Bruce the Knife: Why don't we take care of [killing Clouseau] ourselves?
Dreyfus: Because you wouldn't stand a chance. You don't know Clouseau.
Tournier: He can't be that good.
Dreyfus: Good? Ha, he's not good, he's terrible; he's the worst.
Dreyfus: Because you wouldn't stand a chance. You don't know Clouseau.
Tournier: He can't be that good.
Dreyfus: Good? Ha, he's not good, he's terrible; he's the worst.
An Invincible Incompetent is a hero who defeats powerful opponents, despite having very little skill or ability. Frequently, they keep this up for years, heroically gaining almost no power as they progress, so as to make their constant victories even more impressive.
The method by which they do so differs. Some win on sheer, blind luck. Others know exactly when to say "Let's Get Dangerous!", or intelligently exploit a major weakness of their enemy before returning to their previous state. Many get by on the efforts of mentors and other side characters. However they do it, it makes them effectively invincible, despite being largely incompetent.
This trope caters to audiences who like to identify with the "weaker" side in any conflict. A downside is Villain Decay; it is hard to present a villain as a credible threat if they repeatedly fail to stop the bumbling hero that they supposedly outmatch.
Despite the clear comedic applications of this trope, it is just as often played for (relatively idealistic) drama, with the audience expected to root and identify much more with an outclassed hero.
Closely related to The Fool and the Idiot Hero. See also: Underdogs Always Win, which is this trope on a meta level and primarily applied to sports stories. Inspector Oblivious is a subtrope.
The polar inverse is Powerful, but Incompetent.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: Joey Wheeler perpetually comes from behind to win. Granted, everyone does this, but Joey never seems to be picked as a favorite to win anything, despite several finals showings. Joey's an odd combination of Idiot Ball and Informed Flaw. For no explained reason except poverty, his deck is mostly full of weak cards, in hard contrast to Kaiba, who owns and runs some of the rarest and most powerful cards. To compensate, he also uses many luck-based cards, which have frequently given him victory over stronger opponents, though this is a double-edged sword, seeing as luck could play against him sometimes.
- Tea is the only character in the entire franchise to duel more than once and have a 100% win rate. This is despite the fact that she isn't a serious duelist, and tends to duel just for fun. Her victories include Joey several times at the very beginning of the series before he learns how to duel properly, Mai in Duelist Kingdom (in this case, Mai surrendered a duel she could have won), and most impressively, Crump of the Big Five.
- In the Irresponsible Captain Tylor nobody can decide if Justy Ueki Tylor is this or he's just that good but prefers to look like this.
- Ju Ingong in Transfer Student Storm Bringer defeats everyone and becomes JJang of the school without any fighting skills simply through dumb luck, although everyone who witnesses his fights believes him to be using super-advanced fighting techniques.
- Pokémon: The Series:
- In the Unova League, Ash's new rival Cameron has intelligence that makes Ash look smart by comparison, frequently misses important facts and information yet still proves good enough to beat 8 gym leaders to get to the League. When the two face off, Cameron handicaps himself with 5 Pokémon to Ash's 6 and ends up facing half his team with only Riolu, and still manages to win. Subverted moments later when Cameron gets eliminated in the next round.
- Ash's Kalos companion, Serena, is something of a novice Faux Action Girl who never really improves in battle skills throughout her run. However, she ends the series with her team having not lost a single battle, and rarely even getting scratched, either due to outside intervention, one of her Pokémon evolving at the right time, or most of her opponents being even lower level battlers such as Team Rocket.
- Angel Densetsu: Kitano. Although no pushover (he's freakishly durable and strong, and can defeat most opponents without harming them by shoving them away), he's blissfully unaware that a lot of people he interacts with are actively trying to hurt and maim him, yet he defeats anyone opposing him while believing with all his heart that they're nice and friendly.
- King in One-Punch Man has accidentally acquired an entirely undeserved reputation of being World's Strongest Man and slayer of giant monsters, earning the ranking of an S-Class hero, and now goes around being terrified at being so out of his league. He can't actually kill giant monsters; those were all one-shot by Saitama. However, he still manages to survive under conditions dangerous to real Superheroes and defeat several monsters and villains just by talking to them, thanks to his reputation as The Dreaded and accidentally coming across as sounding really badass. One minor monster even accidentally kills itself out of fear of King, who at the moment doesn't even know it's a monster, but happens to say things that sound like he saw through its disguise.
Comic Books
- Woozy Winks, sidekick to the DC superhero Plastic Man, was a literal version of this. As part of his origin story he once saved a powerful wizard from drowning. As thanks, the wizard put a spell of protection on him, the result of which was that he would magically avoid/survive absolutely anything that could ever hurt him. Falling piano? He'll stumble out of the way so that it hits just an inch behind him. Shoot at him? He'll bend down to pick up a penny just in time to avoid it. At the same time, he was so incompetent and dimwitted that he couldn't really take advantage of this, with it being entirely likely he never realized he had this power to begin with.
- Donald Duck as seen in comic books usually lands somewhere around this trope when he gets into action adventures. He's basically never a skilled fighter (unless appearing in some alternative version like Superduck/Paperinik), and otherwise tends to be some mixture of resourceful and dumb. Sometimes the trope will be averted or subverted when someone in a story recognises his crazy ability to survive anything as a real talent. One example of this involved his being hired as a secret agent while the agency also used his weird lateral-thinking brain as a model for their AI, albeit combining it with actual high intelligence.
Films — Live-Action
- Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther series is a shining example, combined with Bat Deduction in that his profoundly stupid and illogical actions often save him and/or destroy his attacker and/or solve the case he's supposed to be working on. Many skilled assassins try to kill him, but Clouseau inevitably survives by some absurd accident, almost always unknowingly killing the assassin(s) in the process. All for the sake of Rule of Funny, of course. Lampshaded in The Pink Panther Strikes Again when Dreyfus (who is the Big Bad of this film) explains why the Simple Solution Won't Work (that being just use the Carnival of Killers he has access to instead of ransoming the world and ordering the governments to kill the Inspector): in the space of a few seconds he goes from calling Clouseau "terrible" to claiming that "next to him, this doomsday device (the Death Ray he is standing right next to) is a water pistol!"
- The Phantom Menace gives us Jar Jar Binks, who almost singlehandedly wins the Battle of Naboo for the Gungans due to his bumbling antics accidentally dealing serious damage to the droid army over and over again. He clearly has no idea what he's doing for the entire battle and yet is somehow alive, unscathed, and victorious in the end despite it.
Literature
- Discworld: Rincewind is noted for trying to run away from the plot action, yet invariably winning somehow. It's been noted that he has the favour of the Lady, goddess of luck. It's also been noted that she will lose interest if he ever acts like someone with divine protection.
- Ciaphas Cain: This is brought up a lot more than it actually applies. Only the first short story actually fits the trope, its plot boiling down to "I tried to run away but ended up exposing an enemy surprise attack from that direction and looking heroic." Ever after that, Cain is shown to be highly competent — but he refuses to admit this. It's something of a Running Gag in the later books that Cain narrates about how he manages to hold his own in a duel through sheer luck, only for the exasperated editor (who fought beside him many times) to point out that he was actually an incredibly skilled swordsman in a footnote.
- Craig Shaw Gardner's "Ballad of Wuntvor" satirizes the concept. Within the work, he refers to the trope as the "Eternal Apprentice".
Live-Action TV
- Get Smart: Max Smart, who once disarmed an atomic bomb by getting his tie stuck in the timer.
- Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Sabrina went seven years without ever learning even one or two simple spells she could reliably not mess up. Notable in that there usually was no villain except for her mastery of this trope alternately causing and fixing problems.
- Power Rangers RPM: Ziggy the Green Ranger is several leagues behind the other Rangers in fighting skills — and not just the ones on his own team, but just about every other Ranger, period — but he manages to bumble his way through fights, providing support for his teammates rather than drag them down.
Pro Wrestling
- Mikey Whipwreck was the epitome of this trope in ECW. Despite going for months on end without managing to land a single offensive move, Mikey somehow managed to rack up an impressive winning streak due to coincidental outside interference or just sheer dumb luck. This culminated with him winning the ECW Television Title and successfully defending it for a while, despite his numerous attempts to vacate the title.
Web Comics
- The main character of Artificial Time XS, Sheath, is essentially a teenager with a Ralph Wiggum level of intelligence. Several people try to kill her. None of them succeed. This even carries over into A Second Mario Bros X Thing where she survives the end of reality (granted, she receives a McGuffin that lets her keep existing just before everything else is gone), and somehow failed to notice every single thing that happened in the preceding cutscene (including the end of everything).
- Sluggy Freelance: Sam, as a vampire, is almost invincible against unprepared humans, being Immune to Bullets and stuff. But against other vampires, or a competent Vampire Hunter, he's just someone who's dumb as a brick. Yet he manages to survive not only brush-ins with vampire hunters but being hunted by all of the Vrykolakas vampires for years. It's all dumb luck, like when he discloses his location online but gets the state wrong, causing the vampires hunting him to crash a vampire hunter convention instead. It gets to the point that one of his former enemies wants to make him a ruler of vampires because he's the only one who's survived against all the three clans of vampires.
Web Animation
- This is the concept behind the "Build Murray"
character build on the Animated Spellbook. The idea is to play a character who has no business getting into adventuring, but is such a lucky idiot that he succeeds regardless. Manipulating the random dice mechanics as a Halfling Diviner allows the player to fortuitously bumble their way to victory. This build is intended to evoke Bill Murray's various characters.
Web Videos
- In Noob, Sparadrap, one of the worse players, tends to be this on and off. The only situation consistently having it happen is his "fights" against Dark Avenger, to the extent of becoming a Running Gag.
Western Animation
- Scooby-Doo has this trope in two flavors. The later shows and movies, though still often playing on this trope, gave the gang a bit more of a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass cred, displaying more acts of genuine competence and bravado.
- Shaggy and Scooby always seem to end up finding the weekly monster despite their cowardice, laziness, and complete lack of investigative skills.
- Despite the inevitable failure of Fred's convoluted traps to catch the monster, the monster usually ends up trapped by the end of the episode anyway.
- Rufus and Amberley from The Dreamstone were bumbling kids somewhat a cut below Badass Normal, however since their foes were the Urpneys and most of their allies were immortal Invincible Heroes, they usually didn't have to achieve much to win the day.
- Inspector Gadget: Gadget thwarts Doctor Claw again and again, almost solely on the strengths of his Hyper Competent Sidekicks or well-timed slapstick bumbling. On the very rare occasions he gets a clue what's going on however, he is shown to be surprisingly competent.
- Parodied in an episode of Robot Chicken, where Dr. Claw finally puts two and two together and turns Gadget into The Terminator to kill Penny.
- Jonny Quest: Jonny is pretty powerless through the show's whole run, and is constantly being plucked from danger by his father and Race.
- Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes: While the Human Torch and The Thing are often reasonable fighters, they are a lot more effective against Doctor Doom by accident in "Doom's Word Is Law", dodging missiles because they're fighting each other and using a two-pronged attack because they couldn't agree on a plan.
- Coop of Megas XLR somehow manages to win completely impossible situations out of sheer luck.
- Baby Huey combines this with Comically Invincible Hero. Particularly whenever the fox is trying to kill and eat him, nearly all of his plans backfire horribly due to Huey's size and strength. Of course, while all of this is happening, Huey is completely oblivious to any danger that he's in.
- The Simpsons: Depending on the Writer, Homer Simpson is this. His continuous stupid bumbling has caused much more trouble than it's actually solved and he is stupid enough to walk into bad situations, but he's also been able to keep his status quo when other characters nearly (or did) lose everything and has some interesting stories to tell as a result (like having been an astronaut or meeting former President Gerald Ford). The episode "Homer's Enemy" is all about a Logical Latecomer lampshading this and developing everlasting emnity as a result.
- Wander over Yonder has an example in the Titular Character. In a world where the vast majority of heroes and villains have massive armies and very personalized, powerful spaceships that allow them to traverse the galaxy with little to no problems, he has nothing aside from his best friend Sylvia, a Banjo and a magical hat that he can pull items out of. His main tactic for survival involves only trying to befriend the denizens of the Galaxy including those who want only to kill him For the Evulz. He's stopped the villains from conquering planets just by being kind or completely oblivious. The final season reveals he's been doing this for centuries and that he'd even successfully reformed the villain that inspired Lord Hater to become one in the first place.
