Season 5 Episode 3: Sue Casa, His Casa

October 7, 1990

Published 10/07/90

Bud passes his driving test, reports a ninety-eight per cent on the written paper, and then he and Kelly put the Dodge into the side of a Mercedes. The other driver sues for a million dollars. Al, who has declined to carry real insurance on the grounds that the car is worth less than a hundred dollars, has no defence and no cover, so the family does the only thing available to it and counter-sues for a jillion.

The case they assemble is the episode. Al delivers an opening statement describing his children as having been transporting canned goods to a church group, and cannot remember his daughter’s name while doing it. Peggy turns up in a neck brace despite not having been in the car, and explains her injury to the court in terms that have nothing to do with the accident and everything to do with her husband’s reaction to the prospect of a jillion dollars. Marcy takes the stand, admits she saw nothing, and states that the Mercedes must have been at fault on the grounds that her ex-husband drove one.

The judge is played by Dr. Joyce Brothers, who was by then one of the most recognisable psychologists in America, which gives the proceedings a layer of absurdity nothing in the script had to work for. Structurally this is a courtroom episode, which the show did a handful of times and always with the same approach: the Bundys do not defend themselves, they simply lie with total confidence and let the institution absorb it. Nobody in the family treats perjury as a meaningful concept. The joke is never that they get away with it, it is that they were always going to try.