Thinker Pose

Pondering life, the universe, and everything, perhaps?

"The Thinker, huh? I know what he's thinking about! 'How come there's no TV set?'"

—Eustace

Auguste Rodin's famous sculpture "The Thinker" has been imitated countless times as a stock pose. A larger-than-life bronze sculpture, it depicts a nude male in a pose that suggests he's, well, thinking. Rodin actually took this pose from Classical Greece; sculptures and paintings of people positioned similarly are generally meant to convey introspection and melancholy.

A common gag in comedy shows of less good taste is to have a character do this pose while seated on a toilet.

A subtrope of Art Imitates Art.

Examples of Thinker Pose include:

Anime

• Yakitate!! Japan (The bread statue made by Team Japan. Kawachi Kyousuke covered in bread by Team Japan after he broke the bread statue made by said team.)
• In Code Geass episode 17, Lelouch was in this pose for an art class.
• In Ranma ½, Ranma can be seen in this pose occasionally such as during the martial arts eating story arc.

Film

• In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Ace does this pose while pondering about the connection between a missing football player and a female cop. His pet monkey imitated him while he does it.
• The Thinker statue himself appears in Night at the Museum 2. Turns out he's not very bright after all, and is more interested with impressing women than doing any actual thinking.

Literature

• Lampshaded and subverted in Me and My Little Brain, the third book in The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald. The Author Narrator takes the Thinker Pose to do some thinking and discovers that it is quite uncomfortable and not suited to thinking at all.
• The Art of Discworld features a sketch Paul Kidby made of Detritus as "Da Finker".
• Terry Brooks used the Thinker to describe Uhl Belk, the Stone King, from The Druid of Shannara. Makes some sense when you realize that the Four Lands are actually the north western corner of the US After the End.

Live Action TV

• Dobie Gillis at the beginning of each episode of his show.
• CSI: Miami has Horatio doing it once under the shadow of the Rio De Janeiro's Jesus the Redeemer statue. There was much Narm.
• Bruce Forsyth would often appear in silhouette at the start of his shows in a similar (but standing) pose.
• A sketch from The Electric Company (Old school) showed someone (Bill Cosby?) in a Thinker Pose, in an attempt to teach the kids at home about "th".
• Concentration awarded a trophy called "The Connie" in its annual Challenge of Champions. This trophy was modeled after the famous statue.
• In an early episode of Scrubs, JD is switched around from doctor to patient, and imagines himself as The Thinker when a mass of interns study him.

Music

• In Sly Fox's song "Let's Go All the Way," the first verse starts with the words "Sitting with the Thinker, trying to work it out." The two band members replicate the pose in the music video.

Tabletop Games

• In Transhuman Space, Eliard Gamma, an SAI with a fondness for classical sculpture, has a VR avatar based on the Thinker.

Theatre

• In Eugene O'Neill's play The Hairy Ape, the protagonist frequently adopts this pose. In the final scene, the pose is instead done by a gorilla he is observing in a zoo.

Video Games

• In the first Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney game, a clock shaped like the Thinker is key to the first two cases of the game.
• On the foreground during the final battle of Altered Beast there are some statues, or petrified humans. One on the left looks like the Thinker, and another one is The Scream.
• Katawa Shoujo depicts main character Hisao Nakai in the Thinker pose in one of the images featured in the beginning of one of Rin Tezuka's acts. Rin herself is depicted as the Venus De Milo (she's born without arms).

Western Animation

• Goliath from Gargoyles took this pose, while cursed.
  • He would also take it after the spell was broken, usually when he was troubled or saddened.
• Foghorn Leghorn once froze into this pose after being covered with quick-drying cement. ("Don't bother me, dog!" he snaps. "Can't ya see I'm thinkin'?")
• Dimitri, a character from the 20th Century Fox film Anastasia, does one of these next to the actual sculpture during a musical number in Paris.
• Tako from Sushi Pack has a tendency to strike this pose while having his inner monologues.
• Jake from My Gym Partners a Monkey does this during a particularly chaotic situation, leading the other animals to believe he is a natural leader.
• On Family Guy this is how philosopher Thomas Griffin is pictured in the Griffin book of genealogy. He only breaks the pose to utter "why" when his wife pleads with him to get a job.
• There was one cartoon from the '50s or '60s with a bulldog who punished the cat for various offenses by covering him with quick-drying cement and forcing him into some position or other. He apparently favored this pose, because the cat once pleaded, "Not 'The Thinker.' Please, not 'The Thinker'!" Naturally, the mice kept causing trouble that'd get the poor cat made into statuary.