Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes? (aka Look Who's Talking)

It's interesting how little time The Simpsons wasted in bringing Herb Powell back for his shot at recovery. He was only the second "guest" character to return in a starring role, the first being Sideshow Bob in "Black Widower", and even then Bob had wait two whole seasons before being considered as viable sequel material. Herb was brought back after only one season - in his case, it's evident that the production team knew straight away, after finishing "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", that they wouldn't be leaving his story there. They knew they had yanked just a little too hard on the feel-bad chain, something confirmed on the episode's DVD commentary, where it's noted that James L. Brooks had felt uneasy about the ending and suggested that a line of dialogue be added to indicate that Herb would land on his feet; the writers had toyed with this idea, but ultimately decided to save it and use it as the basis of its own episode. Hence, we had "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" (8F23), which first aired on August 27th 1992, one of the rare Simpsons episodes to debut in a summer slot (your typical Simpsons season begins in September and wraps up somewhere in May). This led to some confusion as to whether "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" was to be seen as the delayed finale for Season 3 or the early debut of Season 4; Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood of I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide had it grouped in with the latter, but subsequent official sources have clarified it to be part of Season 3. The August air date was down to a scheduling experiment that Fox subsequently discarded; they'd attempted a similar trick the previous year, by having Season 2's "Blood Feud" premier in July.

It's also interesting to compare Herb's return to Bob's, which landed only a few episodes ahead of it in Season 3's running order, in terms of where each episode ultimately leads us. "Black Widower" saw Bob slide ever more despairingly down the path of corruption, affirming his enmity with Bart and locking him into a vicious cycle that would continue ad infinitum. For Herb, the gamble of choosing to reassociate himself with the Simpsons actually paid off. He was restored to his former glory, and able to exit with his dignity and his prosperity intact. Bob's sorry story was just getting started, but for Herb this has remained his character's coda; even with the series still in production and various other vintage characters being dusted off for the sake of perpetuation, Herb has yet to be mined for his threequal potential. Technically DeVito did return to voice Herb for a third time in a Season 24 episode, "The Changing of The Guardian", but only as a voice heard on an answering machine recording, and it's such a brief and inconsequential moment that (much like the second occasion on which A. Brooks technically voiced Jacques, in Season 15), a lot of viewers tend to overlook that it's there. In terms of in-the-flesh appearances that enable us to hang out with the character in any meaningful way...well, I wouldn't completely rule it out (DeVito's still working, and if they'll bring Jacques back after sitting on him for 33 years then there's got to be hope for Herb), but I think it's very unlikely his book will be re-opened at this stage. Which takes us into one of the biggest mysteries regarding Herb - why did he completely disappear from this point onward? "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" might not suggest any immediately obvious routes for sequelisation in the way that "Black Widower" did, but it does leave the door open for Herb to continue to be a part of the family's lives. You'd think that, in 30 years, he might have popped in to say hello at least once. Despite departing on good terms with his biological clan, there's been little to no evidence that he's even maintained a relationship with them thereafter. Are we to assume that all of this stuff is just happening off of screen?

In the end, Herb might have been stunted by much the same problem that Ruth and Laura Powers had in establishing themselves as long-term presences - when you enlist guest voices in the roles, it's inevitably going to limit how often we'll be seeing them. And in Herb's case, there's been some backstage gossip indicating that the reason he did not return is because DeVito didn't want this to be an ongoing gig and was unenthusiastic about being asked back a second time. I can confirm that nothing is said of this in the episode's DVD commentary. There, Nancy Cartwright asks point blank if Herb's going AWOL was down to DeVito not wanting to voice him again; she gets a predictably waffly response from Al Jean, which acknowledges that, "He might not have", but appears to indicate that they never brought Herb back because they couldn't think of a good enough reason to do so (Jean claims the show would never bring back a character gratuitously, but your mileage may vary on that). Rather, the origin of said gossip turns out once again to have been Hank Azaria, who was quoted in a Times Union article in 1994 as saying that he thought DeVito regretted coming back and wanted to get it over with (note: I have not read said article, so I'm going to do the unthinkable and assume that the Wikipedia citation is accurate). As with Azaria's public smearing of Christopher Collins, a pinch of salt is required (Would we know for a fact that DeVito's lack of enthusiasm was down to his not wanting to do the show? Might he just have had something else on his mind at the time?), but he offers a more compelling explanation than Jean's for why we never saw Herb again. Still, if it is true then it certainly isn't reflected in DeVito's performance - he's on every bit as fine a form here as he was in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"

The title "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" would appear to cement a pattern for a hypothetical series of Herb episodes (one I would fully expect to be discarded if Herb were to return today, mind), whereby each episode titles take the form of a question openly directed toward a brother, and each is evocative of the despairs of the Great Depression. "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was derived from the 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, specifically the title of fictitious book about the Depression that John McCrea's character spent the picture looking to adapt (said fictitious book would later inspire the title of the 2000 Coen brothers film starring George Clooney). "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" is lifted from the song "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?", which was composed by Yip Harburg and Jay Gorney for the 1932 musical Americana and reflects the perspective of an honest hard-working man brought to his knees by the economic crash (the title was also used for a 1975 documentary by Philippe Mora). In both cases, the question could just as easily be asked by either brother of the other. In the original, the question is initially implied to be Homer's - in fact, Homer explicitly asks it during his first act quest to locate his half-brother, but once we've met Herb it seems just as pertinent to his own lifelong desire to figure out where he belongs, a question he ultimately regrets asking. With the second installment, the title alludes most obviously to Herb's goal of convincing Homer to lend him a monetary sum to fund his latest endeavor (and to his impoverished state in general), but also to Homer's desire for Herb to spare him a little clemency. That both titles reference the Depression indicates that the social and economic divide between the two brothers is to be seen as a particularly tender spot in their dynamic. In the original, Herb provided a window into the rich and successful man Homer could have been under different circumstances. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" offers an intriguing reversal on that scenario, so that Herb becomes a haunting impression of how much lower Homer could potentially have sunk; his homely lifestyle now seems positively luxurious compared to Herb's lot. We catch up with the former motor CEO to find him living in abject poverty - he's now a hobo, and he spends his days swapping tales of former glory with his fellow transient (Mickey Mouse whorehouse gag, blah blah blah, now belongs to Disney, blah blah), eating out of dumpsters and being shunned by anyone higher up the ladder. Homer, meanwhile, has just been surprised by a cash bonus of $2000 from the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant - it's actually a paltry settlement, to brush off any legal liability on Burns' part for what prolonged exposure to nuclear radiation has done to Homer's fertility, but Homer hasn't read the fine print and has been hoodwinked into thinking he's receiving an award for outstanding achievement in the field of excellence. At least he's sharp enough to demand an award ceremony from the deal (which itself must have cost Burns more than $2000; Joe Frazier's fee alone would have been a tidy sum). Tensions are ignited when his downtrodden doppelganger appears at the door, demanding retribution for the American dream he personally took from him. Also, Hands Across America features somewhere in the backdrop.

 Hmm...

I say it's intriguing, but I also think the decision to make Herb a hobo somewhat wrong-foots "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" as a sequel. There's a tremendous irony in that the episode was purposely conceived to take the sting off of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", and yet it retroactively makes that ending (and by extension the events of "Old Money") seem even more mean-spirited - there, Herb lost his business and his mansion home, but there was nothing to imply that he was going to end up this badly off. As per the DVD commentary, writer John Swartzwelder just has a thing about hobos and will take whatever excuse he can find to work them into a narrative, so here we are. Likewise, the decision to make Herb a hobo who looks to have stepped right out of a second-hand vision of the Depression era (complete with Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp as one of his associates), while further underscoring the thematic intentions of the title, results in a distinctly caricatured, borderline "cute" depiction of poverty that has few pretences of engaging with the realities of what homelessness looked like in the 1990s. It's not that I require Herb to have a drug habit and be dying of tuberculosis, I'd just prefer that his impoverishment arc was handled with a marginally less cartoonish touch.

I should emphasise that I do really like "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" I greatly appreciate its existence, and its essentially warm intentions. After brutally destroying Herb in his debut episode, they brought him back just to give him a second chance and allow him to regain everything that he'd lost. How lovely is that? It is, though, one of those episodes in which I've found more and more to criticise every time I watch it. Compared to "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", which holds up really well, there are a couple of distinct shortcomings here that mark "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" out as a lesser sequel. The first is that the storytelling is considerably less economical than in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" By now we were deep into the Jean-Reiss era, which means there's a lot of farting around in lieu of narrative progression. It genuinely surprised me to hear Cartwright remark on the DVD commentary that this was one of those episodes where a stash of great material had to be left out due to time constraints (she tells us that the original script was 53 pages long), because the final product reads as the exact opposite, ie: an episode with a lot of dead space it's struggling to fill due to the narrative not being especially well-developed (you know, like "Cape Feare"). Why else would you have an award title as long-winded and convoluted as The First Annual Montgomery Burns Award For Outstanding Achievement In The Field Of Excellence and have the characters repeat it over and over? I get that the awards ceremony, as gratuitous as the entire sequence is, is intended to be its own bit of ridiculous bombast, but there's a truly baffling moment where Bart later says the award title in full, and if they were really that strapped for time then they could have fit at least two whole other jokes in there. Same goes for that sequence where Homer tells Lenny and Carl that his life couldn't possibly get worse, then waits in knowing anticipation for the next story beat - it's amusing, but a deliberately inefficient use of time from an episode that purportedly had little. There's also a rather glaring narrative cheat in terms of how Herb finds his way back into the Simpsons' lives - he learns that Homer has come into money on picking up a discarded copy of a Springfield newspaper, which one of his fellow bums just happened to be using for cover. While it's never specified exactly where Herb is at this point (is he still living in Detroit? Is that the city we see in the backdrop during the scene with the mother and the baby?), he's clearly not anywhere near Springfield, so what are the odds that a local paper detailing Homer's story would happen to find its way out to him? The episode makes the shrewd call to brush past this quickly, so quickly that you might not notice it at all - but now that I have, I fear it will bug me for all eternity. Let's just call it fate and move along.

The second problem is that Swartzwelder, as talented as he is, doesn't write Herb nearly as well as Jeff Martin did before him. He captures Herb's angrier, chipped-shouldered side just fine - without his workforce, he doesn't get the same opportunities for contemptuous outbursts as he did in the original, but he gets to chew out his brother enough times (there are even a couple of instances of physical violence, which is further than Herb went in the predecessor). What he doesn't nail, which Martin's script conveyed so beautifully, are Herb's more kiddish qualities. Balancing out his temperamental nature in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" was that Herb was so distinctively a child at heart. Despite his success, he carried himself with the vulnerability of a lost and wounded child who'd never figured out his place in the world, and though he'd dedicated his life to business and board meetings, what he really wanted to do was to hang out at the zoo and watch cartoons all day. Herb connected so well with the Simpsons children because his own inner child was so alive and kicking. "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" doesn't ignore the particular affinity that Herb had with the younger members of the Simpsons clan - in fact, his efforts to regain his fortune are based around his bonding with and understanding of Maggie - but, gorilla mask aside, there's less of a sense of him behaving like a kid himself. It could be that his time on the streets has knocked those qualities out of him, which is fair enough, except that Swartzwelder replaces them with a hackneyed jingoism that doesn't seem entirely consistent with his characterisation in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" Sure, Herb had lived his American dream, but he also had an outward, Frank Grimes-esque bitterness about how weighted against him the system had been. There's an extent to which Swartzwelder's script seems content to uphold Herb's redemption as a fairly uncritical celebration of the glibly patriotic sentiments he espouses - ironic, then, that it's named after a song expressing a stirring disillusionment for how the people who'd helped build America were abandoned by it in a time of economic hardship. Herb runs into one major roadblock, when he concedes that a mere idea isn't much use without the funding to get it off the ground, but otherwise getting rich again comes very easily to him (considering how hard clearly had to fight for it the first time around). The world below the poverty line becomes a dumping ground for corporate failures (where Herb is rubbing shoulders with a pimp busted for copyright infringement and the inventor of New Coke), and you only stay there if you've opted out of corporate consumerism's rules. Herb's wild idea is to create a device that translates a baby's cries and gargles into perfectly comprehensible speech, so that any parent can respond directly to their needs. He seeks out the Simpsons not only because he knows they've got the cash to spare, but they also have the baby to hand. Which is a point in this episode's favour - any story that finds a significant part for Maggie to play is a rare and precious thing.

The baby translator itself is one of those plot details that just seems tailor-made for viewer nitpicking. The production team even admit on the commentary that, if anyone were to successfully make such a thing then it would be a game-changing invention, so it's weird how it, like Herb himself, is completely forgotten after this one episode. Besides, how would Herb, whose background is in automobile design, not linguistics or child psychology, be able to single-handedly decode an entire baby "language"? At the very least, he would surely have to study a wider range of subjects than Maggie, and the process would take years, not the 30 days the script implies. But whatever, we get some nice moments between Herb and Maggie (I particularly love Herb singing her one of his former company's advertising jingles as a lullaby) and the real attraction is obviously in getting to hear that baby talk translated into the most absurdly articulate and deadpan of announcements (and not to mention, into DeVito's gruff voice).

Somewhere at the sidelines of Herb's baby translator journey is a deeply despondent Homer. Homer really wants Herb to forgive him. But he also really, really wants a chair. Truth is, Homer was miserable before Herb showed up. At the start of the episode, Bart and Lisa accidentally destroy the beloved couch on which he'd forged so many cherished TV-related memories, and even getting his award ceremony and dubious cash prize does little to cheer his spirits. He's still mourning that prosaic item of furniture, speaking of it to Joe Frazier as though he was going through a relationship break-up. Then a vibrating chair with the tantalising product name "The Spinemelter 2000" catches his eye, and Homer decides that he's ready to love again. He tries out the chair, leading into an inspired interlude that recreates the Star Gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), emphasising not only the chair's space age qualities, but that it represents the next major step in reclining evolution. As kismet would have it, the chair's price tag is $2000, but Marge is reluctant to blow all of the money at once on a luxury item, pointing out that they could make better use of it by replacing the faulty washer and dryer downstairs. This is probably the cleverest aspect of Swartzwelder's script, conveying a more quietly critical view of consumer society. Homer's world of material comfort stands in direct contrast to Herb's world of desperate poverty; so long as his ass is well-cushioned and the TV is on, he doesn't have to deal with the harsh realities going on beyond his doorstep. Hence the delightfully cynical evoking of Hands Across America, a charity initiative held on 25th May 1986 to raise money for the homeless and hungry, in which an attempt was made to create an unbroken human chain spanning the United States. The event has been roundly mocked as a failure - as is reported here, there were large gaps in certain states (shockingly, nobody wanted to be standing out in the desert in late May), the amount raised was $15 million, considerably less than the $50 to $100 million target, and obviously it did little to solve the issues of impoverishment overall. As with a lot of these charity initiatives that were fashionable in the 1980s, there's a sense it was more about the people involved than the people it was purportedly helping, a superficial stunt that was not actually looking to get to grips with any of the root causes of poverty, and instead sold a feel-good image of everyone uniting to take on the ugliness of the world - an observation that recently inspired Jordan Peele to turn HAA into a symbol of horror in his 2019 film Us. In this flashback, Homer is not involved in the chain, presumably because he cannot bear for his butt cheeks to part ways with his couch, something that ostensibly marks him out as more a passive observer than a participant, but it's not like anyone else in that room is effectively doing anything different. The destruction of Homer's couch foreshadows Herb's arrival - his sheltered lifestyle is about to be disrupted by a harrowing reality in which he is directly implicated. Both his past dealings with and likeness to Herb mark the problem out as his responsibility, one that he cannot ignore when it's right under his roof and threatening intermittently to punch him in the nose.

Despite Marge's misgivings, Homer still has is heart set on acquiring the Spinemelter, and his big dilemma arises when he has to choose between propping up his world of vapid material luxury and giving a needy individual a second shot at life. Ultimately, he does right by his brother, and while Herb purposely withholds his forgiveness until his fortune has been successfully regained, by the end of the episode their goodwill has paid off. Herb is transformed into a wonderful Wizard of Oz, thanking the family for their support and hospitality by fulfilling each of their individual desires - a new washer and dryer for Marge, a book club subscription for Lisa, a lifetime NRA membership (somewhat questionably) for Bart, and the promise of "something nice" for Maggie. Homer directly evokes Dorothy's dialogue when he he observes that there probably isn't a vibrating chair in Herb's bag for him - tellingly, acquiring that chair is being equated with going back to Kansas, so that he can return to a state of normality and not have to deal with the dangers outside of his comfort zone. Homer is clearly disappointed when it looks as though Herb only intends to extend him his forgiveness and to re-accept him as his brother, but is elated when Herb reveals that he bought him the Spinemelter anyway. Ideally, Herb would like for the restoration of their brotherhood to be regarded as the bigger prize, but he recognises that Homer's mind isn't quite working that way, and by relenting and fulfilling his silly yearning for that expensive chair, he's really procuring his own release, confirming both that he accepts his brother for the carnally-driven loafer that he is, and that he's well and truly over his grudges. After all they've been through, it would be downright petty to deny him.

As for what's next for Herb, I'd like to think he'd have used his regained fortune to help the impoverished, after his own experiences below the poverty line - starting, I would hope, by going back to assist that group of hobos he was previously settled with. But I guess we'll never know. Neither Herb nor his amazing baby translator have graced our screens again. Come to think of it, I'm not sure that the Spinemelter 2000 has either. Surprisingly, the one aspect of this episode that has enjoyed a miniature legacy is the kitschy bird knick-knack that Homer acquires from Herb as part of their agreement. It was later seen in the Season 7 episode "King Size Homer", where it had a significant impact on the plot direction, and later still in the Season 9 episode "Das Bus", where one of Bill Gates' goons unfortunately destroyed it. A sad and unceremonious end for such an underrated series icon.

The greater question concerns whether or not there was really anything more left to do with Herb after his second episode, and to be totally honest...yeah, there was. There actually is a loose end regarding his character that "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?" never acknowledges, which is that Herb never got to meet his biological father. It's strange, really, because if Herb was living with the Simpsons for several weeks, then you'd think the opportunity might have come up. Did Abe never call in at the Simpsons' house within that time? Did the family never offer to take Herb to see Abe at the Retirement Castle? Are we to assume that all of this stuff was happening off of screen? The obvious answer is that the writers couldn't think of a way to integrate Abe into this plot, so they got around the question by ignoring him altogether. Perhaps if they'd chopped out a couple of utterances of that overwrought award name, they could have squeezed him in. But alas, the prospective meeting between Abe and Herb may just have to sit it out for this lifetime.

On a more meta level, I facetiously like to think that the reason Herb has never returned or potentially even maintained his relationship with the family is because Herb himself was smart enough not to get involved with the Simpsons after this. Having recovered his fortune and gone out on a happy note, he decided to leave it there - why do anything to risk undermining that? Frankly, just flirting with a return was dangerous enough - as demonstrated by what was on that answering machine recording I mentioned in "The Changing of The Guardian". It was just a throwaway gag that you could easily ignore if you please, but Herb said that he was broke again. Ah well, we've established that the guy is a survivor, and for all we know his life since has been a perpetual cycle of downfall and recovery, as gruelling and repetitious as anything Sideshow Bob's had to face. Perhaps there's no benefit in having to see any of that onscreen - as delectable a character as Herb is, and as interesting as it might have been to see how his place within the Simpsons clan would have functioned from here, there is something very sweet and gratifying about the final image we have of him being his redemptive embrace with Homer. Truly happy endings with the Simpsons universe, where everyone gets what they want and there's no lingering bitterness on any side are an even rarer and more precious thing than episodes where Maggie gets to star (think of just how acidly things were resolved in "Black Widower", to which this ending is an appealing antidote); maybe it's only right that Herb's story has gotten to remain in the purity of that moment.