“Ladies and gentlemen, the clown show has been put on hiatus for retooling.” – TV Announcer

As part of our tireless efforts to demonstrate the many ways Zombie Simpsons fails to entertain, Season 23 will be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that can only be produced by people typing short messages at one another.  More dedicated or modern individuals might use Twitter for this, but that’s got graphics and short links and little windows that pop up when you put your cursor over things.  The only kind of on-line communications we like are the kind that could once be done at 2400 baud.  So disable your call waiting, plug in your modem, and join us for another year of Crazy Noises.  This text has been edited for clarity and spelling (especially on “continuity”).

Zombie Simpsons ran out of stories a long time ago, so that’s not exactly news.  Still, one does wonder how many times they can kill and resurrect Krusty’s career.  I understand that Krusty was a good vehicle for making fun of the entertainment industry, but he’s been on and off television so many times now that watching him do it again is like asking the audience of a Fast & Furious movie to be surprised that there’s a car chase and bad acting.  This is an idea that was already showing its age in Season 9, and since then they’ve had Krusty quit, retool, or reboot his show, what, like six more times?  This is from Wikipedia’s Season 21 episode summary:

The Krusty the Clown Show is once again reconstructed. This time, in a bid to get girls to watch the show, a princess character named Penelope is hired as Krusty’s latest sidekick.

At this point, “Krusty Changes His Show” should probably be placed up there with “Homer Gets a New Job” and “The Simpsons Are Going to X” as creative dry holes that the writers insist on drilling yet again.

Mad Jon:  Want to jump on it then?

Charlie Sweatpants:  Let’s.

I don’t think I can sum up the stupid here any better than when they meet Krusty at the Krusty Burger and Lisa informs him "We met a ten percenter today."

Mad Jon:  Yeah, that was pretty stupid. 

Charlie Sweatpants:  I know they’ve got to work in the family somehow, and I maybe could’ve swallowed one improbable coincidence, but two, and in about a sixty second span?

Mad Jon:  I especially agree when I think about how the family ended up with those coincidences – the whole "let’s have an adventure" bit that seemed relatively forced.

Charlie Sweatpants:  The entire thing was like that.  The middle of the episode was Joan Rivers narrating a flashback for them.  You know, because they’re all bosom buddies despite having known each other for about a day, if that.

Mad Jon:  Jesus that was Joan Rivers?

I am pretty terrible with voices.

My wife even walked by and said "So what, is Joan Rivers their friend or something?" as I was watching it.

Charlie Sweatpants:  An admirably accurate summary.

You can really see the sloppiness in that she initially asks Homer if he can play a corpse, but then that whole idea gets dropped so we can get her and Krusty on screen together.  Their apathy for story, even improbable story, is consistent.  I gotta give ’em that.

Mad Jon:  You would know quality apathy when you see it.

Charlie Sweatpants:  We can smell our own, which is good because you don’t have to expend too much effort to smell.

Mad Jon:  Also, I agree. There were not a lot of what we would call ‘transitions’ here.  More or less things happened and then other things happened.

Charlie Sweatpants:  Yup, beyond the paper thin excuse for a plot, this episode was nothing but weak TV sketches, when they were even that.

Mad Jon:  Even the flashback was blocky, for lack of a better word.

And did Kevin Dillon already spend all of his HBO money?

Charlie Sweatpants:  It would be funny if he had, but I think this was just a happy meeting of a show and an actor who are both long past the point where anyone cares about them.

Mad Jon:  Fair enough.

Charlie Sweatpants:  I never know how much to read into these sorts of things, but this one was written by Castellaneta and his wife, who both came from sketch shows.  So it would make some sense that this is nothing but them ogling their favorite old and new shows.

Mad Jon:  I could see that.  But how does that explain Krusty spending 20 seconds bitching about how the show parodies are old for this or that reason? That really bothers me.

I hate when they point out that they suck. That’s not funny.

Why can’t you just be more funny?

Charlie Sweatpants:  I don’t know, probably because they learned long ago that being funny has basically nothing to do with whether or not they stay on the air.

Mad Jon:  Again, your observation is good.

Charlie Sweatpants:  I do think they still have a Vader-at-the-end-of-Jedi spark of humor left in them.  Easily my favorite line of the episode was when they had the HBO executive say "And we pay for everything with soft porno and boxing".  Which is true.  I mean, have you seen True Blood or Spartacus?  There are a lot of, shall we say, potential one handed scenes in there.  The thing is, as soon as he said that I also knew they were going to run it into the ground, which they immediately did by having Krusty yell that there’s soft core porn.  As though the man who orders Gigantic Asses doesn’t know about the full panoply of porn.

Charlie Sweatpants:  My point is that despite what things like having Krusty fired back and forth between two cannons would have you believe, they can still recognize a decent joke.  They can’t leave it alone, but they do know when they’ve got something more than their typical dementia.

Mad Jon:  Good point, I can’t think of a line in one of these chats that we’ve had in the last few years where someone mentions "I liked this line" without hearing "But…"

Charlie Sweatpants:  There is very often a "but".

Mad Jon:  And that but is almost always them running it into the ground and then some.

I also chuckled when Moe admitted to faking his way through Wire discussions.

Charlie Sweatpants:  Feh.

Mad Jon:  But I love The Wire and everything that touches it’s shadow.

So whateves.

Charlie Sweatpants:  But the Moe thing was another example of them just cramming things in that didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Mad Jon:  The agent’s line about "On time or sober" would have been good as well, had she not had to explain it to me.

Charlie Sweatpants:  The explanations are tedious, that’s for sure.  There are few things they won’t just let go.  Krusty actually telling us "now I’m strung out in a ball pit" when we can plainly fucking see that he’s sitting in a ball pit springs to mind.

Mad Jon:  Yep. That was indeed tedious.

Mad Jon:  I know I say this every week, but I think that the ending was even less of an ending than ever before.

Charlie Sweatpants:  I disliked the happiness of it.

Mad Jon:  There was so little resolution, that I think it actually moved backwards.

Charlie Sweatpants:  That too.  One second there’s a conflict, then they just dropped it to move into another set piece.  Old people screwing!  Ha!  Does their withered visage remind you of the grim specter of death?

Mad Jon:  Of course I expect zero continuity, but endings like this always remind me of the Family Guy episode about Petoria, where at the end the kid is like "So can they understand the baby or what?"

Charlie Sweatpants:  I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s a decent comparison.  There’s no prelude to her going nuts, there’s no resolution after she does, that’s a kind of continuity isn’t it?

Mad Jon:  Is this like a lack of continuity is the continuity kind of thing?

Charlie Sweatpants:  Something like that.

Mad Jon:  Cause I don’t much appreciate that kind of dangerous thinking.

Charlie Sweatpants:  Anything else here?  There were some Itchy & Scratchy episodes, but they were the same as everything else: lame entertainment love notes.

Mad Jon:  My heart always jumps a bit when the I and S music comes on, but like when I have watched so many Cinemax softcores, I always end up frustrated and slightly ashamed.

Charlie Sweatpants:  They just felt awfully flat compared to things like "Guest Director, Oliver Stone" where Itchy-Ruby shoots Scratchy-Oswald and the whole thing is over in about two seconds.  That’s a parody.

Also, I didn’t get the Hitler joke.

Mad Jon:  I think it was just so Maggie would salute the Reich.

Charlie Sweatpants:  Well yeah, but that’s pretty weak sauce.

Mad Jon:  But I could be wrong. There isn’t much to go on.

Charlie Sweatpants:  True enough.

Mad Jon:  We done then?

Charlie Sweatpants:  Yeah, let’s be done.  It’ll be our continuity.