Dead Homer Society

“Barnacle Bill’s home pregnancy test?  Homer, shouldn’t we have gone with a better known brand?” – Homer Simpson
“But, Marge, this one came with a free corncob pipe.” – Homer Simpson
“Okay, let’s see, ‘Ahoy, maties, if the water turns blue, a baby for you.  If purple ye see, no baby thar be’.” – Marge Simpson
“Well, what color is it, blue or purple?” – Homer Simpson
“Pink.” – Marge Simpson
“D’oh!” – Homer Simpson
“Hmm, ‘If ye test should fail, to a doctor set sail’.” – Marge Simpson

[Note: Crazy noises for “Eight Misbehavin” and “Take My Wife, Sleaze” will be along later this week.]

Babies and where they come from have long been staples of fiction generally and comedy specifically.  Between all the wrenching social changes that come with a kid, the biological absurdities and humiliations that come with making and birthing one, and all manner of other assorted goofiness (everything from buying children’s products to changing diapers), procreation is a rich source of material.  Like their real life counterparts, however, new fictional children must be handled with care. 

The biggest danger a “new baby” episode poses to a fictional universe, especially a television show, is the fact that it is a change in the fabric of the entire story that is both profound and permanent.  There is a huge gulf between the kind of plotlines you can do with a character who is actively caring for an infant and a character who is not, and adding a baby changes characters from one type to the other instantly.  Consider, if you will, the relative cases of Apu and Homer when each of them became a father for the first time. 

Superficially, there isn’t much beyond new fatherhood that’s similar.  Homer gets Marge pregnant accidentally and is woefully underprepared (legally, financially, socially) to be responsible for anyone.  Guys who work menial jobs at mini-golf places and share living accommodations with the likes of Barney Gumble are not what you’d call well prepped daddy material.  Apu, on the other hand, is married, reasonably prosperous, and deliberately knocked up his wife so they could start a long planned family together.  But well planned, relatively uneventful births don’t make for very compelling stories, so Apu gets the completely insane curveball of surprise octuplets. 

Ugh, from parody to reality in less than three seasons.

As a comedy or story premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with big, multiple births.  There have been media circuses around unusually large multiple births for a long time, and if you’ve ever seen someone go through a multi-kid pregnancy, you know that while it isn’t fun, it could be funny if handled in the right way.  But Zombie Simpsons handles the octuplets so poorly that they’re introduced as a shocking cliffhanger to get people to stick around after the commercial. 

Not only does that not make any sense whatsoever, but that’s only the beginning of the comedy destroying zaniness.  After that, the episode piles one bizarre plot shocker on top of another.  First Apu and Manjula get robbed and abandoned by everyone who was supporting them, then they put their kids in a zoo, then the zoo makes them part of a crushingly boring circus act that is somehow popular and profitable, and finally they have to break their kids out of the zoo in a daring nighttime raid.  By the time all these capers wrap up, the audience has practically forgotten how this all got started in the first place and any genuine humor from such a situation has long since fled the scene. 

By contrast, when Homer finds out Marge is pregnant, they go through a much saner and more relatable story, which means that they can exploit all of the recognizable follies for comedy.  The humor is by turns cultural (the “So You’ve Ruined Your Life” pamphlet), crude (“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear he was trying to moon us”), silly (“This castle is impregnable”), social (“The tenth wedding’s on the house”), and everything in between, and it’s all based around an event (two twenty-somethings who didn’t use a condom) that has happened to countless people before. 

Even if we overlook the oddity of the octuplets, “Eight Misbehavin” does none of that.  It’s about a bafflingly stupid and pointlessly weird conspiracy run out of a zoo.  The octuplets themselves are never treated as anything more than props, starting with their hacktacular entrance in Dr. Hibbert’s pockets and ending with them sitting quietly in the audience at the same fucked up zoo show that they used to headline. 

Even in the future the only thing they get to do is be wacky together.

All that would be bad enough, except that where The Simpsons cleverly set all three of its “new baby” episodes in the past, Zombie Simpsons dropped the octuplets into a bizarro, present day situation that it’s been stuck with ever since.  The octuplets show up from time to time on the show, but for the most part they exist as background filler (a similar thing happened to that baby Selma adopted).  And since the show is now locked into this new situation, Apu and Manjula have been relegated to one-note sideshow characters.  Some variation on “eight babies are a handful” is pretty much the only joke either of them has been allowed since. 

So not only did Zombie Simpsons do a “new baby” episode so needlessly exaggerated and poorly thought out that it doesn’t make any sense from scene-to-scene, but they permanently altered two of their own characters (one of whom had only been around for two seasons and was hardly in need of a reboot) for the worse by shackling them to an amorphous blob of kids that’s only really good for one kind of joke.  Apu as a character didn’t change, it’s just that now he’s a harried parent if the octuplets happen to be in a scene (he does more actual parenting in that brief scene with his nephew in “Homer the Heretic” than he does in this entire episode), and regular old Apu when they aren’t. 

Life and all its complexities are funny, and while you can exaggerate some of them, if you exaggerate everything you end up with something that’s so simplistic and weird that it’s actually boring.  Zombie Simpsons doesn’t seem to mind, but The Simpsons never would’ve stood for it.