American High Digital

The American High Digital Network is a series of channels created by film company American High in 2022 dedicated to short-form content, primarily in the form of skits designed for teenagers and young adults. As a subgroup of American High, they are notable beyond other sketch creators for having access to an entire high school converted into a film set. As of 2025, there are three channels that content is posted to:

• American High Shorts, dedicated to content relatable to those still in the school system.
• College Life, for shorts relating to... well, college life.
• Barely Adult, for postgrad-themed content.

The American High channel also hosts the series Minimum Wage, which features the main cast doing their usual shenanigans in the role of workers at a pizza shop.

Accounts for each channel can be found on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Shorts that are a part of American High Digital contain examples of:

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: A teacher bets his house on whether a certain student would be able to get more than a C+ on a desk. Cut to him coming in and throwing his keys to said student.
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: Averted for comedy in the video on schools doing "Purge Weeks", in that the student's ideas on what crimes they'd do is far beyond the actual power of the president to handle.
• Absurd Phobia: One gag in "Making Your Friends In The Sims" is Tommy giving everyone the Hydrophobia trait. At the end of the video, it turns out he was actually right in his friend group being afraid of water.
• AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle: "Saying The Pledge Weird" focuses on Tommy including bizarre pitch changes in the way that he recites the pledge of allegiance.
• Acting Unnatural:
  • In one video a cheap roommate tries to avoid paying for Uber by loudly looking for her phone... while it's in her hand.
  • Grace in "Trying Not To Look At Your BF's Phone" tries very awkwardly to make her swipes look accidental. Eventually she gives up on even that.
• A Degree in Useless: Ryan in "Your Anthropology Major Friend" is outright scared of the word "career".
• Affably Evil: Despite being a wanted criminal that casually makes death threats and plans to follow through on them, Hyde in "Taking Trash Talk Too Far" otherwise seems to be a jovial and friendly person.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The result of installing CarPlay into a car that's several decades old is one that begs for death and screams in agony (or pleasure) at the slightest press of a button.
  • According to "When Spotify Gets Too Personal", the algorithm that creates Spotify playlists gets very aggressive when its users even consider other methods of listening to music, creating playlists that range from direct insults to referencing various world tragedies.
• Air Quotes: Julia in "Theater Teacher Overshares" does air quotes when saying her husband "drowned", immediately disturbing her students with the implications.
• The Alcoholic:
  • Julia in "Dry January" has obtained from drinking every day to follow through... with her court probation after getting into a DUI. When February hits, she'll be hospitalized.
  • The "Alpha Moms" videos, especially "Alpha Moms At Book Club" suggest that they get really into their wine.
  • One of Julia's many problems in "Why Am I Still Sick?" is that almost every night is dedicated to some sort of drinking event.
  • Trevor in "How Teachers Thought You'd React When They Passed Something Around" is stated to be an alcoholic. The "WWII artifact" he brought may just be his regular flask.
  • Hyde in "Guy That's A Bar 'Regular'" gets deals because he goes to the bar every day. Tommy and Julia note that it's not really something to brag about.
• The Alleged Computer: Grace's laptop in "When Your Computer Overheats In Class" has to put in so much work to boot up that its vents blow enough air to lift itself.
• All for Nothing:
  • Hyde in "Doing Homework On The Bus" goes through the effort of trying to complete a long homework packet on a bumpy and bully-filled bus trip, only for it to turn out that the teacher isn't checking the homework that day.
  • The students in "Doing A Video Project: Expectation Vs. Reality" go through a lot of stress trying to create a video for class, which all goes down the drain when the file gets corrupted.
• All Gays Love Theater: Implied with the roommate in "Rooming With A Musical Theater Major"; his voice is very effeminate, and Hyde's reaction to seeing him with another man (to practice a scene) implies that he's walked in on... intimate affairs before.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Grace in "When You're Always The New Kid" is interested in Affion, and the rough and gruff exterior he puts on to avoid making friendships that will inevitably split only intrigues her more.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents:
  • Hyde in "Your Mom Finding Stuff" is audibly flustered at Julia helping in finding things that do not need her help, from ruining magic tricks to interrupting therapy sessions and... more intimate matters.
  • The parents in "Parents Attempt At Gay Seggs Talk" trying to make The Talk more inclusive to their gay daughter only ends up making it more confusing to her by virtue of including a bunch of bizarre euphemisms and props.
• Ambiguous Situation: Its uncertain in "Dissection Day" if Luke's frog is somehow alive only to him, or if he's just going crazy.
• Animate Inanimate Object:
  • Evidently, the reason why tests need #2 pencils is because #1 pencils cause the scanner (voiced by Julia) a large amount of pain. #3 pencils, meanwhile, are "too good", causing a ...different reaction.
  • In "Teacher Fly Down", said open pants are able to have a conversation (and therapy session) with Grace. Which makes somewhat more sense when it turns out to be a dream.
• Animesque: The drawings in "Drawing Fanart Of Your Teacher" are a good send-up of the results of a not-entirely-experienced student attempting to draw in a stereotypical anime style.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: "Being Seduced By Grad School" has the titular topic and similar facilities portrayed as attractive women trying to seduce someone.
• Anti-Climax:
  • Grace and Hyde are very irritated when it turns out that what Julia was hesitant to say in "When They Overuse 'Nevermind'" was that she had a dream where they lived together. Then promptly subverted when she reveals that their dream-selves had a threesome.
  • Hyde in "When You Hook Up With Your Friend" compares the situation to being hyped up for a movie, but regretting your choices once you're in the theater.
• Artsy Beret: Julia as an art teacher in "Day One Of Art School" wears a beret. Later in the video, she says it's required for artists to dress like they're better than everyone else.
• Ass Shove: For some reason, Ms. Frizzle post-tenure has gained an obsession with going into one particular student's ass using the Magic School Bus. The end of the short is poor Timmy hunched in front of a bus as the show's theme starts playing.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: During last period on a Friday, it only takes seconds for students to get distracted from classwork.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Learning Latin is depicted as this: you sound cool, and you can say some cool things, but it's not going to be nearly as useful as taking Spanish or French outside of niche topics.
  • "Doing Work Outside" shows that while it looks cool, its not nearly as easy or functional as studying at a good chair and desk with stable internet and no strong winds.
  • Chilling on the roof during a party looks fun, until you realize how hard it is to get supplies up and down there.
  • "When Companies Have Large Boardroom Tables" has two execs realizing that as cool as the giant table looks, its sheer size makes communicating very hard.
• Back from the Dead: Implied in "Excuses For Missing Class", in which Tommy says "my uncle" as the explanation for both a death in the family and a miracle in the family. Still isn't going to keep him from using his grief in a last-ditch effort to pass.
• Backseat Driver: One video suggests the existence of a whole class on how to badger your driver in the most subtly annoying way possible.
• Badge Gag: "Bad Fake IDs" shows a variety of dubious ID cards with off details, from Grace's listing her nationality as "Goddamn American" to Luke's simply being a leaf with his name crudely written on it.
• Badly Battered Babysitter: A variant in "When Students Are Kind To The Substitute", where the substitute teacher ends up being attacked with school supplies due to the grievous sin of actually giving assignments. This also isn't the first time it's happened to him.
• Banana Peel: One way to test potential employees in "Auditions For Principal's Jester" is to slip on a banana in a funny enough way. Julia has a whole stash ready for anyone wanting to try.
• Bathroom Stall of Angst: "Crying In The Bathroom" has Grace's attempts to invoke the trope ruined by the fact that almost every school group has something to do in there that day.
• Batman Parody: "Batman In High School" has Hyde in a Batman mask doing the typical impression and beating up students over minor misdemeanors. Tommy would call his parents... but they're not in the picture.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The goals of the titular character of "Manifestation Delulu" do seem to come true in the worst ways possible. Wanting to move ends up with her home burning down, and wanting a more minimalistic lifestyle gets her house robbed.
• Behind the Black: The first librarian video has the titular character being able to disappear while being right in front of Grace in a way that only really works due to where the camera angle is placed.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: In "Invention Convention", one of the project submissions is dog repellent peanut butter, because the student's brother is a fan of the "put stuff on your penis and let the dog lick it off" method. The last invention shown is from said brother, and an uncomfortably long time is spent on him trying to explain how his spatula set totally isn't meant for said activity.
• Big "NO!": Tommy makes his disappointment audible when his chances of playing Gomez are crushed in "Spring Musical Reveal".
• Big "WHAT?!": A big use of the W comes from Grace in "Tag" after hearing the phrase "Let me touch you." from Luke.
• Big Red Devil: The titular character in "Your Boyfriend is the Devil" is represented as Grace with red body paint and a pair or horns.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The Alpha Moms act nice towards each other, but will happily start insulting anyone who's not in earshot... or just in a more subtle way if they are.
• Bizarre Human Biology: "Cracking Your Knuckles In Class" has Ryan somehow able to crack the bones in every part of his body, from his feet to his hair.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: Or drink, rather; Grace in "Slip N Slide" is obsessed with drinking water out of the sprayers on pooltoys.
• Black Comedy Burst:
  • The second video on bathroom passes has one evidently be to hunt down a deer, which Grace is visibly horrified from doing.
  • In a video that mostly uses absurdism for humor, Grace in "Professional Frats" says the knitting frat she's is differentiated from a club by having a ton of sexual assault accusations.
• Blackmail: The recruiter's final tactic in "When The Army Recruiter Needs To Hit Their Numbers" is to let Hyde sip from a beer so that he can give him the choice of either joining the army or being in jail for underage drinking.
• Blasphemous Boast: Hyde as the line leader in "Line Leader Goes On Power Trip" compares the job to acting as Moses or Jesus.
• Blatant Lies: Luke as a babysitter says he totally didn't lose the kid as he's turning the whole house upside down in order to find her.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: Discussed in "Unpaid Intern For Bowser", where Tommy notes that the instructions of level building only make it difficult and not impossible for Mario to get through.
• Brainless Beauty: It's a good thing the main character of "Pretty Privilege" has looks good enough to get her anything, as her ability to handle even basic tasks is very underwhelming.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: One student in the "High School" portion of "Importance Of Valentine's Day Through The Years" lists a flower, teddy bear, and a bear that is a flower as some of the gifts he's gotten for his girlfriend.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • "Finding A Summer Job" has jobs being rejected for minor reasons such as having to work weekends or after 6PM... and in one case, because the manager wanted Grace to blow him for the job. Julia is horrified, but Grace doesn't really care.
  • "Figuring Out If It's A 'Shoes On' Or 'Shoes Off' Household" has the monologues of three people fretting about their footwear, and one person who is... very happy that the others took their shoes off.
  • The drawings in "Drawing Fanart Of Your Teacher" are all fairly typical, if somewhat cringey and inappropriate... until the last one, which is just a scrawled date that corresponds to when the teacher's dad is getting a surgery.
  • Ryan's letters in "Love Letters From Summer Camp": "Send pics", "send more pics", I cheated on you several times.
  • Julia's tips in "How To Hot Girl Walk" are pretty normal, until she suddenly mentions the person who's been following her for miles.
  • Julia's offered vibes in "Going Out With Introverted Friend" are "talking", "dancing", and "getting hit on by 40 year old men".
  • The things other employees try to pass onto the "new" guy in "New Guy In The Office" are fairly normal... until someone tries to get him to act as a fall guy for killing the boss.
  • Hyde in "Upperclassmen Talking To Underclassmen Like They're Children" says that younger students don't have to worry about "jobs, internships, and impending doom".
• Breaking Bad News Gently: A student in "Bad Ways To Break Bad News" tries to reveal that he crashed his friend's car during their playing around. It doesn't help to soften the blow at all.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: "Mom Bringing You Stuff You Forgot" ends with the nature of the video as a sketch being brought up when another student questions Hyde's examples of things he forgot stretching into immaterial concepts.
• Breast Attack: "Giving Your Sibling Old Projects" ends with the brothers attacking each other through what appears to be nipple pinching.
• Brick Break: Don't hold anything with two hands in front of Affion as the Guy Who Knows Too Much Karate, or he will be compelled to kick it in half.
• Brick Joke:
  • In "Math Teacher Who's Always Behind", Ryan allows a student to pee in a bottle instead of going to the bathroom while trying to cram information into the class. A later scene then shows him accidently taking a sip from the piss-bottle.
  • While trying to find enough info on Hyde for a Secret Santa exchange, she asks his mom what he's into, before having to clarify that she doesn't mean that sexually. At the end of the video, when Julia gives him Tic Tacs as the gift, he excitedly notes they're for sex. Evidently, his mom knows what he wants well.
  • In "School If We Actually Learned Useful Stuff", Ryan mentions buying a snow leopard in relation to a problem about taxes. At the end of the video he says he's going to find his missing snow leopard after picking open a car.
  • The parents at the beginning of "Every Movie About A High Schooler Throwing A Party" tell Hyde specifically not to touch the thermostat. At the end, the mom is more horrified that it was tampered with than the hole busted through the wall.
  • One of the benefits the titular character of "Every Boat Guy" notes is that his wife can't get to him with divorce papers when he's on the water. At the end, one of the passengers notices her coming with a boat of her own.
• Brown Note:
  • According to "The Reality Of Eggnog", said drink can give you stomach problems just from looking at it.
  • Ryan and Julia's presentation in "When Someone Uses Prezi For The Group Project" has transitions so extreme that they cause their audience to be physically shaken from their seats.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: The coach in "Hit The Showers, Boys!" may be bizarrely obsessed with hygiene over actually playing the game, but his team still somehow becomes state champions through hitting the damn showers.
• Butt-Monkey: For some reason the trailer voice in "Every High School Movie" has it out for Luke, calling him ugly, a douche, and a virgin at different times.
• Car Ride Games: One video shows a game of Punch Buggy getting much rougher than intended due to some unfortunate speed bumps causing punches to hit some more... sensitive areas.
• Caught with Your Pants Down:
  • The first example of student "horseplay" in "Every Woodshop Teacher" is someone using the shop vacuum to give themselves suction in a very intimate place. Another student is doing some impromptu nipple clamping.
  • One video has someone using a pumpkin for trysts coming down the stairs, not knowing that his friends have came home to do actual pumpkin carving. Cue awkwardness.
• Cell Phones Are Useless: Played with in "Guy Who Never Has Battery"; the phone would be useful... if Hyde hadn't ran the battery down to nothing playing Block Blast.
• Cigarette of Anxiety:
  • Implied in "Day 1 Of Nursing School", where Julia says that smoking on the sidewalk is not optional.
  • The depressed teacher in "The Teacher Who Trauma Dumps" was able to smoke 100 cigarettes in a single morning, and doesn't care about doing it in front of students.
• Character Customization: The video of the same name as the trope features Tommy being customized as a character in a fictional video game. Hyde and Luke are watching on and want him to get done with it so they can use the mirror.
• Christmas Episode: "Teachers Making Holiday Themed Lessons" was posted on December 20th, and focuses on teachers trying to involve Christmas theming in their lessons.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Grace in "That One Mom" does seem to love her daughter, but has a level of trust that makes your average Free-Range Children seem cloistered, and thinks eating a colony of fire ants is something to be proud of.
• Cluster F-Bomb: One of the aggressive playlists in "When Spotify Gets Too Personal" is "lo-fi fuck you. fuck you. fuck you. you tiny bitch. yuh. yuh."
• Colorblind Confusion: One gag in "If High School Students Were Dogs" has the teacher trying to get a marker of a certain color from Julia to no avail. Dogs are red-green colorblind.
• Comedic Sociopathy: The main humor of "Getting Called To The Principal's Office" comes from both fellow students and the teacher being very flippant about someone's parents dying in a car accident.
• Confound Them with Kindness: The students in "When Students Are Kind To The Substitute" are only acting friendly to try to get the sub to be lax. When he actually assigns the problems the teacher left, they go into attack mode.
• Conjoined Twins: "Two Headed Teacher" shows both the boons (being able to keep an eye on students while also writing on the whiteboard) and cons (uncertainty from others on whose hand to shake when congratulating them) that comes with being a polycephalic teacher. Or rather, just the result of two people sharing a shirt they split the price on.
• Conspiracy Theorist: One video shows a whole class on conspiracies. Faked moon landings, JFK's assassination, flat Earth, and simulation theories are all mentioned.
• Cool Teacher: Subverted with Hyde in "Teacher That Swears". The first precision swear makes him seem chill, but he then overdoes it to such a forced and hostile point that it makes the students uncomfortable.
• Corpsing: In universe during "Making Eye Contact With Your Friends During A Presentation", where shenanigans from his friends causes Ryan to break his composure in various situations in which doing so is a very bad idea.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: According to "Business Ethics Class", it's actually a class for quite the opposite, encouraging future business leaders to cheat on their exams and laugh at the idea of nonprofits.
• Corruption of a Minor: Hyde as a teacher in "Wobbly Desk" is implied to be using his students as middlemen for getting information for identity theft from the elderly.
• Couldn't Find a Pen: The teacher in "Trying To Find A Marker That Works" ends up using his own blood for ink.
• Court Jester: "Auditions For Principal's Jester" shows that even school nobility can get into the trend of having funny assistants.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: Evan's ID in "The Fakest Fake ID" is comically bad: it has his age at 20 despite being to get into a bar, has an obviously inaccurate height and weight, and tries to paint him as the president and Lebron James at the same time. Somehow, it still works on the bouncer.
• Cringe Comedy: Some of the shorts rely on generating awkwardness, such as "Invention Convention" ending on a student trying to explain an invention that totally isn't bestiality-related for an uncomfortably long time.
• Cure for Cancer: "Shy Girl Cures Cancer" has Paige find the cure in chemistry class. Alas, her sheer underconfidence stymies getting it out into the world.
• Damned by Faint Praise: "When You Have To Start With The Positive Feedback" has the other students clearly reaching to try to find the positives in Julia's story, resulting in such compliments on the writing for being in English, using a good font, and the paper it's on being good for airplane folding.
• Dark Horse Victory: In "America's Next Top Student Messenger", the person picked to take attendance to the office is not any of the students who were fighting over it, but Ryan, who hadn't even appeared in the video until then.
• Dawson Casting: Parodied in "When Old Actors Play Teens", where the other students are very aware that Affion Crocket (who was 50 years old at the time of filming) doesn't look like a highschooler at all.
• Dean Bitterman: Averted in "Every Vice Principal", where the principal is lovely. The vice principal, however, is as aggressive as the trope implies.
• A Degree in Useless: "College Majors In 2024" features very specific degrees in topics like "Early Capitalism In 2000s MTV Programming" and "Post-Ironic Meme Culture". In the end, they all become consultants.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The "Gossip Detectives" videos use a monochrome filter when Grace and Julia fully go into investigative mode to fit the Film Noir vibe.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance:
  • "Gym Warm-Ups" shows one of the practices being a simulating a voting ballot line... and one before 1920, which consists of all the women leaving the line.
  • While the 153rd Year Senior has mostly coped rather well, her reaction to a slight amount of belly showing on another student is "So they allow whores here now?''
  • "When An Alumni Visits The Frat" depicts the progressive softening of fraternities by a former member being surprised that they don't torture pledges or commit random acts of animal abuse anymore.
• Demonic Possession: The main humor in "Look But Don't Make It Obvious" is the two girls being completely oblivious to the fact that the boy they're looking at is going through all the typical possession cliches, complete with other students coming in for an impromptu exorcism.
• Devil's Advocate: The "Devil's Advocate In Politics Class" video shows what happens when a student tries to act as devil's advocate and fails horribly, with the possible hint that they may have more sympathy for the "devilish" opinions than really needed.
• Did I Just Say That Out Loud?: The foot fetishist in "Figuring Out If It's A 'Shoes On' Or 'Shoes Off' Household" only releases his monologue is audible when he notices everyone else looking at him with disturbed expressions.
• Disgusting Public Toilet: Hyde in "Every College Bar" says that the place's bathroom will be horrific.
• Disposable Intern: Tommy's unpaid internship for Bowser in part has him acting as a Goomba, an enemy near-destined to end up being stomped into paste.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • When allowed to act as principal for a day, Julia threatens to burn the house down of anyone who doesn't follow her on Instagram.
  • "That Kid Who Always Reminds The Teacher About Assignments" ends up getting thrown from several stories high over it.
  • Luke in "Every Vice Principal" believes that a food fight should be punishable by death.
• Disappeared Dad: Hyde uses the time for questions in "Career Day" to ask his mom where his dad is.
• The Diss Track: The "final exam" of AP Choir is to develop a feud with Drake to the point where he mentions the students in a diss track. Most students exceed, except for Grace who only gets mentioned for him to note the lack of a beef in her case.
• Distracted by the Sexy: The teacher in "Career Day" is far more interested in the exotic dancer than the astronaut and president, despite the latter being more impressive and kid-friendly.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The "POV: You Find A Rubber Band" videos have a flick-ready rubber band being treated just like a gun, complete with police chases. Lampshaded in the second video when Tommy questions exactly why the homicide unit would actually be involved.
  • "Poppers" has Tommy finding out about them at a party and later dealing them to the students for goods... the poppers in question being the toy type.
• A Dog Ate My Homework: The first scene in "Crazy Homework Excuses" is a student saying a cat ate his homework. Cue said cat coming around the doorway, still with a piece of the work in its mouth.
• Don't Try This at Home: "When The Band Class Is Next Door" has a "these stunts are performed by professionals" disclaimer at the beginning due to the ending having a student launched through a wall by a very aggressive band teacher.
• Double Standard: Implied to be the bartender's outlook in "Trying To Get The Bartender's Attention", as he ignores Hyde the whole time but immediately responds to Grace when she comes over.
• Dream Episode: "Every High School Dream" focuses on the typical weirdness of school-related dreams, from going even as an adult to finding out about work only just before it needs to be turned in.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: The coach variation appears in "Coach Who Is Always Mad", who has beef with every referee and is always aggressively yelling even when his team has won.
• Drugs Are Bad: The "lesson" the teacher imparts to his students at the end of "When The Teacher Messes Up On The Test" is "You don't want to do drugs after college, folks."
• Drunk with Power:
  • When selected as principal for a day, Julia tries to fire the actual principal, threaten students into following her on Instagram, make another student cancel a birthday party due to happening on the same day as hers, and uses the threat of punishments to try to make someone go out with her. The description on YouTube also implies that she didn't step down with dignity either.
  • Hyde in "Line Leader Goes On Power Trip" does the job with the aggression of a Drill Sergeant Nasty, complete with calling the other students maggots.
  • "Arnold Palmer After Naming The Drink" suggests that the golfer went off the deep end after having the drink named after him, deciding to abuse his caddy and flipping out at anyone who also has a named drink.
  • Ryan in "Your Friend Who Celebrates Their Birthday For Too Long" considers all dates that are even vaguely in the ballpark of his birthday to be his and only his domain.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • "Guy Who Takes Senior Pranks Too Far" focuses on Hyde disturbing the other students with his ...interesting ideas of senior pranks such as faking a school shooting or lacing a teacher's drink with fentanyl. No one's too enthused about his idea of an OceanGate-themed prom either.
  • The other parents in "Taking Trash Talk To Far" are horrified by Hyde's "insults" effectively being death threats... especially when he indicates that he's going to follow through on them.
• Dumped via Text Message: "Worst Ways To Break Up" provides the example in the name of the trope, and two ways that are even worse: a drive-by "we need to see other people", and only saying you're breaking up when you've already got a new girlfriend.
• Eat the Evidence: At the end of "Texting Ex-Boyfriend" Julia tries to deny that she made up a card's text saying to have sex with her ex through eating the card.
• Eccentric Artist: Julia as an art teacher is simultaneously welcoming to her students, but also doesn't seem to realize that they aren't interested in her pieces that manage to be abstract yet also uncomfortably sexual. She's also in a polyamorous relationship.
• E = MC Hammer: One video depicts party school rankings as being calculated using an inane equation where the factors represent things like drug dealers per frat and one student's score in beer pong.
• The Eeyore: The teacher in "The Teacher Who Trauma Dumps" has been worn down by life into a deep depression, openly saying that he doesn't care if his students are late with their work because nothing matters in life anyways.
• Egg Sitting: One of the hand-me-downs in "Giving Your Sibling Older Projects" is a baby doll named Timothy the Fourth, as the first three didn't make it. Despite the fact that the school they're going to doesn't do the trope.
• Eldritch Location: In the video on anti-cheating dividers, having one placed on her desk somehow sends Grace to an alternate version of the school that is dark, empty, and has sounds of creepy children's laughter. She claims she spent twenty years there in the thirty minutes the test took.
• Embarrassing Browser History: Implied in "Teachers Hating Wikipedia" in which a student doesn't want to show his browser history for reasons that are evidently unrelated to any use of Wikipedia for a project.
• Embarrassing Nickname: In "When the Teacher Asks If You Have A Nickname", the first idea that comes from their heads when the other students try to come up with a nickname for Aidan is... Aids. Made even worse when they describe being with him for a group project as "I have Aids."
• Empathic Environment: Parodied in "Dramatic Movie Scenes", where the obligatory rain of drama seems to decide it has it out personally for Grace, choosing to intensify for her and only her.
• Enforced Method Acting: An In-Universe example in the "Problematic Theater Teacher" video for Shrek: The Musical, in which Julia as the teacher tries to have Luke (playing Shrek) and Grace (playing Fiona) enter a real relationship to boost their acting.
• Epic Fail: Tommy in "Warming Up And The Team Is Really Good" is so bad at dribbling that the basketball just stays down on the first drop against all laws of physics.
• Escalating Punchline: The joke of "Internship Search Process" is Ryan's expectations getting repeatedly and increasingly lowered from high-tech companies to menial work to quitting college and pawning his possessions.
• Establishing Character Moment: Trevor's first act in "The Kid Who Got Suspended For A Day" is to throw a dodgeball at the teacher, upon which another student tells the poor teach to stay down. This establishes that the titular kid is both not that good of a person, but yet somehow loved in his friend group.
• Even Nerds Have Standards: The first scene of "Kid With A Roller Backpack" has a student in a stereotypical geek outfit calling Aidan a nerd over said pack.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Ryan in "When A Class Has Two Different Teachers" may be very chill, but even then he looks rather perturbed when Hyde asks if he can call him his new dad.
  • Hyde as a college doctor may be very used to the types of sickliness that tend to develop in college students ...until Ryan reveals he somehow contacted syphilis, which gets a reaction of horror and confusion.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: Julia as a law teacher in "Day One Of Law School" says that one of the consequences of the related jobs is that everyone will hate you.
• Evil Teacher: The professor in "When Your Teacher Is The Bully" goes from mere sadism to true fuckedness from his acts not just including typical bullying tactics, but also poisoning Hyde. Twice.
• Felony Misdemeanor: "Teacher Hinting There'll Be A Fire Drill" suggests that revealing a fire drill that was planned to be secret will result in the firing and/or death of the teacher and their family.
• Fiendish Fraternity: The 1980s-era of the fraternity in "When An Alumni Visits The Frat" evidently engaged in random acts of animal abuse and hazed pledges with confinement, waterboarding, and something involving a hammer.
• Film Noir: Parodied with the "Gossip Detectives", in which Grace and Julia treat mundane gossip like a case in a noir film, complete with outfits, accents, and a constantly ringing landline.
• Fingore: The dad in "Dad Advice" decides to stop trying to give rousing speeches and just go to the hospital after the third round of bullying leaves his son with a broken finger.
• Fire Alarm Distraction: "How To Hide A Boner" suggests that pulling a fire alarm can be a good distraction from an unruly penis.
• Flash Step: "Heads Up 7 Up" shows that Grace can evidently move quickly and silently enough to appear behind someone within the space of the camera angle changing.
• Food Fight: The video of the same name as the trope shows how unfortunate it is to be the only person who actually wants to eat when a food fight starts.
• Force Feeding: The overly humble babysitter in "Babysitting When You're Too Scared To Talk About Payment" ends up having cash shoved right into her mouth by the parents.
• Foreign Exchange Student: Parodied in one video that focuses on the treatment of a student from the far off land of... Florida.
• Foreshadowing: Used for laughs in "The Worst Parent At Career Day", in which Mr. Bergland's gorilla suit rampage is randomly cut to in short bursts before it actually happens.
• Forgotten Birthday: The poor birthday boy in "A Birthday With No Happy Birthday" ends up finding out that all of the students and staff either don't care or have entirely forgotten about his celebration.
• Four-Point Scale: The way that the general "scale" of grades changes between high school and college is displayed in "Getting a 50% In HS vs College". In the former, it's cause for despair. In the latter, it's cause for celebration.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: The second "POV: You Find A Rubber Band Video" ends with Tommy shooting a band (which through both videos have been treated as guns) at the cameraperson.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • Pausing in the fake ID video shows that the cards used have other gags that aren't directly mentioned in the short, such as Julia's eye color being listed as "they actually change based on what I'm wearing haha" and some cards having an organ receiver section.
  • The actual chart in "Realistic Mood Ring" is mostly normal... except for the blue-green color being labeled "aggressively horny".
  • In 75th Highschool Reunion", entries for "Least Racist" and "Most Promiscuous" can be seen along with the "Best Smile" in the yearbook.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Hyde in "Team Manager" is clearly disliked by the rest of the basketball theme for contributing pretty much nothing of value, but keeps the position anyways.
• Friends with Benefits: Subverted in their video on the topic, in which Grace evidently thinks that the phrase "Friends with benefits" refers to things such as using each other's insurance.
• Freudian Slip: Julia responding a naked Eli in "Transfer Student" ends up saying her class is "Cockulus".
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Grace as "The Girl You Can't Take Anywhere" invades Julia's funeral to puppeteer her dead uncle, much to everyone else's horror.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In the background of the video on school scoliosis tests, Julia-as-school-nurse can be seen visibly hyping herself up to do the test during most of the short.
  • The wanted criminal "friend" in "Post Grad Friends From The Same College" can be seen stealing all of the party equipment in the background of the video.
• Gainax Ending: "Parents Getting Into College Vs Now" ends with Hyde spilling a bunch of nuts out of what looked to be a coffee mug, after being on topic for most of the video.
• The Gambling Addict: One video shows what happens when a teacher with a gambling problem starts bringing it into class by betting on the whether students will pass their test. By the end he's lost his house, jacket, and the sanctity of his balls.
• Garbage Hideout: Luke at the end of "Locker Room Lost And Found" ends up hiding in the lost clothes bin while running from Julia.
• Getting the Boot: The coach in "Bus Ride Home After The Team Loses" throws anyone who makes even the slightest peep out the bus' back entrance. Including himself.
• Gilligan Cut:
  • In "What The Teacher Said Would Be On The Test Vs What Actually Is On The Test", Ryan saying that the students can skip over reviewing parabolas in contrasted with an instant cut to a student saying that the test has a whole page of parabolas.
  • "What People Really Do On Their Laptops In Class" starts with Ryan saying that laptop use is fine as long as it is only for notes. Cue footage of computer screens being used for about anything but taking notes.
  • "Drunk Doordashing" starts with the group deciding to make a mutual oath to stop doing said activity. Cue a sequence of increasingly inane purchases.
  • Luke's dramatic speech about music in "How It Felt To Leave Early For A Music Lesson" is undercut by a clip of Aidan playing "Hot Cross Buns" in a very undramatic way.
• Going Commando: The inciting incident of "Cheerleader Bush" was "Natalia" (Grace) forgetting to wear anything under her skirt during a cheer routine, resulting in the student body seeing her student body.
• Gone Horribly Right: "When You Stand Up To The Bully" has Hyde listening to his father's advice and finally punching his bully. The statement of "He'll never mess with you again." becomes true... as the punch ended up killing Ryan.
• Gossipy Hens: "The Freshman That Goes To Prom With A Senior" features two girls gossiping about the pair... played by Hyde and Luke, amusingly enough.
• Glass-Shattering Sound: The first assignment of AP Choir is to break a wine glass through sheer pitch control.
• The Grim Reaper: One video shows a variant that reaps not souls, but paychecks: the Student Loan Reaper.
• Groin Attack:
  • At the end of "Gambling Addict Teacher", the titular character says he'll staple his nuts to the desk if a student knows the square root of a number. He loses the bet.
  • "Every Vice Principal" has Luke tasing Tommy in the crotch to find out the name of someone who cheated on a test.
• Hammerspace: Implied in "Girl Who Always Does Her Makeup In Class", where a student somehow manages to bring in an entire salon setup without any evidence of it existing prior.
• Heavy Sleeper: Ryan in "When Your Mom Wakes You Up For School" sleeps through multiple attempts to get him awake, with only physical jostling and a claim that his father was killed doing the trick.
• Here We Go Again!: "When The Teacher Felt Like The Class Was Low Energy" ends with the class being forced to do a bunch of exercises again after Grace gets an answer wrong.
• High-Altitude Interrogation: A reoccurring gag in one of the "High School Mob Boss" videos is people getting dragged to the roof's edge to be threatened. At the end, a teacher does it to Hyde over not having a hall pass.
• High-Class Glass: The magical etiquette guide in "Email Etiquette" wears a stereotypical "gentleman" outfit complete with monocle.
• Historical Domain Character: "Davy Crockett's Hat" has Davy Crockett and Johnny Appleseed as students in class.
• Hopeless with Tech: Julia in "Teen Pregnancy But They Adopted" is evidently so bad with computers that she somehow managed to adopt a child when trying to adopt a dog.
• Horrible Housing: Ryan's dormitory in "Getting The Bad Dorm" only has hallways to sleep in, the bathroom is an outhouse, renovation is done only at night when you're trying to sleep, and the cafeteria lunch is bugs at best and poison at the worst.
• Horror Comedy: Some of the shorts use horror staples for comedy, such as "Grinding At Prom" having a Jaws-style chase sequence... where the chaser is Grace set on grinding the Prom King.
• Human Shield: "The Kid Who Sweats Too Much In Gym" shows the titular character trying to use Grace as a shield while playing dodgeball, not that it works too well given that no planning was done beforehand.
• Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: One of the dubious deals mentioned in "Those Random Deal Nights In Bars" is Manhunt Monday, in which you get a discount if the staff aren't able to hunt you down and kill you within a day.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • The main humor "The Couple That PDAs In School" is the titular couple telling others to stop looking at them while also kissing and cuddling in increasingly attention-grabbing places.
  • Hyde in "Teacher That Curses" is excessively fine with using strong language himself, but freaks out the moment a student says "what the hell".
  • Davy Crockett in "Davy Crockett's Hat" thinks Johnny Appleseed is weird despite himself having a freshly killed racoon on his head.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: The words of a 25 years old car that had CarPlay installed: "Kill me, please! I want to die! No car should live to twenty."
• I Have This Friend: Julia's last phrase in "Dog Intervention", after saying she has a "surprise" in another room is "Hypothetically, if there was a dead dog in the kitchen who should I call?"
• Immediate Self-Contradiction:
  • Julia as the Guy's Girl says that other girls gossip too much, and then right after says that another girl is known for being a slut.
  • In "Sorority Recruitment", Julia says that they don't recruit based on appearance anymore... instead it depends on whether you're pretty.
• Implausible Deniability:
  • Ryan as the Professor You Can't Reach, sitting at a desk in his office: "Sorry, I'm out of office for the entire week."
  • Luke in "Bros Before Hoes" says he's helping Ryan even as he's walking away from his house to meet up with a girl.
• I Need to Go Iron My Dog: All the customers in "When The Restaurant Is Too Expensive" just so happen to get an AMBER alert they're invested in the moment they see the prices on the menu.
• I Never: "Never Have I Ever" shows said game and other similar ones being derailed by Luke being excessively irritated about someone eating his peanut butter.
• Inexplicably Awesome: No explanation is given to how exactly the Librarian is able to teleport and know stuff about students she shouldn't, other than her own quote of "It's a library. I know everything."
• Inheritance Murder: According to "Financial Aid Meeting", actively considering murdering a relative for their inheritance is around the level of money-desperate you have to be to even be considered for financial.
• Inner Monologue: Most of "When You Can't Think of a Fun Fact" is dedicated to Hyde's increasingly frustrated inner dialogue as he has trouble coming up with an interesting fact during student introductions.
• Innocent Innuendo:
  • The main joke of "Recruiting For The Bowling Team" is that Grace and Paige's attempts to recruit someone for the bowling team are phrased in a way that sounds a lot like someone recruiting for pornographic activities.
  • The start of "Teacher Fly Down" has him teaching an aviation-related lesson in which the words "no-fly zone" and "bulges" do not synergize well at all with his pants problem.
  • One video shows Luke as a teacher who doesn't realize why using the phrase "The Big D" to refer to detention sounds very uncomfortable.
  • The main reason why Luke in "Tag" is weird is his very uncomfortable usage of the word "touch" in regards to the game.
  • The titular character in "Having A Hot Sister" is already very attractive to Hyde's friends... and it's made even worse by her innocently holding two large cantaloupes near her chest.
• Instant Web Hit: In "Installing Games On Graphics Calcs", the teacher is able to get 20,000 views on a calculator-made social media post within seconds of submission.
• Insufferable Genius: While the IT Kids know how to fix computers well, they also constantly talk down Ryan while doing so, to the point of deciding he doesn't deserve his laptop in the end.
• Intentionally Awkward Title: "Every Disney Ad" has some fictional show names that would likely not fly on the real Disney Channel, such as "Ribbed For Your Pleasure", "Are You Hotter Than A Fifth Grader", and "Camp Rockin' The Bed".
• I See Them, Too: "Your Conscience During A Test" ends with Julia revealing that she can see Ryan's anthropomorphic conscience... assuming is actually is a conscience and not a random man.
• Irony:
  • One video has Grace being talked over by various men in class... specifically, in Women and Gender Studies.
  • Another has Tommy being unable to think of anything he wants for Christmas despite having been shown to have wanted a lot of things both useful and ridiculous over the year.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Vice Principal Burke believes the best way to find out who cheated on a test in to tape a random student to the wall and taser their crotch until they give up the goods.
• Jammed Seatbelts: Ryan in "Seatbelts On The Bus" learns the meaning of tempting fate when putting on seatbelts gets him trapped in a burning bus. Thankfully, he manages to MacGyver his way out with a marker.
• "Jaws" First-Person Perspective: "Grinding At Prom" features clips from the perspective of a truly terrifying predator: Grace's ass.
• Jerk Jock: Parodied in "The #1 E-Sports Team", where its the competitive gaming team who have taken on the role of "popular but dickish competitive group at school" instead of anyone doing physical sports.
• Just Here for the Free Snacks: In "Every Involvement Fair Interaction", Hyde admits he's only interested in the booth he's at because it has candies available.
• Kidnapping Bird of Prey: Julia gets snatched by a bald eagle at the end of "The Reality Of Chilling On Roofs".
• Laborious Laziness:
  • In "Kid With Bulky Backpack", the "convenience" of not having to change books every day is outweighed by making the backpack so heavy that it's a fight just to get to class.
  • Hyde's attempt to have less days of work in "Kid Who Doesn't Have Class Fridays" ends up with him having to go to class for 20 hours straight, which is fare more hellish than just having several days of a couple class hours.
• Laugh Track: The college elective for being a guest star on a sitcom greets the student with a laugh track.
• Less Disturbing in Context: Invoked in one video, where a guidance counselor is increasingly horrified by two student's issues until its revealed that the "seven-year old" they are talking about is a Snapchat streak and not a child.
• Literal-Minded: "Garage Sale Gone Wrong" shows two people who seem to think that the phrase "garage sale" means that the garage itself is purchasable.
• Living Clothing: The shawl in "Drama Teacher And Her Shawl" is not just able to be used like a prehensile limb, but is also capable of being the lead role in a production.
• The Load: Josh in "Your Roommate's Boyfriend" provides absolutely no assistance despite almost always staying at Grace and Julia's apartment.
• Lost in Character: Pete in "Method Actors Getting Stuck In Character" tends to go "full method", staying in character even during a break. The only way to get him to leave set is to have someone act in-character to tell him to eat.
• Love Dodecahedron:
  • The titular students of "The Popular Friend Group In High School" are in a mess of dates, breakups, and hookups. If one person gets the flu, they all get sick. The ending of the video also suggests this applies to theater kids, softball teams, and the video's cast.
  • In "Dating At A Small School" the limited options result in nearly every student having dated every other student at some point.
• Madness Mantra: One of the first signs of "Manifestation Delulu" being... off is her manifestation activities involving a lot of repeated speech and writing.
• The Mafia: A set of videos has Eli playing a stereotypical mafia don in the setting of a high school.
• Magic Librarian: According to this channel, being a librarian gives you access to near-prophetic knowledge and the ability to spontaneously appear and disappear.
• Male Restroom Etiquette:
  • Someone using the urinal next to you is uncomfortable enough without the constant harmonica playing.
  • The final gag of "House Hunters: School Bathroom" is suggesting the idea of a teacher using a urinal between two students and loudly talking about class.
  • "Peeing Next To Your Teacher" manages to make the scene in the title even more uncomfortable by cutting to the teacher laying right under Ryan to watch him pee.
  • The start of "Kid Who Just Got A Watch" has Luke telling his urinal neighbor about the fact that he can time his streams now.
• Masochist's Meal: "Eating Bug Candy To Impress People" has Grace buying a Hotlix candy with a scorpion inside to impress her peers. Unfortunately, they call her on to actually eat it, and she's suffers the whole way throught.
• Meaningless Meaningful Words: The student's main strategy to bluff in "When No One Did The Reading" is to say statements that sound like profound thoughts, but are so vague that they could apply to pretty much any literature.
• Medal of Dishonor: "POV: It's Time To Announce The Yearbook Superlatives" has some less than complimentary entries, such as "Ugliest Dad", "Biggest Piece Of Shit", and "Most Likely To Die Of Lung Cancer".
• Men Can't Keep House: A large pile of trash can be seen in the boys' house in "Girl Vs. Guy Sleepovers.
• Mental World: The stress of public reading is depicted in "When You're Called On To Read Out Loud" as a zoom into Nick's brain showing three people treating it as a military-esque emergency.
• Microwave the Dog: The only reason why Georgie is running to keep Grace from winning in "Running For Class President" is due to an incident where the latter baked her hamster, despite only doing so out of childish naivety.
• Minor with Fake I.D.: "Bad Fake IDs" focuses on some students trying to use fake IDs where refusing to scan is the least of their problems.
• Mondegreen Gag:
  • One video focuses on several staff members mishearing "prom chaperone" as "prom Chappell Roan" and dressing the part.
  • The second gag of Hyde using Siri in "Theater Budget Cuts" has him asking for pictures of "handcocks" after hearing the word Hancock. The other student quickly shuts down that query.
• Motor Mouth: The substitute in "POV: The Teacher Is Out But The Sub Is Worse" reads very quickly. As in, a whole textbook page is spoken in seconds.
• Mundane Made Awesome: "The All Knowing DD" has asking your designated driver about what happened the night you were drunk depicted as being similar to asking a grand mage questions about occult knowledge.
• Museum of Boredom: In "Class Trip Gets Changed At The Last Minute", a trip to see Wicked gets changed to going to a salt museum due to an incident involving students playing the "penis game" during a prior event. The class is so disappointed that they'd rather do a math packet.
• Naked People Are Funny:
  • Grace in "Waking Up In Your Boyfriend's Shirt" woke up naked and put on a shirt... and only a shirt. She doesn't get why everyone else is concerned.
  • Eli's cultural quirk in "Transfer Student" turns out to be that he doesn't wear clothes. Cue gags relating to the other students trying to cope with his nakedness.
• Neat Freak: Grace in "Moms At Christmas" is so determined to keep the room tidy that she's taking away the giftwrap before the kids even have the chance to do it themselves.
• Nervous Wreck:
  • Aidan "Getting FOMO For Anything In College" worries about what he may miss at various events... regardless of whether its a party, or someone else's therapy session.
  • Paige in "Shy Girl Cures Cancer" is very anxious about social situations despite the fact that what she's accomplished would far override and awkwardness.
  • Luke in "Scared Ghost Tour Guide" is... well, a very easily scared guide for a haunted house. He only has the job because he's in debt to the owner.
• Newhart Phonecall: A variant in "Unpaid Intern For Bowser"; While both people are physically present, the fact that Bowser's speech is only in the form of inhuman noises ends up having the same effect.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Julia in "Teenagers Running Small Business's Social Media" thinks that car crash compilations and people being given food they're allergic to are perfectly normal themes for advertising.
• Non-Indicative Name: In "Party Locations" the fun names of "Dungeon", "Murder Park", and "Dragon's Den" are given to the exciting locations of... parking lots.
• Nothing Is Funnier:
  • Whatever point the titular student was about to make about Hitler in "The Devil's Advocate In Politics Class" is cut off at the mention of his name, giving the viewer the joy of imagining whatever bad take was about to ensue.
  • A worker writes something offensive on a card in "Having To Sign Birthday Cards In The Office" that gets a reaction of confusion and horror from someone else. Whatever it was is left for the viewer to ponder.
• Not on the List: "Every College Waitlist" depicts getting into class as a situation with a stereotypical nightclub bouncer and entrance. Being an athlete or hot gets you in quicker even if you're not on the list.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Ryan in "When The Professor Turns His Back On The Class" seems like a straight-laced professor trying to catch misbehaving students... until he sees them with a beer bong, and promptly joins the fun.
  • The girl in "Where Teenagers Hang Out" seems like the only one aware of how unsafe everyone's hangout suggestions are... until she decides her place fit the definition of a tumultuous household where the father seems always on the edge of Pater Familicide.
• Not That There's Anything Wrong with That: In "Architecture Project", Grace spends most of the video denying that she'd be close enough to the 300 pounds needed to test the titular project, while also denying that there would be any problems if she was.
• Not the Intended Use: Aidan in "Your Business Major Friend" evidently uses a spreadsheet program for direct messaging.
• N-Word Privileges: Implied by the aggro Spotify algorithm in "When Spotify Gets Too Personal", where the title for a hip-hop playlist ends with "c'mon, no one's listening. it's ok if u just say it this one time..." Judging from the fact that the user's phone starts recording when the playlist is opened, Spotify is looking for blackmail material.
• Office Golf: Implied in "Day One Of Business School" where Julia says to be prepared for lots of golfing to a presumed audience of business students.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: The general madness of "The Weird Kid's Locker" starts of with Tommy as a "goo boy", covered in some sort of mysterious dark brown goop.
• Ominous Visual Glitch: Luke's very bizarre and extreme idea of what happens when you call a parent by their first name in "Calling Friends Mom By Their First Name Expectation Vs Reality" has a lot of strange filters and distortions to underscore the general intensity and insanity of the bit.
• Only in Florida: "New Kid From Florida" has the state being treated as if it was some sort of foreign land. One of the questions that gets asked to the new kid is if he has seen the Florida Man, the "guy in Florida who commits all the crimes".
• Our Goblins Are Different: A student in "What I Auditioned For Vs What I Got" somehow manages to get a role as a goblin despite them not existing in the source musical. This seems to consist of painting her face green and harassing the other cast members.
• Overreacting Airport Security: Parodied in "TSA For The Peanut-Free Lunch Table", which has a whole airport security setup complete with extremely cautious guards to find potential allergens.
• Painting the Medium: "Every High School Dream" uses a hazy bloom filter and uncomfortably closed in shots to emulate the weird feeling of dreams.
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: Grace and Paige in "Frenemies" spend most their time trying to insult each other as politely as possible, one example being "complimenting" a sweater by comparing it to a pet's.
• Pedophile Priest: Hyde says that the "Catholic Church" playlist in "When Spotify Gets Too Personal" has a lot of boy bands on it.
• People Fall Off Chairs: Julia and Aidan's attempts to recline in "Leaning Back In Your Chair" don't go well at all. Meanwhile, Ryan being on the floor is just because he really leans back.
• Perp Sweating:
  • Ryan as the "Intense Door Guy" somehow manages to turn the setting into an interrogation room complete with shining lamp while questioning Hyde on his ID card.
  • A similar situation happens to Jericho in "When Your Teacher Asks To Talk In The Highway", in which hitting the teacher with a paper airplane gets the police interrogation treatment complete with light.
• Persona Non Grata:
  • Grace in "AP Class Before Vs After The Test" is banned from Universal Studios due to placing a live jellyfish on someone's face.
  • Hyde in "Guy That's A Bar 'Regular'" has the word "BANNED" over his photo (that he put up without permission) at a local bar. He can only get in by bribing the guard at the back.
• Plagiarism in Fiction: "Plagiarizing In High School" parodies the intense focus on not copying in schools by having a teacher treating it as worse than student fights, admissions of drug use, and sex toys being brought to campus.
• Principles Zealot: Paige in "The Silent Treatment" is so determined to stay silent in front of her boyfriend that she refuses high grades, lottery money, and saving someone's life over a spat on whether to watch Oppenheimer or Barbie (2023).
• Prisoner's Dilemma: Ryan as a professor tries to deal with flaky students by introducing a similar concept of the Hopkins Attendance Anomaly, where if only one person comes to class, only they pass. Cue students rapidly standing up and sitting down while trying to work out the game theory.
• Political Overcorrectness: "Frat Party Themes 2014 Vs 2024" shows the latter years as having often-awkward shifts to make their themes less offensive, such as "Cowboys and native americans and whores". The ultimate goal is to still get pussy though.
• The Promposal: "The Promposal" naturally focuses on asking someone out for prom. While Jericho is a bit awkward and his writing is a bit too long for a proposal, it does work.
• Punched Across the Room: A school security guard gets punched into a hallway wall hard enough to dent it by virtue of Tommy putting all his points into Strength in "Character Customization".
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Invoked in "Asking For Sleepover In Front Of Friend", where Hyde uses his friend showing adorable expressions and playing with plushies to make it more likely for his mom to say yes. It works, but the mom is also fully aware of what he's pulling.
• Raging Stiffie:
  • The others in "Intervention For Guy Who Loves Intervention" realize to their horror that Ryan's love for them may be very physical when he starts getting hard midway through.
  • One video is presented as a vintage instructional tape to hide a boner, with the methods shown being increasingly more obvious than the stiffie itself.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": A bunch of "no"s is the reaction of the rest of the students in "Guy Who Corrects People" when Tommy is about to use the word "faggots" in regards to British cigarettes.
• Red-Flag Recreation Material: Aside from being as stereotypically demonic as possible, Grace in "Your Boyfriend is the Devil" also enjoys watching gore videos for fun.
• Retraux: The video introducing the 2025 cast members is done in the style of a 90s sitcom intro.
• Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: In "Spoiled College Kid", Charles is not aware that the college he's at doesn't have maids or fancy food, and that college furniture isn't spotlessly clean.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: The men in "Salem Witch Trials" may be making their accusations based on the worst and most offensive aspects of the medieval ages, but for once it turns out they actually were right when their target teleports away.
• Right on Queue: "Waiting In A Bar Line" focuses on Hyde, Ryan, and Grace's growing frustration while waiting in a very long queue. By the end, Hyde is sitting down and Ryan in piggybacking on Grace.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The "Class Presidential Debate" video is clearly inspired by debates from the 2024 presidential candidates, with several lines being pretty much near-copies of some of the more infamous statements.
• Rousing Speech: Parodied in "Coach That Takes The Speeches Too Seriously", where Grace as coach seems more interesting in giving encouraging speeches than anything that could count as actual advice.
• Rubik's Cube: International Genius Symbol: The techies in "Asking The IT Kids For Help" are casually playing with Rubik's Cubes as they condescendingly help Ryan with his computer.
• Rule of Three: One of the videos on random college electives has a student see their dad three times, each with a different meaning: nepotism, Freudism, and how to fuck up someone's life entirely.
• Running Gag:
  • The videos have a habit of randomly bringing up presidential figures or similar matters to escalate a skit.
  • The "Random College Electives" tend to have at least one gag per episode og a class dedicated to assassinating a completely random celebrity.
• Sadist Teacher: Trevor in "When A Class Has Two Different Teachers", makes students have to earn their attendance, throws a bunch of papers down just to make Grace pick them up, makes the students have to physically find the test materials for things they haven't even went over yet, and makes the students torture themselves for homework.
• Scare Chord:
  • "Girl Who Loves Twinning" has multiple moments punctuated by scary chords as a part of it aping the horror genre.
  • The titular character's appearances in "Student Loan Reaper" is always punctuated with a spooky booming noise.
• Scooby Stack: "Teachers Telling You The Class Is Behind" has Aiden, Tommy, Hyde, and Julia doing the hallway stack to spy on the class ahead of them. Later, Julia and Hyde somehow manage to do it from within a locker.
• Screen Name: Used for laughs in "Elon Bought AOL", where his first action is to require workers to be referred to by their (often very embarrassing) 90's usernames.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Julia in "College Essays" doesn't have to worry about what her essay is about as her parents donate plenty to the college she's applying to.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Eli in the "high school mob boss" videos mainly gets away with his various misdeeds through bribing the staff with money and expensive gifts.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!:
  • In "Guy's Bedsheets", Grace decides to simply excuse herself after finding out that the person she's gaming with doesn't even have a pair of spare sheets to replace the very dirty ones he's using.
  • The (white, South African that the council evidently thought was most qualified for the job) professor in "African American Studies At A Liberal Arts School" decides to immediately cancel class when someone brings up Apartheid.
  • The viewpoint character in "Couple That Meets On Letterboxd" tries to leave the moment they mention doing a podcast together.
• Second Place Is for Winners: In "Lunch With The Principal", the prize for having the second highest grades is $3000. Ryan considers this to be a lot better than the first place prize, which is to have lunch with the principal that he shares nothing in common with.
• The Secret of Long Pork Pies: When the students start discussing what exactly is wrong with the overly-friendly girl in "The Weird Girl In Your Class", the first conclusion that comes out is that the donuts she brought were made of people.
• Sensory Abuse: "The Last Minute Of Every Class" slowly has Ryan's teaching drowned out by the loud and bass-boosted sounds of everyone packing up, to the point that it mostly sounds like static at the end.
• Serious Business:
  • "Hydroflask Drill" has the sound of someone dropping a metal bottle treated as an event serious (and loud) enough to warrant having school drills about.
  • In the world of "Teachers After The School Day Ends", being seen out in public as a teacher is a crime worthy of police tackling.
  • "Olympics of Kids Who Walk The Mile In PE" has kids moseying their way through the mile run represented as a high-level sports event.
  • "Analyzing Situationships 101" has mundane text messages being analyzed like classical books in English class.
  • "Settling Roommate Expenses" has a quibble over who pays for what treated like a wrestling match complete with announcers.
  • "Dads When You Don't Play Well But It's Larping" suggests a universe where live-action roleplaying is considered a serious sport.
• Sex at Work: The narrator in "The Teachers Who Hooked Up With Each Other" says that the "next episode" will involve two teachers having sex in the classroom. It also clarifies that the students are going to be there to watch the whole thing.
• Sexy Whatever Outfit: The girl's costumes in "When You Don't Have A Halloween Costume" end up being a sexy quarterback, drug dealer, and paper boy by virtue of being made from whatever clothes they could find for cheap. None of the guys are impressed.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product:
  • "Theater Budget Cuts" has the drama department having to resort to cheap knockoffs of more popular productions, with examples given for Cats, Hamilton, and Mamma Mia!.
  • One part of the girls getting shafted in "Men's Vs Women's Sports" is being provided "tampons" that are actually just pencils wrapped in toilet paper.
• Shoddy Shindig: The titular event in "1 Year High School Reunion" consists of a couple former students standing around with Solo cups and talking about what little has happened in their lives.
• Shout-Out:
  • Harry Potter references:
    • Julia claims she in Gryffindor during "Professional Frats".
    • One video shows the results of Professor Snape acting as a substitute in a regular class.
    • One of the guy's incredulous responses to Grace explaining her actions in "Frat Guy Makes Love" is "You dementored her?"
  • One of the hallway visitors in "Teachers in Heels" is a Fremen, as represented by Julia in beige robes.
  • The YouTube title for "Teachers in Heels" is "you better work".
  • Grace's outfit in "Exchange Student That Gets Away With Everything" is pretty much a direct cosplay of Oliver Twist.
  • The title of the video on students competing to be picked to transport things is "America's Next Top Student Messenger".
  • One video focuses on showing the results of Ms. Frizzle gaining tenure, and changing for the worse as a result of the high job security.
  • One of the inane exercises in "Gym Warm-Ups" is recreating The Voice (Talent Show).
  • Several videos depict various scenarios as being similar to presenting a product to the Sharks.
  • The The Exorcist theme plays over Ryan getting possessed in "Look But Don't Make It Obvious".
  • One of the dubious excuses in "Excuses For Missing Class" is the premise of Breaking Bad.
  • "When You Don't Have A Halloween Costume" uses time cards from SpongeBob SquarePants.
  • The description for "Couple That Meets On Venmo" is "they found love in a hopeless place".
  • The dialogue that starts "Character Customization" is very reminiscent of Fallout: New Vegas.
  • In "Class On How To Meet An Essay Word Count", Grace's response to a student mentioning Alexander Hamilton is to start singing lyrics from [[Theatre/Hamilton the relevant musical]].
  • One video shows Tommy taking an internship for the baddest of bosses... Bowser. Bowser (and Kamek) are represented using a style similar to Joel Haver.
  • The titular action in "When Your Prof Has To Use The Pop Star Mic" turns class into a performance of Toxic.
  • The caption of "Southern Dads When Their Quarterback Son Gets Hurt" is "What episode of Friday Night Lights is this?"
  • One video, as the caption describes, depicts "If Tom DeLonge from blink-182 taught biology".
  • Ryan's second "alarm" (actually a neighbor coming to wake him up) in "Your Roomate's Alarm" sings [[Music/Rednex Cotton Eye Joe]] as a part of her methods for getting him up.
  • "If Chef Gordon Ramsey Taught Algebra" depicts math class with the ambiance of a Hell's Kitchen episode.
  • There's several videos show school events with the comedy style of Curb Your Enthusiasm, complete with the iconic music.
  • The zoo in "When You Don't Get A Permission Slip Signed" is evidently the one where four certain iconic penguins live.
  • One of the requests in "Roommate Requests" is to hack the Death Star.
  • The last method shown in "Hiding Glances At Clock From Teacher" is Luke using a neuralyzer on the teach.
  • The alumni in "College Name Game" end up materializing a Guess Who? board to find names that the others would recognize.
  • One video is a update of the spanish rap scene in Community.
  • Alfred's description of his experiences during World War II in "75th High School Reunion" is based on the Fatal Family Photo scene in All Quiet on the Western Front.
  • "Hall Monitor" has location labels that use a typeface very similar to the one in the logo of COPS (1989).
• Showdown at High Noon: Parodied in one video where Hyde and Grace glower at each other with increasing amounts of stereotypical western fare... over who's going to do the dishes.
• The Show Must Go Wrong: Even discounting the shenanigans happening behind the curtain, "Backstage During The Musical" doesn't seem to be going to well: Julia's botches a high note and accidentally walks on stage trying to get to the bathroom, and Grace is more focused on doing unnecessary quick changes than knowing which musical she's singing for.
• Simple Country Lawyer: Implied in "Mock Trial: First Meeting" where both Grace and Luke decide to do southern accents for their characters in a stage trial.
• Sinister Sorority Sisters: Most of the videos on Sororities don't depict them well.
  • "Sorority Recruitment" has a sorority chant where the students involved claim that they're totally not a cult, and Grace trying to call for help mid-chant.
  • "If Sororities Were Honest" focuses on the worst elements of sororities as effectively a whole club of Alpha Bitches you have to pay to join. Your soul is also a part of the fee.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • The students in "Calling 911" are more focused on Luke phrasing the number as "nine-eleven" than on the fact that someone just passed out in front of them.
  • The parents in "Parents Who Would Rather You Do It Under Their Roof" don't mind actions ranging from drinking to arson, but go berserk the moment their guests do it even as far outside as the porch. Likely because they're hiding from something...
  • The teacher in "First Kid To Not Believe In Santa" is more focused on telling off Tommy for spreading this knowledge to the other kids, then the fact that he is smoking a cigarette at the same moment.
  • The main joke of "NORAD Santa Tracker" is Ryan trying to handle the Santa bit while paying little mind to the fact that there seems to be some full-scale attack of the nation happening.
  • The joke of "Permanent Record" is prospective employees being judged based on minor incidents in school instead of their current accomplishments or lack thereof.
• Slasher Smile: When the students show their true colors in "When Students Are Kind To The Substitute", some focus is put on Hyde doing an uncomfortably wide grin.
• Slipping a Mickey: "Picking Up Friend For School That Takes Forever" has Tommy somehow ending up in a bar in Tunisia and having his drink tampered with.
• Soapbox Sadie: Implied for Ryan's fictional kid in "Parents' Made Up Punishments", as his punishments include burning clothes to contribute to climate change or donating them specifically to rich kids who don't need more clothes.
• Soap Opera: Parodied in "The Teachers Who Hooked Up With Each Other", in which the teacher's romantic endeavors force reality to be in the soap opera genre, complete with dramatic filter and a voiceover for fake Previously on… and On the Next segments.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Affion in "When You're Always The New Kid" acts ornery to avoid making any friends that he's going to end up being split from whenever his family moves again.
• Speaks in Binary: One of the classes in the "Random College Electives" series is Binary 10100010.
• Spiders Are Scary: Exaggerated for laughs in "Kid Who Wants To Save Bugs", in which a spider in class causes a response of screaming, barking, aggression, and standing on chairs from all but one student.
• Spit Take: One of the gags of "Teachers in Heels" is students doing large spit takes in response to Ryan's successful predictions, to the point where Hyde pulls out an umbrella.
• Staging an Intervention:
  • One video has an intervention staged for Ryan due to him evidently being too trigger-happy on staging interventions for others.
  • "Intervention for your friend who tags you in everything" is about an intervention for someone who thinks that nearly any situation can be applied to her friends, no matter how random or insulting.
• The Stakeout: The focus of the second Gossip Detectives video is Grace and Julia doing a stakeout to find out why Luke is eating without them.
• Stalker Without a Crush: "School Photographer" focuses on a student getting followed through their class, in the bathroom, and in their car because they're the only black person the photographer can find for diverse-looking campus photos.
• Stepford Smiler:
  • The titular characters in "Perfect Couple Behind Closed Doors" may have the smiles of true love, but they say nothing but bile to each other.
  • The titular students of "Orientation Leaders During Move-In" seem impossibly giddy, but once their out of view the first words out of Julia's mouth are "I want to fucking die!" combined with plenty of heaving from having to give off so much energy.
  • Hyde in "Adult Who Tells You You're So Lucky To Be In College" acts like he's having a casual, happy conversation while saying he hates his life so much that he wouldn't mind his wife or kids killing him.
  • The main character of "Manifestation Delulu" first just seems mostly pathetic due to her "manifestations" applying in the worst ways possible... until she decides to take personal initiative on never seeing her boss again. She's still chipper even as she's being arrested.
• Sticky Fingers: Ryan in "Your Friend Who Goes Shopping At The Dining Hall" gets all his supplies from pilfering the cafeteria... including furniture and staff.
• The Stoner: "Every High School Movie But The Stoners Are...Different" shows what happens when the typical stoner high school clique is crossed with the medieval type of stoning.
• Suddenly Shouting:
  • Whatever exactly is wrong with Luke in the "Teacher Brings Her Kid To School" videos, it causes him to occasionally burst out into loud screaming and panicking.
  • Grace's third song in "The Youth Group Side Hug" quickly goes from calm singing to loud yelling.
• Sunglasses at Night: One part of the Librarian's inexplicable coolness is that she's always wearing sunglasses despite not really needing them when inside a building.
• Supernatural Phone: Hyde's jailbreaking attempts in "Kid with Jailbroken iPhone/iPod" go so amazingly badly that they veer into the anomalous, with shenanigans such as watching nonexistent movies, having a video of a (still alive) student dying, and being able to use telekinesis.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: "Realistic Face Wash Commercials" shows the problem of getting those nice slow-mo shots of people energetically washing their face; it gets water everywhere.
• Talking with Signs: "That One Girl On Vocal Rest" shows the disadvantages of being stuck using a whiteboard and marker for communication: it takes a long time, and can be taken and vandalized pretty easily.
• Technical Virgin:
  • Suggested at the end of "AP Study Hall", where Hyde asks "What did we do?" after Grace says she's a virgin.
  • At the end of "The Youth Group Side Hug", two students leave to do sensual things with the justification of "God doesn't see handjobs."
• Teeny Weenie: Suggested in "Day One Of Art School" where Julia says that the only rule related to the nude models is to not laugh at the size of a certain part that the scene cuts away from before she can say the name.
• There Should Be a Law: The Only Sane Man in "Shark Tank" says the entrepreneurs who brought an "invention" that amounts to a box for people to masturbate into should be arrested.
• Time Travel: Being used as the target for a calibration point in "Calibrating The Smart Board" somehow sends Grace into the future. Whatever's happening in that timeline evidently involves AOC becoming president and needing to be given "the third Bible" to avoid some sort of catastrophe.
• Toilet Humor:
  • The main emotion (for lack of a better term) shown in "Realistic Mood Ring" is "didn't wipe good". Grace doesn't want the ring back after seeing that result.
  • One of the things that results from Hyde going off the deep end in "Student With Senioritis" is casually shitting himself.
  • The janitor in "Teacher That Hates Summer School" is so desperate for something to clean that she's been clogging the toilets herself. Laxatives are involved.
  • Two of Julia's... intense ideas in "Picking A Bid Day Theme" involve large amounts of feces.
  • The first problem in the "reality" section of "Expectation Vs. Reality: Meeting Under The Bleachers" is Aidan and Tina getting interrupted by someone casually engaging in public urination.
• Too Important to Walk: As Ryan is describing how 1st grade decided that the fastest kid in school is "the most popular and essentially a god", footage is shown of said fast kid (Hyde) being carried on a lounge chair by other students through a hallway.
• Too Much Information:
  • "Theater Teacher Overshares" focuses on the results of when a teacher reveals too much about their personal life, with the students finding out that her husband is dead (possibly by her own hands), she worked as a stripper on Disney Cruise, and that she had relations with Donald Trump.
  • The other guys in "Frat Guy Makes Love" are very uncomfortable with Grace physically showing off what "he" did with his partner.
  • Aidan in "Walking Between Two Conversations" only manages to get attention by talking in great detail about his pooping habits.
  • The guy in "Talking During Movies" is awkward enough, but it gets even worse when he says things that imply he was sexually assaulted at some point.
• Training from Hell: All of the videos in the vein of "AP classes that don't exist" show extra-hard versions of regular activities, but AP Gym is by far the nastiest, where the assignments include running a 5k in 15 minutes, while also still having the brainpower to somehow write an essay about it afterwards.
• [Trope Name]: "Every American High Shorts Sketch" is a self-referential video in which everyone's speech is describing various aspects typical to the shorts on the channel.
• Trrrilling Rrrs: One video shows the difficulties of teaching students in Spanish class how to roll Rs. It ends with the entire school vibrating from all the trilling.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: One video shows Hyde as a average-looking fratboy with a stunning girlfriend. Ryan and Grace spend most of the runtime trying to figure out what exactly attracted her to him.
• Ultimate Job Security: Two videos depict tenure as allowing the teachers/professors with them to get away with anything.
  • "Professor With Tenure" shows it allowing Hyde to get away with staff truancy, cutting in line, and mugging people. Selling nukes to North Korea is still a step too far, though.
  • Ms. Frizzle is shown having went off the deep end with it, reveling in being able to come to school drunk and smoking a cigarette, and using the bus less for actual fun things and more for repeatedly going into one particular student's anus.
• Uncanny Valley: Used for laughs in "Typical Picture Day 'Packages", which ends with a picture of Hyde with eyes from a different photo pasted on that is as freaky looking as it is hilarious.
• Unnaturally Looping Location: A small gag in "Finding Your Classes" has Julia turning in a hallway only to find herself back at the start.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: No one interacting with the 153rd Year Senior seems to notice or care that she should logically be dead by all known biology.
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • "Girls Code Words" has some rather interesting terms being used instead of guy's names, from "Pineapple" to "2009 Housing Crisis".
  • In "The Reality Of Most Vision Boards", an image of the Eiffel Tower is supposed to be a metaphor for "new sex stuff". The link between the two is not explained.
• Urban Legends:
  • "When They Prepped You For Someone ☠️ In Class" focuses on two students attempting to invoke the "If someone dies during a test, everyone passes" legend by killing another student. Unfortunately for them, they did so before the test instead of during it.
  • Aidan in "Trying To Get Free Tuition" also believes in the legends about trauma offering benefits. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line he mistook it for inflicting trauma on others instead of himself.
• Visual Pun: The usual avatar for the American High Shorts channels is of the logo decorating a pair of shorts.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Grace and Paige in "Frenemies" may spend most of their time insulting each other, but they enjoy it enough that they still regularly hang out and will probably be bridesmaids for the other.
• Voodoo Doll: The weird kid in "The Weird Kid's Locker" has a doll in the form of one of the staff that reflects movements done to it.
• Wallbonking: Julia in "Girl Who Doesn't Know How To Do Anything" ends up repeatedly running into a door by virtue of not knowing how to open it.
• Weird Currency: "When You Don't Include Units" features a store run by Hyde that evidently requires elephants to pay.
• Welcome to Corneria: A reoccurring gag in the "Highschool as a video game" skits are characters saying their voice lines like an NPC, such as school police saying "You're not getting away that easy!" repeatedly while chasing Tommy in "Detention In Video Games".
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: When you're the school nurse, every ailment can be fixed with an ice pack. Except for bruises, those go to the emergency room.
• Who Will Bell the Cat?: Everyone in "Trying Not To Call The Uber" knows that they all need a ride, but no one wants to actually pay for it.
• Wild Teen Party: "Every Movie About A High Schooler Throwing A Party" focuses on all the typical plot points you'd expect; a parade of booze, drugs, and lewdness, and intense panic when the parents come back early.
• Wondrous Ladies Room: "What Boys Think The Girl's Bathroom Is Like" focuses on the expectation versus reality on women's rooms. The expectation is a glorious spa. The reality is that it's worse than the boys'.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: One video shows a drama teacher brought in as assistant coach to teach students on how to fake pain effectively for flopping.
• X Called; They Want Their Y Back: The trope mixing with flashback scenes in "Our Parent's High School Experience Vs Now" results in the wonderful phrase of "The 80s called, it's now!" from a school bully.
• You Keep Using That Word: Cooper in "When The Teacher Has A Favorite" tries to correct the teacher's use of "DTF" to mean "Down To Focus" to no avail.