Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World is a satirical stop-motion show created by Q. Allan Brocka that airs on LOGO, the first network dedicated to all gay and lesbian programming. It focuses on a trio of couples in the "gay ghetto" of West Lahunga Beach, California (an expy for Laguna Beach). Premiering in 2007, it has met with much critical acclaim, due to its satire not being too preachy. Despite season 2 ending on a cliffhanger, the show is no longer in production. The characters are:
Characters:
- Rick Brocka, Jr. (voiced by Will Matthews): Steve's husband. He is a 30-year-old Filipino-American homemaker. He is also a genius, who belongs to the local all-gay chapter of Menza.
- Steve Ball (voiced by Peter Paige): Rick's husband. He is a 33-year-old real estate agent. Unlike Rick, he's a gym bunny and a bit of an airhead.
- Kirsten Kellog (voiced by Emily Brooke Hands in season 1 and Jessica-Snow Wilson in season 2): Dana's 28-year-old wife. She is Rick's best friend, and a self proclaimed artist. She owns a local sex toy store.
- Dana Bernstein (voiced by Taylor M. Dooley): Kirsten's 32-year-old wife. She is a self-decribed J.A.B. — a Jewish American Bulldyke. She works as a project manager for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. She is also openly antagonistic toward Steve.
- Chuck Masters (voiced by Alan Cumming): Evan's 50-year-old wheelchair-bound boyfriend. Chuck is HIV positive and paralyzed from the left testicle down.note He's Steve's best friend, and an angry yet truthful person.
- Evan Martinez (voiced by Wilson Cruz): Chuck's 19-year-old kept boyfriend. He is extremely shallow, very promiscuous and addicted to a multitude of drugs. Evan invariably spends his nights at clubs.
- Condi Ling (voiced by Margaret Cho): West Lahung Beach's resident Fag Hag. She claims to be Evan's best friend and shares most of his personality traits, though he regards her as more of an annoyance. When alone, Condi is depressed and has attempted suicide in many comical ways.
- Dixie (voiced by Lori Alan): Dana & Kirsten's baby, born in the second season premiere. Originally, Kirsten was going to be artificially inseminated by Rick's sperm. However, Steve mixed some of his sperm in as well, and a bumpy car ride accidentally spilled the sample onto (into) Dana instead. Seems to be gaining mild psychic abilities.
- Pussy (voiced by Liza Del Mundo): Rick & Steve's cat. She has human-like intelligence (at least smarter than Steve) and talks to them so frequently that it doesn't even bother them anymore.
This show contains examples of:
- All Gays are Promiscuous:
- Toyed with with most of the male characters, especially Evan.Chuck: Promise me after I die you'll never sleep with anybody else.
Evan: But I sleep with other people now! - Ultimately averted with Rick and Steve, though, who despite an early attempt to have a threesome, remain monogamous throughout the show's run.
- Toyed with with most of the male characters, especially Evan.
- All Lesbians Want Kids: Kirsten, as well as her friends Ebony & Ivory. And just about every other lesbian on the show too.
- Ancient Conspiracy: Brace yourselves — Ten thousand years ago, Earth was a technological paradise "...more advanced than Star Trek!". Also, everyone was gay. After the first heterosexual was born, everything went downhill from there. A secret society known as the "Lavendar Mafia" (of which Lance Bass is a member) preserves this secret.
- Blue Boy, Pink Girl: Rick and Kirsten were friends since college and are the more traditionally femme partners in their relationships, Kirsten wears a pink coverall outfit while Rick wears a blue shirt.
- Brand X: Most characters use laptops that have a banana (with a bite taken out of it) as a logo.
- Built with LEGO: Averted. The pilot was originally done with LEGO, who objected to something as controversial as a gay themed Black Comedy.
- Cats Are Mean: And form elaborate plots to kill babies they think are getting more attention than they are.
- Club Kid: Evan, whose body is so messed up with drugs and diet pills that if he were to ever fall asleep it would overwhelm his system and kill him.
- Crazy-Prepared: Parodied. In order to pass through an ancient, underground temple (LongStory) the explorer must insert the original Declaration of Independence to proceed.Rick: Darn, I only carry a copy!
- Cure Your Gays: Evan tries to get ex-gay therapy so he can have sex with a woman. The effort is an Epic Fail, however. Instead of associating attraction to men with horrific pain, he ended up associating pain with attraction to men in a positive way, and now asks to be electrocuted in bed.
- Dead Guy Junior: Dana wants to name her son after her saintly dead brother, Dick. And still wants to after the baby turns out to be a girl. They settle on Dixie instead. He and Dana used to play cross-dress up as kids. Dixie was his drag name. Dick could have been Ambiguously Gay, Camp Straight or just very supportive, given how he's painted as a Messianic Archetype
- Everything Is Racist: Parodied. A Twofer Token Minority played by Ru Paul tries to educate both racially insensitive Steve and a straight, Black friend of his. To show the trials and tribulations of being black and gay at the same time he takes them to a Black Gay bar called Antwone's Fissure. Not only does he teach them nothing, but gets asked to leave by the drag queen waiting tables. He now complains that she's discriminating against him because his friends are straight and white, only to be shown that the Black Gay bar has a "No Martyring" policy.
- Fag Hag: Condi Ling is the token straight of the group, and mostly hangs around Evan.
- Fun with Acronyms: Chuck teaches HIV awareness for community service. His method of helping young gays remember to practice safe sex? "Bring A Rubber Every time, Because Aids Can Kill" or B.A.R.E.B.A.C.K.
- Gay Bar Reveal: Inverted. Steve's mom is so deep in denial, she goes to a hardcore gay leather bar, sees a man being lead around on a leash and being from The Deep South seems overjoyed that slavery is still legal in that neighborhood.
- Gayborhood: West Lahunga Beach is an all-gay community of both gay men and lesbians.
- Hypocritical Humor: One of Dana's defining traits is her hatred of men — particularly homosexuals. However, her late brother Dick (the only man she ever loved) was a part-time crossdresser, and may have been in the closet himself. Could be You Are What You Hate, Dana stated in one video that if she was a man, she'd be a male chauvinist, which is what she accuses most men of being.
- Insistent Terminology:
- Chuck does not have AIDS, he's HIV-positive. This is a bit of Truth in Television since many HIV-negative people think the two are one and the same.
- Condi is not a Fag Hag! She's an alternative lifestyle companion!
- Jewish American Princess: The acronym is spoofed with Dana calling herself a J.A.B. (Jewish American Bulldyke); however her interests are more tomboyish than most.
- Jewish Mother: Averted with Dana, who is of Jewish heritage but isn't stringent as Kirsten about the baby. Dana's mother has the accent and the overbearing manner down.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Taken to its logical extreme and lampshaded with Kirsten and Dana. Kirsten desperately wants to conceive but can't, even after multiple insemination attempts. Dana doesn't really want kids to begin with, but all she has to do is spill a cup of sperm on her lap, and her womb "sucks it up through three layers of denim."
- Lipstick Lesbian: Kirsten, she actually is designed with red lipstick and wears a wavy haircut with pink overalls with a daisy on them.
- Mama Bear: Rick's mother, defender of love and gay equality. Steve's mother sworn to "protecting the sanctity of my son's anus".
- May–December Romance: Chuck is in his 50s, Evan is barely 19. Their relationship ends up resembling that of a man raising his grandson... only with more sex.
- Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: Butch Dan and her girly wife Kirsten.
- Mistaken Ethnicity: Hunter, Rick's ex-boyfriend, is absolutely obsessed with dating Asian men. He even affectionately still refers to Rick as "China Doll". Ironically, he can't seem to tell the difference between an Asian and a Latino (he thought Rick was Asian, and seems to think the same of all Latinos).
- Political Overcorrectness: Ebony and Ivory are the embodiment of this trope. They refuse to check whether their infant is a boy or a girl because they believe that shouldn't be up to them to enforce gender roles, they gave the child a gender-neutral name, and insist that the child be referred to as "she and/or he". They refuse to baby-talk because it is patronizing, and they find it offensive to call a child small. They have a bank account specifically for their child's future sex change operation should she and/or he desire one.
- Punny Name: Several supporting and incidental characters, including television news anchor Anderson Pooper and San Francisco mayor Gavin Screwsome, are named with sexualized puns on the names of real-world equivalents.
- Really Gets Around: When they still thought Dana's baby was going to be a boy, Kirsten made a list of four thousand potential names, crossing off each name if it was shared by a guy that Steve had slept with. By the time they were done, the only names left were John, Paul, George, and Ringo; the list of names that had to be ruled out even included Barack.
- Shout-Out:
- When a straight couple moves in to the neighborhood, Condi defends her turf by proclaiming herself "the only straight in the village".
- Upon hearing how long Kirsten's baby-names list is, Chuck remarks "Christ, Schindler's wasn't even that long!"
- Rick's favorite show is Skanky Housewives, with clips showing a red haired mother of a terrible ten year old cocaine addict who snorts drugs off of babies.
- Stop Being Stereotypical: Inverted in the gang's trip to San Francisco, where they are marginalized by the locals for being "heteronormalized" (ie, not being genderqueer, and, in Kirsten and Dana's case, raising a baby).
- Stop Motion: The series is made with stop motion made of Duplo.
- Straight Gay: Steve repeatedly identifies himself as a straight-acting gay, and acts exactly like an idiot jock.
- Suicide as Comedy: Condi, who tries to pathetically commit suicide every time a guy she dates turns out to be gay. It's now in the double digits. Everyone is so annoyed by her shooting her self in the head with glue guns that they start urging her to just kill herself already so they can watch TV in peace.
- Teen Pregnancy: Evan's mother was 14 when she had him.
- Token Minority: One of Steve's friends is the only straight guy in the show to have more than one line.
- Twofer Token Minority: Steve's friend who is both black and gay, who has a bit of a martyr complex. Then there's Rick who is gay and Filipino, and Evan who is also Latino. Then there's Chuck who's an wheelchair bound HIV positive homosexual. There is also a recurring background character of Bodiless Mute Blind Latina Lesbian in a Wheelchair, a disembodied head whose inarticulate mumbles are translated by her live-in nurse Jessica.
- Unsettling Gender-Reveal: In the first episode we are introduced to "huge" gay pornstar Dylan Rambrick, who Rick and Steve gleefully watch. To their (mis)fortune, they encounter and pursue him near the end of the episode, and to their great shock his "penis" pops right off.
- Weight Woe: Rick for being "Skinny Fat" and Dana after Dixie is born. Doesn't help that almost everyone mentions how "fat" she is.
- Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Every business in West Lahunga Beach. There's even a Guns 'n' Homo.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The season two episode Wickeder, a standard Wizard of Oz parody
- With Friends Like These...: Or Neighbors Like These... the whole town wants to see Dana go through a long and hard labor.
