Goofy Buckteeth

Since protruding teeth are usually considered to be "ugly" by society, having buckteeth is a common visual shorthand, especially in animation, that a character is unserious. They might be a Stereotypical Nerd who also has acne and/or Nerd Glasses. They might be the Plucky Comic Relief of a work. They could be the happy-go-lucky, Dumb Is Good protagonist. They could be a Screwball Squirrel (or other rodent for that matter). Who knows?

Note that the character with buckteeth must have a goofy or dorky personality to go with their teeth. Just having buckteeth by itself isn't a trope. Compare Childish Tooth Gap. Related to Asian Buck Teeth, for when Asian caricatures are drawn with buckteeth as a form of mockery.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: Czar Baldy Bald the Third once turned into a weird humanoid-like creature complete with a bucktooth after swallowing Bobobo along with the Hairball.
• Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure: Kabaton is an anthropomorphic pig with prominent buckteeth, and he's a Laughably Evil antagonist, especially with his Gasshole tendencies.
• Kodocha: One of the many running gags of the anime is that Zenjiro, the host of Child's Toy, has huge front teeth that "stick out like a rat", and along with his curly hair and goofy voice, is frequently mocked and ridiculed for it. It is such a large part of his character that he even has a red chopper with his likeness, including his signature teeth on the front of it.
• Spy X Family: Emile Elman, one of Damian's sidekicks, regularly sucks up to his leader and is set as stereotypically "ugly" with his buckteeth.

Asian Animation

• Marshyo from Crazy Candies, much like a certain Nickelodeon sponge of which he's a Captain Ersatz, has buck teeth that accentuate his goofy, happy-go-lucky personality.
• Noonbory and the Super 7: Taegury has noticeable buckteeth, and he's in a Bumbling Henchman Duo with the equally dimwitted Mungury.

Comic Strips

• Beetle Bailey: Zero is a buck-toothed Dumb Blond who interprets the orders he's given in the most literal way possible. He's also Sarcasm-Blind.
  Sarge: Zero, take this report to the General's office and step on it!
  Sarge: (Beat.) Oh oh! (Sarge runs to and breathlessly arrives at the General's office.)
  The General: Too late. (The report is on the floor with a footprint.)
• The Far Side: Subverted in one strip where a bunch of beavers are mocking a toothless one with chants of "Doesn't have buck teeth... doesn't have buck teeth..."

Films—Animated

• Beauty and the Beast: LeFou, Gaston's buffoonish, incompetent lackey, has two big buck teeth.
• In the Cars franchise, Tow Mater, Lightning McQueen's fun-loving comedic sidekick, has crooked buckteeth.
• Chicken Little: Abby Mallard's buckteeth, speech impediment, and long face gives her a goofy appearance, causing her to be nicknamed "Ugly Duckling."
• Kathy from Finding Nemo is a blue and green "chickenfish" who sports prominent buck teeth and a noticeable speech impediment, making her look bizarre compared to the rest of Nemo's classmates.
  Kathy: Oh my gosh! Nemo's swimming out to sea!
• Frozen: Olaf is a funny, naive snowman with a protruding Tooth Strip.
• A Goofy Movie:
  • Exaggerated and Played for Horror during teenage Max Goof's Nightmare Sequence at the start of the film, where his existing buckteeth become larger than his head and he turns into his father Goofy in front of his love interest Roxanne, who runs away screaming. He consciously checks his teeth when he wakes up to make sure it was just a dream.
  • Played for drama in the rest of the film. Max, despite generally subverting the trope, also struggles to be taken seriously at school in part due to his resemblance to his dad, including the teeth, and distances himself from his Amazingly Embarrassing Parent because of this. This hurts Goofy's feelings, especially when he discovers Max lied to him, subverting the trope with a Beware the Silly Ones moment.
• Sid from the Ice Age movies is a dimwitted, accident-prone comedy relief with buckteeth.
• The LEGO Batman Movie: Polka Dot Man is depicted with two buckteeth, and due to both his status as an obscure Batman villain and his power to control polka dots, he isn't treated as a serious threat.
• Hammy from Over the Hedge is a hyperactive Cloudcuckoolander squirrel and has the prominent buckteeth you'd expect from his species.
• In the Shrek movies, the buck-toothed Donkey consistently plays the role of the comedic relief.

Films — Live-Action

• Gremlins 2: The New Batch: Lenny can be seen as both a Mogwai and a Gremlin with buckteeth, just to show how dimwitted he is.
• R.O.T.O.R. has a goofy short-order cook with exaggerated buck teeth be killed by the title's marauding robot cop.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: Dim-witted Skids has prominent buckteeth, with one even being gold. In terms of personality, he and his twin Mudflap are stupid, belligerent and impulsive, akin to "wannabe gangstas". Skids somehow believes himself to be the mature, serious one of the pair and often performs crazy stunts in the belief that this will show he's a better warrior than his brother... though in truth it's because he's genuinely afraid the reverse is true. At one point in the film, the brothers get into a petty brawl in an enclosed space and almost crush their human allies, prompting an enraged Bumblebee to manhandle them and throw them out.

Literature

• Harry Potter: Hermione Granger the Child Prodigy and Muggle-born student of Hogwarts has buckteeth. While she's skilled at all sorts of magic and incredibly intelligent, she is often not taken seriously in her early years as she can be a know-it-all. Getting rid of her buckteeth midway through the series comes at around the same time she starts being taken more seriously as both a talented witch and a love interest. Incidentally, the Harry Potter films originally planned to include her buckteeth, but after filming one scene with Emma Watson wearing fake teeth, it was determined that it was too impractical to do for the whole movie.

Live-Action TV

• Taken to ridiculous levels in a Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch featuring Graham Chapman as a historical film director who has buck teeth so massive that they stretch all the way down to his chest like walrus tusks, and who has a tendency to give the protagonists in his films similarly big teeth (even to Jesus!). When questioned about it by Michael Palin (who can't stop himself from making teeth-related puns by accident), he doesn't understand what the problem is. Afterwards, a series of vox pops reveal that the only person who thought the film was true to life was another man with oversized upper teeth, and two people who criticized it included a big-eared man and a big-nosed man (and one man with really garish dress sense who thought it was "totally bizarre").
• Power Rangers: A handful of monsters have buck teeth and goofy personalities. Two such examples are Mr. Ticklesneezer (from Mighty Morphin' season one) and Zeos Googleheimer.
• The Two Ronnies: In one party sketch, Ronnie Corbett plays a man with massive buck teeth and a posh accent called Gavin, while Ronnie Barker plays a Jerkass who decides to come over and make fun of him for his teeth, and his voice, and his behaviour, just because he's bored. He comes to regret it, though, after he finds out that Gavin has a much more attractive wife, and his own wife then comes to read him the riot act for leaving her alone all evening.
• The X-Files: In "Bad Blood", Mulder and Scully are giving their version of an incident where a teenager is killed. Whenever Scully describes the sheriff (played by Luke Wilson), he is a handsome guy with a southern drawl. When Mulder describes him, the man has buck teeth and acts like a total country bumpkin. He is revealed to have regular teeth and a member of a vampire community that intends to remain hidden.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Bill Engvall's "Dorkfish" bit is about the discovery of a prehistoric porpoise that apparently had a severe overbite. While paleontologists were speculating about what evolutionary advantage this might yield, Bill suggests that it might simply be a goofy-looking fish, or a "dorkfish"; he then puts on a goofy-sounding voice and pretends to have buckteeth while imitating such a dorkfish being caught by a fisherman.
  "I'm a dorkfish! He caught me on a corndog! I was just swimmin' in the ocean, and I was like 'What's a corndog doin' in the ocean?' But you know me, I love them corndogs!"

Video Games

• Club Penguin: All orange puffles have buckteeth and zany personalities.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: Marvin the Mouse has buck teeth and is established as an obnoxious Gasshole who likes cheese.
• Subverted in Five Nights at Freddy's World: Chica's Magic Rainbow has buck teeth, but in truth, she's an extremely obnoxious bully.
• Inazuma Eleven: Kurimatsu, one of the more "comedic" characters in the main cast, has buck teeth.
• Pizza Tower: The Noise, a rival to Peppino, has a prominent bucktooth, and is a childish, mischievous gremlin man with lots of cartoonish pranks up his sleeve.
• The Rabbids from Raving Rabbids are a bunch of moronic rabbits, each with widely-spaced buckteeth.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends:
  • Though buckteeth are rather common within the characters, Nutty tends to be the most outwardly foolish of the gang, especially since his obsession with candy clouds his judgement. He's generally quite hyperactive due to his aforementioned sugar intake.
  • Toothy, of course, stands out visually as his buckteeth are larger and more spaced out than other characters.
  • As with Nutty, Pop's buckteeth suits his bumbling and melodramatic nature.
  • Ironically averted for Sniffles, despite this being a common nerd stereotype.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: Richard has a bucktooth, and is a lazy, slobbish, unemployed moron.
• Animaniacs: Pinky of the Pinky and the Brain duo has large buckteeth and is a scatterbrained mouse who regularly spouts Non-Sequiturs.
• Arthur: Buster Baxter is a rabbit with buck teeth who regularly eats bizarre and rotten food, and believes aliens are real.
• Big City Greens: Cricket and Tilly Green, a mischievous Book Dumb rascal and a Cloud Cuckoolander, respectively.
• Bugs Bunny is a fun-loving Karmic Trickster with buckteeth, as befitting a rabbit.
• Chip 'n Dale are little chipmunks who enjoy screwing with people (especially Pluto). Both have buckteeth, although Dale's are more noticeable. This is fitting, given how Dale is the more dimwitted one between the two.
• Codename: Kids Next Door:
  • Subverted with King Sandy, who is a little kid with buckteeth who believes he is a king and tries to get Number 3 to marry him. While Suki/Number 3 initially doesn't take Sandy seriously and plays along, he flies into a rage when she points out they're just pretending and tries to hurt her and her friends.
  • Numbuh 71.562 is a KND scientist with buckteeth, who is a dork.
  • Exaggerated in "Operation C.A.R.A.M.E.L.". When Sector V gets cursed by Heinrich von Marzipan into giving up the quality they value most, Numbuhs 1, 4, and 5 all get large buckteeth they don't normally have when they lose their leadership, courage, and coolness respectively, making them all weak nerds.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Timmy Turner, the loser that no one understands, is characterized by his exceptionally large buckteeth.
• Family Guy: Mort Goldman is a nerdy loser with large buckteeth. His wife and his son also have them, and are as nerdy as Mort.
• Goofy is an air-headed klutz with buckteeth that are often depicted as widely-spaced, although in cartoons from the 1950's, his buckteeth were considerably closer together, but no less goofy. His son, Max from Goof Troop, subverts this trope; despite having buckteeth, Max is serious (or tries to be).
• Kid Lucky: Dopey is the goofiest and least bright member of Kid Lucky's gang, and he's got prominent buckteeth.
• Jelly Jamm: Goomo has buckteeth that are visible whenever he opens his mouth, and is a wacky guy who doesn't always think his plans through, and often shows a bit of naiveté, being easily swayed by other people's opinions.
• The Loud House: Luan Loud, who has large buckteeth in addition to Pubescent Braces, is the comedian and prankster of the family.
• PAW Patrol: Dwayne has noticeable buckteeth (and is the only dog with these to boot). He's also shown to be rather unfocused and spacey compared to Hubcap and Gasket.
• Recess:
  • Gretchen is a nerdy girl with buckteeth to go with her glasses and Youthful Freckles.
  • Downplayed with Miss Grotke, who is a Hippie Teacher with smaller buckteeth, but has Cloud Cuckoolander tendencies.
  • Woodchuck Scout Phil tends to lie about his "heroic" deeds, particularly in "A Genius Among Us" when he took credit for someone else's work, so the buckteeth emphasize that he shouldn't be taken seriously.
• Rugrats: Chuckie has buckteeth, and his Lovable Coward tendencies (as well as his Absurd Phobias) are often played for comedy, though they can be played for pathos just as frequently.
• Scooby-Doo: Scooby-Doo himself is already a silly talking animal who serves as half the comic relief for the franchise, but his Deep South cousin Scooby-Dum, who has buckteeth, makes Scooby-Doo look smart by comparison. He's often so spaced out he fails to realize he or others are in danger.
• Screwy Squirrel is a wacky trickster squirrel who naturally has buckteeth.
• Secret Squirrel is a bumbling, incompetent secret agent whose prominent bucktooth gives him a lisp. This is subverted in the 2 Stupid Dogs revival, in which his bucktooth is less noticeable, his lisp is gone, and he is actually competent.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • SpongeBob has large buckteeth highlighting his wacky, happy-go-lucky, fun-loving, occasionally naive personality. In one episode he exaggerates his buckteeth for a comedy act where he makes fun of squirrels. Sandy herself is an exception.
  • Patrick is sometimes drawn with a single bucktooth, which is noticeable when he's about to do something stupid.
  • In "No Weenies Allowed", one of the two Stereotypical Nerd fish that are frequent patrons of Weenie Hut Jr.'s—the bar for weak, dorky, and uncool types—has protruding buckteeth and Pubescent Braces.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: Babs and Buster Bunny are as bucktoothed and as manic as Bugs Bunny, their counterpart.
• The Wild Thornberrys:
  • Nigel Thornberry has huge buckteeth, and he's a Bumbling Dad who's an utter goof whenever he's not dealing with his field of expertise (which is animals).
  • Eliza is depicted as being fairly geeky: on top of her vast knowledge of animals, she wears glasses, has red hair, Youthful Freckles, and a mouthful of braces. She's also contrasted by her cool, Aloof Big Sister Debbie. When Eliza smiles, you can see that her two front teeth protrude more than the rest.
  • Donnie is a Wild Child that the Thornberries adopted who speaks in excited gibberish as he Never Learned to Talk and whose wild and unpredictable antics are the primary source of the show's comedy. He also has buckteeth.

---