The All-Solving Hammer

"This caption isn't funny enough! Reboot the server! Reboot the server!"

"Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire."

— Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, Sizzle Flavor Text

When All You Have Is a Hammer… meets Running Gag.

Some people, when facing a problem, any problem, will suggest X, without even trying to consider some of the other, probably better, and usually more rational solutions. Why? Maybe they had a difficult past, maybe they were trained that way, or maybe they just can't think of anything else. The fact is, they have one and only one answer for everything, and it's not like it usually works.

This is a Super-Trope of Kill It with Fire, Murder Is the Best Solution, Duct Tape for Everything, More Dakka, Nuke 'em, Your Answer to Everything and others. If examples fit better on one of those pages, please list it there rather than here. Sometimes used in conjunction with Percussive Maintenance.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The title character in Samurai Harem: Asu no Yoichi, when facing a problem that can't be solved with a Sword Fight, will resort to seppuku. Since the story needs a hero, he never succeeds.
• One Piece: Zoro has a troubling habit of suggesting cutting off body parts as the solution to a number of problems. Sometimes, this is a case of a Life-or-Limb Decision, but he is also inclined to suggest this before it becomes a matter of life or death. Including one time when Luffy's finger was stuck in a bottle, and another time when he was handcuffed to Usopp.
• Cowboy Bebop: Spike isn't the most technical-minded of hotshot bounty hunters. If something mechanical is broken, he'll kick it until it works. Even if it's a hundred-year-old Betamax player that may or may not be the last functional one in existence. Even when someone over his shoulder is yelling at him to stop.
• Yuria from Yuria 100 Shiki, as a runaway Sex Bot, has a rather one-track mind. As a result, all her plans for dealing with whatever problems comes her way essentially boil down to having sex with Shunsuke in some way, shape or form. This works about as well as one might expect.
• While Alex Louis Armstrong of Fullmetal Alchemist has several solutions on hand for any problem (he's a gifted alchemist and a skilled boxer with muscles for days), he seems to favour flexing where possible. At one point in the 2003 anime he attempts to convince soldiers to join a coup by flexing at them.
• In Full Metal Panic!, if Sousuke encounters a problem, his first inclination will be to blow it up. Someone slipped a love letter in your locker? Blow it up. Want to make sure no one will steal your stuff at the beach? Rig it to blow up. Perverts are trying to sneak into the women's bath? Blow them up. There Was a Door? Nah, too risky. Blow up the wall instead. Get stuck in a text adventure game? Well, that's impossible to solve—there's no "blow it up" option. And what he can't solve with a bomb, he'll try to solve by shooting it instead. It gets so bad that in one of the comedy chapters Sousuke develops withdrawal symptoms after Kaname orders him to cut it out.
• In High Score Girl, the protagonist Haruo is so obsessed with Fighting Games that mental projections of characters like Street Fighter II's Guile give him life advice. However, Art of Fighting's Ryo Sakazaki only ever gives one piece of advice: "Use the Haoh Shokoken!", Ryo's Ki "fireball" supermove^note Ryo awkwardly saying "I must use Haoh Shokoken" during AOF's story became a meme among the FGC, which obviously isn't very useful when dealing with things like schoolwork or a Love Triangle. It turns into a Chekhov's Gag when Haruo faces off against Hidaka (another part of the Love Triangle) in The King of Fighters '95, and the Haoh Shokoken is ends up being quite useful when faced off against the game's hidden "Boss Team" of three overpowered characters.

Comic Strips

• In the Dilbert universe, the allegory to the fix-all hammer is "rebooting."
  • Dogbert at one time operated his own tech-support helpline, which invariably recommended a reboot.
  • Dilbert tried calling a software support helpline, and advised the techie upfront that he'd already tried rebooting. After explaining the problem in detail, the solution was... "reboot."
  • A security guard at Dilbert's company got bored of his job, and went from cubicle to cubicle, advising each one to "try rebooting." Even Dilbert got this advice, though Dilbert had to question it: "To fix a typo?"

Comic Books

• The Incredible Hulk has a simple mindset for solving problems. Big mean bad guy wants to hurt you? Smash him. Dumb mustache army man want to drag you back to their base and run experiments on you? Smash his tanks. Violent, incomprehensible alien monster attacks Earth? You're an idiot not to try smashing it. Arrogant God-like being threatens the world and has already beaten your puny friends? Your puny friends are counting on you to smash him. Smart villain with a big head has a convoluted scheme to conquer mankind a plan to keep from getting smashed? Shows what he knows; you find a way to smash him anyway. Random assholes want to bully Bruce Banner? Oh, you better believe Hulk Smash those puny idiots.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm has Harry start as a creative Guile Hero... before his increasingly magical abilities mean that he tends to resort to Kill It with Fire, with one reviewer noting that his battle strategy tends to boil down to "blow it up, then blow up the rubble just to be sure." After the limitations of this become very clear (especially since he's an inexperienced Glass Cannon), he starts becoming much more creative again - though his default battle strategy is still to try and set something on fire.
• Princess Shuri in Founding the Junior Avengers tries to improve Peter's webbing formula by adding powdered vibranium. When Peter and Tony point out that not only does he go through massive amounts of the stuff, which is not reusable, but vibranium is prohibitively expensive even for Tony Stark, Shuri admits she does resort to using vibranium for all her problems. In her defense, not only is the metal incredibly versatile, but her country is sitting on a literal mountain of it.
• This is lampshaded in Avatar: The Abridged Series Episode 4.
  Katara: Have this magical plot-solving acorn. It has the power to resolve the plot of any episode.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie; Benny's answer to pretty much any problem is "build a spaceship". Most of the time he doesn't get the chance, as the other Master Builders shoot down his idea before he can get very far. Once they let him build his spaceship...
• Wreck-It Ralph has Fix-It Felix, the hero of Ralph's game. His hammer can fix anything, which actually works against him once, when he tries to break out of prison and ends up making his cell stronger instead.

Films — Live-Action

• In My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the main character's father's response to any ailment is to put some Windex on it. At the end, we find out that the groom was inspired by his father-in-law to treat some acne with Windex. It worked. The groom may have simply been making a joke, too.
• Magneto accuses Wolverine of this mentality in X2: X-Men United when discussing how to work the spillway mechanism.
  Magneto: What do you intend to do? Scratch it with your claws?

Ironically, this is exactly what Wolverine does later to seal the floodgate shut, and it works.

Literature

• In The Last Continent, Rincewind notes the Ecksian term "no worries" can fix just about any problem.
  It was an amazing phrase. It was practically magical all by itself. It just ...made things better. A shark's got your leg? No worries. You've been stung by a jellyfish? No worries! You're dead? She'll be right! No worries!
• Dave Barry Slept Here:
  • The typical English king is characterized as "a syphilitic hunchbacked lunatic whose basic solution to all problems, including humidity, was to have somebody's head cut off."
  • Harry Truman's first idea for dealing with Stalin's blockade of West Berlin is to drop an atom bomb on Japan. Fortunately, he reconsiders.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has towels. They're good for just about everything (and their diverse uses are really ramped up in Mostly Harmless).
• In Harry Potter:
  • Lord Voldermort tries to kill Harry with magic when he's a baby and fails. He then spends seven books trying to kill Harry with magic and has the exact same success rate. Had he once bothered to stab, strangle, or otherwise use mundane means that Harry didn't have magical protection against, he'd have succeeded. And that's not even mentioning his near constant reliance on the Killing Curse. For the Wizarding World's most powerful evil Wizard, it seems his fallback for every fight. And rarely, if ever, works.
  • Harry himself is noted in-universe for almost always going for the Disarming Charm in a fight and actively warned that it makes him predictable. It pretty much always works, being so Boring, but Practical that he can punch far beyond his weight in a duel. Careful reading shows that his usage of Expelliarmus is less heavy in the later books (fifth and onward), in favor of other spells like the Stunning or Full Body-Bind spells, and that the use of the Disarming Charm tends to be more situational in those books, but by this point his reputation of using this spell has preceded him in-universe. It doesn't help that the moments where he did use the Disarming Charm tended to be when a lot of attention was already focused on him.
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The Queen of Hearts responds to any inconvenience by finding someone to blame and threatening to behead them.
• In The Dresden Files, Harry Dresden's instinctive approach to problem-solving tends to revolve around the copious application of fire magic. It often works, but it gets him into trouble when he tries that approach on a Jotun of Muspelheim in Battle Ground (2020).

Live-Action TV

• Canada's Worst Handyman:
  • Merle Auger, one of the Season 1 contestants, loves duct tape. Over the course of the season, he used it for everything from patching drywall, to fixing one of his fellow contestants' overalls, to holding split wood together, to bandaging wounds, to upholstering a chair.
  • Season 3 has Joe "The Bullet" Barbaro, who, in a fairly literal application of this trope, uses a hammer for everything. Driving screws? Well, they look like nails so why not just hit them in! Cutting drywall? Just tap it and a little piece will break off! He ends up being named the season's worst for this.
• Top Gear:
  • You may be assured that whenever an episode has a car with some mechanical work to be done, Jeremy Clarkson will be reaching for his hammer. By series 19, he has manged to acquire a drawer full of them in the Top Gear workshop, simply labeled "The Drawer of Jeremy."
  • Subverted during the Ground Force crossover. His co-presenters assumed he'd use one for gardening as well. To their alarm, he instead reached for his handy, all-solving shotgun.
    "See these weeds?" *BOOM* "They have ceased to be! Observe the genius of my gardening!"
• Whose Line Is It Anyway?: Colin Mochrie's answer for everything in the Improbable Mission games is an All-Solving Cat. It's a towel! It's fabric softener! It's a vase... or at least it would've been if they had a cat that time.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In an alternate reality episode.
    Buffy: Why don't I just put a stake through her heart?
    Giles: She's not a vampire.
    Buffy: Yeah, well, you'd be surprised how many things that'll kill.
  • In the episode "Hush," she tries to suggests staking as a way to kill the Gentlemen.
• On The Red Green Show, while Red himself relied on duct tape to deal with any situation, Edgar Montrose inevitably tried explosives.
• MythBusters:
  • All of the Mythbusters have a fondness for Stuff Blowing Up, and often suggest using explosives to deal with a given myth. They usually go through with it, too. As it's been summed up: "When in doubt, C4."
  • Grant Imahara often suggests building a robot for a myth. Usually it's viable, but sometimes the suggestion is clearly there as a gag.
  • Two standbys for almost every build: Duct tape and motorcycle chain.
• For Burn Notice's Fiona, the only problems that can't be solved with C4 are the ones that require shooting someone. Even those probably could be solved with C4, it just wouldn't be cost-effective.
• In the second instalment of Horatio Hornblower mini-series, Dr Clive's prescription to everything is a good dosage of laudanum. Captain is mentally unstable and harasses the crew? Laudanum! A midshipman was beaten to unconsciousness and his arse hurts like hell? Laudanum! Captain is utterly crazy and threatens the ship's mission? Laudanum! A cannonball tore off a sailor's leg? Lauda... Oh, wait, sometimes he does do surgeries as well. Interestingly, in all those cases laudanum might actually be useful since it is an analgesiac and has sedative properties. Given the state of medical science back then, laudanum (alcohol laced with opium) was considered a "miracle drug". A large enough dose and you *will* feel better.
• In the Wizards of Waverly Place TV movie, during the challenge to become the family wizard, Alex continuously relies on a spell that turns the ground under the target's feet into a swamp.
• Doctor Who:
  • The reason the Doctor refuses to carry a weapon most of the time is based on this idea; if you always have the option of just shooting and killing your enemy, it's tempting to default to that and ignore possible better options.
  • Some writers use the Sonic Screwdriver as a magic wand capable of solving all problems, which is why in the Fifth Doctor's tenure it was destroyed (and why in the New Series it doesn't do wood and is powerless against deadlock seals).
• Home Improvement Tim Taylor's typical suggested answer to every issue is it needs "More Power! Hrah hrah hrah hrah hrah hrah..!"

Podcasts

• In The Adventure Zone: Balance, Merle constantly uses Zone of Truth, even in situations where it has no possible use.

Pinballs

• In Star Wars (Data East), the ramp shot becomes this for some players, as it's possible to build it up to yield 99 million points per shot, and then simply keep shooting it for high scores.

Tabletop Games

• The Yozis and Primordials in general from Exalted tend to pull this, due to the nature of their existence as cosmic embodiments of certain phenomena. At any strategy meeting, the Ebon Dragon will suggest a sneaky course of action, Autochthon (like Grant Imahara from the Live-Action TV section above) will recommend building a tool or robot, and Malfeas will recommend killing or breaking something.
• Warhammer 40,000 has this in many ways.
  • Aside from the obvious bent of the Imperium using holy-techno hammers to smite the enemies of man, they are a theocracy so ultra orthodox it allowed next to no innovation in the last 10,000 years. They've basically been using the same tactics (and sometimes gear) for that long.
  • Ork biology ensures that "throw more boyz at da problem" works in the long run: dead orks release spores that become more orks once they mature, ensuring a planet once visited by orks will always have to deal with orks.
  • Ork philosophy regarding automatic weapons can be summed up as "No such fing as enuff dakka".
• Magic: The Gathering: Jaya Ballard provides the page quote.
• From BattleTech's CCG, the flavor text of the Saturation Bombing card: If brute force doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough.
• In the Transformers RPG, the Gunner role gets an ability called Worth A Shot, which lets them once per scene in a non-combat situation use a gun as a non-weapon tool of any kind, substituting their Targeting skill in place of the skill normally associated with the check they're trying to make. So they literally can use solve almost any problem with a gun.

Video Games

• In Mass Effect, Wrex's first suggestion for solving any conflict or situation: "Eat them." In Mass Effect 2 a quarian admiral fighting against a fellow admiral who's itching for war can say "Once you build the galaxy's biggest hammer, someone will always start looking for nails."
  • Javik, your DLC Prothean squadmate in 3 and in many ways Wrex's successor, will suggest violence for any difficult negotiation, with Thrown Out the Airlock as his standard solution to any personnel difficulties. In the Citadel DLC, you get Renegade interrupts in which you threaten to cut off the villains' heads and throw them out of an airlock, and Javik will say "Finally!"
  • Another one out of BioWare Knights of the Old Republic's HK-47 will usually suggest firearms or grenades.
    • HK, Wrex, Baldur's Gate's Minsc,^note "You point, I punch." and Jade Empire's Black Whirlwind — don't let 'em near anything breakable...
• In Overlord, you can count problems that can't be solved with minions in one hand. Pretty much everything is fixed through creative use of minions or just swarming the problem with the minions until it goes away. The other problems, well, you take the one hand you're counting them on, wrap it around your preferred melee weapon and start swinging.
• In The Sims, pretty much any broken thing in your house can be fixed with a wrench.
• In the Dwarf Fortress community, it is commonly agreed upon that magma can solve any problem. Invaders at your door? Magma. Troublesome nobles? Magma. !!Dwarf!! on fire? Not for long if you use enough magma.
• In Team Fortress 2: Got a problem? Use a gun. That didn't fix it? Use more gun.
  • And how do you build and fix guns, dispensers, enemies or just about anything else? With a wrench. It's in the official, in-universe instruction manual, no less.
    • Played literally with the Pyro and his weapon of choice for enemy buildings (and the occasional enemy Spy). A troublesome Spy trying to ruin your little nest? Whack 'im. A sapper destroying your Engie's sentry? Whack it. An Engineer on the other team has a nicer dispenser than your Engie's? WHACK IT AND HIM!
• Link's sword in Link's Awakening, and the Oracle games. Aside from using it as a weapon or hedge trimmer, its uses include: deflecting a ball into breakable blocks in a minigame in Ages (even the Biggoron sword is used for this), poking at walls to figure out if they're hollow, grabbing items from a distance, hitting switches, harvesting seeds from trees, and of course, posing.
• In Star Wars: The Old Republic during the Sith Inquisitor's storyline there is no problem that cannot be solved with a good dose of force lightning. Angry Jedi? Shock him. Interrogation subject? Shock him. Uppity party members? Shock them. Sith artefact refusing to open? Shock it. That last one is actually the first case, and as it also happens to be the only thing that works then might be the inspiration for a later fondness.
• inFAMOUS is pretty much the same, with all of your powers being lightning based. In a fight, shoot lightning. If you're hurt, eat lightning. Need to get somewhere? Ride the Lightning. Need to heal someone else? Use lightning. Need to change history to prevent the end of the world? LIGHTNING. Essentially, Lightning Can Do Anything.
• Baby Mario takes this approach in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time from whacking the Star Gate with his hammer to whacking poor Luigi on the head with it. Really, in many Mario RPGs, hammering stuff either helps uncover coins and neat items or reveal secrets in the landscape. Paper Mario especially seems to run on this trope.
• IF ALL ELSE FAILS USE FIRE
• Fallout 4: Strong only need hammer!
• League of Legends: Although there are some in which she shines better than others, Kayle is the only character with the potential to be played in any and every role on Summoner's Rift.
• In Borderlands 2's fourth DLC, 'Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep', the main cast of the first game play an Expy of Dungeons & Dragons. Brick's solution to every problem the group faces is to punch it, including some problems that weren't problems before he punched them.
• The people you help in Elite Beat Agents frequently tend towards this. One mission has a teenage quarterback helping his girlfriend babysit by treating every issue with the kids like it was a football. Another has an impoverished oil tycoon regaining his fortune by employing his skills at digging. And of course, the agents themselves can assist with absolutely any problem whatsoever by dancing at it.
• In Psychopomp, whatever situation the player protagonist is faced with, the usual solution is to literally hit it with her hammer. Need to break into a government building in the dead of night to explore its labryinth? She uses her hammer. Need to convince some uncooperative NPCs into letting her use a plot-critical switch? She uses her hammer. Acquire a key for a door from an NPC? Hammer.

Visual Novels

• When Akira from Spirit Hunter: NG is faced with any sort of roadblock, his default answer tends to be 'beat it up'. Multiple other characters call him out on his violent predisposition.

Web Animation

• Terrible Writing Advice:
  • Regardless of what type of story or character he's talking about, JP's terrible advice almost always includes "add a love triangle".
  • The Evil Emperor's first suggestion for how to deal with literally any problem is always "DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET".
  • The Knights of Artistic Integrity respond to every threat by issuing a stern warning.
• Epithet Erased: Indus is so devoted to his Barrier epithet that at one point he attempts to use one to cut the tape holding Molly to a chair, which doesn't work because his Barriers don't have sharp edges, and Molly has to point out that he could just use his hands like a normal person.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater: The Light Warriors' (especially Black Mage) approach to anything: try to kill everything in sight. Including each other. If they don't do the first, then they stand around arguing until their enemies' stupidity makes them self-destruct. It's usually one or the other.
  • And Red Mage will usually try to solve a problem with animal husbandry.
  • Fighter is probably the closest of the cast to fitting the exact wording of this trope, his solution to all problems is to hit anything and everything with swords until whatever it is goes away.
• Darths & Droids: "I cast Summon Bigger Fish", although even though Jim keeps mentioning it, it never really gets used - aside from the small bonus comic that was done once. Bonus points for him not even having this ability.
• Vaarsuvius from The Order of the Stick has been known to engage in this line of thinking regarding their arcane powers. They even had to go through some major angst and character development to get over it (debatably crossing the Moral Event Horizon in the process), but still struggles with it sometimes like in this strip.
• The Handbook of Heroes: Sorceror uses Fireball as the solution for every problem from opening a pickle jar to providing rocket thrust to fighting forest fires.
• Irregular Webcomic!: Prior to a big Time Skip where he starts learning other disciplines, Kyros tends to solve every problem with a needlessly overpowered fireball, much to the frustration of the rest of the party and the GM. To make matters worse, the GM has a house rule that you can only use XP on skills you actually used during the adventure, so Kyros ends up building an even more powerful fireball at the end of every session...

Web Original

• This Let's Play-style article on Galactic Civilizations II...well...
  God, look at me. This was supposed to be my quest for peace, and I've become addicted to destroying suns. How did I try to mend relations with the Terrans? I blew up a sun. How did I vanquish the Dread Lords? I destroyed their sun. How did I tackle the volatile Drengin? Destroyed all their suns. Drath relations dodgy? Gear up to destroy some suns. It was spreading to real life, too. Deputy Editor Tim called just now to ask how this diary was coming along, and all I could say was "It's taking a while. Couldn't we just destroy the sun?"
• SF Debris:
  • In the site's imaginings, Ben Sisko solves all problems by punching them, even when said problems can't really be solved that way.
  • In keeping with his Alternate Character Interpretation of the characters, we see this played out during confabs between Sisko and the other Trek captains: Picard gives technobabble solutions, Kirk suggests giving a Kirk Summation followed by hitting someone, Janeway votes to kill everything in sight, and a paranoid Archer rants that Vulcans are to blame somehow.
  • He also notes that Janeway responds to everything with overwhelming force, and has on multiple occasions managed to resolve space-time anomalies she has no understanding of by blasting the hell out of them. In "Equinox" he suggests that this has become Star Fleet standard practice: on seeing a rift in space-time, whip out your phaser and start firing. He also at one point starts listing the past times Janeway has solved a problem by shooting it, only to realize that he was listing every episode from "Caretaker" in order.
  • Janeway's other solution to any problem is to have Tom Paris solve it. Since he's a whiz at every single subject, this works occasionally.
  • Worf, presumably the originator of this policy, uses phasers and photon torpedoes to solve Borg problems, Cardassian problems, Romulan problems, and erectile dysfunction.

Web Videos

• Kickassia shows Doctor Smith exhibiting this, even though "Nobody likes the plan with the spiders." Hell, just about any Channel Awesome sketch Dr. Smith appears in involves him suggesting an army of spiders for something.
• The Misadventures of Skooks: In Episode 3, Fred constantly makes the gang go back to the Malt Shop every time they run into a new problem.
• An inversion: Essentially any time the SCP Foundation finds anything at all, someone will suggest using it to try to kill SCP-682. And if it's actually deadly, they really will try it on 682. Except an atomic bomb. The last thing they need is 682 developing an invulnerability to that.

Western Animation

• King of the Hill
  • When Kahn and family moved in, after they came over for dinner Minh suggested some improvements to Peggy's recipies, all of which were "add nutmeg."
  • In another episode, Hank gets his old football coach to coach Bobby's team. His solution for anything is "take a salt tablet".
• The Tool Street Gang: Nutley seems to think that she’s the All-Solving Wrench, and will suggest building plans accordingly.
  Nutley: You know, I think we should be putting that shed together with nuts and bolts.
  Gripper: You would. You’d put a sandwich together with nuts and bolts given half the chance.
  Nutley: Good idea! It’d keep the ham from falling out.
• On Bobby's World, Uncle Ted was coaching Bobby's T-Ball team; one of them got hit with a ball and Ted said "Walk it off." This leads to an Imagine Spot where Bobby imagines Uncle Ted confronted with various other medical conditions:
  Broken leg? Walk it off.
  Heart attack? Walk it off.
  Pregnant? Walk it off.
• In the South Park episode "My Future Self 'n' Me," Cartman runs a Parental Revenge Center and claims to come up with plans tailored to each child's parents, but all his plans just involve smearing poop on the walls of their house. The "tailoring" is what kind of poop is used.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Dial 'N' For Nerder":
    Betsy: It's all about little substitutions. If you want to eat something, eat a bell pepper. Crave something sweet? Eat a bell pepper. Want a beer? Bell pepper.
    Homer: It tastes good like pepper, but crunchy like a bell!
    Betsy: Bell pepper!
  • "My Fair Laddy" has the new gym teacher respond to anything with a dodgeball to the face. "Bombardment!"
  • In the "Treehouse of Horror IX" segment "Starship Poopers", when asked for suggestions for what to do about Maggie becoming an alien.
    Dr Hibbert: Fire, and lots of it!
    Marge: That's your cure for everything.
  • From "Homer Badman":
    Marge: That's your solution to everything: to move under the sea.
  • In "The Front", Bart constantly chooses "rock" during his games of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" with Lisa. Poor, predictable Bart... always takes rock.
  • "Insane Clown Poppy" has Marge give Bart and Homer a list of household chores of which the first item is "Open stuck drawer." Bart uses fireworks, very effectively, and, encouraged by the first success, they use the rest of the fireworks to "fix" a broken doghouse (by blowing it up and promising to build a new one later) and finally detonate just about everything in Lisa's room in an attempt to get a videotape out of her VCR.
  • "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)" opens with Homer picking up the classic Glove Slap maneuver from a Zorro movie and quickly realizing it's a great way to get anybody to do anything he wants, since pretty much nobody wants to duel. He proceeds to Glove Slap his way out of every predicament he faces from toll booths to doctors' needles until someone actually accepts his challenge, forcing him to flee town.
• The Venture Brothers features a cleaning lady at the White House who prescribes club soda for cleaning up anything. She tries it on an indestructable forcefield and it works.
• In Futurama, the Neptunian master chef Elzar augments every dish he touches with a blast from a spice weasel. BAM!
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie's solution to a given situation seems to involve either throwing a party or bursting into song. Sometimes she does both.
  • Fluttershy's solution to anything, lampshaded in dialogue, is to panic.
  • When things are going wrong for Starlight Glimmer, she tends to default to using her magic to solve the problem. Unfortunately, this includes social problems. A major part of her Character Development is realizing that her hammer isn't as All-Solving as she thought it was.
  • Star Swirl the Bearded was solving every problem with magical beings by banishing them to the other place in his past. Even his own friend and comrade. Which he heavily regrets now.
• Young Justice (2010): The Scarab's default reaction to every problem is to blast it with the plasma cannon, to which its host Jaime objects.
• Corey's answer to EVERYTHING in Grojband is Music. However, since this is a show that practically runs on The Power of Rock, it generally works.
• In the Looney Tunes special Bugs Bunny's Thanksgiving Diet, Bugs Bunny is working as a dietitian and he just tells all his clients to eat nothing but carrots.
• In Ben 10: Alien Force, Ben gains an alien named Rath. Rath is an Appoplexian, and according to Kevin, not only are they not that bright, they think that any problem can be solved by hitting it.
  Rath: Not true! Sometimes you gotta hit it a lot!

Real Life

• There's an Irish saying along these lines;
  • "Advice for Builders.
  1. Always use the right tool for the job.
  2. The right tool for the job is always a Hammer.
  3. Anything can be used as a Hammer."
• The advice "If you can't fix it by hitting it with a hammer then it must be an electrical problem." And the corollary, "If hitting it with a hammer doesn't work, hit it with a bigger hammer."
• A true handyman only needs two tools: Duct tape for things that move when they shouldn't and WD-40 for things that don't move when they should.
• There is a theory popular with Aberdeen University Engineers: There is no problem anywhere that cannot be solved through creative application of: Duct tape, WD-40, ice-cream, and a brick.
• Engineering Solution 1: Hit it with a hammer. Solution 2: Hit it with a bigger hammer.
• Millwright joke: What does a millwright call his hammer? Wrench. What does a millwright call all the other tools in the box? Hammers.
• Damage Controlmen (essentially plumbers/general repairmen) in the US Navy and Coast Guard have a nickname for a mallet: The make-fit. Guess why. Also a wrench is referred to as a "Bosun's Hammer"
• Metaphorically speaking, when in the proper quantity and with the proper application, Playing with Fire fixes everything. Need to cook some eggs? Use fire to heat them. Terrorist attack? Kill It with Fire. Nothing cannot be solved by it!
  "'More fire' fixes all problems except possibly 'too much fire'."
  • Fire can be used as a fire-fighting tool, with controlled burns being a method of creating fire breaks, gaps where there isn't enough fuel available to feed wildfires. That said, controlled burns can easily turn into wildfires if not kept under control.
• In the same sense, a recurring joke in some fan circles states that all problems can be solved with sufficient application of Dalek.
• A common English slang term for a hammer? "Birmingham Screwdriver".
• As anybody who's ever worked in the theatre around stage building will tell you, there is no problem that can't be solved by using wood. Wood has been used to keep cushions plump.
  • The movie Those Lips Those Eyes has a scene in which an experienced stagehand explains to the newcomer that they have to reinforce all the furniture that will be used on stage because "Actors are pieces of meat." Stagehands know this to be Truth in Television, since a couch that would give twenty years of faithful service in a home with four rambunctious kids and a large dog will be an upholstered pile of brokenness in a week if used as a stage prop without being reinforced, sooner if the script calls for the actors to do anything with it other than sit on it quietly.
• Charles M. Schulz believed that the introduction of the magical creature Eugene the Jeep to the Popeye comics, while an interesting idea in theory, was to the comic's detriment because Popeye solved all his problems by punching things; until Eugene came along, there weren't any problems he couldn't solve that way, and to introduce more complex problems so that Eugene could solve them took power away from Popeye.
• In higher math and science, particularly in physics, there are multiple correct ways of arriving at an answer. So the people using the math tend to stick with what they're most comfortable with... which is generally the exact same set of math techniques. At a high enough level it gets to the point where people can be identified by the math they use because they will always use the same set of techniques every single time.
• From Vodkastan: "There are no bad days, only not enough vodka. There are no bad friends, only not enough vodka. There is no bad food, only not enough vodka. There are no ugly women, only not enough vodka. There is nothing wrong, only not enough vodka."
• A man's guide to thought: "If the answers aren't beer and women, you're asking the wrong questions."
• Military saying: When in doubt, empty the magazine.
• The Other Military saying: If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't, paint it!
• The page image demonstrates the IT technician's hammer, rebooting. Depending on your experience, this may be a Downplayed Trope, as there are a great many problems that can be resolved this way, but anyone who's halfway experienced with computer problems will probably stop encountering problems that a simple reboot can fix before too long, so hearing this come out of a person trying to give helpful advice is frustrating. You should still try this in most any situation before more complex solutions.
• "There is no problem that cannot be solved by the proper application of high explosives".
• Tough guys know "Violence is not the answer. Violence is the question. The answer is yes."
• The age-old question; Assault Rifle, or shotgun? Yes.
• Archaeologist Ian Morris notes that a lot of early archaeologists were former military men, and that they saw evidence of conflict and violence wherever they went. Having served through a couple of cycles of reaction and counter-reaction to this view, Morris thinks that they were right more often than they were wrong.

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