Season 8 Episode 6: No Chicken, No Check

Al has taken the Dodge keys away, so Bud and Kelly pool their money and buy a car of their own, a boxy military-looking thing that neither of them wants to share and both of them need on the same night. Bud is seeing a foreign exchange student. Kelly is seeing a man who appears in commercials, and her description of his standing in the industry is one of the better Kelly lines of the season. The custody dispute over the vehicle runs through the episode. Al’s contribution is to handle the insurance, and because the only policy he can afford is an agricultural one, the car is now insured as a farm vehicle. The catch, which Al explains in the tone of a man who has read the fine print and made peace with it, is that the company will only honour a claim if there is a chicken in the car at the time of the accident. The policy’s motto gives the episode its title. Running underneath all of it is a food plot: Peg has stocked the refrigerator, Al has photographed the stocked refrigerator for his own records, and by the time he comes home singing about it the food is gone. His proposal for a benefit concert in his own honour is the best throwaway in the episode. It is a solid mid-season episode built on the series’ most reliable engine, which is the gap between what the Bundys need and what the Bundys can afford.

Episode Facts

• Original air date: October 10, 1993
• Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 6
• Overall episode number: 163
• Written by: Ralph R. Farquhar
• Directed by: Tony Singletary
• Taped: October 1, 1993
• Production note: Bud’s middle name is revealed here as Franklin.
• Title note: The motto of the insurance company Al picks, with a nod to Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.”

Guest Cast

• Sean O’Bryan as Neuter
• Valerie Hirshon as Sonja
• Lou Bornacki as Jake

No Chicken, No Check

The insurance gag is the episode’s best structural idea, because it means the family spends the back half of the episode having to keep a live chicken in a car in order to stay covered. Al does not present this as absurd. He presents it as the deal available to a man on his income, which is the same way he presents everything.

The opening grocery scene is a small masterpiece of implication. Bud and Kelly unload the shopping Peg sent them for, and the inventory builds item by item toward a conclusion neither of them wants to reach, with Kelly arriving there one beat ahead of her brother. Bud’s delivery of the last item on the list is the whole joke.

Al’s response to Bud’s suggestion that he simply buy them a car is one of the purest Al Bundy exchanges of the season: he turns out his empty pockets, offers everyone a luxury vehicle, and Peg names the one she would like. His reply about finding one that hungry is the kind of line the show could only get away with because Katey Sagal always sold the insult as affection.

The car itself is a Volkswagen Thing, with the Illinois plate 11 MGM 5, which is a reasonably on-the-nose piece of set dressing for a Columbia production.

Famous Quotes

• Kelly, on borrowing her father’s car: “It’s such a treat driving Dad’s Dodge. The noise, the rust, the thrill of watching the open road through the open floor.”
• Bud, unpacking his mother’s shopping list: “Bourbon-flavored bonbons, romance novels, …Kenny G CD.” Kelly: “Mmm, you and Dad are going to have quite a time tonight, huh, Mom?” Bud: “…Batteries…”
• Bud: “Dad, why don’t you just get us a car?” Al, turning out his pockets: “New cars for everybody! Peg, would you like a BMW?” Peg: “Well I kinda see myself in a Jaguar.” Al: “Oh, if we could only find one that hungry.”
• Al, on his situation: “Why doesn’t Willie Nelson do a benefit for me? They can call it ‘Al-Aid’.”

Notes

• Al sings two food parodies in this episode, “Amazing Beef” and “Buffalo Wings.”
• The Willie Nelson reference follows one in season 6’s “The Egg and I.”
• A goof: Al holds up the photographs he took of the full refrigerator and, in the reverse shot, is clearly holding them upside down.
• Another: the staging of Neuter’s proposal to Kelly changes three times across consecutive shots, moving them from behind a van to beside it and back.