Previously in this series: Not Allowed In The Deep End — Ralph Wiggum.
The world owes a great deal to minor Simpsons characters, and I have taken it upon myself to periodically-yet-irregularly celebrate them as the spirit moves me. Today we honor Edna Krabappel.
There’s a scene in Some Like It Hot where Marilyn Monroe’s character (Sugar Kane!) smiles heartbreakingly at Tony-Curtis-as-Josephine and explains why she’s running away from men:
I’m not very bright, I guess, just dumb. If I had any brains, I wouldn’t be on this crummy train with this crummy girls’ band. I used to sing with male bands but I can’t afford it anymore. That’s what I’m running away from. I worked with six different ones in the last two years. Oh, brother! I can’t trust myself…All they have to do is play eight bars of ‘Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby’ and my spine turns to custard. I get goose pimply all over and I come to ‘em, every time. That’s why I joined this band. Safety first. Anything to get away from those bums. You don’t know what they’re like. You fall for ‘em and you really love ‘em – you think this is gonna be the biggest thing since the Graf Zeppelin – and the next thing you know, they’re borrowing money from you and spending it on other dames and betting on horses. Then one morning you wake up, the guy is gone, the saxophone’s gone, all that’s left behind is a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out. So you pull yourself together. You go on to the next job, the next saxophone player. It’s the same thing all over again. You see what I mean? Not very bright. I can tell you one thing – it’s not gonna happen to me again – ever. I’m tired of getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
This is the story of Mrs. Krabappel’s life; one fuzzy lollipop after the other. She’s one of the only characters in the series who hasn’t spent her whole life in Springfield. She’s been to college — Bryn Mawr! — and now she’s in a nowhere town teaching “a bunch of dead-eyed fourth graders while [my] husband runs naked on a beach somewhere with [our] marriage counselor.”
He apparently takes some time off from tropical bliss to mess with her; in season 3’s “Bart The Lover,” Mrs. Krabappel’s car breaks down and her mechanic tells her “Bingo, bango, sugar in the gas tank. Your ex-husband strikes again.” The casual bingo, bango delivery is perhaps the cruelest touch of all; she can’t catch a break.
When Edna describes her perfect boyfriend to Bart — who’s “the closest thing to a man in my life” — during detention, she says she wants someone who “likes the way I look first thing in the morning, laughs at my jokes, can fix my car.” It’s a particularly poignant moment — she’s not just looking for someone to fix her car because she doesn’t have the time or inclination to fix it herself; she’s looking for someone who will fix her car because the last man in her life keeps breaking it. She wants someone who’s interesting in making her life better, instead of actively sabotaging it. That’s such a small request, and it’s all she wants.
There’s a nice little call-forward in that same episode, by the way — when Edna calls the Springfield newspaper to place a personal ad, she screams out “I NEED A MAN!” so loudly she scares her cat. Who do we immediately cut to?
Under a spotlight, no less. Your time will come, Seymour.
Bart’s perspective of Mrs. Krabappel changes significantly over the course of “Bart the Lover.” It’s the first episode where he realizes that she’s a person. He poses as a man named Woodrow who “really hates yo-yos” and responds to Edna’s personal ad (as revenge for her confiscating his yo-yo), leading her to fall in love with a man who doesn’t really exist.
Bart only learns to empathize with her after he’s humiliated her. At the beginning of the episode, he imagines himself as a giant, flicking a huge yo-yo at a tiny Mrs. K; by the end of the episode, he works frantically to preserve her dignity and her feelings. There’s an unutterably sad montage where Mrs. Krabappel tries on a series of outfits for what she thinks will be her first date with Woodrow. She absolutely comes alive — she smiles into the mirror more than she’s smiled for the rest of the season. Bart walks past her waiting expectantly for her date and laughs as he walks into a nearby movie theater; when he walks back out a few hours later, still laughing, he sees her still waiting, but no longer expectant. The candle has burned to a stub. A waiter comes by and takes up the chairs. Edna sags.
Bart “can’t help but feel partly responsible,” in the way that only a child who is just beginning to learn about responsibility and other people’s feelings can. There’s a particular stage in childhood, when you only begin to realize someone else can have feelings the same way you do after you have hurt them. Bart reaches that stage in this episode. Edna is humiliated, but the audience is never invited to laugh at her. Her loneliness isn’t a joke, and neither is she.
After that moment, things change between the two of them — they continue to butt heads, but Mrs. Krabappel is never again Bart’s enemy. He confesses what he’s done to his mother, who helps him devise a plan to keep Edna from being further humiliated.
Edna’s interest in her students, and toward teaching in general, waxes and wanes according to the Rule of Funny, but for the most part she reminds me of a lot of the teachers I’ve had over the years: a genuinely good person who’s overburdened, underpaid, and forced to make do with not nearly enough resources to do her job. “The only books we have are the ones that have been banned from other schools!” she tells Principal Skinner, gesturing at a copy of TekWar and The Satanic Verses.
She’s willing to let the district move federal prisoners into the coat room to make extra money, sure, but she also jabs seagulls away from the trash heap in Bart’s desk. She’s fought a lot of battles at this point; she’s not going to go out of her way to look for more. Some days all you can do is keep the seagulls from getting too close to the students.
In the first few seasons, most of her interactions are necessarily with Bart; as the series progresses we get a chance to see her smoke and dish dirt with Ms. Hoover, spar with Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers, and alternately fawn over and push away Martin (who can’t stop baking her Raisin Roundies, even after she gives them to Bart’s dog). It’s in Bart Gets An F that we see the genuine good heart underneath Krabappel’s cynical exterior:
“What’s the matter, Bart? I figure you’d be used to failing by now.”
“No… you don’t understand. I tried. I really tried. This is as good as I could get! And I still failed!”
She tries awkwardly to comfort him that a 59 is a high F; when Bart cries out brokenly that now he knows how George Washington must have felt after surrendering Fort Necessity, Krabappel flips to the answer section (in another nice call-forward to “Separate Vocations,” when Lisa steals the teacher’s editions of every textbook in school and the teachers completely lose control of their classrooms) and gives him an extra point, pushing him into D- territory.
He never graduates the fourth grade, anyhow — nobody does — but he passes. Barely — she presses her fingers together to remind him of just how barely he squeaked through — but she passes him, just the same. He earned it.
It’s not the last time she goes to bat for a student, either. In one of the series’ greatest episodes, “The PTA Disbands,” she leads the other teachers on a strike against the school district until they get better teaching materials; her argument with Principal Skinner over resource allocation boils down to “C’mon” and the rubbing of fingers together to symbolize money. (She wins.)
She’s still hilariously and unbelievably inappropriate with her students, often forgetting that she is not perched on a stool and they are not tiny bartenders. As the fourth-graders watch a filmstrip on puberty featuring anthropomorphic bunnies who fall in love and get married, Mrs. K lights a cigarette in the classroom and announces “She’s faking it,” in the louchest, most world-weary voice imaginable.
Mrs. Krabappel’s sexual desirability and availability fluctuates wildly from episode to episode; in “Flaming Moe” she’s a sex-hungry monster who scares men more than she turns them on. She steals Aerosmith’s Joey Kramer’s drumsticks, while he plaintively begs for them, clearly terrified: “Mrs. Krabappel, I really need my drumsticks.”
She places the end of one drumstick in her mouth and says “Then come and get ‘em, big boy.”
Earlier that same episode, she throws herself at Homer, asking him if he’s a single parent and suggesting that he pretend to be one when he tells her he isn’t. He barely wriggles free from her tube-top embrace.
Some of Edna’s on-screen conquests include a master sushi chef:
and, as Sideshow Bob so famously reminds Bart after interrupting their date, “You only get one chance with Edna Krabappel.”
It’s my belief that the romance between Edna Krabappel and Seymour Skinner is the most poignant, realistic, heartrending and earned relationship in television history. They have enough of a history together that by the time they kiss in “Grade School Confidential,” it feels like the plausibly best thing that could have happened to either of them. It’s not a dream come true, exactly, but it’s a welcome escape from what they have, and it makes the both of them quietly and enormously happy.
The dialogue isn’t Tracy-and-Hepburn, but it still breaks your heart.
“Mind if I sit down?”
“It’s a free country.”
“I, I don’t follow you.”
“Oh…just sit down, Seymour. It might be nice to talk to a grown-up for a change.”
“Well this party is certainly a break in my routine. You know, normally I spend my Saturdays carefully laying out my clothes for the following week, then I stroll down to the car wash to see if Gus is there.”
“Oh, yeah, you gotta keep busy. I collect matchbooks from glamorous nightclubs. It’s amazing — if you just write to them and ask them nicely…”
“Is this how you imagined your life, Edna?”
“Well yes, but then I was a very depressed child.”
The details are absolute murder. Walking to a car wash. Writing to nightclubs. Finding solace at a children’s birthday party, in a little boy’s playhouse. Seymour likes Edna’s laugh and “ability to be personally offended by broad social trends.” Edna’s willing to see Seymour’s naïveté as something charming instead of irritating, as she used to do.
She doesn’t have any mints in her purse, but she does have menthol cigarettes. Seymour’s willing to throw caution to the wind, growls “Oh, to heck with it” — the “heck” is perfect — and kisses her anyway.
Seymour takes to wearing a T-shirt to school and casually greeting all of the students as they walk in before the morning bell. Mrs. K wraps a bright red scarf around her neck and insists on holding class outside. Happiness, for the two of them, is having dinner together without his mother around.
For dessert, they have applesauce. Seymour apologizes for not knowing what it is because he “doesn’t get out much,” which is simultaneously charming and devastating. Edna finds herself so captivated by someone whose loneliness so closely matches her own that she demands he “swallow that applesauce and kiss me.”
Ever the literalist, Seymour apologizes. “I’m afraid I already swallowed it while you were talking.”
The Charlie Brown candle smolders down to a stub, but this time, the candle burns down while Edna is with someone. She’s not waiting anymore.
For Mrs. K, it’s a welcome escape from the fuzzy end of the lollipop.
Tags: edna krabappel, finest hour, television, the simpsons, tiny dreams
Edna is literally so important to me it’s ridiculous
But no mention of her talent show dance with the balloons? Iconic
that’s season nine and if I talked about that I’d have to talk about Armin Tamzarian, AND I WON’T DO THAT
That’s fair; Tamzarian was an embarrassing disaster
Yes, but it includes the line I have most often used in my day-to-day life.
“Up yours, children!”
The core plot of ‘Mad Men’ is essentially stolen from that one Simpsons episode.
WOW. wow. that is the truest thing.
when I thought I couldn’t love you any more, I was wrong.
Sidenote: I absolutely have “The PTA Disbands” entirely memorized
“There’s very little meat in these gym mats” is the single best line reading in the history of the show. Lunchlady Doris’ own finest moment.
I’m also a fan of “It’s rich in bunly goodness” from Lisa the Vegetarian.
I end up going with “It’s just a little airborn, it’s still good it’s still good!”
INDEPENDENT THOUGHT ALARM.
THE FINGER THING MEANS THE TAXES
Especially for that purple monkey dishwasher remark.
“OH, THE TAXES. THE FINGERS MEAN THE TAXES.”
“Oh, my bones are so brittle! But I always drink plenty of…malk?”
Now with Vitamin R!
Memorizing episodes? That’s a paddling
“So, how was everybody’s day at school?”
“Horrifying!”
“Pointless!”
“Exhausting. It took the children forty minutes to locate Canada on the map.”
“Marge, anyone can miss Canada, all tucked away down there.”
I think this every time I have a tiring day.
YOUR WEEKLY REMINDER THAT NOTHING AFTER SEASON EIGHT IS CANON
Yes, I will be here all day to delete pending comments that wish to tell us about that nonsense.
Even casual references to Edna in later seasons choke me the hell up, so be a hero and delete all that nonsense right quick.
SEASON NINE IN A PINCH
Seriously thought I go to monthly Simpsons trivia pub nights and while the rules are that as “classic” Simpsons trivia it goes from seasons 1-10, everyone groans if there’s a question past season 9.
Lucky! It goes up to season eleven at our local trivia night. At least we get all-you-can-eat pizza with the $10 cover charge.
Our local trivia night is at a bar in a hipster neighbourhood, so we get nothing for free 🙁
Where do y’all live that you have access to Simpsons-specific trivia nights?
Season 9 MUST be included because of “Das Bus.”
OH GOD AND “THIS LITTLE WIGGY.” My favorite episode of all time.
And the pimps and the CHUDs of New York.
But Mallory, “This Little Wiggy” is in Season 9…
I fully agree that most of season 9 and beyond is complete and utter trash, but I do have a fondness for “Trash of the Titans,” PURELY for the shot where all the garbage Homer buried forces Rod and Todd Flanders’ dead rabbit Mr. Bunny up through his grave DURING the funeral they’re holding.
My own coping mechanism is to assemble a single meta-season scraped together from the best parts of 9, 10, and 11. (“The Cartridge Family,” “The Two Mrs. Nahasapeemapetilons,” “Realty Bites,” “Bart Carny,” “The Joy of Sect,” “Das Bus,” “Lisa the Simpson,” “This Little Wiggy,” “The Trouble with Trillions,” “Girly Edition,” “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” “Bart the Mother,” “Lisa Gets an A,” “Mayored to the Mob,” “Homer to the Max,” “Marge Simpson in: ‘Screaming Yellow Honkers,'” “Mom and Pop Art,” “They Saved Lisa’s Brain,” “The Mansion Family,” and “Missionary: Impossible,” with “Behind the Laughter” for a DVD-only coda. You can stick in a meta Treehouse of Horror composed of “The HΩmega Man, “Hell Toupée,” and “Desperately Xeeking Xena.”)
I’ll have to watch in that order myself.
Seasons 1 – 8 make me feel better about America.
Thank you. Mrs. K and Comic Book Guy? WTF.
I had my own moment of realizing that a Simpsons character was a real person (well, you know what I mean) when I was re-watching “Lisa’s Substitute” and noticed for the first time ever that someone (Skinner?) calls Ms. Hoover “Elizabeth.” I’d never thought of her as having a first name before and it make the humor of her imagined medical leave a little more heart-twisting.
That is so exactly what it feels like hearing your actual teachers call each other by their first names.
pssst, Skinner said the teachers will crack any minute purple monkey dishwasher.
Also, my sister attends Bryn Mawr and when she first decided on it, she told me via text that “I will be joining such notable alumni as Katharine Hepburn and Edna Krabappel”.
Perfect.
Also, I love the tiny-dreams tag.
Oh my god this is heartbreaking. I love Edna. She’s so brilliant. Hearing her say, “She’s faking it,” was one of the funniest things that ever happened to me.
I have not watched The Simpsons since these episodes were contemporary and this series makes me feel like I should remedy that.
This is a perfectly cromulent post.
Also Bart the Lover and the PTA Disbands are two of my favourite episodes, and I have one day dreamed of sending someone a postcard that says, “[Name], I don’t know if it’s the beer talking, but you’ve got a butt that just won’t quit. They’ve got these chewy pretzels alakijgsfgnmvsfkjg five dollars? Get outta here.”
Now I know what to write in all my Toastcards!
Ha! That was my first thought too!
No, children, no! Your education is important. Roman numerals, et cetera. …Whatever. I tried.
Oh god, “Bart the Lover”, just that image of Bart in the window looking at a heartbroken Edna, oh goddd, my heart.
Excuse me, I have something in my eye.
what made you think this was acceptable
Why’d you have to post that? (sniff)
I find Edna even more sympathetic now that a considerable chunk of my social circle consists of teachers. They do so much work! And they get so much shit for it.
Relevant slightly depressing song link. It’s not quite about Edna and Seymour, the details are a bit different, but the writer has said that it was inspired by them.
Well, more than slightly depressing, actually. I’m not sure why I put that “slightly” in there.
Actually, don’t listen to the song, the article ends on a high note and that’s nice.
These make me feel like I might actually be old enough for The Simpsons now, and also Marilyn Monroe classic hollywood films.
I’m having too many feelings right now
I realize this makes me sound like a gushing fangirl, but Mallory’s “Minor Simpsons Characters” series comprises some of the most insightful, vibrant, beautifully written pop culture criticism I’ve ever read. I’m still recommending the Ralph Wiggins piece to everyone I know.
I know! She’s the AHP of Simpsons.
“Don’t worry, children. Most of you will never fall in love, but will marry out of fear of dying alone.”
Oof. Mallory could probably make me all emotional about a coffee cup.
It is so heartbreaking that she had to settle for Skinner just because he’s sweet and staves off the loneliness. Sideshow Bob would at least have challenged her, and she and Patty could have had a beautiful, jaded, smoke-filled Boston marriage.
sideshow bob would have made NO SENSE and patty is a diiiiiiick, skinner is a perfect foil for her
Wait, Patty also dated Skinner!
As someone who identifies most closely with Selma out of all the Simpsons characters, I resent that.
“Bingo, bango, sugar in the gas tank” is a phrase that pops into my head with alarming regularity, delivered in the mechanic guy’s voice and everything. Like, at least once a week.
It’s always weird when she is a cartoon and isn’t Allison Janney.
Oh man, I had NEVER realized the similarities but — you are so right.
Spot on!
I just watched the episode of Masters of Sex where Allison Janney’s character is barred from participating in the experiment, and it evokes the exact tangle of emotions you feel for Edna alone at that table.
I am so furious with Michael Sheen that I’m not sure I can keep watching. It has Lizzy Caplan being perfect and crowds of people lining up to have anonymous sex ‘for science!’, and his character is so utterly reprehensible that I can barely enjoy it.
Trying not to cry at work while reading this. A hard feat when it comes to Edna. I always loved her the best.
No No no MY EMOTIONS
I know we all like to indulge in this kind of garment-rending hyperbole (THE BEST! SHUT THE INTERNET DOWN! THIS IS THE BEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED TO ME! I CAN’T EVEN!) when it comes to commenting on great writing on the internet and particularly the works of Mallory Ortberg, so I want to be clear I’m not doing that and that I’m totally sincere when I say:
This series is one of my favorite things I’ve ever read. This is important work, and work which is done well. The analysis is cutting without being cruel, and the generosity and affection which is afforded to these minor characters (who could so easily be reduced–and later were!–to a collection of stupid traits and catchphrases) is huge in terms of understanding both pop culture and the people who constitute the “minor” characters in their own lives. Screw “This is Water”–if people really want to undertake a radical exercise in empathy, they should be reading these essays.
And the pimps and the CHUDs of New York.
My respect & fondness for Mrs K grew alongside Bart’s, though I’m a grownup so I recognized what was happening sooner. By the time that (perfect detail) Charlie Brown candle was burning down, I’d become her staunchest supporter, and all the nonsense of the current series just irritates me.
This was a throughly enjoyable piece of fuzzy lollipop analysis.
The apotheosis of this series will be Troy McClure. I will not debate this.
For years, I’ve used “name your favorite minor Simpsons character” as an icebreaker to begin meetings. Sadly, the kids today don’t know their Simpsons like they should, so this doesn’t always work anymore.
Edna's great, but Ms. Hoover was always my favorite of the faculty.
My respect & fondness for Mrs K grew alongside Bart’s, though I’m a grownup so I recognized what was happening sooner. By the time that (perfect detail) Charlie Brown candle was burning down, I’d become her staunchest supporter, and all the nonsense of the current series just irritates me.