Season 8 Episode 5: Banking on Marcy

Marcy has to speak in public and cannot, so she adopts a technique: she imagines herself having sex instead. It works on the nerves and rather too well on everything else, and the resulting performance at the bank is received as the most compelling piece of public speaking anyone there has witnessed, which turns into a whole new career for her.

The episode’s comic engine is Al, who is in the audience. He watches the whole thing and is left temporarily impotent by it, a condition the series had already visited on both of Marcy’s husbands: Steve in season two’s “Im-Po-Dent” and Jefferson in season seven. Across eleven years the show managed to render every man in Marcy’s orbit incapable at some point, always by her agency and never on purpose.

What keeps the half-hour from being only a dirty joke is how committed Marcy is to the professional outcome. The technique is a solution to a real problem, it is effective, and she pursues the resulting opportunities seriously. The humiliation lands entirely on the men watching.

Al’s parallel plot has him taking an interest in rap videos, which pairs oddly and well with Bud’s Grandmaster B period. Peggy mentions a family tragedy involving a relative known as Uncle No-Pants. During her moment on stage Marcy calls out for Jefferson, for Steve, and for a lover named Jamal, which the episode does not explain. Beau Billingslea, the moderator, returned in season eleven as Reverend Hightower.

Jefferson’s reaction completes the picture. Rather than being threatened by his wife’s sudden professional celebrity, he treats it as a windfall, and the reassurance Marcy offers him in front of a visibly suffering Al, complete with the nickname she had used on Steve years earlier, is the episode’s last turn of the screw.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: October 3, 1993
• Season 8, Episode 5, and the 162nd episode of the series
• Written by Stacie Lipp
• Directed by Tony Singletary

Guest Cast

• Marilyn Kagan as Dr. Angela, voice only
• Beau Billingslea as the moderator

Marcy’s Speech

The bank makes Marcy the speaker at the annual shareholders meeting, where she has to announce layoffs caused by a bad investment in a film that flopped. She has a terror of public speaking she traces back to a grade school incident involving a cockroach. Peg points her at a radio psychologist, whose advice is a transference exercise, so Marcy gets through the speech by thinking about sex, and brings the house down.

It works so well the bank starts renting her out to deliver bad news to other corporations. Then Jefferson, neglected, stages a one-man protest and she quits. Al, meanwhile, has been impotent since the shareholders meeting, and calls the radio show about it under a false name.

Famous Quotes

• Al: “Marcy killed it, Peg. You made it sick, but Marcy killed it.” Al, on his condition.
• Jefferson: “Emancipate me! SET ME FREE!” Jefferson’s protest.
• Peggy: “So that’s what one looks like.” Peg, watching the speech.
• Jefferson: “Not in public. Unless you count the Skyway at Disneyland.” Jefferson, answering a question nobody needed answered.

Notes

• The bad investment that triggers the layoffs is Last Action Hero, which was made by Columbia Pictures, whose television arm also made this show.
• Temporary impotence is a running gag across all three husbands. Steve had it in Impo-Dent, and Jefferson gets his turn later.
• Marcy calls Jefferson “Sugar Tush,” which was her pet name for Steve back in season 3’s “The House That Peg Lost.”
• Beau Billingslea, the moderator here, returns in season 11 as Reverend Hightower.
• The newspaper montage tracks real 1993 news, including IBM’s job cuts and the base closure commissions.
• Goof: when the camera pushes in on the headline about the CBS fall schedule, the legible body text underneath is an unrelated story about a municipal court centre.