If you haven't seen it yet, the long-running animated Fox comedy "The Simpsons" has taken another turn into the realm of modernity, which is never a good thing.
In a recent episode, Homer is shaking the hand of another man who compliments Homer's grip. Homer tells his wife Marge that all those years of choking his son Bart paid off, referencing a gag that's been going on since the show's inception of Homer choking Bart whenever the former became angry at the latter. Then Homer informs the man (in reality, the audience) that he's stopped doing that because "times have changed."
— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) November 5, 2023
I'm not actually too comfortable with this change, especially for a show like this.
"The Simpsons" shares the same kind of relationship with reality as "South Park," in that it has always been something of an absurdist's take on real life. The difference between the two is that while both acknowledge that times change, "South Park" mocks the seriousness modernity puts on itself while "The Simpsons" obliges it.
What makes every capitulation from "The Simpsons" all the worse is that it's the more mainstream show of the two. So whenever "The Simpsons" sacrifices comedy on the altar of modernity, the negative effect is greater.
Comedy is necessary for a society to function properly, and not just because it gives an escape from the seriousness of the real world, but because comedy stops the world from becoming too serious.
A simple joke can steal the power away from the powerful. It can make a Goliath of a social issue look like a silly matter. It slaughters sacred cows, and in a time when everyone and everything is trying to make themselves into a sacred cow, comedic butchers are worth their weight in gold.
This means that every bit of ground severity taken from levity is one more issue that could grow to be too serious for its own good. It's just another issue that can't be joked about leading to it being another way to control the populace for fear of becoming a pariah for not taking the issue seriously enough.
At this point, you might be asking what the comedic value is in choking a child.
There isn't one, but the long-running gag was never played to any serious effect. There was never an episode where Homer choked Bart nearly to death resulting in abuse allegations, trauma for Bart, a likely divorce from Marge, and a father full of regret for his actions. It was always a brief moment of cartoonish violence that punctuated an equally cartoonish squabble between father and son.
The underlying reliability that made the bit funny was that parents oftentimes get frustrated with their children to the point where it drives them crazy enough to go berserk. In real life, this usually results in the parents becoming flustered and either spanking their kid or some other punishment, but in the cartoon family in a cartoonish world, this sometimes results in cartoonish violence, making a joke out of a serious situation by making the action of a parent against a child absurd in a comedic way.
We all know choking a child is bad. We never needed that lesson. There was never a supermassive rise of fathers choking their sons thanks to a cartoon character doing it on television.
When Homer said "Times have changed," what "The Simpsons" writers are saying without meaning to is that we've been infantilized to the point where it's no longer acceptable to make these kinds of jokes and comedy needs to take yet another step back to appease those who like to take things too seriously.
Now, because "The Simpsons" can't joke about this, the audience has one less point of relatability. If the show had played it off as more of a grumbling comment about the increasingly unfunny state of society, that little turn might have landed a bit more gently, but Homer was proud of his change.
This was "The Simpsons" bending the knee to people who don't understand comedy once again, and sadly, they're just one example.
We need to save comedy so comedy can save us.
