10 MCU Moments That Don't Quite Fit
8. The Self-Cooking Hot Dog - Captain America: Civil War
If the DC Extended Universe can be criticized for being too dark and gloomy, Marvel can be criticized for taking the humor too far sometimes. It should be noted that just because Tony Stark is funny, it doesn't mean everyone who is in a scene with Tony Stark should be funny.
Humor must also be appropriate for the characters and the setting, otherwise it feels forced and pulls the audience out of the moment. This particular offense occurs in the beginning of Captain America: Civil War.
As Tony Stark walks offstage after delivering a philanthropic speech to the students of MIT, he’s followed by an enthusiastic but doltish faculty member who slimily courts Stark for money by pitching his idea for self-cooking hotdogs. Of all the things it could have been, the self-cooking hotdog is a little too far into cornyville to be believable. They double down by having the man explain that the secret is a small thermal charge inside each one. Funny is funny, but this requires too much suspension of disbelief.
We can buy that Tony Stark is Iron Man and gamma rays turn people into Hulks. We can't buy that a man intelligent enough to be an MIT professor would shoot his one shot at glory for a self-cooking hot dog.