10 Genius In-Jokes In The Simpsons
1. "Brevity... Is Wit"
Some of the best jokes have layers of understanding to them that allow people to interpret them on different levels, and that's absolutely true of this killer gag in season three's "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington."
The episode includes the Reader's Digest parody magazine "Reading Digest," which holds a children's essay writing contest that Lisa enters.
The welcome sign includes a quotation, "Brevity is... wit," which is a clear contraction of Polonius' iconic quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit."
On the surface this seems to be a cleverly meta joke about abbreviation, though if you were alive in the 1980s and 1990s, you might remember Reader's Digest as the extremely popular magazine known for republishing articles from other magazines but in often highly condensed form.
This led to the publication being criticised for often stripping important context out of these articles, and so the Simpsons banner is first and foremost a reference to that. Quite literally "the soul" of the Shakespeare quote has been omitted.
Jokes don't get much cleverer or more multi-faceted than that. Bravo.