Refuge In Audacity - Television Tropes & Idioms

Lelouch Lamperouge is known for this using his Magic Eyes to perform actions in such a way that makes it look like he performs miracles. Though he's actually at his best when he instead uses only his wits, brains and knowledge of people.
- Forcing C.C. to let him have his way by pulling a gun out and then threatening to shoot himself.
- On a similar note, averting a mutiny from his own Black Knights by offering up his own gun and telling them to shoot him if they're so dissatisfied with him, knowing full well that, without him, they'd almost certainly be wiped out in the upcoming battle.
- The ending of the series is either this or a Wall Banger depending on if your Willing Suspension Of Disbelief was broken or not. Lelouch Becomes the biggest, most evil dictator in HISTORY, that will forever be remembered. Then has his Anti-Hero/Anti-Villain ally free the world by killing him. People unite against him! This allows people like Nunnally, Suzaku (as Zero), Kaguya (as AFN representative), Empress Tianzi and Ougi to help rebuild the world.
  - Actually, uniting a people by giving them a common enemy is real-life political ploy. Lelouche stands out in that he unites them against "himself".
In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, when Ed is doing his practical demonstration for his State Alchemist qualifications (at the age of 12, incidentally) he proceeds to not only create a spear from the ground without a circle in front of dozens of high ranking military officers, but to then threaten the Fuhrer King Bradley with it, just to prove a point. Of course, he had no idea of just what Bradley was capable of then, though Bradley did show Ed why he's not worried.
- Later, this is subverted when Roy Mustang makes a joke about Bradley being a homunculus, and it is in fact taken very seriously. This is because, while Ed's threat was ultimately revealed to be an empty one, due to Bradley's prowess, Roy's questioning was taken very seriously because he's right, and too dangerously close to the truth for the corrupt higher-ups to let him go.
Isaac and Miria from Baccano! are able to fly under police radar despite being active criminals by virtue of the fact that the heists they pull off are so bizarre that the police don't want to be involved with them. They once tried to steal a museum, after having infiltrated it as a pair of mummies. After discovering that the museum was too heavy to lift, they decided to make off with the entrance door so no-one else could enter the museum (the logic is impeccable, impeccable I say!). They get caught on camera in the process, and pose for the pictures. While still in their mummy disguises. The police, upon being delivered images of two mummies posing for the camera while carrying the entrance door to the city museum, do nothing.
Eyeshield 21 has Hiruma and his guns.
Akira Takizawa from Eden Of The East pulls this off when the Japanese-English language barrier (as well as his own weirdness) leads him to conclude that the best way deal with the police officer questioning him is to drop trou and flash her. Far from arresting him on the spot for indecent exposure, the cop thanks him and lets him off the hook (leading many viewers to conclude that Akira's "Johnny" is so amazing that it has mind control powers).
- Then there's the time when he flashed a random businessman on the street, then says something that causes the guy to laugh, then hand over his pants. Charm Person, indeed.
How has Captain Freakshow, Mayuri Kurotsuchi of Bleach not been mentioned yet? The biggest fan debate surrounding him is whether he's a Complete Monster or just a Jerk Ass, but either way he loves being whichever one he is.

Close Anime and Manga

In the first Sam & Max comic, our heroes are spared from ritual sacrifice when the dagger-holder spontaneously combusts. Instead of lampshading the unlikeliness of such rescue and bringing plausibility crashing down, the duo comments on adjusting one's wardrobe to prepare for such occasions. Light cottons are preferred.
- Then there's their actions in the recent games. Sure, any crime-fighting duo can take out the mafia. But saving the day by usurping the presidency, starting a civil war, and abusing "The Button" takes style.
- Plus, they did take out the mafia-free playland and casino by pretending to be hypnotized and dead respectively.
The Joker. In almost every incarnation he is capable of getting away with things because no one can anticipate his actions, even Batman. In The Dark Knight he has such a conviction in himself and is so apathetic about everything that he can get away with wearing a nurse outfit and remain intensely frightening.
Mob Boss: "You think you can steal from us and just walk away?"
Joker: "Yeah."
Deadpool. Crazy Awesome plus Refuge In Audacity plus Cloud Cuckoolander equals stopping in the middle of a martial arts match to breakdance, putting the enemy off his guard.
Spider Jeruselem lives by this. Hopped up on god-know what drugs, brutalizing anyone who stands up against him, handing out blasts of a bowel disruptor like they were candy, all in the pursuit of The Truth.
Notfunny Cartoons lives and breathes this one. Examples include a guy testing a plane engine whenever he can't sleep, a killer robot teacher (no, not "reprogrammed"), an ax crazy guy living in somebody's wall, a man losing his track of thought and accidentally puppeting and turning into a butterfly when trying to fetch cigarettes... they not only take refuge in audacity, they crank it up to incredible extremes. Oh, and naturally, nobody gives the going-ons more than a curious glance. It really has to be seen to be believed (although they're pretty slow with translating from the original German, sadly).
Tommy Monaghan from Hitman tells his first girl, Wendy, that he kills (bad) people for money. Wendy doesn't believe him until he shows up, shot. Ironically, his next girl doesn't believe Tommy refuses to say 'bitch' -because- he kills (bad) people.
Devildog, one of the members of the evil Sinestro Corps in Green Lantern comics, is probably the most prolific criminal in the entire corps. Wanted for assassination on at lest 17 planets, he showed he had the biggest cajones in the sector when he brutally tore the president of his planet limb from limb on live galactic telecast. Space police force LEGION has redirected all its resources to finding and capturing him.

Close Comics

Be Kind Rewind. When every tape in a video rental place is erased, the leads decide to do 20-minute no-budget versions of the films themselves and hope nobody notices. It didn't actually work, but customers found the remade films had their own odd charm, and the store was actually more successful than it was before the accident.
You only need three words: Big Fat Liar. Like any director would steal creative writing from some kid's backpack and turn it into his next big movie...
- Debatable. Have you seen some of the crap they're coming out these days?
In The Blues Brothers, the cops find out that Elwood's license is suspended, so they call the entire national guard of Illinois to catch them.
- Well, he did have 116 parking tickets and 56 moving violations. That takes some effort!
  - Don't forget the what happens after the gig " the last time they played anywhere, they where charged with: grand lawsuit, felonious motorviecle assault and damages excess of over 20 million dollars"
The Dragnet movie has the obligatory Turn In Your Badge moment be the result of the arrest of a reverend, like anyone would believe that he was organizing a drug rave and trying to offer a woman as a human sacrifice.
The crazier and more over-the-top the actions of the main characters in the movie Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas became, the more likely they were to get away with them. These actions included doing enough drugs to kill a herd of elephants, destroying their hotel rooms, trashing a couple of expensive rental cars, and showing up stoned out of their minds at a police anti-drug convention. The trope was invoked by Raoul Duke at one point, after a truly astonishing sequence wherein he and his attorney chase a pair of cops and their wives down a highway, demanding that they be allowed to sell the cops drugs; the attorney wonders if they'll be arrested, to which Duke points out that nobody would believe the victims if they tried to report it. The scary part is that this is based, however lightly, on actual occurence.
"It was all over now. We'd abused every that Vegas lived by. Burning the locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help. The only chance now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess that nobody in the position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it."
- The author Hunter Thompson's entire reputation seems to be based on Refuge In Audacity.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: while escaping from Berlin in a Zeppelin which hasn't quite taken off yet, Indy notices an SS officer searching for him and his father. With no place to run or hide, Indy decides the best course of action is to disguise himself as a steward on the Zeppelin, follow the officer around, then hit the officer with a sucker punch when the officer finds Jones Sr and throw the officer out a window. The real audacity comes when Indy explains "No ticket" to the shocked German passengers in clear American English.
In Just One Of The Guys, a teenager pulls a Sweet Polly Oliver so she can write an article about life as a guy. When her vacationing parents phone home, her brother informs them that his sister has become a transvestite, and is assumed to be kidding.
Mary Poppins landed her job by simply acting as if she already had it (and to an extent, actually subjected her prospective employer to a quasi-job interview in turn).
- She also flatly dismissed the children's recounting of their adventures with her right to their faces, knowing full well just how ridiculous it actually sounded, even though it had just happened.
- Have we forgotten how she did just blow the competition away to get the job? That was, with a wind spell, against old ladies.
In Disney's The Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu tells his entire plot to usurp the throne directly to the king, then throws in a few more ludicrous (yet some of which are still true, or he wishes they were) claims:
Cardinal Richelieu: Ah, yes. That is usually the first. Let me see if I remember it correctly. While the English attack from without, the wicked Cardinal undermines from within, forging a secret alliance with Buckingham and placing himself on the throne. But really, Your Majesty, why stop there? I have heard much more festive variations. I make oaths with pagan gods, seduce the queen in her own chamber, teach pigs to dance and horses to fly, and keep the moon carefully hidden within the folds of my robe. Have I forgotten anything?
- These lines are delivered in Tim Curry's delightful sneer, from which anyone Genre Savvy should run like the wind.

Close Film

The Bible, in Habakkuk 1:5 "Look among the nations, and see; wonder and be astounded. For I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told."
Douglas Adams messes with this a lot.
- Dirk Gently fuses it with Bavarian Fire Drill in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency when he walks into a police-packed crimescene, then simply orders one cop to disassemble a wastebasket and another to guard he sofa stuck halfway up the stairs (which the cop in question had been ordered to saw up and remove).
- Dirk Gently tries to employ this trope in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, when he steals a cup of coffee off a woman's table in a cafe, believing the act will be so shocking to her that she would let it go without comment. It doesn't work.
- In So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, Arthur Dent ends up sharing a small package of biscuits with a complete stranger sitting next to him at a train station. It starts out as this trope, with Arthur indeed being so shocked that he does not comment at the audacity of the man who has just opened his biscuits and eaten one. Instead he escalates it into a battle of wills, each man taking turns eating a biscuit until they're all gone, with nary a word spoken. After the other man leaves, Arthur finds his own packet of biscuits - they were underneath his newspaper the whole time. This did happen to the author.
- Hitchhiker's series is full of this, the Krikkit wars being the worst offender (they destroy entire worlds, killing 2 grillion people, and then their attorney pulls this trope again by saying that they believed it was the right thing.)
The commander of the medieval English assault on an interstellar empire in Poul Anderson's The High Crusade... well, that speaks for itself.
Two words: Miles Vorkosigan. Perhaps the best is in The Vor Game, in which he has to get back a hostage from the villain before she kills the hostage. At the appointed meeting place, he and his men burst in, guns drawn, and threaten to shoot the hostage if she doesn't give in to Miles's demands. The villain has no idea what to do when faced with the very threat she was about to make, and so Miles gains the upper hand.
- Gregor (the hostage) doesn't do so badly himself: saying, "No, he's bluffing. Watch!" and then walking right up to the muzzle of a plasma cannon held by one of Miles's people, allowing Miles to slam the blast doors behind him.
Roald Dahl's Matilda explicitly states that the monstrous headmistress Agatha Trunchbull would not get away with being cruel and abusive anywhere else, but she gets away with using a girl for human hammer throwing, flinging kids out of windows and locking them in a torture device because no parent would believe a child trying to tell on her. Dahl knew his stuff - his intended audience (elementary-school kids) were perfectly capable of buying that explanation.
- To some extent, this kind of cruelty to children by their teachers was Truth In Television in the British system of public schools (note: a British "public school" is what Americans would call a "private school") back when Dahl went to school in the 1920s and 1930s. Ms. Trunchbull would have been utterly horrible even by that standard, but the idea that parents would stand by and let teachers abuse their children was all too well established. By the 1980s when Matilda was written, things weren't nearly as bad as they used to be, but the memory was still there.
Francis Crawford of Lymond does this all the time in Dorothy Dunnett's "Lymond Chronicles." One of his better moments is chasing away an English army by dressing several thousand Scottish sheep in metal helmets on a foggy day. The English just see the reflections from the helmets and assume the Scottish have a bigger army, even though there's really only a few Scottish soldiers. He also pulls off a lot of disguises because they're so outrageous that no one would guess they're him, including a tearful Scottish whore, a flamboyant Spanish nobleman, a drunken Irish bard, and a French falsetto singer.
In Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder corners the market in Egyptian cotton. Unfortunately for him, he discovers he can't find a buyer for it. Yossarian tells him to bribe the US government into buying it. When he asks how, Yossarian replies that if he makes the bribe big enough and just spreads the word, the right person will contact him. If questioned, just tell people that the national security of the USA depends on a strong Egyptian cotton industry. Just be straightforward and act like you are doing nothing wrong and it will work. Sadly, this has also worked in Real Life.
- This quote by Colonel Korn, spoken in justification of awarding bombardier Yossarian a medal for going over his target twice after failing to drop his bombs the first time, sums up the trope pretty well: "You know, that might be the answer - to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a trick that never seems to fail."
Rupert of Hentzau, a debauched murderer, seducer, traitor, and rapist who caused his own mother to die of grief and shame, from Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda is this trope on legs. Let's see, he stabs The Hero in the middle of an overture of friendship. And a day or two later he flirts with the Love Interest under the hero's nose. He's the Dragon to the Big Bad; this doesn't last long. You see, when he tries to rape the Big Bad's mistress, and the Big Bad tries to intervene, he kills him.
Moist von Lipwig from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series does this all the time. If I am going to fail, I would rather fail spectacularly, he claims.
Tolliver Groat: You've got to learn to walk before you try to run, sir!
Moist: No! Never say that, Tolliver! Never! Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl!...All or nothing, Mr. Groat!
- Even Moist admitted to himself (numerous times) the mastery of Going Postal's antagonist, Reacher Gilt. Gilt deliberately made himself resemble a pirate (complete with talking cockatoo shouting "twelve and a half percent"), essentially advertising he was a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
- Making Money featured the most gloriously audacious moment of his entire career, just to screw over a blackmailer. Warning: too awesome for spoilers, so if you haven't read Making Money, just skip it.
  Mr. Slant: What did you do before you came to the city?
  Moist: Hm? Oh, sorry, I was a crook.
Pick a Night Watch book, any book with the Watch and you'll find this, usually committed by Carrot or Vimes:
- Vimes' disarming of a riot in Night Watch: He goes outside the watch house, unarmed, with a Powder Keg Crowd forming... And sits down on the front porch drinking cocoa and smoking a cigar. Making very sure everyone can see that both his hands are full and neither hand has a weapon.
- Minor example in Guards! Guards!. The four Night Watch members manage to get a long way into the Shades, a district of Ankh-Morpork so dangerous that assassins are afraid of going in, and avoid death by simply being, well... loudly drunk, confusing the hell out of the criminals tailing them.
  - And of course they later arrest someone for committing murder with a blunt instrument. Said blunt instrument was a forty-foot dragon. In fact, the dragon is also arrested.
  - Don't forget their attempt to abuse the fact that million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten by deliberately handicapping themselves when aiming an arrow at the dragon in hopes of killing it. It doesn't work. However, their chances of surviving the dragon's retaliation were in fact a million-to-one, so they were fine
  - Carrot's very good at taking laws literally. He accuses someone trying to dismiss a golem of littering.
- In Carpe Jugulum, Count de Magpyr (an evil vampire) confronts the peasant mob with critical appraisal of their weapons, and promises to send out snacks later. Then he goes back into the castle trailed by "the puzzled mumbling of players who have had their ball confiscated."
- In Jingo, two armies are about to fight a battle. When Commander Vimes protests that they can't be arrested, Carrot does not see why not. They could charge them with Action Likely to Cause a Breach of Peace.
  - He then does it. Successfully.
  - Among the other charges: Loitering with Intent, and Loitering within tent, and one count of offensive language for the commanding general who protests this. That last is the commanding officer of Vimes' own city by the way.
- Also in Jingo, Vimes insults a member of the nobility loudly, repeatedly and to his face, because he knows Lord Rust's worldview does not admit the possibility of such a thing and Rust, therefore, will not notice.
  "Rust's brain erased the sounds that his ears could not possibly have heard."
- Finally, in The Last Hero, Commander Vimes sends him to arrest Cohen the Barbarian and his Silver Horde, who may well accidentally blow up the world. The charge? Conspiracy to cause an affray.
  - The thing about Captain Carrot is that he has no clue that he's taking advantage of this phenomenon... or at least he acts that way. He just acts like a truly decent person who lives in a simple world where people follow the rules, and everyone around him unconsciously plays along to see where the hell this is going.
- At one point, during a search, Carrot had been ordered to leave as soon as Dr. Whiteface, the head of the Fools' Guild, told him to. When Whiteface did so: "If you tell me to leave, I'm going to have to follow the order I was given. Isn't that right, Sergeant? I really don't want to have to follow that order. *leans in closer to Whiteface* If it will make you feel better, I shall probably feel a little ashamed afterward." When Dr. Whiteface threatens that he can have a dozen men in there in moments, Carrot tells him that doing so would only make it easier for him to obey his orders. Sergeant Colon later expresses admiration for Carrot because of this: "That's not just bluffing when you have bad cards, that's bluffing when you have no cards at all."
- Susan Sto Helit, grand-daughter of Death does it too. When employed as a nanny, she quells her charges' fear of a monster in the darkness by taking an iron poker and beating it stupid. The children's parents assume she's putting on a show. The monsters know better.
- Cohen qualifies, too. At one point, he explains to a group of soldiers that they aren't being as scary as they could be, and then reminds them of "the element of SURPRISE!" before slaughtering them all in five seconds.
  - Although Cohen's most famous plan involving Refuge In Audacity comes in Interesting Times where Cohen intends to steal the entire Agatean Empire. To his credit, the idea is so audacious that nobody had ever put much effort into defending against such a direct plan and it works pretty much flawlessly.
Employed frequently by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho

Close Literature

Megan from Drake And Josh, who gets away with everything, never receiving anything but rewards for her horribly contemptible behavior. Many viewers no longer/never found this funny and intensely hate her. At the end of The Movie, she and the title characters accidentally catch some counterfeiters, but not before she steals tens of thousands of dollars in fake bills, which we are left seeing as some divine force rewarding her for committing an extremely serious crime.
The X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" used this in the following way. So, you've seen a UFO, and that's semi-believable. And then these Men In Black showed up and tried to warn you from telling anyone, and that's stretching believability. Now, the Men In Black knock this over the believability threshold into the area where nobody will believe this by... looking exactly like Jesse Ventura and Alex Trebek.
- The parody book The Extra-Terrestrial's Guide to the X-Files, written as an instructional manual for aliens newly arrived on Earth, suggested this as a convenient way to discredit witnesses. "No really, after they abducted me and did their tests, the aliens stood together, sang some Broadway showtunes, forced me to drink a bottle of bourbon, and then dumped me on the side of the road beside a strip club!"
Subverted in an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry, George and Elaine are waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant. Jerry dares Elaine to go to one of the tables and snatch somebody's eggroll with no explanation. She goes, but chickens out, maintaining a ventriloquist's grin for Jerry's benefit while trying to talk the diner into selling her the eggroll.
Life On Mars: Gene Hunt.
Gene: Now. Yesterday's shooting. The dealers are all so scared we're more likely to get Helen Keller to talk. The Paki in a coma's about as lively as Liberace's dick when he's looking at a naked woman, all in all this investigation's going at the speed of a spastic in a magnet factory... What?
Sam: ... Think you might have missed out the Jews.
Everything Shawn Spencer does. Everything. From naming his "psychic" detective agency Psych and defrauding the police department, to haunting Gus's boss's house to keep the team together, to arming a bomb, in the middle of a police cordon, to find out who designed it.
An episode of The Drew Carey Show has Mimi making Drew late for work by getting a cowboy to tie him up. Just as planned, Drew's boss doesn't even consider believing his excuse. To be fair, he initially suspects his British colleague as well; it's only when Mimi imitates the cowboy's "Ma'am" that he finds the real truth.
Doctor Who: The Doctor. Leaving aside all the audacious plots he's came up with largely on the fly that have worked, let us say merely this; in one body, he walked around in a scarf that was twice as long as he was. In another, he wore a multi-coloured patchwork coat and yellow trousers.
- Don't forget the sprig of celery on his lapel!
Absolute Power. In 'Crash and Burn', after their client beats his pregnant girlfriend in an IKEA carpark, they get him out of it by inventing a disease to explain the attack. It works so well everyone's surprised, until Charles tries to convince Alan to fake a heart attack to secure the film rights to his life and Alan backs out and tells the media.
In one episode of Father Ted, Ted has to kick Bishop Brennan up the arse as a forfeit sent by Dick Byrne. however, if he does so, Bishop Brennan will most certainly send Ted to a parish even worse than Craggy Island. Eventually, Dougal suggests that Ted could get away with kicking him if he kicked him, then acted like nothing had happened, as Bishop Brennan wouldn't think that Ted would ever do anything like that, as he is so afraid of him. Photographic evidence as big as a house, however, leads to Teds downfall.

Close Live Action Television

In 1991, Barry Darsow (formerly Smash of the tag team Demolition) was repackaged by the WWE as "Repo Man", which was Exactly What It Says On The Tin. A horrible gimmick that was presumably aimed at provoking cheap heat from deadbeats, Darsow played the character so ridiculously over the top that it was hard to hate him.
Every single thing that Degeneration X has ever done.
In late 2005, WWE was at a loss for how to make the crowd root for John Cena and boo Kurt Angle. They tried all of the cheapest, most offensive tricks in the wrestling playbook to make Angle the bad guy: he began bashing America and was given an Arabic manager to interfere in his matches, all the while playing the xenophobic angle to attract as much cheap heat as possible. It failed because nobody was buying an anti-American Kurt Angle, and eventually Angle lampshaded the difficulty in getting people to hate him by going even further into offensive territory. The resulting promo is generally held to be hilarious because nobody can take it seriously:
Kurt Angle: First of all, I'd like to say that: I hope the US loses the war in Iraq. And, uh, while I'm at it, I think the greatest country in the world is...France! Y'know, truth be told, I'm not a very big fan of..."the black people." And if I would go back in time, the one person in history I'd like to make tap out would have to be...Jesus! ...The point is, I can say anything I want to these idiots, and they'll still cheer for me!
*Right on cue, the crowd cheers enthusiastically*
- After this, WWE finally gave up on trying to make Angle a heel.

Close Professional Wrestling

Consider the principal clown in the Cirque Du Soleil show Mystere, Brian Le Petit. The preshow is based around him offering to usher people to their seats, and proceeding to completely fail at this task time and time again, except when he forces some people sitting in the front row to leave the theater so the people he's leading can sit there. He also has a fondness for stealing popcorn from audience members, which might be the very same popcorn he cheerily throws about. Once the show starts, he picks on the emcee, at one point tricking him into stepping off a high ledge, and then there's his lengthy final segment: he tricks a male audience member into getting into a box. Brian then locks it and sets up a candlelit picnic in the audience, because he wants to woo the man's date and needed him out of the way. By the end of this segment he's set up another man with the date as a patsy, shot a bird (dancer) over a stolen loaf of bread, tried to use a chainsaw to open the box when he loses the key - and then threatened the emcee's crotch with said saw, and when the chips are down dances to The Jimmy Hart Version of "Stayin' Alive" as one of several attempts to avoid getting tossed out. And all the Audience Participation is real; even a Cirque press book admitted this act can be dangerous for its performer.
- Well, all the audience participation that deals with everyone except the plants in the audience. I'll let you decide who they are.
On Flight Of The Conchords, Bret had a dream in which David Bowie told him that, "once in a while, it doesn't hurt to do something absolutely outrageous". At a business meeting with a musical greeting card company Bet decided to act on this advice by climbing onto the company owner's desk and exposing himself. It paid off in the end, as the owner admired Bret's balls.

Close Theatre

Elite Beat Agents. By using an Action Replay, you can give the male agents the female agents' dance moves. Try not to laugh at the sight of any of the characters buttdancing.
- If you get a high enough cumulative score, you can select Commander Khan in Versus Mode. He always dances with the Divas, and... well, he gets down.
Team Fortress 2 deserves a mention here, with game-play elements (rocket jumping, sentient buildings, a gun that shoots medicine) are shadowed by the impressionistic style and cartoon shading.

Close Video Games

In Something Positive, character Aubrey describes a variation of the trope when, asked why she's never been arrested, she responds that "the key is to commit crimes so confusing that police feel too stupid to even write a crime report about them."
The vigilante paleontologists in The Adventures of Dr. Mc Ninja (which might just live off this trope anyway) decide to dress as gunslinger banditos while they're riding their velociraptors, thus preventing word from getting out about them.
Schlock in Schlock Mercenary escaped punishment for spying on his commanding officers from the air vents by being utterly shameless about it.
Mike of the Walky Verse. Nearly all of his actions are played for laughs.

Close Web Comics

The title characters of the Disney Channel series Phineas And Ferb get away with a lot due to this trope. Their older sister constantly tries to expose their activities to their mother. Naturally, she refuses to believe that they built a time machine, or became pop artists, and almost all the time, due to the unintentional machinations of their secret agent pet platypus, everything is back to normal by the time she gets home.
"Aren't you a little young to be ?"
Yes. Yes we are."
"..."
- Unable to actually argue with that, the adults in question usually provide the boys with whatever materials they're asking and let them be about their business.
  - What really makes it strange is that except for their sister Candice, NO ONE seems to think there's anything wrong with any of the things they do, including their grandparents and on at least one occasion, "It's a Mud, Mud Mud World" (where they build a Monster Truck stadium in their back yard) their father. In fact it's not even certain that their mother would actually care, it may all be a delusion on Candice's part because she thinks that she would be punished for doing those things.
Codename: Kids Next Door, "Operation Hound", has Valerie (a classmate of Numbuh 5) getting away with preventing 5 from turning in her homework, because "Valerie's dog ate my homework" wouldn't fly with her teacher. (Though technically, 5 isn't exactly correct with her accusations...)
South Park's Cartman is a past master of this trope. It helps immensely that he usually believes the most outrageous things he says.
In one episode of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, K'nuckles tells Flapjack that the only way to survive when traveling to the tough side of town is to do "nothin' for nobody" and if that doesn't work, call them a sissy. When a street gang rolls a ball towards Flapjack to intimidate him, he throws it on a roof and calls them all sissies. Their jaws drop and eyes widen and only the sheer audacity of Flapjack's actions prevented them from tearing him to shreds.
In one of the more recent seasons of Spongebob he agreed to get a birthday cake for Patrick. He went into the shop and asked to buy one but the lady informed him they had only one cake left in stock. Spongebob asked if the message could be changed to say "Happy Birthday." The original message on the cake? The one that was shown clear as day on this children's television program for at least three seconds? "Sorry for the scabies." You COULDN'T make this up.

Close Western Animation

Raoul Wallenberg. A Swedish diplomat posted to Budapest, Hungary, he kept 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported to the death camps using nothing more than a printing press, typewriter ribbon, and sheer audacity. Also a Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
While not as outrageous as Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler's similar work on behalf of the Jews deserves recognition here. Schindler's Crowning Moment Of Awesome was successfully ordering Nazi soldiers to return a trainload of Jewish children en route to the death camps, through sheer force of personality, by declaring the children to be "essential workers" (a protected class of Jews with skills vital to Germany's war effort) in his munitions factory. A munitions factory that he operated for several years using (and protecting) many Jewish workers, while deliberately never producing a single working artillery shell.
More war stories; Juan Pujol managed to convince the Germans that he was a highly placed British spy with inside information on shipping movements and an extensive network of agents. In actual fact, he had never been in Britain in his life and all the information he gave the Germans was based on film footage and library research. He basically created a fictitious network, just so the Germans would believe him and he'd be able to work for the British cause as a double agent.
Scandalous far-right Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky. There is no more fitting description of his entire career and political tactics than "refuge in audacity". Just read the two controversies sections in his WP page, and rest assured that it is woefully incomplete. Did it work out for him? Well, his party has won parliamentary elections once in the past, and even after a major decline remains the third largest party in the country, while Zhirinovsky has once climbed to the second place in the polls prior to a presidential election.
All of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's characters - Ali G (a white guy pretending to be black who does interviews in character with very important political figures), Borat (a clueless and, let's face it, tactless most-of-the-time news reporter from Kazakhstan), and Bruno (a Flamboyant Gay hairdresser); most of the sketches focus on real people not in in the joke taking their outrageous statements at face value. Since no one living above ground is taken in anymore, Cohen no longer uses them in public.
This and Bavarian Fire Drill were Frank Abagnale's bread and butter. Exploits include taking charge of his school's French class on his first day, and bluffing the agent chasing him by, when asked for his identification, giving him a wallet filled with soda bottle labels and chatting with him as he walks right out the door. All when he was a teenager.

Close Real Life

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. And they manage to outdo themselves each episode.
- ESPECIALLY after the Time Skip: After Simon gets out of prison, pretty much every episode features a bigger mecha or a different form of the previous episode's, which culminates in a galaxy-sized mecha controlled by a moon-sized mecha controlled by a city-sized mecha controlled by the titular two-part mecha Gurren Lagann, which is powered practically by fighting spirit.
Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure RUNS on this trope. Sagas 1 and 2 were already over the top, but when they introduced Stands in Saga 3 up... Damn.
Though the invaders are virtually incompetent, the Gag Series Keroro Gunsou contains a lot of references to, terminology from, and vague satire of World War II (Imperial) Japanese militarism, which was a fairly touchy subject when the show was released in other Asian countries. As the anime slowly leaned towards more mainstream humor and positive subject matter, the producers have modified it accordingly, making more of the jokes about post-war consumerism.
- One major initial change is the avoidance of calling Earth Pokopen (instead opting for Pekopon), which was a derisive way to refer to Sino-Japanese War era China.
G Gundam has a giant robot that can transform into a windmill, a giant robot that looks like Sailor Moon, and Master Asia's horse has its own mobile suit that it can pilot (it also has its own Transformation Sequence). The series finally ends with the main character finally announcing his love and preforming the Sekiha Love Love Tenkyoken an attack that creates a giant pissed off King who leaves a heart shaped hole in the Devil Gundam. If it were any less ridiculous, it wouldn't have worked nearly as well as it did.
Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is successfully pulled off as comedy because of this law.
Excel Saga does this quite often, pretty much every episode has at least one example of this (usually multiple examples). Then the infamous twenty-sixth episode deliberately went so far it hit "unacceptable" again and wasn't broadcast on TV, although being one minute too long was probably the actual deciding factor.
Would you believe that there's a manga and anime series about a boy who's forced to serve a girl whom he was trying to kidnap to repay a large debt by ~~the Yakuza~~ some 'very nice people', and defend her at all costs against all kinds of kidnappings, boredom, and giant robots? And gets forcibly dressed up as a girl and sexually molested by an African Tiger and it's played for laughs? And it's a shonen comedy with a fairly earlier time-slot? That's Hayate The Combat Butler in a nutshell for you.
- The second season will be broadcast in a late-night timeslot, though.
Black Lagoon, a Heroic Bloodshed anime that can, at its finest, be described as the Adaptation Distillation of every single Hollywood action movie into one series and cranked up to eleven through the Rule Of Cool. Amongst the series' collection of over-the-top concepts is a main cast consisting of a hacker, a Japanese Salaryman, a Vietnam vet turned independent contractor and an ex-hitman Dark Action Girl. The antagonists include an Implacable Man maid with a shotgun umbrella and a suitcase full of guns and a villainous group of Neo-Nazis, all taking place in a city where the coroner is a mute Elegant Gothic Lolita who uses a chainsaw in combat and the local church sells weapons to the city gangs for a living. To top it off, the series contains more narmful Gratuitous English than you can shake a stick at.
- The ultimate refuge in audacity, however, occurs in the final episode when Ms. Balalaika shows up at the home of a powerful Yakuza leader (under 24/7 police surveillance, no less), asks to see his gun and proceeds shoots him with it. Afterwards, she exits, shows a fake diplomatic passport to the policemen who came to investigate the gunshots, and then casually gets into her limo and drives away before anyone can figure out what happened.
- Which makes Mood Whiplash hit you like a brick to the face when the serious Story Arc actually shows up. If you've seen the series then you'll know what I'm talking about.
Only Gao Gai Gar would be able to pull off a hammer the size of a planet. Two words: "Goldion Crusher".
One Piece occasionally dabbles in this. Most notably, the character of Mr. 2 Bon Clay, a Camp Gay, shapeshifting martial artist who dresses as a hairy-legged ballerina and uses swans as weapons.
- Many of the characters in the show in general fall into this trope when taken abstractly. A swordsman who competently wields a katana in his mouth, a reindeer who can turn into humanoid forms and is also a skilled doctor, and later on a cola-powered cyborg who rebuilt his own body from scrap ship parts after being hit by a train, and a reanimated skeleton musician who can play the violin with a sword and still has his afro attached... because he has "strong roots".
Dead Leaves. Jesus Christ. First of all, the animation is utterly insane and the entire movie plays like one continuous action sequence. As for the actual plot: A man with a TV for a head and a woman with a spot around her eye regain consciousness outside of a city naked. They go on a crime spree, and after a long chase are caught and sent to a super secure prison on the torn-up remains of the moon. There inmates receive cruel treatment rivalling Superjail, spending the entire time tied up in straight-jacket/sacks while tubes are used for both force-feeding and force-excretion. The fellow inmates include such bizarre things as a man that has either asscheeks or a scrotum for a head, and a man with a gigantic drill for a penis. The pair then have sex together in their cell and somehow undo their restraints of themselves and then their fellow inmates, after which they all attempt a breakout. I don't want to spoil anymore, but suffice to say it must be seen to be believed and it is freaking awesome.
In contrast to the semi-seriousness of the Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome animes, their manga counterparts push the fanservice and plot points into the realms of absurdity, essentially making them Magical Girl harem comedies in the process (at least for the first half, before they get darker toward the end). Most fans who watched the Anime First were not pleased with the differences, though.
There is a manga called My Balls. If the title alone wasn't pushing it, the premise ( a loser gets an absurdly powerful demon sealed in his balls, so he can't ejaculate for a month or she'll be released and cause the end of the world. So of course, every female he meets starts coming on to him.) certainly does.
Does anything more than the name Axis Powers Hetalia need to be said? The history of the world especially through war turned into comedy. The First Sino-Japanese war is represented by a crazed Japan showing up at China's door and attacking him with a sword. The anime tones this down for example the strip that ends with Japan attacking China has its ending removed so Japan comes off as an annoying genius instead of someone who takes China's help and repays it by attacking him.
Suzumiya Haruhi's "Endless Eight", the anime version. This is actually Refuge In Audacity on the producers side, not inside the show. Whether it's trolling or something else is anyone's guess.
- For non-viewers: The plot involves a Groundhog Day Loop. The producers have shown pretty much the same events, animated slightly differently, for eight episodes in a row. Even Adolf Hitler was angry.
Narutaru's anime opening actually spoils a large portion of the plot, including several parts of the manga that weren't animated — but the way it's animated and the opening theme song ensures that nobody will ever take notice of this. In fact, the whole opening is just this trope writ large.

Close Anime

Dane Cook intimated in a bit the time he got fired from a video store. The boss is chewing him out, and he snaps, and says "Fuck you!" then realizes what he's just done, and regrets it, but then thinks, "I'll have to beat him up now," figuring the more over the top his response, the less likely prospective employers will be to believe his old boss.
Old Boss: Well, he sat on my chest and punched me repeatedly. You don't want this guy working for you.
Prospective Employer: (hangs up phone)You're right, he's completely nuts. You got the job.

Close Comedy

Calvin And Hobbes dabbled in this. One Sunday strip depicted a scene from a story Calvin had written, in which an ordinary office worker is shot and killed by rifle-toting deer.
- Another of the Sunday strips featured aliens taking the entire water supply, and telling the Earthlings "We're just doing our job".
The Transformers manga series Kiss Players, in which the Autobots need to be kissed by young women to power up. If you haven't heard of it... well, let's just say it starts out sorta Ecchi and then becomes really Ecchi, with the nominally adult female characters drawn to look standard Lolicon age if not younger. White viscous fluids and other completely unsubtle sexual imagery are thrown at the reader machine-gun style, in a way that's so over the top that it stops being Fetish Fuel. They don't make Brain Bleach strong enough to erase this. The creator has actually said that he'd wanted to make people's jaws drop. He's doing a splendid job of it so far.
- An actual description, complete with a panel from the comic, can be found here.
A Batman comic has Bruce Wayne sequestered to sit on the jury of a man he arrested as Batman trying to kidnap a baby. The prosecuting counsel asks whether there is any reason why he should not sit on this jury. Bruce calmly admits he's prejudiced in the case because he's Batman (hey, he's under oath). After everyone's stopped laughing, the judge tells him to stop screwing around and take things seriously.
This comic, which features Stalin and Hitler battling each other......with magic and superpowers. The fact that there's historical basis for some of the scenes and sayings makes this even better.
Scud, The Disposable Assassin: Scud, a robot assassin purchased from a vending machine for 50 cents, ends up teaming up with space mafia to fight zombie dinosaurs raised by Voodoo Benjamin Franklin. When you get bitten by a zombie velociraptor, you become a zombie dinosaur yourself. It's all explained as 'well, dinosaurs have tiny brains, so they're really hard to re-kill'. This is one of the more reasonable issues.

Close Comic Books

If it weren't for how utterly over-the-top it goes with its crowning moments of awesome, Shinji And Warhammer 40 K would be a bit shit. As it stands, it is the single greatest thing ever to come out of anime fandom, and no, I am not fucking exaggerating. Shinji turns into a Magnificent Bastard Badass Bookworm. Rei turns into an orky superhero. Maya turns into a gun-toting, power armor-wearing Battle-Sister. They Fight Crime.
Tiberium Wars has this happen multiple times. In fact, half of Havoc's plans involve them being so ridiculous no one sees them coming, and in Chapter Fifteen, the ruined remains of Lieutenant Wallace's Zone Trooper squad attacks hundreds of Nod soldiers, tanks, beam cannons, and Avatars.
By the same author, Forward is a Firefly fic that has this happen multiple times as well. For example, one scene in the "Mosaic" story arc has Jayne set himself on fire and charge an enemy pirate crew. Later, int he "Silver" arc, Mal, Jayne, and Kaylee escape from a mansion full of soldiers by escaping on a flying carpet while stark naked.

Close Fan Fic

CRANK more or less runs on this trope: should the main character ever STOP doing things absolutely ridiculous, his heart slows down and he dies. This leads to such incidents as fighting an entire room full of Scary Black Men, overdosing on artificial adrenaline, riding a motorcycle in nothing more than a hospital gown, and having sex in the public of all of China town while they cheer you on. And the sequel only took that further.
Virtually the entirety of 300, which would've died at the box office if it could possibly have been taken seriously. It's a confusing movie: three hundred perfectly-sculpted specimens of Caucasian manhood who look as if they've been greased up for a bachelorette party treat are defending the last bastion of civilization from a million-man army of Scary Black Men, flaming queers, and twelve-foot-tall mutants.
- Alternatively, it is possible that the people that 300 was marketed towards didn't care about any unintentional meanings.
Neo and Trinity's rescue of Morpheus in The Matrix reeks of this. Walking into a heavily guarded installation, with military support and three Agents, with coats full of guns and a bag of explosives. When Trinity points out the ridiculous nature of the plan, Neo retorts, "That's why it's going to work." It does.
The Swedish teen drama film Hip Hip Hora! (The Ketchup Effect) apparently got away with a sex act that involves frontal (prosthetic) nudity, done by barely legal actors playing drunken minors. Sweden, as a whole, is less uptight than the US, but the scene might just have crossed the line had it not played out like this. [NSFW!]
Mel Brooks has based his film career on this for very blatant reasons. He has gone on the record saying that his plan is to make Hitler look so ridiculous that his ideas can never be taken seriously again. This can probably be expanded into all racism as well.
- Consider Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part I. Making light of the persecution of Jews in the Spanish Inquisition, bad. Doing so in a long and elaborate big-budget Hollywood song-and-dance number with a water torture scene envisioned as an aquatic ballet, directed by a Jewish film-maker, funny.
- The Producers, another one by Mel Brooks, revolves around the titular characters accidentally invoking this trope when they try to put on the worst musical ever, Springtime For Hitler.
- Race in Blazing Saddles (again with the Mel Brooks!). Uncensored versions, especially.
Similarly, the crucifixion scene at the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian went from horrifying and sacrilegious to gut-bustingly hilarious with the introduction of the light-hearted sing-along ditty, "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life."
- Even more so when they actually played it at Graham Chapman's funeral.
The ending of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II could be seen as an example of this, Splinter's reaction not withstanding. Consider, four mutant ninja sewer-dwellers duking it out with two super-mutants and a squad of ninjas, in a dance hall, to an impromptu rap song by Vanilla Ice, who then proceed to toss high-fives to the crowd, then hop onto the stage, perform dance moves and shout "Give it up for a Turtle!" None of the people there find this weird.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has an infamous scene in the first act, where Indiana survives a nuclear blast in a lead lined fridge. Yet he doesn't just survive it. The fridge is actually thrown out of the test house it's in, when that house and everything else is disintegrated, and the fridge is actually launched through the air, to well outside the blast radius. To some, this is a Wall Banger. To me, breaking one or two laws of physics is Did Not Do The Research. Breaking a dozen or so is clearly this trope.
- This is *after* he and The Dragon survive the deceleration test (where you get accelerated to just under the speed of sound, and then come to a screeching halt in the space of four feet). This alone would be audacious enough to qualify, and most people forget it even happened because of the fridge incident happening right afterwards.
  - And that gives a whole new meaning to the term Fridge Logic (ba-dum pish!).
- Indy's encounter with Adolf Hitler in The Last Crusade has to qualify. When you're carrying a diary about the Holy Grail, which Hitler seems to want for some reason, and you come face to face with the man himself, do you hide it? No. You take advantage of the book signing you're at and get Hitler's autograph.
  - While it might have looked this way, This Troper is under impression that Indy was having a genuine Oh Crap moment, but luckily Hitler took him for yet another SS-man asking him for autograph. More appropriate example of this trope would be the scene, where Indy throws a German through the zeppelin's window, claiming the guy didn't have a ticket (cue the other passengers showing theirs). As in the above scenario, being appropriately dressed helped much here.
Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, both for the events in the film (climaxing with the trope namer for Riding The Bomb) and its very existence (a comedy where the world is annihilated...made at the height of the Cold War).
- And yet it could have been worse: the original script had the War Room scene ending in an enormous pie-fight, with one of the lines being "Our gallant young president has been struck down in his prime!" The film was supposed to have been released in late November of 1963. Luckily, Kubrick cut it long before the assassination.
Another Peter Sellers film that invokes this is 1969's The Magic Christian, which climbs increasing heights of absurdity as an Eccentric Millionaire tests how willing people are to sacrifce sanity and dignity for money/material possessions. (One of the milder examples is offering a traffic cop money if he'll eat the ticket he's trying to issue. He does.) The source novel, not coincidentally, was by Terry Southern, who contributed to the Strangelove screenplay and co-wrote this one as well.
- Southern also co-wrote The Loved One in 1965, with jaw-dropping antics set in both a human and a pet cemetery. When a portion of the studio-screening audience walked out in disgust, director Tony Richardson was pleased to have achived his objective.
- Southern adapted The Loved One very faithfully from a book written by Evelyn Waugh. Most of the audacious parts are actually from the book itself, not from Southern's imagination.
The cult film Forbidden Zone seems to exist purely as a demonstration of this trope. It begins with a character in blackface, and that argubly could be one of the least offensive bits of the movie ... if the film weren't so brilliantly humorous.
Whenever Tuco is about to be hanged in The Good The Bad And The Ugly, the list of horrific crimes he's accused of committing becomes so ludicrously long and varied that it goes from menacing to hilarious very quickly.
Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino is so racist that it stops being offensive and becomes part of the film's humor.
Hot Fuzz Nicholas Angel kicked a grandmother in the face, shot or beat up a bunch of other old people, and was perfectly justified.
- Shaun Of The Dead also has many fairly ludicrous scenes, including killing a zombie with old vinyl records (but not the ones he still likes!) and Shaun stopping the car after hitting a zombie to make sure they were already undead.
Tropic Thunder is made of this trope. Best example: 12-year old drugdealing leader wielding a bazooka.

Close Film

Christopher Moore's Lamb The Gospel According To Biff, in its entirety. Only in Lamb does a scene where Jesus offers to heal a little girl's malformed hand so she can make obscene gestures at Pharisees make perfect sense.
- And let's not forget Moore's note to readers at the end, where he says any historical accuracies are more than justified by the fact that they allowed him to address the age-old question, "What if Jesus had known kung fu?"
Lots of Warhammer 40000 novels are fueled by this trope. Examples:
- Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novels. Point in case, at the beginning of For The Emperor Cain deliberately invokes this trope when confronted by a mess hall of rioting Guardsmen by leaping up onto a table, pointing at someone, and ordering them to get a mop. The bloodstains were deplorable. In Echoes of the Tomb, he runs into a portal to parts unknown because he believes possible death at the hands of whatever's on the other side is preferable to certain death due to the Necrons before him.
- In Lee Lightner's Space Wolf novel Wolf's Honour, Ragnor realizes, fighting with Madox, that Madox will unquestionably wear him down with minor wounds that add up to mortally injured. So when Madox strikes at him, he doesn't defend himself. In fact, he drives the sword deeper in, and Madox can't pull it out and so can't parry when Ragnor strikes with the Spear of Russ.
- In James Swallow's Horus Heresy novel The Flight of the Eisenstein, the title flight ends up with the ship in unknown space, with a dead Naviagator, and so no way to leave. Garro orders them to jettison the warp drive, despite the danger to their own ship; it will serve as a signal. Voyen threatens him with a gun to try to get him to stop, until Garro talks him down. While the ship is damaged, the signal is noticed.
- In James Swallow's Blood Angels novel Deus Encarmine, the Blood Angels are reduced to a small fraction of their number, facing a Last Stand, and on the verge of despair. Arkio proposes that they sneak into the port they had to abandon and turn its guns, not on the forces facing them, but on their spaceship.
Lady Cecilia from Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano series. An old lady who owns a space yacht called Sweet Delight, she at one point decides to impersonate a military officer. She does this by declaring herself to be a high-ranking agent on a mission too secret for the rank-and-file crew to know about, and responding to any requests for proof with a Death Glare and vaguely-worded threat. It's so outrageous that everyone assumes there's no way she could be just making it up...
- It did help that the captain and most of the crew of Lady Cecelia's yacht actually were military personnel undercover on a top-secret mission... even if they all thought they'd been discharged.
Pulled off with disastrous effect in World War Z. China lied not about sweeping people up and killing them, but the reason they were doing it, claiming they were dissidents when they were actually zombies. The US was woefully unprepared for the reality because of it...
This is the entire plot of the short story "The Catbird Seat" by James Thurber: In order to get rid of an annoying coworker, a man well-known for never smoking, drinking or misbehaving in any way goes to the coworker's house and smokes, drinks whiskey and says he's plotting to kill his boss. Nobody believes a word of it the next day, and the coworker is fired.
Jarlaxle, of R.A. Salvatore's novels set in the Forgotten Realms, is a brightly-colored, grinning avatar of the trope. Let us put it this way: there are two dark elves who could walk into a major Northern city like Waterdeep without getting in trouble. The first is Drizzt, who relies first on stealth, then on scrupulous behavior, and finally on his reputation to keep people friendly. The other is Jarlaxle, who could (literally) charm the pants off a follower of a religion where the dogma includes "Kill all dark elves". And then rob them before leaving in the morning.
- Drizzt would be helped by the simple fact that he could KILL THE ENTIRE CITY! Maybe.
The famous satirist Jonathan Swift wrote an essay titled "A Modest Proposal", wherein he advocates the eating of babies. Practical AND delicious.
- Not just that, as the full title tells us. A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public.
In Plan B, a book from the Liaden Universe, our heroes plan to steal aircraft from the invading army. In the process they essentially reference this trope:
It was a plan somewhat short on detail, but Nelirikk never doubted it would succeed. It was much too audacious to fail.
Ken Follett's The Pillars Of The Earth does this a few times, including Bishop-to-be Waleran getting Prior Philip to pledge support for his nomination when the current Bishop died, then casually announcing the death of the then-Bishop. Among Philip's reasons for never reporting this to anyone is that noone would believe a man of God would do something like that.
In Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang was forced to defend Xicheng with 5000 troops, half of which had to be reassigned to help evacuate all of the goods from Xicheng. When a giant Wei army appears, there was no refuge left but audacity: he appeared over top of the open city gates playing an instrument, flanked by boys holding burning incense, while soldiers dressed as peasants swept out the gate. Wei army commander Sima Yi, seeing this, orders a retreat. Sima's sons were convinced that it was a bluff, but Sima himself thought (from previous encounters) that Zhuge didn't take risks, and that there must be some deep strategem behind this display. To Sima's credit, Zhuge comments afterwards about how much he hated having to take a risk in this instance, but it simply couldn't be helped.
While not terribly audacious over all, the second Artemis Fowl book contains a line which was removed from US editions, in which Artemis thinks he'll probably be attracted to Holly Short when he reaches puberty. Secondary plots of the fifth and sixth books respectively? Artemis going through puberty and learning to cope with attraction, and the beginning of an Artemis/Holly Will They Or Won't They. Neither book would have even made sense cleaned up like the second.
In GK Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, when Syme reveals to Gregory in the anarchist stronghold, that Syme is a policeman, this inspires Gregory to give a speech emphasizes the humanity of their motives. Syme, taking Refuge In Audacity (and trusting Gregory's word), leaps up to give a fire-breathing speech and win the post they were holding an election for, to infiltrate the society.

Close Literature

Hi, I'm Dr. House.
A Venezuelan Telenovela author managed to get his newest soap titled "¡Viva la Pepa!" (a phrase who in Spanish can be interpred as either a reference about lazy characters or a genuine admiration to certain part of the female anatomy) by claiming that the "Pepa" in the title refered to the three main heroines, all with names derived from "Josefa" who all took variants of the unusual diminutive "Pepa" (itself a female variant of the usual shortening "Pepe" for men named José) as nicknames. However, there is a reason, at least in Venezuela, about why very few women would take those particular nicknames...
Top Gear had an episode where the trio competed in driving challenges with their German counterparts (the hosts of the German show D Motor) in Belgium. Clarkson said the BBC had told them not to mention the war. During the course of the film, they proceed to make at least a dozen references to said war, including arriving in two-seat Spitfires, having an Axis v. Allies drag races (with Clarkson cracking a joke about the Italian car switching sides mid-race) and having 633 Squadron as background music. Twice.
- The guys also engage in some rather audacious cheating, including in that contest, passing The Stig off as James. It worked because they were losing, so no one really cared.
- Clarkson had a car pull this on him. A challenge issued by the producers required the trio to drive from Switzerland to Northern England on one tank of gas, a distance of about 750 miles, essentially an exercise in hypermiling. Hammond and May chose cars that were already extremely fuel-efficient. Clarkson showed up in a Jaguar. While May and Hammond practiced hypermiling as much as possible, Clarkson basically declared the challenge impossible and set out carefully to manage his fuel consumption so he would run out of fuel close to his home (so he could spend that evening with his family). Despite the fact that he should have run out of gas after four hundred miles, Clarkson not only made it to the finish line, he even beat May to it and could won easily had he not tried to lose early on. He doesn't believe it to this day.
- Also, the V8 powered blender. That is, a blender powered by a Corvette's V8 engine! Clarkson uses it to create "a manly smoothie". Ingredients: raw beef (with bone!), chillies, Bovril, a lot of Tabasco, and a brick for added bite.
  - And James May drinks it!
  James May: I have a name for it: the Bloody Awful.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia utilizes this trope in spades. Episode titles include "The Gang Gets Racist", "Charlie Gets Cancer", "Mac Bangs Dennis' Mom", and "Dennis and Dee Go on Welfare".
Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse
In the Farscape episode "PK Tech Girl" D'Argo is able to bluff some hostile aliens into backing off long enough to get a forcefield up and running, simply because the aliens refuse to believe a Luxan warrior isn't armed to the teeth. At the end even the alien captain salutes his efforts. "You had nothing, but you used it well."
Tim And Eric Awesome Show Great Job can sometimes be almost nothing but this trope.
In Scrubs, The Janitor loses his job. He then appears working again, having dressed up as a doctor and told the replacement janitor that he was fired. He then continues working in the hospital, despite not being employed, under the philosophy of "everything will work out for me", and then when the paychecks are handed out, he asks where his paycheck is, and the woman apologizes to him and goes off to get him one. When he does get it, he says that he was normally paid twice that amount, which evokes another apology.
Brass Eye - when you invent a fake narcotic, give it an unlikely name, persuade celebrities to read out factsheets on camera including such facts as it is a made up drug (meaning it's made from chemicals not plants) then that is not quite enough. What do you do? Persuade a politician to actually ask a question about this made-up drug in parliament and be immortalised in legislative history of course.
- "It works on a part of the brain known as "Shatner's Bassoon" ... A boy was knocked over by a car because he thought he had a week to cross the road."
In one highly memorable episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway, the director actually comes out to censor them so they can't use Hitler in one of their improv skits. What do they do? Fill the episode with Hitler jokes. The director gives up almost immediately.
(Skit: how the cast of Baywatch would react to an actual emergency)
Wayne Brady: "I'm falling!" (pinches imaginary boobs so they inflate and bounce off the ground)
Drew Carey: "We can do that, but whatever you do, don't [BLEEP]ing make fun of Hitler."
(Later, after a skit that involved Native American references)
Drew Carey (sarcastically): "I love that, let's make fun of the Native Americans all we want, who gives a [BLEEP] about them."
- Another episode once had a Party Quirks game where Colin was investigating whether people were really the sex they claimed to be. This happened. He'd probably have gotten written up for sexual harassment if it wasn't so incredibly blatant. As it turned out, everybody involved thought it was awesome.
NCIS does this in several episodes. Such as the first episode, in which Gibbs steals Air Force One, and then later steals evidence (including the body of the victim!) in order to have his department head the investigation. They didn't think to actually inspect the body when Gibbs handed it over, because no one expected him to lie about who he was handing over.
- The only sensible reception to his hanging up on Director Vance during the Weatherman episode is something along the lines of "This man has balls of cold steel."
Firefly: the whole Ariel episode but especially Simon's famous Drill Sergeant Nasty on the incompetant doctor.
- Of course, aside from the whole being fugitives thing, that scene had little actual deception as Simon's character is presented as easily smart/experienced enough to know such things.
  - Well that's a pretty big "aside from" considering who they are fugitives from. Not to mention that Jayne is NOT easily smart/experienced enough to know such things and River might go batty at any moment. And the fact that Simon just might accidently run into someone he knew.
  - Well yeah, the episode is still a Refuge in Audacity plot. The parts where Simon was doing exactly what he trained most of his life to do at exceptional schools better than the new doc wasn't so much a refuge in audacity, however, as a Refuge in Doing the Right thing, even when it might draw more attention to yourself than you want.
In the Supernatural Season 4 episode "Monster Movie," which is a hilarious Affectionate Parody of old monster movies, the Shape Shifter does this by turning into various old B Movie monsters, such as Dracula, The Wolf Man, and a cheesy mummy. The murders are such a giant Cliche Storm that no one, not even Sam and Dean, can believe that they happened. Going even further, the shapeshifter wants to take on Dracula's identity, picking out a pretty blonde to be his Mina Chandler (and calls her that); when Dean starts to fall for the girl, the shapeshifter dubs him "Harker" (Jonathan Harker, Mina's fiance); he even calls Sam "Van Helsing" (like the Professor, not the Hugh Jackman character). He also built a giant dungeon out of wood and cardboard in his basement.
Captain Jack Harkness' bisexuality falls into this category, perhaps paving the way for other bisexuals with lesser appetites later on Torchwood.
Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson seems to be resigned to the fact that people will be offended no matter what he says, so he just goes for the funny.
Hammond [on a new vehicle called the Skoda Scout]: So presumably ... it pitches up on your doorstep once a year to ask for a pound to clean itself.
May: So I suppose every summer it goes off and sort of stays in the countryside somewhere and is... touched inappropriately.
Clarkson: No, no James. That's the Skoda Catholic Church.

Close Live Action TV

The hit of gay-as-a-maypole singer Thomas Bickham.
A video about somebody becoming a rapper. Say, Adolf Hitler (who has an inexplicable Scottish accent. Or this one, starring our friend Mel Brooks again.
Anal Cunt.
- If nothing else, 'Al Stankus Is Always on the Phone With His Bookie' must be the most breathtakingly facetious name for a song ever.
  - "I Snuck A Retard Into A Sperm Bank" doesn't count? I mean, what?
  - Lest we forget "Hitler Was a Sensitive Man" and "Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck" (addressed to Eric and Conor Clapton).
  - One typo somewhere has "Hitler Was a Sensible Man". Which is kinda funnier actually.
  - Oh, oh, me too! How about "I Became A Counselor So I Could Tell Rape Victims They Asked For It" and "You Converted to Judaism So A Guy Would Touch Your Dick" and and... actually, all of them.
  - And for all those titles, the lyrics themselves are worse. Many of those titles had to be toned down for legal reasons. Just click the link above and see.
- At the same time, this band explicitly avoids this by NOT spelling out their name on the album covers, abbreviating it to AC.
The Muse music video for Knights Of Cydonia is simply indescribable. It starts with Kung-fu cowboys and works its way up.
Godwins Law: Reichroll, the disturbingly funny hybrid of WW 2 Germany footage and Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", aka the "Rick Roll" music.
Springtime For Hitler. I watched it in history class. At first everyone looked on in uncomfortable horror, but around the time the actors started dancing around in the shape of a swastika, every single one of us was laughing helplessly.
- It's the in-movie "horrified reaction" shots which truly put it over the top: "yes, we know exactly how appalling this is, and we're doing it anyway!"
Tom Lehrer. On his debut album, he included a ditty singing the praises of the neighborhood dope peddler. This was in 1953.
- My personal favorite of his, "The Masochism Tango", which is exactly what it sounds like, includes such romantic exhortations as
  My heart entreats,
  Just hear those savage beats
  And go and put on your cleats
  And come and trample me.
- Tom Lehrer himself says that probably his most controversial song is "The Vatican Rag" which, of course, pokes fun at the Roman Catholic Church. Even if you don't come from a religious background, it is downright hilarious, even more so if you're a former Christian. The recording, which is a live one, has the audience breaking out in laughter every few seconds. They really did find it just that funny.
  - Tom's introduction for the song gets quite a few laughs, too, especially when he says that the song he's about to perform is "a modest example". When it comes to Tom Lehrer, there is no such thing, and his audience is clearly well aware of that fact.
On the face of it, the popular Bloodhound Gang song "The Bad Touch" is a tactless solicitation of sex. But it gets away with its plethora of overtly sexual imagery because it's so ridiculously over-the-top, it becomes entertaining.
- Not to mention their song "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo", which is a song entirely composed of sexual innuendo. And yes, the title DOES spell 'Fuck' in NATO phoneic spelling.
  - The music video takes it even further, with such things as a car shaped like a banana becoming unpeeled as it goes through a tunnel.
- ...Aren't ALL of their songs and videos Refuge In Audacity?
The band DragonForce crams so many fantasy cliches into every song that it becomes awesome.
Amanda Palmer's Oasis Crosses The Line Twice by itself, being a peppy song about rape and abortion, ("I've seen better days, but I don't care/Oasis got my letter in the mail!") but the music video brings in the true audacity to take refuge in.
The Ball of Kerrymuir. Jim Croce is a family musician really - except for this one song, which is quite possibly the raunchiest thing you've ever heard. And it is absolutely hilarious. Definitely NSFW.
- That's a relatively clean version of the song.
The Ozzy Osbourne song I Don't Wanna Stop seems to be about this trope. the chorus goes:
All my life I've been over the top
I don't know what I'm doing, all I know is I don't wanna stop
All fired up, gonna go to the top
I'm as real as the world will make me, I don't wanna stop!
G.U.D seem to rely on this for their songs about anything. For example the song "Killing Pandas for Fun and Profit"
Killing
Pandas
For fun and profit
Turn their
Scrotum
Into a wallet
And it fun
To pretend you're killing nuns
Because they're black and white
But don't believe in an afterlife
Lou Reed's legendary "Walk on the Wild Side": while his peers were filling their albums and b-sides with shocking tracks, Lou Reed was the only one with the balls to release a single touching on full-time crossdressing, prescription drug abuse, male prostitution, a transwoman buying favors with oral sex (in a verse sometimes cut even today), and (perhaps most shockingly to modern audiences) a racial slur in the chorus, all in what's almost a bored monotone. And the song made top 40.
Weird Al Yankovic deserves a mention here, as not many male performers would have the gall to dress up as Madonna and re-enact her own video's moves, shot for shot. Also because when he asked the members of Nirvana permission to parody "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and they asked him, "It's not gonna be about food, is it?", he didn't beat around the bush in replying, "No, it's going to be about how no one can understand your lyrics."
"Date Rape" by Sublime. It's about a guy who commits date rape, then gets arrested and raped in prison as Divine Retribution. Who knew rape could be so hilarious?
Flight Of The Conchords - "If You're Into It". Writing a song to a girl? Cute. Suggesting, in said song, that you should get naked? Weird. Going on to suggest a food sex threesome? Hilarious!

Close Music

The Frantics: This trope is the reason why the "Last Will and Temprament" sketch has become such a cult comedy classic: bequeathing "A boot to the head" (literally!) can be surprising and amusing when done once, but doing it to everyone, puncuating with repeating "And another for Jenny and the Wimp!" by an insane lawyer reading the will is hilarious!

Close Radio

Warhammer 40,000 lives off this trope. It includes, among other things, supersoldiers in ridiculously oversized powered armor with chainsaw swords and fully automatic armor-piercing rocket propelled grenade launchers as their standard sidearm, who are led around by hammer-wielding skull-helmeted priests and supported by giant walking sarcophagi with flamethrowers, missile launchers, and chainguns mounted on them, and that's not counting the hundreds of meters tall walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks with the firepower of entire armored divisions, undead robots awakening from before the dinosaurs evolved, flamethrower-equipped battle nuns, vehicles that literally go faster because they are painted red, and aliens with guns that shoot ninja stars.
- Monomolecular ninja stars, thank you very much. You also forgot the psychics who run the risk of having their heads randomly explode due to the DEMONS THAT GIVE THEM THEIR PSYCHIC POWERS trying to escape and wreak havoc, as well as the fact that the gods of those demons will either turn you into a raving psychopath who needs to drink blood to survive, a sex-crazed nymphomaniac murderer who even views death as the sexiest thing possible, a plague-ridden pusbag who loves the immortality he's gifted with that allows him to live through the excruciating disease, or someone capable of hearing every thought in the universe all the time, forever.
- And let's not forget that those monomolecular-ninja-star-gun aliens also have tanks the size of city blocks, but which can FLY; sacrifice themselves to become the giant, fiery living incarnation of their not-quite-dead god of war; and live almost exclusively in giant city-sized space ships, having destroyed their own worlds earlier in their history in a catastrophe that actually CREATED the aforementioned sex-crazed nymphomaniac "death is the sexiest thing ever" god. Oh, and their most elite and feared close-combat fighters are performing troupes of storytelling acrobats and mimes.
- Warhammer Fantasy is less audacious, but it remains one of the few tabletop games to have ever created an army of mad scientist ratmen with lightning guns and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
  - Skaven? Are you crazy?
The GURPS 4th edition rulebook says this on the skill "Holdout" (concealing objects on your person): "A Las Vegas show girl in costume (-5 penalty to skill) would have trouble hiding even a dagger. Of course, the show girl might escape search entirely (unless the guards were bored) because 'She obviously couldn't hide anything in that outfit!' Full nudity is -7 to skill."

Close Tabletop Games

Richard from Richard III, by William Shakespeare hits on Lady Anne, the widow to a man HE KILLED. He does this while the corpse is present, and his wounds are bleeding again as a warning from beyond the grave. He gets her.
- But he'll not keep her long.
In RENT, Angel Dumott Schunard kills a dog for a thousand dollars. Normally, people would take offense to killing animals for money, but since she DRUMS the dog to death without physically killing it, it's okay. She is (or was) also poor, which implies she only did it for the money. And she has AIDS. A broke musician with AIDS cannot be persecuted for trying to get money. The fact that she recounts the event through song and dressed in a Santa suit, zebra-striped tights, and stilettos—with a dose of impressive drumming—does not help the matter.
- CROSS-dressed in a Santa suit, feminine wig, makeup, zebra-striped tights, and stilettos, thank you very much! Angel was a 'she' because we respect her enough to accept the gender she identifies with, not the male one that she technically is.
The Music Man: Professor Harold Hill.
Harold Hill: I can deal with this trouble, friends, with a wave of my hand—this very hand.

Close Theater

Shin Megami Tensei, full stop.
The Wall Market location in Final Fantasy VII is part bazaar, part red-light district, and part normal town. In order to save a female friend of his', the hero must dress up like a girl with the help of another female friend (who looks like she's having way too much fun with the whole deal) and give himself over to the sexual appetite of a local crime lord, Don Corneo. It sports a gym of crossdressing men who challenge the hero to a squatting contest over a wig, several opportunities for bathroom (literally) humor, and more bashes to the hero's masculinity than seem possible. The hero can go to a place featuring girls in slutty honeybee costumes who will put make-up on him, and he can receive panties as a memento of getting felt up in a hot tub full of large hairy men. If the player gets enough items, he can even have the character be picked over the two main females of the game, and proceed on to have to deal with the Don's attentions.
- Even if it weren't preceded by that sidequest, the scene after that one, where three party members (the hero and the other two girls) threaten to (respectively) cut off, rip off, and "smash" the Don's testicles, might qualify for the trope by itself.
The most powerful attacks of the Banpresto Originals from Super Robot Wars use this trope. The most extreme has to be Keisar Ephes' ''The end of the Galaxy'' which has demons escaping, visions of horror appearing on the screen and ends with an image of the Earth blowing up. If the character uses a certain seishin beforehand this attack will do a whopping 10 points of damage.
- This has recently been topped by the final attack of Dark Brain, who warps his target to another dimension before growing to a ridiculous size, then proceeds to destroy at least two dozen planets in the ensuing chaos. And unlike the previous example, none of this is justified as simply being Mind Rape.
No More Heroes: A nerd probably not too distantly related to Napoleon Dynamite buys a beam katana off the internet, takes the advice of a hot stranger and becomes a Badass who slices his way up an assassins' leaderboard. Almost all of said assassins are flamboyant and highly distinctive personalities. When a Mook gets killed blood geysers and coin showers occur. To recharge his weapon, the protagonist... shakes it in a rather suggestive manner.
Metal Wolf Chaos. The President of the United States has been deposed in a military coup by his running mate. He responds by blowing everything up in his Humongous Mecha armed with machine guns, rocket launchers, and a shark gun.
BLACK has a lousy plot; it's actually pretty well known for it. It takes refuge in completely pointless Cluster F Bombs, hands you ammo like candy, doubles the real-life magazine size of all weapons and makes a good 50% of things in the game that aren't walls explode.
Most video games have absurd plots, in fact. See: this article, and this TV Tropes page.
Recently, a group of companies announced an RTS whose title says it all: Stalin vs. Martians. Official site here.
Red Alert 3. Armored bear paratroopers. Psychic schoolgirl commandos. Giant walking battle mechs. Crowd-control spiderbots. APCs whose primary method of transporting troops is to shoot them out of a giant cannon. When the faction that uses the weather control machine is the one deemed to have the most practical technology, you've hit the truly ridiculous.
- And this is the faction that has battle dolphins, literal land battleships, and attack helicopters with shrink rays.
- Red Alert 2 gave us the weather control machine to begin with, along with mind controlled squid, ludicrously tough bomb-dropping zeppelins (re-used in RA 3), dolphins with sonar guns attached to their heads (also re-used in RA 3), soldiers equipped with guns that erase their targets from time and space...and this is before we get onto Yuri's Revenge.
- The Expansion Pack Uprising is trying for the insanity again. Giant Japanese Battleships that are also Giant Heads? Automated Tanks that respond to 'jump' with 'I regret I cannot'? It got to the point where their April Fool's Joke, the Mammoth Tank (a literal prehistoric Mammoth with two giant cannons strapped to its back) seemed like a completely viable unit.
The Force Unleashed. Pretty much every method of disposing of an enemy more complex than stabbing them with the lightsabre counts as this. Say what negative things you will about this game, but never forget that this was the first game that ever allowed one to lift up a TIE Fighter using the Force, charge it with Force Lightning and throw it at a room full of people, essentially creating a bomb about the size of a small room.
- In Jedi Outcast, you throw Stormtrooper at TIE Fighter. In Force Unleashed, you throw TIE Fighter at Stormtrooper!
  - For God's sake, you can (in a manner that might count as indirectly) shoot individual Stormtroopers with the goddamn Death Star!
If a game features one point where you can be killed by something you couldn't possibly have seen coming, it is massively irritating. If it features many such points, the game is completely ruined. I Wanna Be The Guy averages about three of these per screen, and it is awesome.
In City Of Heroes, there is a viable strategy known as "tank stealth" which is the physical embodiment of this. Tanker class P Cs in the higher levels can literally become almost utterly unkillable if they don't stick around to take damage. While stealth porter strategies commonly require that the porter in question not be noticed, a tank can essentially run an entire map full of dangerous enemies, shrug off their fire as he passes them, and teleport the entire team to the objective point. Due to aggro rules, the enemies will most likely not chase the tank as he has yet to lock their aggro on him. Apparently the image of an 8 foot tall block of granite running through your secret underground lair is clearly a hallucination and not a catastrophic breach of security.
- With the advent of the custom mission creator, a number of people have chosen to go this way in creation. By filling their missions to the brim with either extremely strong custom enemies, or individual spawns of everything they can fit into whatever level range they're aiming for, perhaps people will ignore the entire event not making sense. Does it work? Your Mileage May Vary.
Everything in Painkiller. Weapons include a weed whacker with a tractor beam attachment, a stake launcher that shoots *logs* at your enemies to impale them against walls, a machine gun rocket launcher combo, and a gun that shoots shurikens and lightning. And one moment you'll be using these weapons to fight Hell's Angels in a prison, and the next moment you'll be fighting ninjas at the Sydney Opera House.
- Note that the game doesn't bother to explain why you're fighting ninjas at the Sydney Opera House, and by the time you get to that point, you won't care either.
Elite Beat Agents, again. Case in point; the first failure cutscene in Makes no Difference.
Mad World is basically Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 in Real Life. And is in black and white. On the Wii.
In Knights Of The Old Republic, after discovering you're really Darth Revan, you can rub this in the face of the universe. Sure, nobody will believe you, but...
- And then you come to Lehon, where the Rakata actually recognize you and are upset because last time you were there you told them you needed to get into the Temple of the Ancients so you could destroy the Star Forge. While last time you were lying and took over the Temple and the Star Forge and set out to conquer the galaxy, this time it's (possibly) a reasonably accurate description of your quest. Which you can tell them. ...yeah. They're not inclined to believe you.
- For minor dialogue hilarity, name your character Darth Revan to begin with.

Close Video Games

Teen Girl Squad, offshot of Homestar Runner. Any and all specific examples would immediately qualify for
- Also lampshaded in Costume Commercial:
Marzipan: This is so offensive...that it's not really offensive anymore! I'll take twelve!
Dad's Home is this trope incarnate. A guy shows up at his house, kicking in the door, and his head catches fire, which he puts out with the cat. It gets more audacious from there.
In Sailor Moon Abridged, Raye has been interpreted as an Ax Crazy Satanist Emo screeching harpy... and is possibly the most popular character, and de facto Narrator. Lita being a cross-dressing Jive Turkey is mild in comparison, as are Serena's bulimia jokes.
In Order Of The Stick, Haley passionately complains of the injustice of suspecting her of theft because she is a rogue — while she is holding the thing she stole.
And of course Looking For Group, Ansem Retort, and 8-Bit Theater give us... well everything.
How have we gotten this far without mentioning Doctor McNinja?
- We haven't, the rogue paleontologist banditos riding velociraptors were mentioned up at the top. The rest of the series is this, too, though.
  Dr. Mc Ninja: Oh, how silly of me. That was the sound of chainsaw-nunchuks.
Polk Out runs on this.
Axis Powers Hetalia. FULL STOP.
This CVRPG comic shows the aftermath of a character's attempt to invoke this trope.
Red Meat likes this trope. This, for example.
Invoked by Unwinder in Tall Comics here.
Buwaro and Kieri of Slightly Damned at one point decide to drop their disguises and walk around Riverside City as the angel and demon that they are. This ends up being a more effective way of blending in with the Medians than what they had going: (most) everyone refused to believe an angel and a demon would willingly hang out with each other, so they assumed they were a couple of kids wearing elaborate costumes for some publicity stunt. Hey, it beats being mistaken for a pimp and prostitute.
Vladimir And Mr Smith is a children's educational web series on theatre starring an adorable egomaniac vampire puppet who steps in at the last minute to play Puck in a production of William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" which for some reason also includes random dance breaks. He also has personal space issues.
Walky Verse comics have most of Mike's over-the-top jackassery secured in Refuge In Audacity territory, not to mention some other improbable events that fit this trope. However, in the latest Shortpacked! arcs, Amber has begun to delve into Refuge In Audacity territory. The fanbase is split on whether she's hilarious or in the too-realistic offensive category.

Close Web Original

Absolutely everything in Metalocalypse is based on this and parody of heavy-metal fandom.
South Park wouldn't exist if not for this, but one particularly egregious example is the episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die", which started with Cartman getting conned out of $10 by an older boy, and ended with Cartman killing Scott's parents. There might have been moral outrage if Cartman had just killed his parents and gloated about it, but then he ground them up and fed them to Scott in the form of chili and made his favorite band (Radiohead) call him uncool and a crybaby directly afterward. Then Cartman started licking off Scott's tears with unnerving delight, calling them "the tears of unfathomable sadness". It's generally agreed to be one of the best episodes of the series.
- This is actually a reference to Titus Andronicus, an early Shakespeare play (and probably his most popular one during his own lifetime), making this Older Than Steam. In it, the title character gets revenge upon a woman by tricking her into eating a meat pie made from her own children.
  - Shakespeare took this from Ovid's Metamorphoses, making this Older Than Feudalism.
- Also, in South Park episode "The China Probrem" in which multiple people imagine Indiana Jones being raped by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and reacting to it as how people would realistically react to a rape..
  - Really, most examples of Take That South Park fall under this, which is why most consider them funny instead of self-indulgent soapboxing. For example "More Crap" is about Randy Marsh getting in actual crapping contest with Bono, who's shown as a smug ass obsessed with being better than everyone because he is literally the world's largest piece of shit, which somehow gained sentience. Before said Lucas/Spielberg episode, they had another one about them editing re-releases of their own work that ended with them dying after watching a remade Raiders of the Lost Ark in a similar way to the villains in said movie.
- One episode involved three-year-old Ike Broflovski having an affair with his kindergarden teacher. It wouldn't have been nearly as funny if Ike were older.
Four out of five sketches on Robot Chicken get away with this. Lampshade Hanging in one sketch about the tooth fairy visiting a little girl in the middle of the night and overhearing the girl's abusive father murdering the girl's mother. The sketch featured Multiple Endings, culminating in the tooth fairy confronting the father and getting killed, the police arriving and arresting the father after a shootout, leaving the traumatized little girl alone in her bed, and then a marching band bursts into the room and boldly gives the Animated Actors a reward for the "darkest comedy sketch ever."
- Darkest sketch, darkest sketch, DARKEST SKETCH!
Ditto Drawn Together
Pick any Looney Tunes, Tom And Jerry, or Tex Avery cartoon.
The Avatar The Last Airbender episode "The Runaway" starts with the Gaang cheating a gambler that is also cheating out of a lot of money. Then they do the same to several gamblers who probably weren't cheating. Then from a strength contest on the street. Then they pull a Flopsy scheme where Toph pretends to be hit by a nobleman's carriage and Sokka (disguised as a guard) blackmails him into paying several bags of money to stay quiet. Though they don't succeed, they also try to turn Toph in for the bounty and break her out later. None of them thought there was anything wrong with this except Katara, who only cared because it would draw unwanted attention. The biggest thing is that, unlike all other children on TV, they get away with it.
- Then there was the scene in which Sokka was waiting in his tent for Suki. In his underclothes.
- There was an entire episode centered around literal Scenery Porn. You know the episode◊...
The Fairly Oddparents had a throwaway gag where Cosmo had breast implants ("I thought you said plastic surgery!...I'm keeping them). The there's then Fairly Oddbaby special that's about him getting pregnant and having a baby.
Family Guy's Prom Night Dumpster Baby. As well as, arguably, most of their later jokes, such as the "You Have AIDS" song.
- Honestly, the entire show could be considered an embodiment of this trope.
One of the villains from The Powerpuff Girls was a flamboyant, Ambiguously Gay Satan-like demon known only as Him.
The Animaniacs did an episode called "Hot, Bothered and Bedeviled" where the Warners literally go to Hell and meet Satan. The episode opens with a song and dance number where Saddam Hussein falls into the pit of fire.
- Hell, Animaniacs in general. The most ridiculous thing about how they Got So Much Crap Past The Radar is the fact that they usually lampshaded every Double Entendre or Parental Bonus immediately afterwards.
Superman The Animated Series had one memorable scene where Clark Kent straight up tells Lois Lane that he's Superman, and only works at the Daily Planet to find out when disasters and crimes happen all around Metropolis. She thinks he's joking.
The newest Adult Swim heir to this trope appears to be Superjail!. It involves (in any given episode) officers of uncertain gender, a semiomnipotent childlike man in a purple suit, inmates getting brutally killed in inventive ways, half-naked women mud-wrestling... The entire series runs solely on the Rule Of Funny, and damn all logic on the way there.
Speaking of Adult Swim, Moral Orel has to qualify. Throughout its episodes we've seen things up to and including Orel's belief that he should experience punishment for sin turning him into a masochist, convincing his fellow children to let him bathe in their blood in a misguided attempt to prove he is "Innocent," and inadvertently popularizing a song titled "I Hate You Jesus" which the Holier Than Thou small town proceeds to sing in church!
- That's not even close to some other things he does:
- Check out a Necronomicon from the library to bring dead people back to life as zombies, because he misinterprets a sermon as claiming that dead people are rejecting God's gift of life.
- Believes that since masturbation is a sin, he must impregnate all the women in Moralton (which he actually DOES!) rather than let his sperm go to waste.
- Sells his urine as an energy drink for the school sports' teams.
- Gets hooked on heroine.
- Unintentionally has the townspeople kill the dog that is very clearly made out to be the second coming of Jesus because he loves the dog more than Jesus and that's a sin!
- Orel going along with a bully in beating up two boys implied to be homosexual.
- Orel killing an old woman by pulling her life support plug when misinterpreting a sermon, thinking that since God is inside him, nothing he does can be wrong.
- Orel gets a penis piercing.
- Nothing scares Orel on Halloween, so he decides to make it a scary Halloween by breaking all ten commandments—including being somewhat responsible for an old man getting hit by a car (driven by Orel's own father!).
- Becoming an alcoholic based on his father's example.
- Prompting the denizens of Moralton to segregate between them and "Figurelli's"—Italian-American stereotypes—which results by the end of the episode in the entire town catching fire, except Mr. Figurelli's shop.
- Gets a normal kid wants to learn science be declared mentally retarded!
- Has a wet dream about GOD and joins an S&M club when he discovers he enjoys pain.
- Becomes conditioned to attack anyone who forms a fist with their hand, resulting in him savagely beating his own parents!
- Mistakingly unleashes a flood of ST Ds on the town when he begins bringing prostitutes in from Sinsville to "save the souls" of the people.
- And that's just the first two seasons of the three.
Not quite (but nearly) Once An Episode, a human tells Pinky And The Brain that they don't look like whatever they're supposed to be disguised as. Brain invariably responds by saying that they're actually megalomaniacal escaped lab mice, which leads to the questioner saying how funny they are and leaving them alone.
Area 51 in Kim Possible actually contains everything the rumors claims that Area 51 contains, because Area 51 releases the facts as unlikely rumors in order to make the truth rumors.
Everything in the One Episode Wonder show Korgoth Of Barbaria depended on this. The entire show was an exercise in how many times it could cross the line while being completely awesome and funny.
In the King Of The Hill episode "Tankin' it to the Streets", the otherwise Butt Monkey Bill Dauterive manages this while trying to return a tank he stole from his army base while drunk. A few miles short of their goal, they are pulled over by two police officers. Bill, his arm in a cast and wearing nothing but his boxers, emerges from the tank and convinces the two officers that they should forget ever having seen the tank. He even gets the female officer of the duo to go on a date with him.

Close Western Animation

History records that this was used by Hitler during World War II. Part of the method by which the Nazis attempted to keep the existence of the concentration camps under wraps was by ensuring that if someone were in a position to tell another nation about them, their story would be too horrifying to be taken as truth, and would be treated as exaggeration.
- I was flabbergasted to read a newspaper article dated five years before WWII started, in which Hitler announced to the world that if they didn't accept the Jews deported from Germany, every one of them would be killed.
- In fact, the entire career of the Nazi Party was consciously based on the strategy of the "Big Lie": Make the lie (e.g., the existence of an "international Jewish-Communist conspiracy") outrageous enough and repeat it often enough, and it will occur to nobody to doubt it. It helps immensely if you actually believe it yourself, which Hitler (unlike some of his lieutenants) substantially did.
  - What makes this especially audacious is that the "Big Lie" technique was made public knowledge by Hitler himself: in Mein Kampf, he accuses the Jews of using it against Germans.
- Hitler was probably also counting on the "once bitten, twice shy" reaction that the world had had to the mostly false reports of German atrocities on the Western Front during World War One (stories such as Belgian nuns having their breasts cut off by teh Hun, for instance) and probably assumed that they would not so easily believe another series of reports, even if these turned out to be all too true.
- One of the real tragedies of that approach is that reports of the atrocities early in the war were accused by prominent Jewish figures of being nothing more than anti-German propaganda. Individuals reporting the atrocities were often denounced for creating such unbelievable exaggerations, and accused of harming their own cause; because no sane person could possibly commit such monstrous acts.
A corollary to this trope is something too crazy not to be true. This was used to advantage in Ancient Athens, when the tyrant Peisistratos managed a comeback by dressing a tall woman up as Athena and then riding into the city in a golden chariot with her, fooling the masses into thinking he had the goddess' favor. (Of course, Peisistratos then failed in that particular coup. He was forced to retreat, invest in gold mines, and use the money to hire a private army to take back his tyranny.)
The book Cops: Their Lives In Their Own Worlds has one interviewee mentioning that middle-class juries would acquit people simply because they couldn't believe human beings were capable of the things they did…like a mother sewing her baby's rectum up because she got tired of him defecating all the time.
Giuseppe Garibaldi lived by this trope, and actually achieved quite a few CMOAs thanks to that.
- During the Uruguayan Civil War, the Uruguayan army was crushed at the battle of Arroyo Grande, in December 1842. Garibaldi, living in Uruguay at the time, led the defense of the Uruguayan capital Montevideo with a few thousand newly-freed slaves and a few hundred immigrants, against the victorious troops of Argentina's caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas and former Uruguay's Manuel Oribe. Garibaldi led the city's defense for 6 years remaining undefeated, and his side eventually won the war, causing, among other things, the fall and exile of Rosas.
- The Spedizione dei Mille: Garibaldi attacked the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with 999 underarmed men and one underarmed woman, against an army of over 100,000 soldiers. He won the war in the space of five months. He, and all his soldiers, were wearing red shirts at the time.
- The Franco-Prussian War: In this war, tactfully summarised as "The German states play the role of drunken fratboy to France's ugly girl home on a Saturday night", Garibaldi raised a volunteer legion to fight for the new French republic. The reason there was a new republic was that the Emperor had already been captured by the Germans, along with most of his army, and they were setting off to besiege Paris and proclaim their own empire. In Versailles palace, too, just to rub it in. Sounds like a less-than-ideal time to pitch in with a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits? Well, he didn't quite save France, but Victor Hugo called him "The only undefeated "French" general of the war".
- Although he was turned down, the fact that when, offered a position as a Major-General for the Union in 1861, he demanded total command of the US Army serves as a good example of his Modus Operandi.
OJ Simpson's Sarcastic Confession.
The Chasers managed to get through APEC security using nothing but this, a Canadian flag, and fake passes which actually said "fake pass".
Stephen Colbert. Through sheer audacity, the man managed to get his DNA digitized and sent into space.
- That's only the most lasting thing he's done. Among other things, he's also brutalized the 43rd president's policies in satire while standing right next to him.
- Had several animal species named after him.
- And deftly managed to convince NASA to name space equipment (namely the space station's new treadmill) after him. He almost managed to get his name on an entire node of the Space Station, but was unsuccessful. His sheer audacity is one of the things that make him an appealing performer.
John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman. Merely griping about a longtime friend when you're chosen to speak at his memorial service? Not funny. Saying "Good riddance, the freeloading bastard"? Funny as hell! The best part is that they all knew that Chapman would approve.
Many scams - a recent example is Bernie Madoff. As one commenter said: "The SEC is very good at rooting out sophisticated fraud, especially in accounting gimicks [sic]. But they, like most human beings, are simply not that good at identifying accounting statements that are simply made up out of whole cloth."
In 168 BC, the Egyptians petitioned the Romans to aid them in fighting off the Syrian Empire. The Romans sent a small delegation headed by Gaius Popilius Laenas, who travelled to the Syrian camp and demanded an audience with Antiochus IV, the king of Syria. There, he wordlessly handed him the Roman Senate's ultimatum: Withdraw, or face war with Rome. To make sure that Antiochus understood the stakes, he then took a branch, and drew a circle around Antiochus, telling him that he could have all the time he needed to think, but that he had to reach a decision before he left the circle. The Syrians decided to heed the warning of the Senate and withdrew from Egypt.
In February 2009, a young man walked into a chicago police station and worked an entire shift despite having no badge or identification.
- And then there's Darius McCollum, who was obsessed with the New York transit system. At 5, he had memorized all of the routes. At 15, he hijacked a train and drove it along its ordinary route. Passengers did not notice. To this day he is still being arrested for impersonating transit workers.
Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham balances his entire act on this. A character named "Achmed the Dead Terrorist" sounds like it should be horribly offensive... but a skeleton with Big Ol Eyebrows who laments about having killed his son by taking him to Take Your Child to Work Day? Hilarious.
Absolutely everything Frankie Boyle has ever said, ever. For him it's not so much a refuge as a home.
Tentacle Grape.
The creator of Scie^H^H^H^HChurch Of Happyology revels in this trope, and has cited it as a defense against its critics.
- The "Miss Blood" incident is the most famous example of this.
Josef Fritzl successfully imprisoned his daughter and their eventual three children in the basement of his house for 24 years without his wife or their other children or neighbours noticing anything. Really, the idea is so outlandish and monstrous that no rational person would ever entertain the idea of someone doing it.
- To be fair, apparently his wife is 95% deaf and has cerebral atherosclerosis, so not all there either.
Two people escape from maximum security prison in a helicopter. That isn't what makes it an example, what makes it an example is that they were in prison awaiting trial for doing it BEFORE. The fact that you can get away with having a fan club for the two of them says a lot.
A German Prisoner had escaped from prison via... hiding in a Cardboard Box.
Chutzpah has been defined as "clever audacity, for example a child killing both parents and then asking the courts for mercy because he's an orphan."
One entry on FML runs that the poster was eating lunch in a park in New York City, when Steve Martin walks up to him, grabs his sandwich, takes a bite, then leaves, saying, "Nobody will ever believe you!"
- On a related note; Steve Martin. The guy's comedy routines are entirely based on audacity. In fact, I believe the story simply because it's Steve Martin.
Spaced: "...and was subsequently apprehended on Space Mountain."
In an example from the animal kingdom, this. A mouse, caught on camera, stealing meat from a leopard. Right in front of the leopard.
The UK is much more liberal when it comes to swearing on television and radio, but is generally frowned upon before the 9pm watershed. But when one hears, for instance, the word "wanker" in an episode of tea-time gameshow Countdown, or the word "bullshit" on The News Quiz at quarter-to-seven, one tends to brush it off as if nothing happened. Or maybe the Media Watchdogs are just watching the wrong shows.
- The Wankers on Countdown was recorded but not broadcast and The News Quiz is a radio show and the watershead only covers television.
Every scheme listed here is flat-out insane. This did not stop people from trying them. See if you can spot which ones are simply stupid and which are stupid yet take cohones.
One ancient Chinese general had such a reputation for audacious feats of strategy that the one time he was caught off guard, he convinced an entire army to retreat by sitting in front of them playing on his lyre.
There's an old story of two strangers sitting at a table and eating their lunches. Alice looks up and notices Bob is eating a cookie from her bag. So Alice reaches out and takes another cookie, with a meaningful stare. Bob helps himself to another cookie. Alice takes another. They go all the way to the bottom of the bag, and there's one last cookie. Bob breaks it in half, gives Alice half, and leaves. That's when Alice looks again in her lunchbox and sees her own, untouched, package of cookies. She was eating Bob's cookies all along.
- My friend is Bob. Alice is now his wife.
Some of the escape attempts from various POW camps in World War 2 were utterly ludicrous yet (on occasion) successful. At Colditz alone one man almost escaped by crossdressing (being foiled alas by a fellow-POW's politeness), others nearly made it out via a tunnel exiting in high-ranking German's office and one man simply vaulted the wire acrobatically and legged it. Not to mention the glider built by a group on inmates including Douglas Bader (a man worthy of many a trope himself) near the end of the war.
- In fact, just go read The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse (another escape book that really happened). The sheer audacity and cunning of the prisoners is worthy of any fictional character.
In the late 1950s, the Navy was determined to launch the first US satellite with their Vanguard rocket. Which meant that even thought Wernher von Braun had built better rockets for the Army, he couldn't launch anything into space, only launch tests. So, without getting permission from his supervising officer, von Braun moved one of his rockets out to the pad and decided he'd launch it into space and then go "Woops, it was an ACCIDENT!" The supervisor found out before he could actually do the launch, but man, that took GUTS!
Our very own Ad Of Lose page is typically displaying at least one, and frequently two, ads for marketing services. What else could this be?
T. E. Lawrence based his entire millitary career upon this principle.
Napoleon Bonaparte, when he returned from his exile to Elba island. He essentially decided one day that he'd had enough of this 'exile' silliness and caught a boat back to France, where he gathered an army of volunteers while heading for Paris. When Lois VXIII send his army to kill the renowned general, Napoleon left his own forces behind, walked up to the attacking army and asked if they were really thinking of trying to kill "him". He captured Paris two weeks later.
When it was first proposed, Quantum Physics was this. Or, as Niels Bohr put it:
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
Operation Chariot where in WWII, a group of British Commandos and sailors had to destroy the gate of a German-controlled dry dock in France by ramming it with a disguised, obsolete destroyer filled with explosives. The estuary they had to pass through to reach the dry dock was so heavily defended that the army, Royal Navy and RAF command believed it to be impossible, and it would be a waste of resources. The commandos, the naval personnel and Lord Mountbatten (Head of the Combined Operations Headquarters) believed that it was the impossibility of the operation that made it possible, as the German soldiers defending the dock wouldn't believe anyone would have the audacity to try it. Indeed, the destroyer sailed down the estuary virtually unchallenged until just a few hundred yards from it's target, rammed it successfully and later exploded a few hours behind schedule. Despite a catalogue of errors, leaving most of the commandos and sailors dead or captured, the mission was considered by all to be a success as it rendered the dry dock useless to Germany's larger and more fearsome ships.
- So daring was the raid, along with countless incidents of Crowning Moment Of Awesome, five Victoria Crosses were awarded to the raiders, more than in any other operation.
- Operation Chariot aka The Saint Nazaire Raid is taught today at military academies (but otherwise virtually unknown) and is called The Greatest Raid of All Time
- Not to mention that when a large group of commandos were ready to leave, they saw that almost all of the small escape boats had been destroyed and decided on the spot to fight their way through the town, through several thousand heavily armed German troops, and make their way to Spain. It was in the process of this that their dwindling group decided to charge across a well-defended bridge, while the majority were low on ammo and seriously wounded. The Germans, awestruck by such audacity, couldn't keep them back. When the fighting was over, the Germans congratulated the plucky Brits for their guts.
- The hits just keep on coming with this: Lieutenant-Commander Beattie, who had gallantly guided the HMS Campbeltown into it's target while under heavy fire, was being interrogated by an Engligh-speaking German officer. Just as the German officer was telling him how futile it was to use such a flimsy ship to ram such a great and strong dock, the several tons of explosives hidden in the ship's bow and which the Germans still didn't know about, exploded and blew the office windows in.
This, combined with What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic appears to be Japan's next bid for the Olympics after two or three failed attempts since Nagano: They want Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be co-host cities for 2020 games despite the fact that co-hosting isn't allowed by the IOC.
In 2007, Timothy Rouse escaped from jail in Kentucky on some very serious charges by having a friend send a fax from the corner grocery store claiming that a court order demanded his release. The 'order' was incorrectly formatted, on plain paper, with no identifying marks or seals. He was promptly released from jail.

Close Real Life

A man gets pulled over for speeding. The sheriff ambles up, asks for license and registration. "I'm afraid I don't have it," the man replies sheepishly. "Why not?" asks the cop. "I, uh, think I left it at the bar. I get forgetful after a couple of drinks." "Sir, I'm going to need you to step out of the car." "No can do, sir. I stand up and the .45's gonna fall right outta my waistband." The cop is almost livid by now. "Son, what in the *hell* is wrong with you? What are you carrying around a loaded gun for?" "Well, the hooker's not gonna force herself into the trunk now, will she?" By now the sheriff is on the horn for backup, and half the city has arrived, complete with swat team and the Chief. As they've finished tearing his car apart and the guy is face down in the road in handcuffs, he turns to the Chief and says "Lemme guess. He probably told you I was speeding, too?"

Close Old Joke

Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing Help

Tools

Toys

Characters

Examples in Works