The Bad-Mouthing of British Teeth

Decoder Ring

Slate Podcasts

Documentary, History, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

From The Simpsons’ Big Book of British Smiles to Austin Powers’ ochre-tinged grin, American culture can’t stop bad-mouthing English teeth. But why? Are they worse than any other nation’s? June Thomas drills down into the origins of the stereotype, and discovers that the different approaches to dentistry on each side of the Atlantic have a lot to say about our national values. In this episode, you’ll hear from historians Mimi Goodall, Mathew Thomson, and Alyssa Picard, author of Making the American Mouth; and from professor of dental public health Richard Watt. This episode was written by June Thomas and edited and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Our show is also produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd, and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Sources for This Episode Goodall, Mimi. “Sugar in the British Atlantic World, 1650-1720,” DPhil dissertation, Oxford University, 2022. Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Penguin Books, 1986. Picard, Alyssa. Making the American Mouth: Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century, Rutgers University Press, 2009. Thomson, Mathew. “Teeth and National Identity,” People’s History of the NHS. Trumble, Angus. A Brief History of the Smile, Basic Books, 2004. Wynbrandt, James. The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. Watt, Richard, et al. “Austin Powers bites back: a cross sectional comparison of US and English national oral health surveys,” BMJ, Dec. 16, 2015. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	June Thomas is an author, podcaster, a longtime colleague gets sleep, and a friend.
0:10.5	She's interested in many things.
0:12.5	She wrote a wonderful book about lesbian spaces.
0:15.1	She's great to talk to about television.
0:17.3	But anyone who knows her knows that there is one subject she loves to chat about more than anything else.
0:24.6	I am obsessed with teeth, and I can't really deny it.
0:28.6	Like, after the apocalypse, when like we're all just doing things that somebody's got to do this, right?
0:34.6	I will try and maybe do a bit of dentistry because I find it absolutely fascinating.
0:43.3	It's a fascination born out of a lifetime of dental work.
0:46.3	June was raised in a small mining village near Manchester, England, by parents who both had dentures.
0:51.3	It's in no way any kind of neglect. It's just that my parents, you know, they just never had me brush my teeth because they'd never brushed their teeth. So my teeth were just bad. When I was young, I had terrible toothed like, just constantly, like I was, like, I looked like a wee, what are those animals like Chippendale? A Chipmunk. A chipmunk. I looked like a chipmunk.
1:11.7	I often was like totally, you know, puffed out with infections.
1:16.7	I had a lot just open decay.
1:19.9	Like, honestly, it was a very ugly situation.
1:24.7	In the mid-1980s, when June was in her 20s, she moved to the United States.
1:29.4	As an adult with a good-paying job and dental insurance, she began to invest in fixing her mouth.
1:35.5	Over nearly 40 years in America, she spent something like $100,000 on dental treatment.
1:41.3	It got a whole lot better, but it's never going to be normal.
1:45.8	You know, they're not white.
1:47.2	They're getting all snuggled up, all tangled up.
1:50.2	It was kind of a little bit too lit.
1:52.8	Nobody in America ever commented on the state of her teeth directly,
	...

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