Okay, the Simpsons episode "I'm Spelling As Fast As I Can" was on TV today, and I've always had a serious problem with it, which I will now discuss at great length, because I've got nothing better to do with my time on a Sunday night.
Lisa Simpson is competing in a spelling bee and the evil organiser wants an adorable little boy to win it for publicity reasons, so offers Lisa a bribe of a college scholarship to throw the contest, and she refuses. And then it goes like this:
Evil organiser: All right, your word is 'whether' [or 'weather']
Other contestant: Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?
Evil organiser: Certainly. "I don't know whether the weather will improve."
Other contestant: Umm... W... E...
Evil organiser gleefully presses the 'wrong answer' button. Adorable little boy comes to the microphone.
Evil organiser: Your word is 'rigged', as in "this contest is rigged!"
Adorable little boy: R-I-G-G-E-D. Wigged.
Evil organiser: Bravo, my pet! You shall be champion! Assuming Lisa misspells this next word... The word is 'intransigence'! As in "the little girl's intransigence cost her the college of her choice!"
Lisa: Attention, everyone! I was asked to take a dive, but I won't do it! I-N-T-R-A-N-S-I-G-A-N-C-E!
Evil organiser: You fool! It's E-N-C-E!
Lisa: Oh my god, you're right!
Evil organiser: And now you lose everything! And I go back to whatever it is I do!
Okay, George Plimpton as the evil organiser is hilarious, and the whole scene is brilliant, but it annoys me. If he could eliminate another competitor with the weather/whether gag, he could have done that to Lisa too! Much better, and funnier, would be to have the first competitor be given the word 'sellout', spell it X-J-Z-Q-T and be cheerfully thrown a huge sack of money with a dollar sign on it, adorable Alex get 'rigged', then have Lisa be given the whether/weather gag and the evil organiser realise that she got it right because he hadn't noticed there are two words that sound the same, adorable Alex get another hilarious word, and then have Lisa get 'intransigence' wrong. That would be much better all round, and not an insult to the viewers' intelligence!
I have made this point before, every time the episode has been on telly. One time, I was in Cambridge the next day for an othello competition, and a very intelligent person, an actual Cambridge University professor and everything, who doesn't normally watch the Simpsons, was still laughing about having seen that episode and saying how brilliant the whole weather/whether bit was. It almost makes me think that the episode wasn't so much an insult to intelligence as to pedantic quibbling, but no. It's the rest of the world that's wrong.
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