Real Life section maintenance (New Crowner 19 Feb 2024)

• An insincere example of this was Italy during the First World War, which declared neutrality at the start of the conflict. Italian Prime Minister Antonio Salandra called his policy "sacro egoismo" - "sacred self-interest." In practice, it meant seeing who would pay more to have Italy join the war on their side. Possibly okay? He all but name-dropped the trope. Maybe needs to be a little more neutral though.
• Most of the funding for PBS and NPR actually comes from companies that make big donations to fund the networks and stations in exchange for being name-dropped on air. Likewise, Viewers Like You most often donate during pledge drives not just because they enjoy the programming, but because of the goodies that they get in return. General example, cut.
• At the outset of the Cold War, with much of Europe, especially Germany, in ruins from World War II, President Harry Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, tasking the United States with rebuilding western Europe. Truman's ulterior motive, of course, was that getting western Europe back on its feet would stop them from electing communist governments and/or seeking Soviet (reconstruction) aid. It's also much easier to engage in capitalist commerce when your trading partners have a functioning economy. Seems okay; is there evidence that that was his actual motive, though?
• His predecessor did the same before and after the US entered World War II, selling the UK war materiel, food, and other commodities at reasonable prices (or even on-loan) partly because it was profitable and helped the USA's economic recovery, partly because it saved Anglo-Saxon civilians' lives, and partly because it helped keep Hitler at bay. Seems fine.
• This is the gist of crowdfunding services such as Kickstarter: if the product doesn't end up being Vapor Ware, the pledges receive some goodies as well. General example, cut.
• Under Otto von Bismarck, Imperial Germany implemented some of the first social welfare policies in the modern world. But this was not out of any sympathy for socialism or the workers, but because Bismarck wanted to deter socialist revolution. Seems fine.
• Objectivism is this philosophy turned Up to Eleven. It posits that helping others to materially benefit yourself is the only moral way in which a selfish person can act altruistically and that helping others without materially benefitting from doing so is both objectively irrational and morally wrong for selfish people. Oddly, Objectivism — as defined by its creator Ayn Rand — asserts that helping others to immaterially (reputation, gratitude, etc) benefit yourself is morally wrong because your interests are not advanced in an objectively quantifiable way. Psychologists speculate that this oversight stems from Rand's reasons for developing the philosophy, namely to "rationalise"/justify her emotional desire not to be beholden to her (loving, supportive) family and her friendless background. Since her death, Objectivists have moved towards accepting immaterial versions of this trope. Kind of rambly, maybe too general as it describes a philosophy rather than a specific act?
• This is one of the largest motivations behind The Laws and Customs of War as it basically motivates every side in the conflict to have specific standards and lines they won't cross in order to reduce the death and suffering of their own troops, and it only works when everyone does it. Medics are required to treat anyone with impunity, including civilians, friendly, and enemy troops, and can't fire on the enemy unless fired at first, and thus it's in everyone's best interest to not shoot them. It's illegal to feign surrender to get the drop on an enemy or lay a trap, so both sides have motivation to accept the surrender of enemy troops and not gun them down out of paranoia. It's illegal to shoot surrendering troops, retreating troops, or mistreat P Ws, so troops have motivation to retreat or surrender rather than fight to the death. The list goes on. General example, cut.

• Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson built an entire career out of being cheerful, sexy and dark. The character she was an Expy for, Vampira, was also sexy, but otherwise a more "traditional" style of Goth. Edit and move to Live Action TV.
• As one website owner maintained, Salvador Dalí. Troping real person. Cut.
• Photophobia didn't bother the late Church of Satan founder Anton Le Vey, either. After he got rolling, the witty religious rebel played off and played jokes on, off, and with his own image and reputation to a level you'd expect out of (irony noted) the Devil. This was even noted in a interview with him prior to his death undertaken by the pornographic publication High Society magazine. Edit and move to Myths & Religion.
• Voltaire. No, no, not the eighteenth century French author; Aurelio Voltaire Hernandez, the twenty-first century songwriter, author of humorous perspectives on being a Goth, and occasional stand-up comedian. That Voltaire. He also does music for the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, so that makes him doubly cool. Edit and move to Literature.
• Tim Burton and his ex-girlfriend, Helena Bonham Carter. Troping real person. Cut.
• The League Of Gentlemen, in particular Reece Shearsmith. Troping real person. Cut. Doesn't apply to band's persona.
• The Lady of the Manners, webmistress of the Gothic Charm School. ZCE, Comment out, move to Web Original.
  • Who, although she'll probably never admit to it, has shown some distinctly mopeygoth leanings in the past. Natter. Cut.
  • She's also the real life inspiration for Gilly. Troping real person. Cut.
• This t-shirt. ZCE. Cut.
• Lee Presson and the Nails, a Gothic Swing band. ZCE. Comment out and move to Music.
• Grey DeLisle (the voice of Sam Manson) abuses this trope, going into "Are you sure she's really goth?" territory. Troping real person. Cut.
• Noel Fielding, especially apparent on The Great British Bake Off as he frequently dresses and describes himself as goth, yet is very helpful and encouraging to the bakers and maintains a goofy, optimistic demeanor and smile. Move to Live Action TV.
• Christina Hendricks in high school. Troping real person. Cut.
• Taylor Momsen Troping real person. Cut.
• Avril Lavigne is more punk than goth, but definitely fits the perky part. Troping real person. Cut. Also natter.
• Neil Gaiman. Troping real person. Cut.
• Whitby Gothic Style! ZCE. Cut.
• Z Brewer, writer of The Chronicles of Vladimir Tod and The Slayer Chronicles. They wear purple-highlighted hair and black clothes, and they calls their fans "Minions." Troping real person. Cut.
• Christina Ricci has this reputation after playing Wednesday Addams, much to her chagrin. Troping real person. Cut.
• And just like her NCIS character, so is Pauley Perrette (see page image, in her mid-40s, no less). Troping real person. Cut.
• Comedian Iliza Shlesinger is a Genki Girl and Motor Mouth who tends to dress in a darker fashion at times, with dyed hair and healthy amounts of black clothing. She herself pokes fun at this, referring to herself in one routine as looking like a "nineteen-year old lesbian manager of a Hot Topic." Move to Comedy.
• AJ McLean of Backstreet Boys started out as the group's "Bad Boy", but his personal style has evolved into a more goth-like look (his Twitter and Instagram handles even have "skull" in them), and his cheerful personality, it's a little odd to see him performing songs like "I Want It That Way" alongside his bandmates. Inclined to cut. Might edit and move to music.
• Kyra Schon, the little girl from Night of the Living Dead (1968). The "ghoul next door" makes spooky jewelry and has cheerfully posed with tattoos of her face at conventions. Troping real person. Cut.
• British art historian and TV presenter Dr Janina Ramirez. Troping real person. Cut.

• Lindsey Stirling is a very extroverted and energetic musician whose vlog is devoted, in significant part, to her antics involving pranks she plays on those around her, and special occasions like "half Christmas." Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Boxxy. Internet wars were started over her newfound popularity, with many users (rather hostilely) asking "how much genki is too much?" Troping real person. Cut.

• Miley Cyrus. Her little sister Noah is also extremely bubbly, energetic, and confident, but she's just 16, so who knows how she'll turn out. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Jojo Siwa fits this trope to a tee. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Ariana Grande. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Comedian Elvira Kurt breathes genki. Troping real person. Cut.

• Kristen Schaal seems to have forged an entire career out of playing Genki Girls. Her real-life persona is slightly less genki than her various animated ones, but not by much, as evidenced by her congratulating one of her fellow Never Mind the Buzzcocks contestants with a "John Hughes 80s movie clap." Troping real person. Cut.
• Hayley Williams of Paramore, so, so much, if the way she answers interviews, tweets, and acts on stage is anything to go by. Not many people would tweet about how much underwear they're going to buy or make jokes about their own chest during an interview. Troping real person. Cut.
• Felicia Day. Her promotional video for Dragon Age: Redemption is marked by energetic smiling, bobbing, and annotating. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Karen Gillan. Troping real person. Cut.

• Amanda Tapping, who never seems to slow down and is always bright, bubbly, enthusiastic, and an all-around goofball. Yes, the same one who plays the no-nonsense Major in the Stargateverse. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Demi Lovato, when they're in a good mood or with their fans, especially in regards to their fans. Troping real person. Cut.

• Michelle Creber, who voices Apple Bloom on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (who is also a Genki Girl). Just listen to her interviews. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out ** Claire Corlett (Sweetie Belle) even moreso. Her YouTube account has examples of her genki-ness. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Grey DeLisle. Several of the characters seen in the "Western Animation" section were voiced by her. That cannot be a coincidence. Troping real person. Cut.

• Similarly, Tara Strong voices many of the Genki Girl characters listed above and it comes straight from her own personality. In any interview, she'll be bubbly and personable. Fan reports list her as one of the friendliest and most accessible people at conventions. She was going to voice Pinkie Pie, listed above. She ended up voicing Twilight Sparkle instead, but says Pinkie is closer to her real personality.^note Ironically Pinkie's voice actress Andrea Libman says that Twilight is closer to her own personality. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Japanese singer and actress Tomoe Shinohara. "Mikakuru-kuru-kuru-kuru-kuru-kuru~!" Troping real person. Cut.

• WWE's ring announcer Lilian Garcia, as a glance at her web show with Torrie Wilson and Candice Michelle will demonstrate. It rubbed off on actress Maria Menounos when she guest-starred. Unless she was waving beer cans and asking the others to feel how warm her chest was just to impress "Stone Cold" Steve Austin... Troping real person. Cut.
• Delta Goodrem can barely sit still during her interviews and appears to be endlessly bright and cheery. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Ellen DeGeneres. Troping real person. Cut.

• Milla Jovovich. Just watch her interviews or listen to her DVD Commentaries. She's endlessly bubbly and cheerful, particularly in the DVD extras for Resident Evil: Apocalypse. She gets very loud and exaggerated when describing an action scene with Nemesis. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Kirsten Dunst. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Cameron Diaz. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Mila Kunis. Troping real person. Cut.

Commented out * Jennifer Love Hewitt. Troping real person. Cut.

• Kimi Ward Encarnacion, lead singer of Nineties alternative band Moonpools & Caterpillars. Her signature live performance move was hopping up and down on stage. Even a 15-year hiatus couldn't slow her enthusiasm. Move to Music.

Commented out * In general, the majority of Disney Channel actresses tend to fall under this, but Sierra McCormick is right up there with the best of them. Rowan Blanchard broke it Up To Eleven. General example. Cut.

Commented out * Grace Helbig. Troping real person. Cut.

• JUNNA, the drummer of the hard rock girls' band Girls Rock Band Kakumei. She is shown to make an enthusiastic and cheerful look on her face whenever she's rockin' out. Troping real person. Cut.
• Annick Obonsawin to a tee. The characters she voices are her cheerful and excitable fangirly voice is definitely the genuine article. Especially when she is playing Sierra from Total Drama. Troping real person. Cut.
• Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is, outside the House, quite lively, especially evident in her reaction shot to her victory in 2018. Troping real person. Cut.
• Cassey Ho of Blogilates. Troping real person. Cut.
• Dogs of either gender tend to act like this, particularly as puppies. Typically when their owner walks into the room they will run around excitedly jumping on things (including the person). General example. Cut.
• Cristina Milizia is a bonafide Genki Girl. She's always shown to have an energetic aura of happiness with every project and interview she takes part in. Troping real person. Cut.
• Colleen O'Shaughnessey is just precious. She approaches things with an optimistic outlook, and always has the time of her life. Troping real person. Cut.
• Angus Young of AC/DC hasn't been observed standing still since 1973, at least. He's one of the few people in the world who can make Axl Rose ^note who served briefly as AC/DC's lead singer in place of Brian Johnson look positively placid by comparison. Troping real person. Cut.
• Sumalee Montano radiates this energy. She tends to get very peppy and optimistic when showing her fangirl side, and she's quite the adorable, nerdy Fangirl. Troping real person. Cut.
• Tania Gunadi definitely embraces a Genki Girl side with how pumped up and energetic she gets. This is especially the case when she shows a fangirl side. Troping real person. Cut.
• Sydney Sierota of Echosmith has an adorably bubbly personality and an optimistic outlook on life. She's perhaps the most talkative out of all her siblings, and there's hardly a time where she isn't smiling widely while excitedly talking about something. Troping real person. Cut.
• Russian singer Elvira T has shades of this. She is very outgoing and fun-loving, and likes to make jokes. She once surprised one of her fans by going to the girl's house and hiding inside a giant gift box. When the fan opened the door, Elvira jumped out of the box and hugged her. Troping real person. Cut.
• Despite appearing to have a somewhat solemn expression in a lot of her cover videos, Belarusian singer and vlogger Lera Yaskevich is actually very energetic and playful, often goofing around and making jokes. This can be seen especially well in videos where she's with her close friend (and fellow singer/vlogger) Dima Yermuzevich, who has a very calm and laidback personality. Troping real person. Cut.

• There's a Dutch saying: "Krankzinnigheid ligt dicht bij begaafdheid". Translated, this means (approximately) "craziness is close to genius". General Example. Cut.
• The English-speaking world has a few similar sayings: "there's a fine line between genius and insanity"; "genius and madness are two sides of the same coin"/"... go hand in hand"; etc... General Example. Cut.
• Kurt Gödel. He was an outstanding and truly deep-thinking logician and mathematician by whom Albert Einstein was very impressed. He also very nearly failed his U.S. citizenship exam by blithely announcing that he had found an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution which made a dictatorship possible. He had a paranoid fear of being poisoned and would only eat food prepared by his wife; when she was hospitalized for six months, he refused to eat, and eventually died of starvation. Troping real person. Cut.
• Anthony Weldon referred to King James I of England/VI of Scotland "the wisest fool in Christendom"^note The full quote is "A very wise man was wont to say that he believed him the wisest fool in Christendom, meaning him wise in small things, but a fool in weighty affairs". Troping real person. Cut.
• Thanks to exceptionally uneven abilities^note She got exceptionally high scores for her auditory capacities and exceptionally low scores on general reading, autistic activist Donna Williams managed to score only 70 on her IQ test, even though she had an honors degree in Sociology, a degree in Linguistics and spoke four languages. Troping real person. Cut.
• Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner attempted to explain this phenomenon with his theory that a person's overall intelligence could be divided into eight categories, and standard IQ tests only measured a person's capacity for rational thought while other areas such as physical coordination, self-awareness, linguistic skills, or social skills could be sorely lacking. However, this was largely debunked by modern cognitive neuroscience showing that all of these skills share neural processing pathways. General Example. Cut.

• There was Brooke Greenberg, who had a mysterious medical condition that had caused her mind and body to remain in infancy for 17 years before she died in 2013 (with some anomalies, such as her bone age being around that of a ten-year-old). There's no obvious supernatural involvement, although her first five years or so of life were full of medical catastrophes that spontaneously resolved without leaving any damage (for example, a brain tumor that spontaneously disappeared). This article has a video that shows her at twelve years old, looking much like a six-month-old infant.
  • Though given that her telomeres were shorter than a normal child her age, Brooke could've actually aged faster than normal - even though she didn't grow up. It didn't happen.
• Then there are people who have Hypopituitarism, making them look like pre-teens/middle-schoolers long into adulthood. Comedian Andy Milonakis is a famous example.

• In the early 2010s, Real Housewife Kim Zolciak looked like a 40-year-old who aged well. She didn't actually turn 40 until 2018. To make matters worse for this particular trope, her oldest child was born in 1997.
• Fellow troper and musician Dartxker Bitsby (real name Jovontae Pride) is only 14, yet could pass for 19.
• Mila Kunis got her first major role playing Jackie on That '70s Show when she was just 14, even though everyone auditioning was required to be 18 or older. When Mila was asked if she was 18, she said that she would be, but didn't specify when. Eventually she was found out, but was still considered the best fit for the part.
• There's a 1979 WPIX (New York City) clip on YouTube of their newscast where one of the anchors is a man named Bill Jorgensen. He's 52 years old in this clip but looks much older.
• Hollywood lore has it that three-time Oscar winner Walter Brennan's career took off after he lost his teeth in a fight and found that without them he could play old men from around the 1930s onwards — when he was only in his 30s!
• Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in this famous photograph◊ by Dorothea Lange was 32 when it was taken. It showed the devastating effects of The Great Depression more than words possibly could.
• The famous picture of the Afghan girl◊ from National Geographic has many people wondering if she's really a "girl". She was 12 years old when the picture was taken, but because of the stress of being a refugee, she looks to be in her mid-20s. And when the photographer (Steve McCurry) met her again, this◊ is how she looked at approximately 30 years old, in 2002. As of 2017, she looked like this, so she now looks closer to her actual age.
• In 1970, the much-older-looking Mary Ann Vecchio was, in fact, a 14-year-old runaway. Jon Filo's photograph of her crying over Jeffry Miller, who'd been killed in the Kent State shootings, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
• David Gregory of MSNBC appeared to be in his early 50s as early as 2012, mostly because of his silvery hair and slightly aged face. He was born in 1970.
• Nobody could tell how old Michael Jackson was in his later years, mainly because of his vitiligo that made his skin white (he looks much whiter in the photos because of the camera lightning) and because he had no wrinkles. When he was young, however (before Thriller), he looked a bit old for his age, particularly when he was a kid, looking to be around 11 or 12 when he was just 8 or 9. However, by the time Bad came around, he could easily pass for a high schooler at 29 years old.
• The actors who played the Keaton parents on Family Ties, Michael Gross (Steven) and Meredith Baxter (Elyse), were both born on June 21, 1947. However, while Baxter looked her age when she was cast for the series, Gross looked about 5-10 years older largely thanks to his thinning, prematurely gray hair.
• At the age of 15, Traci Lords claimed to be 20, used a fake ID, and started appearing in porn magazines and films. Authorities only caught on three years later. Some rumors claim that she tipped off the authorities herself to force the issue so she could get out of the business without having her work follow her. Since she only did one film after she was 18, everything else is illegal in the US.
• Adolf Hitler was said to have aged rapidly in appearance during the final years of World War II, after having held uncannily the same appearance from the mid-1920s to 1943.
• This is Antonin Artaud, surrealist, not yet 50 years old◊.
• Metal singer Ivan Moody, vocalist for Five Finger Death Punch. Take a good long look at this photo.◊ And this one.◊ He's only 31. He looks at least 15 years older than that. This is especially strange because he was 27 when his band's first album released, and looked that age.
• Michael Jai White was running a martial arts class in his late teens because everyone there thought he was a grown man at the time.
• More a case of Younger Than They Sound, but putting Ivan Moody's example to shame regardless, is the New Zealand metal band Alien Weaponry. If all you've heard of them is the song Kai Tangata — sung completely in te reo due to the trio all having Māori heritage — you'd be surprised that the band's combined age when the song was released in 2018 was just 56.
• Ritchie Valens, who died at age 17, looked easily twice that age◊.
• R. Lee Ermey looked to be a mid-50s gunnery sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. He was only 42 when the film was shot. His look changed incredibly little for the rest of his life.
• Tommy Lee Jones. Until his age caught up to his appearance in the late 2010s, he fell squarely into the trope due to his signature craggy facial skin which appeared to make him look older than he actually was. To put this in perspective, the ages of the four leads in Space Cowboys: Clint Eastwood (70 during the film's shooting), James Garner (72), Donald Sutherland (65), and Tommy Lee Jones (54). Jones is 11 years younger than Sutherland and nearly 20 to the others, yet he is portrayed as being around the same age as his co-stars in a film where a running gag is that many of their peers from their training days decades ago are all dead from old age (and Jones was 54!).
• John Carpenter was only 51 when this picture was taken◊. He looks some 20 years older than that.
• Both Sherman Hemsley and John Amos got away with playing the husbands to women 20 years older than them and the father to sons played by actors only ten years their junior in the Norman Lear produced sitcoms The Jeffersons and Good Times. Hemsley was 36 when he started playing the role and John Amos 35, yet both were playing someone roughly 50. It helped that in both cases they were prematurely bald.
• Sir Patrick Stewart started going bald when he was 19 and was Younger Than He Looked for much of his life.  He was 46 when he started filming Star Trek: The Next Generation; Jean-Luc Picard was 59.Nowadays he's Older Than He Looks.
• Ryan Clark, the lead singer for the heavy metal band Demon Hunter. The music video for his band's "Infected" was shot in 2002, when he was just 23. But due to the large beard he had and his lack of hair (and he's a little fat), he looked to be around 10 years older or so. However, by the time he reached his mid-30s, he looked roughly his calendar age.
• Whitman Mayo was only 40 when he portrayed Grady Wilson on Sanford and Son.
• Steve Martin's hair began to grey at an early age. Because of this, even in his 20s, he looked like he was much older.
• George Clooney had a full head of grey hair before he hit the half-century mark in 2011.
• Maria Teresa "Mariettina" Goretti had the bad luck of being a Huge Schoolgirl without the "school" part, looking at least 14-15 years old when she was just 12. Due to this, she caught the eye of the local Jerkass Delinquent Alessandro Serenelli (19-20 at that time), who first started making lewd jokes around her, then became a Crazy Jealous Guy... and stabbed poor Maria to death when she refused him for the last time.
• Progeria is a real-life genetic disease where the body experiences accelerated aging. People who have this disease usually live no longer than 20 years, with the common cause of death being heart attack, the way normal elderly succumb. The record was 26 years, held by Leon Botha. By the end of his life, he looked like he was over 100 years old.
• Stephanie Cole has specialized in playing women much older than she is. She was the elderly Mrs. Featherstone in Open All Hours in her 40s, and the retiree Diana Trent from Waiting for God when she was in her 50s (opposite Graham Crowden, who was born 20 years earlier).
• John Thaw would have been between 33 and 37 when he played Jack Regan in The Sweeney, but looks well into his 40s — partly reinforced by the way he acts as well. Thaw himself apparently said "I was born looking 50."
• Saoirse Ronan looked like she was in her 20s when she was only 18. This is especially strange since she was 16 when she played a 14-year-old in The Lovely Bones, and looked that age.
• Dioxin poisoning causes serious acne problems, which causes rapid aging. Victor Yushchenko, then in his late 40s, underwent this during a bitter campaign for presidency of the Ukraine, as seen here◊
• Seth Rogen, especially in his earlier films, looked like he could easily be in his mid-30s, though he was born in 1982 and would have been in his 20s. Despite being the oldest looking of the "Freaks" in Freaks and Geeks, he was actually the youngest in real life as well as the only one who was actually high school aged (17). Rogen is pretty well aware of his "old" looks. He occasionally jokes about it in interviews. This actually caused problems when casting Superbad, since originally Rogen was going to play one of the main characters, a high school senior. Because of looking way older than he was (25 at the time), the role went to Jonah Hill. Hill actually is only a year younger than Rogen, but is a case of Older Than They Look. Lampshaded in Knocked Up. Allison (Katherine Heigl) tells her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) that her new boyfriend Ben is 23. Debbie replies that Ben "looks 33."
• Bill Hader in some of his films (namely Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) looks considerably older than he really is.
• Jason Segel. All of Apatow's "stock actors" (except for Jonah Hill, who actually looks younger than he is) look older than they really are.
• Carrie Fisher looked and sounded like she was in her late-30s in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, even though she was only in her mid-20s when those films were shot. In the 2015-2019 new Star Wars trilogy, however, it shifts in the opposite direction as Leia Organa is supposed to be about 30 years older than she was at the end of Return of The Jedi when she was only in her early 20s. In the third trilogy, Leia, who is the same age as Luke^note since Luke is Leia's twin brother should only be in her early 50s, but was depicted as elderly and in frail health.
• When jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died at age 34 due to heavy substance abuse, the coroner mistakenly estimated his age at between 50 to 60 years old.
• This photo◊ of George Orwell had been taken when he was 30 years old. He could have been anywhere from 45 to 60 by looks only. seven years later◊ he still looked like a grandpa. 12 years later◊ and suffering from tuberculosis, he was still unchanged, so it could not be blamed on poor living conditions only.
• Frank Oz, famous for voicing Yoda from Star Wars, Grover from Sesame Street, and Miss Piggy from The Muppets among others, has always looked about 10 years older than his real age. Here he is at 24◊ (Oz is on the far left), and he was around 33 when this◊ was taken.
• Many of the WWE wrestlers. For example, Wade Barrett was born in 1980, but when he was in his early 30s, he looked more like he was in his early 40s. Stephanie McMahon (born in 1976), after her voice went through a radical change in 2002-2003 (most likely due to all the screaming she was doing before then), definitely sounded much older than she really was.
• Shane Harper from Good Luck Charlie looks like he's around 20 to 22 years old. He's 18. Made even worse by the fact that he was 16 in the early episodes of the show, and still looked the same. How many people really look like this at 16?
  • To put it in layman's terms: In Season 1 of the show, he was 16, playing a 17-year-old character who looked like he was 20.
• George Michael seemed to have aged rapidly since he hit his 40s. Especially jarring since he looked his age for decades.
• Don Rickles looked unmistakably old for his age until roughly 1990, when he was in his mid-60s, and then he aged normally until his death in 2017 at 90. Which is kind of funny, since throughout his adult life he possessed the voice of a 20-something guy from Boston.
• Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear has consistently looked at least ten years older than his real age for some time now. It's a little hard to believe he's only nine years older than Richard Hammond.
• Robin Williams looked his age, if not a little younger, but he seemed to have aged badly as a young man. He was in his late 20s when he was on Mork & Mindy, but looked like he was in his 40s. Williams was into drugs and heavy drinking during his early career, which could have contributed to this.
• Max von Sydow looked about 75 from the day he was born. When he did The Exorcist, he was 44, looked absolutely ancient. However, in his last years before his passing in 2020 at 90, he looked quite sprightly.
  • To be fair, Dick Smith did a very good age makeup on von Sydow for The Exorcist; you just don't notice it because of the flashier work on Linda Blair.
  • He was in his 20s when he played Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal. See it and you won't believe it.
• Ernie Pyle, American journalist and World War II soldier, was 44 when he died. At the time, he looked like he was in his 60s or 70s.
• Another WWII soldier, Evgeny Stepanovich Kobytev, appears in a famous comparison of two photos showing him at 31 and 35. In the second image, he could easily pass for being in his 50s. Part of his Rapid Aging is attributed to spending more than a year in a POW camp that was badly overcrowded and exposed to the elements.
• Albert Einstein throughout his life looked older than his actual age. This photo◊ was taken when he was 25, even though he looks more like he's 30.
• Austin St. John (a.k.a. The Red Ranger) was only 18 years old when he first started playing Jason Lee Scott. He looked more like he was about 20-22. It didn't help that his character was supposed to be 15. He actually seemed age appropriate a good amount of the time, but his build made him seem older. Still, it's a little hard to believe he was the youngest of the original six, as Jason David Frank, who was 19 at the time, looked fairly age appropriate.
  • Jason Narvy (Skull) was only 19 when filming began. He looked to be around 23 or so, as did Paul Schrier (Bulk), who was 23 for real.
• When this picture was taken, Dutch footballer Arjen Robben, born in 1984, looked at least a decade older◊ than his real age (28). His age has now started to catch up with his appearance, though not completely so.
• Wilford Brimley for years was a shining example of this trope. To wit: He was only 50 years old when he was cast in Cocoon, but was able to portray a convincing elderly man with just his hair whitened. There's even a Twitter account devoted to marking when celebrities (who tend to be Older Than They Look) reach the same age Brimley was when Cocoon was released (the Brimley/Cocoon Line). This◊ is how he looked when he was in The Waltons. He was in his early 40s at the time.
• It's amazing how many people are shocked to discover that swimsuit model Kate Upton hit it big when she wasn't even 21 (though she's well past it now — she was born in 1992).
  • This is common in many teenage models; Spain's Lidia Ferrer, for example, is 15 years old, but does not represent them at all.
• Miley Cyrus was once mistaken for a 40-year-old woman by a bystander who offered her face cream, despite being 16 years old at the time.
• Unusually, Hayden Panettiere (born in 1989) qualifies for both this and Older Than They Look, as a number of people thought she was older than her actual age while she was on Heroes.
• Michael Douglas (born in 1944), in his mid-50s, looked about ten years older, because he seemed to be trying desperately to hide how old he was (the new, young wife might have had something to do with that). However, by the time he hit his late 60s, he seemed to have made peace with his age, and ever since has actually looked younger because of it.
• Billy Bob Thornton has always looked at least a few years older than he really is, even more so since the late '90s, when he lost a lot of weight, causing him to look like he weighs about fifty pounds.
• Topol was only in his mid-30s when he played Tevye in the film version of Fiddler on the Roof. But he was able to convincingly play a 45-year-old Russian farmer who'd had a rough life. See pic here.
  • In the 1964 Israeli film Sallah, Topol played a man with grownup children when he was just 29!
• Greg Oden, who lost a potentially great NBA career to constant injuries, was born in 1988. However, according to pictures taken when he was 24, he looked to be in his 30s.
• Fergie (born in 1975) actually used to look younger than she really was (she was in her early 30s when her debut album was being promoted, but looked like she was around 24-25). But in her early 30s, she seemed to have aged rapidly, and looked like she was in her 40s by the time she was 35. (This can be chalked up to a drug addiction past and once she got sober, she started looking younger. Her aging now can be chalked up to plastic surgery and pregnancy.)
  • Fergie as an example goes back to her Kids Incorporated days; particularly the last two seasons she was a cast member. She looks roughly early high-school age when she was actually 13-14 those seasons.
• Alice Cooper now looks really good for being in his 70s, but he used to look far older than he really was. This is him in his high school yearbook,◊ looking to be around his mid-20s. By the time he actually did hit his 20s, he looked to be somewhere in his 30s. He continued to look older than he really was until he hit his 40s, when he aged considerably well and slowly converted to being Older Than He Looks. (It likely helped matters that he replaced a former alcohol addiction with an infinitely healthier golf addiction.)
• Florence Welch was 26 in 2012 and then looked like this. Likewise, Adele was born two years later, in 1988, but looks like she's in her 30s. Just to point out further: Florence is the same age as Lady Gaga, and Adele as old as Rihanna.
• Vladimir Illych Lenin got his trademark figure which he held for life when he was just 25◊ and his photos from the late 40s to early 50s actually show him less aged. This is why a Russian journalist and historian said: "It would be hard for modern people to imagine Lenin in his younger years."
• Taylor Momsen, due to her Goth appearance, looked like she was at least 20. At 19 she looks closer to that. Though pre-Goth she looked her age like on the first season of Gossip Girl.
• Alisha Dean was a 13-year-old girl who became famous for abusing statutory rape laws. She had a Facebook page where she claimed to be 19 and divorced, and completely looked the part. She had a habit of seducing older men through her Facebook page, arranging meetings with them to have sex, and then turning them in. She sent THREE men to jail in this manner, reportedly just for fun. Her father did nothing to stop her, instead agreeing that "these laws are there to prevent this from happening". Never mind that the girl even had a fake ID with her fake age, meaning that anyone who actually tried to verify her age could still be duped.
• Randy Blythe from Lamb of God is only in his early 40s but looks like he could be 5-10 years older. Similarly, Lamb of God bassist John Campbell◊ is also in his early 40s, but due to his hair going white very early, he looks considerably older than that — mid-50s, at least.
• June Shannon of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo fame; she is 32 but she looks 10-20 years older than that.
• Courtney Stodden looked like they were in their mid-20s at the youngest in 2012. They participated in the Miss Teen Washington pageant in 2010... at age 16.
• Malcolm McDowell for most of his career post-1980. In A Clockwork Orange, he was 28 when he did the role but he did look reasonably young at the time. By the late 1980s, his hair went white overnight and he lost his young Alex looks. And he started getting a considerable number of "elderly man" roles despite the fact that he only just turned 70 in 2012. Mr. McDowell has confessed that he has no one to fault but himself.
• This◊ is a 2012 photo of Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward. He was born in July 1982, making him only 30 at the time.
• Scarlett Johansson, born in 1984, managed to convincingly play a recent college graduate in Lost in Translation despite being 17. She looks her age now, though.
• Another Judd Apatow-related example. Steve Bannos, the actor who played Mr. Kowchevski on Freaks and Geeks was 39 years old at the time, even though he looked like he was at least 45.
• Sophie Turner is still high school aged but appears to look like she's just hit her 20s. She's only two years older than her character in Game of Thrones with Sansa being 14 at the start of Season 3 with Turner being almost 17 at the time of the season premiere.
• Lindsay Lohan ... oh my. Only seven years actually passed between this photo◊ and this one, yet it looks more like sevenTEEN years had passed.
• Savannah Hudson, who appeared on Season 8 of America's Got Talent, looks to be in her late teens despite being only 13 years old. She looks to be a similar age in her group's music video, despite being 11 years old at the time.
• J. Elvis Weinstein, one of the original cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (he was Dr. Erhardt and Tom Servo's first puppeteer), was only 17 when the show first started on KTMA, and he was only 15 when he first got into comedy. According to certain interviews with him, many people didn't suspect that he was really so young and were surprised when he revealed his age to them. He does look more like his actual age now, however.
• Larry David (born in 1947) has looked like an old man since the 90s, due to having balding white hair and glasses when he was in his 40s. He was only 52 when he started doing Curb Your Enthusiasm, but looked about 70. His friend Richard Lewis is older than him by a few days, and Bob Einstein (since deceased), who played Marty Funkhauser, was more than three years older than both, yet both look(ed) younger. David's age is played for laughs in the show: he's retired because of wealth not age, he has a wife who looks much younger than him, he always dresses like he did in his 20s (wearing sneakers), and his father is still alive.
• Lorde, depending on her makeup and how she's dressed, often looks about 30 (she was born in 1996). There was a picture going around that was of her and the 34-year-old Beyoncé where they looked the same age. Furthermore, a face swap made Beyoncé with Lorde's face made her look like she was really old.
• Until the last half of the 2010s, Hulk Hogan (born in 1953) always looked at least a decade older than his actual age. He is a big guy with thin lips, a mustache, a very dark tan and started going bald in his 20s. As Hollywood Hogan in the 1990s he looked like he was in his 60s despite only being in his 40s. Fortunately once he actually reached his 60s, his age caught up to his appearance.
• Ric Flair hit 70 in February 2019, and looks about 10 years older. He looked very good for his age (even several years younger) up until around 2003 when he started aging rapidly. Compare this image from 1998◊ (at age 49) to this one just ten years later. It looks like 20 or 30 years had passed. He has continued to age, though more slowly — his appearance in the video to the 2017 hit "Ric Flair Drip" shows him to have changed relatively little since the second photo, except for having a bit less hair.
• Sue Lyon, best known for her role as the titular Lolita in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation, was only 14 at the time of shooting, but looked like she was in her late teens because she was unusually curvaceous for her age. She was actually cast because of her older appearance, perhaps to lessen the squeamish reaction audiences would have to a middle-aged man lusting after his stepdaughter. But this also lessened the whole point of the novel and movie (that Humbert Humbert is a pervert covering his own tracks). Lolita's age is never given in the film and several reviewers at the time thought Dolores was "a full 17", not barely 14 (and she was even younger in the book).
• John Linnell of They Might Be Giants has looked to be in his 40s ever since the band began in 1982 (he was 23).
• Ann Miller started dancing professionally in nightclubs when she was 13, passing as 18. Here◊ she is in a poster for the Marx Brothers film Room Service, made when she was 14.
• Judy Garland aged horribly in later years, due in no small part to her alcoholism, heavy smoking and drug abuse. She died in 1969 at age 47, though she looked at least a decade older.
• Louis Marshall "Grandpa" Jones looked his age by the time he was cast in Hee Haw (55 when the show first aired in July 1969), but he took that stage name and performed in the guise of an elderly person when he was only 22. Subverted in that he didn't get the "Grandpa" nickname from his appearance, but rather from his off-stage grumpiness at early-morning radio shows.
• Camren Bicondova, aka Selina Kyle/Catwoman on Gotham, was born in 1999, making her only 15 when the series first aired in 2014, but looked older. Of course, the illusion was dispelled once she opened her mouth.
• Bray Wyatt, born in 1987, looks more like he was born in 1967 or so due to his Beard of Evil. The same also applies to his former stablemates Erick Rowan (born in 1981) and Luke Harper (1979–2020).
• Joey Fatone of *NSYNC was 18 when the group started in 1995, but has looked like a guy in his 30s ever since he could grow facial hair. He's also built at least a size bigger than his bandmates, which also adds to his image. Now that he's hitting his 40s, he's just now starting to look his age, if not still looking at least ten years older.
• Chief Keef has looked to be about 25 since he was in his mid-teens, largely due to the fact that he never had a childhood.
• Ireland Baldwin (born in 1995) looked to be in her mid-20s before she left her teens.
• Believe it or not, Don Most (Ralph Malph on Happy Days) was only 20 when this picture was taken.◊ He looks at least 10 years older than that.
• A lifetime of alcoholism, smoking and stress has aged X Japan guitarist Pata terribly. Here he is in the 90s◊, and here he is now◊. This is especially noticeable considering his band mates are all very much Older Than They Look. He's not even the oldest member. After finally getting clean after a health scare in 2016, he's actually looking more like his age◊ now.
• Say hello to Danny Meeks◊, an 18-year-old ice skater from Flint, Michigan. Let me repeat that, 18! God only knows what he looks like now...
• Michael Jackson's daughter Paris, born in 1998, was able to pass for early 20s while in her late teens.
• Christopher Lee was this for most of his life. He always looked at least ten years older than he actually was... until his final years, when he looked his actual age.
• Angie Diaz was just 17 when she played Vida on Power Rangers Mystic Force, though she looked a little bit older than that. To drive the point home, her on-screen sister was played by a young-looking 26-year-old and many viewers thought Vida was the older sister.
• Daniel Johnston died in 2019 at age 58, but in his last years looked to be in his late 60s or early 70s.
• While John Cleese (born in 1939) looks his age now, he was in his late 30s when he did Fawlty Towers, but he could pass for his late 40s to early 50s.
• Power Rangers Dino Charge's Claire Blackwelder, who plays Team Mom and mentor Kendall looks to be in her early/mid-20s which fits her role, but she is actually younger than everyone else in the cast except for Michael Taber (who plays the teenage Riley) and Camille Hyde (who Claire is barely three months older than).
  • Though acting years older than you are to the Rangers who are in their late teens because of your job and mentor status can do that.
• Neil Kaplan looks his age at 50, if not still a bit older, but looked considerably older for most of his 40s. For example, he was 43 when this video was taken.
• Steven Anthony Lawrence looks about 10 years older than his real age (25). This is especially jarring since he looked his age for a really long time.
• For an example of when this trope and Older Than They Look contrast, the actresses who portrayed the mother-daughter title characters in Kath & Kim were both 40 when the series premiered.
• Jennifer Lewis was frequently cast as 40- to 50-something mothers back in the 90s when she was only in her 30s. She was also cast as the Grandmother of Raven-Symone and Kyle Massey on That's So Raven when she was in her late 40s (and, therefore, would be more likely to be their mother than their grandmother in real life). Voice applies here too — she was the voice of Mama Odie in The Princess and the Frog.
• Angela Lansbury was playing mothers to grown men before she even hit 40 and even played an adult in Gaslight when she was still a teenager.
  "Hollywood made me old before my time."
• Norman Reedus, born in 1969, looked to be in his late 20s or early 30s when he first played Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead in 2010, but by 2015 he looked early to mid-50s◊.
• Tammy Lynn Sytch went to pieces after the death of her husband, Chris Candido. Drug use, weight gain and a deeper voice has made her look and sound like she's in her late 50s even though she won't actually reach 50 until December 7, 2022. While she looked good again by the time she was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2011, her looks have fallen apart again.
• Yet another WWE alumnus, Arn Anderson, made his professional debut when he was 24, but due to the fact that he had a beard, a bit of a paunch and began losing his hair at a young age and wore combover, he looked like he was in his 40s. He's changed very little since then, so his age caught up to his appearance.
• Geddy Lee of Rush, born in 1953, was 38 when this picture◊ was taken, but looked at least ten years older. This is made even more alarming since just four years prior he looked like this◊. However, in this picture◊ taken in late 2015, he looks at most his calendar age, and possibly younger. He looked noticeably younger than 66 in this 2019 video (Lee appears at 2:16).
• Keira Knightley benefited from this early in her career. In her teens, she got very tall and thus was able to believably pass for early 20s (because of course Teens Are Short in fictionland). Although she was playing age-appropriate characters in The Hole, Bend It Like Beckham and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, she looks the same age as her Dawson Casting co-stars in most of them. And in Love Actually she plays a woman in her mid-20s when she was just 18 — and her two love interests were Chiwetel Ejiofor and Andrew Lincoln, who were ten and twelve years older than her respectively. Her looks now match the age she actually is, if not slightly younger.
• Jon Hamm has been quoted that at the age of 25 he was being asked to play the fathers of teenagers on various Teen Dramas — which of course employed Dawson Casting.
• Aaliyah in her teens looked as if she were in her mid-20s. She was only 19 when Romeo Must Die was filmed but looked (and the character appeared to be) at least four years older, and sadly never made it to her mid-20s, dying in a plane crash at age 22.
• Jennifer Lawrence was able to play the female lead in Silver Linings Playbook who has been married for several years, and is the love interest of 37-year-old Bradley Cooper. Her actual age at the time? 21. David O. Russell has taken this trope and run with it, and a Running Gag among fans is that she's frequently cast as characters she's too young for.
• Jack Wild started out Younger Than They Look, appearing as a pre-pubescent 11 to 12 years old◊ when he was 17-18◊. However, years of heavy tobacco and alcohol abuse quickly aged him◊ and when he passed away at 54◊, he looked absolutely◊ elderly!
• Beach Boys frontman Mike Love was 20 when the band formed in 1961, but as you can see in this picture◊ (Mike's in the middle) he looked like he was pushing 40 due to his receding hairline, which is why he's spent most of his life wearing hats to hide it. Nowadays, he's actually Older Than He Looks. He was 75 when this picture◊ was taken.
• Irish actress Amy Shiels is 28 years old◊ as of 2019, and she certainly looks her age now, but she looked significantly older than 13◊ when she starred in Cowboys & Angels back in 2003.
• John Goodman has always looked to be in his 50s or 60s. Now that he actually is in his 60s, he looks rather good for his age.
• Heath Ledger was only 28 when he passed away, but his noticeably receding hairline and facial hair made him look like he was at least in his mid-30s.
• Richard Dreyfuss, perhaps in part due to cocaine addiction, and certainly helped by premature graying and balding, looked like a man in his mid-50s before he had even reached 40.
• Warwick Davis was only 17 when he played the titular character in Willow, a man with a wife and two small children.
• Margaret Hamilton was only 36 when she played the "old and ugly" Wicked Witch of the west. Even in her Miss Gulch role, Aunt Em's line "For 23 years I've been dying by to tell you what I thought of you" suggests she's a lot older than the actress's age.
• Manchester actor Steven Gidwaney is frequently cast as characters older than he is. In the web series 4G or Not To... he plays a dentist, and in the short Assurance he plays a police detective. His actual age in both? 21!
• This◊ is what Dwayne Johnson looked like when he was 15 years old. Described as 6'4" and 215 pounds, when he was transferred to a high school in Nashville, everyone thought he was an undercover police office à la 21 Jump Street.
• Angelica Mandy, known for her non-speaking appearances as Gabrielle Delacour in the Harry Potter films, looks a few years older than her real age. For example, this is how she looked at 25 in early 2018.
• Melody is a Brazilian singer who, at the current date (April 2021), is only 13 years old. However, because of the way she dresses and makes herself up (and also because of how she behaves) she can easily be mistaken as a teenager of 16 or 18. She has caused great controversy in Brazil, as her father is accused of sexualizing his daughter in order to help her career as a singer.
• Johnny Carson, around the 10th anniversary of his hosting tenure of The Tonight Show (1962–1992), looked as if he was nearing 60 years old. He was only 46 years old at the time!
• This is footage of NFL coach Andy Reid as a 13-year-old boy.
• Former Yellow Wiggle Greg Page was born in January 1972, but he looks more like he was born in the 1950s, despite being the youngest original member of The Wiggles and only two months older than the current Red Wiggle Simon Pryce. This may be due to the orthostatic intolerance that caused him to retire from the group. This◊ is what he looked in 2006 aged 35 and this◊ is how he looked in 2020 at age 48. That second image was taken after he was released from the hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest in January 2020. This clearly took even more years off his life as a video featuring him that was uploaded some time after showed him resembling a frail old man◊.
• Leonard Whiting was only 17 in Romeo and Juliet (1968) but was told by an interviewer he could easily pass for 20-something.
• Deborah Kerr sometimes played women who were in their 30s before she was actually that age. She had been hoping to play the teenage Queen Elizabeth I in Young Bess and was not pleased to be shunted into the small supporting role of Catherine Parr (who was mid-30s) instead. And in Tea and Sympathy, she was only 33 playing a housewife who's implied to be in her 40s. Some of her other roles subverted this however — such as Black Narcissus where she's outright said to be too young for her position and The Innocents where she's a young governess on her first job.
• The woman in Grant Wood's American Gothic painting was intended to be his daughter, but her plain clothes and world-weary expression make her look almost as old as her father. The result is many come to the assumption they're a married couple.
• Irish actor Greg Young went through a growth spurt after The Nutters and played roles older than his actual age (such as a soldier in What I Stand For) — helped by growing a thick beard to go with it. At the age of 19, he played a college professor! And in Mr Peterson, when he was still 18, he played a 20-something. That being said, he shaved his beard for other roles and was able to pass for even younger.
• Also from The Nutters, Mason Creedy, who played the bully Ryan was three years younger than the rest of the cast (who were all 16-17) but looked the same age.
• Thomas Fitzgerald was only 20s when he made Aaron and lines in the script indicate his character is that age too — but the longer hair and thick beard made him look several years older (it's said he was a drunken lout in his youth, which would account for this). He looked his actual age in High and Tight without the beard. Likewise, he was nearly turned down for Mr Peterson for appearing too old for the role of the teenage delinquent Archie (but again, he shaved the beard and was cast).
• Serial killer Dorothea Puente used this as part of her shtick to lure victims and evade capture. During the time of the murders, she was in her 50s, and ran a boarding house for people down on their luck, whom she would kill for their social security checks. But she intentionally dressed and styled her hair to appear much older, because who would suspect the little old frail 70-year-old lady of committing over 10 murders and burying them in her yard?
• Bobcat Goldthwait came to fame in his early 20s; even back then he could have passed for mid-30s.
• Irish musicians duo Danny Ruszo and Dubal C gained some traction in 2020 and were assumed to be 20-somethings — due to Danny's facial hair and both having extremely muscular physiques. They then caused a shock by sharing pictures of themselves in school uniforms. Danny only turned 18 in 2021, and Dubal C 17.
• The filmmakers of The Company of Wolves were intending to use mild Dawson Casting for the role of Rosaleen — who is 12 in the script but the film is about her exploring her sexuality. Sarah Patterson was cast when she went to the audition with a friend, not intending to read for the part — assuming she was the same age as the other teen actresses. When they find out she was only 12, they hastily toned down some of the character's sexual behavior.
• Take a look to any politician when they're elected president, and take another look when they end their mandate. They look like if they aged 20 years even if only eight years passed.

• John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, both fit this trope to a T. Considering that both were believed to struggle with depression in addition to Intelligence Equals Isolation, this makes sense. Real person troped. Cut.
• Dorothy Parker qualified, at least during her Vicious Circle period. Snarky, sour, misanthropic, cynical, self-flagellating... even if she did seem to have great sympathy for the Virgin Mary. Real person troped. Cut.
• Alfred Hitchcock seems to be this in his television persona. Comment out ZCE and move to Live Action TV.
• Both Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard were this in spades. Real person troped. Cut.
• The late author Christopher Hitchens. Real person troped. Cut.
• The years since the break-up of The Beatles and especially since his murder have revealed John Lennon to be an example of this. Real person troped. Cut.
• American feminist writer Camille Paglia, especially as regards other feminists. Real person troped. Cut.
• Britain is perceived as this by the rest of the world. General Example. Cut.
  • But they're known for self-deprecating humor and charm along with their wit. The French, however, are not. General Example and natter. Cut.
  • Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh was a literal Snark Knight. Real person troped. Cut.
• George Carlin. This personality trait was exaggerated in his stage persona, but those close to him say the real Carlin shared most of his character's views, he just wasn't as much of a jerk about it. Edit and move to Comedy.
• Florence King. What else can you call someone who's magazine column was titled "The Misanthrope's Corner" and whose book titles include "With Charity Towards None." Edit and move to Literature.
• Warren Zevon was one. In his final appearance on Letterman, having discussed Zevon's recent diagnosis of terminal cancer, the host said: "To me, you look and seem remarkably healthy." Zevon replied: "Well, don't be fooled." Real person troped. Cut.
• Ambrose Bierce. His book The Devil's Dictionary is pretty much the Bible of this trope. Edit and move to Literature.
• Ayn Rand, especially when it came to conservatives and other people she didn't think represented capitalism properly. Real person troped. Cut.

• Supposedly, in the Wild West calling someone a coward was one of four fighting words that you would only invoke if you were prepared to fight for your life. The other three were thief, cheater (especially when playing cards in a saloon), and liar.
• Truth in Television: In Tennessee and the DC area, you can get arrested for calling someone a coward if they refuse to fight you. Interestingly, this is where the phrase, "Them's fightin' words!" comes from, "fighting words" originating as a legal term referring to words spoken to deliberately incite a fight, which is illegal.
• For anyone who gets pressured into doing drugs, if they are called a "C-H-I-C-K-E-N" for refusing, they can tell them (or not) that it stands for "Cool, Honest, Intelligent, Clear headed, Keen, Energetic, and Not interested in drugs".
  • Alternatively? Do your own research on the drug (or the subject of the dare), and ask yourself if you would want to do this, for yourself, if the person who dared you to do this never existed. Remember, no amount of coolness will ever offset the patheticness of those who enslave themselves to bullies who simply say "I [s]order[/s]dare you to ruin your life, Chicken.
• This was very nearly the undoing of Second World War flying ace and rare positive example of Inspirationally Disabled Douglas Bader. Someone dared him to perform an aileron roll at low level over the airfield, which he wasn't especially keen to do for the very good reason that it's bloody dangerous... but then they implied that this was down to cowardice on Bader's part. So he tried it, and it went horribly wrong and cost him both his legs.

• Chicken: The Poor Man's turkey.
• Having volunteers cluck like a chicken during stage-hypnosis acts is practically a Truth in Television trope of its own.
• Werner Herzog has a crippling fear of chickens and includes them in several symbolic scenes in his movies.
• Some scientists have theorized on reviving dinosaurs in a strange way: not through time travel or mosquitoes in amber, mind you, but by reverse-engineering a chicken back into a dinosaur! The idea is that chickens, like all birds, still have the genes for dinosaur traits such as teeth and clawed fingers, they just turn off early on in development. In theory, by reactivating the genes that grow these features, a chick could hatch that has a toothed snout instead of a beak, a longer bony tail, and hands instead of wings: basically, a fluffy, yellow mini-raptor.
  • Of course, chickens already ARE dinosaurs, so this isn't technically "reviving" a dinosaur, only getting a highly-derived modern dinosaur to exhibit more primitive traits.
• There is at least one scientific paper consisting entirely of the word chicken, "Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken" by University of Washington's Doug Zonker. (The paper also been presented at AAAS.) It emulates much of the structure of a real computer science paper (right down to citing sources, or in this case, appearing to), and at a distance might even be mistaken for one, but upon careful review, it does not advance any novel research, and the programming flowchart isn't particularly useful for software development (read: chicken chicken chicken, chicken chickens chicken).
• Sue Lowden made headlines by suggesting that, instead of progressive health care reform, America should revert to the good old days when people paid for health care by bartering with chickens, although it could be argued that this is in fact a subversion of the Trope.
• When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition.
• Mike the Headless Chicken.
• Cockfighting. A very brutal sport where two roosters fight to the death. Two enter a pit or arena where they precede to kick, scratch, and peck each other. In communities where cockfighting is the preferred choice among Beastly Bloodsports, spurs are attached. This allows for quick kills instead of long drawn out disfigurement. Abhorrent to the modern Western person but a very quick source of entertainment in parts where cows outnumber people.
  • Although cockfighting is looked down upon in modern Western society, it's thought to have been instrumental in the introduction of chickens to much of Oceania: eggs and bird meat aren't exactly hard to come by on tropical islands where seabirds roost in huge numbers, but gamecocks could be used for gambling, not just dinner. It's still considered the unofficial national pastime among many Filipinos.
  • Interestingly, one theory of the domestication of chickens suggests that chickens were originally tamed for purposes of cockfighting and that the meat and egg uses were secondary to the fighting use for centuries.
• How numerous are chickens? When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, over a million chickens were lost as a result of damage to chicken farms in that part of the country. How much effect did this have on the cost of chicken in grocery stores due to this loss of supply? None whatsoever, as a million chickens wasn't even a statistic, as far as supply and demand went.
• An Urban Legend claims that an aeronautics company was testing their latest fighter jet and wanted to see how it would deal with running into a bird in midair. A chicken was duly bought at the supermarket and fired at the aircraft, where it promptly shattered not only the windshield but also the crash dummy before embedding itself in the seat. There was much wailing and pointing of fingers as the engineers tried to find out why the cockpit had not held up. After numerous rounds of expensive tests, each ending with the chicken winning against the jet, the solution was finally found: thaw the chicken before testing.
  • In her non-fiction book Grunt, which focuses on the science behind modern militaries,^note designing effective, durable field equipment, keeping soldiers healthy on a tour of duty, advances in reconstructive surgery, etc. pop-science author Mary Roach confirms that the chicken cannon is a real thing. She is silent, however, on the above story—which, given her sense of humor, suggests that it didn't happen.
• Every formally-recognized country in the world has chickens, including ones with no other livestock. Even the Vatican maintains a small indoor coop of hens for fresh eggs.
• Farmers note that the personalities of chickens vary from breed to breed; some breeds are docile, but others are notoriously aggressive and all of them have hierarchies within the flock, which is why we have the phrase "PECKING order." And while they're pretty benign omnivores normally (you can feed them a wide range of insects, grain, and table scraps), they're also known to catch all sorts of small mammals/reptiles that wander into the coop. Meaner chickens can get carried away with inter-flock hierarchies and will often pick on their lower-ranking members.
• This video of a giant chicken coming out of its coop has to be seen to be believed.

• The textbook Special Relativity by T. M. Helliwell has a number of problems (and some cover art) featuring rhinoceros running at relativistic speeds.
• The rhinoceros family used to be far more diverse then the 5 species that are alive today, including gazelle-like sprinters and hippo-like swimmers.
  • The Elasmotherium was much bigger than the white rhinoceros or woolly rhinoceros, rivaling the contemporary woolly mammoths in size. Its nose bump has been theorized to hold a single horn up to 2 meters in length, earning it the nickname the Siberian Unicorn. Some people think it survived as recently the Middle Ages and gave inspiration to the legend.
• The Eocene and the Oligocene produced a number of animals that are often mistakenly referred as rhinos, mostly due to superficial resemblance, although some were actual rhino relatives. The most notable of these pseudo-rhinos include:
  • Uintatherium was one of the first truly giant mammals (about as big as a white rhino) and had saber-like fangs and six giraffe-like ossicones on its head. It lived in the marshy forests of Eocene North America and was part of an enigmatic group of early mammals called Dinocerates.
  • Arsinoitherium lived in the coastal mangroves of what is now Egypt during the Late Eocene and Early Oligocene. It had two massive horns over its nose and was part of an extinct group called the Embrithopods, which were probably related to elephants.
  • Megacerops (formerly known as Brontotherium) and Embolotherium were Brontotheres (which were related to rhinos) from Oligocene North America and Late Eocene Mongolia respectively. The former was recognizable by its forked horn, which males used to ram each other with, and the latter had a giant wedge-shaped plate on its nose, which while too fragile for combat, was likely for display or part of an elaborate nasal system. Rivaling modern elephants in size, they were the largest land mammals of their day.
  • Even bigger were the Hyracodonts, very close relatives of rhinoceroses. The most impressive is probably Paraceratherium, a long legged and long-necked treetop browser that grew to be 18 ft tall at the top of its head and weighing in at 16 tons, making it the second-heaviest, and possibly the tallest, land mammal to exist (the heaviest was the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon namadicus which grew 17 feet at the shoulder and weigh in at 22 tons).
• Inverted in 19th century South Africa. The colonial authorities decided to open an area for settlement, so they killed all the rhinos, considering them dangerous. In the end, the area was not colonized.

• The verb "to badger" means to annoy or harass someone by repeatedly asking the same question, which also adds to the negative perception of badgers. Though the term actually comes from badger-hunting rather than from badgers themselves. Specifically, in the way that dachshunds would grab and hold onto badgers in their dens so that the dogs' owners could pull both the dog and the badger out.
• In French, the word for badger ("blaireau") also means "stupid asshole".

• There is an extinct bat called Necromantis (literally, death eater). Still way too small to kill a person, but a formidable predator nonetheless.
• There's actually an extinct mammal named Jugulator. We know for sure that it closest relatives are adapted for flight (gliding or powered, it would still result in a membrane wing), and one depiction takes it to its logical conclusion.
• Completely subverted by fruit bats. If not for their wings, they look like tiny, wide-eyed foxes. To add a little extra "AWWWWWW", fruit bats love being cuddled and their favorite snack is banana smoothies!
• Subverted by the noble Spacebat.
• Spectral Bats, who have 3-foot long wingspans and are the largest carnivorous bat alive, will eat anything smaller than it and will hunt other bats as well. Except that bats with offspring are very good mothers and fathers. The male will even sleep with the mother and young in his wings.
• There was, during the Pleistocene, a species of giant vampire bat Desmodus draculae. They were roughly one and a half times as large as a modern vampire bat, or the size of a smallish fruit bat, and they fed on the blood of the megafauna of the period such as giant ground sloths. Read more here.
• Ordinary insectivorous bats can likewise be vectors for rabies. The odds of any given bat being a carrier are low, but rabid bats eventually lose their ability to fly due to neurological degeneration, greatly increasing the risk that a predator or unwary human will investigate the grounded bat and get bitten for their trouble.
• An American dentist investigated the possibility of rigging bats with tiny explosive charges, to be carried into the rafters of Japanese buildings in World War II. The bat-bombs were never deployed, and a Disastrous Demonstration resulted in some escaped bats blowing up the researcher's own workshops.
• In cryptozoology, we get many bizarre bat creatures that typically fall under the Dire Bat category. The Indonesian Orang-Bati, for example, is a large batlike monster that's said to eat babies. The African Kongamato and its cousin the Olitiau, are often claimed to be monstrous pterodactyl-like creatures, but their descriptions and most eyewitness reports of the animals seem to suggest something more like large bats. In behavior, it's said to have a Hair-Trigger Temper and being quick to attack anything that so much as makes eye contact with it, fitting it squarely into this trope. The Javan Ahool (which, interestingly enough, is named after the sound it allegedly makes) appears to be mostly harmless by comparison, though, and mainly feeds on fish.

• Bulldogs are also extremely popular as sports mascots.
  • The Cleveland Browns' official mascot may be a brownie, but it's more likely you'll see someone wearing the "Dawg" on his shirt, a big orange bulldog!
  • There are also the Bulldogs who are the mascots of Yale, the University of Georgia, Gonzaga, Butler and the Citadel.
  • A proud, red bulldog is also the mascot for Barq's root beer. (It doesn't really look like the bulldogs of today, it's more muscular.)
  • Similar to the Barq's example, there's the mascot for Mack trucks.
• Believe it or not, Bulldogs are cited as being very friendly dogs, especially for families with children. They'd actually prefer to sleep on someone's lap and wouldn't leave their yard without a human companion. This was intentional as all of the viciousness that made it such a good work dog was bred out as well as shortening the muzzle so that it won't be able to bite (which lead the breed to have both breathing and birthing problems).
• While this trope has become a Dead Horse Trope for bulldogs themselves, other bully breeds still play this trope straight. Bullmastiffs descend from the English Bulldog and the English Mastiff, and make impressive guard dogs due to their size and fearlessness. Meanwhile, the Pit Bull breeds were unfortunately bred for dog fighting, and efforts to breed this trait out of them have been far more recent. While Pit Bulls are surprisingly gentle most of the time, dog experts insist never taking it for granted, especially with other dogs, smaller animals, and young children.

• The Rogue Elephant of Aberdare Forest was a quasi-example. It went completely berserk for several months in the local area, indiscriminately and unpredictably attacking small villages as it went. According to Cracked, it would even lie in wait for its victims and tear them apart with its trunk - but the elephant was likely in excruciating pain the whole time, as the hunter that eventually killed it discovered a completely unrelated bullet embedded deep inside its tusk.

• Foxes can be amazingly cunning predators. One was observed swimming across a lake carrying a branch, so he could look like a piece of floating debris and get close enough to some ducks to grab one.
  • They have also adapted far better to the urbanization of their natural habitat than many species; their population density is actually higher in more urban areas because their competition can't survive in the middle of a city. Urban foxes also tend to reach larger sizes.
    • Being omnivores really helps them there. They can polish off basically an entire bin's worth of discarded food without issue, regardless of what the food actually is.
    • Being rather cute doesn't hurt either, as a lot of people will readily give scraps to a fox that's loitering nearby, and foxes can quickly learn that humans often have a lot of food to give. A few even adopt them and have them as Canine Companions, even though most fox species don't make good pets compared to dogs or even coyotes, without proper training.
    • Foxes are tolerated in towns and cities as they keep vermin in control. They are natural predators for rabbits, hares, and rats and often scavenge carrion and roadkill. And unlike coyotes, they'll usually leave housepets alone, even if they're your Canine Companions.
    • Even cats for that matter usually. Sharp claws give an advantage to a cat in any tussle and discourage the fox from angering a cat. An adult could sometimes be a threat to a kitten, but so too could other adult cats.

• According to some accounts, jellyfish stings can certainly feel like an electric shock or a severe burn, and can even leave scars that reinforce this idea. Obviously, this isn't the result of an actual electric shock, though, but the venom in the jelly's tentacles that attacks the nervous system to paralyze potential prey.

• While they don't launch their quills at their enemies, old world porcupines will attempt to stab persistent attackers by running backwards and ramming them with their spiny backsides. The Indian crested porcupine in particular has been known to severely injure and even kill tigers and leopards with this method, with the latter often becoming man-eaters due to their injuries. For example, the Leopard of Gummalapur, responsible for the deaths of 42 people, was discovered to have two porcupine quills lodged in its right forefoot after it was killed.

• Real stingrays and manta rays mostly avert this trope, to the point that they can be tame enough for divers to swim with them and touch pools where people can pet rays are a popular feature at zoos and aquariums. However, they can still be dangerous if startled or provoked; Crocodile Hunter host Steve Irwin is the best-known stingray fatality.

• The early Christian hermits who lived in the deserts of Egypt and Palestine in the fourth and fifth centuries AD; indeed, words like "monk" and "monastery" derive from the Greek word monos, "alone". Hermits began to congregate into loose collections (now known as "sketes"), where hermits would live around a central place where they could gather for worship; these evolved into monasteries. However, there are still monks and nuns who follow this tradition and live as hermits (they'll tell you they aren't really living alone, but choose solitude in order to experience God more fully). General example. Cut.
• Ditto with monastic traditions in other religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. General example and ZCE. Cut.
• In 18th century England, the best gardens would have an "ornamental" hermit. This person was hired to live on the grounds in a hovel and appear occasionally for guests... at a distance. They weren't allowed to bathe or cut their nails and hair over their tenure. After several years, the hermit would be let go and paid a large sum of money. Most modern interpretations of hermits are modeled after this fad. General example and shoehorn. Cut.
• Somewhat Truth in Television with people who have Schizoid personalities. This isn't the same as Schizophrenic: people with this disposition do not suffer from social anxiety as do Hikikomori, nor do they particularly desire to go out and interact with others, and many hold jobs and spouses. They simply prefer to be alone, and cut themselves off from the "usual" social interactions. With the new DSM-V criteria it won't be considered a disorder any more. General example and shoehorn. Cut.
• Somewhat of a Downplayed example, but there's a perception that this trope is a common reason for why some Americans choose to move to Alaska. General example. Cut.
• Famously, Henry David Thoreau spent a bit over two years living in comparative solitude at Walden Pond, which formed the basis for his book Walden. He often entertained visitors, however, and returned to society once his time was over, so his stay at Walden was more of a social experiment in simple living than an official hermit lifestyle. Oh, and his mom did his laundry for him. Walden was a popular public park in Thoreau's day, so it's basically like a modern day philosopher taking residence in one of the utility sheds in New York City's Central Park. Troping real person. Cut, maybe move to Literature.
• The Lykov family lived in seclusion for nearly 40 years after fleeing religious persecution during the early years of the Soviet Union, living some 150 miles/240 kilometers away from the nearest settlements in the Siberian wilderness. They were completely unaware that World War II had occurred, or even that men had landed on the moon, and were amazed at some of what then modern society had to offer, such as cellophane. It should also be noted that their life was pretty hard, and they were under constant threat of starvation (which the mother died from in 1961) due to not having a lot of modern tools for wilderness survival many people take for granted today, such as cooking utensils or hunting gear. Additionally, three of the children died within days of each other, two from kidney failure, likely due to their diet, and a third from pneumonia. Sadly, only one of the daughters, Agafia who is now in her 70's, is still alive. Troping real person. Cut.
• The North Pond Hermit lived for over 25 years in the woods of central Maine with virtually no interaction with other people (other than breaking into their camps) until he was finally caught and arrested in 2013. Troping real person. Cut.