Introduction: the Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture
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Notes Introduction: The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture 1. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (New York: Continuum, 1996), 19. 2. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (#7G08) ranked thirtieth for its timeslot the night it premiered and earned Fox a 22 percent share and a 14.5 rating. See “Nielsens,” USA Today, December 20, 1989, 3D, Lexis-Nexis Academic, October 2, 2003. 3. “Bart the Genius” (#7G02) ranked forty-eighth for its timeslot and earned Fox a 19 percent share and a 12.7 rating. See “Nielsens,” USA Today, January 17, 1990, 3D, Lexis-Nexis Academic, October 2, 2003. 4. Harry F. Waters, “Family Feuds,” Newsweek, April 23, 1990, 58. 5. Although The Simpsons often ranked within the top ten for weekly or monthly Nielsen totals, the show has not ranked high overall: at the end of the 1989–90 season, its first full season on the air, The Simpsons ranked only thirtieth. See “Final Season Ratings,” Electronic Media, April 23, 1990, 36, Lexis-Nexis Academic, October 2, 2003. http:// web.lexis-nexis.com/universe. Curiously, the show has never been among the top 25 in the Nielsen seasonal totals. It is no longer the ratings juggernaut it once was, but new episodes of The Simpsons still rank in the Nielsen top 50 among prime-time television shows and often in the top 20 among shows in syndication. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946–Present, 8th ed. (New York: Ballantine, 2003), 1073–74. Also see Nielsen Report on Television, Nielsen Media Research (Northbrook, IL: A. C. Nielsen Company, 1998). 6. Note that it has only beaten Gunsmoke in the number of years on the air, not the total number of episodes made. Gunsmoke still holds the record with 635 episodes. 7. Joanna Doonar, “Homer’s Brand Odyssey,” Brand Strategy, February 2004, 20. 8. Alyson Grala, “A Salute to The Simpsons,” License! Global May 16, 2007. http:// www.licensemag.com/licensemag/data/articlestandard//licensemag/192007/425752 /article.pdf. 9. In the first week of its release, in late June 2007, The Simpsons Movie had earned $110,979,172 in domestic ticket sales; the total worldwide gross for the film eventu- ally surpassed half a billion dollars—it made $183,135,014 domestically and another $343,610,123 in foreign markets, for a total earnings of $526,745,137. “The Simpsons Movie,” Box Office Mojo, Box Office Mojo, LLC, March 10, 2008, http://www. boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=simpsons.htm. 10. For more, see Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America is Wracked 210 NOTES by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan, 1995); Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, “Have Americans’ Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?” American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996): 690–755; Nancy J. Davis and Robert V. Robinson, “Are the Rumors of War Exaggerated? Religious Orthodoxy and Moral Progressivism,” American Journal of Sociology 102 (1996): 756–787; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, One Nation, Two Cultures (New York: Knopf, 1999). 11. The full title of Wolfe’s book is One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think about God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, the Right, the Left, and Each Other (New York: Viking, 1998). 12. Morris P. Fiorina, Samuel J. Abrams, and Jeremy C. Pope, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, 3rd. ed. (New York: Longman, 2008), 9. 13. Ibid., 19. 14. Irene Taviss Thompson, Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 1. Thompson’s study rests upon the analysis of 436 articles dealing with culture war issues in the pages of National Review, The New Republic, Time, and The Nation between 1980 and 2000. 15. Fiorina et al., Culture War?, 14. 16. Thompson, Culture Wars and Enduring American Dilemmas, 2. 17. James Q. Wilson, “How Divided Are We?” Commentary, February 2006: 19. 18. Ibid. In recent years, there has been a growth in scholarship rejecting earlier analyses and affirming the idea of a polarized populace. For more, see Alan I. Abramowitz and Kyle L. Saunders, “Is Polarization a Myth?” Journal of Politics 70, no. 2 (2008): 542–55. 19. The debate over the culture war concept has been carried on largely among James Hunter, Alan Wolfe, and Morris Fiorina, as evidenced by the publication of Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), which Hunter and Wolfe coedited and to which Fiorina contributed. See, in particular, the contributions in this volume of Hunter, “The Enduring Culture War,” 10–40; Wolfe, “The Culture War that Never Came,” 41–73; and Fiorina, “Comment: Further Reflections on the Culture War Thesis,” 83–89. Hunter has continued to use the culture war metaphor, most recently in relation to religion in the essay “The Culture War and the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Problem of Pluralism and Weak Hegemony,” Social Research 76, no. 4 (2009): 1307–22. 20. Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989), 10. 21. It should be noted that with many of the culture war issues addressed in various epi- sodes of The Simpsons, the writers often devote the entire time to a single storyline rather than dividing it, in typical sitcom fashion, between a plot and a subplot. This is true of episodes such as “Like Father, Like Clown,” “Much Apu About Nothing,” and “Mypods and Boomsticks,” which I discuss in chapter 2; “Homer’s Night Out,” “The Springfield Connection,” and “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy,” which I address in chapter 3; “Homer’s Phobia” and “There’s Something About Marrying,” discussed in chapter 4; “Last Exit to Springfield” and “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield,” which I discuss in chapter 5; and “Homer the Heretic” and “Lisa the Skeptic,” examined in chapter 6. 22. Waters, “Family Feuds,” 59. 23. Joe Rhodes, “The Making of The Simpsons: Behind the Scenes at America’s Funniest Homer Video,” Entertainment Weekly, May 18, 1990: 5. 24. Tom Shales, “They’re Scrapping Again—But This Time It’s a Ratings Fight,” Washington Post, October 11, 1990: C1. NOTES 211 25. See, for example, “Simpsons Just a Cartoon to TV Academy,” USA Today, February 21, 1992, 1D; Richard Zoglin, “Where Fathers and Mothers Know Best,” Time, June 1, 1992, 33; B. Zehme, “The Only Real People on TV,” Rolling Stone, June 28, 1990, 40–43; Mark Muro, “Harvard’s Laugh Track,” Boston Globe, August 7, 1992, L25; John O’Connor, “The Misadventures of the Simpsons,” New York Times, September 24, 1992, 18; Tom Shales, “America’s Most Animated Family,” Washington Post, September 24, 1992, C1; Ken Tucker, “Toon Terrific,” Entertainment Weekly, March 12, 1993, 48–50; Tom Shales, “The Groening of America,” Washington Post, May 13, 1993: C1; and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Oh Those Family Values,” Time, June 18, 1994, 62. 26. Bruce Gomes, “Awards and Honours,” The Simpsons Archive, November 5, 2007, http://snpp.com/guides/awards.html. 27. Paul Simpson, On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003), 1. It should be noted that Simpson approaches satire from a largely traditional literary and linguistic perspective. However, he also acknowledges that satire is “a culturally situated discursive practice” inextri- cably bound up with social context and “frameworks of knowledge.” His ideas thus remain quite flexible and applicable to predominately visual mass media texts such as The Simpsons. For more on this definition, see Simpson’s chapter 1, 1–14. 28. David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 13. 29. The Flintstones was the first prime-time cartoon made for television and previously the longest-running animated series in prime-time history. The Jetsons, modeled upon The Flintstones and designed to capitalize upon its success, failed as a prime- time show and ran only one year, from 1962 to 1963—it only later became popu- lar as a Saturday-morning children’s show. Brooks and Marsh, Complete Directory, 417–18 and 607. It should be noted that The Simpsons also owes a great debt to the animated films that preceded it, such as those produced by Disney, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera. The Simpsons’ “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoon, for example, is unthinkable without the precedent of Hanna-Barbera’s “Tom and Jerry.” 30. An examination of The Simpsons’ many predecessors and followers is far beyond the scope of this project. For a fine overview of the history touched on here, see Wendy Hilton- Morrow and David T. McMahan, “The Flintstones to Futurama: Networks and Prime Time Animation,” in Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 74–88. 31. Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, eds., Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 25. 32. Harry Stein, “Our Times,” TV Guide, May 23–29, 1992, 31. 33. Jessamyn Neuhaus, “Marge Simpson, Blue-Haired Housewife: Defining Domesticity on The Simpsons,” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010): 761. 34. My understanding of this tradition is informed by many sources but primarily by George Test’s Satire: Spirit and Art (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991), Dustin Griffin’s Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), Steven C.