This article was co-authored by wikiHow staff writer, Eric McClure. Eric McClure is an editing fellow at wikiHow where he has been editing, researching, and creating content since 2019. A former educator and poet, his work has appeared in Carcinogenic Poetry, Shot Glass Journal, Prairie Margins, and The Rusty Nail. His digital chapbook, The Internet, was also published in TL;DR Magazine. He was the winner of the Paul Carroll award for outstanding achievement in creative writing in 2014, and he was a featured reader at the Poetry Foundation’s Open Door Reading Series in 2015. Eric holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and an MEd in secondary education from DePaul University.
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Everyone loves funny characters, but it really adds a cherry on top when the characters look funny as well. From teleporting basset hounds with terrible attitudes to half mole-people who sing songs in the third person, there’s no shortage of hilarious character designs in television and film. Here, we’re going to cover 30 of the most iconically goofy-looking characters from animation history.
Goofy Looking Cartoon Characters
The funniest-looking characters from animated movies and TV shows include:
- Catdog
- The Earl of Lemongrab
- Nigel Thornberry
- Patrick Starr
- Hooty
- Puppycat
- HIM
- Ren
Steps
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Catdog has not developed the long-term cult following that many other cartoons from its period have, but it certainly wins the top rank when it comes to funny-looking cartoon characters. Instead of designing Catdog to have two heads next to each other, the show’s artists decided for the character to just have no butt, instead. The result is what looks like a sausage with faces on both ends and legs that point away from each other.
- We won’t dare speculate on the answer, but it’s hard to look at Catdog and not wonder, “How does this creature poop, exactly?”
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The Earl of Lemongrab is a hysterical character for a lot of reasons, but his appearance is absolutely one of them. From the wacky inflatable tube guy arms to the nose that’s so pointy you could skewer vegetables on it, this lemon-headed noble aristocrat definitely deserves a top spot on the “funniest looking characters” list.
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The Owl House is a bit of a sleeper show with a big cult following, and we highly recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet. The titular Hooty also happens to be hilarious-looking. He’s a house demon who is attached to the show’s main house and serves as its protector. He alternates between literally being an owl door and a tiny little home bird. Cute and hysterical!
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Spongebob Squarepants has a lot of funny looking characters if you think about it. A Sponge with pencil limbs and nerdy pants is hysterical. A squid man whose nose squeaks when he laughs is hysterical. A crab with giant vertical eyes and a booty that don’t quit is hysterical. But the fact that Patrick is basically a round ball of dough with no shirt and a cone head has to take the cake, right?
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Puppycat, Bee’s sidekick, is a “half dog half cat” who looks like Hello Kitty if she needed anger management classes. Puppycat’s funny appearance is only bolstered by the fact that they speak in musical notes that translate to hilariously angry lines. Just watch this compilation of Puppycat talking and try not to laugh so hard you cry…we dare you!
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Mojo Jojo gets most of the love as the primary villain of Powerpuff Girls, but HIM is probably the funnier-looking antagonist. The devil head looks normal enough at first, but note that they’re wearing what appears to be a frilly tutu? And they have crab claws for some reason? And they’re wearing thigh-high boots so pointy you could use them in combat as a weapon? 10/10 goofball look.
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People don’t really discuss it a lot anymore because The Simpsons has been around for what feels like forever, but Bart is 100% a hilarious-looking character. Marge has big, blue hair, so that giant skull has to just be bone, right? If it were hair, it wouldn’t match his skin so perfectly. What’s going on with that head of yours, Bart!?
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With how goofy his father, Nigel, looks, it’s no surprise that Donnie turned out the way he did. The youngest child of the Thornberrys family is a feral ape boy with unkempt hair, giant teeth, and a tongue so long that it hangs out of his mouth like he’s a golden retriever.
- Fun fact: Donnie is actually voiced by Flea, the bassist from the band Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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Speaking of children with giant heads, Jimmy Neutron and Stewie Griffin would probably get along just based on their mutual love of science. Jimmy’s funny-looking-ness comes primarily from his absurd dog toy-shaped head and the ridiculous curl on his head that makes him look like a soft serve ice cream cone.
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Gru’s chest appear to contain roughly 95% of his body weight. His limbs, hands, and feet are basically toothpicks, and it’s only made more obvious and silly by his nose, which is iconic and silly enough to justify an entire article of its own. It doesn’t help his overall goofiness at all that he has a bad accent that seems to alternate between Russian, German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Bulgarian, and Greek.
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For a film franchise about a green ogre and a talking donkey, the animators really went all-in on the hyperrealism of Lord Farquaad’s face for some reason. The diminutive antagonist from Shrek has one of the most unsettling examples of uncanny valley face we’ve ever seen.
- Format substeps as bullets.
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He’s not as obviously funny-looking as a lot of other characters on this list, but Rick’s weird Super Saiyan hair becomes more and more confusing the longer you look at it. Does it just naturally stick out like that? Or does the elderly scientist intentionally style his hair like that every day? The unibrow is really the cherry on top.
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Even if you’ve never seen The Adventures of Fiagro Pho, you’ve probably seen images of the titular main character while perusing the internet. The conceit of the show is that Figaro has literally every single phobia imaginable, so he’s constantly scared. The result is a character so paranoid-looking that you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it.
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This one feels a little bit like cheating because Xavier: Renegade Angel is the kind of show where everything is supposed to look stupid on purpose, but Xavier is just objectively funny looking. He has a yellow beak, an arm that’s actually a sock puppet, and knees that bend in the wrong direction.
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There’s no other way to put it…the Mayor of Townsville is an adorable little goober. We really appreciate the way his head is precisely 50% of his entire body, and that his tiny little top hat floats perfectly on top of his head without ever falling off. It’s also just really fun that he wears a sash all the time like he just won a beauty pageant.
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Droopy is just good old-fashioned silly character design. The lovable basset hound is most widely recognized for his dour, sad tone when he speaks, but he’s also a goofy-looking little creature, too.
- Fun fact: Canonically, Droopy possesses the ability to teleport. His cartoons frequently poke fun at Droopy’s ability to randomly appear in new places without ever actually walking there.[1] X Research source
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Easily the creepiest character on this list, Fred is Muriel’s nephew. He only appears in a few episodes, but his appearance is so strange and unsettling that it’s hard to forget him. The bright green eyes, balding blonde mop of a haircut, and toothy grin all add up to a truly strange and memorable funny look.
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Centaurworld was a wild and wacky cartoon with tons of funny-looking characters in it, but we’re going to give Comfortable Doug the trophy here as the goofiest one of them all. He’s a moletaur, which is like…a centaur except he’s part mole instead of part horse. He wears no shirt, he has no eyes, his lower body is like four times his upper body’s size, and he sings songs about how he’s Comfortable Doug. We love him and he’s perfect.
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