Original air date: 2/18/1993 (produced in 1992)
Production code: 9F14
30 days without beer. Can Homer do it?
After getting busted on a DWI charge after sneaking out of work to go to a Duff Beer Factory tour, Marge urges Homer to go 30 days without beer. Meanwhile, Bart destroys Lisa's steroid-injected tomato and becomes an unwitting test subject in her new science fair project: "Is My Brother Dumber Than a Hamster?"
So trope up! And up! And up!:
- Accidental Misnaming: Homer lists a guy who calls him Bill as one of the barflies who was expecting him.
- Acronym Confusion: Chief Wiggum usually confuses DWI with DOA.
- Alcohol Is Gasoline: Whilst struggling with temporarily giving up alcohol, Homer spots Ralph's science project of an alcohol-fueled car. He immediately has an Imagine Spot of him pumping "fuel" into both his car and his mouth.
- As the Good Book Says...: Attempted by Homer, who needs to quote a Bible verse to get past a giant spider. The spider even stops its advance and patiently waits for him to say something, but he ultimately fumbles and drops it with a rock when it's about to resume its attack
- Bait-and-Switch: Just as it appears Lionel Hutz is going to help Homer out of his jam, it turns out that the Amoral Attorney is actually his neighbour in prison.
- Bedtime Brainwashing: The episode opens with Skinner awarding Bart first prize at the school science fair. The phrase "first prize" echoes until the scene transitions to reveal that Lisa was saying this into Bart's ear while he was dreaming because she was "just screwing with [his] mind."
- Behavioral Conditioning: As part of her experiments on Bart and the hamster, Lisa hooks a pellet up to an electrical current, causing the hamster to immediately avoid the pellet. When she tries the same thing on Bart using a cupcake, Bart simply continues trying to pick it up and shocks himself repeatedly. Later on, he's sent to get cupcakes from the kitchen and winds up collapsing on the floor in a trembling heap.
- Big "NO!": Done by Homer when the Duff blimp airdrops beer bottles onto him.
- Big "SHUT UP!": Moe slaps Barney and tells him to "Quiet down, Rob-a-dub!" when Barney, hearing Moe being palsy to get Homer to drink, reminds Moe that he insulted Homer yesterday.
- Bill... Bill... Junk... Bill...: Man checking beer bottles at the Duff Brewery: "Fine, fine, mouse, fine, mouse, rat, fine, syringe, fine, nose..." And then shortly after that, while the checker is distracted by Barney, Adolf Hitler's head goes by!
- Black Comedy:
- Bart chucking Lisa's steroid-pumped tomato at Skinner (a Vietnam vet who has moments of post-traumatic stress disorder from his stint in 'Nam and the abuse his mother puts him through) and Skinner shaking in shock while the kids laugh at him.
- Wiggum confusing DWI with DOA, especially when a woman comes in asking if her husband was here on a DWI and Wiggum quickly leaves on a lunch break.
- Homer laughing at the montage of car wrecks (and Troy McClure's attempts to make jokes during it- "Here's an appealing fellow; in fact, they're a-peeling him off the sidewalk!").
- Black Comedy Animal Cruelty:
- Nelson's science fair project is called "Wasting Squirrels with a B.B. Gun," and there are a bunch of squirrel pelts decorating his booth.
- Bart's science fair project was (initially) testing the effects of cigarette smoke on dogs. Cue Santa's Little Helper walking into the kitchen hacking and choking on a a cigarette. But thankfully Marge takes the cigarette away from the dog and rightfully chews out Bart.
- Blatant Lies: The sound of Homer cracking open a beer can after promising Marge that he'll stop drinking for a month he tries to pass off as him saying, "Psst! I love you!".
- Borrowed Catchphrase: Bart says "D'oh!" when Lisa manages to find her science project after he hides it.
- Broken Aesop: Invoked in-universe. An ad outside the Duff Brewery says: "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" before it switches to a Duff ad depicting two friends drinking beer on the hood of a car. Homer putting this message into action also causes the episode's dilemma.
- Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Homer tries and fails to escape Duff advertising, to the point where a blimp bearing the sign "Surrender to Duff" airdrops beer bottles directly onto him.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: Phil the inspection guy is rather nonplussed that roughly one-in-three beer bottles is contaminated with dead rodents, syringes and human body parts.
- Couch Gag: Maggie is already on the couch. Homer, Marge, and Bart run off the edge of the film strip and onto an empty white space until they quickly run back.
- Crack Defeat: Lisa decides to use Bart as a guinea pig for a science project (out of spite for him ruining her original one on a practical joke) dubbed "Is My Brother Dumber Than a Hamster?" When it comes time to show her results at the fair, she's shown up and actually beaten by Bart who simply dresses up a hamster with a tiny scarf and goggles, puts him in a model plane and appeals simply for the cute factor.
- Cuteness Proximity: Bart exploits this with his "Can hamsters fly planes" project. No one questions how relevant or scientific the project is because of the endearing diorama of a hamster in a toy plane.
- Cutting the Knot: Rather than try to answer the spider, Homer just chucks a rock at his head and jumps out the window.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: One Duff Beer ad from the 1950s has a cartoon doctor advising the viewers to drink the beverage because of its "goodness", but also indicates the company is also a "proud sponsor" of Amos N Andy, a very popular radio and (briefly) TV show that ran between 1928 and 1960 and was known for featuring Blackface.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Lisa's way to pay Bart back for destroying her science fair project is to psychologically torture and exploit him and try to win the science fair.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: This even applies to mascot costumes, as Wiggum finds out the hard way.
- Evil Laugh: When Marge suggests Lisa to have a hamster run through a maze, she suddenly thought of Bart as a hamster getting stuck and calling out "help me", causing Lisa to chuckle wickedly which Marge noticed.Marge: What's so funny?
Lisa: Oh, uh ... I was just thinking of a joke I saw on Herman's Head. (laughs nervously)
[Marge murmurs, unconvinced.] - Fair-Weather Friend: Homer goes back to Moe's who is happy to welcome him despite badmouthing him the day before.
- Felony Misdemeanor: Flanders is still going to Alc-Anon meetings eleven years later, after he drank a blackberry schnapps (he's been clean ever since) and told his wife that Ann Landers
was "a boring old biddy." He proclaims, "I was more animal than man!" - Get Out!: Rev. Lovejoy assures Homer that he won't be shamed for his past actions at the AA meeting, but when Homer admits that he was so desperate for beer he snuck behind the bleachers and ate some dirt (which likely had beer spilled on it):Lovejoy: I CAST THEE OUT!
- Giant Spider: One of these guards the way out of the plant via Sector 7-B. The directions Homer was given say "To overcome the spider's curse, simply quote a Bible verse", but after saying a fumbling "Thou shalt not—", Homer gives up and drops the spider with a well-placed rock to the head.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Bart destroyed Lisa's giant tomato that she had grown for the science fair. However, Lisa's retaliation is to use Bart as a guinea pig for an experiment designed specifically to humiliate (and psychologically damage) him, so she's no saint, herself.
- Humor Dissonance: Invoked in-universe, where Wiggum insists that there's a bit in his home movie where he does something really funny. Said thing is spraying his wife with a hose while she's carrying a plate of food for no reason, something that provokes a laugh from Wiggum but leaves the rest of the room stone quiet.
- Imagine Spot: Lisa has one where, thanks to her initial project, she's so famous that a family in India has a picture of her, ostensibly as a Messianic Archetype.
- Incompetence, Inc.: Duff Brewery has had Strychnine contaminations (which it unconvincingly denies), the quality control guy regularly finds rats, syringes and human body parts in their bottles and gets distracted easily, all its beer brands are exactly the same drink, and the tour guide point-blank admits when pressed that they have no ideas for the future.
- Ironic Echo: In the opening scene, Skinner declares "First prize!" for Bart's science fair project, which turns out to be a dream Lisa is causing just to screw with him. At the end, Skinner awards Bart first prize for real, and to rub salt in the wound, it was a response to Lisa doing a project specifically to make him look dumb.
- Jerkass Ball: Lisa holds the ball pretty firmly in this episode starting from her first act which was to more or less screw with Bart's dream for no real reason other than It Amused Me. She briefly drops it when Bart throws her tomato at Skinner's behind but she picks it right back up when she decides to switch her experiment to be nothing more than to torture Bart for revenge.
- Karma Houdini: Barney gets away with essentially kicking off the episode's main plot by urging the police to give Homer a breathalyzer test right after he flawlessly passed a field sobriety test (granted, Homer beat Barney pretty bad in order to dissuade him from driving). After failing the breathalyzer test, the clearly sober-enough-to-drive Homer is arrested, stripped of his driver's license, forced to attend AA meetings, and gets into a bet in which he can't drink beer for a month; meanwhile, the obviously skunk-drunk Barney is allowed to drive off, even knocking Chief Wiggum off a cliff as he speeds away. The most he gets is a slap in the face from Moe from almost spilling that he insulted Homer when he wasn't there (that and arguably the pre-emptive beating Homer gave him).
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- Wiggum arrests the still relatively sober Homer, and allows the very clearly drunk Barney to drive home without doing any tests on him. He's immediately knocked off the road by Barney and sent rolling into a tree before inexplicably blowing up.
- Lisa gets this thrown right back at her when she loses the science fair to Bart after using her experiment to more or less torture him psychologically with electric shocks. Sure, she worked on that tomato for a long time but the overall retribution is rather disproportionate.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: At the end, when Homer leaves Moe's bar to go on a bike ride with Marge, Moe proclaims "You'll be back. And so will all of you, and you... and you," whilst looking and pointing directly at the viewer, before quickly cutting to a different shot to show he was talking to Barney.
- Logo Joke: A bicycle bell is heard over the Grace Films logo, along with Homer's laughter.
- Made of Explodium: Wiggum's beer-stein costume. (He's OK after the commercial break.)
- Made of Iron: In order to prevent him from driving drunk, Homer punches Barney in the face, clubs him with a crowbar and slams the car door on his head five times to no effect.
- Minor with Fake I.D.: Homer sings a version of "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra, changing the lyrics thus:"When I was seventeen,I drank some very good beerI drank some very good beer I purchasedWith a fake IDMy name was Brian McGee..."
- Mood-Swinger: When Homer visits Moe's towards the end of the episode:Moe: Well look who it is. Mr. "I don't need alcohol to enjoy life." We hate him, right, fellas?
(bar patrons murmur in vague agreement)
Homer: Moe, gimme a beer.
Moe: (pleased) Hey everybody, Homer's back!
(bar patrons murmur in vague agreement) - Nightmare Fetishist: Homer when watching the traffic safety video. We don't see the violent car wrecks, just the sounds and the rest of the class watching in wide-eyed jaw-dropped horror. Homer on the other hand is watching it with a goofy grin on his face and laughing.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: The "void" stamping on Homer's license is done by his sister-in-law Patty, who's very pleased about doing it.
- Oh, Crap!: Homer confuses his internal and external monologues at breakfast before going to "work" and thence to the Duff Brewery.Homer's Brain: Well, off to the Plant.
Homer: (slyly) Then to the Duff Brewery.
Homer's Brain: Did I say that or just think it?
Homer: I gotta think of a lie, fast!
Marge: Homer, are you going to the Duff Brewery? (Homer shrieks in horror and zips out of the house) - Only Smart People May Pass: Bart hides Lisa's report and dares her to find it by deciphering a fiendish series of clues ... only for Lisa to find it before he's finished gloating.
- Parent Produced Project: One boy's father made his science fair model volcano for him and snaps when he asks to adjust it himself. It's also virtually certain that somebody else (if perhaps not his almost as dumb parents per se) made Ralph's alcohol-fueled car for him.
- Poke the Poodle: Ned has consigned himself to Alc-Anon meetings for over a decade. Why? Because he drank a blackberry schnapps, and while mildly inebriated, called Ann Landers a boring old biddy."I was more animal than man!"
- Police Are Useless:
- Wiggum mixes up DOA and DWI.
- Wiggum arrests Homer for driving while drunk, but then allows the even drunker Barney to drive the car home.
- Right-Hand Cat: Parodied by Bart with Lisa's hamster when he starts to monologue about how he's hidden her report.
- Schmuck Bait: As if there was any chance Bart wouldn't go for her electrically-wired cupcake, Lisa also adds a "Do Not Touch" sign.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: One Mrs. Phillips shows up at the police station and tells Chief Wiggum she's there because someone called and said her husband was found DWI. Realizing it's another of his usual DOA/DWI mix-ups, Wiggum directs her to other cops and leaves for lunch.
- Secretly Selfish: As the Imagine Spot describes, Lisa doesn't just want to end world hunger. She wants people to worship her for doing it.
- Shout-Out:
- The scene where Bart can't bring himself to touch two cupcakes (which resemble breasts) is a reference to A Clockwork Orange.
- The 1950s-era ad shown at the Duff Brewery mentions the company was a "proud sponsor" of the Amos 'n Andy TV show.
- Another ad (apparently partway through Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential debate) has JFK singing Duff's praises, drawing cheers from the audience. Nixon's more halfhearted endorsement is loudly booed in contrast (Homer: "The man never drank a Duff in his life!").
- The episode ends with Homer and Marge riding a bicycle singing "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", a scene taken from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
- Homer laughing at the traffic safety video is based on a The Addams Family comic.
- Slow "NO!": Done by Skinner when he sees the giant tomato hurtling towards him.
- Sophisticated as Hell: When Marge expresses discomfort at Lisa using Bart as a science fair experiment, she formally replies that it's "purely in the interest of science". Immediately after saying that, we get this:Lisa's Head: That'll learn 'im to bust my tomater!
- Soundtrack Dissonance: The gruesome driver's ed film is accompanied by the goofy stock music piece "Round the Bend".
- Status Quo Is God: Anyone who is vaguely familiar with The Simpsons knows that Homer's sobriety is shortlived (he's back on the drink by the next episode). It dampens the heartwarming ending on rewatch. Admittedly, his goal wasn't to stop drinking entirely, just to show he could survive without it and stop being the near-alcoholic he was.
- Survival Mantra: "Don't think about beer, don't think about beer, don't think about beer."
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: The Duff tour guide announces at the start that he's going to address the recent news story that a batch was contaminated with strychnine. When everybody on the tour admits to having no idea what he's talking about (either the story nor CNN which covered the story), he hastily says that it's not true and moves on.
- Take Our Word for It: Obviously, we do not see the multitude of car crashes in the film that Homer and his AA class watch. We can still imagine the horror of it all, given the sounds of the crashes (the offensive Soundtrack Dissonance aside) and the reactions of the class (which range from shock, disgust and fear, save for Homer, who finds it funny since he doesn't know any of the victims).
- Take That!:
- Homer tries to watch a ball game during his "dry spell", finding the whole business boring.
- When snickering at the thought of having revenge on Bart, Lisa tells Marge that she remembered a bit from Herman's Head. Marge looks on worriedly, probably more than if Lisa had told her the truth. Also an example of Self-Deprecation, since several Simpsons cast members (including Lisa's VA Yeardley Smith) were regulars on Herman's Head.
- Tap on the Head: Subverted. Homer tries to knock Barney out to take Barney's keys away, but Homer's attempts, including punching Barney, hitting him with a crowbar, and slamming his face with a car door, all fail. Barney finally surrenders his keys voluntarily.
- Three Stooges Shout-Out: When Lisa asks Bart to hold her giant tomato while she fetches her math book, he replies, "Why, soitenly! Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!" Later, Bart imitates two of the Stooges when he tries to grab the cupcakes and gets zapped.
- Troubled Fetal Position: When Bart can't bring himself to grab the cupcakes, he ends up curling up in a ball.
- Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: During Homer's escape from the Power Plant, after fumbling with the Bible verse, he decides to just throw a rock at the giant spider's head.
- Younger Than He Looks: Hans Moleman is revealed to be 31 years old and looks old because of severe alcoholism. Before anyone cries "Negative Continuity!", this ties in with the birth date on his driver's license, as seen in "Selma's Choice", which is August 2, 1961 (which would make him around 31 to 32 years old at the time of this episode's premiere).
- Your Television Hates You: Lampshaded by Homer when he sees a Duff commercial on TV:Homer: TV, have you turned on me too?
