Basic Trope: A character mixes up two or more historical figures.
- Straight:History teacher: Okay, class, for these next few weeks we will be studying Vladimir Lenin.Bobby: That guy from The Beatles?History teacher: No, you're thinking of John Lennon, Bobby. Two different people.
- Exaggerated:Bobby: Vladimir Lenin? Isn't he that the guy who flew the kite across the river on Christmas to warn everybody that the British were coming to steal our tea from the harbour?History teacher: No ... how are you passing this class?
- Bobby goes one step further by mixing up historical events with similar labels. His project on "The Civil War" describes Oliver Cromwell defeating Francisco Franco at Gettysburg. His description of "the Revolution" involves Vladimir Lenin teaming up with Pancho Villa and George Washington to take the Alamo from Robespierre.
- Bobby manages to get Lenin mixed up with Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great, Sergei Eisenstein, Boris Yeltsin, Josef Stalin, Grigori Rasputin, and Andrei Tarkovsky — based solely on them being Russian or major figures in Russian history.
- Similarly, Bobby keeps mixing up John Lennon with various contemporary British rock stars. At different times he mistakenly conflates Lennon with Freddie Mercury, Elton John, David Bowie, and Kate Bush.
- Downplayed:
- Bobby gets Lenin mixed up with Leon Trotsky, a contemporary and co-national with close enough goals.
- Bobby correctly identifies Lenin's role in the Russian Revolution, but mistakenly claims it happened during World War II instead of World War I.
- Bobby correctly identifies Lenin as a key figure in the Russian revolution and its aftermath, but confuses his part in those events with Sergei Eisenstein.
- Bobby confuses John Lennon with Davy Jones, due to the Monkees being a parody of the Beatles.
- Justified:
- Bobby confused Lenin and Lennon because their last names are similar.
- Bobby is The Ditz or just plain Book Dumb.
- Bobby walks in with zero context of what anyone was talking about a moment ago. He thought he heard someone say "Lennon" and "Walrus" and naturally assumed they were talking about John Lennon.
- Bobby is a huge Marx Brothers fan, so when he heard someone say the name "Marx", his mind went straight to the comedy team rather than the unrelated philosopher, Karl Marx.
- Inverted: Bobby's history book is wildly inaccurate, and he's the only person in his class who realizes this.
- Subverted: A history teacher asks the class if they can name some famous Communists. Billy names John Lennon. The teacher tries to lead into her next topic by saying that he must have confused Lennon with Lenin, but Bobby then corrects her and describes who John Lennon actually was and why he thinks that John Lennon was a Communist.
- Double Subverted: His explanation as to who John Lennon was and why he's a Communist sounds pretty accurate at first. Then things start to take a turn and it begins sounding more like a description of Josef Stalin than John Lennon.
- Parodied: In Bobby's universe, Lenin was in The Beatles.
- Zig-Zagged: Bobby knows the difference between Vladimir Lenin and John Lennon, but he confuses the former with his philosophical inspiration Karl Marx and the latter with his bandmate Paul McCartney.
- Averted:
- Bobby knows the difference between Vladimir Lenin and John Lennon.
- Bobby doesn't know either of them.
- Enforced: The writers are tweaking the nose of a network exec who mixed them up.
- Lampshaded:Bobby: Lenin? Didn't he play with The Beatles?Alice: Really?
- Invoked:
- Bobby knows the difference between Lenin and Lennon; he just wants to yank Alice's chain.
- James tells Bobby that Vladimir Lenin was in The Beatles. So he will fail his history test as revenge.
- Exploited: A local communist organization learns that Bobby confused Lenin with Lennon, so they lure him in with promises of "great music."
- Defied: Bobby made a careful study of political and music history just so he wouldn't confuse Lenin and Lennon.
- Discussed:
- Conversed: "Did they really just have Bobby confuse Lenin and Lennon?"
- Deconstructed: Bobby fails a history test because he got Lenin conflated with Lennon.
- Reconstructed: That's the only question he gets wrong.
- Played for Laughs:
- Vladimir Lenin and John Lennon both come Back from the Dead on the same day in the same town and everyone who sees them mistakes them for the other, to their mutual confusion.
- Bobby walks in on a conversation that seems to be about John Lennon that mentions the Walrus and makes explicit references to music. Turns out it's actually a very bizarre story about this one time Vladimir Lenin formed a band with his pet walrus.
Back to Historical Character Confusion. Wait, no, it's over here. No, hang on, we were right the first time.
