10x12 Sunday, Cruddy Sunday

[7.2/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] This episode has a pretty crummy reputation among the fans, and I get why. The whole thing in the mess. The third act more or less gives up on being a real episode and starts being a series of vaguely Super Bowl-themed sketches, with a bevy of random celebrity guest stars and increasingly implausible happenings. This is not the place to go for down-to-earth jokes about real life characters with the humor stemming from relatable situations.

But damn it, it made me laugh. At the end of the day, that’s all I can really ask for as a baseline for post-classic Simpsons. Many of those laughs are cheap, with outsized gags and humor that doesn’t make much sense if you spend more than two minutes thinking about it. But there’s some decent Simpsons swerves in there, a brilliant gag about not knowing what teams/President would be involved in the Super Bowl when the episode was in production, and some particularly good bits about Homer and Wally Kogen being utter dupes. Speaking of which, it’s great to have Fred Willard aboard here, whose comic delivery continues to be a boon to any project he appears in.

Also, a shout out to the low stakes egg magic segments! They’re weird and down-to-earth in a way nothing else in the episode is. It feels like this barely-there B-plot is missing some kind of closure, but I guess that comes in the form of Vincent Price’s weird bus spot at the end? Who knows?

“Sunday, Cruddy Sunday” is just joke after joke, but enough of them made me laugh to give this one a pass, if only by the standards of the show’s declining years.