Thursday, February 18, 2010

Krusty the Clown as King Lear: Happy Second Anniversary to Bardfilm

"Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner?" By Al Jean. Perf. Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, Harry Shearer, and Hank Azaria. Dir. Nancy Kruse. The Simpsons. Season 11, episode 3. Fox. 24 October 1999. DVD. Twentieth-Century Fox, 2008.
Two years ago today, Bardfilm gave in to the uncontrollable urge to blog about The Banquet (for which, q.v.). One year ago today, Bardfilm celebrated with a Shakespeare-related clip from Family Guy (for which, q.v.).

I suppose that's enough to make it a tradition! Here, therefore, is a Shakespeare-related clip from a different comic animated series: The Simpsons. In this episode, Homer has become a food critic. In that capacity, he ventures out to see Krusty the Clown play King Lear at a dinner theatre—with delightful results. I'm particularly fond of the newspaper caption at the end: "Krusty: Worst King Lear in 400 Years."


Thanks for reading Bardfilm for the last two years. And thanks for letting us be so self-congratulatory here today.
Links: The Episode at IMDB.
Click below to purchase season eleven from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).
Copyright 2008-2039 by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

 —The Tempest