(accompanied by spontaneous images also by me)
I am a road dog. When on shorter trips I find myself in hotels. In general, I am not a big television watcher. Under these circumstances, I do find myself catching the odd show on the off hours here and there.
Stay in a hotel stateside and in the morning if you click on the television once your past that looped promo channel (try are award winning bistro for imaginative menu….) you will see either episodes of Supernatural or Charmed. If it’s the afternoon, then it will be Bones or Castle. Law & Order SVU is on nonstop loop on few channels but that is true at home and in general anyways.
Bob’s Burgers is another show whose presence seems to have greatly increased. While I do not steadily watch it I have caught reruns here and there. This is a theory I formed over the course of my travels.
They are all dead Bob:
Bob’s Burgers, I have a theory about what is really going on. There are aspects of the established mythos which years down the line they have tried to sort of soften or walk back. Initially, in earlier seasons it was mentioned that Bob had a terrible childhood.
His mother had passed away, and his father owned a greasy spoon. Bob’s father seemed without humor and overly serious so that one would think he was owner of a multi-Michelin star place. It is a joyless childhood as exemplified by when someone buys his father’s home and finds an old box of Bob’s things and sends it to him (S3E3). Within the box are Bob’s childhood “toys”. It contains a scouring pad, a bit of soap that Bob considers to be a sort of dog that he used to talk to. Not just in this episode but in general Bob constantly is creating anthropomorphistic friends to talk to (turkey and burgers waiting to be cooked, various tools, things one would find in a utility drawer)
Immediately, his children, far from the most perceptive people, see the sadness of this. Some of the dialogue:
“Lin, I just realized something. I had a bad childhood.”
“Yeah, I know, look at you.”
“What do you mean, look at me?”
“Look at how you stand. People who had good childhoods don’t stand like that.”
His father was joyless and tyrannical, in a later Christmas episode, they reconciled but it is completely inorganic as is most of the later season’s tweaking’s, none of which really changes anything.
With an unhappy childhood, Bob moves into adulthood and one or two girlfriends are referenced but in general he seems to have lived a largely solitary life.
He marries what is probably the first woman who he ever slept with (Linda). While the appeal in his mind is probably affection which he was starved for and understanding, there is a certain amount of projecting on Bob’s part. Linda definitely seems to be somewhere on the spectrum. Her behavior checks some of the boxes, such as wanting what she wants with complete disregard to consequences nor what others may feel about an action.
One of many examples is when Bob, looking for new ways to drum up business, buys an espresso machine which Linda then sells (S3E23) to pay for a scam baseball camp for their son Gene.
She also gets obsessed with ideas that majorly inconvenience others, having no concern about their wishes nor the consequences of the thing. Whether it is selling things without checking with the owner, forcing an activity on everyone (opening a bed & breakfast in their single bathroom home, having a musical theater night in the restaurant et al) or telling personal information to people about her family, her perception of appropriateness of an action is often way outside acceptable societal norms.
Watching the show initially, I thought that aspects of her character were a comment on the youtube generation’s refusal to take the necessary time to truly learn to do a thing or have a skill. At first glance, Linda’s behavior could be chalked up to being a variation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. There is more going on with her than this. Her perceptions are skewed past those of a typical sitcom character’s which then lead to the hi-jinks.
In one episode, she wanted to read stories to children at a library (S8E9) and comes up with the persona of “Punky Bookster”. She borrows one of the other regular character Mort’s electric guitar asking “Okay, how long’s it take you to learn to play guitar? Like 20 minutes?”.
She brings the guitar and inappropriately, a knife to the story time. At the end of her show, the librarian mentions someone has called the police because of the knife which she brought. Linda runs out leaving Mort’s guitar, indifferent to having to return it.
Some of the stuff she does is outright dangerous. Wanting to be a more fun mom, she takes her kids into woods to find the local wolf creature (S8E3). As it appears to be becoming more and more of a bad idea (and dangerous) she sort of alternates between fear and pep talking herself into continuing rather than getting to safety.
She gets a thing in her head and will just do it regardless of skill set, consequences or appropriateness of action. There is a running thing about her caring for neighborhood racoons found out by her restaurant ‘s dumpster.
My take on undercurrent of entire show:
Linda was once again feeding racoons, this time trying to put little hats and ties on them as she had the idea that she could photograph it and have it go viral as to make money, even though outside of the taking of the photos she didn’t have any understanding of how a thing goes viral, why and most importantly, how to monetize it.
Of course she gets bitten. She doesn’t tell anyone because Bob repeatedly had warned her not to mess with the racoons. Linda starts to not feel great. She decides to go to the beach to get some wet sand to slather on the bite because she had once read that Gweneth Paltrow often does mud treatments when feeling off or needing to be reinvigorated.
Spreading dirty beach sand on an already infected bite, she dies.
Bob goes into deep shock.
There have been many episodes in which Bob has been drunk or on something, usually pills. It’s always presented as occurring for a reason and not merely done to do (with the exception of drinking). He gets a part time job as taxi driver to help pay for Tina’s party and smokes crack (S1 E 6) Pops pills to the point of hallucinating because of carpal tunnel pain (S2E4) Pops pills because he hurt his back (S 5 E 19) Pops pills to the point of hallucinating because he hurts his leg (S 8 E 3). Then there are various drinking episodes (S 3 E 5) (S5 Ep 4) (S7 Ep 22) (S 3 E 17).
With the number of episodes for the series, this may seem relatively a small amount of self-medication. With Linda gone, the tempo increases. Bob becomes an absentee father even though he is physically there.
His three children affect his mental state too. There is Louise. Although too old to still be doing so, she is always wearing her pink Gummo bunny ears hat. She is the youngest of the three siblings but the one in charge. There is a weird destructiveness to her that goes beyond the mischief of the Denis the Menace template or the done out of boredom things of Bart Simpson. Louise is a sociopath. There are times when a problem arises and she actually manages to enlarge the problem for no discernable reason. In the very first episode she gets her family restaurant closed by starting rumors of cannibalism. In a later episode (S1 E 12) during a lobster festival the town grows angry with Bob and wants to hurt him. Leaning to the side and using a different voice Louise urges them to throw him onto the shell pile.
Her main thing aside from the strange chaos she often causes is to make money. It is a weird thing for a little girl to be obsessed with, and they never really go into why she wants all this money. I think it is because she sees her father zonked on pills and it is giving her anxiety, how are they going to live and where?
They have tried to soften her down at times and those episodes probably resonate with the fans. But her first instinct is still mostly ordering the neighborhood kids to do things for her various enterprises to earn money.
Tina is the oldest. She is an awkward early teen. She is passionate about horses and zombies. Tina serves as a moral compass for the three siblings but even with her being a sort of jiminy cricket to her sister, Louises initial instinct is still always to scam or some kind destructive behavior so it’s not exactly effective.
There is a lot of ink devoted to fan theories that Tina is the one on the spectrum. Could be, I think Gene and Linda show far more behavior in this respect. Tina is probably the most sympathetic character.
Gene is the older brother. He is chubby with a done at home bowl cut. He is passionate about music but it’s mainly just making annoying noises with repetitive patterns on a primitive keyboard. He can’t read music and has no real knowledge of anything about this thing he is so passionate about. Of course, this is fine when one is starting out by at this point, he should be Brian Eno. Similar in ways to Linda, he has fantasies of what this passion will net him but puts no real work towards achieving the goal. Like Louise, he often at important moments of things going on sabotages the situation. With Gene, it can be said though that he truly has no understanding of what is going on.
Linda had died and Bob fell deeper into addiction. He had always displayed a sort of Junkie’s passivity/logic. A main theme throughout the show is how they are barely scraping by. They have no paid employees and there are always people in the place so where is the money going?
The show often tries to have this nobility about Bob giving up on a thing or with complete lack of pragmatism, walking away from a situation where he could actually come out on top. This has got to be another source of Louise’s money anxiety.
With funds constantly tight Linda still lets Bob buy his dream chef knife (S5 E12) which he then destroys playing weird games against another main character Teddy and his hammer. One of Bob’s few friends (S6E15) (although he had not seen him for who knows how long) is now rich and offers to give Bob 100K. He has some ideas about the restaurant which is essentially a greasy spoon. Bob freaks out not wanting any tiki theme or anything, wanting to be his own man. Clearly the guy is a friend, Bob did not even attempt to ask him to just be a silent partner. Surely there has got to be some middle ground between nothing and 100K.
There’s been episodes of their car breaking down and Bob angerly shouting to the heavens, questioning why he cant just take his family out to the movies etc. But repeatedly throughout the series things come up where he could get ahead in some manner and it is not so much that he drops the ball as walks away from it.
Occasionally Bob has made friends but they just sort of drop away. Sometimes an aspect of this and otherwise presented on its own is Bob showing a gross overestimation of what he can do with zero practice or experience, despite being aware of how bad shape he is in.
I recently re-read Dante. In Purgatorio Dante encounters shades who experience discomforts (punishments as opposed to tortures) connected in some manner to the mistakes they made while alive. They experience these punishments over and over until they learn their errors. Once their souls are cleansed, they then can go upstairs.
Zonked out on pills, Bob tries to do something his out of shape body is ill equipped to do. Perhaps he let the car run out of gas and figures he can just push it in neutral out of the way. He has a heart attack or falls and hits his head.
In the hospital he hangs between life and death, unaware that he is currently in a limbo, a purgatory. His lack of understanding of where he is in large part is enhanced by the fact that he finds himself among his family.
After blindly obeying Louise in her many dangerous schemes (i.e going into a condemned Taffy Factory (S2E1) dressing as Edison’s victim Topsy and messing with electricity (S3E16) et al their dumb luck runs out and Gene and Tina both die.
In his coma state Bob is in purgatory. This is why pretty much all the characters on the show are either grifter types, amazingly incapable or in some cases such as Regular Sized Rudy victims.
All the characters have more than mere flaws, it’s defects, which often manage to be both cringe and at times oddly funny.
Teddy is a handyman but not a very good one. He has odd fantasies of inserting himself into Bob’s family while keeping Bob in the loop. There are episodes when he has done this odd revving gurgling cry (once when Louise sets a trap in refrigerator for Santa and Teddy gets his hand caught in it. Unable to free himself he shakes like a trapped animal emitting this cry until the refrigerator falls atop him and he must lay there and wait for family to come home, once when the fry machine is broken he goes in and starts shaking it to “fix it” emitting the same cry) Not being good at his job, on the mortal plain he probably electrocuted himself and that was the last noise he made.
The school secretary Ms. Schnur is completely checked out. She seems to do the very bare minimum counting down the clock until retirement. I suppose this in the real world with public education system is sadly not exactly a rarity.
“The Deuce” runs a scam baseball camp(S3E23). Gene is horrible at the game. Linda finds an ad for his baseball camp which is not cheap. She sells Bob’s new espresso machine. From the get-go everything about the camp is not only a scam but not a particularly well done one. “The Deuce” lives in the type of motel which back in the day would be rented out by the hour or occupied by those who had nowhere else to go but out or up. Bob feels it is a fraud, but they decide to have one game for the money paid and if Gene shows no improvement, they will get their money back. Gene manages to hit the ball, “The Deuce” gets to keep the money and leaves. Gene playing baseball is never mentioned again and a family barely staying afloat is righteous about having been scammed because Gene is happy.
Tina loves horses and they manage to find a not cheap camp to send her to (S 6 E 17). Despite being the most passionate about horses and with actual knowledge of the verbiage, she is given the worst horse. For the big riding display at the end, Tina has no horse and rides her imaginary one, which consists of her awkwardly running the course. The manager of the camp takes no notice when initially Tina goes missing after being thrown by her horse and doesn’t seem to feel she owes a refund for Tina running the course on foot at the end. It is sort of scumbaggy to say the least on her part and Bob of course having spent money that he could ill afford to, says nothing.
Everyone in some manner is a failure willingly or otherwise. This is why they are all perpetually stuck in jobs and lives they do not like, repeating the patterns until they learn better and can ascend.
Many of the kids seem off or beyond bratty. In all cases of the children seemingly to be little monsters, the parents nervously capitulate becoming emotional hostages. With how unpleasant the bratty children are, it is because they are part of the lesson, a punishment version of the children, some of whom are probably still treading the mortal coil.
Bob, being in purgatory, also explains why his kids in some ways act too young for their age but also will make obscure adult reference comments about things that seem out of character for them. They are shades or spirits and as in Dante and are comprised of what they had been personality-wise but also allowed to view the future at an angle.
This also explains why they seem to be completely cool with not having cell phones. In this place, the internet exists, but it sort of doesn’t. The fact that this is a type of limbo is also evidenced by the fact that the kids are into candy but largely seem indifferent to internet-based things. In the real world, sure, some kids prefer to read or play baseball but even with them, 2025 they are online texting, posting etc. at least some of the time.
The show tries to convey the joy of family and how that can conquer the bad things in life, but these twee moments are often at the cost of them losing something to a more predatory character who gets away with it. The victims then make some type of maudlin speech as to justify their passivity.
With no Virgil to guide him, how long will Bob linger among the shades of his friends and family? What more can he aspire to when his Beautrice is already in bed eating crackers beside him?
Fini
Please do not send me emails or comment in which you want to admonish or debate with me. While I stand by my theory, it’s all in fun.
© 2025 Wayne Wolfson not for use without permission
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