Is this what The Simpsons is now?

Cafe Society
1

So I found the YouTube video of Hank Azaria discussing the Apu flap with Stephen Colbert via a Moviebob link. Unsurprisingly, he came off very well (I say “unsurprisingly” because insensitive, ignorant clods don’t last three decades in television), and even though it probably doesn’t change anything, it’s reassuring to know that are still good people on The Simpsons who haven’t yet left or died. But then I saw another link to a recent episode. Naturally the wording made me suspicious, and I wondered if this venerable cartoon really went to a place I never dreamed it would.

I watched. Yikes.

All right, guests, quick education. Do you know why things like safe spaces, inclusive language, and multiculturalism exist? Because people need them, dammit. And college meets those needs, just like it provides things like financial aid, health care, and career counseling. And you need to know about them if you’re going to function in the real world, because you will be dealing with these people in the real world. I’m dead serious here. If you go through life an unthinking, loud, obnoxious jerk, shouting whatever you want whenever you want and never giving a crap about anyone else, the possible consequences are not sensitivity training or a scolding from some “SJW”, they’re getting barred from everywhere you want to go, getting beaten up, getting thrown into jail, or…worst case scenario…getting a bullet in the brain or slowly starving to death in a filthy alley.

So given that social justice and similar functions of the left wing serve very real, very serious needs, punching down at those needs is going to seriously tick a lot of people off. That’s exactly why right-wing humor… to the extent that it’s anything but a sad oxymoron… not only doesn’t work, few things can doom a show quicker. Remember Son of Zorn, that cartoon/reality hybrid I railed on a while back? Relentless in its mockery of the very existence of leftist ideas. One season, now utterly forgotten. The Critic poked fun at everything from alimony to cultural insensitivity to beauty standards. Stumbled all over the place before quietly dying on a website somewhere.

I know some of you are going to say “South Park”. But that one ripped everything apart (Douche and Turd was probably the quintessential example). From the beginning the cardinal sin wasn’t liberalism, it was giving a crap about anything at all and being anything other than worshipful of the status quo. I noticed that in recent seasons, the show’s switched to a soap opera-esque approach, with politics taking a backseat to the characters’ lives and stories, hinting that Matt and Trey decided that they made their point and now just want to keep this highly lucrative ship running as long as they can. The bottom line is that however many misguided Republicans have latched onto South Park, it wasn’t a homage to rightist thought and never intended to be.

So to anyone who’s actually still watching The Simpsons…has it finally gone to the dark side? Or is it now making fun of everyone and everything, essentially becoming Old South Park Lite (boy, there’s a direction I wouldn’t wish on my most hated show)? Because if this was what really happened, Lisa and Marge’s flippant dismissal of the Apu controversy just went from idiotic PR bungle to dark omen.

Man, where have you gone, Futurama… :frowning:

2

Well, they’ve been led to believe they deserve them. They don’t actually need them.

3

Punching down is ridiculous language. Society shouldn’t have special classes of people where it’s forbidden to satire or joke about. What is surprising is all this angst over a cartoon.

4

Not. At. All.

5

I haven’t watched a full episode of The Simpsons in years, but I just watched the three-minute clip that you linked to. I thought it was … decently funny. Not a match for golden age Simpsons, but I laughed at a couple points.

Your reaction to it, on the other hand, is absurd.

Left-wing campus culture has been in the news a great deal. Sometimes it’s violent, sometimes it disrupts education, sometimes it’s just a joke. In all cases, it’s an obvious target for satire. It would be inexplicable if a show like The Simpsons didn’t make fun of snowflake students and the enabling administrations.

The clip that you linked to shows the elderly, Republican Mr. Burns and left-wingers bouncing off each other and makes fun of both of them. That’s how *The Simpsons * goes, and always has. Yet here you are, clutching your pearls and saying that the show is doing something wrong. Do you expect that left-wing people and ideas will never be satirized? That’s certainly what you’ll get from a great many shows, magazines, comedians, etc… But there’s no logical reason to expect that from The Simpsons, which has always sought to make fun of everything in American culture.

As for your insistence that “safe spaces” all the other crap–hear about the emotional support guinea pigs?–on elite campuses exist because people need them and thus you dare not make fun of any of it, that’s bull crap and everyone knows it. I attended an expensive private school way back in the dark ages: 2000-2004. There was no safe spaces, the term “microaggression” wasn’t in use, there was only a tiny “Office of Institutional Diversity” with just one full-time employee, and no special anything for students of any race or for LGBTQ students or anything like that. The students got along just fine without such things. They weren’t needed then, and they aren’t needed now.

Today I can visit the webpage of the same school, or Yale, or any other expensive private school and see that they’ve spouted an army of new administrators in the past few years. Some of those administrators are specifically assigned to various groups running the diversity scam, while others have other official functions. My college now has three “Deans of the Health and Wellness” devoted to protecting student’s mental health, and top of numerous counselors and a multiple medical offices stacked with psychologists. They barely had any of this while I was there. If it wasn’t necessary in 2004, it’s not necessary now.

For further proof, I can just go to a school that isn’t elite. Ivy Tech Community College of Valparaiso is right down the street from where I live now. It gets by with no safe spaces, no emotional support puppies, no employees or offices specifically devoted to coddling Latinos or transexuals or any other group. If all of that stuff is so necessary, how do thousands of community colleges, tech schools, smaller branch schools, and others get by without them? Face it. Yale is a school created by rich people for the children of rich people. The “safe spaces, inclusive language, and multiculturalism” at Yale and its rivals are actually demonstrations of the fact that the rich kids there expect to be treated better than the rest of the human race.

And as long as that’s true, there’s no reason for The Simpsons to refrain from making fun of it.

6

Now, now–you should realize that 18-21 year-olds are fragile and must be protected from exposure to any idea that they don’t agree with.

7

Oh, also, that episode is from quite a while back, so the explosion of outrage didn’t happen. And Son of Zorn was great and your chacterization of it is weird and from out of left field (pun only partially intended.)

8

Poking fun at the exaggerated positions of others is a key part of humour. The character of Burns and pretty much every character and situation in “The Simpsons” relies upon it. The far left nature of some university politics is ripe for satire, as is the far right nature of Mr. Burns and capitalist pig-dogs just like him. Attacking both positions should be welcomed and encouraged.

And I have to say, considering this relates to the Hank Azaria interview and the kerfuffle about Apu, he is one of the most rounded and sensible characters in the show and I don’t think it matters one jot that the character who voices him is white, I suspect that the animators are not ethnically aligned either so wait for that to be the next storm in a teacup.

9

Speaking of that, there was a recent kerfuffle over Diane on *Bojack Horseman *not having a Vietnamese voice actor.

10

The Simpsons has always punched down. Have you not ever noticed how extensively elderly people get laughed at on it? The issues over Apu are a few drops in the bucket when compared. It’s almost like their writers have phobias of becoming old doddering fools so they need to constantly medicate themselves by poking fun of their hardships for sport. Anyone noticing just now didn’t care then because they didn’t see their ox being gored…with the punch-down machine.

11

If I had to stick my neck out (though I’ve not watched too much recently) I’d say the central point of it is the clumsy, dis-functional, but ultimately loving Simpson family which contains a mixture of ages and genders. Old people get it no worse and no better than the kid…which seems fair enough.

12

This episode was broadcast over a year ago, and apparently it didn’t tick anyone off. In fact, it didn’t cause even the slightest ripple. I would have been surprised if it had.

Even the people who need safe spaces didn’t need to be protected from this mild satire… :slight_smile:

13

…becoming President of these United States?

14

The great thing about universities is how they go out of their way to address diversity by attracting people with a range of opinions on abortion, feminism, affirmative action, homosexuality, and religion.

15

You mean universities don’t go out of their way to encourage people with prejudices? That’s so sad.  :D

16

No kidding.

Likewise, many modern day Republicans.

17

I’m a Lefty Liberal who still watches The Simpsons every week and I remember watching the episode with the college. And I don’t remember being offended or thinking it was overly offensive or out-of-line for The Simpsons. The Simpsons, being a cartoon, has characters and situations that act/exist in an extremely cartoony and exaggerated way. Sometimes you can see yourself in the characters/situation and think “Yeah, that’s me. I can be so silly sometimes!” Maybe not all “safe-space provisions” on college campuses but ridiculous ones are ridiculous. It’s ok to laugh about them.

18

I don’t see how this is mild satire. You can’t put a comment about what a real Yale student said and call it mild satire. They are representing this as a mild exaggeration of what Yale is really like. And it is basically a full on copy of the right wing strawman that gets carted out in real discussions online.

This isn’t the mild ribbing you sometimes see about college students. I’ve seen that plenty of times. This would not be out of place at all on one of those “New Atheist” (meaning proto-alt-right, basically) channels that’s all about how feminism is evil, white people face persecution, gay people being too in your face, and there being only two genders.

This is not at all what I’ve seen of the Simpsons before. The satire I’ve seen is the mocking of media. It’s also very reluctant to really take a point of view beyond the things most people agree with. It may rib on Lisa a bit, but it doesn’t go into full out liberal attack territory.

The final commentary is basically that all this fighting for equality is making the students into robots. We call them human, but they really aren’t. It isn’t that they are showing empathy and going overboard and being stupid because they’re kids still learning.

Seeing this, I now wonder about bringing up the Apu thing. Was it just them being tone deaf? Or are there really writers who think like was presented here, who would think the people for whom Apu was a source of hurt were all snowflakes who only want their safe spaces?

All I can say is that I’ve seen other clips, and that does seem to be a weird outlier. That does not resemble what I’ve seen the Simpsons be about.

19

I don’t agree with them, but is someone who believes in Young Earth Creationism, or that women should (not must) stay at home and raise the kids, or that admissions should not take into account race predjudiced?

20

I don’t see how you can argue that this is extremely cartoony and exaggerated when they include that text saying this is really what a Yale student actually said. That represents this whole thing as a mild exaggeration of reality, not absurdity.

It also just so closely resembles the right wing bubble version of what colleges are like that I find it hard to see as you do. I mean, take out the high numbers and the time frame, and it resembles the bullshit I’ve actually seen bandied about as supposedly real. Making the students into robots that just repeat nonsense is the same insult the right actually uses, and so far from the the truth that it is ridiculous.

It just reads to me like the author is pretty far on the right, and is making a political statement, not a satire on the media or real life. Colleges just aren’t like this.