Laborious Laces

"Left over right, and under and pull.
Make a little loop, now make another.
One loop goes under and over the other.
Have you got it?"

— The Magician, teaching King Rollo to tie his own laces

Laces are an ancient and widely-used method of fastening shoes. However, they are not without problems: they can come undone easily, and if this happens, they can trip up the wearer of the shoes, or in extreme cases, the shoe might even leave the wearer's foot. It is also possible for knots to become tangled and difficult to undo, making a shoe difficult to remove. In fiction, laces can be a Plot-Driven Breakdown to cause a delay for these reasons; and a character can play for time by stopping to tie their laces. If laces need to be re-threaded, this can be very time-consuming, especially if the laces have lost their aglets. If a character frequently has shoelaces undone, this can show clumsiness or general scruffiness. Untied or badly tied laces can cause accidents if they become caught in something, such as bicycle pedals.

Tying shoelaces is one of the more difficult tasks of dressing which children have to learn. One way to show in fiction that a child is less mature than others is if they cannot yet tie their own laces, and somebody has to do this for them, or unlike everybody else, they wear laceless shoes. A child learning to tie their own laces can be part of a Coming of Age Story.

Truth in Television, as many parents and teachers can testify, who have had to deal with shoelace mishaps, or tie children's laces for them. Compare Tied-Together-Shoelace Trip. See also Comedic Underwear Exposure, Open-Fly Gag, and Of Corset Hurts for other comical mistakes involving clothing. See also Can't Tie a Tie.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• In a commercial for Skechers Z-Straps, a bad guy in a gray hood was skateboarding when his shoelaces were untied. The laces jammed the wheels of his skateboard, causing him to lose his balance and crash into some trash cans. The announcer of the commercial said, "Oh, shoe laces are a bad idea."

Film — Animated

• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: Exaggerated. When Flint was a boy, he invented spray-on shoes to try to prevent untied shoelaces, which are shown to be a problem since all his classmates have their laces untied. Later, when Flint is fully-grown, Sam says that his spray-on shoes might "solve the untied shoes epidemic", indicating that untied shoes are still a massive problem.
• Rock-A-Doodle: Patou the dog always has trouble tying his shoes. Edmond teaches him how to tie them.
• Early on in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles says that leaving his shoe untied was a choice (representing his irresponsible nature). He trips on his shoelace while training, causing him to break the goober. When he commits to the responsibility of being Spider-Man, his shoes are tied.

Film — Live-Action

• In the French film Cest La Vie, the youngest child Titi struggles with tying his laces, and the others tire of showing him how to do it; but he glows with happiness when he manages to do it himself.
• In the French film Cross My Heart, Claire plays for time by stopping to tie her laces when she is accompanying her mother, who is about to investigate one of her friends.
• Eskimo Day: When evading his son's questions about mundane matters, the elderly James rattles off a long list of philosophical questions, finishing with "ask me why shoelaces won't stay fastened these days", referring to his own, which he trips on later.
• In Jojo Rabbit, Jojo constantly fails to tie his own shoes, which is a deep embarrassment for him considering that he hopes to join the Hitlerjugen.
• Zombieland: One of Columbus' rules of surviving Zombieland is tying your shoelaces. It can be a problem if you don't tie your shoelaces because you'll trip and become zombie chow.

Literature

• Adrian Mole:
  • In Growing Pains, Adrian decides to wear his Doc Marten boots the day he runs away from home and spends fifteen precious minutes doing the sodding laces up.
  • In True Confessions, Adrian mentions that his best friend Nigel frequently yanks his laces so hard that they break; and he then passes the shoes on to Adrian, because he cannot be bothered to re-thread new laces.
• In the kids' book Countdown To Kindergarten, a little girl is about to start kindergarten, but she must learn to tie her shoelaces first, and she has a great deal of trouble doing so.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rowley is described by his best friend Greg as "one of those kids who are always gonna be a few years behind everyone else maturity-wise." He's in middle school but doesn't know how to tie his shoes because he still has Velcro instead of laces. Last year, his mom bought him sneakers with laces, and Greg had to help him tie them numerous times.
• Harry Potter:
  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: The trio mention that if they were befriending the childish giant Grawp, they would still be teaching him to tie his shoelaces.
  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Played with when Harry comes of age and is allowed to do magic outside of school. He tries to tie his shoelaces by magic, and the resulting knot takes several minutes to undo by hand.
• James and the Giant Peach: When James has the task of removing the Centipede's forty-two boots, each one has laces that are tied in terrible complicated knots which have to be unpicked with fingernails; the task takes about two hours.
• Mr. Men: The scruffy Mr Clumsy frequently trips on his undone shoelaces, in contrast to Mr Fussy, whose laces are not only always tied, but ironed.
• My Weird School: Michael is notorious for never tying his shoes.
• The Railway Children: A Running Gag is that Phyllis's bootlaces keep coming undone, causing the children to be in a hurry.
• The Worst Witch: Mildred's bootlaces are frequently trailing along the floor, to show her general clumsiness.

Live-Action TV

• Breaking the Magician's Code: Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed: The narrator comments that the Masked Magician looks scruffy with untied shoelaces; before the Magician ties them by magic, and reveals how this trick is done.
• Castle: "The Mistress Always Spanks Twice", while investigating the murder of a dominatrix, Ryan and Esposito are visiting the club she worked at. One of the Doms asks for help undoing her knee-high stilettos, admonishing Esposito for being slow. Esposito protests that it's an octagonal knot he's never seen before.
  Dominatrix: Hey, Irish, you wanna help your friend? He seems to be all thumbs.
• The b-story of an episode of Full House is about Michelle learning how to tie her shoes. But she has trouble with them, mostly due to her family having different methods of tying them which usually involves a song. So she tried using gum to hold the laces and eventually decided to give up until her uncle Jessie encouraged her to keep practicing (which also encouraged him to go back to school).
• In Trust, after a badly-burned body turns up in the middle of the Getty kidnapping case, and everyone fears that Little Paul's kidnappers ran out of patience and murdered him, his mother notices that the corpse's shoes are tied; Little Paul always hated tying his shoelaces, so she reasons that the body can't be his and therefore he must still be alive.
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Played for Drama. Kimmy's mother was highly negligent and didn't even bother teaching her daughter to tie her shoes, resulting in her having trouble even in adulthood. As a teen, Kimmy was unable to get her shoes tied while she was walking one day and was left behind by her group, resulting in the Reverend finding her alone and abducting her.

Video Games

• Referenced in the Colecovision game Campaign '84 , a political simulator game, where the player can choose to tackle the issue of shoelaces by banning them.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: In "Mime's Olympic Smoochie", Mime puts on shoes to jump a hurdle, but doesn't tie them first, causing him to trip and get his head sliced off by the hurdle.

Web Video

• In The Angry Video Game Nerd's episode covering the Colecovision, he brings up the game Campaign '84, and how as a presidential candidate, you can propose banning shoelaces, which he says is his favourite choice in the game since he considers shoelaces to be bullshit.
• In The Problem Solving of Filmmaking, David F. Sandberg talks about how Darla's actress Faithe Herman wasn't available for a scene in SHAZAM! (2019), so he Hand Waves her absence by claiming her character was busy tying her shoes. The very next scene, Darla appears, wearing... Velcro sneakers.
• You Know Whats Bullshit: The Bullshit Man talks about the problems with shoe laces. Every time you tie your shoelaces, by the time you walk about they become undone.

Western Animation

• Arthur: In "D.W. All Fired Up", during D.W. and her classmates' first fire drill, one of the children said that her shoelaces were undone. She gets bumped into another kid.
• Hercules: The Animated Series: In "Hercules and the Kids", Herc is asked to help Aesop with some kids on a field trip, including one named Alexander, who can't tie his sandals and has to wear ones with Velcro. Later, Alexander has to save his classmates, who have been captured by a Giant Spider. Unable to untie the webs they're wrapped in, he instead cuts them open. He later grew up to become none other than Alexander the Great, and he used what he learned that day to undo the infamous Gordian Knot. Yet he never learned to tie laces, still wearing Velcro sandals.
• Johnny Test: Gil joins an effort to save Johnny as a return favor for telling him his shoe was untied.
• King Rollo buys himself his first pair of lace-up shoes, but does not know how to tie them. The Magician shows him how and tells King Rollo to practise, which he does with great difficulty. Everybody else hears strange noises from his bedroom, including a shoe being thrown. However, he is proud when he succeeds.
• Rugrats (1991): Two-year-old Chuckie Finster's shoelaces are almost always untied. This has often resulted in Chuckie tripping over them, and it has also sometimes resulted in him causing the episode's conflict, such as when he accidentally fell on his stepsister Kimi's rollercoaster toy and broke it in "Talk of the Town". In "Tie My Shoes", the babies get Angelica to tie Chuckie's shoelaces since she had learned to tie shoes from Miss Carol's video lesson. However, they have to bring her food that she likes before she can do it. When Chuckie's shoelaces are tied, this leads to the adults believing that Chuckie tied his own shoelaces.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Your Shoe's Untied", SpongeBob tries to show Patrick how to tie his new shoes, but he's had them on so long that he has no idea how to do so. Now, having untied his shoes, he can't tie them back up. He tries to find someone to teach him, but no one else in Bikini Bottom has shoes with laces. Finally, he learns how from his pet snail Gary, who secretly wears shoes under his shell.
  • Parodied in the episode "Fools in April". SpongeBob says to his own tongue, "Hey, your shoe's untied. April fools! You're not wearing any shoes!".
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Xavier has a habit of tripping on his untied shoelaces. For example, in the Jackie Robinson episode, he trips on his laces and accidentally sends the baseball into the racist kid's lawn. Brad calls him out on how often this happens in the Jigonsaseh episode.

---