Basic Trope: A comically incompetent father in a Dom Com.
- Straight: Bob means well, but he often grabs the Idiot Ball and gets his wife Alice and their children Carol and Danny into all sorts of misadventures with him. He is also a very flawed (yet sympathetic) individual.
- Exaggerated: Bob is an incompetent manchild who is Too Dumb to Live. His wife and kids are embarrassed to be around him.
- Downplayed:
- The family share possession of the Idiot Ball pretty fairly, but Bob carries the most.
- Bob sometimes makes stupid mistakes every now and then, but when disaster strikes, he is the one who protects his family.
- Because of Rule of Funny, Bob occasionally trips and misinterprets things (and the results get out of control), but he is still very well-read and professional and it's easy to see why he's the primary bread-winner of the family.
- Justified:
- Unfortunately, emotional maturity and common sense are not (and never have been) prerequisites for parenthood.
- Bob's family is a rather Dysfunctional Family.
- Inverted:
- Bob is a Standard '50s Father.
- Bob is a hard-working househusband with a snarky, sarcastic attitude and Alice is a ditzy, disoriented mother, who sits around, drinking wine and watching TV, instead of providing for her family.
- Bob is The Smart Guy and the plots of the series revolve around how the rest of his family can't follow his instructions to literally save their lives.
- Gender Inverted: Alice is Maternally Challenged.
- Subverted: Bob seems dumb, but that was Obfuscating Stupidity.
- Double Subverted:
- But it turns out, he was really that dumb. When he seemed smart, he was Feigning Intelligence.
- Bob really is a genius. However, he is an Absent-Minded Professor who still needs a Cloudcuckoolander's Minder to function.
- Bob is a Genius Ditz and his moment of intelligence corresponded to his being asked a question in his area of expertise.
- Parodied: Alice ends up parenting Bob more often than her kids.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob is a very loving and attentive father, and he's also extremely good at his job and is an excellent provider. The problem is that he's also as stubborn as a mule when it comes to trying to fix something himself when it breaks down, rather than calling a professional. On those occasions, his competence flies completely out the window.
- Averted: Bob is a competent father.
- Enforced:
- "All those perfect Dom Com families on TV ... they make me sick! I'll make a Dysfunctional Family, with a blithering idiot as its head!"
- One of the parents needs to be somewhat on the ball for the sake of Conservation of Competence, and you want the characterisations to be relatively consistent rather than a constant game of Idiot Ball. You know that every time the dad is shown to be somehow "superior" to the mom, you'll have a protracted battle with the Moral Guardians, but not so the other way around. What are you gonna do?
- Lampshaded: "He's like all those bumbling dads you see in sitcoms."
- Invoked: Alice specifies in her Lonely Hearts ad that she's looking for a Manchild with whom to settle down and raise kids.
- Exploited: Bob deliberately makes it look like he can't do anything right around the house so he doesn't have to.
- Defied:
- Alice breaks up with Bob when she sees that he is too immature to raise a family, and not likely to change any time soon.
- Alternately, Bob decides, "Enough fooling around; I'm expecting kids soon," and spends more time with Alice. He also learns basic household chores from her.
- "You're going to be a competent father even if I have to keep this damn shotgun pointed at your head for the rest of your days, son!"
- Discussed: "I hope Bob Jr. doesn't inherit his dad's bumbling tendencies. It'd be a real hassle when we're married."
- Conversed: "Seriously? Another bumbling dad show? I'd like to see a competent, take-charge father on a sitcom for a change."
- Deconstructed: Bob's stupidity and lack of responsibility has a decisively negative effect on his children and his wife, leading to the breakdown of the (presumably already dysfunctional) family. In the end, Alice questions what she even saw in him in the first place and sues for a divorce.
- Reconstructed: Bob is dumb and irresponsible, but he sincerely loves his family and is capable of stepping up when it's important.
- Played for Drama: Bob's mistakes and selfishness negatively affect his family.
- Played for Laughs: Bob's mistakes are why Hilarity Ensues in this story. He probably earns a living as a clown for hire because it's the best he can do with his ineptitude ... and he's a runaway success at that.
- Played for Horror: Bob is not just a Manchild, but a Psychopathic Manchild, Lethally Stupid and actively hates being tied down. His family fears the day he will somehow get them all killed and the last thing they will ever hear on Earth will be something along the lines of "Did I do that?"
- Implied: Bob is referred to alongside his more accomplished wife and children in a My Friends... and Zoidberg manner.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Billy the angst-filled teenage son continually dismisses his father as the biggest pile of incompetence and clumsiness to have ever walked the Earth this side of Goofy, but then it turns out that every time Bob has appeared in the series so far as a bumbling dad is Billy having a "sitcom" hallucination and the "real world" version of Bob is not only a competent man, he is getting increasingly worried about what is happening in Billy's head ever since that car crash five years ago.
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