Seemingly Profound Fool

“Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.”

— Proverbs 17:28, The Bible

There's a newcomer in town, and everyone agrees that he's a marvel, perhaps of Purity Sue proportions. He's friendly, well-spoken, and clearly In Charge but never throws his weight around. Everyone says he's a genius, and rumor has it that he's The Chessmaster, a Cunning Linguist, and the most sought after consultant in the country. He's a bit peculiar, but hey, as brilliant and philosophical as he is, his odd quirks must indicate just how deep he really is, right? He's the guy who is sure to know the answer when you come to him with a problem.

Except that he doesn't have the answer. In fact, he doesn't even understand the question.

Often, the most brilliant visiting expert, or most beloved substitute teacher, or most canny enemy agent is really The Fool. He's usually either a harmless imbecile or mental patient, who, simply because he has the right appearance and is at the right place at the right time, is assumed to be someone other than he actually is. Because everyone assumes that he's a genius, his odd meanderings and banalities are taken for profundities. Oddly enough, his advice is almost always spot on, because the real problems are actually very simple — so simple that everyone has been overlooking the answers all along.

The Seemingly Profound Fool is a human Rorschach test: Other people project what they most want to find onto him, and will insist on their interpretation of his words and deeds with a desperate will no matter how outrageous they are from an objective point of view.

An example of Feigning Intelligence, and a subtrope of both The Fool and Mistaken for Special Guest. Contrast with And You Thought It Was a Game, who may act like this out of temporary ignorance of the true situation. Compare with Blank Slate, in which other characters have a greater effect on him than he does on them, and Silent Bob. A variation on Becoming the Mask as others put a mask on him to serve their needs.

If he is mentally challenged, unlike Idiot Savant and Genius Ditz, he will have nothing that serves as "compensation" for his disability, and Inspirationally Disadvantaged won't apply to him because the others don't know he's disadvantaged. May overlap with Manchild and/or Mistaken for Badass. In extreme cases, he may become a Fake Ultimate Hero, purely as a consequence of how other people react to him. May well result in One Dialogue, Two Conversations.

And Hilarity Ensues when this guy's considered a serious threat.

A Sub-Trope of Mistaken for Profound.

See also Simple-Minded Wisdom, which is what everyone thinks the Seemingly Profound Fool is dispensing.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Galaxy Angel: In one episode , two officers visit Volcott in order to discover how he run the squad, convinced that there must be some sort of secret behind the fact that they haven't been demobilized despite all the trouble they cause. They keep interpreting any mundane action made by Volcott as if it was part of some complicated hidden plan.
• Gintama: In "Dango Over Flowers", the local homeless man Musashi is presented as a "famous gourmet" and the judge for a sweets-eating competition. The Andromeda team raises three objections, and Musashi's response each time — "You better eat while you can!" — is interpreted differently in each context.
• Irresponsible Captain Tylor: In one episode, several of the ship's female crew members come in to ask for advice while Tylor is preoccupied and takes his comments regarding his task as the desired advice. In truth, all Tylor was doing was desperately trying to stop his VCR from recording over the porno tape the ship's marines had given him with explicit instructions to return intact... Or was he?
• Pokémon: The Series: Played With. On several occasions Ash is asked to speak to aspiring trainers based on his legitimate successes. He is almost always muddled and confusing when he tries to give out profound advice — sometimes he fools them, usually he doesn't. However, he is always much more profound when he drops the pretense and can just talk about his friendship with his Pokémon.
• March Comes in Like a Lion: Nikaidou, Matsumoto and Yokomizo spy on Shimada and Gotou from some bushes afar, thinking that they are emitting a sort of sophisticated, intelligent aura that's expected of A-Class players as they get ready for their next game against each other. However, a few panels before show that their conversation is far from profound, and they're really just slugging childish, idiotic insults at each other, with Shimada being accused of looking old for his age and Gotou being accused of narcissism.
• In Overlord (2012), Momonga/Ainz Ooal Gown is thought by all of his subordinates, and many opponents, to be a master strategist able to craft intricate Xanatos Gambits with so many layers even Evil Geniuses such as Demiurge struggle to comprehend the full extent of Ainz-sama's plan. The truth, of course, is that Ainz is just an ordinary office worker Trapped in Another World as his game character, and while he's not necessarily a fool, most of his successes hinge on a combination of intimidating presence, hideous power and dumb luck. Unusually for this trope, Ainz is very much aware of this perception of himself and exploits it for all it's worth to reinforces the mystique around himself as much as possible, mostly because he's afraid his servants (formerly just game NPCs) would betray him if they knew the truth.

Fan Works

• The King Nobody Wanted: Septon Balerion observes that his order has been led by countless "madmen, murderers, and worse" in addition to the better-remembered successful leaders. He believes that the High Septon only speaks with the voice of the Gods when he is speaking about the divine, as the alternative line of thought is troubling. Nonetheless, some people believe that everything any High Septon does is divine, even when the High Septon is mentally unstable and thinks he's a tree.

  Balerion: Well, let us just say that if there's something worse than a bad High Septon, it's men of faith looking for secret meaning in the acts of a bad High Septon.

• In Professor Arc, Jaune's glowing transcript leads him into being accepted into Beacon — as a teacher. The humor in the story comes from everyone seeing Jaune as an awesome hero-when he really escapes his various challenges through luck, bluff, and aid from criminal associates. Even Cinder Fall sees him as a dangerous fiend with an agenda-when his whole agenda has been keeping himself out of trouble.
  • In the sequel Professor Arc II: Headmaster Arc, this trope continues to snowball and cause Jaune issues. This trope becomes so heavily invoked that, in the minds of Cinder Fall, Winter Schnee, James Ironwood, and other major characters, any and all apparent idiocy is, in fact, part of an unimaginably complex, manipulative, and strategic plan. This couldn't be further from the truth.
• Jaune goes through this again in A Rabbit Among Wolves. After accidentally killing Adam Taurus, Jaune unwittingly becomes the leader of Vale's White Fang sect. Jaune sets about trying to reform the White Fang to prove to the public he isn't a cold-blooded monster. His greatest weapon isn't just his own plans and charity. It is the fact that he is a genuinely dorky, cute, timid, and inexperienced person. His bumbling and shy behavior makes him far more endearing to the public than Adam. This causes everyone, from his minions to Team RWBY , to think that Jaune is a brilliant PR mastermind whose deliberately chooses to act like a shy goofball.

Fairy Tales

• The Brothers Grimm wrote of "Doctor Knowall", a peasant farmer who on the advice of a friend gave himself that name and pretended to be a very wise person. When a wealthy gentleman heard of this, he came to the "good doctor" for advice about his servants. Doctor Knowall managed to completely bluff his way through a bizarre series of events in which he unwittingly revealed all of the plots being concocted by the servants, and collected both the gentleman's reward and a bribe in order to not rat the servants out. Because of this, he became very wealthy and continued to be celebrated as knowing everything... somehow.

Films — Live-Action

• Being There: The trope used to be named for Peter Sellers' character Chance the Gardener. Raised and kept isolated from the outside world that he only knows through his incessant TV viewing, Chance is abandoned after his old employer dies and he wanders through Washington, D.C.in a daze. He ends up a major political figure — under the name of Chauncey Gardiner — without ever understanding what is happening to him (or so it seems: the movie-only Twist Ending leaves room for the possibility that he's really more than he seems).
• Teachers (1984): Mr. Gower, a harmless schizophrenic whose bizarre antics make him the best teacher in the school. His presence is a scathing dramatization of the old adage, "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."
• Harvey: Elwood P. Dowd describes this as essentially his job. He goes to a bar, people sit down and tell him their worries, and he introduces them to Harvey. By the time they're done talking, the people walk away feeling better and never talk to him again.
  "My mother once said, 'Elwood, to get along in this world you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.' For years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me on that."
• Bean toys with this trope when he has to give an impromptu speech on the Portrait of Whistler's Mother. Observations like how it's good that the painting is large because "if it were very small... microscopic... then hardly anyone would be able to see it," are taken by the attending crowd as the brilliant statements of a prominent professor of the arts. Also subverted, however, in that several other characters who spend enough time around Bean quickly recognize that he's anything but a genius.
• Didi — Der Experte, a German movie by/with the comedian Didi Hallervorden, follows the car mechanic Willy Schulze (an apolitical guy) being mistaken for the political expert Willy Schneider. They both have lost their memory in a car accident and Schulze starts successfully helping the mayor of Berlin with slogans like "We have to pull on the screws" or "Why change the engine?". Until Schneider regains his memory and decides to take revenge. This ends in a massive landslide loss for BOTH major parties.
• Zelig played by Woody Allen evolves into this, because his only real skill is the ability to blend in and feign expertise. This leads him to meet famous people and bed numerous women.
• Who's Harry Crumb?: Harry (Candy) is almost in Ralph Wiggum's league. He was sent in by the Corrupt Corporate Executive because the executive wanted to send the worst possible detective in the world. Eventually, some characters do catch on to Crumb's stupidity, but by the end are wondering if it was Obfuscating Stupidity. It probably was not.
• The Man with One Red Shoe: The driving concept of the comedy, where a clueless musician (played by Pierre Richard in the original French film and Tom Hanks in the American remake) gets mistaken for a powerful and highly competent spy. Everything he says and does for the rest of the movie is spied, filmed, analyzed and dissected by real government counterintelligence agents who become more and more convinced of his so-called cunning when he is in fact none of those things.
• The Man Who Knew Too Little: Bill Murray's character isn't a complete fool, but due to a mixup in phone calls he thinks he's involved in an elaborate variant of an audience-participation mystery theatre instead of an elaborate espionage plot. He thinks the spies and assassins he's encountering are all actors. And because he's clearly having a blast , they're all convinced that he's such a sociopathic assassin that he finds dead bodies funny. The fact that none of them have ever heard of him before is taken to be just more evidence of how good he is at his job.
• Dumb and Dumber: Harry and Lloyd are seen as this by the antagonists. For example, Harry and Lloyd believed the goons Mental and Shay were gas bill collectors and left them a note addressing them as such. Turns out Mental has acid reflux issues and he and Shay took the note as an indication that Harry and Lloyd are federal agents onto their kidnapping scheme. Later on, Lloyd unwittingly kills the Big Bad's bird and, since they killed Harry and Lloyd's bird earlier on, they believe Lloyd was sending a message.
• Citizen Kane: Subverted because the protagonist is not a fool, but at the beginning of the movie there is a scene where a Corrupt Corporate Executive reunion claims that Kane is one of the Dirty Communists. It follows a scene where in a Worker’s rally Kane is declared a fascist, and then we have Kane’s own declaration that he is an American. This shows Kane as a human Rorschach test: Other people project what they most fear onto him, and will insist on their interpretation of his words and deeds with a desperate will no matter how contradictories they are. The three interpretations are wrong, because the Dirty Communists, the fascists and even the patriotic nationalist all they believe in something bigger than themselves. The movie shows us that Charlie Foster Kane is only for Charlie Foster Kane.
• Strange Brew: Brewmeister Smith sees the McKenzie Brothers cluelessly poking around the brewery and is convinced their ignorance is an act, at one point noting they took a disk containing incriminating evidence from his lab. Doug found the disk randomly and confidently assumed was a bootleg record.
• Office Space: The Bobs, a duo of consultants intending to lay people off from Initech, are fascinated by the newly-hypnotized Peter's Brutal Honesty about how Initech's layers of management have dismotivated him, and decide to promote him (while firing two of his more-competent friends). A downplayed example, as Peter isn't a fool so much as completely not giving a crap anymore after the hypnosis and comes off as much more confident and honest to the Bobs than his coworkers do; presumably they decide to promote him on the logic that he knows the real problems and would be more likely to help than hinder.

Jokes

• Two versions of the same Jewish joke:
  • An antisemitic priest was in charge of a town, and challenged the Jews of the town to a sign language debate with him, with a catch: if the person they pick to debate loses, all the Jews must leave. No one volunteers for the debate except a poor fool. At the debate, the priest draws a big circle in the air. The fool stamps on the ground. The priest holds up three fingers. The fool shakes his head and holds up one. The priest takes out bread and wine. The fool begins to eat an apple. The priest then declares that the fool had won the debate. The priest's explanation: "The circle meant that God was everywhere in the world. The stamp on the ground meant God was not in Hell. The three fingers represented the Trinity. Holding up one finger meant that God was one and indivisible. The bread and wine represented the blood and flesh of Jesus, but when he reminded me of the original sin, I knew he had won." The fool's explanation, on the other hand: "The priest pointed far away, meaning that all the Jews must leave. I stamped on the ground, to say that we're staying right here. The three fingers meant that we had three days to get out. The one finger meant that not one of us was leaving. Then, I guess he gave up, since he took out his lunch, so I took out mine." A variant is sometimes told in which the priest thinks the stamp means "God is not only around us, but right here, with us" to the priest, and the one finger is a reminder that the Christians and Jews both share one common god. Similarly, the one finger may also be the fool's attempt at making a particular impolite gesture.
  • A king says he will expel all the Jews in his kingdom, unless he is defeated in a sign language debate. Again, a poor fool volunteers. The king holds out his hand with the fingers spread, and the fool puts up a fist. The king puts out two fingers and the fool holds up one. Then the king takes out a piece of moldy cheese, and the fool takes out an egg. The king meant for the outstretched hand to mean that the Jews were scattered over the world, and the fist meant that they were united in God. The two fingers meant that there were two kings, on in Heaven and one on Earth, but the fool signified that there was only one king, God. The cheese meant that the religion was old and falling apart, but the egg meant that it was fresh and whole. Or... the king tried to grab the fool and he held up a fist to ward him off, the two fingers were to poke out his eyes and the finger was to stop him, and they both brought out their lunches.
  • A slightly different version of this is told as a Zen parable where the fool assumes he is being insulted:
    Provided he makes and wins an argument about Buddhism with those who live there, any wandering monk can remain in a Zen temple. If he is defeated, he has to move on.
    In a temple in the northern part of Japan two brother monks were dwelling together. The elder one was learned, but the younger one was stupid and had but one eye.
    A wandering monk came and asked for lodging, properly challenging them to a debate about the sublime teachings. The elder brother, tired that day from much studying, told the younger one to take his place. "Go and request the dialogue in silence," he cautioned.
    So the young monk and the stranger went to the shrine and sat down.
    Shortly afterwards the traveler rose and went in to the elder brother and said: "Your young brother is a wonderful fellow. He defeated me."
    "Relate the dialogue to me," said the elder one.
    "Well," explained the traveler, "first I held up one finger, representing Buddha, the enlightened one. So he held up two fingers, signifying Buddha and his teaching. I held up three fingers, representing Buddha, his teaching, and his followers, living the harmonious life. Then he shook his clenched fist in my face, indicating that all three come from one realization. Thus he won and so I have no right to remain here." With this, the traveler left.
    "Where is that fellow?" asked the younger one, running in to his elder brother.
    "I understand you won the debate."
    "Won nothing. I'm going to beat him up."
    "Tell me the subject of the debate," asked the elder one.
    "Why, the minute he saw me he held up one finger, insulting me by insinuating that I have only one eye. Since he was a stranger I thought I would be polite to him, so I held up two fingers, congratulating him that he has two eyes. Then the impolite wretch held up three fingers, suggesting that between us we only have three eyes. So I got mad and started to punch him, but he ran out and that ended it!"

Literature

• Fernán Caballero's comic short story "Juan Cigarrón" revolves around a character who keeps getting acclaimed as an all-knowing, clairvoyant sage, purely because he has a penchant for vaguely worded doggerel.
• Subverted twice in the Discworld novel Interesting Times, when Rincewind is claimed as the Great Wizzard, who will lead the Red Army to victory. Firstly, because Rincewind does understand the question and knows he doesn't have the answer, but can't convince anyone of this; and second, because the leader of the Red Army knows this as well, but thinks they need a symbol. And, of course, double-subverted when he does, though a combination of chance and cowardly cunning, lead them to victory.
• In That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, the villains find a man they believe to be the reawakened Merlin. Since they want Merlin on their side as an ally, they treat him with great respect, addressing him stammeringly in Latin, which they believe to be his native tongue. They are unsurprised when he does not deign to answer them. Little do they know that he's actually a hobo who just happened to be wandering around the area where they thought Merlin was. Since he now has a warm place to sleep and all the food he can eat, he's not about to speak up and disabuse them of their illusions about his identity.
• The short story "El Diente Roto" by Pedro Emilio Coll is about a troublesome boy who, after he broke a tooth in a fight becomes devoted to touching his tooth with the tip of his tongue shutting off any other thought and becoming eerily quiet. The people around him interpret his sudden change and his apparently reflective attitude as great genius.
• Mr. Dick serves in this capacity to some extent to Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield. He's not quite "all there" in his head, but he's very kind, and clever in his own way, and it seems that Betsey Trotwood relies on him to point out the simple and most intuitive solution, when she's complicating things far more than they need.
• The main theme of the Champion Is Playing series. Because his plans keeps working out perfectly, dispite only barely understanding the games rules, everyone assumes Dan is some kind of super genius. The truth is he's actually of below average intelligence, with an unwittingly excellent poker face and insane amount of luck. Nobody even considers that though and they jump to wild conclusions trying to explain why he's doing things that only seem stupid.
• A short story by Richard Fuchs tells about a timid man who is henpecked by his wife, exploited by his boss and bullied by his co-workers. After having surgery to the mouth his speech becomes near unintelligible... and the people who try to understand what he says, haunted by their bad consciences, interpret it as him finally having grown a spine. They nervously start to try accommodating him, giving him a happy ending of sorts.
• Flashman builds his reputation on this - he misses an opponent in a duel in such a way that he looks to have pulled off a trick shot, then he passes out while trying to surrender the British flag so that when he's found it's assumed he was protecting it. As a result, he becomes a military hero. Being a Magnificent Bastard, of course, he plays up to this.
• In one of his short stories, Patrick McManus details his development of the technique of smoking a pipe and looking either "Thoughtful" or "Bemused" in order to hide his ignorance. This combination causes people to think he is doing some serious intellectual pondering.
• James Thurber's Fables for our Time has "The Owl Who Was God", where a bunch of forest animals make an owl their leader when this trope makes them think he's The Owl-Knowing One, with the result that most of them (including the owl) get killed by being run over by a truck.
• Happens to Bertie Wooster quite a few times. In The Inimitable Jeeves, Bertie's friend Bingo Little claims that Bertie is the true author of his uncle's favorite series of romance novels. The uncle spends the rest of the book thinking Bertie is a literary genius with unparalleled insight into the human condition, until the real author shows up and Jeeves saves the day by telling everyone Bertie is insane.
• Jerzy Kosiński's novel Being There: Chance the Gardner is mistaken for a profound thinker, when he is really just a simple-minded gardener.
• Dragaera: Vlad has a hard time deciding whether a drummer he meets is making profound statements about the universe using drumming as a metaphor or if he's just a spacy guy who is really into drumming. The character is based on the author's friend, who really is that into drumming.
• The protagonist of Subversive Activity, Captain Horatio de la Terre, gains a reputation as a savvy, dangerous man who never reveals what he's thinking, when most of the time what he's thinking is some version of "I don't understand what the hell's going on". By the end of the novel, he's discovered unsuspected talents and depths, but luck and misunderstandings still account for a large part of his reputation. Notably, he spends the entire novel fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the MacGuffin, but through the course of multiple conversations neither he nor anybody else realises this.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Buffybot. "School is where you learn." Preach it, sister. It helps that Warren uploaded her with banal observations about the Scoobies.
  Buffybot: ANYA. How is your money?
  Anya: [delighted] Fine, thank you!
• Summer Roberts in The O.C. impressed fellow students at a college fair by her seemingly profound, but actually clueless question "What is a jihad?". A reviewer at Television Without Pity snarkily, but not implausibly, wondered if she got her unexpectedly high test scores a few episodes earlier by writing "What is 'multiple choice'?" on her answer booklet.
• Father Ted:
  • Father Dougal has this conversation with a bishop which later leads to the bishop losing his faith and becoming a hippie, proclaiming Dougal a great insightful mind, when really he's a simpleton.
    Bishop Facks: So, Father. Do you ever have any doubts about the religious life? Is your faith ever tested? Anything you would be worried about? Any doubts you've been having about any aspects of belief? Anything like that?
    Father Dougal: Well, you know the way God made us all, right? And he's looking down at us from heaven and everything?
    Bishop Facks: Uh-huh.
    Father Dougal: And then his son came down and saved everyone and all that?
    Bishop Facks: Yes.
    Father Dougal: And when we die we're all going to go to heaven?
    Bishop Facks: Yes. What about it?
    Father Dougal: Well, that's the bit I have trouble with.
  • In the same episode, in preparation for the visit of three bishops, Ted teaches Father Jack two new phrases to supplement his usual vocabulary of "Drink", "Feck", "Arse", and "Girls": "Yes" and "That would be an ecumenical matter". The visiting bishops end up believing Father Jack is a theological genius.
• Arrested Development
  • Invoked, ending with an homage to Being There. Michael, stunned, asks GOB if that was just one of his tricks, to which GOB responds it was not. It was his ILLUSION! (A trick is something a whore does for money.)
  • The entire existence of Rita plays with this trope. She is a Red Herring for the mole revealing information about the Bluth family: Mr. F. Her actions seem to be consistent with this view and she even has a bracelet that says "MrF" on it. It turns out that she's a Mentally Retarded Female. Apparently, Americans never notice because she has a British accent.
• In The Office (US), new company CEO Robert California divides the employees of the Scranton branch into "winners" and "losers". To everyone's shock he marks out Kevin, the most incompetent employee and a man who can barely function as an adult, as a winner. It's revealed that he mistakes Kevin's asinine ramblings as profound metaphorical statements on business, much like Chance the Gardener. California is mortified when Oscar helps him understand that Kevin is just a man-child talking about cookies.
• In The 10th Kingdom, the dog impersonating Prince Wendell is asked a number of tricky questions to test whether he was worthy of being king. First, his bravery is challenged, and he describes tearing the troll king's throat out with his teeth. Next, he is asked for wisdom, and he describes finding a hundred bones and burying most of them, which the audience takes as a metaphor for conserving precious resources. Finally, Cinderella asks if he's really Wendell White. He breaks down, admits he's unworthy of the name, describes himself as not a leader but rather a "retriever," and says he will never be as great as Snow White and should not be named king. Cinderella thus pronounces that he has passed the test by showing humility.
• In one episode of Leverage, Parker and Sophie are convinced that a museum's head of security is an obsessive, nearly militant force to be reckoned with. Instead, it turns out he's a bumbling Woobie with a crush on Sophie.
• In Parks and Recreation, Leslie runs for office against another candidate who is handsome, charismatic and popular, but it becomes increasingly apparent as the campaign grinds on that he's borderline retarded and so privileged that he cannot function on his own.
• In one episode of Seinfeld, George is mistaken for the author of a book called "The Great Game." He attempts to fake his way through it, affecting a genial-celebrity demeanor and making vague quips like, "Remember, it's only a game, kids." "The Great Game" turns out to be a white supremacist manifesto.
  • He manages to make a career out of this as Assistant to the Traveling Secretary of the New York Yankees. When he resolves to take "the opposite" of his normal approach to life, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is won over by his oddball confidence and blunt approach, and he enjoys three years of Ultimate Job Security due to everyone's misreading of his characteristic Zany Scheme absurdities as displays of valuable outside-the-box thinking. (He can't even turn it off long enough to get fired on purpose.)
• Nelson "Big Head" Begetti in Silicon Valley is basically a modern day version of Chance the Gardener. He's a complete idiot with minimal coding abilities who nevertheless manages to bumble his way into a brilliant career first in the private sector and then academia (despite not having a degree himself), because everyone in the Valley assumes all programmers, especially the dropouts, are geniuses. He never hides his ineptitude and does get quickly found out, but because his bosses are too embarrassed to admit they hired a moron, he keeps getting Kicked Upstairs until he ends up the President of Sanford University.
• Jen on The IT Crowd fits this trope, largely because most of the people she deals with (other than Roy and Moss) don't know any more about computers than she does. She is put in charge of I.T. because she knows technical terms like 'mouse' and 'email', she wows her co-workers by presenting the box that contains the Internet, and also convinces her boss she can translate Italian despite not knowing a word of it.
• Yes, Minister directly references this trope. Sir Humphrey translates the Latin phrase "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses" as "If you'd kept your mouth shut, we might have thought you were clever."
• Jason in The Good Place. When he's introduced, he's having to pose as a Buddhist monk who took a vow of silence, and people interpret his actions as lessons, but it's revealed before long that he's just a petty criminal with the IQ of a cheesegrater from Jacksonville, Florida, and his actions generally have no actual thought behind them. Several episodes after the audience learns this, he pricks his finger on a cactus because he impulsively poked it, and Michael managed to convert that into some sort of proverb within seconds. Revealed in the final episode of the first season to be a subversion. Only the main characters were ever fooled; Michael and the residents are all demons who knew well in advance who Jason really was, and were only pretending that they thought he was wise to keep the charade going.

Theatre

• In Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy the main characters are awaiting a ridiculously wealthy, deaf German art lover who is coming to appraise the male lead's sculptures. As they are preparing, a fuse blows and they are plunged into darkness (hence the title). The electrician who is called to repair the fuse is German and after being shouted very loudly at he corrects them that he is not deaf, which they interpret as meaning the newspaper articles were wrong. They then get him to offer his opinion on the lead's art; the mistake is undiscovered until he reveals that he can't afford to buy the piece.
  • Actually a subversion — for a mere electrician, he has an Encyclopaedic Knowledge of and appreciation for art, but everyone dismisses him once they discover his identity.
• In King Lear, Lear, his fool, and Kent take refuge in a shack provided by Old Gloucester, where they encounter Tom O'Bedlam, who is actually Edgar in disguise and Obfuscating Insanity. Lear believes that Tom has been brought to such a situation by his two daughters:
  Edgar: [as Tom O'Bedlam] Pillicock sat on Pillicock hill. Alow, alow, loo, loo!
  Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen.
  Edgar: Take heed o' the foul fiend. Obey thy parents, keep thy word justly, swear not, commit not with man's sworn spouse, set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom's a-cold.
  Lear: What hast thou been?
  Edgar: A servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves in my cap, served the lust of my mistress's heart and did the act of darkness with her, swore as many oaths as I spake words and broke them in the sweet face of heaven. One that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it. Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly, and in woman out-paramoured the Turk. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand, hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes nor the rustling of silks betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders' books, and defy the foul fiend.
• "Dr." J. Bowden Hapgood in Anyone Can Whistle. Asked to separate the townspeople from the members of the local insane asylum, he instead puts the entire town under his thrall in one 13-minute musical sequence where he uses "the principles of logic" to place everyone in two groups, neither of which is all that sane. It only comes out later that he's a mental patient, not a doctor...

Video Games

• Raz in Psychonauts believes that the absent-minded but constantly-babbling Ford Crueller is actually undergoing some kind of secret assignment. However, he really is just that impaired. Or rather, his split personalities are. Crueller himself is still a sensible and powerful psychic.

Visual Novels

• In Daughter for Dessert, Lily's sayings give the protagonist a seductive view of a worry-free life, but Lily herself is an Extreme Doormat who has trouble holding down a job.

Web Animation

• In the Time Squad miniseries of Blockhead, the eponymous character is strung along on a time-traveling sci-fi adventure to stop a Mad Scientist from destroying time and space itself. As the series goes on, he inadvertently becomes The Heart in the Five-Man Band that is eventually formed as well as the Worthy Opponent and Arch-Enemy of the Big Bad, despite being nothing but a Cloud Cuckoo Lander Talkative Loon throughout the entire series. He ultimately does save the universe, but even then it seems more like one of his random fits of insanity than anything.
• In Red vs. Blue, This is the reason why Smith thinks Captain Caboose is at all fit to be a leader

Web Comics

• MegaTokyo: This is how Largo gets his teaching job in Japan despite not even speaking Japanese. He does get found out when the new English teacher he was mistaken for shows up, but is brought back by popular demand. Apparently, speaking l33t in the classroom, teaching students how to customize their home computers, and dragging them on a "field trip" to the arcade to learn to battle the impending zombie invasion makes "Great Teacher Largo" the most beloved instructor in the school.
• One-Punch Man: While not really an idiot, Saitama is still quite simple-minded, yet his disciple Genos takes almost everything he says as amazingly profound advice.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: This happens when Onni meets Reynir. From the reader's point of view, Reynir is having his first dream/spirit walking experience while thinking he's simply having a normal dream, walks into Lalli's protected area, gets kicked out by Lalli, and accidentally walks into Onni's safe area while trying to get back to his own. Lalli having decided to follow Reynir after kicking him out causes Onni to think Reynir was actively helping Lalli reach him. That causes Onni to interpret any signs of Reynir not actually knowing what is going on as him being quirky, causing him to tell Reynir he's happy to know that there is "another mage" on the crew right before he wakes up. In a later chapter, after Reynir ended up being the one calling Onni as magical reinforcements against strange ghosts due to Lalli being incapacited at the time, Onni has a radio conversation with Reynir and asks him if he has any theory about what the ghosts are. It's only then that Onni finds out that he's actually talking to a sheepherder who literally found out he was a mage when he called him one.

Websites

• In Thuryl's Lets Plays of the Phantasy Star games (available on the Let's Play Archive), Noah/Lutz's characterization is expanded to this, portraying him as having No Social Skills due to secluding himself in a cave for an indeterminate length of time. When Rolf asks for advice in the second game, Lutz draws on his own experiences (read: the events of the first game) and relays them literally, but Rolf finds meaningful advice by assuming these are metaphors to his own situation.
• From The Onion: Machiavellian White House Groundskeeper Gaining Influence Among West Wing Staff

Western Animation

• The title characters play this role in several episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head; in typical plots they are mistaken for job-site replacements or new hires, given control of vehicles or put in front of microphones when other characters, ostensibly smarter, take the giggling idiots entirely at their word. Robot Chicken noticed this: they were able to join the Teen Titans because of this.
• Pinky of Pinky and the Brain would fall under this trope whenever he interacted with the general public. Though the show was always ambiguous about whether he might not actually be the one who's a genius (because of his ability to spot obvious flaws in Brain's plans).
• This is also the basic premise of the Chicken Boo sketches from Animaniacs.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Last Exit to Springfield", Homer accidentally becomes the new leader of the union. Despite being woefully unqualified, events conspire to make Mr. Burns think he's a shrewd negotiator. Burns doesn't realize Homer is just a lucky idiot until the very end of the episode, when he acquiesces to the union's demands on the condition that Homer resign, who begins wildly hooting and dancing on the floor.
    Burns: Smithers, I'm beginning to think Homer Simpsons was not the brilliant tactician I thought he was.
  • In "E Pluribus Wiggum", the Republicans and Democrats battle to secure Ralph — a rather dumb eight-year-old, — as a presidential candidate.
• One episode of Goof Troop featured Goofy applying for a job at the local NASA inspired science lab. He thought he was applying for the Janitor position; the scientists thought he was a brilliant eccentric scientist on the level of Einstein, and kept mistaking all his random comments and actions as profound advice for their floundering space program.
• In 6teen, Jonesy gets Jude to pretend to be a guru simply because Jude can make totally inane statements sound like wisdom.
• In the Phineas and Ferb episode "She's the Mayor", Candace wins a competition with an essay titled "Why My Little Brothers Should Be Busted". Roger, the mayor, praises her use of metaphor for financial matters. In reality, Candace is just obsessed with busting her brothers. Other characters continue to take everything she says as a metaphor throughout the episode.
  Man: Hooray for busting little brothers being a perfect metaphor for our times!
  Candance: NOT EVERYTHING IS A METAPHOR!
• Happened sometimes in Duck Dodgers when other characters think that Dodgers really is the wondrous personage he claims to be.
• Happens to Daffy again in The Looney Tunes Show whenever Foghorn Leghorn gets involved, although Foghorn sees Daffy as an Honest Advisor (which he is, but not in any kind of intelligent way).
• Batman: The Animated Series. "The Man Who Killed Batman" has a variation: Everyone in the audience knows that Sid the Squid Debris is an idiot, but Sid has no personality of his own, so the other characters see him as an idiot and another characteristic they want him to be: After it seems Sid has done the impossible (killing Batman) Thorne's Mooks see him as an evil Idiot Hero even when Sid claims it was an Accidental Murder. Some Gangbangers defy him to fight even when it's obvious Sid is hopeless at a fight. Joker is so upset by being stolen the chance to kill Batman that he claims Sid was an assassin who had Beginner's Luck, and The Don Thorne, who has informants who rightly told him Sid is a Bumbling Sidekick, suspects Sid of being a Magnificent Bastard trying to pull a Scheherezade Gambit on him using Obfuscating Stupidity so Sid can get a Klingon Promotion.
  • Turns out? He's just an Idiot Hero...who has Batman looking after him!
• Bill Tukyuk from Yvon of the Yukon is one of the few outright subversive parodies of a Magical Native American in all of media, and thus is a constant source of weird mythological tall tales that tend to go nowhere, are rife with nonsensical "deep" nonsense, and rarely have anything to do with anything. He's at least trying, being a Kindhearted Simpleton who thinks his stories are profound, but this is about as profound as he gets:
  Bill: Once my ancestors went on a spirit journey, but they went the wrong way...

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