Characters / It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Frank Reynolds

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Main Character Index
The Gang (Dennis Reynolds, Dee Reynolds, Charlie Kelly, Mac, Frank Reynolds) | The Gang's Families | Recurring Characters | Other Characters

Franklin "Frank" Reynolds

"Can I offer you a nice egg in this trying time?"

Played By: Danny DeVito, Michael Shaktah (young, "Psycho Pete Returns"), Farley Jackson (dream, "The Gang Turns Black")

Debut: "Charlie Gets Crippled"

"I don't know how many years on this earth I got left. I'm gonna get real weird with it."

The legal father of twins Dennis and Dee, and possibly the biological father of his roommate Charlie. He used to be a successful businessman with a long history of illegal operations and dealings with sordid characters, but chose to abandon that life and redeem himself after leaving his money-grabbing, cheating wife. He now shares a tiny, filthy studio apartment with Charlie, where they share a pullout couch.

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A-M

• Abusive Parent: He was a terrible father who relentlessly emotionally tortured Dennis and Dee. This continues in the series, as he participates in the usual bullying of Dee that the gang does and takes any opportunity to mess with Dennis, but is actually a relatively positive figure to Charlie, who may or may not be his biological son. Frank still continues to be close to him after finding out in Season 15 that he isn't.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: The way he says "whores" sounds more like "hoors".
• Actor Allusion: Frank's horrible makeup job in "Frank's Little Beauties" causes him to resemble the Penguin, which is one of Danny DeVito's most famous roles.
• Affably Evil: One of the most pleasant members of the Gang, and arguably the highest-functioning. While Dennis, Dee and Mac are manipulative and Charlie can fly off the handle at a moment's notice, Frank just wants to have fun.
• Affluent Ascetic: Unlike the rest of the Gang who have to endure problems typically found with lower and middle-class people, their schemes being ways of moving up in the social and financial ladder, Frank is already rich and can join high society any time he wants. He does not however, feeling most comfortable as a sleazy Con Man living in squalor and financing the Gang's zany and legally sketchy schemes solely for the thrill of it.
• Allergic to Routine: Just sitting around a bar all day bores the shit out of him, and he’ll usually jump at any scheme the Gang has, especially if it involves the chance of money.
• Ambiguously Bi: Frank and Charlie have a bizarre relationship. In one episode he believes that Charlie is dead and makes a mannequin of him. Charlie claims that he saw Frank "banging that thing."
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: When he’s choking to death in a restaurant, nobody bothers to help him. Charlie is annoyed that Frank interrupted him, Mac is an Extreme Doormat who waits for Dennis' order to save him, Dee looks excited at the prospect of her father dying, and Dennis looks outright apathetic, as if telling Frank, "You can let go now." Contrast to even Dee at the end of the episode, who Dennis demands Mac help her from choking.
• Animal Motifs: He was known as the "Warthog" during his days as a CEO. Frank's rotund, slovenly appearance, disgusting personality, and filthy living habits make the comparison to the infamously grotesque-looking pig animal quite appropriate.
• And Starring: "And Danny DeVito as Frank Reynolds".
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Frank's - in the words of Dennis - "seemingly infinite wealth" allows the Gang to do whatever crazy scheme they want without having to worry about money. However, his vow to live a life of depravity means that he only uses his money to finance zany schemes, and he otherwise lives in complete squalor with Charlie and acts like a major tightwad.
• Archnemesis Dad:
  • To Dennis; the two often battle for dominance in the Gang, and Frank is openly disturbed by his adopted son.
  • To Dee as well, as she helps Dennis roofie him with her “magic beans”, and has on multiple occasions admitted to feeling excited for when he dies.
• At Least I Admit It: While his younger companions are all to varying degrees delusional about who they are as people, Frank openly and proudly admits that he considers himself to be scum. In the book, he fully admits he’s an alcoholic sociopath wasting his life in a dive bar.
• A-Team Firing: Whenever he fires his gun, he never really manages to hit anything. Justified by his own admission that his eyesight is bad.
• Ax-Crazy: He will pull out his gun and fire wildly into the air at the slightest provocation... or just no provocation.
• Bad Boss: He used to run sweatshops in Vietnam. His management tactics haven't changed much since buying Paddy's Pub. When trying to run a clothing shop like he did his sweat shops, he tells Mac you have to break the workers down like they’re dogs.
• Bald of Evil: He's bald and a Depraved Dwarf.
• Been There, Shaped History:
  • Claims to have played a role in the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident. Season 15 reveals him to have been the reason for Rudy Giuliani's hair dye running in the 2020 election.
  • "Storm of the Century" also shows he took part in the Rodney King riots, though only minorly.
  • He was on Jeffrey Epstein's Island, although only for the snorkeling (he was unaware about the pedophilia).
• Big Eater: He can really pack it away. He's so obsessed with food that he has a fetish for it.
• Blood Knight:
  • He seems pretty happy doing water torture and also wanted to kill a serial killer in the episode "Mac is a Serial Killer."
  • The very violent Gang thinks he’s too much, with his game ideas being random horror scenarios (that turn into a parody of Saw with them all handcuffed in the basement) and acts of violence.
• Brutal Honesty: In "The Gang Dines Out", Frank attempts to tip the hostess at a restaurant by placing a $100 bill in her cleavage, despite her resistance:
  Hostess: Um... you can just hand that to me.
  Frank: I was trying to feel your breast.
  [Beat]
  Hostess: ... I got that.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Psychotic as he may be, Frank is genuinely competent as an underhanded businessman, which, compared to the rest of the Gang, makes him come off as something of a sage.
• Can't Bathe Without a Weapon: He always brings a gun with him to the bathroom, for safety when he's "at his most vulnerable".
• Card-Carrying Villain: Openly and gleefully a selfish, perverted, manipulative, bigoted scumbag, with no pretensions as to being anything else. This somehow comes across as an improvement over the rest of the gang, who are also selfish, perverted, manipulative, bigoted scumbags but spend their time futility insisting they're not.
• Casting Gag: Frank is a greedy, gun-happy, cutthroat Republican businessman. Danny DeVito is a Bernie Sanders-supporting progressive who's consistently endorsed him in all of his runs for public office and has frequently been a campaign surrogate for him, in addition to his philanthropy for small theatres.
• Catchphrase:
  • Repeatedly says "What's the action?" in Season 2 and "Bigtime!" in Season 5.
  • Frank will often say, "I got a guy" whenever the Gang requires outside help with some shady action, like taking out a life insurance policy on Bill Ponderosa.
• Celebrity Paradox: During the '80s, Frank was in business with Tony Danza, Danny DeVito's co-star from Taxi.
• Character Check: Played with in "Frank Falls Out the Window," where Frank's titular incident leaves him with an injury that erases his recollection of the last 10 years of his life. Frank is seen revisiting his short-lived "new leaf" behavior from Season 2, where he weakly attempts being a morally upright father figure, before his time spent with the gang steers him back towards his deeply entrenched depravity. In this sense, the real "Character Check" is Frank behaving the way that we've come to expect him to.
• Characterisation Click Moment: Charlie Day believes they really found Frank in “Mac and Charlie Die” (though “The Gang Gets Whacked” is very close) as he’s more angry business guy in the first two seasons he’s in, but then he becomes an oddly loveable yet weird as hell sex maniac with no boundaries.
• Characterization Marches On: Frank's introduction in the second season sees him as a successful but very corrupt business man and an actual functional adult in society. His involvement with the Gang, and particularly becoming roommates with Charlie, has seen Frank become more depraved and suffer Sanity Slippage.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Frank has no problem selling anyone down the river... friends, Good Samaritans, business associates, even (actually, especially) his own children.
• Cloudcuckoolander: More so as the series progresses. He participates in some of Charlie's weird activities involving bridges, boiling denim, and many other things.
• Combat Pragmatist: He never hesitates to use dirty tricks in a fight, which is why he generally wins them.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Before retirement, Frank was an experienced businessman who was physically incapable of running his company in an honest and ethical manner.
  Frank: You have to earn what you get. This principle made me a multi-millionaire.
  Dee: No, no. Stealing millions of dollars from your ex-business partner made you a millionaire, Frank.
• The Corrupter: Dennis - with varying degrees of gratitude or frustration - calls Frank out repeatedly on how his terrible parenting has turned him (and Dee, but if Frank is torturing just her he’s usually happy) into monsters. Frank never admits it, though Danny Devito has had a laugh over Frank being an Evil Mentor to them both.
• Creepy Crossdresser: Dee gets him to dress up in her blackface Sassy Black Woman character, and the effect is not helped by Frank retching from clams everywhere.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Frank is completely insane and apparently totally illogical, but he did make millions through dirty deals and is an expert manipulator. The best example might be "Gun Fever Too: Still Hot." Frank goes on TV and describes how he was mugged, thanking the guns he always carries for saving him. He proceeds to whip all of Philly into a frenzy over their Second Amendment rights, appearing on radio and television programs and urging them to buy firearms from Gunther's Guns. At the end of the episode—and after he's arranged a huge gun rights march on City Hall—Frank reveals that he doesn't care about the Second Amendment at all; he bought a stake in Gunther's and brilliantly played on everyone's fears and insecurities to make himself a fortune. The episode ends with him preparing to pull the same scheme with a water filter he's recently invested in.
  • On a lesser note, he is a better physical fighter than most of the Gang. In "Hundred Dollar Baby", he knocks out two professional boxers, and in "The Gang Wrestles for the Troops", he knocks out Cricket, who had already defeated most of the Gang, with a trash can.
• A Day in the Limelight:
  • "Frank's Brother" is a Whole Episode Flashback revolving around the decades-long feud between Frank and his brother, Gino.
  • "Being Frank" is shown entirely from his perspective and depicts what a typical day in his life might look like.
• Defiled Forever: Variation, as he thought he was “damaged goods” after the nitwit school, so slept around constantly to “prove” that he wasn’t such a bad egg after all.
• Depraved Dwarf: Frank is both vertically challenged and a total bastard.
• Dirty Old Man: Frank has no problems groping women or trying to look up their skirts (with mirrors he's attached to his crocs). He also hires prostitutes and has a food fetish. Frank is the oldest member of the Gang and the lewdest, at least in public. He's pushing eighty by the time of Season 16, and has a threesome with Gail and Artemis in the bathroom of a bowling alley.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: In "The Gang Goes to a Water Park", he pretends to have AIDS so he can cut to the front of the line on all the rides.
• Disease Bleach: His hair turns white in "Frank Retires" due to excessive blood loss.
  • He actually states that he forgot to dye his hair, though this was likely due to the blood loss. In "Being Frank" and "2020: A Year in Review", he is shown to dye his hair black, and that his hair is naturally white.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Because they were making fun of him for losing it, he gets the twins to believe their mom is really alive so they can dig her up and see her dead body. Dennis is a sobbing mess and Dee is disgusted and pissed.
  • When Frank gets increasingly pissed off at Charlie and Dee for eating the meat in his fridge, he serves them raccoon meat, telling them they ate human meat. This causes Dee and Charlie to develop tapeworms, while also making them crave the flesh of other humans.
  • In the billboard contest, because Dennis had called him ugly, he lets him do the modelling competition and acts like a Dirty Old Man humiliating him specifically until Dennis quits.
  • Played with in “The Gang Solves The Gas Crisis”, as Dee was planning to kill him for inheritance, but he waterboards her for entirely different reasons. And Dennis doesn’t help because he’s been told Dee is still planning to kill him (which she isn’t).
• Do Not Go Gentle: He wants to go out in a fun way, not die in a hospital bed.
• The Dreaded: Before his arrival in the show proper, Dee gets a call that he wants to see her and Dennis, and they both flee as fast as possible. Early season two they’d both rather go to jail or get addicted to crack than work with him (again, in Dennis’s case).
• Driven to Suicide: He tries hanging himself twice in "The Great Recession". Both times it becomes a Bungled Suicide.
• Drives Like Crazy: Frank is a terrible driver. He fails to recognize this, and he blames at least one accident he caused on Asian drivers.
• Drop-In Character: Several episodes begin with him kicking off the plot by announcing something while walking into the bar.
• Drowning My Sorrows: His method for dealing with trauma or ptsd is “stuff it down with some brown”.
• Entitled to Have You: While Dennis is the one placed as the pissy husband with Dee getting an abortion/hair-cut, Frank also gets overly angry when she decides to do it, even offering her a car if she doesn’t get her hair cut. While the others Blatant Lies at the end they don’t actually care, he admits he still does.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first scene really sums him up, telling the twins their mom is dead, letting them be horrified and then saying they’re just getting divorced, followed by Never My Fault but also wanting to be better.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Season 15 goes out of its way to show that Frank really does care about Charlie as if he were his own son.
  • Extends to all of the Gang; he's an awful father to Dennis and Dee but his whole reason for getting involved in their lives was that he cares about them on some level, and unlike Mac's dad and Charlie's biological father, he was at least present for them if nothing else; and in "Mac Finds His Pride", he cries and gives a standing ovation during Mac's performance.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Despite his ludicrous levels of degeneracy and cruelty, he's absolutely opposed to Dennis and Mac hunting Rickety Cricket in "Mac and Dennis: Manhunters." Why this specific sociopathic scheme bothers him isn't particularly clear, unless he really can't tell the difference between his life and John Rambo's.
  • He is not a 'kid diddler' as he puts it. He opposes dousing a 12 year old in a wet T-shirt contest, and jumps in the way so he gets soaked instead. He is uncomfortable at the prospect of hosting a talent show for children and it is clear that he doesn't want to be seen as pedophilic. But he doesn't do himself any favors when he says that definitely not attracted to the contestants.
  • While he makes all kinds of racist comments and seems to believe stereotypes, he's not as bigoted as his ex-wife; at the very least, he respects his children's Mexican nannies enough to acknowledge the work they did and condemn his wife for exploiting them; and the love of his young life was a Black woman, who he seemed to love for herself rather than any type of fetishization.
  • Although he has no problem using virtually any illicit substance that crosses his path, he thinks that only the true bottom of the barrel sells drugs, according to "The Gang Gets Whacked."
  • He's the only one who insists that Cricket is taken to a hospital, after his hand's been shot.
  • He by his own admission doesn't "get the whole gay thing", but even before Mac comes out he admits he's known he was gay since the day he met him and in "The Gang Misses the Boat" offers to wingman him in finding a man.
  • He's disgusted at the very notion of Dennis and Dee having sex as he considers incest (with a blood relative, at least) to be too perverted even for him.
  • In "Frank Reynolds' Little Beauties" he states that it's his personal policy to never sleep with anyone younger than his daughter. Keep in mind Dee isn't a blood relative.
  • "The Gang Goes to Ireland" reveals he was in business with Jeffrey Epstein and actually went to his private island, but only for the snorkeling and (by his admission) didn't know about the sexual crimes against minors.
  • Frank overall seems to have morals and understand what it takes to be a good person, and is often appalled at the actions of others (despite consciously deciding to be scum himself).
  • While he’s obliviously sexually abusive to his kids, he didn’t nurture dependence like Barbara did, and he’s actually pretty uncomfortable when Dee lets everyone know about Ms Klinsky. In the book, he explains that he really doesn’t want to fuck either Dennis or Dee even when they’re asking for it, just exploit them for all their worth and they’re both whores anyway.
  • He’ll use every dirty trick in the book to increase his fortune, but he’s not into cryptocurrency.
• Evil Mentor:
  • Plays this to Mac whenever they share a plot together, such as teaching him how to run a sweat shop.
  • Dennis admits, in a twisted heartwarming moment, that it was Frank's amorality and neglect that helped shape him into the machevelian monster that he is today.
• Evil Parents Want Good Kids: While he’s just as bad as they are, if not worse, he gets creeped out by Dee and Dennis, and wants to be better for the relatively nicer Charlie.
• Evil Sounds Raspy: He's a scumbag who has Danny DeVito's signature raspy voice.
• Executive Excess: Already an abusive, greedy and transparently criminal businessman (to the point it seems the majority of his wealth came from embezzlement, tax fraud and multiple illegal ventures rather than actual work), Frank Reynolds is likewise a massive hedonist who regularly sleeps with prostitutes, openly does multiple drugs and flat out refuses to spend his vast fortune on anything other than enabling the Gang's insane and depraved schemes. It's best demonstrated in "Franks Back In Business" when he's temporarily called out of semi-retirement in the hope of saving his company, Frank instead blows money on outrageous purchases such as eating sushi off a naked prostitute rather than actually trying to save the company.
• Expansion Pack Past: Frank has lived a full life, to say the least. Details about his shady past are revealed so often that it's practically a Running Gag.
  • In 1961, he was a boxer called "Frankie Fast Hands".
  • In a moment of hysteria, he mentions that he played a major role in the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969. He also attended Woodstock that same year, and got locked in the bathroom of his cousin's Winnebago for three days.
  • After shooting a Black Panther in the early '70s, he spent the better part of a decade hiding out in Colombia working for his brother Gino's cocaine business.
  • In the '80s, he had an apricot business with Greg Louganis and a canned oyster business with Tony Danza.
  • In 1986, he was banned from skiing in the Poconos for thirty years.
  • In 1992, he took part in the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
  • In 1993, he opened a sweatshop in Vietnam that resulted in the deaths of several people.
  • In the 2010s, he was in business with Jeffrey Epstein, who was the official supplier for Frank's Fluids.
• Expository Hairstyle Change:
  • As the seasons go on, Frank's hair becomes increasingly longer and unkempt, symbolizing his descent into insanity.
  • In Seasons 14 and 15, his hair is once again shorter, and he also behaves much more coherently compared to the middle seasons.
• Extreme Omnisexual: He mentions being attracted to pumas and notes that things got "very sexual" with manatees when he went snorkling on Jeffrey Epstein's island.
• Extreme Omnivore: He doesn't deny the possibility of newspaper, credit card fragments, and wolf hair being in his stool in "Who Pooped the Bed?".
• Face Death with Dignity: When he believes that Dennis and Dee are preparing to kill him after spending an entire day letting him do whatever he wanted in "Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang", he shows no resistence, contentedly states that the time was probably right, and thanks them for not doing it in front of Charlie. True to his character, though, he is adamant that they can do whatever they want with his corpse once he's gone.
• Fat Bastard: One of the biggest bastards of the Gang, and is played by Danny DeVito who is fairly overweight.
• Fat Slob: Frank's a rather heavy set guy with disgusting eating habits.
• Fetish: Has a food fetish. He has a fling with Artemis in "The Waitress is Getting Married." They put Bacon Bits in her hair to "make her feel like a Cobb Salad." This is also hinted at in "Mac & Charlie Die Part 2." when Frank and Dennis go to an orgy, and all Frank does is eat. In "Who Got Dee Pregnant" Artemis and Frank experimented with food while having crazy loud sex in a dumpster.
• Financial Abuse: He admits he loves forcing his kids to depend on him for money.
• Flanderization:
  • His behavior has steadily become more and more wild and depraved. Possibly justified, in that he joined the Gang in order to leave behind his successful-businessman lifestyle and embrace hedonism full-on instead, so has become progressively more addicted to any and all sorts of vice he can get his hands on, and more lost in his own life of depravity. "Being Frank" also heavily implies that he's dying from a malignant brain tumor, which may have something to do with his increasingly erratic behavior.
  • In "Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad" he suffers a minor stroke, which could have started the decline of his mental health.
  • Taken up to eleven in "Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang", where his behavior becomes downright dog-like, to the point of peeing on fire hydrants.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: He wears glasses and is a repulsive human being. Fittingly, he switches to more thick-rimmed glasses as he becomes more depraved.
• Friend in the Black Market: As an ex-businessman with a long history of dirty dealings, Frank claims to have "a guy" for just about anything the Gang might ever need.
• Freudian Excuse: He was institutionalized as a kid, and the resulting traumatic experiences probably contributed to his highly unstable personality. In the book he has Abusive Parents of his own: a sonofabitch father who taught him no matter how much you hit your kids they’ll grow up disappointments, and a mom who was his “first love”. He also grew up very poor, so he gets money any way he can because he thinks it solves everything, and the Gang should appreciate him because he always bails them out.
• Funny Flashback Haircut: Played for Laughs when we see a flashback to Frank at 19 years old... played by Danny DeVito and looking exactly as he does in the present day, only with an obvious toupee slapped on.
• Genius Bruiser: While he's old and crazy, he's also tough and deceptively crafty.
• Gonk: The already rather strange-looking Danny DeVito goes out of his way to make himself appear as bizarre as humanly possible. Frank, who is barely half as tall as the rest of the cast, obese to the point of being egg-shaped, and balding with only a few scraggly tufts of hair, resembles a troll about as much as a person possibly can.
• A Good Way to Die: By the fourteenth season, he's pretty much fine dying so long as it doesn't involve choking, spending his last moments on Earth in a hospital bed, or being raped to death. In Season 16, he thinks that Dennis and Dee are planning to kill him and is okay with it.
• The Grinch: He's been deliberately ruining Christmas for Dennis and Dee since they were children.
• Gun Nut: He loves to pull out his gun and according to "Reynolds vs. Reynolds: The Cereal Defense", he has several guns without a permit.
• Has a Type: He’ll hit on any woman, but he really seems to be a Chubby Chaser. He has an on-again off-again romance with Big Beautiful Woman Artemis, and admits in the book that Dee would be hotter if she had more meat on her bones.
• The Hedonist: See Dirty Old Man, Fetish, Ax-Crazy, Blood Knight, and Extreme Omnivore. He gave up his wealthy lifestyle for the sake of doing all the depraved things he wants to. He kept the money, though.
• He-Man Woman Hater: Solely blames Barbara for everything wrong in his family, joins in on bullying Dee and even when he’s pimping her out still complains at her for not being pretty enough, and has sexually harassed countless secretaries.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Charlie. Few others would tolerate the squalor they live in together, but more than that they each enthusiastically support each other's weird habits (like sewer scavenging), have their own traditions and games (like Nightcrawlers) and rely on each other to be able to explain their joint weirdness which is pretty much incomprehensible to anyone else, the rest of the Gang included. When he finds out Charlie was trying to poison him in "The Gang Chokes", he's genuinely hurt. When Charlie experiences a personality change in "Flowers for Charlie," Frank expresses significant concern for Charlie. Frank even pays the Waitress $500 to hang out with Charlie to try to snap him out of it.
• Hidden Depths:
  • On multiple occasions Frank has shown a genuine appreciation for art, including Mac's interpretive dance in "Mac Finds His Pride."
  • "The Gang Inflates" reveals him to be Good with Numbers and capable of performing precise calculations in his head in seconds. While it isn't that surprising, considering his long history as a crooked businessman, it's still rather shocking considering his usual behavior and declining mental faculties.
• Hope Crusher: Takes great joy in crushing his stepchildren, even going as far to find out what they want for Christmas as kids and then filming their faces as they get nothing.
• Human Traffickers: Kinda damningly, Cricket (really Charlie) wouldn’t put it past Frank to run underage girls, but in this instance he really is just running cherries. He’s also far too into trying to break Dennis down to be a prostitute, telling him he’s got nothing else, and is pissed off when he’s thinking for himself again.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Before joining the Gang, he was a crooked businessman whose schemes actually succeeded. As a result, he is hands down the most competent and knowledgeable of the Gang at cheating people, but generally chooses to take a back seat to the rest of the group as he enjoys doing their incredibly depraved and ridiculous schemes more than he does doing one that would actually work.
• Hypocrite:
  • Buys Dee's and Dennis's dream gifts for himself for Christmas every year in a twisted attempt to teach them that you have to earn what you get, a principle Frank claims made him a millionaire. Dee immediately points out that what made him a millionaire was embezzling from his partner.
  • Him constantly calling his wife a hooer - sorry, whore - is rather ironic given he frequently cheated on her with his secretaries and prostitutes.
  • His upset reaction to his wife's cheating becomes this after the reveal that he and Charlie's mother had an affair.
  • Frank believes selling drugs is scummy and “lowest of the low”. Selling his stepchildren as prostitutes, though? Perfectly okay.
• I Banged Your Mom: He's had sex with Charlie's mom in the past (leading Charlie to think that Frank might be his father). The two have an ongoing affair that resurfaces whenever they meet up, much to Charlie's disgust.
• I Love the Dead: On two occasions he's stated that he doesn't care what happens to his corpse. In "Frank's Little Beauties," he says that he'd have no problem with someone having sex with his corpse.
• Iconic Sequel Character: He isn't introduced until the Season 2 premiere, but put someone in front of the TV who's heard of but never seen the show before, and start them on the first season, and they're guaranteed to ask "Where's Danny DeVito?"
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: Plants a baby monitor in a man's apartment in "The Gang Solves The Gas Crisis."
• Insufferable Imbecile: While somewhat more mature and crafty compared to the others (a number of his schemes actually end up working), Frank is a depraved, greedy, lecherous, bigoted hedonist who openly brags about his corrupt business practices, is uncaring toward the suffering of his own children, and holds onto hopelessly outdated views. When asked what his own company makes, Frank reveals he doesn't know or care (or even seem to understand the concept) beyond that it makes money, and sees being a CEO as bullying your employees, stealing money and blowing cash on hookers and drugs.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Frank is old enough to be the father of the other main characters (and kind of is in the case of Dennis and Dee) but is considered one of the Gang and is Heterosexual Life-Partners with his roommate, Charlie.
• Irony: Spends far more time with Dennis and Dee as a member of the Gang than he ever did in their youth as their parent.
• Jabba Table Manners: Anytime Frank is shown eating, it's a given he'll be as sloppy as possible. One key moment being when he eats pistachios whole and spits out the shells.
• It Amused Me: Keeping with Frank's hedonistic desire to "get real weird" with his remaining life, he's more willing to indulge in morbid or mundane activies that the rest of the gang aren't interested in. These include hanging out under the bridge and wearing a gull's skull around his neck for life, with the same nonplussed justification.
  Frank: I dunno, it could be cool.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While he does in fact enable the Gang and make them worse, he’s right that they were plenty weird and scheming before he came along.
• Kavorka Man: Considering he's quite the Gonk, he's done pretty well for himself even without using his money and is the only character to have a consensual, on-going relationship (with Artemis).
• Kissing Cousins:
  • Frank hooks up with his ex-wife's sister's daughter. They're not blood-related, but she's still his niece. Though he describes it as "awful," he still was willing to accept a handjob from her later in "The Gang Squashes Their Beefs."
  • He specifically does this when he's trying to achieve the most depraved behavior possible. Originally, he wanted to bang his dead wife's sister (at her husband's funeral) but Mac convinced Frank that going after his own niece would be even more twisted.
• Knows a Guy Who Knows a Guy: Lampshaded in the first episode of season four, as “he’s got a guy for everything”.
• Lack of Empathy: Not quite as bad as Dennis, but it's there. He has no problem with running a sweatshop, and is even willing to feed his employees the cooked bodies of their coworkers who died from exhaustion. He also casually admits to having shot a few people who tried to steal shoes from the factory, and feels nothing at all about it. Even his moral code seems to be more based on pragmatism or a sense of rule-following than it does any feelings towards other people. His epiphany in the Christmas episode wasn't "you're hurting your friends"; but rather "if you keep hurting your friends, they'll kill you; so be nice to them." The only things that seem to unlock genuine empathy from him are works of art like paintings or interpretive dance and Charlie.
• Lecherous Stepparent: While he's not intentionally sexually abusive with Dennis and Dee, he has zero boundaries with either of them.
  • If there is any truth to “The Gang Buys A Roller Rink”, he let Dennis watch him have sex with a prostitute, tries to kiss him when Charlie has rejected Frank in favour of his actual father, he joins in sexually dominating the sex doll to work out his issues with his stepson, Dee is concerned that they bathe together, and in “The Gang Gets Whacked”, is eager to turn him into an Extreme Doormat hooker. The podcast for the latter outright calls it grooming, the joke being that Frank is able to break Dennis down in just a couple of days.
  • He and Dee pose as an engaged couple, and even go as far as getting married. Although Dee isn't Frank's biological daughter, it's still creepy. In "The Gang Recycles Their Trash", he tries to pimp her out again, pissing her off, and they both end up with ripped clothes. Dee points out one time that for some reason beyond her grasp, her stepfather is talking to her about his cock ring.
• Les Collaborateurs: It's implied that he collaborated with the Nazis for his businesses. Old films showed that Dennis and Dee were unknowingly part of a neo-Nazi summer camp as children (through their grandfather on their mother's side). In the games, Frank's flag resembles a swastika, something he claims that was supposed to be 4 Fs and didn't realize the implication but Dennis doesn't believe him. But it's worth mentioning that he didn't get along with Pop-Pop, who turned out to be a literal SS officer.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Than his ex-wife, Barbara. Frank engages in prejudiced behaviors and flaunts his wealth, but he's willing to acknowledge and respect poor and minority individuals in a way Barbara doesn't; and while he's an awful father to his kids, he at least doesn't belittle them at every opportunity like Barbara does to Dee.
• Like an Old Married Couple: He and Charlie get frequent jokes on behaving and arguing like a married couple, to the point where they do actually get married for a couple of days in season six.
• Like Father, Like Son: "The Gang Dines Out" and "The Gang Escapes" both show Frank and Dennis (not his biological son, but he thought so for all his childhood) expressing the same twisted ideas of how to be "dominant". He and Dennis are also both sex addicts who hook up with multiple women, and they're the two members of the Gang most likely to be a semi-competent leader.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: His mother coddled him and was “his first love”, with Frank constantly sleeping with women that reminded him of her. He then married Barbara, who at best treated their son Dennis like he was a husband.
• Luke, I Might Be Your Father: In the finale of Season 2, it is revealed that Frank might be Charlie's real father, though he denies it and the plotline is mostly dropped after the Season 3 premiere. Charlie's paternity is repeatedly mentioned in Season 10, where the Gang reveals that they intentionally avoided confirming it after all this time due to it being "too much of a hassle". Charlie takes some interest by trying to have Frank's DNA tested, but the results are inconclusive. In Season 15, Charlie meets an Irishman claiming to be his father and the plotline is seemingly resolved, with Charlie embracing Frank as his father of choice after the man dies from COVID-19.
• Made of Iron: He falls out of a second-story window and lands on his head. Frank somehow manages to remain conscious during the entire ordeal.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Frank is a very shady business man. One time, he brought up the whole gun regulations debate up because he made a deal with a gun company and then decided to do the same thing with clean drinking water.
  • Manages to scramble Dennis’s brain completely in “The Gang Gets Whacked” (until Mac gets him thinking for himself again), paying a busboy to poke his narcissism, letting him think he’s just going to have dates with old women until removing that rule and going “straight to banging”, denying he set up assplay when in reality he did, being in the same room when Dennis is stripping for a client, hitting him when he tries to resist but promising protection, and using his Weight Woe against him. Also applies to “Roller Rink”, as he has Dennis as a meek "Well Done, Son" Guy until the guy complains about Frank having sex in front of him.
  • In “The Gang Hits The Slopes”, has set the whole thing up including the race and sex workers so he could frack the place.
• Messy Hair: His balding hair starts out combed down but as he joined the Gang and the seasons went on, his hair becomes noticeably disheveled, likely to match his depravity.
• Miniature Senior Citizens: Due to being played by the famously 4'10" Danny DeVito.
• Mirror Character: It’s been said multiple times in podcast and interviews that Frank is who the rest of the Gang will all grow into thanks to refusing any opportunity to evolve and inability to get better.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: In "Frank Reynolds' Little Beauties". Frank gets offered to host a beauty pageant and agrees. So he can see some hot chicks. But it turns out to be a children's beauty pageant and the original host was a pedophile. So he starts to get worried people might think he's a pedophile. As the Gang points out, his obsessive attempts to try and prove he's not a pedophile just made him seem more suspicious.
• Momma's Boy: Resents his dad, but deemed it “traumatic” when his mom Tina wanted him to stop breast-feeding.
• My Girl Is a Slut: As uncomfortable as he is by Dennis’s sexual exploits (slutty kind or rapist kind, despite being the latter himself), he’ll still use them if he can benefit in some way, and when trying to prove to a kid that Frank can get him laid, wants Dennis to prove that he can still sleep around.

N-Z

• Near-Death Experience:
  • He crashes his Lamborghini in "A Very Sunny Christmas". To get the Gang to show up at the hospital he asks the doctors to tell them he actually did die.
  • He almost chokes to death in "The Gang Chokes". His life is saved by the Waiter, while the rest of the Gang look on either apathetic (Dennis), excited (Dee) or confused (Charlie and Mac).
  • To determine whether Frank is Charlie's father, the rest of the gang covertly steal multiple quarts of his blood, within what might be a single day, for DNA tests in "Frank Retires". His hair and skin turn ashen gray, his voice is left a gurgling rasp, and he becomes so frail and enfeebled that he loses bowel control and has to use a mobility scooter.
• Never My Fault:
  • Both Dennis and Dee are annoyed by his propensity to pimp them out. His response is to tell them they’re already whores, so he might as well get money for it. He also refuses any responsibility for how they’ve turned out, as even the podcast talks about how the twins could have been far better people if they’d had decent parents.
  Frank: I know I’ve been a lousy dad, and there’s only one person to blame for that: your whore mother.
  • When his stepdaughter is approaching suicidal depression, the most he can come up with his “we realise we may have some potential responsibility for the state you’re in.” and devises a plan with Mac and Charlie to “teach her a lesson” anyway.
• Nightmare Fetishist: When told he would have to wear the skull of a seagull that he killed for the rest of his life to ward off bad luck, Frank takes it in stride, commenting that it "could be cool."
• No OSHA Compliance: Implied to be the case with the Vietnamese sweatshop he opened in 1993, as he claims a lot of good people died there.
• Noble Demon: One of the biggest things that sets him apart from the other four. While Frank doesn't have much in the way of empathy, he has a distinct moral code that he generally tries to follow to some degree.
• Not Actually His Child:
  • "Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad" has Frank finding out, while out to dinner with his ex-wife Barbara, that Dennis and Dee aren't actually his children and Barbara had an affair with a man named Bruce Mathis during their marriage, then tricked Frank into raising the twins anyway. This inevitably leads to a meltdown in the middle of the restaurant, where Frank goes around asking random strangers if they had "banged his whore wife" before having a stroke and collapsing.
  • At the end of the same episode, Frank finds out his roommate Charlie might actually be his son instead. It's mostly dropped after the Season 3 premiere, however, and as seasons go on neither of them seem all that interested in finding out the truth. Frank's relationship with Charlie nevertheless evolves into a paternal one, and a few episodes show that Frank does in fact consider Charlie to be the son he always wanted. Season 15 reveals once and for all that Frank isn't actually Charlie's father either.
• Not Helping Your Case: In "Frank's Little Beauties", his attempts to avoid looking like a child diddler just end up making him look worse.
• Obsessed with Food: While the rest of his family has eating disorders, Frank has no problem, even going to the point of having a food fetish.
• Older Sidekick: While he's the eldest member of the group and provides much of the capital needed for its schemes, he typically follows the lead of its other members. Ironically, Mac sees him as the muscle of the team.
• Only Sane Employee: In Season 2, when he buys the bar, he actually puts effort into making it a thriving business and berates his kids for not running it well. It doesn't last.
• Operation: Jealousy: In Ireland, when Charlie prefers his actual dad, his first option of a plan to get him back is to use Dennis as his romantic son stand-in… thing. It’s a hard no from Dennis.
• Out of Focus: Similar to Dee, Frank is less front-and-center in Season 14 than in previous seasons, and has fewer independent storylines as a result.
• Parental Neglect: Joins right in on bullying Dee with the rest of the male gang, deflecting from his own faults by calling her a bird, she gets killed in his save the day fantasy too, and tends to only interact with his stepkids when they can be useful to him. Dennis outright calls him out on either being terrible or never around. He actively wants to be a better parental figure to Charlie though.
• Parents as People: Frank is terrible, obliviously sexually abusive to his kids, and refuses to admit that neither Dee nor Dennis were born evil, but he wants to be better, even if he doesn’t know how, is hurt that they think of him as a monster, and is the best husbandfather for Charlie out of a bad lot.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Occasionally dons these, with a dash of Bavarian Fire Drill for good measure. Surprisingly, they usually work.
  • In "Thunder Gun Express," he pretends to be a tour boat captain by running on to the boat when the real skipper leaves and stealing it.
  • His recurring persona of "Dr. Mantis Toboggan" includes wearing a shirt and tie and declaring that Dennis has HIV.
  • In one episode, he passes himself off as "Ongo Gablogian," an Andy Warhol-esque Caustic Critic and stereotypical avant-garde artist, by wearing a black turtleneck, pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and long white wig.
• Parental Substitute: A twisted one for Mac and Charlie, particularly the latter, who didn't have father figures growing up. He tends to act more fatherly when dealing with them than he does when dealing with his legal children Dennis and Dee.
• The Peeping Tom: Both to get out of it and put Dee on the spot, he as Seamus claims he gets off by watching her masturbate.
• Pervert Dad: They're not his actual kids, he draws the line at blood relative incest, but he has no issue pimping out Dennis or pretending Dee is his partner.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Assures a humiliated Charlie that his musical was very good after the Waitress refused his marriage proposal in front of the audience. Note that Mac, Dennis, and Dee were unconcerned as usual. This fits well with how far over the deep end he went when he thought Charlie was dead, going to the point of carrying around a dummy of him. He's also the only one of the gang who doesn't try to hog the spotlight and make Charlie's play about himself, just trying to play the part that Charlie gave him the best he can (minus his genuine pronunciation issues).
  • After his Near-Death Experience in "A Very Sunny Christmas", Frank has a change of heart and surprises the gang by giving them all the gifts they wanted. True, they all get stolen by his ex-business partner Eugene a moment later, but it's still a nice gesture.
  • He's also consistently the member of the Gang most willing to treat Cricket as an actual human being and express concern for him. He still views him as an expendable stooge, but he at least has some amount of empathy for him.
  • While he goes back on actual allyship later after hearing about vibrating anal beads, he’s still trying to help Mac find his pride and come out to his father despite homophobia, and gives a decent speech about letting blood flow otherwise it’s going to stay a wound forever.
• The Pig-Pen: He lives in squalor and filth on his own initiative and makes a habit of being the most absolutely disgusting human being imaginable.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Frank is tiny, but stocky and incredibly strong.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: Frank once saved Mac's life just by shouting "Hey, faggot!".
• Racist Grandpa: While everyone in the Gang can be pretty prejudiced, the other four don't hate marginalized groups, rather they are just ignorant due their sheltered upbringings. Frank on the other hand is a xenophobe who regularly uses slurs and treats people who are part of other racial groups as subhuman.
• Rags to Riches: Rose from being gutter trash to a multi-millionaire through underhanded business scams. He prefers acting like gutter trash.
• Really Gets Around: One of his favorite hobbies is banging "lots of whores." He's also had sex with a significant number of the show's female cast: The Waitress, Bonnie Kelly, Artemis, and Gail the Snail.
• Reckless Gun Usage: The number of gun safety rules the man breaks is pretty astonishing; he's very fond of drawing and audibly cocking his revolver and then waving it around casually. You can count on it to go off, rarely hitting whatever Frank intended it to.
• Red Baron: Frank's old business views his "The Warthog" persona with reverence and fear.
• Retired Badass: He was a street fighting, drug dealing gang leader in his youth and still has several of his old connections.
• Retired Monster: His first episode has him retire from being a Corrupt Corporate Executive. As the rest of this page implies, it wasn't a moral decision.
• Sanity Slippage: "Being Frank" shows that old age, hard living and already straddling the line of sanity have all taken their toll on him to a point where, of the Gang he can only remembers Charlie's name and otherwise simply pretends to know what's going on while randomly reacting to his environment.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Has increasingly shown signs of senility in the later seasons. The term the Gang use is "donkey-brained". His own POV episode shows how warped his mind is even before he accidentally ingests some drugs.
• Schemer: Became a millionaire by screwing over his old business partner, and regularly does the same to others.
• The Scrooge: Despite his Arbitrarily Large Bank Account, he rarely tends to put it to use in getting a scheme going and tends to penny-pinch. It's justified on his part, though; no scheme the Gang makes could make him as much money as he already has, and if he wanted to, he could live comfortably the rest of his days with no need to connive. His refusal to spend money just means that the Gang is guaranteed to constantly be clawing for any scrap of cash, guaranteeing absolutely ridiculous schemes. It’s the main plot-kicker of “The Gang Gets Whacked”, as he doesn’t want to spend any money on helping the bar so the gang “borrows” drugs, but even when he’s pimping out Dennis all the cash that gets made is spent on a flashy chalice. (Which Dennis then sells to pay the mob off.)
• Seen It All: He’s completely accepting of being mouth raped by the monkey, as is Mac. Rape as Backstory besties Charlie and Dennis are the ones who puke onscreen.
• Self-Made Man: Albeit one who did a fair amount of backstabbing to scrounge his way to the top, it's nostalgia for his former desperate lifestyle that causes Frank to room with Charlie when he joins the Gang.
• Self-Serving Memory: Remembers “The Gang Gets Whacked” as less forcing Dennis into prostitution and more “investing in Dennis’s male escort business”.
• Serial Rapist: While he normally remains 'depraved but not quite crossing into assault' when he tries to have sex, it's revealed in "Time's Up for the Gang" that he has sexually harassed and assaulted many assistants and female employees in his lifetime.
• Seven Deadly Sins: As arguably the most depraved member of the Gang, it is no surprise that he embodies some of these traits. It is even implied that he is actively trying to see how depraved he could possibly become.
  • Lust: He has had various, incredibly kinky one-night stands with Artemis and ends up sleeping with his niece - the incredibly abhorrent Gail "the Snail" - in his efforts to have sex with her recently widowed mother.
  • Gluttony: Being a stout, fat slob and an alcoholic, Frank usually eats things that he shouldn't. His feces included wolf hair, paper and cut up pieces of a credit card, he pictures himself eating a hot dog as the convenience store he is in is being robbed at gun point and he even starts eating from a bag full of anthrax before he is told by Dennis that it is just powdered sugar.
  • Greed: While originally established as a Defector from Decadence, Frank seems much more interesting in the thrill of gaining riches through his shady dealings and scams than he is actually being rich. He created a 2nd Amendment scare just some could profit off of gun sales, he sells a company he founded after he was asked to help reform it (outsourcing hundreds of jobs in the process), has created and ran several sweatshops with terrible working conditions, etc.
• Sexual Extortion: Has no regrets about getting secretaries with no experience to have sex with him, and then promote them.
• Shirtless Scene: Emerges fully nude from a couch in "A Very Sunny Christmas".
• Sixth Ranger: Joins the Gang at the start of Season 2. Like any good Sixth Ranger, he also contrasts the rest of the group by being an old man actively trying to live a depraved life rather than a delusional thirty-something who is mostly oblivious to his own depravity.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • His children being nice to him in preparation to kill him? A touching gesture he has no qualms with. His children being nice to him in preparation to take his gun away? They're out of his will.
  • A guy suicidal on the Paddys roof? Hilarious. Dennis touching his melon? He has to get inside to stop it.
• Slime Ball: He ran a sweatshop, has sexually assaulted a lot of women and he doesn't have much regard for the law, so he's definitely this.
• Slumming It: While Frank is at least a multi-millionaire, he prefers living as cheaply and poorly as possible, and almost never uses his money for anything other than funding the Gang's antics.
• Slut-Shaming: While the others concentrate on Dee really getting around, he takes delight in pointing out that Dennis is far worse. It’s not even about Dennis being a rapist, he uses it to manipulate him into being a prostitute.
• The Smart Guy: Frank is sometimes this, particularly when the rest of the Gang falls victim to manipulation or scams.
• Smarter Than They Look: Frank is a boorish, practically animalistic man who generally comes across as the Gang's most unstable member, yet is consistently shown to be debatably the smartest and undoubtedly the most competent person in the group - displaying genuine savvy and cunning in areas that the other four at best pretend to be knowledgable in.
• The Social Darwinist: Believes that people are animals and there can never be any sense of community, because everyone is out for themselves.
• The Sociopath: Like the rest of the Gang he doesn’t really know what sociopathy/ASPD even really means, and is far too needy emotionally, but the book has him call himself one.
• So Proud of You: When Dee shows her Con Woman side, she’s his Daddy's Girl for about a minute until he bullies her again.
  Dee: We have to look for old women with lots of jewellery and money.
  Frank: That’s my girl.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: He's overjoyed when he finds out his ex-wife Barbara has died from a botched neck lift, and pops open a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
• Stout Strength:
  • Frank is fat and very short, but packs enough of a wallop to be able to knock out two professional boxers.
  • While he’s the smallest, fattest member of the Gang, he can apparently drag their drugged bodies to their basement and handcuff them to various parts of the boiler.
• Stopped Caring: The end of season two has him grossed out by the thought of his two kids banging. By season fourteen he’s in the middle of their abortion powerplay and accepts that his stepkids acting like a horny married couple is his lot in life.
• The Team Benefactor: Rarely spends his vast amounts of wealth on anything other than the Gang's schemes.
• Team Dad: To the group. Whether they like it or not, the Gang does turn to Frank when they need guidance and in a weird way actually respect his opinions and insight. This trope is twisted though, as Frank does nothing to protect the Gang from their worst instincts or manipulates them for his own ends, essentially making him an Abusive Parents version of this trope.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: Very frequently uses an emphatic "bitch."
• Token Adult: Despite all of the other members of the group being in their thirties, Frank is still treated like "the old guy" and is several decades older than everyone else. It helps that the other members of the Gang are manchildren whose emotional levels are (at their oldest) that of teenagers while Frank genuinely acts like a (mentally unstable and manipulative) adult.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Frank and Froggy were one and the same the whole time.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: While season two and three still have Frank as an asshole, Charlie mentioned that they got his character around the time of “The Gang Gets Whacked”, and fully in season four. By that point, he’s in full “At Least I Admit It, Blue-and-Orange Morality, happily awful, exploiting everyone around him” mode.
• Tough Love: He thinks he’s doing this to his stepchildren, wanting Dee to be stronger and Dennis kept in line, but he has really shitty ways of doing it.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Ostensibly Bill Ponderosa's sponsor, he only encourages his hard-partying ways and drug addiction.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Eggs and rum ham.
• Trauma Button: He hates therapists because one sent him to a nitwit school when he was a child, and he has flashbacks at a shut down mental institution because it’s the same one he was in. He also gets claustrophobia if he’s locked up at all, and freaks out on being in an escape room.
• Troubled Abuser: Is really terrible to his stepkids, whether it’s pushing them aside for Charlie, pimping them out, bullying Dee “to make her stronger” or wanting to break Dennis down “because he thinks he can do anything he wants”, but he makes it clear that Barbara was physically abusive to him too, and his own childhood had Abusive Parents as well.
• Trigger-Happy: He's guaranteed to misfire a gun if he's holding one. He's a pretty terrible shot though.
• Uncanny Valley Makeup: In preparation for the beauty pageant in "Frank Reynolds' Little Beauties", Frank gets his foundation done by a mortician, both because he's a cheapskate and because he thought he needed something drastic for his bruising ("ya go to a funeral home to get gruesome repairs!"). The end result is him looking unnaturally smooth, pale and waxy, like he's been embalmed.
• The Unfettered: Because he knows what he’s about, plus thinking of himself as Fun Personified, he’s willing to do absolutely anything to get what he wants, including marrying his stepdaughter to get a fortune.
• Unreliable Narrator: Frank's recollection of his own life is questionable. For example, he often confuses his own life story for the story of John Rambo. Moreover, he remembers the "frog kid" being his roommate. during his time in the "nitwit school." It's later revealed this "frog kid" was actually Frank all along.
• The Unreveal: For the first thirteen and a half seasons since his debut, it's unconfirmed if he's Charlie's biological father. Season 15 finally reveals he isn't.
• Useless Bystander Parent: Frank is a terrible parent in his own right, but Dennis especially is pissed at him for not being there to take care of him or Dee half the time, and leaving them with mom and maids. According to cut scenes, when Dennis had chicken pox, he “went on vacation”.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: In "PTSDee", he seems to delight in using a virtual reality game as an excuse to murder children without consequence.
• The Vietnam Vet: Parodied. Frank indignantly claims to have gone to 'Nam, but Dee points out it was a "business trip" in 1993 to establish a sweatshop.
  Frank: And a lotta good men died in that sweatshop!
  • The closest Frank has seemingly ever come to actual service in Vietnam is his insistence in "Mac and Dennis: Manhunters" that he did a tour, came home, and was hitchhiking through Oregon when he was hounded by an army of state troopers. Everyone is very quick to mention that Frank is confusing the plot of First Blood for his own life experiences, and it's not even the first time he's done it.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Sometimes Dee and Dennis are more like his parents than the other way round, despite how they’re still completely insane.
  Dennis: We should have never let him have that whip.
  Dee: He’s going to hurt himself.
• Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child: Regularly complains that Dee isn’t pretty enough to be his standard of woman, and Dennis can often be too camp for his liking.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: In the book, right after musing about how he should “experiment” holding the twins up at gunpoint (and before wanting Dennis to treat him to hookers and complaining at Dee for her not wanting to see his dong), he calls them ungrateful twats for not appreciating how he keeps the bar afloat.
• The Watson: As the only outsider in the Gang, he frequently is used as a quick way for the others to explain their many weird traditions.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: He doesn’t actually like either of the twins, partly for their creepy codependency and how awful they are in general. In “Charlie Catches A Leprechaun”, he and Dennis laugh over conning Dee out of the truck, and then literally five seconds later Dennis gets ditched. In “The Gang Gets New Wheels”, Dee complains all she got were shitty cars, but it turns out Frank had no intention of getting Dennis a new car.
• Why Did You Make Me Hit You?: He thinks he’s giving Tough Love to Dennis because Dennis thinks he can do whatever he wants otherwise. As season fifteen points out, the neglect and abuse just makes his stepson worse.
• Wild Card: Frank fits the webpage's definition of this trope because he has no loyalty and is willing to switch sides (and betray his own side) for his own benefit. He simply does what he thinks will give him the most profit.
• Would Hurt a Child: In the book, he’s happy to do literally anything to them except diddle them. Even when “they’re begging for it”. Charlie wouldn’t put it past him to traffic underage girls.
• Wrongfully Committed: Part of his backstory is that he got sent upstate to a "nitwit school" after getting scrambled by questions from a psychologist. He eventually gets out with a certificate declaring him not having "donkey brains". "Psycho Pete Returns" reveals that it wasn't so wrongful after all, and his deformed roommate was a figment of his imagination.

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"Whoops! I dropped my monster condom that I use for my magnum dong."