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Average Joe's
Peter
Peter "Pete" LaFleur
Played By: Vince Vaughn
The lazy owner of Average Joe's, a dilapidated gym with only a few members.- Brilliant, but Lazy: He actually has a pretty shrewd business mind, but prefers to slack off instead.
- Bullying a Dragon: He's not exactly innocent in his rivalry with White Goodman, having slept with three of his female trainers and sending White a male stripper as "congratulations".
- Nice Guy: Peter is snarky and needs guidance sometimes, but his supportive persona makes him an effective leader.
- Team Dad: Despite not being the oldest on the team, as the owner of Average Joe's he gives off this vibe.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: To the Average Joe's crew often has good advice even though he is completely unmotivated.
- The Slacker: Has not kept on his bills and the porn movies he rented are overdue. Even when he brushes his teeth in the morning, he washes his mouth out with Yoo-Hoo chocolate drink.
Kate
Katherine "Kate" Veatch
Played By: Christine Taylor
The attorney in charge of handling Goodman's account, she defects to join Peter after Goodman gets her fired from her job.- Ambiguously Gay: Patches calls her male pronouns and calls her lesbian slurs like "muff diver." Dwight also insists she's a lesbian. At the end, she reveals that she is actually bisexual.
- Amoral Attorney: Averted, Kate was never amoral, just doing her job. She falls for the lovable losers and eventually joins them when White gets her fired
- Lesbian Jock: Kate's teammates assume her to be this after she demonstrates excellent dodgeball skills and then she reveals to them she also took up 8 years of playing softball.
- Nice Girl: Kate is really patient and sticks up for the Joe's even before becoming their ally.
- The Smurfette Principle: The only girl on the Average Joe's team.
Justin
Justin Redman
Played By: Justin Long
One of the two members of the Average Joe's gym.
- Butt-Monkey: Nearly all of the Joe's are this, but Justin takes the most abuse throughout.
- The Chew Toy: None of the scripted dialogue could hope to be half as funny as seeing Justin Long get hit by a flying wrench. Or a ball, for that matter. Or a fat cheerleader's... pom-pom... His moment came in the finals by finally catching a dodgeball and help bring back the two main players in the game, though his chew toy status is retained after his moment was over.
- Nice Guy: Justin is cheerful and doesn't have a mean bone in his body, even when he's being played for a fool.
Gordon
Gordon Pibb
Played By: Stephen Root
Another member at Average Joe's.- Motor Mouth: Once he gets talking, he does not shut up unless told to. He'll even continue conversations with himself when the other party (such as Peter) have walked away from him.
- The Smart Guy: Gordon provides the key information to the rest of the protagonists about the dodgeball tournament and its rules.
- You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: When Gordon sees his mail-order bride cheating on him, he turns his anger towards the opposing dodgeball team for that match, taking each one out singlehandedly.
Steve
"Pirate" Steve Cowan
Played By: Alan Tudyk
The only other member of Average Joe's- A Pirate 400 Years Too Late: He dresses and speaks like he's in a pirate movie.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Averted, surprisingly. Alan Tudyk's real talent for mimicking British dialects shows up here as he speaks entirely in an exaggerated West Country accent (the stock accent for pirates) without breaking it except briefly at the end of the film when he's briefly snapped out of his persona.
- Talk Like a Pirate: He plays up the pirate accent and dialogue.
Owen
Owen Dittman
Played By: Joel David Moore
An employee at Average Joe's.- The Ditz: Owen is clearly not playing with a full deck. He even apparently briefly forgot who Steve The Pirate was much to Dwight's annoyance.
Dwight
Dwight Baumgarten
Played By: Chris Williams
Another employee at Average Joe's.
- The Cassandra: Dwight has a few shockingly accurate predictions that the rest of the team dismisses at first.
Patches
Patches O'Houlihan
Played By: Rip Torn (present), Hank Azaria (young)
Retired dodgeball champion, becomes the team's instructor after seeing them compete against the Girl Scouts.
- A Father to His Men: Abrasive and crude he may be, Patches does genuinely care for and support the team. He offers to mentor them with basically no benefit to himself, and is the first to issue sincere compliments
- Politically Incorrect Hero: Nearly every sentence out of his mouth is filled with homophobic or misogynistic slurs.
- Retired Badass: Former dodgeball champion, now unable to use his legs.
- Sir Swears-a-Lot: Patches always disparages the Joe's with profanity.
- Undignified Death: Right before the final game between Average Joe's and Globo Gym, he's killed by a signboard falling on him with no warning..
Globo Gym
White
White Goodman
Played By: Ben Stiller
The egotistical owner of Globo Gym.
- '80s Hair: His mullet is a classic invoked example, along with his horseshoe moustache.
- Abhorrent Admirer: He's this to Kate, who is repulsed by his arrogance and behavior.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: As odd, abrasive and dumb as he is, White appears to be a genuinely talented businessman. He inherited his seed money to start up his business, but from what we see Globo Gym is thriving, constantly full of customers and opening up new locations.
- He also understands why Average Joe's methodology "works" and can articulate it better than Pete can.
- Evil Is Hammy: White could not play up his deep voice and chew the scene any more than he is. He even gives an Evil Laugh during his own company's commercial.
- Evil Is Petty: What he is in a nutshell. Being a multi-millionaire fitness CEO, White doesn't have much to gain from taking over a struggling small business, but seems to take perverse pleasure in taking away something that Peter loves. Similarly, he really doesn't have much reason to compete in a dodgeball tournament, but only enters to sabotage Peter's one chance at saving his gym. He also threw a ball at Kate's face despite her being off-court, for taking a hit meant for Peter.
- Expy: Ben Stiller is essentially playing exactly the same role he played in the movie Heavyweights as Tony Perkis: A formerly fat jerkass fitness guru who escalates hostility with people he views as weaker than him. In this case, it's Peter and his gym buddies, while in Heavyweights it was obese children. Stiller has admitted that Goodman was basically an evolution of Perkis, who in turn was basically an expy of real-life fitness gurus Tony Robbins and Tony Little. Some believe that White and Tony are
in fact the same person. - Fatal Flaw: Obsession with control and stupidity. Although he's fitter than Peter and his team, he's known to make very stupid decisions and he can never just let things play out; he has to interfere, alter the course in his favor, and double down on what is obviously a bad idea out of sheer spite and ignorance.
- When he learns that the Joe's are entering the tournament to win the money needed to buy out the mortgage, he opts to put his own horse in the race to try and sabotage their chances, despite the Joe's having a pretty low chance of winning due to how out-of-shape and inexperienced they all are. He's entirely motivated by petty spite, and it leaves him open later on.
- When the Joe's attempt to recruit Kate to their team, White tries to woo her... and begins the process by getting her fired from her bank job so she can't make any sexual harassment claims against him. Not only was this completely unnecessary since Kate already turned them down due to a professional conflict of interest, but now Kate has no job and every reason to see White lose, giving the Joe's The Ace they need to advance through the tournament.
- He then proceeds to offer Peter $100,000 to buy out Average Joe's directly, just before the final match. It doesn't occur to White that the tournament is taking place in Vegas, and thus there's a huge betting pool on the bracket. So, Peter takes the money, bets it all on his team winning, and then buys out Globo Gym when they do. White simply could have done nothing the entire film, and the worst-case scenario is that he simply has to put up with having Average Joe's next door. Instead, he lets his hatred for Peter cloud his judgment, and ends up losing the tournament, the gym, and his financial and physical health.
- Feigning Intelligence: Completely, and he's fooling exactly no one. Ironically, White even admits he's not the sharpest.White: "I don't think I'm a lot dumber than you thought that I think that I thought I was once."
- Fitness Nut: He's a fitness fanatic who owns a multimillion gym company. Prior to entering the dodgeball tournament, he would often be seen either lifting weights with his assistant Me'Shell or subjecting himself to over-the-top aversion therapy against junk food. Fitting the more negative stereotypes associated with this trope, he's portrayed as shallow and condescending, saying in his commercials that the biggest flaw with ugly and fat people is that they don't hate themselves enough. He eventually becomes obese at the end of the film after losing the tournament and his company to the protagonist.
- Formerly Fat: He was this in his youth. The "formerly" part gets dropped after the tournament.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: White Goodman has no pragmatic reason for following Average Joe's into the dodgeball tournament. He just wants to snatch their last chance at salvation from their hands while rubbing their failures in their faces, using his superior fitness and flunkies to do so. His decision to fire Kate ended up working against him as this cleared her up from her contractual obligation and allowed her to join Average Joe's where she was proven to be an asset to the team. By bribing Peter, White also indirectly gave Peter the ability to buy him out when Peter bet the money on himself to win the tournament. He ends up losing everything by being this obsessive and petty and could have won by just staying out of Vegas entirely.
- Jerkass: And how. He's rude, arrogant, condescending, disrespectful, greedy and generally obnoxious.
- Jerk Jock: A cocky, competitive and abrasive fitness nut who plays dirty constantly.
- Kick the Dog: At one point, he orders one of his employees to manually increase the women's scales by 3 pounds.
- Laughably Evil: White is a total bastard who is very easy to laugh at due to Ben Stiller's energetic, full-on performance.
- Off the Wagon: He was obese as a kid, and he's seen a few times treating his impulses for junk food by electrocuting himself. After losing the tournament, he drowns his sorrows in junk food and becomes obese again.
- Teeny Weenie: Implied, given how he inflates the crotch area of his shorts to look larger.
- Would Hit a Girl: He does this to Kate. It is with a dodgeball, mind, but it was right in the face out of anger, and it was an illegal hit because she had already been eliminated.
Me'Shell
Me'Shell Jones
Played By: Jamal Duff
White's right hand man and assistant.
- The Dragon: To White, though as White puts it, he's his "fitness consigliere."
- Scary Black Man: Me'Shell is a huge, deep-voiced man who acts as White's dragon and intimidator.
Fran
Fran Stalinofskivitchdavitovichski
Played By: Missi Pyle
A member of the Globo Gym Purple Cobras. Hails from Romanovia, where dodgeball is the national sport.
- Big Ol' Unibrow: Fran has one as part of her gag of being a hideous eastern European woman.
- Brawn Hilda: In the epilogue, she is shown to be substantially more attractive, though.
- Love Redeems: She sides with Average Joe's at the end due to her falling in love with Owen.
- Sesquipedalian Smith: Inverted. Short first name, long last name.
- She Cleans Up Nicely: Fran looks much more beautiful at the finale, having hitched up with Owen. She still has the unibrow, though, so we'll know it's her.
- The Smurfette Principle: Much like Kate on the Average Joe's.
- Ugly Slavic Women: Fran from "Romanovia" has large, buck teeth and gaudy makeup. She does look better in the epilogue.
Blade, Lazer and Blazer
Blade, Lazer and Blazer
Played By: Rusty Joiner, Kevin Porter, Brandon Molale
The three other members of the Globo Gym Purple Cobras.- Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: Their Theme Naming in a nutshell.
- The Brute: The Purple Cobras are nothing but this with Blade, Laser and Blazer being huge, muscle-bound players with virtually no lines in the movie.
