Donald Duck has pretty much always had a quacky voice, a Hair-Trigger Temper, and been Born Unlucky, but this series meaningfully explores how these “funny” quirks cause him realistic grief: his quacky voice is treated in-universe as a speech impediment, which causes most characters not to understand him or take him seriously (although that was also a running gag in ''House of Mouse'' and ''The Three Musketeers''). The constant frustration of never being understood, coupled with his eternal bad luck, gave Donald anger issues, which leaves him perpetually impoverished and unemployed, and causes him to struggle to support himself and his three nephews. Being accident-prone also makes it hard for him to qualify for a simple bank loan, and his unintelligibility coupled with his temper and bad luck makes it hard for him to even apply for a job, let alone keep one once he does get one.
Gets further deconstructed in "The Phantom And The Sorceress!" as without his luck, he has no idea how normal life functions and struggles with the tasks that would be easy for anyone else. But because Gladstone never had to do anything, he finds them far harder. This even includes taking stairs to reach the second floor.
The Live TV Audience deconstructs the Laugh Track, (even though that's not typically considered a character in sitcoms). Live studio audiences are people brought in to watch the sitcom that a studio is filming and react to it in real time. They respond to it in a variety of ways and, while laughter is the most common (hence the name), they also have other reactions as well like commiseration ("Awwww"), intrigue ("Ooooo"), and applause and cheering, like when a big name guest star shows up. This is to make the show feel more lively, like other people are watching it besides you, making them technically part of the cast since their reactions are a key part of the show. However, it is also widely seen as a cheap trick to remind people which lines are the jokes. The reason they exist here is that Donald accidentally wishes to Gene that he and his family could live more normally, which Gene interprets by making their lives into a TGIF sitcom, Laugh Track included, and Huey hearing the audience laughing is one of the first hints to him that something is not right. And once the rest of the family find out, the only one other than Donald who doesn't object to the wish is Dewey, and that's only because he's happy to have somebody laughing at his jokes. Once the family starts rebelling and trying to escape the wish, said wish, via the Live Studio Audience, fights back and reveals themselves to be abstract beings that don't naturally belong in this universe (humans, in this case), with the annoying laughter shifting to mad cackling. From a Cosmic Horror perspective, this makes sense. After all, who else would laugh at the misery of someone being trapped in a dimension that's not their own besides insane sociopathic beings who don't even belong in the victim's universe?
Flintheart Glomgold deconstructs the Evil Counterpart archetype. Glomgold has clearly styled himself after Scrooge McDuck and is acknowledged in-universe as the Poor Man's Substitute for Scrooge. This still makes him obscenely rich, to the point he could easily bide his time pursuing any hobby other than fighting the McDuck family. His obsession with imitating and defeating Scrooge has hampered his ability to run a successful business, wasting millions for the goal of upstaging another billionaire. It's eventually revealed that Glomgold met Scrooge when Glomgold was "Duke Baloney," in the exact same circumstances that inspired Scrooge to chase his fortune. In his attempts to recreate his own success story through Duke Baloney, Scrooge unintentionally short-changed the kid, leading Duke to rob Scrooge in retaliation. So enraged was Duke that the world's richest duck paid him a dime, he changed his identity and dedicated his life to making Scrooge miserable. In the end, Glomgold decision to become an intentionalEvil Counterpart means that his entire identity revolves around hurting Scrooge, with no idea how to be happy or fulfilled without doing evil.
Bradford Buzzard deconstructs the Tagalong Kid, showing what would happen if a real-life child was thrust into the perilous and traumatic adventures shown on Saturday morning cartoons of the 80s and 90s. While his grandmother meant well and only wanted to bond with him, the adventures she brought him on, rather than awing or inspiring him, only caused him to see the world as dangerous and chaotic. Driven by his childhood trauma, he formed F.O.W.L., a criminal organization dedicated to “saving” the world from “chaos” by running it behind the scenes, and became hellbent on destroying the very concept of adventure. Despite his attempts to justify his criminal actions as being “for the greater good”, his true motive is maintaining his own sense of safety and keeping himself safe, consequences be damned.
