Bunny Ears Lawyer

Alan Shore for the defense, your Honour.

"Well, obviously, Lionel Tribbey is a brilliant lawyer whom we cannot live without, or there would be very little reason not to put him in prison." —President Bartlet, The West Wing

How is this guy trusted with anything?

Some characters have pervasive or extremely noticeable personality quirks, but somehow remain faithfully employed because they are just that good at what they do. Coworkers, superiors, and friends are willing to overlook certain informalities because of this (e.g., a hypothetical highly successful lawyer who happens to wear fuzzy pink bunny ears during all his cases) so long as they get the job done and cause a minimal amount of intentional problems. This is a cost/benefit ordeal: if they weren't so good at their job or their quirks were too obstructive an employer would consider them a necessary sacrifice for sanity.

Much like the Genius Ditz it is a strange mixture of brilliant and bizarre, the unexpected quirks only tend to bother new characters who don't know them well. Their quirks don't seem to be intrinsic to his success, a la Crazy Awesome. Compare the Insufferable Genius, whose quirk is more often just being a Jerkass. The Insufferable Genius might insist everyone address him as "sir" or "Dr. Smith". The Bunny Ears Lawyer might not answer unless addressed as "Grand Duchess Abigail Chester Wilson Snapdragon Lemmywinks Brian Brain McFisticuffs the Negative 10th." There are lots of Bunny-Ears Lawyers out there, as the length of this page can attest, mainly because having the character be an expert allows the writers to plausibly put them in any situation they want while the quirks are to make the characters interesting and unique, and there is some Truth in Television to this trope--just check out the Real Life section. Authorities in educational or professional environments will sometimes ignore quirks, especially if they don't have any relevance to the degree or job at hand. While you're unlikely to see something as extreme as a bunny ears-wearing lawyer, you will find plenty of examples of people who remain employed despite their quirks.

A form of Ultimate Job Security. For situations where the strange guy is the one in charge (and uses their strange behavior to run their business) see The Wonka. Uniformed examples may overlap with the Military Maverick.

Luckily, they're never Ax Crazy. Usually. For an ultra manly-man who pulls off some girly hobby and nobody minds, take a refresher in the fact that Real Men Wear Pink. If you have enough bunny-ears lawyers, they can easily make up a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits.

Remember: In order for a character to qualify he must keep his job through sheer unquestionable competence. Some examples are of incompetent characters that happen to be quirky and keep their jobs through means that have nothing to do with their competence.

Examples of Bunny Ears Lawyer include:

Anime and Manga

• Sendo from Slam Dunk is considered this. He's great at basketball but is always late for meetings and hardly ever looks serious.
• Ancient Rome, and how! He is said to have conquered most of Europe, but is shown being almost more spacey than his own grandson, North Italy. He even spaces out when giving Germany a lecture on his own history.
• Tabane of Infinite Stratos is the creator of the titular Powered Armor, even creating it at the age of 15, but she acts like an hyperactive idiot in public, and LITERALLY wears bunny ears and dresses up as Alice from Alice in Wonderland.
• Let me ask you a question. Would you trust the former most notorious gang leader of your country, who just happens to be a pervert, a Man Child who is also One of the Kids, a slacker, and a klutz whose M.O. is destruction everywhere? That's exactly what Holy Forest Academy did when they hired Eikichi Onizuka to be a high school teacher in Great Teacher Onizuka. It turns out his unorthodox method of teaching is quite possibly the greatest thing to happen to the school.
• Happosai of Ranma One Half fame is this to an extent. He's constantly seen skirt-chasing, peeking, panty-stealing etc. but he is still one of the, if not the most powerful martial artist around. Same goes for his pupils Soun and especially Genma, who trained Ranma, who in turn has Bunny Ears Lawyer streaks himself.
• Belldandy of Ah! My Goddess is extremely competent and powerful with goddess magic, but woefully ignorant of most everything else, to the chagrin of her Love Interest, Keiichi.
• You know how we said they're never Ax Crazy? We lied. Meet Baccano!'s Claire Stanfield, an assassin that is very good at tracking people down, extracting information, and killing things. The catch is that he has a huge list of quirks (constant name-changing, a tendency to attach himself to anything in a skirt, a habit of going way overboard, a complete disregard for contract confidentiality, a firmly sustained belief that he is God -- the list goes on) that can make him more than a little annoying for his employers to deal with. Still, he is really, really good at what he does.
• Nizuma Eiji, mangaka prodigy of Bakuman｡, can't work without making lots of loud sound effects and preferably turning up the stereo to battlefield volume. His way of blowing just about everybody off makes Topher look like a master of tact in the workplace. Altogether, the T.O. team seems to have branched out by making the Bunny Ears thoroughly obnoxious.
• Phonsekal Laure is a narcoleptic, lazy bum who sleeps almost all the time, takes pillow and blanket anywhere and is one of the most talented Shinsoo users of the entire cast. Learning and deepening that skill is in universe the most time-consuming and difficult tasks for a Regular and everybody sure appreciates his skills.
• Dr. Black Jack. The global medical community isn't quite sure how to feel about the greatest surgeon alive dressing like a vampire, chewing out half of his clients, and obstinately refusing to get a license because it limits the ridiculously high fees he charges. Nonetheless, most hospitals find themselves paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to sneak him in for an operation at least once.
  • Black Jack has, on two separate and unrelated occasions, been mistaken for the leader of an alien invasion.
• Bleach: It's hard to see how Mayuri could ever be a captain of the Gotei 13. He's a full-time Mad Scientist, a part-time Mad Doctor. On a bad day he's a Knight of Cerebus who'd either cut anyone up or use them for experimentation (sometimes both at the same time). The reason he's a captain of the Gotei 13 is that he's too damn useful and he's got the ability to justify (and hold) the rank.
  • Urahara was this back when he was still the Captain of Squad 12. The only shinigami scientist better than Mayuri... and just as eccentric. To date, he's the played the role of the Eccentric Mentor, the Gadgeteer Genius, he'll use Obfuscating Insanity as a weapon... and just to pass the time of day.
    • By the time of the main narrative he's grown into a strange business owner. He's so competent the manga can be viewed as one long chess game between him and the main villain Aizen. Doesn't stop him being an utter Cloudcuckoolander when he feels like it, such as telling Ichigo to survive his training by putting on a silly bandana and gloves and yelling out a summons for the "hands of justice"... just because he felt like it.
  • The 11th division's reputation is simple: They're rough, they're violent, they're uncouth, they're undisciplined, they're sweaty, filthy, loincloth wearing men (to quote Isane and Rangiku). And then there's Yumichika. He fusses about his appearance, he worries about his looks. He will delay entering battle if he needs to change his clothes first. And he will kill you without a second thought if you call him ugly. He gets away with it because he's the third strongest man in the entire division and is capable of defeating vice-captains in battle.
  • Then there's Kenpachi's vice-captain, the only known female in the division, small Rose-Haired Girl, a Genki Girl: Yachiru. There's no way she looks like she should be there... and she spends most of her time doing almost anything under the sun for sweets. And then you notice that every single person in the entire division except the captain is absolutely terrified of her. As are the communication corps. (With damn good reason.)
• Captain Harlock has the Arcadia's entire crew like this. Oddly, Captain Harlock and Kei Yuki are the only ones who remotely seem to be serious about the whole pirating thing.
• Lloyd Asplund of Code Geass is a goofy, graceless social misfit who is bluntly honest and speaks of everyone (even the Emperor) in an almost mocking tone. He's also one of the most brilliant engineers in the world, being the creator of the Super Prototype Lancelot. He's also one of the few Britannians to not be racist. Rakshata Chawla, a former classmate of Lloyd's who works for La Résistance, is equally brilliant and can usually be found lounging on a sofa (even on the bridge of their battleship!) with a pipe in her mouth and a teasing remark on her lips.
  • Then there's Gino Weinberg who's a cheerful Upperclass Twit with No Sense of Personal Space that is fascinated by "commoner" life. Despite this, nobody second guesses as to why he's the Knight Of Three.
    • However, Gino's behavior doesn't sound like a problem when you know Knight of the Round include an Emotionless Girl frequently mind-raped, a Complete Monster who fight for the pleasure of killing, and a Quisling with a Chronic Backstabbing Disorder.
• Death Note
  • L, the most brilliant detective in the world, is a reclusive and eccentric young man who locks himself away in an appartment and solves cases from around the world. He has awkward mannerisms and almost no social skills. He's always crouching in his chair and staring fixedly at something. He grips everything from the top with two fingers, like you might hold up a salamander or wet noodle. Because he burns so many calories by simply thinking, he's a Big Eater with an incredible sweet-tooth. He's almost always toying with or devouring a mountain of candy or pastries.
  • Mello and Near come from the same school for giften children as L and are basically proto-Ls. Like L, they also have their eccentricites. With their powers combined, they are as good or better than L, and appropriarely they split his habits: Near is always toying with things, in this case actual children's toys. Mello is always eating candy, in this case chocolate.
• Muten Roshi of Dragon Ball. A 300-year old perverted man... who happened to be the creator of the Kamehameha, tutor of Goku and Krillin and in early parts of the series the greatest martial artist on Earth.
• In Dragon Ball Z, the Ginyu Force are a team of extremely campy, silly, overconfident apparent idiots who have odd quirks like striking embarrassing poses before a fight, betting chocolate bars on a fight's outcome, and playing Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who gets to fight. However, there is a reason Frieza hired them as enforcers and ordered them to take down Vegeta. They are just that good at what they do.
• Mr. Takuma of Elf Princess Rane is a brilliant Jack-of-All-Trades who insists on speaking backwards. All the time. If you look closely at the subtitles, he says at one point, "If I talk backwards, people will think I'm smart!"
• Nanvel, from Burn Up: she can make some incredible things, and has won several awards for her inventions, but, they're always designed in some absurd way that's supposed to be 'cute'. She also has a massive sweet-tooth, eats a certain snack exactly at 3:00 PM, never misses dessert, and loves children's programming.
• Eyeshield 21 has a host of eccentric but skilled football players:
  • Yoichi Hiruma has a penchant for firearms of all kinds, and never hesitates to discharge them in the general direction of his teammates. He also enjoys heaping verbal and physical abuse upon them, to the point of kicking people he likes. And let's not get started on his use of Blackmail to help his team. However, he is a highly skilled quarterback and tactician.
  • Natsuhiko Taki is a boastful, good-looking idiot who likes to brag "My success rate is 100%!" to the point that it's his Catch Phrase. All the same, he makes a damn good tight end.
  • Wide receiver Monta's resemblance to a monkey is not helped by his bad temper, his obsession with bananas, and his tendency to take his shoes off and grab things with his toes.
  • Shin of the White Knights is one of the best linebackers in Japan because he trains almost nonstop, and in unorthodox ways (doing vertical push-ups with his thumbs at one point). He also has no grasp at all of how to use electronics, to the point that if it's electronic and he touches it, it's broken.
  • Otawara, also of the White Knights, is extremely slow-witted and crude; Running gags involve him farting and his pants falling down. Oh, and, while he isn't the most powerful lineman around, he's close, and he's incredibly fast for someone his size.
  • Jo Tetsuma of the Seibu Wild Gunmen almost never speaks unless Kid tells him to, and follows orders to the very syllable, even to illogical extents. In addition, he is only shown in two situations to take actions under his own initiative. However, his single-minded obedience to commands makes him one of the best four wide receivers in all of Kanto.
  • Kengo Mizumachi of the Kyoshin Poseidons is a spastic, energetic, irrepressibly cheerful guy who is constantly making a fool of himself but couldn't care less. Also, the only reason he started playing football is because no other sport provided an adequate level of challenge for him.
  • Agon Kongo is a dark take on the trope, along with being a kind of insufferable genius. He never trains and spends his days lazing about, picking fights, womanizing, and giving his brother (the team captain, no less) noogies, yet he gets away with it because he's the most talented athlete of the century.
• Maes Hughes of Fullmetal Alchemist.
  • He's either this or he's just Obfuscating Stupidity. Or he just love his wife and daughter to a crazy extent. I mean, would you draw a gun on children for wanting to play with your daughter?
  • In the manga most of Mustang's men are portrayed as excellent military men (Breda graduated at the top of his class) who just act goofy.
  • Armstrong also counts. He tends to be a tad... wacky, but it's not long before you realize it's a good idea not to piss him off.
    • THE BUNNY EARS LAYWER TECHNIQUE HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG LINE FOR GENERATIONS!
• In Full Metal Panic, Mithril appears to employ a number of Bunny Ears Lawyers. There's Kurz Weber, a skilled AS pilot, top-grade sniper, and a complete Lovable Sex Maniac... and Teletha Testarossa, a sixteen-year-old Dojikko with a bit of inferiority complex who's also a Teen Genius, the captain and designer of the Tuatha de Danaan, and the others' commanding officer. Sousuke, meanwhile, is a consummate professional when he's in a military setting... and a hopeless Fish Out of Water with No Social Skills in any non-military situation.
  • In the novels, Sousuke himself takes on elements of the trope even within the military setting. He uses part of Mithril's military maneuvering ground to house his giant pet tiger (whom he referred to as a cat in his report to Tessa, making her largely regret approving it), and along with Kurz ends up completely trashing multi-million dollar Arm Slaves on a pirate treasure hunt. These and other shenanigans - including the incident from Ending Day By Day which did make it into the anime at the end of The Second Raid, in which Sousuke outright demands that Mithril's high command reinstate him as Kaname's bodyguard - are tolerated because Sousuke is the only person who can operate the Arbalest and its Lambda Driver, which are the only weapons Mithril has that can equal Amalgam's technology.
• Every single member of the Galaxy Angel Brigade. Minus the competence part, in the anime.
• Everyone in Gintama.
• Sumeragi Lee Noriega from Gundam 00 is essentially a slightly better-adjusted version of Misato from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  • Graham Aker is pretty much what happens when an Otaku gets into military... except this Otaku is just about as Badass as he can get, to the point that he gets special permission to act as he wants, because his superiors figured out bad things tend to happen to their enemies when Graham gets to do things his way.
  • Andrew Waltfeld, the Desert Tiger, in Gundam SEED. He takes his coffee making very, very seriously, to the point of boiling it in an elaborate chemistry-set-looking contraption, talking about percentages of ingredients he's changed, and randomly mentioning it before or during serious combat situations. However, he's also a brilliant and decorated military commander and an ace mobile suit pilot, so his soldiers don't seem to do more than just blink in temporary confusion when he offers them the chance to try his latest brew.
    • Rau Le Creuset of the same show manages to pretend to be one of these. He's The Obi-Wan to the deuteragonist, Athrun, and a senior military commander with the ear of the high-command...who happens to wear a white mask on all occasions and speak in cryptic, philosophical terms. No one seems to mind as his perceived competence, strategic ability and sheer Badass outweigh these considerations. And then he decides to drop the act...
  • Glemmy Toto of Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ combines this trope with Stepford Smiler, using his quirky behaviour and goofy personality to cover up the fact that he is screaming on the inside.
• As mentioned above, Misato Katsuragi of Neon Genesis Evangelion. One would think that blatant alcoholism and a driving quest for revenge against the Angels would preclude a person being assigned to a post as important as Director of Tactical Operations. She even gets called out on the latter when it seems she will take unnecessary risks to avenge her father's death. Then again, this is Evangelion. She's practically a bastion of sanity and rational thinking compared to much of the rest of the cast.
• The spaceship crews of Irresponsible Captain Tylor and Martian Successor Nadesico.
• Let's not forget their master: Yang Wen-Li, a social misfit with an alcohol problem who almost flunked out of military academy where he only entered because he had no money to pay for his education to become a historian. He sits on his flagship's instrument panel during important fights (when he is not simply sleeping) and claims to everyone that he hates working. No one, no one ever wonders how he became admiral by 30; his skills make it obvious to any character (ally or enemy) that he deserves to be at the top of the chain of command.
• Usami Akihiko of Junjou Romantica is a brilliant best-selling award-winning author of both literary and popular fiction... who sleeps with a teddy bear in a room full of toys.
  • And then there's his head publisher. Misaki on meeting him is absolutely shocked to find out that he's brilliant at what he does.
• Kogarashi in Kamen no Maid Guy - even though he's wearing a dress and frequently harassing Naeka and her friends, most of the time his plans work. Naeka and Fubuki do occasionally beat him up when he goes too far, but that can't stop him forever.
• Mihara Ichirou from Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer acts every inch the Mad Scientist (even wearing a lab coat everywhere he goes), torments his assistant, never gives out his plans to his co-workers, and pops up around a twelve-year-old girl and drags her around town to play a doll fighting game; however, he's also a genius in robotics and, in the anime, an innovative medical researcher.
  • That doll fighting game he drags the girl to? He created it. And not to mention computers that look like cute, teenage girls.
• Kakashi Hatake from Naruto is chronically late, reads porn (sometimes even in mid-battle), and is a bit of a goofball, but threaten his students or anyone else under his care and he'll kick your backside all over Fire Country.
  • Mr. Kishimoto seems to like these: Such as Gai and Lee who are Love Freaks and have Big Ol' Eyebrows but they're very strong and noble. Tsunade, who likes to drink and gamble, hates paperwork to a degree most people would reserve for their work enemy, and is a bit of a Vain Sorceress but also a competent leader as well as a kickass medic and fighter; Jiraiya, who's a self-proclaimed "super pervert" and porn writer but one of the strongest ninja in the world (to the point that some of the other top-tier ninja are wary of fighting him even with a numerical advantage) and who dies heroically. Anko (Stripperiffic and smartass kunoichi who was among the survivors of Orochimaru's experiments with Cursed Seals) and Shikamaru (genius strategist who is so lazy he'd rather hide his smarts than do paperwork) might also count.
  • Killer Bee tops all the others, though. He fights using seven swords, none of which he holds in his hands, because he prefers to keep them free so that he can write rap lyrics in the middle of combat.
• In Nerima Daikon Brothers there is a character named Ichiro who is the head host of a successful host club...who grows algae in a jar as a hobby and is in love with a panda.
• The Galley-La Company of One Piece is full of these kind of characters. As is Cipher Pol 9. And the Marines. And the World Government in general. And the Straw Hat crew. And nearly every single group in the manga. And Oda himself is one.
• Gwen Khan from Outlaw Star has a very eccentric personality, repeating himself, and having a speaking pattern that is basically him talking to himself. He's also the most brilliant mind in the universe having created both the Outlaw Star and Melfina.
• Xerxes Break, "The Mad Hatter" in Pandora Hearts. He talks to a little doll on his shoulder. It may be Obfuscating Stupidity, though.
  • He also does circus acts for no reason, has a case of Crazy Consumption, and is known to act CloudCuckooLanderish on occasion.
• Eiji Kikumaru from The Prince of Tennis is child-like, happy, has a flashy playing style and is somewhat of a Cloudcuckoolander as well... but he also has the sharpest vision in the whole team (only matched by Ryoma), is extremely flexible and capable of very high jumps, works as hard as the others to keep himself atop of his team, and is fiercely loyal to his doubles partner Oishi to the point that one of the OVAs and a whole match in the manga are fully dedicated to Eiji's struggle to show Oishi that he's not a burden to him *and* that he wants him back in the team
  • The former Seigaku captain Yuudai Yamato acts and looks like a full-blooded Cloudcuckoolander (and looks like a teenaged John Lennon), so much that even Ryuzaki-sensei sometimes can't understand him - but he has excellent insight into people's psyche and, if you're willing to listen to him, you can't get better advice from anyone.
• Princess Tutu has Professor Cat, the main characters' ballet instructor who is literally an anthropomorphic cat. He's shown to be a very competent teacher and is greatly respected by other dancers, but he's obsessed with love and marriage, often threatening his young female students that if they don't keep up with their practice he will have them "MAAAAAARRY ME!" Often followed by him doing something cat-ish like falling to the floor to scratch his back, running into a paper bag, or scratching his claws against a wooden board.
• Yomiko Readman (and indeed, almost all Paper Masters) from the Read or Die universe. Deadly with their weapon of choice, and bibliophiles to the extreme. The mangas take this to their logical conclusion, as Yomiko and Michelle sometimes get totally physically immersed in their work, allowing the paper from their books to contact their skin...with sexy results.
• Sailor Moon: Minako Aino, a.k.a. Sailor Venus, is the most battle experienced member of the Sailor Team. Which is hard to notice amidst all the ditzy moonstruck behavior she constantly exhibits as well as how she cheerfully murders all kinds of axioms, verbs and phrases. This is downplayed in the live action version, where she is more of an Ill Girl Broken Bird.
  • The manga version of Queen Beryl can testify Sailor Venus is the most competent of the Sailor Senshi, and asks her to stop disemboweling her every time they meet.
• Saiyuki:
  • Dr. Nii Jienyi carries a stuffed bunny everywhere and babytalks to it, makes completely inappropriate comments to his female assistant, and does not appear to be proficient in social niceties such as regular bathing. He also earned a doctorate at 17, is the only one who knows how to manipulate the Tenchi Kaiden sutras to revive Gyuumoah, and is the bearer of the Muten sutra and the second-youngest person ever made a sanzo priest.
  • From Gaiden, Field Marshall Tenpou can't for the life of him keep his office clean enough to find the floor, bathes with a rubber ducky, and walks around in a labcoat and shower sandals rather than military uniform. He's also a Four-Star Badass capable of taking on whole units by himself and a peerless strategic mind.
  • The sanzo priesthood is essentially an entire religious order of Bunny-Ears Preachers. Because the purpose of a sanzo priest is to protect the sutra they are entrusted with, they are not required to abide by the normal rules of Buddhist monasticism. Every sanzo seen so far has completely ignored the precept of shaving one's head, as well as flouting at least one other precept each. Genjyo Sanzo probably takes this the furthest, as by Word of God the only precept he's (coincidentally) complied with is chastity and he doesn't even personally identify as Buddhist. Weird as they may be, however, do not EVER cross a sanzo. They got where they are by being the most competent mofos around.
• Amae Koromo from Saki is a monster of a Mahjong player whose bandana looks exactly like bunny ears and her power(?) draws from the full-moon, fitting the bunny theme.
• Soul Eater has a few: one of them is the scythe handpicked by Shinigami-sama himself, who is skirt-crazy (and has been quoted, when asked how he got somewhere so quickly, as saying "Nobody is faster than me when chasing a woman's ass") and obsessed with his daughter's safety, especially from boys. Another one is a Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate who wants to dissect you For Science! and has no issue making you feel awkward if it amuses him, but is the most powerful person his school has ever produced. Together, They Fight Crime under the biggest of them all: The Genki Boy, tea-party throwing, doting father that is The God of Death himself.
  • Being eccentric yet ridiculously skilled seems to be a pre-requisite for being in the Shibusen faculty. Of the few staff introduced, only Azusa lacks some odd behaviour. And even she has her crazy map-drawing skills.
  • To that end, every Death Scythe is a Bunny Ears Lawyer (did we forget the violent hammer wielding Genki Girl?)
  • Note that this show takes it so far over the top that two of its main trio basically have crippling mental illnesses (one is such an Attention Whore that he literally can't restrain himself from yelling YAHOO at the top of his lungs and leaping atop the most prominent nearby object when he's trying to ambush someone, the other has such Super OCD he's been paralyzed with doubt and suicidal self-loathing because of worries over whether or not he folded the end of the toilet paper roll in his bathroom at home) and yet they're still incredibly powerful combatants… When their act happens to be together.
  • The bad guys have Crona, a sad, insane, awkward little gender-ambiguous pink-haired kid...who's been fused with the demon sword Ragnarok and turned into the ultimate weapon. At one point they even refer to Crona as "Ragnarok", implying that Crona's presence is merely incidental. And then there's the friendly, excitable werewolf Free, who's depressed after breaking out of a decades-long imprisonment because he didn't escape awesomely enough. He was imprisoned in the first place because of his arsenal of magical abilities and his super agility and strength.
• Haruhi Suzumiya is considered by most of her fellow students to be a Cloudcuckoolander, but since she's also good at absolutely everything, they're willing to overlook that during events like sports and culture festivals when they need her help to do well. Bonus points for actually wearing bunny ears.
  • She's not good at absolutely everything - she's a godawfully bad filmmaker (due to her phenomenally huge ego which makes her believe that anything she does is automatically Academy Award-worthy). She's pretty hopeless at video games too, due to being too Hot-Blooded to believe in minor trivialities like "strategy".
• Pretty much everybody in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, but Kamina probably qualifies the most. Of course, his particular insanity happens to work in this Universe, and spreads to just about everybody else over time.
  • Leeron may be an even better example; no one questions the ridiculously brilliant mechanical and technological abilities of a flamboyantly gay man in red heels and purple eyeshadow.
• Dr. Irabu in Trapeze is, save for profession, almost literally a Bunny Ears Lawyer--but considering his actual occupation the implications are worse; in the anime, he's a psychiatrist who does most of his therapy largely in a psychedelic fursuit (complete with tye-die mascot-esque bear head). The series only gets more insane from there.
• Paiway Underberg of Vandread... although it's hard to determine if she's any good at her job, since Duero supplants her as head doctor within the first three episodes.
• Keima Katsuragi, from The World God Only Knows, is an unrepentant Dating Sim Otaku, so committed that he constantly plays them in class - his teachers only tolerate his behaviour because he gets perfect grades in most of his subjects, apart from PE.
  • Also Elsie, airhead low ranked daemon who, nevertheless, is the most successful daemon in the Runaway Spirit Squad. Subverted as she actually depends on Keima and would be useless by her own.
• Hajime no Ippo: A rare villainous example in Bryan Hawk. He spends all his time screwing around with women, to the point that it seems the only thing he's interested in apart from boxing, is a gigantic jerkass, has absolutely no social tact and basically does whatever he wants. Oh, and he's lazy. Too lazy to train. And despite all that, he's one of the most fearsome boxers in the entire story. His natural talent is so big that even without training, he easily curbstomps his opponents.
  • Takamura can also be considered a Bunny Ears Lawyer, considering how similar he is to Hawk. Tremendous Jerkass who pranks people in the shower, has an ego of the size of Japan itself, chases women around and has been featured in newspapers as a huge pervert... and yet he's a brilliant fighter who works very hard for his prowess and wins every fight he's in.
• In Deadman Wonderland we have a whole host of really really disturbing Ax Crazy Blood Knights who are absolutely brilliant at killing people, but who have a lot of really odd... let's just say 'quirks'.
• In the manga Category Freaks you have a group of paranormal investigators who are the absolute best at what they do but... er... aren't exactly normal. You have *ahem* a Brilliant but Lazy stand (practically a demi-god), a Camp computer geek, a little girl with bunny ears who eats monsters, a woman whose split personality could kick your ass halfway across the room, and a very polite young man who just happens to spend most of his time as an eye. If you're looking for your sanity you might want to check somewhere three feet north of your brain.
• Clair Fortran from Future GPX Cyber Formula. Her behavior can be a little... off at times. But being a very competent worker at the Sugo Team, she is an excellent machine designer.
• Hinoka from Ame-iro Kouchakan Kandan is a highschool student who is fairly good at construction, as we see with her renovation of the Amber Tea House, but her methods are rather unorthodox. And by unorthodox, I mean Chainsaw Good.
• Weather "fairy" Amasawa Chitose from The Weatherman Is My Lover does broadcasts in a different Cosplay outfit every day. He also predicts the weather via his hair.
• Mr. Shinhue the coroner from The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service is a pathologist, mortician, embalmer and historian of ancient Egypt who is an expert on giving customers a pharaoh-style burial (and fairly good at most other forms of burials and respectful body disposal). He also dresses like a mummy, complete with funeral rites in hieroglyphs on the insides of his bandages. While he has severe burns that necessitates wearing bandages 24-7, he seems to like the attire.
  • A throwaway appearance in a later chapter, placed two hundred years in the past, implies that he may actually be a mummy. The story may be non-canon, however.
• Leigharch from Black Lagoon is an Irish getaway driver whose car driving skills are completely flawless, even though he drives under the influence of so many drugs that he tends to spend his workday screaming various non-sequiturs about pop culture. Eventually he overdoses and winds up in an institution.
• A double-decker example in Gosick: the detective Grevil acts pretentious and sports a ridiculous hairdo, but the police overlook these things because he solves difficult cases so reliably. Except...he's secretly completely incompetent. To solve his cases (even the simple ones), he relies on a real Bunny Ears Lawyer: Victorique, an arrogant, manipulative, rolling-around-on-the-floor-to-express-boredom girl who is, unlike Grevil, genuinely very good at deciphering mysteries.
• From Rosario to Vampire, Touhou Fuhai at a glance: a Miniature Dirty Old Man with severe Otaku tendencies. Touhou Fuhai when it counts: a Bishonen Badass Grandpa with an Absurdly Sharp Blade, the most powerful sealing magic in the world, and Oh Crap inducing overall awesomeness.
• In Penguin Revolution, the president of Peacock has a somewhat idiosyncratic method of running the talent agency; among other things, Ryo Katsuragi is required to attend school disguised as a girl as part of his contract and will be fired of the secret is exposed. He also has the entire agency, agents included, undergo Training From Hell as preparation to put on a play. He can run the agency the way he wants because he's the president, but his methods also get surprisingly good results.
  • Not surprisingly, a number of the talents employed by Peacock are also rather quirky. The most notable examples are Ayaori Mashiba, a phenomenally talented actor who when not performing is so laid-back as to be nearly comatose, and Yuzuru Narazaki, another highly talented actor who emulates a samurai lifestyle and not only puts himself through voluntary Training From Hell but expects his manager to accompany him.
• Tiger and Bunny has Barnaby Brooks Jr., a skilled and popular superhero who is more than a little maladjusted. Apart from never actually bothering to learn any interpersonal skills and suffering from a very apparent case of PTSD, he has a number of odd quirks that range from an aversion to keeping "unnecessary things" (including furniture) to a fondness for suits with an entirely excessive amount of buttons.
  • • There's a lot of Fridge Horror involved here, given how much of Barnaby's personality and actions are a result of Maverick's memory-alteration NEXT power. Keeping him obsessed with catching his parents' killer (re-enforcing the PTSD) and ensuring he didn't develop significant relationships with anyone, Maverick had spent several years abusing Barnaby's unconditional trust in him to keep the young man engaged in his work-driven lifestyle, which helped to further Maverick's goals in making HeroTV a more profitable enterprise.
  • Several of the others count: Sky High is a very successful hero in spite of being quite the Ditz; Origami Cyclone's fanboyism (which is actually his selling point) belies his actual talents (not helped by Ivan's lack of confidence). You also wouldn't expect that the showy, flamboyantly camp Fire Emblem owns the company he's affiliated with, meaning Nathan must be pretty successful to stay associated with HeroTV.
• The Phantomhive Staff from Black Butler are hopelessly incompetent at their service jobs. But cooking, gardening, & cleaning aren't what they were REALLY hired for, as they are top notch assassins. Also Grell as a Shinigami, but ONLY in the manga.
  • Also Chapter 66 of the manga had a significant portion of the cast wearing literal bunny ears. (The reason is that it was an easter special)
• Goldfish Warning: inverted with Tanaka, the worst lawyer/butler ever, who somehow remains employed by his former client's daughter's rival, & literally wears bunny ears on a several occasions.
• In Highschool Dx D, Rias describes the four lords of hell as this in their private lives and later on, the other leaders of the different factions are this and it shows. Serafore loves to cosplay as a Magical Girl, Sirzechs and Azazel made an entire Super Sentai TV series based on Ise and Rias after Ise achieves Balance Breaker by pushing Rias' nipples, and Odin visits love motels just to name a few.
• Date Masamune from Gate 7. He's a Bratty Half-Pint who doesn't like to be reminded of that, wants to be an adult quickly and therefore he lies saying that he's in 6th grade since he was in 1st grade; he's acts as the tipical in-love-teenager girl towards Hana to the point to imaginate her as a Catgirl at the middle of a serious fight and it's even Lampshaded that he is comic relief once. Who would believe that this boy is really a excellent swordfighter and a honor's student?
• Narumi from Gakuen Alice.

Comic Books

• James from Bowling King is a former champion bowler with incredibly formidable skills. Not that his protege Shautieh could tell after spending an entire morning of shopping with him; All James seems to care about is his wife, and he rarely focuses on what he's actually supposed to be doing... but he still manages to see patterns and method to Shautieh's approach that even he wasn't aware of before.
• As various deconstructions and parodies have shown, virtually all superheroes are Bunny Ears Lawyers (more so during The Golden Age of Comic Books). Seriously, dressing up in bright colors and knocking people around can only be accepted when you're really good at what you do.
• Famed reporter Clark Kent, aka Superman, has a horrible attendance problem. Tolerated, because he brings in the good stories anyway, and one of the reasons Clark chose 'reporter' as a job in the first place was flexible hours.
• Peter Parker is probably similar, and likely wouldn't have a job at the Bugle at all were it not for his ability to nab so many photos of Spider-Man. Though for a lot of his career, Peter was freelance.
  • Even Spidey himself is a Bunny Ears Lawyer amongst the superheroes. He's known as being goofy and weird but most heroes consider him a brave and valuable asset.
  • Before he became Electro, Max Dillon was so greedy he wouldn't do anything unless he was paid. He only saved the life of a coworker after being offered a large bonus. He was only tolerated because he was the best pole man in New York.
• Deadpool could very easily fit into this category as, despite his blatant insanity, tendency to annoy others and, occasionally, sheer stupidity he is frequently hired as he's just too good at his job.
  • Hilariously, unlike the description given above, he actually is Ax Crazy...which makes him a whole lot of fun.
  • He also strays into Crazy Awesome sometimes; for example, when he fights with absolutely no semblance of sense, not even deciding what an attack is going to be until it connects, to beat the Taskmaster.
• Raptor in G.I. Joe comics. Cobra's accountant, he's a Mad FALCONER who dresses like a bird at all times and is regarded as a complete nutjob even by other Cobra operatives and Cobra Commander himself. On the other hand... he's an okay accountant and nobody else would work for Cobra.
• Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem is a drug addict, a sociopath, a pervert, a world class cynic who despises his own audience...and a damn fine journalist.
• The Bunny Ears Sheepdog of Footrot Flats, 'The Dog', is a Voiceless Intellectual Animal whose exploits are legendary, but is generally capable at bringing in the sheep and cattle.
• Blue Beetle: Ted Kord is an immature nerd who never stops telling stupid jokes, dresses like a kid's show host, has a disorganized lab and a congenital heart defect. He's also a technological genius, expert fighter and detective who uncovered a conspiracy even Batman missed and died trying to stop it.
• Dark Reign: Made Men is a one-shot made up entirely of stories about Norman Osborn and HAMMER making deals with guys like this. Bringing them back to life, getting them out of prison, that sort of thing. Spymaster is a peerless industrial spy and thief... and a con artist who is practically afraid of truth. Attuma is a fearsome and powerful warrior... and a rage case who doesn't understand anything but conflict. The Gamma Corps are an elite fighting squadron of Gamma-enhanced soldiers... and extremely misguided crusaders with a warped sense of justice.
• Arthur on The Tick is a perfectly normal everyday human and an experienced chartered accountant in an accountancy firm... Who also wears a full-body moth suit. Even to work. In an aversion, this gets him fired in all continuities.

Arthur: I'm fired? Is there a problem with my work? Mr. Wiederspan: No, no, no, no, no. It's just... Um... IT'S THAT STUPID BUNNY OUTFIT!

• • The Tick, meanwhile, is trusted by his community as a superhero and protector of the innocent (and not, say, carted off to the nearest insane asylum) in spite of his... Eccentricities. This was actually averted in the comics continuity, in which The Tick started out as an asylum inmate before escaping and becoming a superhero.
• Most of the Green Lanterns from Earth fall under this trope. Hal Jordan despite being impulsive and having a habit of being reckless is an Ace Pilot and can even override his ring's programming. Guy Gardner is arrogant, a jerk, and known for arguing with his bosses, yet he is on the Green Lantern Honor Guard. John Stewart has some pretty heavy emotional baggage, that doesn't stop him from being a crackshot and taking ring slinging very seriously. Kyle Rayner may have lead to the naming of Stuffed Into the Fridge and his other relationships havn't faired much better but he's also considered the most creative of Earth's four Lanterns, and is the guy who was chosen out of every being in the universe to be its protector.
• Tintin gives us Professor Cuthbert Calculus. He's prone to mishear every single word being said to him due to his hearing impairments and he's a borderline Mad Scientist. However, he so brilliant that he kept getting hired by various groups and governments to design various inventions or to help their science programs.

Fan Works

• In Tiberium Wars, GDI Commander Karrde finds Lieutenant Kirce James to be pretentious, self-important, and overly dramatic, which annoys him to no end. At the same time, she's able to whip up squadrons of Firehawks, an Ion Cannon, an entire division of GDI Marines, and a thousand Mammoth Tanks for him on short notice, so he doesn't complain at all when it comes to the results.
• Dr. Kaminko from The Pokémon They Carried has a habit of naming his military hardware after Pokémon. Command lets him keep doing this because he's just that damn good at designing weapons.
• Turnabout Storm has Trixie playing as the prosecutor; she goes to court in a magician getup, refers to herself in third person constantly and has an ego bigger than the courtroom -- yet she's well versed in Ace Attorney prosecutor tricks, and she's very capable of being a huge thorn on Phoenix Wright's side.

Film

• Essentially everyone in the film "Real Genius", which could almost be the trope namer.
• Kuryu, the main character of Japanese movie Hero (based on the TV series, below) is almost literally a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He constantly wears almost-aggressively casual clothes while his contemporaries wear suits, he indiscriminately buys random items from the shopping channel, and spends the whole movie trying to learn Spanish simply because he inadvertently ordered a book in that language. His quirks are overlooked however, partly because he is a cunning and successful lawyer, but mostly because his co-workers are all subtly quirky too.
• Glen Whitman, in Transformers, is a brilliant computer hacker, who may have ADHD and exhibits extremely erratic, perhaps sociopathic behavior. Apart from a lack of basic manners and some sort of unspecified paranoia, his great passions in life appear to be video games and getting into places he does not belong. Which could honestly be said of 90% of computer hackers. Hacking is, after all, all about getting into places you don't belong.
  • We can't forget Agent Seymour Simmons, who the TF Wiki describes as "just a smidge off his nut", but who is very good at what he does. In a bizarre subversion of this trope, his Bunny Ears-ness is implied in the novel The Veiled Threat to be the reason he isn't working for NEST.
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is downright certifiably insane, but because he is so good at solving cases involving animals, he keeps getting hired.
• Elle Woods in Legally Blonde is a law student who literally wears a bunny outfit to a party . Her awesome knowledge of fashion helps her defend her clients.
  • Let's not forget, she also legitimately got into Harvard law based on her academic record and testing.
  • In Legally Blonde 2: Blonde Harder, her awesome knowledge of fashion allows her to root out political shenanigans on Capitol Hill.
• Stéphane from The Science of Sleep is completely... mad, possibly... due to his confusing dreams that keep melding with reality (that he's not entirely about to cope with). However he is a technical genius. He makes a toy horse gallop with robotic parts - rather realistically and possibly a one-second time machine. His "Disaterology" also becomes a big success.
• Dr. Strangelove is a brilliant former Nazi with a severe case of alien hand syndrome - his right hand gives the Seig Heil salute without his control, and takes extreme effort to force back into his lap, and occasionally attempts to strangle him. Among other things.
  • This quirk of his is so well-known that alien hand syndrome is also known as Dr. Strangelove syndrome.
• Martin Riggs from the Lethal Weapon series is suicidal in the first film, and then just plain crazy after he gets over it. He deliberately plays havoc with the department's psychiatrist (and starts to make her snap), for bonus points. His near unstoppability when dealing with thugs is likely the only reason he is left on the force.
• Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant detective, but he is also quite eccentric and drug-addled.
• John Mason (Sean Connery) from The Rock is a good example. Despite being considered one of the most dangerous men alive, the US government is essentially ready to give him anything he wants in order to get him to work for them, as he is the only person who has ever broken out of Alcatraz and lived to tell.
• The pilots in Air America are completely insane, but really good pilots.
• Subverted in Smokin Aces. There is an eccentricly sleazy lawyer. For his first scene, there is literally a costume rabbit head showing in the background. However, he proves to be completely incompetent.
• The detective in Laura always plays with a handheld maze game.
• Vinny in My Cousin Vinny is an acerbic Brooklyn stereotype with a mouth like a stevedore(being played by Joe Pesci, this is to be expected), but turns out to be a brilliant and tenacious opponent in the courtroom. Also, his girlfriend Lisa, an aspiring hairdresser who knows enough about cars that her testimony ends up proving the defendants' innocence.

• Willie Beamen in Any Given Sunday had the habit of throwing-up at least once every match. However, he's a reasonably competent quarterback that he took over as the starting QB when the previous one was injured.

Literature

• A very controversial example in the novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is a spy who, while very competent, believes in every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory under the sun. The character ends up assassinated, showing the problems which come from pursuing false conspiracies and overlooking real ones, but he is still treated with respect by his colleagues prior to that.
• Let's not forget the original Bunny Ears Lawyer: a certain violin-playing, drug-addicted, outwardly disorganized, self-aggrandizing detective named Sherlock Holmes. Holmes also regularly conducted very malodorous chemical experiments, decorated his wall with bullet holes, kept tobacco in a slipper, and correspondence pinned to the mantle with a knife. He also was a Master of Disguise who would often not even tell Watson that it was actually him.
  • Nor should we forget Holmes' (probably autistic) older brother Mycroft, who lived down the street from his government office, frequented a social club where none of the members were allowed to take the least notice of each other, had an almost obsessive hatred of going anywhere besides his apartment, his work and his club... and functioned as a living database, archive, and computer for the British government.
    • Important note, when we say "computer", we mean the machine, not the old Victorian profession.
    • Holmes himself says that Mycroft is even smarter than he is and could be an even better detective. It's just that the man is not willing to do the physical work coming with being a detective.

"Why do you not solve it yourself, Mycroft? You can see as far as I." "Possibly, Sherlock. But it is a question of getting details. Give me your details, and from an armchair I will return you an excellent expert opinion. But to run here and run there, to cross-question railway guards, and lie on my face with a lens to my eye -- it is not my " we mean the."

• Butters from The Dresden Files. The best pathologist in the city...but he loves polka music more than is healthy and wears bunny slippers.
  • To give Butters some credit, he had a close encounter with something that goes bump in the night that might have driven him slightly insane. He was definitely sent to an asylum but that may have been just because other people don't believe in vampires.
  • From the point of view of the muggles, Harry himself. The cops at Special Investigations put up with his proclamations that he's a wizard because he gets results.
    • Also, the Wardens recruit him despite his severe authority issues (especially regarding the White Council) and history of dark magic because he's one of the only really powerful wizards left and is famous for rebelling against the Council, so if someone so anti-council is on their side, they must be doing the right thing.
    • We also get to see Harry's bunny-ears from Murphy's perspective. Harry is a guy who walks into a scene with an outfit that looks like it belongs on the set of El Dorado, asks a few questions that make absolutely no sense, occasionally does something strange like take a strand of hair from a brush, and somehow makes the entire case practically resolve itself.
  • Bob the Skull is an extremely powerful spirit of intellect that has worked for wizards for centuries and has such a wide span of magical knowledge that the White Council considers him a serious threat. And he really likes porn and trashy airport romance novels.
• Discworld: Pretty much everyone, or at least the main recurring characters, falls into this trope.
  • The Librarian of Unseen University is an orangutan. He didn't start out that way, he got accidentally transformed and decided he prefers it. He hasn't been replaced or transformed back against his wishes because a) he's still very good at his job (in fact, he's probably better at it than he was before) and b) an adult male orangutan is considerably stronger than an adult male human, and the Librarian is not necessarily averse to expressing his displeasure physically. It doesn't hurt that bananas are cheaper than an actual salary.
    • These days, if someone told the wizards that there was an orangutan in the library, they would probably ask the Librarian if he'd seen it.
  • The Bursar of the university is literally insane. Subverted slightly in that he has to take dried frog pills in order to perform his job, but played straight in that the dried frog pills don't actually make him sane, they just make him hallucinate that he's sane, that he's a bursar, and, incidentally, that he can fly.
    • And the Bursar was at least passably sane before Ridcully came along, and was apparently one of the few Wizards with real job security, since no-one else wanted to be Bursar, or at least no-one who'd be inclined to kill the previous incumbent to get the job.
  • Continuing with the Unseen University staff, there's Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully. By most people's standards he's no stranger than other wizards, but to other wizards he's completely mad. He not only enjoys but actively encourages healthy exercise, puts a homemade and highly volatile condiment on everything he eats, and is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. He handles most matters through Obfuscating Stupidity, on the assumption that if someone is still trying to explain something to him after several minutes, it must be important. At the same time, he brought stability to UU, ending the tradition of Klingon Promotion by being pretty much unkillable himself.
  • City Watch Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson, a 6'6" dwarf (biologically he is technically human thanks to an odd birth defect commonly known as "both his birth parents are human") who is also (probably) the long lost heir to Ankh-Morpork's throne. Having been raised by dwarves, he has no concept of irony and has become either a Genius Ditz or a master of Obfuscating Stupidity. He also has the stones to arrest anything, up to and including a dragon and all the soldiers in two opposing armies who are about to fight a battle, for " Behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace."
    • It's implied that he started out as something of a Ditz, but is now just Obfuscating Stupidity, most of the time.
  • Also, Otto Chriek is a damn good photographer and a pretty nice guy, helpful to anyone who needs it... and a vampire who obsesses over photography like most vampires obsess over blood. And regularly harmed or reduced to ashes (he gets better) by the flash, much to bystanders' consternation.
    • This is common amongst reformed vampires: channel the obsession away from blood and onto a subject which is less likely to get you staked. The one with a coffee obsession was particularly memorable.
  • Similarly, Jeremy Clockson, a clockmaker with no sense of fun who is, in fact, too sane.
  • Leonard of Quirm, a parody of Leonardo da Vinci. Despite a habit of stopping in mid-sentence to play with folded-paper gliders and doodle schematics for working instruments of destruction in the margins, Lord Vetinari still employs him, and finds uses for all his ideas. Though "employs" is, perhaps, not quite the right word: the Patrician keeps him imprisoned in a tower and well supplied with parchment. Leonard genuinely appreciates both these things, since it keeps him from being distracted from his thoughts and sketches.
    • Also, after talking to Nobby in Jingo Leonard is even happier with Lord Vetinari's 'imprisonment': not only does he get all the materials he wants, but he is also well away from everyone who'd seek to turn his genuinely well-conceived ideas (such as guns, nuclear explosives, etc.) into weapons.
  • Marco Soto - one of the best field agents the Monks of Time have - refuses to cut his hair, as he believes it to be a separate entity that simply happens to live on his head.
  • Maladict, a vampiric Borogravian soldier, is a coffee addict who suffers deprivation hallucinations others can see about wars that didn't even take place on the Disc, carries a rapier he can't use properly to deter attackers because the only other option is to tear them apart with his fists, and is actually a woman.
• Pretty much any Waterhouse (see below re: mathematicians) or Shaftoe from Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle.
  • In Cryptonomicon, Lawrence Waterhouse is a man who does something socially ept "once every two or three years" and enjoys three things in the world: cryptology, playing the pipe organ, and sex. (The third clears his mind, enabling the first, and the second can sometimes be used as a substitute for the third.) Very few people understand much of what he says, and he's never very sure of what's going on around him, but since it's World War II, the whole cryptology thing works out well for him.
    • Also, his grandson, Randy Waterhouse, who has a strange obsession with Capt. Crunch cereal, and tends to use computer, DnD or Tolkien analogies to explain things. He's also one of, if not the, best network engineers in the world. And later on, he finds his grandfather's cryptology notes...
  • And the Shaftoes have a tendency toward violence and a gift at ass-kicking. The extraordinary crazy that runs in the family is not something you want to bring up, because you really want them on your side. Unless you outrank them, in which case, feel free to keep telling Bobby Shaftoe to stop mentioning the giant lizard. (It won't do any good.) The same goes for his son and granddaughter,
  • And in Quicksilver, we meet the Esphahnians, who apparently have no middle setting between declaring a blood feud against someone and adopting them into the family, and are so insane that even Jack Shaftoe (who, at this point, is being literally driven insane by syphilis) comments on it. They're also scarily competent business owners.
  • Stephenson's version of William of Orange is Genre Savvy enough to recognize that the best people have the weirdest quirks, so he only employs Bunny Ears Lawyers, and he distrusts competent people who have no quirks.
  • Also by Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash gives us Hiro Protagonist, who lives in a storage container and is neurotically insecure when it comes to women, but is at the same time, one of the best hackers in the world.
    • And is globally accepted as the world's best swordsman to boot.
    • Although that one is mostly because he wrote the sword-fighting code for the Metaverse. In reality, he seems to be competent, but the book doesn't make an enormous deal about how good he is with an actual sword.
• Dr. Hannibal Lecter is one of the most brilliant psychiatrists in the world and also a cannibalistic serial killer. Averted in that they actually do put him in prison as soon as his "quirk" is discovered, although he continues to write articles for psychiatric publications on a regular basis. The "About the Author" blurb must be a scream.
• Hlaine "Mad" Larkin of the Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts novels is a slightly neurotic old man prone to fits who repeatedly has {{[[[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane]] maybe}}] hallucinated conversations with angels, statues, and dead squad-mates. He's also the best sniper in the regiment.
  • Never mind being the best sniper in the regiment, he may be the best sniper in the Galaxy, beating even bionically augmented super-snipers who have been blessed by the Chaos Gods...
  • Also, technically, no-one knows about the hallucinations except him, since he always has the good graces to have them in private. He's still a bit 'off' at the best of times though.
• Kurt Kusenberg's Eine Schulstunde is about a school seemingly full of Bunny Ears Lawyers. The teacher brought a living bear to class, the principal would teach Shakespeare only while disguised as The Bard, and one of the students would speak every A as an I for one month because he lost a bet.
• The Artificial Intelligence Personalities in Donna Andrews' Turing Hopper mysteries tend towards this as they develop more self-awareness.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in Life, The Universe, and Everything, has His High Judgmental Supremacy, Judiciary Pag, L.I.V.R. (the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed). "He was clearly a bounder and a cad. He seemed to think because he was the possessor of the finest legal mind ever discovered that gave him the right to behave exactly as he liked, and unfortunately he appeared to be right."
• Harry Potter: Albus Dumbledore. Aside from the frequent Xanatos Gambits that usually involved him appearing to do absolutely nothing (getting the school temporarily closed down and Hagrid sent to Azkaban in Chamber of Secrets; getting removed from power in Order of the Phoenix; getting killed in Half-Blood Prince...), there's this gem from Philosopher's Stone, when at the opening ceremony, he says he'd "like to say a few words":

Dumbledore: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Harry: Is he -- a bit mad? Percy: Mad? He's a genius! Best wizard in the world! But he is a bit mad, yes.

• • Just look at his clothing. Every time it's described, it is more bizzare and clashing. And the school song in Philosopher's Stone.
  • Half of Hogwarts' other staff aren't precisely normal either. The History teacher is a ghost who doesn't recognize his own students and may not even be aware that he's dead (the only evidence to the contrary being the one time he entered the classroom through the blackboard) and the Divination teacher...doesn't really count as a teacher because most of the time she's talking out of her behind. The Potions teacher is overly dramatic and openly biased against certain students. The Gryffindor Head of House turns into a cat and doesn't consider her pastoral duties to extend to listening to clearly frantic members of her House. Oh, and Hagrid's love of terrifying creatures makes him quite suited for the Care of Magical Creatures class. Although most of them (with the exception of Hagrid) aren't particularly odd within wizard society.
• In the X Wing Series it seems that Nawara Venn was a Bunny Ears Lawyer who wasn't taken seriously. He's another obvious alien, one who served as a defense attorney in Imperial courts. Of course, being a nonhuman defending people who tended to have perceived or actual Rebel connections meant that he rarely won, so at some point he left to join the Rebellion as a fighter pilot. By the time he took up lawyering again, it was in a New Republic court, where he wasn't seen as strange because New Republic policies aren't blatantly xenophobic.
• Azdak the judge, in Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, is a maverick pursuer of poetic justice and a hero to poor underdogs, in whose favour he usually rules. He is an analogue for King Solomon. He is also drunken, horny, rude, violent and so completely in contempt of his own court that he is nearly hanged at one point.
• Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment; while he may act like a buffoon, he could run intellectual rings around most of the people on this page. One of the book's longest chapters is dedicated soley to showing us how he nearly manages to get Raskolnikov to confess merely by talking him (and the reader) to death; it's easily one of the most amusing and gripping parts of the story.
• The Areas of My Expertise describes this under "Indiosyncrasies of the Great Detectives", including:
  • Miss Millicent McTeague, a Miss Marple parody who eats cats
  • Juno Dix, a Nero Wolfe parody who solves mysteries without ever leaving the bathtub
  • Inspector Franz Duvet-Perez, a Poirot parody who refuses to say exactly what country he is from, thus keeping everyone guessing.
  • Buddy Jimmy Smith, a Kid Detective who is the reincarnation of an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh
  • Brother Metrigon, a tenth-century monk and Brother Cadfael parody who believes he is actually a ninth-century monk
  • Sgt. Demonicus Rex, a Satanist
  • Dr. Kathleen DiPietro, a forensic examiner who wears her victim's skin, which is socially awkward at clubs and restaurants
  • Lord Miles Overstreet, a Lord Peter Wimsey parody who does not realize that he is his own nemesis, the mad Dr. Craig Kittles.
• The Millennium Trilogy- Lisbeth Salander is a nearly Ax Crazy Dark Action Girl with very few morals or social skills and a deep hatred of authority. She also happens to be an incredible hacker and investigator who can find out just about anything given enough time. A very dark example.
• Mark McHenry, the pilot from the Star Trek: New Frontier novels. He actively sleeps at his post, for one. But the best pilot there is. Backed up with alien super-powers of course.
• In The Hunt for Red October, the Dallas's sonarman Jones is described as eccentric even by navy standards, but is nevertheless very competent.
• The Avatar from The Religion War found the technical genius behind the Global Information Corporation by seeking out the angriest, loudest, rudest employee. His reasoning was simply that "anyone with lesser value would have been fired for that sort of behavior."
• In The Time Travelers Wife, despite going missing for days at a time and often being caught naked among the stacks, Henry is allowed to keep his job at the library because he is great at giving talks about obscure literary things. His co-workers were also hanging out to find out the real reason behind his odd behaviour.
• Rhino A. Ross (Yes, that's his actual legal name) from the John Birmingham books Without Warning and After America who at times refers to himself as if he were actually a rhino, has an unnatural fixation on his biceps (which "You don't get by patting kitty cats" and in the second book acquires and insists on wearing a Viking helmet. However he managed to achieve the rank of CPO in the U.S. Coast Guard, is a skilled radar and sonar operator and is every bit as dangerous in a fight as his namesake.
• Felix Hoenikker in Cats Cradle was considered an uncontrollable man by his colleagues. He ground the Manhattan Project to a halt because he decided to stop working on it and instead discover if turtles' spines buckle or contract when they draw their heads into their shells. However, he is an absolute genius, responsible (fictionally) for the creation of the atom bomb, and later Ice-9, a substance that causes the end of the world.
• In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Omnidisciplinary Scientist and vampire hunting expert Abraham Van Helsing has quite the disturbing sense of humor, but his friends still admire him.
• Miles Vorkosigan is a hyperactive, manic-depressive, possibly borderline schizophrenic midget. His own mother acknowledges that he's crazy. He once had three consecutive commanding officers thrown into the brig in adjacent cells. He spent ten years as the best covert operative ImpSec had, with a career that included stopping a Cetagandan invasion and enabling another nation to repel its Cetagandan occupiers after they had been invaded (A feat which involved once of the biggest POW breakouts in history). Then he became one of the Emperor's personal trouble-shooters.
• Buddenbrooks. Many of the teachers, who have peculiar ways of talking and such. Also, some other characters.
• Sydney Carton from A Tale of Two Cities. Even though he's an alcoholic, he's actually a very clever and observant lawyer, even when he's drunk. (During the court case in England, Carton notices that he looks a lot like the accused Darnay, rendering one of the witnesses' testimonies void, since it was primarily based on "I saw him here." He also notices that Lucie Manette is about to faint, even when he's staring at the ceiling. He does all this... while he "smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober.")
• In the early Dr. Seuss narrative The King's Stilts, the eponymous king is up every morning at five, multitasks handling important documents of state with bathing and breakfast, spends the actual working day personally supervising and inspecting every aspect of the kingdom's implausible flood protection system, and at five in the evening every day spends a good hour or so racing around the kingdom on bright red stilts. This is accepted with detached amusement by everyone except his Treacherous Advisor.
• Many of the squires in Dead Souls.
• Myrnin from Morganville Vampires. Claire makes a habit of explaining his outrageous outfits. He has fanged bunny slippers. Could be Obfuscating Insanity, maybe.
• In the Honor Harrington series of books, many of the emperors of the Andermani Empire count. Gustav Anderman I was a brilliant strategist and mercenary who believed he was the reincarnation of Frederick the Great and dressed like him. Gustav VI was quietly deposed after trying to make his prized rose bush chancellor, and was succeeded by Gustav VII, one of his sisters who had herself declared a man to stave off a nasty dynastic war between their male cousins. However, the family has a history of being fair and just monarchs who have slowly expanded their empire by rescuing planets in trouble.
  • Shannon Foraker. Few other officers could forget to use "proper revolutionary titles" as much as she does and expect not to get shot, but her reputation as a "tac witch" and plucky spirit keeps her own Political Officers looking the other way.
• Lieutenant T'Ryssa Chen, the contact specialist in the Star Trek: The Next Generation Relaunch novels. Even in the Mildly Military Starfleet, her lack of protocol stands out, expecially since she's a half-Vulcan who was raised and acts human. But she's a very good contact specialist.
• In the James Bond novel Moonraker, Hugo Drax has a flamboyant personality as a wealthy eccentric who is also a truly brilliant businessman, and Bond's perception of him in person does nothing to change that -- at least not at first.
  • The same book sees a rare look at M outside of the office, and it's not really an example, but Bond has difficulty imagining his boss, playing against the enemies of England "with a thousand live chessmen", at a card table that evening wearing his favorite bowtie.

Live Action TV

• Dollhouse's Topher borrows a Doll to play Laser Tag in the lobby on his birthday. (The craziness here is not so much that he would take advantage of a Doll - that much is pretty much to be expected in the Crapsack World of the show - but that he borrows her for playing games and nothing else. The implication is that he would otherwise be completely unable to find anyone who would want to spend his birthday with him.)
  • His counterpart in the Washington DC Dollhouse, Bennett, isn't quite as bad, only occasionally rolling off into rambling musings. Well, that and she's psychotic and driven by vengeful rage to hurt Caroline for perceived abandonment and the permanent disabling of her left arm.
• Detective Charlie Crews of NBC's Life who turned to zen Buddhist philosophy after his wrongful imprisonment. Or at least, "Zen-ish" philosophy. Imprisonment left him with a number of quirks, including a complete hatred of furniture, a love of fresh fruit and a slowness to grasp some modern-day technology (usually because it wasn't widespread before he went inside), and yet he keeps his job as a detective. It helps that he's given a certain amount of leeway because he was already wrongfully convicted.
  • Some of his quirks do get him into trouble. His habit of always having a knife on him is used to suggest that he is unstable and still suffering from a 'prison mentality'.
  • It is implied that for a while in prison he actually went insane and the quirks are actually a way for him to stay sane. He has a nasty reputation among prison guards even after they find out he was wrongfully convicted.
• Kuryu Kohei, the protagonist of the 2001-2002 Fuji Television series Hero, is almost literally a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He constantly wears aggressively casual clothes (the entire office mistakes him for a TV repairman on his first day on the job) while his colleagues wear suits, and he indiscriminately buys random items from the shopping channel. His quirks are overlooked however, partly because he is a cunning and successful prosecutor, but mostly because his co-workers are all subtly quirky too.
• In CSI at least half the cast is messed up in some way or another despite being generally competent at their job, but the title definitely goes to Hodges, who is so mentally unbalanced that not only would he never be allowed to work with law enforcement in any capacity in the real world, he probably wouldn't even be allowed outdoors without some kind of supervision. (In fact he was let go for his prior job for just such reasons.)
  • It sort of fell by the wayside, but in the beginning of the show, it was mentioned frequently that this was the night crew. Countless other TV shows kept up a running joke that there was a night shift, rarely seen, also rarely mentioned, but when it was, it was always as an explanation for something odd that had happened; something rearranged, left behind, anything bizarre or out-of-place-- it was the night shift that was responsible. Occasionally, a show would have an episode where a night crew member would join the day shift briefly, or a day shift member would work on the night crew, and usually this trope would play-- the night crew member would be quirky and hard to get along with, and the day people would gripe about him, and worry that they'd end up doing his work, but in the end, he'd turn out to be brilliant, much better at his job than the whole day crew combined. Or, the night crew were a bunch of brilliant misfits, who couldn't get along with anyone else, but made a great crew of themselves. CSI was an entire series of that episode.
  • Before Hodges came about, Grissom held the title, avoiding his paperwork by the plague (even to the detriment of his underlings), yet he was kept in position because he is Made Of Awesome.
• Denny Crane from Boston Legal. Made explicit (in a less humorous way than your usual Lampshade Hanging) in Boston Legal's more serious parent series The Practice, in which someone who'd worked with Denny assured Alan that "the plaque comes off his brain" when he's in the courtroom, and he becomes... well, Denny Crane.
  • In fact, nearly the entire main cast of Boston Legal, as well as LA Law.
• Chloe O'Brian on 24. ("I was inappropriately blunt, wasn't I? I do that a lot.")
• The grubby-looking, abrasive, paranoid ex-spy Adam in Northern Exposure was a world-class gourmet chef.
• John "The Biscuit" Cage in Ally McBeal. He was painfully shy, had facial and verbal tics (including shouting "Balls! Balls! Balls!"), routinely hung upside-down in his office like a bat to collect his thoughts, had a secret room installed in the office (the only entry to which was in a bathroom stall, by remote control), and harbored a thousand other ecentricities. Yet when he walked into court, or sat down at a conference table, and took a sip of water, everyone present knew that he was about to utterly demolish his opponent.
  • To a lesser extent, many of the other lawyers in the show. Ally has many brilliant legal maneuvers despite her hallucinations, Nelle is the firm's most productive associate and full of quirks involving a dreaded fear of frogs, and Mark Albert was ridiculously skilled at closing arguments, and was so obsessed with hygiene he had a dentist's chair installed in his office. Even Elaine is shown to be a genius inventor.
• Adrian Monk's obsessive-compulsiveness sometimes throws off other characters, but it is essential to his investigative abilities (as shown on the Flowers for Algernon Syndrome episode).
  • He's one example of a Bunny Ears Lawyer whose weird behaviour has caused him major troubles with employment: his condition became so severely exacerbated after his wife was murdered that he's no longer allowed on the police force, and in one episode he does a compulsion that causes him to accidentally delete important police information, so the commissioner revokes the license he needs to be a private consultant.
• Doctor Who: Is the Doctor in the house? Especially in his days acting as UNIT's scientific advisor... and wearing an anachronistic velvet jacket and a cape. Or a scarf long enough to touch both sides of the English Channel. Or a... whatever this is supposed to be.
  • Even in the relatively serious regenerations, the man saves the universe with psychic paper, a sonic screwdriver, and a time travelling police box.
  • Pretty much his behavior from day one; the First Doctor routinely abused Screw Politeness, I'm a Senior!, repeatedly tried to ditch his first companions Ian and Barbara on any planet that looked like Earth (he eventually grew fond of them) and kept flip-flopping between dangerously capable and dangerously senile.
• Is House even a doctor? Like Sherlock Holmes upon whom he was modeled, Dr. Gregory House definitely qualifies as a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He uses comatose patients for cupholders, watches sports with clinic patients, avoids seeing his own patients as long as possible, has a bedside manner akin to Lex Luthor when he finally does see them, refuses to wear a tie, plays with his gameboy/cane/ball while his patients code; and that not to mention his running commentary on Cuddy's boobs. And is a Jerkass every chance he gets, apparently for his own entertainment. This apparently improves his thinking processes. Lampshaded by Cuddy and Wilson in the episode Let Them Eat Cake:

Cuddy: Other doctors actually use their offices for crazy stuff like seeing patients. Not throwing a ball against the wall and calling it work. Wilson: It's his process. That ball saves lives.

• • Admittedly, his coworkers tend to overlook his quirks partially because House is such a brilliant doctor, but also in large part because eccentricity is the least of his problems.
  • Funny business about the tie, actually. In 2007, Britain's NHS has passed rules banning doctors from wearing long-sleeved shirts and ties in state-funded hospitals. The reason? Ties are worn daily but almost never washed, making them travelling petri dishes for hospital born-infections like MRSA. Perhaps House sees a way to flaunt convention and, incidently, save patient lives. A win-win!
  • Also Lampshaded in the episode Sex Kills (2x14), when guest star Greg Grunberg says, "I assume House is a great doctor. Because when you're that big a jerk, you're either great or unemployed," after settling their differences, albeit a bit aggressively. Granted, House had it coming for pulling a Manipulative Act on him.
  • Lampshaded even earlier on when Cuddy says, word by word, He's the best damn doctor we've ever had.
  • House himself has more or less admitted that he wants to be a Bunny Ears Doctor, having been inspired by a brilliant Japanese doctor whose family tree makes him a virtual outcast among his own staff members.
  • Cuddy mentions at one point that the hospital actually has an annual budget which is basically "House is getting sued" funds, the justification being that House, while being a complete asshole loose cannon, is such a damn good doctor that the hospital doesn't really care that he apparently is threatened legal action on a fairly regular basis. The reason? House is that damn good.
    • And just to drive it home, she points out that despite all his assholing and loose cannoning and blowing up MRI machines and smacking patients in the gut with his cane and all manner of other abuses... this fund is under budget. Meaning either the budget is huge, or House's brilliance and the fact that he saves lives means that his patients rarely resort to legal action.
• The main cast of NCIS is a ragtag lot that makes the casts of the various CSIs look downright normal. The most obvious case is Abby, the Perky Goth Lab Rat who talks to her lab machines and utterly ignores every dress code ever known to man, woman, or government bureaucracy, but the rest of the team is no less offbeat: Tony covers his considerable talents as an investigator and a leader by acting like an immature Jerk Jock Handsome Lech; Ziva, the Israelite who consistently mangles her English idioms and Drives Like Crazy, is actually a spy and assassin on loan from Mossad; Ducky talks to the corpses he autopsies (not that uncommon in Real Life) and turns every conversation into rambling stories about his Glory Days; and Gibbs seems to make it a personal mission in life to piss off anyone in authority over him... come to think of it, McGee, best selling author, computer nerd and online gamer, is the most normal member of the team.
  • Senior FBI agent and Gibbs's close friend Tobias Fornell sums it up neatly in the third season episode "Frame-Up."

Agent Sacks: "This guy is implicated in a homicide and he's making jokes!" Agent Fornell: "You've never worked with NCIS before, have you, Agent Sacks?"

• Most of the cast News Radio fits this description: for all their quirks, Jimmy James is an excellent businessman, Bill and Catherine are great announcers, Dave is a great news director, Lisa is great reporter, Joe is a great handyman and electrician, and, despite her laziness, Beth is about as good a secretary as the insane people around her could expect. Only Matthew can be said to be legitimately incompetent at his job. (Even then he's hyper competant at his real job as a Dentist, Radio is his passion he sucks at).
• Basically the core concept of Alphas. While a neurological mutation allows them amazing powers (reading EM signals, super-strength, amplified senses), it also gives them debilitating mental conditions (autism, severe temper, OCD respectively). They're technically employees of the Department of Defense, but are kept under the supervision of a psychiatrist. While they are extremely useful, "normal" people would have a hard time working side-by-side with them.
• Pick a Scrubs character. Any Scrubs character. And yet, they're all excellent doctors. Except for Dr Murphy, who is merely an excellent clinical pathologist on account of accidentally killing so many patients.
  • The Todd probably takes the biggest slice of the cake, thanks to his constant sexual comments and idiotic behavior, but Dr. Wen once said that Todd's straightforward thought process makes him a talented surgeon. In fact, for a long time he was actually better than Turk.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation had Reginald Barclay, played by Dwight Schultz, who was shy and insecure, had a tendency to stutter, was fearful of being transported, had a holo-addiction problem, and was a hypochondriac. He also saved some lives and the ship at least once. He returned as a recurring guest character in Star Trek: Voyager: his brilliance and scientific insight led to Starfleet finding and establish transgalactic communications with Voyager, though he remained as hopelessly neurotic as ever (initially, the stress of the project and his sympathy for the stranded crew actually made him worse).
• H.M. "Howlin' Mad" Murdock from The A-Team fits this trope to a T. Completely and totally mentally unbalanced, prone to assuming make-believe identities and over-personifying objects and is just flat-out loony. Who happens to be a crack military pilot.
  • Although there's a lot of hints that Murdock is engaged in Obfuscating Insanity when it comes to the authorities and annoying BA when with the team. And like Barclay, he's also played by Dwight Schultz. The man excels at this type of character...
    • The fact that it is rumored he fakes it, and can be serious without a hint of insanity (see the first season finale as an example) makes it even more awesome.
• Captains Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John McIntyre on MASH are never in uniform, chase the nurses, drink to excess, gamble, and use medical equipment to prank others. On the TV series, the early years would be filled with episodes where Generals and Colonels would appear at the 4077 and be appalled at their behavior yet refused to charge them because they were the best doctors around. Occasionally they really are Bunny Ears Surgeons, dressing in crazy outfits to make patients laugh in post-op.
  • From Real Life: Battlefield surgeons were often able to get away with anything short of treason because if you brought them up on charges they would be taken out of the O.R., with no guarantee of a replacement. (It goes for other medical staff, too/)
    • Even more so in the movie version, in which they tend to be more Jerkass.
  • A rare example of this trope working against someone would be Klinger, who is willing to do anything to get out of the army short of shirking his duty. Unfortunately for him, that's all the army really cares about, so he never does get his discharge.
• Don Konkey of Dirt is a functioning schizophrenic with a tendency to skip his meds, but it doesn't stop him from being a very talented photographer, and might at times be seen as an asset, as it results in a reckless disregard for his own safety which makes him willing to go to frankly insane lengths in order to get a difficult shot. Would've gone Ax Crazy at the end of the first season if he had listened to his hallucinations.
• Biochemist Bob Melkinov of Canadian hard-scifi show Regenesis is socially awkward due to his Aspergers syndrome, but his off-the-charts IQ and wiki-like brain more than make up for it. An arc where he was considering leaving to work for a perfume company revealed that he also has an extremely well-honed sense of smell.
• The titular character of Eli Stone has the potential to be a partially (or even fully) literal Bunny Ears Lawyer, if the writers would stop making him the Butt Monkey of his own show.
• CSI: Miami features Alexx, The Coroner who refers to all of her corpses as "baby". A minor quirk compared to most.
• John Amsterdam of New Amsterdam has lived for over 400 years, but no one on the police force he works with knows. Because, every so often, a case is solved because, say, Amsterdam knows a underground club because it was a speakeasy during Prohibition, everyone treats him like a Bunny Ears Lawyer who thinks he's 400 years old.
• Geoffrey Tennant from Slings and Arrows, who argues with his Spirit Advisor in public, stores chocolate in the skull of his predecessor, challenges one of his colleagues to a duel, habitually asks his secretary for black coffee with cream and sugar, chews on a razor blade during his rehearsals and meetings, and spends the better part of a season living in a storage closet. He's also a brilliant theatrical director.
  • Anna is not Geoffrey's (or anybody else's) secretary; she's the executive assistant director of the festival. She just kind of gets treated like a secretary a lot of the time.
• Neatly subverted on This Is Wonderland, where no quirk is harmless. One mild example, Elliot Sacks, started out with long hair and a mildly scruffy appearance, but later went through an identity crisis that had him coming to work dressed in a different style every day. Apparently the only person who could get away with that sort of behaviour was Judge Maxwell Frasier, who wore running shoes into court, loudly complained of boredom and hunger, sang while other people were talking, and would occasionally scream.

It's just a little venting.

• Sam Tyler of Life On Mars frequently looks this way to his 1973 co-workers; the real bunny ears have to be awarded to Alex Drake of Ashes to Ashes, whose firm belief that she's actually trapped inside her own subconscious causes her to be, um, less than restrained in her behaviour- as, for example, openly referring to people as "imaginary constructs," to their faces. The most prominent aversion from both these shows is Detective Gene Hunt. He's a borderline alcoholic who frequently abuses suspects and witnesses both physically and verbally. Why does he get away with it? Well, aside from the fact that he's a bloody good copper, it's also more commonly accepted in the time period.
• Dwight Schrute from The Office.
  • Perhaps even moreso considering his position, Michael Scott -- it's only his prodigious talent as a salesman that keeps him from being fired by Dunder Mifflin.
• Let's get it out of the way: it was stolen from his Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger counterpart, yes, but the thinking position of Power Rangers SPD's Bridge Carson (namely, standing on his head) is nice and quirky. "A-Bridged" is an episode all about Bridge using his quirkiness to solve the day's crime.
  • That's the most normal thing Bridge does. Bridge sniffs people's dogs, wears high heels when a case calls for it, enjoys watching female cadets read from inches away, is obsessed with buttery toast, completely avoids his roommate's best frend for no apparent reason (in fairness, the friend was evil and Bridge is psychic), rambles incoherently, and is terrified of everything. Then again, he also ID'd a perp by her shoes, helped a friend rebuild an obsolete robot into armor, and manipulated a minor villain into giving up a larger villain by threatening to promote the guy's business. The latter is amazing because Bridge lacks any social graces whatsoever.
  • Just to emphasise this point, by the time of the 15th Anniversary Crossover, Bridge is SPD Red Ranger and field leader of the team.
• Played with in Psych; Shawn Spencer's psychic abilities lead him to indulge in some fairly odd and eccentric behaviour, but almost everyone overlooks it because his visions are nearly always entirely accurate and always help solve the case... except, of course, Shawn isn't psychic at all; he's just highly observant, but he enjoys playing up the psychic thing, partly because it does let him get away with doing things that under other circumstances he'd be frowned on (or even arrested) for doing. Of course, he also greatly enjoys the attention as well.
  • Beyond the need for attention, he shows numerous Genius Ditz tendancies and held literally dozens of jobs within a few years before the start of the show, suggesting an inability to fit in normally in society. Generally speaking, his hyper-observance and ability to come up with a seemingly-insane theory in spite of blatantly obvious (usually fake) evidence allows him to pass off his act as psychic, with Gus, Jules, or his father playing the straight man to explain more mundane things to him. Bad things almost always happen when he does anything on his own.
  • Detective Lassiter also has elements of this, being that he fancies himself a sort of action hero and has had multiple "incidents" that has had him banned from going undercover. But he is also one of the best detectives on the force with an impressive detective exam grade.
• Walter Bishop of Fringe is released from the loony bin when events similar to the experiments that sent him there start showing up. He's still very intelligent and remembers everything about his work, but his time behind bars had some adverse effects: his first act upon being freed is to wet his pants, he obsesses over various foods he hasn't eaten since being locked up, and he constantly forgets the name or even the entire existence of another member of the team.
• Penelope Garcia of Criminal Minds talks two hundred miles an hour, plays MMORPGs at the office, gets hysterical when people interfere with her workspace, regularly answers the phone with lines like "talk dirty to me," and is accustomed to wearing elaborate hairdos and cleavagey tops (both in colors not normally found in nature) to work at the FBI. She's the resident computer supergenius.
  • Technically, the FBI hired her because she's one of the most dangerous hackers in the world. In "Penelope", we learn that she joined the FBI rather than go to prison.
  • She also has at least once worn cat ears to work. She's a cat ears hacker!
  • Her key skill is her ability to create search programs that sift through massive databases and correlate the information into something the agents can use to catch the killers. With a few hints she can reduce the suspect pool from millions to just dozens.
• Dr. Jacob Hood, the Omnidisciplinary Scientist on Eleventh Hour. He doesn't have any one bunny ears quirk, but he does act quite oddly, melting someone's watch on a hot plate and then dipping it ice cream, entering a school building (not covertly) through the ventilation system instead of the doors, and so on. He always has some valid exploratory or demonstrative reason for doing these things, but it never occurs to him to explain before hand. Also, his eccentricities were sufficient for the FBI to assign him a handler at all times, and it has been implied that several of his previous handlers quit in exasperation.
• Most of the cast of Pizza and Swift and Shift Couriers would be Bunny Ears Lawyers... except that they're all amazingly terrible at their jobs.
• Sons of Anarchy has an episode centered around the protection of a corrupt accountant who Knows Where The Money Is Hidden, after he completes his jail term where he developed a compulsive tic: unconscious masturbation. The character (Chuck Marstein) has his problem "cured" by a rival gang leader who amputates all but his forefingers. The Sons take him in to prevent his death, which winds up saving their season-long Xanatos Gambit when Chuck comes through in a big way for the club in the third-season finale.
  • One of the Sons is a professional Elvis impersonator which seems seriously out of place in an outlaw biker gang. He is also a stone cold killer.
  • Lincoln Potter, the Assistent U.S. Attorney who's investigating the Sons, shows definite signs of this.
• Patrick Jane of The Mentalist. He enjoys playing mind games with coworkers and suspects alike, whether or not this will actually get results towards solving the crime, and a lot of his more outrageous stunts are inadmissible as evidence. But the CBI keeps him around because he does always manage to catch the culprit.
  • In fact, after Lisbon's previous boss resigns, her new boss tells her outright that Patrick Jane will never get canned or prosecuted for his shenanigans. Lisbon will. Thus, it's in her best interest to keep Jane in line.
• Basically the entire cast of The West Wing, all of them being absurdly smart and well qualified that they are forgiven a little eccentricity in how they do their jobs.
  • Lord John Marbury defines this trope. He is eccentric to the point of being unstable, constantly refers to Leo as "Gerald" and possesses little social grace or decorum around anyone, with the possible exception of The President and even he isn't immune. Despite this, he is a Brilliant consultant and easily one of the smartest characters on the show, possessing a very keen insight into complex issues and always acting in the best interest of Britain and America.
• All of the members of Torchwood Three on Torchwood. Jack's a pansexual from the future and can't die, Toshiko's a shy technical expert who just happens to cover up murders for a living and has a horrible case of the Cartwright Curse, Ianto makes the coffee, uses a stun-gun and has a Cyberwoman hiding in the basement, Owen's an abrasive medic who is just as handy at giving bullet wounds as healing them and Gwen's an ex-policewoman who is, on occasion, just a bit too idealistic. That said, most of the time, they do a decent job of saving the planet (although it was often their fault in the first place).
• Benton Fraser on Due South has conversations with his deaf wolf-dog and his father's ghost, runs around Chicago in his red serge dress uniform, and analyses evidence by licking it, among other quirks. He is, however, a very effective crimefighter.
• Larry Fleinhardt from Numb3rs is a highly eccentric scientist who, among other quirks, only eats white food, and once gave up all his possessions and spent several months in a monastery. However, since the latter came about after he got to go into space, he's clearly qualified enough to act however the hell he wants.
• LAPD Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson of The Closer had her boyfriend move back out to avoid the fallout with her mom, is constantly breaking off dates to work on a case, is quite possibly the most insecure character on network television, will cheerfully lie to suspects, is generally caustic to anyone she doesn't like, and never takes no for an answer. She is also a brilliant detective who manages to close virtually every case to come her way... hence the show title. Chief Pope sums it up:

Pope: I'm sorry, she sometimes forgets there are other people. In... the world.

• Pretty much all the squints on Bones are utterly brilliant but quirky. Brennan and Zack are the smartest people on the show, but extremely people dumb; Hodgins is a conspiracy theorist, and Angela is kind of a nympho. Even Booth likes to jazz up his serious FBI-ness with wacky belt buckles and crazy socks.
  • Don't forget the interns, from random-fact-spouting Mr. Nigel-Murray to emo-tastic Colin Fisher. They even throw in an intern whose quirk is that he is constantly horrified by the quirks of the other squints.
• Agent Dale Cooper, in Twin Peaks, combines wide-eyed innocence and purity of heart with an array of highly unusual investigation techniques and an openness to the supernatural that makes Fox Mulder look like a hardened skeptic. Of course, from the other agents we see in the series, the entire FBI seems to be made up of people like this.
• The X-Files' Mulder himself believes in alien abductions and every other wacky paranormal theory under the sun except the respectable ones, and refuses to shut up or censor himself to make people comfortable. He's such a joke to his peers and headache to his superiors that he is hidden away in the basement at all times. Yet he is kept around, partly because he has some powerful friends and a very competent partner covering for him, but mostly just because he is the most brilliant profiler the FBI has.
• FBI Special Agent Frank Lundy from Dexter is a chipper and quirky man, who does things like stopping what he's doing at one o'clock exactly every day to have lunch, spending hours looking over evidence while going through various types of music to try and find the type which will put him into the right state of mind to figure out clues, and telling his task force that he'll probably make several food-related metaphors because he "likes food". He is also a legendary investigator who has a reputation for catching serial killers in cases which were considered unsolvable, who comes just short of determining the identity of the Bay Harbour Butcher.
  • Lundy has some quirks but it's not that prominent in general. Dexter's colleague Vince Masuka and his constant dirty talk, on the other hand, stand in sharp contrast. However, people don't tend to ignore it. They constantly complain until he cuts it and they miss his Bunny Ears Lawyer self.
  • Dexter himself is an excellent and meticulous blood spatter technician who spends his spare time as a serial killer.
• In Tomica Hero Rescue Force Eiji Ishiguro is the most stoic, silent, by the book character in the whole series. When he "Builds up" into R5 he becomes a Hot-Blooded Large Ham who ... you know what, just Watch the clip it'll explain it a lot better than I ever could.
• River Tam from Firefly is insane and a little knife-happy at times. Half of the reason she has a bunk on the good ship Serenity is Mal's tendency toward Honor Before Reason, but the other half is because of those exceptionally useful Psychic Powers she has.
  • Simon's upper-class core-world behaviour is a symbol of the very people Mal and Zoe fought bitterly against during the War. Mal mainly lets him stay out of a sense of honor, but he really puts up with Simon's posh mannerisms because Simon's actually a very good doctor but still willing to serve as the ship's physician for a gang of thieves on the run.
  • Wash plays with toy dinosaurs in the cockpit, is roughly as useful as a chocolate hammer in a straight-out fight, and doesn't even pretend that his Hot Amazon wife is the one wearing the pants in their relationship. He's however an excellent pilot, and with a single exception never gets in the way of his wife going off to be awesome.
• In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron has her... quirks. Some of them being homicidal rampages. However, she's just too damn useful - being the only one among the Connors' group who can go toe-to-toe with a Terminator.
• Bob Pinciotti from That 70s Show. A cheerful, dim-witted, somewhat immature man who is completely hopeless when it comes to taking care of himself, has the worst fashion sense of anyone on the show, and is given to try some strange quirks alongside his wife Midge (among them nudist and wife-swapping parties). He's also an incredible businessman, owning at least 2 establishments of his own over the course of the series and well-known to be a rather wealthy bastard throughout it. It's also worth noting that while both businesses eventually went under, it was due entirely to big businesses coming in and robbing him of all his customers with prices he couldn't hope to compete with (specifically noting that Price-Mart sold microwaves for less that what Bob had to pay them for from manufacturers).
• Parker from Leverage. Possibly the best thief on the planet but she has...quirks. Enough so that she spent an entire scene dressed as a nun and nobody asked her why because they figured that either it was part of a scam or her just being herself.
• Mad Men:
  • Bert Cooper, the elderly co-founder of the Sterling Cooper ad agency. He's a Japanophile who insists on having everyone remove their shoes on entering his office, fires secretaries and then forgets he did so, rhapsodizes about Ayn Rand, and congratulates employees on non-existent birthdays. But he also got where he was with a keen entrepreneurial sense, comes in to the office alone in the middle of the night to personally handle urgent business, and recognizes and rewards good work and loyalty. He also doesn't wear shoes even outside his office. He once fired a secretary because he thought she spat chewing gum onto the floor which got stuck on his socks, making him actually furious. Also, he popped in and said "Happy birthday" to Harry Crane - when they were holding a baby shower for him.
  • Don Draper just walks out of a business trip and disappears for about a month, somehow he holds onto both his job and his marriage (at least for another season) when he gets back. That's in addition to his regularly insulting of both clients and pretty much everyone who works at Sterling Cooper -- he's just so good at what he does that he gets away with it.
  • Subverted with Michael Ginsberg, who hadn't yet earned the right to get away with his eccentricities. Despite adoring his portfolio, Peggy almost refuses to hire him because of his total lack of professional behavior during his job interview. Don comes within a hair's breadth of firing him after he sells a company on a different, unapproved idea while thinking out loud during a client meeting -- a fact which Ginsberg not only doesn't realize, but even chooses to ignore when Ken points out how angry Don was.
• Comical, ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) on Breaking Bad, despite his goofy demeanor, also happens to be an expert in helping drug dealers get off the hook, with extensive connections in the criminal underworld. He manages to find Walter a lookalike willing to get arrested in his place, and sets up a meeting between Walter and an extremely secretive drug lord.
• The Soup Nazi on Seinfeld. He treats his customers ridiculously harshly, but his soup is so good they willingly submit to his regime rather than go without it, thus his business is safe. (At least until Elaine steals his recipes.)
  • Loosely based on true events, mind you.
  • Don't ever call the real one a "Soup Nazi", though; he's Jewish.
  • A more literal example would be Frank Costanza's lawyer, whom just happens to wear a cape, and prevents a woman from jumping off of a bridge at the end of the episode.
• Battlestar Galactica Reimagined. Dr. Baltar is always twitching and rambling on to himself as if he's interacting with an invisible person, but no-one gives him more than a funny look because he's a recognised genius and their Cylon expert -- it's not as if he has a Cylon in his head or something. A more straight-up example would be Starbuck, whose flagrant insubordination and conduct unbecoming is only tolerated because she's such a hotshot pilot.
  • Well, that and the series premise. When the human race has been reduced to 50,000 individuals and the enemy can respawn indefinitely, throwing away a talented Jerkass or Cloudcuckoolander is less of an option.
  • Starbuck is a heavy drinker and has serious anger management issues, which results in her punching her executive officer on one occasion. Still, she is kept flying due to her being so damn good at it... when she's not too drunk or hung over for it.
  • It may help that she has strong ties with the Adama family though. And that the good commander seems to have somewhat fatherly feelings for her.
  • For that matter, Baltar's actual lawyer at the end of season 3, Romo Lampkin, is a kleptomaniac who wears sunglasses for almost an entire season and carries his ex-wife's cat around in a bag. He's also an amazing lawyer.
• Arguably all three presenters on Top Gear, but the best case can be made for their masked, perpetually silent, possibly non-human "tame racing driver," The Stig.
• The main character of Drop Dead Diva comes off as being a bit eccentric due to her secretly being someone else dropped into her current body, but with the old inhabitant's brains and her ingenuity, she's a good lawyer. At one point, she actually wears a pair of bunny ears while making closing arguments.
• Pretty much everyone in Eureka but two people stand out in particular.
  • Crazy Survivalist Jim Taggart who spends most of his time hunting an apparently hyper-intelligent stray dog named Lowjack (whom he maintains is "evil-incarnate"), but is one of the best zoologists in the world.
  • Douglas Fargo, the man who put the Schmuck in Schmuck Bait. Though lacking in social skills and practical knowledge, as well as being a Sarah Michelle Gellar fanboy, he's proven more than once that he deserves to be in Eureka and is long established as the right-hand man of first Nathan Stark, then Allison Blake, the previous and current heads of Global Dynamics respectively.
    • After history is changed by them traveling to the past, Fargo finds himself the head of GD, although this is revealed to be because his grandfather, a prominent Eureka scientist in the old days, was never a Human Popsicle in this timeline and pulled strings to get Doug the position. It's the old version of Fargo who ends up turning the position into more than a Yes-Man job for the DoD. He also finds himself a girlfriend (played by Felicia Day) who's just as quirky and nerdy as him.
• The doctor who delivers Phoebe's babies on Friends is obsessed with Fonzie, brings him up constantly and insists on watching Happy Days every day, even if he's delivering a baby while doing so. He's also the head of the department and delivers triplets without a hitch.
• In the fourth season The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode "The Summit-Five Affair", U.N.C.L.E.-Northeast head Harry Beldon is pretty much set up as a Bunny Ears Lawyer. He's a flamboyant playboy who arrives at his Berlin headquarters garishly dressed, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, while drinking champagne with two beautiful women (at least one of whom is married, since Beldon tells her "remember me to your husband"). Something which is remarked on:

Illya Kuryakin: Hmmm. Harry Beldon... Everything a cautious, unobtrusive, successful secret agent shouldn't be, except he's successful.

• The entire staff of Veridian Dynamics on Better Off Ted, but especially Phil and Lem who are uttery unable to function outside of a laboratory setting but are impossibly brilliant. Veronica is also a sociopath who courtship with Mordor the Unforgiving (not Kevin!) involved things like slaughtering a goat.
• Big Bang Theory: averted by Sheldon Cooper. Despite being allegedly of the most brilliant scientific minds on the planet, he gets fired, is not requested to return (neither is hired by anyone else) and only manages to get his job back because his mother seduced his boss. Most telling, the people he calls friends can barely stand him and usually only go along with his plans because they'd literally never hear the end of it from him. He's constantly having to defend his behavior to his boss, and usually ends having to back down because he knows his boss will be all to happy to fire him again.
• Judge Stone from Night Court. Ironically enough, with all his wacky co-workers & clientele, he often comes off as the Only Sane Man, despite his own undeniable quirks.
• Glee's Brittany Pierce is dumber than a jar of mayonnaise, "thinks the square root of four is rainbows", once took cold medicine and forgot how to leave a room, and still believes in Santa Claus . . . but get the girl on a dance floor and prepare to be blown away. She also has a peerless knowledge of feline illnesses, earning her a spot on the school's Academic Decathlon team.
  • Also, this trope in combination with desperation is the reason why they let Kurt join the football team, even though he's Camp Gay, hated and bullied by the football team and almost everyone else, and can't do it unless he get's to listen to his music meanwhile. The team has had bad enough of a year that, when Kurt shows up, claiming to be auditioning for the role of kicker and actually pulls it off, the coach is more than happy to have him on the team.

Coach Tanaka: Can you do that, with the game on the line and ten gorillas bearing down on you, wanting nothing more than to taste your sweet virgin blood?" Kurt: Sounds like fun. Can I have my music? Coach Tanaka: If you kick like that you can wear a tutu for all I care!

• • Sue Sylvester may also qualify; she's Crazy Awesome and possibly Ax Crazy as well under the right circumstances, but she genuinely is a world-class champion cheerleading coach who brings in Nationals tropies by the bucketload - and funding to her cash-strapped school - so she's generally allowed to go her length. Generally.
• Dr. Cal Lightman on Lie to Me. He sticks his nose into his team's personal business on a regular basis without hesitation, he acts like a Jerkass to everyone (clients included), and has a fairly big ego. He's also brilliant at what he does. He never seems to miss a single flinch, even on random passerbys.
• Detective Dan Stark from The Good Guys is a fantastic 1981 cop turned Bunny Ears Lawyer due to not progressing with the times. Despite this, he still proves himself a fantastic, if unorthodox cop, uncovering and solving major crimes while handling minor ones. He even once managed to cuff himself to the pimp/murderer while being choked out from behind.
• Dr. Kylie Johnson on Mad TV is a 19-year-old doctor who would often never take her job seriously, doing things like wear belly shirts or play practical jokes. However, she is among the best in the medical field.
• The Carol Burnett Show: A literal example Played for Laughs.
• A poker player in Black Books is nick-named "mouse ears", and does in fact, wear huge novelty mouse ears while playing. One of the other players is apparently deaf and blind, but can still apparently play poker quite well.
• Doctor Martin Ellingham in Doc Martin is abrasive and arrogant, and generally unsociable. He had also developed a blood phobia, which caused him to have to give up his prestigious surgical practice and become the best damned GP (general practitioner) the village of Portwenn ever had.
• Ari Gold from Entourage. He yells racist homophobic sexist or just degrading insults to pretty much everyone but still (almost) always gets his way. Maybe averted in the end of Season 7.
• Law and Order UK has defense counsel Jason Peters, an obsessive-compulsive germophobe who's never lost a case.
  • The closest comparison to Jason Peters from the original Law and Order is Randall J. Dworken. He makes Jack work hard through a liberal use of tapdancing and oafish charm. Dworken is introduced by objecting to 'the people of the state of New York vs. his client' because he is certain that the twelve jurors seem reasonable people.
• Detective Zack Nichols from Law and Order: Criminal Intent is described as this (although not in so many words) by Captain Ross in his debut episode. As is typical of Jeff Goldblum characters, everything about him is a little bit off, and he once left the force for seven years to discover the meaning of life. Goren seems like he should be this, but his offputting quirks appear to make him a more effective interrogator, which puts him closer to Crazy Awesome.
• Judge Mike "The Hammer" Reardon from Justified. Man wears little more than a Speedo -- and shoulder-holstered .38 -- under his judicial robes, and spends his off hours in hot pursuit of hard liquor and loose women. But once court is in session, he's a Hanging Judge who regularly throws, not just the book, but the entire damn Lexington (KY) Public Library, at the guilty.
• Supernatural has Dean, he of the frequent hitting-on girls, affection for junk food, and daddy issues, and Sam, Dean's brother, who has daddy issues, mommy issues, and isn't exactly the most delicate under the covers. They hunt monsters and pal around with an angel with his own set of quirks. In fact, just about every main or recurring on the show has their own set of traits; even Death has an odd affection for cheap food.
• Dorothy in Golden Girls once dated a lawyer who wanted to retire from law and become a circus clown. He was very serious about this. When the Girls got in trouble over an environmental protest, the lawyer comes to their rescue -- wearing part of his clown costume.
• Dr. Geiger from Chicago Hope had some quirky habits of playing music in the operating room, dealing with stress by taking off his pants and playing with trains in his office, and just generally being a strange person who was not very easy to get along with. But he was also a brilliant heart surgeon, so people were willing to put up with it.
• Necessary Roughness centers on a therapist who helps professional athletes and other celebreties whose quirks have started to affect their job to the point that they cannot get away with it anymore. Often enough they have serious problems that were overlooked specificly because they were so good at their profession that people just accepted them as eccentrics and did not seek help for them.
• Kougami from Kamen Rider OOO. He's a Large Ham who has an obcession with birthdays and seems to spend more of his time baking cakes than running his massive company...and yet is a heroic Chessmaster and Manipulative Bastard who managed to Out Gambit a living embodiment of human Greeed and is pretty much the Big Good of the series. His company has invented hundreds of devices that help Kamen Rider OOO out in his battle with the Greeed and he pretty much knows everything about the Greeed and the events of 800 years ago.
• Shotaro Hidari from Kamen Rider W the year before also counts; he's apparently obsessed with living the 'hard-boiled' '50s noir way, yet is good enough as a private investigator that his Friend on the Force lets him have full leeway with every case.
• Implied with Frasier and Niles Crane from Frasier: they're both ridiculously neurotic, eccentric, and have personal lives so screwed-up and behavioral tics so shocking that if you'd never met them, you'd wonder why anyone would consent to get therapy from such colorful characters (Frasier, among other breakdowns, once spent several hours on a ledge above Cheers threatening to kill himself after his wife left him, while ranting about her affair at the crowd below; while Niles once had a Heroic BSOD and stripped stark naked in the middle of Cafe Nervosa after enduring several sleepless nights of constant media hounding and Disaster Dominoes when his ex-wife was arrested for a sensational homicide). The answer, of course, is that they're both absolutely brilliant psychiatrists (and they demonstrate it in nearly every episode too -- it's not an Informed Ability), mentioned to be among the best in the American northwest, enough to retain their respected standing in Seattle's high society despite their general insanity.
• The civilian crew of Primeval. As Lester explained to Becker:

Lester: You will be dealing with a highly strung and temperamental team of rank amateurs who just happen to be brilliant at what they do.

• Jeff & Lester of Chuck are stated by the title character to be better than the CIA's best computer experts, if they're focused. The kicker? Lester's a somewhat sociopathic egomaniac, and Jeff (At least for the first four seasons, before recovering from carbon monoxide poisoning) is the show's resident Cloudcuckoolander.
• Dr. Mark Sloan in Diagnosis Murder occasionally made his rounds on rollerskates, made latex gloves into balloons, seemed to take pleasure in driving hospital administrator Norman Briggs into apoplexy and generally acted, well, like a character played by Dick Van Dyke. He's also a brilliant surgeon and diagnostician, and frequent consultant to the police department.
• Richard Castle is a bestselling writer who helps a homicide squad out with their investigations. One of the things he brings to the table is Connections. Another is money to throw at certain problems, including buying a high-end cappuccino machine. The third, and most important, would be his unusual perspective on the cases, compared to the three cops. He comes up with crazy theories all the time, and they are occasionally proved right. One scene had him explaining his latest wacky idea to Beckett, then instead of rejecting him, she admits she can't come up with anything better.
• Colonel John Sheppard of Stargate Atlantis, for the most part, is a laid-back guy who would rather play with all the cool toys and enjoy the perks of being in another galaxy. He's also an Ace Pilot Colonel Badass who can kick forty different kinds of ass when the safety and lives of Atlantis come under fire, often proving why the position of the military commander of Atlantis rightfully belongs to him.
• Jack O'Neill basically paved the way for Sheppard, as Jack's fought off multiple invasions of Earth from the Go'auld and still finds the time for a fishing trip.

Professional Wrestling

• Eugene, WWE's resident "special" wrestler, started out as a Professional Wrestling Idiot Savant who, despite his mental handicaps, was an excellent ring technician. Faces lined up to be his friend thanks to his simple, childlike demeanor and his kicking a lot of ass, and heels lined up to manipulate him to their own ends, thanks to... his simple, childlike demeanor and his kicking a lot of ass. Unfortunately, he eventually got Flanderized and became a Jobber, and towards the end of his run served mostly as a way for heels to Kick the Dog.
• Jeff Hardy has been portrayed like this as well. He gyrates and dances his way to the ring, covers his arms and face in fluorescent paint, makes abstract paintings backstage, openly refers to his fans as freaks and misfits (in a good way, indicating that he's just as much one as them), and throws his body into his every attack with reckless abandon... and is a two-time WWE world heavyweight champion and six-time tag-team champ. Even better? He fits this trope in Real Life as well, as his real behavior is even more bizarre, and yet he was respected enough and loved by the fans enough during his WWE run that he was given all those title reigns.
  • Amy -Lita- Dumas wrote in her book how some one once told her that Jeff had bought a Bobcat, her first reaction was that he had acquired an actual wild animal as a pet; as opposed to the skid loader/earth moving equipment that he actually purchased. Even among his close friends he's 'off' enough that both were perfectly logical assumptions.

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40000's Adeptus Mechanicus are a sect of Mad Engineers who have the theology of a cult, even for things they fully understand.
  • In fact, the rigorously theological Imperium, in which any heresy against the God-Emperor is punishable by several of the more eccentric forms of violence, is propped up by the Mechanicus, who openly worship machines, and the Space Marine Chapters, who each have their own wacky and heretical Emperor Cult, but who's going to tell them to change?
    • For some reason, this is subverted with the Steel Snakes chapter of the Space Marines, who were mercilessly eradicated for their worship of the Emperor as an animal totem. One step too far out of dogma?
  • Some types of Ork also qualify. Burna Boyz are pyromaniacs carrying backpacks filled with promethium and willing to set their buddies on fire, but are useful in battle and for metal work. Weirdboyz have a habit of making heads explode, but their powers can be directed at their foes if they focus. Mad Dok Grotsnik performs surgery unorthodox even by Ork standards and often times his bionics will "mysteriously" explode if the owner annoys Grotsnik, but he saved the life of his tribe boss and is highly dangerous in battle.
  • Quite a few inquisitors tend to be rather... eccentric, to say the least. They can be rather affable at first glance, or maybe a bit weird depending on how radically they lean, but don't take that as a sign of weakness, or they will kill you on the spot, and that's just if you're lucky. Remember, these are the people who can eliminate entire planets at the snap of a finger, so...
  • The entire Space Wolves chapter of Space Marines. They've pretty much entirely discarded the rulebook, deviating wildly from the official code in terms of force organisation, tactical doctrine, career progression, personal grooming, and not occasionally turning into a gigantic berserk werewolf-thing, but have escaped official censure through a mixture of unerring loyalty to the Emperor and sheer badassery. There are plenty of other chapters that have their share of deviations, but most of them are extremely secretive about it. The Space Wolves don't even pretend to play by the rules.
• Any RPG with Flaws, such as Shadowrun or GURPS, makes it fairly easy to make this kind of character - if your DM will allow you to get away with flaws that are merely amusing rather than especially detrimental.
  • And even if detrimental, so long as they aren't specifically die based, you can probably change them to amusing in certain encounters if you play the cards right.
  • Shadowrun actually makes a point of saying the Awakened (anyone capable of using magic) are often even quirkier than other characters. Due to the rarity of magic-users, they are able to get away with things that would make anyone else unemployable. Just picking to come from a shamanic background may result in built-in personality issues even before you get around to inventing ones specific to your character.
• Rifts has the appropriately-named Crazies character class, a warrior with cybernetic brain implants that greatly enhances his physical prowess (and even grants limited Psychic Powers), at the cost of his mental stability.
  • There's also Dr. Desmond Bradford, head of the Coalition State's Lone Star facility. He nurses a serious God Complex, performs illegal and extremelly dangerous genetics experiments without batting an eye, has people killed whom he suspects know too much and even drops subtle hints that he was behind it, and flaunts his intellectual superiority at every opportunity. But he's also the only man smart enough to have figured out how to get the Lone Star Complex, a laboratory from before After the End, running, and continues to prove his brilliance time and again. To completely solidify his job security, he's a close childhood friend of Emperor Prosek's.

Video Games

• Kotomi in Clannad. Sure, she may be a little... out there... but she's also effortlessly among the top ten students for the entire country. And hey, everything makes sense for her how she does, and it works, right?
• Saints Row the Third: The Mayor of Steelport is often stated to be the only person capable of keeping a city of rampant gang violence, homicidal maniacs running wild and hosting game shows, and general insanity functioning with any kind of stability or sanity. He is also Burt Reynolds, and still loves going out and solving violent disputes personally
• Ace Attorney is filled with eccentric lawyers. Phoenix and Edgeworth love to do the finger-pointing thing, Franziska von Karma has her trusty whip, her father Manfred's nigh-ludicrous obsession with perfection (to the point of highlighting it by making his ATM PIN '0001' because he sees himself as number one - and citing this as evidence during a trial) and the Geordi LaForge-masked Godot can't go a single case without drinking exactly 17 cups of coffee a day (and gets away with calling himself undefeated - because this is his first case). Despite these quirks, they're all said to be the best at what they do. Case 5 of the original game introduces a plethora of eccentric police officers to join the scruffy, dim-but-loveable Dick Gumshoe, from klutzy rookie Mike Meekins to literal Cowboy Cop Jake Marshall.
  • No character here quite out-eccentrics the Judge, who is famously reliable in passing fair judgements in spite of being more than a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander who will misunderstand basically anything, to the point of Franziska's Xanatos Gambit of showing him an illegally-taken photo as vital evidence to make her case (evidence which could just as easily have been turned to Wright's favor) fails - because he just doesn't get the point she's coming across with. At all. Until the next year, when Phoenix successfully uses it in a related case.
  • The fourth game gives us Apollo Justice, who stays up until 5 in the morning doing voice training so that he can yell OBJECTION more impressively, carefully gels his hair every day in a way that makes it look like insect antennae, and gets the truth out of witnesses by using a bracelet that enables him to mentally zoom in on them and dramatically point out their nervous habits. Then there's Klavier Gavin, prosecutor and renowned rock musician, who peppers his speech with random German words and performs air guitar in the middle of trials. Spark Brushel is also worth a mention, being an investigative journalist who seems genuinely knowledgeable despite seemingly never listening to anything anyone tells him, eating far too many breath mints, and indulging in overly-complicated metaphors.
  • And in the fifth we have Shi-Long Lang, an Interpol officer who is really damn good at his job despite having an odd fascination with acting like a wolf, to the point of howling when upset.
  • One case in Justice For All shows us the Berry Big Circus, which is a circus of bunny-ears performers. There's the campy and effeminate magician Maximillion Galactica. We also have the ridiculously innocent animal tamer Regina. Then there's Moe the Clown who has a Motor Mouth and keeps laughing at his own (bad) jokes. But ventriloquist Benjamin Woodman probably takes the cake, his puppet Trilo Quist had his very own personality who keeps badmouthing Ben himself. When said puppet was taken away, he couldn't even form a single word.
  • The theme for talking to people without their own theme in Justice for All-on is actually called "Eccentric".
• Since Ghost Trick has the same developer, it's expected that it also has a few bunny ears. Inspector Cabanela stands out as a special investigator with a spotless record and intense ambition to climb his way to the top. He also dances everywhere he goes, including down the stairs.
• Excellen Browning from Super Robot Wars is a goofy, flirtatious woman who insists upon being called "Big Sister" rather than "Ensign", and has on more than one occasion donned a Playboy Bunny-style costume to raise her teammates' morale. She also happens to be an exceptional mecha pilot and an insanely good sniper, as well as part of one of the most respected and feared teams in the SRW universe.
  • Heck, this trope applies to most of the cast. Among the most dangerous pilots in the group are an amazingly talented mercenary and battleship captain who's convinced that his Paper-Thin Disguise has everyone in the world fooled, a German samurai with a penchant for In the Name of the Moon speeches, an Ascended Fanboy at the controls of the most dangerous war machine on Earth, and a 14-year-old girl in a maid costume. Don't forget the CO who ORDERED said 14-year-old girl to wear a maid outfit. And is apparently a butler, and dresses like one. Also, don't forget the amount of ex-enemy officers.
  • Sean Webley is just an old perv. Plus there's also the Inspectors - Aguija, Mekibos, Vigagi, Sikalog, and their real boss, Wendolo.
• Psychonauts gives us Milla, Sasha, and Ford. Milla appears to be mentally stuck in the 1960s, Sasha is a borderline emotionless stoic with an irrational hatred for tacky lamps and Ford is... well, special. Despite this, they form a crack team of psychic spies unparalleled to none.
  • Really, all the kids at the camp are this trope in training. They're all (presumably) going to grow up to be Psychonauts, and there's not a normal one among the entire bunch.
  • There's also a subversion or inversion of Crazy Awesome going on here as well, as the game is set on an Indian Burial Ground stated to mentally destabilize everybody in its vicinity. The sufficiently curious will discover that all of the kids (including the protagonist) have serious problems (many aren't far from homicidal or suicidal behavior), and that the adults may even have accumulated more (over their longer lives). Their competence, power, and control are the reason why they're Bunny Ears Lawyers: the available alternatives are far worse. As demonstrated by the game's plot.
    • Well actually, psiantium is supposed to make normal people crazy, but actually makes psychics' powers stronger. Which is why Ford can keep his mind together in the mine, but falls victim to his various personae elsewhere in the camp.
• Jodie Foster of Metal Wolf Chaos enjoys watching soldiers getting slaughtered by her boss's Humongous Mecha a little too much, and apparently spends her spare time wondering about how various buildings would look if they were destroyed, and somehow managed to become secretary to the President of the United States. Although considering what President Michael Wilson gets up to, Jodie probably looks like an icon of sanity by comparision.
• The Mission Control of Metal Gear Solid 3 contains an overtalkative genius physician who chatters endlessly about her favourite B-movies, a James Bond fanboy Major with an obsession with his own Britishness and a thing for the paranormal, and a brilliant technician who makes useless objects because they 'look cool' and considers a human catapault a valid weapons development project (and harbours a complex about being the only normal person there). In Portable Ops, they start a UFO club. But they are frightenly competent at throwing the entire world into a long and bitter war.
  • Hal Emmerich is a brilliant engineer who designed Metal Gear, and also happens to be a massive Otaku. Ocelot is a ridiculously superb marksman and the series' resident Magnificent Bastard who is also unhealthily obssessed with his revolvers and Big Boss. Even Snake himself, a formidable warrior by anyone's assessment, has his tendency for meaningless philosophical ramblings and a rather disturbing relationship with The Box(TM). It's also implied he loves trashy action movies and women's figure skating, he's a fan of dog-sledding, and one of the Japanese-only supplemental material guides revealed that his favourite food is blueberries.
    • Strangely, this does have a bit of an application to real life, as one could be a BEL before joining the service, or, alternatively, BEL quirks could surface as a coping mechanism for combat. Follow a group of rough and tumble soldiers around, say, US marines, or GS Gs, or IDF. You should be able to find at least one example of each unless their personalities really ARE that bland. Also, aside from women's figure skating (provided Snake's reasons are pure...) you could throw those at US Marines and it would stick to a good load of them. (though half the time they watch said movies just to MST the terrible physics and weapon usage.)
• Empress Sanaki of the Fire Emblem Tellius games is a Bunny Ears Royal. In Path of Radiance, most of her early interactions with the protagonists involve her jerking them around and forcing them to learn for themselves what's going on instead of just telling them what's up simply because she was bored. Three years later in the sequel, we see her commandeering the King of Kilvas to carry her onto the battlefield because she couldn't bear not knowing what was going on, then later learns that he's bound by a blood pact to the Begnion Senate--and that she can essentially free him from their control since her orders carry more weight than theirs do. And of course, when one of her most trusted aides turns out to be, well, not exactly evil but still responsible for all of the bad stuff that happened, she decides that his punishment is to be drowned in rancid butter.
• Double H from Beyond Good and Evil. On one hand, he has a tendency to quote things at random from his military training manual in an UNECESSARILY LOUD VOICE, he runs things over with his head and never takes off his armor because it makes him "feel manly", and he gets really worked up over hovercraft racing. On the other hand, he's the IRIS Network's best operative, he's good at following directions, and he's pretty tough in battle. Pey'j too--He's a Texan-accented anthropomorphic pig with a habit of swearing like a prospector, and he has an... erm... unusual special attack. He's also a brilliant inventor and engineer. And, you know, the all-mysterious and all-powerful leader of a rebel organization.
• The brilliant engineer Dr. Cid from Final Fantasy XII fits this troupe well--the Draklor Laboratory and the Archadian Empire as a whole manage to ignore his conversations with a not-so imaginary friend due to his skill at manufacturing airships and weapons with nethicite. Balthier, however, was not quite so tolerant.
• Elite Beat Agents. Just look at that hair... and those dance moves! Yet somehow, they managed to stop an alien invasion, prevent the Zombie Apocalypse, rescued a lost puppy, and fight off a virus.
• A good deal of the commanders in the Advance Wars series. A spectacular example is Javier, who wears plate armour all the time and acts like Don Quixote, and is a Boisterous Bruiser to awesome effect.
• The Dungeon Master noble in Dwarf Fortress is a talented animal trainer and metalsmith who permits your fortress to train a variety of creatures you usually can't. He or she tends to also wander around the fortress, naked except for a cloak, shoes, and gloves.
  • ...Actually, just about every dorf with valuable skills could qualify. The rest are just Too Dumb to Live Cloudcuckoolanders who don't mind the fact that their spouse just got eaten by mandrills because they saw a really nice floodgate recently.
• Tsukihime: Arcueid Brunestud. Ditzy blond. Clingy Jealous Girl. Keeps a doll of Shiki under her pillow and magically traps her underwear drawer. Ok maybe that one wasn't canon, but still, it IS like her. Also responsible for Shiki's rather infamous erotic dream. Oh, and she is the most powerful vampire in existence, capable of dragging around moons if she wants. Moons from the future. That she pulled from said future. Why? So red moonlight would splash on her opponent and render him killable. And she was at 30% power when she did that.
• The doctors in Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. They're recommended as exceptionally good doctors, and are shown to be at least reasonably competant, but their behaviour is decidedly odd, and their methods even more so.
• Pretty much all the teachers of Persona 3, from the homeroom teacher with an almost "L"-like addiction to sweets and to playing MMORPGs as a l33t-speaking alter ego, to the school nurse and his over-the-top obsession with mysticism, to the history teacher who always wears his Sengoku-era samurai helmet, to the math teacher who spends most of the class just gushing about the aesthetic beauty of numbers. They're all shown as very knowledgable, and they're all various shades of Cloudcuckoolander.
• It is strongly implied that a light-side Knights of the Old Republic or Knights Of The Old Republic 2 PC only tolerates HK-47's Ax Crazy discourse because he is the only thing that can translate the Tusken tongue and a rather capable warrior
• Minsc from the Baldur's Gate series. He's quite nuts, but when he talks about kicking butt, he knows what he's talking about.

Dynaheir: Minsc is, well, Minsc, but he hath a strong sword arm.

• • Also, none of the mages are exactly well-adjusted, with the possible exception of aforementioned Dynaheir. And even she speaks funny.
  • Kivan is also pretty quirky: he's reclusive and has attitude issues. But Kivan is also God and the game cannot be won to any kind of satisfaction without him. He's by far the best archer in the first game and his THACO defies all reason.
• In Mass Effect 2, this describes your entire crew with the exception of Jacob. Let's just say it's an extreme Dysfunction Junction in which everyone is one of the best people in the galaxy at what they do and leave it at that.
  • Thane seems overly contemplative for an assassin, but we learn that he has been recently diagnosed with a terminal disease, Miranda is pretty normal for a member of a shady organization aside from the Designer Baby Blues, Samara is a Scary Dogmatic Alien, Grunt is a Designer Baby Proud Warrior Race Guy, and Garrus is a level-minded realist. This leaves Jack and Mordin. The latter however takes this trope to its full extent.
  • Jack is an uber-powerful biotic who subjects anyone she meets either to a biotic blast or a Cluster F-Bomb. She mellows out as the story plays out and, by Mass Effect 3, is slightly more level-headed and even makes a great effort to avoid swearing (unless you happen to be Joker, also an example of this trope). Mordin is a brilliant scientist with a Motor Mouth and love for "Gilbert and Sullivan". By the third game, he's close to 40 (making him an old man by salarian standards) and thinks of retiring to a house on a beach. When Shepard points out that he'd get bored collecting seashells all day, Mordin points out that he'll run tests on the seashells. He then goes out with a bang while singing.
• The World Ends With You gives us Sho Minamimoto. A Mad Mathematician, who always speaks in mathamatical terms, makes junk heaps he calls 'art', and is very egotistical. However, he's one of the youngest Reaper Officers to become a Game Master, and excels in all areas of leadership - except cooperation. He's also one of the toughest buggers to beat in the game.
• Arguably every class in Team Fortress 2 fits this one way or another. Apart from all of them being mentally ill in some way, we have the Cold Sniper that keeps his urine in jars, the Husky Russkie that talks to his guns and The Unintelligible Pyro that never removes his/her full-body flame-retardant suit. However, they're very good at what they do and must be well worth their salaries.
• Agent Francis York Morgan ("Call me York. That's what everyone calls me") is an FBI investigator who we first see driving a car while working on his laptop and arguing on the phone with his superiors over inter-dependence issues in Tom and Jerry. He is also routinely late for appointments, rambles on endlessly about old movies and their directors when he's not cheerfully discussing grisly murders and serial rapists over dinner, and goes over his every action and decision with his imaginary friend, Zach. His methods of "investigating" consist less of actual forensic work and more of chain-smoking until he gains visions of the past, and seeing visions of the future in the milk he pours in his coffee every morning. Despite all this, he's an extremely competent detective who isn't at all shy over that fact.
• Infinite Space has a few, but Lord Roth and Thomas Veil stand out the most. Lord Roth is a rather childish man who enjoys his Chick Magnet status a little too much (and puts his aide, Nele, into a lot of troubles because of his quirks), yet he is one of Regeinland's top commanders. Meanwhile, Thomas is an agent of Federation Security Network directed by Brad Lennox and a good crew member for your navigational post... who happens to be a fan of young Idol Singers, almost to the point of being a Lolicon.
• Demon Prince Laharl from Disgaea is the heir to the throne of Netherworld, and he got some strange ideas as to what a King should do: If money is needed, it’s time to loot some noble’s mansion. Assassin love angels are potential recruits. Laughing evilly on a regular basis is a requirement. Ideal Overlord tasks are making it rain pepper so that the humans will sneeze their nostrils out or deprive children of their sleep by giving them addictive videogames. Heroes should not just be defeated; enslavement is the way to go. But he is very passionate and dutiful about the job, not to mention extremely powerful, so he gets it and does a good job all things considered. His vassel Etna has not dethroned him...yet.
• Mike Haggar from the Final Fight series, a professional wrestler turned mayor who deals with Metro City's gang problem by kicking all their asses without police assistance.
• Nero from Devil May Cry 4. Much of his jerkass attitude would've gotten him excommunicated from the Order a long time ago, such as a blue coat instead of their white uniform (although he does have their insgnia stitched on it), listening to his own theme song during prayer, and colorful mouth. However, he's very good at his job in the "dirtier" side of things, and is kosher with the idea of God (in fact, he out right states it near the end of the game) - he's just not all that fond of the church he works for.
• Kazuaki Nanaki, the quail teacher from Hatoful Boyfriend, is a scatterbrained narcoleptic who falls asleep mid-sentence while introducing himself to his students on the first day of class (and repeatedly throughout the game). He's also a world-renowned mathematician, and no slouch in physics and chemistry, either.
  • Oko San's obsession with pudding doesn't seem to interfere with his athletic performance any. He also seems to be able to pass classes at one of the most demanding private high schools in the world, despite being unable to speak in anything but subtitled coos, most of which are pop culture references and complaints about pudding quality.
• Katawa Shoujo has Rin Tezuka, a brilliant armless painter who gets away with smoking and multiple (lighter) violations of school rules.

• LittleBigPlanet 2 has Avalon who, despite being an Insufferable Genius, is an invaluable addition to the Alliance, due to his scientific expertise. Dr. Herbert Higginbotham also qualifies; he shows signs of senility, he speaks in rambling monologues... and is widely considered to be one of the greatest geniuses of all time.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, we have Grace, as shown in this strip.
  • And arguably, also Amanda as shown in this one.
  • The status of several characters as Bunny Ears Lawyers is Lampshaded here.
• A truly astounding example: Dr. McNinja. He's a doctor, and a ninja (and constantly masked, to boot). That alone should have been enough, as each profession is the bunny ears for the other. But he's also obsessed with Batman, not to mention just about everything else about him.
  • Dr. McNinja is self-employed. Judy, on the other hand, is a damn good receptionist and also a gorilla.
• Ekphobippe from Amazoness. A fearsome Hot Amazon with a long list of victories, she's also a clear parody of Sailor Moon. Her pink heart-shaped armor and In the Name of the Moon speech is described as "the dumbest and most awesome strategy I've ever seen".
• Danny Hua in Nukees is a sweet-tempered Cloudcuckoolander who can't follow most basic metaphors, is compulsively honest and has a phobia of speaking with contractions. He is also a brilliant nuclear engineer and one of the finest weapon designers in the world, being personally responsible for the creation of the Giant Robot Ant. There currently is a small contingent of groupies who have decided he is the Wise One for his incomprehensible, unintentionally profound-seeming speech quirks. He is also, according to author Darren Bleuel, based on a real friend of his, and there is a page full of quotes to prove it!
  • What about King Luca? He literally believes himself to be royalty, wears a crown and cloak, and routinely grants land, nobility, or knighthood to his followers. And he does have followers, because he's a wonderful physics tutor who singlehandedly helped many students pass their classes.
• Elan from Order of the Stick. The advantage? He's unbelievably Genre Savvy, such that he even sticks out in the No Fourth Wall world of the comic. The catch? He's a bard (and a poorly optimized one at that). Well, and a total moron. Then he Took a Level in Dashing Swordsman , so he's starting to balance out a tad.
  • Celia may also count, more literally than the other examples. Most of the time she's a Granola Girl whose fighting skills are negligible, and whose righteous ardor for small woodland critters, as well as the sanctity of life in general borders on infuriating, but get her in front of a lawsuit, or two conflicting parties in need of a settlement, and she is hard and cold business right away.
    • She's more of a fairy wings lawyer.
  • And Lord Shojo, who pretends to be senile in order to ward off assassination attempts, but was able to fool not only the paladins he controls, but also the entire Order of the Stick, despite not having any levels in a PC class.
• In Sluggy Freelance recruiting Bunny Ears Mad Scientists (but keeping them at a safe distance) is basically the whole point of the Hereti Corp freelancer program.
• Doug from Fletcher Apts. In high school, he was head of the Science Honor Society and #2 player in the chess club. In college, he's the vice president of the psychology club. Also, he's known for barfing easily and freaking out over female breasts.
• Taisei from Sakana is a very goodhearted, yet silly and naive person who gets drunk often and is a walking source of Ho Yay. He's also a successful assistent director for a pretty big company and the smartest man of the whole cast.
• Rayne Summers from Least I Could Do. Marcy McKean - Rayne's boss and CEO of the company - puts up with his Red Bull addiction, childlike behaviour, and non-existant attention span because he is genuinely good at his job.
  • Marcy says as much in this comic.
• Lampshaded by Hector in Antihero for Hire, but it is later revealed that one of the people he's talking about is... something quite different.
• When Mr. Mighty of Everyday Heroes needs a lawyer, he gets one who wears denim, rides a Harley, and looks like he escaped from the 1960's.
• Othar Tryggvassen of Girl Genius appears to be this. Despite his appearing mainly for comedic effect in the main strip, his adventures documented on his Twitter account as well as mention of him by pretty much every character other than Agatha are pretty clear on the fact that he's almost frighteningly competent.
  • Othar is a "Spark", and Sparks are the incarnation of this trope and Mad Scientist turned Up to Eleven. They're all highly competent geniuses and supergeniuses; and are all completely and totally barking mad.
• Collar 6: Sixx is the very successful owner of a chain of hotels, so no one really cares that she has a harem of hundreds of (willing) lesbian slave girls.
  • But, considering the background material on the world the author has recently been providing, this is not considered to be in any way unusual ... in fact, it's considered rather admirable.
• Blade Bunny is a bunny ears assassin. She seems to be using Obfuscating Bunnygirlness to put her targets off-guard. We hope.
• Darkly subverted in Jack. Doctor Thalmus thinks that developing a cure for cancer entitles him to molest children, even going so far as to hold the cure hostage when Aurthor finds out. No one else seems to agree with his viewpoint.
• MSF High. In a Beyond the Impossible example that counteracts Doctor McNinja...the entire staff. The sanest people are the Mad Scientist who is addicted to coffee, and the Vampire with a harem. Name a staff member who is not certifiably insane, and frighteningly competant.
• Sarabeth Phoenix of Wright As Rayne is the fairly serious head of both a company and a criminal group, but is big on anime and dyes her hair blue.
• James Stokoes' short gag comic SELFISH DOLPHIN SURGEON!
• Gatemaster of Survivor Fan Characters is a Cloudcuckoolander who considers his alliance a group of 'friends', and is perhaps one of the most competent strategists in the game, managing the orchestrate (through a combination of blind luck and coincidence), the final four of his choosing. And he does this without even realising he is in charge.
• Dubious Company's Walter. He is an Magitek engineering genius, with some notable quirks. His self-built airship runs on alcoholism. He's a good leader, but learned pirating from comicbooks. An expert on magical theory, but bounces in and out of an uneducated accent.

Web Originals

• This episode of SMBC Theater gives us a plumber with rock bottom prices, high skill and reliability, amazing punctuatlity ....and an insistence that customers watch him act like a plumber in a porno movie. Yes, both the male and female customers. When questioned, he will immediately say he is the best value in the city.
• Matthew from Critical Hit plays Torq, his Half Orc Fighter, like this. Out of combat, he is stupid, tends to blurt out inappropriate things and is described as having a constant vacant expression. However, he gets a + 11 to his attacks, and in combat becomes a whirling dervish with a giant axe.
• Bugs, a brilliant deviser and gadgeteer in the Whateley Universe. Her intense fascinations with rabbits, sparkles, and building things in egg shapes is completely accepted (usually) because she's just that darn good as an inventor. Oh, and she's the most gorgeous inventor at Super-Hero School Whateley Academy so she gets lots of slack.
• kitten (the lower case k is deliberate), a transexual goth who functions best when being led around on a leash by her boyfriend, spells her name with a lower case k and is a powerful teleporter psychic and the mainstay of the human invasion of Hell in The Salvation War.
• Most of the Teachers in AH Dot Com The Creepy Teen Years. The Gym Teacher from Hell is an especially good example. He's a Lunatic who loves to engage his students in games of tag and prefers to use Tanks and Rocket Launchers for it. Fortunately for everyone involved, It's usually on a Holodeck sort of thing.
• Brigadier General David Adams of Survival of the Fittest spin off The Program. His antics include spontaneously breaking into the American national anthem during an announcement (when he's supposed to be reeling off who died), making bizarre jokes, contradicting himself midsentence and thinking out loud (both also in announcements). For all that, The Program was his idea, and given the setting, there's no possible way he can be an incompetent leader or tactician.
• This Onion article is about a Bunny Ears SWAT team operative.
• Zack from Echo Chamber is stupid and weird, but he's good at his job.
• Most people in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe see the homeless, clearly schizophrenic "superhero" known as Mister Easter as this. (He's a deluded religious fanatic thinks he's been given a mission from God to fight evil, despite most of his powers being utterly useless in fighting crime... things like being able to turn water into wine, curing leprosy at a touch, and coming back from the dead after three days). But then New York City was invaded by an army of vampires, and suddenly Mister Easter turned into the hundred-megaton nuclear weapon of anti-vampire superheroes...

Western Animation

• SpongeBob SquarePants is known for being a Too Dumb to Live loud and hyperactive goofball, but his superhuman skills for making Krabby Patties keeps the entire Krabby Patty restaurant together, much to the chagrin of Squidward.
• Mayor Adam West from Family Guy is a subversion. He doesn't keep his job because he's so good at it. He only keeps his job because of corruption and the stupidity of the city's populace. It is often made very explicit he is quirky AND terrible at his job.
  • Glen Quagmire, who, despite being a raging Hypersexual, is an excellent pilot. The only time he was ever fired from his job was due to Peter's antics. Later that episode, he gets his job back after helping land a plane via Telecom.
  • Also Lois. She is very capable as a housewife and one of the most outspoken persons when it comes to Quahog's social issues and frequently involved in projects that benefits the towns youth. Yet at the same time, she has an incredibly long history of drug abuse and minor crimes and is a huge Covert Pervert.
• Major Johnny "The Mayor" Bledsoe from The Oblongs, the mayor of Hill Valley and a masked professional wrestler who never breaks character.
• Silverhawks, a sci-fi cartoon by the makers of Thundercats, has Colonel Bluegrass. Despite his rank, he looks, talks, dresses and acts like a stereotypical cowboy from the Wild West, but he's also an ace pilot described as being able to master anything that flies. If that wasn't strange enough, he's also a skilled guitar player, and is so fanatic about it that his futuristic guitar is not only a weapon, but actually integrates with the piloting mechanism for the Miraj, the team's spaceship.
• In Transformers, this is a type commonly found in the Decepticon ranks. From ace gunfighter/closet coward Slugslinger to preening victory obsessed egotist Drag Strip, many of the more stable Decepticons find themselves grudgingly accepting the obvious personality disorders around them because the people with them are among the most effective warriors.
  • In the case of Starscream, his quirk is that he wants to supplant Megatron. It is very much due to his superior skill that he is kept on as a Lieutenant, although later incarnations have Megatron far less patient with him.
  • The Autobots aren't devoid of quirky robots, either. For starters, we have Silverbolt, leader of the Aerialbots, who is afraid of heights... which is a bit of a problem when you and everyone in your combiner team turns into an airplane. Broadside, a triple changer who transforms into a jet and an aircraft carrier, is both acrophobic and prone to seasickness. Also among the heroic forces are the egotistical Sky Lynx, neat freak Wide Load, and Siren, who has No Indoor Voice, among others. And this is just in G1.
  • And then there's the Dinobots...
  • Rattrap from Beast Wars is often insubordinate, keeps complaining about his job and single-handedly gets on the nerves of every single one of the Maximals, IE his own side, especially Optimus Primal, IE his boss. Even though they're all stranded, the only reason he's not kicked out of the base to fend for himself alone in the wild against the Predacons is because his skills as a spy, infiltrator, sharpshooter and saboteur are absolutely unparallelled, to the point where when Optimus is gone, Rattrap's actually put in charge because he's just that good.
    • In fairness, the Maximals eventually learn to love Rattrap, who often makes fun of people as a sign of endearment. A much more straight example is Tarantulas, who is completely open to his boss Megatron that he hates him, is working against him, and hopes to destroy him. However, the vast majority of Megatron's other troops are idiots, while Tarantulas has scientific know-how that outclasses Megatron's own. Megatron needs Tarantulas and counts on the fact that when the time comes, he'll be able to outgambit him - he does.
    • Inferno is utterly insane, convinced Megatron is female, and really likes to set people on fire. Megatron mainly kept him around due to his loyalty and how good he was at, well, setting people on fire.
  • Transformers Animated isn't devoid of these either. Blitzwing has three personalities and regularly argues with himself. Lugnut is loyal to the point of fanaticism. Then there's the Starscream clones....
    • Optimus Prime's Five-Man Band in Animated is such a Dysfunction Junction it's a testament to Optimus' leadership that they manage to accomplish anything, let alone save Earth and Cybertron time and again. Ratchet, their Combat Medic, is a Shell-Shocked Veteran and Grumpy Old Man who is an ingenious field surgeon; Prowl, the robotic McNinja and lone wolf who is legitimately skilled and eventually masters the Mind Over Matter aspects of his cyber-ninja training; BumbleeBee, the hyperactive and immature bot that had several Let's Get Dangerous moments in the series that frequently result in a Crowning Moment of Awesome; Bulkhead, the hick from the countryside that Does Not Know His Own Strength and is the most brilliant Space Bridge engineer in the universe and an accomplished artist to a lesser extent; Optimus himself is the least eccentric and that's probably why Ultra Magnus put him in charge in the first place.
• How could anyone forget Georges Hautecourt from The Aristocats? Tarara-boum-di-ey!
• Wildcat from Tale Spin. When actually in touch with reality, he demonstrated MacGyver-level feats of improvisational engineering.
• Shore Leave of The Venture Brothers is a Camp Gay with a porn stache and a sailor's hat. He's also a former top agent of the OSI, a crack shot, and an overall ass kicker when he wants to be. BOOM, yummy!
• Kyösti Pöysti, the main character of Pasila, is a criminal detective who sucks on a pacifier.
• In Kung Fu Panda, Po starts out as a humorous bumbling glutton prone to extremely awkward moments. By the end of the first movie, and remaining so throughout the second, he becomes a Badass kung fu master capable of plowing through hordes of Mooks with ease and going toe-to-toe with other masters... and who is still a humorous bumbling glutton prone to extremely awkward moments.
• The few times that Dale Gribble of King of the Hill has been shown doing his exterminator job, he's really good at it.
  • Despite Bill's many flaws, he's one hell of a barber.
• In the early days of The Simpsons, Krusty The Clown was this. Everyone tolerated his Jerkass behaviour because he was considered a universally beloved entertainer on the level of Elvis Presley. In later, season, he's become a has-been whose popularity keeps sinking, and who's constantly at the risk of being fired by his network.
• Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: rude, crass, tomboyish, eminently egocentric, and prefers to spend her time either napping or practicing flying stunts rather than doing her weather management job - but she's one of the greatest flyers in Equestria, can perform moves other pegasi only dream of, can clear the skies in ten seconds flat, and is ultimately dependable to the point of being the literal embodiment of the Element of Loyalty.
  • Pinkie Pie is childish, intrusive, obnoxious and quite possibly insane, with an addiction to baked goods and a mania for throwing parties for any and all reasons, including "it's a day since we had our last party". On the other hand she is best friends with literally everyone in Ponyville, and she's willing to go to absurd lengths to make others happy. And her parties are always a success.
  • Ensemble darkpony Derpy Hooves is often depicted as one in fanworks. Despite being a spacecase/insane/retarded (pick your interpretation) with an obsession for muffins and a habit of emptying her best friend's fridge, she's an expert at mail delivery, a devoted mother who stops at nothing to keep her daughters safe and happy, and a dependable time-travelling companion to the Doctor. Canonically, she also attended both the Grand Galloping Gala and the royal wedding, and is seen among the Canterlot social elite wearing a pearl necklace and a paperbag on her head.
• A lot of KND operatives on Codename: Kids Next Door.

Real Life

• The late Bobby Fischer, chess master and notorious crackpot.
• 18th century physicist Henry Cavendish, who was and still is regarded with honour at Cambridge university and is most famous for his weighing of the Earth. He was an obsessive-compulsive who was so terrified of other people that he refused to attend any scientific conferences in the latter half of his life and could not communicate with anyone except by letter, including his own housekeeper. When ambushed by a reporter he fled down the street and had to be retrieved by his family. He would sometimes attend social gatherings, and sit very quietly in a corner, not talking to anyone. Anyone who wanted his insight into something were advised to "wander over as if by chance and talk, as it were, into a vacancy". If Cavendish felt so moved, he might deign to reply. Mostly, though, he just made an upset noise and fled.
  • He weighed the planet and determined its density using nothing but two iron balls and a system of pulleys IN A CAVE WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS. It took 100 years for anyone to improve on his figures.
• Very common among ice hockey goaltenders. Terry Sawchuk suffered from bouts of depression throughout his career, eventually dying from injuries resulting from an off-ice scuffle with a teammate. Patrick Roy talked to his net, and refused to skate over the blue lines that separated the defensive and neutral zones. Gilles Gratton, who wore a tiger themed mask, is reported to have hissed and growled at opposing players. An old expression among ice hockey players is, "He's normal... for a goalie."
  • It takes a special kind of person to put aside the logic of self-preservation and throw one's body in front of a hard disk pursued by very large men armed with sticks and low coefficients of friction. Very special.
• Likewise, pitchers in baseball. Bill "Spaceman" Lee and "Oil Can" Boyd are two prominent examples. Once, when Montreal Expos manager Buck Rodgers was asked if he knew about Pascual Perez's habit of talking to himself on the mound, he replied: "He also talks to the baseball, the resin bag, and planes passing overhead. I don't care, as long as he keeps getting outs".
• Mathematicians seem to be very prone to this:
  • Paul Erdős was famous not only for his intensely prolific mathematical career but also for his idiosyncratic vocabulary (children were "epsilons", women were "bosses", men were "slaves", the Soviet Union was "Joe" (Stalin?) and the US was "Sam" (Uncle?), etc.) and being helpless in day-to-day life to the point that fellow mathematician Ron Graham accompanied him a large amount, almost to the point of being his caretaker. For much of his life, he had no permanent home, and no possessions but a bag of clothes and some notebooks, but was so well respected that other mathematicians would let him stay over nearly anywhere he happened to travel. He also accused God of hiding his socks.
    • The amphetamines probably helped his eccentricities along; on the other hand, when he gave them up for thirty days on a bet, he claimed that the '...progress of mathematics had been set back by one month.'
    • He also had a skin condition that meant he could only wear silk, which his host had to wash for him. He did mathmatics twenty hours a day and would bang pans together when he wanted your attention, usually to do math in the middle of the night. He didn't show up at peoples' homes at random, but he researched them and proclaimed "My mind is open" when they answered the door. He's still considered so influential that mathematicians keep track of how many papers they are removed from him.
  • Kurt Gödel was a paranoid recluse with a terror of being poisoned, refusing to eat any food his wife Adele hadn't tasted for him. When she was hospitalized for six months, he starved to death.
  • John Forbes Nash, Jr., subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, who won the Nobel Prize before succumbing to schizophrenia, and, though you won't see it in the film, virulently anti-Semitic schizophrenia at that. Although his depths of mental illness was an unproductive period for him, he could hardly be called "normal" before and after.
  • Alan Turing's odd habits are legendary: for example, he had a bicycle which he used for most travel, even after WWII ended, which had a damaged chain and spokes which would cause it to de-rail regularly; rather than replace it, he would count the number of turns before it would de-rail, and step off the bike to reset it. Unfortunately his brilliance couldn't save him for being persecuted for his homosexuality. He was stripped of his security clearance, chemically castrated and eventually driven to suicide (by eating a poisoned apple).
  • John Von Neumann was, like Turing, one of the fathers of the electronic computer; like Szilard and Teller, he played a key role in the Manhattan Project, and formulated the game theory from which US nuclear weapons policy was developed. He was also an inveterate womanizer and gambler, and was known to give class lectures in the suit he'd worn to parties the night before, having stayed awake the whole night. He also liked fast cars and to drive recklessly - a corner where he wrecked more than one car was named "Von Neumann Corner" by the people in the city. Feynman would later attribute his 'creative irresponsibility' to something Von Neumann had said to him while they were both at Los Alamos.
  • Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of the field of Cybernetics, was known for being absent-minded and getting lost frequently even in familiar places; while at the Institute for Advanced Studies, he would find his way to his office using the 'right-hand rule' for maze solution, trailing one finger along the walls as he continued reading, which led to him startling colleagues by walking into their offices, following the walls around and back out, without speaking or even looking up from his book the whole time, seemingly oblivious to where he was until he reached his own office.
  • Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, deserves special mention, as he was considered eccentric by other mathematicians even before he went Ax Crazy.
  • Tom Lehrer is less known for his career in mathematics than his (Relatively short) career as a songwriter, where he wrote comedy songs that mix intellectual topics and politics with a heavy dose of Dead Baby Comedy. This is despite Lehrer's work in Mathematics, which he's still doing, spanning several times the number of years he was a musician, and the fact that his work has taken place at some of the most prestigious universities in America, such as Harvard and MIT.
• Stonewall Jackson, of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, was a shrewd tactician and a dauntless battlefield commander. He was also a hypochondriac and restlessly raised one arm, both of which may have played a role in his death (he was shot in the arm, and developed pneumonia when he had an aide wrap him in wet cloths after the amputation). He also had the habit of praying, eyes open, on horseback, content in the belief God could surely hear him there as well as anywhere; this was in order to ward off demonic possession, which he feared, with the prayer. Before the war he taught at Virginia Military Institute, where he earned the name "Tom-fool Jackson" for his useless physics lectures.
  • It's been strongly suspected that Stonewall Jackson had Asperger's Syndrome.
  • The Civil War could pretty much be renamed the War of Bunny Ears. Aside from Jackson's antics, Longstreet went into battle wearing carpet slippers at one point, and Custer carried a pet mouse with him in battle at all times.
• Fred Hoyle, a great contributor in the field of astronomy, for his discovery of nucleogenesis is controversial for amongst others things, his coinage of the term Big Bang which seems like brilliance at first but many believe that he used it as a pejorative against the theory of the development of the universe from a singularity in favor of the steady-state model he proposed, although that had more in line with his philosophical beliefs than actual science (although he claims he used the term "Big Bang" to help listeners understand what it was). It seemed even more so when discoveries supporting the Big Bang model such as cosmic microwave background radiation, and young stars and galaxies, he still rejected the Big Bang theory. Also, he rejected abiogenesis as an explanation of life on Earth, citing instead that the development of life began in space and evolution is driven by viruses arriving on Earth via comets. Just as odd, he argued that the human nose is shaped as it is, because it had evolved to help protect it from influenza...which he believed came from outer space. He also questioned the veracity of the "Archaeopteryx" fossil, causing a hub-bub in the scientific community. After resigning from his position as director of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge Institute and as Plumian professor, he cited that Cambridge was politically motivated and accused them of being "Robespierre-like", and has gone on record saying that the scientific community does not give a fair chance to opposition towards the theory of evolution, despite the fact he didn't present any evidence contrary of abiogenesis or natural selection, or those supporting his own wild theories of life beginning in space, or life occuring somewhere else in space in the manner he proposed.
  • And his "philosophical beliefs" that led him to oppose the Big Bang Theory was mostly just an anti-religious bias, but then, the next thing you know, he is coming up with the "Hoyle fallacy" purporting to disprove the evolutionary origin of life.
• Jack Parsons was a brilliant chemist and explosives expert, and was one of the founders of Jet Propulsion Lab. He was also an occultist who was the leader of the Agape Lodge, the major branch of the Ordo Templi Orientalis in the western US.
• Aleister Crowley, "The Great Beast 666", who was a chess master and expert mountain climber, and in addition to being the most famous (or notorious) occultist of the 20th century, and...
  • Well, then he certainly qualifies as a Bunny Ears Lawyer, because he was so good at mastering chess and climbing expert mountains that his co-workers in chess mastery and expert mountain climbing were happy to look the other way about the whole occult thing.
  • His chess-mastery is worthy of mention, as he was reportedly not only capable of winning a game while not even looking at the board (not a terrifically uncommon skill among chess masters), but also doing so while having sex at the same time.
• Crowley's mucker, WB Yeats, in addition to being a damn fine poet, subscribed to a rather odd and quackish macrohistorical theory.
• Many prominent politicians seem to have to have some sort of quirk by default.
  • Richard Nixon was one of (if not) the most corrupt and paranoid presidents ever. Yet he fought for open relations with China, against inflation and segregation, and for environmental concerns. He's been described as an "idiosyncratic president, so brilliant and so morally lacking".
  • And let's not forget all the President Actions we've had- from Andrew Jackson and his penchant for duels, to Theodore Roosevelt, who had a rather long daily jog, and foreign ambassadors generally had to go on it with him if they wanted to speak with him.
  • Among American presidents, however, it's Lyndon Johnson who takes the cake. Let's count the ways:

1. 1. 1. He apparently had a habit of taking his tallywhacker (which he deservedly called "Jumbo") out and shaking it at the White House Press Corps, chiefly to intimidate them. (Since it was the 1960s--i.e. pre-Watergate--they didn't report this).
      2. He installed a telephone in his toilet, that he might conduct business from there. He frequently told the person on the other end of the line where he was.
      3. He would have aides and even other politicians come into the toilet with him, in order to conduct business. He was frequently sitting down.
      4. Starting during his career in the Senate, he had a habit of leaning in really close to another Senator as part of "the Johnson treatment," the most thorough and effective combination of cajolery, browbeating, and outright intimidation that august body has ever seen. He continued even after becoming Vice President (where he leveraged the "President of the Senate" side of the office into "President's Enforcer in the Senate") and as President.
         1. This would escalate to kicking. With LBJ's steeltoed boots. His secretary remembers people's shins bleeding profusely.
      5. He would pick up his dog by the ears, and insist "He lahks it!"
      6. When The Pope sent a couple of paintings as gifts to the US, LBJ sent a bust of himself. Not the Pope. A bust of Lyndon Johnson.

• • • Despite all this--and his controversial policies in Vietnam--he's widely considered today to have been a pretty good President: his domestic policy is widely praised as visionary, and his foreign policy outside of Southeast Asia was all in all well-managed.
  • J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI from its establishment in 1935 to his death in 1972, may very well have been the most brilliantly insidious man in the history of American politics. There's no end to the conspiracy theories surrounding him, and at one point he had the audacity to resist Richard Nixon when he feared the Bureau's powers were being threatened. And he had a very interesting personal life. Upon Hoover's death, Richard Nixon is said to have exclaimed "Jesus Christ, that old cocksucker!" Classy.
    • While he was director of the FBI Hoover apparently had naked pictures of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not necessarily for blackmail or personal use, just because he could. He also had pictures of Marylin Monroe, although those WERE for personal use.
  • Canadian Prime Ministers, we have such a wonderful number, too. William Lyon Mackenzie King, our PM for WWII, was a brilliant man in office, but at home? He used spirit mediums to get advice from his dead mother and several of his dead pet dogs, all of them named Pat.
    • Pierre Elliott Trudeau takes the cake on this one. He married a woman 29 years his junior (and who may have had an affair with Mick Jagger of all people), dreassed far more casually than anyone else had in his job, gave the finger to a bunch of protesters (who, in fairness, were yelling anti-French slurs at him -- as you may have guessed from the name, Trudeau was from Quebec), slid down the bannisters at Buckingham Palace, and did a pirouette behind the Queen. On national television.
      
      On the other hand, he was nothing if not an effective and principled politician: as Justice Minister under Lester Pearson, when queried about a plan to legalize homosexuality he famously stated that "the state has no place in the nation's bedrooms" and rewrote or just removed large portions of the Criminal Code on that principle, and became a very effective if extremely controversial Prime Minister, implementing various policies to make Canada a "Just Society," promoting bilingualism, pursuing a foreign policy independent of both Britain and the US, and dealing with the October Crisis (wherin Quebec separatist terrorists kidnapped the Justice Minister of Quebec and some British diplomat in Montreal) with scary efficiency.
      
      To put this in perspective, Trudeau was known for riding motorcycles in Prussian military regalia in school and various other social taboos of the time. When two politicians were kidnapped and killed by terrorists, he brought in the military, made sweeping arrests and ended the crisis without any more needless bloodshed. He was also known for facing down angry protesters at a political rally who tossed bottles at his podium well he looked on stoicly... without flinching.
    • In more recent years, there's also no forgetting Jean Chretien, renowned for not being able to speak either official language. Of course, that was on account of his Bell's Palsy (making it in rather poor taste to mock him for it) -- but his penchant for golf is such that he defended himself at a fraud inquiry with a handful of golf balls. Chretien also once broke away from his security detail at a rally in Quebec, and began wading through the crowd. One man (who happened to be a Quebec Separatist, but nothing about him at the time indicated this) didn't get out of his way fast enough, and found himself being strangled by the then-Prime Minister of Canada. Chretien's later 'explanation' of his attack was incoherent in a way having nothing to do with partial facial paralysis.
    • We also have The Man Who Would Be (or who would have been) Prime Minister - Stockwell Day, who: 1. Arrived at a press conference by jet-ski; 2. Conducted said press conference wearing a wet suit; 3. Insists that man walked with the dinosaur; 4. Ends up being elected the head of the Canadian Conservative Reform Alliance Party (CCRAP, seriously - they did change the name afterwards) over party founder and likely favourite Preston Manning, and arguably managed to successfully unite the divided right-wing of Canadian politics.
    • And of course, our present Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who writes books about the history of hockey. There's little doubt as to his skill as a politician; he's held together not one but two Tory minority governments in a row (which nobody had done before, ever) before leading his party to a majority, and he came up with some of the most magnificent and brilliant abuses of the rules to stay in power during his second term.
    • John Diefenbaker's eccentricies have been the subject of no less than two Hark! A Vagrant strips.
    • The Spiritualist thing isn't all that odd for the time. Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greely, John A. Roebling, Pierre and Marie Curie and William Crookes, just to name a few, investigated and/or believed in spirit communication.
  • Winston Churchill goes one better. Worked and slept unusual hours, for a start, but topped it by holding a meeting with Franklin D Roosevelt while taking a bath. He commented that "two great men have nothing to hide from each other". This particular encounter occurred during his stay at the White House, during which time he more or less got Roosevelt operating according to his schedule (not that the fun-loving if workaholic FDR minded), which besides the odd hours meant drinking consistently large quantities of alcoholic beverages even when making major decisions. Realizing that a substantial portion of the Allied strategy for World War II was cooked up by these two while never less than tipsy and frequently while hammered really makes you wonder.
    • In fairness, whilst there are many anecdotes about Churchill drinking, there are fewer about him being drunk. His close contemporaries report that he very rarely got drunk, and that one glass of whisky would last hours.
• Ulysses S Grant was a brilliant battle tactician, one of the best horsemen in the entire army and (supposed) drunkard who, after winning against Robert E. Lee and meeting him at Appomattox Courthouse to negotiate a surrender, showed up in his dirty uniform with muddy boots in contrast to Lee's perfectly arranged uniform, leading at least one spectator to comment that if you hadn't known better you'd thought the other guy had lost. (James Thurber's story "If Grant Had Been Drunk at Appomattox" has the hungover Union commander making this mistake himself and handing over his sword to the astonished Lee.) Lincoln also reportedly ordered his aides to find out what sort of whiskey Grant drank and send a case to every one of the Union generals when a group of Union officials attempting to oust Grant on the grounds that he was a drunk (although this story may be apocryphal - it's been told about several generals). And despite being cool as a cucumber during battles, riding up closer than generals were supposed to, with holes through his uniform from bullets (plus numerous horses shot dead as he rode on them) Grant could not stand the sight of blood. That's right -- after each battle he retired to his tent and wept. Every steak he ate had to be devoid of blood or he would become physically ill, and he likely had what we would now classify as PTSD.
  • Grant had worked in a tannery between the Mexican-American War and Civil War; this might explain the aversion to blood (that, or it was the worst job ever).
• Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London, gives off the image of a terrific buffoon and eccentric. We don't know if he's faking it or is really that odd, but he's been competent as Mayor (whatever you think of his politics, he does his job well).
  • By now it's fairly widely accepted that he's an extremely savvy political operator whose frequent 'gaffes' are really just exercises in generating harmless PR for himself (it hardly hurt the MP for Henley that he insulted Liverpool). He's been performing the same buffoon act at least since his undergraduate days; it's no surprise he's improved it over time, so perhaps more a case of Obfuscating Stupidity than Bunny Ears Lawyer. On the other hand, the man himself has noted on several occasions that it is at least partially an act, but also notes:

"I think that is the terrifying reality. Beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of the bumbling buffoon, there may well be a bumbling buffoon. That is the nightmare we all have to live with."

• Immanuel Kant, one of the Western world's most influential philosophers, was known as a man of exceedingly regular habits. He would take a walk every single day at 3:30 pm and it was said that you could set your watch by him. Supposedly the only time he ever missed a walk was when he was reading Rousseau's Emile. He also never ventured more than 40 miles from his home in Königsberg.
  • Which, compared to the author of Emile seems excessively sane.
• Benjamin Franklin may have taken part in occult rituals and was heavily obsessed with sex and turkeys, and yet, is one of the most celebrated American historical figures.
  • He also had some of the Kavorka Man working for him, he was hugely popular with the ladies in Paris.
• Not only was Roald Dahl one of these (he played practical jokes on his upper crust friends so often it's a wonder any of them ever trusted him, and he had very specific demands when writing, including using a particular kind of pencil that was only ever sold in Britain), but he was also a magnet for these kind of people. Apparently, early in his life, Mr Dahl travelled on with an entire boatful of Bunny Ears Lawyers.
• Michael Jackson. Everybody knows he was obsessed with reclaiming his childhood through things like his Neverland Ranch, with its personal zoo and amusement park. Everybody knows he was utterly, utterly obsessed with young boys, possibly sexually. However, he remained popular among many people. Later weirdness aside, his musical talent and showmanship during the years when he was still black is impressive. The man made THRILLER.
  • Even after he "became white", he still made impressive music and performances. Of course, that's the era overshadowed by his extracurricular antics.
  • When his comeback residency at the O2 arena in London this year was announced, tickets went extremely quickly. And now that he's dead, he's gotten even more leeway.
• Similarly James M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan: Refused to grow up, didn't understand why kids DID want to, Spent most of his time with boys who he (allegedly) slept with, was depressed most of his life, in later life it became a depression so deep he could barely function in society.
• William Moulton Marston. Creator of the polygraph (lie detector). Creator of Wonder Woman. And perfectly willing to use both to demonstrate his eternal love of bondage. And that's not to mention his belief that the world would be better off entering into "loving submission" to a world matriarchy, also demonstrated in his Wonder Woman book. Or the "menage a trois" household he maintained with two women...
• Usain Bolt of Jamaica. Called the fastest man alive after his performance at the 2008 Olympics, he was perhaps better known for his behavior on the field. He set a world record by a significant amount in the 100-meter while showboating for the last twenty. And his shoelace was untied, and he'd spent most of the previous day watching TV and eating fried chicken.
• Phil Hellmuth, aka "The Poker Brat". His nickname comes in part because he's prone to wild and hilarious temper tantrums when someone else bets a hand that conventional strategy says they should've folded and gets lucky...and partially because he was the youngest ever WSOP Main Event Champion and has won more bracelets than any other player in World Series of Poker history. (Though the first record was broken in 2008).
  • In the same vein, Mike "The Mouth" Matusow is one of the best pro players around, but, well... you can probably guess how he got his nickname. He's cooled down a lot in recent years, though.
  • And for an example of a pro player with more flamboyant tendencies, there's Humberto Brenes, who calls himself "The Shark" and has the toy shark card protectors to prove it, which he tends to use more as a means of doing a prop comedy act than actually protecting his cards, and has a tendency to turn his volume up to 11 any time he goes all-in. He also finished in the top one-hundred of the World Series of Poker main event two years in a row in 2006 and 2007, when the fields of entrants exceeded six thousand players. Even for a big-name pro that takes serious skill.
• Buckethead is well known for conducting interviews by using a hand puppet resembling a face turned inside out, is almost 7 feet tall, apparently has a crippling fear of women, and watches a lot of horror movies. He also happens to be one of the most impossibly skilled virtuoso guitar players in the world.
  • Not to mention his habit of, say, performing with a KFC bucket on his head and one of those creepy white masks. Or of performing stunts with nunchuks during live concerts. Or his robot-dancing. Or, well...almost anything about him, really.
• Field Marshal Bernard "Monty" Montgomery was a man with an ego a mile wide, a severe lack of tact, a level of racism that was high even by World War Two Allied standards (Axis standards being, well, you know), did not get on well at all with his senior officers and was unwilling to admit when he'd been wrong. However, the British think he was an excellent general (historians from other nations regard him as anything from an egotistical poser who extended the war by months to a mildly competent commander who was more concerned with keeping the British army intact, rather than using it to win battles,) while his men, who he got on well with, loved him. He ended up Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.
  • His career almost ended before it began- he nearly got kicked out of Sandhurst for setting fire to a comrade's shirt during a hazing ritual.
  • Monty acquired a personal Crowning Moment of Awesome in the First World War, where he was severely wounded at Meteren and given up as hopeless to the point a grave was dug for him. He recovered and picked up a Distinguished Service Order medal for gallant leadership. The more impressive thing- the DSO is typically handed out to officers of Captain rank or above. Monty was a Lieutenant. If a Lieutenant gets a medal like that, it is generally seen as a sign that they just missed out on a Victoria Cross.
  • Apropos Montgomery's legendary ego and lack of tact, there is a story that then-prime minister Winston Churchill was once discussing Monty with King George VI and confided that he thought Monty was after his job. "That's a relief," George VI is supposed to have replied, "I thought he was after mine..."
  • The British don't really think he was that excellent a general any more - after the war, certainly, but that was largely to do with his talent for self-publicity. Nowadays he is less highly thought of. Another Monty/Churchill story: When Monty captured General von Thoma, he invited him for dinner in his private command trailer. This horrified many in Britain, but Churchill was more sanguine: "I sympathize with General von Thoma; defeated, humiliated, in captivity and (Beat) dinner with Montgomery.
    • Arguably the British do consider him a fairly great general, mostly because he was responsible for for the first Allied victories of the War and was one of those few commanders extremely interested in keeping his soldiers alive; a fact that made him adored by his men and despaired of by his commanders as he would refuse to commit to attacks if he thought the cost would be too high.
• Performance Artist and perky pervert Bob Flanagan collaborated with alt-musicians like Sonic Youth and Nine Inch Nails, designed numerous museum installations and, for a time, held the world record for living with Cystic Fibrosis until his death in 1995, at 43. He was also a CF Summer Camp Counselor for more than half of his life and a stand-up comedian. His secret? Bob was a self-proclaimed "Supermasochist" and believed in fighting "sickness with sickness." He routinely tortured himself with everything from C-47s to barbeque forks. He also (censored for squick) hammered his penis to a wooden board at least twice and got it on video tape.
• Sir Isaac Newton is rightly regarded as one of the founders of the concept of a rational, mechanistic universe. However, he was also an apocalyptic Christian, astrologer, numerologist and mystic. One example of this interfering with his scientific work is the inclusion of the colour indigo in the spectrum - he wanted there to be seven colours in the spectrum instead of six, as it fitted with a numerological theory that he had. Also, he lived in permanent chaos, constantly leaping from one idea to the other. His servants would often find him in the morning half in and half out of bed, halted in place by an unstoppable train of thought. When he first produced a mathematical model for the orbits of the planets, he not only neglected to publish, but mislaid his notes and workings on it. It was only when a horrified Sir Edmund Halley (of comet fame) persuaded him to redo his workings with all speed (and send him a copy so that he could win a friendly wager with Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke) that the enforced focus resulted in his famous Principia Mathematica, which set down what became known as Newtonian Mechanics.
  • Newton himself regarded his writings on spirituality and the Bible to be his chief accomplishments, rather than his mathematics - indeed, in terms of sheer word count these writings outweighed his science. He was also an alchemist - recent studies on existing samples of his hair show that Newton had massive amounts of mercury in his system, which could certainly account for his odd behaviour. Brusque, deliberately obtuse, and short-tempered to the point of rudeness, he made his published works deliberately obscure and hard to follow so he would not be continually bothered by questions or suggestions from "smatterers", as he called people not up to his mathematical skill. One of his Cambridge colleagues wrote that he could not recall seeing Newton smile once in ten years. It certainly would appear from most first-hand reports of Newton's life that he was indulged in his more eccentric pursuits and tolerated for his unbearable personality precisely because he was otherwise such a brilliant scientist.
  • Newton was a member of Parliament for a year. During his term, he only uttered one sentence in Parliament, to complain about a draft caused by an open window.
  • He was also Master of the Mint. Now, this wasn't terribly unusual--"Master of the Mint" by that point had long been a sinecure: the Mint's internal workings were basically self-sufficient, so the position of Master was given to highly talented individuals like Newton as a way for the Crown to pay them to just go about their business and be productive without worrying about money. What is unusual, however, is that Newton actually took the job seriously. As Master, he took an active hand in fighting counterfeiters and clippers, sometimes by going to pubs and seedy parts of town incognito to catch the criminals in the act. He also took an interest in Britain's monetary policy, and inadvertently switched Britain from a de facto silver standard to a de facto gold standard in 1717 by changing the coinage ratio drastically in favour of gold. It was for these services to the Crown--and not his scientific achievements--that Newton was knighted in 1705.
  • If the coins in your pocket have little ridges around the edge, that's thanks to Newton, who invented the milled-edge coin to make it obvious when a clipper had shaved a coin.
• Stanley Kubrick is inarguably one of the most influential filmmakers in history, responsible for so many iconic moments and images. He was also very bizarre with stories claiming that he worked in only his shirt and underwear, kept many cats around the editing room, would demand dozens of takes for almost all of his shots, used to call people late at night to ask obscure questions, had an immense fear of flying, would keep discarded cigarette filters in Altoid tins, and watched The Godfather ten times, calling it the "Best film ever made".
• Francois Vatel. Personal chef to the French King Louis XIV. Creator of chantilly cream (a sweet, vanilla-flavoured whipped cream still used in pastries today... you know that stuff in the center of a twinky? There you go.). Wrote a cookbook on French cuisine still used by some chefs today 400 years later, and an influence on Auguste Escoffier (widely considered the greatest chef who ever lived). Vatel was also a finicky control freak, an obsessive-compulsive micromanager, and a perfectionist to end all perfectionism. When, while managing a 2000-person dinner party for the French monarch, Vatel was told that a delivery of fresh fish would be slightly delayed (thus disrupting the cooking schedule), Vatel became so anxiety-ridden that he committed suicide with a sword. His body was only discovered when one of his sous-chefs came to tell him the fish had finally arrived.
• Henry Ford was the man who revolutionized manufacturing through application of the conveyor belt-based assembly line to factories, using it to build one of the "Big Three" American automakers and one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. He was also a virulent, unrepentant anti-Semite who used his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to publish a translation of the notorious book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which claimed to be the minutes of a secret meeting by a Jewish cabal plotting world domination (and was already known at the time to be a forgery made up by the Okhrana), as well as a series of vicious articles that were later published as a book with the self-explanatory title The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem. Adolf Hitler lionized Ford and had a portrait of him in his office, and in 1938 he granted Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest honor that Germany could bestow upon a non-German -- an award that Ford never renounced, not even after America entered World War II.
• Robert Downey, Jr., during the years he was in and out of jail and rehab due to a drug addiction, still got hired regularly due to his talent. In addition, Downey had a surprisingly strong reputation for showing up to work on time and with his lines memorized backwards and forwards (and sometimes everybody else's lines as well) despite whatever else was going on in his life.