My Recollection

Manhattan. Doogie Howser cameo. You killed me, Bart.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s don’t try to impress women. Impress them, by all means, but don’t try to impress them. The smart money is on developing skills and characteristics that can impress others when used appropriately. Like a lot of smart money, this is a long game, and the kind of thing that can be effective in that annoying way where women don’t tell you. High schoolers are children. They have not had the years of time and wisdom required to even know what seeds to buy let alone how to grow them, so you tend to go for the basics.

It was around year 11 or twelve, senior is a largely indistinct blur for me, when I’d begun some basic attempts at getting stronger. This mostly involved some irregular weight use and some hand squeezers. You know, those sprung ones that you can use while you’re on the couch. They were safe to use after huffing down several buckets and didn’t interrupt my afternoon’s Passions viewing too much, and so became the exercise I engaged in the most.

Women bitch, but the male gaze is at least an easy enough instruction manual. Do you know what the female gaze is? Neither do I. The best I’ve ascertained is that abs are popular, but besides that, it’s a shitfight of weird things expressed in the most deranged manner possible. I can get abs, I don’t know what the fuck to do with the sentence, “I guess I’m attracted to the shape of a guy’s mouth when he smiles”. That’s a real thing from a real woman who, upon hearing the echo of that deranged statement over my baffled silence, actually managed to see for how weird it was. Aside from this, researching romance literature taught me that women like a man who is emotionally fragile enough to be reshaped into something she prefers, which is a nice way of saying they are cackling harpies who coo over the idea of a broken human being they can groom.

Appealing to this as an adult is a challenge; appealing to this as a teen is out of your hands. You either got a high roll or you’d better work on being funny, you fugly cunt. But the teenage years are ones of great change, and this will delude a young male into thinking that something new to him will be of value or interest to anyone else. A few games of strength with the other boys had shown me that all my squeezing was paying off, and I had something I could actually say about myself.

Women bitch, but many are impressed when you can do something for them that they can’t because they are small and weak. Some friend’s housemates were stuck in the backyard with a new fridge and no way of getting it inside, so I went over, picked it up, and marched it inside myself. To the slightly built barista and bartender combo, this was Incredible Hulk level strength and they talked about how I was some kind of monster for a week. That was 6 years ago, and I still feel good about that. Highschool me had guessed correctly on at least this one thing, so when a girl needed a Snapple opened, my grip was there to save the day.

It was out front Drama class before the lunch crowd had dissipated and one of my classmates was being cruelly kept from her weird fruit-like beverage by the lid. Perfect, there are loads of people around to be impressed and a perfectly valid reason for me to do this. You need that second part too. You can’t just be the guy who did pushups over the Christmas break and then wants to do pushups in front of you. But no, this was great, other guys had already tried and failed, theatre types, but still.

I clasped down on the Snapple lid, clenching it in my palm between the pad and the weird hand pec that all the squeezing had given me. Once I felt it grip, I clenched with everything I had and rotated. It was going to be sweet. No muss, no struggle, just effortless demonstration of my excellent squeezing ability.

Like every other man, I had overcompensated. I shattered the neck of the bottle, cut myself, and began bleeding into the Snapple. I looked up first and saw that she was watching my blood mix with the refreshing taste of kiwi and strawberry. She looked up at me. I had nothing for this, still don’t to be honest. “I don’t have hep”? Maybe? All she said was, “Thanks for that” in a way that suggested she was not actually thanking me for what I’d done.

I considered drinking the bloody Snapple as it seemed a shame to waste a drink that’s 3 dollars, but the top was pointy and I needed to get a cut seen to.

I still have the scar.

 

The Episode

There’s an art to reality. Anything live-action needs to work to suppress the natural reality that real, live recorded humans present, and this deviation requires explanation. The Sopranos has some notably surreal or absurd sequences, but these exist through windows acceptable to the audience’s understanding. Most are dreams, some given spurious rigour through causal details like food poisoning, which are easy because we all have them. Others, like Isabella the lithium fairy, work precisely for the opposite reason. I’ve never been on lithium, you? Maybe pretty Italian hallucinations are just what happens when you get dosed up. The audience of a very real show needs bridges to the bizarre.

Comedy is absurd by nature, so it requires less work to set mood, but one still needs a bridge. The most notable recent example being Community’s Abed, whose spectrumy perspective served as the explanatory McGuffin.

Animations start from the other end and this gives them advantages in the ridiculous. Ren and Stimpy had no stable setting save the titular pair, and this never detracted from the show as it was a screwball cartoon. An animation that wants to use reality has to work to set that tone and expectation in their audience. King of the Hill had strict animation guidelines to prevent any “cartoony” elements from creeping in and threatening their carefully cultivated realism.

These reality levels are also part of what defines the baselines for their jokes to work off of. Ren and Stimpy would make insane jokes about massive Polish orphans screaming for meat drinks because the baseline reality was unhinged to begin with. Conversely, Hank lubricating the lid of his WD-40 with a smaller can of WD-40 stands out against the show’s strong normality as comically absurd, even though it’s relatively tame.

Neither is better than the other and each has problems. Absurdity amidst absurdity can easily degenerate into pointless nonsense that can only descend further to one-up itself, like with Aqua Teen Hunger Force and particularly its late series run of alternate titles. The alternative runs the risk of having the realist/dramatic core start to separate from the comedy and become embodied in separate characters. This split creates early-onset atrophy, as separated halves rot faster, but it can be amended if there’s still lingering energy in the narrative world.

The Simpsons is in the latter camp, but part of the strength and cultural relevance of the series was in its ability to get away with being both. Part of how the show managed this was a level of confidence the writers developed that came from a combination of the show’s popularity and a large enough back catalogue of reality to lean on. Small stretches make large ones possible, so the incremental silliness of earlier seasons became the shoulders later ones stood on. And if your audience is rewarding you for taking these risks, then you’ve clearly established a safe reality level.  

The second factor is dependent on the story writer.

Later episodes have absurd central ideas, Homer going to space etcetera, and have absurd jokes within that. What keeps this from overbalancing is that the initial conceit of the episode quickly makes way for sensible subsequent plot developments or a sensible central theme. The ridiculous plot element is a single McGuffin that sets reality and tone. It then moves to the background as the absurdity shifts to the jokes. Episodes like Deep Space Homer also counter the absurdity with a core story that is really about a man looking for a little respect.

Bart the Murderer makes the mistake of having so much of its absurdity fundamentally connected to the core narrative and having no central theme that relates to it. Rather than shift the absurdity to jokes that can come and go, the core narrative grows more and more ridiculous. One absurdity, like a McGuffin, can be absorbed by the audience early, and jokes are jokes, non-serious things we are expected to know as ridiculous. Instead we have:

• Bart joining the Italian mafia
• Them threatening to shoot a child where they congregate
• Them forcing him to mix drinks or be shot
• Bart being held responsible for Skinner’s disappearance at all
• The courtroom and greater world taking this idea seriously
• Skinner being in his home the whole time, screaming at police in the next room

Some of these would work as quicker jokes. Throwaway lines about shooting the last bartender or something. Making them integral parts of the narrative isn’t having a single McGuffin as the underlying belief that needs to be suspended, it’s akin to having a whole episode of Star Trek being a single lecture of technobabble on warp drive. Bart joining the mafia is Homer goes to space dumb, but they not only never find a sensible reason for it to happen, they advance the stupidity by having the audience expected to believe that the whole town would take the idea of him being the leader seriously. And what’s the point of all this? Bart had a bad day? Crime doesn’t pay but it obviously does?

Bart the Murderer could have been about Bart searching for a replacement for an unstable father figure, and this theme could easily fit with Bart seeing that in Fat Tony. He could have wanted to be around them, which would fit character and be more believable than what actually happened. It could have been about Bart keeping secrets for them, rather than A TOWN THINKING A 10-YEAR-OLD WHITEBREAD CHILD IS THE LOCAL MAFIA CAPTAIN. Everything else could fit in as jokes that wouldn’t taint the basic plot, but none of that happens. If you make your core narrative a joke, you risk making your narrative world a joke. This episode is a largely joyless novelty from a series that would later come to define how to do the novelty episode.

Yours in doing a lot of male bonding, Gabriel.

 

Jokes, lines, and stray thoughts.

Bart’s permission slip is under his pillow in the beginning. It’s visible for a few frames and I still wonder whose idea it was.

I once jumped off my bunk and landed, foot first, on a glass tumbler. Fortunately, it exploded outwardly and not up into various important veins.

The Jackie-O’s and stretch pants joke is a decent visual, which gets a solid boost from the continuing joke of the other cereals. Vitapillars is a decent enough chuckle, but “only sugar has more sugar” on the Chocolate Frosted Frosty Krusty Flakes is a goodun.

Homer’s badge joke is a little sub-human intelligence to carry. Him being dumb is one thing, but blending dumb and childish gets worryingly close to actually retarded.

I feel like there’s a story in Bart actually having done his homework, though the dog eating it is a chuckle.

9×9=100 is grim, Bart. Like, I get not getting 81 but still, 100?

Things like Bart’s walk to school can be plot relevant and silly without fucking up the reality because it speaks to our feelings of how bad days are. It’s more a broad stroke of storytelling, one that has room in the margins for some humour.

The shot of the schoolyard is interesting for containing a lot of lost models and a general corner of Springfield Elementary we don’t see a lot of.

In my school, you had to have the permission slip in a week ahead of time, which gave stragglers and children of the illiterate plenty of time to rustle up a log with a scent marking on it.

Skinner’s chortling, genuine approach to licking envelopes is a nice lean into one of his major characteristics.

The Aztec looks like that redskin mascot thing.

The alternating between Bart and the chocolate factory is good.

Again with the one and done models. The chocolate factory is like a dozen milk cartons worth of missing kids. There’s a naked child in one shot who, judging by height difference, couldn’t be more than 5. I assume he lives in the factory like a naked rat.

The weird kid eating the ground chocolate someone stepped on. They were fairly common in Goodna. Floor chocolate is fine if it’s the only stuff you get to eat.

This feels like one of Milhouse’s first, “My glasses!”

The shot of all the kids spilling stuff into the vat makes me a little queasy. I’ve a firm rule about food tampering.

I love the shot of the tongue. Reminds me of the time I had the pasties really bad and only had salt crackers to eat. My lips were stuck at the top of my gums until I could run them under a tap.

The mafia guys acting like they’d shoot a child, where they all spend their time, is a baffling piece of writing.

I feel like a lot of this episode makes more sense if you imagine Bart’s perspective as being the reality we’re seeing. Like an extended Doug Funny fantasy sequence.

Why would you want a child hanging out with you?

A lot of this feels very Goodfellas, the commentary said it wasn’t but, well, bullshit.

Bart actually being a decent bartender is one of the closest things to a monetizable skill he has ever demonstrated. Bartending isn’t a bad gig, and it can even turn into a meaningful career if your warped child ego can take itself as seriously as a surgeon while being a glorified drug dealer.

The cigarette scene with Homer is funny. Playing a scene like a father finding a son’s smokes straight while amidst towering cartons of Laramies is solid.

Sarcastic guy voice here with a different face. The “kinda sophisticated” line is a goodun.

Wiggum has black hair for the whole episode.

Cigarettes taste like Satan’s ass-hair and you’re a dumbass for smoking them. Meth makes more sense.

Fat Tony’s name changed after this episode.

The relationship between Bart and the mafia guys has a lot of genuine hooks, it bugs me they went with such a dumb gag introduction.

Bart’s smile in the suit is an all-time great image.

Pizza Delivery Truck to Flowers By Irene is good. Homer’s constant gaslighting adds to it.

Manhattan’s are an okay drink. When I wasn’t belting down shots of tequila and beer, I’d generally lean toward a gin martini with a sliver of cucumber.

Jokes like “How, may I ask, did you get past the hall monitors” are a good example of the way the ridiculous can be non-disruptive in a comic environment. If you think about it for a second, it’s dumb, but you’re not meant to, and it serves no function other than to make you chuckle.

Krabapple really cares about Skinner.

People still take psychics seriously. Those people are chodes.

The zombie Skinner scared my little brother when he was 4.

Bart being in jail works as a dream sequence.

Homer’s “Kill my Boy” sign is savagely dark

The buff Sideshow Bob cameo is probably the one example of a throwaway joke that needed to be retconned.

I miss Phil Hartman.

The scene with Burns and Smithers isn’t for this episode. New dialogue was dubbed over old animation as a brief way of trying to mesh the stupid idea of Bart being tried for the murder of Skinner. It doesn’t work.

Skinner screaming a room away from the cops would work as a funny joke but it gets stuck on the end of being expected to take Bart being convicted as mafia boss seriously.

Skinner or Agnes has a cat.

Probably could have just thrown the vacuum cleaner cord up there.

DE-NIED! Good delivery.

The “Blood on the Blackboard” gag at the end is a goodun. Joe Mantegna playing himself, playing a television adaptation of Fat Tony within a series where he plays Fat Tony, is fun.