Bob's Burgers is an American animated sitcom created by Loren Bouchard for the Fox Broadcasting Company. It is centered on the Belcher family—parents Bob and Linda and their three children, Tina, Gene, and Louise—who run a burger restaurant and often go on adventures of many kinds. This is a list of characters from the animated television series. Main characters are listed first.
Robert Eugene "Bob" Belcher Jr. (voiced by H. Jon Benjamin) is the main character of the series. He is the son of Robert "Big Bob" Belcher Sr. and Lily Belcher, husband of Linda, and father of Tina, Gene, and Louise. He is a third-generation restaurateur and currently the proprietor of his eponymous burger restaurant. He is currently 46 years old. It has been mentioned that Bob's mother Lily died prior to the series' beginning. His childhood has been self-described as "crappy", as his father discouraged play. However, he has implied he loved spending time with his mother, as she would take him on long walks. Bob's mother went unnamed until the Belchers went to visit her gravesite.
Bob tends to entertain himself by having conversations with inanimate objects, mainly food, and then speaking back as the inanimate object, usually using a high falsetto voice. He also enjoys making puns, using this talent to name his burger specials. While poor with business management and cursed with an unlucky streak, his skills at cooking are excellent; he has even been referred to as a "beef artist" by Mr. Fischoeder. His primary business rival is Jimmy Pesto, who owns an Italian restaurant across the street from Bob's Burgers.
The Burger of the Day special stems from an incident in which he customized a burger by adding chives and sour cream to it, calling it a "Baby You Can Chive My Car Burger". He tried to serve it to one of Big Bob's regular customers who normally ordered a tuna melt, but Big Bob threw the burger away in front of the whole diner. 10 years later, still resentful over not being allowed to cook the way he wanted, Bob turned down Big Bob's offer of a partnership in the diner and opened his own restaurant.
Bob prides himself on giving the customer a quality meal and goes the extra mile to ensure it by choosing fresh ingredients he gets from the local farmers' markets and co-ops. His biggest accomplishment is the "Meatsiah", a concoction consisting of a steak tartare center with a medium-well cooked burger surrounding it and a beef Wellington surrounding the burger. Bob is allergic to shellfish, particularly lobster, as it causes his face to swell any time he eats it. This is a problem, as the seaside town where the Belchers live has an annual lobster festival he hates since it takes away from his business. Bob, along with Linda, enjoys drinking, and many of the episode gags involve Bob or Linda getting drunk, usually from wine.
Bob is a tall, paunchy, and swarthy chef. He has male pattern baldness and a bushy mustache, olive skin, and feathered bangs swooping down on his forehead. He wears a pale gray, short-sleeved t-shirt usually donned with a white apron with a breast pocket, dark gray chef's pants, and black kitchen clogs with white socks shown on the top near where his pants end.
Linda Belcher (née Genarro) (voiced by John Roberts) is the happy-go-lucky wife of Bob and mother of Tina, Gene, and Louise. Before her marriage to Bob, she was engaged to Hugo, who is now a local health inspector. She is currently 44 years old. She has referred to herself as a "pre-middle-aged mother". In early seasons, Linda wears her everyday outfit top with a button-up, while in newer seasons it is a V-neck instead.
Linda's attraction to Bob, whom she often refers to as "Bobby", is in part due to his passion for his work, and also due to his mustache. Linda remains a loyal and devoted wife despite their frequent financial problems, and never having had a honeymoon or a day off in 10 years. She has a preference for mustaches, and says Bob "made himself ugly" when he shaved it off. Her passions include singing, dinner theater, porcelain baby figurines, Tom Selleck, nautically themed romance novels, and prenatal yoga. She handles the accounting for the restaurant, though her bookkeeping methods are overly complicated. She is fond of alcohol and is known to say "Mommy doesn't get drunk, she just has fun."
Linda is extroverted, has a thick New Jersey accent, and is fond of tackling problems using unconventional methods, though her methods are frequently overly optimistic and things sometimes go awry. She often encourages her kids to engage in behavior Bob finds annoying, and though she wants what's best for her kids, she tends to be scatterbrained. Bob has described her as a pushover because she allows people, especially their kids, to take advantage of her. She has a contentious relationship with Louise and often misunderstands her, even once organizing a slumber party for Louise against her will. She is a talented lyricist and tends to spontaneously burst into song, a trait she shares with her voice actor, John Roberts. Many of the songs she is known for are improvised by Roberts. They are frequently remade and set to music for the end credits of many episodes.
Linda's maiden name is Genarro, and she is of Italian descent. She has a friend who's only mentioned but never seen or heard named Ginger.
Tina Ruth Belcher (voiced by Dan Mintz) is the eldest Belcher child. She is currently 13 years old. She generally speaks in a masculine tone, wears glasses, works part-time at the family restaurant, and is often the voice of reason among the Belcher children. However, it is made quite clear that Tina's own characteristics rival those of her siblings. She is trying to come to grips with her entry into adulthood and claims to have a complicated relationship with zombies. She typically wears a sky blue, short-sleeved t-shirt, a short, navy blue pencil skirt, white tube socks with red stripes on the bottom, black sneakers with white tips, and a yellow barrette on the right side of her head, which she typically dons with her thick glasses to help her see better. Like the rest of her family, she has black hair and olive skin. She also wears her hair in a bob cut with loose curls at the ends.
Despite seeming reticent and shy around her peers, Tina has an active social and romantic life. She has an on-again, off-again relationship with Jimmy Jr., and has dated, kissed, or flirted with several other boys. She is obsessed with horses, boys, and buttocks; in various episodes, she writes in her journal about touching people's butts, which, to her, is the height of sexual contact. According to her siblings, Tina has written erotic fanfiction of several television shows and movies and has moved on to "erotic friend fiction", in which she uses real people. She is a member of the Hormone-iums, a musical revue at Wagstaff that sings songs about puberty, and was formerly a member of the Thundergirls, a Girl Scout-like organization. She is generally soft-spoken and reserved, often in contrast to her more strident siblings.
In the show's early developmental stages, the eldest Belcher child was originally written as a boy, named Daniel Belcher, who was also voiced by Mintz, whose personality is said to have been similar to that of Tina's. She is also shown to have difficulties with her schoolwork despite working hard at it, as seen when she is put into remedial math and when guidance counselor Mr. Frond refers to her as a "dum-dum".
Robert Eugene “Gene” Belcher III (voiced by Eugene Mirman) is the middle child and only male in the family besides Bob. He is revealed to be 11 years old. Like Linda, he has an upbeat and enthusiastic attitude about almost everything. However, he closely resembles Bob and has inherited his lobster allergy. He often promotes the restaurant by wearing a burger costume and using a toy megaphone to hand out samples.
Gene has a variety of interests and hobbies, with his most well-known being food and music. Though he has no training, he occasionally demonstrates great skill in music and aspires to be a musician. He enjoys playing a Casio-type keyboard and using it to make fart sounds. In the past, he has created an elaborate love duet as well as a one-man show. Despite this, Gene is not without his flaws, namely a tendency to be easily distracted, which his family refers to as "Gene-ing out", but he is loving and loyal toward his family. He is also shown to be unathletic and run away from fights in fear. It is shown he suffers from a fear of snakes.
Gene has an occasional tendency towards making unintentionally sexual double entendres, which his father Bob corrects or tells him not to repeat, often admonishing him by simply saying his name. He is also fond of making wisecracks and pop culture references. Like his father and mother, he has olive skin and dark black hair. He has his hair in a short bowl cut with long flips at each side of his head. He sports a pale yellow short-sleeved t-shirt, a pair of slightly lengthy, light blue denim shorts, short white socks, and, like his older sister, white and red sneakers.
Louise Belcher (voiced by Kristen Schaal) is the youngest child of the Belcher family and is revealed to be 9 years old. She typically wears a short-sleeved, olive-green dress slightly below the knees, black Mary-Jane flats, and a hot pink beanie hat with rabbit ears on top of it. Like the rest of her family, she has black hair and olive skin. Her black hair peeks out from her large hat, slightly exposing the hair-ties holding up her pigtails; her yellow hair-ties in the front covered up by the long ends of her bunny hat, along with the aglets of her hat. Like her mother and older sister, her hair has curls at the ends.
Despite being the youngest, she usually dominates her two older siblings by wearing down their self-esteem. Precociously intelligent, manipulative, and aggressive with both children and adults, she is more than willing to exploit people if there is anything to be gained, and has a history of gaslighting her siblings, especially Tina.
She has an offbeat and dark sense of humor, and picks locks as a hobby. She tends to be very loud, and often shouts at the top of her lungs to get her points across. Louise always wears her signature hat, regardless of the situation. To date, viewers have never seen her uncovered head. When a teenager stole her hat from her, her head was off-screen, and she wore a hoodie until she got it back.
She believed her hat made her brave and got it in order to be able to face preschool. However, this turned out to be untrue, as she got it after her first day of preschool when Linda made it in honor of Bob's mother Lily, who often wore a similar beanie, though Louise's hat had bunny ears added due to Linda having extra fabric. Louise is not immune to breaking her tough character persona, however. She called Bob "daddy" until she was eight, felt guilty about almost electrocuting her sister, still believes in Santa Claus, has a disturbing crush on a boy band member, becomes enamored with puppies, and proclaims she does love her family, albeit in the face of death. Since she was a baby, Louise has always liked Bob more than Linda, opting to spend more time with him as she finds him much more interesting. It can be assumed Louise and Bob have a very strong relationship, although she is the most prone amongst her siblings to mock him. On one occasion, Louise accidentally revealed her plan to take over the family restaurant when Bob retires, after renaming it "Louise's Burgers".
