Basic Trope: Abusive Parents (or other forms of child abuse) that are Played for Laughs.
- Straight: Chris's parents Alice and Bob do lots of mean things to him, which is all played for comedy.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice and Bob berate their son for everything, repeatedly hit him with a sledgehammer, make him bathe in hot oil whenever he does anything wrong, and even sexually abuse him. This is all played for laughs.
- Chris has a humorous Multiple-Choice Past consisting of various awful things his parents did to him.
- Chris is The Chew Toy, and everyone in his life has done something awful to him that's entirely played as comedy.
- Downplayed: Alice and Bob once got overly mad at Chris for a simple misunderstanding, which is treated as a joke.
- Justified:
- Chris is an Enfant Terrible, so it's funnier to watch him get in trouble for his actions.
- An adult Chris is retelling the stories of the terrible his parents did to him in his childhood and is deliberately framing the events in a (darkly) comedic way. It is very evident that it is his way of coping with the trauma that was inflicted upon him.
- The humor is more in how Chris actually gets mistreated, since it's played in a ridiculously over-the-top way (with some Cool and Unusual Punishment possible) that makes it hard to actually take seriously.
- Inverted:
- Abusive Parents are treated as a Moral Event Horizon crossover.
- Double Standard: Violence, Child on Adult; Chris treats his parents horribly, which is played for laughs.
- Subverted: Due to Cerebus Retcon, Alice and Bob's constant treatment of their son is now considered more serious.
- Double Subverted: But Chris remembers the time they called him "stupid ass" for failing a math test and finds it pretty funny.
- Parodied:
- Chris is shown being abused in ways meant to be disturbing as possible before a laugh track as a satire of the concept.
- Chris' own mother somehow didn't show up for his birth.
- Zig-Zagged: Sometimes child abuse is played for laughs, and sometimes it isn't.
- Averted:
- There is no child abuse.
- Child abuse is portrayed seriously.
- Enforced:
- "What Black Comedy joke have we not done yet? How about portraying Abusive Parents as a joke?"
- To make fun of Abusive Parents.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Chris doesn't find it funny, and runs away from home to stop getting abused.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "I feel like it'd be a lot less funny if Chris were a real child."
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