I very, very rarely bother with “Comment Is Free” here. It’s one of the wrongest things about The Guardian these days. But I’ve just read an irresistible article. In it, the Assistant Editor (or perhaps “an assistant editor”—dontcha love these meedja job titles?) of the newspaper’s arts and entertainment blog—that’s its arts and entertainment blog—confesses that she doesn’t find The Simpsons funny and has to have the jokes explained to her.
I suppose it’s asking a bit much from a culture correspondent with a British broadsheet newspaper to expect her to recognize cultural references made by Harvard-educated comedy writers, but I’m a veteran of The Grauniad from the days when it usually only printed nonsense by accident. She also attacks the show for its predictability and for relying on “a gut-wrenching dose of American schmaltz” to “[hammer] home the moral message”. Is she watching the same programme as everyone else? Is there some kind of anti-American phrase generator that inserts this stuff into articles at random? What does “schmaltz” mean in a newspaper whose readers voted Cinema Paradiso the greatest foreign film ever made?
The first comment in response to this piece is from a standard-issue CiFfer who liked the show until the one in which Tony Blair appeared. It gave him too easy a ride apparently. Just one comment in and it’s already a parody of a CiF discussion thread.
Anyway, forget about Matt Groening; The Guardian’s Steve Bell: there’s a cartoonist who can do allusive, unpredictable, funny satire. Just yesterday he imagined George Bush and Tony Blair’s last meeting. He drew Blair as a little dog and Bush as a monkey.
10 Comments
That idiot, clownish element, so central to most comedy - from Charlie Chaplin and Jim Carrey to Homer Simpson - leaves me cold.
Idiot. When “Hitler” meets “Mussolini” in The Great Dictator and go to shake hands/seig heil alternately out of phase is one of the greatest pomposity pricks of all time.
And how long do you think it’ll be before a CiFfer pops up to wonder out loud whether Groening is a Jew or not?
Oh come on, have you seen the Simpsons recently (I mean the latest episodes they’re showing in the states)? Talk about flogging a dead horse.
I haven’t seen it lately, but there’s a big difference between saying that a series has jumped the shark and saying that it was never funny.
If she’s complaining about what she terms schmaltz then she’s complaining about the show from the very first episode, not the latest series.
I’m sure there will be more like this to come as the Guardian switches from being a news source to a blog portal.
Not finding it funny is one thing (I’m in the minority that don’t find Ricky Gervais particularly funny).
Not understanding the jokes is another.
> a newspaper whose readers voted Cinema Paradiso the greatest foreign film ever made
Oh. My. God.
And furthermore, The City Of Lost Children didn’t even make the top 40. And Life Is Beautiful did. My opinion of Gardian readers has just plummetted. I didn’t think it was even possible to plummet from that kind of a depth.
I haven’t seen it lately, but there’s a big difference between saying that a series has jumped the shark and saying that it was never funny.
It was both funny and genuinely touching at times, but those times are loooooong gone.
And I wish they would stop having Homer strangle Bart. It never worked and now things are more schmaltzy it really doesn’t fit.
Steve Bell does another hard-hitting cartoon that will bring down the evil Bush/Blair Neocon Empire ?
Of course, in the same manner as a joke, scripted by Richard Curtis and read out by Ben Elton on Saturday Live brought down the evil Reagan/Thatcher Empire.
Very interesting place - nice to read something different.
I wonder what difference Spitting Image made though? Its hard to guess but it certainly said to have damaged the 2 Davids and maybe even helped Thatcher by portraying her as a tough and quite cool figure along with a her henchman Norman Tebbitt.