Beware the Silly Ones

He'll go back to being adorable once he's through eating you.

Mr. Croup: You find us funny, Monsieur le Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions–
Mr. Vandemar: (murmuring) I haven't got a circumlo...
Mr. Croup: –and our little silliness of manner and behavior. And perhaps we are funny. [...] But you must never imagine, that just because something is funny, Monsieur le Marquis, it is not dangerous.

— Neverwhere

So you've got a person who might fulfill the role of comedic relief. For the most part, both the fans and the characters in-story see them as just a great big doofus. Possibly, they spend more time acting ridiculous or laughing in the face of Serious Business than getting dangerous. Sure, they might rant up and down about how they're going to conquer the world in the name of Evil with a capital E or drive the villains to suicide through bad jokes, but in the end they seem to pose little threat to all present.

There's just one thing most people forget: acting silly does not mean you aren't a One-Man Army. The villain can be really dangerous despite being Laughably Evil; in fact, their silly nature may even add to their evil because of the unexpectedness of it. It could be a façade. It could be that they just do it for the lulz. Or maybe they are so badass that they find even the most dangerous scenario to be either just a joke or just a daily, normal thing. A well-hidden Berserk Button can be pressed. In any case, beware the silly ones.

Often achieved by way of Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass. Can be a variation of Underestimating Badassery. Compare Harmless Villain and Not-So-Harmless Villain. Also compare Fighting Clown. Contrast Miles Gloriosus. May overlap with Cloudcuckoolander, at least by appearances. Helps avoid having to Shoo Out the Clowns. If it's this same silliness that makes them dangerous, it may overlap with Success Through Insanity. May make you liable to Threat Backfire. See also Beware the Nice Ones if they're kind and caring and Beware the Quiet Ones if they're known for their near silence. In case the silly one is just acting silly and is actually downright serious, that's Obfuscating Stupidity. Offending the Fool might lead to this.

---

Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
  • One Piece
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Film
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Eastern Animation

• Being a comedy series, nearly every character in Scissor Seven is silly in some way, but also have some kind of super power up their sleeve, with Seven as its shining example. He's Book Dumb, impulsive, has Skewed Priorities, and appearance wise is described as ugly. But he can also control a sharp pair of scissors with his mind, and can get very creative with both it and his transformation eggs. And that's before mentionning he used to be one of the best killers in the world, and when he gets serious or in mortal danger, he's not afraid to unleash his Thousand Demon Daggers and the techniques hard-wired into his muscle memory.

Music

• Norman Sheffield was the first manager of the band Queen, and (allegedly) decided to take financial advantage of the newly-famous musicians, them being naive to the world of recording contracts and such. The leader of these goofy longhaired glam rockers later wrote "Death on Two Legs", which he said was "Dedicated to a motherfucker of a gentleman", and filled with so many acidic insults it was essentially a musical "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• MC Hammer is well known for his radio-friendly brand of Pop Rap and incredibly goofy pants. Less well-known are his (alleged) gang affiliations, which he used to order a hit on 3rd Bass after they apparently made a joke about his mother (they were actually making fun of his album).
• Eminem's Class Clown personality and Subverted Kids' Show aesthetic means his rapping style is extremely playful and gimmicky, combining unrhymeable words, disc-scratching sounds, goofy voices and accents, Throwing Out the Script, and cracking hyperoffensive jokes or excruciating puns. His first hit was a novelty song, and due to being promoted as a Teen Idol his early fanbase was a combination of swooning teenage girls and prepubescent children whose parents didn't know what was on the albums. Add to that his white skin, and it's easy to see why many of his peers did not take him seriously. However, his virtuosity is second to none. After he outrapped Jay-Z in "Renegade" so effortlessly that 'renegading' is now used in hip-hop slang to mean a guest rapper murdering the artist who made the album it's on, other rappers began to reckon with him being a genuine threat. By now, few rappers are willing to guest on his albums because of his reputation of eating them alive, and his Diss Tracks have a reputation for causing severe damage, sometimes ending careers. Several rappers have noted that it's Eminem's silliness that lets him be so brutal — his onetime Battle Rapping opponent Otherwize compared him to Howling Mad Murdoch from The A-Team, as a crazy comic relief figure whose effectiveness as a fighter comes from that.

Podcast

• The Tres Horny Boys of The Adventure Zone: Balance are incredibly silly and crack jokes wherever they go. Working together, however, they can be a force to be reckoned with.
  • Special mention should go to Taako, who's definitely the wackiest of the group. He's a Lovable Coward who's named after tacos, has an absurdly high-pitched and squeaky voice, keeps loose pudding in his pockets, and highly enjoys fucking with people. He's also a hyper-competent Transmutation Wizard and Guile Hero, who uses his powers in incredibly creative ways to get the upper hand on enemies, and has a way of manipulating people that easily gets him what he wants.
• In The Hidden Almanac, Pastor Drom is usually the ditzy comic relief. When Mord asks Drom how she would conquer a technologically advanced society, her answer involves two asteroids, nuclear winter, and food laced with highly addictive drugs. She also keeps a shotgun under her bed, a second one under the sink, and a pistol.
• Doug Eiffel from Wolf 359 speaks mostly in pop-culture references, is willing to lock himself in a freezing room for 16 hours over a tube of toothpaste and refuses any plan that contains violence in any way. He's also a recovering alcoholic and a convicted felon, outsmarted a scientific genius with nothing but a cigarette and a voice modifier, survived 180 days in a non-functioning spacecraft by repeatedly freezing himself to the point where the cell damage caused his hair and nails to fall out, and the thing that gets him to break his Actual Pacifist status and kick someone's ass is when Kepler threatens his deaf daughter.
• This happens with Morton Koopa in the Interstitial: Actual Play one-shot ''A Rush of Sugar to the Head. He's an absolute goof with a silly voice and consistently cheerful demeanour regardless of his situation. He murders Wreck-It Ralph with a hammer.
• Red Panda Adventures: The Red Panda's self-proclaimed Arch-Enemy the Mad Monkey doesn't seem impressive at first glance. His power is mental control over baboons, he paints his face to resemble a mandrill, and rides around in a zeppelin carried by a monkey-shaped parade balloon. However, the Mad Monkey is also one of the more competent supervillains the Red Panda faces, making a clean escape about as often as he's captured and being the rare opponent immune to the Red Panda's trademark hypnosis. In "Stop the Presses", he joins the Red Panda in an Enemy Mine to save a newspaper building that's been taken hostage. He spends the episode doing things like pondering if his and the Red Panda's combined mental powers making the hostage takers ignore them counts as invisibility only to reveal at the end that the whole time this was happening his baboon army was robbing the city blind on his behalf and the Red Panda is forced to let him get away as the enemies they've knocked out need to be restrained before they regain consciousness.

Pro Wrestling

• A case of Hoist by His Own Petard: Sometimes, Heels in ECW would throw out open challenges and the worst they would leave with was a bruised ego. After Justin Credible d. Chris Chetti at ECW Ultimate Jeopardy 97, November 8, 1997 (televised on the November 15th show), his manager Jason "The Sexiest Man on Earth" got on the mic and talked about how, out of 30 or so guys in the locker room, he was one of the few who could actually wrestle and that "it sucks" only working as a manager. So, since he was in his "street clothes," he issued an open challenge for a "street fight." Cue "Let Me Clear My Throat" by DJ Kool, and out comes...The Blue Meanie with Super Nova? Jason dismisses Meanie at first, but finally agrees. While it's not much of a match, and even less of a "street fight" (referee John Finnegan blocks Meanie from attacking when Jason ducks his head through the ropes), it qualifies as Jason basically treats Meanie as a joke the whole time...until Meanie comes up with a testicular claw into a schoolboy rollup for the pin!

Puppet Shows

• Miss Piggy, full stop. She's a veritable empress among drama queens, insufferably vain, yet charmingly foppish, and is constantly comedically pining for the love of her employer, Kermit The Frog, who, half the time, doesn't notice her affections, and the other half is living in mortal fear of her affections. But, don't forget that a large part of her charm is that she's also a take-charge Action Girl who can become a Person of Mass Destruction at the drop of a (designer) hat. Plus, don't press her buttons if you want to live, i.e., don't insult her or her abilities, don't ever threaten her loved ones, and most importantly, don't make pork jokes in her presence. Well, you can if you want to, but, as The Muppet Movie demonstrated, she'll then open a six-pack of extra-strength whoopass on your minions, and violently install you in your own Mind Rape device with extreme prejudice.

Tabletop Games

• In general, if a tabletop role-playing game has a major combat component, a lot of Player Characters will end up like this. With your average tabletop gamer's penchant for jokes and wacky antics, combined with the potential for badassery many TTRPGs offer, you often get a ragtag team of wacky, mildly psychotic goofballs taking on the world and winning.
• In Nomine:
  • The Gamemaster's guide notes that, while Saminga, the demon Prince of Death, might be a complete idiot who talks like a saturday morning cartoon villian, he's also an extremely powerful Omnicidal Maniac. However much he cackles and monologues, he's got the highest death toll of anything else in the setting, and he's constantly aiming to get it higher.
  • Kobal, the Demon Prince of Dark Humour, come across as a harmless comedian interested in nothing but the next punchline, but he's just as as evil as the other Princes — he's just somewhat better at hiding it.
• Princess: The Hopeful: Princesses of Spades have an ideal based on outside the box thinking and spreading humor, which has resulted in them gaining a reputation as lazy and immature pranksters. The crossover section of the game's wiki, however, mentions that some of them managed to con some of the True Fae into leaving the physical world forever.
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • Clan Malkavian is one and all incurably insane in some form or another. Some insanities may be "harmless," but the nutjobs are still vampires with all the inhuman strength and resilience that entails. If the guy babbling in the corner thinks you're interrupting the conversation with the voices in his head, they might convince him to tear your arms out and beat you to death with the wet ends. Oh, and one of their clan skills, the one that scares the hell out of other clans, is to "share" their madness with you if they feel like doing so, which makes the aforementioned death look preferable.
  • Clan Toreador are stereotyped as being snobby, high-culture posers who obsess over art and fashion. However, several vampires have found to their great loss that clan Toreador's focus on social interaction makes them excellent investigators and interrogators, to the point that a surprising number of Sheriffs are Toreador. On top of that, the clan's innate abilities involve supernatural speed and perception, meaning that any Toreador can become a highly functional gunslinger, should the need arise. Then there's the Toreador whose chosen art is swordplay or marksmanship... let's just say that everyone minds their pleases and thank yous around those vampires.
• Warhammer: The Skaven's Laughably Evil presentation and often pathetic misuse of their vast resource base can distract one from the fact that they are, if even mildly unified, by far the most powerful race in the setting, with technology in excess of everyone else's and enough troops to outnumber all of them combined. The two greatest demonstrations of this are probably the Goblin Wars that destroyed the old dwarf empire (they were both primary belligerents and the main backers of the goblins - without Skaven support the latter's efforts quickly crumbled), the Skaven Wars (in which the Skaven killed, depending on the source, 50% to 90% of the Empire's population while also inflicting large damage on the Dwarfs; the same Empire that broke twelve successive Everchosen over its knee while taking little real damage) and Warhammer: The End Times, where they almost single-handedly took out Nagash, the Lizardmen Empire, Karaz Ankor, Tilea, Estalia, Araby, the goblins, and the Border Princes, while also severely mauling the Empire and Bretonnia. Notably, their large-scale participation (along with Order's infighting) is the main thing that separates the End Times from the alternate-continuity Storm of Chaos, where Archaon got smacked back to the Wastes with his tail between his legs.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has its share:
  • Wind-Ups are a bunch of cards that look like Cute Machines, but once had a strategy called a "Wind-Up Lock" so lethal that several of the key cards were Limited or Banned completely.
  • Gadgets are cards with monsters that look like Funny Robots, and yet, they were once part of the obscenely-powerful "Crumbling Tower" strategy that required them to be Limited and Elemental Hero Stratos Banned.
  • The Madolche are monsters that look like the residents of some cloyingly sweet Sugar Bowl, but more support, including Hootcake and Puddingcess' Xyz form quickly made them a force to be reckoned with.
  • At one point, there was an extremely popular deck combining some of the most powerful pendulum monsters in the game. The deck was nicknamed Pepe, and some of the key cards include a plushie, a clown, a couple of guys in silly hats, and a cartoon monkey with a gigantic grin.
  • Most Toon Monsters are cartoony versions of already-existing cards, and pretty much all of them look significantly more goofy. They can also be summoned more rapidly than their original counterparts, and have the nasty ability to attack an opponent directly, ignoring any Monster defending it except another Toon Monster. The catch is that they usually need either a Toon World or a Toon Kingdom card to exist — and if it gets destroyed, they perish with it.

Toys

• The Hong Kong-based toyline Acid Rain World is set in a post-apocalypse Earth where pollution and nuclear war has rendered much of it inhabitable. But even places like this there's room for silliness. Meet the Luggan faction, these wanderers of Europe look like sports mascots with their big, thick furry costumes and silly masks. The Luggans are also known for making delicious offal dishes. But they'e not easy pickings for marauders as these tribes often carry heavy machine guns and powerful rocket launchers to deter bandits.

Visual Novels

• There are quite a few comic-relief characters in the Ace Attorney series, several of which have committed crimes.
  • Luke Atmey takes the cake. It's rather difficult to take this particular blowhard seriously, until you learn he was the mastermind behind several thefts thought impossible. In fact, while Atmey is a Prideful Attention Whore, he also qualifies as an Insufferable Genius and even a Magnificent Bastard, getting you to have him accused of theft just so he could use that as an alibi for a murder that happened at the same time — a murder he actually had committed!
  • Dual Destinies manages to one-up Atmey with Detective Bobby Fulbright. When you first meet him, he comes off as an incompetent buffoon, with his over-the-top shouting about justice, but he ends up being quite competent when it comes to handling the enraged Prosecutor Blackquill and actually manages to come up with some crucial evidence at just the right moment to save your client in Case 4. Which directly causes Case 5. This wasn't accidental. The real Bobby Fulbright died one year prior to when the game takes place. The "Bobby Fulbright" you know throughout the game is in fact the nameless "phantom" directly responsible for several murders, who wanted to frame Athena for his crime. He's a Master of Disguise who took on the identity of the dead Detective Fulbright in order to manipulate evidence, as well as to use Fulbright's over-the-top personality to conceal his own near-complete lack of normal human emotions.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations 2: The Big Bad, a Manipulative Bastard par excellence who orchestrated every murder in the game, using every type of gambit on the index in order to get the revenge he had desired since childhood? He works as an animal trainer at the circus. Not only that, but you meet him in an earlier case as a murder suspect that you prove innocent. Even Edgeworth was fooled.
• Akiko in Akatsuki no Goei is incredibly silly and tends to flirt with Kaito despite being his mother's age even if she doesn't look it. However, people who know her well are actually scared of her. For good reason, given that she blackmails Satake for trying to hide Kaito's past from him and even Genzou will not act against her. She even calls him Genzou-kun like he was still a student and gets away with it.
• Doki Doki Literature Club! has Monika, who at first seems like your standard High School Girl from a typical Harem; adorable, peppy, and overall quirky, especially when it came to literature. However, after progressing through the game and having to deal with your best friend's suicide, horrible glitches and visuals, and the deteriorating mental health of one of your possible love interests, you then uncover the source behind these horrors: Monika, who has been Self-aware since the beginning and is a flat out Reality Warper who's fully willing to tamper with the game's code, mess with the girls' personalities, and even delete the remaining girls herself from the game's code in order to make sure she has you to herself. Her actions alone shift the game into Psychological Horror.
• Hatoful Boyfriend is a game in which the silliest characters often turn out to be the most dangerous. Your maths teacher is constantly falling asleep and is rather airheaded even aside from that, but he's using a false identity to fulfill a quest for vengeance and is fully willing to kill for his goals. That weird manga club kid who acts like he's a YA hero all the time actually produces hallucinogenic pheromones which he's not immune to but which he can use to draw others in and thwart them in the strangest way imaginable. The developmentally delayed track team captain spends the majority of his route talking about pudding and freaking out over the strangest things, only for it to turn out that he is a Physical God who in his route ascends to the heavens and remakes reality in his image. Generally speaking, nobirdie in Littledove Hachiman City should be underestimated for even a second, because they're all very capable of some very strange things, and when more than one of these characters cross paths it tends to turn the game into a horror game or make it awesome.
• Haruka from My Harem Heaven is Yandere Hell is peppy and energetic and she can get carried away with herself sometimes. Unfortunately, she's clingy and possessive of Yuuya and is also one of the Yanderes available.
• Slay the Princess: The Voice of the Smitten is among the most comedic of the voices, being head-over-heels in love with the Princess and seeing himself as her Knight in Shining Armor, much to the annoyance of everyone else. There are times where he shows that his Personality Power is quite strong. He is the voice that is the most capable of taking away control from both the player and the Narrator, and if you kill The Damsel, he forces the Hero to kill themselves to enforce a restart and to spite everyone.

Web Animation

• Epithet Erased:
  • Giovanni is a Harmless Villain and a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander who throws soup projectiles, overacts constantly, mopes when his minions are defeated and comes up with bad arguments as to how Poke the Poodle displays are actually masterworks of villainy. However, he's also managed to construct a broad offensive and defensive toolkit using the ability to summon soup, and his skill with a baseball bat and thus far inexplicable Critical Hit ability allow him to punch far above his weight. He's the one who actually takes down Mera, the villain of the Museum Arc, when Molly uses her Epithet to allow him to launch a surprise attack.
  • Rick Shades in Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic is very loud, very strange, and totally unfamiliar with surface etiquette, to the point where he does things like eating business cards, attempting to attack a jack o'lantern monster while turned into a small lizard on the theory that Phoenica called him a "cheater cheater pumpkineater" previously, loudly asking anyone who so much as looks in his general direction to be his friend and otherwise saying and doing things that make him look insane. It then turns out that his lack of social skills are something of a Necessary Drawback, because his ability to copy not even the powers of his friends, but the things he thinks his friends can do, allows him phenomenal power by combining effects and would push him into Story-Breaker Power territory if he could use it without difficulty. During the final battle with the dragon in Prison of Plastic, Rick does a tremendous amount of damage by combining Giovanni's temporary gargoyle abilities with the black lightning that links him to his friends to turn the lines into obsidian and use them as Razor Floss. This is after he creates a speed potion by mistaking Trixie's random, ineffectual concoctions for a legitimate superpower.
• Hazbin Hotel: Alastor looks, talks, and acts like your typical 1930s radio host, cracks random jokes whenever he can (as dark as they are), and is more than willing to show off his theatrical talents the moment an opportunity arises. He's also murdered numerous people in life and death, overthrown demonic overlords that have ruled for centuries, and spieled about how the denizens of Hell simply being in Hell proves that they're Beyond Redemption. All with an honest-to-God smile on his face.
• Helluva Boss:
  • Blitzo can charitably be described as an absolute goofball. But then there are moments like the one at the end of the first episode where he warns Moxxie that, if Moxxie ever pulls a stunt like the one that caused said episode's plot ever again, then he will fuck both Moxxie and Moxxie's wife. The tone of his voice gets across that this is not an idle threat and Blitzo won't care if the fucking is consensual or not — that he then immedietely snaps back to his usual upbeat and goofy behaviour does not make this moment any less creepy. The fact that Blitzo is the founder and leader of the Immediate Murder Professionals group is probably your first clue that he is not to be trifled with.
    • Later on, the crew meet an imp named Striker, who is better than most everyone around him and knows it. Blitzo not only proves to be his match during a series of events called the "Pain Games", he later gets into a fist fight with him and thoroughly trounces him.
  • Stolas may act very goofy, very pompous, and very lustful at times, but these quirks make it easy to forget that he's a prince of Hell that can create portals to wherever he desires, breathe in the vacuum of space, turn you to stone with just a glare, possess humans, reanimate corpses and force the corpses to carry out a summoning ritual to make him manifest in the human world. In fact, if it weren't for his various quirks, one would be forgiven for mistaking him for his namesake in the Ars Goetia. Vivziepop even mentioned in a livestream that, despite the differences in how their powers work, he's more powerful than Alastor!
  • The entirety of the Immediate Murder Professionals are cornered by a quasi-government agency, D.H.O.R.K.S. Seventy-odd The Men in Black type agents armed for bear with various Edo-period weaponry vs Blitzo, Millie, Loona, and Moxxie. They don't stand a chance. I.M.P. proceeds to clean house, taking them all out without suffering a single casualty among themselves.
• Hunter: The Parenting:
  • Big D is a maniacal Large Ham who's constantly hopped up on multiple drugs. He's also a terrifyingly experiences and efficient Hunter of Monsters.
  • The Mighty Kevin looks like a Crazy Homeless Person larping as a wizard, but he's the most dangerous of the Tunnel vamps due to his low generation and ability to use Domination on multiple targets..
• If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device has a few examples:
  • "Little Kitten". He's the series' Butt-Monkey, constantly insulted by everyone and Comically Missing the Point half of the time. He's also the Captain-General of the Custodes and capable of calling down copious amounts of whoopass: He's shown good enough aim and reflexes to shoot a flipped coin out of the air to make sure it landed the way he wanted it to, easily survives any kind of psychic abuse by the Emperor without any injuries to show for it, and in terms of tactical acumen has outsmarted both the Emperor and Tzeentch himself, even if it was in a children's card game.
  • The Custodes themselves. As Fyodor finds out the hard way, though their ways might be silly and more than slightly homoerotic, they're still very much the elite among elites of the Imperium's fighting forces.
  • Cegorach. He looks like a deranged clown and speaks in Joker font, but he is a Physical God and quick to educate the ignorant on Why Not To Annoy Deities 101. He has utterly terrified the above Custodes just by cracking bad jokes about strippers at them, leaving them traumatized even when he was going to let them pass anyways, and effortlessly evicted an entire Chaos Warband from his library after toying with them for a few minutes.
  • Magnus. He might spend most of his time used as a punchline for the Emperor... but it's the Emperor who's taunting the incredibly powerful psyker. Karamazov and the assembled Inquisition army learn this to their detriment when Magnus nonchalantly sends them into the Warp with little more than a gesture.
  • Kaldor Draigo joins these ranks as well. Even after having gone friggin' insane due to warp exposure, to the point he's become a sort of power-armored, bearded screwball, he's every bit as OP before you can blink.
• Monkey Wrench: Shrike is highly irritable, greedy, whiny, and constantly trying to find shortcuts for his work. But as the big battle between him and the other bounty hunters shows, he's an incredibly resourceful and effective combatant when the chips are down, being an expert sharpshooter and one slippery bastard to pin down.
• Murder Drones presents us with Serial Designation N, one of the Disassembly Drones and the deuteragonist of the series. He's enthusiastic, cheerful, and goofy...oh, and he's also just as capable of killing as any other of his kind when his friendly personality isn't holding him back.
• In Red vs. Blue, the entire Blood Gulch Crew. They're complete morons who spend more time squabbling amongst themselves than they do fighting the enemy... but they didn't kill all their opponents by chance. A partial list:
  • Sarge and Donut are able to capture and kill (respectively) Agent Texas, The Ace of the Freelancers.
  • Tucker finds a laser sword that makes him The Chosen One of an alien prophecy, and he quickly learns how to use it. It also gives him Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, which allows him to trick and defeat Agent Wyoming.
  • Caboose completely shreds the Battle Creek Reds and Blues when he gets angry.
  • The Reds manage to completely humiliate both Washington and the Meta working together.
  • By the end of the Recollection saga, they take on the Meta and manage to actually kill him, which none of Project Freelancer's elite agents have done.
  • In the Chorus Trilogy, they're seen as incredible heroes by the Chorusian armies, but still get absolutely steamrollered by Felix (who himself is goofy enough to qualify for this trope). Felix himself doesn't take them all too seriously once he gets to know them, until they trick him into an Engineered Public Confession about how he and Locus had been Playing Both Sides in order to kill off everyone on Chorus, followed up by rallying both armies, arming them with alien weaponry, and handing him a Humiliation Conga.
  • They curbstomp the other Simulation Troopers on their way to fight the Blues and Reds.
• Half-Life: Zero Viscosity: We get the "beware" before the "silly", but the first episode introduces Po Ta Ter the Pit Drone as a Pintsized Powerhouse that can kill two Metrocops in the blink of an eye (not to mention players of Half-Life: Opposing Force would remember them as vicious little things that could murder you in seconds)... and after that, he spends his off-time wearing a party hat and rambling like an overexcited child about how the Gene Worm is going to eat everything. Shock Trooper pretty much treats him like a kid (and he's a silly one himself).

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater:
  • Black Mage is The Chew Toy and spends most of his time stabbing Fighter and failing to get into White Mage's pants. A few times, however, he's acquired enough power that he decides he doesn't need his companions. On these occasions, he shows in no uncertain terms that he's not joking about being an Omnicidal Maniac, and he has come very close to wiping out reality. On one occasion, he finally succeeded in murdering the rest of the Light Warriors only for Sarda to resurrect them just to screw with Black Mage. In fact, he's a Chew Toy precisely because he is so dangerous; it's in reality's best interests to keep him both abused and alive, because the abuse keeps him distracted from any actual goals and the last time he died he took over Hell and nearly tore reality to shreds.
  • Fighter himself is too stupid for it to be adequately explained by words. His explanation for why he had never seen an Invisible Sky Castle before was that, he figured, they're quite rare (the fact that he isn't technically wrong made Black Mage go crosseyed). He's also the most generally amicable member of the Light Warriors, again to the point of stupidity. But when confronted by his Inner Demon, Sloth, that told him he needed to stop being lazy and work out his brain as well as his sword play, he effortlessly cut it to ribbons and moved on. His brain told him that was faster. He, for reasons probably not even known by Fighter himself, genuinely considers Black Mage a friend, and when others were considering doing something about Black Mage for the good of existence in general, he dropped hints that such actions would end very poorly if taken while he was around. In a fashion that makes one wonder how stupid he actually is. And when Black Mage finally took his cartoonish supervillainy so far even Fighter squared up to stop him, Fighter's ability to block literally anything led to the fight coming to a standstill until Black Mage distracted him. On the odd occasion Fighter's singular brain cell fires, he's arguably the most dangerous of the four Light Warriors.
• Khrima from Adventurers! spends most of the story as comic relief, since he's laughably bad at conceiving with evil plans and his minions are (for the most part) about as threatening as a wet sock. It's hard to take him seriously as an Evil Overlord, especially when compared to Eternion later on. Despite all this, he still manages to be a very tough Final Boss with no less than four One-Winged Angel forms.
• Silver from The Angel with Black Wings seems like she's goofing off and just pulling harmless pranks with people but she can get very strict when it comes to the angels rules and also one of the powerful angels in the series.
• There are a lot of downright clownish characters in Awful Hospital. Almost all of them have it within themselves to bring you to a gruesome end. Given that the titular hospital's located in the Noisy Tenant universe, which you can see in the Web Original folder, it's only natural.
• Cucumber Quest: YA BOY NOISEMASTER, the second of the Disaster Masters to show up. While smarter than the first he's a colorful hammy DJ who's Jive Turkey demeanor hides a cunning mind. His "hype man" personality is later revealed to be an act used to annoy his boss, and underneath that he resents the Nightmare Knight and tries to defy his role in the story by blowing up an entire city.
• Marmalade was introduced as a harmless mook in Dark Legacy Comics but when he became self-aware, he became a monster.
• Lou the fat Italian-by-blood Plumber from Dead Winter maybe a silly, chatty and friendly to a fault handyman. But he shows at times why he's managed to survived for so long in the Zombie Apocalypse and is more than willing to stand up for and with his friends.
• El Goonish Shive: Pandora can be fairly silly, particularly in flashbacks; she is once shown offering a small boy secret magical knowledge in exchange for him carrying a chicken on his head, because she thought it would be funny. She is also absolutely terrifying. Oh, and also the single most powerful, knowledgable, and mentally unstable immortal on the planet. The clearest demonstration of her raw power is highly spoilerific, but it occurs during Sister 3, and is one of the very few events in the series that is genuinely of global significance.
• Lord Kyran from Emergency Exit is usually depicted as both silly and harmless then you get moments like this and this.
• Girl Genius:
  • The Jaegermonsters are variously-hued, apparently dim (except for Dimo, who is often the Only Sane Man of the trio) Funetik Aksent speaking comic relief...until it's time to fight, and then readers are reminded that they are brightly-colored Mad Science-engineered Super Soldiers who do not just have pointy teeth and sharp nails for decoration.
  • Hell, just Jaegers in general. They all have that accent, all of them like their hats big and shiny, and all of them would joyfully run into a huge, bloody battlefield like a kid would into an amusement park, before tearing up entire squadrons barehanded. Even their generals, who are several centuries old, have no qualms joking around in a skirmish, to the point four of them decided to have a little body-count competition, with one of them spending most of the battle getting the rules straightened out, during an invasion on their hometown. And they stomped the everloving hell out of the invaders, with the general that wasted most of the battle winning the competition by way of blowing up the airship carrying the entire force.
• Coyote in Gunnerkrigg Court has incredible power at his command. Most of the time, he just uses it to have fun without causing (too much) trouble. On occasion, however, he uses it for very cruel acts.
• Homestuck:
  • Gamzee goes from a goofy, stoner Love Freak while drugged out on sopor slime to a frighteningly effective Slasher-esque killer when sober.
  • The Courtyard Droll counts too. Despite working for the evil Dersites, he's a Cloudcuckoolander whose version of torture involves swapping hats with someone — and a terrifyingly effective assassin with a bodycount that includes both Jade and Jake's dreamself. For comparison, Hegemonic Brute, The Big Guy of the agents, managed to accumulate zero kills before his death in both universes.
  • John, Jade and Nepeta also count. With the exception of Gamzee, they are the silliest of the heroes. Nepeta is able to kill large wild animals with her bare hands, John, upon becoming a wind god, creates a massive tornado which he uses to drill to the centre of a planet to retrieve a massive bomb, In Cascade, he creates lava tornadoes and defeats the largest enemy seen in the game with a single hit, and sometime later becomes the first person to land a hit on Bec Noir, dealing about 1/10th of his health in damage off of one hit. When Jade reaches God Tier, she becomes fused with her 'dog' Becquerel, making her probably the strongest member of the group.
  • Caliborn is an absurdly petty, hateful, misogynistic and childish dork with a propensity for sexual fantasies about humans. He also orders the assassination of his own sister at a young age and through the laws of causality is fated to become the immortal, universe-destroying Lord English.
• I'm the Grim Reaper: Chase. He may seem like a nerdy dork (and likely is one), but a good amount of that is Obfuscating Stupidity. He is far more smarter than he looks, has a manipulative streak, and even nearly beats a man to death after he shot Scarlet and Chase thought she died.
• It's Walky!:
  • Head Alien generally comes off as a cartoon villain, constantly dreaming up plans doomed to be easily foiled by the introduction of the heroes, who never passes up the opportunity to show his love for dramatic tension, even when doing so hinders or even cripples his plans. He always managing to further some goal every time he is effortlessly crushed, and all it takes is a moment of talking before he's got you trapped with a Breaking Speech, eating out of his hand doing exactly what he wants.
  • The title character himself counts, considering he spends much of the series as a Manchild. Even if it's partly an act.
• Kill Six Billion Demons has a few.
  • Gog-Agog has adopted a jester aesthetic, has a severe case of Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!, suffers from Funny Schizophrenia, never seems to take anything seriously, and is given little to no respect by the other Demiurges. She also just so happens to be a cosmic hive mind that's billions (maybe even *trillions*) strong, expands by eating and assimilating people into herself, and all it takes for her to hijack someone is a single grub. She is also the oldest of the Seven by far and a lot Smarter Than You Look; she appears to have gone insane in the first place because having her bodies act like individuals instead of as one being makes things a lot more interesting for her. On the few occasions where she *can* pull herself together enough to be coherent, she crosses right over into Nightmare Fuel. Even Jagganoth has a healthy respect for Gog-Agog when she's being serious, and according to Word of God an all-the-time serious Gog-Agog would be even more powerful than he.
  • Cio is introduced as a foul-mouthed, fanfiction-obsessed scribe in the service of a lesser demon. We later learn that she was once an incredibly powerful ebon devil who managed to steal part of a demiurge's Key of Kings from right under his nose. It's something she'd rather forget.
• Sparky from The Last Mechanical Monster. A 99-year-old supervillain who's completely out of touch with modern society after serving a sixty-four year prison sentence. Pretty amusing comedy there, right up until he restores one of his flying, flame throwing robots...
• The Order of the Stick:
  • Xykon spends much of his time as borderline comic relief: much of his villainy appears to be of the card carrying variety, and many of his interactions with his supposed subordinate Redcloak imply that the latter is the far more intelligent of the two. This all obscures the fact that Xykon scares the pants off of Redcloak; even though he's the high priest of an evil god, Redcloak's goal is equality for goblins, orcs, and other races that are normally just cannon fodder, while Xykon's goal is more or less "Take Over the World and inflict as much pain and mayhem as undeadly possible".
  • Even with the heroes out to stop him, he's a credible threat to the entire world. They kind of beat him the first time kind of by accident, but since then they've been lucky to get away with their lives when tackling him (and not always so lucky), and that's with him conquering a city and beating its forces at the same time. (With Redcloak's help.)
  • The time when he took on the entire roomful of Sapphire Guard makes this even more apparent. He starts out by tossing a super bouncy ball at them, which was inscribed with a Symbol of Insanity that made them kill each other. Xykon got a whole lot less funny all of a sudden. He even commented that he could've just kept to the air and blast all of them. The only reason he had the Sapphire Guard kill each other was because he thought it would be "going the extra mile".
  • Xykon's Batman Gambit in The Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness: Xykon tempted Redcloak into killing his brother Right-Eye to protect him. The Breaking Speech that follows speaks for itself.
    Xykon: So therefore, you're just going to continue following me and doing whatever I order you to do. Because as long as you're loyal to me, I'll let you pretend this never happened. We'll just go about our daily business, and you can hide from the horrifying truth of what you've become — namely, a murderer who just killed his baby brother in cold blood. And hey, we can pretend that you don't really have any options about any of the despicable actions I ask you to take here on out rather than acknowledging that, like Right-Eye, you do in fact have a choice. But unlike Right-Eye there, you're too chickenshit to ever make it. You'll obey me forever now, because I give you an excuse for your inexcusable behavior. Now, are you going to stand there and tell me I'm wrong? Didn't think so.
  • Also, Elan, as Kubota found out the hard way. Bards can already be surprisingly dangerous, and ever since Elan took a prestige class that gives him special abilities and bonuses based on swashbuckler novel-esque narrative conventions he's become a very competent battler. He will crack a terrible pun with every thrust of his rapier, and the pun will make it strike true and hard.
  • In the Linear Guild, Thog the half-orc. Because he's a funny, ditzy, childlike blithe spirit, people (readers especially) tend to forget that he's a killing machine prone to Unstoppable Rages when he gets bored (like, say, if he runs out of ice cream).
  Tarquin: It's weird. No matter how many people he kills, people still think he's lovable.
  • The Monster in the Dark is this in two directions simultaneously. Firstly, it was introduced as a terrible monstrosity only to turn out to be somewhat dim-witted and quite possibly harmless. Secondly, after spending a long time behaving in a very child-like and friendly manner and doing nothing else, we got a few clues that the MitD might in fact be an exceptionally powerful (and thus potentially dangerous) creature. Its true nature has yet to be revealed, but from what we know, his very lightest whack will send you flying through the nearest wall, and a stomp of his creates minor earthquakes, among other mysterious feats. Most recently he joined Xykon, Redcloak, and a new character in clearing out a cave full of monsters. All the others came out visibly damaged — including Xykon! The Monster in the Darkness comes out still carrying his bucket of red paint. As in, he presumably did it all one handed.
• Brian Souballo, from Our Little Adventure. He is hard to take seriously as the Big Bad as he's friendly and a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander. His cheerful demeanor was only ruined once by an old magic teacher he was trying to recruit for the empire. Read about it.
• In Out-of-Placers, this is the Salia family's hat. The nobles of House Ivenmoth are known for being eccentric and whimsical. Those who take that for a sign of weakness tend to come to sticky ends. Viracroix, the current head of House Ivenmoth, is a prime example of this, perhaps best exemplified when dealing with a subordinate with more appreciation for profit than the well-being of their citizens. His method of debate involves wearing a "special outfit" (a tarp) to avoid getting splattered by Mister Omarhan's messy execution.
• Tiffany of Precocious spends most of her time painting on walls, sleeping in an adorable manner, and digging in her backyard when some random whimsy doesn't strike her. But she also has a non-aggression pact with the local mob.
• Jareth from Roommates. Let's see he seems like a keet, blond, prankster with questionable level of self-preservation instinct who only wants to have fun. Did we mention that he can warp time and space? Manipulate memories and dreams and more? And he also has a Superpowered Evil Side not above trying to kill his own friends (almost succeeded only a Chekhov's Skill saved them first time, the second he actually killed his best friend (who took the shot for the Love Interest / Morality Chain), he got better but still).
• Sluggy Freelance: Torg is ina wacky mood! Then there's the beware part.
• Ben from Weak Hero is a goofball, and most of the time doesn't seem to have a worry in the world. Even as the rest of the school labours under the influence of the Union, Ben can be seen having a great time messing around with his friends. That isn't to say that he doesn't care — as soon as the Union try to mess with the ones he cares about, he more than demonstrates how he earned the nickname Big Ben.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic:
  • Lewie the Lich is initially kind of laughable. Then he decides to try playing Sauron, and after a couple of misfires (beholders can't wear rings...), he enslaves a mountain of monsters.
  • This trope could actually be considered the hat of many of the comic's protagonists, both monstrous and otherwise. Just for another example, underestimating one of the bigger Cloudcuckoolanders on the mountain, the Chimera, can result in a Total Party Kill.
  • Unless the Beholder King is the biggest Cloudcuckoolander, in which case it should be noted he can take on a goddess.

Web Original

• 3rd Life SMP: Nobody thought GoodTimesWithScar would make it past the halfway mark due to his accident-prone nature and him being a bit of a ditz. He ends up not only being the penultimate person to die (or the last person to die when not counting Grian's Last Survivor Suicide), but he personally kills both of Dogwarts' leaders (Rendog and InTheLittleWood) in the final battle.
• BreadBoys: Uncle has many eccentric mannerisms including eating dice and staring at pictures of cats and dogs, yet is more than capable of wiping the floor with Father and Son when provoked.
• Dodo is arguably the silliest cat in Cream Heroes having a very long list of strange and outright dopey antics in the year he's been on camera. Yet he's tough enough to give Lala a run for her money, and once managed to make TT, of all cats back down with a couple of punches and a Death Glare because she punched his mother.
• The Noisy Tenant series of Creepypasta is an entire mythology of this. It's an entire building complex of whimsical, decrepit recreations/mockeries of modern places, like Silent Hill designed by the same people who did Pee-wee's Playhouse. And it's filled with funny and whimsical inhabitants like Dr. Phage, a smiling man-sized bactereophage with a ridiculous bow-tie who performs horrible and unnecessary surgeries on people who end up in his office. Or Harmburger, a tottering anthropomorphic hamburger who tries to slaughter people in his freezer of alien meats or, with the help of similarly whimsical/horrible cronies resembling an anthropomorphised barbecue grill and meat grinder, brainwashes all of humanity with his tainted meat, which also infects them with horrible parasitoid brain-flies that are then sold to some other dimension, in the burgrr.com ARG/creepypasta.
• Critical Role
  • Scanlan Shorthalt has all the appearances and mannerisms of a Quirky Bard, and Sam Riegel has stated in interviews that he explicitly tried to make the dumbest character possible. However, Scanlan has had several badass moments throughout the series (thanks to 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Bards being incredibly powerful and versatile spellcasters,) including taking on an entire manor filled with armed guards by himself in Episode 31, severing Percy's connection to Orthax in Episode 35, paralyzing a Goliath warchief that was tossing Grog around like a ragdoll only a minute ago in Episode 52, slaying a Pit Fiend and stopping the Efreeti guards of the City of Brass from arresting Vox Machina in Episode 76, and holding his own in a Wizard Duel against freaking Vecna in Episode 114.
  • From the second campaign, Jester is a bubbly, upbeat young woman with an extremely crude and juvenile sense of humor, and despite being the group's Cleric, is so bad at healing people that the rest of the party often jokes she forgets she has healing spells at all. She also managed to trick an extremely cunning and dangerous hag into releasing a curse on Nott in exchange for half a cupcake and the pleasure of her company, using nothing but a joke item she obtained several dozen episodes prior and a well-placed Modify Memory spell. Jester also got the last hit in on the Final Boss of the campaign with a Guiding Bolt that punched a massive hole through his chest.
• There have been many occasions on DEATH BATTLE! that deliberately pitted a funny and light-hearted character against a Darker and Edgier counterpart, and on nearly every one of those occasions, the silly character has won. The crowners have to be Rainbow Dash giving a Curb-Stomp Battle to Starscream, and Booster Gold outsmarting Cable into killing himself with his own technology.
• The Evil League of Evil in Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog features such silly gimmicks as Dead Bowie and Fake Thomas Jefferson, but they're all unrepentant murderers at the very least.
  • It says something that the League's leader is a horse that seems to be universally recognized as the embodiment of all evil.
• Even if he's a complete fool who doesn't know what he's doing, even if he is Affably Evil, Nappa from Dragon Ball Z Abridged is still virtually unstoppable to the most powerful human.
  • In the #CellGames video series, Kenshiro proves to be this. After defeating or forcing to retreat Yusuke Urameshi, Yami Yugi, Ryu and Ken and Sonic and Knuckles, Kenshiro walks us and... wants to know if Cell has "bug meat". All the while Cell mocks him, calling him a hobo and, once he performs the Hokuto Hyakuretsu Ken, mocks the attack as "tickling". Until Kenshiro tells him "You Are Already Dead" and causes Cell to explode. Unlike the mooks Kenshiro normally fights, Cell regenerates from this, but it doesn't do him any good — he explodes again less than a minute later, and Kenshiro didn't even have to touch him.
  • Cell himself counts in the main series. The best way to describe him is being a Laughably Evil Knight of Cerebus where both components are played in equal measure. He can genuinely be a source of Nightmare Fuel, but he's always making jokes and acting like a snarky, immature Genki Guy. While he can be entertaining and make you laugh, his scenes still mirror canon and are treated with the same gravity. In fact, the fact that Cell treats everything so flippantly only solidifies how cruel he is. The best display of this is this exchange while he is fighting Trunks:
    Perfect Cell: I'm impressed! Behind all that angst and ridiculous hair, there's a real fighter!
    Trunks: And behind that insufferable smarm there's a dead man!
    Perfect Cell: Trunks... you couldn't fathom the amount of dead men behind me.
  • On the subject of DBZA, Goku himself is even more childish and naive than his canon counterpart and sometimes forgets he even has a son. The two things that primarily tend to be on his mind are food and fights, which is very much Played for Laughs. That said, he's still easily the strongest fighter on the hero's side for much of the series, taking a far shorter time to defeat Nappa compared to canon and outright getting bored with 100% Frieza, and he's far from stupid when it comes to strategizing, with the crown jewel being his (albeit slightly flawed) Batman Gambit against Cell.
• DSBT InsaniT: Taylor is a weird goofball that runs an electronics store. He's kind of annoying and unhelpful, but he'll shift into hyper-competent berserker mode if you insult his store.
• Baelin from Epic NPC Man is an annoying fisherman NPC who always repeats the same phrase, but when two adventurers make the mistake of attacking him, he beats them both.
• Kevin Temmer Tunes introduces the Moon as a googly-eyed Muppet-style puppet with a dopey voice, who berates the Sun during "I Miss My Friends", ending it by saying he wants to do his "Moon Rap", which the Sun protests to. Then in a later video we actually see the Moon Rap, where it turns out he's an Omnicidal Maniac capable of growing larger than the Solar System, boasting Eye Beams capable of destroying multiple planets at once, and wanting nothing less than the annihilation of all matter in the universe.
  Moon: Weeeeell, how do you like my song so far?
  Sun: I'm afraid of you!
  Moon: You like it that much?
• Eian, Link and Zelda's coachman from The Light of Courage. Most of his role is just to make jokes about the current situation, but when he finds himself face-to-face with Ganon, he somehow manages to steal the Triforce of Power.
• Oxventure: In their Dungeons & Dragons campaign, the Oxventurers' Guild as a whole are fairly goofy and seemingly not much of a threat. Dob, the half-orc bard, is a friendly guy who keeps throwing money into lakes for no particularly coherent reason; Merilwen, while often the Only Sane Man, is also largely indifferent to anything outside of animals; Corazon the pirate is egotistical, irresponsible and greedy; Egbert the Careless, while well-intentioned, is also largely devoid of forward planning skills and prone to acting on pure chaotic energy; and Prudence, the warlock, is a wackily overplayed Card-Carrying Villain. This group of five amiable wackos, over the course of wandering around the kingdom of Geth, have also shredded basically every significant threat the DM has thrown at them, from powerful fiends to horrific aberrations to, on one memorable occasion, throwing an entire tower of enemies into chaos with skilful manipulations and the careful use of magic. Presumably their eccentricities give them a particular knack for coming up with unexpected solutions.
• Elliott in Rplegacy's Dark Clouds Gathering fantasy crossover RPG is a good-natured goofball most of the time. God help you if you mess with any kids when he's around to see you doing it, though.
• SBI Rust: Piss Wizard and Kanye West are both characters defined by a single silly joke that are also just as capable as being deadly.
• SCP Foundation takes this trope to the extreme:
  • Me, SCP-426, or "I am a toaster". At first, you sound silly speaking of me, a toaster, at first person. But those who came too close to me didn't laugh as much: an old man nearly starved to death because he ingested toast bread and waited for it to pop out of his mouth for one week, thinking he really was a toaster. Even worse, he was the the sole survivor: his daughter died trying to plug herself on an electric socket and his wife died of internal bleeding after ingesting 10 kilograms of toast bread. On a funnier note, those idiots from the foundation tried to expose me to SCP-682 in a desperate attempt to kill him: while he survived (of course), I made him a toast-shooting monster.
  • SCP-846, or Robo-Dude™ is a funny-looking toy robot with no less than 350 weapons that go from a childish water gun to an atomic grenade.
• Travis of SMPLive frequently has his skills in PVP and other aspects of the game underestimated based on his Cloudcuckoolander behavior.
• At times, Dr. Insano of The Spoony Experiment and Atop the Fourth Wall seems like an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain, but there have been times where he's been a somewhat legit menace, such as the times he took control of the giant robot Neutro, discovered the Anti-Comic Equation (with Warrior #1, a comic so irredeemably awful it distorted the space-time continuum), and hired Squall to assassinate Spoony. Despite all this, Spoony still let him assist him with the review of the awful film, The Clones Of Bruce Lee.
  • One could argue that wasn't exactly a reward for good behavior.
  • Also, according to some interpretations of the Continuity Snarl, that one was a clone.
• Generator (Jade Sinclair) of the Whateley Universe. She's cute, she's wacky, she invents crazy stuff, she looks like she's only ten... She stopped a supervillain with the powers of the werewolf by nailing him to a tree with railroad spikes. She destroyed a Syndicate hardsite by killing their minions and making it look like she had turned them into zombies. She once broke a close friend out of a magical trap... by firing an anti-tank weapon at it. She's weaponized her hair barrettes, makeup compact, and at least one of her plushy toys. Her shoulder angels nearly caused open warfare across the Whateley Academy campus.

---