With apologies for quoting CBG (but note the lack of punctuation so all you CBG quoter haters don’t be hatin’), we’ve done pretty much every “best of” Simpsons thread imaginable so let’s do a “worst of” for a refreshing change of pace.
In my mind the clear winner is from the ep where the family goes to Australia. Bart and Lisa are sitting in a pub and a Crocodile Dundee guy walks up brandishing a spoon:
CDG: “That’s not a knife. That’s (brandish) a knife.”
Bart: That’s a spoon."
CDG: Ah, I see you’ve played ‘knifie-spoonie’ before."
Unbelievably bad joke. WTF was anyone thinking to write it in the first place and WTF was anyone thinking not to cut it?
Nicely put! Personally I liked the knifey-spooney, and doh! a deer joke. However there are a few bad ones like the one where the kids are trying to convince their parents to listen to the radio…
Bart: Hey I have an idea, instead of TV why don’t we listen to the radio! (turns of TV)
Homer: Well put something on, I’m starting to think for myself!
I think I messed that one up a bit, but that was the gist of it. It’s just so horribly obvious and lame.
I love the knifey-spooney joke, as well as the “D’oh, a deer” joke. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.
One of my least favorite jokes is something like this:
Marge: what’s wrong with bart?
Homer: He got new glasses?
Marge: he seems depressed about something
Homer: Probably misses his old glasses
I thought almost all of these were pretty funny, except for the misdirected Woo joke. I don’t have any contributions myself though, I can’t remember all the good jokes much less the bad ones.
WHAT!?! Everyone I know loves that joke, at least when I relay it to them. Proabably the problem is that you’re not even remembering it right. It went a little more like this:
Bart: We’re playing to fund research on balcony collapsing. We might wipe out BC in under a year!
Homer: I don’t care about BC! I care about M-E: “My enjoyment!”
See, he was making a parallel to a previous abbreviation, so it didn’t unfunilly come out of nowhere like it did in your remembrance.
No, I apologize. I messed up Homer’s line; I remembered the BC abbreviation, just didn’t remember Homer referencing it after Bart did.
At any rate, that joke still sucks (IMHO . . . ), though, in retrospect, it might be because right after Homer says the M-E line, he runs away doing the wussy crying that was sort of a recurring theme during, say, 2000-02 or so on the show. So, in my mind, any humor there (which I really don’t see still) is immediately wiped away by the way the scene ends—not coincidentally, that episode is also the episode where Marge ends a scene grumbling Mmrrrrm at least twice. Just didn’t do it for me.
I’ll have to agree with the ballsack joke too. I don’t like when The Simpsons lower themselves to that kind of humor. It seems really tasteless and immature, and SO NOT FUNNY.
Its not really a line or joke, but killing off Maude…sank pretty low their.
Speaking of which, I am surprised that no one has mentioned when they had the animated Clinton say something to Marge like, "You may think I am too good for you, but you are wrong. I've done it with pigs." I can't believe they'd actually portray the president as someone who'd have sex with pigs. I found it funny, but I was incredibly surprised there was no boycotts or outrage from someone over this. I guess its more in poor taste rather than unfunny.
I like the knifey/spoony bit.
Two gags come to mind. When Sideshow Bob chases bart to the houseboat and keeps stepping on the rakes. It gets annoying. A bit too long. And the writers admittedly did this just for filler because the episode was short. The other is when WIlly goes to Scotland to get the Loch Ness monster and meets his parents. They try to make a joke out of the Scottish having no emotion by just showing his parents say, "Oh you're back" and then just standing there, or something like that, but it really just didn't work.
The Rake Scene is friggin’ brilliant. It starts, and is funny, then it goes on too long, and then it just keeps going and going and going and gets funnier and funnier. The best thing about it is how totally preposterous it is that there’s this big open area with dozens of rakes just lying around waiting to be stepped on.