This ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ Season One Scene Could Be the Secret Behind Charlie’s Stupidity

Dennis is asshole. Why Charlie can’t read?

When a sitcom has been on the air for many years without changes to the core cast, the main characters will inevitably suffer from a phenomenon known to TV Tropes users as “Flanderization,” which is “the act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until it completely consumes the character.” 

Naturally, the characters of the longest-running live-action sitcom in American history will Flanderize to a certain degree, and any It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan must admit that Mac, Charlie, Dennis and Dee in the most recent Season 16 are very different from the Philadelphian a-holes we met back in 2005.

But could there be a canonical reason why some of the Paddy’s Pub Gang’s peculiarities grew more extreme over the course of two decades beyond their daily abuse of alcohol (among other substances) destroying their brain chemistry? One fan in the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia subreddit certainly thinks so — although their theory does revolve around taking a shot to the head.

In a thread titled, “Dennis Is the Reason Charlie Is So Stupid,” user Conscious-Town7555 explained their theory for why Charlie started It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as a mostly functioning, full-sentence-speaking, almost-rationally-thinking member of society before devolving into a straight-up mentally disabled man who is now entirely divorced from reality. 

The hypothesis revolves around the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season One episode “Gun Fever,” in which Dennis and Mac invest in a pistol after Paddy’s Pub suffers a midnight robbery. While Dee and Charlie express their reservations about keeping a handgun at the bar, their borderline orgasmic joy at actually holding one betrays the titular gun fever that culminates in Dennis shooting Charlie in the head upon mistaking him for a midnight intruder.

“I’ve seen a lot of people bring up his abuse of chemicals as a kid to explain why Charlie is the way he is; but that fact that Dennis shot him in the head is rarely mentioned,” Conscious-Town7555 writes. “They all say ‘it just grazed him,’ but that never comes from a doctor. So to me ‘just grazed him,’ is a collective lie told by the gang to fully exonerate themselves from giving Charlie brain damage.”

Now, while Charlie’s habitual use of industrial-grade inhalants would certainly cause even the most abortion-surviving brain some serious damage, well, so would a bullet. And Conscious-Town7555 is absolutely right that the Gang would shamelessly downplay the severity of a gunshot wound when it serves their purposes — even Charlie didn’t want to give up the gun, despite his near-death experience.

Of course, this perfectly logical argument wouldn’t explain why Dennis grew exponentially more sociopathic as the seasons wore on, nor is there a clear in-universe reason for Mac going from falling in love with Dennis and Dee’s mom to total homosexuality. Additionally, Dee’s desperate need for attention only became pathological around Season Six. 

However, all this could be caused by an X-factor that only entered It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Season Two: Frank Reynolds. Frank comes into the show with the express purpose of shedding his white-collar lifestyle and joining the fringe class, and his chaotic addition to the Gang could very well have been the accelerant that drives everyone to their most psychotic and selfish extremes.

And, to tie this all back around, who in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia likes guns more than Frank? Maybe the Gang isn’t suffering from Flanderization — maybe they just never shook their gun fever.