A Good Episode: "I Love Lisa" (S04E15)
A Good Episode #1
Situated about two-thirds down the Season 4 bandolier is an underappreciated episode called ‘I Love Lisa.’ It seldom appears on any top 10 lists, it hasn’t generated any significant memes and it has no celebrity guest as Michael Carrington is not a real celebrity. Yet it is a charming, chill, perfectly paced and extremely funny episode that tells a complete story without skimping on the laughs. While its reputation has been drowned out among against bravura of a ‘Marge vs the Monorail’ or ‘Last Exit to Springfield,’ I’d maintain it is perhaps the most underrated Simpsons episode ever. Low concept, low stakes, but never low on energy, here’s why ‘I Love Lisa’ is more than worth a rewatch. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my pants on in this version.
I’m not going to recount the whole plot because I’ll end up saying, ‘this joke was good’ forty-five times in a row, but here are the first five minutes.
‘I Love Lisa’ opens with one of my absolute favourite brick jokes in the series' history. A love heart wipe reveals the KBBL radio tower and the DJ is “Doing the Monster Mash with you on this beautiful Valentine's Day.” Naturally, it’s Valentine's Day in Springfield and Homer has forgotten, he rushes out to get something for Marge and naturally gets price gouged by Apu. Meanwhile, the kids go to school. Bart, who has very little to actually do in this episode, is free to just be a joke cannon. His circulation of candy hearts with crude off-colour sentiments triggers a marvellous PTSD episode in Skinner. There’s also this bizarre bit with a truckload of beef hearts just being dumped on the cafeteria floor, I first saw this as a kid and the rubbery sound they make as they land never left me. Meanwhile, Lisa’s class is making Valentine's cards for each other, which is the kind of extrovert-supremacist nightmare that only a school teacher would think to inflict on small children. Ralph Wiggum receives no card, and Lisa takes pity on him, offering him a card that says: “I Choo-Choo Choose You.” Ralph promptly falls in love. Lisa was just being nice. What’s she gonna do to get this dude off her case?
What follows is basically the plot of sixty shitty rom-coms, in twenty-two minutes, with a better ending, better characters and better jokes.
Rewatching this episode a couple of times to prepare this article, what strikes me is how detailed and complete ‘I Love Lisa’ feels, thanks to a wonderful script by Frank Mula. We have an A-plot: Ralph likes Lisa, but no serious B-plot like Lisa’s study in ‘Duffless’ or Mr Sparkle in ‘In Marge We Trust.’ Instead, we get what I’ll call three C-Plots that have their own tiny arcs but are as much set pieces as anything. There’s Valentine's Day in Springfield, the Krusty Anniversary Show and the President’s Day show. There’s a lot going on here but it doesn’t feel like it. This episode could quite easily turn into an awful Season 11/12 episode, where the plot lurches from set piece to set piece, the previous story discarded in search of the next joke, but that doesn’t happen. Nothing feels rushed, everything feels like it’s been comprehensively explored.
What serves this excellent pacing is the way the plot points dovetail across one another. The most workmanlike way to incorporate these three plots would be to give each its own act, with each act feeding into the next. And in a sense, this is what happens, Valentine's Day is in act one, Krusty’s anniversary is in act two, and President’s Day is in act three, yet these events never become the main focus. Instead, their function in the narrative is as a buttress to the A-plot, a railing that the A-plot beats can be hung, rather than stories unto themselves. The vice grip on the main narrative is never relinquished, all the C-plots are contextualised by the A-plot.
The Krusty Anniversary show is introduced just before the first act break and the main thrust of Lisa not really liking Ralph. The Presidents Day show is introduced at the midpoint, along with Lisa's realisation that she's going to have to be in the play with Ralph. Ralph's heart is broken at the act two break, which in turn closes the Krusty Anniversary show. The President's Day show kicks off the third act and partially serves as the motivation for Ralph to realise that there's more to life than Lisa.
It's just so seamless, so natural, that you don’t even notice that a digression like Sideshow Raheem (“I wouldn’t”) builds up the crappiness of Krusty’s back catalogue, that justifies a feature as lame as talking to the audience, that leads to Lisa eventually blowing her top, and Bart being able to pinpoint the second that Ralph’s heart rips in half. Episode is rit good.
When talking about this episode you also have to mention what a tour-de-force this is for the secondary characters who were starting to seriously get filled out by this point. I'm a sucker for any Krusty the Clown antics, every single scene he’s in in this episode is dynamite. The reviewers are all dead, his treatment of Robert Frost, Sideshow Mel’s treatment of him, his Doors cover, the aforementioned Sideshow Raheem. I don’t think there’s ever been a washed-up hack character as consistently funny as Krusty the Clown. This episode is probably as close to the Ralph Wiggum apex as well, very dumb, but not this intellectually handicapped non-sequitur machine that seemed to have gotten locked in place around season nine. In fact, all the kids are great here. Bart runs riot across the first act, Rex the actor kid should have been a mainstay in the children’s cast “Everyone knows I’m the best actor in this ridiculous school!” and Lisa, despite the antipathy she receives from a lot of the fandom, continues to be the most human of the Simpsons family, and has ample opportunity to deliver her underappreciated understated bangers “That story’s not appropriate for children.”
However, the true MVP is Chief Clancy Wiggum. It’s well recognised what a wonderful father he is to Ralph, his heart is always in the right place when dealing with his, let’s be honest, special needs son, even if his methods are a little off the mark. He goes above and beyond to make life a little easier for Ralph, from rigging the casting of the play to blackmailing tickets from Krusty at a good porno movie. Wiggum’s stupidity and crookedness are counterbalanced so well with his support for Ralph that you don’t really mind when he smashes Homer’s tail light. Beyond everything, he’s just so funny throughout, whether he’s deeply appealing as a man in uniform or leaving gigantic chocolate stains on his pants, it’s one of his best appearances and such a complete portrayal of what could easily be a one-note fat cop character. At the end of the episode, Wiggum watches Ralph and Lisa from in his car. Touched that the two have reconciled. It’s too nice a moment to spoil with an all-points bulletin, so he changes the radio to KBBL, who dedicate a special song just for the presidents, ‘The Monster Mash.’
‘I Love Lisa’ is why I love The Simpsons. Not only is the comedy a cut above from start to finish, it is first and foremost a great story. If you haven’t given it a rewatch lately, it’s past time you should.