I get a little mean about English teeth. But I do honestly love the English.

The other day I was sitting in a group of English people in a pub. I’m beginning to find that English people don’t tend to sit anywhere else—no one here ever suggests just sitting around in the lounge, or sitting in a café all French-like, or sitting in a movie theater, or sitting in a park, or sitting on a boat, or any of the other millions of places you could possibly sit. No, they always want to sit in a dark room that smells faintly of piss and looks like a butch gay pirate’s boudoir, and they want to clutch glasses the size of oil barrels filled with warm beer. And no matter how empty the pub is, it’s always impossible to hear anything anyone else is saying. Even if you are literally the only person in the bar, you still have to shout to hear your own thoughts as I’m pretty sure pubs blast ambient soundtrack CDs of drunk British people shouting about something the French did 200 years ago.

But enough about pubs. I came here to be mean about something in particular, and today I’m going to be mean about English teeth. So anyway, we’re in the pub and somehow the conversation turns to Miranda Hart. I get really excited as, for once, this is someone I think I’ve heard of. So I pipe up, “She’s the one on that lying show hosted by Rob Brydon, right? She's very funny, I think... She’s the one with the bad teeth?”

In a second I knew I had said something very, very wrong, as the British fell silent. Well, when I say silent I mean that those around me stopped talking but the other pub patrons were still pissed off and shouting about something. Everyone kept giving each other a confused look, and finally someone said, “Well, she’s on ‘Would I Lie to You?’ but she doesn’t have bad teeth…”

At that point I shut up about it because I realized that clearly some kind of boundary had been crossed. But being the member of academia that I am, I did my research.


Look, Englisher types. I can get over your love affair with this mysterious “brown sauce.” Or your inability to comprehend the concept of “toaster oven.” Hell, I could even forgive your naughty giggles whenever I accidentally refer to my trousers as “pants.” But I have to put my foot down somewhere and insist that Miranda Hart looks like ½ of a goddamn equestrian team.

And this isn’t me being mean and laughing at this veritable Quasimodo of the dental world while claiming to be some sort of a beauty queen—I’m well aware of my own aesthetic shortcomings! I’ll happily admit, among other things, that I need to get my fat ass in shape and that when I look at myself in the mirror from certain angles I’m pretty sure I have Down Syndrome. I don’t deny these things. So why would I do Miranda Hart the disservice of saying that her teeth are not freakishly horse-like?

I have to talk about it. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and just assume that everyone in England is just too kind to comment on it, but since I’m a total bitch I’ll go right ahead and say it: there are some seriously fugly sets of teeth I’ve seen here. Like, I’ve seen teeth here that have made me question the existence of God.

There’s one woman here in particular whose teeth do actually frighten me. Before I continue, let me just say that she’s certainly not someone who will be reading this blog, and she is certainly not someone I have EVER pretended to be friendly with—I mean, I may be a bitch but I’m not two-faced. I want to be vague, but not too vague. Let’s just say that she’s not the Queen. So that narrows it down.

Anyway, whenever this woman opens her mouth to speak I cringe a little, while at the same time imagining driving a large tractor through the gap between her two front teeth. Sometimes when I’m feeling less frightened I imagine tossing boba through the gap.

The worst thing is that I’m pretty convinced I’m the only person distracted by this woman’s proscenium arch-like mouth. So now in addition to the fear I feel every single time she opens her mouth, where I silently panic that the gap is just going to keep expanding until it consumes us all, I’m frightened that I’m going to fail at life. Come to think of it, I may have already.