Recurring Jokes and Situations
- Fake magazines such as "Lonely Tyrant: The magazine for abusive bosses whose employees hate their guts." Stories inside include, "The fine art of the meaningless memo."
- The X types of Y: The 9 types of college teachers, the 81 types of high school students, the 16 types of brothers, the 9 types of relationships.
- How-To Guides: Examples include "So You Want to Be an Unrecognized Genius," "How to Be a Clever Film Critic," and "How to Get into the College of Your Choice."
- Miniseries – A series of strips focusing on a particular theme in a mock textbook manner, such as "School is Hell" and "Love is Hell," both of which have been collected in their entirety in book form.
- Akbar & Jeff discussing their relationship – Arguably the most common set-up. A 1992 strip, "The Dart Game of Love," was prefaced with "I hope this cartoon pleases you gripers who whined about all those Akbar & Jeff strips where they stared at each other."
- Binky attempting to meditate
- Advertisements for disreputable businesses run by Akbar & Jeff such as "Akbar & Jeff's Lucky Psychic Hut."
- Bongo locked in a detention room or orphanage
- Bongo unsatisfied with the huge assortment of presents he has received on Christmas morning
- Shadow rabbit – Binky's looming shadow towers over Bongo, who has clearly committed a crime despite his assurances to the contrary. Occasionally there would also be a shadow Akbar & Jeff looming over Bongo and their nephews. One comic showed Bongo's shadow looming over Binky
- Forbidden Words – An annual compilation of buzzwords used over the past year that Groening has deemed "forbidden." These also appear in Simpsons annuals.
- "How to draw Binky"
Read more about this topic: Life In Hell
Famous quotes containing the words recurring, jokes and/or situations:
“I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict.... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)