American Dad / Tropes A to E

Tropes A to E | Tropes F to J | Tropes K to O | Tropes P to T | Tropes U to Z

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• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects:
  • Roger's Mushroom Samba sequence in "In Country... Club" is rendered in 3D, also doubles as an Art Shift.
  • The HD seasons increase the use of CGI per episode, with some instances like the storm clouds in "Poltergasm" not even attempting a cel-shaded appearance.

A

• Aborted Arc:
  • Steve's budding relationship with Akiko was abruptly dropped after they officially became a couple in "Spelling Bee My Baby", with Akiko vanishing from the series afterwards and leaving Steve single once again.
  • Season 9 began a long arc of Jeff getting sent into space by Roger when a ship came to get him. We finally got to see some of Roger's people and learned that he had been in a relationship with the ships leader. While Jeff eventually made it back to Earth, Roger's species, their leader, and his home planet haven't been seen or mentioned since.
• Abusive Parents:
  • Francine and Stan have shown minor abusive tendencies, but usually in offhand/throwaway jokes. In "The Life Aquatic with Steve Smith", Francine apparently starts to favor Steve and neglect Hayley because of the former's success at water polo.
    Francine: [serving Steve breakfast] This is just a little thank-you for turning me into one of the cool jock parents. [...] I never thought I'd be part of their world because you and Hayley have always sucked at everything.
    Hayley: Hey. What's for breakfast?
    Francine: Nothin'. Beat it.
  • Akiko and Toshi's mother, Hiko, is so obsessed with ensuring her children a high-quality college education that she forces them to learn skills such as violin playing and spelling, and rarely, if ever, allows them to socialize outside of school.
  • Stan's father abandoned his family when Stan was eight years old, which traumatized Stan and all but ruined his childhood.
  • Francine's biological parents (who briefly appeared in Season 4) completely abandoned their daughter by giving her to one of the airport employees while boarding a plane, just because their flight didn't allow children on first class.
• Accidental Suicide: In "Roots", a Flashback shows young Stan hiding from a kidnapper in a tree. The kidnapper runs in, carrying a gun and a length of rope. He trips over one of the tree's roots, falling over so he lands with the gun barrel in his mouth and accidentally pulls the trigger, blasting his skull to bits.

• Actor Allusion:
  • Any time the writers can get Avery Bullock to say something Picard-esque, they will. Best highlighted by his references to "Number One" in One Little Word.
    • There are also several low-key visual gags which serve as allusions, such as Picard's distinctive fish tank showing up in Bullock's home.
    • Avery Bullock shows off a device exactly like a Star Trek holodeck. When Stan makes the obvious comparison, Avery angrily remarks that he doesn't even know what Star Trek is.
  • Klaus tries to get Stan to put him back in a human body and says he'll get a job making animal sounds. "Making animal sounds" is pretty much Dee Bradley Baker's entire job description (though Baker does human voices as well; he's even announced game shows).
  • There was an episode in which Roger disguised as Stan, but found that he's unable to mimic Stan's voice. Another episode had Stan do an equally-terrible impression of Roger. Both characters are voiced by Seth MacFarlane.
  • In one episode, Steve sings Scott Grimes' hit song, Sunset Blvd. He also says that two movies Scott Grimes was in, Critters and Critters 2: The Main Course, are crappy.
  • Snot's name is a reference to the fact his voice actor played Dudley "Booger" Dawson. His appearance also resembles a younger version of Booger.
    Steve: We nerds have a long history of making our dream girls fall for us. Like that kid in "Revenge of the Nerds," who finally won the heart of that cheerleader!
    Snot: Eh, never saw it.
  • Hector Elizondo appears as a concierge, mimicking his famous role in Pretty Woman. It's even lampshaded to all hell and back.
  • In the episode Virtual In-Stanity, Stan controls an avatar voiced by Sarah Michelle Gellar to get back into Steve's life. At the same time, a kinky-haired ginger girl, voiced by Gellar's Buffy co-star Alyson Hannigan, gains an interest in Steve.
  • In "Boring Identity", the doctor that tells Francince of Stan's amnesia looks and sounds like Archie Morris, a character that Scott Grimes played in ER. Obviously, Grimes voices him here as well.
  • In the episode "Next Of Pin", Richard Belzer cameos as a detective who drafts Steve for his mystery solving skills. Richard Belzer's most famous role is detective John Munch from Homicide: Life on the Street and later Law & Order: SVU.
• Adults Are Useless: Every adult is either incompetent, apathetic, psychotic, or all of them at once. Special mention goes to Principal Brian Lewis, who outright encourages bullying and doesn't care when the school is under attack unless it catches his interest.
• Aesop Amnesia: Stan has an inherent resistance to learning lessons, which has been lampshaded more than once, including by himself.
  • In "Phantom of the Telethon", he says "Lying is wrong! I'd know that if only I'd paid attention to anything that's ever happened to me before."
  • In "Rough Trade":
    Stan: Roger, there's something you should know about me: I don't learn lessons.
  • Cyborg Stan from the future Lampshaded to Francine that the present Stan will keep letting her down as a husband again and again.
  • At the end of "Hurricane!", Stan realizes that he failed to protect his family in a crisis after all his plans failed. Francine tells him the lesson that he should just do nothing, and that way he would be protecting his family. Stan, of course, bluntly and defiantly says that they both know he's not going to do that.
  • Every happy memory that Stan has of his father is either the result of herculean levels of self-denial or he just doesn’t have to full facts. Yet every time he comes back into his life Steve tries to get Stan to confront it. Simply because he needs to know.
  • Downplayed in the TBS era. While Francine has learned to take Stan’s mental needs into account, she regularly takes advantage of them, usually leading to disastrous results.
• The Afterafterlife: Stan's guardian angel is replaced by a new guy, who explains his old angel died, and went to Super-Heaven.
  Angel: If you believe in this sort of thing, not everyone does...
• Alien Abduction: At the end of "Naked to the Limit, One More Time", Roger shoves Jeff into the tractor beam of the ship sent to rescue him. His fate is shown in the episode "Lost in Space".
• Alien Among Us: Roger is a typical grey alien who adopts several human identities so he can live on Earth. Despite his obvious disguises, he fools everyone who interacts with him, even managing to get married on occasion.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Roger is a sociopathic alien who cares only for himself. While his species needs to "let their bitchiness out" to avoid being poisoned by it, it's implied that he is a massive Jerkass even by his people's standards.
• An Alien Named "Bob": Roger is an alien living with the Smith family. You might think that this is merely an easy way for Earthlings to reference him but several flashbacks to his time in space reveal that that is his actual name.
• Aliens Speaking English: Zig-zagged. Roger speaks English as well as any character in the show, but having been on the planet for almost 70 years since his crash in Roswell, he's better equipped to know the language than the people around him. However, other aliens, who were presumably raised on a non-Earth planet, speak English in the episode "Lost in Space". Also, during "Blagsnarst: A Love Story", Bullock attempts to communicate with an alien (named "Qurchhhh" according to IMDB) who has crashed on Earth, but appears to be surprised when the alien does indeed speak English.
  Bullock: Attention, alien creature! Do you speak English?
  Qurchhhh: Yes!
  Bullock: Really? Wow! That's weird!
• All Germans Are Nazis: There are several jokes about Klaus sympathizing with the Nazis, but it gets subverted in one episode:
  Francine: Klaus, you got the train to work!
  Klaus: [riding in a toy locomotive] Ja! It's in my blood. My grandfather was a conductor at Auschwitz. [Francine, Hayley, and Steve gasp] No, no, no! He ran the kiddie train at the zoo. [sighs] You know, it's a big town! There's other stuff there!
• All Girls Want Bad Boys:
  • One episode has Stan teach Jeff to be more assertive, causing the normally docile Jeff to take the pants in the relationship and treat Hayley more like a servant than a partner. She's more than thrilled with this breakthrough and excitedly wonders if he'll turn physically abusive.
  • The episode "The Boring Identity" features Francine using Stan's amnesia to her advantage by telling Stan that he's sensitive, a great listener, and loves to give her foot massages. Unfortunately,the plan backfires, and Stan leaves Francine because she had become the jerk in their marriage. In Francine's own words:
    Francine: This song goes out to a man who, deep down inside, is an insensitive son of a bitch. And he's the only man I ever wanted.
  • A variation with Roger in "Con Heir". When Jack Smith meets Roger, Jack orders Roger to get him a glass of Bourbon. Roger appears to be offended and mentions that Jack didn't say "please," but then he runs off with a smile. Throughout the rest of the episode, Roger begins to fall for him, and Jack's brash, impertinent attitude apparently attracted Roger initially.
• All Guys Want Cheerleaders:
  • With the exception of Debbie, Steve directs pretty much all of his attention to scoring dates with the acknowledged popular girls at his school. Most notably, Lindsey Coolidge and Lisa Silver.
  • Played with in "The American Dad After School Special". After Steve tells his family about his new girlfriend Debbie, Stan immediately assumes Steve is dating a cheerleader, and refuses to believe the truth when he is told otherwise.
• All Just a Dream:
  • Spoofed in "Haylias". Wacky hijinks and various forms of Hilarity were involved, and in the end Hayley assumes it was this trope, which the others happily allow her to believe.
  • In "Irregarding Steve", most of the family is gunned down while Klaus leads Francine to safety in an over-the-top action sequence featuring Mexican vampires and a car chase underwater. It's all Klaus's dream, of course.
  • "Vacation Goo" reveals that Stan trapped his family in dream simulations whenever they asked him to take them out on vacation.
  • "An Incident at Owl Creek" is named after the short story and later The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". It deals with Stan's shame after he accidentally defecates on his neighbour's pool, though most of the episode's events turn out to be one of the protagonist's prolonged dream fantasies.
  • Subverted in "Rapture's Delight", despite being set up in such a way that it would pretty much be the only way to undo the Rapture by the end of the episode. The actual ending is that Stan's personal Heaven is exactly identical to the real world the night before the rapture. With the exception of Klaus being dead.
  • Played with in "Merlot Down Dirty Shame". It's shown that Steve has trained himself to recognize when he's having a lucid dream by setting up a mental signal (namely, a red ball). He mentions this to Klaus, and then harshly refuses to teach him how to do it. Klaus gets his revenge by making Steve think that he's in a dream using said red ball. It ends up with Steve trying to fly out of his classroom, breaking several of his bones, and impaling the girl he has a crush on a pipe.
• All Periods Are PMS: In "1600 Candles", Stan and Francine recall Hayley's first period, in which they are cowering against the wall with Stan holding up a fork in defense, as Hayley screams, "What do you mean 'every month'?!"
• All Take and No Give: When Roger marries Stan's mother, he mentions that she's a great lover, and that "Her give-to-take ratio is 3:1 at worst.
• Alpha Bitch: The morning talk show Morning Mimosa has the hosts constantly drinking and insulting their guests, sometimes even crossing into violent territory and encouraging the audience to do the same.
• Alternate History: When Stan ruins Christmas, it starts a chain-reaction leading to Mondale handing over control of the United States to the communists.
• Alternate Timeline Ancestry: The Christmas Episode "Dreaming of a White Porsche Christmas" has Stan's wish to have Principal Lewis's bachelor life fulfilled. In the alternate reality created by the wish, Francine married Lewis instead. They have children that look like Hayley and Steve but are half-black and have curly black hair.
• American Title: Of the "Subversive" variety. The title was arguably more relevant in the early days of the show, when the over-patriotic nature of Stan was played up a lot more.
• America Saves the Day: Stan believes this, even misquoting history to make America look better. In Tearjerker, there is a subversion when he jumps in to save a British secret agent on a snowmobile shouting "Nobody needs America's help... until they need it!" And then said snowmobile crushes the British agent while he's parachuting from a cliff.
• Amusing Alien: Roger, naturally: A flamboyant Comedic Sociopath with Cloudcookoolander tendancies and a horde of disguises he uses to go out in public and cause chaos.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • The episode "The Kidney Stays in the Picture" is this for the 1990s. Stan and Francine go back to 1996 to see who Hayley's real father is. The episode takes place in 2012, and Hayley is older than 16. It also makes reference to Elian Gonzales and shows Roger trying to create MDMA which has been around since the 1970s. The characters are dressed like it's the late 1980s though.
  • In "The Best Christmas Story Never," an Alternate History shows Walter Mondale surrendering the United States to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, identified from his characteristic squarish face, Chest of Medals, and bushy eyebrows. However, Brezhnev died in 1982, two years before the 1984 election which Mondale is shown to win. Of course, the point of divergence in this timeline is the 1976 release of Taxi Driver, so that doesn't necessarily rule out the Butterfly Effect.
• Anal Probing: Roger's alien race can acquire a person's memories through probing.
• Analogy Backfire: Stan's analogy backfires on himself in the episode "Bullocks to Stan", where Bullock dates Hayley:

  Stan: [Bullock] rode me like an animal for three hours! Do you have any idea what that's like?
  Hayley: [raises eyebrows]
  Stan: And now I'm not hungry.

• And I Must Scream: Played for Laughs in "Familyland," when Roy Family reveals that, 30 years ago, he froze his body but not his mind so that he could watch over his amusement park.
  Francine: You were conscious that whole time?
  Roy: Oh yeah. It was awful.
• And This Is for...: In "Bullocks to Stan", Stan attacks his boss for dating Hayley.
  Stan: This is for treating me like a errand boy! This is for delaying my promotion! This is for disrespecting my daughter! And this is for not letting me stop at the creek for a drink!
• Animal Chick Magnet: Steve tries to score a date by getting himself a weak, elderly dog, and it works in that a girl notices him - to make fun of him.
• Animals Hate Him: Steve's luck with animals is horrible, even when he's trying to be nice to them. In one episode, Steve tries to help a stray cat on three separate occasions, and each time the cat attacks him.
• Animated Actors:
  • The episode "Bullocks to Stan" has Klaus pretending his life was a TV show and he was doing the commentary. He explains that the extra playing a chef was the same man who had played somebody else in a previous scene, because the one who had been intended to play the chef ("Jimmy Ng") had died during filming. The credits for the episode played over an animated scene of the various "actors" from the show in a behind-the-scenes moment, hugging an unseen character, with the caption "Dedicated to the memory of Jimmy Ng".
  • "Widowmaker" had the action stop and pull out to reveal a set and a crowd of people gave Roger an award for American Dad's '1000th vagina joke'.
  • "Bar Mitzvah Hustle" had Stan getting fed up with the uninteresting B story he was in and walking off the set while complaining about the writing. Earlier in the same episode, Steve fell out of a window and had to say his line while in casts.
  • At the end of "She Swill Survive," Stan and Hayley's actors are named Nicholas Vanderbilt and Kate Fagan, who inform the audience just how unrealistic the events of the episode were and that you shouldn't try this at home.
• Animated Shock Comedy: Being a Seth MacFarlane show, it's filled with Black Comedy, Comedic Sociopathy, and violence up the wazoo, with little subject matter that's considered off-limits. It is a bit more reserved than Family Guy in this regard. Just a little bit.
• The Antichrist:
  • He appeared as the main antagonist of "Rapture's Delight". It turns out that he's really the exact opposite of Jesus, looks like the Riddler from Batman Forever, has No Indoor Voice and is very eccentric.
  • He returns as Jeff's adopted son in the "Season's Beatings", only this time, he really is straight up evil. Killing him is the best way for Stan to prove his devotion to the Christian faith again after he got excommunicated. Unfortunately, Nemo ends up getting shipped off to live with Sarah Palin in Alaska.
• Anti-Interference Lock Up:
  • In "Merlot Down Dirty Shame", Roger buries Francine alive to keep her from telling Stan that he kissed her when they were both drunk. Near the end, when Roger decides to tell Stan himself, he buries him alive to keep him from attacking him.
  • In "Spelling Bee My Baby" Francine locks Akiko in the basement to ensure that Steve would win the spelling bee. She later lets her out after realizing that Steve truly loves her.
• Anti-Villain: Cyborg Stan from "May the Best Stan Win". All he wanted was to be with Francine because she had been dead for 1000 years in his time, and he is far nicer to her than the present Stan in this episode.
• Apophenia Plot: In "Rough Trade", Stan and Roger trade places, and this creates a series of incidents that make it look like Stan is an abusive monster. First, Linda comes over to find Stan has become a slovenly drunk (since it's Roger's "job") and that Francine has a black eye (Roger accidentally hit her). Later, when the cops come over to investigate the domestic abuse tipoff, they find angry monkeys in the basement (Hayley was transporting them for her Animal Wrongs Group; Roger forgot to feed them), photos of Steve in his underwear (that he had Roger take to impress a girl he likes), and Francine claiming that she got a second black eye from tripping into the door (which was 100% true).
• Apple of Discord: The Golden Turd corrupts the thoughts of anyone who sees it, turning even the most upstanding person into a greedy, homicidal maniac.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Devices that Stan procures from or uses at work to resolve plots that would be nearly impossible without it.
• Area 51: Roger was initially being detained by the government there, but came to live with the Smith family after saving Stan's life while trying to escape.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: Played with. In the episode "Stannie Get Your Gun", Stan sets up a fake robbery to force Hayley into saving the family by using a gun, so that she'd change her opinion on them.. Afterwards, Francine is offended when (she thinks) Hayley implies that the robber wouldn't have raped her.
• Armoured Closet Gay: Subverted in the episode where Terry's homophobic father, pro football player Tank Bates, comes to visit and finds out his son is gay. Stan, no longer homophobic at this point in the series, tries to find the motivation for Tank's homophobia by running through every gay trope one could find on TV, but finds that Bates subverts them all. Stan ends by claiming in front of a football stadium full of Tank's fans that Tank is a closeted homosexual. It turns out that he isn't.
• Armour-Piercing Question: In "The Most Adequate Christmas Ever", Stan holds a gun to God's head in an attempt to get him to send him back in time to save his family. God promptly calls out Stan for insisting he knows better than God himself, leaving Stan shaken and unable to offer a proper response.
  Stan: (pointing gun at God) Now send me back so I can save my family!
  God: Not gonna happen.
  Stan: You have to!
  God: Oh, okay, so you know better than me. Is that it? You're all-knowing?!
  Stan: No! Eh, I, Yes! I... I-I don't know!
  God: Exactly! You. Don't. Know. You can't know! So stop trying to control everything!
  Stan: I don't do that!
  God: Stan, you're holding a gun to God's head. I mean, I-I-I can't even think of a metaphor that's better than this.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • When Roger's life flashes before his eyes in "You Debt Your Life", he remembers three moments from his life: protesting the integration of The University of Alabama in the 1960s by knocking the books out of Vivian Malone's hands in front of her military escort, getting Joseph Hazelwood — the captain of the Exxon Valdez — drunk at the helm by making him do a beer bong, and having his Jar-Jar Binks character approved by George Lucas. He remarks afterwards that he did everything perfectly.
  • Stan says in "My Morning Straitjacket" that rock music is the number one cause of teenage pregnancy, school violence, and leather pants.
  • A short list of some horrible things Roger has done in his "Ricky Spanish" persona, as shown in interspersed flashbacks: leaving Principal Lewis in Tijuana without ID, murdering Bullock's wife with a Japanese sword for no reason, making a friend serve life in prison, kicking an old lady in the groin, setting fire to a petting zoo, taking upskirt (up-habit?) photos of a nun, defecating into a patient during surgery, literally stealing candy from a baby, and not holding the elevator for someone.
    Roger: Carol, I robbed. Eduardo, I stabbed. Tina, I taught how to kiss. Gave her some bad information, never corrected it. She's out there darting her tongue like this. [quickly flicks his own tongue in an out of his mouth repeatedly]
  • From the Crossover between this show, The Cleveland Show and Family Guy in the final scene of "Hurricane!":
    Stan: [draws a gun on Cleveland] Looter!
    Cleveland: [draws a gun on Stan] Self defense!
    Peter: [out of nowhere, draws two guns on both] A black and a white talking as if it's normal!
  • In the episode "Killer Vacation", when Francine tries to team up with Stan and take down a dangerous war criminal disguised as the resort's activities director:
    Francine: [hitting him repeatedly with a tennis racket] You're Goran the Mutilator! You've killed thousands of innocent people! And you're SCREWING UP MY VACATION!
• The Artifact: Hayley, to an extent. The show was initially envisioned as a modern-day animated version of All in the Family, with ultra-conservative Stan constantly butting heads with ultra-liberal Hayley. The Hayley/Stan conflicts are there in some later episodes, but Hayley's role on the show isn't as strong as it used to be (even though she's now married to her on-again/off-again boyfriend, Jeff, and the two are now living with the Smiths). Lampshaded by Hayley and Klaus in one episode.
  Klaus: Ha ha! I made it into the episode. PAY ME, BITCHES!
  Hayley: Ha ha! Me too!
• Artifact of Death: Roger's golden turd. Two men discover it, and one kills the other so he can keep it for himself. He then kills himself by driving his car onto railroad tracks after he finds out his wife is cheating on him. Later, a cop investigating it steals the turd and takes it home, but regrets it and decides to turn it in because he's going to retire in a week and is afraid he'll be found out. His wife then poisons him to prevent him from doing this.
• Art Evolution: The pilot episode looks remarkably crude to the rest of the first season, and the first season looks crude until "Stan of Arabia", which have a similar look to the rest of the series.
• Artist and the Band: In "American Dream Factory", Steve and his friends form a band called Steve and The Ass-Tones. His friends quit to join another band, so Steve replaces them with a family of illegal Mexican immigrants that Stan is hiding from the authorities and renames the band Steve and The Ass-Tonos.
• Art Shift:
  • The B-story of "Dungeons and Wagons" features Steve, Hayley, and Jeff playing an MMORPG. The in-game segments of this story are done in an elaborate (and very expensive) Animesque animation style.
  • The season 5 opener "In Country... Club" featured two art shifts: one for Roger's Barbra Streisand-gasm (computer animation) and the other for Steve's flashback.
  • The season 5 Christmas episode "Rapture's Delight," where the post-Apocalyptic world looks like something from "Heavy Metal" (or a 1980s fantasy action cartoon with better animation and art).
  • That song about Oliver North drawn like a Schoolhouse Rock! short.
  • Stan's hallucination song that he started singing after going crazy by eating Mad Cow jerky resulted in Disney style animals and environments.
  • The Thanksgiving episode "There Will Be Bad Blood" has one when Stan tells his own version of the story of Thanksgiving modeled after the Rankin-Bass animated Christmas specials.
  • Reginald the Koala's debut and backstory in "Family Affair" has this, combined with Technicolor Explosion, in spades.
  • In "An Apocalypse to Remember," Steve gets addicted to poisonous berries and has hallucinations at the end of the episode, resulting in a colorful distorted picture.
• Artistic License – Biology: In "The Magnificent Steven", Stan ingests beef infected with mad cow disease, which causes him to have intense hallucinations within hours of eating it, causing a Mushroom Samba and making him do and say outlandish things. After the cattle drive, he is completely back to normal after a fever, with no ill effects. In Real Life, eating beef infected with mad cow disease is a slow death sentence, as it is a prion disease, and hence completely incurable and always fatal. While it does cause massive dementia and coordination issues, they occur slowly and only get worse with time until death. Also, introducing the infected cows into the supply, as done in the show, would not lead to mass spreading to the disease, as prion infections are not contagious through the air.
• Artistic License – Geography: In "Meter Made," Stan claims that his half-brother lives on a lake in New Glarus, Wisconsin. In real life, there aren't any lakes in New Glarus.
• Artistic License – Military: Stan is a CIA operative and regularly reminds friends, neighbors, and even random people of that fact. In real life, that would be a major no-no. Real life CIA personnel aren't allowed to tell others what they do, as doing so would be a major security risk; the only people aware of what they do (besides their coworkers) is their family and even they're solely on a "need-to-know" basis. This is rectified in "Permanent Record Wrecker", where Stan loses his job at the CIA. Upon telling a man who's interviewing him, and a random man in the grocery store he later works at about his former job, both are shot in the head by a sniper who apparently follows Stan around.
  Sniper: You really gotta put a sock in it, Stan!
• Artistic License – Religion: The Lent subplot in "Finger Lenting Good" kind of skirts around the fact that Lent isn't 40 consecutive days...the Smiths could indulge in what they gave up on Sunday. In fact, the joke could've been that they're just that weak.
• Artistic License – Space: In "Black Mystery Month," Steve says that Io, "the ice moon of Jupiter," is his favorite thing in the solar system. Europa is Jupiter's famous ice moon, while Io is covered with volcanoes.
• As Himself: Travel writer Rick Steves and survivalist Bear Grylls appear as themselves in "The Bitchin' Race."
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign:
  • In "Naked to the Limit, One More Time", Roger dresses up as Carmen Miranda and offers Jeff a slice of "pishanha". This is obviously meant to be a reference to picanha, the most prized cut of meat in Brazil.
  • Roger has passed himself off for being able to speak Vietnamese, Laotian, Chinese, and Thai by spouting the same Asian-sounding gibberish every time.
• As You Know:
  • Played for Laughs when Roger explains a character's death in great detail, after his friends had just witnessed the accident.
  Roger: I can't believe the bullet completely missed Randy and hit Bad Larry who was on the other side. (Stan gives Roger a dirty look) What? Just trying to make sure we're all clear on that!
  • In "You Debt Your Life", Hayley mentions Roger's life debt to Stan. Francine says that she knows what it is, but asks Hayley to explain it anyway because she likes hearing about it.
  • In "Stan's Night Out", Stan and his CIA co-workers realize their car was stolen and sold to a powerful crime lord. They all express shock at this.
  Stan: Good, we all know who he is, so we don't have to waste any time explaining it to each other.
  Custodian: (appearing) I don't know who he is.
  Stan: Oh, well let me explain it to you.
  • In the pilot, Roger's first lines are him explaining to Stan why he's living with them. However, the way he says it sounds less like As You Know and more like guilt-tripping Stan into letting him borrow his car. However, Stan's answer is pretty As You Know. Klaus also As You Knows his own situation.
• Ascended Extra: Jeff, who for the first few seasons was a minor recurring character who was just Hayley's on-again-off-again lover. By marrying into the family he becomes a main character living in the house.
• Aspect Ratio Switch: Whenever the show switches to the story arc involving Roger's golden turd, black bars appear above and below the screen to give it a cinematic widescreen feel (this was before the show switched to HD, though the ratio switch remains in later episodes with the subplot for sake of tradition). This is played with in the final episode of the arc "300", in which the scene following Roger originally leaving the turd and communicating with his future self is animated in the 4.3 ratio of the first season before wiping back to the episode's regular 16.9 ratio the next scene.

• Asian Rudeness: Subverted with Francine's adopted parents. Although they come off as rude and standoffish, they love the family and are glad Francine married Stan because they know he will look after her.
• Asian Speekee Engrish: In "Rough Trade", Roger pretends to be Japanese and actually uses the word "aglee" in place of "agree" when selling a car to an Asian couple.
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: Thus far they've included Armageddon, with Stan and Jesus battling the Antichrist; Stan storming heaven to demand God bring him back to life; and Santa Claus swearing revenge on them all for almost killing him and attacking with an army of elves.
• A-Team Firing: A variation. In the episode "Pinata Man", Stan goes undercover during a CIA sting, disguised as a waiter. When he's found out by the bad guys, a massive shootout ensues, and Stan is caught in the crossfire. Everyone in the scene is killed, but not one bullet hits Stan, despite the fact that he was standing in the open, and the fact that the water pitcher he was holding got shot as well.
• Author Appeal: Some of the writers' come to light in the show. This is made more obvious because they've also turned up in different situations on their other show.
• Author Tract: The show was meant to be one to demonize "patriots" and conservatives, but it became much less blatant as the years went on.

• Ax-Crazy:
  • Roger is perfectly fine with murdering several men because they neglected to pay him for his services as a chauffer. He also kills an innocent flight attendant, simply because he still felt a bloodlust after his previous actions.
  • Barry, when not medicated, is a diabolical psychopath who feels great satisfaction in threatening other people's lives.
  • Subversion with Klaus. He might not pose a major threat to the rest of the family, but he threatened Steve and Roger to the point where they hid in the attic for nine months going completely insane, all because they made a practical joke on him. Most of his craziness is however rather harmless.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Reinforced in the episode "Irregarding Steve". Steve and Roger might be the smartest pair in the Smith household, and thus capable of using their intellect to manipulate those less intelligent than them, but when they try to apply their knowledge to the outside world, there is always someone smarter, more clever, and more cruel who will take advantage of their level of intelligence.

B

• Babies Make Everything Better:
  • Roger alludes to this during Finances With Wolves when he states, "It's true, the love is instantaneous and unconditional!" while holding a camcorder to video tape his baby sea monkeys in his attic with a sign in the background stating "Maternity Ward"
  • In "One Little Word", Bullock's wife who turned Muslim and hates the West turns her back on fundamentalist Islam when she discovers she has a son. This is also beautifully lampshaded by Francine.
  • In "Tearjerker", Tearjerker!Roger's plan is foiled by Stan streaming video of celebrity babies worldwide.
  • Jeff basically uses the trope name when trying to convince Hayley to adopt a kid in "Season's Beatings":
    Jeff: Sometimes, I feel broken inside, and having a baby fixes everything!
• Baby Don't Got Back: One episode has Steve distressed over having a flat ass, desperately looking for a way to make it bigger by eating donuts. In the end however, Steve decides he doesn't need to have a large ass to be attractive and abandons his plans and leaves the donut shop (although he left half a dozen people in there to die in a fire while making a call to 911 before getting distracted by his epiphany).
• Back-Alley Doctor: Francine in "Helping Handis". Her assistant is Dr. Bearington, a teddy bear. His specialty is hugs.
• Backstory: The episode "Mine Struggle" features flashbacks that serve to explain several character traits, such as why Steve feels such an emotional connection to his backyard (and why he owns the mineral rights of the yard), and also why Hayley wears a headband (Stan off-handedly claimed that her forehead was "shiny" when she was younger, and she took offense).
• Badass Boast: Klaus delivers one so great at Steve and Roger after they pranked him, it scares them into hiding...Until they remember that he's just a goldfish, so they just put a stack of books atop his bowl to stop him.
  Klaus: Allow me to impress upon you the severe mistake you have made. For years my conduct has been largely benign. And yet, without provocation, you have severed our détente and forced me to unleash upon you the vengeful flames of a thousand suns. You shall curse your mothers for the day of your birth. So, go now, go, and begin your life of fear, knowing that when you least expect it, the looming sword of Damocles will crash down upon you, cleaving you in twain and as you gaze upon the smoking wreckage that was once your life, you will regret the day you crossed the WRONG FISH!
• Bad "Bad Acting":
  • Inverted with Roger in "Vacation Goo". Normally, he is an excellent actor when donning his Paper-Thin Disguise, but when trying to apply for an actual acting job, the only thing that doesn't convince the directors is the fact that Roger cannot shed an actual tear.
  • One episode shows that Stan is such a terrible actor that he can't even pull off being a waiter properly ("It sounds like you're offering me water, but I'm just not buying it."). He asks Roger for help and ends up so good that he edges Roger out for a role in a play that he wanted really badly.
• Bad Review Threat: When Roger opens up a bed-and-breakfast in "Big Stan On Campus", in order to keep his perfect five-star rating, he and the Smiths need to perfectly service a particularly uptight guest, who subtly implies that he won't give them that rating unless they provide everything he asks of them.
• Bad Santa: The plot twist in Minstrel Krampus arrives when it turns out the seemingly benevolent Santa is in fact corrupting children while the seemingly evil Krampus is in fact punishing children so that they'll learn to behave themselves instead of sadism.
• Baffled by Own Biology: Roger has so many weird abilities that not even he knows all of them. It wasn't until Stan set him ablaze as a distraction that he learned he was fireproof (as in not harmed, he still caught aflame).
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Stan describes the movie Boys Don't Cry as the film where Hilary Swank got what she deserved... an Oscar. And brutally sodomized... in a review by Derek Simms of the Detroit Free Press.
  • Subverted in "Star Trek." After Steve receives a failing grade in English, Stan says he's going to pay his teacher a little visit, all while menacingly cracking his knuckles. It then cuts to Stan finishing a pleasant lunch with the teacher and his family. As he starts to leave, Stan takes out his gun, puts it to the teacher's head, and demands to know why he gave Steve an "F."
  • In "American Fung" when Fung Wah solves a problem just by opening a previously non-existant door and finding the solution, Klaus speaks up and it looks like he's going to point out that the door didn't exist before, but it turns out he was just speaking up to join everyone in praising Fung.
  • In "Iced, Iced Babies," Stan gets a vasectomy and begins having round-the-clock sex with Francine to satisfy her hope of getting pregnant. At one point, we see an occupied toilet on an airplane, suggesting that they are partaking in the "mile-high club," before zooming out to show Stan is actually watching the plane with binoculars from the bedroom.
• Bait-and-Switch Time Skip: In "Home Wrecker", after Stan and Francine split their house after being unable to agree on the redecoration, it looks as though a whole year has gone past. The Smith kids take turns in celebrating various holidays on each parent's side of the house, while the other parent is left alone on their side. It's revealed later that only a week had passed, where Stan and Francine had been intentionally celebrating the holidays early and cramming it in a short time span just to spite their partner.
  Francine: Oh, Stan. How have you been?
  Stan:A little exhausted celebrating all those holidays in one week just to make each other feel bad.
• Banana Republic:
  • The small island nation of Isla. When Roger starts running the place, he changes the country's name to Bananarama and decrees the entire island be painted yellow.
  • Daniel, a partner-in-crime of Roger's Ricky Spanish persona, has connections to "The Plantain Republic."
• Batman Gambit:
  • In the episode "Failure Is Not a Factory-Installed Option", after a car salesman messes with Stan's head to make him buy a car he doesn't want, Stan goes insane and starts living on the streets, depriving his family of their sole source of income (his paycheck). This forces them to shop at the same discount grocery store as the car salesman. Seeing the devastation his aggressive negotiations have caused, the salesman is shamed into giving Stan a much better deal on a car. Stan then whips off his crazy homeless guy clothes and reveals this sequence of events was all part of his master plan to get the better of the salesman. The fact that this plan led to his family nearly starving and his daughter prostituting herself for grocery money doesn't seem to concern him.
  • In a later episode, "Widowmaker", Francine wishes Stan was more open with her like her neighbor Julie did with her husband Craig, who has been missing for three weeks. After some "therapy" with Roger, Stan becomes very open with Francine, including the fact that he killed Julie's husband for being a blabber-mouth by order of the CIA (and going into graphic detail). Then Francine accidentally tells Julie and has to knock her out so the CIA doesn't decide to kill Stan for the same reason as Craig. Then it all turns out this a plan by Stan and Craig so Francine will quit bothering Stan, and so Craig can get away from having to talk to Julie by moving to a tropical island and taking a new wife.
  • In "The Scarlett Getter", Stan meets an old flame from his CIA training academy and he starts to re-develop feelings for her and ignore Francine. Francine is so irritated by this hookup, she tells Roger to put on a disguise to steal Scarlett from Stan. This works, but Stan wants to break up Roger and Scarlett and hires an alien hunter to capture Roger. Stan and the hunter arrive at the cabin where Roger and Scarlett are planning to have sex, where it turns out that Scarlett is an alien hunter herself. She knew Stan had an alien in his house before their "chance" encounter each other and used Stan to get to Roger and dissect him.
  • "Bar Mitzvah Hustle" shows what happens when one goes awry. Steve plans out a very Ocean's Eleven-esque present heist in order to discredit the guy who stole his girlfriend. Things go smoothly, as he is able to use a decoy heist in order to get his target's attention off his real goal: the money he's been receiving for his bar mitzvah (Steve is trying to cause his target to become paranoid and reveal he's just a greedy little boy for being so concerned with his presents). His plan is to use Snot as an unknowing patsy to get the money out of the party by slipping it in his coat and provoking him to leave by spilling juice on his shirt. This almost works but Snot comes back right at the critical moment and unintentionally reveals he was carrying the money. Steve even notes how his plan is almost foolproof unless that exact thing happens.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Discussed in the episode "Vision: Impossible", after Roger gains psychic powers, and his desire for the family to take him seriously come to fruition.
    Roger: Well, I wanted them to listen to me. Didn't work out so well, though, did it? No, sir. There might be a lesson to learn from this if I were the kind of guy who could learn lessons.
  • In "The Bitchin' Race," Stan and Hayley are the determined halves of their respective teams with Francine and Steve. Both wish for their partners to take the race seriously and agree to change teams. However, Stan and Hayley's drive to win leads to them misreading a clue and ending up in a Thai rebel camp.
• Bears Are Bad News:
  • A bear teams up with a shark and they attack the Smith family in "Hurricane!"
    Steve: They're working in tandem!! They're brothers in arms!!
  • In "You Debt Your Life", Stan gets his legs eaten by a polar bear at the zoo.
• Becoming the Mask:
  • Eventually, one of Roger's disguises takes on a life of its own. Roger, unaware of this, finds out he's been making withdrawals from his account, and sets out to ruin his life. And they're still the same guy, so that gets interesting.
  • Lampshaded in another episode when Stan and Roger are in trouble.
    Roger: Luckily, I know a guy who may be able to help us! Let's just pray that for once, when we get there, he doesn't turn out to be me. (cut to next scene, inside a house) Aw, crap. (camera pans over, Roger is suddenly sitting behind the desk in a completely different disguise) Can I help you?
    Stan: (glances over to the side, seeing Roger isn't there anymore.) I... had an appointment with the horse whisperer?
    Roger: Oh, yes, he'll be right with you. (cut back to Stan. Roger is there again in the same disguise from before.) Thank God I'm just his secretary. (immediate cut back to the desk. Roger is behind it in the new disguise again.) I'm an associate!
  • While parodying thief movies, Roger's shown at Snot's Bar Mitzvah in one disguise, the camera cuts to him in another disguise in a car across the street...
    Roger: Wait, how did I get here?
  • Another example:
    Stan: You're a real actor, I'm not. ... How did you get to be so good?
    Roger: I had a great teacher. (pulls out a card and hands it to Stan) You should look him up, tell him I sent you.
    Stan: "Irwin Beyer, Jr., Acting Coach". ...This-this is you, isn't it? I'm gonna get down there and it's gonna be you.
    Roger: Strong possibility.
  • Roger also has a wedding planner personality, Jeannie Gold, who has two adult sons.
  • Roger's rich alter ego Max Jets, who has been in prison for six years, is about to be released, so Roger actually sneaks into the prison to be let out.
  • Another episode takes the parody to ridiculous lengths. Francine takes a plane down to Patagonia to meet up with a master chef who will teach her how to cook better. Roger follows her along the way, spending the whole trip telling her that this master chef is just going to be him in another disguise, even outright noting how weird it must be "to find me around every corner in your life". Sure enough, they arrive, say their goodbyes, Francine turns around and Roger is immediately there in a new disguise. Then she turns back around, to see Roger in his first disguise is somehow already on the plane back home - and then she turns around again, and Roger in the new disguise is still there, albeit quickly putting the new disguise back on while panting and telling her "that's enough turning around".
  • By later seasons, Roger has so many alter-egos and disguises that when a new character shows up who isn't one of Roger's disguises, not only is the family surprised, but so is Roger.
    Hayley: Roger, I'm surprised. I thought Reynolds Jaspertarian was gonna be you.
    Roger: I gotta tell you, I did too.
  • Invoked by Klaus, with Roger becoming the mask, in the episode "Dr. Klaustus". When Roger refuses to change personas at Klaus' behest, Klaus dresses Roger up, while he's asleep, into the character of "Dr. Penguin." When Roger awakens and looks in the mirror, his tendency to become the mask is so great that he doesn't question the fact that he was an army recruit stationed in Iraq the day before.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Steve tries to use this tactic on Hayley. Needless to say it doesn't go well for him.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • According to the episode "Seizures Suit Stanny", Stan at one point used a time machine owned by the CIA to Time Travel into the past, as he had forgotten his and Francine's wedding anniversary. In doing so, he altered the timeline, creating Israel.
  • During the episode "Brains, Brains, and Autombobiles", Stan explores Roger's subconscious and views a memory of his from 1997; turns out the reason Biggie Smalls was shot and killed is because Roger was driving with Biggie as a passenger, and Roger yelled at a driver who cut them off.
  • It's revealed in "The Best Christmas Story Never Told" that Roger was the alien who crashed in Roswell.
• Befriending the Enemy: In the episode "Bully For Steve" Stan takes the role of a childhood bully in an egregious attempt to make Steve stand up for himself. An oblivious Francine suggests Steve try to make friends with his new bully. When he attempts to do so, Stan goes along with it...and then continues beating him up, scolding him for not getting the point yet ("You can't reason with a bully!").
• Behind the Black:
  • Done in "Stan's Night Out" when, upon establishing everyone knows what's happening, a janitor is revealed to have been listening just out of frame, and requires an explanation.
  • Also lampshaded in "In Country... Club" when Stan criticizes Steve's singing:
    [sudden cut to Francine]
    Francine: I thought it was great.
    [long shot reveals Francine is at the opposite end of the room]
    Stan: Have you been standing there the whole time?
    Francine: Mmhm.
    Stan: That's weird. I had no idea you were there...
• Beige Prose: In "An Incident at Owl Creek", Francine talks in short sentences at a pool party because Stan has limited her to 100 words, since she "runs her mouth at these things".
  Francine: Welcome neighborhood, Shari. [clicks counter three times] Glad not in woods anymore? [clicks counter five times]
• Berserk Button:
  • Francine went to a strict Catholic school as a child, and the nun despised left-handed people ("LEFTIES ARE THE DEVIL'S MINIONS!!!"), so she forced Francine to become right-handed and Frannie ended up developing the same attitude. By the end of the episode, Steve and Haley help get her over this.
  • In earlier seasons, just being in Barry's presence set Stan off for no apparent reason. This is even addressed by Stan.
  • Bullock has several of these, ranging from people kissing his ass to stealing his lunch.
    Bullock:Where. The Hell. Is my SANDWICH?!
  • Anytime Hayley is dumped, a rampage ensues.
  • Among the more rabid members of the fandom, calling this show a Family Guy clone (despite being made by the same guy and coming off as a warped take on The Simpsons and Wait Til Your Father Gets Home) typically gets this reaction.
• Better than Sex: In "All About Steve", Snot holds up a magazine for nerds called "Wizards and Shut-ins". A section on the cover claimed "500 reasons why Krull is better than sex!"
• Beware the Nice Ones: Francine, usually closer to Earth and more moralistic than the rest of her family, can snap in rather random and disturbing manners.
  Francine: [calmly] I don't do anything Monday nights...
  Klaus: Well, you clean my bowl on Monday nights.
  Francine: HUMANS ARE TALKING!!! [pushes Klaus' bowl off the kitchen counter and onto the floor]
• Bigger on the Inside: The Smith's backyard has been shown many times to be a standard-sized pool, a tool shed, and Steve's treehouse— three things not out of place for a standard American household to have. Roger somehow managed to turn it into a small amusement park featuring beer rides that send you through a mountain cave, a large lazy river of booze, a large Tiki idol that spouts beer, henna tattoo stands, 3 porta-potties, a crane for bungee jumping, a pyramid of beer kegs with Donkey Kong on the top, a full-sized performance stage built into the back porch, and numerous tents and chairs.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Steve invites "sexually curious home-schooled girl" Lolo Fuentes to a party he's throwing for unpopular kids. When she shows up, she shows her gratitude with a kiss so epic that they fall into, and destroy, several objects. The trope is discussed later:
  Lolo: Steve, come downstairs so we can keep making out and breaking things.
• Big Eater: Debbie Hyman and Barry.
• Big "NEVER!":
  Hayley: It's not my fault the job market sucks. I didn't vote for Bush!
  Roger: Let it go, Hayley.
  Hayley: NEVER!!!
  • In S1 Ep14, "Stannie Get Your Gun", when Bobby the Bullet is fired and told to give up his costume.
• Big "NO!":
  • Steve, usually. The voice-actor who plays him (Scott Grimes) can get a laugh with one of these alone.
  • Stan does the Skyward Scream bit in "All About Steve".
  • In "Not Particularly Desperate Housewives":
    Francine: Roger, no! [sound of a vacuum exploding] Rooooooooooogggeeeerrrr! [the sound of a timer] My rooooooaaaassssst!
• Big "SHUT UP!": Roger in "The One That Got Away" to his persona Sidney when he questioned his plan to steal a $10 pair of gloves, involving buying a $700 necklace to give to his "girlfriend" Judi.
• Big "WHY?!": Steve shouts a mournful one whenever attacked by a vindictive crow in one episode:
  Steve: Why, crow? Why?
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The Korean writing on the nail salon sign in "The People Versus Martin Sugar" is a Korean transliteration of the English "Nail Salon."
  • During "The Worst Stan", there's a sign in a Chinese restaurant that says "mother" or "parent". When does this appear? When a character reveals that they only want be married to have kids.
  • In the episode "Delorean Story-An", Roger and Francine decide to crash a French masquerade ball, and have something of a short conversation in French. Roger speaks gibberish that he tries to make sound like French, but Francine tells him (regarding Hayley) "Elle est dérangée avec nous", which is a literal translation of "She is upset with us."
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Francine in later seasons.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Played for laughs; apparently, Roger's heart is in his butt, and his genitals are in his armpit. His urine comes out of various, unspecified orifices. Also, in the episode "Buck, Wild", a doctor tells Roger "All your organs are wrong and scary to me. You might want to have that looked at." Throughout the series he has been maimed at various points, including having his entire lower half eaten by bears, which grew back by the next episode. His blood has been shown to be at least 3 different colours (red, green and purple). Additionally, Roger is very oddly proportioned. His arms are so long (and his legs so short) that he has to hold up his forearms constantly◊ to keep his hands from dragging on the floor (speaking of his hands, they're pretty big— larger than any other character's). The shape of his body has been compared to that of a pear or a bowling pin, and his pants size is 48/12. In the episode "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone and His Boy Jabari", Stan notes that Roger's "legs are shorter than his feet."
  
  Roger also has no nose (but still has a sense of smell), and has a set of orifices on the sides of his torso and head (from which he occasionally expels green protoplasm). The aforementioned head is huge and bulbous, much like the archetypal Greys, with no ears and large, almond-shaped eyes, According to the episode "Next of Pin", he is capable of moulting.
  • In one episode, Roger takes Hayley's fake ID and puts it in a pocket seemingly made of his own skin. When Hayley dives in after it, she pulls her hand out clutching what is apparently Roger's pancreas - it has a mouth with sharp teeth, and sprouts tiny legs and scuttles off. Roger complains that he will now have to spend all night "setting pancreas traps."
• Bizarre Beverage Use: Discussed in "An Irish Goodbye" when Hayley asks Francine to get her some tomato juice to neutralize the skunk spray on Jeff. Francine, however, vetoes this.
• Black Comedy: Makes use of this trope from time to time. A great example occurs throughout the episode "Four Little Words". To avoid hearing Francine tell him "I told you so," Stan frames her for murder. At one point in the third act, he uses a wood chipper to get rid of the evidence:
  Stan: [while a clearly terrified Francine is sitting on the ground in the fetal position] Trust me, honey! This is the best way! We have to destroy the body so you won't be implicated! [smiles and throws the victim's shoe into the wood chipper like he's shooting a basketball]
• Black Comedy Cannibalism: In "The Vacation Goo" the Smiths were taking a cruise ship vacation, things went wrong and they, along with Becky (a girl from the ship that Steve was attracted), to ended up stranded on a remote island where some rich guys declared that they'd hunt them. After hiding in a cave a cave-in killed Becky and trapped the Smiths there. Starving the Smiths decided to eat the body. Then they found out the hunters had paintball guns and they'd stumbled across a themed resort.
• Black Is Bigger in Bed: In one episode, Klaus's mind is put into the body of a black man, and he is shown buying condoms. He walks past the small, medium, and large sizes and grabs a garbage bag instead... then starts filling it with boxes of medium-sized condoms.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Used often, usually in offhand shots, throughout the series. Examples (with the real-life product noted in parentheses) include Klinko's (Kinko's), CostGo (CostCo), Verizin' (Verizon) Wireless, and Joe Daniel's (Jack Daniels).
  • One scene in the episode "Bahama Mama" was basically an Overly Long Gag version of this trope.
  Klaus: Steve, you're giving away all your popular, trademarked toys?
  Steve: Yup. My G.I. Joels, my Transchangers, my My Tiny Baby Horse, Warm Wheels (Hot Wheels), Lettuce Field Gang doll, my Pre-Teen Radiated Judo Bullfrogs, Giggle Me Elmer (Tickle Me Elmo), Theo Ruxberg (Teddy Ruxpin), and even my Smorfs.
  Klaus: All classics. So why are you getting rid of them?
  Steve: Well, I'm gonna be an uncle, so it's time to put away my childish things. Things such as Leegos, Malibu Barbara, Affection Bears... plus of course there's the matter of my Board Games. Slides and Stepstools (Snakes And Ladders), Connect Three (Connect Four), Starving Starving Rhinos (Hungry Hungry Hippos), Scrapple (Scrabble), Guess Whom (Guess Who), Frontgammon (Backgammon), Unincorporated Candy Township (Candyland), etc.
  • In "Stan Moves to Chicago", Stan joins the City Second improv troupe, then joins the team of Lorne Mikeys'sSketches & Laughing (a.k.a S&L), to protect the"Week in Update" host, Colin Jokes
• The Blank: In "Enter Stanman", one of the caricatures of Stan in Francine's subconscious is just him with no face. Presumably, it's her seeing Stan as a faceless drone for working at the CIA, but Stan gets confused about what he represents and guesses that he's him as Slender Man.
• Blatant Lies:
  • Stan gets a jump on this trope as early as the pilot episode. When Steve is having trouble with women, Stan tries to help him out:
    Hayley: Oh, my God... Dad, why is Hilary Duff in our house?
    Stan: Hilary is here of her own free will because she wants to have dinner with Steve.
    Steve: Hilary, could you pass the salt?
    Stan: [points gun at Hilary's head] Pass him the salt.
  • Stan spies on the neighbors in a truck with "Surveillance Pizza" on the side.
  • In the episode "The Kidney Stays in the Picture", Stan and Francine time-travel to the 1990s, and they knock on the apartment door where Roger was living at the time. He's on the other side with a large net and a comically oversized envelope addressed to Fidel Castro in Cuba:
    Roger: Elian? Is that you, baby? Come on in; you're safe here. I will not send you back to Coo-ba.
• Blonde Republican Sex Kitten: Francine, although mainly through her association with Stan. Although she's actually a brunette. She dyes her hair.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: One possible explanation for Roger's general behavior.
• Blunder-Correcting Impulse: Stan tries to give a rousing speech to the recently disbanded neighborhood watch committee, who have formed a rebel alliance against Roger after he took over the home owner's association . However, he keeps stumbling over his words until he's reduced to awkwardly repeating the word "bosom." Hayley then takes over for him out of pity.
• Bolivian Army Ending: "Escape from Pearl Bailey" ends with Steve and his friends rallying at the mob they were running away from. From what is heard, it doesn't end well.
• Bond Gun Barrel: One-off parody in "Tearjerker". Stan actually gets shot by the barrel and confesses that he always thought that it was a camera or an eyeball or something.
• Boob-Based Gag: In "Helping Handis", some CIA-supplied steroids cause Steve, and later Stan, to sprout comically large breasts. And yes, it's both hilarious and extremely Squicky.
• Book Ends:
  • The theme song begins and ends with the words "Good morning, USA."
  • "The Long March" begins and ends with Hayley working at Sub Hub, only that one of her co-workers doesn't commit suicide.
• A Boy and His X:
  • In this case, Barry and his pet calf Rosie. Later causes a massive dose of horror for Barry when Stan makes him slaughter the poor animal to prove his manhood ("A man kills what he loves before it weakens him!") The examples where Steve has pets actually count as something of an inversion - not only are they spectacular failures but they actually serve to keep him away from manhood.
  • Many of the Steve/Roger subplots can be considered "A Boy and His Alien" (Or "An Alien and His Boy"), especially "A.T. - The Abusive Terrestrial".
  • Not to mention a whole side story was devoted to Steve's relationship with a cat that was only abusive to him.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • Greg and Terry have this conversation while they're documenting Stan's hunt for Oliver North's gold.
  Terry: We are a lock for an Oscar if there isn't a documentary about penguins or genocide this year!
  Greg: Or penguin genocide.
  Greg and Terry: Oooooooooh.
  Terry: I know.
  • A visual example happens in the episode "Surro-gate", where Francine imagines what Stan's reaction will be when she tells him that she is going to be the surrogate mother for Greg and Terry's baby. In this sequence, once she tells him, Stan attacks her with an array of various weapons. Including a chainsaw, a leopard, and finally a leopard holding a chainsaw.
  • In "Dungeons and Wagons", Jeff's character chisels an epithet on the grave of Steve's character, Agathor. It reads "Here Lies Agathor: Friend, Warrior. Warrior-Friend."
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • An early episode has Francine's friend Julie lamenting over her missing husband:
    Julie: He was always there for me, whether I was laughing, crying or having an especially heavy period.
  • In "1600 Candles", Stan and Francine try to convince Steve that puberty is an experience worth going through and that he should look forward to it:
    Stan: There's stuff you don't want to miss. Your first school dance, getting your driver's license, going over to your best friend's house and finding his mother OD'ed in the tub, or however you cop your first feel.
• Breaking In Old Habits: Surprisingly inverted. Steve's hand is rendered numb, and the standard implication is that he would try to give himself a stranger. However, he is robbed of the sexual experience of getting to second base, because he can't feel anything.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: The occasional aside, usually. Except in one rare case when just over half a minute was spent pulling the animated walls away for the sake of a single gag: a mock celebration in "Widowmaker" for the show's 1000th vagina joke.
• Breakout Character: Klaus was the intended breakout character, but it was Roger and Steve that ultimately won the fanbase.
• Breast Attack:
  • A stripper accidentally gets her breasts pierced by hypodermic needles, causing her implants to deflate. As soon as that happens, her mind clears and she realizes that she should be working as a civil engineer.
  • Also happens to Francine when she and Roger attempt to spice up their mundane lives by attending a party at the French consulate.
  "Roger, that was terrible. We were the only people in period dress and your gibberish got me punched in the boob."
  • And again in a brief bit in one episode where Stan accidentally elbows Francine's boobie.
• Breast Expansion: In the episode "Tearjerker", a James Bond parody, when Stan and Sexpun (Francine) are tied, Stan remembers that Sexpun has a ring in her pocket that was given to him by "S" (Steve), whose gadgets only make womens' breasts grow. He urges her to put it on, which causes Sexpun's breasts to swell so large that they break the ropes, allowing her to set herself and Stan free.
• Brick Joke:
  • At one point, Roger expels a lot of xenoplasm on the couch, prompting Francine to flip the couch cushions. About half a season later, when Stan's father comes to visit, Stan says "Steve, I hope you scotch-guarded. We can't flip those cushions again."
  • When the family spends the night in the Arizona desert during "There Will Be Bad Blood", there's a shot of the moon. A second later, an excited cow pole-vaults over the moon and starts celebrating... before drifting off into space. At the end of the episode, the same cow plummets through the atmosphere and lands on Jeff's van, before rolling off and limping away.
  • In the first episode, Steve is elected student body president, goes crazy and declares all acts of affection to result in expulsion. The scene cuts to a science teacher telling a frog that it is too dangerous at the moment. In a later episode in season two, Francine is searching for Stan in a motel and walks in on the same teacher and frog.
  • In the episode where Roger hires Hayley as an intern, he mentions that he also hired a small child to watch cartoons for him, but that he was imaginary. At the end of the episode, when Hayley tricks Roger into releasing her from her internship, he looks over his shoulder to see the child shaking his head in disappointment. The boy picks up the TV and slowly walks away and Roger yells out "Hey, wait! That TV's real, I bought that!" as the boy and TV slowly fade away.
  • In one episode, Roger (while high off of marijuana fumes) insists on holding a large bag of cat food because he thinks he'll float away otherwise. A couple of minutes later, some policemen tell him to put his hands in the air; when he does, he drops the cat food and really does float away. Then at the end of the episode, after Stan and Jeff walk off, Roger falls back to Earth.
  • In one episode, after Stan has a near-death experience, he mentions that "epiphany isn't just a name that black people give their daughters." Later, after he's begun digging for Oliver North's gold, Greg and Terry arrive to make a documentary on it, stating that journalism is "a young black woman's game" and that they "can't compete with Epiphany Lorenz."
  • In one episode, Stan has real estate agent (and hand model) Barb Hanson sent to Guantanamo so Francine can take her job. Two inmates mention they'll "cut off her pretty hands" that night. In a later episode, we see Barb again during a game show, with a hook where her right hand used to be.
  • When the family goes on vacation, the CIA orders Stan to kill a wanted criminal who's been hiding himself as the activities director at the resort. Things go bad and the criminal gets a gun and shoots Francine. She's saved by the giant blinged-out "HOODRAT" chain she was wearing underneath. Stan once again thanks Hip Hop music.
  • In the episode "With Friends Like Steve's", Stan says that there are certain things you either know or you don't "like sexing a chicken". While this seems like a simple poultry fornication joke, a later episode has Steve winning a job in a factory because of his rare, innate ability to identify the gender of baby chicks.
  • Steve's backup dancing in various episodes after he declares it to be his dream in the third season - "Good, but doesn't draw focus."
  • In "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone And His Boy Jabari Francine", at the start of the episode Stan rants at Roger about why Roger doesn't deserve his Oscar (mostly because it's Cuba Gooding Jr.'s, who Stan deeply respects, and Roger just bought it off eBay). When Cuba Gooding Jr. is killed during the events of the episode's A-plot, Stan can somehow sense what just happened despite being nowhere near the area. And at the end of the episode he steals the Oscar back from Roger and returns it to Cuba during his funeral.
  • In "May the Best Stan Win", Stan adopts the martial arts mantra "Sweep low, Rob Lowe, Chad Lowe!" after messing up his future self's "Sweep low, block low, punch low." At the end of the episode when the two fight, Stan attacks while shouting "Chad Lowe!", and the camera cuts to show Lowe working a nearby concession stand and asking "Yes?"
  • In one episode Stan uses a grappling-hook gun a couple times throughout to escape/creep around. Near the end he swings in on-camera in a Dynamic Entry that ends with him trashing the gun, casually noting "only three shots".
  • In "The Long Bomb," Stan finds a terrorist wearing the costume of the Bazooka Sharks' mascot, and says the suit is usually worn by an Asian woman named Lee Tran. At the very end of the episode, a Bound and Gagged Asian woman hops out onto the field, and a relieved Hayley identifies her as Lee Tran.
  • In "Stan Time," Stan laments that he has never had the time to read The Hunt for Red October, falling asleep at only the second sentence. Later when he's on the CIA pills, he finishes reading the book and promptly throws it in a waste bin.
  • In "The 42-Year-Old Virgin," Ray reminisces about what he ate after his first kill. At the end of the episode, after Stan accidentally kills Bad Larry, he gives him a corn dog, saying he will never forget it.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Francine after leaving Buckle's haunted house in season 7's "Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls".
• Broken Aesop: Done deliberately and played for laughs. Often results in massive hilarity.
  • One example exists in "Lincoln Lover", which has Stan arguing gays deserve equal treatment, and any prejudice and hatred should be redirected at people such as Democrats.
  • After Steve gets quarterback star Johnny Concussion to resign football and earns the ire of the entire nation for it, he learns that people are so invested into football because the daily work grind leaves them tired and wishing for a distraction to look forward to. When he tells Stan that he feels sorry for his crushing job...
    Stan: Huh?
  • The Aesop of "Moon Over Isla Island" it that is wrong to view relationships as give and take and while solid it is explored through Stan and Roger. There are tons of examples of Roger abusing the family’s kindness in fact in both the previous and next episode he tortures them either to get something he wants or just For the Evulz. So, Stan really isn’t in the wrong for blowing Roger off here or there since as stated he mooches off of him all the time completely undercutting the Aesop.

• Broad Strokes: Several episodes hint at the series taking place in the same universe as Family Guy, as characters from both sitcoms have interacted on occasion. However, there are contradicting elements that make for continuity errors; most notably the shows' respective portrayals of Santa Claus: In Family Guy, he is the benevolent folkloric figure; while the American Dad incarnation is a recurring antagonist bent on world domination.
• Brother–Sister Incest:
  • In "Stannie Get Your Gun", Roger tricks Steve into believing he's adopted. One of the first things he does is deep kiss a very surprised and repulsed Hayley.
    Hayley: Steve, what are you doing?
    Steve: Something we've both wanted to do for years... "sis." [kisses Hayley passionately]
    ** Brought up in "Killer Vacation". After Steve goes through hell to reach a nude beach, the first thing he sees are his parents. Repulsed, his companion suggests looking at another couple: it's Hayley and Jeff. At first somewhat repulsed, he quickly takes interest.
  • The episode "Faking Bad" shows us that Steve has Hayley's number in his cell phone, and the picture◊ he has to go with it is of Hayley in the shower (clearly unhappy with the circumstances of the photo).
• Brown Note: The kid Roger introduces to Steve, Freddie, is capable of causing a person's eyeball to pop out of the socket with his scream.
• Buddy Cop Show:
  • Wheels and The Legman takes this to the extreme; they explore pretty much every common Cop show trope available:
    Steve: I’m good cop and Roger’s bad cop. I get to make the wisecracks, but Roger can be sarcastic, so long as it's not too shticky.
    Roger: I get to have the troubled past, but Steve always gets the girl.
    Steve: Unless she's a bad guy, in which case, Roger gets her, so she can betray him, leading to a gunfight on top of an opera house [...] or a theatre.
• Buffy Speak: Hayley, in "Dungeons and Wagons":
  Hayley: [to Jeff's video game character, designed in the vein of the Greek god Pan] Okay... you're the goat... man... thingy...
• Bungled Hypnotism:
  • In "Stan Knows Best", Stan reveals he hypnotized Hayley when she was younger to kill Walter Mondale when she heard the word "Rhubarb". When he says it, she doesn't respond, while Steve appears in the background carrying an assault rifle.
  • In one episode, Hayley realizes that the last time she was happy and carefree was when she was six. Roger offers to hypnotize her so that she will temporarily revert to her six-year-old self. Unfortunately, Roger gets interrupted before he can snap her out of it, making the change permanent.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Stan's idiosyncrasies aside, he's frequently portrayed as fairly competent at his job (or at least no more incompetent than anyone else).
• Buried Alive:
  • In "Bullocks to Stan", Stan tried to help Jeff toughen up to win Hayley back after she broke up with him. Part of this involved burying him in the backyard.
    Jeff: I can't breathe!
    Stan: Plenty of air out here, Jeff. I'm filling my lungs with it now.
    Jeff: Mr. Smith, please!
    Stan: Real men stay calm under pressure, Jeff. By the way, you only have five more minutes to learn that lesson. Two if you panic.
  • In "With Friends Like Steve's", Barry buries a sleeping Francine under the Smiths' yard when he turns Faux Affably Evil from not taking his medication.
  • In "Merlot Down Dirty Shame", Roger buries Francine alive because they had an Accidental Kiss and he doesn't want Stan finding out out of fear that it'll ruin their newfound friendship. Later on, he ends up burying Stan; needless to say, as soon as Stan gets out he is beyond pissed.
• Business Trip Adultery: In "My Affair Lady", Hayley gets a job at an office thanks to Roger's life coaching and meets a handsome coworker named Ax. When the entire company goes on a business retreat, Roger convinces Hayley that it would be okay to have sex with Ax because her husband Jeff is still lost in space and Ax's wife Roslyn has grown distant due to a debilitating illness. Just as she's about to go through with it, Hayley learns that Roslyn is one of Roger's personas and he arranged the whole thing to tempt Ax into having an affair, which would void their prenup agreement and allow Roger to get Ax's money in a divorce. In revenge, Hayley tells Ax that she and Roslyn have been having an affair, with Roslyn faking an illness that takes her out of town for experimental treatments as a convenient excuse for them to meet. Roger can't talk his way out of Hayley's story and concedes defeat, much to Ax's confusion.
• Busman's Holiday: Roger goes on a date with a bartender... at the same bar she works at... and makes her serve the drinks. She is visibly annoyed by it.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Stan occasionally displays this attitude involving some of his CIA duties. Both Roger and Francine also rather nonchalently fumble over past events where they have destroyed (or taken) other people's lives as something of a running gag.
• Butterfly of Doom: Stan convincing Martin Scorsese in the past to give up drugs forces Stan to jump ahead a few years and shoot Reagan to prevent the USSR from taking over the USA. Specifically the timeline of changed events is: Stan convinces Scorsese to give up drugs, meaning he never makes Taxi Driver, so John Hinkley, Jr. never becomes obsessed with Jodie Foster and never tries to assassinate Ronald Reagan to impress her. Reagan, in turn, loses his re-election to Walter Mondale due to not having the added popularity from surviving an assassination attempt. And Mondale, in turn, hands the United States over to the Soviet Union two months into his Presidency.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Klaus seems to have become increasingly pitiful as the show has progressed. The episode "Hurricane!" featured the entire family yelling "Shut up, Klaus!" in unison (unprovoked), followed by Roger punting Klaus, bowl and all, out the door, and another instance sees Francine randomly belittle Klaus by screaming "HUMANS ARE TALKING!" before pushing his bowl off the counter. However, it should be noted he is still treated with a lot more respect and dignity by the family, the writers and the fans in comparison to say, Meg Griffin.
  • Steve seems to have it almost as bad as Klaus.
  • The show itself seems to have become this as there are a number of jokes at its expense on Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. In fact, the Stephen King episode of Family Guy ends with Peter saying, "Well that's it for our show, stay tuned for whatever Fox is limpin' to the barn with..."
  • In later seasons, Dick becomes this amongst his CIA co-workers.
    Stan: You know how I've always said Bullock determines the rooming list? He doesn't. I do. I have a point system where I reward you whenever you're nice to me or say something thought-provoking, and the winner gets to room with me, and I make sure Dick never rooms with me.
• By "No", I Mean "Yes": When Roger and Stan are competing as restaurateurs, Roger tries to steal customers from Stan by wearing a sandwich board that reads "Free refills on everything, food and drink excluded".

C

• Call-Back:
  • Lots of them. An especially clever one takes place in "Rough Trade" when Stan unconsciously duplicates much of Roger's behavior from the first episode.
    Stan: ... pretty sure I asked for Pecan Sandies.
  • The plot of "Tears of a Clooney" is a call back to "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man", where we learn that Francine's "one free kill" is George Clooney. However, in the former she seems solely angry at Clooney for not getting married, while in the latter her main beef with him is that he ruined her big break into showbiz. Anger at his lack of marriage is still a factor, though - her plan is centered around getting together with him so she can break his heart, and she even outright says she's angry that he doesn't have a family who constantly depends on him at the end of the episode.
  • One episode has Stan's half-brother suddenly show up on his doorstep because of a dramatic reason, which may be a call back to Meter Made, where Stan, who is talking to his half-brother on the phone, says they'll stay estranged until his half-brother can come up with a dramatic enough reason to show up.
  • In "Roger Codger", Stan saves Roger by convincing the CIA that an elderly woman is the alien they're looking for. Five seasons later in "You Debt Your Life", Stan and Roger have to go back to Area 51, and the old woman can be seen in a tube of green goo.
    • A two-fer, as what she's in is the vacation goo from the season 3 episode of the same name.
  • In "Season's Beatings" it turns out Nemo is not only an evil child, but he's the Antichrist from "Rapture's Delight", right down to the pajamas and irritating voice.
  • Langley Falls dedicated a huge statue to "The Great Bus Crash of 2010" from the 100th episode, "100 A.D." It depicts the bus at its initial moment of impact while the people inside are screaming and flailing out of the windows.
  • In "Stan of Arabia Pt.1", Stan says that Bullock is an "Asian chubby chaser"; in "One Little Word", the girlfriend Bullock has Stan look after is an overweight Asian.
  • "Dr. Klaustus" calls back to "Francine's Flashback" (indirectly) in that it is revealed that Jeff doesn't get sexually excited by Hayley but rather by Francine.
  • In "Stan's Best Friend", Stan claims that he has never had a dog since he was a kid. Francine mentions that the family has had two dogs, from two previous episodes. Stan promptly tells her she must have been dreaming.
  • In "Failure is not a Factory-Installed Option", a car salesman manages to get in Stan's head by noting he shaves against the grain. In "The Kidney Stays In The Picture", Stan offers to donate his kidney to Hayley, asking for someone to shave his groin for the operation and noting that he likes shaving against the grain.
  • Principal Lewis's mispronunciation of "cocaine" as "kyou-caine" first comes up in "Jenny Fromdabloc", and is later referenced by Superintendent Riggs in "The Worst Stan".
  • In "The Boring Identity" a raccoon that says "remember" appears when Stan regains his memory. The same thing happened in "Francine's Flashback" when she regained her memory.
  • In "The 42-Year-Old Virgin," Roger off-handedly mentions that he fought for the Viet Cong in the 60s. He later played a Viet Cong torturer during a reenactment in "In Country...Club."
  • In "Star Trek", Francine claims that while giving birth to Steve, she "tore from [her] V to [her] A." Later, in "I am the Walrus", she uses that exact phrase during a flashback that depicts Steve's birth.
  • In "Meter Made", Hayley is posing nude for an art class which Roger attends. When she disrobes he asks the rest of the room if anyone had any extra "Areola Pink" as he doesn't think one tube would be enough. In "Finger Lenting Good" Roger insults Hayley about having breasts that are "90% nips" (and is confirmed by Jeff, so this can also be considered a Brick Joke as well, since it's clearly not just Roger being his usual jerk self).
  • In "Comb Over: A Hair Piece", when Stan decides to pick on the family's shortcomings, Steve snaps and points out his baldness, which was previously revealed in "Chimdale".
• Calling Your Attacks:
  • Stan has "Meat slap", "Groin Punch", and a lot from "May the best Stan win".
    • From "Stanny Boy and Frantastic":
      Stan: I'm so sorry... NUT PUNCH!
      Stage performer: Block! Counter nut punch! [does so]
    • From "Season's Beatings":
      Stan: [runs across screen and snatches Nemo (Hayley and Jeff's child; also the Anti-Christ) out of Hayley's arms]: Demon grab!
  • Principal Lewis has "Shoulder tap," and "Bitch slap, slappity slap."
  • Hayley uses "Punch in the face!" on Klaus towards the end of "Da Flippity Flop", as revenge for him having done the same to her earlier.
• Cannot Keep a Secret: Jeff, whether it be a surprise birthday party, a birthday present, a movie summary, Roger being an Alien. If Jeff was a Doctor, he could have his license revoked.
• Captain Obvious:
  • This one:
  Hayley: They think you're Kevin Bacon!
  Roger: Yes, Hayley, I understand things that happen around me.
  • And in another episode:
  Steve: It's the last clue!
  Stan: DUH! REALLY?! Sorry, it's been a really long night.
  • From "Toy Whorey", when the wheels from Stan's SUV have been stolen
  A guy in a car: You can't drive with no wheels.
  Stan: Thank you, genius.
• Card-Carrying Jerkass: Roger openly takes great delight in messing with others for his own enjoyment, although his antics often go well beyond "Jerkass" and well into some pretty extreme sociopathy played for laughs. He's even gone so far as to bury Francine alive and take a dump into someone's open chest cavity during a surgery.
• Cat Fight: "The Magnificent Steven" has Roger manipulates Hayley and Francine into one-upping each other until a cat-fight inevitably breaks out, all so he can film it and win a t-shirt from a website devoted to mother-daughter cat-fights.
• Category Traitor: Terry is angered that Greg is a Republican (and voted for "He who shall not be named").
• Cats Are Mean: The sub-plot of episode "Choosy Wives Choose Smith". Steve finds a cat who proceeds to torture only Steve for the rest of the episode.
  • Taken to extreme levels in "Stan's Best Friend" when the family gets a new dog. Stan is sure that he couldn't possibly be involved in another dog-related accident. This seems supported by the fact that Kisses narrowly dodges a car accident, only for Kisses to be crushed by a random hot-air balloon manned by pirate cats.
  • "Brains, Brains and Automobiles" has this with Osama Bin Laden's cat, Buffy. When Bullock finds she hates him without reason, he finds out she thinks he smells weird; after changing his body wash, however, she still avoids him:
    Bullock: [throws Buffy's bed through a nearby window, and grabs her face] YOU THINK YOU'RE BETTER THAN ME?! YOU'RE NOT BETTER THAN ME!
• Cattle Drive: Through city streets, no less. With Stan swatting at invisible owls. In his underwear.
• Caught on Tape:
  • Roger running someone over while dressed as Kevin Bacon. It's Bacon who gets arrested 20 minutes later across the country in Los Angeles.
    Bacon: I don't remember doing it, but it's clearly me on that tape!
  • Stan bullying Steve in "A Bully For Steve" (Also Principal Lewis drinking a 12-pack of beer and then urinating on the basketball court).
• Caught with Your Pants Down: The trope around which " Smith in the Hand" is based.
• Celebrity Casualty:
  • In "Stan Of Arabia, Part 1", Stan kills Jay Leno via Neck Snap while the latter is making a quip about Stan's relationship with his wife.
  • In "Lost in Space", Sinbad gets killed by aliens.
• Celebrity Paradox:
  • An interesting example occurs in "American Dream Factory" with Steve's band Steve and the Asstones. Since the songs they play ("Livin' On The Run" and "Sunset Blvd.") were minor hits written and performed by Scott Grimes who voices Steve, it is implied that in-universe, Steve wrote them and therefore they are not hits.
  • "Blood Crieth Unto Heaven" starts with Patrick Stewart himself introducing the episode- written as a theatrical play, and the only one of the 12 cocaine-fueled scripts that he found in a dead writer's New York hotel room that he didn't eat in jealousy. Written pretty much in-character as something Bullock himself would do, with him being one of the actors in the aforementioned play.
  • A more straightforward example occurs in "I Ain’t No Holodeck Boy." Bullock unveils a new room the CIA has that can holographically simulate any environment.
  Dick: Oh, so it's like the holodeck!
  Bullock: The what?
  Stan: From Star Trek.
  Bullock: Some of us spent the late 80s and early 90s getting laid, Smith.
  • In "Stan Time," Dick says he's watching every movie ever made and has gotten to the films of Martin Mull, who voices Father Donovan.
• Cerebus Retcon: Stan's personality becomes a lot less funny when you see exactly why he thinks like that later on in the show. He is so patriotic because his father lied to him for years about being a secret agent, he is so focused on appearance because he was bullied as a teenager for being a zitfaced geek (and for losing his hair in his college years), and he believes a man needs to kill what he loves because his mother tricked him into killing his pet dog. Stan’s views of the world are unique to say the least and, while we see glimpses throughout the series of his life providing him with a Freudian Excuse, “I Ain’t No Holodeck Boy” shows us just how horrific it truly was.
• Chaos of the Bells: In "For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls", a hard rock remix of "Carol of the Bells" plays as Santa Claus appears in the horizon, setting up the climactic battle between his forces and the Smiths.
• Character Catchphrase: One of the few animated shows of its kind that don't rely on these. A few phrases pop up multiple times, but they're almost always appropriate to the situation.
  • The early seasons have Avery exclaiming "Capital idea, Smith!" a few times - this is about as close as it gets.
  • Klaus does say "wunderbar" (German for "wonderful") a lot.
  • Can a sound be a catch phrase? If so, Stan's two over-the-top screams count. He has an AAAAAGH!! for pain and an OOOOOOH!! for surprise. The writers actually have names for them in the same vein as the Wilhelm Scream.
  • In one episode Stan said he once tried making a new catchphrase, but it was unpopular (except for with Klaus, at least).
    • "Nuh-uh to your uh-huh!"
  • Another episode has Francine trying to leave a mark on the world, and thus tries out catchphrases on Klaus. After coming up with "Things are getting too spicy for the pepper!", it's revealed that it was a Mexican advertising slogan for a pepper and chili company.
  • "Roger, what the HELL?!?" also seems to recur a few times, as does "Dammit, Roger!", though these aren't catchphrases so much as natural responses to how maddening Roger can be.
  • Hayley has "Oh. My. God!" She also uses the phrase "This isn't over" numerous times, when a character impedes her progress towards whatever cause she's supporting.
  • Steve sure says "Awesome!" a lot, usually with same enunciation.
  • Roger plays with this during an episode in which he sells his "dive bar" and appears in a commercial advertising it as such. His catchphrase for the commercial is "Dive on in," said with an Australian accent. It turns into a running gag, with Roger unable to keep from saying it in everyday life:
    Roger: [to Francine] Hey, look at you sittin' there on the couch, lookin' all fetching. Makes me wanna [accent] dive on in!
    Francine: Roger, you're home now. You don't have to say "Dive on in."
    Roger: Sorry. After 300 ribbon-cuttings, it's a little hard to turn off. [accent] Diveonin.
    Francine: Roger, it was one thing when you were working yourself to death for the bar you loved, but now you're just wearing yourself out promoting something that you don't even believe in!
    Roger: Francine, relax. Have a drink. [accent] Dive on in! [horn honks outside] That's my limo now. Different from the one that dropped me off. Nicer. More promiscuous driver. Oh, and Francine?
    Francine: Don't say it!
    Roger: [narrows eyes, slowly leaves and closes door behind him]
    [Francine turns around and walks towards the kitchen— Roger appears in front of her]
    Roger: [accent] Diveonin.
    
    [Roger is giving a speech]
    Audience member: Do "Dive on in"!
    Roger: No! No, I won't do [accent] "Dive on in"! ... [accent] Diveonin.
• Character Development: In the quest to devise better storylines, this has been a necessity. All of the characters have become more complex and multi-faceted as the series has gone along.
  • For example, Klaus seems to have toned down his Jerkass demeanor to an extent, having dropped his affections for Francine and gained a more friendly relationship towards Stan and Roger. He also seems to have become somewhat of a Butt-Monkey, developing a more pitiful tone as a result of the family's occasional neglect or mistreatment of him.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • Roger's people-shy ways in earlier episodes seem strange in light of the surprisingly full life he is later able to lead outside the Smith house thanks to his many disguises and alternate personas. This can actually happen between episodes. The B-plot of "Helping Handis" involves Roger going complete neat freak and attempting to make the entire house spotless. The very next episode has him quit a fraternity because he's asked to clean. At all. "Roger Codger" also shows him willing to sacrifice his life for the well being of the Smiths, in contrast to the Comedic Sociopath whose Lack of Empathy is one of his key traits. This was the start of Roger's Flanderization, being the first episode where he leaves the house without his alienbeingness being an issue.
  • Though it overlaps with Character Development more than with Roger, Stan gets this too. For example, a Season One episode has him casually go a strip club with his co-workers, emphasizing some hypocrisy in his conservative persona. A more recent episode shows him being embarrassed when his co-workers basically force him to go along and advising the strippers to get other jobs.
    • In the same episode, Stan complains that Hayley is playing rap music. In later episodes it's revealed that Stan is a fan of hip-hop.
  • In the older episodes, Stan used to talk about his political views a lot, as well as blaming liberals for every problem in the world. In the recent seasons, he hardly ever does this. In fact, the whole premise of the show became The Artifact.
  • Also Stan was more of a Jerkass in earlier seasons, later seasons have him toned down to Jerk with a Heart of Gold while in the past, Stan's self-righteous and large ego would lead him to commit extreme acts of callousness. He seems to have become more aware of the effect of his actions on the family and more willing to lay down his pride to apologize. For example, a season two episode had him drive the whole family to poverty just to take a few dollars off a car payment which he admitted thought would take two years and was amazed when it ended early. The episode ends with him in his new car, bragging about how easy it was, oblivious to or uncaring about the hardships he put his family through. In a season five episode, Stan spends the mortgage on a new SUV, risking the family house and homelessness. He later overhears Francine complaining about him prioritizing a car over his family, and unlike in the former episode, Stan is reduced to tears by this realization of his selfishness showing how his character has evolved
  • In season one, Steve was an easily impressionable kid who listened and followed Stan's words to the letter, parroting his words blindly. Not so much these days.
    • Not to mention in the first episode, Steve was even more geekier and gawkier than he would be later on. In fact, looking at his initial incarnation in the un-aired test pilot suggests that he wasn't even originally planned to be a cool kid to begin with.
• Character Title: "American Dad" refers to Stan, the father.
• Chekhov's Classroom: Subverted in the episode "Stan's Night Out". Stan watches a television show about gardening, where the host says that you can start a lawnmower with the first pull, if you stand on the back wheels. Later, when he's trapped by a ruthless crime lord in a shed, he sees a lawnmower, and proposes a wager; if he can start it ten times in a row, the bad guy will let him go. So, he stands on the wheels, pulls the rope... and the lawnmower doesn't start. Stan makes it out okay, but at the end of the episode he calls the show and threatens the host on air because his advice didn't work.
• Chekhov's Gunman: In "Every Which Way But Lose", Roger's football team includes a talented Stage Magician. Later on, they're losing completely to Stan's team, causing Roger to come up with a plan that requires a magician, initially forgetting about the one currently on his team. Said magician becomes The Ace and completely saves the game for them.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • In the episode "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man", Stan mentions that Francine's one free kill is George Clooney. This becomes the plot for the finale of that season, "Tears of a Clooney"
  • In "Hot Water" the can of Spa Down is set up as if it's going to be one of these, but it's subverted when Stan doesn't get to use it.
  • In "Hurricane!" Stan makes a couple of very forced references early on to his "old college javelin", complete with getting a close-up when he says it. Sure enough, later in the episode he tries to use the javelin to save his family from a bear and shark, the key word being tries; he ends up hitting Francine with the javelin instead.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • The beginning of "With Friends Like Steve's" features Stan showing a variety of CIA maneuvers to a thoroughly bored Steve. The main purpose of the scene being to show the growing disconnect between Stan and Steve, the viewer attaches no additional importance to it, making the episode's climax even more satisfying when Steve is called upon to use practically every skill Stan demonstrated to him earlier in the episode.
  • "My Morning Straitjacket" gives us this bit from Francine (which later becomes relevant):
  Francine: Oh yeah, I used to get backstage all the time. Of course, back then you had to work for it. Not like these sissy giveaways. Oh, you're the 97th caller. Bravo! Hmph. Fit that entire phone in your mouth and you might have been able to run with my crew...
• Christmas Episode: Each one more outlandish then the last.
  • The first deals with time travel where Stan screws up history which results in Walter Mondale beating Reagan in the presidential election and turning the United States over to the Soviet Union.
  • The second takes place in the afterlife, where Stan is put on trial to determine if he's worthy of a second chance at life. He eventually takes his lawyer hostage and pulls a gun on God.
  • The third depicts the Rapture and Armageddon, where the Anti-Christ literally is everything opposite of what Jesus was, right down to saying the exact opposite of what he would say. Also, he's a piss-poor carpenter.
  • The fourth involving Steve accidentally killing Santa (under Stan's goading) and the whole family tries to bury the body in the woods. Santa gets better and declares all-out war on the family. The ensuing battle between Santa's elven army and the Smiths is nothing short of EPIC!
    • The absurdity of each Christmas story even gets lampshaded at the end.
      Jeff: Does your family always have such messed-up Christmases?
      Stan: Yeah, Jeff. And now you do, too.
  • The fifth one involves Jeff adopting the Antichrist.
  • The sixth one involves Steve getting kidnapped by The Krampus to get back at Stan's father, who sealed him away for 50 years and Stan's ensuing efforts to rescue Steve.
  • The seventh one is a It's a Wonderful Plot, in which Stan wishes to have Principal Lewis' swinging bachelor life, but soon regrets the wish when he finds out that Francine is married to Principal Lewis in an alternate reality.
  • The eighth shows that Santa is a complete maniac. He kidnaps children to use as forced labor in order to dig out a hug mine so he can summon Humbaba and become all powerful. Jack takes over Santa's palace while the Smiths leave with the surviving children and Santa crawls out of the ruins.
  • The ninth one is a loose sequel to the eighth, and it deals with Roger (upset that no one in the family will pay attention to him) befriending Snot (who's upset over not celebrating Christmas because of his religion) and converting to Judaism. Then, he finds the corpse of Santa Claus and becomes Schmanta, a Santa Claus with the power to make Hanukkah more popular than Christmas, only for the real Santa to get revived (again) and go after Roger for desicrating Christmas.
  • The tenth one follows Stan trying to break a "Groundhog Day" Loop when the tree lighting at Langley outdoor mall goes horribly wrong.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Almost any time someone is foolish enough to trust Roger, it will turn out that Roger is lying or being dishonest in some manner. It would be far easier to list the times Roger averts the trope than the times he plays it straight.
• Clark Kenting: Roger and his various disguises; ties in with Wig, Dress, Accent.
• Cleavage Window:
  • Francine ice dance dress in the episode "Of Ice and Men" has an heart-shaped opening in the chest area.
  • One of Hayley's friends outfit in "Faking Bad".
• Clock Discrepancy:
  • "The American Dad After School Special": Stan puts an Exploding Collar on his son, set to go off if he doesn't ask a girl out in 24 minutes. As he's running down the street, he remarks that his Timex watch shows he still has 5 minutes left, then immediately sees a newspaper with the headline "Timex Recalls Watches For Being Four Minutes Slow."
  • In an early episode, Stan accidentally exposes the whole family to a deadly virus, and they are diagnosed with 24 hours to live. They decide to make the most of their time by watching the complete first season of 24. When the time is finally up, they say their goodbyes and wait for the clock to strike the new hour, as if expecting to just drop dead without question. The clock rings, but Roger tells them that clock is always a little fast. Better give it another minute. The virus was inert, so they weren't in any real danger in the first place.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Francine. Most of the time her head is in the clouds and she is incredibly vapid, but then we see her become a world-renowned oceanologist or start up a series of very successful careers (they're all short-lived), then we find out she killed her college room-mate and had a stint in prison, was a participant in an underground fight ring, and had a long history of adventurous sexual exploits to name a few.
  • Roger even more so. In fact, the entire Smith family (and to an extent the American Dad! universe) is a Cloudcuckooland to some degree.
  • Jeff started out as one, but has slowly grown more competent and financially stable. However, old habits die hard, and his former personality traits do occasionally betray him.
• Coax Them Out of the Closet: Played with. Terry is openly gay and Happily Married to his fellow anchorman, but his father is completely unaware of it. "Daddy Queerest" revolves around the Smiths trying to convince Terry to finally come out to his dad, though their attempts culminate in a drunken Stan blurting out the truth instead.
• Code Name: In "Francine's Flashback", Stan and Hayley have the code names "Upstanding Conservative" and "Dirty Liberal" respectively. Wonder who thought of those.
  • Another episode reveals that Hayley was brainwashed to be a sleeper agent, and if activated, Stan has 7 days to say the deactivation phrase or the agent will turn on their handler. When Stan says the activation phrase, they reveal the code name Agent Small Wonder. The plan predictably backfires, as Stan doesn't say the deactivation phrase in time in order to ensure Hayley marries the man he selected and hopefully cement a series of decisions he made for her without her consent.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Klaus' most recognizable form, a goldfish, is orange. Thus, to make it easy to remember who he is, almost any non-fish form he takes will either have red (read: orange) hair, or will be wearing something orange. Averted in "Of Ice and Men", however.
• Color Me Black: In "Old Stan of the Mountain", Stan is transformed into an elderly man when his general rudeness towards senior citizens gets him cursed by one. At the end of the episode, Stan's curse is lifted, but he becomes a black man.
• Combat Pragmatist: Francine. Technically she's a Retired Badass, and in the past she has participated in a fight club (where she pulled out the knife her opponent had stabbed her with and used it to kill her), and been in jail (where she sharpened a plastic fork into a shiv in order to kill someone). And if Stan pisses her off, she will use everything from lamps to cars to beat him up. He does not look good afterwards.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Everyone. Showing concern for someone who has been seriously injured right before one's eyes is a rarity in the American Dad! world.
• Comically Missing the Point:
  • Stan, on a number of occasions:
    • In "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man":
      Roger: Anyway, last night I ate all of your potato salad, and I tried to make more, but there was no mayo, so instead I used... well, pull my finger.
      [Francine does so, Roger sprays milk from his breasts; everyone but Stan gags]
      Stan: (beat) I don't get it, what's the secret ingredient?
    • In Lincoln Lover, after the Logcabin Republicans perform a two-minute musical piece that explains how gays don't have to be Democrats:
      Stan: [realization] My God. Where did you get this confetti?
    • In "Threat Levels", when Stan discovers gay couple Greg and Terry are the new neighbors, and Stan reveals his prejudice:
      Stan: We don't want their kind in this neighborhood.
      Francine: You're overreacting.
      Stan: Overreacting? Overreacting? Do you know what those two are? Reporters! That's right, Francine, members of the liberal media!
    • In "The Great Space Roaster":
      [power cuts out, before a warning siren sounds and emergency lights start flashing]
      Francine: [distressed] Stan, what's happening?!
      Stan: [indifferent] Not much. What's happening with you?
  • In "Finances With Wolves":
    [camera pans to stand with "AIDS HOTCAKES" sign]
    Jimmy: How come no-one is buying your hot cakes, Mr. Aids?
    Mr. Aids: Because I'm Irish, Jimmy. Because I'm Irish.
  • In "Phantom of the Telethon":
    Terrorist: When you are forbidden to drink, dance or touch yourself, your afternoons are pretty much free.
    Roger: You can't touch yourself? How do you masturbate?
    • In the same episode, a flashback reveals Roger is sabotaging Stan's telethon as he stole the idea from him:
      Roger: I WILL BE AVENGED! [leaves, then re-enters] PLEASE CALL ME WHEN DINNER IS READY!
      [flashback ends]
      Stan: Of course, it's Roger! He's trying to ruin the telethon because I didn't call him when dinner was ready!
  • In "Ricky Spanish", when Roger wants Daniel to knock Steve out:
    Roger: Now it's time to say goodnight, Steve! Daniel?
    Daniel: [beat] Oh? Goodnight, Steve.
    Roger: Daniel... [sighs] no. [nods towards Steve].
    Daniel: Oh! Where are my manners? [kisses Steve on the forehead] Goodnight, puddin'.
  • As The Ditz, Hayley's boyfriend Jeff is susceptible to this trope:
    Bullock: Jeff, we haven't been entirely forthright with you. You see, we're actually out here to hunt the most cunning prey of all.
    Jeff: An otter?
    Bullock: Bigger.
    Jeff: A dolphin? No, that's stupid. We're in the woods. ... a land dolphin?
    [beat]
    Stan: It's you! We're gonna kill YOU! [to Bullock] I'm sorry, but it was gonna take him forever.
• Comic-Book Time: In "Stan and Francine and Connie and Ted", Barry refers to the events of "With Friends Like Steve's" (which aired over a decade prior) as happening only "a few months, but what seems like years" ago.
• Companion Cube: Stan's beloved SIG P220 pistol. Stan loves his sidearm (at least as much as Jayne in Firefly), especially if he gets to use it irresponsibly. He even plays with it like it's some kind of pet in "Roger Codger", and isn't at all alarmed when it goes off.
  Stan: Ha-ha!! Made ya laugh!!
• Company Cameo: "Blagsnarst: A Love Story", the final episode to air on Fox Network before the show moved to TBS, ends with Stan reading aloud from a book labelled "American Dad! on Fox" and then putting the book on a shelf once he's finished.
• The Con: Parodied. When Bullock is finally enough of an ass that Stan assaults him and comes within a hair's breadth of shooting him, Bullock weasels out of it by claiming everything that happened in the episode was a Secret Test of Character, with all the other characters helping him pull off an elaborate charade to see if Stan would be able to stand up for himself. He's clearly pulling this out of his ass, but if it doesn't convince Stan, it at least befuddles him long enough for Bullock to make his exit.
• Confirm Before Reveal:
  • In "Every Which Way But Lose", Roger notices that Steve had one of his ears ripped off while a winning football play and asks, "Before the game, how many ears did you have?".
  • In "One Fish, Two Fish", in order to help Klaus get his U.S. citizenship , Harley decides to have a Citizenship Marriage with him while transferring her mind into a goldfish body to make it more legit. While in the same fish bowl together, Harley asks Klaus a fish question: "I was napping in the treasure chest yesterday and all of these little pellets fell out of me. Is that normal?" Klaus immediately realized that Haley unknowingly laid eggs because he was milting inside the treasure chest and opened the chest to reveal baby fishes coming out of it.
• Conspiracy Placement: "Black Mystery Month" parodies The Da Vinci Code's use of these.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Roger's Solid Gold Poop incident from the episode "Homeland Insecurity" comes up again in later episodes, eventually spinning off into its own side story.
  • In an early episode Stan makes a small offhand Suspiciously Specific Denial about brainwashing Hayley when she was 5. A few seasons later they get around to having a whole episode about this.
  • On occasion, one of the later-season Couch Gags would use one of Roger's disguises from the previously aired episode. Case in point, the Couch Gag for the episode "Jack's Back" had Roger wearing the disguise he wore during the episode "Roy Rogers McFreely".
  • A season one episode had Francine living out her dream to run a muffin kiosk at a mall. A few episodes later when she has an outburst about giving up her dreams, Stan wonders when it changed.
  • In "Love, American Dad Style", when Francine tells Stan that Roger shot Hayley, he replies: "So what? She shot me before, I've shot you a couple of times, everybody shoots everybody, it's how we communicate in this family." This is a nod to "Stannie Get Your Gun" (Hayley shoots Stan in the neck, paralyzing him, under the impression that there were blanks in the gun), "Haylias" (Hayley shoots Stan when brainwashed; he is saved by doctors), "Hurricane!" (Stan shoots Francine at the end), and "Season's Beatings" (Hayley shoots Stan to protect Nemo).
  • In "Killer Vacation", Stan says "Thanks again, hip hop!" in reference to a Noodle Incident that he mentions in "Finances With Wolves".
  • In only the second episode, Jackson off-handedly mentions that he wishes he had a vagina. Later seasons confirm that he's into transsexual women.
  • During the episode "Widowmaker", in the scenes that take place in the Smiths' basement, one of Stan's "holiday cele-bear-tions" teddy bears can be seen in the background (first introduced in "The American Dream Factory").
  • In the episode "Francine's Flashback", Stan tells Hayley a story of how, on his wedding day, he placed a single yellow flower in a white bouquet, symbolizing Francine's sunshine in his cloudy world, and he shows Hayley the flower. In "Wife Insurance", Francine looks longingly at a picture from their wedding day, in which she's holding the very same flower.
• Contraception Deception: Stan Smith is alarmed to find out his wife wants another baby. He books himself in for a vasectomy, without mentioning this to Francine, and she is utterly betrayed and angry when she finds out.
• Conveniently Timed Distraction: In season 6, "There Will Be Bad Blood", Rusty, Stan's half-brother, finds Stan and his family in the desert and threatens to shoot Stan for still being on his land. But Rusty gets startled by a mangled helicopter pilot who went out to get help and shoots him instead, allowing Stan to topple him onto the pilot's corpse and the family escapes.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: During "In Country... Club", one of Roger's methods to get Stan to cough up the Pay-Per-View code is to read the first draft of the Sex and the City movie script.
• Cooldown Hug: In "Frannie 911", Francine sings "I See The Moon" to Roger whenever he starts to freak out (which is often).
• Corrupt Politician: The season 10 continuation of the Golden Turd mini arc sees the old woman being put to death for the murder of her husband, while her son watches. The son eventually finds the golden turd, choosing to ignore his own son's pleas for help outside as he is in trouble himself. He then makes a phone call to someone who has political aspirations to make him president.
• Couch Gag:
  • A spoof topical newspaper headline. It was once even used to kick-start the episode's plot.
  • Replaced by Roger's alternating hairstyles/costumes from season four onwards.
  • Lampshaded in a Family Guy episode where Joe Swanson takes Stan's place in the first opening and the newspaper reads "Newspaper Gag Fails To Live Up To Expectations".
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
  • In "White Rice", Stan is so desperate to avoid discussing difficult issues with Francine that he hires a hypnotist mess with Francine's memories every year. Naturally she's infuriated when she finds out, and to win her back Stan tries out some of the things she mentioned (painting the kitchen, him wearing shorts). However, Francine says that all she really wanted was to actually talk about these things with him; the kitchen looks terrible and the shorts make Stan look boxy. The episode ends with her bringing up the idea of her father moving to town when he retires (which kicked off the episode); Stan agrees to discuss it, Francine says it's a terrible idea, and all is well.
  • "Poltergasm" shows us that American Dad! can take even legitimate tropes and transform it into The Unfair Sex. In a spoof of the movie Poltergeist, the Smith home is haunted by Francine's unsatisfied sexual drive, so it is up to Roger — as medium Ruby Zeldastein — to eliminate the ghost. The problem is that Francine's unsatisfied sexual drive had nothing to do with Stan, in fact Stan had spent years mastering all of Francine’s likes based on what she told him and her reactions. Literally at the last possible second Francine informed Stan that she wanted to spend more time on foreplay, something he neglected in his previous efforts to please her.
• Country Matters: In "Threat Levels", Roger is supposed to be working, but is instead talking with a friend on the phone. When Francine reminds Roger to get back to work, Roger tells the person on the phone that his boss is being a real catch you next Tuesday.
  • In the commentary for said episode, Wendy Schall (Francine's VA) was shocked that they got away with that on network TV.
  • The table read special featuring this episode on the volume one DVD of American Dad! reveals that the original line was supposed to be "See you next Tuesday" and was changed because the "see" made it painfully obvious that the word "cunt" was being spelled in code.
• Counting Bullets: Barry counts the number of bullets when the boys and Principal Lewis are taking cover from gunfire. Only he deliberately gets the principle shot by saying they're out...but they have one bullet left.
• Courteous Canadian: Exaggerated in "The Old Country", when Stan and Steve have most of their internal organs stolen while on a trip to Canada. Nearby Canadians who witness the two wasting away gladly begin removing their own organs to donate to the pair, causing Steve to remark that the number one cause of deaths in Canada is being too kind.
• Crazy-Prepared: Stan keeps a huge assortment of guns everywhere and has a panic room and an investigation room, among other things. Mainly a jab at Stan's paranoia (and therefore that of the perceived "average patriot" in a post-9/11 world) but it often comes in handy when resolving plots.
• Creepy Monotone: In "Anchorfran", Roger falls in love with a boy, Dylan, from a board game called Dream Phone. When he tracks him down and realizes not only that his name isn't actually Dylan, but that he's actually nothing like the character he portrayed for the board game, the next scene is Roger driving Steve, Hayley, and Klaus home (all of whom are visibly disturbed by whatever Roger did).
  Klaus: So, um.... what happened back there?
  Roger: [monotone] We went to the mall and had pizza, because that's what Dylan likes.
  Hayley: Why is there blood on the dream phone?
  Roger: [monotone] He likes malls and pizza. And me.
  Steve: [looks inside a brown paper bag] Roger? What's in this jar?
  Roger: [monotone] Dylan was being bad. And now we have the jar. [turns on the radio, which plays "I'm So Excited" by the Pointer Sisters]
• Crippling the Competition: In "Next of Pin", Stan shivs Steve in the ankle to prevent him from beating him in a bowling competition.
• Crossover:
  • The end of "Hurricane!" brings both Cleveland and Peter (and their flooded houses) together next to Stan and his home.
  • The end of "The Unbrave One" shows that Quagmire was the Internet doctor Dr. Vadgers.
• Crotch-Glance Sex Check: In "Pulling Double Booty", Steve and Roger get jobs at a poultry plant, inspecting chicks to determine their sexes; Steve can tell easily, while Roger struggles at his job.
  Roger: No wiener, no wedge. Just feathers and chicken skin.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Stan himself isn't necessarily the brightest or most rational bulb in the box, but he's still a highly-trained and dangerous CIA agent, and has been shown to be fully capable to take out multiple highly dangerous people at once with little effort.
  • Roger, too. For all his Cloudcookoolander tendencies, he's incredibly dangerous when he's pissed off (which is often). "Dope & Faith" has a scene where he accidentally snorts cocaine and manages to take down a squad of highly armed drug dealers while high.
  • "With Friends like Steve's" reveals that Barry is a dangerous, super-villain-esque schemer when he's off his meds.
  • Francine. For all the Dumb Blonde jokes aimed at her, she was once in a fight club, and once fought Stan's super-powered CIA robot droid by driving a huge Power Loader. And won.
• Crowded-Cast Shot: The episode "Phantom of the Telethon" shows numerous characters (both recurring and otherwise) in the crowd of a CIA telethon. Included are Ma Ma and Bah Bah (Francine's adoptive parents), Officer Turlington, Clifford (the knight who protects Stan's lair in "Of Ice and Men"), Chuck and Christie White, the three founding members of the Ladybugs, Betty Sue (the homecoming queen from "It's Good to Be the Queen"), Bob and Linda Memari, Brett Morris (Stan's newfound best friend from the episode "Dope & Faith"), Henry Fischer (Jeff Fischer's father), Betty Smith (Stan's mother), Travis Bowe (Francine's ex-fiance), Judy Panawitz (the love interest of Sidney from the episode "The One That Got Away"), and Dill Sheppard (Hayley's ex-husband from the episode "Haylias").
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Apparently, Mary Todd Lincoln created peanut butter which her husband disregarded as one of her "lunatic concoctions for warding off evil spirits". She also predicted a man would walk on the moon, but got his name mixed up: "Army Neilstrong".
• Cursed with Awesome: Reginald being transformed into a Koala ^note "transformed" used loosely, as it was a brainswap, rather than a Forced Transformation made his life a million times better, as he has a high paying job, is a badass secret agent, and is freaking adorable. (As opposed to before where he was a skill-less homeless bum who would have probably starved to death) Klaus is the opposite, as he is almost completely immobile, being stuck inside a cramped little bowl 24/7.
• Cutaway Gag: The pilot had a few of these, though they were mostly dropped afterwards to distance the show from Family Guy. They still sneak some in here and there, though.
  Roger: Breaking bad news is part of the job, Wheels. It's a part of life. You got to do it. That's why I volunteer at the cancer ward every Sunday.
  (Cut to Roger standing outside of a hospital with a megaphone)
  Roger: You're all going to die! Your parents and your doctors are lying to you!
  (Roger is dragged away by a security guard.)

• Cut Himself Shaving: Used straight and then subverted in "Rough Trade". Roger accidentaly hits Francine and gives her a black eye; to cover, she uses the "walked into a door" excuse. Later, when the police are there investigating a domestic disturbance call (a series of coincidences having led the neighbors to believe Stan is beating Francine), Francine actually does walk into a door (after tripping on the mop) and gives herself another black eye, but the police do not believe her and arrest Stan.
  Francine: I deserved it for leaving the mop out.
• Cutting Back to Reality: In "The American Dad After School Special", Stan becomes worried that he's gaining weight and hooks up with an abusive trainer named Zack. A little later, it's revealed that Stan is actually suffering from anorexia, and a cut to reality shows him totally emaciated and talking to thin air.
• Cyborg: A cyborg version of Stan from a thousand years in the future competes with present-day Stan for Francine in "May The Best Stan Win".

D

• Dating What Daddy Hates:
  • A large part of the reason Hayley goes out with Jeff is because she knows Stan can't stand him. After having second thoughts about marrying him, she changed her mind only after finding out that her parents were offering a $50,000 to anyone who stops the marriage.
  • Hayley dates a Mexican boy just to tick off Stan, but Stan later hires him and a bunch of other Mexicans to make teddy bears for him. In revenge, Haley rats him to the police because they were illegals.
  • Stan hates fat people, and Steve starts dating Debbie, a Goth, overweight girl. It causes Stan to diet to the point of anorexia.
• A Day in the Limelight: "Lost In Space" focuses exclusively on Jeff's abduction by Roger's species, and his attempt to escape back to Earth. None of the other characters except Hayley and Roger even appear in the episode.

• Demoted to Extra:
  • Most of the supporting characters from the first few seasons fell victim to this around the time the series began phasing out its political edge (late 2008/early 2009). Notable ones like Linda Memari and Chuck White haven't spoken or had any relevance since Season 4.
  • Longtime supporting characters Greg Corbin and Terry Bates fell victim to this in Season 11 due to Mike Barker's (showrunner and the voice of Terry) departure from the series due to creative differences.
• Denser and Wackier: While the existence of Roger and Klaus gave the show a sci-fi angle from the beginning, the show's plotlines were initially relatively grounded and down-to-earth, focusing more on political satire and low-stakes family matters with some outlandish gags and subplots around the edges. Over time, the political commentary was heavily downplayed, the characters became crazier and more irrational, and the plotlines became far more surreal and over-the-top, throwing more and more sci-fi and fantasy elements (such as Time Travel, the apocalypse, and alternate universes) into the mix. All this is generally agreed to be for the better and helped to give the show its own identity.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • The "Mountaintop Spa on top of a Mountaintop" from "Tears of a Clooney".
  • Francine's "creative" simile skills in "The Scarlett Getter":
    Francine: Those two are stuck on each other like gum on a hot summer sidewalk on a summer afternoon. (beat) I'm sorry, I'm taking a creative writing class and I can't turn it off. Like a fire hydrant... gushing onto a hot summer sidewalk... my words cascading like water onto a hot summer sidewalk. A cat skitters by! Each step a relief... cooling it's paws from the hot summer sidewalk. [...] Just hearing his name makes me hot. ...like a hot summer sidewalk. An ice-cream man saunters—
    Roger: Okay.
  • In "My Affair Lady", the company Hayley gets a job with is called "Businesscorp Industries Corp Incorporated".
  • During the episode "When a Stan Loves a Woman", Hayley drinks a beverage called Cougar Boost, which, according to what Steve reads on the can, "May lead to extreme extremeness."
  • "Moon Over Isla Island" gives us two: The fictional nation known as "Isla Island," which translates to "Island Island," and its leader, Juanito Pequeno, or "Little Juan Little."
• Depending on the Writer:
  • In some episodes, Hayley is portrayed as genuinely caring and sincere in her beliefs, while in others, she's a huge hypocrite.
  • Roger can either be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who truthfully appreciates his adoptive family deep down, or a Psychopathic Manchild that literally lacks the ability to feel for anyone but himself.
  • Steve is portrayed as physically weak in some episodes, in others he is shown to beat people within an inch of their life. Additionally, some episodes portray him as a mostly sweet kid, while others make him act like an obnoxiously bratty jackass.

• Desires Prison Life: The criminals from "Man in the Moonbounce" see their prison as a "camp for adults", since they can freely roam the facility and engage in many leisure activities. They actively seek to prolong their sentences as much as possible in order to avoid having to deal with the responsibilities that come with being free men.

• Devastating Remark: In "It's Good To Be Queen", Stan and Betty Sue make their way to the prom dance.
  Stan: That's a great story about being old and alone. It's like you've been walking around dead for 20 years and no one's had the decency to cremate you and sprinkle your ashes over Old Maid Mountain.
  Betty Sue: Wow, that's quite a line.
  Stan: Well, it's actually more of an assessment of your life.
  Betty Sue: No, I mean the line to get in. What you just said was emotionally devastating.
• Did Not Get the Girl:
  • Even when Steve does succeed in charming a girl, something happens to sabotage it. "Spring Breakup" has Carmen Selectra wanting him big-time just before she's crushed by a falling scaffold; and "Big Trouble in Little Langley" has a popular girl let him grope her breast, but his hand is numb from anesthetic, so he says "I can't feel anything", she thinks he's insulting her by saying she has small breasts.
  • Steve and Toshi's sister, Akiko, hang out on Halloween night. The chemistry between them increases, and when Steve finally get's Toshi's blessing after being persistent, Akiko ditches Steve for a nine-year-old kid who appeared with no foreshadowing.
  • In "A Jones for a Smith", Steve meets a hot new girl at school who is completely horny for him, and her father is totally fine with it. Unfortunately, when the families get together for dinner, Stan is freaking out due to a crack addiction and manages to offend the father, who refuses to let Steve anywhere near the girl ever again. Steve spends the rest of the episode glaring at Stan and saying things like "I had a sure thing, old man!" and "I will hate you until the day I die."
  • Lampshaded in "The Vacation Goo". Francine is having trouble distinguishing real life from artificial fantasy sequences, and she deduces that the vacation she's on isn't real because an attractive girl likes Steve.
  • Inverted in "Spelling Bee My Baby" where he and Akiko get together at the end. However, in later episodes, it seems both of them broke the relationship.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Stan name-drops this trope in S1 Ep04, "Francine's Flashback", when Francine, suffering from Laser-Guided Amnesia, thinks she's back in college and steals Jeff away from Hayley, resulting in this exchange.
  Hayley: My mother stole my boyfriend!
  Stan: Your boyfriend stole my wife! Let's get back at them by dating each other!... Wait a minute....Daddy didn't think that one through.
  • Another example comes from Roger, in the Halloween episode. Stan flies in the most dangerous serial killers the CIA had in custody in order to make his haunted house scary, but they really don't do anything in their containers. So Roger, after already provoking the killers by tempting them with Francine, decides to let them out. Roger sadly admits that he doesn't think things through after the Smiths point out that he let loose SERIAL KILLERS.
  • Steve is in "I Ain’t No Holodeck Boy" after seeing just how horrific his dad's life truly was and realizing that the only thing keeping him sane was Herculean levels of self-denial. Steve decided it would be a good idea to break his dad of that nostalgia.
  • In the secondary plot of "My Purity Ball and Chain", Hayley, Jeff, Klaus and Roger decide to build a slide and end up in trouble when a stranger called Kyle rode down it and landed a car, killing him. They hide the body and Roger has to ride the slide to prove that it's harmless, only to horrifically get scarred from the back but the agent believes him and removes them as witnesses. Why didn't just say they built a slide but decided to destroy it when they realised it was too dangerous? Kyle broke into the yard, ignored Klaus' warnings and killed himself because of it.
  • Oh, sure, Stan. Go ahead and rest your eyes while you're still driving your car. I'm sure that won't result in you nearly going off the road, or leaving Steve leaning out the open car door so that his head winds up killing a poor innocent hare.
  • In "License to Till", Steve beats up Reshma, a younger, female exchange student to gain social status when Roger instruct him to target someone weaker. It makes him more of a loser and Roger admits he didn't think he needed to specify the victim be a boy.
• Died on Their Birthday: In the episode "Ricky Spanish", Roger, in his alter ego Ricky Spanish, aims to make right with all the people he had wronged. This involves paying a visit to Bullock's house to apologize for having killed his wife on her birthday. A Cutaway Gag depicts Roger as Ricky Spanish impaling his wife with a katana sword as she blows out the candles on her birthday cake. Bullock, however, seems to have no recollection of the incident and doesn't appear perturbed when reminded about it because he's in the middle of a wild cocaine binge.
• Diegetic Visual Effects: In "Now and Gwen", an argument between Francine and Hayley is punctuated by a lightning strike, which turns out to be Roger flicking the lights off and on while shaking a metal sheet for the sound of thunder. When Roger gets busy with his own subplot, Klaus tries to continue the gag in later scenes but always gets the timing wrong.
• Diner Brawl: Stan vs. Bullock. After an episode and possibly weeks of putting up with Bullock's selfishness and abuse, Stan snaps and beats him up in the diner they just happened to be in. Bullock only survives (Stan seemed ready to actually kill him) by claiming the whole thing was a test and giving Stan the promotion Bullock had been waving in front of him like a carrot on a stick.
• The Dinnermobile: When Roger starts working in a hot dog company, his company car is a huge hot dog.
• Disappeared Dad: The Smiths' neighbor Lisa Collins is a single mother to her two children.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: Inverted in the episode "Stannie Get Your Gun". After Stan is paralyzed from the neck down by a stray bullet fired by Hayley, he's not bitter at her at all, nor does he act like a jerk towards anyone. If anything, his demeanor becomes more pleasant overall after the accident. He plays the trope straight during one scene, using his disability to guilt-trip Hayley into being a pro-gun spokesperson with him.
• Disaster Dominoes: The entire plot of "Hurricane!" involves Stan trying to save his family and accidentally making things worse than before. His decision to seal the house as tightly as possible causes the flood roaring across Langley Falls to lift it from its foundation. In response, Stan uses Roger's wine fridge as an anchor, but the rushing waters cause the house to flip upside down. Since they're now stuck on the top story of the house, he gets the idea to open a window and flood the entire floor, so that the water will carry them to higher ground. When Hayley obeys, a shark finds its way in and severely wounds her. Stan lets a bear into the house hoping the two animals fight each other, but they instead proceed to work together to hunt down the Smiths. Stan then grabs a broken wire to electrocute them, but the shark causes him to lose his balance and burn Roger. Finally, he throws his college javelin at the bear, but misses and impales Francine through the shoulder.
• Discriminate and Switch:
  • Stan is upset when Greg and Terry move in next door. Turns out that Stan doesn't even know they're gay; he's upset because they're "members of the liberal media".
  • Steve and Hayley think Francine is racist for her aversion to Steve's black lab partner, only to find out her hatred is toward left-handed people.
• Disney Creatures of the Farce: It's obvious that when Francine sings with the bird in "In Country... Club", it's a sendup of classic Snow White and Sleeping Beauty moments. Then she drowns the bird, with a creepily apathetic look on her face.
• Disposable Vagrant: Reginald was little more than an unwanted, unloved homeless man before volunteering for a CIA experiment that switched his mind with that of a koala bear. The procedure was a success and he was hired by the CIA as an operative due to the distracting nature of his new form.
• Disproportionate Reward: In "Holy Shit, Jeff's Back!", the alien disguised as Jeff sacrifices his life so Jeff can live, and he does this because Stan and his friends taught him the value of sacrifice by sharing their frozen yogurt with him when he finished his. Stan lampshades the idea:
  Stan: Whoa, whoa. Let's slow down there. It was just a little Fro-Yo.
  Alien: No... the gestures are equal. The universe is in balance.
• Disrupting the Theater: While at the movies with Steve, Stan annoys another movie goer with his talking. This escalates into a fight, in which Stan gets beaten badly. He's saved when the usher comes to his rescue, but she then starts attacking other random movie goers.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  • In the James Bond parody, Stan can't stop looking at Francine's chest after she undergoes Breast Expansion.
  • Roger ended up finding a pair of magical shorts sewn together by an elderly, ambiguously Romani fortune-teller, and it made him attractive to "Famous Homosexual Ricky Martin". Rogers eventually tells him the truth about the pants, and Ricky confesses that the same woman made him his shirt. When he took it off, he lost his sexy body and gained a beer gut. Roger steals the shirt and runs off. While walking down the streets of Miami with both the shorts and shirt on, he's causing EVERYONE around him to be distracted, causing multi-car pile-ups, causing helicopters to crash into buildings, causing birds to fly into airplane engines, which causes the planes to crash...
  • "Family Affair": When Roger is telling off the family that left him at the gas station, the parents' son, Tyler, comes home. Roger goes to tell him off — and can't get over the fact that Tyler grew up to be cute.
  • "You Debt Your Life": Roger (who's staying at a YMCA men's locker room) cries over Stan replacing him with Andy Dick. He reaches for something to wipe his tears — and gets the end of a towel worn by the faceless man next to him. Roger immediately stops crying as he stares at the man's genitals and suggestively comments, "Good for you."
• The Ditz:
  • Jeff's most defining character trait.
  Steve: [on a home movie the whole family, including Jeff, is watching] Hi. I'm Steve Smith. I'm sitting right over there. [points to where Steve is sitting— the Steve watching the film waves]
  Jeff: [wide eyed, does a double-take from the film to Steve's seat across the room] ... what?
  • Barry has flashes of ditziness, such as seeing Snot, Steve, and Toshi passing out after eating cheeseburgers Stan had drugged. He stays conscious and tells Stan "Mine's not working" and Stan implores him to have more, which he does.
• Do Wrong, Right: In "Crotchwalkers", Francine is furious with Steve when he gets caught shoplifting; she isn't upset he was shoplifting, she's upset he got caught.
• Does Not Understand Sarcasm:
  • Stan, usually with Hayley dishing the sarcasm.
  Stan: [after he's kidnapped by members of an occupy rally while attempting an undercover sting] Why are you doing this? I thought we were coolio.
  Female member: Yeah, we know you work for the CIA. Only a narc would wear those mirrored shades.
  Stan: But my daughter told me they would make me look really cool, and — oh, I get it. She set me up. I'm stupid.
  
  Francine: I was being sarcastic! Or don't you get sarcasm, genius?
  Stan: Oh, I think I get sarcasm. And I'm hardly a genius, but still, thank you.
• Does That Sound Like Fun to You?: In S1 Ep13, "Stan of Arabia Part 2", while in Saudi Arabia, Hayley is chased by the Saudi police of vice and virtue for being in public unaccompanied by a man. She's saved by a man named Kazim, who pretends to be her brother and tells her about getting stoned. Hayley thinks he's talking about marijuana, resulting in this exchange.
  Kazim: You should be more careful around the police of vice and virtue. Do you want to get stoned?
  Hayley: Yes! Oh, my God! It's been, like, forever.
  Kazim: You would like to be buried up to your neck and have a crowd of angry men throw rocks at your head?
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • In "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man":
  Stan: Oh, I'll tell you what, Francine, why don't you just grab this broom here? I'll bend over and grab my ankles, you can lube up the handle real good and just sweep me out the door!
  • Steve's angst over not developing a "big boy butt", his stuffing the seat of his pants to compensate for the lack of shape, and popular members of the opposite sex making dumb jokes about his flat butt? Sounds like the male equivalent of A-Cup Angst doesn't it?
  • When Cyborg Stan and Francine go through a "Chocolate Tunnel of Love" in "May the Best Stan Win", Francine says "I was scared at first, but once I relaxed, I was surprised how much I liked it!"
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Invoked at the end of "She Swill Survive". After an episode that consists of Stan and Hayley getting drunk to numb themselves to pain before doing dangerous things like crashing cars and jumping from tall buildings, it ends with a PSA from their "actors" trying to warn viewers - not against crashing cars and jumping off of tall buildings, but against doing so while drunk.
• Don't Explain the Joke:
  • Roger and Stan have the following exchange in the episode "Rough Trade":
    Roger: Cops already? What are we, next door to a freakin' Krispy Kreme?
    Stan: You're thinking about doughnuts now?!
    Roger: No, I'm just sayin' the cops got here fast!
    Stan: What the hell do fast cops have to do with a Krispy Kreme?!
    Roger: Because cops love doughnuts!
    Stan: You are not making any sense!
  • In "Stanny Slickers II", after Stan discovers Oliver North's gold beneath the Smith house, he stages the event on film for posterity, but can't think of the right one-liner to use. His first try is below:
    Stan: ["discovers" treasure chest] 'Ey, you... get it? AU. That's the chemical symbol for gold.
• Donut Mess with a Cop: In "Rough Trade", Roger wonders if there's a donut shop nearby when a bunch of cops appear. Stan doesn't get it.
• Doofy Dodo: "Steve and Snot's Test-Tubular Adventure" introduces one-time character Darren, a dodo bird cloned by the CIA in who has to be constantly kept from getting itself killed. At the end he's struck by lightning and incinerated.
• Double Aesop: In "Shallow Vows", Francine stopped taking care of her appearance out of spite after learning that Stan only married her because of her looks. She insisted that Stan should love her for who she is inside. In response, Stan blinded himself so he can tolerate living with her, which initially seem to make the married couple bond stronger than before... Until Stan revealed that he can't work because he's visually impaired and therefore Francine needs to become the breadwinner instead. Ultimately, both Francine and Stan realized they are just as shallow as each other and decided not to fix what's not broken.
• Double Entendre: S3 Ep 10, "Tearjerker", a James Bond spoof, features Francine as a Bond girl spoof named Sexpun T'Come.
• Double Standard:
  • In the episode "Don't Look a Smith Horse in the Mouth" Stan bets fifty grand on a horse to keep his car, which infuriates Francine. In an earlier episode, she did the exact same thing by losing money in a street race, yet she is treated with complete sympathy, while Stan isn't.
  • When Francine's memory was erased, Stan spent the entire episode trying to win back her affection. Yet when Stan gets amnesia, Francine spent the entire episode brainwashing him to be her ideal husband.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Francine was seen beating Stan for forgetting their anniversary in "Francine's Flashback", Roger even keeps a recording of the precious moment as it appeared on "COPS: Langley Falls".
  • Bullock was shot in the kneecap by his wife for cheating on her. Hayley has shown abusive behavior towards Jeff as well, thought it's not meant to be portrayed as okay, as much as it is meant to show what a doormat Jeff is.
    • Actually, the abuse from Bullock's wife was not technically shown as okay since the joke was that Bullock really needed to go to the hospital and Francine was even telling Stan he could. Stan just decided to pick the worst time to stop being the Yes-Man.
• Double Subversion: Roger likes these.
  Roger: You're going to jail, kid. They're going to take your cherry. Jell-O. Away. In the lunch line. After you're raped. In the shower.
• Downer Ending:
  • In "Jack's Back", Steve bonds with Stan's estranged criminal father Jack, and Stan is resentful mostly because Jack never taught him how to ride a bike. But when Stan's rusty bike gets fixed up by Jack, he tries to make it to the courthouse to prove his father's innocence, only to get injured and lose consciousness, leading to Jack being hauled off to jail.
  • In "Hot Water", Stan buys a haunted hot tub that not only talks to him, but tries to keep him away from his family. Eventually, the tub's jealousy motivates it to abduct Francine and try to drown her. When Stan shows up to save her, he gets thrown out of the house and lands on solid concrete, dying from his wounds. Cut away to Cee Lo Green (the voice of the hot tub) basically saying Stan's dead, the end. Word of God states that the production staff wasn't sure if the show was going to be renewed for another season, so they planned to have "Hot Water" be the series finale.
• Dramatic TV Shut-Off: In "National Treasure 4: Baby Granny: She's Doing Well: The Hole Story", Steve, Hayley and Jeff learn that Francine fell down a well 35 years ago and watch an episode of Morning Glory about it. As old footage of the rescue plays, Francine (who is suffering from major Survivor Guilt related to the event) turns it off before they can actually see her emerging from the well.
• Draw Sword, Draw Blood: In "Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls", once Steve fails to bring back Akiko from trick or treating before sundown like he promised, Toshi dons his Samurai costume and swears that his sword will taste blood. Steve manages to talk Toshi into not killing him and to stop being so overprotective. Instead, Toshi slaughters a bunch of Serial Killers set loose during the A plotline to satisfy the oath.
  Toshi: [subtitled] Once this sword is drawn, it must taste blood.
• Dream Deception: In the "Dungeons and Wagons" episode, Stan catches Francine watching 2 Fast 2 Furious, and it's why he asks Francine if she is bored with him. Francine says Stan is having a dream so she can avoid answering his question.
• Dress-Coded for Your Convenience: In the episode "Stan Time", Stan plays a competitive game of Beet Man, an in-universe video game. His opponent is an Asian man wearing a stereotypical Chinese fisherman's hat, and Stan's beet character is wearing an American-flag bandana.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • In the episode "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone And His Boy Jabari", Steve's teacher Mr. Brink kills himself by jumping out of the window after hearing Stan's monologue of wanting to kill himself.
  • In "Da Flippity Flop", after Stan refuses to give Klaus his human body, Klaus attempts to commit suicide numerous times throughout the episode, each failing hilariously, mostly because he's a fish.
  • "Every Which Way But Lose" sees Stan, who is so accustomed to succeeding at everything he tries, attempting suicide when his youth football team loses in a major upset to Roger's team. He then does the same thing at a carnival when he fails to win one of the carny games.
• Drugs Causing Slow-Motion: In "Fight and Flight", Steve freaks out over getting his first failing grade. His friends try to help by giving him a massive dose of anxiety medication, but all this accomplishes is making him freak out incredibly slowly.
• Drunk with Power: Everyone who's in charge of making announcements over the intercom eventually gets drunk with power, including Steve... and they always forget that it's on when they go on an insulting rant.
• Duck Season, Rabbit Season: Hayley is working for Roger and trying to get him to sign a form saying she completed her internship for a class. They both end up switching into Roger's various disguises and battling each other, in-persona, until Roger dresses as Hayley and tries to say none of this matters, it was All Just a Dream. Then Hayley dresses as Roger and says she'll never sign the release, causing Roger to forge his own signature on the form.
  Roger: What just happened? Did I win?

• Dumber Than They Look: In "Killer Vacation", Steve meets a handsome boy with a British accent who promises to take him to a nude beach. Several times the duo encounter obstacles on their journey, with the kid counseling Steve to make the dumber decision while backing said decision up with nonsense. While suspicious at first, Steve goes along with the advice, inevitably winding up getting hurt. It's when his new friend attempts to use live bees to sooth Steve's cuts that Steve realizes that despite the other boy's cultured, calm voice and handsome features, he's just a lucky dumbass.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • In the episode "One Little Word":
    Bullock: What the hell happened to [my wife]?
    Stan: Well, after three years in captivity... she kind of went Shia.
    Bullock: Brainwashed?
    Stan: And conditioned! ... I'm sorry, I shouldn't be doing shtick. Your wife is crazy.
  • In "The Longest Distance Relationship" (after Stan accidentally burns down the house, hospitalizing Hayley in the process):
    Stan: Hayley, when they told you to feel the burn, I think they were talking about exercise!
    [Beat as Francine gives Stan a Death Glare]
    Stan: I shouldn't joke about this. I did this. [walks away]
• Dude, She's Like in a Coma:
  • In the episode "Escape From Pearl Bailey", before Janet receives a liposuction operation, she has this conversation with the doctor:
    Janet: Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, doc. Last week, I accidentally ate a cookie.
    Doctor: Well, any excuse to put you under and chew on your feet.
    Janet: Oh, you're funny!
    Doctor: [dryly] Yes... I'm funny...
  • Stan goes to the dentist in the episode "All About Steve", and a sign on the front of the office reads "Taking pride in not molesting unconscious patients since 1978."
• Dustbin School: In the episode "Stan-Dan Deliver" Steve is forced to join a class of deprived kids because of Roger's actions. Then Roger becomes a Cool Teacher for this class only to prove at Steve that he is not completely immoral.
• Dystopia: Steve and Snot's school prom had a Cyberpunk "Dystopian Nights" theme to it, complete with flaming barrels for warmth scattered among the dark, dingy streets. It was a scene right out of Blade Runner.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The pilot episode relied heavily on Family Guy's trademarked cutaway humor, which would be dropped very quickly. Also, Stan was much more overt in his paranoia towards Hayley, such as subjecting her to a full body pat-down when she enters the house, and Roger's "clockwork" discharge of protoplasm was rarely mentioned again.
  • Toshi's mom looked very different than she would in later seasons, in which she became a semi-regular.
  • A viewer of later seasons would never know that at the beginning, a bigger deal was made of keeping Roger secret and he wasn't allowed to leave the house, to the point that an early episode had the family bring him to a sci-fi convention as one of the few places he would have a social outlet.
  • The intro sequence was different for the first three seasons and features severe Characterization Marches On. In the original intro, Stan hugs Francine, Steve, Hayley and Roger in the kitchen, gets the newspaper in a Couch Gag that was later phased out, flips over to his car and waves goodbye to his family (with Roger staying inside the house) before driving to the CIA alone with no problems and presenting the American flag. From Season 4 onwards, Stan is noticeably skinnier when he jumps out of bed, greets Hayley, Steve and Francine in the living room (Hayley puts a peace sign on his back, Steve gives him his suitcase, and Francine removes the peace sign) before Klaus throws him his keys, the flipping and waving are removed, and Roger chimes in with the theme song during Stan's drive to the CIA (with Steve's friends and Bullock also appearing in the background while Stan drives), before Stan crashes into the CIA's flagpole and salutes the American flag.
• Easy Evangelism:
  • Played with in "Lincoln Lover". Stan is easily able to convince Steve that gays are evil, using only a few sentences, but after Stan changes his opinions of gays, Steve is now hard-wired into believing gays are evil and Stan is unable to convince him otherwise.
  • In "Red October Sky", Steve is more than willing to join the Red Menace thanks to a little goading from Sergei, but it takes a full day of capitalism complete with thousands of dollars to win him back.
• Eco-Terrorist: Hayley falls in with an environmentalist group whose leader insists that he's a "tree born in a man's body" and "wears" nothing but a potted plant. He also tries to blow up the new mall, but only succeeds in destroying Francine's muffin kiosk and Klaus' human body from the main plot. When he does this, Haley rejects him, shoving him over and breaking his pot, causing him to desperately heap dirt around his body while acting like he's suffocating.
• Embarrassing Relative Teacher: Subverted in an episode where Francine becomes the school's guidance counselor. Steve notes how awkward it will be to go to his mom for counseling, but Francine tells him she's fine with it. This causes Steve to put aside his reservations and ask her for advice.

• Epic Fail:
  • "Hurricane!" has Stan repeatedly failing to save his family in ridiculous ways and making the situation progressively worse in the process. His actions cause the house to get flooded and turned upside down, Hayley to be attacked by a shark, Roger to be electrocuted, Steve to be mauled by a bear, and Francine to be impaled by his javelin. The bear even stops and gives Stan a mocking look. It isn't until Buckle bursts into the house and shoots the shark, the bear, and Stan with tranquilizer darts that things get better, and he justifies shooting all three because he couldn't tell who was doing the most damage. The episode also ends with Stan accidentally shooting Francine during a Mexican Standoff with Peter and Cleveland, which Peter mocks him for.
  • In "Shallow Vows", Francine stops her beauty regiment just before she and Stan renew their vows. Disgusted by her real appearance, Stan tries to sneak out before Francine notices, only to make things worse by charging through seated guests, trampling the band playing music and getting a harp stuck on his foot trying to reach the car. Once in the car, he then gets the harp caught on the underside of the car and smashes through the seated guests, hitting several people.
  • In "Stanny-Boy and Frantastic", Stan and Francine befriend Tom and Cami, a couple in their 20s whose idea of fun is late-night partying, drinking, and extreme sports. When all four get together for a "nice, easy jog", it actually turns out that Tom and Cami wanted to "freerun" from the roof of a large building. They leap gracefully from one roof to the next, as does Francine. Stan, however, crashes through a window when he doesn't get enough distance on his jump, falls flat on his back when he tries to tuck and roll after jumping back down to the ground, limps around in pain for a couple seconds, awkwardly scales a fire escape, barely makes the jump from the fire escape through an open window, and finally gets his head stuck in a banister while trying to race down a flight of stairs. The whole thing ends with Stan bleeding on the floor, covered in bruises, his shirt ripped, shards of glass sticking out of his skin, his shin bone completely broken, and his bottle of sunscreen busted open from the fall.
• Epiphany Therapy: In "American Dream Factory", The Power of Rock convinces Stan that immigrants from Mexico can be just as patriotic about America as he is.
• Erotic Eating:
  • Parodied when Roger declares that he's going to teach Stan's mother to please a man, then swallows a whole banana. When he notices Francine staring, he explains that he wasn't making a point, he was just low on potassium.
  • Played for laughs in "For Whom The Sleigh Bell Tolls". Francine and Hayley start sucking on large candy canes to sharpen them and make swords. Hayley produces the weapon in a matter of seconds, much to her mother's jealousy.
• Escalating Punchline:
  • In "Stanny Tendergrass", Roger marries and kills a woman offscreen, then meets her vengeful, crossbow-wielding daughter:
    Roger: Oh, Pamela. Good. I was just looking for you. You have the same scowl your mother had. When I banged her. After I pulled the plug. (Pamela fires a bolt at him) God, I was kidding! Looks like someone pulled the plug on your sense of humor.
  • In "Stan Smith Is Keanu Reeves as Stanny Utah in Point Break":
    Stan: I'm sorry, Kai, but there are worries. There are lots of worries. For instance, I'm standing on a jellyfish. And the jellyfish has attracted wolves. And the wolves are being hunted by poachers.
    Poacher: (aiming his gun at Stan) You've seen too much!
• Eskimos Aren't Real:
  • When Stan tries searching for Oliver North's gold, Francine tells him it's just a myth, "Like unicorns or speed-reading".
  • In the episode "Ricky Spanish", Stan and Francine meet an African child whom they sponsored years prior. Stan is shocked to discover that he's real, and thus, Africa is real.
• Everything Is Racist: Subverted in the episode "Max Jets":
  Max Jets: [in a restaurant with the Smiths] I'm not a young man anymore, and I just want to spend my money on the only people in my life. You people.
  Black man: [in a separate restaurant booth, having overheard] "You people"?! Who are you calling "You people"?!
  Max: Them. [points to Smiths]
  Black man: Oh, sorry. I thought you meant the letter U, as in the "U People." I've been looking for them for a long time. They live underground, you see. That's where the "U" comes from. They're hard to find, but if you find one, it is tasty.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Two episodes climax with an ancient evil awakened by someone who wanted power:
  • "Ninety North, Zero West", Santa tries to gain the powers of Humbaba by placing special gems in the giant's eyes. The plan backfires when Humbaba is reawakened instead because his throat was slit but his head is still attached to his body.
  • In the episode "Echoes", Memphis Stormfront tricks Steve into releasing an ancient being by destroying the one structure trapping it. He assumed he would get cosmic power as a reward, but it near immediately swats him like a bug.
• Evil Is Petty: Some of Roger's actions include convincing Steve he was adopted for eating his cookie, trying to blow up the Earth just because Stan insulted him, and trying to kill the entire family when they gave him a birthday roast that he himself asked for.
• Evil Twin:
  • Inverted with Stan's CIA body double. Technically, Stan would be the evil twin, although Bill begins to reveal an evil nature of his own during his second appearance on the show.
  • In "May the Best Stan Win", Stan's future self acts as a foil to present Stan with both serving as the other's evil twin up until the climax of the episode. And the whole reason they were fighting was because present Stan didn't appreciate Francine as much as future Stan.
  • Stevearino is Steve's clone, whom Stan created in order to test out whether his or Francine's form of parenting was better. Stan's All-Work-And-No-Play parenting style turned the clone into a complete psychopath who enjoyed torturing, killing and eating stray cats.
  Stan: "Why is it that every time I help someone strengthen their core, it turns right back around to bite me!?"
• Eviler than Thou: In "Decon Stan, Jesus Man", Stan tries to do better than his rival, who presented as so conservative, he makes Stan look sane by comparison.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: In the episode "Blonde Ambition", Hayley realizes that the blonde girls receive more attention from men, so she decides to dye her hair blonde. She receives a good success, but at the end of the episode returns to her usual herself.

• Exact Words:
  • Francine makes Stan promise that he won't get Steve a gun for Christmas. He complies, but then presents his son with a machine gun, telling him "Merry Wednesday!"
  • In "Morning Mimosa", Francine and Steve get into an argument while Steve is playing a video game when he should be setting the table for dinner. Steve says "I didn't ask you to cook for me", and after things escalate, Francine throws it back in his face at dinnertime, refusing to cook anything for Steve as punishment.

• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: From the episode "A Jones For a Smith":
  Roger: You gonna share that crack you're doing, or what?
  Stan: Crack? This is cold medicine!
  Roger: No, sir, it's crack.
  Stan: It's not crack! I bought it on a park bench outside a soup kitchen from a guy in a lime-green suit... oh, my God, it's crack.

• Exposed to the Elements: A one-time character in an episode is a cheerleader in the appropriate outfit asking Steve why he stopped rummaging through her trash. Note how the rest of characters are dressed for winter but not her.
• Exposition: Lampooned often.
  • In the series' second episode (entitled "Threat Levels"), Stan and Francine meet a real estate agent after the Smiths survive exposure to a deadly, but inert, virus:
    Francine: What's going on?
    Real estate agent: Hi, Barb Hanson, Exposition Realty. Let me bring you up to speed. Your virus scare prompted these folks to put their house on the market. Any questions?
    Francine: No, that was very concise.
  • From the episode "Meter Made":
    Francine: [on the phone]...I didn't know what to do, sis! [pause] What? I've never called you 'sis' before? [pause] You're right, it is oddly clunky and expositional! I mean, I know you're my sister, so who am I saying it for? Weird. [later, in the same conversation] So, what's going on with you, sis? Are you enjoying being three years younger than me?
    Stan: [later, in the same episode, also on the phone] You should've heard Francine on the phone. She thinks she married a nobody. [pause] I appreciate you saying that, bro. [pause] I've called you "bro" before. That's what we are, we're half brothers. [pause] Well, I don't care how they say it in New Glarus, Wisconsin, where you live on a lake and have nothing in common with me. [pause] Well, then, maybe we should just stay estranged until you can find a dramatic enough reason to show up on my doorstep unannounced!
• Expy: Snot is a younger and less crude version of Dudley "Booger" Dawson from Revenge of the Nerds. He is even voiced by the same actor, Curtis Armstrong.

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