When you marry someone, you marry into their family and have to try and at least tolerate them, but Gayle is a certifiable lunatic walking around free. If I were Bob, I wouldn't tolerate any of her shenanigans that Linda blindly accepts.
shareI'd use her for sex mostly, My.
RIP Wayne 'Trapper John' Rogers. MASH wasn't the same w/o you. RIP Tony Burton. RIP George Kennedy
I'd put up with her mainly because I loved Linda...
..that and the free childcare.
It's hot... but not as hot as the night Johnny Viti got married...
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Thepennyshowman makes a good point. Bob and Linda don't really like parking the kids with Gayle, because she's nuts (even compared to them), but as long as they stay on good terms with her it's always an option if they need to.
It's true Bob is a bit of a doormat, and never more so than with Gayle. She just completely throws him for a loop and he has no idea what to do. But that may not be the only reason he doesn't put his foot down - and, for that matter, why Linda, a far bolder and less easily led personality, doesn't either - when Gayle does some of her loopier things.
I think their general acceptance of Gayle is internally consistent with the characters and their situations.
"I've decided to live as a bed from now on."
What else would you do with a family member like that? You're stuck. You can't abandon them. But they ARE annoying. And weird. And potentially dangerous. Gayle, if left to her own devices, would wreak even more havoc.
Back at the turn of the century families found excuses to have people like Gayle committed and then they forgot about them forever. You can't do that nowadays. You can't shun her, you can't lock her up...all you can do it tolerate her the polite minimum.
Which is exactly what Bob and Linda do.
YEAH, BITCH! MAGNETS!
I'd use her for sex mostly, American.
RIP Tony Burton. RIP George Kennedy. RIP Doris Roberts. You were wonderful in ELR.
Um, if I had a relative as psycho nuts as Gayle, I would absolutely lobby to get them institutionalized. That's not a "last century" thing. Denying the issues of an unbalanced relatives and enabling them to continue living that way is actually what people used to do. This is a cartoon, so this is all caricature-based for humor...but IRL, someone like Gayle SHOULD be put in a home, or at the very least on a heavy regimen of something. She's completely unstable and has the potential to be a threat to herself and others. Linda just views Gayle as being a little tightly wound and neurotic and seems willfully obliviously to what she actually is: crazy.
As to what I'd do if I were in Bob's place, I would only tolerate her from a distance. I wouldn't join in with Linda's coddling and enabling of her loopy quirks and delusions. Her spells, episodes and odd behavior would have to be a "Linda's family" (i.e. birth family) thing to deal with. I wouldn't participate.
But is she actually dangerous? She's delusional, sure, but only in the sense that she is lying to herself and refusing to confront her issues or try to make beneficial changes in her life. To an extent, Linda is as weird as Gayle, but Linda is tall and I think the series implies she's on the right side of attractive. Gayle is shorter, fatter, stubbier.
Take their similar personalities- but make one short and neurotic, the other tall and outgoing, one stubby face and one attractive-faced.
To me the dynamic between Linda and Gayle is inevitable and probably one many families are familiar with, to a greater or less extent.
YEAH, BITCH! MAGNETS!
Yeah I don't see how Gayle is dangerous either. She doesn't hurt anyone. She holds down a job, takes care of herself and her pets, has a boyfriend, socializes with family. She's very odd, but I think she meets all the standards of legal competence.
"Uncles are creepy by definition, man. Have you not been watching your SVU?"
What's her job? Who's her boyfriend? I got the sense she lived off some kind of family trust fund or had like a crappy 20 hour a week convenience store cashier gig making $7.25 an hour and the rest of her time was spent alone in a musty apartment with those cats.
YEAH, BITCH! MAGNETS!
I correct myself - Gayle supports herself with her work as an artist. So, not a standard job, but the core point stands that she does work. Mr. Frond is her boyfriend.
In any event, she takes care of herself and her pets, and seems quite harmless. We don't go institutionalizing competent people for being odd.
Sometimes quiet is violent
Gayle seems like she probably has to be heavily medicated in order to remain harmless. She's just under the line of not being crazy enough to be locked up, but I wouldn't casually write her off as being a casual oddball. I really wanted Bob to go off on her bad when she pretended to be injured for attention. That was disturbed.
shareOh, it was nuts. But Bob didn't have to go along with everything she wanted - that was his choice.
Sweetheart that he is, Bob isn't too tightly wrapped either.
Sometimes quiet is violent
I think the question is, would going off on her have helped? There's a mixture of resentment and sympathy in his interactions with Gayle.
Who, by the way, I think can be a really fantastic character when they don't write her to be a complete nutcase. I love her characterization in The Kids Run Away and think her interactions with Louise were extremely moving.
Gayle is a crazy a-hole. "supports herself as an artist" pffffff. Best not to analyse crapp|y cartoon show characvters too much though.
shareAfter that Thanksgiving episode, hell to the no.
------Jesus loves you, but only as a friend.------
I would, for the sex.
I couldn't believe when I read his filmography that he played a toilet (no joke) in According to Jim
No. Gayle is insane and in one episode she's literally a sexual predator who's made innumerable unwanted sexual advances toward Bob
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