‘Bob’s Burgers’: Best 30 Episodes, Ranked (2024)

(Season 9, Episode 20)

What’s every kid’s worst nightmare? The dreaded mandatory one-mile run. In order to evade participation, the rebellious Louise Belcher has a plan to get a free scoop of ice cream instead, and Gene is all for it because, as avid Bob’s Burgers fans know, he will do pretty much anything for food. Louise convinces Gene and friends Courtney Wheeler, Regular-Sized Rudy and Alex to drop their bikes off behind the school, take off to the ice cream shop and come back in time to catch up to the stragglers at the end of the pack. In this episode, we see Jimmy Jr.’s arm-flailing running and Tina’s signature awkward arms-by-her-sides trotting as she beats him in the run.

(Season 3, Episode 2)

Halloween costumes are always clever for the Belcher kids, with Louise in this episode dressed as Edward Scissorhands, Tina as a Mommy mummy and Gene as Queen Latifah. Store owners and neighbors in their small town only offer things like deli tickets, oyster crackers and seaweed candy (from school counselor Mr. Frond), so they decide to head out to King’s Head Island, where the residents are richer and are rumored to have full-size candy bars. Louise pulls a prank to get teenagers with pee-filled balloons off their backs. Oh, and Bob kills a guinea pig by accidentally sitting on it in a fat suit.

(Season 5, Episode 8)

Zeke’s class clown demeanor deserves some attention, and this episode highlights the student as he gets caught by Coach Blevins when he tries to steal the school’s mascot costume out of his office. For Tina, this is her chance to rise in hall monitor rankings from “hall marlin” to “hall manatee.” Up for a promotion, Tina has to get this right, and all she has to do is take Zeke to the principal’s office. When Zeke asks to go to the bathroom, he escapes through the vents. When they find him in the storage room hiding in stacked desks, Tina puts a Chinese finger trap on him, which, as most kids can relate to, is pretty hard to get off. A hilarious moment in the episode happens when Zeke is outside talking to Ms. Schnur (voiced by Sarah Silverman) while she smokes a cigarette, the 8th grader fixing for a smoke. Meanwhile, Linda creates a wall of napkin art in the restaurant, and Bob simply cannot draw. He consults Edith and Harold Cranwinkle at the art store for a drawing session, and Bob has to draw the elderly woman naked.

(Season 9, Episode 9)

Is there life in space? That’s the question that Tina and her science fair partner Susmita try to answer with their project. Henry, a know-it-all student mistaken for a teacher who has a note from a doctor that he can’t participate in group projects, wants to sabotage their mission because he’s afraid that if they make contact, the world would be in danger. At the end of the episode, we learn that there are two sides to the argument: If we don’t reach out, we won’t know if there are forces out there to help us — and if we do, we may risk them attacking us.

(Season 6, Episode 4)

It’s Thanksgiving at the Belcher residence and Aunt Gayle, Linda’s reclusive and eccentric sister, needs Bob to pick her up because she sprained her ankle and is also heartbroken over Mr. Frond leaving her. When he arrives, he learns that Gayle’s hypoglycemic cat must come with them, and has to get him down by singing jazz and patting his shoulders. When his car gets snowed in, Bob has to drag the injured Aunt in a kiddie pool tied to his waist. As with most Bob’s Burgers Thanksgiving episodes, there’s always something going wrong with the turkey, and this time, Linda must take over turkey duty. The kids make dessert inspired veggie dishes with gummy worms and whipped cream and the turkey is a bust.

(Season 1, Episode 11)

Music is a huge part of the series, with the soundtrack being made into vinyls and at the end of every episode, a song comes on during the ending credits. This time, the gang sings a catchy “Weekend at Mort’s/We’re gonna have a weekend at Mort’s!” The family is excited to spend the weekend at Mort the Mortician’s “It’s Your Funeral Home and Crematorium” because their restaurant is being fumigated. The kids are left alone in the morgue and when Bob comes back drunk from Jimmy Pesto’s, he hops in a satin-covered casket. The kids hear him snoring and think he’s a zombie, thus rolling him into the crematory.

(Season 3, Episode 43)

Louise is not one for crushes. She hasn’t hit puberty yet and doesn’t subscribe to her sister’s endless infatuation with boys in her grade. But now, she’s got her eyes on Boo-Boo, the youngest musician of the band “Boyz 4 Now,” a nod to the band Boyz II Men. At a concert, Louise realizes (reluctantly) that she has a crush, and as the boys sing, “Let me whisper in your eyes/tell me about the time your goldfish died,” Louise swoons. They sneak onto the tour bus and find Boo-Boo sitting in a booster seat, and Tina gives the iconic line “I put my bra on one boob at a time, just like everyone else.”

(Season 4, Episode 9)

“Bob’s Burgers” is known for delivering two distinct stories in each episode, and this fires on all cylinders for both. Linda forces Louise to branch out and have a slumber party while also dealing with two raccoons fighting over trash in the dumpster. Louise hates the girls in her class, and is furious to learn that Linda has set up a surprise party for her. One of the girls, Jessica, retreats for bed early after she pees her pants, putting them in a plastic bag, an all-too-relatable ordeal for kids. Meanwhile, Linda brings “Little King Trashmouth,” one of the raccoons, into the house to get it away from the violent “El Diablo” who attacked him. Now, they’ve got a loose raccoon in the house and Jessica fights to get her pee-pants back before anyone notices.

(Season 1, Episode 4)

Poop is a recurring thematic element of this series, and in this episode, Bob poops his pants, leading Linda to call her friends about the event. How did this happen? Jairo, Tina’s new Capoeira teacher, defeats Bob in a fight, forcing Bob to the ground and to release his bowels in the middle of the studio. Similar to the character Rex of Rex Kwon-Do in “Napoleon Dynamite,” Jairo is an egotistical fanatic of alternative exercise methods that make him look ridiculous.

(Season 1, Episode 1)

Perhaps the most memorable line of the series happens right out of the gate when 13-year-old Tina looks at her parents and delivers a deadpan, “My crotch is itchy,” which is now regularly memed. In the first-ever episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” the restaurant is having their grand re-re-re-opening, and Tina’s a little nervous about hitting the grill with only one free hand (the other scratching her crotch). To get customers into the restaurant, Gene dons a burger suit and uses his megaphone to blast fart noises, robot voices and laser sounds at passersby with an offering of free sliders. Linda’s ex-fiancee, a health inspector named Hugo, threatens to shut the place down, claiming that there was a rumor (spread by Louise) that the restaurant serves human flesh from the morgue next door.

(Season 3, Episode 7)

Another iconic Tina staple is the infamous long-winded groan she emits in times of stress. We see this here when Bob puts Tina to the test by letting her drive a car for the first time in an empty parking lot. There’s just one other car there, at the far end of the lot, and as Tina drives, she groans and swerves closer and closer to the parked car until she hits it. To Bob’s dismay, this is his arch-nemesis Jimmy Pesto’s car, and the Italian restaurateur decides to get insurance involved.

(Season 1, Episode 2)

In this episode, we are introduced to Tina’s sexual fantasies about zombies, Bob’s hatred for Linda’s parents, Louise’s favorite Kuchi Kopi night light and Gene’s keyboard, which he has on-hand throughout the whole series. When Linda’s parents come into town, Bob has to find a way out of socializing, and when he finds a prohibition-era crawl space that leads throughout the house and restaurant, he “gets stuck” and decides to stay, peeing in cans and videotaping his experience. Tina has a sex dream about zombies that turn out to have the voices of her grandparents having sex next door, which sends her overboard with fear. Bob starts to lose his mind and dreams about speaking to Louise’s Kuchi Kopi night light in the fashion of the bar scene in “The Shining.”

(Season 7, Episode 3)

For another clever Belcher Halloween costume, Tina joins the Wagstaff costume contest as a “Sand-Witch,” and decides to play the part full force as a practicing witch. When she receives a book of spells from Librarian Ambrose (a witch himself) she casts every one in the book: a love spell for Jimmy Jr., fish sticks for lunch (per Gene’s request) and for Louise to not have to perform a book report, among others. She takes her newfound confidence too far and talks back to crossing guard Jackie, who is a witch and casts a curse upon Tina. Terrified, she falls off the stage at the contest, losing out to Regular-Sized Rudy’s mime costume, and because she apologized, the curse is lifted.

(Season 7, Episode 5)

It’s Tax Day for The Belchers, and Bob and Linda have waited until last minute, as is their tradition. The show tackles drug use in this episode as Bob, Linda, and Gerald G. Garrison, the accountant, accidentally eat pot-filled cookies. Linda has three of them and thinks she peed herself; Bob is scared to call the kids to check on them, thinking that they’ll know he’s high; Linda puts tape on her fingers and uses them to massage Bob and Gerald’s faces, and they eventually make a fort. It’s a trip for everyone.

(Season 4, Episode 17)

Bob will do anything for his kids, including dressing up as a pony to infiltrate a convention of men dressed up as “Equesticals,” the male fandom of Tina’s favorite show “The Equestranauts.” Bob evades getting a tattoo from the episode’s villain, Bronchonius, who steals Tina’s beloved Chariot doll, a character in the pony show. He does end up getting a very minor tattoo that looks like a nose with wings, though, because he does not escape fast enough.

(Season 5, Episode 18)

Linda gets her due attention in this episode, pulling an “Eat, Pray, Love”/”Where’d You Go, Bernadette”-esque excursion on her birthday. Although her family had a spa day planned for her, Bob forgot the milk, so she goes to the grocery store. While there, she gets cut in line, locks her keys and phone in the car, splits her pants and then tries to find her way home with a grocery bag serving as a diaper to cover up her split pants. The bus goes the wrong way, she walks through a field and gets sprayed by a skunk and breaks her glasses. The kids and Bob are concerned, going to her favorite spots to look for her: the bakery she was kicked out of for eating too many samples, the hotel where she takes her “BMs in the PMs” (bowel movements in the afternoons) and a pet store.

(Season 7, Episode 1)

Sometimes, the show is trippy. Louise, who’s sick with the flu, has a vivid fever dream in which her Kuchi Kopi doll takes her on a trip to his hidden fortress. Her family voices other characters in her dream, including Linda who plays a huge purple sea monster. The cast sings a catchy song “The fortress is the worstest/And I think it’s kind of cursed us/You can see it has immersed us in this darkness” that carries throughout the episode. All while Louise is asleep, Teddy tries to help fix Kuchi Kopi, who was melted in the oven after the family tries to dry it because Linda dropped it in the toilet.

(Season 3, Episode 8)

The most annoying girl in the school, a necklace-sucking, loud, overbearing student in his grade named Courtney, like-likes Gene. The family begs Gene to break up with her after he accepts her relationship proposal. He tries to break up with Courtney, but he meets her dad, who writes commercial jingles and has quite the set up of music equipment. He asks the dad if he’s Moby, and continues to date Courtney just for the gear perks. An animated Moby ends up making an appearance in Gene’s dream sequence.

(Season 6, Episode 3)

The ending of this episode is what makes it so great. When Linda and Bob take the kids to a haunted house to finally scare Louise (who says she never gets scared), they start out with basic tricks. Linda’s guts fall out as angel hair pasta, Bob tries to get the kids to touch “eyeballs” that are supposed to be grapes in a box. In reality, Gene and Tina were in on a surprise that would finally freak out their sister. They hired Teddy, his mom, Mort and Teddy’s mom’s new boyfriend to groan in the basem*nt, cut out the power, make them so scared they retreat to the roof and then set up a huge ring of fire around the house as they’re dressed in hooded capes. Louise had no idea, and the family can’t help but snap a picture of her mid-scream.

(Season 6, Episode 17)

Tina has an imaginary friend who’s a horse named Jericho. A dream sequence with the two on the beach as she tames the “wild” stallion confirms that this love affair is never-ending, and when Tina signs up for horse camp, Jericho is not happy that she’ll be riding a different horse. Cue Plops, the absurdly poop-filled horse that Tina struggles to tame. The best part of this episode is that after the family scrapes the money for the camp, Tina ends up riding her imaginary horse through the ring for her final exhibition, instead of Plops.

(Season 3, Episode 18)

Linda’s parents are swingers — which the family finds out when they visit them in Florida. Everyone in their community swings, and the couple is in danger of being excommunicated because they decided not to RSVP to a potluck (which, yes, includes sex). In order to save them, Bob tries to find Linda’s father Al’s kink, which turns out to be balloons being popped under a woman’s buttocks.

(Season 2, Episode 6)

There are a lot of love connections happening between the Belchers and their dentist, Dr. Yap, and some of them are unwanted. Tina loves Dr. Yap; Dr. Yap loves Gayle; Bob loves Linda (of course), and now, Gayle loves Bob. In a twisted turn of events, this episode shines because Linda is actually thrilled that her sister kissed Bob at the dentist’s office while Bob was heavily medicated and unaware. Her thinking is that this will bring Gayle closer to another lover, something that has happened in the past. Dr. Yap’s love guru, The Prince of Persuasia, pops up with his three tips for getting a woman: trap them, insult them and brag to them.

(Season 4, Episode 1)

Bob is not a nature man, even though he thinks he is. On a camping trip, he brings no food and ends up getting extremely sick from eating a semi-raw, hilariously small trout. Bob and Linda, naked and in a warm spring (not quite a hot spring), get pulled away into the rushing river and have to find a way back to camp. Bob pukes and poops while dressed in a skirt of leaves and Linda eats bugs to survive. When they finally make it back, a couple in an RV try to have sex with the Belchers, and the kids save them by releasing a bees’ nest in the trailer.

(Season 4, Episode 16)

Tina isn’t the only one who makes some laugh-out-loud sounds with her voice: Linda’s also got that down. When Linda finds out she’s a psychic, she lets out a series of moans, think “nungh-nungh-nungh” and “naa-naa-naa” as she throws her head back and tries to locate her sixth sense. The police department catches on to her supernatural powers and hires her to help locate “The Little Boy Bandit” and the kids capitalize on their mother’s gift to bet on a horse at the racetrack.

(Season 8, Episode 2)

In this mystery episode, Millie Frock is a kooky character that serves as the perfect annoyance for Louise as she obsesses over the Belcher girl’s every move. When Louise needs her help to crack the case of who mutilated Mr. Frond’s therapy dolls, she goes to Millie’s house to try to get insight on who may have been the culprit. The girl just had an orthodontic procedure that leaves her incapable of eating sweets, so when the kids offer her hard candy, she slurps just as Anthony Hopkins does in “The Silence of The Lambs.” The mystery episodes of “Bob’s Burgers” succeed in surprising the viewers, and this one is unexpected when Mr. Frond ends up being the one who mutilated his own dolls.

(Season 3, Episode 12)

Here we go, poop again. There’s a “mad pooper” on the loose at Wagstaff whose excrement has been recovered in students’ dioramas and musical instruments across the school. Tina, an aspiring news anchor, is on the case. She and Louise tape her broadcast over old tapes of Gene’s birth and Tina makes a name for herself. Meanwhile, Gene looks just like Bob as he starts wearing a mustache, cuts his hair into a bald spot and wears the same clothes. The similarities are uncanny until Gene realizes he just wants to be a kid again.

(Season 6, Episode 10)

In this episode, we meet Nurse Liz, frustrated with kids like Louise faking sick in order to skip a pop quiz. She desperately wants to impress her old classmates at a reunion and feels like she has nothing to show for it. When Tammy shows up in a hat and starts scratching her head, Nurse Liz insists that it’s “super lice,” a more intense version of lice. She quarantines the students who were in contact with Tammy and threatens to shave all of the kids’ heads. In one psychotic moment for the nurse, Louise asks Nurse Liz to shave her head, and she does it instantly, shaving her eyebrows, too.

(Season 5, Episode 19)

There’s just something about a murder mystery that attracts viewers, and in “Housetrap,” we meet Helen, a woman who Linda suspects kills her husband. Linda, who breaks into Helen’s house to live the dream of an upper class lifestyle with the rest of her family, investigates and finds that Helen is actually her late husband Larry’s second wife and he died under mysterious circ*mstances. In a particularly hilarious turn of events, Helen gives pain killers to Bob for his back, and in his drug-induced state, he tells Helen that Linda thinks she killed her husband. Helen confronts Linda on the widow’s walk, and Louise saves her mom from Helen pushing her off into the boulders.

(Season 2, Episode 8)

This episode is classic Tina, and we also meet the girly-girl Tammy who joins the school. As a common theme, a dream sequence sees Tina fantasizing about butt-touching zombies, and decides to write erotic friend fan fiction which includes her touching her crush Jimmy Jr.’s butt. In a “Thirteen”-inspired episode, Tammy turns Tina into a bad girl, talking back to her mother saying the infamous, “Don’t have a crap attack,” shoplifting, and dressing just like Tammy, with lipstick smeared all over her lips. Tammy threatens Tina that if she doesn’t come to the park to drink margarita mix with Jimmy Jr. and Zeke, she will read her friend fiction to the cafeteria, but Tina decides to beat her to the punch and reads it herself.

(Season 5, Episode 1)

Gene loves “Die Hard” and is determined to write a musical for Wagstaff based on the film. His ex-girlfriend, Courtney, ups the ante and works with her musician father to develop a musical on “Working Girl,” stealing the competition from Gene. In a turn of events, Louise concocts a plan to have Gene perform his musical in the boiler room at the same time as Courtney’s musical, and it becomes a bigger deal than hers. Some of the best moments come from the music, where Courtney sings “I’m a working girl/I’m a girl who’s working/I’m a girl who works in New York City.” Gene, playing Hans Gruber, fights himself as he turns the musical into a one man show. Mr. Frond gets angry and brings the whole Belcher and Wheeler families into his office. They all eventually agree to host a joint musical of both plays. The shoulder pads on the kids is a highlight, as Tina channels Sigourney Weaver in big, ‘80s style chin length hair cut.