10 Genius In-Jokes In The Simpsons

It's a classic at this point, but absolutely can't be ignored when discussing The Simpson's all-time greatest in-jokes.

Season seven's "Lisa the Iconoclast" opens with Lisa's class watching a film about Springfield's founding father Jebediah Springfield, who utters the town's iconic motto, "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man."

At this point we cut to Mrs. Krabappel and Miss Hoover, with the former asking, "Embiggens? I'd never heard that word before moving to Springfield," to which Hoover replies, "I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulent word."

Later in the episode Principal Skinner also says of Homer's town crier audition, "He's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance."

The joke here of course is that while embiggen was a word invented by the show's writers room, so too was cromulent, despite it seemingly being used as an adjective.

And yet cromulent sounds plausible enough that the majority of viewers likely accepted it as a word they simply didn't know the meaning of, rather than a word whose meaning is only implied by its context.

It's a brilliant example of a snake-eating-its-own-tail joke that also ingeniously toys around with how we use and understand language.