"It’s not meant to be hilarious, it’s supposed to be erotic. Maybe you don’t understand it." That’s how Tina Belcher, the coolest 13-year-old girl in the world, describes her "friend fiction" to a frenemy in one episode of "Bob’s Burgers". And, while it would be easy for the show to wring humor out of a teenaged girl writing stories about fondling a dancing boy, it’s treated as both erotic and hilarious. Tina’s interest in butts is never the butt of the joke—instead, it’s other people embarrassed that she’s so forward. This is all to say that if you’ve never seen an episode before, "Bob’s Burgers" looks like a family-friendly cartoon—but it’s one of the freakiest and most sex-positive shows on TV.
The entire Belcher family manages to get in on the action. Tina’s attraction to zombies and obsession with butts is, of course, never, ever judged by anyone, unless they’re clearly being close-minded in doing so. But son Gene’s gender confusion (or maybe gender apathy) is one of his more adorable qualities, Louise’s first crush plays out as a fixation on mischievous violence, and we’re frequently let in on the weird, married sex life of parents Bob and Linda. It even extends beyond the nuclear family—the happy ending of one episode involves Bob persuading his father-in-law to vocalize his fetish for the sound of popping balloons so that Linda’s parents will participate in a swingers’ retirement community. And, more often than not, this strain of the show’s outlook on life (and bodies) is conveyed in song.
Music would have been one of the core elements of the show no matter what. Creator and showrunner Loren Bouchard has a musical background (and a home studio where much of the show’s composition takes place). Several of the writers and producers work songs into their episodes. And the voice cast is game to sing themselves silly—especially John Roberts, who voices exuberant mom Linda and frequently improvises songs in the recording booth that make it into final cuts. In fact, the fifth episode of the show starts with Linda putting on a dinner theater musical at the restaurant.
"Hamburger Dinner Theater" solidifies all of the Belchers as delightful, unapologetic hams—and in the very next episode, the show introduces its sly approach to music and sex. At first glance, "Sheesh! Cab, Bob?" appears to have a straightforward, uninspired sitcom plot—Bob gets a second job driving a cab at night to pay for Tina’s special birthday party, and then has to deal with the fallout when Tina’s crush object Jimmy Jr. can’t come—but rather than just making him exhausted and causing stress within the family, Bob’s night moves expose him to a whole new part of the town.
A Michael McDonald pastiche sung with aplomb by Roberts, "Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night" introduces some rather pointed, explicit imagery for an ostensibly "family-friendly" cartoon, made literal by the song’s gloriously absurd DVD extra music video. The lyrics refer to Bob’s initial encounter with a group of ambiguously cross-dressing sex workers who, rather than becoming the butt of the episode’s jokes the way they would on a more conservative show, wind up saving the day by blackmailing Jimmy Jr.’s father with the knowledge that he has a diaper fetish. (Okay, so maybe the show isn’t quite 100% sex-positive all the time.) Marshmallow, one of the sex workers, has become a recurring character, and a fan-favorite, in part because no one on the show ever feels compelled to comment on her appearance.
"Lifting Up the Skirt of the Night" creates a template for the ways in which "Bob’s Burgers" uses immediately-recognizable musical forms as masks for genuinely sexually progressive messages. Sometimes, this is really, really obvious—like the Tori Amos riff "Oil Spill", which is just about a vagina and, as Gene notes, is… not subtle. The character of Tommy Jaronda, terrible guitar-wielding health inspector, forces his music on the Belchers in a way that pokes fun at hyper-masculine ideas about sex of the sort that are frequently encoded into rock music. When Linda puts her high school band back together, her sister Gail (voiced by Megan Mullaly) performs a hyper-explicit, kind of gross love song written for her old crush Derek Dematapolis—and, contravening every instinct we have about how these stories are supposed to go, successfully seduces him.
More broadly, nearly all of the music of "Bob’s Burgers" encourages the characters (and, maybe, the viewer) to discard any sense of shame. Sometimes, that’s just about emotional stability and a willingness to be oneself, something that plays out in the music of Boyz 4 Now, the immensely popular boy band Tina and Louise go to see. Their biggest hit is about a ridiculously exaggerated form of emotional confession and investment. But, of course, that shamelessness also extends to bodily functions, as in Linda’s song apologizing for Bob’s diarrhea or Gene’s insistence that farts will set you free. Gene himself is the vehicle for much of the show’s comedy and casual engagement with gender and sexuality, primarily through his passion for performance and resistance to masculine gender norms. Both qualities are exemplified by "Girls Being Girls", a song he writes for a Dreamgirls-style group before deciding it would be better to just do it himself in a wig and dress.
Even the show’s otherwise ordinary songs are full of minor lyrical touches conveying bizarre sexual imagery. Banjo, the hero of Bob and Gene’s favorite series of old-school Westerns, wears leather chaps (even in hot weather). Linda asks Bob to show the family his ding-ding. When Bob trains at an arcade game, he’s groping for glory. These moments frequently reveal themselves only on repeated viewings, or to people already inclined to seek out and obsess over lyrics as fans. And while they scan as juvenile humor (which they are), they also almost exclusively punch upward at boring sexual taboos.
It’s not just sex, though—if there’s a subject that doesn’t seem appropriate for a musical number in a family animated sitcom on a major network, "Bob’s Burgers" has probably tackled it. One of the show’s best shorter musical moments is a short riff on wearing seatbelts, of the kind a goofy family might come up with to ground collective cleaning rituals. In this case, the refrain is "Buckle it up or you’ll die!" Another of Roberts’ biggest spontaneous contributions to the show is a lullaby-esque meditation on the death and current non-existence/decomposition of Harry Truman. A new "Bob’s Burgers" song is exhilarating, precisely because of this freedom—when someone starts singing, you have no idea what’s going to come out.
Take the single most popular Bob’s song—"Electric Love", which Bouchard describes as a one-song musical. The song, ostensibly written by Gene for Louise’s science project on Thomas Edison, dramatizes a love affair between the scientist and Topsy the elephant, an animal cruelly cut down by an experiment with electric current. It’s big, beautiful, and wonderfully weird—even as Gene and Tina perform as Edison and Topsy, the vocal performances actually come from Kevin Kline as Belcher landlord Mr. Fischoeder and Mullaly’s Gail. The whole product is great: As Gene puts it, "If it ain’t man-on-elephant love, it ain’t worth singing about!"
Certainly, that’s the conclusion quite a few artists have come to. The "Bob’s" creative team has collaborated with artists ranging from Cyndi Lauper to St. Vincent, the National to Sleater-Kinney. Pulling in well-established musicians to do songs about taffy butts and bad teenage girls is just an extension of the natural exuberance of Bob’s Burgers and its characters, related to the fact that the show is now capable of pulling off a mashup musical of Die Hard and Working Girl. The most recent season premiere doesn’t feature a ton of new music, but "Bob’s Burgers" shows no signs of slowing down, so we can expect some exciting work and titillating butt music for years to come.