By JJ Bowman
News Editor
I’d speak much more during Great Books classes if I followed the philosophies of Aristotle, Thoreau and Kierkegaard.
But I’m afraid to say the philosophy that has influenced me the most during my life comes from characters with yellow skin, huge overbites and four fingers on each hand. I am a student of Simpsonian ethics.
Like many children in the early 1990s, my mother prohibited me from watching that awful show with the bratty son and the imbecilic ape of a father. But when I watched an episode with the immortal words, “Mr. Hutz, do you realize you’re not wearing any pants?” I was hooked.
Sunday “The Simpsons” celebrated its 300th episode (while airing its 302nd), sparking a barrage of commentary from several different sources including the Los Angeles Times, Slate magazine and an Inside the Actors Studio extravaganza with the six most prominent voices to Springfield’s busiest family. As someone who owes his worldview to the second longest-running television show, I also feel obliged to make a contribution to the cacophony of commentary.
Opinions of “The Simpsons” range from it being the greatest television phenomenon of all time, to it falling somewhere shy of “Seinfeld” among the decade’s best sitcoms, or to it being nothing more than a silly cartoon.
Of course by definition “The Simpsons” is a cartoon, but to limit its scope to only Bugs Bunny’s range is like saying John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is just a fantastic tale of how a man was tricked by a devil then punished by God — there is simply a lot more to it than that.
In the debate over what television show takes the “Best of the 90s” award, “Seinfeld” advocates also fall short. True, Seinfeld has brought many phrases into the common vernacular — “HELL-OHHHH,” “No soup for you!” and “Yaddi, yaddi, yadda” come to mind — but in the end it offered what it advertised, a show about nothing. While that might be a fitting way to describe the decade of the dot-com boom and bust, “Seinfeld” (nor other must-see TV) can’t match “The Simpsons.”
But does “The Simpsons” transcend television, as some argue, and venture toward something more meaningful and universal? When the Great Books of the Western World selected its canon, author Dr. Mortimer J. Adler said three criteria were used: “contemporary significance,” “infinite readability” and “relevance to the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last twenty-five centuries.”
“The Simpsons” certainly meet the first criterion — some episodes are so well crafted they can be watched and studied many times over — but suggesting that it offers worthy insights to the “great conversation” of the world’s most-read philosophers does an injustice to the works that actually meet the third criterion.
Nevertheless, the Simpsons offers a distinct philosophy, even if much of it over the past few years has been muddled in inane storylines and cheap gags.
Clearly, according to “The Simpsons,” family comes first, before God and religion. Although the Simpsons are one of the very few television families that actually go to church and pray, their primary source of meaning is found in the family. A case-in-point example is when Homer pushes Bart down to avoid the boy from getting baptized by town religious guru, Ned Flanders. Homer halted the baptism not as an affront to God, but as a way to ensure that the family would remain together.
With space for another 20,000 words I could fully expand on this philosophy. Then I wouldn’t have to say what the Comic Book Guy said just before a French missile ended his life in a Halloween special, “Ooh, I’ve wasted my life.”
—What’s your favorite Simpsons episode?E-mail JJ Bowman at jjbowman@pepperdine.edu.
February 20, 2003