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| "You play pretty well for someone with no real problems." |
Lisa starts off the episode depressed at the world, finding everything to be pointless, and failing to find meaning in things. I'm sure most of us have gone through that at some point. At one point, she overhears someone playing some mean jazz and runs, at night, to find out who is playing it. The man, who refers to himself as Bleeding Gums Murphy, gives Lisa some tips about jazz, including the all important one: its not about making yourself feel better, its about making others feel worse!
Marge finds Lisa and, the next day, relays the advice given to Marge from her mother: always smile, so that people can see how good your mom raised you, but then Marge sees how big a tool it was going to make Lisa so she quickly set things straight and told Lisa to be herself. These actions somehow cheered Lisa up, and the whole family went to see Bleeding Gums play at a cafe.
Quick Review
In the Tracy Ullman shorts and I guess a couple of the early episodes, Lisa had been portrayed as a somewhat tamer Bart. While she would sometimes show an intelligent side, or at the very least play a straw man to Bart's crazy antics, there would be other times where she would join in, though to a smaller degree. Moaning Lisa essentially defines Lisa's character going forward. Instead of just being a Bart lite, she would be her own character, a smart, sensible young girl with intellectual pursuits.
Despite that, this particular storyline just was not funny. There was hardly anything to laugh at when Lisa was the focus of the episode. Instead, the side-story featuring Homer's harsh quest to finally best his son in video game boxing, only to have Marge literally pull the plug when Homer was one punch away, was pretty much the key source of laughs and where the episode got most of its points. That side story pretty much saved the episode, because otherwise it wasn't much.
Final Score: 6.5
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