Overly Polite Pals

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Known in the entertainment industry as the Alphonse and Gaston Routine (named after the "Alphonse and Gaston" comic strip by Frederick Burr Opper), this is a comedy trope from the days of Vaudeville. It's when two characters are overly polite to each other, often in a bumbling way and almost always done comically. Often these two will be of a lower class but wish to dress and act in an upper-class manner and therefore take things to extremes. Often one will offer the other his arm if they are walking somewhere together, especially someplace fancy. Almost Always Male, and occasionally a homosexual subtext is inferred.

Often this routine involves a door or gate the pair will need to walk through, each of them insisting the other goes first (and eventually they both do simultaneously, and collide). This can also often lead to long lines of increasingly impatient and irritable people forming behind both characters who start urging them to Get On With It Already. Occasionally the intent will be that neither really wants to proceed first, or at all, wanting his partner to endure whatever horrors might lie beyond the door first.

Since the comic strip originated in 1901 and was quickly also picked up in vaudeville routines, this trope is Older Than Television. In modern times, however, this has become a bit of a Forgotten Trope, though it still occasionally crops up.

Compare Politeness Judo, where this is being done as part of a passive aggressive fight.

Examples of Overly Polite Pals include:

Comics

• Alphonse and Gaston themselves are the Trope Makers.
• Gaston Lagaffe has a strip where Fantasio encourages Gaston to be more polite. This leads to a major traffic jam when he and another car driver refuse to go first into a street, blocking up every car behind them.
• Achille Talon has one where both continuously insist the other go first, but here the stalemate goes on until they're both late, leading to a Big Ball of Violence. Amusingly, this came about after Achille read a book on etiquette, and it turns out the other guy was the author.

Film

• The Three Stooges often did an overly-bumbling version of this whenever they wish to attempt to blend in with high society.
• The Blues Brothers invoke this trope when they go into Mr. Fabulous' restaurant, taking each other's arms.
• Hope and Crosby had been known to invoke the trope on occasion in their Road To... pictures.
• The Marx Brothers give a nod to the trope in the Napoleon scene of the 1923 film, "I'll Say She Is". In it, Groucho (as Napoleon) calls for his "faithful advisers, François, Alphonse and Gaston."

Jokes and Humor

• There's a joke about two frogs who are about to enter a kitchen but say "After you, Alphonse; No, after you, Gaston." (It's a reference to the French love of frogs' legs.)
• There is a joke about a woman who's worried her child might take after her excessively rude husband, so she has some hypnosis treatment during her pregnancy. When the time comes, she has difficulty giving birth. The doctors check her womb... one guess what they hear from the twins inside.

Western Animation

• Warner Brothers' "Goofy Gophers", Mac and Tosh, are the Trope Codifiers.
• Tom, Jerry and Butch the dog do the routine in the 1948 short, "The Truce Hurts."
• Aang and Sokka briefly in the episode "The City of Walls and Secrets", as they are trying (and failing) to behave like high society folk.
• Chip and Dale (the first animated shorts, not on the ReTooled Series, where they acted more like Vitriolic Best Buds), act this way towards each other, always praising each other, and trying to give the other the opportunity do first whatever mischievous act they were up to.
• Baloo and Kit have one of these moments in one episode of Tale Spin.
• Family Guy: The "Even Couple".
• In the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode, "Multiple Meats", Shake splits Meatwad in half with a sword. The two Meatwad halves survive, and pull this routine going into the front door of the house - for several seasons (as we see sun, rain, leaves and snow fall while they continue "after you"-ing each other), driving both Shake and Frylock crazy.

Web Original

• Played with in How Top Gun Should Have Ended.

Real Life

• When two rival countries or politicians are being overly diplomatic to each other, it's often said they are "doing an Alphonse and Gaston routine."
• Sportscasters have also used the term "Alphonse and Gaston exchanges" during baseball broadcasts, when two outfielders go after the ball and it falls in between them for a base hit.
• Shirley Jackson used Gaston's Catch Phrase as the title of her short story, "After You, My Dear Alphonse," published in the January 16, 1943 issue of The New Yorker.