Dodgy Toupee

When you want to look ten years younger, there's a small price toupee.

"When he was playing non-Bond roles in the '70s and '80s, he freely showed off his real hairline, but I guess they figured no-one would buy a James Bond with a receding hairline. But come on, who are they trying to fool? What, do they think nobody saw Outland? Do they think no one saw Five Days One Summer? Do they think nobody went to see Zardoz? Uh... you know what, forget I said anything."

— The Agony Booth on Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again

The ridiculously bad and often obvious toupee that adorns the head of a male character in the midst of a Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis, to show off his vanity and reveal his desire to maintain a facade of authority or manliness. (It might not even have to be an incredibly bad toupee but one revealed comically to such an end.)

While this is mainly a comedic trope, it might occasionally be Played for Drama if the character is wearing a cheap wig/toupee due to chemotherapy or a horrific accident that cost the victim his or her hair (like a fire or a chemical mishap).

For other types of fake hair, see Fake-Hair Drama. Likely to end in a Hairstyle Malfunction. Conversely, if someone's real hair looks like this, that's Mistaken for Fake Hair.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A series of Bud Lite commercials called "Real Men of Genius" once paid tribute to this with "Mr. Really Bad Toupee Wearer", noting how it couldn't be any more obvious if it came with a chin strap.
  Singers: I don't think it's on straight!

Anime & Manga

• Hikaru no Go: There is an older male player (who is extremely sensitive about his lack of hair) in a go club that Shindou Hikaru constantly taunted for a while early on. He once put an empty stone container onto the man's head to grind around and gets the hairpiece caught a bit. This causes it to slip off, and the man to dash out of the building with tear-jets flying, but also his mother to scold him. The man shows up on another night in a different-styled wig but is only shamed again by Hikaru. Amusing indubitably, but the point was to further illustrate what a Jerkass the boy is at that point. The first time, though, is meant to teach the man a lesson on bullying other Go players, and the second time is somewhat by accident due to a Spit Take from Hikaru.
• Falling under the "desire to maintain a façade of authority" category is the principal of Nichijou's high school. He's bald from the start, with only that little bit of hair going from ear to ear behind his head. However, the sixth and final episodes of the series show that even this little bit of hair is in fact a toupee, to the utter shock of witnesses.
• Tián Xué-Fāng from Fist of the Blue Sky has a toupee made of metal that's so heavy, he has trouble moving around with it bolted on his head.
• Mob Psycho 100: After Mob accidentally shaves Teruki's head during their fight, he wears a ridiculously tall beehive wig until his own hair grows back. It nearly gets blown off his head at one point and half of it is cut off during an esper fight.
• SPY×FAMILY: Before Operation Strix, Twilight's previous mission was to recover photographs proving a Minister in Westania's employ used a toupee.
• Haikyuu!!: In the second episode, Kageyama hits Hinata in the face with the ball, and it flies straight to the vice principal's head, knocking his wig off, which lands on Daichi's head.
• Psychometrer Eiji: In chapter 1, Eiji tells Ryoko that he knows that the Haneyama is bald and that his hair is actually a toupe. This info sends Shima into a laughing fit. A couple of chapters later after the Moebius case was resolved, Eiji snatches Haneyama's toupe and plays catch Shokichi because Haneyama lost the bet they had (Eiji said that if he cleared Shokichi's name that he will show everyone that Haneyama is bald).

Comic Books

• The Dandy's (the comic, not the trope) Beryl The Peryl had her father's wig coming off as a running gag.
• One issue of The X-Files comic features a character with an obvious toupee to draw attention away from the fact that he has a trepanning hole in his forehead, covered by a latex plug.
• Francine's amazingly embarrassing Uncle Maury, in Strangers in Paradise.
• In All-Star Superman, Clark finally delivers comeuppance to Steve Lombard by surreptitiously setting Lombard's toupee on fire. Clark often quietly used his powers to make Lombard's pranks backfire in the Bronze Age but he was never quite this cruel.

Comic Strips

• There is a weeklong story involving Roger of FoxTrot getting himself a bad toupee. His wife Andy is less than pleased:
  Roger: Andy, I can't believe you don't like my hairpiece.
  Andy: Did I say I didn't like it?
  Roger: No.
  Andy: Then don't put words in my mouth.
  Roger: Fine. (silence) Andy, I can't believe you think my toupee looks like roadkill.
  Andy: Unkempt roadkill.
• Although Jon from Garfield has only a receding hairline, he's had a couple incidents... Like the time he went swimming and there was an uproar when somebody yelled "Rat in the pool!". In Garfield's words, there are some places you just can't wear a chest toupee.
• This is the defining characteristic of Dick Tracy bad guy Rughead.
• According to one Pearls Before Swine strip, Ted Koppel wears one that's actually a rodent. Pig claims that he saw a small, pinkish hand emerge from said toupee and wave hello.
• Mutts: In one strip, Frankie asks Millie what she thinks of his new look, which is apparently a ridiculous Elvis Presley-style wig that doesn't even match his hair. Millie says it looks like he's wearing a dead rat on his head, only for the reader to see that the "wig" is actually Mooch the cat who was asleep on Frank's head, and he hadn't noticed.

Fan Works

• In Ma Fille, just like in canon, Don Flamenco wears a toupee. In one chapter, it gets flung off while he is dancing with Carmen, much to his embarrassment. That same chapter explains that he wears it because he started losing his hair when he started taking testosterone.
• In Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation Counselor Troi says "I sense something terrible is about to happen" just before a stoned Commander Riker yanks off her wig. She runs off screaming, and Riker tries to slip the wig onto Picard's famously bald head while his back is turned.

Films — Animation

• In The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Victor Quatermaine's impressive head of hair is sucked up by the BunVac 2000. It is later replaced by a rabbit.
• In Frozen (2013), the Duke of Weasel Town (it's Weselton!) wears a toupee that comes off whenever he makes a sudden movement or bends over.
• Principal Mazur in A Goofy Movie wears a toupee, It gets knocked off a couple of times in the movie.

Films — Live-Action

• Attack of the Killer Donuts: At the end of their fight in Dandy Donuts, Luther rips Cliff's toupee off the top of his head.
• A movie with Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei, and Billy Zane called Only You, where Zane's character enters a restaurant with flowing auburn locks and sharp manner of dress before making his move on the movie's Love Interest (Tomei). Then the protagonist (Downey Jr.) turns up and gets into a scrap with him, during which his long flowing locks go flying off.
• In The Paper Tigers, it's revealed that Hing was wearing a wig and is actually completely bald when Carter snags it off of him in their fight.
• On the DC Comics front, in Superman: The Movie, we see Lex Luthor's array of wigs before we see his face to give us a sense of his vanity and we never see him without one on. Then when he is finally brought low by defeat by Superman and delivered straight to prison, the wig comes off at his moment of humiliation.
• Since the bad toupee or sudden reveal both lend themselves well to visual humor, it was a popular trope in silent movies.
  • Laurel and Hardy would often make use of it, particularly when worn by their frequent supporting actor Jimmy Finlayson who would also wear a fake moustache for similar purposes.
  • There's also the film Harolds Toupee starring Louis Simon
  • Also Harold Lloyd used it in the cliffhanger classic Safety Last! where a mouse gets onto Lloyd's characters leg which he shakes off, drops down the side of the building, and knocks off the toupee of someone looking out of a lower window.
• Francis's hairpiece in The Goonies. It's especially bad after the various times it gets knocked off his head and he puts it back on.
• In Goodfellas, Morris sells wigs for a living and praises their reliability in a commercial shown on TV. Seconds later his own wig can't endure the beating delivered by wiseguy Jimmy Conway, though.
• The Indian cricket official in Save Your Legs! wears a ginger one that fools no one.
• Liar Liar has a scene with Jim Carrey's character saying this to one of the board members of his company. It actually wasn't horrible, but we still got this:
  Fletcher Reede: Your hairpiece looks like something that was killed crossing the highway. I don't know whether to comb it or scrape it off with a shovel and bury it in lime!
• Jumpin' Jack Flash. After being injected with Truth Serum Whoopi Goldberg's character tells her Jerkass boss what she thinks of him, culminating in her yanking the toupee off his head. Embarrassed, the boss steals a hat and rushes off. At the end of the movie, he turns up with his bald head, having clearly accepted that everyone knows so there's no point in wearing one.
• Used as a throwaway gag in Scary Movie 3. The psychic Creepy Child whom Cindy is caring for goes around Brenda's funeral service giving people cynical and mocking advice ("smoke all you want, you're gonna be hit by a car next week anyway"). He tells the guy with an obvious toupee that he's not fooling anyone.
• A Running Gag in Nothing in Common is how Charlie (Hector Elizondo) tries wearing one bad toupee after another until he finally decides to go back to his natural bald look.
  Lorraine: (after Charlie has left because he's uncomfortable with her staring at his head) That rug is the worst! Do you think he realizes it?
  David: He does now.
• In the anthology film Body Bags, Richard in the "Hair" segment gets a really bad toupee to cover up his hair loss that his girlfriend and his hairdresser both dismiss as just making him look insecure.
• In The Wolf of Wall Street, one of Nicky "Rugrat" Koskoff's defining characteristics is his horrible toupee, which he seems not to be aware of to almost absurd levels of cognitive dissonance. Whenever anyone brings up how bad it looks, he furiously denies that it's a wig.
• Nicolas Cage's character from the infamous Deadfall wears a pretty obvious one; in his final scene, he has a fight with the main character, who pulls the rug off his head and uses it as a distraction to kill him by shoving his face into the fryer.
• Chase McKinney in Now You See Me 2 has a pretty obviously fake mop of dirty blond curls that serve in part to differentiate himself from his anti-heroic twin, Merritt. Merritt seems to think it's a weave instead of a toupee, but it's clearly not natural and nobody's fooled regardless.
• A rare female example in Black Panther when Okoye is undercover with T'Challa and Nakia in South Korea; to cover her impressively tattooed head she's wearing a jarringly-obvious wig and complains about how she can't wait to take it off again. When her cover is blown and a massive brawl/shootout breaks out, one of the first things she does is whip it off and throw it right into an attacker's face.
• Rudy in DISCO (2017) spends much of the movie wearing a wig.
• The court clerk's toupee in The Three Stooges short "Disorder in the Court" is repeatedly abused and shot after the boys mistake it for a tarantula.
• A recurring gag in Take Me involves people pointing out Ray's dodgy toupee.
• In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Uncle Lewis shows up for Christmas Eve dinner at Clark and Audrey's house. As Clark takes off his hat, his toupee sticks to it.
• Christian Winters in Extra Ordinary (2019) has severe pattern baldness that he hides with a wig, the only point where we see his bald head is before he falls to Hell.
• You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah: As seen before Lydia's bat mitzvah, part of DJ Schmuley's pre-party preparation is putting on his toupee.

Literature

• Mr Groat's hair in the Discworld novel Going Postal. It may or may or be alive. It definitely moves. Some doctors once tried to put it in a cupboard, but it got out.
  There may actually be a man somewhere on whom a toupee works, but whoever that man may be, Mr Groat was not he.
• The beginning of young adult novel No More Dead Dogs features main character Wallace Wallace's inability to lie. This included an incident of young Wallace letting his uncle know that his toupee looked like an animal had crawled on top of his head and died there.
• Mr. Krupp in Captain Underpants. He sheds it when his Captain Underpants personality is activated. By contrast, his Mirror Universe self prefers his baldness, and when Evil George and Harold activate his Captain Blunderpants personality, they give him a toupee to wear.
• Dr. Victor from Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. wears a truly terrible toupee, which is all the more obvious in that he has no hair anywhere on his body, not even eyebrows.
• Geppetto from The Adventures of Pinocchio wears a bright yellow toupee causing local kids to tease him and call him "Polendina" because it resembles a cornmeal mush of the same name. This feature about him tends to be left out of most adaptations.

Live-Action TV

• In the TV adaptation^note The original Swedish version, not the American adaptation which can be found here as Backstrom of Swedish author Leif G.W. Persson's mystery novels featuring a Defective Detective named Evert Bäckström, at one point the vain and egotistic Bäckström wears a horribly unconvincing blond wig. Eventually a less-than-convinced public reaction persuades him to ditch the wig and go back to balding.
• Elliot Carlin, on The Bob Newhart Show, a patient of Bob's, wears a piece. Just before Bob was about to conduct a group therapy session on live TV, the director gets on the PA and tells the stage manager to "get some more makeup on the guy with the toupee".
• Get Smart. In "Operation Ridiculous", a magazine writer is coming to do an article on CONTROL, so The Chief wears a toupee to give his organisation a "young and vigorous" look. He quickly gets annoyed at Max and 99 staring at the toupee, then the writer comes in and promptly labels him as the "middle-aged, toupeed Chief" for his article.
• Grantly Budgen in Waterloo Road. The toupee is eventually destroyed in a hair salon accident.
• Part of the plot of the "Michael Ellis" episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. Eric Idle is trying to return the ant he purchased from Harrod's and at one point is directed to the toupee department. All the salespeople in the department wear them, they all don't match, and the salespeople are blind to the fact.
• Special mention must go to the Amazing Stories episode "Hell Toupee", where the toupee is possessed and gives its wearer a compulsion to kill lawyers. This idea and the pun have been used elsewhere:
• Night Court:
  • An episode has a grade school principal wearing such a toupee as a plaintiff. The defendant is a disgruntled prodigy student who programmed the school gym's scoreboard to publicly announce that the principal wore a toupee. Upon hearing this, nobody in the courtroom could keep a straight face.
  • Later in the episode, the kid stole said toupee off the principal's head. The principal started to call his toupee supplier to get a new one but Bull talked him out of it, saying a bald head drives women wild.
  • Averted in another episode where Bull wins his choice of a free toupee and goes with the genuinely stylish (and indestructible) "Shatner Turbo 2000", which instantly turns him into a Chick Magnet.
• Showed up in How I Met Your Mother when Marshall, having shaved some of his hair off in a brief fit of insanity, needed something to cover his head before going down the aisle on his wedding day. One of the guests at the wedding has one of these toupees that just might work, but, come hell or high water, the guy refuses to admit he's wearing a toupee at all. Eventually Barney just snatches it off his head. However when Marshall puts it on it still looks obvious.
• There was a Seinfeld episode where George got a toupee that went all over the place. Both he and Kramer thought it looked great, Jerry referred to it as George's 'hair hat', while Elaine took matters into her own hands...
  Elaine: I DON'T LIKE THIS THING! AND HERE'S WHAT I'M DOING WITH IT! [throws it out Jerry's window]
• Red Dwarf:
  • This is played with in the episode "Out of Time", which featured the time-traveling epicure versions of the crew. Kryten, the android, looks exactly like what he is — an android — in the main series (justified because "humans have always found exact duplicates very disturbing.") As an epicure, however, the new Kryten has to "blend in", and he shows up in a pale blue suit and a ridiculous toupee, which incidentally does nothing to conceal the rather cubic nature of his head. Later in the episode, when they must decide whether to fight their future selves because they hate everything they stand for, or give them what they want in order to survive, Kryten uses it as a justification for fighting:
    Rimmer: Then I say fight... better dead than smeg.
    Lister: Ye-ess. Cat?
    Cat: Better dead than sofa-size butt.
    Kryten: Better anything than that toupee!
  • Also used in the episode "Kryten", where they pick up Kryten, but think that they are instead picking up three hot girls, when the ship's computer Holly is the one to "dress up" by donning a toupee, and again in the song "Tongue-Tied" which has the toupee on Holly's head again.
  • In an early episode, Lister notes that mankind doesn't have the technology to create a toupee that doesn't get big laughs.
• Kevin wears one to Jim and Pam's wedding in The Office (US).
• Several appear in The Goodies episode "Scoutrageous'' when Graeme and Bill are trying to earn their Wig Spotter's Badge.
• Principal Caplan in early seasons of Power Rangers has a toupee that would sometimes be knocked off as a running gag.
• In Charmed, Paige had to deal with a Jerkass coworker and she growled about her toupee and accidentally orbed it off of his head.
• Zacarias of Brazilian comedy group Os Trapalhões is bald, and uses a toupee that is generally spoofed or stolen.
• The Golden Girls' Stanley Zbornak frequently wears one of these, at least in the early episodes. It is the source of great amusement for the women.
• In The Dick Van Dyke Show Alan Brady wore a bad toupee. At one point Laura gave this away on national TV, though really Everybody Knew Already.
• In the "Police Officer" episode of the British Mockumentary series People Like Us, the police captain is wearing such an obvious and horrible toupee that the documentarian has trouble keeping a straight face — especially when the captain uses several hair-related Double Entendres in the course of discussing the life of a police officer.
• On the "Advanced Gay" episode during the third season of Community, Pierce's father Cornelius wore an ivory toupee, due to regular toupees being made from the hair of "godless Orientals". The ivory hairpiece, quote, is the only way to be assured of true follicular purity while still identifying oneself as a man of means.
• Mr Bronson in Grange Hill. He strangely stopped being a complete bastard the day he had to send it to the cleaners.
• The classic Doctor Who episode "Revelation of the Daleks" has Mr. Jobel, the sleazy head embalmer of a funeral home planet. As he dies, he falls onto his back and his toupee falls open like a clamshell.
• An Obligatory Joke in spoofs of William Shatner in Star Trek: The Original Series. For instance, Jim Carrey did a skit for In Living Color! in which Captain Kirk's toupee flipped over his face with every Screen Shake.
• On Malcolm in the Middle, Lois gets fed up with her boss and quits. As she walks out of his office, she tosses his toupee to her shocked coworkers and states "Velcro. I win the pool."
• Danger 5. Used as Hairy Hammerspace by the President of the World to hide his Sexy Secretary. It's no more insane than anything else that happens in the series.
• A slightly odd aversion crops up as the B-plot to an episode of London's Burning when Sicknote goes to work in one. It's actually a very convincing one, to the point where you can only tell because he was bald in previous episodes, but the rest of Blue Watch -and his wife- still find it utterly hilarious. Poor guy just can't catch a break, can he?
• The Creatives features absent-minded manager Jim Haldane, whose hair may or not be an extremely bad wig... though he does get it cut.
• Citizen Khan has Mr Malik wearing one which Mr Khan tries not to draw attention to. When he first sees him he asks if he can take his hat, then realises he's not wearing one, later Mr Khan says he knows some local bigwigs. Finally when Mrs Malik gets arrested for assaulting a Police Officer Mr Malik says he doesn't think he needs to do anything to which Mr Khan says "Toupee" before correcting it to Touché.
• One of the odd products Mark Williams' salesman character attempts to peddle to Granville in Still Open All Hours is a range of dodgy toupees for the customer too embarrassed to consult a hair loss professional but who might impulse buy one at the counter of his local shop.
• The NCIS: Los Angeles episode "Seal Hunter" features a guest character with a rather atrocious...something...living on his head. The team spends half the show making fun of it.
• Fuller House: Steve wears one in "Save The Dates," in an attempt to recapture his glory days in high school. Also a Call-Back to the Pilot, when he mentions he lost half his hair in his divorce.
• In Hill Street Blues: Lt. Ray Calletano arrives at the precinct wearing one, thinking it makes him look younger. He proudly relates this to Capt. Furillo, who tries in vain to keep a straight face. Later, some gang members start a fight, and Calletano helps to break it up, resulting in his toupee halfway ripped off and sticking straight up in the air.
  Calletano: (unaware) What?? What are you all laughing at??
  Gang Member: Hey man, better put the top down, it looks like rain!
• One product featured on World's Smartest Inventions is a visor that makes the wearer look like he has a tribble on his head.
• Cheers: Frasier considers wearing one for a date when he and Lilith are estranged, but Sam mercifully manages to talk him into going au natural. After they leave, Woody finds the hairpiece left in the washroom sink and assumes it's a giant rat.
• Mr. Tudball from The Carol Burnett Show has a rather obvious toupee. It occasionally gets knocked off during his sketches.
• The Muppet Show: Lewis Kazagger is a parody of sports-newscaster Howard Cosell, so naturally in one episode it's revealed he wears a slicked-down toupee when it jumps off his head and joins a wig race.

Music

• In the music video for Genesis song "Illegal Alien", Phil Collins wears a toupee that looks like a black mop head and doesn't match his (much lighter) hair. He doffs it for the camera when getting a photo taken.

Professional Wrestling

• Kurt Angle's head was shaven after he lost a hair vs. hair match to Edge at Judgment Day 2002. He came back to the next TV taping wearing an incredibly shitty toupee held in place by wrestling headgear and insisted that his hair had regrown overnight. It was only a matter of time before Hulk Hogan pulled it off during a match, causing Angle to panic and lose. Angle got his revenge, defeating Hogan by submission (a rare feat) at King of the Ring 2002. This victory resulted in Kurt regaining his confidence and ditching the toupee for good.

Stand Up Comedy

• Bob Newhart did a routine about a man trying to return a toupee his wife bought him after it fell off into the cheese dip at a party while he was trying to put some on a cracker.

Video Games

• Frank Sahwit in the first Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game. It gets thrown into Phoenix's face during his Villainous Breakdown. Also notable is his 'freak out' face, where the toupee jumps up for a moment of its own accord. He returns in Gyakuten Kenji 2 to throw it at Miles Edgeworth in the second case.
• Don Flamenco from the Punch-Out!! series wears a toupee. Knocking it off during a match against him will cause him to go berserk and become much more aggressive.
• Team Fortress 2: one of the unlockable hats for the Heavy is a Dodgy Toupee called the "Coupe D'isaster".
• In the Summer Games version of Office Jerk, the Jerk wears one which you can knock off with some of the heavier items.
• In Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, a few of the crooks in Carmen's gang wear wigs/toupees with witnesses commenting something like "His hair almost looked real... almost."
• The butler Sebastian from Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life is suggested to wear a toupee. In a comedic scene, Lumina gets upset when she learns this.
• GT Blitz in Jak X: Combat Racing wears one and doesn't take too kindly to anyone who messes with it, as Pecker himself learned the hard way. It's actually to cover up the flame tattoo on his head and his identity as Mizo.
• The Adventures of Willy Beamish begins with the school principal, Mr. Frick, being relieved of his toupee by Willy's pet frog Horny. If you get sent to his office during the resulting detention, he demands it back; it looks very poorly laid on his head.
• Daijiro Saigo from Yakuza 5 wears a pretty obvious one, especially when you consider he was completely bald in 4. Not only that, but Akiyama can knock it off no problem, leaving him scrambling to put it back.
• Dean Delmona from Professor Layton and the Unwound Future wears one that barely covers the poor man's head, making it no secret that he's bald. What gives Don Paolo away that he was disguised as Delmona is that he thought the hair was real, thus gave his disguise white hair where the toupee would be.

Web Animation

• In the first episode of Les Kassos, not-Han Solo wears one, as revealed when his father-in-law (not-Darth Vader) moves it with telekinesis.

Web Comics

• There's an example in Dominic Deegan, with the punchline "Toupee" (as the speaker scored the winning touch in a duel, when one traditionally says "Touche", while simultaneously removing the wig).
• In El Goonish Shive, the principal of Moperville North has a toupee that isn't too bad in and of itself, but when combined with the rest of his look, it makes him look like Hitler. Ellen told him so and later he ditches it and goes with a comb-over instead.
• After having his head shaved during his first fight with Mob, Teruki Hanazawa from Mob Psycho 100 wears a ridiculous beehive hairdo wig, affectionately known as "The Haystack," for the 7th Branch Infiltration arc. It gets sliced in half near the climax, making it look more like his original hairdo, and he eventually ditches it for a new style altogether when his hair grows back.
• In Schlock Mercenary, a newsman has the toupee sucked off his head by his interviewee with a reverse-thrust hairdryer. Someone from offstage yells "Fresh scalp-cat to stage 3!"
• In comic 126 of Unwinder's Tall Comics, Unwinder notices Dr. Minivan not wearing his wig. Turns out lice now live inside the wig and became sentient because of Dr. Minivan's drug testing.

Western Animation

• 50/50 Heroes: Mr. Brick's toupee isn't even of the same color as his remaining hair.
• In the DuckTales (1987) episode "Where No Duck Has Gone Before", Courage's wig falls down when Launchpad starts calling him out.
• The Simpsons:
  • Despite Matt Groening hating this trope (it was the reason why he didn't want Principal Skinner to have one), Treehouse of Horror IX has a segment called "Hell Toupee" where Homer gets hair implants from the scalp of the recently executed Snake. Not only does the scalp contain its originator's murderous intent, it shares his Surfer Dude accent.
  • In "Homer Defined", Mr. Burns calls up the news station to dissuade "rumors" of an impending meltdown. A stock photo◊ of Burns shows him wearing an obvious toupee. Not only is it blue, which obviously does not match his currently grey hair, Burns' real hair was originally red.
  • Despite his clear misery over his baldness, Homer has never bothered with wearing a toupee. This is parodied in one episode where Mr Burns and the Rich Texan are engaging in a scavenger hunt, one of the items being "Homer Hairs". After both of them pluck off Homer's remaining hairs, Homer runs into a nearby hair salon and buys a wig that looks exactly like his own bald scalp, complete with the now missing hairs.
  • One of Bart's blackboard punishment lines is "The principal's toupee is not a Frisbee."
  • During a science fair, Nelson has a "wig detector" that's just a bunch of stuff taped together and Nelson himself makes beeping sounds while pointing the "detector" at whatever he believes to be a wig. When Superintendent Chalmers shows up wearing a wig that doesn't match his receding hairline, Nelson makes beeping noises at it until Chalmers removes the wig. Nelson then makes beeping noises at the receding hairline until Chalmers removes it as well.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "A Friend in Deed", Cranky Doodle gets one from Pinkie Pie after she accidentally demolishes his original hairpiece. Though he completely loves it. In "Slice of Life", Cranky again finds himself bald just as he's about to take his wedding vows with Matilda. His friend Steven Magnet, a sea serpent, lends a hand by lopping off half of his mustache to enable him to improvise, mirroring what Rarity did for Steven himself in the second half of the pilot.
• Gargamel wears a wig on his date with Evelyn the enchantress which immediately falls off his head as he enters her house, though his date doesn't really notice, in The Smurfs (1981) episode "Gargamel's Sweetheart".
• Animaniacs: Dr. Scratchansniff ends up wearing a rather obvious toupee when he went on a date at the drive-in. Made even funnier seeing that it appeared to be several sizes too small for his immense head. When the Warners come in to crash his date, Yakko, at one point, comments, "By the way, something died on your head."
• SWAT Kats has Mayor Manx, who wears a toupee that doesn't even match his hair color, and will frequently fly off.
• Steve in Brickleberry is revealed to be wearing a toupee in season 1 when a gust of wind blows it half off his head, forcing him to admit that he went bald in early puberty. Naturally, the entire cast being what it is, mercilessly mock him for it, and Malloy flushes the toupee down the toilet.
• An episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy has Hoss Delgado mock Billy's principal for this trope, stating that all that's lacking is a jaw strap to make it even more obvious. Unusual for this trope, it's not revealed whether or not it actually is a toupee or not.
• The first season's intro for The Critic has Jay exit his apartment with a bad toupee on his head, only for a bird to swoop down and steal it immediately.
• On Doug, Mayor White's toupee tends to come off at times.
• In the 2006 revival of Biker Mice from Mars, the villain Ronaldo Rump covers his bald head with a huge toupee, being a parody of Donald Trump.
• Rugrats (1991):
  • In "Grandpa's Date", Grandpa Lou doesn't want to seem old when he meets Morgana, so he wears a black toupee, despite the fact that the hair on the sides of his head, and his moustache, are gray. Morgana even knows it and asks him to take it off at the end.
  • The episode "Feeding Hubert" features a rare female example of this when a news reporter's wig is knocked off during a trash avalanche started by the babies, revealing to the neighborhood that the woman has about as much hair on her head as an egg does. There's probably a reason why she's referred to as "the one with the hair".
  • In the B-Plot of "Hair!", Lou is visited by Roy Davis, an old friend of his, but is envious of Roy because Roy still has all his hair and he's lost the hair in the upper part of his head. He tries to one-up Roy by wearing a toupee, but his plan is compromised when Tommy takes it following some trickery from Angelica in the A-Plot. Dil then pulls off Roy's toupee, revealing Roy to be bald as well.
• Transformers: Rescue Bots sees Griffin Rock's mayor Luskey wear one—and much like the aforementioned Mayor Manx, it doesn't even match his real hair (it being a darker brown than his real hair) and will often come off. Season 4 revealed that his brother is bald, too, but has better taste in toupees.
• In the Donkey Kong Country episode "Barrel, Barrel, Who's Got the Barrel", Bluster Kong, who normally has a tiny combover parted down the middle, tries to impress Candy by getting a "Banana Flip", an over-the-top drooping spike of hair. Candy wasn't impressed, and later the whole mess was eaten by Klaptraps.
  Klaptrap 1: You know what I hate most about hair?
  Klaptrap 2: You eat a whole headful, and half an hour later you're hungry again!
• Oh Yeah! Cartoons had this happen in the Super Santa short "Naughty", where the villain Elmer Scrooge, a descendant of Ebenezer Scrooge, wore an obvious powdered wig over his bald head and ended up losing it after he's defeated and put in jail.
• Family Guy: Quagmire is revealed to be bald in one episode when he loses his toupee at a baseball game while fighting over a stray ball with Brian and the embarrassing moment being caught on the jumbotron and ends up on the local news. He briefly tries to embrace his baldness and "bald culture", which apparently includes things like basement C.B radio and using a radar gun to catch speeding cars in the neighborhood, but everyone thinks he's become so annoying he decides to get a hair transplant from Dr Hartman and returns to his original personality.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: Mr Wink of the villainous duo Mr Wink and Mr Fibb has one made from his own preserved original hair, which apparently fell out at age 14! He only puts it on once in the show though.

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