Web Video / Game Grumps

The one on the right is Grump. The one on the left is Not So Grump.

"HEY I'M GRUMP"
"I'M NOT-SO-GRUMP"
"AND WE'RE THE GAME GRUMPS!"

Game Grumps is a Let's Play web series on YouTube where two co-hosts play games together and provide live commentary, with conversations ranging from sophisticated discussions about the design of the games they're playing to bizarre tangents unrelated to anything happening on-screen with plenty of ridiculous screaming and bromance thrown in, producing frequently hilarious and occasionally NSFW results. The channel updates daily, and now has a favorite episode crowner!

The co-hosts are referred to in the series' theme song/intro as "Grump" and "Not-So-Grump". Grump has been played by Arin Hanson since the show's debut on July 18, 2012, while Not-So-Grump was originally played by Jon Jafari until he left the show on June 25, 2013, at which point he was replaced by Dan Avidan, a.k.a. Danny Sexbang of Ninja Sex Party. NSP and Hanson later collaborated to form the supergroup Starbomb.

Throughout its lifespan, Game Grumps also has had several spin-off shows:

Active Spin-Offs

• Game Grumps VS: The hosts compete against each other instead of trading off or playing together.
• Guest Grumps: A notable guest joins in. Past guests have included Finn Wolfhard, Jamie Lee Curtis, and "Weird Al" Yankovic.
• Game Grumps Animated: A platform to showcase fan-made animations that utilize the Grump's commentary for audio and inspiration. Consistently releases on Thursdays.
• Grump Out: The Grumps upload miscellaneous content such as behind-the-scenes footage, live-action ads, podcasts, and just about anything else they can come up with. It is hosted on its own separate channel.
• Game Grump: A Let's Play featuring either Arin or Dan going solo. These are often done when one of the Grumps is unavailable to take part in a session.
• 10 Minute Power Hour (2018–2020; 2022–present): An unscripted live-action series hosted on Game Grumps' The Grumps channel and starring Arin and Dan. Despite the name, most of the episodes are more than ten minutes long. The series aired from 2018-20 before it was put on hiatus due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, but resumed in March 2022.

Retired Spin-Offs

• Steam Train (2013–16): Following the same format as its parent show, it featured PC games instead of console titles. It was hosted by Ross O'Donovan (of Rubber Ninja Animation), with guest stars switching between Arin, Danny^note who was originally supposed to be the show's permanent second host until he replaced Jafari, Barry, and Suzy. Steam Train ran before O'Donovan stepped away to focus on his animation career.
• Steam Rolled (2013–16): Four players competed against each other in console and PC games. Arin and Ross were regulars, while the other two players are filled in alternately by Danny, Suzy Berhow (Arin's wife), and Barry Kramer (the Grumps' first editor and uploader). With the introduction of Grumpcade, Steam Rolled exclusively featured PC games.
• Table Flip (2013–16): A 32-episode formerly Polaris-exclusive show in which Suzy, Barry, and several guest stars played tabletop and card games while dressed in period clothing.
• Grumpcade (2015–18): A show where any combination of hosts could play console games (except Arin and Danny, since that's just Game Grumps). Like Table Flip, this show was also open to guests outside the main group. On November 5, 2015, Brian Wecht (a.k.a. Ninja Brian, also of Ninja Sex Party and Starbomb) made his Game Grumps debut on a Grumpcade replay of BurgerTime. The show was the second of three daily uploads for the Grumps channel before it pared down to two daily uploads.
• Guild Grumps: A five-episode mini-series where Ross challenged Arin, Danny, Barry and Suzy to play World of Warcraft and get from level 90 to level 100. The catch is that Ross is supposedly the only expert, while the rest had never played the game before. It was filmed in a Reality Show format which included gameplay footage and the group complaining about the whole situation. Hilarity ensues.
• Doodle Doods (2017): A 20-episode series that aired on Fridays, where either Ross, Arin and/or Chris "OneyNG" O'Neill from OneyPlays (the three of them being professional animators) sketched with guests humorous cartoons centered on a single topic such as TV series like Dragon Ball or The Simpsons, or an episode centered on funny-named birds when Holly from Commander Holly Plays is featured.
• The G Club (2017): An 18-episode podcast featuring various members of the Grumps crew as well other guests to talk about movies and games, either specific titles or general themes.
• Dragons in Places (2017): An eight-episode Dungeons & Dragons podcast, starring Arin as Rascal Dorvin, Suzy as Amanda and Omega, Barry as Flen Turindabber, Ross as Femur Clavicle, and Holly as Alba Blackleaf, with ProJared as their Dungeon Master.

Tropes found in Game Grumps

#-F

• 10-Minute Retirement: Occurs in episode 20 of Sonic '06 after Jon inadvertently triggers a glitch that causes Knuckles to fly into the ceiling and get stuck on a wall. Arin storms out right then and there and Jon has to beg him to come back.
• Abandoned Catchphrase: Basically enforced by the way the Grumps record. With dozens of videos recorded in consecutive sessions, minor in-jokes they circulate for a day or two pop in videos weeks or months down the line. Specifically:
  • Emperor Palpatine's "DO IT," as of the Mario Party 8 Finale.
  • Since the Dennis The Menace episode, "GET OUTTA HERE!"
  • "Mycaruba" came up quite a lot in the early Dan-era videos.
  • Dan initially said 'totally!' very enthusiastically whenever he agreed with Arin, though he toned it down after a few episodes.
  • "Goddammit Ross" was abandoned for being too mean (and after "fans" started using it as an excuse to be mean to Ross).
  • The sarcastic "Like, comment and subscribe!" stopped popping up once an end slate with a subscribe button right at the top was introduced.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Their extended playthrough of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) will never be completed due to Jon's abrupt departure from Game Grumps and Arin's refusal to go back and play it alone. Arin and Danny confirmed they wouldn't finish it, with Danny saying it would be wrong to be there at the end of a journey he wasn't a part of.
  • Zig-Zagged with Demon's Crest. Jon absolutely hated it and actually got into a fight with Arin over it, but a separate playthrough was done later (though never completed).
  • Several games they've played have either gone unfinished or have gone months without updates, despite their last episodes ending normally in the middle of the action.
  • Subverted with their playthrough of Wind Waker, which went months without new videos. It eventually resumed updating and was played to completion.
    • Likewise with the playthrough of Pokemon Firered. Arin and Danny got spectacularly far, then retired it. Then when they came back to it and it became the longest running series in Game Grumps, they had to retire it again just before the Elite Four. They made a specific intro for another series of videos where they explain it was just temporary and Arin had to grind off-camera.
  • Another subversion came with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which was originally done by Arin and Jon (getting as far as the Swamp Palace) before his departure, but was later restarted from the beginning when Danny arrived.
• Abuse of Return Policy: Arin relates how when he lived in Florida and worked at a Disney giftshop, he would do this to get a little extra cash when he was short. A local Walmart had a very generous no receipt, no questions asked, cash return policy, and the giftshop would have a lot of the same items as the Walmart, so Arin would use his employee discount to buy something and then return it at the Walmart for slightly more.
• AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle:
  • Often. For one, it's "AIR-EN!!"
  • Danny does this in a Shout-Out to Saturday Night Live in episode 9 of Super Mario Sunshine.
    Arin: What is with you and your enunCIations?
  • Arin and Danny spend the first two minutes of their Batman playthrough mispronouncing the names of most Batman characters and actors from the film series
  • Dan would like to remind you that it's pronounced syll-ab-LAY, but that's fine.
• Accentuate the Negative
  • Invoked by Arin in the GoldenEye (1997) Game Grumps VS., where he launches into a tirade reminiscent of the Angry Video Game Nerd.
  • He does it again in the Mickey Mousecapade one-off, as he spends the whole video acting like a profane AVGN ripoff.
• Accidental Misnaming: Throughout the Super Mario Maker series, Arin repeatedly calls Bowser Jr. "Baby Bowser". The two are separate characters.
  • On Grumpcade, bringing up either Jared or Jirard repeatedly results in the two being used interchangeably, if not combined into one person.
• The Ace: Whenever the guys play a game show-based video game like Jeopardy!, Arin will insist that at least one of their AI opponents be set to the highest difficulty. This invariably bites the Grumps in the ass, since the AI player will outperform them at every turn.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, Arin defeats a few bosses in ways they're obviously not supposed to be beaten.
    • Gooper Blooper attacks Mario with its tentacles when he tries to attack his weak point, and the solution would be to pull them off to render him harmless. Arin completely ignores that and manages to defeat him anyway.
    • Monty Mole must be defeated by throwing his bombs back at him, but Arin has no idea that he can pick them up, and instead leads them near Monty, and their explosions still damage him, even though they only explode at the base of Monty's cannon.
    • Mecha-Bowser shoots missiles that can attack Mario from both sides while on a rollercoaster. FLUDD clearly warns the player whenever a missile is coming from behind, so they can focus on the ones coming from the front... But Arin keeps looking back and gets hurt a good number of times by missiles from the front, which do not trigger any warning since he's supposed to see them coming by himself. He never corrects his strategy and ends up winning with a sliver of health left.
    • During the second fight against Petey Pirahna, Arin thinks the floating pigs are necessary to make him fall, while spraying him with water would've worked just fine. The pigs are very impractical to use, on top of Arin having trouble navigating the village to follow Petey and frequently missing the opportunity to deal damage to him, but he still manages to win after a long, unnecessarily tedious fight.
  • Arin encapsulates this in his Steam Train playthrough of VVVVVV with Ross.
    Arin: Look at that! I didn't even mean to! [...] Damn, I'm accidentally good!
  • When playing Punch-Out!! for the Wii, Danny is completely ignorant of the duck feature, which is supposed to be the right response to some boss attacks; instead of ducking, he learns how to time counter-attacks for the moves. He later defeats Great Tiger by unknowingly mashing the punch buttons, giving Little Mac a Heroic Second Wind (which he refers to as "going Hulkamania").
  • In Link: The Faces of Evil, Arin and Dan momentarily hit a wall after encountering dinosaur-like enemies in a volcano which are unaffected by Link's sword. However, with a sudden burst of confidence, Arin throws a snowball at them, which, it turns out, defeats them in one hit. He claims that he thought of this because they were fire enemies, but then confesses:
    Arin: To be honest, I was doing it as a joke.
    Dan: ...Oh. Well then...
    Arin: I was gonna be like, 'I got it!' and I was gonna throw a snowball and it was gonna be like, 'tink,' but, um, it worked, so...
    Dan: So you were like, [as Arin] Gotta play it off, gotta play it off...
  • In PUBG Mobile, Arin manages to land right in the middle of the Map, where everyone in the server will eventually have to go since the game will shorten the stage in a sphere and it ends in the middle of the Map. He wasn't even trying to do this, since he isn't that good on PC version alone, let alone an inferior version. Not only does Arin use this to his advantage, but ends up winning his first ever "Winner Winner, Chicken Dinner".
  • In the first part of Detroit: Become Human, Arin skips the investigation and goes straight to confronting the deviant android, because he thought the game was giving you a choice between saving the hostage and figuring out what happened. Miraculously, he actually manages to save the hostage, despite it being pretty impossible by that point. Though he did kill Connor, so make what you will of his victory.
  • In episode 23 of their Twilight Princess HD playthrough, Arin manages to pass through a geyser wall, which you simply need the iron boots for, by going around it essentially. In episode 39, Dan brought this up and called it an "accidental genius" move on his part, since the both laughed at the fact that the answer was unbelievably simple.
• Acrofatic: Lampshaded by Danny in their 46th episode of Super Mario 64 referring to Mario being "quite the acrobat" despite being in his words, "an average, slightly pudgy plumber."
• Actually Pretty Funny:
  • Arin and Danny thought the peer pressure joke in Sonic Boom was pretty clever despite the rest of the game's writing falling flat.
  • While Arin has gone on record stating he's not a big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog, he mentioned in the first episode of their Sonic Adventure DX: Director's Cut playthrough that the franchise's official Twitter is hilarious to read.
    Arin: The Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter is actually really funny.
    Danny: Yeah, I mean whoever's behind that is fucking cool as shit.
  • Danny has made clear he only holds some slight nostalgic love for Leisure Suit Larry Magna Cum Laude and thinks it is a poor installment of the Leisure Suit Larry series. That said every once in a while he and Arin find gold nugget to laugh at.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Lampshaded in Gunsmoke Part 1.
  Arin: We're on your side, that's why we made everything so expensive!
• Adaptation Displacement: Conversed. Ross and Markiplier are unaware that the James Bond Jr. series is based on a cartoon.
• Added Alliterative Appeal:
  • Arin says "Barrel Banana Blast Bullshit", and immediately thinks of The Angry Video Game Nerd.
  • During his fight with the pirahna plant in Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril, Arin begins a story with, "Radical Republicans really wreck my rectal—" before losing the fight. He realizes that trying to alliterate and fight at the same time might be too distracting for him.
  • While playing "P is for Pain," Arin starts reciting "P" words as he jumps on the P-switches, which Dan picks up when he gives it a try. Dan quickly runs out of "P" words and tries to use "pterodactyl" as one by pronouncing the silent letter at the start.
  Peter, prefers, personal, pan, pizzas, partly - [dies] aww.
  • One of their Super Mario Maker 2 episodes is called "Mommy Milky Mario Maker Mania (mmMmm)."
• Addiction Displacement: Dan has said that Skittles have become this for him after a recent sickness left him somehow unable to drink alcohol.
• Admiring the Abomination: From Power Rangers:
  Jon: OOOOOOOOOOOH! EW! EWWWWW! TUMOR-ASS EYE DUDE!
  Arin: Aw, that's cute!
• Aerith and Bob:
  • From The Price is Right: Eva, Jon, Jay, and Sopojkkk.
  • The second intro shows the stars' names as Egoraptor and Danny.
  • The 2nd Wheel of Fortune Junior Edition episode has Suop, Glorgnhak, and Chris.
  • In Super Mario World, Danny reveals that the names of his pet fish in college were Lenaeus, Anaximander, and Bob.
  • In Pokémon FireRed, Arin catches the three Legendary Birds and names them BLUPL, LOMSTER, and GREG.
  • The names of their savegames on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (at least during the Danny era) are Smeef, FARTS!, and Danny.
    Danny: [to the audience, before creating 'Smeef'] Can you tell which [save game] is me and which one is Arin?
• Affectionate Parody:
  • During an episode of Game Grumps VS, Arin takes a bunch of AVGN's typical insults up to eleven when he was frustrated that Jon beat him in GoldenEye (1997). Of course they are both laughing during the rant.
  • During Milky Way Wishes, Arin gives his take on Jon's penchant for giving enemies crazy names on the fly. Jon thinks it's hilarious. It's expanded into a full-on impression in the Donkey Kong Country finale, which gets Jon a little frustrated.
    Arin: OHH, IT'S MEGA-CRUNCH!
    Jon: OHHHHHHHH! OH! OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW! OOOOW!
• Ambiguously Brown: Arin's family, the Bigdix, from the Jon-era Family Feud episode.
  Jon: What is this, like the "Asian, but not really."
• Ambiguous Syntax: In Super Mario Sunshine Part 4, Arin begins to tell a story about how his copy of Wave Race 64 "was stolen". Danny originally thought he meant someone stole his copy, but Arin later explains that his copy was one he stole from a friend when he was little.
• Anachronic Order: They film a large chunk of gameplay in one sitting, then upload small segments at a time. This leads to some series being filmed before others receiving Call Backs only in the later recorded series. Lampshaded in Goof Troop episode 10, where Jon jokes about how his cold will affect the next year of Game Grumps. For example:
  • This practice spoiled the existence of their Secret of Mana videos before they actually released them, and leads to many jokes from future episodes being referenced before they're actually made.
  • They spoiled the Smash Bros video twice: once with the Mii show-off video where you see Brawl loaded up, and once again with an off-handed comment about Jon being upset that he lost (which in turn spoiled the ending).
  • This was lampshaded in the first episode they released for Kirby and the channel as a whole; Jon welcomes them to "the first episode", and then notes that they now have to make it the first episode because he said it would be.
  • The final episode of Zombies Ate My Neighbors has Arin suggesting that they play Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, a series that the two already started and finished.
  • Donkey Kong Country #8 has them suggesting that they play Resident Evil for the Gamecube when the first two episodes had already been uploaded.
  • Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball was mentioned as having been played repeatedly, but because it was made in the same Grump session as Donkey Kong's Crash Course and Kingdom Valley, known for being both That One Level and Nintendo Hard and thus producing a metric butt-ton of content (and also Mario Party 8), it took quite a while before it was uploaded.
  • In Kirby's Epic Yarn part 9, where Danny thinks about how weird it would be if Barry suddenly showed up on an episode and talked. Barry's text promptly pops up and points out "Clearly these guys haven't seen Steam Rolled (which they're in.)"
• Anachronism Stew: In Table Flip, the whole gang dresses in "period" costumes, including a chimney sweep/newsie outfit, a Civil War officer uniform, what appears to be a post-Revolutionary French dress, a stereotypical Victorian gentlemen's getup, and... the Tenth Doctor.
• Angrish: Often. Seeing as Jon used to be the bit more vocal of the two, he tended to start flipping first. Arin can have epic ones, like here.
• Animal Jingoism: Referenced in their Alfred Chicken playthrough.
• Animal Motifs: Jon's favorite Pokémon seem to be based off of birds. He also liked to portray himself as a bear, specifically Banjo with Jacques as his Kazooie.
• Animated Adaptation:
  • Arin animated a few of his favorite scenes from Game Grumps episodes in a sketchy lineart style in the show's early days.
  • Not surprisingly, the fan community cranks these out by the dozens. There are now hundreds of episodes on the internet of various quality, some of which are uploaded to the main channel.
• Animated Episode: Episode 36 of Pokémon FireRed was completely animated by Linzb0t due to the game footage getting lost.
• Animation Age Ghetto:invoked Discussed in part 1 of Star Fox 64. Arin talks about how he hates that people believe that cartoon characters can't have dark and serious backstories as opposed to lighthearted ones. This discussion persists: Arin later asks Jon when the last time he saw an R-rated animated movie was.
  • Animate-A-Grump is a compilation of fan's animations of the Battle Kid finale.
• Animation Bump: In 2018, the channel received a major visual makeover. The intro was redone with more vibrant animation (see the page image), the Grump heads in the thumbnails received a wider range of expressions, and small-drawn versions of the Grumps were also included in select thumbnails.
• Anti-Humor: In Castlevania, Arin eventually takes over for joke delivery while Jon concentrates on clearing Death's level.
  Arin: Why did the axe fly at your face? Because the knight threw it. Why did the axe come back? Because the axe has boomerang-type properties.
• April Fools' Day:
  • "Cat Grumps," ten or so minutes of Arin and Danny's cats being cats, advertised as a "new series" on the channel for April Fool's Day 2014. Also "Meow Train", a similar video "replacing" Steam Train on the same day.
  • For April Fool's Day 2015, we have the first ever "Let's Animate", "Toon Grumps". Pretending to cancel Game Grumps, Arin & Ross spend over an hour talking about animation while Ross sketches out the "Minecraft is for Everyone" video. Also doubles as a Take That! against YouTube's flawed monetary platform built around minutes watched instead of overall hits.
  • For 2016, Game Grumps implemented Face Cam! But there's no room for the game footage, so it's 10+ minutes of two guys sitting on a couch.
  • For 2017, Game Grumps debuted a new series called g that broke down the show's general structure to as minimalist a form as possible, changing the series logo and uploading two "Let's Plays" that consisted of white screens with indiscernible images shown while the Grumps uttered a random stream of words with pauses in between each one. (This went on for the normal length of 10 minutes, mind you.) They also went as far as to further the ideas of g on their Twitter, even after April 1 ended.
• Arc Number: Downplayed. Arin's used Wii has several Miis with names that include some variation of "677". Jon thinks it must be some kind of code.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • In Petz Horse Club, Danny and Arin have some interesting complaints about Carla Van Guiness...
    Danny: She killed a guy, she likes cheese, she eats all her sandwiches one ingredient at a time.
    Arin: She cuts people at Starbucks.
    Danny: She hits dogs with other dogs, she eats cats, she juggles hamsters... I mean, after all, she tears down houses, she eats Lamborghinis.
    Arin: She shits rainbows.
    Danny: Carla: she's purple, she doesn't like the smurfs, she swims funny.
    Arin: She's not a fan of the fourth Chipmunks movie.
  • In Sonic '06 Part 9, after Arin makes a rape joke and justifies it with "it's only a joke":
    Jon: Yeah, it's just a joke! So was Hiroshima, huh? So was Nagasaki, huh?! So was when we elected George Bush... Junior into office, huh?
  • Their Dead Space 3 video:
    Jon: You should just go to Hell and die.
    Arin: We're already there, Jon. We're already there. There's men with baby heads. There's a drill going "ktiky-tiky-tiky-tiky". There's an onscreen menu telling you what to do! This is Hell, Jon.
  • Sonic '06 #46:
    Jon: You died in a fucking shallow pond, you piece of shit, you imbecile, you USELESS PIECE OF FUCKING—OATS!!
    Arin: I didn't di—
    Jon: I'm sorry, I really went too far on that one. I...
    Arin: Did you just— "oats"?
• The Artifact:
  • Played with. Arin's Grump head got a blond streak in its hair around the same time Arin got one in real life, but has totally failed to reflect his beard growth, so he still looks as barefaced as he was in 2012.
  • The Grumps referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as "the Backstreet Boys reunion tour" because of YouTube policies demonetizing videos that mentioned the pandemic outright. Even after said policy was lifted, the Grumps refer to the pandemic as the "reunion tour" because it's just funnier.
• Artistic License – Geography: Episode 6 of Donkey Kong Country includes Jon claiming that "Mexico is practically South America", which completely bewilders Arin.
• Artistic License – Ornithology:
  • A few times during Hatoful Boyfriend, they voice the birds as making clucking sounds like chickens. None of the species involved in this gag actually cluck in real life (most of them are pigeons and doves, so their call is more of a coo, which we hear various times in the game).
  • Parodied with the "Spoiler Owl" joke, where they dub over a hawk cry instead of an owl hoot. Spoiler Owl is also apparently a robin.
• Art Shift: Episode 36 of Pokémon FireRed is entirely animated as a result of the game footage accidentally being lost.
  • Animate-A-Grump, uploaded to celebrate the channel's fifth anniversary, features roughly eighty Game Grumps Animated animators with distinct styles animating a full episode (Battle Kid Part 3). Each animator handled a few seconds of footage, resulting in this trope on rapid-fire.
  • Even among other GG Animated videos, "The Grump Variations" stands out. It's another Multi-Animator Project, but instead of animating a single video, it uses audio clips from various episodes to tell a new story about Arin and Danny learning to play a song.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Often, something in the game will surprise them or catch their attention, putting the current conversation on hold as they go on a tangent.
• Autopilot Artistry: Occurred once in a Mario Maker episode. Arin, who is often known to struggle at games, started to play a level submitted by a fan, but wanted to read the comments first. In the process, he effortlessly beat the level without even realizing what he did, to Danny's amazement. Arin even admitted to not having any idea what the level looked like because he wasn't looking at it.
• Bad "Bad Acting": Arin has a go-to "bad voice acting" voice he pulls out sometimes. Jon prefered the Large Ham version of bad voice acting.
• Bait-and-Switch Comment:
  • During the Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc playthrough, it's revealed during the murder trial that one of the chickens from the coop was also killed, so Dan and Arin remark that they now have two murder victims, and only one can be made into delicious nuggets...after which they'll bury the chicken's body.
  • During a Game of Life 2 episode, Arin and Dan discuss their major projects coming up — Arin's boxing match and Dan collaborating with the Super Guitar Bros on another album. Dan says, "Arin and I are both involved in huge projects, and one of us might get punched in the face... And Arin's boxing!"
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Dan (as well as Arin) constantly jokes about how hilarious it would be if the game they're playing suddenly became super dark (especially if the game is really innocent and light-hearted). Then it actually happened in Doki Doki Literature Club!, and Dan was having none of it.
• Berserk Button:
  • Jon seemed to hate it when Arin would belch, and would actually devolve into angry cursing mid-sentence when it happened. He yelled at Arin for it in Pokemon Emerald #13, and stormed off for a bit when it happened in Kirby Super Star #17. It almost makes him physically ill in Part 30 of Sonic 06.
    Arin: Jon, your disingenuous freak-out over my burp... is making me worried!
    ** Certain viewers have been known to get upset and, reportedly, yell at the screen when the Grumps don't play a game they (the viewers) know really well, but don't play it correctly or even well. See: the time when Arin played Star Fox 64 and actually managed to get to the stage right before Venom, but by mostly mashing A and trying to dodge projectiles instead of locking on, bombing, barrel rolling, or having anything to do with the boost meter. Part five begins with Arin's general response to the tsunami of rage comments this caused.
  • Danny constantly calling Waddle Dees "monkeys" in Kirby's Epic Yarn greatly infuriates Arin.
• Bestiality Is Depraved:
  • In A Link to the Past #2:
    Arin: What was the weirdest thing about Ocarina of Time?
    Jon: You- [narrowly avoids running into a snake] FUCK SNAKES!!
    Arin: I don't fuck snakes! That's disgusting!
  • In part 9 of Katamari Damacy, at the end of the episode when Arin gets fed up with bears:
    Arin: FUCK bears!
    Danny: Okay... I mean, I... I've tried.
• Better than a Bare Bulb: "I didn't leave the room. I opened the door, and closed it. MOVIE MAGIC ladies and gentlemen." (Sonic '06 #45)
• Bile Fascination: In-Universe examples.
  • How they feel about the Mary Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16 game. They say it could almost be fun and crack countless jokes about it, but the episode goes on for nearly four times the normal episode length.
  • They played Sonic '06 and Naughty Bear for this reason too, although in Part 64 of the former's playthrough, Jon commented that it wasn't so bad, especially after playing the latter.
  • This is definitely the case for Sonic Boom.
    Danny: In terms of what we were hoping invokedthis game would be, it really has come through for us with flying fucking colors.
• Big "NO!":
  • Jon unleashes an impressive one during Donkey Kong's Crash Course.
  • Episode 12 of Emerald. Arin finds a whismur! Jon says it's a Plumboom...
    Arin: "Do you remember the episode where Ash caught a Pumbloom?"
    Jon: "Dude—"
    Arin: "NO!"
  • There was also one in part 10 of Donkey Kong Country 2 when Jon gets hit by a Mini-Necky on their last life.
  • Arin gives another one after the unfortunate suicide of Bones in Castlevania part 1.
  • And Jon does another one as the last line of Star Fox 64 Part 1.
  • Arin gets one at the end of his playthrough of Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril. He decides, with the urging of Ross, to give a Nintendo Hard boss one more shot, then accidentally quits the game.
  • Danny in part 32 of Super Mario Sunshine when Mario is just about to reach the star on the pachinko level, only for the physics engine to pull a last-second cheap trick and send Mario flying to his death.
  • The end of part 1 of Wheel of Fortune. After countless turns of landing on the "lose a turn" slot, Vanna White has the audacity to start talking about "the next puzzle" to Danny. The episode ends before he can finish the "no".
  • At one point in part 2 of Super Mario Maker, Danny just avoids a Spiny and lets out a genuinely concerned "NO!" that immediately ends him and Arin into hysterics, with Arin joking about how he could sample that sound and put it into a Martin Scorsese film or use it for his text tone.
• Big "OMG!":
  • In the last round of You Don't Know Jack, Jon gives up and decides to eclipse Arin's high score with a staggeringly huge negative score.
    [sees score]
    Arin: OH MY GAHD
    Jon: I have to pay them all that money?!
    Arin: Dude... You'd better sell your fuckin' house, dude!
  • Jon's response after inhaling a lungful of bittering agent. See Played For Laughs.
  • Danny's response when Suzy confirms the existence of the D Club inNinjabread Man.
  • Arin when he sees Drakkhen subtly glitching out (you know the part).
  • In Ninja Gaiden Sigma Part 4, Arin shoots an NPC he's supposed to be protecting with an arrow, assuming it wouldn't do any harm and wanting to see what would happen. When it does, in fact, result in an immediate Game Over, he responds with this.
  • Dan gives Celestia Ludenberg one of these in response to a Logic Bomb in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc:
    Dan!Celeste: I have never lost a bet.
    Dan!Makoto: In that case, I bet you you won't lose this next bet!
    Dan!Celeste: OH MY GAAAAWD!
• Big "WHAT?!": Jon is particularly good at these and there are a couple notable ones.
  • When Arin and Jon play Family Feud for the NES, they are asked to "name something a father would buy for their kids but would use themselves". Arin writes "C D Player". Model Car pops up as the correct answer.^ExplanationThis happens because the game searches for letters making up key words. In this case, it saw the word "car" in C D Player. Their reaction is amazing.
  • Their reaction to Jeopardy! being convinced that Maleficent is a character from Snow White.
  • The Knuckles wall-climbing glitch caught them completely by surprise, triggering a satisfying round of hysterics.
    Arin: [loudly stomps out of the room, then back in again] NO! I'm fucking done! I'm fucking done!
    Jon: I can't—! [giggling hysterically] I can't get off!
    Arin: WHAT IS THIS?! WHAT IS THIS?!!!!???
    Jon: I'm stuck!
    Arin: WHAT IS MY LIFE?!!
  • CPU Wario turning 8-bit, a feature neither Grump was prepared for.
    Arin: I want that. Can I have that?
    Jon: Dude!
    Arin: [Urkel snort] I love this game now, it's RETRO! IT'S RETRO!
  • From the same series, Jon starts to ramble about the nostalgia of playgrounds, but Arin shoots him down by exclaiming that he just went home with the nice old man. (Prompting a Double Take from Jon.)
  • Jon in the first few seconds of playing the Sonic 06 snowboard level. He lets out several small ones followed by two big ones.
  • Another is let out by Jon during their playthrough of Jeopardy when they're asked for the Portuguese name for Taiwan.
  • Jon lets out one when he accidentally resets Super Mario Land.
  • Arin "WHAT"s spectacularly when he times a jump attack poorly in Dark Souls III and dies for his trouble.
  • Danny's reaction to the famous Wham Shot in Doki Doki Literature Club! is a horrified "WHAT?!"
• Black Comedy: A cornerstone of their humor. The darker it gets, the deeper and deeper the jokes foray into the surreal.
  • In Mario Party 2, Arin describes Donkey Kong's profile image as the face you'd have if someone told you your kid was dead but you never wanted them in the first place.
  • In part 87 of Sonic 06, Jon somehow manages to make a Holocaust joke about shit ("ow-shits", Auschwitz).
  • In part 1 of Disney Princess, the video starts with an annotation warning the viewer about "dialogue about potentially sensitive sexual circumstances" (child rape). The joke in question is about the player character getting hypnotized and molested by a therapist.
  • Their Play with the Teletubbies video runs absolutely rampant with this, with Arin joking about two little girls feeding their dog gasoline so he'd go faster, and ending with Arin audibly hanging himself while Danny happily plays with clouds.
• Blatant Lies:
  • In the second Dyna Blade video, Arin claims never to have said "Wowie Zowie." This is false.
  • During Sonic 06:
    Jon: [watching Rouge struggling to separate herself from a wall] This is a very well put together game.
• Boke and Tsukkomi Routine: During one of the Super RubberRoss World Mario Maker 2 episodes, Arin lampshades that Game Grumps' humor and dynamic with each other often fits the manzai comedy style, usually with Arin as the Boke and Danny as the Tsukkomi (though they do sometimes switch places).
• Book Dumb:
  • Arin fails every Jeopardy question. He mentioned on several occasions that he did drop out of high school, so this is probably understandable.
    Arin: Apparently according to TV Tropes I am not book smart.
  • He cites that a person probably can't remember what they learned in their fourth grade social studies class as an adult and dislikes the argument, in which he raises a valid point: what a person remembers learning in school is based on a variety of mitigating factors (ex: willingness to learn, quality of education, etc).
    • He thought that a century was a thousand years, and not a hundred, as stated in their Aladdin playthrough.
    • A You Don't Know Jack question asks which option is a U.S. territory. Arin picks, of all things, Cuba.
      Jon: Barry, can you draw a chart out for us?
  • Jon had his blind spots and they may surprise you. He comically overreacts to the trivia questions in You Don't Know Jack (#2).
    Jon: I don't fuckin' know. I don't fuckin' know! I was a thespian and I don't fuckin' know! Fuck Shakespeare! I DON'T READ/CAN'T READ YER STUPID ELIZABETHAN BULLSHIT (unintelligible) WHY DONCHA TEACH THE KIDS JAPANESE OR SOMETHIN' USEFUL
• Book Ends:
  • Danny starts off and concludes the Super Mario Sunshine playthrough with a song.
    First episode: "Super Mario Sunshine / It's getting saucy / We're gonna rock it so hard / Ross is an aussie!"
    Final episode: "Super Mario Sunshine / It is now over / It was such a good time / Ross is a fucking aussie!"
  • One that extends beyond Game Grumps: Jon & Arin's last video together on the channel was the finale of their Super Star Wars playthrough on June 24, 2013. Flash forward exactly two and a half years later and Arin makes a surprise return in the Starcade season finale, in a recreation of Return of the Jedi 's climax.
• Boomerang Bigot:
  • "Fat people are everything that's wrong with the world! (I can say that because I'm fat.)"
  • In Episode 3 of The Thousand Year Door, they voice Professor Frankly as saying all Goombas look alike, then he unleashes a Big "NO!" when he realizes he's also a Goomba.
  • During the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, playthrough, upon seeing Grossberg's name, Danny (a Jewish man), groans, "Ugh, Jews."
• Boss Subtitles: In Episode 14 of Pokemon FireRed, Barry puts one over a Geodude after Arin's Big "OMG!". And in Episode 23, over an Abra (three times, the third being a very bland one), and a Kakuna. And again in Episode 26, over the Oddish Currently Known as Fuck King. And yet again at the end of Episode 28, over a Magikarp.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • From their Monopoly playthrough.
    Arin: Walking a baby. Holding a baby. Feeding a baby. Punching a baby. Stepping on a baby. Drowning a baby. Killing a baby.
  • During the "Mark Zuckerberg" texts, "I don't like dying" is randomly sandwiched in between the rants about Jesse Eisenberg.
• Brain Bleach: Discussed in the fourth episode of Shadow the Hedgehog. Arin and Danny are discussing smegma when Danny realizes that Arin doesn't know what smegma actually is. Arin doesn't want to know at first and when Danny tells him the truth, he wishes he could "unlearn" it.
• Brick Joke:
  • In the first Goof Troop episode, Arin claims Jon wouldn't try to save him if he was kidnapped by pirates. In the last episode of Dyna Blade, Arin gets kidnapped by a TAC multiple times, with Jon preferring to just make a second partner for Arin to control.
  • In Goof Troop #4
    Jon, near the start: HEY! How do ya' like watching Game Grumps episodes for?? Jon systematically digging holes!
    Jon, near the end: Hey guys, I don't know about you, but I really wanna do some systematic digging!
  • In Mega Man 7 #7, the judgmental frog from Burst Man's stage returns.
  • At one point, they reference the slogan "Easy Breezy Beautiful Covergirl", and at another point Arin stops Jon from singing a copyrighted song, lest they get hit with a Cease and Desist order. Mega Man 7 Finale 1 ends with Jon quoting "Easy Breezy Beautiful Covergirl", followed by a red Cease And Desist sign appearing on the screen and ending the video.
  • At the end of You Don't Know Jack part 1,
    Jon: Arin wins one, but he doesn't win much, 'cause he's a piece of shit, and I fucking hate him, and next time on Game Grumps, bros and pals and bros and pals...
  • One of the Donkey Kong Country playthroughs starts off with a paused screen of Donkey and an enemy called Manky. Jon calls him a Rangotang. When they finish the game, they show the credits. Manky's name's crossed through.
  • In episode 8 of Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (Which is appropriately titled "Jon Ragequits"), Barry notes in the description "Eh, he'll be back". Episode 9 ("Jon Ragestarts") was uploaded the very next day, with the description "Told ya he'd be back".
  • During Mario Party 4 with Jon, Arin lands on a Bowser space, which causes Baby Bowser to float down to the player hanging from a floating turtle shell. Jon points out "Shell can't float, dude." Much later on in the Steam Rolled series of the same game, Arin again steps on a Bowser space, Baby Bowser again comes down, and Ross points out "I don't want to like, burst his bubble, but I don't think turtle shells float like that."
  • In the Super Mario Sunshine playthrough, Danny tells Arin how he accidentally bookmarked a foot fetish page about Ross's wife, Holly's feet. This is brought up much much later on Steam Train, where Danny tells Ross about this.
• Buffy Speak: Peppered here and there.
  • A good example is Elise's force field being called "the glowy".
  • In a Silver episode: "you can get over there if you great that", referring to a Gauge Up box.
  • A 2022 official compilation, "We Have a PHD in Speaking Good", highlights this from both Arin and Dan. Examples:
    • "God dammit, I'm such a stupid moron! God! Why did I even born?" - Arin
    • "We made so far...go...progress." - Dan
    • Arin refers to the two characters played by Michael Fassbender in the Alien series as "double robo milk".
    • While trying to tell Arin he needs to swing a little harder to reach a platform in a Pac-Man platformer, Dan says he needs "a little more mustard on [his] juice".
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Arin was the unluckier player of the two in Versus during the Jon-era. He even loses both matches in Naruto Shippuden, a game series he has familiarity with, to Jon.
    Jon: [does a celebratory slap clap snap] BOOM! AH! AH! JON WINS AGAIN YES HE DOES! ♪
    Arin: Yeah, okaaay, of course!
    Jon: Should I let you win?
    Arin: [petulantly] ...No—! ...Just GETTIN' OLD!!
  • Ross became the butt monkey for the entire channel for a while, especially from Danny, with the phrase "Goddammit Ross" becoming something of a catchphrase. The intro to Steam Rolled even ends with Danny saying it as Ross' cartoon counterpart starts crying. As mentioned elsewhere on this page, this was eventually retired for being too mean.
  • Vernon.^*At least on the Grumps' social media videos/photos. From getting "peed" on by Danny to getting drilled through the mouth to being held at gunpoint by Ninja fucking Brian.
    • #BlockVernon
• Call-Back:
  • Arin has made several call backs to Jon's series, and Jon has done likewise to the Awesome Series.
    • All of Arin's major works are mentioned (even Lemon & Bill).
  • In Pokémon Emerald #5, they bring up Shifty Fish again. Also in Pokémon Emerald, the Nincada STRGG is a reference to one of the Miis on the second-hand Wii.
  • In Game Grumps Vs. Jeopardy, the game confuses the Sleeping Beauty villain Maleficent with Snow White's evil queen. Later, when the two play Family Feud and Arin types in "C D Player" the game accepts the answer thinking he typed "model car". Jon calls it "some Snow White shit right there" and storms out of the room.
  • While playing Sonic '06, Jon says "The game's playing itself, Arin".
  • Arin's name for the "Skeleton-Snake-Dragon-Head From The Wall" is the same name he gave to that enemy's Super Castlevania IV counterpart in his Sequelitis video.
  • During Jon's epic fight with Dracula, Arin describes Jon's strategy as "Touch 'em real quick an' go!"
  • In Super Mario Bros 2, Arin mentions when he learned to "tongue up" in Yoshi's Island.
  • When playing Dennis the Menace (US), Danny mentions the game is almost as horrible as the Home Alone game (which was released the day before), and in Kendo Rage, which was released the day after, Danny mentions something was nearly "as scary as Mr. Wilson coming out of nowhere".
  • Speaking of Kendo Rage, they also bring up Sad Hoshi again when an enemy from the game reminds them of him.
  • In their Super Castlevania IV playthrough when the game asks for the name Arin asks Danny if it's gonna be Spiarmf again.
  • During A Tale of Two Sons, Danny brings up the fact since Dennis the Menace, he's had ample opportunities to shout 'GET OUTTA HERE!', but none to say 'Mycaruba'.
  • In part 30 of Super Mario Sunshine, Arin and Danny ponder if there is a god of the Mario universe, to which Danny quietly replies 'I don't want religion in MY game.' Cue Arin using the mock internet critic voice from Mickey Mousecapade; Danny once again loses his shit and asks him to stop.
    Danny: I can't go down that road again.
  • When Arin rolls up a pachinko machine in Katamari Damacy, Danny reminds him of the Super Mario Sunshine episode with the giant pachinko machine, saying it's one of his favorites to go back and watch.
    • And in Mario Party 10, Episode 3, Arin picks a Pachinko minigame for 1 vs. 3 and Dan reminds him "Yeah, you've never had trouble with Mario Pachinko before"
    • In the first episode of Super Mario 64, when Arin repeatedly fails to get the red coin on the slope in Bob-omb Battlefield, Dan asks him if they're already in "pachinko town".
  • In Part 1 of Super C, Danny asks Barry for a for a smiling hamburger to float from the right of the screen to left after the game crashes, just as he did with the B.O.B. one-off.
  • In the first episode of Family Feud, Arin puts "raisins" as an answer for one question. Danny then immediately shouts "RAISINS!" which is a reference to their playthrough of The Legend of Zelda.
    • And then again in the fast money round when asked for something that you put on oatmeal.
  • While playing the Wii Punch-Out!!, the grumps made a number of callbacks to the Mike Tyson game (Danny's first series); for example, Don Flamenco saying "SPAIN SPAIN SPAIN!"
  • In Part 5 of Castlevania II, Dan asks if the skeletons run out of bones to throw. Arin's answer:
    Arin: I made a joke about that.
  • When Arin beats Kouma and Kotake and they sprout halos, Dan mutters “I don’t want religion in my game,” referencing the well-known Mickey Mousecapade episode.
    • In the same episode, the Grumps bring back “small town girl” Laura from Super Mario Maker episode 68.
  • In Part 13 of their playthrough of Katamari Forever, Arin references a joke he and Jon made in part 20 of their Pokémon Emerald playthrough about a Beyoncé seance. These episodes aired a total of 1,387 days apart.
• Call-Forward: Common, unintentional usage due to the anachronic order of the videos.
  • In Part 6 of Sonic Mania, Arin remarks that it feels like the game was developed by a para; Danny immediately responds "a para nuts?", saying that he's learned Arin's sense of humor since the "Updog Tragedy of 2014".
  • At the start of the first Dyna Blade episode, Jon accidentally knocks over some games and discovers Goof Troop.
  • In Pokémon Emerald #9, Arin teases Jon about his use of the word "legitimately". In Mega Man 7 #14, Jon learns that he uses the words "legitimately" and "legit" so often that the fans have made a Drinking Game out of it.
  • Battletoads started off with the duo singing a very mangled version of "Prince Ali". About a week later, their first Aladdin video went up.
  • During Amazing Frog?, Arin's frog has a crown and mimics Bane's voice: "The crown is mine, Ribbit King." Danny takes it for just a joke. It turns out there is a game called Ribbit King, and Arin loves it.
• Cannot Tell a Joke: Inverted in episode 9 of Sonic '06. Arin tries to get Jon to answer a knock knock joke, but Jon thinks he's being set up for a rape joke. By the time Jon finally realizes he's supposed to say "Who's there?" Arin has already moved on.
• The Cast Show Off: Arin shows off the wide variety of voices he has and Jon is quite fond of breaking into song. Arin's not a bad singer either for that matter.
  • The first few Game Grumps Animated shorts were drawn by Arin himself.
  • Danny's favorite thing seems to be to break out in song, especially over credits. With this is mind, Starbomb could be considered a form of this (though it's technically not a true Game Grumps project).
• Captain Obvious:
  Arin: You have to be inside these villains to punch them, so what dictates when you get hit?
  Jon: Well when you go BARRINGGG! Oh hey, I guess I got hit.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • In the Ninjabread Man video, Dan initially outright refuses to believe that Arin's D Club is real due to how ridiculous it is. When he heeds Arin's advice to get affirmation from Suzy, and she actually does affirm (even providing a list of names), he is completely shocked.
  • In Sonic Boom, Danny keeps telling Arin that some things are Colour-Coded for Your Convenience; blue objects^*such as balls in the air to homing attack are for Sonic, yellow^*such as holes to put Buddy Bots in is for Tails, red^*such as the walls you can climb for Knuckles, and pink^*such as ledges to triple jump up to for Amy. Arin constantly ignores this, using perhaps too much logic, such as, "bounce pads are blue, but Sonic isn't the only one who can use them."
• Casual Kink: In Sonic '06 #60, Arin attests the best thing about Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin is at the very beginning:
  Arin: They're throwing Jessica Rabbit in the trunk of a car, she's all tied up, and I'm like, "Hmmmmm, I get behind this!
• Catchphrase:
  • "X Grumps!" (X being anything but "game".)
  • "You're an X." "...at least I'm just one."
  • Jon has a tendency to say 'KTLA 5' (The name of the Local News) either right before or right after he sneezes.
  • After casual conversation with Arin, Jon will often say "Game Grumps, everyone. Where we talk about [x]."
  • Arin likes to say "Shut your goddamn mouth" or some variant.
  • Arin likes to say "Holy Jesus" or some variant thereof, sometimes adding "... as if there was any other one" or "the one I don't believe in".
  • Arin likes to say "Gosh darn it!", see Gosh Darn It to Heck! below.
  • Jon's "Adjective-ass-Noun" (Leading to phrases such as "Dingle-ass-dangle")
    Jon: Wario! Fuckin' yellow-ass... purple-ass bitch!
    • And, increasingly, "X-ass-X."
      Jon: Look at this watery-ass-water!
    • Arin has said "Dang-ass" increasingly often.
  • "Real talk."
    • "Dude, can I just say-"
  • Jon yelling "NEXT TIME ON GAME GRUMPS!" at the end of the video without following with anything.
  • Jon's ECCH ECCH, much to the dismay of some fans.
  • Jon, when imitating someone, tends to say "I don't fucking know" often.
  • Jon (and sometimes Arin) tends to shout out "MODE 7" whenever it appears in a game they're playing.
  • Dan saying 'nailed it!' and and 'I/you did it.', often said sarcastically after a humiliating failure.
  • Arin has taken to saying "NICE. NICE. NICE. NICE."
  • Dan has recently taken a liking to the phrase "We're playing the Feud!", particularly for game show video games.
  • Arin's "How do you like THAT shit?"
  • "My dad works at Nintendo!"
  • Arin's "Look, man..."
  • "I'M the Video Game Boy! I'M the one who wins!" and its many variations.
• Catharsis Factor: Invoked. The Grumps experience this in Sonic 06 with the Rival boss fights. When playing as Sonic and Shadow, they have an incredibly difficult time and spend multiple episodes on it due to how overpowered Silver is. When playing as Silver, they get to BE the incredibly overpowered character and just beat up Sonic, driving Arin temporarily insane with glee.
  • Also, in part 104 of their Sonic '06 playthrough, they get to play as Sonic for a while after countless hours of playing as Silver. They are baffled at how fast Sonic runs compared to Silver. This subsequently causes Jon to break out in song, with Arin following suit.
• Celebrity Star: Grant Kirkhope certainly counts, together with Jon.
  • With Danny, they had Steve-O, Jacob Anderson (Grey Worm), Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Weird Al Yankovic, Rob Schneider and his wife, Dan Harmon, Ben Schwartz, and Thomas Middleditch.
• Characterization Marches On: When Game Grumps first started, Arin was more upbeat and happy about the games while Jon was a lot more grumpy for various reasons. Towards the end of the Jon era, the titles of Grump and Not-So-Grump are more apt, with Jon treating Arin's genuine enjoyment and glee at a game as a rare occurrence. This continues into the Danny era, though the rapport between him and Arin is less grating and more chilled than it was between Arin and Jon.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The main reason Arin ragequit Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.
  • They quit DKC2 for the same reason. People noted that they could've just used Funky's Flights to go out of the level and find another save point, but apparently, they were ignorant of this ability.
• Cheer Them Up with Laughter: When Arin struggles to get the Arpagos Egg, Dan decides to lighten the mood with lame jokes which annoy Arin.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • A literal example at the end of third episode of Table Flip. The gun is meant to settle ties. Whoever grabs it first and shoots wins.
  • Early on in Guild Grumps, Ross spent 700$ to get Spectral Tiger Mounts for the Grumps. While nobody cared early on, in Episode 5, Arin's use of the Spectral Tiger gained him the admiration of the other elite players.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Both of them, all the time.
  • Also, Danny's take on Dopey from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the Disney Princess playthrough.
• Cold Open:
  • Naughty Bear #2, which shows a quick clip of Arin finally figuring out the objective they spent all of last episode unable to do, which had infuriated the fanbase quite a bit.
  • Crayon Shin-Chan, showing a weird sequence that occurred before the Grumps did their introduction.
  • Mister Mosquito, with the very first video starting off with Jon and Arin's reaction to the game's bizarre start screen narration.
  • Many earlier episodes open with the Grumps thanking whoever sent them that day's game.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The different shows on the channel are color coded.
  • Game Grumps & Game Grumps VS: Orange
  • Steam Train & Steam Rolled: Blue
  • Grumpcade: Red
  • Table Flip & Guild Grumps: Purple
  • Additionally, the Grumps themselves are usually color-coded, especially in multiplayer games: Arin is usually red or pink, whereas Danny is usually Blue.
• Comically Missing the Point: When Arin discovers that he and Jon had Rule 34 drawn of them, his first reaction is to say 'Hey! We play on a CRT!'.
• Compensating for Something: In episode 2 of Katamari Damacy, Danny mentions Rolls Royce when discussing the two ways to sell in advertising (pricing insanely low, like the Katamari game did, or insanely high, like Rolls Royce did), and he and Arin shit on people that own a Rolls Royce (besides Danny), stating that the only thing they could be proving by owning such a car is that they have a small penis...unlike Danny, who has a big penis.
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch:
  • During Silver's Radical Train, Arin and Jon have a long conversation about Bioshock Infinite that lasts about two episodes, with Arin being critical of it despite having barely played it. Two weeks later, once Arin had actually finished it, he tweeted that he liked it.
  • As they play Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, Jon complains about the game, saying it has no point to be a Mario game since there's nothing Mario about it. Most of the game DOES feature Mario aesthetics, but Lakitu Valley stays simple so it isn't distracting when you try to learn how to play.
  • Arin again displays this in Part 33 of Sonic Boom. Arin complains about Superman for about three to five minutes by saying that he is boring because he is overpowered, despite the fact that Superman's villains are either as powerful, if not more so, than him or are tailored to Superman's weaknesses, and the fact that most stories focus on Superman's internal struggles as opposed to his external ones. He also says that no other hero can beat Superman despite the existence of characters like The Flash (who Arin specifically mentions can't beat Superman), Doctor Fate, Wonder Woman, and Shazam!.
• Conspiracy Theorist:
  • Parodied in Pokémon FireRed episode 45.
    Arin: Good, 'cause I don't want to support the fucking Pharmaceutical Association of America, they manufacture sicknesses with chemtrails!
• Content Warnings:
  • Episode 10 of Trauma Center: Second Opinion had an annotation on the video warning about the extensive discussion of suicide, due to the plot focusing on Derek treating a suicidal patient. The annotation is now gone, but the warning is still in the description.
  • One of their Disney Princess episodes added a content warning for disturbing content after their jokes about the underage player character being molested by her therapist received backlash.
  • The episode of Doki Doki Literature Club! that features the Wham Shot of Sayori's hanging has a warning at the start of the video about "disturbing stuff." This warning is also present in the "best of" compilations for the game.
• Continuity Nod: In Episode 1 of Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, Arin refers to Froakie as his "man, brah." Dan notes that he has worn a man-bra before.^note In the Ninja Sex Party theme song, while listing a bunch of things the pair do, Dan brings up "Trying on some bras (don't worry, they're man-bras)".
• Couch Gag: During the last week of October, when the "Ghoul Grumps" special intro is used, the intro for each episode has a different "satanic message".
  • When they started adding a Subscribe button and end slate to the episodes, they initially pointed it out and made jokes about it, but now it just appears without comment... and occasionally as a word other than "Subscribe." The Disney Princess episode that ended as they started the Little Mermaid level had a "Submarine" button.
  • For the first five episodes of the Super Mario Kart Grumpcade series, Markiplier's name is misspelled a different way in each intro. This started as an actual mistake, then they decided to roll with it.
  • Every Episode of the 10 Minute Power Hour begins with the hosts (usually Arin) clearing the table of a pen cup and two toy dinosaurs in a ridiculous fashion.
• Country Matters:
  • Jon accidentally lets "cunt" slip in the first episode. And he says it again and points out how it makes people mad in the Snowboard Kids 2 Game Grumps VS.
  • In episode 2 of Joe & Mac, Jon wonders why it makes people mad, as he views it as just another word for a certain body part.
  • In part 25 of Shadow of the Colossus, Arin instantly greets the viewers with "Hey, cunts!" They then make fun of how saying the word gives the situation much more gravity. And in a previous episode, Danny explains how one of his Israeli relatives would always call his girlfriend a cunt. To him, however, it was a word of affection.
  • In part one of Super Mario Bros, Danny comes to the shocking revelation that "Duck Hunt" rhymes with "Fuck Cunt."
  • In the first episode of Grumpcade, Barry comments on how the Smash Bros. Announcer puts an extra long pause between the words "Duck" and "Hunt", just to make sure.
  • In Part 1 of the Super Smash Bros. Ganondorf Challenge Grumpcade series, Oney claims that the "C" in the abbreviation "C. Falcon" stands for "the c-word". Ross and Barry then clarify that he can just say "cunt" on the show and proceed to repeat it several times.
  • Discussed in a Super Mario Maker Guest Grumps with Ross, who, as an Australian, always used "mad cunt" as a term of endearment, and was surprised to hear how bad the word was to Americans.
• Covers Always Lie: Jon complains about this in response to Drakkhen. The cover shows an angry, badass dragon, while the actual game is just... brown.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Invoked by Barry, upon getting a request to add some Harry Potter and Voldemort pictures to the Godzilla versus, shows pictures of Luke Skywalker and a baby dressed up as Darth Vader.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Danny picking Big Zam in every match in Gundam: Battle Assault 2 lets him dominate Arin whenever he's playing a non-boss character...until he manages to get behind him and completely destroy him while Danny tries to figure out how to back-attack.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Jon is utterly dominated in every You Don't Know Jack video, often by a wide margin, and usually because Arin racks up all the points in the Jack Attack segment.
  • He dominates Danny as well when they play the PS1 version, winning by a $18,000 margin (while Danny is in the negatives.)
  • In return, Jon dominates Arin in the Mario Party 2 rematch, getting 4 stars (while nobody else had one) and then winning every bonus star but the Minigame Star (which went to CPU Luigi instead.)
  • In Gundam: Battle Assault 2, Danny keeps picking the Big Zam, while Arin manages to beat him with the Neue Ziel (another large boss-level character), he's beaten down whenever he selects more orthodox mecha. ... Until he picks Big Zam as well, and totally annihilates Danny because he knew how to use its Super Move.
    Danny: I COULD DO THAT THE WHOLE TIME!?
  • Timbo, the AI player in the Wheel of Fortune episode, absolutely wrecks Danny and Arin at the same time.
  • Danny's first fight with Mr. Sandman in Punch-Out!!. He is only able to get in a few punches and is almost immediately TKO'd in the first round.
  • Barry and Brian win all three rounds of Push Me Pull You against Arin and Suzy, topped off with Brian describing each victory to them in detail after the game is over.
  • Ross and Barry's first round against Sans in their Undertale genocide playthrough. They shriek through the entire fight and get crushed in just a few seconds. They are left broken and whimpering as the episode ends.
    Barry: [sadly huming the game over music]
    Ross: [voice quivering] Next time on Steam Train, we're gonna see what that was all about... that was fast.
  • Arin completely destroys Dan during the first run of their Hollywood Squares playthrough, winning all four matches on his second turn without Dan being able to gain a single spot on the board. It doesn't help that the game continuously gives Arin all kinds of softball questions while sticking Dan with far more obscure ones.
    Dan: Mother...fucker! I have to identify perfumes, and what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in the privacy of his own home, and you get "Where's the most famous guy from New Jersey from?"
    Arin: (later) Next time on Game Grumps, we're gonna play more "Arin Wins: The Show"
  • In the Finale of Majora's Mask, Arin kills off Majora without taking any damage when using the Fierce Diety Mask. It was so unsatisfying, that he reloaded the save and fought Majora as regular Link. Later, he used the Fierce Diety Mask to fight Odolwa, the first boss fight. He killed him in less than 10 seconds.
• Crocodile Tears: In the "Following a BOB ROSS Tutorial!" Ten Minute Power Hour, Dan accidentally hits Arin in the head with a canvas. Arin begins crying, prompting Dan to comfort him, but Arin briefly smirks at the camera before going back to fake crying.
• Cuteness Proximity:
  • Jon will openly d'aww at anything in a game he finds adorable.
  • Same with Dan. Every time he sees a new Pokémon he likes in the Pokémon FireRed playthrough, he openly coos:
    Dan: Aaaaaw, it's adorable!
• Cut Himself Shaving: During Danny's Mr. Wilson rant in the Dennis the Menace episode.
  Danny: [as Mr. Wilson] Mrs. The Menace? Dennis came over to my house and fell down the stairs again! AGAIN! He's so clumsy!
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Arin forgot that Link to the Past requires you to use a net to put a fairy in a bottle because Ocarina of Time cut out the middle man and just let you use the bottle to catch fairies.
  • Jon keeps getting confused that he's playing as Dry Bones instead of Wario in Mario Party 8, since he played as Wario in the previous Mario Party playthroughs.
  • Jon regularly dies in the beginning of his Castlevania playthrough by trying to jump onto stairs instead of walking up them because he's used to later games where you can do that.
• Deadpan Snarker: Grant Kirkhope in the first Guest Grumps. And good lord, Ninja Brian in BurgerTime, playing the game with a degree of Serious Business usually reserved for emergency surgery.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: Arin's Game Grumps Animated shorts use this to represent the game. The fan animations followed suit.
• Demonic Possession: A video promoting The Merch has Jon get possessed by... something halfway through. It's surprisingly creepy until this exchange occurs:
  Demonic!Jon: THESE SHIRTS ARE GONNA CHANGE SOME LIVES, ARIN!
  Arin: Even demons know! Even demons know!
• Demonic Spiders: invoked When playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Arin has a lot of trouble battling the clam-like Shell Blades. A lot of trouble in fact, as they give him more trouble than either of the dungeon bosses, manage to kill him at one point, and trigger a hilariously epic temper tantrum on Arin's part when he starts screaming about "THOSE FUCKING CLAMS!!!" Danny even brings it up much later when they're playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess when they encounter that game's version of Shell Blades:
  Danny: Hey look! It's your Arch-Nemesis the clam!
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • In the intro skit to Domino Rally (introducing Kevin), Danny's only requests from Barry are to put in Wolfjob and Lupine Employment.
  • Arin uses the phrase "finish to completion" in the context of sexual intercourse, and Danny points out that it's redundant.
• Determinator: While Arin was up for quitting Sonic 06, Jon was legitimately determined to do a full playthrough, despite it being the most technically broken game the two of them had played.
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: After Arin discovers the cheat that lets Knuckles float upward indefinitely in Sonic Boom, he winds up using it in places where he doesn't know where he's supposed to end up where or the correct solution is painfully obvious and would have taken less time than using the cheat.
• Disco Dan: Well, Dan. Although not "Disco", he is extremely attached to 80's music and uses slang or terms from the age, like calling levels or stages "boards" instead. He's also terrible at modern games, but quite skilled at the games he grew up with from the 80's. Arin put it best here:
  Arin: Starring... Dan “hasn’t played a video game since 1985” Avidan.
• A Dog Named "Cat": During their playthrough of Pokémon FireRed, Arin attempts to catch a Dratini. When he fails to, he compensates by nicknaming a Goldeen "Dratini".
• Don't Ask, Just Run: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories #7.
  Danny: Aah! It might be time to turn around and run. Leave the cabin, take the path to the right and oh, okay, okay! Time to go! Time to go!
• Don't Explain the Joke: Averted. Several jokes are explained and the misconceptions are hilarious.
• Don't Try This at Home: During episode 19 of Wind Waker HD, Danny tells a story about how he threw away his antidepressants while studying abroad because he realized that he didn't need them anymore. He later follows up on this story and warns the viewers that it was a stupid thing to do and they shouldn't follow his example, since suddenly stopping the use of any medication without the approval of a doctor or psychiatrist could have disastrous consequences, even if you don't think you need them anymore.
  • The 10 Minute Power Hour episode "The Great Glittery Sock Puppet Palooza" contains a Drugs Are Bad disclaimer, due to Arin and Dan's puppets pressuring guest Matt Watson of SuperMega to smoke a pipe cleaner and snort glitter.
• Downer Ending:
  • This happens when the Grumps end a series abruptly because they can't beat the game in question. A good example is Batman, where Arin couldn't beat the Joker (who seemed like a SNKBoss) and he just sounds incredibly defeated as the episode ends on a quiet note.
  • On a meta level, the ending of Sonic 06, seeing as how it was, at the time, the Grumps' longest running series, they were determined to see it to the end, and they were so close to completing it. Then Jon left, forever leaving Sonic 06 unfinished.
  • Played for Laughs with Crazy Golf as the ending info cards state that Arin and Dan's friendship was ruined and retired from gaming completely due to how unfair the game was.
• The Ditz: Discussed when Jon and Arin talk about how a commenter accused Jon of taking too long to formulate his thoughts. While he might seem this way next to Arin (Book Dumb but otherwise intelligent), Jon isn't really stupid. Arin even says Jon's better at forming concise thoughts than he is.
• Double Take: Jon takes a second to realize he just scrolled past Optimus Prime in the character select for Dream Mix TV World Fighters.
  Jon: Fucking OPTIMUS FUCKING PRIME?!
• Driven to Suicide: Arin after playing Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, and again after Play with the Teletubbies.
• Drunk on Milk: Jon wonders why Japanese games do this, as in Majora's Mask.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • Jon's reaction to a rape joke Arin makes during Sonic '06. See Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking above.
  • Whenever Jon mentions children (ex: the cute little boy from Sonic '06, running into an eight year old fan at Disneyland), Arin always makes it awkward by referring to child molestation, usually by saying: "Do you want me to whip it out?" or "Did you touch him?"
  • In the first Pocky & Rocky episode:
    Jon: "Pocky & Rocky"? They should have just called it "Jap and Coon"!
    Arin: Oh cool! [trying to talk about the game] So is this-? Is this alright? Is...
    [both chuckle nervously]
    Arin: So anyway!
    Jon: MOVING ON!
  • In part 70 of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Danny and Arin make a couple jokes about having herpes at the end of the video. Arin brings this into Part 71, joking that Danny actually does have herpes (he doesn't). Danny calls him out, since even if he's obviously joking there's always a good chance someone will take him seriously. Arin relents but then begins to joke that he, himself, has herpes (he doesn't). Danny calls him out again, since with the number of viewers they have, it's very likely some of them are living with herpes. Arin agrees and apologizes to those fans, admitting having herpes sucks and isn't funny to actually have.
• Dull Surprise:
  • In the Mega Man (Classic) episodes, Arin reads all of Dr. Light's lines in an emotionless deadpan, as a result of Light's expression never changing, regardless of how dire the situation is. Mega Man and Bass get in on it later.
  • Danny pulls the dull surprise in an episode of Super Mario Bros 3, when Arin accuses him of smearing poop on the wall of the Grump room.
    Arin: You're fucking fired if you don't man up to the shit on the wall!
    Danny: This is unbelievable. This is an outrage.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Goes for the first year episodes with JonTron, as Jon is no longer on the show.
  • Barry used to be The Quiet One, until a random Steam Rolled episode.
• Easy Amnesia: Arin offers to blow Escape From The City out of Jon's head (as it's stuck there), but he somehow blows out his entire memory. He then tries to name Jon "Franklin".
• The Eeyore:
  • In Episode 17 of Banjo-Kazooie, they think that Mumbo Jumbo is a depressed Barbiturate abuser that only stays alive because Banjo visits him for the Transformations. They also think that Banjo and Kazooie want to get out ASAP because he's so depressing.
  • Sad Hoshi from episode 5 of Journey To Silius, who's depressed because he screwed up at work (or work screwed itself up and he was blamed for it). The only thing that makes him happy is underage pornography.
• Elderly Future Fantasy:
  • One Game Grumps Animated video animates a scene where Arin thinks "E-Y-E" spells "ewe" and Dan keeps teasing him about it. In the animation, Dan teases Arin and Arin keeps defending himself through the birth of Arin's first child, the Grumps growing up into old men, and even when they're both dead.
  • During their Pokémon FireRed playthrough, Dan and Arin think about what their show will be like in the future, where they're crotchety old men, their show is now available in liquid form, and Dan and Arin fight over how Arin talks to Suzy. Then a normally-aged Barry walks in and asks why they all talk like old men, because they're only three years into the future - Dan and Arin just got jaded really quickly.
• Elephant in the Living Room: Danny invokes this by name in the first part of the new The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past playthrough, where he mentions that Arin and Jon started playing the game but never finished it, and he was the one who suggested picking it back up because he loves the game.
• Empty Chair Memorial: In "Ode to Jon", Jon's seat is treated as such, with Arin crying and rubbing the seat and talking about how much he'll miss Jon while Suzy and Barry console him.
• Epic Fail:
  • In Sonic '06, right after the Egg Genesis fight, you're placed in front of a lake with a portal in the middle and a hint ring to remind you how you can use Elise's aura to reach it. The Grumps somehow avoid the hint ring, walk around the entire lake, avoid the hint ring again, go away from the lake, explore the then-irrelevant hub stage, and complain that the game design is unclear. When Arin looks up a walkthrough and realize what they did, he starts openly berating himself.
  • In Pokemon Emerald, Arin gets beaten by a paralyzed Taillow. Jon even lampshades how ridiculous it is. To be fair, Taillow's ability is Guts, which boosts its damage output by 50% if it's paralyzed (or burned, or poisoned, or put to sleep).
    Jon: How'd you get killed by a motherfucking paralyzed Taillow?! It's paralyzed and it's a fucking SPARROW!
  • And of course, the classic moment in Mega Man 7 when Arin jumps right over Rush and into a spike pit.
  • The first 3/4 of their Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball video is just the two trying to figure out how to play the game while scoring no points (and at the start of the second half, constantly getting Back Court penalties after failing to realize that their baskets switched places.)
  • The Jack Attack of their second You Don't Know Jack episode has Jon mashing buttons, eventually getting a score of -$513,082.
    Jon: If I can't be the best, I sure as Hell can be the WOOOOOOOOOOORST!
  • In one of the platforming levels of Super Mario Sunshine Arin gets a game over after dying three times in less than a minute. He never even makes it to the second platform.
  • In the Wii version of Punch-Out!!, Danny gets TKO'd in the first round by Mr. Sandman, with over a minute to spare.
  • Arin continually dies trying to beat the Aztec Wizrobe in episode 55 of their Wind Waker play-through due to several factors, including: A. trying to fight its endless summons instead the boss itself, B. mistaking the side quest firefly in their only bottle for an emergency fairy and C. forgetting to take the sword out first in order to use it.
  • In the first match of WWF Wrestle Mania Challenge, Danny starts off by accidentally jumping out of the ring and failing to figure out how to get back in, ending the match with absolutely no wrestling done.
  • Pokemon Fire Red: Not 30 seconds into Sch's glorious evolution as a Charizard, Arin accidentally replaces Flamethrower instead of Scratch. Cue multiple Big "NO!"s as he realises his mistake.
  • Arin, inspired by Ross's encouragement, intended to give the plant boss of Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril one more shot, but accidentally selected "End" instead of "Continue" at the Game Over screen. Cue Angrish.
  • Arin and Jon's video of Super Mario Land ends with what may be Jon's biggest fail of all time: after beating the third boss, he somehow accidentally resets the whole game.
  • While playing Dark Souls III, Arin ascends Archdragon's Peak, a twisty and mook-riddled boss arena, to jump from a precarious ledge and score what should be a critical hit, if correctly timed, on the super-powerful Ancient Wyvern. He does not time it well, falls to the ground, dies immediately, and is sent back to the beginning of the area to do the whole thing over. Observe for yourself.
  • During a playthrough of the PS2 version of Wheel of Fortune, Danny manages to hit Lose a Turn four turns in a row.
• Erotic Eating: Discussed at one point in their Sonic '06 playthrough. Arin notes that women never eat a banana suggestively, they just munch it.
• Establishing Series Moment: From their own mouths, that of the Danny-era Grumps was Mayor Luigi.
• Everyone Has Standards: Arin and Jon are audibly disturbed by the brutal murder animations in Naughty Bear.
  Jon: This is even violent for my standards!
• Evil Laugh: Arin goes full on Drunk on the Dark Side in Ultimate Ninja Storm: Generations when he transformed into the fox demon. He has one as well when he's fighting Sonic as Silver in the POV campaign in Sonic '06 seeing as Silver was That One Boss.
  Arin: IT'S NO USE, IT'S NO USE, AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHA!
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • Kirby Super Star Part 17: Jon and Arin Push X.
  • Super Mario Sunshine Part 33: Yoshi Stands on a Boat.
• Exact Words: When playing No Players Online, a horror game emulating the style of an early 90s fps, Arin tries to convince Dan that the game is actually real via this trope.
  Dan: So is this a brand new game, and that's the story behind it or is it true? Like, is this an old 90s game?
  Arin: Yeah. Well, I mean they added, like, a filter over it to make it feel authentic.
• Excited Episode Title!: Part 65 of Sonic '06, which is titled "Follow That Mephiles!"
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: At the very beginning of Jon and Arin's Sonic '06 playthrough, the two of them pretend ignorance about what they're about to put themselves through... but they "figure it out" before too long.
  Arin: What is this blue menu? With a red stripe?
  Jon: I think we've done it!
  Arin: It kinda looks like an upside-down Sonic the Hedgehog—
  Arin and Jon together: OH NOOOO!
• Extremely Short Intro Sequence: The intro is about 6 seconds long, but some of the other series have slightly longer intros.
• Eye Scream: Threatened, but never executed.
  Arin: [In response to not catching Sableye, despite Jon's protests] It's a Sableye. [In response to Soon?'s attempted evolution] Oh great.
  Jon: Dude, I'm gonna disable your eye.
• Failed a Spot Check: Oh, lord.
  • Both Arin and Jon start to get fed up with the lack of Copy Ability in Milky Way Wishes, openly bashing the developers for coming up with something so stupid... and then they accidentally discover that they can access all other abilities whenever they want.
  • Frequent in their playthrough of Goof Troop.
  • In Sonic 06, when they play as Silver for the first time, they walk right past the hint icon that tells them how to use his powers. Three times. While complaining that the game isn't telling them how to use it.
  • They both spend four videos playing Typing of the Dead not knowing you can cancel out of attacking a target by pressing Esc (which has gotten them hit or killed many, many, many times.) When they finally leave the title screen alone long enough that it starts playing the tutorial and explaining how to do just that, they're too busy paying attention to Jon's phone to notice.
  • In their playthrough of Pokemon FireRed, Danny at one point asks if they're fighting the last of their rival's Pokemon, a full six minutes after Arin had defeated him. In a later episode Danny admits that Barry had shown him everything that had happened in that time, to his embarrassment.
  • Sonic Boom:
    • Arin has had a very bad tendency to completely ignore obvious paths in favor of jump glitching his way through. In one particular instance they walk past a open tunnel through a huge wall protecting a town he needs to go through. With a map that points him to go through said town. While complaining that the direction of the game is unclear.
    • Toward the end of Part 13, Sonic and Tails approach a force field blocking their path. Right beside the force field, there's a little yellow tunnel on the ground. Tails says flat-out that you need to use a Buddy Bot and put it through to move on, but Arin and Danny are too busy bashing the game and being shocked at Arin winning an $1,100 eBay auction for one of the New Mexico copies of 'E.T.' for Atari 2600 to pay attention. As a result, the entirety of Part 14 is spent with Arin and Danny lost in this room, yelling at the game for not giving them direction. They only get through because Arin activates a Buddy Bot by complete accident.
  • Episode 4 of Sonic Adventure DX is essentially just them trying to figure out how to progress through the game. They get told in Station Square that they need to find a way into the sewer, and they pass an open manhole cover multiple times simply because they think they need to go to a hotel to find a jumping power-up that Arin mentioned (which they also can't find and can't get yet besides).
  • Speaking of Sonic Adventure DX, one of the most iconic Game Grumps episodes of all time was a result of this. The very first Tikal orb in Big's story explains that, in order to set the lure once you get a nibble, you need to tap Down on the analog stick and 'A' simultaneously. If Arin had just listened to this hint orb, he wouldn't have had such a frustrating time in Twinkle Park or, more memorably, Emerald Coast.
  • Ross, Barry, and Suzy are all ready to take on the second filing segment in Bomb Corp, only to blow up right at the very start. None of them noticed the instructions on their phones telling them to sort the files in reverse alphabetical order.
• Fake Difficulty:
  • Arin complains about Freeze Man being unfairly difficult due to his refusal to telegraph attacks.
  • Jon complains about Hop Or Pop being unfair against the Spike Ball, as the Bounce Balls have flagrantly superior maneuverability.
• Fan Community Nickname:
  • invokedJon appeals to the "Grumplings" in Episode 2 of Super Mario Land 2.
  • Arin attempts to come up with one in Sonic 06 #43. He comes up with Lovelies, Jon comes up with Cumfaggots. Lovelies became the generally accepted one (and is mentioned multiple times by Danny) while Cumfaggot has occasionally been used as an insult for angry or irate fans.
• Fanservice / Fan Disservice:
  • This picture◊ of Arin, Ross, Danny, and Barry in their underwear seductively washing a car. What trope this falls under is left for the viewer to decide.
  • Likewise, this picture◊ of the four male Grumps naked... sorta.
• Fantastic Racism: The Spinakers are a joke about this. They're a particular race with a number of strange and sometimes contradictory characteristics related only by the fact that they all annoy Arin and Danny.
• Fast-Forward Gag:
  • Employed in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) episodes (along with an appropriately sped up version of City Escape) to quickly move through spots they've already been in or have consistently blundered through.
  • Happened in the Donkey Kong Country playthrough, sped up along with the DK Rap.
  • Employed liberally in Wild Guns, especially in the finale and at least once to music from Bastion.
  • Applied in Crayon Shin-chan where they supposedly learn Japanese.
    • Basically, they use it whenever they get stuck, or have to repeat a scene or level often, and it's usually accompanied by a tune.
  • Fast forwards during the Danny era are usually accompanied by an improvised singalong, courtesy of Danny.
• Fat and Skinny:
  • Jon is the fat to Arin's skinny. Lampshaded in their Blues Brothers and Portal 2 playthroughs.
    Arin: So do you want to be the tall skinny one, or the short fat one?
    Jon: ...I think this has been decided for me.
  • Referenced in the first Portal 2 co-op playthrough: Jon plays as Atlas, Arin plays as P-Body.
  • Arin is now the fat (or at least the husky) to Danny's beanpole-skinny.
• Felony Misdemeanor: Their only complaint to having Rule34 drawn of them? It portrayed them using a flat-screen TV when they use a CRT. ^note Arin explained that as an animator, you generally want to use the most well-known image when it comes to technology in a cartoon, meaning using bunny-eared boxy TV's and rotary telephones. Even if these aren't the norm anymore, they are more identifiable than anything else.
• Filling the Silence: The Grumps feel a need to be "on" all the time, considering it weird whenever they're quiet for a notable period of time. With this in mind, Jon actually said it was pretty hard to be a "good" Let's Player, as it requires you to actually be funny and be on all the time.
• Le Film Artistique: Invoked in Play With The Teletubbies. Arin and Danny sarcastically say the game is so artistic that it should be "black and white and in French," followed by a brief segment of Arin and Danny saying random phrases in French over gameplay footage with a grainy black and white filter.
• Flanderization:
  • Jon exaggerated his jerkassery, constantly invoking it.
  • Jon's "X-ass-Y" seems to be intentionally flanderized, as Arin has picked up on saying it due to Jon suddenly using it so frequently.
• Floating Advice Reminder: During the Domino Rally episode that formally introduces Kevin on-camera, poor Barry is besieged by editing requests from Arin and Danny and starts to have a mental breakdown right in front of them:
  Floating Arin Head: Make sure to include THAT part!
  Floating Danny Head: Wolfjob!
  Arin: Zoom in on it!
  Danny: Wolfjob!
  Arin: Doodle-ee-do!... Doodle-ee-do!
  Arin: WOLFJOB!
• Foil: Arin has a hot-blooded and stubborn web persona; Danny's level-headedness and conspicuous relaxation balance things out nicely.
• Forced Meme:
  • Jon hopes "Seven Asses" becomes one, so he repeats it through most of the video. It's still humorous.
  • During Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Danny laments that he's had plenty of chances to use "GET OUTTA HERE!", but none to say Mycaruba."
• Foreshadowing:
  • In the Rugrats in Paris playthrough, Jon asks if they can "stop this, before one of [them] dies." It ends with Arin (faking) attempting suicide.
  • Arin and Danny dropped some stealthy Starbomb references before the band was officially announced. For example, in part 10 of Super Mario Bros 3., when Arin gets the tanooki suit, Danny busts out the line 'MUST I BE A RACCOON TO GET INSIDE YOUR TANOOKI?' from Luigi's Ballard, and even overtly states that it's forshadowing something.
  • At the beginning of Episode 8 of Doki Doki Literature Club!, the audio in the intro is suddenly muted. This may seem to foreshadow what will happen in the game itself.
    • Speaking of foreshadowing, Dan does a lot of it while playing the game. And the best part is it's all unintentional.
• Forgot I Could Fly:
  • Literally, at the start of the final battle in Super Mario Sunshine.
    Arin: I have to jump really really high, so I guess I have to double jump on these-
    Dan: Try the rocket nozzle?
    Arin: Oh, right, I forgot I had this ability! ^note Especially striking (and typical of him) since he made extensive use of the rocket nozzle to get to the final battle in the first place.
  • "Sonic Boom" has some of these:
    • In Sonic Boom episode 21, Arin couldn't figure out how to get past a giant wall until he remembered he could just cheat his way over with Knuckles.
    • Arin demonstrates early on that Amy is capable of triple jumping. Later when Danny attempts to point out the color coded objects that are designated to particular characters, Arin rather heatedly attempts to debunk this by showing that Amy's jump does not reach, but he only double jumps (which every character is capable of). Anyone who remembers her triple jump will quickly recognize that she is literally the only character capable of reaching it without resorting to Knuckle's jump glitch.
• Formerly Fat: The beginning of the show had them talk about drinking soda and eating candy bars a lot. Over the course of the Jon era, they talked about health food (though they eat out a lot), and both mentioned going to the gym often. Arin carries this over to the Danny era, sort of; he eats healthier, but often talks about being the heaviest he's ever been^*this might be due to increased muscle mass.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Arin and Jon devote a special video to showing off the VERY strange Miis they found on a used Wii that Arin bought.
  • The end of their Joe and Mac playthrough: KITTY CATS DANCING! Cue rave-like video of Arin's cats while Jon and Arin start singing Space Jam songs. Oh, and Jon masturbating.
  • The end of Part 3 of Kirby's Air Ride, where they play a game of slaps to break the tie. They agree that they both win so they don't have to hurt each other anymore.
  • Halfway through playing B.O.B., the game crashes. The rest of the episode is "The Grumpcast" - with Arin and Danny talking about random things with the odd image thrown in by Barry.
  • All of their April Fools episodes. 2014 was all just cat videos, 2015 was a single one off pseudo-podcast with Ross and Arin about how animation has no future on YouTube, and 2016 gave us facecam-only videos.
  • At the start of 2018, a string of videos was released that only featured Arin, as Dan was sick with the flu at the time. Aside from him playing games individually (including PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy), this period also saw the release of some more personal videos that saw a closer and more intimate side of Arin, including a series of Q&A episodes as well as videos of Arin revisiting his old animations and scrapped games.
  • The Ten Minute Power Hour consists of almost nothing but this with episodes that hew closely to the premise to ones that have a bizarre subplot (Danny being held hostage by Arin) to ones that are completely derailed by a totally unrelated event (getting sued by Jacksepticeye).
• Four Lines, All Waiting: Well, eight lines would be more accurate. They play through multiple games at once, but only upload two episodes per day at most (the channel uploads at least three now, one often being SteamTrain's or Grumpcade's stuff), and typically focus on a select pool of games per week, cycling through their options as they go. This leads to some games being neglected for a while without being officially abandoned, only to make a resurgence later on.
  • In recent months, Game Grumps have tended to stick with a series until it's done, while Steam Train has switched frequently.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Within the current Grumps, we have Danny (sanguine), Arin (choleric), Barry (melancholic), and Ross/Suzy (two wildly different phlegmatics).
• Free State Amsterdam: When Arin asks "Isn't there a place outside of Vegas where prostitution is legal?", Danny IMMEDIATELY goes for this.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • In Katamari episode 16, Danny asks Barry to add Arin's lactose intolerant story to the "Check list of All time Game Grumps stories" ("Thought was lactose intolerant - wasn't"). After he's done checking it, and the next one ("Hey Dan, did you see that an airplane landed at the airport today, I did.") the list goes up and includes several other mundane events, too quick to see at first glance.
    "That one time I was wearing mismatched socks and no one noticed."
    "I was singing in the shower and my neighbour was giving me this weird look."
    "Didn't know if it was Kevin Bacon in the movie. It was."
    "Went to Starbucks. Realized I didn't want any coffee. Left."
    "Made a Catcher in the Rye reference. No one got it. Later realized it was a Pride and Prejudice reference. Still no one got it."
  • During their playthrough of the Fast level in Super Mario Maker, you can pause the video right as they hit the invisible block and find that the Kamek they had problems with came from that block. It's notable because even they don't get why the Kamek appears.
  • One of the Sonic Boom videos opens with Barry showing Arin his editing work, and how Sonic sometimes appears twice in one frame, speed lines are ahead of the characters, and tons of weird stuff that Arin and Danny didn't notice whilst playing because it all happens in the blink of an eye, showcasing how Sonic Boom was an invokedObvious Beta.
• Freudian Slip:
  • "WELCOME BACK TO SONIC O'DICKS!" (#56)
  • In Mega Man 7: Part 8
    Jon: I don't think "asobu" is the verb for, like, "play video games". That's, like, "to play with a kid"... wait, like "play as a kid".
  • Justified in that depending on the sentence structure, it's very easy to accidentally use the word "asobu" to mean that kind of "play with a kid".
  • Danny mentions one he had where instead of saying "This will blow your mind!" he accidentally says "This will blow your mom!"
  • In "Sonic Unleashed Part 3", Danny reads aloud an erotic Super Smash Bros. Brawl fanfic with this line: "For you Zelda, I'd out-eat Kirby!" he accidentally said "I'd eat out Kirby!" before awkwardly correcting himself.
• Friendship-Straining Competition: Played for Laughs on may occasions when the Grumps are playing against each other. When the competition starts to heat up, someone tends to suggest that the friendship is over or that the game is a friendship-ender. One specific example is in the fifth episode of Puyo Puyo Tetris, where Arin suggests they "won't be the same kind of friends" once the game is over.
• Furniture Assembly Gag: One of the "Ten Minute Power Hour" episodes involved Danny and Arin putting together the hardest-to-make IKEA product, known as "The Divorcemaker". At one point, Arin started losing his mind and starts walking all over the wooden planks, slamming things, and loudly insisting he's not crazy, all because one of the shelves wouldn't fit properly.

G-L

• Gag Censor:
  • Elephants tend to censor the word that would violate the N-Word Privileges.
  • A stampede of elephants censored Arin's rape joke in the Joe and Mac playthrough.
  • Because of the game's adult scenes, Barry initially covers any suggestive material in Leisure Suit Larry with black dots before replacing them with pictures of the Grump's faces.
  • Ben censors out a dildo in the 2020 playthrough of House Party (2017) with an image of Jesus Christ, and censors out a sex scene by blocking the whole screen with more religious imagery.
• Gainax Ending: The ending of the Donkey Kong Country 2 playthrough after Jon's big and hammy Rage Quit.
  Jon: Hey, wanna go eat... soup?
  Arin: Oh, shit!
• The Gambler: Arin has shades of this. There are quite a few videos of him getting distracted by lotteries and gambling mini games. At one point, he sinks nearly 30,000 dollars into roulette to win about 80,000 back.
  Dan: You have lost 20000 dollars!
  Arin: No no no no no no no no no...yes! But no. See, I haven't lost it because I haven't stopped playing yet.
  Dan: Oh, yeah, that's a healthy way to look at it.
• Gasshole:
  • Danny and Ross burp frequently during recordings and Jon farts. Arin, however, burps and farts more often than the others and sometimes they're so potent that it affects his gameplay. One episode had Arin moan in agony after letting out a deep burp which left a really bad taste in his mouth, a Game Grumps Versus episode had him let out a supposedly nasty "garbage fart" which he proceeded to waft towards Danny to try and screw up his playing. His friends often remark on how gassy and "poopy" he is.
  • In their Paper Mario And The Thousand Year Door playthrough, they dub one Toad "Stinky Steve" and have him constantly fart on other Toads.
• Gay Bar Reveal:
  • In episode 27 of the Bloodborne playthrough, Dan recalls a time he was visiting Amsterdam and met up with his sister at a bar with an interesting sign. When his sister showed up, she told him, "This is, like, the gayest of the gay bars." Dan (who was somewhat stoned) replied that he felt "unusually attractive," but he had just assumed all the dudes smiling at him were just friendly.
  • Arin claimed in the Bloodborne episode that he'd never accidentally walked into any bar, much less a gay bar, but in a later episode of the Super Mario Maker 2 playthrough, he recalls accidentally walking into a gay bar late at night with his manager Brent while they were on tour. Arin really liked the drinks and music there, and wonders if he should attend gay bars more often.
• Gay Bravado: The whole point of Arin's D Club. He and his friends were so secure with their masculinity that they would have no problems showing each other their dicks.
• Gender-Blender Name:
  • When it comes to naming Pokemon they typically don't take the Pokemon's gender into account, such as naming a female Lotad after George Lopez. They also intended to name a female Poochyena "Bakuhaku♂♂", but Arin got the gender symbols mixed up.
  • The female love interest of Chulip is named R. L. Stine.
  • Fuck King was the name of a female Oddish that the Grumps caught in Pokemon Fire Red.
• Gender Flip:
  • Discussed in their Bayonetta playthrough. Jon and Arin talk about what a The Legend of Zelda game would be like if Link were a girl saving Zelda the prince rather than princess, or if Zelda and Link were simply to switch places for a change, with Link getting kidnapped and Zelda saving the day. Jon and Arin also express interest in playing a game in which a girl goes on a journey to rescue a prince or a male Living MacGuffin.
  • The "Game Gyaru" merch reimagines Arin and Dan as Arina and Daniella, a Dirty Pair parody.
• Genius Ditz: As opposed to Arin, who is more Book Dumb, Jon actually has a surprisingly broad education, and is well-versed in Disney lore and musical theatre amongst other things. However, virtually any time he tries to talk about something other than those particular topics he gets bogged down in {{malapropÀer}}isms and misconceptions.
• Genre Shift: While the show is always comedic to some extent, the type of humor often changes depending on what game they're playing, and some games are even the subject of serious discussions between the two about game design.
• George Jetson Job Security: Barry got at least one "Barry, do X or you're fired!" or "Barry, you're fired" per mention when he was the channel editor.
• The Ghost: Subverted. They will often make references to people in their lives (such as Barry or Suzy) and will attempt to invoke this, but they've managed to appear in the show at least once, with Arin's cats and Jon's mom each getting a good chunk of screentime. Barry and Suzy both appear in-person in a T-shirt ad without dialogue, but they each manage to get a very brief vocal appearance at least once. Now that Barry and Suzy are regulars on Steam Rolled, they have shed this (although their appearances in actual Game Grumps episodes are still minimal).
• Gilligan Cut: After dying during the final boss fight in Goof Troop:
  Jon: Nooooo, I don't wanna! I'm not doing his again!
  • And so here is a montage of them doing it again
• Glad I Thought of It: In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Episode 8, upon arriving in Petal Meadows, Arin repeats the "put the petal to the meadow" pun that Dan made last episode, then claims that he thought of it when Dan sarcastically comments on it.
• Global Ignorance: Jon firmly believes that everything south of the United States is South America and that Canada is "North America Junior".
  Jon: Mexico is practically South America!
• Goddamned Bats: invoked Arin finds Boos to be annoying in Super Mario Sunshine until he realizes that he could jump on them.
• Godwin's Law:
  • At one point in their first Mario Party 4 episode, Arin calls Luigi Hitler, because he rolled a nein (Read: nine).
  • Jon ends their 15th episode of Kirby Super Star by screaming intelligible gibberish and "HEIL HITLER!". He also claimed Hitler had a "sweet stache".
  • Arin SEEMS to be doing this when he sees the dog in Snowboard Kids 2, who resembles an eager Nazi salute, but Jon derails it with something completely different.
  • In Nickelodeon GUTS, Jon named his character Himmler.
• Golden Snitch: In the first You Don't Know Jack video, they complain that the Jack Attack sequence doles out so many points that it can easily render the rest of the game pointless (and indeed, it's often where Jon ends up losing the game.)
• Go Mad from the Revelation:
  • Apparently Jon's declaration of love for Arin during the Castlevania finale was so mind shattering that their recording software actually malfunctioned.
  • In their Sonic Boom playthrough, in episode 21, they end up stuck on an island for a good half an hour. Eventually Arin just decides to exploit Knuckles' infinite jump and ends up completely glitching up the game. They end up at what looks like an unfinished level; after going back and forth through it a few times they start to leave, then Arin looks around to see that the previously empty and featureless landscape has now become a fully fleshed-out village. He is quite stunned.^note This is likely due to them bypassing the Loading Corridor by clipping into it with the "Knuckles infinite jump" glitch, as it seems that the game only properly loads the areas when they walk through the entire corridor (most games with loading corridors have the area just spawn into place if it's bypassed, so why the game was programmed this way is a mystery).
• Good Behavior Points: Discussed in their videos and reportedly practiced at their office. Brett hands out home-made "Good Boy Coins" to the crew, presumably as an award for being, well... a "Good Boy" (or girl). Dan pointed out that he's the only person to have never received one, despite knowing Brett for years at that point. In one "Ten Minute Power Hour" episode, the Grumps make their own "Good Boy Coins" out of fondant so they can "flood the market" and also finally give Dan a coin.
• A Good Name for a Rock Band:
  • In the 22nd episode of Sonic Boom, Danny refers to Chili-dogs as "Roasted Landwieners" and then later says "My band has a new name!"
  • And in part 37 of Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door, they make a joke about "Lord Crump and the Shadow Sirens" sounding like a band.
  • In their Bayala playthrough, they comment about making a Faberge burrito out of some shiny beans that he gets, and Dan says "Faberge Burrito! What an amazing band name!"
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!:
  • "Gosh darn it!"
  • The Goshdangodon.
• G-Rated Sex: While the MC and Yuri reading together was already quite intimate in the original Doki Doki Literature Club!, Danny and Arin make it explicitly erotic by reading their lines as if they're exerting a lot of energy, culminating in FriendArin sounding like he's orgasming when he tells Yuri the main character reminds him of her.
• Gratuitous Japanese:
  • Jon breaks out into Chiyo's cooking song at one point during their Kirby series.
  • Then in a Call-Back to that later, they name a Poochyena "Bakuhaku♀♀"—
  • In another Call-Back, Arin sings it in Goof Troop Episode 10.
  • They flaunt their limited knowledge of Japanese characters whenever they can while playing Shenmue.
  • While playing Strider 2, Jon reveals that he is able to read both Hiragana and Katakana. Supposedly Arin can, too.
  • While playing Drakkhen, Jon attempts to read the Japanese text on the menu screen, prompting Arin to lampshade this trope.
    Arin: All the people who don't know Japanese are like "ALRIGHT!" and all the people who know Japanese are like "ALRIGHT!"
  • Arin does the intro to one of the 10 Minute Power Hour episodes in Japanese.
• Halfway Plot Switch: In the Sonic '06 episode "Like a Bicycle", Jon and Arin come up with a hypothetical movie inspired by The Family, where this happens several times.
  • Jon: I sold out the mob! Now I gotta live in suburban Ohio... (record scratch) Oh my God, ALIENS?!
• Hanging Around: Arin hangs himself at the end of Play With the Teletubbies because the game just drove him that crazy. We don't see it onscreen, but we hear him struggle and choke and eventually go silent.
• #HashtagForLaughs: "I Burgie Burgie" shorts feature several parodic Engineered Hashtags such as #RelishShits, #BurgerFeels, or #beefy (the latter of which is actually used by a gay porn website, which makes it even funnier).
• Head Bob: While playing Kirby Super Star, Jon and Arin have employed the technique of repeatedly ducking to make Kirby and his partner look like they're talking.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]:
  • Groomp, Fuck, I, OOOOOO, Yump»♢, and R3a7t47.
  • The Bigdix family.
  • Guff.
  • Himmler vs. Buttox.
  • ÆDÒßë.
  • Buttbuttyawn, buttsgalore, and weeweesee / UmJamLam and forevercluck
  • Egofaptor (which is also Arin's Tumblr domain name)
  • Q☆T
  • DABUTT, VAGOO, and BAPS.
  • Let the quest of SPIARMF begin!
    • Buttlet, Scrumf, Smeef and Loafus Cramwell, also from Dan-era Zelda.
  • For Worms: Armegeddon, the gang name their Worms on themes. (Ross' are all Australian things, Danny's are Nabble, Nobble, Nubble, Noble, Nerble, and Fucktard 5000)
  • Mill F. and Tumpynutsメ for Go Vacation.
  • Nixon and Dixon
  • Amusingly, when Arin doesn't do this while playing Chrono Trigger, Danny points it out and remarks that he expected Arin to call Crono "FARTS" or something like that. Arin explains that he loves CT and even as a child he refused to rename the characters "because those are their names". While he keeps most of the cast with their canon names, he does end up changing Lucca to "FARTS".
• Heroic Second Wind:
  • Danny pulls one off in the fight against Mr. Sandman in Punch-Out!! Wii, right before knocking him out and winning the title.
  • Before that, Danny took out Great Tiger with the same technique without even knowing how to do it.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Barry, in the early videos, but his popularity got him a regular spot on Steam Rolled. He eventually got his own live-action tabletop games show with Suzy on Polaris.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Arin is surprisingly both a Supreme Chef (according to Jon) and a decent beatboxer.
  • Jon sings a lot, but you wouldn't know it tied into his training in musical theatre.
• High-Five Left Hanging: In the Ten Minute Power Hour episode "Can you gold leaf while blindfolded?", Danny and Arin have to command a blindfolded Ike as he presents their homemade gold-record to Ben. At the end, Ben goes for a high-five. Danny orders Ike to follow through...only for Arin to immediately tell him not to high-five Ben. The immediate shift leaves Ben disappointed as the episode ends.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Jon insists when playing the first Donkey Kong Country that he isn't going to go after secrets for a few reasons. The playthrough of DKC2 ends with a shitload of tension because Jon neglected to hunt for lives, forcing them to scrape for 1-Ups at the last minute.
• Hollywood Psychology: Jon thoroughly criticizes the "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over" cliché during the Donkey Kong Country playthrough, jokingly stating that "the definition of insanity is when you're flinging your shit at the wall," and that pegging the definition of insanity as belonging to any one specific behavior "is as anecdotal as it gets."
• Hope Spot: During the playthrough of Battle Kid, Arin is willing to give up after failing to beat the plant monster. Ross pops in and cheers Arin up. With Ross believing in him, Arin decides to try one more time. He accidentally hits 'end' and is sent back to the title screen.
• Hourglass Plot: In Kirby Part 18, Arin takes on Jon's "oh it's a [GIBBERISH NAME]" shtick from Pokemon. Later, Jon calls Arin a clod.
• Hugh Mann:
  • The Grumps' depiction of Monika is that of a robot trying - very poorly - to pass itself off as human. Surprisingly, it's not too far off the mark.
  Monika: Don't be afraid to bring things up, okay? I will not blast you with my laser eyes... that I don't have.
  • The Zognoids are two loud aliens awkwardly trying to pretend to be humans, despite knowing very little about them and having to remind each other not to reference weird elements of Zognoid culture.
  "I HAVE A SELECTION OF MANY BOOTS FOR MY HUMAN TENTACLE FEET!"
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • A Piece of Bass has a number of them.
  • Near the end of Kirby's Epic Yarn Part 24, Arin launches into one for the rest of the video, then into the next video ^note Between episodes, Arin found a website collecting a list of terrible jokes. Danny groans over this several times, likening it to 'Crazy Uncle' humor.
    Danny: These barely even register as jokes.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Arin makes a big deal over how he finds subtitled audio to be annoying (he considers it sensory overload), so when Resident Evil doesn't have any subtitles, Arin points out that now they can just listen to what's being said. Jon points out that nothing can be heard due to the audio being so quiet when they record. Viewers also pointed out that their setup made Arin unable to actually register the plot.
  • In the Super Mario Bros 3. Finale, Arin and Danny slag off video walkthroughs where the players comment on their own life, or describe things in too much detail, saying those videos should just be the gameplay. It's capped off by this sentence:
    Arin: So, Danny, how's your day been!?
• I Am Not Leonard Nimoy: Invoked by Arin in the 36th Super Mario Sunshine episode, saying that every movie character Harrison Ford plays is Harrison Ford.
• In a World…: At the start of their Doom (2016) series, Arin and Danny attempt to do this to give a narrative about the world being overrun by cyborgs in 2003. They fail miserably.
• Inconsistent Episode Lengths: For years, episodes were traditionally around ten minutes long, maybe fifteen at the longest. However, a few episodes (usually one-offs) went longer than that, such as their playthrough of Endless Ocean and the first episode of its sequel, both of which lasted about an hour (though the latter became a series comprised of standard short episodes). Starting around 2019, episodes, even ongoing series episodes, became much longer, traditionally a half hour but sometimes closer to 45 minutes.
• Incompetence, Inc.: "Fast Crab", an imaginary company invented during their Link Between Worlds playthrough.
  Arin: "I'm the CEO of Fast Crab International. I'm 22. I just graduated out of business school and well, I'm losing money." Fast Crab: We're losing money.
• Insult Backfire: In the second Super Mario Party episode with SuperMega, Dan calls them "SuperMeGay" (a Call-Back to a joke the Grumps made about Mega Man) to which Matt replies, "At least I'm not Gay Grumps." Arin and Dan actually like that name as they're proud to be gay, so Matt and Ryan decide to embrace "SuperMeGay" in turn.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In the first episode of "Mario Party 2 Reverence", Arin asks Jon if he needs to go iron the cat.
• I Reject Your Reality: The tagline for the premature "finale" to DKC2. "Yay! Um... we beat it!"
• I Warned You: In Sonic #55, Jon attacks Arin for losing a life and undoing all of his hard work clearing out the enemies. Arin in turn suggests Jon is slow for assuming the solution is always to kill everything, and Jon just farts in his direction.
• The Immodest Orgasm: A Running Gag is Arin randomly moaning in pleasure in a feminine and very loud voice as if he's a woman having an orgasm.
  Yeah? Yeah? OOOOOOH FUCK YEAH!
• Implausible Deniability: During the finale of Mega Man 7, Arin found himself in a few occasions where Mega Man's situation was not as good as he thought it was.
  Jon: We have two fucking lives!
  Arin: That's the best, uh, position to be in!
  Jon: What are you- what's wrong with you!?
  Arin: If you have three lives that's too much!
• Informed Ability:
  • They both learn Japanese during a TimeSkip.
• Informed Flaw:
  • When you name your character "Fuck, I", it sounds like everyone does a Double Take and stammers when they see your face, either because you're ungodly beautiful or, more comedically, ungodly ugly. Your character still looks like a normal kid.
  • Jon often says that he's no good at fighting games, but in most of the games they've played he's at least been a decent match for Arin, and has won just as many fighting game episodes of Game Grumps Vs as Arin has.
• Inelegant Blubbering:
  • Arin sometimes can't handle his inadequacies:
    Jon: Arin, you are SO BAD AT NICKELODEON GUTS!!
    Arin: [sobbing] I just wanna go home! I just wanna go home!
  • In their second playthrough of Mario Party 8, Arin unleashes a torrent of babbling when faced with a vengeful ice god...and it happens to be on-beat. So much so that Jon instantly demands Barry to make a remix of it.
• Innocent Innuendo: The relatively innocent Pokémon dialogue becomes rather sexual due to Jon putting in the player's name as "Fuck, I".
• Innocently Insensitive: In one memorable instance, Dan is explaining a doctor's appoitment he once had and Arin casually asks him "Did they gas you?". Dan, who is Jewish, stays silent for a few seconds and points out Arin's very poor choice of words, after which Arin immediately realizes what he said and clarifies what he meant.
• Irony: Sonic 06 #89 has the Grumps discuss Half Life 2 and good game design while failing at a physics puzzle and ignoring good game design.^note Silver's Radical Train features weighted scales, which is first introduced to you in a consequence-free environment for you to experiment with, something that Arin praised about Mega Man in Sequelitis.
• I Should Write a Book About This: In the Kirby's Epic Yarn playthrough (of all things), Danny proclaims that he thought about doing that when he first learned how to properly masturbate.
• Is This Thing Still On?: During Sonic '06 #54, Arin doesn't realize they're recording until they're about 2 minutes into the episode. They decide to leave it in, as their normal conversation style is largely the same as Game Grumps dialogue.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: invoked Discussed in their Donkey Kong Country playthrough. Their opinion is that a game shouldn't be any longer than it needs to be and that a tight six-hour game is far better than a sixty-hour game spent mostly just wandering between the actual "game" parts.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: invoked Basically their opinion about New Super Mario Bros. Wii. They still think that it's fun, but they feel it just lacks soul.
• Joke and Receive:
  • During their Sonic '06 playthrough, Arin made fun of Silver and Blaze's interaction by calling Silver, as Blaze, "so naive". Turns out, in Blaze's next line of dialogue in the game, she calls Silver "so naive."
  • In an early Castlevania: Dracula X episode, Danny jokes about the terrible posture of some skeleton enemies, comparing them to apes. In fact, their English name is "skeleton ape", and a couple boards later one of them throws a barrel at Richter.
  • In the Sonic Boom video, the Grumps get an objective that they think is to find a cliff, and Dan jokes about how they should run into a guy named Cliff. Turns out, they really are looking for a character named Cliff.
  • In episode 47 of Sonic Adventure (during the Big the Cat levels), Arin jokingly suggests that Froggy is the 7th Chaos Emerald, with Danny following that up by saying it would be amazing "if he had swallowed it or something". Danny was more right than Arin.^note This only counts because they were paying too little attention during the beginning cutscene to notice Froggy explicitly swallowing Big's Chaos Emerald.
  • During their Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door playthrough, when Flurrie refuses to leave her room without her pearl necklace, the Grumps improvise Mario shouting, "Are you nude?!" In the next episode, they get to see Flurrie's design, where she's only wearing that necklace, making her indeed appear nude.
  Arin: He like, passes out and he's like, "She was nude."
  • Several jokes during the first act in their Doki Doki Literature Club! playthrough turn out to perfectly fit the Disguised Horror Story nature of the later acts.
    • One case is when Sayori says, "I'm going to keep writing until I die!" and Dan adds "This afternoon!" with a laugh. Sayori actually does commit suicide over that weekend, and it breaks Dan's heart.
    • Many of the jokes they make about their Robot Girl characterization of Monika (which was Dan's idea, and he's the one who went into the game completely blind to the twists) involve her killing her clubmates or insisting that she's always listening in on conversations. During one scene, when the other three girls' sprites disappear so the protagonist can talk to Monika, Arin voices Monika saying, "Okay everyone, vanish!" Who would have guessed that Monika was completely aware that she was living in a game and drove her clubmates to kill themselves before deleting their files from the game? Arin and Dan catch on to their accidental foreshadowing while reading Monika's computer-themed "Save Me" poem, remarking on how amazing it'd be if she actually turned out to be a robot.
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, during the trial to find Sakura's murderer, Dan (in character as the Cloud Cuckoo Lander Hiro) poses a ridiculous theory that Sakura was the murderer. This turns out to be entirely right, because Sakura did commit suicide.
  • Another Danganronpa example: when trying to determine what the victim was covered in that kept the body from getting wet, Dan throws out a bunch of nonsensical answers, such as more water or the missing fifth chicken from the chicken coop. Turns out the latter one wasn't actually wrong - the blood on the victim actually belonged to that missing fifth chicken.
  • During the confrontation between San and Sakuya in Hatoful Boyfriend, the Grumps joke that the player character would mediate by just grabbing their necks and throwing them out a window. The player character then stops the argument by throwing San and Sakuya out the window!
• Jump Scare:
  • The Gag Censor elephant in the 2nd episode of Animal Crossing ends up being this for a lot of people.
  • Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, by nature of the genre, has a lot of these.
  • Dennis the Menace provides an unlikely example in the sudden appearance of Mr. Wilson to carry Dennis from his house. Both Grumps scream in what Arin subsequently confirms as "real fear".
• Just Eat Gilligan: After battling Bowser in Episode 51 of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Danny ponders why Mario doesn't just slit the weakened Bowser's throat.
• Just Plane Wrong: When Arin and Danny are playing Checkers in front of an aviation themed board. Danny calls the biplanes "1940s Red Baron planes" and the jet airliners "747s". The Red Baron was from World War I and wasn't a thing in the 40s, and the modern jet planes only have two engines and a single level while the 747 has two levels and four engines.
• Killed Off for Real According to his panel at Shadocon, Arin's suicide at the end of Rugrats in Paris: The Movie is part of the Game Grumps continuity and he is a ghost now.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: At the end of Sonic Mania episode five, Danny mentions Cloud City from The Empire Strikes Back. Arin then sarcastically asks, "Do you mean Bespin?" He then (jokingly) harasses Danny for getting the name wrong like Danny is a scrub. But Danny is one hundred percent correct — Cloud City is indeed the name of the city. Bespin is the name of the planet it's on.
• Lady Mondegreen:
  • In-Universe, Jon Nguyen?^note Jon wins.
  • Roige the Bat."
    "Royj a Bat."
    "Roiygjxehbad."
    "Rohjj Rujz is with me."
    "Oh hey it's Roogie!"
• Lame Pun Reaction:
  • Sonic 06 #100 has a particularly bad one from Arin.
    Jon: Honestly, this game would be 50% percent better without these loading screens. Bearable at the very least.
    Arin: No-
    Jon: I would think at least-
    Arin I don't think any bears would play this.
    [Jon walks away and grunts unhappily]
  • In Secret of Mana #2:
    Jon: She has lettuce hair.
    Arin: Lettuce look at it.
  • Pokemon Fire Red Part 26:
    Arin: If you were anti-pencil, would you be... erasist?
• Lazily Gender-Flipped Name: Arin names his female player character in New Pokémon Snap "Arina," literally just tacking an "a" onto the name the game already filled out.
• Last-Second Word Swap: In Mario Party 2, when Arin (as Peach) finds a hidden coin block.
  Jon: You're a bitch. You suck balls.
  Arin: Dude, did you really just say that to her face? She's a princess.
  Jon: Dude, you know the only thing she's a princess of is my... *ahem* heart? I love her.
• Left Hanging:
  • It's not uncommon for one of them to begin an anecdote, get sidetracked for whatever reason, and never finish.
  • Any series that was started with Jon and was never finished. Sonic 2006 was the most painful of these for most of the fanbase, since it was so long and they got so close to finishing it at the time of his departure.
• Left It In: Any time one of the Grumps tells Barry to take something out. Given that we see these requests, he never does.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: During their Sonic Adventure playthrough, the two make fun of a YouTuber who made a video criticizing Man of Steel by sarcastically saying, "I've never made a film before and Zack Snyder's made many. Here's my opinion on why he's not good." This is especially ironic, considering that they are literally saying this while playing Sonic Adventure, a game that the two have been openly criticizing any chance they get. Arin, to his credit, acknowledges the hypocrisy in his statement a few moments later, though the irony seems to be lost on Danny.
• Lethal Joke Item: It isn't until the fourth episode of Goof Troop that they realize that their "Raise The Roof" Technique lets them catch and rethrow barrels and bombs.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Whenever Arin starts repeating "I'm not going to die", he does really well in a level by psyching himself out.
• Let's Play: The Grumps play games while adding commentary, sometimes about the game and sometimes not. Though Arin doesn't like calling it that, due to the stigma it carries amongst some circles, Jon openly called their channel a Let's Play channel. They have, however, mocked the many many terrible LPers out there.
• Let's See YOU Do Better!: In their Super Adventure Island playthrough, Arin mocks Dan's lack of skill in the game, to which Dan challenges Arin to play; Arin immediately backs down at the gesture.
• Literal Ass-Kicking: Mr. Wilson decides to teach Dennis how to play buttball.
• Little "No": Arin gives one at the end of Sonic '06 episode 41, in response to the two campaigns they still have to play.
• The Load: In every playthrough of a Mario Party title, the Grumps will set one AI player to Easy difficulty, and one to Hard. The AI player who is set to Easy will be a constantly abysmal failure at every mini-game. If the Grumps are pitted against each other in a 3-on-1 game, the Easy AI player will effectively sabotage the efforts of the team, giving the solitary Grump an easy win. This holds doubly true in 2-on-2 games: one Grump will be stuck with the Load while the other Grump will be working with The Ace.
• Lost Episode:
  • In Episode 2 of Yoshi's Island, Arin tells everyone that they had attempted to record a two hour session of Mario Party 4. While the audio recorded and they still have it, they forgot to record the actual game play footage, though they wound up recording a second session. They said they might release the audio of the first session sometime in the future to riff on.
  • The lost Strider footage.
  • They lost the footage of the Super Metroid playthrough.
  • In Episode 15 of their Zelda II playthrough, Arin reveals that there was an episode of Joe and Mac back in the Jon Era that went unaired because they spent the entire episode talking about abortion, and they didn't want to stir up any controversy in the comments.

M-S

• Mad Libs Catchphrase: This is Jon's main way of describing things
  Jon: Look at this <adjective>-ass <noun>!
• Madness Mantra:
  • Jon closing out the Donkey Kong Country 2 "finale." ...Yup.
  • Arin during the majority of Episode 17 of Super Mario Maker.
    Arin: [impersonating Yoda] MMMMMMMMMM! FUN-EE JOKE?!!
• Makes Just as Much Sense in Context:
  • Many times, but near the end of Pokemon FireRed part 30:
    Arin: [running around the SS Anne] Oh no! Not the lever! Don't pull it! Aaaaaaaahhhhhh!
    Danny: The fuck is wrong with you-
    Arin: I'm ha- Nooooooo! Don't let loose the marmoset!
  • Or during the super sleepy series, Yoshi's Cookie:
    Arin: At age six I was born without a face.
• Manchild:
  • Jon and Arin admit as much during their Kirby Super Star playthrough.
    Jon: Do you realize that we're basically children?
    Arin: Uh, every day, actually. Thanks for noticing.
    Jon: We are actually children...
  • It gets brought up in Arin and Danny's NES Batman playthrough.
    Danny: There's a chance that we are incredibly large children, Arin. And, uh[...] At the point in life where we were supposed to grow up, we may have missed it, like, missed the boat.
    Arin: Ah, mmm... I don't know, mmm... I don't see it.^note From this point on, the conversation turns back into the overly long fart joke they've been making for the last minute.
• Man of a Thousand Voices: Arin has quite a wide array of voices and often makes up new ones on the fly on the show.
• Mercy Kill: In Pokemon FireRed, Dan and Arin decide defeating a Weepinbell counts as this after Dan gets freaked out by its appearance.
  Dan: He looks like a child's art project that doesn't want to be alive! "Help, help me, put me back in the kiln..."
  Arin: He really does have this look like, "Oh God, please..."
  Dan: "End meeeee..." (Bundt knocks Weepinbell unconscious) He's like "Thank you..."
  Arin: "Sweet release."
  Dan: "When I'm fainted is the only time I'm truly happy."
• Metal Scream: Jon's rendition of "Game Grumps Versus."
• The Millstone:
  • Depending on the game, either Grump can become this.
    Jon: Okay, gimmie this—gimmie this! [fights for controller]
    Arin: Ok fine! I'll just close my eyes and shut my mouth! Maybe the show will be better then!
    Jon: Well maybe that's what would be best in the first place! We can just call this Game! [imitates theme song] HEY I'M GAME! ♪
  • In the Goof Troop playthrough, one of them will often screw up the other's puzzle-solving attempts (most often Jon getting in Arin's way, but sometimes the other way around).
    • Culminates in Part 7 where Jon's meddling causes both of them to explode, causing them to get a Game Over and go back to the Title Screen. Thankfully, the Password screen actually remembered their progress, meaning they only had to restart the level.
  • Subverted in Part 11 where Jon's foolishness caused them to find a Boss Key they accidentally overlooked.
  • Jon, for pretty much all of their first Portal 2 playthrough, described by him as being like playing single player but with a severe handicap.
    • Danny, in their playthrough, is mostly being preoccupied with how groundbreaking the videogame from several years ago is, and Arin figures out nearly all of the puzzles.
• Minimalism: Displayed to ridiculous extents with g, the April Fools' Day 2017 series. It broke down the show's general structure to as minimal a form as possible; said form consisted of white screens with indiscernible images shown while the Grumps uttered a random stream of words with pauses in between each one for the normal length of 10 minutes.
• Mistaken for Gay: In Part 15 of the Sonic Boom playthrough, Danny recounts a time where his friend Adam accidentally sent him a text saying "I love cock".
• Mondegreen Gag: Jon and Arin discuss whether or not Wario says Egg Salad or I'd Hit It!
• Mood Whiplash: Pokémon Fire Red has this when Sch evolves into Charizard. The jubilation is quickly replaced by panic when Arin accidentally deletes Sch's Flamethrower to accommodate his Wing Attack.
• Moral Event Horizon: invokedDiscussed in their Mister Mosquito playthrough. Jon and Arin agree that anyone that beats their family members is "just bad".
  Jon: You don't even get a second chance in my book, you're just bad!
• More than Meets the Eye: invokedArin and Danny have a terrible first impression of Deadly Creatures, from a silly title screen, a save file system that uses the same graphic interface as the PlayStation 3, Narmy cutscenes and animation, and the game apparently doing a serious number on Arin's Wii's processor. Once they start playing, though, they have a really great time, to the point where they keep playing it off-screen after their Ghoul Grumps series ends.
• The Movie Buff:
  • Arin's past experience working at a video store (if true) gives him an edge with You Don't Know Jack. Jon's frequent refrain during the game is, "I don't fuckin' know!"
    [indistinct grunts from Arin]
    Jon: One of these days I'm gonna win one. One of these days...
    Arin: [grunts] My BRAIN... is so BIG from knowing facts!
  • Despite his video store experience, there are a lot of classic/popular movies Arin has not seen. On more than one occasion, Danny will mention or reference a movie Arin hasn't seen, Arin will tell Danny he hasn't seen it, and Danny will react in surprise and/or disgust and tell Arin that after their recording session is over, he will make Arin watch it with him.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg:
  • Done in Wild Guns part 3.
    Arin: I have friends, I have family, and I have you, Jon.
    Jon: Thank you - do I not count in either of those categories? [laughs] Friends, family, and Jon.
  • Done again in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Part 1.
    Danny: Danny is the champion of the world, and also New Jersey.
• My God, You Are Serious!: According to Jon, getting the "are you serious?" response from Arin is a sign that he was genuinely offended by the statement in question.
• Mythology Gag: The "FriendArin" voice that Arin uses for the protagonist of Doki Doki Literature Club! is very similar to his voice for Kenstar from Girl Chan In Paradise. He then uses that voice for every other visual novel after that.
• Namesake Gag: In episode 46 of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Dan and Arin claim the portrait of Izuru Kamukara in the Strawberry Room is actually a photo of Milton Strawberry, the inventor of the strawberry.
• Nerdy Nasalness:
  • Dinkles the Buff Nerd, as voiced by Arin and Ross, speaks in a nasally voice, showing just how nerdy he is despite being a buff bully.
  • The nerd Dinkles makes fun of speaks in a nasally voice.
• Never Heard That One Before: In their It Takes Two playthrough, Dan as Dr. Hakim jokingly tells the vacuum, "You suck, ha ha ha!" and Arin sarcastically replies as the vacuum, "Never heard that one before."
• Nightmare Face:
  • When Michelle in Chulip looks angry at Q*T, Jon gets so scared that he demands Arin to get away from her immediately. Arin of course talks to the doctor next to her, and then stays next to her for a while before Jon threatens him.
  • It freaks both of them out when they see the man with the guitar and the huge buck teeth who looks like the Scientist from Ocarina of Time.
• No Ending: Sonic 2006 is aborted before the game could be finished.
• Non-Indicative Name:
  • For a series called Game Grumps, they spend a lot of time laughing their asses off, singing and generally being rather cheerful. However, there are some very standout moments where they're true to their namesake.
    • They get grumpy as all hell during the Universal Studios playthrough.
    • Jon as Not-So-Grump started off with lot more general grumpiness than Arin did. However, this changed as the series went on.
    • In the eighth Goof Troop episode, Arin promises that they will be genuinely grumpy this time after reading comments about how they're not really grumpy at all. Surprisingly enough, their demeanour does not change: they're still rather cheerful, singing and laughing their asses off.
    • Completely averted in the New Super Mario Bros Wii episodes, as they lament on the game's lack of soul. Very grumpy. Of course, as mentioned in their Secret of Mana episode, whenever a fan complains that they complain too much, they can always use their title as a "Get-out-of-Jail-Free" card.
  • Arin unleashes his Grump side halfway through the Super Mario Sunshine campaign. The fifth Harbor stage pisses him off to the verge of a Rage Quit. They then play it off as a "mental breakdown."
  • Episodes of 10 Minute Power Hour frequently run longer than ten minutes.
  • Spoiler Owl is apparently actually a robin.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Played to the hilt in their playthrough of Punch-Out!!, with Little Mac being on the receiving end of some very powerful boxers' "cinderblock" punches.
  Arin: [as Doc] Yeah you won, Mac!
  Danny: [as Little Mac] I LOVE YOU TOO, GIANT WALRUS.
• Noodle Incident:
  • During the introductory clip for ProJared's guest appearance on GrumpCade:
    Ross: Jared, I'm sorry about the slippery butt thing. I didn't mean to-
    Jared: No, no. You hurt me too much.
  • Also lampshaded by Arin in Sonic 06 episode 96.
    Jon: Oh, that's right, you were just talking about the Louis C.K. thing, too.
    Arin: Oh, with the pooping?
    Both: Yeah.
    [beat]
    Arin: I think that's just it. That's all we should give the audience.
• Nostalgia Filter:
  • Arin loves all generations of Pokémon, while Jon believes only the first generation has good Pokémon designs (though the latter likes Pokémon Silver best). Arin states this is because Pokémon was ridiculous in the first place; Jon says the games are overly childish and fully admits he enjoyed the games he did because he played them as a child.
  • Averted with GoldenEye (1997), which they fully admit has aged terribly despite loving it when it was originally released.
  • Jon admits that this is the only reason he finds Banjo-Kazooie better than Banjo-Tooie, despite saying that everything the first game did right, the sequel did even better.
  • It's fairly obvious that nostalgia was coloring Jon's memories of the Donkey Kong Country games. When playing Country 1, Jon insists that the second is better. When they play the second, they find a LOT more problems than in the original, and Jon suddenly insists that the third is better. This is despite the fact that Jon previously placed the third game lower on his Top 20 SNES Games than the other two (DKC3 placed at 11, DKC placed at 8 and DKC2 placed at 4)
• Nothing Is Scarier: The Spice World episode ends with Arin having a mental breakdown and doing God knows what to Jon. In the midst of it, the video cuts off for the final 8 seconds of absolute silence and darkness.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  • There are rumors that Arin and Jon are intentionally making mistakes in their games in order to be funnier. It's hard to fault the logic there, such as with episodes like the Wind Waker HD series where Arin is playing horribly despite all evidence saying he should be playing fine^note Not only is Arin ignoring onscreen button prompts, but the episodes were filmed while he was working on a Zelda-themed episode of Sequelitis, wherein Arin analyzed and broke down many, many mechanics that were reused in Wind Waker. The Grumps addressed this notion in the first Dyna Blade episode, and tried to deny it, pretty much saying that those people have way too much faith in their abilities.
  • Jon does deliberately faff about and screw up later when they're playing The Great Cave Offensive, though Arin calls him on it. He reveals it's just because he thinks The Great Cave Offensive is boring and he wants to move on to Milky Way Wishes.
• Obsessive Spokesperson: A bit in the Grumps Dream Course playthrough had Arin mimic Larry the Cable Guy's Prilosec heartburn medicine commercials, except the impression derails into Larry worshiping Prilosec as a god and eating it in the place of normal food.
• Odd Name Out: The contestants in Game Grumps Vs.: Jeopardy are Nixon, Dixon, and Larry.
• Oh, Crap!: Literally the first words out of anyone's mouth in the Sonic 06 episode is Jon saying "Oh no. Oh no." when he recognizes what's on the screen.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Occasionally funny stuff happens that is only visible to the Grumps themselves, causing sudden bouts of laughter, followed by an explanation to the viewers what was so funny.
• Off the Rails: Varies from episode to episode, but pops up more often in 3D exploration-based games when the Grumps don't fully know the controls and can't be bothered to learn them. It often leads to them making things much harder on themselves than they have to.
• Old School Introductory Rap: Arin and Danny do one in the Dennis the Menace episode as if they're Mr. Wilson, the surly older neighbor:
  My name's Mr. Wilson and I'm here to say, I'm gonna smack your ass in a major way, what 'cha doin' in my basement get out of here... Get outta here!
• Older Than They Look: Danny is at least 6 or 7 years older than Arin despite them both looking about the same age.
  Reddit commenter: Apparently Skittles are the fucking fountain of youth.
• On Second Thought: On seeing Mephiles' Hellish Pupils. (Sonic #50)
  Arin: His eyes look like vaginas.
  Jon: [laughs] No they don't, they look like reptiles eyes! They don't loo—well, a little bit.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • When they attempted to play a Japanese copy of Drakkhen that a fan sent in, they couldn't read the characters' names (or indeed anything else), so they made up names for them: Brian, Bill, Langley, and another Bill. Also known as "Big Bill." And the first Bill might be a woman; they weren't sure.
  • The skit "Two Steves Show" stars two hosts (played by Arin and Dan mimicking surfer accents) whose sole character trait (and joke) is that they're both named 'Steve'.
    Arin: Tune in for the Steve Power Hour... It's tomorrow at three, 'cause it sounds a little bit like Steve.
    Dan: Yeah... 'Threeve'. Check it out at Threeve PM.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The first Disney Princess video starts with an annotation of Content Warnings of the potentially offensive and triggering humor in the video, based around child rape.
• Orphaned Series:
  • All of the one-off games, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Secret of Mana and Zombies Ate My Neighbors. Secret of Mana had a brief Un-Cancelled moment with Danny replaying the game, but still stopped early.
  • Battletoads, a game with a full story mode, won't even be made into a series because they begin to realize that the game is terrible with two players. Arin didn't even like the game to begin with.
  • The Grumps explained that the reason most of their games went unfinished is because they didn't want to bore the audience with replaying things they've already taken care of. It took them until Sonic 06 to realize they could use a Fast-Forward Gag to gloss over any gameplay they had to redo, as well as use the lack of camera focus to put more effort in gaming smart rather than gaming funny.
  • Despite the popularity of the Dog Island series and Arin and Dan returning to the game after a few years of inactivity, they have no desire to return to it as of 2020, partly due to discomfort with the Yi Lu accent gag and partly because the game stopped being fun.
• Outrun the Fireball: Arin managed to sandwich himself between two bombs in Bomberman 2, but somehow escaped and just barely made it out of the blast radius at the last moment.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • Link to the Past Episode 5 has Arin asking Jon to pick something up, then saying to forget about it. Subsequently:
    "What was it?"
    "Just keep goin'."
    "What was it?"
    "Just keep goin'."
    "What was it?"
    "Just keep goin'."
    Ad infinitum.
  • Arin naming off a fake list of names for people who sent them Rogue Squadron, in alphabetical order:
    "Arthur... A.... Anderson."
    "Arthur... B... Anderson."
    "Arthur... B... Anderson... A."
  • Episode 18 of Super Mario 64 has Danny's anecdote about getting a series of texts from Arin (who was both sleep-deprived and on text-to-speech), which featured Arin ranting about The Social Network and "Motherfucking Jesse Eisenberg".
  • The merchandise video is a seemingly-endless stream of bad infomercial-esque sales pitches that go on for five minutes.
    Arin: Can you believe the amount of asinine things we're saying!?
• Overly Long Name: Brian-Frank-Steve-Williard-Jonathan-Michael IV-Michael III-Michael Jordan-Scott, in their Drakkhen video.
• Parody Episode: Arin spends most of Mickey Mousecapades parodying Angry Video Game Nerd-style riff videos rather than providing the live commentary he usually does.
• Parallel Porn Titles: Danny has mentioned Spreadator, A Cock On Lips Now, and The Loin King. In the 22nd episode of their Super Mario Sunshine playthrough, Danny asks Arin what his favorite parallel porn title is. Arin tells him that since he grew up on internet porn he never rented an actual porn tape and that he was personally not a fan of those types of porn.
• Parody Product Placement: When playing the preschool game Peppa Pig World Adventures, they joke that Peppa's House is sponsored by Wild Tobacco, complete with Daddy Pig smoking before talking to the kids.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word:
  • Nostrophous. Little known fact: it isn't a word.
  • 'Klerf', from Part 8 of Katamari Damacy.
    • In Part 15, Arin tries to capitalize on the word-invention market. To that end, he coins the term 'Jingledink'.
• Perverse Sexual Lust:
  • For Arin, May and to a lesser extent Dawn. Arin convinced many fans to draw provocative Dawn fanart (this resulted in some inevitable Rule 34). Generally, no female NPC is safe.
  • Celeste, for both Arin and Jon. Even stranger, considering she is an owl.
    • This puts Jon's love of birds in a completely different perspective.
  • Arin is suddenly spellbound by a random green haired NPC in Secret of Mana.
  • Jon mentioned that the sex scenes in Game of Thrones made him head for RedTube, which is odd considering their nature and sufficiency.
  • In Sonic '06, the moment Arin draws attention to Blaze the Cat, Jon starts yelling "I WANNA PUT IT IN HER!" repeatedly (including variations). For extra amusement, cue a comment on the video asking "Why does everyone want to fuck Blaze?"
  • Another moment in Sonic 06, where Arin says that he would be attracted to Rouge the Bat if not for her 'gross bat face'.
    Arin: If the bat face was gone I would do. But the bat face is there, so it's not.
    • This moment is punctuated by some beautiful editing from Barry.
  • Arin admits that he used to have a huge crush on Ino Yamanaka when they play the Naruto fighting game.
  • Danny has jokingly stated he's tried to fuck some very unorthodox things, such as cantelopes and bears... at least we think it's jokingly.
  • Danny invokes this for Link/"Buttlet" towards Medli during Wind Waker HD.
  • Arin has admitted to being attracted to Gadget from Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers at a young age.
  • On the subject of animal characters, Danny has had enough moments to merit an entire series of compilation videos claiming he's a furry.
• Played for Laughs: In the finale of Mega Man 7, Jon starts spraying compressed air keyboard cleaner into the microphone, thoroughly annoying Arin... until an odd taste alerts them to the bittering agent it contains. Quickly turns into a Mass "Oh, Crap!" as they begin choking on the noxious cloud.
• Please Subscribe to Our Channel: Arin and Danny occasionally throw out a sarcastic "comment, like, subscribe if you like [X]!" There was also a sign that showed up to legitimately remind people, but this was quickly phased out.
• Pineapple Ruins Pizza: In the "Battle Kid" episode, Arin makes up a story about his friend Mark accidentally ordering him nine pizzas, which Arin is willing to eat until he sees that they're pineapple and ham, as Arin (in this story at least) claims he dislikes ham and is allergic to pineapple.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Despite their group name, they're not grumpy very often.
• Piss-Take Rap: Arin and Dan are practiced vocalists and musicians, and their other projects prove them adept rappers. Presumably those were times they took care to write and rehearse their rapping. The show is not one of those times. When either of them breaks out in intentionally-half-assed freestyle rap, it tends to be amusingly bad.
  Danny: My name is danny sexbang and my rhymes are pretty tight / ... I'm white!
• Platform Hell: Every level they play in Super Mario Maker.
• Pokémon Speak: Out of This World's friendly NPC, Buddy, is given the nickname "Mike Aruba", because his only line of spoken dialogue is somewhere between this and Speaking Simlish.
• Poke the Poodle:
  • Arin has a habit of trying to insult Jon with witty comebacks. Too bad his comebacks are anything but insulting.
    Jon: This game is such a joy to play!
    Arin: [petulantly] Yeah, well, you're a joy... to be around...
  • Later, from Mario Party 2:
    Jon: I'm getting all the coin bags!
    Arin: You're a bag. A coin bag. [angrily] That means you're precious to me.
  • Nicklodeon Guts finale: Jon is stumped, and the timer's run out.
    Jon: I'm done. I'm out. It's 7:00.
    Arin: You're 7. [beat] On a scale of of 1-7.
    Jon: Thank you. That makes me feel better than I previously did.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure:
  • Jon says that he would make a good Gimli-like bar patron in a movie, but Arin misses the reference as he's never seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
    Arin: I've never seen it.
    Jon: Are you— AND MY AXE!
    Arin: It doesn't make me have seen it any moreso than I haven't.
  • It's almost a Running Gag to have Danny mention/reference a movie Arin hasn't seen only for Arin to say he hasn't seen it and for Danny to react in disgust and tell him he will make him watch it after their recording session is over.
  • Arin also has trouble with knowing which music artists did what songs. He once thought "Separate Ways" (by Journey) was by Nightwish and "Bring Me to Life" (by Evanescence) was by Linkin Park.
• Pretend Prejudice: In ''Nickelodeon Guts #3, it's fat people, black people, jews, and children with Down's syndrome.
  Jon: I'm sorry I offended anybody with Down's syndrome, I am apt to do these things. Offend people. Barry, put in something else, like "Jew"!
  Arin: Please edit that, Barry, the only Jew of all of us!
  • Arin and Danny say some unkind words about an ethnicity they dislike: spinnakers (which doesn't refer to any group of people). Despite their insults, "spinnaker" does not refer to any group of people.
• Product Placement:
  • Invoked and joked with when they ask for sponsors. As they're just hanging out, they tend to mention products by name; however it's averted from time to time with Jon or Arin referring to a snack or drink as only "this" instead of by name.
    Jon: You wanna play for a while? 'Cause I gotta go drink my this.
    Arin: ...Make sure you drink your this.
  • Spoofed by Arin when he and Danny both say they love Sushi.
  • Danny mentions his love of Skittles almost every episode and at one point jokingly asks for an endorsement deal.
  • Arin is very passionate about food from Wendy's, and spends over a minute in one episode literally begging Wendy's to sponsor the Game Grumps.
• Prophetic Name: Discussed in Skyblazer shortly after Arin and Dan realise the protagonist's name is Sky.
  Arin: Isn't it weird how he was damned to be a skyblazer because his name is Sky? It's just like "Your name is Sky," and he's like "Ugh, that means I'm going to have to fight some evil in the sky, Right? Ugh!"
  Dan: His high school guidance counselor was like, "Tell me, Sky... do you blaze?"
• Pungeon Master:
  • Arin fancies himself this. Though it's just as likely to result in Lame Pun Reaction.
  • The Grumps' befuddled response to a 'roided-up Dan Aykroyd collecting slices of cake.
    Jon: Whoo, boy, y'know I've seen some greats in my day...
    Arin: —And this one 'TAKES THE CAKE''??"
  • Arin repeatedly wiping out his dune buggy in Sonic '06.
    Arin: Shadow wasn't— um, being controlled by me. Dare I say he was in chaos.
    Jon: Fuck you, Arin.
  • "Even the buggy is...buggy? ♥ Tee hee!"
  • [Shadow pushes aside boulders] "You need to think outside the rocks."
  • Rogue's "Heart"-Bombs. (Sonic '06 #47)
    Arin: [giggling] I guess that was a pretty good heart attack!"
    Jon: Fuck you, Arin.
  • Jon is mocked for not grasping such a sophisticated game as The Price is Right.
    Arin: Dare I say...Your Price is Wrong.
    Jon: No you don't dare say that, you piece of shit.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • During the first part of Detroit: Become Human. Arin saved the hostage (despite the odds), but had to kill Connor to do it. This is ultimately subverted, as Connor happens to be the one character you can afford to kill multiple times.
  • Dan mentions this trope by name in a Wheel of Fortune episode, referring to Arin quickly buzzing in on a toss-up puzzle, but getting annoyed that he has to type so many letters to fill it in.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • In Sonic '06, Arin gets a massive one when Knuckles gets stuck on the ceiling. And he wasn't even the one playing at this point.
  • In Super Mario Sunshine, when Arin dies after coming extremely close to getting the Shine from the pachinko machine, he flies into a rage and throws some of his toys around the room.
    • This was so defining that Danny refers to later frustrating levels as "pachinko-esque".
  • In Battle Kid Arin loses it during the ending. It's so bad that even Ross, who apparently loves seeing Arin flip his shit, thought that the circumstances were absolutely terrible and he was only watching from the window. Then just when you get a hope spot once Ross calms Arin down and goes for one last shot? Arin accidentally quits the game causing him to go from recollected to completely fucking berserk over the span of two seconds.
• Rage Quit:
  • Arin in Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, ending the playthrough early.
  • Donkey Kong Country 2 ended as a result of Jon reaching his breaking point after one death too many.
  • Nickelodeon Guts broke Arin. Jon wound up taking the controller from his paralyzed hands.
    Arin: You beat me, Jon... You're better, Jon. ...You're better than me at Nickelodeon Guts...
  • Jon in the second round of You Don't Know Jack. He starts buzzing in a hurricane of wrong answers, causing his score to plummet lower than the U.S. national debt.
    Jon: IF I CAN'T BE THE BEST, I CAN SURE AS HELL BE THE WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORST!!!
  • Arin comes VERY close to this in Part 20 of Sonic 06.
  • Jon in DKC 2; him and Arin never actually complete the game.
  • The Night Trap playthrough lasted only two episodes because Arin quit after accidentally killing one of the girls with a Schmuck Bait trap.
• A Rare Sentence: The forest hub world in Sonic '06 really drains the life out of Arin. He actually welcomes a loading screen.
  Arin: I just wanted to take a break from the green.
  Jon: Dude, I don't know of many people who say that shit in any respect.
• Read the Freaking Manual: They have a tendency to skip or ignore tutorials, then complain that they don't know what to do.
  • Milky Way Wishes, where they said it was probably the worst game on the cartridge for mis-understanding the twist (Instead of copying powers from enemies, you collect cores that let you use it on command by pushing X. It took three videos before they tried the Push X, leading them to assume the game's trick was a lack of copy abilities.)
  • They usually wind up skipping hint points and ignore informative dialogue in Sonic '06, and still blame the game. This in particular is noteworthy for not being entirely their fault, because, while it's still rather ignorant of them to blame the game for their mistakes, they actually have the strategy guide with them, and it almost never tells them anything useful regarding the controls. Even then, the game itself is usually not completely clear on the controls. Still, Jon in particular has an unfortunate habit of swerving specifically to miss hint rings, and then complaining about not knowing what to do.
  • Humorously subverted during part 1 of Stretch Panic. Jon and Arin spend the entire episode trying to figure out how they're supposed to progress before Arin gives up and reads the game manual to discover what to do. Unfortunately, this is played straight in later episodes as they don't properly seal the bosses with the mentioned moves.
  • Arin is mostly ignorant of the function of the B button in Super Mario Sunshine for roughly the first dozen episodes. He manages to beat Gooper Blooper and the Bullet Monty Mole, but with a severe handicap and with some dumb luck. Later episodes established that he practised, and is using the advice of the comment sections.
  • This trope comes back with a vengeance in the Wind Waker HD series. Not only does Arin take entire episodes to accomplish the most basic of tasks, but he constantly outright blames the game for being "cryptic", even when the game directly tells him the button prompts for what he has to do.
  • With a bit of Self-Deprecation, Danny points this out in ''Mario Sports Mix'' ep 1.
    Danny: There was an entire screen dedicated to giving us this information.
    Arin: Yeah well, you expect me to read that shit?
• Raster Vision: The outro for the series takes the form of a CRT screen (with the show's logo burned into it).
• Real Men Wear Pink: Arin picks female characters as a rule. Power Rangers thwarted him by substituting a Palette Swap for Kimberly (or "Man Ass", as Arin calls her.)
• Reality Is Unrealistic: Their justification for not using a Face Cam while playing: while they SOUND funny, they just LOOK like stereotypical gamers plopped in front of a TV. They only LOOK funny when they have the power of editing or a script.
• Rearrange the Song: The original theme song for Game Grumps Vs. was sung by Jon, and only had his voice coupled with beatboxing in the back. Danny's version of the song, seen as the superior one, added extra harmonization in the background.
• Refrain from Assuming: invoked Arin misidentifies "Where Do We Go from Here?" by Jamiroquai as "That's the Way Love Goes". Especially funny given that (A) both phrases are in the refrain, and (B) asking "Where do I go from here?" was what got him off on a lyric-quoting tangent in the first place.
• Rhymes on a Dime:
  • "Oh, hi, Fuck, I!"
  • "Stuck as fuck."
  • In their ''Mega Man 2'' playthrough, Dan notices how Crash Man and Flash Man rhyme, and he and Arin spend the next two or three minutes making up jokes about other "robot masters" such as Cash Man, Trash Man, and Sash Man.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Arin's cat Mochi, according to Jon at least, is "the darlingest....piece of shit!".
  • Jon picked Torchic over Mudkip primarily because Jon thinks Torchic is adorable.
  • Jon found the bats in Shade Man's stage to be adorable.
  • Arin remarks on how adorable Rush is when they use Rush Search at the beginning of Part 12.
  • They both find Celeste in Animal Crossing: City Folk to be adorable, what with her pupil eyes.
  • They both found the vampire enemy Kurokyura in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins to be really cute.
  • Arin gushes over how adorable Makar is, especially the "jingle-jangle" noise he makes when he walks. A few episodes after this, a fan sends the Grumps a plush Makar, complete with a bell inside him to re-create the "jingle-jangle".
• Robo Speak:
  • During the Sonic Adventure playthrough, when they get to E-101's storyline, they decide briefly to invite a guy who does a stellar robot voice to voice the robot character for a few minutes, then having him say random stuff in said robot voice.
  • In their playthrough of Doki Doki Literature Club!, Arin gives the character Monika a robot voice, with mechanical sounding laughter and, after they resume the game following a break, a tendency to wind down as if shutting off at the end of sentences. It's a particularly ironic choice given the poems she writes reference RGB (Red, Green, Blue colors for TV monitors) and reference loading, saving, and deleting. What makes it ironic that the voice was Dan's idea, going by the first episode's end bumper, and he's playing the game blind, so he has no idea that any of the above is coming nor of a much bigger related twist later.
• Rouge Angles of Satin:
  • When reading Shroomish's Pokedex entry, Arin kept confusing the word "composted" with "composited."
  • In Yoshi's Island, he seems to think Jon is trying to say "derived" when he's saying "derided."
  • Arin pronounces BoLse as Boise.
• Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: After Dixie Kong's amazing fall in DKC 2, Arin describes it as a "Rube Goldberg machine of death".
• Rule-Abiding Rebel: In Chulip, Arin and Jon try to kick a road sign (and fail), with Arin (as Q*T, the main character) saying "I'm an angry child. Nobody loves me except nobody!". Also, the Dad in Chulip tells Q*T that he's going through a rebellious stage if he doesn't want to meet the new neighbors.
• Rule of Cute:
  • On some nostalgic topics, like Pokémon, Arin has a Heart of Gold. (And Jon, a Dick of Steel.)
    Arin: Shit, I fucking love this guy, Lotad! He turns into Ludicolo with a sombrero!
    Jon: ...Omigod, this is the stupidest Pokémon.
    Arin: Dude, come on. He's a Mexican leaf-hat man! It's so awesome!
    Jon: It's stupid!
    Arin: You're stupid!
    Jon: How does your DNA evolve into a fucking hat?!!
  • Danny can't stop raving about how adorable Kirby's Epic Yarn is.
• Rule of Funny: Their names for the Emerald LP are all based on whatever is funniest. This leads to a young boy named "Fuck, I" setting out with the Torchic "Soon?", the Zigzagoon "nooooooooo", the Poochyena "Bakuhaku♀♀", the Lotad (now a Lombre) "GeorgLopez", the Slakoth "CHINA", the Shroomish "Compmsgcii", and the Nincada "STRGG".
• Rule of Three: Dan lampshades this in Ocarina of Time episode 12.
  Dan: Well, like the rule of threes. ''[bites into an apple for the third time that episode]'' That's a good apple.
  Arin: That is a good apple.
  Dan: For the third time.
• Running Gag: So many that it needed its own page.
• Sand In My Eyes: In episode 31 of Super Mario Sunshine, Danny recalls arguing with his dad as a kid and pretending not to still be upset hours later, claiming through his Inelegant Blubbering that someone came in and put tears on his pillow.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • During the Sonic 2006 LP, which seems to be a recurring theme for LPs of this game.
  • Happening with Chulip, but, given the game's content, it's probably to be expected.
  • Super Mario Sunshine causes Arin to suffer these frequently, the farther he gets into the game.
  • During Heart of Darkness, Arin gets more and more frustrated with the game being incredibly hard. During one particularly difficult section, Arin dies so many times that he starts literally screaming in frustration.
  • 'Super Mario Maker'' tends to drive them pretty bonkers, but Arin has a straight-up breakdown while playing the level "P is for Pain," eventually devolving into yelling complete nonsense about jerking off and Tom Jones.
• Sarcastic Clapping: The Grumps take turns doing this when the other dies idiotically.
• Saw Star Wars 27 Times: Jon really likes birds, especially not-Pixar animated movies with birds. He talks about how much he watched the movie in Portal episode #4:
  Jon: I watched it on iTunes, and then I bought the 3-D Blu-Ray to watch it in 3-D, and then I watched it again to make Barry watch it; and he was mad at me.
  Arin: It seemed more like he was like, "...yup."
• Say My Name:
  • Jon occasionally goes AIR-EN, shouted in the same tone as David from Alvin & the Chipmunks.
  • One of the donations (the game Totally Rad) by the name of Brinkley. Airn jokes about how it's such a "Boss shout name."
    Danny: "Brink-leeeeeeeeeeeeey!"
  • At The Stinger of Part 20 of Super Mario Maker, Danny yells The Completionist's real name (Jirard) dramatically, presumably as the duo are still tired and frustrated at his levels.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • In the ninth Banjo-Kazooie episode, Arin and Jon tell viewers to look up two videos^note "Pizza Time" and "Eye Socket". However, Jon admits that he found them to be highly disturbing, going as far as to liken one to a Snuff Film. If the comments section is any indication, many of the viewers that watched the videos despite the warning signs were not happy with what they saw.
  • In a reversal of the trope, in Kirby's Epic Yarn part 17, Danny and Arin had just gotten over reading some comment about the game being "gay and boring as shit." After a minute of poking fun at it, Arin jokes "sign online for www.gayasshit.com, please-don't-go-there!" Some users found that it actually leads to the Amazon page for Kirby's Epic Yarn.
• Scrappy Mechanic: invoked For Jon, the shovel in Goof Troop, which wants you to perform systematic digging for Meaningless Lives.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Danny often has a high-pitched scream, especially in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Arin does this occasionally. He always comes back, though.
    • Most notably in Sonic 06 when they encounter the infamous Knuckles wall glitch.
    • In episode 32 of Super Mario Sunshine after Mario is just about to fall down into the center of the Pachinko Game to reach the star, before the physics engine chokes and sends Mario flying to his demise. Hell, he even causes some property damage.
  • Jon does it after being thoroughly owned by Krazy Kremland (Donkey Kong Country 2 finale). It turns out that Jon's own show does not exaggerate his temper.
  • Danny leaves during their playthrough of the P.T. demo, having gotten far too scared to keep watching. He comes back a few seconds later, only for them to encounter a ghost woman. Dan and Arin promptly pull this again by ending the episode immediately after.
• Sea Hurtchin: In the Game Grumps Animated episode "Rolling in the Deep", Danny steps on an urchin with his bare feet and gets injured.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Arin's better at insulting himself than others.
  Arin: UUUH THIS GAME IS STOOOPID.
  Jon: Well aren't you running the self deprecation train right now.
  • In the Pictionary Ten Minute Power Hour, one of the fan-submitted prompts is "skipping the tutorial." Arin gets the prompt and draws a crude version of himself asking what he's supposed to do while a blatant instruction is onscreen, playing into the jokes about how often he ignores the tutorial.
• Self-Parody:
  • Jon and Arin parody themselves in the Steam Train announcement video.
    Jon: Look at this dang-ass game. It's legitimately in my top 10.
    Arin: I hate video games!
  • Jon eventually lampshades this.
    Jon: Somehow I feel like... something's wrong... because it's like we're being a parody of ourselves, heh heh, at the moment. [Arin throws something] DON'T THROW THAT, THAT'S EXPENSIVE TO SOMEBODY.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: The main appeal to the series are the wacky conversations about anything rather than the gameplay.
• Self-Imposed Challengeinvoked: Game Grump (a solo series starring just Arin) has Arin attempting to play Mega Man X without using any of the boss weapons and with the dash boots as his only powerup.
• Serial Escalation: Some viewers noticed that the thumbnails of Kirby's Epic Yarn's videos had Kirby taking up a progressively larger space on the picture. By Episode 16 Kirby has overtaken the "n" in the game's logo, by episode 19 he'd started obscuring Arin's face a bit, and by the finale he'd completely enveloped the screen. See Shout-Out below on the explanation why.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Near the end of their Mega Man 6 playthrough, Arin tells the story of the time in 1942 when he and Danny were children, and Danny (who was a 2-year-old murderer, by the way) shat himself 17 consecutive times at the local Dairy Queen. ...And that's it, really.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Discussed, in relation to the Selena Gomez song "Love You Like a Love Song".
  • When playing 1001 Spikes (and mocking Smash Mouth's All Star).
  The letter L is in the shape of an L!
• Shoehorned Acronym: A common gag is the Grumps turning a word not meant to be an acronym into an acronym, which due to the improvised nature of the show, usually doesn't make much sense.
  • In the beginning of the Pokémon FireRed playthrough, Arin jokes about Professor Oak shitting his pants, and improvises his name as an acronym, going with "Oh! Ass Krap!"
  • In the playthrough of Trauma Center: Second Opinion, they interpret Sidney Kasal saying, "They don't even understand what Caduceus stands for" as "Caduceus" actually being an acronym. Arin improvises that it stands for the nonsensical phrase "Cool And Daring Under Cars, Everybody Understands Sue."
  Danny: [as Kasal] Why did we name our company this?
  • In the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney playthrough, Dan makes a reference to the band P.O.D., claiming (in-character as Maya) that it stands for "People of Doody? Dookie? I don't know what it stands for." Arin guesses it stands for "Puddle Of Dudd," which cracks Dan up.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: A sort of meta case occurs in the Doki Doki Literature Club! playthrough; after the game shows its true colors and the Grumps are sent back to the first act, they repeat all of their readings of the dialogue without making any of the jokes they had been making before, instead just reading the dialogue word-for-word. As at least one commenter noted, this manages to make the atmosphere all the more unsettling, as you're left waiting for a joke that will never come.
• Shoot the Hostage:
  • In the Grant Kirkhope episode, while playing Goldeneye 007 in the singleplayer Frigate La Fayette level, Jon opens a door and immediately guns down the hostage in front of him, completely ignoring the bad guys next to the victim.
    Arin: [laughing] You just fucking killed the hostage!
  • In Dick Tracy for the NES, Danny and Arin actually read the opening narration out loud where the police chief warns them not to shoot at unarmed civilians, and the text appears on screen two more times after that. They died three times from losing health due to shooting at unarmed civilians, then called the game garbage and gave up on it.
• Shout-Out: Constantly, mostly because it's just Jon/Danny and Arin talking about random things.
  • The sped-up sections in the Wild Guns playthrough are accompanied by music from Bastion.
  • The merchandise video has a Shout Out to ShamWoW.
  • In their Zelda playthrough, Danny remarks that "no matter where you go, there you are."
  • In the description to the finale of Kirby's Epic Yarn, Barry puts "It's always been Kirby." This is a reference to Bravest Warriors, and explains why Kirby kept getting bigger in the thumbnail (a reference to the character Wankershim from the BW episode "Ultra Wankershim").
  • A really subtle one to FilmCow when he talks about "Cookie Butter" in Pokemon Fire Red Part 6.
    Arin: It's peanut butter, but instead of being made with peanuts, it's made out of fucking cookies.
  • After the "Rube Goldberg machine of death" moment in DKC 2, the suggestion is made that Barry puts Eraserhead music over it, and directly after the comment he does just that.
• Signature Laugh:
  • Arin's wheezing laugh makes him easy to pick out.
  • Editor Kevin has managed to pinpoint "Oh, this is where Danny laughs" by watching the AUDIO READOUT on the files because it follows an apparent systematic pattern at the same intervals.
  • Ross', as Markiplier once put it in one of his Mario Maker videos, "three-pronged laugh" (even though it has four).
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: invoked In their Mega Man 7 videos, after an inability to defeat Bass, they listened to their fans to find the awesomeness that is the Rush Suit, and after realizing Proto Man explained how there are more secrets, they decided to go for 100% Completion before continuing with the main game.
• Sincerity Mode: "Real talk." Often subverted by then talking about something completely inconsequential.
• Skewed Priorities: Before performing surgery on a young girl in Trauma Center (Atlus), Arin laments how the blanket on the operating table covered up her boobies. Dan yells at him to get his priorities straight.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Discussed and defied by Jon, who doesn't even like calling his fans "my fans" due to how potentially snooty and self-absorbed it can come across.
• Smash Cut:
  • Various episodes end with one. Bonus points if one of them screams at the top of their lungs, only to be cut off mid-scream.
  • Whenever there's a bit they cut out of the episode, such as Arin trying to learn how to use the Mirror ability. There's usually a Lampshade Hanging to explain it, though.
  • Lampshaded in the first Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse episode.
    Jon: Egoraptor?
    Arin: Yeah?
    Jon: HOW MANY CUTOFFS... DOES THI
  • They also like to mix in Curses Cut Short into the video endings on occasion as well.
    Jon: Next time on Game Grumps! Order up! ORDER UP A NEW FU
  • Sometimes, they start with one...
    Jon: One time I fell down... OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
  • The ending of part 1 of Wheel of Fortune.
    Danny: Next time on Game Grumps...uuughh...
    Vanna White: Let's get ready for the next puzzle.
    Danny: NOO—
• Smoky Voice: Their chain smoker interpretation of Maelle.
  Dan: WUAAAGHTERIN' CAN
• So Bad, It's Good: invoked They have gone on record several times remarking how games that are so bad they're good are their absolute favorites to play due to all the sheer joke fodder they provide. Danny thoroughly enjoyed their playthrough of Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and has reminisced about it numerous times, describing it as "the gift that kept on giving" and like "a stupid loyal dog who's always there for you". The duo expressed extreme regret when they finally finished the game, lamenting their abuse of the Knuckles Infinite Jump to skip a solid few hours of the game, because it shortened the amount of time they got to play it.
• Sophisticated as Hell:
  • Another aspect of their random conversations
    Jon: You know what? Have you ever read the Ten Commandments?
    Arin: Uh, yes, one:...
    Jon: Don't dunk your Oreos sideways... that shit'll get fucked up.
  • During the Wind Waker playthrough:
    Danny: [as Makar] Let me play for you a little ditty... "Work Bitch" by Britney Spears.
• Sore Loser:
  • Jon shows shades of it, but believes himself to be much worse than he is.
  • Towards the end of Mario Party 4, Jon's sore loser side comes out at full-force.
  • Both of them can be sore losers. In Mario Party 2, Arin says that Jon's win doesn't count since he didn't get 1st place, even though that hasn't been the case in the past.
  • Arin challenges Jon to two extra rounds in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Based on his reaction to winning both, it seemed to just be out of wanting to prove Jon got lucky.
• Soft Reset: Jon is ignorant of this function, and his speedrun of Super Mario Land comes to an end once he accidentally triggers it.
• Sound of No Damage: During their Mega Man 7 playthrough:
  Jon: He goes "tink!". He's a tinky ass motherfucker.
  Arin: This bitch is tinky! I hope that's like a new fuckin', like, Wikipedia word.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: Barry likes responding to non-specific requests for epic soundtracks by putting peppy tunes in instead. So far it's happened in Chivalry Medieval Warfare and Gradius III.
• Special Edition Title: The Guest Grumps intro for Grant Kirkhope has an arrangement of the theme by him, and instead of "HEY I'M GRUMP!" etc, this exchange happens:
  Arin: Heydoyoumindifsomebodycomesonourshow?
  Jon: NO!
  Together: AND THIS IS GUEST GRUMPS!
  • Starting in 2013, the week before Halloween suitable intro was used, with Arin dressed as Frankenstein's Monster and Danny dressed as a vampire:
    Frankenraptor: Hey I'm ghoul!
    BLEHnny: Blehhhh!
    Together: AND WE'RE THE GHOUL GRUMPS! (followed by a short, backmasked quote which differs with each episode)
  • Christmas that same year saw Arin as an elf and Danny as Santa Claus.
    Egowrapper: I wrap stuff!
    Dan-ta Claus: I deliver that stuff!
    Together: NAUGHTY OR NICE, IT'S THE JINGLE GRUMPS!
  • For Valentine's Day 2014, Arin and Suzy played The Lion King and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo together, with a cute new intro to match:
    Egoraptor: Hey I'm grump!
    [Suzy comes in and kisses him on the cheek]
    Egoraptor: *blushing, meekly] I'm not so grump.
    Together: AND THIS IS DATE GRUMPS! [Suzy and Ego stare at each other with hearts and huge smiles on their faces]
• Spoiler Cover: The second official compilation of their Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc playthrough features Dan and Byakuya standing over Hifumi's bloody corpse, spoiling his death for anybody who hasn't seen the entire playthrough.
• Spoiler Title: The official snippet channel Grump Clips uploaded a joke from the Super Mario 3D World playthrough where Dan tells the "Footprints in the Sand" poem with Sasquatch in place of Jesus, where the punchline is that Sasquatch responds to the man's question about why Sasquatch's footprints disappeared during tough times by just roaring and screaming incoherently. The title of the clip quoted Sasquatch's scream, which ruined the surprise of the joke. After a lot of backlash, it was renamed to "Thank you, Sasquatch."
• Spoofed the Ironic Film Seriously:
  • Their Sonic and the Black Knight play-thru. The franchise has vacillated between melodramatic Totally Radical attempts at cool and goofy, winking-at-the-audience cheeriness. Since the Grumps are determined to torture Arin with as many Sonic games as humanly possible, they booted this entry up and are right away put on the back foot when it starts with Sonic falling from the sky surrounded by chili dogs. Most of the story consists of Sonic making stupid, irreverent jokes about everything that's going on and not taking anything seriously at all. The Grumps then have to try and top those stupid, irreverent jokes with even more stupid, irreverent jokes and take the Excuse Plot even less seriously than the game itself does. At times, they seem to be straining themselves to outdo the script.
  Sonic: [To an obnoxious talking sword] I guess you're not the sharpest tool in the shed, huh?
  Arin: D-DID SONIC JUST SMASH MOUTH HIM?!
  • Their playthrough of ATASHINORIRI makes fun of its obviously low-quality artwork and anticlimactic endings, among other things, as if the visual novel was meant to be unironic. Never do they bring up that it was designed to win a "Worst Visual Novel Ever" contest.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Happens "in-universe" when Arin takes over for Danny on the Rogue Legacy playthrough on Steam Train.
  Arin: I'll kill that motherfucker. Shoot him in his face. Taking over 2/3rd's of the fuckin' Game Grumps channel. [I don't] I don't approve!
• Stay in the Kitchen: Invoked by Arin in "Mickey Mousecapade" while acting like an edgy AVGN rip off.
• Stealth Pun: In one episode, when they were fighting the self-named Mr. Dooter in a Kirby Game, this happens.
  Jon: What did this guy ever do to us!? Literally, he just dazzled us with enchanting-
  Arin: Hey, hey. What did this guy ever dooter us?
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Jon gets a case of this during the Donkey Kong Country 2 playthrough. Due to having low lives, by part 9, Jon starts to get fed up with Arin dying at crucial points. It reaches the point where Jon confiscates his controller and plays for both characters.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy:
  • Arin and Jon respectively; They both love to joke around at the expense of whatever they're playing, but Arin tends to stay focused on their progress while it's not at all uncommon for Jon to run off on a wild tangent or randomly burst into song. Less so with Arin and Danny, who both tend to focus on whatever they're doing while simultaneously running their usual Seinfeldian Conversations.
  • When Arin notices that sampling remixes]] usually don't have many samples from him, Jon reasons that it's because Arin's the more stoic one, specifically calling him the Straight Man.
  • During their Aladdin playthrough, they question whether their dynamic is more like a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine. ...or they would, if they could remember its name.
• Stupidly Long Filler Sound': According to Dan, long "Eh"s are his father's Verbal Tic. He is shown to be telling the truth when he plays a recorded message from his dad. This gets played with in certain episodes.
  Dan(impersonating his dad): I'm happy. I'm feeling eehhhhhhh
  Arin(Joining in):eehhhhhhhh
• Stylistic Suck:
  • "Grep." Grep Animated has Jon and Arin animated as bowling pins with no lip movement.
  • Their commercials for real Grump products are full of this. Their commercials for non-Grump products (Like Crunchyroll or the Shovel Knight amiibo), though more "refined", still feature deliberately bad and/or over-the-top acting.
  • Arin voices most of the Mickey Mousecapades episode as a parody of terrible The Angry Video Game Nerd ripoffs who think being funny equates to swearing heaps and making poop jokes. The jokes themselves are atrocious, but Danny can't stop laughing due to Arin's delivery of them.
• Subliminal Seduction:
  • Typing of the Dead gets accused of this when it makes Jon and Arin repeatedly type self-deprecating phrases and sentences (like "I am foul" and "I wish that I had never been born").
  • Each Ghoul Grumps intro has some recording of Arin and/or Danny played in reverse after the main theme.
• Suckiness Is Painful: Arin has been known to slip into catatonia from a bad game, particularly Nickelodeon Guts, or having to endure the Iblis fight all over again with Shadow. (Woe betide Arin when he battles Iblis a third time as Silver...)
  Arin: [numb] I can't feel anything. Why would anyone like this game?
• Sudden Downer Ending: A mild example in the Batman playthrough: Arin, fed-up with constantly replaying the final level and failing against the Joker, silently quits the game without making any jokes or humorous outbursts.
• Suicide as Comedy:
  • Rugrats in Paris: The Movie's tie-in game was apparently so bad, that Arin shot himself. He succeeded in killing himself and is now a ghost.
  • Arin hangs himself due to how bad Teletubbies The Game is, complete with horrible gagging sounds. Dan shrugs it off and just keeps playing with the clouds.
• Supergroup:
  • Non-musical example: Any iteration of the core Grump cast has been filled with people that were already popular on the Internet prior to joining, starting with Arin and Jon (and a lesser extent Barry, as Jon's editor) and extending to both members of Ninja Sex Party (Danny and later Brian), Ross from his Newgrounds and YouTube animations, and Suzy for her fashion and arts and crafts videos on YouTube. Their previous editors, Matt and Ryan from SuperMega (and former work with Markiplier), have only padded the Grumps' supergroup status.
  • Adding to it even later, is Vernon one of the creators behind Hot Pepper Gaming.
• Super Gullible:
  • Danny is very susceptible to this. Sometimes he will catch on to when he's being fooled, but it doesn't take much to convince him otherwise.
  • He once fell for UPDOG.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Invoked in the Pokemon FireRed playthrough with the player character's name of "I never".
  Game text: I never scurried to the Pokemon Center, protecting the exhausted and fainted Pokemon from further harm...
• Sweeping the Table: Most episodes of "The Ten Minute Power Hour" begins with the guys finding some way of clearing their dinosaur toys and pencil-cup from the table to make room for their activities. Tactics include simply shoving them off, neatly putting them away, and animating the objects running off.

T-Y

• Tactical Suicide Boss: Discussed a few times by Dan (such as in the Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers 2 playthrough) who would comment on that fact that some bosses literally give the player the means to kill them.
• Take That!: Has its own page.
• Take That, Audience!: With particularly bad games, Arin/Jon cuss out the mischievous person who donated it. (Blues Brothers)
  Arin: Carol Sitz, FUCK you!
  Barry's Edit: Dearest Carol, I am afraid I must refuse your most munificent gifts at this juncture in time. Please accept my sincerest apologies. Warm regards, Arin. P.S. FUCK YOU
• The Talk:
  • Arin and Danny both discuss how they were given it in Part 14 of Super Mario 64. Most notable part: Arin's parents did such a bad job explaining homosexuality that he thought he was gay for a few years afterwards since he liked to kiss his father.
  • In Super Mario Maker he reveals that their exact line when he asked was "Someone who kisses boys." His response: "So mommy's gay?"
• Tantrum Throwing:
  • Arin audibly hurls his controller to the floor in Part 20 of Sonic '06, then slams the door without uttering a word.
  • Jon has one in Family Feud where Arin enters "C D Player" as an answer and the game accepts it as a Remote Control Car.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: In the first episode of Guild Grumps, the other Grumps deliberately goof around when they're in World of Warcraft; during a Confession Cam, Arin admits as much and says it's payback for all the times Ross has screwed with them.
  Arin: If he can't take it, then he shouldn't dish it out. Oh shit! Hear that, Ross? Yo, I'm reality show-backtalking you, dog! What're you gonna say now? He'll never see this...until it's up. So he won't be able to rebuttal.
• Tastes Like Feet:
  • Danny says this word for word about blue cheese in Super Mario Sunshine Episode 45.
  • Directly referenced in their Fire Red playthrough, episode 59, when Danny says coffee tastes like dirt, then butts, then feet.
• Temporary Substitute: Throughout September 2013, Arin temporarily replaced Dan on Steam Train. This was reflected in the intro by having Dan shot in the head by Arin (ending the song abruptly), who then threatens Ross at gunpoint to finish the song. This happened again during the holiday season in the same year, when Steam Train was renamed to Steam Sleigh and the usual intro song was changed to Jingle Bells with more appropriate lyrics.
• Tempting Fate:
  • At the end of Goof Troop episode 3, the Grumps say they'll unlock a gate on-screen in the next episode; Jon accidentally unlocks it while the camera's off. To make up for it, they promise to unlock the last gate of episode 4 at the beginning of episode 5. Jon immediately unlocks said door, at which point he curses himself and the video is cut short.
  • This exchange in the pirate ship on Goof Troop.
    Jon: I'll keep one grappling hook.
    Arin: Oh God, we don't need it though. [enters next room, which requires two grappling hooks] It's gonna be da-
    Jon: Wow, you ever heard of that word? What's it called? I-RON-NEE.
  • Jon lamenting that he's winning Vs Grumps again, because Arin is "playing like a grey ape." (NBA Jam)
    [Arin immediately sinks 3-pointer]
    Arin: WOULD GREY APES MAKE THAT SHOT?!! I DON' FUCKIN' T'INK SOOOOOOO!!!"
  • During their playthrough of Donkey Kong Country, Arin plows through most of Tanked Up Trouble, all the while insisting that he won't die. What happens near the end of the level? He dies, and Jon finishes the level for him.
  • Jon professing that he "grew up" playing Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, and growing weary with Arin's ineptitude. At last, he takes the controls and proceeds to lose all of his remaining lives, scream at an obnoxious Kloak (SHUT UP!!), and claim he doesn't remember the game being so hard. Meanwhile, Arin kicks back in quiet victory, and you can practically hear him munching popcorn.
    Jon: [dies] Ok, they've... really gotta fix the physics engine on that.
    [a minute later]
    Jon: I think what's been making it so difficult is I haven't been able to use Dixie. She makes everything so much fucking easier... [Dixie falls to her death] OH GOD
    [the same video...]
    Jon: I know what's gonna happen! [Arin's] gonna pick it up and, like, squander our life on a porcupine or something! [falls in a pit and dies, screaming like a little girl].
  • Jon is actually feeling pumped at the start of the Shadow campaign in Sonic '06.
    Jon: So far it seems different."
    [Shadow stands horizontally on a dune buggy]
    Jon: Ho ho noooo. This soon? This already?
  • Jon complains about the close-quarters field map in Chivalry, so Arin suggests dueling on the elevator. Guess how Arin dies.
  • Arin takes over for Jon in Mega Man 7, calling him on his incompetent playing. He then calls down Rush, and then jumps over Rush into a spike pit.
  • During Donkey Kong's Crash Course, Jon compliments himself on having gotten pretty far on Course 1 and then crashes immediately after saying so.
    Jon: I'm doing really good.
    Arin: Yeah you are. You're really-
    [Crash]
    Arin: Okay. Protip: Don't get proud of yourself!
  • During the finale episode of Skyblazer, as Arin begins the fight against the Final Boss, Danny attempts to end the episode, but is cut off by Arin saying "No, fuck that! I'm not going to take 10 minutes on this bitch!" Observant viewers will note there is still 15 minutes left of the runtime of the episode...
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Given the sheer amount of dialogue in these shows it's bound to happen
    Arin: We've never slept together, have we?
  • When playing Jeopardy! with Suzy's Mii and falling way into the red
    Danny: I'm blowing it for Suzy.
    Arin: Dude, don't say it like that!
  • Jon had another one in Mega Man 7
    Jon: Man it's really hard to get it in there.
    [immediate childish snickering by both Jon and Arin]
• That One Boss: invoked
  • In their case, Silver and Iblis. It generally takes the Grumps roughly 15 minutes to beat either of them each time, for all the wrong reasons.
  • They seem to have a problem with Freeze Man, Turbo Man, and Doctor Wily.
    Arin: Man it's a shit strategy that your best is to get hit by an attack that does the least damage.
• That One Level: Jon thinks of Donkey Kong Country's Poison Pond as this.
• That Reminds Me of a Song: The two have a tendency to break out singing at random intervals during their videos, and in one memorable case while playing Godzilla: Kaijuu Daikessen, an improvised rap session. It's revealed in an episode of Jeopardy that Jon was a musical theatre major in college. With Dan having taken over for Jon as the Not-So-Grump, this still takes place.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Arin says "That makes me angry" when talking about how he couldn't play as who he wanted to in Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Invoked by Jon when he performs his Belmont's Limit Break by nanana-ing "Vampire Killer", when playing Castlevania: Judgment in Game Grumps versus.
• Third-Person Person: They refer to their own web shows and Accounts as such.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • The beginning of the Sonic '06 playthrough begins with Jon saying "Oh no". It's even the title of the episode.
  • The Dennis the Menace title card begins with a voice clip of Dennis shouting "Hey Mr. Wilsooooon!" followed by Danny letting out a worried "Oh my God..."
  • Play With the Teletubbies begins Danny whimpering and mumbling "o-oh... n-no..."
  • Silent Hill 4: The Room has Danny doing this again, not necessarily due to the quality of the game, but how much he despises horror games for their scare value.
  • The fight against Sans in their Undertale playthrough is made of this.
    Ross: Is that some Megalovania I'm hearing? We are in trouble, boyo!
• A Threesome Is Hot: Danny memorably discusses this during Super Mario Sunshine, how he was friends with a lesbian couple and he was always hopeful he'd be invited to join one. This led to him being invited to an orgy (which he didn't go through with).
• Time Skip: Between dropping the game off and picking it up again, though we don't notice. Though in the playthrough of Crayon Shin-chan they claim to have put the game down long enough to learn Japanese.
• Tin-Can Telephone: In a short advertising The Merch, the Grumps' telephone is shown to be a cup with the Jon face shown at the top of the article on it.
• Title Drop: Amazing Island.
  Danny: What's that, Arin, what's that?
  Arin: It's an island! It's looks...
  Together: AMAAAAZIIIING!
• Toilet Humor:
  • Arin loves his burps, but Jon just finds them disgusting.
  • In contrast, two episodes (from Yoshi's Island, Sonic '06 and Mario Party 8) had Jon farting and Arin laughing himself silly.
  • This video is a good sampling of the show's Toilet Humor.
  • Arin spends most of the Mickey Mousecapades video very descriptively comparing the game to various types of feces and diarrhea, as part of his intentionally uninspired, over-the-top parody of bad internet game reviewers.
• Too Desperate to Be Picky: In the "10 Minute Power-Hour" episode "Making TIE DYE!", Ryan gets sent out to find tie dye materials. He ends up wandering for a while, becoming confused, hungry and thirsty. He digs out of trash-cans, spends some time looking for extremely cheap food including a mention of a homeless shelter, and manages to end up lost in the desert, where he resorts to drinking from a waterfall and eating leaves off of a tree.
• Too Dumb to Live: They make fun of the fact that Boggy Bear, in Episode 17 of Banjo-Kazooie, ate an item (A Jiggy) that was the exact same thing he's giving out (twice) and that his children have.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Chicken Alfredo, Monster energy drinks, and Snickers all recur frequently.
  • Danny really, really, really likes Skittles.
• Trade Snark:
  • Done by Arin after the Title Drop in "Home Alone".
  • Crops up again in Sneak King:
    Dan: Arin, Jesus, do you wanna deliver the BK Joe (restricted) coffee or not?
• Trailers Always Lie: Discussed in episode 2 of You Don't Know Jack, in regards to the entire trailer for Snow Dogs being based around an out-of-context dream sequence.
• Troll:
  • In the merchandise video, when Jon wets one of the display shirts and rubs it across the table as a Sham Wow parody, Arin convinces him that he didn't get it on camera. Jon's reaction says it all.
  • They both describe Ninja Brian, and to a lesser extent Ross, as such when playing Super Mario 64:
    Dan: It's going to be very difficult for me when Ross and Brian are together more often, because Brian frigging just thrives on annoying me, and Ross—
    Arin: Yeah! That is literally his food.
    Dan: It's not just me. It's everyone he loves in his life. Like, his wife? I mean, my god, my GOD, she must have the patience of a saint... or just like no other options because I would have left him years ago!
    Arin: True, truth to that. I'd probably just kill him in his sleep.
• Twist Ending: The end of Megaton Punch. Literally.
• Two Gamers on a Couch: Literally, as evidenced by a picture Jon takes during episode 20 of Pokemon Emerald.
• Unreliable Canon: They are known for this. JonTron and Egoraptor have said that Arin's "suicide" at the end of their Rugrats in Paris: The Movie episode is canon and Arin is now a ghost. This is especially confusing since Arin has killed himself in other videos since, including Teletubbies and 2 episodes of Table Flip.
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Peen", "dingle-dangle", "wee-wee" are all often used to refer to a man's penis. The less unusual "wiener" is used as well by Arin.
  • Arin uses "completing," "concluding," "finishing," and "pre-ing" as euphemisms for orgasming, largely because Suzy hates it.
  • In the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney playthrough, when Wendy Oldbag tells Phoenix and Maya not to enter her "employee area," Dan jokes that "employees" is what she calls her dookies.
  • Their Super Mario Galaxy 2 playthrough is the first one to be recorded under "special conditions" except Arin warns Danny that YouTube will demonetize them if they actually name the event in question. Danny gets around this by codenaming the pandemic "the Backstreet Boys reunion tour."
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Beating the Final Boss in the Shadow campaign of Sonic 06 is completely disregarded for a conversation about The X-Files, the Jersey Devil, and what scares people on a primal basis. It's not until the Closing Credits are about to run that the two realize what's going on.
  • Danny doesn't make a big deal about Arin committing suicide in the Teletubbies episode until the very last minute.
  • In the Doki Doki Literature Club! episode, during the conversation with Yuri, the Grumps somehow don't even seem to notice a poster of Sayori's suicide on the wall... at all.
• Uranus Is Showing:
  • An early episode with Jon had them making the classic "Uranus is a gas giant" joke.
  • In We Love Katamari, one of the planets they're assigned to create is called "Pencil Uranus". Danny responds with "Pencil your anus!? I will do no such thing!"
• Verbal Tic:
  • Arin has a habit of saying "Fucking..." before his sentences, especially if he's joking around. In the Jeopardy playthrough alone he says "fucking" almost 150 times.
  • Jon likes to say 'legitimately' or 'legit'.
  • They both like using the word "squander" a lot.
  • Arin and Jon both like using "ass" as a kind of adjective enhancer, such as "sad-ass bear child", "Donkey-ass Kong", and "Michael Jordan-ass face". They do it so much that somebody made a compilation video... that runs for 23 minutes.
  • Danny has actually repeatedly acknowledged that he uses the word "totally" far too frequently.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: invoked Discussed by Arin when he explains why he never really got into The Office (US): the show depicted characters like Jim and Pam as cool, snarky, and relatable, but Arin finds them too mean to be sympathetic.
• Very Special Episode: Episode 19 of Wind Waker HD was taken up by Danny's very serious and heartfelt story about his struggles with OCD when he was younger, how it lead to some serious depression, and how he managed to overcome them. The fan reaction was overwhelmingly positive, to the point where in a later episode Danny did a special recording thanking everyone for their responses and apologized for not being able to respond to them all individually.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Occasionally Discussed by the Grumps.
  • Exploited by Arin during Shadow of the Colossus part 27, when Arin gets Danny talking about how much he loves Agro the horse immediately before a cutscene in which the horse dies. Agro doesn't actually die, though
    Danny: God damn it! Why did we just have a conversation—did you just have that conversation of, like, why we love him, to get me all fucking, like, "Yeah we do love him"? Oh, God damn it!
    Arin: No... yes. I know storytelling.
    Danny: I'm so fucking sad right now...
  • In the finale episode of Super Metroid, the Grumps reunite with the baby Metroid, now humongous. They call it "Little Metroid Buddy" and gush over how it briefly follows them. They are enraged when it sacrifices itself in the final battle and unleash their Revenge Rainbow Lasers upon the Mother Brain.
• Viewers Are Geniuses:
  • Arin during their Goof Troop playthrough begins talking about the fourth dimension, and preemptively admonishes the viewers for saying time is the fourth dimension, when he meant a fourth spatial dimension.
  • Much of episode 10 of Emerald is spent discussing relativistic physics, faster than light travel, and paradoxes.
  • The two of them spend half of episode 11 of Kirby Super Star arguing about theoretical international economics.
• Violation of Common Sense: In the third Goof Troop boss battle, Jon and Arin throw stalactites at each other to trigger non-lethal Mercy Invincibility to avoid the bosses' attacks.
• Visual Pun:
  • A bit of trivia that turned into a Running Gag — because of course it did — during the Sonic Boom playthrough was that echidna penises have four heads. According to Arin, at least. One cutscene towards the end happens to frame Knuckles' tail from an... unfortunate angle. Dan asks Kevin for a slow-mo replay of that scene; said replay has been edited to add photos of his head, Arin's, and two of the other Game Grumps stars at the end of it.
  • In the Steam Train playthrough of Leisure Suit Larry 6, Danny and Ross ask Kevin (and Barry when he subs in for an absent Kevin) to cover the naked men in the shower with jeans. At one point we see a man with DNA strands covering his lower half, and at another two mens' butts are covered by Gene Wilder's face.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • Jon and Arin take tons of cracks at each other, both serious and joking, and both laugh it off. Averted wth Dan and Arin, as they're similar enough in temperament to avoid any major clashes. However, both of them have this dynamic with Ross.
  • Their t-shirt ads purposely portray them as this.
  • Dan and Arin discuss this on episode 8 of Sparkster:
    Dan: I think [we insult each other] because we love each other more, and we show love in the classic brotherly fashion of telling each other to go fuck themselves.
• Vocal Dissonance:
  • Meta Knight dubbed by Jon in Kirby Super Star #5
  • Whenever the Grumps play any sort of "Visual Novel"-type game (such as Sakura Spirit, Go! Go! Nippon!, or Trauma Center), they tend to narrate while playing, and generally let most of the cast fall into this. Ross is particularly notorious for doing this.
• Voice of the Legion:
  • They attempt to do one together during part nine of their Link to the Past playthrough.
  • Jon has this accompanied with Glowing Eyes of Doom after he gets possessed by the caller in their "Grump" and "Not So Grump" T-shirt advert.
• Waif-Fu: Discussed in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #1. Jon feels it can get silly and ruin immersion, Arin thinks it's cool.
• Waxing Lyrical: Arin takes the reigns from Jon... only to drunkenly try swimming up a waterfall of lava.
  Jon: WELLTHENWHYWOULDYOUTAKEITFROMETHEN?!! Why would take it from me in the middle of the— of the death swamp?
  Arin: Because... because I go walking in my sleep!
  • "Up up down down left right left right B A Start! But I shouldn't have to tell you, 'cuz you should have it down to an art!" (Sonic 06 #44) This is actually from a song by Renard; Jon gives props to him in another video.
  • invoked When he gets lost in Link: The Faces of Evil, Arin starts quoting "Where Do We Go from Here?" by Jamiroquai (although he thinks the title is "That's the Way Love Goes") and can't seem to stop. Eventually Dan cuts in:
    Dan: What the fuck you talkin' about? I mean, these are song lyrics but I don't know what they are.
• We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties: Occasionally a game they're playing (usually happens with NES games) will glitch up, resulting in either pushing through, or requiring a reset.
• Weaksauce Weakness: In the Gundam: Battle Assault 2 Vs., Danny steamrolls his way through the first few matches with Big Zam, a playable boss character. Arin finally manages to make a comeback, and how does he best him in the final round? By getting his character behind Big Zam. Big Zam can't attack Arin's character as easily, even though it has some moves that work from behind, and to turn it around requires a special move-esuqe input command that Danny doesn't know.
• Weapon Specialization: Invoked often.
  • In Mega Man 7, they typically preferred the Thunder Bolt, only switching out due to either a lack of ammo, Rush Coil, or for Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. After gaining Rush Adapt, it became their new default.
  • In Kirby Super Star, Arin's favorite Kirby character (and weapon) is Poppy Bros. Jr for his Bomb ability. Jon uses Ninja whenever he has the option, and also is partial to Hammer.
  • In the Shovel Knight co-op, Dan immediately falls in love with the Infinidagger, which is a version of the Propeller Dagger that goes until Dan hits something. Whether his love of the weapon is despite or because of the sheer number of times Danny kills himself with it is up for debate.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: In talking about the Trope Namer:
  Jon: They're like, 'Love!' Or is it, are they like 'Fire!' 'Water!' 'Wind!' 'Love!' And it's like, Bitch, love ain't a element! Love ain't even a real—
  Arin: It's heart.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Brought up briefly by Arin in the first episode of Doom (2016) when he comments on how the imps he's assigned to kill might have families back home that are unaware of their relative's predicament.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?:
  • From Pokémon FireRed Part 17: Milton's Milton Factory.
    • And now, in animated form.
  • Also, from Super Mario Sunshine part 26, the Skrussian owner of Sloan's Ice Cream.
• When Life Gives You Lemons...: From Part 69 of Sonic '06:
  Arin: Well, you know, when life gives you lemons...
  Jon: What, Arin? What?
  Arin: Uh, you kill yourself.
• What's a Henway?: During their playthrough of The Goonies II, Arin keeps bugging Dan to check the level for "updog." Eventually, Dan asks "What is updog?" and Arin is so elated that the prank worked that he forgets to actually deliver the "Not much, what's up with you?" punchline. They bring this up again in a Super Mario Maker 2 episode, when playing a level Ross named "The SS Updog," and Arin pulls another fast one on Dan.
  Arin: [The updog joke] was really popular on Grabon, though.
  Dan: Grabon?
  Arin: [cracking up] Grabon deez nuts, dude! [laughs hysterically]
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Every level of Jackal ends with the military commandos pointing to a map and saying "Here?" Arin speculates about them getting lost in the wrong war as a result, while Danny speculates the game takes place on Mars.
• Who's on First?: In a Wheel of Fortune episode, Arin reads off the category — "What are you doing?" — and Danny thinks Arin's asking him to spin when it's Arin's turn.
  Arin: "What are you doing?"
  Danny: That's you, homie. Oh, that's the category.
  Arin: [laughs]
  Danny: It's like, "I don't know man, I'm waiting for you!"
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Over time, it's become pretty clear that Jon has a strong fear of spiders.
• With Friends Like These...:
  Jon: You know... I took in what you said and I don't care.
  Arin: Glad to know I have friends like you.
• Worf Had the Flu
  • Jon won almost all his Vs challenges after the first one, where he legitimately had controller problems. He also didn't do too well in the second round of Brawl matches, but he claimed this was because he was tired.
  • Jon initially did terribly in Clayfighter, but at the start of the final round, he admitted that he didn't actually know the controls to the game. Arin did let Jon beat him up while explaining the controls in the final match.
• Word Salad Lyrics:
  • The Grumps indulge in some a capella, which is often more entertaining than the game they're playing.
  • Non-musical example: Arin's nonsensical texts to Dan about The Social Network.
• World of Ham: Every single live action sketch is like this.
• Wrench Wench: Discussed in Biker Mice From Mars regarding the female mechanic. Arin and Danny both agree that girls who can fix cars are hot.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: After a long time of leaving Knurtt alone in the daycare, constantly forgetting to pick him up, Arin takes him out for a single battle...only to put him right back in the daycare afterwards. They imagine Knurtt getting really excited about the battle too.
  Arin: [as Knurtt] Yeah, I'm pumped! This adventure's gonna sta— hey, what are you doing?
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: In the Heart of Darkness playthrough, Danny takes great pleasure in laughing at Arin's breakdown, causing him to yell "Danny, PLEASE!" in despair. Given that Arin generally only calls him "Dan" (or "Daniel" when pretending to be mad), the Not-So-Grump realizes just how seriously the game is affecting him and apologizes. While still laughing hysterically.
• You Can't Fight Fate With Bubbles!: Courtesy of Danny, from the Bubble Bobble Game Grumps versus.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Arin has a much more violent version of this in part 32 of Super Mario Sunshine. After repeatedly failing the pachinko level, he finally gets all the Red Coins, but just as he is about to get the Shine Sprite, the game glitches out and sends Arin falling to his death.
  Arin: OH! OH MY GOD! ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
  Danny: What happened?!
  Arin: WHAT HAPPENED?!?!
• You Need a Breath Mint: Implied in Super Mario 64 part 18.
  Arin: I just need to lean away from you for a while.
  Danny: Are you kidding? I do it instinctively every time you open your mouth.
• You Say Tomato: "You know, potato, potarrruh."
• Your Mom:
  • At the beginning of the first One Piece Mansion video:
    Jon: "One Piece" like the anime?
    Arin: No, like your mom.
  • Jon gives quite an epic one by accident in the Sonic '06 play through.

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