MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)
By:
February 27, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE SIMPSONS | 1987–1989 / 1989–present
I never watched The Tracey Ullman Show on a regular basis, but when I did my favorite part was always the animated short featuring a dysfunctional family called The Simpsons. A 1987 episode titled “The Funeral” still sticks with me. In it, Bart can’t wait to see a dead body, then keels over at the sight of the deceased. Further bad behavior ensues graveside, and the car ride home devolves into a shouting match between angry parents and children outraged at being told they will never be allowed to attend a funeral again. It was shocking, funny, and familiar (I grew up with open caskets and lots of yelling). I loved it.
Thus I was stoked when I heard that the shorts would become a series in their own right, and thrilled when the new show didn’t disappoint. The Simpsons was subversive, filled with in-jokes, yet possessed of a core sweetness that was never cloying. A newly purchased videocassette recorder meant that for a time in the early ’90s, I never missed an episode if I could help it. Discussing plot lines (Marge’s almost-affair with Jacques the bowling instructor!), or the latest Troy McClure instructional film (The Decapitation of Larry Leadfoot and Lead Paint: Delicious But Deadly, to name but two) and repeating choice bits of dialogue (“I choo-choo-choose you!”) was an easy way to make conversation, whether I was at work or in a nightclub.
Bart’s anarchic spirit and disrespect for adult authority even caused a mini-moral panic in 1990, when a tee shirt with his picture and the legend “Underachiever and Proud of It” was banned in a handful of schools in California and Ohio. Bootleg tees made this seem quaint — around the same time, I remember seeing street vendors hawking shirts featuring Bart wearing an earring and a “Silence = Death” ACT UP tee. At one of the antiwar protests at the time of the first Gulf War, I couldn’t resist buying a button featuring an angry Bart and the words, “Hell No, We Won’t Go.”
Thirty years later, the show mostly holds up. Jokes about “sex change” operations that weren’t particularly funny then are less so now, and questions about the “brownvoicing” of the Kwik-E-Mart’s Apu Nahasapeemapetilon led to the character bring written off the show in 2020. I’d stopped watching over a decade before that, but even back in the day there were moments that left me scratching my head. A 1993 episode featured a TV ad for Duff beer in which deliverymen spray women protesting sexist advertising with beer, transforming them into hot-bodied bikini babes. I couldn’t tell if the show was making fun of sexist ads or feminists. Either way, I wasn’t laughing.
MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Michael Grasso on MAX HEADROOM | Heather Quinlan on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 | Mark Kingwell on CHINA BEACH | Judith Zissman on SANTA BARBARA | Adelina Vaca on TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES | Deborah Wassertzug on MOONLIGHTING | Josh Glenn on VOLTRON | Adam McGovern on A VERY BRITISH COUP | Alex Brook Lynn on STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION | Nikhil Singh on CHOCKY | Sara Ryan on REMINGTON STEELE | Vanessa Berry on THE YOUNG ONES | Dan Reines on GET A LIFE | Susannah Breslin on PEE-WEE’S PLAYHOUSE | Marc Weidenbaum on LIQUID TELEVISION | Elina Shatkin on PERFECT STRANGERS | Lynn Peril on THE SIMPSONS | David Smay on THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF MOLLY DODD | Annie Nocenti on THE SINGING DETECTIVE | Tom Nealon on MIAMI VICE | Anthony Miller on ST. ELSEWHERE | Gordon Dahlquist on BLACKADDER | Peggy Nelson on SEINFELD | Nicholas Rombes on TWIN PEAKS | Ramona Lyons on ÆON FLUX
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!