This episode provides examples of:
- Art Shift: "Maggie's Extraordinary Animal Adventure" has more detailed backgrounds than the main story, and a bit of bloom too.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: Dr. Hibbert is upset that Selma is smoking in a hospital and directs her to a corridor where the doctors congregate for this purpose.
- Balloon Belly: Marge imagines Patty and Selma being overweight, which soon devolves to them and Homer competing over who is fatter.Homer: No one out-fats Homer Simpson!
- Boring Vacation Slideshow: Patty and Selma propose showing slides, and Homer sighs in relief when it turns out it's only a small box... which unfortunately turns out to be a 5 TB USB stick with over 50,000 slide carousels.
- Brain Bleach: A running gag with Homer. He literally pours bleach on his eyes after seeing Patty naked in the shower. He then pours some onto Bart's eyes as a precaution, and is later seen pouring into his ear in an attempt to bleach out the memory.
- The Bus Came Back: Spider-Pig returns to help Maggie on her rescue mission.
- Call-Back:
- The rivalry between Mr. Burns and Grandpa Simpson is briefly revived.
- From a gag of "The Springfield Files" Doctor Hibbert's foundness of fine Cuban cigars.
- Calling the Old Man Out: When Patty and Selma learn that their father died of lung cancer, they ask how their mother could let them smoke in spite of this.
- Cruel to Be Kind: After seeing Patty in the shower Homer grabs a bottle of bleach to burn his eyes. When Bart walks by wondering what happened Homer preemptively does the same to him, with Bart calling out through the tears "What the hell, man?" As soon as Homer explains why he did so, Bart hugs him in gratitude.
- Daydream Surprise: Homer and Patty appear to kiss, but then it turns out Homer is imagining the scenario.
- A Day in the Limelight: Maggie has a subplot involving her befriending backyard animals and leading them to rescue a possum friend captured by Cletus. One of the few Maggie stories the show has ever done that didn't also have major focus on other family members (in fact they have almost no involvement whatsoever).
- Didn't Think This Through: When Patty and Selma swear off smoking, they dump all their cigarettes into a bowl and burning them. They end up setting their mother's house on fire.
- Epic Fail: Dr. Nick Riviera somehow missed the fact one of his patients was pregnant until the baby's birth. He also doesn't recognize umbilical cords.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: During one segment of "Maggie's Extraordinary Animal Adventure", Maggie outlines a rescue plan via an on-screen subtitle that's so long that, due to not being on screen for long, it ends with the sentence, "If you've read all this, congratulations, you're a genius!"
- Fun with Subtitles: Maggie and all the animals communicate in their respective sounds, but subtitled so that everyone knows what is going on. Maggie outlines a battleplan in a few pacifier sucks that takes up a paragraph of words on the screen, on for only a second to guarantee it to be a Freeze-Frame Bonus.
- Hands Go Down: Cletus asks his kids which ones can drive and all of them raise their hands. He later asks how many are sober and all but one lower their hands.
- Kids Driving Cars: Apparently, all of Cletus's kids can drive.
- Motive Decay: Burns doesn't really care about Marge's mother, anymore; he just wanted to be a dick to Abe.
- Opening Shout-Out: Marge tells Homer she's going to let Patty sleep on their couch, but Homer replies, "That's where we do our Couch Gags!" He then shows her that the monster truck family from the latest iteration of the gag are still at the couch.
- Overly Long Gag: After swearing off smoking, Patty and Selma put the cigarettes they were smoking into a bowl...followed by all the other cigarettes they had, including packs.
- Parental Neglect: Patty and Selma's mother allowed them to smoke because it made them look cool.
- Rich Suitor, Poor Suitor: Once again, Mr. Burns and Grandpa Simpson compete for Grandma Bouvier. This time, Mr. Burns has no interest in her, he just doesn't want Abe to have her.
- Speaks Fluent Animal: Maggie is able to communicate with all of the other animals.
- Status Quo Is God: Patty and Selma swear off smoking for good... at least until they end up taking it up again to cover the bad smell of their apartment.
- Take a Third Option: When Cletus asks Brandine whether she'd like to name the possum before or after they eat it, she responds, "During."
- Wall Crawl: Bart asks Lisa if he could climb walls with his grandmother's denture cream in his hands, then immediately attempts to do it and falls. Lisa tells him, "Next time, you should wait for my answer."
- Wham Episode: In a sense. After decades of never holding any real significance to the show, we finally learn Marge's father is dead from lung cancer.
