5 Sitcom Characters Who Just Kept Getting Dumber
No sitcom archetype gets Flanderized faster than the Dumb Character. In fairness, Flanderization — the act of taking a single trait and magnifying it until it becomes the entire character — seems inevitable with dim-witted sitcom roles since there’s really nowhere to go but down (in IQ).
Here are five characters that had at least half a brain in their sitcom introductions, only to degenerate into complete and utter brainlessness…
Woody Boyd, ‘Cheers’
When Woody arrived at Cheers to take the place of his mentor, the addled Coach, he was a naive, unsophisticated innocent from Indiana. Characters who don’t know what’s going on can be a sitcom writer’s dream — when others need to explain to Doofus what’s happening, a lot of clunky exposition can be delivered quickly.
Woody’s naivety gave way to stupidity in Cheers’ later years. When you study the Constitution because you’re thinking about running for Congreff, you know there’s a screw loose somewhere.
Kelly Bundy, ‘Married… With Children’
Kelly Bundy was a sarcastic, rebellious teenager in Married…’s first season, but that didn’t last long. Soon she became the poster child for Dumb Blonde, a longstanding comic stereotype that the show exploited even further by stuffing Christina Applegate into suggestive outfits.
Applegate later suggested that Kelly wasn’t necessarily unintelligent, but simply a young woman with an unconventional thought process. Nice try. Based on clips like the one above, Kelly became certifiably birdbrained.
Homer Simpson, ‘The Simpsons’
Even Homer’s voice has gotten more imbecilic as the years pass, starting as a loose impression of grumpy Walter Matthau in the first two seasons and morphing into the D’oh!-bot we now know and love.
While Homer is canonically stupid thanks to a dum-dum gene that affects male members of the Simpsons family, his intelligence comes and goes based on the needs of a particular episode. Given that the show’s writers have had to plot more than 768 episodes and counting, we can grant them a little leeway. As director David Silverman noted, Homer can be “creatively brilliant in his stupidity.”
Joey Tribbiani, ‘Friends’
“We didn’t originally intend for Joey to be stupid,” said Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman. “But Matt LeBlanc played stupid so well that it became part of the character.” Um, good job, LeBlanc?
The obtuse soap-opera actor started street-smart but became so dense by the show’s latter seasons that Joey was not only unable to learn French, he was incapable of repeating it as well.
Kevin Malone, ‘The Office’
The guy has an accounting degree, for God’s sake! The slow-talking Kevin Malone started out sly and sarcastic — a World Series of Poker champion! — but he regressed so much by the time Holly came around that she thought he was some sort of special-needs case. In her defense, he certainly acted like one.
