I watched a bad action comedy over the weekend and it clarified in my mind a thing that bugs me in certain kinds of stories, which I've decided to call "The Valences of Comic Competency" (I made charts)

Here's the standard non-comic formula: a character is good at something (or everything) and knows it, and the world knows it. This isn't a funny setup, inherently, beyond the likelihood that it's being employed in a hubristic vanity project.

In order to have an intrinsically comic setup one or more of these values need to be in conflict. Take for example WITHOUT A CLUE, which posits that Sherlock Holmes is a doofus and Watson was the smart one. But everyone treats doofus Sherlock Holmes like he's smart. Funny!

For an inverse example, consider Matlock. Matlock wins every case he's ever tried, but everyone still treats him like total shit. What the fuck? That's pretty funny.

The middle value is where a lot of Marvel movies live, and it's often used more as a self-effacing tool or coming of age setup than a comic formula, but you can get some good stuff out of it

And so on. But the important thing is that these values need to be consistent, at least in the minds of the creators. If a character's hot shit they're hot shit, and if they're a charismatic fraud they're a charismatic fraud, but you can't go back and forth

Those values can change over the course of a story but it needs to be intentional, either a plot point or a character arc. Austin Powers losing his mojo etc. The rules need to be clear before you can mess with them.