| "Lisa the Iconoclast" | |||
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| The Simpsons episode | |||
| Episodeno. | Season 7 Episode 16 | ||
| Directed by | Mike B. Anderson | ||
| Written by | Jonathan Collier | ||
| Production code | 3F13 | ||
| Original air date | February 18, 1996 (1996-02-18) | ||
| Guest appearances | |||
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| Episode features | |||
| Couch gag | The family is portrayed asThe Brady Bunch.[1] | ||
| Commentary |
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| Episode chronology | |||
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| The Simpsonsseason 7 | |||
| List of episodes | |||
"Lisa the Iconoclast" is the sixteenth episode of theseventh season of the American animated television seriesThe Simpsons. It originally aired onFox in the United States on February 18, 1996. In this episode,Lisa writes an essay on Springfield founderJebediah Springfield for the town's bicentennial. While doing research, she learns he was a murderous pirate who viewed the town's citizens with contempt. Lisa andHomer try to reveal the truth about Jebediah but only anger Springfield's residents. It was originally advertised in commercials as aPresidents' Day special episode; the episode aired the day before Presidents' Day.
The episode was written byJonathan Collier and directed byMike B. Anderson.[1] It was Anderson's first directing role and the story was inspired by the 1991 exhumation of PresidentZachary Taylor.Donald Sutherland guest-starred as the voice of Hollis Hurlbut, a part that was written specifically for him. The episode includes several references toColonial andRevolutionary America. It contains a scene of dialogue between George Washington and Lisa in which he makes a reference to "Kentuckians". It also featuresGilbert Stuart'sunfinished 1796 painting ofGeorge Washington.
The episode features twoneologisms,embiggen andcromulent, which were intended to sound like real words but are in fact completely fabricated (although it was later discovered that C. A. Ward had usedembiggen in 1884).[2]Embiggen,coined byDan Greaney, has since been used in several scientific publications, whilecromulent, coined byDavid X. Cohen, appeared inDictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon. In 2018, "cromulent" was added to theOxford English Dictionary.[3]
AsSpringfield celebrates its bicentennial,Miss Hoover assignsLisa's second-grade class to write an essay onJebediah Springfield, the town's founder. Meanwhile,Mayor Quimby proclaimsHomer the town crier during tryouts for historical figures in the town's upcoming celebration. Because his "criering" is better thanNed Flanders', Homer seizes Ned's heirloom hat and bell as props, damaging the hat in the process.
Lisa visits the town'shistorical society to research Jebediah's life. Hollis Hurlbut, the curator of the society's museum, appreciates Lisa's enthusiasm and grants her access to Jebediah's possessions. While examining hisfife, she finds a document inside that purports to be a confession of his secret past as the vicious pirate Hans Sprungfeld, as he was known until 1796. He had attempted to killGeorge Washington while the latter was having his portrait painted, and later wrote and hid his confession, confident that no one in Springfield would ever find it.
Lisa tries to convince the townspeople of the truth about Jebediah, but is met with disbelief and hostility. Hurlbut dismisses the confession as a forgery, and Miss Hoover gives Lisa a failing grade for writing her essay about it, accusing her ofpolitical correctness. Continuing her research, Lisa discovers that Jebediah wore aprostheticsilver tongue after his own was bitten off in a fight. She persuades local government officials to exhume his remains and search for it, but there is no sign of it when the coffin is opened. Exasperated at Lisa's meddling, Quimby strips Homer of his position as town crier.
Seeing a copy of the unfinished Washington portrait in her classroom, and remembering a dream in which he urged her to find the "one piece left in the puzzle", Lisa realizes how she can establish the confession as authentic. She returns to the museum and matches its torn edge to that of the portrait, proving that Jebediah had written it on a scrap of the canvas that got caught on his boot when he escaped after failing to kill Washington. The missing silver tongue is found in one of the museum's exhibits, stolen from the coffin by Hurlbut in an effort to protect his own career and the legend of Jebediah. Lisa and Hurlbut decide to reveal the truth about him during a parade celebrating the bicentennial, but at the last moment Lisa decides that the legend has served to inspire the town and chooses to keep the secret. As Homer watches proudly, he notices that Ned has been reinstated as town crier and pushes him aside, then lets Lisa ring the crier's bell while riding on his shoulders.
The story was inspired by the real events surrounding the exhumation of PresidentZachary Taylor.[4] In the late 1980s, college professor and author Clara Rising theorized that Taylor was murdered by poison and was able to convince Taylor's closest living relative and theCoroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky, to order an exhumation. On June 17, 1991, Taylor's remains were exhumed and transported to the Office of theKentucky Chief Medical Examiner, who found that the level of arsenic was much smaller than would be expected if Taylor had been thus poisoned. The remains were then returned to the cemetery and received appropriate honors at reinterment.[5] Then-show runnerBill Oakley said "Lisa the Iconoclast" is "essentially the same" story but withLisa Simpson in the role as Rising.[4] At the end of the episode, an ode to Jebediah Springfield is played over the credits. The music and lyrics were written byJeff Martin.[4]
Donald Sutherland voiced the historian in this episode.[1] The script was specifically written with him in mind playing that part.[6] Sutherland wanted to do the voice recordings as one would do a film and start in the middle of the script, so that he could get to know the character, but that idea was abandoned.[4] In the episode, Lisa joked she was getting over her "Chester A. Arthuritis", a play on the word "arthritis" and the name ofChester A. Arthur. Sutherlandad-libbed the line "you had arthritis?" and the producers liked it so much that they kept it.[4]
The episode opens with an old documentary on Jebediah Springfield, starringTroy McClure as Springfield. The writers tried to make this documentary seem as lousy and low-budget as possible. One of these tricks was to have post-production add scratches to the animation.[7] The animators added production errors that would occur in a low-budget film. For example, a man in the crowd looks at the camera, some of the people are wearing wristwatches,[8] McClure's stuntman does not have the same sideburns as he does, and aboom microphone can be seen entering the frame.[4] In the Historical Society, the animators spent a significant amount of time decorating the walls. Besides numeroushistorical references, they also decorated the walls withThe Simpsons characters in 18th-century settings. The first painting showsOtto Mann driving children in a horse-drawncarriage. Another painting showsMarge Simpson insilhouette. The last painting showsProfessor Frink holding a kite in the manner ofBenjamin Franklin.[4]
The Historical Society of Springfield contains references to historical figures and facts. The episode featuresGilbert Stuart's unfinished 1796 painting of George Washington and tells a fictional backstory of how it came to be. In reality, the painting was unfinished and it did not have a part torn off.[4] Hurlbut mentions the American revolutionariesWilliam Dawes andSamuel Allyne Otis as equals to Jebediah Springfield.[1] When Lisa passes out the "Wanted for treason" posters, it is a reference to those featuringJohn F. Kennedy, which were circulated inDallas prior to his assassination.[9] Hurlbut claims Springfield's confessions are "just as fake" as thewill of Howard Hughes and thediaries of Adolf Hitler, both of which are proven forgeries.[1] The opening couch gag shows theSimpson family in blue boxes similar to the style ofThe Brady Bunch.[1]
Chief Wiggum is singing "Camptown Races" from 1850 byStephen Foster ventriloquised with the skull of Jebediah Springfield.[1] Lisa's dream in which Washington and Springfield are fighting is a reference toLethal Weapon.[8] When Lisa is telling the people atMoe's Tavern about the real history of Jebediah Springfield, they all sit with their mouths open. This is a reference to a scene in the filmThe Producers from 1968.[8] When Homer knocks over Ned Flanders in order to take over his job as town crier, it is a reference to the filmNational Lampoon's Animal House from 1978.[9] Lisa's decision to hide the truth to preserve the legend of Jebediah Springfield is a reference to the filmThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In addition to these cultural references, at least one author has compared this episode toFriedrich Nietzsche's short workOn the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.[10]
In its original broadcast, "Lisa the Iconoclast" finished 70th in the ratings for the week of February 12 to 18, 1996.[11] The episode was the sixth highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, followingThe X-Files,Melrose Place,Beverly Hills, 90210,Married... with Children, and Fox Tuesday Night Movie:Cliffhanger.[11]
The episode received extremely positive reviews from television critics.
DVD Movie Guide's Colin Jacobson lauded it for the focus on Lisa, commenting that "Lisa-centered episodes tend to be preachy, but I suppose that's inevitable given her character. I like the fact Lisa takes the high road here, though, as she proves she doesn't always have to be right. Homer's turn as the town crier brings mirth to a solid show."[12]
In addition, John Alberti praised the episode in his bookLeaving Springfield as "an especially cromulent example of the narrative fissuring and disruptive disclosure...Lisa spends the entire episode uncovering the truth about Jebediah and courageously defending her findings against a phalanx of authority figures...a symbol of honesty, integrity, and courage. All in all, a spectacular episode revealing the truth behind our society."[13]
The authors of the bookI Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide,Gary Russell andGareth Roberts,[14] thought it was a "clever" episode, and highlighted Lisa's fantasy of the fight between Springfield and George Washington as "fantastic".[1] Dave Foster of DVD Times thought Sutherland offered a "memorable" guest appearance.[15]
Total Film's Nathan Ditum ranked Sutherland's performance as the 14th best guest appearance in the show's history.[16] Michael Moran ofThe Times ranked the episode as the eighth best in the show's history.[17]
Martin Belam ofThe Guardian named it one of the five greatest episodes inSimpsons history.[18]
The episode features twoneologisms:embiggen andcromulent.[4] Theshowrunners asked the writers if they could come up with two words which sounded like real words.[6] TheSpringfield townmotto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." SchoolteacherEdna Krabappel comments that she had never heard the wordembiggen until she moved to Springfield.Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word." Later in the episode, while talking about Homer's audition for the role of town crier,Principal Skinner states, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."
Embiggen, coined by writerDan Greaney,[4] is a verb meaning 'to make larger';[19] itsmorphology (em- +big +-en) is similar to that ofenlarge (en- +large). The verb had in fact been used by C. A. Ward in an 1884 edition of the British journalNotes and Queries, as an "English parallel as ugly" asGreek ἐμεγάλυνεν (Acts 5:13).[20] The word has made its way to common use and was included in Mark Peters'Yada, Yada, Do'h!, 111 Television Words That Made the Leap From the Screen to Society.[21] In 2018, it was included in theMerriam-Webster dictionary[22] and the onlineOxford English Dictionary.[23][24] In particular,embiggen can be found instring theory, as in the journalHigh Energy Physics in the article "Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking", which was published on January 23, 2007.[25] For example, the article says: "For large P, the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild." Later this usage was noted in the journalNature, which explained that in this context, it meansto grow or expand.[26] The episode is a favorite of the producers, among them, series creatorMatt Groening lists it as his all time favorite, stating that its reference of US history was "irrelevance", and showrunnerAl Jean also lists it as one his all time favorites.[citation needed]
Cromulent is an adjective that was coined byDavid X. Cohen.[4] Since it was coined, it has appeared in Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon.[27] It was added to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary in September 2023.[28] The meaning ofcromulent is inferred only from its usage, which indicates that it is a positive attribute. Dictionary.com defines it as meaning 'fine' or 'acceptable'.[27]Ben Macintyre has written that it means "valid or acceptable".[29] In 2018, "cromulent" was added to theOxford English Dictionary.[30]
The episode garnered some attention in July 2024, when UK broadcasterChannel 4 conspicuously pulled a scheduled showing on 14 July, and replaced it with anepisode fromseason 30 during a marathon of season 7 episodes. This was due to references to assassinations throughout the episode, and in light of theattempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania hours prior.[31][32]
Erik Adams writes that “'Lisa The Iconoclast' is a complex episode, and that complexity comes down to the way the show plays with Springfield’s infamous mob mentality. 'A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man' isn’t the episode’s only moral; it also teaches us that unthinking collective—the one that would spend unwisely on a flashy monorail or converge on the local brothel with torches and pitchforks—has a heart, too. As the resident know-it-all, it’s an important lesson for Lisa to learn: Just because she finds freedom in the truth doesn’t mean that everyone else will... once we’re dead and buried and someone has replaced our bodies with skeletons, we forfeit any control over the stories that are told about us. We can attempt to conduct the narrative from the beyond the grave with journals of our innermost thoughts and confessions to our gravest crimes, but if we’re lucky enough to be remembered, then the people doing the remembering are calling the shots. 'Lisa The Iconoclast' captures this sentiment beautifully, showing that the people of Springfield are the ones getting the last laugh over the pirate who tried so hard to dupe them all. They’ve turned him into the figure that unites them all, on both a grand city wide scale and on a smaller scale within the walls of 742 Evergreen Terrace. This takes a bigger chunk out of Sprungfeld’s reign of terror than George Washington’s wooden teeth ever could, and I cannot tell a lie: They did it with their parades and their educational films starring Troy McClure and their ceremonial bells. Lisa and Homer know the truth about Hans Sprungfeld, but the myth of Jebediah Springfield lives on. How cromulent."[33]
The episode was included on April 28, 1997, on theVHS setThe Dark Secrets of the Simpsons, alongside "The Springfield Files", "Homer the Great", and "Homer Badman".[34] On September 8, 2003, the VHS tape was released onDVD under the nameThe Simpsons: Dark Secrets inRegion 2 andRegion 4, but "Homer the Great" was replaced by "Homer to the Max".[35] It was released again onDVD on December 13, 2005, as part ofThe Simpsons Complete Seventh Season.Bill Oakley,Josh Weinstein,Jonathan Collier,Yeardley Smith,Mike B. Anderson, andDavid Silverman participated in the DVD'saudio commentary.[36]
I've just done my first non-fiction book, Oh No It's A Completely Unofficial Simpsons Guide for Virgin, co-authored with Gareth Roberts which has, to be frank, been more of a nightmare than it needed to be [the book was published as I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, with Gary and Gareth writing under the pseudonyms Warren Martyn & Adrian Wood].
