How I Met Your Father Main Characters, Ranked By Funniness
Hulu's How I Met Your Father is a wonderful nostalgia tour for fans of the CBS original, How I Met Your Mother, incorporating its premise and comedic style directly from the Josh Radnor series.
Its strongest selling point is its perfectly-selected cast, helmed by the established Hilary Duff and supported by five lesser-known but equally-competent actors. The characters range from amusing to hysterical, and their combined antics make for twenty-two minutes of pure enjoyment each Monday night that tempt viewers into believing they are spending time with actual friends of their own.
9 Ian (Daniel Augustin)
Ian - a mysterious and charming marine biologist - is Sophie's first love of the series, with the two enjoying a near-perfect Tinder date (one of How I Met Your Father's best rom-com tropes) before Ian reveals that he is moving to Australia and effectively ends the relationship before it can truly begin.
While he is one of the most mature and responsible members of the cast, he occasionally lets his guard down enough to draw a laugh. His text exchanges with Sophie in which they take pictures of Jason Momoa look-alikes and pair them with captions related to their identifying attributes (such as Jason Mimosa) is one of the highlights of the early episodes of the show.
8 Drew (Josh Peck)
Drew is similar to Ian in his reserved and buttoned-up demeanor, but he occasionally shows a looser and more exciting side of his personality.
The scene in which he performs the song and dance to the early 2000s Christina Aguilera hit Dirrty on the roof of Sophie's apartment building showed audiences that he shared a sense of childlike levity with Sophie and her circle of friends, even if his prestigious job and type-A disposition prevent him from displaying it to the same extent as them.
7 Sophie (Hilary Duff)
Lead character Sophie often serves as the foil to her more-eccentric friends, but the writers have still provided her with plenty of hilarious scenes of her own.
Her reliance on the Train song Drops of Jupiter to soothe her in times of distress, ranging from breakups to issues with her laundry, is a brilliant bit that a lesser show would not have provided to its relatively put-together star, and such scenes render Sophie a hysterically-dynamic character rather than the bland glue for a funnier cast.
6 Future Sophie (Kim Cattrall)
Just as How I Met Your Mother was narrated by an older version of the main character reporting from the distant future, the Hulu series features a middle-aged version of Hilary Duff's character recounting her youthful misadventures to her child.
Kim Cattrall plays this role expertly with a level of humor that rivals that of the main cast. By responding to her son's complaints about the length of her story with "I gave you life, you give me one night," she established herself as a comedic heavy-hitter rather than a dry non-factor in the series.
5 Ellen (Tien Tran)
Ellen is somewhat of an outsider amongst the main characters, as she moved to New York City from the rural Midwest at the beginning of the series and had no connection to the other leads aside from a distant one with Jesse. But Ellen refuses to be overlooked, and her sharp wit prevents that from being the case.
During an argument with Jesse in which she explains how a character from 7th Heaven would be her ideal brother, she fails to mention that she is metaphorically alluding to a character from the show when she says that she wants to receive a talking-to for huffing, hilariously confusing Jesse before she explains the misunderstanding. The show's relative lack of How I Met Your Mother easter eggs has been compensated for, at least in part, by the wit of characters such as Ellen.
4 Sid (Suraj Sharma)
Rather than allowing the best friend trope from sitcoms to render him two-dimensional in his relationship with Jesse, Sid is a hysterical character in his own right. His easy frustration is played for comedic effect rather than to minimize him, and his outbursts make for some of the funniest moments of the series.
While attempting to have virtual sex with his fiancée from across the country, an episode of the New York Times podcast The Daily begins to play from his phone, prompting him to scream to host Michael Barbaro, "There's nothing else I need to know, Michael!" Sid's personality easily makes him one of the series' funniest characters.
3 Jesse (Chris Lowell)
Briefly floated as Sophie's potential love interest but quickly given his own romantic prospects and unrelated storylines, Jesse is in many respects the heart and soul of How I Met Your Father. His bleak worldview and dour personality are endearing rather than offputting thanks to his undeniable charm and sharp wit, and he manages to crack up viewers even when his comments land flat with the person to whom he delivers them.
A prime example is when he strikes up a conversation with a woman at a bar by confidently saying, "I think you're gonna like me," only to quickly modify the statement by clarifying that some people find him "charming," while others find him to be "a lot."
2 Valentina (Francia Raisa)
Valentina is a hefty dose of iron confidence and dogged determination, and her assertiveness and extraversion often translate to golden one-liners and humorous situations. In an attempt to encourage Charlie to bond with Sid and Jesse at a club, she attempts to bribe the bouncer into reserving the best available table for her group by giving him vitamin C brightening serum.
Only a character with Valentina's astronomically-high level of self-assuredness could even attempt such a questionable move - all while making audiences laugh in the process. Valentina's humor, paired with her friendship with Sophie, helps to make How I Met Your Father rank among Hilary Duff's best TV shows.
1 Charlie (Tom Ainsley)
The sole Brit in a cast of Americans, Charlie is How I Met Your Father's equivalent of Seinfeld's Kramer or Friends' Chandler - a goofy and eccentrically-unique outsider who commands his own scenes by the power of his natural, reflexive wit. Much of his humor comes from his near-constant state of disorientation due to his removal from the life of privilege and luxury that he only recently left.
An iconic Charlie bit related to this out-of-touch theme involves him showing Valentina an unboxed, raw chicken that he bought from the store, while obliviously adding that he has "no idea what happens next."