Art Crawl

"Art Crawl" is the eighth episode of the first season of the animated television series Bob's Burgers. The episode originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 20, 2011.

The episode was written by Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, and was directed by Kyounghee Lim. It received positive reviews from critics for its character interactions, humor and storyline. According to the Nielsen ratings, it was viewed by 4.43 million viewers during its original airing. The episode featured guest performances by Andy Kindler, Jerry Minor, Megan Mullally, Larry Murphy, Sam Seder, Laura Silverman and Sarah Silverman.

Plot

To avoid Linda's fragile sister Gayle (Megan Mullally), who is hanging her paintings at the restaurant, Bob and his children tour the town's annual art crawl where they criticize paintings. Louise is surprised when someone buys a painting from the art supply store managers, whom she hates, and ends up getting exiled by the elderly couple, Edith and Harold (Larry Murphy and Sam Seder). Bob and the kids return home from the art crawl and discover Gayle's paintings of animal anuses on display in the restaurant.

Bob worries that Gayle's painting will cause the restaurant to lose business, but Linda wants to encourage Gayle's artistic nature. Thus, she insists that the paintings will be taken down at the end of the art crawl, which is only a few days away. Realizing how bad the art crawl paintings are, Louise opens an art sale outside of the restaurant and forces her siblings to paint "crap artwork" as an easy way to earn money. Twenty-seven minutes later, Gene completes his laborious painting of a robot ninja fighting a tape recorder vampire at Stonehenge with his 28 year old albino friend. Tina paints a portrait of her dentist naked. Louise disagrees with their paintings—although she later agrees to let them paint, as long as they do it in a realistic way. Bob catches on to the scheme, and replaces Gayle's paintings with his kids', knowing Linda will love the replacements, but Gayle sees through it. Bob almost levels with Gayle to tell her why he replaced her paintings until Edith and Harold arrive at the restaurant in an effort to forbid displaying the anus paintings, both deeming them offensive. Preferring to side with Gayle over the couple, Bob scares the them off with the anus paintings. Bob declares the restaurant an "anus restaurant" by hanging the paintings on the establishment's walls and encourages Gayle to paint more anus portraits. Meanwhile, Louise's art sale is failing, so she replaces Tina and Gene with classmates Red and twins Andy and Ollie Pesto (Laura and Sarah Silverman). Edith and Harold continue to protest against the anus paintings and Bob declares that the paintings will be a permanent installation.

The next morning, Bob discovers the anuses have been covered over with painted pink underpants and accuses Edith of vandalism. Despite Louise's surprising art sale success, she becomes very bossy and acts like a pimp to the boys. However, she sees Bob entering the art crawl commission, so she follows him and witnesses Gene and Tina learning how to paint. Bob demands an apology, but Edith and Harold make it clear that they did not do anything to Gayle's paintings. In retaliation, Bob paints anuses on Edith and Harold's paintings, both of which are works composed entirely of black dots. Bob later gets arrested by Officers Julia and Cliffany for defacing Edith's property and it is revealed that Linda censored the anuses, not Edith. Linda explains that she had frequent hallucinations of animal anuses that made her paint an image of her pink underpants over the canvases. Louise pays for the damaged paintings with the money that she earned from selling paintings at the art crawl.

Production

"Art Crawl" is the eighth episode of Bob's Burgers and was written by Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux and directed by Kyounghee Lim.^[1] The episode features the first appearance of Andy and Ollie Pesto voiced by sisters Laura and Sarah Silverman, however, the later episode Burger Wars is produced as their first appearance. Emmy Award winning actress Megan Mullally voices Linda's sister Gayle while recurring guest stars Andy Kindler voices Mort, Larry Murphy voices Teddy and Edith and Sam Seder voices Harold. The episode carries a TV-14 rating for suggestive dialogue (D) and offensive language (L).

Burger of the Day

• "Poblano Picasso", a play on Spanish painter Pablo Picasso
• "Salvador Cauliflower", a play on another Spanish painter Salvador Dalí

Reception

In its original American broadcasting, "Art Crawl" was viewed by an estimated 4.43 million viewers and received a 2.2 rating, a 6 percent share among adults between the ages of 18 and 49, an increase from last episode.^[2]

Critical reception has been positive, Rowan Kraiser of the A.V. Club gave it an A, the highest rating of the night and also the highest rated episode of the season. He praised the storyline, its humor and praises and its improvement on the series, also Bob's funnier role in this episode.

References

External links

• at TV.com
• "Art Crawl" at the Internet Movie Database
• Art Crawl at the Big Cartoon DataBase