Idiot Plot/Playing With

Basic Trope: The plot can only proceed by having characters (not portrayed as fools) act like idiots.

• Straight: Jack sees Jill embracing a man and, although a reasonable and good-tempered man, storms out without hearing he is her long-lost brother.
• Exaggerated: Jack sneaks into the castle to steal the MacGuffin even though the king is a Reasonable Authority Figure and Jack needs it to save the kingdom.
• Justified: Jack (and possibly everyone else) has a monstrously huge personality flaw or two (or gazillion of them) that affects the ability to think straight, eg. being a thrill-seeker, a hopeless romantic, paranoid, easy-going, any personality trait taken beyond extreme.
• Inverted: Jack, normally The Fool, can deduce everyone's motives at a glance because the plot needs it.
• Subverted: Jack and his friends work out, in detail, a plan of action that sounds as if it will be the major action of the story. However, his five-year-old adviser is one of those present at this planning session, and comes up with a simpler and better plan.
• Double Subverted: Jack and his friends work out, in detail, a plan of action that sounds as if it will be the major action of the story. However, his five-year-old adviser is one of those present at this planning session, and comes up with a simpler and better plan, which Jack ignores in favor of his original plan
• Parodied: The Wand of Plot Device appears at random intervals to bop characters up and down the IQ range as the plot requires.
• Deconstructed: During or after the Idiot Plot, one of the characters takes it upon themselves to point out what the characters would have to do in order to solve their problems intelligently (in the case of the former, only to be ignored by the other characters)
• Reconstructed: ... because the point of the episode was such that doing things intelligently would have made no sense in context.
• Zig Zagged: While executing the plot, the characters make changes to it to make it work better only to change the good ideas as well.
• Averted: Characters always use their best judgment, and the writers just work harder on the plots.
• Enforced: Reality Is Out to Lunch, and the assumptions that the "intelligent" plan relies on are faulty. What appears to be a stupid plot is, in context, actually the appropriate course of action.
• Lampshaded: "We're only the first chapter, so we can't possibly talk now."
• Invoked: When Jack goes over his plan with Jill, Jill tells him that that will only work if everyone suffered massive head trauma that day.
• Defied: "I know I hate King Horatio, so I will ask my friends who are more level-headed about him what I should do."
• Discussed: "Does it seem to you like everybody's been taking stupid lessons lately?"
• Conversed: ???
• Plotted A Good Waste: People act like idiots, and The Fool deduces what drained their intelligence -- the true villain.
• Played For Laughs: All the characters are The Fool, The Ditz, the Brainless Beauty etc. and the point of the story is the ridiculous convolutions they get up to.
• Played For Drama: The Big Bad is Dangerously Genre Savvy, and the heroes' stupid plan gets them captured and/or killed.

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