The Exact Moment The Simpsons Lost Us

How To Write Comedy

A lot of pop culture analysts have attempted to pinpoint the moment when The Simpsons began its long fall from grace, and many of the culprits will be familiar to fans of the show.

The Principal and the Pauper is infamous for disregarding series continuity in favour of a cheap laugh and a sensationalist plot, but the show never cared for internal consistency all that much. Saddlesore Galactica is highlighted as an example of the show no longer trying to hide its recycled plots, but Bart’s bizarre adventure with a secret society of race-fixing jockeys is actually nothing like Lisa’s moving coming-of-age story when she briefly owned a pony.

The commonly cited culprit Homer Vs Dignity comes closer to the cause, though not for the reasons some commentators claim.

The thing is, the downfall of The Simpsons isn’t rooted in its approach to comedy writing.

Yes, there were a few lightning-in-a-bottle years where every episode was filled with killer gags, but the show’s style nowadays isn’t far from that tone of comedy. The scattershot humour of the series combines everything from highbrow satire, to parody, to sight gags, to gross-out jokes, to slapstick, to typical sitcom character comedy, shifting modes multiple times in a single scene.

This anarchic approach and frenetic pace has stayed in place since it began in the show’s third season standout Homer at the Bat.

The Simpsons lost us not because of any comedic misstep, though there were many, as outlined in the individual episode examples listed above. Instead, the moment that The Simpsons lost us was when it went from being a countercultural phenomenon that mocked those in power, to being another platform devoted to cheerleading them.

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