Tacky Tuxedo
Part of Hollywood Dress Code:
It's Prom Night! Or it's a wedding! It could be Shlomo's bar mitzvah, but no matter what kind of an event, Weirdo McGeek is invited as well. And what kind of garment did he choose to show up wearing?
A frilled shirt, a bowtie, a cummerbund and a tuxedo in baby blue. It's a disco-style Tacky Tuxedo that John Travolta could barely look good in, but the Hollywood Nerd usually comes dressed up like this to a fancy event.
Contrast Sharp-Dressed Man, in which formal wear makes a good impression.
Examples of Tacky Tuxedo include:
Film
- The title character in Angus wears a particularly hideous purple-colored one.
- Tom Hanks' character in Big has one of these (sequins galore!) in the party scene. He makes quite an entrance.
- Dumb and Dumber: Lloyd and Harry
- Barry Fife (Bill Hunter) wears something very like this in Strictly Ballroom.
- In My Cousin Vinny, Vinny shows up to court wearing a particularly hideous tux he had obtained at the last minute from the thrift store. Not like he had much of a choice; the judge had ordered him to wear a suit, and the local department store was closed due to a flu outbreak, so it was either that or his leather jacket, which he already knew that the judge disapproved of.
Literature
- In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, poor Ron Weasley gets stuck wearing an old-fashioned maroon dress robe to the Yule Ball. It clashes horribly with his date's hot pink dress.
Live-Action TV
- Home Improvement: Al and Tim wear these.
- Bubbles on Trailer Park Boys skipped the disco ensemble and wore something even tackier to a wedding: a T-shirt with a tuxedo design on the front. Then again, this is Trailer Park Boys.
- Apparently Glee's Burt Hummel wore a deeply regrettable-sounding powder-blue tux with ruffled shirt and floppy bow-tie to his prom. It's probably a good thing that this is only described, not shown on-screen. What's even more mind-blowing is how Burt can admit to this and then get up nerve enough to criticise his son Kurt for planning to wear a very elegant formal kilt to his junior prom...
- And apparently Artie takes fashion advice from Burt, because the cherry-red outfit he wore to the junior prom made him look like Austin Powers.
- On Boy Meets World, a nerdy guy who mistakenly thinks Topanga agreed to go to the prom with him shows up at her door wearing one of these.
Newspaper Comic
- Jon Arbuckle of Garfield has also been known to wear pink and purple suits as well.
- Zits: In an attempt to persuade Sara to go to the prom with him, Jeremy borrows a tuxedo that used to belong to Hector's grandfather. Only when Hector gives it to him does he discover that Hector's grandfather had been in a mariachi band.
Western Animation
- American Dad: Steve's friend Snot
- Angry Beavers: Daggett
- Batman Beyond: Willie Watt wears an orange version to the spring dance in the episode "Golem". Made worse by the fact that other episodes show that future formal fashions are even more streamlined than those of today, meaning it was really, really out of date and it wasn't actually a formal occasion (the only guys are wearing pretty casual clothes).
- Ron Stoppable wears one of these in Kim Possible, saying he borrowed it from his dad.
- The Simpsons: Homer
Real Life
- Harpo Marx, during a vacation on the French Riviera, constantly wore a tuxedo made out of green felt. He later learned that he'd become widely known as "that American in the pool-table tuxedo".