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Sometimes a talented person is hired to act talentless.
Hey, you know that actor that plays that character? The one that can not sing? Turns out they are a classically trained opera singer. Ironic, isn't it?
Not really. Irony as She Is Cast happens when known skills of an actor and the displayed skills of a role do not mesh - and the fan knows this. If the fan didn't know the actor, then there would be no dissonance.
Their ability might even have been the reason for casting;
Do not expect the character to ever improve in the talent - at least, not for more than one episode. The Character might only be as bad as they are due to the Actor being so good.
Irony as She Is Cast might be reactionary in a long-lived role; extreme cases might try to counter what's Ripped from the Headlines.
Frequently implements: Dreadful Musician; Hollywood Tone Deaf; or Bad Bad Acting (or any of the tropes under Stylistic Suck). Rarely implements Hollywood Homely (although it can be a subtrope of it, instead of talented playing talentless, it's beautiful playing ugly); that is more likely to be Dyeing for Your Art. Contrast: Beautiful All Along, where improvement is part of the story; and The Cast Show Off, where a talent gets to be in the limelight.
Never requires a Talent Double. Is not based of the beliefs of the actor - which tends to result in a Shallow Parody - but may be as a result of observed reactions to that belief.
The Trope Namer is English As She Is Spoke , probably the first real-life example of My Hovercraft is Full of Eels, and not really related to the trope at all. But it makes for a good trope name.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Rie Tanaka (A voice actor well-respected for her singing abilities), frequently.
- Hekiru Shiina has a singing career. Guess which is the worst subject for her character in Magic Knight Rayearth, Hikaru Shidou... singing.
- Minami Takayama, the Japanese voice actress for Conan of Detective Conan, is actually a singer in the J-Pop band "Two-Mix"; before Conan, her voice was what she was best known for. Naturally, in the series itself, Conan cannot hold a tune to save his life. Two-Mix itself actually appeared on the show once and invited Conan to sing with them, as a wink to all her fans. They played with it, too: the episode in question makes it a plot point that Conan sounded like her.
- Takehito Koyasu, while not really a big name in singing career, also sings. Cue Macross 7 where his character Gamlin Kizaki tried to 'outsing' Basara Nekki in singing despite his protests... only for Gamlin to have a horrendous singing tune.
- Maaya Sakamoto is much better known for her singing career than her acting career, especially considering she's done quite a few anime songs, and worked with the famous Yoko Kanno for some of them. In Ouran High School Host Club she played Fujioka Haruhi who is an atrocious actor, and apparently a horrible singer... so horrible we never actually hear her sing, but LIPSYNC a song by Chieko Kawabe (who sang the opening).
- Oddly enough, Haruhi's English voice actress, Caitlin Glass, also has a very nice singing voice.
- Kaere of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is sometimes joked to be a dreadful guitar player and awful singer. Her voice actress, Yu Kobayashi, plays guitar as a hobby and is clearly a quite good singer as evidenced by her singing in various music for the show. Kaere's character songs play around with this trope- at some points they are very discordant and Karere is Hollywood Tone Deaf, but this is a reflection of the character's multiple personality disorder. When that's not in effect, the singing is very good.
- Aya Hirano playing Konata Izumi. Anyone who's watched Hirano as Haruhi Suzumiya (also singing that series' themes) knows that she has a fantastic singing voice. Konata, on the other hand... doesn't (her butchering of "Cha-la Head Cha-la" is but an example).
- The OP theme of Maple Town is sung by Satoko Yamano, who also does the voice of minor character Puriprin. As with many of the above examples, Puriprin is notable for being a horrible singer: her practice session before the school play is cacophonous enough to wake the entire town.
Film
- Ricky Jay, the film's magic consultant, as an incompetent stage magician in The Prestige.
- When he was a boy scout, Harrison Ford was known for being good at handling snakes.
- Used and parodied by casting Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein. She really was a classically trained opera singer, but she was cast as Frederick's tightly-wound fiancee rather then the Bride of Frankenstein. The Bride (from the original movie) could do little more than hiss, whereas Madeline lets forth a soaring aria (when prompted).
- Madeline Kahn playing the German Lily Von Schtupp in Blazing Saddles. She's an extremely popular entertainer for her sex appeal, but her singing voice is deep, heavily accented, and mostly off-key.
- Miranda Cosgrove (Carly on iCarly) needed lessons in how to sing badly to play Summer Hathaway in School of Rock.
- Olivia Olson sang so well that the filmmakers of Love Actually had to train her to sing a little worse as they were afraid audiences would not think it was really the ten-year-old's singing.
- David Bowie has played characters that sang off-key in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
- Meryl Streep playing hammy bad actress Madeline Ashton in Death Becomes Her.
- Basil Rathbone was one of the best fencers in Hollywood, performing all of his own onscreen fights. As he was always cast as the villain in swashbuckling films, he usually lost against less skillful actors.
- Ralph Garman, a radio host, voice actor, impressionist and a pretty damn good singer, was cast by his friend Kevin Smith as the mute Caleb in Red State.
- Subverted by Jean Hagen, a beautiful singer who plays a character with a hilariously shrill voice in Singin' in the Rain. When Debbie Reynolds' character is supposedly dubbing over Hagen's terrible voice, it's actually Hagen's regular voice.
- Mia Kirschner plays Elizabeth Short in The Black Dahlia, a struggling actress who can't get a part. Kirschner's performance was praised by critics as the best part of the film.
- At the end of the Steve Martin film "All of Me", mystic and Cloud Cuckoolander Prahka Lasa is "playing" the piano as accompaniment to a saxophonist performing the eponymous song. This consists of him hitting a single note at the end of each musical phrase for the first verse of the song (and it's the same note each time, except once). Richard Libertini, the actor playing Prahka Lasa, was a professional musician before becoming an actor. Subverted in that a) it's always the right note to blend in with the song and b) at the end of the first verse, he looks at the rest of the keyboard as if in surprise and begins a quite talented accompaniment.
- The Hairspray movie with John Travolta and Christopher Walken romantically singing together and dancing very, very badly. It's even funnier as both are well known as excellent dancers and are doing it badly on purpose.
Literature
- The characters of P.Howard (Jenő Rejtő) are supposedly illiterate pirates or otherwise simple folk, but when narrating in first person, they sound like schooled and literate middle class citizens trying too hard to pretend they are complete morons, because they reflect the style of the author.
- Isaac Asimov once stated that Mark Twain's real genius was in writing Huckleberry Finn as if Huck, who is uneducated and all-but-illiterate, were telling it in such a way that not once does the reader ask himself "How is this illiterate moron telling the story so well?"
Live Action TV
Professional Wrestling
- WWE Diva Michelle McCool, whose current character is, to be put nicely, an Alpha Bitch personified, with a hefty dose of a female Bully thrown in for good measure. However before joining WWE, Michelle was a middle-school teacher and likely spent a good chunk of her time trying to stop bullying.
- Everyone remembers the infamous skit where Santino Marella tries (and fails) to do the splits on the ring apron. Santino actually can do the splits, as he has demonstrated in other matches.
- Lisa Marie Varon as psychotic and masochistic heel Victoria who enjoys whacking people with steel chairs and grinding their faces into the mat. Anyone who's met Lisa Marie in real life will confirm that she is one of the nicest and kindest wrestlers out there.
In Jeeves and Wooster, Wooster (played by Hugh Laurie) was, at best, a competent piano player, while Jeeves (played by Stephen Fry) was very good indeed. In real life, Fry can't play a note, and Laurie is an accomplished musician on several instruments.
Radio
- Part of comedian Jack Benny's persona was his inability to play the violin, much less realize it. In real life, Benny was an accomplished violinist, often performing with Isaac Stern.
- As an amusing anecdote, Jack was at one point asked to dine at the White House, and while he was there he would play his violin. When he arrived, a Secret Service agent asked him what he was carrying in his violin case. Benny answered that he had a Thompson submachine gun in there, "the old Chicago typewriter". The agent sighed and said "Thank God, I was afraid you had your violin in there."
- Apparently, only a very good violinist can pull off playing badly for comic effect. A bad violinist doing it is just horrible.
- This holds true for just about any musical or theatrical endeavor, resulting in this trope in the first place; someone who is very good can be far, far worse than someone who is actually bad or merely mediocre.
- Speaking of Benny, he often compared his skills to the legendary Jascha Heifetz (see the live action TV folder), who himself occasionally recorded hilarious imitations of bad violin students for fun. Once one such imitation of Heifetz was actually rejected in a blind audition test. Heifetz's actual playing was truly spectacular.
- In The Goon Show, Neddie Seagoon is portrayed as utterly unable to carry a tune in several buckets. His actor Harry Secombe had a successful singing career.
- Les Dawson and Eric Morecambe both used "playing the piano really badly" in their acts. Of course, both actually played very well, as is necessary to make playing badly comical rather than tedious, and in fact it can be harder to play the wrong notes while keeping the tune recognisable than to just play the tune right.
Theater
- A classic character type in musical theater is The Rival to the aspiring actor/dancer/singer protagonist. Of course, the rival is never as good as the protagonist at acting/singing/dancing. However, this is frequently Irony as She Is Cast. For example in Hairspray, the actress playing Amber Von Tussle has to be a good dancer, because it takes a lot of skill to trip consistently and safely.
- The girl playing Penny has an even harder job- she has to be awkward and a beat behind everybody else.
Western Animation
- In Shrek the diminutive Lord Farquaad is voiced by the 6'4" John Lithgow.
- Dr. Robotnik from Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog is a horrible singer. However, his voice actor, the late Long John Baldry, was a blues and folk-rock singer.
- In an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Catwoman jokingly mentions that Black Canary being gagged is for the best since she has a horrendous singing voice. Black Canary's voice actress, Grey DeLisle, is a Grammy-winning professional singer.
- The Kim Possible episode "Hidden Talent" reveals Kim as a singer who cannot hit high notes. Kim's voice actress is Christy Romano, an accomplished singer.
- Madeleine Peters, who voices Scootaloo in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic is notorious for her rather bad singing in "The Show Stoppers". However, according to Daniel Ingram, Madeleine is actually a very good singer and was told to butcher the song. He would also very much like an opportunity to record a version of the Crusaders' theme sung properly.
- In the Code Lyoko School Play episode, Laughing Fit, Ulrich gives a spectacularly bad performance as Romeo prior to the Return to the Past...his voice actress was on Broadway at one point.
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