Season 11 Episode 9: Crimes Against Obesity

It is Al’s birthday, and on the way to lunch at the Jiggly Room he insults a customer named Shirley in the course of refusing her a refund. Shirley is not a new character: she was the first of the shoe store’s long line of oversized customers, going back to the pilot, and she has had enough. She blows a whistle, a column of women marches into Gary’s Shoes chanting, and Al is tied to a chair and tried on a charge of Crimes Against Obesity. The format is a courtroom episode conducted inside the shoe store, with witnesses, exhibits and a verdict.

The exhibits are what make it. The prosecution’s evidence is archive footage, and the episode calls up five separate clips from across the run, Matilda from “A Shoe Room with a View,” Enid from “Honey, I Blew Up Myself,” Penelope and Barbara from “Nooner or Later,” and Shirley herself from the pilot. Every one of them is a real line Al said on this show, which turns the half-hour into both a trial and a ten-year retrospective of a single running joke, with the series calling its own witness list.

Al’s defence does not go well, in part because Peggy takes the stand to help and testifies about her mother instead. What saves the episode from being a lecture is the direction the testimony drifts: the women begin corroborating each other’s eating, Peggy’s story about Aunt Edna and the pies is matched by Gwen’s account of losing a kindergarten class, and Al turns and looks directly into the camera. It is one of the few times the series broke the fourth wall, and the line is three words long.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: Sunday, December 29, 1996 on FOX
• Season 11, Episode 9
• Overall episode 247 of the series
• Production code 11.05
• Written by Russell Marcus
• Directed by Amanda Bearse
• The title plays on the legal phrase “crimes against humanity”
• Marcy does not appear, though the character is heard off screen

Guest Cast

• Diana Bellamy as Shirley
• Cassi Davis as Patty
• Danica Sheridan as Matilda
• Jennifer Echols as Gwen
• Helen Siff as Leonna
• Kelly Goodman as Barbara
• Nicole Nagorsky as Penelope

The Evidence Against Al Bundy

Using archive footage as courtroom evidence is a genuinely clever structural idea, and it only works because the series had been consistent for a decade. Al’s cruelty to the store’s larger customers was one of the oldest running jokes on the show, and the trial format lets the episode assemble it into a case file: five clips, five different episodes, five different women, the same man. Diana Bellamy’s Shirley is the right plaintiff because she was there first, in the pilot, which gives the prosecution a decade of standing.

The episode is careful not to resolve into a moral. Al is plainly guilty and the show does not pretend otherwise, but it also does not reform him, and the jury’s own testimony undermines the proceedings from the inside. Peggy’s evidence about her mother eating Aunt Edna is offered in Al’s defence; Matilda’s response is that this happens; Gwen’s is that she lost a kindergarten class the same way. The fourth-wall look that follows is the punctuation the scene needs.

Bud and Kelly’s subplot is slight: they attempt to tint the Dodge’s windows as a birthday present, with predictable results, but it produces one of the season’s better sight gags, with Kelly knocking Bud out and arranging the evidence to suggest he did it to himself. Jennifer Echols appears here as Gwen, a character she had played in “Pump Fiction,” making this one of several roles she took across the series.

Famous Quotes

• Shirley: “Aren’t you open?!” / Al: “Sorry, ma’am, but unlike your mouth, we occasionally close.”
• Griff: “This is a pliant heel with a cork filling.” / Al: “Whereas you are a giant seal with a pork filling.”
• Shirley: “You haven’t heard the last of this! What goes around, comes around!” / Al: “Well, considering your orbit, looks like I have about 10 more years.”
• Shirley: “Al Bundy, you are charged with Crimes Against Obesity.” / Chant: “2, 4, 6, 8, don’t make fun of our weight!” / Al: “1, 2, 3, 4, you’re gonna fall through the floor.”
• Peg: “Inside her there’s a thin woman just dying to get out.” / Shirley: “We all say that.” / Peg: “No, there really is. Last Thanksgiving, she ate my Aunt Edna! I told her not to stand so close to the pies.”
• Matilda: “That happens.” / Gwen: “I lost a kindergarten class that way.” / Al (to camera): “…And I’M on trial.”

Notes

• Shirley, played by Diana Bellamy, was the shoe store’s first oversized customer, appearing in the pilot: the episode uses that original clip as evidence.
• The clip package draws on “A Shoe Room with a View,” “Honey, I Blew Up Myself,” “Nooner or Later” (twice) and the pilot.
• Al’s look into the camera is one of the series’ few deliberate fourth-wall breaks.
• It is also one of only two episodes, with season one’s “Where’s the Boss?”, in which Peggy insults overweight people.
• Jefferson sings “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” heading to the Jiggly Room; Al sings his own version to himself coming down for breakfast.
• Goof: Bud, supposedly unconscious, visibly grips the hammer Kelly places in his hand.