Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

This trope is where a character states a relationship with someone else through a long and indirect chain of connections. The chain can be simple (I know this guy who knows this guy) to elaborate (My uncle's drinking buddy's doctor works with this guy whose brother's fiancee...). And yet the person acts as if he or she knows the person really well.

Usually the elaborate case is used as an hope/promise for a plan, which very rarely delivers.

We Know These Guys Who Know These Examples:

Film

Chicha: So, remind me again how you're related to Pacha?
Yzma: Why, I'm his third cousin's brother's wife's step-niece's great aunt. (beat) Twice removed.

  • Spaceballs: Dark Helmet is Lone Starr's father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate.

Lone Starr: So... what's that make us?
Dark Helmet: Absolutely nothing... which is what you are about to become!

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy that knows this girl who's going with a guy that saw Ferris passed out at 31 flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

  • From Hot Fuzz: "That's Auntie Jackie's sister's brother's boy". That he doesn't just say 'my cousin' suggests complicated relationships... or just Rule of Funny.

Literature

  • In Life, The Universe And Everything, Effrafax of Wug got rid of the mountain he was supposed to render invisible with the aid of "his friends, and his friends' friends, and his friends' friends' friends, and his friend's friends' friends' friends, and some rather less good friends of theirs who happened to own a major stellar trucking company".

Live-Action TV

Hatter: I know some people, who know some, well, other people.

  • This is how Saul arranges a meeting between Walter White and Gus Fring in Breaking Bad.
  • From Cheers:

Sam: I know a guy who knows a guy...
Diane: And he's a bookie?
Sam: No, but he knows a guy who is.

  • In Burn Notice, Sam's key role is being "the guy who knows a guy". The amount of contacts he has is absurd.
  • This is the only explanation for where the martial artists of Power Rangers Jungle Fury got their hands on high tech morphers. Y'see, the substitute mentor knows a guy who knows a guy who has an uncle...

Music

  • Tom Lehrer's song "Lobachevsky" has an exaggeratedly long one of these:

I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

  • Then the next verse runs through the whole thing again backward.

New Media

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

Video Games

  • A note found in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is from a bandit who claims that he "knows a guy whose cousin knows a guy" that could set them up for life, if they steal more than their take from the bandit leader. By the way, you also find his corpse later.

Web Comics

  • Rogue in 8-Bit Theater has "I know a guy" as his catchphrase. One of said guys is even Thief.
  • In The Order of the Stick, Belkar suggests selling some captured enemies to slavery, adding that he "know[s] a guy who knows a guy" to contact for this.
    • Much later, we meet the guy in question, Buggy Lou. His best supplier on the Northern Continent was pals with Belkar.
  • In Exterminatus Now, Eastwood knows a guy who knows a guy that can examine the artifact that a bunch of heavily armed mercenaries tried to steal from them. He forgot exactly which friend he knew this guy through, though...which bites him in the ass since said friend turns out to have been Silas Morth, who is behind the whole operation.

Western Animation

  • SpongeBob SquarePants: Spongebob tries to warn Squidward. "Sea Bears are no laughing matter, why, once I met this guy who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy... who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy's cousin-"
    • In "The Suds", Patrick tells SpongeBob of the horrors of the doctor's office which he knows because "I know a guy who knows a guy who went to the doctor once".
  • Totally Spies!: When asked how Clover was able to get tickets to an event, she says:

"Oh it was easy! The manager of the arena has a cousin who lives next door to a guy who's best friends with a man who's married to a childhood classmate of a mother of a guy I know from the football team. I just flirted with him and he got the tickets for me."

  • Animaniacs: Yakko explains in song why he is now the king of Anvilania:

Yakko: I'm the cousin to the sister / Of son's niece's brother / Of the uncle's daughter's father / Of the nephew's sister's mother / And my grandpa's only cousin / Was the King's daughter's sibling, / But they're all gone,
Crowd: So that is why
Yakko: I am now your king!

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