Counting to Potato

"He doesn't go by numbers, he gets hieroglyphics."

— Darren Criss about Chris Colfer

In situations involving single numbers—or letters when spelling out—any of these numbers or letters may be replaced by one out of sequence, a numerical for a letter or vice versa, or just a random word. This is most often done by The Ditz or by someone mocking their perceived lack of general knowledge, or by characters to try to appear stupid.

This trope comes in a few different flavors:

1: Sequences: You know how the numerical alphabet goes? You know how the phonetic alphabet goes? You know what alphabet spaghetti looks like? Stick the four in a blender. May (later) be justified because 6 Is 9.

B: Lists: Always Played for Laughs, but not always by someone stupid as in Real Life it is entirely possible to forget where you got up to when designating reasons in lists and/or if it was with numbers or letters. The best examples follow the structure of "number-letter-thing."

Wednesday: Isolated Replacement: A number or letter is replaced by something else—anything else, maybe even a picture—in an isolated situation. Let's say you're in math class and you get asked to write on mini wipe boards the answers to some incomplete equations. What's 3x5? You draw a duck. What's 10% of 160? You write "Ze."

π: Alternative Number System: These people don't work in metric (decimal). They don't even work in imperial. Their counting can be non-standard with a perfectly legitimate reason In-Universe. Only if other characters think it's stupid will it count.

-21: Unusual Chapter Numbers: Basically just listing out of order, but with chapter numbers! Usually of books or films, or The Film of the Book, and will undoubtedly confuse some of the audience.

Sex: Homophones (and homosymbols): Six becomes sex, three becomes a tree, M and N are interchangeable and anything else is entirely possible because people can have funny accents.

¶: Lucky Charms Title: Letters or numbers replaced by a similar-looking picture, letter, or number. So, 2 replacing Z but not M replacing W.

Surprisingly unrelated to Letters 2 Numbers, 2 + 2 = 5 and 3 + 5 = 4. Occasionally overlaps with Counting to Three and may result in a case of E = MC Hammer. A key element of the Disorganized Outline Speech.

Super-Trope of Unusual Chapter Numbers and Lucky Charms Title. Compare One, Two, Skip a Few.

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Examples

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: The scores to Calvinball range from oogie to boogie, to Q to 12. Given that the whole point is to make it up as you go, this probably goes for the scores as well.
• In an early Peanuts strip, Lucy counts her cookies thusly: "One, six, eleventy-four, thirteen-eight, nine million, twelvty-three". But despite this, she can still tell that Snoopy took two of them when she wasn't looking.

Fanfiction

• The Boy Who Cried Idiot: In her sleep, Lisa says, "Two plus two equals fish. Three plus three equals donkey. Four plus four equals elephant."
• In Chapter 23 of This Bites!. Maybe a typo, maybe not:
  Cross: (to Lassoo) Hey, fine by me. One, the stronger I get the more damage I can take and dish out, and B. I want to be able to tote around a badass cannon like you.

Films — Animation

• Inside Out:
  Disgust: On a scale of one to ten, I give this day an F.
• Wish (2023): Valentino says he'll count to three, but he goes "One, two..." but then says random words since he is a goat and never learned to count.

Films — Live-Action

• Home Alone.
  • When Heather is counting off the family (with neighbor Mitch Murphy unwittingly standing in for Kevin), Buzz attempts to trip up her count by shouting: "Eleven, Ninety-two, twelve."
  • As the McAllister family wonder about Kevin from Paris, Megan asks Buzz if he's not the least bit concerned about his well being, or something bad happening to him.
  Buzz: No, for three reasons: A) I'm not that lucky. 2) We have smoke detectors. And D) We live on the most boring street in the United States of America, where nothing remotely dangerous ''will'' ever happen, period.
  • In Angels With Filthy Souls, Johnny counts off one, two, ten before pumping Snakes's guts full of lead.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "One...two...FIVE!"
• In Trope Namer The Ringer, Steve Baker (Johnny Knoxville) is pretending to be developmentally disabled, and one of the things he says while practicing in the mirror is, "I can count to potato!"
• Spaceballs: The self-destruct voice does this when counting down the last ten seconds.
  Self-destruct voice: Ten... nine... eight... six...
  President Skroob: Six?! What happened to seven?
  Self-destruct voice: Just kidding.

Jokes

• This trick can be played with a calculator in hexadecimal (base 16) mode: Three men go into a cafe (enter 3CAFE), and have sex (divide by 6). What happens? (Press =.) Answer: A1D5

Literature

• In Alcatraz Versus The Shattered Lens, Alcatraz deliberately numbers his chapters in a way that makes no sense, so that if the order-obsessed cult of Evil Librarians tries to read it their heads will explode.
• In Discworld, trolls have a counting system based on fours, rather than tens (apart from Detritus, who ends up counting in binary). As a result a troll counting "one, two, three, many"^note and continuing "many-one, many-two" all the way up to "many-many-many-three" which is followed by "lots" comes across this way (leading to an In-Universe stereotype that trolls can't count past three).
  Detritus: SOUND OFF!
  Troll Recruits: ONE! TWO!
  Detritus: SOUND OFF!
  Troll Recruits: MANY! LOTS!
  Detritus: SOUND OFF!
  Troll Recruits: ERR! WHAT?
• The Heroes of Olympus: The monsters going through the Doors of Death in Tartarus go through in groups with designations going from A-22 to Double Red. Hyperion wonders just what kind of number system that is.
• Pippi Longstocking does this. "One, two, nineteen."
• In Tacky the Penguin, "odd bird" Tacky always counts, "One, two three, four, two, three, six, zero, two and a half, zero."
• Wayne (the rare Cloudcuckoolander -plus- The Atoner) from Wax and Wayne claims he bought a ward against logic that lets him "add two and two and get a pickle."
• The first Wayside School book features Joe, who is prone to this even though he always gets the correct amount of items. He can count normally by the end of his eponymous chapter, though.
  Joe: Four, six, one, nine, five. There are five pencils, Mrs. Jewls.

Live-Action TV

Series:

• In A.N.T. Farm Paisley counts only in vegetables in one episode.
• Doctor Who: From "Voyage of the Damned":
  The Doctor: First things first. One. We are going to climb through this ship. B... no, two. We are going to reach the bridge. Three. Or C. We are going to save the Titanic. And, coming in a very low four. Or D. Or that little iv in brackets they use in footnotes. Why? Right then, follow me.
• The Full House episode "Arrest Ye Merry Gentleman" has Jesse saying to the joke shop owner (played by Mickey Rooney) who is keeping them hostage in his shop (and has just made fun of Jesse's hair), "A) It's mousse. And 2) Bring those cops on, OK?"
• On Glee, Kurt says that Brittany believes that the square root of four is rainbows◊.
  • She also stopped learning the alphabet because she'd mix up 'm' and 'n' and didn't want to continue until she didn't replace them with each other.
  • "How many 'm's are in the letter 'r'?◊"
  • She turned, in all the season 4 countdown posters, the Glee 'l' into a '7'◊.
• In one Parks and Recreation episode, Ron Swanson gets shot by one of the other parks staffers while turkey hunting.
  Tom: How mad is he, on a scale of one to Chris Brown?
• The Red Dwarf episode "Dimension Jump" finds Holly preparing to activate his new invention, the Holly Hop Drive:
  Holly: 10... 9... 8... 6... 5...
  Rimmer: You missed number seven!
  Holly: Did I? I've always had a bit of a blind spot with sevens.
  Rimmer [sing-song]: We're going to die.
  Holly: No problem, I'll start lower down.
• In this Sesame Street skit, a little girl trolls Kermit the Frog as he attempts to recite the alphabet with her:
  Girl: A, B, C, D, E, F, Cookie Monster!
  • What makes it more adorable is that according to this Jim Henson biography, the girl thought up the joke without prompting, and Henson improvised Kermit's responses on the spot.
• Sometimes present in the "Numberwang" sketches on That Mitchell and Webb Look, a fictional and completely non-sequitur number guessing game show. One episode has the host saying "So Julie, you're ahead on 77; Simon, you trail on 83"; another has "Autumn" appearing when he asks for time on the clock.

TV Movies:

• Hey Vern, It's Ernest!. While preparing for a baking contest, Ernest reminds Vern of three basic principles (while holding up four fingers): "Number one—always use plenty of sauce. B—always squeeze yer tomaters. And three—don't forget to thump your melons, knowwhutImean?"

Music

• The Beatles' "Eight Days A Week" is a variation on this as the title was a typical Ringo malapropism.
• In U2's song "Vertigo", Bono opens by counting in: "Unos! Dos! Tres! Catorce!" (Translation: Some, two, three, fourteen)

Theatre

• Much Ado About Nothing:
  • The incompetent constable Dogberry has just caught a pair of criminals, and is trying to tell Don Pedro what they did in a speech that combines this trope with getting stuck in a revolving door at the Department of Redundancy Department:
    Constable Dogberry: Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.
  • Don Pedro replies in kind:
    Don Pedro: First, I ask you what they've done; thirdly, I ask you what offense they're charged with; sixth and lastly, I ask you why they've been committed here; and, in conclusion, I ask what they're accused of.

Theme Parks

• Disney Theme Parks. At the entrance to Toontown in Disneyland, there's a population counter which is constantly cycling through numbers...and screws, stars, dumbbells, TNT, and various other random things.

Video Games

• Deadly Rooms of Death has a Running Gag in the DLC level set, "Perfection" in which Beethro tries to count something, and a voice in his head starts counting with him and messes up. Subverted in one room where the voice starts counting, and doing it correctly, prompting Beethro to tell it that there's nothing that needs counting.
• In The Simpsons Hit & Run, the bonus races are run by Milhouse, Nelson, and Ralph. All of them will throw in some variation on the countdown just to mess with you. For example, Nelson will say "Psyche!" to mess with your timing, Milhouse coughs from inhaling smog and his countdown is extremely slow, and Ralph is incapable of counting so he just uses whatever random things he comes up with.
• Super Paper Mario: Slim.
  Slim: "OOOOONNNE! TWOOOOO! THREEEEE! FIIIIIIIVE! FOUUUR! EEEEIGHT! SEVENTEEN!!!! THREE-POINT-ONE-FOUR!!!! ONE MARZILLION!! TENNNNN!!!"

Web Original

• DaThings: A participant in "The Price is Rice Jr." is Katherine years old, and Alice Fox of "StaCup" tells of completing eating sequences when she was Catherine years old.
• Element Animation: In "Villager News 2", the winning lottery numbers were revealed to be 1, 4, 17, 548, the letter M, and a drawing of a dog.
• Group X teaches you how to count to "Schfifty Five".
  "Shwam, doo, two-and-heif, scheven, schfourteen-teen, schwenty-one, shwenty-seven-heif, 27, 37, WHAT YOU SAYIN??"
• Back when Game of Thrones was still popular, a meme circulated online asking "On a scale of Luke Skywalker to Jaime Lannister, how well would you deal with losing your hand?"
  • Or "...deal with latent sexual attraction to your sister?"
  • Or "...deal with the fact that your nephew is a complete and utter douchebag?"
• In the "Top 11 Nostalgic Mindf*cks" episode, The Nostalgia Critic counts down from "number banana" to "number relativity".
• Seanbaby will occasionally use these when dealing with a figure too stupid for real integers. His article on MMA fighter Kazuyuki Fujita's legendarily indestructible skull includes fighting tips with made-up numbers like floop, harf, formy & glap.
• StacheBros: In "Donkey Kong Presents: How to be Dumb":
  Donkey Kong: Today, I will be teaching you three easy steps — count 'em; 5, 10, 3 — on how to be the most retarded, mindless idiot! Like me!
• In Issue 7 of Teen Girl Squad (Teeny Tiny Girl Squad), Toddler Whats-Her-Face claims "I can count to G!" while Toddler Cheerleader brags "I can count to purple, backwards."
• Twitch Plays Pokémon Brown had its win condition reached on the 11th day, but didn't end immediately after reaching the win condition because the update to PBR wasn't finished. Because of this, the timestamp on the final update in our recap page is 10d26h1m, aka 26 hours and 1 minute into Day 11.

Western Animation

• In The Amazing World of Gumball episode "The Cycle", after the Wattersons' prank makes Harold thinks he's rich, he pays a skywriter to write Richard saying "I can count to burrito!"
• In The Beatles cartoon episode "Eight Days A Week", Hollywood screen lover Lips Lovelace loses his ability to kiss. Paul says it's preposterous and that anybody can kiss, prompting Lovelace to vent:
  Lovelace: Really? Eight days a week? Six weeks a month? Thirteen months a year??
• The Camp Lazlo episode "Snake Eyes" had a scene where some of the Bean Scouts were playing hide and seek. Skip claims that he can count to ten, but his counting goes as "1, 3, 11..."
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • On a couple of occasions, Numbuh 4's given pretty strange countdowns, with letters and random numbers. Presumably, this is a combo of him being Book Dumb and the overall strangeness of operating the KND's 2x4 Technology.
    • Special shout-out goes to "Operation NUGGET", where he counts to Q for a Showdown at High Noon against the Delightful Children. For extra Facepalm (or Fridge Brilliance?) points, it's apparently his equivalent of four. Somehow, the Delightfuls have no problem parsing what he actually means (which may be deliberate foreshadowing that it was All Just a Dream.)
  • Tommy, Numbuh 2's younger brother, calls himself "Numbuh T" when getting oriented as an official Kid Next Door. This gets called out by the other kids at the ceremony but accepted anyway. (Later episodes show that MUCH more unorthodox numbers are accepted as codenames among the ranks. Maybe they're actually annoyed that he's trying this without any seniority?)
• Cow and Chicken uses this quite often, considering almost all of the characters have some Cloud Cuckoolander in them. Some more specific examples:
  Red Guy is trying to expose Super Cow
  Red Guy: WHAT ELSE DO I KNOW ABOUT SUPER COW? WHAT ELLLLSE?! OKAY, THINK! A) She speaks Spanish. 2) She's a superhero...
  Chicken kicking Cow out of his new treefort
  Chicken: 1) It's for men only. And B) You're a six-hundred-pound girl!
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In the movie Abra-Catastrophe!, Mr. Crocker states that learning math is a waste of time, as in a world where fairies exist, fairies can just warp reality so two plus two equals fish.
  • "Stupid Cupid" has Cosmo fall in love with his own reflection. When counting the ways he loves himself, he goes "one, seven, avocado, Europe".
• Rock Bottom demonstrates this in a Felix the Cat cartoon where he and the Professor are launching themselves from a cannon:
  Rock: Ten, nine, eight...uh, what comes after eight, boss?
  Professor: Seven, stupid!
  Rock: Seven, stupid, six...
• The segments in the fourth installment of Spike and Mike's series Lloyd's Lunchbox are numbered Lesson One, Lesson B, Third, and Lesson 4.
• In the Johnny Bravo episode "Luke Perry's Guide to Love": "On a scale of one to ten... you're an idiot."
• In one episode of Numb Chucks, the Chucks give a countdown that runs "Five...four...ten...blueberry".
• The Patrick Star Show: In "Family Plotz", Patrick counts for a game of hide-and-seek in the cemetery, and goes "1, 2, C, uh, banana..." Thankfully, some grave robbers are nearby to help him learn to count, using their stolen goods.
• Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: Randy hides the Ninjanomicon under a math book cover that reads "easy as 1-2-C".
• The Ren & Stimpy Show has two examples from Sven Hoek in his self-titled episode. When playing "seek and hide" with Stimpy, he counts "Nine... eleven... K... fjord... one yundred!" Then when playing the "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence" board game with Stimpy, Sven moves eight spaces, counting as he does so, "One, six, yirteen... eight!"
• In the Rugrats episode "Visiting Aunt Miriam", Tommy, Phil, and Lil believe Aunt Miriam and her friends to want to cook and eat Chuckie when they say he's "cute enough to eat". To keep Chuckie from finding out and to hide him from Aunt Miriam and her friends, they decide to play a game of hide and seek with all three of them as the seekers. As they're all one-year-old babies, their counting is atrocious, and they include words like "peanut", "potty", "macaroni", and "puppies".
  • A comic strip had Chuckie asking Angelica what comes after Q. She tells him 5, and the third panel is him looking at a chalkboard with a B, a 9, a Q, and an 8 that's been edited into a cat.
• Seven Little Monsters: In "Good Night", Seven attempts to go to sleep by Counting Sheep and his counting goes as "five, seven, ninety-nine..."
• The Simpsons is notorious for its portrayal of the "typical hillbilly". In "Rednecks and Broomsticks", Lisa is playing with the Spuckler children, they counted while she hid as saying, "One, two, backwards-z, one-legged triangle, banana hotdog, double-banana hotdog, sixty-corncob-two..."
  • In "Marge's Son Poisoning", Homer is doing curls with a dumbbell. He starts counting normally, before randomly skipping through numbers, and then including 'banana'.
• Steven Universe: In "Three Gems and a Baby", Greg does this as he tries to explain why baby Steven's gem begins to glow.
  Pearl: Well, what do you do with a human baby when it glows?!
  Greg: First off, human babies don't glow. And letter number B... WHAT IF THEY DO?!
• Strange Hill High: After Mitchell breaks maths in "The 101% Solution", the answer to one square root problem become 'banana football'. Later, while attempting to score -1% on a maths exam, Mitchell gives the answer to one question as 'hamburger'.
• In The Superhero Squad Show episode "The Final Battle! ('Nuff Said!)", the Hulk tries to count the Infinity Stones to make sure he and the other Squaddies have gathered all of them. This being the Hulk, his choice of numbers leaves a lot to be desired.
  Hulk: One, seven, fish, two thousand, negative three...
• In YooHoo & Friends, Chewoo, Pammee, and several other characters have a tendency to include colors while counting.

Real Life

• The page quote is of Darren Criss on his Glee costar Chris Colfer awarding himself 12 out of 10.
• A logic quiz which devolved into a meme has the answers of 2+2= fish, 3+3= 8 and 7+7= triangle. A variant can also be found in one Professor Layton game.
• The NATO phonetic alphabet, used to maximize clarity in official audio communications, uses easily-distinguished words for letters (alpha, bravo, charlie, etc) and supplants 9 with "niner" to ensure it can't be confused with the German "Nein", or with "five" when transmissions' quality is poor. Words substituted for letters were selected, irrespective of actual meaning, after exhaustive tests to determine which English words were most easily distinguished when conveyed between people of various NATO nationalities and accents.
• The cheeky song intro "A one, and a two, and a ching-chong banana!" seems to qualify.
• There's a classic drinking game called "Fizz Buzz", in which players pick a number (say, 7), then take turns counting upwards, until they reach a multiple of the number (7, 14, 21, and so on) and have to say "buzz" instead. Failure results in having to drink a shot. It's also used without alcohol in acting circles as a concentration technique, and in schools, in teaching kids their multiplication tables.
  • A more difficult version of the game has the player swap "buzz" for numbers divisible by the number as well as numbers containing the same numeral. This leads to non-linear segments like "...54, 55, buzz, buzz, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, buzz..."
• Counting in hexadecimal (base-16), which can happen in computer science, can look like this, since it goes 1, 2, 3,..., 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11, 12,..., 18, 19, 1A, 1B, etc. Expressions like 5+5=A or B+C=17 are perfectly valid (although usually numbers in hexadecimal are prefixed with 0x to avoid confusion).
• A joke used to take a shot at Those Wacky Nazis: "On a scale of 1 to 'Invade Russia in winter', how bad is your idea?"

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