“Is that one thing?”: 5 pop-culture life coaches who can’t count

1. Michael Ironside, Starship Troopers
Film and TV characters should really just have one rule: Don’t proclaim that they only have one rule, then turn it into a run-on sentence full of qualifiers. It undermines the point and makes it laughable. Michael Ironside certainly isn’t going for humor when he lays down the law for his new batch of alien-fighting space-marine recruits in Paul Verhoeven’s over-the-top science-fiction action movie Starship Troopers: He’s trying to be blunt and to the point about his expectations when he snaps, “I only have one rule: Everyone fights. No one quits. If you don’t do your job, I’ll shoot you.” It really wouldn’t have been any less blunt or tough to acknowledge that he actually has three rules, or at least that he can actually count. If nothing else, it might wipe some of the smirks off his charges’ faces.
2. Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
At least on How I Met Your Mother, the “one rule” that isn’t even close to one rule is not only openly acknowledged, it’s played for the giggles it deserves. The sixth-season episode “A Change Of Heart” launches a running gag about how Neil Patrick Harris’ horndog bro Barney Stinson “only has one rule,” except that he says that all the time, and it’s always a different rule, from “Never date a girl with a hook for a hand” to “If you’re gonna get it on in a Porta-Potty, do it early in the day.” The further extension of the gag: Every incidence of his “one rule” comes with the exception “Unless she’s hot.” The “Barney only has one rule” business cropped up in at least one later episode, and it also extended to the character’s online spin-off blog, which posted 40 different incidences of his “one rule.” Unfortunately, some of them don’t work well with the exception: “If someone yells ‘duck,’ then duck, unless she’s hot” sounds like a good way to take a football to the face in the park. “If it’s yellow, flush it down, too, unless she’s hot” is even worse.