The Sweetest Apu/References

Cultural references

 * Catch-22 - Homer refers to the punctured keg of beer as being “so cold...so cold.” These are the words Snowden uses when hit and bleeding, in the novel Catch-22. Milhouse also says these words in the season seven episode "Home Sweet Homediddly-Dum-Doodily" after Bart complains that nothing happened to Milhouse after playing with the monkey in the Pier One wicker basket.
 * Wild Wild West - Dr. Loveless' giant mechanical spider, in this episode driven by Professor Frink.
 * The title is a pun on the Sade song, “The Sweetest Taboo”.
 * When Marge is watching the video of Apu’s wedding, Homer gets up with the band and tries to sing the same song from the wedding scene in The Godfather.
 * Apu’s cartoon appears in The New Yorker, which Homer says he purchased only for the photos of Richard Avedon, featuring Lenny.
 * Apu and his octuplets reenact My Fair Lady as part of Manjula’s list.
 * Moe uses a generic Windex brand called Windel for his Windex drink (even though a real Windex drink is made of vodka, triple sec, and blue curacao).
 * At the Civil War reenactment, there is a confederate soldier who bears a striking similarity to General Robert E. Lee.
 * When Apu's wife first kicks him out of the house, his children hiss at him. This is a reference to the hissing children in the David Cronenberg film The Brood.
 * On Apu's reincarnation poster, one of his past lives was "a clod" (MAD Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman) and an assistant to Saturday Night Live executive Lorne Michaels. Lorne hired such Simpsons writers as George Meyer, John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti, Conan O'Brien, Ian Maxtone-Graham, and Joel H. Cohen as sketch writers in the mid-1980s into the 1990s, and hired voice actor Harry Shearer as a season five cast member in 1979).