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  • Crack Pairing: Would you believe that there is actually a very large portion of fanfiction writers that 'ship Will/Karen?
  • Crazy Awesome: Karen, full stop.
  • Fair for Its Day: Offensive as it may have sometimes seemed by the time it ended, it was one of the first American shows with a gay man as a central character, and remains one of few not relegated to cable at midnight.
    • Oddly enough the show may actually be more balanced than people in the supposedly fairer currently climate would like. Note all the attempting on various other parts of the show's trope pages to declare Will Camp Gay just because he's not a beer-swilling, farting, swearing sports enthusiast. Apparently while attitudes about homosexuality itself have become more accepting, attitudes about the stereotypes associated with masculinity have become more strangling than ever.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Often, but never to be taken seriously.
  • Freud Was Right: Jack has the classic Freudian family pattern for homosexuality, but the trope's averted with Will: he's always had a good relationship with his father, and was close to his older brother Sam until he told Sam what he thought of Sam's fiancée. Will is, however, his mother's favourite. Will's gay friend Larry also appears to be very close to his mother. Elliot, on the other hand, also has the classic family pattern for homosexuality but he's straight as an arrow.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: In the Japanese dub, the Camp Gay Jack is voiced by Yuji Mitsuya. In 2017, Mitsuya came out of the closet.
    • A gay man who "converted" to heterosexuality in Season 2 was played by... Neil Patrick Harris, also before coming outta the closet.
  • Hollywood Pudgy: Jack regularly calls Will fat, but is the only one to do so.
    • There were a few rare barbs thrown at Grace by Karen (who usually called her boyish and flat-chested instead.) However, this showed clearly that this was deliberate. A few critics mentioned that the fat jokes thrown at Grace weren't as funny when Debra Messing was pregnant, showing that this was supposed to play off the Values Dissonance of making fat jokes toward the slender McCormick and Messing, similar to the fat jokes made toward Vivian Vance during I Love Lucy.
  • Les Yay: Karen and Grace got to kiss far more than Will or Jack ever did.
    • Karen also has quite a bit of Foe Yay with Lorraine.
      • Also in one episode, Karen mentioned having a crush on someone with long blonde hair as a kid, but she couldn't remember whether said crush was male or female.
  • Retroactive Recognition: In "Fagmalion" part four, Karen dated a handsome, intense maintenance man named Anton. About seven years later, his actor is providing the voice of a handsome, less-than-intense prince-turned-frog.
    • She also once had a Thanksgiving hookup with a plumber, at Stan's behest--played by Mullally's real-life husband Nick Offerman, now well-known as Ron Swanson.
  • Values Dissonance: Partway through, they started to imply Vague Age with Karen, joking either she made a deal with the devil, or was so perpetually filled with pills and alcohol, she was somehow pickled and therefore immortal. She then would occasionally make a comment that would sound more appropriate coming from a bigoted person from the turn of the last century. She refused to believe that a woman could be a doctor, and when Rosario once said that she played Maria in a production of The Sound of Music, Karen said she would have paid six chickens to see that (Rosario's response: "It was an Equity Theater, you racist bitch.") Frequently she comments that she believes than El Salvador (where Rosario is from) is come dusty, barren South of the Border Latin Land stereotype.