There has been many instances of people being dumbed down for humor. Is this a good or bad thing ?
Some examples:
- Joey, Friends
- Mallory, Family Ties
- Eric, Boy Meets World

I was just curious if other people think this is good or stupid.

To quote "Awesomo" from South Park, LAME! and I'll see your Joey, Mallory, and Eric and raise you one Mason from Dead Like Me.

Joan, Joan of Arcadia

Although that may have all been the effects of lyme disease; we'll have to see how she is in the new season.

And you can't leave out Homer Simpson. Although he was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, he wasn't as dumb in the first season as he is now.

Edited because I forgot to add if I thought it was good or bad. In Homer's case, I thought it was good -- because he is a cartoon character. But for real actors, not so good. It's really not fun to laugh at stupid people. What is funny is when an intelligent character makes a stupid statement.

I think this sort of things works better in a comedy than in a drama. I really don't like it because it's strikes me as mean. I agree that with Homer it was good though he still makes very insightful comments now and then.

ETA: Interesting topic Halfpint Ingals. Also Joan's lyme disease better be the reason for last year's antics. It was one of the few things about that show that bugged me.

Cindy on Just the Ten of Us...in the first few epsiodes of the short first season, Cindy was not dumb at all, and if anything, she put Wendy down. Later on though she just got more and more vacuous, e.g. not having the coordination to light a cigarette, not remembering her middle name correctly, not knowing how to calculate her salary.

Also Mark from Roseanne. He didn't really say a lot when he and Becky first started going out, so I guess he could've been secretly stupid, but they definitely dumbed him down over time.

In addition to virtually every American-sitcom(whose characters probably start out dumb these days) the worse example that comes to mind is "Gilmore Girls." Once a dramedy with actual drama and acting. Now it's unbearable screeching "comedy" with people talking in circles to avoid setting precedent for continuity. I only know because I'm draw back occassionally for the likes of Luke and Emily, those who are still partially sane.

I feel like Jack and Karen get more and more stupid with every passing episode of Will & Grace (especially Jack). Seriously, one of these days I fear the jokes will consist solely of Jack drooling on himself happily, while the audience mindlessly laughs at his dumb dog antics.

Also, as you mentioned above, somehow Joey Tribbiani went from occasionally dense to outright mentally slow somewhere along the line.

Jack O'Neill. I cannot believe they put someone that dense in charge of anything. Back in the first seasons he was, in certain areas, very clever. As a military commander he was top notch. Now? Just dumb, dumb, dumb. I really hope there's an episode where it's revealed he just acts thick so people underestimate him, because I used to love that character so much. He was genuinely funny in a snarky way instead of a 'lets laugh at the idiot' way.

ITA with everyone.

I can't think of anyone specifically, but... I can't stand stupid characters. If you want to write good humor, the characters don not have to be stupid. Maybe exaggerated, but not stupid. I think it's all about the situation and the reactions that make comedy. Comedy shows offend heavily in that area.

Are you talking about that jerk from Stargate. Hate him.

Xander and Cordelia were kinda dumb during S1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer they were soon replaced by Anya S4. Angel had Harmony S5.

Let us not forget Kelly Bundy of Married...With Children. She didn't start out dumb at all. She ended up dumb as a box of rocks. It's always sorta bugged.

I hated what they did to Joey on Friends. (Rachel and Ross also became rather ditzy and foolish in the last few seasons too.) Sure, Joey was never the smartest of the friends, but he was streetwise and could crack an insightful joke along with the rest of them. The other Friends would do or say dumb things too.

By the end, Joey was a blithering idiot and a child. He's not a freaking cartoon!

Chrissy on Three's Company got dumber and blonder during her run. When you watch early episodes, she is a bit ditzy and more naive than anything. By the time she was written off, she seemed like it would be too challenging to tie her shoes.

Buddy from Charles in Charles got progessively more stupid each season. If I recall correctly, the very first season (with the completely different family), he wasn't really stupid at all. But by the end, it was out of control. Straight up demented. Ridiculously retarded. Dude literally acted like a 5 year old.

Also, Kimmy from Full House (I have no shame) went from kind of dumb and flakey, to straight up mentally challenged.

Kelly on Married With Children. When the show first started, she was bratty and maybe trampy but she wasn't a complete idiot. As the show went on, she got dumber and dumber, forgetting how to spell soap (sope) and how to go up stairs. At first, she seemed fully aware of how to be sexy and manipulative. It got to the point where her dumbness was the main joke of the show.

Actually, all of the Bundys were dumbed down. At first, Peg actually cooked and Al wasn't completely Homer-esque.

God, why do people think Homer Simpson is funny? He was funny once, back when he bore some resemblance to an adult and had a few responsibilities to worry about. Now he gets away with murder, the 15-year old boys still laugh hysterically, and critics who haven't watched the show in 10 years still call it "America's best comedy!" They may be right, but only because nearly every other comedy is so bad.

As a guy who thinks that Ted Baxter is one of the best characters of all-time, I have no issue with characters who are a bit daft. I do, however, dislike when they take a character who is just a little off and have him or her (but typically him) all but crapping himself while drooling in later seasons.

It all boils down to writing and fan appeal: people kind of like the dumb guy, so more material is written to place this person in spotlight. However, he/she was most likely not meant to be central to a plot. Now, the rest of the show has to be dumbed down to match this new focus ("Family Matters", "Good Times").

Next thing you know, the honor student has apparently dropped out of the state college he was attending for some odd reason in order to be a secretary at his old high school (good job, Screech).

Of course, the prize-winning boobs are hapless husbands. Tim and Jill's relationship in "Home Improvement" may be the reason I don't want to be married; Ray and Debra on "Everybody Loves Raymond" sealed the deal.

Remember the episode where all Ray wanted was to have more input in the decisions of the house? Seems reasonable, yet the end of that episode (where the curtains catch fire and he is spraying the garden hose from 10 feet away, trying to throw handfuls of water at the fire) irritated the heck out of me.

Apparently, though, people like this: every show on nowadays seems to have Clueless Dad (now with extra cholesterol!)

The "appeal" of dumb characters has always puzzled me. I have never liked characters who were completely clueless or incompetent. Clueless and incompetent in some areas, sure. Capable of making funny mistakes, sure. But not out-and-out MORONS.
Consider, if you will, Radar and Klinger on M*A*S*H*. Radar was so naive and unlearned that when a patient referred to "Rembrandt, the painter," he responded with, "Oh, we have aluminum siding." That was actually funny -- but part of the reason it was funny was because we knew darn well that Radar was the engine that kept the 4077th running. He may not know a Dutch painter from his elbow, but he could think on his feet. (He also had imagination, which is a saving grace in many a "ditzy" character.) Klinger didn't know who Wagner was (when Hawkeye pronounced the composer's name correctly, Klinger claimed it "must be the Major's [Winchester's] handwriting") and he couldn't spell "caution" (C-A-W? K-A-W?). But Klinger was cunning, a first-rate scrounge. I enjoyed these characters and could laugh at their malapropisms because I knew that while they might be ignorant to a certain degree, they were not stupid. Ignorant-but-competent characters are enjoyable to watch. Stupid characters are just annoying.

Joan, from Joan of Arcadia, is a contemporary example of an ignorant character. Her most recent malapropism is an assumption that Ellison's Invisible Man is about, well, an invisible man. These mistakes are thrown in for humor, and sometimes to an annoying degree. But as anyone who watches the show regularly knows, Joan is not stupid. She has imagination. She can work out problems. She can discover things. She can even ace a history test once something sparks her curiosity. With regard to ditziness, Joan's worst enemy is herself; she is a "mediocrity" by choice and not by nature. This complexity often makes her a rewarding character to watch.
Mallory Keaton, however, was Just. Plain. Stupid. Joan would only have to hear about the exploits of Magellan once, and she would get it. Mallory, however, couldn't keep "Magellan" and "Massachusetts" straight inside her airy head. She was so clueless about everything save fashion that I could not stomach her and would not watch any Family Ties episode that showcased her. When her tomboy sister, Jennifer, was similarly dumbed down, I became even more disgusted -- because the show seemed to imply that teenage girls were natural morons.

Occasionally, a show will smarten a character up (e.g. Donna on The West Wing made a move toward competency between Seasons 1 and 2), and I find that progress much more interesting to watch. But the Mallory Keatons and Kelly Bundys of this world -- would we really enjoy hanging out with them for long periods of time if we met them in real life? No, most likely we would hope they wouldn't decide to pass on their genes.

Ignorance can be funny. Stupidity is just irritating. Could someone please explain the appeal of "stupid"?

I can't. But one character that I can really think of off the bat who was dumb as a rock, yet was a good, likable character was Rose from The Golden Girls. I don't know why exactly, but it worked. Maybe it was the good writing or the way Betty White played her, but I always thought that was a good role. Another plus for this show was that it always remained true to the characters. Rose was always naive and dim-witted, and they didn't just one day decide to make her that way to fulfill some sort of 'cheap laugh' quota each week. (Unlike some of the other shows mentioned).

I have to say Jack O'Neil from StarGate owns this thread.

I can't stand Peter Griffin from Family Guy, for all the reasons MaggieElizabeth mentioned. He's just one functioning brain cell from being a drooling vegetable. I don't see the appeal at all.

OTOH, I love Stewie and Brian, so I watch, but I keep the mute button ready.

MaggieElizabeth, you put things so eloquently. Sometimes I find myself talking to Friends fans who roll their eyes at my complaints about the character destruction over the years. They say things like, "But Joey's always been stupid!", and I try to tell them that he wasn't stupid, just ignorant and under-educated. (He didn't go to college like the others, but then, Phoebe didn't go to high school either, and she seemed an insightful, smart cookie many times.)

Why can't TV writers see such distinctions? Lack of experience and knowledge in worldly matters does not mean that the character's brain is actually non-functional and equivalent to a child's mind.

I agree, Jazper, and IMO the reason it worked with Rose was because her demeanor was always sunny and cheerful, plus as you noted she was always a little dim and she didn't just turn up that way at some point with no explanation.

Another character that was really ill-served by this treatment was Buffy's Xander Harris. As opposed to his two best friends, Buffy and Willow, Xander never went to college, instead going to work at various and sundry blue-collar jobs. And normally that would have been fine, except I think he got heavily sidelined in the later season of the show because of his lack of education and such. Does anyone have any explanation why this happens at all, or is it only for the 'cheap laugh' quota?

I think that the character Van from Reba does a good job of being dimwitted but sweet. They also let him be funny outside of the dumb jokes.

I hate what RDA made of Jack O'Neill as the show went on. Shut. Up. JACK.

Fred becoming Illyria in Angel.

To me in just felt a bit forced. It was like the writers were on some sort of contract to make sure that someone (a main character) in the Buffyverse always commented on how silly humans were in a way that imploied the actual character was a bit slow. In Buffy it was Cordy S1-3, then when she left Anya replaced her until the end.

Cordy kept up the routine in Angel from S1-4, but then when she disappeared the writers needed a replacement so killed Fred off. Illyria always grated on my nerves because it seemed that Fred had been dumbed down. If the thing can remember Fred's memories, it should be bloody smart.

Harmony was always dumb to me, that's why I don't think she fits into the whole dumbing down of a character.

This was only a temporary 'dumbing down' but it really irked me:
Miranda on SATC, after Steve moved into her apartment and they kept running into Blair Underwood in the building. Her whole giggly / hysterical 'be gentle, he LOVES me' crap, was just painful to watch and not in character at all.

The second I saw this topic, I thought of Tommy D from Saved by the Bell: The New Class. He became so unbearably stupid in the second season, as opposed to just being the slightly dim bully from the first. But that show was shit, anyway.

I agree about Tommy D. They really made him an idiot. How about Eric on Boy Meets World. He was the cool older brother and then all of a sudden he said stupid things just to get laughs

All my biggest pet peeves has mentioned Joey, Eric (from Boy Meets World, Kelly from MWC.

However, Mallory from Family Ties always annoyed me because for the first few seasons she was a bright, slightly superficial (mostly in comparison to the rest of her family) teenage girl who often got the better of Alex and by the end she was a blindingly stupid adult who engaged (or did they get married) to another ridiculously stupid character who were just punch lines.

I agree that Rose worked and that is because she was naive not stupid and that she had such a good heart and was smart about relationships and the like but I could see a woman of her age who grew up in a small town like she did wouldn't be as exposed to the rest of the world as the others.

Actually, it's funny that people should talk about Homer's stupidity. I actually remember reading an interview with Matt Groenig about how they realised a few series in that they had actually made Homer too dumb and they stopped that.



I don't know, I seem to remember some of the later episodes where they showed Mallory to have a different sort of smarts. The best episode was when her little sister (Jen, I think) was trying to have a party with all the cool girls and they all came in and made a series of comments and calls on the food, decor and colour scheme. Then Mallory comes in and makes exactly the same calls and the Keatons pounce on her and realise she's really smart socially and knows what is cool and she can help them. I also remember another episode where she is interviewing for college.

The character that this annoyed me most with this was Mark on Roseanne. He went from the biker bf with jokes about how he wasn't bright enough from Darlene and Roseanne - though in his scenes, he showed insight and intelligence - to drooling idiot.

By the end of the series, the poor actor was reduced to wandering in, tossing off a line about how he didn't know north was up or some such, and leaving as he was insulted by nearly everyone.

It was just ridiculous how stupid they made him and that the character's entire existance was just turned into a punchline.

I think Mallory was always pretty loopy, but it was good-hearted loopy. I don't really recall her getting worse, but I haven't seen it in a long time.

I'm thinking of Suzanne and Charlene on Designing Women, particularly Suzanne. At first she was a kind of vampy, somewhat slutty divorcee, but then later she just became dumb and obnoxious. She and Charlene were set up as the morons next to Julia and Mary Jo. No wonder they left the show. And then came the uber-dumb, Charlene's sister Carlene, played by Jan Hooks. Poor Jan, she used to always play the smart characters on SNL, but then she got this stinker of a role.

My problem with Mallory's being "smart socially," and later with Jennifer's de-volution from smart, spunky tomboy to Lizzie McGuire, was the implication that "social intelligence" was the only kind of intelligence that girls were expected to have. For them, success in high school was about being cool and being popular -- not about learning anything. In this show's universe, academic intelligence was a guy thing (as was ambition). No wonder Alex was sexist; the show justified his prejudice. We had to wait until he fell for Ellen Reed to see a girl or young woman with anything like an academic bent, and Ellen didn't appear for several seasons.

Of course, ditzy fashion plates like Mallory do exist, and television is going to show them. The problem occurs when television never shows us anything else. This is still a problem, as I've pointed out on "Gender on Television" -- and I think that thread has breathed its last -- but it is better now than it was in the '80s.

Still, the issue of being "smart socially" does bring up a question worth asking in this thread: what is intelligence? where does it come from?
I believe that intelligence is firmly rooted in four things:
1) curiosity, 2) memory, 3) logic, and 4) imagination.
The first two are actually the roots of the last, and my biggest irritation lies with the characters who conspicuously lack all four of these. Social intelligence may be all well and good, but it's not enough. It should be obvious that life is about so much more than giving color-coordinated parties, wearing cool fashions and looking good. Sadly, Mallory Keaton never figured that one out.
Academic intelligence, however, is generally depicted by television (and most of popular culture) as antithetical to social/emotional intelligence; the implication is that a person can't be book-smart and heart-smart at the same time -- he or she has to choose. Yet if we examine life and the world around us, we can see that BOTH are important to success and fulfillment. In depicting them as opposites, unable to coexist, television does all of us a disservice.

I think herein lies part of the reason why, as an earlier poster said, "we all like the dumb guy." In television's lexicon, "dumb" is synonymous with "nice," while brainy and well-read characters are invariably shown as self-absorbed snobs or awkward geeks. Shows can't seem to be bothered to depict intelligence -- a well-rounded intelligence, that is -- as a quality that viewers should aspire to. If you're dumb, at least you make people laugh. They'll even think you're "cute."

Lots of good points in the deep discussion of intelligence above.

I think Rachel from Friends is a Mallory Keating type of woman: concerned with looks and dating, not with intellectual issues. She doesn't have a lot of education and doesn't care; to her, a new line from Chanel is much more important than a war in Iraq. And when Joey laughs at "erectus" in "homo erectus", she laughs at "homo". She's not really that smart.



That's a good point. And I'm one of the Friends fans who can admit that Joey got ridiculous by the end. Not funny anymore, just dumb. But it happened to all of the characters - they became one-joke characters with one character trait.

CS, I completely agree with this. I think in the early seasons, all the characters were very three-dimensional. Each had their strengths and their faults, but felt like there were many facets to them. As the seasons progressed, they sidelined Xander so much that he stopped being a character and became a two-dimensional caricature of what he had been. A witty and/or self-depricating line here and there, or embarrased because of Anya's sex talk or inappropriate comments. His relationships with the other core characters became almost unrecognizable.

I have posted many times that the treatment of Xander's character (and NB's talents as an actor) over the course of the series were the Worst.Thing.Ever about Buffy. And considering Season 7, that is saying a lot.

I don't agree that Jack on Stargate SG-1 has gotten dumber. It's always been his role to ask, "What's that buzzword mean?" and look confused when Sam or Daniel tells him. He doesn't have their book learning, and yes, he's played up the puzzled expressions more over the years. But he's in charge because he makes good decisions on a regular basis, and that kind of smarts is damn useful in his chosen profession.

I think Jack "acting cute" by being a distracted unconcerned asshole during briefings and first-contact missions is indicative of excessive dumb in the lowest SGC-employee, nevermind the premiere team-leader.

Kelly from MWC and Buddy from CIC dumbing down really pissed me off. By the end of their shows runs I always wondered how the hell the two of the managed to function on a day to day basis without someone there to take care of them.

Buddy used to be smart! Girl crazy yeah but he wasn't a complete moron. He did manage to get into college.

And Kelly was the slutty girl but she could do more than smile and hike up her skirt more. Though I did love the episode where everytime she learned something new, she forgot an old piece of information. Eh, I'm easy like that, lol.

Although I kind of agree that Xander was dumbed down, I do think Buffy wasn't particularly portrayed as being that intelligent either, and often for comic effect (in the episode ‘The Freshman’ for instance, she doesn't know the difference between ‘reconaissance’ and ‘Renaissance’, whereas Xander does, and she was always getting the names of demons wrong). Even Willow, one of her best friends, described her as a ‘nice girl. Not that bright.’ Come to think of it, bearing in mind some of her battle plans in later seasons, maybe Buffy was the one who was dumbed down. Except it wasn't funny.

One that bugs me is Becky in Roseanne. When the first actress played her, she was a straight-A student who had all these college plans, but when the other actress took over, she's working at some Hooters-style restaurant (not that you can't be intelligent if you work in Hooters or anything), married to a dumbass (Mark's dumbing-down didn't help either IMO), getting excited about moving into a trailer and not doing anything about trying to get into college.

This is an interesting topic with interesting and well-thought-out posts. I agree that most comedy TV scripts perpetuate the idea that characters cannot have both “book” intelligence and “social” intelligence.

One of the things I admire about “Friends” is the way they handled the Phoebe character. They could have created her as the stupid, ditzy, blond, flaky, former street person. Instead, even though she was unconventional, she had some “street smarts” that the other Friends did not, and often came up with interesting, workable solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, TPTB were too chicken to go without any dumb characters, so they had to dumb down other characters (Rachel, Joey). If I was in an arguing mood, I might argue that Rachel wasn’t dumb, as much as shallow/spoiled/used to having money.

People tune in to the “boob tube” to get good feelings, and I wonder if TPTB are afraid that audiences would be threatened by characters that had both “book smarts” and “people skills”. Characters with weaknesses make audiences feel good about themselves and they’ll continue to tune in to feel how much better they are than the characters they are watching. It’s a pretty cynical view of comedy, but I’d bet the farm it’s a view most network PTB share. If a show’s ratings aren’t going well, I guess it’s just too tempting to take a less bright character and make him/her really dumb to keep audiences coming back.

I love the show “Gilmore Girls” in part because one of the main characters is a very bright (now college) female student. However, I wonder if people have a hard time relating to this character if they are not similarly bright and driven.

I had heard that toward the end of the MWC run, Christina Applegate had requested less revealing outfits. It seems to me this was about the time her “Kelly” character was written as outrageously stupid. Maybe since the writers couldn’t count on slinky outfits to keep viewers watching, they resorted to dumbing down the character? Lazy writing? Oh, yes.

Interestingly, (or interesting to me!), the same need to dumb down the characters doesn’t hold for drama series. All the crime detective series and franchises (I’m looking at you “CSI,”, “Law and Order”, etc.) probably wouldn’t be as popular if the detectives and lawyers constantly bungled cases week after week. Then again, with the Pink Panther series, Peter Sellars cashed in on the assumption that people WOULD watch (and pay to see) a stupid detective.

Before I stopped watching ER, the character Frank the desk clerk would constantly get on my nerves. The show had a parade of desk clerks, notably the lovely snarky Randi, who would direct patient traffic and comment on the doctors' personal lives. Frank came in a former cop (he had been treated there in an earlier season for a gunshot wound) and had the potential to insert a more conservative point of view in a show full of fairly liberal characters. Instead he became this bigoted-against-everybody jerk fest, not even in an Archie Bunker way; he was just unpleasant, unenlightened and unfunny.

And then there's Dr. Romano, who owns this thread.

On BtVS, it seemed like most of the cast was dumbed down as the series went on. For the talk of Buffy and Xander, there's also the Willow who was hacker extraordinaire at 16, yet reduced solely to the Google search at 21. Whether there was a specific point to it, whether the writers were being lazy, or whether they were just dumb themselves, who knows...

Similarly, I think much of the "Married With Children" cast as a whole got dumber as the series wound on. It got pretty farcical.

I agree with ems7 and AresCupid about Jack O'Neill. Sometimes Jack's trying to be funny. He only acts that way around his teammates.
There are times when he really doesn't know and in those cases, it's because he doesn't unsderstand the technical asepcts of it. He says in the pilot his discomfort with the physical sciences, especially at the level in which Carter's expertise comes in.


I wouldn't be surprised if Tommy got dumb in Dr. Vegas despite the fact that he's running a casino. I don't watch Two and a Half Men anymore, but thought that Charlie was getting dumb gradually.

Speaking of Ted Baxter, didn’t they dumb down Jim J. Bullock in that other comedy he was in where his 2 daughters lived downstairs? Or maybe that was his blonde daughter. Both?

Also, Chrissy Snow on Three’s Company. She was always a little ditzy and naive but they made her so dumb she shouldn’t have been able to hold down a job. Which reminds me of Cody on Step by Step.

And speaking of Step by Step, I thought Karen was intollerable. Both she and Cody were as dumb as a box of rocks.

Does anyone remember Nells friends name on Gimme A Break? I have mentally blocked I because she annoyed me with her stupidity so badly.

I do, she was played by Telma Hopkins (She was also in Family Matters and Dawn -- of Tony Orlando and Dawn). A Google search told me her character's name was Addy Wilson. I vaguely remember her on the show, but not enough to know if she was dumbed down or not. I'll take your word for it mokey.

I think the reason for most of these "dumbed down" characters along with the one-demensionalizing of the entire cast of Friends is that the writers forget the difference between other characters thinking of a character one way, and the character actually being that way.

Most of the dumbed down characters would be shown in earlier seasons being teased by siblings (or friends or coworkers) who thought less of them, but the teasing was always hyperbolic. But after a few seasons, the line between Character A calling Character B "a flake" and Character B actually being a flake blur in the writing staff's minds and they forget what the character is actually like. The one that most comes to mind is Mark from Roseanne, who became dumb just because Roseanne and Darlene called him that. But it's also true with Xander from BtVS being useless, his self-deprication became truth as time went by- I'm surprised he didn't actually become the King of Cretins.

Although word to whoever said that Harmony wasn't dumbed down. That girl was a moron from episode 1, although her buddy Cordelia did manage to start at the same level and gain some major intelligence by the time she croaked.