History Film / WhatAboutBob

* CringeComedy: The ''Good Morning America'' interview in hilariously uncomfortable to watch. Leo is so high-strung from Bob's presence that he completely botches his answers and comes off as stiff and unnatural, and he ends up getting completely upstaged by the far more relaxed (and much less professional) Bob.

* GoneHorriblyRight: Leo only gives Bob the most apathetic and half-hearted therapy possible in the one short session they have together, but amazingly enough, it ''does'' provide enough help for Bob to convince him that Leo is the doctor he absolutely needs. Which leads to the rest of the film's story and Dr. Marvin's eventual fall to madness.

* GetOut: "You've ruined my life! You've ruined my career! You've ruined my book! You've turned a perfectly peaceful house into an insane asylum! GET OUT!!!

* Foreshadowing: Leo says to Bob that he doesn't get angry or upset, foreshadowing the ending when Bob does precisely both things to him.

* EstablishingCharacterMoment: When Leo prescribes that Bob read his book, he pretends to scan his bookshelves looking for a copy when there's obviously an entire shelf of them prominently placed. False modesty much?

* TitleDrop: Done a couple of times. For example, when Leo returns from attempting to commit Bob to an institution and then gets a phone call telling him they can't take him as there's no reason to do so, Fay yells "What about Bob?" in an attempt to get an explanation of what has just happened.

* [[Foreshadowing]]: Leo says to Bob that he doesn't get angry or upset, foreshadowing the ending when Bob does precisely both things to him.

* Foreshadowing: Leo says to Bob that he doesn't get angry or upset, foreshadowing the ending when Bob does precisely both things to him.

* TheCobblersChildrenHaveNoShoes: Leo is a bad husband and father, and his family is unhappy because of it. To top it off, he's rather oblivious to his failures in that department.

Dr. Leo Marvin (Dreyfuss) is a successful therapist with a best-selling book out and a gig with a morning show scheduled. He is also [[DrJerk very]] [[SmallNameBigEgo arrogant]].

He takes an appointment with a patient, Bob Wiley (Murray), who has been transferred from therapist to therapist. Bob has multiple phobias -- he's afraid of death, tight spaces and germs. Dr. Marvin encourages a first-name basis, as therapists do, and recommends his book to Bob.

Bob's hero-worship for Dr. Marvin begins immediately. Unfortunately for Bob, Dr. Marvin is going on a trip to his vacation house and does not want to bring work along with him. It's a family vacation for a seriously messed-up family. Unfortunately for Dr. Marvin, Bob is not going to give up that easily.

Bob learns where Dr. Marvin will be staying and follows, bringing just his essentials and his goldfish. He has subtle encouragement from the locals, who disapprove of Dr. Marvin and are only too happy to let this lunatic interfere with his peaceful vacation.

The fun begins when Bob and Dr. Marvin's family meet. Bob almost accidentally helps everyone with their problems -- except Dr. Marvin, whom he is unwittingly driving over the edge...

* AssholeVictim: Leo is not an incredibly nice man and the viewer is clearly supposed to find what happens to him funny.

* BreakTheHaughty: At the beginning of the film, Leo is confident to the point of arrogance about his new book and the television appearance it has netted him and is planning on spending the summer showing off how brilliant he is to his family and anyone else who will listen. By the end of the film, Bob's persistence in trying to get Leo to help him deal with his problems (despite Leo's many attempts to get rid of him) and his accidental success in helping Leo's family deal with their problems have rendered him catatonic. The irony is that Leo's immediate assessment of Bob was entirely correct, his "Baby Steps" method actually worked like a charm on Bob (even if this is due to something of a placebo effect) leading to immediate improvement that only got better with time.
* BrickJoke: Leo describes his plan to strap Bob to a large number of heavy explosives as "death therapy", a guaranteed cure. [[WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue At the end of the film,]] a caption mentions that Bob became a psychiatrist and wrote a bestseller called ''Death Therapy'' - resulting in Leo suing him for the rights to the idea.

* TheCobblersChildrenHaveNoShoes: Anna and Sigmund struggle to function normally because of their father's psychological scrutiny, and Leo is completely incapable of getting through to either of them.

* ImpersonatingAnOfficer: Bob pretends he's a police detective to get Dr. Marvin's number out of the telephone operators who earlier didn't give him this, by pretending he's killed himself, with the cops investigating. He shows no psychological handups when doing this, perhaps oddly, though maybe role-playing helps with his neuroses.

He takes an appointment with a patient, Bob Wiley (Murray), who has been transferred from therapist to therapist. Bob has pantophobia -- he's afraid of everything. Dr. Marvin encourages a first-name basis, as therapists do, and recommends his book to Bob.

* HourglassPlot: By the end of the movie, [[spoiler: Bob is cured of his pantophobia, and Leo is driven insane and catatonic. In fact, Bob becomes a psychiatrist while Leo is a mental patient.]]

* StuffBlowingUp: [[spoiler: What "Death Therapy" was meant to be. Bob brought the explosives into the house after he got out of the bindings Leo had set tied him with.]]

* AccidentalMisnaming: During his interview with ''Good Morning America'', Leo is such a wreck that when he tries to explain that the "baby steps" approach doesn't usually work as quickly as it seems to have done with Bob, he accidentally refers to him as "Boob."
* AllPsychologyIsFreudian: Dr. Marvin idolizes Freud to the point that he named his son Sigmund and his daughter Anna (the name of one of Freud's daughters and the one to follow him into psychoanalysis).

* BrickJoke: Leo describes his plan to strap Bob to a large number of heavy explosives as "death therapy", a guaranteed cure. [[WhereAreTheyNowEpilogue At the end of the film]], a caption mentions that Bob became a psychiatrist and wrote a bestseller called ''Death Therapy'' - resulting in Leo suing him for the rights to the idea.

* AccidentalMisnaming: During his interview with ''Good Morning America'', Leo is such a wreck that when he tries to explain that the "baby steps" approach doesn't usually work as quickly as it seems to have done with Bob, he accidentally refers to him as "Boob" and is too embarrassed to bother correcting himself.

* JerkassHasAPoint: Leo is a very cold and unfriendly man, and his therapy isn't exactly helpful, but he's not entirely wrong or unreasonable to find Bob's presence something of an imposition or to become upset at how Bob's presence keeps making things unravel for him.

* TheComplainerIsAlwaysWrong: Leo is the only one who objects to Bob's presence at his house; his wife and children find Bob a delight, and Leo is treated by both the script and the characters as being in the wrong for wanting Bob gone.

* DramaticallyMissingThePoint: After Dr. Marvin attacks Bob at his surprise birthday party when he puts his arm around his sister, Lily, and then becomes catatonic, Lily tells Bob how lucky her brother is to have him around, clearly unaware that Bob is the reason her brother, Leo, is losing his sanity in the first place. [[JustifiedTrope Justified]] somewhat in that she, Lily, had just met Bob and had no idea what had been going on prior to Leo's surprise birthday party.

** Both of Leo's children reveal how difficult it is to interact with him, and Leo confesses to his wife that he feels like a failure. Does he maybe try to find out where he went wrong and make amends? Nope, because a couple minutes later, Leo sees Bob helping Siggy learn how to dive, something he had been repeatedly failing to do, and it all goes downhill from there...

* {{Jerkass}}: Dr. Marvin has let his professional success go to his head, at the expense of having meaningful connections with his own family, whom he treats more like stubborn patients than loved ones. Though they still love him, his wife and children clearly find his attitude difficult to live with.
* JerkassHasAPoint: Leo is a rather cold and unfriendly man, and his therapy isn't exactly helpful, but he's not entirely wrong or unreasonable to find Bob's presence something of an imposition or to become upset at how Bob's presence keeps making things unravel for him.

* LetThePastBurn: Dr. Leo Marvin's lakeside vacation house in New Hampshire is a symbol of his financial success at the cost of strained relationships with just about everyone (his son calls the trip there "another vacation that isn't a vacation", and his neighbors--the Guttmans--hate Dr. Marvin because they were saving to buy that house). At the end, Dr. Marvin tries to kill Bob with explosives, but ends up destroying the house instead. This is the straw that finally breaks Dr. Marvin, and in the next scene he's more or less catatonic. And in the ''next'' scene, Bob unintentionally shocks Dr. Marvin back into full consciousness. Whether or not Dr. Marvin learned anything from the ordeal is an open question.

* TemptingFate: [[spoiler:Siggy asks the catatonic Leo "[[WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong What's the worst that could happen?]]" before the film cuts to Bob and Leo's sister's wedding.]]

* TheCatCameBack: No matter what Leo does, Bob manages to come back. He tells him to go back to New York and take "a vacation from [his] problems", but the Guttmans let Bob stay with them so that he can take said vacation near Leo. He tries to get rid of him before his ''Good Morning America'' interview, but the crew arrive just as Bob is leaving and they decide to make him part of the interview upon learning that Bob's a patient. Leo tries having Bob committed, only for the mental institution to tell him to take him back as he seems harmless to them. He tries abandoning Bob by the roadside, but Bob manages to hitchhike back to Leo's house ahead of him. All of which contributes to Leo's growing SanitySlippage. Ironically, the point when Leo finally snaps, kidnaps Bob and tries to kill him is mere moments after Bob, after a talk with Leo's family, has finally realized that his presence is causing Leo to snap and has genuinely decided to leave.

* LaserGuidedKarma: Given that Leo is a DrJerk and that Bob doesn't ''mean'' to inflict his neuroses on other people (if he was smart enough to understand what he's doing to Leo, he'd be ''horrified''), the whole movie is just the universe evening things out for Bob by letting Leo's previous behavior and treatment towards his family and other people come back to bite him in the ass. Literally, as things get better for Bob they get worse for Leo.

* KarmaHoudini: Depending on how you view Bob and Leo; Bob causes a lot of trouble for Leo over the course of the movie, and never really receives any punishment for it. It does help that Bob is well-meaning and often doesn't realize the trouble he's causing for Leo until it's too late. It could also be argued that Bob's miserable, neurotic life at the beginning of the movie is a kind of preemptive karma.

** After his first session with Leo, Bob obsessively repeats "Baby steps..." as he goes through various minor routines which normally leave him paralyzed by anxiety.

* TheCatCameBack: No matter what Leo does, Bob manages to come back. He tells him to go back to New York and take "a vacation from [his] problems", but the Guttmans let Bob stay with them so that he can take said vacation near Leo. He tries to get rid of him before his ''Good Morning America'' interview, but the crew arrives just as Bob is leaving and they decide to make him part of the interview upon learning that Bob's a patient. Leo tries having Bob committed, only for the mental institution to tell him to take him back as he seems harmless to them. He tries abandoning Bob by the roadside, but Bob manages to hitchhike back to Leo's house ahead of him. All of which contributes to Leo's growing SanitySlippage. Ironically, the point when Leo finally snaps, kidnaps Bob and tries to kill him is mere moments after Bob, after a talk with Leo's family, has finally realized that his presence is causing Leo to snap and has genuinely decided to leave.