Whether you’re studying gender and sitcom for OCR, researching your Med5 Independent Study or your WJEC ME4 essay, The Simpsons will tell you everything you need to know. Rob McInnes shows you how to unpick the magic and mechanics of the world’s favourite TV family.
One of the challenges to Media Studies students is to find your way through a warren of indigestible ‘theory’ while being required to produce coherent exam responses. For the Textual Analysis Paper of OCR’s AS Media exam, you will need to demonstrate an understanding of the mechanics of media texts. For example:
– You will have to study two complete episodes of two situation comedies.
– In the exam you do not have to discuss the history of situation comedy, or generalise about the nature of the genre.
– The exam question will ask you to focus only on the ways in which each programme constructs its representations of males and females, although it may ask you to relate this to other elements of the sitcom, such as ideas about comedy or narrative.
A long time ago, on a TV set far away…
Forget M*A*S*H, Frasier and Friends, it is The Simpsons that is well on the way to becoming the longest running sitcom ever. It is already the longest running prime-time animation television series – although it wasn’t the first. That achievement belongs to another half-hour ‘family’ comedy first produced by independent studio, Hanna-Barbera, over forty years ago: The Flintstones, the first animated sitcom to be broadcast in prime-time (between 6.00 and 10pm), the most competitive period of American network scheduling. Back in 1960, the year it was first broadcast, The Flintstones had been seen as a risky venture, having been rejected by every network and many advertising sponsors before eventually finding a home on ABC – one of the USA’s three main television networks. The success of the show for adult audiences is probably down to its use of the already well-established format of the sitcom.
Take a successful formula…
By the end of the 1950s sitcoms such as I Love Lucy in the USA and Life with The Lyons in the UK had helped establish a successful formula based on familiar characters in predictable settings, recorded in confined studio sets, with a small audience providing immediate responses to the gags. The characters of Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Barney and Betty Rubble were based on The Honeymooners, two neighbouring couples featuring in long sketches on The Jackie Gleason Show. A year or so later, Hanna and Barbera used the same technique with Top Cat, modelled on Sgt. Bilko and other characters in The Phil Silvers Show. The ‘limited animation’ technique permitted many more minutes of animation to be produced than before and was essentially what made the Hanna-Barbera shows financially viable for television. By animating as few frames as possible, and by utilising stock expressions, a growing library of familiar sound effects, repetitive musical cues and by imitating conventional studio camera angles (together with the artificial laugh track that came to be known as ‘canned laughter’), television animation could bring something new to the sitcom genre.
Massive marketing to multiple audiences
Years after Hanna-Barbera had proved that prime-time animation could rework the sitcom format as a cartoon, few people could have anticipated the impact, influence and resonance of the series that grew from the crudely-realised quickie sequences created by Matt Groening as ‘bumpers’ (between the ad breaks and the sketches) for The Tracy Ullman Show. The Simpsons was one of the first big successes for the new American Fox network, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; and the company immediately picked up on the show’s appeal and marketed it aggressively. Similarly in Britain, the programme spearheaded the launch of the new Sky One satellite channel (also a part of the Murdoch media empire) where for some time it was the only place to see it; this helped lend it early cult status. However, both Fox and the show’s writers carefully cultivated a range of target audiences, from the youngest children who were attracted to the bright colour palette, slapstick visuals and prominence of Bart (an anagram of ‘brat’) to the sophisticated media-literate college students who were provided with an apparently endless stream of in-jokes and layered pop culture references to movies, comics and old TV series.
Add everybody’s favourite family guy
The breadth of the show’s appeal has led to some interesting critics and surprising champions. Famously, George Bush Snr. publicly expressed his desire for American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. Conversely, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Wales has more recently described the programme as:
one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda around in the cause of sense, humility and virtue.
Like Williams, psychologists and sociologists across the western world have been drawn to the family’s almost mythological ordinariness, frequently focusing on the character of Homer himself. Over the years, the programme’s storylines have featured Homer increasingly heavily, perhaps because he so readily embodies the concept of the ‘everyman’, an ordinary blue-collar (working-class) character whose motives for any action are always self-serving and built upon a sound basis of laziness and stupidity. In an early episode in which he thinks he is dying from poisoned fish, Homer shares the totality of his wisdom with his son:
Bart, I want to share something with you – the three little sentences that will get you through life. Number One, ‘Cover for me’. Number Two, ‘Oh Good idea boss.’ Number Three, ‘It was like that when I got here.’
Yet despite his less-than-conscientious attitude to life and work, Homer also manages to appear a loyal and loving husband and father, whose lack of self-awareness prevents him from ever seeming really dislikeable.
A recipe for trash – or insightful social satire?
The Simpsons might be said to be guided by a ‘trash aesthetic’ that mocks both ‘high art’ and celebrates and revels in popular culture. The caricatured nature of the inhabitants of Springfield provide the programme’s writers with a constant flow of opportunities for satire and parody. Subsidiary characters often provide either joke-driven cameos or the motor for an entire story. Reverend Lovejoy and Ned Flanders together are used to lampoon attitudes to religion, in ways that other USA television series rarely attempt. Comic Book Guy and Professor Frink demonstrate the show’s preoccupation both with obscure movie parody and the obsessive nature of movie, TV and comic fans. But however delightful these incidental pleasures may be, the show’s major satirical concerns are reserved for its primary characters.
The eighth season episode ‘Homer’s Phobia’ is an interesting example of mainstream television’s potential to explore controversial subject matter. The episode has been amongst the most controversial of the show’s run to date (see side-bar on page 24).
Case study: ‘Homer’s phobia’
The family befriend John, the owner of ‘Cockamamie’ a store in the Springfield Mall full of camp and nostalgic merchandise. John is voiced by film director John Waters, famous for both low-budget ‘trash’ movies and mainstream features such as Hairspray. Blissfully ignorant of John’s sexuality (‘Doesn’t he seem a little … um, festive to you?’ Marge quizzes Homer early on), Homer enjoys his company without realising that John is attracted to the family’s ‘camp’ virtues; their kitchen décor, their record collection, etc. Homer’s usual simpleton persona is morphed into bigot for the purposes of the episode’s satirical tone. On learning from Marge that John’s ‘family won’t be coming over’ he retreats into an absurd caricature of homophobic extremism and refuses to join Bart, Lisa and Marge on their trips out to visit the dark, sordid underbelly of Springfield’s society. However, worse is to come – Homer imagines that Bart is displaying signs of gayness and in keeping with many bigoted perceptions of homosexuality as a pathological problem or disease, becomes totally pre-occupied with ‘curing’ him.
Homer then attempts to ensure Bart does not ‘turn’ by sitting him in front of an roadside billboard depicting scantily clad women advertising Laramie cigarettes for two hours; he then takes him to a steel mill, only to discover that the entire workforce are gay and spend their rest breaks platform dancing (‘We work hard – we play hard!’). Drowning his sorrows at Moe’s, Homer is reassured by Moe and Barney that today’s society has a ‘swishifying effect’ on the young and that the only way to ‘cure’ him of queer tendencies is to take him hunting (‘Shooting a deer will make him a man.’). In locating this scene in the bar, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ takes the series’ traditional settings (the Simpsons’ kitchen and the bar) and reminds us how conventionally they represent male and female environments. The audience has to confront and question its own assumptions about gendered behaviour, and indeed about representation itself. Homer’s hunting trip almost ends in disaster as, failing to find a deer in the wild, Bart is taken to a reindeer enclosure and expected to shoot a captive animal. When the animals stampede, they all end up having to be rescued by John with the aid of a miniature robot Father Christmas – ‘the reindeer’s cruel master’. John adds:
Well, Homer, I won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life. Now if every gay man could just do the same, you’d be set.
The episode hints at the difficulties of confronting deep-rooted prejudices, but offers the hope that exposing those prejudices may eventually break them down. In America, homophobia still remains an ‘acceptable’ prejudice among many sectors of society, not least fundamentalist religious groups. This contrasts interestingly with racism which, after decades of civil rights lobbying and consciousness-raising, is now unacceptable and condemned. Try comparing homophobic and racist issues in your own school or college environment. How much more common is homophobic bullying than its racist counterpart? Gay issues have recently taken centre stage in the States with a legal battle raging in California where San Francisco judges granted marriage licences to gay and lesbian couples. Earlier this year, President George Bush stepped in, threatening a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages.
And satire is …?
‘Homer’s Phobia’ raises the issue of homophobia in a satirical way; that is, it holds a mirror up to human behaviour in order to illustrate our weakness and contradictions. The best satire can sometimes be so subtle it’s barely noticeable. For example, in 1729, in his short publication A Modest Proposal author Jonathan Swift argued that eating children would solve most of the problems of poverty in Ireland. He subtitled the piece:
A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public.
A self-contained essay, it contains few hints that the idea might not be serious, or that his ‘proposal’ was asking its readers to question the notion that logic and reason should entirely govern human behaviour. Reading it now, you might be forgiven for thinking it a product of some deranged eighteenth-century proto-fascist; its internal logic is so well-structured and its arguments made to sound so reasonable.
Swift demonstrated that for satire to be effective it has to risk both offending and outraging people and being misunderstood. Above all it has to encourage the reader/viewer/audience to think for themselves, rather than accept its apparent, superficial principles.
However, satire on television is trickier, due to the weight of audience numbers, the large sums of money involved and the vested interests and political agendas of media owners. Mike Scully, executive producer of The Simpsons for many years, notes how the programme makes regular jokes at the expense of the Fox network that produces and distributes the show:
We have a tendency to bite the hand that feeds us. But they understand that it’s part of the fun of the show.
Scully says The Simpsons is unique for an American network programme in that it is rarely interfered with:
… on most shows you have to accept the input of the network and the studio, their notes on the things they want to be changed. Normally there would be around 12 people going over your script, telling you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, and we don’t have that. We’re completely autonomous.
However, the ‘Homer’s Phobia’ episode had:
probably the most censor notes of any show we’ve had – two solid pages of single spaced notes. But most of the edge of the show was still there.
Is satire dangerous? Till Death Us Do Part
A satire invariably requires key characters to behave in necessarily negative ways. This often provokes conflicting audience reactions, particularly towards a popular character. This problem is exaggerated when a character is perceived as a role model. Debates about how far The Simpsons provide negative role models will draw upon viewers’ responses to the programme’s representations and values. They certainly echo earlier debates around programmes such as Till Death Us Do Part which featured an irascible bigot, Alf Garnett who, in 1960s’ Britain, prompted serious controversy about his depiction of bigotry and intolerance on-screen. In that programme his character was frequently shown to be the ‘loser’ in most arguments and his views were counter-balanced by the remainder of the regular characters, particularly his daughter and her fiancé. The problem was that Garnett (played by Warren Mitchell, who periodically revives the character) simply had all the funniest lines. The humour could therefore easily be seen as celebrating the very thing that it condemned. The BBC and writer Johnny Speight defended the programme but when a more conservative Director General arrived at the BBC, the series was taken off-air for some years.
As with Till Death Us Do Part, ‘Homer’s Phobia’ deliberately accentuates its central character’s ignorance and prejudice at the risk of alienating some of its Homer fans and of confirming the prejudices already held by some viewers. Certainly, websites such as ‘The Simpsons Archive’ reveal some dramatically differing readings of the episode. Some posts praise the episode for the very reasons others condemn it.
‘Homer’s Phobia’ demonstrates both how effective television comedy can be at revealing social attitudes towards gender and sexuality and how intricate are the processes of constructing representations in a medium that is too often considered throwaway and superficial. Time for homework, anyone?
Rob McInnes if Head of Media Studies at Forest Hill School, South London.
This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 10, December 2004
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