Trope Talk: Noodle Incidents

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No relation to The S'mores Incident.

Okay, I can explain.

This is one of the tropes with a weirder name, but as soon as I start describing it, you're

gonna get the picture.

You know that thing, where in order to show that two characters have a storied history

together packed with Hijinks and Shenanigans, they'll start talking about some thing that

happened offscreen.

And they'll be vague about it, because they were both there and know what happened so

they aren't just going to drop any convenient "as you know"s for the audience's benefit,

so it's basically like an in-joke they aren't sharing with us.

You've 100% seen this before.

This is the "you and I remember Budapest very differently" thing.

A Noodle Incident is a wacky hijink that the characters reference but do not explain, and

often if pressed for explanation they get defensive or change the subject so the mystery

is preserved.

A Noodle Incident might even become a running gag if enough characters bring it up - but

it'll always be through hints and tidbits, usually focused on the characters' emotional

reactions and not the specific events they're reacting to.

In general, all we know about the noodle incident is how the characters feel about it and one

or two pertinent details about the most relevant nouns in the key event.

This trope is very widespread, and it's an interesting little nugget, because it's storytelling

by way of implication.

And on paper it feels a little bit wrong, or empty, to have a character hint at some

exciting past adventure and then not show it.

It's a joke that implies a punchline rather than having a punchline.

And I've previously complained about stories that imply they're doing something exciting

or clever and then fail to live up to it, like implying they've plotted out some grand

and complicated mystery that ends up not having a grand resolution.

And when laid out in the broadest strokes, this feels like another case of that.

But it isn't, because in this case the fact that the Noodle Incident is never explained

is the entire point of the bit.

The trope is called The Noodle Incident because of a running joke in Calvin and Hobbes, where

it is repeatedly implied that Calvin did something horrible involving noodles that had the potential

to get him put on Santa's naughty list.

Bill Watterson decided against ever explaining what "The Noodle Incident" was, because nothing

he came up with would be funnier than what the audience imagined.

This principle of comedy is basically the funny ha-ha version of the horror movie principle

of not showing the monster.

The terror the audience imagines from the tiny hints of danger and the overwhelming

power of the unknown is always scarier than whatever the special effects department could

rustle up, and the Noodle Incident is the comedy invocation of this same idea.

The line between comedy and horror is… thinner than either genre would like it to be, and

this means that if a writer plants the right set of hints, they can cue the audience into

entertaining themselves by contemplating the implications of what the story is hiding from

them.

In the case of horror, the hints are danger and fear - unexplained noises, movement in

dark corners, threats in places you thought were safe.

In comedy, the hints are absurdities.

The phrase "the noodle incident" tells you nothing except that it was an incident that

involved noodles.

We can put on our Sherlock Holmes deerstalkers for a minute and infer that whatever role

noodles played in the incident was more prominent than any other participating element in order

to get the incident named after noodles, but really all that tells us is the incident was

probably food being used in a manner inappropriate for food.

"Calvin made a mess" is nowhere near as funny as contemplating the implied horror of what

he could've possibly done that could only be described as "The Noodle Incident."

Noodle Incidents are very efficient at communicating information, but it's pointedly not the information

about what the noodle incident was.

Noodle Incidents are not about what happened, it's the way they are talked about and described

that's basically a characterization speedrun.

For one thing, they flesh out a character's backstory and make it clear to the audience

that they have adventures and a life offscreen and aren't just chained to the camera 24/7,

which does a lot to make them feel more alive.

But the bulk of the information the audience gets from a noodle incident comes from how

the characters act when they're talking about it.

The way they react to the sparse, vague hints we get gives us a ton of information about

the character.

They describe or briefly flash back to an unknown incident in their past, and how they

choose to describe it or not describe it tells us something about them.

Maybe they're speaking really casually about something that's implied to have been a very

dangerous scenario, implying that they are ridiculously badass and blasé about the dangers

in their life; or maybe they're bragging about something they pulled off in a very self-aggrandizing

way that sounds suspiciously exaggerated, implying that they're kind of a glory hound;

or maybe they're acting very mildly annoyed about some vaguely-defined grievance that

sounds absolutely bizarre, which tells us that they're way too acclimated to some really

weird shit.

Or maybe they keep starting a story they're clearly passionate about and getting shut

down, making it clear that the people around them aren't being particularly considerate

of them right now.

And on that note, the way their fellow characters react to them referencing the noodle incident

gives us even more information.

A character who reacts to a noodle incident reference with extreme defensiveness was probably

the butt of the joke, whatever the joke was.

A character might shut down the conversation because they've heard about the noodle incident

too many times, making it clear that somebody in the group really likes talking about it.

This kind of thing can play out in so many different ways, and because it's basically

just freeform dialogue that the writer can drop in anywhere there's a quiet moment, it's

really narratively efficient for getting across characterization in a very short span of time.

One show that does this a lot is Leverage, which seems to have gone out of its way to

deliberately leave a lot of the characters' adventures offscreen to make them feel like

complex people who've lived exciting lives.

In the very first episode it's mentioned that former-insurance-investigator Nate has personally

chased down every other main character at least once, and those adventures are never

ever shown in anything more than a few seconds of out-of-context flashbacks.

You'd think the first time the characters met back when they were still on opposite

sides would be a kind of important story beat, but it… isn't.

None of the characters care to bring it up when they could be focusing on new adventures

instead.

Showing a flashback to a first meeting wouldn't really add anything to the story.

And the formula for later episodes follows a similar principle of only hinting at events

between episodes or backstory bits by showing or telling us out-of-context goofs.

We'll get little bite-sized flashbacks of Parker throwing Hardison off a building or

Eliot getting waterboarded or something, and when it flashes back to the present, the way

the characters react makes it pretty clear that all of these things are very normal for

them and not really worth dwelling on - although their friends might disagree.

And it might sound like these are stories an audience might be curious about seeing

in the actual show, but what makes the balance of Leverage work is that these noodle incidents

are pretty much par for how the actual episodes go.

We never really feel like we're being cheated out of the "Parker steals the Stanley Cup"

episode because we've got like seven seasons of stuff exactly like that.

The noodle incidents just make it feel like there's more show happening in the background

of the show.

In horror movies, the scariness of the story often takes a rapid downturn after the monster

is fully revealed for the first time.

Sometimes this has to do with special effects not holding up, but mostly it's just from

the simple fact that almost all fear is grounded in the unknown, and once the audience gets

a clear, good look at the danger, it's not unknown anymore.

It can still be scary, but it won't be as scary as it was when the audience was imagining

it as their own personal worst nightmare.

Alien is straight up terrifying until the very last scene, which is also the first time

we get a clear, bright shot of the alien in question and it becomes very apparent that

it's a guy in a well-made suit.

Thankfully the reveal is saved til the very end, and on rewatches the movie still holds

up if you know what the alien looks like, but it takes away some of the highly specific

horror of how well it blends into the environment and how the characters have no idea what to

look for when it gets big.

And noodle incidents face the comedy equivalent of the same thing, because despite the fact

that Noodle Incidents are entirely built on not explaining the joke, some stories do anyway,

and this explanation usually happens because not all noodle incidents are actually funny.

For instance, sometimes characters reference serious Noodle Incidents to highlight how

badass they are, either by bragging about some vaguely-defined accomplishment or referencing

some vaguely horrifying element of their formative tragic backstory.

A character with a storied and exciting past full of too many adventures to ever show can

pretty much always allude to some exciting and cool thing they did one time, and as long

as it lines up with the competence the audience has actually seen from them in the episodes

that did get made, it feels like a plausible noodle incident without needing clarification.

Of course you also get cases where a character brags about stuff they did offscreen that

doesn't really line up with their actual onscreen characterization, which might indicate that

this character is lying or exaggerating, or that the writers are hiding all the exciting

adventures in the offscreen zone for some reason.

But tragic backstory noodle incidents are in kind of a weird zone.

Comedic noodle incidents, as discussed, are basically a funny invocation of a horror trope,

storytelling by implication to let the audience fill in the gaps with their own imagination

without bogging down the story with too many lengthy explanations.

In fact, since a lot of comedy is built on characters being distressed, a comedic noodle

incident might be played for laughs but actually be describing an event that sounds unpleasant

at best and horrific at worst.

And if a writer takes those implications and plays them straight they get tragic noodle

incidents which invert that horror-to-comedy inversion and loop back around to just being

horror tropes.

If a character briefly and vaguely alludes to something they went through that sounds

tragic or nightmarish, it serves the same purpose as a typical noodle incident - providing

a highly dense chunk of characterization just through the way the character refers to the

event without ever having to specify what went down.

And it signals to the audience how this character feels about their backstory and how much they

want to share - for instance, in typical Noodle Incident fashion, if they never clarify or

they shut down follow-up questions it might indicate that this slice of backstory is,

rather reasonably, a sore spot they don't wanna talk about too much.

But unlike a typical comedic noodle incident, these more serious teases of emotionally nuanced

backstory elements might actually invite a clear explanation.

A dark or upsetting element of somebody's backstory could potentially be important and

require that the character actually tell the audience what specifically happened.

Sometimes these reveals even reframe a noodle incident that previously seemed light-hearted

and comedic by revealing that the vagueness of the references to it were concealing the

real emotional weight of what went down.

If a noodle incident is hiding an actual plot-relevant event, it kind of has to eventually get cracked

open and explained.

But this is pretty rare; most noodle incidents are jokes that don't need to be explained,

and like all jokes, would be less funny if they were explained.

This actually segues into an interesting tangential principle that applies to a lot of stories,

which I like to call "fans don't actually know what they want from their stories."

The entire core principle of a noodle incident is that it gives the audience just enough

information for them to speculate and extrapolate what might've happened.

Whether that extrapolation is in the dimension of comedy or horror depends on the planting

and how the characters frame it.

By its very nature, a noodle incident piques the audience's interest and makes them wonder

what happened.

But foundational in the trope is the simple fact that the audience's loose speculation

is more entertaining for them than a clear explanation would be.

Essentially, this trope entertains an audience by making them wonder what happened, but if

the audience then asks the storyteller what really happened and the story decides to tell

them, the wave function collapses into certainty and all that fun speculation and comedic vagueness

goes away.

The noodle incident just becomes a little flashback within the story.

And this has confused storytellers.

The fans spent so much time clamoring to know what happened, and then we showed them, and

they seemed disappointed!

This is kind of what screwed over Solo: A Star Wars Story, a completely passable movie

whose entire purpose was explaining every single noodle incident Han Solo referenced

in the original trilogy.

It lays down in canon exactly what he was talking about when he said they did the Kessel

run, or that Chewie hangs out with him cuz he owes him a life debt, or that he won the

Falcon from Lando in a game.

And you can almost hear the writers room clapping themselves on the back because they've figured

out how to give the audience the fanservice they demand, because fans have been speculating

about the kessel run for decades!

Won't it be so good for them to finally see it?

And we can finally stick it to those people who keep pointing out that a parsec is a unit

of distance by explaining how that actually made sense all along!

People are gonna love this movie!

After all, it's what they've been asking for for years!

Solo kinda heralded the current era of Star Wars content where everything feels pretty

intensely focus-grouped to give fans what they think fans want from playing to the averages,

and that means every time they explain a noodle incident, it ends up being basically the average

explanation.

Solo is a movie with no surprises except for how good that one explosion looked.

And I probably liked that movie more than most people.

I mean, for one thing I actually watched it, which is already kind of a big step.

And for ages, the best thing I've had to say in its defense is that it's exactly what I

expected it to be.

It hits every beat you'd expect from a Han Solo origin story.

He checks off every box from his backstory, has a gunfight where he shoots first, gets

all his equipment in order and flies off into the sunset with all the stars going whoosh.

We even get to see Chewie rip a guy's arms off.

On paper this is a nice and tidy way to give fans the answers to every question they've

been asking since Han first rocked up on the silver screen in 1977.

There's only one problem.

A gold-hearted street-smart scoundrel like Han Solo should not be a character with all

his questions answered.

He's had a long and complicated life causing problems and getting into scrapes.

The reason he has so many noodle incidents in the first trilogy is because he's had the

most convoluted life out of our trio of protagonists when contrasted with "princess on a mission"

and "farmboy who's never left his zipcode", and this is signaled by him constantly referencing

things he and Chewie have done in a way that implies he's been doing a lot of stuff.

The fact that we don't know his whole story and he's been up to a lot of sketchy shenanigans

is kinda foundational to his vibes, and it makes the twist of his character work where

he shockingly does not abandon the good guys and instead gets himself in a lot of trouble

doing the right thing for once.

Han is a pretty simple character and he's written pretty efficiently in the original

trilogy, and the fact that there's a lot of vagueness in his backstory is a feature of

his archetype, not a bug to be corrected.

Now when Han mentions the kessel run, the audience doesn't go "ooh, the Kessel Run,

that sounds interesting and space-related, he must've gotten up to a lot of fun high-speed

adventures", they go "oh yea, I remember that part of the movie with the thing that lives

near black holes but isn't immune to black holes."

The Noodle Incident trope illustrates one of the more counterintuitive parts of storytelling,

and one of the parts that I personally have had the most trouble internalizing: sometimes

it's better to not explain something.

The bones of the story need to be pretty solid - setup, payoff, key backstory elements, explanations

to hyped-up mysteries - but outside of that core space there's a lot of room for vagueness

and flexibility and implication.

Noodle Incidents are characterization tropes.

What happens in them almost never matters, it's how the characters feel and talk about

them that's the real meat of this trope.

To drop in a quick MCU example, one of Nick Fury's most interesting lines back in the

earlier phases was "Last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye."

Nick Fury's eyepatch is an iconic part of his character design, but up to this point

it's never really been focused on or addressed directly in the movies, and Nick Fury is not

the kind of person to volunteer information that isn't need-to-know.

So when he drops that little tidbit, the takeaway isn't "oh man, I wonder what specifically

happened to make him lose that eye," it's "oh man, so Nick Fury has been profoundly

betrayed by somebody he trusted in a way that literally scarred him for life, which is probably

part of why he is so ridiculously cautious and overprepared, he sure has been through

a lot of stuff that tempered him into the ludicrous badass he is today - somebody who

would never make that mistake again."

It's a characterization cue.

No explanation for his missing eye was going to have the same impact on the audience as

just hearing him talk about it.

And especially…

especially not the explanation they actually gave us.

And that is actually pretty illustrative of this point!

When they finally showed us How Nick Fury Lost That Eye, it was a joke, and it tacitly

disproved all those juicy characterization implications we'd inferred from that first

reference.

Profound betrayal shaping the young Nick Fury, a reminder of his own past weakness staring

him in the face every time he looked in the mirror - now all we get from it is that he

probably doesn't like cats very much.

A noodle incident is basically narrative sleight of hand.

It looks like it's showing the audience a fun hint of a hidden adventure, but through

the execution of that hint it's actually teaching the audience what kind of person the character

is.

And then, if the writer decides they wanna show how the trick was done, the trick stops

working.

There's a lot of merit to leaving things loose and unresolved when it comes to character

backstories.

If it's not foundational to the comprehension of the story, it doesn't need to be set in

stone.

We don't need to see exactly what Han Solo did to piss off Jabba the Hutt, the only part

that matters for the story is that he did piss off Jabba the Hutt and now our heroes

need to deal with the consequences.

And when we examine this uncertainty principle - a term that definitely has no other, more

confusing meanings - we can loop this back to horror again.

At the end of the horror movie The Thing, when the arctic base has burned down and the

creature has theoretically been destroyed, there are only two survivors left - protagonist

MacReady and engineer Childs, who had previously disappeared and was presumed dead but claims

to have just gotten lost in the storm.

Given the whole conceit of The Thing, it is entirely possible that that is not Childs.

Hell, if you squint, it's technically also possible that that's not MacReady.

The ending is brutally ambiguous - maybe our two human survivors have a chance of making

it, or maybe the only human survivor is about to die in some horrible way and the Thing

in question is just gonna freeze itself into hibernation again.

There's tons of theories and speculation about it - but fundamentally it doesn't have an

answer.

That's what makes it work.

No explanation would be as effective as the impact of not having an explanation.

I do feel the need to go off-script and clarify just a little bit that it takes work to create

a story wherein no explanation would be as satisfying as the impact of not having an

explanation.

Because this is like the root of that mystery-box form of storytelling that I think is absolute

bullshit, because it's like - if you're telling a mystery, the entire point of the story is

the resolution of the mystery.

That is pointedly not a case where a lack of explanation is more impactful than an explanation.

If it's a mystery, we wanna see it solved.

Okay, that's it, I'm done, we're good, bye.

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