Homer: Someday you’ll thank me for this, son.
Bart: Not bloody likely.
Homer: You know, when I was a boy, I really wanted a catcher’s mitt, but my dad wouldn’t get it for me. So I held my breath until I passed out and banged my head on the coffee table. The doctor thought I might have brain damage.
Bart: Dad, what’s the point of this story?
Homer: [cheerily] I like stories.
Encore!
[After the Simpsons receive a large idol head of Xtapolapocetl, the Olmec god of war, as a reward from Burns.]
Marge: The moral of this story is a good deed is its own reward.
Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!
Marge: Well then… I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.
Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter, we wouldn’t have gotten anything!
Marge: Well… then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.
[I liked A Serious Man.]
Señor Xtapolapocetl
Me too.
Look at the parking lot, Larry.
Me the third.
I thought the point of A Serious Man was that, if there is any meaning to our suffering, it is inaccessible to us. And maybe also that community is our only bulwark against a harsh and apparently indifferent cosmos.