Characters / House - Gregory House

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Dr. Gregory House

"Everybody lies."

Played by: Hugh Laurie
Dubbed by: Féodor Atkine (European French)
"People like talking about people. Makes us feel superior. Makes us feel in control. And sometimes, for some people, knowing some things makes them care."

Head of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, with specialties in both Infectious Disease and Nephrology. House did his undergrad at Johns Hopkins; he also attended medical school there but was expelled for cheating and ultimately got his degree from the University of Michigan. House is a brilliant doctor; unfortunately for everyone around him, he's also a misanthrope and an arrogant jerk to everyone he meets. He walks with a cane as a result of an infraction he suffered in his right thigh and the surgery that tried to correct it; the pain from this drives his Vicodin addiction as well.

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#-L

• 10-Minute Retirement: A few times over the course of the series:
  • In "The Softer Side", he quits when Cuddy tells him she won't let him use methadone while he worked at her hospital. He's ready to look into jobs at other hospitals before Cuddy relents and lets him take methadone under her supervision.
  • When season 6 begins, after going through rehab for his Vicodin addiction, he quits from Princeton Plainsboro out of worry that familiar surroundings would cause him to relapse. He returns when he finds that the puzzles from the cases he worked on were the only thing that helped to keep his leg pain at bay.
• Abusive Parents: Ice baths, Denied Food as Punishment if he was ever even the tiniest bit late for a meal, and being made to sleep outside in the yard when he was a child. House loves his mother, but she either didn't accompany House and his father when he was stationed at various military bases or didn't notice the abuse. House concludes that his mother hated his father, too, when he proves that his dad wasn't his dad. Given the nature of this sort of family dynamic, it's very likely she was a victim, too.
• Addiction Displacement: When he kicks his Vicodin habit in Season 6, he takes up cooking to keep his leg pain at bay, thus keeping him from being tempted to take drugs again. When that stops working, he goes back to work, since solving medical mysteries was the one thing that worked. In Season 7, his relationship with Cuddy becomes his new addiction. Fear over losing her to cancer causes him to relapse, and the subsequent end of their relationship makes him a Vicodin addict once more.
• Addled Addict: He suffers hallucinations of Amber throughout the latter half of Season 5, brought on by a combination of guilt over her death (as well as Kutner's suicide) and his Vicodin addiction.
• Agent Scully: He stubbornly refuses to accept any explanation involving magic/angels/misc supernatural.
• Almighty Janitor: House's reason for becoming a doctor. While living in Japan, his friend was injured while rock climbing. Much to House's surprise, the hospital staff turned to a man whom he had assumed was a janitor. He was a Buraku, an "untouchable" in the Japanese caste system, yet the staff had no choice but to turn for help. This aptly describes House's relationship with the medical community — he's a pariah, yet when the chips are down, other doctors are forced to swallow their pride and refer their patients to him.
• Ambiguously Bi: He's definitely into women, but has serious subtext with Wilson, and isn't shy about calling other men attractive. Whether this is an actual attraction or just House being, well, House depends on which fan you're talking to. Hugh Laurie seems perfectly happy calling House and Wilson a couple by season 8.
• Anti-Hero: He has good intentions (most of the time), but he is not a nice man.
• Arson, Murder, and Lifesaving: In that order, and it's the only reason Cuddy hasn't fired him already.
• Berserk Button:
  • House takes issue with Death Seekers and patients who have no desire to live. This typically manifests as his doing everything to make the patient survive regardless of their wishes, as exemplified in the episode "DNR" when he ignores a patient's wishes not to be resuscitated. He loses it in the penultimate episode of the series when Wilson stops taking chemo, nearly strangling a patient to prove a point that "It is our human responsibility to stay alive!"
  • His bad leg is another — no doubt fueled by the fact if the doctors had not initially misdiagnosed his pain, he probably would still be able to use his leg. In "Three Stories" (widely regarded as the best of Season 1), in which he delivers a lecture to the hospital’s residents and interns, he tests them by giving them details of three cases involving leg pain. They do well on the first two, but on the third, they just give the usual treatments, and he gets more and more belligerent — he wanted to see if they could correctly diagnose what was wrong and didn't.
• Best Served Cold: He maintained a longstanding grudge against Philip Weber, the medical school classmate who reported him for cheating and got him expelled. Twenty years after it happened House arranges to have Weber's new drug discredited, ruining the latter's chance of making a fortune on it, after which he declares they're even.
• Blasphemous Boast: "In this temple, I am Dr. Yahweh."
• Blatant Lies: The most obvious: "I never lie."
• Born Lucky: Many of House's critics are quick to comment that he "got lucky" on a patient's diagnosis due to his immoral methods. Cuddy is quick to point out that he gets lucky a lot.
• Break the Haughty: Often, Tritter saw it as his purpose to break his pride and make him apologize.
• Brilliant, but Lazy:
  • House is shown to excel at almost everything he puts his mind to. Nonetheless, he will jump through all kinds of hoops to get out of clinic duty, and he was assigned interns to keep him from spending all his time watching Soap Operas. He can often be found doing random things in his office (or Wilson's office, or Cuddy's office…), ranging from playing with a Zen garden to constructing a Rube Goldberg machine to practicing yo-yo tricks. He claims in one episode that isolating himself "helps his process". Whether this or the above is true, or perhaps a mix of the two, is anyone's guess. More than once, it has been theorized that avoiding work is the one thing he finds a meaningful challenge in.
  • He was like this even as a med student — he was expelled from John Hopkins for cheating on an exam (House is still bitter about this since the answer he copied was wrong anyway). It cost him a prestigious internship at the Mayo Clinic, the student who was responsible for his expulsion and coincidentally got the internship, Philip Weber became his "Arch-Enemy".
• Broken Ace: A brilliant doctor with a shitty past and major dysfunctions.
• Brutal Honesty: This gem from the eighth episode is a prime example: "I'm the doctor who's trying to save your son; you're the mom who's letting him die. Clarity, it's a beautiful thing."
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: A true example of the 'cost/benefit' part of the trope: he's so good at what he does, Cuddy earmarks part of the hospital's budget to pay for the inevitable legal fees (granted, he's always come under-budget, so it's either a large budget or the legal issues occur less frequently than the thought of). It's also made clear on multiple occasions that House's department is a huge money sink, and that House's antics are pretty destructive to hospital morale and overall functionality. Essentially, he's a deconstruction of this trope because his behavior makes him virtually unemployable — Cuddy was the only one who would hire him. He works for a salary much lower than a doctor of his experience and prestige normally would. She specifically says in one episode that she got one of the best doctors in the world at a bargain basement price because no one else would hire him.
• Byronic Hero: A classic example of the trope, being brooding, sophisticated, passionate, and deeply committed to his own personal philosophy.
• Cane Fu: Although he doesn't quite fight with his trusty walking cane, it is not rare for him to use it to block, push away or trip someone as part of his usual antisocial antics. In "Hunting", he goes as far as using it to induce anaphylactic shock to prove that the man on the receiving end has cysts in his liver. And then there's episode "Bombshells" and the Dream Sequence of House fighting his teammembers-turned-zombies with his cane, including turning it into an axe and then into a shotgun.
• Casual Danger Dialogue: House's typical non-reaction of "cool" or "interesting" when a patient's face melts or some such.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "Everybody lies."
  • "It's not lupus."
  • "You're/He's/She's an idiot!"
  • "Interesting…"
  • "People don't change."
  • "What is if the X wasn't X…"
• Child Hater: Downplayed. House never really sugarcoats his attitude with any of his patients, children included. However, he does have a soft spot for babies and will gladly rip any parent who jeopardizes their health.
  House: How old are you?
  Boy: Eight.
  House: And he swallowed something stuck to a fridge. Darwin says let him die.
• Composite Character: In addition to being a Sherlock Homage, his character clearly takes some influence from John Watson as well (even with Wilson being written as an Expy of Watson). He combines Holmes' drug use, deductive skills and antisocial tendencies with Watson's profession as a medical doctor, as well as Watson's limp (Watson walked with a cane, like House, because of a gunshot wound in the Afghan War).
• Consummate Liar: He's good at it, sure, but it plays into his Catchphrase "Everyone lies," and they do.
• Control Freak: House takes it upon himself to know virtually everything about his colleagues and subordinates and goes to extreme lengths to answer questions about the behavior of his coworkers. One time when he suspected that Wilson was taking antidepressants House spiked Wilson's coffee with amphetamines to prove it.
• The Corrupter: Any doctor who works under House will inevitably pick up some of his tendencies for better or worse.
• Custom Uniform: He very rarely wears the white lab coat that all the other doctors are required to wear — he usually wears a blazer over some sort of t-shirt or casual shirt like a blue-button up. In fact, if you do see House in a lab coat, he's probably up to something, usually involving surgery.
• Cynical Mentor: A running theme in the show is House hiring idealistic fellows who try to see the best in people and slowly burning that tendency out of them.
• Deadpan Snarker: Biting scorn or petty sarcasm at everyone, especially patients.
• Dead Person Conversation: Has repeated hallucinations of Amber and Kutner.
• Death Seeker: In the pilot episode, House did mention that he hoped he was dying when he suffered his infarction.
• Depending on the Writer: How much of his leg actually hurts, in the later seasons. Season 6 especially could go between slapsticky pratfalls and dancing, to admitting he could have just cut the damn thing off and had less pain.
• Determinator: When he wants to prove that he's right, nothing can stop him.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: Sometimes he uses his injured leg to do this, though he was a jerk before then. Spelled out and subverted in one of those vulnerable moments in the season 6 finale, as while he was a dick pre-infarction, he admits it made him a worse person, and he wishes he'd just cut the leg off. And because the show has to keep him how he is until the show finale, the patient dies from the amputation, making him probably go back on that wish.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Whether it's about his emotional state or his limp, he'll chew you out for showing sympathy.
• Driven to Suicide: In "Merry Little Christmas" (fails) and the series finale (decides against it). One patient asked if he's tried to kill himself, and he has to admit "not slowly".
• Dr. Jerk: He provides the page image. He acknowledges it, too: "I'm a doctor you'd never send a gift to." He's got such a reputation for this that his boss set aside a generous budget for legal expenses when she hired him. His bedside manner is lacking (to put it mildly) and unless a patient's condition piques his curiosity, he tends to brush them off. That aside, however, House isn't absolutely impossible for his patients to impress - patients and others outside of his team that share his penchant for snark and cynicism tend to be looked upon a lot more fondly by him. Notably, an early episode has him forming an Odd Friendship of sorts with an equally snarky nun who can keep up with him in verbal sparring matches.
  • Several of the subplots of the series, though, exist because of how astonishingly awful and Devil-May-Care of a human being he is, one of which is that said awfulness eventually spreads to anybody who spends too long around him like a virus, which is one of the main reasons he ends up in a mental hospital (and accidentally leads to another patient to die) and leads to Foreman destroying any chance of having a medical career outside of Princeton-Plainsboro.
    Cuddy: You're House Lite. Now the only place that will hire you is the one with House Classic.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: Dr. House went to Johns Hopkins, though did not graduate from there due to being expelled for cheating on an exam, a medical university so prestigious it formed the basis of all medical education in the United States, and he is frequently portrayed unrealistically skilled at medicine.
• "Eureka!" Moment: After pondering the medical mysteries for the episode, he will often have a flash of inspiration that leads to the cure.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • While he breaks rules left and right, it's still in the service of treating his patients. When Dr. Travis Brennan poisons a patient to manufacture a fake polio case, House tells him to Get Out! and has Foreman call the cops.
  • He tends to try at least to keep his mouth shut around (assumed) rape victims, the best example being the fact that he's the only one the victim in "One Day One Room" can stand, but there are other clinic examples too. He’s also shocked when he realizes that he unintentionally mocked a rape victim, and spends the rest of the episode being as gentle as possible with her - in that same case, he outright tried to get Cuddy to give the patient to someone else, fully admitting that his attitude is probably the absolute last thing she needs right now.
  • He takes cases with babies very seriously, to the point that he declared an in-hospital epidemic and demanded the entire maternity ward be shut down after only two babies became sick with unrelated symptoms.
  • In one episode, he's quite nonchalant about the case despite how serious the patient's (a college boy) condition is. However, when he realizes it's a result of radiation poisoning, he immediately gets serious, evacuates the area and summons the proper authorities. He also ensures the steps are taken to safely get rid of it.
  • House is very quick to argue with parents who are obstructing his treatment of a patient whose a minor and generally has little tolerance for most of them one way or the other, but he's also willing to give them a break if it's clear they're trying their best or willing to see reason. In one episode, House is beseeched by two young parents who are giving their infant a vegetarian diet, which he states blunty is bad for babies as they need calcium and protein to grow and thrive. However, when they are arrested for apparent neglect and abuse, he staunchly stands up for them, stating that they are NOT abusive, just naïve. Sure enough, their daughter had a liver condition that stopped her from digesting and growing, proving their concerns were justified (and the mother's uncle was a nutritionist who assured them such a diet was acceptable, which also helped their case).
  • One episode has a patient who has the plague confess she wants to break up with her girlfriend for pretty flimsy reasons... despite the fact said girlfriend donated a kidney to her to save her life. While House still treats her as he normally would, his final words to her make clear what he thinks of her.
    Patient: I got the plague...?
    House: Don't worry, it's treatable. Being a bitch though... nothing we can do about that.
• Evil Laugh: He belts out an impressive one when he has The Team cure a braindead woman so they can use her heart for a transplant.
  House: We're going to cure her.
  Cameron: We're going to cure death?
  House: MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! …Doubt it.
• Famed In-Story: Despite being more-or-less blacklisted in the medical community, he's still a world-famous doctor, and he's constantly getting resumes from doctors hoping to be one of his fellows; he had a hundred applicants in Season 4 — that's how renowned he is. In fact other doctors send their patients to him when they get stumped. Unfortunately, his behavior and ego are equally famous in the medical community (if not moreso), to the point that working for him is a double-edged sword. If your resume shows you worked with House in the past, that's good; you probably learned a lot about diagnosis. If you worked with House too much, that's bad; it's too likely his behavior's rubbed off on you.
• Faking the Dead: In the series finale, he switches his dental records with those of a former patient who was dying anyway, leading to the patient's body being identified as his own in the wreckage of a burned-down building. He ends the show legally dead; only Wilson and Foreman know he's still alive.
• Flanderization: Interestingly, the only Doctor on the show who became crazier as the show went on, suggesting worsening depression and drug addiction. In the first season, House at least tried to hide (however feebly) his rudeness from patients, and went to bat for them if the hospital tried to deny them care. Late-season House made it plain that that the patient is irrelevant; all he cares about is the puzzle. There is also a noticeable shift in ideology; a belief that human beings are all shallow narcissists and that kindness springs from cowardice became a moral principle instead of a cynical observation.
• Fatal Flaw: Ever since the pilot, "Everybody Lies," it's been clear that House has his own personal code about when and why it's better to lie and when it's better to be honest. Many, many times throughout the show, he has used lies and secrets to help patients survive and be happier, but this has proven to be his downfall when it comes to his own personal life. In fact, when it comes to trying to improve or just not ruin his relationships, House is unable to do so thanks to his lies.
  • His relationship with Cuddy ends when she is at risk of a terminal diagnosis and House, instead of getting through that moment by just being near her, takes drugs, instead. When she finds out and asks him to explain himself, he lies about it so she leaves him: to her, this is proof that House is incapable of enduring the hardships that every couple could inevitably face, before or after. In the end, he will always lie rather than be honest and seeking closeness of others.
  • During his brief marriage to Dominika, before she got the green card, House realizes that he has begun to be happy with her, pretending to be a couple. Does he tell Dominika this? Of course not! The moment her Green Card arrives, he throws it in the trash. And of course, the moment Dominika finds out about it, she leaves him, but the worst part was that just before she found out what he did, she admitted to enjoying their time together as well. If House had done the one thing he can't, which is to tell her how he feels, they could have stayed together, at least a little longer, since the moment she leaves him is also the moment...
  • ... when Wilson informs him to have been diagnosed with terminal cancer. To convince his friend to seek treatment instead of giving up, House brings in a young man who claims he had cancer as a child and that Wilson saved his life. After a brief moment of happiness, Wilson realizes that the man he is talking to is nothing more than an actor called in by House, and angrily leaves. The only reason Wilson doesn't end his friendship with House after this is thanks to Foreman, who convinces the oncologist that their friendship is too much important to end there.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • In general, House is the kind of person who hates this trope since it gives a window to overlook a person's objective character. This often happens to House himself; people think his cranky attitude is because of his leg, but Stacey and Wilson confirm that he was just as much an ass before he got his injury. His father was abusive when he was young, but this rarely comes up.
  • When House's blood clot first manifested as intense, paralyzing leg pain, he was written off by every doctor he saw as just a junkie looking for a fix, and their lack of attention caused it to progress to the point where it needed surgery. This probably informs his method of having his minions examine every aspect of patients' personal lives rather than just go off surface details.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: While his fellows have a degree of Undying Loyalty to him, they all agree that House is a jerk. Even Wilson and Cuddy, who genuinely like him, don't try to deny it.
• Friend to All Children: Friend is pushing it, but he's noticeably less abrasive and snarky whenever young children are involved in his cases or clinic duties. Episodes involving kids are one of the rare times where he minds his manners, and he shows a lot of respect to children Wise Beyond Their Years, at least for House. Despite how blunt he is, kids in general are also some of the few patients that actually like him, arguably because he himself is a little childish. In the episode "Finding Judas" his unusually callous treatment of a child patient is used to show just how badly his vicodin withdrawal is affecting him.
• Functional Addict: He's functional most of the time. When he loses access to Vicodin, the result is ugly.
• The Fundamentalist: This is a mild case; his overwhelming need in life is to be right. As such, he has a challenging time accepting that others simply think differently that he does, and will go out of his way to prove them wrong.
• Genius Cripple: The brilliant head of the diagnosis department has a limp.
• Good Is Not Nice: Ultimately, he means well and will go extremely far to save his patients, but he doesn't do it nicely.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: In "The Softer Side", after quitting from Princeton Plainsboro over his use of methadone, he cleans himself up for job interviews at other hospitals. Wilson barely recognizes him in a clean suit and without his stubble.
• Handicapped Badass: A limp doesn't stop him from breaking into patient's houses to find out secrets.
• Has a Type: House definitely goes for brunettes. Cameron, Stacy, Cuddy, Paula the hooker from season two, and Dominika from season seven - all are brunettes. Incidentally, whatever he may or may not have felt for the blonde Amber, such as the instance of a blonde being interested in House, assuming we discount the post-season three Cameron, turned out to be the result of a fungal infection in her brain.
• Hates Everyone Equally: He makes racist, sexist, and downright insulting comments about everyone of every creed and culture, but it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn't have anything against a particular group of people (except maybe those he deems idiots). House just plain hates everyone, and is determined to annoy and insult each and every one of them. Individually. And it just so happens that making sexist, racist, etc., comments are a pretty surefire way to do it.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • Suffering bad ones after Kutner's death, the first hallucination of Amber, Amber's return in the restaurant, learning that he'll be in prison for Wilson's 5 remaining months alive, and Amber and Kutner appearing in the season finale.
  • Both Kutner and Amber appear in hallucinations in the series finale... as do Cameron and Stacy.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Wilson. In the second and third seasons, the writers make light of the shipping.
  Stacy: What are you hiding?
  House: I'm gay. [Stacy glares at him] Oh! That's not what you meant. It does explain a lot, though. No girlfriend, always with Wilson, obsession with sneakers…
• Hollywood Atheist: Is sardonically critical of any expression of religious belief, although, in some of his more reflective moments, he takes a much less confrontational view, explaining that in the absence of definitive proof one way or another, a belief is ultimately a choice between what gives more comfort. It is explained, though, that he does read religious texts in order to be better able to argue with religious people.
• Honor Before Reason: House will go to insane lengths to prove himself right about a diagnosis, no matter how many rules about medical ethics and procedures he has to break. He even botched his chance to get himself released from prison early because he was sure the hospital doctor was mistaken about an ill inmate — House, of course, was correct.
• Hookers and Blow: Hookers and Vicodin, to be exact.
• Hypocrite
  • He openly mocks religious patients for finding comfort in superstition, but privately admits that the evidence for/against God could point either way and his own atheism is partly because he finds it more comforting.
  • In "Three Stories", Stacey Warner points out that House would browbeat patients in his position into getting their leg amputated to save their life, rather than stubbornly refuse the amputation as he did.
• Iconic Outfit: He always wears a blazer over some sort of t-shirt or casual shirt like a blue-button up, denim pants and a pair of sneakers.
• Icy Blue Eyes: The "piercing stare" variety.
• I Did What I Had to Do: How he justifies his illegal/immoral behavior towards patients; it saved their life, didn't it?
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: At the end of Season 4, Amber Volakis died in a bus crash that House was also in when she came to take him home after he went out drinking. Later, when Kutner committed suicide in Season 5, House started to have hallucinations of Amber from the combination of his Vicodin intake and his guilt. At the end of Season 5, House also hallucinates Kutner: he felt guilt for his death and tried to convince himself he was murdered, since suicide meant he never saw what was wrong with him. Afterwards, he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital.
• Immune to Drugs: Years of abusing them have left House nearly immune to the side-effects of Vicodin. He can pop several like they were candy and go about his day with no ill-effect. Compare when Foreman and Taub took one, and were high off their asses.
• Ineffectual Loner: Explored in-depth in the Season 4 premiere "Alone": after Foreman and Cameron quit and Chase is fired, House tries to prove he doesn't need a team anymore by solving the episode's case without one. Despite his insistence that he doesn't need a team, he tries to subtly have other hospital staff (including a janitor) help him. In the end, Cuddy explains to him that he would've sold the case quicker with a team: Cameron would've appealed to the patient's humanity while Foreman would try to prove House wrong and Chase would try to prove him right, with the debate among them stimulating House's mind and helping him make a correct diagnosis.
• Incoming Ham: If a scene opens with the team sitting around in a conference room and House isn't there, you can be assured he's about to make an amazing entrance.
  Thirteen: [as House walks in carrying an enormous broadsword] I had a dream like this once. It didn't end well.
• Insufferable Genius: House is usually right, and he'll make sure you know it.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: And how. House's frustration with idiocy is often shown to stem from his inability to relate to most other people. His only real friend is Wilson which, as Wilson admits, is a "screwed up" friendship.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: He ends his affair with Stacy after deciding Mark is a better person and partner than he is.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Likely the only reason House has managed to keep his job. House invariably presents his observations in the rudest way possible, but his conclusions still tend to be correct, often saving the patient's life.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Obnoxious to an almost religious degree, devoting his life to proving that kindness is rooted in selfishness and fear. In the end, House's patients' lives are his top priority, despite his very rough personality. Heavily implied in some episodes that his assholeish behavior is engineered to keep people away from him, or possibly to keep himself away from other people. But sometimes, when talking one-on-one with dying patients, his jerkass demeanor quickly vanishes and he can become very warm and comforting. He also does care for some people, mainly for his best friend, Wilson, and if really pressed, his team: one of the few times he blows up at Wilson is when Foreman is possibly going to die as a result of an illness House may have exposed him to by mistake.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He threatens to get into this during his Pet the Dog moments, particularly when he was diagnosed with cancer and still insisted on focusing on the patient. As always, it turned out he was just a Jerk With The Heart Of An Even Bigger Jerk than we had assumed — he faked having cancer so he could get his hands on the prescription drugs, although to be fair, his team only "found out" he was sick by snooping around behind his back.
• Karma Houdini: He usually gets away with it because he's the patient's only chance of survival, although the show does put a strain on your Willing Suspension of Disbelief in its realism, as a House who actually did suffer the consequences of his behaviour would make the show's premise impossible. The man can't go an episode without doing something that would cause any normal doctor to get arrested and/or his medical license revoked, yet he continues practicing medicine.
• Kavorka Man: Even though he is a miserable crippled jerk nearing his fifties, he has no problem attracting women like Cameron, Cuddy, and Stacy.
• The Kirk: How he diagnoses patients. His various team-members look at things from emotional angles fulfilling the roles of The Spock and The McCoy, leaving House to decide on the best course of action on his own.
• Lack of Empathy: Averted as he's fully capable of empathy. In emotional or sad moments, and almost always private ones, he'll display that capacity. He just likes to give the impression that he's an outright asshole.
• Large Ham: Certain episodes will have Hugh Laurie devouring entire sets, letting out classic Evil Laughs or behaving like a Mad Scientist in a modern setting.
• Last-Name Basis: None of the hospital staff call him Greg, not even Wilson. Only his mother and ex-girlfriend address him by his first name.
• The Leader: Of the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. Type Headstrong in that he bullies and goads his way to an objective.
• Life-or-Limb Decision: His own leg regarding the infarction that caused his current condition. While he resented Stacy at first for making the middle-ground decision that left him with his leg and constant pain, he often admits in his more vulnerable moments that he'd be much better off if he wasn't so stubborn and just had them cut the leg off.
• Living Legend: An exceptionally famous figure in the medical community. He's regularly sought out by people who are convinced (with some merit) that only he can find out what's wrong with them. How famous versus infamous he is depends on who you are.

M-Y

• Made of Iron: Considering his addictions, all the experiments he performs on himself and the sheer amount of accidents he's been in, it's a wonder he isn't dead yet.
• Mad Scientist: One time, Cuddy even referred to him as "playing mad scientist".
• Manchild: When not being sophisticated and intellectual, he spends his time engaging in childish pranks and insults.
• Manipulative Bastard: To both his friends and his patients; either because it amused him or to find out some secret they're supposedly hiding.
• Mean Boss: If you ever work with him and you have something to make fun of, he will make fun of it. He makes race jokes to Foreman, class jokes to Chase, ridicules Cameron's compassion, makes fun of Adams' rich guilt, Park's social awkwardness, Thirteen's bisexuality, and Taub's inability to keep a relationship together.
• Meaningful Name : His first name isn't used often, but Gregory means "watchful". House is a sharp, keen observer.
• Military Brat: Dragged around military bases by his soldier father, who abused him.
• Mr. Fanservice: Not to the same extent as Chase, but House gets many fanservicey moments over the show.
• Mistaken for Gay: Along with Wilson. In "The Down Low", he pretends he and Wilson are a couple as part of an insanely convoluted plan to sleep with the woman Wilson likes, and keep him from sleeping with her at the same time.
• My Greatest Failure: He clearly views his failure to predict Kutner's suicide, or find the reasons for it after the fact, like this.
• Narcissist: Gregory House is a Jerkass (heart of gold nonewithstanding) whose only friendship is constantly in danger because he attempted to exploit it. He also is constantly manipulative of everyone around him, often just for his own amusement. This has not escaped the notice of any of the main cast.
• Never Be Hurt Again: His relationship with Stacy sent him into one period of emotional disengagement. After his relationship with Cuddy goes bad, he refuses his green-card wife's affections, apparently out of fear that sex with anyone who likes him (rather than hookers) might lead to attachment, which will hurt him again. If you showed him this page on TV Tropes and said that it applied to him, he'd probably call you a moron for thinking it... and then go home and play his piano, while drinking scotch, alone.
• The Nicknamer: A Jerkass version of this trope. He comes up with new, insulting nicknames for everyone every time he sees them. Only one sticks: "Thirteen" for Dr. Remy Hadley. Although black Mormon "Big Love" and Cutthroat Bitch both had pretty good runs. House not calling Amber Cutthroat Bitch even makes for at least two distinct O.O.C. Is Serious Business moments.
• Noble Bigot: He's bigoted toward everyone, but he will do whatever it takes to save their life from whatever disease is killing them. Four or more ethnic subtypes have worked for him, and he mocks them equally. It's lampshaded in one episode after he fails to ruffle Cameron's feathers; she tells him that he's "a misanthrope, not a misogynist". Other times he makes racist and sexist comments because he likes to annoy people.
• Oh, Crap!: Several, the big ones being identifying Amber as the bus crash victim and realizing she's as good as dead in "Wilson's Heart", and Amber and Kutner appearing as hallucinations in late Season 5.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: After spending time in prison, Foreman essentially shanghais him back to work, on a very tight leash — he's on the strictest probation, and he walks a very fine line on being sent back to prison, and the rest of the hospital staff hold him in open contempt, knowing Foreman isn't the pushover Cuddy was. When House inevitably does something stupid and will probably be sent back to jail, Foreman refuses to cover for him, which is why he fakes his death — to spend time with Wilson.
• The Only One: Other characters have made final diagnoses before he has only a few times in the show's history.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In general, despite his general prickish demeanor, warped ethics and affected hatred of everyone, House takes his job and duty to patients extremely seriously - he just doesn't show it normally, preferring to instead snark and take jabs at people for his own amusement. On the occasions he drops the act and shows signs of real concern, or even actual panic (see the bullets about "Forever" and "Daddy's Boy" below), it's a sign that something very very bad has happened or is about to happen.
  • In "The Softer Side", when House suddenly becomes less disagreeable, less in pain, and happier, everyone is concerned, with Wilson even thinking the House started taking stronger drugs like heroin. He was not too far off-base: House had a prescription for methadone. However, House goes back to Vicodin at the end of the episode, as he believes his being happy makes him less effective as a doctor.
  • The opposite is true as well, as he is normally grumpy, but rarely truly enraged. When he gets outraged, he has no qualms calling people out on their bullshit and cowardice.
  • In "Forever", a patient kills her own child due to her disease. Afterwards, she refuses to receive treatment, effectively sentencing herself to death. House, who is usually dead-set on keeping his patients alive even against their own will, doesn't press her and reluctantly lets her die, even berating Foreman for refusing to accept her decision. It really tells you just how messed up the situation is and how delusionally Foreman thinks about the situation.
    • In the same episode, House notices that the patient's baby is not in its crib through the window of her room (because the patient is smothering it in her bed), and immediately drops his cane where he was standing and runs into the room to intervene.
  • Mentioned in "Finding Judas" that other characters notice this trope in effect. One encounter during House's detoxing ends with Cuddy crying alone in her office. When questioned (as House being cruel is basically status quo), she further clarifies that while House is an ass all the time, he's also always holding himself back. When he wants to hurt people, he has no problem sticking a knife into their deepest fears and twisting.
  • "Euphoria" shows him taking the case uncharacteristically personally because he may have put his team - particularly Foreman - at extreme risk. When Wilson points out that House is being unusually cautious, House loses it on him:
    "How many of your guys have caught cancer from one of your patients?! Let me know when that happens, and then we'll have this talk."
  • In "Daddy's Boy", as soon as he works out that the patient's illness is advanced radiation poisoning and locates the source, he does not fuck around; he stops joking around immediately, instructs both Foreman and Chase to get away from the source for their own good, puts himself right next to it to find it, and then immediately calls in the relevant authorities.
• Omniglot: He speaks - or at least has an understanding of - several languages. We see him interact in Spanish, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Portuguese.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: "I'm almost always eventually right."
• Perma-Stubble: House always looks disheveled, a combination of his disability and his personality. The stubble is lampshaded in several episodes. One of these has House actually giving himself a clean shave; the result is so jarring that he looks like a stranger, highlighting how much the stubble is associated with his character. On another occasion, Dr. Wilson tells him, "I lied. I've been lying to you in increasing amounts ever since I told you you looked good unshaved a year ago."
• Perpetual Frowner: He rarely smiles.
• Pet the Dog: Plenty, with the golden example being the series finale, wherein House deliberately destroys his own medical career to be with Wilson, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, during his last five months to live.
• Phrase Catcher: "You're an ass!"
• Politically Incorrect Hero: He won't hesitate for a second to make racist, sexist remarks or joke about wheelchairs, dwarfism, or disabilities directly to patients' faces. Although this is less about being bigoted and more about House just being an obnoxious jerk.
• Professor Guinea Pig: He wouldn't be a mad scientist if he didn't experiment on himself from time-to-time.
  • A college rival House held a grudge against attempted to create a drug that stops migraines. Just to prove him wrong (and also to screw him out of patenting it), House took the medication as well as drugs that would induce an extremely severe migraine headache. His rival's drug failed, and he wound up in extreme pain for the rest of the day, but did wreck the guy's chance to get his drug bought. House eventually cured his migraine himself with LSD. Though his own subconscious surmises that he really did it because he's addicted to being miserable.
  • In one episode, the patient of that week was having a bad reaction, and the team was convinced that it was because of tainted blood from a recent transfusion. House repeatedly said that wasn't the case and eventually got so annoyed arguing the point that he had the team transfuse the blood into him (House being a universal recipient).
  • One of the most serious cases was when House discovered a study being done on rats that would re-grow lost muscle, which he began to steal samples of and test on himself. All rats eventually developed fatal tumors in the muscle mass they were re-growing, meaning House had to cut his leg open and remove said tumors himself in his bathtub.
• Protagonist Title: The series is named after him.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: He isn't exactly averse to looking like a kicked puppy when someone hurts him in one of his weak spots, either. His initial reaction to his cane snapping in half in "Safe" and his emotional moments with Stacy are good examples.
• Really Gets Around: Hookers are one of his favorite pastimes.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The hyper-rational and scientifically-minded Blue Oni to Wilson's passionate and emotional Red Oni.
• Sad Clown: He constantly makes jokes, and enjoys childish pranks. However, he's a deeply depressed man who rarely laughs at anything.
• Sanity Slippage: In late Season 5, House's mental state quickly begins to deteriorate into hallucinations of Amber and delusions of a romantic relationship with Cuddy. House agrees to be voluntarily admitted to Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Of a sort. For anyone else, accepting a vintage 1965 Corvette from a known member of the New Jersey mob, as House did in season one, would be an invitation to ethical conflict, and an incitement to break all sorts of rules. For House, it was an invitation to Tuesday, and an incitement to do exactly what he does without being bribed. Ironically, apart from the car, his conduct on that case was more ethical than some of the things he would do in later seasons.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: How Cameron sees him, anyway. While this evaluation is presumably due in part to her love for him, there are also a number of hints that the two of them are similar, so she may be onto something.
• Secret Chaser: If there is a secret, he has to know it; If not even you know it, he will dismiss your ignorance as a lie right off the bat and even being threatened with prosecution because of violating government classified information won't stop him. The fact that very often that secret is the clue that helps him save the patient-of-the-week's life is the one good thing that comes from revealing it. And as the building up of calluses by everybody else in the cast shows, humiliation and ruination is the most common result of his obsession.
• Self-Deprecation: He has huge issues of self-worth, but it's rare that bystanders notice because he's also an Insufferable Genius.
• Self-Harm: House occasionally delves into this when he needs a better distraction than Vicodin. When he's going through withdrawals in season nine, he purposely breaks his fingers with a pestle to lessen the pain in his leg. His frequent self-experimenting is also interpreted by other characters as being this, like how he induces a painful migraine just to prove that his former enemy's drug doesn't work. In fact, it could be argued that the root of House's problems is that his only form of self-identity is being miserable. He doesn't know of any other way to be himself if he isn't the jaded misanthrope that belittles everyone around him into hating his guts. Even his own subconscious agrees:
  Wilson: You just wanted the pain.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Aggressive and confrontational, he serves as the Manly Man to Wilson's Sensitive Guy.
• Sherlock Homage: He's a brilliant (medical) detective who regularly takes drugs and only takes up cases that he finds interesting. Unusually, despite being clearly inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he's a doctor who hunts diseases instead of a detective who hunts criminals.
• Sherlock Scan: He's been known to deduce a stranger's illnesses after just one glance.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: With Lisa Cuddy: "I try to make you miserable. You deny that it's making you miserable. You try to make me miserable, so I'll stop making you miserable." How romantic... And let us not forget the ending of the episode "Joy" in season 5, where they actually do kiss after the slap slap.
• Sleeping with the Boss:
  • He winds up having sex with Cuddy, the hospital administrator and his immediate supervisor, after she comes over to his house to help him kick his Vicodin addiction. Except their encounter that night never actually happened—it was all a Vicodin-induced hallucination on House's part.
  • He eventually enters a relationship with Cuddy in Season 7. It falls apart after he relapses and starts taking vicodin out of fear that Cuddy had cancer.
• Smug Snake: Once House has proved himself right, there's nothing he likes more than watching people squirm.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: House is not above giving patients or their families these, usually when they're making a terrible and/or potentially life-ending choice, and when he does he often gets through to them. In "Finding Judas" after he angrily tears into Cuddy she later tells Wilson that House holds himself back during these and in truth knows full well how to use his speeches to hit someone where it hurts rather than help them.
• The Snark Knight: If House weren't a genius diagnostician, he'd fall into Loners Are Freaks territory.
• Sociopathic Hero: He does, very deep down, want to cure the people he treats but only if their case is interesting and only if he can go to illegal lengths to make sure.
• Stern Teacher: On the infrequent occasions he actually bothers to interact with the med students — best shown in " Three Stories" where he's pretty harsh to the students he's giving a lecture to but given the nature of their chosen profession he has to be.
  "It is in the nature of medicine that you are going to screw up. You are going to kill someone. If you can't handle that reality pick another profession, or finish medical school and teach."
• Super Doc: House's status as Super Doc is basically the show's premise. His specialty is supposed to be infectious disease, but House has a long-reaching and deeply comprehensive understanding of medicine that spans across specialties, fields, cultures, and historical periods. He's only downplayed in the sense that he needs a team with their own specialties to round out his already-vast knowledge base.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: Almost all women in the show want him at some point. He can't bear idiots. He's got the nice, cheerful friend too, in Dr. Wilson, who tries to teach him humanity and caring.
• Team Dad: With Wilson and/or Cuddy as the Team Mom. Wilson and Cuddy also often act strikingly like they're House's parents.
  House: [calling Wilson on the phone] Hi, honey. How are the kids?
• Token Evil Teammate: Despite being The Leader and the main character, he is the most abrasive, the most snarky, and, as noted above, any heroism he has is sociopathic. None of his minions in the Department of Diagnostic Medicine are this bad.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: It's a plot point in season seven, with him failing multiple patients. He blames this on being happy with Cuddy, which he's drunkenly okay with, but horrifies her (and they break up next episode). He's still not that bright afterwards either, thinking taking tumors out of his bad leg would be easy, but is better by the next season.
• Too Clever by Half: For all his brilliance, House can sometimes outsmart himself (which is often exploited by Wilson). Part of the reason House has a team is to assure himself he doesn't do this when diagnosing patients. A team will correct flaws in House's own logic.
• Troll: Has been known to ruin people's lives for no reason other than that he found them annoying. The fact that the majority of his victims wouldn't be alive were if not for him is the only thing saving him from complete Jerkassery.
• Troubled, but Cute: In-universe women seem to adore him unless he shows his Dr. Jerk tendencies. He has lots of emotional baggage from his past relationships, abusive father, and his chronic pain in leg. He is played by Hugh Laurie who is Tall, Dark, and Handsome with deep blue eyes.
• Ultimate Job Security: He says that Cuddy will never fire him, no matter what he does, because they had a fling pre-series. The only thing that threatens his employment is prison time throughout the final season, in part because Cuddy left and her successor, Foreman, has fewer scruples about putting House in his place.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Inadvertently causes Amber's death in the Season 4 finale. He called Wilson asking for a ride home, Amber saw the number and went to meet him, they went home on a bus which ended up in a horrific crash. Amber died from a combination of her injuries and the flu meds she was taking.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Wilson. House is a Dr. Jerk to the extreme. His concerns about his patients are primarily based on how interesting a puzzle they are, and he takes great joy in tormenting those around him physically, mentally, and emotionally. Wilson is a well-respected and well-loved doctor who is so good at dealing with people he gets thanked when he tells people they have cancer. You'd think these two would be bitter enemies, but they bond together because of their deep-seated cynicism (Wilson hides his very well), and Wilson just as easily snipes right back at House's abuses.
• What Beautiful Eyes!: If he's going to be complimented on anything physical, it'll probably be on his fantastically blue eyes. He'll even be The Charmer with them, but only as a last resort if jerkassery doesn't work.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He's called out on his actions by everyone. Often it's Wilson because he's The Conscience.
• With Friends Like These...: With the entire hospital but especially Wilson. The dynamics go thusly: "House is a jerk, his team puts up with him because he's da boss, and Cuddy just doesn't seem to have a backbone." Then there's Wilson, the mousy-looking Nice Guy cancer doctor, to whom House is an unrepentant bully: stealing his food, interrupting his meetings with outrageous claims, pulling pranks on him. Then comes an episode where Wilson says, proudly, that House is his best friend. Unlike the other characters Dr. Wilson gives as good as he gets, and it's heavily implied that they both enjoy their pranks a lot and it's the rest of the world that just doesn't get them.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: In "Both Sides Now", the Season 5 finale, House seems to get control of his Heroic BSoD... At which point Amber comes out and congratulates him. The look of absolute horror on his face tells you all you need to know.
• You Are What You Hate:
  • House harbours a simmering rage at stupid doctors and clueless patients. He's both; when doctors misdiagnosed his clot, House insisted on waiting it out instead of amputation. He ended up with 1½ legs and double the pain.
  • He also scorns Death Seekers and the suicidal, but has attempted suicide at least twice, and has admitted to contemplating it multiple times.

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"Never trust doctors."

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