Refuge in Audacity/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* [[Badass|Jack Churchill]], in [[World War II]], once took a German bunker by rushing it with a Claymore sword, with bagpipes on his hips, and screaming "COMMANDOOOO!!!!"
** Jack Churchill was this incarnate. He was captured (while playing said bagpipes) and sent to a prison. He just walked out. He was captured again. Once again he walked out and made it back to England.
*** And upon his arrival, he ''demanded'' to be [http://www.cracked.com/article_17019_5-real-life-soldiers-who-make-rambo-look-like-pussy.html put back on the front lines.] Unfortunately for him, the war was over by that point... which also explains how he was able to walk out of the prisons. He was in Yugoslavia fighting as a British liaison among partisans, and formed a thousand-man strong partisan army to raid an island in the Adriatic. He was the only man in his unit not to ultimately be killed, and the Germans found him playing a mournful tune on his bagpipes. Existing in the company of Partisans was a kill-on-sight offense for the Germans, but they thought he was of more use alive, and so interrogated him in Berlin before consigning him to Sachsenhausen. Sachsenhausen the ''concentration camp.'' Sachesenhausen, the ''infamous'' concentration camp. Sachsenhausen, the infamous concentration camp designed to be able to be effectively and securely guarded by ''one machine gun'' if necessary due to the camp's panopticon design. [[Cardboard Prison|He escaped]]. He was recaptured, and was transferred by the SS to the Tirol with 139 other high-value prisoners. There, a regular army unit, concerned that the SS would execute the prisoners out of hand, intervened to save their lives, and after the SS decided not to contest the issue, set the prisoners free. Churchill and a companion walked down German-occupied Northern Italy, finally being rescued by an American armored unit in the last days of the war. After recuperation, he was to be sent to Burma, but Hiroshima and Nagasaki intervened. His reaction? "If it wasn't for those damned Yanks, we could have kept the war going for another ten years." This man was
* Swedish diplomat [[wikipedia:Raoul Wallenberg|Raoul Wallenberg]] rescued as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported to the concentration camps using nothing more than a printing press, his expense account, and sheer audacity. He rented buildings in Budapest, declared them to be auxiliary embassy facilities—technically Swedish territory, and therefore off limits to the Hungarians and their German allies—and used them as safe houses. He also printed up thousands of "protective passports" identifying the bearers as Swedish citizens, and handed them out to every Hungarian Jew he met—even, on one occasion, those locked in the boxcars on a train departing for Auschwitz! At one point he ran on top of a train carrying Jews to be killed and stuffing papers into the cars that the Jews could use to semi-legally escape. While Nazis shot at him.
* While not as outrageous as Wallenberg, Oskar Schindler's similar work on behalf of the Jews deserves recognition here. Schindler's [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] was successfully ''ordering'' Nazi soldiers to return a trainload of Jewish children en route to the death camps, through sheer force of personality, by declaring the children to be "essential workers" (a protected class of Jews with skills vital to Germany's war effort) in his munitions factory. A munitions factory that he operated for several years using (and protecting) many Jewish workers, while deliberately never producing a single working artillery shell. Yes, [[Captain Obvious|this is the same Schindler]] that [[Steven Spielberg]] [[Schindler's List|wrote a film]] about.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120119234647/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_21_126/ai_58675361/ Giorgio Perlasca] is the incarnation of this trope: he was an Italian businessman who posed as the Spanish consul-general to Hungary when Spanish embassy was moved to Switzerland. Apparently him and Wallenberg were the ones going constantly saving people (Perlasca was in Budapest too). He saved thousands of people without any authority at all and
* More war stories; Juan Pujol managed to convince the Germans that he was a highly placed British spy with inside information on shipping movements and an extensive network of agents. In actual fact, he had never been in Britain in his life and all the information he gave the Germans was based on film footage and library research. He created a fictitious network, just so the Germans would believe him and he'd be able to work for the British cause as a double agent.
** For his efforts Pujol was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire ... and received the Iron Cross, becoming one of the very few people decorated by both sides in WWII.
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** Hitler was probably also counting on the "once bitten, twice shy" reaction that the world had had to the mostly false reports of German atrocities on the Western Front during [[World War I]] (stories such as Belgian nuns having their breasts cut off by the Hun, for instance) and probably assumed that they would not so easily believe another series of reports, even if these turned out to be all too true.
** One of the real tragedies of that approach is that reports of the atrocities early in the war were accused by ''prominent Jewish figures'' of being nothing more than anti-German propaganda. Individuals reporting the atrocities were often denounced for creating such unbelievable exaggerations, and accused of harming their own cause; because [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|no sane person could possibly commit such monstrous acts]].
**
* Hitler described the
** When using a [[Big Lie]], it helps immensely to talk oneself into believing it. Hitler apparently managed to do that with his "international Jewish-Communist conspiracy"—although some of his lieutenants had rather more sense.
* This was also how Hitler got the drop on Stalin in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin was planning his own surprise attack, and as a prelude to that, he had filled Nazi territory with GRU spies. (The Gestapo was [[Fascist but Inefficient|much less good at its job than they wanted you to believe.]]) The GRU was—still is!
* Some of the escape attempts from various POW camps in [[World War II]] were utterly ludicrous yet (on occasion) successful. At Colditz alone one man almost escaped by crossdressing (being foiled alas by a fellow-POW's politeness), others nearly made it out via a tunnel exiting in high-ranking German's office and one man simply vaulted the wire acrobatically and legged it. And the glider built by a group on inmates including Douglas Bader (a man worthy of many a trope himself) near the end of the war.
** In fact, just go read The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse (another escape book that really happened). The sheer audacity and cunning of the prisoners is worthy of any fictional character.
*** The TV show ''[[Hogan's Heroes]]'' (and the play and film that inspired it, ''[[
* [[wikipedia:Operation Chariot|Operation Chariot]] where in WWII, a group of British Commandos and sailors had to destroy the gate of a German-controlled dry dock in France by ramming it with a disguised, obsolete destroyer filled with explosives. The estuary they had to pass through to reach the dry dock was so heavily defended that the army, Royal Navy and RAF command believed it to be impossible, and it would be a waste of resources. The commandos, the naval personnel and Lord Mountbatten (Head of the Combined Operations Headquarters) believed that it was the impossibility of the operation that made it possible, as the German soldiers defending the dock wouldn't believe anyone would have the audacity to try it. Indeed, the destroyer sailed down the estuary virtually unchallenged until just a few hundred yards from it's target, rammed it successfully and later exploded a few hours behind schedule. Despite a catalogue of errors, leaving most of the commandos and sailors dead or captured, the mission was considered by all to be a success as it rendered the dry dock useless to Germany's larger and more fearsome ships.
** So daring was the raid, along with countless incidents of [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]], five Victoria Crosses were awarded to the raiders, more than in any other operation.
** Operation Chariot aka The Saint Nazaire Raid is taught today at military academies (but otherwise virtually unknown) and is called [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgF0R4dhUqk The Greatest Raid of All Time]
** When a large group of commandos were ready to leave, they saw that almost all of the small escape boats had been destroyed and decided on the spot to fight their way through the town, through several thousand heavily armed German troops, and make their way to Spain. It was in the process of this that their dwindling group decided to charge across a well-defended bridge, while the majority were low on ammo and seriously wounded. The Germans, awestruck by such audacity, couldn't keep them back. When the fighting was over, the Germans congratulated the plucky Brits for their guts.
* The hits just keep on coming with this: Lieutenant-Commander Beattie, who had gallantly guided the HMS Campbeltown into it's target while under heavy fire, was being interrogated by an
** This is a man who, when successive people were being shot at the helm and replaced five or six times, continued to stand at the conning position and calmly give helm orders with a complete lack of excitement. Total sangfroid and utterly ''nails''.
* This, combined with [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]] appears to be Japan's next bid for the Olympics after two or three failed attempts since Nagano: They want [[World War II|Hiroshima and Nagasaki]] to be co-host cities for 2020 games despite the fact that co-hosting isn't allowed by the IOC.
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* One group of German prisoners in an internment camp during [[WW 2]]. They weren't allowed to have radios, but wanting to know how the war was going, they built a radio into the seat of a chair. The camp commander suspected they had a radio and had their rooms searched repeatedly. Each time, the commander came along to see that the search was done properly. Each time, the prisoners offered him a chair - the one with the radio in it. Each time, the chair wasn't searched, because the commander was sitting on it. After the war, one of the ex-prisoners told the commander how it was done; the commander apparently thought it was pretty funny.
* [[The Producers]] (''[[Overly Long Gag|again]]'').
* Vaclav Havel, Czech President, famously prescribed his way of dealing with living under the insanity and irrationality of communist oppression in the '70s and '80s: he said that regardless of what the communists attempted to impose on him, he lived his life ''as if'' he were truly free.
* Michael O'Leary, CEO of Ryanair, and his outrageous list of suggestions for cutting costs on his airline. One of the best was the idea of increasing the number of passengers by replacing some of the seats with standing room. When this was mocked in the press as being utterly ridiculous a spokesman responded by saying it was just a joke, but one gets the impression that if it had been better received there would be people standing for their plane journeys right now.
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** King Julien XIII
* This and [[Bavarian Fire Drill]] were [[Catch Me If You Can|Frank Abagnale's]] bread and butter. Exploits include taking charge of his school's French class on his first day, and bluffing the agent chasing him by, when asked for his identification, giving him a wallet filled with soda bottle labels and chatting with him as he walks right out the door. All when he was a teenager.
* Vassilis Paleokostas. Greek bank robber and kidnapper for ransom. Escaped from prison with a helicopter.
* Many of the [[wikipedia:Berlin Wall#Escape attempts|attempts to cross the Berlin Wall]] would fall under this category. Such attempts included leaping over low parts of the Wall in broad daylight, stealing an APC and driving it ''through'' the Wall, using a sports car modified to pass under the checkpoint barricades at full speed, and building ultralight planes and hot air balloons to fly over the Wall.
** Special mention to the guy who used a ''power line'' as a zip-line.
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{{quote|After the family of Eluana Englaro (who had been comatose for 17 years) succeeded in having her right to die recognised by the judges and getting doctors to start the process of allowing her to die in the way established by the court, Berlusconi issued a decree to stop the doctor from letting her die. Stating that, "This is murder. I would be failing to rescue her. I'm not a Pontius Pilate", '''Berlusconi went on to defend his decision by claiming that she was [[Dude, She's Like, in a Coma|"in the condition to have babies"]],[89] arguing that comatose women were still subject to menstruation'''.}}
** You forgot [[Sarcasm Mode|this gem]], said during the Sme trial.
{{quote|"All citizens are equal (in front of the law) [[Animal Farm|but maybe the undersigned is a bit more equal than the others]], since the 50 % of Italians gave him the
** At the opening of the European Food Authority in Parma, June 21, 2005, asked to explain how Italy managed to get the support of its biggest competitor (Finland) over the EU Food Authority dispute, he claimed: "I used all my playboy skills and courted the Finnish President". The Finnish parliament took the claim rather seriously and questioned the President about it. Berlusconi then attempted a [[Author's Saving Throw|saving throw]] by using this very trope... [[It Got Worse|only to make it worse]]. He said something in the line of: "Of course I was joking, I mean look at her: do you seriously think I could...?".<ref>The President of Finland from 2000 to 2012, Mrs. Tarja Halonen, was famously ugly</ref>
* This was the essence of Attorney General Philander C. Knox' advice to Theodore Roosevelt when TR asked him to come up with a legal justification for America's having assisted Panama in gaining her independence:
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** You'd be surprised what parents will swallow, if you pass it off as a joke. "Whatcha doin', kiddo?"
** "Oh, I was just gonna get stoned and party naked until I pass out from sexual exhaustion" *Laugh*
* Eric Raymond advises in hacker culture, particularly in open source mailing lists, that because subtle emotions don't carry well in text, it's better to flame so openly and over the top ridiculously, if you're going to flame at all, so that everyone knows you're just being silly. [[Ha Ha Only Serious|Haha, only serious.]]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130806155128/http://funnyexam.com/answers/popular/1608-a-whale-is-fine-too This] exam answer.
** Except not, because the answer below it is marked with the same checkmark, while it is clearly wrong (has a total of 6 roots listed for a 5th-degree polynomial).
*** It's clearly right, provided there's more that's cut off at the bottom of the image. There can be any finite number of possible rational roots.
* The Three Toed Sloth, one of nature's better animals. Mr. Sloth harbors no less than four separate kinds of algae in his fur, causing him to mold green during the wet seasons, allowing plenty of delicious ecosystem for bugs, moths and worms that decide to infest his fur. Even better, the sloth's digestive system is slow that he's just a mobile compost heap wrapped in a moldy sweater... how does this crazy critter survive living in the Amazon, where there are more predators than leaves? Simple: No predator would ever want to ''eat'' Mr. Sloth, due to his extremely revolting niche lifestyle.
** Unfortunately, sloths have evolved against every conceivable predator except cars. They are being roadkilled out of existence. To be fair, there are anecdotes of people trying to move the sloths out of the road that didn't end well. Nobody expects to hear "sloth" and ''"disemboweled the guy"'' in the same sentence.
*** Then again, the algae in its fur probably will wind up making the perfect biofuel for
* A corollary to this trope is something too crazy ''not'' to be true. This was used to advantage in Ancient Athens, when the tyrant Peisistratos managed a comeback by dressing a tall woman up as Athena and then riding into the city in a golden chariot with her, fooling the masses into thinking he had the goddess' favor. (Peisistratos then failed in that particular coup. He was forced to retreat, invest in gold mines, and use the money to hire a private army to take back his tyranny.)
** [[Cartoon History of the Universe|"O.K., let's try it]] ''[[Cartoon History of the Universe|without]]'' [[Cartoon History of the Universe|the goddess..."]]
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** Had several animal species named after him.
** And deftly managed to convince NASA to name space equipment (namely the space station's new treadmill) after him. He almost got his name on a ''node'' of the Space Station, but failed. His sheer audacity is one of the things that make him an appealing performer.
** Tried running for President of the United States in 2008, pretending to be sponsored by ''Doritos'', in South Carolina
** He also got Richard Branson to name a [http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i221/Winglets747/aircolbertgate.jpg plane] after him and almost got the Hungarian government to name a [[wikipedia:Megyeri Bridge#Naming poll|bridge]] after him.
*** It turned out that you had to be Hungarian and dead in order to qualify. Colbert had the Hungarian ambassador come on his show; he greeted him in Hungarian, and the Hungarian ambassador said that he'd passed the first criterion—and if he'd care to come see the bridge, the ambassador was sure that the second could also be arranged!
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** In 2012, Colbert was named #69 on Maxim's Hot 100 list. Celebrities get named to lists of hot people all the time, but it takes a special kind of chutzpah to force your way onto a list of beautiful women despite having a Y chromosome.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsHk9WC7fnQ John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman]. Merely griping about a longtime friend when you're chosen to speak at his memorial service? Not funny. Saying "Good riddance, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries"? [[The Fun in Funeral|Funny]]! The best part is that Cleese knew that Chapman would have never forgiven him if he hadn't said it.
* Many scams - a recent example is [https://web.archive.org/web/20130826051710/http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1866398,00.html Bernie Madoff]. As one commenter said: "The SEC is very good at rooting out sophisticated fraud, especially in accounting gimicks [sic]. But they, like most human beings, are simply not that good at identifying accounting statements that are simply made up out of whole cloth."
* In 168 BC, the Egyptians petitioned the Romans to aid them in fighting off the Syrian Empire. The Romans sent a small delegation headed by Gaius Popilius Laenas, who
** He probably would have left anyway though Rome was the most powerful state in the world at that point and had proven it during the Punic Wars.
* In February 2009, a [http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/local&id=6688621/ young man walked into a Chicago police station and worked a shift] despite having no badge or identification.
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** Darius McCollum, who was obsessed with the New York transit system. At 5, he had memorized all of the routes. At 15, he hijacked a train and drove it along its ordinary route. Passengers did not notice. To this day he is still being arrested for impersonating transit workers.
* Ventriloquist [[Jeff Dunham]] balances his entire act on this. A character named "Achmed the Dead Terrorist" sounds like it should be horribly offensive... but a skeleton with [[Big Ol' Eyebrows]] who laments about having killed his son by taking him to Take Your Child to Work Day? Hilarious.
** Ironically, it somehow backfired on his short-lived TV show. It was canceled after 6 episodes, partially due quickly slipping ratings, and partially due to [https://web.archive.org/web/20100430191752/http://livefeed.hollywoodreporter.com/2009/10/review-jeff-dunham-show-a-complete-train-wreck.html critics claiming it was racist]. They forget that Carlos Mencia got away with ''much'' worse on Mind of Mencia simply because Mencia was a minority.
* Absolutely everything [[Mock the Week|Frankie Boyle]] has ever said, ever. For him it's not so much a refuge as a home.
* [http://www.tentaclegrape.com/ Tentacle Grape].
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* [[wikipedia:Josef Fritzl|Josef Fritzl]] successfully imprisoned his daughter and their eventual seven children in the basement of his house for 24 years without ''his wife or their other children'' or neighbors noticing anything. Really, the idea is so outlandish and monstrous that no rational person would ever entertain the idea of someone doing it. To be fair, apparently his wife is 95% deaf and has cerebral atherosclerosis, so not all there either.
** When asked where did his daughter disappear, [[Fridge Brilliance|he answered something like]]: "She had joined a (Satanic) cult". In front of [[Berserk Button|rural, devoted Catholics]]. Nobody asked any more questions after such an answer.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090227003524/http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i3Ks-O5KRBNdsoFYisncgDeWIi7AD96HFAN80 Two people escape from maximum security prison in a helicopter]. That isn't what makes it an example, what makes it an example is that they were in prison awaiting trial for doing it BEFORE. The fact that you can get away with having a fan club for the two of them says a lot.
* A German Prisoner had escaped from prison via... hiding in a [[Metal Gear|Cardboard Box]].
* ''Chutzpah'' has been defined as "clever audacity, for example a child killing both parents and then asking the courts for mercy because he's an orphan."
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* In an example from the animal kingdom, [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1190772/What-squeak-Daring-mouse-whos-boss-scares-leopard-steals-lunch.html?ITO=1490 this]. A mouse, caught on camera, stealing meat from a leopard. Right in front of the leopard.
* The UK is much more liberal when it comes to swearing on television and radio, but is generally frowned upon before the 9pm watershed. But when one hears, for instance, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBYZTjdkQMw the word "wanker" in an episode of tea-time gameshow Countdown], or the word "bullshit" on The News Quiz at quarter-to-seven, one tends to brush it off as if nothing happened. Or maybe the [[Media Watchdogs]] are just watching the wrong shows.
** The Wankers on Countdown was recorded but [http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/countdown.asp not broadcast] and The News Quiz is a radio show and the
* Every scheme listed [http://www.cracked.com/article_17240_7-retarded-tax-evasion-schemes-people-are-actually-trying.html here] is flat-out insane. ''This did not stop people from trying them''. See if you can spot which ones are simply stupid and which are stupid yet take
* Zhuge Liang was a general in China's Three Kingdoms period with an unparalleled for audacious feats of strategy that always caught the other army off-guard and always worked. Then ''he'' gets caught off-guard: Sima Yi, an opposing general, managed to annihilate the forces tasked with protecting Zhuge Liang's flank and marched an overwhelming force to the gates of the city Zhuge Liang was in. There was no way to win the battle. Zhuge Liang walked out of the city, unarmed, and sat down in front of the walls in full view of the army and started playing his lyre without an apparent care in the world. Convinced that Zhuge Liang had some nasty trick up his sleeve and he was facing
* There's an old story of two strangers sitting at a table and eating their lunches. Alice looks up and notices Bob is eating a cookie from her bag. So Alice reaches out and takes another cookie, with a meaningful stare. Bob helps himself to another cookie. Alice takes another. They go all the way to the bottom of the bag, and there's one last cookie. Bob breaks it in half, gives Alice half, and leaves. That's when Alice {{spoiler|looks again in her lunchbox and sees her own, untouched, package of cookies. She was eating Bob's cookies all along.}}
** My friend is Bob. Alice is now his wife.
*** See also ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish|So Long And Thanks For All The Fish]]'' in the Literature section. [[Douglas Adams]] claimed it happened to him.
▲* T. E. Lawrence based his entire millitary career upon this principle.
* Napoleon Bonaparte, when he returned from his exile to Elba island. He essentially decided one day that he'd had enough of this 'exile' silliness and caught a boat back to France, where he gathered an army of volunteers while heading for Paris. When Louis XVIII sent his army to kill the renowned general, Napoleon left his own forces behind, walked up to the attacking army and asked if they were really thinking of trying to kill ''him''. He captured Paris two weeks later.
** On an earlier occasion, Napoleon's army needed to seize a vital bridge that the Austrian army was preparing to blow up. Two of Napoleon's marshals, Murat and Lannes, ride up and demand to know what the Austrians think they're doing. Didn't they know that this bridge had been ceded to the French under the terms of the armistice? One Austrian sergeant on the
* This was the only reason why Skippy, from ''[[Skippy's
* When it was first proposed, Quantum Physics was this. Or, as Niels Bohr put it:
{{quote|"We are all agreed that
* In 2007, Timothy Rouse escaped from jail in Kentucky on some very serious charges by having a friend send a fax from the corner grocery store claiming that a court order demanded his release. The 'order' was incorrectly formatted, on plain paper, with no identifying marks or seals. He was promptly released from jail.
* In social-engineering attacks, the easiest way to break into a secure facility is to act like you belong there. If there's a "code of the day" system, strike preemptively by ''asking the other person for the password''. Someone broke into an army base by dressing as an officer and ordering his way in.
* Phillipe Petit, when arriving in America with his equipment to walk between the Twin Towers, was asked by a customs official what it was for. He responded that he was going to use it to put a wire illegally between the Twin Towers and walk across. The custom official laughed at him, wished him luck, and called for the next person.
* A more disturbing rather than awesome example: As documented by [[United 93]], one of the chief reasons the FAA and the military were slow to react to the 9/11 hijackings was that a hijacking was simply absurd. It had been decades since the last one, and no one anticipated a hijack on that day, much less four.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20140709190853/http://www.bash.org/?834654 This] bash.org quote.
* John Giles, the Alcatraz escapee who verifiably made it to dry land before being intercepted. While washing military clothing in the prison laundry, he managed to purloin a complete Army uniform one piece at a time; thus disguised, he simply stepped onto a military launch as if he belonged on board. Had his absence from the prison not been noticed immediately, or had the launch not been bound for Angel Island rather than the mainland, Giles would've been the guy ''Escape from Alcatraz'' was written about.
* In the case "[[Banned in China|R. v. Sharpe]]", Canadian Chief Justice openly admitted that "person" has a clear definition given in the Canadian criminal code, but that she will impose a separate definition for this one law.
* Darkly averted in recent news: a Qatari diplomat traveling into the United States snuck cigarettes aboard his plane and started smoking in the restroom. Eventually, one of the air marshals noticed smoke drifting out through the door and asked what he was doing. The diplomat's response? [[Unfortunate Implications|"I'm trying to light my shoes on fire."]]
** Yeah, while we're at it: '''[[Don't Try This At Home|DO NOT]]''' attempt [[Refuge in Audacity]] with airport security. Ever. [[Seanbaby]] put it best when he wrote: "Federal regulations require them to have no idea you were only joking as they riddle your body with bullets."
* Sad but true with atrocity-
** Not if [[Mossad]] has anything to say about it, though.
*** Many [alleged] [[Mossad]] operations qualify for this trope.
*** Gordon Thomas' "Gideon's Spies" details an interesting mix of fact and speculation about the Mossad.
**The reasoning is understandable. Often enough a dictator's victims would like to kill him but even more want to just be rid of him. Dumping him in the care of some state that will take responsibility for his security while he spends the rest of his life in hedonism is a compromise and one might be pardoned for thinking it [[Lesser of Two Evils|less bad]]
* [[Roger Ebert]]
* The state of Georgia finally caved into the pressure to change its state flag in the early 2000s because of its depiction of the Confederate battle flag.
* In an interview, [[Johnny Depp]] recounts a story in which he buys some paint with the intent of defacing a billboard with his face on it because he doesn't like the picture. He is caught by a security guard, who, upon realizing who he is, tells him to get on with it.
{{quote|"That's ... you!"
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{{quote|"On rollerskates... It's such an absurd thing to do, you have to try and top yourself."}}
* Halloween relies on this. It is the only time of year who can dress in sexually charged and/or bloody costumes without getting arrested.
* An Arizona restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill has food items like the Quadruple Bypass Burger or Flatliner Fries, dresses their servers as sexy nurses, and bears the slogan "A taste worth dying for." Its
** [[Funny Aneurysm Moment|A man recently had a fatal heart attack there.]]
* eBay sellers that charge something like $100 for an item or more when there are others selling for way less. Possibly justifiable if you're the only one who ships internationally or something, but otherwise, who do they think they're trying to kid?
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130806135742/http://funnyexam.com/answers/popular/1610-actually-i-think-this-may-w this.] it takes [[Breathless Non-Sequitur]] [[Up to Eleven]].
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130819001813/http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-malaysia-theft-idUSTRE72A6PR20110311 A house was stolen].
* John Wilkes Booth managed to escape capture at the Ford Theater due to the simple fact that what he did was so ''outrageous'' nobody realized what he'd done. He had time to jump onto the stage, breaking a leg, deliver a [[Bond One-Liner]], and then limp to his horse on the aforementioned broken leg before riding off into the night... while the majority of the theater was still trying to figure out what he'd done. (That is, shooting Abraham Lincoln.) He even did this while there were military personnel at the theater!
* It seems the Pakistani government may be attempting one of these. The world's #1 terrorist is found a couple hundred yards from their largest military academy, in a massive house on an even more massive lot, surrounded by 10 to 18 foot high barbed wire topped walls with no phone lines, in a city full of retired military officers 30 miles from their capital city and they had no idea.
* Hizzoner Da Mare Richard J. Daley of Chicago could have listed an example every day. His son, Richard M. Daley, as mayor, wanted to get rid of Meigs Field airport on the lakefront, so he could reclaim it as parkland. The owners of the airport protested, and eventually brokered a legislative compromise to keep the airport operating for the next 25 years—however, the final vote on it stalled in the Senate. Before things could go back for another round of legislation Daley sent bulldozers to the runway in the middle of the night to carve huge Xs into
* One anecdote tells of a white undercover FBI agent who managed to successfully infiltrate a black gang in Los Angeles and get them all busted for drug trafficking. Later interviews established that the gang members trusted the agent because they didn't think the police would be stupid enough to send a white guy to infiltrate a black gang.
** The same agent was also famed for keeping a country music tape in his car that contained a song with the lyrics "He's an undercover agent for the FBI" in it and ensuring that as many people as possible got into the car and heard that song.
* Quite a lot of internet phishing (not to be confused with hacking) relies on [[Refuge in Audacity]]. Not as common now that the average joe knows about scam letters and phishing methods, but in days when the average AOL'er and secretary was less savvy, it was quite common for accounts or entire systems (occasionally very big systems) to be compromised simply by someone calling/emailing pretending to be a serviceman asking for their information. They did it by burying their intentions under technical jargon and functioning on the premise that it was assumed that no one with bad intentions would simply call and ask for your password or to be keyed into your system.
* Copyright-lawsuit outfit Righthaven, after
* Game designer and [[Small Name, Big Ego|rampaging egotist]] [[M Dickie]] justifies making a game depicting a heavily edited version of the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad with an essay that boils down to, "Doing this isn't blasphemy because I don't want it to be. Also, the taboo against depicting Muhammad is the ''real'' blasphemy, because that way I'm actually an iconoclastic religious hero to a faith I don't subscribe to."
* An unintentional example ensued when a minister at a local church recovered from an illness. It was the custom to post messages to the parish on the church bulletin board using stationery inscribed with the message "[[God Is Good]]." Underneath this was written [[A God Am I|"Dr. Hargreaves is better."]]
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* On June 12, 1970, Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates pitched a no-hitter—one of the hardest things to accomplish in baseball—while under the influence of LSD.
* ''[HitmanForHire.net]''. If it hadn't been for a terrified woman going to FBI after the "hitman" tried to blackmail her, they might have never realized the man behind it was soliciting actual offers.
* In his ''Dress to Kill'' show, [[Eddie Izzard]] points out that "[
**If there was a
**To put it another way, aside from the fact that Hitler was a direct threat to the US, there were a lot of Americans descended from, British, Poles, Frenchmen, Scandinavians, Dutchmen, and Jews. Cambodians just arrived on the scene after Pol Pot and when they did America had had all the war it wanted.
**Then too Hitler's Germany was ''conquered'' and thus its dirty laundry was aired out in public by it's enemies. Only a few of the worst camps were in Germany ("Not in my backyard" applied even in the Third Reich) and most were in Poland (primarily because the Germans wanted to make Poland a giant concentration camp anyway so having a super concentration camp there was logical, if you want to call it that). However the advancing Russians were usually willing to show nasty stuff to the press unless they [[Moral Myopia|had something of their own]] [[Empire with a Dark Secret|to hide.]] And the Americans and British found enough slave camps and one or two extermination camps on their front.
* The BBC/Discovery documentary [[wikipedia:Human Planet|Human Planet]] is about the extremes of humans living in nature. Many of the examples in the episodes go this far.
** In Cambodia a man traverses shallow water in a small boat with his young son to gather hundreds of snakes to sell. When he gets home, his wife implores him to give some snakes to the girls to play with. The segment ends showing the girls wearing living snakes as bracelets and necklaces.<ref>This involves enough snakes to be [[Nightmare Fuel]] for people that aren’t scared of snakes. For those not staring in shocked horror, the little girls making jewelry out of small braided snakes is absurdly hilarious.</ref>
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* Some of Sir Richard Branson's ad campaigns for Virgin fall under this.
** When ''[[The Full Monty]]'' premiered on Broadway, Branson and the show's cast advertised Virgin cellphones by ''suspending themselves over Times Square, dressed only in "nude" bodysuits, with prop cellphones covering their "business."''
* [[Rodrigo Duterte]] was once quoted as cussing at Pope Francis when he recalled about being stuck in traffic due to the Pontiff's visit in the Philippines in 2015. As the Philippines is predominantly (and historically) Catholic, this didn't sit well with the faithful who view the [[Precision F-Strike|obscene gesture]] as an irreverent insult, with one priest lamenting how Filipino values have "gone down the dregs", but somehow Filipinos [[Values Dissonance|still rooted]] for him to be elected president. Some of these supporters (who happen to be Catholic) either let that episode slide and looked more into what Duterte would bring to the country, or simply did not care at all.
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