Indubitably Uninteresting Individual

Read it. Live it.

"Whatever you made, I hope it's as mild as kitten milk!"

— The Earl of Lemongrab, Adventure Time

Have you ever seen a bland character who never seems to move outside the boundaries of what society deems as mundane or boring?

The air around them is so dry and uninteresting that it makes you want to drink a water-cooler-jug's worth of water. Their most extreme hobbies include solitaire, knitting, reading the newspaper, and listening to light chamber music. Their favorite foods tend to be white bread, white rice, water, plain boiled macaroni, unflavored oatmeal, or any dull, tasteless fare. Their collections tend to involve paper cuttings or chotchkes that have no real subjective value (such as doilies or painted walnut shells).

They love Incredibly Lame Fun. They may dress in muted or prim-and-proper attire (barring tuxedos and evening gowns), even when the situation may not call for it. Their house is immaculate and clean, and their manners are polite, courteous, and non-threatening. They may even stick closely to a planned-in-advance schedule. They sit up straight, follow the rules, and never make a fuss — so much so that their voice may never waver above an octave or 50db (the normal decibel range for conversation). Sometimes they are meek and timid. Even if they do "lash out" and "curse", either what they say is cute at best, or has no verbal force at worst, and people who have the same personality may overreact as if they actually HAD said something offensive. Furthermore, when they become "greedy" (whether related to food or buying), their additional desire is only a slight step above what they normally have (i.e. obtaining an extra spoonful of cereal, or asking for just a few extra mundane items for Christmas).

Sometimes, the character may be overly weak, even unable to defend themselves or offer any offensive strength. If they are older, Games of the Elderly, such as checkers, chess, bingo, bridge, etc., will likely be depicted as the most exciting event of the day, and for extra comedy, they may move extremely slowly, at a snail's pace. The rooms of elderly individuals may either be spartan, or feature old-style decor and, again, more chotchkes. ^note However, some of this may just be an outer appearance, as the old person may have some Hidden Depths to them (e.g. They were a war veteran, and their room contains memorabilia related to the war that they served in, or their chotchkes are a heartfelt reminder of significant-others passed on)

In fact, they are so boring, subdued, and unwavering that one may think something is wrong with them; to drive their characterization home further, their interests and tastes may be entirely arbitrary as if they know that other kinds of desires exist, but they are putting on a face or find the other desires to be negative, rude, or evil in some way. They may stick so closely to them that you're afraid if they try to push themselves any closer to "normal" that they'll proverbially crack emotionally. The individual may even have a Holier Than Thou air about them, and be condescending towards others, sometimes trying to force that "extreme normality" on others if they think it will benefit the other person. However, if being completely uninteresting is the character in question's basic way of living, and they decide to go beyond their boundaries, it may be a case of O.O.C. Is Serious Business; or for the better, Character Development.

A super-trope of Plain Palate, The Bore, Obsessively Normal, and Incredibly Lame Fun. May cross over with Stepford Smiler, Abusive Parents, Big Brother Is Watching, The Evils of Free Will, Hidden Depths, Flanderization, or if it has to do with work, either Soul-Crushing Desk Job, Vast Bureaucracy, and/or White Collar Worker. If the characters are heroic, then they may have a bit of Incorruptible Pure Pureness. If the person can't seem to get away from a maternal influence that has this personality, then it's My Beloved Smother. When applied to an entire community, it's a Stepford Suburbia, which further may apply to the fictional idea of a Cult, where this idea may be enforced by its leader(s) and followers. If the person has other odd interests besides dull and dreary foods and activities, but just can't seem to mesh with other people, then maybe they're a Straw Loser. Compare Ridiculously Average Guy, where the character-in-question is like everyone else, but the fact that they blend in with the crowd gets them unnoticed.

As with similar tropes involving personal opinions, No Real Life Examples, Please!! Real life examples would be subjective opinions which would likely lead to disagreements and edit wars. Also, please note that this trope page is not for characters that are personally considered terrible. This is for characters that, by consensus, have little-to-no-basic-personality overall, either as an intentional and normal character flaw, as a foil, or by accident; for good or for bad.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Played with in Danganronpa. Izuru Kamukura was created from Hajime Hinata through a series of operations and surgeries to create a perfect genius talented in everything. However, this procedure involved excising Hajime's interests, emotions, and memories along with anything else that could interfere with developing talent. The project succeeded in making Izuru perfect but also made him undeniably bored with the world, having no feelings towards anything, and lacking motivation altogether. His official likes and dislikes are even listed as 'none'.
• Mob Psycho 100: The eponymous Mob, real name Shigeo Kageyama, gets his nickname from the fact that he has so little presence he’s comparable to a background NPC from a video game. This is deliberate on his part: an esper of unimaginable strength with unstable Psychoactive Powers and a conviction that power doesn’t make anyone special, he practices Emotion Suppression to keep his powers in check and strives to be an average, normal middle schooler like his older brother, and so comes across as a very boring person most of the time.

Audio Plays

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama "The Holy Terror", Court Scribe Eugene Tacitus seems extremely comfortable being the most boring and powerless man in the royal court: he lives alone, drinks nothing but water (lukewarm or tepid), wields no authority, and has no interests outside of chronicling the lives of the Emperors — an especially dull task, given that it mainly consists of recording literally every moment in a given Emperor's life, no matter how mundane. Plus, nobody in the Castle ever reads the Royal Bibles except for him. Conditioned to Accept Horror, he barely reacts to mass-murder, torture, or threats against his life, but grows so confused around events that don't fit in with the usual routines of the Castle that he can sometimes be reduced to blind panic. The twist is that Eugene is actually the all-powerful Reality Warper that created the Castle and all its people, along with the recurring cycles that govern its history; he's using these patterns to keep his life orderly, comfortable and ritualized so he can forget the crime that had him imprisoned in this dimension in the first place.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's parents seem to be like this, at least from his point-of-view.
  • One comic has his dad doing this after a Saturday run:
    Dad: Ahh, what could be better than a Saturday 6-mile run at dawn in 20-degree weather...
    Dad: ...followed by a big bowl of gummy oatmeal and some dry toast!
    Calvin: [still groggy] How about dried-up prunes and a root canal?
    Dad: Dried-up prunes! Do we have some??
  • In a New Year's strip:
    Hobbes: Are your parents going out for New Year's Eve?
    Calvin: Are you kidding?
    Calvin: My parents' idea of a wild night is to mix a scoop of real coffee in with the decaf.
• In Garfield, some of Jon Arbuckle's activities include this.

  Jon: Hey, Garfield! It's hot and humid today! The conditions are perfect! Let's go!
  Jon: [pushing an armchair across the room] I'm getting a front-row seat.
  Garfield: [sarcastically, to the reader] Silence, please, we're watching the linoleum curl.

• Charlie Brown in Peanuts worries that he might be this, calling himself "blah". Lucy also sometimes calls him "blah". His neuroticism and passion for baseball keep him from being this 100 percent.
• Spud of Wallace the Brave tends toward the trope. In this strip he confides that his favorite color is beige and his favorite ice cream flavor is mild vanilla while Wallace is searching for an Out-of-Character Alert.

Films — Animation

• The LEGO Movie: The town of Bricksburg is a Stepford Suburbia because it was built by an obsessively neat adult LEGO collector but even among citizens of Bricksburg, Emmet Brickowski is so bland that his co-workers can't say more than two words about him.
  Construction Worker: Look at Randy here, he likes sausage. That's something. Gail is perky, that's something.
  Randy: We all have something that makes us something, and Emmet is...nothing.

Films — Live-Action

• Demolition Man takes this to its logical extreme, where the population of San Angeles is as meek and nonviolent as monks. No junk food or sex (in the traditional sense) or tobacco or violence (in the form of contact sports) or weapons are allowed, radio and TV commercials are considered the height of fun music, everyone outside of the police force wears something that would look better as your house's curtains, Taco Bell (or Pizza Hut, in international versions) is considered haute cuisine, everyone is polite even when rude, freedom of thought and emotional coarseness are restricted and fined, and the police force has lost all defensive value as a result. Sylvester Stallone's character, John Spartan, is unfrozen from suspended animation ^note because he never grew up in the culture that the population did, and is more gung-ho and freer with his emotions and approaches to stopping crime to defend the city against his arch-enemy, Simon Phoenix. One man, Edgar Friendly, seeks to rebel against the modern idea of meek and dull peacefulness, wanting to be able to do what he wants, eat what he wants, and say what he wants, with reasonable restriction. Dr. Raymond Cocteau, the leader of San Angeles, wants to control it with absolute power. Even Phoenix, his personally-programmed assassin, thinks there's something wrong about it.
  • When Spartan finally meets up with Edgar Friendly:
    Edgar Friendly: I'm the kind of guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter, and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading a Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've SEEN the future. Do you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake, singing "I'm an Oscar Mayer Wiener."
  • When Phoenix has had enough of Dr. Cocteau:
    Dr. Cocteau: Yes, but this time, they're really intimidated. Now I'll have carte blanche to create the perfect society. My society. San Angeles will be a beacon of order with the purity of an ant colony and the beauty of a flawless pearl.
    [meanwhile, Phoenix is aiming at him and attempting to pull the trigger of a gun, but because of Dr. Cocteau's implanted programming, he can't]
    Simon Phoenix: Look, you can't take away people's right to be assholes.
    Dr. Cocteau: Hmm?
    Simon Phoenix: That's what you remind me of, an evil Mr. Rogers.
    [Phoenix throws his gun to a teammate]
    Simon Phoenix: Will you please kill him? He's pissing me off.
    [the teammate shoots Dr. Cocteau multiple times]
• Pleasantville plays with this, with a bit of Crapsaccharine World to boot. The titular show within a movie is a Leave It to Beaver-esque black-and-white program where everyone is perpetually pleasant, the firefighters do nothing but rescue cats from trees, families are completely wholesome, and all problems (which are minor inconveniences to begin with) can be solved within a single twenty-two-minute episode. Main character David thinks that Pleasantville must be a paradise, while his sister Jennifer calls it stupid. Eventually, David and Jennifer are sucked into the world of Pleasantville; while they try to find a way to escape, David quickly learns that the so-called "perfect" town is more like a Stepford Suburbia where everyone must be Indubitably Uninteresting: the books are all blank because no one reads, the roads don't lead anywhere because no one can escape, no one thinks for themselves or questions anything because they literally can't imagine any other type of life, and—most shockingly of all—no one knows anything about sex. As Jennifer (and later David) start to introduce new ideas and concepts to the citizens of Pleasantville, the townspeople begin to feel genuine emotion for the first time, which turns them (along with various objects) from black-and-white to fully colored. The change leads to some rather heavy-handed but important metaphors about "coloreds" ruining the town and how being old-fashioned is the only way to live. By the film's end, everyone in Pleasantville has fully changed, and the world is lush and colorful; to symbolize that the world is now real, the roads actually lead out of town, setting people free to live their own lives.
• The Truman Show is this, plus Stepford Suburbia. Truman's life never changes, and despite the movie taking place in the mid-1990s, almost every aspect seems stuck in an obsolete world. The buses, the local drugstore, his wife's advertising style, even the yards of his neighborhood are from the 1950s. The building he works in seems to be stuck in the 1980s.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • Apart from being the greatest political mind on the Discworld and therefore the ruthlessly pragmatic ruler of its most powerful city, Lord Havelock Vetinari fits this. His clothes are "the sober, slightly shabby black of a man who doesn't want to waste time in the mornings wondering what to wear". His taste in food is that "a glass of boiled water and half a slice of dry bread was an elegant sufficiency". His hobbies include strategy games like chess and Thud, political philosophy, and reading music — the idea of it being played, with a lot of sweaty people messing about with catgut and brass between you and the composer, makes him shudder "although not much, because he never did anything to extremes". Since Ankh-Morpork politics before him was largely based on playing on the current Patrician's vices and weaknesses, this drives the city's other power players mad. He also very rarely raises his voice or uses bad language ... but then, he doesn't need to.
  • Mr. Bent of Making Money is an even more extreme example — Vetinari at least has some quirks, whereas Bent seems physically incapable of laughing or having fun; he describes most things people enjoy as "silly". Even when he had leave time, he spent it learning more about banking and making sure that he still read reports from the Ankh-Morpork bank every night. After having a mental breakdown from making a mistake, he reveals that the Indubitably Uninteresting persona was his deliberate attempt to go against his upbringing as a circus clown. At the end of the book he's on his way to being a more well-rounded individual.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy seems to paint this as one of the Vogons' hats, with Vast Bureaucracy and Obstructive Bureaucrat built-in. Their poetry is so uninteresting and terrible that it's used as a method of torture. It's even more egregious with the 2005 Movie where every Vogon's lifestyle seems to revolve around conformity, bureaucracy, and inhibition of creativity. (All of their buildings are dull, almost-featureless block-like skyscrapers on the outside AND inside, the majority of them dress in ill-fitting suits, their lives are governed by filing and transfer of properly signed paperwork, and they work according to a consistent schedule.) On Vogsphere, the planet of the Vogons, there is a species of subterranean plant that slaps anyone who has a coherent thought or idea upside the head.
• In Lord Dunsany's Smethers short stories, the title character is a self-described "small man", a nondescript relish salesman with no particular hobbies other than playing The Watson to his crime-solving roommate. As he introduces himself in "The Mug in the Gambling Hell":
  Smethers is my name. You won't remember me.
• Grey Murphy from the Xanth series comes across this way when he's first introduced. He doesn't have any magic talent that he's aware of, and he's so boring that his hair is simply "hair-colored."

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock:
  • Kenneth plays with this trope. He is decidedly old-fashioned, never swears (his idea of the "a-word" is "angry"), and refuses to listen to more than two notes of rock and roll for fear of the Devil corrupting his soul. However, it's heavily implied that this is because he is impossibly ancient and ageless, and thus never adapts to the spirit of the twenty-first century because he's lived through many before it.
    Kenneth: You're being a real c-word right now. That's right, a Cranky Sue.
  • Main character Liz Lemon is a downplayed version of this trope — she's often considered an old, lonely spinster by other characters (despite being in her mid-30s) because of her dowdy clothing and boring hobbies, but she also dates frequently and enjoys the finer things in life, especially food.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • Sheldon Cooper has some of this, although it's more of a case of his vaguely defined mental disorder keeping his mind in line with a routine. Eventually, he learns to move outside his boundaries gradually. Although in the case of the main characters' interests, stigma against "nerdy" activities, such as computer programming, comic-book reading, sci-fi television and movie watching, and action figure collecting, have fallen out of favor starting around the time the show premieres.
  • Amy Farrah Fowler, who was originally a female Sheldon, started out this way. On their first date, she ordered a glass of tepid water; when she was invited to her first-ever "girl's night," she had to buy a set of genuinely comfortable clothes (since she didn't own any) and printed out a list of activities to follow; and her favorite TV show is the decidedly old-fashioned Little House on the Prairie. Over time, though, Character Development kicked in, and she started exploring other activities and becoming more social. Tellingly, in the penultimate season, she gets legitimately angry when Penny and Bernadette arrange a quilting bee for her bachelorette party. They acquiesce and go to a bar instead... where Amy promptly passes out after one shot of liquor.
  • Young Sheldon: The prequel seems to expand certain aspects of Sheldon's characterization, possibly to the point of Flanderization. Then again, in this series he is a child with an unspecified mental disorder, working off what others might expect of him, and learning to expand his routines and ideas gradually.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine has this as a Running Gag for a good number of characters, particularly Captain Holt and his husband Kevin. For instance, they consider shaking hands to be an extreme amount of PDA for them.
• Father Ted has an extreme example: Father Paul Stone, who never does anything other than sit and stare unless he absolutely has to. It's not that he's catatonic or stupid, he just doesn't want to do anything else, and he says almost nothing simply because he has almost nothing to say. He likes visiting, though, which terrifies other characters because his presence sucks the energy out of the room and leaves them deeply depressed.
• In The Good Place, there are the Janets, who are A.I. robots. There are the Good Janets, who are endlessly cheerful and helpful, the Bad Janets, who are endlessly lazy and rude, and there are the Neutral Janets, who are dressed in beige, speak in monotones, and are only as helpful as they absolutely have to be. The Neutral Janets are this trope, if A.I. robots count.
• Home Improvement: Al Borland has shades of this. His idea of a night out is going to bingo with his mother. And once when Tim stays over at his place, Al's idea of a movie night is watching home movies of him as a baby.
• Knit Knots, the neighbor and manager of the Imagination Movers, is a dull man who is wary of anything too exciting, contrasting with the eccentric and active Imagination Movers and his niece, Nina.
• MADtv:
  • The skit "How to Telephone a Girl" parodies the depiction of the early 1950s as this, while also serving as a blatant advertisement for Bell Telephone and social propaganda from The Daughters of the Confederacy. Two school students, Eddie, a "normal" person, and Bud, a jock, are told about a hayride on Friday. Both of them plan to call someone for a date. Eddie later telephones Janet, a seemingly prim, proper girl, on a Bell Telephone. Unfortunately, Janet's mother tells Eddie that Janet is in the bathtub bathing; this arouses Eddie, who gets a bulge in his jeans. Eddie acts as if he has sinned and goes to his bedroom to pray. Bud, on the other hand, calls Janet using an inferior "oriental" telephone and is seemingly destined for a bad date on the hayride. Despite this, Bud has the rowdiest romantic time of his life there, while Eddie and Janet (both dressed in spic-and-span clothing) treat touching each other as if it were blasphemous.
    Eddie: Say, can I touch your collarbone?
    Janet: Oh, hang on there, Romeo. You have a lot more telephoning to do before you go that far.
  • Another skit, "The Fun Room" has two socially-outcast cousins being, well... out-cast from a party, and being forced to spend time out in an enclosed porch. Their idea of fun is imitations, rattling off nonsense trivia, and eating chips, and speaking with child-like cadence. Unfortunately, there's a hint of characterization that suggests they are both mentally-challenged.
• Our Miss Brooks: Mr. Boynton, Miss Brooks' Adorkable Love Interest lives this trope. He likes to play chess. He hangs out at the Biologists Club. His other hobbies include leading a Boy Scout troop and taking care of his pet frog McDougall. He likes to take Miss Brooks to the zoo on their dates. His bedtime is usually ten o'clock, but is known to stay up until eleven on New Year's Eve. In "Hello Mr. Chips", Mrs. Davis remarks his habits are like those of a much older man.
• The Peter Serafinowicz Show had a 1940s parody of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, titled Who Would like to Win 100 [British] Pounds?. It's set in what can be considered a parlor, the clapping and speaking are as polite as that of a golf match, the only music is provided by a harp, "Silly Town" is the best possible parody answer, and the audience is dressed in their Sunday best. The host provides "jokes" resulting in stilted, polite laughter.
• Saturday Night Live with its infamous Schweddy Balls skit paints the two NPR broadcasters as this.
  NPR Broadcaster #2: Are you, Margaret-Jo, going to leave any treats out for Santa this year?
  NPR Broadcaster #1: Oh absolutely, I always do. I like to leave Santa some tap water and rice.
• Somehow, this applies to a HOLIDAY; the holiday of Festivus from Seinfeld, which also crosses over into depressing:
  • The sole decoration of the holiday is a bare aluminum pole attached to a cross-shaped wooden floor stand.
  • The only real "traditional" food of Festivus is what looks like a reddish meatloaf.
  • During the meal, a tradition known as the "airing of grievances" happens, where family members talk about the various ways that others at the table have disappointed them this year.
  • After the meal (or even during), the head of the household selects one person to challenge to a "Feats of Strength" competition, which, at its base, is just a wrestling match. Rules state that the holiday is not over until the head of the household is pinned.
  • Easily explainable events during the holiday are labeled "Festivus Miracles".
• Star Trek:
  • In the various series, the Vulcans appear to wear this hat, as their culture is based around logic, emotional control, spartanism, mentally-challenging-but-boring activities, and vegetarianism. Their voices also do not change emotionally. On the other hand, there are a few Vulcans that resisted these ideas. Although for the normal individual, it is a VERY bad idea to let one's emotions go unchecked, as Vulcan emotions are very strong and can easily get out of hand. Plus, when a Vulcan loses emotional control or shows a hint of emotion, it is often a bad sign that something is wrong with them or the situation, or that they have become dead-serious about something.
  • Star Trek: The Original Seriesn "Return of the Archons": This is what the planet Beta III has become, with a healthy dose of Stepford Suburbia (although this is implied to be planetwide), because of the iron grip of Landru, who is actually a computer working off the flawed programming of its eponymous programmer and previous leader.
  • Some people seem to find the (fictional) future of humanity in Star Trek: The Next Generation much like this:
    • Unless something is wrong aboard ship, on most starships (including the Enterprise-D), the corridors, hallways, and crew quarters are spick-and-span spotless. This, combined with its design, has led some people to compare the Enterprise to a glorified cruise ship. Even Scotty, in the episode "Relics", points this out.
      Scotty: Good lord, man, where have you put me?
      Ensign: These are standard guest quarters sir, I can try and find something bigger if you want.
      Scotty: Bigger? In my day, even an admiral would notta had such quarters aboard a starship!
    • Design documents from when the show was still in the planning stages show this even more strongly, with a decentralized bridge that more-or-less resembles a retro-futuristic shopping mall.
    • Most music selections are from composers like Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. (Although Riker likes jazz and Worf likes Klingon opera.)
    • Most selections of literature are based on vintage-looking books.
    • Games are mostly board-based in the strategy category, and often simplistic in nature.
    • Most egregiously, in the First Season children as young as 8-10 are taught CALCULUS (a normally middle-to-high-school subject!)
    • Food, although rarely non-nutritional, is served in neat servings.
    • Played with in the character of Data. He was built that way. He does not need to consume food, and he does not have a sensation of taste (at least implied not to human standards). His off-duty activities include reading poems, studying schematics, listening to music, painting, being company for his pet cat Spot, and playing the violin. Despite this, his exploration of humanity and natural life, his desire to be more human, and his superhuman abilities make him interesting. Also averted in that he does find acting in certain stories, such as Sherlock Holmes or The Tempest, appealing.
    • In the episode "Starship Mine", one-time character Commander Hutchinson is shown to be like this in his manner of speaking, consisting of nothing but small talk.
    • In the episode "Phantasms", Captain Picard attempts to find a reason to skip the 2370 Admirals' Banquet. Thankfully, due to the small invisible parasites causing problems with, and inhabiting, the new warp core the engineering crew just installed, he gets to skip it. He describes it as "fifty admirals shaking hands, making dull conversation, uninteresting food [and] boring speeches...":
      Picard: I've just received a message from Starfleet Command.
      Riker: Bad news?
      Picard: You could say that. I've been invited to the annual Starfleet admirals' banquet.
      Riker: My condolences.
    • Furthermore, in a canceled spin-off called Star Trek: Federation, the United Federation of Planets becomes this, losing a lot of member worlds in the process.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • In the episode "Someone to Watch over Me", the one-time alien race that Voyager encounters, known as the Kadi, have this as their all-encompassing hat — even more so compared to the Vulcans. They are actually offended by anything that does not match their bland way of life. The ambassador the ship accepts in exchange for mineral negotiation averts this, as he wants to take the chance to sample EVERYTHING that he can. (Including hitting on Seven of Nine, who doesn't take well to it.)
    • Lieutenant Tuvok, the Vulcan tactical officer of the bridge crew, manages to be just as bad, if not worse (possibly because of the quality of the writing at the time). For him, he somehow manages to be a hardass to the rest of the crew by standing aloof from them, insulting their emotions and culture, and taking the fun out of their ideas by being literate, logical, and socially distant ALL THE TIME; and he gets seriously called out for it not once, but TWICE, with other smaller call-outs peppered throughout the series.
      (From the episode "Flashback")
      Sulu: Mr. Tuvok, if you're going to remain on my ship, you're going to have learn how to appreciate a joke. And don't tell me Vulcans don't have a sense of humor; because I know better.
      
      (From the episode "Alter Ego")
      Marayna: But what about you, Tuvok? Will you always be alone?
• What We Do in the Shadows: Exploited by Colin Robinson, a day-walking energy vampire who feeds off of the energy and life force of those around him. He's very generic-looking (a bald white man who dresses in beige and other boring colors — his ancestry report even just says "100% White"), lurks around his Standard Office Setting workplace, has a monotonous way of speaking, and is prone to tangents about boring things. He also has Incredibly Lame Fun interests because he knows that this causes frustration and misery that he can feed on.

Music

• The song "Henry's Work" by "The Wake" is about a person who spends vacation in the same place every year, does nothing but routine, reads mainstream newspapers and has great performance at his workplace. The only thing that stands out is that he keeps a rubber duck underneath his bed. But this thing alone does not make a man interesting, right?
• Parodied in "Weird Al" Yankovic's "White'n'Nerdy," where the eponymous nerd's interests as well as taste in food, music, and games fit this trope. However, like the Spongebob and Big Bang Theory examples, with the advent of nerd culture becoming mainstream, much stigma against the knowledge of sci-fi TV, comics, and computer programming has fallen out of favor. On the other hand, the nerds have other mundane and odd interests; for example, his idea of a good gift is a surge protector plug strip. His personality is summed up in the lyric:

  Weird Al: I'm nerdy in the extreme, and whiter than sour cream...

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock has this as Boober's main character trait. One of his mottos is "Tedium and drudgery are good for the soul." His job is doing everyone's laundry, and his hobbies are cooking and cleaning. Occasionally, the other Fraggles' behavior suggests that, even though they don't understand why he enjoys these tasks, they are glad someone enjoys them, since they like eating good food and wearing clean clothes.
• On Sesame Street, this is one of Bert's defining qualities. His list of hobbies and interests include keeping pigeons, collecting bottle caps and paper clips, playing checkers, and eating oatmeal. Some of the spin-off books explore this further: his favorite color is apparently beige and when he meets a genuine genie, he wishes for things like new shoelaces and a birdcage for his pet pigeon Bernice (the genie even remarks that Bert is making the oddest wishes he's ever seen). Bert's hobbies are meant to teach An Aesop to children about not having the same interests as your friends while still getting along with them; Ernie, Bert's roommate, is far more social and likes typical kid activities like playing sports, inventing loud games, and going outside. This has led some to label Bert Unintentionally Sympathetic — even though he's ostensibly "the boring one" to Ernie's more convivial, energetic, child-friendly character, he also genuinely likes doing the things he does and has fun in his own way. Furthermore, Ernie often forces Bert to abandon his own activities just to go with what he wants to do while never trying Bert's choices for himself.
• Spitting Image plays with this trope a few times.
  • World snooker champion Steve Davis, a man who prefers to live a quiet, uneventful life outside the billiard room, and whose snooker playing is methodical and consistently good rather than flamboyant, becomes Steve "Interesting" Davis for the show, a complete bore who is pathetically desperate to show the world how multilayered and interesting he is.
  • This happens again with John Major, who became a monotone grey-skinned blur of a human being whose idea of excitement is eating peas with his tea.

Radio

• Dead Ringers: Sir Keir Starmer gets portrayed as this, being completely, utterly passive and non-confrontational, much to the aggravation of his deputy Angela Rayner, portrayed as a Blood Knight. Her every attempt to get him to show some sign of an interesting personality is met with failure.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner:
  • Strong Sad, while originally a one-note depressed character, now seems to have developed into a more rounded individual. Yet his brother, Strong Bad, thinks that his interests are lame and have no punch. Strong Sad likes to listen to public radio (Similar to NPR), and his favorite pastime is writing poetry and prose. On the other hand, he ironically hosts a fan club based on Strong Bad Email, called "The Deleteheads".
  • Marzipan, to a point. She tends to be about on the same level as Strong Sad, except she has a hippie vibe to match.
  • Reynold, a character from the series' Show Within a Show "Cheat Commandos":
    • From "Shopping for Danger!":
      Reynold: Ha ha, yeah. That's like how I labeled and alphabetized all you guys' combat accessories so it'll save on valuable mission time.
    • From "Commandos in the Classroom!":
      Gunhaver: Uh, sorry Reynold, I'm afraid lights-out for you is at oh-now hundred hours!
      Fightgar: Yeah, all that cuss-language might give you nightmares. [laughs]
      Reynold: Oh, I can handle it. Why, I can even swear a cuss myself! *ahem* Diaper biscuits.
      [the rest of the Cheat Commandos laugh at him]
    • From "Cheat Commandos":
      Strong Bad: [As Reynold] Oh, I really need to go grocery shopping. I wish my girlfriend didn't leave me.
    • From "2-Part Episode! Part 2":
      Reynold: [to a wall drawing of Gunhaver] And I'd like to submit a formal request for you to shut your face whenever it's convenient for you, and if not, then no problem!
      Who then follows it up with, after some goading by Blue Laser:
      Reynold: I'll tear off your face! I'll tear it right off! I'll tear it off and wear it to town!
  • In the Strong Bad Email "slumber party", Strong Bad compares the extremes of how a slumber party should and should not go...
    • After Strong Bad finds a stash of "rated-M-for-Mature" titles at an "unpopular kid's" house:
      Homestar Runner: Oh, those are off-limits. We're only allowed to play Clapping Party!
    • After describing the dinner fare of a "normal" slumber party (consisting of nothing but junk food, candy, and soda):
      Strong Bad: [increasingly uncertain as he speaks, while boring music plays in the background] But if you get over there, and they're, like, having a meal at a table, and they're serving, like... [a paltry chicken leg in a rusted casserole pan slides in] Chicken... in a pan? [A plate moves towards Strong Bad and plain salad and cut tomatoes without dressing appears on it] With some... salad... [A glass of milk pours from the top of the screen] and a... glaaaass of milk? To drink? You better start running! [Strong Bad runs off] Because that family must have some serious health problems!
    • When Strong Bad gets invited to an "older kids" slumber party (consisting of "elderly" characters Bubs, Coach Z, and the King of Town):
      [Boring music plays in the background]
      Bubs: My cousin Louis, he's dead. My cousin Harold, he's dead.
      Coach Z: [Overlapping] And my back still hurts. And my knees still hurt. And my head still hurts.
      The King of Town: [Overlapping] Government ain't right! Government ain't right!
      Bubs: So my escrow carried over into my lumbago, but then my sciatica started acting up.
      Strong Bad: Uh, can you guys start using some words that were invented after the year nineteen-oh-zero?
      The King of Town: Come now, young whipper-snapper. My fellows and I were just about to start playing at games of chance. [Holds up some dice and shakes them]
      Strong Bad: Lemme guess. That doesn't include Bed Axe. [holds up an axe]

Webcomics

• Questionable Content: One Obstructive Bureaucrat's Facebook activity is so bland and devoid of personality that Roko immediately assumes it's a front for something freaky. Though he's unhelpful and dismissive, it's because he doesn't see a point in even trying to help her.
  Roko: Look at this: an article about fishing. Actuarial tables. Sock manufacturing. Model trains. Rice farming in Cambodia. Fingernail facts. A list of Youtube celebrities. There's no pattern here. He reads whatever crosses his path, goes "huh" and moves on to the next random thing.

Western Animation

• In Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse, this is Midge's main characterization — she's so old-fashioned that she's rendered in black and white and lacks articulated joints. Even after getting a colorful makeover, her idea of a "wild time" is an afternoon of macrame. When the gang goes on a beach picnic, she turns down Barbie's offer of "spicy food" — namely, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole-wheat bread (the bread set her off).
• DC Super Hero Girls: Steve Trevor's only hint of personality is his desire to go to military school, which at least implies a sense of patriotism. Everything else about him is dullness incarnate. He shops at a store called Every Shade of Beige. As leader of a debate team, his stance on "Which way to hang a toilet paper roll" is "I don't know, both sides are great." Of course, this is all to highlight the absurdity of Wonder Woman's crush on him.
• The Pixies from The Fairly OddParents! are a magical species modeled after boring businessmen. They dress in grey, speak in the deadpan gloomy voice of Ben Stein (except during occasional rap numbers), and never show emotion. Unlike fairies, they refuse to grant fun wishes and only conduct magic through bureaucratic paperwork. The only game they enjoy is golf. Their primary interest involves replacing fun things with boring things, even kidnapping a clown child to raise him as an anti-fun lawyer — the better to enforce their ideals.
• Family Guy:
  • The cutaway character "Buzz Killington", where his interactions cause any fun to cease, such as laughing stoically and humorously at a joke involving a Scotsman.
  • From "Welcome Back, Carter", there's Babs' ex-boyfriend, Roginald, who could give Mr. Killington esquire a run for his money. He politely asks Babs if he could one day sit beside her in the same context that most people would suggest having sex, calling him a "rascal" makes him recoil in horror at "such language in the presence of a lady", and saying the word "penis" causes him to Faint in Shock.
• F is for Family: Alaquipa Ed, a minor character introduced in season 4, and upgraded to supporting character in 5, is basically the poster boy for this trope. He's an extremely plain and well-mannered midwestern man who always speaks in the same monotone voice, even while admonishing tardy employees. His favorite food is carrot soup, his favorite music is marching band, and expresses disbelief that anyone would prefer Led Zeppelin over the dead-eyed drones who play the kind of music he likes.
• Futurama:
  • The Neutral People, where due to Rule of Funny, they don't display any emotion, they don't take sides on any subject, their highest alert level is "Beige", and even they themselves as people are completely devoid of any substantial color.
    Neutral President: If I don't survive, tell my wife, "Hello."
  • Hermes is also this trope somewhat, since he seems to enjoy being a bureaucrat. His Jamaican ethnicity makes him a little livelier, though, and his non-bland hobbies include limbo and ganja.
• Gravity Falls: Tad Strange is the only normal person in Gravity Falls. He dresses in a neat suit and tie, moves in a politely stiff manner, speaks in a cheery, yet almost robotic tone of voice even in traumatic situations, and loves bread. Part of the joke is that he's voiced by the voice of Welcome to Night Vale, and this was the character they gave him.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy pairs this trope with The Ditz for Fred Fredburger. In one episode, the only "interesting" thing he wants to do after winning a "Spend the Day with Grim" essay contest is "...to eet sum frozun yogert" (The minimum word count requirement is 500 words, so he wrote it ad infinitum on the pages of paper.)
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic brings us Maud Pie. A Literal-Minded, exceedingly calm and seemingly emotionless pony. Her debut episode sees her visit her sister Pinkie Pie as well as gain the chance to meet Pinkie Pie's friends for the first time. They all find her off-putting due to her interests in rocks, rock-related poetry and her pet rock — a pebble named Boulder. Presented with a collection of beautiful dresses that Rarity made, she promptly decides on wearing an old dishtowel. When offered a muffin, she inadvertently eats a sizeable rock that was dropped into the batch. Adding to the difficulty, she always speaks flatly. The episode culminates in all of them deciding that their friendship with Pinkie Pie is what unites them as friends. Though Maud's expression never changes in the slightest, Pinkie Pie remarks that she's never seen Maud more excited. However, at the end of the episode, she smiles a bit, still with half-lidded eyes.
• Jerry from Rick and Morty is this, as a contrast to all of the strangeness and adventure around the rest of the cast; he's an aggressively normal suburban dad, while the rest of the family is some stripe of adventurer.
• In The Simpsons:
  • Fictional celebrity Corey Masterson has his own phone line in "Brother from the Same Planet". For the low price of 4.95 a minute, you can hear him drone on and on. Of course, the tween and teen girls who use the phone service don't see the banality of it.
    Corey: Here are some words that rhyme with Corey: Glory... Story... Allegory... Montessori..
  • Ned Flanders and his family is this in spades:
    • Their most extreme snack is "Nachos, Flanders style", which is just cold cucumber slices topped with cottage cheese.
    • Rod and Todd seem to enjoy sitting-still contests.
    • In one episode, Ned punishes Rod by taking away his Bible Story privileges when his son repeats Homer's cursing from earlier in the episode. Maude reacts as if he had raised his voice to him.
      Maude: Weren't you a little hard on him?
      Ned: Well, you knew I had a temper when you married me.
    • In another episode, Ned joins Alcoholics Anonymous for over 4000 days (almost 11 years) because one night, he had a blackberry schnapps. This exchange occurs:
      Maude: Ned, did you clip [the] Ann Landers [newspaper column] today?
      Ned: Ann Landers is a boring old biddy!
      Maude: [gasp] Ned!
      Ned: (in the present) I was more animal than man!
    • This trope even comes into focus in one episode, "Viva Ned Flanders", where it's revealed that Ned is 60 years old but hasn't taken an impulsive risk in his life, which leads him to hire Homer to show him how to have a good time.
      Ned: Of course, I resist all the major urges.
      Sideshow Mel: All of them?
      Marge: You mean you've never splurged and, say, eaten an entire birthday cake, then blamed it on the dog?
      Edna: You've never licked maple syrup off your lover's stomach?
      Bart: (Speaking from outside the church window) You've never snuck out of the church to break into cars?
    • In another episode, Homer encounters Flanders at a historic cider mill, where not only does he rattle off cider trivia, but even shows his cider mill season pass, which happens to be number... 00001.
    • In "Brawl in the Family", which harkens back to "Viva Ned Flanders", Flanders' Vegas wife runs away after attempting to reconnect with him, claiming that he's "too goody-goody".
  • Kirk Van Houten is a good example. When Bart gets tangled up in a lie about being kidnapped by Kirk, it's revealed that one of Kirk's favorite pastimes is playing video poker (actually a cheap handheld game) and eating popcorn (an equally cheap and questionable brand), as seen here.
  • Probably because of his mother Agnes' sinfluence, Principal Seymour Skinner is another good example. His activities mainly include being the Principal of Springfield Elementary, doing light-silhouette cutouts with his mother, and helping her around the house.
  • In "Bart's Friend Falls in Love", one-off students Ezekiel and Ishmael are prohibited from watching a sex ed film, and their appearance makes Flanders' family look like Satanic black metal fans in comparison. Both wear clean white collared shirts and dress shorts, sit up straight, and sport eerily-proper haircuts. One of them has his hands clasped together over what is implied to be a Bible.
    Ms. Krabappel: Ezekiel and Ishmael, in accordance with your parents' wishes, you may step out into the hall and pray for our souls.
  • In "The Joy of Sect", nearly all of Springfield becomes this, with the people joining the Movementarians, forced to work day after day harvesting and eating nothing but lima beans after being brainwashed into the doctrine of joy and serenity. The recruiters that Homer meets early in the episode also give off this vibe, being overly calm, nice, and "trusting". (for lack of a better term)
  • In "Bart Gets Famous", this trope is played completely straight, where at the beginning of the episode Principal Skinner reveals that the field trip of the day is a tour of the local Cardboard Box Factory. In addition to the overall monotonous aspect of the field trip, there are several sub-jokes that take the atmosphere from dull and dreary to funny, including the fact that the factory workers treat their occupation as (somewhat) serious, but boring, business:
    • The exterior of the factory looks slightly run-down and shoddy, while the only notable elements within the interior of the factory are unpainted brick walls, large glass industrial venting windows, exposed electrical piping conduits and air ducts, industrial shaded ceiling lamps, and slowly creaking conveyor belts leading to sparsely-arranged silent machines that assemble and fold the boxes one. step. at. a. tiiiiiiiime... (As opposed to a person building the boxes by hand.)
    • The chairman at the factory speaks as if giving a university lecture (not unlike Ben Stein's character in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"), and begins the tour of the factory with an implied-to-be long-drawn-out spiel about how "two brothers and five other men parlayed a small business loan into a thriving paper goods concern... ...[beginning] with the filing of Form 367/A".
    • The assembly of the boxes is not even completed at that particular factory. Instead, they are shipped off to Flint, MI.
    • A Hope Spot about any interesting addition to the tour occurs when the factory chairman mentions in one of the rooms that it has one important difference until he says...:
      Chairman: ...oh, we took that out. Yes, it is just like the other rooms.
    • The chairman's small main office is as spartan and dull as the rest of the factory. It's very small and cramped with an arbitrary yellow line for tours to follow, going from the door, around his desk, and back out.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • SpongeBob himself, in the episode "Not Normal". To make Squidward feel better, Spongebob starts to change his over-enthusiastic ways. He's mild-mannered and kind after he does this, but not only has his outward appearance changed, every ounce of enthusiasm and spark has flowed out of him as he tries to cater to Squidward's whim. It gets to the point where Spongebob becomes TOO normal (somehow), and is offended by Squidward's (again, somehow) comparatively-less-normal life. Naturally, Spongebob is back to his old self by the end of the episode.
  • Squidward and his hobbies. The most extreme sport he's willing to engage in is riding a bicycle. The episode "Squidville" takes this to the logical extreme — EVERYONE is like him in the town that he moves to, having the exact same interests and a taste for canned bread. Eventually, he's driven to insanity by the sheer monotony and heads back to Bikini Bottom by the end of the episode, but only after pulling Spongebob-level antics in Squidville before leaving.

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