YMMV / The Simpsons S4 E16 "Duffless"

• Alternative Joke Interpretation: When Homer is watching a baseball game during his month without beer, he's surrounded by other spectators drinking while Homer comments that he finds the game boring. Is this a jab at baseball calling it a boring game? Is it saying all sporting events are boring while sober? Or is it implying Homer himself doesn't actually like baseball or sports and only watches games to drink?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Homer fighting the giant spider in order to escape work.
  • Chief Wiggum randomly exploding when he hits a tree after rolling down a hill in his beer costume. After the commercial break, he's perfectly fine as if it never happened.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Bart hurling Lisa's gigantic tomato at Principal Skinner, a Vietnam veteran who suffers from PTSD is both horrific and hilarious (especially when Lisa comes back to find Principal Skinner shaking in shock while kids laugh at him).
  • The traffic school video that's nothing but car crashes set to wacky comedy music and cheesy puns narrated by Troy McClure.
• Fair for Its Day: Lisa's science fair project involves making a tomato grow huge by injecting it with anabolic steroids and planning to use it to cure world hunger. While Lisa would likely still want to cure world hunger in later seasons — albeit she probably wouldn't use anabolic steroids as part of the process — she'd most likely be horrified at her Imagine Spot featuring a poor Indian family worshipping an image of her, due to its white savior overtones. However, this was much easier to ignore in the 90s, what with the idea of it missing the forest for the trees and that an 8-year-old girl planned a science fair project that could cure world hunger in the first place.
• Harsher in Hindsight: At the end, Homer leaves Moe's Tavern in order to spend time with Marge, and Moe angrily responds by saying that he'll be back, along with the other patrons, including Barney in a Fourth Wall Psych. Later episodes show Moe making good on this threat by forcibly pouring alcohol down Homer's throat to make him forget that he has a drinking problem and getting Barney (who had sobered up a few seasons prior) off the wagon just so he could make more money from him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the in-universe movies that shows the dangers of driving is called "Alice's Adventures Through The Windshield Glass". 30 years later, and there's an episode with an almost identical name.
  • One of the items that slips past Phil (the Duff Brewery quality control guy) is Adolf Hitler's head in a jar. Some years later, heads (of still-alive people) in jars became a ongoing story element in the Matt Groening animated series Futurama.

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