The Man Who Knew Too Little - Television Tropes & Idioms

A character approaches a situation under the impression that they're dealing with a prank, a con, or a staged event. Unfortunately for them, it's all quite real. When they eventually find out, expect mighty embarrassment or even Fainting if the situation was dangerous enough. Sometimes this is a Magic Feather, and it's revealed that the character is far more competent than they realize.

Not always played for laughs, if the character realizes the reality of the situation before he succeeds (and especially if their oblivious actions have made things worse in the meantime).

In comedies, discovering that the situation is real often turns The Man Who Knew Too Little into Genre Savvy.

Named for the 1997 film (which combines this with Mistaken For Spies).

Examples:

When the holodeck in Star Trek The Next Generation malfunctions, the players sometimes take a while to realize there's a problem. The most obvious example was the first such episode, "The Big Goodbye", in which a Red Shirt practically dares a hologram to shoot him and is shocked when the bullet actually hurts him.
Tim Allen's character in Galaxy Quest orders the destruction of a threatening enemy spacecraft, believing himself to be shooting a promo for the fans of his show.
Guido (Roberto Benigni) spends most of the film Life is Beautiful trying to maintain his son's condition as The Child Who Knew Too Little, to maintain his hope.
In the movie Problem Child, Ben Healy (John Ritter) encounters a bear at a campsite, and, believing it to be a friend in costume, acts playfully towards it. He soon realizes that the bear is an actual animal. During the ensuing panic, the bear retreats and the actual friend dressed as a bear arrives, who Ben hits over the head with a skillet.
A good 2/3 through Malibu's Most Wanted, the main character B-rad finds out that the "thugs" who kidnapped him were actually just actors hired by his father to try to scare him straight. When actual thugs break in and kidnap him, however, he doesn't realize the discrepancy.
Dramatic example: In Enders Game, it turns out that the orders the characters give in the Command School training simulator are being carried out by real battleships and fighters. The orders including the destruction of a planet and Xenocide.
In the film Three Amigos!, three movie stars who specialise in rescuing-Mexican-peasant-villages-from-marauding-bandits movies are invited to come and rescue a real Mexican peasant village from real marauding bandits; they assume the whole thing is staged until one of them finds out the hard way that their opponents are using real bullets.
In the movie Erik The Viking, the title character borrows Princess Aud's cloak of invisibility and bravely attacks Halfdan the Black's crew, not realizing that the cloak only makes its wearer invisible to Aud's father. (Not a Magic Feather because he wasn't misled about the powers of the cloak; he took it into battle before Aud could explain its limitations.)
Webcomic example: In Clan of the Cats, the main character is a shape-shifting witch, who can transform into a black panther. After an incident during a vacation with her ditzy half-sister, she runs off into the woods in a distressed state. Shortly after, a black panther is found hiding in a crawlspace under the house they're staying in, and The Ditz crawls in there to comfort her half-sister. After spending most of the night trying to cheer up her half-sister, she finally finds out that it's a REAL black panther, who has just escaped from a private zoo...
- Similarly, in one of the books by Laura Ingalls-Wilder, her mother goes out in the dark to see to the cows, and finds instead a bear. But, believing it to be her cow, she swats it on the rump. This leads to her ordering Laura to "go back inside--now" in an effective lesson on quick obedience that this troper's mother drilled into her.
Jack Putter (played by Martin Short) in the film Innerspace believes that Tuck Pendleton (who has been shrunk and is inside Putter's body -- long story) can increase the power of his muscles during a confrontation with an evil henchman. He can't, but that doesn't stop Jack kicking his ass.
In one episode of The Life And Times Of Juniper Lee, "The World According to LARP", June's brother Dennis is kidnapped by monsters (as opposed to the intended target, her other brother Ray Ray... the orders given were something to the tone of "the one who can see monsters"), but believes this to be his LARP (live-action role-play) group's new adventure. Since his "props" are real magical items that he stole from June's room (which also happen to make him able to see monsters like Ray Ray), he defeats his kidnappers and escapes the dungeon with no idea that any of it was real.
Literary example: In the Discworld novel Going Postal, Moist von Lipwig is totally unconcerned about facing down a pack of Angry Guard Dogs because he knows that all purebred Lipwigzers (the Disc's version of Rottweilers) were trained by his family. He successfully uses his granddad's commands to control them, but later learns they were Ankh-Morpork mongrels that looked like Lipwigzers.
Literary example: The titular character in Dan Simmons "Rise of Endymion" does some pretty bad ass acrobatics on a mountain cliff, all the while thinking that dropping would be such a hassle because somebody would have to retrieve him from the safety line. Just until he see some fearful friend rush to him with just that safety line he forgot to attach. Considering the circumstances, his lapse of mind is easily forgiven, though.
In an episode of The Thin Blue Line, Fowler confronts, and talks down a group of dangerous bank robbers, while under the impression they were students playing a prank.
The main character of Dokkoida agrees to put on the costume and fight supervillains because the costume contains a special component which boosts his fighting ability, all while playing dramatic music... except that the end of the first episode reveals that the suit manufacturer forgot to put that specific component in, leaving only the music. The other characters don't bother to mention this fact to him until the last episode.
Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz being called about an "escaped swan". "And who might you be? P. I. Staker? Right. 'Pisstaker'? Come on!" Cut away to Nicholas taking Mr. Staker's statement.
Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun 2 1/2 in a truly painful scene where he tries to "expose" an impostor, eventually going so far as to sand off the "fake" mole on his buttocks.
The titular character in Johnny English faces a similar situation when he discovered a plot involving the coronation of Big Bad Sauvage by a fake Archbishop of Canterbury. Unfortunately for English, the evil plan was scrapped, and he eventually tries to "expose" a man "disguised" as the Archbishop of Canterbury, leading him to attempt to pull off the "mask" and "reveal" a tattoo on the impostor's butt... on a coronation being broadcast to the entire world.
On Just Shoot Me, Maya's Murder Game goes awry when an actual death occurs and she can't convince the others that it isn't part of the game.
On Frasier the exact same thing happens.
In one episode of Stargate Atlantis, Sheppard and McKay are playing what they think is a simulation/strategy game similar to Civilization. Their differing play styles and natural rivarly means that it's no surprise that this strategy game will quickly turn into a wargame. However, everything changes when they realize that the Ancient device they are playing the game on is actually manipulating two actual civilizations remotely, and they scramble to try to avert a real war.
Killroy And Tina: When an enemy of Killroy's shows up while he's training Tina, Killroy lets Tina believe it's part of the test.
The Wotch: Anne mistakes an actual attack for a training exercise.
In American Dad, Francine mistakes a real vacation for a fake one, after finding out that most family vacations have been fake. Thinking she is hallucinating the whole thing, she kills people, sinks a boat, and wreaks havoc before finding out that this is all really happening.

The Man Who Knew Too Little

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