Eccentric Townsfolk

Mrs. Krabappel: Let us take our case directly to the townspeople.
Chalmers: Oh yeah, that'll be real productive. Who do you want to talk to first: the guy in the bumblebee suit, or the one with the bone through his hair?
Sideshow Mel: My opinions are as valid as the next man's!

— The Simpsons, "Grade School Confidential"

These are the inhabitants of Quirky Town, a selection of several Stock Characters. They're goofy, quirky, friendly, and ultimately harmless. There will be one or two "sane" people (protagonists included) and at least one sourpuss and a Tall, Dark, and Snarky townsperson to complain about this idyllic place. And it is idyllic. It would take a town of Stepford Smiler clones to approach the non-existent level of crime and unemployment these towns have.

If they are related, they are a Quirky Household. Wacky Homeroom is the school equivalent.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Barakamon, uptight, neurotic calligrapher Handa must deal with an island village full of laid-back eccentrics.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: In Diamond is Unbreakable and JoJolion, the residents of Morioh, despite being in a Dangerously Garish Environment, are eccentric with their own routines, even while most of the townsfolk possess Stands.
• The residents of Kinkan/Gold Crown Town in Princess Tutu, who are all unaware characters in a fairytale and are comprised of quirky people and anthropomorphic animals.

Films — Animated

• The lemurs of Madagascar, led by King Julien XIII, self-proclaimed king of the lemurs, blah, blah, blah, hooray everybody!
• The monsters in Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas, as introduced in the opening song.
  Child Monsters: Tender lumplings everywhere, life's no fun without a good scare!
  Parent Monsters: That's our job, but we're not mean, in our town of Halloween!

Films — Live-Action

• Better Off Dead: The inhabitants of the protagonist's hometown Greendale are a goofy, quirky but not-so-friendly version (though not nearly to a Town with a Dark Secret level).
• The residents of the village Sandford in Hot Fuzz. It's a dark form of this, however; many of the townsfolk do have their stereotypes, or at least roles, but it turns out that they're actually murdering anyone who threatens the town's rural image, including other Eccentric Townsfolk. But... it's for the greater good!
• The inhabitants of the town in King of Hearts are escaped patients from the local mental institution and qualify as this trope.
• In many Laurel and Hardy pictures, townsfolk tend to exhibit some unusual behaviour.
  Laurel: Which way is the basement?
  Receptionist: Down the stairs.

• Spoofed in The Tall Guy when Dexter is hired to play one, and is told to give a simple one-line greeting in a mysterious manner.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • Any town you like in Lancre, a rural location remote from just about anywhere. This corner of the Disc has towns called Bad Ass, Mad Stoat, Slice...
  • Many settlements in remote corners of the Sto Plains, like Scrote and Twoshirts, would also fit the general vibe.
• In Nora Roberts' Nothern Lights, the town Lunacy, high up in Alaska is inhabited with independent eccentric characters.
• Whateley Universe: Some of the quirky residents might be a bit quirkier than you'd like in Dunwich, New Hampshire, just a mile or two from the Superhero School Whateley Academy.

Live-Action TV

• There are a few quirky townspeople in Eureka, including the cloned set of twins. (Or would that make then quatruplets?)

• The Golden Girls has the people of St. Olaf, Minnesota. We never actually see the town ourselves, but plenty of locals drop by Miami, and what they all manage to prove is that Rose seems to be the most clear-headed and intelligent person who ever lived there.

• Played with in The League of Gentlemen; the people of Royston Vasey are certainly eccentric, but very, very far from harmless.

• My Name Is Earl takes place in Camden County, where everyone is either a crook, stupid, crazy, or all of the above.
• Pretty much everyone in the unnamed Vermont town Newhart takes place in apart from Dick Loudon qualifies.

• The Vicar of Dibley: The inhabitants of Dibley, with the possible exception of the Vicar and David Horton. What's disturbing is that the producers report having multiple letters from people saying that this was exactly like their own village.

Podcasts

• The Adventure Zone: Balance has Refuge, whose inhabitants include an old Prophetess who bakes magic scones and talks like Bjork, an Elemental deputy sheriff whose voice is supplied by a talking bird, and a diamond miner who is inexplicably convinced the boys are Gerblins.

• Wooden Overcoats is set in the small village (that is very nearly a town) of Piffling Vale. With the sole exception of Georgie, literally everyone is a bit of weirdo, ranging from Rudyard, a misanthrope who talks to a mouse, to his sister Antigone, a Creepy Mortician who literally brings shadows with her everywhere, to their rival Eric, who is such an Ace that it stretches into Parody Sue territory and beyond.

Radio

• The Navy Lark has the UK armed forces as being populated solely by Eccentric Forces Personnel.

• Karl Pilkington of The Ricky Gervais Show et al tells a series of stories about the people who lived around where he grew up that consistently amaze or bewilder Ricky and Steve. They include:
  • Karl's own family: his mother, who made him stay home from school when it was very windy and used to shave the family cat so it would be easier to keep clean; his dad, a cheapskate and grocery thief who once removed a mentally challenged young man ("a Forrest Gump") from his taxi and left him in a wheelie bin; his brother, who impregnated many girls and was discharged from the army after driving a tank to the store to buy cigarettes; and two aunts: Auntie Nora, who once farted for five straight minutes and wanted her back yard astroturfed so she wouldn't have to take care of it, and "Uncle" Hazel, a lesbian with a haunted house.
  • "Uncle Alf," a friend of Karl's dad who slept in an inflatable lifeboat (even though he had a mattress in the back of his van) and had two televisions, one of which had no sound and the other no picture, so he would tune them both to the same channel to watch something. He was also a cobbler who would overdo shoes to the point that they became Tricked-Out Shoes.
  • Guys with nicknames like Jimmy the Hat and Tattoo Stan.
  • A family that kept a horse in their living room. The mother was apparently a fat, ugly woman with "big eyelids" who worked on a sex hotline, and had a child who started off cute but became ugly by the age of three and used to chase cars.
  • A family who used to babysit Karl and had "a cat that was dead violent." When they wanted to control Karl, they would get him to take a nap on the sofa and put the cat on his chest, and when he woke up he would be afraid to move.
  • Ms. Piggy, a fat woman who rode a three-wheeled bike with her husband in the basket. She was mean to him, so Karl's dad impersonated a policeman to scare her into leaving him alone.
  • Two boys at school who both had abnormally big heads and webbed hands. (Karl explains that he grew up near a chemical plant.) They weren't related and didn't hang out together because that would be "too obvious."
  • The mother of a friend of Karl's who was obsessed with cleanliness. When Karl would come over to play video games, rather than let him in, she would send him around to his friend's bedroom window and he would stand outside and look in.
  • Shorts Man, a guy who wore ridiculously tight short-shorts and walked with big strides in the hopes that his genitals would pop out and he could flash people.
  • Scruffy Sandra, a woman who never bathed and was constantly carrying garbage bags with her. As a result, nobody wanted to be near her, which Karl claims lead to her never being sick.
  • A friend of Karl's dad named Benny who had a pet monkey, and he had to hit it because he thought it was coming onto his wife. He also apparently lived with a Drag Queen.
  • Even at the time of the show's recording, Karl's neighbors included a "madwoman" next door who thinks his name is Clive and an amateur beekeeper whose dog got stung 150 times, and his parents live next to an old woman whose mother was a witch.

Theatre

• In The Music Man, the townspeople of River City, Iowa all turn out to greet Harold Hill when he arrives, if only to make it known that the sourpuss type is their default.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: In each of the main cities, the civilians generally go on with their lives as they see fit, participating in passerby conversation while some adapt to some aspects by getting shrouded in.

• Most of the denizens of Tassing in Pentiment have their share of quirks, especially the elderly.

• All of the inhabitants of St. Mystere in Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Not only do they have "unusual" personality quirks, they have an unhealthy obsession with riddles. This is because they're all robots designed as part of a test to see who's worthy of getting the treasure and Flora.

Webcomics

• In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Bob's girlfriend Jean has commented in frustration (and more or less accurately) that she appears to be the only sane person in town — casually lumping Bob himself in with the Eccentric Townsfolk.

Western Animation

• Amphibia: The citizens of Wartwood are generally a rather odd and quirky bunch. We've got the sleazy mayor and his toady, a Cloudcuckoolander woodsmith, a one-eyed vagrant, a chef with artificial limbs who makes crappy food, a baker who dotes on his Creepy Child daughter, a snobby journalist, an outdoors survivalist, a perpetually spaced-out hairdresser, and a gardener who only ever says "I grow tulips!", just to name a few.
• The titular town from Gravity Falls, to be sure. There's ditzy waitress and Crazy Cat Lady Lazy Susan, comically macho lumberjack Manly Dan Corduroy, and hillbilly Mad Scientist and self-declared "local kook" Old Man McGucket. Justified due to the fact that the Laser-Guided Amnesia the townsfolk are subjected to whenever they encounter something they shouldn't leads to mental deterioration.

• Ponyville in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. The locals include a socially-awkward bookworm from the big city who's trying to learn how to make friends, a manic-depressive (mostly manic) baker who loves to throw parties and occasionally defies known physics, a melodramatic fashion designer who loves to make Gem-Encrusted Pimped Out Dresses, a painfully-shy animal lover who can stare down dragons and cockatrices when provoked, a hot-headed apple farmer with a nice hat and a huge extended family, and a boisterous stunt flier with rainbow-colored hair, and those are just the Mane characters.
  Twilight Sparkle: All the ponies in this town are crazy!
• Ready Jet Go!: While the Propulsion family are obviously a Quirky Household, the people living in Boxwood Terrace are all equally eccentric in their own ways. We've got:
  • A perfectionist Child Prodigy who idolizes Neil Armstrong and fears going to space.
  • A science-fiction geek who is obsessed with Commander Cressida and writes fanfiction.
  • A geeky little kid who tries to be a detective.
  • A girly Asian Airhead.
  • A DSA scientist whose past is very mysterious, but she says that she felt like an alien when she was younger, hinting at this.
  • Another DSA scientist with an obsession for coffee.
  • A robotics engineer who still loves Commander Cressida.
  • Another scientist who always speaks very bombastically, is the judge/referee of every single contest in the neighborhood, and is somewhat of an Extreme Doormat. He also treats mini-golf as Serious Business.
• The Simpsons: The inhabitants of Springfield are, to a man, completely eccentric. In "Grade School Confidential", Edna Krabappel suggests they let the townspeople decide if it's okay for her and Principal Skinner to date despite working together. Superintendent Chalmers immediately shoots the idea down.
  Chalmers: Oh, yeah, that'll be real productive. Who do you wanna talk to first, uh, the guy in the bumblebee suit or the one with the bone through his hair?
  Sideshow Mel: My opinions are as valid as the next man's!
• And of course South Park, a town where one of the most normal residents has a talking piece of crap as a best friend.
• The Unstoppable Yellow Yeti has the citizens of Winterton. They live in constant paranoia of monsters that they drive off by yodeling, drink pinesap from boots, and have numerous Loony Laws, among other things. Even among individuals, they're all CloudCuckoolanders to varying degrees, from the baker who talks to her own pies to their ridiculously uptight Obstructive Bureaucrat of a mayor.

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