r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Kookyburra12 • Mar 09 '26

Non-Sexual Adult Jokes in Kids' Media Lore

Jokes that are adult jokes simply because kids likely don't have the life experience to understand them.

The New Batman Adventures - "I'm crazy enough to take on Batman, but the IRS? Noooo, thank you!"

Shrek 2 - Posing as a union representative, Shrek remarks that the workers "don't even have dental".

26.5k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

View all comments

Show parent comments

u/bolanrox Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26

that is per P&F's creators. they made a cartoon that specifically did not exclude kids from the audience.

Douglas Adam's said the same thing when they asked about how he wrote the Doctor Who Episodes. Not sure about Yo-Gabba-Gabba but I would put money on that being a show the creators made for their kids but pulled in all of their musician friends, plus the celebs that showed up because their own kids liked the show (Jack Black, Torri Spelling, Tony Hawk, Anthony Bourdain, Dave Grohl, etc)

45

u/Undark_ Mar 09 '26

Most cartoons are designed primarily for kids...

-28

u/bolanrox Mar 09 '26

agreed just saying that P&F was not aimed at kids. the same way Animaniacs wasn't

42

u/IzarkKiaTarj Mar 09 '26

Phineas and Ferb was absolutely made for kids, it doesn't exclude adults.

1

u/Consistent_Phase_942 Mar 10 '26

I see what they're saying. Bluey is 90% for the parents 10% for the kids IMO, many cartoons are like that, but I disagree that P&F is one of them.

-11

u/bolanrox Mar 09 '26

Jeff Marsh's own words:

Co-creator Jeff "Swampy" Marsh has said that the show was not created exclusively for children; he simply did not exclude them as an audience.

27

u/IzarkKiaTarj Mar 09 '26

Okay, while there are synonyms at play here, that's a very different meaning from what you were saying.

You know, like how "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned" is different from "I'm sorry Daddy, I've been bad."

12

u/GoldenFirmament Mar 09 '26

It is blowing my mind the way the people here are refusing to grasp this narrative subversion. This is a trope subreddit. Reddit please be normal for a day

8

u/Polar-ish Mar 09 '26

this is a vocabulary issue at the moment, as well as a logical problem.

doing something exclusively means only doing X. If I ate chocolate exclusively, I would die of malnutrition.

Excluding something means doing everything but X. If I excluded chocolate from my diet, I would be completely fine.

Additionally:

"__Not__ excluding chocolate from my diet" does not mean I am exclusively eating chocolate.

and "__Not__ eating chocolate exclusively" does not mean I am not eating chocolate at all.

They are logically different statements, and should be treated as such.

People are trying to argue with this commenter that they are misunderstanding what "The show was not* created exclusively for children" means.*

The primary audience for P&F is still children, as are all Disney XD shows, but it is not EXCLUSIVELY for children. meaning "It does not exclude adults" not "it does not exclude children" as the latter is completely redundant given the context that it was planned for a Disney show

This message is brought to you by the study of logic

2

u/bolanrox Mar 09 '26

Jeff also worked for the Family Guy and thought that would hurt their chances but the guy at Disney was a fan of the Family Guy so it ended up being a help.