Playing Drunk

Bodie: How are you going to play it?

Doyle: Urrrh...drunk!

—The Professionals

Simply put, a character fakes being drunk. This is often a way of achieving Obfuscating Stupidity.

Variants: The person's pretending to be high. They may even be a tad buzzed/high to complete the effect.

Compare Fake High, where the character thinks they're drunk or high when they're not.

Examples of Playing Drunk include:

Anime and Manga

• In Death Note, Matsuda, after being caught by Yotsuba, pretends to be drunk so he can fake his death via falling.
• In Soul Eater, Stein pretends to be drunk to trap Medusa. Unfortunatly even though he gets her to admit she's a witch, he's too late to stop her putting her plan into action.
• Zoro and Nami do this in One Piece during Whisky Peak. Nami also used it frequently as a tactic for her pirate robbing prior to becoming a Straw Hat.

Comics

• Bruce Wayne does this as part of his public persona. Most people don't realize that the drinks in his glass are either non-alcoholic beverages that look like alcoholic ones to a casual glance (When he's drinking at home) or poured into the nearest potted plant (when he's drinking elsewhere).

Film

• Beverly Hills Cop. While in the bar, Axel Foley pretends to be drunk to make an armed robber think he's harmless and get close enough to take him out.
• The Fugitive (1993). While Gerard and Newman are approaching the house with one of the escapees inside, they pretend to be drunks. Gerard even says "Be drunk, Newman."
• The Sting. Henry Gondorff pretends to be drunk to justify acting offensively toward Doyle Lonnegan. To enhance his act he gargles with gin to get alcohol-laden breath and brings along a gin bottle full of water to drink from.
• Bruce Wayne does this in Batman Begins, he fakes being drunk as an excuse to insult all of his party guests and shoo them out of his house (thus preventing them getting killed).
• Beerfest: "We're not that drunk."
• In Down Periscope, the entire crew of a submarine (minus the sole woman) pretends to be a boatload of drunk fishermen to fool the other side during a war game, singing "Louie Louie" at the top of their lungs and as far from the proper key as they can manage.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark - Marian, who can drink a huge Himalayan under the table, plays drunk with Belloq long enough to (try to) make a break for it.
• In Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Brad Pitt's character pretends to be drunk and wanders into a room full of targets, asking for a round of poker. He sits down and plays cards with them, tricking them into letting their guards down and eventually shooting them all to death.
• Lucy of The Awful Truth uses this as part of a plot to embarrass her husband in front of his prospective in-laws.

Literature

• Dolphus Raymond from To Kill a Mockingbird. He pretends to be a drunk so he doesn't suffer backlash from the fact he's in love with a black girl (and fathered a mulatto).
• The title character of the Agent Pendergast books often mimics being high or drunk to blend in with criminals, or repel ordinary people from suspecting him.
• In the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet, the murderer returns to the scene of the crime to retrieve an item he left behind, and finds that the police are on the scene, so he pretends to be merely a drunk passerby. (Holmes, hearing about it later, immediately realises the deception from the policeman's description of the "drunk" man's mannerisms.)
• In Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, and Dr. Meade fake being drunk in order to disguise the fact that Ashley has been shot while engaged in an act of vigilantism against the men who attacked Scarlett O'Hara Kennedy.
• In the Discworld novels:
  • In Feet of Clay, the murderer leaves a bottle of whisky in reformed alcoholic Sam Vimes's desk, then contacts various "respected citizens" with the news he's drunk. When they arrive, it intitally appears that it's worked; the place stinks of alcohol and Vimes is slumped over his desk. Actually, Vimes just wants to see who turns up and how they react.

Vimes: When we find the man responsible, somewhere at the top of the charge sheet is going to be Forcing Commander Vimes To Tip a Whole Bottle of Single Malt On The Carpet. That's a hanging offence.

• • Inverted in Unseen Academicals. Vetinari is drunk. He's just very good at acting like he isn't.
• In one of the Bloody Jack books, Jacky Faber and one of her female friends fake being drunk in order to fool some guards into drinking some opium-laced liquor. Once the guards are out, they sabotage the cannons that the guards are supposed to be guarding, which ensures their safe escape.
• In Honor Harrington, Kevin Usher did this regularly in the days of the Committee of Public Safety. He held that a reputation for being a drunk could get you out of as much trouble as genuinely being a drunk can get you into.
• In the Michael Crichton book The Great Train Robbery (loosely based on an true story), Edward Pierce wanders by acting like a drunken lout to distract a guard outside a railway office, allowing his accomplice to get in long enough to duplicate a key.

Live Action TV

• Community subverts this trope in an episode where Jeff Winger's lame attempts to play drunk quickly give way to his being genuinely very drunk.
• In Burn Notice, pretending to get drunk is one of the spy skills Michael has cultivated.
• Claire Bennet from Heroes has Nigh Invulnerability, which extends to her liver. In one scene she is in a Drinking Contest, and wins because she was only pretending that the drink was affecting her. Although she did wait until her father Nathan had gotten completely blitzed on tequila in the first drinking contest of the episode before stepping up. Swell kid you got there.
• In one episode of House, the title character does this to try and break up the relationship between Cuddy and her boyfriend.
• The first episode of Angel opens with the title character apparently drunk at a bar, pouring his broken heart out at the bartender. Moments later it turns out he's just faking it and keeping an eye on a group of vampires; as they leave the bar with a couple of unassuming victims, he immediately turns from a blabbering drunk into a smooth dark hero and proceeds to kick ass.
• In Veronica Mars, Veronica walks into a poker game, picks up a half-empty bottle that the clearly inebriated Duncan has been drinking from all night, and drains it in a single gulp. It was iced tea, and he was faking drunkenness as part of his poker strategy.
• In an episode of Get Smart, Max has to pretend to be an alcoholic. He is issued a pill to keep under his tongue that absorbs all the alcohol he drinks. As he puts it, "I'll look drunk, act drunk, even smell drunk, but I'll be stone sober!" Then he accidentally swallows the pill, causing all the alcohol it absorbed to be introduced into his system at once.
• In an episode of Blakes Seven , Villa pretends to be drunk so he can make a suggestion on how to fix the current problem (atmosphere leaking out of a hole in the hull) in the form of a rambling remeniscence, but not be called on to undertake the repair himself (because you couldn't give such a dangerous task to someone who was obviously drunk).
• In an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Ilya harasses a girl while pretending to be drunk so that Napoleon Solo can step in and rescue her.
• The killer in one episode of Monk picked a fight while pretending to be drunk so as to attract paparazzi attention, which would then give him an alibi for the murder he was going to commit.
• The Tenth Doctor in the Doctor Who episode "The Girl In The Fireplace".

Have you met the French? My GOD they know how to party.

• In Peep Show, Mark tries to fake an ecstasy high after being given a pill that he doesn't want to take. Hilarity Ensues.
• Alistair feigns drunkenness in As Time Goes By in the episode where everyone tries to surprise Jean with a trip to Barbados. It's all a bit involved.
• Jessica Fletcher did this once on Murder, She Wrote.
• The Professionals. In "The Female Factor", Doyle pretends to be drunk when visiting a high class call girl in order to draw out her pimp, whom CI 5 wishes to interrogate.
• Sam Winchester of Supernatural does this in "I Know What You Did Last Summer" to hustle pool.
• Sherlock Holmes pretends to be completely drunk in the unaired pilot "A Study in Pink" of the BBC series Sherlock in order to approach the murderer.

Professional Wrestling

• The trope came into play during the Jake Roberts vs. Jerry Lawler feud of 1996. Background: Roberts returned to the World Wrestling Federation in 1996, using a reformed Christian persona who has quit the bottle, playing off his real-life experiences. Lawler – then a shameless heel – played on Roberts' past, claiming that he was a "drunk" and was appearing at wrestling events under the influence. On an episode of WWF Monday Night RAW, Lawler cut a mean-spirited promo in the ring mocking Roberts and alcoholics in general, when an "intoxicated" Roberts staggered to the ring with a whiskey bottle; however, the crowd – and Lawler, immediately after getting sucker-kicked and DDT'ed – quickly realized it was a ruse to catch Lawler off guard and give him his comeuppance. (Roberts then poured whiskey in Lawler's face to further embarass him.)

Tabletop Games

• The Dungeons and Dragons module T1 The Village of Hommlet. Elmo the ranger acts inebriated, but is only pretending in order to get other people to underestimate him.

Theater / Opera

• In The Desparate Hours the protagonist pretends to be drunk and abusive to make his son's schoolteacher leave, to hide the fact that three wanted fugitives are keeping them hostage (and had left liquor bottles lying around).
• The Count in The Barber of Seville pretends to be a drunken soldier as part of his Zany Scheme to marry Rosina.

Video Games

• Caius Cosades of Morrowind claims to be addicted to the drug "moon sugar" (and its refined variant, Skooma). Given that he is: a) the imperial spymaster, b) said to hold his "liquor" fairly well, and c) implied to have killed people who have underestimated him, it can be assumed it is an act.

Web Original

• I'm a Marvel And Im ADC. At first the Green Goblin really is on a drug trip, but when it wears off he has to fake it.

Jeez, you'd have to be on drugs to be this high!

Real Life

• This was one of the tactics used by the MIT Blackjack Club to avoid attracting attention. Sure the drunken wash-out is winning tonight, but there's no way he could be counting cards, right? Of course, eventually the casinos caught onto the scam.

Other

• That famous joke (or urban legend, or story, or whatever) about the cop watching a bar who spots an obviously-drunk guy getting into a car, pulls him over, and finds out he's totally sober- it turns out it was his turn to be the decoy.