Someone is off his meds.
Bedevere: So, logically...
Peasant: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck... she's made of wood.
Bedevere: And therefore...?
[Beat]
Another Peasant: ... a witch!
Crowd: A witch! A witch! A witch!!
Witch: It's a fair cop.
Peasant: If... she... weighs... the same as a duck... she's made of wood.
Bedevere: And therefore...?
[Beat]
Another Peasant: ... a witch!
Crowd: A witch! A witch! A witch!!
Witch: It's a fair cop.
Insane Troll Logic is the kind of logic that just can't be argued with because it's so demented, so lost in its own insanity, that any attempts to make it rational would make it more incomprehensible
. It is logic failure that crosses over into parody or Poe's Law. A character thinks in such a blatantly illogical manner that it has to be deliberate on the part of the writer.
For examples of Insane Troll Logic by video game developers, see You Can't Get Ye Flask, Moon Logic Puzzle, and (extreme examples of) Guide Dang It!.
For examples of characters who engage in this, see The Ditz, Cloudcuckoolander, Strawmen, Hitler Ate Sugar, Moral Guardians, and of course trolls of both internet and mythological origin. A character will tend to use this when he thinks he is smarter than he really is. See also Bat Deduction (when the Insane Troll Logic is used to deduce something - correctly), Right for the Wrong Reasons (same), Blue-and-Orange Morality (when the troll logic stems from an otherworldly bizarre moral compass), and Reality Is Out to Lunch (when reality actually follows the troll logic). Irrational Hatred may have this as its basis, and Chewbacca Defense is literally built of it. And then, sometimes it's just Obfuscating Stupidity or Obfuscating Insanity in action, or the presenter is just plain Troll rather than Insane, and is screwing with the audience because they find the resulting confusion funny. No relation to Insane Clown Posse… for the most part.
Remember that not all bad or faulty logic is Insane Troll Logic. Insane Troll Logic is so badly screwed up that it isn't even wrong — usually either the presenter or the audience have no grasp of even the concept where the "logic" should apply.
A character consumed by this trope tends to say things along the lines of "Because I say it is!" or "You're a liar!"
(Note that, in order to qualify for this trope, some reasoning must be provided; for example, "He likes sweets, thus he is a Nazi" on its own probably doesn't qualify for this trope, but "He likes sweets, thus, he likes Danishes, and if he likes Danishes, he must be a German, and as we know, all Germans are Nazis" probably does, since it provides more "logic" and context. The latter is otherwise known as the Fallacy of Composition.)
Often the driving force of a "Not Gay" Rationale.
Warning: trying to understand the following trains of logic may make your brain hurt.
No Real Life Examples, Please! Disagreements may cause flame wars. Those very flame wars will happen on this website if started, therefore TV Tropes' servers might catch on fire and may get damaged, and spread to the rest of the internet via the gravity of the situation. You cannot argue with this, it's legitimate fact-based physics. That's why it will happen physically. These flame wars will be the depth of the Internet — No, not DEATH, but they are similar concepts because they're similarly pronounced. Furthermore, many computers are connected to those servers and they might catch on fire, too. Because if you can see a fire, you can feel the heat. Ergo, fire is bad, and everyone needs to cool down a bit. So, remember to always douse your computer with water when having a disagreement.
Seriously, though — no real-life examples. Not to be confused with Violation of Common Sense.
Example subpages:
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- Comic Books
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- Fan Works
- Films – Live-Action
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- Live-Action TV
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- Video Games
- Visual Novels
- Webcomics
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Other examples:
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Advertising
- Cablevision has played it straight many times, with ads promising better picture because the pixels on your TV will be happier on Cablevision, or that Verizon is a phone company, and therefore too busy to provide you with internet service (ironic, considering Cablevision's primary job is to provide you with TV, not Internet). Some of their commercials from a few years ago were mistaken for parodies.
- DirecTV
- In Latin America, during the 2014 edition of The World Cup, DirecTV advertised the then-upcoming football league season by telling the viewer about what would supposedly happen if they missed them (a sequence of very improbable events leading to a bad situation). One commercial's logic procedure goes from the viewer missing an important match to waking up in a dried ditch in the street. Another's goes from missing a match to flooding the house.
- The Get Rid of Cable campaign from DirecTV. See what happens when you make bad decisions — namely, choosing the Other Guys subpar cable services. For example:
"When you wait forever for the cable guy, you get bored. When you get bored, you start staring out windows. When you start staring out windows, you see things you shouldn't see. When you see things you shouldn't see, you need to vanish. When you need to vanish, you fake your own death. When you fake your own death, you dye your eyebrows. And when you dye your eyebrows, you attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley. Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley. Get rid of cable, and upgrade to DirecTV. Call 1-800 DirecTV." - In Latin America, during the 2014 edition of The World Cup, DirecTV advertised the then-upcoming football league season by telling the viewer about what would supposedly happen if they missed them (a sequence of very improbable events leading to a bad situation). One commercial's logic procedure goes from the viewer missing an important match to waking up in a dried ditch in the street
- The ad "Gatorrada" about the energy drink Flying Horse has a scientist noticing that toasts always lands buttered-side down, while cats always land on their feet. So, what happens when you tape toast, buttered-side up, on a cat's back? Infinite energy!
- In one of Jeremy Clarkson’s “rejected” advertisements for Hawkstone Lager that was posted on Instagram, he claimed that because God took six days to create the world and he took thirty days to create the lager, that makes Hawkstone Lager “six times better than the world” (a subtitle at the bottom corrected it to five times).
- ''Mercatoni Pravettoni:
- Downplayed. In "Carta Zerovelo" Pravettoni proposes a plan to reduce the cutting of trees: Stopping the usage of toilet paper (Like he already does).
- In "Pellicce Pravettoni" Pravettoni thinks somehow that sending an animal to a tourist resort and killing it at its return would make a fur "eco-friendly".
- Always in "Pellicce Pravettoni" Pravettoni's plan to save stoats, who are endangered, while also profiting out of them consists in skinning them alive and then give them, as a replacement, a new skin in fake leather, oblivious to the fact that skinning an animal alive ends up killing said animal.
- Time Warner Cable had one once which was nearly as bad. The spot featured Mike O'Malley holding a small puppy, saying that since cable cost less than satellite, the money could be used to buy things like dog food and that puppies love dog food so that the simple conclusion must be that satellite hates puppies.
- Toshiba used a similar argument in one commercial to tout their shock-proof hard drives, because if a power station tech drops his laptop and breaks the hard disk, then it causes a glitch and the power will go out. If that happens, then your milk will spoil. If that happens, you'll drink the spoiled milk and turn into a zombie, then bite your roommate, who will then bite others until zombies roam the land. So dropped laptop = Zombie Apocalypse, and that's why shock-proof hard drives are good. It's ostensibly played for comedy, but the ad offers up a bit of Fridge Horror when you notice that the guy following this loony-bin train of logic is the president of the company.
Asian Animation
- Simple Samosa: In "Tutti Frutti", when Samosa goes to Tutti Frutti's bedroom to find clues as to where she's run off to, he finds a picture of her and her father Falooda in front of a snowy mountain background and somehow comes to the conclusion that she went to the mountains because that's apparently "where it all began", her being an ice cream who would like cold places. Vada agrees with this unusual logic, pointing out that the world began with the Ice Age.note
Audio Plays
- In an old Bert and I... sketch, a notoriously smelly and unclean man becomes enough of a nuisance that he's brought before a judge to explain himself. The man asks the judge how he can be considered unclean — after all, he washes maybe once a year, while some people are apparently dirty enough that they have to wash every day.
- The Big Finish Doctor Who audios feature several;
- In "Short Trips: The Second-Oldest Question", the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa find themselves in the village of Snittlegarth, where the residents not only readily believe that a chicken is capable of arson, but is actually planning to commit arson.
- In "Short Trips: Rulebook", the Fifth Doctor and Peri have to deal with the twisted logic of the rule-bound Ellani. As the most straightforward example of the Ellani's fixation with rules, after the Doctor and Peri were involved in a mad battle that nobody could have survived, Ellani logic dictates that they didn't survive, even when Peri and The Doctor are standing right in front of them.
- In "The Holy Terror", the Sixth Doctor and Frobisher arrive in a society where the current reigning emperor is considered to be a god. As a result, when new emperor Pepin is subject to a ritual assassination attempt, the whole ritual is performed with blanks in the gun, reasoning that he wouldn't be harmed either way given his divine status.
- In "The Last of the Cybermen", the Sixth Doctor once again meets the Logicians, who are making another attempt to ally with the Cybermen. Zennox in particular tries holding a gun at a Cyber-Controller, thinking this puts her in charge. The Cybermen disabuse her of the notion, but she dies still agreeing with their insane logic.
- In "Flip-Flop", the slug-like Slithergees make various proclamations to assert that they are a "persecuted minority" even when they're basically in charge of the planet Punxatornee in one timeline (the other timeline has Punxatornee as a nuclear wasteland after a devastating war).
- In "The Chimes of Midnight", the butler Shaughnessy argues that the impossible deaths depicted- including a woman drowning herself in the sink or another woman stuffing herself to death with her own plum pudding- happened because the victims were too stupid to realise that it was impossible to kill themselves that way.
- In "Zagreus", when the TARDIS locks Zagreus (currently controlling the Doctor's body) inside a Schrödinger's Cat lead box, Zagreus tells her that he's dead now, so she'd better let him out. When the TARDIS pointedly remarks that dead people generally don't talk, Zagreus tries to convince her that she's mad for talking back to a dead person, so she'd better let him out.
- "The Furies" (part of the Diary of River Song series) looks at the conclusion of Madame Kovarian's attempts to kill the Doctor to prevent him restarting the Time War from his time on Trenzalore (as discussed in "The Time of the Doctor"). Having failed to kill the Eleventh Doctor, Madame Kovarian becomes so consumed with the idea that she "has" to kill the Doctor to save the universe that she goes back along his timeline to try and kill the Fifth Doctor... in other words, to stop the Doctor from restarting the Time War, she killed him before he could even stop it in the first place (to say nothing of the worlds that will now die without him to save them).
- "Her Own Worst Enemy" (looking at the adventures of Jenny, the Doctor's daughter), Jenny encounters a society that judges people by auditing them on whether they feel that they have lived a worthwhile life. As Jenny tries to point out, such a system doesn't actually work as the criteria being measured are too variable, as arrogant people will constantly justify their actions while good people may hold themselves to such a high standard that they can't live up to their own expectations.
- On the Touch Tone Terrorists, the reps generally use insane troll logic to justify their abrasive behavior towards the callers, i.e. claiming they should have sent their package sooner, or that they're not psychic and that it'll get there when it gets there. Or claiming that the victim of a car crash is somehow responsible for the crash when they weren't even in the vehicle at the time and have witnesses that the other party was fully responsible.
Comedy
- Finlay Christie: In "when they go to a foreign country in a hollywood film part 6", the characters get to the Temple of Jalebi and come across three tiles in the floor — a camel, a dog, and a rat — and a riddle, supposedly in Urdu (or some language native to Pakistan at any rate), translated as, "The animal you choose is the temple's favourite food." How do they solve it? Like this:
American Character: Jalebi... Wait! Jalebi, dessert, desert, camels, camels have humps...American Character and Maria: ...and dogs hump things!
- In one of his sketches, Coluche had this famous Black Comedy joke:
"30 per cent of road accidents are due to alcohol. I conclude that 70 per cent of road accidents are due to water."
- Bill Cosby has a famous routine (from his concert film Bill Cosby: Himself) about him being rudely awakened by his wife, and his daughter asking him if she can have cake for breakfast. He decides it must be healthy because it has eggs, wheat, and milk in it, and says yes. His wife then comes down, sees what the kids are eating, "has a conniption", and then sends him back to the bedroom… which is where he wanted to be in the first place.
- Mitch Hedberg would frequently use this to great comedic effect. One anecdote he told involves him encountering a duck and wanting to feed it, so he goes into Subway and orders a bun with nothing on it. They refuse to sell it to him until he puts at least one topping on it, so he relents and has them put lettuce on it. When they ring it up, he mentions he wants it to feed a duck, and they give it to him for free. Conclusion: Ducks eat for free at Subway.
Mitch: Had I known that, I would've ordered a much larger sandwich. "Lemme have the steak fajita sub, but don't bother ringing it up, it's for a duck! There are six ducks outside, and they all want Sun Chips!"
- Steven Wright does this a lot.
One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said "Didn't you see the stop sign?" I said "Yeah, but I don't believe everything I read."
- Abbott and Costello:
- Abbott and Costello have a recurring sketch where Costello tries to prove that 7 × 13 = 28 (the real answer is 91). The brilliant thing about this bit is that Costello manages to find three incorrect methods of getting the same wrong answer, using division, multiplication, and addition, and those who don't know math well will find these arguments sound.
- The "You're not here" routine also runs on this. In short, "If you're not in Chicago, or in Philadelphia, or in St. Louis, then you must be someplace else... so if you're someplace else, you're not here." Costello ripostes with "Well, if I'm not here, then WHO took your money!?"
Films — Animation
- BoBoiBoy: The Movie: When Gopal tells Papa Zola that his father says that people only fish for squid at night, he asks him if his father sleeps at night. He replies yes, and Papa Zola suddenly shouts that surely the squids need to sleep at night too.
- Coco: The attendant at the Family Reunion Office is allergic to Dante, a hairless dog, and keeps sneezing. The attendant, like everyone in the Land of the Dead, is a skeleton and insists that it makes sense that he's allergic to a hairless dog because he doesn't have a nose. Miguel is appropriately bewildered by this response.
- Dog Man (2025): Mayor becomes upset that Petey is constantly escaping jail and blames Dog Man for it as he's constantly putting Petey in jail. When Chief tries to argue that's really more a problem with Cat Jail than with Dog Man, she instantly defends the Jail, as her brother runs it.
- In The Emperor's New Groove, Yzma uses this as an excuse not to give food to the poor:
Yzma: It is no concern of mine whether or not your family has... what was it again?
Peasant: Umm... food?
Yzma: Ha! You really should have thought of that before you became peasants! - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney):
- Judge Frollo is a Holier than Thou Bible-thumper utterly convinced of his piousness while committing sin after sin in God's name and blaming others for his problems via Psychological Projection. Because of this, he is "plunged into the fiery pit" for his immoral actions.
- There's Frollo's rationale for hating Romani in particular, which boils down to "the way they act makes normal people more inclined to sexuality and other immoralities, so they all have to be killed". Ironically, his lust for a Roma woman is what drives the plot. He even professes this in the second half of "Hellfire", where if he can't have Esmeralda, he'll kill her. And anyone who stands in his way will be disposed of.
- The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island has the adult dinosaurs looking for the children who have wandered off. Mr. Threehorn growls at Grandpa Longneck at how he blames Littlefoot for getting Cera missing, but when he's questioned by the sauropod on why he blames Littlefoot, he sheepishly admits that he just feels the need to blame somebody.
- In The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Eyeore's explanation for how Piglet's house is Owl's house qualifies. But Pooh invokes this trope when he points out how they keep finding a sand pit when lost in the mist, which leads to him deducing that they should look for the pit instead to find their way home by accident. This leads to Rabbit deciding to prove this idea false, subverting the trope at first, only to double subvert it when it turns out that Pooh's plan is partially true; actively searching for the pit results in Rabbit not finding it, nor home.
Pooh: Say Rabbit, how would it be if as soon as we are out of sight of this old pit we just try to find it again?
Rabbit: What's the good of that?
Pooh: Well, you see, we keep looking for home but we keep finding this pit. So I just thought that if we look for this pit we might find home.
Rabbit: I don't see much sense in that. If I walked away from this pit and walked back to here, of course I should find it! I'll prove it to you! Wait here! - In Mickey's Christmas Carol, Scrooge (McDuck) uses this to get out of giving money to the poor.
Scrooge: Well, you realize if you give money to the poor, they won't be poor anymore, will they?
First Collector: Well, I—
Scrooge: And if they're not poor anymore, then you won't have to raise money for them anymore.
Second Collector: Well, I suppose—
Scrooge: And if you don't have to raise money for them anymore, then you'd be out of a job. Oh please, gentlemen, don't ask me to put you out of a job. Not on Christmas Eve. - In Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack, Char decides that the best way to save the good, green Earth with its beautiful environment from being destroyed would be to throw a whole ton of nukes at it, along with a giant asteroid.
Gamebooks
- Bowser's scheme in the Nintendo Adventure Book Dinosaur Dilemma. To quote the Super Mario Wiki:
Bowser has his minions begin abducting all the dinosaurs in Dinosaur Island, so he can "prove" his theory that the dinosaurs went extinct due to not looking both ways before they crossed the street; once the dinosaurs and all evidence of their existence are gone and his theory is thus "proven" true, Bowser intends to be awarded the Snowbell Prize (feeding the cooked dinosaurs to the committee awarding it) and be named curator of the Mushroom Kingdom Museum of Natural History, conveniently located across the street from Mushroom Palace, which he plans on pelting with garbage.
- Wizards, Warriors and You: The Warrior gives a ludicrous explanation on how he cured the Wizard's madness-inducing infection by shooting him with a poisoned arrow. The Wizard had made the poison, saying it will kill anything. The Warrior thus figured it would kill the illness infecting the Wizard, but leave a good man untouched.
Multiple Media
- MonsterVerse:
- Riccio in the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong descends into this late into his Sanity Slippage. He goes from respecting the Iwi to assaulting and threatening them as he becomes more concerned with his idea of Kong as God, and he decides to bring the Iwi's wall down as a test to see if Kong is the kind of god that will come to their aid; rationalizing that if Kong doesn't intervene to save the Iwi, then it means them and everything in the world is unworthy of Kong specifically, plus all his talk about removing the barriers that divide creatures even if doing so is suicidal as in the case of taking down the Iwi's wall.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
- The Eco-Terrorist mastermind Emma Russell has a pretty big case of this even if they do make some valid points. Their child was a casualty of a past Titan battle, and how did they decide to ensure their child's death wasn't "in vain"? By setting all the Titans loose on the world indiscriminately so they can inflict Gaia's Vengeance, and they're staggeringly oblivious to how this act essentially involves re-engineering their child's exact death a million-fold on a global scale, because in their mind, if it'll stop future generations from losing all their children to a manmade extinction event then engineering that event in the present is an acceptable sacrifice. It's no wonder Emma gets called out as insane.
- Alan Jonah's justifications for letting King Ghidorah do what it wants to the Earth descend into Insane Troll Logic once it becomes clear that Ghidorah's goals involve creating an even more rapid extinction event than the one Jonah and his allies were originally trying to prevent. Jonah brushes off Emma's concerns about Ghidorah with a brief rant about how irredeemably despicable he thinks the human race is, and he nihilistically decides to just go with whatever Ghidorah does and focus on keeping himself and his troops alive throughout the apocalypse, declaring that what matters is that the Titans (or rather a Titan) are taking the Earth back from humanity. At this point, it doesn't matter to Jonah that Ghidorah's actions defeat his entire original purpose of saving the Earth's ecology, all that matters is that humanity isn't the dominant species anymore and that he feels confident he and his men can weather out the coming apocalypse.
- Record of Lodoss War: Karla the Grey Witch justifies constantly manipulating the various factions and rulers of Lodoss into an endless chaos of border-wars, rebellions, monster uprisings and other slaughters as preventing great suffering by preserving the Balance Between Good and Evil. The heroes opposing her point out that this just means people are constantly dying directly or indirectly from the fighting, and Wort the sage even states outright in the OAV version that her whole modus operandi stems from having gone mad.
Music
- The Arrogant Worms:
- "Let There Be Guns":
Worm 1: Nobody ever gets shot, cause everybody have a gun.
Worm 2: Makes sense.
Everybody: Wouldn't it be great if everybody had a gun?... - Also, their "Don't Go Into Politics" concludes that going into politics, science, or music is a bad idea, because so many famous politicians, scientists, and musicians are now dead.
- "Let There Be Guns":
- In the song "Bubba Shot the Jukebox" by Country Music singer Mark Chesnutt, the title character gets angered by a song on the jukebox and shoots it. When the cops arrive, this trope occurs:
Reckless discharge of a gun, that's what the officer's a-claimin'
Bubba hollered, "Reckless, hell, I hit just where I was aimin'!" - The Lonely Island song "Threw It On The Ground" has a protagonist who's oddly angered by being handed things, and responds by breaking them "on the ground." In one scene of the protagonist at the farmer's market with his "so-called girlfriend", she hands him her cellphone, stating it's his dad. He then throws it on the ground, because his dad's "not a phone! DUH!". In a previous scene, he throws a free hot dog note on the ground because "What do I look like, a charity case? (...) I don't need your handouts!"
- "1.0 (Fuck No)" by the Moistboyz is a song that rationalizes drinking and driving with lines such as "Why'd you put the bar so far from my home?"
- Flanders and Swann, parodying Neo-Luddites and their attitudes, said: "If God had intended us to fly, He would never have given us the railways."
Podcasts
- Mom Can't Cook!: Andy and Luke decide the reason First Kid uses a CGI White House for one shot is because "America's enemies might see it." There doesn't seem to be a more logical explanation they can come up with.
- Episode five of Mystery Show revolves around the question of Jake Gyllenhaal's exact height, a question prompted by a very divided internet comment thread. In said thread, one commenter notes that Jake must be six-foot-three because he was (allegedly) supposed to play the Joker, who is six-foot-three. Others point out that that doesn't make sense because they can't confirm that the Joker is six-foot-three. Starlee suggests (probably jokingly) that the discrepancy might be why Jake didn't get the part.
- Sick Sad World:
- One episode talks about a man who said aliens were threatening him. This guy later got arrested for child porn and claimed not only did aliens plant it, they also erased a hard drive of his, which police suspected had some incriminating evidence. The hosts point out it doesn't make sense that they would destroy evidence if they wanted him to get in trouble.
- The same episode has a guy claiming aliens wanted him to be sentenced to death so they could save him at the last minute and prove their existence. Dev and Jasmine point out if the aliens were that powerful, they could easily find another way to prove they are real.
- Welcome to Night Vale: Night Vale runs on this trope. For example, the reason they are fighting the Blood Space War, as explained in "Lost In The Mail", is because they believe that if the war ends, then the war will never end, and therefore they have to continue it forever so that it might one day end.
Pro Wrestling
- Samoa Joe walked out on Crimson during a tag team match in TNA because Crimson was on an undefeated streak and Joe never needed help during his undefeated streak.
- Scott Steiner famously declared his imminent victory over Samoa Joe at TNA Sacrifice 2008 by breaking down the "math" of their chances of winning. In brief: Joe's chances of winning come out to 8.3%, while Scott's chances of winning add up to 141.67%. The actual math is hard to follow and makes sense only to Scott.
- John "Bradshaw" Layfield's rants supporting the heels have this, one example saying that Daniel Bryan had the nerve to reject The Wyatt Family even though they kidnapped him to force him to join. He also says that The Authority's abuse of power was "helping" wrestlers and "best for business".
- Michael Cole was doing this after Layfield's departure to wrestle again and before Layfield's return to the announce table from 2010-2012. His demented justifications for the behavior of many heels, especially former General Manager John Laurinaitis, legitimately angered many fans, as well as other members of the commentary team.
- Sami Callihan deserves a shot at Dragon Gate USA's Open The Freedom Gate Champion Johnny Gargano because Gargano and Callihan are both part of the EVOLVE roster, which was just featured in a video game in which Callihan's usage by players exceeds Gargano's by 2%! Proof that the people are turning on Gargano, proof that Callihan is better than him!
- In one of his comedic introductions for his and The Miz's web show The Dirt Sheet, John Morrison declared that he doesn't like Canada, because he doesn't like maple syrup. And he doesn't like maple syrup because it reminds him of Canada.
Puppet Shows
- The Acceptors from B.R.A.T.S. of the Lost Nebula are a cult that accepts anything and everything, including destruction at the hands of the Shock. When the Brats show up to save them and point out that they have to accept the aid, the Acceptors deal with the two mutually exclusive acceptances by trashing the Brats' ship, the logic being that they do not have to accept help from the Brats if the Brats are rendered incapable of actually helping them. Later, when all of the other cultists bail, the group's leader decides that, since a cult cannot consist of just one person, it is effectively disbanded, and thus he is no longer bound by its rules, and so can now reject being destroyed by the Shock.
- In the Fraggle Rock episode "The Preachification of Convincing John", Mokey has very sensible (albeit wrong) reason for wanting the Fraggles to stop eating Doozer constructions. When this fails to persuade everyone, she recruits Convincing John, who explains it like this:
Well you eat a Doozer tower,
And it's as pretty as a flower,
And a flower's what you pick up in a field,
But the field can have a hole,
And you can fall in while you stroll,
And then a Gorg can come along to find a meal,
And he can pack you in a sack,
And you can try to scramble back,
But you'll never, ever, ever get free,
'Cause every time you eat a tower you'll be shut up for eternity! - The Muppet Show:
- One skit on the Rita Moreno episode has Kermit, Piggy, Rita (portraying "Tiffany Gonzales"), and Brewster (a mostly forgotten Muppet) in a panel discussion:
Brewster: In my country, we have a seldom-used saying, "When the swine lubricates the automobile, you wind up with a greased pig."
Rita: That doesn't make sense.
Brewster: I know, that's why it's seldom used. - Gonzo the Great does this a lot (being the Cloudcuckoolander on The Muppet Show) but there is a good one from The Muppet Movie:
Gonzo: Where are you going?
Fozzie: We're following our dream!
Gonzo: Really? I have a dream, too!
Fozzie: Oh?
Gonzo: But you'll think it's stupid.
Fozzie: No we won't, tell us, tell us!
Gonzo: Well, I want to go to Bombay, India and become a movie star.
Fozzie: You don't go to Bombay to become a movie star! You go where we're going: Hollywood.
Gonzo: Sure, if you want to do it the easy way.note
- One skit on the Rita Moreno episode has Kermit, Piggy, Rita (portraying "Tiffany Gonzales"), and Brewster (a mostly forgotten Muppet) in a panel discussion:
- On Sesame Street, Lefty the Salesman would use this logic to try to sell Ernie useless items. For example, one day he tried to sell Ernie a number 8, with the pitch that he could hang it up on the wall at home, so if he ever had pressing questions like, how many tentacles does an octopus have, or how many reindeer pull Santa's sleigh, he could merely glance at the mounted digit for the answer. (He didn't make the sale, but only because he just missed another salesman who tapped Ernie out with his sale of number 9s; exact same spiel, but for how many players are on a baseball team.)
Radio
- Bleak Expectations has an example of a character using such logic, when Harry Biscuit attempts to break the 30 mile an hour speed limit. He believes the issue is a lack of horsepower, on account of only having so many horses. Therefore, if he has more horses, he shall have more horsepower, and break the speed limit.
Harry: It is simple mathematics.
Pip Bin: ... It is wrong mathematics! - Doctor Who Expanded Universe
- In Big Finish Doctor Who, an Eldritch Abomination named Zagreus possesses the Doctor. The TARDIS manages to lock him up inside her. Zagreus tells her that he's dead now, so she'd better let him out. When the TARDIS pointedly remarks that dead people generally don't talk, Zagreus tries to convince her that she's mad for talking back to a dead person, so she'd better let him out.
- In the BBC audio drama Hornets' Nest, the hornet queen throws every moment of doubt Mike Yates has ever had of the Doctor at him in order to break his trust, heedless of the fact that they're contradictory. So in one breath, she criticises the Doctor for abandoning Earth, then she suggests that he's not really a time and space traveller at all and Mike's been conned, and then she asks Mike if he's not jealous of his Time Lord powers.
- The Goon Show based a huge portion of its humor around this kind of logic. One of the best-known examples is the exchange between Eccles and Bluebottle that is usually referred to by its first line, "What time is it, Eccles?" In this example, Eccles explains in a perfectly logical sequence of total nonsense that he knows what time it is because he has the time written on a piece of paper in his pocket.
- In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978) (and no other versions) the natives of Brontitall build a fifteen-mile high statue of Arthur Dent Throwing The Nutrimatic Cup, an event they witnessed as a vision that changed their whole society. The Arthur Dent part of the statue stands on the ground; the Cup part of the statue hovers in midair. How? Because it's artistically right.
- The radio version also mentions that Marvin, the Paranoid Robot, who, due to copious amounts of time travel, ended up several times older than the universe itself, at long last finally broke down... and was promptly put back together again because his owners, i.e., Zaphod and the gang, were — due to time travel — alive at the time he broke, which of course went against the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's lifetime warranty.
- I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue uses a lot of this logic, either taking it seriously (of course Mornington Crescent is a real, rational game with a long and detailed history) or as one-off gags and quick silliness.
Humph: Graeme, why are cashew nuts never sold in their shells?
Graeme: Ah, that's because cashews are actually monkey kidneys. And monkey kidneys don't come in shells, they come in monkeys. That would bulk out the packaging too much. - The Men from the Ministry:
- Mr. Lamb apparently asked his landlady Mrs. Bradby to charge less rent for the benefit of both of them. When his secretary Mildred questions how it brings help to her, Lamb says that in weeks he can't pay she loses less money.
- According to Sir Gregory, it is said that one person in four is mentally unstable. Therefore if you're on the bus and the nearest three people look sane, it must be you.
- The Navy Lark: Sub-Lieutenant Phillips has a Ph.D. in Insane Troll Logic. Starting in "A Strange Hobby" and becoming a Running Gag from Series 12 onwards, Mr. Phillips would take a word said by the announcer or another character and craft an insanely tortured etymology around it based on the sounds of the word's syllables. CPO Pertwee would then chime in, trying to knit the thought together in some form of coherence. In "The Master of Sardinia", Pertwee's job went to The Master instead:
Sub-Lieutenant Phillips: Yes, "sacrosanct". Now, that's an interesting word. Funny enough, they gave the derivation of that word in my comic last week.Commander Murray: Oh, dear, Noddy's off again!The Master: In my opinion, he's a raving nut!Sub-Lieutenant Phillips: No, no, this is jolly interesting. "Sacrosanct". "Sack", as in "race", or "the thing you fill up with coal", if you've got any, that is, "rose", as in "cod" or "to smell as sweet as", unless you happen to be sitting on two thorns at the time, and finally "sanked", which is the past tense of "sink", as in "washing up" or "where you do your smalls".The Master: Now, let me see if I've got this right, clever boy. According to you, the word "sacrosanct" means that somebody called "Rosie" is sitting in the sink with a sweet-smelling cod, who's just delivered a sack of coals in her smalls.Sub-Lieutenant Phillips: Exactly. Now, that's another interesting word...The Master: What is?Sub-Lieutenant Phillips: "Exactly". "Eggs", the things that people lay... uh, I'm sorry, the things hens lay. Well, "act"—Commander Murray: Oh, shut up!
- The vast majority of logic from Karl Pilkington, from The Ricky Gervais Show, is this.
- For example, he's willing to donate all of his organs except his eyes. He doesn't want to donate his eyes because he's afraid of becoming a blind ghost. Even though he is convinced that blind people will get eyes in the afterlife.
- Another example: Karl believes that snakes and spiders like hiding under rocks. The Earth is essentially a giant rock, with Australia underneath. That's why there's so many snakes and spiders in Australia.
- Karl thought the dodo went extinct because it tasted terrible and no-one wanted to eat it.
Tabletop Games
- A big part of Conspiracist is the player characters (agents of the Illuminati) using absurd logic to determine what their mission will be, based on a cryptic clue given by the game master (or "Controller").
- In Dungeons & Dragons, slaadi have weird ways of thinking. They are outsiders from the realm of chaos, are Always Chaotic Neutral (or Chaotic Evil in 4th edition), and have a mechanically-enforced Our Monsters Are Weird creature-generation system. They also look like giant anthropomorphic frogs. And this is ignoring the very big potential for Player Character Chaotic Stupid tendency.
- In Genius: The Transgression, this is the Phenomenologist's modus operandi. They believe that facts shouldn't get in the way of personal whim, and so they will happily alter their philosophy and perception of reality to justify whatever they're doing at the time. What sets them apart from The Unfettered is that they genuinely believe everything they say, even if it's obviously absolute nonsense.
- In Paranoia, playing along with The Computer's Insane Troll Logic is a major survival skill and plot instigator.
- This is part of the appeal of Warhammer 40,000's Orks. Imperial scholars theorize that somewhere in the distant past a Mekboy built two superficially identical vehicles, one of which was painted red. Due to an immeasurable internal difference, the red vehicle went faster, so the Orks decided it was due to the color scheme, a belief they've stuck with ever since. Since the Orks are unconsciously, latently psychic, this means that any vehicle painted red goes faster because they expect it to.note
- /tg/ has applied Orky logic to matters of camouflage: Orks also believe that purple is the sneakiest color, and that purple things are well-camouflaged regardless of their surroundings. Their reasoning: have you ever seen a purple Ork?
- Orks on military strategy: "Here's da plan: win. If we lose, it's because ya didn't follow da plan."
- Orks on friendly fire: "If ya misses it, it's obviously one o' ours. If ya hits it, den it must be one o' theirs."
- Orks on victory and defeat: "Orkses is never beaten in battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin' so it don't count as beat. If we runs for it we don't die neither, so we can always come back for anuvver go, see!"
- Even better: "Orks is made for fightin' an' winnin'. So if dey lose, den dey weren't really Orks!"
- Orks on being ambushed: "Ha! Dese gits just made da classic blunda: attackin' an Ork who 'adn't found 'em already! Now we'z can stomp dem fasta, haha!"
- Orks on firepower: "Dere is no such t'ing as too-much-dakka. If such a t'ing as enough-dakka existed, adding more to it woul' be too-much. Derefore dere is no such t'ing as enough-dakka! Pile it on, boyz!"
- One Ork Warboss and his invasion fleet got sent back in time by a Warpstorm, arriving shortly before they'd left. The Warboss decided to kill his past self so he'd have two copies of his favorite gun. The resulting confusion stopped the invasion in its tracks, thus proving that even Orks have their limits.
- By this, Eldar philosopher Uthan the Perverse concluded that Orks are the only sane race:
"The Orks are the pinnacle of creation. For them, the great struggle is won. They have evolved a society which knows no stress or angst. Who are we to judge them? We Eldar who have failed, or the Humans, on the road to ruin in their turn? And why? Because we sought answers to questions that an Ork wouldn't even bother to ask! We see a culture that is strong and despise it as crude."
- This can apply to the Players themselves. A swarm of infantry bodies in any other army would be a suicide tactic (or at least be a handicap in the case of the imperial guard). For the Orks, it's the only tactic! This actually works because the Orks roll so many dice, the sheer amount of actual hits are still enough to kill whatever they're targeting, despite the massive odds against them.
- This is a significant part of Tzeench's domain, as he is the chief patron of Manipulative Bastard and Exact Words contracts that will end up benefitting or harming (or both) the person who dealt with him. Tzeench is rightly feared as a Chaos God for his Troll logic.
- It is implied that Konrad Curze, the Night Lords' Primarch, let an assassin kill him not only because he was so horrified at what he and his legion had become and he just wanted to die, but because he foresaw his own death and believed that if he died in the exact circumstances of his nightmares then it would prove that fate is inevitable and that he never had any choice in all of the horrible things he did.
This website is ruining your life? PREPOSTEROUS! If it could ruin your life, you would look like the ancient Roman city of Pompeii! Do you look like the ancient Roman city of Pompeii? Of course not! So technically it can't ruin your life.