Grease Monkey

A character that likes to play around with machines and usually gets filthy doing so. A side effect of his grunginess is that he often turns out to be Mr. Fixit in some way, shape or form.

These characters usually work with mundane objects like cars or stereos or fuse boxes. If they show up in a fantastic setting, they'll often mistrust technology and favor elbow grease to solve a problem. Their way of speech will also make their spaceships sound like normal motor vehicles.

In other words, this is a mechanic, be he mundane or fantastic, with a lot of similar threads regardless of the type.

See Wrench Wench for the Distaff Counterpart to this trope.

Not to be confused with the name of the comic book by Tim Eldred or the Firefox app enabling custom scripting.

Examples of Grease Monkey include:

Anime and Manga

• Sparky from Speed Racer.
• Keiichi from Ah! My Goddess!
• Yusei from Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. You try making motorcycles from scrap parts. THREE TIMES!
• The father and son team in Cowboy Bebop who rebuild the Spaceshuttle Columbia. After the Columbia disaster some fans theory that they rebuilt it from the pieces making them even more awesome mechanics.

Comic Books

• "Tank" Tinker, mechanic to pilot Hop Harriagn in The DCU. He also appeared in the Hop Harriagn radio show and movie serial.
• Wrench from the Thunderiders in the Marvel Universe.
• Slic, Chassis McBain's robotic mechanic from Chassis.
• The titular character of Grease Monkey. Also a pun, since the character in question is a gorilla.
  • The pun is turned into a hurricane of them when the gorilla instructs his human buddy to use the word "monkey" as often as possible during a visit from a senior inspector. The human does so. Gorilla demands his toolkit-human hands him a monkey wrench. Gorilla sits down to do paperwork, human says he'd like to join in the monkey business. Gorilla polishes the brightwork, human remarks on how happy he looks when engaging in monkey shine. it's a setup. The inspector is the politically correct type, and chews the human out for engaging in racial slurs.
  • Interesting also in the fact gorillas aren't monkeys. They're apes.

Film

• Han Solo and Chewbacca, although not because they like it but because they have no choice if they want to keep the Millennium Falcon running.

Luke: [on first seeing the Millenium Falcon] What a piece of junk!
Han Solo: She'll make point five past lightspeed. She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid. I've made a lot of special modifications myself.

• • From the Fanfic Soft Wars:

Mac Logo: It may not look like much, but she'll make point five past light speed. I've made some special modifications to her. See. (he points at the side of the ship.)
Fluke Codewriter: What?
Mac Logo: The stripe! It's red. Makes it go faster. Really. The Falcon will outrun anything the empire has.

• • Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace has Anakin as one of these. Oddly, he apparently gave up this hobby once he became a Jedi, and especially by the original trilogy.
• Andy Micklin and Hutch from Black Sheep Squadron.
• Alien: Parker, the Chief Engineer, and Brett, the Engineering Technician
• Ed and his fellow auto mechanics in I.Q..

Live Action Television

• Scotty and every engineer in Star Trek. Which kind of makes sense, since why else would you pick that job if you didn't like to play with machines?
  • Star Trek also has Tom Paris, who isn't an engineer in any shape or form ? except on the holodeck, where he loves to tinker around with antique (read: 20th-century) cars and actually calls his program Grease Monkey.
    • Actually, he did rebuild an entire shuttle with an obsessive girlfriend for an AI from scrap.
• Rizzo from M*A*S*H.
• Cooter Davenport from The Dukes of Hazzard.
• Henry from Eureka is the (only) resident grease monkey. He's actually a literal rocket scientist; he just fixes cars for fun.
• Kurt from Glee is implied to be a Grease Monkey despite his Camp Gay tendencies. He's the son of a mechanic and apparently has his own coveralls at the shop. One Crowning Moment of Heartwarming ended with him going to change out of his ridiculously expensive sweater for some father-son car fixin'.
• Damon from Power Rangers Lost Galaxy

Radio

• Ichabod "Ikky" Mudd from the Captain Midnight radio show and its spinoff comics, comic strip and TV show. The TV show later changed its name to Jet Jackson, Flying Commando.

Video Games

• Any character named "Cid" in a Final Fantasy game will be a technical wizard of some sort, but the one from Final Fantasy IV fits this trope the best. The dude even fights with a wrench in battle.
• Dwarf Engineers from Warhammer Online. Complete with wrench to beat people with.
• Andy carries around a giant wrench, dresses like this, his CO power is fixing things, and he has lines like "I haven't even cranked the engine yet!"

Western Animation

• Wildcat from Tale Spin
• Clutch from G.I. Joe.
• Monkey from Garfield in Paradise.