A Manchild who imagines himself as a movie super agent or a military Special Ops guy on a top-secret mission and acts accordingly. Usually Played for Laughs.
Distinct from "Tuxedo and Martini Played for Laughs" in that Tuxedo and Martini is more about James Bond and the notion of the spy as the suave, evening-dressed, martini-ordering playboy. This trope is about a character who pretends to be a secret agent to assuage the tedium of their day-to-day existence and gets into no end of trouble when they encounter or blunder into the real thing (when combined with And You Thought It Was a Game and Mistaken for Badass). The character can actually work for an espionage agency, but as a paper-pusher, informant or some other unimportant thing rather than any kind of "superspy".
In a way, a Wannabe Secret Agent is similar to a Conspiracy Theorist in that both imagine themselves privy to secret knowledge that they believe puts them above the dreary everyday (though the former likes to play out his fantasy more than to discuss it). Both character types are portrayed as common amongst The Mentally Disturbed, and as a result both often feature in plots revolving around The Schizophrenia Conspiracy.
May have some overlap with Miles Gloriosus. Contrast Secret Agent Masquerade, when a con artist pretends to be a secret agent but is under no delusions that they actually are one, and Teen Superspy, who is an actual child and an actual super agent.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- The Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic "Secret Agent 006 1/2" has Donald working as a janitor at a special operations agency. He likes to fantasize about being an actual secret agent and claims to be one before his girlfriend Daisy. Of course, they both end up on an actual mission.
Film — Animated
- Daffy Duck has this role in Looney Tunes: Back in Action where he helps a stuntman played by Brendan Fraser rescue his father Timothy Dalton (who actually is a secret agent).
- The Penguin quartet in Madagascar are a paranoid bunch who act like they are advance recon scouts deep in the enemy territory, a trait that carried over and taken more seriously in The Penguins of Madagascar.
Film — Live-Action
- Burn After Reading: Two bumbling gym rats, one played by Frances McDormand and the other played by Brad Pitt, discover a manuscript for the written memoir of a former intelligence agency employee, and, falsely believing it to contain classified information, try to sell it to the Russian government. A whole ton of Cringe Comedy ensues.
- Condorman. CIA desk jockey Harry needs a civilian to do a sensitive courier job, so he gets his friend "Woody" Wilkins, creator of the eponymous comic superhero, to do the job. Unfortunately Woody is this trope so not only does he wear a Conspicuous Trenchcoat but he introduces himself to his contact as a secret agent when he's not supposed to be working for the CIA. Things escalate from there until Woody ends up playing Condorman for real.
- In The Man Who Knew Too Little, the protagonist believes he is only playing a secret agent, but due to a mix-up everything he encounters is very real (though he doesn't realize that).
- Ronin (1998): Spence is an Englishman who claims to be ex-SAS but is outed as utterly incompetent and nearly gets the team killed in the process.
- Spies Like Us. Austin Millbarge is a basement-dwelling codebreaker at the Pentagon who aspires to escape his under-respected job to become a secret agent. Emmett Fitz-Hume, a wisecracking, pencil-pushing son of an envoy, takes the foreign service exam under peer pressure. Both of them fail (Fitz-Hume openly attempts to cheat, while Millbarge is woefully unprepared because his supervisor withheld notice of the test till the day before). Needing expendable agents to act as decoys to draw attention away from a more capable team, the DIAnote decides to enlist the two, promote them to be Foreign Service Operatives, put them through minimal training, and then send them on an undefined mission into Soviet Central Asia.
- In The Spy Who Dumped Me the two protagonists get caught in a spy story (the eponymous spy is an ex-boyfriend) with Kate being more than delighted to have some sparks in her life. She ends up begging the MI6 boss (played by Gillian Anderson) to let her join the agency. At the end of the film she obliges.
- True Lies: Bill Paxton plays Simon, a used-car salesman who pretends he works for the CIA in order to hit on the wife of Arnie's character who, ironically, is a real spy who pretends he's a computer salesman.
Literature
- Bernard Samson Series
- Werner Volkman is a subversion of this trope; he desperately wants to work for the British as a secret agent, and when given the chance to do so, is incredibly good at it.
- Julian MacKenzie in "Mexico Set" plays this straight, with tragic consequences. He's a staff member of British Intelligence who wants to be a spy, even though spies are recruited 'in place'. Nevertheless Bernard uses him for various grunt work and he gets killed by an overzealous KGB agent.
- The children's quasi-graphic novel series Gangster by Johanne Mercier stars the title character, a self-centered cat who fancies himself a secret agent, as he supposedly pulls off incredible feats on the regular while protecting his humans...According to his point of view, at least. In reality, any problematic crises that come up tend to be resolved with minimal involvement on his part.
- The children's novel Our Man Weston by Gordon Korman, involves a teenager (and his long-suffering twin brother, who keeps getting blamed for his antics) who becomes convinced there's an international spy ring in a hotel next to an air force base. There is a spy there as it happens, but our bumbling hero completely fails to uncover him.
- Quiller is saddled with one in The Warsaw Document, who had good contacts in the Polish dissident movement but whose blundering constantly exasperates him. Turns out this is a lie; he's being blackmailed by the KGB but has already confessed this to Quiller's superiors, who are using Quiller as an Unwitting Pawn.
- The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré: A British Army WWII veteran approaches George Smiley and asks if it's true that his recently-deceased son was actually an agent for British Intelligence. The father always thought his son was a lowlife convict who died in a Prison Riot, but the last time he visited, the son said he was actually a top-flight secret agent working "behind the lines" in the Soviet Union, and his handlers just brought him back to England to pretend to be in jail and show him to his father to uphold the masquerade. The wife brushed off this story, arguing that their son could never tell fact from fiction, which is why he got into such trouble with the law, over and over again. Smiley, despite his inner skepticism, investigates diligently and is forced to conclude that the son was "an irredeemable and habitual monster" without the slightest association with the British Secret Service or any other government association, who was just trying for the last time "to steal his father's glory."
Live-Action TV
- The Beverly Hillbillies: Jethro Bodine opens up a "double-naught" spy branch-office. Hilarity Ensues.
- In an episode of Bones the Victim of the Week was a desk analyst for the CIA who idolized James Bond so much he carried a Walther PPK, drove an Aston Martin, and used "Universal Exports" as his cover. He was killed after he discovered and tried to investigate a diamond-smuggling operation all on his own. At the end of the episode, the CIA honors him as if he were a full field agent, for his bravery in the line of duty.
- Invoked in Castle: a company sells spy-themed fantasy vacations where normal people get to pretend that they are real spies performing secret missions. When one of the clients ends up as the Victim of the Week, Beckett and Castle initially believe that they are dealing with real spies. They arrest one of the pretend spies and he stays completely in character until he realizes he is in a real jail cell, at which point he starts crying.
- CSI: NY: "Brooklyn 'Til I Die" involves a role-playing game where the participants go undercover as spies. In this case, a couples' code names are Boris and Natasha, which the detectives learn upon finding their fake ids. The girlfriend dies after pointing her fake gun at some guys they thought were "enemy agents" in an alley, and one of them shoots her in self-defense. Turns out they're real thugs, not part of the game; they kidnap the boyfriend and hold him for ransom.
- The Lone Gunmen trio of The X-Files have their moments, such as when they discover that the Cigarette-Smoking Man apparently kidnapped Scully in episode "En Ami" and visit Mulder disguised as... themselves. As in, they wear each other's usual outfits to blend in with the crowd.
Video Games
- Possibly Steven Heck from Alpha Protocol. He claims to work for a top-secret branch of the CIA, but there's no evidence that he's ever worked for them at all. One character suggests that Heck is just a lunatic who has somehow deluded himself into thinking he's a CIA agent. Either way, he's very, very effective, contrasting with the usual portrayals of this trope.
- Conrad Verner throughout the Mass Effect trilogy pretends to be a Spectre (essentially a government-sanctioned Judge, Jury, and Executioner), inspired by Commander Shepard. His blunders, however, are Played for Drama or Black Comedy at best.
- Irene from Missing Stars is first introduced accidentally having fallen out of a tree. She claims to have been doing "basic recon." Irene is curious and likes eavesdropping on others around the school; she even has a laser microphone.
Web Animation
- In season two of Red vs. Blue, Griff and Donut are sent to do recon on the Blue base to try and retrieve Lopez. Donut thinks of it like spy work and acts like this to the point of annoying Griff into sending him away.
Real Life
- In a rather bizarre case, 23-year-old William Kampiles
swiped a top-secret satellite manual, sold it to the Soviet Union for 3,000 dollars, and then confessed what he had done to the CIA in the mistaken belief that they would employ him as a double agent. He spent 18 years in prison.
