Despite contrary belief, individuals on the mild-to-moderate spectrum of intellectual disabilities individuals can learn practical life skills, which allows them to function in ordinary life with minimal levels of support. They may never be 100% "normal", as only a very small percentage go on to do things such as driving a vehicle, attend higher-education institutions (unless the college specifically has a program for disabled students), become parents, or live completely independently, but if treated appropriately they can still be functioning and productive members of society. After all, disabled people are people too, and should be treated as such.
In fiction, intellectual disability has stereotypes associated with it. Such characters are often perceived as unintelligent, sometimes being a Cloud Cuckoolander. They're also portrayed as childish and immature to the point of being a Kiddie Kid or a Manchild. If they are a part of a team or Five-Man Band, expect them to be The Load or Plucky Comic Relief. When it comes to sexuality, they are often assumed to either have no interest in sex or be outright sexually deviant/an Abhorrent Admirer (the latter is particularly the case with males). Also expect them to be unaware of their strength a la Lennie Smalls from Of Mice and Men, sometimes to the point of even being Lethally Stupid and having an affinity for small, cute creatures such as rabbits. Finally, adult male characters with intellectual disability are much more likely to be portrayed in a negative light than females and children, and all are likely to be associated with being innocent, naive, kind-hearted, and overall stereotypically "cute & cuddly" in a way that's attempting to not come across as ableist, but actually does so in a different way. Finally, a common attempt at avoiding ableism is to reveal these characters to have Hidden Depths and a secret talent/skill at something, particularly something that requires intelligence or creativity.
As for physical attributes, they often have a Non-Standard Character Design compared to the rest of the cast. This often manifests in wearing a bicycle helmet (often implied to protect them from injuring themselves), as well as unusual clothing such as bibs, diapers, undersized T-shirts, and anything considered stereotypically "childish" clothing. For physical appearance, they often are drawn in ways that the audience can recognize them as disabled, such as with rabbit teeth, crossed eyes, unibrows, oversized hands or feet, disfigured head shape or nose, and typically either being heavy-built or obese, or being abnormally small. The large-framed build is actually common as a result of Of Mice and Men, with them having supernatural human strength, despite such body type not being associated with intellectual disabilities in Real Life. Finally, for vocal traits, they are often depicted as having a Simpleton Voice or speaking in Hulk Speak or Pokémon Speak, or some other similar fictional speech impediment.
As time has passed, this is becoming a Discredited Trope and has fallen under Unacceptable Targets. As Time Marches On, accurate portrayals of the mentally disabled are slowly integrating their way into modern media. The only portrayals of this you are likely to see now are characters who are faking having a disability to show how politically incorrect they are in a way that Crosses the Line Twice. In addition, many disability rights communities and organizations have spoken out against offensive portrayals and have urged writers to do research to properly incorporate these characters into media.
Compare Hollywood Autism, Hollywood Tourette's, Disabled Means Helpless, Disability Gag, and Inspirationally Disadvantaged. Someone who is a victim of Neurodivergence Stigma is likely to be stereotyped to be like this if they are intellectually disabled.
Examples:
- For Better or for Worse: Shannon Lake, a girl who April meets in her high school cooking class, is said to have intellectual disabilities that came about because she was born with "serious" medical problems which are never stated apart from being born with a cleft plate and needing speech therapy. She's portrayed as speaking slowly with long gaps in her words, appears "younger" than the other students, and has a wider, broader face than most other characters her age in the strip. She bursts into tears when she loses her mom in the store, even though she's a teenager April's age, and needs April to guide her back to her mom. When other kids in school tease her or mock her, her initial way of dealing with it is just to "think positive." The website bio
goes on to describe her as struggling to read and write despite being in high school and that she will "never drive" and struggles to take the bus, with a life apart from "the mainstream." She doesn't appear to have any friends outside of April, and even with April they're never shown hanging out outside of school and Shannon isn't seen with April's other friends or at her birthday party, despite wanting to do activities with other kids. During one series of strips called "Shannon Stands Up", she gets up on a table to give a heavy-handed speech about how people with disabilities deserve respect and the other students need to stop making fun of them and insulting them, which ends with students clapping and cheering for her, her bullies apologizing, and her saying she was "born different to make a difference". She isn't shown to have any hobbies or interests and serves mostly to be Inspirationally Disadvantaged and teach April about disabled people.
- The Benchwarmers: Clark Reedy always wears a bike helmet, acts a little out there, and is explicitly called "a retard" by one of the film's bullies. Given how odd the rest of the film gets, it's ambiguous if he's actually mentally disabled or not.
- Drop Dead Gorgeous: Hank Vilmes is constantly exposing himself and is implied to have been responsible for the death of his babysitter or his mother. The other characters, even the ones we’re supposed to sympathize with, casually refer to him as “the retard” or “the tard.”
- Carla in The Other Sister is supposed to have an intellectual disability, although her intellect seems to be just fine. She can learn. She can process and retain information. She can even live on her own. But her grasp on social etiquette seems a little underdeveloped, her speech is childlike (although her vocabulary isn't), and she wails out loud like a small child when she cries.
- Scary Movie: "Special Officer" Doofus "Doofy" Gilmore (a parody of Dewey Riley from Scream) is a very stereotypical and unsympathetic example, infamous for repeatedly having sex with a vacuum cleaner and for drooling because he "forgot to swallow." It turns out he is the villain of the movie in disguise and is Obfuscating Disability at the end of the movie in a parody of The Usual Suspects.
- There's Something About Mary: Mary's mentally handicapped brother Warren wears earmuffs due to hating his ears being touched, is overweight and funny, and has an emotional attachment to a baseball. He also is also revealed to know how to solve a Rubik's cube. However, unlike other examples, The Farrelly Brothers attempted to make Warren a more realistic portrayal and based him on real people they knew.
- Stir of Echoes had ghostly teenager Samantha who had an intellectual disability that caused her to gain a cognitive ability of a child.
- A memetic conversation in Tropic Thunder discusses the portrayal of intellectual disabilities with regard to getting the Oscar:
Kirk Lazarus: Everybody knows you never go full retard.Tugg Speedman: What do you mean?Kirk Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. Then you got Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and he won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded. He was a goddamn war hero. You know any retarded war heroes? You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, i am sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty-handed...
- Dracula: The titular count himself is described by Van Helsing, a learned scholar, as having a "criminal mind" and his brain is like a child, a Victorian pseudoscientific belief that criminality is the result of intellectual disability. In practice, he is intelligent and cunning in the short term but lacks the ability to plan long-term and improvise.
- Judge Dee: In "the Morning of the Monkey", the killer is the pharmacist Wang's mentally-disabled son, said to be strong as an ox. He saw a young woman and declared her to be his girlfriend before an older man named Twan shook him off (her traveling companion and unlucky suitor), and when Wang's son saw Twan again he killed him. Wang angrily denies there's anything wrong with his son and even tries to Take The Heat, but the judge gets him to confess what happened by pointing out that with all Wang's goods confiscated by the state, his son will be thrown out into the street.
- Of Mice and Men is one of the Trope Codifiers. Lennie, who is described as a child in an adult's body, is preternaturally large and strong; while this body type is not associated with intellectual disabilities in real life, it continues to be portrayed as such in fiction.
- Crank Yankers: Special Ed is a mentally handicapped teenage boy with a seemingly undersized helmet and a unibrow who speaks in Hulk Speak and has the mind of a two-year-old. His archetype which was comedic at the time of the show first airing, is now seen as ableist, which is probably the reason he is absent in the Revival.
- In the Fallout series, characters with an Intelligence score of 3 or lower speak in grunts and baby talk. Played for laughs in Fallout 2, where a low-Intelligence character can have a meaningful conversation with Torr Buckner in Klamath, as his dialogue with the player character is "translated" into normal English in parentheses.
- SuperMarioLogan: One of the main characters, Jeffy, was first introduced in 2016 being dropped off on Mario's porch. He is a walking stereotype of a mentally disabled person, having a helmet on his head, a pencil in his nose, crossed eyes, a unibrow, a diaper on the outside of his pants, and behaving like an idiotic toddler. Common behaviors of his early on included spanking his diaper and hitting his head when called a "bad boy". He had Hidden Depths, such as being able to paint the Mona Lisa on an Easter egg and effortlessly reciting the alphabet backwards. However, his character would slowly shift away from being a mentally disabled teenager, into a completely reckless, crazy monster who is a menace to society, and would no longer be portrayed as unintelligent or slow.
- American Dad!: Barry is a fat kid who is typically depicted as a simpleton who blurts out random non-sequiturs, though this is actually the intended effect of the medication he's forced to take that suppresses the cold, calculating psychopathic intellect of his true personality.
- Clone High: The Special Ed students are relegated to a joke building surrounded by a moat to keep them away from everyone.
- The Drawn Together episode "The Other Cousin", Princess Clara's cousin Bleh visits the Drawn Together house. Bleh steps out of the short yellow bus and as expected she drools, wears a football helmet, and has a limited vocabulary consisting of reviews of i am sam.
- The Fairly OddParents!: In "Certifiable Super Sitter", Mr. Turner appeared to act like a stereotype of a mentally handicapped person, having to wear a helmet and baby leash while acting incredibly stupid and immature (even by his Season 10 standards).
- Family Guy:
- One episode had a subversion where Chris dates a girl with Down syndrome named Ellen. Despite him thinking people with Down syndrome are different and nicer than everybody else, she actually turns out to be pushy and abusive towards him, which makes him realize anybody can be a jerk.
- The main character himself, Peter, is diagnosed as "mentally retarded" in the episode aptly titled "Petarded". This is Played for Laughs in jokes with him being unable to do simple things such as eat or drive, as well as him playing the preschool version of Trivia! while everyone else is playing the normal version, not to mention when he was being tested for the MacArthur Genius Grant he took the test with a See-N-Say while everyone else was using a graphing calculator. The trope is later deconstructed when Peter starts using his diagnosis to get away with being a jerk...only to lose custody of his children after injuring Lois and being deemed an unfit parent.
- Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: Subverted in the episode "Mainstream," which introduces a new student named Dennis. Though Values Dissonance is in play as the boys' teacher and Albert himself casually use the word "retarded" to describe Dennis (which, to be fair, was the medically-accepted term when the episode premiered), the episode goes out of its way to show that Dennis doesn't look any different from the other students. The only real distinction is that he takes longer to speak, react to other people, and complete tasks; when he's given the extra time he needs, he's able to excel and even win a classwide art contest.
- South Park:
- Timmy is depicted as having a fictional disability, described by the creators as a "strange combination of palsy and Tourette's"; he has a non-standard head shaped like an upside-down triangle, a perpetual smile, thin wavy arms which he is always depicted as flapping around, uses an electric wheelchair to get around and can say little more than his name. Unlike most examples, however, he is depicted as no less of a character than any characters on the show, capable of communicating with others despite his speech impediment as well as having a fleshed-out personality. This is In-Universe as well; in fact, Comedy Central was against having Timmy as a recurring character for the very reason of being offensive and ableist, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone lobbied to keep him for the reason that his peers treat him equally to other characters.
- Nathan and Mimsy are recurring characters and the rivals to Jimmy and Timmy, with Nathan having Down syndrome and Mimsy appearing to be an Expy of Lennie Smalls, are a variant of this trope. Their designs and personalities are based on Rocky and Mugsy from Looney Tunes, and they are constantly trying to kill Jimmy or at least thwart his plans or make him look bad. Their schemes always backfire, with humorous consequences such as Nathan being raped by a shark. Mimsy is depicted as a bumbling idiot to whom Nathan is a Straight Man, with a recurring gag being the latter smacking the former in the face while shouting "Shut up Mimsyyy!", though it is subtly hinted here and there that Mimsy is actually smarter than Nathan.
- Parodied in "Up the Down Steroid", with the B-Plot involving Cartman pretending to be mentally handicapped to get into the Special Olympics because he thinks it will be easy to win. He squints his eyes, puts on a vacant open-mouthed smile, and wears a helmet, undersized shirt, and only has a shoe on one foot but not the other. His mother is very against him doing this, and when it comes to registering for the Olympics when he is asked about his disability, he says "How should I know? I'm retarded... DURR!". Hilarity Ensues and he ends up coming in last place in all of the events (providing lesson that disabled people are just as capable as abled people), but he still gets a $50 gift card as a pity reward for coming in last, so he's still happy anyways (until Jimmy outs him in front of the whole audience as faking his disability).
