Basic Trope: A plan that sounds stupid but works anyway.
- Straight: Clyde hatches a plan to bust a wall open by crashing a car into it. The plan works.
- Exaggerated: Clyde hatches a plan to solve global warming by nuking the world. It works with no negative side effects.
- Downplayed: Clyde hatches a plan to connect to a robot using a video game controller. The plan works, much to everyone's surprise, including that of Clyde.
- Justified:
- A plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped.
- The plan was a Million to One Chance, and the heroes manage to beat those odds by sheer dumb luck. On the flip side, any other plan that could be attempted had plain zero odds.
- There literally is no other plan available.
- Clyde's plan needed a combination of skilled enough people who wouldn't be afraid to take insane risks, and the enemy being caught unaware. Clyde and his True Companions were a Badass Crew who had nothing left to lose which is why they tried it in the first place, and the plan came out of nowhere to the point the enemy was caught with their pants down.
- It exploits a weakness that was researched by the enemy and dismissed because it would take a literal idiot to think of exploiting it.
- It's extremely high-risk, high-reward. The enemy did not expected Clyde to value their destruction over his life. But he does.
- Inverted:
- Clyde creates a plan that is sensible and functional (although Boring, but Practical) that works like gangbusters.
- Clyde comes up with a plan to protect everyone in nuclear bunkers. The plan fails.
- Subverted:
- Clyde comes up with a crazy plan ... that fails abysmally.
- The whole point of a plan Crazy Enough to Work is to catch the enemy by surprise. The enemy ends up adapting too quickly for the surprise to work.
- Alice and Bob expect Clyde to come up with a crazy plan, but he comes up with a very grounded one.
- Double Subverted:
- But Bob comes up with a plan to dump Clyde on the enemy so he'll create their plans, which is crazy, but does work.
- The plan Crazy Enough to Work was a distraction and it allows the Boring, but Practical plan to work — which, considering how good the enemy is, nobody expected. Which means that, in a roundabout way, the "boring" plan is also Crazy Enough to Work.
- From Subverted 3:
- Clyde emulated a plan that everybody dismisses as crazy.
- His reasoning is based on Insane Troll Logic.
- Parodied:
- Clyde's crazy ideas are the only ones that work; taking the most logical course of action always ends badly.
- Every time someone proposes a plan, even if it's extremely sensible and simple on paper, Clyde insists (to the point of madness) that it's "crazy enough to work".
- It's a plan that takes literal (and immense) insanity and idiocy to create and execute. This is presented as one more example of Clyde's Achievements in Ignorance.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Clyde alternates between logical and crazy plans (Played Straight + Averted).
- Clyde is found out but executes a crazy plan to keep his position (which may be improvised or planned) (continued from Double Subverted 1).
- The enemy was Crazy-Prepared for the boring plan, so our heroes revert to their crazy plan or hatch another new one (continued from Double Subverted 2).
- The last person to use the "source plan" was the Only Sane Man and had thought it through (continued from Double Subverted 3).
- Clyde's reasoning was sound, if unorthodox; it was Alice and Bob who weren't thinking logically (continued from Double Subverted 4).
- Averted: The only plans that work are plans that have attachment to logic.
- Enforced: The writers are either going for a comedic resolution to the work or they are aiming to write the heroes as a bunch of people so against the wall that they are willing to try anything — and obviously they also don't want a Downer Ending.
- Lampshaded:
- "I never thought that would work."
- The Spymaster who is hiring Clyde (by hook or by crook) to pretend to be a ninja gymnast to infiltrate a Communist country takes a second to state that "if we didn't thought this was the plan with the better chance of success, Mr. Clyde, we wouldn't be here talking. My colleagues and I don't have the time or money to afford on pranks."
- Invoked: Clyde becomes a master of Confusion Fu.
- Exploited: Clyde uses his ability to hatch crazy, yet possible, plans to stop crime in the world.
- Defied:
- "THIS is the best you can think of as a plan? I demand a second op—no, I demand a second and third option!"
- The enemy attacks before the plan can be implemented.
- The enemy is just too good.
- "If it's stupid but it works…" "It's still stupid, and I'm going to be blunt and say that if it works I'm not really happy what that has to say about their cleverness or ours."
- Discussed: "Writers just can never think of good, practical plans being done by cool-headed professionals as anything but "boring", right?"
- Conversed: "With a bunch of losers this sorry, of course the only plan they could try is the one that would give a professional game theorist a conniption."
- Deconstructed:
- While yes, the wall is broken, the best-case-scenario is that the car becomes too damaged to use properly. As for the worst-case, the car is no longer functional and Clyde suffers severe injuries. No matter what, it's a Pyrrhic Victory.
- An all-or-nothing plan running on sheer alleged crazy has too many failure points. And what do you know, failure occurs.
- Reconstructed: It beats laying down and dying.
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