Lowbrow means appealing to simple, popular tastes rather than educated ones. Lowbrow entertainment, lowbrow humour, unashamedly lowbrow.
It is usually dismissive, though it is sometimes worn cheerfully as a badge. It pairs with highbrow, meaning intellectual, and middlebrow, which is the most insulting of the three because it accuses something of pretending. The words are useful and worth handling carefully: they describe an audience's assumed education, and the snobbery is built into them rather than added by the speaker.
1adjectivelowbrowAppealing to simple, popular tastes.
“It is lowbrow comedy and it fills the theatre every night.”
synonyms: unsophisticated, popular
lowbrow is a level of taste.
The words come from phrenology, the discredited nineteenth-century belief that skull shape revealed intelligence, in which a high forehead meant a large brain. Highbrow came first, in about 1880, and lowbrow was coined to answer it.
A bahuvrihi compound of low + brow. An Americanism whose first use appears c. 1902. Refers to the (by that time discredited) pseudoscience of phrenology, which suggested that a person of low intelligence and sophistication would possess a lower brow-line than someone of greater intelligence and sophistication.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA