I once took a tutoring job just so I could quit it and join a violence gang, but then I couldn't find a violence gang. :(

You wanna go out sometime? You know, out back? (I'm basically Moe.)

I'll always have a soft spot for The Finger Thing Means The Taxes Guy from The PTA Disbands, but yes, Benevenstanciano is a great name.

idiotking, if I were in a position to employ anyone, I would hire you just for your chimp-sex primer from earlier. Are you talking enough about chimp sex in your cover letters?

At the moment, the word "Dan" appears seven times in the comments of this article. "Savage", twelve. Forms of "kink", 17. Forms of "adventurous", 22. "chimp", 50. Well done, team!

Doing a control-f for references in the comments to "chimp", because obviously that is the correct way to read these comments, and this was my favourite one. It's so…delightfully minimalist.

Okay, so far candidates for the mother's name are "Penny" and "Odysseus".

I see where you're coming from. Certainly, if the extent of the story were "Kent is jealous of a former colleague who's become rich and famous now", then she qualifies. But I felt a bit of a tug when they tried to position her as someone doing something real, substantive, and enviable compared to Kent's job. Like the…

So, wait.

When I was but a lad, I always thought that "a-paddlin'" was an old man phrase for something one would enjoy doing, kind of like when Mr. Burns says something is "sporting". I was pretty dumb when I was a lad, is mostly the point of this story.

I use Michael Caine's exaggerated DUH OH.

I'm watching just out of morbid curiosity to see how in the hell they manage to turn such a compressed-time premise into a series. I'm glad that that lady cleared up in her dialogue that she is not a priest, though, because I had been operating under the assumption that she was a priest.

The best performance of his life!

This is one of my favourite lines ever and I don't know why.

Well, I know what I'm doing for the next 11 hours.

Just two weeks ago, I said Sims would call "And Maggie Makes Three" "And Maggie Makes These". He proved me wrong, and got the name of the episode right, and I briefly doubted myself. But this "Bart's Comic" incident has taught me better: like democracy, Sims doesn't work.

joelgord, do you ever feel that getting a shitty job because you love your baby daughter was as useless as that yellow, lemon-shaped rock over there?

You know, I agree with you - "anything for a gag" vs. "sincerity" is what separated early Simpsons from current Family Guy. My absolute least favourite Simpsons moment is in the fairly-recent episode where Lurleen's dad comes back and they do a cut from the whole family (including Marge) singing a song in the hallway…

Yeah, I would bet that that's a deliberate "Homer's faulty memory" gag.

I liked your old gimmick better, Newton.