25x08 White Christmas Blues

[4.9/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] There’s not much here. Theoretically this one has an A-plot and B-plot. The A-plot is Marge deciding to turn the Simpsons’ home into a local bed & breakfast to take advantage of Springfield having America’s only snowfall thanks to climate change and make a little extra scratch around the holidays. The B-plot is Lisa trying to get thoughtful and helpful gifts for her family, rather than just gifting them trifles.

But you can barely even call either of them stories. At best, they’re loose skeletons for the writers to hang jokes on. I don’t necessarily mind that approach, especially for a holiday lark, but the jokes have to be funny!

There’s umpteen jokes in this episode, since it’s basically a gag machine, and despite that, I chuckled three times. 1. When Marge complains about the second verses of Xmas carols being all creepy and religious, 2. Homer received a packet of seeds from Lisa and deadpanning, “You got me weed?” and 3. Bart misunderstanding Lisa’s O. Henry “Gift of the Magi” reference to mean that she’s pretending the gift is from Maggie, but it’s really from her.

That’s it! That’s a terrible hit-to-miss ratio for an episode that’s founded on nothing but gagwork. There’s dumb bits about Wiggum ending up in a giant snowball, a faltering Z-plot about Rev. Lovejoy’s Xmas sermon, cringeworthy bits the Flanderses having “religious fits” and Lisa declaring that “women just want to be heard, and an endless array of dumb list gags (something I thought the show had grown out of by this point). So much of the material in this episode feels like filler, whether it’s comic or more narrative.

The stories, threadbare though they may be, don’t really have any sort of progression. Marge decides to open the B&B; the guests act like complaining jerks, but then they’re nice. What caused them to suddenly be nice? What did Marge learn from any of this? How has anyone changed due to this experience? Who knows! It’s just stuff! Please enjoy our imbecilic gag about Homer making a “sleigh ride” out of an old wagon and the family pets.

There’s slightly more of a trajectory in the Lisa story, with here learning to give people gifts that they’ll actually like rather than vaguely passive-aggressive suggestions for self-improvement, but even that’s pretty thin.

Again, this kind of gag-every-second approach can work, but the jokes have to actually make you laugh. This is just a sweaty, vaguely holiday-themed snowball of nothing. It’s actively bad in a few places, but mostly it just feels like insubstantial stuffing the whole way through.