While sizing up the pins and making his way to bowl on his turn, Mac chants the mantra “stride, stride, stride, execute,” taking three steps forward as he says “stride,” and then he launches the ball. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the same little chant he used in the classic season 6 episode “Mac and Charlie: White Trash” when he and Charlie got stuck in the bottom of an abandoned pool and he attempted to run up the wall with a sweet flip. Mac’s faith in his own athletic skills and martial arts abilities has been a running punchline in the series since the earliest seasons, but his failed attempt to run up the pool wall is one of the funniest bits. The failure even leads to Mac wanting a pair of cutoff jean shorts like Charlie so that he would have a fuller range of motion to run, which is its own great moment. 

The characters of “It’s Always Sunny” are very set in their ways and will never really change, and the tiny character moments that stay consistent, like Mac’s chant, help make them feel more like real people. They aren’t using these lines like catchphrases, but instead insert them organically, like people actually tend to re-use the same vocabulary and phrases. “Stride, stride, stride, execute!” isn’t a successful mantra by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a funny one. 

New episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” premiere Wednesdays on FXX and stream the next day on Hulu.