The Chew Toy/Playing With
Basic Trope: A character who is loved by misery.
- Straight: Jason constantly slips into puddles of water...
- Exaggerated: ...and constantly falls into the floor, table, and bookshelf.
- Downplayed: Humorous Butt Monkey
- Justified: Jason is The Klutz.
- Or, Jason has done something horrible that the universe intends to give due retribution for.
- Inverted: The Woobie
- Creator's Pet (sometimes, if the author lets everything go their way).
- Karma Houdini.
- Subverted: Jason might seem to be having a perpetual bad luck, but other than this unlucky day bad luck usually stay out of his way.
- It goes too far once, and he starts becoming rather sympathetic
- Double-Subverted: ...but it turns out he's cursed to have this kind of bad luck for the rest of his life. And it's funny.
- ...but later it turns out he actually deserved what he got, and so it's back to the usual.
- Parodied: Cosmic Plaything.
- They Killed Kenny.
- It's really hard to parody something that was already funny
- They Killed Kenny.
- Deconstructed: The series goes meta and the writer berates the viewers for taking amusement in a person's suffering.
- Lampshaded: "I seem to spend most of the time getting the shit kicked out of me."