Season 10 Episode 4: Reverend Al

October 8, 1995

Published 10/08/95

The beer tax goes up, and NO MA’AM discovers it can no longer afford beer worth drinking. That is the entire inciting incident, and it is a perfect one for this show: a group of men whose organizing principle is grievance finally encounters a grievance with a dollar figure attached. Treasurer Bob Rooney turns up at the meeting with two six-packs of something called “Yeast ‘N Stuff,” the members take one sip each, and the resulting stampede out of the garage establishes the stakes. Nobody in this room is willing to go back to their wives for more beer money, so the money has to come from somewhere else.

The solution arrives courtesy of Ike, who mentions that the nudist who officiated his marriage to Frannie is now one of the wealthiest televangelists in the country and pays no taxes on any of it. If a man can call himself a church, Jefferson reasons, so can a garage full of men in a suburban driveway. Al is installed as reverend, the Church of NO MA’AM is chartered in secret, and the half-hour becomes a sustained parody of televangelism filtered through a group whose doctrine is a collection of complaints about women.

It works far better than it should. Word spreads, men across the country start mailing in ten dollars each, and the organization suddenly has an income stream. Al stages a function to collect more, delivers a sermon, and then loses the whole operation when Marcy breaks the story on Channel 83 Action News. Running alongside all this is a smaller, nastier plot in which Peggy buys her own birthday presents and has the children hand them over, which Marcy also exposes, a structural joke the episode makes twice, since both Bundy parents are running a con and both get caught by the same neighbor.

Episode Facts

Original air date: Sunday, October 8, 1995 on FOX
Season 10, Episode 4
Overall episode 215 of the series
Taped September 8, 1995; production code 10.04
Written by Kim Weiskopf
Directed by Gerry Cohen
The title refers to Al’s elevation to reverend of the Church of NO MA’AM
The opening credits are overhauled starting with this episode, with new introductory footage for all six main cast members pulled from season nine