Kicking My Own Butt

"Man, man, we should start putting those Homestar vs. Homestar fights on pay-per-view. Instant classics!"

— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #165 "strong badathlon"

This isn't a case where you're fighting an evil twin or a clone of yourself, but where you are literally fighting yourself. As in, you're voluntarily hitting yourself or otherwise trying to inflict damage to yourself.

Sometimes this is used to set up a Wounded Gazelle Gambit, Police Brutality Gambit, or for Playing the Victim Card, while other times it's a literal form of Fighting from the Inside. In cartoons, this can result from a Big Ball of Violence in which all but one character escapes. Compare Attacking Through Yourself, when the only way you can hurt your opponent is to hurt yourself as well.

The "Voluntarily" part is important. If the self-hitting is involuntary, it's Stop Hitting Yourself.

Not to be confused with Self-Harm, which doesn't have a motive beyond causing pain to yourself.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A Pepsi Max commercial has a man at a job interview suddenly start screaming and beating himself up, including tearing his shirt, dunking himself into a fish tank, and throwing himself out of the office. It turns out it was a ploy to scare away the other interviewees so that his friend would have no competition for getting the job.

Films

• Fight Club: The narrator blackmails his boss into paying him for no work, and to seal the deal beats himself up in front of the boss, threatening to blame him for the beating if he doesn't comply, and of course in order to show how serious and nuts he is.
  • Also - at the beginning of the film, the narrator and Tyler Durden have fighting sessions in the parking lot of a restaurant. At the end, when it's revealed that Tyler was a figment of the narrator's imagination, it's shown that the narrator was actually beating himself up.
• Liar Liar: Fletcher Reede desperately needs an excuse to get out of a court case since he's stuck with a curse so that he Cannot Tell a Lie. After hurting himself in the bathroom (by knocking his head against the wall), he comes up with the idea of beating himself up to get out of the case.
  Fletcher Reede: I'm kicking my ass! Do you mind?!
• Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith has Palpatine effectively do this when, disarmed by Mace Windu, he blasts Force Lightning directly into Mace Windu’s lightsaber to reflect it back onto himself and make it appear that Mace Windu brutally attacked him while he was defenseless. He claims that “the attempt on (his) life (from the Jedi) has left (him) scarred and deformed” as a ploy to get both the Galactic Republic and Anakin Skywalker to feel sympathy and side with him over the Jedi. The Republic was not there to witness it, giving them no reason to doubt the claim. As for Anakin, who saw the whole scene play out right in front of him...

Literature

• Cerberus High: Blanc becomes a victim of Akuji's poisonous senbons during his fight with the demon in the Underworld Arc. In order to snap his body out of the poison's advancing effects and continue fighting, Blanc drives his ice arrow into his own leg.
• Discworld: It's said in A Hat Full of Sky that Nac Mac Feegle are so belligerent, one left on his own for long enough will try to kick himself in the nose to alleviate the boredom.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of Taxi where Bobby and Tony get into an argument results in Bobby talking Tony out of slugging him by slugging himself. Alex - always the Only Sane Man - can't believe he's breaking up a fight between one guy.
• In Hannibal, Francis Dolarhyde beats himself bloody in his attic. Although from his point of view, it's his split personality, The Great Red Dragon, punishing him.
• Malcolm in the Middle: In an episode where Malcolm and Reese are both trying to convince Francis to take them to a wrestling show, Reese punches himself in the face repeatedly (drawing a lot of blood) and claims that Malcolm beat him up in an effort to get Malcolm punished so he couldn't go. It doesn't work.
• In a sketch from a Monty Python's Flying Circus live stage show, Graham Chapman plays Colin "Bomber" Harris, a wrestler who goes up against...Colin "Bomber" Harris.
• Night Gallery: In "The Hand of Borgus Weems", Peter Lacland smashes his own hand because he believes it belongs to Borgus Weems.
• The Office: As Dwight is giving a martial arts demonstration, Jim states that "the only one who can defeat you is yourself", which leads to Dwight trying moves on himself.
• Saved by the Bell: Screech wrestles himself in order to get out of a match with another character.
• Shown several times on World's Dumbest...; as mentioned above, often used to set up a Police Brutality Gambit. The presence of cameras recording the events means that they never work.
• Smallville: in "Precipice", Helen's psycho ex-boyfriend Paul smashes his own face into a mirror, which leaves deep gashes in his forehead and blackens both eyes. Then he admits himself to Helen's hospital and claims her new boyfriend Lex paid some thugs to beat him up.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • In the Strong Bad Email "strong badathlon", one of the events is "Greco-Roman Homestar Crud-Out-Of-Beating." The reigning champion is none other than Homestar, who is shown beating the crud out of himself.
    Homestar Runner: C'mon, you little so-and-so! (SLAP! PUNCH!) Is that all you got? (PUNCH! PUNCH!) Oh yeah? Oh yeah? You think you got it like that?
  • In "The Next April Fool's Thing", Strong Mad tries to psych himself up to "talk to orange juice" by punching himself in the face. He turns out to be strong enough to send himself flying.
• How It Should Have Ended's take on Revenge of the Sith has Anakin throw a wrench in Palpatine's scheme by calling Windu straightaway when the Sith Lord reveals himself. Palpatine panics and charges up his Force lightning.
  Palpatine: Help me, Anakin! The Jedi are taking over!
  Anakin: Why are you shocking yourself?
• In Jonbro's Super Mario parody Power Star 4.5, Mario is shown constantly dealing more damage to himself than to his brother, Luigi. While this mostly only happens during the first few seconds, the remainder of the battle still shows him not putting much effort into actually hurting Luigi.
• In the Happy Tree Friends episode "Autopsy-Turvy", Flippy's evil Split Personality Fliqpy has seemingly emerged as an Enemy Without, and they engage in an episode-long fight to the death. However, near the end of the episode, the two happen to pass by a mirror, and upon seeing their reflections, or rather reflection, they realise that it was all a hallucination brought on by Flippy taking too much anxiety medication, and that he was actually fighting himself the whole time by repeatedly switching back and forth between the two sides.

Western Animation

• In The Fairly Oddparents episode Movie Magic, Sylvester Calzone criticizes Timmy's Amateur Movie, to which Timmy retorts, asking if he's some kind of critic. Since Sylvester had built an image of being a "Critic Punching Movie Star," he punches himself out, and throughout the rest of the episode, can be occasionally seen in the background continuing to punch himself.
• Futurama: In the episode "Bender Gets Made", Bender joins the Robot Mafia and when they hijack the Planet Express Ship, the Donbot tells him to go and find the robot listed on the ship's crew and kill him (not knowing that that robot was Bender himself). Bender then proceeds to hide from the Donbot's sight and beat himself over the head with a frying pan, while pretending to be beating up someone else.
• Comes up several times in The Amazing World of Gumball.
  • In The Refund, Gumball repeatedly slaps himself in order to pressure Larry into giving him a refund while Darwin holds his breath. It doesn't work because Larry was willing to do something for them, but saw his cheapskate manager was still watching.
  • In The Banana, Banana Joe's attempt to attack Gumball and Darwin results in him slipping and bruising himself. Knowing they'd be seen as bullies if anyone saw this, Gumball and Darwin proceed to beat themselves (and each other) up to make it look like it was an even fight, even tricking Joe once he woke up.
  • In The Watch, Marvin refuses to give the back family heirloom Darwin gave away, so Gumball uses Marvin's cane to beat himself for the sake of accusing Marvin of having done it when the cops come. After hitting himself once he becomes too disoriented to remember what he was even doing.
• On the Classic Disney Short "Lonesome Ghosts", Goofy tries to ambush one of the ghosts hiding in a dresser, but he ends up trying to strangle himself. He then sees his own butt and, thinking it's the ghost's, stabs it with a thumbtack.
• In the Darkwing Duck episode that introduced him, Negaduck was originally Darkwing's Literal Split Personality. The two are merged together in the middle of a fist fight between each other, resulting in Darkwing grabbing himself by the collar and punching himself before realizing he's back to normal.
• On the Looney Tunes cartoon "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery", Daffy Duck is so excited after reading a Dick Tracy comic that he starts miming a fight, and throws a punch so hard that his fist springs back and knocks himself out, leading to the Dream Sequence that makes up the rest of the short.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "No Weenies Allowed", Patrick performs a brutal beatdown on himself as part of a ruse to make SpongeBob look tough enough to get into the Salty Spittoon. It works, but SpongeBob slips on an ice cube right after walking in the door and has to go to the hospital.
• In one episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Jimmy builds a pair of nanobots to pilot a machine to serve as his bodyguard, but they get carried away and attack anyone for even the slightest offense against him. Jimmy eventually stops them by beating himself up, causing a Logic Bomb in the nanobots because they were programmed to protect Jimmy, but they can't hurt him either.
• Wander over Yonder: In "The Helper", Wander's Chronic Hero Syndrome accidentally causes a lot of trouble, with him repeatedly trying to help people who don't need help. In the end, Wander offers to make it up to the townsfolk by throwing himself out of town.
• Xiaolin Showdown has a variation in one episode where Clay tries to get past an Enemy Mime who keeps copying his every move. He eventually succeeds by punching himself in the face; while Clay only got a black eye, the mime ended up knocking himself out.

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