For a show which was the leading light of Western popular culture for a good six or seven years, The Simpsons' writing staff and show-running team are, surprisingly, just a bunch of colossal nerds. Show-runner, writer and producer Mike Reiss only narrowly decided to study English over Mathematics at Harvard, and his pal and fellow show-runner Al Jean was accepted to study maths at the same school when he was just sixteen years old. Meanwhile, writer David S. Cohen and his high school friends invented a whole coding language for the Apple II Plus. It makes sense, then, that there are loads of scientific, mathematical, and philosophical jokes packed into every nook and cranny of every episode. The Simpsons is the show that The Big Bang Theory desperately wishes it could be, if only it knew how. Also, you know that old saying about how analysing comedy is like dissecting a frog; that nobody laughs, and the frog dies? Well, the aim of this list is to dissect the frog, make it die, but then resuscitate it with some nerd-voodoo and parade its reanimated corpse about a bit. You'll laugh, but in a much more thoughtful way than you did before. You might well stroke your chin a little bit.
