Season 8 Episode 15: Honey, I Blew Up Myself

January 23, 1994

Published 01/23/94

It is Al’s birthday, and Peg’s present is a boudoir photograph of herself. Al’s reaction to it is the sequence the episode is remembered for: asked what he really thinks, he consults an internal readout the show calls the Wife-O-Meter, which displays his available answers alongside the physical consequences of each. Old carries a groin pull and possible head trauma. Good after ten beers carries definite head trauma. Beautiful fails on the grounds that he could not keep a straight face. The one that clears is Nice, logged as a meaningless compliment accepted and a meaningless marriage continuing. The photograph then gets blown up to billboard scale and installed next to the shoe store, which means Al spends his days watching other men look at his wife, and discovers he minds. His solution, eventually, is to go to Marcy’s women’s group for advice, which is not a sentence that applies to any other episode. Meanwhile Bud and Kelly are shopping for a present and keep buying him things he already owns and actively dislikes, a joke the episode runs past the end of the credits. And Al’s shoe store customer this week is a woman named Enid who insists she takes a size four, which Al eventually resolves with a can of WD-40. It is one of the better birthday episodes the series made and the one that produced its most famous visual gag. The Wife-O-Meter has outlived the episode around it, and deservedly so, because it manages to be a cartoon device and an accurate description of a twenty-year marriage at the same time. The billboard plot, meanwhile, gives Katey Sagal a rare chance to be the one holding all the cards.

Episode Facts

Original air date: January 23, 1994
Season and episode: Season 8, Episode 15
Overall episode number: 172
Written by: Wayne Kline
Directed by: Sam W. Orender
Production note: This is one of the very few post-season-3 episodes whose original closing credits survive intact on DVD, complete with the real “Love and Marriage” and a full extra scene.
Title note: A play on Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, and on the photo being blown up to billboard size.