Season 4 Episode 14: A Taxing Problem

January 14, 1990

Published 01/14/90

An audit notice arrives, the fault is entirely Peg’s, and the consequence is Al’s. He needs five thousand dollars he does not have and no legitimate route to it, so he finds an illegitimate one: there is a buyer for his wife’s hair, and Peg has a great deal of hair. The plan requires her to be asleep, which Al explains to her in advance while standing behind her with a comb.

Bud guesses what has been sold inside one line, without hesitating, which tells you how normal this is in that house. Peg does not believe it until she sees her husband’s face. Al meanwhile spends part of the episode packing a suitcase for prison, and Steve turns up mid-pack to announce that he has quit the pet store and is considering becoming a rodeo clown before settling on living out his days in Yosemite.

That line is doing more work than it appears to. This was the final episode David Garrison taped before leaving the show, and Steve’s talk of disappearing into a national park is the groundwork for how the character actually departs. He appears in the following episode, which was shot earlier, and then he is gone from the regular cast. It is also the last episode of the series filmed in the 1980s, which gives the whole thing an accidental end-of-era quality it was never designed to have. Worth noticing on a rewatch is how little the audit itself matters. The IRS is a device to get Al into a corner, and once he is there the episode is about what he is willing to do to his wife to get out of it. The answer arrives fast and without much deliberation, which is the joke and also, in its way, the point.