The Creepiest Thing Howard Ever Did On The Big Bang Theory
Howard Wolowitz was one creepy guy.
Over the first few seasons of CBS' The Big Bang Theory, fans got to watch the lovably nerdy scientists Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), Leonard Hofstadter (Johnny Galecki), Rajesh Koothrapali (Kunal Nayyar), and Howard Wolowitz (Simon Helberg) stumble their way through a long string of awkward social encounters. While many of these incidents were comedy gold that induced laughter from viewers all across the globe, some of them were far less endearing. Many of the latter type involved Howard.
Desperate to get with women, Howard often stepped way over the line trying to get his kicks, and the lists of his unsavory interactions with the opposite sex is long. He's pretended to be goth and nearly got a tattoo just to impress a girl (almost forcing Raj too as well); slept with Penny's (Kaley Cuoco) friend in Penny's bed, then used her loofah and her bathrobe; and engaged in risqué behavior online with a troll in a video game while his then-girlfriend Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) was sitting in the next room. He's also brazenly hit on Penny numerous times, despite her repeatedly asking him to cut it out because it made her uncomfortable and she wasn't interested, and used "the internet, military satellites, and robot aircraft" to find the house the girls from America's Next Top Model were living in, all in hopes of getting lucky.
Clearly, there's plenty of pick from when it comes to Howard's worst moments as a man. But which takes the proverbial cake here? Here's the creepiest thing Howard ever did on The Big Bang Theory.
Howard Wolowitz became a creepy voyeur
It should come as little surprise that the creepiest thing Howard has ever done involves Penny, the object of his former obsession.
On the same episode where it's revealed that Howard and Bernadette broke up when she walked in on him e-romancing a troll in the online game World of Warcraft, we hear just how far Howard's obsession with Penny got at one point. Viewers watch as Howard uses a voice recording of Sheldon to knock on Penny's door, then asks Penny when she opens the door whether she would have answered if she had known it was him and not Sheldon. Penny's response is incredibly unsettling: "Not since I found out the teddy bear you gave me had a webcam in it."
It's bad enough that Howard continually hit on Penny despite her protests, but it's even worse to find out that he was spying on her in her own home — and likely her bedroom. Really not cool from Howard, and we're surprised Penny didn't give him more flack for it considering she once punched him in the nose for trying to kiss her. Howard being Howard, all he did was grin and change the subject after Penny said she knew about the webcam inside the teddy bear, clearly showing zero remorse about his creepy behavior. The moment Penny made that discovery was never actually shown to the audience on screen, but here's hoping she at the very least threw the teddy bear in the general direction of Howard's head shortly after.
Fortunately for Big Bang Theory fans, Howard got more bearable as his and Bernadette's relationship got more serious, and he became markedly less creepy as the show went on and they got married. By the end of The Big Bang Theory, he was almost unrecognizable as the creep introduced to viewers on season 1.