FEATURE

Blondes top from left: Jayne Mansfield, Liz Fraser, Pamela Anderson,. Main: Suzanne Somers. Bottom from left: Rik Mayall, Jeff Daniels and Goldie Hawn

Stock comedy characters: from Marilyn to Carry On’s Liz Fraser - the dumb blonde

Or maybe not so blonde as apart from getting regular employment and fame it guaranteed a pay packet. Harry Mottram dyes his hair blonde to investigate

She’s bubbly, funny and seemingly one penny short of a shilling: The Dumb Blonde is a comedy stock character who is instantly recognised in all her two-dimensional form. Blonde (obviously), sexy rather than glamorous, over dressed in one sense and under dressed in another sense, selfabsorbed and the love interest for at least one or more co-stars in various screen comedy dramas. Meet the dumb blonde. Marilyn Monroe (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), Goldie Hawn (Good Morning, World), Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can’t Help It), Suzanne Somers (Three’s Company), Pamela Anderson (Blonde and Blonder), Ana Farris (The Hot Chick), Liz Fraser (Carry On Regardless) and of course not forgetting the butt of a thousand jokes the bottle blonde in white high heels: the Essex Girl. All a bit dated and very cliched but for the best part of the 20th century the Dumb Blonde was a staple of films, TV, videos and even the radio with Samantha keeping the scores in BBC Radio 4’s antidote to panel games I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. There is an accepted wisdom amongst students of the human race that because natural blondes are rarer than red heads, brunettes and raven-haired women they stand out and as such are more attractive to men. Not all blondes are dumb of course. There’s a whole genre of the golden haired ones from ice cool platinum blondes (Grace Kelly) to blonde bombshells (Brigitte Bardot) and from bottle blondes (Ivanka Trump) to Strawberry Blondes (Christina Hendricks). But Dumb Blondes are supposed to be... well a bit slow.

And we shouldn’t only suggest dumb blondes are female although their male counterparts are seen slightly differently. I give you Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, Rik Mayall in Bottom, and Paul Gasgoine in er... Gasgoine. If female dumb blondes struggle to work out how to open a bottle of champagne then male dumb blondes struggle to open a door. Back to female dumb blondes.

Classic dumb blondes are even more attractive as they don’t always have the usual body language barriers that say don’t approach me. Instead, they are supposed to be easier to talk to, flirt with and are generally more agreeable company due to their child-like honesty. For viewers, the dumb blonde is a character we think we know immediately. Like a pantomime baddie, a good fairy or a tall dark and handsome stranger they save a drama having to build their persona. They are the instant stock character. Women have died their hair blonde for centuries with lemon juice, cider vinegar, sun light and sea water but it was the introduction of L’Oreal’s synthetic hair dyes in 1917 that hair salons could create the first bottle blondes which coincided with the rise of cinema.

But the dumb blonde didn’t really arrive until sound was added to film allowing the character to evolve into the fully formed comedy stock character. Not knowing the fallout of her novel Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes it was to spawn not one film but two with the most famous one being the 1953 version with Marilyn Monroe in the pivotal role. Marilyn Monroe was to further push the role in Some like It Hot as Sugar Kane – the singer with a soft spot for saxophone players – and for the smoothtalking Tony Curtiss as Shell Oil Junior. Perhaps the quintessentially dumb blonde in the television era was Goldie Hawn in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In as she fluffed her lines, goofed around and giggled her way through the show.

A sexual stereotype perhaps in all her baby doll pinkness, but in the movie Legally Blonde, the protagonist Elle Woods complains: “All people see when they look at me is blond hair and big boobs.” But she ends up turning the notion on its head and graduates as a savvy lawyer confounding all the students mocking her at the beginning of the movie.

It’s a neat way to turn the tables on her detractors and to show that dumb blondes are not so dumb.