TV TROPES WIKI

The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer

"Ladies and gentlemen of the City Council, I'm just a caveman... Your world frightens and confuses me. When I see your tall buildings and flashing neon signs, sometimes I just want to get away as fast as I can, to my place in Martha's Vineyard. I'm more at home hunting the woolly mammoth than I am hunting a good interior decorator. And when I see a solar eclipse, like the one I went to in Hawaii last week, I think 'Oh no, is the moon eating the sun?', because I'm a caveman... but there is one thing I do know. The new resort housing development proposed by my partners and myself, will include more than adequate greenbelts for recreation and aesthetic enhancement. Thank you. (smug grin)"

—Cirroc, The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Saturday Night Live

We've all seen it. A character is placed in a completely unfamiliar environment, perhaps sent forward through time, or to a ship in outer space, or something equally ridiculous, and quickly becomes a Fish out of Water. This case doesn't seem any different. Just like every other time, the fish is flapping around, and is running out of air. But wait, why does it look like that fish is trying to walk on its hind fins? IT'S LEARNING TO BREATHE AIR! Something's fishy here.

Take it to the illogical extreme, and you could end up with a caveman, frozen in ice for thousands of years, who awakes to the modern world and promptly becomes a lawyer. It's when a former Fish out of Water becomes well adapted to their new environment, to the point where they almost fit there better than the people that actually belong there. Makes you think this is where they should have been in the first place. Often justified in that the person coincidentally had an affinity for the very environment they ended up in, and thanks to their Genre Savvy manage to adapt with little fuss. i.e. a person who reads a lot of sci-fi novels ending up in space and thanks to all the stories he's read about aliens, is inoculated against the shock of being around them and easily wraps his head around their whacky explanations of all the Phlebotinum they tote around. Sometimes the justification is that the newcomer's fresh viewpoint makes them superior to the natives at operating in his new environment.

An alternate justification is that the newcomer possesses a trait he always considered useless, but is of incredible utility in his new environment. Named for SNL's Cirroc, The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, who slyly manipulated the jury by playing the "I'm just a caveman" card, who wore nice suits, and had a smug charm stereotypical of modern laywers. Despite the name the character is not necessarily a Contemporary Caveman.