The Simpsons has been around for a very long time, and while every episode brings with it new jokes,
some gags have been recurring again and again for years. From odd geography to embarrassing photos,
here are the best long-running jokes on The Simpsons.
The Simpsons is a satirical comedy, which means that to strike as broadly as possible,
it has to be set in the most average-seeming place imaginable. So, writers came up with Springfield,
a mediocre town that's also full of goofballs and weirdos. So as to not impose any regional
characteristics on the mid-sized city and keep it as down-the-middle and relatable as possible,
the state where Springfield sits has aggressively never been revealed. All viewers really know is
that its capital city is literally named Capital City and that the governor is named Mary Bailey.
Diligent Simpsons fans have looked for contextual clues for years,
trying to pinpoint Springfield's exact location, but they'll likely never
find it - it's physically and geographically impossible for Springfield to be a real place.
Information about its locale is purposely contradictory, and it's one of the show's best
prolonged gags. In the Behind the Music parody episode "Behind the Laughter," Springfield's
location is given as both northern Kentucky and southern Missouri. In The Simpsons Movie,
Ned Flanders says the town is nestled in between such far-flung states as Ohio, Maine, and Nevada.
In many episodes of The Simpsons, Homer mindlessly watches television and comes
across an infomercial invariably hosted by aging, washed-up, B-movie actor Troy McClure.
McClure usually introduces himself by saying:
"I'm Troy McClure! You probably remember me from such films as The Revenge of Abe Lincoln,
and The Wackiest Covered Wagon in the West."
He then lists a couple of terrible-sounding old
movies from his apparently vast resume of forgotten projects.
Among his dozens of credits, we've got The Boatjacking of Supership '79,
Dial M for Murderousness, Here Comes the Coast Guard, They Came to Burgle Carnegie Hall,
and Gladys the Groovy Mule.
Troy, voiced by big-voiced Saturday Night Live cast member Phil Hartman, got a lot of
hosting work in the Simpsons universe as he also introduced hotel information videos, telethons,
and TV specials, while listing his corresponding past credits. His work in educational films is
particularly hilarious, with such titles as Earwigs, Ew!, Lead Paint: Delicious but Deadly,
and Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun. The running gag comes full circle when
the Simpson family actually meets Troy McClure and mentions the films they remember him from.
Homer Simpson is a man of simple pleasures, but all the beer, donuts,
and bad TV are offset by a strange fixation on goals he never has the drive to achieve.
"Marge, you're standing in the way of my boyhood dream of managing a beautiful country singer."
The result? Homer has earnestly stated several times that a given aspiration is his "boyhood"
or "lifelong dream." Among those goals, there's his desire to manage a country music singer,
to be a monorail conductor, own the Dallas Cowboys,
be an inventor like Thomas Edison, live in the woods, and get rid of Bart.
Whenever Homer brings up another steadfast dream, Marge almost always points out that
he recently fulfilled his "dream," like eating the world's biggest hoagie, running out on the
field during a baseball game, or appearing on the televised talent contest The Gong Show,
playing a huge harmonica with Barney, while both were inside of a giant pair of overalls.
In recent seasons, Herman Hermann, proprietor of Herman's Military Antiques, hasn't appeared all
that often on The Simpsons. In the early days of The Simpsons, however, Herman was a predominant
side character, a Springfield townie on par with the likes of Kent Brockman or Helen Lovejoy. And
similar to those characters and their handful of defining traits, Herman had his whole thing, too.
Herman knows a lot about military history and strategy, and he's also rather paranoid.
Physically, it's quite noticeable that Herman is completely missing his right arm. Viewers might
presume he lost it in a long-ago combat skirmish, but that's not necessarily the case. Writers made
a dark and ghoulish running joke out of just how Herman became separated from his appendage.
In the 1990 episode "Bart the General," Herman claims that he stuck it out of the window of
a moving bus, and a passing truck tore it off. Years later, in the episode "To Cur with Love,"
it's shown that Herman lost it when trying to hail a ride,
and it was ripped off by Chief Wiggum driving an animal control vehicle.
As it was in real life, there was a hotline for everything on The Simpsons in the '90s.
And just like in the real world, the hotlines in the series would have such
high call volumes that they'd put callers on hold and make them wait for a while,
allowing the time to pass with some soft rock "hold music."
The Simpsons mocked this phenomenon by making the wait music as savagely funny
and on the nose as possible. For example, when Homer feels disconnected from Bart,
he calls the National Fatherhood Institute for help, and while on hold, they play Harry Chapin's
gut-wrenching absentee dad song "Cat's in the Cradle." In another episode, when Marge leaves
baby Maggie in Homer's care, she runs away, and so Homer phones a missing child hotline,
and quickly tears up when the hold music is Player's "Baby Come Back."
Characters on The Simpsons coin a lot of words, and one of the best is
"retirony," a clever construction from the usually less-than-sharp Chief Wiggum
that can be used to identify an especially durable running joke from The Simpsons itself.
It's a combination of "retire" and "irony," and Wiggum tells a financial planner in the
2000 episode "Homer vs. Dignity" that he doesn't have to plan for the future because
"retirony" will ensure he's shot and killed three days before he leaves the police force.
"What if you don't get shot?"
"What a terrible thing to say."
The Simpsons' first use of the retirony concept is a direct jab at action movie cliches. In a 1991
episode, Homer watches a McBain movie, in which the title character's just-about-retired partner
is brutally shot by a hitman, all while the poor guy is holding a photo of his new boat,
the Live-4-Ever. Retirony was subsequently taken to absurd places. Homer smashes a news
camera hidden in a hat, which had one day left until retirement. While searching for Homer,
a police dog one day away from retirement smells the man's underpants and runs away.
And then, Marge accidentally frees a group of prison inmates,
who Chief Wiggum notes were, quote, "one day away from being completely rehabilitated."
The triangular flags known as pennants seem like an old-fashioned form of showing fandom,
since Mr. Burns was seen holding a "Beat Harvard" pennant after attending a game in the 1996 episode
"Burns, Baby Burns." But the pennant gag is also a reliable staple for Homer Simpson.
For years, Homer seemed to always have at the ready a professionally made pennant for every
occasion, no matter how minor, inappropriate, or private the experience. He had an XFL pennant to
watch the ill-fated football league's launch at home on his couch, one reading "Mid-Season"
to greet the arrival of replacement television shows, a "Girth" one to complement his "Fat Pride"
T-shirt," and even one reading "Justice" that he held aloft from the sitting area of a courtroom.
Initially conceived as a guy for Homer Simpson to play against,
Lenny Leonard was both a work friend and drinking buddy to the main character of The Simpsons,
a fellow mid-level employee of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and
a frequent customer of Moe's Tavern. And over the decades that The Simpsons has been on TV,
Lenny's character and backstory has grown deeper. For example, viewers learned that he has serious
eye-health issues and very bad luck relating to those eye-health issues.
This all gave Lenny one of The Simpsons' grossest and funniest running gags. Some unknown injury
left Lenny with a fragile peeper, and yet it's frequently attacked by the one, ultra-specific
thing his doctor has said to keep out of there. Homer throws a dish of pudding at Lenny, but he's
"not supposed to get pudding" in that eye. He's wrestled to the ground on top of a jigsaw puzzle,
even though he's "not supposed to get jigs" in his eye. Other times, Lenny and his poor
eye are just in the wrong place at the wrong time, like when he takes off his eye patch for
the allotted five minutes a day and fish guts get inside of it, or then there's the time that
Homer pranks him with the old snakes-in-the-can bit, sending a spring right into his cornea.
The Springfield Nuclear Power Plant is a big place, and it's one of the town's biggest
employers. It's absolutely logical that the aloof, cynical, and cruel man who owns and
runs the place - C. Montgomery Burns - wouldn't be on a first-name basis with all of his underlings,
but it's hard to believe that he wouldn't remember Homer Simpson from one day to the next. After all,
the safety inspector from Sector 7-G has worked at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant for many
years, and they've often interacted off the clock, even in ways bordering on intimacy or friendship.
For example, Homer and Burns were on the same bowling team,
Homer acted as Burns' romantic wingman, and Homer once served as
Burns' "prank monkey." This is to say nothing of his attempts to woo Marge,
steal away Grampa Simpson's girlfriend, or his enduring rivalry with Grampa Simpson himself.
That's why the running gag of Mr. Burns completely forgetting Homer Simpson is
so funny. The character is so mean and self-serving that he can't even find a
few brain cells to remember a man with whom he's shared multiple experiences.
Whenever Homer comes up in conversation, Mr. Burns has to ask Smithers who he is,
and this disregard is even held up as Homer's motive for trying to kill Mr. Burns.
Springfield's favorite bartender, Moe Szyslak of Moe's Tavern, is a deeply unpleasant guy,
and Homer Simpson is one of his few friends. Moe has spent a lot of time around Homer's family
and has a particular fondness for the Simpson children, and yet he never seems to recognize
Bart Simpson's distinctive voice during one of his numerous prank phone calls to Moe's
place of business. That only makes the running joke of Bart calling up the bar even funnier,
with the Simpson boy asking to speak with a patron whose name is an obvious and slightly risqué pun,
and Moe slowly realizing he's been made the fool and flying into a rage.
"Is Oliver there?"
"Who?" "Oliver...Klozoff."
Bart isn't much of a student, but he really puts in the effort when coming up with fake names for
his crank calls. Among the more memorable, there's Al Coholic, Lee Keybum, Amanda Hugginkiss, and Bea
O'Problem. The joke really sails when Moe reacts perfectly, asking the whole bar if the person with
that name is there, only to completely lose it when he realizes he said he has a "B.O. Problem."
Springfield isn't all that big a place, and Homer Simpson does a lot of dumb things.
That creates the unique situation in which he winds up featured on the Channel 6 news,
with Kent Brockman reporting on his latest bone-headed or accidental shenanigans.
In providing the audience with background info on the subject of the story,
Kent will pull up a "file photo" the station already has on hand of Homer Simpson.
It changes with the episode, and it can only hilariously hint at just what stupid
activity Homer was engaged in when the photo was snapped. There's at least a whole season's
worth of Simpsons episodes that could tell the stories behind these extraordinarily damning
and embarrassing pictures, such as an angry, pants-less Homer shaking his fist at a zoo ape,
Homer with his tongue stuck to a pole, and Homer apparently trying to set some kind
of world record with more than a hundred cigarettes stuffed into his gaping mouth.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus,
even more Looper videos about your favorite shows are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.