Michael Caine said something to the effect of “On stage, you act with your body, on film, with your head, and on TV, with your eyes”
The character of Brad in Extract was funny.
I unabashedly love this movie.
That reminds me…Brad Pitt was hilarious and very stupid in Burn After Reading. Until, well, what happened in the closet. Frances McDormand was almost as dumb, but just as funny.
If you wanna talk about one scene wonder stupid character there is always this guy from RoboCop 3 (probably the only good thing in the movie):
One of my favorite stupid characters is Dale in Horrible Bosses. I don’t mind stupid if the person has a good heart. Not that this clip illustrates that, it just cracks me up.
Stupid and mean doesn’t work for me.
I think Randy just feels in awe of Monk (and the kind of cases that draw him in), so he tries too hard. If he’s working a “normal” murder he does fine.
If that weren’t so, I would agree he would be too stupid.
I was watching an episode of Mr. Bean last night and realized he might be considered stupid. And he is one of my favorite characters. But, a lot of the humor is the creativity of a childish (stupid) person and not making fun of his stupidness.
Both Abe and Sheldon are brilliant when it comes to their particular field, but they lack “emotional intelligence”.
Yeah, on the occasions when we see Randy in a normal police situation (or when a Monk case turns into a more normal police situation), Randy does quite well.
I never really watched Monk, so I’m not familiar with this character. But I can think of several examples where having an extraordinary main character can make the merely competent and ordinary ones around them seem buffoonish by comparison.
A couple of police drama examples are Greg Medavoy on NYPD Blue and Holland Wagenbach (Dutch) on The Shield.
Many media renditions make Dr. Watson to be a dolt, but in Doyle, he’s clearly a highly competent doctor, and quite intelligent.
Greg Medavoy was a good cop on NYPD Blue, but was used as comic relief. I never understood how such a nice guy could work that kind of job. (He reminded me a bit of a Gary Larson comic strip - something like a guy in hell doing some hellish work there, but whistling and happy, and the devils saying, ‘there’s no getting through to that guy!’)
When I was a kid I disliked the scripted grammar errors by The Lone Ranger’s Indigian sidekick, Tonto, played by Jay Silverheels, and later in life I would even refer (internally) to such errors I heard from other people as “tontoisms”. Then much later I got into Spanish and learned that the Spanish word tonto means stupid or dumb in English.
Well, any character that thinks a guy called the Lone Ranger needs a sidekick can’t be too bright.
Here’s a scene you have to watch:
What, no love for Beavis & Butthead? 
I’ve been pondering all through the thread, trying to clarify my own distaste for “stupid” characters, because I know that it’s too inconsistent to just be about stupidity. I think it has to be a combination of stupidity with doing actual damage, or it has to be more about intellectual laziness and willful ignorance. If a character is both stupid and mean-spirited, or if they get away with causing avoidable harm, I find it off-putting. (And I find both all too common with “sitcom-stupid” characters.)
On the other hand…there’s Richard Moore, from “Detective Conan”/“Case Closed”. On the face of it, I should hate him. He’s a self-aggrandizing drunkard who perpetually leaps to wrong conclusions because he’s too lazy to think things through. However, when the chips are down (and assuming the protagonist allows him to remain conscious), he displays a streak of honor, acts decisively, and sometimes even manages to get things right.
So I think it’s less about the intellectual capability of the character, and more about allowing a “stupid” character to have redeeming features. A character who’s dumb, but aware of their limitations and trying their best. An intellectually lazy character who wakes up and is (briefly) useful when they’re really needed. Give them some little wins to make them less grindingly one-note, and I can tolerate them much better.
I never liked Maxwell Smart. I get that Mel Brooks takes a stereotype, reverses it and exaggerates it, but it doesn’t work in a series. It’s OK for one movie (Blazing Saddles is a favourite), but watching the same thing night after night got very samey and frustrating.
You can handle the stupid townsfolk of Rock Ridge and the evil cowboys, because they are facing a new situation they haven’t come across before - but the Max Smart situation at Control was ridiculous. It would have made a fun movie
(good-hearted idiot somehow gets a job way above his ability and bumbles through) - but only once.
Tell that to Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers.
That reminds me of “Spies Like Us” works so well - the bad guys picked two people they thought were dolts because they needed dolts, but one of them was in fact incredibly competent, but was receiving bad reports from a boss who wanted to keep the guy in his current position (doing all the work), and the other, while nowhere near as competent as he thought he was, was a pretty good liar and combined with the other guy’s encyclopedic knowledge, they were a team that could actually get stuff done.