Mae "Maeby" Fünke

Maeby is the Bluth family's teenage schemer, a deadpan cousin drifting through a household too self-absorbed to notice her. Neglected by parents chasing their own vanities, she entertains herself with cons and shortcuts—forging permission slips, dodging school, angling for a job she has no business holding—all with a shrug and a smirk.

Alia Shawkat plays boredom as a survival skill, delivering absurd lies in the same flat register as everything else, which makes the show's escalating nonsense feel oddly plausible. Maeby's neglect is played for comedy, not pathos, but Shawkat lets a flicker of real loneliness show underneath the hustle, which is what makes her funny rather than just cynical.