Comically Invincible Hero

When you have an invulnerable hero in a dramatic show, or one that tries to get you to take the fights seriously, it's a Boring Invincible Hero. When the focus is on the Rule of Cool, it's a Showy Invincible Hero. Some shows, though, play the hero's absurdly overpowered abilities and near-invulnerability for laughs. Since the fights themselves are a foregone conclusion, they frequently get skipped or handled in one panel (this trope is particularly common in comics.) The characters frequently lampshade this trope, and in the rare case where a fight actually does have any build-up, it will often end in a deliberate anticlimax. Sight gags are often used to lampshade it further, such as supporting characters playing cards or otherwise ignoring the latest Big Bad (or even the fight itself.)

Works with this trope do tend to bring in enemies capable of threatening the hero eventually, especially as time goes on and the initial joke wears thin; this can turn the hero into a Boring Invincible Hero if it's not done right. Up until then, though, the vast majority of fights are deliberate, comical Curb Stomp Battles.

Might feature The Ace. Not to be confused with Iron Butt Monkey.

Examples of Comically Invincible Hero include:

• The original Dragon Ball was like this, with Goku's absurd invulnerability played for laughs most of the time.
  • The abridged version of DBZ continues this tradition, even if the show it's a parody of does not.
• Dragon Half almost completely ran on this trope.
• Superman sometimes gets used this way, especially in some of the Silver Age comics.
• Othar Tryggvassen, GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER! from Girl Genius is generally treated as so invulnerable that they often don't bother to show or explain how he escapes traps (or only a vague Noodle Incident-style description of the items he used is listed).
• The Irresponsible Captain Tylor has a variation on this: Tylor is comically invincible despite the fact that he has no apparent skills that suggest he should be. As a result, his crew is never less incredulous about how they keep surviving encounters that almost certainly should have resulted in all of them being killed.
• The Blues Brothers, where among other things Jake and Elwood have a house dropped on them, but they just dust themselves off and walk away.
• The Tick (animation) usually played the eponymous character's nigh-invulnerability for laughs.
• Powers Guy in the webcomic Man-Man is a Superpower Lottery winner who can sort out anything, usually off panel.
• Fightman, a one-off character Deadpool has to kill, is like this.
• Asterix and Obelix frequently play their inhuman strength for laughs.
  • And the battles happen off-screen often—one occasion where pain stars and screams drifted into view, while the narration announced something like "It's such a beautiful day today that we'll skip the extreme violence in this scene."
• Bun-Bun from Sluggy Freelance, most of the time. While he's faced some serious challengers, the majority of his fights are him utterly dominating someone just off panel.
• Popeye the Sailor is probably the Ur Example. Most of the fun comes from the way Popeye casually uses his strength for mundane tasks. Once he gets the spinach in him though, he becomes even more comically invincible.
  • Granted, the build up to him using said spinach usually has him beaten down or humiliated by the foe until eating it becomes a neccessity. Though he can create spinach from nothing (see Beyond the Impossible) as he does in Fowl Play (see 6:02) he is always invincible, he just choses to let his enemies think they can win first before laying the smack down.
• Dan in Bad Guy High, for the most part.
• The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. There's no question that anyone she fights is going to lose; the problem is convincing her to fight.
• Even though it's called Combat Butler in translation, the battles are few and far between is ironic enough. The battles that don't challenge him aren't even on panel. You see them attacking, then in the next panel Hayate is walking away and the attacker is on the ground with a Cranial Eruption. The ones who do challenge him are the (at worst) minor characters, usually the ones on his side.
• Jack Rakan, anyone?
  • For that matter, Nagi Springfield, who's completely invincible because... well, because... because he just is!
• Squirrel Girl
• Oga from Beelzebub. He is the strongest deliquent in his school. The running gag is that other people spend whole episodes trying to find him and challenge him only to get beaten in a few seconds with him paying much attention.
• The Mask - except in the original comic, where he was a evil wacko willing to kill anyone who opposed him.
• Plastic Man is usually played this way as his powers basically make him a cartoon character on steroids. He was once scattered molecule by molecule across the ocean for 3000 years and it only sobered him up a little, until he got back from vacation.
• GodMan, the superhero with omnipotent powers. He's like the god of the Bible fused with Superman. In fact he is the image of the God Mode Sue page.
• Speedy Gonzales' Super Speed made him completely untouchable in most of his original appearances, all of which was played in a slapstick tone. In the De Patie Freleng shorts, he was made slightly more fallible but still had shades of this.
• To a lesser extent Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes hero ensemble. Bugs lost slightly more often even in his earliest appearances but his obvious superior wit over his foes is often a defining trait and a prominant source of humor.
• Sonic the Hedgehog occasionally leans into this, especially in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic X, every now and then however Dr Eggman will remind him he is a Not-So-Harmless Villain.
• Adventure Dennis from the webcomic by that name takes visible damage sometimes, but it never affects him and always goes away.
• Sunred from Tentai Senshi Sunred. The entire series is just one long Go-Karting with Bowser moment between Sunred and his 'Arch Enemy', the not-so-evil organization Florsheim. When the monsters demand to fight him due to Contractual Genre Blindness, the battles are hilariously one-sided and never shown on-screen.
• Metro Man of Megamind.
  • Is also a Deconstruction of this trope. Metro Man is so invincible, the people take him completely for granted, never allowing him to have his own life.
• Pucca. Despite being a little girl she's the strongest character in the show and she's always pulling out New Powers as the Plot Demands.