The Hilarity of Hats

"Tarnish notte the majesty of my TOWER of HATS."

"What is it with these fucking tiny hats?"

— Lelouch, Code MENT

Hats as a clothing article were once a sign of social standing but are nowhere near as prominent as they used to be. Their unfamiliarity to the modern audience makes them a source of comedy.

This trope comes in two forms: silly hats or inexplicable obsession with hats.

Compare Hat Damage, which may result in hilarity. A cornerstone of the Brotherhood of Funny Hats. A distinctive hat will often be a character's Signature Headgear. A parody of the Hat of Authority is a common way of puncturing the fragile dignity of said authority.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. Dr. Zarkendorf is introduced wearing Space Clothes including a skullcap bearing a circular antennae for one of the new-fangled 'mobile telephones'. Alien invader D'Ork singles him out from the other humans by referring to Zarkendorf as, "The one in the silly hat!"

Film — Live-Action

• In Duck Soup, there is a sketch where Harpo and Chico mess with a lemonade stand owner by knocking his hat off and then swapping it around with their hats when he tries to pick it up and put it back on.
• El Dorado has a Running Gag concerning the other character's opinions of Mississippi's choice of headwear:
  Bull Harris: ...might have anyhow if I wasn't tryin' to figure out what that fella's got on his head.
  Mississippi: It's called a hat.
  Bull Harris: Well, I'll have to take your word for it.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: After several failed attempts to get Groot to bring him a prototype fin, Yondu gives Groot his Ravager badge and tells him to look for that symbol. Groot puts it on his head. Rocket explains that Groot thinks Yondu wants him to wear it as a hat, which Yondu denies.
  Groot: I am Groot.
  Rocket: He's relieved you don't want him to wear it as a hat.
  Groot: I am Groot.
  Rocket: He hates hats.
  Groot: I am Groot.
  Rocket: On anyone, not just himself.
  Groot: I am Groot.
  Rocket: You see someone and think they have a weird head and then it just turns out part of their head is a hat. [Beat] That's why you don't like hats?
• The comedy I'm Gonna Git You Sucka has Mr. Big's Big Brim Club, where the title Big Bad's criminal minions relax and drink while wearing giant-sized hats.
• In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, the Python troupe conclude that one of two concepts related to the eponymous question is that people are not wearing enough hats.

Literature

• The Dr. Seuss book The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins is about a boy who tries to take off his hat 500 times, but finds that there is always another hat underneath. The hats eventually start getting larger and fancier up until the eponymous 500th hat, which became so fanciful that the king had to have it for his very own... which, thankfully, ended the hat problem as there were no more hats after that.
• Caps for Sale combines this with Silly Simian, when a traveling hat salesman who carries his wares on his head in a massive stack encounters a troupe of monkeys with a fondness for stolen headwear.
• In Discworld, overdressed characters are always described as wearing a hat with a feather in it. Vimes, who objects to even wearing a plumed helmet (he has a "plumes allowance" that he's never claimed), hates that the official ducal regalia includes one.
• In a hat gag that contemporary audiences would have got, Dracula in the titular novel turns up (off-camera, the event being related to van Helsing) to flee England wearing a straw hat. It doesn't suit him and to cap it all, it's October, after the season for wearing them ended.
• The picture book Go, Dog, Go! has a Running Gag involving a poodle appearing in increasingly ridiculous hats and asking another dog, "Do you like my hat?"
• In The Parasol Protectorate, Alexia's best friend Ivy is renowned for having the worst taste in hats in the known world, with almost every character commenting on it. In Changeless, the switch to a secret door in a milliner's is hidden under a hat so deliberately hideous that no one would ever want to buy it. Ivy makes a beeline for it.
• The Trials of Apollo: The Troglodytes, a species introduced in the final book, The Tower of Nero, consider only hat-wearing species to be civilized and insist that their human and demigod guests put one on. This soon segues into a lampshaded Take That! to the New York Mets and an instance of Lampshade Wearing.

Live-Action TV

• In the short-lived BBC comedy Come Back Mrs. Noah, the crew have to dress up in spacesuits with helmets topped by a couple of plastic tubes, in which ping pong balls move up and down to show the wearer is breathing correctly. In another episode they have to wear Space Clothes with pointy radio beacon hats.
• Doctor Who:
  • Fezzes are funny rather than cool, and the Eleventh Doctor finding fezzes cool is funny to the other characters. He's also tried to add a Stetson, top hat and pirate tricorn to his ensemble with little success. If River Song is around she'll make her disapproval clear by shooting the hat.
  • The Thirteenth Doctor also has a love of funny hats, including a feathered helmet and, as a Call-Back to Eleven, another red fez.
• Fawlty Towers: In "The Builders", Basil prowls around looking for his cap, which is on his head. When he goes out, he puts another cap on top of it.
• Frasier befriends a man named Bob who likes to wear gaudy tam o' shanters. When Bob offers one to him as a gesture of friendship, Frasier is horrified as it's completely out of place compared to his more refined style of dress.
• Friends
  • When the gang go on a beach trip in the third season finale, Rachel dons a giant sunhat that Chandler compares to a spaceship.
    Rachel: Well excuse me, my fashion-impaired friends, I am here to tell you that hats are back.
    Phoebe: And this time, they've ganged up to form one giant, super hat.
  • During a trip to London Joey buys a novelty top hat printed with the Union Jack from a gift stand. Chandler thinks it's stupid and refuses to be seen in public with Joey while he's wearing it.
• The Goodies. When Bill Oddie is inducted into the ancient Lancashire martial art known as "Ecky Thump", he's given the flat cap of a Novice. We're then shown the much bigger flat cap of a Master, and then the Grand Master is carried in wearing a flat cap so large it could be used as a sun umbrella.
• The Grand Tour: While looking for an excuse for losing a race, Jeremey buys a massive fluffy hat and claims it was a purchase he thought long and hard about.
• Little Britain: Somebody tries to win the world record for the tallest man by wearing an extremely tall top hat, until he learns that they're only measuring from the top of the head down.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus:
  • Near the end of the "Courtmartial" sketch, the British soldiers put on pixie hats (with fake pixie ears attached to them), to the audience's delight.
  • In "Biggles Dictates a Letter", Biggles indicates to a Cloudcuckoolander secretary whether or not he's dictating by wearing a hat with silly horns. His secretary still gets it wrong, writing it down when he isn't dictating and not writing it down when he is.
• On Tic-Tac-Dough, Wink Martindale regularly modeled novelty hats sent in by viewers.
• Top Gear
  • A series 15 episode opened with:
    Jeremy: Tonight- I wear a hat!, Richard wears a hat! And James wears a hat!
  • S16/E5 (The Snowmobile episode) reused this gag:
    Jeremy: Tonight- Richard wears a blue hat!, James wears a different hat! And I wear a hat with things on it!
  • S18/E4 reused this gag again, but with a twist:
    Jeremy: Tonight- I wear a hat!, James wears a hat! And Richard is behind a low wall!
  • Once when Jeremy was reviewing an old Soviet-made car, the only good point he can find is there's enough headroom to drive in a hat. Cut to him in a wolfskin ushanka.
  • When in America, the presenters buy some hats so they'll blend in.
    Richard: You couldn't look more ridiculous if you tried.
    (Jeremy turns his cap backwards)
    Richard: Yep, you do. You've done the impossible.
  • And in Romania, Jeremy buys a hat two sizes too small to blend in (while driving a supercar).
  • While testing luxury cars in Albania Richard ponders whether the biometric sensors on his car can detect if he like certain cheeses or whether he's currently thinking about hats.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway? (all series) has a segment called "Dating Service", where the comedians pull different silly hats from a box and pretend they're making a video for a dating service.

Newspaper Comics

• A Running Gag in Curtis Sunday Strips is Curtis and Barry sitting in church, and Curtis making fun of the elaborate hats ladies wear to church to make Barry laugh.

Radio

• Cabin Pressure:
  • Martin has an apparently quite incredible captain's hat, which looks even more ridiculous on him because he looks so little like a captain.
  Martin: Look, I keep telling you, I didn’t ask for extra. It’s just the standard amount of gold braid they put on a captain’s hat these days.
  Douglas: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, maybe...
  • Arthur has his own hat, which he doesn't need to wear but made for himself. The hat goes undescribed, but given what Arthur's like, it almost certainly looks ridiculous.
• Our Miss Brooks: In "Bargain Hats For Mother's Day," Mrs. Davis asks Miss Brooks to sell the homemade hats she made. They feature an imitation sparrow perched upon imitation fruit. Mr. Conklin buys one for his wife Martha, Mr. Boynton buys one for his mother, Walter Denton gets one to use as a table centerpiece, while Genre Refugee Tex Barton buys one for his horse Lucy. Unfortunately, the recipients, even Lucy, are fanatics about having individualized wearing apparel...

Video Games

• In Dawn of War II: Retribution's Ork campaign, an Inquisitor attempts to hire Kaptain Bluddflagg and his Freebooters to deal with the Big Bad in exchange for sending three Imperial Guard regiments for them to fight. Bluddflagg is willing to accept the deal, but pushes it too far when he asks for the Inquisitor's distinct hat as well. He does end up saving the day in Orky fashion, but his campaign's ending cutscene shows Bluddflagg ambushing that Inquisitor, leaving her helpless on the ground... and then walking off with her hat.
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the Colovian Fur Helm stands out as being very tall, pointy, and silly, essentially a bright yellow Santa Claus hat that stick straight up. As a sign, none of the characters who wear one can be taken seriously, for example Uncle Sweetshare, Tarhiel, and M'aiq the Liar.
• In Golf With Your Friends, cosmetic hats are awarded for playing the game for a while. They include many, many things that aren't strictly hats, such as a cake, a rotating radar dish, a hamburger, and a nest with eggs.
• In the Skylanders games, you can give hats to your Skylanders (and in the fourth game, your captured villains), all of which provide varying stat bonuses. By the fourth game, there are hundreds to choose from.
• In StreetPass Mii Plaza, most of the hats that aren't Nintendo references fall under the silly hat category. Sometimes this is combined leading to things like your Mii wearing a replica of Princess Peach's castle.
• Hats are the main collectible of Struggling. Troy can wear two of them!
• A central motif in Super Mario Odyssey. Mario's regular hat gets shredded at the beginning during his attempt to save Peach from Bowser, so he allows Cappy, a member of a race of hatlike ghosts called Bonneters, to take its place. Cappy can transform into any of the various goofy-looking hats that Mario buys, and his eyes suddenly peaking out from time to time adds to the silly vibe. The various allies and enemies Mario encounters frequently wear silly hats themed after the areas they are found in, even characters like Goombas and Toads who don't usually wear hats. This is also a gameplay hint; those characters who aren't wearing hats can be Captured by Mario.
• Team Fortress 2 has so many wearable hats, and a player base so obsessed with said hats, that the game is occasionally known as "the world's #1 war-themed hat simulator," to the point that any of the other examples on this list may be converted into a Team Fortress parody. The developers have run with this, to the point of lambasting the band behind "Safety Dance" for having "the most unthinkably offensive name we've ever heard," and including vintage editorial cartoons showing that everyone in the TF2 universe is obsessed with hats, and has been for centuries.

Visual Novels

• Jezaille Brett, a British Foreign Exchange Student witness from The Great Ace Attorney, wears an elaborate hat with a swan on it. Not a swan design, a real, living swan. It honks and flaps its wings when she's surprised.

Webcomics

• Awkward Zombie: One strip parodying Team Fortress 2 by way of David Attenborough describes a Medic deciding which ally to Ubercharge as if it were a nature documentary, with the prospective "mates" displaying their hats to impress the Medic. The Medic picks a character with a whole stack of hats on his head... who turns out to be a disguised enemy Spy. In the rant, the artist admits that this is usually how she picks who to Ubercharge when playing as Medic.
• Bogleech: One comic pokes fun at H. P. Lovecraft's tendency to portray anything "alien" (i.e. "different") as mind-bendingly horrific. In the comic, Lovecraft is introduced to a race of cute, utterly benign arthropod-like creatures with a fondness for hats, who attempt to converse politely with him: "Hello, friend soft-skin, do you like my hat?" The joke is that the aliens wear hats on their stomachs instead of their heads, which Lovecraft finds so abnormal that it drives him insane.
• Girl Genius:
  • The Jaegermonsters' obsession with hats is often Played for Laughs, though occasionally it is played for drama or plot advancement as well.
  • Gil's hat, which the Jaegers gave as a sign of genuine respect. It's a ridiculous, hideous looking thing several times the size of Gil's head, yet conveys the inexplicable ability to convey to people who are otherwise unconvinced they are actually looking at Gilgamesh Wulfenbach.
• Homestuck:
  • The various incarnations of Courtyard Droll have a fondness for hats: the bigger and more elaborate, the better. In most cases he ends up wearing towering, showy contraptions several times taller than he is. Jack Noir himself is saddled with a "ridiculous hat" during Act 6.
  • After John arrives in the Land of Wind and Shade and some of his house's objects end up scattered around, one of the local salamanders finds a crumpled top hat, decides that it's the most stylish thing he's ever seen, and starts a cultural craze around this item. Afterwards, the salamanders' growing obsession for "rumpled head objects", the ridiculous amounts of money they'll pay for them and the supposed shame they're bringing on their ancestors for their frivolity is a minor source of running jokes.
    Haberdasher: HELLO! Looking for a head object that is rumpled and unsightly? All of our head objects are rumpled and unsightly, fortunately!
• Galaxion: Patty, The Medic and a quirky, friendly soul, owns an insane hat collection.
• Prolangs features a personification of Kay(f)bop(t) (see the Web Original folder below) who constantly switches between four hats.

Web Original

• A certain Daniel Swanson made a parody Conlang called "Kay(f)bop(t)", where each syllable has a letter in parentheses indicating what kind of hat the speaker has to wear while saying it: 'f' is a fedora, 't' is a top hat, 'b' is a baseball cap, and 'p' is a pangolin-shaped hat. He says a speaker can wear a turkey-shaped hat if they lack a pangolin one, but such speakers are generally considered untrustworthy.
• Empires SMP Season 2: During the crossover event with Hermitcraft on Season 9, the Hermits start a game of "Multi(verse) Tag" where a player must kill another player from the other server by a strange and difficult method chosen at random by a machine, and the Tagged player must wear a very large, off-kilter, pastel jester's hat to designate themself to be in the role.
• Feed Dump: Every episode ends with the following:
  "There may be better sources for news, but they don't have..." (presenter pulls out ridiculous piece of head-wear) "...this hat."
• In the 2022 Homestar Runner Halloween Special, Strong Mad's attempts to continue the scary story end up with him giving all the characters hats, including a refrigerator and pile of hats.
• When GoodTimesWithScar was first introduced in Pirates SMP, he is wearing about four hats stacked on top of each other — a red top hat on top of a cyan top hat, on top of a bottle green tricorn hat, on top of a brown pirate's tricorn hat.

Western Animation

• Bugs Bunny: In "Bugs' Bonnets", a bunch of hats get blown out of a delivery truck and start landing all over the woods where Elmer is chasing Bugs. Each time a new hat lands on either of them, they also change personality to go with the new headgear. A judge's wig makes Bugs act like he's running a trial; a grandma's bonnet makes Elmer act like a little old lady; a Boy Scout hat compels Bugs to help little-old-lady-Elmer cross the street, et cetera.
• Family Guy:
  • Peter Griffin thinks having his head smashed flat between two giant logs is more than worth a feather cap.
  • In a non-canon story where Peter finds a genie and gets Three Wishes:
    Meg: I want a new hat!
    Chris: I want a new hat!
    Stewie: I want them to have new hats!
• House of Mouse has used this several times. One was the Mad Hatter singing a song about hats ("Hats that are tall, and hats that are small, and hats that are totally off of the wall!"). Another was Goofy getting sidetracked in one of the trio's business cartoons by trying on hats in a hat shop.
• In the Mickey Mouse (2013) short "Hats Enough" Mickey realizes he's the only one of his circle of friends without some headgear of any kind. He desperatly wants to find a hat he could wesr which results in a funny montage of him wearing different hats, including the ones he weared in his debut cartoon Steamboat Willie and the feature film Fantasia.
• The "Marge Gets a Job" episode of The Simpsons has her suggesting "Funny Hat Day" with Tom Jones music playing regularly as a way of raising morale, after seeing a line of deeply disturbed employees (one popping back antidepressants, one a clear alcoholic, and the other brandishing a shotgun). A scene later the same employees look essentially the same, but they're wearing silly hats.
  • In another episode Homer suggests they add a scene in the Mr. Smith Goes to Washington remake where the titular character, played by Mel Gibson, tries on lots of funny hats. Mel quickly vetoes it.
• South Park: "Wall-Mart" changes into A Form You Are Comfortable With by putting on a hat. "Does this form please you?"
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Mr. Krabs sells SpongeBob a drinking hat he found in the garbage for $10, only to find afterwards that it is a hot collector's item as several collectors give him increasing offers for it up to $1,000,000. Then it turns out the hat is worthless, and SpongeBob got a clapping hat that's worth $1,000,000,000.
• In Teen Titans Go!, Robin, Cyborg and Beast Boy ditch Starfire and Raven for what they claim to be a super cool "boys' night out." Turns out the boys' idea of a wild night is a visit to the hat shop, where they model a series of silly hats. In another episode, the Titans manage to capture a leprechaun and extort wishes from it. Their first two wishes are for cool hats on their heads and to rotate them 90 degrees.

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