Season 6 Episode 20: Hi I.Q.

Kelly Bundy receives an invitation to a party thrown by Alpha, an organization for people with very high IQs, and she accepts it at face value. The viewer works out what is actually happening some time before she does. The Alpha members have a tradition: each of them brings the dumbest person they can find as a date, and there is a prize for the winner. Kelly is somebody’s entry. The episode gives Christina Applegate one of her best stretches of the season, because it plays the reveal straight and lets Kelly be genuinely wounded by it rather than oblivious, and what follows is Bud offering her the only two forms of recourse the Bundy family recognizes. The first one she declines on hygiene grounds. The second, which he describes as destroying their superior smiles with sheer pointless violence, she accepts. In the meantime Al and Jefferson have bought a flat-packed workbench and are attempting to assemble it, an undertaking that the two of them are catastrophically unqualified for and that Peg and Marcy watch from the kitchen with the detachment of people observing a cartoon. Some of the hardware in the box is not even workbench hardware. The project reaches its natural conclusion when Al picks up a blowtorch to investigate whether it is clogged and asks Jefferson to hold the lighter. Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes of the whole series.The two halves do not intersect at all, which is fine, because both are about intelligence and the people who think they have it. Alpha believes it is smart and behaves appallingly. Al and Jefferson know perfectly well that they are not, and set themselves on fire anyway.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: March 22, 1992
• Season and episode: Season 6, Episode 20
• Overall episode number: 125
• Written by: Steve Crider
• Directed by: Gerry Cohen
• Taped: February 21, 1992
• Production note: Ed O’Neill named this one of his favorite episodes in the 1995 special My Favorite Married.
• Title note: A play on “high IQ,” generally taken to mean a score of 130 or above. The fictional Alpha society stands in for Mensa.

Guest Cast

• Joshua Beckett as Scott (credited as Joshua Rifkind)
• Christopher M. Brown as Ralph
• Rana Kirkland as Margie (credited as Rana Mack)
• James Quattrochi as Delbert (credited as James Quarter)
• Gary Epp as the security guard
• Tim Hill as the man

The Idiot Party

The premise is cruel and the episode knows it. A room full of people who consider themselves the smartest in Chicago have organized an evening around humiliating strangers for sport, and the show is on Kelly’s side throughout. Her comeback to Bud early in the episode, that he who laughs last laughs west, is exactly the kind of line that makes her an easy target, and the episode’s whole point is that being an easy target does not make the targeting acceptable.

Bud’s solution is the series in miniature. He offers Kelly the Bundy Way, she misunderstands which Bundy Way he means, and he clarifies: destroy their superior smiles with sheer, pointless violence. His stated motivation for helping is that they turned him down too.

The workbench subplot is the funniest material in the episode and almost entirely physical. Al and Jefferson examining a blowtorch, concluding it is not clogged, and then arranging for one of them to hold a lit flame to the nozzle while the other looks inside is a sequence that could have come out of a silent film. Peg’s observation that you can almost hear the Looney Tunes theme is the only commentary it needs.

Christopher M. Brown, playing the network executive Ralph, had been on It’s Your Move in the mid-eighties, a sitcom created by this show’s own Ron Leavitt and Michael G. Moye and co-starring David Garrison.

Famous Quotes

• Kelly, after her brother asks whether she got lost on the way to her own house: “Laugh on, goo-boy. But remember, he who laughs last, laughs west.”
• Jefferson, inspecting the blowtorch: “Hmm… Well this blowtorch doesn’t look clogged to me.” Al: “…Well you hold the lighter and I’ll look.”
• Peg, watching from the kitchen: “Wow, you can almost hear the ‘Looney Tunes’ theme, can’t you?”
• Bud, proposing a course of action: “You gotta get back at these people, the Bundy Way!” Kelly: “…But I like changing my underwear.” Bud: “Uhm… The other Bundy Way, Kel. Destroy their superior smiles with sheer, pointless violence!”

Notes

• The answer to Bud’s question about how many are in a gross is 144.
• Kelly’s mail sorting reveals that both Al and Bud subscribe to Playboy, Peggy subscribes to Playgirl, and Buck receives something called Bitches in Heat.
• One of the very few references Marcy makes to her father, who she says built her a bike for Christmas.
• The Alpha display board credits Dan Quayle as “Last Years Winner,” missing the apostrophe, which for an organization of this kind is the episode’s quietest joke.
• Goofs: the finished workbench has a three-board work surface though only one board came out of the box, and some of the hardware Jefferson studies is joist hangers that have nothing to do with the project.