Bobs Burgers / Tropes A to K

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#-D

• 555: The number of Bob's cab in "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?".
  • When Tina scribes down her phone number in "Lindapendent Woman", it begins with 555.
• Abandoned Warehouse: "The Belchies" takes place in an abandoned candy factory that's set up for demolition. The children venture inside to find a supposed lost treasure from the previous owner, a la The Goonies.
• Absurd Phobia: "It Snakes a Village" reveals Tina has a fear of feathers.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The factory in "The Belchies" has a sewer that's so massive the Belchers spend an entire night just trying to get out of it. Justified, as the tunnels weren't originally made to be sewers; they were used to smuggle alcohol during Prohibition and were simply repurposed after their original use became obsolete.
  Gene: I just cannot stop banging things down here! The acoustics are GREAT!
• Abusive Parents: Bob and Linda seem to be just about the only notable aversion in the series. Jimmy Pesto has all but disowned his children and completely neglects them, Linda and Gayle's mother Gloria takes advantage of the former and shows distaste for the life the latter leads, and Bob's father Big Bob (Bob Sr.) is a Control Freak who kept his son working all the time and prevented him from truly enjoying his childhood. While Big Bob has shown remorse for his actions and is making an active effort to make amends with Bob, Gloria and Jimmy truly have no excuse.
  • Much like the Bumbling Dad trope, Bob is a very refreshing aversion in the face of this trope being used for pretty much every animated sitcom father under the sun. The times he actually gets mad at his kids he always makes it clear that he's just on-edge and will apologize if he gets too angry, and he never does anything to intentionally emotionally or physically hurt his kids.
  • Compare the Belchers' reaction to the kids going missing in "Fort Night" to Jimmy Pesto's. Bob and Linda are understandably worried and go out in search of them when they realize the kids have been gone for too long, and nearly actually find them before Millie leads them away. Meanwhile, Jimmy Pesto doesn't even appear in the episode, showing he literally didn't even notice that Andy and Ollie were gone (or, if he did, that he didn't care).
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable:
  • Lampshaded in "Synchronized Swimming":
    Mr. Frond: You'll need an AH-dult to supervise you...
    Louise: We know an AH-dult...
    Gene: We definitely know an uh-dult.
  • Lampshaded in "The Equestranauts" when Bob finally asks Bronconius why he keeps stressing the second syllable in "tattoo".
  • In "Ambergris", just before Felix unveils the restaurant's redesigned bathroom, he says "bathroom" with extra emphasis on the second syllable.
• Accidentally-Correct Writing: All in-universe.
  • In "Sliding Bobs", Tina writes the Habercore children to be as different as possible from the Belcher children. For Louise's counterpart, Tina writes her as a Daddy's Girl (to contrast Louise's status as a Little Miss Snarker). Except, while she's nowhere near as blatant about it, the real Louise actually is a Daddy's Girl.
  • In "Bed, Bob, & Beyond", Gene's story devolves into a Speed ripoff, complete with the bus having to maintain above a certain speed. Gene measures the speed using miles per hour, ignorant of the fact that England uses the metric system (as Bob and Linda call him out on)... and then Tina points out that while England primarily uses the metric system, it actually does use miles instead of kilometers. While Gene clearly didn't know as much, the fact remains that he still got the correct terminology.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: When Bob buys a $300 kitchen knife, his obsession with his new knife and his casual dismissal of other people's tools results in hard feelings between Bob and both Linda and Teddy. It ends with Teddy using his prize hammer to destroy the knife... and Bob wanting to get the same brand of hammer.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In "Food Truckin", Tina mistakes Randy for Werner Herzog. Randy's voice actor, Paul F. Tompkins, is known for his Herzog impression.
  • In "Moody Foodie", Bob is startled when Mr. Fischoeder likens him to a tumor with hair and teeth. H. Jon Benjamin was the voice of just such a tumor on Lucy, the Daughter of the Devil.
  • In "Mutiny on the Windbreaker", Bob gets shanghaied by a cruise ship captain, which becomes even funnier if you think of it as Len Trexler getting back at Archer for all the crap he's pulled.
  • In "O.T.: The Outside Toilet", Jon Hamm is a guest voice (playing the titular toilet), which is acknowledged when Bob walks into the kitchen in a suit. Cue Louise: "Woah, Don Draper's looking fat this season!"
  • In "Easy Com-mercial, Easy Go-mercial", Jordan Peele plays a semi-brain-damaged football player not unlike the meat-headed athletes he played in sketches seen on MA Dtv and Key & Peele.
  • In "The Millie-churian Candidate", the climax of the episode hinges on Louise (played by Kristen Schaal) discovering that a girl (nicknamed Abby) is actually named Mabel, the same name as Schaal's character on Gravity Falls.
  • In "Eat, Spray, Linda", we learn that Linda has giant hands, like H. Jon Benjamin's other animated love interest, Lana Kane.
  • In "Ain't Miss Debatin'", when asked by Louise who can do a Russian accent, Gene is the only one who doesn't say yes or otherwise indicate he can. In a hefty dose of irony, Gene's voice actor Eugene Mirman was born in Russia (well, technically the Soviet Union, but still).
  • "The Hurt Soccer" is basically an excuse to make H. Jon Benjamin a soccer coach again. One of the background players resembles Brendon Small, and Louise's teammate Mara is a dead-ringer for Melissa (and is even voiced by the same actor).
  • "The Taking of Funtime One Two Three" is basically an excuse to have Kevin Kline participate in another heist, just like he did in A Fish Called Wanda. He even turns on his allies like he did in the film.
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • In "Crawl Space", Bob accuses Linda of nagging, and refers to her with nicknames like "Nagatha Christie" and "The Secretary of Nagriculture". Linda isn't amused until Bob gets to the latter nickname, which she admits was a good one.
  • Despite warning Linda not to start singing all week again, when she belts out a musical Big "NO!", spins around, and falls on the bed, Bob lets out a chuckle.
  • While Linda is reading from Tina's diary in "The Belchies", she finds a random entry that reads "If guys had uteruses, they'd be called duderuses." Bob snorts.
  • In "Bad Tina", Tina tells Linda not to have a "crap attack", which Linda gets so mad about she sends Tina to her room. Everyone else finds it hilarious, and Bob even uses it on Linda a few more times. Louise finds the phrase just as funny as her father does, if not even more. As mentioned above, Bob uses it on Linda, and each time he does Louise laughs as if she's hearing it for the first time.
  • In "The Frond Files", Bob and Linda actually enjoy their children's stories that Mr. Frond found objectionable. Granted, it helps that the stories themselves are largely fine (besides maybe Tina's), and the big issue Mr. Frond has is that he's the bad guy in all three.
  • Also in "The Frond Files", the end of the episode reveals that Louise managed to get Mr. Frond with her "brownie surprise" prank, which she explained in her story.^note It involves placing a brownie on a chair or stool, so that anyone who sits down on it gets brownie stuck to their pants, making them look like they crapped themselves. Bob and Linda have to stifle laughter when they notice.
  • The big reveal in "The Gayle Tales" is that the kids got grounded for pulling a prank on Linda that led to her farting after crashing into a pile of maxi pads. Bob actually found the incident hilarious, and it's clear he thinks Linda was a bit hard on the kids.
• Afraid of Clowns: Implied with Andy and Ollie in "Bad Tina". Tammy gives Tina an excessive amount of makeup. Andy and Ollie scream in horror upon seeing them and Ollie yells, "Bathroom clowns!!"
• Affably Evil:
  • Mr. Fischoeder. He's a man who makes his fortune off of child labor^note a throwaway line mentions he runs a child-run coal mine, which could be a joke but could just as easily not be, shady if not outright dangerous business venues (see literally every corner of Wonder Wharf), and is arguably very close to being an actual sociopath with how callous he is towards human life. Yet he manages to remain hilarious enough for most of this to be glossed over, and he showcases a genuine admiration for the Belchers, meaning that however close he is to sociopathy, he's not quite there. "The Oeder Games" reveals that he invokes this, as he wants to be a landlord that his tenants can be friends with even while trying to bleed them dry of their cash.
  • The robber from "Hamburger Dinner Theatre", who robs the restaurant and then sings a duet with Linda before leaving. Then he comes over the next day and is almost requested to do the same thing again for a second time by Linda before Bob calls the cops and forces him to run away.
  • Mickey, the bank robber from "Bob Day Afternoon." The entire time he holds the bank hostage, he's relaxed, friendly, and happily helps Louise with her essay—he's even nicer than some of his own hostages, and unambiguously nicer than the police. Overall he's just helpless without his usual robbing partner, which Bob realizes. After the incident ends and Mickey's trial comes and goes, he even becomes a friend of the Belchers.
  • The One-Eyed Snakes are meth-cooking (and meth-selling) murderers implied by Critter to also have ties to white supremacy movements. In any other genre of story they'd be villains. However, they do a good job at making one forget all of their less-admirable vices (aside from Louise siccing them on Logan, as well as a few throwaway lines).
• Affectionate Parody: The titular films in "Hawk & Chick" are this to Lone Wolf and Cub.
• Afraid of Blood: "The Kids Run the Restaurant" shows Bob fainting at a single drop of blood. Justified; he's all but stated to be a hemophiliac.
• Ageless Birthday Episode: Played with. On the one hand, Tina's 13th birthday in "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" and Linda's 44th/45th birthday in "Eat, Spray, Linda" mention the characters' new ages (well, part of it in Linda's case), while Bob's 45th birthday in "The Laser-inth" isn't directly said to be his 45th^note a flashback in "Father of the Bob" has him state his age as 14 and the episode proper takes place thirty years later, thus indicating Bob was 44 in the episode proper; "Father of the Bob" happened before "The Laser-inth", thus meaning Bob would be 45 as of the latter episode. However, the show maintains subtle continuity by permanently aging the characters up for these birthdays (Tina started the series at age 12, but has remained 13 ever since that Birthday Episode)—even Bob's unspecified 45th birthday keeps him a year older (or one can assume, given his age hasn't been mentioned since "Father of the Bob"). There is one exception—Bob's second Birthday Episode in "Are You There Bob? It's Me, Birthday", because it comes so soon after the previous one (not only do Linda and Tina not get a second birthday episode before then, but Gene and Louise haven't even had one). In that case, it's not so clear whether Bob remains 45 post-"The Laser-inth" or is now 46 (in effect, having aged two years in the time everyone else took to age one—or, in Gene and Louise's case, not even one).
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: The bikers in the episode "Ear-sy Rider", The One Eyed Snakes. They're not necessarily bad guys, but they're depicted as violent, hard-drinking thugs that have no problem with taking care of people who insult them "the hard way". They also make and sell meth.
• All for Nothing: Defied in "The Equestranauts". After Bob goes through hell to retrieve Tina's stolen Chariot doll (which culminated in him getting an Embarrassing Tattoo on his back for the rest of the series), he spots Tina putting the doll away because she feels like she's getting too old for the titular show. While she nonetheless thanks him for his efforts, Bob refuses to let everything he did go to waste, to the point that he demands and then starts yelling at Tina to play with the doll.
• All Gays Love Theater: Discussed by Chet in "Bob Rest Ye Gentle-Mannequins":
  Chet: (to Bob) That's very theatrical. Are you gay?
  Louise: We wish.
• Alliterative Name: Aside from the ever-obvious Bob Belcher, there's also Hugo Habercore, Chuck Charles, Shelby Schnabel (Calvin Fischoeder's ex), Henry Haber (an eighth grader at Wagstaff), Hogarth Haber (Henry's younger brother), Derek Dematopolis (a dermatologist and Gayle's old high school crush), Sylvester Stieblitz (Regular-Sized Rudy's father), Felix Fischoeder, Matilda Merkin (Wagstaff's music teacher), and Big Bob Belcher (Bob's father). And while not alliterative in the spelling sense, Phillip Frond's first and last name both phonetically start with an "f-" sound.
• Alliterative Title: Bob's Burgers.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Supervising Director Bernard Derriman has created a diagram to quell the notion that Bob doesn't have ears with their exact location under his hair.
  • The recipe Bob uses in "Turkey in a Can" is hilariously described on the show's official Tumblr blog, supposedly from Bob himself.
  • The writers used a diagram to keep track of where the secondary characters were seated in the restaurant over the course of "Glued, Where's My Bob?", and a closer look at the diagram reveals the name of Regular-Sized Rudy's father (which hasn't been mentioned in the series proper, not even in the end credits) to be Sylvester Stieblitz.
• Almost Kiss: Bob and Linda in "Lindapendant Woman", thanks to Louise. Also a Moment Killer.
• Alpha Bitch: Tammy Larsen is arguably a deconstruction. She's rich, she's rude, she acts like the queen of the school... and most people can barely tolerate her at best because she's just that insufferable. She's not popular with legions of followers, she's a self-absorbed airhead with only a few friends who thinks she's popular, with everybody else unable or unwilling to tell her otherwise. The only reason Tammy gets away with half the stuff she does is because she's part of the school's extracurriculars (meaning she still comes across as more popular than she actually is) and because Tina is generally used as a scapegoat (see: literally pooping in the library with the intent of getting caught, just so she can frame Tina).
  • It comes to a peak in the Season 12 finale, where she and Jocelyn use their new segment on the school news to hype up themselves and people they like while relentlessly bullying everyone else. Even people who actually are friends with Tammy (like Zeke and Jimmy Jr.) call her out on it.
• Alternate Timeline Ancestry: In "Sliding Bobs", Tina imagines what things would be like if Linda had married Hugo the health inspector instead of Bob. The Habercore children, along with having Hugo's blond hair, have personalities that are the opposite of the Belcher children: boy-obsessed Tina becomes Mona, who has no interest in boys at all; Large Ham Gene becomes shy, soft-spoken Dean; and Enfant Terrible tomboy Louise becomes Charlize, an Adorably Precocious Child in a pink princess dress. The Belchers are quite understandably disturbed at the mere thought of this, especially Louise (who outright calls Tina a monster for her re-imagining of history).
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Linda. Louise states at one point that she not only tries too hard, but she tries too hard to not try too hard.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: While Gene was born male and still primarily identifies as male, he has occasionally referred to himself as a girl and displays no problems with other people (primarily his sisters) doing the same, sometimes even insisting that they call him such. It's entirely possible that he's genderfluid, though at the same time he's only eleven, meaning nothing is set in stone.
• Ambiguously Bi: Whenever a man shows interest in Bob, Bob's reactions range from flattered to mild interest. Bob himself outright admits he's "mostly straight", and the fact that the show hasn't outright used the word bisexual to describe Bob is arguably the only reason it's ambiguous in the first place.
  • Gene as well. He doesn't show interest in men nearly as often as Bob, but it's definitely there and he's arguably less ambiguous about it than his father.
• Ambiguously Brown:
  • The Belchers are on the tanner side. In-Universe too, since in "Torpedo" Bob is outright asked if he's an immigrant by Mr. Fischoeder, though judging by their appearance they could be Greek or Mediterranean descent.^note According to Loren Bouchard, the last name "Belcher" is French-Canadian, but the family is said to be a mix of Jewish, Greek, Italian, German, and Armenian (with Bob as the one with Greek and Armenian roots while Linda is Italian, German, and Jewish).
  • "Darryl, you're something, right? Black?"^note His voice actor is Indian-American, if that's any indication for Darryl himself.
  • Calvin and Felix Fischoeder are both on the paler side, but Bob reminds Calvin of his father, and as seen above Calvin himself believes Bob is non-white, leaving room for both Calvin and Felix to be mixed-race.
• Ambiguously Christian: The Belchers celebrate Easter and Christmas and Linda has taken Eucharist at least once in her life, but their celebrations of the aforementioned holidays appear purely secular in nature and they're never once seen in church, with absolutely nothing suggesting that they even attend. If they are Christian, it's looking more and more likely that they're non-practicing.
• Ambiguously Gay: Little King Trashmouth and Gary, a pair of raccoons that live in the alley behind the restaurant. Linda insists that they're gay and married, but it's not made clear if they really are gay or Linda is just making it up. Though it's shown in "The (Raccoon) King and I" that they have a very close relationship.
• Ambiguous Situation: In "The Fresh Princ-Ipal", it's revealed that Principal Spoors has a brother-in-law named Don. It's never clarified if Don married Spoors's sibling or if Spoors married Don's sibling. In fact, Don himself doesn't even know.
• Ambiguous Syntax:
  • On romance:
    Chet: As summer turned to fall casuals, our relationship became anything but.
    Tina: Casual?
    Chet: Yes, casual.
  • Another from an exchange in "I Get a Psy-Chic Out of You":
    Louise: It involves horses and money and us getting some.
    Tina: (smiles) Some horses?
    Louise: Some money!
    Tina: Oh...
• Analogy Backfire: Bob's family is not quite sure the circumstances that would account for hitting candy from a baby's hand... with a baseball bat.
• And This Is for...: When Louise is shooting Linda in the laser tag arena.
• Animal Motif:
  • Louise has rabbits. Much of her clothing (including her iconic hat and the slippers of her pajamas) are rabbit-themed.
  • Tina has horses, helped by the fact that she is a prime candidate for All Girls Like Ponies.
• Animal Wrongs Group: Two in "Sacred Cow", the film documentary group that glued a wig to a castrated steer and the discount petting zoo that stole the cow from the restaurant and is all but stated to abuse its animals.
• Animation Bump:
  • The animation for the end-of-episode gags are almost always a lot more fluid and well-timed.
  • The animation of Teddy getting his hand caught in the refrigerator in "Christmas In The Car" is fluid and weighty enough to be worthy of a feature film.
• Annoyingly Repetitive Child: In "Sexy Dance Fighting", there is a montage of Tina^note Who was twelve at the time, prior to her thirteenth birthday two episodes later doing a capoeira movement and quoting something that Jairo told her. This inconveniences Bob, as she keeps interrupting whatever he's doing to repeat what Jairo said.
• Apathetic Teacher: Ms. LaBonz has no care whatsoever for her students, not even enough to dislike them. She just wants to make it through the day and go home.
• The Artifact: Mort and his funeral home were tied into the original concept of the Belchers being cannibals. Presumably he was going to be their supplier. With that aspect gone he no longer held much narrative significance and was eclipsed by Teddy.
• Artifact Name: Regular-Sized Rudy was nicknamed such because of the One-Steve Limit; there being another Rudy at Wagstaff (nicknamed Pocket-Sized Rudy). However, Pocket-Sized Rudy is so minor a character that he has a grand total of three appearances (one of them in flashbacks) in the entire series, and is mentioned only once besides then; meanwhile, Regular-Sized Rudy is one of the most recurring characters in the entire series. Thus, there's little need for the nickname when only one Rudy has any actual significance in the series—which the show has silently acknowledged by having the characters refer to Regular-Sized Rudy more often as just Rudy as the seasons go by.
• Artistic License – Child Labor Laws: Bob's underaged kids are all working at his burger restaurant because Bob doesn't have the money to hire or pay for any employees, due to it barely making enough money to stay afloat, and he doesn't pay his kids for any of the work they do at the restaurant since it's all treated like one of their chores. This is lampshaded by Hugo in the pilot episode and somewhat justified as minors under the age of 16 actually can work for their parents' business, provided the work they're doing isn't hazardous to children.
• Artistic License – Geography: In "It Snakes a Village", a Travel Montage of the Belchers' road trip to Florida shows the family car traveling on a map of the East Coast, with each state outlined and colored. While the map is largely accurate, Long Island is drawn as part of New Jersey (and connected to the mainland rather than being an actual island) rather than New York State.
  • As seen in "Bed, Bob, & Beyond", the kids' knowledge of England's geography is spotty at best (primarily Gene and Tina, since Louise's story mostly takes place in a flat). This leads to things such as Gene calling Tower Bridge the London Bridge and thinking the Tube (slang for the London Underground) is a literal (not to mention above ground) tube. Bob calls Gene out on both (and moves to correct Louise when she makes the same London/Tower Bridge mix-up in her story), but he makes a very common mistake as well—he refers to Big Ben as the clock tower, when it's actually the bell inside (the tower itself is the Elizabeth Tower). Unlike the other examples, the Big Ben mix-up is never corrected.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • In "Bob Fires the Kids", Mickey is released from prison on a technicality (the prosecutor was on meth during the trial), and believes he can rob the same bank as last time and not get arrested due to double jeopardy. Bob has to tell him that double jeopardy doesn't work that way.
  • In "Family Fracas", the Belchers sue the titular game show under the belief that it rigged the game they lost (it did). However, Harry, one of the game show's co-hosts, destroys the key piece of evidence (a recording of the rigging), causing the Belchers to lose the case. This by itself isn't quite an example, but what is an example is the fact that Harry destroyed said evidence in front of several witnesses yet somehow gets away with everything—in real life, he'd be criminally liable for blatantly tampering with evidence.
  • In "They Serve Horses, Don't They?", Hugo and Bob attempt to expose a vendor for meat fraud (advertising one kind of meat as another—in this case, horse meat as beef). This is an actual crime, but in the process of investigating the meat fraud Hugo completely overlooks another meat-related law—namely, it's illegal to sell horse meat in the United States period, even if it's advertised as such. Bob and Hugo didn't need to get the vendor to lie about the meat product, because the simple fact that he was selling horse meat (which they did have proof of, so evidence wasn't an issue) would've been enough to get him in deep trouble.
• Art Shift: "Brunchsquatch" goes above and beyond by using fan submitted ideas from the Bob's Burgers Fan Art AKA Fart Contest (over 60 animators) by constantly shifting the art style every time a setting transition occurs (sometimes within the same setting). At one point, it even goes Animesque.
• Art Evolution:
  • Season 1 was animated in Adobe Flash (hence the floatier animation). Starting with Season 2, it's animated using the more-reliable Toon Boom.
  • Mr. Frond undergoes a noticeable design change in "The Frond Files". His head and eyes are smaller, and he appears slightly fatter when viewed from the side.
  • "Itty Bitty Ditty Committee" marks several minor changes in character design. For example, Louise's neck is slightly shorter, and Linda's shirt is now a V-neck.
• Asinine Alternate Activity: In "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" Linda takes Louise to a bonding seminar, but Louise would rather play Laser Tag next door.
• Ass Pull: In-universe. Linda started her murder mystery production with a prologue where she claimed that she was not the murderer, but at the end of it she went back on that and said that she was. There was zero foreshadowing or even sense in it (it's one thing to have her character be Beneath Suspicion the whole time, but Linda stated while out-of-character that it wasn't her). The public was not amused.
• Attractive Zombie: This is how Tina views any and all zombies. She frequently writes “erotic friend fiction” stories involving zombies and has romantic dreams about them. Once, she even wrote a school essay about dating an entire zombie basketball team.
• Auto Erotica: Gayle and Derek Dematopolis can be seen making out in a car at the end of "Purple Rain-Union". While they're not having sex yet, it's pretty clear that this is the direction they're going in.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Bob's burgers of the day are on paper an excellent idea to demonstrate his skill in cooking. In practice, it's the opposite, as Bob never repeats them, buys a new ingredient everyday, and has to come up with a pun name. This means he spends a lot of money on something nobody else but Teddy cares about, especially since one episode revealed he spent a whole months barely selling any. It doesn't help that Bob wants them to be the main hook to his restaurant.
• Awkward First Sleepover:
  • Louise is forced into having her first sleepover by her doting mother Linda. Not only does Louise not want a sleepover in the first place, but Linda makes the situation even more awkward by exclusively inviting girls Louise can't stand.
  • Gene's first sleepover is with his friend Alex, and that also goes poorly, as he gets roped into Alex's attempt at running away from home and living out in the wilderness. Not helping is that Gene, much like Louise, also didn't want to have a sleepover, although in Gene's case it was moreso out of fear than dislike.
• Awkward Poetry Reading: In "The Kids Run Away", Louise is hiding at her Aunt Gayle's to avoid getting a cavity filled. In order to draw Louise out, the rest of the family encourages Gayle's most annoying tendencies, such as asking that Gayle read her poetry aloud. While it doesn't get Louise to leave, it's clear that the poetry reading is excruciating to sit through.
  Gayle: Little cat, you're just like me / You go outside and squat to pee. SQUAT! SQUAAAT! SQUAAAT! SQUAAAAAT!
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Happens often with the Belchers. It'll be a huge turning point of the episode whenever Louise is involved (primarily because she's the one most likely to come across as if she doesn't love the others), and an even bigger one whenever it's directed towards Bob (primarily because Bob is the most common target of Louise's hell-raising).
• Bad Boss: Mr. Fischoeder underpays and undervalues his employees, to the point that they've attempted to unionize before.
• Bad Date: Well, Bad Double Date. Bob and Linda go out with another couple in "The Trouble with Doubles". As the title might imply, though, things don't go according to plan. To Bob and Linda's credit, it's through little fault of their own—but between the other couple's service dog (who probably needs a service dog of his own) and the other couple hogging most of the food, the poor Belchers don't have a fun night out. And then they get trapped in an escape room together, during which Linda accidentally texts the couple while trying to tell Tina about how the entire night has been horrible...
• Badly Battered Babysitter: Happens pretty much anytime that Tina is assigned as a babysitter for Gene and Louise. Also happens to Jen, the professional babysitter hired in "Purple Rain-Union", suggesting that this is probably just an inevitable result for anyone taking care of the Belcher children.
• Bait-and-Switch Performance: Bob finds a banjo and starts playing it, thinking it could be a fun hobby. Soon he starts playing beautifully, and a large crowd gathers at the restaurant to hear him play. Cut back to reality, with Bob still struggling to play properly.
• Baseball Episode:
  • "Torpedo" (Season 1): Bob meets his childhood hero, the baseball player Torpedo, and pushes Gene to participate on mascot races to earn the restaurant publicity.
  • "The Unnatural" (Season 3): Gene turns out to be really bad at baseball, and Linda pawns the restaurant's new espresso machine to pay for a training camp. While Bob attempts to get a refund because the camp is an obvious scam, a coffee-addicted Tina loses her mind from caffeine withdrawal as a result of the espresso machine being sold.
• Batman Gambit:
  • In "Dr. Yap", Linda pretends to fall in love with the titular dentist knowing that it'll make Gayle stop pursuing Bob to instead pursue Yap.
  • The plan of The Chessmaster, Henry Haber, in "The Millie-churian Candidate" is an extremely convoluted plan that's very dependent not only on playing on several people's character flaws, but that several of the involved people would fail at certain tasks - most prominently, that Louise would get caught doing something illicit and thus get disqualified from the election. Parts of the plan bordered on Gambit Roulette.
• Beach Bury: In "The Belchies", Ollie has apparently been buried to Buried Alive standards by Andy, who forgot where he was under the sand. He was fine.
• Bears Are Bad News: Does a man in a bear suit count?
• Beast in the Building: There is an episode where Bob brings Moo-Lissa the cow inside their tiny, walk-up apartment. She stays because it turns out cows can't walk downstairs - until a fed-up Linda invents a way (sliding her down on a mattress).
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In "Mazel-Tina", Tammy tells Tina to keep on-schedule no matter what. Tina agrees and doesn't derail the party for any reason—even when that reason is Tammy getting stuck inside a giant model of her head, resulting in Tammy missing her entire party.
• Berserk Button:
  • Thinking of insulting Bob's kids, perhaps by calling them freaky? Probably not a good idea. Also, try to avoid talking about Lobsterfest. And don't even think of buying him a V-Neck shirt.
  • Make sure not to mention "Bad Hair Day" to Linda.
  • Don't even think about taking Louise's bunny ears. And heaven forbid if you actually go through with it...
  • If you mess up Critter the biker's vest, there will be hell to pay.
  • Gretchen goes completely apeshit if one of her regulars goes to another hairdresser besides her even once. If she finds out, she'll plan on using her scissors to cut a lot more than just hair...
• Better as Friends: "Tappy Tappy Tappy Tap Tap Tap" opens with Tina deciding to tell Josh (her secondary love interest in Season 3) that they're better off not dating. She spends the entire episode worrying about how to break the news to him (assuming he still likes her) before the episode ends with Josh revealing that he also doesn't want a relationship with Tina—if anything, he's annoyed that Tina didn't just tell him at the start like she planned.
• Big Damn Movie: A feature film of the series was released on May 27, 2022.
• Big "NO!":
  • Linda gets one during "Art Crawl" when she has a nightmare of Gayle's paintings.
  • When Louise believes her bunny ears were incinerated in "Ear-sy Rider".
  • During Tina's Imagine Spot of her in Hell in "Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks":
    Tina: What's for lunch today?
    Demon: Your lies!
    Tina: NOOO! That's what I had yesterday!
  • Bob in "Turkey in a Can" when he sees his Thanksgiving turkey in the toilet. Twice.
  • Bob does this a lot. Some memorable examples are in "Sacred Cow", and "It Snakes a Village".
• Big "OMG!": Sometimes, if a situation is just that nuts, Bob's usual subdued "Oh my God" will grow in volume and emphasis.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Bob yells this at a new customer in "Synchronized Swimming".
• Big Sister Instinct: Linda has this for Gayle, being very protective of her and going through hoops to make her happy. Unfortunately, it's deconstructed through this overprotective approach making Gayle overreliant on Linda and also rendering Gayle genuinely incapable of functioning on her own (to the point that she can't even keep a job without calling Linda for help).
• Big "WHAT?!":
  • Linda's initial reaction upon learning that the kids told Mr. Frond that she would be choreographing a synchronized swimming routine for their fake "independent study".
    Linda: Independent WHAAAAAA...?!
  • When Bob calmly tells Linda that he and Tina were in a "little accident" in "Tina-Rannosaurus Wrecks".
• Birds of a Feather: Part of what lets Bob and Louise bond so easily is that at their core, they're fairly similar. In addition to their shared habit of making something into a Companion Cube, they share similar interests in movies and TV shows, they're among the smarter (or at least more well-adjusted) members of their respective age groups, and Bob even has a wilder streak that, as "Carpe Museum" shows, Louise is perfectly capable of drawing out from inside him. It lets their attempts at bonding come more naturally, in contrast to Linda trying to force a bond onto Louise.
• Birthday Episode:
  • "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" (Season 1): To raise money for Tina's 13th birthday party, Bob takes a night job as a cab driver and befriends a trio of hookers, who he promptly invites to said party.
  • "Mazel-Tina" (Season 4): Tammy's birthday and Bat Mitzvah is coming, and although Tina hasn't been invited, she gets in anyways by getting her family to cater.
  • "Eat, Spray, Linda" (Season 5): Linda, who hates her birthday, has to face a series of misadventures when going to buy groceries while the Belchers look for her around the town.
  • "House of 1000 Bounces" (Season 6): Rudy's birthday has the celebration endangered when the bounce house for the party is taken elsewhere.
  • "The Laser-inth" (Season 7): For Bob's birthday, he is going with Gene to watch a laser show, but the boy is scared of the loud noises of it.
  • "Are You There Bob? It's Me, Birthday" (Season 8): Linda forgets Bob's birthday, and sends him out on a day watching Hugo the health inspector at work while she tries to throw a belated surprise party.
• Black Widow: "Housetrap" has Linda and Louise suspecting that the wealthy owner of a beach house was murdered by his second wife. Though their suspicions are never proven, it's heavily implied that they're right.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: In "The Unbearable Like-Likeness of Gene", Gene tells his girlfriend Courtney that he was just being her boyfriend so he could have access to her dad's music studio. The following exchange ensues:
  Courtney: You were using me?
  Gene: I prefer the term "networking".
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Bob becomes obsessed with a video game expy of Burgertime. The sprites are Burgertime-ish but the game itself is a platformer that has massive difficulty reminiscent of early Konami games.
  • Apparently the ubiquitous search engine in this show is neither Google nor Yahoo!, but Yahoogle.
  • Two games that the Belchers own are called Torpedo and Surgery Sam, referring to the games Battleship and Operation respectively.
  • Subverted with Burobu in "Mission Impos-slug-ble". It seems like it's this to Pokémon, with a similar theme song and trading card game, but a throwaway line from Tina reveals that Pokemon already exists in the Bob's Burgers universe, meaning Burobu is just a rip-off that happens to be popular.
  • Purrbo, a Virtual Pet game Gene gets addicted to in "A-Sprout a Boy", is clearly based on Tamagotchi.
• Book Dumb: All three Belcher kids, but the show places particular emphasis on Tina. Numerous episodes have happened as a result of Tina's poor grades, and it's shown that she just generally has trouble focusing in school.
• Boring, but Practical: Bob tends to favor the simplest and least flashy way to solve a problem, compared to Linda (who almost always does the opposite).
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Bob does a Tina-moan during his nightmare in "Friends with Burger-fits". Gene also does a Tina-moan throughout most of "The Unbearable Like-Likeness of Gene". All three kids later indulge in one in "World Wharf II: The Wharfening" when it looks like Bob is about to drown.
  • Louise has a tendency to break out Bob's trademark "Oh my God" whenever she's annoyed or frustrated. On at least one occasion she and Bob even say it in unison.
• Brain Bleach: During "The Trouble with Doubles", the Belcher kids have a secret horror movie night with Rudy, Darryl, the Pesto kids, and Zeke. By the end of it, everyone is mentally scarred by the movie so much that Tina has them watch a video of when she was a little kid crying over flushing her own poop down the toilet in order to make them forget about the scary movie. It works, albeit by mentally scarring them in a much different and less scary manner.
• Bravado Song: Subverted in "It Snakes a Village". Gene starts to sing about how he's not afraid of ghosts, sharks or cancer, but the instant he mentions snakes he proceeds to rant about how he doesn't like them for the rest of the song.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • From "Sexy Dance Fighting":
    Gene: At first, we thought it was a breakdancing class, and then we thought it was a special needs class.
    Louise: Now we think it might be a special needs breakdancing class.
  • Gene remarking on Tina's "End of the world mating list" in "Lobsterfest":
    Gene: Gay... gay... mythical creature... gay mythical creature...
  • From "Tina-rannosaurus Wrecks":
    Tina: I'm going to jail, or hell, or Hell Jail.
  • As of this point in the series it's practically become the family's Share Phrase.
• Brick Joke:
  • In "Human Flesh" after the "May contain human flesh" notice is put up an old lady says she might still try it. At the end of the episode she shows up again along with her adventurous eaters group.
  • In "The Belchies", Teddy invites Bob to watch a game and have a make your own three bean salad meal and Bob had to bring his own beans. Later a construction worker says he went to a make your own three bean salad meal and he didn't bring any beans.
  • In "Food Truckin'", when Randy and Gene talk about Tabitha Johansson's song "Oil Spill", Gene remarks that it's really about her vagina—Bob is aghast that Gene knows this, but both Gene and Randy claim it's not subtle. At the food festival later in the episode, the Belchers and Randy are treated to a live performance of "Oil Spill", and Bob quickly remarks that it really isn't subtle^note The song, for the record, mostly consists of Tabitha rubbing her crotch on a piano bench and moaning while singing "Oil spill!" over and over.
  • At the beginning of "Broadcast Wagstaff School News", Tina practices her news-anchor routine on Bob, where she catches him out on not knowing how to cook paella. This goes unmentioned again until the very last line of the episode where Bob suddenly remembers he does know how to cook it.
  • In "Lindapendant Woman", Louise ties balloons to shrimp and sends them floating into the heavens. Towards the end of the episode, right as Linda and Bob are about to kiss and make up, a shrimp on a balloon lands between their lips. Dozens of other balloon shrimp soon follow.
    Louise: Yes! It's happening!
    Linda: Wha-? Louise, what'd you do?
    Louise: I MADE IT RAIN SHRIMP! What did you ever do?
  • A multi-episode one. In "Mother Daughter Laser Razor", Louise adamantly remarks that she doesn't sing. Later, in the two-part finale of Season 4, there are two major songs ("Nice Things Are Nice" and its Dark Reprise "Bad Things Are Bad")... and sure enough, Louise is the only Belcher without a notable line in either^note she provides a tempo beat alongside Gene during Tina's verse of "Nice Things Are Nice", but doesn't actually say anything, whereas Gene has a line in "Bad Things Are Bad" and the other Belchers have lines in both.
  • In "Silence of the Louise," Linda hangs one of Teddy’s motivational posters in the kitchen over Bob’s instructions for saving a choking customer, causing Bob to complain about it being a hazard. In the background of the episode’s credits, Teddy chokes on his burger and Bob rushes into the kitchen to rip down the motivational poster to read the Heimlich instructions.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: As implied in "Poops!... I Didn't Do It Again" and confirmed in "Touch of Eval(uations)", Louise has the brainpower to do genuinely well in school, but she couldn't care less about that.
• Broken Aesop: In "Are You There Bob? It's Me, Birthday" as Bob is out being distracted by Hugo he makes the remark that all Hugo does is harass people, prompting Hugo to make Bob join him as he inspects a wrap restaurant so Hugo can prove the importance of his job. It’s meant to give new perspective of Hugo’s job for Bob, expanding his scope about health inspectors, and if the point were isolated on its own it succeeds. However, the point is diluted by the fact that it blatantly ignores how Hugo has harassed Bob over nothing, having even been threatened with termination by his supervisor solely because he keeps harassing Bob. While Bob concedes Hugo's point, if anything it just makes Hugo look even worse, as he's completely professional with the wrap restaurant but completely biased and unprofessional towards Bob's Burgers.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • From "Torpedo": Poor Bob's idol, the titular baseball player, is a cheater in multiple senses of the word, using grease to make his pitches harder to hit and having a Secret Other Family—actually, three of them. Torpedo discusses it later in the episode, telling Bob to pick older role models that'll be dead by the time he grows up.
  • In "Hawk & Chick", Louise originally looked up to Chick from the Hawk and Chick movies, but upon meeting Yuki, the real-life Chick, she's completely distraught to learn that Yuki doesn't look back fondly on her old movies and wants nothing to do with her father. She's so mad that she has to sit outside Yuki's office yelling "Idiot!" just so she doesn't call Yuki that to her face.
  • Also from "Hawk & Chick", as shown in a flashback, Louise openly compared Yuki and her father's bond to Louise's own bond with Bob; now, Louise wants them to be nothing alike if it means she and Bob avoid the same fate as Yuki and her father. Fortunately, it leads to a case of Rebuilt Pedestal after Bob and Louise successfully reunite their heroes.
  • In "Wag the Hog", the One-Eyed Snakes grow bitter towards Critter for pretty much leaving the gang to be a full-time father. Bob manages to turn it into a case of Rebuilt Pedestal by talking about how Critter can make time for both, as well as Bob's experiences with his own kids and how parenthood isn't a bad thing.
• Broken Record:
  • During the preparations for Rudy's play in "House of 1000 Bounces", Harley fights with Sasha over the stress ball, repeatedly saying "No!"
  • In the very next episode, "Stand By Gene", Tammy doesn’t like where Jimmy Jr.'s going with some valuable information, and keeps saying "Wait" over and over.
• Brutal Honesty: Bob doesn't mince words with anyone, even his own family. It helps that he's known to be a Bad Liar, so he takes it to the opposite extreme.
  • In the Season 4 finale, Bob tells his family that he loves them, but makes it clear to Linda that he prioritizes the kids over her.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: A very rare literal example. In "Sacred Cow," Bob has a dream with a courtroom sequence. In it, Louise acts as his attorney, complete with three-piece-suit... and her ever-present bunny ears. Later in "A Few 'Gurt Men," Louise is a bunny-ears lawyer for real when she acts as Mr. Frond's defense attorney and of course, is still wearing her ears.
• Bumbling Dad: Averted, which is wonderfully uncommon for an animated cartoon dad. Bob commonly acts as the sensible one in the family, in contrast to the rest of the Belchers. He puts his duties as a father before just about anything else, and is never the one being coddled by his children (at least, not in a way that clearly isn't patronizing and meant to be demeaning).
  • According to Loren Bouchard, the Burgers of the Day mean Bob's not just phoning his cooking in, but thinks of the restaurant as his own 'food laboratory'. Given Bob would not only have to think of a name for the burger, but also prepare the ingredients (which have been shown to sometimes be more rare than the standard farmer's market produce) and taste the burger to make sure it's edible, it's easy to see this point of view. Additionally, Bob is shown to never repeat Burgers of the Day (as evidenced by holiday episodes), and assuming he's been doing them since the restaurant opened (at least 15 years prior to the series, given it was open when he and Linda got married, and probably before then), this means that Bob has come up with at least five thousand Burgers of the Day, and very likely more (assuming that 15 years is too low a number for how long the restaurant has been running). If Bob were truly bumbling on the level of other animated fathers, needless to say he would not be capable of anything near this caliber.
  • Not to mention "Bob and Deliver", which shows his skill not just as a Home Ec teacher, but as the boss of a packed, student-run restaurant.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • A frequent occurrence is for seemingly one-off characters to return in a later episode. Examples include Sal (debuted in Season 3, returned in Season 5), Helen Goodwin (debuted in Season 5, returned in Season 9), and Shinji and Yuki Kojima (debuted in Season 5, returned in Season 10).
  • Among recurring characters, Josh was Put on a Bus in Season 3, Jen in Season 4, and Mickey in Season 5. Josh and Jen later returned in Season 10, while Mickey returned in Season 11.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • The Fuzzy Buddies.
  • While not quite an example of this trope, it's worth noting that in "Art Crawl" there's a literal butt monkey (as in, a monkey with a second rear end replacing its head).
  • Bob seems to be this for the whole town- in almost every episode Bob ends up being humiliated in some fashion.
  • Tina seems to be this for her siblings. It was a lot more noticeable in Season 1.
• Bystander Syndrome:
  • In "Burgerboss", after Bob chases Darryl's bullies outside, the Family Funtime security guard just stays where he is, glad that it's no longer his problem.
  • In "Easy Commercial, Easy Go-mercial", Bob is harassed by Jimmy Pesto's customers after they assume Bob stole Jimmy's idea of using ex-NFL player Sandy Frye to advertise his restaurant—not only was it the other way around, but Bob's commercial aired first, giving even less credence to this theory. Sandy Frye himself is nearby and could quite easily verify Bob's claims that he did his commercial before Jimmy did his. So naturally, he just sits there and eats his food, doing nothing to calm the situation and forcing the other Belchers to save Bob.
• By the Hair: Linda snatches a clump of the hair of Debbie, the high school reunion organizer, after a day of non-subtle disappointment at being forced into booking the Ta-Tas, when she tells them to chant for Bad Hair Day. See Berserk Button.
• Cain and Abel: Linda and her sister Gayle. Gayle is the Cain, with a compulsion to steal any guy Linda likes just because Linda likes them. Linda is fine with this and uses it to set her up with Dr. Yap.
  • The Fischoeders also play this role. Unlike what you'd expect at first glance, though, the ineffectual, oft-belittled Felix is Cain and the Affably Evil, emotionally distant Calvin is Abel. Felix is the reason for Calvin's missing left eye, and that's saying nothing of the Season 4 finale, where he attempted to drown his brother under Wonder Wharf.
• Call-Back:
  • Tina moans on the floor in "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" like in "Sexy Dance Fighting".
  • Tina's zombie fantasy comes back at the end of episode 6 with angel wings and her unicorn poster comes to life in her Imagine Spot.
  • One of the flyers Bob's kids hand out in "Burger Wars" flies past in a scene in the next episode.
  • In the Pilot Episode, Linda calls Hugo while he's crying in a bathroom stall at the "Falafel Waffle" restaurant. Later, in "Nude Beach", Bob calls Hugo an 'awful man' for shutting him down after failing a health inspection. Hugo corrects Bob, saying "Uh, wr-r-rong Bob! I'm a 'lawful' man." Gene and Louise then tease him with "Falafel Man." and "Waffle Man." respectively. Tina belatedly yells "Omelets! Am I doing it right?"
  • Linda says she's going to Pickles, a strip club, in "Hamburger Dinner Theater" when she's actually going to a dinner theater. Bob and the kids enter Pickles in "My Fuzzy Valentine" on a mission to get the Love Test-o-meter for Linda, and the entire family winds up back there in "Land of the Loft". Additionally, Linda claims in "Hamburger Dinner Theater" that the place is named because it apparently serves very good pickles; Bob gets to try them in "Land of the Loft" and he remarks on how good they are.
  • In "What About Job?", Louise claims that her mother devised a method to move cows down a flight of stairs, a reference to the events of "Sacred Cow".
  • The series premiere started after Louise presented one of Bob's burgers at show-and-tell and claimed it was made from human flesh. Season 13's "The Show (and Tell) Must Go On", which focuses on Louise's final show-and-tell, features a flashback to this scene.
• Camp Gay: Dalton Crespin, a brunch blogger known as Dame Judi Brunch, is quite flamboyant and is known to have had an ex-boyfriend.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': The Belcher family never hesitates to call out Bob when he's being meaner or even slightly more selfish than usual.
• Cassandra Truth: In the first episode when Bob admits to Linda he forgot their anniversary, but she thinks he's actually planning a surprise party.
  Linda: I can see you smiling.
  Bob: I'm not smiling!
  Linda: You're smiling with your eyes.
• Cast Full of Crazy: You could count the number of recurring characters without at least a single issue on one hand.
• Caustic Critic: The Moody Foodie from his eponymous episode. While some of his negative reviews do have a point (one restaurant uses day-old bread, and another reuses uneaten noodles), for the most part he's just being overly harsh and explicitly revels in seeing his targets' businesses suffer.
• Celebrity Lie: Courtney's dad claims to know Carly Simon but keeps making excuses for why she hasn't shown up yet. He gets slapped when his lie gets fully exposed.
• Cell Phones Are Useless:
  • In "The Belchies", Linda tries to use her cell phone while in the tunnels below the taffy factory. Linda assumes it's this trope when she gets no reception, but Bob quickly points out that cell phones don't exactly work underground.
  • In "World Wharf II: The Wharfening", Bob is tied up with Mr. Fischoeder and tries to use his cell phone to call Linda, but can't put it to his ear and the call is drowned out by ambient noise. He next tries sending a photo, but can't get a good angle and sends only a picture of Mr. Fischoeder's butt (which Tina recognizes, but it still doesn't give any important information). Finally, he tries texting, but auto-correct garbles it and it takes a while for the others to decipher it. The phone falls into the water before it can be of any more (dis)service.
• Centipede's Dilemma: In “The Fresh Princ-ipal”, Teddy innocently inquires how Bob flips burgers so well, inadvertently psyching him out and making him unable to do it at all. The trope is actually discussed, with Teddy calling it the "yips" (the term used to describe the dilemma when applied to sports).
• Central Theme:
  • Family and sticking with each other through bad times. The Belchers are poor, and life seems to love screwing them over, but they've still got each other so things aren't too bad.
  • Renegade Cut argues in a video about the show that Class is also one. The Belchers face multiple challenges typical of the lower economic class, and it shows that their friends are mostly of the same class while their enemies (Mr. Fischoeder, Jimmy, Tammy, etc) are often of a class above them.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • Bob's countless and sometimes hilariously unique utterances of "Oh My God" and/or "Oh God", the first of which came after just one minute in the series premiere.
  • Also Linda's constant use of the elongated "Alriiiiiiight!"
• Characterization Marches On:
  • The first few episodes have Bob display traits of the traditional animated sitcom father (he forgets important dates and he at one point calls his kids failures), and he's much more impulsive. Compare this to his current depiction starting with the second half of Season 1, where he's a caring and loving father who doesn't always understand his kids' quirks, but accepts them all the same, and is much more calm and laid back.
  • Similarly, Linda is more of a Wet Blanket Wife in Season 1, to the point that she often chastises Bob for doing something he'd likely chastise her for doing in later seasons. She's also more of a jerk, which largely vanishes by Season 2.
• Character Tic: Linda and Louise twitch their eyes when they're angry or going nuts.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Linda's prenatal yoga tape from "Synchronized Swimming".
  • The ice cream machine in "The Deepening".
  • The giant Tammy head in "Mazel Tina".
  • Louise's grabber toy in "The Cook, the Steve, the Gayle & Her Lover".
  • Gene's "Super Bowel" in "Easy Commercial, Easy Go-mercial".
• The Chessmaster: In "The Millie-churian Candidate", Henry turns out to have manipulated events to ensure he could win the class election. It's even foreshadowed by his campaign slogan: "Chess I can".
• Chew-Out Fake-Out: In "Carpe Museum", Louise makes a jab at Mr. Frond on the school bus. Bob tells her not to insult Mr. Frond, but quickly adds "here" to the end of his sentence, revealing he'd be fine with it if Frond weren't around to hear it (which is further supported by the fact that Bob has already shown disdain towards Frond on multiple occasions, including earlier in the episode).
• Christmas Episode: Every season since Season 3 has featured one.
  • "God Rest Ye Merry Gentle-Mannequins" (Season 3): The family befriends a man who believes he is a mannequin brought to life, and when he helps them with the decorations and marketing for Christmas, they pay him back by reuniting him with his mannequin "wife".
  • "Christmas in the Car" (Season 4): The family gets stuck in the car while shopping for a last-minute Christmas tree, and they get followed by a disgruntled truck driver; Teddy goes to check on Bob's Christmas dinner, only to fall for a trap the kids set for Santa Claus.
  • "Father of the Bob" (Season 5): The family goes to spend Christmas at Bob's father's diner, causing some old friction between Bob and his dad to come to light; the kids raid their grandpa's basement for a last-minute gift for Bob.
  • "Nice-Capades" (Season 6): Louise, Tina and Gene put on an ice-skating show to impress a Mall Santa with their so-called good deeds.
  • "The Last Gingerbread House on the Left" (Season 7): Bob participates with the Fischoeder brothers in a sketchy and strange gingerbread house-making competition with the Fischoeders' fellow eccentric millionaires; Teddy goes caroling with Linda and the kids, where they try to solve the mystery of a creepy old house at the end of the street.
  • "The Bleakening" (Season 8): A musical two-part episode that features Linda throwing a Christmas party to bring cheer to the town. When her mini tree and the family decorations on it goes missing, Linda drags Bob into her quest to find the thief, while the kids suspect a Krampus-like monster called the Bleaken and strike off on their own investigation to find the Bleaken's lair.
  • "Better Off Sled" (Season 9): The kids fight back when Logan and his friends take over the sledding hill in the park with their snowball fights; Bob and Linda work on homemade gifts for the kids.
  • "Have Yourself a Maily Linda Christmas" (Season 10): Linda gets a part-time seasonal job working for the post office, but defies post office protocol in order to make sure a last-minute gift gets to its recipient. Gene and Louise tag along to find a gift for Tina, leaving Bob and Tina to deal with Gayle, Al, and Gloria by themselves.
  • "Yachty or Nice" (Season 11): The Belchers are invited to cater at a yacht club's boat parade, but when Bob learns the invitation is from Jimmy Pesto he becomes paranoid that Jimmy has an ulterior motive; Louise attempts to sneak off and steal presents that Teddy (who is dressed as Santa) is giving out.
  • "Gene's Christmas Break" (Season 12): After Gene breaks his favorite, extremely rare '70s era Christmas record, Tina and Louise join him in the search for another copy. Meanwhile, Teddy wants to do a neighborhood Secret Santa with Bob and Linda.
  • "The Plight Before Christmas" (Season 13): Bob and Linda try to attend all three kids' holiday performances at the same time.
• Chromatic Arrangement: The Belcher women.
  • Linda = Red
  • Louise = Green
  • Tina = Blue
  • The Belchers also fit the traditional four-color version of this trope, with Gene (yellow) being added to the above three.
• City with No Name: For the first eight seasons, the town the Belchers lived in had no official name. Neighboring areas were given a name (such as the nearby town of Bog Harbor), but the town itself went without one. The Season 9 premiere, however, finally gave the town the official name of Seymour's Bay (which had been an unofficial nickname used behind the scenes, but hadn't been made canon until then).
• Class Trip: The plot of "Carpe Museum" and "If You Love It So Much, Why Don't You Marionette?" each revolve around one.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Good luck trying to name a character who isn't one. Even the more rational characters have their moments.
• Closed Circle: In the aptly-named "Housetrap", the Belchers are stuck in the home of a suspected Black Widow, due first to Bob's back injury (caused by Linda) and then due to Hostile Precipitation.
• Color-Coded Characters: All the Belchers are associated with one main color: Bob is white, Linda is red, Tina is light blue, Gene is yellow, and Louise is light green.
• Comic-Book Time: The show has been on the air since 2011, but none of the characters have aged more than a year^note Bob, Linda, and Tina have all had birthday episodes, but Gene and Louise have stayed the same age, Bob and Linda's ages are only mentioned once and never again, and Tina's case is close enough to not aging at all because her birthday was in Season 1—and school-wise, the kids are all in the same grade as they've always been (fourth, sixth, and eighth). See Not Allowed to Grow Up below.
• Comic Sutra:
  • In "Bob Day Afternoon", Linda offers Bob some extra incentive to get out of the hostage situation alive by offering to do "anything"... except "that one thing".
  • In "My Fuzzy Valentine", Linda hosts a speed-dating event at the restaurant and asks for the participants' favorite food and sex position. Mike the mailman answers "fried green tomatoes" to both. The other participants' responses to the latter question are also quite interesting: "Pick 'n Roll", "Broken Sprinkler", "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", and "Sticky Wicket", with no elaboration on what any of them mean.
• Comic Trio: Again, the Belcher children.
• Comedic Sociopathy: Louise is this.
• Comically Missing the Point: Bob tells his kids it's not good to cheat at sports in the episode "Torpedo". Tina then immediately asks if he and their mother are getting a divorce. Cue the Flat "What" from Bob. Further point missing ensues.
  Gene: I call Mom!
  Louise: I call Dad!
  Tina: You took both of them.
  • As the show has continued, this tends to sum up both Linda and Tina's jokes.
• Companion Cube: Between Louise's Kuchi Kopi nightlight and Lance the Thanksgiving turkey, Bob has a tendency to do this. As hinted at in "Spaghetti Western & Meatballs" and further revealed in "The Belchies", Louise has inherited this tendency.
  • Bob's tendency towards this was explained in "Bob Fires The Kids"; a bar of soap, a rusty spatula, and a scrubbing pad were his only toys, and since Bob had no friends... or rather his father forced him to spend his entire childhood working, forbidding him toys or friends, so he was forced to improvise with cooking tools when his father wasn't looking. As for why Louise does it as well, the likely explanations are either childish imagination or she learned from watching Bob.
• Complexity Addiction:
  • The kids occasionally run into this problem. One Halloween, the three kids were a group costume, the movie Twister, with one dressing as a tornado, another dressing as various objects that got picked up by the tornado, and the last being Helen Hunt. Later, the kids became costumed wrestlers, and decided to become sea cucumbers with an overly complex backstory and in the ring routine. Despite the kids being overly ambitious in some of their plots, they are able to pull them off as often as not.
  • Mr. Fischoeder's plan to woo Shelby in "An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal" technically only required Linda, as he needed someone to pretend to be his wife. By bringing the rest of the Belchers into it (with the kids pretending to be his own and Bob pretending to be a lowly chef under his employ), he makes more work for himself to maintain the facade—and sure enough, Bob's frustration at being neglected soon leads to him getting shitfaced on absinthe and disrupting dinner in a fit of jealousy, which in turn leads to the kids intentionally revealing the hoax to try and save Bob from a trigger-happy Shelby. The only required part of the plan was the only part that didn't go up in flames. In other words, if Mr. Fischoeder had just brought Linda, he might've been able to keep the facade going long enough for him to get what he wanted.
• Conforming OOC Moment: Despite being characterized as feeling uncomfortable when it comes to lying, Tina has had her share of dishonesty in several episodes when her siblings lie, like in "Synchronized Swimming" (wherein she and Gene were okay with Louise forging Linda's signature), and "Burgerboss" (when she, Gene, and Louise lied about having sailing lessons).
• Continuity: Many times, the show subverts Negative Continuity by showing the consequences of older episodes in recent episodes.
  • In the first episode, deceased taffy company owner Mr. Caffrey is being buried (in a candy box coffin) out of Mort's funeral home. In the Season 2 premiere, the taffy factory is about to be torn down, and Caffrey himself is revealed to have been a bootlegger whose fortune came not from taffy but from alcohol. Season 7's "Sea Me Now" reveals that he bought an island to try and woo a girl.
  • The seal mascot in "Torpedo" was the same mascot that was having sex with Teddy's ex-wife in "Bed & Breakfast" (the crown being a dead giveaway).
  • In "The Deepening", Bob uses the ice cream machine to defeat a mechanical shark by clogging its insides, but the machine is damaged in the process. While it's still operational, ever since this episode it'll be depicted with bite marks.
  • After "The Equestranauts", any episode where Bob's back is seen will show the mustache tattoo he received from Bronconius.
  • In "Gene It On", Jimmy Jr. offhandedly mentions that he could sell his bike to pay for a date with Tina. Episodes before this depict him with a brown bike while episodes after this depict him with a green bike, indicating that he really did sell his bike to pay for the date.
  • The out-of-place bathroom designed by Felix Fischoeder in "Ambergris" remains in "Wharf Horse" (and gets pointed out) instead of just disappearing (like Bob wishes it would). Later episodes that show the restaurant's bathroom also depict it with Felix's design, and it even becomes a plot point in "Glued, Where's My Bob?" when the lack of a removable toilet seat means Bob is immobile for most of the episode.
  • "Speakeasy Rider" features the return of several previous one-off characters, notably Mudflap and Critter (last seen in "Ear-sy Rider"), Gus (the elderly docks man in "Seaplane!"), and Bryce (the leader of the Hell Hunt in "Full Bars"). The episode also mentions Tina's fender bender from "Tina-Rannosaurus Wrecks".
  • The Sofa Queen commercial from "Sacred Couch" is playing on the TV in the opening scene of "The Trouble With Doubles".
  • Linda's love of chanting, first depicted in "Carpe Museum", is brought up again in "Something Old, Something New, Something Bob Caters For You", 5 seasons later.
  • Several episodes feature throwaway lines revealing a certain quirk of a character that becomes a major plot point in later episodes.
    • Season 9's "The Taking of Funtime One Two Three" casually reveals that Bob has a Shy Bladder when it comes to public bathrooms; Season 10's "Poops... I Didn't Do It Again!" focuses on how Louise has inherited this issue, and showcases Bob and Louise working together to overcome their shared problem.
    • The Season 10 premiere reveals that Linda can't whistle, which becomes the subplot of Season 11's "Fast Time Capsules at Wagstaff School".
    • Season 9's "The Helen Hunt" and Season 11's "Some Kind of Fender Benderful" reveal that Teddy was in the Navy, which is placed front-and-center in Season 12's "Frigate Me Knot".
  • The plot of "Loft in Bedslation" depicts the Belchers building Louise a loft bed. Since then, any episode that features Louise's room will depict the loft bed.
  • Season 13 onwards is set after the movie, and features the consequences of the movie's events.
    • The patch of road outside the restaurant is noticeably darker than the surrounding road, referencing the sinkhole from the movie that was recently filled in.
    • Bob and Linda have upgraded to smartphones, as their flip phones were dropped into the ocean during the movie's climax and thus needed to be replaced.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The end credits sequence from the Season 6 finale "Glued, Where's My Bob?" features cameos of nearly every character ever introduced, even including one-off characters such as Bronconius (from Season 4's "The Equestranauts") and Torpedo Jones (from Season 1's "Torpedo"). Interestingly, despite the appearance of one-shot characters, two recurring characters—Mickey and Logan Bush—are absent from the sequence (Logan's absence is even more noticeable given his mother's presence in the sequence).
• Contrived Coincidence: In "Ear-sy Rider"; had Logan's dad's doctoring skills not turned up when Mudflap was going into labor, bad things would have happened. Also, Mudflap going into labour the exact second Critter was about to brutalize Logan's parents—while the stress of the whole situation likely was the cause, the fact is they are very lucky it happened.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: In "Mother Daughter Laser Razor", Louise and Logan get a bit too disruptive during the therapy session and as punishment are locked in a room containing a television that is showing Freaky Friday on a loop^note One can tell it's the 2003 version because the episode's end credits list Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Tess Coleman in that version. They're initially horrified about it, but after a loop or two Logan quickly becomes fascinated with the movie, and even appears to have found some deeper meaning in it.
• Cool Teacher: Bob quickly becomes this in "Bob & Deliver" by encouraging the Home Ec students to get creative with cooking rather than just watch movies all day. Unfortunately, he gets a bit too popular for the school's liking.
• Costume-Test Montage: In "These Boots Are Made For Stalking" one of these pops up when Tina goes to a thrift store to find new clothes to impresS a group of "cool kids."
• Couch Gag:
  • The business that owns the building to the right of Bob's Burgers (called the Store Next Door) is different in every opening. In the episode proper, it is always shown as being "For Rent", with a few exceptions (such as in "Burger Wars", where the raccoon sanctuary shown in the opening is apparently still there). Every time the Store Next Door is actually there in the episode, it'll be referenced by one of the characters. In at least two cases, it even directly affects a subplot. The easy implication is that the businesses are forced to shut down regularly, but why isn't clear^note "Seven-tween Again" changes up the usual formula on two accounts—first off, the Store Next Door is occupied in the episode, but by a completely different store than in the opening, which has never been the case before; second off, the business owner states that they'll be changing location not because they're going out of business, but because their rates are too expensive for the neighborhood, suggesting that some of the previous Stores Next Door have simply changed locations without completely being shut down.
  • As of the second season, the ending credits are different for each episode, usually based on some variation of the family working in the restaurant.
  • It's easy to miss, but in the opening, the name of the pest control firm that shows up to exterminate the rats changes every episode from Season 2 onward. For instance, in one Halloween episode, they were bat exterminators.
• Counterfeit Cash: In "Ancient Misbehavin'", a teacher creates a system where kids who participate in class earn clay coins they can exchange for prizes. However, the way she has the desks set up means she can only see half the class at any given time (not helped by her poor eyesight), meaning several students barely end up with any coins. To circumvent this, Louise, Rudy, and Millie start making counterfeit coins. However, the operation has two flaws—they barely participate so they can't use too many coins at once without arousing suspicion (which locks them out of the better prizes, basically defeating the entire point), and it's later revealed that the teacher added a hidden strip of foil in the center of the real coins that the counterfeits lack (which the students aren't told about until after the counterfeits have been in circulation for days).
• Cover Version: Some of the show's musical numbers are short covers of existing songs. See Teddy singing "Beyond the Sea", Tina singing "Just What I Needed" by The Cars, and Bob and Louise singing "Bat Out of Hell" by Meat Loaf for prime examples.
• Crash Course Landing: In "Seaplane!", Linda has to use what little she learned during her one flying class to land the seaplane safely after it becomes airborne as it's being towed to shore.
• Crazy Jealous Guy:
  • Teddy is a platonic example; he becomes extremely possessive whenever Bob hangs out with someone who isn't him. Bob even mentioning that he plans to also sets him off.
  • If there's one consistent way for Jimmy Jr. to ever start liking Tina back, it's when she's going out with someone else, which he never takes well.
• Credits Gag: The scene in the credits with Bob and his kids working in the kitchen is changed to relate to the episode, even being in 8-bit style in "Burgerboss". This was occasionally done in Season 1, but starting in Season 2, it applied to every episode.
• Creepy Child: Louise is more cheerful than most examples, but that doesn't exactly help, given how disturbing her behavior can get.
• Creepy Twins: Andy and Ollie Pesto, who are outright called such on occasion.
  Ollie: I know how everyone's gonna die.
• Crossover:
  • The Season 4 premiere of Archer opens with that show's Sterling Archer suffering from amnesia and thinking he is Bob Belcher (both characters are voiced by H. Jon Benjamin). Linda and the kids make an appearance and are even given the much more detailed Archer art style, though only Linda has any dialogue.
  • Bob has a cameo appearance in the Family Guy episode "The Simpsons Guy".
  • Speaking of The Simpsons, the show proper features the Belchers a few times as well. Aside from the aforementioned cameo in "The Simpsons Guy", the entire family appears in the Couch Gag of "My Way or the Highway to Heaven" (which takes place during the opening sequence), while the final scene of "Treehouse of Horror XXXIII" is set in the restaurant (though only Linda appears).
  • In-universe; the Season 5 premiere sees Gene and Courtney team up to make a crossover musical of Die Hard and Working Girl, called "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl", turning the two stories into a tragic romance between Hans Gruber and Tess McGill.
• Crowd Chant:
  • Gene starts a "fight" chant and gets a crowd going in "Sexy Dance Fighting".
  • In "Bob & Deliver", the Home-Ec students start chanting for Bob to turn on a movie, not helped by Louise's yelling outside. Bob loses it.
    Bob: You're all animals!
  • Linda tries to start one for Tina and Louise in "Speakeasy Rider". She stops after realizing nobody's gonna chant with her.
• Crying at Your Birthday Party: In "House of 1000 Bounces", Regular-Sized Rudy breaks down sobbing in anger because Louise and the others had forced him to go along with stealing a bounce house for his birthday party when all he wanted was to perform a spoon puppet show.
• Cue O'Clock:
  • In "Are You There, Bob? It's Me, Birthday", Hugo tells Bob that it's "health inspection o'clock".
  • In "Dream a Little Bob of Bob", Mr. Fischoeder announces himself by saying that it's "half past rent o'clock."
• Cutting the Knot: In "The Equestranauts," the hotel safe with Tina's Chariot doll is locked with a code that "only the most diehard fan" of The Equestranauts would know. Does Bob open it with the intense knowledge of the show that Tina drilled into him? Does he rely on The Power of Friendship with the more rational fans of the show that he's connected with to provide the answer? No, he just calls the hotel staff and gets them to open it for him.
• Daddy's Girl: Despite everything about her, Louise admires Bob to the point of wanting to take over the family restaurant, is strongly implied to see Bob as her hero, and one of her biggest fears (if not her absolute biggest) is growing apart from him as she gets older. It's even acknowledged by characters in-universe that Louise favors Bob over Linda and likely always will. Their strong bond is the focus of several episodes, is occasionally hinted at in episodes not focusing on the two, and Louise seems to open up most often when she's around her father.
  • "Mother Daughter Laser Razor" deconstructs it. While Louise and Bob have a very close bond, it comes at the cost of Louise neglecting her bond with Linda. Additionally, Linda is not only aware of Louise and Bob's bond, she's jealous of it.
  • To a lesser extent, Tina's bond with Bob has been the focus of a number of episodes. While Louise is shown to look up to Bob the most of the kids, her sarcastic nature means that Tina is the kid most likely to immediately rally to his side.
• Dance-Off: Bob and Teddy take a hip-hop dance class and get challenged to a dance-off by Flips Whitefudge, the teacher's son. As the dance battle begins, Flips hurts himself, so Bob and Teddy win by default before they even make a move.
• Dark Reprise: The Season 4 finale, being a two-parter, has a couple songs in the first half that get significantly more twisted in the second half.
  • In "Wharf Horse", Bob sings a song called "Oh, Nice Things are Nice" to try and convince Mr. Fischoeder to sell the Wharf, singing about how selling the Wharf will improve the lives of both Fischoeder and Bob himself. In "World Wharf II: The Wharfening", Bob sings the song again after he and Fischoeder have been tied up under the pier by Felix—only the song is now "Oh, Bad Things are Bad", and Bob is lamenting his imminent demise while his family desperately looks for him.
  • In "Wharf Horse", Fanny's song "Mr. Dancefloor" is sung twice, the first by herself. After a while, it's sung again with Linda, Mort and Teddy added to the list of singers—and this time, the song is way more intense and frightening, showing scenes of Bob agreeing with Felix, the carousel being destroyed while Tina tries to protect it, and Mr. Fischoeder calling people to the Wonder Wharf. And then there's Fanny singing it a third time in "World Wharf II: The Wharfening". While the song itself isn't too tense in the moment, it should be noted that she's singing it as she holds the Belchers and Fischoeders at gunpoint.
• Deadpan Door Shut: In "Nude Beach", Tommy is singing about his abusive father in the restaurant. Mort starts to open the door, briefly listens to Tommy's singing, and then wordlessly closes the door without changing his neutral expression.
• Deadpan Snarker: All of the Belchers can be prone to this (special mention to Tina for being deadpan in general), but Bob and Louise definitely do this the most. Bob and Louise in particular are prone to snarking together, as shown by Burn Unit (which they play regularly) and even the occasional jab at their own family.
• Debate and Switch: The entire conflict in "Sacred Cow" was solved by said cow almost getting hit by a car and then dying of a cow heart attack.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Most of the Burgers of the Day fall into this, as even when the pun is obvious there's still a little "served with" parenthetical underneath. "New Bacon-ings (served with bacon)", "She's a Super-Leek Burger (Comes with braised leeks)", etc.
  • Mort's line, "I've been murdered... to DEATH!" in "Hamburger Dinner Theater".
  • Linda says she has "'90s Cosmopolitan magazines from the '90s" in "Tina-Rannosaurus Wrecks".
• Designated Villain: In-universe; in "The Frond Files", the kids invoke it by each making Mr. Frond the villain of their creative writing, despite Mr. Frond having not really done anything to deserve their wrath (well, not this time, at least) besides confiscate Gene's keyboard. Deconstructed, however, as Mr. Frond realizes that the kids are doing this because they genuinely hate him, which drives him to tears.
• The Determinator: The Belchers. No matter what happens, their poor luck will not get the best of them.
  Tina: Our family motto is "Maybe we'll get lucky this time."
• Devoured by the Horde: In "The Gayle Tales", in Louise's Game of Thrones inspired story, Lindaryen (Linda) unleashes the Mort-ain (Mort) to fight in the duel against Louise. However, Louise wins the duel by slapping him with her sword and making him fall into the pit of ravenous porcelain babies that eats him alive. When Lindaryen mentions that she should get a new fool as her current fool Bobdor (Bob) isn’t skinny or hot, Bobdor gets angry and throws Lindaryen into the pit, too.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • In "Mutiny on the Windbreaker," Bob tries to get away from Captain Flarty, until Flarty points out that because he's on a ship in the middle of the sea, he can't get far unless he can walk on water.
    Bob: Dammit, you're right!
  • In "Fort Night", Darryl betrays the group during their escape attempt so that Millie will let him outside to use the bathroom. Louise has to outright tell him how stupid he is for thinking that foiling the escape attempt would let him escape.
  • Many of Frond's ideas for Wagstaff (be it a contest to decide the new school anthem or mandatory teacher evaluation forms) are poorly planned. If Frond doesn't directly undermine it himself, the kids are often able to notice loopholes within a minute and remove whatever authority Frond had over the situation. It's lampshaded by both students and Frond's fellow faculty members.
• Different in Every Episode: The Burger of the Day that is posted on the restaurant's blackboard changes every episode. Befitting its name, it will also change during episodes that take place over multiple days^note The current record for a single episode is seven official Burgers of the Day in "They Serve Horses, Don't They?"; "Beefsquatch" features eight pun-based burgers, but five of these are for "Get On Up" and not official Burgers of the Day.
• The Dinnermobile: "Christmas in the Car" sees the Belcher family being menaced on the road by an angry trucker whose rig is shaped like a candy cane.
• Distant Duet: Bob and Linda get a sweet one in "Lindapendant Woman".
• The Ditz: Gene, full stop, although Linda and Tina can occasionally give him a run for his money.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • In "Lobsterfest", the kids act like the titular celebration is a religious holiday, with Louise trying to skip class by claiming her family doesn't observe it. Later they describe what they want Their First Time eating lobster to be like, with Tina planning to save lobster for her wedding, Gene hoping to eat lobster in a hot tub, and Louise wanting to order lobster as her last meal on the electric chair, then use it to stab the executioner's eyes out and escape. When they wind up eating lobster later that episode, Louise tells Tina to pretend at her wedding that it's her first time.
    • From the same episode, it's pretty obvious that when Gretchen described Hugo as having a small "badge" he didn't know how to use, she clearly meant his penis.
  • In "Bad Tina", Bob gets addicted to "caking" (extreme patty cake) and it's portrayed as if it's some weird sex act, complete with Bob trying to get Teddy to do it and Teddy getting freaked out.
  • In "Mother Daughter Laser Razor", Louise talks to her mother about their relationship as if they were a couple.
  • In "Itty Bitty Ditty Committee", the scene where Linda haphazardly tries to shave her armpits and Bob interferes is reminiscent of someone trying to stop a suicide attempt.
  • In "Sit Me Baby One More Time", the Belchers catch Teddy eating at another restaurant. Teddy's reaction sounds as if he's just been caught committing adultery (even saying that the few times he's tried a burger that wasn't Bob's meant nothing to him before breaking down sobbing about betraying Bob).
  • Often, Bob reacts to using another grill as if he's cheating on his old one. He outright spells out the comparison in the 200th episode, likening it to cheating on Linda.
• Don't Explain the Joke: A Burger of the Day named "Child Molester" (it comes with a side order of candy) is disturbing enough without Louise trying to explain the name.
  • Most of the time, the Burger of the Day board has a small "comes with [ingredient]" next to the name of the burger, in case people don't understand the pun.
  • Tina often forgets this, turning an often-already awkward joke into an even more awkward joke.
• Double Entendre: In "Lobsterfest," Louise tells Tina, "When you get married, just pretend it's your first time eating lobster."
• Downer Ending: "Family Fracas" is a mild example. See Karma Houdini for more details.
• Drag Queen: When Bob starts driving a taxi he befriends three of them, and they're portrayed fairly sympathetically. Despite being called transvestites, at least one of them seems to be a pre-op trans woman who hasn't been able to get surgery.
• Drawing Straws: Squickified in "Speakeasy Rider", when the kids turn to plucking the hairs on Gene's back mole.
• Dreadful Musician:
  • Tommy, the health inspector that briefly takes over for Hugo in "Nude Beach", makes music that's a lethal combination of disgusting lyrics ("Elderly Prostitute", anyone?) and a complete lack of actual talent.
  • Subverted with Gene. At first, his love for music seems to only be an excuse to make obnoxious fart-based compositions with his keyboard. Then comes Season 3 (primarily the episode "Topsy"), where it's revealed he's not only capable of making actual music, he's capable of making it good.
• Drop-In Landlord: Mr. Fischoeder, the family's landlord, often shows up to remind the family that the monthly rent is supposed to be paid every month. Typically episodes involving him revolve around some crazy favor he wants in exchange for forgiving a set number of months' collective rent, such as the Belchers pretending to be his family to impress an old flame, Bob being his ringer in a gingerbread house building competition, or the kids being used to pull an Ocean's Eleven style heist on his own fun center.
• Drowning Pit: In "World Wharf II: The Wharfening", Felix ties Bob and Mr. Fischoeder under the pier to let them drown in the rising tide.
• Dub Pronunciation Change: The Italian dub changes the pronounciation of the main characters' last name Belcher from "Bel-chair" to "Bel-care" and the one of Zeke's name from "zeek" to "Zeck".
• Dumb Blonde:
  • Although he's currently bald, "The Deepening" reveals that Teddy's natural hair color is blond. As for the intelligence factor, well...
  • Invoked in "Tina, Tailor, Soldier, Spy". When Linda gets her hair dyed blonde, she starts screwing up orders and her intelligence drops. She goes back to normal once she returns to her black hair color again. However, Bob points out that her hair color isn't directly lowering her intelligence—the reason she's started screwing up more is because she's so obsessed with her new blonde hair it's all she can think about. Thus, her new hair color is causing her screw-ups, but not in the way one might think.
  • Helen Goodwin is a mild version of this, with certain lines showing her true blonde-ness. It's implied that this is just an act to make her seem like an unassuming, friendly woman rather than the Black Widow she very likely is.
  • Jocelyn, and also Tammy (from Season 3 onwards). Jocelyn in particular seems to be pushing Too Dumb to Live levels.
• Dying Declaration of Love: When it looks like they're going to drown in "World Wharf II: The Wharfening", all five Belchers reaffirm their love for each other. Fortunately for them (and no doubt for the audience), they get to live to see another day.
• Dysfunctional Family:
  • Subverted: the Belchers are weird, bicker a lot, and can be outright jerks at times, but it's made consistently clear that they truly love each other, dozens of episodes show just how far they'll go for each other, and even at their worst they never resort to physical or verbal abuse (the farthest anyone goes is Louise regularly slapping people, but she does that to everyone).
  • Played straight regarding the Pestos. Jimmy Sr. is a deadbeat divorcee who neglects all three of his kids, causing Jimmy Jr. to dislike him and also leading to the twins becoming emotionally dependent on each other. This has led to considerable emotional distance between all of them—outside of Andy and Ollie, the Pestos have very few interactions with each other, and even fewer of them are positive.

E-I

• Ear Ache: In "Ear-sy Rider", the One-Eyed Snakes threaten to cut off the ear of a bully named Logan if he didn't return Louise's bunny ears (which he had stolen), and even pull a knife on him. They claim to have just been trying to scare Logan, but Louise clearly intended to have them actually do it and Logan's family certainly thought they would have.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: And that's just putting it lightly:
  • The show's early seasons featured more crude adult humor in an attempt to fit in/compete with the animation landscape of the time which was dominated by "edgy" shows such as Family Guy. Compare the first Christmas episode, in which the third act was dominated by lewd sex store jokes, to the more family friendly Christmas episodes from later seasons such as the "The Plight Before Christmas" where Louise is too embarrassed to admit that she submitted a heart-felt poem to a poetry contest.
  • The kids were more supportive of their father until only Tina's insensitive-but-well meaning compliments to him remained. Louise was the biggest example.
  • The kids were too much into profane stuff (like Gene's recording of his grandparents having sex).
  • Profane stuff was very general until it switched to just weird stuff.
  • Linda mentioned a lot of graphic mental images regarding Bob.
  • Bob was a lot more emotional and direct in the early seasons. He was also more prone to dark humor, much like Louise.
  • Louise's status as an Enfant Terrible was at its most prevalent and random (she would target anyone for the hell of it, even her own family), in contrast to her more controlled but vindictive attitude (she'll still snark at her family, but tends to be kinder in their presence, and ruthlessly pursues anyone who hurts her or her family).
  • In his debut episode, Randy Watkins had a small but noticeable crew to help film his documentaries. Later episodes indicate that Randy operates on his own, playing every role he needs to and in general being far less professional (which really says something).
  • Gene's fart-playing megaphone has since been phased out in favor of his fart-playing keyboard.
  • Linda, Gene, and Louise liked to be almost smiling all the time that they looked like perpetual smilers even in the background. Nowadays, they don't smile as much for the heck of it.
  • Mr. Fischoeder had a black eyepatch in his first appearance, as opposed to his current white one.
  • Peter Pescadero looked completely different◊ on the first season. Compare it with his regular appearance◊ for the rest of the series.
  • In her first appearance, Tammy was a brunette and had a crush on Zeke. Later she dyed her hair blonde and any romantic feelings toward Zeke disappeared.
  • The animation style in Seasons 1, 2 and 3 were wildly different from the series onward. All seasons had more fluid movement and the characters stood in varied poses beyond simply facing forward most of the time, while Season 1 had the mouths curve and move in an odd way. Background characters also looked like they were in a completely different style than the main characters.
  • The first two seasons lacked any Christmas, Halloween, or Thanksgiving episodes. Starting from Season 3, each season has had one of each, with most of them also having a Valentine's Day episode as well.^note Justified in that the first two seasons were mid-season replacements that didn't premiere until after Christmas.
  • The intro is very different in the first two seasons:
    • The intro's animation is much stiffer. The burger Bob holds merely pops up on-screen instead of falling into place. Mort's crematorium and the Store Next Door snap into place, rather than slamming into the restaurant more fluidly. Additionally, several of the Belchers have different poses: Linda doesn't put her arm around Bob, Gene lacks his keyboard and doesn't bounce on the spot, and Louise doesn't strike a pose, leaving Bob and Tina as the only characters who keep the same pose in both intros.
    • At the end of the intro, the camera zooms upwards into the "Grand Re-Re-Re-Opening" sign, as opposed to zooming in towards the burger Bob is holding like in Season 3 onwards. It also pauses once in the middle of the zoom, as opposed to remaining fluid throughout it in Season 3 onwards.
    • The theme song is slightly different from the one used from Season 3 and onwards.
    • The Season 1 intro had the exterminator van, but it didn't change every episode. Throughout all of Season 1, the facility was met by a company called, "Rats All, Folks!" before changing in every episode onwards.
  • The opening credits for the first few episodes used the Comic Sans font instead of the distinctive font used afterwards.
  • Larry Murphy (Teddy's voice actor) wasn't in the opening credits until Season 3. Teddy also wasn't considered a "main" character until Season 3.
  • The credits sequence remained the same throughout the first season (the Belchers working in the kitchen as normal) with no variation aside from what music played. Starting from Season 2, the sequence varies depending on the episode, with several sequences moving away from the kitchen midway through or even leaving it out altogether.
  • The first two episodes of Season 1 had a Running Gag involving Louise changing the "Burger of the Day" name to one of her own choosing, with the resulting name being completely inappropriate. This gag was completely dropped afterwards because the writers realised coming up with regular "Burger of the Day" names was difficult enough already. Bob alludes to it in "Bob Fires the Kids", and in "The Kids Run the Restaurant" a Freeze-Frame Bonus confirms Louise once again changed the burger name after Bob and Linda left for the hospital.
• Easily Forgiven: Initially defied in regards to Felix Fischoeder. After the Season 4 finale involves him trying to drown his brother Calvin and Bob under Wonder Wharf, he has a Heel Realization and becomes a Karma Houdini when the blame for his scheme is placed solely onto his girlfriend Fanny, who continued the scheme when Felix wanted to save Bob and Calvin. Bob, however, outright questions why he's not facing charges, and is very close to just going to the cops and telling them everything. It's played straight in future episodes, but it's arguably justified— it's heavily implied that Calvin paid a lot of money to the Belchers to keep things quiet.
• Eat the Camera: Linda when finding out about independent study in "Synchronized Swimming".
  Linda: Independent [camera instantly zooms into her mouth] whaaaAAAAAAA?!
  • Literally happened in the Bob's Buskers "Sailors In Your Mouth" music video where the Belchers eat the members of The National, who resemble gravy sailors throughout the video.
  Bob Mmm. Man, this gravy is good.
  Linda: I know, right? It's my mother's recipe.
• Eating Pet Food: In "There's No Business Like Mr. Business Business", Tina finds a box of Aunt Gayle's cat food, has a taste, and becomes utterly hooked on it. She then gives some to Gene, who likes it as well and soon both of them are scarfing it down. Then they discover that the box was Linda's, and it's implied that this has been a longtime habit of hers. And then Gayle mentions eating cat food regularly, to nobody's surprise. And then Bob and Louise try a couple bites at the end.
• Eccentric Millionaire: Calvin and Felix Fischoeder, with extra emphasis on the "eccentric" part.
• Either/Or Title: "Wharf Horse" and "World Wharf II: The Wharfening" each have (or How Bob Saves/Destroys the Town) as a subtitle^note "Wharf Horse" specifically has (or How Bob Saves/Destroys the Town—Part I), while "World Wharf II: The Wharfening" specifically has (or How Bob Saves/Destroys the Town—Part II), establishing the episodes as each being one half of a larger story (namely the one-hour Season 4 finale).
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Bob is forcibly given a tattoo of his nose and mustache in "The Equestranauts". Ever since that episode, any shot of Bob's bare back will depict the tattoo.
• Employee of the Month:
  • In "Late Afternoon in the Garden of Bob and Louise", Bob hires Louise's Sitcom Arch-Nemesis Logan to work at the restaurant so Logan's mom Cynthia will give Bob a plot in the community garden. Logan doesn't do anything except make a mess and pick on Louise, but when Louise fights back and Linda escalates the situation further it upsets Cynthia and Bob is forced to give Logan an Employee of the Month award to keep Cynthia happy and avoid losing his garden. Even though she knows the award is meaningless, the gesture still upsets Louise so much that she temporarily quits.
  • In "Driving Big Dummy", Linda and the kids are left working at the restaurant while Bob is away. With a big rush of customers coming in and the kids being as unhelpful as ever, Linda tries to entice them to work harder by offering an Employee of the Day award; the winner gets twenty seconds worth of soft serve ice-cream directly from the machine. The competition later changes to have all of the kids team up against Linda.
• Entertainment Above Their Age:
  • A couple of episodes suggest that Gene and Louise have been secretly watching Game of Thrones. In "An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal", Gene lists "Season premiere of Game of Thrones" among the holidays the kids like more than Thanksgiving, much to Bob's confusion. In "The Gayle Tales", Louise's story is a blatant parody called Gayle of Thrones, though when Bob questions if she's actually watched Game of Thrones, Louise pretends she's never even heard of it.
  • In "The Handyman Can", Louise's story is a Whole-Plot Reference to both Waterworld and Mad Max: Fury Road (the former being PG-13, the latter being rated R), with Louise explicitly citing the latter. She very unconvincingly claims she's never seen Mad Max, especially not by using Linda's password over and over.
  • In nearly every Halloween Episode, Louise's costumes of choice are characters from PG-13 and R-rated movies^note Edward Scissorhands in "Full Bars", the Driver in "Tina & the Real Ghost", Anton Chigurh in "The Wolf of Wharf Street", a dragon with a girl tattoo in "Nightmare On Ocean Avenue Street" (although this is a subversion because for once she actually hasn't seen the movie it's a reference to), The Bjorn Identity in "Pig Trouble in Little Tina", Beetlejuice and Blade Bunner in "Heartbreak Hotel-oween" (Beetlejuice is rated PG, but even that's known for having much more adult content than a PG rating would imply), and Peter Pan's Labyrinth in "The Pumpkinening". Only two of her costumes are age-appropriate—and not only are both of them a costume involving all three Belcher kids^note the dragon from "Fort Night" and the snail from "Heartbreak Hotel-oween", although the kids didn't even use the dragon, but both of them are generic costumes and not movie references.
  • Subverted in "Drumforgiven", when Louise makes a threat likening herself to John Wick, but immediately clarifies that she hasn't actually seen the film:
    Louise: Hey, quick question: you ever see John Wick? ... Well I'm John Wick, and Gene is my puppy. And you're those guys who did something to the puppy, I'm not sure what because I only saw the trailer, but I know enough about it to know that you are gonna pay. PAY!
• Entertainment Below Their Age: In the episode "The Equestranauts", Tina is a fan of the eponymous magical talking horse adventures show, and she and her dad are equally surprised to find there's a massive following of adult male fans who call themselves "Equest-icles". Tina herself also qualifies, given she's a teenager and the show is clearly marketed for kids much younger.
• Epic Fail:
  • When Tina took the car for a spin in a massive parking lot, while driving extremely slowly, there was only one parked car there. Not only that, but Bob was there telling her exactly what to do at every moment. Tina still managed to crash into the car.
  • Gene's attempt to complete a parenting assignment in "O.T.: The Outside Toilet". He near-immediately drops the flour bag representing a child and breaks it open. Then, when he's given a replacement, he drops it and breaks it the second Frond lets go of the bag. He then goes to steal another kid's flour bag... and proceeds to trip over the previous two bags and break the third. Frond just gives him a failing grade and moves on.
  • Jimmy Pesto decides to compete in the titular competition in "Best Burger". As if he weren't already outclassed (he's up against a world-class chef and a man who cooks burgers daily), his burger (which he loaded with oregano and left out under a heating lamp when he finished it ten minutes early) is so bad that it gets spat out in a single bite, giving him last place in a landslide.
• Elephant in the Living Room: Tina having a sad look on her face.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Discussed in-universe in "Bob Belcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Kids". After it's revealed that Hugo started the restaurant fire, Tina is quick to point out that while the kids may not have started the fire as previously thought, the things they did likely only made the fire worse. Louise quickly shuts her up, and overall it works out because Hugo is so unlikeable that nobody exactly feels bad for Ron making him take full responsibility—plus, the kids had already spent the entire episode atoning for what they believed was their fault, so even if they were involved they'd already made up for it.
• Establishing Character Moment: Each of the Belchers get this in the opening scene of the first episode:
  • Bob is giving a pep talk to the family, mentioning past difficulties with the restaurant which establishes him as the no-nonsense business owner determined to pull his struggling business out of the red. There's also the line to his kids "You're my children and I love you but you're all terrible at what you do." Bob forgetting the anniversary also establishes Bob's character as being so focused on the restaurant that it often gets in the way of the rest of his life and responsibilities as a family man, a recurring conflict in future episodes.
  • Linda enthusiastically interrupts Bob's pep talk to drop hints about her and Bob's anniversary which establishes her as the enthusiastic fun-loving one.
  • The first line Tina says in the series is "My crotch is itchy."
  • Gene disrupts Bob's pep talk by making fart noises with his toy megaphone. Bob also reminds Gene to not annoy any mourners from the funeral home next door while giving off samples and that it's not "The Gene Show" outside and there's a line between being entertaining and annoying. This establishes Gene's showmanship, sense of humor, and his constant desire for attention.
  • Louise is told by Bob to not alter his chalkboard and that he's taking away the chalk, of course Louise already has her own chalk on hand. She then proceeds to name the burger of the day "The Child Molester". This establishes her as a rule-breaking prankster with a dark sense of humor who is generally one step ahead of the rest of the family.
• Establishing Series Moment: Bob's monologue in the first episode and Linda's subsequent reassurance establishes the series and characters as always persistent despite the failures in their lives.
• Even Evil Has Standards: A new health inspector dumps rat feces in the restaurant and shuts it down after Bob refuses to allow him to play his disturbing music (one of his songs is called "Elderly Prostitute" and he played it in front of the kids) in the place. This prompts Hugo (who had taken a leave of absence) to return to duty and reopen the restaurant, as not only does he want to be the one to take down Bob, he doesn't want to resort to sabotage to do so.
• Everyone Has Standards: This is basically Louise's character in general. As chaotic and mischievous as she is, there are lines she won't cross. Intentionally harming her friends and family (as opposed to snarking at them or messing with them) is one such line.
• Everything Is an iPod in the Future: In Tina's Flash Forward Imagine Spot in "Can't Buy Me Math", the world that she breaks the news to her grandkids that she is bad at math is very shiny and white. Ditto for her Imagine Spot in "Wag the Song".
• Evil Chef: In the shot after the lunch lady at Wagstaff in "Bob and Deliver" sneaks in the men's bathroom to burn Bob's hands with hot water in the sink, a crow overlooks her forcing him into a car in the parking lot. And that's just two scenes.
• Evolving Credits: The opening credits change in Season 3, and again in Season 13.
  • In the first two seasons, Louise stands still during the intro. Starting in Season 3, she does a "ta-da!" to the camera when she appears. Similarly, Gene stands still in the first two seasons, but has (and uses) his trusty sound effects-playing keyboard from Season 3 onward (and can also be seen bobbing up and down as the opening plays).
  • Season 13's intro is updated to acknowledge the events of The Bob's Burgers Movie. The sinkhole is depicted alongside the other three disasters that befell the restaurant (the fire, infestation, and falling telephone pole), the "grand opening" sign is updated a fourth time as a result of the sinkhole (the same sign was seen at the end of the movie), and the road is shown to have a noticeably darker patch to reference the sinkhole being filled in (also seen at the end of the movie and throughout the season proper).
• Exposition Already Covered: In Season 4 "Purple Rain-Union", after Linda has a nervous breakdown and flees from her high school reunion when her old high school band isn't going her way, Jen the babysitter gives her a Rousing Speech about not worrying about what people will think and do what you love, which gives Linda the courage to return to her reunion. When Linda returns, Bob, who has a huge pimple on his nose, was about to give Linda his own inspirational speech similar to Jen about his worries about his pimple but he was brave to be seen in public and still had fun, but Linda cuts him off and tells him Jen already gave her the inspirational speech and she's fine. Bob didn't mind and he went back to hang out with his new friends, thanks to his pimple.
• Expy:
  • Bob has a similar personality to Tom from Tom Goes to the Mayor as well as Chris from Dan Vs..
  • Louise is Bob's Heloise.
  • Ollie and Andy Pesto are really into each other. Like, a lot. Like Walter and Perry in Home Movies.
  • Tina's very similar to the animated Karl Pilkington with a similar mouth to Beeker.
  • Dr. Yap is very similar to Ben Chang from Community. Both are even played by Ken Jeong.
  • Boo Boo the singer to Justin Bieber and notably Zayn from One Direction, down to leaving his band to pursue a solo career just like the latter (though unlike in Zayn's case, Boo Boo eventually returns).
  • The sleazy insurance agent Chase is essentially just Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He's even played by Bob Odenkirk.
• Eye Scream: Calvin Fischoeder is missing his left eye, which he covers with an eyepatch. A throwaway line in "Ambergris" reveals that his own brother Felix gouged it out, and a decades-old picture of the Fischoeders confirms it was when he was a teenager/young adult at the very oldest.
• The Faceless: The most we have seen of Principal Spoors is a neck-down blue suit in "The Runaway Club".
  • Even after Ginger's two cameos in "Sliding Bobs" and "Clear and Present Ginger", we've never seen her face, as her back is always facing the camera during her few seconds of screentime.
  • Teddy's mother is only shown once, from behind, while riding a scooter in "Loft in Bedslation".
• Faint in Shock:
  • In "Sacred Cow", Bob faints after he witnesses Moolissa's death, resulting in him having a dream about talking to Moolissa on a cloud and kissing him.
  • In "The Kids Run the Restaurant", Bob passes out at the sight of his hand bleeding a bit.
• Faceplanting into Food:
  • During a flashback in "Crawl Space", Al briefly dozes off and faceplants into his breakfast, causing Gloria to shout his name in annoyance.
  • In "The Land Ship", Tina is so exhausted from her nightly graffiti excursions with Jordan that she keeps falling asleep in random times. After she falls asleep in her cereal, a suspicious Louise points out that's the fourth time she's fallen asleep in her food that week. Bob eventually has to hold her head up so she doesn't do it again.
• Faked Food Contaminant: In "A Few 'Gurt Men", a customer pulls this scam on both Bob and Jimmy Pesto, pretending to find a hair in the last bite of his food to get a free meal. They try to get back at the scammer, a celebrity impersonator, by hiring him to perform at a party and then refusing to pay him...only to discover they'd already paid online in order to book the performance.
• Fake Period Excuse: Not quite fake, but according to Tina, one of her classmates actively tried to get her period to skip a test.
• Family Business: The titular Bob's Burgers, ran by the Belcher family. "Carpe Museum" reveals that Louise plans to keep it in the family by inheriting it after Bob retires. When Bob finds out, he's absolutely elated.
  • Big Bob's Diner, the restaurant owned by Bob's father, used to be run by father and son before Bob quit. Unlike many examples of this trope, including Bob's Burgers itself, it's clear that the diner has nobody to inherit it in the event of Big Bob's retirement and/or death, as Bob has no interest and Big Bob doesn't have any other relatives (at least, none who are alive and/or in any position to run a restaurant).
• Fan Community Nickname: All in-universe.
  • Fans of pattycake performance group "Cake" are referred to as "Patty Daddies".
  • Fans of Boyz 4 Now members Allen and Boo-Boo are referred to as Allencoholics and Boo-Boo Boosters, respectively. Teddy is known to be the former, while Louise is quite clearly the latter.
  • Of course, there are the "Equesticles" for adult male fans of The Equestranauts.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father:
  • Bob's father was a workaholic who made his son work all the time instead of playing, leading to him having no friends or even toys. Big Bob realizes it after he drives his son away and shows genuine remorse for it.
  • Jimmy Jr. loves to dance. Jimmy Pesto would rather he do literally anything else.
  • Bob defies it because his father was one—even if he finds something conceptually stupid, he won't stop his kids from doing it unless it harms them, even if that something is atypical or beyond the traditional "norm" (such as Gene becoming a cheerleader). In one episode he's so worried about being this that he fires his kids just so they can enjoy some time away from him... which is then deconstructed in that it doesn't work precisely because he isn't one of these—the kids grow bored being unable to spend time with their father in the restaurant.
• Fauxreigner: The Pestos aren't actually Italian, as implied in "Burger Wars" (their real surname is revealed to be Poplopovich, implying Slavic origins) and eventually confirmed in "Bye Bye Boo Boo" (Jimmy Pesto outright states he wishes he was Italian).
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: In "Tinna-Rannosaurus Wrecks", Tina attempts to drive. She gets so nervous that she says, "Uh..." for thirty seconds straight while slowly swerving back and forth. Even when Bob yells at her to hit the brakes, she ignores him and this results in her colliding into the only other car in the parking lot.
• Feigning Healthiness: In "The Kids Run Away", Louise refuses to allow Dr. Yap to fill in her cavity, so she hides in Gayle's house. Bob and Linda make a deal with her; if she can spend the whole weekend with the annoyingly eccentric Gayle, she won't have to get her cavity filled in. Louise starts to feel the pain of a toothache, but she hides her discomfort and manages to last the weekend. As such, Bob and Linda trick her into eating ice cream so that she'll go to the dentist.
• Female Groin Invincibility: Seemingly averted in "Sit Me Baby One More Time". When Tina and Tammy discover that Kendra's been kicking her classmates in the groin and letting them take the blame for it, Kendra yells that she's going to kick them in the "tinkle-dink". Judging by their panicked reactions (and them using leaves as protective padding), they know it's still gonna be painful for them. She never does get to nail her attacks on them, though.
• Fictional Board Game: Gayle has created a board game called "Gayle Force Winds" and has made her family play it before, though everybody hates it. The game's plot involves Princess Gayle trying to save multiple kingdoms from a witch, but the rules make no sense and the game can just restart from the beginning whenever Gayle feels like it. The kids don't actually finish it, but a throwaway line implies that Bob and Linda have—and they do not have fond memories of it.
• Finger-Snapping Street Gang: Referenced. In the episode "Burger Wars", Linda mentions that the situation with their kids and Jimmy Pesto's is similar to West Side Story. She sings and snaps her fingers like the Jets.
• Fire Alarm Distraction:
  • In "Synchronized Swimming", the Belcher children make up a fake synchronized swimming class to get out of regular gym class. When Mr. Frond demands an actual performance, Louise tries several methods to get the performance cancelled. She tries pulling the fire alarm, but Mr. Frond claims that the swimming pool is the safest place to be during a fire, so no one evacuates before the alarm is found out to be fake.
  • In ["The Runway Club", the students in Saturday detention manage to convince Mr. Frond to let them leave early, so when Principal Spoors shows up to check in on them, Mr. Frond panics and pulls the fire alarm as a distraction while he runs out of the building.
• Flat Joy: Tina is naturally timid, so even at her most excitable, it comes off like this.
• Flight of Romance: In "Seaplane!" Linda's flight instructor is famous for seducing women while in the air, earning the nickname "Upskirt Kurt". However, Linda isn't as susceptible to Kurt's charms. She doesn't even realize what he's doing at first, and when she does realize she refuses to even consider sleeping with Kurt.
• Focus Group Ending: Discussed in-universe in "The Deepening". Teddy reveals that the original ending for the titular movie had the shark die of cancer, but test audiences thought it was too anticlimactic, so they changed it to have the shark suffocated with wet cement.
• Foil: There's enough of them to warrant its own page.
• Follow in My Footsteps:
  • Interestingly, Bob himself doesn't count, but his own father does. Big Bob wanted his son to run Big Bob's Diner with him as a father-son team, even making plans to change the diner's name to Big Bob and Son's Diner. However, while Bob did want to go into the restaurant business, he wanted to do so on his own terms—by getting to create whatever burgers he wanted without the restrictions of a menu or his father's constant criticisms. When Bob revealed this, it caused a massive argument that the two took twenty years to reconcile from.
  • Bob himself is a technical inversion. While he doesn't forbid his kids from taking over the restaurant when he retires, he clearly doesn't expect them to and he seems resigned to that fact. However, one of his kids does plan on inheriting the restaurant in the future—said kid happens to be Louise, something that shocks (and delights) Bob when he finds out.
    • "What About Job?" further expands on his viewpoint, explaining that he doesn't want his kids to feel like they have to take over the restaurant just for the sake of continuing his legacy, and wants them to explore their career options—if they actually want to run the restaurant, that's fine, but if they don't that's fine as well.
• Food as Bribe: In "Burger Wars", Bob intends to do this to convince Mr. Fischoeder to look the other way on rent. While it initially fails when Fischoeder chokes on the burger, at the end of the episode Fischoeder tries Bob's food again and likes it so much that he not only forgoes rent but extends Bob's lease.
• Food Songs Are Funny: Gravy Boat!
• Foolish Husband, Responsible Wife: Inverted with Bob and Linda. Linda is recklessly enthusiastic, tends to be smothering regarding the kids, and is often a Horrible Judge of Character. Bob, however, is pragmatic in regards to difficult situations, can cook burgers quite well, and usually objects to whatever shenanigans Linda's got planned.
• Foot Popping: Tina while stuck in the milk fridge, made easier by her feet already being elevated.
• Foreshadowing:
  • It's very brief, but when Tina mistakenly concludes that Bob and Linda are getting divorced in "Torpedo", the kids' responses (where they each claim a parent's custody) lay the groundwork for the dynamics that are explored in later seasons—Louise, later revealed to be a Daddy's Girl, claims Bob; Gene, later revealed to be a Momma's Boy, claims Linda; Tina, who isn't shown to really favor either parent, is last to go and doesn't actually claim a parent before the conversation gets sidetracked.
  • Throughout Season 12, the sidewalk outside Bob's Burgers gradually gets more cracked and uneven, with later episodes in the season even featuring some background characters tripping over it. This is meant to tie into the movie, with the ruined sidewalk serving as early signs of the massive sinkhole that opens up in front of the restaurant.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: Jimmy Pesto loves Italian culture, to the point of changing his surname to sound more Italian-themed.
• Forgot Their Own Birthday: In the first episode, after Bob realizes that he forgot his and Linda's anniversary, he says that he's not good with dates. A montage of him forgetting important dates shows that he even forgot his own birthday once.
• Forgotten Anniversary: Bob is apparently such a dedicated worker that he not only forgets his and Linda's anniversary, but also Linda's birthday, his own birthday, and the birth of his first child!
• Forgot to Pay the Bill: Or, rather, Linda deliberately didn't pay when she and Bob have an argument in "Lindapendent Woman", causing the power to go out.
• Four-Philosophy Ensemble: The staff of Wagstaff school. Mr. Branca (optimist), Ms. Jacobson (realist), Mr. Ambrose (cynic), Ms. LaBonz/Ms. Schnur/Coach Blevins (apathetic), Mr. Frond (conflicted).
• Framing Device: Often used to set up stories told by the three kids. Every season since Season 4 (with the exception of Season 8) has had one of these kinds of episodes. Another trend starting in Season 11 has one of the kids sit out while either Bob or Linda step in to tell the final story.
  • "The Frond Files" (Season 4): The kids write three stories for a school exhibition, but Frond says they are "inappropriate" and refuses to display them. When Bob and Linda ask why they are "inappropriate," he reads the stories to them.
  • "The Gayle Tales" (Season 5): To get out early from grounding, the kids have to come up with stories about Aunt Gayle.
  • "Sliding Bobs" (Season 6): The kids wonder how Linda and Bob's first meeting would go down if Bob didn't have a mustache.
  • "Mom, Lies and Videotape" (Season 7): After failing to record the kids' Mother's Day performances, the kids come up with completely fictional and improved versions of their crappy plays to Linda.
  • "Bed, Bob and Beyond" (Season 9): After watching part of a movie, the kids take turns telling what they imagine happens next, hoping to improve Bob and Linda's moods, and thus get out of trouble. Notably the first anthology episode to be combined with one of the show's regular holiday episodes, namely Valentine's Day.^note While the previous anthology episode was about Mother's Day, the show only recently started doing Mother's Day episodes, while Valentine's Day episodes, though less consistent than Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, have aired since Season 3.
  • "The Handyman Can" (Season 10): The kids take turns telling Teddy stories to restore his confidence in his handyman abilities.
  • "Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid" (Season 11): Louise, Tina, and Bob take turns comforting a sick and bathroom-ridden Gene on Thanksgiving. This is the second anthology episode to be combined with one of the show's regular holiday episodes, this time Thanksgiving.
  • "Interview with a Pop-pop-pire" (Season 12): Tina prepares to interview Bob's father Big Bob for a school paper. After learning about a time Big Bob was nearly crushed by a tree, Louise, Gene, and Linda take turns recounting their theories on how that happened. The episode differs from the other anthology episodes by introducing a Halfway Plot Switch—while the other anthology episodes keep the stories going until the end, this time Big Bob interrupts things at around the two-thirds mark, with the episode shifting focus to his and Bob's relationship.
  • "What About Job?" (Season 13): When an upcoming career day makes Louise fear that she will have a boring job for the rest of her life, Gene, Tina, and Bob come up with stories of interesting jobs for her.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: During "Mom, Lies and Videotape" Tina faithfully recounts her grade's Mother's Day performance for the sick, and thus unable to attend, Linda. It was a blatant rip-off of Aliens, except Sigourney Weaver's character (named Sigourney) and the alien queen become envious of each other's positions and due to a spatial anomaly they switch bodies/costumes.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Many of the show's Couch Gags, such as the exterminator van and many Burgers of the Day, are only onscreen for two or three seconds at a time.
  • Hugo's surname of Habercore is only briefly seen in a news headline within the first episode, and never mentioned elsewhere.
  • Louise's Christmas wish list in "Bob Rest Ye Gentle-Mannequins". It reads: "1. My own apartment 2. Towels (for apartment) 3. Doll whose head comes off and it's a knife". Only the apartment is directly acknowledged in the episode proper.
  • In the opening titles (starting with the second season), if you look carefully at the pest control van's window, you can see Jimmy Pesto in the reflection. This makes Jimmy the only non-Belcher to appear in the opening.
    • In "The Hauntening," Jimmy Pesto's reflection is instead a skeleton in Jimmy's usual stance and wearing his tie.
  • In "The Equestranauts", Bronconius claims the combination to the safe he's keeping Chariot in is an obscure Equestranauts reference that even Bob, who binged the entire franchise in a weekend, wouldn't know. While we never overtly learn what the combination is (Bob just calls the hotel security to open it for him), earlier in the episode Bronconius opens the safe to show Bob the doll—the combination is 5193, though what it references is unknown and will almost certainly never be revealed.
  • They're only visible in one shot before Mr. Fischoeder guns down Bob's gingerbread house, but in "Last Gingerbread House on the Left," one can see that Bob made miniatures of his family on his gingerbread house's front lawn.◊
  • In "The Ring (But Not Scary)", the kids sneak downstairs in the dark to meet with Nat. In the split-second before the lights turn on, Bob's outline can be seen in the dark, indicating that he's already there waiting for them.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: Several episodes primarily focus on two members of the Belcher family and their relationship with each other independent of the other Belchers. The show has done most of the possible pairings, all except for one—Tina and Gene. While every other pairing has had spotlight^note such as Bob and Louise in "Carpe Museum" and "Hawk & Chick", or Bob and Gene in "L'il Hard Dad" and "The Laser-inth", there has never been an episode whose A-plot focuses on just Tina and Gene^note the closest we get is the second half of "Topsy", when the two continue the titular musical even without Louise's involvement. Second-last is Gene and Louise (with only one episode—"Large Brother, Where Fart Thou?").
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Bob's love of experimenting with food, his Companion Cube habit, his lack of social skills, his Brutal Honesty... hell, pretty much every aspect of Bob as an adult can be explained by how his father was when Bob was a kid—Big Bob was extremely strict, gave Bob no room to explore new ideas, forced Bob to work all summer instead of making friends, and was himself rather blunt with Bob.
  • Similarly, when we see just how horribly Gloria and Al treat their kids, Gayle being a mess of a human being becomes a lot easier to understand (which Bob outright lampshades in "An Incon-Wheelie-ent Truth"). Linda being a Horrible Judge of Character also makes more sense—she fails to see the poor attitude of someone she's known for her entire life, so she won't have an easier time seeing the poor attitude of someone she's just met.
  • Parodied by Mr. Frond in "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl", though not in the typical psychiatrist role, and more as a jab at bad school counselors.
    Mr. Frond: Alright... well, this is the part where I blame the parents.
  • A brief line in "Father of the Bob" reveals that Big Bob's poor treatment of his son can be traced back to the death of his wife, making things tougher on him as a single parent and leading him to make mistakes he might not have made if there were another parent in the household. However, Big Bob himself doesn't use it as an excuse—he makes it clear that he does truly regret how he raised Bob.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Tammy believes she's the most popular kid in school. Aside from Jocelyn, everybody has been shown to barely tolerate her.
• Full Moon Silhouette: Gene does this with a wagon and a hi-tech talking toilet. Bonus points for the episode in general being a Whole-Plot Reference to E.T.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Mort is this.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • "Spaghetti Western And Meatballs" has Mr. Frond's conflict resolution program "A.B.S.": Access your feelings, Be apologetic, Slap it! (referring to giving a high five once the conflict is resolved). Humor is mined from the fact that Frond pronounces the acronym like the abbreviation for "abdominal muscles", resulting in him telling his students to work out their "abs", and at one point offering to show his "abs" to a bemused and disgusted Bob.
  • "Mazel-Tina" mentions "BFOS" (pronounced "bee-foes"): Boys From Other Schools. "Sleeping with the Frenemy" derives this into "BFOT" ("bee-faht"): Boys From Other Towns. The latter episode also has Tammy proclaiming herself as an "OOTGF" ("oot-guf"): Out-of-Town Girlfriend.
  • In "The Millie-Churian Candidate", a power-hungry Millie Frock runs for class president in order to get closer to Louise and become her best friend. If elected, she plans to impose a system called "BESTIES": Buddying up Everyone with Someone To Improve the Experience of School.
    Zeke: That's elegant.
    Tina: She's really good at that stuff.
• Funny Background Event: Happens occasionally, like in the pilot.
  • Every so often, Jimmy Pesto is visible across the street being a dick to Trev.
  • "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" has Tina and Gene getting slapped by Louise repeatedly. Even as the camera pans away from them, the slaps can still be heard.
  • In "Burger Wars", when Bob tries to serve his Meatsiah burgers at Jimmy Pesto's, Teddy can be seen at a table hiding his face so as not to be seen by Bob.
  • "Bob Day Afternoon" has a cop who removes his headphones every time Louise screams into the phone.
  • In "The Kids Run The Restaurant", while Bob and Linda are driving home and Bob's blood is spraying everywhere, a man in the car behind them can be seen looking horrified.
• The Gadfly: If the there's a chance to make their father's life harder, the Belcher children will take it. Louise and Gene especially enjoy saying things to people just to make Bob squirm, whether it be calling him a murderer for making burgers or cheering for distressing news.
• Game Show Appearance: The plot of the first half of "Family Fracas". In the second half, it becomes a Courtroom Episode.
• Gasshole:
  • Gene. Almost every other scene with him will contain a fart joke.
  • Gloria and Tammy.
• Genius Ditz: Bob and Teddy for cooking and mechanics/home repair, respectively. Though Bob isn't so much The Ditz in non-cooking elements as he is generally unskilled or simply average, and is actually shown being quite decent in some areas (such as, of all things, knitting). Teddy, on the other hand...
• Gentle Giant: Teddy.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Louise snaps Linda out of her panic attack like this.
• The Ghost:
  • Ken, Gene's alleged 28 year old albino friend who does improvised hip hop. However, it is often implied by the other characters that Ken is just an imaginary friend, which is confirmed in "Mr. Lonely Farts".
  • The appropriately-named Principal Spoors^note "Spoor" means evidence that an animal has passed by (for example footprints or droppings) without seeing the animal itself.
  • The mayor of Seymour's Bay, who Linda seems to be a fangirl of. In "I Bob Your Pardon" he's conveniently absent due to a Potty Emergency, and in "Yachty or Nice" he's always just offscreen despite being at the same parade the Belchers are attending.
• Girlish Pigtails: In "Slumber Party", Linda throws Louise an unwanted slumber party and wears her hair in pigtails to fit in with the girls.
• Girl Scouts Are Evil: Tina has had a run-in or two with Troop 257, a ruthless group of Thundergirls who have their troop leader cowed into submission and treat cookie sales as Serious Business. Even their own fathers are spineless when it comes to them.
• Girly Run: Linda's run in "Purple Rain-Union" is fairly girly, and her runny makeup really feminizes her in the scene as well.
• Given Name Reveal:
  • The family's surname of Belcher wasn't actually mentioned in the show proper until "Synchronized Swimming", although it'd been used in supplementary material prior to then and the title of "The Belchies" (which predates the aforementioned episode) alludes to it.
  • "Torpedo" reveals the first name of Calvin Fischoeder, while "Synchronized Swimming" reveals the first name of Phillip Frond. Both had gone exclusively by their surnames prior to those respective episodes.
  • In her debut appearance, Nat solely goes by her nickname. The Season 10 premiere confirms her surname to be Kinkle, while "Just The Trip" confirms her full first name to be Natalie.
  • After twelve seasons of mystery, "Sauce Side Story" reveals Linda's maiden name (and by extension the surname of Gayle, Gloria, and Al) to be Genarro^note It also confirms Gloria's maiden name to be Rinaldi.
  • Despite Bob's mother first being mentioned in Season 3, it's not until Season 13's "Show Mama from the Grave" where her name (Lily Belcher) is mentioned for the first time.
• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: In "Dr. Yap", Gayle aggressively pursues a squicked-out Bob, mostly because she's not attracted to a man unless Linda falls in love with him first. As noted, Linda resolves this by pretending to fall in love with her dentist, which sends Gayle after him—All According to Plan.
• GMPC: Gayle's board game, Gayle Force Winds, revolves entirely around a character named Princess Gayle. Given none of the kids' player tokens resemble anything that would represent Princess Gayle, the likeliest explanation is that Princess Gayle is one of these (if the name wasn't already a dead giveaway).
• A God Am I:
  Louise: Voodoo works! I'm a god!
• Going to See the Elephant: In "Stand By Gene", Gene and the other kids head to a farm that has a goat with two butts.
• Gonk: The guy in the pelican suit and the guy in the cotton candy suit.
• Good-Looking Privates: Gretchen is attracted to men in uniform with power positions. And Hugo's got a thermometer.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: In "Beefsquatch", Linda tries to stop a live show by swearing on camera, but none of her "swear words" are anything close to offensive. She then resorts to flashing her breasts, which not only stops the live show but gets it cancelled.
• Green-Eyed Monster: It's implied on more than one occasion that Jimmy Pesto hates Bob so much because he's jealous of his food's high quality. And considering Bob's family is more tight-knit than Jimmy's, it's entirely possible that Jimmy is also jealous of Bob's home life as well.
• Grossout Fakeout: In "Hamburger Dinner Theater", Mort uses fake intestines for the Belchers' murder mystery show. Unfortunately, it looks too realistic and the audience ends up calling the police^note And it turns out they weren't unjustified, as Mort's comments to the cops heavily imply that the blood and organs were real.
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare:
  • In "Sacred Cow", Bob has a few days to make a choice; he will either make Moolissa into a burger or spare his life. He keeps him outside during a rainy night and has a nightmare that he's put on trial for killing Moolissa, and he loses the case. He wakes up and decides to let him sleep inside for the night.
  • In "Friends with Burger-Fits", Bob is feeling remorseful and worried about serving burgers to Teddy, as the latter has informed him that constantly eating burgers has given him high levels of cholesterol. He has a nightmare that Teddy's doctor calls him on the phone, and then a long arm comes out of the receiver. The arm pulls Teddy's heart out of his chest and begins to stuff burgers into it. Bob grows several arms and uncontrollably shoves burgers into Teddy's exposed heart, which grows bigger and bigger. He wakes up in a fright just before Teddy's heart bursts.
• Halloween Episode: Has become par for the course for every season since Season 3. Most of them are opportunities for the kids to show off their knowledge of pop culture and/or puns.
  • "Full Bars" (Season 3): The kids travel to King's Head Island to trick-or-treat in a rich neighborhood and get targeted for hazing by older kids; Linda and Bob go to Teddy's party, only to get caught up in a murder mystery when Teddy's guinea pig gets killed.
  • "Fort Night" (Season 4): The kids, the Pesto twins and Darryl get locked in their box fort by Millie, a girl who's obsessed with becoming Louise's best friend; assuming the kids are off trick-or-treating, Bob and Linda decide to use the costume they were making for the kids to trick-or-treat themselves.
  • "Tina and the Real Ghost" (Season 5): Tina falls for a ghostly teenage boy that they believe to have locked in a box; the ghost attracts business to the restaurant, including a duo of ghost hunters.
  • "The Hauntening" (Season 6): The family tries to scare Louise during Halloween, but things take an unexpectedly dark turn at Bob and Linda's makeshift haunted house.
  • "Teen-a-Witch" (Season 7): Tina becomes a witch to attempt to win a costume contest, while Bob's jack-o-lanterns keep getting stolen.
  • "The Wolf of Wharf Street" (Season 8): Linda and the kids go looking for a wolf on a foggy Halloween night when trick-or-treating turns out to be a bust. Meanwhile, Bob, under the influence of painkillers, thinks Teddy is a werewolf.
  • "Nightmare on Ocean Avenue Street"(Season 9): When Ocean Avenue closes street traffic for Halloween, someone starts stealing the kids' candy; Bob gets dragged into Teddy's decorating war with a rival contractor.
  • "Pig Trouble in Little Tina" (Season 10): Tina is haunted by the ghost of the fetal pig she dissected and recruits her siblings to help get rid of the ghost; Bob struggles with a serious earwax problem.
  • "Heartbreak Hotel-oween" (Season 11): Louise intends to get revenge on a couple for stiffing her on a previous Halloween, but her plan hits a snag when she and her siblings meet an old woman with a dark and mysterious past; Bob goes to donate blood with Linda and Teddy, where things predictably don't go to plan.
  • "The Pumpkinening" (Season 12): Linda and Gayle return to their hometown to confront a misdeed they committed 27 years ago; Bob's Burgers becomes a hit with trick-or-treaters after Bob buys a popular candy brand, but the Belcher kids worry that he'll run out before they can get some for themselves.
• Handsome Lech: Jimmy Pesto is good-looking (as confirmed by Linda, Tina and Hugo) but some episodes suggest that he also has a seedy private life. In "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?", it's revealed that he frequents adult fetish clubs and a comment by Andy on Ollie in "The Unnatural" implies that he also takes dates to sleazy motels ("this is where our dad goes for his naps!").
• Happily Married: At the end of the day, Bob and Linda are this. They occasionally bicker, and Linda can be a bit too energetic for Bob to keep up, but they're just as in love as when they first met.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • The lesson in "Art Crawl" is, "some people are too fragile to be told the truth". Made even funnier by the fact that the episode seemed to be heading towards a more normal "honesty is the best policy" Aesop, but Bob and Linda couldn't go through with it after seeing that it would've caused Gayle to have a Freak Out.
  • A lesson in "A Fish Called Tina" is that sometimes people won't like you for no real reason and still won't even if you actively try to make them like you.
• Has a Type: Tina mentions in "Ain't Miss Debatin'" that she has a thing for boys with speech impediments and/or accents. Which, prior to that same episode introducing Duncan, basically included Jimmy Jr. and nobody else.
• Hash House Lingo: The episode "Bob and Deliver" has the following exchange:
  Gene: Give me a bald Kelly Ripa and a canoe with a brick!
  Zeke: Chicken taco, no sour cream, plus a brownie — you got it.
  Gene: Really? I didn't even know what I meant.
• Hates Their Parent:
  • Louise and Linda were not on great terms for the first few seasons, not helped by Louise's blatant preference of Bob. While her preference of Bob remains, Louise has largely grown out of outright hating her mother, though the two still don't always see eye-to-eye and Louise is far more likely to get annoyed at Linda than she is at any other member of the family.
  • Jimmy Jr. has a lot of resentment towards his father for refusing to let him dance and generally just being a crappy dad. Compare this to Andy and Ollie, who blindly worship Jimmy Sr. despite him being even worse to them than he is to his eldest son.
  • Bob held a lot of resentment towards his father Big Bob for his Control Freak tendencies and refusal to let him enjoy his childhood. Big Bob, for one, deeply regrets his role in this and apologizes to his son. By the end of "Father of the Bob" the two are on better terms, though Bob still expresses displeasure with how Big Bob raised him.
  • Gayle holds a contentious relationship with her mother Gloria, which is primarily because Gloria is an Abusive Parent to both her and Linda. The fact that Gayle actually recognizes Gloria as a crappy parent is a sharp contrast to Linda, who blindly supports her mother even when it's clear she'd be better off cutting ties.
• Heart Symbol: Tina in "My Fuzzy Valentine" in a flash back gets a bad case of these floating around her head.
• Heist Episode:
  • "The Kids Rob a Train" (Season 4): The Belcher kids employ Regular-Sized Rudy in their plan to steal a hoard of chocolate stored in a wine train; Bob and Linda get into it with a snobby wine taster.
  • "The Taking of Funtime One Two Three" (Season 9): Mr. Fischoeder employs the Belcher kids, Pesto kids, Darryl, and Zeke in a plan to win Family Funtime's prized dune buggy; Bob and Linda are given a chicken from Teddy.
  • "Yes Without My Zeke" (Season 9): The kids sneak into school on the weekend to erase toilet paper graffiti and save Zeke from being sent to a reform school; Bob and Linda rent out the restaurant to Randy for his latest filmmaking efforts.
• Helium Speech: In "The Unbearable Like-Likeness of Gene", Tina and Louise start doing this with the balloons at Courtney's birthday party. Tina sneaks one out with her, and Bob asks for a hit of it.
• Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue":
  • A lot of Tina's erotic friend-fiction uses an idealized version of herself as the protagonist. It's most noticeable with "Buttloose" at the end of "Bad Tina".
  • When Gayle explains her overly-complicated board game, Gayle Force Winds, a brief line reveals that the game revolves around none other than one Princess Gayle. Yes, a multiplayer board game where the focus is always on one character. Try not to think about it.
    • Gayle gets it again in "The Gayle Tales", though this time the kids are specifically invoking it because they're trying to appeal to Gayle. Gayle in general seems to not like stories without her as the perfect protagonist.
• Here We Go Again!: Linda spends the entirety of "A-Sprout a Boy" waiting for a delivery of Alaskan salmon that Teddy ordered, having to watch out for it during a very specific timeframe. When the salmon finally arrives, Teddy reveals he ordered ribs to thank the Belchers for helping him... ribs that Linda is going to have to spend even more time watching out for.
• Heroic BSoD: A downplayed example in Louise. She has been picking the lock on Tina's diary for years, so when called on to help Gene break back into the house he was sleeping over at, she finds the skills translate over into the real world. The look on her face just sells it, as she seems to realize that no door can keep her out now. You can almost hear the gears turning.
  Louise: (Door opens to reveal Louise with lockpicks in hand) So, I guess I can do that now!
• Hidden Heart of Gold: A literal example in "The Belchies". One of the taffy dummies, designed to stop intruders and terrify them, is befriended by Louise and used to get her out of danger. Turns out the hidden treasure was a gold bar hidden in the chest of the dummy.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Bob has a habit of, both, willingly and unwillingly wrecking any chance the restaurant has at succeeding. In season six alone (in back-to-back episodes no less), a childhood friend and a historian presented Bob with opportunities to make the restaurant popular and he rejected both of them.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: In-universe; substitute teacher Dinkler (from "Topsy") views Thomas Edison as a heroic figure to be admired, and intends to have students write a science fair report about how great Edison was. This is, of course, ignoring Thomas Edison's history of electrocuting animals, which Dinkler is not only aware of, but outright ignores just so his hero's image can remain untarnished.
• Historical In-Joke: The Thomas Edison-centric "Topsy" features a scowling Nikola Tesla as a Funny Background Event during the end credits. Tesla and Edison had a very public rivalry during their lifetimes.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Near the end of "Bad Tina", Tammy was defeated by farting too much.
• Homage:
  • In "Art Crawl", to Dumbos Pink Elephants on Parade with "BUTTS, BUTTS, BUTTS, BUTTS..."
  • Bob's dream in "An Indecent Thanksgiving Proposal" spoofs My Neighbor Totoro.
  • "Full Bars" features a few nods to The Warriors, including lawyer-friendly musical quotes, and a "come out to playy-aayy!" delivered by the "Hell Hunt" teens.
  • The last act of "Moody Foodie" ably apes Reservoir Dogs.
  • A Spaghetti Western with a banjo-wielding gunfighter? It's been done.
  • The three stories in "The Frond Files" parody The Terminator (with a hint of Jurassic Park), Rock 'n' Roll High School and zombie movies in general, respectively.
  • "The Belchies" was inspired by The Goonies complete with a theme song performed by none other than Cyndi Lauper herself.
  • In "The Unnatural", Tina goes through caffeine withdrawal and hallucinates a porcelain baby with Jimmy Jr.'s face crawling on the walls, a la Trainspotting.
  • In "Mazel Tina", Tammy's video introduction at her Bat Mitzvah was an homage to the opening titles and theme song to the TV show Blossom.
  • The final number of "Work Hard or Die Trying, Girl" looks just like "Seasons of Love"
  • A graphic with some cinematic allusions in the show can be found here.◊
  • At the end of "The Kids Run the Restaurant", Linda performs a copyright infringement friendly "Anything Goes" tune accompanied by dancing sailors.
  • "O.T.: The Outside Toilet" inspired by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
  • The singer at the festival in "Food Truckin" is a parody of Tori Amos.
  • "The Quirk-Ducers" is inspired by The Producers, complete with a Springtime for Hitler gambit.
• Hollywood Density: Somehow characters managed to carry a taffy dummy around and not notice that it was stuffed with gold bars. While Bob could probably chalk it up to a person-sized dummy naturally being heavy, it's a wonder Louise (and Gene for a brief moment) was able to carry Taff at all.
• Honor Before Reason: If Bob can't make his restaurant successful based solely on the quality of his burgers, and without resorting to any gimmicks, he would rather live in Perpetual Poverty, as seen in "Pro Tiki/Con Tiki".
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Glitter, Marbles, and Cha-Cha from "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?", as well as Marshmallow (though her profession isn't mentioned past her debut episode).
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Tina lusts for everything from Jimmy Pesto's son to zombies.
  "Is it possible to be in love with twenty-five people at once?"
• Humans Are Bastards: "The Oeder Games" grapples with this theme. Most of the townspeople are perfectly willing to engage in a water balloon fight to get their rent deducted, and when the going gets tough they're willing to betray any alliances they might have made to save themselves. By the end of the episode, they decide to stand with Bob after Linda convinces them through a Shaming the Mob speech.
• Human Shield: Discussed by Tina when she and Gene are both used as them in "Slumber Party".
  Tina: Gene, is this your first time as a human shield?
  Gene: Yeah!
  Tina: It's my third time. You're doing great.
  • In "The Oeder Games", Jimmy Pesto uses Andy and Ollie as body armor, with one twin covering his front and the other covering his back.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Sergeant Bosco claims he's part of a secret society that does this during Linda's impromptu speed dating. It's never made clear if he's joking or not.
• Hustler: Mr. Fischoeder is revealed to be one in "The Kids Run the Restaurant". He loses a few hundred on games like Surgery Sam to let the kids' guards down... and proceeds to win five thousand dollars on rock-paper-scissors, forcing Bob to intervene to avoid paying him.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: In general, this tends to sum up Louise's character. Only she mocks her family and gets away with it.
  • In "Bad Tina", Gene and Louise blackmail Tina into doing their chores. Then they find out her school frenemy is blackmailing her into getting into trouble. Suffice it to say that Tammy now has them to contend with.
  • Louise consistently mocks her family's cooking throughout the series. In "Sleeping With the Frenemy", when Tammy acts as if the Belchers' cooking is beneath her, Louise responds with an Implied Death Threat.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • In "The Belchies", after Tina invites Jimmy Jr. without asking, Jimmy Jr. brings his friend Zeke, leading to this exchange.
    Tina: Zeke?! Jimmy Jr., you don't just invite someone without asking!
    Louise: Yeah! Yeah! We're in agreement on that Tina!
    Tina: Okay, good.
  • Tina has another hypocritical moment in "Carpe Museum" where she calls Henry Haber's robot-themed graphic novel dorky, despite being an avid writer of erotic fanfiction. She even considers making a robot fanfiction after this.
  Tina: (thinking) Robots? That does give me an idea for my next erotic fanfiction: "Ro-Butts!"
• I Am Not Shazam: In-universe; Teddy thinks Bob's surname is "Burgers" because of the name of his restaurant. This is first revealed in "O.T.: The Outside Toilet" and every so often it's revealed that he still thinks that even after Bob tells him otherwise.
• Ice-Cream Koan: Teddy creates an inspirational poster that reads "Today is tomorrow's yesterday". Think about it for a second.
• Iconic Item: Louise is never seen without her pink bunny ears hat. When they get taken from her by a bully in "Ear-sy Rider," she wears a hoodie until she gets them back.
• Iconic Sequel Character: Much of the series's recurring cast debuted after the first season, such as:
  • Season 2: Jimmy Jr.'s best friend Zeke, Affably Evil bank robber Mickey, incompetent police sergeant Bosco, gaming nerd Darryl, Casanova Wannabe Dr. Yap, and Alpha Bitch Tammy Larsen.
  • Season 3: The obnoxious Logan and Cynthia Bush, Gene's rival/love interest Courtney Wheeler, Boy Band Boyz 4 Now, and Louise's partner-in-crime/Only Friend Regular-Sized Rudy.
  • Season 4: Calvin Fischoeder's younger brother Felix and Louise's Stalker without a Crush Millie Frock.
• Idiot Ball: Frequently with Linda and the kids. Particularly in "Christmas in the Car", when they do all sorts of idiotic things, including buying a Christmas tree the day after Halloween, pissing off other drivers by trying to play "Jingle Bells" on the car horn, and tickling Bob while he's driving.
  • In "Mr. Lonely Farts", Gene freaks out when he's left home alone. He tries to call Linda only to find her flip phone vibrating under the couch cushions. He then tries to call Bob but can't read his number off the fridge because the numbers are smudged. He never once thinks to use Linda's phone to look up Bob's number and call him.
• Ignorant About Fire:
  • In "Hamburger Dinner Theater", during the series of flashbacks showing Tina's Performance Anxiety, Tina is shown calling 911 and being too nervous to tell the operator that the kitchen is on fire.
    911 operator: 911, what is your emergency?
    Tina: Uh...
    Bob: [bursts out of the kitchen] Tina! Help!
    Tina: Uh... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...
  • In "Bob Belcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Kids", none of the characters know much about fire safety. Gene uses a crimping iron, but he leaves it turned on and plugged into the wall, and the kitchen is set alight. It's revealed later on in the episode that Louise accidentally made the fire worse by leaving a bunch of sparklers lying out and Tina left a fan in front of the iron, which literally fanned the flames. At the end, however, the real culprit is revealed to be Hugo, who, during his inspection the previous day, threw a bunch of greasy rags on the floor; Bob found most of them but missed one under the stove, and it ignited during the night.
• I Have No Son!: Jimmy Pesto likes to think Jimmy Jr. and his twins don't exist because of how they have a dubious career choice/are nutcases. It's one of the things that further contrasts him with Bob (whose children also have atypical interests and can be even more off-kilter, yet are treated with love and respect in contrast to the Pesto kids).
• I Have This Friend:
  • How Bob tries to get advice from Fischoeder in "Torpedo", but he just divulges it anyway.
  • Rudy attempts it in "The Fresh Princ-Ipal", but everything he mentions about this "friend" is so specific (asthmatic whose parents are divorced) he could not be talking about anyone other than himself. He eventually admits it.
• I Know You Know I Know: In the episode "Radio No You Don't," Bob is telling the story of how his grandmother Alice suspected a spy was living in her appartnemnt during World War II. When she noticed bird poop on her neighbor Mr. Miller's shoe, she knew he was on the roof sending radio signals, then she began to panic, but attempted to hide her distress from Mr. Miller, acting oddly as a a result. The kids, who Bob is telling the story to, then begin engaging in this trope, wondering if Mr. Miller knows that Alice knows he is the spy.
• Illegal Gambling Den: In "The Kids Run the Restaurant", Linda has to take Bob to the hospital to get a nasty cut stitched up. In their absence, the Belcher kids start an underground casino in the basement of the restaurant called the "Meat Grinder".
• Imaginary Friend:
  • Gene's "friend" Ken, a 28-year-old albino who does improvised hip-hop. For a long time, the show never outright stated whether Ken was real or imaginary (though everyone around Gene seemed to believe the latter), but "Mr. Lonely Farts" seems to have definitively confirmed that Ken truly is imaginary.
  • Gene also has another imaginary friend, Antonio, who "covers" some of Gene's shifts at the restaurant and believes Bob killed his father.
  • Tina has an imaginary horse named Jericho. Quite a bit of Cringe Comedy occurs from Tina "riding" Jericho in front of others.
  • Linda also states that she used to have an imaginary friend who stole all her make-up from her. It's not clear if this is a case of a Not-So-Imaginary Friend or she just misplaced her make-up a lot.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The restaurant doesn't actually serve human flesh, of course. But rumors that it does attract the attention of a club for "adventurous eaters".
  • The original concept for the series had the Belchers actually use human meat in their burgers. It's not clear if they eat the meat as well or if they only serve it to others (not that either way is any less horrific than the other).
• I'm Standing Right Here: In "Family Fracas", Jimmy Pesto refers to Trev as the son he wishes he had. As if that weren't bad enough, he says it right in front of Jimmy Jr. and the Pesto twins—and on live TV.
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • Gene bears quite the resemblance to his voice actor Eugene Mirman.
  • Tina is Dan Mintz, right down to the monotone and glasses (it helps that Mintz uses his natural voice to play Tina), and used to be even more like Dan in the original pilot.
  • Mr. Frond looks very much like David Herman, especially when he's wearing glasses.
  • Josh, Tina's temporary love interest in Season 3, looks like Ben Schwartz with lighter brown hair.
  • Fred Stroller's inksuit guest character, Sal the sex shop owner, in "Bob Rest Ye Merry Gentle-Mannequins"
  • In "Family Fracas", Harry uncannily resembles his voice actor, Daran Norris.
  • Bob's high school friend Warren Fitzgerald looks a lot like his voice actor, Chris Parnell.
• Innocently Insensitive: While they're a family that cares a great deal for each other, much of the show's humor comes from the fact that few people make life more difficult for Bob than his own family. In spite of this, they do all care for each other in their own weird way, and they don't mean to be as mean to him as they are.
• Insistent Terminology: As Bob puts it, Marshmallow isn't handsome, she's beautiful. Considering Marshmallow is trans, this distinction is justified (and, based on Marshmallow's reaction, quite appreciated).
• In Spite of a Nail: While Tina's story in "Sliding Bobs" is a what-if scenario regarding Linda marrying Hugo, the Habercores retain some consistencies with the Belchers (primarily in terms of physical appearance). Namely, Dean is still just as chubby as Gene, Mona still wears glasses like Tina, and Charlize still shares Louise's need to have a hat covering her head (in her case, a princess cone hat rather than a bunny ears hat). Charlize and Louise are also both very fond of their respective fathers (although Charlize is way, way more open about it than Louise).
• Instrument of Murder: The titular Anti-Hero in Banjo has an instrument (guess which one) that shoots bullets.
• Intentional Mess Making:
  • In "Art Crawl", Bob draws "anuses" (read: black dots) on the paintings in Edith's store Reflections.
  • In "Broadcast Wagstaff School News":
    • The main plot is Tina trying to find out the identity of the Mad Pooper, who keeps defecating in the school. Tammy intentionally takes a dump in the library while dressed as Tina to make it seem like she is the Mad Pooper.
    • During the climax, Zeke reveals that he was the Mad Pooper. The first time he soiled himself was an accident, but he did it for fun in some of the following incidents (although a couple more accidents happened as well), and eventually does it to help Tina's journalism.
  • In "Topsy", Mr. Dinkler accidentally-on-purpose knocks Louise's papier-mâché volcano out of her hands and stomps all over it.
  • In "Glued, Where's My Bob?", Tina, Louise and Gene prank each other by putting sticky stuff in random places so that one of them will touch it by accident. This results in Bob getting glued to a toilet.
• Intercourse with You:
  • In "Food Truckin'", there's a hippie singer named Tabitha Johansson who claims to be singing about oil spills, but she's really singing about her vagina. It's not subtle. The fact that she seems to be orgasming while singing doesn't help (nor does the fact that she's rubbing her crotch on the piano bench).
  Tabitha: Oh it's hot and wet and slick / And it's making everybody sick / Oil spill / Oil spill / Oil spill
  Bob: Ugh, you were right. It's not subtle.
  • Tommy's music in "Nude Beach", which is either about sex or his abusive father. That said, Tommy's music doesn't come across as seductive or hot—it comes across as immature at best.
• Irony:
  • The one time Bob actually does something that could get him shut down (illegally selling homebrewed beer in "Speakeasy Rider"), Hugo is called out for harassing Bob and forced to back off under threat of being fired.
  • Louise is a mini-Linda in appearance and base personality. Guess which parent she likes the least.
  • As much as Hugo hates Bob for marrying Linda, Hugo himself is responsible for helping bring the two together—the engagement ring he gave Linda got stuck in Bob's mustache, and Linda fell in love with him when she got a good look at him while trying to untangle it.
• Irritation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Louise's fan/stalker Millie Frock.
• Island Help Message: Linda goes for a flying lesson in the "Seaplane!" episode and it turns out that the instructor likes to fake an emergency landing near a remote island then seduce his female students with a picnic of wine and cheese that just so happens to have. After the seaplane floats off, Linda makes a help message out of the wine bottles that he left from his previous visits.
  Linda: Sheesh, this island's seen a lot of "emergency landings".
• Is That the Best You Can Do?: After a tree branch and powerline fall in "Lobsterfest", Bob shouts, "Is that all you got, storm?" He is then hit in the face with wind chimes.
• It Amused Me: Many of Louise's antics stem from this. As Linda says, "She likes to play tricks on people she thinks are stupider than her". Sometimes she'll play tricks on people she knows aren't stupid, seemingly just to see what she can get away with.
• It's All About Me: Linda tends to lapse into this.
  • In "Hamburger Dinner Theater", she gets mad at Bob for calling the cops on someone who robbed the restaurant and held them at gunpoint, all because he happened to make her dinner theater popular.
  • In "Boywatch", she initially plans to unplug the router because nobody is paying attention to her, even though giving out the wifi password has been extremely good for Bob's business.
  • In general, Linda tends not to punish the kids for anything unless their actions specifically affect her (see "The Gayle Tales"). Granted, Bob rarely punishes them either, but it's especially noticeable given how loose on discipline Linda is overall.
  • Whereas Linda will only occasionally show shades of this, Tammy Larsen has it as her main character trait. Especially noticeable given more than one character is willing to point out that it's really not all about her.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: In Pro Tiki/Con Tiki, Bob's best friend from high school, Warren, is the guest of the week. Warren is played by H. Jon Benjamin's Archer costar, Chris Parnell, a.k.a. Cyril Figgis.

J-N

• "Jaws" Attack Parody: In "The Deepening", it's revealed that a movie with a similar plot was filmed in town years ago (Teddy even had a minor role in it), and Mr. Fischoeder buys the mechanical shark from the movie as an attraction for Wonder Wharf. The Belcher kids play with it and it turns on and falls on its side, sending it wriggling across the block. The residents treat it as if it were a real shark attacking, and it's up to Bob to stop it.
  • The episode overall makes a lot of Jaws references. Teddy attempts to recreate the Nails on a Blackboard scene (failing because he doesn't have nails) and at one point Teddy says "We're gonna need a bigger restaurant", which Bob actually calls him out on.
• Jerkass:
  • Hugo Habercore and Jimmy Pesto Sr., especially to Bob.
  • Linda was a naggy jerk in most of Season 1, but Characterization Marches On for her from Season 2 onwards.
  • Teddy in Full Bars, though he's justifiably on-edge due to Bob accidentally killing his guinea pig he had for years.
  • Bob's own children (less so Tina) tend to really undermine his authority and almost never root for him in his endeavors unless it benefits one of their crazy schemes.
  • Steve's son Xander, who's a shameless pickpocket enamored with Tina.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The Belcher kids, especially Louise, are rude and disruptive (less so Tina, but it's still there on occasion). However, even though they regularly disrespect (or, in Louise's case, outright mock) their father, they still love him dearly and will show it. In particular, Louise's poor attitude towards Bob is a cover for the fact that she not only loves him, but outright idolizes him.
• Jewish Mother: While her religion is apparently Catholic (she takes Eucharist), Linda has a lot of traits of this trope^note John Roberts, who voices Linda, is Jewish and claims to have based his performance on his own mother. Assuming Linda is (or at least was) Jewish, this trope could also apply to her mother Gloria.
• Jump Scare: The intro to "Fort Night". The image itself isn't scary, but it comes out of nowhere.
• Just One More Level!: Bob goes through this when they buy a "Burger Boss" arcade game, but mainly because he was trying to beat Jimmy Pesto's high score, because Jimmy entered the initials "BOB SUX". When Linda takes it away, he has to go with his kids to an old-fashioned arcade to beat the score.
• Kafka Komedy: Several episodes revolve around Bob suffering a ton of abuse through no fault of his own, with the entire world (whether they're rivals like Jimmy or Hugo, random one-time characters or even his own family - particularly Louise during her worst moments) ranging from actively making his life hell to being completely unsympathetic towards him.
• Karma Houdini:
  • In "Family Fracas", Jimmy Pesto, Chuck and the Channel 13 station owner conspire to keep the Belchers from winning the Game Show, complete with the station owner destroying evidence of their scheming on camera. The only comeuppance for any of them is when Bob makes fun of Jimmy for not knowing how to change a tire on his new minivan (which the Belchers should have won). Originally, the Belchers were supposed to spray Jimmy Pesto with Silly String as revenge, but Loren Bouchard thought it would come off as petty and out of character, so he dropped it. Either way, both endings would have had their share of irate fans.
    • Even then, when Bob teases Jimmy about the tire, the rest of his family chides him for being immature and pressures him into helping him change it. Can't Get Away with Nuthin'.
  • Unless one counts being treated as a perpetual Butt-Monkey for the rest of the series as karma, Felix Fischoeder faces no consequences for his actions in the Season 4 finale, even though Bob outright lampshades he should've been sent to prison. Justified; his brother Calvin kept him out of legal trouble by pinning his actions on Felix's accomplice, and it's implied Calvin also paid the Belchers a lot of money to keep quiet.
  • Overall, as the seasons go on, antagonists tend to get away with tormenting/screwing with the Belchers without comeuppance. That said, they will just as often get karma of some kind.
  • Bob will never punish his kids no matter what they do, and Linda tends to only punish them for things that affect her.
• Karmic Butt-Monkey: Mr. Frond is an egotistical Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who doesn't care about the students, with his sole motive for helping them being clout. As such, no one respects him, especially the Belcher kids, who frequently prank him or otherwise treat him poorly (such as in "The Frond Files", where they write stories, and each one of them cast him in an unflattering light). While he suffers quite a lot throughout the series, it's hard to argue that he doesn't deserve at least a little of it. In fact, it's not just the students—even the adults don't like him. Bob in particular hates him even more than Gene and Tina, and arguably as much as Louise does.
• Kitsch Collection: Linda's porcelain babies.
• Kitschy Local Commercial: Bob makes one to air during the Super Bowl in "Easy Commercial, Easy Go-mercial".

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