Idiot Houdini

I've used this term a lot same I going to explain what it means. A Idiot Houdini is someone who is known for making consistently poor judgments never has to answer for them. In fact, nearly the exact opposite happens. even though In a more realistic story anyone acting the way he does would almost certainly have died ten episodes before the series began.

Overlaps significantly with The Load, The Scrappy, Born Lucky and The Fool.



The character above is the much beloved (although In my opinion overrated) main protagonist of The Simpsons, Homer Simpson at first showed reasonably poor judgment, but repeated encounters have gradually turned him into this trope. A good example is the episode "Homer Defined" that features Homer saving the nuclear power plant from a meltdown, and becoming a hero because of it; but in reality he simply hit the override button by going "eeny-meeny-miney-mo." When this is discovered, the term "Homer" thus becomes a trope of its own in the episode, for whenever someone does something good on just plain dumb luck. Magic Johnson even said, "Looks like I pulled a Homer!" when he won the game by accident.


This aspect of his character was deconstructed in the eighth-season episode "Homer's Enemy" featuring Frank Grimes, an orphan who had to struggle and work hard all his life just to reach the lower middle class. He is perplexed and disturbed by how successful Homer is despite the fact that he's incompetent at nearly everything. Grimes finally snaps when, after tricking Homer into entering a future nuclear plant model contest for children, the crowd cheers and applauds Homer when he wins the competition by building a scale model with minor efficiency tweaks and stripes going down the towers.

Of course, it is worth noting that Homer is also one of the show's prime Butt Monkeys. He can get away with his stupidity, but only when the plot calls for it, other times fate punishes him dearly such as in The Simpsons Movie, where his actions got the town domed in and everyone goes up to his house with Torches and Pitchforks and his family leave him. Only for him to idiot houdini his way outta that one as well.

Michael Scott on The Office has a habit of falling into this from time to time. Even though he has aspirations to being a highly successful businessman, for example, he doesn't seem to have a rudimentary grasp of economics. An episode where he meets his accountant shows that he spends a great deal of his money, not just on luxuries, but on objects that are almost completely useless to him: He has a fishing rod worth several hundred dollars even though he doesn't know how to fish. His best escape act, though, is when he bankrupts the Michael Scott Paper Company by not understanding that his prices are so low he can't recoup his costs. Dunder-Mifflin, not realizing this (in part because Jim sabotages Dwight's attempt to warn them), offers him a buy-out because on paper Michael's taken a lot of their customers.


Scooby-Doo is considered this by the fans He has NO detective skills and in fact is a dumb coward but he always manages to catch the Monster of the Week by accident and gets congratulated by everyone at the end of each episode- in some of the spinoffs he's even famous for it!

Inspector Gadget is even worse at detective work than Scooby Doo, yet no one ever seems to catch on to this fact; it helps that Penny and Brain (who do pretty much all the work) are either unwilling or (in the latter's case) unable to reveal the truth.

Spongebob Squarepants leans more and more increasingly into this trope as seasons pass, frequently bothering or inflicting misery on the other residents of Bikini Bottom (usually his neighbour Squidward) due to his well-intentioned stupidity, and someone else facing the repercussions for it. Combined with his friend Patrick's near equal Idiot Houdini tendencies the show becomes disturbingly sociopathic for a kid's show at times.

Deedee from Dexter's Laboratory. She normally means to be playful, but always destroys everything Dexter works hard for with nearly no comeuppance at all.

Zim was The Millstone on his own planet, but became this after being Reassigned to Earth. If anyone suffers from Zim's plans, it's usually Dib.

In Adventure Time Jake borderlined this afew times but it was not till the episode Power Animal That he permanently became this.