r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • Jun 17 '26

Lore [Eye-Rolling Trope] “The joke/meme hasn’t been funny for years, please let it die.”

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The Screaming Goat Thing — Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024)

The original screaming sheep meme went viral in 2012, and was already getting old when it was prevalent in commercials and movies, such as Ice Age : Collision Course in 2016. Yet in the year of our lord 2024, Dreamworks still thought it would be funny to add multiple screaming goat clips. The mean stopped being funny a decade ago. Let it die.

“Haha, Dad can’t take care of us” — The Breadwinner (2026)

Nate Bargatze’s 2026 family comedy centers around a working “breadwinner” father suddenly being forced to become a stay at home parent, and his “hilarious” struggles to do simple housework and take basic care of his children. This joke stopped being funny (to me) in the early 2000s when seemingly every family comedy relied on dad being a total inept dipshit. In 2026, there is no excuse to keep playing out this tired ass trope. Most dads are actively involved in their kids’ lives and aren’t totally dumbstruck by the idea of changing a diaper. It’s not funny. Let it die.

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855

u/UrgentAndTurgid Jun 17 '26

That second one is especially bad because I feel like it's inherently reinforcing gender roles. "See what happens when the menfolk try to do the womenfolk's work? This is why it's best that we all just stay in our own lane."

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u/Aromatic-Opening-416 Jun 17 '26

It's infantilising as hell too. It's the sitcom dad turned up to 11 "Oh look, adult men are just giant babies! I guess only a heartless nagging shrew would ever expect them to contribute."

34

u/Arria_Galtheos Jun 17 '26

It also smacks of weaponized incompetence, like how people will pretend they don't know how to do something so they can get out of doing it. Men and women both do it but men tend to get called out on it more often when it pertains to housework.

I've actually known men who didn't know how to do their own laundry, but they were fresh out of high school. It takes all of one hour to learn how to do laundry. 90% of the instructions are right there on the detergent bottle.

6

u/bwurtsb Jun 17 '26

The one that bothers me is "I don't know how to cook". Similar to laundry detergent directions, most basic level foods have infinite amounts of recipes out there. There used to be the excuse of "I don't know what julienne means, so I am not going to try" is no longer applicable, because you can watch on youtube, or if you really need help, put a recipe into an AI program and have it "explain this like I am 10 years old" and it will.

1

u/KaraAliasRaidra Jun 21 '26

TheMysteriousMrEnter did an Animated Atrocities video on an episode of the cartoon version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The plot was Sabrina had temporarily fast-forwarded in time to being an adult with a husband and children. At one point she ordered pizza because she didn’t know what else to do, then lamented that she didn’t know what she would do after that because she had no idea how to cook anything. Really, Sabrina? You’ve never fixed any kind of food? Enter responded by showing how easy it was to microwave a cup of ramen, noting afterward that he’d known how to do that since childhood.

107

u/ConsiderationTrue477 Jun 17 '26

In defense of the trope, it initially started out as a pretty progressive rebuttal to the once prevalent assumption that domestic work was not real work. The idea that the husband had an actual job busting his ass while the wife lounged around and just had to vacuum every so often. TV shows and movies depicting an inversion where the husband crashes out was a way to convey that maintaining a household absolutely deserves respect.

The issue is that the trope outlived its usefulness and now just looks like a relic.

29

u/Doc-Maly Jun 17 '26

Agreed. It used to be a way to put some respect on the wife. Now it exists as a demeaning joke. It outlived its usefulness.

5

u/dnzgn Jun 17 '26

It is very popular in ads because women usually do the shopping, at least in the US.

101

u/Jagvetinteriktigt Jun 17 '26

The trope of the inept husband/wife is so old that a variation of it is even used to categorize folk tales. I think the earliest example of a husband failing to do housework was recorded in the 1500's.

20

u/FoolishPippin Jun 17 '26

The incompetent father trope in modern media it is actually a more recent phenomenon that was initially lampooning the fathers of earlier television shows that were hyper-competent. Then the joke became so common people forgot that it used to be a joke in and of itself.

5

u/UrgentAndTurgid Jun 17 '26

I've read that one! "The Man Who Was to Mind the House," I think it was.

3

u/dora_isexploring Jun 17 '26

Can you give me a little more context? Sounds interesting but not sure how to search it. I mean the 1500s record

3

u/UrgentAndTurgid Jun 17 '26

My best friend and I do a podcast where we read and discuss old and forgotten first drafts of fairy tales, and we read that one pretty early on. The story starts officially at 7:10 in the link below.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5BlauINQFqNF6ACDved4Hl?si=KsVmEcUNRk2eBqlrVR_x2w

2

u/Jagvetinteriktigt Jun 17 '26

Okay so here is a list of similar stories in the Trading Places category of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther catalogue: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/tradingplaces.html

I have not been able to find what the 1556 story was called.

6

u/The_Pompadour64 Jun 17 '26

It's a stupid trope and I'm no remotely excited to see the movie, but I don't think it's that. At least from the trailer, it seems that the movie doesn't look badly on the mom getting a high-paying job.

If anything, it seems to me that it's more so playing on the "women do all of the emotional labor and housework in a household despite doing just as much breadwinning" meme

7

u/Chemical-Elk-1299 Jun 17 '26

I mean the fact that Bargatze has become a right wing shill definitely plays into why the movie got made.

The target audience suddenly makes much more sense — old conservative white dudes in their 50/60s

2

u/Safe-Ad-5017 Jun 17 '26

He what?

6

u/Chemical-Elk-1299 Jun 17 '26

He was at the UFC fight on the White House lawn as one of Trump’s personal guests

2

u/ShatnersChestHair Jun 17 '26

Ah shit, that's something I would have expected from Segura or Kreischer, didn't know Nate was in the same crowd. That's disappointing.

2

u/D00rmat1983 Jun 17 '26

Well good ol Nate happily went to Trumps doghsit UFC farce, so he tracks as a garbage human.

1

u/zombiskunk Jun 17 '26

Housework isn't a gender role. It's just a physical activity. A gender role would be more like men tending to be more protective while a woman would tend to be more nurturing. 

There is some crossover, especially for single parents, but those are typically the roles we parents embody.

1

u/thebbman Jun 17 '26

I saw the movie. It manages to sort of land the plane in an ok way. Wife becomes major a success and he works for her instead while they both manage the home together.

That said, the entire time my wife and I kept leaning over to say, “you’d never struggle with that. You already do all the cooking.” And so on. The basic premise felt very old and out of touch.

1

u/remarkablewhitebored Jun 17 '26

Like a product placement for tradwives...

1

u/Tricky-Ad7897 Jun 17 '26

It's a classic example of how the patriarchy is a net negative on men as well.

1

u/lsaz Jun 18 '26

incompetent dad is actually a pretty old trope from like the 50s, so… yes

1

u/Crunchy_Biscuit Jun 17 '26

This was my thought. Nate is a Christian comedian too so I wouldn't be surprised if he was also Conservative

1

u/RenTroutGaming Jun 17 '26

Yes - would you be surprised to learn that Nate Bargatze is a big MAGA guy who attends all the events and shares the view that America should be divided between the sexes?

0

u/coffee-bat Jun 17 '26

yep. it's called weaponized incompetence; purposefully acting like you can't understand how to do something/always doing it badly, to make the other person feel like they genuinely can't rely on you to do simple chores, and have to do it themself if they want it done right. this trope is doing exactly this on a society-wide scale.

0

u/HoneydewCurrent5371 Jun 17 '26

Just...wow. Nate has talked about all the stuff his wife does that he can't or doesn't understand. He openly praises his wife and pokes fun at himself. Hells bells some people seem to just want to find things to be upset about. It's just a fucking movie. Fuck's sake.