The Humanity of The Simpsons--and the Inhumanity of the '90s

A few years ago The Simpsons creator Matt Groening gave an interview to Smithsonian Magazine. The piece had many interesting tidbits--not least how Homer got his name (and what relation the name "Homer Simpson" had to Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, something I had wondered about for decades).

One of the more interesting was Groening's remark about the increasingly "mean and sour" tone of "sitcom banter" from the '70s on, which got to the point "that half the time someone would say something in a sitcom, and it seemed like the spouse’s response should be, 'I want a divorce.'"

I don't disagree about that, but I do think it surprised me hearing it from Groening. After all, at the time of its debut The Simpsons was a new arrival on the upstart FOX Network, the home of shows like Married . . . With Children, and if perhaps not quite to the same degree, edgy enough by the prime-time sitcom standards of the day to outrage the culture warriors (the more in as, much more than is admitted, people thought then and still think now of cartoons as something for children only).

Still, it is a reminder that for all of Homer's antics--which in the course of a single season of the show saw him do things that would probably get a person divorced in real life--Homer was in the end a loving husband and father, with the comedy often coming out of that.

It is also a reminder that the show (which originated as a The Tracey Ullman Show sketch in 1987, even if it only aired its Christmas special in the second half of December 1989 and its first "proper" episodes in 1990, and had its glory days in the subsequent years) was ultimately more of the '80s--the era of The Cosby Show and Growing Pains and the rest--than of the '90s--that era of the "extreme!" in which amid a sense of national nervous breakdown the "cool" thing to do was supposed to be to ride that breakdown like a surfer does a giant wave, for the sheer "extreme!" thrill of it.

By contrast South Park was much more reflective of that decade's nihilistic outlook--and the fact that the show is not just still on the air, but still treated as culturally significant, is a reminder that the "national nervous breakdown" just went on getting worse and worse.