All sitcom dads being fat, slobbish and painfully stupid and unaware of anything to do with housework, children, or common sense but somehow they all have long-suffering yet weirdly hot wives who just roll their eyes and somehow don't file for divorce.
The Simpsons
King of Queens
George Lopez's show
According to Jim (Belushi)
Last man standing (Tim Allen)
Home improvement (Again Tim Allen)
Everybody loves Raymond
The entire premise of every one of these shows is HAHAHA DADS ARE IDIOTS HA HAHA
Any sort of "my husband/wife/spouse is lazy/a nag/useless" or from the opposite perspective "I'm lazy/a nag/useless, I'm so lucky my husband/wife/spouse is a sucker and puts up with my bumbling incompetence".
I think Married With Children has managed to come through unscathed because of Ed O'Neil and who he is as a person. He's so much the opposite of Al Bundy and has always been very open about that. The show as a result falls into that same category as South Park or All in the Family; We understand that the jokes are meant to be satire via absurdity; It's so over the top and the actor is so different in real life that we just get it.
Compare that to something like Home Improvement, where we know that the humour isn't meant to be absurdist, and we know that Tim Allen really is a douche.
I feel like the cursed inverse of this is The Orville, where they’re divorced and then drama and jokes about being divorced is half the show. It was in what I saw of season 1 anyway, it was so relentless I couldn’t stand another minute of it.
How rude they are to Jerry in Parks & Rec. Doing a rewatch of it now and wow it is way worse than I remembered, and starts way earlier. It's not a flanderisation thing, there was a season 2 joke that made me have to pause and go online just to see how many other people felt the same way as me.
I find it funny because of the sheer absurdity of it. There's absolutely no reason to dislike Jerry. He affable and unassuming, a good family man and just generally a good guy. Yet everyone inexplicably hates him, even Chris. It's makes absolutely no sense and that disconnect is what makes it funny to me.
If they hated him for a reason it would be mean spirited. Instead, it's just over the top silly and fits in with the humor of the show.
The bit where Leslie throws his painting in the lake is one of my favorite moments. It's just so exorbitantly stupid that it makes me laugh.
Personally I don't have as much of an issue with when they're poking fun at him per se, but when they denegrate or damage things he has clearly worked hard on and put a lot of passion into, that's crossing a line for me. It becomes incredibly mean-spirited.
There are two examples in this compilation video. One at the linked time, and another at 6:33. Especially with how happy he is to see Leslie in the second clip until she destroys his art. It's honestly heart-breaking. The pie to the face that came a little bit before that was also hard to watch and really felt mean. Dunno if that's because of how cold and calculated it was (vs the more usual off-the-cuff comments), or because it was a physical act rather than verbal, or something else. But I didn't like it.
It's the opposite of the Lil' Sebastian thing, where there's that horse that everyone idolizes for no discernible reason. Although with that, there's the one character who doesn't understand why they do that, so maybe that's what the Jerry thing needed? Or perhaps that would have made it even sadder lol.
Agreed. The only redeeming thing I can give the writers credit for is that they gave him an amazing family life. Even though he is the office punching bag, he is much more fulfilled outside of work than any other character is. That, and he also does love his job.
Watching Parks & Rec for the first time, and I also noticed this. IMO it's missing something, maybe if only one of the characters acted that way towards him or something it would be better. He's pretty much Meg from Family Guy, and I never really cared for that dynamic either.
I couldn't agree more. The idea seemed to have been "Hey, lets take a joke that was just luke warm at best to begin with, and then over use it in an attempt to wring every single spec of amusement out of it until our audience gets physically sick when they hear it"
It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.
If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.
Sometimes that can happen with a joke - like it's kind of mid when you first tell it, then you keep pushing it and everyone hates it, then at a certain point something breaks and it becomes the funniest thing ever for some inexplicable reason. Not saying that's what happened with with this joke necessarily, but it is possible! Old Family Guy used to do it quite well sometimes I think.
I am completely done with the "male character says something chauvanistic, female character slaps, that's the joke."
Futurama did it quite a lot, Leela hit Fry a lot, Amy hit him a few times. I done with shows that do that. I see that joke happen again I'll stop the playback right then and there and cancel whatever service I'm watching it on.
I hate how in Disney family sitcoms as well as some cartoons, there's always the stock dumb kid that gives the majority of the humor, and it's humor that gets old.
The example I think that got me to dislike the trope was in Austin and Ally. The character Desmond was eating a muffin with the muffin wrapper on, and one of the characters mentioned you "have to remove the wrapper before eating it", so he removes the wrapper and throws the muffin away and starts eating the wrapper because that's how he interpreted their advice. And I'm thinking has there ever been a teenager who didn't have some instinct on how to eat a muffin.
Here's the opposite; a joke that I love from a sitcom I hate:
"Secret elixir, huh? Well, I'm usually more of a bourbon guy, but when push comes to shove I don't know what the hell's in that either." - Charlie Harper, "Two and a Half Men"
Some of the Scrubs jokes aged badly. I can't remember any specifically, but there was some anti-gay humor and stuff like that. The show I still appreciated enough to get through a rewatch recently and still mostly enjoyed, but some of the individual jokes were hard to sit through. Wish I could remember one lol.
Same with Futurama. Kif repeatedly reacting disgusted at Zapp's more homoerotic antics or singing a pro-trans song, do not seem to sit right when watched with a modern eye.
I only remember one instance of Kif being homophobic, when Zapp says Lee Lemon is filling him with “other emotions that are weird and confusing.” Not wanting to constantly see your commanding officer naked isn’t homophobia.
And his annoyance when Zapp sang a name-swapped version of Lola was about how Zapp is acting toward Leela by doing that rather than the subject matter of the original song. Zapp even replaced the trans subject with a cis one, what could a transphobe even be objecting to?
Maeby: And the worst part is he thinks he’s passing.
Yes, her motivation was make Steve Holt not interested but fundamentally the joke is that Steve wouldn't be attracted to trans woman, which is what happens. Which honestly makes the whole joke worse.
And even if you don't care about that, Maeby's motivation doesn't matter because she still uses transphobia as a way to harass Lindsey behind her back.
I honestly find the whole thing so upsetting and not even remotely funny.
Whether it’s visual gags, exaggerated takes, fourth-wall gags, deconstructed gags, pop culture references, or even forced bait-and-switch gags.
The blue cat boy himself is insufferable and his family and friends and all the other characters and how they’re all written are just as unlikable to me…it’s like Family Guy mixed with South Park but marketed towards a children’s network.