Resurrected
The Script Says I’m Supposed to Hit You With This
Now that I have a Master’s degree essentially in hand, I think it’s high time I post about something important: The Simpsons.
I’ve been re-watching classic seasons while I’ve been laid up with a sinus infection and wisdom teeth removal, and it occurred to me that maybe the Simpsons hasn’t gotten worse, precisely, but maybe we’ve become a dumber audience.
Like most people, I consider the heyday of the Simpsons to fall around seasons 3-7, and these seasons hold up even after 15 years. I’ll be the first to admit that the Simpsons was a key part of my childhood exposure to pop culture, and I’ll concede that my affinity for these seasons might be due to nostalgia—in part. At the same time, there’s an awful lot of evidence that the Simpsons has gone seriously downhill, and there are a lot of reasons bandied about: the departure of Conan, the tragic death of Phil Hartman, even the notion that the folks at Fox have just run out of ideas. I think there’s something to all of these, and that maybe it’s hard to make witty comment on the trappings of pop culture when you yourself are the biggest cultural touchstone, but it occurs to me that maybe we are just not as intelligent an audience as we used to be.
Tonight I watched an entire new episode for perhaps the first time in months, “Wedding for Disaster.” During the whole episode, I cracked a smile maybe once or twice, and had a bit of a chuckle over the ending gag with “blue roses.” The episode was littered with film references—notably, the Saw series—and general zaniness. I kept thinking about the gags they could have gone for but didn’t (come on, take blue roses to Tennessee Williams!), and the general obsession the current writers have with making references only to the here and now. Essentially, I think the show is pitching to the lowest common denominator, which is a far cry from the days when they made jokes work on multiple levels, as here:
In a little more than 1 minute, this clip sends up Ayn Rand, The Great Escape, and their own merch. This isn’t even the best gag of the episode, which actually does take it to Tennessee Williams (in musical form!), lifts a verbatim scene from The Birds, and has quite possibly the greatest musical send up of New Orleans ever penned. And yet—for all the literary references and classic movie spoofs, the episode was funny to me when I first saw it at 8 or 9 years old.
So why has the show gotten progressively more vapid? Part of me fears too many kids are growing up these days without exposure to classic film and literature—indeed, even when I was in high school (a decade ago, oi) I had a better education in classic pop culture than many of my friends (thanks, mom and dad, for making me an elitist hipster). I sincerely believe FOX executives hold the American public in the deepest contempt, and it wouldn’t surprise me if their hiring decisions and other interference with the Simpsons pushed it towards the unwashed masses. On the other hand, maybe we aren’t literate enough anymore; maybe we made the Simpsons a shell of itself. Did we not laugh hard enough at Sideshow Rahim or HMS Pinafore gags, and too hard at fat jokes? Can we only keep 6 months of movies in our collective memory? Can we only understand scripted gags framed around reality TV shows? In short, are we really that stupid?
To end on a nostalgic bright note, have another great moment in classic Simpsons:
