| abstract
| - Odd Job Jack is a Canadian animated, situational comedy show about Jack Ryder, the master of mediocrity. He works at a temp agency where every episode he is assigned a new job. At home, he lives with his corporate mother, drug-addicted grandmother and activist sister. His friends are the agoraphobic, wanted-for-cyber-crime Leo Trench and the musically-inclined, dorky guy Bobby Lee. The show began as a web series, but was quickly discovered and put to television on The Comedy Network. Four seasons have been made, out of which only the second has been released to DVD. Seasons 2-4, however, are available for free viewing through Hulu.com. This show contains examples of:
* Absurdly High Stakes Game: The Big Game in "Twenty-One, You're Dead". It's a Deadly Game where basically, if you lose Blackjack, you get a bullet to the head.
* Activist Fundamentalist Antics: Spoons seems to prefer this method.
* Actor Allusion
* Adobe Flash
* Alien Invasion: Turns out they just wanted to win the hot dog contest, but invasion, that's a good idea...
* Anal Probing: Leo: "Hey, remember me? You guys gave me an anal probe." Aliens: "You'll have to be more specific. We give a lot of anal probes...a lot."
* Angry Dance: How Jack is finally able to do the moves in "The Great White Joke".
* Bad Future: Really bad. Jack starts the apocalypse. He must soon travel back in time to kill himself.
* Bank Robbery: Leo and Bobby are displeased with how "unreal" a heist movie they watch is, and decide they can do a better job. So, they hire some professionals and go for it.
* Belly Dancer: In one episode, Jack displays his belly dancing skills. He took classes!
* Bilingual Bonus: Anytime they use another language, they actually speak it, but never use subtitles.
* British Stuffiness: Neville, who has a literal stiff upper lip and a literal rod up his bum.
* Bug War: Jack is an exterminator once. He literally goes to war with them.
* Camera Spoofing: Leo and Bobby do this with a clip (of a break in, no less) from a movie when they break in to a vault. The security guards notice immediately, but don't care because the actress has a nice butt.
* Canada
* Catch Phrase: "I'm all over it!"
* Conveniently an Orphan: Jack's mother thinks this of the girl Jack is marrying because it means now she'll be the one stuck with the entire wedding bill.
* "Dear John" Letter: Jack writes one of these to Betty.
* Did Not Get the Girl: Story of Jack's life.
* Everything's Deader with Zombies: Leo creates an army of zombies. The entire city still prefers zombies to meter maids. Heck, many even find it preferable.
* Film Noir: Done without actually going noir, but they use all the elements.
* Hey, It's That Voice!!: The stars that appear are easily recognizable by their voices. John Goodman, David Cross, Fred Willard, Sandra Oh, Henry Winkler, Will Arnett...
* Homoerotic Subtext: The captain and Andy in the Star Tramps episodes, not to mention Gayspock.
* Bobby turns gay thanks to electrified milk in "Jack Ryder gets Hitched" and spends the episode lusting after Jack. In the next episode (it's a two-parter) he's drooling over Leo.
* How We Got Here: Each episode starts with the (often confusing) climax of whatever mess Jack's gotten himself into, leaving the rest of the episode to fill in up to that point.
* Identical Grandson: In the flashback episode. Jack imagines he and his friends are all of the people written about in his great great great grandfather's journal.
* Informed Attractiveness: It's hard to tell which characters are supposed to be attractive unless they're being actively lusted after...
* Keep Circulating the Tapes: If ANYONE can find the first 12 episodes...
* Knight in Shining Armor: Jack hallucinates about these while working for the road paving guys.
* Limited Animation
* Mistaken for Gay: A flight attendant Jack likes thinks he's gay. He remains clueless.
* Mushroom Samba: Several, since many jokes revolve around the smoking of weed. Done especially with Jack's grandmother.
* Musical Episode: "Orgy! The Musical"
* No One Should Survive That
* Once Per Episode: Jack getting a new job.
* One-Gender Race: The city of Wu.
* Orphan's Ordeal: Hoo boy...
* Our Time Machine Is Different: A model ship, a swordfish, a shotgun..."you really must let go of your pre-conceived notions of what a time machine should look like!"
* Pensieve Flashback: There's a whole mess of 'em in the flashback episode.
* Potty Emergency: In "Twenty-Nine (And a Half)".
* Punished with Ugly: After Jack gets addicted to plastic surgery, he ends up hideous and must learn about the beauty within from a group of freaks living in the sewer.
* Redshirt Army: By the end of the episode, all of Jack's platoon save for he is dead.
* Reset Button: Usually by the next episode, but a really big one is used at the end of "Close Encounters of the Uncomfortable Kind" after the Time Skip.
* Rubber Forehead Aliens: Many goers of the Star Tramps convention dress as such. For instance, Bobby's choice of race includes aliens whose genitalia is on their foreheads.
* Saw a Woman In Half: Happens literally during the magic show Jack is assisting in.
* Shotgun Wedding: Bobby thinks the father of the farm girl he slept with wants this. Turns out he just wanted Bobby dead.
* Shout-Out: One episode spoofs Lord of the Rings, another does 24, there's a two-parter that does Star Trek, another for Terminator...heck, every episode has at least a handful of references.
* Show Stopper: Jack failing to "keep up" his role in the musical.
* Sociopathic Soldier: There are two who want this role in Jack's army platoon, and they fight over who gets the title.
* The Cracker: Leo
* The Everyman: Jack is designed to be this.
* The Gambling Addict: Bobby becomes addicted to scratch lotto cards at one point, then moves up to slot machines.
* Thoroughly Mistaken Identity: Everyone is convinced Jack is Star Tramps' Andy and continue to call him such until aliens actually revive the dead actor and bring him forth.
* Timey-Wimey Ball: "Jack to the Future". The bad future is averted, but the future selves remain. Eventually, Future!Leo comes in and decides the only option to fix it all is to kill everyone.
* Trapped by Gambling Debts: Bobby, and every other person to play "The Big Game".
* Trash of the Titans: Jack's boss when he works for the sanitation company. Cranked to 11 when it turns out his boss is actually stuffing houses full with stolen trash throughout an entire TOWN...
* Voices Are Mental: Bobby and Leo switch voices along with their brains.
* Yet Another Christmas Carol: Titled "A Christmas Coma".
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