Howard Wolowitz

Howard Wolowitz
The Big Bang Theory character
Simon Helberg as Howard Wolowitz
First appearance	"Pilot"
Created by	Chuck Lorre Bill Prady
Portrayed by	Simon Helberg
Information
Nickname(s)	Froot Loops (as an astronaut) Rocket Man (by Bernadette) Wolowizard (Online gaming name)
Gender	Male
Occupation	Aerospace Engineer Astronaut (Formerly)
Family	Mr. Wolowitz (father, left the family) Mrs. Wolowitz (mother)
Spouse(s)	Bernadette Rostenkowski
Relatives	Lewie (uncle) Murray (uncle, deceased) Barbera (aunt), Jeanie (second cousin) Elliot (uncle) David (cousin) Mr. Rostenkowski (father-in-law) Mrs. Rostenkowski (mother-in-law) Joey Rostenkowski (brother-in-law) (other siblings-in-law)<br!-- Do not include Bernadette here. She is already listed as his spouse! -->
Religion	Judaism
Nationality	American

Howard Joel Wolowitz,^[1] M.Eng is a fictional character on the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory, portrayed by actor Simon Helberg. Among the main male characters in the show, Howard is distinguished for lacking a doctoral degree, for still living with his mother, and for believing himself to be a "ladies' man". Simon Helberg's character is named after a computer programmer known by the show's co-creator Bill Prady.^[2] He is the only character who has been to the International Space Station.

Biography

Howard is a Mechanical Engineer at Caltech's Department of Applied Physics who is often seen at the apartment of Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki) and Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons). He is best friends with Rajesh Koothrappali (Kunal Nayyar). He was born in 1981 as specified in season one's episode "The Pancake Batter Anomaly". Howard received his degree in Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Howard sports a bowl-style haircut and tends to wear loud, vintage, 1960-era outfits, a V-neck or t-shirt over a turtleneck or dickey which sport a variety of pins, and always has skinny jeans and an alien pin. He is also fond of belt buckles, which have included a Nintendo controller, a silver Batman logo, a 45 RPM record insert, a Klingon communicator, and a buckle containing the superhero the Flash, wearing these over only one belt, as stated in one of the episodes. Although Jewish, Howard often rebels against the religion and even goes as far as mocking Judaism. He is also an interpreter of sign language.^[3]

Personality

Like his friends, Howard is a big fan of comic books and superheroes. Until after he returned from space in season six, his preferred personal transportation was via his Vespa motor scooter. However, he has sold the Vespa and bought a Mini Countryman in the episode "The Parking Spot Escalation", using the fundings from his space travel, and lives with his wife Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz, after moving out of his mother's home.

Besides English, Howard can speak six languages including French, Mandarin, Russian, Persian, Arabic, and the constructed language Klingon from the Star Trek franchise. He also knows some words in Sindarin, one of the elvish dialects invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings. Although in the show, Howard has been mentioned as speaking these languages, the writers have not explored his proficiency much. The episode "The Wiggly Finger Catalyst" also reveals he knows American Sign Language.

Until his marriage, Howard fancied himself a "ladies' man" and he provided outrageous pick-up lines whenever there was a female present, resulting in humiliating rejections. Howard describes himself as a romantic,^[4] although he usually comes across as overtly sexual, and in the words of Penny, disgusting.^[5] However, Penny's animosity toward Howard has mellowed somewhat since Howard started dating Penny's work colleague Bernadette, to whom he is now married. When Howard found an ALF doll and revealed that it filled a void for him when his father left, Penny felt sympathy for him and began to empathise more when she understood his behavior a little bit better.

Howard, much like Penny, dislikes many of Sheldon's antics, but he has grown accustomed to them, although he gets frustrated with Sheldon more quickly than Raj or Leonard. Once Penny asked how Sheldon had become friends with him and Howard simply replied "We liked Leonard".^[6]

Howard is allergic to peanuts, which can give him a life-threatening anaphylactic reaction; he once deliberately caused this just to keep Leonard busy at the hospital (they were planning a surprise birthday party for him), and his face was horribly disfigured. Another time, when he was depressed about breaking up with Leslie Winkle in Season 3, and while he was at Las Vegas with Raj and Leonard, he tweeted "I'm so lonely and horny, I'm thinking of opening this $20 can of peanuts and ending it all". He has also mentioned having transient idiopathic arrhythmia. Howard is proud of the fact that he has only 3% body fat, which Raj declares makes him look like a human chicken wing.

Although Jewish, Howard is not very serious about his religion, and does not keep kosher. For instance, he eats pork, and when the price of pork went up at the group's favorite Chinese restaurant, he remarked "it's getting tougher and tougher to be a bad Jew".^[7] On another occasion, when Howard tried to date Sheldon's sister, Missy, he said he would kill his rabbi with a pork chop if his religion was an impediment, and one of the reasons he was happy to continue dating Bernadette (who is Catholic) was because it gave him the chance to really annoy his mother. Despite this, Howard has shown some belief in his faith. When he and Raj posed as goths to pick up women, he wore fake-tattoo sleeves and refused to get real ones (although he attempted to get one but was too scared of the needle). It is noted in "The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis" that he observes Hanukkah. He also apparently attends High Holy Day services, as Sheldon once critically commented that he was not available to compete in Halo during those times.^{[citation needed]} However, in "The Financial Permeability" he made the sign of the Cross — a Catholic practice — during an encounter with Kurt, Penny's ex-boyfriend.

In the episode "The Herb Garden Germination", he became engaged to Bernadette when she accepted to his marriage proposal. They eventually married in "The Countdown Reflection," the Season 5 finale, which featured a small reception. They had a bigger, "official" one after Howard returned from space (although this was not featured).

Work

Unlike Leonard, Sheldon, and Raj, Howard lacks a Ph.D. and is sometimes derided about it, especially by Sheldon, Sheldon's girlfriend Amy Farrah Fowler, and the department head, Dr. Gablehauser. He defends himself by pointing out that he has a master's degree from MIT (although he first studied in medical school but dropped out since he was terrified of blood).^[8] Because he does not have a doctorate, Dr. Gablehauser refers to him as "mister" while referring to his friends as doctors, and Sheldon often says that he is the least smart of the four "nerd" characters, as shown in "The Bus Pants Utilization", where the guys develop an iPhone app and Sheldon refers to them as "three geniuses and their friend Howard".

Howard is usually seen working on equipment to be used in NASA missions and the International Space Station, though many times he is careless about it, and has "access" to high-tech surveillance and NASA gear. In the first episode, Howard mentioned working on the design of a satellite that orbits a moon of Jupiter taking high-resolution photos.^[9]

Having worked on the Mars rover project, he invited his date, Dr. Stephanie Barnett, to drive it at a secret facility. Instead, the rover became stuck in a Martian ditch and he spent the rest of the night with Sheldon and Raj trying to undo the damage and get the rover out of the ditch. When this proved unsuccessful, he decided to erase the hard drives of the facility and destroy all the files connected to his treachery to cover up his meddling, only to later find out that the rover had discovered the first clear signs of life on Mars.^[10]

The rover incident was kept a close secret, until the Season 4 episode "The Apology Insufficiency", when he made it onto a new team for the Defense Department laser-equipped surveillance satellite, Howard was not granted security clearance and was taken out of the team after Sheldon revealed the rover incident to an investigating FBI agent.^[11]

On another occasion, Howard worked on a zero-gravity human-waste disposal system, essentially a "space toilet", that was deployed in the International Space Station. He later realized the equipment had a structural weakness (the toilet would explode after 10 flushes) and again sought the help of his friends to correct it. The solution proved unsuccessful and an incident on the station ensued (Raj referred to this as the "zero-gravity human-waste distribution system"). The end of the episode showed the ISS astronauts leaving the station for an "unscheduled" space walk.^[8] This leads to Sheldon describing his work as being a "space plumber."

Being the engineer among his physicist friends, he assumes the role of leader for small hands-on projects. He was the primary force behind "M.O.N.T.E.", a killer robot designed to enter a robot fighting competition. The robot was destroyed by Barry Kripke's own robot, the "Kripke Krippler", in an unofficial match before the start of competition.^[12]

In the season 4 premiere, Howard developed a robotic arm for the International Space Station. Realizing how much it felt like an actual arm, he used the arm to masturbate, only to get the arm stuck on his penis. He called Leonard and Raj, but neither was willing to get too "hands on" and help free him from the arm's grip. He was afraid to use the computer controlling the arm as it thought it was holding a screwdriver and would start twisting if he un-paused the program. Eventually, Leonard and Raj took Howard to the hospital, where the attending nurse went against Howard's fears and turned off the computer, freeing Howard. The episode's tag scene implied that Howard tried to use the arm to masturbate again and ended up in the same predicament. Howard likely has the most hands-on and mechanical aptitude of the four as well. It appears he has soldering and electrical/wiring abilities as shown when he built the robot fighter M.O.N.T.E.

Howard visited the International Space Station as a Payload Specialist on Expedition 31. He has the unwanted astronaut nickname "Froot Loops" (he had wanted the nickname "Rocket Man" and to that end installed the ring tone for Elton John's song "Rocket Man", but another astronaut overheard Howard's mother telling Howard that his Froot Loops were getting soggy during a NASA Skype conversation).^[13] At first NASA canceled his flight to a very relieved Howard, but then the mission was moved up causing Howard and Bernadette to move up their wedding. A very nervous Howard is launched into space. His sixth season experience is not great since his fellow astronauts play tricks on him and he starts to experience panic attacks. Upon his return to Earth, he gets an underwhelming response from his friends, and his only consolation is a free slice of cheesecake at a restaurant. He spends the remainder of the season boasting about his trip, to the irritation of everyone. Sheldon eventually sets him straight by denying being jealous of his going into space, since "Monkeys went to space."

Family

Until his marriage, Howard was noted for still living with his overbearing mother, who is selectively oblivious to his accomplishments as an adult and usually treats him like he is still a child, filling the cliché of a Jewish mother. Once, Leonard stated that Howard "was in a pretty serious relationship-with his mom." Howard is an only child. Howard's wife is Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz.

Mrs. Wolowitz (voiced by Carol Ann Susi) is not shown on-screen until the season 6 episode "The Spoiler Alert Segmentation", but her voice is heard when he is at their house or when he talks to her on the phone. She only communicates with Howard by yelling to him in an obnoxious manner, which results in awkward long-distance conversations, with Howard frustratedly yelling back at her. Her nosy nature and her barrage of questions make Howard's life tense at home, which prompts him to call her a "crazy old lady". It is revealed in "The Cohabitation Formulation", however, when Howard briefly moves in with Bernadette, that he likes being "mothered" to some extent. In "The Apology Insufficiency", Sheldon observes that Howard seems to have "an unresolved Oedipus complex".^[14]

In "The Precious Fragmentation", Howard reveals that his father left his family when Howard was 11. His mother bought him an ALF doll to help Howard try to get over it. When Howard finds a similar doll at a garage sale, he starts talking to it as if he were 11 again, asking him to find his dad and bring him home. This causes Penny (who usually avoids Howard and is disgusted by him) to be sympathetic. The trauma of his father's desertion and the lack of a father figure throughout adolescence may be the root of much of Howard's behavior. So far Howard is the only character out of the main cast who has never had a family relative appear on-screen but his family seems to be rather extensive and distributed all over the USA, as seen from the time when he briefly dated Dr. Stephanie Barnett. In "The Shiny Trinket Maneuver", it is mentioned that the birthday party where he did his magic show was his cousin's party but it is unknown who his cousin was in the group of children that were present. In "The Closet Reconfiguration" Howard gets a letter from his father which is the first contact that he gets from his father in the show.^[15]

Relationships

Howard is consistently depicted as the most sex-crazed of the guys. For example, he develops a mathematical formula for the likelihood of his having sex by applying and modifying the Drake equation to include the "Wolowitz coefficient," which he defines as "neediness times dress size squared." He states, "I'm a horny engineer... I never joke about math or sex".^[16]

Howard's techniques in approaching women are varied, including magic and card tricks.^[10][17]

Along with Leonard and Raj, Howard also attempts to date Missy, Sheldon's twin sister. His offer is not accepted, although it was clear she was waiting for Raj.^[18] Katee Sackhoff appears as herself in "The Vengeance Formulation" where she is fantasized as Howard's dream girl. She appears again in season 4, in the same role.

Since the beginning of the series, Howard shows an interest in Penny, but the interest is primarily sexual and she always turns him down. After yet another approach by Howard, Penny finally confronts him about how he treats women. This greatly affects Howard and he falls into a depression, missing work and staying home. When Penny apologizes, Howard tells her about his past relationships and Penny shows some sympathy for him; after her comforting words, Howard tries to kiss her, but she reacts by punching him in the face. With the situation resolved, Penny believes they have come to an "understanding", but Howard instead thinks he was merely "halfway to pity sex" with her.^[12]

Howard engages in a "friends with benefits" relationship with Leslie Winkle, which brings him a few benefits besides sex.^[19] However, he still becomes depressed when Leslie dumps him some time later. In order to cheer him up, Leonard and Raj take Howard to Las Vegas and manage to hire a prostitute for him.^[20]

When the guys travel by train to a symposium in San Francisco, Howard gets a chance to talk to Summer Glau (portraying herself). His clumsy attempts at impressing the actress fail, despite his being in a confined environment with her for multiple hours.^[21]

During a camping trip with Leonard and Raj, in which they all get stoned by eating cookies laced with a drug (likely marijuana), Howard reveals he lost his virginity to his second cousin Jeanie after his uncle's funeral. This fact prompts incessant teasing from Leonard and Raj.^[22]

Despite the fact that Howard is undeniably obsessed with women, some believe him to be in a homosexual relationship or bromance with Raj. The belief is proposed by Dr. Beverly Hofstadter, Leonard's mother. She says she believes them to be in an "ersatz homosexual marriage."^[23] Both Howard's and Raj's parents are aware of this; when Howard asks his mother if Bernadette can stay over, she clearly states she cannot say no when Bernadette is "willing to give the milk away free." She concludes her statement by saying "Frankly, after all your sleepovers with the little brown boy, a girl is a big relief."^[24] while Raj's mother stated "the closest thing we have to a daughter-in-law is that Jewish boy Howard!"^[25] Raj and Howard have several arguments during the series, in which Raj repeatedly accuses Howard of leaving him for everyone who is only slightly better looking, which appears Raj to be assuming the cliché female role in partnership arguments. However, Raj and Howard's relationship is mostly close. Raj often whispers comments to Howard when Penny is in the room, which allows him an avenue of communication, given Raj's chronic inability to speak to women (although he was cured from it at the end of Season 6).

In recent seasons, Howard is in a romantic relationship with Bernadette Rostenkowski (Melissa Rauch). A waitress paying her way through graduate school for microbiology studies, Bernadette is introduced to Howard by Penny. At first she and Howard do not get along, as they appear to have nothing in common. However, when they find out they both have overbearing mothers they immediately feel a connection. They are particularly pleased that it could enrage both Howard's Jewish mother and Bernadette's Catholic mother to find out their kids are dating. They also each note that they lost their virginity in Toyota vehicles. Subsequently, Howard realizes Bernadette represents a real opportunity to develop a lasting relationship and, in an impulsive manner, he proposes to her. Although Bernadette rejects his offer, they remain a couple for a time.^[26]

There is often a running gag between Leonard and Howard mocking Raj for still being single. In The Plimpton Stimulation, Howard briefly mentions that he and Bernadette broke up a couple weeks earlier, but did not mention it since he "was waiting for the right time." It is later revealed that the relationship ended because Bernadette caught Howard having cyber sex with "Glacinda the Troll" on World of Warcraft, who is later revealed to be played by a male employee of the university (Steve Patterson, "The greasy old fat guy in Facilities Management"). By the end of the episode, the two discuss their problems and restart their relationship from the beginning.^[27]

Season 4 introduces Howard's "latent homosexual tendencies" when George Takei appears as himself in an imaginary conversation with Bernadette and Katee Sackhoff over his relationship status with Bernadette and his sexual fantasies with animated characters, which is a reminder of what Leonard's mother earlier says about the ersatz marriage.

In "The Herb Garden Germination," Howard once again proposes to Bernadette, this time in front of his friends. To the horrific dismay of Raj, who had developed feelings for Bernadette, she accepts. However, during their engagement, Bernadette is awarded her Doctorate degree and reveals that she has gotten a job at a pharmaceutical company which promises a "buttload of money." Although he claims to have supported her new career, Howard's friends mock him for not having a Doctorate, with Penny calling the others doctors then remarking that Howard knows a lot of doctors. The situation reaches its breaking point when he and Bernadette have an argument after she buys him a Rolex. He interprets it as a sign that she will be the main breadwinner.^[28]

The souring of relations grow worse when he learns from Raj that, in addition to having slept with Penny, Raj also was writing love poems and fantasizing about Bernadette and him, which leads to Howard distrusting Bernadette and believing that she may cheat on him with Raj.^[29]

More recently, Howard accepts that Bernadette may be the main breadwinner in their relationship, since they've agreed that if they have kids, he will stay at home with them while she continues to work.^[30]

At his bachelor party, a drunk Raj describes Howard losing his virginity to his second cousin, his Las Vegas prostitute experience and their three-some with a pudgy Sailor Moon girl at ComicCon which Wil Wheaton uploads to the Internet. Bernadette picks them up and is furious after seeing the video and is wondering how she can marry a man that she doesn’t seem to know, though she does forgive him after he gives an beautiful apology for Penny to transfer, which sends her into tears.^[31]

Bernadette tells Howard that she wants to be married to him before he is launched into space. After an abortive attempt to be married at city hall before it closed, they agree to be married on the roof of the apartment building. Bernadette is escorted down the aisle by her father and is married by Raj, Leonard, Penny, Sheldon and Amy who all became ministers for the occasion. The ceremony is photographed by an orbiting satellite for the Google Earth website.^[32]

During season 6, the newlyweds do have some bumps including Howard readjusting to being back on earth,^[33] moving out of his mother's house,^[34] and spending too much on his collectibles hobby.^[35] but they continued to grow a steady relationship together.

See also

• List of The Big Bang Theory episodes

References