Simpleton Voice

When a character will open his mouth to speak or make voices while having no dialogue, and the instant they do, you immediately know that this character is a dumb or pretty stupid character. Whether he's an over-muscled Mook or she's the Plucky Comic Relief, the one thing you can tell just by their voice is the fact that his elevator just doesn't go all the way to the top floor. Alternately, it is common for someone to put such a voice on to make fun of someone who supposedly doesn't grasp something obvious or just giving this to display The Ditz.

Very common for this kind of voice in animated works, because allegedly such an obvious characterization tool that appeals to children. In The Golden Age of Animation, this sort of voice was used a lot by characters who were a parody of Lennie from the film adaptation of Of Mice and Men or to reference a goofball character.

When the character is male, generally expect a halting voice in the low registers, silly inflections in his voice, or else a high-pitched, nasally quavering, with most sentences beginning with the word 'duh'. When the character is female, expect a high-pitched nasally whine or an even higher-pitched squeak-fest. Often, characters with this voice will use poor grammar or Hulk Speak. Male characters often substitute the t or d sounds for the th sound, like saying "dat" for "that." A Valley Girl accent helps for common, female ditzes. They may occasionally utter a Stupidly Long Filler Sound, just to enhance their dimwitted nature at times.

A very common characteristic of Mooks and The Ditz, as well the Moose Are Idiots, Dogs Are Dumb, Dumb Dinos or a Doofy Dodo characterization. Contrast Unintelligible Accent and Nerdy Nasalness.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• This GEICO talking pothole mixes Valley Girl and a Southern drawl for her ditz voice. Subverted when "she" reveals herself to not so much be a ditz, as much as a snarky inanimate object. "Cuz I'm a POTHOLE!"

Anime and Manga

• Dorodoron's voice from Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star sounds very similar to this type, sounding rather like Grounder from Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog would if he was speaking Japanese.
• Pokémon: The Series: Slowpoke says its name in this kind of voice, and it is established to be a very dimwitted species.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • In the original Japanese, Son Goku is voiced with the equivalent of a country hick accent. This is an essential part of his character for Japanese viewers (along with generally sounding like a child), but was excised in the English dub.
  • Recoome of the Ginyu Force; the "dumb-as-nails Psychopathic Manchild" vs. "hammy sadist who's just toying with you" ratio depends on who's voicing him.
• Bear in the American English dub of Yo Kai Watch (voiced by Paul Greenberg), which makes scene considering what what type of character he is. He sounds even dopier in the Asian English dub, where he sounds nearly like Moose below.

Asian Animation

• Careless S. of Happy Heroes, while actually not that stupid, does have a major habit of forgetting stuff. The English dub made by Lookus reflects this characteristic by giving him a low-pitched, stupid-sounding voice.
• In the English dub of Noonbory and the Super 7, Coldygury and Mungury (both voiced by Rod Beilfuss) have low, dopey voices, establishing them as the lesser-witted, softer villains of the series.

Comic Books

• Moose from Archie Comics is written this way. He used to say "Duh—" before every line.

Comic Strips

• Moe, the bully in Calvin and Hobbes, combined this with Painting the Medium — his speech bubbles are written in a childish scrawl.

Fan Works

• Suzaku Kururugi of Code MENT, complete with some slurring, speaks in this.
• Dragon Ball Abridged: Goku's voice is higher-pitched and more nasally than in the official dubs, in a nod to Masako Nozawa's voice in the original Japanese.
• Fate/Cero: Rider-class Servant Iskandar is voiced this way.... which in no way lessens how much of a Large Ham he can be.
• Red XIII is voiced this way in Final Fantasy VII: Machinabridged, fitting his relatively naive characterization.
• Sailor Venus of Sailor Moon Abridged has a stereotypical Valley Girl voice to go along with her Dumb Blonde personality.
• Tristan of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series. But it does give him super strength! It's a reference to how he had this kind of voice in the first ten episodes of the 4Kids dub, before Greg Abbey took over the role and gave him a completely different sounding voice.
  • Zorc, being far more childish than his canon self, has an appropriately dopey-sounding voice.
  • Miho from Season 0. Her speech mannerisms show that she isn't very smart.

Films — Animation

• Gus the Mouse from Disney's Cinderella. You can tell Jaq is the brains of the duo simply by his voice, long before he shows his lack of stealth.
• Jeffrey, Maltravers's assistant from The Legend of the Titanic and its sequel, speaks with goofy voice. He's also not the brightest characters out there.
• In Wizards, Peace aka Necron 99 after being reprogrammed speaks for the first time in this tone.

  Peace: Peace wants love. Wants free. Will help.

Films — Live-Action

• Judy Holliday used this sort of voice when playing Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday.
  • Likewise, Broderick Crawford in the same film uses the rough-and-tumble "big dumb guy" version. Crawford really spoke like that...
• Sam in i am sam is shown to have a childlike tone when he speaks.
• Napoleon's low-pitched voice and his brother Kip's higher-pitched one in Napoleon Dynamite.
• The Neverending Story III Escape From Fantasia: Falkor, who was a wise sage in the previous films and the original book, inexplicably Took a Level in Dumbass in the third film and is now a bumbling moron with a Patrick Star like voice.
• Mira Sorvino played a rare low-pitched female version of this in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, adopting a deep but very feminine drawl that made her character seem very slow witted.
• This was lampshaded in Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo. Jennifer Love Hewitt does a perfect impression of the Big Bad's bimbo girlfriend's voice.

Literature

• Referenced in the novel version of Flowers for Algernon; Charlie notes that he had a stupid-sounding voice before his increase in intelligence, and he lapses back into it whenever he gets drunk.
• Discworld trolls tend to have this type of voice. Detritus, the troll that tends to show up the most, says "dis," "dat" and "der" instead of "this", "that", and "the." (He also sometimes replaces "th" with "f", for example "fink" instead of "think".)
• Crabbe and Goyle from the Harry Potter books. Both are dim-witted lackeys of Harry Potter's school nemesis Draco Malfoy. Even Malfoy himself at one point describes Goyle as being so slow that if he were any slower, he'd be going backwards. Crabbe speaks mainly a soft but deep grunt, Goyle speaks in a low, raspy voice. They sound equally dumb in the film versions.

Live-Action TV

• Subverted in The Big Bang Theory: Bernadette speaks with a high, nasal, squeaky Dumb Blonde voice, but has a doctorate in Microbiology.
• The Ogrons in Doctor Who should be this, with one exception. In Day of the Daleks, the Controller confronts two Ogrons. The first one says, "We found...and destroyed...the enemy." The controller asks if there were any complications, and the second one replies, "No complications," in a perfectly normal voice.
• Big Bird's been created to have one on The Ed Sullivan Show before Sesame Street. After a couple of years into Sesame Street, his performer, Caroll Spinney, felt like the character worked better as a six-year-old than a simpleton, so the simpleton voice was phased out for a more childlike one.
• The Muppet Show:
  • Beauregard has a deep, goofy sounding voice.
• Cat Valentine from Victorious and Sam & Cat. She originally started out with a more normal-sounding voice, but her voice got higher, slower and more baby-like as she became more ditzy.

Music

• Booji Boy, mascot of Devo, a character portrayed by their singer Mark Mothersbaugh in a baby mask. Booji Boy exemplifies the band's philosophy of Devolution, and talks with a squeaky voice, known for such phrases as "We're all Devo".
• Frank Zappa used many of these across his career, like the teenage doo wop singer voice he uses on used on several tracks on Freak Out.

Radio

• Eccles from The Goon Show.
  • "Well, I'll say this much... I don't say much, but what I do say... don't make sense."
  • Spike Milligan admitted that Eccles' voice was based on Disney's Goofy (see below).
• Edgar Bergen used this kind of voice for his dummy Mortimer Snerd, in contrast to the higher-pitched, sharp-witted Charlie McCarthy.
• Duffy's Tavern featured the numbskull Finnegan, who would enter with a long "dyuuuuhhh, Hehllo, Awrch" at an appropriately funny time. Typical jokes included, "Archie's dead? Well, that's life."

Theater

• In Bells Are Ringing, Ella adopts a "dumb chorus girl" voice during "Just In Time" when an audience gathers to watches her dance with Jeff, but goes back to singing in a normal voice before the song ends. (This was another role originated by Judy Holliday.)
• The Wizard from Wicked, who describes himself as "This corn fed hick / Who thought it might be keen / To build a town of green / And a road of yellow brick." Of course, his seeming simple naivete and paternal air is hiding something much darker...

Video Games

• Rollo from The Elder Scrolls Action-Adventure spin-off game, Redguard.
• Plutia from Neptunia acts like this, but that all changes when she gets angry.
• Ogres and Peasants from Warcraft II and III.
• Frost Man from Mega Man 8. "Dat hurt!"
• Clark from Rayman 2: The Great Escape.
• Ogryns in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. ^note At least in the French version. Some Ork boyz, too.
• Xu Zhu from Dynasty Warriors has the high-pitched inflection that shows his "uncomplicated" nature.
• Derby in Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box.
• Olaf from the PC and Saturn versions of The Lost Vikings 2.
• Sonic The Hedgehog:
  • Big the Cat has a slow, ponderous voice to match his slow and ponderous demeanor.
  • Zomom from Sonic Lost World speaks in some sort of country bumpkin-like accent and is a simpleminded glutton.
  • Cubot, the dumber one of Eggman's two robot cronies, actually has a large number of stupid voices he can do, on account of a defective voice box.
• Willard and Mog from Jak and Daxter.
• Boastful: While elcor from Mass Effect have this tone of voice down to a T with the low, "drooping" pitch and lazy inflection, they subvert this trope by being as intelligent as any other species and sometimes prone to Spock Speak to make up for the lack of emotion in their voices.
• Goliaths in Borderlands 2, the Giant Mook enemy type of the Bandits. Strangely, their speech is a lot less slurred when you make them angry.
• Sir Daniel from the MediEvil series and Playstation All Stars Battle Royale. However, this one is justified due to the fact that he has no lower jaw. And he's not really stupid, just very clumsy.
• In the English dub of Trouble Witches NEO!, Pril Patowle is given such a voice, making her sound incredibly slow and dim. Here, listen for yourself.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, you have Organization XIII, whose members generally sound fairly dangerous... except for Demyx, who both acts and sounds like a moron... at least until it's time to get serious.
• Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime: Investi-Gator, who is rather incompetent, has a deep, goofy-sounding voice for his Speaking Simlish.
• Wade from Grand Theft Auto V. While his voice doesn't match his looks, it certainly matches his level of intelligence.
• Bob from The Twins speaks in a deep, muffled voice that is hard to understand, to enforce his role as Dumb Muscle.

Web Animation

• The Flap-Jacks from CarnEvil have a rather Goofy-esque voice.
• Lumpy from Happy Tree Friends has a dopey voice for a dopey character.
• Homestar Runner: Strong Mad speaks in an extremely exaggerated version of this trope, Played for Laughs. Most of his dialogue is nigh-unintelligible growls, but if you listen closely he is saying actual words... probably. Homestar Runner himself is a (somewhat) more subdued version of this trope.
• In his review of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Yahtzee adopts this kind of voice to represent the Metal Gear franchise as a whole, to reflect how he views it as being lovably stupid.
  Yahtzee: Hey, Metal Gear? Why did you pretend MGS 2 would be about Solid Snake, then replace him twenty minutes in with a cross between an albino Barbie doll and Wesley Crusher?
  'Metal Gear': Duh, I'm sorry. I just wanted everyone to meet this cool new character I made up. He’s a cyborg and his nipples turn into shurikens!
  Yahtzee: Hey, Metal Gear? Why are all these emotionally traumatised young women thrusting their butts at the camera?
  'Metal Gear': Duh, I'm sorry. Looking at bums makes my willy feel nice.
• Caboose from Red vs. Blue. Early episodes didn't have it, but Joel Heyman eventually got the voice to a "obvious moron" one, and the writing ramped up the character's stupidity as well. Joel also explained that Caboose speaks like a human does so to a dog or cat, "only everything to him is an animal".
• Boyfriend seems to have this in the later videos of STA Studios Animations. Although it changed back.

Web Comics

• In The Order of the Stick, half-orc Thog the Dumb Muscle Bumbling Sidekick is implied to sound like a moron just as much as he is one. His general speech pattern is Hulk Speak, the text of his speech bubbles is emboldened and transcribed in all lowercase letters and to top it all off he's a Third-Person Person. It was later revealed that all orcs speak like this, though they can apparently grow out of it through grammar lessons.

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Chick did it in her review of Spice World.
  Mel B: Girl power, feminism, you know what I mean?
  Chick: [in the stupidest voice she can manage] No. Do you?
• Jeffy from SuperMarioLogan has a deep but shrill, childish, and lispy voice to portray how idiotic he is. He can sometimes change his voice for comedic purposes.
• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
  • Yellow Guy uses this voice, only emphasized by his short stature, noticeable slowness and status as a Butt-Monkey.
  • The Spinach Can from the fifth installment has one, which emphasizes the low quality of his/her song and helps invalidate his/her flimsy health advise.
  • Unlike the five preceding videos, the sixth video's Teacher is almost immediately revealed to be malicious and ignorant, and as such, the Lamp's voice is quite slurred in order to immediately convey his incompetence.
• DC Super Hero Girls: Combine her high-pitched comical voice and her tendency not to be a deep thinker and you have Harley Quinn.
• In The Proving Grounds: The Naming of Swords by Jeff C Wells, when Kelli Thunderhold, Paladin of Righteousness, is horrified to learn her sword's name is a Double Entendre
  Kelli: Stupid friggin' elves. Dad always told me not to buy an elf sword. He was all like, 'It's meteoric iron or nothing, Kelli!' And here’s me: 'Hurr durr durr, I’m gonna go on the Aethernet and buy an elf sword because I love mithril! Holy rainbow slaadcrap I love mithril so farking much!
  Eidey: This keeps remaining awesome. I love the voice you do when you're being 'you except stupid.'
• Jon Bois: In Pretty Good: "The Dumbest Boy Alive", TheJosh is given this voice to go along with his insistence that working out every other day doesn't average to 3.5 workouts per week. Near the end of the video, TheJosh returns to say he was trolling and Jon drops the voice.
• Adventure Is Nigh: the Player-Character Dabarella is noted to have a low Intelligence score. Her player, Amy Campbell, gives her a childish voice that you'd expect from someone half her age and a quarter of her size.

Western Animation

• Grounder in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. His voice changes to Received Pronunciation when he gets a genius chip.
• Richard from The Amazing World of Gumball. Sussie the Chinikin is an even more extreme version (but only when she's voiced by Fergus Craig; her Aurelie Charbonnier voice is more calm and sounds mostly like a normal girl).
• The identically-sounding Runt (a downright Shout-Out to Rain Man) and Ralph (a Dumb Muscle always outsmarted by the Warners) from Animaniacs.
• Avenger Penguins: Rocky talks with the typical deep, goofy voice to help convey that he's the Dumb Muscle of the team.
• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • Invoked by Batman whenever he is being Bruce Wayne in public, to strengthen his cover as a useless rich guy. Bruce tends to downplay Batman's normal baritone and speak in a somewhat higher pitched and more cheerful voice, as well as using a much more simple vocabulary.
  • Harley Quinn spoke in the female variation, complete with a Jersey-like accent. In the episode "Mad Love", it's revealed that before she was brainwashed by the Joker, she spoke in a lower pitched voice and the accent was more subtle. Also subverted; not only can she switch to a deeper, un-accented voice at will (as shown in the episode, "The Man Who Killed Batman"), but she's actually highly intelligent, not only having been a psychologist before her brainwashing, but able to pull off a perfectly good and understated gem heist on her own. The implication is that she acts like this because the Joker prefers for her to act stupid.
• Ringo Starr from The Beatles speaks noticeably more slowly than the other three. The actual Ringo wasn't happy about it at all.
• Steve the Neat Freak boss from Bordertown sounds really derpy.
• Camp Lazlo: Chip and Skip are ditzy dung beetles that have deep, dopey voices. Clam's voice is scratchy and similarly low-pitched, but he's far from stupid.
• Catscratch: Waffle has the goofy high-pitched voice common to characters voiced by Kevin McDonald, which in this case indicates his ditzy character to viewers.
• Class of 3000: Philly Phil represents a rare case of this trope being used to support a Ditzy Genius characterization, with him being the curious and inventive but frequently hapless Smart Guy of the team.
• The Cleveland Show: Cleveland Jr. Kevin Michael Richardson based the voice on a mentally-retarded character he played for an episode on the first season of E.R.
• Discussed in The Critic, when Jay's boss, Duke Phillips (who speaks with a southern accent) meets Jay's new assistant, Alice (who is also southern). He notes to her about how as southerners, they have to work extra hard in New York because as soon as people hear them talk, they're immediately dismissed as illiterate, country bumpkins.
• Daria:
  • Head cheerleader Brittnay has an extremely high-pitched whine, and her quarterback boyfriend Kevin has a voice that befits his own lack of book smarts.
  • And on the other end is Tiffany, the Asian Airhead of the Fashion Club, as seen here. Her voice is breathy, monotonous, and she speaks very slowly.
  • Jamie. Unlike Joey and Jeffy, who speak normally, Jamie has a slower tone. Daria even makes a sarcastic remark about his monotone while reading Romeo and Juliet.
    Daria: Thanks, "Joey, Jeffy, or Jamie". Lawrence Olivier in his present state couldn't have done better
    Jamie: Cool!
• Ed from Ed, Edd n Eddy, the Dumb Muscle Cloudcuckooland of the titular trio, speaks in a dopey voice that instantly clues you in on his lack of intelligence, even before he starts spouting his trademark Non Sequiturs.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Cosmo has an extremely high pitched voice. In fact, thanks to his Flanderisation from "goofy but smart" to "straight up idiot", his voice got progressively higher. In the original Oh Yeah! Cartoons shorts, he was pretty intelligent (probably even smarter than WANDA) and had a deep and smooth voice. In first few seasons, when he was goofier and less intelligent, but not to terrible levels, he had higher voice, but it still had a natural tone to it. In later seasons, when he became Too Dumb to Live, he has voice so high you would swear that either his original voice actor got replaced or that his voice is digitally edited to sound like that.
• Chris Griffin from Family Guy. This wasn't actually the intention; Seth Green went into the audition and decided to do his impression of Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs as a joke, but ended up getting the part. Inevitably, this is referenced in a cut-away gag where Chris does an impression of Buffalo Bill dancing naked (and tucked back) in front of a mirror.
  • And in the original version of the Pilot, his voice is more of a typical low-pitched simpleton voice.
  • Exaggerated (unintentionally) in the AI-generated AI Peter parody, where Chris' text-to-speech AI will often mispronounce or slur words and also has him constantly shouting every word, making him sound even stupider (and earning him the nickname "Loudris").
  • For that matter, Barry in American Dad!, who has the same voice, only slightly more affected. Well, it isn't his real voice but the voice he has while heavily drugged to suppress his true, evil personality. His real voice is a cultured accent.
• The Flintstones: Barney Rubble didn't originally have one (with a more high-pitched, nasal Joisey accent), but after Mel Blanc recovered from a car accident in 1961, he settled into a deeper and more goofy-sounding voice from then on. It became even more prominent when Frank Welker took over. Averted with Kevin Michael Richardson's take on Barney, which uses Barney's older Joisey voice.
• Used in the Futurama episode "Fear of a Bot Planet" where the crew meets the council of robot elders. They promote human hunts to distract from their bigger problems.
  Elder 1: Like our crippling lugnut shortage.
  Elder 2: And an incompetent group of robot elders.
  Elder 3: Duh, that's for sure.
  Elder 1: Quiet, Jimmy!
  • Igner (of Mom's three sons) can also qualify as this. The irony comes in when we learn his father is Professor Farnsworth!
• Glenn Martin, DDS: Connor Martin speaks in a whiny, nasally voice. It's most evident when he temporarily becomes a genius after hitting his head with a frying pan; he sounds normal (albeit speaking with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness).
• Hyuck! Goofy (1932), first appearing in the early days of the sound era, may have been the very first cartoon character with a voice like this. Bill Farmer is capable of pulling off the voice while still giving Goofy an impressive emotional range in modern productions.
• Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats: Mungo has the stereotypical "dumb guy" voice.
• Stinky from Hey Arnold! has a very nasally southern drawl, but he's not a complete idiot, just comically awkward.
• Beezy from Jimmy Two-Shoes. According to his voice actor, Brian Froud, it was originally a bad impression of Brad Garrett that then just evolved into "this dog-like, child-like voice".
• Looney Tunes:
  • Any character that parodies Lennie Smalls, such as Hugo the Abominable Snowman from "The Abominable Snow-Rabbit" and Benny the cat from "Hoppy-Go-Lucky" (who even calls Sylvester "George"). Here is a compilation of such characters.
  • Cecil Turtle is a subversion. He has the rather low-pitched, slow, goofy-sounding voice expected of a nitwit, but he's the only character who outwitted Bugs Bunny every time.
  • Beaky Buzzard has a deep, low voice like Edgar Bergen's "Mortimer Snerd"; in-house he was alternately known as "The Snerd Bird".
  • Junyor Bear of the Three Bears, voiced by Stan Freberg, has the oafish type that marks him as older than his dress code suggests.
• The Mighty B!: Penny is very idiotic, and has a deep somewhat congested voice to go along with it.
• Motorcity: Tooley has a very basic vocabulary and audibly struggles to enunciate longer words.
• Snails and Derpy Hooves from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Derpy is a strange case; Tabitha St. Germain was, apparently, originally under the impression that Derpy was meant to be a boy. So Derpy was never actually intended to have this trope; she just got one because Tabitha isn't very good at Crossdressing Voices.
• The Nutshack: Jack has one, despite being smart enough to make robot body parts for Horat. He is, however, quite stupid when it comes to being Street Smart. His accent doesn't help his case.
• Pinky and the Brain: Pinky speaks in a high voice and a heavy Cockney accent to emphasize his simplemindedness.
• Big Billy of the Gangrene Gang from The Powerpuff Girls is easily the least intelligent member of the gang and he sounds just as stupid as he acts.
• Stimpy from Ren & Stimpy Show, modeled after another famous Cloudcuckoolander, Larry Fine.
• Rocko's Modern Life: Heffer has a goofy-sounding, relatively high-pitched voice.
• Scooby Dum from Scooby-Doo has a low voice to go with his foolish personality.
• Shirley from Shaun the Sheep. Seeing that she's the Fat Idiot of the group, her voice is low and raspy.
• The Simpsons: Homer Simpson is the leader of a small crowd of such characters that also include his friend Barney Gumble (whose exaggerated slurred drawl is because he's almost always drunk), Cletus (who has stereotypical "yokel" voice), and Chief Wiggum (who has a comical nasally voice based upon Edward G. Robinson's) and his son Ralph (who uses a vacuous-sounding high-pitched variation). However, Homer is definitely one of the most iconic examples in western animation.
  • Parodied/subverted with Oxford "Ox" Haas, one of the soldiers Grampa Simpson served with in World War II in "The Curse of the Flying Hellfish." He spoke with this voice, and looked exactly like the kind of person who would, but is actually smarter than he seems.
    Burns: How many of you are familiar with the concept of a "Tontine"?
    [beat; all stare at Burns silently, until Ox raises his hand]
    Burns: All right, Ox. Why don't you take us through it?
    Ox: Duh, essentially, we all enter into a contract whereby the last surviving participant becomes the sole possessor of...all them purty pictures.
  • In "Lisa The Simpson", an Imagine Spot in which Lisa imagines her future after losing her intelligence where she's inexplicably gained a southern accent.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Patrick Star is one of the top examples in western animation; most probably first heard the stereotypical low-pitched, goofy-sounding dopey kind of voice associated with this trope from him. However, up until Season 9, the Japanese dub of the TV series^note but not the first movie gave Patrick a high-pitched voice similar to Masako Nozawa's Goku.
  • Peter Browngardt, aka Uncle Grandpa, makes a guest appearance in the Season 10 episode "Patrick's Coupon" as the Ice Cream King and used Uncle G's voice. The similarity between the voices is uncanny. In the German version, they brought back Patrick's original German voice to voice the Ice Cream King.
  • In "Squirrel Jokes," when Sandy pretends to be Lethally Stupid in order to make SpongeBob stop telling jokes about squirrels being stupid, she exaggerates her southern accent, accents her sentences with "duh," and her voice becomes slightly lower-pitched.
• Kuchipatchi has this voice in Tamagotchi Video Adventures, contrasting with his appearances in later Tamagotchi media where he has a much higher-pitched voice.
• Bebop and Rocksteady in the '80s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon both speak in voices that make their idiocy apparent.
• Tom and Jerry: On the few occasions Tom speaks, he may speak in a low, simple voice.
  Tom: C... A... T... Cat.
• Total Drama:
  • Brainless Beauty Lindsay speaks in a high-pitched childlike Valley Girl voice that instantly gives away her extreme lack of intelligence.
  • Max is a super-villain wannabe who believes he's an Evil Genius, but in actuality, he's a bumbling buffoon.
  • Downplayed with Sugar. While she has a heavy hick accent, and is certainly Book Dumb and The Ditz, she is a lot more cunning and ruthless than her style of speech would suggest.
• Spud from Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race is so dull and dim-witted, he speaks almost as fast as he thinks...rather slowly.
• Largely subverted in Transformers: Animated. Bulkhead is The Big Guy of the team, with a slow and heavy voice. He has around average intelligence (with some Hidden Depths) and is generally hurt that some people might see him as an unintelligent brute.

Real Life

• Actor Bill Fagerbakke (who is quite intelligent, urbane, and friendly in person) has made a career out of this trope, and he does it by only very slightly exaggerating the way he naturally speaks. In addition to voicing Patrick Star in Spongebob Squarepants, Broadway in Gargoyles and Bulkhead in Transformers: Animated, Fagerbakke played Tom Cullen in the miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand (1994) and Dauber on Coach; all of them had the "big dumb doofus" form of this trope.
• Similar to the above, the French actor and singer Bourvil made his Signature Style of playing Butt Monkeys speaking like this, also by exaggerating his normal speech pattern. Though it is notable that he was equally good in dramatic roles.
• French actor Henri Guybet has dubbed a number of dumb animated characters with such a voice, such as Rex in the Toy Story films and Mr. Tweedy in Chicken Run.
• Studies done on rural American Accents found that a disproportionate amount of preschoolers who spoke with vernacular rural accents (Vermont, Appalachia, etc.) were placed in special education classes for it.

---