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I believe in giving every movie the benefit of the doubt. I walked into The Waterboy, sat down, took a sip of my delicious medium roast coffee and felt at peace with the world. How nice it would be, I thought, to give Adam Sandler a good review for a change. Goodwill and caffeine suffused my being, and as the lights went down I all but beamed at the screen. Then Adam Sandler spoke, and all was lost. His character's voice is made of a lisp, a whine, a nasal grating and an accent that nobody in Louisiana actually has, although the movies pretend that they do.
—Roger Ebert, on The Waterboy.
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You've heard it a million times. A character will open his mouth to speak, and the minute he does you immediately know that this character is stupid. Whether he's an over-muscled Mook or the Plucky Comic Relief, the one thing you can tell just by his voice is the fact that his elevator just doesn't go all the way to the top floor.
Very common in animated works, because allegedly such an obvious characterization tool appeals to children. In The Golden Age of Animation, this sort of voice was used a lot by characters who were a parody of Lenny from the film adaptation of Of Mice and Men.
When the character is male, generally expect a halting voice in the low registers, or else a high-pitched quavering, with most sentences beginning with the word 'duh'. When the character is female, expect a high-pitched nasally whine or an even higher-pitched squeak-fest. Often, characters with this voice will use poor grammar. Male characters often substitute the t or d sounds for the th sound, like saying "dat" for "that." A Valley Girl accent helps for female ditzes, as it makes them fall into the category of "Kill her, I can't take her voice anymore!"
A very common characteristic of Mooks and The Ditz.
Examples of Simpleton Voice include:
Advertising[]
- Grimace from McDonald's commercials
Abridged Series[]
- Sailor Venus of Sailor Moon Abridged.
- Tristan of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series. But it does give him super strength!
- Zorc too.
- Jack Atlas as well.
- Nappa from Dragonball Z Abridged, as well as the Kanassan who gives Bardock the ability to see the future.
Anime and Manga[]
- Dorodoron's voice from Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash Star sounds very similar to this type, sounding rather like Grounder from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog would if he was speaking Japanese.
- The French dub of Dragonball Z is notable for giving an extraordinarily nasal voice to Vegeta of all people. It's been theorized that not having read the entire story, the voice actors had originally expected him to be a generic cartoon villain, and thus gave him a generic cartoon villain voice; cue Heel Face Turn...
- It was never a "moron" voice though, more of a "evil schemer with permanent Psychotic Smirk" voice.
Comic Books[]
- Moose Mason from Archie Comics is written this way. He used to say "Duh-" before every line.
- Moe, the bully in Calvin and Hobbes, combined this with Painting the Fourth Wall - his speech bubbles were written in a childish scrawl.
Film - Animation[]
- Gus the Mouse from Disney's Cinderella.
- Whale hunter's assistant from The Legend of the Titanic and its sequel.
- Br'er Bear in Song of the South.
- Cubby from Peter Pan.
Film - Live Action[]
- This was lampshaded in Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo. Jennifer Love Hewitt does a perfect impression of the Big Bad's bimbo girlfriend's voice.
- In many film adaptations of Of Mice and Men, Lenny is often portrayed like this.
- Judy Holliday used this sort of voice when playing Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday.
- Likewise, Broderick Crawford in the same movie uses the rough-and-tumble "big dumb guy" version. Of course, Crawford really spoke like that...
- Falkor from The Neverending Story III.
- Lina Lamont in Singin in The Rain.
- Nick in 30 Minutes or Less.
- Sam in I Am Sam.
Literature[]
- Referenced in the novel version of Flowers for Algernon; Charlie notes that he had a stupid-sounding voice before his increase in intelligence, and he lapses back into it whenever he gets drunk.
Live Action TV[]
- Pets, Aiku and inspector Kukeke from Wremja.
- Michael Westen on Burn Notice occasionally affects something resembling this accent for his "Bubba"-ish characters.
- The Pakleds in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Radio[]
- Eccles from The Goon Show.
Theater[]
- Leaf Coneybear from The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee generally has one.
Video Games[]
- Rollo from The Elder Scrolls: Redguard.
- Ogres from Warcraft II and III.
- Frost Man from Mega Man 8. "Dat hurt!"
- Clark from Rayman 2.
- Ogryns in Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War. [1] Some Ork boyz, too.
- Xu Zhu from Dynasty Warriors.
- Derby in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.
- Olaf from the PC and Saturn versions of Lost Vikings 2.
- Big the Cat from Sonic the Hedgehog.
- Mr Fossey from The Curse of Monkey Island.
- Willard and Mog from Jak and Daxter.
Web Original[]
- Strong Mad from Homestar Runner speaks in an extremely exaggerated version of this trope, Played for Laughs. Most of his dialogue is nigh-unintelligible growls, but if you listen closely he is saying actual words...probably. Homestar Runner himself is a (somewhat) more subdued version of this trope.
- Homsar. Dear God, HOMSAR.
- The Nostalgia Chick did it in her review of Spice World.
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Mel B: "Girl power, feminism, you know what I mean?" |
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- The two titular leads of Baman Piderman.
Western Animation[]
- Hyuck! Goofy (1932), first appearing in the early days of the sound era, may have been the very first cartoon character with a voice like this.
- Homer Simpson is the leader of a small crowd of such characters from The Simpsons.
- Quite ironically, Ralph Wiggum, a character well-known for being unintelligent, is an aversion of this trope. His voice is high-pitched because he's a child, not because he's dumb, and it is no higher than the other characters who are children.
- Parodied/subverted with Oxford "Ox" Haas, one of the soldiers Grampa Simpson served with in World War II in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish." He spoke with this voice, and looked exactly like the kind of person who would.
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Burns: How many of you are familiar with the concept of a "tontine"? |
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- In one Imagine Spot where Lisa imagines her future after losing her intelligence, she's inexplicably gained a southern accent.
- Used in the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet" where the crew meets the council of robot elders. They promote human hunts to distract from their bigger problems.
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Elder 1: Like our crippling lugnut shortage. |
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- Pinky from Pinky and The Brain.
- Mungo from Heathcliff and The Catillac Cats.
- Hugo the Abominable Snowman from Looney Tunes.
- Also Beaky Buzzard, and Junior from the Three Bears shorts.
- Mugsy of Rocky and Mugsy
- The identically-sounding Runt and Ralph from Animaniacs.
- Various minor Ren and Stimpy characters, such as Lump and Loaf. Not to mention Stimpy himself.
- Chris Griffin from Family Guy. This wasn't actually the intention; Seth Green went into the audition and decided to do his impression of Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs as a joke, but ended up getting the part.
- And in the original version of the Pilot, his voice is more of a typical low-pitched simpleton voice.
- For that matter, Barry in American Dad!, who has the same voice.
- Cleveland Jr. from The Cleveland Show.
- Brittany, from Daria.
- And on the other end is Tiffany, the Asian Airhead of the Fashion Club, as seen here.
- Jamie too.
- Grounder in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. His voice changes to Received Pronunciation when he gets a genius chip.
- Bebop and Rocksteady in the '80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.
- Luanne and Bill from King of the Hill.
- Linsday from Total Drama Island.
- Ed (single "d") from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy.
- Ringo Starr from The Beatles. The actual Ringo wasn't happy about it.
- Junior from Tex Avery's George and Junior shorts
- Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants.
- Heffer from Rocko's Modern Life.
- Stinky from Hey Arnold, but he's not a complete idiot, just comically awkward.
- Willy White from Doug.
- Waffle from Catscratch.
- Brain from Top Cat.
- Megawatt from Mucha Lucha.
- Scooby Dum from Scooby Doo.
- Rocky from Avenger Penguins.
- Meathead from Tex Avery's Screwy Squirrel cartoons.
- Snails and Derpy Hooves from My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic
- Derpy is a strange case; Tabitha St. Germain was, apparently, under the impression that Derpy was meant to be a boy. So Derpy was never actually intended to have this trope, she just got one because Tabitha isn't very good at Cross-Dressing Voices.
- Tred Possum in Get Muggsy.
- Cheif from Tak and the Power of Juju.
- Gerold from The Goode Family
- Ranger Stu
- Wally Gator as he appeared in Harvey Birdman.
- Principal Pixiefrog and Neardy Crockodile from My Gym Partner's a Monkey.
- The titled protagonist of Yakkity Yak.
- Penny from The Mighty B.
- Baby Shellbey from House of Mouse
- Proffesor Pamlemoose from Sidekick.
- Rancid Rabbit from Cat Dog
- Nester, Momma, Paddy, Dan Duck and Paulie from Scaredy Squirrle.
- Gobsmack and Mr. Flea from Pearlie.
Real Life[]
- Actor Bill Fagerbakke (who is quite intelligent, urbane, and friendly in person) has made a career out of this trope. In addition to voicing Patrick Star in SpongeBob SquarePants, Broadway in Gargoyles and Bulkhead in Transformers Animated, Fagerbakke played Tom Cullen in the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand and Dauber on Coach; all of them had the "big dumb doofus" form of this trope.
- Karl Pilkington of The Ricky Gervais Show and An Idiot Abroad sounds notably less intelligent than Ricky and Steve...naturally, he is.
- Studies done on rural American Accents found that a disproportionate amount of preschoolers who spoke with vernacular rural accents (Vermont, Appalachia, etc.) were placed in special education classes for it.