Comedy Archeology - Straight Outta Springfield

It’s hard to imagine now but there was a time when this show was new, exciting and a threat to the status quo. Like anything that swiftly becomes beloved, it’s now a part of the furniture (I’d even go so far as to say it’s part of the background) and has lost that energising spark that it once had. The early years, though, were and still are examples of sitcom writing at its finest.

The Simpsons
It’s become (and I am sad to say it) almost an irrelevance now. As it heads towards its thirty first and thirty second seasons as well as its 700th episode, it’s not really a show that anyone talks about anymore. In the early 90s though, I was obsessed.

It’s easy to forget that this was a series that so challenged the traditional image of an American TV family that it was criticised by the first President Bush ('We need a nation closer to the Waltons than to the Simpsons!'). It was bold and brash and showed a family that, although they did love each other, weren’t afraid to show all the other times when they were ready to grab each other by the throat (probably the only other similar show at the time would have been Roseanne). The family dynamic was clear and the characters well-defined and the supporting cast were appealing enough to warrant further fleshing out.

Most importantly? It was genuinely laugh out loud funny in those early years. There are so many Simpsons moments and lines from those first seven or eight years that are indelibly printed upon my long-term comedy memory (next to all the lines from Monty Python, Hitch Hikers, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones, etc…). Bart joining the scouts, Homer going to space, the competing ice hockey teams, Bart getting an elephant - all of which have a high hit rate of gags that actually hit the mark (Homer spinning round on the floor while trying to read writing on the back of his head had me genuinely crying with laughter the first time I saw it)

Maintaining a consistently funny level over a long period of time becomes difficult. Writers and producers don’t necessarily want to spend thirty years working on the same show and so, by necessity, things change behind the scenes. Also, once you become a massive success, it’s pretty much impossible to be the anarchic fly in the ointment. At some point the Simpsons shifted from gently mocking the rich and famous to courting them for cameo appearances. As for the characters and situations themselves, the lure of the silly and the surreal becomes stronger and stronger when you have more episodes to fill. Sometimes that works and sometimes it moves the show so far away from what it was that it becomes a bit lost.

Is it a patch on what it was in the early years? Definitely not. That shouldn't take away from the fact that this is one of the most influential comedy shows of the last three decades and shouldn't detract from the memory of those early slices of comedic gold.