Carl Brutananadilewski: The Everyman of Aqua Teen

Carl Brutananadilewski is the greasy, gold-chained everyman of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and he holds one of the worst jobs in all of animation: living right next door to a talking milkshake, a floating box of fries, and a wad of sentient meat.

That one address has cost him his pool, his car, his sanity, and on a shocking number of occasions, his life.

With his balding hairline, his permanent stubble, and a white tank top he seems allergic to removing, Carl looks like every burnt-out guy who ever screamed at kids to get off his lawn.

He is the closest thing this show has to a regular person, which is exactly why the madness around him hits so hard.

I have always thought Carl is the secret glue of the whole series. The Aqua Teens are the stars, but Carl is the one reacting the way you or I would, and that reaction is where most of the comedy lives.

Who Is Carl Brutananadilewski?

Carl Brutananadilewski is one of the four main characters of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the surreal Adult Swim series about a trio of fast food creatures who share a run-down house in New Jersey. Carl lives next to them, and that is basically his entire tragedy.

His days are simple. He wants to wash his car, grill some meat, watch sports, drink a beer, and be left alone.

He almost never gets any of it, because the Aqua Teens turn his pool into a science experiment, blow up his lawn, or drag him into whatever cosmic nonsense they have kicked off that week.

What makes him work is that he takes most of it in stride.

Carl is the reality check in a show that has none.

While a giant milkshake argues with aliens, Carl is standing on his porch pointing out how insane all of it is, usually with a swear word attached.

The Carl Philosophy

Carl’s best trait is that almost nothing rattles him anymore. Living next to a sentient milkshake, a box of fries, and a rolling ball of meat would break most people. Carl mostly shrugs and reaches for another canned beer.

That flat, unimpressed attitude is the joke. The weirder the situation gets, the more deadpan Carl becomes, and his dry, cutting sarcasm cuts right through the surrealism.

When a normal guy stands in the middle of chaos and calls it exactly what it is, the chaos somehow gets funnier.

Carl’s Background

Carl did not exactly have a warm start in life.

He is the son of a one-time military man who became a factory worker, and he grew up in real poverty with no mother around. His dad put him to work at the insulation factory when he was just eight years old.

The episode “Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future” shows you how bleak it was. In a 1968 flashback, young Carl gets a single Christmas gift: a Berber carpet sample, which he and his father seem to boil and eat for their holiday dinner. The tree is bare except for a few empty beer cans.

He later reconnects with his mother when she is bedridden in a Veteran’s Hospital, which suggests he was raised in his dad’s custody after the divorce.

It is a grim little backstory, and it explains a lot about how Carl turned out.

Carl’s Enduring Grief

Being the Aqua Teens’ neighbor is a full-time punishment. Carl’s house gets wrecked, his pool gets invaded, his car gets stolen, and his safety goes out the window on a weekly basis.

It is one of the show’s longest-running gags that nearly every disaster in Carl’s life traces back to the trio next door.

And I do mean nearly every disaster. Carl racks up more on-screen deaths than any other character in the series, getting exploded, shredded, decapitated, and eaten alive across the run. He always comes back, of course, ready to be tortured again next episode.

That grinding, endless bad luck is a big part of his charm.

He keeps waking up, keeps trying to grill, and keeps getting flattened, which somehow makes him easy to root for.

From Everyman to Tragic Figure

On the surface, Carl reads as pure comic relief. Dig a little and there is something sadder underneath, because his outward confidence hides a guy who is deeply lonely.

His love life is where that really shows. A few examples that stuck with me:

• Freda: In this episode, Frylock builds a robot girlfriend for Master Shake, but she becomes self-aware, dumps Shake, and runs off with Carl. The catch is that she demands Carl kill Shake before anything happens. It falls apart when Frylock points out she is a robot who cannot have sex at all.
• Darlean: In “Big Bro,” Carl finally lands a real relationship with the mother of a kid Frylock is mentoring, then immediately panics at the thought of being tied down to a family.
• Rock bottom: At his lowest, Carl has been shown keeping a cardboard cutout around for company, which tells you everything about how starved for connection he is.

Under the beer and the bravado, Carl wants somebody in his corner and almost never gets it. That quiet loneliness is what turns him from a punchline into a character with real weight.

Carl’s Personality

Carl is short-tempered, crude, careless, poorly groomed, and about as sarcastic as they come. He does not filter himself, he does not apologize, and he treats his own health like an afterthought, figuring everyone dies young anyway.

He is not big on religion either, though the show cannot keep its story straight. In his sports web series he calls himself a Catholic, while the “Hand Banana” episode plays him as an agnostic. That kind of casual contradiction is very on-brand for a show that never worried much about continuity.

Underneath the rough edges, though, Carl is oddly consistent. He knows who he is, he knows what he wants out of a day, and he is endlessly annoyed that the universe will not let him have it.

Carl’s Hobbies

Carl’s tastes are exactly as low-brow as his appearance suggests. His favorite strip club is “Melon Shakers,” he drinks canned beer until he passes out on the living room floor, and he treats a good grill session like a religious event.

His run-in with the law in the episode “Intervention” is peak Carl.

He gets arrested for drunk driving after downing 18 beers and wrecking his car with a hooker in the passenger seat, doing 136 in a 25 mph school zone.

He gets Tasered for mouthing off to the officer, then has an alcohol ignition interlock installed so the car will not start unless he is sober. His solution is to bring Meatwad along to blow into the tube for him on his next trip to Melon Shakers.

He is also a fanatical New York sports fan.

He lives and dies with the Giants and the Yankees, and he even hosted his own Adult Swim web series, “Carl’s Stone Cold Lock of the Century of the Week,” just to yell his sports opinions at the internet.

On the music side, Carl is a classic rock lifer. His rotation includes:

• Boston, especially “More Than a Feeling,” which he considers the greatest song in the universe
• Foreigner
• Loverboy
• Judas Priest
• Krokus
• Bryan Adams
• Led Zeppelin, plus Ted Nugent, whose tour loincloth he wears on laundry day

Carl and Frylock

Of the three Aqua Teens, Carl likes Frylock the most, though it took a while to get there. Early on he mostly finds Frylock annoying, but from Season 3 he starts hanging around the trio far more often.

• In “Intervention,” Frylock bails Carl out of jail, then refuses to fly him to Melon Shakers because of how reckless he is being, and stages an intervention to sober him up.
• In “Party All the Time,” Carl feels bad when he learns Frylock has cancer, then almost immediately asks him when he is going to die.
• Most of his frustration with Frylock comes from being the default test subject for Frylock’s inventions, which tend to blow up in Carl’s face.

Carl and Master Shake

Carl saves his real hatred for Master Shake. Their relationship is closer to open warfare than friendship, mostly because Shake keeps breaking into Carl’s house, vandalizing his stuff, and taunting him for sport.

• Carl regularly threatens Shake, sometimes with a shotgun.
• In “Bookie,” when Meatwad orders Carl to bust Shake’s kneecap, Carl says it is his pleasure.
• They do get rare friendly moments, like helping Shake become “cool” in “The Dudies” and enjoying a Labor Day party in “Revenge of the Trees.”
• In “Freda,” Carl proves there is a line even he will not cross, refusing to murder Shake just to sleep with a robot.

Carl and Meatwad

Carl cares about Meatwad the least on paper, yet somehow spends the most time with him. Early episodes show Carl avoiding physical contact with Meatwad because of the mess he leaves behind.

• In “Super Bowl,” Carl happily tries to manipulate Meatwad for his own gain.
• Even so, he is kinder to Meatwad than to the others, and will sometimes stand up for him against Shake’s bullying.

Carl’s Criminal Record

For a guy who insists he is the normal one, Carl has quite the rap sheet. A few of the highlights:

• Assault: He tricks Shake into beating himself with a baseball bat in “Unremarkable Voyage,” and works him over with a tire iron in “Space Conflict From Beyond Pluto.”
• Drunk driving: The arrest in “Intervention” that kicks off his whole sobriety arc.
• Eco-terrorism: He and Shake dump a huge container of fry oil in the forest in “Revenge of the Trees.”
• Murder: He fires a shotgun at Shake in “Deleted Scenes.”
• Resisting arrest: In “Lasagna,” he tries to sprint past an electric fence while under house arrest, all for a plate of Shake’s lasagna.
• Threats: In “Ezekiel,” he promises to shoot the title character with a shotgun if he ever comes back.

Fast Facts About Carl Brutananadilewski

A few extra pieces of trivia that make Carl even better once you know them:

• His car, “2 Wycked,” is a red Dodge Stealth modeled on co-creator Matt Maiellaro’s real-life car, and like everything in the show it was drawn using Photoshop paint tools.
• Carl has the highest death count of anyone in the series, but he has appeared in the fewest episodes of the main cast.
• He makes a voice cameo in “Grand Theft Auto V” as an angry caller on the in-game radio station FlyLo FM.
• Outside the show, Carl has fronted ads for Carl’s Jr. and Slim Jim, and even teamed up with Meatwad to promote “Deadpool 2.”
• Dave Willis once described Carl as the “basic stereotype of males in general,” which is either an insult or a compliment depending on the day.

Who Voices Carl Brutananadilewski?

Carl is voiced by Dave Willis, the show’s co-creator, who pulls double and triple duty across the cast. Along with Carl, Willis also voices Meatwad and the Mooninite Ignignokt, which means a huge chunk of the show’s best lines all come out of the same guy.

Willis co-created Aqua Teen Hunger Force with Matt Maiellaro after the two met writing for Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and he has voiced Carl for the character’s entire run.

If you want the full rundown of his credits, his IMDb page covers everything from Squidbillies to his turn as Barry Dylan on Archer.

His raspy, permanently fed-up delivery is so tied to Carl that I cannot picture the character sounding like anyone else.

He shares a neighborhood with a milkshake who wants him dead and a box of fries who keeps using him as a lab rat, and yet he is still the most human character on the show.

Is Carl a favorite of yours?

Drop a comment and let me know.