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The Ditz
aka: Ralph Wiggum

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Eye spy with my eyeglass, a not-so-bright Ed-boy.

Blackadder: Oh yes, Percy, and the new ruff?
Lord Percy: [confident] Better?
Blackadder: Worse.
Lord Percy: Uh, the fashion today is towards the tiny.
Blackadder: Well, in that case Percy, you have the most fashionable brain in London.
Blackadder II

The Ditz is a character whose defining characteristic is profound stupidity or quirkiness. In fiction, female ditzes tend to be sweet and naïve, while male ditzes tend to be oafish but lovable (whether if they were inverted or not gender-wise). Either way, they're almost always friendly and sociable (or very kindhearted, honest, & humble in some instances), something that can't be said for the polar opposite side of this trope. The Ditz is written to appear unintentionally funny or humorous. In a drama series, they provide comic relief.

Unlike The Fool, The Ditz is seldom in any real danger and, even if they were, luck can often be counted on to save them. Though darker, or more cynical stories, tend not to favor them, their stupidity usually getting them killed in some awful fashion.

A good looking Ditz (of either sex) might be a Brainless Beauty. An independently wealthy Ditz is an Upper-Class Twit. A Ditz that's a Mighty Glacier (Most commonly as The Big Guy or The Brute) is a Dumb Muscle. A Sexy Secretary of this class would be a Ditzy Secretary.

A more competent if lucky Ditz will often become The Fool. Taken to its weirder extreme, the Ditz can evolve into a Cloudcuckoolander.

One reason you can find The Ditz on so many TV shows is that it gives the audience someone to feel superior to. No matter how stupid one might be, you are still smarter than The Ditz. In certain settings, this trait may also leave them suspect to be accused of having a psychological or neurological disorder to justify their general behavior. In series with a Gadgeteer Genius, count on this character to be the dreaded Spanner in the Works, often ruining the Genius's latest project by touching things that shouldn't be touched.

See also: Asian Airhead, Genius Ditz, Obfuscating Stupidity, Dumb Blonde, and The Klutz (who can relate with having a foolish persona). Can overlap with This Loser Is You, but isn't the same thing.

In extreme cases, if the character dies because of their stupidity, see Too Dumb to Live. If the character puts others in danger because of their stupidity, see Lethally Stupid. May overlap with Idiot Hero.


Examples:

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    Advertisements 
  • The women in this ad for the LA County Fair. All three women act like dumb valley girls who think that cotton candy is "vegan" because it "comes from cotton".note 
  • Those Two Guys in the Sonic Drive-In (an American fast food chain) composed of a straight man and total idiot. While the dumb one was only slightly dim at first he was later flanderized into being the ditz of the pair. Around late 2016 to early 2017 he mistook a cherry stem for a straw and complained "how it didn't work" and thought his friend was the dumb one and when they talked about "the dumb friend that never gets it" they believe that the smart one is the dumb one and he's being hard on himself.

    Anime and Manga 
  • The main lead of Angel Densetsu has his moments (it's more a combination of Nice Guy, The Klutz, and Selective Obliviousness actually), but then we have the most fearsome and brutal of the Shadowy seven: Hishida Haruka! Yep, she's The Ditz, and The Klutz, and almost a Pollyanna ...she's also the living embodiment of Confusion Fu, and she's not even aware of all the destruction she's spreading around.
  • Asteroid in Love:
    • Several characters have bluntly called Mira dumb. For example, in response to her getting a cold, Mikage actually says she's "a genius in being stupid" to her face, due to her subverting Idiots Cannot Catch Colds.
    • And then when Sayuki "Eva" Ibe appears, Mikage decides she is even more stupid than Mira. How? Sayuri attempts to eavesdrop on the Earth Science Club to scoop on blackmailing material, but she operated in such an obvious way, that every member sees it, and when brought into the Earth Science Club's room, she pretty much mentioned her intentions without any prodding.
  • Rino Rando from Best Student Council. Most of the smarts seem to have been given to her snarky hand puppet Pucchan.
  • Buso Renkin: Kazuki Muto's younger sister Mahiro is a sweet girl, with Genki Girl tendencies, who is such a scatterbrain that when her brother and Tokiko invent the lie that they're siblings immediately believes them and is confused by the fact that nobody told her she had an older sister.
  • Castle Town Dandelion:
    • Hikari is the most energetic among the siblings, but she seems extremely clueless about the consequences of her actions.
    • While Akane's most important characteristics are Justice Will Prevail and Shrinking Violet, as the story goes on it's quite clear that despite her own self-consciousness, she's utterly clueless of what's happening around her — like whether she's wearing anything on her lower body (Chapter 12/Episode 4A), or that everyone knows she is Scarlet Bloom (Chapter 21/Episode 9A).
  • Code:Breaker: An extremely ditzy Re-Coder shows up. When asked how many people she killed, she says "One, two, three... Ten, I guess, because I have ten fingers! But I'm not in a counting mood, so now I'll kill you painfully!" She never lapses into a Slasher Smile but remains cheerful and perky throughout.
  • The characters of Cromartie High School tend to pass the Idiot Ball around quite a bit, but Hayashida is particularly stupid. The Other Wiki describes him as "dumber than a gorilla" — which, considering a gorilla is actually part of the cast, is proven true in the show. In his defense, the gorilla is the smartest member of the class. Yeah. It's that kind of series.
  • The frequent use of this trope as a Charm Point was parodied in a stinger skit in Daily Lives of High School Boys.
    • Yanagin gets her sempai to teach them how to be cuter, and the correct answer is...
      Yanagin's Senpai: "Pretending to be an idiot who doesn't even know common knowledgenote  is what makes high school girls cute! Listen up, their brains and eyes are directed right here..."
    • Ringo-chan is a straight example; she's not the brightest bulb in town. In High School Boys and Panties it took her an hour to diagnose the reason for a network problem: the wire was never plugged on. Then she unwittingly flaunts her panties to Motoharu, the President and the Vice-President; fortunately for her, she doesn't get to see them in the act, much less their horrified reaction.
  • Daltanious: Catine is an Alien Princess who's not very bright and tends to get angry over small things. She repeatedly puts herself in danger to get her crush's attention, not caring that she's The Load to him and his friends. Even Judela, her nanny, admits it.
  • Touta Matsuda from Death Note. Most of the time, anyway. In his defense, he is not so much a could-not-function-in-normal-society Ditz. Most of the time, he acts like a fairly normal (if somewhat impulsive and over-enthusiastic) young man. It's just that in a situation where one false move (like revealing your face to the wrong person) could mean instant death, any false move starts to come off as Too Dumb to Live. It also doesn't help that he's working with (or, as it turns out in one case, against) people like Light, L, Near, and Mello.
  • The standout ditz of Don't Become an Otaku, Shinozaki-san! would be Akina's childhood friend Chigusa. She almost always has a dreamy look on her face and her likes are listed as "stripes". When boys would ask if she would go out with them, she'd respond with "go out where?", Oblivious to the fact they were hitting on her. Konatsu is also ditzy in the more Genki Girl fashion.
  • Elfen Lied:
    • Deconstructed by Director Kurama's ditzy secretary, Kisaragi, who gets decapitated by Lucy in the first 7 minutes of the show because she's Too Dumb to Live. This is made better in the German dub, where she tells her colleagues "I just don't lose my head." moments before.
    • Anna (after she returned to normal) is another example, being unable to solve basic mathematical problems.
  • The title character (and arguably most of the cast) of Excel♡Saga.
  • Kousaka from Genshiken isn't quite as dimwitted as some; his ditz qualifications comes mostly from his utter lack of a filter between his thoughts and his mouth.
  • Tomoko from Great Teacher Onizuka is clumsy, Book Dumb, and doesn't have any real friends when Onizuka meets her. In the manga, her classmates nickname her Toroko (Slo-mo-ko in English) since she's so "slow". She turns out to have Hidden Depths, though.
  • Joshua Lundgren in GUN×SWORD straddles the line between ditz and Cloudcuckoolander. He once looked for Wendy by heading into every women's restroom in a train station, not understanding why the women were screaming until he got arrested for it.
  • Satomi Ookuma of Handsome Girl and Sheltered Girl is the "Sheltered Girl" in the title. She's completely oblivious to how her friend at college, Mizuki Kanda, is not a man but actually an androgynous-looking woman, and thus the "Handsome Girl." It's implied that Ookuma's overprotective parents may be part of the problem, especially since they have some rather strange ideas; her father wants any prospective boyfriend to submit a resume to him.
  • Shizuka Marikawa from Highschool of the Dead. Her entire character is practically this and Ms. Fanservice (though, to be fair, most of the girls in this series are that).
  • Italy from Hetalia: Axis Powers: the name of the series is even a portmanteau of the Japanese words for "hopeless" and "Italy". Italy is such a Distressed Dude that it's a wonder he survived until Germany formed an alliance with him. One notable example is when Germany tries to teach him how to throw a grenade. Italy throws the pin, leaving the grenade clenched in his mouth. He then just sits there blankly, while Germany screams at him to throw the grenade before they both get blown up. The one time Italy manages to plant a grenade correctly he stands there cheering... as a Russian tank comes up behind him. Romano later does the same thing, suggesting that this trope runs in the family, which in the dub Germany immediately lampshades. America is more of the 'lovable/obnoxious oaf' kind.
  • Imaizumin-chi wa Douyara Gal no Tamariba ni Natteru Rashii: ~DEEP~: Ruri often forgets the point she's trying to make. Reina calls her having 30 IQ.
  • Subyss from Innocent is a darker example. He is a Torture Technician with a sadistic streak a mile long, but he is kind of silly in an almost amusing way. He'll ask the wrong questions, get drunk at inopportune moments, is professionally unlucky, and is dumb enough to believe his job is something to be proud of.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Nai is a boy version of this from Karneval, although he's really a cute little animal. Yogi is more of the "lovable oaf" kind when he's not being serious, which is often.
  • In Kemono Friends, Hululu, the Humboldt Penguin member of the PPP, is both a ditz on and off the stage.
  • Yayoi of Koi Koi 7 (the pink-haired one, not the one with the eyepatch.) When standing in the middle of a heated battle with the shots missing her, her only response is "Fireworks!"
  • Shinobu of Kiniro Mosaic is hardly bright. One of the earliest strips showed her scoring zero in math, and despite her European Foreign Culture Fetish, she doesn't know much English (and tried to read an English paper!) and may or may not even know that England and France are part of Europe at all!
  • Nadeshiko from Laid-Back Camp doesn't appear to be very bright; nearly the first thing we know about her is her not bringing a cell phone nor having any meaningful amounts of cash (just 100 yen) when she cycles in the countryside of a place she moved into a day ago.
  • Tsukasa Hiiragi from Lucky Star is a sweet girl who's also airheaded, forgetful and regularly gets poor grades in school, putting her in contrast with her smarter and more responsible twin sister Kagami. Even mundane tasks like following a study schedule, reading a newspaper or finding her own cellphone number prove to be very challenging for her.
  • Kanako from Maria†Holic is marvelously dumb. She flunked nearly all her exams and, when given notes that "even an idiot could understand" by Sachi, she fails to comprehend even that. She's so single-minded in her pursuit of finding girl-love that she's dim in everything else. Including the realization that liking girls makes her a lesbian.
  • Papi of Monster Musume and her fantasy counterpart Aero of Deadline Summoner are both harpies, barely wear anything and have just as much upstairs.
    Kimihito Kurusu and Mamoru Onodera: She's a birdbrain!
  • My Monster Secret: The entire point of the series is that it's a Romantic Comedy driven by a cast full of characters who are "just a little dumb" (in the author's own words); however, they're all depicted as lovable goofs or space cases rather than simply idiots. Special mention goes to the female lead Youko Shiragami, whose goofiness has more often than not put her secret at risk.
  • Negima! Magister Negi Magi Konoka can also act ditzy, but it's almost certainly an act.
  • Naruto:
    • The toad Gamatatsu is rather childlike and obsessed with food.
    • Naruto himself fits this in part 1, though it's really more a case of Book Dumb. He outgrows it after the time skip.
  • Aoba of New Game! can be pretty spacey and oblivious at times, like forgetting her ID card multiple times, or failing to recognize that Sophia was inspired by her own appearance. In fact, when designing Sophia, she started to do a search for reference material on twintails — the style of hair that Aoba herself has.
  • Luffy from One Piece easily falls into this trope. From recognizing mixed animals by their least dominant feature to chalking up anything beyond his comprehension (i.e. most everything!) as "mystery" things, Luffy is easily the most gullible and air-headed of Shounen heroes. What's confusing about Luffy is that he is genuinely stupid most of the time, so it's quite hard to notice the situations where he probably is smart, but just acts like a ditz.
  • Himeko from Pani Poni Dash!. She's so dumb, she faints upon SEEING English letters, since her brain can't take it.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • The Team Rocket trio seems to have become cursed to this position ever since encountering Ash, (with the exception of the Best Wishes series).
    • Misty's Psyduck stumbled from place to place with a vacant look on its face. He was also shown to be unable to swim despite being a Water-type. He is somewhat more competent in his return in a Sun & Moon episode, though.
    • May and Dawn when they first started as trainers — May was a bit less competent because she didn't really want to train Pokemon, which was before the anime introduced Contests. This even passed on to her starter Torchic, who Took a Level in Badass and evolved into Combusken in the middle of Hoenn, eliminating this trait.
    • Cameron from the Unova arc was ditzier than Ash was in almost the entire anime, as he practically had to be handheld as a Trainer through all of his appearances. In spite of all this, he beats Ash after bringing 5 Pokemon to a 6-on-6 Pokemon League battle.
    • Ash's Rowlet is shown to be this when it isn't asleep. Its first appearance in the anime showed it mistaking a wind chime for food.
    • Casey from the Johto saga is cute, but she's not the brightest kid. In her first appearance, she insulted Ash as a trainer despite only just starting her journey and having about a few days of being a trainer, and insisted on battling him despite this, which predictably ends with her losing miserably to Ash's Charizard. Being a huge fan of the Electabuzz baseball team, she also tries to sing their fight songs... and she really sucks at it. Misty once had to stop her because her singing was so terrible.
  • In the Pretty Cure franchise, the pink-themed leaders might be the sweetest girls they can be, have nifty skills that set them apart and great leadership skills, they might not be the sharpest tools in the shed. Examples include Nozomi, who infamously got kicked out of every school club possible due to her clumsiness, and Ichika, who kept thinking the boyish girl was a handsome boy even when she transformed into a Cure herself.
  • The Quintessential Quintuplets: Despite being the most enthusiastic in being taught be Fuutarou, Yotsuba Nakano also gets the lowest grades out of her sisters; her test grade in Chapter 2? Eight out of one-hundred. Additionally in Chapter 20, not only she has the lowest overall grades out of her sisters again, her score in mathematics is Nine out of one-hundred.
  • Teasing Master Takagi-san: Mina doesn't seem to be dumb or anything, but she tends to overreact to things, and once walked into the toilet, saw Takagi and asked if she and Nishikata were dating (Takagi said no), left the toilet, ran into Nishikata and his friends and mentioned her conversation with Takagi, and then remembers she went to the toilet because she needed to pee. She also apparently once got hypnotized while watching a hypnotist on TV.
  • Mihoshi, in the various Tenchi Muyo! television series (Flanderized from a Bunny-Ears Lawyer / Genius Ditz in the OVAs). She is an endless source of frustration and despair for not only Kiyone, her long-suffering partner in the Galaxy Police, but also Washu, whose projects are always being ruined by her stupidity.
  • Yotsuba&! qualifies. Sure, she's five years old, but what kid that age doesn't even know how a swing works? She can also be led by the nose rather easily. Any moderately intelligent five-year-old would eventually figure out that Danbo is simply Miura in a cardboard box, for instance.

    Comic Books 
  • Dumb Bunny from the Inferior Five ('60s humor comic from DC), whose name says it all, really. She's "stronger than an ox — and almost as smart!"
  • In The Eye of Mongombo, Norbert Nuskle’s brother-in-law Boswick is so dim, it takes him roughly ten seconds to react or answer someone.
  • The eponymous character from Groo the Wanderer was infamously slow of mind. It often took him pages to react to an insult, and recurring characters would frequently have to remind Groo that they had met before. Sometimes he'd remember that he knew them, but not whether or not he liked them. Say, what did he mean, "Slow of Mind"?
  • Boom-Boom/Meltdown/Tabitha Smith of Nextwave: trailer-trash klepto with the power to make things go boom. She says "zomg" out loud and misspells her own name.
    "I hate cops! Because, like, cops keep arresting me and stuff? For stealing? Like stealing's a crime or something?
    • Forbush Man's mental powers do not work on her. Guess why. Her explanation? "I gave him the explodo because I am clever."
  • A particularly extreme example would be minor Eldritch Abomination Avaggdu from Sláine. So terminally stupid that when tricked into biting his hands, he doesn't notice they're his and starts devouring himself until there's literally nothing left.
  • Kelly from Soulsearchers and Company is undoubtedly helpful, cheerful and well-meaning. However, she is also far from the sharpest tool in the shed. In her background, it is stated that one of the reasons Arnold keeps her employed is that she usually forgets to ask for her salary.
  • The Parademon from the Villains United miniseries. He even fully admits to wanting to die in a stupid gesture.
  • Wonder Woman:
    • In their original iteration back in the pages of Sensation Comics two of the Heyday triplets were dumb blondes — to the point that their grandmother left their inheritance to the one smart triplet figuring they'd be better off with her in charge of their money — who still liked to pull pranks and hated fascists along with the rest of the Holliday Girls. Their The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016) iterations were reduced to twins, changed to redheads and the traditionally smart one became the clueless one while the other became the smart one.
    • Wonder Woman (1987): Stheno has a tendency towards cluelessness that irritates her sisters. One of her standout moments involved licking a television because there was ice cream on the screen, even though she's been around TVs before and should be aware it's just an image. It's possible she's lost a bit of grey matter during her numerous resurrections.

    Fan Works 
  • All of the four main characters of the Avantasia Protag AU series have their turns at being ditzy. Some of it is justified because of the time travel leading to unfamiliarity with modern things, but often they do wacky or stupid things with little excuse. The author describes them as "sharing a single brain cell which gets passed around between the four of them."
  • The Boy Who Cried Idiot: Martin is the eponymous idiot, doing things like assuming Lincoln is so-named because he's related to presidents, getting people's gender wrong, and forgetting things moments after doing them.
  • Cao Hong in Farce of the Three Kingdoms. The rare occasions when he actually does something sensible are considered remarkable.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Italy sure seems like one. After all, he seems to be oblivious to a lot of things including Germany's and Japan's obvious feelings for him. Keyword: seemed.
  • Limefrost Spiral in Manehattan's Lone Guardian is described as being forgetful and not very bright outside her element. Her first appearance has her completely forgetting the time that she was supposed to meet Smooth Beat for a date, leaving him to wait at her door while she wasted time sunbathing.
  • My Stupid Reality: Sayu gets in on this:
    Sayu: I guess. Why do we have to take a train or walk everywhere? You're way old enough to drive.
    Light: It would take longer to drive than it does to walk. Have you ever seen rush hour?
    Sayu: The movie?
  • In The Loud House fanfiction The Nightmare House, Leni's impostor is just as dumb as her and accidentally gives away the location of the real sisters.
  • Kayla in NoHoper, is an example of a ditz too dumb to take a hint and cannot fathom that Light is not in the least bit interested in her:
    Light: I like... science.
    Kayla: Oh? Really?
    Light: Yes. And some silence.
    Kayla: Is that a band?
  • Ash Ketchum of The Pokémon Squad, who often borders on Too Dumb to Live and/or Lethally Stupid at times. His stupidity and gluttony often kickstart an episode's main dilemma (such as "Unhappy Trails", where he mistakes RM's credit cards for Pokémon cards and trades them, which forces the entire squad to live in a trailer park. Ash burns down their trailer while imitating Beavis and Butt-Head.)
  • Spooky: Tombstones often creates problems for himself, whether it be by not thinking ahead, using his scythe as a universal tool, or just not comprehending how to tackle a situation.
  • This Bites!: With Vivi now having a permanent place on the crew due to her undeserved bounty, her tendency to act before remembering, considering or displaying all available information is shown in a lot more detail. An example is how she mistranslated the sign language of an ancient civilization of octopi and got everyone mad at the crew because she failed to read through the whole translation book properly and thus didn't notice the particular dialect for people with joints.
  • Unbreakable Red Silken Thread: Cody describes talking to Lindsay as "best to avoid allusion, irony, sarcasm, repartee, satire, and words longer than 'chicken'."
  • Deconstructed in Wishing Well with Rainbow Dash. He's described as "vapid and innocent", but this is due to essentially brain damage. He was fond of eating a fruit that was later found out to cause short-term memory loss. Rainbow Dash's memory issues and childish personality make him unpopular and awkward to be around.

    Film — Animated 
  • Babs from Chicken Run is very dimwitted. Every time someone leaves the farm, she thinks they're on "holiday". The only reason she doesn't want to be turned into a pie is because she "don't like gravy". But she is quite adept at knitting.
  • In The Incredibles, Bob tries to justify Thunderhead's death by his cape snagging on the fin of a missile with this trope, saying, "Thunderhead was not the brightest bulb..."
  • The Lion King (1994): Ed is easily the least intelligent of the trio of Hyenas, lacking common sense and being unaware of everything as well as laughing at things that are not funny and at inappropriate times. He even bites his own leg after a brief scuffle with Banzai. He even has the Fish Eyes to match, suggesting some sort of intellectual disability.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • Virtually every character played by famed comedian Lou Costello of the Abbott and Costello comedy duo. Occasionally he will even lampshade himself, such as when one of his characters in the film Who Done It? turns on a radio and hears "Who's on First?" (one of Abbott and Costello's most famous routines) and immediately turns it off, remarking how stupid the "short, chubby guy" (actually Costello himself) is.
  • In Back to the Future Part II, we learn that Marty's son Junior is a total moron. Probably it has to do with the fact Marty had become a "chicken" after his car accident in the coinciding 1985 timeline.
  • Mr. Bean in Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie and Mr. Bean's Holiday. Also Johnny English to some extent.
  • Bullshot. Rosemary Fenton, Damsel in Distress and daughter of an Absent-Minded Professor with a dangerous habit of knocking over equipment in Daddy's lab.
    Bullshot: "I see. You intend taking on the Most Dangerous Man in Europe by yourself, do you? Have you given a moment's thought as to what you intend using for brains?"
    Rosemary: "How dare you! I've done pretty well without brains so far!"
  • August in Cemetery Gates. When Kym tells Tony and Enrique that they wouldn't now what to do with a pragmatic woman, August comments that she is part Russian. Later, Tony persuades her to make a sex tape with him with the argument "everyone is doing it".
  • Cher Horowitz in Clueless... kind of. She's certainly no genius level intellect, and is definitely more than a little naive and 'clueless', but she's savvy enough when she needs to be and has enough wits about her to 'negotiate' her grades with most of her teachers.
  • Corky Romano: Corky is a total goofball who's very nice but also extremely quirky and clumsy.
  • Tabby in Escape Room (2017), who has to count to work out that 'E' is the fifth letter of the alphabet.
  • Ghostbusters (2016): Kevin Beckman. Bless him, but as gifted as Kevin is physically, the pendulum swings hard in the other direction when it comes to his brains (specifically his lack thereof). He wears glasses but took the glass out so he didn't have to clean them, thinks covering his eyes blocks out sound, cannot figure out how to work a phone, only announces appointments when the person has been waiting for at least ten minutes, and wanders off during the final battle to go get a sandwich. Erin wanted to hire him because he is just so damn pretty, while the other girls went along with it because he was the only applicant.
  • Good Burger has the main character, Ed. When Dexter says he looks familiar, Ed isn't sure why but speculates that he (as in Ed himself) might be someone famous, like a baseball player, or a pretty nurse.
  • Tiffany in Headless Horseman. After Doc discovers that the 'blood' on her forehead is really red nail polish, her reaction is an astounded "Oh! So that's why it didn't hurt!"
  • Karen in Mean Girls Has a fifth sense, which she refers to as ESPN, where her breasts can tell when it's already raining.
  • In My Favorite Martian, after Martin clones Brace's body and mind, and later returns to normal.
    Martin: [clutching his head] Whoa. Her head was dark and empty.
  • In Stranger On A Train, Bruno's mother is quite clueless and dotty to everthing concerning her husband and her son, Bruno. She is told her son may have committed murder, and continues to be happily unaffected and disconnected. One interesting note - she shows Bruno her latest painting, and the image is surreal and disturbing. This indicates that Bruno inherited his psychopathic nature from his mother, who is too dense to present any of the symptoms herself.
  • Not Okay: Danni starts off as this, somehow thinking that her article is worth publishing despite her saying things like she "missed" 9/11.
  • Sorina from Pain & Gain, who easily buys Daniel's story about him and the others being CIA agents and even seems to still believe it when testifying at their trial.
  • Dean Walker's daughter in Promising Young Woman who falls for Cassie's story hook, line and sinker and is left sitting in a diner convinced that her favourite boy band is going to show up to shoot a music video. Even Cassie, who is generally sympathetic to other women, tells Dean Walker that is a good thing that the girl is pretty because she isn't very smart.
  • Sharon in Satan's Cheerleaders, who has it to have explained to her what an 'unsoiled maiden' is.
  • Sheila in Scarecrow Slayer. Upon arriving at Caleb's farm, she asks "What is this? A farm or something?", to eye-rolling from Mary in the back seat.
  • Officer Ed from Scotland, PA. Why would anyone trust this man with a loaded gun? They don't.
    Ed: Sir, I called the number, like, 95 times. I practically had it memorized.
  • Blanko the Nerdluck in Space Jam. They don't call him 'Blanko' for nothing.
  • Zangief in Street Fighter. His proposed solution to seeing, on a TV screen, a vehicle loaded with explosives heading toward the building he was in at the time was to change the channel.
  • Margalo from Stuart Little 2. She puts on an understated version of this, mostly to throw Stuart off the fact that she's an Artful Dodger.
  • In This is Spın̈al Tap, none of the characters are particularly bright, but nearly everything Nigel Tufnel says is, as David St. Hubbins puts it, confused.
    Marty: Why don't you make ten louder and make ten the top number and make that a little louder?
    Nigel: (long pause, staring at his amp and thinking) These go to eleven.

    Literature 
  • Baccano!: Isaac and Miria, the Outlaw Couple pair, are twice as flakey. For instance, they think the fact that no one has ever found gold in a given hill is a perfect reason to dig for gold there, and that to perform a "train robbery", you take a train somewhere, rob someone, and then use the train to escape.
  • Akihisa Yoshi from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts is by far the stupidest person in the school. He divides pot noodle in half continually thinking that that way he can get infinite meals out of one serving. He even concludes that discovering this makes him a genius. Most geniuses don't spend their food money on porn in the first place. He explains that this why he is eating 1/67th of a pot noodle. Nobody is even surprised that he gets the math wrong there. When Hazuki Shimada turns up and calls asks for the big idiot Akihisa Yuuji Sakamoto says he's surprised that everyone in Japan knows of his stupidity. Akihisa insists it's not all of Japan, just the local area.
  • Bazil Broketail: Vlok is not the brightest bulb among the dragons of 109th. Still bright enough, though, to be a competent swordfighter and a soldier.
  • In Buddenbrooks, Tony is impressed by smart people (like Morten Schwarzkopf — a doctor-to-be with whom she falls in love, but can't marry him because of the Grünlich thing), but is neither book smart nor street smart herself, and calls herself "a silly goose" sometimes. Her poor relative Klothilde is even more so.
  • Dear Dumb Diary — Emmily. [Yes, she really spells it with 2 Ms. It's because it reminds her of candy that way — not M&Ms (those are Ws and 3s) but because "Mm" is the sound she makes when she eats candy.]
    You remember Emmily — she was very sweet and we all loved her, but she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Emmily wasn't even the sharpest spoon in the drawer. Most of the time, Emmily wasn't even in the drawer at all. She was lost somewhere in the bottom of the dishwasher.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Creighton the Cretin (Greg's comic strip character in the first book) is this in spades. He's tricked into thinking his name is "Stewart Pid" (and then says his name is "Stew Pid"), mistakes a brick for a box, and asks a doctor to give him a new butt because his old one has a crack in it.
  • Razza from Don't Call Me Ishmael!. His grades are terrible and he isn't very intelligent, but he is very sociable and fun-loving.
    Sometimes, Razza wasn't quite on the same page as other people — often, he wasn't even in the same library.
  • The Dresden Files has a few subversions:
    • Maeve does her level best to be perceived as a narcissistic, hedonistic political non-entity. While there is some truth to the first two, Maeve is far more savvy and in control than her public persona indicates. When Billy tells her no-one buys the act, she pouts, but immediately becomes all business and casually provides important information the heroes have been busting their chops to get a hold of. Underestimate the queens of Winter at your own peril.
    • Abby of the Ordo Lebes comes across as scatterbrained through no fault of her own. Abby is actually pretty intelligent and perceptive, but she is also a very limited-ability precognitive with very little control of her ability. The reason she spaces out and comes up with non-sequiturs sometimes is that she sees the present and about a minute into the future simultaneously and occasionally loses track of which is which.
  • Lina the maid from Astrid Lindgren's Emil i Lönneberga. When the parish priest asks her who the first humans were, she answers "Thor and Freya". That doesn't make sense even in Norse Mythology!
  • Homura Hinooka from Fire Girl is a downplayed example. Her ditziness mostly stems from her status as being Book Dumb and being fairly incompetent in knowledge regarding "complicated" basics in life (she doesn't even know how to use the internet for starters) but she is actually fairly self-aware and perceptive otherwise.
  • The Girl Who Drank the Moon has Fyrian: woefully uneducated, unable to observe or retain information, and believes everything he is told, but through this becomes an enthusiastic, optimistic, and loving family member.
  • Journey to Chaos: Ponix Enaz is constantly forgetting to fully shapeshift back into his elven form and thus leaving strange body parts lying out, providing Too Much Information, or being so absorbed by puzzles that he neglects what's around him.
  • Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff: The titular protagonist theorizes that Raziel is the origin of dumb blonde jokes.
  • Jack Pumpkinhead from the Land of Oz series is always described as unintelligent. Some of the words used to describe him are "stupid", "dim", "innocent", "simpleton", "not known for his intelligence", etc. He might also have a bit of a neurological disorder, as he fails to pick up on vocal cues and sometimes takes sentences to mean the opposite of what they mean (he once called a ferryman 'nice' after he refused to let Pumpkinhead cross a river on account of not having any money).
  • Miss Marple: Lettice Protheroe from The Murder at the Vicarage is vague about everything, and frequently confused about what time and even what day it is. Several characters express the opinion that it is a form of Obfuscating Stupidity.
  • In the Modesty Blaise novel The Night of Morningstar, Earl St. Maur's wife Victoria is an airhead from a noble family who is incapable of maintaining a train of thought on any subject that doesn't involve horse-riding or sex.
  • Mother Goose: Simple Simon was one, "simple" being a common term for "stupid" when the poem was written. After his meeting with the pieman, he tries to fish for a whale in a bucket of water and then tried to find plums on a thistle bush.
  • Ratburger has Sheila, who is so dumb she thinks a drawn-on mustache is real and it's not even well-drawn.
  • Louie from Rune Soldier Louie has a complete disregard for his own or anyone else's safety: "When it comes to the odds, I have done worse than 20 percent!"
  • In The Shattered Kingdoms, Kira pretends to be like this at the Norlander imperial court, being flighty, talkative, politically naïve, and superficial. Some people see through it, but as she notes, it's pretty difficult to prove she's smarter than she acts, so it's still a good barrier against people trying to get anything from her.
  • Volatilus, the sweet but not too bright little dispatch dragon from the Temeraire books. The little guy can't even pronounce the titular dragon's name — the best he can do is "Temrer".
    Temeraire: And where, pray, do you come from?
    Volly: I was hatched! From an egg!
  • Slayers:
    • Gourry Gabriev is nicknamed "jellyfish brain" because he lacks so much common knowledge about the world and is generally clueless in any circumstance.
    • Naga the Serpent, Lina's (self-proclaimed) greatest rival, gets into a lot of trouble with her lack of sense. In Naga's defense, Word of God implies she is mentally traumatized, so it's less that she's stupid and more that she's genuinely mentally unwell. Although it's probably fair to say she wasn't sensible, to begin with, given the strong hints she's related to Amelia and Prince Philionel, who are... definitely flaky.
  • Tawneee (yes, three 'e's), a minor character from Thud!, a pole dancer. A short, somewhat paraphrased, description: "It's as if the gods said, 'Sorry, kid, you're going to be thicker than a tub of lard, but it'll be okay — because you'll be very beautiful'." She thinks people come to see her because she's a good dancer and knows some "tricky steps".
  • Till We Have Faces: Redival is unable to focus on the Fox's classes and at times misunderstands his teachings. She ends up lacking the foresight to see her gossip and slander against her sister will do great harm to her family.
  • In Warrior Cats, Fuzz, the kittypet that Barley meets in Secrets of the Clans, is a cheerful ditz who is so literal-minded that he thinks Barley's name is "Erbarley", and upon being corrected, then thinks it's "Justbarley".
  • Who Wet My Pants: Reuben doesn't notice when he wets his pants and when it's pointed out to him, he thinks first that someone else did it and then that they sprang a leak.
  • Wolf Hall portrays Thomas Cromwell's son Gregory as a bit dim. While Cromwell is a highly savvy polyglot, Gregory is a poor scholar, guileless, and flighty; at one point Cromwell admits to a friend that neither Cambridge nor Gregory have anything for each other. Gregory does wise up as time passes and his father finds more effective mentors for him, but Cromwell actually likes that his son is so unlike himself even if it makes it difficult to relate — he might not be the brightest but he's a model gentleman. More importantly, having a genial ditz for a son is always leagues better than getting Granddad's drunken, abusive jerkassery repeated in the family tree...

    Live-Action TV 
  • All in the Family: Edith Bunker — her Transatlantic Equivalent, Else Garrett of Till Death Us Do Part, really wasn't one, despite her husband's frequent references to her as a "silly moo".
  • A.N.T. Farm: Paisley, who sometimes forgets that her name is Paisley.
  • Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters: Irlene Mandrell, in many of the monologues and skits. As is the case with her later roles on Hee Haw, Irlene was musically gifted and her "ditz" persona was comedy improvision.
  • The Big Bang Theory: Zack who is incredibly dense, but very open and friendly with the guys.
  • Cat Valentine from Victorious started off as more naive and scatterbrained than outright stupid, but quickly was Flanderized into this trope, getting increasingly dumber as the seasons went on. This carried on into the spinoff series Sam & Cat.
  • Canada's Worst Driver has no shortage of the truly clueless. Andrew Younghusband often wonders how in tarnation they get their drivers licenses, and Season 4 was a toss-up between a ditz and a road rager.
  • El Chavo del ocho isn't short in ditzy characters, but the biggest one is Kiko, who is so deeply dumb, he rarely notices and often ends unconsciously agreeing which every insult given to his intelligence.
    Kiko: *mocking El Chavo* You're so dumb because you arrived late to the brains repartition.
    El Chavo: So? What 'bout you?
    Kiko: Ha! Like I ever went!
  • Danger Force: Bose is far from the brightest.
  • Dear White People: Kelsey, in some aspects. Following the blackface party, Kelsey successfully manages to get a therapy dog for herself because she told the counselor she would kill herself over the party. In addition, she was genuinely surprised that racism was still a thing that could happen. She actually does experience racism in the aftermath of the final episode where Sorbet is dognapped, with only a note reading, "Black girl, white dog, not on my watch" left behind, but is dismissed by virtually everyone in the room.
  • Desperate Housewives:
    • Susan Meyer started out as the Ditz, but it was largely limited to being a horrible cook and having a tendency to trip over things. This has since been Flanderized to the point where she occasionally just seems mentally disabled, such as her being so desperate to get the new neighbors to like her that she kidnapped their dog planning to heroically "find" it later.
    • Susan's mother Sophie is far ditzier than her daughter, especially when it comes to men, coming across as an aged Brainless Beauty. Susan's daughter Julie, on the other hand, is smart and mature. If this family trend continues Julie's daughter might be the next Marilyn vos Savant.
  • Doctor Who: In "Silence in the Library", Miss Evangelista is a very self-aware Brainless Beauty who is described as having mistaken an Escape Pod for the bathroom twice on the journey over, requiring the ship to turn back for her both times. Then, she falls for some obvious Schmuck Bait, wanders off by herself and is eaten by the Vashta Nerada. She no longer qualifies in "Forest of the Dead", as her Brain Uploading by the Library's computer had some corrupted data that vastly boosted her intelligence.
  • Friends:
    • Joey, especially in later seasons. His ditziness especially shines through in the subject of geography — at various points in the series he has thought that the Netherlands was where Peter Pan lives, described Chandler's "going to Yemen" ruse for getting rid of Janice as clever because "it almost sounds like a real place", and goes to the bank to try changing dollars into "Vermont money".
    • Phoebe is supposed to be street-smart but she frequently comes off as a flaky ditz and her quirkiness is played up to eleven.
      Phoebe: I got a call at two in the morning, but all I could hear was, like, this high squeaky sound, so I thought, okay it's, like, a mouse or a possum. But then I realized, like, okay, where would a mouse or a possum get the money to make the phone call?
    • Rachel starts out as almost painfully clueless concerning any real-life skills (she moves in with Monica without asking and says she's gonna "get one of those 'job' things"). Thanks to Character Development she becomes a lot more sensible and capable.
    • Rachel's sister Amy, who notably thinks Phoebe's name is Emma. When Phoebe keeps trying to correct her, she doesn't at all get the hint and instead thinks she's making a "funny noise."
  • Hee Haw:
    • Junior Samples was almost painfully dumb at times.
    • Irlene Mandrell was this, combined with a "dumb blonde" persona in many of her comic roles during the later years of the show. (Belying the fact she was a very talented musician, just like older sisters Barbara and Louise.)
  • Hip Hop Harry: That token black kid, affectionately nicknamed "Stupid Scott" by Joel McHale of The Soup. Despite being roughly around the age of 12, he expresses the cognitive skills of a 6-year-old and has to have explained to him (by the smarter Asian girl) things like how to fill up a bathtub or why its not a good idea to feed ice cream and hot dogs to a pet gerbil. The program goes out of its way to make viewer wonder how on earth he manages to cross streets on the way home.
  • The InBESTigators: Ava's best friend Pixie, who thinks the solar system has a planet called Sagittarius, and can hold an entire conversation about her hair without noticing the other person has left.
  • The Inbetweeners: Neil. It sort of works to his advantage because it stops him from realizing just how wrong everything keeps going for him. Amongst other things, he thinks Swansea is a species of animal, and that women give birth through their anus.
  • Clover from It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling... is a terrible case, going about her business with not a second thought in her head. For example, in "A New Lease", when she finds her friend Kenneth drunk and passed out in her hallway, she starts cooing over how cute he looks as one would to a newborn baby.
  • On The Joe Schmo Show, a parody of reality shows in which every character except the chosen schmoes were actors playing according to a script, all of the characters were written as archetypes such as "The Rich Bitch" and "The Asshole." In the second season, Cammy's archetype was that of "The Moron." She played the role to a tee. This particular season was a parody of reality-romance shows and in her Establishing Character Moment she gave the suitor character, Austin, her cell-phone as a gift saying that now he could call her at any time.
    Ingrid: (interview segment, Beat) ...But she just gave him her phone...?
  • Kel from Kenan & Kel. In one instance, he thought a headless mannequin was speaking to him.
    Kel: How are you talking with no head?
  • Kaamelott: Perceval is stupid in a manchild and Book Dumb way, though he does have his Genius Ditz moments.
  • Married... with Children: Kelly Bundy was eventually Flanderized into a brainless trollop who hadn't enough mental capacity to remember her homework and the members of her own family at the same time.
  • Modern Family: Luke is always tripping, jumping on the trampoline while on a pogo stick, getting his head stuck in the staircase railing... He inherited it from his Bumbling Dad Phil and shares it with his sister Haley.
  • Night Court: Bull Shannon. Bull is firmly in Genius Ditz territory, as he frequently is thinking about things on an entirely different level than the rest of the characters. In one episode in which the characters took an IQ test, Bull outscored the rest of the main cast significantly.
  • Odd Squad:
    • Octavia from Season 1. She is a Dumb Blonde who can be very airheaded, and often tends to muddle things such as commands and when to feed the dinosaurs.
    • Omar from Season 3, although he can border on Genius Ditz at times. One prominent example of his ditziness is in "Running on Empty", which had him prioritize playing Two Truths and a Lie with Oswald over catching a blob that's loose in the van.
  • Our Miss Brooks:
    • Dumb Jock Stretch Snodgrass and his brother Bones. The Snodgrass brothers are incredibly dense and are often very Literal-Minded. In "Madison Mascot" Stretch Snodgrass tears off a piece of a note Mr. Conklin wrote, asking Miss Brooks to buy an elephant bookend. Stretch gives the incomplete note to Miss Brooks, telling her Mr. Conklin wants an elephant as a mascot for the school.
    • In "The Yodar Kritch Award" (based on an earlier radio episode featuring Stretch)), Bones Snodgrass wins the trophy for "unique achievement" in English, after, uniquely, having failed to give a single correct answer.
    • Then there's ""Suzie Prentiss" in the episode of the same name (a remake of "Stretch is in Love"). She managed to get a minus two on her test, after having not only not answered a single question right but also managed to spell her name wrong.
  • Parks and Recreation: Andy Dwyer.
    Andy: Leslie, I typed your symptoms into the thing up here and it says you could have network connectivity problems.
  • Peep Show: Jeremy (aka Jez). ("Potatoes aren't veg, are they? I mean they kind of are... but not really. I mean tomatoes are fruit but potatoes are like... bread?")
  • Pretty Little Liars: Oh, Hanna. This line sums it all up:
    “Jenna can’t hear us — she’s blind.”
  • ¿Qué Pasa, U.S.A.?: Sharon, Carmen's Anglo friend, hangs often at the Peña home, where they speak English and Spanish. The culture and language barriers make her come across as ditzy, as well as her attempts at Spanish. Even when language is not an issue, her tendency to blurt the first thing on her mind does not help.
  • Reba: Barbra Jean (who's also a Dumb Blonde), to the point where most of the characters (usually Reba) make fun of her intelligence (or lack thereof).
  • Screenwipe: Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk, two brainless characters who pastiche the kind of Talking Heads found on I Love the Exties shows. They spend all their time misidentifying shows they're watching, assuming they can even identify the actors (they are under the impression that Professor Brian Cox is Jason Orange), and delivering rambling, brainless commentary that sometimes is unexpectedly profound but is mostly just Insane Troll Logic. Later, Philomena starts making TV documentaries about subjects like "Time" and "Crime" — in the latter show she said that if 1 in 20 people in Britain are victims of crime, that means 19 in 20 are criminals, and asks a legal expert questions like "if a policeman broke the law, could he arrest himself?".
    Philomena: Next time on "Moments of Wonder", I'll be asking why there's more water in a tap than you'd expect.
  • Stath Lets Flats: Sophie demonstrates an alarming lack of common sense — for example, she thinks “bubbly” is a slang term for chocolate and mistook a building for a hospital “because [it was] big” — and writes and performs songs with nonsensical lyrics: “So raise a glass of beer / And set fire to the beer / But make sure it’s safe / Keep all the women safe”.
  • The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: London Tipton is often referred to as the "airhead heiress" who, depending on the episode, may not know what a book 'is'' let alone how to read it, or be capable of doing anything for herself.
  • That's So Raven: Chelsea is so often clueless and slow-witted that when she demonstrates knowledge about something, both of her friends are shocked. Yes, not even the psychic can see those moments coming.
  • Titus had Titus' younger brother Dave, who was also The Stoner, but is best summed up by this exchange.
    Titus: Dad, you're not in love with her; it's the heart attack rebound thing. It's the angina talking!
    Dave: (Overjoyed) It talks?!
  • The Windsors: Prince Harry, who's generally goodhearted save his propensity for dressing up like a Nazi, but is so stupid he can't even read or write. He lacks all knowledge about the British government and even the history of his own family, and is mainly concerned with getting shitfaced at every opportunity.
  • Wizards of Waverly Place: Max. The only person who could write "One Syllable" as the answer in a game of charades.

    Music 
  • Devo's character Booji Boy (portrayed by their singer Mark Mothersbaugh, in a rubber mask). He is supposed to represent someone who has devolved into a manchild, as per the band's theory of devolution.
  • 'Cause I'm a Blonde by Julie Brown. "Because I'm blonde, I don't have to think, I talk like a baby, and never pay for drinks..."
  • 2D of Gorillaz. The man introduced himself in an interview with "Hi, my name is 2D, and I'm the singer, and I need the toilet..." Then in Rise of the Ogre he was quoted as saying:
    "I never really thought about what I wanted to do after school, though... I've never really thought about anything, as far as I can remember."
    • He is also implied to have some Hidden Depths, as he is still capable of composing stunning music and saying some surprisingly philosophical things once in a blue moon. 2D may be more of a Genius Ditz or Brilliant, but Lazy when he's not thick with painkillers.
  • Bassist Tomomi Ogawa of the Japanese band SCANDAL . The band once successfully tricked her into thinking she was made to pay for the pyrotechnics at their first Budoukan concert, complete with a fake cheque. Even after the prank was revealed she still looked like she was in a state of complete shock and confusion for another 3 minutes.

    Podcasts 
  • Tellie from Sequinox is not very bright, which is unfortunate because it's supposed to be the girls' mentor. It can vaguely remember some things, but most of the time when they ask it questions about Gaea, their powers, or the Stars, Tellie just shrugs and says "I don't know". And then probably eats a dinner plate.

    Professional Wrestling 

    Puppet Shows 
  • Between the Lions:
    • Scot and Dot, who never think to get out of the way when danger approaches, forcing Chicken Jane to take the punishment for them.
    • Walter and Clay Pigeon, who cannot finish a thought without the help of the other.
    • The Lone Rearranger, who usually needs his partner to point out when it's time to do his job.
    • Captain Ahab and Captain Starbuck of the Moby Duck segments, who are unaware that the fabled duck is right behind them.
    • Dr. Nitwhite, the aptly named professor of vocabulary who is constantly making "discoveries" of the English language that his assistant Watson inexplicably points out are already common knowledge.
    • And most of all, Cliff Hanger.
  • The puppet for George W. Bush in the French satirical show Les Guignols de l'Info is among the many who have been regularly portrayed as brainless.
  • Bruno from Bullzeye was an extreme example. When his wife Uschi had her head in bandages (after he injured her without noticing), he thought she was one "Herr Sultan". Sequel Series Eye TV makes him intelligent enough to be a TV salesman, but not a very good one.

    Radio 
  • The Jack Benny Program: Dennis Day portrayed himself this way. Apparently, he didn't even realise he was supposed to cash the paychecks Jack gave him each week.

    Video Games 
  • Janet Van Dyne in Avengers Academy has shades of this. While most characters have a study mission at the Timeless Archives, Jan has "Try to Study", which involves her sleeping on top of the desk. She gets better as she levels up, however, as she begins studying fashion and later entomology.
  • BlazBlue: Taokaka often forgets things that are told to her just seconds after the fact.
  • Dooley, the protagonist's sidekick in The Darkside Detective. When he was a boy he wanted to be an astronaut until he realized astronauts have to go into space. As a man, his ability to put a coherent thought together hasn't improved much. At one point, he comments that he's never understood the point of fire alarms since surely alarming a fire would only make it more dangerous. Half the time, he seems only vaguely aware that he's a police officer, and even when he can remember that he doesn't seem to notice anything weird about the supernatural situations he and his boss deal with.
  • In Don't Wet Your Pants, when you ask your character to do something that's not part of the game, he will reply "I don't know how to X". This makes him seem pretty ditzy when you ask him to do things like "walk" or "blink". He's also able to take off his pants but not put them back on.
  • Dragon Age II. Merrill is not incapable but she tends to miss things in conversations and dig herself into holes while speaking. A good compilation is here.
  • Nanashi in Duel Savior Destiny is a complete airhead with a faulty memory and a rather bubbly disposition in contrast to the whole 'so undead my limbs are falling off' thing.
  • Yda in Final Fantasy XIV is quite the airhead and believes the majority of problems can be solved through violence. Many concepts and ideas that are normal to most people tend to go over her head, requiring Palpamyo to dumb things down for her. Her ditziness goes out the window when she reveals that she's actually Lyse and was impersonating her dead sister to keep her memory alive.
  • Galaxy Angel: Milfeulle Sakuraba, while not technically stupid, is very slow on the uptake and often needs to be explained things. The anime however ramps it up, sometimes even to Lethally Stupid levels.
  • The Game of the Ages brings us the Village Idiot of Stupidity. Guess what his defining attribute is?
  • In Holy Umbrella, the Emperor Dondera displays a surprising degree of goofy ineptitude despite ostensibly being a Big Bad bent on world domination. At one point, he runs scared of being robbed by Donderamaid before the heroes point out that Donderamaid is his own minion.
  • Yellow Heart from Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, for all her enthusiasm and good intentions, has simplistic speech patterns, extremely limited literacy, and is generally about as sharp as a spherical brick. She makes up for it by being horrifyingly strong even by the standards of a Physical God.
  • I Miss the Sunrise:
  • In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, academia is not one of Tammy's strong points. She tries, but she's so bad at it that helping her study actually decreases the MC's Reasoning stat. And while she already knows that babies grow in their mothers' bellies, she was so embarrassed to watch the sex ed holovids, she doesn't know how they're made in the first place.
  • Kingdom Hearts:
    • Surprisingly, NOT Goofy. Despite him easily qualifying for this in the comics and TV-shorts/shows, he's pretty smart in KH, except for occasionally confusing similar words.
    • Alice shows some real Dumb Blonde qualities in the first game, particularly when, while waiting to be rescued from her beheading sentence, she says "I would like to keep my head. Why, if my head and body were to be separated, none of the food I eat would be able to reach my stomach!"
  • In Miitopia, two of the personality types showcase this sort of behaviour. First are Airheaded Miis, which are more blatantly this trope, with their abilities being picking the wrong target for an attack (which does bonus damage, but still), playing with the monsters you're supposed to be fighting, or even falling asleep mid-battle. Energetic Miis are less so, but one of their actions falls into this trope, with them tripping over as they attack a target, dealing extra damage at the cost of taking a bit of damage themselves.
  • In Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, there's Nokia Akkino. For starters, she's not even a hacker and has issues trying to understand anything more complicated than just logging into EDEN. She is The Narcissist, often commenting that she's got a "hot bod" as an important quality (it works for the most part, because most guys do fall for her especially when she starts the Rebels) but only pulls ahead in life because Heart Is an Awesome Power, though this can fall in Born Lucky territory. She is also hopeless in trying to remember names or makes some up on the spot, much to the embarrassment of people around her. Even Fei notes she's capable of sucking the tension out of serious situations by causing mass Flat "What".
  • Nippon Ichi Video Games: Examples include Flonne and Captain Gordon, Defender of Earth! in Disgaea, Trenia in Makai Kingdom, Taro in Disgaea 2, and Danette and Levin in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters. Most of them are used as a foil for the resident Deadpan Snarker.
    • Danette and Levin may suffer from an unfortunate Racial Hat, but Levin acknowledges Danette as the Ditz, and Danette acknowledges herself as the ditz! Though thankfully, Levin turns out to be a lot smarter than he lets on, so you don't have to suffer his supposed "idiocy" forever.

      Danette gets a little better as well, after the seal of her memories (and seemingly other brain functions) is broken.
  • One of the female cheerleaders in Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, Aoi Kanda (the pink haired Meganekko), is completely clumsy when it comes to anything outside cheerleading, whether it's failure to make a meal for sale, failure making a pottery, dropping foods on floor (or not chewing it properly), spacing out on class, and the list goes on, see the bottom of the page. And those are only examples from the first game.
  • A few Pokémon are described as being this:
    • Slowpoke and Slowbro are mainly characterized by their ditziness as it takes five seconds for them to register pain.
    • Rhyhorn are so dim that they'll charge at something, forgets why it's charging in the first place and then only remember when it hits something. It becomes a little smarter when it evolves into Rhydon.
    • Cranidos and Rampardos have skulls that are so thick that it prevents their brains from growing.
    • Pidove are so forgetful that they may await a command even when they already have one. In Detective Pikachu, they apparently can't remember names that were given to them.
    • Quagsire's Pearl Pokédex entry describes it as being rather dimwitted.
    • Cramorant are dim-witted bird Pokémon that often forget what they're fighting in the middle of battle.
  • Portal 2 has Wheatley, an awkward, lovable little Idiot Ball, who guides Chell around Aperture and helps her stay under GLaDOS's radar, all the while being laughably bad at it. That is, up until the end of Chapter 5, "The Escape", where he takes over GLaDOS's body, becomes Drunk with Power and throws both GLaDOS and Chell down an elevator shaft. He becomes the new Big Bad, forcing Chell to team up with GLaDOS in an attempt to stop him before he causes a reactor core meltdown with his complete incompetence.
    • Justified in Chapter 5, when GLaDOS reveals that Wheatley's real name is The Intelligence Dampening Sphere, and his purpose is to (in her words) "cling to [GLaDOS's] brain like a tumor, generating an endless stream of terrible ideas." This was done in an attempt to slow her down. To rephrase that, Wheatley was created for the sole purpose of being an idiot. As she reveals this, she unfortunately also gives Wheatley's Berserk Button a good, hard whack.
      GLaDOS: You're not just a regular moron... You were designed to be a moron!
      Wheatley: I! AM NOT! A MORON! [slams GLaDOS against the elevator so hard the glass cracks]
  • Lucia in Shadow Hearts: Covenant is described by her own teacher Carla as "slow".
  • Star Ocean: The Last Hope Sarrie from Just how bad is it? She wakes up on a sacrificial alter, in a room with greenish light... and simply says "Good Morning!" She then remembers that "guests" came in through her window, and she was going to serve them tea...
  • Suikoden: Viki is actually implied to be pretty smart, but suffering from a severe case of time-displacement-induced confusion. Her younger self, who has done less time-hopping, is very smart, observant and has a knack for pointing out other people's idiocy — including her own future self's.
  • Zigzagged for the gran in Survivor: Fire: She doesn't come out of the kitchen when it's on fire, but then she seems pretty competent.
  • Tales Series:
    • Both Lloyd and Colette from Tales of Symphonia qualify quite well for the title of The Ditz. A great example is a skit conversation between the two and Regal when Colette asks how Lloyd memorized every single Dwarven Vow (of which there are at least 108).
      Lloyd: Since I was a child, I memorized one before each meal and was tested on it. And if I couldn't say it, I didn't get to eat.
      Colette: Oh, I see... There must have been Dwarven Vow memory ingredients in the food.
      Lloyd: Huh? R...really?
      Colette: I wonder if I can memorize all the Dwarven Vows if I eat Dirk's cooking.
      Regal: No, Colette, that's not it. Lloyd's desire for food temporarily strengthened his memory.
      Colette: Oh... so Dirk's food has powers like an Exsphere to increase people's abilities.
      Lloyd: I see!
      Regal: ...why does the topic of conversation go out the window when talking to Colette?
    • Taken to further extremes in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World:
      Tenebrae: Am I really that much of a stick in the mud?
      Emil: I can't believe he's still thinking about that.
      Colette: I honestly don't see any mud on you. But what's wrong with getting mud on you anyway? Everyone gets a little dirty now and again.
      Marta: I don't think he meant that sort of mud.
      Colette: Well then, what sort of mud did he mean?
      Emil: No, listen. There was never any mud, to begin with.
      Colette: Oh! So was it more of a muck? Or maybe a slime?
      Tenebrae: So now I'm slimy?
      Colette: I have to say, I prefer mud to slime myself. It's easier to clean.
      Tenebrae: Well, it would depend on where the slime came from.
      Emil: Yeah, but think about your fur. Slime would stick to it, while mud would just wash off, no problem.
      Marta: Someone, anyone, please make it stop!
  • Touhou Project:
    • Cirno. In particular, the manual for Phantasmagoria of Flower View has a screenshot with numbers pointing out items of note (i.e. "1. Player Character", "2. Score", etc.); Cirno was labelled "9. Baka".
    • Rumia is known for constantly blinding herself with her own darkness powers and knocking into trees while flying.
    • While not typically known for it, Youmu Konpaku has her moments of this, such as this gem from Imperishable Night:
      Youmu: Oh no, Lady Yuyuko! It's completely dark when I close my eyes!

    Visual Novels 
  • Several characters in the Ace Attorney series.
    • The most prominent is probably Maya Fey. Her ditzy commentary during investigations is part of her endearing charm.
    • Larry Butz may not appear as often as Maya, but he's the biggest ditz of the series; while there are many other airheaded characters, no one commits to the role with the professionalism that he does. He serves largely as a foil to make the sensible characters seem sharper, but he has a knack for providing the occasional piece of absolutely critical evidence.
  • Helion in Aselia the Eternal - The Spirit of Eternity Sword got a two-part OVA and is rather scatterbrained most of the time. She's probably not actually stupid but tends to act without thinking.
  • Henry from Double Homework makes every other ditz seem like Einstein with the inanities that come out of his mouth nearly every second.
  • Michiru in The Fruit of Grisaia comes off as largely brainless at times. She's exaggerating her natural ditziness a little so she stands out more, but that's only a result of being stressed from not standing out due to not being very smart or pretty, to begin with.
  • Monster Prom: Scott the werewolf football player is a total ditz, but he's loveable in how enthusiastic he is about everything and even resident Alpha Bitch Vera likes him.
  • Arcueid, she of Tsukihime and Melty Blood fame, comes off quite ditzy, being a centuries-old vampire princess not used to the societal norms of the human world.
  • Yumina, the titular character from Yumina the Ethereal, who completely lacks any common sense and has trouble understanding even non-complex concepts.

    Web Animation 
  • Wayne the Ogre in 442oons.
    "I'm Not Stupid! <whispers> What's an og-reh?"
    —— Wayne The Ogre
  • The Pink and Blue unicorns from the Charlie the Unicorn YouTube videos appear to be this at first, but seeing as they tricked him into donating his kidney — without consent — in the first movie, and ended up robbing him in the second, they're something else entirely.
  • Dreamscape: Boru is an absolute moron that really frustrates Seleenara with how specific she has to be with her orders to get them through her thick head.
  • Nar in GEOWeasel, doing such things as going out in a severe storm that knocked out power to get batteries for a video game, and Thinking Out Loud about a surprise party for the person standing right in front of him.
  • Many, many innocent bystanders in GoAnimate. Many videos depict the troublemaker planting an obvious trap in the ground with the people falling into the trap, unaware that they were just trapped. Idiots!
  • Several characters on the Homestar Runner site. Homestar himself is the most noticeably ditzy, but there's more than one Idiot Ball being passed around among the cast, including Strong Mad and Homsar.
    • Though at least game shows Homsar as being completely intelligent, it's just that he's speaking another language. It's also been shown that he is completely coherent and intelligent on the phone, and is, in fact, both aware of, and quite distressed by, the fact that he can only speak random nonsense in all other situations.
  • Plancy's World: The main character, Plancy, is this. The series is made as a Take That! toward Dora the Explorer, so Plancy is made to be like Dora, but dumber.
  • Red vs. Blue:
    • Caboose is a team killer because he keeps accidentally killing Church, who he also thinks is his best friend. He's recognized as the dumbest creature in the universe. He gradually becomes disconnected from reality (at one point, he loads his gun with crayons and forgets how to spell his name).
    • Donut has a strange view of the setting at times.
    • Sister could also count when she arrives. Both of them share two traits — speaking terrible Spanish, and both of them talk way too damn much.
  • All of the characters in the video podcast Tiki Bar TV drift in and out of this. This is largely because the dialog is improvised while the actors are drunk, leading to some bizarre exchanges that drift back and forth between The Fool and Cloudcuckoolander, and generally end up falling around The Ditz.
    Dr. Tiki: I'm a PhD MD USB for a reason!
  • Ultra Fast Pony:
    • Rainbow Dash is belligerently dim and illogical. Once, during a motivational speech, she forgot what the opposite of "good" was. In another episode, she mistook a road sign for a clock — and thought she could time travel by changing the "clock".
    • Sweetie Belle seems to have fried her brain with Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. She once forgot Twilight Sparkle's name, twice, in a conversation lasting less than a minute. She doesn't know what cutie marks are — even though they're a central concept of Equestrian society, and even though she joined a club specifically about cutie marks.

    Webcomics 
  • The Bird Feeder has Terry, who forms a mockingbird duo with his counterpart, Jim. Strips with them in it usually consist of Terry speaking for a long stretch about a dumb thing he's been thinking about, and finally, Jim taking the opportunity to tell him how dumb he is.
  • The Little Trashmaid: Tidy isn't the brightest bulb thrown into the ocean. Her reaction to being given a bag with a shirt in it was to wear the bag like a shirt, and use the shirt as a bag.
  • A Magical Roommate:
    • Duchess Letita is very ditzy, although whether it's due to her stupidity or just her strange viewpoint is fluid.
    • Her younger daughter is a clearer example, though it's implied that she's only ditzy because she thinks she's entitled to everything and chooses not to use her brain.
  • Not that most Mountain Time characters are smart, but Dawn literally can't tell up from down.
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • Elan thinks only in terms of narrative tropes which leads to him being Wrong Genre Savvy even in a world where genre savviness is useful. He once thought that singing a song could make someone stealthier. He matures over the course of the comics, becoming a Genius Ditz, but the Ditz is still there.
    • Crystal, the goth assassin, is too stupid to live in a place like Greysky city without someone smarter than her telling her what to do. When she fought Haley, she attacked her with pickles. Her reasoning was thus: Haley never ate pickles, but pickles are yummy, so the reason she didn't eat them must be that they're deadly to her.
  • In Rusty and Co., Madeline wields a hoe, and later a shovel, under the delusion that they are respectively a holy avenger sword and a vorpal halberd. To be sure, she's deadly with both.
  • Ménage à 3 isn't above exploiting the ditz joke:
    • Sonya is largely defined by her comedy stupidity. There are occasional moments which suggest that she has some kind of brain which she just never bothers to use, but that's unproven at best.
    • DiDi, it is increasingly clear, is fundamentally disconnected from normal reality.
    • Maura definitely lacks smarts and is prone to silly accidents such as knocking her date out.
  • Dustin from Spacetrawler is so consistently stupid that the other characters just start doing the opposite of whatever he advises.
    Pierrot: Dusty thinks it's a bad idea, it must be sensible.
  • Sticky Dilly Buns inherits a penchant for ditz characters from its parent comic, Ménage à 3:
    • Title character Dillon is easily fooled by fairly Blatant Lies, especially in matters of romance.
    • Andy is completely incapable of picking up social cues or noticing when he's being exploited, and takes the dumbest advice from whoever offers it, to the point of hero-worshipping the very camp gay Dillon as an oracular source of heterosexual dating advice. Quite what he's doing as a prospective boyfriend for the book-smart, nerdy Ruby is unclear. He is cute, admittedly.

    Web Original 
  • Taipu from the BIONICLE online games and shorts. He at one point mentions that a lot of rocks have fallen on his head, which might have something to do with it. Also a Dumb Muscle, at least among the Matoran.
  • Goku, from Dragon Ball Z Abridged, is this crossed with Idiot Hero. He is never focused on whatever he's doing, he thinks about food all the time, and he stopped fighting because he was getting bored.
  • Dream High School's Student Council President, Corliss. One of her highlights is not realizing you're joking when you tell her your name is "Grok, Destroyer of Worlds":
    Corliss: Oh my gosh, I'm soo sorry! Is that a foreign name?
    • And no matter how much you insist that's not your name she doesn't understand and even gives you a nickname ...joy.
    • Then she introduces you to some other students as Grok, Destroyer of Worlds.
  • Zack in the TV Tropes original webseries Echo Chamber.
    Tom: Kenneth Branagh did it first.
    Zack: The Blue's Clues guy? Wait, I forget. Was he the blue one, or was he the dog?
  • Hugo, one of Matt Santoro's clones. He uses made-up words, mistakes paint chips for the kind of chips meant for eating, and thinks it's a good idea to get numerous immunization shots at once.
  • Tara from Sex House is a parody of this archetype as frequently found in Reality TV. She, along with the rest of the cast, becomes increasingly more intelligent as the series delves further into the horror genre.
  • Ryan ToysReview
    • Combo Panda, despite being a skilled gamer, can be quite dim-witted. For example, he thinks his backyard is one of the Earth's continents, and in the science fair, he used the same science experiment two years in a row, because he thinks "Pepsi is different from coke" when the former is a brand of cola.
    • Gus the Gator, even though he lacks naïvety and can be quite intelligent, can be clumsy and oblivious at times.
    • Big Gil the Shark is the most clueless main character, and he often fails at quizzes.
  • February from Starship. She takes the fact that she removed her helmet before she was supposed to on an unfamiliar planet as a sign that she's "super ahead of schedule". Bug and Junior have their moments, too.
  • Tiffany Thongbiscuit. When she heard from The Vogue (Pronounced "the vagooey") that Mad Men was fashionable. She went to school dressed as a literal mad man.
  • At the Super Hero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, one example is the minor character Bubble. Someone comments to herself, "She has a bubble all right. Between her ears." Another good example is the egocentric, villainous Solange, who isn't smart enough to be an effective villain. She uses her powers to absorb an ethereal protagonist and steal said character's powers; she gets run through the Humiliation Conga for her efforts.

    Western Animation 
  • Big Dog and Little Dog from 2 Stupid Dogs, especially the latter. The entire point of the show is that they're idiots. In fact, Little Dog apparently doesn't even know his own name.
  • Cinnamon Bun from Adventure Time is literally half-baked. As a result, he's klutzy and not particularly intelligent. However, "The Red Throne" has Cinnamon Bun become fully baked, amping up his intelligence.
  • Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: Scratch and Grounder (especially the latter) are a pair of particularly dimwitted badniks and Western Animation’s equivalent to the Team Rocket trio. They’re the primary reason Dr. Robotnik can never actually catch Sonic.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • Richard Watterson is a Bumbling Dad with nothing in the way of common sense or maturity. There is a reason for it: his mother was so safety-obsessed that he was never able to think for himself, and now he can hardly think at all (as Nicole put it).
    • Gumball Watterson and Darwin qualified back in Season 1. It took them an entire episode to recognize an obvious robber as a bad guy. In Season 2, they became somewhat smarter.
    • Out of Gumball's classmates, Sussie is the dimmest bulb. She can't tell when someone is bullying her and has a tendency to make weird noises. That being said, she has Hidden Depths as her answer to Gumball and Darwin's question in "The Question" is by far the most profound.
  • The Beatles: Ringo Starr was portrayed as a complete bumbling idiot.
  • Beavis and Butt-Head: Beavis and Butt-Head are defined by their sheer stupidity. They have no common sense, can only barely read, can't pick up on the obvious even as it happens in front of them, and can't recognize the inherent danger in things like jumping out of a moving vehicle or touching a buzzsaw. Butt-Head is marginally the more intelligent of the two, with the keyword being marginally.
  • Blue's Clues
    • The human hosts, Steve and Joe (and later Josh). They are actually quite talented in multiple areas, but their memory and attention problems make it very difficult for them to function without help. Both movies of the series deconstruct this: Blue's Big Musical Movie reveals that Steve has self-esteem issues, and considers himself useless for being so dependent on others, while Josh on Blue's Big City Adventure develops severe anxiety issues related to his concentration problems and is forced to realize the hard way that if he doesn't get better, he's probably going to miss out on a lot of important things in life (literally and figuratively).
    • Mr Salt is Team Dad, and an Supreme Chef, and quite wise, but not much smarter than the three hosts, being quite distracted, prone to causing accidents and acting without thinking, which occasionally causes problems.
    • Julia, the slipper repairwoman, character exclusive to the extra material for “Blue's Big Pajama Party”. For comparison, Steve of all people acted like the Straight Man when interacting with her, her analytical skills leave something to be desired and she genuinely doesn't seem to understand that the slippers she gave Steve would never fit his feet.
    • Marlon, a neighborhood store owner, isn't very bright when it comes to organizing things and like Josh, needs help from viewers to complete basic organizing tasks.
  • Bob's Burgers: Several of the Belchers aren't particularly bright:
    • Linda Belcher is not exactly bright. She's been shown to be gullible, impulsive, and childish on multiple occasions.
    • It's been shown that, unless it involves horses, Tina Belcher's not very bright. Examples: not realizing two people she thought were two kids who liked each other were siblings even after they called the same woman "Mom"; didn't realize Bob was lying to a panicking Gayle over the phone that Linda wasn't missing until he gave up trying to explain to her he lied; and genuinely believing, until Louise made fun of another girl who thought the same, that elbow macaroni was made from actual elbows. However, she does show quite a cunning side to her personality when motivated, such as getting the family out of debt in "Tina-Rannosaurus Wrecks" by recording the insurance scammer's confession, expertly plays Louise in "Ambergris", hatches a successful plan to catch the mole in "Tina Tailor Soldier Spy" and in general shows quite a lot of insight into people's personalities.
    • Gene is far and away the dumbest member of the Belcher family. He can't even remember the name of his father's establishment (and was seriously certain it was Dad's Burgers).
  • Bonkers: The titular character but it could be explained away by his being a Toon; he's super emotional, gets all huggy (and kissy) when he's happy and seems a bit naive when it comes to human matters (especially in the Miranda episodes). On the other hand, he's very knowledgeable about his own kind and knows just what sort of Toon stunt or prop can save the day.
  • Brickleberry:
    • Steve Williams. Being the stupidest of the main cast, he has frequently endangered the safety of himself and others. Not to mention that he cannot count past 92 nor tell fiction from reality.
    • BoDean is an even bigger example, given that he eats raw bacon, jacks off while putting guns in his mouth, and sticks pencils and pens in his eye as soon as he signed up for Bobby's health care plan.
  • Camp Lazlo: Chip and Skip. Two morons for the price of one.
  • Carl²: C2. He is only a few months old, and part dog, so some of it is excusable.
  • CatDog: Dog displays an astonishing lack of common sense, and his stupidity and recklessness often endangers Cat. He’s pretty well-meaning, though. Most of the time...
    • Lube, one of the Greasers, also being a dog, is just as dumb as Dog.
  • Madison from Class of 3000. She tried to sell fleas at a flea market and a garage at a garage sale, and tends to be very oblivious to her general surroundings.
  • Codename: Kids Next Door:
    • Numbuh Three goes between this and Genius Ditz frequently, often appearing oblivious to her surroundings while in danger, although, in the Grand Finale, it's implied that she was Obfuscating Stupidity to stave away depression.
    • Numbuh Four is Book Dumb to the point of almost being illiterate, and often too thick-headed to see the obvious, but again, the finale shows he grows out of it, gaining a medical degree from Harvard as an adult.
  • Daria:
    • Brittany and Kevin. Of the pair, Brittany tended to be the smarter one (which isn't saying much, though at least she managed to not be held back and graduate from Lawndale High).
    • Tiffany, the Asian Airhead of the Fashion Club.
  • Dexter's Laboratory: Dee Dee, trope namer for "What Does This Button Do?".
  • Drawn Together:
    • Captain Hero, despite being an alien superhero with powers such as super strength, flight, and laser vision, is shown to be a very dumb superhero. He once thought that an AIDS charity walk was a race and that his immigrant neighbors from Greece were a college fraternity. Foxxy and Xandir often berate Captain Hero for his stupidity and poor decision making
    • Princess Clara, despite being religious is also a ditz. She once thought that women could get pregnant from a kiss and that she was pregnant after Foxxy kissed her in the pilot episode. She also claimed that a creature called the woodbeast was mentioned in the bible even though there is no actual mention of one.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • The Fairly OddParents!:
    • Cosmo has no idea what he's doing with that magic wand, or anything else really. If he weren't immortal, he'd be so dead.
    • Timmy's Dad is probably even dumber than Cosmo, but he's occasionally shown to be good at mechanics and a number of his creations actually work. For that matter, Timmy's Mom isn't anything to write home about in the intelligence department either.
  • Family Guy:
    • Peter Griffin is a complete idiot most of the time (and a jerk). In one episode, he finds out that he's mentally handicapped.
    • Chris Griffin has an intelligence somewhere between that of a signpost and a bag of moldy French fries. One episode reveals it to be because of his unhealthy addiction to masturbating; when he stops completely, he's a great student.
    • Jillian, Brian's ex-girlfriend. She makes Peter look like a genius. Though she does wise up to Brian thinking she's an idiot and dumps him. She may not be all that bright, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have feelings.
      • Jillian’s group of friends are just as dumb (if not dumber) than her.
    • Cleveland Took a Level in Dumbass when he got his own show (mostly to match Seth MacFarlane's other sitcom fathers), though still not to Peter's extent.
  • Cheese from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, who seemingly has the intelligence of a two-year-old; he’s scared of cake, loves chocolate milk in spite of being lactose intolerant, and repeats the same words over again.
  • Futurama:
    • Amy Wong from is a black-haired Ditz — she fails at haggling, confusing it with bidding at auctions, and flirts with all men. Bordering on Genius Ditz, since she's also an engineering student (though in one DVD commentary, the writers admitted that they'd completely forgotten that). Only after the return of the show post-cancellation, she begins to be portrayed more as a Ditzy Genius.
    • Fry. Partly because he's a Fish out of Temporal Water and partly because of that whole Delta Brainwave thing. In either case, he always seems to be a little slow on the draw.
    • All three of Mom’s sons are pretty stupid, but Igner takes the cake. He's also a very naive Manchild. The sheer irony is that Professor Farnsworth, unquestionably one of the smartest characters on the show, is his father.
    • Enos, Fry’s grandfather (at least until a series of events led Fry to become his own grandfather), wasn’t very bright. He eats computer chips out of Bender’s head, licks his fingers after handling raw chicken, and considers himself lucky to be “saved” after being pushed into a pile of rusty bayonets. This trope is a given, being an Expy of Gomer Pyle.
  • Disney character Goofy is a classic example.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Billy once scored -5 on an IQ test (for comparison, they gave the same IQ test to a shovel and two candy necklaces, and they SOMEHOW scored 22 points higher than Billy did). Amazingly the show was somehow able to come up with a character even less intelligent than him: Fred Fredburger.
  • Hip-Hip and Hurra. It goes so far that you could argue that each of the characters represents a different type of stupidity. Heck, some episodes in the second season almost feel like a race between the characters, to see which one is the biggest idiot of them all.
  • Inspector Gadget: The inspector bungles through each case until his niece and dog solve it. Sometimes, he doesn't even know there is a case despite being in the middle of it.
  • Invader Zim: Gir is amazingly ditzy. He often heads into Cloudcuckoolander territory, depending on the local humidity and/or piggy count.
  • Johnny Bravo, especially in Seasons 2 and 3, where a lot of the humor was based around his stupidity, sometimes to the point of making him Too Dumb to Live.
  • KaBlam!: June used to be one of Nickelodeon's biggest ditzes until her change into the Deadpan Snarker starting in Season 2.
  • Kaeloo: Stumpy, to the point of being Too Dumb to Live at times. There was one episode in Season 2 which proved that he is literally the "most moronic of morons". However, there are implications that he may have a mental disability, with Mr. Cat even going as far as to call him the show's "token disabled person" because of this.
  • Kappa Mikey: Gonard at one point forgets where his hat is. It's on his head. Also, he takes part in the auditions for a new cast member for Show Within a Show "Lily Mu", despite already being a cast member. All this is in the pilot episode. "Cheerful buffoon" is putting it mildly.
    Gonard: Dude! Check out my laced gloves! Hey, where'd my shoes go?
  • Luanne Platter, from King of the Hill is rather airheaded. However, earlier episodes showed her as having a little more brainpower than she was usually given credit by others.
  • Looney Tunes has many of these.
    • Elmer Fudd, whom Bugs almost always tricks effortlessly. In Bugs’s very first cartoon, he breaks down crying because he thinks he killed Bugs... the very same rabbit he set out to kill in the first place.
    • Willoughby the Dog, who appeared in a few shorts from the early 1940s. This naturally comes with the territory of being an Expy of Lennie.
    • Red Hot Ryder from Buckaroo Bugs is so insanely stupid that he makes Elmer look like a rocket scientist. He utterly fails to put two and two together that Bugs is the Masked Marauder until the end of the cartoon.
    • Junyer from the Three Bears shorts was a bumbling half-wit who caused never-ending pain to Papa Bear through his Lethally Stupid tendencies.
  • The Looney Tunes Show:
    • Lola Bunny can out-ditz anyone on the show.
      Lola: Are you really a duck? I always thought you were a crow. Aren't ducks the ones with those big beaver teeth and that big beaver tail?
      Daffy: Those are beavers.
      Lola: So, you're a beaver?
      Daffy: Uh... Forget it.
      • Later, in the same episode:
      Lola: Porky's a pig? I always thought he was a seal.
    • Daffy Duck also has his ditzy moments. In “Eligible Bachelors”, for example, he repeatedly asks Granny if she died while she was telling him her experience in World War II. He apparently doesn't know who Superman is, either.
  • The Loud House: Leni Loud is portrayed as the stereotypical fashion-obsessed Dumb Blonde of the Loud sisters.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Pinkie Pie is far from stupid, but she's too hyperactive to actually use her intelligence. It's her clones that are the real ditz because they can only say "Fun!" and forget the names of her friends.
    • The Cutie Mark Crusaders are also presented like this, by way of Children Are Innocent.
    • Derpy almost by definition, as seen when she unwittingly destroys town hall.
    • Snips and Snails certainly qualify, especially the latter.
      Spike: The proof is in the pudding!
      Snails: (laughs) I like pudding!
  • ‘’Pac-Man’’: Inky of the Ghost Monsters is so dim it enrages Clyde.
  • Philbert Frog, BIG time. How else can you describe someone who once forgot that you have to shut your eyes if you want to go to sleep?
  • Pet Alien: Gumpers is by far the dumbest of the aliens. In "Evil That Pinched My Feet", he couldn't even think of a word beginning with B!
  • The Powerpuff Girls:
    • Bubbles can be pretty dim. One example is after reading Mojo Jojo's repetitive ransom note, she asks who did it.
    • The Mayor makes Bubbles look intelligent. In "Best Rainy Day Adventure Ever", he forgets that he's a mayor and jumps out the window after Bubblesnote  calls him on the phone.
    • Bunny from "Twisted Sister". She is told to beat up villains but instead beats up police officers. She also has trouble saying big words.
  • Teen Titans: Starfire can act spacey and clueless because she's an Amusing Alien and she doesn't have much knowledge about the Earth. When the Titans go to Tamaran, she is not at all ditzy and it is her teammates that have the blank "what's going on" looks.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987): Bebop and Rocksteady are a pair of incompetent minions. No wonder Shredder never wins.
  • Ten Year Old Tom: The titular Tom isn't a very bright kid. He is easily led, never thinks things though, and just doesn't know when to stop talking in-general. His first campaign slogan when running for class treasurer was "I'm bad at math".
  • Timothy Goes to School: Lilly is prone to forgetting things and very clumsy. But she's a really sweet student and gets along very well with her friends in school.
  • Total Drama:
    • Lindsay. Despite being one of the dumbest contestants with little skill or clue as to what she's doing, she still remains one of the best contestants who fortune favors. She eliminates herself in Action and in All Stars, and has accidentally voted for herself more than anyone else.
    • Her boyfriend Tyler isn't very bright, but not to the same extent as her.
    • Owen. He's a few sandwiches short of a picnic most of the time.
    • Geoff. Particularly in Island and Ridonculous Race, though nowhere near to the extent of Lindsay. In the words of Gwen: "Geoff doesn't seem like the scholarly type."
    • Katie and Sadie. Downplayed with Katie, she's not the brightest on the team, but she's scarcely seen doing anything excessively stupid. Sadie is implied to be smarter than Katie; however, she is still fairly airheaded.
    • Lightning rivals Lindsay in terms of stupidity. He has trouble identifying other contestants' genders, appears unable to count to ten, and thought steak came from trees, among other things. Nonetheless, his physical prowess makes him a formidable competitor in his own right.
    • Downplayed in All-Stars with Zoey. She's not a total ditz, but is shown to be very gullible and obtuse, as evidenced by it taking an entire season for her to realize that Mal exists, despite receiving explicit warnings from both Alejandro and Duncan.
    • Sugar in Pahkitew Island. She reasons that Leonard is smart, simply because she can't understand half of what he says.
  • Van Beuren Studios: In the cartoons based on the newspaper comic, The Little King. While he's not really incompetent, he acts very eccentrically and childish for someone in his position.

Alternative Title(s): Ditz, Ralph Wiggum

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G-U-N-P-O-W-D-E-R

Junyer Bear mistakes clearly labeled-gunpowder for tobacco, with predictable results.

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