Ethnic Scrappy/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Basic Trope: A character who is disliked for playing to some stereotype about (usually) race or ethnicity.
  • Played Straight: Bob, the only black man on the show likes rap music, makes gang signs with his hands all the time, and wears his pants such that his underwear is perpetually exposed.
  • Exaggerated: Bob does all of the above, but also uses ridiculous amounts of slang, and his Trademark Favorite Food is fried chicken and watermelon.
  • Downplayed: People only dislike the streotypical moments of Bob. Otherwise, they consider Bob OK.
  • Justified: People find stereotypical behavior offensive.
  • Inverted:
  • Subverted:
    • Bob displays a like of rap music, but otherwise doesn't act too stereotypical.
    • Alternatively, Bob seems to be reasonably well-received by the audience.
  • Double Subverted:
  • Deconstructed: We get a good look at the background that produced such behavior in Bob: a lower-class inner-city white neighborhood in which Bob felt a constant need to reaffirm his black heritage, but only knew how to do so in the most offensively stereotypical ways because he was the only black person around other than his parents, who themselves exemplified, if not the worst racial stereotypes associated with black people, then at least the worst socioeconomic stereotypes associated with the poor: crime, welfare dependence, and support for radical political movements.
  • Reconstructed:
  • Parodied: Bob is played by a white actor in Blackface. Needless to say, the audience is not amused.
  • Lampshaded:
  • Zig Zagged: Sometimes Bob acts stereotypical, other times not, Depending on the Writer. The audience's perception of him changes according to how he is presented.
  • Averted: Bob does not come across as a racist caricature.
  • Enforced: The Funny Foreigner turned Up to Eleven, Dead Baby Comedy, Space Jews, or just general racism on the part of the writer(s)
  • Invoked: Bob does not want to be that famous, so he wearing sunglasses, "grillz", a backwards cap, lots of bling, and riding in a car with spinner rims and full of beautiful women while snacking on a bucket of fried chicken.
  • Defied: Not wanting for the consequences, Bob makes sure he is not presented in a stereotypical fashion.
  • Played For Laughs: Almost always is; YMMV as to whether it's successful or not.
  • Played For Drama: It turns out Bob is a rapper with Hidden Depths, who is being forced to pander to the Lowest Common Denominator for the sake of record sales.
  • Discussed:
  • Conversed:

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