Simpson and Delilah

"I have hair!"

- Homer Simpson

"Simpson and Delilah" is the second episode of season 2. It originally aired on October 18, 1990.

Plot
While watching TV with the family, Homer sees a commercial for a hair restorer called Dimoxinil, touted as a "miracle breakthrough" by the announcer on TV. He visits a doctor who sells Dimoxinil, but learns it costs $1,000, and Homer can't afford that. Lenny suggests Homer pay for Dimoxinil through the company's health plan: "Just fill out a few medical insurance forms creatively." Homer arranges to get the Dimoxinil through a shady deal in an alley with the doctor he visited previously. He applies the restorer to his head, and the next day, Homer wakes up with hair. At work, Mr. Burns surveys the security monitors to find a new person to promote to an executive position. He sees Homer with hair and chooses him for the job.

Now he's an executive, Homer looks for a good secretary, but all of the applicants — attractive women who openly flirt with Homer — fail until a man named Karl applies. Homer hires Karl, and finds in him a man who sees Homer isn't executive material, but is willing to help him. The two improve Homer's workplace wardrobe, and Karl even arranges for roses and a singing telegram when Homer forgets his and Marge's wedding anniversary. At the power plant's board meeting, Homer makes a suggestion to improve the low productivity and decrease the record high worker accident rate: Give people more tartar sauce when they have fishsticks every Tuesday. Burns approves Homer's proposal, and accidents do decrease while productivity increases. However, Smithers observes the decrease in accidents exactly matches the number Homer himself is known to have caused last month, and the productivity increase matches the one which occurred the last time Homer went on vacation. Burns, however, is impressed with Homer's efforts and gives him the key to the executive washroom. Smithers grows jealous over Burns' joy regarding Homer's work at the plant, and when Mr. Burns asks Homer to towel off his hands (bypassing Smithers) and follow him down the hall, it's the last straw. Smithers takes matters into his own hands. Checking through the plant's files, Smithers finds Homer's "creatively" filled out medical insurance form and sees Homer charged Dimoxinil to the company health plan and wrote "to keep brain from freezing" as the reason for the charge.

Shortly afterwards, Burns asks Homer to give a speech to the executives. As Homer discusses the speech with Karl, Smithers meets up with them and confronts Homer about the insurance fraud, ready to fire him on the spot. However, Karl convinces Smithers the entire scheme was his idea, and he's fired instead of Homer. Karl politely says his goodbyes to Homer, who now has to worry about the big speech without his secretary's help. When he gets home, he finds Bart using the Dimoxinil bottle, splashing the formula on his face in order to grow a beard. Homer's exclamation at seeing Bart handling the formula scares Bart and causes him to spill the hair restorer. The next day, without it, Homer loses all of his hair before the big meeting. At work, he's surprised to find Karl, who wrote a series of notecards for Homer to help him with his speech. However, Homer tells Karl without his hair, he won't be taken seriously. Karl energizes Homer with a pep-talk, explaining all of the things he did (the tartar sauce, the washroom key, drying Burns' hands) were the result of him, not the hair.

Homer presents his speech about economizing the power plant. Despite the fact Homer gives a brilliant speech about the Japanese art of self-management which can save the plant a lot of money, it flops because none of the other executives are willing to take a bald man seriously. By the end of the speech, the entire audience walked out, and Homer's summoned to Mr. Burns' office. Burns voices his displeasure, but rather than fire Homer, he tells him of the time he too had hair, before turning "bald as a plucked chicken". Knowing what Homer went through, Burns is willing to give Homer his old job back. Even so, Homer's still upset, worried the kids won't respect him now he's back to his old job, and Marge won't love him now he has no hair. But Marge being Marge, she lets him know the hair doesn't matter.

Production
The episode features a scene where Homer and Karl kiss each other, which happened 10 years prior to television's first real man-on-man kiss on Dawson's Creek. Karl is implied to be gay; creator Matt Groening says that when people began asking "Was he gay?" the day after the episode aired, his response was "He's whatever you want him to be."

Reception
The episode was placed twenty-third on Entertainment Weekly's top 25 The Simpsons episodes list and is often considered one of the best episodes of the show.