Basic Trope: A criminal makes various idiotic mistakes that get them caught or fail to get them any loot.
- Straight: Alice uses a note to tell the bank teller that she's robbing the bank. She leaves it behind after escaping with the cash and it turns out she wrote it on the back of a piece of mail with her address on it.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice uses a note to tell the person behind the counter that she's robbing the bank. That person tells her she's actually entered the pet store next door to the bank. Alice then tries to rob the pet store by pulling out a gun and aiming it at the cashier. The cashier notices that her gun is a water pistol that's not even disguised as a real gun. The cashier also tells her that their daily profits have already been taken to the bank. Alice runs out of the pet store telling them they'll never catch her, giving out her name in the process. When she gets outside, she tries to hijack a bus, telling the driver to take her to the airport. The driver tells her they're already going there. A later analysis of the holdup note reveals it was written on the back of a piece of mail with her address on it.
- Harmless Villain.
- Downplayed: Alice's holdup note has her full name on the back. It takes the police a little while to find her as there are several other people with her name in the city.
- Justified: Crime is not a line of work requiring a high degree of intelligence.
- Inverted:
- Alice robs a bank and plots out every possible complication to get the maximum take. By the time the bank realizes they've been robbed, a week has passed.
- Alice is a police detective who's investigating a bank robbery. The case has several obvious clues to the robber's identity, but Alice misses all of them, writing them off as circumstantial.
- Classy Cat-Burglar
- Phantom Thief
- Alice is pretty average as criminals go. The cops assigned to the case are a perfect capsule of incompetence and uselessness.
- Subverted:
- Alice makes a number of idiotic mistakes in her attempt to rob a bank, but it turns out they were made intentionally to further her real goal: getting sent to jail so she can kill Bob.
- While not to the point of coddling, Alice's mistakes are merely to let the Rookie Cops get the training they need.
- Double Subverted: When she gets to jail, she finds out that Bob has been released early for good behavior, something she forgot to consider.
- Parodied: When Alice is detailing her plan to her accomplices, the goal or methods used are completely impossible within the physics of the world.
- Zig-Zagged: Every time Alice does something stupid in her effort to rob the bank, she follows up with a brilliant idea. Other times, what seems like a mistake turns out be what she had planned all along. But sometimes, even that has a fatal flaw.
- Averted:
- Alice performs a robbery without making any stupid mistakes.
- Alice is not a criminal.
- Enforced: The last few criminals featured on the show have been rather disturbing in terms of methods or behavior. The producers ask for a more light-hearted episode to give the viewers a mental break.
- Lampshaded: "She wrote her holdup note on the back of a piece of personal mail? Could she really be that stupid?"
- Invoked: When Alice is wondering how to make some more money, Charlie talks her into committing a bank robbery despite knowing she's not smart enough to pull it off.
- Exploited: Bob realizes that Alice, who's known to be not that smart, is planning a bank robbery, so he uses the chaos to perform a robbery of his own while the others are distracted.
- Defied: When Alice reveals she's planning to rob a bank, Charlie talks her out of it by asking her how she plans to do several aspects. She realizes that she doesn't know what to do in that situation.
- Implied: A reporter broadcasting the news of Alice's misdeed begins to laugh live on air and asks if they are being pranked when they read the info on the crime off their cell phone/teleprompter.
- Discussed: "I hear the robber left her holdup note behind. Hopefully, she was stupid enough to write it on something with her address on the other side."
- Conversed: "Crime doesn't really require intelligence to perform. So, it's entirely possible for someone to make an idiotic mistake while committing a crime. You know, like the guy who tried to rob a gun store thinking it was a bank."
- Deconstructed: Alice's stupidity leads to her life being completely ruined, like all criminals who are arrested do, but she carries the additional weight of being the object of ridicule of fellow criminals.
- Reconstructed: The stupidity of Alice's crime helps the defense attorney plea for a lesser sentence by painting her as an incredibly desperate victim of circumstances.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's attempt at being a crook is Epic Fail incarnate, something so bizarre that Alice is able to get away with it (maybe) because nobody can believe she would do it.
- Played for Drama: Alice's attempt at being a crook is so stupid that it's impossible to believe she could get away with it... but she does, going Off on a Technicality courtesy of equally stupid police, or jurors, or judges. The police protagonists can only be disturbed at the fact that this is more evidence of the world being full of idiots.
- Played for Horror: The inciting incident of The Rampage of Monster-Kill is Alice's bumbling attempt at stealing the home of Mad Scientist Old Mr. Johnson breaking the monster free. Alice is literally Lethally Stupid.
Back to Stupid Crooks. Oh shoot! That address is written on the back of my holdup note!
