Follow TV Tropes

Following

The Bore

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thebore.png
"I know I'm probably starting to bore you..."
"YOU WASTE OF AIR. I feel like I wasted a gallon of oxygen just talking to you. Starving children could have used that oxygen you know. NOW THEY'RE DEAD!"
Neckbeard, Frumplequest

This is a person whose personality is so dull, you would rather watch paint dry for an hour than listen to them for a minute. The Bore may not be talkative—perhaps they just have the charisma of a wooden plank, saying nothing and doing nothing of interest. They're probably an enthusiast for Incredibly Lame Fun and take a keen interest in, say, the history of toothpaste caps. Perhaps they do have interesting stories but tell them so often or in such a way as to suck all interest out of them. Perhaps whenever they join a conversation, no matter what the subject, they can only talk about how it affects or relates to them. Whichever it is, The Bore is unutterably, interminably dull.

Usually, they are completely oblivious to the agony they cause, and often they're too nice for anyone in the cast to want to hurt their feelings, although this isn't always so. Some of them are aware of how uninteresting everyone else finds them and simply don't care, or they'll exploit the rules of common etiquette or a position of authority to "enlighten" their victims with their droning. In any case, getting into a conversation with them is like getting caught in Hollywood-style quicksand: unless someone or something interrupts, you won't be able to escape being sucked down into a bottomless pit of monotony.

Maybe a source of Nap-Inducing Speak. Compare No Sense of Humor. Not related to The Comically Serious, where a boring person gets laughs by having funny things happen to her while she reacts completely seriously. Super trope to Old Windbag, a kind of Bore who is old (usually) and known for telling really long, uninteresting stories. Also a super trope to Windbag Politician, a politician who bores the audience half to death with long, usually low-substance speeches.

A sub-trope of Indubitably Uninteresting Individual. Contrast with Fun Personified and Genki Girl whose overall energetic and fun demeanor is likely to be pointed out by people around them.

In-Universe Examples Only, please. This is about other characters finding someone boring, not audience members.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • In Chainsaw Man, Asa Mitaka tries to date Denji in an attempt to set up her power (which requires her to emotionally connect with potential victims). The problem is that Asa is a socially inept loner. In her mind, "going to an aquarium" means standing in front of each exhibit for 30 minutes while Asa rattles off trivia about fish species. Even the manga layout illustrates this, with repeating layouts and large bubbles full of text letting readers grow as bored as Denji is in the story.
  • The Comically Serious and Socially Inept Todoroki from My Hero Academia comes off as really boring to a bunch of elementary kids he's supposed to win their hearts to pass an exam.
    One of the elementary kids: [pointing at an object dangling from Todoroki's belt] Weenie! It's a weenie!
    Todoroki: This is not a weenie. This is a first-aid treatment for when relief doesn't arrive in time—
    The kids: Boring.
    [...]
    Todoroki: [takes a deep breath] My name is not five weenies. I'm Shoto, a U.A. student who wants to be a hero. My father, Endeavor, is the current No. 1 hero, but I've always hated him. So I set my sights on becoming a hero to get back at him. I didn't mesh well with my classmates and—
    Present Mic: He's talking like a character introduction page!
    The same kids: [in unison] ...So boring.
    Present Mic: ...And no-one likes him!

    Comic Books 
  • Batman is sometimes portrayed this way when the Justice League wants to have some downtime and hang out, especially in Justice League International. This despite the fact that Bruce regularly engages in playboy activities in order to keep his identity under wraps.
  • Transformers:
    • The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers calls Prowl this, with Kup sharing a story about the time Prowl caught a Decepticon criminal. He proceeded to read a list of every single transgression the criminal had ever committed. At some point during the third day of this, he realized that his prisoner had shut his own brain off at some point rather than continue to listen. That's right, Prowl actually managed to bore someone to death.
    • The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye gives this trait to Ultra Magnus. To recruit Tailgate into the Autobots, he teaches him the entire 10,000 page Autobot Code (and doesn't tell him there's an abridged version). To bring some bots who have been out of commission for a while up to speed, he prepares an 851 slide presentation that one of the viewers describes as "so boring it made my life cry". He also Cannot Tell a Joke to save his life (at best he can manage a little snark), has smiled a single-digit number of times in his millions of years of existence and regrets many of them, and is so obsessively organized that he keeps his desk tidies in a desk tidy.
      Rodimus: Magnus? Last time he gave a speech, people died.
      Drift: I know. The only winner that day was medical science. We finally know what happens when the brain is totally deprived of stimulus.

    Fan Works 
  • In Like a Red-Headed Stepchild, Professor Binns' infamy as an incredibly boring teacher is referenced when it's mentioned in passing that Percy Weasley (even if a Lawful Stupid enforcer of Hogwarts laws otherwise) is willing to allow his brothers and Harry to sleep in Binns' class (in reality a result of some all-night training, but still) because even he can't stand the ghost's dullness.
  • Mob in the Mob Psycho 100 genderswap fanfics Everyone Loves Mob and Playing Games when she gets started about Neon Genesis Evangelion. Teru, being in love with her, is immune to and actually enjoys her hours' long recaps on every single episode of the series.
  • Namedropped in the Sherlock Holmes fanfic Agreement and Disputation; when Watson walks in on Holmes trying to reassemble a skeleton, the detective mentions that he didn't learn much in anatomy class because the instructor, Ezekiel Anderson, was so dull. Watson mentions seeing him lecturing recently; the doctor mentions toying with the idea of poking him to see if he would change his expression and pities his unfortunate students.

    Films — Animated 
  • Professor William Brandywine, a bit character from Monsters University, has an extremely bored-sounding monotone voice as he lectures his class on Scream Can design. He is also not the best motivator.
    Brandywine: Some say scream canister design is dull, a waste of a monster's potential.
    (Beat)
    Open your textbooks to Chapter 3.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • A Running Gag in Airplane! is Ted Striker telling the passenger he's sitting next to an anecdote about his past. The anecdote goes into a flashback, then when we return to the present the other passenger has been Driven to Suicide by boredom. In the sequel he manages to escalate himself by driving an entire wing of a psychiatric hospital to suicide by hearing him, and the current page image, in which he not only manages to make an old woman die (of Heaven-knows-what, but the fact that she says she doesn't get sick in airplanes and Striker starting to talk makes her puke implies that somehow his boredom made her fatally ill) while the flashback is going on but once it cuts back we see the woman has completely decomposed down to her skeleton and Striker is still talking to her like nothing has happened.
  • The summer school teacher in Big Fat Liar lectures the class in the most uninteresting way possible. Although most of the students are half asleep, he doesn't make any effort to earn their attention.
    Teacher: Today, students, we are going to learn about the joys of a special friend I like to call Mr. Semicolon. The semicolon was first used in a 1734 letter to British Parliament... by Mr. Jedediah Wilkinson.
  • John from Christmas in Connecticut is an architect who will not stop droning on about plumbing and fireplaces and home construction. Yardley, the magazine publisher whom John is trying to start a business relationship with, even calls him a bore. This is part of the Romantic False Lead characterization that contrasts John with Jefferson, his handsome, charming rival for Elizabeth's affections.
  • In Clockwise, Mrs Trellis is a dotty old lady who talks non-stop about "the sherry glasses", even though nobody pays attention to her. Surprisingly, she remains silent when she accidentally wanders into an important meeting.
    Mrs Trellis: It's no use letting Lou have the sherry glasses. She won't appreciate them, she won't polish them, you know what she's like, so I said: well, all right. She goes on and on about those glasses, never stops. Of course I don't say a word... I'm not much of a talker.
  • The Knowledge: Those studying for the legendarily difficult exam faced by London taxi drivers become absolutely devoted to their subject, at the expense of everything and everyone else.
    "It's a form of euthanasia."
  • Planes, Trains and Automobiles: Del Griffin may be a very jovial guy, but according to the more cynical and impatient Neal, who has had to deal with him for a whole day now on top of an unending barrage of humiliation in his quest to get home by Thanksgiving, his story-telling style has a bit of an issue:
    Neal: You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You're a miracle! Your stories have NONE of that. They're not even amusing ACCIDENTALLY! "Honey, I'd like you to meet Del Griffith, he's got some amusing anecdotes for you. Oh, and here's a gun so you can blow your brains out. You'll thank me for it."
  • Prince Valium in Spaceballs is so boring he puts himself to sleep.
  • Essentially every role ever that Ben Stein has ever had. (Examples: his One-Scene Wonder in... anyone? anyone?... in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and the Western Animation example below).
  • In Jane Wants a Boyfriend, Bianca tries to set Jane up with another autistic person, thinking he'll be more suited to her than Jack, but he spends most of the evening talking about himself and doesn't ask Jane a single question about herself.
  • Henry from Twice Round the Daffodils loves his sister Harriet, but finds her and her constant letters to be rather exhausting:
    Henry: Oh, I appreciate Harriet, all right, I think she's marvellous. Never before was so much written about so little in such detail.

    Literature 
  • Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle: Boris Dolokhov, Baron Wulfenbach's chief administrator. A footnote takes the time to assure the reader that not only is he the most boring man in the entire empire, but he is also the most boring man in the entire world.
  • Ascendance of a Bookworm: Ferdinand is quite the Workaholic and any attendant that manages to last more than a year under his employ tend to end up with that character trait, as well. Sylvester, a fun-loving Manchild, considers all of Ferdiand's attendants to be among the most boring people he knows and his head attendant Arno to be the most boring person he ever met.
  • In Harry Potter, Professor Binns is infamous for his ability to put students to sleep as soon as he starts teaching his class. He has a unique ability to make everything sound dull, even subjects that might have been interesting to learn about, like the Giant Wars, or the violent and bloody goblin riots. Being Hogwarts' only ghost teacher, it's said that not even death itself was enough to stop Professor Binns from droning on and on and on about historical subjects.
  • In Horatio Hornblower, Hornblower sometimes bleeds off the stress of forthcoming action by forcing his junior officers to play whist with him (a complex and mathematical card game) and then going over the game in minute detail to point out each and every error they made in a deliberate effort to bore them to death. The prospect of a whist night with the captain is viewed with a mixture of dread and admiration.
  • Lucky Jim is filled with these, as part of its Take That! towards academia. Professor Welch takes the cake, as he's prone to long, rambling digressions about subjects of little interest to Jim, mostly on the subject of obscure Medieval art forms. Bertrand, Welch's pretentious artist son, also certainly qualifies. There's also Mitchie, a student who takes after Welch. He seems genuinely interested in Medieval History and will drone on about it at length to Jim.
  • Magic Shop: The Skull of Truth has Charlie's great-aunt Hilda and great-uncle Horace, whom Charlie considers "The Two Most Boring People in the World" (and most of his family feels the same way). Unusually for the trope, Horace knows that he's boring, and hates it, which surprises Charlie when this comes out and makes him wonder if Horace's problem with being a bore is like his own compulsive lying.
  • Oddly Enough: The narrator of "What's the Worst That Could Happen?" thinks of his eighth grade social studies teacher as one, remarking via narration that the man is someone "who you will probably see on the front of the National Enquirer someday as a mass murderer for boring twenty-six kids to death in a single afternoon."
  • Referenced by name in The Pigman by John, who refers to his father as "The Bore". Between this and Lorraine's Abusive Parents, it's no wonder the two warm up to Mr. Pignati the way they do.
  • Pride and Prejudice:
    • Everyone who knows Mr. Collins will use any excuse to avoid his pomposity and endless sycophancy towards Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
    • Miss Mary Bennett's recitations of what she's read are usually found to be tiresome by the rest of her family.
  • Gilles Ponsi in Reflections of Eterna has a tendency to bore the hell out of people near him, especially with his attempts at poetry, but is completely oblivious to this fact and takes offense at them not appreciating his company.
  • Star Trek: Articles of the Federation: Bera chim Gleer. President Bacco has to try very hard not to shut her eyes and nap when he gets going on one of his long-winded diatribes.
  • Wings of Fire has Coconut, a RainWing who is boring to hang out with because he is so shallow and unintelligent, and Snowflake, who seems the same, though ''Runaway'' reveals that she was just Obfuscating Stupidity.

    Live-Action TV 
  • As Time Goes By:
    • Jean's brother-in-law Stephen, while much more pleasant than his wife, is still unbearable to be around because of his habit of intense conversation about the most mundane topics.
    • Gwen Flack, Lionel's temporary secretary while writing the mini-series, chatters so much about her dog, her old boyfriends, and how unalluring socks are that Lionel can't get any writing done.
  • On a long space trip in Babylon 5, Dr. Franklin divines that the trip will end in Marcus' death. Marcus offers to sing instead. ("I AM THE VERY MODEL OF A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL...")
  • Barney Miller has Inspector Luger, an old cop who shamelessly exploits Barney's good nature to endlessly reminisce about his old buddies Brownie, Foster, and Kleiner. Some of these stories are quite gruesome, but having been told so often, nobody wants to hear about how they blew up Foster or gunned down Kleiner anymore.
  • The Big Bang Theory:
    • Sheldon Cooper has this as one of his many flaws. He considers his friends' lack of interest to be evidence of their intellectual inferiority.
    • Amy Farrah Fowler originally had a case of this that was even worse than Sheldon's in her earliest appearances. Later on, because of her friendship with Penny opening up her eyes to the joys of social life, she later makes more concerted efforts to be less boring, though she still retains ideas of Incredibly Lame Fun.
  • Big Brother:
    • Big Brother 14: Kara was very nice but she was super boring and dull.
    • Big Brother 15: While Howard is a good and nice guy, most live feeders found him very boring and dull.
  • One episode of Bizaardvark involves a teacher with a Professor Binns-esque ability to put entire classes to sleep, even if his subject is dinosaurs. He admits that it's a recurring problem, and he's been fired from all his previous teaching positions. He ends up quitting teaching altogether and gets a new job recording sleep aid tapes.
  • Breaking Bad: Walter's life before his life of crime. You can really see this when he has conversations with old friends at Gretchen's party or any time he talks to Hank in the first season.
  • Brooklyn Nine-Nine: Amy's temporary boyfriend Teddy is described as being "the most boring man in America." His only topic of conversation is how much he loves drinking and bottling pilsners, and his idea of a wild time is vacationing in San Diego, or going to "jazz brunch." (As in, brunch where there's background jazz music... about brunch. He even does adult coloring books at them!) Even Amy, an extremely nerdy woman with some very pedantic interests, finds him insufferably boring and dumps him for it. Even when he becomes a Stalker with a Crush towards her after the breakup, his defining trait is how dull he is. When he discovers that people find him boring, he resolves to be more interesting, but everything he tries is a boring person's idea of what's interesting, which only serves to make him even more boring.
  • Cheers: Cliff Clavin, who is ready and willing to regale everyone with his endless array of Little Known Facts, whether they want them or not.
  • Colm of Derry Girls is borderline The Dreaded for his monotonous voice and never ending, rambling stories. Everyone does their best to avoid him, or at least foist him off on someone else. When Sister Michael is stuck with him, she briefly wonders if she has actually died and gone to hell. Unlike most examples, his stories are actually interesting - it's just his delivery is what that makes them completely dreadful.
    • He seems oddly self-aware of it at times.
    Colm: Sometimes I just say something to get meself from one sentence to another.
  • Father Ted:
  • On Friends, one of Monica's boyfriends was "Fun Bobby", who turned out to be an alcoholic. Once he sobered up, however, he became "Ridiculously Dull Bobby".
  • Leverage: Redemption: Fake Nate from "The Mastermind Job" is revealed to be one; the only thing he can talk about in any detail is bureaucratic regulation, which naturally puts most people to sleep within seconds. In fact, the entire reason he resorted to pretending to be Nate Ford was because he knew full well how uninteresting he was and wanted to be something cooler than who he really was.
  • Al Bundy in Married... with Children. Since he's accomplished nothing after high school and has no life, he'll usually brag on and on about his past glories as a high school football player and complain endlessly about his job at the women's shoe store and how much life sucks. Everyone on the show tries avoiding him.
  • "Slow Roger" from My Name Is Earl. He seems to have some kind of disorder, and he goes on long rambles, listing stuff from movies (and in one case, all the car parts Earl stole, instead of simply saying that Earl stole his car and slept with Roger's sister.)
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus:
    • The sketch Vocational Guidance Counsellor has a man who wants to change jobs and has taken some aptitude tests to determine which one best suits his personality. On learning that this job is chartered accountant, he protests that he already is one, and he wants to change because the job is so desperately dull. It ends with an appeal by the counsellor for donations to "prevent chartered accountancy."
      Counsellor: Yes, but you see, Mr. Anchovy, your report here says that you are an extremely dull person. Our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in chartered accountancy they are a positive boon.
    • "The Silliest Interview We've Ever Done" had Mr. Badger.
      Badger: My wife Maureen ran off with a bottle of Bell's whisky during the Aberdeen versus Raith Rovers match which ended in a goalless draw. Robson particularly, in goal, had a magnificent first half, his fine positional sense preventing the build-up of any severe pressure on the suspect Aberdeen defence. McLoughlan missed an easy chance to clinch the game towards the final whistle but Raith must be well satisfied with their point.
      Interviewer: Do please go on. This is the least fascinating conversation I've ever had.
    • The protagonist of "Mr. Pither's Cycling Tour" is one of those terrifying people who go on and on about their favorite hobby at stupefying length, not recognizing that the person he's talking to has no interest in cycling, is not listening, or even that they are having a private conversation.
    • One of the panellists on "Interesting People" is a man who is so boring that he turns invisible the longer he talks.
  • Jess dates someone she considers a "human pile of saltine dust" in New Girl. Played by Taran Killam, he is usually on his phone and rarely talks, unless he's discussing model trains in excruciating detail.
    Fred: What a wonderful cheese store. They had so many options. That's good, 'cause I love cheese. All kinds of cheese. Orange cheese, pizza cheese... I love all parts of pizzas, especially the dough. Once I asked for a ball of dough, and they gave it to me and I took it to a park and ate it.
  • Toby from The Office (US) fits the role. His dull voice and adherence to professionalism contrasts the usual shenanigans in the show. This is the main reason why Michael hates Toby. Could be viewed as Truth in Television, because in real life, offices aren't as exciting.
    Michael: (to Toby) Why are you the way that you are? Honestly, every time I try to do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be.
  • Arnold Rimmer of Red Dwarf, when he's not acting like a smeghead, is probably being this. He's using his time to put together a complete history of pockets and has so many stories about his thrilling victories in Risk (as in the board game).
  • In the Ripping Yarns episode "The Testing of Eric Olthwaite" Eric is considered extremely boring to everyone due to his interests: rain, shovels, and black pudding. After he gets a job at a bank and gets kidnapped by a bank robber who it turns out has the same interests. They go on a "crime" wave of measuring rainfall and he becomes interesting to the general public, despite not changing at all.
  • Seinfeld's examples include Jerry's Uncle Leo and real-life New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner (faceless and voiced by Larry David); whenever the latter summons his employee George Costanza to his office, the meeting will eventually devolve into Steinbrenner rambling endlessly until Costanza quietly slips out of the office. In "The Race," Steinbrenner sends Costanza to negotiate with Fidel Castro, who turns out to be his country's George Steinbrenner (to the point that Costanza exits his meeting with Castro the same way he usually exits meetings with Steinbrenner).
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Commander Hutchinson's receptions are dreaded by the Enterprise's senior staff thanks to his limitless ability to talk about absolutely nothing. Fortunately for them, Data has recently written a subroutine for "small talk" that needs to be tested. In another episode, Picard gets out of a social occasion with Lwaxana Troi by summoning Data to talk her into submission.
    • Also, the alien in "Liaisons" whom Picard is forced to share a long shuttle ride with.
      Picard: Is there any part of your planet you recommend I visit while I'm there?
      Alien guy: No.
      [Picard bugs his eyes]
  • The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager becomes this once he starts taking up hobbies, which involve boring the crew half to death with his slide shows. In one episode Captain Janeway orders the bridge crew on duty to fabricate an emergency so she can leave early; they refused, having suffered through similar slideshows without rescue.
  • Bert from Sesame Street is one of the definitive examples when it comes to children's works. His interests include "boring stories", collecting paperclips and bottlecaps, pigeons and bland food like oatmeal and unflavored soda. Many Bert and Ernie sketches involve Ernie trying to play a game with Bert, but he would prefer to do a more boring activity.
  • Frank Pickle of The Vicar of Dibley loves to tell the story of that time the pub completely ran out of crisps and does enthralling impressions of his second cousin, before and after tonsillectomy. It is known, but unproven, that Frank actually bored his parents to death. He maintains he was outlining parish procedure when they hand-in-hand leapt out of an open window.
  • In What We Do in the Shadows (2019), Colin Robinson is a rare example who's fully aware of what he's doing. As an energy vampire he can feed off boredom or anger, so he works in an office and constantly drops by other employees' cubicles to tell them inane trivia or interminable anecdotes. His powers work on regular bloodsucking vampires, so he's near as aggravating to his housemates too.

    Music 

    Radio 
  • Bleak Expectations: In order to reach the afterlife and rescue his wife without actually dying, Pip Bin travels to the most boring place in all Great Britain, the House of Lords, to listen to Baron Arid Words deliver a lecture on evaporation, so he can be bored exactly half to death. It works.
  • Cabin Pressure: Martin, whose idea of a fun day off is going over aviation techniques. When he discovers a "hidden" bar on MJN's main airport, he soon becomes a pariah because all he wants to talk about is flying, which in the bar requires buying everyone a drink first. Even that isn't enough to get everyone else to feign interest.
  • Dead Ringers:
    • Jeremy Hunt gets a job as an anaesthetic, accomplished by incessantly reminding everyone that he used to be an entrepreneur.
    • Gyles Brandreth, during an executive remodeling of Killing Eve to appeal to older viewers, where he's replacing Villanelle. He threatens to kill people by subjecting them to tediously twee segments about knitwear.
  • John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme has The Storyteller, who is explicitly described as his club's resident bore and on at least one occasion had the unheard interloquitor try to stop him from telling his rambling story:
    Finnemore: No, you can't have the biscuit until I've told my story. I don't care that you no longer want the biscuit. You've started me off!

    Tabletop Games 
  • This is the Azorius stereotype on the plane of Ravnica in Magic: The Gathering. It goes far enough that one card literally wins the game by boring the opponent to death.
  • Paranoia adventure The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues. Angela-G-OGO is a food processing supervisor who loves to talk about food additives. She does it so much that she has bored all of her co-workers blind on the subject, and even Internal Security finds her boringly loyal. However, this is just a front: Angela is in fact a member of Death Leopard.

    Video Games 

    Visual Novels 
  • Professor Aristotle Means from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies is quickly established to make speeches that easily induce others to sleep. Interestingly, this is a plot point, because he acknowledges his speeches make students sleep to the point his pre-recorded speech, created to have a false alibi, includes a section where he tells a student to wake up - and it initially works, with no one finding it strange.

    Web Animation 
  • Homestar Runner:
    • Strong Sad is dreary and depressing, and even his body is grey. Thanks to the fact that few people around him care about being polite, he's fully aware that they can't stand him, but he still makes an effort to get them interested in his poetry.
    • Strong Sad has odd friendships with Marzipan — who's often considered the bore herself due to her Soapbox Sadie tendencies — and Homsar, whom no one can understand.
    • One Strong Bad Email deals with strategies to drive off the "office dullard".
    • The email "boring (really)" deals with a situation where every character is this trope, talking ponderously slowly and spending their time doing things like counting the bricks on a wall or practicing with closing their eyes... except Strong Sad, who is on a caffeine buzz for some reason and ranting about an alien spaceship.
  • Zero Punctuation brought this up when discussing Red Faction: Armageddon, as Yahtzee theorized that there was some kind of unknown prequel that was cancelled in favor of Armageddon, based on what appeared to be Orphaned References to it. As he really didn't like the protagonist of Armageddon, he theorized that the only way that Armageddon could have had the more interesting story is if the protagonist of the cancelled game was "a geography teacher, who defeated the cultists by diligently doing his taxes at them."

    Web Comics 
  • Girl Genius: The Great Hospital at Mechanicsburg hires the storyteller to help get difficult patients to sleep, much to his disgruntlement. This gets him volunteered to help get Klaus to sleep soon after. About the only person who doesn't find his storytelling dull is Tarvek, though this might be because that particular story was a way for Klaus to give Gil the very important information that Klaus had been wasped.

    Web Original 
  • Channel Awesome:
    • This is the Critic's biggest complaint about Junior. He feels that a movie with such a ludicrous premise, that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a brilliant scientist who impregnates himself to test his new procedure on himself, should be completely over-the-top, offensive, stupid, and ludicrous. Instead it's largely taken seriously and Played for Drama, which makes the main character completely and utterly too boring to be invested in:
      Critic: I mean, it’s bad when I’m actually praying for it to be insensitive and insulting! At least, maybe, we can get some form of humor across! I mean, OK, I guess the actors are alright, and Arnold doesn’t come across actually as that bad in this, but that’s part of the problem! We want him to be bad in this! Of all the movies we want him to be over-the-top and goofy in, this is the one! It’s almost like the movie was written for a real pregnant woman, and then, at the last minute, they decided to throw Arnold in!
    • He feels this way about Uwe Boll movies on the whole. As much as he liked the whole The Three Shmuckheads routine with Linkara and Spoony, he finds Uwe Boll movies like Alone In The Dark and Bloodrayne, and Boll himself, to just be so uninteresting and boring that he struggles to even get through the films, let alone come up with anything funny about them to mock.
  • The SCP Foundation has SCP-6869, an unfinished living artwork of a crying man named Fred. He's so godawfully boring that his article is filled with Rouge Angles of Satin, making it just as unfinished as his life story (his number appears as SCP-####).

    Western Animation 
  • In The 7D, Hildy Gloom competes with a childhood rival at an award show for witches over who can put the most people to sleep. The prize, however, goes to the show's emcee, who has just put most of the audience to sleep.
  • The Amazing World of Gumball:
    • Molly. She's so boring, in fact, that the universe retconned her out of existence for being too boring.
    • Hector is an deliberate bore. He has to be kept calm and sedate at all times, lest he goes on a town-ravaging rampage. Which has the side-effect of making him dull.
  • Animaniacs:
    • The sketch "Chairman of the Bored", which introduces Francis "Pip" Pumphandle. He is this, The Thing That Would Not Leave and a repeated example of The Cat Came Back, driving The Warner Brothers (and Sister) to near-suicidal (and homicidal) despair with one of his (days-long) rambling anecdotes. Voiced by Ben Stein for higher-caliber boredom. Comically enough, by the time he finishes his story and leaves, the Warners have been Conditioned to Accept Horror, and now think their home is too quiet without the incessant droning of Pip. The episode ends with them running after him, begging for more stories.
    • And then Ben Stein comes back in Wakko's Wish as the "Desire Fulfillment Facilitator", who nearly bores Wakko to death while shaking his hand.
    • Perry Coma, the singer of the "Anvilania" national anthem in the "King Yakko" short. It's a Running Gag that every time he sings he makes everybody fall asleep (although whether it's him or it's the anthem being that lousy is unsaid). The Warners weaponize this at the climax by using it to make an entire army fall asleep.
  • Archer: Ron Cadillac, Malory's husband by the start of season 4. He's an older, wealthy man who owns several luxury car dealerships, who has a very mild and bland personality compared to the rest of the cast. Archer later discovers that Ron actually started his career running a car theft ring with his childhood friends, and later opened a chop shop with them, later using the money they earned from their crimes to open his first legitimate dealership. He still leads a secret double life, paying his former partners in crime with untaxed money as payback for not turning him in to the police when they were all arrested 20 years before.
  • Bob's Burgers: Teddy, a regular at Bob's restaurant, is fond of telling rambling stories about everyday things, like finding out his towels are slightly mismatched. Gene and Louise even make listening to one of Teddy's stories a test of endurance in "Dr. Yap".
  • Quinn Morgendorffer, the younger, more popular sister of Daria, may have legions of guys falling for her and she might be at the top of the social food chain at Lawndale High, but that's just because of her looks. It's frequently shown Quinn has almost nothing interesting or engaging to talk about, and she'll usual ramble on and on about how hard it is to be well dressed and popular when she's not blabbering about contrasting sock length or coordinating shoelace coloring with her date's car. In at least two instances, Quinn's rambling knocked out a psychiatrist and her tutor once called her out on how boring she really is. Deep down, Quinn's genuinely terrified of being this since she has such low self esteem she thinks she really has nothing to offer beyond gossiping and talking about fashion. Quinn eventually starts to display her Hidden Depths and finds out she does have more to offer.
  • Family Guy:
    • Buzz Killington, a phenomenally boring Englishman with a Meaningful Name.
    • Cleveland Brown started off this way, though became more outgoing when he gained center spotlight. Even after his spin-off was cancelled and he returned to Quahog, he never regressed to his previous behavior.
    • Quagmire delivered a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Brian Griffin to explain why he doesn't like the dog. After going through his list of Brian's faults, Glen admits he would easily look past all of that if he wasn't such a bore.
    • More recently, Joe Swanson has been most likely to kill the vibe with his inability to make small talk.
  • Kim Possible:
    • In "The Twin Factor", Drakken uses a Mind-Control Device to make Shego obey him and listen attentively to his anecdotes. After she's released from its effects, she rants, "Do you have any idea what listening to you is like? It is SO BORING!" before chasing after him to exact her revenge.
    • In the half-episode "The Truth Hurts", Kim's dad has his bosses coming to dinner... right after Kim has been hit with a Truth Ray that causes her to blurt out what she's heard her dad say about them, including the description of one of them as a long-winded bore. Fortunately, their boss shows up, and turns out to be the Kidnapped Scientist Kim had been rescuing when she got hit with the Truth Ray.
  • King of the Hill: Hank Hill is the king of this trope. He literally has no life outside of his work at the propane business. He talks about propane and propane accessories as if they're something to be worshipped by the world. The show mostly revolves around Hank trying to understand normal people since he can't understand why no one cares to listen to what he has to say. This may also apply to his wife, Peggy, and friends since their stories revolve around them trying to do something crazy so they don't become this trope.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
    • Pinkie Pie's older sister, Maud Pie. In fact, the rest of the mane six (minus Pinkie) could tell straight-on that Maud is a very boring individual, and even with that in mind, they still had a hard time connecting with her just because she's so boring.
    • In season 8, Maud gets a boyfriend, Mud Briar, who's just as boring as she is; even Pinkie finds him intolerably dull. Appropriately his cutie mark is a stick in the mud.
  • Gearhead at the party for the season 1 finale of Rick and Morty. Do you want to know the long and incredibly detailed history of the Gear Wars? Gearhead will lecture you whether you want to or not.
  • One of Rocky and Bullwinkle's Fractured Fairy Tales was about Leaping Beauty, a beautiful girl who leaps about spreading joy and cheer until she runs afoul of a witch, who curses her to become a bore, after which she literally puts the entire kingdom to sleep with her incessant prattling. It gets mixed with Fun with Homophones when she is exiled to live with boars.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Marge Simpson's incredibly bland taste in everything is a frequent source of humor. For example; looking for some adrenaline in her life, Marge decides to stop buying regular ham, and go instead for deviled ham. Contrast this with Homer's Renaissance Man qualities, music, language, etc. only some of which are played as one off jokes.
    • In "Last Exit to Springfield", Mr. Burns hires Abe Simpson and other retirees as strikebreakers. Abe explains that while they can't break heads like they used to, they can tell long and incredibly pointless stories in order to bore people to death. He then proceeds to tell an excruciatingly long story about visiting Shelbyville while Burns and Smithers visibly wilt.
    • Seymour Skinner is a spectacular example of this on his own (witness him boring the hell out of the Springfield Police from just standing there trying to recall what he witnessed during the first part of "Who Shot Mister Burns?")... many of the jokes involving him are that he works hard at being a Professional Butt-Kisser for Superintendent Chalmers, but his buzzkill, Control Freak, all-work-no-play (and hard-core Mama's Boy) personality instead makes Chalmers hate him with an absurd passion (Chalmers's own Flanderization including him being unable to say Skinner's name nor anything that remotely sounds like "Skinner" without yelling it angrily).
    • Reverend Lovejoy is a preacher with zero passion or interest in spreading the word of God. His sermons are thus lackluster and boring affairs that often put people to sleep. Lovejoy even has a sound generator installed to wake people up. One episode shows that he actually did start out as a compassionate and spiritual man back in the 70's, until he moved to Springfield, and on his first day met Ned Flanders who began to grind away every bit of Lovejoy's spirit, bugging him day and night with his inane and pathetic "issues" until Lovejoy became completely apathetic.
  • An episode of Tom and Jerry features this. Tom is brought along to a show and tell. While waiting for his turn, he meets a very chatty rabbit who explains that his name is "Jerald". He goes on and on about it's usually spelt with the letter "G". All the while Tom is trying to think of a way to eat Jerry but once his plan is formulated he finds that Jerald will not stop shaking his hand and besides that, he's still talking. Tom takes something made of metal and beats Jerald across the head with it offscreen but when the scene cuts back to Jerald his head is absolutely covered in cartoonish lumps, his eyes are black and some of his teeth are missing.
  • Words, Words, Words...: One man's dialogue is represented by a speech balloon filled with random numbers. The woman sitting with him tunes out, looking instead at a handsome man at the next table.

 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

Reverend Lovejoy

Reverend Lovejoy's sermons are agonisingly boring. No-one can stay awake throughout, to the point that he has a sound machine installed for when his congregation inevitably falls asleep.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (7 votes)

Example of:

Main / TheBore

Media sources:

Report