10 onscreen himbos who paved the way for Ken

Chris Hemsworth is no stranger to playing a himbo: His Thor Odinson is at once the most sinewed and silliest member of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He brings both attributes to 2016’s female-led Ghostbusters remake, winningly skewering the dumb-blonde secretary role and regularly stealing scenes from an all-star comedy lineup that includes Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig. Kevin the receptionist cannot make coffee, he doesn’t know how to use the telephone, and names his dog “Mike Hat” (a.k.a. “my cat”). And Hemsworth improvises brilliantly stupid character choices, including Kevin wearing eyeglasses with no lenses because simply he doesn’t want to clean them.

Star quarterback, prom king—in the early days of the beloved NBC sitcom, Troy Barnes possessed all of your usual jock-jerk bonafides, right down to the high-school letterman jacket he was still sporting around the campus of Greendale Community College. Over the series, his cocky, tough-guy posturing (“How about I pound you like a boy? That didn’t come out right”) softens to reveal the cartoonishly sweet-natured dork underneath, thanks in no small part to the bromantic hijinks he gets up to with best friend and roommate Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). Together, the daffy duo sport matching pajamas, freestyle rap in rudimentary Spanish (“the goat’s mustache is Cameron Diaz!”), and host imaginary morning talk shows, proving that himbos are nothing without heart.

The breakthrough role that would make John Travolta a star (he’d go on to lead ’70s classics Carrie, Saturday Night Fever and, of course, Grease during the ABC sitcom’s run), Vinnie Barbarino isn’t just a remedial student at James Buchanan High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn—he’s the “unofficial official” leader of the remedial students, known as the Sweathogs. As dashing (“Your hair should look like it’s being blown by unseen winds”) as he is dense (many of his catchphrases are some form of “I’m so confused” and “Who, what, where?”), Vinnie is a loudmouth and a ladies’ man, sure, but he’s also the one Sweathog you’d want cheering you on as you deliver your baby in an elevator. Without Vinnie Barbarino, you simply wouldn’t have fellow himbo hall-of-famers like A.C. Slater, Uncle Jesse, or the number one guy on our list.

Before becoming the well-muscled lead of action franchises like Guardians Of The Galaxy and Jurassic World, Chris Pratt turned what was supposed to be a small guest-starring role as the douchey, slacker boyfriend of Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones) into a series regular gig off the sheer strength of his himbo-ness. In fact, Andy Dwyer’s character reads like a himbo Mad Libs: He doesn’t know who Al Gore is and “at this point [he] is too afraid to ask.” His favorite food is a Skittle mashed between two Starbursts, which he calls “Andy’s Mouth Surprise.” His alter egos include both Johnny Karate and Jonathan Karate. Over the course of seven seasons, Pratt churned that blend of innocence and imbecility into one of TV’s most beloved dopes.

You can make an entire top 10 himbo list of Channing Tatum performances alone, from the 21 Jump Street franchise to the Magic Mike trilogy, but his first foray into the genre was opposite Amanda Bynes in this Twelfth Night-inspired, gender-swapping teen farce. Tatum’s Duke Orsino is a hunky soccer-playing sweetheart who, despite having Channing Tatum’s entire face and physique, is endearingly awkward around the fairer sex—except for Viola (Bynes), who is disguised as her twin brother Sebastian to get onto the boys’ soccer team. Boyishly charming and refreshingly sensitive, Tatum gamely goes toe-to-toe with Bynes—a generational talent—in his physical comedy, shoving tampons up his nose, shrieking at tarantulas, and bumbling about gouda. Far from the typical meathead jock, Duke serves as the blueprint for Tatum’s future himbo performances.

Before there was Ken’s himbo power ballad, there was Edgar’s beach-set belter: a shirt-ripping, sand-kicking, seagull-summoning musical number that double-underlined exactly how absurd the Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumolo comedy was aiming to go. (Choice lyric? “I’m going up a palm tree like a cat up a palm tree who’s decided to go up on a palm tree!”) Dornan’s spectacularly oblivious and laughably lovelorn secret agent was a delectable departure for the otherwise dramatic actor—despite the giggle-inducing ridiculousness of the Fifty Shades franchise, the heartthrob had never really done a big comedy—allowing the actor to gloriously go full goof. Let him do it more often, Hollywood.

You have to be smart to play dumb well, and Manny Jacinto does just that with the compassionate, chaotic (“Molotov cocktails work—anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem”), and constantly bewildered Jason Mendoza, the most heavenly himbo of the afterlife. Sure, his mind isn’t nearly as sharp as those glass-cutting cheekbones—the amateur DJ doesn’t know how snorkels or Spider-Man works, uses the words “ethically” and “ethnically” interchangeably, tried to create a body spray crossed with an energy drink once and has definitely eaten candles before—but he’s endlessly optimistic and joyfully enthusiastic about everything from bass drops to Blake Bortles, even in the Bad Place.

Though he’s flexed other acting muscles since—most recently his Oscar-winning performance in last year’s The Whale—Brendan Fraser’s ab-tastic run of roles in the 1990s make him a himbo legend, from Encino Man to Airheads, Blast From The Past to The Mummy. But it’s his titular, Tarzanesque turn in 1997’s George Of The Jungle that is the himbo prototype, a hunk of wide-eyed sincerity and tree-slamming senselessness so pure, it was almost primal. George may be King of the Jungle, but he’s as graciously devoid of ego as he is clothes (save for that PG-friendly loincloth), a primitive virtue more modern men should look into adopting.

Were it not for the ubiquity of marijuana in the 1970s, Michael Christopher Kelso might not have become a himbo for the ages. He did have a shockingly high SAT score despite his cannabis intake, a character detail mirrored IRL by actor Ashton Kutcher going from Dude, Where’s My Car?-style frat-boy shenanigans to becoming one of the tech industry’s most formidable players. Thankfully for TV fans, however, inside Kelso’s feather-haired, Abercrombie-model head was a brain blunted by, well, blunts. (“My mind’s always doing things that I don’t even know about!”) As such, the undeniably handsome, unfathomably half-witted gent occupies an extra special subset of himbodom: the stoner himbo.

With Joey Tribbiani, the sandwich-loving, foosball-playing fool from Friends, Matt LeBlanc manages to achieve something that Charlie Sheen (Two And A Half Men), Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), David Duchovny (Californication), and the like couldn’t: infusing his womanizer with enough overt sweetness to offset any semblance of sleaze. The good-looking oaf definitely gets around—his signature “How you doin?” might just be the most successful pick-up line of all time, and he once opened a gal’s bra just by looking at it—but LeBlanc wisely gear-shifted from Joey’s original character description (“Macho, smug, loves women and most of all Joey”) to create a man so fetchingly well-meaning and non-threatening, it makes sense why an endless parade of sophisticated New York women falls for his shtick time and time again. Joey Tribbiani is a man of simple pleasures (the Knicks, fruit jam, Baywatch in slow motion) and even simpler mental capabilities (“It’s like a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter. It’s moo.”), but it’s his innate goodness that makes the friend one of the most endearing, enduring himbos of all time.