One of many plots where a character/s with the lowest intelligence ends up becoming smarter, potentially the smartest one in the cast, whether through a Genius Serum or some other reason.
In the beginning, the other characters may enjoy this, but eventually the enjoyment runs out when and if the character becomes an Insufferable Genius who they can no longer tolerate. Reasons may vary, with one of the most common being that they make everyone else look dumber by comparison or that the original smart guy/s are left with a lack of purpose in the group. And so, the other characters decide that the newfound genius is better off being an idiot instead and try to come up with a way to return them to normal. One of many plotlines used for the excuse of Status Quo Is God.
May be related to Ignorance Is Bliss when the character becomes smart enough to realize the context and morality of the actions of others around them and decide to be better off as ignorant as before. Compare "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome, when the intellect boost is temporary as opposed to some here that last for longer periods of time or are even permanent. See also We Want Our Jerk Back!.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Doctor Slump: In one of the early chapters, the clueless and cheerfully destructive Arale accidentally eats an insect and suddenly turns into a calm, studious, and reasonable girl. Arale's friends and the other villagers miss her old personality (it helps that Penguin Village is a mostly anti-intellectual Cloudcuckooland and studying is considered a weird thing in Arale's school), so when they find a way to change Arale back to "normal", they throw a party to celebrate.
- Durarara!!: Downplayed. While Shizuo isn't an idiot, he's Too Dumb to Fool and hates it when things aren't straightforward, but on very rare occasions he's capable of surprising shows of intelligence contrary to his usual behavior. This tendency upsets Izaya, who already hates him but especially loathes the moments when Shizuo has the presence of mind to make smart decisions that defy his expectations, often upsetting his plans in the process.
Izaya: Unbelievable. One moment he's dumb as an ox, the next he's sharp as a whip. And it's because of this very reason... that I hate him so much.
Films — Live-Action
- In Laurel and Hardy film A Chump at Oxford, a window falls on Stan's head. It turns out Stan had a case of Easy Amnesia, as the blow to his head causes him to remember that he is Lord Paddington, the "greatest athlete and scholar the university (Oxford) ever had." Lord Paddington speaks with an upper-class RP accent, and is a super-genius. He is also mean, insulting and belittling Ollie while giving Ollie a job as his valet. At the end of the movie Lord Paddington gets whacked on the head by the window again, and turns back into dumb old Stan. Ollie is delighted and gives his friend a hug as the film ends.
Live-Action TV
- Chuck: In Season 5, Jeff, the Buy More's resident creepy Cloudcuckoolander, turns out to have been suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning for years due to sleeping in his van, and after he's freed from its effects, becomes an intelligent and sensitive guy who gets on much better with everyone. This does not sit well with his "best friend" (read: controlling Jerkass who lets Jeff hang out with him in return for getting to treat him like crap), Lester, who doesn't appreciate Jeff breaking out of his subordinate role and tries to return him to the way he was by pumping monoxide fumes into the room he's in. Fortunately, however, Jeff escapes and later has Lester arrested; however, being the Nice Guy he is, he eventually drops the charges on the proviso that Lester promises never to poison him again.
- Eureka: The episode "Smarter Carter" has the book-dumb sheriff gain significant intelligence after taking a cognitive enhancement drug, the effects of which end up lasting much longer than originally planned. Throughout his time as a super-intelligent scientist like much of the rest of the town, he becomes increasingly distant from his various relationships, particuarly treating his robot deputy Andy more as an experiment than a partner, enhancing Andy's processing power in a way that requires far more power than Andy's circuits can handle. Only after Andy goes on a power-sapping rampage, causing him to come close to a permanently irrepairable state, Jack helps to fix this, then details a way to remove his heightened intellect to the other scientists.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "Flowers For Charlie," a pair of scientists study Charlie after giving him an "intelligence pill." The rest of the Gang get irritated by his new stuck-up behavior, with Frank saying they need to talk him down because he's their foundation (and foundations belong on the bottom). It's all subverted when the pill turns out to be a placebo; the scientists note Charlie only thought he was smarter, when the only uptick they saw was his arrogance.
- Star Trek: While fairly intelligent, the shy and introverted Reginald Barclay is modified by a Cytherian probe to become super smart in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Nth Degree." As Barclay's intelligence increases exponentially other members of the Enterprise crew would rather have the old Barclay back, especially after he directly connects himself to the ship's computer.
Web Animation
- Played for Drama in Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: in 'Electricity', it's revealed that Yellow Guy runs on batteries, which have clearly expired.note Swapping them for the latest teacher's fresh ones makes him a genius – to the point of noticing the staircases to higher levels – but also causes the house and teachers to start breaking down. Duck and Red Guy end up taking his fresh batteries to undo the damage, reverting him to his original idiocy.
- The Grossery Gang: During the "A Gooey-Ful Mind" arc of the series, Egghead, the young and ditzy member of the Grosseries, sticks his tongue in an outlet to retrieve a mint. Doing so zaps his brain to a much larger size, increasing his intelligence. This also has the drawback of having him realize how disgusting the Yucky Mart truly is, causing him to set up a campaign to get it shut down. The other Grosseries, realize this would leave them without a home and without the source of their species' creation, devise a plan that culminates in him getting zapped by the hot dog rollers, bringing him back to his regular intelligence.
- Robotzi: In "Eusebiu", F.O.C.A. builds a device to makes himself smarter, but the ditzy Mo tries it, which turns him into an Insufferable Genius. F.O.C.A claims that although a retard, the old Mo was at least bearable, so he tries to bring him back to his old self. Alcohol and savarins end up working.
Web Comics
- In one storyarc of Ctrl+Alt+Del, Ethan gets electrocuted by a telephone wire while trying to "unclog the internets". As a result, he now no longer has unhealthy interest for video games and instead wants to make tea and read books. The problem is that New!Ethan is better in every way than Old!Ethan. His friends however are driven mad by the wackiness withdrawal and both become like Old!Ethan, until New!Ethan notices and decides to make himself idiot again.
Web Originals
- Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: The video "Smart Mario" has the others turning Mario smart after putting up with his stupidity for so long. Things go well at first, but Mario proves that even though he's smarter now, he's still just as immature as he was an idiot. In fact, he plans to get revenge on everyone for treating him as such. This makes the others realize even though Mario was stupid, he wasn't as threatening, prompting them to change him back.
Western Animation
- The 7D: One episode has the Glooms using a spell to greatly boost Grim's intellect, making him not only the smartest person in Jollywood, but near-unstoppable too. Hildy initially enjoys it, but Grim becomes increasingly distant towards her and more focused on his conquest of the kingdom. This causes Hildy to secretly form an Enemy Mine with the 7D to take down her husband and undo the spell, returning Grim to the idiotic, yet compassionate Manchild that his wife loves.
- Played with in the Action League NOW! episode, "A Flesh of Brilliance"; The Action League downloads the knowledge of the world into The Flesh's brain to keep it from getting in the hands of the evil genius, Smarty Pants, who wants to use said knowledge to take over the world. As a result of the download, The Flesh becomes smart. At first, the rest of the League likes the new smarter Flesh, but they start to dislike him when he programs a VCR to record nothing but the History Channel. The Flesh also gets on The Chief's nerves by correcting his grammar. The Chief asks the rest of League if they want the old dumb Flesh back, and they all agree. When Smarty Pants captures the League as a result of The Chief getting aggravated by The Flesh's grammar corrections, The Flesh comes to rescue the League, challenging Smarty Pants to a game of chess. Smarty Pants knocks out all of The Flesh's knowledge, but The Flesh still wins the chess game anyway. After Smarty Pants is arrested, the League is glad to have the old dumb Flesh back, but when The Flesh causes the League to get crushed by some of Smarty Pants' stolen encyclopedias, the League wants the new smart Flesh back again.
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
- In "Sheen's Brain", Sheen is in danger of being held back in school after failing a recent history test, requesting Jimmy to create a device to greatly boost Sheen's IQ. While great at first, Sheen rapidly becomes more intelligent and arrogant as time passes, to the point where he develops psychic powers and declares himself a god. However, after realizing that he hurt Jimmy and Carl who were trying to help him before his head explodes, Sheen chooses to willingly decrease his IQ to turn himself back into his idiot self, apologizing for his actions.
- Inverted in the episode "Normal Boy" with Jimmy. Since the kids in Jimmy's class and even Jimmy's own mother gets fed up with Jimmy's intelligence inconveniencing their lives, Jimmy tries to lower his IQ to a regular level. He just ends up dumb instead. Jimmy's classmates eventually realize they need Jimmy to be smart again to save the planet from being destroyed by a meteor.
- American Dad!: In "Who Smarted?", Jeff, after embarrassing Hayley on a double date with his stupidity, decides to undergo a CIA procedure to increase his intelligence. Hayley initially tries to stop it, but once she realizes it could actually improve him, happily allows the operation to proceed. However, on a double date, Hayley finds their positions reversed and immediately changes her mind, trying to slip him weed, which the doctors stated would reverse the process, only for Jeff to catch her in the act and decide to dump her, stating that now that he's smart, he can see what an insecure, selfish person she is. In the end, he's given a lobotomy with a coat hanger, dumbing himself down again.
- Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese: In "Cat Confessions", Cat obtains a helmet that greatly boosts her intellect and uses it to make her siblings her servants by threatening to expose all the secrets they've told her, becoming extremely Drunk with Power. However, after witnessing how her actions have greatly damaged the family's relationship with each other when everyone reveals their secrets themselves and start fighting with each other, Cat decides that her old intellect was far better than her new one, apologizes to her siblings, and takes off the helmet, returning to her mindless old self and restoring order.
- Chop Socky Chooks: In "Planet of the Bubba", a freak accident in space causes a satellite TV chip to get lodged in Bubba's head, making him a super genius who leaves even Chick P. and Wasabi in the dust. The latter finds it great at first, until Bubba decides that he would be a better ruler than his boss, locking Wasabi up in jail with everyone else. The Chooks and Wasabi then form an alliance in an attempt to return Bubba back to his idiotic self. They manage to do so using the TV remote for Wasabi's TV to switch the channel giving Bubba his intelligence to shows that instead lower it back to normal.
- While Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory is hardly a jerk, she does annoy Dexter with her ditzy and destructive habits. But even when Dexter manages to get rid of Dee Dee, it doesn't last because Dexter feels that it's not the same. Two major examples being...
- "Dexter's Assistant" in which Dexter made Dee Dee much smarter so she would stop fooling around and start helping him with experiments, but she turned out more intelligent and competent than him.
- "Dee Dee and the Man" in which Dexter "fires" Dee Dee, only to realize that the chaos she causes has been helping him concentrate. Dexter holds auditions to fill the void and ends up hiring an actress in the role of Dee Dee.
- An inversion happens in "Way of the Dee Dee" when following another rant from Dexter about Dee Dee being stupid, Dee Dee, in return, pitifully chastises Dexter for spending his youth alone in his laboratory and not knowing how to have fun. Devastated, Dexter pleads his sister to teach him "the way of Dee Dee". She agrees, but the results are catastrophic — the reworked Dexter proves to be even more erratic and destructive than Dee Dee herself ever was. She smacks him back into his right mind.
- DuckTales (1987): Gyro invents a helmet that turns Bubba into a genius. The kids are upset that Bubba is now so smart he no longer wants to play with them, but Scrooge loves that the new Bubba is a financial genius. Later, when Huey, Dewey, and Louie are attacked by a monstrous beast, Scrooge is horrified to find out that as a genius Bubba is incapable of violence, and worse, he doesn't care that his friends are in danger. Scrooge begs Bubba to go back to being a Bruiser with a Soft Center.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Little Ed Blue" the normally sweet and affable Ed has come down with a MAJOR case of the grumps, becoming openly hostile and angry. His friends attempt to cheer him up as hijinks ensue, with Ed even managing to cow his normally abrasive and dominant sister Sarah. In the end it's revealed that Ed's sour attitude is the result of a pebble that's managed to wedge it's way into his shoe. Once the pebble is gone, Ed returns to his normally blissful self.
- The Fairly Oddparents: In "Smart Attack!" Timmy wishes his dad to become the smartest man in the world, with a head of Einstein Hair to go with it. While great at first, Timmy's dad becomes increasingly distant and gets extremely close to exposing Cosmo and Wanda to the world via dissection. Fortunately, he's persuaded by his son to not go through with it and realizes that Timmy's happiness comes first before scientific interest. Timmy then proceeds to wish his dad back to his idiot self.
- Family Guy: The episode "The Most Interesting Man in the World" has Peter becoming an intellectual after going on several business trips across America. His family enjoys it at first, until Peter starts pushing his new lifestyle on them. Brian and Lois especially dislike the new Peter, because they're no longer the smartest people in the house and he makes them look dumb by comparison. The two of them decide to revert Peter back to being an idiot by sending him on a trip to Tuscon, Arizona, where he's back to his old intelligence level by the time he returns home.
- Futurama: In the episode "Parasites Lost," Fry becomes infected with worms that improve his intelligence and strength, and give him the confidence to tell Leela that he loves her. She becomes so impressed with the new him that Fry worries she only loves him for the worms and not him. He damages his brain and forces the worms to leave, and his worries are confirmed when Leela kicks him out now that he's a dumb manchild again.
- A more straight-forward example in the episode "Law and Oracle." Fry quits his job at Planet Express and becomes a police officer. The Planet Express crew quickly realize how boring the company is without him, and they become more hostile and confrontational with each other. When Fry is fired from his police job, the Professor begs him to come back, which he accepts.
- Gravity Falls: In the Three Shorts episode "Little Gift Shop of Horrors", one of the shorts (a story Mabel makes) involves Mabel's pet pig Waddles becoming super-smart by accidentally ingesting magical mushrooms, and getting more unattached to Mabel because of his desire to pursue intellectual topics (which instead made him and Mabel's brother Dipper get closer). In the end Mabel, quite tearfully, begs Waddles to go back to normal and he does. The short's Anti-Intellectualism bent also clearly shows that Mabel doesn't enjoy that her brother has become increasingly separated from her by his obsession to seek mysteries.
- House of Mouse: The episode "Not So Goofy" sees the club crew being concerned about the chaos and damage waiter Goofy does thanks to his clumsyness and, well, goofyness. They hire José Carioca to teach Goofy to be less clumsy. It works perfectly, but soon, the crew and the audience realize that isn't the Goofy they know and love, so in the end they ask him to turn back which he gladly does.
- Jelly Jamm: In "Professor Goomo", Bello's tired of always playing the same games with Goomo, but the latter isn't good at remembering how to play newer games. As such, he takes Goomo to Mina so that she can give him a brainpower-enhancing helmet. This works, but Goomo starts hanging out more with the equally-smart Mina, so Bello wishes Goomo were his old goofy self again. At the end of the episode, Goomo takes off said helmet and returns to his old intelligence.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes: In "Beezy J. Genius", Heloise's latest invention to make herself even smarter ends up accidentally making Beezy even more of a genius than she is. However, Beezy's increased intellect causes him to alienate everyone, including Jimmy, Heloise, and Lucious, who all conspire to return him to his former intellect.
- Downplayed in The Loud House episode "Butterfly Effect". The dopey Leni gets a head injury that makes her smart, but unfortunately it makes her even smarter than her Child Prodigy sister Lisa, who gives up studying in a fit of insecurity, causing Lynn (who she tutored) to flunk, and she kicks a ball in frustration that hits Lola, disfiguring her face, so the two start a life of crime together. Also, becoming smarter makes Leni arrogant, so she leaves home. Leni's siblings wish Leni was dumb again just so that everything could go back to normal. Thankfully, it was all in Lincoln's head.
- Pinky and the Brain: In "That Smarts", Brain thinks his plans to Take Over the World would go better if Pinky weren't such an idiot, so he builds a machine that will make Pinky smarter. It works a little too well, as Pinky is now smart enough to find all the mistakes on Brain's plans, exasperating him as much as when he was stupid. After some calculations, Brain concludes that for their dynamic to work, "One of us must be an imbecile!" So Brain turns the machine in reverse and makes himself stupid. Unfortunately, Pinky, sad that Brain doesn't like him now that he's smart, comes to the same conclusion and uses the machine to make himself dumb again. The episode ends with both too stupid to operate the machine to reverse the effects (though everything is back to normal by the next episode).
- The Simpsons: A self-inflicted version in the episode "HOMЯ": when Homer becomes smarter by getting a crayon that was embedded in his brain (a childhood accident) removed, he becomes increasingly fed up with the loneliness that said intelligence is bringing to him (mostly by making everybody else in town, who are highly anti-intellectual, to shun him). In the end he gets the crayon embedded in his brain again, bringing his smarts back down to their regular level of idiocy (a move that he knows perfectly well will make him less loved by Lisa - he even writes in the letter he makes for her before the procedure that he's sorry for "taking the coward's way out").
- Spliced: In "Outsmartered", Mister Smarty Smarts builds a machine to make everyone on Keep Away Island as smart as he is. It ends up working too well, and makes everyone smarter than he is while making him look dumb in comparison. After failing to build a machine to make everyone dumb again, Smarty Smarts then uses a time machine to go back in time and stop himself from ever building the first machine that made everyone smarter.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Patrick Smartpants", Patrick becomes a super genius after accidentally attaching brain coral to his head. The smarter characters like Sandy and Squidward initially enjoy this, but even they get annoyed at Patrick over time when he calls them dumb and talentless respectively. Even Patrick himself gets sick of his intellect and seeks to find a way to get rid of it, as he realizes that he's alienated everyone, including SpongeBob.
- In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Knowledge", Starfire gets a magical necklace from Raven that gives her all the knowledge in the world. Soon not only she starts to become a no-fun nuisance that ruins everything, but her brain also starts to expand to dangerously large dimensions, meaning that the other Titans have to make her go back to normal by miniaturizing themselves, entering inside her head and destroy her brain.
- The Transformers: The Season 3 episode "Grimlock's New Brain" saw the normally dimwitted Grimlock gain super-intelligence. Unfortunately this ends up alienating him from the other Dinobots because he's no longer able to enjoy the simple pleasures the group usually indulges in. The Dinobots lament that they miss the old Grimlock who was loads more fun than brainy Grimlock. After building the Technobots, he transfers his intelligence into their combined form, Computron, to save the rest of the Autobots from an emergency.
