Bart’s Friend Falls in Love

My Recollection.

The Raiders March. ♪FOR NOW THE NETS ARE FULL O’ FISH…♪ Lamentably no, my gastronomic capacity knows no satiety.

The thing about Australian culture is that there isn’t any. There’re Aborigines, around two hundred distinct groups in that way that Next Generation had around 200 distinct forehead designs, and then a rotating cast of imports who each experience the same thing: clinging to their home culture for the two generations required for something you love to become that weird bullshit grandpa is always going on about before bumbling out into the light and attempting to forge a cohesive national consciousness from a few war stories, three popular ad slogans, and a hardware chain. Goths have a richer cultural identity than Australia.

Russia has its own versions of sitcoms like The Nanny and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia because there is enough variation between the Communist Dogs and Capitalist Pigs to make the adaptation an additive process. Aside from a few grotesque failures, Australia didn’t do this, because why bother? This similarity created a funny little gap for odd ideas to slip through, though, as anything unfamiliar was so small it was assumed to be one of the few things that doesn’t translate.

This is why I, for a long time, thought there were some kind of actual United Statesian sweet called a Wet Willy, because otherwise why would Bart be walking around offering them? A prank needs to punish a fault, even if that fault is only credulity. Lacking any other meaning, why would you say yes to a wet willy? That it turned out no such thing existed surprised me, but only because then the “prank” took on a familiar quality I never expected to see.

Our degenerate trench of stunted human potential couldn’t risk dangerous things like creativity, and in that, the schoolyard “pranks” of Goodna State School took on an almost beautiful anti-joke quality. Each was a stunning work of art through artlessness, the kind of raw expression that would spit in the face of anyone who dared try to capture or name them. They had no heritage and bore no legacy, their users too stupid to have learned them and to ignorant to have invented them. It was as though each paradoxed itself into existence in a Heinleinian spasm of predestination. The only thing they punished was you.

The Dunny Flush, named because it resembled flushing a toilet to people who shit in the yard, used actual imagery which would have placed it dangerously close to requiring abstract thought had the suburb ever left the anal-expulsive phase and the act not been so rewardingly painful. The perpetrator crept up behind someone wearing a baseball cap, and wacked the metal rivet down onto a fontanelle that a lack of proper natal nutrition had left flopping open like so many screen doors in the breeze. Hat-bolts being mashed into still-forming brains is the kind of experimental science one typically conducts on the underclasses, but the lack of control group eventually led to an aggressively enforced schoolwide ban.

Goodna was built on an ancient aboriginal burial ground, the site of a convict massacre, and a hole used by the British to store leftover fissile material, so the primary school’s resulting student base of curse victims, genetic abominations, and pituitary novelties came in two basic sizes: faintly ambulatory equipment shed and crouched avian skeleton monster. The Elephant Root was when an equipment shed would creep up behind one of the slenderchildren and attempt to launch it into low orbit with the kind of knee strike that Tekken would make you use an actual motion input to pull off. The nominal goal was the tailbone, but only because clumsy infant homophobia made aggressively thrusting any part of you into another boy’s bumhole a crime reportable to the Homofinder General. The actual goal was, of course, the bumhole, because everyone swiftly learned that bruising someone’s date shut like it had burned dinner again was the gift that keeps on giving. This one faded with time, though, as the combination of size and boniness that could really blacken your brown eye was the exclusive domain of Goodna’s few legendary shinies.

The key to a good mystery is to start with the ending and work backwards, this was at the heart of “What’s Up Here?” a seasonal favourite of those who could afford jumpers and whose grandmothers beat them with an Agatha Christie paperback. In this case, the ending was a fist pulled down the armlength of a standard Kmart jumper and the beginning was the poly/cotton foreskin left dangling in the winter air. Flaccid winterwear was hardly going to stump Poirot, but in a town where wordplay could get you beat, a dark hole that wasn’t there a moment ago was too great a puzzle to resist. The Riddler’s gimmick scarcely stands up to scrutiny when his opponent is a genius who constantly kicks his ass, but Goodna’s rogues gallery fared better, and many a young ward got belted in the face.

Then there were the ones that didn’t need unfair advantages, like your victim owning a hat or your metabolism not knowing about high fructose corn syrup. Back Slaps were the honest physical assault game of the sub-proletariat, requiring nothing more than a flat palm and the ability to run away from someone who just had a palm slapped into them like they’re being watched by a Japanese wrestling audience.

Finally, there was “Smell the Cheese” which was so fucking stupid I only ever saw it work once. A fist was placed on an open palm. This fist was the cheese. One was then offered a smell of the cheese, which would put a nose right where the fist wanted it to be.  Everything else here at least required some degree of stealth or effort. For all their advantages in Rugby and cart pulling, an Islander boy who looked like a Kirby sitting on a Jigglypuff has a hard time not being seen. If a child big enough to warp local menstrual cycles can get behind you unawares, then you deserved having your asshole collapsed like a sinkhole. Who even wants to smell cheese? I love cheese and I don’t want to smell cheese.

But still, this makes more sense than accepting an offer for a Wet Willy from a ten-year-old boy.

 

The Episode.

Success and failure are measurements defined by set goals. Sprinting to be first across the hundred metre line is a success in a 100m sprint and a failure in a marathon. This is one of the reasons drama has tended to look down on genre, because the latter has goals separate from just presenting the story. A zombie movie with a good story and good characters, but no zombies, isn’t a good zombie movie. This is why fans can sit through trash, provided there’s a good scene where someone gets eaten.

From its title onward, Bart’s Friend Falls in Love is a sophisticated work. Principal Charming was a full episode that focused on a romance between side characters but keeping Milhouse unnamed in the title establishes that though Bart’s friend falling in love is the plot, it’s not the story. With the perspective centred on Bart, elements of the romance plot that focus would have made necessary can be skipped. We never have any idea why Samantha takes so immediately to Milhouse, or vice versa, but watching love from outside makes these into mysteries anyway. That they happen in the narrative in a way that may seem odd to the viewer simply better places us into Bart’s emotional shoes.

And these are fascinating shoes to be placed in. Bart is at a transitional stage at the end of season 3, the audience has at least a sense that he won’t grow and so he’s shifting into a more archetypal position, one that fundamentally clashes with emotional depth. Centring the conflict between the pair around Milhouse spending time with a girl shifts it away from the antagonist/protagonist dyad. Milhouse hasn’t done anything wrong, neither has Samantha, there is no villain save the cruelty of differing maturation rates, a villain Bart can neither understand nor fight. Pain and injustice without perpetrator shifts the story focus from plot to feeling, establishing the narrative direction and making Bart’s behaviour here more understandable than his later sociopathy.

The B story is a similarly clever example of its type. Lisa’s concern over her father’s weight driving Marge to purchase subliminal weight loss tapes, and getting sent vocabulary enhancers instead, is light, engages the rest of the family, and very funny. Using Lisa and Marge as the entry points focuses Homer’s enhanced vocabulary on the house, which lets it share space with Bart’s moping over Milhouse in his treehouse. This makes for a sadly underutilised form of integration with the A plot, a kind of contact without combination. Homer and Bart share moments in manners that are organic to both without having to be bound up in each other, a point perfectly exemplified when Bart explains that he’s coming to Lisa for help because he can’t understand his father. It’s Bart’s moment in Bart’s story that focuses on Bart’s perspective, a scene of this actually occurring would lose that to Homeric comedy. The throwaway line is perfect because it humorously engages the other plot without sacrificing anything for the one it’s in.

One of the consistent problems with Bart stories is his lack of possible growth spoiling the emotional depth of the resolutions. He confesses to this or realises that, and it goes nowhere. When videogames wanted to fix escort quests, they did the unthinkable and just removed the bad parts. Ellie, Atreus, and Elizabeth Comstock accompany you, but they alert no enemies, take no damage, and require no attention at all. The games are built around this and are better for it.

The problem wasn’t so much that Bart couldn’t grow; the problem was we were presented with situations where he should have but didn’t. Bart’s Friend Falls in Love removes that situation by never suggesting that he’s going to grow and structuring the plot to fit that reality. I was torn on Bart’s Friend Falls in Love for some time, but part of that was seeing gaps as faults. Bart sobbing in an alley over the loss of a friend made me want a deeper exploration of that. The fight between Milhouse and Bart is intense and genuine which made me want a more coherent resolution. Homer’s funny side story is great but doesn’t do anything and filled time I thought could have been better spent. But that’s my goal, and my goal ignored the realities of the show.

How many 10-year-olds do you know who are capable of life-altering epiphanies? This conflict doesn’t require one to work because it isn’t about that, it’s about the clumsy intensity of childhood feelings. Bart, like his father, feels so immediately and so strongly that it causes him to lash out, but it also tortures him with intense guilt. Milhouse’s feelings toward Samantha needed the resolution they got, but his friendship with Bart has the kind of inevitability that comes with childhood. He is friends with Bart because he is friends with Bart, any other ideas are beyond him so his immediate forgiveness, even prior to his doormat period, is not out of place. My expecting more from the pair of them, though, is. When Milhouse’s anger is spent, the hate gone as quickly as the love arrived

This isn’t a drama, it’s a comedy with depth. The 8-Ball started this with its declarations that Bart and Milhouse wouldn’t be friends, so shattering it works as a dramatic resolution to a conflict that doesn’t have one. It’s okay that it doesn’t have one, because the core of the story isn’t built around it. It’s good that this isn’t the core of the story, because the nature of the show means that goal doesn’t fit with Bart.

Different goals create different success measurements. The Simpsons’ success with emotional depth has a way of shifting that perceived point. This is an hilarious episode, whose structure allows for terrific jokes spanning myriad forms that layer upon each other. Expecting a breakdown of the complexity of losing a friendship to something as immovable as them getting interested in girls before you is user error. It can only be a synecdochical glance into it via a character whose self and genre reality makes anything more a fault. This is a sprint, not a marathon, and an amazing one.

Yours in noticing fur where there was no fur before, Gabriel.

 

Jokes, Lines, and Stray Thoughts.

The art to a reference is in making something that shouldn’t be somewhere look like it absolutely should be there. It’s comedy through pitting two parts of your cognitive dissonance against itself. Take this brilliantly constructed image as an example. It is absolutely not someone asking if the person on the roof really can’t find the frisbee, but by making the meme a reply it forces the reader to perceive the image in a manner that fits the suggested reality. In that, a pair of duelling demons are exactly two people looking for a frisbee.

This is why things like Family Guy and the like grate, they don’t do that effort. Without that art, there’s just stuff being jingled in front of you like so many keys. But they want to imitate it because when it’s done well, it is beautiful, and the Raiders opening of the Simpsons is one of the all-time greats. It’s so fucking good I have been regularly rewatching it for 25 years and it still draws an honest chuckle out of me each time. This is a symphony of perfectly structured referential humour.

The first part I’ll address is the music, having the actual Raiders March is a prime example of why fair use for parody needs to be violently protected. The tune itself is so iconic and fun that using it is almost cheating. A substitute could easily have been used and the sequence would have still been funny, but the actual music works like comedy cement to bind all this genius into one cohesive moment better than its parts.

The reason this is so good is that everything that happens fits perfectly into every established element of the show. Frame after frame is exactly what it is but also what it isn’t. The shiny valuable object, the light shafts, the stray items being stepped around, obstacles to be hurdled, natives firing darts, and a slowly closing door are all perfectly natural to both a suburban home and hidden Peruvian temple. Homer’s role as boulder fits perfectly amidst a back catalogue of fat jokes, him falling down the stairs has precedent, and both are the perfect source of amazing sight gags while still feeling organic to the moment. Keeping the other audio, like Maggie’s pacifier, the darts, Bart’s squeaking shoes, Homer’s “what the?” as he goes careening into some pots, and the sound of the garage door helps maintain the reality and the reference as two technically separate things, creating the necessary comic juxtaposition. Bart going back for his lucky red cap, Otto taking off in the bus, Homer being stupid enough to run into the door and jabber like a maniac on his lawn, and Bart waving his hat mockingly at his father are similarly perfectly in-universe behaviours. But string them all together and you have the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, one of the greatest intros in cinema. None of it is what it is but it also is what it is, and THIS is what makes a funny reference. Each of these by themselves is a gem, all of them strung together in a way that keeps enhancing itself is a miracle. I love this whole sequence.

It’s so good individual moments deserve a little attention. Homer as the ball is very cartoony, but the sequence of him falling down the stairs behind Bart actually shows how he gets folded up into himself as part of the fall. It’s a level of detail only visible in freeze frames and leads to the amazing, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gag of the Homer-ball bouncing off the stairs.

There’s a thud and a Homer grunt here that reinforces the human part to balance the ball part.

Bart grabs his schoolbag here, which is something I only just noticed.

The shot of Homer having hit the garage door is a masterpiece all by itself. Just on pure comic impact, it follows a few frames after Bart grabs his cap where you can see him speeding toward the closed door, this creates a sense of comic inevitability which pairs perfectly with the shift in Bart’s external perspective of his surprise entry. It’s a moment that has its cake and eats it, but it also perfectly structures the reference. Shifting Homer’s function from dad to boulder to jabbering native is tricky when working within the natural expression of the moments. His shocked face naturally fit his first boulder moment but couldn’t be replicated here. Having just his bald head and belly poke through is already an hilarious fat/bald gag combo, but it also serves to emphasise him as the non-sentient boulder without having to clash with anything, which elevates it to one of the best shots of the series.

There are some freeze frame gems too. It just keeps on giving.

By itself, this image has so much. I could look at this for hours, it should be hung on a wall, and yet it flashes on the screen for a few seconds.

The way everything settles perfectly into Bart and Milhouse marvelling about the 8-Ball is another lesson in how to do this. The story world doesn’t recognise that anything amazing just happened, because to them it didn’t. The change jar goes into Bart’s bag and we never hear about it again. Self-awareness would break the joke by admitting it was all a bit.

Magic 8-Balls are among the more baffling novelty ideas so I had to look them up. The working component, a 20-faced die with shit written on it, was invented by the son of a clairvoyant, based on some kind of spirit writing device. It was first chucked into a tube called “The Sycho-Slate”, which was then turned into a sphere based on the crystal ball. This was later changed to a giant 8-Ball after a scene in a 3 Stooges movie, “You Nazi Spy!” (yes), where a clairvoyant uses one in lieu of the traditional crystal.

Milhouse’s sad bragging about Circus of Values portends his bleak future.

Wasn’t Circus of Values the Bioshock store?

As a bully, Nelson is pretty on the ball for what makes a good opportunity.

The coconut bonk being followed by Milhouse’s more realistic groan of pain is a great little enhancement of the old bit.

There are only 5 outright negative answers in the Magic 8-Ball, so to get 3 in a row is pretty bad luck.

The ability to weld narrative logic to absurd things like the ball stems from early storytelling, where gods coming and fixing shit was a feature and not a bug. Classical narratives that veer away from realism can still do things like this, but it takes care. Think of the way superheroes and villains frequently wind up with thematically appropriate powers as an example of a common modern version.

Fairly classic setup for the Samantha reveal. Speaking of, Samantha Stanky, which the modern world has made probably worse than stinky, is played by Kimmy Robertson, who was the police station secretary Lucy in Twin Peaks.

This moment is another good example of logical progression creating a stable base for weirdness. We have a reason to cut to Skinner in his office beyond the desire to do a Skinner gag and his PTSD based asides are all triggered by something Samantha says. Comedy struggles with authorial voice, the jokes in this scene benefit tremendously because they’re natural to the scene.  

“Lord knows I do”

Another big part of these jokes is the harshness of the juxtaposition. There’s nothing inherently funny in what Skinner is saying, they are, in fact, quite dark, but this is the point as he springs back to bright principal talking to a ten-year-old girl. The lighting and cinematography shifts in this are great too. Another example of how having to consider complex lighting really adds weight to animation.

“Don’t worry, they’ll forget”

“Every night I wake up screaming… Well, let’s meet your classmates”

It falls apart later, but there is a great use of time in the first half. The episode starts at the beginning of the day, moves naturally to Bart in class, there’s a lunch break, more class, some after-school moments, and the Homer on the couch in the evening. It’s rare for The Simpsons to organise itself like this and I wish they’d done it more. It’s another thing that creates an internal inevitability to anchor a necessary normality to.

 “Very poor even for you” is not good pedagogy.

This episode is a fantastic display of how underlying construction can really help the jokes. There are so many great one liners, dream sequences, and other moments in this that are boosted by the way the story makes them fit naturally. Edna and Skinner’s little moment here is a goodun.

“How embarrassing for you… Well, goodbye”

Things like that line and Edna’s “I’ll be grading you on grammar and poise” are great gags that fit so perfectly into the ramshackle Springfield Elementary.

I lived in a weird smell town, I never got used to it because the smell would come and go.

Being able to go from a good Edna line like “It’ll take you about six weeks, dear” to a great visual gag of Bart giving Milhouse a wet willy without any discordance or extra work is what I mean when I say that a well-constructed narrative helps your humour. It doesn’t need to be well-constructed as in some kind of mind-shattering mystery, just that one should think about the logic of scene progression.

The way Milhouse isn’t animated while Bart is twisting his finger in his ear makes this a great visual. The slight eye close with the open, upturned but not smiling mouth really sells it.

Still though, why the fuck would you say yes to a wet willy if a wet willy didn’t exist as a thing you may already want?

Bart approaching Lewis with his finger up and the eventual audio of him yelping is another great example of making the audience work for a funnier punchline. We already saw this once, but the advance combines with the yelp to give it that surprise through mystery edge.

The squeegee like sound of the wet willy is another goodun.

I absolutely love the calm before the storm frames.

They probably didn’t know it at the time, but that this is some of the last happiness Milhouse gets kind of makes what happens a bigger bummer than the episode was prepared for. Look at little Samantha just liking Milhouse. That’ll never happen again.

Similar to Skinner’s asides about ‘Nam, Edna’s comically inappropriate ramblings about her personal life fit perfectly when adequately prompted. They are inappropriate to us, and funny because, but they are also inappropriate in the story world, the story just makes them a little more understandably real.

Ezekiel and Ishmael look a lot like the creepy fundie kids from around Goodna. Weird haircuts, thousand-yard stares, and that way they look like they are just about to be malnourished.

Video things like this are just a tee-up for comedy as they exist outside of the moment enough to be wild but exist within the episode for a good reason. They’re like a cutaway joke in freedom but with actual narrative setup.

Sex ed tapes in my high school weren’t this terrible, but they weren’t great. I think they tried to meet basic common sense halfway but showing an actual birth, but all that did was freak the girls out which the boys of the class, naturally, made worse through teasing.

“Eight survived”

“Chased something small and fluffy down a rabbit hole” is exactly the kind of line a jaded teacher would use. Suggestive, bordering on obscene for an adult, but beyond the scope of a 90s ten year old.

“Most of you will never fall in love and marry out of fear of dying alone” Truly great run of Skinner and Krabappel moments.

“God schmod, I want my monkeyman”

Bart’s line here is a good indicator of where he is developmentally. The Fluffy Bunny video wasn’t even funny for him in the way it would be a teenager. Girls are gross to him, but Milhouse’s really quite early blooming is separating the pair. It nicely sets up one of the episode’s tentpoles.

Milhouse with some awkward game. Picking up women is a lot easier when they are already interested in you. Getting that second bit to happen is a baffling traipse through a backwards dimension of torturous bullshit.

Some kids taking advantage of Otto’s pro-shoving stance.

Otto’s truly amazing line about his girlfriend is a doozy rule of threes. 1: dancing topless, 2: at the airport bar, 3: from 4:15 to 4:20. The last one is a great nested gag. Simply saying five minutes wouldn’t be nearly as funny, it having a schedule that happens to be only five minutes adds a spurious rigour element and makes the five minutes a reveal. Great work.

Lazier writers look for ways to shoehorn characters they need here and there for the jokes they have, this episode is a great example of what you get when it all flows.

IDEA FOR MY OWN SIMPSONS EPISODES: I’d do this story again from Milhouse’s perspective. He walked Samantha home, ostensibly, before getting to Bart’s treehouse. This and a few other moments are interesting gaps.

One of the subtler ideas in this episode, one that didn’t need to be brought out here but could have been seeded for later, were it that type of show, is how much of Bart’s reaction is because Milhouse is really his only friend.

I can’t really rip on Milhouse for bringing a girl to his friend’s place because it’s the only available hook up spot because I’ve done that. Generally, guys will know and accommodate this because you gotta help out where you can.

“What if I want to strut around nude?”

Bart’s immediate emotional shift from outrage to attempted host is in character.

The list of girl comics is good. Bonnie Crane: Girl Attorney, Punkin and Dunkit the Twinkle Twins, Lil’ Kneesocks. I could never make out what the last one was supposed to be until it was somewhere on the internet to look up.

“I’m okay; you’re too fat” If lifestyle magazines were still remotely profitable, that would be mine.

The episode uses the ad break for a jump to Homer on the couch, which skips an awful lot of stuff. A bit like how we forget the Joker was still upstairs after Batman landed on the car in Dark Knight, elements of a narrative can be used to cover as scene escapes. The leap to Homer is less pronounced because of the day’s natural flow and moves events along.

I think Lisa’s magazine, Eternity, is based on Omni, a magazine that was a blend of pop-science and fiction. Some big names wrote stories for it, including George R.R. Martin and Ray Bradbury, but it ceased publication in ’97 after one of the main publishers died.

It would make sense that it was an Omni reference, actually, as the subliminal tape thing is exactly the kind of pseudo-science stuff the magazine dabbled in.

I am fascinated by that kind of fat that guys get where the monster gut takes over the whole body like a parasite. Bam Margera’s dad is a classic example. How do you get to your dick?

Homer’s general weight of around 240 pounds isn’t even amazingly heavy, particularly by today’s standards, but his listed death weight here is actually fairly fat.

Dream sequences are a bit like cutaways in that they can be wild, but are unlike cutaways in that they do take some work and need to be tied in to events. This one, and Marge’s later one, meaningfully drive events and function a bit more like the inner life usually accessed by literature.

Fried cheese like haloumi or fried cheese like The South?

The sad thing is, the Good Morning Burger is not even close to being the biggest menu item at most burger places these days. I think they at least don’t soak shit in butter, but I can’t be sure. I saw a thing once about these butter burgers popular in one of those US states that’s mostly colossal farm whites. They weren’t big, but man, they shone like sweaty diamonds. I’d probably manage one before some kind of self-defence reflex kicked in.

This shot of Lisa staring at her father uses some great perspective to really emphasise his weight.

“I’ve gotta help him”. Like a lot of The Simpsons, that Lisa fails in this task is actually pretty grim, but the comic tone overrides that.

Here’s where the episode’s time signature falls apart. That was absolutely evening lighting that Homer and Lisa were in there, and that followed on from the earlier treehouse scene’s afternoon, but now we’re in the treehouse again and I’m guessing it’s the next afternoon. This feels like an edit was made after the scenes could be reanimated. Editing the ad break of Bart’s shock to the scene with the trading cards fits perfectly, and Homer’s scene could have followed that. What was a perfect day of flow is now another jumble where scene movement happens because a writer god wants it to, which is a shame.

Ah, highschool.

That Bart even has a photo of Homer sleeping on the couch is an odd detail.

This scene could easily be the following afternoon, but there’s nothing to indicate that at all. Adding a line about it would be another easy fix, though the temporal movement is still a bit everywhere.

Milhouse just slaying is still weird to see.

The Age of Cooties wouldn’t have been so bad if Reagan hadn’t ignored it.

More on the separation between the pair. The developmental difference is a good one to explore because it is so fundamental. There’s no speeding it up or slowing it down, it’s a firmware upgrade and it gets there when it gets there.

Milhouse talking about melting girls makes me uncomfortable.

I don’t consider his change to ultimate human toilet to be against character because his use here is more a matter of convenience than the establishment of any deeper characteristic. We don’t learn that Milhouse is Big Chief Pussymaster, some girl just took a shine to him, and there was no other friend around who could have filled the role in the plot.

The breathy, horny woman talking about food thing seems to have died down, not that I see much advertising these days, but it really got about back in the day. I do love the “We start with…” thing as a template, though. You can put a lot of crap after that and make it funny.

I mean, savouries can work in big piles, but there’s a hard limit on straight sugars. This bar would be fucking inedible.

Maybe I’m underestimating the fatties.

Subliminal shit doesn’t work, anything saying otherwise is a cluster of ambiguous results, poorly constructed tests, and confounding variables.

“Lose weight AND listen to new age music?”

There was an episode of Newsradio where they gave Andy Dick’s character, Matthew, smart pills and he became a genius, but that only happened because he was too stupid to know that smart pills don’t work. Genius Matthew knew and eventually faded away. There’re elements of that concept here, and it’s been about in other things.

Marge’s fantasy isn’t as funny as Lisa’s but works in the other senses by being understood glimpses into a character’s thoughts. Internal stuff is generally not risked in visual media because there are few ways to signal the change. Comedy can do the obvious sound effects and screen blurs, but drama can get away with it via dreams, like in The Sopranos.

“Here you go, fatso”

The face on Homer’s gut and his eyes bugging through the slot border on the kind of creepy thing you’d see a Nord or Slav doing for some odd festival.

These hair things are such a combination of odd elements that if I saw this scene approaching me in some remote Bulgarian field I’d just start crying

Marvin Monroe’s horrifying voice being described as subliminal is a good punchline.

Obviously, the vocabulary builders aren’t making him lose weight, but they seem to be making him hungrier.

“They don’t open their mouths, do they?”

Bart just glaring at them from his room is some incel shit.

Oh hey, a Birgut, sighting on the bus. He hasn’t been seen in the classrooms for a while.

Having Bart in his hat more often after its feature in the opening is a nice touch.

The partial glimpse of the empty chair in front of Samantha and Milhouse adds an inevitability setup to Martin’s inviting, borderline vacant face. The chair pat is a perfect little dollop of cream.

The degree to how bad the attempted friendship with Martin goes creates an implied, “How bad could it be” in Bart when he goes to sit next to him. Retroactively enhances the joke.

Bart’s just lonely.

Ah, the hat is here because it had a function.

A look at Martin’s room beyond what we saw when he tried to tutor Bart. Pretty much as expected.

The Lute scene is a fucking gem. Firstly Bart’s face as Martin offers to play it is playing to the back of the building but otherwise familiar to anyone who has been in a horrendously cringe inducing social moment where only you realised that’s what it was. Part of what makes these moments special is that the poor sap doing it is doing it 100% genuinely, so you can’t hate them or be mad at them exactly. Bart’s here because he invited himself into Martin’s social bubble, what he’s seeing is his fault, so he can only pull the “Oh god, what’s about to happen” face. The single shot for the whole scene is a brilliant choice as it pays off the gag of seeing Bart run away in the background. The background action joke is a classic, the Airplane style movies used heaps of them, but shifting from foreground to background adds those little invisible steps that wouldn’t work to show but do work to enhance the gag.

This is a small one, but another all-timer nonetheless.

That he’s running, too.

That he doesn’t know he’s doing it makes Homer’s thesaurus talk so much funnier.

Some absolute gem freeze frames here.

To be fair to Bart, Milhouse is being a shitty friend. Like, yeah, if you needed somewhere to hump because you’re living with your parents, you can use the downstairs couch. Go for it. But at least say hello on your way through. Millhouse is all take here, he’s spending time in his friend’s presence but not with his friend. Bart tries hanging out with someone else, and this sequence shows he even tries to work as a third wheel, but Milhouse tells him to bounce while still using his treehouse. What a dick.

Some fucking Kill Bill shit in this Itchy and Scratchy episode. Love Itchy’s Kung Lao impersonation.

Appropriate thematic relationship between characters and other elements within the story world is a feature of classical narrative. Plenty of shows tie their monster of the week or whatever to some idea the characters are dealing with that episode. It’s insane if you think about it, but you aren’t meant to.

Like, Scratchy’s just trying to get married and Itchy kills his fucking wife. That’s fucked up. That’s not like tricking Scratchy into marrying a woman made of dynamite. That it’s over quickly and is a cartoon within a cartoon is what gets it by, but damn, look at this for one moment and it’s really fucked.

The story feels like it’s making Bart out to be intruding here, and the theatre scenes do emphasise that, but this is 16 minutes in and Bart’s done everything else he can. If they wanted to sell Bart as an intrusion on Milhouse’s romantic life, it would have been best to skip all the genuine sense of rejection and Milhouse using him the rest of the episode has shown us. If Milhouse were just spending time with Samantha, that would be one thing, but using Bart’s treehouse forces Bart’s loss in his face and is fucking rude.

Bart’s suggestions for activities in this episode are fairly harsh, but I do like the slight edge to his delinquency.

Jesus Milhouse, if I can cop a writsty in a parking lot, you can make out behind a shed or something. Fucksakes.

Bart’s reaction here is immature, sure, but he’s also a kid. Would all this be resolved with communication? Sure, but I rate Milhouse as being more in the wrong.

Great shot here in the alley. The inevitable perspective and walls leading to a sinister Bart is a goodun.

Having a Homer moment brush by a Bart moment is a good way to maintain connection between separate stories without having to contrive one. The natural closeness of a family creates awkward bond points in A and B plots that can impose a connection that can tamper with the structure of the stories. Letting them breeze by like this releases that tension in a cleverly subtle way.

“Oooh, a sextet of ale” is another one that got a lot of use.

One of my girlfriends got mad at me because she couldn’t eat peanut butter due to my allergy and her desire to spend most of her time pressing her face on me.

If Samantha and Milhouse were fucking, that’d be an acceptable reaction. Otherwise this is the standard behaviour of a culture twisted by generations of deranged fundamentalists into a writhing mass of horny, guilty maniacs. Look up the sex therapist industry in Utah if you want a sad laugh.

There were a LOT of crows in that tree with Milhouse and Samantha to the point where their kissing takes on a Midsommar-esque nature ritual quality.

Just violently shake your daughter for kissing a boy, great parenting.

Yeah, chuck her in an all-girls school, none of the women I know who went to one of those things turned out a voracious bisexual or anything, nosireeeeeeeeee.

“We started out like Romeo and Juliet, but it ended up in tragedy” is a brilliantly written joke because it fits the moment perfectly for situation and the ignorance of the child saying it but also repeats itself in real life when someone doesn’t get it. Absolute fucking masterpiece.

I like the word “haruspicy” and the act is hilarious too. How did that take off? Why goats? Who was the first person to believe the guy who said his goat entrails told the future? I wanna get haruspicy back, have a column in the Lifestyle section of the local Murdoch rag. Today’s spleen says avoid new business ventures. I am not a nut.

The thing about the vocabulary stuff is that a lot of it can be deduced from where it is in the sentence, the tone, the meaning of the circumstance, and other cues. From what Homer is saying, you can gather the meaning of something like “mountebank” without having to know that it’s the anglicisation of an Italian idiomatic phrase that referred to people jumping up on benches to get a crowd’s attention.

That said, the sheer size of English, having been invaded several times and then done some invading of its own, gives it more utility than you’d think. A lot of the synonyms of English are used to express subtle variations of meaning, and aren’t just interchangeable, even if that’s how some of it gets used. For instance, a mountebank can mean a specific form of low-grade huckster or be used derisively with that meaning. I recommend digging around in English’s abandoned rooms as you can find some gems in there.

Contrary to popular belief, men have emotions, and while these disgusting things should be kept private until the overwhelming weight of them crushes you, Milhouse’s pit of despair is fairly common. Being a mighty robot, I am usually stuck being the rocky outcrop some friend grabs onto to keep from plummeting off their cliff, so all of this is pretty familiar.

Great shot of Milhouse here.

You’ll be noticing more of the episode jumping around now. There’s little logical flow between moments, save narrative necessity, but while that works to guide viewers it’s the clumsy intrusion of authorial voice.

This whole episode is basically an ad for the non-existent Eternity magazine.

Good five finger gag here. Creating a world where 4 was the default number of human digits would affect more than people think, as elements of how we count and approach the numerical world were influenced by our number of countable digits.

Why isn’t Marge there? Where could she even be? It doesn’t mean anything to the plot, but in the greater understanding of The Simpsons this is a perplexing question.

As Homer grew from realistic and depressing adult to comedy buffoon, he lost some depth, but they managed to create a kind of ad-hoc replacement in making his shifting and forgetfulness a basic part of his idiot self. Bart gets a similar treatment, though he’s never portrayed as the idiot his father is so his growth has to be lost amidst childhood flippancy. But it works and I wish they’d stuck with it a bit more. His tears and his scene here are brief but real, and they don’t demand the growth he can’t have. This would have been a way of pumping the brakes on Bart’s descent into parody.

The reference to Homer is another great light connection, but better than the last because it manages a meaningful connection while still being indirect.

That minty gel never came out, dammit.

Some of Bart’s misbehaviour is the villainy of an older, near teenaged boy, so this could have had a mirror in Bart’s occasionally mature positive behaviour, like his confession here. His expression is similar to when he was with Martin, but the attempted smile changes the nature of the unpleasant thing he’s about to endure.

A lot of work going on in Milhouse’s room. The Spinal Tap poster callback, the Krusty walkie-talkie by the bed we see used occasionally, an X-Wing, some skis. More personality than he usually gets. The fact that most of his Krusty stuff is for Sideshow Mel is a nice nod to his own sidekick status.

The conversation about Milhouse crying is at once very funny, the long division bit is great, but it also brings into balance elements of Milhouse’s presented wussiness and his success with girls. These are different tears.

THE SPEAR!

I’ve heard this music so many times I can’t remember whether it’s a reference to something or not. It was first in Three Men and a Comic and is driving me nuts. I’ve poked about, and it looks like nobody else has come up with an answer, so it’s probably more general homage to 70s style action music than anything specific. Some say it’s a reference to the Kirk and Spock fight music, but I don’t buy that. Too dissimilar and it’s uses were too far out from any possible reference, aside maybe friends fighting, and I don’t think that’s enough.

Any action scene in The Simpsons is always a paradise of freeze frame.

“Milhouse is out of bed and full of beans” as his fist pumps into Bart’s torso is always such a great line. Kirk and Luanne shutting the door as they leave is a great little detail too.

It’s the obvious joke that Bart skips all these effective weapons, but I think it more a comment on his desire to not really hurt his friend.

The fight between George and Frank in They Live is kind of a basic explainer of violence among males and how it can be incredibly serious but also forgotten in a moment. Granted, that one ended with aliens in a black and white subliminal message dimension, but there’s a moment where George swings a bit of wood at Frank and Frank is genuinely pissed off because that could have really hurt him. Even George realises that and apologises, but the fight continues because a certain level of violence is okay, just don’t take it too far.

Bart’s less than lethal choice of weapon has a dramatic callback to it as well, and one that reminds me of the kinds of old plot devices that were far more direct and often sapient. It clicks here more than first watch would suggest, once you integrate the idea that Bart doesn’t want to really hurt him.

Another thing about emotions is that they are physical events that occur using chemicals and electricity. In this, physically draining conflict can both sap the energy the anger used while giving it the expression it has needed. Bart confessed, Milhouse choked him for a bit and got some good hits in, the issue is resolved.

Milhouse laughing at the joke is the subtle clue that he’s done with the fight too. Good way to cap the moment and the 8-Ball’s tale.

Now Homer’s fat and sounds like an idiot. Though I do like the idea that the vocabulary lessons seeping out of his brain took some of the words that were already in there with them.

One time I forgot the word “tortilla” because I was really high, so I called them “burrito papers” which I think is fair.

This is a resolution of sorts, but then it was only a story of sorts. The Bs can get away with shoddier elements because they aren’t designed to hold the weight.

Time jumping here is a solid choice and Bart’s line implies they’ve been talking about it. This means the awkward apologies and whatnot necessary to real resolutions can happen in that unconscious space.

Having Samantha really not enjoy Springfield Elementary and love St Sebastian’s School for Future Horny Girls is a good way of keeping her from being collateral damage, which limits the negativity of what Bart did.

Love the little callback to the Circus of Value. Non-fulcrum things like this still do a lot to tie the episode off.

Bart’s honest apology is nice.

Canadians rarely pronounce things as they do in American media, but their pronunciations involve audible vowel elements the Americans don’t use. The otherwise similar accents means this bit stands out, so we get jokes about “oot” when really the “oo” part is actually a small element of what would be more of a diphthong.

That singing nun song gets sampled in the excellent TISM song, “I Might Be a Cunt, But I’m Not a Fucking Cunt”.

Apparently, the lyrics sung here aren’t the lyrics cause they had no way of quickly looking it up when they were recording it, so the voice actress just riffs a bit.

Nuns are mental. One slammed my mother’s head into a blackboard for getting a math question wrong when she was 8.

The black girl in the background is going fucking hard on the jump rope, and her expression makes me believe that it’s some form of torturous punishment for, I dunno, insulting Christ by being born with a clitoris.

Functionally, there’s no reason this relationship had to end, but the use of previously unseen elements like the nun-school creates distance from the regular settings that the show can use to imply an impassable barrier.

Milhouse would probably have held on tighter if he knew this was the last girl to ever love him. Still, he’d probably do better if he’d stop pining over someone who clearly doesn’t actually like him, let alone love him. Perseverance is for creeps. Nobody is that interesting and your attachment to single individuals is a side-effect of an instinct setup that expects you to only meet maybe 3 potential mates in a lifetime. Clinging to one person like they are your soulmate, particularly if they are uninterested, demonstrates a profound lack of self-respect.

“Now let’s go whip donuts at old people” is a great cap line and, again, kind of harsh. The “Homer Sez” section is somewhat odd. Not bad, but it doesn’t add much and the fade out from Bart and Milhouse was a good ending