i loved the 18's episode

the beginning was hilarious, the blood is always funny, homer's rendidtion of 'end of the world' was friggin funny, and the teacher walking off into the water had me rolling.

of course, i was pretty stoned, as is my simpsons sunday ritual.

I think I may have to start smoking up before watching Simpsons, if this continues--it certainly wasn't good without being stoned, drunk, or otherwise high.

Brian

tox wrote:

No

What?

I liked this one too. It's getting to the point where I can accurately guess how the newsgroup is going to rate an episode, by just reversing my own opinion of it....I simply don't get the critiques, it was a creative, smart episode.

Amazing how humor is subjective that way =p

"tox" wrote in message news:XwZJ7.5199$[email]...

Nim wrote:

OK, but what was creative or smart about it? I gave you all reasons--what are yours?

Brian

I'm not sure why it matters, since this isn't a debate and there's no right and wrong involved. And analyzing entertainment like this tends to suck the entertainment right out of it.

The half-finished robot gag was great. "M" was great. The whole concept and implementation of Swigmore U. was entertaining.

Basically I don't see a lot of cliches in the dialogue. Like Moe leaving the bar. One-fifth of a second later Homer blows something up. Moe comes back in. "I thought you were going now." That to me is a good joke. Nice and homer-esque but not some tired, entirely predictable response. And the rest of the episode, along with most of the other new ones, are like that. In general I think half of the jokes are meta-humor, playing off of either the show's internal logic, or off of humor cliches in general. Tonight's was no exception. The whole series of rakes in Sideshow Bob's face was a good example of ironic meta-humor. Some of the stuff in tonight's episode was cut from the same mold, and I like that. Like the profuse bleeding. It's ironic, not just moronic slapstick. I don't THINK that's giving them too much credit. And even if it isn't intended that way, that's how it comes across, so I enjoy it on that level.

Good enough? =p

"Brian Beck" wrote in message news:[email]...

are

"Nim" wrote...

ok, look at Family Guy, Episode 204 "Lets Go To The Hop"... Peter does the SAME THING, they get NO credit for that one because they STOLE IT!

Family Guy has stolen its fair share of plots from the Simpsons. Just as an example, Episode 203 Da Boom (Y2K) followed the Simpsons apocalyptic Y2K episode with very similar consequences.

-AV

Oh, and the new Family Guy last week where some dude was after Chris and they went under the witness relocation program... Remind anyone of "The Thompsons?"

except that a totally different set of events occured. Oh I get what you're saying, the witness relocation program is copyrighted by the Simpsons. My bad.

(deeply sarcastic) (btw if you couldn't get that, I pity your soul) Amir Vardi wrote in message news:[email]...

does the

Oh and in Family Guy 218, E Peterbus Enum, Latoya Jackson, replacing Reggie Jackson in prayer, says "Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub." Didn't Bart say that as grace one time?

-AV

but family guy can get away with things like that becasue they admittedly use common sitcom plots and then branch off to ddo their own thing and its so funny you cant complain

"Nim" wrote in message news:_v_J7.153504$[email]...

Eh, those are the brakes.

Waaaay too predictable. I don't remember the line he said before that, but I knew right away that something unfinished was coming up. It turned out to be some sort of pseudo-lifeform. If it was something that even remotely tied to Homer, I would have laughed, like a broken bookshelf or something. They really pushed it with a "robot".

Deja Vu of Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag. I kept thinking that the whole episode. I didn't enjoy it at all.

That was good. That and Bart digging in the front was one of the few redeeming qualities about this episode, but alas, bart digging led to nowhere but Homer's story. Not enough redeeming to escape the 'worst episode ever' award.

I laughed the hardest during the whole episode right there. That was a good joke, I will admit.

It's been done. I didn't give more than a murmur of a smile at that attempt of a joke.

Yep, I enjoy your review. :)

Dan

Basically, re-hashing the exact same ideas and jokes from previous episodes is okay by you?

I disagree. It is just moronic slapstick, which is really kind of pointless when you consider the fact that any moron can draw a person bleeding, but it takes a little talent to effectively act out slapstick comedy, or to just write a witty line. That was the part of the episode I despised the most, because it was just cheap, masturbatory stupidity done for stupidity's sake.

Your opinion is your opinion, but please don't get offended when I say that calling tonight's pile of shit something more intelligent and humorous than a random collection of sight gags makes me want to wretch. Now, if you don't mind, I'll crawl back into "Lurker's Cave." To pilfer the funniest line of the evening's programming, "Loitering Permitted... but be reasonable."

Man I knew I shouldn't have gotten into this thread...

"WhiteTrash" wrote in message news:[email]...

Almost never are they the "exact" same ideas and jokes. Some of the themes are rehashed, and that's kind of lame, but the exact implementation - the specific jokes, dialogue, and animations, are almost always unique. Having some thematic similarities <> identical. Please do not take this as an invitation to surgically analyze each word of the script either, to prove the point. Obsessive proof can be saved for mathematicians

Well that's the beauty of humor, right. I saw it as ironic. You saw it as stupid. I got a mild chuckle out of the gag on that level, you didn't. There is not a right and wrong here. Although I could have picked a better example....I didn't think that particular joke was all that entertaining. Kind of like the eagle attacking Moe. ("Homer bleeding to death had heart, but... Eagle in the Groin had an eagle in the groin")

Wretch all you like. I think the folks complaining about the episode as mindless slapstick and rehashed cliche are way off the mark, but as I'm not a writer for the show, and don't depend on its popularity for my income, it doesn't matter at all if every last poster here thinks it was the worst...episode....ever.

even if you think it's funny to have homer bleed profusely, please explain to me how it is in the least bit ironic? what is ironic about punching through glass and then having your fist bleed? i am at a loss here.

It's not the bleeding itself that's ironic...since that is of course what happens when you put your hand through glass. The joke is ironic, in that the appeal isn't just "haha, cartoon man is bleeding." The ironic element is in taking some low-level slapstick and overdoing it grotesquely. Not only is he bleeding a LOT, but he's trying to keep his Fonzie-cool while he's dying, spouting nonsense like Hemmorhage-a-mundo.

When I watch this, I see writers who know that putting your hand through the glass is just some lame slapstick, so they play off of that convention by making it even more absurd. Normal slapstick isn't funny when it's grotesque, and people are dying. But it's also not usually funny at all (look at 95% of Jim Carrey's alleged comedy). So the Simpsons set this up as a throw-away slapstick gag and then play off of those expectations by making it awful and graphic. Now like I said in the earlier message....even as meta-humor I didn't find it as inspired as some of the other jokes, so this is still a bad example to be dealing with.

It's entirely possible I'm seeing more in the show than is meant to be there. But I'm still seeing it, and enjoying it on that level. I've got some "real life"(tm) friends who still argue about this... some of them see it the way I do, others think it's just stupid and a degenerate excuse for what used to be intelligent writing. I don't think there's a right answer =p

"Langdon Alger" wrote in message news:9tbmes$coj$[email]...

=v= Wow, that's the exact opposite of what I think. Nothing personal, of course.

=v= It seemed out-of-character for Homer to have built even half of a robot. The sequence with "m" was a bunch of cheap shots at fish in a barrel (note my ironic use of a mixed metaphor); aside from the penis joke, it was dead boring. I liked some of Swigmore U., but it reallycould've used work.

=v= I laughed at the Drabble joke and the penis joke, but it
didn't do a whole lot for me until R.E.M. showed up.
    <_Jym_>                                              .--.
    Mmm, curds ...                                      /   |\
  |\/\/\/|                                           __/____| \

It was better than usual, IMO, but it went nowhere after a while. The hole digging thing could have gone somewhere, and Homer being pushed away by Moe because of some new crowd was done in the Flaming Moe ep. R.E.M's appearance was quite pointless. ________________________________________________________________

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In article , [email] (Sydney Assbasket ) wrote:

The hole digging was just part of the story that Homer was reeling off to the patrons of Moe's.

Yeah but they never explained why Bart was digging the hole. What the hell was that all about ?!

Baker Street.

It wasn't about anything... it was just Homer's story. It probably never happened at all.