Original airdate: September 25, 2008
Earl and Randy head over to a garage sale at their parents’ house, where dad Carl (Beau Bridges) has decreed that if they want their old childhood stuff back, they’re going to have to pay for it. A set of lawn darts triggers this week’s list-related memory in Earl, as he recalls the Hickeys’ old neighbors, the Clarks. It seems that Clark Clark (guest star David Paymer, doing his usual nebbish thing) was a bit of a sensitive guy, and Earl and Randy enjoyed torturing him with pranks such as delivering a fake newspaper that proclaimed baby suicides at an all-time high (apparently Clark wasn’t particularly smart, either).
Eventually Clark was so tormented by Earl and Randy’s treatment that he and his wife moved away. Earl decides he needs to track down Clark Clark and make it up to him. This proves to be pretty simple, since the Clarks only moved one town over, and there aren’t a whole lot of people in the phone book with the name Clark Clark. Earl and Randy tell Clark that they’re sorry for how they treated him; he accepts their apology but says that the pranks weren’t the reason he moved away. Rather, it was because he had an affair with Earl and Randy’s mom, Kay (Nancy Lenehan).
Horrified, Earl confronts Kay, and naturally Carl walks in just as she’s about to confess that she and Clark had one night of passion while Carl was working and Mrs. Clark was busy with her self-defense classes. Furious, Carl moves out of the house and shacks up with Earl at the motel, where they bond over their shared experiences with cheatin’ women. This gets Carl’s blood up, and he decides to confront Clark Clark and beat him up. Instead, Mrs. Clark turns out to be quite the self-defense expert, and thoroughly trounces both Carl and Earl.
That angle exhausted, Carl then turns to getting himself laid as the sure-fire revenge tactic against Kay. He propositions a bank teller and a pharmacist who he claims always flirt with him, but it turns out they were just trying to keep his business, and they both turn him down. The next option is a supposedly frisky waitress, but she ends up being Patty the Daytime Hooker. Without any other options, Carl finally decides to let his feelings out, and he cries in front of Earl for the first time ever. This naked display of emotion inspires Earl to cry, too, about how badly Joy treated him while they were married.
All cried out, Carl goes back to Kay, and Earl tells Joy that he forgives her, but she doesn’t seem to care, since she’s been busy with this week’s B-plot: At the garage sale, Joy sets her sights on a little game with a metal ball, but Carl is too hard-nosed a negotiator for her. So she steals the ball and bides her time until the price comes down. Unfortunately for Joy, Willie the one-eyed mailman decides to purchase the game for himself, and he doesn’t need the ball since he can use his glass eye. Undeterred, Joy offers Carl $45 and takes off with both the game and Willie’s eye. After Earl’s expression of forgiveness, something small inside Joy’s cold heart must melt a little, since she finds it in herself to return Willie’s eye. Aww.
