Season 9 Episode 14: The Naked and the Dead, But Mostly the Naked
January 8, 1995
Peg and her friends have decided they want to know what the attraction is, and they inform their husbands that they are coming along to the nudie bar. NO MA’AM’s response is a strategy meeting in the Bundy garage, conducted behind a barricade of tyres and suitcases in low voices, and it is the funniest sequence of the season. The plan is to take the women on a Thursday, which collides with bowling night until Al explains why bowling is on Thursday in the first place, at which point the entire group arrives at the answer together. Jefferson’s assessment of the club’s Thursday roster is delivered with real relief. The contingency planning that follows, covering what to do if a man finds himself excited anyway, involves two separate mental images of Jefferson, and then Ike asks one question too many and the laughter stops dead. The evening itself delivers the episode’s best visual joke, which is that Bud is already there and is a regular, and the staff know him by a professional title. Running alongside it, Kelly has been cast in a commercial for a weight loss shake, and the product tastes bad enough to constitute its own argument against dieting. This is also the episode that finally gives the nudie bar a name.
The nudie bar gets a name here for the first time. Earlier episodes had simply called it that, and this one establishes it as the Jiggly Room and gives it an owner, Iqbal, folding a running location into the series’ permanent furniture. The garage summit is the comic centrepiece, with the men whispering tactics behind a barricade as though they were planning something more consequential than an evening out. Kelly’s weight-loss shake commercial runs alongside, and the product’s taste does most of the work.
Episode Facts
- Original air date: January 8, 1995
- Season and episode: Season 9, Episode 14
- Overall episode number: 197
- Written by: Michael G. Moye
- Directed by: Sam W. Orender
- Production note: The first episode to name the Jiggly Room and show its owner, Iqbal. Before this the venue was only ever the Nudie Bar.
- Production note: The homes of Bob Rooney, Ike, Charlie and the Darcys are all seen from the outside for the first time.
- Title note: From the 1948 Norman Mailer novel.
Guest Cast
- Leland Orser as Mark, the commercial director
- Iqbal Theba as Iqbal
- Tom McCleister as Ike
- Barry Shabaka Henley as Charlie
- Mother Love as Helen (credited as JoAnne Hart)
- Brandy Ledford as Brandi
- Alix Elias as Louise
- Carol Ann Susi as Frannie
- Michael Caldwell as Peter the makeup artist
- Kevin Schon as the stage manager
- Kevin Curran as the voice of Buck
A-Cup Night
The garage meeting is a perfectly built escalation. Al reveals the plan, Charlie objects on bowling grounds, and Al’s leading question produces a group realization that the show lets the men applaud themselves for. Jefferson’s summary of what Thursdays at the Jiggly Room offer, and Al’s conclusion about the consequences, is the heart of it.
Then the contingency planning starts, and it is the best run of jokes in the episode: the first fallback is imagining Marcy on stage, the second is imagining Jefferson on stage, and Ike’s question about what to do if neither works kills the room. Al’s answer is the only one available.
Bud being discovered at the club, already known to the staff and operating under an assumed profession, is the episode’s sharpest gag, and it arrives directly after Peg has asked what kind of example the place sets for their son. The timing is immaculate.
Al’s definition of what a nudie bar actually is, delivered to the assembled women, works because he starts out apparently about to defend it and then arrives back exactly where he began.
Leland Orser plays the commercial director here, the first of three appearances as a cynical director opposite Kelly. He and Ed O’Neill were both in The Bone Collector four years later, though they share no scenes. Iqbal Theba, the club owner, later became Principal Figgins on Glee.
Famous Quotes
- Al, explaining the institution to the women: “While it may seem that the nudie bar is a place where men go to watch surgically-altered hooters sway oddly to bad music. In reality, it is a place where men go to relax and unwind and… watch surgically-altered hooters sway oddly to bad music, Peg.”
- Charlie: “Thursday night? That’s our bowling night!” Al: “And why do we go bowling on Thursday night? Because at the Jiggly Room, it’s always…” Bob Rooney: “A-cup night!”
- Jefferson, relieved: “There’s not a doctored yummy in the house!” Al: “Hence, we won’t get excited.”
- Bob Rooney: “But what if we do?” Al: “Well, then, try to imagine Jefferson’s wife up on stage with no clothes on. And if that doesn’t work, try to picture Jefferson up on stage with no clothes on.”
- Ike: “What if that doesn’t work?” Al, after a long silence: “…Then you’re out of the club.”
Notes
- Peg asks what kind of example the place sets for their son approximately four seconds before the camera finds Bud.
- Marcy’s reaction to a newspaper photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. is one of the more alarming things Amanda Bearse was asked to do.
- Some cable prints cut the opening scene, in which Peg’s friends demolish a cake and Buck observes that he is glad not to be made of buttercream.
- A goof: the Darcy house seen from the front here has white doors under an awning, where season 1 and the season 4 credits both show a green door facing the driveway.
