Tear Jerker / American Dad!

Poor Guy...

While this show has Black Comedy similar to Family Guy, there's bound to be some Tragedy here.

Moment Subpages are Spoilers Off. You Have Been Warned.

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• First off, yes there is a Bond parody episode (and a sequel episode to that) called "Tearjerker" where Roger plays a character named Tearjerker, but that's not what we're talking about here, though the movie he produced in the first episode, while deliberately over the top depressing, IS pretty tear jerking in its own right.
  • The films that Roger's persona Tearjerker produced. The first film, Oscar Gold, was about a mentally retarded alcoholic Jewish kid whose cancer-ridden puppy dies during the Holocaust. The other? Six hours of a baby chimp trying to revive his dead mother! Considering those films were deliberately designed to get audiences to cry themselves to death...
• This brief moment from "Pulling Double Booty" when Hayley is outlining her three-way with Stan (posing as his body double) and a waitress (though it is more funny than depressing, it does get a little sad when you realize that once upon a time, Stan really did love Hayley and wants her to be the sweet, obedient girl she used to be).
  Hayley: You could do her, then I could do you, then I could do her while you watch!
  Stan: (sadly) You used to watch Sesame Street.
• "Weiner of Our Discontent", when Roger realizes that he was sent to Earth as a crash test dummy and not on some important mission and goes through a month-long depression (though it can be argued that Roger deserved it because of his rude behavior — which spanned from the 1950s to the present — before discovering his true intentions of being put on Earth).
• Francine facing the facts that Steve is growing up and moving on in "Iced, Iced Babies" (until Steve comes home crying over Debbie breaking up with him and Francine's creepy, "You can stay with Mommy. Forever" line).
• "Man in the Moonbounce", where Stan has silly, carefree fun for the first time in his life, then breaks down sobbing. Hell, that whole episode, and the revelation that Stan's father leaving meant that Stan had to forego his own childhood to look after his mother, which probably played a big role in turning him into the emotionally stunted jerk he is in adult life.
• Stan being Driven to Suicide in "Every Which Way But Lose", saying that he's a big fat loser who doesn't deserve to live because he lost one game in life.
• Stan's Best Friend: The story of how young Stan was forced to kill his dog because he thought he had a terminal disease (Turns out it was because his mom was moving into an apartment that didn't allow dogs or cats. Rabbits, however, were only allowed on a case-by-case basis). Stan himself said the story was so sad, that he wasn't going to undercut the flashback with a joke. He wasn't kidding, given that Francine was reduced to tears when Stan told her about it.
  • The entire episode is a Tear Jerker with Stan being determined to keep Kisses, the family's new puppy, alive after it gets critically injured by a group of pirate cats that crushed it with their hot air balloon's basket. The vet tells the family that Kisses would not last much longer, but Stan refuses to let Kisses die, so he puts the dog on life support, and then decides to steal Kisses from the hospital, taking him to a non licensed veterinarian to keep Kisses alive. She does so, but winds up making Kisses a complete Frankenstein-like freak that barely resembles a dog and seems to be in even more pain than ever. Steve spends several scenes crying his eyes out seeing that his new pet is on the verge of death.
  Francine: (screams in horror)
  Steve: (wails loudly) Oh, my God! Please, kill this dog!! End this!!!!
  Stan: I know he's hard to look at now but he's still Kisses! Look deep into his eyes which are now his balls and you'll see—
  Francine: Okay, whatever that is, it's not Kisses.
  • The biggest tearjerker comes from Stan slowly accepting the fact that his puppy will never be the same. Stan tries to ignore his dog's suffering, but he then sees his old dog from his childhood in a dream that tells him to let Kisses go because the poor puppy isn't a puppy anymore and can no longer do anything that a dog loves to do. Stan tearfully agrees and decides to put him out of his misery. But Stan being Stan, he decides to blow up Kisses with TNT.
  • Klaus on the brink of tears after Roger rudely tells him that he's not a pet because nobody loves him.
• In "I Am The Walrus", Stan, inspired by a walrus documentary, proves himself to Steve that he's the real man of the house by doing the one thing Steve can't yet: have sex. Roger invites Steve to a party at the prospect of getting laid but it ends in failure and the poor boy has a mental breakdown. Stan arrives just in time to see his son crying. Roger congratulates Stan, telling him that now Steve will never challenge him again and he won't have any son of his own challenging him since he'll never have children. Stan realizes that he's made Steve inept and apologizes for trying to make him live like a walrus and helps him with one other way of being a man: shaving.
• The subplot from "Delorean Story-an" parodying The Tortoise and the Hare. A bit of careless driving by Stan leaves a sleeping Steve leaning out of the car, causing his head to hit a running hare (named Andy). We then see a tortoise approach the now dead hare and cry, saying that he always respected him. The tortoise then decides that he and the hare should finish the race together, so he drags the hare's corpse down the road.
  Tortoise: OH, GOD! Oh, no, no, I wanted to win, but not like this! Oh, we had different approaches sure, but I always respected the hell out of you!
  • The episode ends with the tortoise dragging the hare's mangled body over the finish line before breaking down crying.
  Tortoise: We did it, Andy! We did it, old friend!
• Stan not winning the respect of his neighbors in "I Can't Stan You". While Stan is a Jerkass for most of the time, he just wants to be loved.
• The subplot with Lindsay dying from staph infection after breaking her leg in soccer on "Adventures In Hayley-Sitting".
• National Treasure 4: Baby Franny: She's Doing Well: The Hole Story puts a depressing new light on all the previous Francine-centric episodes where she either tries to find a career or some new form of fulfillment beyond what she has. Because she was saved from a well when she was younger, and a firefighter died though not really so she could live, Francine's previous attempts at jobs and careers were all to prove that her life really was worth saving. She's felt that she's done nothing with her life, meaning that firefighter died for nothing and it's on her head.
• The flashback of Roger's most memorable moments on "Naked to the Limit: One More Time" when Roger is about to go back to his home planet (in the end he doesn't but it still hits home) set to Suicide is Painless (best known as the theme song to M*A*S*H, both the movie and the TV show).
  • Stan giving Roger the American Flag pin he always wears on his lapel, right before the latter is about to leave.
• A large amount of the episode "Lost in Space", but especially the Majestic musical number. Jeff is being shown supposed proof that he never loved Hayley at all, and he cries and falls to his hands and knees at the footage of him not appreciating his wife enough, now with the knowledge that he may never see her again. Scrappy or not, you'll just want to give Jeff a hug after that.
  • When Jeff confronts the Majestic, he finds out Emperor Zing is forcing it to show only bad memories, or else he'll get killed.
  Majestic: (Crying) Oh, what you must think of me.
  • Also take into account of the Fridge Horror, all the alien slaves are being kept from their true love, and probably took the test and failed. One alien is seen crying at the beginning and another was so depressed he hit the bottle (although the latter was also a funny moment), and it's understandable. Also during the start of the revolution, Roger's people and the slaves were all angry at Emperor Zing for his lies to them about love, that they were separated from their loved ones for nothing.
• The family believing that Steve and Roger died when their treehouse was struck by lightning in "Irregarding Steve," from Hayley leaving flowers by what's left of the tree and crying to Francine screaming at Stan for not letting Steve and Roger come back inside during the storm until both of them are in tears hugging on the floor. It's one of the few times the show isn't trying to be funny in the slightest.
  • The b-plot of What's Eating Gilbert Grape as reenacted by squirrels recreates the scene of Arnie finding out that his obese mother died in her sleep a little too faithfully.
• Steve's prom clone Glitter's "death" in "Steve and Snot's Test-Tubular Adventure".
  • That episodes end credits are played over the image of Snot crying next to Honey's body (Pictured Above), holding the macaroni necklace she made him.
• "Daddy's Gone". The song Steve and Roger sing in "Hot Water" when Stan kicks his family out and chooses his new hot tub over them. The episode itself, really, as it ends with Stan and most likely Francine being murdered by said sentient hot tub. Even worse, this was written as a possible series finale.
• In "Office Spaceman", when Steve and Hayley find out about Francine's hatred of left-handed people stemming from her upbringing at a Christian orphanage, they try to talk her into acceptance of lefties. When that fails, they show her a fish just like the one she was repeatedly smacked with to comply with the nuns' teachings. At that moment, Francine breaks down crying in total shame.
  Francine: (sobbing) It's true! IT'S ALL TRUE! Oh what you must think of me!
• In the "Ricky Spanish... (Ricky Spanish)" episode, Steve's pet butterfly who, in a jar, had been dropped off the port and into the sea... while still in its cocoon. How it then exits the cocoon, only to find itself trapped until death, is an extremely depressing scene.
• Altough a parody of independent movie cliches, the story in Independent Movie is actually fairly tearjerking on its own.
• The whole of "Independent Movie". The jokes are few and far between, the main story being a genuine attempt by Steve to help Snot come to terms with his estranged dad's death and when the ending hits.
• Roger's sad song about his bond with Steve changing and breaking in "A.T. The Abusive Terrestrial". For all the shitty things Roger's done it's hard not to feel bad for the guy.
• Stan still going through with donating his kidney to Hayley in "The Kidney Stays in the Picture," despite the chance that Hayley may not be biologically his.
• The scene where Francine accidentally kills a bird that had been 3 days sober. Sadist Show or not, that's just cruel.
• "The Full Cognitive Redaction of Avery Bullock by the Coward Stan Smith" becomes very melancholic towards the end, when Stan realises that Bullock is suffering from dementia except not really and decides to kill him rather than let the CIA turn him into a vegetable. It winds up becoming deeply depressing watching Bullock having a clear mental breakdown, and watching Stan trying to give the deputy director the best day of his life before going to Mercy Kill him.
• Rapture's Delight. Sure, Stan acts like a selfish dick just after the Rapture happens which causes Francine to finally leave him for Jesus, but seven years later, he's a broken man who is blind in one eye and lost his left hand and is forced to fight a battle he doesn't care about for the man who stole his wife. At the end of the episode, he sets an explosion to blow up the building and takes a bullet for Jesus which causes him to slowly bleed out internally and with his last words, he apologizes to Francine for his words before she left him, and tells her that she deserves happiness with Jesus. He begs Jesus to escape without him unraptured (and to drag a tearful Francine with him) before dying in the exploding building.
  • Then, we see Stan's personal heaven: His life before The Rapture. It's not one were he has all the money and power in the world, it's just his normal life (with the exception that Klaus is still dead, so the poor guy still gets the short end). Think about that for a second.......
• In "Minstrel Krampus", Krampus doesn't punish naughty children because he enjoys it, but because he wants to set them straight, and "We've Been Bad" is about how bad he feels about his job.
  Krampus: When I'm breakin' the finger, lord, it breakin' my heart / and every Christmas Eve my soul is always torn apart!
• Longest Distant Relationship: Hayley finds out Jeff is going back to Earth and is going through a wormhole to make it there, and she agrees to wait. After going through the wormhole, he does arrive 60 years later. She has been waiting for 60 years and everyone in her family is worse off. Later on, she suffers a heart attack and is at the hospital, and Jeff decides to go back and tell Hayley to move on, ending their relationship.
  • To make things worse, he ended their relationship because he believed that she'd end up with a nice millionaire. The ending makes it seem like in the end, she'll at least be happy with someone again, only for Roger to kill him, leaving her heartbroken and alone again.
• Sidney Hoffman's sub plot in "The One That Got Away". Convinced he stole from his credit card, Roger conspires to ruin his entire life, spreading lies to get him fired, dumped by his girlfriend and sabotaged his beautiful garden. It turns out Sidney is in fact a persona of Roger's that took a life of his own to deal with the trauma of his first unselfish thought, Roger ultimately "kills" him after he hires an assassin to stop his conspiracy.
• In "Seizures Suit Stanny", Stan's smartphone lists Jeff as "idiot son-in-law" while Jeff's phone lists Stan as simply "Dad", surrounded by hearts. A major tearjerker considering Jeff's relationship with his own father, and how much Jeff must want to be acknowledged and appreciated by Stan.
• In "Holy Shit Jeff's Back!", Hayley learning that Jeff is dead (after being dissected by the Collectors AKA the Dissectors); thankfully he gets better at the end.
• Even though Sergei Kruglov didn't care much about Steve, and he should have, it's hard not to feel bad for him. He believed in the Communist Party and was raising his son to be a Communist like him. Then, when Communism fell, his wife, who he loved, left him for a Capitalist, and then his son became the very thing he hated, a CEO, a capitalist. Since Capitalism stole his son, he wanted to steal Stan's son.
• In "Top of the Steve," Stan breaks down crying on two occasions due to missing Steve, who ran away to boarding school. Also his excitement when he thinks Steve is home when the door bell rings, only to have his hopes dashed when it turns out not to be him.
• "The Long March" starts out with Hayley being promoted to Assistant Manager at a sandwich shop. She fears that she will spend the rest of her life stuck at that stressful, monotonous job — a fear that a misguided Stan cheerfully confirms when he happily tells her that her life will revolve entirely around her employment until the day she dies. He even bluntly tells Hayley that he never really respected or cared about her as a person before she got that job. The fact that Stan never loses his cheery demeanor despite how depressing his words clearly are is just icing on the cake.
  Stan: Oh, Hayley, I've been so disappointed in you for so long; completely given up on you as a father!
  Hayley: You what?
  Stan: Yeah! But now that you've turned things around, [he pulls out a day planner and hands it to her] I got you a gift!
  Hayley: A day planner?
  Stan: Yeah, and the best part: I've already filled it out for you!
  [Hayley opens the day planner; every page has "9:00 Go to Work —> 5:00 Go Home" written on it]
  Hayley: [reading aloud] Go to work. Go home. [turns page] Go to work. Go home.
  Stan and Hayley: Go to work. Go home. Go to work. Go home.
  Stan: Welcome to the long march! Oh, I envy you: just starting out on a job you'll do for the next 40 years! The turbulent wave of life's joy and despair will become... a flatline! [he mimics a flatline sound effect]
  Hayley: What?
  Stan: Soon, you'll be marching to work, clocking in and out, marching home... over and over and over! You'll be 30! 40! 50! 60! [does flatline sound again] The march ends at the grave!
  Hayley: [clearly horrified] It's... just a promotion...
  Stan: There's that vacant stare of a fellow marcher! Aw, man! The march!
  • Disturbingly for real when she tries to get out of the job by becoming a instagram star, she so obsessed by avoiding work, that she just working without ANY breaks whatsoever (Not to mention outright slave-labor later in the episode).
• "Flirting With Disaster" brutally shows the consequences of Roger's shoddy made birdhouses. We get a supposedly cartoony scene of an anthropomorphic family of birds, before the house suddenly begins to fall apart around them, with the husband screaming in horror as support beams crush both his wife and children and he gets engulfed in fire and debris. This alone, in spite of the intentional Narm is morbid, but then we get a perspective shot from Steve afterwards who finds the broken birdhouse with the corpses of two realistic birds and their crushed eggs. Steve is understandably heartbroken and furious at Roger.
• Stan's final monologue in "The Adventures of Twill Ongenbone And His Boy Jabari."
  Steve: So, who was president when you were a kid?
  Stan: Oh, I don't know, I guess I think about killing myself pretty frequently. And why not? What's so great about living? You know when I'm happy? For about five seconds in the morning when I first wake up, before I remember who I am and what my life is all about- (voice breaks) anxiety, disappointment, diarrhea more often than not. (sighs) I don't, I don't know if there's an afterlife, but who cares? Nothingness couldn't be any worse than this meaningless march through my empty days.
  • And to top it off, Steve's teacher ends up so depressed that he declares "Life dismissed" and jumps out a window.
• In "Into the Woods" Stan realizes he didn't abandon a kid being bullied when they were children but was left behind by the other kid and he was just so traumatized he switched the scenario. Then Francine tries to make him feel better by doing a middle school reunion, but everyone turns out to be doing better than him, including one guy who found money in the woods that Stan was hiding out in literally a day before the reunion. Then to really make matters worse when the bullies that led to Stan's trauma show up and ask Francine if she is Stan's wife and... she pretty much calls him a loser and says she doesn't know him. Stan runs out ashamed, but when he and Francine are driving home and she's apologizing Stan switches the scenario in his head again and apologizes and Francine just accepts it. He's that traumatized that he copes by playing it off as if it's his fault.
• "Brave N00b World" ends with Steve and Stan ultimately causing the end of the world and all of them dying... again, but then the world is sort of 3D printed back into existence except there's a small change and Stan doesn't take the call and just wants to hang out with Steve for father-son day... this is so unnerving to Steve that he realizes the world is fake and goes insane from it... essentially Stan is such a terrible father that the mere thought of him being loving to his kids in a certain way even for a second is so out of place that it's out of character and makes you realize the world is fake!
  • What's worse? Even as the world is about to be consumed in a nuclear Holocaust? Stan can't even BARE to say he loves Steve! No matter the circumstances, even the END OF THE WORLD, Stan refuses to give his son genuine mutual respect or affection.
• "Little Bonnie Ramirez" really tips the scale on Roger's level of cruelty. To put it plainly, Roger has Francine arrested and falsely imprisoned for abducting a child persona of his simply because she said he was losing his edge. That itself is Played for Laughs, but later on, he gets her out of it by swapping her with a television actress who played Francine in a reenactment. What's so sad about this is that the actress was a genuinely kind and caring individual who helped the Smiths throughout the episode for literally nothing. The Smiths are visibly uncomfortably as she is dragged away crying.
• "Beyond The Alcove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Klaus" features Klaus hypnotising everyone in town into loving him. While what he does is pure Nightmare Fuel, it makes you realise Klaus is so desperate and starved for affection that he has to hypnotise people to get it.
• The Golden Turd may be an Artifact of Doom and pure Nightmare Fuel, but the things it does to the people that find it are tragic. The only solace is that since Roger contacted himself in the past and convinced himself to send it to Boca Raton before anyone else finds it, that none of these tragedies had to occur anymore.
  • The first person to find it was an electrician named Jim. After he and his best friend Mikey find it at the powerplant, Jim beats Mikey to death with it so he can have it for himself, and nearly attacks a police officer when it looks like he might get caught. When he tries to call his fiancé Abby to tell her about it though, he learns that she was having an affair, and breaks down crying over what he did. He ends up turning to the bottle, and is Driven to Suicide by driving on to the train tracks.
  • The second person to find it is Lt. Eddie Thacker. After coming across the scene of Jim's death, he finds the Golden Turd and pockets it, bringing it home to show to his wife Marylin. While Marylin is excited to use it to retire in luxury, Eddie is torn up about stealing evidence and risking his pension, the two then arguing about his desire to turn it in and face punishment. While Eddie is able to realize the Turd is what's making them fight and seems to calm Marylin down, she actually puts rat poison in his tea and kills him. She's caught soon after and sentence to death row, her last words before lethal injection being her apologizing to her son Vincent.
  • The third person to find it is Vincent Edmonds. After having to see his mother be executed for killing his father, he goes back to their home, his old room specifically, to question why his mother would ever do it. He overhears a child outside cry for help after he's hit by a car, only to trip on a loose floorboard and find the Turd hidden underneath it. He then proceeds to ignore the child crying out for help in favor of calling a Corrupt Corporate Executive who had offered a back alley deal for his campaign for POTUS. The night of the convention, he's become so obsessed with the Turd he just sits there staring at it when his manager comes in saying the papers will be running the story about his back alley deal. The moment his manager reaches for the Turd, Vincent lunges at him while crying out "Mine!" as if he were Gollum, only for get beaten to death with the Turd. The manager is shortly after gunned down by Secret Service, his dying breaths having him still reaching for the Turd beneath the couch before he's shot dead.
  • After a cleaning lady finds the Turd, she takes it to the Vatican and gives it to the Pope, who brings it before a secret order comprised of the worlds' religious leaders, dedicated to destroying the Golden Turd. Right as it looks like they are united in what to do, they all turn on each other and kill themselves in a shootout.
  • Once Roger is put back together and poops the Turd again, Stan offers to destroy it when the rest of the family becomes mesmerized by it. Instead, he takes it and goes into hiding for twenty years, living under a fake name in Vermont. One by one, Steve, Hayley, and Francine all arrive looking for the Turd, and don't hesitate to attack each other to get it. Steve nearly beats Stan to death with a pipe, Hayley kills Steve by crushing him between her truck and his car, Francine executes Hayley after backstabbing her, and Stan and Francine proceed to fight to the death over it, Francine tricking Stan into giving her mercy before shooting him in the head with a nail gun, before getting her scarf caught in a power saw and getting strangled to death. Roger coming across their corpses is enough to drive him to tears, and prompts him to tell his past self to hide the damn Turd somewhere no one can find it.
• In "Trophy Wife, Trophy Life," it's revealed that Tuttle's whole life is watched in Korea as part of a reality show called Sad Fatso. Klaus, Steve, Hayley, and Roger start coming over to his house so that they can get on TV, but this ends up tanking the ratings because they're making Tuttle happy. Once they find out how unpopular they are, they flatly reject Tuttle by slamming a door in his face. The side plot ends with him eating a cake out of his garbage, must to the cruel joy of the Korean viewers.