Dumb Blonde

That's...not how you iron hair, but you do you.

"You may think I'm just a pretty blonde, well, in this case, what you see is exactly what you get! Blondes are dumb as [honk]!"

— Sailor Venus, Sailor Moon Abridged Ep. 50

The stereotypical assumption is that blondes are dumb. These characters fit it. Perhaps no more than a Foil to the Brainy Brunette, but can also appear as The Fool, The Ditz, or even the Brainless Beauty. Extreme cases can make her the Cloudcuckoolander, or Too Dumb to Live. Her character is otherwise flexible; the Dumb Blonde ranges from a Love Freak, to a sweet, wholesome blonde whose lack of interest in education only shows that she is more concerned about people, to a vacuous, mean-spirited and often lazy bimbo, or less often to The Vamp.

The Dumb Blonde may be less worldly-wise, or she may have decided to skate through life on her looks, leaving intellectual pursuits to her darker-haired counterpart because she does not want to spend the effort to cultivate her mind. It may even be a deliberately cultivated act, to appear in need of help before men. Whatever the reason, she tends to be scatter-brained and lacking in common sense.

While the trope is Older Than Steam, it really started to become popular in the 1940s and '50s with comic books, radio, and movies cementing the idea of the pretty but foolish blonde.

Very prone to subversion now, with the characters who assume the blonde is foolish paying for it dearly. This may be a form of Obfuscating Stupidity, with the blonde playing off the stereotype, or she may have both strengths and weaknesses, and the blonde hair causes characters to overestimate the weakness and underestimate the strengths. Some works of fiction also play with this trope by splitting it into two subtypes: One types Book Dumb, while the other is book smart, but lacks common sense.

Oddly enough, this trope seems to apply to bottle blondes more than natural ones. Perhaps dyeing her hair is a sign of her natural shallowness, or it's one of the ways that she tries to get out of doing any thinking, studying, or other action to develop her mind. This is sometimes referenced by another character who asks, "Has all that hair dye you use finally seeped into your brain?"

When the blonde is innocent rather than stupid, that's Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold. If the blonde is also very strong, then this takes on a Brains Versus Brawn dynamic, especially if the Brainy Brunette is there as a contrast or in a Brains and Brawn duo. When the blonde is sexy rather than stupid, that's Everyone Loves Blondes. If she is sexy and stupid, she's a Brainless Beauty. And if she's in a Four-Temperament Ensemble, she's probably Sanguine. Bonus points go to Dumb Blonde characters who aren't real blondes. Especially watch out for a Ditzy Genius or a Modern Major General.

Not quite Always Female, but mostly so.

Because not every blonde person you come across is an idiot, No Real Life Examples, Please!

noreallife

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Examples:

Advertising

• An Australian KFC Hot and Spicy ad campaign from the '90s had customers gain the ability to breathe fire after eating the spicy chicken. One commercial featured a guy tucking into a bucket of extra hot chicken while his attractive blonde girlfriend sitting beside him is completely absorbed in a very cliche-sounding soap opera. Without taking her eyes off the screen she asks him what he is eating. He responds by leaning over and blowing softly in her ear causing a jet of flame to shoot straight out of her other ear. As he leans back she blinks, comments that it sounds nice and reaches for a piece herself, still without taking her eyes off the screen (see it here).
• A 2014 Geico commercial averts this trope, as a blonde suggests the best way to escape a killer is to get into the running car.
• Subverted in a World War II "Careless Talk Costs Lives" poster, which showed a sexy blonde surrounded by off-duty forces personnel and the caption "Keep mum - she's not so dumb".

Anime & Manga

• Nina from Berserk, she borders on complete Jerkass with the amount of dumb and selfish decisions she makes.
• Cutey Honey is a borderline case, because she's blond only in civilian ID (and not in live action). Ditziness (and whether it's real or Obfuscating Stupidity) will also vary depending on the version of the character.
• Misa Amane from Death Note. though her hair is dyed. Then again, next to L or Light, pretty much anyone would look dumb by proxy. Also, she's not so much "stupid" as "completely insane". She's fairly savvy and even cunning when she's being serious about things, but most of the time she's just too childish to be competent.
• Panchy, Bulma's mother from Dragon Ball. Didn't even recognize her grown-up grandson from the future and thought Krillin's karaoke was great. Panchy also doesn't leave Capsule Corp despite the threat of King Piccolo and later Majin Buu destroying West City all because she doesn't want to leave her pets. Though to be fair her husband Dr. Briefs is also dangerously absent-minded.
• Excel♡Saga: Excel Excel is Japanese and has no reason to be blond other than for this trope. The anime Flanderizes this in addition to giving her a lighter shade of blond than the manga, in which she's more often shown dirty to strawberry blond.
• Inverted in Great Teacher Onizuka with the Child Prodigy Urumi Kanzaki. Later on, it's implied that Urumi's dirty secret is that she was conceived from an American sperm donor based solely on his intelligence.
• Astraea in Heaven's Lost Property. Of course, it's not her fault — each Angeloid can only excel at two things and be bad at the third. She's good at fighting and emoting, so she lacks intelligence.
• Played with in regards to the beautiful tomboy Seras Victoria from Hellsing. True, she lacks the education or social class of Integra, but despite her often naive childishness Seras has a "superficial intelligence" that makes her shine among the cast. Also, you don't need to be brainy when you can rip people apart with vampire strength.
• Miki Hosokawa from Hell Teacher Nube is pretty street-smart and typically Genre Savvy enough to take advantage of situations (repeat: typically)... but she has an endless curiosity and just won't stop poking any Artifacts of Doom she comes across, testing Urban Legends, going into haunted places, or teasing the eldritch powers just for the fun of it. Or daring others to do the same.
• Poland from Hetalia: Axis Powers is a quintessential example. He needed someone to turn the table while he was standing on it to screw in a lightbulb. He also talks like a Valley Girl and often pushes around a Brainy Brunet (Lithuania). Poland was still smart enough to buy time for Lithuania to pull his Big Damn Heroes moment in the Battle of Tannenberg, doing so and remaining more or less calm while Prussia was pointing a sword at him. That, and the whole series pokes fun at stereotypes of all kinds; his supposed stupidity is actually Played for Laughs, and nations with other hair colors can be just as dumb (re: Italy, a brunet who's pretty much The Ditz) and almost every Northern European is blond anyway.
• Played with in Hidamari Sketch: Miyako is a tall, busty blonde who often comes off as ditzy, flighty, or just plain weird, and is prone to making extremely poor decisions — but most of it seems to be the result of an extremely severe case of ADHD (which is actually presented in a surprisingly accurate fashion compared to most examples of Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!). Artistically speaking, she is by far the most talented of the main characters (all of whom go to a prestigious art school, mind you), she is quite a fair bit more knowledgeable than all of them (when it comes to strange and extremely obscure trivia), and she's such an academic genius that it's heavily implied that she got accepted to the school on a full scholarship (because she appears to be dirt poor) and was actually exempted from having to do the academic portion of the entry exams.
• Eleanor Mercer in the hentai series Honey Blonde is an American student in Japan... who is the only one in her class who can not speak English.
• Kaolla Su in Love Hina is utterly lacking in common sense, being the series' resident Cloud Cuckoo Lander. She's not exactly stupid, though; she constructs working mechanized toys of mass destruction on a regular basis.
• Naruto:
  • Zig-zagged with the title character. Naruto isn't the sharpest kunai in the pouch, especially when it comes to social graces or book smarts; however, he's surprisingly perceptive and a cunning battle tactician.
  • Ino Yamanaka, similarly to Naruto, can be very smart when she wants, given that she was the one who concluded that Pain's real body must be around the village for his technique to work during the latter's invasion. However, when attractive boys are involved, Ino can be very, very dumb.
• Ayaka plays with this trope in Negima! Magister Negi Magi. She's a bit shallow and slow on the uptake, and quite dense when it comes to recognizing when people are in love (besides herself, of course), but actually gets good grades and is apparently a little smarter than average. This trope is then slammed to the ground and stomped on into a pulp by Evangeline and Arika.
• One Piece:
  • Downplayed with Sanji — he's certainly not stupid, being quite book smart, but he can still be one of the ditziest Straw Hats, sometimes a bit of a sucker, and one of the Straw Hats most likely to make poor decisions based on immediate emotions. Averted when it comes to battle as Sanji reveals he is actually a genius fighter and tactician, but when hot ladies are in his vicinity... he becomes dumber than Luffy.
  • Kalifa, despite being one of the more intelligent CP9 members. In her fight with Nami, she reveals that she is quite The Ditz, confusing a ramping Chopper for Nami and getting flustered with embarrassment afterwards before getting defeated.
• Ouran High School Host Club: Tamaki Suoh acts like a ditz, but he effortlessly gets the second best grades in the second year classes behind only Kyoya.
• From Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt has Panty Anarchy. In the dub, Stocking has to correct her on the reading of "Les Diaboliques".
• Robot Romance Trilogy:
• Voltes V: Inverted with Prince Heinel. He graduated as the top cadet at the Boazanian Institute of Military Sciences and Warfare, and was the only one competent enough to lead the Earthern Invasion. Even Zaki, who hates him, admits it. Also inverted with Katherine, who shows herself to be the Only Sane Woman between her bloodthirsty comrades.
• Daimos: Richter has long, blonde hair that almost touches the ground but his anger overtakes him during his worst moments which leads to some horrible decision making. The Greater-Scope Villain is well-aware of this and uses it to his advantage to make Richter commit the most heinous of crimes.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Sailor Moon manages to get blond-pure and blond-ditz in the same character.
  • Sailor Venus is this more in the anime than manga. In the manga, while she is terrible at school work, she is very knowledgeable about other topics and is usually the one that solves the problems the other girls create. Though in the early days of Codename: Sailor V, she played this a little straighter.
• Male example: Gourry Gabriev of Slayers. Played with a bit, though: he isn't wholly naive, having been a mercenary in his late teens, and has sharp observation skills (as he shows by revealing Xellos as a high-level demonic being), good knowledge on swordplay, and high morals. He's more airheaded in regard to common sense and is Oblivious to Love. Also, due to his aforementioned background, he probably never had the chance to dive into magical knowledge and intensive literature, whereas Lina (from a family of sorcerers), Amelia (from a royal family that specializes in White Magic), and Zelgadis (raised by and was the follower of an extremely powerful priest) did. An interview with the creator Hajime Kanzaka revealed that his magic capacity rivals Lina's, but because he has such a poor memory, he cannot learn spells.
• Strike Witches: Erica Hartmann has elements of this on the ground, although it's not so much dumbness as laziness and lack of proper military protocol. In the air, she is anything but incompetent.
• Mihoshi, the blonde from Tenchi Muyo!, in most continuities. In the OVA she's more of a Genius Ditz.
• Tiger & Bunny has Keith Goodman/Sky High, a superhero whose skill and popularity is eclipsed only by his amazing Ditziness.
• Trigun: Vash the Stampede pretends to be this as Obfuscating Stupidity.

Comic Books

• Betty Coopers from the main Archie Comics started out as one, but with the rise of modern feminism, the writers took advantage of that to make her more distinctive from Veronica as a self-confident voice of common sense Wrench Wench among a myriad of other talents.
• The aptly titled French comic Les Blondes is entirely devoted to Dumb Blonde jokes, with the main character Vanessa embodying this trope.
• In Convergence: Supergirl: Matrix #1, Matrix Supergirl is very ditzy. At one point in a fit of anger, she hurls away the device Luthor gave her to monitor the domes.
  Matrix: Omigod! The gizmo! It found... whatever! I just threw away my only chance of ever getting off this world!
• Zig-zagged with Harley Quinn. She should avert this, as she majored in psychiatry and got a goddamn PHD, but a fateful shrink session with a psychotic clown turned her into a criminal lovesick dunce. It also doesn't help Harley is presented as ridiculously childish in all portrayals and her psychiatry background is rarely brought up.
  • Somehow justified in The Batman Adventures where it was shown that she got her grades getting Sextra Credit.
• DC Comics example: Dumb Bunny of the Inferior Five is typical, but with superhuman strength.
• Red Ears: Double Subverted in a comic where a very drunk guy in a bar offers to tell a dumb blonde joke to three blonde women who then threaten him by describing how the three of them are experts in various martial arts disciplines. He just shrugs it off with "Never mind. I'm not going to tell the same joke three times."
• In Rubine, a blonde model witnesses an assassination between mafioso. Much to her annoyance, Rubine is tasked to her protection. The model is very shallow and only thinks of looks, fashion, and makeup, and doesn't know what a grenade is when someone tosses it at her. As it turns out in the end, the model is far from clueless. She's actually an assassin and the attacks against her were meant to get her in a Witness Protection program so she could kill another witness.
• Runaways: Karolina gets treated like she is one, but she never really does anything to earn the reputation other than being blond and not a genius.
• Spider-Man:
  • Liz Allen, one of Spider-Man's first Love Interests, was this in high school, mocking Peter for his book smarts and drooling over Jerk Jock Flash Thompson. However, she Took a Level in Kindness, getting a crush on Peter, and subverted this trope entirely years later by becoming CEO of Alchemax. Ultimate Liz plays this more straight.
  • It's revealed Aunt May was this in her youth, nearly getting wooed away by a jewel thief before Ben Parker stepped in.
• The Mighty Thor: Depending on the Writer, Thor can very easily be a male version. Being too Hot-Blooded for his own good, he tends to get outwitted by his brother Loki in Brains Evil, Brawn Good scenarios or even outsmarted by fellow Avengers. Though later Thor would avert this, actually being pretty crafty when he wants.
• Subverted in Valhalla. Freya can play the man-obsessed ditz to the hilt, and enjoys making the guys act like idiots, but is consistently shown to be very socially adept (as befits a Love Goddess) as well as a level-headed and shrewd planner who has Out-Gambitted Odin on occasion.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): It depended on what was needed for the story but during the late Golden Age and Silver Age Steve Trevor usually fits as a male example, being a pretty blonde that many characters are attracted to but somehow being unable to tell that the "two" women he spends almost all of his time with are one and the same and constantly walking into obvious traps despite being an intelligence agent.
  • Sensation Comics: Two of the Heyday triplets, all three of whom are identical attractive blonde women, are acknowledged to be reckless, foolish, and dangerously impulsive to the point that their grandmother leaves her estate only to the one of them who doesn't fit here, as she feels Tillie will take care of her sisters with the money and that the other two will be better off that way than if she'd actually given them the money themselves.

Fairy Tales

• "Goldilocks" combines both the innocence and the folly associated with blond hair. You have to be pretty dim to enter the house of a family of bears, eat their food, and use their stuff after all.
• The Pretty Princess from Perrault's Riquet of the Tuft is often represented in illustrations as a blonde. She's sweet and kind but very dumb, and quite aware of it.

Fan Works

• Bebe from South Park is often flanderized into this for various different reasons.
• A male example. Despite being called such, Max subverts the trope in Bringing Me To Life. He might be late sometimes, but he does everything he can to pass high school.
• Kaede Mizuno in A Growing Affection deliberately invokes this trope, pretending to be vain, vapid, and more concerned with her looks than she really is. Not that she is not proud of her appearance, but this is mostly a ploy to get people to underestimate her.
• Not all blondes are dumb in The Night Unfurls, but two of them fit.
  • The original version has Alicia Arcturus, a blonde Princess Knight who is responsible for the largest tactical blunder presented in the story: giving up her entire, well-defended fortress to the Black Dogs in exchange for a number of hostage nuns.
  • Remastered version:
    • While the above has yet to happen, Alicia continuously sending barbs to Kyril, who can slaughter an entire orc band by himself while she cannot, would definitely qualify for this trope.
    • Chloe is blonde. Her Hair-Trigger Temper and Fantastic Racism towards humans means that she is a bomb ready to go off if not for Olga and Kyril disciplining her. Kyril even says that Chloe is testing his patience by needlessly antagonising other people.
• The Pokémon Squad in general avoids this stereotype:
  • Inverted by RM. He is blond, but is one of the smartest characters in the series.
  • RM's Other Friend also inverts this (her IQ is the same as RM's).
• Chiara/Cure Vanilla in Pretty Cure Perfume Preppy is blond and described as being "just clueless" by her sister Chloe. However, she matures a little through the course of the fanfic, becoming less ditzy but still retaining her Genki Girl status.

Films — Animation

• In Beauty and the Beast, the Bimbettes, three blonde bimbos that hang out in the tab near Gaston, to contrast to Belle, who can't be bothered to be charmed by his superficial charms.
• Charlotte La Bouff from The Princess and the Frog. She's very sweet and kind, but on the other hand, she's not too bright and easy to fool; when hiring Tiana, she hands her a wad of cash.
• Downplayed in "The Road to El Dorado", in the case of Miguel who, although not that stupid, can be a bit ditzy sometimes, especially when playing off the far more serious and cunning Tulio.
• In Turning Red, Stacy is implied to be not that smart since Mei's friends believe they can convince her that she imagined seeing Mei in panda form twice.

Films — Live-Action

• Inverted in 7 Zwerge. Since the Queen is blonde while her enemy, Snow White, is black haired, she insists on everyone telling jokes about dumb black-haired women.
• The Ice Princess in Batman Returns combines this with Brainless Beauty. While rehearsing for the Tree Relighting Ceremony in Gotham Plaza, she thought she had to press the big button after the Christmas tree lights up, until she corrected herself. She also doesn't know who The Penguin is, despite the publicity he's been getting for "rescuing" the Mayor's baby, as well as his mayoral campaign, and instead, fell for his lie that he's a "talent scout", which led to her kidnapping and eventual death at The Penguin's hands, in his attempt to frame Batman for it.
• Played with in Bill & Ted. While neither of our heroes is especially bright, blond Bill (a male example) is the more pragmatic of the two, while brunet Ted is slightly dopier.
• Blonde and Blonder, a female version of Dumb and Dumber starring Denise Richards and Pamela Anderson, the latter of whom specializes in dumb blondes.
• Justified in The Cabin in the Woods - Jules dyes her hair blonde before the camping trip, and chemicals are used to make her into a dumb blonde. It's mentioned that she's a med student otherwise.
• August in Cemetery Gates. When Kym tells Tony and Enrique that they wouldn't now what to do with a pragmatic woman, August comments that she is part Russian. Later, Tony persuades her to make a sex tape with him with the argument "everyone is doing it".
• One of the earlier movie examples would be Jean Harlow's character, Kitty Packard, in Dinner at Eight. When she mentions to Marie Dressler's character that "I was reading a book the other day," Dressler literally stops in her tracks in astonishment. Her book is The Salvaging of Civilization by H.G. Wells, published about ten years earlier. The reference to machines taking the place of every profession is a dead giveaway. Jean Harlow initially played vampy Shameless Fanservice Girl characters, before the Hays Code forced her to switch her image for this instead.
• Birdie Jay from Glass Onion is the only natural blonde among her friend group, the Disruptors, and she's by far the dumbest, to the point that she thought that the word "sweatshop" meant "place where sweatpants are made".
• Male example with Park Gang-du from The Host (2006), who was intentionally given blond highlights to show that he's irresponsible and not very bright. At the end of the film, he gets rid of the blond highlights as a sign of him becoming a more responsible parent.
• The infamous Howard the Duck has Beverly, a human being who on being asked what world they're on by an anthropomorphic duck responds with:
  Beverly: The planet's called Earth... I think.
• Marilyn Monroe was iconic as a dumb blonde, and did frequetly play up the stereotype as a part of her public persona, and it led to many assuming she was one in real life (she was pretty smart and made sure she studied drama before breaking into the movies). She plays with this image in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where her character Lorelei is a Genius Ditz who says she can be smart when she wants to be but "men don't like it". Also worth noting is that Marilyn was actually a brunette who dyed her hair.
• Sarah from Hocus Pocus. She spends most of her time "prancing around idiotically", in the words of her elder sister.
• Inverted in Jennifer's Body. The nerdy, intelligent heroine Needy is blonde, while her airheaded Alpha Bitch friend Jennifer is brunette.
• King Kong (1976): Dwan is a beautiful young woman with bright blonde hair. She's also very impulsive and often makes questionable decisions throughout the film.
• When the main character is clothes shopping with her friends at the beginning of Legally Blonde, the saleswoman says to her co-worker, "There's nothing I love more... than a dumb blonde with daddy's plastic." It quickly turns out that Elle is not as dumb as she looks, though. In fact, the entire film is about Elle subverting this stereotype — while she's certainly very preppy, very feminine, and very blonde, she proves to be an extremely competent lawyer against everyone else's expectations.
• Lake Placid: In 3, Tara is blonde and mixes up elk and deer, thinks that an elk's head is the best part of it to eat, and thinks a zookeeper is the same thing as a zoologist.
• Played with in the spoof Loaded Weapon 1. Destiny Demeanor, Kathy Ireland's character, is a gorgeous blonde, comically Literal-Minded, and, when the hero blows in one of her ears, the breeze snuffs out a lit candle beside her opposite ear, but at the same time, she's actually one of the saner, more Genre Savvy people in the film.
• Karen Smith, by far the dimmest character in Mean Girls, is a blonde. In fairness, so is Regina George, who is fairly sharp - at least in terms of manipulation.
• Inverted in the movie version of My Favorite Martian: The vain, shallow Brainless Beauty is played by the brunet Elizabeth Hurley while the smart, likable, funny Girl Next Door love interest is played by the blond Daryl Hannah.
• Buttercup in The Princess Bride; she also has golden hair. But she's not nearly as dumb in the movie as she is in the book.
• Christina from Project Almanac is a downplayed example. She's not unintelligent but she lacks the science smarts of David or Adam or (to a much lesser extent) Quinn and she comes across as less perceptive and witty than Jessie. She is also The Watson of the group, meaning that if any concept or technology has to be explained, it is mostly explained to Christina ("Can you guys speak English?").
• This is more or less how Jen is introduced in Revenge (2017). She's a helluva lot more competent than anyone expects, though.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Rocky Horror is a male example of this. He's also a nearly literal example of Brainless Beauty (he's only got half a brain, folks).
• Romy and Michele's High School Reunion: The two main characters are dim but loveable blondes with a snarky brunette foil.
• Anna Faris plays these in most of her roles. Notably, in the Scary Movie series, she was a brunette in the first two movies, but became blonde from the third film onward.
• Scream 4 defies this trope. Marnie is told by the killer that she's the "dumb blonde with the big tits" who is destined to be the first victim. Marnie responds that she has a 4.0 GPA. She still dies.
• Lina Lamont from Singin' in the Rain. "What do they think I am? Dumb or something?"
• Subverted in Superman III. Pamela Stephenson's character Lorelei Ambrosia displays all the traits of a dumb blonde when other people are around. When she's alone, though, she likes to kick back and read philosophy. Interestingly, the actress herself got tired of playing blonde comedy bimbos and is now a psychologist.
• Amusingly, Thor from the MCU is a male version. He frequently makes rash decisions, thinks science is lame, flew a spaceship by smacking buttons, and sometimes comes off as a complete Idiot Hero. It's a mark of how far Thor has come by the time of Thor: Ragnarok that he's eventually able to outwit his brother Loki the God of Mischief. Averted when it comes to battle, where he's a fighting genius, plus, as seen in Ragnarok, Thor can effectively pilot a spaceship and is more tech savvy.
• Nicole Kidman plays a rare outright villainous Dumb Blonde - admittedly only Book Dumb though - in To Die For. Rarer yet, she is also the main character.
• Jay from the The View Askewniverse is a male example as a ditzy, talkative stoner with a head of blond hair.
• Valentine: Lily Voight is a straight example as a Genki Girl who's gullible enough to bite into an unmarked box of chocolates that turns out to contain maggots and apparently entered into a relationship with a guy she knew would be trouble but dated him anyway. Her friend Kate on the other hand is also blonde yet has a consistent job, conducts most of the research into someone her friends hurt in the past, and is much more cautious about her boyfriend due to his past behavior (the guy has a drinking problem).
• Zombieland: Double Tap introduces Madison, who, while having some incredible survival skills (she avoided a Zombie Apocalypse by living in a Pinkleberry freezer), spews hilariously stupid quotes just about every time she speaks, making her a perfect foil to Brainy Brunette Wichita.

Jokes

• Double Subversion: A ventriloquist is performing a routine with his dummy, telling a series of dumb blonde jokes. Suddenly, a well-dressed platinum blonde businesswoman stands up and says "How can you judge people based on their hair color? It has no bearing on intelligence!" The ventriloquist says, "Lady, please, I just—" The blonde snaps, "You stay out of this! I'm talking to that jerk sitting in your lap!"
• A subversion was submitted to and read out on the Australian show Sunrise: A blonde goes into a bank and asks for a $10,000 loan. The bank manager asks what she will submit as collateral, to which she points outside to a new-looking Rolls Royce. The bank manager, thinking he's taken a sucker, gives her the loan, then drives the car into the secure lot underneath the bank, laughing all the way. Three days later, the blonde returns, and repays the $10,000, as well as the interest, which came to $7.81. As the bank manager drove the car up to meet the woman, he asks, "Ma'am, I noticed that you have over a million dollars in personal funds, as well as over $200,000 in investments. Why would you need a $10,000 loan?" Getting into her car, the blonde replies, "Where else can I park my car for three days for $7.81, and still expect it to be there when I return?"
• A blonde is taken to the hospital with severe burns on both ears and is asked how she got them.
  "Well I was ironing my clothes, and the phone rang, and I forgot I was holding the iron and I held it up to my ear."
  "I see. And the other one?"
  "That's when I tried to call the ambulance."
• Three blondes are sitting in a cafe, discussing Michelangelo's place in Renaissance art. Suddenly one of them whispers: "Guys are about to take the table next to us! Switching to celebrity gossip on my mark!"
• A businessman returns from lunch and asks his secretary if there were any calls. She says: "Oh yes, someone named... I think it was Gomez? Or Tanakawa? He sounded French. Or Australian. He said "If your boss doesn't call me back within the hour his entire company is going under and he can expect twenty years in prison!" ".
• A jet was on its way to New York, when a blonde seated in Economy Class got up moved to the First Class section found an empty seat and sat down. The flight attendant watched the blonde make herself comfortable in First Class, then went over and asked to see her boarding pass. Noting that the pass was for an Economy seat, the flight attendant said, "I'm sorry, but you didn't pay for the first-class seat, so you'll have to go back to the Economy section." The blonde replied, "Listen you, I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to New York, and I'm staying right here in First Class."
  
  The flight attendant went to the cockpit and told the pilot and co-pilot that there was a blonde from Economy Class who was sitting in First Class and wouldn't move back to her assigned seat. The co-pilot went to the passenger area and approached the blonde. He explained that it was against the rules for her to sit in First Class when she had only bought an Economy Class ticket. "I'm sorry he concluded. but you'll have to return to your Economy section seat." The woman snorted and tossed her blonde locks, "Listen you," she snapped, "I'm blonde, I'm beautiful, I'm going to New York, and I'm staying right here in First Class."
  
  The co-pilot returned to the cockpit and told the pilot that he might want to have the police waiting to arrest the blonde when the plane landed. "She refuses to return to her Economy Class seat" the co-pilot explained. "because, she says, she's blonde and beautiful and going to New York." "I'd better handle this," said the pilot. "I'm married to a blonde, so I have experience speaking their language."
  
  With that, the pilot entered the passenger area, went over to the blonde, and whispered in her ear. The blonde immediately stood up, stormed out of First Class muttering "Why didn't anybody say so?" and sat back in her assigned Economy Class seat. The flight attendant and the co-pilot were amazed at how easily the pilot had persuaded the blonde to move. "How did you do it?" they asked him. "Simple," he replied. "I told her that the First Class section wasn't going to New York."

Literature

• In American Psycho, all the blondes whom Patrick Bateman interacts with are as vapid and stupid as the rest of his friends, Evelyn and Courtney primarily. Also, three models (Libby, Daisy, and Caron) Patrick and his associates mingle with in a nightclub. In the book, when they're asked to name any of the planets, two guess the Moon, and the third one guesses Comet. In the film at least, this is deconstructed with one of the models lamenting this and saddened by how Bateman sees her as nothing but a brainless squeeze, suggesting that there is more to her character, but she doesn't mind because she thinks Patrick is actually a nice person.
• A Brother's Price:
  • Keifer Porter. One of his wives says she's known dogs who were smarter. He was also very beautiful and cruel. His sisters, also blond, are much smarter.
  • Cullen Moorland is an aversion. While a bit on the keet side, which is understandable in a 15-year-old boy, he's of at least average intelligence and can be rather crafty at evading rules and escorts when he wishes.
• Chocoholic Mysteries: As noted in Bear Burglary, Rich Godfrey wanted one of these for his wife and thought Lee was one because of her speech impediment. When he found out she was actually very intelligent, it was the beginning of the end for their marriage.
• Inverted in the ColSec Trilogy. The one blond female character is Samella, who's The Smart Girl, an empath, a Wrench Wench, and described as unremarkable in appearance unless she's in an optimistic mood.
• Inverted in Damon Knight's Dio (also called The Dying Man). Claire, the player who falls in love with Dio, is blonde but is more thoughtful and introspective than most people in her class. Her brunette friend Katha is a complete airhead.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In No Brainer, Sophie, a Slacksville girl Greg dates in the final act, is a fair-haired girl who can't spell or understand how a clock tells time. However, this (probably) isn't because Sophie herself is inherently dumb or a bad student and is instead a symptom of the pathetic curriculum at her school.
• Occurs a few times in Discworld, both played straight and subverted:
  • Played straight with Christine in Maskerade, a shallow bimbo opera singer who gets to be the leading lady purely because of her looks, even though she has no vocal talent whatsoever.
  • Letitia in I Shall Wear Midnight, an inane upper-class girl and Tiffany's rival for Roland. Subverted when she and Tiffany turn out to be similar, Letitia also being a young magically-talented woman who is dissatisfied with her lot in life. She and Tiffany become Fire-Forged Friends, and Tiffany ends up blessing hers and Roland's marriage.
• Harriet Smith, in Emma, is a mix of this and Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold. She is a sweet and innocent girl to be sure, but she's also incredibly dim, especially compared with the exceedingly clever Emma.
• In John C. Wright's Fugitives of Chaos, a character describes a location as easy enough for Amelia — "blond brain" — to find. (He intends it as an insult; other characters have particularly marked her out as the clever one.)
• Annie in George's Secret Key to the Universe is a thorough inversion of this, being very intelligent, especially since she inherited her smarts from her scientist father Eric.
• Subverted with Caroline in The Giddy Death of the Gays and the Strange Demise of Straights and lampshaded by Caroline herself. Her blonde hair, occasional insecurity, and occupation as a bartender cause many to perceive her as this, but she's also a postgraduate student with a strong political and social awareness.
• In the novel The Godfather, Carlo Rizzi is a blond, blue-eyed Northern Italian (though he has brown hair in the film), and it is implied that his being a blond is connected with his less-than-stellar intellect.
• In the InCryptid novel Discount Armageddon, Verity objects to being treated as stupid — yes, she's blond, but that doesn't make her a dumb blonde.
• The Infernal Devices: Subverted. While flouncy and just a tad spoiled, Jessamine Lovelace is a perfectly capable Shadowhunter in her own right.
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff: Biff says Raziel, a blond-haired angel who can't figure out that soap operas aren't depicting reality, is the Ur-Example of the trope and the reason the world has dumb blonde jokes today.
• Bess from Nancy Drew, who, along with being "slightly plump", is consistently portrayed as easily frightened, ditzy, boy-crazy, and obsessed with clothes and makeup.
• Inverted in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Annabeth and most of the other children of Athena are blond, but very intelligent (their mom is the Goddess of Wisdom and generally anyone she has kids with is pretty darn smart as well). The Heroes of Olympus even has Leo wonder how this stereotype developed, as Annabeth has made him associate blonde hair with intelligence and danger.
• Subverted in Poster Girl, the main character Sonya is blonde and at times calls herself not very clever and the old regime actually considered her not intelligent enough for a position above Trophy Wife, but she is actually quite crafty and smart throughout the story.
• Inverted by Laeshana in The Quest of the Unaligned. Even among aeshes (whose secondary power is essentially a burst of superhuman knowledge about something they've been considering), Laeshana is brilliant. At the beginning of the story, she suspects that the theory of magic everyone's followed for the past eight hundred years is missing some major components. By the end of the story, she's been proven right.
• Joy Chant's Red Moon Black Mountain features an entire race of Dumb Blondes.
• Samuel from Rolitania zig-zags this. He has decent grades, so he isn't necessarily Book Dumb, but he lacks basic common sense and social smartness, which causes him to be the Butt-Monkey.
• Subverted by Dr. Sarah Winchester, aka Trigger of the Seekers of Truth; being blond himself, the author wanted to make a blond woman the most intelligent member of the team.
• The Lannisters from A Song of Ice and Fire cover the whole spectrum.
  • There are lots of heads on spikes who can vouch that Tywin Lannister is a major aversion.
  • Tywin's son Tyrion averts it in a major way as well.
  • The twins, Jamie and Cersei... well, someone has to perpetuate the stereotype. It later turns out that Jamie is smarter than he appears to be at first; Cersei, not so much.
  • Lancel (Cersei, Jaime and Tyrion's cousin) and Ser Stafford (Cersei calls him "Uncle Dolt") play the trope straighter than the average Lannister, to their sorrow and others' frustration. It gets them abused, dismissed, mangled, and, in one case, killed in their attempts to fit into the family's near-constant Battle of Wits that just won't accommodate their well-meaning limitations.
  • Cersei assumes that her uncle Kevan is, if not exactly dumb, at least overly stolid and uncreative. This comes back to bite her hard when she finds out that he is actually highly intelligent and only appeared that way because he made an educated decision to be unswervingly loyal to Tywin.
• Georgina Talgarth in Sorcery and Cecelia is often referred to by her cousin Cecy and her sister Kate as a peagoose. In all fairness, she never challenges that perception.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Decidedly subverted by Tash Arranda in Galaxy of Fear. At the beginning of the series she's kind of naive but studious, but gradually starts adding her Force-Sensitivity to her wisdom score, and eventually takes a role quite similar to The Smart Guy. Her darker-haired Book Dumb brother, whose mechanical aptitude and better physical skills originally were more useful and then came to complement her talents, starts feeling useless and overshadowed.
  • Exploited in I, Jedi. Protagonist Corran Horn, who is naturally a brunet, dyes his hair blond as part of his Kieran Halcyon disguise, which carries over to the Jenos Idanian identity he adopts to join the Invid Space Pirates. Their leader, ex-Imperial Moff Leonia Tavira, turns out to believe in this stereotype despite "Idanian" clearly being just as intelligent as the real Corran to the reader, and overestimates her ability to use her feminine wiles to control "Idanian" as a consequence.
• Tawny the inept succubus from Succubus Dreams, the third book in the Georgina Kincaid series. However, by the end of the book, it is revealed that at least some of her stupidity is an act.
• This Side of Paradise: Discussed in chapter 4 of Book 1, where, during a discussion about the hair colors of the senior council members, Amory brings up that people unconsciously expect blondes to talk, and if they don't talk, they're considered shallow-minded and stupid. He notes that dark-haired people who are stupid aren't called out for being stupid, unlike blondes.
• Inverted in Tom Gates. Despite being a blonde, Amy Porter is one of the smartest students in Tom's class. Also, unlike most inversions of this trope, she isn't an Alpha Bitch. In fact, she's quite the opposite.
• The Twilight Saga: Averted by Carlisle (a Doctor) and Jasper (a former soldier with considerable tactical knowledge). Subverted with Rosalie. Despite having several blonde jokes thrown at her by Jacob, she is actually a talented mechanic and, according to the illustated guide, she has studied medicine in order to be able to help Carlisle.
• Subverted with Glinda from The Wicked Years. She's a pretty blonde socialite who comes to Shiz more for the idea of going to university than actual education. Glinda starts off as an Alpha Bitch in a Girl Posse and she contrasts heavily with her Brainy Brunette roommate Elphaba. However, as Elphaba mentions to Boq early on, there's more to Glinda than initially appears. She just prefers to hide away in a mask of a clueless young woman. Eventually, Glinda's social skills end up serving her well, and she does put her brain to good use as a witch.
• Downplayed with Big Anthony, Strega Nona's hired helper. He's not stupid so much as he is easily distracted and impulsive (and he has a bit of a problem with Aesop Amnesia, too).

Live-Action TV

• On 30 Rock, Brainy Brunette Liz stands in contrast to dumb blondes Jenna and Cerie. Both Jenna and Cerie have occasional flashes of being smarter than they initially appear, but overall follow the trope.
• Bridget in 8 Simple Rules. She has quite a few ditzy moments, such as Kerrie banging on the table and Bridget answering the door to find nobody there and remarking that it keeps happening. Bridget is shown to be quite a capable girl when it comes to things she's interested in, such as fashion and boys, but she's definitely a little spacey.
• Inverted on All in the Family, where blonde Gloria is very smart and her brunette mother Edith is a scatterbrained dingbat.
• The producers of The Amazing Race manage to cast at least one ditzy woman in most seasons. They are usually, but not always, blondes:
  • Subverted in Season 10, where the team of Dustin and Kandice, a pair of Beauty Queens (Miss California and Miss New York respectively), were immediately dismissed by everyone (fans and other teams) as dumb blondes, but then ended up being one of the most feared teams to ever run the race and even dominated a large portion of the All-Star season.
  • Taken to new heights in Season 16, with Jordan Lloyd and Caite Upton.
  • Subverted again in Season 17, with Brook, who along with brunette Claire were considered an airhead fodder team pre-race, but finished 2nd overall behind Doctors Nat (who was also blonde) and Kat.
• Beatrice from Another Period is portrayed as very ignorant and clueless. She, however, is Obfuscating Stupidity and is, in fact, a Genius Ditz. She's great at math despite being illiterate, has an amazing opera voice, and can discuss ethics and politics quite well. A season 2 episode revolves around her being able to show her smarts off but she ends up choosing to continue acting dumb.
• Taken to its logical extreme on Arrested Development when Micheal romances a beautiful blonde who, unbeknownst to him, is actually mentally handicapped.
• Played with in Arrow. Felicity Smoak jokes that she "may be blonde, but... not that blonde" in reference to one of the ridiculous cover stories that Oliver Queen and John Diggle tried to fool her with before she became a Secret-Keeper. In fact Felicity is a genius, but actually a brunette who dyes her hair blonde. Her mother, however, who is a natural blonde, fits the stereotype to a much greater extent.
• Penny from the The Big Bang Theory. She's not dumb (although she was in the pilot; that's pure Early-Installment Weirdness), but is the only "normal" person amongst a group of friends that aside from her consists of all scientists. Not at all helped by the fact that she frequently takes on the role of The Heart and enjoys reality TV. Subverted by Bernadette, who has a very Kawaiiko personality and occasionally comes across as slightly dense, but earns her degree in Microbiology over the course of the show.
• Dirk from Bizaardvark, who is the host of a web series where he takes absurd dares. An entire episode's subplot of him being stuck in a storage room after being buried under junk from a shelf could've been easily solved had he used his phone to call for help instead of using it to record himself.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The show set out to subvert this trope with the titular character; she comes off on first acquaintance as a stereotypical Dumb Blonde, but turns out to be a clever, wisecracking Action Girl. On the other hand, many of the villains and minor characters (most notably Harmony) play the trope straight; and Buffy herself, though savvy and intelligent, is a mediocre student (of course, she never has much time to study) and not nearly as brainy as her redheaded friend Willow.
    Buffy: Spell it out for me. I feel an attack of dumb blonde coming on.
  • Spike zigzags the trope. He's portrayed as distinctly observant, witty, Street Smart, fluent in multiple languages and has a surprisingly vast knowledge on the supernatural. That said, he's often too impatient and brash to take full advantage of his smarts, which leads to a great deal of dumb, impulsive mistakes. His soullessness for most of the series additionally leads to him often being confused by morality, which could come across as unintelligence but really is a simple byproduct of having no functioning moral compass and something all soulless vampires in his place would suffer from.
  • Anya wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer in her early years and often got confused by social cues, although she's shown to be very good with math.
  • In the Angel spin-off, Harmony has this trait really cranked up. In the parent series, she's merely an Alpha Bitch and an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
• Angelina, the season 5 winner from Canada's Worst Driver. Any of the contestants with yellow hair could apply due to shocking ignorance about simple rules of the road, but how else do you describe someone who doesn't know how to get the gas cap off? Yes, that was shown, and yes, the door over the cap was open. She returned for the all-star season 9 along with season 6 runner-up Dale, with neither one having gotten any better.
• Jill Monroe in Charlie's Angels, particularly in early episodes. Although attempts are made to avert this by having Jill display unexpected insight and knowledge, there are still moments like in "Night of the Strangler" where Jill, for no reason whatsoever, asks about a suspect's astrological sign in the middle of a mission briefing (the same episode includes a joke that she's taking memory classes because she keeps forgetting things; Jill says she forgot to take the class). Jill (and her successor, Kris) also play up the stereotype as missions demand, as do (very rarely) Sabrina and Kelly as they attempt a "dumb brunette" variant.
• Charmed (1998):
  • Phoebe went blonde in the third season and, while she was already a bit of a ditz, whenever she had a moment, Prue or Piper would call attention to her being a blonde. Paige — the ditziest of the sisters — went blonde in season 6, but nobody ever referenced it.
  • Billie sometimes uses Obfuscating Stupidity but, like Bridget above (played by the same actress), is shown to be capable enough.
  • A season 6 episode has three evil blonde witches who are completely dim. Their entry in the Book of Shadows says there's no need to vanquish them because of how incompetent they are.
• In Le cœur a ses raisons, Megan Barrington-Montgomery is otherworldly stupid, even by the show's standards. Highlights include her trying to apply sunscreen directly on the sun for better efficiency in a deleted scene, failing to understand the simple phrase "Megan, I have to talk to you" and three other variants, and being frightened by the fact that one could cut a piece of paper with scissors. Ashley Rockwell also qualifies, but to a slightly lesser degree.
• Comedy Central Roast Of Pamela Anderson: Several jokes of this kind are made at Pam's expense. For example, Jimmy Kimmel joked that Pam having two published books meant that she had "written more books than [she] read."
  Jimmy Kimmel: "Don't let the dumb blonde thing fool you, this woman is as smart as a rock."
• Quendra on Community. It's made abundantly clear Jeff wants her in the study group only for her physical attributes.
  • Downplayed example with Britta, who started off as the intelligent Straight Man of the group but over the course of the show was Flanderized into this trope.
• Also inverted in CSI: Miami, where brunette Natalia is less intelligent (relatively speaking) than blonde Calleigh.
• Doctor Who:
  • Jo Grant, the Doctor's UNIT assistant who only got the job because her uncle was able to pull strings, and whose role as The Watson was played up so much it seemed like she needed everything explained to her by the Doctor.
  • "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks": Tallulah initially seems like this trope, but in a subversion is far from naïve, pointing out that it's her problem that she chooses to go into the dangerous sewers looking for her missing boyfriend.
• The Dukes of Hazzard offers a male example. The younger (prettier, impulsive, blond) Duke boy Bo is forever getting the two into scrapes that his older (brunet) cousin Luke has to get them out of.
• Poppy on Frasier. Unusually for the trope, her defining character trait is being an irritating Motor Mouth — her being stupid is incidental.
• Game of Thrones: While Cersei isn't a complete moron, Tywin perfectly assesses her when he says that she is nowhere near as intelligent as she thinks she is. Her main flaw is that she continually underestimates people, and her level of misguided arrogance about her supposed political brilliance prevents her from seeing that she is wrong. She loses control of Joffrey almost immediately after he becomes king, and most of her attempts to dispose of Tyrion are laughable failures.
• Inverted in Gilmore Girls with the intelligent and ambitious Paris Geller, who was played by actress Liza Weil, who actually dyed her hair blonde to underline her character as a foil to Rory Gilmore, who, interestingly, is herself a Brainy Brunette.
• Terri on Glee, as well as her sister Kendra. The other main blond characters, Sue and Quinn, meanwhile, have fairly normal intelligence. Brittany meanwhile is the ultimate ditz.^note  An Alternate Character Interpretation of Brittany is that she's not actually dumb, she's completely insane and everything she does and says would make perfect sense if you were under the same delusions that she is. This interpretation is the one held by Heather Morris, the actress who plays her.
• Lilly from Hannah Montana. Subverted in that she gets a scholarship to a prestigious university at the end of Season 4, while Miley fails to get in (though it's due to Miley's lack of participating in extracurricular activities, which she was unable to attend due to having to work as Hannah Montana). Lilly might have her ditzy moments, but academically is of at least average intelligence.
• An unintentional but undeniable example is Claire from Heroes, whose stupidity and inexplicable vulnerability to serious injury would've resulted in her death long ago if not for her Healing Factor. While she occasionally has displays of actual competence, they are undermined by frequent disastrous decision making, culminating most recently in revealing the existence of the specials to the world on a whim, which has been shown (literally in previous seasons) to never end well. To be fair, almost no one on Heroes seems to possess the intellectual capacity to avoid making potentially world-ending choices.
• While Else Tetzlaff in Ein Herz und eine Seele wasn't meant to be this, she technically is. Her husband Alfred doesn't call her "dusselige Kuh" ("ditzy cow") circa Once an Episode for nothing.
• Both inverted and played straight with the titular characters on Hope & Faith. Hope is blond but has the most common sense out of anyone. Faith, on the other hand, fits the stereotype perfectly as she's so dense at times that she almost steps over the line into being an extreme ditz. She's also a bit of a Cloudcuckoolander.
• House of Anubis:
  • Amber tends to lean towards this trope, though it's shown that she is pretty smart when it counts and has come up with many ideas, including the formation of Sibuna itself. She might be a case of Brilliant, but Lazy, or more likely the Genius Ditz, as she is shown to be very skilled in fashion and often mystery-related topics as well.
  • Mick also counts as this, but it's shown that he does have the ability to be smart and he does try, he just struggles academically. When he does get help, his grades go up by a lot.
• iCarly:
  • The portrayal of Britney Spears expy Ginger Fox throughout "iFix a Pop Star":
    Carly: She should be here four hours ago!
    Ginger Fox: You said 2 o'clock.
    Sam: It's 6 o'clock!
    Ginger Fox: Well, I didn't know if you mean o'clock AM or o'clock PM.
    Sam: You're o'mazingly stupid.
    Ginger Fox: What did she say?
  • In the first season, Carly's friend Sam was cast as a dumb blonde, like when, in "iWin a Date", Carly is telling Shannon everything and Sam still says, "Shhh. It could still work." As time went on, she became lazier and less stupid.
• Clover from It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling... is blonde and could best be described as the ditzy one of the four flatmates:
  Clover: "Dear Miss Mason..."? Oh, that's me.
• Mad Men: Meredith, the SCDP/SC&P receptionist starting in Season 5, seems to have all the awareness and intelligence of a cinder block. It's very startling given that all the other blonds of the show (account man and writer Ken Cosgrove, witty yet shallow former model and anthropology major Betty Draper Francis, the smartass yet sensitive Sally Draper, calm and efficient Faye Miller, and the wise and loving Anna Draper and her priggish sister and free-spirited niece) all show to be just as, or even more intelligent than the non-blonds on the show. In fact, brunette Janie Sterling lacks common sense.
• Kelly Bundy on Married... with Children fits the trope to a T, being a vacuous and ditzy blonde who can barely read. Though it's implied in various episodes that she's not a natural blonde.
  Bud: You can't be this dumb!
  Kelly: I can be anything I wanna be, it's The '90s!
• Midsomer Murders: Camilla "Millie" Farquaharson in "The Noble Art". She's blonde and while it is never made clear whether she is ignorant, stupid, or both, almost every time she opens her mouth she ends up saying something that makes her look like one or the other.
• Carol Cleveland played a lot of roles like this in Monty Python's Flying Circus, such as Vanilla Hoare, the stuck-up starlet in "Scott of the Sahara". In real life, she is a redhead, by the way.
• Jessica Simpson portrayed herself as one of these in MTV's Newlyweds Nick And Jessica, notably with her famous "chicken or fish?" line. She's also played numerous other dumb blonde characters, a big contrast to her wholesome image when she was a pop star.
• Occasionally downplayed with Marlene in Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie; she's Book Dumb and a ditz, but she has manners and smarts that Street Smart Alice Avril doesn't.
• Pipo De Clown: Inverted with Mamaloe. She's a blonde, and the smartest of the cast. It is the red-headed Pipo and the dark-haired Klukkluk who leave a lot to be desired in terms of intelligence.
• Cheyenne and Barbra Jean from Reba both have plenty of "blonde" moments, though Cheyenne is pretty smart most of the time, whereas Barbra Jean embodies this trope to the point where most of the characters (usually Reba) make fun of her craziness and lack of intelligence.
• Chanel's only role on Ridiculousness is to blurt out NonSequiturs for Rob and Steelo (and the audience) to laugh at. She's also there, like us, to giggle fiercely at the people getting hurt.
• Played oddly straight (though possibly accidentally) on Robin Hood with Kate. Even more strangely, the actress is a natural brunette. For them to have actually dyed a woman's hair in order to make her a blonde, and then portray her as such an idiot that there was serious fan speculation that she had a mental disorder, led to several Unfortunate Implications. But it also created several moments of unintentional hilarity: when the outlaws are about to be burnt at the stake, an angry crowd begins chanting, "Burn them, burn them!" Kate joins in but is slightly out of sync. Obviously, two whole syllables were a bit much for her.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Generally averted with Sabrina and her aunts (though Hilda is Book Dumb), but the trope is invoked in some episodes.
  • In one episode, a cleaning spell goes wrong, resulting in the black-furred cat Salem turning white. The response:
    Salem: I'm blond! My IQ just dropped 20 points!
    Zelda: [indicating the three witches in turn, then Salem] Blonde. Blonde. Blonde. Dead.
    [Salem jumps off the table]
  • An episode has Sabrina getting hit with an airhead virus that turns her into the stereotypical dumb blonde.
• On Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, Victoria Jackson frequently played this type.
• Saved by the Bell:
  • A recurring minor character called Ginger is a stereotypical dumb blonde who has a Running Gag of always asking if she has lipstick on her teeth. Highlights include calling Slater dressed as an astronaut "Mr. Scuba Diver" and believing Zack when he claims he wrote the song "Pretty Woman".
  • An episode with a Beauty Contest features one contestant called Jeannie Tyler who rattles off this gem during the questions and answers round.
    Mr. Belding: Are you ready, Jeannie Tyler?
    Jeannie: Yes. That was an easy question.
• Paris Hilton famously portrayed herself like this on her reality series The Simple Life — her line about Wallmart being a place where people buy walls becoming legendary. She created an entire public persona of herself like this until she finally dropped the act in a documentary with BBC presenter Fearne Cotton that showed how smart and business savvy she was. Paris explicitly pointed out that by playing this persona she had accumulated more wealth and fame than she would have by living off her inheritance.
• Inverted in Smallville with blonde Chloe Sullivan, who is easily the smartest recurring female character on the show and one of the smartest characters overall. Meanwhile, brunette Lana Lang is definitely not brainy (despite what the writers would like you to think). The aversion is lampshaded when Chloe refers to herself as the "sharpest blonde you'll ever meet." However, her natural hair color was actually brown.
• Inverted with Samantha Carter in the Stargate-verse (who isn't merely competent, but unquestionably The Smart Guy). Later spoofed by Rodney McKay:
  McKay: I wish I wasn't so attracted to you. I've always had such a weakness for dumb blondes.
  Sam: [looks shocked for a minute, then glares] Go suck a lemon. [exits]
  McKay: Sexy. Very, very sexy.
• In The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, this trope was deliberately subverted as Ashley Tisdale was asked to dye her naturally brown hair blonde so they could provide an inversion of the Dumb Blonde, Smart Asian stereotypes. As such, London embodies every characteristic of the dumb blonde apart from the actual hair color while Maddie is a good student, very logical, and has the most common sense out of all the characters. One episode features an alternate reality where things in the hotel are swapped around with Maddie being the heiress and London being the candy counter girl. Here, the trope is played straight with Maddie, so much that she makes Zack and Cody's London look like a genius.
• In That '70s Show, Laurie Foreman is a dumb blond; might also be considered the skanky blonde. There's also Midge Pinciotti and Annette, played by guest star Jessica Simpson.
• Sketch actress Carol Wayne specialized in playing this type on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, as with the Matinee Lady in the "Art Fern Tea Time Movie" routines. Even on those occasions when she chatted with Johnny "as herself", she affected this persona.
• Detective Ishihara of Trick is this in spades. The man is so off his rocker that he would have trouble holding down a job at McDonald's, let alone become a detective with the Tokyo police, even if he's in a comedy series. Then, in the season 2 finale, when the cast goes to a forest that makes hair grow, his natural black hair grows back, displacing what must be gallons of bleach, and he not only becomes competent, but downright intelligent. One can only imagine he started bleaching his hair after becoming a detective...
• The Twilight Zone:
  • The Twilight Zone (1959): In "A Penny for Your Thoughts", Hector B. Poole hears the thoughts of anyone standing near him. When tries to read the mind of a blonde woman in the bank, he can't hear anything.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Tooth and Consequences", Dr. Myron Mandel tells the blonde and beautiful Lydia Bixby that he is going to kill himself and to have a nice day. Her only reaction is to wish him a nice day too.
• On The West Wing, Lt. Jack Reese breaks a $400 ashtray (for submarines) to show Donna why it costs so much money. He wishes he hadn't done it and says to Donna (jokingly), "It's... 'cause you're blonde." As that quote implies, Donna neatly and completely subverts the trope through the entire series, often entering into heady debates with her boss and winning more than half the time because of how smart Josh is about not-politics.
• In Yo soy Betty, la fea, Patricia Fernández (whose stupidity is in Small Name, Big Ego style) and Aura María (who's simply ditzy and a bad judge of character).

Music

• The narrator of Lene Alexandra's satirical "My Boobs Are OK" is a blonde who freely admits that she didn't even pass junior high, but gets away with being a stupid Lazy Bum because of her boobs.
• Avril Lavigne's "Dumb Blonde" criticizes this stereotype.
• Julie Brown's "'Cause I'm a Blonde", notably featured in Earth Girls Are Easy. Julie herself is actually a redhead; she wears a blond wig to perform this song.
  I just want to say that being chosen as this month's Miss August is like a compliment I'll remember for as long as I can. Right now I'm a freshman in my fourth year at UCLA but my goal is to become a veterinarian 'cause I love children.
• Brazilian rapper Gabriel O Pensador calls them out in his song Loraburra", though it ends by saying there are dumb blondes "who don't own a drugstore partnership" and have different hair colors. In a later live version, he added a dig on a certain blonde ("Dumb blonde, are you even capable of killing your own parents?").
• Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry" mentions a "bubble-headed bleach blonde" among the purveyors of sensationalist news coverage.
• Hoku's "Another Dumb Blonde", where she calls out an ex for thinking of her as a trophy to show off with no feelings or thoughts while he likely cheated on her.
• Dolly Parton has been quoted as saying that dumb blonde remarks don't bother her, "because I know I'm not dumb... and I also know I'm not blonde." Her first hit song was also titled "Dumb Blonde".
• Eminem's Slim Shady character is a variation - he has bleached blond hair, is extremely stupid to the point of literally not having a brain in many songs, and his blondeness is connected to his stupidity ("good luck tryin' to convince a blonde!"). However, he rarely displays the vanity and physical shallowness - his stupidity is more along the lines of Ax-Crazy omnicidality and self-destructive behaviour, which he expresses in witty, elaborate technical rhymes.
  • He also frequently mentions his hatred of other blondes for their stupidity.
    Misfit, blond and nitwit
    Like I've gone ballistic, with a frostin' tip kit
    Screamed, "I hate blondes," and became one, I'm optimistic
  • In "SHADYXV", Eminem claims his manager was worried about him bleaching his hair again because he thought it would revert him to the Lost in Character Slim persona he had in the early 2000s ^note This doesn't appear to be true - it was actually his manager's idea for him to go blond again. He then switches into the Slim persona to discuss the antics he could get up to now he's blond - racially abusing Macklemore, "record[ing] a wack response to Kendrick Lamar's 'Control' verse", and performing his Stylistic Suck Grossout Song "FACK" in concert. (We then hear an audio clip of him trying to hype up a very confused crowd over the "FACK" beat.)
• Discussed and defied in "Just Because I'm Blonde" by The Dollyrots. The singer is aware what people think, but she doesn't let it bother her or keep her from having fun.

Pinball

• One of the characters in America's Most Haunted is a blonde cheerleader who's too busy chewing bubble gum and videotaping herself to pay attention to the ghosts around her.

Professional Wrestling

• The Beautiful People were shown to be this occasionally, especially the original two. Daffney, at the behest of Taylor Wilde and Roxxi, had begun impersonating Sarah Palin and feigned interest in Angelina and Velvet. The latter takes the cake with this exchange.
  Velvet: What's horse dung?
  Angelina: It's horse shit, Velvet! HORSE SHIT!
• In GLOW, the California Doll was portrayed as one of these.
• When Jillian Hall was in Ohio Valley Wrestling, she got breast implants and turned into a dumb blond, the storyline being that her implants leaked and the silicone went straight to her brain.
• Kelly Kelly was initially conceived like this, and the meaning behind her ring name was that she was "so stupid her parents had to name her twice". This got dropped pretty soon, and she was portrayed first as a Girl Next Door and then a Beware the Nice Ones wrestler.
• Inverted in LayCool, where Michelle was blonde and (while quite ditzy) was the more competent of the two. Dark-haired Layla was the ditzier one.
• Invoked in 2011 when Princesa Sugehit paraded around arenas in a shirt that had "bimbo" on it.
• This is Little Jeanne's opinion of Brandi Wine. In fact, her hatred is so great Jeanne applies this line of thinking to all other blondes she meets, such as Mona.

Puppetry

• Lavinia, the titular Little Witch of South African children's show Die Liewe Heksie, is young, good-natured, blonde, and not terrifically bright or quick on the uptake. The original illustrated children's books make her even blonder.

Radio

• The Trope Codifier for the beautiful Dumb Blonde might have been the enormously popular late 1940s/1950s radio sitcom My Friend Irma starring Marie Wilson as the very pretty but oh so dim Irma. The series would spin off into feature films, a television series in the early 1950s, and a long-running comic scripted by Stan Lee!

Theatre

• Kendra from 13 trusts people like Lucy way too much, which leads to her downfall near the end of the show.
• Billie in Born Yesterday isn't a complete airhead, but still lacking enough smarts that she needs help to not seem like one. Also, when she's asked if she's happy right now, she says that all she ever wanted was a mink coat, and now she has two.
• Cindy Lou Bethany in Kiss the Boys Good-bye by Clare Boothe has blonde curls and, by her own admission, is "pretty dumb". She goes against the stereotype, however, in being decidedly prudish.
• Holly from both the movie and musical versions of The Wedding Singer is both slutty and slightly dim, if sympathetic. However, in the original movie, Julia herself is intelligent in contrast to Robbie's stupid brunet ex, Linda. The musical reverses Julia and Linda's hair colors, with Julia a Brainy Brunette/Girl Next Door type and Linda an even bigger Dumb Blonde than Holly.
• Glinda from Wicked fits this trope, at first anyway. When Elphaba writes home and tries to find a word to describe her room-mate, all she can come up with is "blonde". In the song "Popular", however, she explains how her persona is actually hugely helpful, showing the first glimmer of how sharp her mind really is, which serves her well over the rest of the story's course.
  It's not about aptitude
  It's the way you're viewed
  So it's very shrewd to be
  Very, very popular like me

Tabletop Games

• Leave it to Warhammer to make a Darker and Grittier example of the Dumb Blonde. In this case, it's a male Chaos Champion named Sigvald the Magnificent. The guy is a magically beautiful, bishonen blonde Viking who is into every and any form of debauchery. The dumb part comes from him having the Stupidity rule, which is something that's usually associated with mindless creatures (even low IQ creatures like Orcs and Ogres don't get that). In Warhammer, stupidity means that you can be so stupid that you'll actually stop moving or fighting in the middle of a pitched battle (in his case, the warriors of his retinue cluster around him and hold their mirrored shields up so he can admire himself from every angle). Get close to him, however, and you'll find out exactly how the guy can behave like a fop and stay alive...

Video Games

• AkaSeka: Natsume Sōseki. Just Natsume Sōseki. When he debuts, he says stuff like he finds birds pretty and then suddenly decides he wants to eat fried chicken. The heroes have a hard time conversing with him because he keeps leaving them in favor of his cats. Later, when he gets a serious moment talking about how radical Moral Guardians make his literary career hard, he totally ruins it by declaring he needs to save his cats.
  Shōtoku-taishi: Is he really the chosen one?
• Nell from Atelier Iris 3 is a classic example: She's blonde, ditzy, very busty, and quite foolish.
• Noel Vermillion from BlazBlue combines this with Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold and, strangely enough, Fiery Redhead. While she's the most emotional of the Three Stooges of Torifune, she has to study extra hard to keep pace with her friends, and even then she tends to run on her impulses instead of thinking things completely through. Needless to say, this causes problems, and Jin Kisaragi doesn't help at all. But let's be fair to Noel; she's only five.
• Berri the Chipmunk, Conker the Squirrel's girlfriend from Conker's Bad Fur Day, is a stereotype of this trope. She can't recognize Conker when all he's wearing is a caveman's hat.
• In Corruption of Champions, drinking Bimbo Liqueur will turn you into one. It's also possible to use Bimbo Liqueur to turn various NPCs, for example, Rubi and Sophie, into Bimbos.
• Destroy All Humans!: Miss Rockwell, the winner of a beauty pagent, has blonde hair and "a brain the size of a peanut". Her lack of intelligence makes her an ideal specimen for study so Crypto is tasked with abducting her.
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness:
  • Angel Trainee Flonne from, though she's more ditzy than stupid.
    Flonne: Nice to meet'cha, I'm an assassin! ...Oops, I wasn't supposed to tell you that.
  • Jennifer may look like this at first, but she turns out to be the Hypercompetent Sidekick instead.
• Dragon Age: Origins: King Cailan, while not exactly dumb, comes off as naive and overly idealistic at Ostagar, and Loghain has to handle the tactical planning for the battle. (His snarkier, more down-to-earth half-brother, Alistair, is basically a Palette Swap with light brown hair and hazel eyes.) However, Cailan's equally blonde wife Anora very, very, very much averts the trope.
• In The Elder Scrolls series, this is a trait of the Aureals (aka Golden Saints), a form of lesser Daedra in service to Sheogorath, who have golden hair. However, unlike most examples of this trope, they're portrayed as "dumb" in the Dumb Muscle or Dumb Jock sense rather than being The Ditz. They don't always think things through and prefer to attack issues head-on, which, despite their power, isn't always the best course of action. This happens several times in Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, and they often need to be bailed out by the Champion of Cyrodiil.
• While Rikku was a subversion of this trope (being the party's Smart Wrench Wench with a dash of The Ditz) in Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2 exaggerates her ditzy nature, turning her into this.
• Sin Kiske from Guilty Gear. Given his pedigree, he should be brilliant (tactical genius for a father, bookworm for a mother, and two of his grandparents were scientists), but he's barely literate. This is mainly because he was raised by Sol, who half-assed his education.
• Harry the Handsome Executive is a male Idiot Hero example.
• Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life:
  • Rock is, well, dumb as a rock.
  • Muffy may count at times, but she's more naive than dumb.
• Tess from Jak and Daxter acts like a typical ditzy yellow-haired bimbo, but she is a genius when it comes to building weapons.
• Cindy from Kindergarten is an Alpha Bitch variant of this trope. She wants to eat vegan, but she doesn't actually know what that means other than that the slop the cafeteria serves isn't vegan, so she'll eat pretty much any food you give her as long as you tell her that it is. In Kindergarten 2 you can trick her into sticking a fork in an electric socket just by telling her that it'll "cause a distraction."
• Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals: Tawni, the blonde topless girl. She makes out with a complete stranger (Larry) after he gifts her with his credit card. After she dumps him, Larry scams her out of her money by disguising himself as a native and selling her a fake carving. She fails to recognize him even though said disguise doesn't alter or cover Larry's face. On top of that, she forgets her towel when she leaves the beach, which Larry claims for himself.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's Portable: The Gears of Destiny has Yuri Eberwein, the blonde, Ditzy Sovereign of the Purple Sky, a trait that gets remarked on by Kyrie in Sequence X since she didn't expect her to be a natural airhead in contrast to how fatalistic she was as the Unbreakable Darkness.
• Metroid: Inverted with Samus Aran, who is blonde and a genius, holding all three traits of Beauty, Brains, and Brawn. She is a gifted combatant and strategist as well as a skilled bounty hunter, in addition to being a Lightning Bruiser.
• Amitie, the blonde of Puyo Puyo's Blonde, Brunette, Redhead protagonist trio, is clueless enough that she has trouble at the supplementary classes she takes at school. But she actually isn't that much of a dimwit, going off the fact that she's actually quite talented with puyo battles and magic spells.
• Senran Kagura: Defied by Shiki at every opportunity. She tells Yagyu that "just 'cause I'm blonde doesn't mean I don't notice things, you know?" In more detail, Shiki is blonde, busty (not that she stands out), runs a fashion blog, is constantly calling and texting her friends, and speaks with a regional accent associated with a less-than-bright stereotype (Woolseyism-ed into a Valley Girl accent in English). This tends to make her peers write her off as a dumbass, or at least not as attentive as a Shinobi should be. In reality, Shiki is perhaps the most well-adjusted and people-smart student featured, and tends to be extremely quick on the uptake.
• Septerra Core: Inverted. Led, the only (female) blonde in the team, is almost as smart as Grubb.
• So Blonde, an Adventure Game where you play Sunny, a clueless and stereotyped American blonde girl, with a slight British accent. As you progress in the game, it's shown that there may be more than meets the eye, as she's shown to be capable of cleverness.
• Cassandra in the Soulcalibur series behaves in a slightly ditzy, clumsy, and purportedly cute manner. Her just as blonde older sister Sophitia, on the other hand, is quite a bit less silly... and also an Action Mom.
• Candy from Space Colony ticks all the boxes. She is a blond cheerleader who is obsessed with shopping, ans she's definitely dumb.
• Colette from Tales of Symphonia, hardcore foolish Pollyanna Love Freak.
• Viva Piñata has an item called the Weathergirl Wig. It's a blond wig. The description says, "It decreases the wearer's intelligence by 50%, but apparently, [blondes] do have more fun."
• Male example: Daisukenojo "Beat" Bito from The World Ends with You. One particular example of this comes up when he helps Neku out despite being a Reaper. When Kariya says that he is walking on thin ice, his response? "Shibuya ain't cold for ice, stupid!". Also, he doesn't realise that other characters are insulting him and mistakenly takes it as a compliment until Neku points it out, causing him to be genuinely shocked.
• Male example: Ryuji Goda from Yakuza 2. He's blond (Bonus points as he even dyed it, which is implied in the Flashback Sequence where he's a black haired baby), and he's a Dumb Muscle and a Blood Knight, acting solely as The Brute for the Omi Alliance. He only discusses the dumb part:

Ryuji Goda, when aiming his gun at Ryo Takashima: A real man... ought to be a little stupid...

Visual Novels

• Averted in Daughter for Dessert with Amanda, Lainie, and Cecilia. All three are/were intelligent and resourceful (even though Lainie was more than a little naive).
• The Fruit of Grisaia: Bleached blonde Michiru is not the brightest student at Mihama Academy. Her idiocy usually lands her as the butt of most jokes, and although her circumstances make it a bit more complicated as there is definitely a layer of obfuscation, she is genuinely not the sharpest tool in the shed.
• Averted with Sophia in Melody. She’s shown to be a good book learner.

Web Animation

• Barbie in Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse is often depicted in the airhead stereotype, but given the metafictional aspects of the series (the characters know they're dolls, for example) this falls closer to the lampshading side of things.
• Cuddles from Happy Tree Friends is a non-human example. He's a yellow-furred bunny and a huge daredevil who often takes very stupid risks in the name of fun, such as jumping in a lake with a "no swimming" sign in "Water You Wading For" and returning to a roller-coaster that already had one dangerous accident happen to it during his first ride in "The Wrong Side of the Tracks".
• DSBT InsaniT: Kayla is quite the airhead, and pretty Literal-Minded too.

Webcomics

• In 1977:The Comic, guitarist Jeff is the local example of this trope: amiable, attractive, friendly, but dim.
• Bird Boy: While part of Bali's problem may be his youth, he certainly gets himself into foolish trouble very quickly.
• Katie of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, who manages to pull the trope off despite being a dog. All of her fur is blonde.
• To a degree, Laura in Collar 6, although it's partially just naivete about the lifestyle she's entering into.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • Susan is a heavy inversion. She is a natural blonde who dyes her hair black/blue/some dark colour and is, in fact, one of the smartest and most sensible people in the comic.
  • A side character named Sandi is a straight example. The author has said that he doesn't feel particularly guilty about having her fit all the ditzy blonde stereotypes because she always seems to appear around perfectly intelligent blondes.
  • Diane is a natural blonde and, although a bit shallow and snooty, is clearly not dumb. Being Susan's Separated at Birth identical twin sister might have something to do with it.
• Oggie, a Cute Monster Boy in Girl Genius, may fall into this category.
  "You cannot possibly be as stupid as you act."
  "Ken if I vants to be!"

  Also, see the time he tries to cover up for having knocked out Lars. He claims that Lars was hit by a falling brick and supports his argument by holding up a brick on which is written the words "I Hitt Mr. Larz (Syned) A Brik". While him being a Jaeger definitely has to do with it, his two constant companions are also Jaegers, and though they have their moments, they find him idiotic enough to remark on it often.

• How to be a Werewolf: Thoroughly inverted. Marin won a full-ride scholarship to a state school on one semester of education at a Christian university, and graduates with honors. She is a practicing lawyer by the time that the story takes place, and is one of the smarter characters in the main cast.
• Cookie Jarr of Jet Dream isn't dumb, but might give that impression to people who aren't fluent in Totally Radical.
• Kim of Kim & Jason may qualify, as despite being four years old, she once ran a presidential campaign with a toy skunk as her running mate.
• Invoked by ShiShi from The Law of Purple. She's not actually dumb, although her cultural mindset and self-centered personality sometimes get in the way of thinking clearly.
• Sarah from Las Lindas hovers dangerously close to the line between this trope and being The Ditz.
• In Misguided Light, Kerri, who has bleached-blonde hair, is much stupider than her dark-haired sister, Terri.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • In Start of Darkness, when Xykon throws Lirian to the brain-eating zombies, he says that being a blonde, she might not have brains enough for them.
  • Elan would be a rare male version of the trope (a Dumb Blond), having blond hair and a frustrating lack of common sense that makes it pretty clear INT was his dump stat. It's implied that his Evil Twin Nale hitting him in the head when they were babies had something to do with it.
• One of the main characters of Pacificators, Larima Torbern, is rather renowned for her beauty - and a lot of people certainly made this assumption about her. However, they quickly find out that she's a highly skilled Pacificator of Water who holds the highest rank possible. Oh, and she's famous for her diplomacy skills.
• Scandinavia and the World features the United States in the form of America and Sister America, who are both brown-skinned and blond. America is the Dumb Muscle and Sister America is The Ditz, and both generally come across as well-meaning but dimwitted in their own ways (for instance, having an extended argument about whether gay people are penguins or flamingos).
• Captain Tagon of Schlock Mercenary would be another male example, though he only seems to be Book Dumb, with a fairly good grasp of military tactics and handling the troops.
• In a strip of So... You're a Cartoonist?, author Andrew Dobson depicts the winner of a beauty contest, who is blond, as a dumb broad. The woman is asked what her opinion is on gay marriage, and the woman, in her stupidity, mumbles that "marriage is like between a man and a woman", only for main character Atea to kick her yelling "Lesbian kick!" because she can't stand ignorance. The audience then congratulates her for her assault.
  
  This strip is based on real-life model Carrie Prejean, who during Miss USA 2009 was asked her opinion regarding gay marriage, to which she replied that due to her upbringing, she believed in traditional marriage. Dobson characterized her as a dumb bimbo who barely speaks coherently.
• Carol in Suburban Tribe is actually a dumb redhead, but because most of the comics are uncoloured, many new readers mistake her for a blonde. This has been lampshaded.
• Inverted in an early The Wotch arc. A blonde schoolgirl complains about all these "blonde jokes" to her (also blonde) friend and wishes that the non-blondes would be the stupid ones. She says this within earshot of a genie who's currently unable to not grant any wishes she hears. Ironically, this happens just as Anne (the redhead) has found a way to stop the mayhem... which she promptly forgets. Even further, Robin wishes to gain powers like Anne has to fix things, except her powers require she be a girl, also making him/her become a bimbo. Jason saves the day by wishing fir Anne to become a blonde.
• The Wretched Ones both has this trope and subverts it. Sparkes is blonde and is shown to be fairly smart and quick-witted while fellow blonde John is seen as ditzy and lacking common sense.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has "The DinSea Princess visits" arc... "There's no polite term for it."
  Goldie: Wow! Look at all the trees! I wonder if this is the forest!

Web Original

• A Dim Christmas shows a boy attempting to surprise his new girlfriend with a Christmas present - but it turns out she's quite dumb.
• Clarabelle of Disney World of War is this, but she has moments of being a Genius Ditz when her brain decides to kick in.
• Escape the Night: Justine and Tana are downplayed examples. Justine is simply not good at puzzles and riddles. Tana was a bit of a ditz in her original season, but came back for an all-stars season and became much more competent (her ditziness was still there, but not that prominent).
• Sarah of lonelygirl15 and LG15: the resistance is a subversion of sorts. While she can be pretty ditzy (e.g., holding maps the wrong way up), she also repeatedly shows herself to be competent, manipulative, and prone to being a Deadpan Snarker. She also frequently plays up the "dumb blonde" stereotype to her advantage.
• In Noob, Valentin, the dumb Casanova Wannabe, happens to be blond. Likely done on purpose considering the guy playing him in the webseries version is actually dark-haired and wears a wig for filming.
• Survival of the Fittest: Charlene Norris is a blonde and noted to not be particularly intelligent, having needed tutors to pass classes at all before (out of both said lack of intelligence and partying all night). She also has been shown to make very unwise decisions on occasion.
• Aphrodite in Thalia's Musings, full stop. But she does have a certain shrewdness to the matters of the heart. For example, she can see right through Apollo and Thalia.
• Whateley Universe: Discussed, mentally, by Mrs. Carson in reference to a newsreader in Kayda 9.
  a bleach-blonde newsreader who probably had never heard of South Dakota before it was on the teleprompter. Mrs. Carson caught herself with that thought; it wasn't fair to the woman that she looked like an airhead blonde.

Western Animation

• In The 7D, Happy has shades of this. For example, he thinks a yard sale means selling the yard itself.
• Action League NOW! has two examples in the forms of The Flesh and Thundergirl. The Flesh is the strongest member of the team, but also the least intelligent, having once failed his Action IQ test by marking his answers in the shape of a cat. While Thundergirl is usually the smartest between her, The Flesh, Stinky Diver, and Meltman, she's definitely not as above her male counterparts as she'd like to believe.
• Francine Smith from American Dad!. Well, she's not as much dumb as she is eccentric and playful.
  "I may be blonde, with great cans, but I'm pretty smart when I've had my eight hours!"
• As Told by Ginger: Courtney Gripling. She's more of a Brainless Beauty because she's so ditzy and spoiled she can come off as ignorant.
• The trope is lampshaded by Harley Quinn in one episode of Batman: The Animated Series, who denies being a dumb blonde, even telling Batman, "I'm not even a real blonde!" Indeed, there are times when Harley seems to be Obfuscating Stupidity at least a little, and both fans and writers were originally divided on whether she earned her psychology degree or cheated her way through school in order to get it. Eventually, in her own series the writers settled on the former.
• In Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Booster Gold fails to take answering Riddler's riddles seriously in the episode "A Bat Divided!".
• Beavis And Butthead: Beavis. Butt-Head isn't the sharpest tool in the shed either, but Beavis himself takes the cake, being so stupid that he loses his finger twice and sits on top of the same copy machine he just got freed from.
• Bob's Burgers:
  • Played with in the episode "Tina, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" when Linda dyes her hair blonde and starts feeling dumber, although Bob points out that it's because she hasn't been paying attention to anything but her new hair. Her friend Gretchen, who dyed Linda's hair in the first place, is a straight example; she dyes her hair brown and starts feeling like a Brainy Brunette, although she remains a ditz regardless. "You know what they say: Once you go brown, bye."
  • Tina's classmates Tammy and Jocelyn are similar: Jocelyn is a natural blonde and one of the dumbest kids in the school. Tammy bleaches her hair and is only barely smarter than Jocelyn.
• Madison from Class of 3000.
  Photographer: Alright. Which one of you is the smart one?
  Madison: [while a butterfly flies through her entire head] That's me!
• In Codename: Kids Next Door, Numbuh Four is this in full swing (he can't count to 3), although he has shown signs of hidden intelligence, such as he realizes that he won't be able to use brute force to make a Rainbow Monkey leave the treehouse. The series finale shows that he eventually outgrows this and turns quite smart.
• Dee Dee from Dexter's Laboratory is a mix of this and Cloudcuckoolander... though she has her moments.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • Nazz can be a ditzy blonde, but only Depending on the Writer. In some episodes, she's smart and mature.
  • May has blond hair and is usually The Ditz of the Kanker Sisters.
• The Fairly Oddparents:
  • Chester McBadbat, one of Timmy's best friends. Chester is a poor kid who, unlike Timmy, is happy despite of it and is shown to be extremely poor at school.
  • The popstar Britney Britney. Not very smart and she's also easily brainwashed.
• Family Guy:
  • Brian's ex-girlfriend Jillian.
    Stewie: Now, why in the world would you be embarrassed about dating her?
    Jillian: Oh, my God, Brian, I was watching something on TV about this guy named Hitler - [gasps] somebody should stop him!
    Stewie: [to Brian] Are her parents brother and sister?

    And that's the censored version, the uncensored version straight up has this line instead.

    Stewie: [to Brian] Is she retarded?

  • Chris Griffin is the only blond member of the Griffin family, and is quite possibly dumber than Peter. However, one episode hints that it's a result of his excessive masturbation.
• Hilariously inverted with the titular duo from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, where redheaded Billy is the dumb one while blonde Mandy is the fiery one.
• Harley Quinn (2019): Harley Quinn had this reputation as the Joker's sidekick, but it's wrong. She graduated her high school as valedictorian and was, by all accounts, a perfectly capable clinical psychologist. Her problem is not that she's dumb, but that she hasn't had much reason to value or use her own intelligence in a long time, and is still a little rusty at it. That, and for all of her intelligence, Harley is still insane.
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Inverted with Cindy Vortex, who was the smartest student in her school before Jimmy's family moved in. She is a straight A student, a skilled martial artist, and once made a device for the science fair that could take old socks and reform them into sweaters.
• The titular character of Jimmy Two-Shoes, though Depending on the Writer he can be smart in an odd way or simply a naive Only Sane Man.
• Johnny Bravo is one the first male variants in a cartoon. He was originally much smarter, but Flanderization settled in.
• In Kick Buttowski, Gunther Magnuson is helpful but easily distracted and confused.
• Kim Possible:
  • Downplayed with Ron Stoppable. He's not nearly as intelligent or coordinated as his best friend/girlfriend, but he is at times remarkably savvy and resourceful. He's also a Supreme Chef, which requires brainpower.
  • This trope is completely subverted with Vivian Francis Porter, who is one of the best robotics designers. Credit for her work is stolen by Dr. Finn, who seems like a Brainy Brunette but is actually a Dumb Brunette in contrast to her smart blonde.
• The version of Lola Bunny featured in The Looney Tunes Show, compared to her more Ms. Fanservice counterpart from Space Jam. Heavily implied, given her golden-ish fur.
• Leni Loud on The Loud House. Although not the only blonde in the family, she's certainly the least intelligent. Although she's the The Ditz, she has enough "dumb luck" to make up for it.
• Posey in Mission Hill acts like a brainless, naïve hippie most of the time, but does show a startling flash of business acumen at least once. There's also an unaired script in which she chessmasters everyone with nigh-on ruthlessness in order to get her way.
• Nurse Bendy from Moral Orel shows a more depressing side to the stereotype in Season 3, which reveals that she's often mistreated (not to mention being possibly sexually abused) for being a pessimistic dumb blonde. It isn't until she is reunited with her equally unintelligent son, Joe, that she finally finds someone who accepts her for who she is in quite a heartwarming fashion. Although when she meets her son, she tells him she dyed her hair - it's really black like his.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has Derpy Hooves, a pegasus who is very klutzy and accident-prone. Derpy became popular with the fanbase due to her googly-eyes as a background character, which led her to become an Ascended Extra. She originally spoke with a Simpleton Voice, but due to complaints from parents thinking she was a mockery of people with disabilities, she started to speak with a normal and feminine tone of voice.
• The titular star of Pearlie. Though she isn't dumb, but pretty gullible and sometimes overly optimistic.
• The Powerpuff Girls:
  • Bubbles plays just about every blonde stereotype perfectly straight, being both less intelligent than the other girls, being more upbeat, and having more fun, on average. Of course, that doesn't mean she can't still be the heroine of the story. Bubbles appears to have gotten the short end of the subversion stick, as brawny Buttercup and brainy Blossom have hair to the opposite of their tropes.
  • Bubbles' Distaff Counterpart Boomer is certainly a dumb blond. Well, he's certainly a Cloud Cuckoo Lander and designated Butt-Monkey, but he generally comes off as less intelligent to the other characters.
• To an extent, Mikey and Gus from Recess. However, Mikey's more naive and a Cloudcuckoolander than dumb, and Gus is just incredibly gullible and naive. The only real "dumb" member of the gang, T.J., is a brunette (Though some early drawings have him as a blonde).
• Regular Show: Referenced in "Bet to be Blonde", where Mordecai dyes his hair blond after losing a bet with Rigby. Naturally, Rigby takes advantage of the situation to crack a bunch of "blonds are dumb" jokes.
  Rigby: How do you confuse a Blondecai? You don't. They're born that way! OOOOOOOOHHHHH!
• The Simpsons:
  • Bart Simpson is portrayed as a dumb boy most of the time, but he's also more talented and smarter then he lets on sometimes despite Flanderization. At least the boy has an excuse... usually.
  • Inverted with Lisa Simpson, but one episode plays with the idea — she joins the debate team, but nobody treats her seriously because of this trope. Lisa is really upset while Bart doesn't care because he thinks this stereotype is exclusive to the women, claiming that blond men are more likely to be stereotyped as evil.
  • Played straight with "Miss Springfield", Mayor Quimby's recurring mistress, who comes across as a Brainless Beauty.
• Les Sisters:
  • Marine does incredibly stupid things which cause problems for herself and Wendy. While it can be attributed to her young age, one of the comics suggests that her teen/adult self would still be stupid. Wendy (who is a brunette) even lampshades this by calling Marine a "blonde" when she does something especially dumb.
  • Maxence is not the sharpest tool in the shed either; he believes anything you tell him and jumps to crazy conclusions.
• Butters Stotch from South Park isn't dumb, but he is shown to be painfully naïve and gullible.
• Sally Avril from The Spectacular Spider-Man. She is a popular and bitchy cheerleader, but not very smart.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Played with for Star Butterfly in that she isn't so much dumb as she is impulsive and hyperactive with the attention span of a rodent, which frequently makes her come off as a ditz. However, her wisdom and intelligence stats on her trading card are both in the double digits (she's as intelligent as Eclipsa), and she frequently pulls off extremely high-level advanced magic almost on the fly.
• Finn from Storm Hawks is often shown to be the least bright and most impulsive of the team, as well as the main Butt-Monkey. He's got the best aim of anyone on the team too, however.
• Total Drama:
  • Lindsay is the textbook definition of this trope, being a beautiful blonde girl who is as dumb as a brick, to the point of constantly getting people's names wrong and forgetting that her boyfriend exists, even when he's right in front of her. Lindsay gets by in the competition thanks to her social game; while she knows she isn't all that smart, she doesn't have a mean bone in her body and is able to make friends, with moments of Obfuscating Stupidity towards people who she knows don't like her. Ironically, it’s hinted that she’s not a real blonde.
  • Geoff isn't exactly the sharpest crayon in the box, being a stereotypical dudebro surfer, but he at least has his moments of stoner-like wisdom. He's even dumber in Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race, where Flanderization sets in and his common sense flies out the window.
  • Owen isn't too bright either, though in his case it's less that he's blond and more that he's constantly thinking of food, even when it's detrimental to the challenges.
  • Dakota in Revenge of Island has more common sense than her fellow rich daddy's girl Lindsay, but is still not that much brighter comparatively speaking. Unlike Lindsay, who's secure in her airheadedness, Dakota is self-conscious about her lack of intelligence, because she knows it's one of the reasons she's disliked.
  • Sugar from Pahkitew Island is a dumb hick pageant queen in addition to being blonde. She manages to stay in the competition thanks to a combination of her brute strength, Street Smarts, and insane luck.
  • Hockey bro Wayne from the Total Drama Island reboot happens to be gullible and dimwitted, even believing that Nichelle’s stunts were real.
• Stella in Winx Club isn't that stupid, but she is shown to be really thick at times, and it is mentioned several times that she always gets the lower grades at school. It's implied that this is more due to her not taking her schoolwork seriously rather than that she doesn't know it.

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