Characters / American Dad! - Smith Family

(aka: American Dad Stan Smith)

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• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Stan and Francine often display this; Steve even cites them as the main reason he didn't want to bring his new girlfriend to his house in "Dr. Klaustus":
  Steve: I feel like I can't bring anyone around here 'cause Dad's a lunatic! And if he doesn't drive them away, Mom's food will probably kill them!
• Ax-Crazy: All of them to a certain degree (minus Jeff) are supposed to be the heroes, but it's shown they are very harmful towards others. Flanderization certainly doesn't help this case.
• Badass Family: Though their combined competence level varies, each of the family members have done extremely badass things either on their own or as a team.
• Bad Reason to Do Good: Another shared family trait.
  • In "Into the Woods", Stan encounters an old friend he remembers betraying, and goes out of his way to "fix" the man's life. It's quickly made clear that this is less about Stan wanting to make amends, and more about Stan needing to convince himself that he's a "good person".
  • In "One Fish, Two Fish", Hayley goes to extreme lengths to help Klaus attain citizenship — not because she cares about him, but because she wants to prove wrong a friend who told her she only cares about herself.
• Butt-Monkey: The family tends to suffer a lot every episode. Luckily, even in the moments where a family member dies or loses a limb, the damage is never permanent.
• Conservative Dad, Liberal Mom: Stan Smith is stereotypical 2000s era Republican who staunchly supports Bush and Reagan, while Francine Smith displays more liberal tendencies, in how she calls out certain countries for their treatment of women and defends the right of gay marriage.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: Francine is a bubbly housewife who wears a pink dress, while her daughter Hayley is a confrontational, rebellious Tank-Top Tomboy who always wears jeans.
• Flanderization: Just like with the Griffins, everyone has had their traits greatly exaggerated overtime. They've either became stupider (Stan), jerkier (Steve and Roger), crazier (Klaus) or all the above (Francine)!
• Full-Body Disguise: In “Can I Be Frank With You”, Francine completely disguised herself as a CIA agent named Frank to spend more time with Stan
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Each member of the Smith family (except Jeff) often displays dangerously sociopathic behavior when given the opportunity, having destroyed private property or beaten, killed, tortured, raped, or tormented enemies or just bystanders for the most arbitrary of reasons without remorse afterwards.
• Hypocrite: In "Idiot Rich", the family (minus Hayley) claim that Jeff does nothing but mooch off them. But after Jeff receives a large amount of money, they're all too quick to try and mooch off him.
• Jerkass: Stan and Roger. While the other Smiths are capable of being utterly repulsive, self-centered jerks for their own personal gain at times, both Stan and Roger are the most likely to be acting this way.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: On their better days. Deep down, the Smiths do still love each other despite their flaws and will have each other's backs in the end.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Especially common in later seasons, which their proneness to Aesop Amnesia only makes more apparent. Often times, whenever they seem like they have moments of generosity and kindness for others or one another, it's actually for selfish, malicious or outright abusive reasons.
• Jock Dad, Nerd Son: Stan's the jock dad, Steve's the nerd son. Stan constantly tries to help his son with various "masculine" activities to avoid letting Steve repeat the same poor experience Stan had in high school.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: Of the six main family members, they can be divided into three groups:
  • Nice: Steve and Francine, particularly in earlier seasons before Flanderization kicked in. Steve is generally a good-natured and friendly guy (if occasionally obnoxious and bratty) and Francine is (usually) depicted as a loving wife and mother. Once he joined the family, Jeff can also be counted as "Nice", as he's a Nice Guy with no real corrupting qualities like the rest of the cast.
  • Mean: Stan and Roger, obviously. Both characters are massive jerks and Villain Protagonists who have no qualms about harming others or committing illegal acts to accomplish their goals (Roger out of malice and for fun, Stan out of stupidity and pig-headedness) and have fewer Pet the Dog moments than the rest of the family.
  • In-Between: Hayley and Klaus. The most Out of Focus members of the family; Hayley is very morally self-righteous but usually laid-back and friendly, while Klaus started off as a perverted jerk but Took a Level in Kindness as the show went on.
• Shared Signature Move: All members of the Smith family have used elbow drops when fighting or giving a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to anyone who antagonized them.
• Thicker Than Water: For all their abuse and cruelty towards each other, the show still makes a noticeable effort to portray the Smiths as a loving - if still very dysfunctional - family. For as many episodes as there are of them harming each other, there are also many episodes that show that, despite everything, they still care for each other.
• This Is Gonna Suck: On late seasons, the Smith family have grown to always expect that whoever new person they have to deal will be one of Roger's personas, and react with midly annoyance. This includes Roger, who teases the possibility to the Smiths.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Stan, Francine, Steve and Roger have all become significantly crueler and prone to harming others in later seasons.
• Unwitting Pawn: The majority of the family often find themselves the unknowing pawns of Roger's schemes.

The man of the house, a CIA agent later promoted to Deputy-Deputy Director. Although an extreme right-winger to the point of parody with a tendency to forget the lessons he's just learned, he still loves his family.

• Abusive Dad:
  • Stan openly admits to disagreeing with everything Hayley stands for even when he understands when they are right. On top of which, he literally made her middle name Dreamsmasher.
  • He constantly tries to raise Steve to be just like him, and despises the fact that his daughter is a liberal while his son is a geek instead of a jock or even a fairly normal kid. He's usually either neglectful of Steve or obsessive over any coming-of-age obstacle in his way, like getting his first kiss, learning about sex, or going to a school dance. It is even revealed once that Stan is threatened that Steve may one day become the man of the house, but is calmed down when he remembers that the true man engages in intercourse, and Steve is a hopeless virgin.
  • In "Failure is not a Factory-Installed Option", he concocts a perfect plan of revenge that includes having his family go broke, Steve losing a chance at sex because the repo men took the cars back, and Hayley selling her body so they can survive. On the ride home, Stan happily gloats about how good it feels to win while his family looks on with trauma.
  • His idea of shooting down Hayley's or Steve's beliefs is to fart on them (as shown in the first episode, as well as "The Missing Kink"), and giving Steve a charlie-horse for no reason (as seen in "Vacation Goo"). He once even wakes Steve up by scaring him in his dreams. The reaction is Steve jumping out of his window and twisting his arm.
• Acrofatic: Stan's got a rather large gut (although, he alternates between this and a hunky physique, depending on the episode), but doesn't stop him from doing handsprings and being a proficient CIA agent (though he sucks at free-running). The original intro has him perform several somersaults from the house doorway to enter his car through an open window.
• Action Dad: He is in the CIA as a field agent after all.
• Aesop Amnesia: A significant portion of the episodes' plots wouldn't be possible if Stan actually bothered to remember the dozens of times he learned that lying is wrong, to accept other groups such as gays and foreigners, to never listen to Roger's "advice", and to accept Steve and Hayley the way they are. It's even been lampshaded on more than one occasion that Stan is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes; Stan himself even acknowledges it (multiple times, no less):
  Stan: Lying is wrong! I'd know that if only I'd paid attention to anything that's ever happened to me before!
  
  Stan: There's something you should know about me by now, Roger. I don't learn lessons.
• Alliterative Name: Stan Smith.
• Amazon Chaser: Stan thinks it's hot when Francine discusses how she wants to kill someone and got an erection when Scarlett held him at gunpoint. He also got very turned on when Francine gained some muscles in "One-Woman Swole".
• Amusing Injuries: He suffers these and more often than not they're anus related. He has good butt insurance from Darkstar.
• Anti-Hero: Stan is the Pragmatic Hero at his best, and the Unscrupulous Hero at his worst.
• Assumed Win: His ego leads him to believe he will always win anything. In "Season's Beatings", he was convinced he'd be picked to play adult Jesus in the church's nativity play, on the grounds that he was "the most devout" member, only for Father Donovan to point out that he was unsuited due to being overweight.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Stan almost always wears his iconic blue suit.
• Big Beautiful Man: He fits in this tropes perfectly. He's tallest in the family, muscular (though it has been shown that he's slightly overweight), and there have been many women interested in him. Examples being episodes "Wife Insurance" and "When a Stan Loves a Woman"
• Big Eater: He has his moments. The episode "Anchorfran" had him binge-eating at Loco Larry's for several weeks (i.e, 16 burritos per day) to the point of developing intestinal blockage.
• Black Comedy Rape: When Stan was a boy, he molested his Catholic priest while away at a summer camp. And no, that wasn't a typo. He molested the priest. Which he casually reminisced about once. Though in Stan's words he claims he seduced the priest, and adds there was no actual fucking between them.
• The Bore: He has a habit of telling dull, boring stories that drag on and on. "The Never Ending Stories" shows the rest of the family hiding away rather than endure having to listen to them.
• Born in the Wrong Century:
  • It's been shown several times that Stan has wild west values and views (i.e, loves guns, has sexist views of women, is against non-heterosexual relationships, and believes that traditional masculinity must be publicly defined). In several cases, Stan is shown to dress like a cowboy or address the lifestyle. In "Familyland" he bases his clan around the Wild West as "Black Stan" and the "Italian Stallions". In "The Magnificent Steven" he forces Steve and his friends to be cowboys in order to prove their manhood.
  • Ironically, in "West to Mexico", where the series is reimagined as the wild west, Stan is actually out of his element because he possesses qualities that are unfit for the western lifestyle.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite his quirks, he seems to be very good at his job or at least competent enough to avoid being fired outright by Bullock.
• Calling Your Attacks: MEAT SLAP!
• Can't Take Criticism: The entire plot of "I Can't Stan You" revolves around this; within the episode, he ends up having everybody in his neighborhood, including his own family, deported to a roadside motel simply because they kept criticizing and insulting him. Multiple later episodes often show that criticism is one of the easiest ways to shake him up.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Oh my God!" He'll often say this whenever he learns a lesson in an episode.
  • Whenever he is caught off-guard when doing something bad as seen by others or when he narrowly avoids problems, he often says fast, "OOH!"
  • "What have I done?!"
• Caught Coming Home Late: Stan gets a three-fer. When he gets to the living room, Steve confronts him over having a black man pose as him at a CIA softball game. When he gets to the kitchen, Francine chews him out about the same thing. When he reaches the bathroom, he encountered a bruised-up Roger, who apparently got beat up by a taco.
• Character Development: He starts off the series as a Heteronormative Crusader, but by the time of "Daddy Queerest" he's a full gay rights supporter.
• Characterization Marches On: In the early seasons, Stan was clearly a parody an Bush-era republican. He was ultra conservative, he all but worshiped Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, he openly supported the War on Terror and he frequently conflicted with Hayley over her liberal beliefs. However, this was toned down significantly in later seasons of the show. He's still conservative but noticeably less so than when the series first started and, aside from an occasional reference to American politics, he doesn't really talk much about the modern Republican party or the state of the government.
• Commander Contrarian: On more than one occasion he has admitted that he's against anything Hayley supports, sometimes even immediately contradicting himself when she is agreeing with him.
• Competition Freak: He has a habit of taking any contest or sport too seriously, from ordering a member of the football team he was coaching to injure Steve, his own son, to ditching Francine when he believes she's holding him back during a race around the world.
• Control Freak: Many episode plots center around him trying to control every aspect of his family's lives and freaking out when they won't do what he says. One episode even finds him in Heaven trying to save his family from dying on Christmas day, and after nothing goes as he planned, he ends up storming into God's office with a heaven gun that can kill angels, holds god at gunpoint, and demands that he at least be able to go back to Earth to do it himself. Despite this, he still insists he doesn't try to control everything at first.
  God: Stan, you're holding a gun to God's head. I mean, I can't think of a better metaphor than this.
• Crazy-Prepared: He's hidden guns all over the house, and went to such lengths as having it completely sealed in cause of a flood. Unfortunately, he also sealed up the drain track underneath the house, leading to it being torn off its foundation when Langley is flooded during a hurricane.
• Cross Dresser: Doesn't hide from his family the fact that he wears panties and if it was socially acceptable, would wear mascara because it makes his eyes "pop like firecrackers".
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: When on his game, Stan is nearly unbeatable.
• Depending on the Artist: When being seen shirtless, Stan is either depicted as either being in shape or having a visible gut a-la Zapp Brannigan. Even in the intro, when Stan emerges from bed in just his underwear, he's noticeably chunkier in the original version.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Stan's attitude towards his family varies from "A Jerkass because he doesn't understand what he's doing wrong, and tries to fix it when he finds out" to "Manipulative Bastard who's so callous that he'll often put them through some horrible Evil Plan for some incredibly trivial/stupid reason".
    Stan: "Lying is wrong! I'd know that if I'd paid any attention to anything that has happened to me before!"
  • His attitude towards his family is dependent on who he's interacting with at the time: Hayley is either daddy's wayward grownup daughter who he tries to keep on the right (his) path, or the displaced trouble child he simply gives up on because they have nothing in common. Steve is both his school-stud son who has hidden geek qualities (in his mind's eye), or simply a shake of the head as to where he went wrong raising that boy. Francine is possibly his air-headed housewife who is slightly clueless as to what goes on in front of her, or his air-headed housewife whose rager past is contained by the suburban shell around her.
  • Stan's competence also varies from episode to episode. In some episodes he is something of a Bunny-Ears Lawyer, and despite his shortcomings is a somewhat competent agent whose stunts ultimately prove his worth, or a completely hopeless excess of a human being who is actually far less capable of surviving than his family.
  • In most episodes where the topic of religion comes up Stan is depicted as deeply and sincerely religious (albeit often with a comedic level of ignorance about his own faith) and the entire plot of "Dope and Faith" revolves around his fears that his atheist friend will go to Hell due to his lack of belief. In "May the Best Stan Win" on the other hand, Stan appears to have no belief in any sort of spiritual afterlife, planning to be cryogenically frozen after death.
• Determinator: Stan, at times, is so adamant about being right, that he absolutely refuses to admit defeat even in the face of overwhelming adversity. A good example occurs in "Less Money, Mo' Problems". Stan makes a bet with Jeff and Hayley— if Stan and Francine can survive for a month on Jeff's minimum-wage salary, Jeff and Hayley have to move out of the Smith's home. Mere days into their journey, Stan and Francine are living in a cheap car with only rice and potatoes to eat. Francine gives up and goes back home, but Stan continues the bet. He's eventually hit by a car, but can't get treated in a timely manner due to lack of health insurance (per the terms of the bet), so he administers self-first aid with a newspaper and a used hypodermic needle. After his car is towed, he resorts to sleeping under parked cars, and eventually attempts to break in to his house and rob his own family. At this point, he finally admits that he was wrong and tells Jeff and Hayley that they can live with him for as long as they need to.
• Detrimental Determination: One of Stan's biggest flaws is his inability to give up on a venture, even when it's clear to everyone else that he should stop. Perhaps the best example of this flaw is in "Hurricane!"; Stan is determined to show his family his way is right, even though it's apparent that he's doing far more harm than good. End result: he gets his family attacked by both a shark and a bear, and impales Francine in the shoulder with a javelin (he was aiming for the bear). It's only when Buckle shows up and tranquilizes both animals that the family is finally safe.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • In "American Fung", he has Francine put in a mental hospital for a few days, so he can avoid facing her wrath for forgetting their anniversary. It never crosses his mind that Francine would put two and two together, and figure out who put her there.
  • In "Point Breakers", his desire to keep working undercover with his new surfer friends leads to him framing them for bank robbery. He fails to realize that this will upgrade them from "suspects" to "wanted criminals" until it is pointed out to him.
• Dirty Cop: He's a CIA agent, yet he has broken the law and/or taken advantage of his position countless times over the course of the series.
• Dirty Coward: He's not afraid to let someone else suffer or take the fall to save his own skin. This includes his own family. Once, they were being hunted by Roger on a space station and he prioritized leaving the ship on his own and ignored his family's cries for help.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Stan is personally responsible for Klaus being stuck in the body of a fish, simply because the CIA didn't want East Germany winning the Gold medal for Ski-jump during the 1986 Winter Olympics.
  • In "Four Little Words", he goes to great extremes to make Francine believe that she killed her friend when in actuality her friend was accidentally killed by Bullock during a date gone wrong. Why? He didn't want her say "I told you so".
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • This happens to him at the end of "Hot Water" for no real reason, but like Kenny McCormick, he is alive and well in the next episode, mostly because "Hot Water" was a series finale that was rewritten as a non-canon episode when Fox decided to renew the series.
  • Stan dies in "Rapture's Delight" and gets escorted to his personal heaven, which is identical to the beginning of the episode (though Klaus is dead and mounted on the wall). The commentary for the subsequent episode jokes that everything from then on actually takes place in Stan's personal heaven.
  • At the very end of "Big Stan On Campus" the helicopter transporting him and Bullock crashes in a huge fireball, presumably killing him. Nothing is heard of that incident again.
• Dumb Muscle: He is a muscular hunk who is often quite dim-witted, especially after Flanderization.
• Eagleland: Type 2 Incarnate. He's frequently seen as a massive patriot who constantly tries to protect his country. This was more prevalent in the early episodes of the show.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the earliest episodes, Stan was shown to be almost inhumanly agile, performing cartwheels and many an Unnecessary Combat Roll. Later episodes dialed this back to the point where he is incapable of keeping up with Francine while the two are free-running in "Stanny Boy and Frantastic."
• Egocentrically Religious: He is this at times, such as in "Dope & Faith", where he prayed to Jesus to let him win a raffle for a paddleboat. He claims his religion is the "foundation" of who he is, yet he more often than not uses this as an excuse to think that he's better than others (like in "Rapture's Delight") rather than live up to its teachings, and in "Daesong Heavy Industries", admitted that he's never actually read the Bible. Following a Crisis of Faith after Steve's logic undermines all the book's stories, he reacts dismissively to the suggestion that he simply see them as a set of instructional fables, detesting the idea of basing his character around some "fairy tales".
• Entitled Bastard:
  • No matter what terrible things he does to others, he always expects them to forgive him right away.
  • In "There Will Be Bad Blood", he's convinced that he should have everything his half-brother Rusty owns, on the grounds that he "deserves" it.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In a show where Black Comedy runs amok (and he is no angel himself), Stan shows cases of his own morality at times. For instance, he is stunned when he learns that Francine’s birth parents deliberately abandoned her at an airport as an infant just to avoid giving up their first class seats. He then quickly voices his discomfort with their apparent lack of remorse about it.
• Expansion Pack Past: Different episodes give increasingly weird and tragic events in Stan's childhood, often in the form of abuse by his dad, Jack. It's been revealed through various episodes throughout the series that Stan learned about sex by watching his father do it with a prostitute, was abandoned by Jack and briefly raised by the Harlem Globetrotters and that Jack tricked him into believing that a random stranger was his imaginary friend, just for starters.
• Extreme Doormat: He tends to be this to Deputy-Director Bullock in multiple episodes. The most extreme example was in "(You Gotta) Strike For Your Right", where he was not only the only person not to strike for better working conditions, but continued working for Bullock even after being made the target of his Home Alone-esque pranks.
• Fat Bastard: He is generally muscular, but some episodes do depict him as plump, which is combined with being a ruthless Jerkass.
• Fat Idiot: He is occasionally shown to be chunky (beneath his muscular exterior) and is often a complete idiot who makes destructive decisions.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Stan's so uptight that when he enjoys something, he can't stop.
  • Also his "unusual" way of thinking, his arrogance, and pride tends to get him to perform unlikable acts of Disproportionate Retribution and ends up doing horrible things to his own family and is completely willing to put them in danger, lie to them and abuse them for his own benefit or sense of justice.
  • Stan's ego. He's allowed himself to be deceived, or convinced to go along with really bad ideas, simply because he's gotten lots of praise.
• Feigning Intelligence: He thinks that he knows everything and constantly uses an eloquent and authoritative tone when speaking, but it's shown, especially in later seasons, that Stan is every bit an Idiot Hero and a Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
• Flanderization: Stan was always something of a bumbling sociopath, but it originated more from his ego and right-wing extremities, and at times he diverged from Seth MacFarlane's traditional Bumbling Dad role by proving to have Hidden Depths and some amount of tact (to the point of having spaced moments he was actually right about something). As time passed however, the necessity for Stan to learn An Aesop every episode led to him becoming increasingly moronic and childish, and his badass CIA agent qualities have been increasingly degraded in favor of making him a borderline Straw Loser for the rest of the Smiths.
• Forgotten First Meeting: "100 Years a Solid Fool" reveals that he first met Roger when he was a rookie agent, long before the rescue at Area 51. While narrating the story to his family, he fails to see the similarities between the manipulative, disguise-wearing drug lord he was outsmarted by and Roger until Roger flat-out tells Stan it was him.
• Freudian Excuse: Stan was extremely unpopular in his childhood due to his nerdy ways. As a result he bullies Steve for also being nerdy hoping to break him of said habits, in order for Steve to have the life he didn't. Additionally, his father Jack was an alcoholic who never stayed around (and was later revealed to be a con artist) which didn't exactly help. Meanwhile, his needy mother made Stan take his place, leading him to try taking all adult responsibilities prematurely and not grow up naturally.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: In spite of his Hilariously Abusive Childhood and multiple other Freudian Excuses, he is still often rightfully called out for his actions, even when his past motivates him to act like a selfish, abusive jerk.
• Future Loser: In "No Weddings and a Funeral", the future Stan is shown to have been (finally) divorced from Francine, (finally) lost his job and is forced to live in a rundown apartment with only a cat for company; both he and the cat plan on killing themselves once they’re able to afford two bullets for a gun.
• Genius Ditz: Despite acting like a general idiot and doing incredibly stupid things, he is a weapons expert and the best field-agent on the CIA. He was even able to outsmart Francine several times in episodes like "Franny 911" and "Widowmaker". However, this would eventually disappear in later seasons since Stan has been relegated into a full-blown idiot.
• Going Native: Stan has a strong tendency to do this; lampshaded by Francine in "Stan of Arabia".
• Gun Nut: Not only is he almost always carrying a pistol, he's hidden guns around the house and frequently holds people at gunpoint whenever he can't make them do what he wants.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: He can viciously lose his temper at the drop of a hat. Roger has learned this more than once.
  Stan: You don't deserve to be on that cross, you lazy, wine-loving bisexual!
• Happily Married: To Francine, but they have an equal amount of neglect and unfaithfulness with love.
• Heel Realization: "The Kidney Stays in the Picture" actually has him learn a lesson and learn from it. When he finds out that Francine cheated on him with another man a few days prior to their wedding, he (quite understandably) becomes a lot more rude and petty towards Francine. Then, when he stops Francine and Joel (the man she drunkenly cheated on Stan with) from having sex out of spite, Francine warns him that Hayley's existence could be undone by Stan's reckless intervention. Stan begins to realize that he truly loves Hayley regardless of blood. Not long after, he and Francine visit their younger selves and explain what should happen in order to preserve Hayley's existence. When his younger self isn't convinced, he remembers all of his fond memories with Hayley and truly realizes that she will always be his daughter, biological bonds be damned.
• Henpecked Husband: Played with in "Stan's Night Out." He throws a brief temper tantrum because he assumes Francine never lets him go out with his friends. However, Francine has absolutely no problem with Stan spending time with his friends away from her and is surprised he thought he was "stuck" there.
• Heteronormative Crusader: He gets better as time goes on. In fact, accepting gay lifestyles is the only lesson Stan remembers, probably because a relapse into homophobia wouldn't fly under the radar as easily as his other forgotten lessons. To the point where he even once gives a Patrick Stewart Speech that while Republicans might not accept gays or support gay rights, they shouldn't hate Gay Republicans, because they're on their side and it's a waste of perfectly good hate that should be reserved for Democrats!
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: He's the main protagonist and has done many messed up and heinous actions throughout the show. Thankfully, he's nowhere near as bad as Roger.
• Hidden Depths: Despite being incredibly conservative, he apparently has a history with rap and hip-hop music.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: His father left him when he was young and his mother forced Stan to fill his role as provider despite being too young to do so. His mom also lied to Stan, saying that his pet dog was sick and needed to be shot to put him out of his misery (turns out she did it because the apartment they were moving in to didn't allow dogs).
• Honor Before Reason: Wheeeeeere to begin...
  • Generally, he dislikes being proven wrong by others on his ideals.
  • He steals the idea of a telethon from Roger to save a torturing program for terrorists, but when many wonder if he really came up with the idea, Stan lies and claims he did, which makes Roger go after him to ruin the telethon. (Stan stupidly believed Roger got angry at him for not calling him for dinner.)
  • Stan is so into the thrill of winning that when he actually lost to Steve's team in a game of football, he attempted to commit suicide because of the shame he felt for losing. It also turns out that Stan never was able to express sadness properly either.
  • The initial reason he agreed to risk his career (and possibly even life) to protect Roger from the CIA, considering himself to be honor-bound to repay Roger for saving his life from Unfriendly Fire at Area 51.
  • He trained up Steve by masquerading as a school bully to toughen him up. When Steve asks him what Stan did to get rid of his bully, he simply laughs it off by saying his bully moved out so there was never a closure there.
• Hypocrite:
  • Several plots (such as "Seizures Suit Stanny") revolve around Stan being deeply against something, then (by circumstance or his own choice) trying it for himself, and becoming obsessed with it (and usually trying to cover his hypocrisy around his family). These episodes more often than not tend to portray Stan at his most unlikable, especially with the lows he'll sink to in order to cover his tracks.
  • Stan often derides Steve for being a geek and a "wuss", despite the fact that he was the same (or even moreso) at his age, and constantly tries to "make a man" out of him. But several episodes (such as "Chimdale") have shown that, when push comes to shove, Steve can be more of a man than Stan is.
  • Despite the hard time he gives Steve for the latter's niche hobbies, Stan often shows an abnormal level of passion for his own interests, such as joyously treating the United States Census as an actual holiday.
  • In "Bully for Steve", Stan acted as a bully to Steve, constantly telling him that he needed to stand up to bullies. Not only did Stan never stand up to his childhood bully, Stelio Kontos (because he simply moved away), but when Steve brings him in to do the fighting for him, Stan doesn't even try to fight back, letting Stelio beat him to a pulp.
  • In "There Will Be Bad Blood", he tells Steve he should appreciate what he already has, so he decides to bring him to his allegedly poor Native American half-brother Rusty's place in Arizona to teach him humility. However, upon finding out Rusty is actually supremely rich, he tries to steal the wealth for himself and throws a massive temper tantrum about how it should all be his.
  • In "Big Stan on Campus", he looks down on the campus security team, believing them to be "unprofessional", even though he himself saw his temporary employment there as being like a "vacation", and wanted the students to see him as a Cool Uncle rather than an authority figure. When the students make it clear they don't see him that way, he attacks them all with pepper spray.
  • "The Mural of the Story" began with Stan lecturing Hayley about how you should always put family first. But when Hayley ends up taking the blame for the damage he caused to the town's beloved mural while attempting to restore it, Stan does nothing to correct that belief and is perfectly willing to let his own daughter suffer rather than publicly admit his failure.
  • He frequently finds fault with others, expecting them to just stand there and take it, but he himself Can't Take Criticism at all.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Stan forbids Steve to go out with Debbie, an overweight girl, while his family points out that he isn't quite thin himself. With Stan being extreme like he usually is, he takes the fat comments too close to heart and starves himself to the point where he becomes anorexic.
  • At one point, he basically sends Francine to the woods because she has a spanking fetish to "recover" from her deviancy, despite the fact that he's obviously got a foot fetish himself.
• Idiot Hero: Stan is able to hide it by using an eloquent and authoritative tone, but only just barely.
• Incest Subtext: He gives his mother baths in the bathtub. He sits in the tub and sings about washing her private parts as well.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: Stan's idea of a good time usually involves things most people would find unbearably boring, such as taking part in the annual census.
• Inexperienced Killer: Apparently up until the end of the episode "The 42-Year-Old Virgin" that despite working at the CIA for years, Stan had never actually killed anyone before. This winds up making Steve hate him and Francine losing sexual interest in him, but gets the approval of Hayley. He gets his first kill at the end of the episode, a poker buddy named Bad Larry, albeit by accident.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: While deeply arrogant, stubborn and self-assured, Stan is also very insecure, and craves the validation of others. In "I Can't Stan You", learning that he is not as beloved by his neighbors as he believed he was causes him to break down, eventually driving him to have the whole neighborhood (and his family) relocated so he won't have to endure their "criticisms". This trait is also brought up in "Chimdale" and "An Incident at Owl Creek", with Stan even stating in the former his belief that other people's opinions of you matter more than anything.
• Informed Flaw: He's allegedly such a Control Freak that God Himself called him on it, but it's shown time and time again that he actually has very little control over his life. He doesn't want Hayley to date Jeff — Jeff marries her and moves in with the Smiths. He doesn't want another baby — Francine tries to rape him. He doesn't want Roger to risk exposing his alien identity — Roger sells photos of himself to the local media. And while Hayley’s actions are usually given the excuse of his harsh rules, they’re usually things like coming in past curfew, dying her hair green, drinking while underage, getting a job as a stripper, having boys in her room, and stealing monkeys from an animal testing lab and keeping them in the house (although that's still better than letting then be tortured by evil scientists). It's reached the point where the family does the complete opposite of what he says the moment he says it (although it's possible that his Control Freak tendencies are actually a result of the lack of control he has in his life).
• Ink-Suit Actor: Minus the exaggerated chin, Stan looks a lot like Seth MacFarlane.
• In Love with Looks: In "Shallow Vows," it's revealed that he only married Francine for her looks. Stan is so shallow that he even has himself blinded when Francine decides to stop taking care of her appearance (though to be fair, Francine proves she just as shallow in the same episode when she admitted she didn't want to be the provider and married to get a pampered life-style).
• Insane Troll Logic: Stan's logic when it comes to fixing things he perceives to be broken.
  • He tries to stop Francine from thinking he's too boring and leaving him by poisoning Roger so Francine will be too busy taking care of him ("Brains, Brains, and Automobiles").
  • He tries to get Steve to stop playing with toys by taking him to Mexico to lose his virginity to a whore ("Toy Whorey").
  • He believes he could "fix" Christmas after he perceives that liberals have ruined it by going back in time and killing Jane Fonda ("Best Christmas Story Never Told").
  • He plans to make up for forgetting his and Francine's anniversary again by having Francine put in a mental hospital, just long enough for him to put together a (poorly thought-out) gift ("American Fung").
• Instant Soprano: In "Crotchwalkers", he steps on a rake, which swings up and hits his groin so hard that his testicles allegedly retreated up his scrotum, leaving him with an embarrassingly high-pitched voice. Ironically, it's right when he accepts it to help Roger, Klaus and Hayley's Russian folk band that his balls drop back down.
• Insufferable Imbecile: He is an extremely stupid CIA agent who has anger issues and frequently engages in depraved and assholish behavior.
• I Reject Your Reality: Stan has a bad habit of refusing to acknowledge anything that disproves the mental illusions he's crafted for himself, whether in regards to his talent, brains, popularity, or even the idea that he had anything other than a happy, well-adjusted childhood.
• Irony: Despite his aim at protecting his family, there are times where he is completely willing to put them in danger, lie to them and abuse them for his own benefit or sense of justice. This was lampshaded in "Hurricane!" (part three of the Seth MacFarlane "Night of the Hurricane" crossover). It didn't help he shot Francine a couple times during the whole ordeal.
• It's All About Me: While he does care about others, Stan is still completely willing to put them in danger, lie to them and abuse them for his own benefit or sense of justice.
• Jaded Washout: "The Life and Times of Stan Smith" reveals that, under all his boasting, he believes himself to be this, well aware that all his best days are behind him. This is why he becomes so obsessed with having Roger help him relive his glory days.
• Jerkass: When he's not being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, he is this most of the time.
• Jerkass Ball: While he tends to not be the nicest guy to begin with, he gets far worse several times. Taken to an absurd degree in "Wiener of Our Discontent" where he reminds and demeans Roger that he is a useless alien who was sent to Earth as a crash test dummy to test out said ship (and not to be "The Decider" as Roger thought he was and flaunted said title to avoid comeuppance for his actions). The kicker is Stan goes out of his way to make Roger feel like crap even after Roger gets a job at a wiener factory to the point Francine wonders how many sick days Stan is going to take just to make Roger's life miserable.
• Jerkass to One: Stan really hates Steve's friend Barry, and has gone out of his way to insult and threaten him unprovoked on multiple occasions.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • The episode "Less Money Mo' Problems," depicts Stan as being in the wrong for considering Hayley and Jeff freeloaders for living with him and Francine instead of being out on their own. While the episode had some valid points about how hard it is to make a living on just minimum wage, Stan was actually justified for getting frustrated with them; what with Jeff waking him up in the middle of the night to watch Bones, going to the bathroom while Stan was still in the shower, and pouring out an entire bottle of syrup onto his pancakes after Stan asked him to pass it. It’d be understandable for anyone to get upset with obnoxious people who live in the same house.
  • In "The Old Stan and the Mountain," Stan is depicted as wrong for going behind his elderly coworker's back and stealing an assignment to demonstrate a new Urban Assault Vehicle. While, yes, it was kind of a dick move, Stan points out that the coworker who was supposed to demo it was clearly exhibiting signs of senility, citing how just the other day he mistook a sponge for a Hot Pocket.
    Stan: You microwaved it for thirty seconds, flipped it over, and then microwaved it for another thirty seconds. You had a lot of opportunities to see that it wasn't food.
  • Generally, though most episodes usually depict Stan as in the wrong, he does make some legitimate points, even if he goes about them the wrong way, such as Roger being a lazy Fat Slob who acts like he's better than everyone around him ("Weiner of Our Discontent"), Steve being a wimp who either gives up when things get hard or doesn't even try ("Bully for Steve") and being irritated that Francine's adoptive parents drop in uninvited and completely take over his house ("Big Trouble in Little Langley").
  • In "Hamerican Dad", he adamantly refuses to let Roger join his ham club, well aware that Roger will end up making it all about him. After Francine browbeats him into sponsoring Roger for membership, Roger ends up doing exactly that.
  • In "Railroaded". While he was mostly trying to deflect blame for his own actions, he was right to point out that the citizens of Langley really shouldn't have voted to make him mayor, meaning the mayhem that followed was just as much their fault as it was his.
• Jerk Jock: He has this mindset, looking down on "nerds" while enjoying sports and other "manly" pursuits. Which is ironic, considering a) his being looked down on and bullied by the jocks during his school days and b) his interest in overly geeky hobbies like slot car racing.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Arguably Stan's callousness and self-righteous attitude has been toned down or at least been placed in more well-intentioned light in later seasons. It is a rule for the creative team that, in his own mindset, Stan's actions are for the well being of his family and country. No matter how insane or immoral they are.
• Jock Dad, Nerd Son: A constant source of contention between he and Steve. Stan constantly tries to help his son with various "masculine" activities to avoid letting Steve repeat the same poor experience Stan had in high school.
• Karma Houdini: He is this most of the time. In the worst offender, "The Mural of the Story", he's put in charge of the restoration project to restore the town's mural. But before it even starts, he ends up wasting the entire project's budget on a pre-party leaving him the sole person to fix it but only ends up making it worse. When the mural is unveiled, everyone assumes that Hayley was the one who made it worse and Stan... Decides to just let them continue thinking that thereby completely throwing her own daughter under the bus and ruining her reputation. While he does eventually own up to his actions at the second unveiling of the mural (which is now entirely repainted in tribute to Hayley due to the aforementioned's revenge ploy of making him think that all his earlier actions led to her being involved in a serious car crash and in critical condition so that she and Klaus could plot to blow it up), nobody besides Hayley calls him out for selling her out the way he did nor does he receive any punishment for wasting the initial project's budget before it could even get off the ground. And that's not even mentioning up how in-between him throwing Hayley under the bus and her revenge on him, he chisels her eyes out and flays her entire face off in an attempt to help her.
• Kissing Under the Influence: With Roger during their trip to Atlantic City. They were both drunk, and Stan agreed to the most intimate experiences of Roger's species. Roger ended up knowing all of Stan's memories, but not vice versa — this was especially humiliating for Roger because Stan was actually Roger's first.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Numerous episodes go out of their way to emphasize this, especially The Most Adequate Christmas Ever, where God actually had to tell Stan face-to-face (as Stan holds a gun to his forehead) that no, he does not know everything and he can't.
• Lack of Empathy: In "100 Years a Solid Fool", he shows no regrets over the agents who died as a result of his poor decision-making, callously stating that they were just holding him back.
• Lactating Male: In "A Pinata Named Desire", Stan, while bragging about being better than Roger at everything, states he can wet nurse better than Roger — proven when wet patches appear on his shirt.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Perhaps the most ridiculous, exaggerated example in all of Western Animation.
• Large Ham: Seth has gone on record describing Stan as his most exhausting role on any of his shows.
• Lethally Stupid: At his absolute worst. Stan's attempts at helping only cause pain and suffering for everyone involved such as Francine being shot and a bear and shark attacking the family in "Hurricane!" and Hayley needing extensive facial reconstruction after he disfigures her in "The Mural of the Story".
• A Lesson Learned Too Well: Related to his fatal flaw detailed below; when an epiphany finally does work its way through his thick skull, before the end of the episode erases it, it's at the worst possible time where it leads him to leave others to take the fall for something he could help fix. Such as finally learning to say no to Bullock when he's asked to take him to a hospital for a bullet wound.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse: While it's not Lampshaded in-series, it should be noted that his mom bears a resemblance to Francine; same height, blond hair, same lips, similar body shape, and a similar face shape as well. Knowing Stan, it makes sense that he ended up marrying a woman who looks like his mother. Stan's relationship with Francine is eerily similar to his relationship with his mom, given that he shows All Take and No Give devotion to her which she only calls out when it becomes an inconvenience to her.
• Locked Out of the Loop: In the episode "Haylias," he believed that Project Daycare, which he put Hayley in, was discontinued because the subjects lost their free will permanently after seven days of activation. It isn't until after he activates Hayley and misses the deadline that he discovers from Bullock that the project was actually discontinued because the subjects turned on their handlers and killed them after seven days.
• Love Is a Weakness: To quote "The Magnificent Steven":
  Stan: A man kills what a man loves before it weakens him.
• Manchild: It really depends on who's writing the episode. "Man on the Moonbounce" actually showed Stan acting like a kid, despite being an adult, as a therapeutic way to catch up on the childhood he lost when his father abandoned him and his mom forced him to grow up and provide for her.
• Manipulative Bastard: He can be surprisingly good at nudging people into doing what he wants.
• The Millstone: As shown in "Hurricane!", Stan's every attempt at trying to save his family from the hurricane just keeps making the situation worse until, when things reach their boiling point, Buckle bursts in and tranquilizes Stan along with an attacking bear and shark because he "wasn't sure who was doing the most damage." Francine even states that, though many of Stan's ideas and plans sound reasonable at first, they're always doomed to end badly.
• Momma's Boy: In "Oedipal Panties", it's revealed that Stan is so overprotective of his mother that he had been abducting his mother's boyfriends and dumping them on a deserted island for over 30 years!
• Money Dumb: He is oftentimes shown to be horribly irresponsible with managing money. Here are the most notable examples:
  • In "There Will Be Bad Blood", he received $20,000 from his dying grandfather. He ended up losing it — not in stocks or bonds, but by leaving it on the bus.
  • In "Less Money, Mo' Problems", he was in charge of handling $938 to live on minimum wage for a month. He loses almost all of it overnight by spending it on frivolous things, becoming homeless as a result.
  • In "A Little Extra Scratch", he invested everything in pornographic pogs, which his financial advisor warned him not to do. He ends up at risk of losing the house.
• Moral Myopia: If he does it for himself, it's okay. If someone does it to him, it's unforgivable.
• Mr. Fanservice: He's tall and muscular, often has scenes wearing nothing but brief underwear, was briefly employed as a male stripper, and it has been shown on more than one occasion that he has a muscular booty (earning him the nickname "Thunder Butt"); he also gave a rather provocative dance in a skin tight suit in "Virtual In-Stanity".
• My God, What Have I Done?: After stabbing Steve in the ankle to get him out of bowling, he comes to the realization that he stabbed his own son and deeply regrets it.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: He has a bad habit of blindly going along with whatever Deputy-Director Bullock tells him to do, regardless of how little it makes sense. In "The Full Cognitive Redaction of Avery Bullock by the Coward Stan Smith", he goes along with Bullock's increasingly bizarre actions, to the point of letting him steal an armed nuclear submarine. When Bullock is back in his right mind, he admonishes Stan for this.
• My Way or the Highway: Stan is often insistent that others do things the way he thinks is best and will go to absurd lengths to convince them to choose the "right" way.
• Narcissist: Most of his actions, his selective memory and the mental gymnastics boil down to his highly inflated ego and sense of self worth.
• Never My Fault: When things go wrong, he's quick to assign blame to others, even when he's the one to blame. Just like with the Hypocrite example, episodes where this happens tend to show him at his absolute worst:
  • In "CIAPOW", he put the blame for his team's failed atempt to steal an inhaler on all the others, in spite of the fact that it was his idea to steal it in the first place, and that they were only caught because he left a piece of paper with their hotel information on it behind.
  • In "Father's Daze", when the rest of the family learn that he was using a Laser-Guided Amnesia device to make them "redo" Father's Day over and over again, rather than accept fault for it, Stan instead rants about their inability to "get it right".
  • In "The Mural of the Story", he ends up being the sole person responsible for restoring the town's mural after blowing the project's budget on the pre-party and ends up making it even worse. While he does later own up to it, he initially just callously lets Hayley take the fall for it at it's first unveiling.
  • In "Bully for Steve," Stan states that it's "time I stop blaming [him]self" for how sensitive and gentle Steve is. Francine increduously tells him that he's never blamed himself, and Stan responds that that's correct, because he's never made a mistake in his life.
• Official Couple: With Francine; they've been married since the start of the series.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Stan's full first name has never been conclusively given. He's been referred to as "Stanley", "Stanford" and "Staniel" at various points and it isn't known which, if any, is actually his name. The episode "Hayley Was a Girl Scout?" gives his full name as "Stanford Leonard Smith".
• Only Sane Man: In "Stan's Night Out", Stan discovers that his coworker friends at the C.I.A. are a bunch of irresponsible assholes whose blatant disregard for other people boarders on the sociopathic, with him playing the role of the straight man throughout an increasingly insane night.
  • Also in "People vs Martin Sugar", he is the only member of jury who sees that Roger is guilty despite his sympathetic attitude during the trial.
• Papa Wolf:
  • He might not agree with Hayley, and he might not have much in common with Steve, but if anyone insults or harms either of them, that person's going to be in pain for a long while.
  • Do not call his daughter a whore. Avery Bullock learned this the hard way. (You know, Stan's boss whom he more-or-less idolizes?)
  • In the early seasons when there was more emphasis on hiding Roger from the CIA, Stan was fully prepared to execute Roger if it meant protecting his family from any possible repercussions, despite being indebted to Roger for saving his life by his own admission.
  • He was also willing to get stabbed by multiple swords in unison if it means getting his son to finally lose his virginity.
• Paper Tiger: As much as he likes to act like a tough guy, he tends to fold pretty quickly when someone puts up a good enough fight, and will sometimes even run from a confrontation entirely. In "Francine's Flashback", it was shown that Francine once beat him to a pulp for forgetting their anniversary, with Stan begging police officers to keep her away from him.
• Patriotic Fervour: Stan veers between honorable and despicable, but prides himself on being a true patriot.
• Picky About Validation: As shown in episodes like "I Can't Stan You" and "An Incident at Owl Creek", Stan cares more about his reputation with the local community than he does about his status with his family. It matters little to him that his family loves and accepts him as he is, so instead he focuses on earning the admiration of others.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: He usually wears a blue suit while Francine's dress is pink.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: He's a bigot in many ways, but he generally learns An Aesop about it...for a while. Gays, fat people, senior citizens, even blacks; they all get some backlash from Stan at least once.
• Prematurely Bald: One episode revealed that Stan is completely bald, and has been trying to keep it a secret from everyone. Except everyone already knew, and none of them cared. He then decided to keep wearing his wig and no one ever cared enough about it to mention it again afterwards. Despite this, several episodes before and afterwards blatantly prove this is almost certainly not canon (cf. "Frannie 911" showed that Stan was once scalped by Roger dressed as an American Indian, leaving stubble on his bald head. If he were wearing a wig, there'd be no stubble nor would Roger need to scalp Stan). Stan's baldness would be re-canonized in "Comb Over, A Hair Piece", where Stan gets hair plugs.
• Promotion to Parent: For Jeff, first symbolically, and then literally once Jeff and Hayley tie the knot.
• Psychopathic Manchild: If he's not acting like a three-year-old, he's killing someone while acting like a three-year-old.
• A Real Man Is a Killer: He has this mentality in the episode "Buck, Wild," explicitly telling Steve that the only way he can become a man is by hunting and killing an animal. Ironically enough, the episode "The 42-Year-Old Virgin" revealed that Stan had, in fact, never killed another human being and had simply been talking a big game (his first credited kill had died in a subway accident, and every kill since had died in increasingly ridiculous accidents just as Stan tracked them down). Steve and Francine lose all respect for him as a man when they find out. However, he netted his first kill by the end of the episode and he's killed multiple people on-screen since. Deservedly, of course. Usually.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Stan has a major soft spot for ponies.
• Reckless Gun Usage: Stan doesn't care much for gun safety, and frequently points his gun at people he doesn't intend to kill (like his own family). At one point, he was so Trigger-Happy that he shot the toaster to pieces.
• Retcon: There are several aspects of Stan's character that are only established for a specific episode and forgotten about later. Such examples include:
  • "The 42-Year-Old Virgin" revealing that he's never actually killed anyone, despite killing Jackson's double in "Francine's Flashback" and Jay Leno in "Stan of Arabia - Part 1".
  • "Chimdale" revealing that he's bald and wears a wig. This is contradicted by both previous and later episodes like "Frannie 911", "Old Stan in the Mountain" and "Gifted Me Liberty" where in the first-mentioned a flashback shows Roger scalping off his hair leaving visible stubble and the latter two having his hair gradually fall off due to either rapid aging or extensive blood loss. "Comb Over: A Hair Piece" re-establishes his baldness, but has Stan get hair plugs to fix it.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair:
  • Just about always the Wrong Way to Francine's Right Way in terms of their parenting skills (Francine has the odd subversion, but even then Stan is almost never the Right Way).
  • Even more so against Hayley. While Hayley can be self-serving and abrasive about it, her left-wing ethics are always far saner than Stan's right-wing extremist ways.
• Self-Serving Memory:
  • In "There Will Be Bad Blood", Stan believes that his half-brother Rusty "tricked" him out of the valuable land their grandfather left to him. This is in spite of the fact that (as shown in a Flashback), Stan, believing the land was worthless, cheated Rusty with a rigged game so he would end up with the $20,000 their grandfather was also leaving them (which he later lost on the bus).
  • In "Into The Woods," Stan suddenly remembers how he once betrayed a friend from childhood by not standing up for said friend during Halloween. After seeing him for the first time in years, Stan becomes obsessed with making it up to the guy. Stan's "help" involves stalking the guy and trying to force him to accept a new job he thinks is cooler, to the point he burned down the sub sandwich store the guy worked in. It turned out Stan got the memory mixed up and his friend's the one who abandoned him for being a loser. At the very end of the episode when Francine does something similar, we get a look into Stan's head as he keeps replaying Francine's betrayal until he literally rewrites the memory and swaps places so now he's calling her the loser.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Manly Man to Steve's Sensitive Guy. Stan even tries (and fails) to get Steve to toughen up in one episode by being his aggressive and threatening bully.
• Sexual Karma: Stan's moral compass becomes questionable in later seasons and he's constantly shown to be selfish and self-righteous. In a majority of the sex scenes between Stan and Francine, it's mostly for Stan's satisfaction since he believes it proves his manliness. This dynamic is the focus of Poltergasm, Francine reveals that after they married she started faking her orgasms because Stan stopped taking his time or addressed her need for pleasure. Once they start doing it more affectionately, Francine's "poltergasm" disappeared under a thunderous cry of pleasure.
• Shaking the Rump: Isn't afraid to literally shake what his momma gave him as he did in "Spring Break-Up" and in "Flirting With Disaster" It's revealed that the women at the CIA nicknamed him "Thunder Butt" because of his muscular butt and his ability to clap his butt cheeks together.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Frequently acts narcissistic about his looks and "intelligence". May also apply as Inferiority Superiority Complex when it's found out he wasn't always "the stallion he is today".
• Sore Loser: To a ridiculous degree in "Game Night". In the past, he reacted to being bested during the family's games by accusing the one who won of cheating, Flipping the Table, and cruelly insulting everyone in the room. It got so bad that the others decided to just let him win rather than suffer another outburst, and did so for years until Jeff got fed up with his Unsportsmanlike Gloating.
• Split Personality: In "Cock of the Sleepwalk", though technically it's Stan and his conscience.
• Standard '50s Father: Tries to invoke the trope, but fails.
  • In a DVD-exclusive special on the creation of American Dad, Seth [MacFarlane] describes the show as "What If? a 1950s anti-Communism short film announcer had a wife, kids, and a job with the CIA in the 21st century?"
• Stay in the Kitchen: Stan's been known to be incredibly sexist towards women, believing women shouldn't have a say in matters, let alone vote. In Stan of Arabia, he sings about this trope and even takes advantage of Saudi Arabia's laws to keep Francine in line... until he learns that she risks execution for trying to rebel.
• Straight Man: He tries to be this, but is really much more of a The Comically Serious Butt-Monkey. He gets rare genuine moments of this, usually against Roger, who is immature and outright sociopathic enough to make him look sane.
• Straw Character: He's an exaggerated stereotype of hyper-patriotic Republicans. Though much less so as the show went on.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Stan is a CIA agent, yet his physical prowess varies greatly. Sometimes he's every bit as strong and skilled as a professional killer should be and other times he's been beaten up quite easily by untrained fighters (most notably his old childhood bully Stelio Kontos).
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Very much so. He's raven-haired, the tallest in the family, and has the most chiseled face out of all of MacFarlane's animated protagonists.
• A Taste of His Own Medicine: In "Dancing A-with My Cells", he uses DNA-editing technology to make his family more like him. It isn't long before he ends up on the receiving end of the worst aspects of his personality, being insulted and even assaulted by his altered family members.
• Tautological Templar: He's always confident that his way (which is often shockingly bigoted, even by his own family's standards) is the good, righteous, and just way, by simple virtue of being his way. He often comes around by the end of an episode, but the show actually lampshades how the lesson never sticks. As a gung-ho CIA agent, he also feels this way about the United States itself — he doesn't believe that America can do no wrong so much as he believes that anything it does is justified by being America.
• Took a Level in Badass: In a season 1 episode, he was noted as a weapons expert who hadn't fought hand to hand in years, and has the shit kicked out of him by a homeless man. Later, Stan is an extremely competent fighter, hand to hand or otherwise.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: While never a genius by any stretch, the move to TBS saw Stan become dumber and more impulsive.
• Troubled Abuser: As bad of a father as he can be, Stan's own parents were even worse. His father was cruel and neglectful and completely abandoned the family when Stan was 8, and his mother expected him to take over the role as man of the house, costing him his entire childhood and leading to a disturbingly co-dependent relationship between them in adulthood.
• Troubled Sympathetic Bigot: Minus the "sympathetic" part, but in the earlier episodes, Stan is shown to be xenophobic and homophobic multiple times. Examples include when he falsely accused his new Iranian neighbors of being terrorists and when he kidnapped Greg and Terry's newly adopted daughter because he thought that kids shouldn't be raised by gay couples.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour: He's been kidnapping his mom's boyfriends and dumping them on a deserted island since he was a boy to keep them from dumping her and breaking her heart like his father did.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Averted. Stan's just as, if not more, attractive than Francine. He just hasn't slept around as much as Francine.
• Ultimate Job Security: He's done things that should have got him fired. In "Bully for Steve" and "A Boy named Michael" he didn't go into work for extended periods of time, just so he could "toughen" Steve up by bullying him in the former, and mock Roger by acting like a low-class lout in the latter. His career has never been shown suffering any ill consequences for those acts.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: Subtly deconstructed (initially). Stan's recurring fear (other than seagulls before getting over it in "Choosey Wives Chose Smith") is if his friends and family still actually love him or not.
• Unwitting Pawn: To Roger in "Railroaded". Roger convinced Stan to run for mayor, engineered his victory, then encouraged Stan to relax while he handled all the hard work. This allowed Roger to lock up all the townspeople and do anything he wanted.
• Vicariously Ambitious: Due to his background as a high school loser, Stan frequently attempts to live triumphs through his family by pressuring them into social climbing, particularly Steve.
• Villain Protagonist: When you take into consideration many of his actions throughout the show's run and the lows he'll stoop to in order to get his own way or hide his hypocrisies from the rest of the family, there are many episodes where he ultimately comes across as the bad guy instead of the hero (even in ones where he's supposed to be the hero!). Episodes like "The Scarlett Getter", "Seizure Suit Stanny" and "Father's Daze" just to name a few are prime examples of Stan playing this trope 100% straight.
• Virtue Is Weakness: In "A Jones for a Smith," he expresses the view that people should solve their own problems and asking for help of any kind is a sign of weakness; when Hayley starts choking on a piece of turkey sausage, Stan goes so far as to forcibly hold Francine back from helping her, leading to Hayley nearly dying.
• Vocal Evolution:
  • His voice sounded a lot deeper and gruffer in Season One.
  • Starting with around Season 16, Stan's voice sounds noticeably hoarser and less booming.
• Weight Woe: Stan is a Rare Male Example. He once became so self-conscious about his weight he hallucinated that he was getting fatter and fatter until his family pointed out he was suffering from anorexia and hunger-based delusions to the point that he had wasted away to a walking skeleton. This was not helped by further hallucinations of a frat boy-like personal trainer.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Has elements of this in his relationship with his father Jack, and this trait is very prominent in his son Steve.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Often the cause of his Jerkass antics.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: He fears seagulls. Or rather he feared them, as he mentions he got over the fear in "Choosy Wives Choose Smith", where he interacted with them (a hand wave, as the plot required said interaction).
• Yandere: To his mother. Ever since his father ran out on them, he has decided to be there for her. When she starts seeing other men, he believes that they'll just break her heart like his father did. So to "protect" her, he kidnaps her boyfriends during their third date and he sends them to a deserted island.

The matriarch, wife of Stan and mother of Hayley and Steve. A fairly happy housewife, if not a little loopy at times, although she does wish she could do stuff outside the house other than grocery shopping. During her years growing up, she was the adopted daughter of the Chinese Lings after her birth parents, the Dawsons, abandoned her as a baby at an airport since bringing babies to first class wasn't allowed. Prior to hooking up with Stan, she was very promiscuous (currently has the largest rose garden dedicated to the men she had sex with prior to meeting Stan — one with guided tours and a native tribe who has never seen a white man) and wild.

• Abusive Parents: Downplayed. She isn't usually abusive like Stan is, but she does have her moments. She constantly shows a need for Steve's approval for her rather than acceptance, and Francine goes out of her way to sabotage Steve's relationships with other girls so he can stay a Momma's Boy. She even flat out tells him that his ex, Debbie, never loved him, and that no woman - not even any future wives or daughters - will love him as much as his mother. In "Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls," when Stan scares Steve so bad that he jumps out the window and dislocates his shoulder, Francine is actually impressed (though she does push it back in). It's even part of the plot of "Morning Mimosa," where after Steve drops an F-bomb at her, she flat-out refuses to take care of him on the grounds that since one doesn't say "F*** you" to their mother, Steve must not consider her his mother; to further drive the point home, Steve even tried to apologize by way of a card, but Francine refused to accept it. In "Businessly Brunette", she not only laughs at Hayley's desire to become a businesswoman, but when she actually succeeds, Francine joins the same company just so she can show her up. "Hot Scoomp" has her proudly state that she practices "benevolent neglect", showing no interest in Hayley's problems whatsoever under the belief that it will help her.
• The Ace: It's downplayed, but beyond being a (mostly) devoted homemaker and mother, Francine is actually very skilled whenever she tries new things or is able to break out of the box she's been shoehorned into by her family (mostly Stan). Some of the pursuits she's succeeded in are marine biology, stand-up comedy, parkour, and business.
• Action Girl: Occasionally, but it's clear she's the second badass character next to Stan, if not moreso: there are hints that when she's motivated, she can actually beat him due to her athletic build compared to his Acrofatic body, as she effortlessly restrains and disarms him in "Beyond the Alcove" when he pulls a gun on her. Some other examples of her ability include:
  • She dishes out quite the beating on Thundercat in "Stan of Arabia", and fought alongside her family against Santa's elves, actually killing a few.
  • In "Bully for Steve", she leaps out of a window while chasing down Stan, and catches him by ramming him into a tree during a car chase.
  • She's also an Instant Expert on Le Parkour in "Stanny Boy and Frantastic", and has displayed a hefty amount of physical strength in "Hurricane!" where she carries a wounded Hayley rather easily, who's just about the same size as she is.
  • She also goes toe-to-toe with Toshi's mother Hiko in "Spelling Bee My Baby".
• Aesop Amnesia: While not nearly as bad as Stan, she does have her moments. For example, in "Iced, Iced Babies," she spends the episode having empty nest syndrome and trying to have another baby, but at the end, she's talked down when Stan points out she'll always be a mom and that the kids are supposed to leave because it means the mother has done a good job. When they get home and find that Steve has been dumped by Debbie, as soon as Stan is out of the room, she blows off everything she just learned and eagerly seizes the opportunity to coddle Steve.
• Affectionate Nickname: Roger calls her "Franny" (as do others, but much less often).
• Anachronistic Orphanage: Francine used to live in an orphanage as a child.
• Angrish: In "American Fung", she suffers Sanity Slippage upon learning that Stan put her in a mental ward for three days just to buy time for a half-assed anniversary present of a bucket of fried chicken. She is promptly dragged back into the ward that she was about to check out of, screaming incoherently all the way.
• Ax-Crazy: Often shows shades of this. In the episode "Francine's Flashback," it was shown that the last time Stan forgot their anniversary, she flew into a rage and attacked him, resulting in them appearing on an episode of COPS.
  • Her response to Stan telling her he's struggling to kill a target because he is constantly surrounded by people is "So kill 'em all!"
• Badass Adorable: As noted above, she's able to defend herself and is better than her spy husband at Le Parkour, yet she's no less cute bubbly because of it.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: In "Trophy Wife, Trophy Life", Francine, feeling neglected by Stan, wishing she could be more important to him. She gets her wish when he is badly hurt by a falling satellite, and she takes the opportunity to nurse him back to health herself... only for Stan to become so utterly dependent on her that he can't bear to be away from her for even a few moments.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • She's a very sweet and friendly person, but take care not to cross her, as she can as vengeful as Stan. Even Stan (who usually has a very low sense of self-preservation) is smart enough to be scared of her when she gets angry. Example? Season 1, Episode 4.
  • She nonchalantly admitted to stabbing her college roommate to death while the Smiths were having dinner at a restaurant.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Sometimes in later seasons. She is usually a very nice and caring mother figure, but she is sometimes as bad as her husband.
• Big Eater: Which forces her to work out until she pukes, power lift the couch, and take a ton of laxatives to stay attractive.
• Blonde Republican Sex Kitten: Sort of. Compared to Stan, Francine is much more apolitical (she likely doesn't understand politics in general.)
• Brainless Beauty: Francine's intelligence has declined in later seasons; either believing that fictional characters exist in the real world, being literal-minded, or making ill-advised decisions. Such as sending naked pictures of herself to a stranger on the internet to see if she's pregnant. In terms of beauty, every character in the show has been attracted to her and the show itself does not shy away from having her be scantily clad.
• Breast Expansion: Her character in "Tearjerker", Miss Sexpun T'Come, was the same as regular Francine until she put on the engagement ring Stan gave her. That ring was given to Stan by S, who is Steve's character and is a perverted inventor that only seems to make hidden gadgets that causes women's breasts to become fantastically large. As such, she very rapidly grows several Cup-sizes, and ends up with a chest Stan has trouble looking away from.
• Bring My Brown Pants: "Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls" establishes that Stan builds a haunted house each year, with success equating to Francine wetting herself. When she returns from Buckle's even scarier haunted house, we hear a sloshing sound from her shoes, followed by Stan noticing the scent of urine.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: One of the bustiest characters on the show, rivalling the many other attractive women in the series and only beaten by the most endowed female characters^note Except in "Tearjerker"; then she is the most endowed. Several characters have remarked about her breasts staying nice at her age, especially Bullock. She self-descrbies her breasts in "Flight and Fight" as being DD-Cup and gravity defying.
• Cleavage Window: Her ice dance dress in the episode "Of Ice and Men" has a heart-shaped opening in the chest area.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • The brief times her head comes back to earth, she can be very intelligent and sound. The rest of the time... well... remember the box she thought was a TV? Nuff said.
  • In the episode Live And Let Fry, Francine comes off as borderline insane, mostly because she's used to cooking with trans fats and the ban has limited her cooking abilities.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: It's not that she's a bad chef, it's just that she's uninspired. Since she follows the recipe exactly people find her cooking bland and soulless. A cooking class with Roger in "The Eight Fires" has her admit that she follows the recipe exactly because if people don't like it she could say it was a bad recipe, but if she tried cooking without one and people didn't like it, then she'd have nobody to blame but herself.
• Covert Pervert: Despite living a very sex-positive life before she and Stan got married, her occasional mention of her pre-marital sex squicks Stan out.
• Cute and Psycho: At her worst, she can go on rampages or ramble about messed-up events at the drop of a hat.
• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Subverted. Her birth parents said they had to give her away... because first class doesn't allow babies and they're too vain and haughty to accept coach. Even Stan found this unappealing.
• Depending on the Artist: Whether Francine has a Cleavage Window varies depending on the episode, with various episodes adding or removing the line representing her cleavage on each shot.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Francine can either be a woman of average intelligence (if she sleeps at least eight hours, according to herself), or a full-blown Dumb Blonde. She also shifts between a genuinely loving family woman who can scare Stan himself if she's pushed beyond ethical limits, or a psychotic Bitch in Sheep's Clothing. In the episode "Live and Let It Fry", she comes off as completely insane.
  • Her attitude towards her children (especially Steve) also varies from loving to downright resentful, sometimes bordering on hateful.
  • Writers make her either a Supreme Chef or Lethal Chef per plot and/or gags. Later on they split the difference by saying her good dishes are already good recipes she's just following while also being dumb enough to mistake a formula for a paste to patch bike tires for a food recipe. An even later episode about her clarifies her cooking isn't awful tasting, just unbearably bland because she follows recipes strictly to the letter and others can taste her lack of passion. She manages to cook an amazing meal (out of Roger at his request) when she's forced to improvise.
  • Her desire to have her own career. Early episodes focused on her wanting to get a job outside the home. Later episodes make it clear she not only wants Stan to take care of her, she'd also leave him if he was unemployed.
  • Based on the episode, she can either feel confined and resentful of her responsibilities to her family, or be intent on keeping them as close and dependent on her as possible.
• Dude Magnet: Many men find her attractive.
• Dumbass Has a Point: She embodies this trope. While she's not the smartest person in her family, she does often makes reasonable arguments against Stan and/or Roger's antics and schemes.
• Dumb Blonde: While she's isn't as stupid or as impulsive as her husband, well just barely, she's still isn't the brightest bulb of the family. She does has the occasional grasp of intelligence every once in a while.
• Ethical Slut: She really got around when she was younger, but all in the name of partying, having fun, and free love, admitting the sex she had was meaningless without actually loving her partners.
• Even the Girls Want Her:
  • The Smiths' neighbor, Linda Memari, is in love with her.
  • "My Morning Straitjacket" has a female bouncer attracted to her, with Francine not minding and even initiating a kiss with her.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Everyone has found her attractive or admitted to Francine being hot. However she is not a natural blonde but a brunette, which most likely explains why her son Steve is a light brunette, and daughter Hayley is a darker brunette who seems to have more of Stan's hair color. Before she got a new hairdresser in "Star Trek", her dark roots were visible. There is some Negative Continuity to her natural hair color, however, as she was blonde as a baby and a toddler, and blonde hair tends to run in her family. One episode featuring Francine as an older woman also shows her to have blonde hair with gray streaks, implying it's undyed. There have also been plenty of episodes where her hair's stayed blonde during long periods where she couldn't possibly have colored it (like being lost at sea or locked in a mental asylum.)
• Expansion Pack Past: Her Chinese-American parents, her half-sister, her stand-up comedy...
• Fatal Flaw: Francine gets herself in trouble because of her need to have a more exciting life.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: Feminine Mother to Hayley's Tomboyish Daughter. Francine is a bubbly housewife who wears a pink dress, while her daughter Hayley is a confrontational, rebellious Tank-Top Tomboy who always wears jeans.
• Fetish: Kinky Spanking, just to name a few of many other perverted kinks...
• Flanderization: Her bitchy side has become much more played up in later episodes (especially the TBS episodes).
• Former Teen Rebel: And a former young-adult rebel, for that matter. Whenever we get peeks of Francine's past, it usually involved copious amounts of sex, drugs, partying, and fighting: a lifestyle that she accredits Stan as saving her from. Being raised in a strict Catholic boarding school as a child following her WASP parents ditching her at the airport because their flight didn't allow children in First Class and then adopted by lenient Chinese parents probably had something to do with it.
• Gasshole: Has been seen belching loudly as a throwaway gag on occasion, usually after drinking or eating something. She even admits it!
  Francine: I'm gross...
• Genius Ditz: For the brief periods of time when she tried to pursue something outside of being a housewife, she is ridiculously good at what she does. To the point where she once became an oceanologist, and published a paper on how she found a thought-to-be-extinct species! Stan always brings things back to a screaming halt (to the point where he deliberately sabotaged the American economy because that was the only way to stop her career as a real estate agent). However, these moments of genius are mainly Played for Laughs, leaving her an unintelligent bimbo for most of her appearances. Other characters for the most part comment on how idiotic she generally is.
• Genki Girl: She can be high-energy and somewhat crazy.
• Godiva Hair: In "Daesong Heavy Industries II: Return to Innocence".
• Gone Horribly Right: When Stan lost his memory in "The Boring Identity", Francine, in an attempt to turn him into the "perfect man" made him think he was an supremely-caring, deeply sensitive individual. It never crossed her mind that such a man wouldn't want to be with a woman with as many flaws as she possesses; In fact, it doesn't take long for the new Stan to decide that they're too different to be together, and he openly denounces Francine for her own insensitivity.
• Gonk: Apparently, she's hideous when she didn't bother to do her beauty regimen for two weeks. She stopped taking care of her appearance out of spite when Stan said he only appreciated her for her looks. Stan had to turn himself blind (and jobless) so he can tolerate living with her, which ultimately invoked an aesop proving both of them are just as shallow.
  Roger ("Jeannie Gold"): Alex, Ronnie, cut! Momma's not making a monster movie!
• Good Parents: While she’s often ditzy and occasionally holds the Jerkass Ball, she is often much more accepting and caring towards her children than Stan is, such as whenever she calls out Stan for mistreating Steve and Hayley and sides with them.
• Happily Adopted: She was raised by a Chinese couple called the Lings and is so happy about it she does not even want to know who her biological parents are.
• Happily Married: To Stan, but they have an equal amount of neglect and unfaithfulness with love.
• Head-Turning Beauty: In "Rubberneckers " Stan calls in Francine as a witness and she arrives in a racy dress. As she walks towards the front with a Supermodel Strut, she catches the eye of every man present and Stan calls them on it.
• Hoist by Her Own Petard: In "Spelling Bee My Baby", her plan to kidnap Akiko and eliminate her from the competition for Steve to win would've succeeded had she not given her captive a Nintendo Wii - this led to Nintendo alerting Akiko's mother when she sent the Yakuza and Toshi on a manhunt to find her, and giving her the Smith address to rescue Akiko and get her to the competition just in time before she's eliminated.
• Housewife: Francine is an extreme parody of this. In the Thanksgiving episode, she was obsessed with having the most number of burners on her stove, and upon entering an enormous magnificent mansion, all she can think about are the burners.
• Hypocrite:
  • She claims to be an animal lover but drowns a rare species of bird in one episode and takes Steve's pet rabbit so she can fry it.
  • Then there's the fact that, in one episode, she refuses to be a provider after Stan goes blind because he values good looks above all else. Even stating she married him so Stan could financially take care of her despite bashing Stan on his superficial reasons for marriage. They then decide not to fix what isn't broken.
  • Despite bashing Stan for his bad parenting habits, she sees nothing wrong with excessively spoiling her kids until Stan decided to spend time for himself forcing her to have to deal with its consequences.
  • In "Whole Slotta Love", she is outraged when she thinks Stan is cheating on her, but later in the same episode, she admits that she likes the idea of other women being attracted to him.
• I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: Francine is a practiced expert at this having used sex appeal to get by in life. In the episode "My Morning Straitjacket", to help Stan get backstage to meet the lead singer of My Morning Jacket, she pulls this against several security staff, including flashing her breasts and making out with another woman.
  • She attempts it (and fails) in "1600 Candles", trying to get something out of some CIA agents. Lowering the straps of her dress doesn't work, giving him her panties (taken off right in front of him) doesn't work, but the second she mentions her brownies his partner charges over in a Humongous Mecha and takes them. "He makes it hard to negotiate," the first scientist remarks.
• Insane Troll Logic: In "A Song of Knives and Fire", she decides that the best way to help Stan live out his dream of being a volunteer firefighter is by setting fires for him to put out.
• Insufferable Imbecile: Francine's stupidity can reach self-satisfying levels; her only defence for dying to dirty water repeatedly whilst trapped in Oregon Trail is that she was thirsty and she continues not to believe Steve about strangers in the basement even when those same strangers come out of said basement to sing.
• Karma Houdini:
  • She has gotten away with excessive stealing in "Crotchwalkers."
  • The entirety of the events of "Poltergasm" are blamed on Stan's inability to sexually satisfy Francine, to the point her unsatisfied urges manifested as a bloodthirsty, psychotic entity that threatened to kill the family. At no point does anyone ever call Francine out on how her repeated lying to Stan over the years is what led to the Poltergasm's creation. It takes everyone being literal seconds from being crushed to death for her to finally tell Stan what she actually wants from him, and Stan's still the one to apologize.
• Kick the Dog: Got her son suspended from school by stashing drugs in his locker.
• Kinky Spanking: In "The Missing Kink", she develops a taste for spanking after Stan demonstrates how he uses it to punish Steve. She tells Stan that he should punish her for Steve's misdeeds (claiming they're a reflection on her parenting) and promptly starts framing Steve for causing trouble.
• The Lad-ette: In her younger years, she was a Hard-Drinking Party Girl who loved to drink, party, and have tons of sex.
• Lethal Chef: Stated to be one in "Dr. Klaustus." Stan can't stand her cooking and has been secretly feeding it to wolves for ten years, and Steve even cites it as one of the reasons he didn't want to introduce his girlfriend to the family, outright stating that Francine's food would probably kill her if Stan's lunacy didn't drive her away first.
• Male Gaze: Francine is often subject to this with major focus during her Supermodel Strut scene in "My Morning Straitjacket" and "Rubberneckers". Also, Bullock (Stan's superior) like to focus on her breasts.
• Mama Bear: Messing with Steve and Hayley is a sure way to get you killed by Francine, whether you're her husband or not. When Jeff seemingly decided to break off his engagement with Hayley for 50,000 dollars, Francine was so disgusted she tried to kill Jeff by unloading Stan's gun into his face. If it wasn't for the fact that Stan removed the bullets, Jeff would be dead right now. And when she discovered Stan had been bullying Steve in order to toughen him up, Francine chased him through the school, jumped out a window, and ran after him with glass in her hair until he drove off. She then rammed his car off the road with hers.
  Stan: What the hell, Francine! You t-boned me bro!
• Morality Pet: Zig-Zagged. Francine is a victim of Roger's selfishness, but she's also one of the very few individuals who can curb his said selfishness. When Roger thought he was going to signal Earth's destruction, the only person he planned to mourn was Francine:
  Roger: You know Stan, it's too bad. I actually liked Francine. The rest of them can go suck it but Francine I'm sorry to see die.
• Moral Myopia: She sees nothing wrong with manipulating and making her kids (especially Steve) dependent on her. Even in "Tapped Out", when the whole town makes her an outcast, she still refuses to admit she's done anything wrong.
• Ms. Fanservice: She is a very attractive woman and there are many fanservice tropes relate to her. Special mention goes to "My Morning Straitjacket", in which she got Stan backstage by showing off her body to appease all of the guards, and "Best Little Horror House in Langley Falls" where she spends half of the episode in underwear.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: She's in her 40's, and has had two canon kids (three counting Greg and Terry's daughter, Libby). And she can pass for a girl in her 20's. Brought up during "My Morning Straightjacket".
  Jim James: Hey, is this your daughter?
  Stan: Wife.
  Jim: Damn...
• My Beloved Smother: Towards Steve. She wants to be able to dote on him forever and is terrified of him growing up and leaving her, and as such, she deliberately tries to sabotage his romantic relationships. And the less said about the events of "Tapped Out", the better...
• Nice Girl: Aside from her occasional Bitch in Sheep's Clothing tendencies, she can be sweet and caring most of the time.
• Not So Above It All: While she is much more sane than Stan, she still engages in zany schemes, like trying to assassinate George Clooney because she felt he upstaged her (Season 1 finale).
• Official Couple: With Stan; they've been married since the start of the series.
• Older Than They Look: Francine's able to unintentionally pass herself off as a teenager when she's up to it. In the first season, after Stan accidentally erased the last twenty years of her life from her memory, Francine noticed no significant change in her physical appearance (except for pubic hair).
• Parental Abandonment: Her biological parents left her at an airport after being told they couldn't bring children with them in first class.
• Perverse Sexual Lust: On one occasion she's empathetically expressed a desire for Stan to roleplay the Monopoly Guy as a part of foreplay.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Her classic outfit is pink while Stan wears a blue suit.
• Pink Is Erotic: Francine wears pink all the time, and not only is she stated to have had sex with numerous men, but she's also considered very attractive by many characters in-universe. In My Morning Straight Jacket, Francine decides to help Stan by becoming a groupie to get him through security. She wears a hot pink tube top with pink lipstick and she gets through security by; posing provocatively to the doorman, showing her boobs, and making out with the lady security guard. The ending implies they either have a threesome with the lady security guard or Stan gets to watch them making out again.
• Pink Means Feminine: Pink is her favorite color and has many outfit with this color. Her normal attire consists of a pink gown with straps and pink high heels to match.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Much like her husband, Francine is sometimes a very impulsive and naive Womanchild as well as very insane, obsessive and unpredictable.
• Really Gets Around:
  • Shown at the beginning of "When a Stan Loves a Woman" where Francine revealed she has a sex garden where she planted a rose bush for every man she slept with that was later revealed to be the largest sex garden in North America and made cover of Sex Garden Magazine.
  • Played for Drama in "The Kidney Stays in the Picture", as she had sex with a man who may or may not be Hayley's real father on the day before her wedding because she was nervous about settling down to be a wife after being a party girl for so long and getting married and Stan is upset over being lied to about being Hayley's father (though he does accept the fact that he still loves Hayley, whether or not he's biologically related to her).
• Retired Badass: She was once in a fight club and in prison, and if you really anger her, she becomes a Combat Pragmatist who will do anything short of killing her family members if they cross her (she rammed Stan with a four-wheel-drive!).
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: The Right Way to Stan's Wrong Way (on more than a few occasions she proves to be just as bad).
• Sexual Karma
  • Compared to Stan, Francine's sex life is portrayed as innocent, satisfying and mutually pleasurable despite her darker moments because she's usually depicted as naive but well-meaning. However, in Poltergasm, Francine reveals that after they married she started faking her orgasms because Stan stopped taking his time or addressed her need for pleasure. Once they start doing it more affectionately, Francine's "poltergasm" disappeared under a thunderous cry of orgasmic pleasure.
  • The episode "Hot Water" had a moment where a post-Hot Tub Stan lead to an incredibly pleasurable sex session. Though mind-blowing, it wasn't Francine's best.
  Francine: That. Was. The. Best. Sex. I. Ever. Had. With You.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Francine really likes it when Stan acts sweet and sensitive. However it ends up averted in "The Boring Identity" where she turns an amnesiac Stan into her ideal sweet and caring man, but ends up bored with him and realizes she loves the old Stan who she acknowledges deep down is "an insensitive son of a bitch" but is the "only man she ever wanted." Meaning she wants a bad boy who's good in small doses.
• A Sinister Clue: She is left-handed, but suppressed it after having this trope (literally) beaten into her. Steve and Hayley help her overcome her past, and she resolves to start using her left hand again, which proves catastrophic because she had simply trained herself to be right-handed.
• Stacy's Mom:
  • Steve's friends have mentioned being attracted to her. Jeff finds her attractive too (despite the marriage with Hayley making Francine his mother-in-law.) Even her son Steve has expressed how attractive he finds her.
  • Steve himself in "Rubberneckers" literally sings twice about how he would to have sex with her if Francine wasn't his own mother.
• Stalker with a Crush: When she was younger she had a crush on her algebra teacher, Mr. Feeny. He didn't take her seriously, and then his wife found her in their closet smelling his clothes and cutting herself. Francine lied to the police about them being lovers, so he was arrested and eventually killed himself in prison.
• Stripperiffic: Her dance dress in the episode "Old Stan in the Mountain" that is very revealing. Indeed she is visibly embarrassed when Roger takes her to a funeral instead of a dance competition while wearing her ridiculous costume.
  [Roger and Francine walk into the funeral, and receive glares from all those in attendance]
  Francine: Why is everybody staring at us?
  Roger: Maybe 'cause we're at a funeral and you got your 'taters out.
• Supermodel Strut:
  • In "My Morning Straitjacket", she manages to get past a bouncer guarding the backstage (and bring Stan with her) by walking up to him in an intentionally seductive manner while swaying her hips and chest. The bouncer lets her in and the onlookers are too briefly distracted to complain about it.
  • In "Rubberneckers", when called as a witness, she enters the court while strutting and purposefully swinging her hips to get the men at court to look at her, proving that they're all 'Rubberneckers'.
• Taught to Hate: Francine Smith is left handed and hates left handed people and forces herself to use her right hand instead. This is because she grew up in an Catholic orphanage till the age of 7 where her left hand was beaten with a side of beef (or a fish on Fridays) if she used it whilst the nuns who taught her would scream about left handedness being the sign of the devil.
• Temporary Bulk Change: She becomes quite buff after she becomes a body builder in "One Woman Swole".
• Too Dumb to Live: For the most part she is this. In "Standard Deviation" she makes paste that's used for bicycle tires and serves it as dinner for her family believing it to be a recipe for soup! She also got said "Recipe" from a bicycling magazine.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In the early seasons, she was a perfectly nice person. But over time, she has become more callous and detached in regards to others.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Starting at around Season 14 or 15, she became less callous and neglectful to her family.
• The Unfair Sex: Though she has flawed moments, any confrontation she has with Stan (regardless as to whether Stan has a legitimate point or not) ends with her winning 99% of the time. Played straight as possible in an episode she revealed to have cheated on Stan just before their wedding. She's still the good guy.
• The Un-Favorite: Subverted. Her Chinese in-laws parents seem to favor their birth daughter Gwen to her. And Stan finds her parents' will, in which they leave everything to Gwen. But after Francine's father saves Stan from a burning building, he explains that they help Gwen because she is an idiot, but Francine is intelligent and can take care of herself and she has a good husband, so they know she'll be fine.
• Vocal Evolution: By the TBS seasons, her voice has gotten a bit lower and more shaky, likely due to Wendy Schaal aging.
• What Does She See in Him?: Stan is a Jerkass who's incapable of learning any lessons and does such things as lie to and use his own family for his own benefit, and has forgotten his and Francine's wedding anniversary more than once. In at least one episode, Francine has actually thought about leaving him.
• Womanchild: She often behaves like she is 7-years-old despite being a 40-year-old woman.
• Women Are Wiser: It varies, but the female Smith members tend to be better people. It sometimes happens when Stan is portrayed as the smart, rational one in comedic situations where her flaws don't bring any serious consequences. During the actual plot, where stupidity does push the conflict, however, you won't see Stan having the high ground. One example of this is "Daddy Queerest", which starts with showing Francine as embarrassingly stupid at a party, while the actual plot concerning Terry hiding in the closet from his homophobic father shows Francine as reasonable for helping him uphold a charade of heterosexuality while Stan is portrayed as an insensitive idiot for outing him after he pushed Greg onto Stan as a scapegoat.
• Would Hurt a Child: Well, teenager actually; She kidnaps Akiko in "Spelling Bee My Baby" so that Steve could focus on the competition.
• Yandere:
  • To her son, Steve (non-romantic example). Francine has moved away from this aspect in the later seasons, and when Stan starts having issues with Steve growing up Francine's the one who has to set him straight.
  • She's even one for her husband. When he tells her that he "killed" one of their friends' husband, she becomes jealous and overprotective of him. When she accidentally reveals that Stan "killed" her husband, she goes to extreme measures to keep Stan from getting arrested.
• You Are What You Hate: In one episode, she is revealed to have animosity toward left-handed people though shortly reveals herself to be is naturally left-handed. This is due to during her childhood being struck in the orphanage for using her left hand subsequently growing up believing lefties to be spawns of the "Devil".

Daughter and the oldest of the two Smith siblings. As a kid, she and her father were close due to sharing the same beliefs, but as she became a young adult, her views became the complete opposite of her dad's, causing the two to butt heads often; for instance, she's in favor of gun control, while he isn't. That's not to say that she doesn't get Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other moments with Stan, and shares more than a few personality traits from her father, both negative and positive.

• A-Cup Angst: According to some episodes, such as "1600 Candles", she's not very satisfied with her bust size, angrily yelling "This is as big as they're gonna get?!"
• Aesop Amnesia: Like Stan, Hayley has trouble learning lessons. In "Faking Bad", she uses Steve to make fake I.D.'s for her friends, while mocking him behind his back. This eventually results in Hayley going to jail. The two reconcile, but immediately after, Hayley goes back to insulting Steve.
• Aloof Big Sister: She only rarely connects with Steve; otherwise, she is distant and standoffish towards him.
• Ambiguously Bi: While mostly dating men like Jeff, Hayley flirts with women in episodes like “Pulling Double Booty” and “Haylias”. In “Pulling Double Booty”, she encourages a waitress to join a threesome, suggesting Jeff have sex with the waitress, then with her, and then watch the two women together. In “Haylias”, she expresses a desire to leave the United States to live a more uninhibited life in France, including pursuing love affairs with both men and women, leaving her sexuality open to interpretation.
• Attention Whore: She most likely flaunts her left-wing beliefs around to irritate her father and to get attention. She quickly abandons them whenever she wants to.
• The Artifact: Arguably even more than Klaus, who one can argue has never really been a major character, until later seasons. Hayley was the second character created for the show after Stan, when the premise was supposed to be a modern All in the Family. When politics was phased out in the first two seasons, Hayley's screen time and storylines were dramatically reduced.
• Ax-Crazy: She was a holy terror during the various stages of puberty, doing such things as setting the couch on fire and throwing Roger out a window. Furthermore, though she dumps boyfriends regularly and nonchalantly, the minute she's the one who gets dumped, she flies into a destructive rampage that has led the police to threaten her with prison should it happen again. Potentially justified due to the background of Project Daycare.
• Balloon Belly: Gains a pot belly from overeating at the UN Camp which Haley calls "The African 20", in "Camp Refoogee".
• Big Sister Bully: To Steve. She often puts him down and mocks him for being a "loser". Any moments of genuine affection between the two are few and far between.
• Big Sister Instinct: In "Meter Made" she beats up Roger after traumatizing Steve.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Special mention goes to the episode "Dungeons & Wagons" when Hayley breaks up with Jeff yet again because she feels he's smothering her. Later, after deciding she wants him paying attention to her again, she finds that Jeff would rather play an online RPG game with Steve and his friends so she herself enters the game and kills Steve's character. What makes this example stand out among others is the usually passive Jeff openly calls her out on her selfish and Jerkass behavior when she tries to make him pay attention to her again and even suggests that he wants nothing more to do with her.
• Body Paint: In "Roy Rogers McFreely", she paints over her chest to protest changes being made to the neighborhood.
• Book Dumb: She keeps dropping out of college due to her laziness, but she is quite abstract at other things that she sets her mind to.
• Bourgeois Bohemian: In addition to being a hippy/hipster, she lives with her upper middle-class parents.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Stan enrolled her in a program to become a CIA sleeper agent when she was 5. If you say the right combination of words, she becomes a trained killer.
• Brainy Brunette: Despite her brattiness and occasional self-righteousness, Hayley is quite intelligent and insightful.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Sort of, in the early seasons. She has beliefs that directly oppose her father's, but at times, it appears that she simply rebels against her parents for the sake of it.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: She exhibits strong critical thinking abilities and an abstract sense of direction, but she prefers to lounge around on the sofa instead of doing anything useful.
• Burger Fool: Hayley has kept a steady job at Sub Hub. It was the sole factor in her quitting vegetarianism.
• Butt-Monkey: Not to the extent of Klaus or Steve, but she is often dismissed by Stan and subject to Amusing Injuries.
• Competition Freak: "The Bitchin' Race" shows that she shares this trait with Stan; While teamed up with Steve in a race around the world, she treated Steve like he was useless (claiming that she had been "carrying" the team the whole way), and would go to any lengths to get ahead, from teaming up with Stan to having the leads taken out of the race.
• The Cynic: She frequently sees life as unfair, which started when she saw a news report of a man clubbing a baby seal.
• Daddy's Girl: When she was younger she used to absolutely adore her father.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Originally the main reason Hayley even bothered with Jeff. However, Stan eventually warmed up to him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Usually to her father.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Particularly from Season 3 on. Compare her screen time with Francine's, Steve's, or Roger's. Arguably because the show switched from politics driven to character/story emphasis, and her personality wasn't much developed other than as the strawman liberal.
  • Since Hayley married Jeff Fischer, however, the writers seem to be making an effort to include her more along with Jeff, but even then the subplots don't rely on Hayley's leftist views as much as they focus on problems with their marriage. There have been at least a few sub-plots on Hayley and Jeff's lack of a satisfying sex life.
  • Then, starting from Season 9 and continuing into the TBS episodes, she received more focus compared to her screen time from the last few seasons. At one point, Hayley had more episodes focused on her than Stan or even Roger!
• Depending on the Writer:
  • Hayley's Soapbox Sadie tendencies can switch between being genuinely passionate and well-intentioned, or completely hypocritical and implied to be nothing more than a facade to irritate her father. Similar to Francine, she can switch between the most level headed of the family or as much a self-righteous Jerkass as Stan.
  • Her intelligence level seems to fluctuate wildly between episodes. Some episodes she is clever and competent, others she is so stupid she thinks she can taste food by licking an image of it on her computer.
• Drug-Based Characterization: Haley is Stan's daughter and is a recreational stoner who opposes everything Stan believes in as a staunch republican. In "My Affair Lady", she decides to get a job after realizing her dealer was right to call her a loser for being unemployed.
• Dude Magnet: Like her mother, many men have been attracted to Hayley. Notable examples include Jeff, Bullock, Snot, and Reginald.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Dreamsmasher.
• Entitled Bitch:
  • "Pulling Double Booty" shows she turns into a monster if a guy dumps her, going on rampages that require heavy tranquilization just to make her calm down. When she was a kid she tore up her classroom after the boy she crushed on decided he liked a different girl. She even murdered a pregnant hamster. Jeff being the one to break up with her for a change resulted in her tearing a mall apart before they shot nineteen darts in her chest. She makes no effort at all to curb her anger issues even with the threat of being thrown in prison held over her head and expects people to just deal with her.
  • In the episode "LGBSteve," she's genuinely shocked and driven to tears when the lesbian roller derby team she and Steve joined kicks her off the team, despite the fact that mere minutes before they do so, she exposed Steve as a boy to the others by pulling his pants down to expose his genitals right in front of them; as it turns out, the other girls had known all along that Steve was a boy and didn't care.
• Everyone Loves Blondes: Invokes this trope by dyeing her hair blonde to get people to pay attention to her (in the episode "Blonde Ambition").
• Fake American: In-Universe. At the end of "She Swill Survive", there is a scene with Stan and Hayley being their Animated Actors. Hayley's actress has a thick Australian accent.
• Female Misogynist: In the earlier seasons when she was portrayed as a straightforward Straw Feminist, she enjoyed mocking women like Francine for "wasting their lives" instead of doing "more important" things. Which is rich coming from her, a lazy stoner and a total Hypocrite.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: Tomboyish Daughter to Francine's Feminine Mother. Hayley is a confrontational, rebellious Tank-Top Tomboy who always wears jeans, while her mother Francine is a bubbly housewife who wears a pink dress.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Her hypocritical and psychotic tendencies can be somewhat explained as an inherited tendency from her parents, but also as a likely side effect of the brainwashing Stan put her through when she was little.
  • See Used to Be a Sweet Kid for more traumatizing details.
• Generation Xerox: After she and Jeff get married, she starts to become more and more similar to Stan as Jeff is a lot like Francine.
• Granola Girl: In deep contrast to Stan, albeit a more cynical version of this trope. In the "Stan of Arabia" two-parter, when she's being chased by police for going out in public without a man, she yells at them "I respect your right to chase me!" (even though someone who is liberal and pro-women's rights like her should be objecting to how women are treated in Muslim countries). Later in the episode she agrees with a terrorist about how evil America is, though she insisted there were ways besides terrorism to fight the system.
• Happily Married: Most of the time, anyways. She does get irritated with Jeff's Cloudcuckoolander tendencies, but the two tend to have a much more stable marriage than Stan and Francine.
  "I'm married. Sometimes happily."
• The Hedonist: She ditches her left-wing, hippie vegetarian views several times in order to endorse superficial lifestyles. It usually doesn't end too well for her.
• Hidden Depths: The episode "Love, A.D. Style" shows that she's a very good singer (as is her voice actress) — to the point where Roger becomes dangerously obsessed with her.
• Hypocrite: A lot of humor tends to revolve around this.
  • In some cases she is incredibly shallow about her own ethics and views, albeit Depending on the Writer.
  • She dumps boyfriends, frequently Jeff, coldly and nonchalantly on numerous occasions (perhaps most notably dumping Avery Bullock over phone, midway through a presentation, on live TV, right before he was going to promote Stan) and is occasionally outright termed as a "slut." When a boy dumps her, however, she goes out and out Ax-Crazy (to the point that the police have threatened her to have her put in jail for life if she gets dumped again).
  • To hammer this point in, at the beginning of "Pulling Double Booty" (which introduces her violent responses to being dumped), a panicked Francine tells Stan that Hayley and Jeff broke up. Stan casually points out that this happens "at least every other week" before being told that Jeff caused it. Stan freaks out upon hearing that particular detail of the story.
  • In "Meter Made", she has no problem posing nude for an art class — until she learns Roger is in the class. When he brings the painting he made back home and puts it on display, she openly protests, prompting Roger to point out her earlier claim that posing nude "empowers" her.
  • The episode "Hayley Smith, Seal Team Six" reveals that she became a Soapbox Sadie at her 7th birthday party, where she witnessed a baby seal getting clubbed to death on the news and realized how unfair life was, yet she sees nothing wrong with taking advantage of her family.
• Inconsistent Spelling: "Hayley" is the official spelling of her name, but some source material, along with a few episodes, misspell it as either "Haley" or "Hailey". For example, "Pulling Double Booty" uses the former misspelling twice.
• Informed Deformity: She apparently has a very masculine face, to the point where she's sometimes mistaken for a man, despite her face being nearly identical to that of Francine's.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Hayley is essentially a caricature of Rachael MacFarlane, albeit younger and shorter.
• Interspecies Romance: She's a human who briefly dated, and willing to have sex with, Reginald, a koala.
• It's All About Me: Yet another negative trait she inherited from Stan.
  • In "Fleabiscuit", she sabotaged Jeff's racing dog, ruining its winning streak, all so she could remain the successful "alpha" in their relationship.
  • In "Who Smarted?", she allows Jeff to be subjected to a risky procedure that will increase his intelligence, due to being constantly annoyed by his idiocy embarrassing her in front of her friends. When the procedure turns out to be a success, she initially basks in the reflected glory of the now-genius level Jeff. But after making a fool of herself in front of their new "smart" friends, she instantly decides to try and reverse the procedure, clearly not happy that she is now the "dumb" partner.
• Karma Houdini: A lot of Hayley's role revolves around being a hypocritical foil to Stan and showing similar overzealous or callous tendencies as her father, especially in early seasons. However, similar to Francine, due to being mostly in supporting roles or minor comic relief, her actions are rarely called out or met with repercussions to the same level as Stan or even Steve.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: As a result of undergoing "Project Daycare" as a child, Hayley was brainwashed to become a nigh-unstoppable killing machine when Stan utters a specific codephrase (a phrase that "no one in the world would ever utter"). Unfortunately, after seven days she'll go crazy and try to murder Stan.
  Stan: I'm getting fed up with this orgasm!
• Lazy Bum: Hayley only seems to work her hardest when attempting to screw over her family. For example, in "Helping Handis", she makes a video about how worthless Francine's life as a homemaker is for class, despite the fact that she keeps dropping out of college; the show openly acknowledges that she will never move out of the house. In "Less Money, Mo' Problems", it's revealed that Jeff is the only one working full time; Hayley would rather remain a community college student and blame the low minimum wage for them mooching off Stan and Francine than get a job herself to bring in more income so they can move out.
• Like Parent, Like Spouse:
  • Hayley once entered a relationship with Stan's C.I.A. double, Bill, who looked like her dad (and nearly drove Francine to kill Stan because she thought he was sexually molesting her).
  • Likewise, Jeff is noted as being very similar to Francine, mainly in regards to both being blonde Cloudcuckoolanders, which is fitting as Hayley herself is a lot like Stan. "The Sinister Fate" in particular has Hayley being worried that she is turning into Francine, but she later discovers that, in fact, Jeff is a lot more like Francine than she is.
    Hayley: Oh my God... I'm not becoming my mother. I married her!
• Made of Iron:
  • Survived being bitten in the abdomen by a shark in the "Hurricane!" episode. Though she doesn't exactly shrug it off either, spending the rest of the episode pale and weak with blood loss.
  • In "Love, A.D. Style", she survives a point-blank gunshot wound to the chest from Roger, and while in the hospital also gets a vase smashed onto her head again by Roger. She also doesn't seem any worse for wear even after Roger kidnaps her out of the hospital and holds her captive in a dingy warehouse.
• Mama Bear: In "Season's Beatings", despite denying any maternal instincts, the minute she sees the baby Jeff adopted she starts sobbing uncontrollably with joy over "her baby." To the point that she was willing to kill Stan to protect Nemo, even if he is the Anti-Christ (from Rapture's Delight, to boot).
• Manchurian Agent: The trigger words: "I'm getting fed up with this orgasm." It was supposed to be "rhubarb," but that ended up triggering Steve into being a killer.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Masculine Girl to Steve's Feminine Boy.
• Meaningful Name: Her middle name, "Dreamsmasher". Stan wanted to use his youth on something productive and extravagant, but Hayley's birth put an end to his plans.
• Mirror Character: To Stan. In spite of their clashes with each other, they are both quite similar, being self-centered, self-righteous individuals who don't always practice what they preach.
• Ms. Fanservice: Not at the level of her mother, but again present. One of early episodes has her work as a stripper and another models nude, making a big deal on how it's totally not scandalous... until she sees that Roger is in the class.
• No-Respect Guy: Gender-inverted. She often receives no respect from her family (especially Stan), who sees her as a preachy downer and a disappointment to the household. The only one who consistently supports her is her husband, Jeff.
• Not Good with Rejection: Things can get really ugly if she is the on the receiving end of a breakup.
• Official Couple: With Jeff; they've dated since the start of the series and eventually marry.
• Only Friend: She's the one member of the Smith family who gets along with Klaus on a consistent basis (though even she can be mean to him at times). And since Hayley is seldom shown hanging out with anyone outside the Smith household (Danuta and Nerfer are her only recurring friends and their appearances are scarce), the same could be said about Klaus being her only friend. They even possess the ability to communicate with each other telepathically.
• Only Sane Woman: Compared to Jerkass Stan and Roger, energetic Francine, sex-crazed Steve, somewhat insane and perverted Klaus, and her stoner husband, she comes across as the closest to normalcy within her family.
• Out of Focus:
  • Since about Season 3 onward, compare her screen time and plot/subplot focus to Stan, Francine, Steve and Roger. In some episodes, she's lucky to have comparable screen time and lines to Klaus. See Artifact above. A big part of it is that as the show moved away from political satire, Hayley ended up losing most of her purpose to the show.
    Francine: It's been so quiet around here. Roger, Klaus and Hayley are still on that 100,000-mile road trip.
    Hayley: I didn't go on that trip.
    Francine: Hmm... you've really been flying under the radar this year...
  • As of Season 9, this has become subverted as she's been given much more plot/subplot focus than in the years prior. Season 11 for example had her playing some sort of essential role in 7 of its 15 episodes.
• Parenting the Husband: She often acts more like Jeff's mother than his wife. She is said to give him baths, needs others to watch him when she isn't around and once made him sit in a corner for 10 minutes (later upped to 20 when he talked back) because he insulted Francine.
• Perpetual Frowner: She is frequently shown frowning, which is lampshaded in "Hayley Smith, Seal Team Six" where the family gets sick of her sour demeanor.
• The Pig-Pen: Implied. It's been pointed out several times that she reeks of body odor, which isn't unlikely given her rather lethargic demeanor. It's also revealed she eats out of the garbage; she is even shown picking her nose on several occasions.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: She's absolutely tiny for an adult woman (she's barely five feet tall according to this cover art◊ for volume 6), but is much stronger and better at fighting than you'd think, capable of curb-stomping Stan, who is a trained killer.
• Rightly Self-Righteous: Her hypocrisy and ego is Lampshaded in excess, but having a father like Stan (and Seth's usual depiction of Republicans), she usually still proves the saner man.
• Right Way/Wrong Way Pair: Her left-wing ethics are always the right way to Stan's right-wing extremism.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: She has been shown to be pretty attractive when she wears a more flattering outfit and hairstyle, even developing a much curvier figure than her thin top and loose jeans would indicate. On few episodes, Roger even tells her that if she cleaned herself up and abandoned her hippy look, men would find her more attractive.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: She's much shorter than her mother and most other teenage and adult women on the show.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Her husband, Jeff, and many of Hayley's ex-boyfriends are nice guys.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Yet another negative trait she inherited from her father; she thinks she's more important than she actually is.
• Soapbox Sadie: To provide contrast to Stan's over-the-top right-wing attitude. Became this way after seeing news footage of a baby seal getting clubbed on her seventh birthday. From then on, she became very political and dour. For instance, when Stan came to her school on Career Day to tell the class what he does for a living, she introduced him as being responsible for introducing crack cocaine and AIDS into poor, inner-city neighborhoods (even though, according to Stan, the FBI was responsible for infecting inner-city neighborhoods with AIDS).
• Straw Feminist: She falls into the category of espousing women who choose to be mothers and housewives are wasting their lives instead of doing more important things. Hayley once created a presentation for one of her courses juxtaposing Francine doing household tasks against famous women of history, cruelly humiliating her own mother by making it look like Francine's an idiot.
• Straw Hypocrite: At her very worst. While she does show genuine devotion to her beliefs at times, a lot of her actions seem to be solely to outrage her Control Freak father, and has attempted to bail out a few good times she is made to go through with the consequences of her actions. Stan's status as an unofficial villain makes her this a lot of time such as in the episode "Less Money Mo’ Problems" where Hayley only brought up how hard it is to make a living on just minimum wage after Stan got tired of their antics which involve Jeff waking him up in the middle of the night to watch Bones, going to the bathroom while Stan was still in the shower, and pouring out an entire bottle of syrup onto his pancakes after Stan asked him to pass it. Making it come across as an excuse to allow them to keep freeloading off of Stan than something she actually believed in.
• Strawman Political: She's as much a stereotypical liberal as her father is a stereotypical conservative.
• Straw Vegetarian: Claims to be vegetarian, but eats a lot of ham in "Camp Refoogee" and had lobster with her family in "Family Affair". On "N.S.A: No Snoops Allowed", Roger convinces her to spend one day eating meat after eating Klaus' hazelnut and veal omelette, which escalates her into eating the brain of a gorilla (or so she thinks), which disgusts her enough to return to her vegetarian diet. In "(You Gotta) Strike For Your Right", she mentions skimming ham off the sandwich deliveries at her new job, showing that she has completely abandoned her former beliefs. Subsequent episodes show her eating meat with no issue, confirming that it stuck.
• Strong Family Resemblance: With her hair dyed blonde and without her headband, she looks practically identical to Francine.
• Tank-Top Tomboy: She sports a black tank top to display her rebellious nature.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Averted. In "Roy Rogers McFreely", Hayley points out to Stan that, since Roger's in charge and his views are counter to his, Stan is now part of the counterculture, and therefore on the same side with Hayley. Rather than argue, Stan realizes she's right and the two form a group to undermine Roger's control on the neighborhood. The episode showed that, if not for their clashing points of view, Stan and Hayley would get along great.
• Tomboyish Voice: Hayley has the deepest voice of the female characters, which befits her dominant, no-nonsense personality.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: Hayley is headstrong, dominant, and hedonistic, with a Limited Wardrobe of a black tank top and jeans. She also dresses up on formal occasions, wears panties, likes the color pink, enters baking contests and fawns over animals.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Hayley contends with Stan far less in later seasons, with more focus being put on her stoner nature for the sake of comedy.
• The Un-Favorite: Her middle name ("Dreamsmasher") says most of it, as well as Stan's disdain for her and Francine's blatant favoritism for Steve. Plus, with her extreme liberalism, her rebellious attitude, her dating and marrying Jeff, etc., she tends to get Stan's dislike often.
• Unstoppable Rage:
  • If the guy is the one who ends a relationship with her, she'll go on a destructive rampage. Averted in the episode "American Dream Factory", however. Illegal Mexican immigrant Paco breaks off a relationship with her, with no adverse effects (though she does go to desperate lengths to have him prosecuted by the INS). This is likely because this episode is almost two years older than "Pulling Double Booty", the episode where this trait made its debut. Though the reactions are different throughout the show, Hayley at least consistently handles being dumped in an extremely callous manner, especially considering the number of times she has coldly dumped Jeff.
  • She also was a holy terror during various stages of puberty: when told that she had to wear tampons now that she was on her period, Hayley (who was wearing a skirt) threw the tampon box away and sat on the Smiths' new white couch, she yelled at her parents for not getting bigger boobs, and when Roger cracked a joke about a pimple on her face, she threw Roger through a window and set the living room on fire.
  • One could speculate that her talent for destruction might be due to Project Daycare.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: She was very happy and energetic as a child (her nickname even being Happy Hayley). The episode "Hayley Smith - Seal Team Six" reveals that this aspect of her personality vanished at her 7th birthday party, where she witnessed a baby seal getting clubbed to death on the news, turning her into the preachy downer that she is now.
• Vocal Evolution: Hayley's voice sounded higher-pitched in earlier seasons, before settling into a much deeper contralto.
• Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Compared to her borderline Ax-Crazy father and scatter-brained mother, she is more level-headed.
• Weirdness Magnet: She always seems to attract questionable men, and being sucked into an environmental cult with a man who planned to be turned into a tree, as well as having dinner with a psychopathic serial killer who just killed his father.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: It's occasionally implied that some of her political beliefs and actions are simply ways to get her parents (mostly Stan) to notice her. Likewise, she once admitted that she felt as though Stan didn't love her since he's never openly said it.
• Woman Scorned: To its most extreme when she gets dumped. One time, she killed a class hamster in a fit of rage.
  Stan: The autopsy showed the hamster was pregnant.

The younger of the Smith siblings. A nerdy and awkward teenager who has his own circle of nerd buddies and quests for tail. While otherwise unsuccessful at the game of love, he does have an on-again/off-again relationship with heavyset goth Debbie Hyman, which seems to have resumed as of 'Escape From Pearl Bailey' but ended for good as of "Bar Mitzvah Hustle".

• Allegedly Dateless: Has had 18 prominent romances over the series (16, if you count that one of them was his dad in a cyborg's body trying to "seduce" him and another was an Artificial Human girl he made out of a vacuum cleaner), and 5 of them gave him a very realistic chance of losing his virginity ^note  Becky Arangino was a hebephile who wanted to take his virginity before being crushed to death by falling rocks, "Carmen Selectra" was willing to take it before being crushed to death by a collapsing stage, Stan was going to have sex with him in his avatar's body before calling it off, Jeanine Winthrop's father refused to let Steve have sex with her due to Stan's crack addiction at the time, and Steve was going to have sex with a girl named Ashley before deciding she was too "crazy" (to put a long story short). despite supposedly being incredibly incompetent with girls.
• Alliterative Name: Steve Smith.
• Always Someone Better: Invoked. His relationship with Snot turns out to be this, as Steve always found himself the best of the two because Snot lacks so many things Steve has and often comes to him for support. So when Snot's life starts to get better and he doesn't have to rely on Steve anymore, Steve goes out of his way to make his life miserable again so he goes back to being the loser of the two.
• Ambiguously Bi: Despite his endless Quest for Sex with girls, Steve has shown several instances of an open attraction to men. He has been visibly seduced and kissed by Roger several times, and has even openly kissed Snot as an "oath of friendship". In 'Railroaded', Roger gets new friends for Steve to improve Stan's image; Steve scoffs at the idea until he sees his new "friends" are all hunky, handsome young men upon which he enthusiastically takes off his shirt and jumps into the arms of one of them to carry him off. However, when Stan just asked him if he were gay with Snot, he denied it... with a quick "ugh" and a limp wrist. In a possible future, he and Snot are married.
• Animals Hate Him: If an animal appears in a subplot involving Steve, it's a sure bet it will attack him at some point.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Hayley sometimes becomes annoyed with his geeky behavior.
• The Baby of the Bunch: He's the only main character who isn't adult, being only 14. He's frequently being pushed around, mocked and babied by the other Smiths and can be extremely childish on occasion.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Generally a nice and pleasant kid, but it's been proven time and time again that when pushed, he will fight back. Case in point: in "Irregarding Steve," he puts up with Beauregard's relentless taunts and insults up until the point where Beauregard begins to insult Stan, at which point Steve snaps and beats him unconscious.
  Steve: Don't talk about my dad that way! Just because he doesn't know everything doesn't... mean... he's... stupid!
• Big "NO!": Periodically belts out a rather humorous one.
• Brainy Brunette: Brown hair and going along with being a nerd, Steve is fairly intelligent for someone his age.
• Book Smart: He is generally shown getting As and and Bs in his report cards.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Steve is constantly bratty and whiny, much to the annoyance of Stan and Hayley. Especially in the later seasons were his bratty behavior has progressively gotten worse.
• Break the Cutie: A victim of this in "Ricky Spanish." ...(Ricky Spanish)... He tries to prove to Roger that everyone can change for the better by trying to redeem Roger's Ax-Crazy persona of the same name... only for "Ricky" to use him as an Unwitting Pawn to set up a robbery and leave him to take the fall with the cops. Steve's final scene in the episode is of him exercising in prison while swearing revenge on Ricky Spanish, now hating him just like everyone else in Langley Falls. To twist the knife even further, there's even a Hope Spot that makes it look like Roger is going to help Steve escape... only to steal his wallet and throw him to the cops, who promptly beat him senseless.
• Butt-Monkey: The biggest in the show. He's been beat up, humiliated and/or tormented by nearly every other character in the show, like jocks at school, Roger, his friends, and even his dad in one episode. Plus, the writers have fun giving him the possibility to get a girlfriend just to lose her at the end of the episode. There have been times where he does manage to successfully keep a girl at the end of an episode, only for said girl to never appear again in later episodes.
• Casanova Wannabe: Although to be fair, while he does have the classic bad pick-up lines and often misplaced charisma, this borders on Informed Flaw due to how often he actually does have girls interested in him.
• The Cast Show Off: Similar to Seth MacFarlane, Scott Grimes has an incredible singing voice, and so this is exploited whenever possible in the show, with Steve singing R&B numbers in a flawless falsetto. Nearly always Played for Laughs, given that Steve is a suburban white kid who can sing like R. Kelly.
• Catchphrase: Scott Grimes once joked that he actually got an umbilical hernia from screaming "AWESOME!" so often during early series.
• Characterization Marches On: There's a six minute precursory test pilot where Steve's character, both in personality and cosmetics, is drastically different than how it looks now.
• Chick Magnet: While he may be a Casanova Wannabe and depending on the plot, Steve has managed to successfully flirt with and date many young ladies who genuinely find him cute.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Despite his multiple Butt-Monkey moments, Steve has shown the ability to form complex plans, strategies, and pull off some fairly impressive feats, such as when he went on a revenge pranking spree.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • He's either a sweet nerdy kid who looks up to his dad, a kid with serious issues, or hormonal and perverted.
  • His competency with girls varies wildly. Sometimes, he comes off as awkward, but funny and cute to girls. Sometimes he's a stuttering, nervous wreck when talking to one, but endearing to them anyway. Sometimes, he's an ultra charismatic smooth operator who comes just this close to losing his virginity, while in other cases he's a tactless pervert who earns the disgust of the object of his affection. And in "I Am The Walrus" (at a Wild Teen Party, no less) he couldn't even talk to a girl without curling up into a fetal position on the floor and hyperventilating.
  • His level of strength and fighting skills also varies; generally, he's a wuss, but in "Irregarding Steve," he beat Beauregard unconscious in a fit of rage. In "Bully for Steve," he's so pathetically weak that, according to Francine, he can't even make a fist.
  • Just like with his mother, the extent of how much of a bratty jackass he's become thanks to his Flanderization also varies from episode to episode. Unlike with Francine however where she's more of a bitch in episodes where she isn't a main character, this example applies to any episode with Steve, main character or not.
  • Either he really is proud of his father (which then makes Stan treat him with pure disdain and embarrassment because of Steve's geekiness getting in the way) or he is absolutely embarrassed of him (when Stan usually feels proud of him and wants him to succeed at an activity Steve isn't interested in at all).
  • His intelligence sometimes varies wildly, from being very intelligent and logical to a Ditzy Genius to being a complete moron despite his nerdy looks. A good example of the latter is in "Dope & Faith", Roger somehow was able to trick him into thinking he was studying potions in Hogwarts when it was obvious that he was actually fabricating drugs in a crack den.
• Determinator: No matter how many girlfriends he's lost, Steve never gives up on trying to get laid; after a moment of heartbreak, he simply picks himself back up and moves on to the next Girl of the Week.
• Deuteragonist: Gets as much focus on the show as his father.
• Did Not Get the Girl: The episodes where he tries to get the girl always ends like this because Status Quo Is God. His longest relationship was with Debbie Hyman, who dumps him in "Bar Mitzvah Hustle" (twice). And later on when he dates Akiko Yoshida (even hooking up with her at the end of "Spelling Bee My Baby"), she disappears from the show without mention afterwards, and Steve has gone back to being single.
• Dirty Coward: In "Lost Boys", he's quick to try and sell out his friends to save his own hide.
• Ditzy Genius: At times. For example, in "Irregarding Steve," he's shown to know more about the New York Stock Exchange than about prostitution.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the original six minute test pilot, Steve's appearance was wildly different. In the pilot, he wore a red t-shirt with a lightning bolt on it, blue shorts, round glasses and was much skinnier. In the show, he wears an open red shirt over an orange shirt, blue jeans, square glasses and is noticeably less skinny.
• Embarrassing Middle Name: Not that it comes up very much, but it's apparently Anita.
• Endearingly Dorky: A nerdy kid who geeks out and frequently becomes giddy, and is desperately trying to get the girl of his dreams. Despite failing miserably for the most part in the romance department, some girls throughout the series find Steve's nerdy/dorky nature to be charming.
• Fiction 500: In "No Weddings and a Funeral" it's mentioned that Steve was able to buy Australia.
• Flanderization: As of the latest seasons, his obsession with losing his virginity and bratty nature have become his defining traits. In the case of the former, by "News Glance with Genevieve Vavance", he'll willingly sell out his own sister for something that she didn't even do (Roger's bogus news story that Hayley kidnapped him) if it means that he has a chance at getting laid. And in the case of the latter, by the time of "Morning Mimosa," Steve has absolutely zero qualms against saying "fuck you" to his own mother.
• Free-Range Children: He and his friends are generally shown on their own with no adult supervision, even once having travelled to Los Angeles without his parents. The only adult who is shown accompanying him most of the time is Roger, who constantly endangers his life for whatever scheme he comes up with.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: His friends seem to only hang around him because there's no one else to hang out with and tend to ditch him or start drama with him at the drop of a pin. He's prone to the same treatment when one of them is under the limelight.
• Geek Physique: He's a scrawny little dork who wears glasses.
• Girls Like Musicians: Steve mentions taking up the cello just so he can hook up with girls.
• Goal in Life: Steve's main goal throughout the series is losing his virginity.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Particularly in later seasons where his anger issues have become more prominent, to the point of frequent lashing out over very trivial matters.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Snot. The two are repeatedly shown to be extremely close (even beyond Steve's friendships with Barry and Toshi) and are usually there for each other.
• Hollywood Atheist: Is depicted as such in "Daesong Heavy Industries," openly criticizing religion in church and eventually driving Stan to a Crisis of Faith.
• Hollywood Genetics: It has been explicitly said that Steve has red hair (though on television, it appears brown). His mom is a brunette, that dyes her hair blonde, and his dad has black hair with blond recessive genes and seen as a blond when he was a child and baby.
• Hormone-Addled Teenager: Many episodes that deal with Steve's sexuality portray him as a naughty young man with his perverted tricks up his sleeves to gain attention from girls.
• Incest Subtext: In later seasons Francine has become an object of his confusing Oedipal emotions. In "Rubberneckers", Steve literally sings twice about how he would have sex with Francine if she wasn't his own mother.
• Informed Flaw: One common joke about him is him supposedly being extremely feminine, despite not being noticeably girlier than most 14-year-old boys. One episode even has him join a lesbian gang because the members thought he was more girl than boy and in "LGBSteve," he joined a women's roller derby team because Hayley introduced him to the team as her sister and the other team members believe that he's a lesbian in a boy's body.
• It's All About Me: Several episodes show that Steve often decides what he and his friends will be doing, and doesn't like it when his "leadership" of the group is challenged in any way.
• Jerkass Ball: Post-Flanderization has given him plenty of moments where he'll act selfish and bratty when the plot demands it ("Minstrel Krampus", "I Ain't No Holodeck Boy", "News Glance with Genevieve Vavance", "Morning Mimosa", "The Life Aquatic of Steve Smith", "The Unincludeds", and "Julia Rogerts"). Even in episodes where he's mostly nice like "Garbage Stan", he'll still have at least one moment of being a complete asshole to someone (in the aforementioned's case, Klaus who he essentially dehumanizes by forcing him to take down a poster that he hung up in the alcove between the kitchen and garage which he considers to be his room).
• Jerkass to One: Even on his better days, he is still crueler to Klaus than anyone else, often insulting him and flipping his bowl for no reason.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He can be an annoying and conceited brat who tends to take friends and family for granted, but at heart he's a decent kid. Granted, his moments of kindness diminish more and more with each new post-Flanderization season.
• The Jinx: In both the case of animals and romance. The few he successfully gains the affection of tend to meet a terrible fate. Simon the cat seemed to make the connection.
• Jock Dad, Nerd Son: A constant source of contention between he and Stan. His father constantly tries to help him with various "masculine" activities to avoid letting Steve repeat the same poor experience Stan had in high school.
• Karma Houdini:
  • In "News Glance with Genevieve Vavance", he got no punishment for going along with Roger's lie that he was kidnapped by Hayley which required him to sell out his own sister for something she didn't even do... unless you count him not being able to have sex with the very girls that motivated him to sell out Hayley for.
  • He was also an accomplice in Roger's orphan enslavement ring in "Tears of a Clooney", and neither he nor the aforementioned were really punished or called out for their actions there either.
• Karmic Butt-Monkey: On some occasions, his Amusing Injuries and humiliations happen as a result of his selfish and obnoxious behavior, particularly in "Big Trouble in Little Langley", "Merlot Down Dirty Shame", "There Will Be Bad Blood", and "A Ward Show".
• Keet: He's rather excitable and energetic, which only becomes more prominent as the series goes on.
• Kiddie Kid: While he does act like a teenager at times, he also has a lot of moments where he acts like he's 4 years old (especially after his Flanderization around the 8th/9th seasons). Just look at "Toy Whorey", "Minstrel Krampus", and "Familyland". He also still has a babysitter in "Adventures in Hayleysitting".
• Large Ham: Seems to inherit his father's melodramatic tendencies.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: Much like his sister, though his password is apparently "rhubarb."
• Locked Out of the Loop: In the episode "Chimdale", he learns that his father is bald and has been wearing a wig over his head. He tries to expose it to his family but at the end, when Stan reveals it, they admit they knew all along and they only kept it from Steve because they believed he would overreact.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: His desire to lose his virginity was always a part of his character, but as of the latest seasons, it's become one of his two sole defining characteristics to the point of losing the "lovable" part.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Feminine Boy to Hayley's Masculine Girl. Also, when with on-and-off (mostly off) girlfriend Debbie, the Feminine Boy to her Masculine Girl.
• Momma's Boy: This gets addressed a few times where Stan is concerned that Francine nurtures Steve too much, making him less of a man.
• Morality Pet: Zigzagged. Steve is a victim of Roger's selfishness, but he's also one of the very few individuals who Roger always wants to make happy.
• More than Meets the Eye: Regarding his surprisingly good singing voice when he sings for real, instead of being Played for Laughs by singing in his normally shrill voice. You can hear him here. He also isn't shy about it, taking several opportunities to sing in front of people, and even once landing him and his friends a spot on a boyband. Fun fact about this; his voice actor, Scott Grimes, is actually a professional vocalist.
• Mr. Vice Guy: He's usually a nice guy, but his obsessions with getting laid and becoming popular sometimes lead him to do questionable things. Later seasons also give him a noticeably bratty, childish streak.
• Naked People Are Funny: Has been seen fully nude a few times. One instance has him try to become unpopular even by outcast standards to ensure that Snot and him will remain friends. The two dance wearing nothing but tightly-whiteys when they're hosting a party and later decide to go the distance and dance in the buff.
• Nerds Are Pervs: Steve is a glasses-wearing dweeb who's often a disappointment to his CIA agent dad Stan and the biggest loser in school. Depending on the Writer, he's either a harmless, socially awkward kid who is seen by some girls as Endearingly Dorky, or a Hormone-Addled Teenager and Casanova Wannabe, who is always trying to hit on some of his female classmates, much to their displeasure.
• Nerd Glasses: He's a nerd with glasses.
• Nerdy Nasalness: Befitting his nerdy appearance and personality, Steve has a high-pitched, nasally voice.
• Nice Guy: Pevert tendencies aside, he seemed like a good-hearted boy at least in the first few seasons.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In "Bazooka Steve," he convinces star quarterback Johnny Concussion to retire from football for the sake of his health, costing the Langley Falls Bazooka Sharks the season. In response, everyone in Langley Falls turns on Steve, including his own family, and chases him out of town; in fact, Francine was the one who sold Steve out to the town in the first place.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Has remained 14 for virtually most of the show's run. "Virtual In-Stanity" had him turn 15, only for every subsequent episode since then that mentions his age keep him at 14.
• Obfuscating Disability: He pretends to be a paraplegic in a wheelchair when portraying his detective persona "Wheels", one half of the detective duo Wheels and the Legman (with Roger as the Legman).
• Older Than They Look: Due to his short stature and scrawniness, he looks closer to ten than fourteen.
• Otaku: Downplayed. Some of his several nerdy obsessions include manga and anime based things, but for the most part, he enjoys nerdy American things (mostly Star Trek, video games, computers, and Dungeons and Dragons). But, he does have a particular thing for Japanese cosplay, being very "interested" in Akiko's Chun-Li costume.
• Papa Wolf: After raising a clone of a random girl to be his date to the prom, Steve comes to legitimately see her as his daughter, to the point that, after Stan makes a comment about how hot she is, Steve slaps him in the face on instinct alone.
• Pathetically Weak: In contrast to his physically active father, Steve Smith is so wimpy that when Francine tried to teach him how to fight she gave up in violent frustration when he couldn't even ball a fist.
• Quest for Sex: Majority of his storylines amount to this. He usually never succeeds getting laid though.
• Raging Stiffie: In keeping with his Hormone-Addled Teenager vibe, he has a habit of getting these (and humorously trying to hide them).
• Ridiculously Successful Future Self: Both "The Unincludeds" and "No Weddings and a Funeral" show that Steve will one day become rich and successful, with his own tech company. While in "Mural Of The Story" he has become a professor at Berkeley.
• Robosexuals Are Creeps: Steve builds a robotic girlfriend by decorating a vacuum cleaner. Stan doesn't like this and tells Steve to disassemble it before he gets home from work. In an alternate future where Stan dies retrieving gold, Steve still has the sexbot and is viewed by everyone as a freak for it. In the future seen during "No Weddings and a Funeral", Steve has a "pleasure" robot - that he pleasures (something the rest of the family is repulsed to learn).
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Fitting with his stereotypically nerdy and wimpy personality, Steve constantly screams in a high-pitched tone.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Sensitive Guy to Stan's Manly Man. Stan even tries (and fails) to get Steve to toughen up in one episode by being his aggressive and threatening bully.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: He and his friends are dwarfed by practically every other teen on the show (except his sister Hayley, who's also short). Especially jarring since both his parents actually appear to be fairly tall (Stan is listed at 6 feet. Francine's height is unknown, but she isn't terribly shorter than Stan).
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: Has this in one episode with an underage Indian girl.
• Small Name, Big Ego:
  • He wrote a Saturday Night Live sketch called "Quantum Rape", about a guy in jail for raping Scott Bakula who tries to explain to his cellmate what Quantum Leap is and failing. Steve finds this hilarious, but Jon Stewart didn't. Steve comes to the logical conclusion that Stewart was raped as a child which is why he thinks it's so awful.
  • Like his father, Steve generally tends to think he's a bigger deal than he actually is.
• Smart People Wear Glasses: The only of his immediate family to wear glasses and is quite the smart guy.
• Spoiled Brat: Can come off as this sometimes (especially post-Flanderization), but it became much more apparent when one episode had him raised by Francine only, turning him into the stereotypical spoiled and lazy teenager.
• Stereotypical Nerd: Wears Nerd Glasses, has Nerdy Nasalness, is a Pathetically Weak wimp because of Geek Physique, is not cool and a bit of a social outcast, and harbors a strong academic interest in science, especially chemistry. More typically geeky traits of Steve's include his interests in Dungeons & Dragons, Harry Potter and Star Wars. His luck with the ladies varies Depending on the Writer between him being a sex-obsessed Casanova Wannabe and him actually being considered Endearingly Dorky.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Just how much of a wimp he is, Depending on the Writer. In "Irregarding Steve", he actually beats Beauregard unconscious in a rage after Beauregard insults his family, whereas in "Bully for Steve," he's so wimpy that, according to Francine, he can't even make a fist.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: In "My Purity Ball and Chain." After thirteen seasons of his Quest for Sex failing, Steve finally manages to lose his virginity.
• Too Dumb to Live: "Stan Smith as Keanu Reeves as Stanny Utah in 'Point Breakers'" had him make friends with a drifter he met on the edge of town who won't tell him his name, stays with the Smiths, uses Steve to commit crimes, and heavily implies that he's going to kill Steve. Near the end of the episode, Stan calls Steve out on this egregious lapse in judgment and throws the drifter out.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: While he could be bratty, selfish and insensitive at times, Steve was generally a good-hearted, sensitive person. Around Season 9, he became an obnoxious, childish brat through Flanderization and his nicer moments became few and far between.
• Vocal Evolution: His voice was much higher in the unaired pilot. In the aired pilot, his voice was rather deep and nasally. But as the series goes on, his voice slowly gets higher before going deeper in the later TBS seasons, likely due to Scott Grimes aging.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Tries to impress Stan, who is repulsed by his nerdiness and lack of athleticism.
• With Friends Like These...: Steve's friends ditch him the first chance they get when something out of the norm happens to him. He also frequently fights with them, and can be perfectly willing to ditch them in order to save his own skin.

An East German athlete trapped in the body of a goldfish thanks to a scheme by the CIA to prevent him from winning the gold at the 1986 Winter Olympics because he was from the "communist East." An unspecified time later, Stan was assigned to looking over Klaus, and as such the talking fish has become an honorary member of the Smith family.

• Accent Adaptation: In the German dub, he has a Saxon accent.
• Acquired Situational Narcissism: Whenever he manages to get the upper hand on someone or becomes center of attention, he tends to let it go to his head and starts becoming narcissistic. Prime example is "Plot Heavy", where Stan starts doubting his confidence in decision making after the rest of the family decides to turn their backyard into a cemetery, Klaus browbeats Stan into following his idea for a beach club, begins bossing him around while calling him his "employee" and berating him, and letting him take the blame from the others when they get pissed off.
• All Germans Are Nazis: Zigzagged. Klaus was horrified when the others thought his grandfather worked at the Auschwitz concentration camps (he actually drove the kiddy train at the Auschwitz zoo); and outright admits that what the Nazi did was monstrous in the episode when he and Stan met Francine's birth parents. However, another episode has him pay his respects to the Nazi soldiers who perished during D-Day, and when labeled as an anti-semite he just says "So that's how you spell it!" Since the move to TBS, Klaus has stopped making references to the Nazis.
• Artistic License – Biology: Fish swallow water and filter oxygen as it leaves through their gills, but as long as Klaus sits in a bit of water, he suffers no repercussions from most of his body being exposed to air.
  Francine: And apparently, he doesn't even have to be in water. Just, like, touching it? That's not how fish work!
• Bathtub Mermaid: Klaus is usually seen floating in a fishbowl or lounging in a filled cup. In "1600 Candles", he becomes mobile by having a hamster ball filled with water.
• Beneath Suspicion: At times, this serves as Klaus' greatest strength; the rest of the Smiths are so used to seeing him as an impotent goldfish he can completely blindside them. He tricks Roger and Steve into waiting to get a refund that won't even go to them for days, with Roger lampshading he never once considered Klaus was playing them. And when Stan deliberately ignores him when he erases the family's memory for a good Father's Day, Klaus alerts them to the truth and breaks the mind-erasing device beforehand, throwing back at Stan his earlier statement about him; "It wasn't on my radar".
• Beware the Nice Ones: While usually nobody takes him seriously, on one occasion, Klaus is enraged by a prank and furiously swears revenge on Steve and Roger, instilling paranoia by claiming his retribution could come at any time! This terrified them so much, they spent over 9 months hiding in the attic.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In-universe, when Klaus disappeared in a puff of smoke, then later reappeared whilst cutting himself out of a squid, armed with a sword and wearing a crown.
  Klaus: I was gone sixty years! How long was it here?!
  Roger: What, where'd you go?
  Klaus: I don't know, but wherever it was, I am their king now!
• Brain Theft: His backstory is that of an Eastern German Olympic skier who's brain was stolen and transplanted into a goldfish. He pulls this on Steve one time but things are resolved at the end.
• Butt-Monkey: As a man trapped in the body of a helpless goldfish, Klaus is the victim of several misfortunes and is often ignored or mocked by the other characters.
• Characterization Marches On:
  • In the first season, Klaus was a shadier, more unpleasant personality, openly lusting after Francine and delighting in tormenting Roger. In later seasons, he's usually the lowest member on the Smith family totem pole, frequently being insulted or demeaned by the others, has dropped his crush on Francine (and is even irritated by her on occasion), and is generally more demure and empathic.
  • In the early seasons, Klaus frequently dropped hints that he held Nazi sympathies. These have been discontinued since the move to TBS.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Spent most of the early seasons trying to woo Francine. Less prominent later on where he seems to have gained a respect for Stan and lost interest in Francine for the most part.
• Commonality Connection: In "A New Era for the Smith House", he bonds with Dick over the fact that they both receive very little respect from the people around them.
• Damned by a Fool's Praise: In the TBS seasons, if Klaus brings up a piece of media or public figure, it's almost always a Take That! by the writers to reinforce that he has terrible taste.
• Dirty Communists: In the German dub, he's a Communist instead of a Nazi, largely due to how extremely strict the country is in portrayals of Nazis in fiction.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Occasionally implied that he had a trouble past, but because of how Out of Focus he is, isn't really truly revealed.
• Depending on the Writer: While he's shown to hate being a fish most of the time, there are other times where he seems to enjoy it or at least not hate it.
• The Dog Bites Back: Later episodes have him finally standing up and having his revenge against the Smiths.
  • In "Da Flippity Flop", he abuses Stan's brainswitched body as revenge for his constant poor treatment.
  • "Scents and Sensei-bility": After being coldly thrown out of the house by the Smiths due to his smell, he outsmarts and kicks them out of the house. By the end of the episode, he still has the Smiths kicked out of their house, with their attempt to bring in wild animals to kill Klaus ending with him slaughtering them all off-screen.
  • "Father Daze", he intentionally ruins Stan's plans for a perfect Father's Day when the latter had insulted him prior.
  • "A Nice Night for a Drive", he lashes out on Stan when his mind is swapped with the family car.
  • "The Life and Times of Stan Smith", he hazes the shit out of Steve with his old fraternity.
  • "Live and Let Fry" Klaus convinces Roger to impersonate him after reading a newspaper notice that Klaus needed to sign papers to receive an inheritance. Klaus knew all along that it was a ruse by former members of the East German Mafia to whom he owes money, resulting in Roger getting the crap kicked out of him.
  • "A New Era for the Smith House" has Klaus (along with Dick) kicking the Smiths out of their home after they were ungrateful for his house sitting service, deeming him unfit to be left alone in the house. Despite that, he proves the Smiths right when he accidentally burns the house down.
• Disproportionate Retribution: He has a habit of lashing out at those who lightly wrong him.
  • In "Surro-Gate", he reacts to Steve and Roger pranking him by swearing a terrible revenge, driving the two into paranoia.
  • In "The Mural of the Story", he joins Hayley in her attempt to punish Stan, simply because Stan wouldn't immediately look at the comic book Klaus created.
• Even Evil Has Standards: In "Big Trouble in Little Langley," he's absolutely disgusted to find out that Francine's birth parents abandoned her simply because they couldn't bring a baby into a first-class flight.
  Klaus: Stan, these people are monsters. You know what my country’s done, and even I find this repulsive.
• Faking the Dead: In "No Weddings and a Funeral", he fakes his death in hopes that the Smiths will finally realize how poorly they've treated him over the years (it doesn't work, though).
• The Friend Nobody Likes: He is basically the Meg Griffin of American Dad!, frequently disrespected and mistreated and bullied by the Smiths. Hayley is the only one who's consistently nice to Klaus, but even she participates sometimes. When push comes to shove, they will admit that they do love him.
• Forced Transformation: A human trapped in the body of a fish. He has repeatedly shown disdain in being a fish but other times he seems to be content with it.
• For the Evulz: In "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man," he not only tricks Roger into eating Francine's potato salad for the Deacon's wake, but also deliberately tells Stan that Roger produces more breast milk when he eats, leading to Roger being hooked up to a milking machine. Both times, he states it's simply because "I'm German. It's what we do."
• Fratbro: His primary characterization in the TBS seasons.
• The Hedonist: When he forcibly swaps bodies with Stan in "Da Flippity Flop," he embarks on several pleasures, such as smoking, having unprotected sex with diseased hookers, and doing drugs. Though it's mostly to get revenge on Stan for letting Klaus' old body rot.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Klaus, before being transformed into a fish, was highly accomplished; he studied at Viardina European University and may have a doctorate in therapy. He owned a Ferrari and was an Olympic class skier. However, as none of that is relevant to being a goldfish it's frequently overlooked or ignored.
  • He also has far more of a social circle than the series lets on, namely Fratbro friends all across the country, much to the Smiths' bewilderment every single time.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Sometimes, Klaus ends up ruining a chance to improve his rather abysmal lot in life through his own intensity and paranoia. Hayley's hot friend Danuta expresses romantic interest in him at least twice; he goes overboard trying to impress her even though she's interest beforehand, driving her into the arms of his friend Jurgen. Thinks everyone who enters his store is a scheming thief; he shoots a health inspector, wounds himself to set up a shoot-out, and then gets robbed for real by a delivery man when he falls unconscious. Gets himself a committed girlfriend and becomes a loving father-figure to her young son; when Roger makes a sculpture of him which he says doesn't reflect his inner beauty, his anger drives them both away.
• Humanity Ensues: He gets his brain put in the body of a cryogenically-frozen black man, which he intends to use to have sex with Francine. It expires after getting impaled by debris from a mall statue and is put in a goldfish body once again. Sometime in the future, however, he has a human body for good to the point where he has a grandson.
• I Love the Dead: In "Shallow Vows", Stan brings home a fish the CIA experimented on and removed its retina that died shortly after it was put in Klaus's bowl, this was over two weeks before Stan and Francine's anniversary and wedding vow renewal. With the fish's body still floating in his bowl after the renewal, Stan still wouldn't take it out of the bowl despite Klaus asking him to. After a sigh of resignation, Klaus remarks that he'll have sex with the fish's body again before the smell makes him throw up.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: He occasionally takes on a villain role in his few A Day in the Limelight episodes, usually involving him trying to steal somebody's body and/or get revenge on Stan. However, it's hard to root against him when you realize he's a human being who's been trapped in the body of a fish for about 30 years.
• Irony: In the early days of the series, Klaus would delight in tormenting Roger (most notably in "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man"). After the second season, Roger is the one doing the tormenting, regularly tearing down Klaus's self-esteem without a care.
• I Reject Your Reality: This, along with The Mad Hatter, and Cloudcuckoolander. His mental health has obviously deteriorated due to being stuck in the body of a fish, and he's fully aware of it. He has conversations with himself, and has narrated his life and those around him as a DVD commentary, among other instances of insanity. Later episodes occasionally subvert this by having his delusions be Real After All, most notably his boys in Florida, who have since become recurring characters.
• The Load: Even Francine is blunt about this:
  Klaus: Oh, can I help?
  Francine: How can you help? You're a fish!
• Manipulative Bastard: One of the most cunning, manipulative characters on the show. He can frequently get revenge on others for his mistreatment, despite bring confined to a bowl. Most notably in "Stanny-Boy and Frantastic" where he gets back at Roger and Steve for insulting him, by tricking them into wasting days to get a refund on a credit card that wasn't even theirs.
• Mars Needs Women: Lusted after Francine in early episodes.
• Mobile Fishbowl: Being a fish, he gets around by crawling around in a small glass filled with water, rolling around in a hamster ball filled with water, or just appearing where he needs to be, bowl and all.
  Francine: And apparently, he doesn't even have to be in water. Just, like, touching it? That's not how fish work.
  
• Mysterious Past: Much about his human life is unknown. He studied psychology when he was in college, was an accomplished Olympic skier and apparently owed money to the German Mafia at some point.
• Noodle Incident: Apparently he really pissed off the East German Mafia in the past.
• One-Man Army: Klaus spends the majority of "Scents and Sensei-bility" being mercilessly harassed by a mob of cats and birds who want to eat him. At the end of the episode, all of his enemies gang up on him, but the fish somehow quickly kills them off-screen.
• Only Friend: Aside from Danuta and Nerfer, who only appear very infrequently, he's pretty much Hayley's only friend and vice-versa. Rudely lampshaded by Steve in "Merlot Down Dirty Shame".
• Out of Focus: Some of the Fox seasons regularly assign him only one line per episode. Generally diminished in the TBS run, however, in which he becomes a more prevalent source of comic relief and frequent B-plot protagonist.
• Retcon: His backstory since the very first episode was that he was a skater in the 1986 Winter Olympics. However, fast forward to many years later where the Season 13 episode "The Life and Times of Stan Smith" inexplicably changes it to where now he was a college student post-1994 when the Foo Fighters were formed.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: In "Da Flippity Flop", Klaus' original human body is finally found, but Stan repeatedly refuses to take Klaus to the CIA to swap him back when asked. When Francine finally convinces Stan to do so, it turns out that lab technicians unfroze Klaus' body and used the ice to cool their beer, causing the body to severely decay and rot. Outraged, Klaus knocks Stan out and swaps bodies with him, and then goes on a bunch of insanitary revenge-fueled adventures, during which he repeatedly abuses and defiles Stan's human body by, among other things, smoking, getting multiple tattoos, having sex with diseased prostitutes, playing with dead animals, and doing drugs while sharing the syringe with a hobo. Through it all, he brings Stan, now trapped in the body of a fish, along in a fishbowl and forces him to watch.
• The Scapegoat: In "No Weddings and a Funeral", the family realizes they need Klaus to be their Butt-Monkey, as mistreating him is the only thing they have to bond over.
• Stronger Than They Look: Despite having the body of a goldfish, Klaus can prove himself to be shockingly strong. He was able to drag Haley into a toilet bowl, push away a couch to the point it essentially glides, flying tackle Steve and single-handedly kill a large number of birds and cats.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • "Of Ice and Men" shows that he eventually does obtain a human body again, and also starts a family (as evidenced by his grandson).
  • In "The Two Hundred", Klaus mutates into a draconic monster and finally earns the family's respect by using his powers to save them from certain death. He can be seen happily playing with the Smiths' descendants before the episode's end.
  • Typically any A Day in the Limelight episode that focus on him tend to end well - or at least have an affirmation that he is a part of the family.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Along with Hayley, he's the only one who mellows out and becomes a lot nicer later on (whilst the rest of the Smiths Took a Level in Jerkass). Granted, he will occasionally fuck with the Smiths on rare occasions but does show a more considerate and caring side when necessary (e.g. "Seizure Suits Stanny" and "Father's Daze") and generally goes hand-in-hand with the Depending on the Writer moralities of the other Smiths.
• Ungrateful Bastard:
  • In "Man in the Moonbounce", Klaus whines that he misses having hair, and Hayley gets him a doll wig out of sympathy. He then requests her to trim it so it resembles Ryan Phillippe's haircut, but when she botches the job, he angrily calls her a failure and tries to drown her in the toilet.
  • In "Cheek to Cheek", Steve lets him stay in his room after Francine takes Klaus' alcove. Klaus proceeds to take over the place completely, inviting first his girlfriend, then his girlfriend's entire family to live there.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Very few people seem to be all that surprised by a talking goldfish, in contrast to Roger, who has to disguise himself. Then again, considering it shares a universe with Seth McFarlane's other shows, this is less surprising when you remember that talking animals are rare, but not unusual (see: Brian and various other animals on Family Guy and Tim the Bear on The Cleveland Show.)
• Verbal Tic: Calls everyone "bro" in the TBS seasons.
• Vocal Evolution: In the early seasons, his voice was a bit lower and his German accent was a lot heavier.
• Voices Are Mental: He's able to speak even though his consciousness is inside a goldfish's body. He also maintains his own speaking voice whenever he transfers his consciousness into different human bodies.
• Your Size May Vary: He tends to be drawn larger when in his fishbowl than when he's in his cup. And even then, his exact size varies, especially in the earlier episodes.

Hayley's on-again, off-again stoner boyfriend. They get married in the premiere of Season 6.

• Amusing Injuries: Jeff has been ripped in half. Twice. And he's none the worse for wear, aside from a nasty scar.
• Ascended Extra: Jeff was originally a secondary character, but after he and Hayley officially got married in Season 6, he appeared significantly more often and is now just as important as the main Smith family. While he did get temporarily Demoted to Extra after Roger sent him to space, once he came back, he regained prominence and regularly joins the rest of the Smiths in adventures.
• Beware the Nice Ones: He's typically a laid back, friendly guy — but if he's pushed enough, he can give an absolutely blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech. At one point he even calls out Stan for his neglectful treatment of Hayley.
• The Bus Came Back: After being abducted by aliens, he later escapes with help from other prisoners on the ship (including Sinbad). He makes it back home but decides to undo his return because it will mean that Hayley will live a full life doing something rather than spend it doing nothing but waiting for him. He finally comes back for real in Season 11.
• Butt-Monkey: By absolutely everybody except Steve and Klaus. Most often by Hayley and Stan, as well as Francine in later seasons. Stan summed it up nicely in "Hayley Smith, Seal Team Six", when Jeff is on trial for clubbing a baby seal to death, which he did to save Klaus' life:
  Hayley: [having regressed to the mental state of a six-year-old] I like seals. I don't like that man.
  Stan: [deadpan] No one does.
• Calling the Old Man Out: He can be this with Stan on occasion.
  • In "The Devil Wears a Lapel Pin", he calls Stan out for treating Hayley like dirt when all she wants is to help him.
  • In "Game Night", he not only calls Stan a Sore Loser to his face, but points out that everyone has been pretending to lose to him for years. Even him, whom Stan often considers an idiot.
  Jeff: My "dumb" ass has been tricking you for years!
• Cannot Keep a Secret: "Naked To The Limit, One More Time" proves he can't, whether it be a surprise birthday party, a birthday present, a movie's summary/ending or the fact that Roger's an alien.
• Commuting on a Bus: While largely missing for the next few years after being abducted by aliens, "Lost in Space" and "The Longest Distance Relationship" show what he's been up to.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: In "Less Money, Mo Problems," Jeff was pretty quick to take on intruders with only a knife.
• A Day in the Limelight: He's the star of the Season 9 episode Lost In Space, which details what happened to him after Roger tossed him onto his "rescue" ship.
• The Ditz: He’s not very smart, and his gullible nature often lets other people take advantage of him.
• Dumbass Has a Point: In "Game Night", he is correct in pointing out that letting Stan win all the time is hardly better than suffering through him being a Sore Loser, due to his unbearable Unsportsmanlike Gloating.
• Extreme Doormat: Usually to Hayley and Stan's abuse (albeit largely due to being The Pollyanna).
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: In "Who Smarted?", Hayley subjects him to a procedure that greatly increases his intelligence, turning him into a genius. When he's abducted by a charity organization for the purpose of having his sperm harvested for future generations, he intentionally makes himself dumb again by reaching into his nose with a wire hanger, as he and Hayley needed his stupidity in order to come up with a plan so absurd that the organization members wouldn't see it coming.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: None of the Smiths other than Hayley are very fond of him. And even Hayley only barely puts up with him sometimes.
• Genius Ditz: So musically talented and intelligent, but so blindingly stupid at the same time, that he gives Francine a run for her money.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: He's actually been torn in half at the waist twice, though both instances were in throwaway gags.
• Happily Married: With Hayley - despite their issues, it's clear that they care deeply for one another.
• Henpecked Husband: It's fairly clear that Hayley wears the pants in their relationship due to inheriting Stan's ego. Despite this, the two have a relatively stable marriage.
• Hero-Worshipper: Has shades of this towards "Agathor", Steve's alter-ego in the online game Dragon Scuffle, to the point where after Agathor's death in the game, Jeff's character held a candlelight vigil for days.
• Hidden Depths:
  • "Fleabiscuit" reveals that Jeff is a skilled racing dog trainer, having raised a champion who is on the verge of making history.
  • "The Life Aquatic With Steve Smith" shows that he is quite skilled at sailing a boat.
  • In "Lumberjerks" he proves himself to be a highly skilled lumberjack.
  • "Henderson" shows that he's a highly talented glass smith, making several fishbowls for Klaus with highly detailed glass statues attached to them.
• Hidden Disdain Reveal: Jeff is a Nice Guy for the most part, but despite that, Stan finds him annoying and doesn't even bother trying to hide the fact that he hates him. In "For Whom the Sleigh Bell Tolls," Jeff reveals that he in fact hates Stan right back, considers him an ass, and only tolerates him for Hayley's sake.
• Made of Iron: Survives having his skin removed and then worn by Roger. Also survives being dissected into multiple pieces by aliens. Sort of, as only his brain survives, and must be uploaded into the body of an alien clone that offers to sacrifice itself to do so. He later gets a human body back thanks to Roger's "help."
• Manchild: In "For Whom The Sleigh Bell Tolls", Stan is incensed that Jeff still believes in Santa Claus. He turns out to be real later in the episode.
• The Millstone: He rivals Stan in his ability to make situations go from bad to worse.
• Missing Mom: He confirms in the Season 2 episode "Joint Custody" that his mom ran away before he was born.
  Stan: How.. how could she do that?
• NEET: In most episodes, Jeff is depicted as unemployed and unlike Hayley, isn't pursuing any further education. He does get jobs in some episodes, but they never last.
• Nice Guy: Jeff is an easy-going, friendly individual. He does have his limits though, particularly if Stan is involved.
• Noodle Incident:
  • In one episode Hayley is pissed and fed up with him trying to win her back, but Jeff tells her something offscreen that apparently causes her to fall in love with him and elope. What he said is never revealed, probably because there's no believable way they could write something that emotional.
  • According to "Game Night", he's legally not allowed to use scissors for some reason.
• Obnoxious In-Laws: He frequently annoys Stan with his various quirks and habits. "For Whom The Sleigh Bell Tolls" reveals that Jeff actually feels the same way about him and only tolerates him for Hayley's sake.
• Official Couple: With Hayley; they've dated since the start of the series and eventually marry.
• OOC Is Serious Business:
  • He's usually a very laid back Nice Guy with hardly a mean bone in his body. So it says something when he snaps at Stan in "Game Night" for being such an insufferable douche about games.
  • He's usually very attached to his hat, but in "Lost in Space" during his Heroic BSoD, he barely reacts when the summoner flicks it off.
• Parental Abandonment: His father framed him for possession of cannabis and frequently expresses embarrassment for him in a highly unfiltered Sarcasm Mode. His mother abandoned him before he was born (the impossibility of this is lampshaded, however).
• The Pollyanna: Is quite possibly the most cheerful, upbeat guy in the entire show.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Jeff gets added to the updated intro in Season 22, eating cereal to the left of Stan as he meets with the rest of the family.
• Put on a Bus: He's abruptly abducted by aliens and is gone for quite a while thereafter.
• Riches to Rags: He used to be a multimillionaire. Back when he was a cook for Blues Traveler, he ended up acquiring the rights to their debut album, which gave him an income of about two million dollars a year. He no longer has the rights, as when he was really into cougars, he ended up marrying a very elderly woman and gave the rights to her daughter for a fiftieth birthday present.
• Sarcasm-Blind: His father highlights the many disappointments he has with Jeff with sarcasm. Stan picks up on it after a couple minutes; Jeff not so much.
• Secret-Keeper: He's the only character outside of the Smith family to know Roger is an alien. He's terrible at keeping secrets, which leads to his eventual exile into space. It takes several seasons for him to make it back to Earth.
• The Stoner: Justified, as it's revealed that if he doesn't smoke weed, he starts to masturbate constantly.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Most likely due to a continuity error, Jeff is shown to physically resemble his father and mother.
• Teeny Weenie: The episode in which he runs away with Hayley reveals he has a flying car, which he feels more than makes up for his "small weiner".
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Stan despises Jeff so many times even after he's come to like him at the end of an episode focusing on them both. When Jeff is sent to space and comes back except as an alien that took his place that becomes increasingly rattled with guilt for taking Jeff's spot, Stan takes everything in stride without a single hint of sympathy because this change was the best thing that ever happened to him. He only continues to show his contempt to Jeff as the episode goes on.
• Token Good Teammate: By far the nicest member of the Smith household; he's generally non-malicious and friendly, and some of his meaner moments are generally done out of stupidity rather than malice.
• Tomato in the Mirror:
  • His body gets dissected into multiple pieces by a group of alien Collectors that find his space ship. The same group sends an alien clone of him to Earth to replace him, but he reveals what's going on to Hayley, Roger, and Stan, who board the Collector ship to recover the real Jeff. As Jeff's original body is now effectively dead, the clone offers to sacrifice itself so that Jeff's still living brain can be placed into his body, and as everyone except Roger has their memories of this erased on the ride back to Earth, Jeff effectively becomes this trope.
  • Later in the series, Roger reveals this to the Smiths (having forgotten about it all that time), and offers to help Jeff get a human body back: by swallowing his brain and then "gestating" him a new body as though he were pregnant.
• Took the Wife's Name: He reveals in "Portrait of Francine's Genitals" that he took Hayley's last name, making him Jeff Smith.
• Tuckerization: Jeff is based on Seth MacFarlane's friend, also named Jeff Fischer, who voices the character.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • "Seasons Beatings".
  Stan: Jeff? I thought you drowned!
  Jeff: Nope.
  • He's also somehow recovered from being ripped apart at the waist on two separate occasions.
• The Un-Favorite: He once off-handedly mentioned having a brother whom his father loves far, far more than him.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Constantly seeks the approval of his father who hates him.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: For a fair bit of the episode "Beyond The Alcove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Klaus", he is dressed as a French maid. No one bats an eye at this.

Roger's homunculus/son, who becomes a family member in the 250th episode.

• Beware the Nice Ones: He's far nicer than Roger, but still shares his father's vengeful streak. When Klaus left Rogu at the bottom of a well in "Thank God for Loose Rocks", he escaped and went back to the dude ranch to kill Klaus, shooting innocent men in the groin for no reason. And when the Smiths refused to let Rogu kill Klaus, Rogu decides to kill all of them, including Roger. Even after Klaus saves Rogu's life, Rogu still wants to kill Klaus, only sparing him because his dick is too small to shoot (though it's implied Rogu was just joking and was trying to mess with Klaus).
• Bizarre Alien Biology: First of all, he started off as a tumor, which Roger claims grew into a homunculus because of his difficulty maintaining all of his personas. He coughs up clones whenever he eats candy, they can merge together when listening to music and the giant can be shrunken down to original size when he falls asleep. He can also survive being cooked, chopped up and eaten, but incredible survivability and healing are traits he shares with his father.
• Cast from Hit Points: "The Sickness" reveals that as a tumor, his health is inversely tied with Roger's, so Roger living a healthy lifestyle will make Rogu deathly ill.
• Cousin Oliver: Definitely appears to play this trope straight despite only making a small handful of appearances. "An Irish Goodbye" for example has him being treated like a beloved member of the family for no real reason whatsoever.
• From a Single Cell: He has survived being chopped up, cooked, and eaten.
• Morality Pet: Of the Smith family, he's the only member who everyone else consistently treats with care and affection.
• Power-Up Food: Candy causes him to multiply and clams turn him into a giant red Kaiju as shown in "The Hand That Rocks the Rogu".
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Rogu is added to the updated intro in Season 22, his head peeking out from the roof of a building as Stan drives off to work.
• Third-Person Person: Speaks like this repeatedly. "Thank God for Loose Rocks" reveals that he actually can talk normally, but he chooses to invoke this because it makes him look more lovable.