Al Bundy


Al Bundy is a fictional character and the main protagonist of the American television series Married... with Children, played by Ed O'Neill. He is a misanthropic, working-class father of two, portrayed as a somewhat tragicomedic figure. Although he is a born loser who constantly laments his lot in life, he nevertheless stands by his family, displaying wit, self-sacrifice and resilience in times of crisis. He and his wife, Peg, were rated the 59th best characters on television by Bravo. In a 2016 interview Ed O'Neill said that he based his interpretation of Al Bundy on one of his uncles.

Character history

Al Bundy is a simple, working-class man, forever regretful of the turns his life has taken since the end of high school. He was a star running back on the Polk High School football team. However, marriage and a broken leg prevented him from attending college on a football scholarship.
Al is married to Peggy, whom he asked to marry him while drunk, and was forced to go through with it at gunpoint. They have two children: Kelly, a promiscuous, dim-witted blonde, and Bud, an intelligent but sex-crazed and unpopular schemer named after Budweiser beer. His next door neighbor Marcy is his archnemesis, and the two frequently squabble.
Al lives in a suburb of Chicago and is the proud owner of a 1970s Dodge automobile.
He works as a shoe salesman at the fictional Gary's Shoes and Accessories for Today's Woman in the fictional New Market Mall. Al hates his job, loses it several times throughout the series, yet always ends up coming back to it. There is a running joke throughout the show that Al makes minimum-wage.
In one episode, Al is offered early retirement and given a year's pay: $12,000, yet in another he says that after taxes and Peggy's spending he only gets one nickel out of every paycheck. In "My Mom, The Mom", Al states that he earns a 10% commission on each sale. In "Weenie Tot Lovers and Other Strangers", Peg states that his paycheck was for "80 pesos". The family also brought in income through game-shows, theft, various absurd schemes and mooching off of the Rhoades/D'Arcy's wealth throughout the series.
Throughout the series, Al is continually saddled with massive debts caused by everything from the various disasters he becomes involved in to his wife's extravagant spending habits. However, he never appears to miss a mortgage payment or file for bankruptcy. The "Bundy Will", passed down from generation to generation as a punishment, indebted the "benefactor" with these debts that Al Bundy has incurred. In the episode "England Show I", it was stated that Al's ancestor Seamus McBundy insulted an obese witch, and brought a curse upon the fictional Bundy ancestral town of Lower Uncton in England.
In flashbacks, it is revealed that Al's mother may have been an alcoholic. While pondering his shortcomings over a toothpaste sandwich, he relives a moment where his mother tells him that he can become anything while audibly saying "Yeah right, Mom, try saying that when you're sober!" In a similar situation, he asks her if she wants her Bloody Mary. In one flashback episode, Al had an overdue library book for 30 years; he tries to get out of paying a $2,163.20 library fine by tricking the librarian into believing that he had returned it years before, only to have his trick revealed on closed-circuit TV on Chicago television.
Most of the show's running gags concern Al. Aside from his bad luck, Al also maintains a "do-it-yourself" attitude whenever something in the house needs repair. Combined with his creativity, poor judgement, and lack of skill, this usually produces absurd results, and often involves physical injury to Al.
Al is also frequently described as being careless about hygiene: he is often told that he smells bad. He is often seen leaving restrooms, even public ones, with a newspaper tucked under his arm, to the sound of a toilet flushing. A running gag is that Al showers and brushes his teeth as rarely as he has sex, which is extremely infrequent, as he continually rejects and avoids Peggy's advances.
Al is disliked by most of his neighbors, except for Steve Rhoades and, after he leaves town, Jefferson D'Arcy ; both are, at different times, married to Marcy. In "Route 666" Marcy said that when they thought Al had died, they all started dancing and singing "Ding dong, the shoe man's dead" and called it a "cruel, cruel hoax" when they learned it was a false alarm—as usual, Al had survived his latest misadventure. In another example of the neighborhood's distaste of Al during "You Better Shop Around", after he blacked out everyone's houses during a heatwave, the neighbors attempt to attack him with pitchforks and torches. Other people pay little to no attention to him and, as a result, his name often ends up misspelled on paychecks, reserved parking spots, etc..
Despite being a somewhat phlegmatic and slow person, Bundy has a sarcastic and cynical sense of humor; he also has a definite love for his family. Examples can be seen on the rare occasions when he enjoys luxury and money. In one episode, Peggy and Al receive free first class plane tickets to New York City from Marcy. They are shown sipping champagne together and singing "I Got You, Babe".
In another episode, Al's Dodge turns up missing and the only reason that he wants it back is to recover an item in the trunk. The item turns out to be a family photo of Al, Peg, Kelly and Bud together. This suggests that his distaste for them is spawned merely by his disappointment in his extremely poor quality of life.
Al dislikes obese women and cannot stop himself from insulting them to their faces with one-liners, a behavior he has engaged in since he was a child. He also hates his job, the prospect of having sex with his wife, and his feminist neighbor Marcy.
He loves nudie magazines, free beer, bowling and "nudie" bars, and often cherishes the glory moment of his past: scoring four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the fictional Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus fictional Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon in the episode "All-Nite Security Dude".
Another episode, "Damn Bundys", featured Al selling his soul to the devil in order to lead the Chicago Bears to the Super Bowl as the oldest rookie in NFL history; Al scores the touchdown and ends up in hell with his family and neighbors for 300 years.
In the Season 8 episode "Dud Bowl II", a scoreboard at Polk High's football stadium was to be dedicated to Al, but Marcy had arranged for it to instead be named after Terry Bradshaw out of malice; but after hearing from Kelly how much it would mean to her father if the scoreboard honored him, Bradshaw decides to let the scoreboard to be named after Al. Al did not know this and he arranged to have Jefferson and Bud blow up the scoreboard.
He is a fan of oldies music, and a fan of westerns. His favorite movie is Hondo, and his favorite sitcom is the fictional Psycho Dad.
Politically, Al appears to have mixed views with a somewhat conservative outlook. He is an ardent admirer of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he often battles his feminist neighbor Marcy, but later in an homage to his time as Al Bundy, Ed O'Neill reprised the role of Al showing his support for the then-candidate, Barack Obama's tax plan. The plan was said to give "Al the Shoe Salesman" a $1,000 federal tax break. Al also has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports trivia, which usually demonstrates how he has little interest in anything else. He does however serve his country by joining the Army National Guard in which Al receives the 'Bronze Dumpster' for service during a garbage strike.
Bundy's favorite magazine is Big'uns, though an early episode used an issue of Playboy instead. He enjoys watching sports and adult movies on television, with his right hand tucked into his waistband. Though he almost always resists Peggy's frequent amorous advances, he is shown to have a particular fondness for her breasts, which she refers to as "the guys".
Al's talents include bowling, barbecuing, and getting into and winning fistfights. He can survive incredible injuries ranging from falling off his roof while installing a satellite dish, getting shocked by that same dish, and being pulverized by a massive woman wrestler in Las Vegas, to jumping from an airplane without a parachute, and surviving a huge explosion when he accidentally detonates dynamite in his own yard trying to kill a rabbit who has been eating his vegetable garden.

Reception

Al Bundy had a highly positive reception. Much of the praise went to O'Neill's portrayal of the character. Al and Peg were named the 59th best TV characters by Bravo.
In 2009 TIME magazine named him among the 10 most memorable fathers in television history.
In 2014, BuzzFeed listed Al Bundy as the 10th greatest TV Dad of All-Time.