Is there any work that has more greatly influenced my thought than The Simpsons? Maybe The Shield, and that had a big heaping of help from beloved Soluter wallflower to guide me through it. The Simpsons taught me so much on its own, merely by rewatching and thinking about it. Granted, it has the advantage of having grown up with me, having begun airing shortly before I was born and being an institution throughout my childhood. But it was and remains a peculiar, unique beast – one that is still frequently misunderstood today, let alone when it first aired (not helped, obviously, by the fact that it descended into caricature in its ninth season, tainting the views of even die-hard fans into thinking things Lisa was always a whining harridan). For a leftist show, it always came off more as exhausted conservatism – by which I mean that it believed in hard work and community, and saw right-wing policy as failing those ideals.

Hard work factors not just into its morality, but its very sense of humour. Obviously, The Simpsons makes fun of laziness, but it uses its whole ass to do it. On a basic level, the show sweats out every single word it uses in every single joke. What is the funniest possible way to express the exact thought we’re trying to express? It follows through on this with its staging, and further out from this into its character work. Comedy requires an understanding of truth and falsehood, and the more razor-sharp one’s understanding of the truth is, the funnier you can be. The Simpsons‘ mastery of language led to a mastery of character – not just asking what would be funny or what would flatter my view of the world, but what a character would actually say based upon their history, their knowledge base, and most of all their motivations.

I suppose that’s what attracts me to the show: ambition. Is there any joke on TV more ambitious than “It depends on what you mean by ‘cwisis’.”? The basic idea of the joke is that Bart turns on the TV hoping for fun, only to watch a boring rerun. But that’s not enough for The Simpsons; they make up an entire era for Krusty’s show to emulate. They pattern it after prime time adult talk shows, they rework Krusty’s theme to sound jazzy, they animate it in black and white. What really gets me is the precise language they use; ‘collective bargaining agreements’ is vitally important to adults and totally meaningless to a kid, and there’s something so funny about specifically choosing George Meany to caricature; his pay grade seems a bit above ‘TV clown’. It also seems in character for Krusty, chasing whatever TV format is popular – I love the way the animators capture his body language. All of this in service of a joke about a kid turning on the TV to find something boring!

That kind of thinking influences the jokes I make now – a pedantic level of correctness, capturing both the spirit and the fact of the thing it’s joking about. You want to parody a thing, you have to look up how it was made and replicate that as close as possible, and you have to tweak the details until they match up as close as possible. On top of this, you have to get why they made the decisions they did – what motivated this object of ridicule? Why did they make this particular mistake? On top of all of this, you have to commit to the craft of comedy; you have to lead the audience’s attention around correctly, trick them into thinking you’re going one way so you can go the other.

Comedy like this leads to a strange kind of compassion. It’s not that you forgive people for what they do or even respect where their emotions are coming from, but you do recognise suffering and desire. Burns might be infinitely rich and infinitely evil, but he is also infinitely old and gets the fragility that comes with it. This also extends to the stupidity; Simpsons writer John Swartzwelder described Homer as a labrador who could switch emotions not only on a dime but with total sincerity, and his love for monster trucks, bad pop music, and terrible junk food is as earnest as his love for his wife and children. No matter how absurd their expression, the feelings people have for things come from real places.

There are also things I’ve had to choose to reject. Its cynicism is funny, and even necessary for its comedy, but it’s not particularly helpful for living one’s life; it’s better for looking at institutions rather than individuals (most institutions and services are badly organised, while most workers I’ve met are more like this guy). The Simpsons draws attention to the more boring and unpleasant parts of life because those are funniest, but it’s generally better to assume good faith on the part of other people and focus one’s attention on the wins and gains of life rather than letting negative experiences colour one’s whole perception of something. In a way, recreating the funniest moments of the show is missing the point of it.

In this respect, its presentation of mob mentality – with the most original and iconic image of the show being its recurring angry mobs – has had a deep influence on my own views. I’m most definitely not immune to mob mentality, even now, but I have frequently caught myself when seeing a group of people angry about something and asking: are we actually in the right to be mad about this? Too many times have I seen a big group of people pile onto an innocuous situation because they wanted to be angry and right and didn’t need all the facts to do it. I usually think of Lisa as the countermodel for this kind of thinking, but at one point or another all the protagonists end up becoming a lone investigator, digging through the moral outrage o’ the week to find the facts.

Anger is easy, and that’s not the way of The Simpsons. It’s about the accumulation of a million tiny victories as opposed to one big lucky payday; one can see the results in the good years of the show itself, still rewatchable and still sentimental and still funny as fuck thirty years on. You also have the convenient counterpoint of the show’s degradation, when they start making easier choices to lesser results. There’s a pleasure in knowing – not just believing but knowing – that you’re right, because you did the work and you see the results. This is what I took from The Simpsons. That and about half the language.