Well, he did open the wrong end of the bag.
"In the course of my life, I have more than once been too ignorant to know that something was impossible before I did it anyway."
— Antillar Maximus, Codex Alera
In a world bound by laws of physics, some things are just impossible. Even when magic is involved, there are often limits.
Despite this, somehow there's someone who can do things thought impossible, because they were unaware it was supposed to be impossible. Any of the characters might occasionally be And You Thought It Was a Game, but it can be a recurring trait for a Genius Ditz or a Bungling Inventor. This trope focuses on the times a character will achieve some amazing feat due to either not knowing how hard it should have been or was aiming for something else entirely and stumbled upon the answer.
In contrast to many cartoons, which consistently (and inconsistently) apply and dismiss physics for the Rule of Funny, this trope is typically meant to occur when the act in question goes against whatever physics are firmly established within The 'Verse. Generally, the best way to tell the difference is whether or not the Achievement in Ignorance can be lampshaded or not.
This can be played either seriously or for laughs. If for comedy, it is often The Ditz who does the undoable deed. If for drama, the character in question may be a genius or prodigy in their particular field.
This happens in Real Life, usually with things like math or physics equations and occasionally with feats of daring that the accidental daredevil hasn't been told are life-threatening. On the more mundane side of things are people learning or successfully trying things their more learned peers were taught couldn't be done.
Compare with these tropes:
- Accidental Discovery - to which the adage "not knowing it was impossible, he went and did it" is usually applied
- Accidentally Real Fake Address - a fake address (or similar) that a person makes up ends up being real after all.
- Autopilot Artistry - someone succeeds at something they normally fail at when they aren't thinking about it.
- Beginner's Luck - being new to this business, and really, really good at it.
- Beyond the Impossible - for impossible events or people trying to break the rules
- Centipede's Dilemma - someone is able to do something but stops being able to once they start thinking about it
- Clap Your Hands If You Believe - devices powered by believing they'll work
- Crazy Enough to Work - the craziest plans always work
- Determinator - the person knows it's impossible, but tries anyway
- How Did You Know? I Didn't
- I Thought Everyone Could Do That - thinking that their Achievement is a feat anyone could do
- Magic Feather - an object gives people confidence to do things they only think are impossible for themselves
- Power Born of Madness - person does the impossible deeds because he no longer cares they're supposed to be impossible
- Reminder of Impossibility - if they can't do it anymore once it's pointed out that they shouldn't be able to it
- Right for the Wrong Reasons - the plan happened to work because of circumstances they were unaware of at the time
- Runs on Ignorance - devices that work only if you don't know how they work
- Screw the Rules, They're Not Real! - breaking the rules because you just don't care about them
- Strategy, Schmategy
- Too Dumb to Fool - a fool immediately sees through a lie or other treachery because they're too stupid to even know what either of those would imply
May lead to a How Unscientific! moment. A Snipe Hunt may occasionally end this way. See also Magic A Is Magic A, which the perpetrators of this trope tend to violate. This trope may be the reason for the idea that Idiots Can Not Catch Colds.
Please note that this trope is not just doing something despite not knowing how, or doing something by accident / blind luck. It is specifically doing something thought to be impossible because you don't know it is "impossible".
Examples:
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Audio Plays
- Discussed in the Big Finish Doctor Who story, "The Chimes of Midnight", as the Doctor investigates the suspicious death of the house servant, Edith, who drowned from having her head held down in a kitchen sink. The other members of the house staff try to insist that Edith's death must have been a suicide, but the Doctor retorts that it would be physically impossible for Edith to drown in the way she did by herself. The staff then try to suggest that since Edith was "very stupid", she managed to kill herself anyway because she didn't know it was physically impossible.
Card Games
- Sentinels of the Multiverse:
- A meta example: Santa Guise's variant is incredibly easy to unlock by accident in the digital version, but the official community game surrounding the unlocks also requires as one of the rules figuring out what the specific unlock conditions are, and it took more than six months to accomplish that part.
- As a more story oriented example, due to the nature of his powers, Setback tends to do this, as implied by the flavor text.
- Star Wars Customizable Card Game has the following flavor text on Han's Modified Heavy Blaster: "In theory, you can't modify a DL-44 Heavy Blaster. No one told Han that."
Comedy
- From a Sarah Silverman routine: "Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it's a mistake. Not because they can't, but because it never would have occurred to them that they couldn't."
Comic Books
- In an Archie Comics story, the klutzy Archie loses his memory following an athletic mishap. Reggie toys with him by telling him he's the school's champion athlete, expecting that Archie will humiliate himself, only to be astonished when Archie proceeds to accomplish incredible athletic feats, such as a record-breaking pole vault without using a pole. When Archie throws a javelin beyond school property, accidentally puncturing a guy's tire, he gets a memory-restoring punch in the head and reverts to his usual clumsiness.
- Atomic Robo:
- Why can giant ants exist despite the Square-Cube Law? Because they don't know there's a square-cube law.
- At one point, one character thwarts an invasion of vampires from another dimension by using a plan that depended on the use of a Xenon laser. When he explains this, Robo informs him that the laser he used was not, in fact, a Xenon laser, and he doesn't think their facility even has one, leaving the guy baffled about how his plan worked.
- Taken to its extremes by Dr. Dinosaur, whose inventions just plain don't make sense even within the context of a comic that once used the Large Hadron Collider as a proton cannon. This causes extreme frustration in Robo, who gets to watch the laws of reality bend into pretzel shapes because of a delusional dromaeosaurid inverting gravity with a spanner, a light bulb, two car batteries, and a broken calculator. And crystals. Let's not forget crystals.
- Batman:
- When The Joker met Batman-expy Midnighter, Midnighter, whose Stock Phrase is "I've fought this fight X thousand times in the supercomputer in my head so you've already lost" can only stare at the Joker with utterly no idea what to do next.
- Batgirl (2000): When Cassandra Cain was fighting the Joker, Cassandra was initially losing. Cassandra is able to analyze her opponent's fighting style to predict their next move, but the Joker has no fighting style - even he doesn't know his next move.
- Excalibur: Tweedledope is a member of a group of villains called the Crazy Gang who can somehow create Applied Phlebotinum by just tinkering with junk. No doubt the most miraculous piece of machinery he created this way was the sapient portal-creating robot Widget. It should be noted that Widget's sapience derived from the amnesiac and temporally displaced mind of Kate Pryde, the Days of Future Past version of Kitty Pryde (it takes a very long time for Widget, let alone else, to figure this out), and later examination suggested that there's a mystical element involved.
- In Fantastic Four, this has been used as an explanation for why Reality Warper Franklin Richards is so much more powerful as a young child than various adult versions of him (introduced via Time Travel) have been: he doesn't realize that all of the things he's doing are impossible. An adult Franklin who actually understands the laws of physics needs to think of ways to work around them, even though based on the way his powers work that's only a psychological limitation.
- In one Carl Barks Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic, the Beagle Boys trick Super Goof into ingesting a formula that makes him so hungry he eats everything in sight, gaining a huge amount of weight. When he finally gets his act together and goes after them, he's so fat he can barely stay airborne. But he still apprehends the villains when he falls on them.
- Green Lantern:
- When Kyle Rayner first got the Green Lantern ring, his first-ever battle was against Mongul. Naturally, Mongul assumed his yellow skin meant Kyle's ring couldn't work and was shocked when Kyle was able to beat him down. Aiding Kyle, Superman was also surprised, bringing up the yellow weakness and Kyle brushing it off with "News to me." note
- Simon Baz can ignore the limitations on his ring's capabilities because no one told him about them.
- In the Elseworlds Superman & Batman: Generations, an aged Alan Scott and Hal Jordan are attacked by Sinestro. When a Green Lantern falls, Scott picks up his ring and Sinestro is stunned Alan can combat his yellow-colored attacks. After Sinestro is defeated, Alan and Hal confront the Guardians, who reveal that the "yellow impurity" was a fiction to create a"mental block" to prevent Green Lanterns from misusing their power. They bring up that in Alan's first outing with his own ring, a thug got in a lucky shot with a bat which convinced Alan his ring couldn't work on wood. Thus, because Alan instinctively reacted as he would have with his original ring, he never thought yellow was a weakness and could overcome it.
- Alfred E. Neuman of MAD fame displays this on various classic covers — sitting on a swing hanging from a branch he is holding, painting a white stripe down the middle of a road by painting a white road black and not painting the middle, etc..
- The Sandman (1989): Dream and Death meet Hob Gadling, a 14th-century peon who believes that people only die because they accept death as inevitable. By choosing to reject death, he believes he can live forever. Now, Hob's premise is completely, horribly wrong, but Death is so amused by his ignorance that she grants his wish. In a roundabout sort of way, this also makes him completely correct, just not for the reason he thinks. Hob ended up becoming one of Dream's few friends.
- Scooby-Doo! Team-Up: El Kabong can swing around until someone points out there's nothing holding the rope.
- In Seven Psychopaths, this is the in-story rationale for recruiting a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to assassinate Hitler—all the sane people in the military have long since dismissed the notion of assassinating Hitler as impossible, so the only ones who stand a chance of succeeding are those who are too crazy to realize it's impossible.
- Taskmaster was on the receiving end of this in his fight with Deadpool. Taskmaster has the ability to analyze and duplicate any physical action, so he can instantly master any combat style just by observing it. Deadpool starts acting completely at random and kicks his ass.
- In a comic book story based on Wacky Races, Dick Dastardly believes the other racers can cross the painted tunnels he makes because they don't know it's not real.
- Discussed in Young Justice:
Wonder Girl: But he sure can't keep it up!
Superboy: You know Bart, Wondy. If we don't tell him he can't, he may forget that he can't and go in circles forever.
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes:
- In one Sunday strip, Calvin was daydreaming in class that he was Spaceman Spiff, being attacked by an enemy craft. He dreamed that his ship was hit, and he started plummeting towards a planet's surface. "This spells disaster!" screams Calvin/Spiff. Then Miss Wormwood yells at Calvin to pay attention, and he quickly says, "Uhm, 'disaster', D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R." Fortunately, that was exactly the word Miss Wormwood had just asked him to spell.
- The same thing happened when Spiff was doing a countdown and hit 7 right when Miss Wormwood asks Calvin what 10 minus 3 is.
- And again when Spiff had just fired on some aliens ('Krakow! Krakow! Two direct hits!') when Suzie asks Calvin about the name of Poland's former capital.
- Dilbert:
- Parodied when a CEO with no experience is hired because "someone who doesn't know anything doesn't know what can't be done." When he goes to shake hands with the Pointy-Haired Boss (who is right-handed), he extends his left...
- This happened in Dilbert again with Ratbert, who was told he was so stupid that he had telekinetic power.
Ratbert: I have the power to watch television!
- In another series of strips, Ratbert decides to fly simply by flapping his arms. Dilbert insists it can't be done. Bob the Dinosaur gives Ratbert some advice that turns out to work, resulting in him flying near an annoyed Dilbert and remarking "This must be so embarrassing for you."
- One time Dilbert tells someone from Marketing that he reprogrammed his DNA into that of a weasel's. The poor dope is so gullible that he actually starts changing!
- FoxTrot:
- A Sunday strip has Paige nodding off in class, dreaming she's being romanced by the handsome, dashing Pierre. She repeats "Oh, Pierre" in reply to everything he says, until she wakes up, discovering she just answered her teacher's question - "What is the capital of South Dakota?" - correctly.
- There's also the time when Roger somehow made the charcoals for the grill burn upside down because he put them in that way. Jason even says that he'd deem it impossible if anyone other than Roger did it.
- Garfield:
- Odie chases Garfield up a tree, resulting in both of them sitting on a high branch. Jon immediately tells Odie that "dogs can't climb trees". Garfield's response? "It's amazing what one can accomplish when one doesn't know what one can't do."
- In fact, in one of the early comics, this is how Garfield himself learned to walk on his hind legs. Until it stuck, he'd promptly face-plant when Jon reminded him it's not possible.
- One strip shows Odie sleeping on the underside of a hammock, and Garfield notes that he doesn't even understand the laws of gravity.
- Peanuts:
- Schroeder can play extremely difficult piano pieces on a toy piano where the black keys are simply painted on (or are they...).
- Similar to the above-example in Garfield, there was one week-long series where Snoopy and Linus climbed a very large tree to investigate a "strange creature" in Woodstock's nest which turned out to be an egg. Eventually, Lucy came along, and Charlie Brown explained what was going on. Lucy shouted to them that dogs can't climb trees; Snoopy replied, "You're right!" before falling out with a crash.
- In early strips where Linus was still shown as an infant, he often displayed this trope. Examples included stacking blocks off-center well past the point they should fall over, and blowing up balloons cube-shaped. While Charlie Brown kept trying to figure out how he did it, Lucy was just embarrassed that her brother didn't know how to do things right.
- In one story from Wally Wood's Sally Forth, the characters are riding in a battle-scarred helicopter — until one of them points out that it should not be able to fly, causing it to fall immediately.
Films — Animation
- In Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Sherman and Penny are in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop and find his flying machine, and Penny urges Sherman to take it for a joy ride. With her "Just do it!" encouragement, Sherman gets it airborne and is actually piloting it with skill until Mr. Peabody sees them and reminds Sherman that he doesn't know how to fly. The instant Sherman hears this, he freaks out, loses control and crashes it.
- Toy Story: While he's completely oblivious to the fact he's a toy who can't actually fly, Buzz manages to actually "fly" around Andy's room with his eyes closed by bouncing on a ball, riding the loop-de-loop and getting his wings hooked on a toy airplane.
- In Toy Story 3, Woody manages to leave Sunnyside in broad daylight with minimal effort. When he offhandedly mentions having been there to Bonnie's toys, they're horrified and ask how he managed to escape - and only then does Woody learn of Sunnyside's true nature as a cruel, oppressive dictatorship from which escape is supposed to be impossible. Sure enough, when the rest of Andy's toys attempt to break out, they have a much harder time.
- In Wakko's Wish, Buttons runs straight up a tree to save Mindy, only to fall when she tells him "Puppies can't climb trees."
Films — Live-Action
- Joe Patroni in Airport is a skilled mechanic qualified to taxi planes but not fly them. When a 707 is stuck on a snowy runway and has to be moved off at any cost to allow another plane's emergency landing, he takes the cockpit and pushes the aircraft past its limits until he manages to get it moving just ahead of the plows coming to (destructively) give it a push, thereby saving the aircraft. Arguably Patroni is overqualified for this trope, because he knows the plane inside and out and exactly how much abuse it can take. What drives it home is when he's told afterward that the manual says what he just did is impossible—to which he replies the beauty of the 707 is "she can do everything but read." It's an achievement in ignorance for the plane.
- In Being There, this is a possible explanation for the final shot in which Chance walks on water. It's also the reason he gets as far as he does in the film with the people around him - he doesn't actually realize what he's doing most of the time.
- During the Spinning Paper montage that ends Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Road & Track reports that Death managed to win the Indy 500 on foot. His response? "I didn't know I could run that fast."
- In the 2005 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mike Teavee sees Willy Wonka's Television Chocolate setup as this on Mr. Wonka's part — Mr. Wonka was merely looking for a new way to get his chocolate to market and wound up creating a teleporter without realizing the true significance/potential of such an invention.
- The Dark Knight Rises: Invoked. Bruce comments on his safe being supposedly uncrackable. Selina Kyle, who has just cracked it, quips that she didn't know it was uncrackable.
- Edge of Tomorrow is centered around William Cage, an inexperienced soldier who becomes trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop after being splattered in alien blood. But how did he get that in the first place? Well, he ran out of ammo, saw a soldier strapping a Claymore to his armor and pulled it towards the alien, not knowing said mine is guaranteed to kill anything within a few feet of it (the soldier was clearly aiming for a suicide attack), meaning the Claymore killed them both, but Cage was splattered with the blood that enables him to revive by looping. In short, he became The Only One capable of defeating the aliens because of being literally Too Dumb to Live!
- The premise of Forrest Gump is built on this trope. Forrest is so dense that he routinely attempts things other people wouldn't even consider, and so single-minded that he puts his maximum effort into everything he does. As a result, he meets spectacular success while the skeptics are left scratching their heads.
- Galaxy Quest:
- The Thermians construct a fully functional, space-worthy Starship, complete with powerful weapons, Warp Drive, and Teleportation, based on the design of a ship seen in "Historical Documents" intercepted from space. Unbeknownst to them, these "Historical Documents" were actually episodes from the TV Series Galaxy Quest, broadcast from Earth by humans not remotely capable of producing these technologies. It's important to note that this also included the Omega-13, an alien device that was not part of the original ship schematics and that nobody even knew what function it had, only educated (and conflicting) guesses.
- Nesmith actually manages to defeat the Big Bad in the first act of the film, while he still believes that he's on a television show. Wanting to end the "show" as quickly as possible because of his hangover, he orders an immediate attack that takes the villain completely by surprise. Unfortunately, he promptly leaves, allowing the villain to recover and come back later.
- In the film Home For Christmas, after finding herself homeless following her divorce, Julie Bedford (Linda Hamilton) basically improvises a career in real estate to give herself a reason to be staying in a “white elephant” house that nobody will buy as the asking price is too expensive, decorating it with furniture loaned from a salesman she has befriended to give the impression that she has somewhere to stay when her daughter comes Andie over for Christmas. When prospective buyers come by on Christmas Eve as Julie is having dinner with Andie, Julie is briefly anxious that she’s going to be in trouble, but she is instead praised for designing the house to create such a homely atmosphere, which results in the buyers paying the asking price along with whatever it will cost for the furniture to be included, giving Julie a significant boost in her income when she just intended to give Andie a nice Christmas.
- Jem and the Holograms (2015); the protagonist becomes famous after she takes a video of herself singing which gets uploaded to YouTube by her little sister after Jem herself assumes it's going to bomb, then suddenly goes viral with millions of hits, overnight. (Clearly, her music is better in-fiction than out of it.)
- In The Man Who Knew Too Little, thanks to how he's convinced that he's just participating in a live-action role-playing spy game, Wallace stops the bombing of a conference, prevents the start of a new Cold War, takes out two dangerous spies and convinced a legendary assassin to retire. The best part is that everyone else is convinced they're witnessing some sort of bad-ass superspy in action and don't grasp Wallace has no clue what's happening.
- Molly's Game: 'Bad' Brad accidentally bluffs his way into winning a huge hand (his first-ever win at the table) because he is too bad at poker to realize that he should have folded. His reckless betting spooks Harlan into thinking he has a much stronger hand and he folds.
- This is the plot of Pay It Forward as described by the mother:
"You don't know my son, you tell him he can do something and he's going to believe you."
- In Pippi On The Run, the final Pippi Longstocking movie with Inger Nilsson as the eponymous character, this trope becomes a Running Gag. Over the course of the movie, Pippi does several completely impossible things, and then afterward claims that the reason why she could do them was that she forgot they were impossible. The entire thing is subverted at the very end of the movie when Pippi rides a broomstick around Tommy and Annika's house, and when Annika once again claims that this is impossible, Pippi cheerfully yells back that it's not impossible to her."
- In the film Robot Overlords, humans are monitored and basically controlled due to implants that alert the robots now in control of Earth if they are out of their homes for too long. The events of the film begin when a group of teens accidentally shut down their implants after receiving an electric shock while trying to repair a Playstation.
- Spider-Man: No Way Home:
- Despite having no training whatsoever in the magic arts, Ned is able to figure out how to use Doctor Strange's sling ring to make portals, though he's unable to close them, or lead him to the right Peter Parker. This is explained as him being told by his lola that they have magic in their ancestry.
- Unspoken, but this is also present with the Green Goblin. Since he's from a world where Captain America doesn't exist, recreating the super-soldier formula was not Norman Osborn's intention. Creating an evil split personality notwithstanding, Osborn's performance enhancer is the most successful attempt at copying it, if not better given Goblin's strength feats from the two films, like holding up a gondola with no physical difficulty apparent, go beyond Cap or even other attempts. It also does not give him physical alterations like Hulk or Abomination had. The fact that Peter could only hurt him after he stopped holding back means that at best Hulk and Thor would have been the best likely to outdo him in strength.
- Star Wars:
- This was probably the original intention behind Han Solo's retort to C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back: "Never Tell Me the Odds!!" Han does not want to know how unlikely his various insane flight maneuvers are to work precisely because that might deter him from trying them, and those insane maneuvers were their only chance of escape. Han does not want to know what is impossible, or so unlikely as to be effectively impossible.
- Played with in the same film when Luke tries and fails to use the Force to lift his X-wing out of the swamp. He fails, and then, when Yoda is able to do it, he says that he cannot believe it, only for Yoda to tell him that that was why he failed. He failed, that is, because he did not believe that it was possible, whereas Yoda knew that it was.
- Han continues to use the trope as his standard operating procedure in The Force Awakens, allowing for him to pull such insane stunts as jumping to hyperspace from inside a hangar. When Rey incredulously asks if that's even possible, Han replies, "I never ask that question 'til after I've done it."
- In Superman III:
- Gus writes a program in his computer class, then shows it to the instructor after hearing the instructor explain to another student that what the program does is impossible.
- Later on while working for Ross Webster, Gus is told to synthesize kryptonite to kill Superman. Gus manages to get part of the way there... but there's a catch: there's an element of kryptonite that isn't found on Earth and therefore can't be used. Gus fills in the blank by adding tar after reading his pack of cigarettes, figuring that since tar is unhealthy for humans, it's probably unsafe for Kryptonians. The result? While the synthesized kryptonite doesn't kill Superman, it causes just as much trouble by causing Superman to spiral into Superdickery for a time.
- Synchronic: A doctor who was just trying to create designer drugs ends up accidentally creating the titular Synchronic; a time-travel drug.
- In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, the subterranean, wormlike Graboids move into a new biological phase: three-foot tall, bipedal, raptor-like beings nicknamed "Shriekers". When the Shriekers disable a car on the road out of town, (blocking the road) and disable communications by taking down the radio tower, the heroes nearly panic at the implications, especially after having previously seen how clever the Graboids could be. Then they discover that the Shriekers have visions based on seeing heat and are simply attacking anything hot in their way, such as a car engine or a radio tower, and have managed to disable their human opponents purely by chance. As one stunned character says when they find this out "You mean they're acting so smart...because they're so stupid?!"
Jokes
- An adage of unknown origin: "Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently determined fool."
- Often seen in Polish jokes (more often than not told by Poles themselves). One such joke: Satan locks an American, Russian, and Polish scientist each in their own sealed room in Hell, and gives each one a pair of one-tonne solid steel balls, saying whoever can come up with the most impressive feat after seven years may be permitted to leave and go to Heaven. After seven years he returns to see their progress. The American has made the balls hover in the air and glow, which impresses the Devil. Next he goes to see the Russian, who has made his balls roll around the floor whilst playing Tchaikovsky. But the Pole impresses him the most: he's broken one of the balls in half and lost the other.
- It's sometimes joked about that before Isaac Newton discovered gravity, people had the ability to fly.
Live-Action TV
- A.N.T. Farm: Paisley, sometimes to Reality Warper levels. She's made a helicopter out of balloons that worked and did a full body gift wrapping of herself!
- Parodied in Arrested Development when Rita walks across a pool after suggesting that Michael visit her in England by walking across the ocean, "if it's not too deep". As it turns out, it's one of Gob's
magic tricksillusions. - Blackadder:
- In the episode of Blackadder II themed around Elizabethan-era exploration, Blackadder launches an exploration mission to improve his standing in court. His actual plan is just to channel-hop to France, relax for a while, and come back with made-up tales of adventure. The captain he hires, however, is almost completely insane and no-one else on board knows how to navigate or operate a ship. As revealed at the end of the episode, they somehow made it to Australia and back within two years.
- At the end of the final episode of Blackadder the Third, Prince George announces he's alive because the bullet hit the cigarillo box in his pocket. As soon as he realizes the cigarillo box is in his other jacket, he dies.
- In Chernobyl, nobody thought that it was possible for an RBMK reactor to explode. Several of the plant workers remain in denial for hours because they can't get it to make sense in their heads. Only later, after Khomyuk's extensive interviews with the dying technicians, do the pieces fall into place. There was a Failsafe Failure in which reactivity would momentarily increase when all the control rods were reinserted—but Soviet officials decided to hush it up because it would only become dangerous if someone recklessly disregarded every safety precatuion. That was what Anatoly Dyatlov, head of the night shift, did—he unknowingly created the exact set of circumstances that would turn AZ-5 from an emergency shutdown to a detonator.
- In one episode of Corner Gas, Oscar offers to help destroy a barn and says he's more than qualified for the job. Cue a montage of him accidentally destroying various things, with the last thing being a bowl of salad, which spontaneously explodes in his face for absolutely no reason.
Hank: How do you blow up a salad?
Oscar: Happens more than you think! - In one episode of Dara O Briain's Go 8 Bit, all four contestants were playing Pac-Man, with the rules being that the one to survive the longest won. Sam Pamphilon, one of the series regulars known as a "Gaming Muggle", was the one who managed to survive the longest, despite believing himself to have already run out of lives.
- Eureka:
- Basically the premise of the series. In a town full of the world's top geniuses, the average-intelligence-having sheriff often saves the day by not knowing enough about science.
- Which is sometimes invoked after a while, especially by Sheriff Carter's friend Henry Deacon, since he has seen how many Eureka Moments have come from it. Henry is one of the few that doesn't immediately dismiss Carter's intelligence and treats his "dumb" questions more as teaching moments.
- Gilligan's Island: Gilligan once flew by attaching a pair of artificial wings to his arms and flapping them until the Skipper told him it was impossible.
- The Goodies: In "The Lost Tribe", Graeme builds a canvas television that works perfectly. Then he is told that a canvas television is a scientific impossibility so he throws it away.
- A gag in The Good Place reveals that every religion and theologian's idea of the afterlife was pretty inaccurate, with most of them getting only about 5-10% right - except for an Erudite Stoner named Doug Forcett from Calgary, who got really high in the '70s and started rambling about life after death. Somehow, by pure chance, he got over 90% of it right. He's something of a revered figure in the afterlife as a result.
- However, this same example is played with later in the series. When Michael and Janet meet Doug Forcett in Season 3, they find that Doug has run himself ragged trying to act on the principles he derived from his fugue state. He is neurotically obsessed with doing as little harm as possible to anything and everything around him so as to qualify for The Good Place, to the point where he causes great pain and discomfort to himself. To make matters worse, in the very next episode it is revealed that he did it All for Nothing, as it would still be impossible to reach the threshold for good behavior before he dies. This is thus a rare example of an achievement in ignorance making a person's entire life worse rather than better, however, it also provides the main characters with the clues they need to suggest how best to change the afterlife, and he is completely unaware of how important he is to the fate of the universe until he reaches the afterlife himself.
- On Kevin Can F**k Himself, Patty supplied a couple of old ladies with generic oxycodone, thinking she was just helping a few people. She's completely stunned when a gangster comes up to her, demanding more from the person the local underworld considers a key dealer. It turns out those people started selling pills to others who, in turn, sold them to others. Thus, to her own amazement, Patty has become the biggest oxy supplier in Worchester.
- LazyTown: Pixel invents an automatic tooth-brushing machine, apparently without knowing what a toothbrush is.
- Married... with Children: Kelly will do this on occasion. One episode had Bud distracting her by giving her a Where's Waldo? book. She runs all over town trying to find Waldo and, at the end of the episode, he's sitting next to Kelly at the dinner table.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus has the Upper-Class Twit of the Year Show, in which Oliver Sinjin-Mollusk (whose father was a cabinet minister and his mother won the derby) manages to not run over the old woman, but instead runs over himself with a car.
- Discussed in an episode of My Favorite Martian, when Uncle Martin explains to Tim why he's so concerned about their landlady's new private detective hobby:
Uncle Martin: An amateur is infinitely more dangerous than a professional. If Alexander Graham Bell had been a professional electrician, he would never have invented the telephone — he would have known it was impossible!
- NewsRadio: A "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome episode features Matthew, a very stupid person, drinking what he thinks is an intelligence-boosting formula and, because he is so stupid and gullible, he believes it works and therefore it actually does. Until he became smart enough to realize it was only a placebo and immediately reverted back to his old stupid self.
- In an episode of Power Rangers Zeo, Bulk and Skull are able to defeat a group of Cogs, foot soldier robots of King Mondo. The Cogs usually analyze fighting style and predict movement but because Bulk and Skull are not trained in combat, their "style" is erratic, so the Cogs cannot defeat them.
- Quantum Leap. Children under five can see Al and the real Sam. So can animals. This was probably a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, since a director couldn't tell small children or animals to pretend that Dean Stockwell wasn't there.
- Red Dwarf:
- Rimmer is advised to invoke this trope in the episode "Cassandra", being told that if he doesn't know enough to know that he doesn't know enough, there's no fear holding him back.
Kochanski: He's got the power of ignorance.
Kryten: And with the ignorance he's got, that makes him one of the most powerful men who ever lived! - At the beginning of that season, Rimmer mentioned that anyone who couldn't fix the drive plate had to have a brain the size of a newt's testicle. Apparently, it's really, really hard to botch the job.
- Rimmer is advised to invoke this trope in the episode "Cassandra", being told that if he doesn't know enough to know that he doesn't know enough, there's no fear holding him back.
- On The Rookie, everyone is stunned when dim-witted cop Smitty reveals that while tripping on a combination of cough syrup and diet pills while writing This Is Us fan fiction, he accidentally founded QAnon.
- On Scrubs, the Todd once revived a flatlined patient... with a high-five.
Dr. Cox: Great moment, there, dumbass. It starts out with a profound misunderstanding of how the human body works, and winds up with you shattering some old man's hand.
- In the Smart Guy episode "TJ Versus the Machine", TJ beats the unbeatable chess computer Socrates by taking a lead from Marcus. Marcus doesn't have a clue what he's doing, and TJ realizes that a computer designed to compete against expert players won't be able to formulate a strategy against random, unpredictable play.
- Stargate Atlantis has the Rookie Red Ranger John Sheppard, who's only just begun to learn about the Stargate and the Lost City. In the first episode, he happens to sit in a chair...and turns out to have the genetic mix from the Ancients necessary to operate the technology. He had pretty much no clue what was going on.
- In the Stick Stickly TV special Stuck, Stick becomes a natural at ice-skating completely by accident when he slips and tries to right himself.
- In the sketch "Poker Face
" by Studio C, Matt somehow got to the final four of a poker tournament despite having no clue how to play the game. Or what "call" even means.
- Played with in the Supergirl (2015) episode "Far From the Tree". Supergirl pretends this. She claimed she took a Wrong Turn at Albuquerque, accidentally ending up on Mars.
- Sweet Genius:
- Some winners have been primarily self-taught and have won largely because they didn't cook by the same rules the trained professionals did, resulting in unusually creative desserts.
- One chef in the infamous bone marrow challenge decorated her plate with the bone the marrow came in, not realizing Chef Ron has a thing about inedible decorations. However, the way she used it was creative enough to actually earn his praise, and she won the episode.
- WandaVision: The Hex only comes into existence because of Wanda's emotional outburst right outside her would-be home in Westview. When Agatha Harkness questions how she managed to create something so big and intricate without any training, Wanda flat-out admits that she doesn't know how she did it.
Music
See the Real Life section for out-of-universe examples.
- This is the topic of the Collin Raye song "What They Don't Know", where the narrator sees boys fishing in a tiny puddle and decides not to tell them they're not going to catch anything.
- This is apparently part of the premise of Blue Man Group's act: the eponymous Blue Men have re-created alt-rock and contemporary pop music by tapping PVC pipes and beating up pianos without realizing they shouldn't be able to create those sounds without synthesizers and digital studio equipment.
- Kids Praise: This happened in-universe in one of the albums: Psalty tried to invent a machine that stretches time, and instead invented a machine that travels through time... and did this by accident!
- Lee Murdock wrote the song "Just Five Minutes" about a man who fell overboard from a vessel on the Great Lakes and successfully swam to shore; he commented in the liner notes that the guy was young and didn't know that you can only survive five minutes in the ice-cold waters of the lakes.
Podcasts
- This happens a lot as a result of the McElroy Brothers (and their dad, Clint) having a tenuous grasp on the rules of Dungeons & Dragons in The Adventure Zone: Balance. Merle consistently casts spells above his spell slots because his player, Clint, has no idea how they work. Zone of Truth, instead of forcing the target to not lie, instead inexplicably causes people to spout their secrets. Taako uses Phantom Steed, a spell that summons a ghostly horse, to summon a bicorn named Garyl. Most egregious is the moment dubbed "Arms Outstretched", from the arc The Suffering Game: Magnus has his soul knocked out of his body, and Taako, in an effort to save him, uses Blink to travel to the Ethereal Plane, where Magnus' soul is. Merle then casts Planar Ally to summon a being from a different plane - namely, Taako and Magnus' soul. Needless to say, that's not how any of those spells work, but Griffin allows it because of Rule of Cool. It's acknowledged by Griffin in The The Adventure Zone Zone, who states that they're basically playing Calvinball with the standard D&D rules. At live shows, he insists that the audience not call him and his family out on not knowing the rules.
- After Welcome to Night Vale's former mayor Pamela Winchell retires, she takes up several hobbies which go horribly wrong. Her attempt at birdwatching somehow causes massive fires, tropical fishing results in a flash flood, and her coin collecting crashes the economy, just to name a few. Even Cecil and the other locals find all this both astonishing and alarming.
Radio
- In a story from "X Minus One" entitled "Project Trojan" a British intelligence agency enlists the help of a science fiction writer to come up with plans for a fictional "Death Ray" that they will feed to Nazi Germany in order to pull top-level German scientists to try to finish the Ray before the British do. Unfortunately even though the Ray was considered impossible to build, the Germans managed to complete it anyway, resulting in an entire mountain being blown apart. This was the writer's plan the whole time. The Ray was impossible because it would always eventually backfire, and when it did, it took out the entire German base, along with dozens of their top scientists, making this more of a subversion of this trope.
Roleplay
- A roleplaying website had an event that featured an organization based around a large number of superhumans. Two of them explicitly manifested this as a superpower; the second one became an Omnidisciplinary Scientist who could play around and break virtually any field of science over her knee because she believed she was a supergenius without peer who could just figure things out no one else could. The first one, on the other hand, was a butler to the group's ruling council, because in trying to figure out what his powers were and how they worked, they made his powers stop working.
- The title character's player in The Ballad of Edgardo arguably deserves Pantheon status for this trope. When the story's narrator is building his character, he instinctively picks the coolest-sounding options without consulting anyone else for advice, and only learns too late from the other players that the abilities he's chosen are considered by the other players to be pathetically underpowered and strategically useless. He'd made an unarmed brawler, but fists do zero damage against any kind of armor. He'd set up his stats to give himself a Spirit Cap of five (not terrible, but not great either), then picked the Perk "Overflowing Spirit" to remove the cap, not realizing it also locked him out of using elemental attacks, which would at least let his fists do some damage. He was stuck using the Non-Elemental "Raw Spirit", which does far less damage, but cannot be resisted by anything. Those same players learn too late that Edgardo's supposedly useless stat build, thanks to brilliant exploitation of a limited field effect, is actually the most overpowered Game-Breaker in the entire setting. The city of Haven is home to the Spirit Well. While in Haven, your Spirit automatically and instantly recharges "up to the cap." With no cap, Edgardo has literally infinite Spirit to spend on every action, and thus can use Raw Spirit to deal infinite irresistible damage with every punch.
- Dino Attack RPG plays this for laughs constantly with Enter and Return. Where to begin, they firmly believe that sharks, trees, and umbrellas are appropriate equipment for surgery, successfully used a shark to revive a patient after conventional CPR and a defibrillator already failed, and in one instance after being sent on a Snipe Hunt, they managed to leave a hospital, buy a fishing pole, go to the harbor, catch a shark and get back in roughly 30 seconds.
- Happens in the Firefly game of Cool Kids Table. Thanks to Josh's great piloting roll, his character Mickey is able to dock a shuttle while passed out.
Tabletop Games
- Arduin: This is exaggerated with the ibathenes, which have the ability to keep fighting for a number of rounds after they're killed because they're genuinely too stupid to realize that they're supposed to be dead.
- Ars Magica: There are three ways to enter the Pocket Dimension of a regio — perform the correct ritual, guide yourself in with Supernatural Sensitivity, or get so lost you stumble in somehow.
- Everybody who has learned to play Chess has probably encountered this from both directions. Especially when grade schoolers are involved.
- Don't Rest Your Head: It's implied that not only do the normal people ignore anything related to Mad City (for example, when they stole an entire district, they thought it was destroyed in a fire), they can literally No-Sell anything the Nightmares do. Most of the time.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Shadow Conjuration spells summon things that function as real if the defender fails to disbelieve in them. Normally, they are used offensively, but when used defensively, the recipient has to choose to ignore knowing that he knows it's not real in order for it to be real enough to give him or her the full benefit.
- With the right Prestige Class combination, disbelieving makes it more than 100% real.
- Psionics in 3.X had a rather bizarre meta example based on how people played them. Since Psionic Characters used a pool of points rather than Vancian Spell Slots, their powers were enhanced by pumping a power with more points, either by raising the parameters in the power (Eg: 1 point per 1d6 extra damage with Energy Ray) or by powering their metamagics. A common phenomenon in the game was known as "Going Nova" where a Psionic character would hoard their power points until the big boss and then pump them all into a single power to deal absurd amounts of damage and end the fight quickly. This gave rise to a false reputation of Psionic Classes being overpowered and many people issued house rules to "Cap" their power... except there was already a Balancing Factor to this built into the game: Psionic characters could not spend more points on a power than their current manifester level. In other words, it was mistakenly labeled as overpowered because players didn't read the rules carefully enough. This phenomenon was so widespread that a popular house rule was implementing the limits that they already had. In fact, when Dreamscarred Press released their Psionics Books, they made sure to label this limit "The Golden Rule of Psionics" and repeat in several times throughout the book just to make sure people actually read it this time.
- Genius: The Transgression:
- The premise is implied to be this. Since the Inspired put the "mad" in "Mad Scientist", they have a tendency to veer into Insane Troll Logic. They're still able to make inventions using that logic, however, often achieving impossible feats.
- Indeed, one of the defining conflicts of the game is between "normal" Geniuses (who know it isn't possible and do it anyway) and Unmada: Geniuses who truly believe science works according to their paradigm. Around an Unmada, it does...
- Zig-zagged in cosmic religious horror game KULT. It has a similar feature to Don't Rest Your Head. Briefly, Humans Are Cthulhu and the cosmic horror angels broke their arm punching us. These angelic horrors pale before humanity's real power. However, individually, humans are usually torn apart in places these beings come from. These otherworldly, nightmarish parallel dimensions are just about the last place you want to go. Individual player characters who are in a positive mental state are shielded by our own ignorance — but also trapped in a false reality that imprisons us. To see the real reality — the one so lethal to player characters but where humanity can become nigh-omnipotent again, they have to shed their ignorance. One way is to be a saint. The other way — the easier way — is to be so thoroughly traumatized the illusion crashes down about you in an fit of madness. So safety - being able to almost No-Sell the cosmic horror — is an achievement in ignorance, but as a player character, you are all but guaranteed to have that veil of ignorance torn away to confront beings that are terrified of our nascent godhood but basically godlike compared to most of us.
- Pathfinder: Cayden Cailean managed to ascend to godhood by attempting the Test of the Starstone on a bet... while completely blackout drunk during a three-day bender. Even he has no idea how he pulled it off.
- Toon:
- Steve Jackson Games' role-playing system, which takes place in a cartoon universe, gives appropriately cartoony reasons for being able to do this sort of thing. If a character wants to walk off a cliff and on thin air or breathe underwater or whatever, he can roll to intentionally try to fail an intelligence roll. If he fails, it's considered that he's too dumb to realize it's impossible. This is a reference to all the times cartoon characters do just that. It's actually considered a law of Toon Physics that gravity does not affect a character until they realize it's supposed to. This is demonstrated in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures.
- The "Star Toon" setting in the Tooniversal Tour Guide sourcebook features the Bozonians, an alien race so monumentally stupid they can build outlandish architectural wonders and incredible scientific devices because they're too dumb to realize the things they build should be impossible. Visitors to their home planet of Bozok are strictly forbidden because all it would take is one smart-ass telling the locals "That's impossible!" to bring down a civilization.
- Warhammer: Daddallo was inspired to create the wingsuits used by the Birdmen of Catrazza when he discovered a set of documents and schematics on the subject written by Leonardo da Miragliano. These later turned out to be forgeries, but Daddallo built working wings anyway.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- This is how a lot of humanity's technology operates in the dark days of the 41st millennium. After thousands of years of scientific regression, the Adeptus Mechanicus not only has a monopoly on mankind's Lost Technology, they worship it and wrap all but the simplest of mechanical tasks into a religious ritual. So activating an ancient plasma reactor or whatnot involves a great deal of chanting, incense, the application of sanctified engine oil, and some specific taps with a wrench that just so happen to hit the "on" switch. Depending on the Writer this is all a scheme to keep the common people from learning how to maintain their own devices, while other sources have the AdMech genuinely clueless of the scientific principles behind their shiny toys. In yet others, much of it is real, the Machine Spirits the worship is meant to appease exist, and advanced Tech Priests are essentially wizards.
- The Orks are an even more pronounced example. Greenskins don't have scientists that we'd recognize, but "Meks" and "Doks" with mechanical and medical knowledge hard-wired into their DNA. They can put together an engine block or perform an organ transplant purely on instinct, but wouldn't be able to explain how they did it. For the Orks' weirder, physics-defying inventions, the devices function to some extent because the Orks expect them to — Orks are latent psykers, but aren't conscious of this fact. This is why captured Greenskin technology is so temperamental or nonfunctional when used by a non-Ork, and why when it comes to Orky vehicles, the Red Ones Go Faster.
- An even more extreme example are the Jokaero. Similar to the Orks, these orangutan-like aliens are capable of creating technology on an instinctual level. Unlike the Greenskins, though, these aren't piles of junk randomly slapped together and brought to life through sheer willpower. The Jokaero can make some of the most advanced, highly miniaturized technology in the galaxy, utilizing advanced techniques and seemingly natural phenomena that the best minds in the Imperium can't wrap their heads around, which they can do with pretty much any bits of junk that happen to lie around. A Jokaero can sit on a pile of technological scrap and assemble a spacecraft that is more advanced than almost anything any other race can put together. Another difference from the Orks is that anyone can use Jokaero tech. In spite of this, there is great debate if Jokaero are sentient, as they don't appear to have any discernible language or culture, with everything they do motivated only by their will to survive. The evident lack of sentience, their innate technological prowess and the non-exclusivity of their tech means that the Imperium is willing to make them an exception to their policy regarding Xenos, and Jokaero technology is highly sought after by both Rogue Traders and Inquisitors. That said, their creative process appears to be entirely random. Handing a Jokaero a bolt pistol could result in it having enough firepower to vaporize a tank in one shot, or an otherwise normal bolt pistol with some high-tech but ultimately useless flourish, with no way to discern which you are going to get.
- The World of Darkness:
- Mage: The Ascension: This is a very real thing at a collective level — because reality is strongly defined by what people think it is, a sufficient portion of humanity not knowing or believing that something is impossible or has certain consequences can very much alter reality to make this belief correct.
- The ignorant and blind Sleepers — that is, all of non-mage humanity — constantly keep the terrible demons, gods, monsters, etc at bay, and away from our tasty souls, day in and day out. This is done through the amazing, awe-inspiring power... of disbelieving and desperately ignoring that these things could possibly exist.
- Clever mages can get around disbelief by convincing sleepers that there is a logical explanation and it's not magic they're seeing. A true mage posing as a stage magician could get away with separating their lovely assistant in half for real so long as the audience stays convinced that there's a hidden trick for them to try guessing, or giving scientific-sounding technobabble for an impossible device.
- It works even better to play on the staggering ignorance of the general population. Things that should only work in action movies are a great way to disguise magic that static reality would otherwise reject, mainly because most people aren't bright enough to know it isn't possible. A can of hairspray and a lighter is enough to make basic fire effects coincidental, even if the resultant stream of fire outclasses any actual flamethrower in power. It's suggested that the unrealistic aspects of popular fiction are deliberate attempts to subvert the dominant paradigm.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: Creating new vampiric powers is supposed to be something only very old and powerful vampires can manage. However, the weak 14th- and 15th-generation vampires seem to be able to do it with ease. They grew up on stories that said, for example, that vampires could fly; therefore, they managed to find the magic that let them do it, simply because they were too unimportant for elder vampires to explain to them that it was impossible.
- Mage: The Ascension: This is a very real thing at a collective level — because reality is strongly defined by what people think it is, a sufficient portion of humanity not knowing or believing that something is impossible or has certain consequences can very much alter reality to make this belief correct.
Visual Novels
- In Chapter 4 of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Forgetful Jones Monotaro suddenly becomes a whiz with computers... because he forgot that he was bad with computers. Of course, he eventually forgets that he forgot and goes back to being a computer-illiterate dumbass.
- Fate/stay night:
- Shirou was told that Projection magic was useless, so he stopped pursuing it as his primary magic and simply uses it as a warmup before he tries other types of magic. This is roughly equivalent to performing surgery on someone as a warmup to fixing a radio: painful, dangerous, has little to do with what you're gearing up to do, and something that a non-expert should never do. And no one is an expert in Projection because it's seen as incredibly difficult and incredibly useless. However, Shirou doesn't know this, so he basically creates matter from nothing, which is supposed to be an impossible feat even in this universe. At best, most people can only keep their projections around for a few minutes and they're of shoddy quality, but Shirou shows the ability to replicate items that never seem to disappear as well as legendary weapons. And he doesn't even realize this is amazing.
- To his credit, this isn't entirely an achievement in ignorance so much as it is no one realizing how Shirou's magic actually works or recognizing that he's doing something other than what it looks like. He has internalized a Reality Marble — basically a cheat in otherwise consistent natural law — that specializes in the knowledge and tracing of swords and sword-like weapons, though he can't properly utilize it due to his poor magecraft skills. Archer calls it Unlimited Blade Works. That said, he didn't only practice Projection with swords—because it's more like he's drawing the blade from inside himself, it could be said that his "Projecting" swords is almost a different form of magic entirely.
- Okabe Rintarou of Steins;Gate somehow managed to turn a microwave into a freaking time-machine by fiddling with it enough in an attempt to get it to operate remotely. Subverted when he eventually realizes this and reacts just as one might expect.
Web Animation
- In Camp Camp, the Flower Scouts spend their A Day in the Limelight episode setting up and running a powerful drug cartel without even realizing it. It all started when their leader told them that the crystal meth she had possession of was "Mexican sugar cane", and it all escalated from there.
- Homestar Runner:
- This may explain the title character's use of the "telekinetic powers/invisible arms" that the fans are still debating over. Homestar may not realize that he should be unable to manipulate objects or coat sleeves or stay airborne between two shackles in Trogdor's Dungeon in 8-Bit Is Enough. However, suggesting the same of Marzipan might be pushing it.
- Quite a few characters have Invisible Anatomy. It could be that the characters grew up with it and so don't think it's unusual (or impossible).
- According to the Strong Bad Email "4 branches", Strong Bad has classified a whole list of "So Stupid It's Smart-ities" Homestar has accomplished, like accidentally reciting Coulomb's Law when asked, "What's two plus two?"
- The Most Epic Story Ever Told in All of Human History: Ridiculously Epic Fail is somehow able to turn Ridiculously Epic's "Evil Mobile", the one that he insists is not an armadillo, into an actual armadillo when he drives it, only because he actually thinks it is an armadillo.
- In Red vs. Blue, when Church enters Caboose's mind, he finds that everything inside there is based on how Caboose understands the world around him. At one point, he needs to use Tucker's sword — the sword can't be used by anybody but Tucker, but Caboose is too dumb to understand this, so the sword works for Church inside Caboose's mind.
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Karen's son, Corey, started flying because his brother told him he was a helicopter. And apparently it's not the first time it's happened.
Web Original
- Cracked:
- This article has Brockway acquire the power to shoot lightning due to misunderstanding a side-effect of Celexa.
When asked to explain this in simpler terms, he elaborated that I was "so retarded that it crossed the line into the supernatural".
- At one point in Agents of Cracked, Swaim gets President James Garfield and Garfield the Cat mixed up. Despite this, he somehow manages to invite President Garfield the Cat to a teleconference, who indignantly states that he was promised lasagna.
- This article
- On Not Always Right, a man tries to buy a bird from the pet store... a wild bird that he'd caught just outside the store, mistaking it for an outside display.
- On Not Always Working, three pranksters in a video game store fill an empty console box with water bottles to fool any would-be shoplifters, and end up accidentally catching an assistant manager with a history of stealing games and money from the store, indirectly getting him fired.
- Reddit:
- On the subreddit /r/ShittyAskScience a user once asked, if the sun were to instantly disappear, would it take 8 minutes for the earth to stop orbiting it? However, this is actually what would happen if the sun were to spontaneously disappear, as the force of gravity travels at the speed of light. The page exploded when they realized that someone asked a question so unreasonably stupid it became reasonable.
- As a joke, a male reddit user decided to urinate on a pregnancy test to see what would happen. The pregnancy test came out positive and the user discovered that he had testicular cancer via a tumour. Turns out pregnancy tests can detect beta human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone in the blood and the urine produced by the developing placenta, beta hCG can also signal testicular cancer. It should be noted that this method isn't reliable and if people are concerned about their health then they should consult a medical professional for advice and a proper examination.
- On the subreddit /r/ShittyAskScience
- SF Debris: Parody Janeway is capable of solving any kind of Negative Space Wedgie by shooting it, mostly by failing to realize that they should not be susceptible to phaser blasts. This includes resolving time paradoxes with gunfire and even breaking the event horizon of a black hole, a procedure which, scientifically speaking, is about as plausible as becoming able to fly by hunting down gravity and stabbing it through the heart with a tuning fork.
Web Videos
- Achievement Hunter Minecraft Series: In episode 159, the crew is playing with a mod that adds dinosaurs. Ryan and Geoff are looking at a machine that creates eggs and embryos from DNA, and Ryan's wondering why it doesn't seem to be working. Geoff puts a chicken egg in the machine as a joke, and it turns out that eggs are the "fuel" for the machine.
- Alfredo has been given the nickname "Mr. Magoo" due to the fact that he has bumbled across the Minecraft server, somehow avoided monsters and death traps that have taken out other Hunters numerous times and discovered places that the others failed to by complete accident. This is how he ends up winning the second "Ya Dead Ya Dead" series.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd has a Commodore 64 computer in his game room and among the games he has played on it include Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures among a few other PC fan games, and an SNES Emulator to play Hong Kong '97.
- In Code MENT, Lelouche is able to corner Clovis in his G1 base and has absolutely no idea how he managed it (which he tells Clovis when asked).
- He also manages to fly a helicopter by randomly pushing buttons.
- Dashie Games: Towards the end of Dashie's playthrough of Life Is Strange Episode 2: Out Of Time, he gets to the part where Max tries to convince Kate not to commit suicide. The point is, he has no prior knowledge of this. The decisions he chooses is "Things will get better," "It was in silent mode," "I'm gathering proof," "Be strong," "Your mother," and finally, because Dashie knows someone named Matthew and that it was 11:30 at this point, "Matthew 11:28." After all of these decisions due to having no prior knowledge and no walkthrough to guide him as a result, in the end, Dashie ultimately ends up saving Kate. Due to his success in this, Life Is Strange became one of his requested games and it racked up a lot of likes.
- Double Life SMP: On Day 4, Martyn and Joel end up accidentally killing the "Ranchers' Revenge" Warden with fall damage while playing around with fishing rods.note
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged:
- Goku is able to obtain a blueberry muffin during a space voyage because of his deluded belief that there's a button which makes muffins onboard the spaceship (despite being repeatedly told earlier there wasn't one). In the 21st episode, the power of the muffin button allows him to read minds. It's implied later that the Muffin Button may have actually been real, since Goku finds a muffin button on Freeza's ship when Namek is exploding. The Muffin Button in Goku's pod was a leftover bit of technology from when it was one of Freeza's.
- Dr. Gero apparently has no idea how he put his brain inside his android body which he immediately questions himself when 18 asks this.
17: Wait a sec, are you an android? Holy shit, you're an android! How did you even do that?
Gero: I took my brain out and put it inside this body.
18: How!?
Gero: I... huh, how did I do that?
- Epic NPC Man: In "Missing an obvious game mechanic", two Skycraft players, played by Rowan and Ben, come across a crime scene in the woods. Rowan bemoans the expected lengthy duration of trying to find clues, meanwhile Ben's confused as to why Rowan's picking around the scene instead of following a set of footprints leading away. Rowan's equally confused about what Ben's talking about, and he asks if Rowan's using "Detective Mode". This confuses Rowan even more and Ben urges him to use R3 to turn it on, whereupon Rowan is utterly flabbergasted at learning that he had not only never realized there was a Detective Mode, but that Ben says it was both introduced in the first quest of the game and is a core mechanic as well. It's to the point that Rowan took 18 hours doing a quest that took Ben only 5 minutes. Both are equally baffled and impressed that Rowan was able to reach his character's high level despite this self-inflicted handicap.
- Game Grumps and Steam Train:
- When engaging in a Games Grumps Vs. match, Jon often does better going in blind, which frustrates Arin to no end.
- When the guys played Trine 2 on Steam Train, Ross attempted to solve any and all problems by conjuring boxes, and in so doing actually bypassed several puzzles that would otherwise have required actual problem solving. In response, the developers sent him some swag, including a certificate of excellence in the art of boxing from Amadeus the wizard.
- On Jon's own channel, JonTron, this happens quite a lot, by way of managing to play games inserting them into the wrong consoles. Or the wrong machines entirely. And playing episodes of Goosebumps by inserting the books into a console. In his Titenic (sic) video he plugs the correct cartridges into the correct console, but then submerges the console in a fish tank before playing it. He also somehow manages to recut a total disaster of an episode into something actually good in post-editing, apparently just by pushing a couple of buttons on his FitBit.
- For half of the playthrough of Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Danny did not know that he could duck or regain health. Instead, he developed ridiculous timing skills that allowed him to exploit brief moments of vulnerability before his opponents could hit him with moves he thought were unblockable.
- During their playthrough of Besiege Ross keeps building utterly ludicrous kill machines like a "tank" that literally just drives around spinning a big arm in an attempt to kill enemy soldiers. The soldiers effortlessly overwhelm it, smash the arm off rendering it helpless, and proceed to bust it to shreds... which hurls it into a mine, blows it apart, and ignites all the scattered pieces which in turn kill enough of the soldiers to complete the level. Naturally, Ross is completely blown away by this.
Ross: Wait, woah! T-they all died! Wait-wait-wait-wait-wait! WAIT!!! That counted?! THAT FUCKING COUNTED?!
Danny: Congratulations, Ross!
- On The Guild, it turns out that Kwan is a champion-level competitive gamer in Korea. The guildees probably wouldn't stand a chance against him, but Mr. Wiggly defeats him by using spells an experienced player would never use. Kwan didn't bother defending against them.
- In one the Raising Corpse skits, a young Corpse summons his Fratbro friend Kyler by chanting Kyler's catchphrase three times. Kyler apparently didn't know this was possible, as he is confused when he gets teleported to where Corpse and his mother were.
- In Ultra Fast Pony, it's impossible to kill Rainbow Dash because she's so stupid she doesn't know how to die.
- In Vision of Escaflowne Abridged, when Van is first magically transported to earth, he furiously asks where he is and how he got there. Later, he seems perfectly confident in how to get home.
Van: Now, to return home the way I got here.
Hitomi: I thought you didn't know how you got here?
Van: Right, that way.
