“Hello, Marge.” – Tom Jones
“That’s it, big smile, everybody’s happy.” – Mr. Smithers

There’s a lot to love about “Marge Gets a Job”, but two things in particular show the kind of care and skill that made excellence typical on The Simpsons.  The first is the way everyone in this episode, regardless of the size of their part, acts perfectly in character.  The second is the many callbacks that build from one to another, often involving those minor characters.

Consider Surly Joe, the only foundation repairman in town.  He’s only in two scenes, and in both cases he manages to irritate Homer by telling him the truth.  Smithers, true to his unwavering dedication to Burns, not only ruins poor Jack Marley’s retirement party, but dutifully and unquestioningly commits several felonies against Tom Jones, even after being demoted to urinal cleaning duty.  Speaking of Jones, he’s in three scenes, and in each his troubles deepen.  He gets gassed, hit on the head, threatened with a gun, and shackled to the floor, but it’s never drawn out and, unlike so many later celebrity cameos, he doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Like the ever worsening plight of Jones, there are a number of other small jokes that add up over the course of the episode.  There’s the plants newly instituted theme and funny hat days, which allow us to see that the place is staffed by depressives, alcoholics and mass murderers.  When Lisa is writing Marge’s resume, we see her invent some things that can be called stretching the truth, but those also act as setups for the pack of outright lies about Marge being a songwriter, speaking Swahili, and having invented nuclear equipment.  Cramming all of that into a single scene would’ve been gratuitous and tedious, so they spread it out.  The same is true of Grampa’s old fashioned medical quackery.  It gets started when he can’t figure out that all Maggie wants is her bottle, and while his list of crazy ailments is funny enough on its own, it also primes the audience for his later use of leeches and a rectal thermometer on Bart.  And, of course, there’s Tibor, who manages to be one of the greatest minor characters ever without even appearing on screen.

Zombie Simpsons has a tendency to hit on something clever and then drive it immediately into the ground.  When The Simpsons came up with meaty concepts like Grampa’s home remedies or Tom Jones being kidnapped, they drew them out slowly, even when they had a bunch of them

[Programming Note: Due to extreme laziness, we had a schedule conflict this week and couldn’t do Crazy Noises.  We’re pretty sure they’ll be back next week, prob-probably.]