Counter Zany - TV Tropes

"The only antidote to a zany scheme, is an even zanier scheme!"

• Mao-chan: The new Prime Minister starts a Monster Protection Racket to promote his "Three Aces" team... whereupon the Defense Force leaders launch their own fake alien at the same time to try to get the Defense Corps girls back in the public's good graces. Turns into a game of Zany Scheme Chicken when Yuriko launches a real alien for the girls to fight... and all of the aliens look like pandas.

• Spy vs. Spy: While some strips revolve around the Black Spy and White Spy pulling guns and devices out of nowhere which essentially becomes an out-gunning competition, others have them be more ingenuous yet as dumb as ever. One of the spies will, for instance, make a peace offering via cake, or cook a plot that lands their rival in, say, court or jail. Seconds later, it's revealed that said rival expected it and despite initially appearing fooled by it only to turn the situation around in their favor thanks to varying degrees of absurd/complex plans.

• Danganronpa Re:Programmed: In Chapter Three, the culprit's plan comes crashing down around their ears due to Yasuhiro launching a particularly absurd one of these.

• Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey: Good Robot Bill and Ted are created because Bill and Ted want to create good robot duplicates to fight their evil robot duplicates.

  "How do you stop a pair of bad robot usses?"
  "By building a pair of good robot usses to fight them!"

By Creator:

• The works of P. G. Wodehouse run on this trope.

By Work:

• Myth Adventures: Practically standard operating procedure for the series.
• Whateley Universe: When Generator hatches a plan to prank Phase with realistic shoulder angels, Phase retaliates by stealing Generator's lingerie. While Generator is standing in the middle of the cafeteria. Generator does not take this lying down.

• All in the Family: In 'Beverly Rides Again', a prank war between Pinky Peterson and Archie results in each staging a fake date with some sort of punchline for the other. Archie manages to have Beverly, a trans-woman, go out with Pinky, hoping he will be horrified when he realizes she's not a cis-woman. Pinky believes he's detected the setup and decides to let Archie think he was successful, while pulling his own convoluted vengeance.

A prank war involves a double-date and a trans-woman (relatively sympathetically portrayed).

• Arrested Development: Usually involving George Bluth's attempts to teach his children a lesson. It comes to a head in the third season with a Counter-Counter-plus-gambit-Counter Zany.
• Community: "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design" features a Gambit Pileup of Counter Zanies. Since all of them involve people being apparently shot dead only to get back up and reveal they faked the whole thing, the poor Dean ends up a nervous wreck.
• The Golden Girls: In "'Till Death Do We Volley", Dorothy ends up the victim of a practical joke, courtesy of Trudy. With the help of the latter's husband, Dorothy enacts her revenge by staging a situation in which Trudy is Shamed by a Mob at the class reunion. Dorothy fakes her death while playing tennis (something Trudy pushed her to do), only to suddenly "revive" and have a good laugh about it.
• Hannah Montana: In "People Who Use People", Miley starts fake-dating a guy to induce jealousy in Jake, her love interest, who appears to have fallen in love with another girl. In reality, Jake had staged the whole thing to make Miley realize her romantic feelings for him. This is evidenced by how obnoxiously and contrivedly both rub their faux relationships on the other.
• Home Improvement: Earlier seasons often have Tim and Jill pulling these in response to their children's antics in order to teach them a lesson.
• I Love Lucy: Sometimes taken to mounting levels of on-the-spot planning, improvising, and zany consequences. A married couple and their friends, any two of whom are liable to be on the same side at any given time? Just as many schemes are bound to be met with their own schemes and grand productions in response. In multiple instances, the counter-scheme is only revealed as such to the audience by the end, often in cases where the schemers feign that the original lie was true all along by staging "proof".
• Saved by the Bell: Zack, an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, has a penchant for manipulating and getting his friends into trouble as a result of his (in his mind, brilliant) schemes going pear-shaped. There have been some occasions in which they manage to get onto him and make plans just as convoluted to halt him or get revenge.
• Whitney: Alex's Genre Savviness is instrumental to his ability to predict and retaliate accordingly from Whitney's many zany schemes.

• Our Miss Brooks: In "Twins at School", after discovering Connie has been impersonating her non-existent identical twin Bonnie, Mr. Conklin invents a non-existent identical twin of his own. Complete with cowboy accent.

• Dates back at least to William Shakespeare, therfore proving The Zeroth Law of Trope Examples
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor: Anne's parents each come up with one to let their respective preferred son-in-law-to-be elope with Anne while everybody's preoccupied with Falstaff's Humiliation Conga. In the denouement, the two preferred suitors discover they've eloped with decoy Annes while the real thing has eloped with her preferred suitor.
  • Much Ado About Nothing: Don Pedro comes up with a scheme to woo Hero in Claudio's stead. Don John tries to thwart it by telling Claudio that Pedro means to woo Hero for himself. When that fails, John's evil scheme is to slander Hero by using Margaret as a pawn to make Claudio think Hero is sleeping with someone else (i.e. loving/fooling around with another guy). It's the Evil Counterpart of the scheme Don Pedro, Claudio, Leonato, Hero, Ursula, and Margaret herself is in on, to trick Benedick and Beatrice into thinking one is madly in love with the other. The slander succeeds but is countered by having Hero pretend to be dead in order to get Claudio to repent and marry her.

• Kaeloo: In "Let's Play Courtroom Drama", Mr. Cat points out that Kaeloo can transform into a violent monster whose actions are well beyond her conscious control and accuses Kaeloo of being the real attacker during the trial. Kaeloo seems to believe this story and packs her bags. Mr. Cat asks where she is going, and she explains that she is leaving Smileyland in order to avoid hurting her friends. Mr. Cat, feeling extremely guilty and not wanting his "best friend" to leave forever, confesses to the crime and says that his story was a made-up lie. Kaeloo then turns around to face him, declares him guilty and punishes him offscreen.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "28 Pranks Later", Rainbow Dash starts a campaign of pranking Ponyville that starts to get a bit too indiscriminate after her friends tell her she wasn't putting enough thought into them and she takes it the wrong way. The rest of the Mane Six eventually confront RD and tell her that she needs to stop because the pranks are starting to cross the line into flat-out insensitive, but Rainbow Dash makes clear she won't. The obvious solution then becomes: trick her into thinking swapping out cookies for her latest prank accidentally triggered a Zombie Apocalypse.
• South Park: In "My Future Self 'n Me", the boys' parents launch a Zany Scheme in which actors pretend to be the boys' time-traveling future selves, with the aim of scaring the boys away from drugs and alcohol. After discovering the truth, Stan attempts to fight the zany scheme with logic but gets nowhere. Butters, with the help of Cartman, launches a Counter Zany to get revenge on his parents (by smearing feces all over their house). Needless to say, the Zany-Counter Zany collision results in a standard Anvilicious message about communication and honesty. For added hilarity, Butters' Counter Zany somehow had the exact effect he hoped for; his parents apologize for the original scheme immediately, even though they would normally scold him for doing perfectly innocent stuff.
• Spongebob Squarepants: In "New Leaf", Plankton’s plan to get the formula involves him pretending to close the Chum Bucket so that Mr. Krabs will befriend him and offer him the formula as a gesture of their new friendship. Mr. Krabs responds by pretending to get close to Plankton eventually entrusting him with "The formula" (in reality, just a piece of paper that reads “Gotcha -Krabs <3”). Plankton shouts a Big "NO!" at the very end.