12 Greatest One-Off Simpsons Characters
11. Lucius Sweet
The Don King spoof admittedly makes a couple of background cameos outside his main appearance, but the character was only ever really used meaningfully in “The Homer They Fall”, in which Homer becomes a boxer, fighting against a Mike Tyson parody under Sweet’s stewardship.
In a neat meta gag, Homer describes Sweet as being exactly as rich and famous as Don King, and looking just like him too. Sweet was formerly Moe’s manager during the bartender’s abortive boxing career, and he serves to fill in much of the character’s ever evolving backstory.
Sweet is a particularly colourful character - culture clashes are a frequent source of comedy on The Simpsons, and it’s good fun to see the sleazy and small time worlds of Moe and Homer come up against this epitome of glitz and glamour.
Even eight seasons in, the writers were still building Springfield up, adding new areas and cultures we had not yet been exposed to, and Lucius Sweet is a perfect example of that. While he seems like little more than a playful spoof, he actually adds a lot to the mythology of one of fiction’s greatest creations, Springfield.