Howard

Howard is already installed in the house when the new students move in, and he never quite leaves the group's radar afterwards. Odd, blunt and seemingly immune to social cues, he says exactly what he thinks, keeps stranger habits than his flatmates, and treats the house's chaos as ordinary background to his own private world.

McHugh plays him utterly straight, which is the joke: Howard never signals that he knows he's strange, so every deadpan non sequitur lands harder than a punchline ever could. Against the show's more calculating characters, his total lack of guile makes him oddly endearing, and increasingly indispensable to the ensemble's rhythm.