JOKE 1: 0’07”

Titles. Blackboard gag: Bart is writing “I will not whittle hall passes out of soap” on the blackboard.

 

The first thing we see, as usual, is a quick sign-gag. It’s up to the audience to read it fast, or pause it, before the camera whips past. These running blackboard gags might seem throwaway, but they’re the first joke of every single episode, and they often contain everything that makes this show work. They’re fast, they’re witty, they have allusions and references, they often set up or reflect the character of Bart – the original lead character of the show – and they establish the sort of jokes that an audience can expect. If the blackboard gag is dumb, the bar is set nicely low for some goofy fun. If it’s obscure, we know that the show might sometimes expect us to miss a gag or two, while rewarding us if we catch the reference.

This particular line about whittling a bogus hall pass is a reference to prison breaks using fake tools such as guns carved from soap. It’s a good character gag for Bart who treats school like a prison, and is, as usual, acting more grown up than would be expected of a child his age. Like his sister, he is an old soul, an established character note, so the gag here confirms all our expectations of him; this joke “belongs” to Bart.

It also, as an extra note on top of that, confounds; this is an absurdist joke about an impossible thing, ie: whittling a convincing school document out of soap. The idea is silly, but, thanks to the widely known cultural trope of soap escape kit, it’s not confusing.

The idea of whittling escape equipment from soap can probably be traced to bank robber John Dillinger, who famously escaped prison in the 1930s using a fake gun. The prop was in fact carved from wood, not soap, or was possibly smuggled in by his attorney, so it’s one of those things everyone knows happened, that didn’t actually happen. It was Dillinger’s associates Harry Pierpont and Charley Makley who actually attempted escape using fake guns made of carved soap, blackened with boot polish. They failed, so maybe the audacious story got attached to the successful escapee to prop up his legend.

I had never heard of the real life examples when I first saw this episode, but I still laughed, because culturally the joke “reads”. Prisoners whittling a gun out of soap was an accepted trope for comedy by the time of the film Take The Money And Run in 1969, when Woody Allen’s character makes a soap-gun escape attempt in a rainstorm, ending up with only a fistful of froth.  That a soap gun joke “reads”, without needing to know quite why, is a good example of how, despite the number of anxious notes comedy writers receive along the lines of “will people get this?”, an audience doesn’t need to understand a reference in depth in order to enjoy a joke. Soap whittling is just something bobbing in our shared cultural casserole, something that we “know” happens, and accept. And if for some reason you can’t triangulate the reference – maybe you’re from a culture or an era that lacks ambiently circulating myths of soap-assisted prison breaks – there’s another gag along in a moment.