While new episodes of The Simpsons have recently begun editing in topical jokes immediately before the show's broadcast, this trend is a tacky, unfunny, and ill-considered addition that season 34 should discontinue. The Simpsons is not South Park. While both shows have their defenders and detractors (and the latter was undoubtedly influenced by the former), South Park’s crude, R-rated political satire is not the same as the warmer, more family-friendly sitcom tone of The Simpsons.
While this might seem obvious to many viewers of both shows, recent episodes of The Simpsons make it clear that the series isn’t always aware of the stylistic gap between Springfield and South Park. In a transparent attempt to gain some of South Park’s viral meme popularity, The Simpsons season 33 featured numerous jokes that were clearly added to episodes at the last second in an attempt to make the show feel more timely and topical. Not only were these jokes not particularly strong, but The Simpsons gags also served the ironic function of making their outings feel instantly dated.
The Timeliness of The Simpsons
Throughout the show’s 33-year history, The Simpsons has always had a tricky relationship with timeliness. On the one hand, The Simpsons is a social satire that mocks trends in culture and politics, meaning The Simpsons must be relatively up-to-the-minute to avoid seeming out of touch. However, the show’s attempts to address short-lived fads like Pokemon Go or memes like Baby Shark multiple years after their popularity peaked is proof that The Simpsons has struggled to feel relevant and can often come across as desperate when the series attempts to shoehorn in contemporary references (hence the less timely, more family-focused stories of Bob’s Burgers). As a traditionally animated sitcom, a Simpsons episode takes eight months to produce. As such, The Simpsons is not a vehicle for quick-response satire in the vein of, for example, South Park or Saturday Night Live, but the show’s need to remain relevant results in the creators still jamming in topical gags regardless.
The Simpsons Can Pull Off Topical Jokes
While recent seasons have not boasted much evidence of this, The Simpsons has historically excelled at making topical jokes when the show applied a perennially popular take to real-life events. Take, for example, their depiction of 1996’s presidential candidates Bob Dole and Bill Clinton as two of the same power-hungry alien race in a Treehouse of Horror Halloween special. Although the candidates are hardly iconic figures of US politics (particularly the forgettable Dole), the conceit of Democratic and Republican candidates both being unfeeling, uncaring aliens is a funny, irreverent, and (unfortunately) still-relevant gag that works despite the timelines of the plot. The Simpsons has even been able to pull off quick-response gags, as Bart’s brutal reder to George H W Bush’s “Waltons vs Simpsons” comments famously proved.
When George HW Bush claimed that American families ought to be more “like The Waltons” and less like The Simpsons, the show wasted no time replying to the sitting president. In the cold open of season 3’s premiere “Stark Raving Dad,” Bart Simpson replied to the comment, quipping that the Simpsons were just like the Waltons, in that they too hoped for an end to the Depression. Long before relied on celebrity cameos, this gag proved that the show could comment on contemporary events without cramming in awkward lines that betrayed the tone of The Simpsons—a balance that season 33’s topical jokes failed to find.
Why The Simpsons Last-Minute Jokes Don’t Work
The problem with the last-minute additions thrown into recent episodes of The Simpsons is not simply that these jokes are added too late. After all, Bart’s brutal comeback was added more days before the episode aired. Instead, the problem is that these supposed jokes are either blatant marketing ploys (like Homer reminding viewers that Avatar: Way of the Water exists the day before its long-awaited trailer dropped) or tacky, tasteless references to real-life events (like Homer noticing "a lot of Russian generals” on a list of evil people days after the real-life invasion of Ukraine). The latter joke, which appeared in a messy, disted Simpsons episode supposedly satirizing cancel culture, is a testament to the issues with last-second additions to a show that is typically written months in advance.
Homer’s opinions on the Ukraine/Russia conflict aren’t the sort of subject that usually make it into most episodes of The Simpsons. Homer has never been depicted as a particularly politically aware citizen, and the thought that he would recognize the names of numerous Russian military officials is wildly out-of-character. That said, Homer has done goofier things in service of a gag, but the issues with this joke run deeper. Is the joke intended to clarify that Homer Simpson doesn’t Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Ukraine? Is it intended to remind viewers that a violent war is taking place across the globe? Or is The Simpsons gag, unlike South Park’s surprisingly sharp Ukraine/Russia satire, simply intended to remind viewers that the show is being released in 2022? The final option appears to be the most likely impetus driving gags like this one, which explains why the joke falls flat. These topical gags of The Simpsons season 33 don’t fail because they were added at the last minute, but rather because they are weak jokes that would never usually make it to the screen. As a result, The Simpsons season 34 needs to drop this trend before timely jokes added at the last minute end up ironically dating the show even more than its normal pop culture references.