Web Video / Buttered Side Down

Par for the course, really.

"Comedy skit series following the exaggerated perspective of an unfortunate idiot."

— The official channel description

Buttered Side Down is a comedy channel on YouTube about an average guy with terrible luck.

You see, the protagonist is a strange man in a strange world. He doesn't know how to do basic things, and when he tries to do pretty much anything, he complicates them to the point where they're more likely to hurt him than anything else.

On the other hand, he's always having strange things happen to him. And sometimes the weirdness comes from outside his control. Killer plants, his pool teleporting him to the middle of the ocean, a a sentient mystical staff found in the garbage, time travel...

Did we mention he's unlucky?

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Buttered Side Down provides examples of:

• Alien Geometries:
  • Retrieving a Frisbee has the unfortunate protagonist suffering from these, as the rooftop he just climbed to, no more than a story tall, seems to grow several hundred meters when he's right on top and he wasn't looking, and goes back to normal once he makes it back down the hard way. Then again, it may just be a matter of perception... And earlier, he was throwing a frisbee through one side and catching it from the other, so it might be Real After All.
  • Cheating Death has the protagonist somehow leaping into his own throat to dislodge a stuck meal he was choking on; he even jumps up and down on it, to no avail.
  • Eating Something Spicy has the protagonist somehow grabbing the sun with the usual "pinch the sun" perspective trick, and putting the hyperhot marble in his noodles to make them spicier. He is forced to put it back right after with the same trick.
• Alien Invasion: FIDGET SPINNER ALIENS features a bizarre one made almost entirely out of enormous fidget spinners... for some reason.
• All Just a Dream: Or, more properly, just a daydream in FIDGET SPINNER ALIENS.
• Ambiguously Human: In The Birthday Wish, the protagonist somehow exhales helium.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Usually, throwing a vial of uranium into a rocket does not turn it into a nuke. But then again, Rule of Funny...
• Ashes to Crashes: Breaks a vase filled with ash in Learning to Yo-yo and promptly whispers "Grandma..." before attempting to sweep the ashes under a dresser and hide the vase in one of the drawers.
• Berserk Button: The titular FIDGET SPINNER ALIENS seem to be invading mostly because they (for reasons unknown) despise people who use actual fidget spinners, disintegrating them (and stores that hold spinners) on sight.
• Bigger on the Inside: The protagonist's new home after Pet Rock 2 is just a cardboard box cut into a tiny house-like structure, but he can enter it and within is a fairly decent-sized office room, complete with desk.
  • The protagonist's picnic basket is this in "Having a Picnic".
• Bittersweet Ending: Pet Rock 2. The pet rock was successfully resurrected, at the cost of the protagonist's entire house, leaving both entirely homeless.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: The entirety of Eating Something Spicy is spent trying to make the most intense one of these possible, as the protagonist really wants some spiciness. Putting the sun in his cup of noodles is the only thing that achieves it, with an experimental pepper that sets the whole town on fire only comes close.
• Kill It with Fire: The only solution the protagonist found when he found out in Killing a Spider that the walls of his home are stuffed full of live spiders is to burn the entire damn place down.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first episode, Making A Paper Airplane, is much bloodier than any of the other episodes so far.
• Establishing Character Moment: Making A Paper Airplane has the main character using such tools as a pizza cutter, clamps, a hammer, large quantities of tape, and WD-40... to make a paper airplane.
• Fire-Breathing Diner: Eating Something Spicy has plenty. They start with mere fiery burps, and escalate right until the whole damn town is on fire because the protagonist torched it by accident.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • Planting a Garden. The plants he gets from this whole ordeal are far too alive for most's tastes, and end up scurrying away in the night to an uncertain fate, leaving him with just a hole in his garden and possible trauma.
  • Pet Rock as well. He gets much more of a pet than he bargained for, leading to stolen food, messes to clean up, and finally tragedy.
  • Making a Firework has nothing but a string of successes, including the part where he gets carried away and builds a mini-nuke, accidentally EMPs his entire neighborhood with it and sets off the nuclear attack alarms in his city from the resulting firework.
  • He successfully makes a yo-yo spin in Learning to Yo-yo... but it keeps spinning faster.
• Hammerspace: In Having a Picnic, the protagonist's picnic basket qualifies enough for him to pull out an entire picnic table and chairs out of it. There's enough space and stuff inside that pulling a plate in the wrong way causes an audible avalanche inside it. It also comes in handy when taking revenge against a particularly persistent storm cloud, by stuffing it into the basket and kicking it around to beat it up.
• Hammerspace Hair: Part of why he wishes to remove his beard in Shaving a Beard is because he just keeps losing things inside it, including food, milk, several sets of cutlery and some unspecified electronic implement that nearly kills him when he tries to wash it.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: In Gaining Super Powers, the protagonist's attempt at teleportation goes fairly wrong because hyperspace is boring as hell and it takes far too long to travel (to the point walking is faster).
• The Grim Reaper: He shows up during Cheating Death to claim the protagonist, who was choking to death at the time. The latter just takes his scythe and uses it to dislodge the watermelon he was choking on, thus surviving; the reaper himself apparently finds this hilarious, and makes quick friends with him afterwards. And then somehow chokes to death himself during their snack.
• Learning to Ride a Bike: BSD learns how to ride a bike. It doesn't go well.
• Made of Iron: The protagonist is close to unkillable, despite being apparently human; anything from repeated lightning strikes to crashing a bike at FTL speeds is just shrugged off.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Built a nuke in ''Making A Firework. Guess how THAT turns out.
• Mundane Utility: The best uses for a demonic, chanting, tribal staff? Use it to beat a rug, sweep the floor, get spiderwebs, and unjam the toilet. It finds this treatment so undignified it outright quits.
• Lethal Chef: Making Cookies proves this protagonist should never get close to a kitchen again; he uses toilet water, sprays ingredients everywhere, uses WD-40 as non-stick oil and sets his oven so high when he wakes up later it's generating magma.
  • Making Cupcakes sees a new protagonist invoking this too. This time though, it turns out to be entirely deliberate, as part of a plot to kill the regular protagonist for unclear reasons. As previous episodes that feature the regular protagonist surviving their own cooking would suggest, this plan doesn't work.
• Organ Autonomy: An odd example in the protagonist's beard, which refuses to be shaved and almost kills him so he'll stop; it lives even when removed and escapes into the wild. Again.
• Portal Cut: Happens in Pulling A Rabbit Out of a Hat; After the Rabbit magician attempts to pull him back out of their hat, our protagonist waves the wand at the hat and severs the connection... as well as the rabbit's arm. He then throws the whole set and the arm out and decides he's done with stage magic.
• Rocket-Powered Weapon: His penultimate solution to a ball that refuses to be hit in Hitting a Home Run is a rocket-powered baseball bat, with the rockets made out of plumbing nozzles and CO2 canisters. The sheer overkill of it makes it impossible for him to hit the ball, so he has to cheat further.
• Rule of Three: Commonly used for the Serial Escalation gags, where the third gag is always the funniest and most outlandish.
• Shout-Out: The Bathroom Paradox features the protagonist encountering some langoliers.
  • Opening a Pickle Jar features the SCP logo appearing when he attempts to hack the pickle jar open.
  • FIDGET SPINNER ALIENS is pretty much a giant reference to Independence Day, complete with giant mothership (and its equally giant store-incinerating laser).
• Spiders Are Scary: In Killing a Spider, the protagonist tries to deal with one of these. Turns out they infest the walls.
• Stable Time Loop: The Bathroom Paradox ends this way, combining this trope with Book Ends.
  • Making Candy Corn also features this.
• Swapped Roles: In Catching The Red Dot, a human is the one chasing the dot... while a cat is the one pointing it.
• The Tooth Hurts: The protagonist accidentally knocks out one of his own teeth while Learning to Yo-yo
• Training Montage: Getting Fit consists of one of these, complete with cheesy 80s music (which the description says is completely mandatory).