Basic Trope: A French character is a Jerkass.
- Straight: Jacques is French and is rude, obnoxious, arrogant and generally unpleasant.
- Exaggerated:
- Jacques is an Omnicidal Maniac.
- Everyone from France is Always Chaotic Evil or a Les Collaborateurs.
- French Villain
- Downplayed:
- French Jerk With a Heart of Gold.
- Downplayed, then Subverted : French Jerk With a Heart of Jerk
- France only has a slightly higher proportion of jerks than the average country.
- Only Parisians or Les Collaborateurs are jerks.
- Jacques has no patience for tourists, but he's nice to his own countrymen.
- Jacques is also American, Italian, and German, but he's still a jerk nonetheless.
- French Jerk With a Heart of Gold.
- Justified:
- Jacques is normally a Nice Guy, but everyone has treated Jacques like he's a jerk and made Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey jokes to him, so he has every reason to be a jerk in retaliation.
- Jacques's French sensibilities seem rude to an American perspective.
- Inverted: Jacques is a Nice Guy, who's often concerned for his American friends' healths (seriously though, why are they always forced to keep smiling even though they work their backs out?).
- Subverted:
- Jacques is first seen speaking with an outrageous accent and playing the stereotype straight to a ridiculous degree, then he just laughs about it and say it's all a joke and is later on a very pleasant fellow.
- Alternatively: It turns out that Jacques was actually a German faking being a French.
- Double Subverted: That's all just an act too and he talks behind everyone's backs and thinks of them as beneath him.
- Parodied: The minute Jack discovers he has French heritage, he changes his name to Jacques and starts acting like a colossal asshole.
- Zig Zagged: American tourists visiting Paris have bad experiences with local people, until they meet Audrey who's a Nice Girl and offers to take them to her house in the countryside. However the tourists are dismayed to find out Audrey's parents are jerks, but when they go to explore the surrounding village everyone is very nice and hospitable.
- Averted:
- No French characters are present.
- French people are no more or less rude and jerkish.
- Enforced: There's a Vacation Episode set in France, and this is the easiest form of conflict.
- Lampshaded: "I'm sure there must be at lease one nice person in France."
- Invoked: Jacques deliberately acts unpleasant to keep the tourists off his back.
- Exploited: Bob is being chased by a criminal while in France, so he deliberately runs through a crowded cafe in hopes that his pursuer will anger one of the customers, stalling them and giving Bob time to ascape
- Defied: Jacques sets out to challenge stereotypes about the French by being as polite and nice as possible.
- Conversed: "Why are French people so often portrayed as rude and self-righteous in fiction?"
- Implied: Bob comes back from a trip to France in a very bad mood and with a couple scrapes here and there.
- Deconstructed:
- Having everyone in France/of French origin be a jerk is absurd. But French people are still stereotyped this way, leading to resentment and a Cycle of Revenge where they begin harboring negative stereotypes of other peoples.
- People will avoid Jacques as much as possible due to his unpleasant jerk behavior, and he ends up alone and friendless.
- Reconstructed: Jacques and his friends run into Bill, who is a hard-core example of the "Ugly American" Stereotype and bullies them just for being born in France. What comes around, goes around.
- Played For Laughs: Jacques is an Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist.
- Played For Drama:
- Alice is an American who has to move to France and she feels very lonely because everyone is unfriendly.
- Alternatively: Knowing how pretty much everyone in France treats her, Alice now comes to the conclusion that all French people are bastards, and then kills them all off just because everyone there’s a jerk.
- Played For Horror: Jacques is a French Serial Killer who takes way too much from The Jerk Index. It is even revealed that the reason he left France was because he was running out of people to kill.
- Plotted a Good Waste: This is a French show and the snobbish behaviors is presented as parody and criticism of their own heritage.
"Mmmph, of course ze Américain will need help finding his way back to the French Jerk page, n'est-ce pas?"
