Danny DeVito Gets His Greatest Fake-Out In It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia Season 17

Hey jabronis, there are spoilers for the latest season of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ahead.

There are quite a few great running gags woven deep into the lore of the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” gang, but one of the funniest is Frank’s (Danny DeVito) love of a good fake-out. In a move he learned from his scumbag business partner Eugene (David Huddleston), Frank loves to set people up to believe one thing only to reveal that it was all pretend to begin with. There’s usually no ulterior motive beyond Frank trying to teach someone a lesson, so it’s not quite like Charlie (Charlie Day) or his mom faking cancer. Still, Frank’s fake-outs can be just as emotionally devastating.

Fans first learned of the fake-out in the Frank-defining episode “A Very Sunny Christmas” when his assumed children, Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Dee (Kaitlin Olson), shared a home video from a childhood Christmas where every present beneath the tree was actually just an empty box, with Frank gleefully yelling “Fake-out!” as they tore through the wrapping paper. Since then, Frank has planned and executed even more nefarious fake-outs, and in season 17, the show delivers possibly the very best (or worst, if you’re on the receiving end) Frank fake-out yet.

In “Frank is in a Coma,” Frank convinces the entire gang that he’s in a coma after Dee makes fun of him and then tickles him while he’s watching one of those reality shows where bakers make cakes that look like ordinary objects and then people have to guess if it’s cake or real. He even creates a fake drawing from Dee as a child and plants it so that she will have an emotional breakdown over the idea of her father dying, only to appear from the other room and reveal that she’s crying over a cake made to look like his comatose body. That’s a brutal fake-out that is quite possibly even worse than when Frank convinced the whole gang to dig up Dee and Dennis’s dead mother because he assured them she was secretly alive and had buried a fortune in her grave. (For what it’s worth, the actors think that might be one of the very worst things anyone in the gang has ever done, and Dennis’s screams of “My mommy is dead!” are really something.)

Eventually, Frank reveals that his coma was all a bit and the gang enjoys a pretty f***ed-up laugh over the cake, but he might have finally taken things a step too far for Dee. Then again, if convincing Olson’s character she was a successful stand-up comedian and was going to do a set on Conan’s late night show only to reveal that it was a fake-out didn’t fully send her over the edge, maybe nothing will.

New episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” premiere Wednesdays on FXX and the next day on Hulu.