Twenty seasons, 450 episodes, 23 Emmy Awards — and it all led up to a story line about Jewish intermarriage.

“The Simpsons” celebrated two decades on television January 10, airing a celebrity-packed episode that skewered long-standing targets, such as the show’s nuclear power plant and patriarch Homer Simpson’s obsession with doughnuts. In a jab at those who would tinker with the long-running series, the episode’s plot is set in motion by meddlesome TV executives who force the show’s favorite burned-out entertainer, Krusty the Clown (born Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofski), to add a new co-host to his children’s after-school TV program.

Despite initial tensions, Krusty soon hits it off romantically with the sidekick, Princess Penelope, voiced by “The Devil Wears Prada” star Anne Hathaway.

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The pair’s wedding plans generate pointed ambivalence in Krusty’s father — long familiar to fans as Rabbi Hyman Krustofski — who can’t quite restrain himself while performing the ceremony. “Friends, loved ones,” says the rabbi, voiced by Jackie Mason, “we are gathered here today to marry a Jew and — a Congregationalist? Is that even a thing?”

Following an interruption by Bart Simpson — who reveals that he has locked a monkey in the synagogue’s “Torah room” — the ceremony is called off, only for a distraught Krusty to follow his beloved to Paris for a reunion. Although she hasn’t converted, Princess Penelope reveals her appreciation for Krusty’s Jewish roots, proclaiming him her “Borscht Belt baby” in the episode’s closing scene.

Krusty, who had a midlife bar mitzvah ceremony in a 2003 episode titled “Today, I Am a Clown,” expresses satisfaction that sounds Yiddish. As the pair floats down the Seine, he declares, “I’d rather be a happy shnook than a noble shlumpf.”

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