The Best Lisa Moments On The Simpsons

Poor Lisa Simpson — she yearns to be understood by her immature and more simplistic peers, but when she actually finds someone she can relate to on an intellectual level, she can't stand it because she's no longer the smartest and most special person in the room. This is the gist of the 1994 The Simpsons episode "Lisa's Rival," which finds the usually conscientious and sensitive Lisa expressing an emotion she doesn't usually show: jealousy. 

A new student named Allison comes to Springfield Elementary, and she and Lisa hit it off because they almost miraculously have so much in common — like Lisa, Allison is a very good student and also a very talented saxophone player. Actually, she's smarter than Lisa and is a better saxophonist, defeating her in an epic band audition duel. The rivalry is seemingly completely one-sided, as Allison is something Lisa isn't — well-adjusted — and doesn't seem to care much that Lisa isn't quite up to her level. The whole relationship drives Lisa a little mad. After her exquisite diorama of Oliver Twist for her school's Diorama-Rama gets destroyed, she endeavors to hide Allison's also exquisite diorama depicting Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," until guilt gets the better of her and she reveals it. Allison and Lisa both wind up losing, however, to Ralph Wiggum's non-diorama, a collection of Star Wars figures in their original packaging. This serves to humble Lisa and humanize Allison.

Lisa Simpson generally doesn't trust barons of industry who shamelessly pollute the natural world, so the arrangement at the center of the 1997 episode "The Old Man and the Lisa" is surprising. 

After years of inattention to his stock portfolio and some last-minute bad investments, Mr. Burns goes bankrupt, is found wandering around a grocery store, and is committed to the Springfield Retirement Castle, where he meets up with Lisa again, after once speaking at her Junior Achievers Club meeting and dismissing her idea of fundraising for a trip by collecting recyclable cans. Lisa agrees to help Mr. Burns get rich again, on the condition that he adopt more environmentally friendly practices. 

It all backfires, however, when, after Lisa shows him that six-pack rings can ensnare innocent wildlife, he invents and implements the Burns Omni-Net — millions of plastic rings glued together to purposely capture fish which he uses to turn into a lucrative industrial product he calls Li'l Lisa's Patented Animal Slurry. In his attempts to be good, Mr. Burns is even worse than before, although he does try to give Lisa a cut of the profits when he sells his slurry to a fish stick manufacturer. She cannot, in good conscience, accept that check for $12 million... the refusal of which gives Homer a heart attack.

Ralph Wiggum is possibly the dumbest, strangest, and most baffling boy in all of Springfield. Viewers get to know exactly who Ralph is early in the 1993 episode "I Love Lisa," when he and Lisa's class engage in the pointless busy work of constructing Valentine's delivery boxes — only Ralph isn't allowed to use safety scissors, somehow glues his head to his shoulder, and eats his red crayon. When the Valentine's exchange begins, Ralph cries because he gets no cards at all, and Lisa, perhaps because she also often feels unloved, disliked, and left out, drops a friendly Valentine into his box. Ralph is transfixed and amazed by the gesture and the card itself — there's a picture of a train on it and it reads, "I choo-choo-choose you," which Ralph interprets as a romantic overture. 

He spends the rest of the episode trying to get Lisa to love him — he constantly calls her his Valentine, gifts her a Malibu Stacy convertible, and takes her to Krusty the Clown's anniversary special, where he tells the host he's going to marry Lisa one day. That's the last straw for Lisa, who angrily proclaims on TV that she does not love Ralph, breaking his heart. It makes it awfully awkward, then, when they have to star in Springfield Elementary's President's Day play about George and Martha Washington together.

Lisa Simpson never fails to feel her feelings, and when a caricaturist at a Springfield Elementary carnival draws her in an unflattering light in the 1992 The Simpsons episode "Lisa the Beauty Queen," she comes to believe that she's ugly — and it's devastating. Homer can't stand to see his daughter so upset and suffering from body image issues, so he sells the prize he wins at the carnival raffle — a ride on the Duff Blimp — to afford the entry fee in the Little Miss Springfield pageant, reasoning that Lisa won't think she's unattractive if she's a beauty queen. Lisa, reluctantly at first, throws herself into the festivities, learning tricks like putting petroleum jelly on her teeth to enhance her smile and working the crowd into a patriotic fervor by performing a pandering medley of "America the Beautiful" and "Proud Mary" in the style of Tina Turner. Lisa is disappointed when she's named first runner-up, but then takes the title anyway when winner Amber Dempsey is struck by lightning attracted to her metal scepter at a public appearance. But even when she wins, Lisa loses. She's forcibly stripped of her title after she refuses to do kid-oriented commercial work for the Little Miss Springfield's official sponsor: Laramie Cigarettes.

Even Lisa Simpson's own parents can get a little tired of Lisa Simpson — her activism and standing up for what's right is honorable and admirable, but adhering to Lisa's various standards can exhaust Homer and Marge. In the 1996 episode "Summer of 4 Ft. 2," Lisa gets sick of herself, jolted into the reality of just how unliked by her peers she is when nobody signs her yearbook at the end of the school year. That summer, the family rents out Ned Flanders' beach house, giving Lisa the chance to completely reinvent herself in a new town where nobody has any preconceived notions of her as a brainy nerd. Lisa purposely doesn't pack any clothes, so she has to buy new ones on arrival and chooses an arrival of hippie-bohemian threads and accessories that gain her entry into a clique of cool slacker kids that hang out on the beach (and do little more than that). Lisa finally feels accepted because she stifles her own personality, only for Bart — resentful that Lisa is more popular than him for once — to ruin it all, exposing Lisa's nerdiness by showing off her yearbook to the new gang. Amazingly, and heartwarmingly, they still like Lisa, even though she was a total fraud.

Lisa Simpson isn't a happy person, a Simpsons suggestion that intelligent people have too many thoughts to find peace. Lisa does occasionally find pleasure in life, generally when she gets to enjoy her self-proclaimed favorite things, primarily playing jazzy tunes on the saxophone and ponies. 

Early in The Simpsons, Lisa was just like millions of other eight-year-olds in that she wanted nothing more in life than to own a pony which she could ride, feed, and hang out with all day. In the 1991 episode "Lisa's Pony," her long, pony-less struggle comes to an end when Homer buys her one, wracked with guilt after he gets drunk at Moe's instead of getting Lisa the saxophone reed she needs right that minute for the school talent show, leaving her performance a squeaky wreck. In a parody of the famous horse's-head-in-the-bed scene from The Godfather, Lisa wakes up to find a full, alive, friendly pony next to her one morning, which she names Princess. The rest of the episode alternates between footage of Lisa riding her pony, bonding with her pony, talking to her pony... and Homer working the graveyard shift at the Kwik-E-Mart to pay for Princess. Ultimately, Lisa can't be happy after all, at least not in a pony-related way, agreeing to give up Princess when she learns how her father is desperately struggling to make her dream possible.