The Best Film and TV Boozehounds, According to Reddit

The droll drunkard has been an archetypal character in Western culture since the ancient Greeks held theater festivals in honor of Dionysus. However, neither Sophocles, Euripedes or Aristophanes could have predicted that an animated Rick Sanchez belching his way across space and time would be one of the most popular figures in contemporary storytelling.

Reddit has reviewed the history of movie and television boozers and come to the consensus that these stumbling, slurring and urine-soaked characters are the most memorable, most entertaining and most likely to forget everything that happened to them by the next morning.

Mr. Lahey, Trailer Park Boys

If a character is the most memorable drunk from a show where everybody is drunk, then he’s got to be the top spot on the list — after all, he is the liquor. John Dunsworth staggered through 106 episodes of the beloved Canadian comedy as the cantankerous trailer park supervisor before he sadly passed away in 2017 at the age of 71. Mr. Lahey’s character arc had more twists and heel turns than a WWE wrestler as he played the antagonist, the ally, the father figure and the unrequited lover of the trio of pot-smoking, rum-and-coke slamming miscreants. The shenanigans of Ricky, Julian and Bubbles wouldn’t be half as hilarious without Lahey crashing every adventure and foiling every plot while barely staying on his feet.

Lucille Bluth, Arrested Development

Another performer whose passing has left a hole in our hearts, Jessica Walter’s role of the Bluth family matriarch was a terror and delight without which the series could not have succeeded. The snarky, selfish, scheming queen of Balboa Towers was rarely seen without a martini glass in hand while she connived and plotted both with and against her preposterous progeny. Lucille was as sharp as she was extravagant, and the manipulative mother delivered some of the very best burns in television history.

Doc Holliday, Tombstone 

Val Kilmer’s performance as the real-life gambler, gunslinger and dentist Doc Holliday was iconic as he swayed and swaggered through Tombstone, Arizona while keeping his cards very close to the chest. Kilmer’s Holliday always seems a little off-kilter, either because of the booze or the tuberculosis, but neither the audience nor the other characters can ever know for sure if Holliday is simply feigning his frailty to get the other gunmen to drop their guards so he can fire off a kill-shot. “In vino veritas” indeed.

Randy Marsh, South Park

As opposed to some of the other characters on this list, Randy isn’t always drunk — sometimes he’s high instead. The town of South Park, Colorado has some outrageously stupid and indulgent adults, but none are more chaotically entertaining than Lorde himself. Randy doesn’t do restraint; he acts on his impulses and urges like a wild animal as he drinks, drives, fights, farts and flaunts his sheer shamelessness across town — much to the chagrin of his family. Randy is responsible for many of the most iconic lines in boozing history, including his thoughts on the finer things: “I’m not having a glass of wine, I’m having six. It’s called a tasting, and it’s classy.”

Frank Gallagher, Shameless

The most depressingly realistic yet darkly funny entry on the list is William H. Macy’s performance as Frank Gallagher, a role that would earn him six Emmy nominations. Frank is selfish, he is vindictive and he is so sickly devoid of any dignity that he truly earns the show’s title entirely on his own, and, by the end of his arc, booze is the least destructive of his vices. Frank’s plotlines in some of the later seasons of Shameless are the result of the writer’s room deciding, “Let’s just see how low Frank can go.” The one thing that always united the fractured Gallagher clan is the agreement that, as awful as they all could be, Frank would always be the biggest POS in town. And that’s what family is all about.