Episode 17 - Love is a Many Strangled Thing
28 March 2011
Synopsis: Homer humiliates Bart by tickling him until he wets himself at a football game. Marge insists that Homer go to a fatherhood class where Dr Zander is horrified to learn that he strangles his son. Zander gets Kareem Abdul-Jabaar to begin strangling Homer in their sessions to teach him how Bart must feel. Homer is soon terrified of Bart and Bart takes full advantage.
The Good: Nothing.
The Bad: I've never found Homer strangling Bart to be that funny. I always shrugged at it as the kind of cartoon violence that simply served the purpose of establishing Bart's need for attention at all costs and Homer's short fuse. There was clearly no point in addressing it in a serious story because there is no way that it can be adequately dealt with.
In 2011 the thought that a father would strangle his son is pretty horrific and so the reaction of Dr Zander and the other fathers was entirely understandable. But The Simpsons is so beyond telling responsible stories that it was instantly clear that they would have been better off leaving this issue alone.
The "moral of the story" if you could possibly call it that was that Bart is so horrible that he deserves to be strangled. Seriously, that was the conclusion you had to come to when he was so horrible to the now psychologically-scarred Homer. Strangling is just too extreme an act to be tackled by a comedy. It's also worth questioning why this episode was so focussed on Homer? It was Bart who was publically humiliated and I assumed it would be his trauma that we would deal with.
Instead we got the silliness of Kareem Abdul-Jabaar strangling Homer as part of therapy. At every stage of the story the writers undermined anything vaguely serious about it which further mocked the idea of bringing strangling into it. The strangling therapy was shown to us in a montage which was naturally full of stupid jokes about Kareem shooting baskets. Then we have Homer's alcoholism mocked at the same time which is another personal problem that shouldn't be made light of. Then once Homer is "cured" we get another montage of abusive parental relationships from other TV shows. This is yet another reminder that the creative team would rather amuse themselves than create a good story.
I have no idea why we needed the one minute long B plot of Marge and Lisa watching sad movies.
Best Joke: Homer's inability to fight back against Bart's abuse leads Marge to seek out Dr Zander. "Whatever you did to my husband, it was too effective" she tells him. He replies "Yes, one of the most common complaints about therapy."
The Bottom Line: Even if I look at this as having no moral and no story and just being a collection of jokes, it's still awful. Jokes have to have some context or else they are just dull contradictory statements or random acts of violence. Bringing the strangling issue into the light was a mistake and the results were terrible.
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