George Jetson Job Security

"Fire whoever designed that bottle, Kaibacorp products shouldn't bend that easily!"

— Kaiba (after squeezing a bottle in a fit of frustration), Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions

Employees of large companies walk a fine line in sitcoms or sitcom-related shows as they could be fired on a whim at any moment. Our hero may have worked for the business for 10, 20, 30 years, or more and been the model of efficiency and dependability, but if he screws up just once in front of the boss, it's all for naught. And heaven help the employee who's railroaded into putting on a Disastrous Demonstration, even if the product on demo is one they'd never even heard of before being shoved on stage.

The mistake may not even be work-related. Losing a game while paired with the boss at the company picnic is just as bad as, if not worse than, falling asleep at your desk. Refusing to participate in the boss' latest Zany Scheme (which may or may not be illegal) could also bring the axe, as can refusing to spend personal time babysitting his bratty kids or entertaining his demanding relatives.

Bosses in the TV world have apparently never heard of such things as wrongful termination or hostile workplace lawsuits (or maybe they have heard of them, but were arrogantly dismissive of them because they are so confident it could never happen to them).^note  Truth in Television for much of the US, due to "at-will" employment laws allowing firing anyone for any reason (aside from federally protected statuses like race, gender, and sexual orientation) or no reason; yet even in the worst such states (e.g. Florida) un-Constitutional firings still can be litigated. The difficulty is proving such. And neither has the poor employee, who will likely spend most his time dejectedly scanning the want ads while his concerned family looks on instead of planning some kind of legal recourse.

Fortunately, a boss who'll fire you for such asinine reasons will also be just as capricious in his hiring, and the fired character often gets their job back anyway, either by the end of the episode or by the start of the next one— making the lack of job security more of a Running Gag than a real threat to their well-being. The inverse may even happen, with the character getting promoted only to get soon demoted to his old job.

Named for George Jetson of The Jetsons, who seemed to be fired (and then rehired) on a daily basis by his hot-headed, near-Napoleonic boss Mr. Spacely.

See Ultimate Job Security for the other extreme, in which employees who legitimately should be fired somehow manage to keep their position, Vetinari Job Security for cases where employees are too indispensable to be fired, and No Such Thing as H.R. for when nobody seems to be in charge of personnel at all.

See You Have Failed Me for when screwing up gets you terminated with extreme prejudice. Compare with New Job as the Plot Demands and Disproportionate Retribution.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A commercial for True Classic T-shirts revolves around a white-collar employee being fired on Casual Friday for wearing a shirt he deems inferior to co-worker's True Classic shirt.

Anime & Manga

• Taizo "Madao" Hasegawa of Gintama gains his nickname, which stands for "totally useless old man", due to his inability to hold down a job through the series.
• A Running Gag throughout Hayate the Combat Butler is Klaus constantly threatening to fire Hayate if he cannot accomplish any of the variety of Impossible Missions (or regular missions, or pretty much any situation where Hayate's skills are put to the test, no matter how absurdly petty) that come his way.
• In the infamous filler episodes, Tsunade almost constantly threatens to send Naruto back to the academy. While most of the time, this is just used to keep him in line, Tsunade actually seemed to consider it for Naruto, Hinata and Kiba during the Treasure Hunt arc, since the three of them had failed their missions in the Bikochu Arc (because Naruto had farted on the beetle), and in the Bounty Hunter arc (because while the criminal was captured, another bounty hunter took him in).

Comic Books

• The Story The Magnificent Seven (minus 4) Caballeros by Don Rosa opens with Scrooge firing Donald Duck:
  Scrooge: You're fired! And be back here at work all the more early tomorrow to make up for the time you lost by getting fired today!
  Huey Dewey or Louie: Poor Unca Donald, Unca Scrooge fires him at least once a week!
• The European Donald Duck comics printed in weekly magazines popular in the continent (and elsewhere) has Donald giving George Jetson, the Trope Namer, a run for his money at the very least. Comics where one page (or more) is devoted just to Donald getting fired from job after job is not unheard of - due to the Negative Continuity the comics have, there's just nothing stopping the poor duck from either:
  1. Working with shining Scrooge's coins to slave-like conditions.
  2. Getting one (or multiple) jobs — if one job (2a), he has total success until the end, where it becomes a failure of massive proportions and he is fired as a result — if multiple (2b) it's the rapid-fire firing mentioned above.
  3. Having to live with chronic unemployment.
  4. Or multiple / all of the above. In the same comic, even.
• ORPHANIMO!!: Vallalkozo fires people for any mistake, no matter how good a job they did before. Even his assistant Hanz is not safe from this, but he manages to get re-hired every time.
• Spider-Man: Peter Parker and J. Jonah Jameson, to the point that this could almost be the Trope Namer. Of course, JJJ would argue Parker's only a "freelancer", anyway (see the entry under Western Animation).
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • Ultimate Spider-Man: Kingpin, who had been taped killing someone, manages to have the criminal charges dropped because of legal technicalities. J. Jonah Jameson insists on continuing his "Spider-Man is a menace" rants, and Parker asks why he bothers so much with Spider-Man but doesn't attack the Kingpin with the same fervor. Jameson, who wasn't having a good day, fires him. He eventually re-hires him, after enduring a lot of "the kid has a point!" and "What the Hell, Hero?". A later issue has Ol' JJ firing Peter again. One phone call with Aunt May, he tells Peter two things: He's got his job back, and his aunt is to never speak to Jonah again. After this incident, Jonah never tries firing Peter again.
  • Ultimate Origins: When the Watchers of the Universe show up at several locations, one of them goes to the Daily Bugle, where Jameson is firing his star reporter, Ben Urich, over a discussion.

Comic Strips

• Blondie (1930): Dagwood is incompetent and falls asleep on the job while his boss is physically and verbally abusive. He has explicitly been shown a few times to only get his job back because their wives are good friends.
• Dilbert has regularly gotten fired or quit himself. He always ends up back at the company, usually in an even worse situation than before.
  Dilbert: Please don't make me work in sales again. I'll take a pay cut. No, I'll work for free! No, I'll pay you!
  Pointy-Haired Boss: [while Dilbert is cleaning his shoes] I should make all my engineers work in sales some time. You come back more appreciative.
• In FoxTrot, Roger Fox is a technophobe at best and a Walking Disaster Area at worst with technology. However, in one long arc where he did quit (and two get-rich-quick ideas went rather badly), his boss J.P. Pembrook was glad to hire him again, explaining to him that younger men with his skills — whatever they are — wouldn't do his job for less than five times what they had been paying him. And his coworkers are even more relieved to have him back, as without Roger in the office, the computers barely ever crashed and they were deprived of the numerous breaks they used to get while waiting for the system to recover.

Fan Works

• Subverted in Not That Kinda Fired: at first it seems to be easy to get fired at Endeavour's Agency (in fact the story opens with the Agency running out of interns again), to the point Izuku decides to try and get fired to escape the bad working conditions without having to pay the immense penalties, but as the story progresses it becomes clear it takes serious offenses to lose the job at Endeavour, such as sexual harassment (why the interns were fired: they would get grabby with Burnin', Endeavour's second in command), fraud, or assault - thus Izuku not only fails to get fired but even gets rewarded for his antics (while the guys who were making his work conditions get fired once they're caught).

Films — Animated

• In Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, Mr. Krupp fires the science teacher, Mr. Fyde, because the latter wanted to spend the Saturday with his family instead of attending the mandatory Invention Convention.

Films — Live-Action

• In All of Me, Edwina tells Roger's boss to fire him simply because she doesn't like him. Subverted in that Roger isn't really fired, his boss just wants to placate the wealthy and megalomaniacal client who's going to die soon anyway.
• In the first Fantozzi the title character beats an executive at billiard and almost gets fired and beaten up. The only reason it doesn't happen is that he kidnaps the man's mother to insure his escape and force him to pay an indemnity to his wife and daughter, and the woman falls for him and has her son reinstate Fantozzi. More in general, the employees are all aware that the trope is in effect and could get fired on a whim, and are terrified of their bosses to the point of bending to their every whim (the only one who isn't scared is the one Communist employee, who is unionized).
• In Here Come the Girls, Stanley keeps messing up every play he's in, and he keeps getting thrown out of the troupe. He's begged to come back in order to trap a serial killer, and they try to bribe him, but since he'll just get fired right after it's done, he demands a run-of-the-play contract.
• Jack Taylor in My Boss's Daughter is this kind of boss.
• In both The Nutty Professor and its sequel, Sherman Klump ends up getting fired around the start of the third act but gets his job back at the end.
• Used in Spider-Man 2 where Peter is fired by JJ twice and the film still ends with him employed. In one scene, he is fired and then re-hired within the space of three seconds. When JJ actually plans on firing you, you'll know. Just ask Eddie Brock.
• In Friday, the reason Craig gets involved in the plot at all is because he gets fired on his day off.
• Older Than Television: It's hinted that Mr. Wynant may be something of a Mr. Spacely in The Thin Man:
  Wynant: Tom, show this... Where are you going?
  Tom: Home. I'm fired.
  Wynant: Who fired you?
  Tom: You did.
  Wynant: Ah, forget it. Will you show this gentleman around?
  Tom: [smiling]: Yes. Right this way, sir.
• In Tomorrow Never Dies, Bad Boss Elliot Carver sacks his PR woman for not being able to explain what caused a power outage. As the outage was caused by James Bond, there is no way she could have known the cause.
• In Bernard and the Genie, the title character makes an incredible gain for his art company after discovering some very rare paintings at an old woman's estate and is celebrated. But when he suggests that it would be a nice idea to let the original owner benefit, his boss (played by Rowan Atkinson, of course) not only fires him on the spot but humiliates him and soils his reputation by implying he's a petty thief and a molester. The boss then asks a veteran female employee (who had been with the company for ages) if he might have been too hard; when she politely suggests he might have gone overboard, he fires her too.
• No One Gets Out Alive: Ambar, in need of money, asks her boss for an advance payment, which he refuses to give her. When she pushes him for it, he fires her.

Literature

• In the first Artemis Fowl book, Mrs. Fowl - who is in rather poor mental health - orders her son to fire a maid who displeased her. Artemis agrees and then suggests that they hire Butler's sister Juliet as a replacement. Since Juliet was the maid in question, this results in her being fired and then rehired before she even finds out that she had been fired in the first place.
• Caging Skies: Herr Demner threatens to fire people over the most miniscule of reasons, like leaving crumbs on the desk or putting your feet up. He's The Dreaded to his employees.
• Constantly an issue in the Sano Ichiro series, as Sano fights to maintain his position in the shogun's court. Given the fickle nature of the shogun and the schemes of Chancellor Yanagisawa, merely being fired isn't usually an option, though. At best, it's likely exile; at worst, it's execution. So far, Sano has only managed to be demoted once, but he's since made a comeback to his previous position.
• In the Serge Storms novel When Elves Attack, Jim Davenport has made a career out of inducing this. His consulting firm is regularly hired by companies that want to justify massive unnecessary layoffs of qualified personnel in order to manipulate their stock prices. Then a few weeks later, the companies realize that they can't meet their business obligations after laying off a large portion of their manpower, so hire the same firm to act as a headhunter, at which point Jim rehires all the people he had just sacked.
• James Herriot was unfortunate enough to witness his new boss Siegfried not just sacking but disowning his younger brother Tristan for doing poorly in his exams, as related in the first chapter of his fictionalised memoirs. Once he can slip away to check up on the poor boy, he finds him to be utterly nonchalant about it: He plans to find a quiet place to sleep under the stars and come back for breakfast the next morning, by which time Siegfried will have completely forgotten the whole thing. This turns out to be pretty typical of Siegfried, who has a short fuse but is completely incapable of holding a grudge.
• Played with in the book Skunk Works, about the crack engineering team of Coolplane-maker Lockheed, the author talks about his boss Kelly Johnson. Johnson would "fire" people every day for minor infractions. This was mostly to scare underperforming employees and for Johnson to let off steam. Johnson was the boss of the "Skunk Works" during World War II and the first two decades of the Cold War.
• According to Terry Pratchett's biography A Life in Footnotes, as written by his PA Rob Willkins, Terry would sack Rob on a fairly regular basis, but never with a suggestion that he shouldn't come back the next day. Apparently, Terry himself, during his newspaper career, briefly worked for Da Editor who had this kind of management style but was much more vicious about it. Already chafing under this regime, the third time he fired Terry, Terry decided to take it at face value.

Live-Action TV

• Alice: Mel constantly threatened to fire his waitresses, especially Flo and Vera; it happened to Alice much less frequently, as he quickly gained respect (if not grudging) for her. When Mel did follow through with his threats, he always hired them back, since he realized that he needed them more than they needed him, and without them, his business (and life) would be nothing – and more than once, this was after Alice reminded Mel of this.
• The Apprentice: The entire show's premise is built on this trope. The winning Project Manager is probably safe for the time being, but there are no guarantees. In Season Four of the U.S. version, a team lost its challenge badly, then bickered relentlessly about who was to blame; Trump fired the entire team.
• Darrin in Bewitched was fired and re-hired on a regular basis, normally one being the result of magical meddling.
• The Brady Bunch:
  • In "How to Succeed in Business?" after Mike and Carol find out that Peter had lost his job as a mechanic at a bike shop, Mike assures his middle son that failure and getting fired are a part of life. He states explicitly, "I've lost jobs" — although he was likely referring more to his company losing contracts for jobs they had bid and clients firing his firm. When it came to clients firing Mike:
  • It is narrowly averted in "Sorry, Right Number," whereby a hard-nosed company executive is about to complete a deal for a lucrative contract when a telephone operator cuts in, asking Mike to pay 10 cents to continue the call (on a payphone installed at his home). The executive is about to fire Mike when Mike miraculously explains the payphone situation (he was using it to teach the kids responsibility, manners, and money management... and none of the other phones were available).
  • Mike is fired outright in "Mike's Horror-scope"... although it isn't a bad thing, since his client was the impossible-to-please executive of a cosmetics company that wanted to make a hilariously, impossibly designed building.
  • At least twice, his boss, Mr. Phillips, threatens to let Mike go. The first is in "Double Parked," after the boss learns that Carol is heading up an effort to save a neighborhood park where the company is seeking to build a new courthouse and Mike balks after he is told to tell Carol to cease and desist. The other is after Carol — who was under Mike's strict orders to not use the phone, to rest her voice after having her tonsils removed — unknowingly insults Mr. Phillips during a phone call; she had thought it to be Mike to test her, and when Mike tries to call Mr. Phillips back to explain, he gets a short retort and an earful of telephone slam.
• On The Burns and Allen Show, George Burns fired his announcer Harry Von Zell once about every other week for either saying things behind his back or participating in one of Gracie's zany schemes.
• Occasionally happens to Earl Sinclair on Dinosaurs. Examples include:
  • "The Mighty Megalosauras": When Earl asks B.P. Richfield for a raise, Mr. Richfield snaps at him and orders him to quit. But Earl ends up getting his job back in the end.
  • "Green Card": All of the tree pushers get fired as a result of there being no more trees to push down (as Richfield says, they've outlived their usefulness). However, they eventually get hired back to work on a project to build a wall on swamp land to keep the four-legged dinosaurs from entering their land.
  • "A New Leaf": After bringing the "happy plant" to work and being dopey from its effects, Richfield fires Earl, who is all too happy to be fired. When Fran finds out, she brings Earl to work to talk Richfield into rehiring him. At this point, Richfield had taken the plant and is a hippy. He's happy to not only rehire Earl but also make him his assistant... only for Richfield to get a call from his superior telling him that he's fired (which also means Earl is still fired). And we never see Richfield or Earl get their jobs back at the end of the episode.
  • "We Are Never Alone": After a robot from another planet (actually Robbie using a robot) convinces Earl to care for the environment, he ends up quitting his job because WESAYSO is named the #1 biggest polluter. But after he finds out that it was a trick to get him to care for the environment, Earl runs to Mr. Richfield's office to see if he can get his job back, right when Richfield is about to give in, thinking Earl is there to make demands.
  • "Earl's Big Jackpot": Earl gets fired merely for getting injured on the job (after Richfield made his employees work overtime at the last minute, without pay). Earl ends up suing his boss. After Earl rubs in his new wealth, Richfield then fires all of his tree pushers and says it's because of the company losses. Robbie later convinces Earl to consider giving his money back, in exchange for rehiring the employees, which Richfield refuses. Then Earl accidentally bumps his new golf cart into Richfield's trailer, to which Richfield fakes an injury... But the judge demands that Richfield hire back all fired employees while Earl give Richfield his money back.
• Developed into a Running Gag in The Drew Carey Show, with the boss firing people for ridiculously petty reasons in an increasingly insane manner. Let's just say it's a very bad idea to work there if your last name is Johnson. The main character loses his job multiple times, yet always manages to get it back, though the timeframe can vary from within one episode to over two seasons. Wick's wacky firing schemes do eventually blow up in his face, though, as one of them ends with him taking a crossbow bolt to the junk and losing a testicle.
• The Dukes of Hazzard: Several times, Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane and/or his deputies, Cletus Hogg and/or Enos Strate, have been fired by Boss Hogg.
  • Rosco's highest-profile firing was in "Robot P. Coltrane," when Rosco – who had been Hazzard County's top cop for 25 years – let the Duke boys slip from his grasp, but a robot – a ROBOT! – easily subdued the Dukes. It turned out that was the last straw in a series of his mistakes, as Boss enumerates every minor slip-up or goof his sheriff had made. Of course, Rosco is rehired by episode's end, as the robot shorts out.
  • Enos was let go at least twice, most famously in "Enos Strate to the Top," the pilot for Enos (his own hour-long police dramedy). His departure comes when he stands up to Boss and declares once and for all that he is through harassing the Duke family on his orders. In the 1984 episode "The Ransom of Hazzard County," Enos is given a de facto dismissal when Boss loses patience with his honesty (he is demoted to records clerk); however, Enos will play a key role in capturing his successor, who is conspiring with a pair of extortion artists to blow up Hazzard Dam if Boss doesn't pay him $1 million.
• The British '70s sitcom The Good Life (or Good Neighbors as it was called in the U.S.) featured an episode in which Jerry Leadbetter's boss, known only as "Sir", asks him to play host to a visiting Dutch businessman on the same night when Jerry's wife Margot is to play in a local production of the The Sound of Music. Jerry for this reason declines the request and his boss sacks him. Jerry's friend Tom Good tries to convince Sir to hire Jerry back but learns only at the end that Sir had never intended the firing to be permanent but only meant to teach Jerry not to think of himself as irreplaceable.
• House:
  • House’s employees live in perpetual terror of being fired, but barring the mass interview, the chances of anyone actually staying gone are slim to none.
  • They don't even always stay gone during the mass interview. During the "mass" part of the mass interview when House is still having everyone wear numbered tags so he doesn't have to remember their names, one character who is fired just turns his tag upside down and claims to be a different number. House notices and calls him out on it, but considers it good initiative and lets him stay anyway.
  • In "Dying Changes Everything" the doormat Patient Of the Week casually mentions in the middle of the episode that she was replaced from her job as the personal assistant to a Straw Feminist activist despite having been gone for a few days at most and being committed to a hospital for a potentially life-threatening illness. At the episode's end, the replacement quits and the patient is offered the same job with increased autonomy and she accepts, much to Thirteen's disappointment who wanted her to take the opportunity to make a new life for herself. No one considers the more logical third option of the assistant suing the employer for wrongful termination and winning an enormous settlement.
• In The IT Crowd, Reynholm fires everyone on an entire floor of the building for not working as a team. And then calls HR to hire a new security team to escort out the other team in case they don't act as a team when escorting everyone from the floor out.
• The Jeffersons: In the early years, Florence seemed to always be walking a tight rope with her boss, George. In the 1976 episode "Louise Gets Her Way," George actually follows through with his threat, tired of her sass and eavesdropping on his phone conversations. However, Florence saves her job when, while listening in on another phone conversation, she overhears a potential client of George's confer with his partner... to close out a scam deal over damaged delivery vans! The trope became less frequent and, by the end of the series' run, it had gone away completely.
• The infamous Amy's Baking Company, as featured in Kitchen Nightmares, was known for this trope. During dinner service, Amy blows up at one of her servers for double-checking which table to send a meal to. Then she fires her, calling her a "poisonous little viper". Later in the episode, when Gordon Ramsay asks former employees about their experience at the restaurant, they estimate that Amy and Samy went through 50 employees in one year. The truth is worse - their actual turnover rate is closer to 100!
• In La Femme Nikita termination resulted in being 'cancelled'; you were executed when your services were no longer required by Section One. Explained by the premise that all agents/assassins were only probationally salvaged from Death Row (note that Nikita was innocent of any crime in the TV series, unlike the movies).
• Subverted in Mad Men: Bert Cooper, who as part of his Japanophilia never wears shoes in the office, steps on some gum that got left on the office carpet and then fires the first secretary he sees chewing gum (as she says, "How could it be my gum? My gum's in my mouth!"). However, the other higher-ups tell her to just leave and come back tomorrow anyway, because Bert's not going to remember it or her face.
• Arthur from Merlin has only really fired Merlin once, but he threatens him with it constantly. Merlin knows better than to take it seriously, because if he left, Arthur would be insane within a month. And most likely dead, but nobody knows how often he saves Arthur's life.
• Mr. Show features a sketch in which a Mean Boss promotes one of his employees after he stands up to him. Another employee agrees and is fired. Everyone else who speaks against him gets promoted for "having spunk" but the second employee can't get unfired for doing the same thing. Another sketch featured a boss who in an attempt to downsize, fired all his employees . . . until he was the only one left.
• The Muppet Show:
  • In the episode with Nancy Walker, Kermit got sick and put Fozzie in charge. After all that happened in the episode, as it was about to end Fozzie figured Kermit would fire him. Kermit then shows up and tells Fozzie that he's fired. However, Fozzie seems to be more happy to see Kermit back than concerned about his firing, and Kermit quickly tells him that he's hired again.
  • Kermit has threatened to fire Miss Piggy multiple times due to her numerous attempts to get his affections or pressure him into a relationship. He actually does fire her in the Loretta Swift episode, but is talked into hiring her again.
  • While never explicitly threatened as often as the other two, but Beauregard and Gonzo had also been at risk of being fired only for Kermit to walk it back or the situation that caused him to lose his patience with them to be resolved.
• Justified in the beginning of The Office, when the company was downsizing and looking for people to layoff (redundancies in the UK version). Subverted when Michael fake fires Stanley to discipline him, which backfires as Stanley says he is filing a lawsuit. This leads Michael to admit that he was only pretending to fire him.
• In one of the Malibu Sands episodes on Saved by the Bell, Leon Carosi fires Zack Morris because he didn't vote for Carosi's daughter in the beauty pageant. However, he does hire him back after his daughter gets pissed at him and points out that he could sue him.
• On Seinfeld, George's boss Steinbrenner is eccentric enough to fire people for almost no reason.
  George: Nobody knows what this guy's capable of. He fires people like it's a bodily function!
• In one episode of Silver Spoons, Ed claims that Grandpa fired him at least twelve times. In the same episode, Grandpa apologizes for eleven of those times, but not the most recent. (He's not sorry about that one.)
• Played for Gallows Humor in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Apple", where Kirk tells Scotty that he's "fired" for failing to get the Enterprise out of danger (a moot point, since the failure has left the ship a few hours away from destruction). Of course, he's "re-hired" when the crisis is past.
• Naturally, this was parodied to the extreme on That's My Bush!. In the episode "Fare Thee Welfare," George is impeached by Vice President Dick Cheney. What follows is a host of scenes with George taking on and getting fired from various jobs (each parodying a famous sitcom), only to immediately get back his job as President of the United States by the end of the episode.
• Every episode of Spectreman has director Kurata firing Joji for something, and then re-hiring him because no one else can do the job required of the Pollution G-Men.
• On Three's Company, Mr. Angelino fired Jack numerous times. Even after Jack got his own restaurant, Mr. Angelino was his landlord and repeatedly threatened not to renew Jack's lease.
• Played for drama in Vazelina Hjulkalender. Inga fires Synnøve because Synnøve could have forced the wreckers to move, but refused to. Synnøve didn't have a lot of money in the first place, and having lost her job doesn't help her or her children.
• 30 Rock:
  • In the episode "Rosemary's Baby", Jack fired Liz when she refused to fire a guest writer with edgy ideas. Also, Jack fired Pete for no apparent reason in the pilot, rehiring him at the end of the episode at Liz's insistence. Liz feared being fired when she confronted Jack about how he was taking over the writers' room in "Jack the Writer". In "The Fighting Irish", Liz fired her romantic rival and, when Pete and the accounting department objected, she responded by firing them all. Pete was obviously rehired again as was Liz's rival, who was then promoted to a branch office.
  • Jack does quite a lot of firing. Jonathan's gotten fired three times in the first three seasons. Kenneth got fired for about a minute in "Blind Date". Jack spent all episode firing people in "Cutbacks". And in a case of Fridge Logic, Jack fired Tracy from his community-service job as a Little League coach in "Cougars" and rehires him later in the episode.
• "Chicago", an eighth season episode of Little House on the Prairie, sees series protagonist Charles Ingalls travel to Chicago to comfort his grief-stricken friend, Mr. Edwards, after Edwards' son John Jr., a young newspaper reporter, dies in what turns out to be a murder to cover up union graft. John's boss, newspaper publisher Mr. Callahan, insists upon helping the two investigate, but not before having a drink or several in the local pub. A paperboy hands Callahan an advance copy of the late edition, and Callahan, enraged at several typos in the copy, tells the bartender to inform his copy boy when he sees him next that he's fired, and storms off. The bartender assures the shocked Ingalls and Edwards that Callahan is actually quite a fine and decent man, and assures them that he "fires" said copy boy at least a couple of times a week.
• On Married... with Children, Kelly Bundy is fired from multiple jobs due to everything from refusing to wear a bikini in a TV ad to the fleabag diner she worked at being shut down for health code violations to having her hit TV show destroyed by Executive Meddling to trying to help her family defraud the company she worked for to simply being The Ditz and too stupid to do the work.

Music

• Buddy Rich was a notorious Jerkass to his band and routinely fired band members for incredibly trivial things like looking away while Rich was playing a solo. The same musicians would often be hired back later. An audio example with NSFW language.

Print Media

• The fictional columnists in Private Eye. Most columns end with "You're fired, Ed", but they're always back next issue. At least one column had the above note in the middle of the column, with the next paragraph having a note saying, "This is dreadful. You're hired again."

Professional Wrestling

• Jim Ross — despite being one of the most well-respected play-by-play commentators in the business — is also known for having incredibly shaky job security within the WWE/F. For whatever reason, longtime chairman/CEO Vince McMahon really liked to haze the guy and subject him to a frankly bizarre level of humiliation, firing JR in and out of kayfabe multiple times before quietly rehiring him, often due to the company having no one to replace him (as well as promises of writing a tell-all biography about his time with the company, which suspiciously dies down once he gets rehired). Within kayfabe, this was a surefire way to get some cheap heat (bonus points if the firing took place in his home state of Oklahoma), but other firings were much more legitimate, including an odd incident in 2013 where Ric Flair went on a profane, possibly intoxicated rant during a live panel, with JR getting the boot supposedly for not keeping things under control as panel host.
• This is done in Professional Wrestling all the time, with the authority figure du jour putting characters he doesn't like in "You're Fired" matches, where, as the name implies, the loser is fired.
  • The "You're Fired" (originally "Loser Leaves Town") match was most common in the pre-Sports Entertainment era, when wrestlers traveled from promotion to promotion more often and would be the culmination of a heated feud. The stipulation would also be used when a more prominent wrestler wanted time off and/or to heal from legitimate injuries, with some explanation given when the "fired" wrestler returns. And then there was the "masked stranger" that would show up to cause trouble for his (almost always heel) foe, with the masked wrestler acting on the "departed" wrestler's behalf; invariably at some point, the masked wrestler would be exposed and the feud would turn up another notch.
  • Which in fact makes this trope Truth in Television for pro wrestling. Employees have lost jobs with WWE for posting blogs about being cheated on by their girlfriends, being associated with the competition in any vague way (friends of Hulk Hogan generally get their walking papers when he and Vince McMahon are having one of their semi-regular Real Life feuds), or having "heat" backstage with a member of management.
  • Or for looking at the boss funny, for being too fat, too skinny, too short (but never too tall for Vince McMahon!), screwing up a match's scripted finish just once, or getting into altercations with wrestlers backstage that are favored by the management (though as CM Punk can attest to this isn't limited to Vince).
• In the final years of Vince McMahon's reign, the WWE canned dozens of wrestlers, referees and crew, citing budget problems while recording massive profits. Since becoming the WWE's head of both creative and talent relations in July 2022, Triple H has started bringing many of these fired employees back. One Reddit user quipped that if Vince's catchphrase was "You're Fired", Hunter's catchphrase could be "You're Rehired".

Stand-Up Comedy

• Comedian Gerry Dee recounts how, when he was a kid, he would make money by doing odd jobs for his Rambunctious Italian next-door neighbour. He claims the man would fire him every day for the smallest of infractions, then immediately forget about it and tell him to come back the next day like nothing ever happened.

Theatre

• In the musical Anything Goes, Billy Crocker gets fired by his boss, Elijah Whitney, only to remind him about an amalgamation deal he apparently forgot the paperwork for, which leads to Billy getting hired again. Billy also lampshades this trope by telling Reno Sweeney that "[his boss] hires and fires me every eight minutes."

Video Games

• Shantae: Given how badly Scuttle Town needs a Guardian Genie to protect it against the likes of the Barons of Sequin Land and Risky Boots, you'd think Mayor Scuttlebutt would know better than to fire the titular half-genie hero. Yet in Shantae: Risky's Revenge, he tosses her after Risky attacks the town, and later ponders selling the town to Ammo Baron; in Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, he actually sells the town to Ammo Baron, who chucks her out first thing. And yet, even after Shantae fights off Risky's renegade Tinkerbats and almost singlehandedly frags the Pirate Master, he fires her again in Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, and only officially rehires her at the end of the game, well after she eliminated her "replacement" on grounds of attempting to sacrifice the town's memories to her pet worm. She's on vacation in Shantae and the Seven Sirens, so her job's safe for now, but the Genies know it's only a matter of time before the issue of her remaining employed rises again...
• In Spider-Man 2, your first interaction with Jameson ends up with you "fired". After he leaves the office (to get more pictures for the Bugle), Spidey muses that that was "The fifth time J.J.'s fired me this week." And if J.J.'s office is open, you can "talk" to him; one of the randomly-generated responses is "you're fired." It's possible to get this result several times in a row.
• Played for Laughs on the Team Fortress 2 blog with a series of blog posts detailing how Robin Walker had just learned that he could fire people and subsequently got Drunk with Power and ended up firing all but two of the employees at Valve.
• The homebrew game Zooming Secretary has a rather heartwarming example occur when you miss too many calls.
  You're fired!... and re-hired!
• In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud marches in the Junon parade that's being televised around the world. Your performance determines how good the parade's ratings are. If you screw it up (which is very easy to do, given your contradictory instructions, the finicky controls and it just being That One Sidequest) and the ratings are bad enough, the TV producer will fire one of his assistant directors even though the poor schmuck didn't do anything wrong.

Web Animation

• In Dave Madson's Looney Tunes Intro Bloopers, Sam fires and re-hires Shield Guy about every other episode for putting up the wrong titles in a short film's opening sequence.

Webcomics

• Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs (originally) in Irregular Webcomic! is constantly demoted, re-promoted, fired, and rehired by Head Death. Other Deaths also suffer from this from time to time.
• Dr. Chester in A Loonatic's Tale. In spite of being so apathetic as to medicate any and every patient regardless of what their actual problem is, the sanitarium directors keep him around because from a pure skill standpoint he's the best psychiatrist on staff (excluding themselves), and they're hoping he'll get his head out of his ass and put it to good use. Since he never does, they occasionally hand him a case with the stipulation that his continued employment hinges upon its success.
• Inverted in Narbonic, where Dave talks about quitting/ threatens to quit/ quits Narbonic Labs about twice a story arc, but just can't seem to leave.
• Mostly subverted in Quitting Time. Nate is constantly getting fired, but once he's employed again, it's (almost) always at a different place.
• Played with in The Trenches. One can get fired on perfectly reasonable (or unreasonable as the case may be) grounds, but thanks to Credenza's little management quirks, getting re-hired is as easy as applying under a different name since they suspect the boss has face blindness. Then "Rarley" gets fired again, and the boss takes a photo of him and gives it to security with instructions not to let him in the building.
• In Champions of Far'aus, Captain Shalor fires Flamel from the Garn city guard, though unlike most examples it is out of concern for Flamel's wellbeing.
• In Scarlet Lady, anyone working for the Bourgeois family is subjected to this.
  • In "Rogercop", the Mayor fires Officer Raincomprix (for not doing something blatantly illegal), but decides at the end of the chapter to rehire him with a higher rank. Of course, as Raincomprix finds later on, the Mayor doesn't have the power to fire (or hire) him.
  • In "Despair Bear", Chloé fires her butler because he kept her from making a scene over Adrien and Marinette dancing. By the end of the episode, she's forgotten about it.
  • In "Style Queen", Audrey starts firing everyone that doesn't meet her (absurd) demands - even those people she can't actually fire.

Web Original

• Parodied in the Bastard Operator from Hell stories when Simon is fired by his boss, only to be rehired by the company's HR department for the same job with higher pay only 5 minutes later. Later on, it becomes a Running Gag that he'd get his boss fired instead, going through a series of them over the past few years.
• Parodied by The Onion: "Media Company Looking For Ways To Get Rid Of Veteran 24-Year-Old Employee.

Western Animation

• The Jetsons: As the page description itself points out, George Jetson is the Trope Namer. However, Mr. Spacely promoted him to vice president nearly as often as he fired him.
  • One episode ended with George saying, "Does anyone need an unemployed vice president?"
  • One episode had George threatened with firing if he didn't vote for Mr. Spacely's poodle in a dog show that Astro was also competing in.
  • In another, the Jetsons and the Spacelys faced off against each other in a Family Feud-style game show, and Spacely threatened to fire George if his family won (he flat-out yelled that he would fire George if he picked the top prize right in front of everybody else and on live television). Thankfully for the Jetsons, the second prize was exactly what they needed, while Spacely won a large supply of Cogswell Cogs.
  • Interestingly, another episode had Spacely sign a contract George wrote up that prevented him from being fired for life. So Spacely made him his shoe-shine boy.
  • Another episode (from the 1980s episodes) had Spacely, instead of his usual firing of George, dispatch him to Outer Moongolia following a computer glitch.
• Fred Flintstone from The Flintstones was also fired by Mr. Slate frequently, not surprising since the two shows are cousins of each other. But Mr. Slate rarely fired Flintstone without some good reason. In one Cartoon Network station ID, Slate fired Fred, a mammoth, and the channel's logo in rapid succession.
  "Heh, I love having bad days!"
• The British children's series Alias the Jester made a Once per Episode Running Gag of this, with every episode ending the same way: "Jester?" "Yes, your majesty?" "You're fired." "Yes, your majesty." (The only exception is the first episode, in which it's "You're hired.") Of course, he always has his job again at the beginning of the next episode.
• Stan Smith of American Dad! has been suspended or lost his job in some way a number of times, yet at the beginning of the next episode, he's always right back at work.
• Family Guy:
  • Averted when Peter lost his job at the toy factory due to his boss dying and the factory closing. He was unemployed and seen doing various odd jobs for nearly an entire season before he got a new job at the brewery.
  • Peter was fired from the brewery in "Peter-Assment" after refusing to have sex with his boss Angela. He was rehired at the end of the episode after doing so, although it was actually Mort who did it.
• This happened to Inch High, Private Eye in every episode of his series, except "The World's Greatest Animals".
  • Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law hangs a lampshade on it in an episode where Inch does sue his employer after his latest firing, since he was essentially fired for being short.
  • On the other hand, Inch's employer is well within his rights to fire Inch for being shitty at his job (which he is, but Inch is able to make his claim because he's shitty in a way that's very height-flavored). Contrast with a pizza delivery boy filing for wrongful termination after causing his sixteenth on-the-job twelve-car-pileup.
  • In fact, this is often the way Phil Ken Sebben enters the room, clearly intending to fire Birdman and being interrupted by something.
    Phil Ken Sebben: Aaaaaaaand you're fi- wait a minute...
• An episode of Inspector Gadget had Gadget fired and replaced by a crime computer.
• On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Lucius fired Heloise for an incredibly trivial reason (and, in the same episode, hired Jimmy so he could fire him). Justified, since he runs Miseryville and is The Caligula.
• Kappa Mikey has Ozu threaten to fire the entire cast and/or cancel the show on a regular basis, often for ridiculous reasons, or because of something one of them (usually Mikey) did.
  Ozu: "Okay, you're all hired again, but only until I remember why I fired you in the first place."
• King of the Hill:
  • In one episode, Peggy loses her job as a real estate agent, and Bobby lampshades the trope with the trope namer.
    Peggy Hill: (after listing all the jobs she's lost) Bobby, look on the internet and find out who holds the record for most jobs lost.
    Bobby Hill: I think that'd be George Jetson.
  • Occurred in another episode when Dale gets a desk job at an adhesives company. His supervisor places Dale in charge of firing employees whom she hates. Dale then develops the habit of firing employees for no reason but to see them cry.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): Brittany and Whittany Biskit often talk about how their butler François LeGrande is going to be fired for helping Blythe or in any way hindering the Biskits' schemes, even if he does the morally right thing. Though, as mere teenage daughters of a filthy rich pet shop owner, they don't really have much real authority over François's job.
• Mission Hill also intended to go against this trope, by having Andy change jobs every eight episodes. Unfortunately, the series only lasted long enough for him to change jobs once.
• Benson threatens to fire Mordecai and Rigby from Regular Show so often, it's pretty much become his catchphrase. This is lampshaded in "Brain Eraser" when Mordecai, Rigby, and Skips are traveling through Mordecai's memories and have to climb through a huge mob of Bensons. Every one of them is shouting "You're fired!" Lampshaded again in "A Bunch of Full Grown Geese", when after Benson threatened to fire them in most of the previous 99 episodes, Rigby calls him out on either never carrying out his word or firing him and Mordecai only to rehire them less than a minute later.
• Bloaty the Tick from Rocko's Modern Life had Mr. Ick, who exaggerated this trope to ridiculous extremes. Every time he spoke, he would say "You're fired", and then correct himself. ("You're fired! I mean, good evening." "You're fired! I mean, pass the salt." "You're fired! I mean, The End!")
  • The titular character was also frequently given this treatment very often by Mr. Smitty at Kind-of-a-Lot-of-Comics. This was even lampshaded in "Scrubbin' Down Under", when Rocko is sent up to his office and is seemingly given a pink slip, and Rocko asks if he is firing him again. It turns out it was an announcement for his nomination for the Service with a Smile Award.
• The Simpsons:
  • Homer doesn't lose his job as frequently, but it's happened enough to notice, and Mr. Burns has as lax a set of criteria for firing employees as his predecessors (never mind the fact he can never seem to remember Homer long enough). This has been lampshaded with Homer casually mentioning that he can participate in the Zany Scheme because he has been fired again.
    Bart: Do you even have a job anymore?
    Homer: I think it's pretty obvious that I don't!
  • Also lampshaded by a related gag where Mr. Burns never remembers Homer's name, for better or worse.
  • Lampshaded again, when a family member comes up with some wacky caper or other and Homer says "That's a great idea! And it's perfect timing because I just got fired!"
  • This example might be more of a subversion, actually, since the only times Burns actually seems to sack Homer are when he's done things that really are examples of gross incompetence and stupidity. Burns never fired Homer for suing him after he hit Bart with a car, or for standing up to Burns when he sexually harassed Marge, or even for thwarting Burns' campaign for governor. Another way it's a subversion is that Homer seems to be able to get his job back despite his incredible incompetence and gross stupidity.
  • And then there's the rally to the top of the mountain in "Mountain of Madness". Last team in is fired. Subverted at the end when Burns pretty much says that he never intended to fire anybody, it was just to motivate them.
  • Although it DOES appear that the (lack of) job security applies to everyone:
    Carl: Hey Mr. Burns, can I have a raise?
    Mr. Burns: (cheerfully) Clear out your desk, you're gone!
  • And then there was what happened to Lenny:
    Mr. Burns: All right, let's make this sporting, Leonard. If you can tell me why I shouldn't fire you without using the letter "E", you can keep your job!"
    Lenny: Uh...okay...I'm a good...work...guy...
    Mr. Burns: You're fired.
    Lenny: But I didn't say-
    Mr. Burns: You will. (opens the trapdoor Lenny is standing on)
    Lenny: EEEEEEEE!
  • Also lampshaded in the comic once, after being fired again, Homer brushes it off saying "If I didn't get fired now and then, I'd never spend any time with the kids."
  • Burns has even fired his loyal Yes-Man Smithers twice. Both times, it didn't last. (In fact, in the alternate ending to "Who Shot Mr. Burns", he would have forgiven Smithers for trying to kill him and hiring him again with no more punishment than a small pay cut.)
  • This could be explained by Mr. Burns' philosophy that keeping Homer on staff is the only way to ensure he can make Homer suffer and fear him—A "Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer" type of thing. He said as much in "Burns Verkaufen du Kraftwerk".
  • After his divorce, Kirk Van Houten was actually fired from the cracker company for being single. Though since Kirk apparently got the job from Luann's father he may have only have gotten to stay there as a favor, or possibly the firing was to get back at him for the divorce. He was noted to be the worst employee at the company, causing it to fall behind a rival brand (one of the subjects mentioned in one of their fights prior to or during the divorce), so remaining employed beyond that incident was likely a favor from Luann's father.
  • Another interpretation is that Homer's real job is to fill the position of "safety inspector" without any of the trouble or expense of actually discovering and correcting safety problems, making it more a case of Vetinari Job Security from Mr. Burns' point of view.
  • In the episode "Realty Bites", Marge becomes a real estate broker in an attempt to deal with yet another bout of boredom and is hired by Read Blazer Estates, with Lionel Hutz as a boss. She doesn't even make it to the end of the day before Hutz warns her that he has a policy of firing any agents that don't sell any houses within a week of being hired, leading to her deciding to not tell Ned Flanders that the dream house he rushed to purchase from her was the site of a notorious multiple murder.
• Subverted in Spider-Man (1967):
  Jameson: Tell him he's fired.
  Betty Brant: You can't fire him, he's a freelancer.
  Jameson: Well, put him on the payroll and then fire him.
• In SpongeBob SquarePants, Patrick went through a super-fast version of this with Mr. Krabs during a board game:
  Patrick: It's off to jail for you, Mr. Krabs!
  Mr. Krabs: Patrick, you're fired!
  Patrick: But I don't even work here.
  Mr. Krabs: (puts a Krusty Krab hat on Patrick's head) Would you like a job, starting now?
  Patrick: Boy, would I!
  Mr. Krabs: (yanks hat away) You're fired.
• Jonesy Garcia from 6teen attains and is fired from a new job every episode. For some reason, none of the stores at the mall seem to think a teenager with a four-page-long resume is a little suspicious. He even lampshades that as a good thing for getting future jobs. In one episode he realizes that he's about to be fired again and declares, "I QUIT! ...Man, that feels good!"
• Dr. Stinger is fired at the end of every Super Duper Sumos episode, but inevitably rehired before the next episode takes place.
• In the Oh Yeah! Cartoons short "Super Santa: Naughty", the villain Elmer Scrooge has his first demonstration of how mean he is when he fires his butler just for giving him tea with two lumps of sugar when he changed his mind on how many lumps he wanted at the last minute.

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