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.”

So it only stands to reason that the next decade to look forward — er, back — to is the ’90s, which last time I checked was a bastion of huge hair, terrible fashion choices, and crappy rave music. But there must have been some good stuff that happened last decade, or this new nostalgia kick wouldn’t be in full swing. Here are five signs that we are all going to be wearing fluorescent-colored fanny packs and talking about Jordan Catalano sooner rather than later.

1. Trend pieces: You know how newspapers are usually the last ones to catch on when something’s cool? That means that by the time a new cultural movement is getting reported on, it’s already too late to stop it. So yesterday’s piece in The Daily about a ’90s comeback is just an arbiter of the re-pre-millennial explosion. Expect the New York Times to figure this out in about 10 months when they write their own trend story … at which point the ’90s won’t be cool anymore.

2. ’90s reprogramming: Announced today, Nickelodeon’s TeenNick will be launching “The 90s Were All That,” a new time slot from midnight to 2 a.m. that will focus exclusively on the retro shows of the station’s heyday. The lineup so far includes “Clarissa Explains It All,” “Kenan & Kel,” “Pete & Pete” and “Rugrats.” What, no “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”

3. Boy band reunions: When New Kids On the Block joined up with Backstreet Boys for a tour last summer thousands of 20- and-30-somethings were suddenly glad they never threw out their Donnie Wahlberg dolls. Irony went out the window around the same time these concerts sold out. Maybe that’s why Justin Bieber recruited Boyz II Men for his Never Say Never tour … even if he was just a baby when the R&B group was selling out stadiums, he knew the power of the ’90s.

4. “Simpsons” love: For awhile in the aughts, Matt Groening’s beloved cartoon had lost its place in the cultural dialogue. While “Family Guy” and “South Park” took center stage with their pop-relevancy, “The Simpsons” seemed content to die a slow death. (Even Groening’s move in creating “Futurama” was taken as a sign that “The Simpsons” had jumped the shark.) But Homer and the gang hung in there, and eventually we got sick of “South Park’s” preaching and “Family Guy’s” predictable cutaways. Matt Zoller Seitz’s new essay on the number of pop culture references in “The Simpsons” further proved that no matter how far we stray, we always come back to our favorite yellow family.

5. “Portlandia”: Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s sleeper hit “Portlandia” needed more than six episodes on IFC to fill the need it created in our twee little hearts for putting birds on things, Aimee Mann, and a mayor played by Kyle MacLachlan. “Portlandia’s” opening scene is a huge musical number about a magical world that’s stuck in the ’90s (“The tattoo ink never runs dry! All the hot girls wear glasses!”); an epic love song to a decade of coffee shops and pseudo-intellectualism.

Viva la ’90s! Or is it livin’ la vida ’90s?

Either way, “Cedar Rapids” is often hilarious, although I found it so amped-up and overly broad that I was exhausted before the movie was over. Ed Helms of “The Hangover” and TV’s “The Office” stars as the severely unworldly Tim Lippe, a small-town Wisconsin insurance agent whose mettle will be tested in the crucible of Cedar Rapids. If the resulting movie resembles those two influences a bit too much, at least those aren’t bad starting points. Tim is 30ish without so much as a pet, and doesn’t seem to grasp that his clandestine liaisons with his one-time middle-school teacher (a nifty cameo for Sigourney Weaver!) are cougarish recreation, and not the pathway to matrimony.

Tim is well liked by clients, but as his slime-bucket boss (Stephen Root) at BrownStar Insurance tells him, “When I first hired you, I thought: ‘This is a kid who might be going somewhere.’ And then you just didn’t.” But when BrownStar’s studly star agent is felled by a tragicomic calamity, it’s Tim’s turn to step up, go to Cedar Rapids, and come home with ASMI’s “prestigious Two Diamond Award” (almost always described with that epithet) that represents exemplary service to clients, community and God.

Fortunately, right about the time I was getting truly sick of Helms’ Gomer Pyle act and Tim’s implausible, overplayed innocence, he goes to Cedar Rapids and gets sucked into the orbit of the notorious Deanzie (John C. Reilly), ASMI rebel, party animal and all-around speaker of truth to power. Reilly’s enjoyable in almost anything, but Deanzie is a masterwork, from the pitch-perfect Upper Midwest accent to the feverish, disheveled divorced-dad hedonism. Throwing his arms around their third roommate, Ronald (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who appears to be the only black person at the ASMI meeting, Deanzie crows to Tim, “Haven’t you ever seen a chocolate-vanilla love sandwich?”

That’s only one of several ambiguous gags surrounding Ronald, a buttoned-down, soft-spoken agent from St. Cloud, Minn., who is unmarried and mentions antiquing and community theater among his favorite leisure activities. No one seems to notice, and indeed Deanzie later jocularly accuses him of being scared to show love for another man (either before or after urging the gang toward what he calls the “all-you-can eat pussy buffet”). Whitlock, who once played a state senator on “The Wire,” is also called upon for some pseudo-gangsta talk late in the movie, while extricating Tim from a scrape. So Ronald is the focus of all the racial and sexual anxiety of “Cedar Rapids,” which is asking a lot from a Minnesota insurance salesman. Again, this is how the movie works: Arteta and Johnston try to push us right to the point of total discomfort with their reckless storytelling, and then make us laugh about it.

I suppose it’s progress that this trio of guys is joined by a woman just as bawdy and eager to do shots of Jäger in suburban sports bars as they are. That would be Anne Heche as ASMI femme fatale Joan Ostrowski-Fox (the name is just perfect, isn’t it?), a married woman who actually tells Tim, “What happens in Cedar Rapids stays in Cedar Rapids.” Heche’s delicate performance is in many ways the film’s moral center, and I actually wish her character were explored more fully. Of course, there’s also Bree (Alia Shawkat), the convention hotel’s resident hooker, who introduces Tim to chemical substances and sexual practices he’s never even heard of before — but really, I’m getting ahead of myself. Johnston has a good ear for the quasi-inspirational language of sales culture, and “Cedar Rapids” features a bunch of essentially lovable characters who have to face the most morally compromised situation of all — being American adults. If it resembles an inflated pilot episode for a raunchy sitcom more than a motion picture, at least it looks like a show that won’t bore you or insult your intelligence. 

Nicholson’s presence is arguably more a problem than a strength in “How Do You Know.” In essence, the movie is an ungainly but irresistible romantic-triangle comedy built around Rudd, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, with Nicholson rambling around its periphery like a demonic bear, part comic relief and part distraction. But in that moment of mock-self-knowledge I saw the presence of one of America’s greatest screen actors, in an extraneous old-guy role, as purely symbolic: Nicholson is a stand-in for 70-year-old James L. Brooks, the genius of American comic melodrama, who is, after all, manipulating all the younger characters in the movie, and everybody watching it, the whole time.

I wouldn’t call myself a Brooks fan, exactly — that’s like asking whether you’re a fan of the Empire State Building. When you look at what the guy has accomplished in a pop-culture career that began on network television in the mid-’60s, impressive doesn’t begin to cover it: From “Room 222″ to “Mary Tyler Moore” to “Taxi” to “The Simpsons,” before even considering the slow-burning movie career that began with “Terms of Endearment” in 1983. “How Do You Know” is only Brooks’ sixth feature in the last 27 years, and like all the others — the hits, meaning “Endearment” and “Broadcast News” and “As Good as It Gets,” and the flops, meaning “Spanglish” and “I’ll Do Anything” — it’s clumsy, lumpy and half-crazy in places. But even Brooks’ bad films have something, call it life force or spirit or just good-heartedness, that sets them apart from the soul-munching Hollywood system, and his better ones are like mini-vindications of the entire American movie tradition.

You will have noticed (because you’re clever that way) that I haven’t yet firmly stated whether I think “How Do You Know” is one of Brooks’ successes or one of his failures. Even more than is customary with Brooks, that’s an individual question, and I can understand why some people I like and trust have declared it an unwatchable mess seasoned with therapeutic clichés. With me, though, it’s different. After watching, and halfheartedly praising, a bunch of painfully flawed romantic comedies this year — I shudder to recollect that I declared “Going the Distance” the summer’s best rom-com, which is rather like picking your favorite case of shingles — I want to sing hosannas to the heavens for delivering one made by somebody who damn well knows what he’s doing. Is “How Do You Know” schmaltzy and manipulative and not entirely convincing as a portrait drawn from real life? Sure — and it’s also richly, goofily funny, loaded with terrific actors and delicious moments, and pretty much bursting at the seams with joy and affection. I cried. Twice.

Paul Rudd has been a movie star in embryo for what seems like a decade now, and as George he gets to play the half-hapless funnyman and the romantic lead in the same movie. (Whether he actually works for female viewers, in the latter category, is an open question.) George is a straitlaced, straight-shooting CEO — we never find out what the Madisons’ company actually does, if anything — with an overanalytical math professor (Shelley Conn) for a girlfriend. His sudden fall from that pinnacle, when the feds come after the company, is one of those wrenching Dickensian tumbles that’s meant to reveal a character’s true nature. Within a few weeks, he’s unemployed, nearly penniless and single, having sold his fancy Washington apartment and gotten dumped by the math lady. (“I’ll be here for you when this is all over,” she helpfully assures him.) So he ends up, one night, going on a haphazard blind date with Lisa (Witherspoon), an elite athlete who has just gotten cut by the U.S. national softball team.

It’s a timeless formula: Two characters going through major life changes, but who don’t seem quite right for each other. George is a big talker, something of a closet intellectual, a guy from a messed-up rich family who spends too much time in his own head (not to mention too many nights getting drunk and singing Teddy Pendergrass into his lamp). Lisa’s bright enough, but she’s an athlete — a class of human being often sentimentalized in the movies, but rarely explored below the surface. Her bathroom mirror is covered with positive-thinking Post-its: ritual invocations to swagger, or to reject fear or stupidity. (“There are three kinds of players: 1) Players who don’t know what’s happening; 2) Players who watch what’s happening; 3) Players who make it happen.”) Brooks is neither mocking nor endorsing her self-help nostrums, but if anything George is a little envious of Lisa’s relentlessly positive attitude and her refusal to be dishonest with herself.

Their first date goes nowhere, and anyway Lisa is seeing Matty (Wilson), a blond, muscular, preening star ballplayer. (The idea that the Washington Nationals have a $14 million pitcher — and that he’s in the bullpen — may strike baseball fans as one of this movie’s major failures of verisimilitude.) Matty is in many ways Brooks’ supreme creation here; indeed some viewers may feel that he’s such a blast Lisa shouldn’t ditch him for nerdly Mr. Right over there in the corner. Matty’s a shameless rake who keeps a supply of girly toothbrushes and personalized logo hoodies on hand for his overnight guests. But he’s by no stretch a bad guy, just a vain, rich and pampered one, and he’s clearly smitten with Lisa, so much so that when she asks whether they’re being monogamous he responds, “Pretty much.” (The film’s title comes from a bullpen conversation between Matty and a fellow pitcher about how you know when you’re in love; I won’t spoil the punch line.)

Lisa likes Matty pretty well, and it seems entirely possible that he can be domesticated. He gives Lisa a zillion-dollar diamond watch to indicate that they’re “engaged to be engaged,” and solicitously offers to eat with the Christians at a team barbecue rather than expose Lisa to his horndog teammates. But George has gotten under Lisa’s skin, and like any romantic heroine she’s wrestling with herself and preparing to throw away all certainty. Early in the film, George asks her, “Do you ever wish you could push the delete button and erase everything you’re saying — even while you’re saying it?” She literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about, because she’s a person who has trained herself to avoid that level of self-doubt. All that is about to change. If Witherspoon has fewer histrionics than either of her beaus, she gives a composed, quiet performance that shines out of the center of the movie like a blond beacon. The story of her internal transformation, told over a couple of half-accidental encounters with George that rank with the best scenes Brooks has ever written, is its internal motor.

Nicholson’s Charles prowls around the edges in Mephistophelean fashion, continually demanding that George choose between unpalatable alternatives, but it’s Kathryn Hahn, as Annie, George’s ultra-pregnant, hormone-crazed ex-assistant, who nearly steals the movie entirely. Allowing a goofball minor character to rob focus from the central couple — and then to serve as the instrument that brings them together — is a purely Brooksian move. He is so steeped in Hollywood formula that he believes it, inhabits it, overcomes and transcends it, all at the same time. “How Do You Know” is in no sense a perfect movie, and if its combination of shameless sentimentality and willful eccentricity simply sets your teeth on edge, I’ll understand. Me, I think it’s a wonderful home-for-the-holidays flick, defined by the wonders of young love and the wiles of old age.