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Dapper Pencil Mustache - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Jan 12 2025

Dapper Pencil Mustache (trope)

When it comes to mustaches, there are two routes that are usually taken. One is the Porn Stache (and its Latin American cousin), which is thick, bushy, and fills the space between the nose and mouth. The other, in stark contrast, is what's commonly called the pencil mustache, which is thin, neatly trimmed, and rarely extends past the edges of the mouth unless it's combined with a beard or goatee or is styled to do so.

In contrast to the macho-ness and raw virility the Porn Stache tends to play into, a man who wears a pencil mustache is usually going for a look of suave sophistication or roguish derring-do, or is wanting to look dapper and well-groomed. Tuxedos, natty suits, stylish clothes and hats, and a clean-cut, well-groomed appearance usually go hand-in-hand with this style of mustache. It can be strongly associated with bachelorhood, as the mustache implies charm and a great deal of focus on appearance, the finer things, and personal grooming. This is meant to impress and attract women, as their possessions show they're well-off, and their grooming shows that they're clean and tidy. When paired with nice clothes, the mustache makes them appear elegant and pampered, almost promising that partners will be cosseted.

Much like the horseshoe mustache, the pencil mustache has some lesser-known LGBT associations. The term "confirmed bachelor" was a euphemism for a gay man, and the pencil mustache was integrated into queer coding because it showed they were refined, self-confident, sharply dressed, and theatrical. It also showed them as men of wealth and taste, which makes them look flamboyant, stylish, and wealthy to others.

Such a mustache is not an indicator of moral character, as both heroes and villains will go for this look.

If a Stage Magician is wearing a tuxedo and top hat, it's almost certain that he's going to be sporting this style of mustache.

Subtrope of Manly Facial Hair. Compare to the Dastardly Whiplash, whose mustache is thin but very long and usually comes to points that extend off the face, all the better for twirling. Not to be confused with Upper Class 'Stache.

Examples:

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Anime & Manga 

  • Bleach: Lieutenant Chojiro Sasakibe is a well-groomed, work-focused older man with a thin mustache and short grey hair. It contrasts both with the more colourful personalities in the organization and with his Captain-Commander Yamamoto — Sasakibe is an anglophile, whereas Yamamoto is a traditionalist with a long, flowing beard, mustache, and eyebrows.
  • Case Closed: Kogoro Mouri is the self-obsessed protagonist with an overinflated sense of his importance and detective prowess. He has a parted pencil mustache and is shown to be flirtatious and easily attracted to women, much to his daughter's embarrassment.
  • Hajime no Ippo features Ricardo Martinez, the most dominant featherweight boxer and champion in the series' history, sporting this type of mustache, adding to his air of cool-headed suaveness.
  • Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Phantom Blood: Baron Zeppeli, an eccentric yet dignified Hamon master, has this style of mustache to fit his sophisticated masculinity compared to the boyish gentleman Jonathan or former thug Speedwagon. According to Araki, the mustache was a gamble due to the stigma against facial hair for shonen protagonists of the era.

Comic Books 

  • Batman: Alfred Pennyworth is Bruce Wayne's butler and surrogate father after a mugger killed his parents. Alfred's pencil mustache didn't appear until Detective Comics #83 and has since become a staple of the character to reflect his high-class personality.
  • Invincible: Subverted by General Kregg, who wears a pencil mustache yet tends to dress in street clothes when not in his Viltrumite outfit. He's identified as Viltrum's top enforcer, and is believed to be the second highest-ranking Viltrumite behind Thragg himself. While committed to the Viltrmite goal of conquering Earth, he's also sired children with dozens of human women and genuinely loves them equally.

Film — Animated 

  • The Willoughbys: The Willoughby family is known for having big bushy mustaches, even the women. Mr. Willoughby, on the other hand, has a pencil mustache since his wife harvests the hair to make yarn. It's also a visual cue to how different he is to the other Willoughbys in the family, who were bold, daring adventurers while he (and his wife by association) are lazy ne'er-do-wells who are content to live off the family fortune and treat their children with extreme neglect.

Film — Live-Action 

  • The Addams Family: As Gomez Addams, Raúl Juliá sports the thin mustache Gomez wears in the original cartoons, contrasting John Astin's more normal-looking mustache from the '60s TV series. Amusingly, in Addams Family Values, Pubert Addams was born with a duplicate of Gomez's mustache, and is dressed in suits that are tailored for a baby.
  • Babylon (2022): Jack Conrad, a huge movie star (and unrepentant womanizer) during the Rise of the Talkies, sports a well-groomed pencil moustache.
  • Blazing Saddles: Hedley Lamarr, the main antagonist, is a greedy businessman who wants to drive out Rock Ridge's townsfolk to sell railroad land at a massive profit. His fancy suit and pencil mustache show off his wealth and are a stark contrast to the more rugged Western clothes worn by the rest of the cast.
  • Casablanca: Captain Renault is the police prefect in Casablanca, who pays lip service to the Nazi occupation but subtly works against them and eventually joins up with Rick in the Allies. He wears a pencil mustache, his uniform is impeccable and fits him like a glove, he's always well-groomed without a hair out of place, he's polite to people even when taking advantage of them, and maintains his cool demeanor whether he has a gun pointed at him or if someone gets gunned down right in front of him.
  • The Citadel: Dr. Manson starts as a crusading good doctor with pioneering research on tuberculosis, but becomes corrupted and turns into a profiteering scammer who targets wealthy hypochondriac ladies with fake treatments for non-existent illnesses. He grows a pencil mustache as a sign of his turn toward unethical behavior.
  • Edward Scissorhands: The Inventor was a well-off rich man who lived in solitude in a mansion, and is always shown wearing fancy clothes and a pencil mustache. He decided to make a robot that he named Edward, teaching Edward etiquette and poetry but failing to give him proper human hands before his death, leaving Edward with his signature prosthetics.
  • Gone with the Wind: Rhett Butler is a wealthy bachelor who made his fortune through professional gambling, his brothel, and war supplies. He's always very well-dressed and sports a pencil mustache that accentuates his roguish charm.
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel: When Zero begins learning the ropes of being a lobby boy from consummate gentleman M. Gustave H., as a way to try to look more respectable, he uses a makeup pencil to draw on a very thin mustache. He does this until the final train scene, in which he's sporting an actual mustache.
  • High Anxiety: Dr. Montague is the smarmy, pompous secondary antagonist whose pencil mustache is a visual cue to his characterization. He's part of a scheme to extort millions of dollars from wealthy families by institutionalizing wealthy individuals under false claims of mental illness.
  • The Mad Magician: Vincent Price played the evil Stage Magician Don Gallico, who murdered a rival magician to usurp his career. Price wore a tuxedo and cape, and changed his normal thin mustache to add sharp upturned points at the end.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Of the three Avengers who consistently sport facial hair (Tony Stark, Thor, Sam Wilson), Stark's style is the most visually striking and unique as he pairs a thin mustache with either an anchor beard or a chinstrap beard that keeps the anchor's points. This fits well with his status as a billionaire playboy, tech genius, and business owner.
    • Like his son, Howard Stark was a billionaire industrialist, tech genius, and smooth-talking ladies' man and sported a thin mustache (without the goatee). It's particularly evident with the younger Howard seen in Captain America: The First Avenger and Agent Carter, but he kept the mustache after marrying and having a son, right up till the day he died.
  • O Brother, Where Art Thou?: Ulysses' ex-wife's new "bona fide" suitor, Vernon T. Waldrip, presents himself as the image of a Southern gentleman with a white suit and neat pencil moustache. In contrast, Ulysses is an escaped convict who obsesses over his hair and sports a regular mustache and Perma-Stubble throughout the film.

Literature 

  • The Daevabad Trilogy: Jamshid e-Pramukh, captain of the Emir's guard, is a Pretty Boy with a thin mustache that's described as both old-fashioned and handsome. He's quite image-conscious as a young Country Mouse in a prestigious position, so it could be a deliberate choice.
  • Discworld: Victor Tugelbend, star of Moving Pictures, grows a thin mustache to try to look debonair (the narrative concedes that this works in a certain light, but "in another, made him look as though he had been drinking a thick chocolate milk shake"). In-story, he's a wizarding student and wants to distinguish himself from full-fledged wizards, who are expected to stop shaving altogether, but out-of-story he has it because he's a stand-in/send-up of Golden Age Hollywood actors — particularly Clark Gable, as he winds up starring in the Discworld equivalent of Gone With the Wind.
  • Hercule Poirot, along with his enormous ego, is known for being very fastidious about his appearance, and is usually depicted with a thin, immaculately well-kept mustache that curls up at the ends, although Kenneth Branagh's portrayal of Poirot features a thicker, bushier take.
  • Mistborn: The Original Trilogy: The elderly Lord Renoux is described as elegant and aristocratic even compared to other aristocrats, with a thin, neat mustache, fine spectacles, fashionable dress, and a calmly self-confident demeanor.

Live-Action TV 

  • American Horror Story: Hotel: James Patrick March, who designed the Hotel Cortez and still haunts it, had both a pencil mustache and a gentlemanly charm that helped obscure his activities as a Serial Killer.
  • Doctor Who: The Fifteenth Doctor has a thick pencil mustache and is quickly established with his debonair-looking outfits and air of showmanship and flamboyancy. He loves music and fashion, as shown by his eagerness to join Ruby in finding an outfit for himself when the two arrive in 1963 London to see The Beatles.
  • The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel: Lazarous is a debonair-looking, well-dressed man with a pencil mustache who meets Mrs. Maisel at a park bench. He guides Midge to a lesbian bar for Susie, whom he agrees to help.
  • One Day at a Time (1975): Schneider, the superintendent of the apartment building where Ann and her daughters live, sports a pencil mustache and is a rare case of a more macho-coded example, as he's typically seen wearing a white T-shirt, jeans, a work vest, and a tool belt. He started out as a relentless, almost stalkerish hound who constantly hit on Ann, even though he was married and she was blatantly and vocally uninterested, but had his lecherousness gradually toned down as the show went on.

Music 

  • Cab Calloway wore a thin mustache, and is known for his enormous hats and zoot suits almost as much as for the Creepy Jazz Music and scatting that he pioneered.
  • Ghost:
    • Papa Emeritus II, when not in his papal regalia and skull facepaint, wore a nice suit and sported a thin mustache, and was known to be a player, spending a good portion of the Papaganga promotional videos partying and dancing with women.
    • Cardinal Copia initially had a thin mustache, and when not in his formal robes, wore suits and (sometimes) a fedora when performing, but had many Butt-Monkey moments that subverted the sophistication of his appearance.
  • German Latin pop performer Lou Bega sports a pencil mustache as part of his stage persona of a Cuban Casanova.
  • Jimmy Buffett: "Pencil Thin Mustache" revolves around Buffett being nostalgic for the works of his youth and the feelings they gave him, and specifically mentions his desire for "a pencil-thin mustache, the 'Boston Blackie' kind" as a way to tap those feelings. The reference is to Boston Blackie, a pulp Film Noir criminal-turned-detective who, typically for the time, wore suits and a fedora, and was often depicted with a thin mustache.

Tabletop Games 

Toys 

  • The LEGO "Paradisa" range was set in a presumably expensive, high-class resort. The male characters, apart from a handful of clean-shaven exceptions, all sport the same thin, pointed moustache.

Video Games 

  • BioShock:
    • Andrew Ryan, a billionaire industrialist, always sports a thin, neatly trimmed mustache to go with his expensive suits. He's the creator and ruler of Rapture, a city made at the bottom of the ocean to house the best and brightest of humanity so they could work in peace without ethical restraints from the world above.
    • J.S. Steinman was a renowned plastic surgeon invited to Rapture after his revolutionary work in medicine. However, Steinman was addicted to opioids and was quickly addicted to ADAM when the drug became available to purchase. The surgeon used plasmids for his surgical work, and his business thrived under the ADAM trend because residents became desperate for surgery to remove their deformities. However, the doctor was driven mad by his own use of ADAM, which made him believe he saw Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who told him true beauty was achieved by symmetry. While he's usually depicted wearing a surgical gown and has a haggard appearance behind his mask, in the in-game advertisements for his services, he's shown to have slicked-back hair, glasses, and a pencil mustache.

      When Picasso became bored of painting people, he started representing them as cubes and other abstract forms. The world called him a genius! I've spent my entire surgical career creating the same tired shapes, over and over again: the upturned nose, the cleft chin, the ample bosom. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could do with a knife what that old Spaniard did with a brush?

  • Cuphead: King Dice has a thin, black mustache, fitting for a rich casino manager in a snazzy purple suit. He shares his 'stache with Cab Calloway, who was his main inspiration.
  • Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Professor Emmrich Volkarin, a Nevarran death mage, is one of the companions. He is a dashingly handsome Silver Fox with an elegant air and gentlemanly attitude, so naturally he sports a well-groomed pencil mustache to complete his look.
  • Identity V: Jose Baden, the first officer, presents himself as a charming sailor who comes from "high society" and is a prestigious worker who reports directly to the queen of his country, and his pencil mustache helps to create this image. It turns out that it is all a façade—Jose's glory days are long gone, and he is a broken and depressed man who has come to the Manor seeking to restore his family’s honor. Hilariously tragically, he never realizes that his elegant persona fools no one, which directly leads to his downfall.
  • The Suffering: Dr. Killjoy has a pencil mustache and was one of the Doctors who worked on Carnate Island. Although Dr. Killjoy is well-intentioned and sincere in his efforts to help, his methods of treatment are considered cruel and deplorable, and his patients often die in horrible ways. Killjoy is sophisticated and has an urbane way of speaking, even wearing a waistcoat under his surgeon's apron.

Web Video 

Webcomics 

Western Animation 

  • Archer: Ray Gillette is one of the agents at ISIS and is shown with a parted pencil mustache. Ray is openly gay, well-dressed, and has exuberant tastes for Japanese culture.
  • Batman: The Animated Series: Alfred Pennyworth is the Wayne family butler and is a former agent of the British Secret Service and has more than once proved he is quite capable of holding his own in fights.
  • The Batman: Alfred Pennyworth is the Wayne family's loyal retainer, who raised Bruce through his traumatic childhood following the murder of his parents.
  • The Cuphead Show!: King Dice is The Devil's so-called right-hand man who has a pencil mustache that is waxed down by his minions before every show. After falling out of favor with The Devil, King Dice's mustache becomes bushy and messy, but becomes clean again once Cuphead and Mugman decide to help him.
  • Family Guy:
    • In "Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater", Peter takes classes from Brian on how to be sophisticated and gentlemanly after deciding to live in Cherrywood Manor, a summer home that Lois inherited from her aunt. To look the part of a gentleman, Peter grows a pencil mustache and quickly loses it when Brian snaps him out of his delusion.
    • In "The Tan Aquatic With Steve Zissou", Stewie gets a tan after attending a golf game with Peter. Stewie goes overboard with this new obsession and draws a pencil mustache on his face. In the same episode, Stewie makes a lot of homoerotic comments towards Brian.

      Stewie: I like it 'cause it's just above my lip. It's the kind of mustache that says, "Yeah, I've been nude on camera. What of it?"

  • Harley Quinn (2019): Alfred Pennyworth is the faithful butler to Bruce Wayne and a trusted companion of Batman. This incarnation of Alfred leans more toward Alfred's aptitude for combat, as he fights crime while Bruce is incapacitated.
  • Little Rural Riding Hood: City Wolf (voiced by Daws Butler impersonating George Sanders) sports a pencil mustache to both contrast with his cousin Country Wolf and to go with his demure sophistication...which goes clean out the window after seeing Country Red.
  • Rick and Morty: Mr. Beauregard is a one-time character who appeared in Total Rickall, who was actually a parasite in disguise. He appears as a classy butler with a pencil mustache.
  • The Simpsons: In "Homer's Phobia", the family meets John, an eccentric antique dealer who decides to help the family make some money by analyzing their possessions. However, Homer calls off their friendship after being told that John is gay and Homer spends the episode fearing how Bart may turn gay by being in John's presence. John (being an Ink-Suit Actor of his voice actor) has a pencil mustache and is shown to be perceptive as he can notice any items of value.