Lisa takes up ballet and becomes addicted to the secondhand smoke from the other dancers; Homer and Bart meet a family of raccoons that have eaten Homer's beef jerky stash.
Tropes:
- Adults Are Useless: Subverted with Homer angrily yanking a cigarette from Lisa and later having the other ballet dancers' cigarettes confiscated when he learns she broke her promise not to inhale cigarettes.
- Animal Nemesis: When Homer pits himself against the raccoons, Bart warns him that this kind of thing has never gone well for him, pointing to a time when he lost a war with earthworms.
- Bait-and-Switch Comment: After the dancers desperately look for stuff that could be used as cigarette replacements, Lisa makes a speech against a known health hazard that stunts your growth and is marketed toward children: ballet.
- Ballet Episode: For Lisa.
- Call-Back: In the previous season's "Jazzy and the Pussycats", Homer at one point mentions trying to become a Mexican wrestler. At the end of the episode, when Marge learns An Aesop about parents not living out their career dreams through their kids, Bart asks Homer if that means he can stop training to be a Mexican wrestler (to which Homer says no and makes him practice right there and then).
- Circle of Shame: Comic Book Guy in line waiting in line for the Angelica Button book release.
- Comically Missing the Point:
- Domino Mask: Homer equips a raccoon with one right before sending the raccoon to steal all the ballerinas' cigarettes. The mask doesn't change the raccoon's appearance at all.
- Door Stopper: The "Angelica Button" book is so big that it leaves an indent in asphalt when thrown out a car window.
- Epic Fail: At some point Homer waged a war against worms and got trounced so badly that he was forced to build his own Monument of Humiliation and Defeat.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: When we see the raccoon Simpsons eating jerky, the Lisa equivalent is eating a nut.
- Halfway Plot Switch: Homer and Bart wrap up their B-plot in record time by befriending the raccoons that are stealing their homemade beef jerky so that they can involve themselves in the main plot with Lisa. The first story winds up coming back around when they use one of the raccoons as an agent to steal all the cigarettes from the dancers' bags backstage.
- Handy Feet: One of the ballet dancers shows Lisa her ability to light and smoke a cigarette using only her toes.
- Hard Truth Aesop: Failing to achieve your childhood dreams, as sucky as it is, does not give you the right to force it upon others.
- Hypocritical Humor: Homer expresses disgust saying how it easy it is in the country for girls to smoke, right as he's putting away his gun in his coat full of firearms in broad daylight.
- Insistent Terminology:
- I Resemble That Remark!: Lisa says to Homer that he "never had to be thin and focused." Cut to Homer eating and a burger and asking what she said.
- Meat-O-Vision: A non-food variant of this trope occurs in the middle of practice, with Lisa hallucinating the hands of a clock as a pair of cigarettes. The main ballet dancer is also experiencing this hallucination, as she tells Lisa that their next break is "when the big cigarette hits 9."
- Mirroring Factions: The two raccoons with whom Homer and Bart match wits, a heavyset adult and a spiky-headed juvenile, obviously resemble Homer and Bart themselves, which Homer doesn't notice until he finds their burrow and discovers a raccoon Lisa and Marge.
- Monument of Humiliation and Defeat: Apparently, after Homer lost his war with the earthworms, they had him construct one of these.
Bart: Dad, you never win a fight with animals. Remember when you lost that war with the worms?
Homer: That was not a defeat, that was a phased withdrawal.
Bart: Oh, yeah? They made you build this statue! (points at statue of Homer bowing before a worm, titled "Worms are better than me")
Homer: When you cut them, they multiply! I can’t defeat that!
- Must Have Nicotine: The ballet dancers when they lose their cigarettes.
- Negative Continuity: Bart insists that he's not a nerd but a "jock who's too cool for sports," although he's the star player on his Little League team the Springfield Isotots and other one-off episodes have seen him playing peewee soccer, football and ice hockey.
- No Kill like Overkill: Homer rips the cigarette away from Lisa, stomps on it, and then fires a gun at it.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Upon finding that the raccoons he's been feuding with are part of a family that reminds him of his own, Homer befriends them and shares his jerky.
- Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Maggie gives another demonstartion of her unusual strength by overpowering Bart.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The title is a reference to Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water".
- Reckless Gun Usage: When Homer spots Lisa about to smoke, he tosses her cigarette to the ground and shoots at it with a gun before he casually comments on how easy it is for kids to smoke in the country while he stores the gun in his coat full of weapons.
- Retroactive Wish: While having sex with his lover, Mayor Quimby prays for a cigarette. Right after that, the cigarettes Homer and Bart stole from the dancers and threw away land on him. He then thanks the Lord and offers one to the lover, who refuses because she's pregnant. Mayor Quimby then asks the Lord for another favor.
- Rule of Three: Marge has three stethoscopes at home. One is from her childhood dream of becoming a doctor; one is from her dream of being a safe cracker; and the third is from when she dreamed about being a stethoscope salesperson.
- Shout-Out:
- Similar Squad: The family of raccoons are quite similar to the Simpson family, complete with the Homer raccoon strangling the Bart raccoon, and even the Lisa raccoon being a vegetarian, eating an acorn instead of the jerky.
- Smoking Is Cool: The ballet dancers think this, as smoking helps them focus in their lessons.
- Smoking Is Not Cool: Lisa at first thinks this, until she has a dream where it's revealed her feminist heroes used to smoke too, so she begins inhaling the secondhand smoke from her classmates. In the end, Lisa begins using nicotine patches for kids.
- Stage Mom: Marge encourages Lisa to take ballet in order to fulfill her dream of being a ballet dancer.
- Take That!: Comic Book Guy initially criticises Lisa for her costume supposedly being inaccurate, only to end up humiliated when she points out that she was going off the book rather than the movies, presumably as a jab against fans who take adaptations of something as the gospel.
- This is followed by the Simpsons, after getting the latest book, not even bothering to actually read any of it and just skip right to the ending, followed by everyone, with deadpan expressions, chucking away all their memorabilia and Homer chucking the book out the car window as a jab at people who only follow series for the sake of appearing trendy and abandoning it the moment it's over.
- Walking Arsenal: Homer for one singular Hypocritical Humor gag.
