Hollywood Tone Deaf

When a character is supposed to be a bad singer, they will often use a ridiculous fake voice to simulate a supposedly "tone deaf" sound. Sliding the notes up and down randomly and screeching at the top of your lungs, often complemented by bad lyrics, is a popular portrayal of bad singing, even though it is blatantly fake to anyone who has ever heard the real thing. If you listen to genuine bad singing (for example, certain American Idol contestants, or Jeremy Hardy on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, or any unskilled person trying to karaoke at a party), it typically sounds nothing like this.

There's a very good reason for trained (or even just "decent") singers to do this: they have to ignore everything they've learned about singing (which is naturally hard for people who've trained for years). But even after just a year or two of singing the proper way, the physical mechanics of singing mean that it's genuinely hard for someone to return to their untrained or "bad" singing since trained singers habitually try to correct being off-key or off-tempo as soon as they realize it or someone points it out. Hence, the best way for them to consistently sing badly is to make their singing so horrendously godawful that they stop trying to correct themselves. It's like a self-inflicted Informed Flaw.

Even if not familiar with proper vocal techniques, the majority of people are capable of hitting the approximate notes and even harmonizing within a group. In addition most anyone when listening to music can recognize when a note is off-key. Because this includes the audience as well, the extreme is usually needed in order to properly convey someone who cannot sing at all.

Expect "tone deaf" to be misused as a blanket term to describe anyone who sings badly. A truly tone deaf person is unable to hear differences between notes coming from themselves, thus making them unable to hear whether they sing accurately. They are still able to hear if others are singing inaccurately or if their singing is played back to them because of the dissonance in sound waves that it causes, however. A great deal of self-proclaimed "tone deaf" people can't sing because they're untrained, not because they have a hearing impairment.

A close cousin of Stylistic Suck. See Bad Bad Acting for this trope applied to acting. Compare Cute but Cacophonic. Dug in Deeper is this trope masquerading as a plot. See also Irony as She Is Cast.

Examples of Hollywood Tone Deaf include:

Anime and Manga

• Lucia without her pearl in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. Accidentally averted in the same series with Caren, a genuine terrible singer.
• In Azumanga Daioh Yomi is supposedly a bad singer, but when you consider that her VA is Rie Tanaka (another very famous actress known for performing anime theme songs), the "bad" singing ends up sounding completely fake.
  • It's still hilarious, though.
• In episode 16 of My-HiME Natsuki attempts to sing and does a horrible job of sounding like she can't. As a bonus for viewers, the song she's pretending she can't sing was sung by Saeko Chiba, who voiced... Natsuki.
• An obscure show called Koi Koi 7 features singing (go to about 1:50) by a character named Miya that is truly indescribably horrible and you can understand how it knocked everyone out.
• The otherwise angelic Aya Hirano's screaming/singing as Konata on Lucky Star.
• Show Within a Show Kujibiki Unbalance takes this to the n-th degree with Tokino's karaoke. Not only is her singing completely over-the-top tone-deaf, it's not even her own voice actor doing the singing.
• Several characters exhibit this trope in a karaoke-themed episode of Digimon Adventure. It's present in both the Japanese and English versions.
• Eimi Date in Pretty Sammy TV (aka Magical Project S). Her classmates have to silence her whenever the class sings.
  • In the soundtrack CDs, Eimi's seiyuu sings her signature song straight, proving that she's at least a competent singer—except it sounds completely wrong and disappointing, because Eimi's song should be sung lethally off-key and with great gusto.
• Coco from Pecola. In one episode, she was practicing her singing for Pecola's band, which was assaulting on the ears of everyone in Cube Town. Towards the end of the episode, Coco's screechy voice became smooth during vocalization, and Pecola compliments on it.
• Whenever Kirby copies a singing ability in the anime, his own allies shudder in dread of his apocalyptically bad singing. The Manual stats this is how the enemy-erasing "microphone" ability in the game works. One of the opening sequences in one of the games even has him being attacked by his own music notes.
• Shinichi (and therefore Conan) in Detective Conan is tone deaf and can't sing worth beans. (His Japanese voice actress, however, makes up half of the J-Pop duo Two-Mix.)
  • This isn't consistent; in a recent Non-Serial Movie he has perfect pitch, but still sings terribly.
    • Even if you discount that movie it's impossible for Shinichi to be tone deaf, he's supposed to be able to play the Violin really well, which would be damn near impossible if he was actually tone deaf.
• Akira Nagisa in Chrome Breaker - so bad she scares magical sidekick birds.
• In Hidamari Sketch, Yuno's bad singing manifests as a completely different (but consistent!) melody line—which Miyako can subsequently sing back perfectly.
• Maya Natsume in Tenjou Tenge; she loses her karaoke "battle" with Friendly Enemy Mitsuomi because she's a terrible singer. Since her voice actress in the anime was Aya Hisakawa, they telegraphed this by making her Hollywood Tone Deaf - in karaoke scene, she basically just groans into the mic.
• According to Word of God, Hikaru Shidou has singing as her worst subject in school. Surprisingly, her seiyuu Hekiru Shiina was actually an accomplished singer. This is played around in one moment when Hikaru seems like having No Indoor Voice.
• Some character's renditions of the Zetsubou Sensei Drawing Song in Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei delves into this, most noticeably with Kaere Kimura.
  • Who is Yuu Kobayashi, who, like Rie Tanaka, is a fine singer.
• One episode of Mapletown has the Hollywood Tone Deaf Puriprin picked for the lead role in a play. Hilarity Ensues as everyone is kept up at night by her ear-shredding attempts at "singing practice". The kicker? The VA for Puriprin is none other than Satoko Yamano, who sings the opening and ending theme songs.
• Averted with Takehito Koyasu, of all people, in Macross 7. Even though he's an accomplished singer, he manages to be very believably, incredibly off-key when singing the theme song. (His character, Gamlin is tone deaf.)
• Both English and Japanese versions of female Ranma in Ranma ½ belt out an off-key verse during the "Tendo Family's Christmas Scramble" OAV, where she's shanghaied into joining Kasumi, Nabiki, Akane, and Shampoo in a song to entertain the guests. Similarly, the Japan-only "Hot Song Battle Contest" album and OAV have her screeching out a cloyingly cute kiddy song about balloons. While Brigitta Dau's singing credentials are unknown, Megumi Hayashibara is actually an excellent singer, including her in-character performances as part of in the DoCo supergroup (which is composed of those same five characters) as well as the rest of the Ranma ½ Image Song collections.
• Rio in So Ra No Wo To—played by the aforementioned Yuu Kobayashi—sings a god-awful snippet of the opening theme song in one of the DVD-only extra episodes. Then again, her musical talents lie elsewhere (she's a trumpeter in the army).
• In K-On!, although Yui's Seiyuu is quite a talented singer, during a childhood memory scene, she sings an ear-grinding song about turtles.
  • Azusa can't sing at all.
• In the Karaoke Box episode of Kannagi, some of the characters sing their songs pretty badly. The singing is made better for the Image Song release.
• In Bakuman｡, Miho is nervous about Mashiro hearing her singing, because she says she's not very good. The first time she's heard on TV, her best friend laughs at her and Mashiro feels as embarrassed as he thinks she must have felt. Saori Hayami, on the other hand, is praised as one of the best singers among modern voice actresses, and sings fairly well. Eventually, however, Azuki gets better at singing, and sends Mashiro some of her songs on a disk.
• Once in Gosick Victorique singing was mistaken for her moaning in pain.
• Giroro from Keroro Gunso has no singing talent at all. Made painfully clear when he's ordered to lullaby the temporarily age reverted Kururu. His screeching singing is so horrible, it drives Kururu to hit the self destruct button on his human suit to make it stop.
• In the last episode of the first season of The World God Only Knows, a sleep-deprived and delirious Keima sings a beautiful song - with backup singers!

Film

• Minnie Driver's character in GoldenEye.

James Bond: Who's strangling the cat?
Zukovsky: [shoots Bond's chair] That is Irina, my mistress!
Bond: Very talented girl.

• Aversion: In My Best Friend's Wedding, Cameron Diaz's karaoke actually sounds realistically off.
  • And yet, it's a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the character.
• Amanda in The Holiday, also portrayed by Cameron Diaz. She's singing along with the radio. Badly. And inordinately loudly [though the reason she's doing it is a plot point].
• Shrek: a sequence in which Fiona's (also voiced by Cameron Diaz) singing kills a bird actually had a talented singer come in and replicate the sound of an incredibly off-key note. This was noted on the DVD, in which they explained that a true bad note required either a truly tone-deaf person or a professional singer that knew the difference.
  • The bird, to explain, explodes while attempting to replicate the note.
    • This scene was so popular that it's repeated with black birds for the video game of the sequel.
• Anna Faris' character in Lost in Translation...who is said to be a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Cameron Diaz.
  • Faris does it again in the second Scary Movie. She butcher's Vitamin C's "Graduation" so badly, that the track on the radio stops and tells her to "shut the fuck up and let me sing.
• Summer, the band manager from School of Rock.
  • The DVD commentaries tell us (and prove to us) that she actually sings really well, and she had to be taught how to sing badly.
    • And she's still got a singing career. Even the iCarly theme song is proof of her talent.
• Averted in Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds when Tom Cruise's character sings to his daughter. It toes the line between off-key and too-good-for-an-average-Joe nicely.
• American Beauty: Kevin Spacey sings along to "American Woman." Terribly.
• Slammer in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka who sings a very poor rendition of "Grazing in the Grass" as it plays on his car radio. It's funny to begin with, but he's played by singer Isaac Hayes, which takes it into Casting Gag territory.
• The singing girls in Dick Tracy were coached to sing worse than they normally would so that they could have the nasal, squeaking sound that invokes recordings from the 1930s.
• Two words: Bridget Jones. Especially in the first movie.
• Cacofonix in the live-action film Asterix and Obelix vs. Caesar (based on the popular French comic series) is portrayed by Pierre Palmade; the character is supposed to be a really awful singer, but Pierre Palmade had to practice singing badly.
• Clarke and Rogers (Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty) in Ishtar.
• The nuns of Sister Act are all hilariously off-key and screechy. A few pointers from Whoopi Goldberg's character, however, has them singing like a proper choir. All of the actresses playing the nuns are genuinely good singers—except for the novice, the nun who ended up with most of the solos; her voice was dubbed over for those parts.
  • She essentially assigned each nun a part within her vocal range, and made sure the sopranos, altos, and so on were standing in clusters rather than scattered around the risers. That alone really can make a good difference.
• Cleverly averted in Citizen Kane. In order to put across the idea that Kane's mistress, Susan Alexander, is out of her depth in the opera, they overdubbed the actress with a professional opera singer, but hired an alto and had her try seriously to sing a soprano part. As a result, her singing voice sounds realistically strained.
• One of Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer's trademark shticks in The Little Rascals was his (deliberately, at least later on in life) off-key singing, which Alfalfa was oblivious to. Subverted in that Switzer was allegedly a gifted singer in real life. This makes it Older Than Television.
• In Scary Movie 2, Cindy's singing in the car is so bad that the singer on the radio actually asks her, "Will you shut the f** k up and let me sing!?"
• A number of the students auditioning for the Winter Musicale in High School Musical displayed this trope (in addition to other bad singing tropes...)
• Averted by Denise Richards's off-key, whispered performance of "You're Just Too Good To Be True" (tastelessly addressed to Jesus; watch here) in Drop Dead Gorgeous. She may be actually tone deaf, at least if the video of her singing at the 7th Inning Stretch of a Cubs game is any indication.

Live Action TV

• A prime example of this is Madame Edith from Allo Allo, who fancies herself a cabaret singer, and insists on singing to the customers of her cafe. (Some customers jam cheese in their ears to avoid the horror.)
• Lily in Hannah Montana, London on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, a subplot on That's So Raven, Paolo (non lip-sync) in The Lizzie McGuire Movie....is there a Disney show that hasn't featured this?
  • This is subverted on Lizzie McGuire where Miranda, to make up for her bad acting earlier in the episode, does a decent job at singing.
• That one episode of Full House where Jesse gives Rebecca singing lessons. Becky is shown to be a horrible singer when she joins Jesse, Danny, and Joey in singing Nicky and Alex to sleep. Jesse attempts to surreptitiously give her singing lessons and Hilarity Ensues. However, it's later shown that she's a wonderful singer when she's singing them actual lullabies.
  • Another example from Full House is Kimmy Gibbler, as exhibited during the 1989-90 season. One episode where D.J. is having trouble with her first babysitting job leads to Kimmy showing up early in the episode where the kid doesn't go to bed and Kimmy volunteers to sing (or more accurately, scream) a lullaby to him. Later that season, after Stephanie somehow backs the car into the kitchen window, she walks in nonchalantly. At that point, we hear Kimmy singing a little bit of the chorus of "Straight Up", sounding much better.
• Hyacinth in Keeping Up Appearances. Fits this trope to a T because Patricia Routledge is an accomplished stage actress with a more-than-adequate singing voice.
• A non-singing example is Klink's violin playing in Hogan's Heroes. His violin playing is hideous but he's the only one who doesn't seem to notice. Of course, in real life Werner Klemperer was a concert-level violinist.
• In an episode of Mama's Family, Mama has to audition to sing the town's anthem "Raytown, O Raytown" for a Founder's Day event and mangles it rather badly before getting the part anyway and refusing it. The actress, Vicki Lawrence, had a hit in 1973 with "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia".
• Any show on the "TNBC" Saturday-morning block had at least one episode dealing with someone who's "tone deaf" (and usually a love interest who's lying to them, saying their singing is wonderful.) Fun Fact: The California Dreams episode of this trope (in which the girlfriend of the lead guitarist tried to join the band so she wouldn't be a "groupie") was named... "Yoko, Oh No!" (No bands were disbanded, however.)
• This was a running gag on I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball was a decent, if not quite stellar, singer in real life.
• Beautifully averted in an episode of House, with a little girl singing along—only slightly off-key and off-rhythm—to a CD as she gets dressed in the morning. As a bonus, the fact that she wasn't singing quite right took the scene from overly-cute to realistic and affecting.
• Also averted in Peep Show when Mark decides to sing "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" to Sophie, in a romantic moment. He's in tune - he just sounds nervous and as if he isn't putting much breath into it.
• One can only hope Gillian Anderson is a better singer in real life than Scully was in The X-Files episode "Detour". She sings in her own voice and doesn't bother to elevate her pitch to match the tone of the song rather than singing wildly off-key.
  • In Anderson's defense, the monotone could have been due to the context; Mulder cajoled Scully into singing when she didn't want to, so she wasn't very enthusiastic about it.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Cordelia utterly murders the Whitney Houston standard "Greatest Love of All" during talent-show rehearsals in the first-season episode "The Puppet Show."
  • Averted in the musical episode "Once More With Feeling". Actress Alyson Hannigan was a self-admitted poor singer and requested that she be given minimal singing lines in the episode to the point where her character's song was sung by her girlfriend.
    • Michelle Trachtenberg also requested that Dawn's singing be minimized, and was given a a ballet number to perform instead.
• Angel: "There's three things I don't do: tan, date, and sing in public." When forced to do the last at Lorne's karaoke club in the second-season opener "Judgement," he's completely monotonic, and badly off-tempo. (Then the outtakes of David Boreanaz that close the episode turn into one huge lampshade of this trope.)
  • However, when David Boreanaz sings on Bones, (which he does in a couple of episodes) he has a perfectly respectable voice.
• Supernatural justified it in "No Rest For The Wicked". Jensen Ackles is known to be a very good singer yet when Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive" comes on the radio, Dean (and later Sam) sings it obnoxiously loudly and badly. Why? Because it's his last day alive and he wants to cheer Sam up like the awesome big brother he is, that's why.
  • Dean seems to alternate between being completely unable to sing a note and not being all that bad. He's not awful doing the REO Speedwagon tune, but when he sings a Christmas carol at some point, he's awful. Jensen Ackles actually said in an interview that he thinks Dean is the kind of character that couldn't carry a note if he tried, so he makes a deliberate attempt to sing badly.
  • Jensen also confirmed at a convention that the writers wrote on his copy of the script, "JENSEN--DON'T SING ON KEY."
  • Averted by Jared Padalecki, who plays Sam and genuinely can't sing.
• Barney Fife had a whole episode devoted to how bad of a singer he is on The Andy Griffith Show, even though he had sung with Andy on earlier shows, and Don Knotts had a fine country tenor voice.
• Averted in an episode of Frasier, featuring someone who is superior to Frasier in many ways but is a somewhat realistically awful singer.
• Played straight in Moesha. Professional R&B singer Brandy has a terrible voice in the show, to make way for the talents of her co-stars.
• Averted in Dexter: when he's singing his girlfriend's children to sleep, Dexter's voice isn't horrible, just a little off-key. In real life, Michael C. Hall's a trained singer with a very good voice. Jennifer Carpenter, on the other hand...
  • In Six Feet Under. In one of his fantasies, David (also played by Michael C. Hall) is on a stage with half-naked sweaty guys, singing rather well.
• Averted in Gilligan's Island: Dawn Wells by her own admission is a terrible singer, so whenever an episode called for her to sing, her voice would generally be dubbed in by a professional singer. However, the episode "The Second Ginger Grant" called for an amnesiac Mary Ann, believing herself to be Ginger, to sing badly. Rather than faking a bad singing voice, Wells, knowing her own restrictions, made an earnest attempt to sing the song properly. The result ended up being just off key enough to sound believable and fit the plot at the same time.
• Andy Kaufman's Alter Ego Acting persona Tony Clifton, a Lounge Lizard, averted this. Tony's problem wasn't that he couldn't hit notes, but that 1) his voice itself was incredibly nasally and unpleasant by nature, and 2) he was a usually grouchy Jerkass who picked on his audience. This aversion was probably one of several reasons many people (at least at first) were successfully fooled into thinking Andy and Tony were separate people.
• Subverted by Grace in Will and Grace. In real life, Deborah Messing has a perfectly serviceable, if not gorgeous, singing voice. Her character Grace kept to the tunes relatively well, but always started out way too high, and when the key of a song was supposed to change, she changed too far. A lot of poor singers actually do sing this way. Grace was also incredibly loud.

Grace: (singing) "My baby don't mess around becaus she loves me so and this I know for sure...HEEEEY YAAA! HEEEY YAAA! HEEE-- *phone rings* Hello? ...I'm sorry, I'll stop. Hold on, I have another call...hello? Yes, I'm sorry, I'll stop."

• Touched By an Angel has Monica, who is also a bit self-conscious about this, because as an angel she loves to sing.
• Averted on Seinfeld, where Broadway star Jason Alexander was able to sound quite convincingly amateurish on George's musical answering machine message in the episode "The Suzie." But played straight when Jerry's girlfriend (Miss Rhode Island) tries to sing in "The Chaperone".
• In an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Broadway actors Avery Brooks and Rene Auberjonois sing "You Can't Take That Away From Me" together; Brooks' character has a good voice, but Auberjonois sings in Odo's gravelly monotone, even though he's appeared on Broadway in musicals like Dance of the Vampire, 'Big River and Coco.
• Jeopardy! has a recurring category that avoids this: the clues will be the lyrics to a song, which are read automatically by either Alex Trebek himself, or occasionally by The Announcer, Johnny Gilbert.
• 30 Rock has Cheyenne Jackson's character Danny Baker doing this very intentionally during a duet with diva Jenna Maroney in the 2009 Christmas Special so as not to steal her spotlight. At one point he slips into his natural (and excellent) singing voice and quickly switches back to tone deaf after a Death Glare from Jenna.
  • Bonus points for knowing that Cheyenne Jackson and Jane Krakowski were both in the stage play of Xanadu before 30 Rock started (though not in the same cast; Jane was in an industry-only workshop performance of the musical with a different actor. Cheyenne joined the show later when the original male lead was injured and performed on Broadway with Kerry Butler.)
• In Degrassi, Hazel affects a terribly fake "bad" singing voice when she is trying to show off her vocal skills to Paige and Ashley. Further proof that the voice was fake came when Andrea Lewis released a music video on the same channel and sang just fine. In season 9, Fiona auditions for the musical and has a similarly fake failure.
  • This trope was also averted in that same episode with Hazel's "bad singing". When the girls perform at a talent show, Paige sees her rapist sitting in the audience. After this, she grabs the microphone from lead singer Ashley and sings the song (which happens to be about rape) herself. Her singing was a little bit... rough, but realistically so.
• Katey Sagal is a good singer (she got her career start as one of Bette Midler's Harlettes), but her character of Peg Bundy from Married... with Children isn't.
  • She fakes bad again as Leela.
• Parodied in Harry Enfield and Chums. When Lance makes a painfully bad attempt to sing "Who's That Girl Running Around With You", Lee attempts to put him right by inserting correctly-pitched noises such as "bing", "bong", "ding" and "dong" into the melody. Lance begins to get the hang of this, only to revert to his initial attempt when the noises are removed. He then remarks that he's only tone-deaf in English, and not in Italian, proving this by launching into an impressive rendition of an operatic piece.
• Played straight in Glee, when Rachel gets sick and loses her voice. Kind of subverted earlier in the series when Kurt blows the high F; his voice doesn't slide so much as break, very realistically, even though Chris Colfer really can hit the note.
  • Mike Chang doesn't think he can sing, so when he has to do a duet with Tina, they play this trope for laughs with a rendition of "Sing!" from A Chorus Line.
    • He later proves himself wrong in season 3, when he auditions for West Side Story. His singing is actually not that bad.
  • Let's not forget Sugar's awful rendition of "Big Spender." Vanessa Langies is a pretty accomplished singer (American Dream).
• On a Private Practice/Grey's Anatomy crossover episode, Naomi (Audra McDonald) and Sam (Taye Diggs) were heard singing quite badly, which is amusing as both actors have extensive Broadway experience.
• Purposely used in an episode of The Brady Bunch when Peter's voice begins to change, and Greg Brady writes a whole new song that uses the dissonant singing voice called "When It's Time To Change".
• And who can forget the opening to All in The Family? Jean Stapleton could apparently sing quite well in real life.
• Galina Sergeevna from Daddy's Daughters screeches through a song in Episode 14.3. Her actress, Liza Arzamasova, can actually sing decently, so to sing badly, she has to caterwaul.
• There was an episode of the tv series "Clueless" where Cher tried out for her school's Holiday play. Problem was, she couldn't sing to save her life (or so we were supposed to believe). Of course, her "bad singing voice" was so fake that it was laughable to anyone who's heard genuine bad singing. This ended up being revised later in the series when the writers decided they wanted Cher to sing in her school's production of Grease. Turned out, she actually had a pretty good voice once she learned the right technique (which was said to be something along the lines of squeezing your buns and breathing).
• In the Korean Drama Twinkle Twinkle, Jung Won loves to sing popular music and trot tunelessly. I mean, really tunelessly.
• Averted in The Night Shift, when Olafur sings for a judge on the Icelandic version of The X Factor. It's realistically weak - generally in tune but a little strained and with a trying-too-hard kind of sound to it.
• Averted in Victorious with Tori's sister Trina. Trina is clearly a bad singer, but her tone-deafness isn't over the top and she usually sounds realistically bad.
• The Orgs in Power Rangers Wild Force are this: They consider human music to be repulsive, yet Flute Org's terrible tunes are music to their ears.

Music

• Darlene Edwards would often sing in a high grating voice, change keys without warning, and make weird sounds for no reason. Her husband Jonathan Edwards would do equivalent on the piano, playing an untuned piano, switching meters as the winds changed. (See Kentucky Fried Movie for their rendition of "The Carioca".) They were actually a comedy duo played by respectable musicians Jo Stafford and Paul Weston, who enthusiastically claimed the two were a lounge act they had discovered.
• The fake 80s heavy metal band Bad News consists of 4 comedians (3 of them from The Young Ones) gleefully massacring "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Pretty Woman". Okay, Adrian Edmondson has a good voice, which he tones down for the songs. The other three, however...
• This version of "O Holy Night" is the closest to a true, unironic example of this trope you'll ever hear.
• Mozart has fun with this trope in Ein Musikalischer Spaß (A Musical Joke).
• The country music version of Jonathan & Darlene Edwards: The Statler Brothers recorded an entire album in the persona of a hilariously untalented group called Lester "Roadhog" Moran and His Cadillac Cowboys.
• Biz Markie deliberately sang "Just a Friend" off-key, thus becoming a one-hit wonder.
• The song "A Word on My Ear" is from the POV of a tone-deaf singer and requires a very good ear for music, since you have to sing at odds with the pianist. Word on My Ear example 1 and Word on My Ear example 2.
• Florence Foster Jenkins, who ironically used to command large audiences because people would flock to hear how genuinely awful she was, ultimately appearing at Carnegie Hall a month before her death. Despite lacking a developed sense of pitch or rhythm Florence herself remained fixedly assured of her own greatness; due to early recording technology we can decide for ourselves.
• Lacuna Coil once held a contest to promote their upcoming DVD, where fans could send in footage of themselves hanging out at concerts, rocking out to the band's music, or doing other band-related stuff, with the chance of having the footage appear as bonus material on the DVD. Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro made a Youtube video demonstrating the kind of thing that fans could send in, where Cristina hilariously sang a deliberately off-key "karaoke" version of the song "Closer".
• How did this page go so long without mentioning William Hung?
  • Hung probably doesn't count, as his bad singing doesn't appear to be intentional. See So Bad It's Good instead.
• In "I Just Wanna Love You (Give It 2 Me)," Jay Z raps "In the club, high, singing off key/'And I wish I never met her at all...'." His delivery of the second line is, as promised, sung off-key.
• Harry Chapin's "Six String Orchestra" is sung from the POV of a terrible guitarist, and includes several instances where Chapin deliberately stumbles over the notes.
• Another rare non-ironic Real Life example: This poor guy, made somewhat famous in a viral video, has been described as the "Worst Church Singer Ever." He appears to be Southern Gospel's answer to Florence Foster Jenkins: he's completely sincere and even appears a bit smug about his singing, but there's not one note on key in the entire song. That takes... talent?

Professional Wrestling

• This is pretty much WWE diva Jillian Hall's entire character. Have a listen. Or better yet, don't.
  • This gimmick started as a Take That to Brooke Hogan. Of course, with Brooke's career over before it began, most assume it's just a jab at American Idol.
• La Resistance's Sylvan Grenier. The rendition of the French anthem combined with the fact the team was the evil foreigner type made for some pretty intense heat.
• Used straight with Stone Cold Steve Austin, who has admitted more than once that he can't sing worth a damn—yet still attempted a duet with Lillian Garcia in 2003.
  • This was played with immensely during the Invasion angle in which he sang a revised Queen song into "I am the Champion" and "Kumbaya" for a despondent Vince and singing an a capella duet of "Margaritaville" with The Rock towards the end of the story.
  • And lampshaded on the WWE Originals CD. In between the real songs (most of which featured actual bad singing), were spoken tracks of Austin getting ready to record his song for the album. Of course, the song doesn't actually exist.
  • Austin recalled a story from his upbringing where he was looking to be a rock star until one day his brother slapped the headphones off his head while he was practicing and declared, "You suck!"
• Following Austin's lead, Kurt Angle played with this trope as well singing "Jimmy Crack Corn" to Vince and later an revised "Heartbreak Hotel" at the prompting of the Rock. He also did the famous "Sexy Kurt" bit but that involved more non-singing than bad singing.
• La Resistance's Sylvan Grenier. The rendition of the French anthem combined with the fact the team was the Evil Foreigner type made for some pretty intense heat.

Radio

• Harry Secombe's Goon Show alter-ego was an enthusiastic but Hollywood-terrible singer, in deliberate contrast to Secombe's accomplished singing in real life.
• Jack Benny's violin playing. In reality, he was a very talented violinist, and counted virtuoso Isaac Stern among his friends.

Theater

• The musical Souvenir is about the notoriously bad singer Florence Foster Jenkins. Actresses playing Jenkins have had to study bad singing in an effort to sound genuinely awful.
• The first girl auditioned to sing "Who Wants To Live In New York?" in the "Opening Doors" sequence of the musical Merrily We Roll Along.
  • "Sopranos with voices like bees" indeed.
• Played straight in all versions (film, theater, TV movie) of The Phantom of the Opera, where we are lead to believe that Carlotta is a terrible singer, when in reality, she sounds almost exactly like an opera singer would.
  • In the film, Margaret Preece—who sings for Carlotta—obviously has a lot of training and talent, but one can also tell she's doing all she can to sound really annoying; she turns her high notes squeaky as they end, pushes way too hard in her lower range ("from our saviors, from our saaaaaaAAAAAAEEHHHVIAAAAAHS") and, particularly in her rendition of "Think of Me", uses way too much glottal emphasis at the beginnings of the higher notes.
• Kristine in A Chorus Line, who has a song about how she can't sing.
• In the comic Opera La Fille du Régiment. Marie (coloratura soprano) has been raised by soldiers to sing rousing patriotic songs and camp ballads, but apparently needs to be retrained to sing "refined" music. Meanwhile, her mother clucks and squawks like an old hen. The contralto has be genuinely horrible throughout, which only makes Marie's already beautiful voice sound even better.

Video Games

• In one of the voiced dramas for Riviera: The Promised Land, Serene's singing ability comes up. She's supposed to be a very bad singer, but when she actually has to sing part of a spell to save her friend Polly, she performs it without any screeching. Her voice isn't particularly strong, but she's not tone-deaf, so it's something of a subversion.
• An entire tone-deaf band makes an appearance in Brutal Legend. The Boy Band that Eddie starts out roadying for is made up of posers with a tween demographic who blend rock, pop, and rap into something so bad that all three musical styles would disown it, then beat it up and take all its money.
  • Karmic Death for the band for dreaming up something so incredibly shitty. Even funnier when the God of Metal screams, and their heads simply fall off.
• Hitman': Blood Money, The female assassin posing as a singer in the Dance with the Devil mission sings this way.
• Valkyria Chronicles: Edy Nelson actually attempts to sing Rosie's song. The results? She ends up flooring everyone within earshot of her, and not in a good way. Even Homer, who normally can take her usual punishment, can't take her singing. She'd better stick with just acting.
  • Her sister from Valkyria Chronicles II, Anisette, is also tone deaf, which might explain why she's the only person ever to be able to tolerate her sister's singing. Despite that, she's actually good at singing.
  • Vario. A celebrity wannabe/ Captain Ersatz of Elvis, this guy has quite the horrifying voice when he attempts to sing. He does improve, however.
• Saints Row 2, The Boss has 6 different voices to choose from when creating your character, and each gets a different song they sing along to on the radio, one voice has two(They all sing to "Take On Me" by A-ha). The songs range from The Final Countdown, to Sister Christian and your character can not sing worth a shit to any of them.
  • The male voice that sings to "Sister Christian" actually semi-raps it, occasionally improvising spoken word nonsense like "cuz you're a bitch!!" and "aaah! man! guitars and shit!" at the end of lines. Not even trying.

Web Original

• Sarah in Lonelygirl15 sings a tuneless, croaky rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner" in "Mission Gamma". Actress Alexandra Dreyfus is a classically trained singer.
• In Whateley, Merry has a rather unique version of this. When drunk on electricity, she sings exactly off-key, enough that they're pretty sure that's it's part of her abilities. Unfortunately, she's a prankster, so she's probably doing it on purpose.
• Miranda Sings... Just... Miranda Sings. It would be better if she actually knew the notes', but she doesn't.
• Megami33 is actually a really good singer, but when she voices Serena in Sailor Moon Abridged, she has to make her sound bad.

Western Animation

• Happened with Deedee in an episode of Dexter's Laboratory, who was so bad Dexter tried to mute her...and instead gave her an incredible bass, which allowed her to join a barbershop quartet.
• As seen in the Kim Possible episode "Hidden Talent", singing in public is one of the few things Kim can't do. (However, her voice actress Christy Carlton Romano is—like many Disney Channel stars—a trained, professional, singer.)
  • No, she could sing fine, she just had trouble with the high notes.
• Both straight and subverted with Jane Turnkey. One episode shows she can't even perform scales without screeching like a sickly cat. Yet that's her singing the show's theme song.
• In Danny Phantom, Jazz's singing is yet another misuse of the term tone deaf. But not as severe as Tucker who abuses this trope.
• Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius: Carl and Sheen. Compared to Sheen's singing, Carl's is angelic. No really, Sheen's singing voice is really horrible. However, in Attack of the Twonkies, his singing voice proved useful in stopping the horrible beasts the eponymous creatures turn into from exposure to music.
  • His singing made them change back because it was so bad that the Twonkies couldn't even register it as music.
• Peewit and Harmony Smurf in The Smurfs.
• In the Ruby Gloom episode "Unsung Heroes", Ruby and Iris sing in off-key, off-rhythm shouts that, although still not totally realistic, are not as overdone as some examples of this trope. Misery (while awake) does sing in the top-of-her-lungs, randomly-pitched shrieking wail that exemplifies this trope, but it's justified, as she appears to actually be a banshee.
  • They still though produced a Ruby Gloom image single in Japan, though, with a professional singer portraying Ruby.
  • All three eventually develop into fine singers, so their early stumbles can be dismissed as rookie mistakes. Or the No-Talent Ball. Whichever.
• Clash, the Misfits' groupie from Jem and The Holograms, is Hollywood Tone Deaf. This is revealed near the end of "One Jem Too Many", when she is impersonating Jem and the real Jem challenges her to sing.
• Happened in Arthur when Francine attempted to play the drums while singing. What ensues resembles nothing so much as a sick eagle wrestling a cat in a tumble dryer. In the end, it turns out she can sing just fine; she just can't do both at once. In another episode, she sings "There's-Nothing-to-Do-Today Day" in an Imagine Spot. Cut back to the real world, she tries to reprise the song and it comes out... a little off, but believably so.
• In an episode of Disney's Doug, Doug and the gang discover that Patti is a terrible singer when she tries to perform her entry in the "Bluffington anthem" contest. They spent the rest of the episode trying to stop her from performing it at the contest without actually letting her know she can't sing.
  • Sadly, this casually disregards a few episodes of the original series in which Patti sings passably. Of course, given the reception of the Disney version, we might disregard the retcon.
• In one episode of Megas XLR, Coop uses his mediocre singing as a weapon, "The Jammer".
  • To specify, it's the one weapon Megas has that Coop considers cruel to use and has more safety measures preventing its activation than Megas' NUKES!!!
• Huckleberry Hound ("Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine...") and Quick Draw McGraw are both examples, since they were voiced by Daws Butler, who could sing rather well.
• My Gym Partners a Monkey: "OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH! (Glass shatters) I'M A FRIENDLY ARMADILOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
• Grace on Home on the Range
• Henry on KaBlam!!, especially if you compare it to June's singing (which is angelic, even if she's kinda devilish).
• Invoked by Seth MacFarlane as the plot demands on Family Guy. One of the characters he voices can be a stellar singer in one episode and totally amateur the next. Seth has perfect pitch in real life and is freakishly good at staying just out of tune enough to sound believably bad; see episode The King is Dead featuring Brian (fantastic) and Peter (awful) back to back. Even better the actual episode version of Peter's I Need a Jew (off-key and mediocre) vs a live performance (perfect).
• Garth from Alpha and Omega. He is such a bad howler that birds drop from the sky every time he sings. However, it actually portrays this trope rather realistically, as he just hadn't learned how to properly howl, once Lilly gave him some lessions, he sung very well.
• In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode, "The Show Stoppers," Scootaloo's singing voice is so horribly off key it helps her team unintentionally win an award for best comedic act in a talent show.
  • Don't forget Pinkie, whose voice was so "bad" it started a war!
    • Allegedly one of the reasons Pinkie has a vocal double is that her actress was too clear and in key, and the producers felt the character needed someone skilled enough to sing somewhat poorly while remaining entertaining.
• Leela is such a bad singer on Futurama that when she tried to sing Whitney Houston, she convinced the Omicronions that Earth was launching a surprise attack. Katey Sagal, as mentioned earlier, is a very good singer.
• Invoked by the producers of Moral Orel with the character Bloberta Puppington who was played by Britta Phillips (a Truly Outrageous! woman) known for her powerful vocals, she was directed to sing loud and off key when it came to Bloberta's enthusiasm for singing even though she couldn't sing.
• The ReBoot episode "The Crimson Binome" has Bob singing along wordlessly and horrendously off-key to his music player. It's hilariously dreadful.
• Eddie in one episode of Birdz sings so badly that his entire class begs him to stop. As does his family after he breaks some dishes.
• Girl racer Ninki in The BBC's pre-school show Kerwhizz sometimes breaks horribly into song, causing her canine companion Pip to howl in agony.
• Angelica from Rugrats. Justified seeing that most kids at age three don't really know how to sing well. However, it's revealed in All Grown Up! that she still can't sing.