Cloudcuckoolander

From Tv Tropes

File:Cloudcuckoolander.jpg
Delirium lives in her own little world...
"You know when you're sitting in a chair, and you lean back so you're just on two legs, and then you lean too far and you almost fall over, but just at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time."
-- Steven Wright


A character with their head in the clouds. They are strangely oblivious to things that everyone else takes for granted, such as whether it is okay to turn their suite-mate's room into a landfill and board it up, or that most people don't wear the clothes of a dead person. Male Cloudcuckoolanders often dress in women's clothes for no reason other than they feel women have nicer fashions. Others may wear nothing at all without realizing the taboos attached to it in most cultures. They may have an argument with themselves for fun, or tell rambling stories that have nothing to do with the point they're trying to make. They make totally unintentional double entendres, and are great for Getting Crap Past the Radar.

Cloudcuckoolanders are very rarely malicious. They are far more likely to be Comic Relief. Maybe he's one of Those Two Guys or the crazy member of the Comic Trio. They lapse into non sequitur a lot and while they aren't totally insane, they act it much more than some other crazier characters.

Sometimes also called "Space Case" or "Space Cadet", or plain old "Strange".

One mark of a Cloudcuckoolander is when, 90% of the time, you think the character is just plain nuts, but 10% of the time, you suspect that the character is in fact the Only Sane Man on the show. In other words, a Cloudcuckoolander has massive knowledge and understanding of the workings of the universe... Unfortunately when they are Genre Savvy, nobody else is, and when they are not, everybody else is. In any event, they can be oddly endearing, if not downright Crazy Awesome.

Another notable mark is that often there is nothing actually wrong with what they do, but it is most assuredly not something a normal person would do. A Cloudcuckoolander sees no problem with using a communal shower as their method of hygiene if they lack another method -- hell, they may consider going swimming the same as taking a bath (this example wouldn't apply in cultures where communal bathing is common). Sit down with a Cloud Cuckoolander and try to explain to them that normal people don't wear the clothes of a dead man. They will never understand what your problem is. It's not like the dead guy cares, is it?

When they are given a specific disorder, it is often Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny, despite the fact that a couple of lesser-known disorders actually fit better: Schizotypal personality disorder, which is essentially schizophrenia-lite characterized in part by acting really weird. The rest of it consists of mild versions of the delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations found in paranoid schizophrenia, as well as the affect disturbances that appear across types, hence "schizophrenia-lite", and thought disorder, which is when normal speech is disrupted and presumed to reflect a similar disruption in thoughts.

When their weirdness delves into disturbing territory, they become a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant.

On rare occasion, a Cloudcuckoolander may become Bored With Insanity and become more normal. If this happens, sometimes it sticks, and sometimes a "we want our Cloud Cuckoolander back" movement, subsequently getting bored with sanity too, or some other means of inducing insanity will make him or her a Cloudcuckoolander again (since, after all, Status Quo is God).

Frequently clips entire stacks of Weirdness Coupons from the paper. Certainly, many of them get away with a good deal no one else would be allowed.

This kind of character has a weakness for falling into a Wiki Walk.

This character is a mainstay of Surreal Humor, Dada Comics, and Word Salad Humor. Even in a series with a little more structure overall, the Cloudcuckoolander's wacky and bizarre antics will often be used for an easy gag. This is probably why there are so many Web Comics examples. Often this character will also be a Granola Girl or New Age Retro Hippie.

The name of the trope comes from the city built on air above the Greek plain in Aristophanes' play The Birds, 414 B.C., whose ruler had quite a large mental gap between the dreamy, idealistic Utopia that he imagined his city to be and the brutal totalitarian regime that he had actually imposed on it. He also came up with brilliant ideas like keeping people out of his city -- a city you could only reach through flight -- by building a really, really tall wall around it. (We'll give you a minute to figure out why that wouldn't have worked so well.)

If you've ever had a thought like this, please feel free to contribute to our intellectual coal mine of Musings. For various variants and overlapping tropes see The Fool, Manic Pixie Dream Girl, The Wonka, The Ophelia, The Mad Hatter, and Axe Crazy. If written badly or subjected to Flanderization, a character who was supposed to be merely weird may become a Ralph Wiggum or a full-time Talkative Loon.

Their native land is Cloudcuckooland.

See also Cloudcuckoolander's Minder for the person who with or against their will often accompany the Cloud Cuckoolanders and try to prevent things getting out of hand. An of course usually nearly impossible task.

Lastly, when dealing with Cloud Cuckoolanders, always remember that sometimes their ramblings aren't just ramblings.


Contents

[edit] Animation

  • Katie, the yellow... something from Horton Hears a Who, in spite of having only one line: "In my world everyone is a pony that eats rainbows and poops butterflies." The rest of the time she'll inexplicably: make a gonk face like she's choking, sit with her back to Horton (he's a kind of Baloo the Bear "teacher" in this adaptation), and finally float off into space... in spite of being a hoofed mammal with no wings. Fittingly, while the other young animals have parents Katie appears to be completely unique.
  • Frank, the paranoid lizard from The Rescuers Down Under is clearly off his rocker.
  • All of the lemurs in Madagascar seem crazy to some degree, but King Julien XIII is definitely the worst. He clearly comprehends all that goes on around him (which may be why he's King)...
Melman: Hey! The bozos have the people!
King Julien: They're up there." (points to some human skeletons hanging from parachutes snagged on the branches of a large tree) "Don't you love the people? Not a very lively bunch though.
Alex: Oh. So... do you have any... live people?
Julien: Uh, no. Only dead ones.
  • Belle from the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast is at first presented as this, since she's bored of living in a small town and finds escape in the books she reads. The townspeople find her strange because of this. In fact, one line in her intro song (sung by the barber) goes: "Her head's up on some cloud." Of course, we end up finding out that's she's really a strong young lady who doesn't hesitate to stand up to the Beast.
  • Every Ice Age film has one of these. The first film has the Dodos, an entire species that plans to survive the Ice Age which even they themselves say will last for billions of years, with a stockpile of three watermelons. The second has Ellie, a mammoth who thinks she's a possum, despite the obvious size difference between her and her "brothers". She got better. The third has Buck, the one-eyed weasel who most likely lost part of his brain when he lost his eye.
  • Ed and Rafiki from The Lion King.
  • Osaka from Azumanga Daioh. She has a tendency to say and do strange things out of the blue, drifts off into daydreaming from which she is very hard to shake.
  • Gedatsu in One Piece is a villainous example; he often forgets that his mouth needs to be open to talk, or to unreverse his eyes to see, and apparently isn't even able to cross his arms properly without advice. He kills his own Mooks by accident. The main character who faces him doesn't get it and finds his behavior utterly terrifying, though.
  • Tsukasa from Lucky Star, apart from randomly spacing out for no discernible reason, finds balsamic vinegar strangely fascinating.
  • The titular character of Suzumiya Haruhi, who rants about dumping all her previous boyfriends because they weren't aliens, time travellers, or espers, seems to fit this trope at first... until her criteria turn out to be less farfetched than they seem....
  • Ed from Cowboy Bebop. Though as a hyperactive teenage super-hacker, she also qualifies as a Genius Ditz. This may be hereditary, given how her father acts.
  • Milly Thompson from Trigun is an almost stereotypical example. She once nearly threatened a shopkeeper with her ReallyBigGun when in search of pudding... and got it. Only to drop her grocery bags a few moments later to emphasize a point mid-conversation.
  • Nia Teppelin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann; at first due to her sheltered up-bringing but it's quite clear she isn't all there in the head when even after seven years in the outside world she still surprises everyone with her quirky misunderstandings. Simon even remarks that he has a hard time understanding what she says.
  • Hohenheim from FullmetalAlchemist has a way of looking and acting as if he came straight from another planet.
  • Finland from Axis Powers Hetalia shows signs of this; he thinks that "Blood-smeared Flower Egg" is a perfectly acceptable name for a puppy. Italy combines elements of this with The Ditz.
  • Isaac and Miria from Baccano! share a train of thought that has to be seen to be believed. For example, they once decided to steal an entire museum, building and all, for the sheer hell of it. Then they realized it was impossible... so they stole the door instead to stop people from entering.
  • In Full Metal Panic, a more disturbing example is Gates. Most of the things he says don't really make sense, and the people who employ him have a hard time understanding what in the world he's talking about. In fact, the last thing he does when Sousuke obliterates his AS (and kills him) is to play with his hair and say, "Maybe I cut it too short?"
  • In her first few appearances, Lacus Clyne Gundam Seed was one. She seemed utterly unaware of the fact that she was on an enemy warship, and condemns Kira to an Accidental Pervert moment when he takes off her dress right in front of him.
  • If one were to examine GIR from Invader Zim, one would inevitably find a "Made in Cloudcuckooland" label. On one memorable occasion where we got to see the world from his point of view, a quartet of cows became talking sausages with top hats, canes and dinner jackets, which propositioned GIR to dance with them "into oblivion". Seriously. Possibly justified, as he's assembled from random bits of garbage.
  • Captain Murphy from Sealab 2021 is like an unusually clueless child. He thinks you don't have to pay for things bought by credit card, and never quite gets what people want from him. ("If trenches are what Hollywood Actor Beck Bristow wants, then trenches he shall have!")
  • The titular character of The Tick, with his odd proverbs ("That's trouble with a capital troub!"), odder lapses of knowledge (Spanish is a "crazy moon-language") and even odder Spoof Aesop a minute, as well as his battle cry of SPOON!
The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight: "And so he says to me, you want to be a bad guy? And I say Yeah Baby! I want to be bad! I says surf's up, space ponies! I'm making gravy without the lumps! Ah ha ha ha ha haaaaa!!!!!"
Mr. Krabs: "I didn't want to say this in front of Patrick, but that hat makes you look like a girl."
Spongebob: "Am I a pretty girl?"
  • Starfire of Teen Titans frequently acts this way. It's unclear, however, what part of this is her cultural upbringing as a literal alien from another planet, and what part's her own unique personality.
  • Ty Lee of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Ty Lee: "Hey, look at that dust cloud. It's so... poofy.... Poof."
  • Crystal Zilla of My Dad the Rock Star is a Pink-haired New Agey sort of Cloud Cuckoolander, who is also CloserToEarth on occasion. But she's a mother, and her husband is rock star, so maybe it's a defense mechanism.
  • Fry from Futurama has at least one foot in Cloudcuckooland at all times, most obvious when he is asked a "yes or no" question, he thinks he's being asked a question, he tries to explain something, he tries to formulate a plan, he's finishing a story, or he's just trying to complete a sentence.
Fry: "It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came and the grasshopper died and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?"
  • Pinky of Pinky and the Brain is a notorious Cloud Cuckoolander, most commonly during the Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering exchanges.
    • One mini-episode that was done entirely from Pinky's perspective (to the point of having his snout in the camera view at all times) revealed the train of thought that led to one such exchange. It didn't come across any less weird for the explanation.
  • Charlotte from Making Fiends. She is oblivious to the horrors created by Vendetta, who she thinks is her best friend, despite the strong hints that Vendetta hates her. Charlotte also likes lemon drops, puppies, singing about monkeys and cheese.
  • Many characters on Family Guy, especially Mayor Adam West. West brings his own creamed corn to the theater because the creamed corn they have there is too crunchy. He once dispatched the entire Quahog police force to Colombia to rescue the heroes of Romancing the Stone. He chases people off his property with a Cat Launcher.
    • Not to mention his strategy to distract people from the "Dig'Em" scandal -- jingle keys from his window. Then he gets hit by someone throwing a brick and starts to bleed.
  • Dory, the blue tang from Finding Nemo, fits this trope to a tee, thanks to her short-term memory loss. Among other things, she uses a deadly jellyfish as a trampoline, frequently misremembers the name of the title character, and believes she can speak the language of whales (this one turns out to be true, though). She even mumbles non-sequiturs in her sleep:
Dory: "Careful with that hammer... sea monkeys got my money... yes, I'm a natural blue...."
  • Hank from The Venture Brothers is not only Too Dumb to Live, but he tends to lose his grip on reality easily, especially when facing the prospect of adventure. Contrast with his more down-to-Earth brother Dean, who's also rather dim but isn't nearly as crazy.
  • Stimpy of Ren and Stimpy is an example of this. When he gets an idea, it's usually very farfetched but due to the nature of the show sometimes it's plausible; these are evident with his theories on a simple question like, "why do kids go to school?" He responds with the answer that the kids' parents are aliens, "And while you're at school, they shed their human skins and breathe dryer lint!" When Ren hears about some of these ideas, he usually slaps him or tells him he has too big of an imagination.
  • Beavis and Butthead, but especially Beavis.
  • Sheen from Jimmy Neutron is definitely one of these, albeit the harmless, ADD-type.
    • Hugh Neutron also seems to be one. His obsession with ducks and pies is just the start.
  • Homer Simpson frequently tends toward this. Perhaps most notoriously in The Simpsons Movie where he's imagining a cymbal-banging monkey... and even that tells him to pay attention to what Marge is saying.
  • Cosmo from The Fairly Oddparents.
  • Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory was pretty much born in Cuckooland, sometimes leaning more to The Ditz, but, in other cases, just a Cloud Cuckolander. It is especially evident when she tells Dexter her bedtime story while she's sick, mixing a variety of common childhood nursery rhymes and stories.
  • Bobby from King of the Hill. The boy fell in love with a wig dummy! To name just one instance.
    • Dale Gribble moreso. Bobby at least has shown that he can competently conduct himself through many situations (his Cloud Cuckoolander moments seem to be sort of self-aware instances of fantasy-indulgence, or the fact that he's still very impressionable as a child). Dale, however, seems to live quite happily as an adult in a world all his own that just happens to intersect with Arlen, Texas. Once he tried to combat a heatwave by "fighting fire with fire," which entailed turning the heat all the way up in his house. Another time he hosted his own shortwave radio show during which he claimed to be getting a phone call from former (and long-since deceased) Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev.
  • From American Dad we have Francine. She's a cross between Cloud Cuckoolander and Genius Ditz.
  • Arnold's grandmother on Hey, Arnold! was ridiculous to the point of dressing up as Mary, Queen of Scots to go downstairs to the dinner table. Indeed, her Cloud Cuckoolander status was so central to her character that in one episode, which was about a heat wave, it was so hot that it made her sane.
  • Ron Stoppable of Kim Possible is a prime example. His naked mole rat is more grounded than he is.
  • The Penguins of Madagascar Almost everybody on the show, although Julien and Mort are particuarly bad.
  • Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. While all the other ponies walk, she hops and skips, and she frequently goes off on weird tangets or breaks out in song.
  • The Homestar Runner universe has a number of these. Homestar Runner is usually The Ditz, but his energetic, active stupidity often results in some surreal dialogs (or monologues). "Say, you got a girlfriend? Well, what if your girlfriend was a wooden spoon and an orange plastic bowl? That'd be really weird, man. What kind of screwed-up kid are you? We don't recruit your kind! Get out of here!"
    • Or the way he talks to the movies in the theater. Not as in, "Oh no don't do that!! He's right behind you!", just small talk to the characters. Sometimes about a salad he plans to make. "Yeah, I figured I'd just cut up some iceberg lettuce, throw some tomatoes on there, maybe a little catalina. Nothing fancy, nothing fancy..."
    • Homestar is often naive to the world around him, so he often needs Pom Pom to help him... too bad Pom Pom is The Unintelligible.
  • Fred of Fred the Monkey.com acts this way on occasion.
  • Red vs. Blue's Caboose started off as a profoundly stupid recruit, but between Flanderization and mental trauma from possession by a rogue AI, he quickly loses much of his grasp on reality. He thinks his commander is a gay robot, plans to use his Purple Heart and future medals to build an entire purple person ("and we will be best friends"), is in love with a tank, and good friends with a bomb. Journeys to the center of his mind reveal that it's inhabited by wildly inaccurate avatars representing the rest of the cast: Red Team's leader talks like a pirate, the one in lightish-red armor is a girl, and Blood Gulch's newest arrival is "from the part of the plane that crashed on the other side of the island." Naturally, Caboose is one of the most popular characters.
  • Salad Fingers is a somewhat creepier version of this trope.

[edit] Comic Books

Ambush Bug: "Hello, room service? Send up a plot and three pages of dialogue right away! The weekly grind is tearin' me apart!"
  • Harley Quinn seems to live in Cloudcuckooland, Gotham City Sirens is just where she rents space in her time off.
  • Pictured above, Delirium from The Sandman is this trope -- since she's the Anthropomorphic Personification of insanity, it's probably reasonable to assume that she is genuinely crazy, but nonetheless she does have at least one moment during the series where she pulls herself together and becomes briefly 'sane', though it's made clear that she finds it very difficult to do this. She also has a few other moments in which she seems to become temporarily slightly more lucid, and comes out with a very perceptive or useful comment before reverting to her usual chaotic self.
    • Shivering Jemmy also qualifies. She's an agent of chaos.
  • Deadpool is made of this trope, and a good number of his adventures derive from it.
  • Ragdoll. The self castrating, dead friend stuffing, sister fancying, weird phrase spouting, limb contorting freaky-pants of Gail Simone's fantastic Secret Six series. He's quite possibly the only person in the DCU who can make The Joker appear sane by comparison.
"I was thinking what it would be like to be abandoned and tortured and abused and forgotten. When your life is so worthless that your only degraded value to anyone is when your pain gives them amusement, and the person entrusted to care for you sees you as more disposable than used tissue... but then I thought... I wonder what it's like to fuck a butterfly."
  • Mento of Doom Patrol fame sometimes qualifies as this when wearing the psionic helmet that gives him his powers. It enhances his mind in many ways, but the consequential increased mental activity makes it difficult for him to concentrate. When the helmet malfunctions, it make him fairly eccentric and at one point gave him cancer and dementia.
  • Norbert Sykes, a.k.a. The Badger, is a prime example. The author tended to vacillate between presenting Badger's mental illness as serious or just an excuse to make him goofy as hell.
  • The characters in Scott Pilgrim tend to run in and out of this sometimes, but most famously is Scott himself, with such winning lines as:
Stacy Pilgrim: "Maybe you should start thinking about the future, Scott."
Scott: "The future? Like, with jet packs?"
The Tick: "And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick-pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking. But when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky's the limit!"

[edit] Fan Works

Jamma-P: "HEY, I DIDN'T WRITE THIS SCRIPT SO DON'T COMPLAIN TO ME!"
Yuri: "Wow, someone needs a nap."
Momoko: "Is it me?"
  • Major Raikov in the Metal Gear Solid fanfic Stray is "always the type who took sanity more as a suggestion," to the extent that Ocelot considers Raikov's Psycho Electro boyfriend to be the stabilizing influence in the relationship.
  • Demykins from the Kingdom Hearts fanfic Those Lacking Spines behaves in this manner, with a multitude of his lines as Shout Outs to other media; when he doesn't quote from various works, he ignores the situation altogether.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanfic The Long Walk has Leonardo musing on the Original Character Breech Loader, thinking about what it must be like to have to try to be normal. Breech Loader is a Cloud Cuckoolander with a badly warped appoach to grasping normality, and a tendency to 'lose it' at the most inappropriate of times. As a quote from the story itself:
"Trying to be normal. He wondered what that was like; to try to be normal. Most people were normal, or normality came naturally. Or behaved however they saw as normal. Even most crazy people thought they were normal. Breech was trying to mirror their behavior to be normal, and like a mirror, it came off wrong. Identical in every way, but somehow wrong; a facade, an illusion. What must it be like, to have to try to be normal?"
"I'm going to work on a shrimp farm. Or something. Some kind of farm. Do they farm crabs? I mean, they must. It's not like crabs just walk into the grocery store. Though I guess they could if they wanted to. Wouldn't that be funny? I don't know, maybe not. But I guess if I was farming crabs I might get pinched. What?"

[edit] Film

  • Jordan from Real Genius definitely fits this trope, and she manages to make it lovable.
  • Gracie Allen's ditz persona frequently slipped into this type. Sample dialogue from College Swing:
Hubert: "Everything makes me think of Love, Gracie." (she leans gently on his shoulder) "What are you thinking about?"
Gracie: (sighs rapturously) "Clams."
Hubert: "Aren't they beautiful? I hope I don't make you think of clams."
Gracie: "Oh no, no. I was just thinking, if we were clams, we'd never have to take our shoes off. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
Rex Kramer: (reading newspaper headlines) "Passengers certain to die!" (hands the paper to McCroskey)
Steve McCroskey: (still reading) "Airline negligent." (hands the paper to Johnny)
Johnny: "There's a sale at Penney's!"
  • Leslie Zevo in Toys. But his sister, Alsatia, is even more of one. Even though it turns out she's a robot, you have to be amazed that someone out-Cloudcuckoolanded Robin Williams.
  • Henry Bullock from Splitting Heirs. It's proven by his first scene, where he shows up on roller-skates.
  • Brick from Anchorman veers between this and a Ralph Wiggum.
  • Harpo Marx's characters. Consider Duck Soup: despite being a spy, he walks around cutting things with scissors, ruining a Jerkass stallholder's business, and generally being, well, a Harpo character.
  • The film adaptations, more than the book-versions, of the Harry Potter series, show Bellatrix Lestrange as one of the few malevolent versions of this trope.
  • Jim Carrey's portrayal of The Mask is basically the Anthropomorphic Personification of the Category:Rule of Funny. Makes sense, since his powers come from Loki, the Norse god of mischief. They manifest as if Tex Avery-style Cartoon Physics worked in Real Life.
    • It should be noted that the Mask takes its chaos from the wearer's own mind. Stanley Ipkiss has a fondness for classic cartoons in general and Tex Avery cartoons in particular, so that's how he expresses The Mask. This is foreshadowed by showing lots of cartoon memorabilia, and even a poster of Red Hot Riding Hood on his wall. When less harmless people end up wearing The Mask, the results are... bloody, and generally less slapstick. Always funny, at least for a given value of funny...
  • Mark from Empire Records. It's not clear how much is the influence of drugs and how much is just him being special.
    • Lucas, though, doesn't have even drugs for an excuse.
    • AJ super glues coins to the floor and not one of his friends gives any indication that this is in anyway unusual for him.
  • A lot of the characters in Christopher Guest's Mockumentary comedies would fit this trope. To take but one example, Fred Willard's dog-show announcer in Best in Show goes from wondering aloud why one entrant isn't dressed up in a Sherlock Holmes-style deerstalker hat and pipe to asking which dog would make a good wide receiver on a football team. He later asks his on-air partner, apropos of nothing at all, to guess how much he can bench-press.
    • In fact, Fred Willard's primary role in Guest's ensembles is to be the most obvious Cloud Cuckoolander in the cast; which is truly a feat, considering that nearly all of Guest's main characters qualify as Cloud Cuckoolanders to varying degrees. According various people who have worked with him, he really likes to play this trope in real life as well, despite actually being quite intelligent and poised. Christopher Guest described him on the Charlie Rose show as a man who "got into character twenty-five years ago, and has never gotten out".
  • Allen from The Hangover does not seem to operate on the same wavelength as anyone else; it's heavily implied he's seriously mentally ill, though he appears able to function to a degree. He is, however, a genius at card-counting.
  • In Scrooged, the Ghost of Christmas Present fits this pretty well if not a prefect fit. Though she also has tendencies of the Jerk Sue, minus the feminism.
  • Raven in Cecil B. Demented (keep in mind, she's always perky no matter what she says):
"See, my father is Zozo, the dog at the gates of hell."
"Satan says you need more color!"
U.S. Bill: "This is the basement. Want to see the furnace?"
Nightbird: "That's okay."
U.S. Bill: "It's hot. Don't press your face against it for too long or you get red streaks on you for, like, a month."
  • Any version of Willy Wonka, whether it's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • Alice from the 2010 Alice in Wonderland film starts off the movie as one of these, although this doesn't last that long since she immediately turns into The Arthur Dent upon entering Wonderland. While dancing with the man her mother had set her up to marry, she gets distracted by a vision of all the women in trousers and the men wearing dresses and subsequently by imagining what it would be like to fly. (Although this troper can see where she's coming from, since I know I'd rather focus on wild flights of fancy than dancing with Hamish.)
  • Kitten (Cillian Murphy) from Breakfast on Pluto has definite Cuckoolander tendencies, despite dropping the occasional Deadpan Snark when vexed. She even lives in a "small elfin dwelling on Wimbledon Common" for some of the movie.
  • Jack Sparrow seems to be this, though he's actually pretty good at thinking up Indy Ploys.
  • Bettie Heslop in Muriel's Wedding
  • In DownPeriscope, Nitro definitely qualifies, from having "absorbed a lot of voltage" as an electrician/radio operator during his time in the Navy. E.T. "Sonar" Lovicelli is one of these as well, to a lesser degree.
  • Fred Kwan in Galaxy Quest, with such lines as "That was a hell of a thing" after traveling through hyperspace for the first time, or, after sucking bad guys out through the airlock, "Sorry, I was -- the door was a little sticky. Did you see that? I'll get one of my boys up here with a can of WD-40."
  • Rookie of the Year has Phil Brickman, the pitching coach: "The key to being a big league pitcher is the 3 R's: readiness, recuperation, and conditioning!"
  • For a charming/ sexy example, there's the titular character in Don Juan DeMarco (played by Johnny Depp), who lives in a wonderful romantic world inside his own head... or is it?

[edit] Literature

  • Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, who speaks almost exclusively in metaphors, walks around barefoot, chatters airily and often argues with Taren, while still being a beautiful and sharp-witted girl who serves as a Love Interest.
  • Wendy from John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming is similar to Eilonwy -- a Hyperactive Girl who believes she forgot how to fly and runs naked in the woods trying to remember, gets sidetracked during a conversation to hunt for elves, and isn't at all surprised when a armored knight-errant climbs through the window in her hospital room.
  • Jeanne from Charles Baxter's Shadow Play. She invents new words like "zarklike", "corilineal" and "nutomberized", talks to herself, believes she's drifting on an ocean liner, speaks in metaphors, sees angels and so on and so forth. At the same time, she's often wise and loving. She actually understands she's crazy, but seems to choose madness over sanity and prefer living in her own universe. As her son Wyatt said about her, "you couldn't be insane by choice, but she was".
  • Luna "Loony" Lovegood from the later Harry Potter books seems to suffer from a mild-to-medium case of this. As her father publishes the Wizarding World's equivalent of the Weekly World News (without the "for entertainment purposes only" disclaimer), this may be understandable. Although she seems totally insane, she's actually right about certain things that other people can't see or don't think exist.
    • Also Professor Trelawney.
  • The Bursar from Discworld is something of a Cloud Cuckoolander. Since the overbearing Mustrum Ridcully took office as Archancellor of Unseen University and the various weird things that happened since then (including the movies-influenced invasion of Things from the Dungeon Dimension in Moving Pictures and the incident with Windle Poons becoming a zombie in Reaper Man), the Bursar's nerves have been worn threadbare, and given him a tendency to do and say odd things under pressure. Thankfully, his skill with numbers remains no matter how detached from reality he gets, and with a steady diet of dried frog pills, he consistently hallucinates that he is sane (just like everyone else...) and is able to function reasonably well. Though he still sometimes thinks he can fly, and him being a wizard, gravity isn't about to say otherwise.
  • The entire Harpell family of wizards in the Drizzt Do'Urden books. A list of their "experiments" include trying to cross a horse with a frog; accidentally turning themselves into dogs; physically relocating their brains to their buttocks; separating their eyes from the rest of the body and getting stuck that way; believing double initials to be important omens, and so on and so forth. All the while beaming happily. The really weird part is that their experiments tend to have successful side effects -- the one who turned himself into a dog, once turned back, ended up a werewolf; the one who tried to cross a frog and a horse succeeded (he dubbed the result "Puddlejumper"); and the brain-switching was actually with purpose, as it was done to fight against brain-eating aliens. This may mean the family hinges on being a clan of The Fool.
    • As for Harkle Harpell's eyes being teleported away from his body, he actually had an excuse that time: it happened during the Time of Troubles, during which everybody's magic spells went wrong somehow. Harkle tried to teleport his entire body before he knew the situation, the result being that he was able to see his intended destination (since his disembodied eyes were there) and talk to the people there, but his body remained behind. He was blind to his immediate surrounding until his colleagues were able to help him make the trip overland and reinsert the eyes in their sockets.
  • In Garcia Lorca's House of Bernarda Alba, the grandmother appears completely crazy and delusional; she takes out the jewelery and says she wants to get married, then appears cradling a lamb as if it is her baby. Yet she occasionally says what all the other characters should be thinking, and is the first to voice her protest against Bernarda's tyranny.
  • In Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, fictional Nobel laureate Felix Hoenikker, "father of the atomic bomb", was so easily distracted that, at one time, he completely abandoned the development of the atomic bomb to study the skeleton of turtles... his wife suggested his desperate colleagues to simply remove anything turtle-related from his laboratory, and he'd forget about his fascination with them completely (they did, he did).
  • Most characters in Alice in Wonderland count, but the Cheshire Cat is arguably the most famous. He's also a recurring character in the Thursday Next series, where he's portrayed as smart enough to manage a library containing every book ever written pretty much single-handedly, but still spends most of his time asking bizarre and irrelevant questions.
  • In Patricia C. Wrede's The Seven Towers, the sorceress Amberglas is somewhere between this and ObfuscatingStupidity; her constant rambling digressions seem to be genuine, but she's much sharper (and more powerful) than she gives the impression of being, and frequently she has important things to say if you can sort them out from the nonsense.
  • A popular Older Than Television example that helped define this trope is James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". The titular hero is a mild, unassuming man who's prone to spinning off into elaborate heroic fantasies at the slightest real-life suggestion.
  • Valentine Michael Smith from Stranger in a Strange Land is this trope played seriously, a Fish Out of Water that confuses everyone immensely because he is clearly not stupid, and probably an outright genius.
  • Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye is more Cloud Cuckoolander than Emo Teen.
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians has Tyson, the 6-foot-something cyclops who acts like he's about 3 years old.
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
    • The Ruler of the Universe from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. To the Ruler, everyone else (if they exist) are the Cloud Cuckoolanders: they persist in believing things that they have no immediate, direct evidence for -- like what's on the other side of that closed door -- and insist that things are as they say they are without even considering the possibility that they could be otherwise. And then they get angry about it.
Zarniwoop: "And they ask you to make decision for them? About people's lives, about worlds, about economies, about wars, about everything going on out there in the Universe?"
The Ruler of the Universe: "Out where?"
Zarniwoop: "Out there!"
The Ruler of the Universe: "How can you tell there's anything out there? The door's closed."
  • Angela of the Inheritance Cycle comes out with random nonsequiturs frequently. In her spare time, she tries to prove that toads don't exist, even when she's holding one. Of course, this may lead to a Mind Screw, she and the main characters get into a discussion about how the toad she's holding is actually a frog... excuse me, my brain hurts...
  • From P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle novels, Lord Emsworth. Emsworth is a doddering old man who cares about nothing more than his pig (which he christened the Empress of Blandings). Want to talk to Emsworth? Chances are he'll end up rambling about pigs, derail the conversation based on semantics, or just plain space out and not listen to you at all. Even if you're lucky enough to have a lucid conversation with him, ten minutes later he'll have forgotten about it (and quite possibly you) anyway.
  • An interesting variation occurs in the novel Summer of Eternity. The mother of one of the characters learns that her husband helped commit a murder and has been arrested. She has a complete breakdown, as a result. For the rest of the book, she is in a cheerful mood and is off in her own little world, believing that her husband is off at work rather than at prison. The trope is played straight, but due to the context in which it is played, it comes across as heartbreaking rather than funny.
  • Ebbitt of The Seventh Tower definitely qualifies. He'd be plain old Crazy Awesome... if he didn't keep forgetting key points of his plan.
  • A great deal of the plot of Pippi Longstocking revolves around Pippi living in Cloud Cuckooland while the adults and others don't.
  • Fregly of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. With the things he says to people ("I bet I can fit your whole foot in my mouth!" and "Wanna hear about my hygeine issues?"), the things he does (play in ball pits, show people his secret freckle, chase people with his boogers) and the fact that anything with sugar turns all of these things Up to 11, he makes some of the examples of this trope look normal.
  • Odiana of the Codex Alera series lives somewhere in the hinterlands between Cloud Cuckoolander, The Ophelia, and Axe Crazy. Not entirely unexpected, since she's an incredibly powerful empath with a past that could have driven even a normal person crazy.
  • Orr from Catch-22.
  • Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables falls victim to this a moderately, especially in the earlier books. She just really loves living her own little fantasy world, a world where everything is really, really romantic. She asks Marilla to call her "Cordelia" rather than Anne upon their first meeting, claiming it sounded better. It's to the point of hilarity, really. She gets herself into all sorts of scrapes as a result of having her head up in the clouds, including sinking her best friend's father's dory while re-enacting Tennyson's "The Lady of Shallot". She mellows out with age, but still retains her wild imagination.
  • Robert Marsh from Darkness Visible, who was driven mad by the influence of Unreality. The same fate befalls about a third of London's population before the book is done. Not that being totally bat-shit insane stops Robbie from contributing to the plot, of course...

[edit] Music

  • Frank Zappa
  • Lady Gaga
  • Kate Bush
  • Tori Amos
  • Bjork
  • Cyndi Lauper. Much of the appeal of watching the current season of Celebrity Apprentice is in watching her exist on an entirely different plane of existence than every other competitor.
  • David Byrne
  • Rudy "?" Martinez of ? and the Mysterians says that he has travelled time and seen dinosaurs.

[edit] Newspaper Comics

Ms. Wormwood: "Calvin, pay attention!! Now, what state do you live in?"
Calvin: "Denial."
Ms. Wormwood: (sighing) "Well, I suppose I can't argue with that..."
  • Jon Arbuckle from Garfield, since the late nineties, has gone from a slightly-dim, arrogant loser to a full-fledged Cloud Cuckoolander in some strips, with lines of pure insanity like "I think my feet are jealous of my hands because they get to point at things." This without even getting into the surrealistic brilliance of Garfield Minus Garfield and other projects to improve the strip.
  • Hillary's classmate Nona from Sally Forth. Tends to take Hillary and Faye's idle Zany Scheming and run with the idea into surrealism. All in the same tone of voice one would normally use when discussing lunch.

[edit] Professional Wrestling

  • WWE wrestler Al Snow became most famous as a Cloud Cuckoolander who has "HELP ME!" inexplicably written backwards across his head and gets advice from a mannequin head (appropriately named "Head"). One particularly memorable storyline had him thinking that Head betrayed him and stole the Hardcore Championship from him, so he started using Pierre, a taxidermied deer head, to substitute for Head. Another had Al winning the European Championship, and deciding that, in order to better represent "the citizens of Europea", he would dress in the traditional garb (and come out to the national anthem of) a different country each week (including, inexplicably, a '50s style greaser outfit for Greece).
  • Jeff Hardy, full stop. Doubly so because it's not just his TV character. His TV character is in fact considerably more normal than he is in real life. His closest friends claim that one of his favorite activities outside of wrestling is "digging holes and filling them back in." His sculpting material of choice is aluminum foil.

[edit] Radio

Jack: "Dennis, I didn't know you had relatives in New York."
Dennis: "No, my family lives in Jersey. I had to drive under the Hudson River to visit them, and gee was it damp! Boy, did I get wet!"
Jack: "Was there a leak in the tunnel?"
Dennis: Ohhhhh, tunnel!"
  • Lonesome Cowboy Dave, whenever he gets free rein on the Church of the SubGenius Hour Of Slack. His influence tends to rub off on Wei R. Doe.

[edit] Real Life

  • This trope dates back as far as Brother Juniper, a 13th-century friar and one of Saint Francis of Assisi's companions. According to legend, Brother Juniper was once caring for a sick man and learned that the sick man had a craving for pig's feet. So Brother Juniper found a herd of pigs, cut a foot off of one of them, and carried it back to the sick man. When the pigs' owner confronted Brother Juniper about the incident, the friar couldn't understand why anyone would object to such a charitable act. He patiently explained his reason for cutting off the pig's foot, although this only seemed to make the pig owner angrier. Finally, he hugged the pig owner, who had a change of heart and donated all his pigs to the friars. Upon receiving the donation, St. Francis praised Brother Juniper, saying, "Would to God, my brethren, that I had a forest of such Junipers!"
  • Comic book writer Neal Addams actively espouses the long-since-debunked Expanding Earth "theory" as an explanation for continental drift.
  • Zooey Deschanel, sexiest Cuckoolander alive.
  • David Lynch. An article once described him as "Jimmy Stewart from Mars," and his interviews contain such gems as "I'm a real thin pancake! I'm right on the edge!" It does not make sense in context. He also wanted to make a sitcom about the sunken continent of Lemuria.
  • The late Graham Chapman is always described by the other Pythons as being "in his own world"- clearly a very peculiar man to fathom. Eric Idle relates in one book the story of a woman who declared that, what with Graham being gay and all, he should be stoned because she'd been reading the parts of the Bible that appealed to her xenophobia. So the Pythons took him out and got him stoned. "Of course, Graham was pretty stoned most of the time anyway..."
  • Rube Waddell, baseball Hall of Famer from the first decade of the 20th century. He'd randomly run off from games to go chase fire trucks, accidentally shot a friend through the hand, forgot to divorce his first wife, causing him to be arrested on bigamy charges, and would even be distracted by puppies and toys by opposing players and fans. This borders on Ralph Wiggum and can also be considered a Bunny Ears Lawyer example, since he was considered -– when not in trouble or wandering off into his own little world -– arguably the best pitcher of his time (his record for most strikeouts in a season would not be bettered for 61 years).
  • Crispin Glover
  • Joaquin Phoenix
  • MeganFox. Read the following quotes and tell me you don't see it.
"You eat Chinese food, your farts come out like Chinese food. If you eat Mexican food, your farts come out like Mexican food. And milk, it's like-you can smell the warmth in the fart. My wardrobe on Transformers always smells like farts, and I have no idea why."
"I am pretty sure I am a doppelganger for Alan Alda. I’m a tranny. I’m a man. I’m so painfully insecure. I’m on the verge of vomiting now. I am so horrified that I am here, and embarrassed. I’m scared."
  • Kristen Stewart. Watch any interview with her.
  • Quentin Tarantino
  • Jason Mewes. His character, Jay, from the View Askewniverse is basically how he acts in real life.
  • Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, Detroit Tigers' pitcher back in the late '70s is absolutely this. He used to play with the dirt on the mound, talk to himself, talk to the ball, and had various odd routines that made him a curiosity back in his day. He also led the American League in ERA and was second in the Cy Young Award voting as a rookie (winning Rookie of the Year) and pitched a complete game in over half his career appearances in an era where relievers were already becoming prominent. Sadly, his career was cut short by injuries, to the point that said outstanding rookie year constitutes more than half of his career starts.
  • Former Vice-President Dan Quayle. Some of his quotes include:
"You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."
"Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."
"The holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. No, not our nation's, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history."
"It's time for the human race to enter the solar system."
  • Yogi Berra, although he didn't say half of the things he said.
  • Gary Busey. Supposedly, he was like this before a serious head injury from a motorcycle accident.
  • Fred Willard. His roles in just about any movie he's in is to be Cloud Cuckoolander. In a Christopher Guest movie, his roll is to out-cuckoo and entire cast of Cloud Cuckoolanders. According to his various friends and collegues, he's very much this in real life as well.
Christopher Guest: "Fred Willard is a man who got into character twenty-five years ago, and never got out."
  • Anne Heche has a tendency for statements that reveal her to be farther from Earth.
  • Salvador Dali

[edit] Tabletop Games

  • Foxbat from the Champions setting is completely convinced that he is a great, powerful comic book Supervillain.
  • Some of the Malkavians from Vampire: The Masquerade could get this way. Of course, they tended to be really scary at the same time.
    • Only if they're played well. And scary doesn't even begin to describe it.
  • The entirety of House Criamon of Ars Magica. They view the physical world as a series of metaphors and symbols and spend their entire lives trying to interpret everything around them the way literary scholars interpret novels, so getting a Criamon to express her thoughts on anything is a little bit like communicating across a language barrier via Babelfish translations.
  • Magic: The Gathering: the Ravnica block gives us the Izzet. Red/blue, it turns out, isn't quite right in the head, considering their hobbies include routing magic through the heads of goblins with an interesting variety of psychological conditions. (The goblins, that is, not the magic. Until the magic has gone through the goblin, that is.)
  • The Mystara D&D setting is home to the d'Ambreville family of wizards, who seem susceptible to an hereditary strain of this trope. As any d'Ambreville who isn't a Cloud Cuckoolander is usually a freakin' trigger-happy psycho, siding with the loony ones is usually the best bet.

[edit] Television

  • Many of Kel Mitchell's characters from Kenan and Kel.
  • Jack Handey of Saturday Night Live, who gave us such "Deep Thoughts" as: "If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I'd say Flippy, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong, though. It's Hambone."
    • Also from Saturday Night Live, Tracy Morgan's sketch character named Brian Fellow who interviewed various animal trainers and made inane comments about the animals. Usually at the end, he would have a daydream about the first animal in the sketch that sometimes was completely random. For example, at the end of a sketch featuring a bunny, he imagined a bunny cutting its hair. And then he reacts to the delusion -- in a way that his real second guest can hear!
    • Will Ferrell's Harry Caray certainly counts as well. As the host of an astronomy show, he asks his guests if they would eat the moon if it were made of spare ribs (he would) and proclaims the sun to be his favorite planet, which is why he stares at it. After a guest asks him about his death, his only response is, "What's your point?"
  • Reese from MalcolmInTheMiddle. "Yeah I like clouds. I call them Sky Kittens."
    • Dewey is the archetypal Cloud Cuckoolander, and attracts others of his kind without trying. He's cute enough -- in his extremely dorky way -- to avoid Creepy Child status. It's revealed in one episode that whatever Mom is really saying in earshot of him, he just hears "Dewey Dewey Dewey...".
    • And Hal. It Runs in the Family
  • Cosmo Kramer of Seinfeld. Although, his problem isn't that he doesn't understand what's going on around him, or what is or isn't considered acceptable by society, but rather that he doesn't care, and thus behaves as if he were oblivious.
  • Dougal McGuire from Father Ted has to keep a list of things that don't exist, including "non-Catholic gods", "the Phantom of the Opera", and "Darth Vader". In the very first episode, he had a diagram explaining the difference between dreams and reality, and still got confused.
  • Hank from Corner Gas. He often daydreams about various oddities, sometimes confusing other characters. In one episode, he not only wonders who would win if robots fought werewolves, but also mentions how impressed Vikings would be if they could travel through time and see all the glow in the dark stuff we have.
  • Richie and Eddie from Bottom start off in this situation and descend occasionally into Ralph Wiggum territory. When they think they've killed a gas meter reader, Richie suggests they eat the corpse in order to dispose of it; when they go camping, Eddie lights the Sterno without inserting the valve and almost sets himself on fire.
  • J.D. from Scrubs, who, when faced with problems outside medicine, keeps coming up with solutions involving monkeys, gnomes, or his head being independent of his body. Sometimes his statements sound more bizarre to the other characters than they are, because they didn't hear the Inner Monologue leading up to it, but more often, knowing what he was thinking just makes it weirder.
Todd's Inner Monologue: "Oh, great. There he goes off into his fantasy world. Now I'm stuck waiting until he snaps out of it with some weird comment."
JD: "We'd have to find a lot of gnomes..."
Todd: "That's helpful."
  • Phoebe Buffay from Friends.
    • Although quite sane in the first few seasons, Joey ends up fitting this trope in later seasons.
  • Mad About You has Ursula Buffay, the waitress at their usual restaurant, who is played by the same actress who plays Phoebe from Friends. (The characters are twin sisters.) The food must be really good. Also note that Ursula showed up on Friends a couple of times, and that Phoebe was the smart one.
  • Dwight Schrute from The Office is someone who, while his behavior is mostly predictable, seems to have motivations and an internal monologue that indicate that he is one of these.
  • Trudy from Reno 911! tells a story of how she mistook a goat for a Turk (or maybe vice versa), and seems to think that she's in a relationship with the openly gay Lt. Dangle.
  • While everyone in iCarly is crazy, Spencer Shay is in a league all of his own.
  • River Tam of Firefly, while she is actually insane, does have her lucid periods during which she is still endearingly unpredictable. Notable examples include her deciding to imitate Badger's accent while deconstructing his gangster facade and her attempt to "fix" Shepherd Book's Bible. It's difficult to tell how many of these moments are due to Cloud Cuckoolander-ness and how many are actually because she's kind of a genius.
    • One perfect example was in the episode "Trash":
Jayne Cobb: "As a rule I say girlfolk ain't to be trusted."
River: "Jayne is a girl's name."
  • Green Acres presents a kind of subversion of the trope, the people of Hooterville operate on their own weird plane of illogic that, nonetheless, seems perfectly normal to them (and works, in a surreal little town where the laws of phsyics, cause and effect, etc. seem to be suspended). Ditzy Lisa fits right in and is attuned to their mindset (she even understands Arnold the Pig's grunts, as do the townsfolk). It's Oliver who, in this bizarro world, is the Cloud Cuckoolander -- his appeals to logic, science, law, and "common sense" are viewed by Hootervilleans as somewhat "out there."
  • Reverend Jim Ignatowski of Taxi.
Alex Riger: "Jim, when I said you were a flake, I meant you'd done some weird things."
Jim: "Name one."
Alex: "You lived in a condemned building for five years."
Jim: "You're confusing flakiness with style!"
Alex: "You kept a horse named Gary in your bedroom."
Jim: "Not everyone has a guest room, Alex."
  • Cliff Clavin of Cheers occasionally drifts into this territory.
Frasier: "Hello in there, Cliff. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"
Norm: "Okay, Cliff. At what point in your life did you come to the fork in the road, where sanity was to the left and you took a hard right?"
  • Cat of Red Dwarf. "I hate to get all technical on you, but: all hands on deck! Swirly thing alert!"
  • Station owner Jimmy James from News Radio often showed signs of being a Cloud Cuckoolander. However, this may or may not have been a cover for the fact that he was actually a Genius Ditz, a Trickster Mentor, and a Magnificent Bastard.
  • Tracy Jordan of 30 Rock has a rather tenuous hold on reality, perhaps best summed up here: "I do not want to disappoint my Japanese public! Especially Godzilla. Ha Ha Ha, I'm just kidding. I know he doesn't care what humans do."
  • Topanga from Boy Meets World started off this way, but eventually the role was taken over by Eric, who made anything Topanga did look sane and rational by comparison. This was, arguably, a good thing as Will Friedel is a natural comedian and very good at improv. A good deal of his lines in the later seasons were the result of Throw It In, particularly his singing of "Ooh, Child" to Trina McGee.
  • Walter Bishop from Fringe is still a brilliant scientist, but spending more than a decade in a mental institution has given him a few quirks like obsessing over certain foods and constantly forgetting the existence or just the name of one particular member of the team. The fact that, during the 1970s and '80s, he regularly tested the psychological and neurological effects of LSD on himself as well as doing it recreationally might have contributed.
  • Rose Nylund of The Golden Girls and her frequent tales of the complete insanity of her hometown of St. Olaf, Minnesota. And it was all true.
  • Lowell on Wings sometimes takes extra-long strides to avoid "Cosmic Potholes," for fear he'll be lost in time.
  • French Stewart's Harry Solomon in Third Rock From the Sun; actually, when he was repeating the voices in his head (from the Big Giant Head, for example) he sounded much more reasonable than he usually did, albeit officious and megacorporate.
  • Cameron from The Sarah Connor Chronicles has an odd tendency to go off on random spiels and discussions without any warning, including one instance where she starts measuring the exact center of the house to determine when it will need to be repainted in a couple of decades, or when she randomly goes off quoting Bible passages. Of course, in her case, its actually quite justified, as her processor is damaged and thus renders her slightly unpredictable.
  • In Life, spending years in prison for a crime he didn't commit seems to have made Detective Paul Crews slightly unhinged. He says things that make his partner ask if it's a "Zen thing", has an odd fruit fixation, and has a decidedly offbeat manner in dealing with the public.
  • Shawn Spencer of Psych uses this for Obfuscating Stupidity, as it throws off those around him, allowing him to bring his extraordinary observational skills to bear. That and he doesn't want to act like an adult.
  • Jessica Tate from Soap. Prone to uncontrollable fits of laughter at the slightest things. Also a bit dim.
  • Jane from Coupling:
Jane: "I once went on holiday and pretended to be twins. It was amazing fun. I invented this mad, glamorous sister and went around really annoying everybody. And d'you know, I could get away with anything when I was my crazy twin Jane."
Sally: "But you are Jane."
Jane: "Kinda stuck. It's a long story."
Lewis: "Well, I just want to say one thing. "Earl" minus L is ear. How much more clear could it be?"
Drew: "Lewis, "clear" minus "cl" is ear."
Lewis: "No, now you're reaching."
  • "Howling Mad" Murdock from The A-Team. Each new chapter comes with a new personality/distorted reality. Still he's a remarkable pilot and as skilled as the other member in most areas. It's also implied that some or most of his insanity is an act, as he considers the mental hospital his 'room and board' and would prefer to stay there because he was the only member of the A-Team who wasn't charged with the crime, so if he was let out of the hospital, he'd have to re-assimilate to normal society and would not be able to work with the A-Team anymore.
    • This idea is played with in the late Season One episode "In the Belly of the Beast from Boeing," when he's kicked out of the hospital because he's been declared sane (he declares "my career is OVAH!"). At the episode's climax, Murdock manages to guide Hannibal through flying a plane with his eyes shut (Murdock couldn't fly it because his eyes had been burned by discharge from a gun) and seems pretty sane and resigned to the idea of being normal again.
  • Illyria from Angel, beneath the arrogance and soul-crushing depression. Mostly due to being a bored Eldritch Abomination.
Wesley: "She's either counting oxygen molecules or analyzing the Petri dish she just put into her mouth. Or sleeping. I can never quite tell."
Drusilla: "I'm naming all the stars..."
Spike: "You can't see the stars, luv, that's the ceiling. Also it's day."
Drusilla: "I can see them, but I've given them all the same name, and there's terrible confusion."
  • The Doctor of Doctor Who is an example of a Cloud Cuckoolander that managed to be pretty damn good at what he does, but nevertheless retained his disdain for mundane things like reason and reality, even in his more serious regenerations. (One and Seven in particular, with regenerations like Four and Eleven constantly breaking the Cloud Cuckoolander scale.) A lot of it is Obfuscating Stupidity to fool his enemies, but most is because he just operates on a different level than everyone else.
    • The episode "The Doctor's Wife" demonstrates that the TARDIS is even more of a Cloud Cuckoolander than the Doctor, with a heavy dose of The Cloud Cuckoolander Was Right. Having your mind spread across all of time and space] will do that to you.
    • The Doctor's various companions are well aware of his... eccentricities, and have to repeatedly justify not only why others should listen to the Doctor, but also convince themselves why, exactly, they put so much faith into this crazy person, for example the episode "Flesh and Stone":
Bishop: "Doctor Song, do you trust this man?"
River Song: "I absolutely trust him."
Bishop: "He's not some kind of madman, is he?"
River Song: (long beat) "I absolutely trust him."
  • Parker from Leverage. Described by one of her teammates as "twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag." She has very little social skills and often makes inappropriate yet accurate comments. However, she is very skilled in other areas such as improvisation when it comes to thieving. Word of God says that Parker has Asperger's Syndrome.
  • The Muppet Show has Gonzo the Great. Well, what did you expect from a guy named Gonzo? When you're the weird one on that cast, that's saying something.
  • Mason from Dead Like Me. At various points has believed that college is a plot by bacteria, there's a giant dust cloud in China stripping the flesh off cows, money from parking meters goes through underground tunnels, and if you drilled a hole in your head it would increase the amount of blood in your brain and get you really high. (He died of that last one, and after forty years he still seems to be unaware that was a really stupid thing to do.) He also once tried to lick a lit match. Most of it is due to the fact he's almost always high on something, and when he's really, really high, he gets even weirder.
  • Brittany from Glee started out as a nameless background dancer, but has evolved into this. While many of the characters (Emma, Finn, Quinn) can be a bit spacey, it's hard to imagine Brittany as a functioning person in real life.
"I'm pretty sure my cat's been reading my diary."
"Did you know dolphins are just gay sharks?"
"I've been here since first period. I took all of my antibiotics at once and now I can't remember how to leave."
  • Mr. Eldridge from Remember WENN. He also has a tendency to take things literally. But on occasion, he can be very wise, as when he helps Gloria Redmond get over her husband's death.
  • Mr. Bean is the golden standard by which all other Cloud Cuckoolanders are judged.
  • Bull Shannon from Night Court.
  • Raj from The Big Bang Theory can be like this sometimes. "If I could talk to rabbits, they would be amazed by me and make me their king. I would be nice to them... at first..."
  • While Robert Goren from Law and Order: Criminal Intent mostly uses this trope as a from of Obfuscating Stupidity to mess with suspects, he displays plenty of these moments without any justification to qualify.
  • Cat Valentine on Victorious.
  • Gaius Baltar from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica is an interesting subversion of this trope. If you pretend you're one of the thousands of people who can't see the Six that he's always conversing with, he comes off as more than a little bit not all there. Trouble is, she's not a hallucination, and she's really conversing with him. And only him, until the last episode of the series, when she finally addresses Caprica Six.
    • How about the Hybrids? They're constantly spouting what seems to be gibberish, but can often be interpreted as speaking prophecies. It's mentioned that one theory is that because they live their lives as the minds of starships traversing the galaxy, they simply have a clearer view of the universe. Another theory is that they have literally seen the face of God, and it has driven them mad.
  • Basically every character in the main cast of The Addams Family exemplifies this trope. They are consistently portrayed as out of step with the day to day norms of society, yet they believe they are the normal ones and everyone else is odd. Due to the macabre nature of their idiosyncrasies, most of the other cast members on the show (particularly the Normanmeyer's from the second animated incarnation) consider the Addams' to be Nightmare Fuel Station Attendants, but because the audience is in on the joke and invited to see things from the Addams' point of view, the horrified reaction of the other characters becomes a bigger joke than how out of step them Addams' themselves are.
  • Larry Finkelstein from Dharma and Greg.

[edit] Theater

"I think Crab, my dog, be the sourest-natured dog that lives. My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear. He is a stone, a very pebble stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog... Nay, I'll show you the manner of it. This shoe is my father. No, this left shoe is my father. No, no, this left shoe is my mother. Nay, that cannot be so neither. Yes, it is so, it is so -- it hath the worser sole. This shoe with the hole in it is my mother, and this my father. A vengeance on't! There 'tis. Now, sir, this staff is my sister, for, look you, she is as white as a lily and as small as a wand. This hat is Nan, our maid. I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog--O, the dog is me, and I am myself. Ay, so, so."

[edit] Video Games

  • Subverted in Psychonauts: Shegor appears to be a Cloud Cuckoolander under the delusion that her kidnapped pet turtle can talk and has the answers for everything. When you finally rescue her turtle, after it just sits there for a while... it actually does start talking and its plan does solve everything -- at least for the moment.
  • In Dragon Age: Origins you meet the dwarf trader Bodahn Feddic who found his somewhat retarded son Sandal in the Deep Roads. The only thing Sandal ever does is enchanting your weapons while saying "Enchantment!". Near the end of the game you find him surrounded by Darkspawn corpses. When you ask him what happened he just happily answers "Enchantment!". May also qualify as Nightmare Fuel.
  • The legendarily bizarre ranger Minsc and his "Miniature Giant Space Hamster" Boo from the Baldur's Gate series.
  • GlaDOS of Portal, despite being an all-powerful AI, seems to have a very loose grip on reality. She regularly makes childish insults at the player in later portions of the game and even tries to convince you that one of the puzzles is impossible to test your resilience in an atmosphere of "extreme pessimism". She also instructs you to take the infamous Weighted Companion Cube (a box with hearts on all its sides) with you on one of the tests, then asks you to "euthanize" the inanimate object at the end by dropping it in an incinerator. And later guilt trips you over "murdering" it.
  • Phoenix Wright: Justice for All has Regina Berry, who demonstrates that a Cloud Cuckoolander can be the cause of tragic circumstances in a (mostly) realistic setting. Due to being raised in a circus, she has a fairly substantial disconnection from reality. She doesn't understand, for example, how her putting pepper on Bat's scarf led to him being bitten by a lion... or that he may never recover from the resulting coma. Bat's brother, Acro, was so infuriated by her lack of remorse that he decided to kill her.
  • Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines allows you to play one in the form of a Malkavian. Funny dialogue choices, even funnier if you've played the game before and know what the dialogue is normally like (and realize that the character is able to see the true plot in advance, but doesn't comprehend it). You also get the chance to have an argument with a stop sign. ("No, you stop!")
    • And you can even spread your insanity to other people, like convincing a guard that you're a keyring so you should be given the keys. And it works.
  • Aldanon in Neverwinter Nights 2 is basically a wizard equivalent for the absent-minded professor stereotype, exhibiting qualities like lapsing into rambling doublespeak with metaphors abandoned halfway, changing subjects mid-conversation, forgetting his own orders, or mistaking a prison cell for his own house.
  • Sheogorath, the Daedric Lord of Madness from The Elder Scrolls is of course obliged to follow this trope. "Well, looks like the cat's out of the bag now... who puts cats in bags, anyway? Cats hate bags."
  • Charmy Bee from the Sonic the Hedgehog games. Somewhat justified in that he is a hyperactive 6-year-old.
Charmy: "Oh, flower, pretty flower, show your face and I'll sting you!"
  • Moira Brown in Fallout 3. She apparently thinks digging a well with a miniature nuclear warhead is a perfectly fine idea, among many other zany ideas. There is an entire quest line in the game involving the Player indulging her Cuckoolander propensity. You can also convince her to stop.
  • Ellis, from Left 4 Dead. His Cloud Cuckoolander status is especially apparent in Dark Carnival, where he expresses great displeasure that the survivors cannot go on any rides. In the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • The Truth from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas clearly rambles in a style suggesting he's mad, but at the same time, seems to know a great deal about things not obvious to CJ. Of course, he's also a stoner. And he apparently got high with some really awesome polar bears.
  • Borderlands has Patricia Tannis, former Dahl scientist who after spending quite a while on Pandora has become part this and part Axe Crazy, though is still pretty calm about it. Her journal entries show her descent into madness as she develops a relationship with her recorder (they're just friends now) and instills a personality into the corpse of a bandit she killed (his name is Leslie and he turned to violence due to being mocked for his name). After collecting her entries for her, she requests for you to bash your head in with a rock to forget everything you read.
  • In BioShock, there are about half a dozen denizens of Rapture with even a tenuous grasp of reality, and whimsy and delighted singing are common. One of the few examples where this is used to make things creepy as fuck.

[edit] Webcomics

  • Largo from Megatokyo at first finds it hard to tell the difference between the real world and the videogame world. Then it turns out the Megatokyo world is indeed a conglomeration of anime and videogame tropes. Which just shows you can be Genre Savvy and a Cloud Cuckoolander at the same time; in fact, it can be an advantage if the situation you're in is itself insane.
  • Ethan in Ctrl+Alt+Del.
  • Ellen from Questionable Content, but Raven seems to have officially taken over that role recently.
  • T-Rex from Dinosaur Comics.
  • Elan of Order of the Stick. For instance, when Haley argues that, as they are adventurers, everything they do counts as an adventure... he takes off his shirt, covers himself in jam, stands on one hand, hangs a lantern from one foot, puts a squirrel on the other and plays with a paddle-ball with his free hand. And shouts "I'm on an adventure!"
    • In a slightly-more-coherent example from an earlier strip, Elan found out that wearing armor incurs an armor-check-penalty on certain skills, including Hide. Therefore, he decided that removing all his clothes would increase his Hide skill to the point of invisibility. Hilarity Ensued.
      • He much later concluded, when a newly resurrected Roy was standing naked in front of him, "You're invisible!"
  • Schlock Mercenary's Lieutenant Pibald turns into one of these when he forgets to take his medication, acquiring delusions of having hyperbolically exaggerated status or talents which he doesn't. This wouldn't be as serious a problem as it is if his hobby wasn't homemade explosives... that metastasize and form colonies.
  • Eddie from Emergency Exit is nothing "but" this. He is obsessed with traffic cones, thinks chickens are out to take over the world, collects distractions, and just generally acts like a insane seven-years-old on an eternal sugar rush. He also wields a Hyperspace Mallet, and uses a "coolness enhancer" that enhances whatever it's attached too. Anything. He also has a fully stocked Mad scientist laboratory, although the whether the stuff he makes is powered by science, magic, or some combination of the two is anyone's guess.
  • Torg from Sluggy Freelance does this quite a bit, such as when he declares "I will find us a new place to live!" He doesn't actually make any effort to find a new apartment; he thinks making the big dramatic statement should be enough.
  • Quilt from Dominic Deegan literally has no brain (he's a necromantic golem, a la Frankenstein's Monster), and thus can be a little... out there. When told to keep his eye on someone, his response was to take his eye out of the socket and point it at the subject. But this is probably where he exhibits the trope the most.
  • Summer Glau's recent portrayal in xkcd. Sample dialogue: "I can extrude hair, but I can't retract it." Does that seem right to you?
  • Yuki from Menage a 3, though Lampshaded by the fact that growing up around her father's Tentacle Rape comic art really did mess her up pretty badly.
  • Coyote from Gunnerkrigg Court shows signs of this and Large Ham. Annie also has elements of this, often seeming to occupy a separate world to her classmates, and the pair definitely rub off on one another.
  • Sensei Greg of El Goonish Shive seems to be one. Being an anime-style martial arts instructor, he has obviously watched way too much anime, and it seems to effect his behavior. His first appearance had him attempting to go Super Saiyan, and later after learning one of his male students could turn into a girl, attempted to make it happen by dumping a bucket of cold water on his head.
  • Hope from Alone in a Crowd tends to say and do some pretty strange things, much to the confusion of the people around her.
  • Tiffany from Precocious is known to do strange things such as randomly digging a hole or drawing continuing far past the canvas.
  • Arkady from Freak Angels, due to an overdose, is quite flighty, but certainly seems to be perfectly in control of most every situation. Not to mention being the only one willing to push her powers beyond their assumed limitations.
  • Girl Genius: Certain Jägermonsters are this, interestingly enough. Or not, considering their creators...

[edit] Web Original

  • Supervillains Simon bar Sinister and his twin sister/lover (yes, its that sort of relationship) Penny Dreadful, from The Butlerverse. They'd be seen as a lot more comical than they are if they weren't also Axe Crazy murderers.
  • Survival of the Fittest's Mitch Gunter. The following quote is all of the explaination required.
Mitch: "Dog eat dog. Dogs don't eat dogs, they eat birds and cats and Kibblebits if they have a family. Those words are silly. But I would have gotten that right if that silly glasses boy hadn't answered before me. Yes, I would have gotten it right."
  • Julia's boss Justin Credible from Kate Modern, in a way that veers back and forth between creepy and amusing. To give you some idea, he puts his clothes on backwards, makes his office in a toilet and plasters the walls with photos of Lee dressed as a jockey and Julia in a bikini, "forgets" to pay his employees and keeps coming up with bizarre ideas for TV shows (all of which are awful).
  • The Wallflower Report is a blog written from the point of view of (fictional) Cloud Cuckoolander Ariella Rasputin Wallflower. Her two most recurring 'landerisms are her disbelief of trees (atreeism) and her paranoia concerning squirrels.
  • Internet wrestling parody Brawlers on a Budget has Coma, formerly half of the Head Trauma Boys. Due to taking too many chairshots, he communicates entirely in non sequiturs, and is known to wear such outfits as a toga with a tutu. His current tag team partner, Hallucination Boy, sees everything as oncoming trains.
Coma: "Fly fishermen at thirty paces! Invert the muskrat!"
  • Weird Jimmy and Lionel from Chad Vader. An example from one of Chad Vader's Training Video, Jimmy talks about how to mop the floor.
Jimmy: "More important the the grip is listen to your mop, because mops talk. They'll tell you where the dirtiest parts of the floor are and the dirtiest parts of your soul."
  • Clara from The Guild could be considered one as well.
Codex: "He's in my bathroom. Pooing evidently."
Clara: "Oh. I hate poo..."
  • Ginny from Dangerous Lunatics quite definitely qualifies. Turns out she actually CAN make walls melt, though. "My daddy makes toasters for a living! I like to look at the moon!"
  • Pretty much every character from Friday Night Cranks has been this at one point, but Barney, Brendan, and Michelle probably qualify best.
  • Damian of makemebad35 fame on YouTube. Most, if not all, of his videos involve him doing and saying some of the strangest shit even by YouTube standards. There are a few times he plays a bit of a straight man type, but even then he's still a bit off.
  • Ranger in Comic Fury Werewolf has been known to be this. He thinks it's getting worse.
  • The author of My Opinions on Every Pokemon Ever counts as one.
  • Zack from Echo Chamber. Is he trying to be funny or is he actually this stupid? The world may never know.
Zack: "Do you guys keep your dead cat in a box, too?"


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