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Really 17 Years Old
aka: Really Seventeen Years Old

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Angel: [holding up his badge] Hey. When's your birthday?
Kid: Uh... 8th of May, 1969?
Angel: You're 37.
Kid: Yeah?
Angel: Get out.

A character lies about their age or hides their real age in order to get around a social or legal boundary. The reasons the character does this vary. Sometimes they feel a sense of duty and are stopped by that age boundary. Sometimes they feel too limited by their age and wish to hide it. Maybe they feel that they are above the law. Either way, the interest of the situation comes either from the character trying to keep the secret until they almost inevitably get caught, or sometimes in Rule of Funny situations, it comes from The Reveal and consequences of that reveal.

When it's about sex, the age boundary is virtually always 18 (at least in American media) due to Hollywood Provincialism, even though only twelve states in the USA have this as law and it is either 16 or 17 in the other thirty-eight states.note 

Not to be confused with Younger Than They Look, where a character is much younger than they appear to be, but they aren't necessarily lying about it, or Totally 18, when the character or story says they're of legal age as a Suspiciously Specific Denial.

Truth in Television for many different contexts.

Minor with Fake I.D. is a subtrope. Contrast (but do not confuse with) Really 700 Years Old.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says: When Toda's sister Yuuko visits, Tanaka finds out she's been lying about her age so she can get published as a hentai artist, and she is actually about to turn 18.
  • Played with Ayakashi Triangle: Sosuke technically isn't a child, but an ageless humanoid Ayakashi eventually reduced to a childlike form. He gets a job as a steward at Lu's mansion by claiming to be a short twenty-year-old, which worked because Sosuke's type can manipulate the Weirdness Censor to blend in.
  • Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto: In exchange for a DVD he needs for school, Sakamoto is made to get a number of porn movies from the 18+ section and hand them off to Acchan and his friends. Sakamoto successfully bluffs the store's manager and the cashier, but Acchan doesn't even end up watching them and returns the whole stack.
  • Komi Can't Communicate: Played for Laughs with the protagonist's mother Komi Shuuko. She looks youthful enough to pass off as her daughter's older sister and loves to act like a ditzy teenager, even calling herself an "eternal 17-year-old", but it's obviously just a way for her to have fun by embarrassing her daughter.
  • Implied with Megumi in Martian Successor Nadesico. She's officially 17 but lives independently and isn't treated as odd, is treated as an equal in a Love Triangle over a 20-year-old, and is a voice actress, a profession known for lying about your age in Japan.
  • One Piece: Jewelry Bonney, one of the Eleven Supernovas has the power to change her age at will, but typically assumes the form of a woman in her 20s. In the Egghead arc it's revealed that she was using her Devil Fruit to obscure her true age. In reality, Bonney is a twelve year-old child, meaning that she became a pirate captain with a bounty of 140,000,000 when she was ten.
  • Late into Wandering Son Nitori begins working at a bar at age seventeen. She told the owner she was eighteen.
  • In Weathering With You Hina tells 16-year-old Hodaka that she's 18 so he should act more respectfully towards her. Near the end of the movie, Hodaka finds out from the police that she is actually only 15, having lied about her age on her résumé so she could work to support herself and her kid brother.

    Comedy 
  • In "No Sex (In the Champagne Room)", Chris Rock says that "If a girl says she's 20 and looks 16, she's 12."

    Comic Books 
  • The Avengers for a time had a member named Rage, who was an enormous, muscular man who gained superhuman strength from his adrenaline - basically a street-level Hulk. They assumed Rage was a grown adult, and were stunned when they finally learned that he was 12 years old and his appearance was due to a mutation.
  • Happens with a porn actress in the Ms. Tree storyline "Runaway II" (which was probably inspired by the Traci Lords scandal that was unfolding at the time).
  • Shazam!: Occasionally happens with Captain Marvel since he's an adult in superhero form but a kid (usually pre-teen) in civilian form.

    Fan Works 
  • This trope is the premise of a The Avengers fic Age Play by LaylaBinx. Tony and the others discover some shocking news regarding their Captain, much to readers' amusement.
  • In Fly Me to the Moon, Shadow and Maria don't bat an eye when the teenage Sonic claims to be Gerald's assistant.
  • Alice got into a lesbian bar in Metamorphosis (EndOfAbraxas) despite only being 18. Sei is able to tell she's under the drinking age of 20 but isn't bothered by it.
  • Skids and Mudflap are implied to be this in Things We Don't Tell Humans.
  • A Running Gag in the Touhou Project fandom is Time Abyss Yukari Yakumo claiming to be 17 years old, with any smart remarks along the lines of "more like 17 million" resulting in the offender getting gapped.

    Film — Animated 
  • Inverted with Ercole in Luca; he claims to be 16 when signing up for the Portorosso Cup, but other characters comment that he's getting too old to participate and he's obviously entering so he can easily beat the younger kids and lord his victories over them. The director of the film has said he envisions Ercole as actually being around 18 or 19 years old.

    Film — Live-Action 
  • In Animal House, one of the characters meets a girl and they have a fun romp that ends with them having sex in the middle of a football field. After all this is done, she reveals that she's thirteen. The guy is understandably horrified. This was a Censor Decoy that the censors somehow missed. The writers wanted them to "catch" this, then "allow" them to change it to sixteen as a compromise.
  • The Benchwarmers features one of the rival teams getting Carlos, a fifty-year-old Dominican man who claims he's twelve (using a piece of paper with his photo and the words "I am 12" written in crayon; the paper holds a dollar bill to bribe the umpire with). He even drinks alcohol and has a son.
  • In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Edmund (who is only about fifteen) attempts to lie about his age in order to enlist in the British army and serve in WWII. He steals his aunt's (non-photo) ID and tries to pass off "Alberta" as "Albert A." The ruse falls apart when Lucy walks in and calls him by his real name, much to the amusement of the other raw recruits in line behind him.
  • In Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, the oldest of the kids lies on a résumé in order to get a better job than flipping burgers so they have money for the summer. She winds up as an executive assistant instead of the secretary position she was aiming for, and has to continually lie about her age (and experience) in order to keep getting away with it. She eventually confesses to being in high school at the climax of the movie, but she's done such a great job turning the company around that the investors (and her boss) don't care.
  • In Hot Fuzz, Nicholas throws a bunch of underage drinkers out of the bar, who lied about their real age to get in. This comes back later in a grim way when Nicholas discovers that the NWA killed all the teenagers he picked up for underage drinking to avoid kids with arrest records making the town look bad.
  • Liar Liar: Fletcher is trying to defend his client, Mrs. Cole, in a divorce case; this is hampered by the fact that he knows she's in the wrong and is supernaturally compelled to tell the truth. He eventually wins by discovering a loophole, however: she was actually only seventeen when she and her (ex-)husband got married, but she claimed to be a few months older. That means their original prenuptial agreement is void but not their marriage, so she still gets half his wealth.
  • In The Matrix Revolutions, the Kid is well, a kid, but tries to pass himself off as an eighteen-year-old in order to fight the machines in the docks. Captain Mifune tells him he should have said sixteen, as that might be believable. When the Kid cops to it, Mifune points out he's too young to join the corps... until the Kid points out that the machines would kill him no matter his age, which convinces Mifune to let him help.
  • Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: After Pussycat proposes to give him head, Cliff asks if she has some kind of ID to confirm her age. She refuses and claims that she's eighteen, which Cliff isn't convinced by in the slightest. Pussycat's age is never specified, but it's heavily implied that she is underage.
  • Plot point in Pitch Perfect, where a boy from a local high school lies about his age and schooling to be able to compete in a college acapella competition. He is found out and the Bellas are still able to compete in nationals.
  • In Starkweather, Charlie's girlfriend Caril Ann is 14 years old but described as having the body of an 18-year-old.
  • One of the major subplots in Superbad involves the characters trying to pass as 21 (when they're still in high school) in order to buy alcohol. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Inverted in The Terminal. Amelia tells Viktor that while she's actually 39, she tells passengers she's 27 and lets her coworkers believe she's 33 because she's still single.
  • In Trainwreck, Amy goes to a club with her coworkers and ends up going home with the intern Donald (played by Ezra Miller, who was 22 at the time). After she punches him too hard when he asks her to slap him, he screams and his mom comes in and says that he's 16. Amy promptly gets fired from her job.
  • Whip It: The protagonist says she's 22 in order to be allowed to join the Roller Derby League. She's 17.
  • Youth (2017): Shi Linfeng, the soldier with full-body burns, is said to be seventeen. He confesses that he lied to recruitment and is actually sixteen.
  • In Zig Zag (2002), Walters tells Detective Hawke that ZigZag is eighteen so Hawke can interview him on the record without the permission of a parent. It doesn't work, since Hawke needs a driver's license.

    Literature 
  • Firo lies about his age in both directions in later volumes of Baccano! (set in 2002) once he discovers the loophole in the "No false names" clause of immortalitynote . Physically he's just shy of nineteen (and chronologically ninety), but he claims to be twenty-five to reap the benefits of the legal drinking and gambling age. Most people find it a bit hard to swallow, given that he has trouble passing for eighteen as it is.
  • Casteel Series: When Heaven finally gets to meet her birth grandmother Jillian and step-grandfather Tony, she tells them she's sixteen years old instead of seventeen to hide that her mother Leigh was already pregnant with her when she married her father Luke. It seems like a harmless white lie at first but turns out to have unexpected consequences as Tony is actually Heaven's birth father who raped and impregnated Leigh before she ran away from home and married Luke but since Heaven lied about being younger, Tony thinks that Luke was her actual father and encourages her to get romantically involved with his younger brother Troy, not knowing that Troy is actually Heaven's uncle by blood until Jillian tells him the truth.
  • In The Catcher in the Rye, high school student Holden Caulfield is proud of the premature grey hair on half of his head, claiming that it allows him to pass as an adult. No one is actually fooled. Holden often tries to get alcohol at places, but he fails just as often as he succeeds.
  • In The Devil is a Part-Timer! the hero Emilia is seventeen, but the ID papers she obtains after arriving on Earth claim she's over twenty. She did this so that she could get a better job and not have to deal with school. This is in contrast with the titular demon lord, who is really about 300 years old but claimed to be a teenager and is currently stuck working at a fast food restaurant.
  • Go Ask Alice: When they run away to California, sixteen-year-old Carla and her seventeen-year-old friend live under the guise of being eighteen. They even rent a store on their own.
  • In William Saroyan's The Human Comedy Homer Macauley, who's fourteen, claims to be sixteen to get a job as a messenger at the Postal Telegraph office. The boss isn't fooled but keeps him anyway.
  • In Wild Magic, the first book of The Immortals quartet, thirteen-year-old Daine claims to be fifteen. The person she's lying to sees through it with her magic but thinks she's a good liar and lets her come anyway.
  • James Bond lied about his age in order to join the Navy at the age of seventeen during WWII.
  • In Monstrous Regiment, Sergeant Jackrum covers for Oliver's struggle to shave Lieutenant Blouse by saying he was too young to shave and had lied about his age to enlist. Jackrum himself regularly deducts a couple of decades from his own age to stay in the army.
  • In Night, the protagonist and his father both have to lie about their ages to avoid extermination in the concentration camps.
  • In the Old Kingdom trilogy, when Sam starts flirting with Lirael, she discourages him by telling him that she's thirty-five years old (he's seventeen). When he expresses incredulity at this because she looks too young, she explains that she looks like she's only nineteen because she uses really effective youth-enhancing creams. He believes her. In fact, she looks nineteen because she is nineteen.
  • Reincarnated as a Sword: People who see Fran's strength simply assume she must be from a long-lived race like elves and is actually a seasoned veteran. But no, she's really just a talented 12-year-old girl who stumbled upon the titular magic sword that massively boosts her stats and growth.
  • Rick Brant: Scotty lied about his age to join the army in his early teens.
  • In The Savant, seventeen-year-old Louie Harkin lies about his age so he can join the Marines.
  • Nobody believes Ren in This Is Screwed Up, but I Was Reincarnated as a GIRL in Another World! is actually 11 years old when they meet her because she 1) is exceptionally tall for her age, 2) is exceptionally busty, 3) has two Fenrir as pets, 4) has the maturity of a 30-year-old man, and 5) routinely takes down monsters that C-ranks and above have a hard time with, even though it's illegal for her to hunt them down (though not to defend herself from them if they attack her).
  • In the Time Scout series, Margo Smith shows up on Time Terminal 86 claiming to be eighteen and determined to be the first female time scout. About halfway through the book, she reveals that she's just celebrated her seventeenth birthday. After a passionate rendezvous with a man twice her age.
  • In Titanic, Alfie Huggins claims he's a year older than he really is in order to get a job.
  • In Orson Scott Card's horror novel Treasure Box, Madeline has two secrets. One, which is revealed about halfway through the book, is that she's the result of a witch using magic to create the illusion of protagonist Quentin's dream girl. The second, revealed much later, is that the witch responsible for the illusion is twelve years old and has been bluffing her way through an adult romantic and sexual relationship for her own reasons.
  • Vorkosigan Saga: Miles Vorkosigan, in his "Admiral Naismith" persona, is reputed to look seventeen because of advanced rejuvenation techniques. He is, in fact, seventeen.
  • In the first Warrior Cats book, Lionheart asks a ShadowClan apprentice how old he is because he seems unusually small. The apprentice claims that he's six moons and that his mother is small too, but as it turns out he's actually only three moons, only half the age he's supposed to be to start training as a warrior. With the murderous Brokenstar as ShadowClan's leader, it's no wonder that he would be afraid of revealing that his leader was breaking the warrior code.

    Live-Action TV 
  • On 30 Rock, Liz claims to be 29, and goes on a date with a guy who claims to be 25. Halfway through the date, she confesses to being 37, and he admits that he's only 20.
  • American Idol:
    • In the first season, there was a guy who was a few years older than the maximum allowed; when they found out he was booted from the competition.
    • In the first season of Idol in Norway, a 15-year-old girl lied about being 16. She made it through the semifinals and was disqualified once they found out.
  • In Arrested Development, Maeby gets a job as a producer where she constantly has to hide the fact that she's still in high school. She deflects any comments about her age by acting flattered and saying "marry me!". At one point, someone from the family asks about her job, she reflexively tries the same deflection technique but only gets a confused response.
  • Bomb Girls: New factory worker Reggie lies about her age to get her job. Her coworker tries to use it against her when she finds out, but their supervisor turns a blind eye.
  • One of the major story arcs in Californication involves middle-aged Hank Moody being seduced by a girl who neglected to tell him she was only sixteen until the next day.
  • The Teaser of the very first Cheers episode has a teenage kid coming in and ordering a beer. When Sam asks for his ID, it shows him as being a sergeant in the U.S. Army and born in 1944.
    Sam: That makes you thirty-eight. (sarcastically) You must've fought in Vietnam.
    Kid: Oh, yeah.
    Sam: What was it like?
    Kid: (shuddering) Gross!
    Sam: Yeah, that's what they say: "War is gross."
  • On Cold Case, one subplot involved a witness who was an army recruit who lied about his age and was almost discharged (for other reasons).
  • Played with in one CSI: Miami episode. The victim is a pornographic actress who is determined to have been eighteen at the time of her death... but she has been in porn for a couple of years already, and the management of her company was aware.
  • When Laura married Petrie in the The Dick Van Dyke Show, she lied about her age. She told her fiancé that she was nineteen when she was really seventeen and hence too young to get married.
  • Doctor Who: In "Blink", Kathy Nightingale claimed to have been 18 after being sent back in time to 1920. Sally's reaction to deducing this upon seeing Kathy's grave indicates that however old she actually was, she wasn't 18.
  • On one episode of Everybody Hates Chris, Chris makes a fake ID with the name "Gene Simmons" on it in order to get into a concert.
  • In an episode of Friends, Monica dates a younger guy who appears to be in his early twenties and claims to be a senior in school. After they sleep together, he admits that he's not a college senior...
  • Ghostwriter: The main antagonist of the "Into the Comics" arc is an aspiring comic book artist who enters a contest for youths under 16, dressed up as a character he created and speaking in Totally Radical lingo to hide his true age. Whenever he gets questioned about it, he chalks it up to genetics or otherwise makes pretty paper-thin excuses.
  • One of Casey's dates in Greek turned out to be sixteen...and he had a fake ID good enough to fool Lizzi, the resident Party Patrol.
  • On Hannah Montana, Miley tried to make Jake jealous by accepting a date at the bowling alley with a guy she just met who claims to be a senior. Unfortunately for Miley, it turns out he is actually an 11-year-old brat and the "date" is really a birthday party.
  • This also happened on Happy Endings to Dave in the pilot-he meets a girl with a club and, still devastated over his fiancée Alex leaving him, sleeps with her. He then invites her to Penny's birthday party to make Alex jealous, and it's then revealed she's still in high school, although apparently of legal age. Cue Spit Take.
  • In one episode of House, a young man brings in his apparently mentally ill mother for treatment. House eventually notices little details about the guy hinting that he's not as old as he pretends and eventually confronts him. He turns out to be a fifteen-year-old boy masquerading as an adult so he can support his mother. This leads to some drama when someone places a call from the hospital to Child Services to pick him up, and the boy immediately blames House. This leads to the "Eureka!" Moment since House finds out the boy's mom made the call because she wanted to free her son from the burden of caring for her. House realizes she's not crazy after all, and that her apparent mental illness is actually a symptom of something else.
  • Inverted on How I Met Your Mother, when Lily and Robin, both pushing 30, try to get into a high school prom (to listen to the band) by pretending to be 17. The guard isn't fooled for a second. They do manage to go as the dates of two nerds.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
    • In one episode, Charlie starts dating a Korean girl who turns out to be 12.
    • In one episode, the gang notes that the bar's crowd has become really young. Really young. Charlie suspiciously asks the closest patron how old she is, and she sheepishly answers, "... Twenty-one?" while revealing braces on her teeth. Charlie kicks everyone out, and the gang quickly discover that their bar has become popular with high school kids.
  • Gai Amatsu from Kamen Rider Zero-One will often proclaim he is "eternally 24", until Is reveals his true age of 45, much to his displeasure.
  • An episode of L.A. Law featured a man on trial for both rape and statutory rape. His defense to the statutory rape charge was that the girl looked over the age of consent and was being served alcohol in a hotel bar.
  • Malcolm in the Middle: A story arc at the end of season 5 revolved around 16-year-old Reese running away to join the army under a fake identity after crossing the Despair Event Horizon from Malcolm stealing his girlfriend. He excels in basic training, but after he's deployed to Afghanistan he gets cold feet and deserts. Meanwhile his mother Lois raises hell trying to find him and manages to track him down in India, then proceeds to drag him by the ear all the way back to California.
  • M*A*S*H:
    • Ron Howard plays a kid who lied to get into the Marines; Hawkeye catches him and sends him home.
      Kid: I'll hate you for the rest of my life!
      Hawkeye: Let's hope it's a long and happy hate.
    • Col. Potter did the same thing back in WWI; apparently he was Older Than He Looked.
      Potter: Had big thighs for a boy.
    Thing is, if he was only 15 in 1917, then at most he would have been 51 during the Korean War. That's about a decade younger than Harry Morgan was during the show.
  • Mock the Week did this once on one of their Scenes We'd Like To See.
    "Amy is sixteen. At least she said she was. How much trouble are you in?"
  • The final season of New York Undercover featured a Fair Cop claiming to be 26. Her lieutenant confronts her with proof that she is in fact 22, meaning that she was underage when she took the exam for entry into the police force.
  • Inverted in Shake it Up. A famous celebrity singer (a parody of Justin Bieber) guest stars on Shake It Up! Chicago claiming to be 16. However, after CeCe and Rocky accidentally release a picture they took of him kissing his manager, he thanks them confessing that he is really 24note and that his manager is actually his wife.
  • Too Old to Die Young: The 30-year-old main character's girlfriend is 17 years old, which causes him some trouble. In one scene, she's shown drinking at a bar when one of the bartenders suspiciously asks how old she is. She says she's 22, but the bartender isn't convinced, so she threatens to have the place shut down if she isn't allowed to keep drinking.
  • Inverted in the first season of Ugly Betty: Daniel sleeps with a Sensual Slav model named Petra and her sister Lena, who then reveals that Petra is 16 and she's actually her mother. They blackmail Daniel into making Petra the cover model of the next issue, or they go to the police and the media. It turns out Petra is actually 20 and Daniel doesn't have to risk prison.
  • In the 7 Yüz episode "Büyük Günahlar", Elif claims to be a twenty-something college student when she calls Aytaç over the telephone, resulting in a sexual exchange. He is naturally horrified to learn that she's actually a fifteen-year-old, especially when Mete reveals the conversation was recorded.

    Music 
  • Mark Chesnutt's "She Was" begins with the subject of the song running away to get married. "He was eighteen; she wasn't. But she said she was."
  • In "Parents Just Don't Understand" by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, the age of the girl the narrator picks up is never stated, but he is quite shocked when he later finds out she's only 12.
  • Geri Halliwell from The Spice Girls writes in her autobiography that when she wanted to see the film Desperately Seeking Susan at the age of twelve, she padded out her chest with her brother's football socks to make herself look fifteen.

    Podcasts 
  • In The Magnus Archives, Martin lies about his degree and age on his CV in order to get a job at the Magnus Institute. Jon also lies about his age, claiming to be a decade older than he actually is for no discernible reason.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • ECW's infamous "Mass Transit Incident". In 1996, Erich Kulas, a 17-year-old, 350-pound kid from New England with no in-ring ability, lied about his age, his wrestling experience, and his schooling background (claiming to have been trained by Killer Kowalski) in order to get into the ring. He was given the gimmick "Mass Transit", a Ralph Kramden-like wrestling bus driver, and thrown into a tag-team hardcore match (filling in for Axl Rotten) alongside D-Von Dudley against New Jack and Mustapha Seed. It ended about as well as you would expect — Kulas left the match lying in a pool of his own blood after a botched bladejob, New Jack was arrested and later sued (he was let off after it was revealed how Kulas had lied to the bookers), and ECW's first pay-per-view, ''Barely Legal'' was almost canceled and wound up getting pushed back by four months.
  • It's Common Knowledge among wrestling fans that the Briscoe Brothers were under the legal age for a wrestling license when they made their pro debut, the "evidence" being Jay Briscoe's claim to have spent his entire adult life wrestling for Ring of Honor when they did not debut there and the fact every CZW show they worked in a commission state before their ROH debut had them under masks.

    Video Games 

    Visual Novels 

    Web Animation 
  • Subverted twice with Yang in RWBY. The drinking age in Remnant is presumably at least eighteen. In both the Yellow trailer and the first episode of Volume 5 (set after she's eighteen), she goes to a bar and is asked if she's old enough to be there. Both times it turns out Yang's not interested in alcohol.

    Webcomics 
  • In Beloved L, a sixteen-year-old girl goes to a club and sleeps with a woman over twice her age by pretending to be older.
  • Least I Could Do has a storyline where the main character meets a girl in a bar who turns out to be a minor.
  • Something*Positive: Helen (a crossover character from Penny and Aggie) tries to get a job at Nerdrotica despite being underage. Nancy catches her out because of her crappy fake ID.

    Web Original 
  • Tina Marie, an ex-prostitute's diary, is a blog in Spanish (very NSFW) where the author, a former Mexican prostitute, tells how she started working at 17 in a "modeling agency", her bosses knew her true age, but they ordered her to tell her clients that she was just over 18 years old.

    Western Animation 
  • In the third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Gaang has to pretend to be Fire Nation citizens, which entails Aang enrolling in school. However, his behavior causes his teacher to demand a meeting with his parents. So, Sokka (15) and Katara (14) dress up to make themselves look older (Sokka donning a beard and Katara stuffing a pillow how her shirt to make herself look pregnant) and present themselves as Aang's parents, "Wang and Sapphire Fire".
  • In the Family Guy episode "Quagmire's Mom", Quagmire has sex with a 15-year-old girl who claimed she was 23 and is arrested for statuatory rape. As a minor, the girl faces no legal ramifications herself.
  • An episode of The Flintstones has the family traveling into the far future. A man tries to pass his son off as twelve years old to get children's fare. The worker immediately pulls out a device and slips it over the boy's wrist to confirm his age as fourteen, forcing the dad to pay regular adult fare.
  • G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: Shipwreck, while being interrogated by Cobra, reveals he joined the Navy at age 16, having lied about his age (the minimum age to enter the US Navy is 17).
  • Gravity Falls:
    • In "The Inconviencing", twelve-year-old Dipper claims that he and his twin sister Mabel are thirteen ("and thus technically teenagers!") so they can hang out with his Precocious Crush, Wendy, and her friends. He's eventually forced to reveal his age towards the end of the episode, but he and Mabel still hang out with Wendy and her friends in later episodes.
    • In another episode they use fake IDs to get into a bar to investigate a crime. The IDs were clearly made by Mabel — both of them have mustaches and googly eyes, their names are "Lady Mabelton" and "Lord Dippingsauce," and they are trying to pass as 21 and 45, respectively.
  • King of the Hill: Cotton Hill states he was about sixteen when he joined the Army, lying about his age.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Parodied: Grampa Simpson says that he fought in World War I — "of course, I had to lie about my age to get in". In the ensuing Flashback, he's five.
    • In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", Bart tells a tattoo artist that he's 21. He buys it without question.
  • In the Undergrads episode "Drunks", Nitz convinces Gimpy to make fake IDs for everyone at the dorm so they can get into bars. Rocko has one that is just a piece of cardboard with his photo and "I am 21 so drinking is yes". None of them get caught.
  • In Young Justice (2010), the Justice League are largely annoyed when they discover that Billy Batson (see above) was actually a ten-year-old with an Older Alter Ego. He defends himself by saying that he never actually claimed to be older (which Wonder Woman writes off as a "lie of omission"). It's also implied that the Justice League didn't technically have an age restriction before this came up. They vote whether or not to expel Billy from the League but let him stay.

    Real Life 
  • A few well-known actors got big breaks this way:
    • Laurence Fishburne lied to the producers of Apocalypse Now to get a role in the movie. He said he was 18 when he was really 14. Coincidentally, his character was seventeen years old. And the film took so long to complete that by the end of the shooting, he actually was 17.
    • Mila Kunis was 14 when she auditioned for the role of Jackie on That '70s Show. She told the casting directors she'd be 18 on her birthday, but didn't say which one. This made her the actor on the show closest to her character's age.
    • Gillian Anderson was twenty-four when she auditioned for The X-Files, but she knew Scully was a doctor so she said she was twenty-seven.
    • Melody Patterson used a forged birth certificate when she auditioned for the role of Wrangler Jane in F Troop. It showed she was 18 but she was actually 15.
    • Al Lewis claimed he was significantly older to land the role of Grandpa on The Munsters—he was only 41, a year younger than his screen daughter Yvonne De Carlo, but claimed to be in his mid-50s. He continued the deception for the rest of his life, and ran for governor of New York in 1998, claiming to have been born in 1910, or age 88 at the time. After his death, various government records and his own family revealed he was actually born in 1923.
  • Also a trope in more... prurient forms of acting:
    • Traci Lords became a porn star at the age of 16, using a fake ID. Authorities discovered this two years later, and almost all of her films were removed from distribution. To this day her early films are illegal to even look at (much less distribute), because they became retroactively classed as child porn. Her lie resulted in several hoodwinked men being sent to prison and shook the industry to its core. The result of the Lords scandal is that the porn industry is now extremely thorough in their background checks to make damn sure all their actors are at least 18. A similar incident occurred involving performer Brent Corrigan.
    • In 2010, a porn actress who used the artistic name of "Bieyanka Moore" was accused of actually being only 15 years old (she was supposedly a teenage girl who escaped from her home and stole the identification of an older woman), it is not clear if she really was a minor or not, but she has completely disappeared from the industry and social networks.
    • Similarly, The Guy Game was pulled from shelves across America when it was learned that one of the actresses featured in the risqué full motion video sections wasn't 18 at the time of filming.
    • María Jose "Cote" López is a Chilean model who in 2007 became quite famous due to her appearances on television and numerous photo sessions where she exploited all her sensuality. She claimed to be 19 years old, but it was later discovered that she was actually only 17 years old.
  • In sports:
    • The Chinese gymnastics team was accused of doing this in the 2008 Olympics and in other international gymnastic tournaments and had been caught at it for the 2000 Olympics, resulting in their losing a medal 10 years after the fact.
    • 2001 Little League World Series pitcher Danny Almonte's father forged his birth certificate, saying he was 12 (eligible to play) instead of 14 (ineligible). Unsurprisingly, his team was disqualified.
    • Manute Bol, the tallest player in NBA history, was born in an isolated village in what is now South Sudan and never had a formal birth certificate. When he came to America in 1983, his birthdate was recorded as October 16, 1962, but Kevin Mackey, the college basketball coach who recruited Bol, now says he arbitrarily made that day up when he was negotiating with US Customs officials to get Bol the proper documentation, and he suspects Bol may actually have been around 40 at the time. This means he would've been in his mid-50s when he retired from the NBA, making him by far the oldest player in league history.
    • In the non-fiction book Outcasts United, about an Atlanta youth soccer team made up of refugees, the team is accused of this trope by other teams because many of the team members' birthdays were listed as "January 1". The unfortunate truth was that many of the refugees didn't know their actual birthdate and so were given "January 1" as a birthday.
  • A common tactic employed by young men eager to join the army, especially in World War I and World War II.
    • It was also reversed; Men older than the 40-year-old cutoff age often claimed to be in their late 30s so that they could serve. Allegedly, some boys would put a scrap of paper with the correct number (16 or 17) written on it in their boot, so they could say they were "over 17" without it technically being a lie (which may have helped them keep their story straight, if nothing else). Other versions of such stories imply that the recruiters encouraged this so they had plausible deniability, or even giving advice like "walk twice around the building and come back in; then you'll be 17".
    • Audie Murphy, in a literal example. He was seventeen when he joined the US Army after his sister altered his birth certificate. Before attempting to join the army, he was turned down by the Marines, the Paratroopers, and the Navy. After finally being accepted into the military as an Army infantryman, he went on to become the most decorated soldier in US Army history. His tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery states his false date of birth, however.
  • Edgar Allan Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. To get around the age issue to get the marriage license, they had some papers forged that gave her age as 21.
  • Prostitution and the like:
    • The Rubygate scandal has this in spades. Browse The Other Wiki for details.
    • Zahia Dehar, a French prostitute who slept with several high profile footballers (among others), have done so under the age of 18. Her clients deny that they were ever informed, which she has confirmed several times.
    • Inverted by teenaged prostitutes, who often tell the johns that they're younger than they actually are. Apparently, that makes them seem more attractive.
  • Inverted by Kikuko Inoue as her Running Gag. She's already a married woman, now in her late 50s(!), but she still constantly refers to herself as only being "17 years old".
  • Walt Disney lied about his age to get into the Red Cross early in his life. His mother didn't approve but allowed it to happen.


Alternative Title(s): Really Seventeen Years Old

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