Review: American Dad “Hamerican Dad!”

Yes, there will be ham puns

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Once again, Stan is celebrating because somebody died. This time it’s a man named Skippy from his Ham Club. Roger is the only family member unfamiliar with Ham Club, and Stan is more than happy to explain it to him. Stan’s so excited, he exposits all over the place throughout Skippy’s entire funeral. Turns out, the Tappahonnock Ham Society is a group of old, white, probably Republican men who are really into ham.

Roger loves the notion and wants in. Stan, not wanting his alien to ruin yet another one of his things, invites him to a formal interview assuming he’ll blow it. And Roger almost does, but then he wows the club with a ham-fisted rendition of Chicago’s “All That Jazz” (Bebe Neuwirth style), his most obscure reference until he alludes to Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny later in the episode.

Having Roger as a member is worse than Stan imagined. The good ol’ boys adore him and even buy into his “there are things in life other than ham” agenda. In desperation, Stan poisons a ham that Roger serves to the group. However, the mild poison works far too well (because that mischievous alien also poisoned the ham), so the guys take the sick gentlemen to Roger’s property in Maine—the one he hasn’t shut up about since the beginning of the episode.

Meanwhile, in Anemic B-plot Land, Francine realizes she’s never seen her neighbor Greg become scared. To remedy this problem, she runs across the street brandishing an axe. Before she can truly scare him, she gets creamed by a truck and falls into a coma for weeks. This unfortunate event winds up “scaring” Greg in a way Francine never imagined. Score one for Mrs. Smith!

Anyway, that’s probably why the family doesn’t notice Stan and Roger missing for several weeks as they attempt to nurse the Ham Society back to health. However, despite around the clock care and tomfoolery, the society members don’t get any better. At long last, Roger confesses he’s been poisoning the men’s ham, food, and water nonstop in a convoluted effort to spend more time with Stan. Why? Because he loves him, and deep down Stan loves Roger. Sometimes it’s hard to express your deep-rooted love, so if you have to poison a group of ham-obsessed weirdos to show the extent of your affections, so be it.

Our Take

After weeks of cycling through Haley, Steve, Francine, Stan, and Jeff, we’ve finally landed on a Roger episode. The creative team accentuated this bizarre plotline by pairing him with Stan, his greatest comic foil—besides Steve or Francine. After a fair amount of exposition—which we could’ve lived without—their buddy-comedy antics went into full swing.

The reason I say the exposition wasn’t important is that the Ham Society was merely a means to a greater end. We needed an excuse for this pair of Seth MacFarlane-voiced characters to be alone with each other so they could react to their varying levels of untapped craziness. The way they fully commit to each other’s gags is rare for characters on this show and for humor in general—and yet, somehow it almost always works.

In previous weeks, we’ve seen pairing such as Steve and Snot, Haley and Francine, and Francine and Jeff. In each of those cases, the humor derived from the conflict between the two parties. While there’s plenty of conflict flying between Roger and Stan, the scenes in which they work together against an invisible wall of conflict are often their strongest moments. Seeing them burn the midnight oil as they abuse a recent widow’s hospitality shows just how similar these two supposedly polar opposites really are. And even though Stan has done terrible things to Roger out of anger—which in the real world would’ve ended their friendship—the pair have maintained a strong, unique bond throughout this long-running series.

The side story, while once again brief with no bearing on the major action, was a more entertaining outing than last week’s modeling nonsense. Francine had a goal, and she went to the proper lengths to carry it out. It didn’t matter that she almost got flattened by a truck. If not for the truck, she would’ve brought that axe to Greg and threatened him until he begged for mercy. However, as in life, things didn’t work out that way, but that certainly doesn’t mean things didn’t work out for Francine.