To make Lisa jealous, "Haney's Marriage Salvage Service" produces Oliver's date for the ball: Ingrid, a Norwegian woman smuggled over in a shipment of kippered herring.
Kimball claims he can't take Ralph to the ball because he has to stay with his mother who's planning on having the bends that night.
Mr. Douglas' sarcastic comment about the bubbles in Mr. Kimball's mother's head invokes the name of Lawrence Welk, who was a popular big band leader in the mid 20th century and whose nationally broadcast TV show, i.e. The Lawrence Welk Show (1955), will forever be associated with soap bubbles floating in the air.
The sarcasm from Mr. Douglas about dates to the ball is apparent when he invokes the name Tiny Tim, a none-too-attractive performer in the 1960s and '70s whose idiosyncratic style of singing falsetto from a playlist of songs written in the early 1900s pushed his persona into the realm of caricature and darling of the absurd.