Saved by a Terrible Performance

You have something you enjoy doing. Everybody does. However, you are the worst at what you enjoy doing. Whether it is cooking, singing, or driving just about anything, you are often the last person people would turn to for these tasks. Then a situation arrives where you are the only person able to take care of the problem. Why? Because your terrible performance is the only solution.

This is moments where somebody being bad at something ends up ultimately being played off as a good thing. Maybe their horrible skill ends up pleasing a monster whereas a skilled professional only pisses it off even more. This may result in them choosing to never get better afterward so as to keep it as a powerful weapon in the future or ask to get more involved in public performances if they think they are good at it in the first place.

Can often overlap with Spanner in the Works depending on the circumstances. See also Chekhov's Skill, when someone is established at being good at an activity that later becomes important. Compare to Blessed with Suck. Contrast Springtime for Hitler, which is when a character tries to suck at something for benefit, only to succeed instead, and Do Well, But Not Perfect where a character deliberately performs well enough but not the best. A compare and contrast with Crisis Makes Perfect, for when a character succeeds in performing an action he's failed at previously Just in Time to save the day.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• In Nisekoi, the plan for sabotaging Marika's wedding to save her from a forced marriage includes using Kosaki's Lethal Chef status to give everybody food poisoning.
• In Doraemon, Gian's Dreadful Musician status is often used as a weapon.

Comic Books

• Asterix: Cacofonix's Dreadful Musician status is sometimes used to save the day (to his chagrin, as he's convinced he has real talent that's wasted on the village barbarians):
  • In Asterix And The Normans, he ends up teaching a bunch of Vikings the meaning of fear (they aren't afraid to die or get hurt, but the thought of sitting through another of his recitals turns their legs to jelly).
  • In Asterix And The Magic Carpet, his singing is so bad it causes rain to start falling. An Indian mage hears of this and asks for his help to fight a drought in the Ganges.
  • In Asterix And The Secret Weapon, his singing is the last straw for the female Roman legionaries, who refuse to fight any longer.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: In "The Call of C'Russo", a beautiful singer's voice will wake up an Eldritch Abomination that will destroy the world. Donald, who is actually a terrible singer, receives a potion that causes his voice to improve and wakes it up. Later, when his terrible voice returns, it's also what puts the monster back to sleep.

Film - Live-Action

• Jack Frost (1997): At the beginning of the movie, Ryan made his father some oats to eat as a snack. In the end, these oats are what melts Jack Frost because he added antifreeze, thinking it'd keep his father warm.
• At the end of The Seven Little Foys, the recently widowed Eddie Foy successfully defends himself and his children against prosecution for illegal entertainment by performing for the judge and convincing him that his family's act is so bad that it can't be entertainment.

Literature

• Good Omens: Newton Pulsifer helps save the world by being really bad with technology.
• In a Warrior Cats short-story featured in the "Battles of the Clans" field guide, Mistystar is seen training a group of apprentices in water combat. Rushpaw, the smallest, is having trouble swimming due to the water temperature and her size. After driving everyone crazy with her problems, she accidentally splashes water everywhere when they're tasked with ambushing Mistystar. She thinks she ruined everything when Mistystar admits that the water splash made her think the apprentices were on the other side of the stream — and that it could be considered a brand new battling tactic.

Live-Action TV

• Legasov pulls this off on accident in Chernobyl, when he directly confronts Charkov (a high-ranking KGB member) to release Khomyuk from custody, despite Scherbina trying to be diplomatic about it. This actually saves Legasov and gets Khomyuk released; Legasov's performance was so bad that he came off as too much of a "naive idiot" (in Scherbina's words) to be a threat.

Video Games

• In Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Ezio goes undercover as a Florentine Wandering Minstrel to infiltrate the Sultan's palace during an official gathering of Istanbul's elites. His vocal talents are atrocious and everyone at the palace tries to chase him away — but this is just perfect for his disguise, because Florentine minstrels as a whole are known to be terrible singers, both in-universe and to the players of the previous games.
• Subverted in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: B.J. Blazkowicz's Bad "Bad Acting" gets criticized by Adolf Hitler, so long as he follows the actual lines in the script. However, B.J's fierce Enforced Method Acting in the action scene impresses Hitler so much that he accepts B.J's position for the job, executing the last remaining actor in the troupe.
• In Death Road to Canada, Irritating characters (or characters with a supremely low Wit and Attitude stat) have the ability to annoy bandits, traders, NPCs, etc. This often ends poorly. However, doing this a third time in a row yields tremendous benefits (indicated by glowing exclamation marks).

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: Sheen is noted as being a Dreadful Musician, yet in "Attack of The Twonkies", his horrible singing ends up proving to be a lullaby to the twonkies whereas everybody else's singing is what causes them to attack in the first place.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: Whenever Numbuh 4 does his homework, it is always one hundred percent incorrect. However, Numbuh 5 manages to weaponize Numbuh 4's homework twice in the series. First time is when the Delightful Children From Down The Lane hire some kids to steal everybody's homework. Numbuh 4's is the first one the teacher looks at which gets the delightful children in trouble (Numbuh 4 attempts to call them out on it, but Numbuh 5 stops him). Second time is against a weredog who feasts on homework. Numbuh 5 takes Numbuh 4's and feeds it to the weredog, giving it a stomachache (bad homework tastes terrible to weredogs).
• Danny Phantom: Tucker is likewise a terrible singer, as shown in the episode "Fanning the Flames". But late in that episode, Danny weaponizes Tucker's bad singing to break Ember's musical hypnotic spell over not just their hometown of Amity Park but the entire world, as the concert he interrupted was being broadcast worldwide.
• DuckTales (2017): Due to his voice, it is commonly known to many that Donald Duck is a terrible singer, yet his bad singing ends up being what saves his family from being eaten by a giant plant monster in "The Town Where Everyone Was Nice". His terrible singing was too much for the plant to take, killing it.
• In King of the Hill, Peggy is on the verge of being jailed in Mexico for kidnapping charges thanks to an unfortunate misunderstanding. She is advised to defend herself in Spanish; her translations are so horrible that the judge becomes convinced it was a mistake and acquits her.
• Invoked in a cartoon featured in House of Mouse titled "Mickey and the Goat Man". Mortimer promises the Goat Man to give them a spectacular show if the Goat Man lets him, Mickey, and Minnie go. Minnie, however, tells Mickey to perform lousily, which Mickey does by purposefully screwing up his parts in the performance. In the end, the Goat Man lets Mickey and Minnie go saying that he keeps the things he likes having loved Mortimer's performance but hated Mickey's.
• Kim Possible:
  • In the episode "Bonding", Ron gets stuck to Mr. Barkin and is forced to attend Pixie Scouts with him. Ron even has to take part in squirrel calling. Unfortunately, his squirrel call is so awful, it scares the squirrels away. Then when the scouts are up against mutant wiener dogs, Ron's squirrel call is what tames them.
    Barkin: Amazing. The worst squirrel call I've ever heard turns out to be a mutant wiener dog call.
  • In "Hidden Talent", Kim has some difficulty with consistently hitting high notes. However, a dissonant attempt at a high note proves to be just the thing to shatter a wall of ice and enable her to escape Drakken's Death Trap. She does manage to pull off a flawless singing performance at the talent show afterwards.
• The Smurfs (1981): After Clumsy Smurf brings a fuzzle in the village and it's revealed to be an all-devouring scissiparous Explosive Breeder,^note As in, "it reproduces asexually by splitting itself in two, exponentially" the day is saved when it turns out the (hordes of) fuzzles enjoy Harmony Smurf's awful music, which he uses to lure the fluffy pink tide out of the village.
• Sonic Boom: In the episode "Sleeping Giant", a rock giant is attacking the town and Stick’s horrible singing actually helps put it to sleep.