Mr Plow

Goldeneye on the N64 is a good game, but you couldn’t pay me to play it today. Was I wrong about it in the past or did something suck the good out of it? Is the good Goldeneye 64 the same good in the good Half Life 2? When I say that season 4 is a “good” season of The Simpsons, the word “good” is going to stand out more than the essay it’s in. Is it as good as a later season? Is it as good as a good episode of House? Is it as good as a sandwich?

It’s tough to compare long essays. In fact, doing so would probably take an even longer essay. Single words or other basic symbols are much easier. A long essay could adequately answer all these questions, but a lot of people are going to get stuck on the word “good”. 

Mr Plow is a fascinating episode. At once genius and garbage, it’s an excellent case study in the ways narrative and comedy interact, and why discussions around good media are the way they are. 

The garbage will be addressed first as there is an almost reasonable explanation for it. Behind the scenes, a cluster of writer contracts ended at once, leaving the writer’s retreat sparsely populated. Because of this, the story was entirely pitched by one man, John Vitti, with his script undergoing some late changes, including swapping in Barney as Homer’s rival from the original choice, Lenny. The result is a story that was produced under less-than-ideal circumstances, and it shows. The episode is filled with logic gaps, poor attempts at paving over them, and an ending that screams “fuck it”. 

Starting from the least excusable, the god ending is so bad I’m surprised Groening didn’t have it cut. God’s intrusions into reality must be explainable phenomena, dreams, visions, or in otherwise non-canonical spaces like the Halloween stories. God can talk to Homer in his dreams, it can manifest as the little cloud protecting Ned’s house because that’s just a fortunate accident, but god can’t affect the ending of a regular canon story. 

Even ignoring this, it would have been easy to simply have both ploughs get avalanched into the ravine, and have Barney pay Homer’s debt as a thanks for saving his life. That was my first idea and took all of 3 seconds. This story doesn’t even deal with the fact that Homer and Marge’s cars are still trashed, which was the motivating issue of the narrative. I’m willing to concede that the general pressure of a depleted writer’s room, having to solo the plot, and various late changes can stifle creativity, but this is still pretty grim.

The next most noticeable fault is the ad. As a part of Homer’s buffoon nature, he must be comically bad at everything. This provides the obvious comedy and locks him into his lot in life. Homer’s purchase of the plough is obviously stupid, predicated as it is on a guy doing the whip-crack sound effect, and the narrative emphasises this via his scene with Marge in the driveway. Stupid buffoon decisions can’t pay off like this, so naturally, Homer has to struggle to get business, which leads to the ad. The ad being Homer’s idea means it must also be stupid, and so it’s a silly homemade joke on a UHF channel at 3am. It then cuts to a montage of Homer heroically ploughing driveways and getting the key to the city because… The ad worked? 

It’s an ugly gap, but one that skates by better than the ending due to some narrative sleight-of-hand. The scenes don’t logically relate, but they feel like they should because of their positioning and because the bounding frame of the narrative insists that positioning has logical meaning. Combine this with the episode’s pace moving past it quickly, as opposed to the focal ending, and it can be missed. A neat technique if you’re in a pinch, but I wouldn’t do it in anything I had my name on.  

The final point is the issue of the episode’s antagonist, and he is an antagonist, Barney. Homer’s not bad at his job, is depicted as earning his money (even if he scrapes some asphalt), is given a heroic montage, and is nothing but positively inspiring when Barney mopes about his lot in life. He’s the good guy here, so for his failure to be the unjust event the story needs for its protagonist, it must be perceived as unfair. It can’t just be the result of Barney being better at being a plough guy, so Barney is shooting out tyres and destroying Homer’s business, which is entirely out of sync both with his character and the narrative weighting. Now the episode needs to create internal validation for the thing it’s using to validate something else. A needlessly complex machine. 

The situation wouldn’t have been helped if they’d kept Lenny, either, as it doesn’t address the narrative balance because he’s also Homer’s friend. Having the opposition be someone more comfortable with antagonist status (like Burns running a town plough monopoly) or emphasizing Homer’s oafish character traits by having him scam customers would have functioned better. Even just having Homer lord his success over the bar patrons would have created a tighter internal motivation for Barney than Homer giving him a beer decades ago. This is an example of a very loaded hinge being far too weak for what it has to do and is the kind of carelessness with character that can cause destructive Flanderisation.

All this said, it is brilliantly funny and is the first episode to really engage the dream-like surreality that defines the best of this period. 

Dreams are the surreal result of stray brain activity being processed by the part of your brain that coheres reality from chaotic sensory data as said part gets closer to waking. This is how things we know as nonsense can feel utterly real when we’re experiencing them. A similar process sees constellations in stars, faces in wood knots, and is frequently at work in narrative. 

Narratives skip an awful lot of material that is technically logically relevant to the plot, be it obvious things like months of training compressed into a montage, or the tiny unnoticed things like travel. It seems obvious now that this shouldn’t be an issue, but there were initial concerns that, with only theatre’s unmoving stage as precedent, people wouldn’t be able to connect events separated by a cut as being related to each other. It was a baseless concern, as the human brain is a narrative machine. People don’t see films as collections of cuts, but as a whole thing, a thing with a title whose thingness forces a connection between all its contained elements. It takes a lot to convince the brain that the things it’s seeing in a film aren’t logically narratively connected, a point you can see reflected in the content and structure of non-narrative video art.

Narratives leverage this forced connection to create innate explanations for skipped material that requires work to disrupt. Malcolm and his family can be in a location that isn’t their home without us wondering how they got there because we can assume they drove using one of the occasionally seen cars common to a 2000s, lower-middle class family. For this assumption to become problematic, the story would have to spend time explaining why the cars aren’t available or have them somewhere beyond the believable reach of one. There are lots of these both in the production and reception of narrative largely unconsciously because of that innateness. 

Mr Plow, blurs from Carnival of the Stars to Homer’s conversation with his insurance agent, to a pig giving him the eye, to Crazy Vaclav’s, to Adam West jiggling at an auto show, all in 180 seconds. None of it feels like the mad scatter of video art, though, because it’s bound by the thingness of a show and the story of “having to suddenly get a replacement car”.

It's easy to present something as surreal when you abandon logical and spatial connections. Doing so while maintaining those connections requires utilising an overlooked, secondary characteristic of abandoned logical and spatial connections: speed. By pulling so much out, Mr Plow can mimic dreamlike speed without sacrificing logical coherence, resulting in a sense of the uncannily strange permeating the opening act. It also means the scene structure patterns begin to mimic the normally far quicker joke structure patterns.

Any single scene or series of scenes in a comedy will typically have more than one joke in them. The scene has work to do, the jokes have work to do, and you can imagine these as separate sinewaves with the joke patterns being a much higher frequency. They interact and play off each other, but because single gag slow builds are rare (and ones that abandon all other jokes to span one or more scenes are rarer still) the waves never exactly line up.

That 180 second miracle run is the result of the narrative and joke structure sinewaves lining up. It’s the impossible geometry of intertwined narrative, set-up, and punchline where you don’t know what is a joke and what isn’t because it’s not being spoiled by a big, structural sign saying, “JOKE HAPPENING”. The necessary joke structures do exist but are invisible when matched with the narrative wave, snapping into view for only the time it takes for the punchline to happen. It’s the freedom of the Family Guy cutaways without the disjointedness that forces recognition of the artificiality which gives it all away.

Across this series, I’ve written about how the best jokes of the show are usually doing a lot at once. The actual structure of intended meanings in the joke will be a complex pattern of interactions that hide extra layers of comic surprise to multiply effects and enhance the end result. But even the best of these is a painting within a frame. A masterpiece you can hear about, go and observe. That 3 minutes is a painting you hallucinate in the middle of a religious experience. It’s the series’ defining trait, a thing many struggle to put their finger on, why the episodes can withstand so many rewatches, and whose impostures are only the hyperactive babble of mistaking a complex pattern for chaos. 

It’s also something that later episodes will do even better.

Other episodes have had mixes of bad and good in various measures, but few have had such stark a difference as Mr Plow. The bad parts are bad, but the good parts are very good and relate more to the show’s overall goal than the bad. Is it a 10/10 comedy with a 4/10 plot? Does that add up to a 7/10 episode? Is a 7/10 good? The simplest answer to these questions is that they are the wrong questions. This isn’t written as a readymade opinion to be copypasted into social media replies, it’s an examination of a machine where the question, “Is it good?” can only be answered with a longish essay. 

Yours in calling for flurries of passion followed by extended periods of gettin’ it on, Gabriel. 

The First Annual Gabriel Morton Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Simpsonness

Best Line.

Hooooeeeee, this section is going to be a workout. This is the beginning of a period that will see the show generate its best lines and most lasting quotes. 

The final elements are coming together to bring this about. Young, strange comedy nerd writers have a defined but flexible reality to play with allowing for the kind of joke depth you need to allow lines to skip playfully about the surface. 

The first runners up there are a pair from the ever-reliable Troy McClure via the eternally missed Phil Hartman. The emergence of the omnipresent bit players like Troy is a result of the animated reality level settling into position and the expansion of Springfield into a character itself. Now, Troy exists within Springfield as a character, but also as a trait within the character of the town. Coupled with his D-List desperation, he is able to appear pretty much wherever one of the more quotable episodes would want to put him with very little friction or exposition. 

“We’re not just for lepers anymore!”

“Dial M for Murderousness” 

So, of course he is hosting Springfield’s “Carnival of the Stars” (based on real thing that happened, Circus of the Stars), on stilts, from Molokai Island, where he declares, “We’re not just for lepers anymore”. At its base, it’s a simple contrast gag where the tone clashes with the content, but it gets a little boost from Hartman’s wonderful delivery and the use of “We’re” instead of the expected “It’s”. “It’s” would suggest it was something Troy was saying about the island, saying “We’re” means it’s not just some off-the-cuff statement from a D-list celebrity, but a slogan given to him by some Island authority. 

The great thing about a D-List actor character is he always has a list of stupid film knockoffs which never fail to amuse. The bulk of them are references to films that do exist, including this runner up, “Dial M for Murderousness” which wins over “The Erotic Adventures of Hercules” for its sheer, strained desperation for a connection. The Hercules film is a parody of soft porn flicks that do exist, just starring Zorro or Robinson Crusoe, and if you told me there was one starring Herc I wouldn’t doubt you for a second. Perfectly legitimate. “Dial M” stands out for the grammatical stretching to get something that sounds like “Murder” be legally distinct. I can picture the title being laboriously arrived at on-the-fly by a desperate producer in front of an irritated lawyer. 

An element of effective worldbuilding is treating the place as though it’s lived in via idioms the audience has to intuit. This forces exploration and connection of presented world elements in a way that will feel natural compared to direct exposition. This same idea is at work in comedy and the next two runners up illustrate how it can be used for world and character in an amusing way. 

When Bart says, “They’ll be chewing on him for a while”, while flipping away from Krusty being mauled by three Siberian tigers, it’s delivered in a way that makes the behaviour expected and the line a cliché. Naturally, no delinquent ten-year-old is going to change the channel from a TV blooper of a clown being mauled by tigers, and “They’ll be chewing on him for a while” was, at least prior to this, not a clichéd idiom. What makes it stand out is the effort spent to make it not stand out. Funny though the treatment of it as prosaic. The line became a house standard to express boredom with something, but I’ll still never change the channel when a clown is being mauled. 

The second is Barney’s, “We’ve been looking for a project to do together for a while”, when Moe asks how he got Linda Ronstadt to do his Plow King commercial. One of my favourite ways to torment children is to answer a question in a way that literally answers it but doesn’t address the actual intended point of the question. It’s a great way to illustrate the complex nature of meaning and annoy a child at the same time. Barney’s response perfectly answers the question Moe asked, how he and Linda wound up doing the ad, but not the underlying premise of the question, how the hell a bum barfly would have a working relationship with a multi-Grammy award winning recording artist. It's a great structure with good parts and quality delivery.

Growing up in public housing, I’ve got a soft spot for jokes about how shitty your hometown is, and Eastern European/Former Soviet states are the kings of this. This is why the next three are all from Crazy Vaclav. 

Specificity is a great sly comedy tool because its use can be both technically correct and innocuous while contextually irregular. When unexpected, it stands out in the mind and creates a weird bump in the line of a sentence. If you track the line of a joke geometrically, points of specificity act as distant surfaces for the line of a joke to bounce off of. The distance between these points gets covered quickly, and the end result works sort of like the disorienting jerks of a theme park ride, imparting added surprise elements to the gag. 

When Vaclav tells Homer “She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene” we get a flawless demonstration of these principles. Hectares and kerosene are both perfectly normal words and can even feel like they fit in the sentence regarding the car. Cars go units of measurement on tanks of stuff. The sentence prosody fits. But hectares are a unit of area, not distance, and while you are still thinking about this, you’re told the vehicle runs on kerosene? What the hell runs on kero? Combined with Vaclav’s vague cultural heritage, and you get a pinball machine journey through the delicately absurd that speaks to a whole mad world you’re ignorant of. 

Speaking of, Vaclav’s next line, “it no longer exists” relates directly to said world. Being girt by sea, Australia imparts a sense of permanence to the idea of a nation. It is the shape, the whole thing, how could this cease to exist? A child I went to school with, Jason, was a little more familiar with this concept as he was from what was being referred to at the time as “The Former Yugoslavia”. 

Vaclav lingers on the “it” in “it no longer exists” as a way of delaying the inevitable and rushes through the “no longer exists” as a way of distracting from the obvious. One would expect this sort of thing to be done about a manufacturer that has gone out of business. A common occurrence and one that doesn’t bode well either for the quality of the car and the chances of aftermarket service. But to do it for a whole nation is another piece of strange specificity that punctures the sense of vast permanence a state imparts and gives the line its strength. 

Vaclav’s final contribution is another fantastic line and the first runner-up. As Homer is trying to leave the yard and struggling to get the car started, Vaclav gives him a push and shouts, “Put it in H!” 

The H stands for неутрален (neutralen), Bulgarian for Neutral, which is what you have to put shitty little cars into to push-start the things. The line itself is another example of the comic principles already outlined but tops the others through the H detail and the breadth of the line’s utility in the real world. Things go measurements on tanks of other measurements and things can cease to exist, but H is not a state one can occupy. Having the flow of reality line up to make screaming that the absolutely correct thing to shout is fine work and leads to a line that one can shout whenever someone is trying to get anything to work.

But the winner is...

"It's a pornography store. I was buying pornography."

I’m going to say it every time it comes up: Dan Castellaneta is an amazing voice actor whose work as Homer is grossly underappreciated. He can shift Homer from serious feeling to comic bellowing to terrified shrieking without ever making either state feel out of character or forced. Little details, like the voice Homer puts on when he wants to hide his voice or the differences between the forms of his inner voices that operate as independent entities aren’t easy and add so much. 

Homer talks to his own brain a bit, and the brain is usually trying to help ol’ Homer improve his current situation. The brain is unsurprisingly smarter and talks to Homer in a calmer mode of speech, like when it’s explaining to him that money can be exchanged for goods and services. It’s almost like an actually useful version of Clippy. 

I have loved this line since it first aired, for reasons that will be discussed, but one thing that hadn’t occurred to me until recent rewatchings, and one of the reasons it won, was that this was not The Brain’s line. The Brain does what it usually does, advises Homer in a way to help him get his insurance claim filed by not revealing that he was drinking before the accident. All of which is a level of awareness and planning that Homer typically lacks. But then The Brain panics, what else is open that late at night? 

The Homer/Brain separation is not a static one. Sometimes Homer is almost entirely in The Brain, like when he’s trying to figure out if what was said about him by Moe in The Springfield Connection was negative or not. Usually, the Brain and Homer speak to each other as equals in a partnership where one is largely silent. The moment starts off as though it’s going to be one of the latter, but as The Brain panics, the emotions draw The Homer into itself, much like around Moe’s card table. Both Homer and The Brain are in his head. There is nothing left to speak and yet, speak he does. 

When Homer speaks to his Brain, he speaks to it as he would anyone else in room. When his brain speaks to him, it speaks largely normally, if with degrees of intelligence and calm that Homer can’t even aspire to. Neither of these are the way he reads this line. 

The line is two sentences with four words each. Merely a couplet. The principle of technical specificity is at work here too, via the never used like this but technically correct “pornography” over any number of common slangs or euphemisms, but here they also serve the idea that Nothing is speaking here. Nobody says “pornography” like that, let alone twice in as many sentences. It’s close to over-enunciated but not and can only be described as the perfect pronunciation of “pornography”, untouched by the corruption of human awareness or social cues. 

Each attempt to categorise the tone of the delivery fails. Reading the line yourself reveals nothing but two short sentences bereft of comic merit. The kind of thing you’d read in machine translated manuals for knock-off appliances. Attempting to decode or analyse it simply turns us into The Brain, alien from its origin and so doomed to only marvel at it from afar. 

Expecting a voice actor to do this is absurd. Directing this line read is a fantasy. Castellaneta can so embody a character that he can become One with the entirety of the universe for a split second just to ensure that Homer really sounds like he doesn’t know where that answer came from. Buddha nature as a stunt. 

If the universe has cheat codes, this is one of them, and I’ll go to my grave trying to figure out what it does.  

Best Sight Gag

A lot of the more obvious entries here were too wrapped up in overall jokes, and the episode’s dull shot style didn’t lend itself to many defining sight gags, but there are still some solid entries. 

 

First-up is the name of Crazy Zaclav’s business, the “Place of Automobiles”. This represents one of my favourite things in language: words that mean the same thing that don’t exactly mean the same thing in a sentence. “Place of Automobiles” is an exactly flawless description of a car yard and yet, with a little incongruous formality, it sounds absurd. The staggering volume of words in English, along with their various origins, lends it to this sort of thing.

The next runner-up is another suspicious car business, Fourth Reich Motors and their crash test footage. I haven’t seen an advertisement in decades, but back in the 90s, these sorts of ads were frequent, so much so that crash test dummies got their own cartoon series. The footage was always extremely dramatic, to emphasise the difference of European safety standards, with the softening factor being the clearly artificial dummies. As this poor dummy opens the rear door and reaches desperately for help that isn’t coming, the cultural weight of all this period’s car safety commercials comes crashing down. One is impaled. One is almost beheaded. There’s no blood. It should be safe, but it isn’t. This exhibit is closed.

The next runner-up is the cut to the overhead shot of Homer, the wrecked cars, and his family staring at the scene from the doorway. The overhead view is a shot alien to normal human life, and when combined with the lack of visible faces, creates an alienating effect from the characters. The humour is in the totality of the moment, the reality of Homer being happy he wrecked his “opponent’s” car while not realising he’s in front of his own home. We are above him, gazing down at a fool whose depths we know we will never sink to. 

 

The next runner-up is a fairly simple one, but a nonetheless solid entry that emphasises important elements of reference jokes. Homer driving across the rickety bridge, only to see the large, new, perfectly constructed one just some fifty metres away is an overt reference to the 1977 William Friedkin film, “Sorcerer”, about a group of men transporting dangerously unstable TNT across dangerously unstable South American jungle. The scene being parodied is an incredibly tense one, owing to it being actual trucks driven over an actual rickety rope bridge by an actually terrified Roy Scheider. 

While not shot-for-shot, the reference uses some synth music, referring to Sorcerer’s use of German electronic band Tangerine Dream for the soundtrack, to cement the overt quality of the reference, as that kind of music never otherwise occurs in the show. 

The laziest form of intertextual gag are the jingling keys ones of a familiar thing being recreated whole. This bit actually uses the reference in the intended fashion, though, as a set-up with an actual punchline, with even the pseudo-Tangerine synth peaking with the reveal of the modern bridge. References like this should be used like a custom chip on a board that executes a function in a way that allows for a complex occurrence without cluttering the primary run of code, and this is a great example of that in action. 

 

The final runner-up is a contrast to the overhead shot of the family staring at the crash, it’s Homer, Bart, and Lisa staring at a jiggling Adam West. Adam West performing the Batusi to his own muttered music is internally funny and would carry with a similar wide overhead as the crash reaction, but West’s monologue to himself with corresponding 60s Batman Dutch tilt draw the viewer in to his perspective and mind, so the reaction shot mirrors it to emphasise the social inappropriateness of the behaviour that an overhead/omniscient perspective would only suggest.

Bart and Lisa’s eyes are that Simpson neutral, loaded with so much and just waiting for the right fuse.  The fuses here are their mouths, gaping in stunned silence at something they still think should have greater meaning based on their father’s introduction. Unlike the agog children, Homer’s teeth show in a placating smile with his slightly upturned brow, the expression a struggling, run-down remnant of the delight of moments ago.

Not daring to look away lest the maniac charge. 

Watching Adam West jiggle away from an omniscient view would ensconce the viewer in a protective distance from the shame and dance dangerously close to sympathetic. The shot position from behind West highlights his embarrassing jiggling and how far into his own mind West has fallen while the Simpson faces trap us in the sympathetic shame one would feel as part of this scene. 

But the winner is...

The Greeks, now there were some people who could really go on about the beauty of the male form. Decades of, “lol, gay” has dented our ability to appreciate it, and while that’s there, I can also think a sunset is beautiful without wanting to fuck it. I’m not a car guy but I can appreciate the beauty of a well-crafted machine, and a muscular male form fits a similar bill. But a perfectly built machine is a judgement that stands on the function the machine is built to execute, and while I’m just as delighted watching a peak athlete go as anyone, I can also appreciate when the machine has a different purpose.

Whereas lean musculature of a body built for athletic purpose is inspirational, this is peak male beauty when the machine is built for comedy. Look at it. His amusingly round head, cherubic cheeks, and toothless, slack-jaw expression all give him the kind of art-nouveau organic softness that reduces the usual potential menace of a large nude man. He leaps into the air with the uncanny grace of a gazelle while looking like the humanoid sweet potato grown by an old lady that the local news would put on after the weather. He is completely naked, and yet we can see nothing that could possibly offend. He is a naked maniac with the innocence of a toddler and through these incongruities he creates perfect comedy. 

Barney has that similar anti-David body. The kind of physique one can describe as “slumped pear”. A life of failures collapsing to a structural centre of wasted chest and fattened waist. The baby bonnet suggests innocence, but his stature and desperate screams tell us he knows shame. His is not the mindless gallop of a loose child, his is the desperate scramble to regain the one thing tethering him to his identity as civilised man. It does not delight, and wondering only poses questions with grim answers, so we must laugh.  

Best Joke

Finding a mid-point between the comically extreme and the legitimately possible can be an uphill battle, but it’s one our first runner-up nails, it’s Homer drinking the brine. 

Getting something insane over the line is a matter of setup. A lot of animated sitcoms with absurd jokes, particularly ones like South Park and American Dad, will bake absurdity into the foundational reality of the show as this reduces the effort required for a wackiness. The other way is to set the elements up in a way that maintains their abstract separateness until some event resolves them into a visible picture. A bit like when a speed artist paints something that looks meaningless until they rotate the canvas. One of my favourite executions of this principle was in the farcical but still very much based in our reality Arrested Development, where an episode-long series of entirely separate story components combined to create a perfectly plausible accidental kaiju attack. 

Homer being a buffoonish glutton means you can get him to eat absurd things or normal things in an absurd way relatively easily, but prior episodes have shown there are ways to botch this. Homer drinking the Lemon Time dishwashing liquid in Marge Gets a Job was stupid because it’s not a food and, at most, it would taste like lemons which isn’t one of Homer’s established gluttonous favourites. 

The setup of Homer asking how anyone can abuse their body like the firewalking Angela Lansbury demands the obvious payoff of Homer then doing something to abuse his body. A similar Barney joke in The Homer they Fall, pays this off with Barney drinking varnish, which fits his established character, but Homer has less flexibility, creating a somewhat tighter rope to walk than one would assume. 

The artistry to this joke comes in the selection of pickle brine as the offending substance. It’s not not a food. It isn’t a technically edible peel, loads of it is consumed along with the pickle as nobody washes the thing after removing it from the jar. It even tastes good. There is nothing technically absurd about this behaviour and yet we all know it is fucking insane to chug a whole giant jar of pickle brine. The way these points interact for a simple gag is one of those things that shows you how the base level of The Simpsons was well above average. 

The next runner up is a family moment that really nails a generation gap, it’s Homer’s rap. 

As a 42-year-old white man, I have spent most of my life listening to rap and can tell you that the genre has had a few separate emergences into broader pop-culture. The first wave was the “Sugar Hill Gang” variety, which is typified by being far simpler structurally, and lighter in content and tone over the more “Cypress Hill Gang” later wave of gangster/a rap. This episode first aired in ’92, and while Ice-T and NWA were already massive hits, the simpler, friendlier rap of yesteryear was only just settling into suburban whites, laying the groundwork for some of the most embarrassing dad behaviour seen by this or any generation. 

Lyrical content is a vital part of rap analysis, and this is no exception. What we have here is a masterclass in terrible dad-rap lyrics. The first line, “I’m Mr Plow, and I’m here to say” is a classic of the genre. It’s the kind of opening that’s so hacky it’s hard to say if it ever actually happened or if it was birthed into the world through a cringe in the space-time continuum. It’s the Seinfeldian “what’s the deal with…” setup but only from the mid-90s onward. The next line, “I’m the plowingest guy in the USA” is another cliché form spiced with the kind of awkward suffixing of a present participle that screams “already out of rhymes”. 

The obvious set up here is that Homer is out of rhymes and has nothing for his last two lines. Making things not rhyme is very easy, so coming up with something to not rhyme in a manner that is comically out of place is challenging. The third line, “I’ve got a big plow, and I move a lot of things” is a fairly simple setup which is what makes the final, somewhat difficult to hear line such a gem. Lots of things don’t rhyme with “things”. Most things, actually, but the line, “just like your cow if you have one” is a masterpiece. It goes to so much conceptual effort to add a cow into the situation only to have that effort become a burden. Of course, you have to add “if you have one”, even though it doesn’t remotely rhyme, as you are only just now remembering that most people don’t own cows. Most if not all of your potential customers don’t own cows. It’s a needlessly complex failure on several fronts and a real gem. 

The second component to this gag is the equally important reaction and it’s another area where the moment excels. Bart and Lisa are instantly extremely hostile to Homer’s rap in a way they typically aren’t with their father’s embarrassing behaviour. Groans designed to drown out the shame are instant. They beg him to stop. The cat hisses at him midway through. The room itself is ashamed of this display. Finally, we cut to a great shot from behind Homer as Bart demands he stop, and Lisa tells him to promise to never do that again. 

The shot would have been a possible Best were it not a core of the joke. The sitting room blue carpet connected by ruddy fireplace bricks barely registers as depth which emphasises the amazing symmetry of the rest of the shot. Homer’s back-turned cap, crown for his empire of shame, faces us, as do the faces of his children. The Simpson neutral is at work, this time embodying a desperate if defeated pleading through just the slightest downturn of the mouth. Bart and Lisa mirror each other like the angel and devil on Homer’s shoulder, though here both are in perfect agreement. His kids, the cat, the room, the world; all are begging Homer to stop with the kind of muted, insistent fury one can only muster when it’s for your subject’s own good. 

There’s this thing in WWF/E where the audience is constantly besieged with giant human beings who can barely walk, let alone wrestle. These entities will toddle about clumsily on acromegalic knees, unable to perform basic moves or even fall down because their joints are made from paper mâché and hope. This happens because the hero has to look short, and the hero is already 6’10”. That you could make the 6’10” guy the villain and any of the abundant 6ft guys the hero never occurred to the imbecile rapist who ran the company. The point is the specific details don’t matter as much as the relationship between them, which is demonstrated by the next runner up, The Mountain Goat.

If Family Guy wanted to make the same joke, they’d steal a scene from Cliffhanger or show a goat falling down a cliff repeatedly in an incredibly violent manner. That blood and guts is the 8ft wrestler, the thing that’s undeniably interesting to look at even if that’s the only thing it’s actually good for. The Simpsons is the 5’10” wrestler, though, the one with the collegiate background and body free from human growth hormone. It doesn’t go into the sex and violence like its mid-to-late 90s brethren, but it doesn’t need to when the writers know what they’re doing. 

This almost went into the Sight Gag category, but it really isn’t one as part of the joke is precisely what is not seen. The brilliance of this is that it is a blind sight gag. We know there is an incredibly violent scene occurring, but only through artful implication. 

Similar animated sitcoms wear wholesomeness like a decorative wall hang, to be thrown up or torn down as needed. For The Simpsons, wholesomeness is built into the foundation. Tear it out for a quick gag and the whole thing collapses. The violence is cartoony and doesn’t leave any lasting marks and that’s the first thing we get with the goat. A funny, very cartoony little leg whirl and some bonk noises. Then we cut back to the family. 

This was where I thought about putting an audio gag section in. The family’s eyes all track identically as the goat falls three more times.

Most gags from around this era and definitely from the era the show was based in would have simply left the joke at the goat falling at all. The thing about this is that it is an extreme joke, just one that happens to be a physically capable 6’10”. The sound design is the other element of this. The rhythm of the BONK-MEE-EEE-EEEH from the goat and the family’s eyes watching create the obvious 3-part pattern that the subsequent SPLAT-MYUUUHUUUERRRRR disrupts. It’s beautifully suggestive audio while simultaneously having a possible harmless explanation. Sure, it’s probably goat skull cracking open, or it could just be a concussed goat landing in a pile of wetter snow at the bottom of the mountain. It’s still moving, it’s probably fine. The synchronised responses from the family are all we have to point us to the tragic reality. Like wordplay and euphemism, these fundamental structures can be applied to different formats to great effect.

Like an entire league of 6’10” bodybuilders, what happens to the goat here would go completely unnoticed in most modern shows.

But the winner is...

Comedy is about surprise which people tend to see as being the unexpected answer to a question, where knowing the answer before it’s delivered is equal to failure. Non-traditional joke formats may seem to contradict the surprise principle, but what they are doing is moving where that surprise is. Surrounded by the absurd, the very normal becomes the surprise. The thing about Krusty and the three Siberian tigers is that we know where it’s going the moment Troy says the words. These are huge, dangerous tigers. Krusty is not a trained tiger handler. 

The tension in the shot is obscene. Krusty’s face is his probably patented blank presenter smile, while the tigers that dwarf him glower with currently directionless killing intent. What is going to happen is so obvious it makes a villain of Krusty for being so stupid or self-absorbed that he doesn’t notice it. What can you feel for such oblivious, unearned confidence but complete contempt. He even has the gall to crack the whip. The comic inevitability is so vast, the scale of the obviousness hits like a joke itself.

Anti-jokes developed as people began to get used to standard comic patterns and are the prime example of shifting the surprise element to an unexpected normal. The thing is, people will then get used to that pattern and so the new inversion became to deliver the expected payoff, but in an even more exaggerated fashion. Exaggerated here doesn’t necessarily mean unrealistic, as often very realistic violence is used in modern expressions of this form, just exaggerated in a way that places the surprise into how much the joke leans into the expected result. 

One of my favourite genres of internet video is older, somewhat incapable men being attacked by geese. The thing about a goose is that it really can’t kill you. I’m sure someone has a link where one knocked someone off a bike or flew into a plane engine or something, but those are assists. One on one, a waddling old man vs a goose is, at best, a draw with both fighters eventually falling asleep. With “grumbling nap” being the only actual outcome, this makes the sound and fury of such an attack a delightfully absurd thing that will never fail to make me laugh. 

The tiger attack is, for the show and period, quite extreme. Large white teeth sink into yellow flesh and his clothes tear as the huge beasts maul him. Castellaneta’s accompanying screams are exaggerated but not false, full of legitimate pain and terror. But these screams give way to comic gibbering. Where flesh would tear, Krusty stretches and reforms. His gibbering ends in a plea for them to not maul his face. His vanity even under this brutal attack being enough sin to prevent sympathy from polluting the schadenfreude.

It's the old man versus the goose but exaggerated way beyond what I could ever expect to see. Krusty will be fine, even if they’ll be chewing on him for a while.

Best Shot

The most many arts awards can meaningfully contribute to anything is the dubious honour of attention. I only say many because I’m assuming there has to be at least one out there that has real effort put into it, not that I can bring any to mind just now. Attention in the arts is almost real and almost the point, but again a mixed bag. Winning an Oscar can certainly do wonders for a career but is a meaningless marker of quality. Long is the list of artists being awarded for mediocre work as an apology for far better work previously ignored and longer still is the list of greats that never get one. 

I use it here for that dubious honour as a way of separating out the discussion on specific jokes into a focused format and to demonstrate the difficulty of meaningful comparison. It’s always the First Annual award, and that will never change. It’s not serious but if there is one element I could add to the whole affair, it’s this: there is no best shot this time. 

The rushed nature of the rest of the episode’s writing would leave little in the way of storyboarding time or the necessary energy to put into creative shot choices. There are really only three that even register: the overhead shot of Homer in the driveway, the lingering shot of the Kwik-E-Mart as Snake and accomplice arrive, and the shot of Homer’s one eye as the alarm goes off. Each is more of a gag, and really only the overhead is internally interesting. The rest is either functional or a direct reference to other work. 

As much as I enjoy discussing the jokes, this little section is always the most fun as it’s about teasing out the beautiful in the unexpected. I find great joy in that sort of discovery, particularly in material that’s otherwise so familiar, and the depth one can get into on something as minor as a basic frame of animation is always good exercise. But an award that must be given out reflects nothing. I could win gold in the 100m sprint if nobody else shows up. That doesn’t make me a good sprinter, and this is about quality so if nothing clears the bar then nothing is being awarded. 

Honourable Mentions

Barney’s loose giant baby pin before his nappy comes off is a good detail. 

Jason Torchinsky, writing for Jalopnik but now at The Autopian, did probably the best work in figuring out both the type of car that Vaclav was selling as well as its country of origin. He zeroed in on the car’s make, being near identical to a British invalid car called the AC Petite, and concluded it was a Soviet copy of the British model (which did happen). It had to be either Yugoslavia or the former political entity known as the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, which became the Republic of Bulgaria in ’89. Both had auto industries, and both had languages that could use Cyrillic writing. Jason cleverly used the barely coherent slogan, “Zagreb ebnom zlotdik diev” to land on the PRB, as while Zagreb is a city in Croatia, once Yugoslavia, “diev” or “deiv”, translates to “girls” in Bulgarian and the borrowed “zlotdik” is close to the Polish word “zlotnik” which means “goldsmith” though not written in Cyrillic. He concluded that the slogan was probably something close to “Girls from Zagreb will think you’re a goldsmith,” which does sound like a car slogan. Lastly, he concluded that the car was called the Mуха (mukha) or housefly, based on the hood ornament. It’s possible to still lean towards Yugoslavia, as the kinds of word-borrowing use to get this to work could have easily been at work in a country made of several countries jammed together, but some great work went into this conclusion, so I see no need to disagree.  

There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it frame of the tow truck guy as the family cars are being cleared, and it’s insane. He looks way too horny for his job. 

A part I really enjoyed was Homer retelling his, “Kiss my asphalt” line, it just didn’t fit up in the Best Line section as it’s not exactly funny, but a great character moment for Homer. An issue comedies and particularly the “filmed in front of a live studio audience” type sitcoms can have is that characters say or do things that would be funny for other characters and yet these characters rarely laugh. The gag was for the invisible audience and so the visible one doesn’t get to participate. 

Homer is so desperate for adulation and respect that he brings his sitcom line home with him to get a laugh he can hear. He tells his joke for the visible audience, but it’s a dud. His wife and children look away as his eyes beg for validation. 

Dishonourable Mentions

 People are trying to say that Vaclav is actually Zutroy, and this is plainly nonsense. I don’t give a fuck if it was listed as such in Tapped Out or whatever mobile game this idea came from, but there is not a single sane piece of connective tissue between Vaclav’s behaviour in this episode and Zutroy’s in later ones. Just say they’re cousins or some shit. 

The commercial thing really takes up too much time and space. 

Freeze Frame Fun