The Simpsons

The piece started with an anecdote about watching a fourth-season episode of “The Simpsons,” “Krusty Gets Kancelled,” with my kids. Upon hearing me laugh at a particular gag — action star Rainer Wolfcastle telling “Springfield Squares” host Kent Brockman about his new film, in which a man visits his son at college and is horrified to discover that he has become a nerd — my 7-year-old son laughed, too. Then he asked, “Dad, why is that funny?” I realized my reflexive laughter was generational. I’m in my early 40s, and the joke presumed thorough knowledge of pop culture made within my lifetime, much of it arcane. I realized the entire episode — one of the greatest of all “Simpsons” episodes, without question — was so strongly rooted in pop culture trivia that “if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as ‘The Waste Land,’” and that “the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that’s going to be.”

So many sitcoms from the post- “Simpsons” era are like that: “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Family Guy.” I called them “footnote shows” — programs built around references that feel universal and timeless to viewers of a certain age only because it’s what they grew up with. 

Comedy writers needn’t feel obligated to make every joke and every episode a monument to the eternal verities; sometimes the audience is just looking to unwind after a long day, and a Britney Spears impression or a Charlie Sheen joke is all they want or need, and that’s fine. And pop culture references are not an inherently bad thing, of course, and I said that in the piece. And yes, it’s true, all entertainment — all art — dates eventually. We don’t look at a Rembrandt painting or listen to a Miles Davis record and assume they were made last week.

But hopefully there’s something about the work that transcends the time in which it was created, otherwise it’s ephemeral, disposable. I probably singled out “The Simpsons” because it’s considered a pantheon series, a great and presumably lasting work. And during the first half of its run, it did have certain timeless qualities. The pop culture references were dense and sometimes deep, but there also frequent references to mythology, ancient history, biblical scripture, opera, Broadway musicals, painting and literature: Shakespeare, Vincent van Gogh, Gilbert and Sullivan, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, you name it. And the best episodes weren’t just a bunch of riffs strung together. There was a coherent, often scathingly funny vision of American life at the core of the series, as well as an intuitive, honest portrait of family and community and human nature; the gags were just wonderful embroidery. But in the last decade, the embroidery has taken over “The Simpsons” — and just about every other TV comedy of any profile that came after it. The only hugely popular half-hour comedy that escaped this fate is CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which modeled itself on pre-1970s comedies and consciously strove to avoid topical references altogether.

In a piece titled “Rest Assured, Your Kids Will Get ‘The Simpsons,’” Atlantic blogger Ray Gustini offered a list of five episodes he believed would not date, including “Das Bus,” which Gustini describes as “‘Lord of the Flies’ recast with the children of Springfield elementary. Without the book, we wouldn’t have the episode, which means we wouldn’t have the best last line in any fictional work, ever. Luckily, William Golding is still required high school reading.”

But other writers took issue with the implication that comedy should strive to be anything but funny in any way that it can, using whatever material is handy. 

“Worrying about whether future generations will find a joke funny seems like the perfect way to stifle anyone’s ability to produce something hilarious,” wrote Halle Kiefer of SplitSider. “Beyond that, the value of comedy specifically has often been its immediacy; why wouldn’t we want writers to make jokes that are relevant to their current audience? The reality is that comedy, or any kind of art, doesn’t have to be enduring to be worthy. Additionally, we’re selling kids short by assuming that not understanding a comedic reference will ruin their enjoyment of an entire episode, or movie, or cultural moment in time.”

A couple of writers thought my anecdote about “Krusty Gets Kancelled” disproved my own point. They said the mere fact that I was watching a 1993 episode of “The Simpsons” in 2011 and laughing at it with my 7-year old proved it was, if not timeless, then certainly durable, pop culture references and all.

In a Macleans article titled “Everything Gets Dated,” Jaime Weinman says there’s almost “nothing” TV series creators can do to keep a show from seeming dated, because “almost everything is an era artifact to some degree or another … They become period pieces anyway. Carl Reiner likes to boast about how he kept topical jokes to a minimum on ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show,’ but that show is the ultimate Kennedy/Johnson era time capsule for the hair, the look, and the attitudes encoded into it (like the unquestioned assumption that a talented performer like Laura will give up performing once she gets married).”

Chris Holden of Charge Shot!!! wrote, “The worst sin of the pop culture nerd is to automatically assume that something is funny by mere fact that there’s an obscure cultural reference,” and cited “Family Guy and “South Park” as frequent offenders. But he went on to take issue with the idea that the pop culture references, however plentiful, would necessarily overwhelm a comedy episode, and speed its march toward irrelevance.

“I don’t buy Seitz’ argument that this encyclopedic brain is necessary to understand these jokes on ['Krusty Gets Kancelled']. For one thing, these jokes come so quickly that, even if you miss one, there’s going to be three more in the next ten seconds. Background knowledge of Arnold Schwarzenegger and ‘Kindergarten Cop’ would certainly extend the appreciation of the gag, but it’s certainly not necessary.”

Holden adds, “I’ve been rewatching old ‘Seinfeld’ episodes, and while there are references to Murphy Brown and C. Everett Koop, Kramer’s physical comedy remains funny regardless of what era he’s in.”

The headline of a piece by Entertainment Weekly’s Darren Franich asked, “Will ‘The Simpsons’ still be funny when no one gets the references?” His conclusion: “Short answer: Yes, with an ‘if.’ Long answer: No, with a ‘but.’” Franich continues:

“The ’90s-era ‘Simpsons’ episodes weren’t funny because of the references — they were funny because the writing was snappy, the characters were fully-realized, and the individual episode plots were structured so well. There was wordplay, and farce, and topical satire. (There was also just outright silliness — see Sideshow Bob getting hit by all those rakes.) The references were the icing, not the cake. Also, it’s worth considering that not all referential humor is created equal. Most episodes of ‘Family Guy’ are filled with scattered pop culture tangents, which can bring a pleasant ‘A-Ha!’ feeling if you’re aware of what’s being referenced. But the Christmas episode of ‘Community’ was funny even if you had never seen the claymation ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,‘ because the show had a point to make: About Christmas, about friendship, and about Abed’s specific character arc.”

Todd VanDerWerff, a columnist for the Onion A/V Club and a former colleague of mine at The House Next Door, discovered that some of my concerns about “The Simpsons” also applied to the wonderful Simon Pegg-Jessica Stevenson-Edgar Wright sitcom “Spaced,” which VanDerWerff sees as the forerunner to NBC’s pop-culture-saturated and very self-aware “Community.” Fans of ‘Spaced’ have taken VanDerWerff to task for “not sufficiently putting myself in the headspace of someone who was watching the show for the first time in 1999 or 2001.” He continues:

“And, yeah, I haven’t been doing that. Part of that has been because this series is putatively about someone watching the show for the first time in 2011 and seeing how it holds up (quite well, thank you). But another part of that is because no one can ever experience some piece of pop culture all over again and feel the impact of what it was like at the time when it first came into being. I can remember the hubbub that surrounded ‘The Matrix’ or the ‘Star Wars’ prequels. I can remember just how big ‘The X-Files’ was at the time. But I can’t re-experience those emotions, nor can I suddenly feel what it was like to stumble upon ‘Spaced’ in the middle of the night on the tube and realize that these people were talking directly to you. ‘Spaced’ now comes with expectations—expectations a British friend of mine argues have damaged the show, since it creates the idea that this is something more than just a silly comedy—and it’s impossible to entirely set those expectations aside, to pretend it’s 1999 or 2001 all over again.”

Wolfcastle: “My son returns from a fancy East Coast college, and I’m horrified to find he’s a nerd.”

Kent Brockman: “Ha, ha, ha! I’m laughing already!”

Rainier Wolfcastle: “It’s not a comedy.”

I laughed at this. My son laughed, too — but after a moment he asked, “Dad, why is that funny?”

I told him it was too complicated to explain, because it was.

Wolfcastle was “The Simpsons”‘ stand-in for Arnold Schwarzenegger, a wildly popular movie star circa 1992-93, when that episode first aired. Schwarzenegger built his fortune on bloody action thrillers, but had recently begun playing against type in such dumb but harmless comedies as “Twins” and “Kindergarten Cop.” The movie Wolfcastle was promoting was obviously in that vein, but the plot evoked the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Wolfcastle’s line, “It’s not a comedy” was also a joke at the expense of phony ’80s macho; the very idea of nerdiness would horrify a gym-muscled dolt like Wolfcastle.

There were a couple of marginal jokes in the scene, too. Brockman’s moonlighting on “Hollywood Squares” acknowledged a long tradition of newscasters working as game show hosts and commercial pitchmen on the side (see Wallace, Mike). And “Springfield Squares” is a sendup of 1970s game shows in the vein of “Hollywood Squares” and “Tic Tac Dough.” The rest of the episode contained references to the 1929 film “The Great Gabbo,” Eastern European animation, Joey Bishop, “Howdy Doody,” Ed Sullivan’s censoring the lyrics of the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the 1968 “Elvis” TV special, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ penchant for nudity, and Bette Midler serenading Johnny Carson during his final week on “The Tonight Show.”

Do all or even most of these gags connect with a viewer under 25 who isn’t a 20th century pop culture junkie? I doubt it. Granted, some of the jokes were inside even for 1992-93 – ”The Great Gabbo” and the Eastern bloc cartoon “Worker and Parasite,” for instance. But most weren’t. They referred to things that were current or that felt that way, thanks to syndication or shared childhood viewing experiences. Circa 2011 that’s no longer the case. “Krusty Gets Kancelled” is one of the greatest of all “Simpsons” episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as “The Waste Land” – and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that’s going to be.

So much post-”Simpsons” comedy is in that vein: “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “South Park,” “Family Guy” and its spinoffs. Not to mention such recent arrivals as “Community,” “Chuck,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Glee,” “30 Rock” and the American version of “The Office.” They’re all footnote shows: amusing and perhaps hilarious right now, but likely to be dated in five years, quaint in 10, and borderline impenetrable in 20. Or inadvertently poignant. Or chilling.

Remember Bart and Lisa watching the “School House Rock” parody “I’m an Amendment to Be” in a 1996 episode “The Day the Violence Died“? “It’s one of those campy ’70s throwbacks that appeals to Generation X-ers,” Lisa says. “We need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks,” Bart says coldly — a line that would be a lot funnier if the United States had not, in fact,  gotten involved in another Vietnam seven years later.

Comedies saturated with pop culture references can be a lot of fun, and on a few recent occasions I’ve even used them as a way to connect with my kids. These shows are virtual museums of pop culture history, honoring certain entertainers and works and perhaps introducing them to future generations. After the Madonna and “Rocky Horror” episodes of “Glee,” my daughter and I watched bits of the source material being referred to, and had a fun conversation about appropriation and theft and whether there was any real difference between them. The Madonna episode was especially interesting because it referenced Madonna’s “Material Girl” video, which in turn was a parody of Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” — which made the “Glee” number a spoof of a spoof.

But all things considered, if I want to bond with my daughter I’d rather take her to lunch or the park. If the first half of “The Simpsons’” endless run has held up, it’s because of the characters and stories, the timing of certain lines and sight gags, and the phenomenal voice work. (When my daughter was an infant, Krusty’s voice used to make her laugh hysterically.) Most episodes of “The Simpsons” made after 1998-99 — the last consistently watchable season — are gag-fests based around Homer’s escalating stupidity and selfishness, and fast-and-furious “SNL”-style pop culture references. “The Simpsons” used to mix highbrow and lowbrow gags, and timeless and timely humor, but that rich mixture was simply too difficult to sustain. So it became a pop culture reference factory, not unlike “The Family Guy” — a consistently ruder, funnier show that was nonetheless never as rich as “The Simpsons,” and that looted Matt Groening’s cartoon like a department store during a blackout.

This season’s “Homer the Father” seemed to acknowledge the show’s tiredness by having Homer become obsessed with a TV Land-style cable channel showing repeats of “Thicker Than Waters,” a fictional 1980s sitcom written by David Mamet. Homer wore an early-’80s-style “Cosby Show”-type sweater the entire time, and when the episode was about to cut to a commercial, Homer said that Bart’s exit line “could be a hell of an act break” but “could use a button.”  That’s the default mode of TV comedy now: Reference-o-Rama. 

You can see it exemplified on NBC’s “Community,” which never met a reference, or a meta-reference, that it didn’t want to embrace and that — like “The Simpsons” — already seems torn between character-and-story-based comedy and something flashier and more disposable. This season’s “Basic Rocket Science” episode  — which lampooned “Apollo 13,” ”2001,” 1980s video game graphics, KFC and TV product placement, among other subjects — was fitfully amusing but quite shallow and forgettable. The Christmas episode — which was built around 1970s-style Rankin-Bass puppetoon imagery — was more surprising, weirder and darker, and ultimately more about the psychology of one major character, Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), than any of its marginalia. On March 24 the series is airing a sendup of “Pulp Fiction.” How much you wanna bet there’ll be a joke about the choice of subject being very mid-’90s?

The show’s heart often plays like “heart” — much more so than NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” a more earnest and authentically warm series that has more to do with observable reality than pop culture riffing. Where “Parks and Rec” expertly balances in-the-moment character comedy and reference-based humor (such as Mark’s “I Fell in the Pit” from Season 1, a sendup of pompous early-’90s grunge rock), “Community” is so acutely self-aware that it comments on its own jokes, comments on the fact that it’s commenting on its own jokes, and preemptively guesses how viewers might try to describe it. But the most self-consciously self-conscious episode of “Community” is less shallow and gimmicky than NBC’s “Chuck,” which really does feel like a long “Saturday Night Live” sketch — specifically one of those loopy, half-baked sketches that airs right before the final signoff when nobody’s watching. It’s the “Family Guy” of live-action comedy — which is to say if it were a person, it’d be that kid in the fourth grade who did the same funny catchphrase over and over and always made you laugh until you spit milk through your nose.  It’s a pleasure to know that kid, but his humor doesn’t travel well.

To varying degrees, all these shows have given me joy, and no, I don’t think self-aware comedy is an inherently less worthy form than any other. But there’s a downside: a lack of durability.  Some of the most buzz-worthy TV comedies of the last 25 years have proved as sturdy as tissue paper. Even the great ones from the ’90s (“The Simpsons” and “Seinfeld”) are starting to seem as era-specific as high-top fades and Koosh balls. “I Love Lucy,” ”The Andy Griffith Show,” ”The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” ”Cheers” and other pre-’90s sitcoms didn’t start to seem dated or irrelevant for decades, probably because they kept the pop culture references to a bare minimum; the more recent hit comedies are starting to exude that expired fish stench while they’re still on the air.  Can a show still call itself a comedy if you have to explain why it’s funny?