This The Simpsons review contains spoilers.
The Simpsons Season 32 Episode 5
Olivia Colman (The Favourite, Hot Fuzz), voices Lily, a woman so vivacious and magnetic, Willie uses forks and knives in her presence. Her mission is to make life fun. She’s the kind of grand dame who can turn Macbeth into a comedy. She plays cricket on pool tables. Lily is a minor sensation, but like the Beatles and balmy weather she was too hot for England, and is banished to America, or as Willie calls it, Britain’s penal colony. Scots really know how to breathe new life into old jokes. Willie even dangles his haggis as a punchline.
The trip to America sequence is filled with a barrage of effective one-liners, as it tells the story through quip. Lily causes emotional turbulence on the plane. She gets Leonardo DiCaprio, in an uncredited cameo, to admit he plays the same part in every movie before he pleads with her to marry him. She has the same siren effect wherever she goes. Men hold up signs reading “We can kill my wife together.”
The Simpsons always affords more visual gags than might meet the eye to each installment, and while previous seasons lagged on it, they have been making a comeback since last season. While on vacation with the kids to the vinelands, Marge reads a book called “What to Read When You’re Reading.” These little bits, like Sergio Aragonés drawings in Mad, are consistently effective humor enhancers on the show. They are a happy distraction, and the episodes are much more fulfilling with them.
An errant wind on a dart board, because all Brits settle life decisions with pub acts of fate, sends Lily to Springfield: “America’s least romantic city,” a line which works on its own, but is actually a set up for the punchline about it being where men have the lowest testosterone. The most effective jokes follow the rule of three, so by the time she sees the “Welcome to Springfield, we put the sit in obesity” sign, the entire trip is underscored by as much inferred humor as it is moved forward through the musical numbers.
Burns, on the other hand, goes full on James Bond villain: He hires a small orchestra like he did when he kidnapped Tom Jones to woo Marge in an early season installment, evilly strokes a cat, and giggles and giggles. Every giggle more maniacally villainous than the last. When Lily makes not of it, he appreciatively says “She gets me,” which, again, is a fine twist on a known cliché. It’s all going less than swimmingly until Burns does his princess cake dance, singingly wonderfully like Gypsy Rose Lee, “and his cardiologist makes three.” It is a grand move, but an anticlimactic ending.
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