Now That's Using Your Teeth



"Jimmy dropped his pants And Ozzy dines on bats And Hendrix played guitar with his teeth"

- Billy and the Boingers, Bloom County, "I'm A Boinger"

Hard as it may be to imagine, having two hands with opposable thumbs can actually be pretty restrictive. For one thing, everybody knows that you can do stuff with your hands. No one in their right mind is going to do something like point a gun at a person's arm, because you're pretty much just begging them to grab a bullet out of thin air and throw it at you. So once a character is sufficiently strong, he needs a new way to catch an opponent off guard, and that means giving him a third arm. And what better place to have a third arm than with those shiny white things in your mouth?

In terms of story and narrative development, this is a fairly popular method of showing a character as being unbelievably strong- at any rate much better at what they do than pretty much any nameless Mook. In actual practice, this is a trope that usually falls strictly under the domain of Rule of Cool. Are there people in the world who can use their teeth to do practically anything? Maybe. Teeth are pretty strong, after all, and can exert more force than a hand. Still, one can't help but wonder how those teeth manage to continue to stay pearly white even after they've grabbed every filthy, dangerous, explosive object under the sun. Ah well. Best not to dwell on it too much.

Cutlass Between the Teeth is a subtrope, when someone uses their mouth to wield a weapon. Contrast Biting the Handkerchief.

See Man Bites Man for the other use of the teeth in battle.

Anime & Manga
"Lavi: Nice teeth."
 * In Detective Conan, it looks like an old man had committed suicide in his room; then Conan deduces that.
 * Ranma Saotome of Ranma ½ has on many an occasion blocked opponents' attacks with his teeth, most notably against Ryu Kumon.
 * In D.Gray-man, Krory stops Lavi's Hammer Drop attack (which involves Lavi jumping above him and growing his hammer to roughly the size of a small building) with his teeth. Lavi is duly impressed.


 * I think anything with Krory's use of teeth apply to this trope, actually.
 * In Hellsing, Alucard stops Rip van Winkle's bullet with his teeth (and half his face, but he gets better).
 * In Seras's fight with Zorin Blintz, Seras has Zorin pinned on the ground. Zorin works her right arm free and starts punching Seras in the head with that arm until Seras (looking more irritated than anything else) destroys her hand with a single bite.
 * Quoted almost word for word by Guts in Berserk, when he uses his teeth to catch the tip of Griffith's sword, seen in the page image. It's a tactic he makes use of quite often in fact.
 * It's also used against Guts when Wyald catches his sword in his mouth.
 * As well as, tragically, against.
 * He also bit an Apostle during the Eclipse.
 * Then he uses them again against Rosine.
 * ... And again against Mozgus's henchmen.
 * Hey: the guy has an impressive set of choppers. It'd be a shame if they went to waste.
 * In Michiko to Hatchin, Michiko pulls up a rope with her teeth to save a man from falling to his death while her hands are tied on her back. If that isn't a Crowning Moment of Awesome, I don't know what is.
 * Roberta from Black Lagoon makes use of this trope to catch a thrown knife from Shenhua in mid air with her teeth. She then proceeds to shatter it with her teeth while giving a giant Slasher Smile. Awesome!
 * Heihachi Mishima does much the same thing with a thrown axe in the OAV of Tekken.
 * In the Sengoku Basara anime, Sarutobi Sasuke catches a knife with his teeth when Kasuga throws it at his face.
 * Gangryong in Veritas often uses his teeth when fighting an opponent.
 * Kagura from Gintama catches a bullet with each hand and the last one in her teeth.
 * Kuroki from Blazer Drive blocks a shadow spike from an enemy with his teeth. Said spike came from the enemy's tongue, leading to... unfourtante implications.
 * Irresponsible Captain Tylor catches a nail shot from a nailgun in his teeth. If that isn't bad enough, the nailgun actually had enough power to shoot the nails from halfway across a room with enough force to pull him out of the way of a falling scaffold and nail his jacket (with him still in it) to a wall several meters away.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima has Jack Rakan, who
 * In One Piece, Arlong's teeth are so strong, he's able to catch a cannon ball in his teeth, which he subsequently shatters. He later does the same thing to a stone column.
 * It's not his teeth that are so strong, it's his jaws, as Luffy comes to find out when he puts a set of Arlong's teeth into his mouth and his one bite attack isn't that strong.
 * And recently, The New Fishmen Pirates captain Hody Jones, a Great White Shark fishman, has destroyed a whole pirate crew and their ship using only his jaws.
 * His crewmate Daruma is a Cookie-Cutter Shark Fishman that threatens to eat offenders. He regularly tunnels underground with them.
 * The 7th from Mirai Nikki blocked Yuno's knife with his teeth. Partially justified because he knew it was coming.
 * In a bonus novel for A Certain Magical Index, Sogiita Gunha uses his teeth to stop Mikoto's Railgun (at 30% power).
 * In the second Durarara!! OVA, Shizuo catches a knife (thrown at him by Izaya) with his teeth twice, shattering it one of those times.
 * In Rave Master, Haru catches an arrow with his teeth that an enemy fired at point blank range.
 * In one Saiyuki Reload chapter, catches a bullet by his teeth.

Comic Books

 * Green Arrow has been shown using his teeth to draw back his bowstring when one of his arms is incapacitated.

Film

 * Jim Carrey catches a bullet in his teeth (while driving his car and leaning out the window, mind you) in one of the Ace Ventura movies.
 * Kakihara loves showing off his Glasgow Grin; in one street fight, he yanks the pins from his cheeks and catches a man's fist in his horribly wide maw. Chomp.
 * In You Don't Mess With The Zohan, when fighting terrorists, Zohan catches two bullets with his hands before catching a third one with his teeth. He then catches a fourth one with his nose. This is all seen as pretty mundane to Zohan.
 * Parodied in UHF, where the bullet is not only caught with the teeth, but it is then crunched and shot back from the mouth.

Literature

 * The two headed Peirson's Puppeteers from the Ringworld series lack arms (or looked at another way their heads are their arms, given there brains are near the point where the necks join into the trunk), but there mouths are well adapted to manipulating objects.
 * In Clan of the Cave Bear, Creb used his mouth and teeth to hold and manipulate objects because he only had one arm. His teeth were worn down from doing that. Noteworthy for being one of the few characters to do this who is explicitly not super strong, as well as for showing what would happen to a real person's teeth if they did this all the time. (Well, OK, technically he's a Neanderthal, but that's neither here nor there.)
 * Truth in Television, as the teeth of people from low-tech societies often exhibit wear-patterns from tasks such as chewing on animal sinew to soften it for use as twine.
 * Sunny from A Series of Unfortunate Events. She doesn't mostly use her teeth in combat even under a loose definition of that term, but the stories constantly imply that Sunny's teeth are as useful to her as those of a beaver; for instance, they have many plots tailored to the party and ordinarily Sunny's part involves using her teeth.
 * As an example, in The Ersatz Elevator she used them to scale a wall.
 * In The Miserable Mill Sunny actually uses her teeth as pseudo-swords to fight off the villain in a 'swordfight,' and the most impressive thing about it is that they were pretty much equals in the fight, despite the fact that the villain had a longer reach, was using an actual sword, and was fighting a baby.
 * In The Fifth Elephant, Vimes fires a shot at Wolfgang and Wolfgang catches it in his teeth.
 * Lincoln Rhyme, in The Bone Collector and other novels in the series, is essentially quadriplegic throughout the series. In the first book, he's about to be killed by a psychotic madman, so he uses the only weapon he has left, his teeth. As noted below in Real Life, that's more than enough to rip out a throat...

Video Games

 * In Wild ARMs 5, Kartikeya is shown catching a bullet with his teeth when Greg attempts to wipe that smug bastard's grin with a point-blank range head shot. He smacks Greg for that one, saying that it hurt. A lot.
 * Winfield of Demonbane does boxing. This apparently grants him the power to catch a katana with his teeth (one wielded by a demonic samurai-sorcerer, no less). It's OK, though: boxing explicitly makes you superhuman in that world. Because.

Western Animation

 * In Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, Kale grabs his enemy's sword in his teeth, then jerks his head to throw the opponent overboard. Quoth Sinbad "And I was overworking it?"
 * The first time Molotov appears in The Venture Brothers, Brock throws a knife at her and she catches it in her teeth. Then she licks the blade and tries to stab him.
 * Ubiquitous to the point where the vast majority of its uses fall under Mundane Utility in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic. Completely justified since, as ponies, they have no hands with which to manipulate objects.

Real Life

 * Truth in Television: As noted in the page quote, Jimi Hendrix could play guitar with his teeth. If that doesn't count, nothing does.
 * Buddy Guy will perform the same feat when covering Jimi's songs live. He can also play covers of Eric Clapton with a handkerchief, or just play solos of his own making with his ass.
 * The above Truth in Television is referenced in K-On!, in which the advisor of the titular club turns out to be able to perform the same feat.
 * So can Krauser from Detroit Metal City, though Souichi notes that it's not good for himself.
 * Zack Wylde of Heavy Metal band Black Label Society shows off this ability as well during solos in live sets.
 * Ryyuske from BECK as a homage.
 * Humans have very impressive jaw strength compared to many animals, comparable to most attack dogs in terms of pounds per square inch exerted.
 * And yet, only in the direct bite - human jaws are quite feeble otherwise.
 * A German Shepherd died after attacking a slightly intoxicated man on a street in Ukraine. The cause? The man tore out the dog's throat. With his teeth!
 * Some Native Americans would carry an arrow in their mouth. This would make a faster draw than to draw from the quiver. It also allows them to use their hands to help ride their horse or to sneak around by crawling on all fours.