Source — Quotes.net, The Simpsons "When Flanders Failed" Schadenfreude exchange

Title: Movie/TV quote page for The Simpsons — "When Flanders Failed" (Lisa/Homer "Schadenfreude" dialogue)
Author: uncredited (fan-submitted quote-database entry); the underlying dialogue is written by the episode's actual writers (not identified on this page)
Publication: Quotes.net (STANDS4 network)
URL: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/926044
Date: quote-database page undated; the episode itself, "When Flanders Failed," is The Simpsons season 3, episode 3, which aired in 1991 (per IMDb's listing, title tt0763042, cross-checked via web search but not directly fetched — IMDb blocks this project's fetch tools, see Gaps)
Accessed: 2026-09-01
Type: primary for the dialogue text itself (directly fetched and read by this project via curl); the episode-identity/air-date metadata is tertiary (IMDb, not directly read).

Extract

Full exchange, directly confirmed by fetching this page's raw HTML: "Lisa: Dad, do you know what Schadenfreude is? Homer: No, I don't know what 'shaden-frawde' is. [sarcastic] Homer: Please tell me, because I'm dying to know. Lisa: It's a German term for 'shameful joy', taking pleasure in the suffering of others. Homer: Oh, come on Lisa. I'm just glad to see him fall flat on his butt! [getting mad] Homer: He's usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel... What's the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours? Lisa: Sour grapes. Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything!"
This is a genuine, directly-verified 1991 mainstream-American-television instance of the word being explained to a general audience — independent of, and not contained in, the English Wikipedia Schadenfreude article (see that source page's access-method note: an earlier WebFetch summary wrongly implied Wikipedia was the source for this claim).
The scene is itself a small data point about the word's popular gloss at the moment of one of its most visible mainstream introductions: Lisa's own gloss ("shameful joy") differs slightly from the dictionaries' "enjoyment/pleasure/joy... from the troubles of others" (no "shameful" component in Merriam-Webster's or Wiktionary's definitions on file) — a minor but real instance of a popular restatement adding a moralizing connotation not present in the dictionary definitions.

This project could not directly verify the episode's identity/air date from a primary source: IMDb blocked both WebFetch and a curl request with a browser user-agent (HTTP 202 with an empty body, consistent with a bot-check page) for its quotes page; TV Tropes' recap page also returned HTTP 403 to curl. The season/episode number and 1991 air date are therefore filed as web-search-reported (from IMDb's own listing title, "When Flanders Failed (TV Episode 1991)," seen in search-result snippets only), not independently confirmed by this project's own reading — flagged accordingly.
No claim is made here that this episode is what "popularized" the word generally (a stronger causal claim seen in some low-quality web sources) — only that this specific, directly-verified scene exists and is one documented mainstream 1991 appearance of the word.
Whether this is in fact the first mainstream-media use of the word in English is not established or claimed.