As you know, we only have love, admiration and respect for the dental professionals we get to work with on a daily basis.
Movies and television, on the other hand, appear to feel quite differently.
Because some of our favorite goofballs, weirdoes and on-screen scoundrels happen to work as dentists. With a loose hand on the laughing gas valve and wielding crude implements of torture, they delight in putting pained patients through the ringer while displaying colorful personal predilections and bizarre tics.
Since we could all use a little levity in these isolated times, The Bone Guys are taking a look at our favorite on-screen dentists. Just to have a little laugh at ourselves and the medical professionals we adore. Since we’re yet to encounter any dentists this diabolical or peculiar out there.
Who: Dr. King Schultz, the erudite German bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained.
Most memorable moment: When his wagon first appears, strapped with a giant spring-loaded tooth, as Schultz rides in to coolly help liberate the title character.
Our favorite line: “Normally, Monsieur Candie, I would say ‘Auf wiedersehen.’ But since what “auf wiedersehen” actually means it ‘‘til I see you again,’ and since I never wish to see you again, to you sir, I say goodbye.”
Who: Dr. Orin Scrivello, the sadistic, Elvis-esque dentist and cruel boyfriend of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors.
Most memorable moment: His eventual overindulgence in laughing gas that leads to the bad doc eventually serving as plant food.
Our favorite line: “You’ll be a dentist. You have a talent for causing people pain.”
Who: Dr. Wolfe, the periodontist at Painless Dentistry who gives Lisa her braces on The Simpsons.
Most memorable moment: When the doctor’s admission that he left the nitrous oxide tank leaking is met with prolonged laughter from everyone in the room.
Our favorite line: “Lisa, so you won’t be scared, I’ll show you some of the tools I’ll be using. This is the scraper. This is the poker. And this happy little fellow is the gouger.”
Who: Dr. Christian Szell, the renditionist and drill-enthusiast of everyone’s worst dental nightmares, played by the legendary Lawrence Olivier in Marathon Man.
Most memorable moment: Dustin Hoffman, uninformed that his older brother was chasing down a Nazi war criminal with stolen jewels, undergoes slow, measured torture on his front teeth.
Our favorite line: “Is it safe?”
Who: Dr. Rudy Blatnoyd, Martin Short’s randy, coke-sniffing 1970’s dentist in the film version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice.
Most memorable moment: Short all but steals the film in every second he appears in, but might be at his funniest amid fits of paranoia after a car he’s riding in gets pulled over by the cops.
Our favorite line: “It’s not groovy to be insane.”
Who: Dr. Stuart “Stu” Price, the much put-upon cohort of the wolf pack in The Hangover films.
Most memorable moment: When the dentist wakes up amid the world’s worst hangover, only to find he has pulled his own tooth.
Our favorite line: “I look like a nerdy hillbilly!”
Who: Dr. Julia Harris, the D.D.S. in Horrible Bosses played by Jennifer Aniston who is desperately in need of on-the-job sexual harassment orientation. Most memorable moment: When Dr. Julia asks her beleaguered assistant to let her know once she’s crossed a professional line. All while standing completely naked before him.
Our favorite line: “Well, Shabbat Shalom, somebody’s circumcised.”
Who: Dr. Philip Sherman, the Aussie dentist who kidnaps everyone’s favorite clown fish in Finding Nemo, to give to his niece as a present.
Most memorable moment: After a pelican flies into his office, a racket commences, a drill hits the ground and everyone starts screaming, drawing frightened looks from the waiting room.
Our favorite line: “Crikey!”
Who: Tim Whatley, Bryan Cranston’s “Dentist to the Stars” and serial re-gifter, who dates Elaine on Seinfeld.
Most memorable moment: George stalks him at a party with a pencil ingrained in teeth marks, because he wants to know if they belong to the actor Jon Voight. Or maybe when Dr. Tim converts to Judaism and offends Jerry, not as a Jewish person, but as a comedian.
Our favorite line: “I’m just getting warmed up. Because I’m just a sadist with newer magazines.”
Who: Dr. Walter "Painless Pole" Waldowski, the camp dentist in the movie M.A.S.H.
Most memorable moment: In a cinematic recreation of the Last Supper, Waldowksi faces his advised end following a humiliating failure in the bedroom.
Our favorite line: “I wasn’t going to fool around out here because I got these three girls I’m engaged to back home.”
The Runners-up
Of course, these aren’t the only contenders for the best on-screen dentists of all time. We thought of a few more you may consider beloved or behooved, depending on which side of the chair you’re standing on.
Frank Sangster in Novocaine, aka Steve Martin’s other devious dentist role.
Doc Holiday in My Darling Clementine, in which the real-life dentist is identified as an on-screen surgeon.
Dr. Barry Farber, the orthodontist who Rachel’s left at the altar on Friends.
Nick "Oz" Oseransk, Matthew Perry’s dentist facing a hit man neighbor in The Whole 9 Yards.
Dr. Wilbur Wonka, the dentist father of iconic cavity creep Willy Wonka, in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory.
Geoffrey, the dentist who takes a drill through the thumb in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
David and Dana Hurst, the conflicted married professionals at the center The Secret Lives of Dentists.
“Snub” Pollard, the titular bootlegging doctor in the 1920 short The Dippy Dentist.
George Barbor, the insistent professional in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much.
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