Basic Trope: An intelligent character pretends to be less intelligent in order to make others underestimate them.
- Straight: Alice pretends to be naive and ditzy so that Bob will not suspect she is investigating him.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice acts like a complete and total moron and manages to underhandedly deceive everyone around her for her own benefit because of this.
- Alice pretends to be severely mentally challenged so that Bob will not suspect her.
- Alice successfully fakes Laser-Guided Amnesia, and she routinely drops the act whenever she's alone with her friend who is in the know, only to continue the act when someone else enters the room.
- Alice pretends to be excessively unintelligent and intentionally talks funny, as well as pretending to know nothing. She also acts annoying and mimics Bob's sentences when given the chance.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is not very smart, but she exaggerates the extent of her stupidity.
- Alice is smart, but she just feigns slight cluelessness or average intelligence instead of pretending to be outright stupid.
- Justified:
- Bob is an Insufferable Genius who will quickly disregard anyone he decides isn't as smart as him.
- Bob is expecting an investigation and is thus wary of people who seem insightful, forcing Alice to try and seem like she couldn't be a threat.
- Alice needs to test how well the less-educated will fare in the situation at hand to determine if Bob's work counts as a marketing stunt or as plain fraud.
- Inverted: Feigning Intelligence.
- Subverted:
- Alice thinks she is cleverly pretending to be stupid, but never considers the possibility that Bob isn't fooled by her 'dumb' act.
- Alice pretends to be naive and unsuspecting, but when she reveals her real self she turns out to be... not so bright.
- Doubly Subverted:
- He's not quite prepared for just how smart Alice is, however.
- She's Book Dumb and bad at forensics, as it turns out. When it comes to social intelligence and puzzling out motives, she's a prodigy.
- Parodied:
- Alice's a very poor actor, but Bob is nevertheless completely taken in by her.
- Alice is a super-genius capable of solving derivatives in her head; however, all she has to do to get people to think she's a dunce is say something like "1 + 1 = 11".
- Know one catches on to Alice's statments such as "Oh gosh everything worked out in my favor, I couldn't possibly be intelligent enough to do that all intentionally".
- Alice really is a bumbling moron, but Bob makes the Wrong Assumption enough to believe she's just acting and starts treating her as a threat. Afterward, he denies every chance to ensure he's not being inspected because he thinks that Alice is luring him into doing so.
- Zig Zagged:
- Nobody is ever sure whether Alice is a Genius Ditz, an Inspector Oblivious, or using Obfuscating Stupidity.
- Alice is a Genius Ditz Cloud Cuckoolander, but she plays it up to the point where no one is exactly sure how much of this is an act, often coupled with Ping Pong Naïveté.
- Averted: Alice's disguise does not include altering how intelligent she appears.
- Enforced: The actor playing Alice is normally cast as a genius and wants to play against type.
- Lampshaded: "She's not as dumb as she seems!"
- Invoked: "He'll never suspect anything if I act like an idiot."
- Exploited:
- Alice gets out of doing favors for people by pretending to be stupid.
- Alice needs a source of amusement, so she acts like an idiot to get a rise out of people.
- Defied:
- "You're not as dumb as you look. Nobody could be as dumb as you look, and still be as successful as you are. I'm on to you."
- Alice has too much pride to pretend to be a ditz, no matter if it would be beneficial. The most she will do is pretend to have committed a faux pas, because even the smartest people on Earth can occasionally screw up.
- "Keep an eye on Alice. It doesn't matters if it's luck or smarts, if she starts to get too close, eliminate her."
- "Alice... I don't care if I come off looking like I belong in a madhouse, I'll keep yelling that you're smart until someone believes me."
- Discussed: "How can someone this dumb be a private investigator?" "Well, she might not be as dumb as she looks..."
- Conversed: "Alice's such an idiot!" "Yeah? Well, so was Columbo."
- Played For Laughs: When asked what 1 + 1 is, Alice quotes an obscure law of physics.
- Played For Drama: Alice lives in a world affected by Tall Poppy Syndrome. If anyone powerful thinks she's too clever, they'll get rid of her.
- Played For Horror: Alice is a Serial Killer who is Beneath Suspicion because she doesn't "look smart enough" to have killed 200 people.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice suddenly needs to assert authority in an emergency, but nobody listens because they still think she's stupid.
- Alice pretends to be stupid for so long, her mental habits actually start to decline.
- Alice works a bit too hard at pretending to be an idiot, which comes back around to people figuring out she's smart - literally, Nobody's That Dumb.
- Reconstructed:
- ...So she continues to act dumb to her advantage. After all, since everyone still doesn't believe her, it gives her the advantage of surprise again.
- So Alice takes countermeasures to keep herself smart in case she feels like she's slowly slipping into stupidity.
- So Alice recruits Ralph, and they think he is doing the same act and is a master at it only to find out that, nope, he really has the brain capacity of a paramecium. If someone that stupid actually exists, Alice has an easier time pretending to be dumb.
- Implied:
- Alice seems to be a blundering idiot, but there are occasional hints that she has some sort of agenda going on.
- Alice's letters to other people show very simple prose, but her private journals and logs are far more elegant.
You're not fooling me! I know you're not stupid, Alice!
