Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture 9789048540334

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Understanding The Simpsons

Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence The book series Transmedia: Participatory Culture and Media Convergence provides a platform for cutting-edge research in the field of media studies, with a strong focus on the impact of digitization, globalization, and fan culture. The series is dedicated to publishing the highest-quality monographs (and exceptional edited collections) on the developing social, cultural, and economic practices surrounding media convergence and audience participation. The term ‘media convergence’ relates to the complex ways in which the production, distribution, and consumption of contemporary media are affected by digitization, while ‘participatory culture’ refers to the changing relationship between media producers and their audiences. Interdisciplinary by its very definition, the series will provide a publishing platform for international scholars doing new and critical research in relevant fields. While the main focus will be on contemporary media culture, the series is also open to research that focuses on the historical forebears of digital convergence culture, including histories of fandom, cross- and transmedia franchises, reception studies and audience ethnographies, and critical approaches to the culture industry and commodity culture. Series editors Dan Hassler-Forest, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Matt Hills, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom Editorial Board – Mark Bould, University of West of England, United Kingdom – Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, United States – Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California, United States – Julia Knight, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom – Simone Murray, Monash University, Australia – Roberta Pearson, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom – John Storey, University of Sunderland, United Kingdom – William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States – Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside, United States – Eckart Voigts, Braunschweig Institute of Technology, Germany

Understanding The Simpsons Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture

Moritz Fink

Amsterdam University Press

Parts of this book are based on passages that previously appeared in The Simpsons: A Cultural History, copyright 2019 by Moritz Fink, published with Rowman & Littlefield, and are reprinted by permission; all rights reserved.

Cover illustration: Springfield (2014) by Tim Doyle; reproduced with permission. Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 831 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 033 4 doi 10.5117/9789462988316 nur 674 © M. Fink / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To D’oh! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. (In memory of Robert S.)



Table of Contents

List of Images

9

Acknowledgments

11

Preface to the AUP Edition

13

Introduction

15

1. Bart Talks Back: The Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture 37 2. Alternative TV: The Genesis of The Simpsons

63

3. More than Just a Cartoon: Meta-Television Culture and the Age of Irony

85

4. High Fives on Prime Time: Representing Popular Culture

109

5. At the Edge of Convergence Culture: Engaging in the Simpsons Cult

131

6. Echoes of Springfield: The Simpsons in Remix Culture

159

Conclusion: The Simpsons, Cultural Feedback Loops, and the Case of Apu

205

Bibliography

213

Index

231

List of Images Fig. 0.1 Fig. 0.2 Fig. 0.3 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8

“Bartman Begins” (2005). Remix poster by Erik Skov. “Fall Out Boy and Bartman Selfie” (2014). Fan art created by D. J. Whitaker. An early 1990s Bartman action figure by Mattel. From the collection of Bart of Darkness. Photo courtesy of Warren Evans. Picture of Simpsons stuff on display in Bart of Darkness’s “shrine” (2019); the superfan also runs an Instagram account, which documents his collection, with over 65,000 followers. Photo courtesy of Warren Evans. The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios, Los Angeles, December 2012. Photo courtesy of Stuart Sevastos. 7-Eleven store disguised as Kwik-E-Mart at 345 W. 42nd St., New York City, July 2007. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Gray. Herbert Krabel’s Simpsons avatar created through Simpsonsizeme.com (2007). Final panels of the three-page New Simpsons comic strip (2009), created by DeviantArt user SemiAverageArtist. “Marge Simpson as Kate Moss; Kate Moss Poses for Playboy’s 60th Anniversary Edition” (2017), from Marge Simpson “Iconic Dresses” series, by aleXsandro Palombo, Humor Chic. Unofficial “Playdude” featuring Marge on the cover (2008), created by Big Wayne. Simpsonized pop culture characters featured in a Springfield Punx wallpaper (2008), created by Dean Fraser. Bartkira, Vol. 6 (2017), pp. 344–45, two-page contribution by Tyler Boss. Springfield Night (2014), from the UnReal Estate series by Tim Doyle. Wes Dance’s “Steamed Hams” (2019) parody book cover. Banksy mural in New Orleans (2008). Photo courtesy of Eugene Kim.

17 18 24

141 142 143 144 165

167 169 172 173 176 178 179

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Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12 Fig. 6.13 Fig. 6.14

Understanding The Simpsons

Clipping from White Supremacy 1/1998, p. 2, featuring Bart Simpson altered into a Nazi superhero. Street artist Barbara’s way of expressing dislike of Nazis (2015). Photo by Barbara. Sticker with Lisa Simpson as Antifa crusader (2004). Image from the collection of Joel Morton. Protesters on the sidelines of an anti-AfD rally in Peiting, Germany, September 4, 2018. Photo by Alexandra Fink. Demonstrators holding the remixed Merkel-Burns poster at an anti-nuclear energy campaign rally in Berlin in 2010. Photo courtesy of Stefan Boness/IPON. Lemuc’s 2009 modified election billboard drawing on the Merkel-Burns meme. Photo by Lemuc.

191 192 193 195 196 197

Acknowledgments This book evolved from a research project submitted to the Department of American Studies at the University of Munich in 2013, an initial print version of which was released in Germany in 2016 with independent publisher Tectum. I am grateful to Amsterdam University Press for the opportunity to update and republish a chunk of that study, and thus make my research accessible to a larger scholarly readership in the wake of The Simpsons’ thirtieth anniversary. In particular, I would like to thank Maryse Elliott, as well as the editors of AUP’s Transmedia series, Dan Hassler-Forest and Matt Hills, who have all shown enthusiasm about the project from the beginning. Dan’s and Matt’s comments at various stages also helped to reorganize and improve the original manuscript and its structure. (Sure enough, I couldn’t resist the temptation to thoroughly rewrite, declutter, and hopefully improve the manuscript as I went ahead). The rewriting process began with a rather difficult time for me personally (before the pandemic created a period of hardship for us all); hence I am thankful for the leniency of my editor upon receiving the unpleasant news that the manuscript would not be ready on the next delivery date. I am glad that Maryse did not seem as frustrated with the postponements as I was myself (though I bet we were both relieved when I finally delivered the goods). Since I took up studying The Simpsons as an undergraduate, several people were involved in what has become a long-term project, helping me to better understand “The Simpsons” as a cultural and media phenomenon. Thanks go out to my doctoral advisor, Christof Decker, as well as to a number of scholars who have shaped my thinking along the way in various situations: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Marilyn DeLaure, Jonathan Gray, Matthew McAllister, Jason Mittell, and Daniel Stein. In particular, I am indebted to Henry Jenkins for sharing his thoughts on the topic in multiple exchanges we have had in the last decade, and for being an invaluable source of inspiration, encouragement, and mentorship. Tausend Dank, Michael Alan Ingber—your linguistic pedantry and “old-school” criteria substantially improved the original manuscript, helping to refine my writing and keep ESL issues to a minimum (hopefully!). Thanks a million as well to Dan Hassler-Forest for the extraordinary editorial guidance during the revision process. Also, I am glad to have among my friends and colleagues such smart thinkers and Simpsons connoisseurs as Bene Feiten, Markus Hünemörder, and Richard Rohrmoser. Extra cheers to the people who have provided photos and artwork, and thus

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made this book much more enjoyable: Barbara, Big Wayne, Stefan Boness, Tyler Boss, Wes Dance, Tim Doyle, Warren Evans, Alex Fink, Dean Fraser, Jonathan Gray, Eugene Kim, Herbert Krabel, Lemuc, Joel Morton, aleXsandro Palombo, SemiAverageArtist, Stuart Sevastos, Erik Skov, and D. J. Whitaker. Special thanks to Tim Doyle for the cover image. Last, but not least, I would like to thank my dear family: Alex, Annie, Bela, and Lizzy the Dog. Hugs, too, for Ingrid and my siblings. (Dad, I wish you could still be with us to join us celebrating birthdays—of books, pets, and kids.)



Preface to the AUP Edition

Publishing an updated edition of Understanding The Simpsons has been on my mind for quite a while, though I never planned it would be realized in tandem, and somewhat supplementary to, the general-audience book The Simpsons: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). The months during which I began revising Understanding The Simpsons were not only marked by the earlier book’s release in connection with The Simpsons’ thirtieth anniversary year of 2019; the Western world also found itself in a time of huge cultural turmoil. U.S. President Donald Trump and other nationalist mountebanks were seizing discursive space, reviving culture wars that had seemed long overcome. “The Media,” “The Academia,” and “The Intelligentsia” were, again, blamed as delusion organs run by smart alecks, liberal fundamentalists, bleeding hearts, and hopeless SJWs (Lisa Simpsons, that is, as Republican Senator Ted Cruz’s infamously grotesque reference to The Simpsons showcased). In late 2019—thirty years after Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie had debuted on their own television show—the Simpsons’ currency, indeed, lay in the characters’ meaning as cultural icons rather than in the show’s ratings. Disney’s acquisition of Fox earlier that year had signaled a will to prolong the already unusually extensive trajectory of America’s longest-running fictional prime-time series; moreover, it would expand Disney’s palette of media content, adding one of the 1990s’ most popular cult TV shows to the company’s streaming service, Disney+. At the same time, the program’s producers tried hard to revitalize The Simpsons’ political meaning. With a number of satirical swipes and direct commentary against Trump, they were using the famous franchise as a forum for articulating dissent—in an era where reality appeared to have superseded all (satirical) fiction. Expressed in the form of television comedy, the stunts certainly resonated with a larger cultural sentiment. While popular media has always informed the civic discourse in modern societies, The Simpsons’ gestures toward demonstrating political oppositionality might have contributed less to the public debate than to the amusement of the liberal community. But it seemed imperative in a time when vulgar, misogynous, and racist sentiments were no longer rhetorical excesses at the fringes but articulated by self-declared “democrats” who had become the figureheads of political powerhouses. This felt all the more true as we heard about the discontinuation of what used to be a constant of liberal humor for generations (MAD magazine); right-wing populism entering the

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pop culture market (e.g., Alt-Hero comics); and “conservative intellectuals” (read: smart-ass right-wingers) and Fox News pundits naively slamming a media studies professor for publishing a critical reading of Disney’s Lion King in the Washington Post, according to which the film promoted a fascist ideology (Dan Hassler-Forest). As I finalize this preface at the onset of 2021, it is hard to estimate the political and cultural effects that will emerge from the post-Trump era, not to speak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump’s presidency and the Disney–Fox merger brought The Simpsons back into the spotlight. And yet, to say that the show lost much of its originality, cultural vigor, and edge long ago continues to be more popular than to claim that The Lion King represents fascism. Nostalgia for the 1990s Golden Age of The Simpsons also means reminiscing about lighthearted laughter, liberal comedy on network TV, and a seemingly progressive zeitgeist. Nevertheless, while Homer and Co. appear to be television mavericks on the verge of retirement, this is clearly a time where every single progressive voice is needed, even the feeblest, faded-yellow Simpsons—as cultural agencies, shared media icons, and semiotic resources.

Introduction Abstract This introductory chapter links the Simpsons phenomenon to the emergence of convergence culture, which refers to the blurring of media production and media consumption in the digital age. Various cultural agencies, I argue, have both shaped and expanded the popular narrative associated with The Simpsons. In contrast to most other pop culture texts, The Simpsons’ iconic characters and storyworld are mainly parodic commentaries that reflect sensibilities rooted in popular culture, informing what I call the series’ “popular semiosis.” Furthermore, the chapter discusses the cult series in relation to the label “fan” as well as in relation to media scholarship that adopts the dual role of critical inquiry and pop culture fandom. Keywords: The Simpsons, convergence culture, popular semiosis, cultural studies, media fandom, aca-fandom

Thirty-plus years after its prime-time premiere on December 17, 1989, the American animated sitcom The Simpsons represents a pop-cultural institution: on the one hand, a globally recognized icon of American popular culture, on the other, a media text whose major subject is popular culture itself. Today, most people in the Western world will know of The Simpsons. Many adult TV viewers, including myself, consider the series and its characters a part of their media socialization—a part of their media culture. Looking back to the show’s phenomenal success in the 1990s and 2000s, the Simpsons brand appears quite dated; for younger generations, the media franchise holds far from the same attraction that it originally did for Gen Xers and millennials. But why, then, is The Simpsons still in production and being broadcast all over the world? And how have the Simpsons characters preserved their recognizability and meaning as popular cartoon icons?

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_intro

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This book traces the cultural phenomenon of The Simpsons. This refers not only to the eponymous television show itself but to the associated media franchise at large, as well as to various forms through which we encounter The Simpsons beyond The Simpsons.1 To approach this nexus, my study will reflect how media production has undergone tremendous changes over the past three decades: the television industries have shifted from broadcasting to narrowcasting; storytelling strategies have moved away from illusionist approaches toward self-referential and self-deprecating forms of representation; and traditional models of mass-communication have been reshaped by media convergence in the digital age. As I will show, The Simpsons’ remarkable trajectory has followed these momentous transformations. Tracing the rise of the yellow-skinned cartoon characters as they became media icons helps us better understand these larger cultural shifts. Consider the figure of Bartman, Bart Simpson’s Batman-style superhero alter ego. Initially a piece of merchandise—for example, printed on Tshirts in connection with a variety of Bart Simpson motifs to promote The Simpsons during its formative years in the early 1990s—Bartman made it into The Simpsons television series and, over the years, has taken on a life of his own. In a parodic nod to Tim Burton’s popular 1989 Batman movie, Bartman had his serial debut in the Season 2 episode “Three Men and a Comic Book” (1991) and was only featured on the show once more, on the 2007 episode “Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times,” in the Batman Begins spoof segment “Bartman Begins.” But Bartman has proliferated far beyond The Simpsons on TV. While not a part of the regular series’ cast, Bart’s alias developed in Simpsons comics (most notably in a six-issue Bartman miniseries [1993–1995]), video games, and memorabilia. In The Simpsons Game (2007), for example, the figure of Bart Simpson can turn into “Bartman,” thus enhancing the character’s powers (he can climb walls and use a cape to glide through the air or generate bats as weapons).2 However, Bartman’s dissemination has hardly been limited to these “official” outlets of the Simpsons franchise. To gain a more nuanced understanding of the figure as a cultural signifier, we have to widen our focus and enter the “unofficial” domain of Simpsons fan culture. For instance, before the series’ creators revived Bartman in the wake of Christopher Nolan’s 1 Throughout this study, I italicize The Simpsons when I refer to the television show, while instances related to the series in a general sense appear in regular type. 2 The episode “Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times” can therefore also be viewed as an instance of transmedia cross-promotion, as it originally aired on January 28, 2007, the same year The Simpsons Game was released.

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Figure 0.1: “Bartman Begins” (2005). Remix poster by Erik Skov.

2005 Batman Begins movie, the then fifteen-year-old Canadian Simpsons fan Erik Skov had already riffed on the connection (Skov 2021), creating a “Bartman Begins” poster and circulating it via the social media platform DeviantArt in 2005.3 Another fan work on DeviantArt, created and posted by American teenager D. J. Whittaker in 2014, situated Bartman beside Fallout Boy, a superhero-sidekick within The Simpsons’ fictional comic book series Radioactive Man. Through parody characters such as Bartman or Fallout Boy, The Simpsons’ creators have suggested a remix universe, which is then taken up by fans who render Fallout Boy the perfect match for Bartman in a humorous nod to comic book superhero Batman and his “ward” Robin. Critical voices might object that such remixes based on pop-cultural icons—creative as they may seem—tend to merely reproduce corporate signifiers that form popular culture’s image bank. In that logic, mixing and matching commercial media images often fails to be transformative in gesture, “disrespectful” towards the appropriated object, and thus critical or “democratic” as discursive practice (cf. obsession_inc. 2009). This argument is reasonable and will reverberate as I discuss The Simpsons’ role in digital remix culture in Chapter 6. For now, the example of Bartman serves the 3 DeviantArt is online art platform where users can share self-created visual content. Open to virtually everybody, the website constitutes a forum for professional as well as amateur artists—many of whom are fan artists.

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Figure 0.2: “Fall Out Boy and Bartman Selfie” (2014). Fan art created by D. J. Whitaker.

broader purpose of demonstrating how a signifier originating in a mass-media context (Bartman) traverses multiple media platforms as well as multiple cultural sites. Not only have commercial media producers created a character that is already a parodic homage of another pop culture icon (Batman); this homage has in turn inspired an active fan culture which participates in (re) negotiating and reproducing versions of the derivative signifier “Bartman.”

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About “The Simpsons”? In analyzing the interplay between a specific mass-media text and popular culture, this book considers The Simpsons as an instance of what Frank Kelleter and others have conceptualized as “popular serial narrative”—a pop-cultural mythology which “emerges from situated historical actors and agencies” (Kelleter 2017, p. 11). The dynamic relationship between The Simpsons and an increasingly participatory media culture has been crucial to the cultural impact and longevity of this particular media franchise. The word animating in the subtitle of this book hence refers to both senses of the term—to an animated cartoon that represents a participatory media culture and to a serial narrative that stimulates this kind of participatory media culture.

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First and foremost, the show The Simpsons developed a distinct fan sensibility, which greatly contributed to the series’ meaning as a cult phenomenon. And as audiences were becoming more and more interactive via the emergence of the internet, The Simpsons’ producers also encouraged fan engagement by recognizing these forms of participation. This has typically occurred in the form of promotional gimmicks, such as the digital “Simpsonizer” tool featured on the official website for the 2007 The Simpsons Movie. The application gave fans the ability to create customized Simpsons avatars using template forms such as the characteristic overbite, bulgy eyes, and some of the characters’ recognizable haircuts—presets that indicate the extent to which corporate media have a solid interest in domesticating, channeling, or otherwise incorporating fan activities. Other examples of Simpsons fan creations, however, are “unauthorized” Simpsons productions—that is, productions not commissioned and licensed through 20th Century Fox, the commercial rights holder of the Simpsons media property (and part of the Walt Disney Company as of 2019). As the aforementioned Bartman examples have illustrated, amateur producers often create Simpsons-related artifacts without the copyright holder’s consent, thereby reclaiming their space within the Simpsons universe (or, rather, within the textual construct that is “The Simpsons”). 4 As we will see, Fox has reacted on various levels to what it sees as the unauthorized use of intellectual property. And yet, like “authorized” Simpsons avatars were routinely created through The Simpsons Movie’s website, “unauthorized” Simpsons material plays a significant role within the textual derivatives that typically proliferate around pop culture phenomena. While unauthorized productions featuring The Simpsons may be considered illegitimate or even violations of copyright, instances such as bootleg Simpsons T-shirts, which I will discuss in Chapter 5, also inform the cultural meaning of The Simpsons (albeit, perhaps, in less privileged or circulated ways). In that sense, The Simpsons has always been more than a television show. Rather, the series has been a cultural “catalyst” similar to Henry Jenkins’s (2003) description of the Star Wars saga: not only has The Simpsons created a media franchise, which licensed the series’ characters and iconography to a variety of corporate partners, including comics, video games, toys, and 4 I use the term “amateur” only to indicate that these people do not belong to commercial media organizations and usually do not make a living from their art. Indeed, most of these amateur artists are extremely talented as well as media-savvy, and their works frequently exhibit professional skills. Often enough, talented “amateurs” will turn “pro” and become freelance artists or are hired by commercial media.

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other merchandising companies. The series has also popularized a set of characters and recognizable iconography, adding them to a shared media space that provides meaningful cultural resources for a wide variety of audiences, as described by Jenkins in his 2006 landmark book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: [The] circulation of media content—across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders—depends heavily on consumers’ active participation. . . . Each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives. (Jenkins 2006a, pp. 3–4)

From this perspective, The Simpsons represents what Diane Penrod (2010) calls a “public image” in the semiotic playground that is contemporary remix culture: a corporate-owned media text, globally distributed, highly popular, and thus convenient for a diverse range of cultural producers that rework it for various purposes. In describing The Simpsons in terms of a “public image,” this project adopts a cultural studies notion of popular culture that emphasizes the liberties of semiotic participation (see, e.g., Fiske 1987). This book’s transmedia approach, then, views The Simpsons more as cultural text than as licensed media property. As Emanuel Ernst and Sven Werkmeister asserted at the turn of the millennium, in a German-language edited volume on the Simpsons phenomenon, the agencies that have shaped the cultural text “The Simpsons” refer to at least three different categories: Matt Groening and the production team being the “inventors” and creators of the show; the media corporation 20th Century Fox (now owned by the Walt Disney Company) as the copyright owner and distributor; and the audience and fans, not only as viewers and consumers but also as interpreters, appropriators, and rewriters of the Simpsons universe (Ernst and Werkmeister 2001, p. 100). Moreover, given its three-decade-plus lifespan, The Simpsons has resonated with various generations of viewers and media consumers. Over the years, The Simpsons’ fan base has naturally changed. New fans have arrived; veteran fans grew older and might have either given up their fandom, or pursued their passion with varying degrees of intensity. But fan sensibilities typically become entrenched in people’s identities. A media text as long-lived and popular as The Simpsons constitutes a collective point of reference in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century’s global popular culture. In various contexts and situations, you will meet people familiar with the series and its characteristics. As a cultural artifact, The Simpsons has

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entered their (former) viewers’—or (former) fans’—everyday lives as well as the professional lives some of those hold within the worlds of commercial media production and other forms of creative art.

“Off-Screen Studies” and the Meaning of Paratexts in the Age of Convergence Culture Certainly, it is a well-established method to take into account aspects of reception in order to better understand how a mass-media phenomenon such as The Simpsons works as a cultural text. The field of cultural studies offers a particularly long tradition of ethnographic audience research, emphasizing specific readings of specific audiences to interrogate the range of meanings a certain text may offer. Strikingly, the internet has provided audiences with an infrastructure to share and document reception practices. The Net’s datasphere has become a substantial source for media scholarship to analyze the ways audiences respond to mass-media products in form of “visible” texts, as discussed by Jonathan Gray in Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. A significant part of “off-screen studies” (Gray 2010, pp. 6–7), the internet constitutes the quintessential medium where we see the two traditional categories of media reception and production interacting and intersecting. Henry Jenkins reflects on the impact of the internet when he notes that Ien Ang’s 1985 study on Dallas once drew on just a few dozen letters, which Ang requested by means of a magazine advertisement, whereas Jenkins sampled from online fan forums at volumes of a dozen postings an hour during the online research for what would grow into his eminent 1992 Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (see Jenkins 2006b, p. 115). Notably, Jenkins undertook his pioneering study of participatory media culture way before the internet became a mass phenomenon with the rise of the World Wide Web during the 1990s. In the meantime, the internet has become synonymous with the accessibility of media consumers and the growing visibility of participatory culture. It is definitely no exaggeration to propose that the digital revolution constitutes the single most significant technological development in this process of recognizing audiences. A device of communication that operates in a much more democratic fashion than the traditional media,5 the internet has greatly amplified the impact of audience-generated paratexts. 5 For the problem of the digital revolution viewed as a democratizing force, see, e.g., Dean (2002) and Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013, pp. 39–41).

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The term paratext denotes additional material linked to a given source text, such as a television program or f ilm. In this context, some media scholars (e.g., Hills 2004) have followed John Fiske’s definition of intertextuality. Fiske distinguishes between “vertical intertextuality,” consisting of “secondary texts such as studio publicity, journalistic features, or criticism [and] tertiary texts produced by the viewers themselves” as opposed to “horizontal intertextuality,” which Fiske refers to when he speaks about the relationship between primary texts (see Fiske 1987, p. 108). With the digital revolution, however, the distinction between secondary texts and tertiary texts has become increasingly blurred. Why should a review in a newspaper be ranked “secondary” while a blog review by a user is (only) “tertiary”?6 Fiske and Hills both draw the line at the point where some material is commercially available (see Hills 2004, p. 510). Yet this implied hierarchy is increasingly inaccurate given the growing visibility, circulation, and thus accessibility and marketability of user-generated content in the internet age. Instead, we might treat all the work created in relation to a certain media text equally as secondary material. Following Gérard Genette, I therefore reserve the term intertextuality for the authorial practice of quotation or allusion; paratextuality, on the other hand, refers to all secondary texts that provide the primary text with “a (variable) setting and sometimes commentary, official or not” (Genette 1997, pp. 2–3). As Gray argues in Show Sold Separately, the paratexts surrounding a television program such as The Simpsons may consist of ads or promos, commentaries, interviews, reviews, articles, blog entries, the show’s website, merchandise articles, and so on. That is, all that contributes to (re)framing and (re)situating the source text, The Simpsons. According to this definition, instances where audiences discuss and talk about the series are also paratexts. As Gray observes, audience paratextuality also includes criticism and reviews, fan fiction, fan f ilm and video (vids), “f ilk” (fan song), fan art, spoilers, fan sites, and many other forms. Type the name of almost any popular film or television program into Google, and beyond the first two or three links for official, industry-created paratexts, one will likely find several if not hundreds or thousands of pages with various forms of audience-created paratexts. (2010, p. 143)

6 For the relative character of these categories, see also Gray (2015).

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Indeed, my research on the Simpsons phenomenon corroborates Gray’s hypothesis. Googling “the simpsons” produces around 45 million hits at the time of writing. From this number, “off icial” websites linked with The Simpsons as Disney-owned media property only account for a tiny fraction. Consequently, the majority of hits refer to paratexts not directly produced by The Simpsons/Fox but rather by unaffiliated media outlets and, to a significant extent, by bloggers and/or alternative media such as user-generated podcasts, YouTube videos, and online wikis. However unofficial such venues may be, they belong to a paratextual realm which helps us to understand the phenomenon of The Simpsons—its various cultural meanings and popular extensions.

Popular Semiosis The wealth of imagery provided by commercial media—movies, television shows, computer games, comics, and so on—has always been vital for popular culture’s practices of semiotic reworking and remixing. Yet, as this book will demonstrate, The Simpsons constitutes a special case. Given the show’s extraordinary longevity as a TV phenomenon and its global impact as one of America’s most successful pop culture exports, The Simpsons’ cultural status can be called iconic. But unlike most other media icons, The Simpsons has cultivated a parodic perspective tied to a recognizable iconography as central features of what I am calling “popular semiosis”—a term borrowed from semiotician Umberto Eco. To clarify, I do not consider it very helpful to engage in depth with the theory of semiotics in this context; this book will not spend any time with Ferdinand de Saussure or Charles S. Peirce. Rather, I draw on semiotics as it has been fruitfully employed by theorists of cultural studies—as a resource of popular empowerment. By the category “popular semiosis,” then, I am referring to the sign system through which a media text (in this case: The Simpsons) provides people with a specific vernacular enabling them to communicate and express themselves in creative, effective, and efficient ways within contemporary media culture. In short, the various forms through which The Simpsons manifests itself as and in popular culture. As a concept, popular semiosis is particularly applicable to The Simpsons. Like most other commercial entertainment media content, Springfield’s cartoon world has given fans and other cultural creators a distinct mythology and image system, a “discursive repertoire from which to make their popular culture” (Fiske 1989, p. 125). Significantly, the Simpsons universe

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Figure 0.3: An early 1990s Bartman action figure by Mattel. From the collection of Bart of Darkness. Photo courtesy of Warren Evans.

has represented a didactic venue that invites us to do what the franchise is premised on: to view media culture as an image bank; to appropriate, remix, and match elements from it; and to generate new meanings by putting them into new contexts. In that sense, the series has provided vital semiotic resources, not only to interact with The Simpsons’ participatory realm but also to deploy The Simpsons as a meta-media text. This indicates The Simpsons’ intended parodic posture vis-à-vis other media texts (Batman, Star Wars, television sitcoms, canonic movies, animated cartoons, etc.). Beyond suggesting an autonomous fantasy cartoon world, The Simpsons has always represented a cultural commentator. What distinguishes The Simpsons from most other media franchises, then, is the referential humor that has become its trademark—the series’ abounding parody-oriented references to the pop culture world (including The Simpsons itself) as well as “ironic” merchandise items (such as “Bartman” action figures). Through its aesthetics of semiotic play, The Simpsons has drawn on the satirical humor popularized in the United States during the baby-boomer era by different media formats—from MAD magazine (1952–2019) through CBS’s Saturday Night Live (1975–)—whose comedy reflected what cultural studies scholarship had originally identified as practices of participatory (sub)cultures.

Methodology, Chapter Overview, and Some Simpsons Background A transmedia analysis of The Simpsons, as proposed in this book, involves multiple areas of critical inquiry—not only in relation to the show’s “official”

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producers but also in relation to amateur producers and fans who participate in shaping The Simpsons as a cultural text. Therefore this study first looks at the industrial level and examines the specific production context that gave rise to the Simpsons phenomenon; I then discuss the show’s aesthetics in terms of representing an interface between commercial and alternative media practices; last, the book investigates how The Simpsons and its iconography has found expression in contemporary remix culture. In interrogating The Simpsons’ meaning as popular semiosis operating within the politics and poetics of participatory culture, I will draw on a tripartite cultural studies approach as suggested by Douglas Kellner (2009), which establishes the following areas of critical inquiry: – the socioeconomic context that situates a particular cultural artifact – the textual composition of the cultural artifact and its representation of ideologies and social groups – the ways the cultural artifact under question interacts with certain groups of people To do so, this introduction will be followed by a chapter on theory, in which I lay out the basic concepts used within this book: participatory culture, popular semiosis, and media fandom. Chapter 2 traces the socioeconomic context out of which grew The Simpsons—from some crudely animated cartoon vignettes to one of the 1990s’ and 2000s’ most popular media phenomena. The iconic cartoon characters around the Simpson family, derived from Matt Groening’s original sketches, first appeared in between TV skits starring Tracey Ullman. When The Tracey Ullman Show (Fox, 1987–1990) was dropped due to low ratings, producer James L. Brooks managed to convince the executives at the nascent Fox network to spin off the segments featuring the chaotic cartoon family into a show of its own. Thus, The Simpsons became the first animated prime-time sitcom since the demise of Hanna-Barbera’s groundbreaking The Flintstones (ABC, 1960–1966) and the shows following in their forerunner’s wake—The Flintstones’ sci-fi counterpart, The Jetsons (ABC, 1962–1963; syndicated, 1985–1987), Wait Till Your Father Comes Home (syndicated, 1972–1974), and Where’s Huddles? (CBS, 1970). Contrary to the 1980s media industry standard that considered animated comedies for adults an outdated concept, the impact of The Simpsons led to the 1990s’ and early 2000s’ boom of cartoon shows for young adults. The most significant of these were Beavis and Butt-Head (MTV, originally 1993–1997), The Simpsons’ sister shows at Fox (The Critic [1994–1995], King of the Hill [1997–2010], Family Guy [1997–],

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and Futurama [1999–2003, Comedy Central, 2008–2013], and American Dad! [2005–2014; TBS, 2014–]), as well as South Park (Comedy Central, 1997–) and a battery of shows produced for the Adult Swim network, culminating in the cult show Rick and Morty (2013–), all of which followed the trail blazed by The Simpsons’ creators. Indeed, few expected the success story The Simpsons would become. The show and its characters turned out to have a mass appeal for millions of mostly young Americans, just before it proved to be marketable throughout the world (today, The Simpsons airs in almost every country around the globe). In addition to creating a marketing bonanza, the series resonated with the 1990s’ zeitgeist by displaying an appreciation of complex television comedy writing (which earned The Simpsons accolades such as Time magazine’s title of the best TV show of the twentieth century and numerous Annie and Emmy Awards) and signifying the (neo-)liberal spirit that reshaped America toward the Age of Clinton (Troy 2015, p. 108). On a textual level, the “postmodern” media entertainment of the 1980s and early 1990s (parody-films such as John Dante et al.’s 1987 Amazon on the Moon, 1984’s mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the indie movie vogue ushered in by Richard Linklater’s 1990 Slacker, and TV comedies like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World” sketches) may count as signposts pointing towards the trend of popular media reflecting the culture of popular media consumption through ironic humor. As I will argue in Chapter 3, The Simpsons’ success was a significant driving force in this development. Jim Collins has suggested the term “hyperconsciousness” to refer to a media text that comments explicitly on “its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception” (Collins 1992, p. 335). Notably, this characteristic goes beyond the traditional artistic trope of self-reflexivity as described by Robert Stam (1992), for instance, as well as “postmodernism” as a fetish for pastiche and referentiality. Following this idea further, I argue that The Simpsons’ impact is indicative of what I term “meta-television culture”—that is, the cultivation of an awareness among the 1980s’ and 1990s’ young adult (YA) audience regarding the various effects of mass media, which fed back into an ironic position towards all media messages, as a key characteristic of the so-called Generation X. What originally framed The Simpsons as an unconventional television experience, then, was not only the return of animation on prime-time TV. As I will further discuss in Chapter 4, the producers charged the cartoon series with their boomer sensibilities: rock music, comics and geek gusto, and especially media fandom constituted (sub)cultural traditions through

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which the creators around Matt Groening forged bonds with a consumer group that embraced The Simpsons as an “authentic” expression of their media culture. In addition to its strident cartoon style and protagonists tapping into the children’s market, The Simpsons provided a second layer of adult-oriented comedy which successfully courted a YA fan audience whom we may associate with the so-called Generation X. These Gen Xers related to the ways their own media engagement was represented, and thus acknowledged, on mainstream television in form of The Simpsons. The Simpsons thus follows a larger paradigm of TV programs showcasing the artistic potential of television entertainment and inviting new, “quality” audiences (see Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi 1984). When The Simpsons first aired, critics celebrated the series for effectively blurring the boundaries between high and low culture by conglomerating references from modernist paintings and Hitchcock movies to media history in its broadest sense, including virtually every sitcom trope imaginable. Moreover, The Simpsons soon established itself as a site that acknowledged the cultural agency of people actively engaging in popular media discourse. Thus, the series successfully fended off the stigma of pop culture serving as tranquilizer, as its writers included richly layered reflections on media consumption and fandom. As I will discuss in Chapter 5, The Simpsons has not only expressed the social relevance of pop culture fandom; its producers have also actively fostered media fandom by tapping into the realm of participatory culture. Since the series’ inception, its creators have invested in audience engagement through transmedia approaches while, at the same time, seeking strategies to maintain the hegemony over their intellectual property. Addressing the subcultural sensibilities of cult media fans, the Simpsons franchise has not only drawn in preexisting fan communities (especially comics and sci-fi fandom) but also cultivated a massive fan following of its own, and thus a powerful form of interpretive community. As the examples of online fan sites such as The Simpsons Archive illustrate, while active audiences have forged networks to discuss and document media texts before, these formations have increasingly gained cultural status in the media landscape at the turn of the twenty-first century. The rise of the internet and digital culture has made fan culture—or participatory culture in general—more visible and therefore more significant as agencies of cultural production, a process reflected in the Simpsons series. Lastly, Chapter 6 looks beyond the “official” Simpsons. Widening the focus will reveal the meaning of The Simpsons’ semiosis in the digital age. As the series—its mythology and characters—has proliferated through

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the (visual) practices of cultural producers via such popular platforms as DeviantArt or YouTube, The Simpsons became fully integrated into online culture. The franchise’s distinct iconography, which is both iconic and easy to recreate, in combination with The Simpsons’ parodic/satirical ethos, has animated popular culture’s politics and poetics of semiotic appropriation, providing protocols on how to translate the show’s aesthetics into participatory pleasures and practices. In addition to “classic” examples of fan work, digital culture has not only borrowed from The Simpsons’ iconography but also built on the franchise’s parodic and satirical impulses in what is often referred to as “Simpsonizing” in the popular vocabulary. As demonstrated in various case studies, the internet provides a wealth of memetic derivatives linked to The Simpsons: images of Marge as sexy cover girl, Simpsons vaporwave videos and parodic clips of the show’s iconic intro sequence, or Simpsons characters being used in political contexts in Germany are all examples of participatory culture creatively repurposing The Simpsons. More precisely, in these instances the series’ semiosis has given participatory culture a rich mythology and imagesystem to articulate perspectives of reframing, nostalgia, critical correction, and what Henry Jenkins and others have called the “civic imagination” (Jenkins 2016, pp. 29–32; Jenkins et al. 2016; Jenkins, Peters-Lazaro, and Shresthova 2020).

Fan Stereotypes, Fan Critics, and Aca-Fans More often than not, people who “talk back” to, or otherwise embrace and participate in, The Simpsons will be considered “fans.” But we have to be careful with that label. Although most people are “fans” of something, many still use the category with hesitation; fandom has for a long time been subject to cultural depreciation and social stereotyping. Dean Fraser, for instance, whose Springfield Punx blog will be discussed in Chapter 6, expressed reservations about being a Simpsons fan. Although Fraser declared to (still) like and watch The Simpsons, he mentioned his fan relationship with the series with reluctance. In a rather defensive tone, he stated: I am a fan of the show. Not necessarily a live-and-breathe fanatic for it, but it’s great fun and I still watch it. I am confident I’ve seen most of the episodes so I feel pretty well versed in The Simpsons’ world and its history. (Fraser 2012, n.p.)

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While this position clearly corresponds to a general understanding of the concept of fandom—Fraser has seen “most of the episodes,” has an inside knowledge of the show’s history and storyworld, and has been inspired by The Simpsons’ stylistic features—he does not really feel comfortable with being associated with the “fan” label. He views his personal relationship with the show distinguished from that of the cliché die-hard fan or “fanatic.” Whether this latter fan-model refers to a pathologized subject being “obsessed” with the show or a naively (i.e., excessively) consuming superfan (cf. Jenson 1992), it suggests how Simpsons fandom, as well as the attribution “fandom” in general, continues to be carefully and critically considered by many fans themselves. The label “Simpsons fan” is therefore complicated by some of those who have an affective relationship with the franchise because of stereotypes and prejudices that have traditionally been associated with media fandoms. One obvious reason for the hesitation to call yourself a Simpsons fan may stem from an assumed expectation that fans are supposed to know everything about their favorite piece of pop culture—an expectation that is hard to meet in the context of a massive media text such as The Simpsons. At the same time, this reluctance may have to do with The Simpsons’ trajectory from representing edgy, “alternative” television entertainment in the series’ early stages to end up as one of Hollywood’s pet media franchises. Indeed, most people are acquainted with The Simpsons, and to many, the stamp “Simpsons fan” might suggest reservations. Matt Hills (2004) has emphasized the particularities of fandom involved in cult media texts such as The Simpsons. Cult fandom, as Hills describes it, is often characterized by an anti-commercial, or at least a consumer-critical stance. While cult fans do not necessarily “‘resist’ processes of commercialism” (Hills 2004, p. 517), they assume the role of a “constructed Other” which is based on an uneasy relationship with mindless or uncritical consumption practices (Hills 2010, pp. 68-69). According to Hills, this typically results in an analytical as well as a critical approach that fans adopt towards their object of devotion. Criticizing the qualitative decline of one’s favorite TV program, such as Simpsons fans debating which episode has been the “worst ever” (see Chapter 4), is a definitive characteristic of cult fandom. “Being a fan of cult TV,” Hills writes, “doesn’t mean just displaying subjective enthusiasm or ‘special devotion.’ It also means, at the very least, being able to attempt to account and defend one’s fan passions; being able to analyse and critically appreciate one’s favoured text” (2004, p. 517). Most clearly, such a position comes to the fore in the 2012 e-book Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead by a

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Simpsons fan who goes by the name of Charlie Sweatpants. In the preface, he writes: [Today], if you flip on Fox at 8 p.m. on Sundays, you will see a program that bills itself as The Simpsons. It is not The Simpsons. That show, the landmark piece of American culture that debuted on 17 December 1989, went off the air more than a decade ago. The replacement is a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. (Sweatpants 2012, n.p.)

For fans such as Sweatpants, the moment they view their favorite TV show “jumping the shark” is crucial. As well as justifying his passion for The Simpsons with the cultural significance of the series, Sweatpants criticizes the makers of The Simpsons for having become predictable, “superficial,” and trite in comparison with the series’ “original” creative output; The Simpsons franchise is only kept alive in order to generate more money, reads the common argument. Such forms of evaluation or canonization of a TV series are manifestations of “fan criticism” in relation to media cults (cf. Jenkins 1992, pp. 94–98). Typically, fandom operates informally, yet is driven by networked communities, influencers, mentors, curators, gatekeepers, and tastemakers which form hierarchical structures (Brower 1992; MacDonald 1998; Baym 2000; Kompare 2017). These are the agencies that shape the interpretive fan community around a media text, constituting fandom as a hegemonic discourse (Johnson 2017). Traditional threads in this context are discursive constructions of “aesthetic histories” (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995): Star Trek enthusiasts debating the links and inconsistencies between the different generations of individual TV series and movies; Star Wars fans evaluating the original trilogy against the prequel or sequel trilogies; Simpsons aficionados being nostalgic about the show’s heyday in the early 1990s and lamenting how their favorite program began to lose its original edge. This dimension of fan criticism also informs Planet Simpson author Chris Turner’s periodization of The Simpsons. Turner distinguishes between the show’s “Early Days,” starting with the Tracey Ullman shorts through the middle of The Simpsons’ third season in 1992; the “Golden Age,” beginning in the middle of Season 3 and continuing throughout Seasons 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8; until the show entered a phase of diminished originality and wit with Season 9 in 1997, which Turner calls the “Long Plateau” (Turner 2004, pp. 36–41). Both Sweatpants’s as well as Turner’s assessments demonstrate

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a shared sentiment that often exists among fans vis-à-vis their favored texts (see Jenkins 1992, p. 95). In the fans’ readings, The Simpsons lost its authenticity linked to the series’ “original” quality as satirical, offbeat TV show. If The Simpsons was designed to develop a fan audience, the same fans have turned out to be the show’s harshest critics. Many a Simpsons fan shares Sweatpants’s frustration over the latter-day Simpsons being merely a pale imitation of itself. Besides these fan-authored publications, a tremendous amount of literature on The Simpsons already exists, contributing to what we may call Simpsons studies or “Simpsonology,” which is often driven by Simpsons fandom (see, e.g., Gray 2006; Waltonen and Du Vernay 2010; Henry 2012; Waltonen and Du Vernay 2019; see also Chapter 5). In an academic context such “partiality” should be acknowledged, building on scholarship of popular culture and media fandom that follows Jenkins’s (1992) “dual role” as fan and academic—the so-called “aca-fan.” Although such an aca-fan position clearly bears the danger of obscuring analytical distance, Jenkins has famously advocated the advantages of writing as “both as an academic (who has access to certain theories of popular culture . . . ) and as a fan (who has access to the particular knowledge and traditions of that community)” (p. 5). At this point, I also wish to disclose my own background growing up with The Simpsons, as well as various other American TV programs brought into the German television landscape since the 1980s. Arguably, this is an important factor in approaching such a complex, multilayered, and enduring cultural phenomenon as The Simpsons. Thus, I believe an inside knowledge of The Simpsons is helpful, if not necessary, for understanding the series and the cult around it in all its cultural and aesthetic nuances. In reflecting on my own subjective relationship to the cultural text that is The Simpsons, I am following a turn in media studies—linked to the tradition of cultural studies—to acknowledge, rather than to obscure, one’s role as being an insider and a critical examiner at the same time (cf. Jenkins and Scott 2013, p. ix). Hence, I consider bringing to the table some degree of “fannish” enthusiasm towards my object of study not so much an obstacle in maintaining “critical distance” than an advantage in navigating through the digital jungle of today’s complex and vast mediascape to explore the complex and contradictory cultural meanings of The Simpsons. The transmedia lens adopted in this book is meant to expand previous research in Simpsons studies, building most notably on Jonathan Gray’s (2006; 2007) publications in relation to the series and accounts of its history and evolution (Turner 2004; Ortved 2009; Fink 2019), as well as spadework exploring The Simpsons as a merchandise empire and media franchise (Ernst and

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Werkmeister 2001; Gray 2010; McAllister 2004; Shores 2019). Adding to the shelf of existing literature on the show, Understanding The Simpsons delves into The Simpsons as a cultural phenomenon—the franchise’s evolution, its relationship with media fandom, unofficial Simpsons productions, and The Simpsons’ role in digital culture—by adopting a historical perspective that follows the series’ trajectory and its deflections into the age of convergence culture.

References Ang, Ien. 1985. Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination. Translated by Della Couling. London: Methuen. Baym, Nancy K. 2000. Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brower, Sue. 1992. “Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers for Quality Television.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 163–84. London: Routledge. Collins, Jim. 1992. “Television and Postmodernism.” In Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, edited by Robert C. Allen, 327–51. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dean, Jodi. 2002. Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ernst, Emanuel, and Sven Werkmeister. 2001. “Little Shop of Homers: Skizzen zum Simpsons-Sellout.” In Die Simpsons: Subversion zur Prime-Time, edited by Michael Gruteser, Thomas Klein, and Andreas Rauscher, 77–101. Marburg: Schüren. Feuer, Jane, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, eds. 1984. MTM: “Quality Television.” London: British Film Institute. Fink, Moritz. 2019. The Simpsons: A Cultural History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fiske, John. 1987. Television Culture. London: Methuen. –––. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Fraser, Dean. 2012. “Inquiry—Your Springfield Punx Blog.” Message to the author, November 12. Email. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. –––. 2007. “Imagining America: The Simpsons Go Global.” Popular Communication 5.2: 129–48.

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–––. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2015. “Afterword: Studying Media with and without Paratexts.” In Popular Media Culture: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, edited by Lincoln Geraghty, 230–37. New York: Palgrave. Henry, Matthew. 2012. The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture. New York: Palgrave. Hills, Matt. 2004. “Defining Cult TV: Texts, Inter-Texts and Fan Audiences.” In The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, 509–23. London: Routledge. –––. 2010. “Mainstream Cult.” In The Cult TV Book, edited by Stacey Abbott, 67–73. London: I. B. Tauris. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. –––. 2003. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” In Rethinking Media Change, edited by David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, 281–309. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. –––. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2006b. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2016. “Youth Voice, Media, and Political Engagement: Introducing the Core Concepts.” In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, by Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Klingler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman, 1–60. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, and Suzanne Scott. 2013. “Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later: A Conversation between Henry Jenkins and Suzanne Scott.” Introduction to Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, updated 20th anniversary ed., by Henry Jenkins, vii–l. New York: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova, eds. 2020. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change. New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, and Neta KlinglerVilenchik. 2016. “Superpowers to the People! How Young Activists Are Tapping the Civic Imagination.” In Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis, 295–320. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Jenson, Joli. 1992. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Characterization.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 9–29. London: Routledge. Johnson, Derek. 2017. “Fantagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom.” In: Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 369–86. New York: New York University Press. Kelleter, Frank. 2017. “Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality.” In Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, 7–34. Columbus: Ohio State University. Kellner, Douglas. 2009. “Toward a Critical Media/Cultural Studies.” Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches, edited by Rhonda Hammer and Douglas Kellner, 5–24. New York: Peter Lang. Kompare, Derek. 2017. “Fan Curators and the Gateways into Fandom.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, 107–13. New York: Routledge. MacDonald, Andrea. 1998. Uncertain Utopia: Science Fiction, Media Fandom, and Computer-Mediated Communication.” In: Theorizing Fandom: Fans, Subculture, and Identity, edited by Cheryl Harris and Alison Alexander, 131–52. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. McAllister, Matthew P. 2004. “From Lard Lad to Butterfinger: Contradictions of The Simpsons in Promotional and Commercial Culture.” Paper presented at the International Communication Association Conference. New Orleans, May 27–31. obsession_inc. 2009. “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom.” Posted on July 1. Archived at: https://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html (accessed January 20, 2021). Ortved, John. 2009. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. New York: Faber & Faber. Penrod, Diane. 2010. “Writing and Rhetoric for a Ludic Democracy: YouTube, Fandom, and Participatory Culture.” In Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, edited by Heather Urbanski, 141–51. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shores, Tyler. 2019. “‘It’s Not Selling Out; It’s Co-Branding!’ Watching and Consuming The Simpsons in the Digital Age.” In The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield: Essays on the TV Series and Town That Are Part of Us All, edited by Karma Waltonen and Denise DuVernay, 207–19. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Skov, Erik. 2021. “Simpsons Picture on DeviantArt—Bartman Begins.” Message to the author, April 21. Email. Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Sweatpants, Charlie. 2012. Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead. Kindle file. Troy, Gil. 2015. The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s. New York: Thomas Dunne/ St. Martin’s Press. Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London: Routledge. Turner, Chris. 2004. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo. Waltonen, Karma, and Denise Du Vernay. 2010. The Simpsons in the Classroom: Embiggening the Learning Experience with the Wisdom of Springfield. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. –––, eds. 2019. The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield: Essays on the TV Series and Town That Are Part of Us All. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

1.

Bart Talks Back: The Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture Abstract This chapter traces the concept of participatory media culture as it has emerged from the field of cultural studies and evolved through the work of John Fiske and Henry Jenkins. Building on Fiske’s thinking, Jenkins’s scholarship on media fandom has fundamentally revised cultural studies’ traditional neo-Marxist perspective of (sub-)cultural resistance versus an assumed dominant ideology. In order to outline a theoretical framework for this study, the chapter reconsiders the concept of participatory culture and specifies its political as well as its poetic particularities. In addition, I discuss popular culture’s participatory character in relation to Fiske’s notion of popular cultural capital and what I call “popular semiosis.” Keywords: cultural studies, John Fiske, Henry Jenkins, participatory culture, media fandom, convergence culture

“The kids in TV land are being duped!” squeaked a talking Bart Simpson doll from amid the flood of merchandise and memorabilia as The Simpsons went big in the early 1990s. Packaged in the self-referential, irreverent language that would define the original Simpsons style of satirical humor, the statement also captured one of the series’ main qualities. Suitably conveyed by Bart, as an emblem and role model for the post-MTV generation, The Simpsons emphasized the meaning of media knowledge and ironic distance necessary to navigate an all-encompassing media culture. Bart, in that sense, functions as the spokesperson for the show’s writers as well as for a whole generation of viewers, when the ten-year-old rascal defiantly talks back to those traditionally accepted as social authorities— parents, priests, politicians, police, teachers, the media, you name it. This antiauthoritarian spirit also characterizes a sequence inserted at the last minute as an alternate opening for the 1992 rerun of the Season 3 episode

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_ch01

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“Stark Raving Dad” (1991). In the added scene, we see an animated TV set framing original footage of George H. W. Bush’s 1992 election campaign speech at the National Religious Broadcasters, where Bush argued American families needed to be “a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons!” Then the animated sequence switches to the Simpson family having dinner in front of the TV, focusing on Bart who quips, “Hey, we’re just like the Waltons—we’re praying for an end to the depression too!” As meta-commentary, the clip demonstrated The Simpsons’ potential as political commentator and liberal voice. Notably, though, the statement is not performed from some kind of podium, but embedded in the quotidian setting of a family household functioning as micropolitical discursive space. Bart’s quick-witted response to Bush thus represents practices associated with everyday spectator culture, where people are not necessarily “duped” by media messages but may react or “talk back” in defiant ways. Indeed, if television had long been considered the quintessential mass medium— culture’s lowest common denominator—it has been one of The Simpsons’ narrative twists to fall back on this notion in order to undermine it. Much of the show’s humor has built on the effects of television—toying with the mass media’s negative image as tool of delusion vs. its function as interface of cultural participation. To better understand the ways The Simpsons has reflected elements associated with participatory culture, this chapter traces the evolution of the concept and maps its key properties in political and poetic terms. Discussing the works of John Fiske and Henry Jenkins, I reconsider participatory culture as an umbrella term embracing different practices of popular culture-making, of which media fandom constitutes a prototype. As fandom moves from the margins to the mainstream, creative engagement in the mediasphere by appropriating, remixing, and feeding back popular media content has become a dominant form of cultural production. In this connection, I will juxtapose the categories of popular cultural capital and popular semiosis as chief aspects of a popular media literacy.

Participatory Culture, Reconsidered Media scholarship in the wake of British cultural studies has usefully described the participatory dimension of “active audiences” as inherent to the reception of popular media content. Pioneers in the field like John Fiske and Henry Jenkins followed a strand of thinking that—in contrast to the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory—considered mass media

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not necessarily as means of cultural imposition but more in terms of a discourse, thus stressing the role of recipients in what are processes of cultural negotiation and meaning-making (see Hall [1973] 1980). A key concept in media studies today, the notion of participatory culture has gained currency to describe the practices that emerge from people’s interaction with the commercial media and entertainment industries. Thereby, the concept drew on studies of popular culture that emphasized acts of appropriating and repurposing elements of the dominant ideology (e.g., Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979; de Certeau 1984), which also spurred scholarly interest in the history of fandom—as a cultural as well as an economic category. Historical accounts of fan engagement, for instance, date back to Goethe’s 1774 bestseller, The Sorrows of the Young Werther, where they range from people posing as Werther to a number of suicides that have been linked to some readers’ obsessions with the book’s protagonist and his tragic fate (Sauerland 2010); Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which also triggered a great deal of popular debate (including fan letters to the publisher and author) in the years before the American Civil War (Okker 2003); the Sherlock Holmes hype that led Arthur Conan Doyle to continue with his famous mystery solver for what would become the 1901 bestseller The Hound of the Baskervilles (Cranfield 2014); and Charlie Chaplin or Elvis Presley look-alike contests, which already existed during these figures’ lifetimes in the early 1920s and the mid-1950s, respectively (Watts, George, and Beekman 2009, p. 213; Paget 2002). Practices of participatory culture may take multiple forms—from media consumption (in which meaning is created in relation to rather than through media content) to fan and other grassroots fabrications (as articulations of people’s emotional relationships to the surrounding culture). Linked to the latter, alternative media models offer another subset of participatory culture. Stephen Duncombe’s study (1997) of the American zine tradition provides an excellent starting point for understanding alternative media within a participatory culture framework. Crucially, these small-scale communication forms have allowed marginalized, underrepresented, and dissenting social groups to participate in media production, and thus to participate in the making of culture through circulating self-created media content. In revisiting the concept of participatory culture, Nico Carpentier (2011, pp. 66–70) points to the pitfall of conflating participation (as political/ cultural agency) with interaction with media content (as consumer/user), arguing that we should not formulate too broad a definition of cultural participation unless we want to entirely strip the term of its political dimension. Along these lines, Duncombe refers to phenomena of media

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fandom that mark a cultural site where participatory culture, in a cultural studies sense, becomes particularly overt. But as Duncombe points out, this participation is restricted because popular culture and commercial media do not naturally operate within the same logics, nor on the same levels of power (1997, p. 113). For a useful exploration of participatory culture, and in order to distinguish the concept from models of media interactivity, we need to understand popular culture’s function as a civic discursive space of informal learning and shared engagement (see Jenkins 2013, p. 283). To be clear, not every form of participatory culture is political per se. At the same time, the politics of participatory culture express themselves through power dynamics different from what we often associate with democratic processes of decision-making and civic engagement (see Carpentier 2011, p. 69). As Jenkins notes in conversation with Suzanne Scott, in the opening to the twentieth anniversary edition of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture: There has always been a tension between the desire of fans to create culture that is meaningful within their own community (a worthy goal) and the desire to engage in larger conversations that impact the culture (also valuable). We can see this as play vs. politics, except that the forms of play which drive fan culture are often deeply political at the most personal levels (for example, teens asserting their own sexual identities, wives claiming some control over their social and cultural lives), and even when fan’s play is “innocent” of politics, it is often forced to defend itself because it operates outside of dominant conceptions of intellectual property or outside heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions. (Jenkins and Scott 2013, p. xxxviii)

It does not make much sense to exhaust the debate of whether fan articulations count as “participatory” in a political sense or not, let alone to abandon the concept of participatory culture altogether. Rather, I make a case for the concept where it is political in that it refers to commercial media entertainment providing resources for popular empowerment, tools for expressing emancipatory points of view. The logics of participatory culture become manifest where do-it-yourself producers appropriate from and inscribe themselves in existing media texts, where they playfully rework and recombine elements from different sources through bricolage, pastiche, and parody. As Jenkins emphasizes, a nuanced notion of participatory culture refers to cultural practices that use the mediasphere for building communities, constructing identities, accruing cultural capital, and creating

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value in ways that are alternative in relation to dominant social power structures (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2016, pp. 15–16).

The Politics of Participatory Culture For cultural theorist John Fiske, popular culture is the culture of “the people” in modern times—that is, the ways people build their culture in societies where mass-cultural production, mass media, and the entertainment industries have commodified, and thus corrupted, what had formerly been “authentic” folk culture (Fiske 1989b, p. 27). Popular culture, as conceptualized by Fiske, does not refer to the commodified objects—that is, the products—supplied by the industries (top-down); popular culture is a living category that emerges in response to industrially produced consumables (bottom-up). Fiske characterizes this relationship as conflict-laden and contradictory: popular culture takes shape in relation to a dominant capitalist culture as a “double movement of containment and resistance, which is always inevitably inside it” (Hall 1981, p. 228; quoted in Fiske 1989b, p. 29). Popular culture, in that sense, is formed within the dichotomy of “the power-bloc,” which exerts the forces of ideological domination, versus the subordinate sphere of consuming individuals—that is, “the popular forces” (see Hall 1981, p. 238; Fiske 1989b, p. 28). In contrast to the false consciousness paradigm that has shaped critical theory from Marx through the Frankfurt School and beyond, Fiske follows the sociological approach of cultural studies—most notably, Stuart Hall’s— in drawing theoretical support from post-Marxist Structuralist concepts as offered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and, particularly, Antonio Gramsci’s model of hegemony. As Fiske explains: Originally, hegemony was used to refer to the way that a nation could exert ideological and social, rather than military or coercive power over another. However, cultural theorists tend to use it to describe the process by which a dominant class wins the willing consent of the subordinate classes to the system that ensures their subordination. This consent must be constantly won and rewon, for people’s material social experience constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a constant threat to the dominant. So . . . hegemony is not a static power relationship, but a constant process of struggle in which the big guns are on the side of those with social power, but in which victory does not necessarily go to the big guns—or, at least, in which victory is not necessarily total. (Fiske 1987a, p. 259)

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Fiske understands ideology as a “dynamic social practice,” in which each of us is “constituted as a subject in, and subject to, ideology” (ibid., p. 258). In late capitalist societies, everyday life is characterized by commodities: toys, TV shows, fashion, and merchandising surrounds us from the cradle to the grave. These commodities necessarily represent and relay the economic logic of capitalism as dominant ideology (Fiske 1989b, p. 14). Opposing these forces, however, are the cultural needs of the people, this shifting matrix of social allegiances that transgress categories of the individual, or class or gender or race or any category that is stable within social order. These popular forces transform the cultural commodity into a cultural resource, pluralize the meanings and pleasures, evade or resist its disciplinary efforts, fracture its homogeneity and coherence, raid or poach upon its terrain. All popular culture is a process of struggle, of struggle over the meanings of social experience, of one’s personhood and its relations to the social order and of the texts and commodities of that order. Reading relations reproduce and reenact social relations, so power, resistance, and evasion are necessarily structured into them (ibid., p. 28).

Popular culture is not produced by the industries; it is created by the people as they make use of the products provided by the industries. In order to become popular, mass-cultural products must resonate among a wide range of people, “appeal to what people have in common” (ibid.), and “offer opportunities for resisting or evasive uses or readings, and these opportunities must be accepted [by the people]” (ibid., p. 32). For Fiske, the culture industries do not generate passively consuming, homogenous masses as pictured by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno ([1947] 2002), for instance.1 Instead, the industries “produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the 1 In fact, the so-called Frankfurt School was not as homogeneous as its common identification with Adorno and Horkheimer suggests. Especially the theoretical approaches of Walter Benjamin or Leo Löwenthal—figures who were also affiliated with the Frankfurt School—contrasted with Adorno/Horkheimer’s overall pessimistic attitude towards “mass culture.” Corresponding with Bertolt Brecht’s approach to turn “places of entertainment into organs of mass communication” (Brecht 1965, p. 42), Benjamin emphasized the emancipatory potential offered by popular art (cf. Wiggershaus 1987, pp. 239–40). Along the same lines, Löwenthal viewed the aversion to commercially produced popular culture on behalf of many intellectuals as a reflex that stems from a reactionary skepticism toward new forms of artistic expression and technological progress in general. For Löwenthal, rather than condemning popular culture, critical theory should instead consider “the question of how mass media can be used as instruments for encouraging the cultural and educational development of broad segments of the population” (Löwenthal 1984, p. 57).

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various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture” (ibid., p. 24). Central to Fiske’s description of popular culture as a “constant struggle” (ibid., p. 44)—a “constant refusal to cede [the people’s domain] to the imperialism of the powerful” (ibid., p. 46)—are practices of mundane life, shaped by “the creativity of the weak” vis-à-vis the dominant culture (ibid., p. 47). Here, Fiske and those following in his vein draw support from Michel de Certeau’s ideas in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). While de Certeau’s book does not exactly provide a theory of popular culture, its discussions of the routines of everyday life as practices of joyful resistance within the “network of already established forces and representations” (de Certeau 1984, p. 18)—what the author calls “the art of being in-between”—offered metaphorical terminology that found much resonance in the critical vocabulary of cultural studies and beyond. A first central term is “tactics,” defined as practices employed by the disempowered in opposition to “strategies,” which are “operations performed from a position of strength” (Jenkins 1992, p. 45). The allusion to tactics as associated with guerrilla warfare fits Fiske’s category of “the people,” which is characterized by its fluidity, consisting of “nomadic subjectivities who can move around this grid, realigning their social alliances into different formations of the people according to the necessities of the moment” (Fiske 1989b, p. 24). Another concept is that of “poaching” as a theory of appropriation according to which consumers—from a position of marginalization and inferiority—become producers of textual meaning through their “impertinent raid on the literary preserve that takes away only those things that are useful or pleasurable” (Jenkins 1992, p. 24). Textual poaching, in other words, is a model of contesting textual authority by means of semiotic appropriation and resignification. De Certeau’s study of the quotidian harmonizes with Fiske’s understanding of popular culture in that it does not manifest itself as a radical movement: popular culture does not actively work to overthrow the hegemonic system by means of social or political power, but rather negotiates its own meanings and pleasures in relation and in opposition to the hegemonic system through semiotic power. This form of cultural power is derived from the polysemy natural to all cultural objects as components of different signifying systems in processes of “reading.”2 2 This assumption has been seminally articulated in Hall’s 1973 essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1980). Drawing on semiological theory, Hall proposed that mass media texts are polysemic—“capable of being read in different ways by different people” (cf.

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Initial scholarship in British cultural studies focused on subcultural youth groups of the post–World War II era as formations of a do-it-yourself, grassroots culture. The Mods, the Punks, the Skins—they all appropriated materials provided by the dominant culture as resources to express alternative identities out of a position of marginality through performative acts of resistance (see Hall and Jefferson 1976). The punks studied by Dick Hebdige (1979), for instance, used safety pins and transgressive symbols and transformed them—resignified them—as they incorporated these signs into their own subcultural codes. In anticipation of Fiske’s combative rhetoric, Hebdige (p. 105) invokes Umberto Eco’s ([1967] 1986) metaphor of a semiotic “guerrilla warfare” to describe the subversive practices of groups acting as subcultural bricoleurs. Bricolage, a concept borrowed from anthropology to describe a creative, improvised response to a hegemonically structured environment, has become part of cultural studies’ vocabulary to characterize processes of identity negotiation via tactics of semiotic appropriation and resignification from the “supermarket of meanings” (Fiske, 1989b, p. 132) offered by dominant culture.3 Following in this vein, “guerrilla semiotics” has become the weapon of choice within the sign-saturated world of billboards, media flow, and brand culture for activists like the feminist group Guerrilla Girls, the anti-corporate Adbusters movement, and other forms of political street art which have been discussed under the rubric “culture jamming” (see Dery 1993; DeLaure and Fink, 2017). Culture jamming does not only assume the freedom to read a certain message differently from its preferred meanings (cf. Eco 1986, p. 138); the radical arts of the 1990s’ Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada or today’s publicly acclaimed street artist Banksy consider it the people’s fundamental right to creatively respond to messages placed in the public space, “to talk back Fiske 1987a, p. 260). Hence, “reading” a television text refers to “that moment when the discourses of the reader meet the discourses of the text. Reading becomes a negotiation between the social sense inscribed in the program and the meanings of social experience made by its wide variety of viewers” (ibid., p. 269). More specifically, Hall identifies three reading positions: the hegemonic one, according to which the viewer decodes the message analogous to its encoding (which Hall assumes to correspond to the dominant capitalist ideology); the negotiated reading position, which generally accepts hegemonic viewpoints as truths but is disrupted by individual aspects of oppositionality, thus contradicting the dominant form of encoding from time to time; and the oppositional position, according to which the viewer is aware of the dominant discourse being at work in a given television text, but the decoding is executed “in a globally contrary way” (Hall 1981, pp. 137–38). For a further discussion of Hall’s encoding/decoding model, see Chapter 4. 3 The concept of bricolage has been fundamentally adopted by cultural studies scholarship in the works on post-war subcultures; see Clarke (1976, pp. 177–78), Clarke et al. (1976, pp. 55–56), Hebdige (1979, pp. 104–105).

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to images they never asked to see” (quoted in Klein 1999, p. 280; cf. Banksy 2005, p. 196). Parallel to these forms of cultural resistance executed under the surface of mainstream culture, traditions of participatory media culture have evolved. On a basic level, the degree to which audiences are active translates into what Fiske calls “oral culture,” where participatory media culture constitutes a conversational topic in everyday life within specific “talk communities” (1987b, pp. 78–79). Television in its traditional sense, in particular, fulfills this function. For Fiske, the classic television text is popular culture par excellence, for it provides a continuous stream of competing discourses that “delegates the production of meaning to the viewer-producer” (1989a, p. 63). Television “entails the subject’s power to participate and inflect meanings of text, social experience and subjectivity” (ibid., p. 71). At the same time, fan groups linked to media texts are intense manifestations of such “talk” or “interpretive” communities (Jenkins, 1992, pp. 88–89). Often enough, the category “fan” evokes a particular identifiable consumer group, suggesting that fandom is an entity embracing a particular pop culture phenomenon. But “fan” and “fandom” are far from being homogeneous categories—fan cultures are as diverse as participatory culture itself. In his influential essay “The Cultural Economy of Fandom,” John Fiske has proposed that media fans are a special type of active audiences in their particular forms of consumption and cultural production. “Fandom,” writes Fiske, “is an intensification of popular culture which is formed outside and often against official culture” (1992, p. 34). Texts created by fans, such as fan fictions, are tangible (albeit elaborate) versions of the readings “ordinary” viewers produce (p. 46). Echoing his analysis of popular culture, Fiske views the cultural economy of fandom in opposition to the dominant capitalist culture: “There is constant struggle between fans and the industry,” he says, “in which the industry attempts to incorporate the tastes of the fans, and the fans to ‘excorporate’ the products of the industry” (p. 47). Henry Jenkins, though in many ways a Fiskean, has been a constant critic of the analogy of fans with “regular” consumers. Although it might be true that over the past decades fan sensibilities and readings have become major characteristics of popular culture at large, Jenkins recognizes “the cultural specificity of fan cultural production, seeing fan fiction not simply as traces of interpretation, but as representing a distinctive tradition with its own genre expectations and literacy practices” (2010, p. xxix). Initially, he differentiated between “spectator culture” in general and media fandom in particular (1988, p. 88). Most notably, what Jenkins calls the “moral economy” of fandom, describing the informal set of standards involved

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in the relationship between fans, the fan text, and the culture industries (2006a, p. 38), marks the significant difference between Fiske’s common notion of active audiences on the one hand, and the specific practices and politics of media fan cultures on the other. First, most fans entertain a “privileged” relationship with their favorite texts. Fans distinguish themselves from regular spectators by claiming a high amount of popular “expertise” or fan-cultural capital (ibid., pp. 86–87), as well as exhibiting specific affects tied to the fan identity, “defined by its refusal of mundane values and practices, its celebration of deeply held emotions and passionately embraced pleasures” (ibid., p. 283; see also Kohnen 2018; Lamerichs 2018). Fandom, in that sense, provides a form of cultural discrimination, separating insiders from outsiders. Second, just as fans are seldom committed to one specif ic text, but are rather bricoleurs or “textual poachers,” who “take pleasure in making intertextual connections across a broad range of media texts” (Jenkins 1992, p. 36), they do not correspond to the kind of “resistant” reader often idealized by cultural studies. While fans “promote their own meanings over those of the producers,” their fandom is motivated more by consent than by resistance in relation to the favored text, as “there is already some degree of compatibility between the ideological construction of the text and the ideological commitments of the fans,” notes Jenkins (ibid., p. 34). Rather than being “radically resistant to media narratives,” fan productions are “in fact actively expanding those media narratives” (Jenkins 2018, p. 31). Unlike the subcultures studied by early cultural studies, or active audiences who read a media text against its dominant meaning, pop culture fans typically select their objects of fandom “from the total range of available texts precisely because they seem to hold special potential as vehicles for expressing the fans’ pre-existing social commitments and cultural interests” (Jenkins 1992, p. 34). Jenkins’s seminal media fandom research has shown that participatory culture does not conform to the “them vs. us” dichotomy that had been the theoretical center of cultural studies in the Birmingham tradition. Indeed, many fans are simply not oppositional in relation to the dominant ideology that is structured into their favorite pop culture text. Fan productions, in that sense, are not so much shaped by a “creativity of the weak” as guerrilla semiotics; rather, fans find empowerment by embracing commercial products as semiotic resources to articulate identities, fantasies, and desires. Furthermore, these resources work as cultural conjunctions, helping to forge social communities and to create collective forms of expression and collaborative acts of culture-making.

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More recently, Jenkins has introduced the concept of “the civic imagination,” referring to the potential pop culture texts have to provide stories as shared reference points “for us to imagine what a better world looks like” (Jenkins 2016, pp. 29–30). Typically performed by a new generation of activists, this kind of civic participatory culture promotes social change by playfully drawing on popular media texts in an approach to envision alternative worldviews, engage with political discourse, and articulate positions of protest and dissent. Popular mythologies, such as those of comic book superheroes, thereby provide symbolically powerful entry points to engage with social and political issues in a way that will be understood by a large number of people. As an example, the Twitter account of President Supervillain (since 2021, Former President Supervillain) inserts Donald Trump quotes into speech bubbles of comic book supervillains. Notably, this kind of culture-making is not born out of an aversion against the appropriated media texts; these grassroots producers exhibit a clear fondness or even fannish affection for the very pop culture imagery that illustrates and amplifies their political messages as it creates “semiotic solidarities” (Matt Hills quoted in Jenkins 2006b, p. 164; Jenkins 2010, p. xxxvi; see also Jenkins 2016, p. 18).

The Poetics of Participatory Culture As a form of civic imagination, (Former) President Supervillain illustrates well how participatory culture operates stylistically. The satirical response to President Trump’s notorious tweets comes in the guise of Captain America comics, with all the patriotism and political heritage this entails. Significantly, the parodic twist focuses on the series’ main villain, Red Skull, who is turned into a signifier for Trump and his Twitter rhetoric. The activist who runs the President Supervillain account, in other words, hijacks the Captain America franchise to use it, ironically, as a serial vehicle for lampooning the 45th President of the United States. In fact, poetics (rather than aesthetics) is the useful term to describe the stylistic characteristics through which participatory culture expresses itself. Using aesthetics in this context involves connotations of quality, which refers to such subjective categories as art, taste, and beauty (which are not necessarily relevant when it comes to participatory culture’s modi operandi). Poetics, by contrast, is much more neutral in this respect if we extend the Aristotelian denotation for the theory of drama and literature and instead consider the concept as the study of creative forms of production in general. As David Bordwell notes in connection with the film medium:

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Poetics derives from the Greek word poiesis, or active making. . . . Any inquiry into the fundamental principles by which artifacts in any representational medium are constructed, and the effects that flow from those principles, can fall within the domain of poetics. (Bordwell 2008, p. 12)

Applying this broad definition of poetics, then, is especially useful for a study of participatory culture—culture-making that typically operates through a variety of media channels and within a variety of cultural contexts, and thus demands to be analyzed as a transmedia phenomenon. With this in mind, let us have a look at the key poetic principles inherent in participatory culture. Bricolage The term bricolage (French for “jerry-rig”) refers to do-it-yourself approaches of creating something new out of pre-existing materials. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, bricolage practices in handicraft and homemade production increasingly translated into responses to consumerism. The term found particular resonance in cultural studies, where it was used to describe practices of (sub)cultural self-stylization based on appropriating signs and commodities offered by the dominant capitalist culture, and their reworking in juxtaposing ways that aim to “disrupt and reorganize meaning” (Hebdige 1979, p. 106). In that sense, bricolage also became an aesthetic principle in the radical art of Dadaism, Modernist surrealism, and appropriative pop art by such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Barbara Kruger. Significantly, bricolage has always been a cultural expression that emphasized the individual vis-à-vis the homogenizing drive of consumer culture. The “textual poaching” (Jenkins 1992, pp. 39–40) inherent in bricolage entails a range of emancipatory models—from reflecting individual relationships to consumer culture to the creation of “semiotic solidarities” among groups and (sub)cultural formations. Assemblage, collage, pastiche, and parody are all modes that inform bricolage as a poetic practice of participatory culture. Counterreadings Another basic element of participatory poetics is reading a text against the grain—against its intended meaning. In her seminal 1985 study on the then-popular TV series Dallas, Ien Ang described how some of her Dutch sample viewers were conscious of the capitalist ideology promoted by Dallas, yet nevertheless enjoyed the show by what Ang identified as an

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attitude of mockery and irony. To these ironic viewers, “it is self-evident that Dallas is ‘bad mass culture,’” Ang writes, “but the very weapon of irony makes it unnecessary for them to suppress the pleasures that watching Dallas can nevertheless arouse” (p. 101). Ang’s classic study has showcased the kind of pleasure derived from such ironic readings to be a vital element within television’s oral culture. Since then, Ang (2007) has reflected on her earlier observations, asserting that ironic viewing attitudes have become more popular since the 1980s. Younger audiences in particular, she argues, approach television genres and conventions with much more ironic distance than earlier generations of viewers. Some viewers who read Dallas ironically deliberately “misunderstood” the value system represented in the show, and thus inverted the show’s preferred meaning. To them, Dallas worked as a form of satire commenting on the excessive character of American capitalist culture (cf. Mittell 2010, p. 442). A subcategory of ironic reading positions, such satirical readings also produce enjoyment on behalf of the viewer, but other than generally finding pleasure in a text while being aware of its ideological dimension, this form of enjoyment arises from imaginarily exaggerating, caricaturing, or otherwise distorting the content of the original (see Ingulsrud and Allen 2009). In other words, if ironic viewing is premised on ironic distance, “satirical” or “parodic” viewing is premised on processes of semiotic resignification by imaginarily twisting the source text in humorous ways. 4 Fan Reworking Scholarship on media fandom has emphasized the particularities of how fans talk back to and make meaning out of popular media texts. In distinction from ephemeral daily practices that do not necessarily involve fandom, fan readings often materialize in the form of secondary, tangible texts. Fan producers typically appropriate and rework selected components of the favored texts to articulate their individual take on the source texts. Thus fans wear costumes (“cosplay”), create songs (“filking”), or conceive fan fictions—from scribbling for private fun to full-length novels, comics, or videos which sometimes reach a larger public in ways that can align with corporate media promotion. In their fictions, fans conjure up plot elements 4 Analogous to the distinction between parody and satire, as outlined by Neale and Krutnik (1990, p. 19), I consider parodic viewing in relation to a program’s formal aspects, drawing on aesthetic conventions, while satirical viewing has a broader focus and targets social or institutional structures, that is, ideological agencies at work in a certain program.

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that add to the source texts’ prefigured mythologies, thus recontextualizing and connecting the “official” storylines into what fans imagine to be “a more coherent and satisfying whole” (Jenkins 1992, p. 163). For this purpose, fan producers may creatively expand the dimensions of time and space, or redirect the spotlight to secondary characters to compensate for what they feel is missing in the original texts. Another characteristic is the shifting of genres, for instance, deflecting a science fiction adventure like Star Trek into a romantic or erotic/pornographic parallel story. In this connection, relationships between individual characters may be deliberately expanded or transformed. Muting the action-driven plot of the original, some fans create alternative stories devoted to the characters’ friendships or what they perceive as homoerotic undertones (ibid., p. 169; p. 175). A specific category in this context, which established itself as an underground genre of its own, is slash fiction—derived from the slash sign that connects the initials of two characters (e.g., K/S for Kirk/Spock). Slash writing refers to stories written typically by female fans that articulate sexual fantasies about two characters whose relationship is being reread as queer, thus making explicit what is perceived as a homoerotic subtext. Also typical of fan fictions are crossover narratives, where the universes and mythologies of different source texts are mixed and the boundaries between them are blurred (ibid., p. 170).5 Humor plays a significant role in fan writing too, and often derives from a carnivalesque laughter as conceptualized by the Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (cf. Jenkins 2003, p. 304). Carnival, for Bakhtin, temporarily inverts social and cultural hierarchies by parodying institutions and conventions, by celebrating the bodily, the eccentric, the obscene, and the grotesque. The spirit of carnival “offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things” (1968, p. 34). Following Bakhtin, John Docker (1994) views the subversive spirit inherent to the carnival tradition reflected in modern popular culture in form of “the carnivalesque.” As a form of pleasure derived from the inversion of hierarchies commonly upheld by the dominant culture, this sensibility is developed as early as in the minds of children. Docker takes the example of the cartoon cliché that is Tom and Jerry. As most of us know, children enjoy it when the mouse defeats the cat—a position Tom and Jerry regularly rewards in its plots, for instance, when Jerry triumphs in the foreground, “looking out the window at Tom, in the backyard, in the doghouse, chained to a spike, looking small: the topos of a world upside down, mundus inversus, topsy-turvy” (p. 277). 5

For a brief historical account of crossover fan fiction, see Coppa (2006, pp. 52–53).

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As Fiske observes, media fan cultures also mirror the participatory élan of children who enjoy weaving in their favorite media figures into their games and speech, and using commercial products as raw materials out of which they create their own storyworlds. Fans, like children, operate within a “patchwork culture” (Jenkins 1992, p. 290), which finds expression in consumers’ eclectic output. Reworkings of commercial media texts can incorporate such genres as the romance, pornography, or the music video—yielding a “pastiche” of multiple genres and media as they mix and match formal features, different materials, and visual styles. Thus fan producers often defamiliarize the original media artifact by using a form different from the original to narrate their stories. Fan producers write stories or draw comics about their favorite television show or recombine different materials provided by mainstream culture to reenact and rewrite a particular media text (e.g., LEGO, Playmobil, Barbie dolls, or Mattel action figures). Strikingly, fan productions shift the balance of power from the industries, which produce the original source text, to the audience. As Duncombe points out, fan fiction creators have always countered the notion of mass media’s proposed form of one-way communication by “talking back to the stories written for them” (1997, p. 108). Of course, fan power is also curtailed by the rules and standards of the industries (ibid., p. 113), but no one can deny the fans’ utopian realm of imagination. Some fan writers may incorporate avatars of themselves into the fantasies based on their favorite media product (Jenkins 1992, p. 173), or announce their own appraisal by identifying what they consider to be crucial moments in the source text’s history. As will be discussed throughout this book, the rise of participatory culture has led to the establishment of media fandom—both as cultural stereotype and as a form of cultural authority. Détournement Originally, the term détournement referred to aesthetic practices executed by The Situationist International, a French art collective of the 1950s and early 1960s. One of the leading figures in the Situationist circle was the Marxist intellectual and artist Guy Debord. Primarily known as the author of The Society of the Spectacle (1967), one of the key texts of the student revolts in France in 1968, Debord also wrote a number of political essays. In co-authorship with fellow Situationist Gil J. Wolman, Debord elaborated on the concept of détournement in a 1956 piece titled “A User’s Guide to Détournement.” Typical of left intellectuals at that time, Debord and Wolman

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draw heavily on Marxian/Hegelian terminology to describe their vision of a dialectical form of appropriative art which approaches a so-called “parodic-serious stage” (Debord and Wolman 2006, p. 15). This concept calls for a “con-fusion of signs” (Crano 2014, p. 45) that negates the ideology of the dominant capitalist culture to achieve what Adbusters cofounder Kalle Lasn, referring to the Situationists, describes as “a perspective-jarring turnabout in everyday life” (1999, p. xvii). Thus, détourning a billboard featuring Philip Morris’s Marlboro cowboy by boldly placing the sentence “I miss my lung, Bob” against the backdrop of two cowboys riding in front of a prairie sunset, “not only attacks a specific brand, but prompts critical reflection upon the entire institution of advertising” (DeLaure and Fink 2017, p. 13). The French term détournement, according to Debord translator Ken Knabb, means “deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose” (Debord and Wolman 2006, p. 480n14). Not unlike fan fiction writers who talk back to mass-media texts, acts of détournement executed by groups such as Adbusters claim the right to respond—to talk back—to the flow of media messages. Significantly, though, fans do not generally aspire to culture jammers’ ultimate goal to defeat the spectacle of commercial culture (cf. Jenkins 2016, p.18). Fans, in that sense, are not engaged in semiotic guerrilla warfare; rather, fans might be considered unruly backseat drivers who embark on what they choose as their semiotic vehicles of choice. If not for revolutionary ends, participatory culture deploys the subversive sensibility of détournement when corporate media content is appropriated, transformed, and fed back to the mediasphere with twisted messages serving alternative purposes and creating perspectives of correction in relation to the narratives of the dominant culture. Digital Remix In his 2008 book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Lawrence Lessig has built on the idea that digital remix culture bears analogies to folk culture traditions in “reaff irming the right of everyday people to actively contribute to their culture” (Jenkins 2006a, p. 132). While practices of sampling media content have been spurred on by several technological innovations towards the end of the twentieth century, the digital revolution marked the most fundamental shift within popular-cultural production. Today YouTube is the most widely known online platform where users can upload and circulate homemade digital content. Although YouTube—owned

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by Google/Alphabet Inc. since 2006—is molded, maintained, and monitored by the corporate media, it offers an unprecedented infrastructure and “bottom-up” platform for participatory culture. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, authors of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, put it, “For YouTube, participatory culture is not a gimmick or a sideshow; it is absolutely core business” (2009, p. 6). Providing a digital playground for participatory culture, YouTube offers what Diane Penrod (2010) calls a “ludic democracy,” inviting fans and amateur producers to play with media images and generate mashups or remixes of media artifacts. In her analysis of the audiovisual language of user-created YouTube videos, Penrod proposes several categories, such as camp, parody, homage, and satire, which together characterize the aesthetic and rhetorical variety inherent in digital remix culture. According to Penrod, the “participatory pleasures” provided by digital culture are not necessarily infantile, trivial, or thoughtless pursuits. Rather, “there is knowledge and meaning made through play on YouTube,” she reasons, “as those spaces proffer opportunities for agency, action, and interaction” (p. 150). Remix videos constitute a “meta-textual” genre exhibiting a “transformative logic” (Russo and Coppa 2012). Thus, when users circulate homemade video clips based on mass-media content, such as f ilm or television franchises, they do not necessarily praise these franchises; as paratextual instances, such clips often involve critical gestures vis-à-vis the source texts, or otherwise challenge their preferred readings. As Chuck Tryon observes for YouTube remix videos, some of these mashups are characterized by a parodic ethos whose “critical tone” reflects Jonathan Gray’s (2006) understanding of parody as “critical intertextuality” (Tryon 2009, p. 155), where texts and readers interact in ways that negotiate and create meanings. Calling digital remix culture a “ludic democracy” might cause raised eyebrows, perhaps invoking Fiske’s phrase of a “semiotic democracy,” and I will touch again upon both concepts at the end of this book. Before the digital revolution, unofficial productions derived from appropriating, reworking, and resignifying popular media narratives, and thus expanding these narratives, mostly stemmed from within the context of specific fan cultures. Today, such appropriative work is integral to what Limor Shifman has discussed under the rubric of the internet’s “memetic” or “meme” culture.6 This refers to the “sparking of user-created [media] derivatives articulated as parodies, remixes, or mashups” (2014, p. 2), practices that have become characteristic of today’s participatory media culture in general. 6 For a critique of the meme concept, see Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013, pp. 18–19).

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Popular Cultural Capital and Popular Semiosis In contrast to high culture’s traditional function of demonstrating distinction through highbrow taste, popular culture has a democratic character that invites virtually everyone to participate in it. Lessig considers the separating function of the Latin language in the Middle Ages, while comparing the peoples’ vernacular of older times to the mass-media audio/visual content in the digital age, for both provide a vocabulary to engage in a shared popular culture (Lessig 2008, pp. 68–69). Umberto Eco uses the term popular semiosis in his 2014 book From the Tree to the Labyrinth to refer to the kinds of sign systems that, in contrast to the written word, are not reserved for a literate cultural elite, but also belong to the (illiterate) populus. The dichotomy already implies that Eco’s study is historical; his examples are medical symptoms or physiognomic traits along with “effects of rules and habits, like dress, bodily posture, pictorial representations, the productions of folklore, liturgy” (Eco 2014, p. 493). In applying Eco’s notion to modern media societies, one is perhaps reminded of Fiske’s notion of “popular cultural capital” as theorized in Television Culture (1987), followed by his influential essay “The Cultural Economy of Fandom” (1992). First, both concepts are couched in a political diction of “the powerful vs. the people”; second, both thinkers understand semiotics as a key to popular empowerment. And yet, it is fruitful to draw on Eco’s term of popular semiosis as well as to distinguish it from Fiske’s terminology. Whereas Fiske’s category refers to the competences through which we derive meaning and pleasure from popular media texts, along with specific forms of demonstrating distinctions in analogy to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, popular semiosis expresses itself at another level: it is the sign system itself through which a certain media text enters popular culture and thus becomes part of its “discursive repertoire” as a form of vernacular (Fiske 1989, p. 125). My take on Eco and Fiske is furthermore meant to problematize their understandings of popular culture as a necessarily oppositional relationship between top-down and bottom-up culture. By contrast, I adopt a more nuanced understanding of popular culture, not only as a sphere of conflict and oppositionality but also as a sphere of cultural convergence and interaction. This must not necessarily be conflated with consonance. Just as Bart Simpson irreverently talks back to representations of authority, so do some grassroots creators “talk back” to the corporate media, articulating their own worldviews by appropriating and repurposing Simpsons material. Counternarratives and inflections of mass-media texts have long been an

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essential part of the vocabulary of popular culture. Given The Simpsons’ referential humor in relation to other pop culture artifacts, Simpsonian aesthetics have become a powerful resource for fan art, internet memes, hashtags, GIFs, Twitter handles, Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Conclusion: The Digital Age, the Mainstreaming of Fandom, and the Rise of The Simpsons Although the media fandoms Jenkins documented in Textual Poachers are examples of how participatory culture may be quasi-institutionalized through organized fan communities, fanzines, and other amateur publications, at that time they were still described as subcultures which operate in the shadows of mass culture, and which are typically detached from the broader public. But today, participatory culture is obviously much more visible than it was at the time Jenkins conducted his research in the late 1980s. “The Web has brought these [fan] consumers from the margins of the media industry into the spotlight,” Jenkins observes in Convergence Culture (2006a, p. 246). And not only fan consumers. As Jenkins notes in retrospect of Textual Poachers, “it has become clearer that fans are only one example of the broader phenomenon of participatory culture” (Jenkins and Scott 2013, p. xxi). Consequently, Jenkins’s 2013 book, Spreadable Media, co-authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, argues that “the appropriation, remixing, and recirculation of [media] content via the mechanisms of participatory culture are increasingly impacting conversations far removed from what once might have been seen as niche communities” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, p. 28). In this connection, it would be misleading to view the cultural phenomenon of The Simpsons solely in the context of a specific fan community. The Simpsons is a media text whose high degree of popularity and familiarity is exceptional, and many of the people contributing to the cultural meanings of The Simpsons will challenge the category of fandom. The Simpsons is not just a cult text as a prototype for fan engagement; it represents a mass-media text that managed the balancing trick of offering both a “cult message and sensibility for fans” and a media franchise that resonated with the global pop culture market (Gray 2014, p. 227). For this reason, I am suggesting that The Simpsons and its iconography furnish what I am calling “popular semiosis,” as a sign system or vernacular that enhances the discursive repertoire—not just of fans but of participatory culture at large. As historical accounts of fan activities have demonstrated, participatory culture—“[people] using the dominant culture and recreating their own

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relationship to it”—did not first emerge with the advent of commercial mass culture; it has always been essential to culture itself (Duncombe 1997, p. 112). Yet the possibilities of derivative material produced by amateur producers have flourished in the second half of the twentieth century, especially given technological innovations such as the photocopier, the camcorder, the personal computer, and the internet. With the advent of the internet, in conjunction with social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr, participatory audiences have indeed obtained powerful communication tools. The digital revolution has offered a vibrant network for virtually anyone to share cultural experiences and circulate homemade media content. In Jenkins’s terms, we live in an age of “convergence culture”—we witness a media culture “where old and new media collide, where non-commercial and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2006a, p. 2). On one level, the media industries welcome and try to tap into audience participation. On another level, though, popular feedback cannot be completely controlled, and the industries cannot predict or govern what is going to happen to their products in the hands of the consumers. Therefore, cultural convergence is both “a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process” (ibid., p. 18). As Jenkins argues, the convergence culture paradigm is interrelated to the aspect of fandom moving “from cult status towards the cultural mainstream,” a process that has been greatly propelled with the digital age (2006b, p. 142). While it is misleading to simply equate participatory culture with fan culture, Jenkins emphasizes the trajectory of fan creativity within the evolution of participatory culture. Along with other traditions of grassroots cultural production, fandom has played a central role in shaping today’s popular culture—with fan practices that had previously taken place in the domestic sphere or in small-scale communities becoming dominant properties of participatory media culture (Jenkins, Ito, and boyd 2016, p. 3, pp. 17–18). Fanhood is an integral part of today’s culture, which we also see in marketing trends that consider fans not only as lucrative consumers but also as valuable multipliers and informal influencers. Obviously, the tremendous success of The Simpsons is linked to this period—the nineties and aughts—where much of media fandom’s original “subcultural” spirit was vanishing. As a consequence, Simpsons fandom in the 1990s looked somewhat different from earlier fan formations—say, the “Trekkers” from the late 1960s through the 1980s, who published fan fiction in homemade and self-distributed zines or attended self-organized

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conventions in Star Trek costumes (e.g., Bacon-Smith 1992). For instance, the biggest Comic-Con, staged annually in San Diego, has long become a commercially organized event, a site where the intersection between the media industries and fan audiences becomes manifest. In this regard, what makes The Simpsons especially intriguing in a context of cultural and media studies is the show’s meaning as both a signifier as well as an amplifier for this “post-subcultural” (cf. Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003) condition. Not only have the producers around Matt Groening been regular guests at Comic-Con, the show’s rise coincided with a time when the internet was emerging as a discursive public sphere, and fan practices and aesthetics were gaining in visibility and impact. (Fittingly enough, 2019 marked the thirtieth anniversary of both The Simpsons and the World Wide Web.) A major reason for the series’ popularity, then, was its representation of media fandom at a time when fan cultures were gaining strong currency in popular discourse. The following chapters will elaborate on The Simpsons’ meaning as a key media text for the (post)millennial age. Looking at the cartoon phenomenon through the prism of transmedia studies—from the show’s original conception as “alternative TV” to its characters’ status as pop-cultural icons—will offer insight into larger cultural shifts regarding media production and reception at the turn of the century.

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Fiske, John. 1987a. “British Cultural Studies and Television.” In Channels of Discourse: Television and Contemporary Criticism, edited by Robert C. Allen, 254–89. London: Methuen. –––. 1987b. Television Culture. London: Methuen. –––. 1989a. “Moments of Television: Neither the Text nor the Audience.” In Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power, edited by Ellen Seiter, Hans Borchers, Gabriele Kreutzner, and Eva-Maria Warth, 56–78. London: Routledge. –––. 1989b. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. –––. 1992. “The Cultural Economy of Fandom.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 30–49. London: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. –––. 2010b. “The Simpsons.” In The Essential Cult TV Reader, edited by David Lavery, 221–28. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Hall, Stuart. (1973) 1980. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–38. London: Hutchinson. –––. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” In People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel, 237–40. London: Routledge/Kegan Paul. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Jefferson, eds. 1976. Resistance through Rituals. London. Hutchinson. Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. (1947) 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ingulsrud, John E., and Kate Allen. 2009. “Analyzing the ‘Critical’ in Media Control Discourse.” Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines 3.1: 80–91. Jenkins, Henry. 1988. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2: 85–107. –––. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. –––. 2003. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” In Rethinking Media Change, edited by David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, 281–309. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. –––. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2006b. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2010. “Why Fiske Still Matters.” In Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed., by John Fiske, xii–xxxvii. London: Routledge.

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2.

Alternative TV: The Genesis of The Simpsons Abstract The Simpsons emerged out of a unique moment in U.S. television history, when Fox Broadcasting began to establish itself as the fourth nationwide broadcasting network by targeting a young-adult audience with its brand of “alternative TV.” In addition to interrogating Fox’s strategy, this chapter introduces the central figures behind The Simpsons. More specifically, I analyze the role of James L. Brooks, whose name and clout as a successful writer-producer largely helped to launch the series. Furthermore, I spotlight the show’s “father,” Matt Groening, an alternative cartoonist who entered the television industry as a sort of “auteur import” from alternative comics culture, thus furnishing the program with street cred and a subcultural sensibility. Keywords: The Simpsons, Fox Broadcasting, James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, television auteur, alternative comics

When The Simpsons premiered on Fox in late 1989, it did not come out of nowhere. In retrospect, no one will dispute the show’s mass appeal; but back in the 1980s, the idea of producing an animated sitcom did not easily harmonize with the concept of mainstream media entertainment. More precisely, the show’s birth might be understood as the effect of multiple negotiation processes—both industry-related and linked to larger cultural shifts. On the one hand, The Simpsons was an industrial experiment; on the other, it filled a cultural void. Throughout the Reagan presidency, television had exhibited a considerable conservative streak. Peter Levy asserts that Reaganism “sought to invoke a nostalgia for the past, for a better and simpler time” (1996, p. 289). This aspiration characterized many television programs of this era, most notably sugar-coated family sitcoms like The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–1992)

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and Family Ties (NBC, 1982–1989). Indeed, Reaganism’s American Dream mythology seemed all-pervasive, and “liberal” content as offered by Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–) found itself mostly at the fringes of the television schedule (either late at night or on niche channels). The degree to which the coming of The Simpsons interrupted prime-time television in America is only understandable against the cultural background of the Reagan years. “It is hard to recapture the sense of just how different The Simpsons really felt when it first came on the air,” as recollected by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones, and Ethan Thompson, the editors of Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (2009, p. 24). Social satire had largely disappeared from the small screen, and for many critical viewers, The Simpsons arrived like rain following a drought. Indeed, The Simpsons was different: first of all, an animated show about television; and it satirized “American social vices by playing with American television, realizing that in a televised nation, social satire must often be both on and about television” (ibid.).

One Moment in Time: The Launch of Fox TV In the f irst place, the birth of The Simpsons is inevitably linked to the foundation of the Fox Broadcasting Company as the fourth major American broadcasting network. Then a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, the Australia-based News Corporation, Fox TV was launched in October 1986. To compete against the long-established “Big Three” (ABC, CBS, NBC), Fox targeted specific niche audiences rather than an assumed mass audience. In doing so, the newly founded network drew on the notion of “demographics,” thereby following a countermodel to television’s broadcasting paradigm. Back in the 1970s, new forms of programming, most notably shows produced by Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker’s production company, MTM Enterprises, had already anticipated the shift from the older mass-audience model to that of “directing television shows toward specific audience groups” (Feuer 1984, p. 3). Supported by statistical data provided by Nielsen ratings in the United States,1 technological developments such as the distribution 1 In 1973, Nielsen introduced its audiometer which documented what channel was being watched by how many people. The people meter arrived in the mid-1980s; it provided much more specific data regarding age, ethnic background, and educational level of a given viewership (see Edgerton 2007, p. 315).

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of cable and satellite television as well as the remote control during the 1980s had fundamentally changed viewing practices, and thus converted the industrial category of a single audience into that of multiple audiences (see Edgerton 2007, pp. 313–15). An important momentum of what Jimmie Reeves, Mark Rodgers, and Michael Epstein (1996) have called the transition from “TV I” to “TV II,” Fox’s approach, was, in a nutshell, narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. As noted by Daniel Kimmel, author of The Fourth Network, Fox’s alternative approach revolutionized the television industry in the long run, as marketing experts started to consider demographics to be more important than the general household numbers (2004, pp. 116–17). More specifically, the network’s strategy targeted a demographic most lucrative to advertisers: a young adult, middle-class, (sub)urban, and multicultural audience—the media-savvy and fandom-oriented offspring of the baby boomers often referred to as “Generation X.” In his 1997 book, Gen X TV, Robert Owen describes how Fox’s establishment had contributed to shape a generation essentially defined through media phenomena, just like the invention of MTV (p. 50). Launched in 1981, the music-video channel had proven the viability for television directed at young adults. The logic behind Fox’s narrowcasting strategy therefore was, as Amanda Lotz observes, to negotiate “the main lines of cultural consensus for the particular network and its typical audience member rather than for society in general” (Lotz 2014, p. 45). To certify itself as a hip, unconventional, or even edgy broadcaster, Fox was willing to break the rules and take risks. With the dysfunctional Bundy family from the sitcom Married. . . with Children (1987–1997), Fox had already tested the boundaries of network television’s comedy taste when The Simpsons followed in late 1989. Alongside Married. . . with Children, 21 Jump Street (1987–1991), Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (1990–1993), and In Living Color (1990–1994), The Simpsons quickly became one of Fox’s signature series by which the channel demonstrated its offbeat, youth-oriented form of programming, a desired distinction from the traditional shows on the traditional networks. The popular cartoon family that we today all know as the Simpsons originated as an interposed sideshow act within the Fox firstling The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–1990), before receiving its own program slot in late 1989. Matt Groening, who originally conceived the main characters and operated as the main writer for the Ullman shorts, has been billed as executive producer and creative consultant for The Simpsons ever since. Groening’s central role in the initial stages of the series notwithstanding, he cannot be considered the architect of The Simpsons’ overall conception, nor as being

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intensively involved in the production of the show. Wallace Wolodarsky, a former Simpsons writer, pointed out in an interview that while Groening had supplied the template for the show, it was largely producer Sam Simon who developed that template, transforming it “into an even bigger world and really flesh[ing] it out with characters. He brought a broader perspective to it. He made it bigger than just the family” (quoted in Ortved 2009, p. 61). Another key figure in the show’s genesis was James L. Brooks. Groening reaffirmed that it was essentially Brooks’s “history and reputation and clout that got The Simpsons on the air” (quoted in Kozikowski 1993, p. 201). Indeed, Brooks’s legacy as television producer is undeniable, and The Simpsons is a show which fits within his body of work. When Brooks approached Fox with the idea of developing the Simpsons shorts into a separate series, he was a long-established, Emmy-decorated veteran in the field of television entertainment. The lead figure behind Tracey Ullman, Brooks had been one of the creative brains at Moore and Tinker’s MTM production company. Among the programs Brooks had (co-)created were such successful “quality” comedies as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977) and Taxi (ABC, 1978–1982; NBC, 1982–1983). Brooks represents the so-called “hyphenate” writ large—that is, the fusion of the writer and the producer into one person. While the idea of the writer-producer has become as a cachet of premium TV in the wake of HBO’s game-changing impact with series like The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Six Feet Under (2001–2005),2 it was groundbreaking at a time when networks began to view figures such as Brooks as guarantors of artistic consistency and commercial success (see Newcomb and Alley 1983, pp. 14–15). Brooks is therefore one of the central figures in the history of “quality” TV as discussed by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi (1984). To Feuer and her co-editors, it is no accident that quality television is a notion associated with independent production companies such as MTM or Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin’s Tandem (later called TAT Communications) production company, which produced progressive shows like All in the Family (CBS, 1971–1979), and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (syndicated, 1976–1977). Unlike the traditional network-affiliated television production studios, their independent equivalents considered a high degree of creative freedom for their writer-producers as a prerequisite for unconventional, innovative, and fresh forms of television entertainment. Conversely, the emergence of the “indie” TV studios was no accident either. As Feuer points out, the rise of the independents had to do with, on the one hand, the younger 2

See, e.g., McCabe and Akass (2007, p. 10).

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“quality demographics” to which the networks were increasingly turning, and on the other, federal measures to regulate the television market (Feuer 1984, pp. 1–4).3 In his 1995 book Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television, John T. Caldwell contends that the success of the independent production companies in the 1970s brought about a cultural appreciation of television entertainment altogether. As Caldwell observes, even though this “TV art . . . was defined structurally by its sparseness and intellectual seriousness, not by messier formal excesses, kitsch, or camp”—that is, by its “content, not form”—both Tandem/TAT and MTM were successful in establishing their own house styles (1995, p. 57). In other words, television was no longer anonymous; hyphenates such as Lear, Brooks, or Michael Mann—followed by what Caldwell dubs “auteur-imports” from the film world (e.g., David Lynch, Spike Lee, and Ridley Scott)—allowed the networks to demonstrate prestige and promote certain programs with a distinct and recognizable signature (ibid., pp. 14–15). In that sense, critics praised the TAT and MTM shows for raising controversial and socially relevant issues. Mary Tyler Moore, for example, centered on a self-sufficient single woman working as an executive producer for a news show in the male-dominated world of television broadcasting. Taxi went even further by touching on themes such as urban decay, social alienation, failed relationships, drug use, gambling addiction, and sexual harassment (see Waldron 1987, pp. 430–68). Given the advance of such “socially conscious” themes, conservative commentators like Ben Stein, in The View from Sunset Boulevard (1979), lamented early on that television producers such as Brooks reflected their personal value systems within the shows they produce. Yet as critics of Stein’s account argue, however true it might be that television producers and writers play a significant role in shaping the values represented in their shows, these micropolitics were certainly confined to an overriding framework provided by capitalist logics—addressing audience tastes, attracting sponsors, pushing ratings—and thus, ultimately, entrepreneurial success (see Gans 1979; Gitlin 1983, p. 269). Hence it would be wrong to conclude that individual writers or producers had infiltrated the television 3 In an attempt to curb the oligopoly of CBS, NBC, and ABC, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented the so-called Financial Interest and Syndication (Fin-Sync) Rules in 1970, which limited the amount of programming produced by the networks. The Fin-Sync Rules are often considered to have boosted independent production companies, most notably Tandem/TAT and MTM Enterprises (see Edgerton 2007, p. 280).

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industry; rather, their political agenda resonated with a considerable group of viewers. Liberal television entertainment enjoyed great popularity from the post-1960s onward throughout the 1970s. If American television in the 1980s contrasted this trend by largely mirroring the conservative backlash of Reaganism, the rise of The Simpsons, in many ways, marked a return of the liberal antiestablishment sensibility that typified television in the 1970s. The supersession of the older broadcast paradigm, and the emergence of the Fox network as “alternative” television for young adults who embraced the channel’s “renegade” image (Alberti 2004, p. xxii), offered The Simpsons’ writers an opportunity to promote a liberal agenda on mainstream TV and purposely go for moments of transgression. In juxtaposition to the conservative media landscape of the Reagan years, The Simpsons echoed the social consciousness of 1970s quality programming in that it caricaturized the dysfunctional family and society. Domestic violence, drug consumption and alcoholism, social class, atheism, and homosexuality were classic liberal themes The Simpsons’ writers touched upon, albeit in a lighthearted, funny way, which was further eased by the show’s cartoon form. While potentially enjoyable to an audience made up of both liberals and conservatives, The Simpsons mostly rewarded a liberal slant by addressing such concerns as environmental issues, the plight of the U.S. public school system, the excesses of capitalism, and the moral abysses of political culture. Another aspect here is that of language: in addition to youth slang, The Simpsons’s writers provoked by including vocabulary considered indecent. Since the show’s inception, its writers have challenged fault lines by smuggling words such as “butt,” “piss,” “ass,” “hell,” “damn,” or “wanker” into the dialogues. While this register did not directly violate the regulatory guidelines of television broadcasting in the America, they were certainly considered edgy by the contemporary prime-time network standards. 4 4 Until the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which included the Communications Decency Act that fundamentally regulated issues of accepted decency within media content, the FCC used the 1978 case FCC v. Pacifica Foundation as a guideline for foul language within broadcast media content (Jost 2013). The Pacifica decision strengthened the FCC in ruling over cases of indecency and was based on a satirical performance by George Carlin in which he recited the seven “Filthy Words” one must not say on radio or television: “shit,” “piss,” “fuck,” “cunt,” “cocksucker,” “motherfucker,” and “tits.” The Simpsons’ usage of “wanker” in the episode “Trash of Titans” (1998) caused much more controversies in the United Kingdom than in the U.S. since in British usage the word’s connotative meaning is considered much ruder (Dowell 2008). For censorship of the word bastard in a Simpsons episode, see Groening (1993).

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Partners in Crime Brooks’s status as a prominent writer-producer might associate his persona with the idea of the television auteur. The term auteur (“author”) is of French origin and has become an internationally established (albeit disputed) concept in film criticism since its popularization by a group of French film theorists centering around André Bazin (see Hayward 2006, p. 32). Auteur theory stems from the notion that filmmakers have an original signature style which is discernible in their films, similar to an artist’s distinctive art style. Even more so than in film, it raises controversies to identify such an individual sensibility when it comes to the production of television entertainment. Traditionally, television shows have been produced anonymously and according to the networks’ guidelines. As Robert J. Thomson observes, “Creation in television is an issue of power. Not just imaginative power or intellectual power but organizational, occupational, and entrepreneurial power as well” (1990, p. 1). Thus, the 1980s and 1970s have given rise to writer-producers—“hyphenates”—who have “amassed a great deal of power within the production organization” (p. 2), as well as “auteur imports” (Caldwell 1995, p. 14), both of which have significantly influenced television serial production in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century (cf. Nochimson 2019). Cultural criticism in the vein of Fredric Jameson has called into question the idea that an individual style can prevail within a cultural environment where art is perverted into a commodity. While I neither want to make a case for nor discuss Jameson’s theory of postmodernism in detail, it suffices to say that such criticism has become all the more relevant in the televisual context, where artistic production is de facto “integrated into commodity production,” as Jameson puts it (1991, p. 4). Like its precursor—the radio—television has traditionally pushed the role of the director into the background. Television’s infrastructure, in particular, is industrial in nature and complicates the question of authorship, since many people at various stages are involved in the process of creating a certain television program. Suitably, John Ellis speaks of television in terms of an assembly-line produced medium whose modes of production follow capitalist rules of standardization (2004, p. 278). Hence, we have to consider a TV show like The Simpsons as a collaborative product: the result of a negotiation between the network’s executives, numerous writers, producers and showrunners, as well as various directors. Not surprisingly, for a series that has been on the air for more than three decades, this constellation has also been more or less in flux, with changing producers for many of the seasons as well as different directors and writers

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for many of the individual episodes. As of Season 32, Wikipedia (2021a; 2021b) lists 147 different writers and thirty-nine directors. Other creatives include the layout artists at The Simpsons’ animation studio (initially the small Hollywood-based enterprise Klasky-Csupo, which was replaced by the Burbank studio Film Roman with The Simpsons’ fourth season in the fall of 1993). The animators are also part of the creative process as they develop storyboards, backgrounds, the characters’ movements and design before the material goes to an animation studio in Seoul, South Korea, where the visuals are assembled (see Silverman 2005). Furthermore, there are the voice actors, who constitute an important element within animated forms of entertainment. The original actors for The Simpsons were recruited from the Ullman cast and received credits for some of The Simpsons’ signature features, such as Dan Castellaneta’s creation of Homer Simpson’s iconic exclamation “D’oh!” (see Groening [2007] 2012). And yet, although The Simpsons illustrates the idea of television programming as a factory-like mode of production, the show has by no means been exemplary in this regard. While tasks like the outsourcing of the animation process to South Korea were certainly economic decisions, the series’ creation was largely improvised and experimental. As mentioned earlier, the realization of the show profited to a very great extent from the formative phase of the Fox network. After Fox’s executives had greenlit the project, this meant first of all that the show’s producers were on their own to get the series going. In an interview with Tom Heintjes, veteran Simpsons director David Silverman (2005) emphasized the project’s DIY character in its initial years. In the beginning, the production of The Simpsons was executed in a small-scale environment on the 20th Century Fox lot in West Los Angeles. This included the writers, a handful of animators, and producers Groening, Brooks, and Simon. Unlike most of the writers and producers of the show, especially those involved in the graphics were inexperienced in creating a television series, as it presented a much bigger challenge than the two-minute Simpsons shorts for Tracey Ullman. On the other hand, The Simpsons’ staff took comfort in the situation of being mostly left alone by Fox’s executives.5 Silverman even states that The Simpsons’ writers had “complete [creative] autonomy,” except for Fox’s general standards. That the series’ writing has been executed without any notes from Fox since the show’s inception is an aspect underscored in many

5 To get an impression of the (relatively few) attempts of Fox to control the content of The Simpsons, see, e.g., Ortved (2009, pp. 236–40) and Turner (2004, pp. 248–49).

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interviews with the figures behind the show. Longtime writer and producer Mike Scully, for example, remarked that One of the great things about being involved with The Simpsons is that it’s a completely unique experience as a writer, because 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 twelve people going over your script, telling you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, and we don’t have that here. (Quoted in Sloane 2004, p. 141)

While commonly unthinkable within network television, this unusually high degree of creative freedom has to be understood, first of all, in the specific moment that constituted the formation of the Fox network. Fox’s early years allowed for experiments and granted The Simpsons’ writers a kind of satirical immunity, even covering swipes at the show’s own network, Fox. Notorious for being headed by the conservative and hidebound media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Fox not only proved to be a convenient target for occasional moments of “transgression” that would soon become one of the show’s hallmarks, but also benefited from a lucrative pie-in-the-face image well in tune with the anything-goes logic of capitalism in the neoliberal age. In addition to Fox’s tolerance, the commitment of its executive producers Brooks and Simon is what made The Simpsons an exceptional show. Brooks’s influence in asserting a high level of independence for the show’s writers—what he has experienced as a prerequisite for the production of quality entertainment in his own career—cannot be overstated. As Carina Chocano (2001) asserts, the producers’ standing was a decisive factor in achieving this autonomy and maintaining it over the years. In addition to Brooks, Chocano emphasizes Simon’s crucial role as the series’ initial showrunner. Formerly an executive story editor for Taxi as well as a writer-producer for NBC’s 1980s sitcom hit Cheers (1982–1993), Simon had already co-produced Tracey Ullman and was later responsible for hiring the show’s foundational writing staff, including comedy heavyweights such as Al Jean, Mike Reiss, George Meyer, Conan O’Brien, and John Swartzwelder. Many of the original writers were Harvard alumni—“geeks” who had already contributed to the college’s humor magazine, the Harvard Lampoon, and its spinoff, the widely-circulated National Lampoon. Bill Oakley, one of these original writers and another Harvard alumnus, mentioned that during his stint as a Simpsons writer from 1991 to 1997, “there was never a time that there were less than 80 percent Harvard Lampoon graduates on the staff” (quoted in Ortved 2009, p. 149). At the same time, this established

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a sort of “men’s club”—a male-dominated creative space, which corroborates Suzanne Scott’s (2019) critique of the creative media industries’ androcentric hegemony. Thus, it was only with Season 6, during David Mirkin’s term as showrunner, that a woman (Jennifer Crittenden) had been first admitted to the all-male circle of the show’s writing room. As of Season 32, among the 147 people having written for the show, Wikipedia (2021b) lists only twenty-three women, over half of them employed since Season 30. In fact, under longtime showrunner Al Jean’s tenure, since 2003, a more inclusive climate seems to have begun, increasingly adding women to the writers’ room. Initially, The Simpsons turned out to be a platform on which a cadre of comedy writers could act out. Longtime Simpsons writer Mike Reiss emphasizes the meaning of The Simpsons for placing 1970s college humor on prime time: We all come from this background of comedy that has never been big and popular—it’s this Letterman school or Saturday Night Live, Harvard Lampoon, National Lampoon. . . . It’s as though we finally found a vehicle for this sensibility, where we can do the kind of humor and the attitudes, yet in a package that more people are willing to embrace. (Quoted in Rushkoff 2004, p. 300)

Indeed, The Simpsons’ writing has often been acclaimed as among the most sophisticated and complex in television history. Strikingly, the show’s writers pulled the balancing act of courting a dual audience. Avid fan-viewers were invited to participate in the game of detecting references in the allusionriddled text that is The Simpsons, while another level of comedy could still be enjoyed by a broader viewership (like slapstick and graphic humor that is also attractive to children). The Simpsons’ mainstream success, then, proved that television comedy was not necessarily a vulgar form of entertaining ourselves to death. The show’s appeal demonstrated television’s intellectual capacities through a form of “complex comedy,” which drew not just a massive YA demographic in general but also a more intensively engaged fan audience. In this sense, The Simpsons can be regarded as one of the trailblazers for “high pop” as we have seen it develop in complex television series since the late 1990s.

Matt Groening: The Signature on The Simpsons Arguably the most significant trait of The Simpsons in its formative years was the program’s countercultural vibe, strengthened by the cartoon clan’s

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“father,” Matt Groening, and his biography as alternative cartoonist and pop culture aficionado. This may be because many people feel comfortable with the somewhat romantic notion that drawn images originate from an individual artist. On the other hand, this has also been an essential part of marketing The Simpsons. In fact, Groening’s background as underground cartoonist had originally fueled The Simpsons’ connotation as “alternative” TV show to a great extent. Put differently, Groening’s reputation as an independent grassroots cartoonist charged The Simpsons with an air of alternativeness. Unlike The Simpsons’ producers and writing staff, the creator of the show’s core characters had been foreign to the television industry before he was asked to provide cartoon characters for The Tracey Ullman Show. If auteur figures “imported” from the film medium were meant to provide both a certain network and television program with “a visionary aura of artistry and aesthetic challenge” (Caldwell 1991, p. 14), Matt Groening was such an import too, yet from the world of alternative comics, where authorship has a long tradition that rose in America with the underground comix movement of the 1970s (cf. Fink 2018). As Paul Wells (2002, pp. 74–76) has noted, animation has always involved the role of the auteur, whether on a textual (as an agency that executes the organizing principles) or on an extra-textual basis (a figure who embodies distinction). In the case of The Simpsons, the prior aspect might originally describe the role of James L. Brooks; Wells’s latter attribution, however, is comparable with Caldwell’s notion of auteur imports into television that serve the purpose of “aesthetic badges and trophies of distinction” (Caldwell 1991, p. 14). Thus, in addition Brooks, Groening carried an auteurist function for The Simpsons as well, in that he provided an aesthetic badge for Fox: an animated sitcom with an alternative comics sensibility billed by the label “created by Matt Groening.” In the wake of The Simpsons, this type of television cartoon auteurism became a fashion of its own through the figures of Groening (Futurama, Disenchantment) Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill), Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park), or Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad!, The Cleveland Show). However, to name Groening as the sole creator or author of The Simpsons is of course inaccurate. Notably, he was only involved in the writing of the Simpsons shorts and a few episodes in the series’ early years. Officially credited as executive producer and creative consultant, Groening instead came to serve as the series’ prominent spokesperson, the public “face” and creative voice of The Simpsons (a role that has increasingly been adopted by showrunner Al Jean). Shortly after the beginning of the series, Groening

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retreated from the creative process around the show entirely, in part because of growing conflicts with original showrunner Simon, and was henceforth no longer deeply involved in the production of The Simpsons (see Ortved 2009, pp. 60–61). Nevertheless, the franchise’s general association with Matt Groening has been maintained, as John Alberti notes, for the sake of the show’s “visual look” (2004, p. xxi). This is apparent in the Simpsons logo which remains stylized in Groening’s handwriting (a font called “Simpsonfont,” which can be used for word-processing software). Another domain that seems to have remained in Groening’s hands is Simpsons merchandising, including Simpsons comics and video games (see Sharp 2006, p. 691). As Ortved points out, “To this day, Groening signs off on every piece of Simpsons merchandise that goes on the market” (2009, p. 50). As a requirement of licensing the trademark The Simpsons™, Groening’s name—stylized in the Simpsons/ Groening font—must appear beside the Simpsons logo on all merchandise articles. This directive still supports the marketing of The Simpsons as a “subversive” enterprise under the rule of an underground cartoonist, even though it remains doubtful whether Groening really is personally in charge of Simpsons licensing. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 1997, Groening noted that, while he received about an 8 percent licensing fee on all Simpsons merchandise articles, “Fox controls the merchandising,” that he “couldn’t control the wave, but . . . tried to surf on it.” He added he would go into a shop and see new Simpsons merchandise, wondering, “What the hell is that? We did [Simpsons] swizzle sticks?” (Quoted in Matzer 1997, n.p.) Groening’s “rags to riches” story constitutes a popular narrative: Groening’s career as an artist started slowly, in the L.A. alternative comics scene. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1977 at the age of twenty-three and felt completely lost in the city (see Lenburg 2011, pp. 28–30). In between working dead-end jobs and unemployment, he clerked for the legendary punk rock record store Licorice Pizza on Sunset Boulevard. The job allowed him to sell photocopies of a comic strip he drew called Life in Hell (1978–2012)—in true DIY manner—by offering photocopies to the customers for $2 apiece (see Morgenstern 1990). After its first official publication in alternative magazine Wet in 1978, Life in Hell’s first serial appearance began in 1980 (see Ortved 2009, pp. 16–17). When Groening eventually took a job as a rock critic at the Los Angeles Reader, he got the chance to publish the comic strip on a weekly basis. With its main characters, the rabbits Binky and Bongo along with the gay couple Akbar and Jeff, Life in Hell featured aesthetic traits that would comprise Groening’s signature in the Simpsons characters: a simplistic, crude drawing style with bold outlines; four fingers per hand

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and huge bulgy eyes, as well as an exaggerated overbite that would become one of Groening’s stylistic trademarks. Originally, Groening was asked to use his Life in Hell characters for Tracey Ullman but, afraid that he would lose his copyright, he came up with a whole other ensemble of cartoon characters instead (see Chocano 2001). Legend has it that Groening conceived the Simpsons characters in a few minutes while waiting in Brooks’s office. As Ortved points out, however, Groening has also given credit to Jay Kennedy, an editor at the cartoon and comic strips distribution company King Features Syndicate and friend of Groening, for having encouraged him to use human forms rather than rabbits for the TV shorts, thereby making the characters more marketable (see Ortved 2009, p. 49). What remains undisputed, though, is that Groening submitted some black-and-white sketches and layouts of the Simpson family as templates. The producers of Tracey Ullman liked it and hired Klasky-Csupo to produce the animated shorts for which Groening drew the storyboards in a sort of “guerilla-style animation,” as Michael Mendel, the postproduction supervisor of The Tracey Ullman Show and The Simpsons, recalled in an interview. “It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple of directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week” (quoted in Ortved 2009, pp. 54–55). In an interview with Heintjes, Silverman (2005) mentions that Groening’s sketches were very rough and needed to be fundamentally developed by the animators. That was also where the Simpsons characters received their color from colorist Gyorgyi Peluce, who came up with the now iconic Simpsons iconography by turning the characters’ skin yellow and Marge’s beehive hair blue. Thus, while Groening is certainly the “inventor” of the Simpson family, his singular authorship becomes increasingly shaky from this point onward. Nevertheless, Groening’s imprint on The Simpsons is indisputable. This starts with the Simpsons’ names—Homer, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie—named after Groening’s own family members (with Matt himself represented by Bart, an anagram of “brat” with aural similarities to “bark” and “fart”), or the family’s fictional address, 742 Evergreen Terrace, named after the street where Groening lived as a child in Portland, Oregon (Manuel 2017). By inserting such autobiographical aspects, Groening not only associated The Simpsons with his persona, he also cultivated a fan following that embraced such inside knowledge. As with the countless allusions that permeate the Simpsons text, this extra information strengthened the connection between Groening and the show’s audience. It is, in William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo’s words, part of “the cultivation of intimacy” where “author and audience become intimately connected” (Irwin and Lombardo 2001, p. 86).

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Furthermore, Groening’s mistrust of societal institutions and authorities, which had been the leitmotif of Life is Hell, became a dominant feature of The Simpsons. To a great degree, Groening’s worldviews and liberal sentiments harmonized with those of Brooks, Simon, and the other Simpsons writers, since this credo clearly persisted in the show. In an early interview with Rolling Stone, Groening expressed his vision to produce popular entertainment with a considerable portion of subversion hidden within it: “And if I can make myself and my friends laugh and can annoy the hell out of a political conservative, I feel like I’ve done my job” (quoted in Hamilton 1988, n.p.). According to Groening, The Simpsons is meant to promote a liberal agenda. He considers the series a tool for civic pedagogy in that one of the show’s central messages is that “your moral authorities don’t always have your best interest in mind. Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians—for the Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids,” he told Mother Jones in 1999 (quoted in Doherty 1999, n.p.). In fact, The Simpsons is a show that revived older enemy stereotypes popular in the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, on The Simpsons, the police are represented by the incompetent, piggish Chief Wiggum, a character allusive of depictions of police forces in the notorious Fritz the Cat (1972, dir. Ralph Bakshi; based on a comic strip by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb). Another recurring image in The Simpsons’ initial seasons was Richard Nixon. The quintessential archenemy to many liberals as well as a popular target of satire in the 1960s and 1970s, Nixon embodies a relic of Groening’s (and probably many of The Simpsons’ writers) adolescent years (cf. Groening [2007] 2012). On the whole, Groening’s visual signature has fundamentally shaped The Simpsons’ now iconic look, with the characters appearance and miseen-scène mirroring the visual style Groening made his trademark in Life in Hell. While the idea of the auteur complicates and destabilizes the notion of the industrially produced television text that is The Simpsons, this tension is intensified by Groening’s image as alternative cartoonist and cultural critic. In many interviews, Groening maintains the impression that he feels comfortable with his role as a “pirate underground cartoonist [who] had hijacked the airwaves,” as Chris Turner puts it (p. 24). “My goal from the very beginning was to invade pop culture,” Groening said in “The Simpsons’ 20th Anniversary Special—In 3-D! On Ice!” (2010), a special Simpsons episode and documentary directed by Morgan Spurlock. “That was my goal as an underground cartoonist. See how far I can carry this.” With entertainment like “his” 1990s shows (The Simpsons and Futurama), Groening intends to

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reveal “some of the ways in which we’re being manipulated and exploited” in our media culture (quoted in Doherty 1999, n.p.). Couched in the comfort zone of the aims justifying the means, Groening consistently reiterates the meaning of The Simpsons to function as a sort of Trojan horse within the television system: “What’s the alternative?” he asks interviewer Brian Doherty. “You tell me where else I could go and still reach the audience. If there is a wonderful progressive studio to go work for, point me to it. That’s one of the frustrating things about Hollywood—you can’t go, ‘Fuck you, I’m going to the good guys’” (ibid.). Echoing Douglas Rushkoff’s (1994) notion of The Simpsons functioning as a media virus that is able to bypass the censorship of institutionalized media under the cloak of being “just a cartoon,” Groening views The Simpsons as an intervention into commercial television. Thus he interprets the yellow color of most Simpsons characters metaphorically as an interruption of the television message: “It looks as if there’s something wrong with your TV set” (Groening 2000, n.p.).6 Aware of the dilemma that The Simpsons is meant to critique the very medium from which it originates, Groening notes, “I feel a little bit like a fish trying to analyze its own aquarium water, but what I want to do is point out the way TV is unconsciously structured to keep us all distracted” (quoted in Doherty 1999, n.p.). While Groening has undoubtedly contributed to strengthening The Simpsons’ underground reputation, to associate him with the notion of the television auteur is clearly misleading. Groening’s credit then refers much more to a certain degree of subcultural authenticity or “street credibility” rather than to an executive authority over the Simpsons media franchise—which demonstrated a dispute over the show’s course between Groening and Simon that caused Groening to withdraw from the production of The Simpsons (see Fink 2019, pp. 27–28).

Television from Fans for Fans Groening’s grassroots aura is strengthened by the cartoonist’s credentials as a pop culture geek. Since his early childhood, Groening has been heavily drawn to the very staples of American popular culture, a great deal of which was introduced by his father, Homer Groening, who was also a cartoonist and 6 Needless to say, these cartoon characters have long become an integral part of the television image. To many viewers today, watching The Simpsons is associated with familiarity rather than disruption.

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filmmaker (see Lenburg 2011, pp. 13–18). Like many cartoonists, Matt Groening has made no secret of how he admired fellow comics artists, especially those of the 1970s alternative comics scene such as Lynda Barry, Charles Burns (both of whom he knew from his time as an editor for the school paper at Evergreen State College), Gary Panter, Art Spiegelman, and Robert Crumb. Furthermore, he cites older cartoon strips—George Heriman’s Krazy Kat (1913–1944), Al Capp’s Li’l Abner (1934–1977), Walt Kelly’s Pogo (1948–1975), and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000)—as points of reference for his own artistic trajectory (see Busack n.d. [1999]). Obviously, Schulz’s Peanuts characters served as templates for Groening’s initial sketches. As Groening mentioned in an interview, Schulz’s influence was visually reflected in the Charlie Brown–style striped shirts of his characters Akbar and Jeff (ibid.). All these characteristics position Groening within a continuum of pop culture producers which Scott (2013) defines through what she calls the “fanboy auteur.” Scott thereby refers to the model of male creators strengthening the cult status of the particular media property they represent via their dual identity as unabashed fans and visible author figures. This corresponds to Catherine Johnson’s observation (2005) for television in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where shows like The Simpsons, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (originally 1988–1999, on different channels), and Beavis and Butt-Head (MTV, originally 1993–1997) were attempts by nascent channels to target the fan-consumer market. Authorial performances as well as paratexts—interviews, commentaries, and other “bonus” material—by figures like Matt Groening propose to function as extensions of the fanconsumer experience of media franchises such as The Simpsons. More specifically, fanboy auteurs potentially strengthen the “affective value” (Scott 2013, p. 45) for audiences in engaging with a certain media text; figures like Groening suggest a more intimate, “dialogic” relationship between the creators and the fans (p. 47). In emphasizing his dual role as artist and fan, Groening might have spoken the same language as most of The Simpsons’ original writers. Consisting of baby boomers raised on a diet of sitcoms, cartoons, and comics, The Simpsons’ founding fathers considered themselves “comic-book nerds” (Jean et al. 2002, 01:06). This identification with “comic book nerds” indicates how The Simpsons’ producers have viewed themselves as connected to fan culture traditions—especially science fiction, fantasy, and comics fandom—whose influence on the show will be discussed in more depth in Chapter 4. A particular point of reference of those initially involved in the production was a deep admiration for the popular post–World War II era satire magazine MAD (1952–2019). Emphasizing the significance of MAD

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for cultivating a humor shared by a whole generation of baby boomers, former writer Bill Oakley states in Ortved’s book: “Basically everyone who was young between 1955 and 1975 read MAD, and that’s where your sense of humor came from” (quoted in Ortved 2009, p. 283). Indeed, the role MAD has played in influencing a whole generation with its parodic approach can hardly be overstated. MAD’s status as a comic magazine, whose premise was to spoof political, popular, and corporate culture, has worked to “challenge totalizing rhetoric within the American cultural, intellectual, and political establishment, and to call for readerly autonomy” (Matthews 2007, p. 212). In her monograph Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (1991), Maria Reidelbach emphasizes the effect of this aesthetic on MAD’s readership in the sense that the magazine armed readers “with a crucial weapon against the onslaught [of post-war consumerism]” (p. 55). Ethan Thompson’s study (2011) specifies this MAD-effect. As Thompson notes, the magazine’s parodies were, in fact, texts of instruction which “encouraged an active participation with media texts” (p. 11). They provided “protocols” for popular counterreadings, “based on strategies of recycling, reappropriation, and recombination” (p. 49). This instructive approach has substantively informed The Simpsons’ DNA of satirical comedy. If MAD managed to reach a massive audience of kids and young adults by being the only one of its kind in post-war America, The Simpsons somewhat shared that fate—at least for some years. Amalgamating MAD’s antiestablishment humor with the sitcom’s originally sincere affection for the family as bourgeois society’s most basic unit, the series’ mainstream success and mass appeal echoed MAD’s older role in that The Simpsons shaped the zeitgeist of its Gen X audience. In his study of The Simpsons’ use of parody, Jonathan Gray emphasized the show’s quality as “popular media literacy educator” (2006, p. 109). Like its predecessor, The Simpsons routinely featured spoof ads and faux products that viewers can critically relate to their own media-saturated environment. In a vein that recalls MAD’s anti-corporate rhetoric, the creators of The Simpsons caricature objects the audience may recall from the real world through an elaborate visual approach that parodies the language and symbolism of consumer culture (see Fink 2017). Thus, much of The Simpsons’ comedy is based on a mode of indirect viewing which Gray links to what he calls “critical intertextuality”: if you watch the show or discuss it with your friends, you are “laughing at and playing with discourses of genre, and indirectly discussing and criticizing other media forms” (2006, p. 2; emphasis in original). The Simpsons, in other words, pursued the role MAD had in the Boomer era by exploiting

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the potential of parody—not only parody’s compatibility with mainstream culture (see Hendra 1987, p. 140), but also its pedagogic effect. In that sense, The Simpsons took over MAD’s role to cultivate an ironic relationship towards the products of consumer culture both as commodities and objects of fannish sentiments. MAD’s significance as one of the twentieth century’s major touchstones in U.S. media history cannot be stressed enough, for its style of humor fundamentally renegotiated the degree of “transgression” and “subcultural” appeal possible within a mainstream media context. Switching to the magazine format to evade the Comics Code, which effectively censured “indecent” content in the comics industry, MAD lived on as a satirical organ in its truest subversive sense. In a way, The Simpsons’ producers followed in MAD’s footsteps when they succeeded in spinning off the shorts for Tracey Ullman into the sitcom format, thus drawing a much bigger audience for their cartoon’s humor, which appeared quite edgy at that time.

Conclusion No mass-media text is the product of a monolithic, industrial entity; there are always multiple agencies involved in creating mass-media content. In other words, every mass-media text is the result of processes of negotiation. This is especially relevant in the context of the broadcast medium that is television. As shown in this chapter, The Simpsons entered the media landscape at a time when the American television industry found itself in a stage of transformation. For this purpose, I have laid out to what extent contextual conditions played a major role in The Simpsons’ genesis. The Fox network, I have argued, transformed the televisual landscape thanks to its attempt to court a new generation of media-savvy viewers. Rather than addressing a mainstream audience, the nascent Fox network and the producers of The Simpsons targeted an audience segment of young adults characterized by fan-consumer tastes and an affinity for progressive, “edgy” content. Fox’s neoliberal marketing strategy included targeting this niche audience through placing “countercultural” themes within a mainstream media package. To a significant degree, those who envisioned the show provided this “alternativeness.” More precisely, I have addressed the question to what extent the white men (and we are indeed dealing almost exclusively with white men here) “behind the show” shaped The Simpsons to represent a forum for liberal ideas and subcultural sensibilities (an aspect that will be further discussed in Chapter 4).

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Such an understanding invokes, first of all, Matt Groening’s reputation and street credibility as underground cartoonist that informed The Simpsons’ maverick image. In addition to Groening, I have discussed the function of James L. Brooks and Sam Simon, as well as the original staff that produced The Simpsons. As I have argued, it was this particular constellation that led to the groundbreaking phenomenon that was The Simpsons—a liberal show emerging in the wake of the conservative climate of 1980s prime-time network television. Admittedly, this perspective was challenging insofar as it assumes the notion of television auteurism—the idea that individual people are able to shape a given television program in their own distinct styles and (political) worldviews. But it helped to understand the unique TV phenomenon that The Simpsons represented in its initial years, with a distinct set of qualitative features as well as a pronounced subcultural sensibility.

References Alberti, John. 2004. “Introduction.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, xi–xxxii. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Busack, Richard von. n.d. [1999]. “‘Life’ Before Homer: Richard von Busack Celebrates the 11th Season Premiere of The Simpsons with a—D’oh!—Previously Unpublished 1986 Interview with Matt Groening.” Metroactive.com. Archived at: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.02.00/groening-0044.html (accessed June 19, 2019). Caldwell, John Thornton. 1995. Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chocano, Carina. 2001. “Matt Groening.” Salon.com, January 30. Archived at: https:// www.salon.com/2001/01/30/groening/ (accessed June 19, 2019). Doherty, Brian. 1999. “Matt Groening: The Creator of The Simpsons on His New Sci-Fi TV Show, Why It’s Nice to Be Rich, and How the ACLU Infringed on his Rights.” Mother Jones, March/April. Archived at: http://www.motherjones.com/ media/1999/03/matt-groening/# (accessed June 19, 2019). Dowell, Ben. 2008. “The Simpsons: Channel 4 Apologises for Pre-Watershed Swearing.” Guardian, June 9. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/ jun/09/channel4.ofcom (accessed June 19, 2019). Edgerton, Gary R. 2007. The Columbia History of American Television. New York: Columbia University Press. Ellis, John. 2004. “Television Production.” In The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, 275–93. London: Routledge.

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Feuer, Jane. 1984. “MTM Enterprises: An Overview.” In MTM: “Quality Television,” edited by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, 1–31. London: British Film Institute. Feuer, Jane, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vahimagi, eds. 1984. MTM: “Quality Television.” London: British Film Institute. Fink, Moritz. 2017. “Culture Jamming in Prime Time: The Simpsons and the Tradition of Corporate Satire.” In Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, edited by Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, 254–79. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2018. “Of Maus and Gen: Author Avatars in Nonfiction Comics.” International Journal of Comic Art 20.1: 267–96. –––. 2019. The Simpsons: A Cultural History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gans, Herbert J. 1979. “Televising Our Values.” The Nation, March 10, 1979: 278–80. Gitlin, Todd. 1983. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson. 2009. “The State of Satire, the Satire of State.” In Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era, edited by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey P. Jones, and Ethan Thompson, 3–36. New York: New York University Press. Groening, Matt. 1993. “Groening Has Breathed New Life into Prime-Time Animation and Inspired a Merchandising Empire to Boot: Richard Gehr Talks to the Show-Biz Guerilla.” Spin 8.10: 54–57, 76. –––. 2000. My Wasted Life. Orig. aired on BBC on June 23. Posted by Arizonabay on YouTube, November 1, 2008. Archived at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iX4L1DGtdKU (accessed June 19, 2019). –––. (2007) 2012. Matt Groening: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview). Playboy. Kindle file. Hamilton, Trish. 1988. “Rabbit Punch.” Rolling Stone, September 1988: 81–82, 113. Hayward, Susan. 2006. Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Hendra, Tony. 1987. Going Too Far: The Rise and Demise of Sick, Gross, Black, Sophomoric, Weirdo, Pinko, Anarchist, Underground, Anti-Establishment Humor. New York: Dolphin-Doubleday. Irwin, William, and J. R. Lombardo. 2001. “The Simpsons and Allusion: ‘Worst Essay Ever.’” In The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer, edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conrad, and Aeon J. Skoble, 81–92. Chicago: Open Court. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jean, Al, et al. 2002. “Audio Commentary for ‘Three Men and a Comic Book.’” The Simpsons: The Complete Second Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD.

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Johnson, Catherine. 2005. “Quality/Cult Television: The X-Files and Television History.” In The Contemporary Television Series, edited by Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon, 57–72. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jost, Kenneth. 2013. “Indecency on Television. CQ Researcher, November 9. 965-88. Kimmel, Daniel M. 2004. The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television. Chicago: Dee. Kozikowski, Thomas. 1993. “Groening, Matt: 1954–.” In Contemporary Authors: A Bio-Biographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction, General Nonfiction, Poetry, Journalism, Drama, Motion Pictures, Television, and other Fields, Vol. 138, edited by Donna Olendorf, 196–203. Detroit: Gale. Lenburg, Jeff. 2011. Matt Groening: From Spitballs to Springfield. New York: Chelsea House. Levy, Peter B. 1996. “Popular Culture.” Encyclopedia of the Reagan-Bush Years. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. 2nd. ed. New York: New York University Press. Manuel, Joseph. 2017. “‘The Simpsons’ Landmarks in Portland.” Travel Portland, July 21. Archived at https://www.travelportland.com/article/simpsons/ (accessed June 19, 2019). Matthews, Kristin L. 2007. “A Mad Proposition in Postwar America.” Journal of American Culture 30.2: 212–21. Matzer, Marla. 1997. “Simpsons Sales: Halving a Cow.” Los Angeles Times, Special to the Times, September 25. Archived at: http://articles.latimes.com/1997/sep/25/ business/fi-35880 (accessed August 23, 2018). McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. 2007. “Introduction: Debating Quality.” In Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, edited by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, 1–11. London: I. B. Tauris. Morgenstern, Joe. 1990. “Bart Simpson’s Real Father: Recalling the Fear and Absurdity of Childhood, Matt Groening Has Created a Cartoon Sitcom more Human than Most Live-Action Shows.” Los Angeles Times, April 29. Archived at: http:// articles.latimes.com/1990-04-29/magazine/tm-544_1_matt-groening (accessed August 23, 2018). Newcomb, Horace, and Robert S. Alley. 1983. The Producer’s Medium: Conversations with Creators of American TV. New York: Oxford University Press. Nochimson, Martha O. 2019. Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ortved, John. 2009. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. New York: Faber & Faber. Owen, Rob. 1997. Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.

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Reeves, Jimmie L., Mark C. Rodgers, and Michael Epstein. 1996. “Rewriting Popularity: The Cult Files.” In Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright, 22–35. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Reidelbach, Maria. 1991. Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Rushkoff, Douglas. 1994. Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York: Ballantine. –––. 2004. “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 292–301. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Scott, Suzanne. 2013. “Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling.” In The Participatory Cultures Handbook, edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, 43–52. New York: Routledge. –––. 2019: Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry. New York: New York University Press. Sharp, Michael D. 2005. “The Simpsons (1989–).” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Vol. 3, edited by Gary Westfahl. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. Silverman, David. 2005. Interview by Tom Heintjes. “Family Matters: The David Silverman Interview.” MSNBC, November 30. Archived at: https://web.archive. org/web/20100217065814/http://cagle.msnbc.com/hogan/interviews/silverman. asp (accessed June 19, 2019). Sloane, Robert. 2004. “Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment in The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 137–71. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Thompson, Ethan. 2011. Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Robert J. 1990. Adventures on Prime Time: The Television Programs of Stephen J. Cannell. New York: Praeger. Turner, Chris. 2004. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo. Waldron, Vince. 1987. Classic Sitcoms: A Celebration of the Best Prime-Time Comedy. New York: Macmillan. Wells, Paul. 2002. Animation and America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wikipedia. 2021a. “List of Directors of The Simpsons.” Last update on May 24. Archived at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_directors_of_The_Simpsons (accessed May 30, 2021). –––. 2021b. “List of The Simpsons Writers.” Last update on May 24. Archived at: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Simpsons_writers (accessed May 30, 2021).

3.

More than Just a Cartoon: MetaTelevision Culture and the Age of Irony Abstract The cultural climate of the 1990s has rendered irony the dominant mode of both media consumption and production. This chapter highlights The Simpsons’ pivotal role as a TV show contributing to the cultivation of what I dub “meta-television culture” in reference to John Fiske’s key work in television studies, 1987’s Television Culture. More specifically, I argue that, by working elements of spectator culture into the parodic framework of an animated sitcom, The Simpsons has both tapped into and reinforced a cultural sensibility of meta-media humor, which characterized the zeitgeist of young adults in the 1980s and 1990s. Keywords: The Simpsons, television culture, Generation X, ironic consumption, meta-television, postmodernism

In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson views The Simpsons as a prime example of how pop culture has become increasingly sophisticated and intellectually charged towards the end of the twentieth century. Referencing the fan-maintained online resource The Simpsons Archive, Johnson notes that the average Simpsons episode includes some eight movie-related gags such as a plotline, a line of dialogue, or a visual pun on some movie sequence (p. 223). Additionally, there are references to other elements of cultural history, such as TV shows and pieces of popular music. Similarly, as William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo note, “From the venerable name of ‘Homer’ to Lisa’s ‘Howl,’ to parodies of The Raven, Cape Fear, and All in the Family, The Simpsons links itself to high culture and popular culture alike” (2001, pp. 81–82). Hence, when The Simpsons started to take off from the late 1980s’ rather shallow media landscape, the series did not just captivate a growing loyal

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_ch03

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audience; commentators, critics, and scholars were likewise fascinated by the show. As Jason Mittell has observed, critics typically appraised the program’s quality by distinguishing The Simpsons from earlier cartoon shows. Thus The Simpsons was declared to be “more than just a cartoon” by offering “intelligent comedy” which “appeal[ed] to adults as well as to children” (quoted in Mittell 2001, pp. 18–19). Perhaps even more than previous forms of “quality TV” (see Feuer, Kerr, and Vahimagi 1984; Thompson 1996), The Simpsons demonstrated that television and art do not necessarily preclude each other. Most of all, The Simpsons appealed to viewers who enjoyed the show’s dense comedic writing, which has offered a plethora of references to American cultural history in all its nuances—from the Founding Fathers to Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms, Beatlemania, Bill Cosby, and Star Wars—against the backdrop of the program’s “childish” cartoon style. The sophisticated form of “popular art” represented by The Simpsons, then, contributed to shaping a cultural sentiment of metafiction, which largely eluded the postmodernist obsession with the hyperreal. Rather, The Simpsons cultivated a cultural climate among its young-adult audience that we may call meta-television culture, using, as Steven Johnson puts it, the “metaform” to reflect the naturalized role of the mediasphere “as a real, vital, unavoidable component of everyday life” (Johnson 1997, p. 31). Much of The Simpsons’ humor premised on the sociological effects of the media and media representations, employed “meta-humor and irony,” as Kim Bjarkman puts it in her work on comedy in the post-boomer era, “to stake out a different common ground as the shared culture of ‘cool’” (2014, p. 5).

Of and above Television Besides abounding in allusions to the worlds of film and literature, the show’s artistic aspirations became especially manifest through self-reflexive gestures vis-à-vis television. The cartoon program thereby constitutes an early instance of what Mittell calls “complex comedies,” for The Simpsons has consciously made recourse to and undermined televisual narrative conventions to toy with its viewers’ media literacies and genre expectations (2015, pp. 21–22). This starts with the show’s cartoon form as a parodic foil through which The Simpsons has effectively both reproduced and distanced itself from the sitcom genre, thus inscribing itself into American television culture of which

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the sitcom has always been a quintessential part (cf. Marc 1984, p. 13). The Simpsons has done so implicitly, because its central characters and many episodes are built on a traditional sitcom setting and narrative, and, more explicitly, by referring to the sitcom genre (its conventions, tropes, and characters) in reflexive and metafictional ways. Beyond the caricature of a sitcom family inhabiting American suburbia— a formula already explored by Hanna-Barbera’s cartoon sitcoms The Flintstones and The Jetsons in the 1960s—The Simpsons’ toying with the sitcom’s obligatory “moral ending,” and the need to “reset” at the end of each episode, has become commonplace in this regard. Typically, this effect is achieved either by direct commentary or by hyper-artificial deus ex machina endings. An example of the former happens right in the very first episode, “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (1989). In it, Mr. Burns, Homer’s Boss at Springfield’s nuclear power plant, announces that there will be no Christmas bonus that year. In order to be able to buy his family Christmas presents, Homer takes an extra job as Santa Claus, but he hardly earns any money. Bart finds out about his father’s predicament and, as Homer’s booze buddy Barney suggests taking the family’s savings to bet at the dog track, encourages his father to do so: “Come on, Dad!” Bart tells Homer. “This could be the miracle that saves the Simpsons’ Christmas. If TV has taught me anything, it’s that miracles always happen to poor kids at Christmas. It happened to Tiny Tim, it happened to Charlie Brown, it happened to the Smurfs, and it’s going to happen to us!” Not only is Bart right—the Christmas miracle occurs and the Simpsons get their Christmas present in form of a dog dubbed Santa’s Little Helper—his commentary also shows how The Simpsons is aware of its own relationship to the TV sitcom tradition, defined through such routines as the annual Christmas episode ritual and the narrative cliché of what the wiki TVTropes (n.d.) refers to as the “Christmas Miracle.” What distinguished The Simpsons from most scripted TV programs, then, was a self-awareness and memory that its characters are artifacts inhabiting a television show. As “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” anticipated, this has been a recognizable feature from the series’ start. In another episode from Season 1, we follow the Simpson family as they wander through the neighborhood and peek inside other living rooms to examine the lives of “normal” families, thereby alluding to the family’s own situation of being stared at by millions every week (“There’s No Disgrace Like Home,” 1990). With The Simpsons’ second season, the show’s writing became even more confident regarding its degree of metafictional humor. In episode “Blood Feud” (1991), Bart saves Mr. Burns’s life by providing him with a

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blood transfusion. Homer, who had expected to be richly rewarded for Bart’s generous deed, is completely disappointed when the Simpsons only receive a thank-you card from Mr. Burns. Driven by impulse, Homer sends Mr. Burns an insulting letter. Upon receiving the letter, Mr. Burns wants to punish his employee, but eventually acts against his urge and rewards the family instead. In the last scene, we see the Simpsons sitting on the couch, looking at their present—a gigantic antique Olmec head—and reflecting on the episode’s moral ending: Homer: Save a guy’s life and what do you get? Nothing! Worse than nothing! Just a big scary rock. Bart: Hey, man! Don’t bad-mouth the head. Marge: Homer, it’s the thought that counts. The moral of the story is a good deed is its own reward. Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool! Marge: Then . . . I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded. Homer: Wait a minute. If I hadn’t written that nasty letter, we wouldn’t have gotten anything. Marge: Well . . . then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story. Homer: Exactly. Just a bunch of stuff that happened. Marge: But it certainly was a memorable few days. Homer: Amen to that! [laughter all around]

The effect of this self-reflexive humor is twofold. First, through its simultaneous identity as and distinction from the sitcom, The Simpsons has succeeded in positioning itself as a form of meta-TV, to be “both of and above television,” as John Alberti puts it (2004, p. xvii). Second, The Simpsons has invited its viewers to adopt positions of (critical) distance, sharing the meta-humor and pleasure derived from genre parody rather than narrative illusion. Regarding the phenomenon of “complex” TV series in the postmillennial era, The Simpsons is clearly a vanguard of this new paradigm of sophisticated television storytelling, as it has always emphasized an “intensified viewer engagement” that asks for “formal awareness” (Mittell 2006, p. 39). As mentioned in Chapter 2, this engagement has been fueled by the cornucopia of references and allusions that imbue the Simpsons text. In addition, the show’s conscious play with genres—for instance, not only parodying sitcom formulas but also juxtaposing them with incongruities such as narrative oblivion vs. serial memory—has provided entry points for viewers and fans to align with the show’s meta-humor and textual ambiguities.

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By addressing its viewers as TV-literate, and as receptive to metafictional humor, The Simpsons became a key media text for the 1990s and beyond. As Jonathan Gray observes, “The Simpsons seems to have ushered in a new era of ironically distanced and distancing humor, and of the expectation of such humor” (2006, p. 7). The series therefore provided an instructive dimension which shaped the codes of an emergent meta-television culture characterized by its ironic treatment of subject and reading positions.

Meta-Television Culture As outdated as it might appear today, John Fiske’s seminal 1987 book Television Culture remains essential for understanding practices of watching television, and talking about TV, as discursive forms of (domestic) oral culture and meaning-making. According to Fiske, although the expression of “watching television” refers to a “generalized textual experience,” which Raymond Williams once described in terms of a perpetual “flow,” the television image is by no means a coherent unit like the theatrical film (Fiske 1987b, p. 99). First of all, the text itself is segmented into sequences interrupted by commercials, promos, or news breaks. Second, the viewer may use the remote control to switch between channels (“zapping”), thus generating an even more fragmented text (let alone television’s fading into the “background” of everyday household life). Furthermore, “watching television” has become increasingly nonlinear as the result of technological innovations such as the VCR, digital recorders, online streaming services, and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube—tools which enable us to document, archive, or otherwise sample, share, and consume media content. Therefore audiences do not just passively receive these media texts; they negotiate the texts’ meanings, “read off” contradictory messages, or read “against” the dominant ideology of a certain text through practices that are shaped by what Stuart Hall ([1973] 1980, p. 137) has called “situated logics”—positions that emerge in relation to the dominant discourse of power. In addition to the particular social situation through which an audience generates meaning from a television program in these processes of negotiation called “reading,” Fiske contends that the polysemic potential of a given television text is further increased by its “multitude of intertextual relations” (1987b, p. 127): those between primary texts that are more or less explicitly linked, usually along the axes of genre, character, or content. . . . [And those] between

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a primary text, such as a television program or series, and other texts of a different type. These may be secondary texts such as studio publicity, journalistic features, or criticism, or tertiary texts produced by the viewers themselves in the form of letters to the press or, more importantly, of gossip and conversation. (Ibid., p. 108)

Within this (para)textual nexus, The Simpsons prompts us to ask to what extent this concept of popular culture in its function as participatory culture has fed back on the media industries and the content they produce. The remote control, for instance, brought about new practices of reception and viewing habits that not only affected the intertextuality of television as a cultural experience but also the intertextual aesthetics of individual programs. The Simpsons appeared as such a program reflecting the role of viewers as active channel-changers by suggesting a sort of “zapping” through its pastiche aesthetics. According to Douglas Rushkoff (2004, p. 295), The Simpsons’ approach of representing a form of meta-television—its reframing of the television image—can be traced back to the series’ origins as animated bumpers for The Tracey Ullman Show to go in and out of commercials. Thus it is not only the Simpsons characters’ original function as cartoon vignettes that invokes a kind of meta-television; in addition to the conventional three-act structure prescribed by American commercial television, the individual episodes are further divided into subplots, smaller skits, and relatively short sequential units. This emphasis of fragmentation rather than coherent unity might have its origin in the style of the Ullman clips. But The Simpsons also anticipated sophisticated stylistic techniques, like voiceovers, flashbacks, and fantasy sequences, which would become characteristic of American comedies in the millennial years such as Sex and The City (HBO, 1998–2004) Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, 2000–2006), and Scrubs (NBC, ABC, 2001–2010), which contrasted with the three-camera storytelling conventions of earlier television comedies (see Lotz 2014, p. 104). Most of all, though, the series’ creators have relied on short shots and quick cuts to speed up the rhythm, which evokes a zapping-like form of representation.1 Aside from the series’ form, the association with zapping is relayed by the show’s content. The Simpsons’ cast exceeds that of its live-action sitcom siblings by far, providing instances of refocalization by alternatively 1 On Cinemetrics, a database that provides shot lengths for various films and television series, Joe Blevins (2007) measured the average shot length (ASL) of the Season 1 Simpsons episode “Life on the Fast Lane” (1991) with 3.5 seconds. This is remarkably faster than a median ASL of about 5.25 seconds for television programs from the 2000s (cf. Butler 2012, p. 371).

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portraying scenes that focus on the supporting characters, which further strengthens the fragmentation of the individual episodes (e.g., 22 Short Films About Springfield,” 1996). Moreover, The Simpsons frequently depicts people watching television and abounds in parodic television-within-television situations, thus inviting the audience to critically watch television with the show’s protagonists. In that sense, the Simpsons’ couch and TV set, being the domestic center of the show, also symbolize one of the series’ leitmotifs. Although many television shows—sitcoms, in particular—display people sitting on couches, and thus pay tribute to the “couch potato” as a cultural phenomenon, they rarely show the characters engaged in the process of watching television (see D. Hall 2006). If anything, we see the characters while they are watching TV, but hardly ever what they are watching. This discrepancy between real family life in our media culture and its illusionist portrayal in media texts is also asserted by James Monaco, who writes: “The single most irresistible fact about the television families with whom we spend most of our time is that they don’t watch television. If they did, they’d be as boring as we are; we’d turn them off as quickly as we do ourselves” (2000, p. 514). The Simpsons, by contrast, is not so much a comedy show about a family; it is primarily a comedy show about television. Probably like no other television series has done it before, The Simpsons satirically reflects on the way everyday life in Western societies is structured by television, and how people are socialized by the medium, through exhibiting a high degree of televisual pastiche. As Gray points out, these television-within-television sequences present what its characters are watching, and much of the dialogue of the show results from their responses to these sequences (2006, pp. 7–8). In fact, the role of television on the show is to represent the center of The Simpsons as well as its characters’ lives. In retrospect, longtime writer and showrunner Al Jean observed, in an interview with Douglas Rushkoff, that the show’s meta-televisual humor became one of the major foci for the show’s writing team: “Some of the most creative stuff we write comes from just having the Simpsons watch TV,” Jean noted (quoted in Rushkoff 1994, p. 111). Back in its formative years, this preoccupation with television was indicative of a generation of “screenagers,” as Rushkoff (2004) dubs Gen Xers raised in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This generation has grown up with television and video games, and is characterized by a form of media literacy much more sophisticated than that of their baby boomer parents. As Rushkoff notes, one of this generation’s essential traits is an ironic impulse towards media images, the very “ethos and behavior embodied by screenager role model and antihero Bart Simpson” (p. 294). Bart’s tendency to “skateboard” (read: channel-surf) through the episodes is suggestive of the younger generation’s

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“ironic detachment needed to move through increasingly disorienting units” (p. 299). In contrast to Homer, Bart arrives with an arsenal of reading strategies—or, rather, tactics—towards the media texts he encounters within The Simpsons. For Rushkoff, the character of Bart thus offers lessons in “advanced media activism” (p. 298). More so, Bart’s role adds to the larger meaning of The Simpsons to serve as a form of media pedagogy teaching the tenets of the “meta-television” zeitgeist. In that sense, Bart and the other characters support the show’s larger project of presenting a sitcom whose major theme is participatory media culture as conceptualized by John Fiske and Henry Jenkins (see Chapter 1). For the media-savvy Gen Xers who embraced The Simpsons in the early 1990s, this formula worked so well because it followed the ironic lens of mockery through which they typically deconstructed their own media diet. Canadian author Douglas Coupland is commonly credited for having popularized the term Generation X. In his 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Coupland characterizes the baby boomers’ child generation—an age cohort of which he is himself a part—as aimless, indifferent folks who were raised in a comfort zone of parental care and economic affluence. Coupland’s portrayal corresponds to the demographic group William Strauss and Neil Howe dub “13ers” in their book Generations: The History of America’s Future. This generation, which Strauss and Howe link to Americans born between 1961 and 1981, often irritates outsiders because it openly embraces the image of not being ambitious, of not being interested in school and politics, of not caring about its future. As Strauss and Howe put it: The youth attitude that strikes elders as blasé is, from the 13er perspective, unflinching and realistic. They have already tramped through the dirty beach where idealism can lead. Remembering how the “freedom” of open classrooms produced noisy chaos and gave them what others constantly tell them was bad education, they have learned to be skeptical about what happens whenever barriers are broken down. (Strauss and Howe 1991, p. 333)

Often this skepticism comes across as cynicism. “Lacking the ego strength to set agendas for others, 13ers instead react to the world as they find it” (p. 232), Strauss and Howe further observe. They take solace in the privacy that affords them. Many even delight in the most demeaning images of youth ever crafted by the electronic

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media: Max Headroom, beheaded in an accident, imprisoned within TV sound bites; the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, flushed down the toilet as children, deformed by radiation, nurtured on junk food; and Bart Simpson, the “underachiever” . . . . (ibid.)

Yet this form of delight has a strong ironic component, as revealed by Strauss and Howe’s diagnosis of the self-deprecating character typically exhibited by 13ers/Gen Xers. This self-deprecation is also reflected in Gen Xers’ media texts, which “make half-comic reference to their own garbagey quality.” Quoting Chris Kreski, a writer for MTV’s parody quiz show Remote Control, Strauss and Howe emphasize his awareness that his show was “stupid.” And they explain in parentheses that in the lingo of 13ers/Gen Xers, “words like ‘stupid,’ ‘bad,’ or ‘random’ are words of praise” (ibid.). It was exactly this ironic attitude that Fox wanted to tap into. “We sold Generation X,” former Fox senior vice president for research, Andy Fessel, once mentioned. “We were out working with [Douglas Coupland’s] concepts and the marketing information around that, to sell [advertisers] the values of 18–34 and how they were very sophisticated and very upscale” (quoted in Kimmel p. 117; latter brackets in the original). This turned out to be a successful strategy, indeed. For many commentators, television itself has become a central domain for def ining Generation X. As Rob Owen, the author of Gen X TV, notes, “Xers are the first group for whom TV served as a regular scheduled baby-sitter”; “the f irst to experience MTV and the Fox network”; “the most media-savvy generation ever” (1997, p. 5). According to Owen, the label “Generation X” does not so much represent a demographic category (stereotypically white, middle-class, twenty-something) but rather a generation sharing the same media diet. Owen identif ies Generation X as the f irst “true television generation” (ibid.), the f irst generation that was growing up with multiple TV sets in one household (often with personal TVs), satellite and cable television, remote controls, VCRs, and the rise of the personal computer. Gen Xers exhibited an unprecedented amount of media consumption, which qualifies them as the first generation socialized to a large degree on media images that have shaped their ways of thinking, acting, and expressing themselves. At the same time, Generation X’s relationship to media content and entertainment culture was typically characterized by a sense of demystification and ironic detachment. This attitude of “ironic consumption,” as Naomi Klein calls it in No Logo (1999, p. 78), significantly contrasted Gen Xers from their baby-boomer parents. To members of the

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Generation X, rebelling against “the system,” which had been the aspiration for previous youth cultures, appeared to be somewhat pointless in world where the industries discovered subcultures and their individual styles as marketing targets. Thomas Frank, in his 1997 book the Conquest of Cool, discusses how corporate culture has co-opted the myth of an “authentic” experience of countercultural youth rebellion to promote it as a lifestyle since the 1960s. If acts of resistance have turned into conformity, Klein argues that Gen Xers would typically take the other road to express difference: they embraced commercial culture, yet with a “sly ironic twist” (p. 77). To illustrate this approach, she quotes the editors of the indie magazine Hermenaut, who have written in their issue on popular culture: Going to Disney World to drop acid and goof on Mickey isn’t revolutionary; going to Disney World in full knowledge of how ridiculous and evil it all is and still having a great innocent time, in some most unconscious, even psychotic way, is something else together. This is what [Michel] de Certeau describes as “the art of being in-between,” and this is the only path of true freedom in today’s culture. (Quoted in ibid., p. 78)

Television programming designed for Gen Xers, then, had to reflect this “art of being in-between,” this ironic treatment of commodif ied pop culture and the subject positions that emerge within commercial culture, by means of self-referential and self-deprecating comedy. In large parts, The Simpsons’ success has been related to this attitude; through a satirical portrayal of the media accompanied by a high degree of self-irony, The Simpsons addressed its viewers’ cultural vein of mocking the escapism lingering from the past—to be found in the conservatives’ naive celebration of “family values” as found in 1980s TV fare such as The Cosby Show, on the one hand, as well as in the liberals’ idealist commitment to “political correctness” in the wake of the 1970s counterculture, on the other (Bjarkman 2014, p. 15). As Owen observes for The Simpsons, “It’s a show whose humor is totally in sync with the sarcasm, cynicism, and media obsession that appeals most to Generation X” (1997, p. 64). Along with other programs that Owen names as instances of Gen X TV, like Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Beavis and Butt-Head, The Simpsons appealed to viewers who embraced the moments when their own media-saturated lives and ironic relationships towards media culture were humorously reflected on the screen.

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Pop Culture Hyperconsciousness In the light of The Simpsons’ high level of television-themed meta-comedy, initial academic approaches to the series were often couched in postmodern discourse (see, e.g., Collins, 1992; Henry, 1994; Weinstein, 1998; Bybee and Overbeck, 2001; Ott, 2003; Knox, 2007; Fuchs, 2008). This reaction might not only have to do with the 1990s popularity of postmodern theory in the humanities and beyond; the label “postmodern” seems to have also served, as Douglas Kellner proposes, as “a placeholder, or semiotic marker, . . . a sign that something is bothering us, that new confusing phenomena are appearing that we cannot adequately categorize or get a grip on” (Kellner 1995, p. 46). For John T. Caldwell, however, postmodern discourse is not very helpful for a broader explanation of the aestheticization of television in the 1980s and 1990s—as features of individual shows as well as radical stylistic trends as introduced by MTV. Traits that are commonly considered indicative of postmodernism, such as intertextuality or self-reflexivity have been “defining properties of television from its inception” (Caldwell 1995, p. 23). To Caldwell, the “hip gratifications that result from discovering loaded intertexts as we see it on The Simpsons” were nothing really new or unique in 1990s television, nor of a certain kind of “postmodern” television experience. He contends instead that postmodern theories “tend to overshadow the fact that intertextuality was a central component in television from the start” (pp. 23–24). As a consequence, “Television has either always been postmodern, or its [so-called] postmodern tactics are part of a much different and less celebrated dynamic” (ibid.). While I agree with Caldwell’s basic premise that overt intertextuality and self-reflexivity was not something The Simpsons introduced or brought to television, it seems obvious that the series offered some new kind of television experience. Jim Collins, for instance, has considered The Simpsons an instance of “postmodern” television because it is “hyperconscious” of itself, “of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions of its circulation and reception” (Collins 1992, p. 335). Collins’s casebook example stems from the Season 2 episode “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” (1990). In one scene, we see Homer and Bart as they are watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on television. Bart asks his father to identify two cartoon characters that float past in form of helium balloons on the TV screen, because he is not familiar with their names—Bullwinkle and Underdog (two of the show’s best-known precursors)—and complains that the organizers of the parade are using such outdated figures. Emphasizing the meaning of

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the parade in terms of an American “tradition,” Homer replies that “if you start building a balloon for every flash-in-the pan cartoon character, you’ll turn the parade into a farce,” whereupon we see a Bart Simpson balloon on the TV set in the background. The joke, of course, has two layers: Homer’s naive equation of commercial popular culture and American folk culture, as well as an implied metafictional awareness regarding the Simpsons’ own rise as pop culture icons. Another such early instance of The Simpsons’ hyperconscious mode can be seen in the episode “Bart Gets Famous” (1994), in which Bart becomes a (short-lived) cultural hit in Springfield, a popularity based solely on uttering the catchphrase “I didn’t do it.” The episode also reflects on the Bart Simpson merchandising craze which took hold of America during the series’ initial seasons. Fittingly, the episode closes with the end of the “I didn’t do it” quasiBartmania, and with Bart experiencing how cruel and ephemeral life in show business often is. To console Bart, Marge brings a box of Bart’s “I didn’t do it” merchandising stuff—T-shirts, pin buttons, figurines—which will always remind him of the time when he was “the whole world’s special little guy.” On a meta-level, the makers of The Simpsons signify Marge’s gesture as a reference to the real-life hype around Bart, and thus to the media phenomenon “The Simpsons,” whose commercial peak will necessarily terminate one day. As Matthew Henry argues, through this self-conscious blurring of boundaries, The Simpsons articulates being “simultaneously complicitous in and critical of its role in the production of popular culture” (Henry 1994, p. 91). Whether we call it “postmodern” or not, this particular self- or hyperconsciousness is a mode of artistic self-awareness that deviates from classic examples of a breaking-the-fourth-wall-style of self-reflexivity as discussed by Scott Olsen (1987) or Robert Stam (1992). But what is it that distinguishes The Simpsons from previous televisual instances of self-reflexivity, which Jeremy Butler (2012, p. 77) already observes for the postwar sitcom The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (CBS, 1950–1958), namely, as comic devices grounded in the vaudeville tradition? Collins’s notion of hyperconsciousness argues that, unlike earlier scripted American TV shows, The Simpsons has humorously reflected on its own role as corporate media franchise, as well as the awareness that the characters’ status as media icons capable of voicing social commentary is necessarily cushioned by their existence as commercial products. Put differently, The Simpsons does not simply exhibit metafictional aesthetics; gags like a Bart Simpson balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, or Bart’s “I didn’t do it” adventure, expressed within the series’ storyworld, point to Bart’s role as both pop culture icon and merchandised commodity outside of

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television—in the real world. It might be argued that such hyperconscious gestures have had only little critical value—they earned The Simpsons many cheers and laughs from the viewers, while reinforcing the neoliberal approach to capitalize in on the franchise’s self-deprecation. At the same time, however, such meta-moments cultivated a critical perspective, which asked regular viewers to take the “self-deprecating” play performed by their favorite cartoon characters with a grain of salt—that is, with a degree of suspicion regarding the cartoon characters’ function as cash cows and reproducible corporate mascots. In other words, The Simpsons’ hyperconscious gestures have informed their viewers’ discursive repertoire as an element of meta-television culture.

Popular Encoding As for another key aspect of this meta-television culture, it is important to understand that media texts can not only be decoded from alternative reading positions, as Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model ([1973] 1980) suggests; media texts may likewise incorporate alternative reading positions into their mode of encoding. Collins’s study of “postmodern” TV programs, such as The Simpsons or Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), stresses the ways these shows reflect the contest of codes inherent to the polysemy of television by working elements of reception “back into the ‘text’ itself” (p. 336). According to Collins, while it has been one of the major achievements of cultural studies to consider practices of “active viewing” as identity formants, the discipline has for a long time neglected the incorporation of these popular practices through the dominant commercial culture. Shaped by a Marxist perspective, cultural studies has traditionally identified the corporate media with an a priori ideological agency. The presupposition that media texts are ideologically encoded, however, risk overlooking moments of cultural oppositionality within commercial media texts. As cultural studies scholarship has suggested, even “conformist” television shows such as Dallas may be viewed and enjoyed ironically by a certain audience, despite the awareness that this is “TV kitsch” (see Ang 1985, pp. 96–101), that the show’s encoding remains a “straight” or, in cultural studies’ terminology, a “dominant-hegemonic” one promoting the ideology of a white Western patriarchal capitalist society.2 Satirical TV programs 2 For an elaboration on how ideology works in the representational encoding of media texts through lighting, camera, music, character, and mise-en-scène, see, e.g., Fiske (1986).

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like The Simpsons, on the other hand, do not fit this formula. They make a case for preferred readings that are not dominant-hegemonic but rather treat the viewer as “ironic, knowing, media-savvy subject” (Douglas, 2009, p. 49). Shows like The Simpsons “wink at the viewer, saying, ‘we know that you know that we know that you know that [television] is excessive and kitschy, that you’re too savvy to read [it] straight and not laugh at it’” (ibid.). In order to fully understand and enjoy The Simpsons, the viewer is asked to identify and analyze specific viewing positions. As Collins notes for the series Twin Peaks, What distinguishes Twin Peaks from, say, Dallas . . . is not that it encourages this alteration in viewing positions but that it explicitly acknowledges this oscillation and the suspended nature of television viewing. In other words, Twin Peaks doesn’t just acknowledge the multiple subject positions that television generates; it recognizes that one of the great pleasures of the television text is that very suspension and exploits it for its own ends. (p. 348)

As we have seen, The Simpsons achieved this effect through its formal ambiguity (similar to Twin Peaks’ destabilizing of genre discourse). Furthermore, the show reflected meta-television culture’s play by building different viewing positions into its narratives. Put differently, the Simpsons series consciously uses the “codes” that audience research in the field of cultural studies has identified as formants of competing subject positions. To clarify this point, it is useful to remember Fiske’s example of the pop star Madonna, who he describes as being encoded by popular decoding strategies: Madonna consistently parodies conventional representations of women, and parody can be an effective device for interrogating the dominant ideology. It takes the def ining features of its object, exaggerates and mocks them, and thus mocks those who “fall” for its ideological effect. But Madonna’s parody goes further that this; she parodies, not just the stereotypes, but the way in which they are made. She represents herself as one who is in control of her own image and of the process of making it. . . . She makes her own meanings out of the symbolic system available to her, and in using their signifiers and rejecting and mocking their signifieds, she is demonstrating her ability to make her own meanings. (1987a, p. 278)

Signif icantly, this assessment must not be conflated with television’s polysemy as Fiske understands it. While Madonna seems to be capable of

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appropriating and resignifying material taken from the dominant culture, Fiske does not include such a form of encoding performed by television texts. Although the television text as a whole offers a multiplicity of meanings, these meanings must still be activated by the reader. The “preferred reading,” as Hall calls it, which corresponds to a text’s encoding, however, is necessarily a dominant-hegemonic one (see Fiske 1987a, p. 261). Following Hall, Fiske does not take into account a preferred reading that is oppositional or, at least, negotiated (cf. Sloane 2004, p. 139). In contrast to the Madonna example, for Fiske, critical readings are exclusively activated semiotically through a certain text’s cultural-intertextual relationships, not through the parodic/satirical intertextuality articulated by the text itself. As previous scholarship has shown, however, such encoding strategies have been a defining feature of The Simpsons. Originally, The Simpsons might be understood as a reaction to ideologypromotion as we see it in the 1980s in such shows as Dallas. In contrast to Dallas’ portrayal of two wealthy dynasties, The Simpsons’ social satire centers on a blue-collar working-class family whose patriarch represents little less than the inverse embodiment of work ethic as an all-American virtue. “If you don’t like your job, you don’t strike!” Homer Simpson announced in one of his memorable aphorisms. “You just go in every day, and do it really half assed. That’s the American way!” (“The PTA Disbands!” 1995). As Gray observes, viewers who understand such jokes as satirical commentary on “the timeworn, tiresome ‘America the Awesome,’” are, in fact, reading the show passively rather than actively (Glynn, Gray, and Wilson 2011, p. liii). This seems to suggest that The Simpsons’ form of satirical encoding limits the decoder’s power to read the show in oppositional ways. In other words, The Simpsons may wink at its audience as ironic consumers, and its writers may convey that “they know that we know that they know that we know.” But at the same time, readings of The Simpsons’ performed “oppositionality” are necessarily curbed by the series’ inherent ambiguity in representing both an agency of popular culture in a cultural studies sense, and an agency of neoliberalism that turns ironic positions via-à-vis the dominant capitalist culture into a commercial angle.

Indirect Viewing Within its narratives, The Simpsons represents the ironic viewing position typically placed in juxtaposition to that of the stereotypical “duped” reader (whose decoding follows the imagined encoding of a particular media text

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embedded in the show’s diegesis). In the series, Bart and Lisa usually occupy the ironic position, whereas the elder generations—usually Homer—represent the cliché of the media “dupe.” As Brian Ott notes, embodying the “classic dupe,” Homer “is produced/used by the system he cannot resist,” which culminates in moments where he is not able to distinguish real life from the images on TV (2003, pp. 64–65). This juxtapositioning corresponds to what Jonathon Oake observes for films aimed at a Gen X audience, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), Home Alone (1990), or Reality Bites (1994), where “young characters are often marked by an innate visual literacy—an ability to read advertising, TV, and film texts” (2004, p. 88). In contrast to these young, media-savvy characters, “this literacy is lacking in their elders, who emerge, comparatively speaking, as credulous and dim-witted consumers of visual texts” (ibid.). Take, for example, the opening sequence of the 1995 episode “And Maggie Makes Three.” There we see Homer, Bart, and Lisa as they are watching Knight Boat, a parody of the 1980s’ series Knight Rider (NBC, 1982–1986), starring David Hasselhoff, alias Michael Knight, and his speaking, artificiallyintelligent automobile, KITT. The “Knight Boat” sequence features a typical Knight Rider scenario where “Michael” and his “partner” are chasing some thugs, and, while facing obstacles of various kinds, always find a way to catch the bad guys. Michael: Faster, Knight Boat! We gotta catch those starfish poachers. Knight Boat: You don’t have to yell, Michael, I’m all around you. Michael: Oh, no! They’re headed for land. We’ll never catch them now. Knight Boat: Incorrect. Look! A canal! Homer: Go, Knight Boat, go! Bart: Oh, every week there’s a canal. Lisa: Or an inlet. . . Bart: . . . or a fjord. Homer: Quiet! I will not hear another word against the boat.

As this sequence illustrates, Homer follows Knight Boat with unbounded enthusiasm and completely identifies with his television heroes. Bart and Lisa, by contrast, point to the program’s formulaic and predictable plot. Despite this flaw, however, the Simpson kids seem to be familiar with its conventions and well versed in popular media literacy. Whereas Homer represents the quintessential “cultural dupe,” Bart and Lisa adopt the Gen X position: they demonstrate a high amount of media literacy. Clearly, The Simpsons invites its audience to share this position of irony by mocking

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shows such as Knight Rider, which seem worn-out by 1990s standards, At the same time, the ironic reading of Knight Rider acknowledges the cult status the show might have had for some Simpsons viewers who grew up watching the adventures of Michael Knight and his speaking car. Similar to moments when The Simpsons reference cult TV shows like Batman, Star Trek, or Twin Peaks, the allusion to Knight Rider is a form of homage—a specific mode of ironic viewing that carries, as McCoy and Scarborough referring to Susan Sontag have noted, a “camp sensibility” as a kind of “ironic consumption as admiration” (2012, n.p.). It speaks for The Simpsons’ intended inconsistency that the show’s protagonists do not fulfill their prescribed roles as stock characters. Homer may be a dimwitted dope who corresponds to the sitcom archetype of the “working-class buffoon” (Butsch 2018), but he also breaks character in moments when he morphs into a loving father or savior of all. (Indeed, in the course of the series’ history, Homer has become the central narrative figure who drives the plotlines when he breaks character and assumes identities of various sorts.) Similarly, the series’ writers suspend the Simpson kids’ superior position as TV-literate Gen Xers when Lisa or Bart are characterized as TV-addicted media dupes who fall for the manipulatory power of kids’ entertainment. This is exemplified in a scene in which we see Bart and Lisa sitting in front of the TV watching their favorite program, The Krusty the Clown Show. The show’s host is Krusty, a bad-tempered media celebrity in Springfield, who appears in the guise of a clown and has no scruples about cashing in on his young fan followers. In the scene, Krusty greets the live audience in front of him as well as the kids at home: “Hi kids! Who do you love?” The kids in the studio chant in unison, “Krusty!” who follows up, “How much do you love me?” whereupon we see Bart and Lisa reply along with the kids on TV: “With all our hearts!” “What would you do if I went off the air?” Krusty wants to know, and the kids cheerfully respond, “We’d kill ourselves!” (“Krusty Gets Busted,” 1990) In another scene, in a Halloween episode (“Treehouse of Horror IX,” 1998), Bart and Lisa are literally absorbed by their television to find themselves within their beloved cartoon program, The Itchy & Scratchy Show. While they like the idea of being situated in the cartoon universe at first, Bart and Lisa have to learn that their TV heroes, Itchy and Scratchy, are redirecting their routines of violence and blood lust against them, and that the weapons they suddenly face are lethal. In the end, it is only through Homer that they can escape this fatal fictional world. In fact, varying modes of ironic viewing are exemplary for The Simpsons. In many instances, the show’s diegesis provides alternative reading positions

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that reflect the overall satirical tone of the show vis-à-vis the media industries—either explicitly, as in the aforementioned examples through Bart and Lisa’s commentary, or implicitly through caricature. In the latter case, a critical reading is typically integrated into the (fictional) shows or films watched by the characters. An example here would be The Simpsons’ parodic take on its Fox fellow Married. . . with Children in the episode “Deep Space Homer” (1994). In essence, the sequence lampoons Married’s simplistic formula to create humor out of Peggy Bundy’s demand for matrimonial sex and her husband’s notorious monosyllabic reactions of reluctance (“Ehh. . . no, Peg!”). The Simpsons’ critical approach towards television culture becomes especially pronounced when the characters in the series are affected by the programs they are watching. “Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy” (1994), for instance, begins with a scene with Homer in the Simpson parents’ bedroom watching what is announced to be a rerun of Good-Time Slim, Uncle Doobie, and the Great “Frisco Freak-Out”—a fictional movie attributed to the 1970s exploitation film era. The flic features the caricatures of two hippie hoodlums—complete with eccentric clothes, peace signs, and a multicolored Volkswagen beetle—being chased by the police. As Marge snuggles against Homer, dressed in a seductive negligee, he rejects her approach: “Please, Marge! How often can I see a movie of this caliber on late-night TV?” Apparently, however, the film is a “cheap” B-movie. Through this scene, The Simpsons not only exhibits a more authentic take on the issue of sex life and marriage than the way it is played out in Married. . . with Children; it also reflects a parodic reading of the recognizable formulas of lowbrow Hollywood entertainment from an earlier period. Television satire on The Simpsons that emerges from the characters’ reactions becomes even more pronounced when they react to television or they are directly affected by what they see on TV. The episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” (1994), for example, contains a scene where Homer and Grampa Simpson watch a commercial for Buzz Cola, one of the fictional products from within the Simpsons universe. Although embedded in the episode’s diegesis (Homer and Grampa are sitting on the family’s couch, watching television), the segment is formally marked by a distinctive establishing shot (we might call it the “couch-shot”). The composition is aligned symmetrically: we see the backs of Homer and Grampa Simpson’s heads; the family’s television screen constitutes the center of the image. Through this point-of-view shot, the audience shares the characters’ perspectives of the television screen and encounters a television-within-television situation. As the on-screen television image expands to a close-up, we see three people

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characterized as elderly. Interestingly, the Simpson family’s television frame is still visible. Both formal devices (editing and framing) support the instances of focalization of Homer and Grampa, respectively. Through such overt acts of reframing, The Simpsons doubles the televisionwatching process for its audience. As Gray observes, this situation of watching television within television is already implied before each Simpsons episode by the show’s opening sequence, which closes with the family gathering in front of the TV. This is followed by a close-up of the Simpsons’ old-school rabbit-eared tube, as we see the final credits blended in, “signaling that we as viewers are watching television with the Simpsons and with The Simpsons” (2006, p. 7). This reframing of television (a TV shown within the frames of the viewers’ TV sets) anticipates what Gray calls “indirect viewing” (p. 2) as the major poetic mode performed by The Simpsons. The Buzz Cola commercial sequence illustrates this principle of indirect viewing. After the seniors on the screen have drunk Buzz, an explosion erupts. Then we suddenly see them partying on the beach. The old people are dancing in Hawaiian shirts; the men carry electric guitars and play along to heavy metal music, which is blended in an extradiegetic fashion without any devices of amplification as typical for the lack of realism in many commercials. Next, we see a medium shot of one “guitarist” who raises his hand to sport the familiar heavy metal “sign of the horns” gesture. At this, the Buzz Cola logo fades in, and a low-key male voice adds in a voice-over: “Buzz Cola—There’s a little boogie in every bottle.” As for the satirical dimension, it is relevant to observe that the graphic level is very cartoonish and clearly hyperbolic in comparison to an actual television commercial, while especially the level of sound (heavy-metal music as signifier of youthfulness, and the male off-screen low-key voice) are relatively authentic. In addition, the aspect of transformation (the explosion, the metamorphosis of the old people, the logo at the end) is indicative of such tropes in actual commercials. In this regard, the segment represents a humoristic critique of the “this-drink-makes-you-feel young” rhetoric that has become so cliché for soft-drink ads. As a fan reading of the episode on The Simpsons Archive suggests, the sequence spoofs a 1993 Pepsi commercial featuring a youth crowd partying on the beach with heavy metal music under the slogan “Be Young. Have Fun. Drink Pepsi.” (Cherry 1996) Finally, what makes this sequence especially interesting in our context is the effect the Buzz commercial’s message has on Grampa Simpson. Before the commercial segment, Grampa is depressed. He feels old and superfluous, ignored by his family and by society at large. Then, he—along with the audience of The Simpsons—sees old people like him drinking Buzz

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and having fun. One of the older men remarks, “One sip and I’m totally hip!” Every experienced television viewer will be highly familiar with this rhetoric. In contrast to this awareness, and a position of ironic distance that results from it, Grampa Simpson is presented as completely ignorant of the commercial’s manipulative rhetorical strategies. In a situation of emotional despair, he exclaims: “Holy smokes, that’s it! From now on, I’m thinkin’, actin’, and lookin’ young, and I’m gonna start with a bottle of Buzz Cola.” Thus Grampa’s naiveté contradicts the audience’s assumed competence in identifying the persuasion strategies that are the driving forces behind every advertisement. This critical perspective is reinforced through The Simpsons’ satirical take on advertisements in general, and Pepsi’s “Be Young. Have Fun” commercial in particular, when Grampa actually takes a bottle of Buzz and starts to chug. Ironically, the drink appears to be totally inappropriate as the carbonated acid hurts Grampa’s tongue. He jumps up and runs out of the frame: “Ah! Ah! The bubbles are burning my tongue! Oh! Oh! Water! Water!” Then the sequence ends. This is to say, the figure of Grampa represents an uncritical or naive position of reception. Being duped by persuasion strategies that seem trite to most television viewers, Grampa’s blind submission signifies a caricature of Hall’s “preferred” reading position. It shows what every consumer should know: the rhetoric of advertisements is by no means reasonable with regard to the real world. Arguably, by parodying the language of television commercials, The Simpsons succeeds in strengthening this critical perspective. One of the show’s pedagogical effects, then, is to cultivate a consciousness of ironic and satirical viewing habits, especially in the context of television as a highly commercialized cultural space.

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, The Simpsons found resonance as one of the key programs on television that both echoed and cultivated the meta-television zeitgeist of young-adult audiences in the 1990s. By translating media satire as it was developed by precursors such as MAD magazine to the context of prime-time television, The Simpsons contributed to a media culture characterized by meta-humor, irony, and self-deprecation regarding the effects of media messages and images. In this regard, the series offered a storyworld that caricaturized stereotypes of the passively consuming “dupe” in favor of portrayals of what cultural studies has described as active audiences—folks engaging in an

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interactive relationship with culture, who selectively make use of, reconfigure, and “talk back” to dominant cultural forms. Thus, the series has represented reading positions that characterize spectator and participatory media culture. As we will see in the next chapter, this is especially true of the show’s representation of media fandom. In contrast to media “dupes,” The Simpsons has managed to reaffirm clichés of media fandom and other subcultural formations to achieve effects not only of ridicule and rebuke but also of respect towards its own fans in particular, and pop culture fandom in general.

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Johnson, Steven. 1997. Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate. New York: Basic Books. –––. 2005. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books. Kellner, Douglas. 1995. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern and the Postmodern. London: Routledge. Kimmel, Daniel M. 2004. The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television. Chicago: Dee. Klein, Naomi. 1999. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf. Knox, Simone. 2006. “Reading the Ungraspable Double-Codedness of The Simpsons.” Journal for Popular Film and Television 34: 72–81. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. 2nd. ed. New York: New York University Press. Marc, David. 1984. Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McCoy, Charles Allan, and Scarborough, Roscoe C. 2012. “Watching ‘Bad’ Television: Ironic Consumption, Guilty Pleasures, and a Camp Sensibility.” Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. Denver, CO, August 17–20. Mittell, Jason. 2001. “Cartoon Realism: Genre Mixing and the Cultural Life of The Simpsons.” Velvet Light Trap 47: 15–28. –––. 2006. “Narrative Complexity in American Television.” Velvet Light Trap 58: 29–40. –––. 2010. Television and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. –––. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press. Monaco, James. 2000. How to Read a Film. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Neale, Steve, and Frank Krutnik. 1990. Popular Film and Television Comedy. London: Routledge. Oake, Jonathon I. 2004. “Reality Bites and Generation X as Spectator.” Velvet Light Trap 53: 83–97. Olson, Scott R. 1987. “Meta‐Television: Popular Postmodernism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4.3: 284–300. Ott, Brian L. 2003. “‘I’m Bart Simpson, Who the Hell Are You?’ A Study in Postmodern Identity (Re)Construction.” Journal of Popular Culture 37.1: 56–82. Owen, Rob. 1997. Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Rushkoff, Douglas. 1994. Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York: Ballantine. –––. 2004. “Bart Simpson: Prince of Irreverence.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 292–301.

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Sloane, Robert. 2004. “Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment in The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 137–71. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Stam, Robert. 1992. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press. Strauss, William, and Neil Howe. 1991. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow. Thompson, Robert J. 1996 From Hill Street Blues to ER: Television’s Second Golden Age. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. TVTropes. n.d. “Christmas Miracle.” Archived at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/ pmwiki.php/Main/ChristmasMiracle (accessed July 19, 2019). Weinstein, David. 1998. “Of Mice and Bart: The Simpsons and the Postmodern.” In Postmodernism in the Cinema, edited by Christina Degli-Esposti, 61–72. New York: Berghahn.

4. High Fives on Prime Time: Representing Popular Culture Abstract An important reason for The Simpsons’ impact and longevity as a media franchise has been the show’s dedication to representing popular culture. From film and television history to sci-fi and comics culture, from rock music to street art—popular culture has provided The Simpsons with a wealth of figures, narratives, and themes to convert (sub)cultural capital into commercial entertainment. As this chapter shows, one particularly prominent domain of popular culture that The Simpsons invested in was media fandom. Positive depictions as well as mockery of media fans (including Simpsons fans) created both gestures of affiliation and discipline that have targeted the tastes of fan consumers as a valuable audience group for Fox and the Simpsons series. Keywords: The Simpsons, popular culture, media fandom, convergence culture

In her analysis of TV phenomena in the post-network era, Amanda Lotz (2014) has drawn on Newcomb and Hirsch’s concept (1983) of the “cultural forum,” according to which a television text raises a range of questions, contradictions, conflicts, and ideas that coexist and compete with each other within liberal societies. Popular TV comedies of the broadcast era succeeded in drawing a heterogeneous audience by operating as such a cultural forum. Lotz gives the example of All in the Family, which alternatively challenged and reinforced different worldviews through the show’s antagonism between the characters Archie and Meathead (p. 44). In the post-network era, ushered in by the arrival of MTV as well as Fox’s “edgy” shows, television began to work increasingly in terms of what Lotz dubs a “subcultural forum,” as a discourse “among more narrow groups that share particular cultural affinities or tastes.” Networks like MTV and Fox, and

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_ch04

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shows like Married. . . with Children and The Simpsons thus provided “the lingua franca for adolescents and operat[ed] as ‘must-see TV’ in order for teens to achieve cultural competence” (ibid., pp. 47–48). In the previous chapter, I have discussed the extent to which The Simpsons reflected Gen Xers’ meta-television culture as one element for the series’ success. This chapter sheds light on the ways the show succeeded as a “subcultural forum” and “must-see TV” for a significantly hybrid audience in the early 1990s. For this purpose, I will analyze stylistic characteristics of The Simpsons, such as its fast-paced, strident aesthetic and the role of soundtrack. If MTV’s style of music videos and quick-cuts found an echo in TV shows that shaped Gen X culture, like Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1990) and Melrose Place (Fox, 1992–1999), it also affected The Simpsons’ style of incorporating soundtrack to furnish the series with subcultural vibe. Furthermore, I will focus on representations of cultural practices like skateboarding, graffiti, alternative rock, and media fandom through which The Simpsons drew in specific YA fan consumer groups. Media fandom in particular, I argue, served as a tie-in for various niche audiences which would soon comprise The Simpsons’ die-hard fan base. Displayed on the show, representations of fandom served as both signifiers of affinity and instances of disciplining.

Rock ’n’ Roll Television MTV went on the air in the U.S. in 1981, exhibiting a distinctive style that fundamentally redefined the general perception of television. MTV was not only about music; the channel provided an effective commercial system to reach the youth market. As Timothy Shary (2005) observes, MTV functioned as a media outlet for pop culture at large, promoting specific acts, live events, clothing, and even movies in addition to showing music videos. Thus MTV became a pop-cultural institution, “the court where youth culture was told what was cool” (p. 54). For its young target audience, the music channel’s fast pace and dynamic crosscutting between music videos, commercials, and promo clips intensified the fragmentation inherent in the television experience as a whole. If zapping through the ever-expanding television landscape had become a substantial part of Gen Xers’ everyday lives, MTV reflected this position of navigating through the mediasphere. Addressing the impact of media culture, The Simpsons also framed itself as a show about “watching TV”: in addition to television-within-television sequences, many episodes featured larger, overarching stories, from within

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which individual sketches and smaller, self-contained clips could emerge. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a high frequency of switching between individual scenes created a fragmented aesthetic similar to channel flipping. This aesthetic interacted with The Simpsons’ artful ways of mimicking different film material and footage. Flashback sequences marked by sepiatones and other references to the past (e.g., “low-quality” home videos or black-and-white “archive footage”) not only demonstrated the series’ stylistic sophistication as cartoon but also reflected our culture’s way of approaching history through media texts. An additional component of this kind of mediated history is music used as an accompanying soundtrack. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank denounced the function of soundtracks in the film and ad industry that serve to create pseudo-authenticity. In this sense, The Simpsons both recreated and parodied the clichéd use of soundtracks: Jimi Hendrix’s iconic “All Along the Watchtower” conjures up the 1960s’ social unrest (“Mother Simpson,” 1995); the classic melodies of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony connote a premodern, television-free setting (“Itchy & Scratchy & Marge,” 1990s); and a mellow, jazzy saxophone riff accompanies Homer’s idiosyncratic way of walking through a rock festival venue—a scene reminiscent of R. Crumb’s 1968 Keep on Truckin’ characters as icons of the hippie era (“Homerpalooza,” 1996). From such parodic uses of soundtracks to the characters humming popular songs or even engaging in musical-style performances, music culture has been a defining element of The Simpsons. By incorporating “Simpsonized” versions of real-life celebrities, The Simpsons followed a rich tradition of television entertainment when singer Tony Bennett was the first musician to guest-star on the show in the Season 2 episode “Dancin’ Homer” (1990). As the show’s popularity grew, the producers became increasingly successful in casting prominent guests from the world of music. Many popular stars have lent their voices to The Simpsons or had cameo appearances on the show, including Michael Jackson, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, Sting, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison, Elton John, Barry White, Paul Anka, Tito Puente, Weird Al Yankovic, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Kid Rock, and Lady Gaga, as well as the bands Aerosmith, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Ramones, the Smashing Pumpkins, Cypress Hill, Sonic Youth, U2, Phish, ’N Sync, Blink 182, Green Day, the (Dixie) Chicks, The Who, Metallica, and The White Stripes. While most of these celebrity guests agreed (or even asked) to be caricaturized by becoming cartoon figures, their appearances were also promotional in nature—much in the way that performances on MTV used to be. This is even truer since The Simpsons has become the pop culture institution it is

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today; appearing on The Simpsons has become an accolade for celebrities of having “arrived,” similar to receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And yet, particularly in The Simpsons’ formative years, the representation of music and musicians associated with different subcultures made the series appear as a rebellious rock ’n’ roll show, especially by the standards of early 1990s prime-time network TV. When The Simpsons offered the Ramones a stage to play “Happy Birthday” for Mr. Burns, or featured the Smashing Pumpkins or hip-hop hard rockers Cypress Hill, it attracted viewers from various subcultural backgrounds by demonstrating an affinity with punk rock, alternative rock and grunge, and hip-hop music culture. At the same time, those acts showed respect to The Simpsons by aligning themselves with the show’s claimed liberal-minded humor and political outlook. Significantly, though, The Simpsons brought an ironic twist to the table. While the music industry in the 1980s (including MTV) profited from taking the relationships between music fans and their favorite bands and singers seriously, The Simpsons took a comedic approach to these relationships (as previously seen in the Beatles’ 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, Jim Henderson’s Muppet Show [syndicated, 1976–1981], the 1982 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, or Saturday Night Live’s “Wayne’s World” sketches). Beyond caricaturing those on the stage, The Simpsons featured (parodic) portrayals of the audiences in front of, as well as the “touring” world in-between and the “backstage” world behind it. The Simpsons thereby added a satirical perspective to our shared cultural history of popular music. What may seem to be homage often has a demystifying subtext: the rebellious gesture inherent in “rock” becomes co-opted by corporate culture at the “Hullabalooza” festival (“Homerpalooza,” 1996); Homer attends a rock ’n’ roll summer camp to compensate for his mid-life crisis moment of not having realized his dream of becoming a rock star (“How I Spent My Strummer Vacation,” 2002); or—in an alternate history—that being a famous, successful rock star turns out not to be the dream Homer has imagined, but rather a nightmare of narcotics and self-destruction in what is an allusion to Kurt Cobain’s tragic fate (“That ’90s Show,” 2008). On another occasion, the pop music industry is on target in the Season 12 episode “New Kids on the Blecch” (2001), where Bart is cast to join Nelson, Ralph, and Milhouse as the bad-boy character for a boy band named the Party Posse.

The Arts of the Street In addition to popular music, The Simpsons has touched on other subcultures that informed Generation X. By equipping Bart Simpson with a skateboard,

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for example, the show’s creators updated the archetypal catapult-carrying scallywag figure in the vein of Dennis the Menace, adapting it to the image of 1990s youth culture. Bart’s skateboard illustrated The Simpsons’ aspirations towards youth-oriented writing and, simultaneously, became a symbol for the show as such. Thus, when Bart is skateboarding home from school in the original opening sequence of Season 1, he flies out of the school building, cuts a corner by holding onto a light post before he gets back on to the sidewalk, passes a shop window with a number of TVs displaying Krusty the Clown, and rolls by a bus station where he snatches the bus-stop sign. As a result, we see a bus that does not stop and people running hysterically to catch it. Clearly this scene informs us—the viewers of The Simpsons—about Bart’s role on the show as rascal kid and prankster. Moreover, however, the skateboard is symbolic of the generational gap between the “old” style of television and The Simpsons’ much more fast-paced and dynamic aesthetic. On several occasions, Homer happens to encounter his son’s vehicle of choice, which is to the baby-boomer dad much more of a handicap (or a snag) than a means of urban transportation and lifestyle accessory. In fact, The Simpsons’ 300th episode, “Barting Over” (2003) featured skateboard legend Tony Hawk, whom Homer convinces to set up a rigged skateboarding contest in order to win back Bart’s affection. “Dad, you don’t understand,” Bart comments on Homer’s stunt. “This was never about being cool. It was about you not caring how I felt.” Another subcultural leitmotif in The Simpsons has been graffiti culture. Again, it is Bart who performs tactical tricks with his spray can—graffiti being a culture of ephemeral (re)writing. Armed with spray paint, he mocks Principal Skinner on the schoolyard wall, fools his adversary from Shelbyville, or otherwise leaves his tag, El Barto, on various objects across Springfield. The portrayal of graffiti on the series has been less a reference to its parallel existence as “visual art” than a form of documenting and paying tribute to street art as an element of urban youth culture whose “codes” become popularized and “conventionalized” through mainstream media and commercial appropriations (Poveda 2006, p. 44). This also points to The Simpsons representing a media franchise of the dominant “white” culture, which appropriated subcultural practices traditionally associated with non-white ethnicities—like graffiti and hip-hop culture—and thus helped to commodify them for white middle-class audiences in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Kitwana 2005). Unsurprisingly, Bart Simpson has become a popular motif spray-painted on walls and bridges all around the world. A notable episode highlighting this connection is Season 23’s “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart” (2012), a title that evokes the 2010 documentary

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film Exit Through the Gift Shop, directed by street artist Banksy. Here, The Simpsons took up the debate around street art’s rise, from being branded “vandalism” to its status today as an appreciated “art form” which has gained mainstream appeal and even entered museums with work by the likes of Banksy. The episode featured cameo appearances by popular street artists Shepard Fairey, Ron English, Kenny Scharf, and Robbie Conal. “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart” revolves around Bart, alias El Barto, who retaliates against Homer’s disciplinary measures by covering Springfield with stenciled images of Homer and the word “Dope.” Notably, Bart’s posters are similar in design to Shepard Fairey’s OBEY-stickers, which found great resonance in the early 1990s in East Coast hip-hop and skater subcultures, and evolved into an iconic image among Western youth in the 2000s (and, eventually, into Fairey’s fashion label, OBEY Clothing). Together with Milhouse, Bart expands his project, creating different designs based on his Homer-motif. He becomes a celebrated street artist whose work is featured in an exhibition visited by hipster-styled art aficionados. At the show, Shepard Fairey shows up with police, revealing that he has worked undercover to help find the vandal who has spray-painted Springfield. Since Bart is underage, he does not have to go to jail; but his career as a street artist comes to an end as The Simpsons drops street art’s proposition like a hot potato, namely, by acknowledging that graffiti is, indeed, a crime. The implied kids-friendly admonition (“Kids: don’t do this—it’s against the law!”) seems to run contrary to The Simpsons’ advocacy of artistic forms protesting corporate culture and the commercialization of public space. In “Exit Through the Kwik-E-Mart,” Bart’s use of billboards and public signs as media for his subversive messages—what the popular lexicon refers to as “culture jamming”—are sanctioned when Bart is caught and his career as street artist is ended. On the one hand, this ending is necessarily prescribed to reset after the episode is over. But at the same time, Bart’s punishment underlines The Simpsons’ evolution from intruding on the media industries as an alternative cartoon series (bottom-up) to representing the media industries as a corporate entity with an interest in burking unauthorized forms of art (top-down). Originally, however, The Simpsons introduced a cartoon universe that showcased brand and ad parodies on prime time TV (see Fink 2017). Springfield represented a utopian world where satirical attacks, which followed street culture’s credo of claiming the right to respond to messages in the public space, were considered fair game. Moreover, when The Simpsons depicted a “Sprawl-Mart” store, emblazoned with a banner that ironically

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reads “Not a parody of WALMART” (“The Fat and the Furriest,” 2003), the series addressed a political climate among its viewers that was related to the anti-corporate attitude inherent in the anti-globalization movement, which appealed to a sizable youth audience at the turn of the millennium. Significantly, Springfield has never been a logo-free world. Rather, it used to be a world where the No Logo spirit, which Naomi Klein discussed in her landmark book No Logo, became manifest insofar as every logo, advertisement, or brand depicted on the show was a detail to be carefully considered, for they potentially provided satirical commentary that was critical of consumer society. This critical dimension, which implicitly and in a self-deprecating manner took aim against the same corporate culture of which The Simpsons is a part, was increasingly downplayed in the show’s third decade, as demonstrated by fans complaining about uncritical representations of companies such as Facebook in Season 22’s “Loan-a Lisa” (2010). Parody logos, ads, and commercials have been utilized by The Simpsons as backdrop symbolizing corporate satire. In addition, the series has run story-driven sketches, including critical commentary against specif ic brands or business models. Such moments emerge, for instance, when we accompany Homer working under inhumane conditions at “Sprawl-Mart”; when we understand Lisa’s obsession with overpriced “Mapple” products in Season 20’s episode “MyPods and Boomsticks” (2008) as satirizing the business model of the Apple computer company; or when we see Starbucks coffee stores virally taking over, shop by shop, at the Springfield Mall while Bart gets his ear pierced in the Season 9 episode “Simpson Tide.” Through such moments of corporate satire—hitherto unseen within a scripted cartoon show—The Simpsons addressed the sentiments shared by many who experienced the neoliberal paradigm associated with globalization. In No Logo, Klein has described this condition in terms of a “culture [no one] could physically escape” (p. 78). Rather, the corporate mammoths of our time—Wal-Mart, Apple, Starbucks, you name it—are not just brands but have established themselves as consumer cults, which exploit employees, clients, and smaller-scaled businesses.

Putting the Cult in Pop Culture As Simone Knox (2007) has observed, much of The Simpsons’ original attraction derived from the show’s “double-codedness.” This not only refers to the series’ neoliberal tongue-in-cheek humor to satirize Western society’s capitalist culture; moreover, as Knox highlights, the show’s winks

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at media-savvy viewers “by addressing them as—and rewarding them for—being culturally conversant and ‘in the know’” (p.75). Through this mode of dual address, The Simpsons can be watched by a general viewership whose involvement in the series may be more or less cursory while, at the same time, the show’s producers are speaking to a specific, much more intensely engaged audience segment of intimate viewers. To this end, a great deal of the show’s content has been devoted to media fandom, as well as the encyclopedic knowledge that goes along with it. In this context, Knox notes that “the allusions enhance our enjoyment if they are caught, but do not detract from enjoyment of the show if they are missed” (ibid., p. 88). Similarly, Jonathan Gray has pointed out that while deciphering the cluster of allusions on The Simpsons demands a high degree of cultural capital (or, rather, subcultural or fan cultural capital), the parodic humor which targets genre and rhetoric concepts works on a much more general level (Gray 2006, p. 85). Hence, media-literate viewers who watch the series through an analytical lens will typically claim for themselves the rewards of a deeper understanding of the show and a richer experience from interrogating The Simpsons’ intertextual play. As an extra layer of The Simpsons’ double-coded textual composition, one significant reason for The Simpsons’ appreciation as cult show is the series’ way of tapping into media fan cultures. For one thing, The Simpsons emerged as a stronghold for film buffs that participated in (re)defining the film canon by referencing “classics,” including renowned masterpieces like Hitchcock or Kubrick movies, but also such media cult phenomena as Star Wars or the movies of Quentin Tarantino. By parodying scenes from Tarantino’s 1994 Pulp Fiction in the Season 7 episode “22 Short Films About Springfield” (1996), The Simpsons presented itself as a show that both defined and reflected Gen Xers’ media literacy. Some viewers might have understood such parodic jokes as homages to movies they themselves appreciated (or not); others might have identified these references as signposts to cultivate or expand their film knowledge. In other words, if film criticism was the traditional way of evaluating a certain film or director, The Simpsons fulfilled a similar function for an audience that acknowledged the show’s expertise on film history. The show’s visual homages often referenced landmark movies such as Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. Thus, The Simpsons’ creative team riddled the series with movie allusions, high-fiving those in the audience who caught

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a certain reference (on first or repeated viewing), while making sure that those who did not could nevertheless enjoy a given scene. The Simpsons, in other words, marked a site that invited boomers and Gen Xers to interrogate traditional distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, between “art” and “kitsch,” between “cult” and “canon.” This characteristic is also demonstrated in the show’s parodic references to television, especially cult TV shows like Twin Peaks, Knight Rider, the 1960s Batman, Star Trek, or Dr. Who. This “geek appeal,” which TV critic Emily Nussbaum discusses in relation to the ABC hit series Lost, has long since become a touchstone for contemporary TV serial production (Nussbaum 2019, pp. 306–308). In that way, “the series works to construct an expert puzzle of intertexts and in-jokes,” which, as Knox notes, “offers the viewers the pleasure of recognizing these references and working out ‘hidden’ jokes” (ibid.). For Irwin and Lombardo, one of the effects of allusion-laden texts such as The Simpsons is the “forging of community” (2001, p. 86). Allusive texts play with our intertextual knowledge and cultural encyclopedia, a creative process practically every audience enjoys. It is a pleasure to f ill in the blanks, to know the right answers or recognize something familiar.

Representing Fandom Displaying their own backgrounds as pop culture geeks, Matt Groening and the creators of The Simpsons have emphasized the aspect of fandom within the series since the show’s inception. From sports to popular media, pop culture fandom has been spelled with capital letters in Springfield (albeit with a satirical slant that carried forward the spirit of fan humor as originally popularized by MAD magazine; see Chapter 2). Among other pop culture elements, domains of fandom that are particularly prominent in the series are comics and science fiction—media fan cultures which often intersect and which are known for their keen and fastidious following. As Michael Sharp observes in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Simpsons’ writers have tapped into these cultural traditions and, thus, created overlaps between Simpsons fan culture and that of comics and science fiction: “this has afforded them ample opportunity to both honor and mock their fans” (Sharp 2005, p. 1231). A particular subject of satire on The Simpsons is science fiction fandom, even though the portrayals are also affectionate and demonstrate “deep respect” for this passion (ibid., p. 1232). Aside from the pop-culture-obsessed

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kids portrayed in the show, this sensibility comes especially to the fore though the character of Comic Book Guy, a figure through which the producers are able to demonstrate popular cultural capital as a defining element of fandom. The owner of Springfield’s comic book store, The Android’s Dungeon, Comic Book Guy is the embodiment of sci-fi and comics fandom. As Sharp writes, “his store is the center of many a science-fiction-related plot and subplot, and he functions as both a curmudgeonly critic (he has a master’s degree in folklore and mythology) and repository of all kinds of arcane knowledge on the subject of science fiction and fantasy” (ibid., p. 1231). According to Knox, the character represents “the ‘ideal’ fan with his demonstrably comprehensive knowledge of popular culture that tells of much time spent watching television programs and solving their puzzles” (2007, p. 77). Like many of the show’s characters, Comic Book Guy functions as a parodic template, representing the caricature of a sci-fi geek and “naive” superfan. Portrayed as white, male, incel (involuntarily celibate), clumsy, and socially awkward, the character has not only drawn on the stereotype of the comic book fanboy but even, as Lincoln Geraghty (2016) notes, has become iconic in that regard. Furthering this image is Comic Book Guy’s depiction as an obnoxious, overweight slacker, who revels in an arrogant attitude of self-aggrandizement based on his expertise in pop culture, while still enjoying the comfort of his mother’s basement. As fan-friendly as The Simpsons might seem, the character of Comic Book Guy has contributed to a continuum of forms of representation that Suzanne Scott (2019) links to conceptions of fandom as imagined by what she calls the “convergence culture industry.” Thus, the representation of Comic Book Guy harmonizes with Scott’s reading of the “fanboy archetype,” who reaffirms rather than challenges the market-oriented logics that drive the culture industries, and, in turn, privileges a gendered representation of the nerd figure as a defective male whose “potentially ‘failed’ masculinity is buttressed by his . . . knowledge of geek culture” (2019, p. 59). In that sense, Comic Book Guy led the way for the representations of nerds in CBS’s hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–2019) in that all of them are framed as “affirmational fans, avid consumers and collectors,” as well as privileged male fans who, unlike their female counterparts, understand “the appeal of comic books, video games, cult movies, and the fan culture surrounding them” (p. 60). Indeed, Comic Book Guy’s stereotyping in the show is only somewhat cushioned with Season 24’s episode “Married to the Blob” (2014), which shows Comic Book Guy falling in love with, and later marrying, the manga aficionada Kumiko.

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Besides being featured as representational clichés reproducing a malecentric ideology (albeit somewhat “othered” by the media industries’ preference of consumer over macho culture), fan representations in the shape of Comic Book Guy may also serve “disciplinary function[s]” (ibid., p. 58). Thus, Springfield’s pop culture fanatic/critic writ large presents a great gimmick for the show’s writers to maintain its storyworld while commenting on the relationship between the show’s producers and its fans. Comic Book Guy, in other words, is the prototype of geeky fan stand-ins to come, like Lost’s Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (sometimes mockingly referred to as “Darlton Cuselof”), who have been perceived as “manipulating [the series’] own relationship with its fans, alternately evading and reflecting their critiques, and the finally satisfying them in the most condescending possible way” (Nussbaum 2019, p. 308). As Robert Sloane (2004) has suggested, Season 8’s episode “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” (1997) remains particularly telling in this regard. The episode features the producers of The Itchy & Scratchy Show, the fictional Tom and Jerry–style cartoon show within the Simpsons universe, as they decide to insert a new character into the series to make it appear “fresh” again. The new character is a hipster dog named Poochie; as the producers of Itchy & Scratchy are searching for a voice for Poochie, Homer auditions and gets the job. By commenting on the familiar strategy in the television industry to add new personalities to freshen up a show or series, The Simpsons satirizes the industrial discourse of television entertainment. As Sloane notes, this commentary intensifies when, parallel to Poochie on Itchy & Scratchy, a character called “Roy” shows up in the Simpsons’ household without any introduction or explanation, disappearing at the ending as mysteriously as he had popped up at the start. The recursive effect of these moments deepens when Lisa tells the producers of Itchy & Scratchy that “there’s not really anything wrong with The Itchy & Scratchy Show. It’s as good as ever,” she goes on, but after so many years, the characters just can’t have the same impact they once had.” That Lisa is saying this while facing her own mirror image, of course, marks the statement even more as meta-commentary; after a number of seasons and several years on TV, The Simpsons’ producers themselves began to face the problem of “jumping the shark.” In addition to these self-reflexive gestures towards the series’ economic conditions, the episode also spoke directly to The Simpsons’ fanbase through an encounter between Comic Book Guy and Bart Simpson. After the first Itchy & Scratchy episode featuring Poochie has been aired, Bart meets Comic Book Guy, who complains bitterly about the episode. In a humorous way,

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the dialogue provides a critical response to The Simpsons’ own hardcore fans’ practice of finding great interest (and potentially pleasure) in internet threads debating, week after week, which one would be the “worst episode ever.” CBG: Last night’s Itchy & Scratchy was, without doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured that I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust throughout the world. Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain? CBG: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me. . . Bart: They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them! [Pause] CBG: Worst. Episode. Ever.

Sloane observes that “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” was the episode with which The Simpsons overtook The Flintstones as the longest-running animated prime-time show in American television history. But instead of celebrating, the creators of The Simpsons used this opportunity to present “a meditation upon the very issue of television longevity and on the pitfalls that come with keeping a show ‘fresh’ after a number of years” (2004, p. 143). In fact, the episode positions The Simpsons (advocated by Homer, Lisa, and Bart) in opposition to an ungrateful and overly critical audience. Reflecting the discussions about The Simpsons’ qualitative decline as they actually took place in online discussion groups such as alt.tv.simpsons, Bart’s encounter with Comic Book Guy thus functions as a virtual dialogue between The Simpsons’ producers and the show’s fans. As noted by Sloane, The sentiments of the Comic Book Guy seem to be a dig at the fans that inhabit electronic newsgroups such as alt.tv.simpsons, where fans discuss their favorite shows in cyberspace. Clearly, the creators of The Simpsons feel hurt that “loyal viewers” dismiss the product of their hard work so readily, and yet many posts on the newsgroup do just that. Fans go over each episode and scene with a fine-toothed comb, rating their relative qualities with unabashed frankness. . . . In this context, however, the writers [of The Simpsons] seem to suggest that such nit picking can lead to an under appreciation of the show’s larger project. There is no room for error in the minds of these fans. (2004, pp. 147–48)

Thus, in another scene in the episode, we see a promotional appearance by Homer as Poochie’s voice actor in The Android’s Dungeon. At the event,

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Homer faces a group of hardcore Itchy & Scratchy fans depicted as nerds with rimmed glasses whose questions address internal inconsistencies and other trivia within Itchy & Scratchy, such as, “In episode 2F09, when Itchy plays Scratchy’s skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones.” Sloane explains that such trivial issues have been regular topics in early Simpsons online discussion groups. Fans used to discuss all kinds of details including inconsistencies or flaws which, on the other hand, “is perfectly understandable, as [The Simpsons’] animators do show an amazing attention to detail and are sometimes quite consistent, referring back to past episodes” (p. 148). This form of fan criticism echoes the same hyperconscious humor The Simpsons had been cultivating over the years. Albeit somewhat exaggeratedly, these fans mirror the series’ tendency to self-consciously satirize its own shortcomings regarding questions of narrative continuity as well as its performed oppositionality against the dominant (capitalist) culture. By taking The Simpsons seriously, the show’s hardcore fans might miss the economic realities that define every industrially produced media property. But their perspective, which some of the show’s producers might have written off as quixotic, is the ultimate proof of The Simpsons’ efforts to understand fan sensibilities: that is, (sub)cultural values based on creativity, continuity, and integrity, in contrast to dropping these principles for the sake of profit. In a vein that echoes Saturday Night Live’s legendary 1986 “Star Trek Fans Get a Life” skit, featuring William Shatner (best known for playing Star Trek’s Captain Kirk) who mocks the lifestyle of those portrayed as stereotypical fans, The Simpsons also reaffirms the stereotype of the geek who is white, male, and socially deficient. Moreover, “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” demonstrates how the makers of The Simpsons play out their relationship with the fans in a satirical way by working two layers of cultural criticism into the text: criticism expressed by fans towards their favorite TV franchise alongside criticism of this behavior as a mode of disciplining fans. In this respect, the representation of fan culture on The Simpsons offers some remarkable insights. On the show, various characters have been used as satirical commentators and thereby vehicles for disciplining the show’s fans in subtle ways, such as when Bart reprimands Comic Book Guy’s criticism against The Simpsons’ proxy cartoon program, The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Consider the scene where Bart tells Comic Book Guy that, “they’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them!” Apparently, Bart functions as a mouthpiece for The Simpsons’ producers (“they”) who

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implicitly address and criticize the show’s fans (“you”) for being insuff iciently grateful. Similarly, Lisa occupies the entrepreneurial position when she chastises her father for simply copying and pasting all kinds of graphics from the internet to create his own blog as Mr. X in the episode “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” (2000). “A web page is supposed to be a personal thing,” she tells Homer. “You’ve just stolen copyrighted material from everyone else. They could sue you for that,” Lisa complains, obviously in a nod at fans who did the same with visual material produced for The Simpsons—that is intellectual property “owned” by Fox. Moments like these corroborate the series’ neoliberal nature, illustrating how strongly the show has reproduced and valorized capitalism’s central tenets rather than criticizing them.

Performing Fandom And yet, it would not do justice to the originality of The Simpsons to write off these representations of media fandom as mere devices of fan disciplining. Take the figure of Bart Simpson, whom we may understand as symbolic of The Simpsons brand. Brian Ott has observed that, “as a fan, Bart shapes his identity without turning it over to the culture industries” (2003, p. 64). Considering Scott’s concept of the convergence culture industry, however, we can say that Bart conforms to the male fan stereotype in that he is a model fan-consumer. While being selective in his choice and displaying subcultural taste, Bart seems to be a slave to his objects of fandom—that is, Krusty the Clown and his media outlet, The Itchy & Scratchy Show, or the fictional comic book hero Radioactive Man. This is demonstrated as early as Season 1’s episode “Krusty Gets Busted” (1991), when we see Bart lying in his bed, bathing in Krusty merchandise, owned by a corporate clown who has let his little big fan down innumerable times. Bart’s fandom also becomes explicit in his appreciation of collectibles, such as when he convinces two friends to buy the first edition of Radioactive Man, Bart’s favorite comic book, for $100 in “Three Men and a Comic Book” (1991), a second-season episode which shows how the creators of the series have emphasized the aspect of fan elaboration from the beginning. While reflecting on The Simpsons’ own meaning as a mass-media product merchandised to the highest possible extent, such moments also offer gestures of appreciation for collecting special items or memorabilia as an integral aspect of fan culture. As Matt Hills notes, collecting is part of an alternative economy that offers commodities which would, “according to

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the conventional logic of use and exchange-value, be almost worthless” (2002, p. 35). At the same time, whether it is Bart’s love for Krusty the Clown, the cartoon program Itchy & Scratchy, or Radioactive Man comics, Bart Simpson is still positively portrayed as a clever, media-savvy agent of participatory culture. The aforementioned episode “Three Men and a Comic Book,” for instance, starts off with Bart introducing Radioactive Man to his little sister, Lisa. All this happens while the kids are on their way to a local comic book convention. Bart tells Lisa all about how Radioactive Man “rules” and how “cool” he is. To demonstrate this, Bart shows Lisa an extract of the comic. A close-up invites us to quickly scan several panels, thus being suggestive of both the way comic books are read (in fact, often at speed, and repeatedly) and the dynamic and power Bart brings to the text. While Lisa was skeptical about Radioactive Man at first, she finally appears to be convinced of the originality of her older brother’s favorite comic book. Bart hereby fulfills the role of the (paternalistic) fan tastemaker for his younger sister; but the way he reads out the balloons also gives Lisa a good laugh, a scene which is suggestive of how kids might have a mentoring function in cultivating an affinity for pop culture fandom for younger siblings. In these instances, the creators of The Simpsons clearly signal their own fannish relationship to the comics and cartoon world, a link that is further developed when Bart and Lisa arrive at the comic book convention. We see the line in front of the entrance and a sign that reads “Admission: $8—$5 if you’re dressed like a cartoon character.” Notably, everyone waiting in the line is disguised as some character from the pop culture world—a boy dressed as a Jedi, another one dressed as Krusty the Clown, and so on. Then Lisa notes in ironic tones, “Too bad that we didn’t come as popular cartoon characters.” Bart, (raising) his hand up in the air in a comic superhero fashion, exclaims: “This does sound like a discount for. . .” Upon this, he jumps to the right with the camera following him, to an iconic red phone booth; Bart pushes the man inside out of his way and, accompanied by a Batman-esque jingle, transforms in a split second into—“Bart-Man!” With a sudden breeze of wind and in a pose reminiscent of superhero iconography, Bart stands in front of Lisa. He wears a black cape in the style of Batman but with a special Bart design, as his spiked hair is integrated into the outfit. Obviously, the whole scene echoes the “fantastic” scenarios of superhero worlds—Bart neither had the cape with him nor any place to hide it before; let alone the fact that he is not able to produce wind inside a closed building. Both the visual as well as the sound level are highly parodic, as is Bart’s masquerade.

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Much more important in this context, however, is that the scene can be understood to be suggestive of fandom-driven stories in which such fantastic things are considered legitimate because they comply with the logics of specific fictional media texts. Through conceiving the figure of “Bartman,” Bart inscribes himself into a superhero universe. Notably, the image of Bartman is not so much a parodic representation of Batman as it is fueled by a dimension of popular, fan cultural capital. By appropriating characteristics of his favorite superheroes, including such generic conventions as the sound when he “transforms” and the wind that accompanies his performance, Bart gives shape to his alter ego through what are processes of self-stylization by appropriating popular mythologies and media images. Bart’s identity negotiation via another pop culture text is underscored when the cashier asks him who he is supposed to be, and Bart grabs him by his collar and replies, “I’m Bartman!” mimicking the way Batman speaks similar in the 1989 movie Batman. Although Bart’s tactics are unsuccessful, since the cashier does not know “Bartman” and thus demands the full price, the way the scene mimics the close-up in the movie it references underlines the creators’ own fan-cultural capital. Even more so than in the regular episodes, a domain where The Simpsons’ writers are able to juggle with their own and the show’s audience’s fancultural knowledge has been the annual Halloween specials, which allow the show’s writers to depart even further from the series’ already-tenuous connection to realism (Johnston 2015, p. 176). The episode “Treehouse of Horror X” (1999), for instance, provides a good example here. Of particular relevance for our discussion is the second segment of the episode, entitled “Desperately Xeeking Xena,” in which, due to X-ray radiation, Bart and Lisa become the mutant superhero duo Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl (reminiscent of two characters in the comic book series The Fantastic Four). As in many original superhero narratives, their newly acquired powers allow them to be superheroes and have their own adventures within The Simpsons’ fictional universe. The “Stretch Dude & Clobber Girl” segment is presented in the style of the late-1960s’ Spider-Man or The Marvel Super Heroes, with an intro sequence and theme song which credit the heroes’ individual superpowers, their dedication to law and order, neighborly helpfulness, as well as political patriotism. In the final scene of the parodic opening sequence for Stretch Dude & Clobber Girl, we see how the duo ties up and kicks Saddam Hussein in the pants, destroys a Nazi zeppelin heading for New York, and is finally thanked by Bill Clinton. This kind of humor, of course, satirizes the American tradition of using comic book heroes for propagandistic purposes, such

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as Captain America punching Adolf Hitler in the face on the cover of the character’s first issue in 1941. At the end of the intro song, we see a title card captioning the topic of the adventure of “tonight’s episode” together with a voice-over which announces the quasi-title (“Enter. . . The Collector”) in a fashion typical of these cartoon series. The episode’s plot starts with a talk given by Lucy Lawless, the actress who played Xena in the fantasy series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and its spin-off Xena: Warrior Princess. At the event, a reading set within a bookstore in front of an audience of sci-fi geeks, Lawless is exposed to criticism from the “fans” concerning the show’s narrative inconsistencies. Then “The Collector” enters (represented by the character of Comic Book Guy). Apparently, he is the villain of the upcoming story. Wearing a bodysuit with the letter “C” on the breast, plus a cape and a mask, he is modeled in the stereotypical fashion of superheroes and their antagonists. The Collector kidnaps Lawless because he considers her to be Xena, whom he wants to make his bride as well as part of his collection of fictional characters. This is not only a parodic comment on male fans’ obsessive collection habits, but also alludes to fantasies articulated in fan fictions where people engage in (sexual) relationships with their objects of fandom, typically carried out by female fans. Jenkins (1988, pp. 96–97), for instance, illustrated how female “Trekkies” (originally derogative term used by male “Trekkers” to denote female Star Trek fans) write romantic fictions, some of which feature the authors themselves, as they are having love affairs with the show’s protagonist. Not only the switching of genres, which is typical of fan creativity, but also the blending of different universes (crossover fiction) can be recognized in the “Desperately Xeeking Xena” sequence. It is interrupted with short inserts functioning as an editing device to crosscut between the villain and the superhero duo, who are clearly mimicking the animated “scene shift cards”—including the brass riff played during the scene changes of the late-1960s’ live-action series Batman. This blurring between different fictional universes of science fiction and fantasy action heroes becomes further personif ied by The Collector/Comic Book Guy’s assemblage of fictional characters kept in large plastic pouches to remain in “near mint condition,” consisting of Spock from Star Trek, Robbie the Robot from Lost in Space, Yasmine Bleeth from Baywatch, Doctor Who, and a Matt Groening cameo. In addition, the Collector wants to be called by the names of such characters as “Obi-Wan” (Obi-Wan Kenobi from the Star Wars films) and “Iron Man” by Xena/Lucy Lawless during their wedding night. As Stretch Dude and Clobber Girl appear, The Collector draws a “phaser” (a fictional

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weapon used in the Star Trek universe) to overcome the intruders and finally intends to kill them—of course, in an extensive procedure and by means of a sophisticated arrangement, lowering the heroes in a pool filled with Lucite to conserve them for his collection. This leads to the plot’s climax where Lucy Lawless—in typical Xena manner—manages to overwhelm the Collector with a ruse and her superpowers. Ultimately, The Collector arms himself with a Star Wars merchandise lightsaber, but as he realizes that he has removed it from its original packaging and thus devalued it as collectible, he stumbles and falls into the pool of Lucite, crawls out of it, and, as the Lucite is hardening, imitates a pose from Lorne Greene in Battlestar Galactica in which he prefers to die, with the words “Best. . . Death. . . Ever.” He stumbles, in other words, over his own neurotic fan behavior. Finally, The Simpsons’ writers once more exploit the blurring between the f ictional universes of action-hero mythologies and “realism” for a fan-oriented punch line when Xena takes Lisa and Bart and flies home with them, whereby she violates the codes of Xena’s powers, which do not include flying. As Clobber Girl/Lisa remarks, “Wait a minute, Xena can’t fly,” Xena/Lucy Lawless (still wearing her Xena outfit) replies, “I told you, I’m not Xena. I’m Lucy Lawless.” Although both scenes mock several aspects of fandom (cosplay, collection habits, “nerd-dom,” nitpicking, and so forth), they nevertheless reveal The Simpsons’ creators’ fundamental knowledge about, and aff iliation for, media fan cultures. They engage with what we may call fan-cultural capital as a specific form of popular cultural capital by the countless parodic allusions that only a small group of the regular Simpsons audience will fully appreciate. By incorporating other cult texts, the writers position their own show within a special relationship to the sci-fi/fantasy genre as well as its fan cultures and their traditions. Thus, while many viewers were probably familiar with the more obvious references to well-known pop culture phenomena like Star Wars and Star Trek, only pop-culture-literate fans might have immediately caught the more sophisticated references, say, to 1960s superhero comic culture. Overall, though, the gestures and style will be recognized by most people as a general homage to the superhero genre as form of pleasure derived from “visual critical genre study” as it is common in media fandom (see Stevens 2020, p. 143). Moreover, the episode deals with the fantasies entertained by some fans of transgressing the “official” universe of a particular media text, and setting foot in a utopian space where all sorts of media texts can intermingle and also blend with the “real” world.

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As the “Desperately Xeeking Xena” sequence illustrates, The Simpsons’ creators both follow the trajectory paved by MAD and the magazine’s parodic take on comics culture with motifs such as “Superduperman” by presenting superhero satire as we know it from participatory/fan culture while simultaneously positioning themselves as comics and science fiction fans. While references to and incorporations of other fictional and/or media characters have been abundant and defining properties of The Simpsons since its inception, it is striking that the franchise has treated “cult” texts (especially those of science fiction like Star Trek, Star Wars, or Batman) with special care. A specific category of fan writing that has established itself as an underground genre of its own is slash fiction—derived from the abbreviation K/S (Kirk/Spock). Slash writing refers to stories written by fans that articulate sexual fantasies about a film or television series’ main character pairing being reread as queer, thus bringing to the fore a homoerotic subtext offered implicitly by a particular story. If homosexuality as a recurring theme in Groening’s work became manifest first in the Life in Hell comic strips in the form of Akbar and Jeff (see Henry 2004, p. 230), The Simpsons has also suggested similar camp aesthetics.1 Apart from the explicitly romanticized relationship between Waylon Smithers and his boss, Mr. Burns, this gay sensibility is interestingly also expressed through allusions to some classic camp readings within cultural history, such as that of the 1960s Batman television series, which is played out in several ways, most notably through the comic book hero Radioactive Man and his companion and “ward,” Fallout Boy (functioning as Robin). As Matthew Henry observes, by parodying the patterns of the Batman series, “The Simpsons is in effect rearticulating the homoeroticism of the show for mainstream audiences, overtly enacting the same reading that gay men and women have covertly made for years” (2004, p. 232).

Conclusion As has been shown, the poetics of media fandom and participatory culture have influenced The Simpsons on various levels. While its creators were 1 For a definition of “camp,” see Babuscio (1993, p. 20): “Camp is never a thing or person per se, but, rather, a relationship between activities, individuals, situations, and gayness. . . . The link with gayness is established when the camp aspect of an individual or thing is identified as such by a gay sensibility.”

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cautious at f irst about appropriating elements from other pop culture universes because of legal concerns, this issue was increasingly ignored over the course of the series’ development. “In those [initial stages of The Simpsons],” former Simpsons showrunner Al Jean observes, “we were a little more concerned with legal clearances, so we’ d have ‘our’ versions of famous characters; in later years, we’ d just put Darth Vader or The Joker in and not care about it” (Jean et al. 2002, 02:36). If The Simpsons’ aesthetics had always included popular readings—semiotic appropriation, and parody of pop culture texts—these features became increasingly assertive over the course of the series’ longer trajectory. (At the same time, Simpsons fans have criticized the show for losing its edge when it comes to its original dimension of anti-corporate satire.) For the most part, however, The Simpsons’ performances of fan behavior conform to the logics of what Scott calls the convergence culture industry in that they have privileged media fandom as a male-connoted cultural space. In this regard, it is worth noting that Lisa’s depiction as superheroine happens only within a Halloween episode, a special occasion that is regularly used to transcend The Simpsons’ internal logic (I will come back to this issue in the course of the final case study in Chapter 6). Normally, however, Lisa represents the little girl, super-smart but eventually powerless, her ideals doomed to failure in Springfield’s satirically dysfunctional society of (see Fink 2019, pp. 68–69). A different logic applies to Bart. He might only be street-smart, but his cleverness vests him with power. This hierarchy reverberates in Simpsons fan culture, where Bart’s role as (anti-)hero is broadly accepted, whereas Lisa mostly drops behind her brother in popularity. Even though Lisa’s character seems to represent a mouthpiece for some of the writers’ liberal views, her image is not so popular among many fans—far from the visual culture around Bart, which dates back to the Bart craze in the early 1990s, where remixes of Bart Simpson printed on T-shirts circulated widely as bootleg merchandise (see Chapter 5). The character of Comic Book Guy has emerged as an especially prolific figure when it comes to the relationship between media producers and media fans. Over the course of the series’ development, the character has become a stereotype for satirizing fandom in general and Simpsons fandom in particular. As Sloane notes, Comic Book Guy “has become a sort of shorthand for criticism of the producer-receiver relationship”; and he and “his ‘worst episode ever’ line have become recurring jokes themselves” (2004, p. 162). Notably, the fans have not responded to the satirical figure with bitterness; instead many have adopted Comic Book Guy as a legitimate representative, popularizing “CBG” as signifier for a particular kind of geek

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mentality and identity of pop culture fandom in the digital age, illustrated by myriad CBG-allusions, as well as images and GIFs featuring the character that are commonly used in contemporary digital culture. Crafted through the lens of pop culture satire, The Simpsons’ representation of media fandom has also been welcomed as a tribute to geek culture by many viewers.

References de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Babuscio, Jack. 1993. “Camp and the Gay Sensibility.” In Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, edited by David Bergman, 19-38. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fink, Moritz. 2017. “Culture Jamming in Prime Time: The Simpsons and the Tradition of Corporate Satire.” In Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, edited by Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, 254–79. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2019. The Simpsons: A Cultural History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2016. “Fans on Prime-Time: Representations of Fandom in Mainstream American Network Television, 1986–2014.” In Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture, edited by Lucy Bennett and Paul Booth, 95–105. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. Henry, Matthew. 2004. “Looking for Amanda Hugginkiss: Gay Life on The Simpsons.” Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 225–43. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. Irwin, William, and J. R. Lombardo. 2001. “The Simpsons and Allusion: ‘Worst Essay Ever,’” In The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer, edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conrad, and Aeon J. Skoble, 81–92. Chicago: Open Court. Jean, Al, et al. 2002. “Audio Commentary for ‘Three Men and a Comic Book.’” The Simpsons: The Complete Second Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD. Jenkins, Henry. 1988. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2: 85–107. Johnston, Derek. 2015. Haunted Seasons: Television Ghosts Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kitwana, Bakari. 2005. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Klein, Naomi. 1999. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf. Knox, Simone. 2006. “Reading the Ungraspable Double-Codedness of The Simpsons.” Journal for Popular Film and Television 34: 72–81. Lotz, Amanda D. 2014. The Television Will Be Revolutionized. 2nd. ed. New York: New York University Press. Marriott, Michael. 1990. “I’m Bart, I’m Black and What about It?” New York Times, September 19, 1990, C1. Mirkin, David, et al. 2005. “Audio Commentary for ‘Homer the Great.’” The Simpsons: The Complete Sixth Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD. Newcomb, Horace, and Paul M. Hirsch. 1983. “Television as Cultural Forum: Implications for Research.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 8.3: 45–55. Nussbaum, Emily. 2019. I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution. New York: Random House. Ostrow, Joanne. 1998. “Man behind Simpsons the Toughest Critic of All.” Denver Post, January 14: G1. Archived at: The Complete Simpsons Bibliography, https:// www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/bibliography05.html (accessed July 10, 2019). Ott, Brian L. 2003. “‘I’m Bart Simpson, Who the Hell Are You?’ A Study in Postmodern Identity (Re-)Construction.” Journal of Popular Culture 37.1: 56–82. Poveda, David. 2006. “Language and Talk.” In Contemporary Youth Culture: An International Encyclopedia. Vol. 1, edited by Shirley Steinberg, Priya Parma, and Birgit Richard, 41–46. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Reidelbach, Maria. 1991. Completely MAD: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Scott, Suzanne. 2019. Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry. New York: New York University Press. Sharp, Michael D. 2005. “The Simpsons (1989–).” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders, Vol. 3, edited by Gary Westfahl. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ABC-CLIO eBook Collection. Shary, Timothy. 2005. Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen. London: Wallflower. Sloane, Robert. 2004. “Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment in The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 137–71. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Stevens, E. Charlotte. 2020. Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

5.

At the Edge of Convergence Culture: Engaging in the Simpsons Cult Abstract One of the main reasons behind The Simpsons’ success was the series’ conflation of fan sensibilities and mass appeal. This chapter traces the ways in which The Simpsons’ producers created a prime-time television franchise and merchandising empire that still managed to carry cult status for a devoted fan community. In this context, I discuss strategies of fan marketing, transmedia storytelling, audience interaction, and contested claims of intellectual property. Finally, the chapter examines instances where the interests and economies of The Simpsons’ producers and participatory culture have converged, as well those in which they have clashed. Keywords: The Simpsons, cult TV, media fandom, convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, intellectual property

Parallel to its mainstream success as a prime-time television show, The Simpsons has always enjoyed cult status—not just as a cult show but also as a cult franchise. If this seems incongruent, it is because the attribute “cult” in relation to media objects is typically associated with subcultural appeal, and thus with a rather small circle of viewers or devotees (cf. GwenllianJones and Pearson 2004). As touched upon in the previous chapters, The Simpsons—along with other media fare from the 1990s—has substantially contributed to redefinitions of this traditional understanding of “cult.” Reflecting on the condition of convergence culture, Matt Hills observes how television entertainment featuring “cult” characteristics—which used to derive from a program’s niche appreciation—has increasingly been drawing larger, even mainstream audiences. The Simpsons might be considered an early instance of the array of 1990s shows suggested by Hills in this context—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, Lost, The XFiles—which were “designed to reach a wide range of audiences and intended

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_ch05

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to be read fannishly as well as less closely [by general viewers]” (Hills 2010, p.73). Furthermore, Hills emphasizes the spread of digital culture and new media, which fueled the dissemination of media fandom and diffused the cult experience related to a certain television program. Indeed, it seems unsatisfying to narrow down The Simpsons’ cult status to a particular group of hardcore fans. The “cult” around the show reached the mainstream quickly after the series debut, when the cartoon family made it onto the covers of Mother Jones, Newsweek, Time magazine, and TV Guide, and Simpsons merchandising became a staple in shops across America and beyond. This is to say, The Simpsons has never been just a TV show; it started out both as a media franchise and a multimedia serial narrative corresponding to what Marsha Kinder has observed for many fictional characters or character ensembles within commercial pop culture: constituting the nucleus of a “supersystem of transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 1991, p. 3). Since its inception, The Simpsons has entailed transmedia extensions that expanded the consumer experience—industry-driven peripheral texts such as comics, books, action figures, websites and so forth, as well as media content emerging from the participatory realm surrounding it. Significantly, though, participatory culture and capitalist entrepreneurship operate under different economic logics. Early work investigating the transmedia paradigm in entertainment media, such as Kinder’s 1991 Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games, has shed light on how spectator culture became increasingly interactive, and how these models provided new sources of revenue for the media industries. But it was mostly through the lens of fan studies that media scholarship has understood the different economies at work in commercial and participatory media culture. Fan cultures are typically characterized by what Matt Hills calls the “dialectic of value”—an alternative value system according to which fans operate “simultaneously inside and outside processes of commodification, experiencing an intensely personal ‘use-value’” that is not related to “exchange-value” in a purely capitalist sense (2002, p. 19). While varying in visibility and power, it is the interaction between the corporate and the participatory spheres that shapes the trajectory of multimedia serial narratives like The Simpsons.

The Simpsons as Cult Phenomenon Television programs cannot be planned to become cult media texts. As Hills notes, fan engagement plays the most significant role in transforming a

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media text into a cult object. While drawing a cult following may be a factor involved in the production of a show like The Simpsons, this is by no means a guarantee for becoming a cult show; it is the viewers—the fans—that turn a text offered by the media industries into a cult experience. Besides the discourse within fan groups that reflects the meaning of “cult” (which includes using the term cult itself), cult status expresses itself most overtly through paratexts, as described by Jonathan Gray (2010a). Manifestations of this can be seen in the self-organization of fan communities and conventions or grassroots productions such as websites, blogs, online discussion groups, mailing lists, fan art, or even books dedicated to a specific cultural artifact (Hills 2004, pp. 518–19). It seems obvious that The Simpsons is a massive cult phenomenon. After the series had launched, it quickly attracted an enormous number of viewers all around the world, some of whom became loyal fans. As Gray’s reception study in Watching with The Simpsons (2006) illustrates, the show was especially popular among Western university and college students (with regard to age as well as appreciation for the show’s liberal stance). Within a demographic sample of international female and male students, Gray’s qualitative study has shown that The Simpsons originally mobilized an intense form of “interpretive community”—viewers who watched the show collectively, and even “religiously,” in viewing groups or with friends (Gray 2006, pp. 125–26). These insights are corroborated by Canadian Simpsons fan Chris Turner in his 2004 book, Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. Turner describes his weekly encounter with The Simpsons in a pub at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, during the “Golden” Simpsons era. Describing the show as a venue for the “‘alternative’ [campus] culture of the early 1990s” (p. 6), he reflects on the process of watching The Simpsons with his fellow students as a collective experience: “All those scattered, slivered Is became wes,” he writes in fannish, adoring prose, and continues: “We were being defined by the show. Shaped by it. Even united by it” (ibid.). This level of affinity corresponds to Gray’s observation that fans of specific TV shows are affected by the language and values articulated in their favorite programs, for example that Simpsons fans reference scenes and quotes from the show in casual conversations as a form of “Simpsons-speak” (Gray 2006, p. 127). Turner contends that “The Simpsons was not just a show you watched but a language you talked, a worldview you adopted” (p. 8). To people familiar with The Simpsons, Turner argues, the series can work as sort of “critical vernacular” (p. 9).

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For many original Simpsons aficionados, this “vernacular” carries cultural capital to this day. If The Simpsons was “must-see TV” to millions of teens in the 1990s, many are still versed in specific scenes or quotes of the show’s history—such as Homer’s famous aphoristic toast, “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” Another popular thread here is to associate real-life situations with moments from the series (cf. Fink 2019, p. xi). “For an entire generation and a half . . .,” Tyler Shores observes, “Simpsons quotations have become a cultural shorthand, a sort of shared cultural literacy” (2019, p. 213). In accord with Turner’s seemingly hyperbolic appraisal of The Simpsons as having shaped a whole television generation, Shores’s description of The Simpsons as providing a “shared cultural literacy” might seem exaggerated. And yet, there is hardly any media text like The Simpsons, whose humor and satirical worldview resonated among millions of adolescents and young adults across genders, social tiers, ethnicities, and continents. These emotional ties to The Simpsons that are still held among millions of people—whether we want to call them (ex-)fans or not—imply a common familiarity with the franchise that makes The Simpsons stand out from the longer list of cult media texts. But why did The Simpsons develop such as massive cult following? Jenkins refers to Umberto Eco’s notion of cult films to explain why a certain media text is more likely to reverberate as a cult experience than others. To gain cult status, Jenkins notes, a text must offer a parallel universe—“a completely furnished world” (Eco 1985a, p. 3). In addition to this narrative complexity, which Hills describes using the category of “hyperdiegesis”—a vast narrative space that operates according to a consistent internal logic (Hills 2002, p. 137)—the storyworld should be composed of multiple recognizable and detachable elements that can be individually interpreted or enjoyed, as well as allusions and references to other pre-existing texts (see Jenkins 2006a, pp. 97–98). In this regard, The Simpsons was bound to become a cult TV show due to its auteurist features, expansive range of characters, elaborate visual details, high degree of intertextuality, striking level of self-awareness, and ironic sensibility discussed in the previous chapters. The Simpsons spoke to an audience that arrived at the text with a willingness and ambition to fulfill the role of what Jenkins describes in terms of a textual “hunter and gatherer” (2006a, p. 21), who is “invited to play upon his [sic] encyclopedic competence” (Eco 1985b, p. 171). Apart from its textual complexity and intertextual references to other pieces of cult media, as discussed in the previous chapter, The Simpsons’ longevity and massive volume of secondary literature also contributed to fostering the series’ cult character (cf. Hills 2005, p. 191). Since its early

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days, the show’s producers have provided accompanying comic books and episodes guides. First issued in 1991, a companion magazine entitled Simpsons Illustrated featured interviews, background information on the characters and the series, as well as comics based on the series’ mythology. From 1997 onwards, regular episode guides were published, starting with The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Family.1 In addition, there have been several book publications, such as The Simpsons Xmas Book (Groening and Pond 1990), Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life (Groening et al. 1993.), and The Simpsons Family History: A Celebration of Television’s Favorite Family (Groening 2014). Clearly, the producers considered these licensed secondary texts as a way of strengthening the relationship with their consumers. The DVD collection boxes available for most Simpsons seasons (twentyone seasons as of December 2020) serve a similar function. Like the episode guides, most DVD sets provide commentaries by the show’s creators, background information on cultural references, documentation on inside jokes such as the “chalkboard gag” (the sentences Bart writes on the school’s chalkboard in the opening sequence, which differ from episode to episode) or the so-called couch gag (which also varies from episode to episode, including guest-written couch gags).2 Furthermore, special collectors’ DVD boxes in custom designs constituted a form of marketing that is certainly intended to intensify the cult experience for the fans (cf. Hills 2004, p. 516). In 2016, Fox introduced a website and app called Simpsons World, an online service tied to the FX pay-TV channel, which not only offered Simpsons episodes but also provided a wealth of extra Simpsons data and information. As Shores (2019, p. 210) observes of the service, it is a “database only dreamed of by fans in previous years and decades.” The service ceased to exist with the launch of the Disney+ streaming service, which now hosts Simpsons episodes; it remains to be seen to what extent Disney’s platform will include other forms of audience and fan engagement in the future, in a move to continue Simpsons World’s function to combine “television . . ., streaming, and web content” (ibid.). A fan service par excellence, the documentation of individual series as provided by Simpsons World was originally developed by fans themselves. The Usenet group alt.tv.simpsons was launched in March 1990, only three months after The Simpsons’ serial debut, and rapidly became one of the first major online fan communities (as of August 2021, the newsgroup is still in 1 See Richmond and Coffman (1997); for subsequent episode guides, see Gimple (1999), McCann (2002, 2005), and Simpsons World: The Ultimate Episode Guide (2010). 2 For the phenomenon of TV series on DVD, see Kompare (2006) and Mittell (2010).

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existence). With the inception of the World Wide Web and the growing accessibility of the internet, more and more unofficial Simpsons fan sites subsequently emerged. Two of the most influential were The Simpsons Archive (from 1994 to 2013 hosted at the Web address snpp.com; since 2014, at simpsonsarchive.com) and the fan forum No Homers Club (NoHomers.net, since 2001), both of which were launched and maintained by former members of alt.tv.simpsons. The amount of documentation and knowledge about the series provided by these websites is remarkable. In addition, Wikipedia also provides in-depth entries on The Simpsons’ history, in connection with Simpsons-related wikis such as Wikisimpsons, along with numerous Simpsons-themed podcasts and social media accounts. Clearly, the degree of participation provided by online fan communities constitutes a whole new level of what Fiske and early cultural studies scholars have described as “active audiences.” As Jenkins (1995) notes, many media fans embraced technological devices such as VCRs, the PC, and the internet to extend the experience of textual complexity that television entertainment began to exhibit in the early 1990s with shows such as Twin Peaks or The Simpsons. Documenting, sharing, and discussing popular media texts not only enhances forms of cult experience but also builds communities, shaping the media texts’ cultural meaning as “common property” (Jenkins 1995, p. 57).

From “TVII” to “TVIII”: The Simpsons and Convergence Culture I have already discussed the characteristics of what media scholars Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein have described as the “TVII” moment in television history (see Chapter 2). It was, on the one hand, precipitated by technological developments (cable and satellite television, the remote control, the VCR, and the PC), and on the other, a move towards treating fan audiences as a new, lucrative type of quality audience. When Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein’s essay on Fox’s The X-Files appeared in 1996, there was no way of knowing the impact the internet would have in the millennial years (hence the authors’ marginal mentioning of early online fan communities via online newsgroups such as alt.tv.simpsons or alt.tv.x-files). Considering the profound effect the internet has had on contemporary media culture and the relationship between television production and consumption, Derek Johnson (2007) suggests that, today, we are experiencing a new “TVIII” moment in the history of television. Johnson notes that while Reeves, Rodgers, and Epstein’s “TVII” model stresses the role of the fan-consumer as a driving force for the production of television content, it

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does not take audience participation into account. In what he tentatively calls “TVIII,” Johnson argues that “audiences are not just cultivated as fans, but also invited in, asked to participate in both the world of the television text and the processes of its production” (p. 63). While The Simpsons did technically not emerge within a “TVIII” context—it suff ices to say that Johnson’s examples of the postmillennial series Lost (ABC, 2004–2010) and 24 (Fox, 2001–2010; 2014) are clearly more demonstrative of his argument—The Simpsons’ longevity and cultural pervasiveness makes the series particularly interesting in this respect. More than any other American television series, The Simpsons has been a constant presence in media history over the last three decades. Thus, the show’s trajectory illustrates the transition from “TVII” to “TVIII” and documents the entry of television production into the convergence culture era. In other words, in order to sustain its popularity and prevail among numerous other innovative programs in competitive commercial television, The Simpsons was equipped from its inception with features that anticipated the “TVIII” turn, while its producers also succeeded in developing ways to adapt the show to the changing conditions of convergence culture. In an interview with Joanne Ostrow (1998), Groening stated that The Simpsons’ complex writing has contributed directly to the huge fan following. However, the same fan following has also been the show’s harshest (and in Groening’s opinion, often most unfair) source of criticism. As noted, these fans have been keen to document inconsistencies within the individual episodes or to criticize what they perceived as the series’ overall loss of quality practically since The Simpsons’ very f irst seasons. Most of this exchange happened via the internet, which already provided platforms of communication for a growing Simpsons fan community in the show’s early days. At the center of what we have come to view as instances of participatory culture related to The Simpsons, however, lies the media franchise’s promise to encourage “forensic fandom” as described by Jason Mittell (2009). By riddling the Simpsons text with references, parodies, and allusions, the show’s producers have always called for an autopsy of the individual episodes in order to “get” all the jokes. With the still-recent adoption of VCR technology, fans recorded, rewatched, transcribed, and commented on the joke cluster that each Simpsons episode consists of; more recently, YouTube analyses of The Simpsons are legion. Since the show’s inception, the producers have embedded subtle visual Easter eggs in the show, so they can only be discovered when a certain scene is watched in slow motion or “freeze frame” (such as the price when

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baby Maggie is “scanned” on the register in the original opening sequence: $847.63—the average cost of raising a baby in the United States at that time). Matt Groening and his team were quite aware that their writing invited viewers to “review [a certain scene] and study it frame-by-frame and talk about it on the internet” (Jean et al. 2002, 01:22). In this sense, they have encouraged and welcomed fan participation. Groening in particular has often affirmed how he appreciated what the fans are doing, for instance, when “they labor over what they call ‘freeze-frame moments’” (quoted in Ostrow 1998, n.p.). While online fan forums such as The Simpsons Archive were early sites documenting these visual details, today anyone can consult publications such as Olivier Lebrun’s Companion to Books from The Simpsons (2012; updated ed. 2018), which chronicle specific books that could be seen on the show, or the Instagram account Simpsonslibrary, which documents all the (parody) book titles that have appeared on the show. While the writers and producers often refer to fan communities, they do so primarily by pointing out the fans’ prissy and pedantic protocols but also the elaborate, labor-intensive, and time-consuming work ethic through which the fans deal with the show. As Groening once noted regarding internet communities such as NoHomers.net: “[These fans] often act like spurned lovers if they don’t like anything. They notice everything. With The Simpsons, you are rewarded for paying attention. If you don’t pay attention, fine, the show will roll by you. But if you do pay attention, there are all sorts of secret little details” (Groening [2007] 2012, n.p.). Groening’s statement implies the ambivalence inherent in the relationship between creators and fans. On the one hand, Groening and his team are flattered by the fans’ enthusiasm and respect them and their work (and their economic value); Groening even admitted to consulting websites such as The Simpsons Archive himself for questions regarding specific details from the series’ history (see Graña 2003). On the other hand, the writers and producers also seem to be offended by some fans’ (overly) critical attitude. Former producer and showrunner David Mirkin once formulated succinctly as he remarked apropos NoHomers.net: “This is a show that rewards paying attention, and you guys are the epitome of that, way more than we wish you would” (Mirkin 2005, 06:50). While fandom is a paradigmatic instance of participatory culture, Mirkin’s statement indicates that it is not always collaborative in relation to the culture industries: hierarchies of power, diverging interests, efforts of disciplining vis-à-vis signs of resistance characterize the encounter between the commercial culture and the fans. Jenkins, Ford, and Green draw attention to these tensions inherent in cultural convergence when

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they write, “Corporate interests will never fully align with those of participatory culture, and frictions will frequently emerge” (2013, p. 36). In sum, not every form of fandom is “participatory” in a purely affirmative sense, and not every form of participatory culture is “fandom” as firm, convenient, and lucrative as the industries would like to see it. Often enough, fans are unruly backseat drivers—not just commending but also commenting, criticizing, and countering the course their pop culture vehicle of choice is taking as it is guided by those who ultimately direct it. As autonomous cultural agencies, fans may judge, counteract, or openly protest against specific politics advocated through their favorite media franchise (see, e.g., Tulloch and Jenkins, 1995; Jenkins 2012; Johnson 2017; see also the case of Apu discussed in the conclusion to this book.) In fact, some of the major challenges for the media industries in the convergence culture era has been to recognize an increasingly visible participatory culture, to create (new) models of audience engagement, and to deal with the results of these processes. As Jenkins, Ford, and Green note, “the media industries understand that culture is becoming more participatory, that the rules are being rewritten and relationships between producers and their audiences are in flux” (p. 35). At the same time, the authors underline that corporate media for the most part are concerned about the risks of losing control over what the media industries consider “valuable intellectual property” (ibid.). As we will see, 20th Century Fox, the original copyright holder of The Simpsons, for the most part belonged to this conservative camp: they might have come up with models to expand the televisual experience of watching The Simpsons and to foster audience engagement; yet they remained uneasy about losing control over their intellectual property, about abdicating too much to the fans’ domain.

Televisual Overflow, Synergies, and Transmedia Storytelling Just as comics and video games enjoy a prominent status in the fictional world of the TV series, Simpsons comics and Simpsons video games should not be perceived merely as supplementary sources of revenue in the real world. For the production team, these media platforms offer the opportunity to deal with and flesh out elements that have only marginal meaning in the series and develop them in much more elaborate ways than is possible within the intra-serial world. The pronounced role of comics culture within the show qualifies Simpsons comics especially as paratextual sites through which the show’s storyworld

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is expanded. From 1993 until 2018, Simpsons comics—distributed through Bongo Comics, a comics publishing company co-founded by Matt Groening—offered an additional outlet through which The Simpsons’ universe has been narrated and expanded. Simpsons video games were likewise available from shortly after the series’ start. Through this medium, fans could not only watch and consume the adventures of Homer and Co., but also experience them as interactive participants (for instance, by operating virtually as “Homer Simpson” in scenarios transferred from the television series). As Jonathan Gray notes, the parodic aesthetic and satirical content defining the Simpsons series is largely maintained in these parallel sites (2010b, p. 227). The 2007 Simpsons Game, for example, abounds in parodies of other video games such as Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games, 1997–) or meta-commentaries, such as when Comic Book Guy mocks video game clichés. Indeed, the emergence of video game culture and the internet in the late 1980s and early 1990s paved the way for new, expanded media experiences. As Will Brooker’s study (2001) of the millennial TV series Dawson’s Creek suggests, television audiences have been increasingly encountering new TV experiences with television texts that “overflow” the boundaries of the medium. In other words, television texts expand across multiple media platforms (the internet, comics, video games, the movies, and so forth) and contribute to building synergies between different audiences, markets, and producers. As Brooker asserts, this convergence is largely “shaped from ‘above’” (p. 468); the viewer or fan of a television show is both invited and guided by the culture industries to “extend the show’s pleasures” (p. 461), for example, via computer games, interactive websites, or other entertainment media. Thus, in 1996, Fox released The Simpsons Cartoon Studio for PC and Mac users, which allowed its players to animate their own Simpsons episodes by means of predesigned character templates and backdrops associated with the imaginary universe of Springfield. Today, on the World Wide Web, we not only follow “Homer” but also many of the show’s producers and writers on Twitter, including longtime director David Silverman and marathon showrunner Al Jean. From day one, The Simpsons has been heavily marketed through merchandise articles, which attract fan-collectors to this day.3 The continuing cult around the show becomes manifest when original cells and drawings by the series’ creators reach considerable sums in auctions, or Simpsonsthemed art garners enthusiasts around the world. Thus American artist 3

For a catalogue of Simpsons merchandise in the 1990s, see Getz (1998).

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Figure 5.1: Picture from Simpsons stuff on display in Bart of Darkness’s “shrine” (2019); the superfan also runs an Instagram account, which documents his collection, with over 65,000 followers. Photo courtesy of Warren Evans.

Shepard Fairey hosted an exhibition devoted to Simpsons spoof character Mr. Sparkle in 2019; in the same year, a Simpsons-based painting by fellow artist KAWS was sold at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for $14.7 million (Cascone 2019). As a transmedia phenomenon, The Simpsons becomes part of the “real,” tangible world—yet typically in the form of consumer experiences, for instance, when Universal Studios licensed The Simpsons Ride theme park in 2007, including a Krusty Land rollercoaster and a Kwik-E-Mart gift shop. Marketing gimmicks are a traditional way through which the media industries have sought to promote pop culture products by incorporating audiences. Early in The Simpsons’ history, its writers ended Season 6 with a cliffhanger that asked their audience “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” Inaugurating one of the first TV-based contests that included the internet, Fox’s PR team launched a website on which the show’s audience could engage with the mystery and register the name of a suspect. As for a prize, the winner would be animated on the show. Ironically, the winner, who was selected out of a random sample, took a cash prize instead of appearing on the show (Mirkin et al. 2005). In another instance, Fox Broadcasting constructed a real-life replica of the Simpson family home on 742 Evergreen Terrace, in collaboration with the California-based homebuilder Kaufman & Broad

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Figure 5.2: The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios, Los Angeles, CA, December 2012. Photo courtesy of Stuart Sevastos.

and Pepsi-Cola in 1999. Installed near Las Vegas in Henderson, Nevada, it was the first prize in a competition (see Rogers 1998). Such promotional stunts were especially prevalent in connection with advertising The Simpsons Movie in 2007. Then, Fox asked America’s many towns named Springfield to be The Simpsons’ Springfield for a day and host the official premiere of The Simpsons Movie. Moreover, the movie was powerfully hyped by 20th Century Fox and four corporate tie-in partners: several 7-Eleven stores across North America were turned into Kwik-EMarts, complete with the show’s characters and its f ictional products; Burger King ran Simpsons commercials and handed out Simpsons toys along with kids meals; JetBlue temporarily labeled itself the “official airline of Springfield” and presented itself in tune with the humor of the show; and Vans, the manufacturer of skateboarding shoes, initiated a Simpsons-based limited edition sneaker line (see Schiler 2007). As Gray (2008, p. 80) observes, “overflowing” the boundaries of television, then, manifests itself not only in a “long-established form of overflow and synergy—a movie,” but also in such innovative forms of “televisual expansion.” Also in connection with The Simpsons Movie, Fox and Burger King offered an online Simpsonizer tool that allowed anyone to create their own Simpsons avatar. At Simpsonizeme.com, you could upload a portrait that would be transformed into a Simpsons character—Simpsonized. Similarly, you were

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Figure 5.3: 7-Eleven store disguised as Kwik-E-Mart at 345 W 42nd St., New York City, July 2007. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Gray.

able to produce a Simpsons avatar on the movie’s official website, Simpsonsmovie.com. 4 What strikes me as particularly remarkable is that the tools were not only used by fans but also by what we may understand as a wider category of participatory culture. Herbert Krabel, then a forty-seven-year-old ad man running Guerilla Communication, a company providing “alternative” advertising, blogged a picture of himself created with Simpsonizeme.com. Interestingly, Krabel modified the image by inserting a Guerrilla Communication ad sign. He told me that he would not call himself a Simpsons fan, but that he “always enjoyed the show” and used the Simpsonizer as a way to promote his company (Krabel 2012). The Simpsonized Herbert symbolizes the unruly character of convergence culture as Krabel (mis) used the Simpsonizer tool and repurposed it to promote his company. As his creation implies, the media industries may be able to offer parameters but, in the end, cannot fully control how their products are used. This is suggestive of how The Simpsons as an object of cultural participation is not only attractive to the hardcore fans of the show but also to a more general type of participatory consumer who appropriates The Simpsons’ 4 Other than Simpsonsizeme.com, a promotional website for The Simpsons Movie (Simpsonsmovie.com) launched by 20th Century Fox in corporation with Burger King, which contained a Simpsonizer tool, was active until mid-2013.

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Figure 5.4: Herbert Krabel’s Simpsons avatar created through Simpsonsizeme.com.

popular iconography and thus taps into the show’s cultural recognition. Similar to Krabel’s usage of the Simpsonizer, many continue to use Simpsons avatars as profile pictures in internet forums or social media applications such as Twitter. Needless to say, animated GIFs linked to The Simpsons (e.g., the popular “Homer Backs into the Bushes” meme) have inscribed itself into the visual language of the Net. For this purpose, individual Simpsons avatars are also offered by online marketplaces such as Fiverr.com (“How Much Did I Pay for My Simpsons Avatar?” 2013), and on frinciac.com, users can create Simpsons GIFs by typing in words or quotes, which generate screenshots from Simpsons episodes that relate to their search. As Gray notes, the global popularity and worldwide distribution of popular media texts such as The Simpsons makes them everyday encounters in some form (advertisements, T-shirts, toothbrushes, coffee mugs, etc.). At the same time, they are rendered “part of a common language, as are many of their events and characters, and these texts grow through media talk to something more than just the moment(s) of viewing” (Gray 2008, p. 76). Sometimes attempts to tap into participatory culture have also been incorporated into the show itself. In spring 2009, for example, The Simpsons’ producers asked their audience to create a character for the show’s twentieth anniversary in the so-called “Best. Character. Ever.” contest. Simpsons

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showrunner Al Jean explicitly called the contest a “thank you to loyal fans” (Elber 2009, n.p.). The contest’s winner was a fifty-two-year-old Simpsons fan from Orange, Connecticut, who envisioned a new character, Ricardo Bomba (aka “La Bomba”) for the Simpsons universe. Similarly, in October 2012, Fox announced the “Couch Gag Contest.” As the name suggests, fans were asked to submit a storyboard for a couch gag for the Season 24 finale. In these forms of audience engagement, one can clearly see the producers’ attempts to remain in control of the product in that they only call for suggestions, without making the storyboard process transparent to the public. Unsurprisingly, the new character was mostly a publicity stunt and was not considered worth maintaining in the series by its producers. As a consequence, “La Bomba” had to die in a car crash during his debut on The Simpsons and has hitherto not been used again. Of course, such marketing gimmicks are nothing new. In the history of twentieth-century Western popular culture, commercially produced media texts—series in particular—have always involved strategies of audience interaction, such as the $10,000 prize money advertised in a public announcement soliciting suggestions for the best ending for the 1914 silent film series The Million Dollar Mystery (see Kelleter 2012, p. 24). In seeking audience participation, the producers of The Simpsons drew on a well-established means of building ties between the show and its audience, apparently driven by an interest in promoting the series and gaining publicity. What is significantly different today, however, is that television programs are the objects of an extended experience that is offered through strategies and aesthetics which Jenkins (2006a) calls “transmedia storytelling” (strategies because the distribution of fictional storyworlds via multiple media platforms are clearly driven by economic motives; aesthetics because the result of this media convergence provides completely new media experiences). In this cultural mode, Jenkins argues, to fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience. (2006a, p. 21)

To be sure, in comparison with the innovative and experimental forms of media-convergent narrative we see in Jenkins’s case study (2006a) of the Matrix franchise in the millennial and postmillennial period, The Simpsons may not be considered a textbook example of what Jenkins calls

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transmedia storytelling. And yet, given its meaning as a cultural artifact that has spanned an unusual long history of media entertainment, the franchise constitutes a significant historical document in this regard. And the makers of The Simpsons have always aspired to explore new ground. The episode “Simprovised” (2016), for instance, featured the gimmick of a three-minute segment animated live as the voice actor for Homer Simpson, Dan Castellaneta, answered questions viewers could pose via phone. And yet, as this example corroborates, The Simpsons is and will always be a television show in the f irst place. Mittell (2015, p. 294) has pointed to the medium’s prescribed hierarchical relationship between its primary discourse—the show itself, or the “core text” (which Mittell refers to as the “mothership”), and its supporting transmedia extensions. As he observes: For the industry, some transmedia extensions might provide an additional revenue stream, but their primary function is to drive viewers back to the television series; for creators, transmedia storytelling must always support and strengthen the core television narrative experience. (p. 295)

Claiming Intellectual Property, Embracing and Disciplining Active Audiences Although The Simpsons’ aesthetics and textual composition seem to have always suggested a liberal approach towards acts of remixing pop culture content, the show’s producers have given the fans ambivalent signals in this regard. While the online Simpsonizer was a tool designed for fans to virtually coalesce with the Simpsons universe and iconography, creations that reworked The Simpsons in some form without license from Fox have often found themselves in legal quicksand. This does not only refer to the official Simpsons signet, which is protected by trademark law (signified by the TM-symbol beside the show’s logo); legally it is precarious to use any kind of images or sounds from The Simpsons without the consent of Fox (owned by the Walt Disney Company since 2017)—consent the company’s executives will rarely grant. Anyone who violates these terms, like fans who use visual material from The Simpsons in privately created websites dedicated to their favorite TV show, risks legal action on the basis of copyright infringement. Specifically at the turn of the millennium, when the Simpsons series entered its second decade, Fox showed great efforts in pursuing legal action

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against such creators of Simpsons online fan sites. As Nancy Basile, writing for About.com, observes: The battle began in 1999 between Fox and fans of The Simpsons . . . . The Internet was just beginning to thrive, and just about anyone could have a web site. Fans began creating web shrines to The Simpsons . . . . Fox responded by sending letters to those fans asking them to “cease and desist” using images, pictures, sounds and video clips from The Simpsons. If the fans did not modify their web sites, they were shut down. (Basile n.d.)

Even reports about cases where Fox sent out cease-and-desist letters to fans who depicted Simpsons imagery they had drawn themselves are not unheard of. Basile quotes a Simpsons fan who was asked if her feelings towards The Simpsons changed after she had received mail from Fox in reaction to her circulating self-created Simpsons characters. Indeed, the “creativity” and the “enthusiasm” she once had for The Simpsons “are gone,” said the fan (quoted in ibid., n.p.). The fact that the climate between fans and the show’s copyright holder used to be quite hostile is corroborated by Jouni Paakkinen. The administrator of The Simpsons Archive noted in retrospect that “Fox did not greet . . . fan enthusiasm [on the internet] with pure joy. In fact, [Fox] started to send out cease-and-desist letters, demanding that site owners remove all the material they [Fox] considered infringing. . . . This action left many sites crippled. For a while, the atmosphere was really grim and fans didn’t feel that they were appreciated at all” (quoted in Ortved 2009, p. 241). Similarly, Eric Wirtanen, founder of NoHomers.net, commented that he received cease-and-desist letters, the wording of which was so “frightening” that he eventually gave up and removed material Fox considered its intellectual property. As a college student, Wirtanen was afraid of getting “involved in a lawsuit” (quoted in ibid., pp. 241–42). While Fox’s reactions against fan creations using imagery from a franchise as popular as The Simpsons may seem harsh, they have to be understood; as a semiotic system, The Simpsons represents both economic and cultural capital. This recalls Jenkins, Ford, and Green’s observation that the media industries are concerned about losing control over what they consider “valuable intellectual property” (2013, p. 35). From the Fox executives’ points of view, then, it is imperative to maintain hegemony over The Simpsons’ recognizable and distinctive iconography, because this hegemony corresponds to what Rosemary J. Coombe (1998) observes for corporate symbols

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as such: controlling the sign means to be “enabled to control its connotations and potentially curtail many forms of social commentary” (p. 73). The media industries for their part are always on the fence about how much fan activity is too much. Especially the internet—the key infrastructure of convergence culture—encouraged fans to become “collaborators” or “laborers on behalf of the [media] franchise” (Johnson, 2013, p. 24). As Mark Andrejevic points out, Fan culture is at long last being deliberately and openly embraced by producers thanks in part to the ability of the Internet not just to unite far-flung viewers but to make the fruits of their labor readily accessible to the mainstream—and to producers themselves. (2008, p. 25)

In this view, fans are “multipliers” and “influencers”: they extend the corporate media’s marketing power and contribute to disseminate media content. Since the media industries have begun to view fans as resources of collaboration (or even a force of “free labor” to be utilized or, in Marxist terminology, to be “exploited” [cf. Terranova 2000] ), fans are both valuable allies and necessary encounters in a morally complex, contradictory, and often “messy” relationship (see Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, pp. 172–74). As a result of this condition, advocates of participatory culture like Henry Jenkins have observed that commercial copyrights holders are not as antagonistic towards fan cultures as they were a few years ago. This “more permissive climate” (ibid., p. 298) is also corroborated by operators of Simpsons fan sites: “Eventually, instead of banning everything,” says Paakkinen of The Simpsons Archive, “Fox laid out some ground rules and the sites that have followed them have lately been left in peace” (quoted in Ortved 2009, p. 242). We will have to wait and see in which direction Fox is going under Disney and in a time where content from the show (e.g., in GIF form) has entered the vocabulary of social media discourse, even used by people affiliated with The Simpsons. One reason for this policy shift might be the sheer volume of websites and blogs, which has mushroomed in the twenty-first century. In the inflationary media culture that we see today, the costs of enforcing ownership of intellectual property as a matter of principle, including the monetary effects of bad publicity, are at risk of becoming too high. This situation demands a departure from costly and labor-intense zero-tolerance policies in favor of more efficient means to protect and maintain intellectual property. At the same time, Fox might have become aware that, as Jenkins notes, “attempts to regulate intellectual property undercut the economic logic of media

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convergence” (2006b, p. 147). Rather than being considered as essentially “antagonistic” in relation to the culture industries, fans are increasingly considered collaborators who have to be nurtured rather than suppressed. Because audience engagement is crucial for a media property’s popularity, and therefore its f inancial success, maintaining control over what the corporate media consider their intellectual property (like characters of a TV show or a movie) cannot simply be reached by suppressing fan voices. Rather than sending out cease-and-desist letters to fans who might violate intellectual property rights, the industries are seeking alternative ways of “disciplining” in the age of convergence culture. Likewise, Derek Johnson has contended that in the “TVIII” era, virtual instances of discipline are often embedded in the text through characters functioning as “fan representatives” or even “stand-ins” (Johnson 2007, p. 76).

Parallel Economies As the 1990s’ answer to the literary rascal archetype in the vein of Tom Sawyer or Dennis the Menace, the character of Bart Simpson in many ways overshadowed the franchise and its reception. It is striking, for instance, that Bart, rather than the Simpson family, dominated the covers of magazines such as Cracked, Entertainment Weekly, MAD, Rolling Stone, and Time during the show’s premiere year of 1990. Unsurprisingly, Bart’s iconic image of the rebellious Gen Xer was a popular target for unlicensed appropriation and reworking. Not only was Bart—restyled as a sort of Rambo—printed on anti–Saddam Hussein T-shirts during the first Gulf War, but his figure was also hijacked to serve as the unofficial mascot for various political purposes: anti-war groups, pro-vegetarian groups, and even Nazi groups (see Ernst and Werkmeister 2001, pp. 96-97; Doherty 1999). The most documented instance in this connection remains Barts appropriation by African-American youth. In a variety of remixes, Bart became “Rasta Bart” or “Bart Marley,” “Air Bart” (fusing Bart and Michael “Air” Jordan), and even a spokesperson for civil rights groups (e.g., a Black Muslim sporting the slogan “We Shall Overcome” or depicted alongside Nelson Mandela saying “Apartheid. No!”). Peter Parisi’s article (1993) about the Black Bart phenomenon has demonstrated to what extent the commercial media offer mythologies through which minority groups who feel alienated by the dominant culture seek an individual identity by adopting media images and resignifying them. This corresponds to what early cultural studies scholarship observed about the self-stylization of youth subcultures “borrowing” imagery from the dominant

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consumer culture and transferring it into different social or cultural contexts (see Clarke et al. 1976, p. 55). Russell Adams, the chairman of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, explained in an interview with the New York Times that the reason Bart had become so popular among black youth is because he symbolized the rebellious “outsider” who expresses the feelings of blacks who “grow up in a society that often alienates them” (quoted in Marriott 1990, n.p.). In other words, the role Bart plays in the Simpsons series is already suggestive of the public image of “Bart Simpson,” serving as a vehicle through which cultural groups can articulate their positions or worldviews (especially if these are considered unpopular or in conflict with the dominant mainstream culture). Also, as Vincent Brook (2004, p. 178) notes, the series’ color-coding, which represents “white” Simpsons characters with a yellow skin tone and thus implicitly bypasses issues of race in the white-dominated mainstream media, might have encouraged the “creative colorization” by African Americans. If The Simpsons already exhibited an anti-hegemonic dimension, such acts of appropriation not only reflected this aspect, they also reinforced it. As Emanuel Ernst and Sven Werkmeister put it, “the new multiple identities of the protagonist [Bart Simpson] enhance the creative and potentially subversive capacity Springfield has to offer. Bart’s character allows for attribution beyond those of [The Simpsons’] creators’ intentions” (2002, p. 97, my translation). As the bootlegged Bart Simpson T-shirts illustrate, participatory culture can never be completely held in check; it has its own (informal) rules and logics, which have historically evolved from under the surface of the cultural mainstream. And although the producers of The Simpsons were mostly not amused by what they saw or heard, and Fox did take legal action “wherever it could” (Ortved 2009, p. 128), they were not able to completely control the mutations of Bart Simpson—neither the sign nor its cultural meanings. Today, Bart bootlegs such as “Bart Marley” images have even become a part of the Simpsons cult itself, as the social media accounts dedicated to “Bootleg Bart,” which archive and document images related to the phenomenon, illustrate. All legal questions aside, the logics of convergence culture thwart any authoritarian suppression of participatory culture using media content. Rather, the industries have to seek alternative ways and strategies to respond to acts of (illegal) appropriation. Thus, while the executives at Fox were mostly alarmed by what they regarded as an expropriation of their intellectual property, the company was smart enough to convert this kind of audience activity into a promotional gag. With True Colors (1990–1992), Fox placed a show right after The Simpsons in the channel’s schedule, which was primarily directed at an African-American audience. In a promo for this

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new combination, the audience saw Bart dancing next to the young black protagonist of True Colors, calling him “my idol!” (Ernst and Werkmeister 2001 p. 98). An even more sophisticated (and self-ironic) approach in response to the Black Bart incident, however, was undertaken by Groening. In his cartoon strip Life in Hell, Groening referenced the bootleg productions through a fake “Bootleg Akbar and Jeff” T-shirt ad, which offered T-shirts with “Air Akbar,” “Blakbar & Jeff,” and “Akbar & Jeff Go Funky Reggae” in direct allusion to the Black Bart motifs. Below the depicted T-shirts, a caption read, “Warning: We Will Prosecute Bootleggers of Our Bootlegs,” probably a humorous allusion to Groening’s own appropriative textual practices as we see them in his work, most notably in The Simpsons. Being “one of the most bootlegged cartoonists in the world” (Groening quoted in Doherty, n.p.), Matt Groening usually presents himself as moderate regarding issues of copyright infringement, or even as a pro-fan advocate who considers Fair Use of his intellectual property as being protected under the First Amendment. At the same time, however, he seems to feel comfortable with Fox’s “legal machinery” going after cases of copyright infringement. Couching his remarks in the rhetoric of a liberal underground cartoonist who does not really care about such bureaucratic matters, Groening clearly follows Fox’s restrictive policy, even though he pretends not to be involved in the actions of the attorneys dealing with cases of copyright infringement. I don’t pay attention to that, honestly. I deal with gigantic T-shirt companies ripping off The Simpsons. You know, by going after people for copyright infringement I’m on solid ground. Bart Simpson has been appropriated by anti-war groups, by pro-vegetarian groups—“Don’t have a cow, man.” [But] he’s also been appropriated by skinhead Nazi youth groups, and it’s a thrill to be able to kick their asses based on copyright infringement. But I couldn’t do it if I didn’t go after it consistently with other stuff. Although I think we let vegetarian stuff fly. (Quoted in Doherty, n.p.; brackets in the original)

In reality, Groening’s offhand remark is of course serious business. In cases where corporate iconography was subject to appropriation in the past, jurisdiction, especially in the United States, has often supported corporate interests, giving superiority to the legal doctrine of “dilution” over those of artistic freedom (see Coombe 1998, p. 77). In the context of The Simpsons, one such incident where a court ruled in favor of “dilution” was the case of a small Australian beer company which

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produced and distributed “Duff Beer,” the fictional beer brand in the series’ storyworld. In 1996, Fox successfully sued the Australian beer company because, as the Federal Court of Australia ruled in Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and Matt Groening Productions Inc v. The South Australian Brewing Co Ltd and Lion Nathan Australia Pty Ltd, the Australian beer company exploited “a strong association between their use of the name ‘Duff Beer’ and ‘The Simpsons,’ which in fact is deceptive.”5 As the “Duff Beer” case demonstrates, the fictional world of The Simpsons does not only pervade the real world through the show’s producers’ extension strategies; a fictional trademark can even become a real-life issue of copyright law. Admittedly, recalling Groening’s statement concerning legal consistency, it is hard for Fox to tolerate free use of Simpsons material without losing the ability to protect and thus profit from its media property. And yet the commercial distribution of Simpsons bootleg T-Shirts or “Duff Beer” is different from fans using the series’ iconography for small-scale, non-commercial purposes. As Rebecca Tushnet (2007) observes, for the most part, fans are not aware that their practices of appropriating from the semiotic realm of popular culture are illegal, or else they do not consider them illegal, feeling their work does not violate copyright because it is produced privately and not for profit. Jenkins argues that fans typically follow informal rules according to which they legitimize their appropriative acts and their production practices. What Jenkins, drawing on E. P. Thompson, calls “moral economy” refers to an “ideology of fandom” which is informed by a commitment to the original texts’ logics and history as well as “a perceived right to evaluate the legitimacy of any use of those materials” (1988, p. 100).

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, sometimes fan cultures are more in conflict with the corporate media, sometimes less. They may be framed as inconvenient yet influential cultural agency according to the traditional top-down paradigm. But fan cultures operate non-hierarchically through what Julie Levin Russo calls “horizontal activity” (2009, p. 127). Whether this activity appears to be lucrative or harmful for a particular media company, Jenkins, Ford, and 5 The decision is archived at http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/PILFoxvAus.htm. Nevertheless, other forms of “Duff Beer” continued to being distributed. From 2009 to 2013, for example, a “Legendary Duff Beer” was available in Europe through the German brewery Eschweger Klosterbrauerei.

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Green are right to emphasize the “alternative systems of value” inherent in participatory culture. This alternative value systems may refer to the aspiration to massively circulate media content, to gain an audience and a reputation, to engage in dialogue with and build up communities, to promote an individual cause, or to express a particular perspective or identity (2013, pp. 59–60). Thereby fans and other cultural producers participate in an “informal economy” (p. 61) that coexists with the commercial economy and is directed much more bottom-up than top-down. In his study of media fandoms, Jenkins (1992) used Michel de Certeau’s metaphor of “poaching” to describe the politics and poetics of semiotic appropriation as practices of meaning-making among fans cultures. Textual poaching thus offers a model of contesting textual authority through appropriation and resignification which gives emphasis to “conflicting,” “competing,” or “contradictory” interpretations of a certain media text on behalf of the media industries as first-hand, and the fans as second-hand producers (cf. Jenkins 1992, pp. 32–33). While these coexisting interpretations stem from different interests—with one camp promoting its interest over the other camp—Jenkins emphasizes that this is not to suggest that the meanings fans produce [through their practices of textual poaching] are always oppositional [in relation to an imagined dominant reading according to Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding” model] . . . . Fans have chosen these media products from the total range of available text precisely because they seem to hold special potential as vehicles for expressing the fans’ pre-existing social commitments and cultural interests. (ibid., p. 34)

As we will see in the following chapter, this does not just apply to fans of the series but to popular culture as a whole. A semiosis as easily recognizable and reproducible—and as popular—as The Simpsons is used by cultural creators of various sorts for various purposes.

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Brook, Vincent. 2004. “Myth or Consequences: Ideological Fault Lines in The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 172–96. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Brooker, Will. 2001. “Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence, and Television Overflow.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4.4: 456–72. Cascone, Sarah. 2019. “Sotheby’s Was Hoping This KAWS Painting of ‘The Simpsons’ Would Sell for $1 Million. It Just Went for $14.7 Million.” Artnet.com, April 1. Archived at: https://news.artnet.com/market/kaws-auction-record-sothebys-1505122 (accessed: December 3, 2020). Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. 1976. “Subcultures, Cultures and Class.” In Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 9–79. London: Hutchinson. Coombe, Rosemary J. 1998. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Doherty, Brian. 1999. “Matt Groening: The Creator of The Simpsons on His New Sci-Fi TV Show, Why It’s Nice to Be Rich, and How the ACLU Infringed on his Rights.” Mother Jones, March/April. Archived at: http://www.motherjones.com/ media/1999/03/matt-groening/# (accessed June 19, 2019). Eco, Umberto. 1985a. “Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” SubStance 14.47: 3–12. –––. 1985b. “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics.” Daedalus 114.4: 161–84. Ernst, Emanuel, and Sven Werkmeister. 2001. “Little Shop of Homers: Skizzen zum Simpsons-Sellout.” In Die Simpsons: Subversion zur Prime-Time, edited by Michael Gruteser, Thomas Klein, and Andreas Rauscher, 77–101. Marburg: Schüren. Elber, Lynn. 2009. “Ricardo Bomba: New Simpsons Character Contest Winner Chosen!” Huffington Post, November 19. Archived at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/ricardo-bomba-new-simpson_n_363444.html (accessed August 24, 2013). Fink, Moritz. 2019. The Simpsons: A Cultural History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Getz, Robert W. 1998. Unauthorized Guide to The Simpsons™ Collectibles: A Handbook and Price Guide. Atglen, PA: Schiffer. Gimple, Scott M., ed. 1999. The Simpsons Forever! A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family . . . Continued. New York: HarperCollins. Graña, Dolores. 2003. “La larga risa de todos estos años.” La Nácion, June 24. Archived at http://www.mundosimpson.com.ar/html/notas/2003_06_24.html (accessed July 10, 2019). Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge.

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–––. 2008. Television Entertainment. New York: Routledge. –––. 2010a. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2010b. “The Simpsons.” In The Essential Cult TV Reader, edited by David Lavery, 221–28. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Groening, Matt. (2007) 2012. Matt Groening: The Playboy Interview (50 Years of the Playboy Interview). Playboy. Kindle file. –––. 2014. The Simpsons Family History: A Celebration of Television’s Favorite Family. New York. Abrams. Groening, Matt, and Mimi Pond. 1990. The Simpsons Xmas Book. New York: HarperCollins. Groening, Matt, et al. 1993. Bart Simpson’s Guide to Life. New York: HarperCollins. Gwenllian-Jones, Sara, and Roberta E. Pearson. 2004. “Introduction.” In Cult Television, edited by Sara Gwenllian-Jones and Roberta E. Pearson, ix–xx. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hills, Matt. 2002. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge. –––. 2004. “Defining Cult TV: Texts, Inter-Texts and Fan Audiences.” In The Television Studies Reader, edited by Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill, 509–23. London: Routledge. –––. 2005. “Cult TV, Quality and the Role of the Episode/Programme Guide.” In The Contemporary Television Series, edited by Michael Hammond and Lucy Mazdon, 190–206. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. –––. 2010. “Mainstream Cult.” In The Cult TV Book, edited by Stacey Abbott, 67–73. London: I. B. Tauris. “How Much Did I Pay for My Simpsons Avatar?” 2013. 5DollarBlog: What Can You Do for $5. September 16. Archived at https://5dollarblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/ my-own-simpsons-avatar/ (accessed June 19, 2019). Jean, Al, et al. 2002. “Audio Commentary for ‘Three Men and a Comic Book.’” The Simpsons: The Complete Second Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD. Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. –––. 1995. “‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’ alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery.” In Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, edited by David Lavery, 51–69. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. –––. 2006a. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2006b. Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2012. “‘Cultural Acupuncture’: Fan Activism and the Harry Potter Alliance.” Transformative Works and Cultures 10. Archived at: https://journal.

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transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/305/259 (accessed September 20, 2020). Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Derek. 2007. “Inviting Audiences In: The Spatial Reorganization of Production and Consumption in ‘TVIII’” New Review of Film and Television Studies 5.1: 61–80. –––. 2013. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2017. “Fantagonism: Factions, Institutions, and Constitutive Hegemonies of Fandom.” In: Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd ed., edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 369–86. New York: New York University Press. Kelleter, Frank. 2012. “Populare Serialität: Eine Einführng.” In Populare Serialität: Narration—Evolution—Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Frank Kelleter, 11–46. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kompare, Derek. 2006. “Publishing Flow: DVD Box Sets and the Reconception of Television.” Television and New Media 7.4: 335–60. Krabel, Herbert. 2012. “Re: Inquiry—Your Blog Post ‘Simpsonizeme.’” Message to the author, October 21. Email. Lebrun, Oliver. 2012. A Pocket Companion to Books from The Simpsons in Alphabetical Order. Zurich: Rollo Press. [–––]. 2018. A Final Companion to Books from The Simpsons. New, updated ed. n.p.: Yellow Pages. McCann, Jesse L., ed. 2002. The Simpsons Beyond Forever! A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family . . . Still Continued. New York: HarperCollins. Mittell, Jason. 2004. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York: Routledge. –––. 2009. “Sites of Participation: Wiki Fandom and the Case of Lostpedia.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3. Archived at: https://journal.transformativeworks. org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117 (accessed July 10, 2019). –––. 2010. “Serial Boxes.” Just TV: Random Thoughts from Media Scholar Jason Mittell, January 20. Archived at: https://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/serial-boxes/ (accessed June 19, 2019). –––. 2015. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press.

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Mirkin, David, et al. 2005. “Audio commentary for ‘Who Shot Mr. Burns (Part One).’” The Simpsons: The Complete Sixth Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD. Ortved, John. 2009. The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History. New York: Faber & Faber. Ostrow, Joanne. 1998. “Man behind Simpsons the Toughest Critic of All.” Denver Post, January 14: G1. Archived at: The Complete Simpsons Bibliography, https:// www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/bibliography05.html (accessed July 10, 2019). Owen, Rob. 1997. Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Parisi, Peter. 1993. “‘Black Bart’ Simpson: Appropriation and Revitalization in Commodity Culture.” Journal of Popular Culture 27.1: 125–42. Reeves, Jimmie L., Mark C. Rodgers, and Michael Epstein. 1996. “Rewriting Popularity: The Cult Files.” In Deny All Knowledge: Reading The X-Files, edited by David Lavery, Angela Hague, and Marla Cartwright, 22–35. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Richmond, Ray, and Antonia Coffman, eds. 1997. The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family. New York: Harper Perennial. Rogers, Patricia Dane. 1998. “Doh! [sic] She Won the Simpson House, But It’s Too Far from Home.” Los Angeles Times, January 21. Archived at: https://www.latimes. com/archives/la-xpm-1998-jan-21-ls-10342-story.html (accessed June 19, 2019). Russo, Julie Levin. 2009. “User-Penetrated Content: Fan Video in the Age of Convergence.” Cinema Journal 48.4: 125–30. Schiler, Gail. 2007. “D’oh! Fox Limits Tie-Ins for Simpsons Movie.” Hollywood Reporter, July 6. Archived at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/doh-fox-limitstie-ins-142006 (accessed June 19, 2019). Shores, Tyler. 2019. “‘It’s Not Selling Out; It’s Co-Branding!’ Watching and Consuming The Simpsons in the Digital Age.” In The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield: Essays on the TV Series and Town That Are Part of Us All, edited by Karma Waltonen and Denise DuVernay, 207–19. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Simpsons World: The Ultimate Episode Guide, Seasons 1–20. 2010. New Yorker: HarperCollins. Terranova, Tiziana. 2000. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text 18.2: 33–58. Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. 1995. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London: Routledge. Turner, Chris. 2004. Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo. Tushnet, Rebecca. 2007. “Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by. Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 60–71. New York: New York University Press.

6. Echoes of Springfield: The Simpsons in Remix Culture Abstract This chapter analyzes the extent to which the series has become reworked and repurposed in the realm of contemporary remix culture. Most notably, the series’ semiosis has resonated not only with an avid fan community but with participatory culture at large. In particular, “Simpsonizing”—the art of translating people’s physiognomies into Simpsons characteristics—has popularized a form of caricature and comedic representation. Besides examining Simpsons-related fan productions exhibiting nostalgic sentiments, this chapter looks into revitalizations of the show’s characters and video remixes of The Simpsons’ intro sequence. Finally, I focus on Simpsons imagery used in political contexts in Germany to provide a more profound exploration of The Simpsons’ semiosis used in participatory culture’s civic imagination. Keywords: The Simpsons, remix culture, Simpsonizing, fan art, mashup videos, civic imagination

Over thirty years ago, The Simpsons stirred up the American media landscape. Today, the series has long become a part of the television establishment throughout the world, and its characters are global pop culture icons. According to the commercial logic that rules the entertainment media, the Simpsons franchise will be pursued as long as it is monetizable. The series and its merchandising empire, in other words, will be kept alive even though many fans have been decrying the death of the “real” Simpsons long ago, coupled with a steady decline in the show’s ratings. Ultimately, though, The Simpsons will share the fate every TV program has to suffer one day: it will be discontinued as soon as the decision makers at Fox/Disney consider the brand unprofitable. Within the realm of popular culture, however, The Simpsons will live on indefinitely. Alongside Disney’s ducks, dogs, and mice, Charles Schulz’s

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_ch06

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Peanuts, Hanna-Barbera’s and Warner Bros.’ cartoon protagonists, and many others, the Simpsons characters iconography have long since joined the pantheon of pop culture imagery. Recognized and cherished by a large number of people in the Western world and beyond, The Simpsons represents a shared point of reference within the imaginary realm consisting of popular products the U.S. entertainment industries have provided. In his article for Wired on The Simpsons’ parallel existence in digital culture, Thomas McMullan (2019) has pointed to the cartoon characters’ unusual split identity of representing both an ongoing television franchise and an online phenomenon, which is typically shaped by a nostalgic affection for the “original,” genuine Simpsons (that is, the 1990s, spanning Seasons 1–12). As McMullan observes in this connection, the larger cultural meaning of the show is eventually a generational question. He quotes Cornish poet Rachael Allen—co-editor of the anthology Can I Borrow a Feeling? (2015), which assembles poetry and art inspired by The Simpsons—who considers the series “a ubiquitous meeting point” familiar to those who grew up with the show, some of whom will “keep using The Simpsons as a cultural touchstone and phenomenon for things that happen now and in the future.” Born in 1989, Allen belongs to the millennials rather than to Generation X, and thus technically falls outside the age group that grew up with the “classic” 1990s Simpsons, though Allen’s generation may be the last one to understand the semantic transformation The Simpsons has been undergoing in the last decade or so: “For older generations it’s a subversion of something cherished,” she concludes. “For a younger generation, it’s just part of The Simpsons.” Like other media image-worlds, The Simpsons provides a distinct signifying system and vocabulary—a popular semiosis—which has left its stamp on the discursive repertoire of popular culture. And yet, as I have already pointed out, The Simpsons offers a popular semiosis of a special kind. Similar to what Ethan Thompson (2011) observes for the impact of MAD magazine in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, The Simpsons’ parodic humor vis-à-vis the world of pop culture represents a shared media experience and cultural “common ground” for so many Westerners who were growing up in the 1990s. Furthermore, like MAD, the Simpsons franchise established itself as a mass-media text reflecting the politics, poetics, and pleasures associated with participatory culture (see Chapter 1). In that sense, The Simpsons has constituted a cultural catalyst amplifying practices of popular culture, on the one hand, while providing a powerful form of popular semiosis within the participatory realm of popular culture on the other.

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To interrogate this interplay, the previous chapters have explored the ways through which the Simpsons franchise has represented, reflected, and resisted elements of participatory culture. This chapter will take a deeper look at The Simpsons’ role within popular culture. For this purpose, I will analyze examples that are representative of how pop culture images are used in contemporary digital culture as well as demonstrative of The Simpsons’ semiosis constituting a vernacular for participatory culture to articulate idiomatic perspectives in creative, humorous, and fascinatingly appealing ways. To be sure, such a hypothesis must be viewed cautiously, and previous studies examining the creative effect of television series in the age of convergence culture have, indeed, raised skepticism as to the emancipatory function of media products that invite audience engagement. Will Brooker’s study of Dawson’s Creek, for instance, concludes that many viewers “seem to be content to engage with the show through consumerism rather than creativity” (2001, p. 468). Even for much more vital fan communities in the digital age, Brian Ott asserts in his case study on South Park fandom that the fans’ productions are typically superficial; often, they simply replicate “the mode of textual production that they observe in the series in their own textual creations” (2003b, p. 229)—for example, when South Park is remixed with other pop culture storyworlds through Photoshop, such as blending South Park with The A-Team in what becomes “The SP Team.” While replication and mimesis have always been characteristics of fan creativity (see Hills 2014), they are also key features of digital remix culture. Media derivatives created by fans and other cultural producers might be redundant and replicative, but at the same time, these unofficial paratexts operate under alternative logics, as laid out by Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture (2014). Examples of visual mimicry may seem rather superficial and uncritical; but in the domain of digital meme culture, they also create new inflections, pleasures, and meanings—thereby marking off territory and claiming ownership of the original texts. Like most popular media texts, The Simpsons has inspired a wealth of “unofficial” productions tapping into the series’ fictional universe. The crucial question is whether the series’ meaning as a meta-text that both parodies and promotes activities associated with participatory culture has inspired “unoff icial” media content that distinguishes itself from archetypical forms of fan art. To what extent has The Simpsons provided a vernacular or a semiosis empowering participatory culture? Conversely, I am wondering to what extent the series’ “anything-goes,” neoliberal form of satire, which has mocked practically every media product (including The

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Simpsons itself), every political position, every cultural trend, every form of lifestyle (including Simpsons fandom), has immunized the series, and the capitalist media empire associated with it, from being reconfigured or satirized? So, let us take a closer look into the realm of the unofficial Simpsons remix culture.

Fan Fantasies The romance, no doubt, has emerged as a classic genre within fan writing. In relation to Star Trek fan fictions, Henry Jenkins has identified a generic switching whereby predominantly female fans take elements from the original source text and blend them with genres commonly associated with female audiences, like soap opera or popular romance (1988, p. 92). A typical feature in this context is to reimagine (sub)plots that have to conclude within the show because the episodic format prescribes it. Thus, the 1996 Simpsons episode “Lisa’s Date with Density” ended with a picturesque still of Bart’s best friend Milhouse van Houten in pajamas as he literally jumps for joy. The boy is so happy because he has just learned that his great love, Bart’s sister Lisa, was no longer dating Springfield Elementary School’s dreaded bully, Nelson Muntz. What a sweet ending, one might have thought. Yet Milhouse’s bliss is, of course, also a necessary authorial decision. The show’s writers simply had to end the romance between Lisa and Nelson in order to end the episode and “reset” the narrative. There are Simpsons fans, however, who would have ended the episode differently. To them, what started as a cute teenage romance between Lisa and one of the show’s bad boys could have grown into much more than an incidental plotline. Bending The Simpsons’ serial principles, according to which none of the characters is meant to develop, break, or grow older, these fans reimagine narrative instances that articulate their individual, alternative readings. Some fans—many of whom have prodigious talents—produce fan art to express their fantasies about the fling between Lisa and Nelson. Because The Simpsons is an animated show with a distinctive style, Simpsons-based fan work has often manifested itself in images.1 The website DeviantArt, for 1 For written fan fiction material in relation to The Simpsons, see, for example, the fanfic archive FanFiction.net. Because I view the graphic style and iconography as central to my account of popular semiosis, I will focus on visual examples of Simpsons-based fan productions sampled from a qualitative internet research, which I conducted in different stages in the years 2012 through 2019.

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instance, is a popular platform that allows fan artists to circulate and share visual content. Suffice to say that The Simpsons is a prominent theme on DeviantArt, fan work that emphasizes the relationship between Lisa and Nelson (grouped under #NelsonxLisaLovers) is an established category in this context. Posted predominantly by female users, the Lisa-and-Nelsonin-love phenomenon corresponds to the genre-switching paradigm typical of fan fictions. One such picture that I discovered during my research (and which has since been removed by its creator) was a drawing by the Canadian user Emily Carrier. It showcased many of the characteristics at work in the Lisa-and-Nelson-in-love fan artworks: depicting Lisa and Nelson from a low angle kissing each other, the drawing emulated the Simpsons-typical look with its reduced graphic complexity, stark outlines, and bold colors (including the figures’ characteristic yellow skin color). Strikingly, though, the characters were portrayed as older than in the series and drawn as grown-ups, with Lisa’s adult body sexualized and her spiky hair now long and straight. Apparently, the image was meant to depict teenagers in love (signified by means of a pink shadow around the characters and a heart above their heads). Given the variety of similar images falling under the Lisaand-Nelson-in-love rubric, we can say that their creators express fantasies shared by a larger number of people (many of whom would not produce such fan fiction material). As one user commented on Emily’s image, “I love this epic pairing!!! I wish they would have more episodes of them together. I love how you aged them in the true Matt Groening art style.” A second prominent theme within the realm of Simpsons fan art exhibited by Emily’s Lisa-and-Nelson-in-love image is to envision how the characters (especially the Simpson kids) grow older. Again, this element is an aspect features in The Simpsons’ official storyworld where such moments have occurred regularly, for instance, when we see a sequence of Lisa dreaming about her future as the harbinger of world peace (“Bart Gets Famous,” 1994), or when a whole episode is set in the future altogether (e.g., “Lisa’s Wedding,” 1995; “Bart to the Future,” 2000; “Future-Drama,” 2005). This trope may have fed the fans’ imaginations when they depict older versions of the familiar characters, thus addressing and playing with the “real” Simpsons’ ambiguous realism. One such fan narrative devoted to the characters’ future lives is The New Simpsons: A Fan Comic by SemiAverageArtist (2009), an outstanding work to be found on DeviantArt. The user SemiAverageArtist, identified on his profile as a male Australian, has posted an imagined Simpsons fan comic set in a future Springfield. At the time of writing, three pages of the comic

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have been posted. In perfect Simpsons-style, The New Simpsons presents the story of Lisa at the age of twenty meeting Milhouse at the University of Springfield after a stay abroad. Milhouse appears to be an upset bodybuilder because he has been “working out nonstop” to fill the void after Lisa had turned him down before she left. When Lisa sees Milhouse in this shape, she is deeply shocked. As she runs away and hides from her tragic admirer, she spots a huge golden statue of her old love Nelson Muntz, installed on the campus plaza. Besides a remarkable imitation of The Simpsons’ visual style, the artist also plays with the history of Milhouse’s unrequited love for Lisa, as suggested in such episodes as “Lisa’s Date with Density.” Similar to Emily Carrier’s work, The New Simpsons centers on two archetypal motifs in Simpsons-based fan work on DeviantArt: depicting the characters in an imagined future scenario and (re-)imagining a romantic relationship between selected characters. The aforementioned examples of Simpsons fan art demonstrate well the extent to which the series provides themes and subtexts that invite viewers to use pen and paper (or a computer) and flesh out aspects they view as suppressed or otherwise underdeveloped. At the same time, these fan artists do not operate in an economic vacuum. Adding to the cultural text “The Simpsons,” they still act within a discursive regime by foregrounding narrative elements the “official” producers cannot or do not want to bring up. Fan work is situated within a “shared frame of reference,” as Jenkins (1992, p. 137) puts it. Like Jenkins’s example of fans conceiving romances based on the protagonists of the late 1980s’ CBS series Beauty and the Beast, the fans who reimagine the romance between Lisa and Nelson ground their imagination on “future narrative developments . . . that . . . must necessarily be confirmed and reconfirmed by references to specific episodes” (ibid., p. 138). In order to be respected in the community, they must follow certain informal logics and rules that exist within the specific fan culture of which they and their work become a part. Another example in this context aims at elaborating the psychological depth many had found in the original Simpsons. Marge Simpson Animé: The Liberation of Marjorie Bouvier, a graphic zine by Soolagna Majumdar, features aquarelle portraits of Marge Simpson in an artful surrealist style. Notably, the tone of Marge Simpson Animé is a serious one, providing an introspection of Marge’s psyche and identity as a woman struggling with questions of sexuality and her confined role as matriarch in the Simpsons household. In the vein of fan fiction, Marge Simpson Animé takes up the subplot of Marge’s attempts to escape her role as housewife on The Simpsons in liberatory moments, such as when she engages in a close relationship with

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Figure 6.1: Final panels of the three-page New Simpsons comic strip (2009), created by DeviantArt user SemiAverageArtist.

her friend Ruth, including a chase scene in Thelma & Louise–style in “Marge on the Lam” (1993). While this angle remains largely underdeveloped in the show, predominantly female fan artists such as Majumdar reimagine Marge’s story of emancipation. Freeing Marge from what Majumdar perceives to

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be a fate of isolation and loneliness, Marge Simpson Animé depicts Marge as she realizes her unexpressed love for Maude Flanders (the neighbor whose character was written off and had to die in the series in Season 11 after a financial dispute between voice actor Maggie Roswell and Fox); Marge eventually starts a new family life in partnership with Manjula Nahasapeemapetilon (who is married to Kwik-E-Mart proprietor Apu in The Simpsons’ storyworld). Another theme in fan fantasies about Marge Simpson is to portray the show’s matriarch through the male gaze as a sexy cartoon character and pin-up girl. One such image is aleXsandro Palombo’s satirical representation of Marge in the style of Kate Moss posing for Playboy’s sixtieth anniversary edition in 2014. On his blog Humor Chic, the Italian digital artist Palombo appropriates comics and cartoon characters for his activist pop art. In several cases he has tapped into The Simpsons’ semiosis as a form of awarenessraising for political issues such as the fashion industry and the sexual objectification of women, domestic violence, racism, or even referencing the horrors of the Holocaust. Palombo, like many other artists using The Simpsons, does not consider himself a Simpsons fan; rather, he repurposes the popular iconography as it is eye-catching, and the show’s reputation to represent “the society we live in in a simple, intelligent and desecrating manner” (Esteban 2012, n.p.). The motif of Marge portrayed as cover girl for a men’s magazine is interesting in its own right, for it indirectly connects back to 2009, when Playboy magazine announced that Marge Simpson would be on the cover of its November issue. Indeed, it seems unusual for an adult-oriented magazine to feature a cartoon character that “reveals all.” Even though not that much was actually revealed, the announcement constituted a cute promotion gimmick both for Playboy to court a younger readership (besides older Simpsons fans who might buy this issue) and The Simpsons’ producers to advertise the series’ twentieth anniversary (see Serjeant and Dobuzinskis 2009). What is remarkable about Playboy’s encounter with Marge Simpson is not so much that the magazine featured a cartoon character—this had been done before: Playboy’s November 1988 issue depicted actress Laura Richmond stylized as Who Framed Roger Rabbit’s Jessica Rabbit. Unlike Marge Simpson, though, the character of Jessica Rabbit represented the epitome of the sex symbol in the history of animation (strengthened by Richmond’s pose). Marge, by contrast, is the satirical image of America’s idealized conservative “mom” and a parody of the classic sitcom matriarch in one (see Fink 2019, p. 57). On the series, Marge’s self-fulfillment consists solely of the Simpson family’s wellbeing (that is, not so much her own but

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Figure 6.2: “Marge Simpson as Kate Moss; Kate Moss Poses for Playboy’s 60th Anniversary Edition” (2017), from Marge Simpson “Iconic Dresses” series, by aleXsandro Palombo, Humor Chic.

that of her egocentric husband, Homer, and the kids, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie). What is much more remarkable about this cross-media instance, then, is that Playboy depicted a figure that, unlike Jessica Rabbit, does not so much correspond to the men’s magazine’s overall hegemonic-male perspective of sexiness. Playboy’s Marge Simpson cover story maintains the innocence that the simplified Simpsons style suggests. All we see is Marge sitting in lingerie, revealing little more than the outlines of her breasts, still in tune with the Simpsons-typical “childish” visual approach. In fact, since the show’s start Groening has had his eye on this particular visual feature and has prevented the designing of female characters in The Simpsons’ universe as if they were “drawn by horny animators” (quoted in Ostrow 1998, n.p.). In the Playboy issue, this “innocent” style is further underpinned by sensual objects of another kind (we see a plate with donuts and Duff Beer) which indicate that Marge, as an object of desire, exists exclusively for Homer (and, indeed, Homer’s silhouette is visible in one picture). In short, Marge is a faithful and devoted wife; she does not represent a vamp of sorts but the series’ moral compass. In the fictional interview with Playboy that accompanied the images of Marge, the paragon housewife consequently stated: “A nice girl like me would never display her body if it weren’t to raise money for charity. That’s why I’m donating my hefty fee from this tasteful pictorial to SPHG—Saving and Preserving Historic Gazebos.” When Playboy asked “Marge” whether she enjoyed the celebrity status that would be linked with her

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appearance on the cover of a magazine, which had previously featured such women as Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, Marge replied: “I’m just happy to be a MILK—Mom I’d Like to Know” (“The Devil in Marge Simpson” 2009, p. 52). This staid attitude is, of course, in perfect harmony with Marge’s character as it has been written for The Simpsons. When former First Lady Barbara Bush told People magazine after the first season that the show was “the dumbest thing” she had ever seen on TV, it was through Marge that The Simpsons’ writers responded. They wrote a friendly letter telling the then First Lady that Marge was hurt by Mrs. Bush’s commentary because she felt she was an advocate of family values just as the First Lady was in Washington, and signed it, “With great respect, Marge Simpson” (“Bush vs. Simpsons” 2004). The Simpsons’ rule of not representing women in sexualizing ways, however, seemed to have been identified as a blank space by some male fans, who aim to compensate this flaw through the realm of participatory culture. Of course, this idea did not come out of nowhere. The subtext of Marge representing a sexy and desirable woman has rather been a distinct element within The Simpsons’ trajectory. A fundamental part of the series’ sitcom context, Homer is depicted as an obese, bald, lazy, and rather unattractive husband, while Marge is characterized as handsome and agile.2 All this makes Marge’s self-description as “MILK” appear ironic. Unsurprisingly, a strand exists in Simpsons fan culture that portrays Marge as a so-called MILF (“Mom I’d Like to Fuck”). Popularized during the 1990s, the concept of the MILF denotes young males’ lust for older, attractive women (typically one of their friends’ mothers).3 In our context, it refers to the practice of hypersexualizing Marge’s character by depicting her with larger breasts, completely naked, dressed as S/M dominatrix, and so forth—all features that are meant to signify her as a MILF. In one such instance, Big Wayne’s Cheesy Blog (a blog devoted exclusively to pornographic modifications of cartoon characters, which is now defunct) featured a Photoshopped Marge Simpson on the cover of “Playtoon,” a fictional men’s magazine in The Simpsons’ universe stylized in the fashion of Playboy magazine. Big Wayne depicted Marge completely naked with prominent breasts as well as a touch of pubic hair in the shape of the Playboy bunny. Obviously, the picture is much more explicit than the typical Playboy 2 The sitcom King of Queens (CBS, 1998–2007), for instance, uses a similar gender-based formula. 3 While the motif of a teenager boy being seduced by an attractive older woman has a longer tradition drawing back to Mike Nichols’s 1967 film The Graduate, the 1999 teen comedy American Pie is often credited as the term’s origin, where Jennifer Coolidge plays the MILF, alias “Stifler’s mom” (Em and Lo 2007).

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Figure 6.3: Unofficial “Playdude” featuring Marge on the cover (2008), created by Big Wayne.

cover (which is demonstrated by Playboy’s cover featuring Marge’s intimate parts hidden behind a chair shaped in the form of Playboy’s iconic bunny).4 This already indicates how far rules and taste hierarchies within fan cultures differ from that of the “official”—that is, commercially produced— culture where such explicitness is banned from magazine covers, or from Groening’s directive that the Simpsons characters should not be eroticized. Another such characteristic is sharing the created content with other fans and online users. As Big Wayne notes, a commentator had suggested to name the magazine “Playdude” rather than “Playtoon” to make it consistent with the world of The Simpsons. This call for accuracy not only demonstrates the aspiration for imitation and authenticity that typically exists within fan cultures; it also shows the will to share and discuss one’s creations with other people, a common acceptance that there is room for correction, improvement, or even collaboration. Notwithstanding the question whether it is morally correct, sexist or obscene, or otherwise transgressive to sexualize Marge Simpson in that 4 The composition is a reference to Playboy’s October 1971 issue featuring Darine Stern, the first African-American women to be on the magazine’s cover.

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fashion, the MILF Marge phenomenon demonstrates how the text “Marge Simpson” is negotiated through a nexus of multiple (official and unofficial) cultural sites. Notably, this (re)negotiation takes place within the context of cartoon pornography, a context that differs significantly from The Simpsons’ generic formula. And yet, as I have suggested, the MILF Marge motif does not merely stem from the fantasies of (male) Simpsons or cartoon porn fans, but is also a subtext offered by The Simpsons’ writing. Sex between Marge and Homer is a running theme in the series; often enough Marge’s sexual attractiveness—her “MILF factor,” so to speak—is augmented. This happens quite literally in the episode “Large Marge” (2002), as Marge wants to get liposuction treatment to become more attractive to Homer, but accidentally receives breast augmentation instead. While Marge’s “new breasts” mostly serve the show’s satire, it is a feature that remains visually emphasized throughout the episode. In one scene in the episode, Marge even reveals her new breasts to the whole town of Springf ield, though The Simpsons’ audience can only see her back (of course, Marge’s motives are noble ones—she aims to rescue a defenseless elephant by distracting policemen who are about to shoot it). Such incidents certainly fuel the imagination of Simpsons fans and may inspire such phenomena as the “Playtoon” Marge. Significantly, while Big Wayne’s “Playtoon” Marge offers an example of how The Simpsons is rewritten according to the pleasures and aesthetics of one specific group of participatory culture (following a subcultural genre that has its origin in the 1920s in the underground comics tradition of so-called Tijuana Bibles, which also included pornographic remodeling of popular cartoon characters), this recontextualization is carried out at a rather superficial level. Besides the explicit “adult” context (maybe even pubescent humor), Big Wayne’s creation remains what it is: a pornographic snapshot of a Simpsons character. Unlike Palombo’s intended political claim, Big Wayne’s Marge carries no narrative dimension, no political commentary, no parodic or satirical agenda, no insightful moment about it. What makes this work valuable in a broader context of participatory culture is rather the creator’s graphic achievement, as well as an aspiration for authenticity in relation to The Simpsons as source text, being illustrative of what Hills (2014) calls “mimetic fandom.”

Simpsonizing If the aforementioned examples exhibit some of the classic features of fan art, an entirely new practice through which popular culture deploys The

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Simpsons’ semiosis is “Simpsonizing.” The term to Simpsonize has entered the popular lexicon in reference to The Simpsons’ original practice of turning pop culture figures into Simpson-style representations with yellow skin, bulging cartoon eyes, overbites, and chinless faces. Thus, it is a stylistic filter that transforms the image of a real-life person or fictional character “by the creative and artistic expressions distinctive to The Simpsons,” as defined by the California Court of Appeal in connection with actor Frank Sivero’s lawsuit against the show’s parodic representation of his portrayal of Frankie Carbone in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (L.A. County S. Ct. 2018, p. 24). While software such as the official online Simpsonizer has provided ready-made images, Simpsonizing suggests a relatively simple form of caricature, which has given fans and other amateur producers a graphic protocol through which anyone can be resignified through the parodic Simpsons lens. The extent to which Simpsonizing has become a well-established practice within today’s digital remix culture is illustrated by websites such as Simpsonized by ADN or Springfield Punx. Both blogs are devoted to Simpsonized versions of famous pop culture characters (e.g., comic book heroes and characters from cult movies and popular television series). A sort of subset of crossover fan writing (fan writers blending different fictional universes with one another), the blogs also echo “Springfield” as we know it from The Simpsons (albeit in still form). That is, they maintain the series’ parodic take on other pop culture texts—TV shows, films, comics, video games—and their mythologies. Launched in 2008, Dean Fraser’s Springfield Punx blog (http://springfieldpunx.blogspot.com) was inspired by the official online Simpsonizer tool. By taking characters from various other popular mythologies and reworking them in true Simpsons style—Simpsonizing them—Springfield Punx mostly reflects the practices of The Simpsons’ producers. (Note: this is not meant to downplay the artwork’s aesthetic qualities. In fact, Fraser’s skills are extraordinary; the characters actually could be “officially” Simpsonized. And yet, this take on The Simpsons corresponds to Ott’s observation on the productions of South Park fans which mimic the conduct of the original source text rather than transforming it.) As this example illustrates, the tools provided by the media industries to invite audience participation, such as the online Simpsonizer, typically bypass characteristics appreciated by participatory culture. As the creator of Springfield Punx notes, he did not consider the “assembly line” creations offered by Simpsonizeme.com “particularly great” or in any way unique (Fraser 2012, n.p.). In other words, nothing has to be made

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Figure 6.4: Simpsonized pop culture characters featured in a Springfield Punx wallpaper (2008), created by Dean Fraser.

up; everything is “already there” to provide the typical Simpsons look. Hence the Simpsonizer motivated Fraser to “do it better” by playing with The Simpsons’ iconography to offer a parallel universe where all kind of mutations and fusions with other popular mythologies are possible. Yet, while Fraser perfectly captures the original Simpsons style, his work is not so much transformative as mimetic. At the same time, however, its value as a piece of popular art lies in the perfection of precisely this graphic mimesis as well as in paying tribute to Simpsonization as an established practice of caricature today. An impression of the range of Simpsons-related material emerging from participatory culture gives a gallery launched for the occasion of DeviantArt’s 2014 Fan Art Friday devoted to The Simpsons. Mostly maintaining The Simpsons’ original parodic sentiment vis-à-vis pop culture and, especially, film and television history, the page features posters such as “Nightmare in Springfield” (A Nightmare on Elm Street), “Kill Homer” (Kill Bill) “The Simpsons Bad” (Breaking Bad), or Simpsons characters reworked in anime style, as the Sopranos, as zombies, and so on. Unsurprisingly, parody seems to be the dominant mode of Simpsons fan work; since The Simpsons is essentially characterized by a recognizable and easily reproducible drawing style, and centers aesthetically on parody and pastiche, much of the

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Figure 6.5: Bartkira, Vol. 6 (2017), pp. 344–45, two-page contribution by Tyler Boss.

fan-created paratexts follow this formula. They inscribe themselves into the larger transmedia text of The Simpsons not by positioning their works as “resistant” to the popular source text, but rather by echoing its dominant aesthetic of pop culture parody as we see it in the plethora of Simpsons spoof segments (the annual Halloween episodes have become particularly notorious in this regard). The Simpsons’ fashion of incorporating other pop culture texts might have also inspired a collaborative effort of crossover fan art that started as a “Bartkira” homage comic in 2013. Created by Ryan Humphrey, the comic blended the cult manga and anime film Akira with characters from The Simpsons. Humphrey’s work initiated the Bartkira project (bartkira.com), a collaborative effort to self-publish a panel-by-panel Simpsonized rewriting of Katsuhiro Otomo’s six-volume manga masterpiece. Comprising the work of over a thousand artists, the complete Bartkira was published on the website in 2017 (along with “Bartkira: The Animated Trailer”). One of the greatest challenges of the project has been to provide a complete picture of Otomo’s 2,000-plus-page manga. This passionate, labor-intense claim for completion and authenticity is clearly informed by a high degree of fannish enthusiasm and fan-cultural capital, traits that have been identified as a defining part of the Simpsons franchise as well.

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Fan Nostalgia While pop culture has clearly been the dominant subject of the Simpsons series, references to the world of art have added to the show’s intellectual complexion. Thus, despite the relatively crude visuals of Season 1, The Simpsons’ sophisticated graphic style already allowed for embedding canonical paintings, like Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field with Crows in “The Crepes of Wrath” (1990), to be followed by numerous similar references.5 In the same vein, Marge has always been distinguished from the bluecollar character of the Simpsons family by displaying cultural taste and artistic affinities, for instance in a scene where she lectures Homer about Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans ready-mades, exhibited in the Springfield museum (“Mom and Pop Art,” 1999). In this episode, Homer also faces a drawing of Akbar and Jeff from Groening’s Life in Hell comic-strip, which Homer mocks as not belonging in a museum. A giant pencil with an eraser instantly starts rubbing on Homer, who responds, “Oh no! I’m being erased.” The next cut reveals, however, that the giant pencil is actually another artwork (a reference to Claes Oldenberg’s Pencil Sculpture) carried by two museums workers. All this is to say that The Simpsons’ genesis is rich in artistic claims distinguished from the cartoon’s “lowbrow” connotation (see Chapter 4) as well as in parodic mockery towards the world of art, which is well in tune with the cartoon’s carnivalesque spirit. As mentioned before, The Simpsons’ semiosis represents cultural “common ground” for several generations. I have referred to the poet Rachael Allen, who considers The Simpsons a “cultural touchstone,” which may be an accurate description for many of those who deploy and repurpose the series’ iconography while not necessarily being fans of the show proper. Indeed, many of the artists I have encountered during my research rejected the “fan” label, yet still feel comfortable citing The Simpsons’ graphic style as something of a visual lingua franca—a popular semiosis—carrying its own attraction. This appeal also informs Scott Carr’s reimagining of the Simpsons visiting New York in Season 9’s “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson” (1997). To many who watched the show in the 1990s, the episode has remained especially remarkable after 9/11 because it depicted the World Trade Center as well as the Simpsons’ car being illegally parked in front of the Twin Towers and fitted with a wheel clamp (all of which ends with Homer seeing red). Notably, the episode was not aired in the United States in the years following 5

For an overview of art references on The Simpsons up to Season 22, see Complex (2012).

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the September 11 terror attacks, and the scenes showing the Twin Towers were edited out in many reruns. Carr, who used to live in New York City, created his own reading of the episode in what became The City of New York vs. Hammer Sonpsims, thus maintaining the “eerie” air the episode carries in retrospect. As Carr notes about his usage of Simpsons characters, “a lot of artists like myself probably learned to draw from copying the characters when we were younger, and now have progressed into the art world. These characters are hardwired into our brains, and it feels natural to use them” (Carr 2017, n.p.). In a remarkable video about the derivative life of The Simpsons, titled “The Bizarre Modern Reality of The Simpsons,” YouTuber John Walsh traces the meaning of The Simpsons in contemporary digital culture (Super Eyepatch Wolf 2019). Like many other commentators, Walsh is part of the generation for whom The Simpsons marks “common ground.” Thus he discloses his own past as an avid Simpsons fan (a show that has not only shaped his sense of humor but also parts of his identity when he was growing up). “We miss that old show,” Walsh confesses. “We miss what The Simpsons used to be.” As his video argues, there exists a spirit of community among veteran Simpsons fans who regret that much of what they identify as the series’ originality has gone, and “who still care about The Simpsons the way [he] do[es].” For Walsh, today’s online culture offers a sphere where this community is able to express its love for the “classic” 1990s Simpsons. Walsh’s video refers to Instagram accounts related to the “Golden Age” of The Simpsons (again, roughly, Seasons 1–12), such as Scenic Simpsons, which assembles still shots from old Simpsons episodes. The featured stills are linked predominantly by an absence of the yellow characters, thus foregrounding the old-school, pre-digital visual style of the show, which Walsh characterizes as “minimalistic and ambient surreal art . . ., including a somber atmosphere.” Without those cartoon characters, he attests, the images “feel empty and cold, like something is missing, creating this nearly surreal sense of loneliness.” But Scenic Simpsons is just one of numerous such Instagram accounts, which, in turn, constitute just a small fraction of Simpsons online culture. Indeed, a certain degree of nostalgic sentiment and “pastness” informs many unofficial works related to The Simpsons on the internet. Shaped by a sentiment of disinterest (or even frustration and rejection) held by many former Simpsons fans towards the franchise’s trajectory since the last decade or so, these works characteristically reframe The Simpsons as a relic of the 1990s, thus reinforcing the series’ original character and its retro charm. As Lincoln Geraghty notes, this form of nostalgia serves as a “tactic

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Figure 6.6: Springfield Night (2014), from the UnReal Estate series by Tim Doyle.

for dealing with the present and a celebration of historical texts that no longer disappear thanks to their retelling through new media technologies” (Geraghty 2018, pp. 164–65). This nostalgic mood is also reflected in an ensemble of Simpsons-related pieces that stem from Austin-based illustrator Tim Doyle’s UnReal Estate series. Doyle’s collection reimagines iconic locations from popular television shows and movies. The dark colors and somber tone of the still lifes reframe settings that we associate with action-driven and noisy stories as lonesome and quiet places. And yet, by night Springfield morphs into a placid and peaceful, utopian world. The absence of familiar Simpsons characters in combination with Doyle’s realistic drawing style adds to the contrast between the snapshots and the “real,” cartoony Simpsons; at the same time, the artist’s incorporation of details from The Simpsons’ canon echoes a familiarity with the franchise’s mythology shared by many (ex-)fans, conjuring up the early seasons’ anarchic spirit. One of Doyle’s artworks shows Bart, situated next to his tag, El Barto, looking over “his” town, Springfield. Once again, this familiarity demonstrates how we seem to have internalized the world of Springfield as being connected to our collective consciousness. The UnReal Estate examples, thus, explore The Simpsons’ existence beyond the show and franchise, “if this is how the town would look when the cameras stopped rolling and it’s no longer just the backdrop to a sitcom,” says Walsh.

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As a continuum running through Simpsons online culture, Walsh diagnoses an aura of nostalgia created by the ways the characters are characterized as being aimless, displaced, and lost. Whether this is mostly a nostalgia-driven recollection of the show’s originality in the early 1990s or rather a general nostalgic look back to the artists’ youth, associated with such media experiences as The Simpsons, is hard to tell. As Walsh observes for the fan art presented in this section, these works subvert The Simpsons by “discarding the format of the show.” They do so by citing and repurposing familiar scenes and moments from the series’ early days, as well as by unyoking the characters, thus freeing the franchise from its prescribed cycle of routine. It seems ironic, but all these mutations are echoes from the past evoking the popularity of the old days, at least in the participatory domain of popular culture, much more than the “original” franchise has in recent years.

Simpsons Memes While it is no surprise that a cult TV program as popular as The Simpsons has served as an inspiration for many internet memes (a popular one being the animated GIF showing Homer as he “backs into bushes”), it is probably more telling to reference the “I, For One, Welcome Our New Insect Overlords” meme, based on a quote from Simpsons character Kent Brockman from the 1994 episode “Deep Space Homer.” Since the early 2000s, the quote has become a popular phrase on the internet, with Brockman’s “insects” serving as a placeholder for all sorts of things. The meme not only illustrates The Simpsons’ popularity at the turn of the millennium but also the degree to which the franchise’s semiosis has been a part of online culture ever since the internet became a mass phenomenon. One such Simpsons-related internet meme that has become a classic in itself is the “Steamed Hams” meme, which derived from a story segment between Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers in the Season 7 episode “22 Short Films About Springfield” (1996). In it, the superintendent visits Skinner for lunch, but Skinner accidentally burns the food. In order not to lose face, the principal resorts to a web of ridiculous excuses, including calling hamburgers (which he just got from a nearby fast-food restaurant to substitute for the burned food) “steamed hams.” Skinner’s charade reaches the point where the house is on fire, but the principal keeps smiling as he accompanies his superior to the door. The whole absurdity of the scene has generated a meme resulting in over 140,000 YouTube videos related to

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Figure 6.7: Wes Dance’s “Steamed Hams” (2019) parody book cover.

Skinner’s incompetence, such as an installment that remodeled the scene in over a dozen different animation styles. The Steamed Hams meme illustrates the tradition of fan mythologies that emphasize and highlight characters that function as supporting characters in the original source text, but take center stage in derivative usage (see

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Figure 6.8: Banksy mural in New Orleans (2008). Photo courtesy of Eugene Kim.

Jenkins 2018, p. 18). Notably, The Simpsons and its tendency to routinely include sequences focusing on supporting characters (such as Principal Skinner) have provided springboards for fans and other cultural producers to reimagine and expand the adventures of those secondary figures. Even in 2019, graphic designer Wes Dance conceived a cover for a parody crime noir book, which is not only another derivative of the Steamed Hams meme itself but also an homage to the meme’s vintage vibe. While The Simpsons’ heyday predated the era of internet memes, the series’ long-lasting trajectory occurred in tandem with the rise of digital culture. Indeed, the franchise can be said to have helped popularize the participatory poetics of memetic play, given that much of its humor depended on visual sampling and modification. The sentences Bart writes on the chalkboard before every show, for example, started with “I will not waste chalk” in Season 1’s “Bart the Genius” (1990) and initiated the ritual of varying the commandments from episode to episode. A traditional motif of antiauthoritarian humor (see Fink 2019, p.12), the show’s chalkboard running joke has become iconic in its own regard, offering a great template for creative rewriting. A striking example here is the 2008 mural by British street artist Banksy, created in New Orleans in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. As Banksy’s ironic message—“I must not copy what I see on the Simpsons”—demonstrates, the idea behind the chalkboard gag could be easily reproduced (with anyone writing whatever message they desire).

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Among other things, this inspired internet users to create Bart Simpson online chalkboard generators, thus reinforcing the memetic character of the chalkboard motif. Given that Bart’s subversive chalkboard messages have become inflationary, spreading from The Simpsons to the media culture around it, distinctions between what is “official” Simpsons and what is “unofficial” user-generated media content has become increasingly blurry.

Simpsons Mashups on YouTube YouTube and Participatory Culture As the most widely used online video-sharing platform, YouTube provides a vast multimedia reservoir that demonstrates the textual wealth created by remix culture. YouTube offers an infrastructure where amateur producers can circulate and share “unofficial” media content. Answering the conditions of a visually centered multimedia culture, YouTube has emerged as one of the most prominent (social) media platforms, not only as a means of storage for archiving purposes but also as an interactive device for widely circulating and sharing media content created by its users (Kessler and Schäfer 2009). In its initial phase, YouTube appeared to be quite laissez-faire about the content uploaded on the website, much of which would pass below the radar of the media industries (Burgess and Green 2018, p.3). Thus, formerly subcultural practices of fan cultures, such as remixing original media content, have become more integrated into mainstream culture—they are “more accessible and visible than ever before, both inside and outside their [originally] fannish milieu” (Russo 2009, p. 126). However, YouTube’s conduct regarding the usage of copyrighted material has shifted significantly over the years, especially after its commercial breakthrough following Google’s acquisition in 2006. Operating through algorithms like Content ID, YouTube’s is very protective when it comes to potential issues of copyright infringement, which often enough ends in the platform taking down content that uses material registered as intellectual property by the corporate media (such as Disney/Fox/The Simpsons). Naturally, YouTube avoids the risk of facing lawsuits, de facto discouraging its users from vernacular practices that use copyrighted material, even if they might fall within the doctrine of Fair Use (Burgess and Green 2018, p. 49). Necessarily, my reading of The Simpsons in terms providing a form of popular semiosis stems from a position of Fair Use advocacy. From an economic perspective, labeling The Simpsons a common good is, of course,

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inaccurate. As I have suggested in Chapter 5, the copyright holders of The Simpsons have, in the past, often turned out to be trigger-happy when it came to unlicensed use of The Simpsons. While appropriating copyrighted material for “transformative” purposes (like parody or satire) is generally protected under the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, jurisdiction depends on the facts in each case (cf. Tushnet 2007, pp. 60–61). In convergence culture’s “ludic democracy,” The Simpsons represents what Diane Penrod (2010) has described as “public” images, providing a semiosis which can be deployed by virtually anyone for various purposes. A paradigmatic example here, in our context of The Simpsons, are Simpsonswave video clips, a subgenre of the Vaporwave online phenomenon. Simpsonswave producers remix old sequences form the show’s history and defamiliarize them by morphing different scenes, inserting graphic noise, and adding 1980s and 1990s electronic shopping-mall music. Not only does this digital collage create disturbing, psychedelic, contemplative, and somewhat hypnotic effects; moreover, the old scenes familiar to many of those who used to be regular viewers in the 1990s, in combination with “bad” visual quality that we associate with the VHS era and the ambient sound layer, reframe The Simpsons as an anachronism from another media era. Simpsonswaves echo the nostalgic sentiment that has driven Scenic Simpsons, but the remix videos’ focus is on the familiar cartoon characters with whom we meander through canonical moments from the show, that is, the characters are not absent in the video clips; they appear to be absent-minded—out of place and out of time. Simpsonized Fake Trailers A major “genre” that have emerged within YouTube’s mashup culture is the so-called fake trailer. The fake trailer is a short clip that mimics the trailer genre, typically with a humorous tone created through a parodic take on an actual trailer of a certain movie or television series. As Chuck Tryon notes, “Instead of anticipating upcoming films, most fake trailers mock the rhetoric of anticipation using the clichés commonly associated with movie trailers and advertisements” (2009, p. 161). Typically, the creators of fake trailers use material from films or television and reassemble or edit it in a fashion which we know from film trailers—with a speedy rhythm, pronounced crosscutting, and dramatic underscoring. Fake trailers are typically forms of pastiche, mixing content from various source texts as well as genres. A Simpsons-related example here is “The Simpsons Dark Knight,” by YouTube user Crazyskater1000. It combines the style and soundtrack from

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the trailer for The Dark Knight with visual material from The Simpsons. An instance of a range of Dark Knight fake trailers (some of which reworked with Simpsons material), “The Simpsons Dark Knight” comprises the relatively rare “sinister” scenes to be found in The Simpsons’ history—for example, scenes from the Halloween specials or a particular scene from The Simpsons Movie (2007), which shows a torch-bearing mob approaching the Simpson family’s house by night. As I noted in the introductory chapter, the writers have already suggested the Simpsons-Batman connection with numerous Batman-references over the course of the series’ trajectory (e.g., Bart and Milhouse watching “Batman” fighting Krusty the Clown [“Large Marge,” 2002] ) or through the parody character Bartman. In other words, The Simpsons may not only have fueled the fans’ imagination to create these Simpsons-Batman mashups: the series also provides remix video creators with appropriate visual material for their productions. Another such mashup found on YouTube was “Breaking Bart” by Samuel Kim. A parody of the popular television series Breaking Bad, “Breaking Bart” used one of the “Previously on. . .” sequences that typically precede an episode of a continuing drama series. With their fast cuts, brief dialogue snippets, dramatic composition, and musical underscoring, these sequences exhibit a style similar to that of the fake trailer. Resembling the aesthetics exhibited in “The Simpsons Dark Knight,” Kim took the sound layer and the narrative form and reworked it with visual material appropriated from The Simpsons.6 Like “The Simpsons Dark Knight,” “Breaking Bart” demonstrates how The Simpsons’ parodic humor effectively inspires its viewers to emulate what they see on the show. Not only does “Breaking Bart” exhibit The Simpsons’ parodic custom of using puns to play with original titles (replacing “Bad” with “Bart” as in Batman/Bartman), it crosses other popular media phenomena with the storyworld of The Simpsons. As a precondition, The Simpsons’ visual history provides scenes reminiscent of the Breaking Bad narrative. Thus the fan creators evoke parallels between the Simpson family’s annoying neighbor Flanders and the main protagonist of Breaking Bad, Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with lung cancer who embarks on a life of crime by producing methamphetamine. This portrayal benefits from the characterization of Ned Flanders in The Simpsons. Not only are there similarities between Ned Flanders and Walter White in terms of physical appearance (glasses, 6 By 2015, the video had been taken down. I can only speculate whether this might have been due to a cease-and-desist order, given YouTube’s reach in comparison to less used video-sharing sites such as Vimeo or Dailymotion.

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brown hair, and a mustache), but Flanders is also known for having an RV (“The Call of the Simpsons,” 1990), a vehicle that has a central function in Breaking Bad, serving as mobile laboratory for Walter White to produce crystal meth. Also, the f igure of Ned Flanders creates comedy by the juxtaposition of frequently breaking character, and transforming from an average conservative white American into a man who finds himself losing control, for instance, when we witness a dream sequence of him running amok in “Homer Loves Flanders” (1994). In addition, The Simpsons has a history of references to drug culture, including Homer becoming involved in a crystal meth den in the 2011 episode “The Food Wife,” or Homer getting a prescription for medical marijuana in the Season 13 episode “Weekend at Burnsie’s” (2002). In other words, participatory culture does not need to graphically manipulate any of the scenes; the visual material provided by The Simpsons is already there to create links to Breaking Bad. In acknowledging the popularity of Breaking Bad by blending it with The Simpsons, remix creators echo The Simpsons’ own take of recognizing a certain pop culture phenomenon by placing parodic references to it in the show. Thus, The Simpsons also officially referenced Breaking Bad in 2013; for the episode “What Animated Women Want,” the writers dedicated an extended couch gag to the AMC series. If parody has always offered the choice to be used for purposes of homage, The Simpsons’ plethora of pop culture references has followed this lineage, and thus resonated well with the parody-as-homage ethos inherent in participatory culture. While mockery plays an important role in the aforementioned mashup videos, they are mostly characterized by pastiche in distinction from parody (cf. Jameson 1991). Drawing on long-established practices associated with “underground art” (Russo 2009, p. 126), mashup videos, as well as remix media culture in general, have generated new aesthetics and codes which are characterized by ephemerality and superficiality. This is to say, many mashups do not question the original producer and genre, form and formulas, and are not actually parodic of the original source text in a Jamesonian understanding of the term. As Ott puts it: “The principal claim to ‘originality’ in such productions concerns the technical skill needed to create the particular character context combinations” (2003, p. 229). That is, discourse is emphasized over story, form over style. Unlike the examples of fan writing and Simpsonizing raised at the beginning of this chapter, these fake trailers rely on sampling techniques; their artistic focus is on sampling audiovisual material rather than drawing and remodeling the characters. Significantly, these mashups use The Simpsons as a vehicle for a critical intertextuality that demystifies the aesthetic codes of the respective trailers parodied: the

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atmosphere created through cinematography, suspense achieved through editing techniques, or the manipulative use of film music. The Simpsons Intro Another motif that has gained much attention within YouTube’s remix culture is The Simpsons’ opening sequence. Like the trailer, the intro sequence for a television series is relatively short in duration and thus convenient to rework; it is interrupted by sharp cuts, introduces the main characters, and sets the tone of the text in aesthetic terms. As the official reference to Breaking Bad in the opening to “What Animated Women Want” suggests, not only does the Simpsons intro often consist of mashups itself; it also frequently offers associations and connections between The Simpsons and other pop-cultural texts. In other words, the show has invoked mashup aesthetics through opening sequences which may have served as instructive protocols for mashup and meme culture. While Bart’s chalkboard gag has become an iconic piece of visual culture in its own right, the entire opening sequence has found its way into pop culture history as a representative element of the series. The familiar sequence featuring the family members on their way home to gather in front of the TV; the notorious chalkboard and couch gag routines as venues to blend with other worlds of pop culture; the improvised solos Lisa plays on her saxophone—all these features comprise a recognizable pattern that provides room for creative riffs, thus expressing the ludic character of the show. Cast in a concise form, the title sequence exhibits a textual playfulness that fits in well with contemporary remix culture. Unsurprisingly, the show’s opening has been mimicked numerous times—just go to YouTube and type in “Simpsons intro” to get an idea of the variety offered by today’s video clip culture. An early example is a 2006 real-life version of The Simpsons’ title sequence produced by channel Sky 1 to advertise The Simpsons in England. Another lineage uses LEGO bricks as its raw material, a well-established technique in digital remix culture. An initial LEGO re-enactment was made by a thirteen-year-old boy from Estonia in 2007. Despite its simplicity and imperfection, the clip “The Simpsons Intro LEGO Style” has been watched over 10 million times and, according to the producer, even aired on television in Estonia and on BBC in the United Kingdom. In many ways, “The Simpsons Intro LEGO Style” is illustrative of the dynamics that emerge between fan culture and the commercial media. We do not know if the Estonian boy was inspired by a LEGO-based couch

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gag for Season 19’s “Midnight Towboy” (2007), which offered a fast-motion animation of how to build the Simpson family with LEGO bricks, which premiered a few weeks before the boy from Estonia uploaded his video. Yet both installments—one fan-made, one corporate—reflect how LEGO has become a popular resource for reimagining and reenacting pop culture themes (see, e.g., Brownlee 2016). In that sense, the LEGO company and 20th Century Fox tapped crosspromotional synergies in 2014 when the toy company began marketing Simpsons sets. The official Simpsons LEGO figurines, in turn, provided ready-made raw materials for video artists like YouTube user MonsieurCaron (2014), who created a highly sophisticated version of the Simpsons introduction in LEGO style. The Simpsons–LEGO connection was only topped by the show when its writers situated the family in a whole LEGO-animated Springfield in Season 25’s “Brick Like Me” (2014), following the collaboration with LEGO for the show’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Other remixes have reimagined The Simpsons’ opening by means of cartooning. One such example is French animator Yoann Hervo’s twist on the famous intro sequence carried out in surreal cartoon style in what he calls “Weird Simpsons VHS” (2015). Another version of the opening was produced and circulated via YouTube by Badmash Comics, a professional animation company from India. It transferred the sequence into an Indian context, including the show’s satirical framework, by incorporating all sorts of clichés and stereotypes about Indian culture. The clip called “The Singhsons” (AlbinoBlackSheep 2008) portrays India as an agrarian area under the rule of arranged marriages and global sweatshop corporations. Or consider the 2019 “Russian Art Film Version” of the Simpsons intro by Lenivko Kvadratjić, which uses the iconic sequence to satirically comment on the state of affairs in contemporary Russia by situating the Simpsons (Russian: “Simpsoni”) in a grim, brutish, dysfunctional, and impoverished society. Subverting the Simpsons Intro, Jonnystyle7 A particularly intriguing intro remix found on YouTube is a satirical reworking of the special Simpsons opening sequence created by the show’s writers in collaboration with British street artist Banksy for the Season 22 episode “MoneyBart” (2010). The creator of the clip, a French street artist who goes by 7 A preliminary version of this section was published through Henry Jenkins’s blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan (Fink 2012).

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the name of Jonnystyle (poquelin JB 2011), took the original intro sequence with all its ironic, postmodern antics, and transformed it into a critical response to both The Simpsons and Banksy. The original title sequence starts like every Simpsons intro with the opening credits, the show’s theme, and snapshots of life in Springfield. Yet the viewer’s eye may already be caught by the visuals in which Banksy’s pseudonymous signature has been added to the familiar backdrop of the town of Springfield. We see a billboard with a “Banksy” tag on it, as well as Bart in the school building, writing repetitively “I must not write over the walls” for the intro’s chalkboard gag (in fact, Bart is writing all over the walls). While these sight gags are supposed to conjure up the “anarchic” spirit typically associated with street art, Banksy’s political voice becomes explicit as the Simpson family gathers on the couch. Accompanied by a sinister tune, we are shown what is underneath the cheerful cartoon show. In a dungeon-like, premodern setting, a battery of workers (portrayed as Asian children) produces Simpsons stuff: animation cells, Bart Simpson dolls and other merchandise articles, Simpsons DVDs, and so forth. Clearly, in a highly satirical fashion, Banksy’s grim portrayal satirizes the show’s outsourcing to South Korean sweatshops.8 The Simpsons’ collaboration with Banksy is clearly another, albeit exceptional, instance of the show’s neoliberalism. It suffices to say that a mere one minute and forty-four seconds of “subversion” on prime time seems negligible in contrast to the show’s economic status as a commercial cash cow (see Holmes 2010); after all, it is only with Fox’s blessing that The Simpsons is able to broadcast such a fancy form of recursive satire. Although The Simpsons’ writing is said to allow for more creative freedom than virtually any other program on mainstream television, it has nevertheless to conform to given broadcast standards.9 And yet, what could be more indicative of The Simpsons’ meaning as a pop culture institution than inviting one of today’s most popular street artists and thus providing a forum to criticize the show’s own exploitative practices? This might be seen as a statement of subversive humor, but it certainly follows a neoliberal logic in that it is a win-win situation and a publicity stunt for both The Simpsons and Banksy. 8 Banksy and the makers of The Simpsons were criticized for their morbid and degrading representation of Korean animations studios as sweatshops (see Cain 2010). 9 This is also true of the Banksy intro, even though, as Simpsons showrunner Al Jean mentioned in an interview with the New York Times (Itzkoff 2010), about 95 percent of Banksy’s original storyboard made it into the final version.

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Even though we do not know much about the production of the Simpsons– Banksy intro, it is obvious that Banksy only contributed to the storyboard of the sequence and was not very involved in the visual design. It conforms entirely to the established Simpsons visual style, with nothing really Banksyesque about it; no punkish stencil graphics or pop art aesthetics as we know them from Banksy graffiti. Everything is shaped in that smooth, iconic Simpsons look. Yet what the original sequence lacks—or, perhaps, what it is not able to provide given Fox’s network standards—is achieved by grassroots artist Jonnystyle. In his remix of the intro sequence, which he posted on YouTube, the couch gag is turned inside out again as Jonnystyle writes himself into the Simpsons text. On an animation cell, we see the Simpson family sitting on the couch with Homer transforming into Jonnystyle’s recurring character, a large-headed cartoon figure with a mustache (in fact, at this point, it still could be an actual Simpsons couch gag). We see a hooded cartoon character (apparently Banksy), tagging a billboard with the slogan “Banksy,” still perfectly realized in Simpsons iconography. Then Jonnystyle’s alter ego appears and starts to chase the masked stranger. As both characters literally jump out of the frame, they morph into animated sketches on a sketchpad. At this, the Jonnystyle character pulls down the black cloak of the Banksy avatar to reveal Mr. Burns, whom he kicks back into the virtual space of the original Simpsons-Banksy title sequence. While the original intro sequence written by Banksy features a machine that incessantly produces Bart Simpson dolls, that same machine vomits out a hooded Mr. Burns action figure in Jonnystyle’s satirical alteration. In the next scene, we face an array of these action figures on a supermarket shelf, arranged in Simpsons design and packaging that features the name “Banksy.”10 As the camera zooms out, it shows the Fox logo, modified to read “20th Century Fox—Gift Shop” along with the brand logos of eBay and Toys “R” Us as well as Polygone (which refers to a former shopping center in Montpellier in France, where Jonnystyle is from). To great effect, the shot parodies the original ending of the Simpsons-Banksy intro in which the Fox logo is depicted as huge monolith in the midst of a prison camp secured by barbed wire fence, watchtowers, and searchlights. Also in mockery of the original, in the very last scene of the Jonnystyle video, we see—as we usually do at the end of Simpsons intros—an animated TV set with the credits blended in (which actually read “Copyright of Matt Groening” in Jonnystyle’s clip), with a sledgehammer on top of it. As The Simpsons’ 10 From my interview with Jonnystyle (2012), I learned that he had taken original Mr. Burns action figures from The Simpsons to remake—and thus repurpose—them in this fashion.

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intro theme ends, the credits on the television screen read “Diverted by Jonnystyle.” We hear birds singing peacefully as the lower part of a real-life figure (probably Jonnystyle himself) enters the scene, grabs the hammer, and smashes the tube with a loud bang. At the point the screen bursts, we realize it actually was a real-life TV which has just been smashed to pieces. On one level, the Jonnystyle video clip illustrates many aspects of participatory culture in the convergence culture. Besides being circulated via YouTube, the clip also riffs on The Simpsons in harmony with the series’ own political humor, creative wit, and pop culture affinity. In other words, Jonnystyle embraces the series’ original aesthetics in order to write his own critical voice into the Simpsons text. On another level, Jonnystyle rewrites the original sequence in that he provides us with several layers of critique. This aspect of cultural criticism built into the remix clip is what I find particularly interesting. First of all, it is obvious that Jonnystyle confirms Banksy’s original criticism of The Simpsons as a corporate brand in the age of globalization with everything that this entails (well in tune with the traditional criticism among Simpsons fans who feel betrayed by what they consider The Simpsons’ “selling out”). Additionally, the video foregrounds Banksy’s own hypocrisy in this respect. The video clip implicitly asks if Banksy, after all, is not merely a brand just like The Simpsons. In this regard, it is no coincidence that Jonnystyle unmasks Banksy, whose trademark is never to reveal his identity, as Mr. Burns, the embodiment of capital and big business in The Simpsons’ universe. In linking Banksy with big business, Jonnystyle echoes the common accusation among cultural critics against Banksy having been co-opted by commercial culture (cf. Feiten 2017). The sellout debate, then, signals another parallel with The Simpsons. As I mentioned before, many Simpsons fans understood the process of the show “going mainstream” in the early 1990s as a contradiction to the show’s alternative (that is, anti-commercial) founding myth, and thus as an assumed loss of authenticity. This parallel is also present in Jonnystyle’s depiction of the Fox logo that comes along with the affix “Gift Shop.” This allusion to Banksy’s 2010 pseudo-documentary film Exit Through the Gift Shop may have been unintentional, but regardless, it captures the overall tone of Jonnystyle’s criticism of both Banksy’s and The Simpsons’ respective neoliberal ways of selling “subversive” art. According to Jonnystyle, his work is a sort of “détournement” (Jonnystyle 2012), and I think this label also helps to make sense of the video clip. In Chapter 1, I have already discussed détournement as an element of participatory culture’s poetic repertoire. At this point, I will not go into much detail on Debord and Wolman’s original conception of détournement as a

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revolutionary practice (e.g., what they refer to as “literary communism”), nor do I want to suggest that the Jonnystyle video operates according to the Situationists’ and Debord’s vision of détournement. (For Debord and Wolman, the film medium was a powerful vehicle for détournement, and Debord’s own films, like his 1961 Critique de la séparation [“Critique of Separation”], demonstrate what he understands as a filmic form of détournement; in fact, the use of clips and images from other films or newsreels and the aspiration for Brechtian distanciation effects, as we see it in Debord’s films, create an avant-garde aesthetic that is very different from Jonnystyle’s entertaining riff.) Nonetheless, there are two aspects that are striking in this regard. First, that Jonnystyle himself (like Debord, a French native speaker) calls his video a form of “détournement,” by which he means subversive content disguised as a piece of “official” culture (Jonnystyle 2012); second, Jonnystyle’s reformulation of the term is situated in a media environment that differs significantly from what Debord ([1967] 1994) calls the Society of the Spectacle in the 1960s. Hence, mediated détournement in the age of remix culture, which we may call “digital détournement,” does not so much emerge from the motivation to negate the media per se, but rather to challenge the culture industries that distribute and sell media content. Forms of digital détournement are not meant to disrupt communication channels but rather understand these channels as their infrastructure and use the possibilities provided by the digital media age, such as YouTube, to circulate their subversive comments on and via the infrastructure provided by corporate media. The Jonnystyle video illustrates many features of participatory media culture today. Rather than taking snippets almost randomly from the realm of media images, Jonnystyle deliberately appropriates a specific popular media text to write his own narrative into it, and circulate the product in DIY fashion via YouTube. His ways of modifying the original, as well as circulating his clip, are therefore not acts of cultural criticism in a Debordian, neo-Marxist or revolutionary sense. Rather, Jonnystyle embraces The Simpsons to create a new work that is sophisticated both in its aesthetics and critique against The Simpsons and Banksy. These different levels tell us a lot about the understanding of pop culture today as it is represented by the work of Banksy or The Simpsons. Jonnystyle does not loathe the culture he criticizes. Instead, he has been socialized with it and thus belongs to it, as he adopts the materials and even the style of the culture he toys with. Yet all this reworking is not executed with bitterness; it exhibits an affectionate, playful sensibility and an eye for detail (similar to The Simpsons’ own satirical semiosis). At the same time, Jonnystyle does

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not consider himself a Simpsons fan. To him, The Simpsons works perfectly as popular semiosis—with the series’ humor and iconography constituting cultural common ground shared by millions of (former) Simpsons viewers who can make sense of his satiric swipe as a form of satirizing The Simpsons in the series’ own style

The Simpsons and the Civic Imagination in Germany A popular media phenomenon that has its origins in the 1990s’ network era, The Simpsons helped to shape the “political and civic imaginations” of a multitude of people (Miller and Gray 2020, pp. 60–61). In its interplay with popular culture, the series has provided familiar symbols and a powerful form of semiosis—not only in North America but in many parts of the world. Germany is one such national market outside of the Unites States where The Simpsons has enjoyed great lasting success. Shortly after its debut on U.S. television, The Simpsons aired in Germany in 1991, placed in the afternoon programming of the public network ZDF before the show moved to ProSieben with its fourth season in 1994.11 Jonathan Gray (2007) has explained how The Simpsons works on at least two levels: an all-American show satirizing American culture and values, and as a show that provides a more universal sense of humor that transcends national boundaries with its satire and criticism being relevant to other national contexts as well. Given its political connotation as a “liberal” show that addresses issues such as media manipulation, big business, corruption, populism, civil rights, and environmentalism, it is not surprising that The Simpsons’ semiosis has fed back into participatory culture as a widely understood vernacular for satire and political humor. For such instances where media image-worlds like The Simpsons offer entry points to engage in political discourse, Jenkins, in collaboration with a research group based at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, has introduced the concept of “the civic imagination” (2016). As the imaginary worlds of novels, television series, and Hollywood blockbusters enter popular culture, they 11 As one of Germany’s initial commercial television networks, ProSieben is very popular among adolescents and young adults. The airtime of The Simpsons in Germany also shows how programmers (mis)understood the series as children’s entertainment at first. This only changed with the airing of Season 11 in Germany in the fall of 2000, when ProSieben moved the new season to a 9 p.m. prime-time slot.

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Figure 6.9: Clipping from White Supremacy 1/1998, p. 2, featuring Bart Simpson altered into a Nazi superhero.

provide a “shared vocabulary” and “shared stories” as reference points “for us to imagine what a better world looks like” (Jenkins 2018, pp. 29–30). However, as Jenkins also emphasizes, the perspective what “better” really means is ultimately subjective. For many, there seems to exist a consensus regarding what is meant by a “better world,” while others might see it realized in “their own reactionary conception of contemporary society” (ibid.). Also taking into account such reactionary impulses, Fiske (1989, p. 177) speaks about the inherent contradictions of popular culture, which may produce counter-readings and appropriations situated in various social perspectives. Thus, parallel to the Black Bart T-shirts featuring Bart Simpson as a hero for Civil Rights, as discussed in Chapter 5, we also see appropriations of Bart’s (anti-)hero image by other cultural groups, some as borderline as “Nazi-Bart” sporting combat boots and a swastika-badge. This toxic mutation also diffused in Germany in form of a Bart Simpson distortion featured in the neo-Nazi underground zine White Supremacy. According to press reports, the Bartman-style representation of a Nazi-hooligan with blackjack and boots (including the number 88—street code for the Nazi salute) was designed by neo-Nazi terrorist Uwe Mundlos, who contributed to the magazine in the late 1990s.12 Mundlos’s 12 Mundlos would misuse various pop culture images to “celebrate” an assassination series committed by the terrorist three-piece he co-founded, the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund

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Figure 6.10: Street artist Barbara’s way of expressing dislike of Nazis (2015). Photo by Barbara.

perverted Bart was also found printed on T-shirts along with slogan “The Skinsons,” demonstrating how toxic ideologies may be disguised by means of popular cartoon characters’ “cute” and “innocent” connotations. If these ugly examples demonstrate the flipside of the “civic imagination” as a utopian realm where the fantasies of “the people” find expression in all their various forms (and excesses), other grassroots artists can be said to have freed The Simpsons from the clutches of Nazis. An illustrative example here is the Heidelberg-based street artist “Barbara” who repurposed the image of Nelson Muntz by attaching it alongside two poorly drawn swastikas. In combination with a speech balloon containing Nelson’s characteristic bisyllabic laughter—“Ha-Ha”—which routinely serves as a humorous device of ridicule and schadenfreude in the Simpsons series, the character is used to amplify Barbara’s anti-Nazi stance in a creative form of satirical mockery. In fact, Barbara’s appropriation of Nelson is indicative of the creative potential to use The Simpsons’ semiosis within frameworks of civic imagination. For instance, a sticker calling to protest a neo-Nazi rally in Berlin Kreuzberg on May Day 2004 used the image of Lisa Simpson and (NSU), in Germany between 2000 and 2007, where nine people with immigrant backgrounds and a police officer were killed.

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Figure 6.11: Sticker with Lisa Simpson as Antifa crusader (2004). Image from the collection of Joel Morton.

reimagined her as anti-fascist crusader. Authored by the radical leftist youth group Antifa (which stands for anti-fascist or Antifaschistische Aktion), the sticker depicts Lisa, printed on solid pink background, swinging from a rope dressed in pants and boots and armed with a spray can,

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with a grrrr on her face, ready to take action. As Joel Morton (2018, p. 104) argued forcefully, the image displays Lisa as a “heroic Antifa street artist, determined—as the bold white text makes clear—to confront a planned Nazi march on May Day.” Another motif shows Lisa in a superhero pose as she smashes a swastika sign to pieces. The composition is based on a traditional Antifa image which depicts a f ist that symbolically shatters the swastika, with the f igure of the superhero(ine) being incorporated in a vein that recalls American comic book covers from the Second World War era. The alteration featuring Lisa Simpson has been distributed as a print on a batch. As we all know from the “off icial” Simpsons narrative, Lisa is a liberal idealist with a pronounced political consciousness. The series typically represents her as a passionate human rights advocate who stands up for the little man and an activist who struggles for the feminist cause. But her larger goals mostly fail, being subverted by the nihilist humor that dominates the series (see Fink 2019, pp. 68–69). Indeed, reimagining Lisa as anti-fascist crusader frees her from the fate the character has to suffer within the Simpsons franchise. It connects to a cultural tradition where superheroes and comics characters have served as “multifunctional metaphors” enabling “people in different contexts to make common causes” as an important element of the civic imagination (Jenkins 2020 p. 27; p. 33), a poetic tradition of participatory culture which goes back at least to historical appropriations of superhero images that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement era. The creators who reimagined Lisa as superheroine have not only used The Simpsons’ semiosis to make a public claim, they have also created a paratext of The Simpsons which adds to the complexity of the character. Lisa the Antifa crusader thereby not only becomes a political symbol against fascism and neo-Nazis, she also has a feminist dimension, corresponding to Jenkins’s observations that civic imagination also provides alternative conceptions of superheroes (see ibid., p. 36). Thus it is not Bart—whose performances as combative rebel, sly superhero, and subversive street artist in the series significantly inform the figure’s image—who serves as an icon against Nazis; it is Lisa, who has always had to struggle with her brother’s image and status as a “cool” and powerful guy. Whenever Lisa has tried to be accepted by other kids (“Summer of 4 Ft. 2,” 1996), or slipped into the role of a superheroine (Clobber Girl in “Treehouse of Horror X,” 1999), this has been suspended by the show’s makers with the endings of the respective episodes. In that sense, the reworked Lisa becomes an even more powerful symbol when she is boldly placed on a girl’s back at a rally protesting an election

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Figure 6.12: Protesters on the sidelines of an anti-AfD rally in Peiting, Germany, September 4, 2018. Photo by Alexandra Fink.

campaign of the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the context of the Bavarian state elections in 2018. Another Simpsons character who emerged in the context of political campaigning in Germany demonstrates a feature that Jenkins also views as characteristic of the civic imagination’s use of popular narratives: storyworlds like that of The Simpsons provide models not only for the heroes but also for “the bad guys” (ibid., p. 35). During the 2009 election of the German parliament (the Bundestag) for instance, a Photoshopped collage circulated via various blogs, which was based on an official election poster depicting the candidate from the CDU (the conservative party in Germany), Angela Merkel, in combination with the Simpsons character Mr. Burns. The comedy of the remix lies not only in the analogous representation of the figures’ hand gestures and jackets (with Burns’s having been adjusted to Merkel’s green outfit). The way they touch their fingers together are little less than trademarks typically associated with both characters (in The Simpsons, it usually accompanies Mr. Burn’s catchphrase, “Excellent”; in the case of Merkel, the hand pose known as the “Merkel diamond” has become one of the central characteristics satirists use when referring to the German chancellor). The poster’s text was equally reworked. While the original featured the slogan “Wir wählen die Kanzlerin” (“We are electing the chancellor”), this has been changed in the reworked version to “Wir wählen die Atomkraft” (“We are electing nuclear power”). Clearly, the critical subtext refers to chancellor Merkel’s then pro-nuclear stance (a position that has been reversed

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Figure 6.13: Demonstrators holding the remixed Merkel-Burns poster at an anti-nuclear energy campaign rally in Berlin in 2010. Photo courtesy of Stefan Boness/IPON.

by the CDU in the aftermath of the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011). In this combination, the remixed image associates Merkel’s nuclear policies with Mr. Burns’s diabolical nature as the unscrupulous capitalist owner of Springfield’s nuclear power plant and his connotation as the personified evil—the supervillain—of Springfield. By juxtaposing the original election poster with Mr. Burns and the Simpsons text, the remix demonstrates how The Simpsons’ semiosis provides “shared vocabulary” that grassroots producers can draw on to express a particular perspective and articulate their common cause. The Merkel-Burns remix went viral and became a popular motif, publicized not only online but also on placards at political demonstrations and in the form of clandestine détournements. An activist who calls himself Lemuc, then a student of communication design, posted a photo of an election billboard he had altered during the 2009 elections in Germany in true culture-jamming fashion. Lemuc also drew on the Merkel-Burns remix as he manipulated the aforementioned original election poster at a location at Borsigplatz in Dortmund, Germany, modelling Mr. Burns’s face over that of Mrs. Merkel. Like other grassroots creators featured in this section, Lemuc also stressed that he would not identify himself as a Simpsons fan but rather regards the series and its (critical) humor as a sort of “common ground” in today’s popular

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Figure 6.14: Lemuc’s 2009 modified election billboard drawing on the Merkel-Burns meme. Photo by Lemuc.

culture (Lemuc 2012). As a form of civic imagination, the Merkel-Burns meme illustrates the extent to which The Simpsons is both the nexus for a specific fan community as well as a global public image readily appropriated by cultural producers from virtually all around the world, who deploy the series’ widely recognizable iconography to amplify their voices of protest.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown that The Simpsons is not only the object of an active and creative fan culture; the show’s recognizable iconography and global popularity have created a form of popular semiosis that is convenient for culture-makers from various backgrounds and for various purposes. Thus, in addition to generic types of fan work related to mass-media texts, The Simpsons has informed popular imaginations that circulate far beyond a specific fan community. This relationship corresponds with what Jenkins, Ford, and Green (2013, p. 28) observe of the age of convergence culture, namely, “the erosion of traditional boundaries—between fans and activist, creativity and disruption, niche and mainstream.” As we have seen, the digital revolution has provided participatory culture with an infrastructure to appropriate and remix content offered by the

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commercial media. Functioning as a form of popular semiosis, The Simpsons represents a powerful vehicle in this context. Not only are the politics and poetics associated with participatory culture themselves part of the series’ DNA; together with its iconic visual style and its political subtexts, The Simpsons’ semiosis constitutes a rich (re)source for a variety of cultural producers to create intertextual relationships, expand the narrative, and thus produce new meanings. In his reception study of the TV series, Gray (2006) has noted that some of his interviewees are inspired by The Simpsons’ critical intertextuality in what he calls “do-it-yourself parody” (p. 158). This refers to the series’ cultivation of parodic reading positions as a part of what I have called “meta-television culture”—to read a TV show as “more tongue-in-cheek . . . than the authors of it intended it to be” (ibid.). However, what would an equivalent reading of The Simpsons as more “tongue-in-cheek” than intended by its producers look like? Can a satirical text be read satirically? Or does The Simpsons rather generate a participatory culture applauding what is deconstructed by the franchise’s parodic ethos? The Simpsons exemplifies one of the major contradictions of mass culture today—that is, how “mainstream” can a product become, while still being considered defiant? Perhaps the series’ makers saw a connection when they asked Banksy to do something for the show. Or was it because they were fans of Banksy? Of course, it would be just as plausible to suggest that the franchise’s creative team figured it would be cool to have another famous guest star and hip cultural phenomenon on the show. All this brings us back to Jonnystyle’s digital détournement. Jonnystyle repurposes The Simpsons’ semiosis, not only to artfully rework it but also to add a critical perspective to it. In creative ways, he demonstrates his idiomatic counterreading of The Simpsons and the neoliberal character of much of what counts as popular art today. Notably, Jonnystyle’s video reflects the satirical style of the couch gag Banksy has written for The Simpsons—the message is more or less the same—yet Jonnystyle’s work is neither produced nor circulated via a primetime television show. Rather the remix was carried out in a non-commercial and unsolicited context, which seems to make Jonnystyle’s critical voice much more authentic compared to Banksy’s, which necessarily bears the ring of corporate cooptation. Similar to other examples presented in this chapter, Jonnystyle exemplif ies how cultural producers can reconf igure popular narratives as meta-commentary. Within the “ludic democracy” of remix culture, The Simpsons’ semiosis can be deployed for a variety of purposes—from providing allegories within larger political discourses to referencing the

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Simpsons franchise’s “flaws” and what are perceived as inherent contradictions, in juxtaposition to its original subcultural character and display of fan-cultural capital. Thus, instead of merely reproducing The Simpsons’ stylistic features in a superficial way, Jonnystyle implements a perspective of correction. His work articulates contradictions the Simpsons text necessarily entails. That Banksy situates himself in opposition to commercial art is certainly just one of the paradoxes Jonnystyle is able to reveal about the original intro. At the end of the Jonnystyle clip, the television screen—surely one of the major foci of the Simpsons series—gets smashed with a sledgehammer, the ultimate gesture of cultural criticism, which the show’s makers by nature cannot and will never encourage, as it is the branch they are sitting on.

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Complex. 2012. “The Complete History of Art References in The Simpsons.” complex. com, January 9. Archived at: https://www.complex.com/style/2012/01/thecomplete-history-of-art-references-in-the-simpsons/ (accessed January 23, 2020). Debord, Guy. (1967) 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books. “The Devil in Marge Simpson.” 2009. Playboy, November 2009: 52–56. Douglas, Susan J. 2009. “My Media Studies: Thoughts from Susan J. Douglas.” Television and Media 10.1: 49–51. Em, and Lo. 2007. “Of MILF and Men: The Sexy-Mom Phenomenon—Is It Hot or Not?” New York Magazine April 19. Archived at: https://nymag.com/news/ features/2007/sexandlove/30915/ (accessed January 29, 2019). Esteban, Vanessa. 2012. Communicating aleXsandro Palombo’s interview answers to the author, February 20, 2012. Email. Feiten, Benedikt. 2017. “Answering Back! Banksy’s Street Art and the Power Relations of Public Space.” In Culture Jamming: Activism and the Art of Cultural Resistance, edited by Marilyn DeLaure and Moritz Fink, 218–36. New York: New York University Press. Fink, Moritz. 2012. “Digital Detournement: Jamming (with) the Simpsons-Banksy Intro, Jonnystyle.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, October 5. Archived at: http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2012/10/digitaldetournement-jamming-with-the-simpsons-banksy-intro-jonnystyle.html (accessed July 20, 2019). –––. The Simpsons: A Cultural History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman. Fraser, Dean. 2012. “Inquiry—Your Springfield Punx Blog.” Message to the author, November 12. Email. Geraghty, Lincoln. 2018. “Nostalgia, Fandom and the Remediation of Children’s Culture.” In A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies, edited by Paul Booth, 161–74. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Glynn, Kevin, Jonathan Gray, and Pamela Wilson. 2011. “Reading Fiske and Understanding the Popular.” Introduction to Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd. ed., by John Fiske, xxxix–lvii. London: Routledge. Gray, Jonathan. 2006. Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality. New York: Routledge. –––. 2007. “Imagining America: The Simpsons Go Global.” Popular Communication 5.2: 129–48. –––. 2010. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.

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Hall, Stuart. 1980 (1973). “Encoding/Decoding.” In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–38. London: Hutchinson. Henry, Matthew. 2004. “Looking for Amanda Hugginkiss: Gay Life on The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 225–43. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Hills, Matt. 2014. “From Dalek Half Balls to Daft Punk Helmets: Mimetic Fandom and the Crafting of Replicas. Transformative Works and Cultures 16. Archived at: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/531/448 (accessed September 16, 2020). Holmes, Linda. 2010. “‘The Simpsons’ Tries to Get Its Edge Back with a (Kind of) Daring Opening.” MonkeySee: Pop-Culture News and Analysis from NPR, npr.org, October 12. Archived at: https://www.npr.org/2010/10/12/130509380/the-simpsonstries-to-get-its-edge-back-with-a-kind-of-daring-opening?t=1563547784758 (accessed July 19, 2019). Itzkoff, Dave. 2010. “‘The Simpsons’ Explains Its Button-Pushing Banksy Opening.” Arts Beat: The Culture at Large. New York Times, October 11. Archived at: https:// artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/the-simpsons-explains-its-buttonpushing-banksy-opening/ (accessed July 19, 2019). Jean, Al, et al. 2002. “Audio Commentary for ‘Three Men and a Comic Book.’” The Simpsons: The Complete Second Season. Burbank, CA: Twentieth Century Fox. DVD. Jenkins, Henry. 1988. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5.2: 85–107. –––. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge. –––. 2003. “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars? Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” In Rethinking Media Change, edited by David Thornburn and Henry Jenkins, 281–309. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. –––. 2016. “Youth Voice, Media, and Political Engagement: Introducing the Core Concepts.” In By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism, by Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Klingler-Vilenchik, and Arely M. Zimmerman, 1–60. New York: New York University Press. –––. 2018. “Foreword: ‘I Have a Bad Feeling about This’; A Conversation about Star Wars and the History of Transmedia [between Henry Jenkins and Dan HasslerForest].” In Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling, edited by Sean Guynes and Dan Hassler-Forest, 15–31. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. –––. 2020. “‘What Else Can You Do with Them?’ Superheroes and the Civic Imagination.” In The Superhero Symbol: Media, Culture, and Politics, edited by Liam

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Burke, Ian Gordon, and Angela Ndalianis, 25–46. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Jonnystyle. 2012. “Inquiry: Your Simpsons-Banksy YouTube Video.” Message to the author, July 4. Email. Kessler, Frank, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer. 2009. “Navigating YouTube: Constituting a Hybrid Information Management System.” In The YouTube Reader, edited by Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau, 275–91. Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. L.A. County S. Ct. 2018, Frank Sivero v. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, No. BC561200, 24, February 13. Archived at: http://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/ nonpub/B266469.PDF (accessed July 19, 2019). Lemuc. 2012. “Lemuc’s Blog—Merkel/Burns Bild.” November 12. Message to the author. McMullan, Thomas. 2019. “The Unstoppable Meme Machine Is Tearing The Simpsons in Two.” Wired, February 19. Archived at: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ the-simpsons-meme-machine (accessed January 23, 2020). Miller, Taylor Cole, and Jonathan Gray. 2020. “Family Sitcoms’ Political Front.” In Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, edited by Jenkins, Henry, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova, 60–67. New York: New York University Press. MonsieurCaron. 2014. “The Simpsons LEGO Movie Couch Gag that FOX Should Have Used.” YouTube. March 11. Archived at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=FZyWwzdBEuU (accessed January 28, 2019). Morton, Joel. 2018. “Sticking with the German Antifa in Berlin. Signal: A Journal of International Political Graphics and Culture 6: 104–15. Ostrow, Joanne. 1998. “Man behind Simpsons the Toughest Critic of All.” Denver Post, January 14: G1. Archived at: The Complete Simpsons Bibliography, https:// www.simpsonsarchive.com/guides/bibliography05.html (accessed July 10, 2019). Ott, Brian L. 2003. “‘Oh My God, They Digitized Kenny!’ Travels in the South Park Cybercommunity V4.0.” In Prime Time Animation: Television, Animation and American Culture, edited by Carol A. Stable and Mark Harrison, 220–42. London: Routledge. Penrod, Diane. 2010. “Writing and Rhetoric for a Ludic Democracy: YouTube, Fandom, and Participatory Culture.” In Writing and the Digital Generation: Essays on New Media Rhetoric, edited by Heather Urbanski, 141–51. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. poquelin JB. 2011. “Generique Simpsons Banksy Diverted by Jonnystyle.” YouTube, October 10. Archived at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUwV3brLbYI (accessed January 28, 2019).

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Conclusion: The Simpsons, Cultural Feedback Loops, and the Case of Apu Abstract The concluding chapter revisits the central idea behind this book—The Simpsons’ trajectory into the age of convergence culture. More specifically, the chapter discusses notions of the civic imagination and fan activism in relation to The Simpsons, as well as the contested relationship between the producers of a profitable media franchise and participatory culture. In this connection, I interrogate the idea of cultural participation going full circle and feeding back to the original text. Traditionally, the media industries have resisted interference with what they consider their intellectual property. But at the same time, they have to open up their work to popular discourse in order for a product to remain popular and thus to survive in the marketplace of convergence culture. Keywords: The Simpsons, convergence culture, intellectual property, fan activism, cultural feedback loops, Apu Nahasapeemapetilon

In reaction to U.S. President Trump’s 2020 State of the Union address—as well as to Trump’s failure to answer the obligatory handshake—the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, demonstratively ripped up her paper copy of the speech. In response, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted a GIF screenshot from the 1991 Simpsons episode “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington,” which shows Lisa Simpson, appropriately dressed in a white dress just like Pelosi on the occasion of Trump’s speech, as she sobbingly rips up sheets of paper. Pompeo’s message of mockery was obvious: both Pelosi and Lisa are weak SJWs. Bill Oakley, a longtime writer and showrunner of The Simpsons, in turn, responded promptly: “Mr. Secretary of State please do not ever ever ever use Simpsons material in your twitter or watch the show or refer to it in any way.” With this reply, Oakley reiterated the rejection of the Trump administration

Fink, M., Understanding The Simpsons: Animating the Politics and Poetics of Participatory Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789462988316_concl

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declared by many who have worked for The Simpsons and are active on Twitter. Even more angrily, Lisa’s voice actress, Yeardley Smith, retorted: “I might just add f*ck you @mikepompeo for co-opting my character to troll @SpeakerPelosi.” But many Twitter users conversant in The Simpsons’ storyworld reacted much more coolly. A wave of replies understood the irony within Pompeo’s tweet. Actually, the scene he has chosen shows a disillusioned Lisa in tears ripping up an essay draft, which originally was supposed to deal with the ideals of American democracy but feels phony after Lisa has discovered the system of corruption which rules Washington, D.C. Others recalled the Simpsons episode “Bart to the Future” (2000), which suggests a future scenario with Lisa as the first female President of the United States inheriting a huge budget deficit from her predecessor, “President Trump.” The implied joke was that now it seemed to be clear who was going to be the next president. This range of responses underline Pompeo’s faux pas; the whole case illustrates that communication within digital culture and public speech not only demands a certain degree of media literacy but also fan-cultural capital. As argued throughout this book, The Simpsons has been an early instance of popular media’s interplay with a condition we have come to describe as convergence culture. Fueled by pop culture and its image-worlds, the rise of the internet has boosted the visibility, media literacy, and cultural power of participatory culture. In this context, fan studies has traced the role of media fandom, noting that the digital revolution provided audiences with both an infrastructure and a repository for performing cultural engagement (Sandvoss, Gray, and Harrington 2017, p. 12). Furthermore, digital culture has offered its users new forms for expressing their relationship to a media property and the creators behind it. For one thing, new practices of fan activism have emerged. Departing from the traditional fan-letter writing campaigns, fans have come to understand that the impact of sending individual messages is limited, while media attention garnered from memes and collective campaigns, including a broader mobilization of supporters, may be more effective (Barton 2014, pp. 163–65). Simpsons fans who take action for their cause add to a larger picture of what we may understand as fan activism. For example, in reaction to Fox’s cease-and-desist letters at the turn of the millennium, a group of Simpsons fans united and organized the “Great Simpsons Blackout of ’00,” temporarily shutting down Simpsons fan sites for an entire week in February 2000. Another such incident of fan activism occurred in Bolivia in early 2015 when around 2,000 Simpsons fans, some donning homemade costumes in a form of cosplay, protested in three of

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Bolivia’s largest cities against a change in their favorite TV show’s program slot—with success. Not only did the network bring back the original time slot, but it also extended the daily dose of Simpsons from forty-five minutes to two full hours for Simpsons-hungry Bolivians. The producers were flattered by their loyal fans in Bolivia, to be sure. On Twitter, they blended footage from the protests with a powerful moment from The Simpsons Movie that provides a dolly shot through an angry mob of torch-carrying Springfieldians. The collage ended with a Spanish message that translates as: “Many thanks to the educated mobs on Bolivian streets” (Fox News 2015, n.p.). This gesture of solidarity shows that corporate media are increasingly aware of the fans’ concerns and actions. To be fair, in this rather unproblematic incident it was not a big deal to side with the fans. This would look different in cases where fans target more delicate matters, or even Fox itself. Fans, like audiences in general, are not always participatory in an affirmative sense; as we have seen, hierarchies of power, diverging economies, and efforts of disciplining vis-à-vis acts of resistance shape the encounter between the media industries and participatory culture. Such a “more delicate” matter presented Hari Kondabolu, a New York stand-up comedian of South Asian descent, and his 2017 documentary film, The Problem with Apu. In the film, Kondabolu criticizes the way Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon (the Indian-American proprietor of Springfield’s 7-Eleven-style Kwik-E-Mart convenience store, voiced by non-Indian Hank Azaria), had introduced what would become a dominant ethnic stereotype in America, thus strengthening the marginalization of South Asian Americans. While some people have agreed with Kondabolu’s criticism, others have argued that much of The Simpsons’ satirical humor derives from its depiction of stereotypes. One online commentator, who identified himself as Indian, declared in his commentary on a YouTube trailer for The Problem with Apu that he is not offended by Apu’s character: “[Apu] is as much a stereotype of Indian culture to a Westerner’s eye as Homer himself is emblematic of popular blue collar conceptions of idiocy,” writes Sagnik Nath (2017). Drawing on stereotypes has always been a central strategy of The Simpsons’ social satire. But this does not disqualify characters such as Apu from being some viewers’ personal “heroes,” as pointed out by the Indian-American columnist Bhaskar Sunkara (2018), who views Apu as a progressive depiction of a person of color in the media. Matt Groening responded to the criticism of Apu as well, although without getting to the core of the controversy. Instead, Groening (2018) emphasized that the cultural climate today seemed to be hypersensitive to issues of discrimination. The

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Simpsons’ writers took basically the same line as their prominent spokesman. Rather than dealing with the argument, or—in what would have been the true Simpsons manner—rebutting it, they just shrugged it off. Thus Lisa had to serve as the stooge in the Season 29 episode “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” (2018) when Marge discovers one of her childhood books, which she considers racist by today’s standards. Marge wants to give the book to Lisa, so she executes some editorial whitewashing, but it seems pointless in the end. “Well, what I am supposed to do?” asks Marge. Directly addressing the camera, Lisa quips, “It’s hard to say. Something that started decades ago and was applauded and inoffensive is now politically incorrect. What can you do?” Next to Lisa’s bed, we see a photo of Apu autographed with the words “Don’t have a cow.” “Some things will be dealt with at a later date,” Marge consoles her daughter, whereupon Lisa answers, “If at all.” One of the striking qualities of The Simpsons used to be that it managed to expose social and ethnic stereotypes—Scottish groundskeeper Willie, the Italian restaurant owner Luigi Risotto, the obese German exchange student Üter, or Apu—not to mock those being stereotyped, but rather to satirize the dominant culture that generates those stereotypes. A “thin line,” indeed, as Sean O’Neal (2018) observes in an article for the A.V. Club. But O’Neal also notes that The Simpsons has always been “at its heart, a humanist show, one that cared about the backstory and dignity of even its most sketchily drawn side characters” (ibid., n.p.). In fact, Apu’s biography has been a theme in several episodes in The Simpsons’ history. For the first time, his immigrant status becomes a big issue in the Season 7 episode “Much Apu About Nothing” (1996). In it, Springfield’s political leadership singles out illegal immigrants as the reason for a budget crisis. As a consequence, a referendum is held to decide on “Proposition 24” on whether to deport “illegal immigrants.” The law is promoted by slogans that have a familiar ring, like “Buy American” or “United States for United Statesians,” and unleashes racist voices discriminating against Springfield’s non-U.S. citizens (backed up by his classmates, as well as by Principal Skinner, school bully Nelson tells the German exchange student, Üter, to “Go back to Germania [sic]!”). Clearly, the overall theme of the episode is discrimination against immigrants versus their value to the U.S. economy and culture. More specifically, the writers of the episode took their inspiration not only from the (anti-)Immigration Act of 1924 but also from anti-immigration sentiment in California, which resulted in the state’s Proposition 187. The California law, which sought to exclude foreigners from public funds, passed at the polls in 1994, but was eventually overturned by the courts as unconstitutional (Beard 2004, pp. 283–84).

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To the surprise and shock of Homer, Apu, a model minority citizen wellintegrated in Springfield (Apu is also portrayed as the city’s fire chief and a juror in Springfield County Court), is one of those illegal immigrants. It is revealed that, as a part of the wave of Indian computer specialists who came to the United States in the 1990s, Apu arrived on a postgraduate scholarship in computer science, and stayed on illegally after earning his PhD, working in a Kwik-E-Mart to pay back his student loans. In the episode, Homer originally spearheaded the anti-immigration sentiment of Proposition 24, but he changes sides when Apu is threatened with deportation. So, Homer and the rest of the Simpsons decide to help. In the end, Apu receives citizenship and is allowed to stay. Nevertheless, his difficult journey illustrates some of the realities around the immigration debate in the United States, including those occurring prior to the Trump presidency. Apu acquires illegal documents and abandons his culture to mimic a “real” American (again based on stereotypes, wearing a cowboy hat and “Nye” [New York] Mets clothing and speaking in a Texan accent). Eventually, he passes a citizenship test in which he proves to be much more knowledgeable about American history than those lucky enough to be born in the country that has become Apu’s adopted homeland (e.g., Homer tells Apu that the thirteen stripes in the American flag stand for “good luck”). Indeed, The Simpsons’ producers seem to have gotten into a huff over the Apu controversy, signaling that they intend to write the character out of future episodes entirely. (In early 2020, Hank Azira, the voice actor for Apu’s character, announced he had decided to no longer voice Apu on the show.) At the same time, TV producer Adi Shankar ran a public contest for a script for a Simpsons episode that would transform the stereotype of “[Apu] into a fresh, funny and realistic portrayal of Indians in America” (quoted in O’Falt 2018, n.p.). While Shankar’s move has not been met with positive signs on behalf of the official Simpsons producers, he sounded optimistic that he would accomplish to produce a bootleg “episode of ‘The Simpsons’ that will sound and look like the Fox series” (ibid., n.p.). We will have to wait and see where this journey will lead, but it is interesting to notice that whoever makes the decisions within the “official” Simpsons media property has not seized on Shankar’s idea so far. Otherwise, we would see convergence culture coming full circle: a cultural feedback loop starting with a (satirical) mass-media representation, a critical reaction from the grassroots level (albeit some thirty years after the character’s television debut), processes of negotiation about the character’s future on both sides (among the show’s producers and its audience/fans), and a potential script as a form of correction to be aired on television as part of The Simpsons.

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Notably, such a move would be an entirely different level of feedback than The Simpsons’ meta-references to the “worst episode ever” discourse reflected through the Comic Book Guy character, or to the “Homer Backs into the Bushes” meme in a scene with Homer texting the animated GIF featuring “himself” as he reverses back into the bushes in the 2019 episode “The Girl on the Bus.” Or consider the guest appearance of the heavy-metal band Okilly Dokilly, whose members dress as Ned Flanders and most of their songs are parodic references to the character, during the closing credits of Season 20’s episode “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say D’oh” (see Blistein 2019). Of course, these instances are nice gimmicks. As the disputed case of Apu has shown, however, we must remain skeptical about the degree to which a commercial image-system like The Simpsons is actually open to the public, the degree to which the environment of remix culture is actually democratic, as the term “ludic democracy” suggests. Certainly, as we have seen in Chapter 5, the media industries are keen to retain hegemony (and their right to profit) over their intellectual properties; popular appropriation, however “valuable,” “progressive,” or “justified” it may be, naturally runs against this corporate interest. In fear of finding themselves in a legal minefield, amateur artists might understandably be discouraged to use material from the commercial media space, even if they do not cross any red lines. But there are also other aspects that curb the democratic potential inherent in the idea of participatory media culture. Questions like who has access to the technological infrastructure and know-how, or “which participants are welcomed, marginalized, and excluded” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, p. 37) invite us to think critically about the prevailing power hierarchies in the age of convergence culture. And yet, if the media industries want their products to become or remain popular, they have to open up to the meanings the products generate in pop-cultural contexts, as John Fiske’s concept of a “semiotic democracy” has proposed (see Jenkins 2010, p. xxxiv). We will have to see to where this logic of participatory culture will drive The Simpsons’ producers, not only in the case of Apu, but regarding the Simpsons franchise as a whole.

References Barton, Kristin M. 2014. “Chuck Versus the Advertiser: How Fan Activism and Footlong Subway Sandwiches Saved a Television Series.” In Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century, edited by Kristin M. Barton and Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, 159–72. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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Beard, Duncan Stuart. 2004. “Local Satire with a Global Reach: Ethnic Stereotyping and Cross-Cultural Conflicts in The Simpsons.” In Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, edited by John Alberti, 273–91. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Blistein, Jon. 2019. “They Started a Ned Flanders Metal Band. Then ‘The Simpsons’ Called.” Rolling Stone, April 9. Archived at: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/ tv-news/ned-flanders-metal-band-okilly-dokilly-the-simpsons-819321/ (accessed January 20, 2021). Fox News. 2015. “‘The Simpsons’ Thank Angry Mobs in Bolivia Who Protested to Get Show Back On Air,” February 16. Archived at http://www.foxnews.com/ entertainment/2015/02/16/simpsons-thanks-fans-in-bolivia-for-protestingandgetting-show-back.html (accessed July 19, 2019). Groening, Matt. 2018. “The Simpsons Exclusive: Matt Groening (Mostly) Remembers the Show’s Record 636 Episodes.” Interview by Bill Keveney, USA Today, April 27. Archived at: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2018/04/27/thesimpsonsmattgroening-new-record-fox-animated-series/524581002/ (accessed July 19, 2019). Jenkins, Henry. 2010. “Why Fiske Still Matters.” In Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed., by John Fiske, xii–xxxvii. London: Routledge. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press. Nath, Sagnik, 2017. Comment on “The Problem with Apu: Official Trailer | truTV,” YouTube, July 27. Archived at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGzvEqBvkP8 (accessed July 19, 2019). O’Falt, Chris. 2018. “‘The Simpsons’ Is Eliminating Apu, But Producer Adi Shankar Found the Perfect Script to Solve the Apu Problem.” IndieWire, October 26. Archived at: https://www.indiewire.com/2018/10/simpsons-drop-apu-characteradi-shankar-1202015372/ (accessed July 20, 2019). O’Neal, Sean. 2018. “What Can You Do about Apu? The Simpsons Used to Know.” A.V. Club, April 9. Archived at: https://tv.avclub.com/what-can-you-do-aboutaputhe-simpsons-used-to-know-1825114234 (accessed July 19, 2019). Sandvoss, Cornel, Jonathan Gray, and C. Lee Harrington. 2017. “Why Still Study Fans?” Introduction to Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, 2nd. ed., edited by Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, 1–26. New York: New York: University Press. Sunkara, Bhaskar. 2018. “Don’t Get Rid of Apu. He’s a Hero to Many of Us.” Guardian, November 1. Archived at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ nov/01/apu-simpsons-hero (accessed July 19, 2019).

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Index aca-fans 31 alt.tv.simpsons (online fan forum) 120, 135–36 American Dad! (TV series) 26, 73 Ang, Ien 21, 48–49 animated sitcoms 25–26, 63, 64, 73, 87, 120 auteur theory. See under television production Banksy 44–45, 114, 179, 187–88, 189, 198, 199; couch gag written by 185–86, 186n8–9; Exit Through the Gift Shop (documentary film) 114, 188; parodying chalkboard gag 179–80 Bartkira (fan comic) 173 Bart Simpson (Simpsons character). See Simpson, Bart Bartman (parody character). See under Simpson, Bart Bartmania. See under Simpson, Bart Batman (superhero character and media franchise) 16–18, 24, 123–24, 127, 182 Batman (film series) 16–18, 123–24, 125, 182 Batman (TV series) 101, 117, 123, 125, 127 Beavis and Butt-Head (TV series) 25, 73, 78, 94 Big Bang Theory, The (TV series) 118 Black Bart. See under Simpson, Bart Breaking Bad (TV series) 172, 182–83, 184 bricolage 40, 44, 44n3, 48 Brooks, James L., 66, 67, 73, 76; role in conceiving The Simpsons 25, 71 Burns, Charles Montgomery (Simpsons character) 12; repurposed in remix culture 187, 188, 195–97 Bush, George H. W.: commenting on The Simpsons 38 Bush, Barbara: commenting on The Simpsons 168 Caldwell, John T. 67, 73, 95 camp 127n1. See also under Simpsons, The Castellaneta, Dan 70, 146 civic imagination, the 28, 47, 190–97 collecting. See under fandom Comic Book Guy (Simpsons character) 118, 125–26, 140; as fan stand-in 119, 120, 121, 128; “Worst Episode Ever” meme 120, 126, 128, 210 comics 78, 23, 27, 47, 49, 132, 194; featured in The Simpsons. 117, 122–23, 124–25; underground comics 73, 170. See also Life in Hell; MAD; Simpsons, The convergence culture 20, 55–57, 139, 197, 209–10 convergence culture industry 118, 122, 128 Cosby Show, The (TV series) 63, 94 cosplay. See under fandom

Coupland, Douglas 92. See also Generation X critical intertextuality 53, 79, 183, 198 Cruz, Ted: commenting on The Simpsons 13 cultural resistance 43–45, 46 cultural studies 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 41, 43, 44, 43–44n2, 44n3, 46, 48, 97, 98, 99, 104–5, 136, 149 culture jamming 44, 52, 114, 196 Debord, Guy 51–52, 188–89. See also détournement de Certeau, Michel 43, 94, 153 détournement 51–52, 188–89, 196, 198 DeviantArt 17, 17n3, 28, 162–63, 164 Disney (corporation): acquisition of 21st Century Fox 13, 14, 23, 146, 148; Disney+ (streaming platform) 13, 135 “D’oh!,” 70 Eco, Umberto 23, 44, 54 El Barto. See under Simpson, Bart Exit Through the Gift Shop. See under Banksy Facebook 55, 56, 115 Fairey, Shepard 114, 141 fake trailers 181–84 fair use 151, 180–81 Family Guy (TV show) 25, 73 fanboy auteur 78 fandom 22, 28–31, 40, 45–46, 55, 56–57, 117–18, 124–25, 132, 137, 139, 148–49, 152–53; collecting 126, 135, 140–41; cosplay 49, 57, 123, 126, 206; fan art 49–51; fan activism 206–7; fan critics 30, 120, 139; fan fiction 50–51, 56, 127, 162n1, 164; forensic fandom 137; mainstreaming of 55–57; nostalgia and 160, 175–77; satire of 117–21, 126 (see also under Simpsons, The; see also “Star Trek Fans Get a Life” under Saturday Night Live); Simpsons writers as 26, 78–79; stand-ins 119 (see also under Comic Book Guy); stereotyping of 29, 118, 121–22, 125–26. See also under science-fiction; Simpsons, The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 67n3, 68n4 Film Roman (animation studio) 70 “Filthy Words” (performance by Carlin) 68n4 Fin-Sync Rules 67n3 Fiske, John 22–23, 38, 39, 41–43, 45, 51, 54, 89–90, 92, 98–99, 136; Television Culture (book) 54, 89; “popular cultural capital,” 54, 118, 126; “semiotic democracy,” 53, 210 Flintstones, The (TV show) 25, 87, 120 Fox Broadcasting. See under 20th Century Fox

232  Frankfurt School, the 38, 41, 42n1 Futurama (TV series) 26, 73, 76 Generation X 65, 92–94, 112; media culture of 26–27, 92–94, 100–101, 104, 110, 116, 160 graffiti. See under Simpson, Bart Gray, Jonathan 21–22, 53, 64, 79, 89, 91, 99, 103, 116, 133, 140, 142, 143, 144, 190, 198. See also critical intertextuality; Watching with The Simpsons Groening, Matt 20, 27, 57, 72–78; artistic approach 75, 138, 167; artistic influences 78; biography of 74, 77–78; conflicts with Simon 74, 77; control of Simpsons merchandise 74; political outlook of 76–77, 151; response to fan critics 138, 207; role in creating The Simpsons 25, 65–66, 77, 81, 174. See also Futurama; Life in Hell Hall, Stuart 41, 43–44n2, 89, 99, 153 Halloween special episodes of The Simpsons. See under Simpsons, The Hanna-Barbera (animation studio) 25, 87, 160 Harvard Lampoon 71, 72 Hills, Matt 22, 29, 122, 131–32, 134, 170 intellectual property. See under Simpsons, The intertextuality 22, 89–90, 95, 99, 116, 132, 134; critical intertextuality 79, 99, 183, 198 ironic consumption 89, 93–94, 99–101 ironic viewing 92, 97, 99–101, 103–4 Itchy & Scratchy Show, The (fictional cartoon show) 101, 119, 122, 123; representing The Simpsons 120–21 Jean, Al (showrunner for The Simpsons) 71, 72, 73, 91, 128, 140, 145, 186n9 Jenkins, Henry 19–21, 28, 40, 45–47, 55–56, 125, 134, 136, 138–39, 145, 147, 148, 152–53, 162, 164, 190–91; Textual Poachers 21, 40, 55; See also civic imagination, the; convergence culture Kellner, Douglas 25, 95 King of the Hill (TV series) 25, 73 Klasky-Csupo (animation studio) 70, 75 Klein, Naomi 93–94, 115 Knight Rider (TV series) 100–101, 117 Krusty the Clown (Simpsons character) 101, 113, 122, 123, 182 Kwik-E-Mart (fictional brand) 141; as real-life attraction 142 LEGO 51, 184–85 Life in Hell (comic strip by Groening) 74–75, 76, 127, 151; appearance on The Simpsons 174 Lotz, Amanda, 65, 109–10

Understanding The Simpsons

MAD magazine 13, 24, 78–80, 104, 127, 149, 160 mashups. See remix culture Mirkin, David (showrunner for The Simpsons) 72, 138 Married. . . with Children (TV series) 65, 102, 110 memes 53, 161, 177–79, 184; chalkboard gag as 179–80; “Homer Backs into the Bushes” meme 144, 177, 210; “Insect Overlords” meme 177; Merkel-Burns meme 195–97; “Steamed Hams” meme 177–79; “Worst Episode Ever” meme 120, 126, 128, 210 meta-fiction. See self-reflexivity Mr. Burns. See Burns, Charles Montgomery MTM (Mary Tyler Moore production company) 64, 66–67, 67n3 MTV (Music Television) 65, 93, 95, 109–10, 111, 112. See also Beavis and Butt-Head Muntz, Nelson (Simpsons character) 112, 208; repurposed by street artists 192; romantic relationship with Lisa Simpson 162–64 Mystery Science Theater 3000 (TV series) 26, 78, 94 Nahasapeemapetilon, Apu (Simpsons character) 166, 208–9; controversy over (see Problem with Apu, The) National Lampoon (humor magazine) 71–72. See also Harvard Lampoon nerd culture 78, 118, 126 No Homers Club (online fan forum) 136, 138, 147 Oakley, Bill (showrunner for The Simpsons) 205 paratexts 21–23, 78, 133, 161, 173 parody films 26, 112 participatory culture 18–20, 27, 28, 38–40, 55–56, 90, 132, 138–39, 143, 148, 150, 153, 161, 170, 172, 177, 197–98, 206, 210; poetics of 47–53, 179, 183, 194, 198; politics of 41–47, 173, 188–89, 198, 207 Peanuts, The (cartoon strip by Schulz) 78, 159–60 Planet Simpson (book by Turner) 133 Playboy (men’s magazine): featuring Marge Simpson 166–68 poetics: concept of 47–48. See also under participatory culture popular cultural capital: see under Fiske, John popular culture: concept of 41–43, 50, 54–55 popular semiosis 23, 25, 28, 54–55, 153, 160, 162n1, 174, 177, 180–81, 190, 192, 196, 197–98 postmodernism 26, 69, 86, 95, 96, 97 Problem with Apu, The (documentary film) 207, 209 quality TV 27, 66–68, 86

Index

Radioactive Man (fictional superhero character and comic book series) 17, 122–23, 127 Reagananism 63–64, 68 remix culture 17, 20, 24, 38, 52–53, 55, 161, 167–73, 180–88, 189, 195–96, 198, 210 Roswell, Maggie: financial dispute with Fox 166 satire 49n4, 53, 161–62, 181, 190; television and 64, 76, 99, 102, 104. See also MAD magazine, see also under Simpsons, The Saturday Night Live (TV show) 24, 26, 64, 72, 112; “Star Trek Fans Get a Life” (skit) 121; See also “Wayne’s World” science fiction: fandom of 27, 118, 125–26 (see also under Simpsons, The) Scott, Suzanne 40, 72, 78, 118, 122, 128 semiotic democracy. See under Fiske, John semiotic guerrilla 44, 46, 52. See also détournement semiotic solidarities 47, 48, 96 self-reflexivity: on TV 26, 95, 96; as metahumor (see under Simpsons, The) Silverman, David (Simpsons staff member) 70, 75, 140 Simon, Sam (showrunner for The Simpsons) 66, 70, 76; assembling writers for The Simpsons 71; conflicts with Groening 74, 77 Simpson, Bart 87–88, 91–93, 95, 100, 101, 126, 135, 162, 176; Bartman 16–18, 24, 123–24, 182, 191; Bartmania 96, 128, 149; Black Bart phenomenon 149–50; bootleg T-shirts of 149–51, 152; chalkboard gag (see under Simpsons, The); El Barto 113–14, 176; fan identity of 122–23; “I Didn’t Do It” Boy 96; merchandising of 24, 37, 96, 128, 187; Nazis using image of 151, 191–92; origin of name 75; rebel image of 37–38, 54, 113, 128, 150, 176, 179, 194; as spokesperson for The Simpsons 38, 120, 121; and street art 113–14, 186 Simpson, Homer 87–88, 92, 95–96, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 167, 168, 170, 183, 209; aphorisms of 99, 134; D’oh!, 70; as Mr. X 122; origin of name 75; as Poochie 119–21; “Homer Backs into the Bushes” meme (see under memes); satirical function of 100–103, 174, 207, 209; Twitter account of 140; voice of (see Castellaneta, Dan) Simpson, Lisa 13, 88, 100–102, 123, 124, 126, 184, 205; as anti-fascist symbol 192–95; origin of name 75; as President of the United States 206: romantic relationship with Nelson Muntz 162–64; satirical function of 115, 119; as spokesperson for The Simpsons 120, 122, 208; as superheroine 124, 126, 128, 192–94; voice of (see Smith, Yeardley)

233 Simpson, Marge 75, 88, 96, 102, 174, 208; fan reworking of 164–70; MILF Marge phenomenon 166–70; origin of name 75 Simpsonizer (promotional online tool) 19, 142–44, 143n2, 171–72 Simpsonology 31 Simpsons, The: as academic field (see Simpsonology); accolades of 26, 86; aesthetic complexity 85, 86, 88, 90–91, 111, 113, 116, 138, 174; animation process of 70; art and 85–86, 141, 174, 174n5; books about 133, 135, 135n1, 138 (see also Planet Simpson; Watching with The Simpsons; Zombie Simpsons); camp aesthetics of 127; cease-and-desists letters to Simpsons fans (see under 21st Century Fox); censorship of 68n4, 70n5; chalkboard gag 135, 179–80, 184, 186 (see also under memes); characters of (see Burns, Charles Montgomery; Comic Book Guy; Krusty the Clown; Muntz, Nelson; Nahasapeemapetilon, Apu; Radioactive Man; Simpson, Bart; Simpson, Homer; Simpson, Lisa; Simpson, Marge); comics of 16, 19, 74, 135, 139–40; as commercial entity 20, 23; companion guides of 135; contests for fans 141, 144–45; continuity of serial logic 88, 128; couch gag 135, 145, 183, 184, 187, 198 (see also under Banksy); cultural impact of 14, 15, 20–21, 24, 26, 37, 79–80, 89, 94, 104, 110, 111–12, 133–34, 144, 159, 160, 174–75, 177, 190, 197; criticized by fans 30–31, 119–21, 137, 159, 175–77, 188; decline in quality 30–31, 120, 128, 137, 177; didactic function 79, 80–81, 92, 100–101, 104–5; directors of 70 (see also Silverman, David); drug culture and 183; DVD boxes 135; episode guides 135; fan art related to 17–18, 163–85; fan engagement 19–20, 27–31, 78, 105, 110, 116–17, 132–38, 140–41; fan encounters 146–47, 206–7; fan satire 118–22, 125–26; fan fictions of 162–66, 162n1; film parodies by 116, 124; geek appeal of 116–17, 128–29; Golden Age of 14, 30, 133, 175; guest stars 111–12, 113, 114, 198, 210; guest writers 135, 145; Halloween special episodes of 101, 124, 128, 173, 182; history of 30, 63–66, 70–76, 112; independence from Fox 70–71 (see also censorship under Simpsons, The; Fox controlling The Simpsons under 20th Century Fox); indirect viewing in 79, 97–105, 110; influences 78–79, 104; as intellectual property 19, 27, 122, 139, 146–52, 180–81, 210; licensing of 19–20, 142; marketing of (see under 20th Century Fox); mainstream appeal of 26, 55–57, 131, 160; media satire of 97–104; memes related to (see under memes); and merchandising 19–20,

234  24, 37, 74, 122, 140n3, 141, 186, 188; meta-humor 86–91, 95–97, 104, 119, 186; music in 103, 111–12, 210; neoliberalism of 71, 97, 99, 114–15, 161–62, 186; online fan communities of 135–36, 138 (see also alt.tv.simpsons; The Simpsons Archive; No Homers Club); opening sequence parodied 184–90; political voice of 13–14, 38, 112, 205–6; pop culture parodied in 111–12, 114, 116, 124–28; production of 69–72; real-life house of 141–42; referentiality 27, 85–88, 95, 101, 116–17, 124–25, 127, 137; satirized by fans 187–90, 198; satirizing corporate culture 79–80, 103–4, 114–15, 186; satirizing fans 118–22; satirizing Fox 71; and science-fiction fandom 117–18, 125, 127; shorts (see under Tracey Ullman Show, The); showrunners of (see Jean, Al; Mirkin, David; Oakley, Bill; Simon, Sam); Simpsonizing 19, 28, 111, 170–72; sitcom parody 87–88; social stereotypes 207–09; stereotyping of 76, 99–100, 118, 121, 122, 125, 128, 207–8, 209; and street art 112–14, 179, 186, 192–97 (see also Banksy; Fairey, Shepard); transgressive moments 68, 71, 112; transmedia approach of 140–46; video games of 16, 139–40; voice actors 70, 146, 166, 206 (see Castellaneta, Dan; Roswell, Maggie; Smith, Yeardley); writers of 70–72, 78–79; yellow skin color 150 Simpsons Archive, The (online fan forum) 27, 85, 103, 136, 138, 147, 148 Simpsons episodes cited: “And Maggie Makes Three” (2F10) 100; “Bart Gets Famous” (7F11) 96, 163; “Barting Over” (EABF05) 113; “Bart the Genius” (7G02) 179; “Bart to the Future” (BABF13) 163, 206; “Bart vs. Thanksgiving” (7F07) 95; “Blood Feud” (7F22) 87; “Brick Like Me” (RABF21) 185; “The Call of the Simpsons” (7G09) 183; “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson” (4F22) 174; “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes” (CABF02) 122; “Dancin’ Homer” (7F05) 111; “Deep Space Homer” (1F13) 177; “Exit Through the Kwik-EMart” (PABF09) 113, 114; “The Fat and the Furriest” (EABF19) 115; “The Food Wife” (NABF20) 183; “Future-Drama” (GABF12) 163; “The Girl on the Bus” (YABF04) 210; “Homer Loves Flanders” (1F14) 183; “Homerpalooza” (3F21) 111; “How I Spent My Strummer Vacation” (DABF22) 112; “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say D’oh” (YABF12) 210; “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show” (4F12) 119–22; “Krusty Gets Busted” (7G12) 101, 122; “Large Marge” (DABF18) 182; “Life

Understanding The Simpsons

on the Fast Lane” (7G11) 90n1; “Lisa’s Date with Density” (4F01) 162, 164; “Lisa’s Wedding” (2F15) 163; “Marge on the Lam” (1F03) 165; “Married to the Blob” (SABF03) 118; “Midnight Towboy” (JABF21) 185; “Mom and Pop Art” (AABF15) 174; “MoneyBart” (MABF18) 185; “Mother Simpson” (3F06) 111; “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” (8F01) 205–6, ; “Much Apu About Nothing” (3F20) 208; “MyPods and Boomsticks” (KABF20) 115; “New Kids on the Blecch” (CABF12) 112; “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” (XABF07) 208; “The PTA Disbands” (2F19) 99; “Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Three Times” (JABF05) 16; “Simprovised” (VABF13) 146; “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (7G08) 87; “Simpson Tide” (3G04) 115; “Summer of 4 Ft. 2” (3F22) 194; “That ’90s Show” (KABF04); “There’s No Disgrace Like Home” (7G04) 87; “Three Men and a Comic Book” (7F21) 16, 122–24; “Treehouse of Horror X” (BABF01) 124, 194; “22 Short Films about Springfield” (3F18) 91, 16, 177; “Weekend at Burnsie’s” (DABF11) 183; “What Animated Women Want” (RABF08) 183, 184; “Who Shot Mr. Burns? (Part One)” (2F16) 141 Simpsons Movie, The 19, 182, 207; promotion of 142–42, 143n4 Simpsons Ride, The (theme park) 141–42 sitcoms 63–64, 66, 87, 96; sitcom parody on The Simpsons (see under Simpsons, The). See also animated sitcoms Sivero, Frank: suing The Simpsons 171 skateboarding 110, 112–13 Skinner, Seymour 113, 177–79, 208. See also “Steamed Hams” meme under memes Smith, Yeardley 206 South Park (TV show) 26, 73, 161 Springfield Punx (blog) 28, 171–72 Star Trek (media franchise) 101, 117, 125, 126, 127; fandom of 30, 50, 56–57, 121, 125, 162 (see also satire of fandom under fandom) Star Wars (media franchise) 19, 24, 30, 86, 116, 125–26, 127 “Steamed Hams” meme. See under memes street art 44, 113–14, 179, 186, 192, 193–94. See also Banksy; Fairey, Shepard. See also under Simpson, Bart; Simpsons, The subcultures 24, 55, 56–57, 112–13 Sweatpants, Charlie (Simpsons fan) 29–31. See also Zombie Simpsons Telecommunications Act of 1996, 68n4 television production 69–70; auteur theory and 69, 73, 78, 81; “hyphenates” in 69; independents 66–67, 67n3 This Is Spinal Tap (mockumentary) 26, 112

235

Index

Tracey Ullman Show, The 25, 65, 66, 70–71, 73, 75; Simpsons shorts 25, 30, 65, 80, 90 transmedia storytelling 16, 132, 134, 140, 145–46 “Trekkies” (Star Trek fans) 56, 125 Trump, Donald 47, 205–6, 209; satirized by The Simpsons 13–14 Turner, Chris 30, 133, 134. See also Planet Simpson 20th Century Fox 19–20, 25, 63–64, 68, 70, 71, 146–46, 187–88; establishment of Fox Broadcasting Company 64–65, 68, 70; cease-and-desists letters to Simpsons fans 146–47, 181, 206; controlling The Simpsons 70n5, 74, 122, 159, 180, 186; cultural impact of 93, 109–10; Disney’s acquisition of 13–14, 148; satirized by The Simpsons (see under Simpsons, The); launching The Simpsons 25, 65–66, 70–71; legal action over copyright issues 146, 148,

150–52, 181; marketing The Simpsons 16n2, 65, 71, 73, 78, 80, 93, 99, 109–10, 17, 135, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 150, 185 Twin Peaks (TV series) 97–98, 101, 117, 136 Wait Till Your Father Gets Home (TV series) 25 Walt Disney (corporation). See Disney Warner Bros. (animation studio) 160 Watching with The Simpsons (book by Gray) 133 “Wayne’s World” (SNL sketch series) 26, 112 “Worst Episode Ever” meme. See under memes YouTube 28, 52–53, 56, 89, 137, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 189, 207; blocking content 180, 182n6 Zombie Simpsons (e-book) 29–30. See also Sweatpants, Charlie