Tropes N to Z / Foxtrot

FoxTrot contains examples of:

See also Tropes A to M.

Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
- In the series of strips where Peter serves as assistant coach to the football team, he makes the brilliant decision to tell a player named "Rhinoski" that his athletic cup is too big.
- In another strip, where he's the water boy, he makes another dumb move, trying to order around another huge, hulking football player - who we can see this time, who's about twice his size - named "Ogreski". The last panel shows the coach asking the referee for a time out due to a medical emergency.
- In yet another, Peter comes home from a baseball game beat up and dirty because he tried to help himself to another player's sunflower seeds: "I swear, 'Raging Bull' Truckowski has got to learn to share!"
Name-Tron: As mentioned above, invoked by Jason in his comic strip.
National Geographic Nudity: Referenced in a Sunday strip where Roger assumes Jason to be reading old National Geographics for this, when he's really after the Apollo 11 issue.
Nerds Are Pervs: Nerdy characters Jason and Marcus are both source(s) of the strip's science and Nerd culture Shout-Out humour. A few early strips have some punchline(s) where this trope is in play:
- One strip in a story arc depicting the Fox family getting internet has Andy comment about all the things the kids can learn. Cut to Jason and Marcus looking at the computer, where Jason comments that "Ms. October sure has big hooters!" and Marcus pondering if that might affect the download speed.
- Another comic strip depicts Jason and Marcus stargazing. Jason adjusts the telescope so he can view other celestial bodies...then tilts it so he can see a couple making out with a smile on his face.
Nerds Speak Klingon: Jason, naturally. At a showing of a Star Trek movie he cosplays as a Klingon and demands fresh gagh from the beleaguered movie worker. Another strip has him ask Peter to check whether he's memorized the Klingon-English dictionary.
Never My Fault: Each member of the Fox clan usually employs some extreme variety of Insane Troll Logic to avoid taking responsibility:
- To Roger, the fact that he's overweight and his cholesterol is sky-high, putting him at serious risk of heart attack or stroke, and forcing him to immediately go cold turkey on nearly all of his favorite (junk) foods, is Andy's fault for making him go to the doctor.
- When Paige gets dinged on her first day of school for not doing her summer reading, she blames Andy; an incredulous Andy says she bought the book, gave Paige the book, spelled out exactly what would happen if she didn't read the book, and reminded her every single day to read the book! How can it be her fault?
  Paige: You didn't make me read it!
No Celebrities Were Harmed:
- Paige enjoys a band called The Back sync Boys. Like the Brand X example, also averted about half the time.
- This may be meant as a Take That! against such bands in general. There was this exchange between Andy and Jason in a strip shortly after a Christmas arc.
  Andy: Jason, I asked you to take out the trash. Paige's new Backsync Boys CD is not trash! [pauses, looks at the CD] ...Of the kind I meant.
  Jason: If I may quote a recent review...
- A strip featured spoofs on a number of popular webcomics, with Jason's comment that all his work "felt kinda derivative."
No Indoor Voice: Paige. As Peter put it, she just likes to yell.
Noodle Incident: One is created in this strip:
Peter: [after an incredibly lame pun by Jason in the style of Pearls Before Swine] Remind me to start hiding your Pearls Before Swine books.
Jason: You still haven't returned my Calvin and Hobbes books after the Noodle Incident, by the way.
No Sympathy: It's very uncommon for any member for the family to genuinely sympathize with or take another member's side after hearing about the other person's problems. The exception was when Peter was feeling down after breaking up with Denise, and Andy not only comforted him but talked him through the decision, helping Peter apologize to Denise and win her back.
Not Allowed to Grow Up:
- The kids are always attending the same school in the same grades every year. Lampshaded in a strip shortly after 9/11 when Roger goes to donate blood and Jason asks if he's suddenly stumbled into For Better or for Worse; Andy reassures him that he can stay ten years old.
- There is precisely one character in the strip who has aged. Katie O'Dell, the little girl Paige babysits, was six months old in her first appearance, but later aged up to two years and froze there.
- Lampshaded in the 25th anniversary comic◊, where Peter finds a box of old photographs showing how the characters looked in the beginning of the strip's run.
  Jason: Wow. When were these taken?
  Peter: The box says 25 years ago, which is weird because I'm only 16.
  Jason: You know, for a cartoonist who used to be semi-decent at math...
Not Helping Your Case:
- In one story arc, Andy is furious when Paige casually mentions that she saw Indecent Proposal at the theater; as she is ranting about how much sex and nudity are in the film, Paige rolls her eyes and says that, at most, it had a third of the sex and nudity she saw in Basic Instinct. Andy hits the roof, and Paige backpedals quickly, and much too late.
  - When Andy asks just how many R-rated movies Paige has seen despite being underage, Paige reluctantly admits "a few dozen... dozen"^note I.e., upwards of 144 , then quickly adds, "Some were just the violent kind, though."
- Andy grounds Peter for a week after he let slip that he saw Kill Bill: Volume 2; he protests that she didn't get upset when he saw Volume 1, and she replies that she didn't know he'd seen Volume 1.
- When Andy tells Jason he's not allowed to watch Game of Thrones because his eyes aren't ready for all the graphic violence and adult content, he responds by listing things he's seen on the internet since breakfast. Cue Andy taking away Jason's computer until he's 50.
Not Listening to Me, Are You?: One strip had Peter make all sorts of strange statements, which Roger basically ignores giving the "yeah", "uh-huh", and "that's nice" responses because he's reading the paper... right up until he says he's staying an hour past curfew, and he promptly shoots down his request. Peter comments that one day he's going to get past his dad's filter. Meanwhile, Paige is telling Roger her intent to change her name to a semicolon, with the same initial responses.

Obfuscating Stupidity: Roger does this with Andy occasionally and gets away with it. When she gives him a chore to do (such as: load and run a dishwasher) that he really doesn't want to do, he messes it up as badly as possible so she will never ask him to do it again. He also acts dumb and clueless when Andy drags him to a workout session so she will be too embarrassed to take him back.
- Jason as well, in a strip in which he declares he's going to burn Paige's Backsync Boys compact discs as a purposeful middle-finger to the record industry's anti-piracy measures - and then proceeds to literally burn them by grilling them on the barbecue.
  Jason: Let me play dumb just this once.
Obnoxious In-Laws: Inverted: Andy herself dreads her mother's visits because the whole family absolutely adores her mother, and Andy feels pushed to the sides.
Obviously Fake Signature: Paige attempts to forge her father's signature on a note to get it out of gym. She not only signs it 'Mister Fox', but she dots the i with a little love heart.
Old Faithful: Mosquito Falls has a geyser that erupts every day, right on time...at 2 in the morning.
Old-Fashioned Fruit Stomping: One story has Jason convincing his father to make wine through the grape stomping technique instead of buying some from the store. It dissolves his athlete's foot treatment, which along with other mishaps along the way leads to the family using the wine as drain cleaner.
Old Shame: An in-universe example would be Roger hiding his college diploma in the attic, because his name was spelled Orger Fox on it.
One-Book Author: Bill Amend has done no other professional cartooning to date.
One Dialogue, Two Conversations: In one strip Andy asked Roger what he thought of her new haircut. Roger thought she was asking about the new brand of beer he was drinking and replied that it didn't have much body and he hoped she hadn't paid a lot of money for it. He then wondered why she ran off crying.
One-Two Punchline: Very common.
Only in It for the Money: When Paige tells Jason that the amount she'll pay him for his math tutoring will depend on the grade she gets on the test ($10 for an A, $5 for a B, etc.), Jason puts aside his usual Flaw Exploitation of Paige's incompetence at math and takes extra care to make sure she's prepared for the test. The prospect of money literally makes Jason more nervous about the test than Paige is. When Paige ends up getting a 91% on the exam, Jason is overjoyed - not out of pride that Paige was able to do well, but that she now owes him $10.
Only Six Faces: The characters' faces are almost all alike, with only hair styles and accessories to differentiate. Andy's hair style even changed early on to make her look less like Paige.
Opaque Nerd Glasses:
- Present on both Jason and Morton and most of the other one time or recurring characters who wear them.
- Weirdly enough, Paige's Biology teacher, Dr. Ting, has drawn eyes that can always be seen through the glasses lenses.
Original Position Fallacy: In one arc, Jason is covered with poison oak, and torments Paige by telling her he touched all her stuff.
Andy: Paige, the odds of poison oak being spread like that are-
Paige: I don't care! Will you tell him to stop?!
Andy: If you want me to humor you, fine. Where is he?
Paige: He's using your computer.
Andy: Not without gloves, he's not!
Out-of-Character Moment:
- The 1990 story where Jason tries to fix Paige's sweater after Quincy chews on it. Usually, he tells Quincy "good boy" when he does that.
- Paige has had a few of those in regard to Morton Goldthwait. In one arc, Paige actually attends a Halloween party held by Morton, because she doesn't want to be rude. In an earlier arc, Paige actually defended Morton when Peter called him a "drip", even going so far as to kick Peter in the shin for his rude comment. To be fair, this was after Morton gave Paige a heartfelt "thank you" for just letting him sit by her at lunch, since most girls won't even let him near, and Paige was visibly moved. And in a third, Paige is actually upset when Morton asks someone other than her to the Christmas dance, although this turns out to not be such an out-of-character moment as the reason Paige was upset was that her ego was bruised.
- Also, in another arc (conveniently one of the last daily strip arcs), Jason was apparently falling behind his studies because of his playing video games. The fact that he even has to take finals is itself out of character as Jason is actually more likely to not have any finals (usually taking them way back in September). Never mind the fact that he's usually portrayed as being so smart that he doesn't need to study.
- Jason downloading a swimsuit calendar and happily noting how big Miss October's "hooters" are. Normally, Jason's attitude is that Girls Have Cooties regardless of whether said girls are his peers, teenagers, or adults. A similar Out-of-Character Moment also had Jason attempting to make a snowman modelled after Lara Croft from Tomb Raider, despite his earlier fear of her for being a girl.
Overcomplicated Menu Order: Peter Fox, while making a real complex order at a coffee shop (which ultimately translates back to 'a cup of coffee' once the jargon is stripped away), is charged $4.97, to which Peter pays $5.00 and tells him to keep the change. He also admits to Jason that he was being deliberately annoying, which was why he tipped him. Cue the three pennies flying towards his head.
Overly Long Gag:
- One Sunday Strip had Jason pacing for NINETY-SIX PANELS.
- A strip has Jason and Marcus establishing the ground rules for their snowball fight, which lasts so long all the snow melts by the time they're finished.

Pac Man Fever: Averted. Even in the early days, any references to gaming were completely accurate. It should come as no surprise that Amend is a nerd.
Padding the Paper: In one strip, Peter's three-page book report on The Great Gatsby consists entirely of "The Great Gatsby is about a guy named Gatsby" written in enormous font.
Painting the Medium: Done so much it's a Running Gag.
Paranoia Gambit: Being the target of a "Jason Vow of Vengeance" causes Peter to completely freak out and spend the day subjecting himself to ever-nastier hiding places (winding up grounded in the process). That is Jason's vengeance.
Parental Hypocrisy:
- Andy is a serious offender. Some of the biggest examples:
- In an early strip, she angrily scolded Paige and Jason for not even trying to keep their New Years resolutions to be nicer to each other, not even realizing she was eating potato chips - breaking her own resolution - as she yelled at them.
- She has a terrible addiction to candy and regularly eats all of it during Halloween and Easter. And she wonders why her kids say bad things about her tofu and eggplant casserole.
- She regularly condemns her children playing violent videogames, but spent an entire early arc being addicted to one of Jason's games.
- In another series of strips, she installed a new system for the TV that would regulate how much the kids watched and prevent them from watching shows with controversial content. She got rid of it when it wouldn't let her tape her soaps. (As Jason tells Peter, "You wouldn't believe how fast she ripped out the wires.")
Parental Sexuality Squick: In one strip, Jason, disgusted with his mom and dad kissing each other, has a T-Rex ignoring a Triceratops and other potential prey, even a sleeping Brachiosaurus due to disgust at witnessing Roger and Andy kissing, and also even begs for some Velociraptors to put him out of his misery.
- In another story arc, Andy has The Talk with Paige while Roger, Peter and Jason are on a camping trip. Paige is obviously disgusted and horrified throughout, particularly when Andy starts bringing in examples from when she and Roger were dating.
Andy: ...then on the next date, the boy might say to you...
Paige: Mother, please! This subject makes me uncomfortable!
Andy: Paide, you'll be a freshman in high school this year! I don't want you to have to learn this stuff the hard way. (beat) He might say, "c'mon, just a little hickey?" That's what you father did...
Paige: You don't call THIS the hard way?
Parent Produced Project: Averted in an arc when Paige is assigned to do a history paper on Thomas Edison, who just happens to be the subject of Roger's college thesis. Roger is just dying to essentially dictate the paper for her, but Paige eventually locks him in a closet until she is finished.
Parodies for Dummies: Roger tries to buy an actual For Dummies book, but can't bring himself to pronounce the name and admit himself a "dummy", instead asking for a book for "college-educated professionals who majored in the humanities before computers existed."
Parody Product Placement:
Paige: I hate the way the American Idol judges have those Coca-Cola cups right in front of them.
Peter: It's called product placement, Paige.
Paige: Well, it's tacky.
Peter: Get used to it. Altoids® brand mint?
Paige: Mmm! Thanks! They're So Curiously Strong™!
Pathetically Weak: Both Jason and Peter suffer from this trope, though it's more obvious with Peter who tries to work out and has delusions of being able to play sports with any degree of competence. Jason is 10 and can barely throw a baseball more than a few feet, while Peter is 16 and can't even gain weight no matter how much he eats.
Patriotic Fervor: In a parody of the "freedom fries" debacle, Paige insists on her French homework being called "Freedom homework."
Pet the Dog: In one strip where Paige has a zit on her nose around the holidays, and Andy's concealer can't conceal it without giving her what seems to be a long nose, Jason gives her reindeer antlers. Then the sensible advice follows: if she shows she's willing to laugh at herself, then the other kids are less likely to make fun of her or call her "Rudolph". (It's a shame that it backfires; the other kids call Paige a weirdo for wearing antlers, though she says at least that she's been through worse and appreciates that Jason tried.)
Picture Day: A frequent source of humor. One of the best has Peter ending up with his face covered in mud while retrieving his trademark baseball cap, so that he can have it on for his picture.
Pie in the Face: Paige threatens to do this to Peter for insulting her pies.
The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: References to Andy's job as a newspaper columnist were gradually dropped over time. Several mid-1990s strips reference her work without actually showing her working. Possibly lampshaded when she spends an entire arc after the kids go back to school in September unable to motivate herself to write, only to spring into action once Roger asks if she wants to play chess.
Plane Awful Flight: One arc had Roger going on an agonizing plane trip. First, he has to get up before the crack of dawn to go to the airport, then he finds he's missed his flight and the only other way to get to his destination includes half a dozen flight changes and will take until next week. He's the last one allowed to board the flight, for calling a male flight attendant a stewardess. His seat is at an acute angle, and when he asks a flight attendant for help with it, she reveals that was the reclined position, and the normal position is even worse. The in-flight movie is Alive, a film about the survivors of a plane crash who were driven to cannibalism. The flight attendants sell earplugs and blindfolds at extremely inflated prices.
Playing Pictionary: In one strip, Roger and Andy are playing Pictionary. He keeps shouting out obviously incorrect answers as the drawing progresses (including "It's a snowstorm!" before she's even drawn anything), culminating in "It's a Christmas tree in a cereal bowl next to a snake!" and "What's with these 'B', 'O', 'A', and 'T' symbols? Are they Pictionary shorthand?"
Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo: A variation with salt in milk, between Jason and Peter with multiple switches and some alleged fake switches, culminating in the line "We're trying to figure out which of us should be throwing up right now." Turned out Paige had somehow gotten the salt.
Polar Bears and Penguins: Averted in a December 2004 Story Arc where Roger dreams that he's the lead character in The Polar Express:
Conductor: Well, here we are! The North Pole!
Roger: Are those penguins over there?
Conductor: Yeah. Why?
Roger: Don't penguins live at the South Pole?
[Beat Panel]
Conductor: Stupid Mapquest.
Roger: So should we turn around or keep going?
Popcultural Osmosis Failure: In one strip, Jason is musing about winter and makes references to The Empire Strikes Back, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day; none of which mean anything to his father. Roger then remarks on how one particular cloud looks like Trigger.
Potty Emergency:
- Two similar strips dealt with this. The first one was an early strip where Roger drank a whole pot of coffee before work, saying his boss was holding one of his notoriously boring meetings and that there was "nothing more embarrassing than falling asleep during Pembrose's endless sermons". In the last panel, he's at the meeting, excusing himself for his third bathroom break in the past hour, and clearly looks very embarrassed.
- The second time was when Peter drank an entire pot of coffee, claiming he had a killer math test, and though a whole pot would get his brain functioning like a "super-fast calculation machine". In the last panel, he's in class, sweating heavily, thinking to himself, "If the boy's bathroom is a hundred feet away and I run at a rate of ten feet per second..."
Power Fantasy: Peter gets these whenever he is left in charge of his younger siblings, including fantasies of being an all-powerful god.
The Power of Hate: Peter Fox becomes assistant coach of the football team, and is such a nuisance overlapping with The Neidermeyer that the coach puts him near the opposing team's goal. Allowing them to vent on the field has won them three games.
Prank Date: Peter's aforementioned Love Letter Lunacy.
Precedent Excuse:
- In one arc, Andy grounds Peter for a week after finding out that he saw the R-rated Kill Bill Volume 2. Peter protests that she didn't get upset when he saw Volume 1. Andy responds that she hadn't known that he saw Volume 1 and that he is now grounded for two weeks.
- Another example: Andy is going through the bills, horrified by the heating bill, the telephone bill, the cable bill... Then Paige walks in a bikini, telling her that she's got her friends on a conference call if they can go to some TV-sponsored event. The next panel has Peter, Paige, and Jason in heavy winter clothes watching the rabbit ear antenna'd TV, with Jason holding up a telegraph telling Paige she has a message as Peter angrily demands to know what Paige told their mom.
Precision F-Strike:
- In an early strip, Paige and Nicole attend a Wild Teen Party with the former remarking that it "sucks".
- Peter, when Jason vows vengeance on him for breaking a model. Peter's response? "Crap." Counts, as it's one of the few times that sort of response is used.
- Played with another time, where Andy chastised Jason for using the word "crap." After he said "but it's a dice game," Andy told him "that's craps." His response fell into Loophole Abuse territory: "Craps. The stupid Simpsons is a rerun."
- In one arc, Peter hosts a Halloween party in his house. Some upper classmen are upset that there's no beer, and one of them says, "This party sucks!"
Predatory Business: Referenced:
Andy: I wish that Coffeebucks hadn't opened up down the street.
Roger: Why? You think it'll hurt the Mom & Pop coffee shops?
Andy: Because it's on the route Peter takes to come home.
Roger: I wondered why his teeth were chattering all the way through dinner.
Present Peeking:
- Jason Fox once started ripping into his presents on Christmas Eve, explaining that as it was technically Christmas Day for American troops stationed in Afghanistan, he was opening them at the same time they were. Roger retaliates by calling to have his son shipped off to Afghanistan.
- Played more seriously in another story, in which Jason opens all his presents in the wee hours of the morning... and then has no presents to left to open when the rest of the family gets up to do the same, resulting in him feeling left out. Andy then gives him a sweater that was meant for Roger.
Product-Promotion Parade:
- Spoofed when Jason drew storyboards for a proposed Slug-Man cartoon where every panel was an advertisement for a Slug-Man vehicle, toy, or play set.
- Another strip has Jason playing with his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles toys in front of Andy, having them complain about how they have nothing to do, and they would have lots to do if they had the various accessories.
Properly Paranoid: One Sunday strip has Paige and Jason taking an Autumn walk when a leaf flies right into Paige's eye. She angrily accuses Jason of planning the whole thing out; when he calls her out on "extreme paranoia", he spreads his hands, revealing calculations written on his palms, proving her right.
Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Played for Laughs. Several story arcs have one member of the Fox family dreaming with all the others somehow being pulled into the dream as well and cast as "actors". One series had Peter trying to read The Odyssey via Sleep Learning. Jason says "Just keep me out of your dreams tonight", but the last panel shows him as one of "Petysseus"'s men, angrily saying "I said...!" Later on, Jason's geekiness turns the Island of the Cyclopses into an X-Men Crossover and Peter says "I thought this was supposed to be my dream" while rolling his eyes.
- It isn't even limited to the human members of the family either. One Sunday strip shows Jason and Paige in a dream where the latter has been "cast" as Daenerys Targaryen but can't figure out whose dream it's supposed to be; the punchline reveals that it's Quincy who's dreaming (about being a dragon, naturally).
Put Off Their Food:
- A strip where Jason ties the ends of his spaghetti noodles together so he can eat them all in one long, unending slurp (and worse, discovering that he can pull it back out) ends with Andy adding spaghetti to the list of things she can no longer make for dinner.
- Another time, Paige had just dissected a frog in Bio class and she thought it was really cool. She tells her family about the intestines and they stare in horror at the spaghetti they're eating.
- In yet another strip, Paige and Jason are eating Jell-O and Jason describes how he likes to pretend it's gelatinized brain juice, asking "Wanna know what I pretend the banana slices are?" In the last panel, Peter enters the room and asks Jason why he always ends up with two bowls of the stuff.
Put on a Bus: Happened to Jason's first teacher Miss Grinchley who retired three years into the strip.
Pyrrhic Victory: Jason often purposely fools his siblings into "winning" bets that are this:
- In one Horrible Camping Trip, Jason bets Peter a dollar he can't hit a tree with a hatchet. Peter takes that bet, and hits it perfectly. When Andy is angrily chewing him out for doing something so dangerous, Jason considers the show a dollar well-spent.
- On one Thanksgiving, he bets Peter a dollar he can eat more than him. He eats two helpings and calls it quits; Peter eats 27 platefuls before even checking the score, eventually passing out without closing his eyes. Again, where else could Jason have gotten so much fun for a dollar?
- Paige has been a victim of this as well: after she yelled at Jason to leave her alone, Jason claimed he wasn't Jason but a holographic projection of himself that Paige could pass her hand right through. When Paige tried to do just that, she ended up slapping him in the face, and Andy informed her that she was now grounded for hitting her brother.
- It happens to Jason himself when he bets Marcus fifty cents that he can write a longer essay. His thousand page essay easily trumps Marcus' 500-page one, but while Marcus gets an A on the essay, Jason, for all his work, gets a D, and fifty cents. (And he doesn't learn a thing afterwards.)

Q-R

Quote Mine:
- One strip had Jason recording Paige talking on the phone: "Mr. Vivona says we have to cut three articles from a newspaper for social studies class every day this week, and the only pair of scissors I have are totally dull." He then gets on the computer and edits it so she's saying "I cut social studies class every day this week. Mr. Vivona is totally dull."
- In another strip, Andy asks Paige what she had for lunch, and Paige replies, "A sandwich, an orange and some milk." Andy is relieved, since Paige usually eats junk.
  Peter: An ice-cream sandwich, an orange soda, and some Milk Duds.
  Paige: So I abbreviated a little.
Rain Dance: Jason and Marcus do a snow dance. Paige joins them in the hope that school might be canceled if it works.
Rank Inflation: Jason's report card usually consists of A+++ grades or higher. Jason's specialty is math and science. He just happens to be an expert in all his other subjects as well? That goes against the strips with him in P.E. class...
Reality Is Unrealistic:
- In-universe: Jason finds the taste of real watermelon strange because it doesn't taste like his watermelon gum.
- Also in-universe, when Paige gets to play tennis in P.E.
  Classmate: That's one funky-looking racket.
  Paige: It's my mom's.
  Classmate: I've never seen one like this. What's it made out of?
  Paige: Wood, I think.
  Classmate: Whoa. When did they start making tennis rackets out of wood?
  Paige: She also had these newfangled steel ball cans.
Real Life Writes the Plot: A 1991 storyline sees Jason and Paige throw away a loose hypodermic needle they find on the beach. When they tell Andy, she freaks out. This was at the height of the AIDS pandemic, and celebrities such as Rock Hudson and Liberace had already died from the disease.
Real Money Trade: In one arc, Jason decided to spend his summer vacation being a gold farmer on World of Warcraft. It turned out not to be as easy as he thought.
Reasonable Authority Figure:
- A cop at the mall where Paige and Nicole are shopping is revealed to be this. He tells the girls he saw them slip a CD into their purse without paying, but because they put it back, he's letting them off with a warning. Also if they hadn't made that decision, their conversation wouldn't be as pleasant.
- While on a family trip to DC, a Secret Service agent patiently answers all of Jason's questions, including that he will sic a bunch of fellow agents on a man if he steps closer to the fence. Jason shouts, "Step closer to the fence, Dad!" as the agent warns Roger to not listen to his son.
"The Reason You Suck" Speech: Averted. Roger plans on giving one to Pembrook calling him out on how he's taking a raise instead of a pay cut while people lose their jobs, but he never does anything beyond rehearsing it.
Recorded Spliced Conversation: Jason does this to Paige to get her in trouble. Paige is talking the phone and says "Mr Vivona wants us to cut five articles from the newspaper every day this week for social studies, and the only scissors I have are, like, totally dull". Jason records this, then splices it together so Paige says "I cut social studies every day this week. Mr Vivona is totally dull."
Recruiters Always Lie: Averted. Peter tells how a Marine recruiter addressed his class and told them all about the early morning starts, the gruelling physical training, etc. Paige asks how that was supposed to entice people to enlist. Peter responds that the recruiter had then held up a college algebra text for comparison.
Red Live Lobster: In one strip, Jason plans on sneaking up on Peter while he's swimming to scare him, by dressing as a red lobster. The plan takes an unexpected twist, as Jason gets pinched by an actual lobster off-screen.
Red Shirt: Parodied in one strip:
Jason: I decorated my gingerbread men in little Star Trek uniforms.
Paige: Good lord, could you be a bigger geek? [Jason eats a cookie] Why are they all wearing red shirts?
Reel Torture: The kids sometimes play "television roulette", where one person rapidly clicks the remote until told to stop, and whatever program it lands on the viewer is forced to watch it all the way to the end. Landing on an infomercial or a John Tesh concert is treated as an especially grueling torture.
Retconning the Wiki: In a great show of self-fulfilling prophecy, the comic strip mentions Jason vandalizing the Wikipedia article for "Warthog" by replacing the image with a picture of his sister Paige. This prompted some FoxTrot readers to go onto Wikipedia and replace the image with a picture of Paige.
Revenge: For the entire run of the strip, Jason's favorite weapon while antagonizing Paige has been a suction-dart gun. In a 2012 strip, however, Paige got even and then some. When he tried it, she quickly pulled out a bow with suction-tipped arrows, and he ran screaming. In the last panel, Jason told Peter, "I don't like the effect The Hunger Games has had on our sister."
Revenge via Storytelling:
- One arc has Paige write herself as a Princess Classic encountering a tiny troll that looks like her brother Jason, which she leaves to get eaten by boars. Jason's complaint isn't that she cast him as the villain but that the work sucks overall. In another arc, she writes a horror story that culminates in Jason being decapitated by axe-wielding ghosts.
- Jason frequently writes Paige into his Slug-Man comics as the villainous Paige-o-tron, who always gets defeated (but returns to face the hero another day).
- Jason also drew a week's worth of standalone strips attacking Paige. She countered by drawing a week's worth that attacked him, mostly recycling the same gags.
- After deciding that he wanted to become Gary Larson's successor for The Far Side, Jason drew a week's worth of Far Side strips, all of which also attacked Paige (also lampshading The Far Side's obsession with cows).
- And there are plenty more where these came from. In general, any time Jason ever works on any sort of creative work for any reason, an avatar of Paige will be a villain, victim, and/or monster.
- In the How the Grinch Stole Christmas! parody, Jason actually changes things up a bit: Paige is portrayed in a basically positive manner, and Andy is made into the villain. The idea seems to be that Jason was too upset and preoccupied over the terrible presents Andy got everyone to bother with Paige, his usual target of choice.
Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: Although it was always a gag-a-day strip, FoxTrot was more realistic in the earlier years and had the occasional Very Special Episode-type plot and overreaching story arcs that sometimes lasted as long as two months, counting the Sunday strips. More serious subjects were often present, such as Paige and Jason finding a hypodermic needle on the beach, Peter trying to quit chewing tobacco, et cetera. In the late '90s, the humor style became more off-the-wall and any trace of seriousness disappeared, with occasional exceptions such as the strips which followed 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
Reverse Psychology Backfire:
- Used often. For instance, in one strip, Jason begs Andy not to buy a new computer and she doesn't. In another, he begs Andy to ground him for a week instead of some "torturous" punishment like eating Ding Dongs; not only does it fail, he ends up grounded for two weeks. In another, Andy "supports" Roger's decision to quit his job, and he goes with it instead of seeing the reverse psychology.
- In the first example, he sullenly says, "Reverse psychology must have been invented by a parent."
Rhetorical Question Blunder: Andy asks Roger if he's going to quit his job out of his guilt over not being there when Jason was injured. Roger says "Now there's a thought." For extra points, he actually does it.
Ridiculous Exchange Rates: Jason adds up all his pocket money and announces that he's a millionaire in Turkish lira.
Ridiculous Procrastinator:
- Peter and Paige often become this before exam time or when homework is due.
- Their parents aren't any better. Roger wrote his entire senior thesis in one night, and Andy put off sending Christmas cards so long that when she finally got around to it the family photo showed Jason in diapers.
Right on Queue: A Sunday strip had the majority of the strip devoted to a ridiculously long airline check-in queue, with the final panel having Andy remark that she thinks she has forgotten the tickets.
Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: Peter does it in a Sunday strip when the alarm clock interrupts a dream about making out with swimsuit models.
Rise of Zitboy: Paige panics over zits often enough. There was once a week long story of her trying to cover one up by wearing antlers to match her "red nose".
Road-Sign Reversal: Jason and Marcus strike out into the wilds of suburbia in search of adventure (wearing pith helmets, no less). Along their way they encounter the streets of "Maple" and "Oak;" Maple Street is lined with oak trees and Oak Street is lined with maples. Helpfully, they decide to switch the street signs around to correct the error, but wind up attracting the attention of the police in the process.
Rocketless Reentry: Jason suggests this as a new Olympic sport, with the diver putting on a spacesuit and jumping off the diving board located at the very edge of Earth's atmosphere, burning up entirely on reentry.
Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies:
- A couple. From an early strip:
  Peter: As your elf touches the gold doorknob, 45,000 volts shoot through his body. Your elf is now charcoal. What does your wizard do?
  Jason: He calls the Dungeon Master a jerk.
- The first and only time that Jason talked Paige into playing Dungeons & Dragons, he literally invoked this trope about 5 seconds into the adventure:
  Jason: You are standing at the entrance to a cave. A sign reads, "Welcome to Jason Caverns." What do you do?
  Paige: We enter the cave.
  Jason: Suddenly there's an earthquake and the ceiling collapses! Your entire party is killed! Ha ha ha ha ha!
  Paige: [examining a miniature] Where's a real sword when you need one?
Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue...: Jason writes a lot of poems of this sort. None are complimentary.
Rube Goldberg Device: Jason has frequently designed them: one to illuminate a halo over his head to convince Santa Claus that Jason was behaving; and another to light the grill.
Rule #1: This strip spoofing the Fight Club meme by having rule #1 as "Do not talk about Font Club" and rule #2 as "Do not use Comic Sans".
Rule of Funny:
- Pretty much what this strip has run on ever since it abandoned the Very Special Episode plot lines. That point of abandonment is also when the Lampshade Hanging and Medium Awareness got turned up to eleven.
- This is obviously impossible to do, but still hilarious.
- Characters will exchange traits for the sake of a joke; for example, one strip had Peter complaining about how strong Roger makes his coffee^note, but another strip published a few months later had Roger complaining about the strength of Peter's coffee^note.
Run for the Border:
- Some of the strips, most notably the one where Jason learned that copyrighting the I-Don't-Like-You-Eileen-Jacobson Computer Virus, had this when he asked how long it would take to skateboard to Mexico.
- Also a rare domestic example in the Roger housesitting arc where, after flooding the house (namely due to incompetence on Roger's part involving the dishwasher), and turning it into a swamp as a result of trying to drain the water, he mentions that they need to flee the border before Andy gets home.
- Paige's reaction to a cosplaying Jason giving her a "shout-out" on live TV news at the local premiere of Batman (1989): "I'm moving to Mexico."
Running Gag:
- Roger applying several bottles of lighter fluid to the barbecue, then the fire blowing it into his face (it originally was Peter who started this gag).
- Another gag involves Jason wearing a large overcoat and putting Quincy on his head to impersonate someone.
- Several Christmas Story Arcs had a pastiche of some famous Christmas work, usually by way of a dream, as mentioned above. Similar dream pastiches have occurred at other times, as well.
Rushed Inverted Reading:
- Peter and Steve are discussing a fight Peter had gotten into when the principal appears behind them. Peter hurriedly pretends to be talking about an algebra problem but is holding his textbook upside down.
- Peter also did this with a hymn book at church after Jason showed up in Devil makeup (yesterday was Halloween; he couldn't wash it off in time).

Sabotage to Discredit: In the arc where Jason and his friends go to Science Camp, he and Marcus attempt to sabotage Eileen and Phoebe's invention, but accidentally destroy their own, forcing them to vote for the girls' team just to prevent Eugene from winning.
Sadist Teacher: Paige's biology teacher, Dr. Ting straddles the line between Stern Teacher and this:
- Ting assigns 46 chapters' worth of reading. During a time when everyone in town is suffering the effects of a flash flood. And after the power goes out, Paige has to read her chapters by the light of birthday candles and Jason's glow-in-the-dark toys. And then it turns out that Dr. Ting lost the test files on the computer, because his power also went out.
- He once showed disappointment that Paige's lab reports were improving, claiming they were a source of entertainment for him.
- In yet another strip, Ting gives Paige a bad grade on a report where she jokingly claimed cellular division included "smileyphase."
  Paige: Man, if there was ever a teacher who needed some comic relief...
  Nicole: How cute! He made a little frowny face out of your grade!
- Even worse is Paige's unseen math teacher, who seems to enjoy trying to psych out his students. He once dressed up as the Grim Reaper for a math final, and he makes a math test where the students are being asked to calculate how many percentages of a student body will flunk a given math test.
Satchel Switcheroo: Jason mixes up his maths text book with Eileen. As a result, Eileen ends up finding an incredibly sappy love poem Jason had intended for his mother, and thinks it is for her.
Saw "Star Wars" Twenty-Seven Times:
- In one story arc, Andy sees Titanic (1997) and gets addicted to it, seeing it again way too many times and practically lets it take over her life. Roger gets concerned once she says that she went all the way to the multiplex just to watch it twice in a row.
- Another strip actually did it with Star Wars. Peter is working at a movie theater when The Phantom Menace comes out. A patron in a costume asks him for tickets. Peter asks him which showing, and names off the times, and the patron asks for one for each showing.
- Another strip has Jason camping out (on his computer server) to get tickets to see Attack of the Clones.
  Jason: You're looking at a boy with eight tickets to Star Wars!
  Peter: Congratulations. Who's going with you?
  Jason: My friend, Marcus.
  Peter: Who else?
  Jason: Who else?
  Peter: [rolling his eyes] Start over.
  Jason: You're looking at a boy with two tickets to four consecutive showings of Star Wars!
- Yet another strip had Jason and Marcus planning to spend the day watching the entire Original Trilogy back to back. When Peter points out that will take at least six hours, Jason and Marcus clarify that they meant they are going to watch the entire trilogy three times in a row. So it will take at least eighteen hours.
- Another strip had them see Apollo 13 so many times that the employee at the ticket booth knew every question they were going to ask. Their dialogue mentions the popcorn tastes different from that morning's.
Saw It in a Movie Once: After Jason and Paige spill cola onto Andy's keyboard, Paige urges Jason to fix it. Oddly, despite being the nerd that he is, his only expertise in the matter consists of a MacGyver episode in which MacGyver hooked a computer up to a bicycle. Or maybe it was a minivan.
Scare 'Em Straight: Something of an after-the-fact reinforcement. Paige and Nicole debate about stealing a music CD, and even put it in Paige's purse. They reconsider and put it back. Upon leaving the store, a mall cop stops them and tells them that he saw them put it back, and was really glad. Especially since he also saw them put it in the purse. The two girls nearly have heart attacks at how close they came to being arrested.
Scary Flashlight Face: Jason managed to get himself and Peter lost on a camping trip by doing this ("playing 'Mister Specter Face'", as Peter calls it) until the battery ran out.
Sdrawkcab Alias: At one point, Jason meets someone on Warquest named "Sgt. Neelie." It's Eileen Jacobson.
Seasonal Rot: In-Universe with Roger's favorite strip, Captain Goofball, in one arc about how Roger's upset to hear that Andy wants it cancelled. When Andy shows Roger the latest strip, Roger says that Captain Goofball just had a bad day, prompting Andy to bring out many old comics pages to show him that it's been declining in quality for a while. Roger's forced to admit that Captain Goofball has gotten stupid over the years, but weakly protests that it was hilarious when he was a kid, prompting Andy to coldly say that today's kids deserve to laugh their heads off.
See-Thru Specs: Played with in one strip where Jason orders X-ray glasses from a comic book and uses them in front of Peter to say that he can see Paige's leopard print underwear. She protests loudly to refute this point which causes Andy to think Paige has something to hide.
Peter: Those things don't really work, do they?
Jason: I think they work extremely well.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In one strip, Peter and Steve complain about how impossible their math test was, then congratulate themselves for not wasting much time studying for it.
Separate Scene Storytelling: Just about every time someone tries to make a story, we see it this way.
Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: One comic had Jason going through the dictionary and thesaurus just so he could tell Paige "your corpulence is downright Brobdingnagian" without repercussions.
Sheathe Your Sword: One story arc has Paige get past an extremely difficult boss in a video game that Jason had been trying to beat for a month simply by walking past him.
Schmuck Bait:
- In one strip, Jason and Marcus found Paige's diary. When they turned to the last page, this was the entry:
  Diary: Dear Diary, Today I'm leaving this diary where Jason and Marcus can find it so I can punch their lights out when I catch them reading it. [cue an Oh, Crap! from both of them as Paige appears behind them]
- Another example was this strip that came much later. Most longtime fans of the strip probably saw the punch line coming a mile away.
She Is Not My Girlfriend: Jason's reaction after the Love Letter Lunacy arc mentioned above. Of course, by the end of the story arc, the Will They or Won't They? has started resulting in this being a recurring theme.
Shoddy Knockoff: The aforementioned "Tamagrouchy" arc, where said toy belittles Paige. Until Jason reprograms it to demand that she pay him money.
Shout-Out: Lots. See the ShoutOut.Fox Trot page.
Shown Their Work:
- Any gag revolving around physical equations is bound to include a real equation, as Amend was a physics major. Gags about computer programming often involve accurate programming code, such as a gag where Roger asks for "java" and is given sheets with Java code on them.
- A beautiful example was the time Jason correctly calculated the area of a rectangle by evaluating an integral.
- Jason tried to use accurate C++ code to get out of Writing Lines on the chalkboard at least twice; once by making the program to print the lines out and tape them up, and again by writing the code directly on the board. Neither attempt worked.
Shutting Up Now: One strip has Roger watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Paige gushes about how much she loves the film while going over the entire plot as Roger repeatedly tells her "Paige, be quiet.". Paige then asks her father if he likes the movie as much as she does, with him replying that he's never seen it before. Realizing she spoiled the entire film for Roger, Paige says nothing further, instead just thinking to herself 'Paige, be quiet.'.
Sibling Yin-Yang: Peter and Paige are rather average teenagers, while their little brother Jason is a nerdy Child Prodigy.
Sidetracked by the Analogy: In one strip, Paige has a math problem in the vein of "Lisa has X dollars and the store is selling a red sweater for Y dollars, a blue sweater for Z dollars, etc. How many different combinations of sweaters can she buy?" She calls the the problem "absurd" because it doesn't give enough information — "It doesn't say what color her hair is, it doesn't say what color her eyes are...!" Jason, standing nearby, responds "This IS absurd."
Silly Prayer: One week long arc has Jason having a nightmare where he is tormented by Lara Croft coming on to him (Jason is still at the Girls Have Cooties stage). The last strip of the arc has him explaining this to his 16 year-old brother Peter: telling him how she kept tackling him, pinning him to ground, kissing, and generally acting she wanted him to be her boyfriend. Peter, meanwhile, is looking like he is about have a stroke and/or strangle his brother:
Jason: It was total nightmare.
Peter: Jason, are you aware of that special, extra prayer I say every night?
Simple Solution Won't Work: In one strip, Jason says there's an easy way to get him to stop tricking his parents into buying video game consoles (i.e. give in and buy them when he asks). While to him it is the simplest solution, it ignores that they're expensive and his parents don't like him playing video games in the first place.
Singing in the Shower:
- One strip had Roger singing "Burning Love" in the shower, and an annoyed Andy meaningfully tells one of the kids about the valve marked "cold water shutoff."
- Something similar happened in another strip, this time with Roger singing "Love Machine." Jason ends up exacting revenge by pulling up the answering machine all the way up the stairs (which was also partially Roger's fault, as Jason pointed out that Roger was the one who decided to buy the model that had a cord long enough to reach the shower) while recording the new voice messaging system, and then having Roger unknowingly sing the song while showering, with it going on without Roger noticing for at least two weeks, if not more.
- Another strip has Peter singing "Heartbreak Hotel", with the rest of the family gathering outside the door to complain:
  Roger: You mean "Earache Hotel".
  Andy: I'd say "Headache Hotel".
  Paige: "Shampoo-Bottle-Stuffed-Down-His-Stupid-Throat Hotel!"
  Jason: Too many syllables, Paige.
- In another strip, Paige is singing the "The Love Boat Theme" in the shower when she notices a microphone hanging from the ceiling and abruptly stops. Turns out Jason was recording her.
  Jason: [being chased by a Modesty Towel-clad Paige] Give me a break - today's Show and Tell.
  Paige: I'm sorry, I have soap in my ears. Did you just say, "Paige, please kill me"?
6 Is 9: One strip has Peter celebrating the fact he got a 99 on his test. Then, he ended up embarrassed by his teacher saying he was holding it upside down and the score was only a 66.
Sleep Cute: Parodied in a 1989 strip (and an obvious non-shipping example): During a long plane trip, Paige falls asleep on Jason's head. Luckily, this quickly stirs the both of them awake and causes them to scream in terror.
Slurpasaur: Invoked in a 1988 strip, where Jason wants to shoot a dinosaur movie for science class, and his stand-in is Quincy with a fan taped to his back.
Smart People Know Latin: Jason says that his new year's resolution is to speak entirely in Latin. He recites common-knowledge Latin phrases such as "a priori" and "quid pro quo", just to annoy Paige.
Smart People Play Chess:
- Inverted, as clueless dad Roger is the only one in the family that enjoys chess. Jason, the smartest of the family, only plays when Roger ropes him into a game and wins in three moves.
- In another strip, Jason actually beat him in one move (something that would be impossible in Real Life).
Snarky Inanimate Object:
- The iFruit.
- And, in a much more malevolent way, the Tamagrouchy.
- Roger had an electronic chess game that was snarky to him, to the point where it made chicken sounds to lure him into playing (and losing).
- A high-tech camera Roger bought treated him this way when he tried to take a picture.
  Camera: *BEEP* Please hand me to someone who knows what they're doing.
  Roger: Dang. It's retracted all the buttons.
Sneaking Out at Night: One strip has Andy and Roger noticing that the neighbor's dog is barking again, Roger complaining that it's the third night in a row as he goes to take care of it, with the final panel showing that the dog is barking at their teenage son Peter as he's trying to sneak out.
Snipe Hunt:
- An early strip featured Peter trying this on Jason, but he was genre savvy enough to see through it and refuse. The last panel has Jason and Peter teaming up to try this on their dad.
- A much later strip had Paige and Peter try this on Jason, but again he's savvy enough to see through it. He still agrees to do it with enthusiasm: "Cool. Can we wait until it gets a little darker out?"
Snowball Fight:
- One mini-arc had Roger agreeing to one with Jason, and apparently coming back with brain damage:
  Andy: How was the snowball fight?
  Roger: Snowball fight?
  Andy: The one you just had out back?
  Roger: Out back?
  Andy: With Jason?
  Roger: With Jason?
  Andy: Roger, how many fingers am I holding up?
  Roger: Holding up?
- In another strip, Roger ends up coming home from work only to be pelted by the kids with enough snowballs to transform him into a snowman, with Andy misconstruing it as the kids stealing Roger's favorite hat and putting it on one of their snowmen.
- In another strip, despite the forecast predicting light flurries, Jason managed to garner enough snow to pelt Roger with snow when he returned home, leading the latter to think they had heavier flurries than predicted.
Snowlems: Or snow dinosaurs in this case. In one strip Jason and Marcus make a demonic snowlem based on Paige.
Solar-Powered Magnifying Glass: One strip has Jason seemingly roasting ticks with a magnifying glass and then eating them to gross Paige out. It turns out they were really just raisins. Another one has him and Marcus playing detective but getting sidetracked burning ants.
Solomon Divorce: Often threatened by Andy and used as a way to get out of camping (either far away, or in one case, camping in the backyard).
Some Dexterity Required: Parodied in an arc where Peter and Jason buy a Fighting Game: "Here's a fold-out chart showing how to kick..."
Soup Is Medicine: Andy makes turkey noodle soup for Peter when he is too sick to join his family for Thanksgiving.
- In another strip, Andy makes a sick Roger lie on the coach under a blanket, and gives him soup and soda crackers.
Souvenir Land: Trope Namer (part of the amusement park Fun-Fun Universe).
Space Whale Aesop: When Jason becomes interested in trading commodities, he asks Roger for advice, who gets a little too fanciful in his illustration:
Roger: The basic idea behind commodities trading is that you're trying to predict whether something will become more scarce and thus more valuable, or less scarce and therefore less valuable. For example, if you thought space aliens were going to come and take away half the world's cows, you might want to load up on cattle futures, since the low supply would send their value through the roof.
Jason: Space aliens? This is cooler than I thought.
Roger: Conversely, if you knew someone was about to discover a giant pirate cave filled with gold...
Spammer: Jason.
- In one strip:
  iFruit: Welcome, Paige_Fox88. You have 21,752 new messages. [lists messages] "Purchase Jasonsoft's Spam-Block Software!" "Purchase Jasonsoft's Spam-Block Software!" "Purchase Jasonsoft's Spam-Block Software!"...
  Paige: [to Jason, drawing her fist back to punch him] Allow me to hand-deliver my 21,752 replies.
  Jason: E-mail's fine! Really!
- In another, he spends an entire night typing and sending "handcrafted spam" - upwards of 20,000 individual messages - and nearly has a stroke when Paige deletes the entire bloc she received from him, without reading a single one.
Spanner in the Works: Jason finds it impossible to beat one guardian monster in a video game, as it instantly squashes his character every time he tries. Paige, who almost never plays video games, takes the controller and gets by the guardian by simply walking around him.
Sphere Eyes:
- Most of the characters have these.
- It was even parodied in one strip where Paige cuts ping-pong balls in half and puts them over her eyes to give the impression that she's not falling asleep in class.
Spit Take: Roger does one in an early strip. While Andy makes a cake for Quincy's birthday party (yes, Quincy's), Roger asks how you make a cake for an iguana, while licking some batter off his finger:
Andy: I threw some mealworms in the batter.
Roger: PPBSPT!
Andy: I was kidding!
Spoiled Brat: Jason is likely the only child in existence who thinks it's is a good thing to be this. In one strip, he tells Andy that since the Bible says "Spare the rod, spoil the child", and that she and Roger have never spanked him with a rod, they should spoil him more than they have, at which point he starts asking for more allowance and privleges. Andy's response: "Maybe I've just been saving the rod for the right time." It shut him up.
Spoiling Shout-Out: Paige walks in on her father watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and starts gushing about it despite his repeatedly asking her to be quiet, culminating in her spoiling the happy ending where they realize they don't need any presents...
Roger: I wouldn't know, I've never seen it.
Paige: [thinking] Paige, be quiet.
Roger: Now what was that about not needing any presents?
Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Jason became this - most of his appearances in the later strip(s) before it went Sunday-only were merely to show off Amend's knowledge of physics and computer code.
Spring Cleaning Fever: Andy is prone to fits of this and dragoons the family into helping her. Also, in one storyline, Roger, Jason, Peter, and Paige Fox have to rush to clean up the house (with Peter improvising a leafblower as a means to clean up) before Andy comes home at 4 PM. Justified, as Roger had earlier flooded the house by his attempt at running the dishwasher, leaving an immensely big swamp of soggy clutter that, had Andy came home to find it, she'd go ballistic on them and especially Roger.
Spy Fiction: Roger attempts to write a novel. The novel he chose was a James Bond expy. It is as bad as one would expect.
Spy Speak: To thwart Jason and Marcus' eavesdropping, Peter and Denise engage in this. "The red flag flaps not at night." "In Paris, the cafés are many."
Stab the Salad:
- One Sunday strip set things up like a scene from a horror movie, making it look like someone was being stabbed to death. It turned out to be Roger doing a poor job of slicing up a turkey, and the looks of horror were from Paige, who had to witness the spectacle.
- Something similar happens later on: one strip sets up an apocalyptic event that causes all the mass of the Earth to be focused on a certain point (specifically Midwestern United States), causing the Earth to wobble around trajectory and then end up colliding with the moon before the narrator asks what could have destroyed Earth. It then cuts to Peter having his 38th slice of turkey, to which Peter makes very clear that he isn't even close to being finished with Thanksgiving Dinner, to Andy's disgust, while Jason muses about how this event would surpass even Independence Day as being fodder for a movie.
Stag Party: Roger mentioned one in one strip, where he went to the Playboy Mansion without Andy's knowledge for his bachelor's party.
Status Cell Phone: Parodied in this series of strips from 1998. Roger, tired of being the only one at the office without a cell phone, decides to one-up all his co-workers...with an absurdly oversized phone that must be half his own height, and needs to be plugged in because no battery can hold a charge long enough to power it. Naturally, Roger is the only person who thinks this is a good idea.
Status Quo Is God: While the first couple years featured several status-quo changing events (Andy's hairstyle change, Andy's columnist job, Denise and Peter getting together, Jason's teacher retiring), later on not much really changed over the course of the strip as the kids repeated grade 5, their freshmen year, and junior years of high school close to ten times. Pretty much all that changed was the family computer.
Stealth Pun: The characters occasionally make reference to watching Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity on TV. It takes a while to realize the joke — The Fox family is watching Fox News!
Steel Drums and Sunshine: One arc has Roger take the family to the Carribeany Resort, a hotel more than a thousand miles away from any ocean. Roger is the only one not to see past the tourist trap nature of the place, and when he asks his wife if she wants to go to a steel drum concert, argues that it isn't fake because it's a real guy playing the synthesizer. Who'd just hit the "bagpipes" setting.
Sticky Situation: A week long story featured Paige and Jason having their faces glued together by experimental bubblegum.
Strangely Specific Horoscope: One brief arc has Jason trying his hand at writing horoscopes, claiming that the ones in the newspaper were too vague to be of help to anyone:
Jason: They need clear-cut instructions. With mine, there'll be no ambiguity at all.
Peter: [reading Jason's writing] "Scorpio: Give Jason Fox all your money."
Jason: Hee hee. Bill Gates is a Scorpio.
Stylistic Self-Parody: Occurs in this strip. Funnily, Amend's editor didn't get the joke.
Stylistic Suck: The aforementioned "His Code Name Was the Fox" story. One week of strips consists of hiliariously-bad quotes and over-the-top scenes, plus his wife's reaction to the same (for instance, a Big "NO!" when the character is faced with a Wire Dilemma involving 173 wires and cuts the right one). It's even funnier when one realizes that his wife is (ostensibly) a professional writer.
Subliminal Advertising:
- Played with in one comic where Jason's selling flip books for $25 each and somehow gets Paige and Peter to buy them because of one of the frames in the book saying "Buy me."
  Paige: It's lame, but I'll take it.
  Jason: Most excellent.
  Peter: Can I pay you again for this one?
- Another comic has Jason offering Andy all kinds of expensive presents like a sports car and diamond necklace, saying it was all possible because she raised his allowance to $25,000 a week. The last panel shows he's whispering this to a sleeping Andy, while Roger says "Honey, wake up, he's doing it again."
Suicide as Comedy: One Christmas strip has everyone receiving badly mismatched gifts (Peter gets diamond earrings, Paige gets a football, Andy gets a digital voltometer, and Jason gets an "I (heart) the Backsynch Boys" sweater); as Roger apologizes ("It was late and I was tired!"), Andy yells for Jason to get his head out of the oven.
Summer Campy: The Camp Bohrmore arc.
Sunday Strip: Nothing but, since 2007. The Sunday strips originally ran in the regular half-page Sunday comic format until 1999, when Amend changed to a third-page format.
Suntan Stencil: When Paige fell asleep while sunbaking, Jason went looking for the magnetic letters from the refrigerator to spell out a message on her back, with his mom repeatedly asking why he wanted them without him giving an answer, the last panel reveals him placing them in a "kick me" formation on her back.
Sweet and Sour Grapes: As mentioned under Green-Eyed Monster, Peter's thin despite wanting a muscular physique, while his parents struggle to lose weight.
Sweet Tooth: Paige, especially when ice cream is involved. (In one strip, she bought an ice cream truck's entire inventory, and in this one a sundae nearly as big as she was.)
Symbol Swearing: Parodied in one strip, overlapping with Medium Awareness:
Peter: Ow! I stubbed my toe! Ampersand! Asterisk! Dollar Sign! Pound Sign! Asterisk! Asterisk! [beat] Comic strip swearing leaves something to be desired.

Take That!:
- In Jason's Slug-Man comics, the titular character's recurring nemesis "Paige-O-Tron." Also, in "The Final Confrontation 3", at the end of the En Masse anthology, a thief being electrocuted in the background by the Slug-Mobile's security system is wearing a purple and white hat with an A on it, just like Peter.
- Jason also drew a week's worth of standalone strips attacking Paige. She countered by drawing a week's worth that attacked him, mostly recycling the same gags.
- After deciding that he wanted to become Gary Larson's successor for The Far Side, Jason drew a week's worth of Far Side strips, all of which also attacked Paige (also lampshading The Far Side's obsession with cows).
- And there are plenty more where these came from. In general, any time Jason ever works on any sort of creative work for any reason, an avatar of Paige will be a villain, victim, and/or monster.
- Paige herself has done this. In one notable arc, she writes a horror story that culminates in Jason being decapitated by axe-wielding ghosts. In another, he's depicted as an ugly troll who gets eaten by wild boars.
- In the How the Grinch Stole Christmas! parody, Jason actually changes things up a bit: Paige is portrayed in a basically positive manner, and Andy is made into the villain. The idea seems to be that Jason was too upset and preoccupied over the terrible presents Andy got everyone to bother with Paige, his usual target of choice.
- Amend himself has used the strip as a Take That! on the entire newspaper comic industry. In one story, Roger is forced to confront the fact that the comic strip he loved as a kid, Captain Goofball, has lost all its appeal over the years, and is no longer funny. It's basically the author's way of commenting on the way that there are so many comics in the newspapers these days which were once funny, once had a lot of appeal, but are now tired and boring.
- He made another Take That! to the medium itself, specifically how some newspapers run comic strips extremely small so that they can cram as many as possible onto the page:
  Andy: This says a cartoonist in Mississippi got a group of school kids together to help him make the world's largest comic strip. It was 135×47 feet. [beat] 6×2 inches probably would've been big enough.
  Roger: I can't tell... is this Ziggy or a comma?
- Amend, being a Mac user and supporter, has done numerous Take Thats to Microsoft and Bill Gates over the years.
- Amend also has a few favorite pop cultural targets, most notably Richard Simmons, *NSYNC, and Survivor.
- Jason reads about Sony placing malware on CDs that intentionally install viruses on a user's computer if the user tries to play it in a computer, and remarks, "Makes you feel sorry for people who bought the new Céline Dion CD. ... Almost."
- In one strip, Jason is working on creating an animated film called Finding Hemo. When Peter calls him out for doing "a total ripoff of Pixar", Jason asks what's wrong with that and Peter replies, "That's DreamWorks' turf."
- In the run-up to the 2000 Presidential election, one comic had Roger forgetting to vote despite driving past several gigantic signs reading "GORE" and "BUSH"...and a single miniature sign reading "NADER"^note.
- During their heyday in the early 2000s, Boy Bands were treated as the most terrible things on the face of the Earth — and not just by Jason as one would expect, but by everyone in the strip outside their target audience of squealing fangirls. People routinely refer to their music as trash, and in one memorable comic Jason nearly kills countless Kazaa users by tricking them into listening to an *NSYNC song disguised as "Beastie Boys Studio Outtakes".
- Amend has traded a few playful jabs with Stephan Pastis of Pearls Before Swine. In particular, a strip in 2016 ended with a joke at the expense of Pearls. A year almost to the day later, Pastis fired back, but Amend was ready with his own shot at the timeliness of the reply.
- Two strips published around the time it was happening took shots at the O. J. Simpson trial — specifically, how the news channels were obsessed with it to the detriment of pretty much everything else happening in the world.
- Jason shows Marcus the G.I. Jim Nimitz-class aircraft carrier he got for Christmas; Marcus is amazed to see a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the flight deck and realize that it is the special "Presidential flight-deck photo-op" model:
  Marcus: I thought those were all recalled.
  Jason: I guess Santa shopped early.
Taps: Jason and Marcus once planned to build a space shuttle, and wrote a computer program to model how particular designs might work out. The first time they use it, the disaster it depicts is so horrible that the program actually starts playing Taps at them.
The Talk:
- Andy and Paige go through this while the male members of the family were out on a Horrible Camping Trip.
  Paige: Mother, please we talked about all this three years ago.
  Andy: That was just the basic overview. We're ready for the Birds and the Bees Lesson #2.
  Paige: I do watch network television, you know.
  Andy: ...Good point. We'd better skip to Lesson #40.
- Afterwards, Andy points out how she didn't enjoy having the talk with her mother either and swore that she would never make her teenage daughter sit through it. What changed her mind? She now has a teenage daughter.
- Subverted in one week-long arc where Peter actually tries to read Moby-Dick and write a report on it the morning before school on the day it's due. Andy tells Roger she wishes he'd stop having talks with him. Apparently, Roger once told him how he wrote his entire college thesis in one night.
Talking in Bed: Roger and Andy do this frequently.
Talking in Your Sleep: Roger ends up doing this when he's having a dream where Andy gives him a huge amount of fattening food (22 ounce steak with both Bearnaise sauce and Hollandaise, a fully loaded baked potato, corn on the cob that's dripping with butter, deep-fried onion rings with extra salt, a big slab of barbecued ribs, and having the entire pecan pie for desert). Even worse, the entire family hears him mumbling the dream with his face in the tofu slaw, causing Jason to speculate that Roger falls asleep during dinner on purpose.
- Another strip depicts Roger about to tuck into a huge and delicious-looking, if unhealthy, breakfast, and exclaiming, "Andy, pinch me - I'm dreaming!" Cut to the two of them in bed together, revealing that Roger is talking in his sleep, and a groggy Andy mumbling, "If you insist..." as she reaches over to pinch her husband.
- Paige sometimes ends up doing this when she falls Asleep in Class. Once, it inadvertently even resulted in her giving the correct answer to the teacher's question...
  Pierre: [in Paige's dream] What is the capital of South Dakota?
  Paige: Ooo - Pierre.
  Teacher: [back in real life] Very good, Paige. I could have sworn you were asleep.
  Paige: [waking up, confused] Hmm?
Tap on the Head: Zigzagged when Jason fell off the roof after Peter made him retrieve a football. X-rays at the hospital reveal that Jason only has a mild concussion and needs to spend the night. Andy's Death Glare towards Peter, however, indicates that it could have been much worse and they all got lucky, especially Jason.
Tattooed Crook: Jason does this as a contingency plan.
Andy: What are you doing?
Jason: Drawing tattoos all over my body with a sharpie.
Andy: What on earth for?
Jason: This way, if I get sent to prison, the other inmates will think I have an escape plan, like the guy in Prison Break, and will be nice to me.
[Beat Panel]
Andy: [head in her hands] Is there something I should know about?
Jason: The CIA's computers are public property! Am I wrong?!
[the doorbell rings]
Tattoo Sharpie: One strip had Jason try to remove an ink goatee from Peter (having tricked him into using a blue permanent marker), which unfortunately smeared all over his face instead. He went to school the next day with has face entirely blue... with the effect that the guys thought he looked like a Star Trek alien, while the girls thought he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio towards the end of Titanic (1997).
Peter: So between the teasing and the google-eyed fawning, it averaged out okay.
Jason: Huh. I though girls liked Dicaprio.
Peter: You and I share so many genes, and yet...
Taught by Television: After Andy grounds Peter for two weeks for seeing the Kill Bill films behind her back, Peter watches an episode of Court TV and then smugly tells Andy his grounding is null and void because she didn't read him his Miranda rights. She asks him if he's angling to be grounded for three weeks.
Peter: (to the television) Some help you are...
Thanking the Viewer: The final stretch of daily strips had Roger and Andy discussing a comic that was switching to Sunday-only and how the author would handle it. In the final strip, Roger suggests that the author could just come straight out and directly thank his readers for following the strip for all those years; Andy replies "And break the fourth wall? Not likely."
That Came Out Wrong:
- Paige does this while rehearsing for a play.
  Paige: My defecation does begin to make a better life. 'Tis paltry to be Caesar... Oops, I mean "desolation."
- Her cheerleading stint.
  Paige: Send 'em home losers in their loser pus!... I mean, bus.
- Also the part where Paige, when complaining to her biology teacher about her textbook, stated that it "should have more intelligent design", causing her teacher to tell her to sit down.
- In an early 90's arc, Roger is outraged when Andy secretly orders Jason to tie up the television playing video games so Roger can't watch pre-game coverage of the Super Bowl. His attempt to tell Andy off goes downhill fast:
  Roger: Why would you, of all people, want to deny me the one true love of my life?! (realizes) Um, that didn't come out quite right...
  Andy: Speaking as the other one true love of your life...
- Roger again, when he said that he was only using Jason's virtual plastic surgery software on Andy's photo for fun:
  Roger: I don't want some drop-dead gorgeous, hot-bodied wife...! (Beat) I'm not helping myself, am I?
  Andy: Can you say "freefall?"
  - See Not Helping Your Case above.
- In one strip, Peter is complaining about being stuck on the bench for all of baseball season. Andy, trying to console him:
  Andy: Peter, nothing is ever a sure thing. Sometimes life throws us curveballs.
  Peter: This isn't helping, Mom.
That One Boss: In-Universe example. One story arc has Jason stuck on a boss in a video game he's been trying to get past for a month. Paige ends up getting past the boss by simply walking past it.
That Cloud Looks Like...: Parodied in this strip, where the clouds literally do look like Jason's uncannily specific descriptions.
Theatre Phantom: Jason and Marcus once wanted to go to start attending the opera. Andy saw they were up to this, since they made the mistake of applying the Phantom's well-known mask before asking her for permission.
There Are No Girls on the Internet: One strip has Peter getting an instant message from someone claiming to be a supermodel with the same interests as him. He figures it's Jason and Marcus trying to prank him, but the last panel shows that there really is an attractive girl on the other end, who's responding to Peter's misaimed threats by calling the police.
Thermal Dissident: Andy, the mother of the Fox family, constantly goes off on a Thermostat Tamper Tantrum (see below) to the point of a Running Gag. Her desire to keep the thermostat lower than her children would like it has led to a fresh cup of coffee flash freezing, snowmen being setup at the kitchen table and not melting, and the kids having to go outside to warm up in the winter.
Thermostat Tamper Tantrum: As above, it's a Running Gag that Andy, the mother of the Fox family, keeps the thermostat lower than her children would like it and refuses to turn it up.
Thirsty Desert: One of the family’s Horrible Camping Trips was to Cactus Flats, Arizona, an incredibly hot, flat, arid desert, in mid-August. Roger notes that a native tribe that once lived there was apparently wiped out by mass heat stroke (cheerily noting "I bet we find arrowheads"), and a news station shortly before they left was reporting a record heat wave that caused the on-location news crew to quit mid-broadcast. While the family brought enough supplies that they were never in real danger, the trip was explicitly miserable for just about everyone. Jason’s sneakers melted, Roger started hallucinating, and Paige apparently went insane (to the point where they thought it was a wolf howling at first).
Tied Up on the Phone: at one point Paige is on the phone, wandering about the house. In the final panel, the perspective widens and we see that she's ensnared every member of the house in the phone cord.
Title Drop: Inverted; as with many Newspaper Comics, most of the anthologies are named after throwaway lines of dialogue contained therein.
Token Minority: Jason's black best friend Marcus, the Asian and Nerdy siblings Phoebe and Eugene, and Peter's blind girlfriend, Denise.
Tomato in the Mirror: When Andy was once doped up on allergy medication, she was calling Roger with news that she was getting over her doped upstate. The final panel then has Peter trying to yell to Andy offscreen that Jason's setting the fence on fire, to which Andy responds by hushing Peter and telling him that she's talking with his mother.
Tongue on the Flagpole: Peter gets his tongue stuck to a flagpole off-screen. Jason tells Andy to get the camera instead so he can upload it to YouTube.
Too Dumb to Live:
- Jason is mostly a genius, and yet after all these years he has yet to realize that if he messes with Paige, she's going to beat him senseless. Of course, he may just consider it Worth It. In the same vein, his "get rich quick" schemes usually result in him being grounded or otherwise punished (Andy once said that his stunts currently have his allowance being withheld until his freshman year in college.) Marcus gets this to a lesser extent, but it's not as obvious since we only ever see him at the Fox household or at school, and thus never see the kind of stuff he does to his five own sisters or what kind of retribution he suffers.
- Hopefully subverted in this strip.
Tooth Strip: Parodied. Roger tries a whitening toothpaste which erases all the lines between his teeth.
Totally Radical:
- Usually averted. The cartoonist usually tries to keep the pop culture references and slang current, though there are sometimes lags due to the publishing schedule, and the translation is sometimes imperfect. When the comic did a strip referencing "All your base are belong to us," some fans on the Internet griped that the fad had passed a few months ago and that Jason didn't say the phrase exactly right.
- This trope was once lampshaded in a Painting the Medium manner in one cartoon where Jason tells Peter that he read an article that a cartoonist has been chronically late with his submissions, so he was threatened with various fines if he continued to be late. Peter then questions how long this cartoonist has been late, to which Jason states that the article doesn't mention how long. Then Paige walks in and asks "Hey guys, did you hear about Watergate?"
Trade Snark: Jason has been known to pepper his creations with far more ®, ™ and © symbols than necessary.
Trapped at the Dinner Table: In one strip, Peter's mom, Andy, makes him sit at the dinner table until he finishes his tofu casserole. Peter stubbornly ends up staying there until 4 AM, insisting that he still won't try the tofu casserole... but in the next strip, he tries a little and begrudgingly admits that he actually likes it.
[Trope Name]:
- This strip, along with Rule of Three.
- One of the anthology books is Some Clever Title: A FoxTrot Collection Blah, Blah, Blah.
The Trouble with Tickets: In one arc, Roger gets a parking ticket. Andy wants to pay the fine, but he wants to do a Perry Mason impression.
TV Genius: Jason all the way. He's smart enough to write a computer virus that destroyed the Internet, but he does incredibly stupid things like try to convince the dentist to leave the X-ray machine on to give him super powers.
20 Minutes into the Future: Done at the end of a 1991 story arc where Paige and Peter go back to school shopping. Paige asks Peter when he'd like to go on another shopping spree, to which Peter says he'd maybe be up for it in the year 2000. Paige asks which month she can put him down for.
Twerp Sweating:
- Denise's father does this to Peter when he arrives to take her out for their first date.
- Peter, himself, did this justifiably, it turned out to one of Paige's prom dates.
Tyrant Takes the Helm: One early arc had Roger and Andy leaving Peter in charge while they went on vacation for a few days. Peter immediately goes Drunk with Power, ordering Paige and Jason to do everything he wanted — and when they rebelled, he locked both of them in the basement. Unfortunately for him, their parents returned sooner than he expected...

Ultimate Job Security:
- You'd think Mrs. O'Dell would know better than to hire Paige as a babysitter by now, but the worst punishment Paige receives is having to pay for Katie's outfit, which she destroyed using scissors.
- She seems to have just barely prevented another disaster in this strip. Of course, you could probably blame Peter more for this one.)
Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: "Doomathon 2000", "Duke Quakem," and others.
- Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000: Andy joined a group called MAGG (Mothers Against Gory Games) and vowing to only allow MAGG approved games in their house. The storyline revolved around Peter playing a game called "Nice City" and later complained about the other games Andy had given him, which included "Pacifist Man", "Resident Good" and "Eternal Lightness." It's also hinted in the ending that she only joined up with them in order to have an excuse to get the kids off video games.
Unexpectedly Obscure Answer: Jason comes up with a quiz show called I Want to Be a Millionaire, which he talks his dad into playing. He starts off by switching to math questions after Roger says that he was an English major, and the first question is "What is the 8,346th digit of pi?" The trick being that every time Roger gets a question wrong, he has to pay Jason that amount.
Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Jason once spent a week trying to defeat the Red Orb Guardian. Paige instantly bypasses it by... bypassing it. Jason declares just walking past a menacing, powerful boss to win to be "counterintuitive," to which Paige asks him how many nanoseconds a day he spends in the real world. (See also Lord British Postulate.)
Unraveled Entanglement: One very early arc had Roger, in the beginning of his life as a Hopeless with Tech Walking Tech Bane, end up wrapped in printer paper while trying to use a computer. We don't see what happened.
Peter: It's the Mummy!
Paige: No, it's the daddy!
Roger: You laugh— that thing tried to kill me!
Unsound Effect: "Crank" and "uncrank" to indicate a thermostat being turned up, then down, the latter perhaps a more egregious example than the former.
Unusual Pets for Unusual People: Uber-nerd Jason has a pet iguana named Quincy that he loves to use to torment his sister Paige. (One strip—where Paige wants a cat—mentions that Peter and Jason have allergies, which might explain Jason's choice. But, honestly, it seems like the kind of pet he would have gone for anyway.)
Unwanted Assistance: The April 10, 2016 strip has Paige stuck with a talking cell phone case that's constantly reminding her not to drop her phone and she's already trying to remove its batteries before getting home.
Useful Book:
- Paige asks to borrow Andy's copy of Great Expectations. Andy is excited and happy, gushing that it's one of her favorite books, until Paige returns with the book two seconds later, explaining that she just needed it to kill a spider and didn't want to mess up her new issue of Cosmopolitan.
  Andy: Methinks I need lowered expectations.
- A similar comic had Andy remarking on Paige borrowing a bunch of books like the encyclopedia set and dictionary; it turns out she was just changing a light bulb.

V-W

Vandalism Backfire: Jason and Marcus are at science camp and get into a prank war with Jason's sort-of girlfriend Eileen and her new friend Phoebe. The boys decide to win the war by sabotaging the girls' science project but get lost in the dark cabin where the projects are and end up sabotaging their own project. Then, to add insult to injury, it turns out the the girls' project is one of the top two—with Phoebe's brother Eugene (the most obnoxious kid at camp) having the other one. Jason and Marcus are forced to cast the deciding votes that give Eileen and Phoebe the win.
Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
- After Paige defeats a monster in a video game through pacifism an disbeliving Jason begs her to tell him the secret:
  Paige: If you must know, I walked right by him.
  Jason: Well, of course you did, once he was dead!
- After he gets what Paige is saying, Jason muses, "So you're not supposed to attack the unstoppable killing machine of death? How counterintuitive."
- While playing "Nice City'', Peter complains that it is impossible to help twelve little old ladies across the street in the allotted time. Jason watches his next attempt and remarks, "I don't think you're supposed to beat and rob them first."
Viewers Are Geniuses: This strip is a treasure trove of nerd humor, to the point that they collected an entire book of such jokes titled Math, Science, and Unix Underpants.
Violence Is Not an Option: One arc has Jason unable to get past a videogame boss called the Red Orb Guardian. His entirely un-nerdy sister Paige gets past it without trying, so she blackmails him for a while until she finally tells him the secret: don't attack him.
Jason: He's the most lethal video game creature ever! He towers above you with fists like anvils! Skulls litter the ground at his feet! And you're not supposed to even try to take this guy on in a fight?... Wow, talk about counter-intuitive.
Paige: Refresh my memory, you spend how many nanoseconds in the real world each day?
The Voice: The strip has a few, including Miss Grinchley (Jason's original teacher, who only had two physical appearances), Roger's boss J.P. Pembrook and Denise's parents.
Walking Techbane:
- Roger has proven completely incapable of operating a computer since the strip's first year. This is a man who once got completely wrapped up in dot-matrix printer paper; who crushed 3½ inch diskettes trying to put them in; who thought "backing up the computer" meant pushing it off the desk. He gets the Windows version of software for their Apple computer based on the fact that there's a window right there in the computer room. He has destroyed various other forms of electronic equipment as well, and even managed to flood the house using the dishwasher.
- Other than Roger, there was also one other instance where a character ended up ruining important equipment: When Jason was ordering tickets for Attack of the Clones, Jason and Marcus had to wait a long time (to the extent that Jason even had to use a lawn chair to wait out the loading time, and communicate with Marcus via the computer). Eventually, he did get the tickets, and speculated that the reason for the insanely long amount of time it took to download the tickets was because the theater's server was swamped. Jason was right, but not in the way he would have thought, as it immediately cut to the sink with a computer server in the sink with running water, with the head of the theater shouting to Johnson "I told you to wash the butter server!", thus meaning that the server was literally "swamped."
- Another guy was responsible for disconnecting Jason from the WOW server just before he could claim an ultra-rare item by tripping on a cable.
Watch Out for That Tree!: "We need to find softer trees."
Water Hose Rodeo: Jason says "One day I'm going to put on weight and really enjoy watering the lawn" after one such rodeo.
Weight Woe: Despite her penchant for junk food, Paige was shown to be occasionally weight-conscious in early strips. In one Sunday strip, she berates Andy for making macaroni and cheese for dinner, since it's so high in calories and she wants to lose weight. Andy tells her, "Paige, you do not need to lose weight. You must weigh about 10 pounds less than me!" "Oh, swell," Paige sarcastically remarks before walking away. We then see Andy examining her own stomach, and then, in the final panel, scrapping the macaroni and cheese and making a salad for dinner instead.
Wham Line: During a storyline that started with Eileen giving mushy valentines to every boy in class except Jason, she keeps teasing him about it to try and get him to admit that it made him jealous. One day at school, Jason finally snaps and responds, and Hell freezes over.
Jason: Okay, fine, it bothers me! I mean, gee, stupid me, I thought we kind of liked each other! What's it to you, anyway?
Wham Shot: After a week's worth of strips where Paige is over the moon about getting notes from a secret admirer, the last panel of Saturday's strip reveals the sender: It's Peter and Steve, writing another note and snickering over how gullible Peter's sister is.
What Are Records?: Word for word, from Jason.
What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Jason submitted an idea to James Cameron for Titanic II about a ship named 'Titanic II', complete with a "They thought it couldn't go wrong again..." narration.
What's a Henway?:
- Paige, trying to weasel her way out of a Macbeth report:
  Paige: What's Macbeth about?
  Andy: It's about 100 pages. Now get going.
- Another example:
  Jason: Man... this is one cold house.
  Paige: Tell me about it.
  Jason: Well, let's see... It's got two stories, it's white with green trim, it's got four bedrooms...
- And another:
  Peter: Hey Paige — if the kitchen's in the house and Diana's in the kitchen, what's in Diana?
  Paige: I dunno. What?
  Peter: A state.
- And another:
  Paige: What's on the TV?
  Jason: The VCR... a couple of magazines... dad's bowling trophy... probably a thin layer of dust, too.
- One had a Bilingual Bonus involving Paige's "dream guy", Pierre.
  Paige: [dreaming] Pierre! Is it you? Is it really, really you?
  Pierre: C'est moi.^notePronounced "say mwah"
  Paige: Moi moi moi moi moi...
What Does She See in Him?: The reader will almost certainly ask this about Andy after a while.
- And given how Andy treats him, the reader may ask the same of Roger.
What the Hell, Hero?
- Denise gives one to Peter after he punches someone, saying that he shouldn't think violence is an acceptable solution to problems. Subverted when he mentions that his victim had insulted her, and she says "And you JUST punched him in the nose?"
- Andy gives one to Jason and Paige for not coming forward about breaking the computer when she punished their father.
- Paige gets another one in a 1991 story arc in which she and Jason find a hypodermic needle while coming the beach and throw it away. Instead of the reaction Paige expects (praise for getting the needle off the beach so no one could step on it), Andy chews Paige out for picking up the needle in the first place instead of reporting it to health authorities.
What Were They Selling Again?: Referenced in a 2004 strip in which Paige tells Peter she just saw a commercial that was so funny she snorted soda out of her nose, and that the ad agency responsible deserves multiple awards. Peter asks what the ad was for, and Paige can't remember.
Wheel o' Feet: Parodied in one strip where Jason ties a pair of wheels with a spiral design around his waist and stomps on bottles of dry ice during gym class so that he appears to be running faster than he is.
Where the Hell Is Springfield?:
- There is evidence that the Fox family lives in a town called Hillsdale (such as a Hillsdale Mall in a 1988 strip, the letter H on the high school team's uniforms), but beyond a street address in the first strip, no real specifics have been given for their place of residence.
- Also, since the "A" on Peter's hat is a direct reference to Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the confusion is only greater. The same college's iconic chapel frequently appears in the background during Roger's college reunions, leading to a nice Shout-Out.
- Several hints dropped seem to indicate they live in the Chicago area, such as Andy going to, and returning from, a Chicago Bulls game in the same night. Also, Roger mentioned he was born in Chicago at one point, and on a long business trip, flew out of a Chicago airport.
- The cartoonist often jumbles around their location to confuse the readers. An example is one strip where Jason states that "the [Comic-Con] in San Diego is too far away" but a strip the next year has him getting ready to go to Comic-Con as though he lives there.
- In one strip, Jason celebrates the new year at 8 am, remarking that's "it's midnight in New Guinea". This would place the Fox family in the Mountain Time Zone.
Who's Laughing Now?: said almost verbatim by Peter when he threatens to tell on Jason for tricking him into drawing a goatee on his face with a permanent marker:
Peter: Just wait until I tell Mom and Dad! We'll see who's laughing then, pal!
[He storms out... and after a few minutes, stalks back in.]
Jason: Judging by your face, I'd say Mom and Dad.
Peter: [fuming] I'm moving out.
Andy: Peter come back! We were guffawing with you!
Who's on First?: Jason and Marcus do one relating to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, complete with a reference to the Trope Namer:
Marcus: Who are they?
Jason: Yes.
Marcus: I mean the people.
Jason: Who.
Marcus: The ones standing in a circle singing that "Fahoo" song!
Jason: They're Who.
Marcus: What are you asking me for?!
Jason: Abbott and Costello meet the Grinch.
Paige: Who?
Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Jason asked every member of his family if they wanted to have a snowball fight with him. They each reply "Do I look like an idiot?"... until he gets to Roger, who says "Let me get my coat" before Jason can even finish the question.
Wild Teen Party: In a 1989 story arc, Paige and Nicole get invited to one at the home of Mitch Kellogg, an upperclassman, and quickly discover it's not what they expected. Everyone is drinking and doing drugs, and a drunken Mitch even propositions Paige for sex and then attempts to get her to smoke pot and do coke with him. Paige refuses each time, and when Mitch still won't leave her alone, resorts to punching him the face, remarking to herself, "Sometimes just saying no isn't enough." Perhaps to illustrate how strung out Mitch is, he is unfazed by Paige's punch and merely moves on to another girl.
- In the final strip of the arc, Paige complains about how much the party sucks, and Nicole remarks that at least it's better than sitting home watching a rental movie. This remark is followed by an off-screen beer chugging contest followed by everyone puking in unison. Paige and Nicole high-tail it out of there and head for the video store.
William Telling:
- Roger asks Jason what sport he has taken up and Jason tells him to put an apple on his head and he'll demonstrate. Roger, wisely, flees.
- Inverted in one strip where Jason has an arrow tied to his head, and Marcus tries to shoot apples through a bow at it. He says that way, they're only being kinda stupid.
Women Are Wiser: Andy, although she's frequently Not So Above It All. In fact, this eventually Flanderized to the point where she's just about as insane as the rest of the family and only thinks she's the sensible one. (And very much averted with Paige.)
Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer:
- Peter's first attempt to ask Denise out.
- Also occurs in a 1990 strip where, even after Peter places an ad in the school paper, Paige is unable to find a date for her or Nicole. A set of twins finally says yes to both of them, but Paige rescinds their offer even after spending most of the past two weeks' worth of strips complaining about her inability to find a date. Apparently, this resistance was either because they insist on having someone ask them out instead of the other way around or because the twins were totally dorky (we never actually see them, but their response to being asked out was "Golly, gosh dang, gee whiz, yes!").
Worst News Judgment Ever: Andy is watching the OJ Simpson trial. Suddenly, breaking news: aliens have landed and are now addressing the UN! Amazing! Now back to the trial...
Andy: I'm beginning to see why Elvis shot that TV.
Writer's Block Montage: Occurs with Roger in the aforementioned Her Code Name Was "Mary Sue" story arc.
Writing Lines: Jason has been subjected to this on a regular basis, to the point of doing them a day in advance so he wouldn't have to miss a doctor's appointment by staying late.
Written Roar:
- "AAAA!" is the preferred method of screaming in this strip.
- Likewise, "WAAAA!" (sometimes with a ~ at the end) is the preferred method of crying/sobbing in this strip.
Written Sound Effect: "Pbbspt!" is Amend's favorite onomatopoeia for Spit Takes.
Wrong Genre Savvy: Jason seems to believe that the laws of fantasy apply to reality more often than not, but relying on them usually only get him in trouble or gets him hurt (or both). For example, when he tries to imitate Spider-Man and builds a web-shooter, he wonders why he only succeeds in getting himself tangled in it.

X-Z

Xenofiction: A few strips are from Quincy's (Jason's pet iguana) point of view. In one we're given a P.O.V. Cam view while he's inside his hamster ball. In another, we're taken inside a dream of his where he's the size of a T-Rex and terrorizing people in a Jurassic Park Expy.
Yes-Man: One 1990 Story Arc has Roger getting a summer intern named Skip Riley who completely sucks up to him. While this thrills Roger, it saddens Peter, who feels that Roger is pushing him aside in favor of Skip (one strip has him gushing about Skip to Andy and completely ignoring Peter's request to come out and play catch). At the end, Roger has a meeting with a higher-up, causing Skip to ditch Roger entirely and start sucking up to him instead, in order to work his way up the ladder.
Yet Another Christmas Carol: A two-week storyline has Jason having a dream involving the cast as the characters of A Christmas Carol (thanks to Andy's garlic, green pepper and tofu chili, 'the meal of a thousand nightmares'). Paige is Christmas Past, and shows him how happy she was before he came along; Peter was Christmas Present and, after making the standard "Present/Presents" mistake, eats the mountain of food; Quincy is Christmas Yet To Come, and shows Jason his grave (which freaks him out, since he died the day before The Phantom Menace came out.
You Are Grounded!: Happens several times to Peter. In fact, in one series, Andy grounded him for seeing Kill Bill 2, then grounded him for another week after figuring out he saw the first Kill Bill movie the year before. Andy eventually released Peter from being grounded, although only because trying to ground him for two weeks actually proved to be cruel and unusual torture for the rest of the family.
- In another story arc a few years earlier, Andy grounds Paige for seeing Indecent Proposal. In this instance, however, Paige is only grounded for one weekend (which is more than enough for Paige since it means she'll have to endure Jason all weekend).
You Do NOT Want to Know: This is Roger's answer when Andy asks just how zoned out she was with her allergy medication's side effects. It's also shown to send her into a Mushroom Samba (one of the kids offscreen asks Andy if she could take the Pink Floyd out of the music player, and Andy wonders who wrote squiggly lines on her hand).
Your Mom: In one strip, Jason and Marcus exchange "your momma" lines as a means of trash-talking before a test. This exchange led to the title of one of the compilations, Your Momma Thinks Square Roots Are Vegetables.

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