All five members of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Gang are memorable in their own unique ways. But if you ask most fans who their favorite character is, they’ll likely reply “Charlie Kelly.” Even when he’s stalking the Waitress or threating to “f**k up” someone’s bike you just can’t help but love the guy. Not one member of the Gang is a particularly good person, but Charlie comes the closest. He carries a certain innocence with him, mostly because he has little to know idea what’s going on over half the time. His friends can be talking about him directly to him and Charlie will reply “Yeah, he doesn’t even like get us, man.”
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From the episodes that shine a light on Charlie’s past to those that help illustrate just how he’s so unique, these are the best Charlie Kelly episodes of it’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There are plenty of other great episodes that didn’t quite make the cut, too, including Season 14’s “The Janitor Always Mops Twice,” Season 12’s “The Gang Tends Bar,” and Season 9’s “The Gang Saves the Day.”
1) “Charlie Got Molested” (Season 1, Episode 7)
One of the best aspects about Charlie as a character is his love for, but exasperation with, his mother. Of course, a big part of this was Charlie Day’s chemistry with the late Lynne Marie Stewart, whose presence will be dearly missed throughout upcoming seasons.
But then there’s his relationship with her brother, Uncle Jack. Season 1’s “Charlie Got Molested” is an important episode for several reason. It not only introduced the McPoyles. but the aforementioned Uncle Jack. It also heavily implies that, yes, Jack molested Charlie, which is a hint that would repeatedly pop up in the show all the way through to Season 16.
2) “Mac’s Banging the Waitress” (Season 4, Episode 4)
While Mac and the Waitress are the characters whose names are in the title of “Mac’s Banging the Waitress,” it’s not their episode. Intstead this is the Charlie and Dennis show all the way.
When Charlie calls Mac his best friend in front of Dennis, the latter is perplexed. Charlie relays the simple reason: Dennis “banged” the Waitress. But now Mac is secretly trying to do the same (because he thought Charlie smashed his Project Badass tape). Dennis convinces Charlie of this, so Charlie waits up all night at Dennis and Mac’s apartment, devouring an entire pizza and drinking a whole case of beer in the process. Two of Sunny‘s very best scenes are in this episode. One is when Charlie first arrives at Dennis and Mac’s apartment. Dennis tries to get Charlie to spend time with him, e.g. with the proposition of playing Chinese Checkers, to which Charlie replies with a no and says it’s “too foreign.” Then there’s the scene where Mac arrives home, and we see Charlie with a belly full of pizza and beer. He’s a mess.
3) “The Nightman Cometh” (Season 4, Episode 13)
“The Nightman Cometh” isn’t just one of the great Charlie episodes, it’s one of the great It’s Always Sunny episodes period. From front to back, it’s flawless.
But its sublime narrative wouldn’t exist without Charlie and his newest ploy to secure the affections of the waitress. Too bad for him it fails, probably because the ploy was to write a play about him getting violated by his uncle when he was a kid (which is, of course, something he either won’t admit to himself or just flat-out can’t remember).
4) “The Waitress Is Getting Married” (Season 5, Episode 5)
The dating profile scene in “The Waitress Is Getting Married” is pure gold for Charlie fans. Or, really, anyone trying to understand him.
He wants to wear a checkered hat and hold a pipe for “The Sherlock Holmes look.” When asked what his favorite food is he replies, “Milk steak” and says that the prospective date would know what it is. His hobby? Magnets. Just magnets. His likes are ghouls, “funny little green ghouls” and, as for his dislikes, “people’s knees.” In other words, a bunch of answers that should never be put on a dating profile. A member of the Manson Family would read it and think, “This guy’s too out there for me.”
5) “Paddy’s Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens” (Season 5, Episode 8)
“Paddy’s Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens” spends pretty much equal time with all five members of the Gang, but it’s Charlie who runs away with the episode from moment one. After all, it kicks off with his amateurish ad for “Kitten Mittens.” The most impressive thing about the ad is that he at least spelled kitten correctly.
The fact the kitten mittens end up finding a buyer in the episode’s final moments is funny enough, but the fact that the Lawyer ends up getting the cash is even better. He had to get paid by them somehow. Fake ads on Sunny are always great, and the two fake ad sequences here in “Kitten Mittens” are arguably the best of the series, but Charlie’s is also charming and cute. He’s just trying to “make a quieter cat.” He could also just stop eating cat food every night, that would probably get the cats to stop pawing at his window, but kitten mittens are a fine option B.
6) “Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats” (Season 6, Episode 10)
One of the major details about Charlie that keeps popping up is his illiteracy. He spells Super Bowl “sooper bol,” for instance. Or, more accurately, he writes that Paddy’s is “Klozed 4 salmonella becoz sooper bol” with about a quarter of the letters backwards.
Then there’s his Drambach (AKA his Dream Book). We learn about this in “Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats,” an episode where Frank tricks the Gang into throwing a surprise part for Charlie that’s actually a surprise party for himself.
7) “Flowers for Charlie” (Season 9, Episode 8)
“Flowers for Charlie” is a play on the novel Flowers for Algernon, which follows an intellectually disabled man who takes part in a procedure that grants him extraordinary intelligence. But the procedure ended in death for Algernon, the mouse on which the test was first performed. That seems to be the case for the book’s lead character, named Charlie.
Always Sunny‘s Charlie doesn’t face that same fate, but it also turns out he never became a genius at all. He just thought he was so smart he could learn Mandarin overnight. The pills he’s been taken have been placebos, which by episode’s end is just another word Charlie finds as humorous as the Police Academy movies.
8) “Charlie Work” (Season 10, Episode 4)
“Charlie Work” is widely deemed one of the show’s best episodes. This is due in no small part to the ten-minute long take that occupies about half the runtime. But it’s also just a flat-out great Charlie episode.
His job just be to clean toilets in a low rent bar, but Charlie takes it seriously. When the bar receives its annual inspection he jumps into action. But this year two things are standing in his way. One is the Gang’s chicken airline miles scheme. The other is the fact there’s a new inspector looking at the bar, and she’s nowhere near as lenient as the previous one. It’s compelling to watch Charlie hold the bar together by a thread, even if his friends don’t even notice.
9) “Charlie’s Home Alone” (Season 13, Episode 8)
Plenty of movies and TV series have referenced or parodied 1990’s Home Alone throughout the years. But It’s Always Sunny did it best.
The first episode of a two-parter, “Charlie’s Home Alone” works so well because it really puts the title character through the ringer all because of a silly misunderstanding. The Gang has left Paddy’s Pub for the Super Bowl, but Charlie got left behind because Rickety Cricket put on his Greenman suit. When two patrons try to open the door to Paddy’s, Charlie thinks they’re burglars, so he sets up a series of traps and then manages to hurt himself with each and every one. He also eats a live rat (to try and stick to his superstitious ritual of eating brown)…which goes about as well as one might expect it to.
10) “The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain” (Season 15, Episode 8)
One of Charlie’s major threads throughout It’s Always Sunny was his desire to know his father. For a time, he thought it was Frank. But in Season 15 he learned that his pen pal, Shelly Kelly, was his biological dad.
Unfortunately, Charlie barely got a chance to know the man, as he died in between the season’s seventh episode, “Dee Sinks in a Bog,” and its finale, “The Gang Carries a Corpse Up a Mountain.” The narrative is exactly what it sounds like, and as the episode progresses Charlie finds himself increasingly alone, as the other members of the Gang bail on the respectful ritual. Eventually even Charlie finds himself exasperated, and in the middle of a rainstorm he breaks down in tears, screaming to the heavens how Shelley should have been there for him. It’s the best acting the show has ever displayed. The fact Day wasn’t nominated for an Emmy shows the organization’s baffling bias against the show.
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