they're probably Giftedly Bad.

Unfortunately, there's worse. Fortunately, there's also better. There's even in between. A good visual of all four can be found in this xkcd comic.

Compare Stylistic Suck and So Unfunny Its Funny, which play this trope for laughs.

Examples broken down by medium:

Examples:

Professional Wrestling

WWE wrestler The Boogeyman is an almost-bald Scary Black Man with his entire head painted red with black spots, who walks like he's having a seizure, smashes giant antique clocks over his head, speaks almost entirely in singsongy nursery rhymes, eats worms by the handful, and his catchphrase is, "I'm... THE BOOGEYMAN! And I'm comin'... TO GETCHA!" The whole thing is as hilariously awful as it sounds.
- It should be noted that his backstory actually lampshades the ludicrousness involved — an actor for a show that didn't materialize who snapped (falling too deep into method acting) and became the Boogeyman, but was sicced onto WWE's Smack Down! brand anyway to see what would happen and because he was still under contract. Seriously.
- Even more hilariously awful is the time in one skit with D-Generation X, he appeared from underneath the ring, and told Triple H and Shawn Michaels: "I'm...THE BOOGEYMAN! And I'm comin' to - (briefly sans Boogeyman gimmick) - see if I can join DX."
In the same vein, any all-woman promotion David McLane was involved in, whether it be GLOW, WOW, or POWW. Stupid, cheesy fun with stupid, cheesy gimmicks, stupid, cheesy action, and stupid, cheesy cheesecake.
Mick Foley deliberately went for this while wrestling as Dude Love in order to separate the gimmick from his other personae (the sadistic Cactus Jack and the psychotic Mankind).
- It wasn't the first time he had done this. During his "anti-extreme" gimmick in ECW (a promotion that prided itself on high-quality, high-risk wrestling), Mick (as Cactus Jack) reduced his entire moveset to one move: a headlock. Thus, his matches would consist of nothing but ten straight minutes of assorted headlocks, gaining incredible heat from the quality-hungry ECW fans.
WCW's San Francisco 49ers Match between Jeff Jarrett and Booker T is one of the most hilariously stupid matches of all time. It's basically a glorified pole match (gee, I wonder who booked this disasterpiece) with four wooden boxes at the end of each pole; one contains the WCW Championship and the other three contain "weapons:" a blow up doll, a framed picture of Scott Hall, and a coal miner's glove. It began with an old lady trying to smack Jarrett with a shirt Booker T gave her and ended with Beetlejuice (not that Beetlejuice, the Wack Packer from Howard Stern) giving Jarrett five "high blows". The title fell out of the box, and Dave Penzer... I mean Booker T became the WCW Champion.

Theater

The Musical adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie has acquired this reputation. Its commercial failure on Broadway became so notorious that it was the inspiration for the book Not Since Carrie, a chronicle of Broadway musical flops of the latter half of the twentieth century. (King himself reportedly liked it, though.)
Show Within A Show example: "Pyramus and Thisbe" in A Midsummer Nights Dream. It's so badly written and wretchedly performed that it's hilarious. The Duke and his guests order it performed just for the Snark Bait.

Toys

GoBots Rocklords. Think Transformers, but instead becoming something cool like a car, a dinosaur, a plane, or a tank, they became rocks! You could choose between granite, quartz or shale amongst others!
- The really stupid bit is when they appear in the Go Bots movie, they transform and roll out and slowly clump away down the road like bricks turning under their own power.
  - That could be cool, but I'm guessing it wasn't.
The Piraka rap from Bionicle. Listen to it here in all of its hilarious glory.

Food

Sugar cereals. They wreck your teeth, turn you into a prime diabetes candidate, are usually over-sweetened to the point of being stomach-turning, and are generally the last thing you should be eating in the morning. Yet we love them. A lot of other Guilty Pleasure foods qualify.
Hot Pockets. Jim Gaffigan: "They should come with a warning label. WARNING: YOU JUST BOUGHT HOT POCKETS! Hope you're drunk or heading home to a trailer!" But we still keep eating 'em!
- Or you're a college student who's sick of cafeteria food and ramen.
Sucaritos. The name translates to 'little sugar bits'. The commercial starts with 5 first grades sitting in the middle of the desert (why?), shifting the sand talking about bored they are. Then a polar bear shows up on an ATV and says that they need to have fun, so he offers them a bowl of corn flakes and then says 'and lets add sugar', to which the kids reply 'we want more'. 'more' he adds sugar to the flakes, 'we want more', he adds even more sugar, 'no, MORE' and then even more sugar goes on them, followed by the kids suddenly riding sand skidoos, paragliding and sand surfing. When did our American commercials stop being that bad/good about selling sugar?
Hot Peppers: The only truly masochistic food. When something tastes "hot," that's your body's may of waving the red flag. "Spit that shit out! RIGHT NOW! It's potentially corrosive to your digestive system! Whatever you do, don't eat any more!" Conditions like ulcers are aggravated by hot food, and things like "Delhi Belly" and the famous painful bathroom experience after eating Mexican happen because you IGNORE this red flag. In fact, unless you begin eating hot food at a very young age - allowing your body to adapt to it, then too much of it can actually kill you. In fact, the hottest sauces actually make you sign legal wavers before buying them because of this. So why do we eat hot food? To prove to our friends we're not pussies.

Real Life

Formula One fans over the past few years have grown to love Kimi Räikkönen's hilariously bad interviews. Like this one from just after he's won the most prestigious title in all of motorsport for the first time.
Some Trolls fall into this. Instead of causing an uproar, they end up being the laughingstock of whatever individual or group they decide to harass.
Jack Thompson's pursuits. It's hard to be taken seriously when you do things like harass legal personnel, spam threatening faxes until the recipient's fax machine breaks, send gay porn to judges (as a bribe, even!), lose your license, and still go on making childish threats and uproars.

Art

The entire Dada "anti-art" movement was specifically made to be so stupid it's art. Why is an upside-down urinal considered art? "Because I said so".
- Said Upside down urinal was called "The Fountain" when submitted to the art galleries. When asked "why the fountain"? The Artist replied "It's interactive art, you need to engage in making it a fountain." So Yeah.
  - Then, when two people did "interact" with it, they got in trouble.
- Marcel Duchamp made The Fountain to troll some exhibition organizers who claimed they would accept anything. He signed it "R. Mutt" to avoid recognition as an established artist and therefore inherently legit. He did it for the lulz.
- Similar to the above mentioned Dada movement, the "Museum of bad art" is dedicated to collecting the worst paintings they can find.
Though a bit more of a Your Mileage May Vary example, many who dislike modern British artist Damien Hirst see him as this; there's just something disgustingly delightful about factory-made 'artworks' that were paid for in thousands of pounds just for the sake of making a splash. Really, one of his most famous 'works' is a skull studded entirely with diamonds. What's not to love?