Delinquent high-school student Dawn Davenport goes berserk when her parents refuse to buy her the shoes she wants for Christmas because "nice girls don't wear cha-cha heels": she destroys presents, topples a Christmas tree on her mother, and flees the house.

The majority of the film consists of Randy, Carl, and Dehling reciting their separate lovesick accounts of their experiences with Jewel, each narrating over what they consider to be the real version of the recent events.

Peggy Gravel, a neurotic, delusional, suburban housewife, and her overweight nurse, Grizelda Brown, go on the lam after Grizelda smothers Peggy's husband, Bosley, to death.

Housewife Francine Fishpaw watches her upper-middle-class family's life crumble in their suburban Baltimore home.

Paul Bland is a balding wine snob who works at a cheap wine shop. His attractive wife Mary is a nurse who is routinely groped by hospital patients.

Lady Divine is the owner and operator of a show titled The Cavalcade of Perversion, a free exhibit of various perversions and fetish acts and obscenities, such as the "Puke Eater".

The people of Harford Road are firmly divided into two camps: the neuters, the puritanical residents who despise anything even remotely carnal; and the perverts, a group of sex addicts whose unique fetishes have all been brought to the fore by accidental concussions.

An anonymous flasher exposes himself to shoppers in the Forest Ridge Mall parking lot.

Ricky, a 23-year-old psychiatric patient, has been deemed cured and is released from a mental institution.

FBI agent Copeland brothers, Kevin and Marcus Anthony II, try to bust a drug dealer selling their product disguised as ice cream, but they botch it when a genuine ice-cream salesman shows up first.

Lovers Lula and Sailor are separated after he is jailed for killing a man who attacked him with a knife; the assailant, Bobby Ray Lemon, was hired by Lula's mother, Marietta Fortune.

Beverly Sutphin appears to be a typical suburban housewife living with her dentist husband, Eugene, and their teenage children, Misty and Chip, in the suburbs of Baltimore.

Marty is a struggling writer who dreams of finishing his screenplay, Seven Psychopaths.

Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde) is a witty, charismatic serial killer who holds forth at length about whatever comes to mind, be it the "craft" of murder, the failings of architecture, his own poetry, or classical music, which he plays with his girlfriend Valerie (Valérie Parent).

Joey Boca (Kevin Kline) is the owner of a pizza parlor located in Tacoma, Washington, and has been married to Rosalie (Tracey Ullman) for years.

Millionaire Sam Stone (Danny DeVito) hates his wife Barbara (Bette Midler).

In 1975, Duncan's, a fast-food restaurant owned by Norm Duncan in the tiny hamlet of Scotland, Pennsylvania, hosts a variety of workers.

Nicholas "Oz" Oseransky (Matthew Perry) is a likable Quebec dentist from Chicago, but is hated by his wife Sophie (Rosanna Arquette) and mother-in-law (Carmen Ferland).

Julian (John Paul Tremblay) plans to steal money from an automated teller machine (ATM).

Buddy Ackerman, an influential movie mogul, hires Guy, a naïve young writer, as his assistant.