Class is out and the coffee's on.
The Teachers' Lounge is an improvised comedy podcast on the Earwolf network which follows the lives of four highly questionable education professionals played by Drew Tarver, Dan Lippert, Jon Mackey and Ryan Rosenberg.
Indifferent to their students and focused on their own short term goals and aspirations, the teachers find themselves in many unlikely scenarios and even far outside of the teaching profession.
Teachers' Lounge contains examples of:
- Aborted Arc:
- The first episode of season 8 sees the teachers dead and in Hell, but the second episode has them out on work release in a mall on earth. Their being dead isn't totally abandoned (The Devil is mentioned to be observing their behavior and the season ends with them being brought back to life), but the season is overall much more about them working in a mall than it is about them being dead and in Hell.
- The minisode season begins with the teachers in Washington DC, but moves them to New York City a few episodes in after it becomes apparent that they all have Small Reference Pools regarding DC culture, and can't come up with anything interesting to do there. By the end of the season, they also run out of stuff to do in New York, and the final few episodes are a string of random one-offs.
- After spending several episodes at the beginning of season 9 preparing for the school's winter formal, the teachers agree to drop the subject entirely due to lack of interest, causing it to have no kind of conclusion.
- Affluent Ascetic: As the heir to the Levi's Jeans fortune, Howard is actually very wealthy, but voluntarily lives in a ridiculously compact house (it's really more of a box).
- Ambiguously Human:
- Despite looking like a human, Todd is apparently a single-celled organism that lactates an energy drink-like fluid and can transform into a liquid state at will.
- Sam is the son of two birds, but was born via immaculate conception. The details of his birth are so hazy that it's unclear if he's a bird raised to act like a man or a man born to birds.
- While Howard begins the show seemingly as a human, his soul is able to inhabit the rotting husk of another man and regrow his body from within it. After being reborn, he suddenly gains immortality.
- Animorphism: Bill's alternating addictions to Ostragen and Bearoids cause him to mutate into an ostrich and a bear, respectively.
- Apathetic Teacher: While each of the cast are often distracted from their duties to their students, Todd treats his theater students almost exclusively as an annoyance or as a means to his own selfish end.
- Arc Words: Season 4's "We're normal now."
- Armored Closet Gay:
- Bill is an extremely campy and effeminate fellow who regularly finds himself in blatantly sexual relationships with other men but nonetheless emphatically insists that he "ain't gay no more" whenever his sexuality is called into question.
- Todd similarly has had numerous homosexual experiences (even starring in a series of hardcore gay pornography films at one point) yet will insist that he is straight whenever he believes someone thinks otherwise.
- Artifact Title: The "teachers" spend seasons five through eight doing things completely unrelated to teaching. Season nine finally puts them back in the original Hamilton High setting, though they're still only inclined to do anything related to their jobs when they feel like it.
- Auto Cannibalism: Sam spends most of season 7 mutilating himself and preparing the severed body parts as food. A variation, as while he's the one preparing himself to eat, it's the rest of the camp's staff and campers who are actually eating him.
- Ax-Crazy: Sam Weatherman tends to be the most violent and destructive of the four.
- Back to School: The ostensible plot of season 6 is that the teachers go back to college to find themselves. In practice, them actually attending classes is rarely brought up and very few of their guests or subplots have anything to do with college at all, something which is mercilessly lampshaded in the latter half of the season.
- Beware the Quiet Ones: The meek and mild-mannered Howard will transform into an Expy of Alex Jones when sufficiently riled up.
- Big Beautiful Man: Sam is occasionally mentioned to have an erotically curvy body that allowed him to have a career as a BET video vixen before he became a teacher. He later starts his own Instagram account that is filled entirely with suggestive pictures of himself, which Bill regularly masturbates to.
- Born Lucky / Born Unlucky: The teachers arguably qualify as both. Sure their lives consist of pretty much nothing but humiliating themselves and ruining everything they take part in, but they're always able to find a new endeavor to screw up when all's said and done, with few (if any) lasting consequences for their previous actions.
- Borrowed Catch Phrase: Bill, Todd and Sam all start to use Howard's "Kick it!" in season 9 in order to "beat" him at introducing the show.
- Burger Fool: From season 5 onward, Todd takes a second job at Burger King that he's so embarrassed by he constantly tries to hide it from the other three. His excuses basically always reach Implausible Deniability levels.
- Butt-Monkey: While all of the teachers have terrible luck, Todd tends to suffer the most humiliating punishments in life. Within their group dynamic, though, Howard is distinctly at the bottom of the pecking order.
- Catchphrase: A few:
- Howard sheepishly states "We've been recording this whole time." at the top of each episode, followed by "Kick it!" when "officially" starting the show.
- Every episode ends with the group telling their audience to "Stay Flippy!"
- Todd abrasively telling someone to "Fuck off", generally when they rightfully point out a mistake that he made.
- Bill's "I ain't gay no more!"
- One of the teachers stating that "Guinness screeched to a halt." after hearing certain news, followed immediately up by another declaring "Guinness is back, baby!"
- Whenever Bill talks about using the internet, expect him to say "And then I log onto Pornhub and jerk it to completion." at some point.
- Character Focus: Certain seasons end up having a "central" plotline that focuses on one particular teacher, with the season finale generally being almost entirely about them:
- Season 2 focuses on Sam becoming a guidance counselor and motivational speaker at the school. He ends up being so viciously abusive to the students under his care that an entire wing of the school ends up becoming a hellish quarantine area for those that have had their spirits broken by him where he is worshiped as a demonic deity known as "the Big Nightmare". The finale focuses on the area, nicknamed "the Danger Zone", getting destroyed and the teachers getting fired in response.
- Season 3 focuses on Howard getting bullied by the other three about being a virgin. After trying to deny it in increasingly ridiculous ways for several episodes, he eventually owns up to it and eventually ends up finding love. The pressure that the other three put on him about losing his virginity ends up being too much for him, however, and he has a fatal heart attack at the mere thought of being intimate with his new girlfriend. The finale centers on the aftermath of his funeral.
- Season 5 focuses on Todd struggling to find work in Hollywood as the other three steadily begin to fall upwards into obscene levels of success. The stress finally gets to him and he ends up snapping and murdering his friend O. J. Simpson. The finale centers on the teachers dealing with the fallout.
- Season 6 focuses on Bill getting indoctrinated into a cult that he believes to be a college frat and becoming engaged to its leader to be used as a blood sacrifice. The finale is set during the day of the wedding and is about the teachers trying to find a way of getting Bill out of it.
- Cloudcuckoolander: While all four of the teachers are clearly nutcases (Todd dates mannequins and seemingly lacks object permanence, Sam enters into a three-way relationship with his tapeworm and cannibalizes his own body for no real reason, and Howard transforms into Alex Jones when pissed off), Bill stands out as the loopiest of the bunch. It's rare for him to stay on the same wavelength as the other three for very long before bursting off into another new and wild tangent.
- The Corruptible: Bill falls under the control of shady and manipulative men practically once per season. In season 6, he full-on joins a cult under the mistaken belief that it is a frat.
- Crisis Crossover: The final minisode before the debut of season 9 was a crossover between every single Similar Squad rival podcast established in the previous seasons. This means that it features each of the four hosts playing six characters each all at once to naturally chaotic results.
- Death Is Cheap: Howard dies and is absent for almost an entire season (with Mackey instead playing a different character known as Stu Taylor) but comes back from hell at the end of the season- much to the dismay of the other teachers. At the end of season 7, all of the teachers die, but are revived by the end of the next season.
- Decoy Protagonist: Nurse Daryl Kirkman is introduced in the third season finale, seemingly as the replacement host for the deceased Howard (as both are played by Jon Mackey). By the end of the episode he also ends up dead and the fourth season is forced to introduce Stu Taylor, yet another character played by Mackey, to take over the empty host seat.
- Depraved Bisexual: Bill, Todd and Sam all show attraction to both sexes at one point or another and are all sleazy creeps.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Daryl Kirkman is killed on the spot by the other three teachers for saying "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" instead of "Stay Flippy!" at the end of his first episode as a host.
- Dodgy Toupee: Bill uses grass as a hairpiece and insists that it's his real, long, beautiful hair.
- Drives Like Crazy: Despite being a driving instructor professionally, Sam is an extremely dangerous driver who almost always causes major property damage and leaves a body count when put behind a wheel.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first season features background music outside of the top of the show, and has Bill speaking at a much lower, more normal-sounding register.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Todd has a very deep bass voice and is a despicable coward.
- Exact Words: Sam takes the concept of putting himself into his cooking a little too literally in season 7.
- Expansion Pack Past: The teachers reveal more and more improbable things about their pasts in nearly every episode.
- Extreme Doormat: Howard is so conflict avoidant that he'd rather allow his abusive stepdad to bully him into
marriage than confront him about his behavior. - Extreme Omnisexual: The teachers have collectively dated and/or been engaged to a number of truly terrible men and women, along with a countless number of animals and inanimate objects.
- Extreme Omnivore: Todd Padre's crippling addiction to paint.
- Flanderization: Bill Cravy's voice becomes increasingly more high-pitched and absurd-sounding across the first three seasons, to the point where the fourth season acknowledges it by canonically revealing him to suffer from "ridiculous voice", which is alternatingly used as an analogy for being a closeted homosexual and having a terminal illness. Howard being a pathetic wet blanket virgin also steadily starts to overtake his character as soon as his virginity is established.
- Four-Temperament Ensemble:
- The manic and excitable Bill Cravy is Sanguine.
- The buttoned-down and put-upon Howard Levi's is Phlegmatic.
- The moody wannabe thespian Todd Padre is Melancholic.
- The hyper-aggressive and enterprising Sam Weatherman is Choleric.
- The Friend Nobody Likes: Bill, Sam and Todd hate Howard pretty openly, to the point where he at one point says that he feels like the podcast is "three against one every goddamn episode".
- The Ghost: Several characters are often mentioned but never appear, the most notable examples being Todd's ex-wife and O. J. Simpson.
- Guest-Star Party Member: Band Director Stu Taylor fills in for the deceased Howard throughout most of the fourth season before dying near the end of the second-to-last episode. In the season finale, his corpse is possessed by Howard's ghost and he hasn't been heard from since.
- Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: Bill rips all of his hair out during a nervous breakdown at the beginning of season 5 and never manages to grow any of it back. It becomes a Running Gag for the remainder of the series that he puts grass on his head and tries to pass it off as his actual hair.
- Her Codename Was Mary Sue: All of Todd's plays, when not outright autobiographical, are clearly based on his own life, and are without fail absurdly self-aggrandizing. The most famous example is "My Conversations With the Devil", which consists of nothing but him (who is described in the script as being flawless) giving a "Reason You Suck" Speech to the Devil, who serves as a blatant stand-in for his ex-wife. The rest of the cast consists of a fake audience who applaud and cheer whenever Todd's character says anything.
- Horrible Judge of Character: The teachers are all good friends with and greatly admire O. J. Simpson and El Chapo.
- Hotter and Sexier: Parodied in season 6, where the teachers claim the mantra of "We're nasty now!" in reference to sexually experimenting now that they have to go Back to School. While the season does feature slightly more sex jokes than usual (admittedly a pretty small leap), none of it is even slightly titillating.
- I Am a Humanitarian:
- Not only do the other three teachers eat Howard's remains after he dies, they convert what was supposed to be his funeral into a barbecue with him as the entree.
- When Sam becomes a camp cook in season 7, every meal he prepares consists of his own body parts. By the final episode, all that is left of him is his head.
- The teachers eating human flesh comes up so frequently that they start to acknowledge how often they do it.
- Not only do the other three teachers eat Howard's remains after he dies,
- In-Series Nickname: While Howard's spirit is possessing Stu Taylor's dead body throughout season 5, the other three teachers take to calling him "Howard in Stu's".
- The Internet Is for Porn: Bill doesn't seem to understand that computers can be used for anything other than "logging onto Pornhub and jerking it to completion".
- Is This Thing Still On?: An inverted example; Howard always accidentally starts recording before the teachers are ready, causing the top of every episode to consist of embarrassing small talk that the audience ostensibly is not intended to hear.
- Jesus Was Way Cool: The setting's version of Jesus is consistently portrayed as being an obnoxious gym rat who is seemingly in a perpetual state of getting gains while blasting bad Nu Metal. He's also apparently a diva, as he had the Devil cast out of Heaven for being prettier than him.
- Karma Houdini: If the teachers face any consequences for their actions, expect them to miraculously escape relatively unscathed in the end.
- Kiddie Kid: Hamilton is ostensibly a high school, but its students often engage in activities that are associated more with middle or even elementary schoolers, such as using a supervised pickup lane after school.
- Later-Installment Weirdness: The first few episodes of season 9 (when the podcast moved to Earwolf) featured actual guest stars (as in people who aren't playing characters) and had the teachers attempt to interview them about their high school experience. The interviews inevitably went Off the Rails before much could come of them, and the concept was dropped just as quickly as it was introduced.
- Leader Wannabe: Howard considers himself to be The Leader of the teachers due to being the one who introduces the show. Not only do the other three not agree with him, but he's pretty consistently the member of the group with the least amount of sway over their decision-making.
- Lighter and Softer: Parodied and subverted in season 4, which sees the teachers return to being regular staff members at a school as opposed to running one as they had in the previous season in an attempt to stabilize their lives. Their mantra throughout the season is even "We're normal now". Despite this, the season is no less off the wall ridiculous as the previous one, and only continues to get weirder as it goes on.
- Literal Metaphor: Tater, one of the hosts of the Beachers' Lounge, is a "Beach Bum" in the most literal sense (as in he is a stereotypical Crazy Homeless Person who happens to live on a beach).
- Loser Protagonist: The teachers are one of the most pathetic bunches you'll ever encounter. Any success they find in life is always temporary.
- Meaningful Name: Bill Cravy's last name is one letter away from being "Crazy", and he's generally the most deranged of the four. This is actually acknowledged in-universe, as he is apparently called "Coach Crazy" by many of his students.
- Meaningful Rename: Sam Weatherman changes his name to Sam Silver after becoming a successful Hollywood agent in season 5, and goes back to his old name after losing the job at the end of the season. He occasionally takes up the Sam Silver name once again whenever he's feeling particularly cocky.
- Miles Gloriosus: While all of the teachers have traces of this, Todd fits it the most cleanly. He's a talentless old loser who nonetheless believes himself to constantly be on the verge of a career breakthrough as an actor.
- Must Have Caffeine: The teachers have any interesting spin on this; they only drink awful coffee from old, overused and uncleaned coffee pots, and wretch at anything of even slightly higher quality.
- Noodle Incident: Played for Laughs with the origin of Sam's birth. After it's revealed that he was born via immaculate conception, the teachers tease an upcoming "Sam's Origin" supersode in every following episode, clearly never intending for it to actually ever become a thing.
- Of Course I'm Not a Virgin: Howard spends most of season three attempting to deny being a virgin. The others never buy it and he's eventually forced to cave in and admit to being one.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Howard is referred to almost exclusively as "Blunt" throughout season 7 due to asking if he could be blunt with the others in the first episode of the season.
- Only Sane Man: Howard, relatively speaking. He's still a despicable loser and idiot, but he consistently has the highest moral standards of the group, and is generally a bit more intelligent than the other three.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Howard spends all of season five as a ghost inhabiting Stu Taylor's dead body. Over the course of the season, the body begins entering an increasing state of decay until it finally crumbles apart in the finale to reveal that Howard's original body had somehow regrown inside of it.
- The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: While we get occasional glimpses of the four hosts doing their jobs (and inevitably doing terribly), it's common for them to go entire seasons without so much as mentioning anything related to the teaching profession. And they continue to refer to themselves collectively as "the teachers" even in the (several) seasons where none of them actually are.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: The teachers are all at various points shown to be racist misogynists. If any of them (usually Todd) expresses any kind of progressive thinking, expect it to be blatantly motivated by a desire to appear sophisticated and get praised.
- Put on a Bus: Bill leaves the show for a few episodes late into season 9 to travel the world selling his product the Beef Diapernote . It was intended to last much longer, but the COVID-19 epidemic ended up bringing him back within a month.
- Retool: Happens at the beginning of every season from season 3 onward, to the point of being a Running Gag:
- Season 3 sees the teachers founding their own charter school as opposed to merely being staff members at a public school as they had in the previous seasons.
- Season 4 sees the teachers return to their original jobs, but with a newfound focus on being "normal".
- Season 5 sees the teachers "go Hollywood" and try to make it big in Los Angeles.
- Season 6 sees the teachers go back to college in an attempt to start their lives over again.
- Season 7 sees the teachers become camp counselors at their childhood summer camp.
- Season 8 first sees the teachers dead and in Hell, but quickly puts them on work release in a run-down mall.
- Season 9 has a soft Continuity Reboot, returning the teachers to Hamilton High while downplaying (but not outright dismissing) discussion of the events of the previous seasons.
- Social distancing brought on by the COVID-19 epidemic had the show's new episodes ostensibly be unreleased content recorded during the early 2000s to justify their lower audio quality. On top of that, the early 2000s episodes are set in Cancun, with MTV's Spring Break going on in the background, essentially giving it two gimmicks at once.
- Random Events Plot: While the seasons are each generally able to weave together a fairly coherent and consistent storyline within themselves, there are occasions when they fly so far Off the Rails that it can be close to impossible to identify what the overarching plotlines are.
- Random Species Offspring: Sam appears to be human, yet his parents are eventually revealed to be birds.
- Recycled Plot: By sheer accident, Bill ends up placing himself and Howard in a plotline in season 9 (with them competing for the same position in what is a thinly-veiled allegory for the presidential election) that is nearly a complete rehash of the plot they had in season 7. Two episodes after the recycled plot begins, Todd Lampshades that it's a rehash.
- Running Gag: Too many to list. To name a few:
- Howard realizing that he had already started recording the podcast without realizing it, exposing the teachers' embarrassing top of the show chatter to the world.
- Season 9 introduces a new variant of the gag that has one of the other three teachers "beating" Howard at introducing the show by abruptly saying "kick it!" to cue the music at the top. One episode begins with Sam doing this, before anything can even happen.
- The Guinness World Records van screeching to a halt on the scene of the teacher's antics to immediately identify something that one of the teachers has done as a new (generally terrible and/or pathetic) world record, followed by one of the teachers (generally Bill) exclaiming "Guinness is back, baby!".
- Todd either being in a romantic relationship with or getting life coaching from a mannequin.
- Bill constantly talking about how long and real his hair is.
- The teachers going off on a tangent of heavily enunciating Inherently Funny Words like "beef" or "scramble".
- Almost every time Paul F. Tompkins appears as a guest, the teachers somehow trick his character into eating paint during a blind taste test.
- Secretly Wealthy: Howard is actually the heir to the Levi's Jeans fortune, but chooses to live outside of his family's wealth to prove his own merits.
- Sex Signals Deatg: With a particularly pathetic twist; Howard dies of a heart attack caused by the panic he felt at the thought of losing his virginity.
- Similar Squad: From season four onward, it has been revealed that the universe the podcast takes place in is home to several similarly-named podcasts starring four men who sound and act remarkably similar to, but not quite the same as, the teachers.
- Smart Ball: Held most frequently by Howard, but can be passed to any of the teachers at a moment's notice. This practice is occasionally mocked when the others call out the ball's current holder for straight manning right after having said or done something ridiculous just moments before.
- Straw Loser: Howard is a partial example. While the universe generally hates all four of the teachers equally, Bill, Todd and Sam tend to take solace in punching Howard down to feel better about themselves.
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bill will emphatically insist "I ain't gay no more!" whenever he interprets someone as accusing him of being attracted to men.
- Teeny Weenie: Todd's penis is apparently so small that it's the only thing the media can focus on once it's revealed during coverage of his post-murder police chase.
- Throw the Dog a Bone: On rare occasions, Howard will find ridiculous (and undeserved) success that will cause Bill and Sam to become his toadies and for Todd to take his usual place as the designated Butt-Monkey of the group. Status Quo Is God ensures that these moments never last for much longer than an episode, but they still allow Howard some time to not constantly get shit on.
- Title Confusion: Official sources have variously referred to the show as Big Grande Teachers' Lounge, Big Grande's Teachers' Lounge, and Big Grande's The Teachers' Lounge.
- Ultimate Job Security: While the teachers do get fired multiple times throughout the series, it doesn't take much for Hamilton to be willing to rehire them.
- Undignified Death: Jon Mackey's characters inevitably go out like this:
- Howard Levi's dies of a heart attack caused by nerves about losing his virginity. To make matters worse, his body is cannibalized at his funeral, which quickly devolves into a depraved orgy.
- Daryl Kirkman is kicked out of a helicopter hundreds of feet in the air for making a Saturday Night Live reference and lands directly on top of Howard's grave, fatally breaking his back.
- Stu Taylor is cursed by a genie to be shrunk to minuscule size and is then eaten by a tapeworm. His corpse is recovered by the teachers who attempt to resurrect him, only for Howard's spirit to possess it instead.
- Villain Protagonist: All four of the teachers are selfish and despicable people who regularly menace the people around them for no real reason.
- Virgin-Shaming: Howard is repeatedly made fun of by the rest of the cast for his assumed virginity early in the series.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: A Running Gag introduced later on has the teachers all becoming choked up while talking about their neglectful fathers.
- Wild Card: Bill Cravy (and by extension his performer Drew Tarver), through a combination of his short attention span and Cloudcuckoolander personality, can on a whim completely upend plots that have been ongoing for several episodes by introducing new and totally unrelated topics.
- With Friends Like These...: The teachers will sell each other out for their own gain in a second. Special mention goes to Howard, who has his dead body cannibalized by his so called friends during his funeral.
- Younger Than They Look: Todd is apparently seventy-something but looks a hundred.
