How Is That Even Possible?

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    A Stock Phrase that is commonly used as a Lampshade Hanging of those occasions when the laws of physics (and other scientific laws) are blatantly defied. This is sometimes caused by Achievements in Ignorance, when the impossible thing only occurs because the person involved has no idea that what they are doing is supposed to be impossible.

    Often Played for Laughs, this phrase can be used to tell the audience that the strange or unusual occurrences going on aren't the norm for the world in which the story is taking place. It can also be used as part of the Rule of Scary for the same reason.

    On occasion, this trope will be accompanied by an explanation of how the strange occurrence is impossible. The creators will do use this to avert the Did Not Do the Research trope and demonstrate that they did their homework.

    Compare and contrast with Fridge Logic.

    Examples of How Is That Even Possible? include:

    Anime and Manga

    • Beauty's default reaction to Bobobo-Bo Bo-bobo's antics.
    • In One Piece, this is Vivi's reaction when Nami is able to predict when a cyclone will hit while navigating the Grand Line, something regarded as impossible by most pirates. She wonders whether Nami does so less from researched skills and more from innate ability.
    • In the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, Yuya defeats his foe by Pendulum Summoning, a technique that was, up to then, unknown. Even Yuya himself has no idea - at the time - how he did it, and is shocked to see that he won. (He'd find out how later, much to his regret.)
    • In Dragonball Z, this was everyone's reaction when Cell somehow survived his own Self-Destruct Mechanism, including Cell himself.

    Comic Books

    Film

    Uhura: Admiral, I have a signal closing on the whales. Bearing 328 degrees.
    Kirk: On screen.
    Gillian: How can you do... that...
    Uhura: On screen.

    • In The Matrix, this is a beat cop's reaction to not only witnessing Trinity leap over a six-lane street, plus sidewalks, to go from rooftop to rooftop, but seeing Agent Brown follow her.

    Literature

    White Queen: Now I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.
    Alice: I can’t believe that!
    White Queen: Can’t you? Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.
    Alice: There’s no use trying, one can’t believe impossible things.
    White Queen: I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

    • In Contact (the book, not the movie), while the characters are moving through the wormhole, one of them, a theoretical physicist, does some calculations and says (paraphrase): "I can almost prove mathematically this can't be happening".
    • Seeing as he can do impossible things, Mr. Impossible - from the Mr. Men books - gets this a lot.

    Live Action TV

    • In an early Sesame Street sketch, Ernie poured himself a glass of milk while hanging upside down, ignoring Bert's warnings that the milk would spill.
    • Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Spectre of the Gun". When Spock and McCoy test their Knockout Gas on Scott it doesn't work.

    Spock: Captain, you don't seem to understand. It did not function, but it must function.
    McCoy: Nothing could go wrong, Captain. It should work.
    Spock: A scientific fact. But if the tranquillizer does not function, which is clearly impossible, then a radical alteration of our thought patterns must be in order.

    Newspaper Comics

    • Charles Addams's skier cartoon... specifically, the other skier's reaction.
    • In one series of Bloom County strips, Opus and Milo are hunting for the Basselope in the forest. In one, Opus thinks he sees him and takes a Polaroid shot, but instead takes a picture of a squirrel blowing a raspberry at them with a loud "Thpptp!" In the last panel, Opus looks at it and says, "How can a picture go 'Thpptp'?"
    • Peanuts has many, most involving Snoopy:
      • In one strip, Snoopy is asleep while playing second base, with an alarm clock behind him. It rings, waking him up, and he catches the fly ball coming towards him. A confused Charlie Brown says, "How do you set the alarm for a fly ball??"
      • In another strip, Snoopy tries to dive into Lucy's wading pool, but she shouts, "Oh no you don't!" and Snoopy turns around in mid-air. Then he says to himself, "Now how did I do that?"
      • In another, Snoopy is upset that it's raining on his face, and shouts "Why can't it only rain on my legs?" And it does. When Lucy comes by and asks how that's possible, he says, "There are always ways of working things out."
      • One strip set in winter has him lying on his doghouse, covered with snow. When Charlie Brown comes out with his supper, he takes his dish, eats it - evidenced by loud chewing sounds - and hands the empty dish back, all without disturbing the snow. "I wonder how he did that?!" muses Charlie Brown.

    Webcomics

    "What I hate about my life... Part of what I hate about my life is that it is working."

      • Sarda also invokes this (using a Flat What) when Ranger dual-wields his dual-wield .
    • Happens to the word in this Questionable Content strip, when an AI appears to be drunk.

    Web Original

    Church: Poor Jimmy was the last one to go. Tex walked up to him, pulled Jimmy's skull right out of his head and beat him to death with it.
    Tucker: Wait a second... how do you beat someone to death with their own skull? That doesn't seem physically possible.
    Church: That's exactly what Jimmy kept screaming.
    (cut to Tex, in black armor, beating Jimmy to death with his own skull)
    Jimmy: This doesn't seem physically possible!

    • Dragonball Z Abridged, Goku obtained a muffin and the ability to read minds by pressing the muffin button of the spaceship... except there is no muffin button.
      • King Kai says this directly when Goku pretends to hang up on him while they were communicating telepathically.

    Goku: "Oh, all right. I promise I will absolutely not click-brrrrrrr *long inhale* rrrrrrrrr"
    King Kai: "He hung up on me! How did he even do that?"

    • This phrase being said verbatum is a running gag in the College Humor point-of-view sketches.
    • Danbooru has an image pool with this name.

    Western Animation

    Zoidberg: My home, it burned down! How could this have happened?
    Hermes: That's a very good question!
    Bender: [picking up his still-lit cigar from the underwater ruins] So that's where I left my cigar!
    Hermes: That just raises further questions!

    Kuzco: No, it's impossible! How did you get back here before us?
    Yzma: "Ah..." [looks confused] How did we, Kronk?
    Kronk: Well, ya got me. [pulls down a chart displaying the progress of the previous chase] By all accounts, it doesn't make sense.

    • During the Justice League episode "Hereafter", the Flash is almost fried by enemy lightning. Wonder Woman saves him by deflecting the lightning with her metal bracelets. Flash's response? "There are so many reasons why that shouldn't have worked."
    • In a Road Runner cartoon, Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff while in pursuit of the Road Runner who, it turns out, is standing just off the edge of the cliff in mid-air. The bedraggled Coyote looks up from the bottom of the canyon at the Road Runner and holds up a sign commenting that what the Road Runner is doing defies the laws of gravity. The Road Runner responds by holding up his own sign saying it doesn't matter because he's never studied law.
    • In "The PTA Disbands" episode of The Simpsons, Homer gets upset at Lisa for making a working perpetual motion machine because it violates the laws of physics. ("In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!")
    • 1973-74 Superfriends episode "The Watermen". The title characters are trying to refuel their starship by extracting silicon from sea water. This causes the sea water to immediately turn into red tide, which is impossible: red tide is caused by microorganisms. An oceanographer named Professor Matey points out several times that the red tide is not acting normally.
    • In one Woody Woodpecker cartoon, the villain is trying to ambush Woody using a rifle with a crosshairs. As he watches Woody approach through the crosshairs, Woody actually walks up the vertical line of the crosshairs, causing the villain to look up and exclaim, "How did he do that??"
    • In the climax of the Teen Titans episode "Betrothed", Beast Boy is able to scare some palace guards away by transforming into one of the giant Tameranian beasts he saw earlier:

    Raven: How long have you been able to do that?
    Beast Boy: Uh... Since just now?[1]

    • The Real Ghostbusters; Slimer runs away in an episode after Peter yells at him, and leaves a note behind. Jennine finds it first, and angrily reads it to the guys, scolding them. Ray takes the note and asks how she can read it, as Slimer not only has bad penmanship, but got slime all over the paper. Jennine simply snarks, "I'm a secretary. I can read anything."
    1. ↑ Fans have debated just how Beast Boy's powers work, given that he seems able to turn into any living or extinct member of a planet's natural ecosystem, but not magical creatures like Malchior; most have simply concluded that if he has seen the animal, or a depiction of it, he can turn into it.
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