Crazy Is Cool

"Good. She's plenty crazy."

— Satoru Gojo, Jujutsu Kaisen

So, there's this character that seems to have a few screws loose. They always seem to do things so off-the-wall and insane that you know they're crazy...

... And they're so cool.

Yep, this is for characters whose craziness makes them seem cool. In this context, "crazy" doesn't mean clinically insane. Rather, it means that they don't act like how a normal person would act, which could be due to actual insanity, intense quirkiness, or simply being bizarre. If a character is well-liked because of mild quirkiness, then they're Adorkable. Do not confuse with Success Through Insanity, which is for characters whose madness is essential to the task at hand.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Kamina from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is a complete misfit who has no idea how to fit in to society at all, especially the grim one he finds himself born into. And holy hell, is he the coolest and most inspirational guy on the show. And the show then goes on to examine this in a way, since his "crazy coolness" is, essentially, what gets him killed, and much of lead character Simon's arc for the rest of the show is more or less him considering to what degree he should really try to follow in Kamina's footsteps, or if that's even a good idea.
• Beelzebub: Oga. He convinced Alaindelon to teleport a polar bear into his room just so he can fight it.
• Doctor Slump: It's Arale's hyperactive craziness that makes her so cool and popular as well as one of funniest Memetic Badass anime characters. That little girl can literally punch the world in half when she's just playing around!
• Vassalord: 86. A drugged up Cloud Cuckoolander who triples as a Scarily Competent Tracker, a One-Man Army and a former member of an Italy-based Chinese Mafia. Bless you, Chrono-sensei!
• Zombie Land Saga: Kotaro. He raises the dead, acts as if it isn't anything special, and plans to save Saga by creating an idol group out of the undead. Totally crazy? Definitely. But both Mamoru Miyano and Ricco Fajardo's incredibly hammy performances are just too much fun to watch no matter the context, and Kotaro being a Renaissance Man on top of that means he is always surprising the audience in one way or another.
• Battle Angel Alita: Desty Nova is the kind of guy who saws the top of his head off to prove a point, gives random people bodies that account for weapons of mass destruction, makes a backup of his brain (and head) on his belly, or becomes inmortal in a way that turns him into a literal plague, and with at least 3 of himself with separate agendas and working against each other; all for the lulz KARMATRON DYNAMICS, and meanwhile he eats flan, laughs madly, and wears spectacles that makes him look like a maniac.
• Kogarashi, the titular Maid Guy of Kamen no Maid Guy, is Rule of Coolin spades. He has 37 senses, multiple superpowers, a body of steel, used to teach math at MIT, is a complete sociopath, but wears a maid dress and frilly mask.
• Shizuo Heiwajima from Durarara!!. For one, he can punch people out of their clothes, his favorite weapons tend to be vending machines and street signs, one of which he uses to slice a car's roof off.
• The Principal easily qualifies despite his being in the charmingly cutesy Hidamari Sketch. The Principal appears completely out of place compared to the other characters, and his actions make him appear more so. For example as The Landlady for the Hidamari apartments strolls by the school gates from across the street she abruptly stops to see The Principal dash towards the gate perfoming three full front flips as he leaps over, perfectly landing next to her and proceeds to thank her for taking care of the students. Another is when Yoshinoya is spraying him with a water gun several times over before The Landlady tosses him his own to which he reacts by dodging Yoshinoya's shots at rapid speed before firing directly at her forehead. In these scenes The Principal's animation style changes drastically from Cutesy to Extremely Serious.
• Pretty much everyone in The Legend of Koizumi; it's basically a Crazy Is Cool world. This begins to set in with chapter one, but is firmly established by the point where Junichiro Koizumi sets himself on fire scraping a mahjong tile made of depleted uranium with his fingernail hard enough to scratch the top half millimeter off in a room with too much oxygen.
• Hiruma Youichi of Eyeshield 21. Has taken over his school from the shadows, throws a long pass as a quarterback with his broken arm, runs across America for 40 days without showing any fatigue until the end, Has blackmail material for half the people in the world, and throws together a high-school American football team within a year that manages to beat an all-star high school team that has never lost before, among other examples.
• Future Diary:
  • Yuno, who is just plain crazy to boot. When a Mad Bomber takes over the school and forces the hostages to attack Yuno and her boyfriend/stalkee? Yuno decides that this makes the hostages her enemies and starts setting the bombs off. She also firmly believes Murder Is the Best Solution and has a tendency to appear out of nowhere with a knife, ax or similar object.
  • Yomotsu Hirasaka AKA Twelfth is a whole handful of crazy awesome. A total whackjob, who dresses like a deranged Sentai character, and steals a bomb, just so he can make a flashy entrance. Did we mention he does all this, while being totally blind?
• Team Rocket in Pokémon: The Series. Some of their plans are just INSANE. And more often than not, involve gigantic mechs. Not to mention the fact that they seem to just enjoy dressing up so much they work weird disguises into every plan. And when all else fails, they just dig a hole and wait for the protagonists to fall into it.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Taken to extremes with Kimblee: to sum, a Sociopathic Soldier Blood Knight Troll crossed with The Social Darwinist and The Philosopher. Even before his death, he's an unsettlingly realistic example of high-functioning sociopathy. He also proves that, in Fullmetal Alchemist, both badassery and Crazy Awesomeness need not be influenced by silly things such as death. After being devoured by Pride, he surfaces momentarily, maintaining his identity specifically because he Loves the Sound of Screaming, and pulls off a Villainous Rescue, delivering a crushing "Reason You Suck" Speech to Pride before disappearing into the mass of tortured souls. In the flashbacks, he inspired the heroes to redeem themselves and Amestris, and unlike most Nice Job Fixing It, Villain cases, he probably would have been genuinely proud of their success. Yes, his sense of morality is just that screwed up.
  • Ling as well. He actually let himself become the host of the new Greed to gain a Philosopher's Stone, knowing that he'd have to fight the spirit of a homunculus for control of his own body, for the sake of saving his country (and become the emperor of said country).
• Drosselmeyer in Princess Tutu. His character design is surreal, and he's first introduced to the audience and the main character as an ominous, booming voice, then materializing upside-down in front of her bit-by-bit in a Cheshire Cat fashion. As the series goes on, it becomes QUITE clear that he's absolutely off his nut, and quite enjoying the tragedy playing out in the story. And then, as the series nears its end, it's revealed that while dead, he exists in a netherworld filled with gears and mocking puppets he controls, has been pulling the strings of everyone in the hopes of making the story have a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending, and when his hands were cut off before his death, wrote the story controlling the town with his own blood using the stumps of his arms. And he finds the whole thing hilarious.
• Baccano!: Graham Specter enjoys "breaking" things (including people), uses a wrench to catch a flying bullet, and idolizes Ladd Russo. Oh, and one of the most popular characters, possibly due to the insane rambling philosophy he has.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. The entire cast (sans Beauty) could fit under this heading, but the main trio of Bobobo, Don Patch, and Jelly Jiggler get top honors for being practitioners of an actual fighting style whose main purpose is to utterly bewilder the enemy into submission. It really says something when you have two characters merge into a Magical Girl and beat the enemy by singing, and you accept it because it's still not as crazy as the time Bobobo pulled Yami Yugi out of his afro.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple:
  • Siegfried. As his martial arts form is essentially unique, he could not find a master to teach him more. So he decided to imitate a spinning stone that Tibetan monks use... for forty days straight. Spinning. Also sings constantly, will stop fighting to write music and can use his loud voice as an attack while singing. Despite this, Kenichi's masters describe him as a genius with abilities that are already nearly at the master level.
  • Master Fuurinji also has his moments, like entering a tournament intended for teenagers as "Mysterious Teenager Garyu X" by putting a mask on and changing nothing else about his appearance. He also took on a fully armed combat force by throwing their own soldiers back at them.
  • Some of the stuff Shigure does also counts. Like defeating a squad of assassins with a ribbon, or disarming all the members of a gang of delinquents in one hit... with a spoon. And doing Clothing Damage in the process by accidentally cutting their clothes with said spoon. She then request that they attack her again. The result is the same except this time she's wielding a plastic sword controller.
• Soul Eater:
  • Crona. Their weapon of choice is an enormous shrieking black puppet made of congealed blood that erupts out of her back and can turn into a sword. Also their eyes are always, always moving. This isn't actually by choice, more as a result of having Medusa for a mother, who experimented on them.
  • There's also the Death Scythe Tezca Tlipoca, a man in a suit wearing a giant fluffy bear mask who turns into a mirror wielded by a monkey wearing clothes and a baseball-cap. This guy creates copies of himself and merges with them in order to turn into an extremely weird-looking but devastatingly powerful attack form. Oh, and he fakes his own death and operates in disguise by...replacing the bear mask with a mouse mask, changing absolutely nothing else about his behavior or appearance.
• Juzo Kabuto from Shin Mazinger is one of the most awesome Mad Scientists around, performing many ridiculous stunts and generally being Crazy-Prepared in the most bizarre ways. The highlight of this was when he snapped his grandson (a Humongous Mecha pilot) out of a Heroic BSoD by surfing a rocket punch through the air and jumping off it into the cockpit.
• From My Hero Academia, Midoriya earned the title of The Absolute Madman for his ability to withstand inhuman amounts of pain to come up with insane plans and moves in order to defeat his opponent. In-universe, there have been times where people have questioned his sanity based on his crazy plans that always end up working, especially considering the fact that he is willing to tear himself apart to save people. A special mention goes to using Eri's uncontrollable rewind quirk to use One For All at 100% and hurt himself in the same speed she is rewinding him, therefore suffering no injuries while neither being erased from existence.
• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Inosuke wears a googly-eyed boars head as a mask. His default response to any situation is violence. He believes so earnestly in his own Insane Troll Logic that if he wasn't a Large Ham he could be The Comically Serious. And he'd probably be completely useless except that these traits have combined to make him a terrifyingly effective fighter.
• Fairy Tail: Quite a few characters:
  • Fukuro is a cross between an owl and a man, sees himself as a superhero, has Power Copying abilities and, most of all, uses two missiles as a jetpack.
  • Also Gajeel, here's a short list of problems and his solutions:
    • Want to be accepted by friends? Hijack the stage and sing a song of friendship in a silly hat.
    • Encountered one of the most badass furries ever? Tell him you are going to make him your cat.
    • A freaking Humongous Mecha? Eat the damn thing!
  • Natsu as well:
    • Faced with a Anti-Magic Sphere of Power? Use your magic outside to propel yourself and punch the guy in face.
    • How to stop a powerful moon beam from entering a pyramid? Break the pillars on one side and tilt it.
    • Dealing with an enemy who can read your mind? STOP THINKING.
    • In a bonus chapter, Natsu uproots an entire tree of flowers and promptly sends it to Lucy because she wanted to see it.
    • Bonus points in that he is completely oblivious to the fact it would be taken as a romantic gesture to most females. Good chances are, Natsu would instantly rise to No.1 on the "most desired bachelor mage" list on Sorcerer Weekly if word ever got out about the incident.
    • Before finding out the guy shared a backstory and friendship with Igneel, he intended to EAT Atlas Flame, a humongous fire dragon, and use that power up to kick Future!Rogue's ass. From what it looked like, one could believe his plan would have worked.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Accelerator exists for this trope. His face and his laugh when maiming his victims, and the way he killed a squad of soldiers, including shotgunning a woman in the face will forever be in the minds of any fan of this series. They don't show this in the anime, but when he shotguns her in the face, a piece of her jaw gets blown off and lands on his face. You know what he does with it? "...Oh hoh hoh, so your face turned to something good for a fuckin' pacifier."
  • A more humorous example from Index is the #7 Level 5, Gunha Sogiita. Nicknamed the "Attack Crash", the guy thinks he is and act like a textbook [[ShōnenDemographic Shounen]] hero. His powers include incredible durability, Super-Strength, shockwave creation, and other assorted things... but nobody knows how they work. Even he doesn't know how they work! He doesn't care either. All he ever does is shout about "GUTS!" and run around beating up troublemakers.
  • Not wanting to be outdone, Mikoto pulls out some seriously awesome shit in the finale of Railgun's second anime season. The first season finale already demonstrated that she can use objects much bigger than coins as ammo for her signature attack; here, Kongo launches Mikoto and Kuroko into low Earth orbit on-board a Humongous Mecha, the two eject into vacuum in their school uniform and Mikoto promptly fires her ride at an incoming missile before Kuroko teleports them both back to Earth. Repeat, Mikoto went into space for the sole reason of using a Humongous Mecha as railgun ammo.
• Issei Hyodou in High School D×D is this seeing as almost everything he does post-transforming into a devil has so much crazy stuff he can think on the fly that it actually works. Shred clothing? No problem. Hear breasts talk? Sure he can do that. Summon a god from another dimension that other mythologies don't even know about? Even gods thought that was crazy.
• Jin the Taxi Driver from Canaan. Most people would probably get scared and freaked out when two people who were pursued by numerous bad guys shooting at them got inside your taxi. Jin? He thinks it's just a good opportunity to show off his crazy driving skills while singing along with a cheerful J-pop song. "CHINA STYLE, with HIGH TENSION", indeed.
• Hellsing: Alucard. The crazy part can't be argued; entire pages of the manga are his posturing and maniacal laughter. His typical fighting strategy is to invite his opponent to kill him, let them do it, and then come back to finish them off. He also enjoys impaling his opponents. Preferably with their own weapons.
• Code Geass:
  • Jeremiah counts, somewhat. Maybe not at the beginning, but the character slowly evolves from a forgettable and unlikeable foe to The Woobie to a deranged, ferocious mild version of this trope in the first season finale. Eventually he calms down and fully evolves into his own in R2 as a somewhat unhinged, but ridiculously competent pilot and fighter.
  • Some of Lelouch/Zero's plans count. The first major example is in Stage 4, where Lelouch first pops up as Zero. He shows up, in a convincing fake of Prince Clovis's car, burns the flag of Britannia to reveal himself, deliberately does the most reckless thing possible and even confesses to having killed Clovis on live TV! All to put himself in Geass range, claiming that he will spill "Orange" (which he made up off the top of his head, possibly because his target - the above Jeremiah - has orange eyes) to let Suzaku go and help him and his group escape.
• Bleach:
  • Kuukaku Shiba is a pyromaniac who loves fireworks and crazy buildings so much she's almost an outcast. People like her, but no-one wants live near a house so bizarre. Even Ichigo's group doesn't want to be seen entering it. However, her crazy home-turned-firework-launcher is precisely what's required to break through Seireitei's normally impenetrable shield by effectively turning the group into a human cannonball. The launcher's true purpose is to help the Royal Guard return to the Royal Realm whenever they leave it. Even the Praetorian Guard needs her insanely awesome talents.
  • To say Urahara has a unique way of looking at things is an understatement. His quirky view of the world helps him invent things other people might never think of. It also helps him play the role of Eccentric Mentor. He tells Ichigo his only chance of survival is to put on a silly bandana and boxing gloves. Ichigo refuses to submit to the humiliation as he argues with Urahara while dodging his very dangerous opponent. Eventually he takes Urahara's advice... and learns Urahara was joking, they're just an ordinary (and very silly) bandana and gloves after all. What Urahara was actually doing was distracting Ichigo so much that he couldn't focus on his opponent and was therefore forced to keep dodging her, teaching him without him realising it, how to move his new ghost body when he previously could barely even manage to breathe in that form.
• Great Teacher Onizuka is not a typical teacher, to say the least. A former biker gang leader, he's prone to Comedic Sociopathy and Tough Love, but will do anything to protect his students, up to and including Fast-Roping from a fucking blimp through a hotel room window, jumping off the roof of the school at least half a dozen times, and driving his motorcycle off an unfinished overpass, with one of his students on it too. His antics make him popular with his students (once he wins them over) and cause no end of headaches for the vice principal and most other teachers.
• Chainsaw Man has more than a few characters perform absolutely crazy feats that give them an edge against Devils. For example, Denji's fight against Doll Woman (who was empowered by the monstrously powerful Darkness Devil) sees him lighting himself on fire to negate her powers. It somehow works. According to Kishibe, being crazy is actually a necessity for Devil Hunters since Devils know how to exploit sane, rational individuals. As he puts it, the only effective way to fight a Devil is to have a few screws loose and no screwdriver.

Comic Books

• 30 Days of Night: Lex Nova, the deranged vampiric detective. He monologues out loud to himself without knowing it, and seems to truly believe that he's in some kind of insane detective novel. He still somehow manages to be effective, and really, one of the nicest vampires in the series.
• The Awesome Slapstick: Slapstick, the living cartoon. Defeats a rampaging vigilante at the mall by kissing him on the lips. Foils a five-year-old Mad Scientist with a spanking. Stops a rampaging irradiated nuclear bum (no, that's not a typo) with a cup of coffee. And tops it all off by dumping a bucket of water on Ghost Rider's flaming head.◊
• Batman:
  • The Joker, especially in "The Long Halloween" which involves the Joker attempting to steal Christmas. While reciting a certain Dr. Seuss book, no less.
  • The Creeper definitely fits the bill. Imagine a Chaotic Good (sometimes) guy with bad jokes, exchanging Joker Immunity for Nigh-Invulnerability, and the hots for Harley Quinn, and you get the man the Joker considers, with no irony whatsoever, "a LUNATIC!!!"
• The Boys: The Frenchman, who might not be legally insane, but certainly acts like he is. While he has his moments of lucidity, and he certainly displays competence in the more cerebral parts of The Boys' line of work, he also often goes into non-sequiturs, is friends with The Female, and his main contribution to the team is as muscle, AKA putting on his goggles and going apeshit, despite his otherwise genial and mild-mannered nature. While the origins of each other member of The Boys, past and present, have been told during the series, The Frenchman's past as he tells it is not even remotely believable, and the other characters clearly state at the end of his story that he might not be entirely there.
• Deadpool: Deadpool being crazy awesome was key in defeating the Taskmaster in hand-to-hand comba- *rghk!* Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody but me gets to talk about me! It's just too fun! Now I don't mean to brag, but beating Tasky's no small feat, considering that his powers allow him to copy and second-guess anyone's fighting style, including, but not limited to, Captain America, Daredevil, and any other fighter in the entire Marvel Universe. However, I am so crazy sexy, I don't need a recognizable fighting style. My brain having exploded from my sheer, goddamn handsomeness also makes me near-impossible to mind-read or mind-control, and let it be known that I was once (FYI, this "once" I'm talking about started when Joe Kelly adopted me, and it's still going) the only person who could save humanity by a combination of this and my willingness to kick Captain America inna nerts to do so.
• Dylan Dog: Groucho looks identical to Groucho Marx and makes puns with pretty much every phrase he says, often causing groans and rage in the listeners. Said puns have sometimes saved the day, with such things as keeping up the morale of people blinded by a mysterious illness, taming the gremlins that had taken control of the British nuclear arsenal, and bringing Bloch out of a coma (Bloch had been shot, and the doctors expected him not to pass the night. Then Groucho entered his room and started telling him puns until Bloch woke up screaming for someone to drag the punster out, exactly as Groucho was planning).
• Green Lantern: Larfleeze, the only member of the Orange Corps of Greed. He had an I'm Taking Her Home with Me! moment with Scar, a corrupted, demonic Guardian who serves Nekron because.... she was evil, so she was different than other Guardians, so she was worth more. And he really wanted his own Guardian. There's also the fact that his defining character trait, greed, leads to his power being more effective. Unlike the lights of the other Corps, the Orange light of greed is best when wielded by only one person.
• Madman: Mike Allred's Madman is, well, a madman. In the first few pages of his first appearance, he knocks a guy out with a lead-filled yo-yo before prying one of his eyes out and eating it. He was doing this to psych out another malcontent, you see. "Now... be quiet. I'm going to touch you." To be fair to Madman, he threw the eye up when the coast was clear. The point is that he's crazy enough to try anything to get what he wants. Although this is somewhat of a case of Early-Installment Weirdness. Allred didn't even like that scene right after he wrote it. For the rest of the series, Madman was much more childlike.
• Moon Knight: Moon Knight, especially when they play up the multiple personalities. He's considered insane by the other superheroes, regularly fights werewolves and ghosts, and is known to fly around in a moon-shaped helicopter. He's also a Badass Normal who once took on Count Nefaria in a one-on-one battle armed only with his fists, a set of wrist blades, and a fake Captain America shield. And he actually held his own.
• The New Guardians: Snowflame from New Guardians #2 is a supervillain whose powers come from snorting massive amounts of cocaine, worships cocaine, and is basically the religious leader of a cult that also worships cocaine.
• Revolutionaries: Sgt. Savage is a soldier from the 1940’s who was transported to the future and proceeded to go totally insane and fall in love with 90’s pop culture. Now he’s an ultra-upbeat Liefeld-style Badass Normal Cloudcuckoolander who speaks entirely in Totally Radical dialogue and spends his days fighting ninjas and skateboarders.
• Scud the Disposable Assassin: The comic series runs on Crazy Is Cool. The first issue has the titular Scud, a robot assassin bought out of a vending machine, fighting a monster with mousetraps for hands, a three-pronged plug for a head, and mouths on it's knees. And it only gets weirder from there, including a cult that worships manliness and unnecessary explosions, an immortal voodoo priest Benjamin Franklin controlling zombie dinosaurs, and a werewolf astronaut looking to gain power from standing on the moon.
• Transformers Ongoing:
  • Brainstorm is one of the Autobots' most prevalent weapons makers and also holds the record for creating the most unethical and deadly inventions ever, a fact which he is proud of. There's a fight about to happen? Well he'll be sure to give you some sort of morally dubious gun to do some damage. Such inventions include a gun designed like a children's toy that says catch-phrases when fired, a bomb that demoralizes enemies by thinking they're in a comic, and a devise that "allegedly" accidentally snuffed out a sun. Whirl admits that he could listen to Brainstorm for hours going on about whatever murder machine he's cooked up.
    • And because he wasn't mad enough, it eventually turns out he'd been pretending to be a mole for the Decepticons for centuries, if not more, just to scam them into giving him the parts he needed to build a time machine. And he gets away with it.
  • Whirl's status as the most unhinged Autobot has made his life, and a lot of other people's, worse in a variety of ways, but it has also led him to stunts like kicking Megatron in the bearings.
• Transmetropolitan's protagonist Spider Jerusalem.
  • After beating the snot out of a thinly-veiled grown-up Charlie Brown to get to a source of information, he throws another of her bodyguards out a barroom window... and onto a dog who is a dead ringer for Snoopy. (This being Transmetropolitan, it might even be an intelligent dog.) Whose corpse he claims as his dinner.
  • And that's just Spider winding up to his "A" game. This is the man who owns a Bowel Disruptor, ^note  The settings of wich are, in order of least to most potent... loose, watery, fiery, burning anal geyser, rectal volcano, prolapse, unspeakable gut horror, shat into unconsciousness, and fatal intestinal maelstrom. Yes, this means that he can make you crap yourself to death. has a phone grown into his forehead, started the series by blowing up his former local bar, overthrew the corrupt president of the United States, and once got away with writing an entire article consisting only of the word Fuck copy-pasted over and over. 8000 times.
• The Walking Dead: Negan is a whirlwind of insanity and awesomeness. His witty dialogue, filled with dark humor and (many) swear words, wacky behavior such as deciding whose skull to bash in with a baseball bat with a kid's nursery rhyme, to loving his signature weapon a little too much are just some examples of why he's one of the most beloved characters of the series.
• Welcome to Hoxford: The delusional serial killer Ray Delgado, whose first reaction to a werewolf snarling in his face is to bite off its tongue. Of course, he did believe himself to be Kronos, Lord of the Titans at the time. He later decides he's a werewolf too, challenges the ten foot tall alpha, and successfully chews out its throat.

Fan Works

• Child of the Storm: Harry Dresden, as per usual. Examples include killing a particularly tough demon by impulsively grabbing a high voltage power line and channelling the power through himself and taking on Gravemoss with a soulfire lightsabre (and later, with help, successfully purpose-building one of his own). Yes, It Makes Sense in Context. Somehow. And, of course, riding the polka-powered zombie T-rex into battle.
  • Harry can only hold a candle to the true master of this trope, Sorcerer Supreme Stephen Strange, whose MO basically revolves around this trope. For example, how does he react to a council of Physical Gods deciding that Harry is a threat and needs to go? To take the Tesseract (Thor gives it to him—he could've stolen it from Asgard's highest-security vaults, but that would've taken too long), bring them all to the Rock of Eternity, which is basically the ultimate prison, give them a Badass Boast, stick an uppity Zeus (a peer of Odin's for raw power) in a crystal prison, and tell them that they will either actively assist his plans, stay out of his way, or get stuck in the Rock of Eternity for as long as he pleases and still serve his plans as "gigantic fucking batteries." It works.
  • In the same book, Harry Thorson sourly notes that while Magneto's teaching philosophy is "let students figure out what's possible on their own," Strange's is "ignore reality and it will ignore you."
  • When Strange's apprentice Wanda Maximoff was a teenager, she was really into West Side Story, but couldn't go to a live performance due to her Power Incontinence at the time. Eventually, as a present, Strange arranged for their own private live performance. How? He called in some favours from the Sidhe, blackmailed some demons, and used Mindless Ones as the backup dancers. Note that Mindless Ones are Hulk-sized, rocklike beings with a single visor-like eye. The street took a little fixing afterwards, but apparently it was worth it.
  • Perhaps the finest example of this is in the sequel's side story, Unfinished Business, where he responds to the imminent Battle of New Orleans by turning the city's bedrock into a giant amp and blasting out first We Will Rock You, then the Shrek 2 version of Holding Out For A Hero. He tops this all off with coordinating the counter-measures to the global plus scale outburst of Wild Magic by the Arc Villain by taking it up a notch, using a newly manifest Swamp Thing to hijack her skyscraper sized spell magnifying amp and act as a living instrument, playing tunes specifically selected to a) ground out the magic, b) distract the Arc Villain, c) annoy the shit out of her.
• Due to being the adopted son of Simon and Nia as well as his uncles being Kamina and Kittan in HPDK, it would be expected of Harry Potter to be this. His known feats include: Renaming himself Iron Hands McAwesome. Convincing the Sorting Hat to travel into space. Getting into a wrestling match with a troll and winning. Swimming all the way from Europe to America for Christmas break and vice-versa when he needs to return. Literally sensing that Hagrid has acquired a dragon egg. And accidentally killing Quirrelmort with a peanut.
• Mukrezar is a quirky character. One of his plans to conquer an underworld city involved baking the world's largest cake. This was completely effective. His other plans, some involving suddenly-living-undead-food, are similarly off-the-wall.
• The Best Seven Years, where Calvin and Hobbes go to Hogwarts. Turning Percy's hair into spaghetti, flying across the ocean on an enchanted surfboard, and instructing the house-elves on how to make pizza a la Iron Chef are some of the least crazy things that occur when you give Calvin magic powers.
• The AU version of Garrus Vakarian in Renegade. He is described, in the authors own words, as "An unholy fusion of Jack Bauer and the Kool Aid Man." His favorite tactics include kneecaps, excessive force (including hijacking a Hover Tank to capture an unarmed, injured mercenary), and crashing cargo haulers through warehouses. Several, warehouses.
  "I've yet to encounter a potentially dangerous situation that can't be defused by smashing through a wall."
• In Negaverse Chronicles, Quackerjack is undeniably insane. He was even committed for a time. On the other hand, this is also the reason why he can make so many toy-like weapons that are effective enough for him to hold his own on a team of superpowered heroes. His insanity is also suspected to be the reason why he can see the Voice through the glamour.
• Xerosis runs on this— surviving the apocalypse and being the star of a Peggy Sue fic has warped Harry's mind and with Voldemort as his partner and Luna as his sidekick they come up with the perfect "muggle solution" to move all wizards to the moon and leave the Earth to the Puny Earthlings.
• The Gatekeeper from Plausible Deniability does his best to embody this trope. He blatatantly dresses as an Evil Sorcerer to impress, threatens the Elven king with McDonald's - as elfes are health nuts and junk food is very not healthy - casts a ward protection transforming the attacks against it into plushies and candy and dreams to avenge his dark past in Asgard by exposing the Asgardian youth to - gasp - boys band and Justin Bieber!

Film — Live-Action

• Two of the cinematic versions of Joker, the Large Ham played by Jack Nicholson in Batman, and the more sociopathic but still bizarre and Laughably Evil one by Heath Ledger from The Dark Knight.
• Brazil: Harry Tuttle. Robert De Niro is clearly having a blast playing a Bomb Throwing Anarchist.
• Forrest Gump: Lt. Dan. Never mind that he went to Vietnam fully expecting not to return alive, he gets caught in a violent storm and insults God, challenging Him to destroy him. With the completely maniacal laughter he lets out, you know this man is absolutely insane and you can only love him for it.
• Holtzmann from Ghostbusters (2016) is a nuclear engineer who can find seven uses for a cadaver on sight and nonchalantly noms on Pringles when faced with evidence of the afterlife.
  Jillian: You try saying no to these salty parabolas.
• Mad Max: Fury Road:
  • Though they serve as Mooks for Immortan Joe, the War Boys have a huge fan following because of their savage fighting skills, meme-worthy lingo, and the fact that they consider an epic death to be the highest honor. Summed up best by War Boy Nux as he drives his interceptor into a sandstorm and sees his mates' vehicles exploding in the air:
  Nux: Oh what a day! WHAT A LOVELY DAY!!!
  • Also among Immortan Joe's army is the Doof Warrior, whose function is to provide martial music and relay Joe's orders via musical cues from a massive rig manned by four drummers, housing a massive set of speakers, and playing on a guitar. A double-necked electric guitar. That spews flames!
• Maximum Overdrive: Bubba Hendershot, a Small-Town Tyrant and Good Old Boy who has a cache of weapons in the basement of his truck stop, up to and including a freaking rocket launcher.
• Network: Howard Beale, crazy old man and anti-establishment champion; they didn't call him "the mad prophet of the airwaves" for nothing.
  Jensen: Good morning, Mr. Beale. They tell me you're a madman.
• Tremors: Burt Gummer, paranoid survivalist, establishes his legend in the first film by employing an epic More Dakka attack on a graboid with his massive gun collection, and only gets more combative (and more beloved by fans) with every sequel.
• Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Almost all of the characters are overshadowed by Willy Wonka himself in the latter half of the film, due to his over-the-top inventions, sardonic sense of humor, and a legendary performance by the late Gene Wilder.
• Zombieland: Tallahassee. Most of the awesome things Tallahassee does, such as fight off a horde of zombies with just two pistols, his zombie kills in the store, among other moments of awesome he accomplishes coupled with the fact that his behavior suggests that he is crazy like a fox make him the definition of this trope.
• Staff Sergeant William James in The Hurt Locker. He keeps parts from bombs he's disarmed—but only from the ones that almost killed him. At one point, realizing how big the bomb he's trying to disarm is and that even with the disposal suit he would die if he screwed up, he takes it off (noting that "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die comfortable", and flipping off his superior officer when ordered to put it back on). With some of the stuff he pulled, if he weren't such a genius at the job, he...well, he'd be dead.
• Dr. Praetorius (Ernest Thessiger) from Bride of Frankenstein is a Camp Gay Mad Scientist who grows tiny people in jars, does not so much tinker in God's domain as wage open war against him, dreams of creating a race of monsters and interrupts his grave robbing to hold cozy picknics with Frankenstein's monster in the crypt. To put it another way, this is a Mad Scientist who scares Dr. Frankenstein.
• The titular character (played by Johnny Depp) in Don Juan DeMarco is subject to a persistent identity delusion... which brings happiness to him and everybody in his vicinity. So does his condition really need to be cured?
• From 13 Assassins we have flaming, exploding bulls and a warrior named Kiga. Kiga is a bandit who fights swordsmen with rocks. He even says fighting loads upon loads of samurai is boring and looks like he's drunk half the time! He gets impaled through the throat and his belly is cut open...at the end of the film, he's perfectly fine. His response? "Oh, its no better than being injured by a wild boar." Eastern literature proficiency bonus: Read Journey to the West. Rewatch Thirteen Assassins.
• Doc Brown in Back to the Future. The definite example of benevolent Mad Scientist. He builds all manner of gadgets, including a time machine. Built out of a DeLorean because he wanted to do it with style. To get it up to the eighty eight miles an hour to time travel is almost as impossible as time travel. The idea to make it possible came to him after he hit his head on a toilet seat. He gets the plutonium needed for it to work by ripping off Libyan terrorists with a suitcase full of pinball machine parts, claiming it's a bomb they asked him to build for them. On its test he has himself and Marty stand right in the car's path believing the car would go through time rather than run them over. In the past, he slides down an electric cable from the clock tower and electrocutes himself to get the time machine to work when the cable got disconnected just before it was due to be hit by a bolt of lightning. When he is accidentally sent to the Old West, he has Western Union deliver a letter to Marty at the exact time and place where the DeLorean malfunctioned, seventy years later. He built a giant Steampunk machine to make ice cubes and a sniper rifle out of a telescope. And at the end after swearing off time travel, he builds another time machine, built out of a flying locomotive, with his children Jules and Verne and his wife from a hundred years ago. That should do it.
• Eugene Tackleberry of the Police Academy series. His solution to everything is to shoot at it. Little wonder he's one of the few characters who's been in every film.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle: Neil Patrick Harris' drugged-out/sex-crazed version of himself was so memorable he had to return for the sequels Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Guardians of the Galaxy (2014):
    • Rocket Raccoon is a Trigger-Happy Heroic Comedic Sociopath who gets Drunk with Power at the idea of More Dakka, hoards bombs in a shoebox, is obsessed with stealing random trinkets from his enemies and even people he's currently working for just because he finds it funny and hangs out with a talking tree. No wonder he's already the Ensemble Dark Horse even before the movie opens.
    • But he never distracted a genocidal madman with virtually the power of a god, by challenging him to a dance-off. Only Star-Lord can manage that particular brand of crazy.
  • What does Dr. Hank Pym in Ant-Man do to escape a building that is going to be destroyed? Why, grow a shrunken down tank disguised as a keychain and drive it of course? He also pretty much solves any other problems he faces as well as doing his regular, everyday activities by just using ants.
• Fool, the 13-year old protagonist from The People Under the Stairs. How many adults do you know who will stop an attack dog by touching an electrified doorknob and the dog at the same time, or blow up a house, while they're in it, and survive?

Literature

• Raven from Snow Crash is so cool he drives around with a nuclear warhead in his motorcycle.
• The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil. As noted under Beware the Silly Ones, he's lively, dresses in colorful clothes, loves to sing and is a total Cloudcuckoolander who's older than most, if not all, of the other characters and is speculated to be able to resist Sauron at the height of his power for a while, at least. Oh, and the One Ring has absolutely no effect on him, other than giving him a slight bad feeling. He qualifies for this trope because it's speculated that at least part of the reason the Ring doesn't affect him is because he's too absent-minded to notice or worry about it.
• Dirk Gently. There aren't many people who, when they read about an accident being ruled an act of god, take the time and energy to correctly identify which god did it. (It was Thor.) There are fewer still who would then take their insurance agency to task over it, pointing out that an "act of god" in the constitutionally protestant UK must legally refer to the Christian god. Since his house was destroyed by Thor, Dirk insists that the insurance company has to pay out.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
  • Ford Prefect. Smuggled himself and two friends onto a very public spacecraft by pretending to be a very important scientist and that two boxes filled with videocassettes of movies were his equipment, defrauded a massive corporation whilst on the run from security and then escaping by throwing himself out a window twice, and tried to buy a spaceship off of "The King" (Elvis Presley) and then was given it for free. And all that's just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Zaphod. Beeblebrox. Became President of the Galaxy for shits and giggles — and that's the most mundane thing he's done. To get deeper into it, he invented a drink that's so strong that one sip is enough to warrant rehab, hijacked one of the most advanced spaceships ever made, found a long-lost, faded-into-myth planet, uncovered a massive government conspiracy, and (if you think And Another Thing... to be canon) made a chain of deals that unwittingly resulted in saving the human race.
• Discworld:
  • Bloody Stupid Johnson. His Organ in the UU, to wit: "One foot kicked the 'Afterburner' lever and the other spun the valve of the nitrous oxide cylinder." He built ornamental fountains that can be used as artillery pieces and managed to invent a simple mail sorting machine that ripped a hole in time. Doing so because he needed a way to change pi to 3. Because "three and a bit" is untidy.
  • Cohen the Barbarian. He tried. To blow up. The realm of the Gods. Almost succeeded. In fact, only failed, because he stopped it. Later, he decided that he wasn't dead...so he wasn't. The Valkyries tried to take him to Valhalla, but instead he mugged them and rode their flying horses into the stars to look for a space fantasy setting so that he could keep on barbarianing.
• John and Dave from John Dies at the End. Nothing quite exemplifies this like the first time they save the world: while "disguised" as Elton John (John thinks Elton John is a band, by the way), they ward off the apocalypse just long enough for Albert Marconi to foil the demons' plans. How? By beating monsters to death with a folding chair while making constant, godawful chair puns and playing the worst song ever made. It works.
• Nakor the Blue Rider, from The Riftwar Cycle. He refuses to acknowledge the existence of magic, despite being one of the world's most dangerous magic users, and his brand of magic follows no discernible rules or limits. He once defeated a Big Bad (who was his ex-wife) by throwing pepper at her and then hitting her with a sack of oranges while she was sneezing. The aforementioned sack of oranges contains an interdimensional rift in space-time leading to a fruit vendor, which Nakor created because he was hungry. He slept with an Artifact of Doom under his pillow for decades, robbing him of his dreams, and in retrospect realized this might have caused his insanity.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In Ghost Story, Harry Dresden was able to manifest his disembodied spirit into the real world and punch a mook, specifically because he was insane. Only insane ghostly spirits can manifest physically, you understand, because it's incredibly dangerous. Oh, and the way he comes to realize he's crazy enough to do this? He remembers all the other crazy stuff he's done in previous books. And much of that crazy stuff was awesome.
  • In Dead Beat, Dresden finds out that the dark ritual that the various necromancers are trying to pull off actually drains the life of anyone who gets too close to it, unless they're protected by having undead of their own. Small problem with this - the Laws of Magic prohibit necromancy on pain of death. However, those laws only apply to mortals. Humans. Because undead animals are pretty pathetic by comparison. But the older a corpse is, the more powerful a zombie it can be. Cue Dresden riding into battle on a Zombie T-Rex. A Zombie T-Rex, powered by a one-man Polka suit.
  • Small Favor: Harry is being hunted by a member of the Fae nobility who has slain at least three wizards older, stronger, and more skilfull than himself. Said Sidhe doesn't want to kill him, but is under orders he cannot disobey (namely, that until Harry gets clear of the field of battle, he has to try to kill him). Harry's owed a favor from the Fae, but not one big enough to directly get him out. What does he do? He asks the Sidhe to get him a donut. The Sidhe complies, getting out of the way long enough for Harry to vamoose.
    Eldest Brother Gruff: Likest thou jelly within thy donut?
    Harry: Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead, and frosting of white.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Danaerys Targaryen aka the "Mother of Dragons" — extinct those beasts are no longer. Doing the insanely impossible, unknowable or just downright weird and, somehow, damn awesome is just part of her portfolio as a Targaryen. Be it a success or failure. Heck, past ones who just muddled through with a big "meh" of mediocrity or plain old, boring competency got questions asked about just how Targaryen they actually were. See Daeron vs Daemon and the whole Blackfyre Rebellion.
• Vorkosigan Saga: Miles Vorkosigan at his most manic and inspired slips into this territory. Probably best exemplified in The Vor Game when he resolved a hostage situation by threatening to shoot the hostage himself. With a plasma cannon.
  Miles had judged the hostage-problem logically insoluble; therefore, clearly the only thing to do was make it Cavilo's problem instead of his own.
• Thibbledorf Pwent. The guy walks around in armor that's covered in spikes and ridges, which badly scratches up any floors or walls he comes into contact. It does even worse to anybody he attacks, which he does by jumping on them, grabbing them, and starting to shake and convulse until they're ripped to shreds. Pwent loves doing this. He'll throw himself at a whole army and try to kill them all singlehandedly unless somebody he's actually willing to take orders from stops him, and he'll usually win in that kind of situation. He once fought a whole battle carrying the impaled body of a goblin on his helmet spike.
• Wraith Squadron, from Star Wars Legends, practically exists to come up with and implement Zany Schemes that are Crazy Enough to Work:
  • When the squadron is on its way to a rendezvous and gets taken out of hyperspace and disabled by a very, very fancy mine, and is left hanging over a planet attempting repairs but aware that there's no hyperdrive, no long-range communications, and an enemy ship is on the way to see what the mine got... what happens?
    • What happens is that you put your hyperintelligent Gamorrean pilot in a torn-out smuggling compartment with thrusters, a two-meter laser cannon, and an astromech strapped on, you put him out in space with the most damaged X-Wing which is repeating a plea for help recorded by your ex-child actor, and you wait. When the enemy ship jumps into the system and veers over to the damaged X-Wing, your Gamorrean pilot engages thrusters, steers by the astromech, enters the ship's hangar, aims the laser cannon—which was taken off one of the X-Wings—and fires straight up, blasting the captain into the ceiling. Then your pilot forces everyone on the enemy ship to surrender and invites the rest of the squadron on board, at which point it is discovered that in the confusion no one sent out a distress signal, which means the enemy does not know that this ship has been captured. Then things get interesting.
  • An earlier incident had the Wraiths lure an Imperial ship away from an escaping transport by faking the Millennium Falcon's signature, amplifying their own transponder signals until they looked like a squadron of fighters each, and basically yelling "come and get me". It's shortly after this that Wedge starts wondering what he's gotten himself into.
• The Star Trek novel set on a Planet of Hats where the hat is Rodgers and Hammerstein. Kirk finds himself up against the Klingon captain in an elaborate farce, McCoy ends up being proclaimed The Chosen One in a Flash Gordon parody because of his breakfast order, and Scotty and Chekov end up fighting a war with the "ancestral weapon of the Scots" - golf clubs. The long-term plan is to blackmail both the Federation and the Klingons into leaving them alone by having compromising footage of both the Klingon and Federation representatives looking like idiots - and it works.
• Gary Karkofsky AKA Merciless: The Supervillain without MercyTM in The Supervillainy Saga runs on this. Whether fighting giant Nazi robots, riding a cybernetic T-Rex, or escaping a prison on the moon—his only weapon against his enemies is Confusion Fu and being a Bunny-Ears Lawyer in a more serious Capepunk universe.

Live-Action TV

• Blood & Treasure: Danny. He decided to rush in to take on a group of heavily armed terrorists single-handed, in a room filled with lethal toxin, while rappelling through a skylight using a fire hose as "Ode to Joy" blares.
• Deadliest Catch:
  • Freddy Maugatai (one of Captain Phil's deckmen up to Season 7) is pretty hardcore. He's known to eat the intestines of fish and even once covered his face in the blood of a fish for good luck. He topped himself on the July 23, 2013 episode: the Wizard came up to a floating walrus carcass and wanted to drag it aboard to cut off its tusks for the ivory (which meant a few thousand dollars of extra money). But they couldn't get a line secured around the thing to lift it up. So, Freddy strips down to his sweatpants and jumps in the freezing Bering Sea in order to help properly secure the line! And when he's pulled out after several minutes, he's not even shivering, unlike other people who are reduced to shivering wrecks after a lot less time and wearing a lot more clothes. Captain Keith Colburn probably said it best with these two quotes:
    Keith: [as the incident is happening] Holy fucking shit, that guy's a fucking maniac!
    Keith: [after the incident] Freddy Maugatai's wired differently than pretty much anybody I've ever met in my life.
  • Edgar Hansen occasionally indulges in this; in addition to his pyromania (including the flaming hook ritual) and biting the head off a cod, at one point he drank the blood of a cod, getting greenhorn Nick Totman to join in.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Euron Greyjoy, the deadly, insane terror of the seas who brings an amused, slightly unsettling and highly enjoyable theatricality wherever he goes, making up for decades of embarrassing defeats for the Ironborn in the process.
  • Thoros of Myr has earned this as a result of his Noodle Incident that in equal measure made him a Memetic Badass throughout all of Westeros. During the Siege of Pyke, Thoros lit his sword on Wildfire and charged against the Greyjoys single-handedly in a mad fury, slaughtering an untold number. Jorah Mormont called him the bravest man he ever saw while even Jaime fondly remembers him as a total badass then. The best part? He doesn't even remember any of it. Turns out the real reason he charged in Leeroy Jenkins style was because he got drunk. As in brain-meltingly, complete and utter loss of inhibitions, absolute black-out-mode smashed. Given how much he already drinks (and regularly), one really wonders if he guzzled down the Mormonts' entire supply of ale to pull that one off.
• World's Dumbest...: The guy who did a backflip off the top of a house, landed face down on the ground. He got up and walked away like it was nothing. This is the same show that has seen people hospitalized after falling from heights of seven feet or less. After hitting the ground, he rolled into a ninja-style kneeling pose that almost looked convincing before getting up and walking away.
• Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger: Yayoi follows in her grandfather's footsteps when she jumps into Plezuon's open mouth while screaming "Brave in!" so he can help save the day.
• John Crichton of Farscape becomes like this as the series progresses. One particularly awesome example is dancing on a table in front of Scarran Emperor Staleek with a NUCLEAR BOMB strapped to his hip. One of Staleek's attendants calls Crichton insane, to which Aeryn responds, while grinning and having eyes only for her nutty boyfriend, "Isn't it fun?"
• Sherlock: The titluar character is a guy who, instead of just questioning the witness, pretends to be an old friend of her purportedly deceased husband and then more or less purposely gets things wrong while talking about him just so the widow will correct him and tell him more than he’d get out of a standard interview. He also keeps a skull on his mantle that he apparently used as his sounding board before meeting John, he spattered himself with pig’s blood for a case and claimed it was tedious, and one time he played Cluedo, he insisted that the only possible solution was for the victim to have done it. He has referred to the poisoning of children with mercury as “neat” because of how it was done, and walks around with a mind palace that, when accessed, can feed back to him practically everything he’s ever known that he considered important enough to save (including Elvis). Oh, and did we mention that he refers to his brain as a hard drive and refuses to remember basic astronomy because it would clutter said mind palace up? (This, as well as the pig’s blood, is a reference to the original stories.) Add in the fact that he gets himself out of arrest by taking his best friend hostage, and the man has Crazy Is Cool coming out of his ears.
• The Muppet Show: Most of the cast is crazy, all of them are awesome, but there is no one who can combine the two as marvelously as Gonzo the Great. Catching cannon balls? No problem! Demolishing an antique car to the tune of "The Anvil Chorus?" True art! And we didn't get to see what he was going to do with a flaming torch, a tire swing and a cow.
• Black Adder has King Richard IV. A over-the-top Blood Knight that wages war just for the hell of it and is implied to have killed several thousand Turks with a fruit knife. Being played by BRIAN BLESSED certainly helps.
  King Richard IV: Let blood! Blood! Bloood be our motto! Slit their glizzards! (laughs like a maniac).
• Pretty much the entire cast of Legends of Tomorrow is this in some way or another. This is especially true of the Legends, who specialize in coming up with the most unorthodox plans and letting all hell break loose to save the day. Hell, they beat the Big Bad of season three by taking the form of a giant avatar of Beebo, who's basically the Arrowverse's version of Tickle-Me Elmo.
• Mr. Bean. Seriously, dressing while driving (with his feet!) a car, foiling a car thief by taking his steering wheel with him to a picnic, winning a dog show with a teddy bear? And that's just a couple of episodes...
• Hooch from Scrubs is one of the more popular minor characters due to him being very Ax-Crazy.
  Hooch: Who the hell... put bouillon cubes in the shower head!?! Huh? Hm, did you do it? Hm? Did you? If it happens again, I will wait in my S.U.V., blast me some speed-metal—5.1 surround sound, heavy on the bass—and someone... will be getting...mowed...down.
• Les Nessman from both WKRP in Cincinnati and its Revival. He has an "office"—actually just part of the office floor. But "one day" he will get walls, and he has put down tape strips to mark the future walls and door. He even insists that people knock before entering. Les feels so strongly about this that in the first series, when the only woman on Earth who would sleep with him decides to remove the tape, he kicks her out of his life. Here's the kicker: it's catching. In an episode of the second series, Les has vital information in his desk, but he has "locked" the "door" to his "office" and taken the key. With Les not even in the room, the other characters admit that the "locked door" is an obstacle, but one of them tries to "jimmy" the "lock" with a credit card. And he fails.
• Doctor Who:
  • In Season 31, Amy Pond throws a tantrum at her wedding that pits her memory against the very fabric of reality. The fabric of reality promptly throws up its hands, squeaks "mommy!", and allows the Doctor to exist again, because she's the type of girl who bit her psychiatrists when they tried to convince her that her imaginary friend wasn't real, and stubbornly refuses to listen to the entire universe telling her that there's no such thing as stars all her life, because she remembers them, dammit, and to hell with anyone who dares imply she's remembering wrongly.
  • The Eleventh Doctor; Who else would eat fish fingers in custard? Who else would jump in front of a gun and shout "Look at me, I'm a target!" complete with a manic grin and a thumbs up!? And, to put it bluntly, who else would look awesome saving the universe in a fez and a bowtie while carrying a mop?
    The Eleventh Doctor: I am definitely a madman with a box!
  • The Twelfth Doctor continues the proud tradition. In the course of a single story, he rides a tank into a medieval arena while playing his own theme tune on electric guitar; announces that he won a broadsword fight by using a daffodil (a Call-Back to how, in a previous adventure, he beat Robin Hood in a sword fight with a spoon), pulls a cup of tea and saucer out of seemingly nowhere, and reveals that he's upgraded his sonic screwdriver into sonic sunglasses. A later story has him pull a glass of water—a full glass of water, mind you—out of his pocket, attributing it to "skills."
  • The First Doctor's original plan to help the Greeks defeat the Trojans was to build giant paper airplanes to catapult them over the city walls. He ended up scrapping that idea and suggesting a giant wooden horse instead...
  • The Ninth Doctor escaped a patrol ready to shoot him by taking the elevator behind him, the crazy part being him buying time by telling the soldiers they shouldn't have left him standing in front of an elevator. Oh, and when he found himself trapped in a reality show where being eliminated meant actual physical elimination, he escaped by causing his own elimination before ten minutes had passed, guessing that whoever teleported him there would have stopped that from happening, since they could have killed him directly if they wanted to. He also has a habit of switching guns for bananas.
  • The Third Doctor. Distinguished-looking older gentleman who zoomed around in a hover car named after himself, sang his own theme song, wore capes and lace-cuff shirts without the slightest hesitation, performed magic tricks, and didn't hesitate to karate-chop anybody that stood in his way.
  • While Eleven is definitely one of the most alien Doctors, they all have it:
    • The Ninth Doctor swaps guns for bananas and Ten — who defeats an army of Cybermen and Daleks with a pair of 3-D glasses.
    • Four wore a ridiculously long scarf and greeted everyone, even those trying to kill him, with a calm "would you like a jelly baby?"
    • Six sported a ridiculous rainbow coat and honestly couldn't care what anybody thought about it.
    • In Eight's only televised adventure, he went on raving about his shoes and aiming a gun at his own head.
    • Ten, in addition to the 3-D glasses, defeated his first enemy with a satsuma.
  • As befitting his role as the Doctor's Evil Counterpart, the Master possesses a fair share of this trope as well.^note Well, the John Simm version, at any rate. Try and say that tearing the fabric of space and time apart in order to conquer the Earth - while playing Rogue Trader's "Voodoo Child" - isn't kickass.
  • Michelle Gomez's Master...er, Mistress is cranking up her own brand of this; dressing like a Gothic Mary Poppins, fishing for compliments from a Mook before killing him and creating a Cyberman army as a gift to her old frenemy The Doctor to try and impress him. And she's genuinely hurt (well as genuinely as The Master can be) when he treats the whole idea like a Homemade Sweater from Hell.
  • The original Masters were crazy, too!
    • In his first story, the Delgado Master killed a man by feeding him to a chair and tried to take over the world with plastic daffodils.
    • In his first story, the Ainley Master destroyed a good part of the Universe by accident. And then using the incident as leverage to bluff the Universe into submission. And that's just scratching the surface.
  • On the subject of the old series, how about Mad Bomber^note Which, incidentally, makes her the only Companion until Amy with canonical mental illness Companion Ace, who actually inspired the creation of the Moment of Awesome page by beating the crap out of a Dalek with a baseball bat? All because the Dalek called her small.
• Heroes: Sylar is a completely insane serial killer, but he's so nonchalant about everything and can be quite funny when the writers aren't filling him with Wangst. He's the only character who actually enjoys his powers and he's hilarious when he takes on a fake identity (usually just for fun).
• Power Rangers RPM:
  • Dr. K, who has twice taken out The Dragon using a violin, and is so forced and unnatural in social situations that it goes past awkward, past being simply funny, and into pure awesome. One of the two violinnings was with an amplifier to create a sonic weapon, and once was by using the violin to remotely control the base's ventilation system. She also keeps a laser cannon in the refrigerator (ready to fire the moment the door is opened), has created an experimental clothes-destroying weapon, and once blackmailed the person who is ostensibly her superior with the threat of her maybe kinda possibly having worked on an undetectable chemical that causes a case of diarrhea "a thousand times more extreme than the worst case of dysentery ever recorded." If it was anyone else, it would sound ridiculous and be seen as a harmless joke. With her, he caved instantly.
  • Speaking of which, then there's Gem and Gemma. Sure, they're called the Marmite Twins, but they emphasize the CRAZY part of this trope. (Boom time, anyone?) Although completely childish, drawing unicorns and rainbows as maps, and completely creepy when they engage in twin-speak, they are highly intelligent and often come to the other Rangers' rescue. They're even the catalyst for Dr. K's social development as they're the only two friends she had growing up together in Alphabet Soup, and they call her out for being impersonal towards the other Series Operators when they turn up alive from the wastelands.

Roleplay

• O ye who think you have seen true madness, listen well, for you know nothing of this til you have read the tale of the one, the only, Old Man Henderson, the patron saint of The Roleplayer everywhere, the living manifestation of sheer aggressive campaign derailment, and widely known as "The man who won at Trail of Cthulhu." When one thinks of what your usual Call of Cthulhu PC is like, one probably doesn't think "Hawaiian shirt-wearing dyslexic/schizophrenic Vietnam veteran who wears aviator sunglasses at all times, talks to the stuffed parrot on his shoulder in a nigh-incomprehensible Scottish accent, and is motivated for revenge against the cult because he thinks they stole his garden gnomes." And this is only scratching the surface of the sheer insanity that the character manifested:
  • Group of enemy cultists holding a secret meeting in a heavily guarded building? Henderson steals a tanker trunk that's refueling a nearby gas station, drive it towards the building, jumps out just before the truck crashes and blows the cult (along with two other player characters) to kingdom come, landing safely because he installed Heelies in his combat boots.
  • GM is planning to kill you off via lethal sanity damage when you snatch a page of the Necronomicon? Henderson rolls the Necronomicon into a blunt and smokes it, incurring no sanity damage because he is already completely fucking insane.
  • There's a reason that 1d4chan has a scale to measure how any given action by a player has disrupted the GM's intended plot. That scale is also named after Henderson.
• Shadowhunter Peril's Veronica Marie Carter falls into this category easily, because she is able to act like a total lunatic yet hold her own in a fight against multiple enemies. She tends to switch from a maternal figure to a warrior princess to an abusive friend in a matter of moments. That, and the fact that she also blows shit up for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Every popular Ork. Orks are so crazy that their technology is fueled by Insane Troll Logic and STILL manages to work, because they have latent psychic powers that allow anything to work if they expect it to. In the franchise that coined the term "grimdark", they hold their own by operating on the same logic as Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote. Their technology only functions like it does, in defiance of the laws of physics, because the Orks are too dumb to know that it's impossible. They can make a gun out of anything: If an Ork thinks a stick can be a gun, the stick will shoot bullets.
  • Boss Tuska the Daemon Killa; a Warboss who decided that the Warp sounded like a fun place to be, so he mustered an army and charged into the Eye of Terror, slaughtering every daemon he could find. The orks were finally defeated on a Living Planet, but not before Tuska dispatched the offending Daemon Prince (who had just slaughtered the last of Tuska's weirdboyz with a gesture. Tuska responded by reaching between the daemon's legs with his power klaw and making a gesture of his own). The best part is that every day following that, the orks are resurrected and forced to fight impossible odds... meaning that Tuska found the ork equivalent of Valhalla.
  • Something has to be said for the whole process behind the creation of the Rukkatrukk Squigbuggy. At first, it was essentially a fast food truck for speed freaks, that'd fire meals into their vehicles or even waiting maws in the form of squigs. That already is insane enough to qualify. And then someone screwed up and instead fired one of the bitey species of squig right into an unfortunate ork's face, at which point lightbulbs came up, and the idea of shooting dangerous squigs at enemies from this same truck was born.
• Warhammer:
  • How crazy are the Skaven? In one of the novels, a Skaven leader announces the death of a rival as the result of a "tragic accident" involving a crossbow and an exploding donkey... This would be an incredibly flimsy excuse for literally any other faction in the setting. The Skaven, not so much.
• In the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, there is the deadly Test of the Starstone, which turns any mortal who passes it into a god. The adventurer Cayden Cailean went on a roaring drunken bender one night and took it on a dare. He woke up the next morning as the god of bravery, freedom, and alcohol. He still doesn't remember how he did it.

Toys

• Vezon in BIONICLE was by far the most insane character in the cast.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag: Blackbeard. He's violent, he's ruthless, and he's impulsive, but damned if he isn't likable! He's also Too Cool to Live.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum has a Joker that for all its insanity and malice, it's still so damn fun. Specially in the bonus maps where he's playable, as the guy can leapfrog over attackers, uses a joy-buzzer and a comical eye-poke in combat and can use chattering teeth bombs in his predator challenges, yet he can still be as badass as Batman.
• Dissidia Final Fantasy: Gilgamesh. His attacks include spinning in place to create a cyclone, whipping out a giant cartoon missile from Hammerspace, firing a pair of giant boxing gloves as a Rocket Punch, and leaping into the air to deliver a diving headbutt straight down. He's without question the wackiest character, and he makes it work.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The Eldritch Abomination Majora is a Psychopathic Manchild of epic proportions who is nonetheless memorable for precisely that reason. The battle against its second form demonstrates this trait perfectly: it moves and acts like an over-the-top toddler.
• Skullgirls: Peacock's powers rely on a mix of her love of cartoons and her total insanity. Things like her beartrap teeth, her calling in Anvil on Head attacks, and her creative and absurd Hyperspace Arsenal make her both an incredibly deadly Long-Range Fighter, and a stand-out even in a zany Cast of Snowflakes.
• Turovero: The Celestial Tower: Sigurd and Ruby. How else would one describe a knight that has the ability to stonecleaver and a sniper thief?
• The World Ends with You: Minamimoto. Not many villains can claim to activate their ultimate attack by reciting ''pi to 150 decimal places''.
• The Punch-Out!! series has Aran Ryan, who, in the Wii game, was recharacterized as a complete lunatic and Combat Sadomasochist. In addition to some memorable voice lines, he also cheats quite a bit, incorporating headbutts, boxing gloves lined with horseshoes, and a third boxing glove turned into a flail into his moveset.
• Ork freebooter Kaptin Bludflagg's whole crew qualifies. The aforementioned Mr. Nailbrain keeps the aforementioned battlewagon, and has a radar-like thing device he calls his "gitfinder", which can apparently be set to "Panzee", Spookums is one of the few sneaky orks you'll ever (not) see, despite carrying enough explosives to level several buildings at once and not being afraid to throw about half of them at anyone he ambushes, and once tried to hide in lava, and Brikkfist has a penchant for strapping huge rockets to his back for a chainaxe-assisted Dynamic Entry at will, and would gladly use one of the Imperium's planetbuster missiles for this if he could get his claws on one. How effective is this bunch of loonies? They take down a centuries-old ascended marine, who used to be a Chaptermaster, an Eldar craftworld, a good chunk of several legions, among others, leaving a good part of the sector in ruins, and loot a gigantic Space Hulk, taking it as their new krooza and teleporting away to get themselves some new victims while Aurelia's still burning. And might we remind you, the Kaptin did all this for a hat.
• World of Warcraft has its share of crazy characters scattered around the worldspace, but the granddaddies of all things both awesome and completely batshit crazy are: the entire goblin race. To wit, Azeroth's goblins are your run-of-the-mill green midgets hopped up on intelligence-boosting kaja'mite which turns them into a race of Mad Scientists. They put that mad science to work being Azeroth's premiere hustlers, con-artists and extortionists, as well as being the reigning kings of stuff which blows up as well as some of the wildest inventions you could possibly imagine; shark-shaped submarines with head-mounted laser cannons are just the tip of the iceberg with these guys. You can find a fair few topics asking why the Cenarion Circle, or the Earthen ring hasn't decided to turn on any of the goblin franchises because of the repeated, guiltless, and blatant environmental damage assosciated with the entire race. The simple truth is, They can't. The economy on Azeroth is controlled by said goblins. If they were challenged, it would ruin the worldwide economy. And this is assuming the combined might of both Horde And Alliance could withstand the sheer number of resources the goblins could level at them.
• This trope is seemingly mandatory if you want to be a Demon Hunter in Devil May Cry.
  • Topping the list we've got Dante. Even the most cheesy and narm-tastic lines sound badass when spoken by a red longcoat-wearing, gun-slinging, BFS-wielding half-demon Demon Hunter. Anyone who can defeat a horde of hellbeasts with half a slice of pizza in his mouth deserves to be listed here. And in the trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds, he fights none other than the equally crazy awesome Deadpool. Lampshaded by Dante himself if he beats Deadpool:
    "Sometimes you gotta out-crazy the crazies if you wanna beat 'em."
  • Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening introduces Lady, a young woman who casually saunters straight into hordes of demons that can rip the military apart armed with nothing but More Dakka, Stuff Blowing Up and a BFG and comes out completely unscathed nine times out of ten. On the crazy side of things, while definitely one of the more stoic and level-headed Demon Hunters, she still employs the same Rule of Cool-based combat style as the rest of the cast, and that's not even mentioning her Unorthodox Reload methods.
  • Come Devil May Cry 5, Nero has grown into his role as a demon hunter and puts as much enjoyment into the work as old man Dante himself, and his Devil Breakers, a set of mechanical arms with a wide variety of outlandish gadgets built into them, starting with Shock and Awe Blasters and Rocket Punches and getting crazier from there, allows him to do stuff like jump up on his fired Rocket Punch and use it as a hoverboard, complete with skateboard tricks for attacks.
  • Nico Goldstein is a non-action version of this trope introduced in the fifth title, being a craftswoman taking the personality of a teenage boy from a 90's sitcom smack dab into the middle of the apocalypse, she's Lady's arms dealer and the inventor of Nero's Devil Breakers. And the weapons she invents range from the logic defying to the outright bizarre. She's also the living embodiment of Drives Like Crazy, often driving her van to places that should by all means be impossible for anything short of an aircraft to reach in precisely the way you'd have to drive a van in order for it to reach said places.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • All of the characters take Violation of Common Sense not as the exception but the norm. This means they have inane ideas such as using a neon light underwater, punching people with boxing gloves in a fight to the death, beating people to death with a fish, death by icicle, hacking your own arm off just for a prosthetic you had no need for in the first place, shooting people with a crossbow to heal them, throwing "Yellow Liquid" as a weapon, using a hand grenade as a club, fashioning a rocket launcher, flamethrower and Heal-Gun thingy from random household items, holding bear claws over your hands in a fight, and we're just grazing the list.
  • Some of the background characters, too. Saxton Hale (head of Mann Co—"We sell products and get in fights") in particular. One letter from him that has been seen out there can be, depending on which boxes are ticked, either "thank you for your submitted product idea, we'll get back to you" or "you bastard, you tried to steal from me, I'm going to hunt you down and beat you to death with my own bare hands."
  • The Medic, as revealed in "Meet The Medic", is totally insane. He performs surgery on the Heavy without anesthesia or gloves, keeps a BLU Spy's severed head in his fridge, ends up giving the Heavy the heart of a "Mega Baboon" after accidentally exploding the Heavy's old heart, and, finally, when he's preparing to Uber the Heavy for the first time?
    Heavy: Doktor! Are you sure dis will work?!
    Medic: AH-HAHAH! I HAFF NO IDEA!
• Max from Sam & Max: Freelance Police. For example:
  Max: Gratuitous acts of senseless violence are my forte!
  (He turns to face an unconscious man hanging by his chin from the bannister. Max nudges him off and he hits the ground with a thud.)
  Sam: You're such an adorable urchin, Max.
• President Howard Ackerman of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 running on the Attack Dolphin party with the slogan of "Screw 'Em All". His immigration policy? Attack Dogs! Those without health insurance? He'll donate a pint of his blood a week to render your immune system indestructible! Special Interests? None! He's too busy serving the Dirty Communists a steaming platter of shame with a side order of suck it. Vote for him if you want to live! He's also a Japanese android. Probably.^note  He's the Final Boss of the Soviet Campaign and the Empire of the Rising Sun was destroyed in their seventh mission. And he actually got a few votes in the RealLife 2008 elections.
• Pokémon Colosseum:
  • Miror B. in Colosseum and XD. Disco dude with an enormous Poké Ball-colored afro and this for a battle theme. And the first time you meet him in Pokémon XD, he moonwalks in. On lifts. The Pokémon most associated with him, Ludicolo, is a pineapple duck with a rain-collecting hat that dances.
• The Sims 3:
  • You can give your Sims the "Insane" trait, which lets them to do all sorts of hilariously ridiculous things, like fishing in swimming pools (and actually ''catching'' fish this way!).
  • Similarly, the "Neurotic" sims get compulsive, yet easily fulfilled wishes (like checking the oven) which put them in a positive mood, and have access to a special "Freak Out" command which puts them in a "happy place" mentally that means that for several hours, their Fun need meter won't degenerate no matter what kind of stresses they're subjected to. Quite a powerful ability in the Sims universe!
• Baldur's Gate: Minsc, especially in the second game, as his already-tenuous grip on sanity seems to slip further and Jim Cummings really throws himself into the role. This is, after all, a character who believes in solving problems with swords, thinks "shirking" is a painful sharp thing you do to people who would steal nuts from squirrels, and gets most of his inspiration from a hamster. A miniature giant space hamster no less. Who is mighty and wise and probably quite stringy.
• Mass Effect:
  • In the first game, upon seeing that the Conduit is seconds from closing, Shepard decides that the only option available is to gun the throttle, charge through a ton of Geth including several Colossus and hurl the Mako through a Mass Relay. Considering that Shepard has no way of knowing if either they nor the Mako could even survive the trip.
  • Jack is stark raving mad and awesome enough to tear apart three YMIR mechs with her bare hands (despite the fact that they are still rather difficult boss monsters individually at that point in the game).
• Carmen Sandiego. She stole the Moon. And Gandhi's glasses. And an entire peninsula. And an entire country. And the letter n. And these are some of the tamer ones. And her motivation? She used to be one of the best detectives in the world, but got bored with it.
• Cave Johnson of Portal 2, CEO of Aperture Science, and a grade-A certified Mad Scientist whose inventions are both brilliant and hilariously dangerous. His finest moment, though, is his proposal on what to do when life hands you lemons...^note "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! WITH THE LEMONS! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!" And it's actually not out of the question that he did.
• In a trailer of World in Conflict: Soviet Assault, the Russians paradrop a freaking heavy tank into a battle to rescue a squad of paratroopers pinned down inside a mall. As someone on Youtube commented, "only the Soviets have balls to drop MBT off of an airplane".
• Champions Online has one in the form of the lunatic Foxbat. Using a ping pong ball gun that launches custard pies, massive amounts of pre-chewed bubblegum, high exlosives, and the homing device for an orbitally launched ten ton weight (that says "Ten Tons" on it), as well as robot fan boys, he proceeds to: 1 ) Use voodoo dolls to mind control an entire clan of vampires as part of a bid to marry a Superhero / Pop Star, 2 ) Manage to get a time machine that (in an alternate timeline) required more power than the city's power grid to work to somehow work multiple times, grabbing cowboys, samurai, vikings, cavemen, and Roman legionaires to help fight fallen angels, and 3 ) Takes over a local TV Station so he can broadcast the Foxbat show, in "thrilling Fox-O-Vision". Oh, and lines he spouts when fighting you include asking you if you want to be his sidekick. Only Grond has become more of a meme in the CO universe than Foxbat.
• Persona 2:
  • Michel in Innocent Sin. He's a narcissist, to the point where he'll offer demons and even undead Nazis his autograph, and he carries around a guitar case that turns into a machine gun. One of his other demon contacts, especially with other party members, is to put on an impromptu rock concert.
  • Then there's Baofu in Eternal Punishment, who is a creepy guy with a perpetual smug smirk in sunglasses and a gold-colored suit. He never stops snarking at and insulting everyone around him, his choice of weapon is coins flung fast enough to hurt, and he can try to blackmail demons - and succeed! (Though some just think the mere attempt is hilarious.) Oh, and he's also on a personal crusade against the Taiwanese mafia.
• While most people in Monkey Island deserves a mention, Guybrush Threepwood, while appearing normal on the outside is crazy once you think about it (related to how the games themselves work), but he's killed zombie pirates by spraying him with root beer, he once locked a man in a coffin (which he sold, used) to steal a key, he took instructions to complete a maze by listening to his dead parents singing it to him in a dream, he purposely drank poison to kill himself, then coming back to life to claim a life-insurance all while stealing just about anything he could see.
• Hatoful Boyfriend:
  • Oko San is a super-fast track star pigeon who's completely obsessed with finding the perfect pudding that will awaken the pudding god and banish sadness forever. No really; he accomplishes exactly that in one of his endings where he becomes the pudding god himself and turns the entire world into gooey happy pudding.
  • And then there's Anghel Higure, a bleeding-heart bird who proclaims himself to be a fallen servant of God and the heroine to be his reincarnated lover who sealed him away eons ago, enters through glass windows instead of doors, and treats everything around him like some grand battle to be fought or some vile thing containing demon spores that must be eradicated to the tune of epic battle music. A side comment from Bad Boys Love says that Anghel's body secretes hallucinogenic pheromones that Anghel himself is not resistant to. In fact, Anghel Higure's route is the only one in which Dr. Shuu is actually defeated; all the other routes have you escaping his attentions (knowingly or no) or getting murdered.
• Realm of the Mad God has Oryx, the titular mad god and a Drunken Master, at least according to fanon. His exploits include taking pity on orphaned drakes by turning them into trees, creating the recursive Mook Maker Cube God, and reanimating his own puke (okay, it's bile, but you get the idea) to battle you if you trespass in his wine cellar.
• Metal Gear:
  • Snake went up against a tank with grenades, alone, and winning, and not finding that remotely unusual. However, amongst other things, Snake has punched a man dressed entirely in metal plates, identified a female soldier by stalking her until she needed to use the bathroom, grabbed a statue's penis, deliberately enticed a wolf to pee on him to disguise his scent, blown up a rat with industrial explosives, disguised himself as a woman, disguised himself as a corpse, shot a bunch of hamsters with a machine gun, shook a woman to death using a psychic puppet, and hatched an owl from an egg to use its hoots to convince a guard that it was nighttime. Big Boss has murdered people with a fork, recharged his batteries by eating glowing mushrooms, disguised himself as a bishounen, an androgynous Japanese diety, a zombie, a monkey and a crocodile, and defeated enemies by tying them to helium balloons.
  • Those times when Big Boss held up an entire camp of soldiers... With a banana.
  • Many bosses also qualify:
    • Fatman, a bomb-slinging man in an oversized flak jacket who rides around on rollerskates and drinks fancy wine from a fancy wine glass with a bendy straw.
    • The soldier who fights while covered in bees and grows special bullet hornets in his body.
    • The cowboy-wannabe Speztnaz officer who fends off a horde of Baltic hornets by twirling his revolvers around.
    • The century-old veteran sniper who is part plant (and is even able to photosynthesise) and uses a tricked-out dart rifle because he wants to be a mentor to the guy who will inevitably kill him.
    • The US Senator so jacked up by nanomachines he can block a vibro-katana with his bare forearms and destroy the remains of the Metal Gear he was riding up to that point with a single punch.
• Street Fighter:
  • Super Street Fighter IV gives us Juri Han. A Tae Kwon Do fighter who joins the tournament simply because she's bored, and is nothing short of f'in insane, as is evidenced in her ending, when she overthrows Seth and takes over S.I.N. She also delivers classic villain lines such as "I'll have my reveeeennnnnggggggeee"! when she loses, which is nothing short of hilarious. She tones it down a bit in Street Fighter V, though she's still plenty sadistic.
  • Also from SSFIV, Hakan. A blue-haired, red-skinned Turklish oil wrestler who lugs around a gigantic barrel of said oil with him everywhere he goes (think Gaara's giant gourd of sand), which he then proceeds to dump on himself at the beginning of every match. His moveset revolves around using his oily body to slide around the arena, and one of his Ultras has him almost literally launching you out of his ass. His motives for joining the tournament are no less crazy. While most of the others are there to defeat a rival, destroy the world or some other dastardly plot, Hakan simply wants to travel the world to find the best olive oil. He's stated to be a multi-billion dollar Olive Oil Tycoon, so he could have done it without travelling the world beating people up. He also has a hot wife with 7 daughters he loves very much.
  • With Season 3 of Street Fighter V came G, the self-proclaimed "President of Earth." Capcom decided to make their equivalent of Uncle Sam a hammy Attention Whore ^note he waves at the screen while striding forward with control over gold and magma who constantly proclaims the unity of mankind while striking all manner of poses in-battle, cultminating in his Critical Art, Pangaea Burst, having G pull the classic Uncle Sam Wants You pose as multiple bursts of lava immolate his foe. ("Light it up.") One of his special moves, Message to the People, consists of G giving a rehearsed presidential address—and it charges his Critical Gauge as long as he speaks. It even comes in three different variations!
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Sheogorath, the series' Daedric Prince of Madness. To note:
    • His quests in Morrowind and Oblivion respectively involve killing a giant floating cattle-like jellyfish with a cursed fork and fulfilling a prophecy involving stinky cheese and burning dog corpses raining from the sky, respectively.
    "I once dug a pit and filled it with clouds... or was it clowns... come to think of it, it began to smell... must have been clowns. Clouds don't smell, they taste of butter. And tears."
    "Time for a celebration! Cheese for everyone! Wait, scratch that, cheese for no one. That can be just as much of a celebration, if you don't like cheese. True?"
    "I'm so happy, I could rip out your intestines and strangle you with them!"
    • In The Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, attacking him causes him to paralyze the player, before teleporting them about a thousand feet over the island. If you can actually find the area he teleported you to, you find a man who was similarly executed... for the great crime of having a mustache. Of course, this is the realm of a Mad God.
  • In Morrowind, Divayth Fyr is considered this, due to him being a 4,000 year old wizard, the highest level NPC in the vanilla game, a collector of both Dwemer artifacts as well as artifacts associated with the "Battlespire" event, and an eccentric genius who surrounds himself with Opposite-Sex Clone wives/daughters, diseased zombie-esque maniacs, and the last living Dwarf. He left the council of Great House Telvanni and the Psijic Order in order to run his Corprusarium (a refuge for the aforementioned diseased zombie-esque maniacs) while also working on a cure for the disease, which he finds...sort of. (It only works on the Player Character, and also isn't really a "cure", as the PC still has the disease. It simply removes the negative effects, leaving the PC with the positive effects of being The Ageless and Ideal Illness Immunity.) He would even become the unofficial mascot of the Elder Scrolls lore community for a time on the official forums.
  "Good. Open your mouth, and close your eyes..." Continue "Good. Now swallow... Goodness... Good grief! Look! Look! It's... WORKING!" Continue [Disposition +10.] "Remarkable. Let me check your skin... your eyes... your tongue.... Amazing. I think it worked. No sign of the disease at all. Of course, you still have corprus disease, just like I planned. But all your symptoms are gone. Marvelous. I'll go try it out on some of the more desperate inmates..."
  • Cicero in Skyrim doubles as this and Creepy Awesome. Despite dressing as a jester and coming across as nuttier than Sheogorath, his insanity belies the fact that he's a highly skilled assassin of the Dark Brotherhood. The advantages of this are obvious - in fact, in the Brotherhood questline, he uses his theatricality to pull a Wounded Gazelle Gambit and a Xanatos Gambit simultaneously. After he completely snaps and you're tasked with hunting him down, he pretends to be dying to make you either leave him alone or drop your guard trying to finish him off.
    Cicero: Haha! Behold the final trick of the Fool of Hearts! You think me near death? Haha! Think again.
• Tales Series:
  • Anise Tatlin from Tales of the Abyss has the crazy awesome fighting style of riding on the back a giant, animated teddy bear, which then proceeds to plow enemies into the ground like it's nothing. HOLY SHIT.
  • King Richard of Windor - Badass with a sword, King of a major nation, extremely pretty...also possessed by a space demon Energy Being and totally hell-bent on essentially destroying the planet. Watch any anime cutscene from Tales of Graces and tell us he's no badass...then watch his infamous TOMODACHIII HUAAAARGH breakdown and tell us he's not nucking futs.
• Borderlands:
  • Patricia Tannis. She leaves a series of recordings you can listen to, following her quick descent into various forms of madness. For example, after killing an intruder, she then comes up with an entire backstory and name for him out of starvation for human contact. All this after a rocky relationship with her personal audio recorder? Also, she was the person to actually discover the location of the Vault?
  • Mister Torgue High-Five Flexington. The man is a genius weapons engineer...because of his obsession with Stuff Blowing Up and severe Testosterone Poisoning. His company's best-known inventions include the Unkempt Harold, which fires exploding bullets that split into more exploding bullets, and the KerBlaster, a gun with bullets that drop grenades on impact.
  • Gaige's effectiveness is predicated entirely on mad science. For example, her Action Skill only works because she sawed off her own arm and replaced it with a cybernetic one. That she built after the amputation.
  • Krieg. Two of his skill trees are "run around with your shields down hitting people with your buzz axe" and "be ON FIRE as often as possible". The latter allows him to set himself on fire by setting other people on fire, with an upgrade at about level 15 that lets you ignite yourself with any elemental damage effect. The name of this upgrade? Delusional Damage. He also has lengthy arguments with the voice of his sane self in his head and yells non-sequiturs constantly.
    Krieg: I'M THE CONDUCTOR OF THE POOP TRAIN!
• Grand Theft Auto V has Trevor Phillips, quite possibly the most Ax-Crazy protagonist in the series' history. There is nothing Trevor won't do to his achieve his goals. Whether it be crashing a crop duster into the bay of a cargo plane (while still in flight!), or jumping atop a speeding train with a dirt bike, and crashing said train with another, Trevor's unhinged antics provide some of the game's most Awesome Moments. But this ends up being a Subverted Trope for the most part, as Trevor's hairbrained schemes always end with him getting screwed out of any profit or pissing people off enough to want him dead.
• Guilty Gear:
  • Faust (formerly Dr. Baldhead) He's nucking futs, even after his Heel–Face Turn. Turning into a baseball player, swimming through air, attacking you with a giant scalpel, and implanting a nuke on you, all while trying to save the world. Gotta love him.
  • Also Slayer, the dandy vampire whose Instant Kill involves punching you to a different galaxy using only the power of haiku.
• BlazBlue: Terumi Yuuki. Candy-flavoured zombie Jesus on a stick, Terumi! He is a Fallen Hero who has decided to kill God and Create a Playground For Evil, and to that end he initiated a "Groundhog Day" Loop that has pretty much destroyed the world some 700+ times over, and when finally someone who might actually be a threat to him and his plans appears, or even someone who ISN'T a threat appears, what does he do? He Trolls them.
• Father Grigori from Half-Life 2; a Badass Preacher armed with a shotgun, holed up in the zombie-infested city of Ravenholm, where he's not only survived against the monstrous hordes, but also built several traps to kill said hordes easier on his own. Including at least three cars suspended in the air that are bound by nothing more than a few ropes, that act as falling anvils of death. The "crazy" part comes from the fact that he views the zombies as his congregation, considers shooting them in the head their salvation (he's not wrong there, though), and seems to genuinely care about them.
• Steven Heck. It's not the fact that he's willing to torture his employees to find his car keys. It's not the insane conspiracy theories. Its not the penchant for fire, or the funny names he gives his operations, and or his capacity for use of the Improvised Weapon (including decapitating people with soccer balls). No, it's the fact that he welded a minigun onto a subway car and strafed a subway terminal when Mike Thorton hired him to play fire support. He's a fun guy.
• In Just Cause, Rico Rodriguez has this as part of his job description. Part of the tutorial for the second game involves a carsurfing gunfight and two fights against helicopters with only his pistols and Grappling Hook Gauntlet. The hook itself allows for absolutely insane things (such as strapping a bad guy to a passing jumbo jet). The craziness keeps ramping up throughout the story, including a fights against an APC and a Kill Sat.
• Resident Evil: Albert Wesker got his superpowers by injecting himself with an experimental virus and deliberately letting a Tyrant impale him because the virus is only activated by his death. He returns to life as an undead, mutated monster with glowing red eyes, and he absolutely loves it, slaughtering his way through zombies while laughing maniacally about his newfound "amazing power", all while covered in his own blood. He then runs out of the mansion before it explodes and goes on to become a powerful crime lord, playing every side to his advantage, while initially believed by most of the world to be dead. In Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, he's so gleeful about his new powers that he twirls around after beating Chris up, and he generally varies between Large Ham and Cold Ham. Wesker eventually decides he's a god and tries to take over the world...and his ultimate plan involves turning the entire population of the world, including himself, into tentacle monsters. He fires a triple-barrelled shotgun one-handed, his fighting style is full of over-the-top flips and twirls, and he's vain enough to stop in the middle of a fight to fix his hair. He also does most of this while wearing Sunglasses at Night, and tight black leather clothing with a collar. Even as a human he was a Mad Scientist who worked on zombie viruses, and a skilled fighter who appeared to enjoy combat.
• Undertale: The Human Child, aka, Frisk, during the Pacifist Run takes being a Badass Pacifist to Crazy Is Cool extremes, see a sentient jet plane with Tsundere tendencies coming at you? run directly toward it! See a living volcano spewing lava everywhere? hug it! A Physical God threatens to destroy the world? keep reaching out to his true self, a scared lonely child, until he no longer wants to fight anymore.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus:
  • Fans were immediately drawn to Caine for this exact reason, as anything he says or does is so unhinged and out-of-left-field that it's hard to not be entertained by him, resulting in Caine becoming a Fountain of Memes.
  • Kinger is similarly beloved for how crazy he is, but in a more low-key fashion, as a lot of his insane ramblings result in rather comedic scenarios that help him stand out amongst the rest of the colorful cast.
• Red vs. Blue: In the chorus trilogy, Doc of all people comes off this way, now that O'Malley exists in his head as a split personality. He now switches between his ineffectual Nice Guy persona to the violent and cartoonishly evil Saturday morning villain we all know and love.
• RWBY:
  • Nora is an energetic, bubbly powerhouse who gets stronger every time she's hit by electricity. She is willing to use "sloth" noises as a secret signal, ride Ursa, blast people over canyons if they can't jump the gap, and offer to break a bully's legs as a way of showing support.
  • Qrow's introduction consists of him turning up drunk to goad Winter Schnee into a fight, and then keeping pace with her the entire time. He enjoys beating his nieces at video games, telling them inappropriate stories, and is one of the best Huntsmen alive despite the alcoholism.
  • Tyrian is quite literally Laughing Mad, is introduced taunting Cinder's injuries and reveling in the chance to hunt down Ruby Rose; he gets disappointed when he can't kill, becomes frighteningly insane when he disappoints his boss, and fights in a wild, high-speed, dance-like manner that makes him one of the most dangerous, crazy and enjoyable villains in the show. He can even block sniper fire with his tail without looking.

Webcomics

• Sequential Art: Scarlet, even more so once her sisters start helping. For starters, she once made a lawn mower design that incorporated a black hole and, more recently, cracked perpetual motion with a Slanky.
• Riff from Sluggy Freelance. His insane inventions malfunction about as often as they work and are usually used for incredibly mundane activities, but they're just so awesome. A paintball gun that drowns the enemy team in paint. The "Gworg" monster. A voice-activated, toast-making laser. A catapult that launches "censorizing black bars" to block a female assassin's "distracting nudity."
• Largo from MegaTokyo. Actually the whole series could be crazy awesome, but those three look crazy even to the other inhabitants. He decapitated a zombie...with a giant radish...from the seat of a three-wheeled muffin cart. He also managed to somehow WEAPONIZE a Rickroll. Top that.
• Jayden and Crusader's resident mad scientist Smic is known for his crazy moments, including, but not limited to, harnessing the power of sunspots to fill the house with pizza, firing a cannon using cream as gunpowder and defeating an alkaline super-monster using his bare hands. He is also extremely British.
• The Order of the Stick: Xykon. Dude tossed a bouncy ball with a Symbol of Insanity spell inscribed on it into a room full of paladins. The outcome contained a balance of Hilarious and Horrific worthy of the Joker.
• Hanners of Questionable Content is a neurotic Neat Freak with crippling OCD in addition to being the resident Cloudcuckoolander. She is also one of the strip's most memorable and popular characters. When she swings into action, it's usually awesome and somewhat unusual.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has Captain Fang, the Dread Pirate. He is either utterly insane or has a near-terminal case of dyslexia which he doesn't try to circumvent (and is easily distracted). He's also either absurdly lucky or a good enough pilot to go into tricky waters, get even with a crack crew in an artillery duel (while sitting on the cannon face to the breech) and somehow got into the semi-final of a great tournament. All the while rambling and apparently not paying attention to anything.
• The captain from Romantically Apocalyptic. (S)He wanders the post apocalyptic landscape with his two subordinates looking for humans and monsters. Makes sure along the way that the trains run on time, gets TWO cults to worship him/her, picks up some fast food and rescues his subordinate from aliens with a cup with a red heart and some stale cake. Yes, really. Zhee Captqainn is also highly radioactive, and his/her angry stare can literally make a person's head explode.
  • Pilot is, if anything, almost as crazy as his superior officer. In his time off, he reenacts the balcony scene from Titanic with Zee Captain, on his working hours, he dutifully obeys Zee Captain's orders to "find me a flying machine" by tying helium balloons to seemingly everything he can find: a chair, a clock, a pair of headphones, a pineapple, one of the giant worm monsters, and a boat. That's frozen in a lake of ice. Oh, and he adopts the giant worm monster as a pet, and names it "Photoshop".
• Freefall makes repeated mentions of Dr. Bowman, some manner of programming, computational, and biochemical genius (in that he designed the brain maps for the setting's Uplifted Animals and, unexpectedly, its robots) who is also implied to be incredibly secretive and stubborn—there are over 10,000 false identities claiming to be him. That's weird, but that's not why he's crazy awesome. We're finally introduced to him, and he turns out to be an uplifted chimpanzee. He's kept in an isolated base at the south pole of planet Jean, has a shock collar attached to him, has his own "tantrum room" to vent his frustrations, and is considered so dangerous that he requires toxic gas, barbed wire, and capture drones to contain. It turns out that these are entirely necessary, as not only does he have a bit of an ego but he proves both clever and dexterous enough to pick a high-security metal door inside 30 seconds and hack a coffee machine so he can back-talk the base's commander. In spite of this, he happily offers to wear the shock collar so Florence doesn't feel threatened by his species' notoriously uncouth behavior, and when the base commander tries to take Florence back (her presence alone is causing a Gambit Pileup), Dr. Bowman holds himself hostage so that he can take a moment talk to Florence, and it's implied he's held himself hostage before. Wow.
• In Wily's Defense gives us the one and only Freeze Man! To name a few things, his first line in the comic is "Hello, ground! Nice to see you again!", he's hilariously violent for the sole reason that he's just plain insane, Satan lives in his head, he constantly refers to himself as "Batman", and he's aware that he's both in a TV show and a webcomic.
  Heat Man: Alright. As a token of my awesomeness, I'm going to give you twenty seconds to answer my questions. 1) Who in the name of ME are you? 2) In what way are you NOT a complete Me-damn fairy? And most importantly... 3) Why are you not on your knees and bowing before my greatness? You have twenty seconds, lower being! Get a-answerin'.
  Freeze Man: Oi oi, just twenty? That seems like a very low amount of time to be "a-answerin'" your inquiries. 1) The name I am known by is BATMAN. 2) I don't say 'HEY! LISTEN!' every 3.1415 seconds! 3) Probably because I have a limited amount of poses, and so I don't have a 'bow down before your greatness' pose.
• Mob Ties: Sidney Burns and his booziness were what got this whole mess started, have continued to propel him through much of the story, and is actually a vital part of his character: the booze is self-medication to keep the trauma of several months being a prisoner of war from turning him into a rage-filled monster. Of course, there are a few side effects. Moreover, the guy frequents a bar called the Trainyard that is full of crossdressers (and not the pretty kind) because he likes the margaritas, throws bottles of beer with devastating accuracy to silence loud students in class, renamed an entire yakuza clan after a high school mascot, and improved his boxing skills by training with a giant panda. Oh, and he often communicates via puppet.
• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja:
  • Start with Dr. McNinja, who runs a medical practice with a gorilla for a secretary, regularly fights hundred-foot-tall giants, punched out Death, air-surfed a robotic Dracula, battled laser-eyed cyborgs, saved the world with tennis, and massacred countless clones, Sky Pirates, and Mooks.
  • Then you have the supporting characters—his entire ninja family, his raptor-riding 12-year-old sharpshooter sidekick, his mentor the Ben Franklin clone, Dracula himself, the time-traveling ex-astronaut Mayor, his college superhero team and his motorcycle. The only person who isn't crazy awesome is his ex-girlfriend, and she once skyjacked an airplane while dressed up as an ancient Incan robot.
  • Dan McNinja, the Doctor's father, gets bonus points for lighting himself on fire because ninjas can't catch you when you're on fire. Frans Rayner also gets points for testing out that theory by lighting two of his mooks on fire.
    Minion: You're not trying to catch them, sir?
    Rayner: [sips his coffee] No. I guess they were right.
  • Having noticed his own reputation for creating such characters, the author finally said "screw it" and created King Radical. He's a king of the "cereal mascot" variety from an alternate universe called the Radical Land who became the leader of the Cumberland^note Population: 21,518 mafia after sealing away the evil unicorn king Sparklelord. He routinely rides his motorcycle over alligator pits, has trumpeters on skateboards announcing his presence, and eats only fresh, locally produced organics, prepared simply and with passion.
• How about Joe Chaos, from Another Gaming Comic? He's notorious for holding onto anything—anything, including cursed items—and using it against the DM later, such as using the slightly-broken rules for choking to give himself time against a poison attack with a cursed Necklace of Choking. On top of all the rest, he's also Crazy-Prepared, ridiculously intelligent, and received Training from Hell in the art of playing Dungeons & Dragons. His nickname comes from the time he used a cursed Gauntlet of Rust to completely negate a kyton—a demon that attacks with metal chains. Joe's name isn't even Joe. It's Irving.
• Robin DeSanto: Hyperactive speedster. War hero. Was elected to Congress three times, twice because she appealed to the desires of toy collectors and once because she flashed her boobs out a balcony. Tried to pass a bill to outlaw cancer. Once built a Rube Goldberg Device to get two men to bang each other. Tried to upstage Sarah Palin by hunting wolves with rocket launchers and machine guns while jumping out of a helicopter on a surfboard wearing nothing but a jetpack and a camouflage bikini. And later won a fight by shoving Faz up Sarah Palin's ass. If all that doesn't qualify her, than the definition is clearly broken.

Web Original

• Thavian from Ash & Cinders is infamous for this. He does stuff like fake a limp to make his entrance that much cooler, summon a whiskey bottle out of thin air, make a rapidly-disintegrating copy of himself to tell an innkeep that he'll be arriving shortly; all the while asking him vague questions about childcare and if he has a wife who can breastfeed without actually going into any detail. He also wears objectively too many rings on one hand to the point where they "seem encrusted" onto his fingers, and wears a huge wolfskin cloak. yet he still manages to be effective and intimidating by being evil through his own ridiculousness.
• Assignment 2's Stanley Brown oh, so much. Swordfights with genetically-enhanced monkeys are pretty much par for the course. In a world which is almost logical and normal, he basically does whatever the hell he wants, ignoring anything remotely resembling sense.
• Economy Watch: Most of the characters are sort of weird and strange.
• Half-Life but the AI is Self-Aware: Dr. Coomer, who formed the Black Mesa Underground Boxing Ring, punches aliens to death, punches the top of a tank, and has numerous clones that he kills to grow stronger.
• Whateley Universe: Jade Sinclair, codename Generator . What has she not done? She has defeated opponents with her flying Hello Kitty makeup compact. She once defeated a guy in power armor who was holding her hostage by impaling herself on his knife. She took over part of a Syndicate hardsite by making everyone think she had turned dead thugs into zombies. She let a Mad Scientist experiment on her, including cutting her foot off! (She got better.) When she shouted, "People! I am not crazy! And the voice in my head agrees with me!" her friends laughed, because it's exactly true.
• Parody Janeway from SF Debris, a delusional, unstable, ruthless petty tyrant and would-be Mad Scientist who relies on advice from her shoulder spider, orders her crew (okay, just Harry) to be footstools, and is capable of succeeding through lunacy at things no sane person would even attempt. At one point, her master plan is to hijack the Borg Collective by being assimilated. And it works.
• Psycho Gecko, the main character from World Domination in Retrospect, may be evil, but he's evil in a bonkers way that makes it difficult for superheroes to fight him effectively. He hides lasers in potato peelers and makes rubber chicken grenades. He's not good at throwing knives, so he added explosives to them. He once brought a pineapple along on an attack because he wanted to know what it felt like to hit someone with a pineapple. By the end, he's used it to take down a helicopter.

Western Animation

• Principal Lewis from American Dad!. He's a drug lord principal who gets into fist-fights with dogs!
• Dr. Weird from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Deadly flying corn, having a child with a lawnmower (apparently "she was drunk, she didn't know what she was doing!"), the phone spiders, eyeball spiders, stealing someone's muscles to be strong, there's nothing this guy won't do in the name of science, much to his assistant's chagrin, and always making a big show out of his work.
  Dr. Weird: "It works! I am one can short of a six-pack!"
• Arcane: Jinx is practically a study into this. Since her introductory MV, she's been portrayed as crazy in a fun and awesome way. In contrast, Arcane delves into her childhood, showing a fairly normal girl called Powder and the traumatic experiences that created Jinx. Even when she does identify as Jinx, her unstable mental state is oftentimes played for tragedy or horror. Jinx's destructive antics, rather than just damaging property or non-sentient robots, has an actual body count, complete with funeral. Yet when Jinx spins up her mini-gun and starts shooting, the fandom still loves it.
• Batman: The Animated Series: The Joker, because he can't be mentioned enough times. "I should've picked the fat guy." Escaping a madhouse by riding a Christmas tree that was also a rocket right out through the roof, all while singing "Jingle bells, Batman smells"? Yup. And keep in mind this was his first scene in his first episode. Even more impressive is the Alternate Universe version of him that manages to remain crazy awesome while being completely calm after getting lobotomized!
• BoJack Horseman: Todd. Unlike the vast majority of the cast, he's just fine with who he is, doesn't have many hang-ups, and attracts all kinds of weirdness. Who else could click so well with Mr. Peanutbutter, change a documentary into a B-movie alien flick re-imagined as a box of bimonthly packaged snacks, host an impromptu party for a drug cartel, get away with copyright infringement when Disney sued him for making an unauthorized Disneyland theme park because they trademarked Disneyland with two I's, and reinvent himself as Toad Chavay, a guy so cool he can steal people's motorcycles?
• Franklin Sherman from The Critic is admired for being a wealthy businessman, his charity work, and for being a scholar, former governor, and Cabinet member, but he is completely nuts; he does and says the most random and crazy things, like gluing furniture to the ceiling, sticking a banana in his ear to feed the monkey that he claims lives inside his head, and claiming to be the first black female head of the Ku Klux Klan. According to his wife Eleanor he began acting like that the moment he had his first alcoholic beverage.
• Mayor West from Family Guy. The guy has a freakin' cat-launcher for crying out loud! He also went up into space and punched the constellation of Orion. Then there was the time he won back his wife from another mayor.
  Mayor West: The chair recognizes your face! (throws a chair at the other mayor's face)
• Gravity Falls:
  • Quentin Trembly, the eighth-and-a-half President of the United States. The guy declared war on pancakes, tried to ban pants, and appointed babies to the Supreme Court. He also cryogenically froze himself in peanut brittle... and it worked! He eventually leaves town by leaping onto a horse and riding it backwards.
  • Old Man McGucket. He's not just the self-declared local kook, he's also a Mad Scientist who builds things like a giant mechanical replica of a local lake monster.
• Hey Arnold!:
  • Curly, with the emphasis on crazy (as in, "This kid needs serious mental help" crazy). To elaborate, he once broke some animals out of a zoo. Alone. Just because he wanted to.
  • Chocolate Boy can be this, too. Apparently, he's spent so much time around chocolate that he can be used to literally sniff out Helga and Harold after they get separated following a tour at a chocolate factory (made all the more impressive, because this was several hours after the duo had been lost). Made funnier because he's literally put on a leash.
• Justice League Unlimited:
  • This version of The Question is a conspiracy nut who is an excellent detective perhaps because of his paranoia. He's also depicted as being highly eccentric; in one instance, he interrogated a man using a girly pop song, and then was later shown humming that same song while casually smashing through a glass door. By his own admission, he rummages through everyone's trash and believes the Girl Scouts of America are responsible for Crop Circles. When Batman recommends him for a major investigation, everyone at the League's fancy conference table groans. Upon being tortured:
    Interrogator: Tell me what you know!
    The Question: The plastic caps on the ends of shoelaces are called aglets. Their true purpose is sinister.
  • The DCAU's other Ditko creation is fairly awesome too. The Creeper has your basic superhuman strength, stamina, reflexes, etc. But while he's a good guy, what makes him a problem for other characters is that he is even crazier than the Joker. He is in fact the only person that the Joker refuses to fight.
    The Joker: HE'S A LUNATIC!
  • The Unlimited version of Toyman is about the only guy in that world that can beat the crap out of other supervillains with a yo-yo.
• Varrick from The Legend of Korra is a brilliant inventor and charming businessman... who decides his business partners with staring contests, hides from the law inside a taxidermized platypus bear, and comes up with new ideas by hanging upside down after eating chili peppers. He's also self-aware enough to recognize that he's likely to end up in jail one day, so he builds himself a super-comfy cell in the local prison. With a hang glider stored inside just in case a hole opens in one of the walls, somehow ^note Like one did in the finale of Book 2., and he can escape. By the time of Book 4, he's aware of how other people view him, and uses that to his advantage to pull off several Bavarian Fire Drills.
• The Mask. If it's not funny, he won't pull it off to beat the Villain of the Week. He is a Cloudcuckoolander who is very much like a little kid who just wants to have fun but he does a good job of being a superhero and his enemies are very afraid of him to the point of holding a meeting of how they should get rid of him only that they find out that he found out where they were hiding and he defeats all of them in a few seconds. The Mask is also powerful as well conjuring things out of thin air and uses them to defeat the supervillains that attack the city he lives in and protect the people who live in it as well and as a Troll he uses it to trick his enemies into thinking he is dead or defeated only to reveal himself at the last moment and defeats them in the end putting himself at the top showing that he is genuinely very smart despite behaving and acting like a kid and changes his appearances as well to fit any situations that is appropriate for it. His forms are brilliant in defeating his enemies while being hilarious at the same time which shows just how creative The Mask is with his insanity and his knowledge of pop culture showing why The Mask is very efficient with his job as a superhero.
• Motorcity: The Duke of Detroit. He has a tank that shoots limos. As in, it uses limos as ammo.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie: Major Cloudcuckoolander, tends to do most of the musical numbers, and is one of two characters with Medium Awareness. She can also pop up pretty much anywhere and break the rules of magic in the series through operating by inexplicable cartoon logic. To the point that there's an episode where Twilight decides to find out exactly how Pinkie's Pinkie-ness works, and by the end it seems the moral of the story is that there are things pony was not meant to know. "Sweet and Elite" introduces us to her Party Cannon. It shoots parties. Not as the target, as ammo. In the two-parter "A Canterlot Wedding", she uses said Party Cannon as a weapon to beat the crap out of changelings! In "Secret of My Excess", she attempts to defend Sugarcube Corner from a rampaging dragon by throwing cakes at him.
  • Then there's Discord from the Season 2 premiere. He's Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation in everything but name and appearance (They even share the same voice actor in John de Lancie!). He creates cotton candy clouds that rain chocolate milk and at one point filled a glass with said chocolate milk (from the top down), drank the glass itself, and then casually tossed the still-glass-shaped chocolate milk over his shoulder, which caused it to explode which darkens the screen instead of creating a flash of light. He's pure chaos who wants to do nothing more than Troll ponies all day.
  • Cheese Sandwich from "Pinkie Pride" pretty much outdoes Pinkie Pie as party planning pony. That Party Cannon Pinkie has? He has a Party Tank. He's also got "Weird Al" Yankovic as a voice actor. His episode escalated into an all-out duel for the title of the ultimate party pony, before he revealed that he was anything but the Life of the Party until Pinkie inspired him.
  • Pinkie Pie's older sister Maud Pie (from the eponymous episode) continues the Pinkie trend with her obsession over rocks, her emotionless deadpan tone, her ability to throw rocks over the horizon that land like bombs going off, and pummeling house-sized boulders into rubble in under two seconds with her bare hooves. She is loved by a lot of the fanbase.
  • Starlight Glimmer could be considered a more serious version of this trope. As a villain, she's an emotionally unstable unicorn with the magical skill and talent to rival an alicorn, and her idea for revenge is to GO BACK IN TIME AND STOP TWILIGHT FROM EVER MEETING HER FRIENDS. (Keep in mind that such level of time travel magic is something established to have been pretty much impossible before Starlight showed up, so she basically INVENTED TIME TRAVEL for the sake of vengeance.) Even after her reformation, she still has some of these moments, including impulsively switching the cutie marks of the royal sisters, thereby forcing them to walk a day in the other's shoes and gain a better appreciation for one another. Also she sort of created Daybreaker.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • The title characters don't mess around when it comes to finding something to do during summer vacation:
    Isabella: You built a roller coaster through downtown! You made giant tree house robots - you traveled through time, for crying out loud! Twice!
  • Dr. Doofenshmirtz was mentored by one "Professor Destructicon" ("Kevin to his friends"), who plotted to set fire to the sun. Redundant, as Doofenshmirtz points out, but ambitious.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power has Entrapta, a Genius Ditz engineer with No Social Skills who builds armies of sentient robots for fun, is the only one on the entire planet to successfully reverse-engineer the First Ones's technology, and manages to reform Hordak through The Power of Love simply by virtue of being the only one who sees him as anything other than a Bad Boss Evil Overlord. Her Prehensile Hair also means she's impossible to imprison. And when she's sent to Beast Island, a place that's considered a death sentence, she builds herself a Mini-Mecha and survives there for months while studying its unique ecosystem and technology.
• The Space Pirate Hondo Ohnaka from Star Wars: The Clone Wars has earned this as of late. Not only does he have the balls to snark off to not just Dooku, not just Grievous, but also Darth fucking Maul, he just so happens to fight off droids not with a blaster...but with a sword.
• Total Drama:
  • Izzy, is an undisputed fan-favorite character specifically because of her crazy antics and fun-loving attitude. Her cute design and well-intended personality (she does sometimes cause harm to other characters, but it’s typically unintentional) add a lot to this too.
  • Shawn is a Crazy Survivalist and Conspiracy Theorist who believes the Zombie Apocalypse is real and inevitable, but also has all the insane physical abilities of an Action Survivor to go with his paranoia.
• Transformers:
  • The Junkions from G1, such as Wreck-Gar, are actually something of a subversion of this. The fact that they speak by quoting television and radio broadcasts from Earth makes them sound positively insane- but once you learn to decipher that, they're mostly normal 'bots. It's basically just a funny accent.
    • Wreck-Gar in Transformers: Animated, on the other hand, plays it straight. He's a garbage truck with the brain of a toddler who's voiced by Weird Al Yankovic. He switches sides every five seconds based on who he's been talking to, and is very dangerous because he can pull almost anything out of the trash compactor on his back. Thankfully, he wants to be a good guy. He's just a little confused as to who the good guys really are.
      Wreck-Gar: I am Wreck-Gar! I Dare To Be Stupid!
  • Also Wheeljack, a mad scientist who creates weapons of mass destruction and transforming robot dinosaurs, and he's a good guy. Said robotic dinosaurs are crazy themselves, being fire-breathing robot dinosaurs that transform into robots, have no respect for the main hero, don't care what they smash, and they're also good guys.
  • Beast Wars: Uprising has Bisk, who thinks he's a video-game character, and treats life accordingly. Megatron hires him to find a top-secret research facility and steal something for him. And Bisk does. In a cardboard box. Then he goes on to survive a full-blown robo-zombie apocalypse, just thinking it's a storyline expansion and rolling with it.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Hunter Gathers. The man faked a sex change to avoid capture, for one.^note For the record the sex change wasn't fake. He actually had a sex change operation. Twice. He's also Brock's mentor, and a truly badass one at that.
    Hunter: ...Are you still ready for anything?
    Brock: Ye-
    Hunter: Hu-Wrong! *bashes Brock's kneecap with a baton* Lesson number one, trust no one. The second God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them. Get up, damn you!
  • Then there's Hunter's boss... General Timothy Treister. General Treister outstrips Hunter Gathers by miles: the season 4 finale has Treister pretending to think he was a 'hulk' to root out traitors in his organization. He then reveals that he engineered the circumstances for Hunter Gather's defection to see if he had the balls to replace Treister. And he tops it off by revealing he has cancer, and launching himself into space in a rocket wearing nothing but an American flag and a sticky note that says 'Fix It!', addressed to alien races that may be able to cure him. Then we get All This And Gargantua-2, where not only did Treister survive getting launched into space, but he picked up gamma rays that cured his cancer and turned him into an actual hulk.
    I want notes, lists and answers by the time I finish this here Juicy-a-Box! WARNING: I am Thirst-ay! And it is Fruit Punch! And it is Delicious!
  • We can't ignore the two links at the opposite end of the OSI Master-Apprentice Chain. Brock Samson and Hank Venture may not be at Hunter's and Treister's level yet, but they've had their moments throughout the series. To go into detail:
    • Brock once killed two pirates assigned to guard him when he was captured using his butt and entered a moving car about to flatten him by doing the Tai Chi Single Whip maneuver and then jumping into the car, crushing her into the seat and taking control of the car himself.
    • And then there's the music that the fandom associates with his ass-kicking moments. It's an epic piece by J.G. Thirwell and it's called Assclamp.
    • His crowning achievement has to be this. Keep in mind that the guy he's talking to is Treister's son.
  • Hank once tried to join S.P.H.I.N.X., and aced every test they gave him (keep in mind that all of them were tricks to get him out of their hair). Tie him up? He's been in that situation a lot. Try to erase his mind? He catches on and wears a tinfoil hat to block it. And that's not even getting into the time he saved his dad and Sgt. Hatred in Venture Libre by defeating a squad of humanoid animals with all the strengths of their animal sides in hand to hand combat while high on coffee beans, wearing a Native American bat mask and a cape made of palm leaves.

Real Life

• Joshua Norton, AKA the "Emperor of these United States and Protector of Mexico":
  • Norton was celebrated in the mid-to-late 1800s as one of these by the people of San Francisco, and is generally considered the patron saint of lovable crazies everywhere. The residents of San Francisco treated "Norton I" as if he really were an Emperor, and some 30,000 people (at a time when San Francisco's population was less than 235,000) attended his funeral.
  • Norton was once arrested in order to commit him to involuntary treatment for a mental disorder. The arrest outraged the citizens and sparked scathing editorials in the newspapers and the police chief eventually released him, reasoning that he may be a wackjob, but he wasn't dangerous, which was more than the chief could say for his peers. Norton granted an "official pardon" to the arresting officer. From that day until his death, the San Francisco police saluted him whenever he passed.
  • He successfully predicted, and ordered, the creation of a League of Nations, and explicitly forbade any conflict between religious groups based solely on their differing beliefs.
  • Once, during an anti-Chinese riot he knelt on the street between a rioting mob and the Chinese ghetto, bowed his head and recited the Lord's Prayer until the rioters dispersed.
  • Additionally, he issued his own currency. Legitimate business accepted this currency!
  • He even had a memorable appearance in The Sandman (1989) where he gets the better of Desire of the Endless, essentially a god of mind control, through the clarity of his madness.
• Nikola Tesla is the Mad Scientist. Works include: the Tesla Coil, the AC Polyphase Electric Motor, a frickin DEATH RAY! and being obsessed with pigeons. Mark Twain frequently volunteered to test his inventions and offered to help sell his Death Ray. Words can't describe how much awesomeness is contained in that pairing.
• Wesley Willis. Was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and wrote some truly inspired songs, such as "Birdman Kicked My Ass", "Kill That Jerk", and "Rock & Roll McDonalds".
• The legendary Unipiper, a Portland street performer who rides around on a unicycle wearing a kilt and a Darth Vader costume and playing "The Imperial March" on bagpipes that shoot fire. He's basically a real-life version of the Doof Warrior.
• The Chinese Cavalry of 1967. Shooting when riding horses is okay for any cowboy, but how about firing AK and RPD Machineguns? When charging a MUSHROOM CLOUD? Go watch the last minutes of Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. It's filmed by those cavalrymen themselves.
• Henry Darger, in much the same vein as Wesley Willis and Emperor Joshua Norton. By all accounts, he lived a very tragic life, spending much of his childhood as a virtual slave in a horrible asylum, but escaped at age 16 and spent nearly the next sixty years of his life (most of it spent locked up in his room) working on his masterpiece, the 15,145 page In the Realms of the Unreal, which he wrote out by hand. He also produced many incredibly beautiful (and sometimes disturbing) portraits of children in gorgeous natural scenery that he also drew out by hand, and despite the occasionally violent scenes depicted therein, he was by all accounts a lovely neighbor and tenant and never harmed a living soul.
• Ivar Haglund, a Seattle businessman, was unquestionably out of his damn mind and very successful at it. He parlayed a third-rate aquarium into a wildly successful chain of restaurants, owned one of the local TV stations (and took advantage of that fact to give himself a show singing Norwegian folk songs for an hour each week), and bought the Smith Tower (at one point, the tallest building west of the Mississippi River). When the Seattle Building Department took issue with a salmon-shaped windsock he flew from the tower's flagpole, he sent them protest letters in the form of pun-loaded poetry. His publicity stunts were legendary; having a wrestling match between a retired boxer and an octopus, putting a baby harbor seal in a baby carriage and taking it to see Santa, taking advantage when a train car full of syrup sprung a leak in front of his restaurant by racing out with pancakes, encouraging his patrons to feed the seagulls, running for office and getting elected as a joke, and peppering his advertisements with a Hurricane of Puns. He died very wealthy, and the chain of restaurants bearing his name is still thriving.
• Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Highlights of his life include his expulsion from the SAS because he blew up a dam in a Wiltshire village as a protest against 20th Century Fox (adding trouble to the already Troubled Production of Doctor Dolittle), hacking off his own frostbitten fingers with a power tool, forgetting his own frostbitten toe and leaving it beside his bathtub when it came off, discovering the motherfucking lost city of Ubar, and reaching the peak of Everest in his sixties, but perhaps the best has to be running 7 marathons, in 7 days, on 7 continents, only a few months after a heart attack and bypass operation—and, with doctor's orders not to let his heart go over 130 beats per minute, he forgot his heart monitor.
• Adrian Carton de Wiart. Just... Adrian Carton de Wiart. If you read up on his involvement in the Boer War and both World Wars, you'd see how one man could define "crazy awesome". To put short and simple, this British soldier received many injuries in various battles, including a missing left eye (resulting in a badass eyepatch) and left arm. It was reported that he once bit one of his own finger off when doctors where unable to decide whether or not to amputate it. Even his capture by Italian soldiers during WWII shows some badassery, seeing how he swam a mile to the Italian shore after his plane was shot down one mile from shore, despite of being in his sixties and missing an arm. He even once stated that a battle during the Boer War (in which he lost his eye) was "exhilarating fun". And this is only scratching the surface of his crazy awesomeness.
• Hunter S. Thompson: Gonzo Journalism simply wouldn't have existed if not his willingness to do bizarre—even insane—things to himself and occasionally others. This mostly meant drugs, but it also meant things like going around in a bar waving a cattle prod and yelling at people to get out of his way.
• Italy's infamous Gabriele D'Annunzio. On the crazy side, he (supposedly) had his lower ribs removed to be able to use his mouth when masturbating (among his many antics). On the awesome side, his record during World War I: he charged at an Austro-Hungarian trench line while wearing a Badass Cape and with a revolver in each hand (yes, Italian military issue revolvers of the era were underpowered, but he remained the only one to actually do it) and a combat knife in his mouth, in the Bakar's Mockery he took three MAS (speedboats with torpedoes strapped on them) in the most well-defended harbor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, fired torpedoes at the moored ships (that survived only because the Austro-Hungarian admiralty had placed torpedo nets everywhere just in case) and left mocking messages in bottles (in the attempt to convince the ships into giving chase and be torpedoed by a waiting force as they left the bay of the port. The Austro-Hungarians didn't fall for it), and when the Austro-Hungarians carried a demonstrative bombing raid on Milan he personally led a raid on Vienna and dropped propaganda leaflets (a quarter with a poetic message written by D'Annunzio itself that was considered a war crime and so wasn't translated, and the others with a more understandable message that could be resumed in "You've lost the war, you're fighting against the whole world, surrender while you still can and before we change our minds and return with bombs") to prove that they could bomb the Austrian capital itself but were too civilized to actually do it. Oh, and he couldn't actually fly a plane, he was there merely because he had the idea.
• Admiral Charles "Swede" Momsen of the United States Navy:
  • While studying decompression sickness for the Navy, Momsen devised the first mixed-gas diving rigs (in this case, oxygen/helium) and through trial-and-error, developed the first protocols for safe mixed-gas diving. That's awesome enough, but the crazy part came from testing the mixtures on himself. He methodically and repeatedly gave himself the bends to research ways to avoid getting the bends.
  • In 1939, he rescued the survivors of a disabled submarine, the USS Squalus (SS-192). Rescuing 33 sailors trapped 70 meters below the surface is amazing enough, but that could have never happened without two critical pieces of equipment: the diving rescue bell, and the Submarine Escape Lung (an early rebreather); both of which Momsen, himself, invented. He also recovered the submarine itself, which was repaired, renamed Sailfish, and went on to fight in the Pacific during World War II.
  • In 1943, the Navy was having problems with the Mark 14 torpedo, which would often fail to explode when it impacted a ship's hull. The Navy turned to then-Admiral Swede Momsen to lead an investigation into the defective torpedoes. Momsen did so by live-firing armed torpedoes at targets, and then he personally dove in to recover the unexploded ones so experts could take them apart and figure out where the problem was. This bears repeating: as a flag officer, Momsen dove into the water to recover torpedoes with armed, high-explosive warheads that he was fully aware were equipped with defective fuses.
• Jackie Chan does all his own stunts. This includes things like running down the side of a building^note Who Am I?, jumping from a building to a rope ladder hanging from a helicopter^note Police Story 3: Supercop, and a sideways roll over a spinning circular saw^note Mr. Nice Guy. There is a reason he has stated that no insurance company in the world will give him coverage.
• Julie d'Aubigny, also known as Mademoiselle Maupin, was a 17th century noble-born bisexual fugitive swordswoman and opera singer. Married off to a much older man at an early age, she called it quits on that lifestyle by eloping with her fencing instructor after he killed a man in a duel and spent time on the roads with him singing opera and fighting duels in local villages. Her favorite activities as an adult were drinking, dueling, singing opera, and seducing every attractive man and woman she could get her hands on, frequently in that order. In a time when homosexuality was punishable by death in many places, she dealt with people who had a problem with her sexuality by either giving zero shits or challenging them to a duel, which she almost invariably won. She once accepted a duel from three different noblemen after they saw her kissing a girl they liked at a ball and beat all three of them at once.
• Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of The Official Monster Raving Loony Party, an actual political party in the UK that has Cloud Cuckoo Lander candidates who run for elections to this day.
• Screaming Lord Sutch has nothing on Lord Buckethead, who runs for office in a mock Darth Vader costume and claims to be an intergalactic space lord. He's run against Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Theresa May, and won a higher percentage of the vote each time.
  • His party platform includes:
    • Free bicycles to be provided to the general public.
    • Demolishing Birmingham to make room for a spaceport.
    • Nationalising Adele.
    • A firm commitment to rebuilding the UK's Trident weapons system followed by "an equally firm commitment, privately, not to build it. They're secret submarines, so no one will ever know. It's a win-win."
    • Legalizing the hunting of fox hunters.
    • The founding of new grammar schools on the principles of 1) better funding for teachers, 2) increased facilities for children, especially playing fields, and 3) having unruly children blasted into space, "with the parents provided with a lovely fruit basket, by way of consolation or celebration, depending on the child."
    • Having the racist TV presenter Katie Hopkins exiled to the Phantom Zone.
  • In 2017, his party, the Gremloids, actually beat The Official Monster Raving Loony Party in the general election against Theresa May, winning him enough votes to appear on stage with all the other candidates, including a visibly displeased May. Lord Buckethead celebrated by dabbing onstage.
• French climber Alain Robert climbs tall buildings as a hobby, including most of the world's tallest high rises. Without any safety whatsoever. He's regularly arrested as a result of his antics. The most incredible thing is that the man suffers from permanent vertigo. A condition he got as a teenager, by falling from a height of 15 meters and surviving. Twice in the same year.
• It takes a bit of a brave person to fly a $1500 light aircraft in the 1940's. It takes a bit of a brave and crazy person to fly a light aircraft for the military as a spotter. It takes a bit of a brave, crazy, and awesome person to have the sheer gall to strap a bunch of infantry bazookas to that tiny, fragile spotter plane and go out hunting Tiger tanks on his own and succeeding at it. All without taking a single hit. This summary cannot begin to do justice in regards to the actions of one Charles Carpenter, AKA "The Mad Major," "The Lucky Major," and "Bazooka Charlie," who only had this to say:
  "Word must be getting around to watch out for Cubs with bazookas on them. Every time I show up now they shoot with everything they have. They never used to bother Cubs. Bazookas must be bothering them a bit."

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