To paraphrase Marx, sitcoms repeat themselves, first as satire after which as farce. Or perhaps simply as self-parody.
That is the case with The Simpsons, America’s longest-running scripted TV sequence, longest-running animated present, and longest-running sitcom. As soon as an engagingly genial but subversive a part of American fashionable tradition whose creator, Matt Groening, sharpened his abilities in different comix, The Simpsons troopers on in its thirty fifth season as a pale, drained imitation of its earlier self, one which now not delights as a lot because it disappoints. It’s virtually definitely asking an excessive amount of for The Simpsons or another inventive providing to maintain a pointy edge for this lengthy, however the present’s newest controversy supplies an object lesson in how pedantic and tedious American tradition can develop into.
In a current episode, goofball patriarch Homer publicizes that he’ll now not enact one of many present’s longest-running gags, which concerned strangling his son Bart at any time when the child pisses him off (which is commonly). When assembly a brand new neighbor who remarks on his robust handshake, Homer says to his spouse, “See, Marge, strangling the boy has paid off….Just kidding. I don’t do that anymore….Times have changed!” Because the pop-culture website IGN notes, Homer hasn’t actually strangled Bart onscreen because the 2019–2020 season. (Go right here for a supercut video that guarantees “Homer STRANGLING Bart For 10 Minutes Straight!”)
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Sure, occasions have modified. The minute I learn concerning the new episode, I assumed again to a very memorable installment from the present’s second season. In “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” Marge leads a profitable marketing campaign to wash up TV after realizing how ultra-violent her youngsters’ favourite cartoon, Itchy & Scratchy, actually is. (In a typical episode, “Field of Screams,” Itchy the mouse runs over Scratchy the cat with a thresher after which makes use of the decapitated head to play catch together with his son, parodying a scene within the syrupy baseball film Subject of Desires.)
The inciting incident for Marge comes when child Maggie imitates what she sees on the small display and whacks Homer on the top with a mallet. Marge’s protest succeeds spectacularly, and she or he will get the makers of Itchy & Scratchy, whose theme tune guarantees “They fight! And bite! They fight and bite and fight! Fight, fight, fight! Bite, bite, bite!” to create healthful episodes just like the one beneath, titled “Porch Pals”:
The brand new and improved Itchy & Scratchy is so nauseatingly candy and good-for-you that Springfield’s youngsters flip off their TVs and go outdoors to play and begin to thrive like by no means earlier than, a wry commentary on persistent fears that fantasy violence—and fantasy intercourse—on the boob tube deformed youngsters’s ethical lives.
In its earlier days, The Simpsons wasn’t merely humorous. Together with quite a few different exhibits, similar to Beavis and Butt-head and Thriller Science Theater 3000, it helped to show us all find out how to eat popular culture critically by commenting instantly and not directly on the recurring conceits and tropes of TV and the vital dialogue concerning the medium.
This was no small matter. The nation was within the midst of an explosion of cultural choices that freaked out tastemakers and gatekeepers. Because the double whammy of cable TV and the web rolled out throughout the nation, highly effective individuals have been satisfied that almost all of us, however particularly youngsters, have been incapable of distinguishing between primary cable and primary actuality. What we would have liked greater than ever was a guardian class that may regulate and prohibit the music we listened to, the TV and films watched, and the web sites we searched. Because the College of Tulsa’s Joli Jensen informed Motive, the guardian-class perspective proceeds from “an assumption that art is an instrument like medicine or a toxin that can be injected into us and transform us.” In case you imagine that, you’re going to do no matter you’ll be able to to ensure solely the “right” kind of messages are being despatched. “Just like TV sets or radios,” I summarized the view in 1996, “we are dumb receivers that simply transmit whatever is broadcast to us. We do not look at movie screens; we are movie screens, and Hollywood merely projects morality—good, bad, or indifferent—onto us.”
That kind of considering has a protracted and storied lineage, and it has been utilized in varied methods to novels, films, comedian books, rock and roll, and different types of mass leisure. The thought recurrently migrates to new types of fashionable tradition (video video games, social media, good telephones) and normally will get dressed up in scientific-sounding language.
It is laborious to recapture the ethical and social panic brought on by the looks of The Simpsons and the Fox community on which it appeared. Fox turned the fourth over-the-air broadcast community in late 1986 and was recognized for its edgy content material and gross-out humor. Conservatives and liberals alike attacked The Simpsons and the community’s different exhibits, similar to Married…with Youngsters, as portents of the top of all that was good and respectable in American society. Bluenoses raged on the sight of Bart sporting a t-shirt with “Underachiever” emblazoned on it, with some faculty districts truly banning the gear. Republican Invoice Bennett and Democrat Joe Lieberman, two fortunately largely forgotten however as soon as highly effective political figures, joined forces to denounce such anti-social choices by handing out “Silver Sewer Awards” that trashed Fox TV and Rupert Murdoch for vulgarizing the airwaves. They have been joined by such figures as Sen. Bob Dole (R–Kansas), Lawyer Common Janet Reno, and first woman Hillary Clinton, who have been satisfied that “fantasy violence” and promiscuous intercourse scenes on TV prompted those self same issues in the true world. Reno explicitly threatened TV networks with censorship, averring that “the regulation of violence is constitutionally permissible” whereas senators pushed laws that may have made cable networks topic to FCC content material laws. Pundits predicted an countless rise in mayhem if exhibits like The Simpsons—which had a well-known gag the place a personality stored shouting “Will someone please think of the children?”—weren’t reined in.
Such fears largely dispersed within the absence of believable analysis exhibiting a lot of a correlation, a lot much less something hinting at causation, between watching intercourse and violence on TV after which perpetrating it in the true world. The lengthy and nearly uninterrupted decline in crime that started within the mid-Nineteen Nineties—proper as more and more violent and sexually express TV, web content material, and video video games have been changing into ubiquitous—additionally helped to reduce requires extra G-rated content material and tighter restrictions on who may eat what. Which after all is not to say they went away: In 2005, as an example, Hillary Clinton, by then a senator from New York, declared that the online game Grand Theft Auto “encourages [children] to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them” whereas calling for an federal investigation of how video games have been rated and offered.
Over the previous decade or so, requires kinder, gentler content material appear pushed much less by worries that, say, depictions of violence will trigger issues in the true world and extra concerning the ache and struggling that dangerous representations of explicit kinds of characters would possibly trigger amongst some viewers. Certainly, the final time The Simpsons was broadly mentioned was in 2017, when comic Hari Kondabolu* referred to as out the present for its supposedly one-dimensional illustration of South Asians within the documentary The Drawback with Apu. In consequence, the actor who voiced Kwik-E-Mart proprietor Apu, Hank Azaria, stopped doing the character. A number of years later, throughout riots and protests within the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, the producers of The Simpsons introduced that it could “no longer have white actors voice non-white characters.”
Nevertheless well-intentioned such gestures may be, it is clear that they’ve carried out nothing to deliver viewers again to The Simpsons. In its first few seasons, it averaged nicely over 20 million viewers per episode. Its most up-to-date full season drew lower than a tenth of that.
“Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” ends with Marge renouncing paternalistic censorship after a motion impressed by her personal activism launches a marketing campaign to place pants on Michelangelo’s David. Thirty-three years later, the present that after challenged the censorial zeitgeist now appears all an excessive amount of part of it.
CORRECTION: This text initially misidentified the author and star of The Drawback with Apu as Akaash Singh, whose 2022 comedy particular Deliver Again Apu argues that The Simpsons character “is not racist, he’s the American Dream.”