After tickling Bart into Potty Failure, Homer is sent to parenting therapy — and is put through shock treatment (by having Kareem Abdul-Jabbar strangle him near-constantly) after admitting that he strangles Bart as a means of discipline.
Tropes:
- Abusive Offspring: After Homer's therapy makes him afraid to discipline Bart at all, Bart quickly becomes this to Homer. A Flashback Twist gag also shows that Homer was this to Abe.
- Asshole Victim: Homer gets this big time. After years of hurting Bart, he finally gets his just desserts.
- Behavioral Conditioning: Homer's therapy consists of showing him what it's like to be Bart by having a taller man, Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, strangle him repeatedly. Unfortunately, this just makes Homer afraid of Bart full-stop, causing him to collapse on the floor in terror after trying to approach him.
- Black Comedy: One of the blackest examples the show has to offer.
- Callousness Towards Emergency: Bart just prank calls Moe while Homer is getting hanged right in front of him. This enrages Dr. Zander and he strangles Bart in return.
- The Cameo:
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar appears in order to perform Homer's therapy: strangle him for a week straight.
- The Planet Express Ship flies by in the episode's opening title.
- Decon-Recon Switch: Homer's habit of strangling Bart, and being an awful father to him in general, gets this treatment, first by having a Logical Latecomer (the shrink, Dr. Zander) point out that it's horrifying and breaking Homer out of it, and then the second half shows that nearly killing Bart every time the boy pisses off Homer for any reason is one of (if not the only) punishment that keeps him from becoming a full-blown Stewie Griffin-style hyper-sociopath capable of bringing Springfield to its knees.
- A Degree in Useless: Dr. Zander is revealed to be bleeding patients because of the economy not supporting expensive luxuries like therapy, ending up in a homeless camp on the river alongside numerous other degreed and elite professionals.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Sure, Homer has mistreated Bart since day one, but Bart definitely goes far overboard by constantly having Homer get beaten up and allowing him to get hanged in front of him.
- Edgy Backwards Chair-Sitting: Homer's shrink sits this way when he wants to explain that strangling of a child is inexcusable. Strangely, he sits backwards to appear more intense and serious, other than to have the usual connotation of being relaxed.
- Flashback Twist: After revealing to the class that he strangles Bart, Homer remarks, "I guess it's just how I was raised." We then see an Imagine Spot of a young Homer sitting at the kitchen table with Abe. Abe is looking at Homer's report card, which has bad grades on it. Abe tells Homer he's not allowed to watch TV for a week... prompting Homer to jump onto the table and begin strangling Abe.
- Hollywood Psych: Dr. Zander's practices would never be allowed in real life. Bart and Homer have legal right to know what they'd be expected to do beforehand, and Homer could withdraw. Since the main conflict is Bart abusing Homer, putting Homer in a situation where he can easily be harmed is not ethical.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: When the therapist loses his patience with Bart after seeing the boy not caring that his father was about to die in front of him and begins strangling him himself, Homer sees this and leaps to his son's defense since only he's allowed to strangle his son.
- Internal Deconstruction: The Hilariously Abusive Childhood and Abusive Parents evident in the relationship between Homer and Bart is put on full display, with Homer's Running Gag of strangling Bart criticized as simply not okay. Conversely, though, Homer ends up terrified of disciplining Bart in any way, which Bart only exploited by ramping up his misbehavior.
- Jerkass Ball: Bart holds this big time. Not only does he continuously harass Homer for being more passive, but he has no qualms against having him hanged.
- Kick the Dog:
- Dr. Zander's final hail-Mary therapy is to have Homer dangle from a noose and have Bart save him. Bart absolutely doesn't gives a shit about Homer and leaves him to die.
- Bart and Homer finally reconnect in the very last scene and perform something they both will enjoy... sue Dr. Zander and get his home (or rather the hole in a tree that he is using as a home) as settlement.
- Kids Are Cruel:
- It turns out that Homer's abusive disiplining of Bart are actually keeping Bart's bad boy tendencies from going up to eleven.
- A quick Imagine Spot has Homer strangling Abe when he was a child.
- A Lesson Learned Too Well: Homer's therapy doesn't just stop him from abusing Bart but conditions him into fearing to contradict Bart period.
- Negative Continuity: The episode humorously averts The Chain of Harm by showing that when Homer describes strangulation as "the way [he] was raised," he means that as a kid he used to strangle Abe. Other episodes before and since would show that Abe did strangle Homer and depict Homer as a Troubled Abuser to Bart in turn.
- No-Sell: When Dr. Zander snaps and tries to strangle Bart himself, Bart hardly even feels it. His neck has become so hard and strong from years of Homer's strangling that he's pretty much immune to anybody else trying to choke him.
- Parental Incest: Homer’s failed attempts to shoot down Burns’s balloon blows the last letter off an airplane sign saying “Marry me, Pam”. An old man promptly punches his son in the gut upon seeing it, calling it “disgusting”.
- Psychological Horror: While partly Played for Laughs, the depiction of Homer's breakdown due to his therapy going horribly right slides into this.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: Years of Homer strangling Bart have made Bart's neck as hard and strong as oak. When anybody else tries to strangle Bart, he can just shrug it off.
- Rage Breaking Point: Dr. Zander, who spent the whole episode doing his work as a shrink and hoping to fix the Simpson men's horrifying relationship, finally snaps when Bart doesn't gives a crap about seeing his own father being in mortal danger and attacks the boy with full intent to kill the (now officially, in his eyes) sociopathic little brat.
- Riches to Rags: In the meanwhile between Homer being "cured" of his strangling obsession and Lisa and Marge going to look for him so he can solve Bart's escalating sociopathy, Dr. Zander lost his home and all of his money in the housing crisis. He lives in a hole on a tree and accepts the case for $23 and a can of beans.
- The Shrink: A therapist attempted to cure Homer of his Bart-strangling obsession (or at least make him understand it's not acceptable to strangle children) by having somebody strangle Homer all time. When Homer was "cured", the therapist said the road of recovery was far from over but had a change of mind when Homer confessed to have lied about having insurance.
- A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Homer's therapy to break him out of strangling Bart all the time is to have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar strangle Homer for a week straight, 24/7.
