"Lisa the Iconoclast" is the sixteenth episode of the seventh season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on Fox in the United States on February 18, 1996. In this episode, Lisa writes an essay on Springfield founder Jebediah Springfield for the town's bicentennial. While doing research, she learns he was a murderous pirate who viewed the town's citizens with contempt. Lisa and Homer try to reveal the truth about Jebediah but only anger Springfield's residents. It was originally advertised in commercials as a Presidents' Day special episode; the episode aired the day before Presidents' Day.
The episode was written by Jonathan Collier and directed by Mike B. Anderson. Embiggen, coined by Dan Greaney, has since been used in several scientific publications, while cromulent, coined by David X. Cohen, appeared in Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon. In 2018, "cromulent" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Plot
As Springfield celebrates its bicentennial, Miss Hoover assigns Lisa's second-grade class to write an essay on Jebediah Springfield, the town's founder. Meanwhile, Mayor Quimby proclaims Homer the town crier during tryouts for historical figures in the town's upcoming celebration. Because his "criering" is better than Ned Flanders', Homer seizes Ned's heirloom hat and bell as props, damaging the hat in the process.
Lisa visits the town's historical society to research Jebediah's life. Hollis Hurlbut, the curator of the society's museum, appreciates Lisa's enthusiasm and grants her access to Jebediah's possessions. While examining his fife, she finds a document inside that purports to be a confession of his secret past as the vicious pirate Hans Sprungfeld, as he was known until 1796. He had attempted to kill George Washington while the latter was having his portrait painted, and later wrote and hid his confession, confident that no one in Springfield would ever find it.
Lisa tries to convince the townspeople of the truth about Jebediah, but is met with disbelief and hostility. Hurlbut dismisses the confession as a forgery, and Miss Hoover gives Lisa a failing grade for writing her essay about it, accusing her of political correctness. Continuing her research, Lisa discovers that Jebediah wore a prosthetic silver tongue after his own was bitten off in a fight. She persuades local government officials to exhume his remains and search for it, but there is no sign of it when the coffin is opened. Exasperated at Lisa's meddling, Quimby strips Homer of his position as town crier.
Seeing a copy of the unfinished Washington portrait in her classroom, and remembering a dream in which he urged her to find the "one piece left in the puzzle", Lisa realizes how she can establish the confession as authentic. She returns to the museum and matches its torn edge to that of the portrait, proving that Jebediah had written it on a scrap of the canvas that got caught on his boot when he escaped after failing to kill Washington. The missing silver tongue is found in one of the museum's exhibits, stolen from the coffin by Hurlbut in an effort to protect his own career and the legend of Jebediah. Lisa and Hurlbut decide to reveal the truth about him during a parade celebrating the bicentennial, but at the last moment Lisa decides that the legend has served to inspire the town and chooses to keep the secret. As Homer watches proudly, he notices that Ned has been reinstated as town crier and pushes him aside, then lets Lisa ring the crier's bell while riding on his shoulders.
Production
thumb|[[Donald Sutherland guest-starred in the episode as the voice of the historian.]]
The story was inspired by the real events surrounding the exhumation of President Zachary Taylor. Then-show runner Bill Oakley said "Lisa the Iconoclast" is "essentially the same" story but with Lisa Simpson in the role as Rising. The animators added production errors that would occur in a low-budget film. For example, a man in the crowd looks at the camera, some of the people are wearing wristwatches, McClure's stuntman does not have the same sideburns as he does, and a boom microphone can be seen entering the frame. In the Historical Society, the animators spent a significant amount of time decorating the walls. Besides numerous historical references, they also decorated the walls with The Simpsons characters in 18th-century settings. The first painting shows Otto Mann driving children in a horse-drawn carriage. Another painting shows Marge Simpson in silhouette. The last painting shows Professor Frink holding a kite in the manner of Benjamin Franklin. Hurlbut claims Springfield's confessions are "just as fake" as the will of Howard Hughes and the diaries of Adolf Hitler, both of which are proven forgeries.
Reception
In its original broadcast, "Lisa the Iconoclast" finished 70th in the ratings for the week of February 12 to 18, 1996. The episode was the sixth highest-rated show on the Fox network that week, following The X-Files, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills, 90210, Married... with Children, and Fox Tuesday Night Movie: Cliffhanger.
In addition, John Alberti praised the episode in his book Leaving Springfield as "an especially cromulent example of the narrative fissuring and disruptive disclosure...Lisa spends the entire episode uncovering the truth about Jebediah and courageously defending her findings against a phalanx of authority figures...a symbol of honesty, integrity, and courage. All in all, a spectacular episode revealing the truth behind our society."
The authors of the book I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, Gary Russell and Gareth Roberts, thought it was a "clever" episode, and highlighted Lisa's fantasy of the fight between Springfield and George Washington as "fantastic".
Total Films Nathan Ditum ranked Sutherland's performance as the 14th best guest appearance in the show's history. Michael Moran of The Times ranked the episode as the eighth best in the show's history.
Martin Belam of The Guardian named it one of the five greatest episodes in Simpsons history.
Legacy
The episode features two neologisms: embiggen and cromulent. The Springfield town motto is "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." Schoolteacher Edna Krabappel comments that she had never heard the word embiggen until she moved to Springfield. Miss Hoover, another teacher, replies, "I don't know why; it's a perfectly cromulent word." Later in the episode, while talking about Homer's audition for the role of town crier, Principal Skinner states, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."
Embiggen, coined by writer Dan Greaney, its morphology (em- + big + -en) is similar to that of enlarge (en- + large). The verb had in fact been used by C. A. Ward in an 1884 edition of the British journal Notes and Queries, as an "English parallel as ugly" as Greek ἐμεγάλυνεν (Acts 5:13). The word has made its way to common use and was included in Mark Peters' Yada, Yada, Do'h!, 111 Television Words That Made the Leap From the Screen to Society. In 2018, it was included in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and the online Oxford English Dictionary. In particular, embiggen can be found in string theory, as in the journal High Energy Physics in the article "Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking", which was published on January 23, 2007. For example, the article says: "For large P, the three-form fluxes are dilute, and the gradient of the Myers potential encouraging an anti-D3 to embiggen is very mild." Later this usage was noted in the journal Nature, which explained that in this context, it means to grow or expand. The episode is a favorite of the producers, among them, series creator Matt Groening lists it as his all time favorite, stating that its reference of US history was "irrelevance", and showrunner Al Jean also lists it as one his all time favorites.
Cromulent is an adjective that was coined by David X. Cohen<!--He called himself David S. Cohen while working on The Simpsons-->. It was added to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary in September 2023. The meaning of cromulent is inferred only from its usage, which indicates that it is a positive attribute. Dictionary.com defines it as meaning 'fine' or 'acceptable'. In 2018, "cromulent" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
The episode garnered some attention in July 2024, when UK broadcaster Channel 4 conspicuously pulled a scheduled showing on 14 July, and replaced it with an episode from season 30 during a marathon of season 7 episodes. This was due to references to assassinations throughout the episode, and in light of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania hours prior.
Erik Adams writes that “'Lisa The Iconoclast' is a complex episode, and that complexity comes down to the way the show plays with Springfield’s infamous mob mentality. 'A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man' isn’t the episode’s only moral; it also teaches us that unthinking collective—the one that would spend unwisely on a flashy monorail or converge on the local brothel with torches and pitchforks—has a heart, too. As the resident know-it-all, it’s an important lesson for Lisa to learn: Just because she finds freedom in the truth doesn’t mean that everyone else will... once we’re dead and buried and someone has replaced our bodies with skeletons, we forfeit any control over the stories that are told about us. We can attempt to conduct the narrative from the beyond the grave with journals of our innermost thoughts and confessions to our gravest crimes, but if we’re lucky enough to be remembered, then the people doing the remembering are calling the shots. 'Lisa The Iconoclast' captures this sentiment beautifully, showing that the people of Springfield are the ones getting the last laugh over the pirate who tried so hard to dupe them all. They’ve turned him into the figure that unites them all, on both a grand city wide scale and on a smaller scale within the walls of 742 Evergreen Terrace. This takes a bigger chunk out of Sprungfeld’s reign of terror than George Washington’s wooden teeth ever could, and I cannot tell a lie: They did it with their parades and their educational films starring Troy McClure and their ceremonial bells. Lisa and Homer know the truth about Hans Sprungfeld, but the myth of Jebediah Springfield lives on. How cromulent."
Merchandise
The episode was included on April 28, 1997, on the VHS set The Dark Secrets of the Simpsons, alongside "The Springfield Files", "Homer the Great", and "Homer Badman". On September 8, 2003, the VHS tape was released on DVD under the name The Simpsons: Dark Secrets in Region 2 and Region 4, but "Homer the Great" was replaced by "Homer to the Max". It was released again on DVD on December 13, 2005, as part of The Simpsons Complete Seventh Season. Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, Jonathan Collier, Yeardley Smith, Mike B. Anderson, and David Silverman participated in the DVD's audio commentary.