Follow TV Tropes

Following

Southern-Fried Genius

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/robot_chicken_genius.jpg
You can always count on him to solve a practical problem.

"I know I don't sound the part. Get raised by brahmin ranchers, and you never lose the twang. Drives Hildern crazy. But I know every inch of the power grid from Hoover Dam to Shady Sands."
Dr. Angela Williams, Fallout: New Vegas

An inversion of the "idiotic redneck" stereotype people from the Deep South often have attached to them, in a similar mould to Black and Nerdy.

This character may have the same down-home sensibilities or otherwise act like a good ol' southerner, but is very, very smart. Maybe they exhibit Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness alongside their Southern vernacular, maybe they have a teleporter in their garage, maybe they're engineering geniuses capable of creating huge automatons, who knows. The juxtaposition is often helped by a cornpone Hayseed Name.

The Simple Country Lawyer exemplifies this trope; he uses his intelligence and accent as a weapon, talking in simple allegories and colloquialisms in order to make people think he's a moron, then brutalizing them with his superior wit.

May overlap with Good Is Not Dumb and/or Southern Gentleman. See also Country Mouse and Southern-Fried Private. Contrast Half-Witted Hillbilly.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Terryman from Kinnikuman and his son Terry the Kid/Terry Kenyon from Ultimate Muscle look, dress and (in the localizations) speak like stereotypical Texan ranchers, but also serve as their respective series' Mr. Exposition whenever a scientific explanation is called for.
  • Due to Accent Adaptation, Bill tends to display this in the translation of PokĂ©mon Adventures as a substitute for the original's Kansai-ben — which was, much like this trope, presumably intended as a subversion of The Idiot from Osaka.
  • The students at Yezo High in Silver Spoon may not do well in traditional academics, but many of them are prone to going into lengthy, university-level discussions on such subjects as the mechanical specs of farm equipment, food processing chemistry and biotechnology.
  • In Star Blazers, the English dub of Space Battleship Yamato, communications officer Eager is given a thick Southern accent, but he's clearly a very technically proficient and deeply competent comm officer.

    Comedy 
  • Jeff Foxworthy once joked that most people automatically deduct 100 IQ points if they hear a southern drawl, and would probably walk out on their brain surgeon if he had an accent. He himself qualifies for a Real Life example, as he attended Georgia Tech and was employed by IBM (and not in a janitorial capacity as he is sometimes wont to [over-modestly] state) before making it in the world of stand-up comedy.
    Jeff: Allrite, now whut we gon' do is... saw the top o' yo head off... root around in there with a stick... and see if we can't find that dag-burn clot. [beat] Heh, no thanks, I'll just die.
  • Another stand-up joked that you can basically say any stupid thing with a British accent and be believed, and how he feels sorry for southern nuclear physicists with the opposite problem.
    • This might have been Tim Allen—in his book Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man, he mentions meeting a Southern engineer when he toured an aircraft carrier (because of course he did).
    He was smarter than I'll ever be, but he sounded dumber than a ham hock. "That boat five football feels lawng, nuklar pawr."
  • Trae Crowder, AKA The Liberal Redneck, is known for this as well, his comedy often comes from the contrast of his thick Tennessee accent and his biting political commentary. As a bonus, he also happens to hold a Masters Degree.

    Comic Books 
  • Jim in Creature Tech is a bumpkin redneck with a heavy Southern drawl who demonstrates rather marvelous skills in particle and quantum physics, electronics, mechanics and alien technology.
  • Flash Forward from the 2001 Doom Patrol revamp is a poor kid from rural Alabama who dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He's also unquestionably the smartest person on the team, and the others aren't exactly morons themselves.
  • The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers: While hitchhiking to San Francisco, Freewheelin' Franklin meets a friendly redneck who had just learned about "merry-jew-wanna" in Acapulco and had bought a camper full up with him. Franklin offers to sell it, figuring he can scam this guy asking a dirt-cheap price from him, but the guy then matter-of-factly rattles off one potential marketplace town after another, knowing the going price and all the dealing pros and cons at each location. Franklin's grudging admiration is deflated when the guy asks "One thing I was wondering, though - what does that stuff do to you guys? I never smoked any of it myself..."
  • Samuel "Cannonball" Guthrie from New Mutants is a former coal miner from Kentucky with the ability to fly through explosive propulsion, as well as secondary force field generation. He's also highly intelligent, extremely intuitive, and incredibly clever and creative when it comes to using his powers.
  • PS238:
    • Herschel Clay in is more or less a redneck Tony Stark, with a business empire, power armor — and a gimme cap.
    • This guy is at least smarter than the protagonists gave him credit for.
      Redneck: Just 'cuz I live out in th' sticks with piles of junk 'round my trailer don't mean I'm ignorant of history.
  • One issue of The Tick had the characters run into this, when a town full of hillbillies got their hands on The Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • Veronica Cale is a Mad Scientist Corrupt Corporate Executive from Texas, introduced in the pages of Wonder Woman (1987).
  • Dr. Billy Joe Robidoux from Wynonna Earp is a Mad Scientist version of this. To quote Wynonna: "He's a southern-fried gumbo of Dr. Josef Mengele, Dr. Frankenstein and runs a real-life version of The Island of Doctor Moreau."

    Fan Works 
  • The Codot Verse version of Jonathan Crane speaks in a pretty thick Georgian accent (which has a basis in canon believe or not), but is no less intelligent than his canon counterparts in terms of medical and chemistry knowledge.

    Films — Animation 
  • Mater from Cars 2, whose friendly and outgoing nature is coupled with an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure car parts. Later, he's the one who figures out the plot to sabotage and discredit the World Grand Prix.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In The A-Team, Bunny-Ears Lawyer Murdock has a southern accent. Given that he's insane and can change his voice on a whim, though, it's entirely possible that he's faking it.
  • John Nash from A Beautiful Mind and Real Life.
  • The Blind Side features a version of Tennessee where college education is the norm and there's no condescension to the intelligence of football players in the Southern town.
  • The Coen Brothers movies often feature Southern characters who either are very smart, or talk like it.
  • Samuel Gerard from The Fugitive has a distinctly Southern accent, wears jeans to work, isn't afraid of the occasional well-placed profanity, and is a high-ranking law enforcement officer whose specialty is hunting down dangerous criminals. He earns the trust of the title character by basically being a badass, and independently and near-singlehandedly solves the mystery of the film.
  • Budd in Kill Bill, played by Michael Madsen doing his best Southern drawl, may live in a trailer and work as a bouncer and janitor at a trashy strip club, but he's a lot cleverer than he initially seems. His Combat Pragmatist tactics make him one of the Bride's more effective opponents, and he's also a surprisingly philosophical Noble Demon.
  • Benoit Blanc of Knives Out is a genius detective with a strong but nonspecific Southern accent. It stands out against the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant cast of the first film and the celebrities in the sequel with neutral American accents. In the sequel, he suggests that he will occasionally play up his Southernness to distract people.
  • Brad Whitaker from The Living Daylights is something of a whiz at both history and military technology.
  • Logan Lucky has a whole cast of these, organising the robbery of a NASCAR event. They pull off a very elaborate scam that involves a great deal of misdirection not just of their targets and law enforcement, but even some of their fellow thieves, and the crew includes genius mechanics and an incarcerated explosives expert. Most are portrayed as Genius Ditzes, being brilliant in their respective fields but often clueless in others or showing an utter lack of common sense at times, and much of the comedy comes from them being very smart on some occasions and ridiculously dumb on others.
  • Judge Haller and DA Jim Trotter III in My Cousin Vinny. Vinny thinks he can run roughshod over them when defending his cousin in an Alabama courtroom, but they turn out to be a lot more intelligent than he suspects. Fortunately for his cousin, so is Vinny.
  • In the Robin Williams movie RV, the family spends a good chunk of the movie thinking that the RV full of friendly Southern people were redneck hick stalkers. They were two for three. Near the end of the movie, the kids witness the redneck's kids doing home-school work out of an advanced Calculus book. Cue the daughter saying in complete astonishment, "So... you guys are smart."
  • Cade Yeager from Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Texan inventor.
  • Dale from Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is a variation; he never finished grade school, but he's got a great mind for trivia.
  • Bobby Boucher in The Waterboy only seems dumb due to years of excessive sheltering by his mother who taught him everything "is the Devil!" He has practical knowledge about water filtration, and later does well with every college class, even having a near-perfect score on his high school-equivalency exam.
  • William Stryker from X2: X-Men United. He has a slight Southern accent, and he's also a talented scientist and military strategist.

    Literature 
  • Agent Pendergast: The title character is reminiscent of Atticus Finch (see below). He sports a strong New Orleans accent paired with a razor-sharp wit and legal mind.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In Mortal Fear, newly-turned vampire Billy Bob is a fat, bearded southerner who is a former computer repairman who can hack into cable channels to watch his favorite shows without paying. He is also a decently tactical leader.
  • Bunnicula: In Nighty-Nightmare (Book 4), Bud and Spud come across as dumb hicks, but are later revealed to have graduated cum laude from college — Bud (real name Buford) is an architect, and Spud (real name Spalding) practices law.
    Bud: And one of these days, he'll get it right!
    Spud: [whacks him]
  • In The Dresden Files, Ebenezar McCoy is acknowledged as one of the most powerful and dangerous wizards in the world. He has centuries of experience and knowledge to draw on, and literally wrote the book on practical entry-level spellcasting. He lives on a farm in rural Missouri, speaks with a rural accent, and has typical rural values. His Vitriolic Best Bud and fellow wizard Listens-to-Wind jokingly calls him an "inbred hillbilly redneck."
  • Robert A. Heinlein's "Future History" series:
    • Andrew Jackson Libby from is a boy from the Ozarks who, among other things, discovers artificial gravity and hyperspace travel. Even a thousand years later, Lazarus Long comments that Libby was the only man who ever understood the mathematics of hyperspace: not only is every other pilot who claims to understand Libby's "imperial numbers" a liar and a menace to his passengers, but every single computer that can navigate through hyperspace is a copy of Libby's unique mind.
    • Lazarus Long probably qualifies as well, though his is a more general kind of Renaissance genius, capable of doing anything (Libby was a capable mechanic, and at home in greasy overalls, but happier with pure numbers) and anyone. When not deliberately speaking another language or putting on polish, Lazarus reverts to the rusty Missouri saw he spoke in his youth.
    • Note well that Heinlein himself was from rural "Bible Belt" Missouri, and that Long at least was an Author Avatar.
  • Neuromancer: Dixie Flatline, a former "cowboy" (hacker) is written as being from near Atlanta, and is written with an "Good Ol' Boy" accent and mannerisms. He's renowned as a clever hacker and has the ability to cleverly explain concepts to the main character.
  • Patternist: Asa Elias "Eli" Doyle is a Black and Nerdy geologist and astronaut. His friends note that he's very good at code-switching and at playing up his accent when he wants to be underestimated.
  • The minor character Bud in Kurt Vonnegut's debut Player Piano is a Georgian smart enough (maybe not) to create a machine that makes his job unnecessary.
  • Military science fiction authors John Ringo and Travis S. Taylor have made good use of this trope more than once.
    • In Von Neumann's War, Earth is invaded by a horde of Von Neumann Machines. New weapons capable of fighting the machines are developed by two of the smartest people in the world who both are Southerners. One is a PhD physicist and the other is a graduate student working as a Hooter's waitress from Alabama.
    • In the Into the Looking Glass series, one of the protagonists is a genius Southerner Omnidisciplinary Scientist working as a scientist for a fictional defense contractor. Ringo modeled Dr. Weaver on Taylor, who was uninvolved in the initial book of the series.
  • Serge Storms :
    • Story Long from Nuclear Jellyfish is a stripper from Jacksonville who enjoys drinking cold beer, wearing cutoff jeans, and in-depth discussions of Supreme Court rulings, Senate filibusters, Florida history, and the Code of Hammurabi.
    • Jasper from Clownfish Blues is an Apalachicola fisherman who digs up his own bait and whose appearance prompts a Deliverance joke, only for Jasper to reveal that, unlike most people Serge knows, he's read the original book by James Dickey, along with the works of James Joyce and William Faulkner
    Jasper: Dad-gum right I know Dickey, Southern literary lion, and poet loreee-ate.
    • Darby Pope from The Pope of Palm Beach may look and sometimes act like just a Florida beach hippie but is one of the best-read people in town.
    • Benmont Pinsch from No Sunscreen for the Dead is a brilliant data analyst who previously worked for a company converting textbooks into digital materials for online classes. He hails from a Tennessee coal mining town that is implied to have had a lot of bright kids in it, as his high school girlfriend and ex-wife won a pi-memorizing competition at their school.
  • Silver John: The titular character is a wandering singer from the Ozarks, who also happens to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of American mythology and folklore and knows hundreds of folk songs. It's stated that he could easily have gotten Ph.D.s in both anthropology and musicology if he'd bothered with formal education, and he notes that he was the Library of Congress' second choice for gathering and recording American folk songs (though he secretly admits that Bascom Lamar Lunsford was the better choice).
  • Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, though he certainly doesn't exhibit any real southern stereotypes, at least no negative stereotypes. He's sort of the genteel southern elite, an erudite, upper class Southern gentleman. Fortunately for his children and his client, he also displays an educated, liberal tolerance and gentility as well. (Let's not get into his portrayal in Lee's original draftnote  Go Set a Watchman, although as strange as it is, it doesn't detract from the man's intelligence.) He is a crack shot with a rifle, though he tries to keep that fact away from his children.
  • From the Whateley Universe: Multiple Gadgeteer Geniuses:
  • The hero of Way Station is a rural mountaineer who is befriended by an alien and becomes the caretaker of an interstellar teleportation waystation, with all the technical know-how that the job title implies.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Angel:
    • Lindsey MacDonald is a skilled lawyer who also knows a thing or two about magic. His exact origin is ambiguous, though he has an Oklahoma license plate on his pickup truck. Angel dismissively calls him a "tiny Texan" at one point; this could be an in-joke directed at Christian Kane, who hails from Dallas.
    • Not to mention Fred, who's basically a Farmer's Daughter turned borderline-Mad Scientist.
  • Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory is originally from Texas, but this trope is subverted in that he does a lot of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and he doesn't have the stereotypical Texan/southern accent. However, it's implied that he adopted his curt way of speaking to distance himself from his southern background. Whenever he is distressed, upset, angry or occasionally drunk, he reverts to his native Texan accent, including even using country-styled idioms (the actor also has a natural Southern twang, being a native of Houston). Furthermore, he is surprisingly very knowledgeable about American football (it was inescapable where he lived after all and his dad would make him watch and come to games as a bonding activity), frying meats that aren't chicken as if they were chicken, and some stuff on firearms (he offered to teach Leonard on "how to shoot close enough to a raccoon that it craps itself").
  • Bones: Finn Abernathy, the squintern introduced in Season 7, is initially teased by Hodgins for his Southern drawl (and calls him out on it), and manages to impress Temperance Brennan with his forensic skills when they first meet (no mean feat there).
  • A non-heroic version appears on Boston Legal in the form of the sleazy Southern defense lawyer Alan would occasionally cross swords with.
  • LAPD Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson of The Closer, who is a CIA-trained interrogator, is phenomenally skilled at obtaining confessions... and sounds like she just took the train up from Georgia. Which, y'know, she did.
  • Ballistics expert Calleigh Duquesne of CSI: Miami is from Georgia.
  • Former FBI Agent Jo Danville who joins the CSI: NY team in Season 7 is an expert profiler/scientist from Alabama who tells Mac people, be they suspects or superior officers, open up to her because they don't quite know what to do with her Southern charm.
  • J.R. Ewing of Dallas is a folksy ten-gallon hat wearing Texas good old boy and yet arguably the most famous TV villain of The '80s. Every inch The Chessmaster and Magnificent Bastard.
  • Daisy Duke of The Dukes of Hazzard. Despite quite a few Awesome moments when she proved to be made of both stern and smart stuff, in the series proper she's still best known for being one of the famous Ms. Fanservice of the twentieth century. In the 1997 telemovie Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion, it's revealed that Daisy is well on the way to getting a Ph.D in Ecology. During that movie, despite being kidnapped by the Big Bad, she scams the Big Bad into helping Daisy plan her wedding while being held hostage, AND tips off her cousins as to where she is from the pattern of the purchases the Big Bad is suddenly making.
  • In Farscape, astronaut scientist John Crichton hails from Florida. Beyond the general intelligence and scientific education required for all astronauts, Crichton invented his own space shuttle and discovered how to create wormholes, while still having a stereotypically "Southern" personality. This trope is taken even further with his "super-evolved" version who speaks with a clear Texan drawl. Ben Browder himself was born in Tennessee, raised in North Carolina, and went to college in South Carolina.
  • Good Eats star/creator Alton Brown, emphatically so: Brown started off a cinematographer (most notably doing camera work for music videos for bands like R.E.M.), he studied science (of which he had been a poor student in school) to excel at culinary school, and built his show around his science-based cooking and general erudition.
  • Justified, being set in rural Kentucky, is chock-full of these. Perhaps the best example is Boyd Crowder, a highly articulate and charismatic criminal who has knowledge of explosives and thinks faster than almost anyone else in the cast. Also worth mentioning is Bo Crowder, his father, a crime lord who lampshades this trope to the out-of-town gangster who underestimates him.
    Bo: You know, I may not own a private plane or a fancy car, and when you look at me, you probably just see some dumb redneck who likes to eat roadkill for breakfast and have sex with his cousins. I don't eat roadkill, I don't screw my relatives, and I didn't just get off of no short bus. So for you to bring me all the way down here to threaten me, as if I didn't already fully understand the stakes of our business agreement? Hoss, that's just downright insulting.
  • Law & Order:
    • Abbie Carmichael, of the Law & Order Mother Ship, was a Southern-Fried Legal Genius, with a dash of Blonde Republican Sex Kitten (OK, brunette Republican Sex Kitten, but really, does it matter?) and a bucket of Hello, Attorney!.
    • Also DA Arthur Branch, a smart man, whom the writers made no attempt to hide was simply his actor (the actually excellent lawyernote  and former US Senator from Tennessee Fred Dalton Thompson) in the form of a fictional character.
    • One of McCoy's opponents deliberately invoked this trope to appear simultaneously a down-home country boy, just one of us chickens to pair with his rapier wit and encyclopedic knowledge of the law.
  • Jake Stone in The Librarians 2014 has spent much of his life working on an oil rig in Oklahoma, spending his evenings in a bar with his friends. His favorite Christmas pastime is getting into bar fights. Secretly, he has an IQ of 190, knows seven languages, and is one of the world's foremost experts on art history, writing well-known papers under different (well-established) names. He's the guy most museums will call on to authenticate a new find, and he's the guy they're afraid to call on, since he'll spot a fake easily. Why doesn't he reveal the truth to his family? In his own words, "family ain't easy."
  • Overton the handyman on Living Single; he knows Hebrew for one.
  • Sawyer of Lost. He's a very successful con man, after all, and is commonly seen reading a wide variety of literature.
  • In the M*A*S*H episode "Temporary Duty", Hawkeye is traded to the 8063 for Cpt. Roy Dupree who is equal parts chicken-fried hillbilly and incredibly brilliant surgeon.
  • Dwight Hendricks of Memphis Beat (with a side of Defective Detective).
  • My World… and Welcome to It: The character of Zeph Leggin appears in two episodes, "A Friend of the Earth" and "Native Wit." He's essentially a transplanted hayseed sage from the South or Midwest who hangs around Westbury's version of a general store, dispensing homespun witticisms to his circle of admirers. John crosses his path soon enough and spends both episodes matching wits with him.
  • Chris LaSalle of NCIS: New Orleans has a very thick 'Bama accent, courtesy of being played by Lucas Black. He's also a highly skilled NCIS agent.
  • This concept was discussed in an early QI, where Stephen Fry said that it's difficult to imagine someone from the American South becoming a professor of fine art, and Rich Hall agreed, saying that if you come from the south, it's difficult to have any credibility if you do anything other than play a washboard with spoons.
  • A So Random! sketch revolved around a "simple country boy" who can instruct others on intricate things like heart surgery and bomb disarming.
  • Ben Browder's natural drawl comes through more with his character in Stargate SG-1. It's adorable.
  • Steven Sharpe/the Gambler from Stargirl (2020) is the Injustice Society's master hacker who speaks with a thick Southern drawl.
  • Star Trek:
  • Supernatural:
    • Ash drinks like a fish, lives in a Roadhouse bar, and can be found sleeping on the pool table. But, he is a genius who was kicked out of MIT for reasons he won't specify, and in Season 5 is able to hack Heaven itself.
    • Bobby Singer looks and sounds like a Midwestern trucker but is a Cool Old Guy who's a walking talking compendium of demonic lore.
  • Phil Harding of Time Team proves that the U.S. is not the only country with a rural South and people subverting the stereotype. While he has less formal education than the rest of the team (his doctorate is honourary and he only has a high-school education), he's a field archaeologist with over forty years of experience, a trained scuba diver and President of the Nautical Archaeological Society as well as an expert flint knapper. And plays a mean guitar in his spare time. All concealed in the body and accent of a cider-fueled West Country Owl/Man-hybrid.
  • Rust Cohle from True Detective is a genius detective with a thick Texan drawl.
  • Daryl from The Walking Dead (2010) appears to be a bad tempered, redneck hick. He's also an excellent tracker, has knowledge of Native American history, and is quite possibly the best all around survivalist in the group.
  • The West Wing has Ainsley Hayes, the Trope Namer for Blonde Republican Sex Kitten, who trounces one of the main characters in a televised debate in her Establishing Character Moment. There are other, lesser examples throughout the series.

    Podcasts 
  • S-Town centers on John B. McLemore, an antiquarian horologist (read: restorer of historical clocks) and all-around self-educated polymath who lives in the small town of Woodstock, Alabama (on the outer fringes of Greater Birmingham). He calls it "Shit Town" and invites Yankee journalist Brian Reed to investigate corruption and a possible murder in Woodstock. And then the plot thickens...
  • In Trials & Trebuchets, the gnome wizard Winsler Wallaby is a humble farm boy who speaks with a southern accent, and is one of the smartest students in his class, receiving the third-highest score on his first year exams.
  • One of the hosts of Well There's Your Problem is civil engineer Justin Roczniak, who uses a very notable southern accent (Appalachian) and a lot of Layman's Terms to get across the engineering terms.

    Video Games 
  • Augustus Sinclair from BioShock 2. He's a cunning businessman, clever manipulator and by some accounts a great scientist.
  • Beethro from Deadly Rooms of Death. He's more medieval than southern, but he has to be smart when his line of work involves getting past booby traps while killing monsters.
  • Fallout:
    • Fallout: New Vegas has Dr. Angela Williams, an NCR scientist who was born and raised on a cattle farm, and lampshades how her country twang doesn't fit with her occupation.
    • Sturges from Fallout 4 is the only character in the game with a Southern accent and he fits the trope to a tee. Investigating his old home shows that he was highly skilled at fixing and maintaining power armour, and he can also build you a very complicated teleportation device should you ask him to. Unlike the other people you can ask he has absolutely no prior experience with similar technology, making it all the more impressive. Though he is (unknowingly) a Synth, so he might have some innate understanding of Institute tech.
  • Cid Highwind is Final Fantasy VII's version of a rocket scientist — and the first man in space, to boot. His accent was spotty in the original game, but comes through loud and clear in Advent Children and Kingdom Hearts.
  • Donnel in Fire Emblem: Awakening, being from a remote corner of Ylisse with a very noticeable southern drawl, but quickly picks up on almost any subject he tries to learn. This is most noticeable in his supports with Miriel.
  • Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2 seems to be a lot smarter than he lets on. Even if he did think the Mona Lisa was a sculpture.
  • Cecil in Obduction, better known as C.W., was just a regular guy from somewhere in the South during the Civil War era, until he was abducted by an alien seed to the town of Hunrath, along with hundreds of others from various places and times. Once there, he managed to not only get grips on the pieces of modern technology some people had brought with them, but also the tech of other aliens that had been abducted to the same place. For instance, he managed to splice a video recorder into an alien force-field generator, making it possible to record a person's image and project it as a volumetric display. He also found out how to artificially trigger the swapper seeds, allowing quick transportation between Hunrath and the other alien towns, and was working on a plan to reverse the original abduction and send everyone back to their home planets.
  • Eugene Ius from Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is a very nerdy Clakker who studies ancient ruins and has a laptop that controls Buzzardton's power grid. Though he has a very negative opinion on the native Grubbs, considering them idiots, and destroys an ancient statue for a quick exit from the ruins.
  • Parvati in The Outer Worlds is the crew's mechanic and is one of the smartest persons on the Unreliable alongside Ellie and possibly the Unplanned Variable, and speaks with a noticeable southern accent.
  • Lucas Baker, eldest child of the Baker family in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, is a rural Louisiana native with a strong Deep South accent and dialect, and has a prowess with machinery that's been winning him amateur inventor/engineering contest prizes since he was elementary school age. Since the Bakers fell under the influence of the installment's particular horror illness and became a hostile Cannibal Clan, he started using that knack for tinkering to become a Trap Master who treats violence as a toy (mind you, he always had that kind of mentality by nature; he chafed under having Good Parents who wanted to keep him in line growing up, is cured, and is using his parents' affliction as leeway to fully "be himself") and executes trespassers on the family's property via Saw-style "games". A homebrew grenade launcher and flamethrower can also be found and used over the course of the game that are implied via the rough looks and colored-pencil-y and doodled-on maps leading toward their locations to have been made by him. The post-main game Not a Hero DLC also reveals that since he was cured, in true Resident Evil tradition, he's been dabbling in full-on Mad Scientist work on the sly.
  • The Secret World: While Edgar initially appears to be somewhat "slow", a look at his notebooks reveals that, in his own way, he's actually quite familiar with quantum physics.
  • Irving from Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey. Uses multiple euphemisms in his everyday talk.
  • The Novakid in Starbound are, to a man, super-geniuses in any field they put their mind to, but are possessed of such legendarily short attention spans that they never bother to preserve any records of what they built, as well as focusing primarily on things that are "cool" rather than practical. The end result is that despite the fact that any given Novakid can build a functioning spaceship after merely observing one in action, the race as a whole is still developmentally stuck in a version of the Wild West, only with laser revolvers and spaceships that look like trains.
  • The Engineer from Team Fortress 2, a brilliant inventor from Bee Cave, Texas. note  His profile on the TF2 website indicates he likes "barbeque, guns, and higher education," and has eleven hard-science PhDs. Make of that what you will.
    The Engineer: Look, buddy. Ah'm an engineer. That means Ah solve problems. Not problems like "what is beauty?" because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy. Ah solve practical problems. Fer instance, how'm Ah gonna stop some big, mean mother-hubbard from tearin' me a structurally superfluous new bee-hind? The answer? Use a gun. And if that don't work, use more gun.
  • T-Bone Grady from Watch_Dogs. Speaks in a vague Southern accent, builds scrap metal sculptures, loves torching stuff, and is a genius hacker on top of that.
  • The Wonderful 101: Professor James Shirogane, chief scientist of the Centinels. Creator of the superpowered Centinel-Suits, the Shirogane Comet, and owner of the orneriest southern accent around.

    Webcomics 
  • Brilliant biologist Dr. Jean Poule of The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! was raised on a farm, and has described herself as descended from "Scotch-Irish hillfolk" (which implies Appalachia). Her Uncle Cess who helped raise her certainly has the accent. She was the first in her family to attend college, where she got her PhD.
  • From Slice of Life, Pinkie Pie's parents become this after the family discovers molasses on their farm — Pinkie's dad becomes the CEO of Equestria's largest molasses company, while Pinkie's mom becomes their head attorney and negotiator.
  • All of the mages in What's Shakin' speak with a southern accent, but are also highly intelligent.

    Web Original 

    Western Animation 
  • Archer gives us Ray Gillette, the top-notch intelligence analyst and, while quite flamboyantly gay, actually pretty badass. He is from a family of West Virginia backwoods rednecks. They don't seem to know all that much about his life.
  • One-shot villain Enoch "Farmer" Brown from the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Critters". Despite talking and acting like Old MacDonald, he's an incredibly skilled microbiologist who has developed a way to cause massive growth in animal species as diverse as cattle and insects, which he tried to market as a way to end world hunger. He can even engineer programmed genetic defects into his monsters and grants superhuman attributes to his daughter through a special application of beef steroids.
  • Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys: Dr. Splitz's... well, split personality, Splitzy, embodies this trope. Interestingly, Dr. Splitz is a highbrow, conceptual scientist, while Splitzy leans more towards a practical mechanic.
  • Steve Austin is like this on Celebrity Deathmatch; personality-wise, he's much like his wrestling personality, but he also invents miraculous technology like the Deathmatch Time Machine and the Super-Freaks.
  • Courage the Cowardly Dog: Dr. Gerbil from the episode "Human Habitrail" has the accent and mannerisms of a typical Southern Gentleman, but is secretly a Mad Scientist.
  • The Hyper-Chicken of Futurama is a parody of this. He's really a horribly incompetent Bunny-Ears Lawyer, but he somehow manages to win most of his cases and clients keep hiring him. They seem oblivious to his incompetence and charmed by his southern accent.
  • Gravity Falls:
  • One episode of Jackie Chan Adventures had Jackie and Co. meet an entire family of these, including two brothers who were a nuclear physicist and an archeologist, respectively, yet still worked on their father's farm.
    "Doctor Buford McDonald? Your books are very insightful!"
    "Thank yee." *punch*
  • Kim Possible has some Down on the Farm relatives who live on a ranch in Montana (which is a northern state and not a southern state). Their ranch horses are all fully functioning robots that nonetheless move like real horses, invented and built by Kim's uncle. In fact, considering he's her paternal uncle (her dad's brother), this could possibly apply to her rocket scientist father as well, since we don't know whether Slim Possible acquired the accent after moving to the farm, or Mr. Dr. P. lost the accent after leaving the farm (though he doesn't have an accent in the flashback to his college days).
  • An episode of Kung Fu Dino Posse features a family of identical-looking cross-eyed buck-toothed idiot yokels... the last of whom speaks in a perfect Shakespearean accent, deplores the family business, and wishes he'd been an actor.
  • Fuzzy Lumpkins is like this in the pilot episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998), having invented a Ray Gun that can turn things into meat. (Yeah, that's what it is. After the Girls defeat him, Townsville cleans up the damage with a barbecue.) This was changed when regular episodes started, turning him into a hillbilly with a Hair-Trigger Temper who isn't all too smart.
  • In an episode of Robot Chicken, there's a parody of Paris Hilton's reality show The Simple Life called Country Folk R Morons. A toothless redneck in overalls is standing in front of a chalkboard covered in equations.
    Hick: And this is how Quantum-Chromo-Dynamics theorizes how Quarks interact by changing particles on the subatomic level.
    Teela: [Beat] You're [bleep]ing stupid.
  • An evil Mad Scientist version appeared in one episode of The Secret Saturdays, using his technology to temporarily merge Zak and his two cryptid companions, Komodo and Fisk, into one creature.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants:
    • Sandy the Squirrel is a proud Texas native and is easily one of the most intelligent in the series.
    • Plankton is a subversion — he himself is an academic genius (though he nearly always slips up someway) who comes from a family of rednecks. However, he shares no traits with them and actually forgets what his family is like because he's been away for so long, assuming them to all be would-be supervillains like him.
      • Double subverted with one of his cousins, who says he'd like some more memory for his laptop.
  • Total Drama's Ezekiel seems to be this, according to his online bio. A typical TV Homeschooled Kid, he can apparently speak eight languages and was a National Spelling Bee champion. We never see this in the show, though, because the writers have never given him enough screen time.
  • Bulkhead from Transformers: Animated — really. He's lost the accent by the time the series starts, and he's not the sharpest tool in the shed most of the time, but he was raised on a farm (for Energon) and he's an expert in space bridge technology. Basically, he's a Southern-Fried Genius Ditz.
  • One of the shorts of What A Cartoon, "Hillbilly Blue", has Eustace the crawdad, who acts like any other of the hillbilly characters, but has a non-nonsense attitude and likes to talk about physics.

Alternative Title(s): Southern Fried Smart Guy

Top