The absurdity of an elephant being able to crash through back-to-back political conventional halls like that, to raucous applause and jeering boos, in the span of 10 seconds? That had me laughing so hard at the time, I never was able to notice the signs until reruns.... and even if I had, it wouldn't have mattered.
We have all forgotten what humor is in the name of slavish political devotion, and it's sad.
Oh, best joke was when he's headed for the peanut factory " This is the moment we feared people! Many of you thought it would never happen! "
The thing about Flanderizeing Flanders and killing off Maude was it was just so mean-spirited, like the writers were making him pay, personally, for the sins of the Religious Right. They kept having him brutalized by fate as a way to almost dare him to renounce his faith... and become an insufferable moralist so they could justify it. It was treated as if this was "right", a "fair" fate for such a man, to lose his wife and anything good he may have had because a Christian in 2000 didn't deserve peace or prosperity.
It was inexcusably nasty because he'd been "punished" before, he started up a small business that failed (only to be rescued, ironically, by Homer realizing that his desire to see Ned fail was selfish) and later he ends up losing his home to a Hurricane, suffers a breakdown, and spends time in a mental ward, revealing he had a very unhealthy childhood where his parents let him run wild, let him steal and beat up other kids, never disciplined him, and his current perfectionist-like personality was a result of psychiatrists trying to make him less of a brat ? That should be plenty humiliation. But no, none of that was GOOD enough..... this man hasn't suffered ENOUGH for the likes of the writers, apparently. Now it's time to kill his wife. What's that say about THEM?
