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| - As for Harkle Harpell's eyes being teleported away from his body, he actually had an excuse that time: it happened during the Time of Troubles, during which everybody's magic spells went wrong somehow. Harkle tried to teleport his entire body before he knew the situation, the result being that he was able to see his intended destination (since his disembodied eyes were there) and talk to the people there, but his body remained behind. He was blind to his immediate surrounding until his colleagues were able to help him make the trip overland and reinsert the eyes in their sockets.
* Brandon stands out in The Leonard Regime due to his unusual behavior and overall oblivion.
* Discussed in Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son. He wasn't too fond of this trope: "Sir Isaac Newton, Mr. Locke, and (it may be) five or six more, since the creation of the world, may have had a right to absence, from that intense thought which the things they were investigating required." (letter I)
* Just because Shin-tsu of The Longing of Shiina Ryo is one of these doesn't mean he's wrong, you know.
* Lord Peter Wimsey's mother, the Dowager Duchess. As well as Lord Peter himself, though it's hard to tell how much of it is Obfuscating Stupidity.
* Morganville Vampires series: Myrnin (a vampire mad scientist with bunny slippers) and Miranda (a psychic ghost child).
* Maia Fresia from Umberto Eco's Numero Zero is very much this, having some childlike mannerisms and a penchant for saying things that randomly pop into her head (one of her colleagues even speculates that she has "a mild form of autism"). Interestingly, she combines this with a great sense of humor and a sharp wit.
* Ashley in the Nursery Crime novels, and his entire family. Considering they're Rambosian aliens, it's fairly obvious why they don't get many of the minutiae of human interaction.
* Oblomov. It's not really funny: Instead of caring for the village he owns, he spends years of dreaming up improvements and does effectively nothing.
* Gilbert Hays in Of Snail Slime, who spouts Non-Sequiters left and right, and seems to change his personal view of the world at the drop of a hat. Partially because he's a brainless walking human shaped tumor. Somehow.
* Oddly enough, also an Author Avatar.
* Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac's fictionalized version of Neal Cassidy drives 100 mph naked through the midwest in a borrowed car without a second (or first) thought. This not extreme behavior for this guy.
* Dwight from the Origami Yoda series is a Cloud Cuckoolander. He lies down in random places, and once thought that there were squirrels inside a locker he needed to open
* One of the most iconic examples is Jenny Wren, from Our Mutual Friend, who is physically handicapped to boot, and lives in a mixed world of harsh reality and poetic fancy ("Who is this in pain? Who is this in pain?").
* Percy Jackson and The Olympians has Tyson, the 6-foot-something cyclops who acts like he's about 3 years old.
* A great deal of the plot of Pippi Longstocking revolves around Pippi living in Cloudcuckooland while the adults and others doesn't.
* The Pirate Captain from Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! series. In one book he is told to concentrate and stay focused. Somehow he turns this into a ten-page daydream about a world made out of mint, where a lazy king tricks people into doing his yard work.
* The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed is nothing but this trope. Understandable because the author is an AI.
* Eilonwy from Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, who speaks in similes and metaphors, walks around barefoot, chatters airily and often argues with Taran, while still being a beautiful and sharp-witted girl who serves as a Love Interest.
* Psmith is another Wodehouse example. He added a silent P. to his name to differentiate himself from all other Smiths out there, and can tell when you're pronouncing his name without that silent letter. He also once offered to provide any service for a prospective employer, including assassinating their aunt.
* Bat Jarvis, from "Psmith, Jouralist", the gangster who's prone to ask you if you've ever had a cat with different-color eyes
* Sacksby Senior from Cocktail Time. He has a habit of misinterpreting everything that is said to him, and he also refers to his acquaintance Lord Ickenham as 'Scriventhorpe', for no discernible reason. Out of Wodehouse's cloudcuckoolander characters, he is arguably the most divorced from reality:
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* But Wodehouse's most famous Cloud Cuckoolander has to be Bertie Wooster, the kookiest narrator ever to assert that opossums play dead by instructing their friends to hang out crepe paper and go into public mourning.
* A popular Older Than Television example that helped define this trope is James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." The titular hero is a mild, unassuming man who's prone to spinning off into elaborate heroic fantasies at the slightest real-life suggestion.
* In Patricia C. Wrede's The Seven Towers, the sorceress Amberglas is somewhere between this and Obfuscating Stupidity; her constant rambling digressions seem to be genuine, but she's much sharper (and more powerful) than she gives the impression of being, and frequently she has important things to say if you can sort them out from the nonsense.
* Ebbitt of The Seventh Tower definitely qualifies. He'd be plain old Crazy Awesome... if he didn't keep forgetting key points of his plan.
* Jeanne from Charles Baxter's Shadow Play. She invents new words like "zarklike", "corilineal" and "nutomberized", talks to herself, believes she's drifting on an ocean liner, speaks in metaphors, sees angels and so on and so forth. At the same time, she's often wise and loving. She actually understands she's crazy, but seems to choose madness over sanity and prefer living in her own universe. As her son Wyatt said about her, "you couldn't be insane by choice, but she was."
* Eliza in Someone Else's War. Her chipper nuttiness is a breath of fresh air, considering that the rest of the novel is one relentless punch to the gut after another. The same novel also gives us Abdel, a quirky little weirdo who arbitrarily decides that he is psychic.
* Stargirl in Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. Doesn't wear makeup and carries a ukulele around school and serenades strangers in the canteen with music from it on their birthdays. Also decorates her desk each period with a tablecloth and flowers.
* In Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series the entire city of Trenton, New Jersey seems to be if not Cloudcuckooland, at least a suburb thereof.
* Valentine Michael Smith from Stranger in A Strange Land is this trope played seriously, a Fish Out of Water that confuses everyone immensely because he is clearly not stupid, and probably an outright genius.
* An interesting variation occurs in the novel Summer of Eternity. The mother of one of the characters learns that her husband helped commit a murder and has been arrested. She has a complete breakdown, as a result. For the rest of the book, she is in a cheerful mood and is off in her own little world, believing that her husband is off at work rather than at prison. The trope is played straight, but due to the context in which it is played, it comes across as heartbreaking rather than funny.
* Patty, the 12-year-old protagonist of Summer of My German Soldier, is virtually friendless and suffers abuse at the hands of her parents. She often escapes into daydreams as a coping mechanism.
* In The Trolls there is a woman nicknamed "Mad Maud" from Aunt Sally's stories who lived in a house filled with stuffed animals she supposedly shot herself and routinely goes cougar hunting in the woods surrounding her house. Said cougars were actually squirrels, and her aim is far from accurate.
* Dr. Roger Burrows, the wanna-be Adventure Archaeologist of the Tunnels series. He tends to get so caught up in his admiration of ancient artifacts that he neglects trivial matters such as the fact he ran out of food three days ago and is surrounded by large carnivores. He does however have enough of The Fool archetype to survive most dangers by virtue of simply not noticing them.
* Wendy from John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming is similar to Eilonwy--a Genki Girl who believes she forgot how to fly and runs naked in the woods trying to remember, gets sidetracked during a conversation to hunt for elves, and isn't at all surprised when a armored knight-errant climbs through the window in her hospital room.
* Just about anyone in Winnie-the-Pooh besides Eeyore. Kanga's a bit more stable, too, if a little overprotective.
* Almost every character in Work Shirts For Mad Men has some elements of this. The narrator often comes off as one to other characters.
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