Professor: So what does this cartoon mean?

Tina (a student): It shows how the depletion of our natural resources has pitted our small farmers against each other.

Professor: Yes, and birds go “tweet.” What else?

The Simpsons is mocking teachers like us!

            It’s not the first time, actually. We both attended and taught at Florida State University. Shortly thereafter, in the episode “Smart and Smarter,” a character played by Simon Cowell said of Maggie, “Your baby is brilliant. Why, she could already teach at Florida State.” As Maggie is an undiscovered genius, we don’t mind. We wouldn’t anyway. It’s high praise even to be noticed by the show that called Princeton a clown college.

            Karma shows the clip of “Passive Analysis of Visual Iconography” on the first day of her Simpsons class, as a way to address the elephant in the room: What are we doing here? by letting the show itself pose the question.

There are many people out there using The Simpsons in their classrooms. The classes are more varied than one might think—American Studies, Women’s Studies, Literature, Composition, Science, Psychology, Sociology, Religion, Political Science, and even Math.

There are many reasons for this.

1. As of 2007, there were no 18-year-old students entering college who had grown up without The Simpsons as a part of the world around them.
2. The Simpsons permeates our culture. It is referenced in and has influenced many other media. South Park, exhibiting what Harold Bloom might call the anxiety of influence, even had an episode about how difficult it is to obtain originality when confronted with The Simpsons oeuvre: “Simpsons Already Did It.” The Simpsons have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The former Prime Minister of England and every Beatle except John Lennon have guest starred on the show. Pollsters consistently report that people can name the characters in The Simpsons more easily than they can remember aspects of politics and history. “D’oh” is now in The Oxford English Dictionary. In 1992, President George H.W. Bush used The Simpsons as a benchmark with which to measure family functionality (though the reference was meant as an insult).
3. Thus, those who ignore The Simpsons are in danger of being culturally illiterate. What used to be oral stories and popular entertainment (Greek myths and Shakespeare’s plays, respectively) became necessary reading for those who wanted to understand allusions and revisions in later art and literature. The Simpsons is a necessity for those who wish to stay on the pulse of contemporary culture. (The fact that you need to understand Greek myths and Shakespeare to understand some of The Simpsons should not be overlooked.)
4. One mark of superior cultural literacy is to be able to comprehend and appreciate a culture’s sense of humor. Unfortunately, humor is a devalued aspect of culture. As Helle Klem Thomsen and Jacob David Eichler, editors of a Copenhagen Business School anthology of American Humor explain, it is as “if a text must be serious in order to be relevant and meaningful” (7). Their anthology was created, however, to further international understanding: “One touchstone of really understanding a foreign culture and language is therefore, can you appreciate their humor?” (9).

The Simpsons is our text of choice because it captures our zeitgeist. What other show so perfectly captures America while satirizing it at every turn? As Duane Dudek of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel maintains, “If television stirs primal memories of ancient communal campfires, then The Simpsons are [sic] the cave paintings for our times.” We are social anthropologists, exploring the cave paintings to understand what they reveal about our culture.

If you’re reading this book with an eye to using The Simpsons in your classroom, we don’t need to convince you that this is more than just a show, more than just a cartoon. We’ll list articles and books in Chapter 2 that do make this argument, however, in case you need them in your arsenal. However, if you are reading this book simply because you’re a Simpsons fanatic, we do not mean to alienate you by constantly talking to you like you’re a teacher. Thank you for reading the book!

While there are many secondary texts that deal with The Simpsons, and while some of them do focus on education, there is as yet no pedagogy text. With this book, we aim to help you integrate The Simpsons into your lessons smoothly. We will also give you ideas on how to teach a full Simpsons course, sharing the exercises and prompts we use. We will also update our webpage as new episodes appear, as new sources appear, and as new resources are found.

One of the best examples of this is seen by posing the following question at the beginning of an integration of The Simpsons—“Were any of you NOT allowed to watch this show?” Students launch into a discussion of parental techniques, censorship, and media. This show often inspires even the shyest of students into talking.

There are disadvantages to using The Simpsons, however. Some students may have been sheltered from The Simpsons or may have been raised in one of the countries where it wasn’t as invasive as in our own. However, we have never known a medium so useful in facilitating cultural literacy for these types of students.

Some students, when they hear The Simpsons is on a syllabus, assume they will be in for an easy class and an easy A. Occasionally, students choose a timeslot, and not necessarily a class, and may not take the subject matter seriously. These students will be insolent when asked to start paying active attention to the show and the class. We advise attempting to weed these students out early. If they manage to stay in the class, they might need to be reminded that Shakespeare was once “popular culture,” too. (These students might also been seen as your great challenge of the term—if you can get them thinking critically, you will have scored a point for the side of light.)

We must also sometimes defend ourselves against parents, students, and colleagues who keep saying the word “cartoon” as if it’s the ketchup you’ve just offered them for their filet mignon. Most of these people haven’t watched the show. They often quiet down once you tell them that the vast majority of the show’s writers are from the Ivy League; some require a reason to be impressed before they can accept something as college material. These sorts of people have existed throughout history, declaring themselves critics—whenever anything is popular or belongs to a relatively new genre, they cry foul.

One of the reasons why watching and teaching The Simpsons is rewarding is because it’s a text that invites critical thinking. Theorists have been classifying texts along the critical thinking spectrum for a long time. Roland Barthes divides texts into readerly and writerly. Readerly texts are not challenging for the reader, while writerly texts disturb expectations and call attention to the act of reading or viewing. These texts reward those who return to the text after the first read. Stanley Fish discusses texts in much the same way, but he uses the terms rhetorical and dialectical. The dialectical (writerly) text “is didactic in a special sense; it does not preach the truth, but asks its readers to discover the truth for themselves, and this discovery is often made at the expense not only of a reader’s opinions and values, but of his self-esteem” (qtd. in Freund 98)².

Both reader-response and reception theorists would agree with Margaret Atwood that every reader is different, as every reader comes to a text with a distinct history—including a unique reading and viewing history. Each experience changes a person further: “Reading is also a process and it also changes you. You aren’t the same person after you’ve read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way” (Atwood, Second Words 345).

               Jamey Heit reminds us that, “[a]s a postmodern show, The Simpsons relies in part on its viewers to generate meaning” (12) While some believe that the show has radical ideas (others claim that it’s evenhanded), whatever meaning taken from the show comes from an interplay of many factors, including an audience trained in a certain level of cultural and tele-literacy: “[m]eaning must grow out of The Simpsons interacting with, not dictating to, its audience” (13).

Of course, to get the most out of an experience, it is necessary to participate actively rather than passively. Unlike the professor in The Simpsons, we discourage “passive viewing of visual iconography.” Passive viewing may be what some students expect in the beginning, but active viewing is what must be nurtured and demanded. The active viewer asks questions and makes connections. A writerly text of this stature deserves nothing less.

He’s Bart Simpson; Who the Hell Are We?

Karma has been watching The Simpsons from the beginning—the very beginning, when there were only animated shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show. Karma has always had a penchant for comedy and saw Ullman as a successor to another of her heroes, Carol Burnett. When she heard that there would be a Simpsons Christmas Special, she and her mom set up the VCR. Karma’s mother, unlike Karma’s grandmother, found the show endearing rather than a promotion of bad behavior. Karma tape-recorded every episode and became one of those annoying people who can find a Simpsons quote for every occasion.

She met Denise in graduate school, as the former was setting up her first Simpsons course. She has taught The Simpsons at Florida State University and now teaches courses on the show at The University of California, Davis.

Denise, too, discovered and loved The Simpsons from the beginning. She taught The Simpsons at Florida State University and currently teaches communications and humanities courses at Milwaukee School of Engineering, working The Simpsons into her course plans frequently. Once, after a week in a cabin on an island in a northern Minnesota lake (without indoor plumbing), her friend asked if she was looking forward to getting home. “Well, I do miss Bart,” was all she said.

What We Won’t Do

While we would love to really show off our geekiness by referencing everything that can possibly be referenced in this show, we simply cannot discuss every Simpsons moment and episode that strikes our fancy. We’re very sorry if we didn’t get to share your favorite joke with you.

We will try not to repeat the mistakes that some books and articles have made in the past. We are Simpsonologists³ and take the name seriously. Thus, we are not passing fans who may have seen a few episodes and have decided that we can write about the life of the show. We are not trying to sell a book about a The Simpsons particular topic after having rather randomly assigned this show as our medium. While we may make mistakes, it will not be because we aren’t familiar with the canon; it will be because people make mistakes. In practical terms, this means that we won’t treat “Treehouse of Horror” (Halloween) episodes as part of the “realistic” canon. We also won’t say silly things like Maggie has never spoken, when in fact Elizabeth Taylor voiced her first word⁴. As the show is still in production, we will potentially fall victim to a temporal problem—that is, we might make a generalization or draw a conclusion that is disputed by shows yet to come.

We will not be devoting time to giving a history of the show or the characters. Most secondary sources do this. Presumably, if you’re reading this, you know who the family members are, what the name of their town is, and other basic information. If you need a good overview of the early history of the show, we recommend Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson. We, unfortunately, will also refrain from constantly inserting Simpsons jokes and quick references. We cannot make the same promise on the website.

We will not attempt to talk about subjects that we don’t know much about. Thus, this book is geared toward the humanities. While we can talk about philosophies of learning and Marxist theory, we can’t be that helpful with physics and economics. The ways in which other authors have discussed how The Simpsons intersects with these ideas is covered in Chapter 2.

Finally, we will not throw a lot of theory at you, nor will we seek to render unintelligible the information related here via jargon, syntax, or pretentious diction—except right there. When theory is mentioned, it will be referenced for those who aren’t familiar with it. We prefer practicality to theory. We also prefer clarity and being readable over ambiguity and being undecipherable.

What We Will Do

The remainder of this chapter will give a timeline of the show, highlighting important moments both within the world of the show and within the wider contextual and pop cultural world. We hope this is useful to people who need to brush up on their Simpsons history or who want to be able to discuss the show within the broader culture. We will conclude this chapter with an episode guide*, geared to allow teachers to find the Simpsons episode that fits the topic they’re interested in.

Chapter 2 is an overview of secondary sources on The Simpsons, including books, Internet resources, and significant articles. Consider this an annotated bibliography.

Chapter 3 discusses the use of The Simpsons in Composition classrooms, reviewing critical thinking and argument terms before launching into activities and paper assignments related to argument, logic, and style, and editing.

Chapter 4 deals with Linguistics. This chapter discusses many of the subfields within linguistics (phonology, morphology, language acquisition, etc.) and gives examples, not just of how The Simpsons has interacted with these subfields, but in the case of morphology, how The Simpsons has actually affected language. The chapter closes with some activities and assignments suitable for students taking introductory linguistics.

Chapter 5 details how The Simpsons intersects with Literature, including Poetry, Fiction, Drama, and Film. While many of the assignments from Chapter 3 would be appropriate in a literature classroom, this chapter ends with a general discussion of literature with targeted paper assignments.

Chapter 6 is concerned with how The Simpsons intersects with cultural literacy, including popular culture, social issues, and cultural issues and shifts. Particular attention is paid to using The Simpsons in humanities classes.

Chapter 7 discusses the show as a piece of art in and of itself. Its genre and methods (postmodern satire, parody, etc.) will be discussed, before moving on to activities and a sample syllabus. Due to the problems of defining postmodernism, parody, and other relevant terms, this chapter is the most theory-laden.