Season 11 Episode 9: Crimes Against Obesity

December 29, 1996

Published 12/29/96

It is Al’s birthday, and on the way to lunch at the Jiggly Room he insults a customer named Shirley in the course of refusing her a refund. Shirley is not a new character: she was the first of the shoe store’s long line of oversized customers, going back to the pilot, and she has had enough. She blows a whistle, a column of women marches into Gary’s Shoes chanting, and Al is tied to a chair and tried on a charge of Crimes Against Obesity. The format is a courtroom episode conducted inside the shoe store, with witnesses, exhibits and a verdict.

The exhibits are what make it. The prosecution’s evidence is archive footage, and the episode calls up five separate clips from across the run, Matilda from “A Shoe Room with a View,” Enid from “Honey, I Blew Up Myself,” Penelope and Barbara from “Nooner or Later,” and Shirley herself from the pilot. Every one of them is a real line Al said on this show, which turns the half-hour into both a trial and a ten-year retrospective of a single running joke, with the series calling its own witness list.

Al’s defence does not go well, in part because Peggy takes the stand to help and testifies about her mother instead. What saves the episode from being a lecture is the direction the testimony drifts: the women begin corroborating each other’s eating, Peggy’s story about Aunt Edna and the pies is matched by Gwen’s account of losing a kindergarten class, and Al turns and looks directly into the camera. It is one of the few times the series broke the fourth wall, and the line is three words long.