Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World

Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World is a satirical stop-motion show created by Q. Allan Brocka that airs on Logo, the first network dedicated to all gay & lesbian programming. It focuses on a trio of couples in the "gay ghetto" of West Lahunga Beach, California (an Expy for Laguna Beach). Premeiring in 2007, it has met with much critical acclaim, due to its satire not being too preachy. A third season is currently in production. The characters are:

Characters:

• Rick Brocka, Jr.: Steve's husband. He is a 30-year-old Filipino-American homemaker. He is also a genius, who belongs to the local all-gay chapter of Menza.
• Steve Ball: Rick's husband. He is a 33-year-old real estate agent. Unlike Rick, he's a gym bunny and a bit of an airhead.
• Kirsten Kellog: Dana's 28-year-old wife. She is Rick's best friend, and a self proclaimed artist. She owns a local sex toy store.
• Dana Bernstein: Kirsten's 32-year-old wife. She is a self-decribed J.A.B. -- a Jewish American Bulldyke. She works as a project manager for the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. She is also openly antagonistic toward Steve.
• Chuck Masters: Evan's 50-year-old wheelchair-bound boyfriend. Chuck is HIV positive and paralyzed from the left testicle down.^[1] He's Steve's best friend, and an angry yet truthful person.
• Evan Martinez: Chuck's 19-year-old kept boyfriend. He is extremely shallow, very promiscuous and addicted to a multitude of drugs. Evan invariably spends his nights at clubs.
• Condi Ling: West Lahung Beach's resident Fag Hag. She claims to be Evan's best friend and shares most of his personality traits, though he regards her as more of an annoyance. When alone, Condi is depressed and has attempted suicide in many comical ways.
• Dixie: Dana & Kirsten's baby, born in the second season premiere. Originally, Kirsten was going to be artificially inseminated by Rick's sperm. However, Steve mixed some of his sperm in as well, and a bumpy car ride accidentally spilled the sample onto (into) Dana instead. Seems to be gaining mild psychic abilities.
• Pussy: Rick & Steve's cat. She has human-like intelligence (at least smarter than Steve) and talks to them so frequently that it doesn't even bother them anymore.

Tropes used in Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World include:

• All Gays Are Promiscuous: Toyed with with most of the male characters, especially Evan.

Chuck: Promise me after I die you'll never sleep with anybody else.
Evan: But I sleep with other people now!

• • Ultimately averted with Rick and Steve, though, who despite an early attempt to have a threesome, remain monogamous throughout the show's run.
• All Lesbians Want Kids: Kirsten, as well as her friends Ebony & Ivory.
  • And just about every other lesbian on the show too. Rick and Steve really loved this one.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Brace yourselves -- Ten thousand years ago, Earth was a technological paradise "...more advanced than Star Trek!". Also, everyone was gay. After the first heterosexual was born, everything went downhill from there. A secret society known as the "Lavendar Mafia" (of which Lance Bass is a member) preserves this secret.
• Asian Guy With White Guy: One of Rick's ex's only sleeps with Asians.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The second season compared to the first season.
• Brand X: Most characters use laptops that have a banana (with a bite taken out of it) as a logo.
• Butch Lesbian: Dana. She even has a little lego mullet.
• Butt Monkey: Condi Ling
• Cast Full of Gay: Goes without saying...
• Cats Are Mean: And form elaborate plots to kill babies they think are getting more attention than they are.
• Club Kid: Evan, whose body is so messed up with drugs and diet pills that if he were to ever fall asleep it would overwhelm his system and kill him.
• Crazy Prepared: Parodied. In order to pass through an ancient, underground temple (Long Story) the explorer must insert the original Declaration of Independence to proceed.

Rick: Darn, I only carry a copy!

• Cure Your Gays: Evan tries to get ex-gay therapy so he can have sex with a woman. But instead of associating attraction to men with horrific pain, he ended up associating pain with attraction to men, and now asks to be electrocuted in bed.
• Dead Guy, Junior: Dana wants to name her son after her saintly dead brother, Dick. And still wants to after the baby turns out to be a girl. They settle on Dixie instead.
  • He and Dana used play cross-dress up as kids. Dixie was his drag name. Dick could have been Ambiguously Gay, Camp Straight or just very supportive, given how he's painted as The Messiah
• Deadpan Snarker: Dana and Rick, mostly. Steve has his moments too.
  • Chuck!
• Dirty Old Man: There's Chuck, obviously. Plus in one episode we're introduced to Rick's perverse gay uncle, who convinces men that he's actually Rick's cousin. His younger cousin.
• Everything Is Racist: Parodied. A Twofer Token Minority played by Ru Paul tries to educate both racially insensitive Steve and a straight, Black friend of his. To show the trials and tribulations of being black and gay at the same time he takes them to a Black Gay bar called Antwone's Fissure. Not only does he teach them nothing, but gets asked to leave by the drag queen waiting tables. He now complains that She's discriminating against him because his friends are straight and white, only to be shown that the Black Gay bar has a "No Martyring" policy.
• Everything's Built With LEGO: Averted. The pilot was originally done with LEGO, who objected to something as controversial as a gay themed Dead Baby Comedy.
• Fag Hag: Condi Ling.
• Fun with Acronyms: Chuck teaches HIV awareness for community service. His method of helping young gays remember to practice safe sex?

Bring A Rubber Everytime, Because Aids Can Kill, or B.A.R.E.B.A.C.K.

• Gay Bar Reveal: Inverted. Steve's mom is so deep in denial, she goes to a hardcore gay leather bar, sees a man being lead around on a leash and being from The Deep South seems overjoyed that slavery is still legal in that neighborhood.
• Gayborhood: West Lahunga Beach.
• Good People Have Good Sex: "Daddy!" "Piggy!"
• Has Two Mommies: In season two, Dana and Kirsten raise Dixie, because Rick and Steve helped in the surrogacy, they allow the guys two have shared custody too. So Dixie has two moms and two dads.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Nightcrawler voices Chuck!
  • Margaret Cho voices Condi Ling.
  • Ricki, I thought you didn't drink!
  • Lorna Luft (Judy Garland's other daughter) voices Steve's ultra-conservative mother.
• Insistent Terminology: Chuck does not have AIDS, he's HIV-positive. This is a bit of Truth in Television since many HIV-negative people think the two are one and the same.
  • Condi is not a fag hag! She's an alternative life style companion!
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: Subverted hard with embittered, wheelchair bound, HIV+ Chuck.
• Last Het Romance: Condie Ling to Rick.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Taken to its logical extreme and lampshaded with Kirsten and Dana. Kirsten desperately wants to conceive but can't, even after multiple insemination attempts. Dana doesn't really want kids to begin with, but all she has to do is spill a cup of sperm on her lap, and her womb "sucks it up through three layers of denim."
• Lipstick Lesbian: Kirsten.
• Mama Bear: Rick's mother, defender of love and gay equality. Steve's mother sworn to "protecting the sanctity of my son's anus".
• May-December Romance: Chuck is in his 50s, Evan is barely 19. Their relationship ends up resembling that of a man raising his grandson... only with more sex.
• Nightmare Fuel: For Steve anyway, the thought that so much as a single cell of his could have come into contact with Dana is enough to wake him up screaming several times.
• Nobody Over 50 Is Gay: "I am the oldest homosexual in the world! I am thirty-three!"
• Political Correctness Gone Mad:

"Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Ramadan,
Christmukah, Solstice, too.
And if you don't believe in nothing,
happy that to you!"

• • Ebony and Ivory are the embodiment of this trope. They refuse to check whether their infant is a boy or a girl because they believe that shouldn't be up to them to enforce gender roles, they gave the child a gender-neutral name, and insist that the child be referred to as "he and/or she". They refuse to baby-talk because it is patronizing, and they find it offensive to call a child small. They have a bank account specifically for their child's future sex change operation should he and/or she desire one.
• Really Gets Around: When they still thought Dana's baby was going to be a boy, Kirsten made a list of four thousand potential names, crossing off each name if it was shared by a guy that Steve had slept with. By the time they were done, the only names left were John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
• Screwed by the Network: Even as reruns, you're lucky to see one episode a month.
• Shout-Out: When a straight couple moves in to the neighborhood, Condi defends her turf by proclaiming herself "the only straight in the village".
  • Upon hearing how long Kirsten's baby-names list is, Chuck remarks "Christ, Schindler's wasn't even that long!"
  • Rick's favorite show is Skanky Housewives, with clips showing a red haired mother of a terrible ten year old cocaine addict who snorts drugs off of babies.
• Stop Being Stereotypical: Inverted in the gang's trip to San Francisco, where they are marginalized by the locals for being "heteronormalized" (i.e., not being genderqueer, and, in Kirsten and Dana's case, raising a baby).
• Stop Motion
• Invisible to Gaydar: Steve repeatedly identifies himself as a straight-acting gay, and acts exactly like an idiot jock.
• Suicide as Comedy: Condi, who tries to pathetically commit suicide every time a guy she dates turns out to be gay. It's now in the double digits. Everyone is so annoyed by her shooting her self in the head with glue guns that they start urging her to just kill herself already so they can watch TV in peace.
• Teen Pregnancy: Evan's mother was 14 when she had him.
• Token Minority: One of Steve's friends is the only straight guy in the show to have more than one line.
• Transsexualism: Rick and Steve's favorite porn star it turns out is an FTM transsexual. They repeatedly mistake him for being a lesbian.
• Tropes Are Not Bad: Would you believe me if I said there was an episode with this as their moral?
• Twofer Token Minority: Steve's friend who is both black and gay, who has a bit of a martyr complex. Then there's rick who is gay and Filipino, and Evan who is also Latino. Then there's Chuck who's an wheelchair bound HIV positive homosexual.
• Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Every business in West Lahunga Beach. There's even a Guns 'n' Homo
• Whole-Plot Reference: The season two episode Wickeder, a standard Wizard of Oz parody
• Wholesome Crossdresser: The drag queen that shows up several times in the series.

1. ↑ He was hit by a car as he was exiting the clinic at which he was tested.