The Simpsons

The Simpsons turns 20 today. Jonathan Chait tries a bit of analysis:

In the world of the Simpsons, people are capable of bottomless cruelty, greed, and hypocrisy -- indeed, these traits are so widely shared that they go unremarked upon. In this case, Barney is not only launching a competitor to his best friend's livelihood, he's savaging his character on television. And he's attacking him in terms that not only apply more to Barney himself, but utterly define his character -- the only things Barney ever does are be a loser and a boozer.

The show doesn't make a joke about, or even highlight, this violent hypocrisy. It's just accepted. That's how people are. That's why it was such a deadly satire.

I don't know if I buy that. To me, the denizens of Springfield were never ultimately cruel, greedy, or hypocritical--they always redeem themselves in the end. Even in the episode that Chait cites, Mr. Plow, Homer and Barney eventually make up and become friends again. So I kind of don't know what he's talking about.

Moreover, in my opinion, the satirical bite of the Simpsons came not from some cynical portrayal of how "people really are", so much as an irreverent send up television itself and its central place in American society. Recall that when the Simpsons debuted it was pre-Seinfeld, pre-South Park, and during the heyday of the Cosby Show. TV characters never exhibited true dysfunction, did not exhibit the now-familiar American pathologies of overeating, laziness, and basic ignorance. Most importantly, unlike real Americans, the Americans depicted on television never watched television. Whereas the typical American was watching an average of 4 or 5 hours of TV a day, Bill Cosby was spending 5 hours a day kibitzing with Rudy in the living room. The Simpsons was the first to portray Americans as the true television-watching, fast-food eating, pop-culture consumers that they are.

Of course, this is also what made The Simpsons a uniquely post-modern affair. Whereas characters on the Cosby Show and Cheers seemed to live in an idealized alternate reality free of consumerism and pop icons, the characters in the Simpsons traded in them as a matter of course: pop cultural references were the show's trademark. There were parodies of Patton, of the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and countless other movies; the characters, too, were often parodies of famous people in the old Warner Bros. cartoon style, such as Mayor Quimby standing in for a generic Kennedy (right down to his wife always being shown as dressed in the pink dress and pillbox hat--which is actually pretty morbid now that I think of it) or Karl having a Sly Stallone inflection, or Ranier Wolfcastle as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Part of the game of watching the Simpsons was seeing if you could catch all the references being made.

In any case, personally it feels a little awkward to analyze the Simpsons all academic-like, because it's such an organic part of who I am, and who my friends are. When the Simpsons began, I was 10 years old. Though obviously I didn't understand all the subtle layers of humor at work, I did understand that this is what funny was. I was fluent in the language of Simpsons quotes, and the day after a new episode aired, conversation with my friends before homeroom would consist almost entirely of quoting the best parts of the episode from the night before. It was a universal language, too: everyone from ever click and group had at least a basic knowledge of the Simpsons. And as we all developed our senses of humor, it became clear that we owed a tremendous debt to that show, which traded so much in pop cultural references and absurd tangents.

On a final note, I'll just add that my favorite episode of all time is Homer the Heretic, the one where Homer skips church and ends up having the best day of his life. Off the top of my head, I can think of these choice jokes from that episode:

• God saying to Homer, "I have to go now. I have to appear in a burrito in Mexico."
• "We interrupt this political roundtable to bring you: professional football." The graphic being shown while this is said is two pundits battling on what appears to be a mesa somewhere, one of them brandishing a suitcase and the other, a mace.
• Everyone freezing their butts off in church and reveling in the imagery of hell.
• Homer relecting on the best days of his life, including one of him dancing in a fountain of beer emanating from a crashed beer truck.
• "Rich, creamery butter..."
• Moon waffles, including liquid smoke
• Communing with nature, various birds and forest critters light on Homer's head and shoulders; later, when he's taking a shower, they're still there.

Anyway. Yeah. The Simpsons.