It’s hard to grow old without betraying yourself. Not even the Simpsons escape because they are so used to predictions that they predicted it themselves. In one of his final episodes, Homer announced that he would no longer strangle Bart, a recurring gag for more than thirty seasons.
What happened is reminiscent of “Scratch, Itchy and Marge,” the episode in which the yellow matriarch promotes the cancellation of Bart and Lisa’s favorite show. Their association, Springfieldians United Against Violence, for Understanding and Help, was an offshoot of the group founded by Tipper Gore in the 1980s. The horror suffered by the former president’s wife after hearing the lyrics to Prince’s Purple Rain led to the creation of the “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content” sticker. Tipper’s reaction video to Bad Bunny’s Baticano and his “I give him where he pees, where he poop” is the content I need right now. Instead, Disney brings me Isabel Preysler celebrating Christmas as if there was a day in Isabel Preysler’s life that it wasn’t Christmas. The moral of this chapter was as expected, because after “Scratch and Itch” the Springfieldians chose Michelangelo’s “David” because it is just as difficult to set limits on censorship as it is in the country.
The worrying thing is not that they gave up on the joke, that no gag lasts 34 seasons, nor that the next thing could be replacing Homer’s beer with kombucha or enrolling him in a workshop on new masculinities, but that they had to verbalize it, show us that they are able to deconstruct what is important: it is an animated series, not a workshop for fathers and mothers. “Times have changed,” said Homer, and he’s right, we no longer live in the time of The Simpsons, but in the time of Flanders.
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