Season 3 Episode 14: A Three Job, No Income Family
March 19, 1989
Money is tighter than usual, which for this household is a significant statement, and Peggy’s solution is to sign Al up as a door-to-door cosmetics salesman. Then she hears what the job’s perks are and signs herself up instead, apparently thriving at it, and Al is left working at Burger Trek, eating a toothpaste sandwich, and being supervised by a manager played by Pauly Shore.
It is the second time Peggy takes a job and the second time the series uses the same structure: she turns out to be competent, the household cannot absorb it, and the arrangement collapses. What is different here is that Al ends up worse off than before. The fast-food uniform and the Captain are a genuine humiliation, and the episode does not soften it.
The toothpaste sandwich produced one of the best audience reactions in the show’s history. A voice from the studio crowd can be clearly heard calling “Don’t do it, Al! Don’t do it!” before he takes a bite, and the take was kept.
Pauly Shore’s appearance here set up a running gag that outlasted his career. The series went on to mock him by name in “Ride Scare,” in season ten’s premiere, and again in the season ten finale, where Al’s response to being told someone is in prison is that unless it is Pauly Shore he does not care. Christian Jacobs, one of the Burger Trek employees, later fronted the band The Aquabats. Al also gets in another reference to his mother’s drinking, a thread running through “My Mom, the Mom” and “Eatin’ Out.”
Episode Facts
- Original air date: March 19, 1989
- Season 3, Episode 14, and the 49th episode of the series
- Written by Richard Gurman
- Directed by Gerry Cohen
Guest Cast
- Pauly Shore as the Captain
- Teresa Ganzel as Heather
- Christian Jacobs and Dylan Kussman as two of the kids. Sources disagree on which of them played Butch.
Al Bundy, Burger Trek Employee
Money is short, so Peg signs Al up to sell cosmetics, hears about the perks, and takes the job herself. Al ends up behind the counter at Burger Trek instead, taking orders from a manager called the Captain. For most of the episode Peg looks like the bigger earner, commissions beating Al’s fast food wage, until Al goes through her customer list and works out that the only person buying the cosmetics is Peg.
It is the second time Peg has held a job, and the show is already using the same structure it would reuse for a decade: the Bundys briefly look like they might climb, and the climb is revealed to be a circle.
Pauly Shore’s Captain is a tiny role that got much funnier in hindsight, and it is the episode the Bundy Club broke down with him on the Zoom.
Famous Quotes
- Al: “Bud, you don’t date! How do you eat?!” / Bud: “Just like the proud Indian, I’ve learned to live off the land.” Followed by a demonstration involving the gap between the stove and the wall.
- Al: “Well, then, I’ll get the hanger and a little piece of gum and a-hunting we will go!”
- Peggy: “I have a bone to pick with you, Al.” / Al: “There wouldn’t be any meat on it, would there?”
- Peggy: “Just when I was loose and ready… BAM! You ran out of money. Look at these bags. This is what you make, Al. All of it!”
- Bud: “Dad, can you pinpoint for us the exact moment that life passed you by?” / Al: “Son, life didn’t pass me by… it sat on my head!”
- Kelly: “Well, I still love you, Daddy. I just don’t have any respect for you.” / Al: “Well, Pumpkin, the feeling is mutual.”
- Peggy: “Everyone, guess what? I make more money than my husband!” Announced from the open front door.
Notes
- Burger Trek is a Star Trek parody, down to the Captain’s “Beam me up a burger, Bundy, warp speed” and the slogan “To go where no burger has gone before.” Patty Bright Cosmetics is a Mary Kay parody.
- When Al is about to eat the toothpaste sandwich, an audience member is clearly audible shouting “Don’t do it, Al! Don’t do it!”
- As Pauly Shore’s career took off in the 1990s the show started mocking him by name, in “Ride Scare,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner” and “The Joke’s on Al.”
- Christian Jacobs later became the vocalist of the band The Aquabats.
- Al’s crack about his mother saying things sober lines up with “My Mom, the Mom” and “Eatin’ Out,” which both establish that Al’s mother drank.
- It originally aired back to back with the previous episode, “Can’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me,” after a two week break.
- Goof: the fryer and stove at Burger Trek are visibly non-functional props, and Al’s first botched burger moves between shots.
