“Alright, brain, it’s all up to you. If you don’t think of what it is, we’ll lose Marge forever.” – Homer Simpson
“Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding. Eat the pudding.” – Homer’s Brain
“Okay. But then we gotta get to work.” – Homer Simpson
“Hello! I am Llewellyn Sinclair! I have directed three plays in my career and I have had three heart attacks. That’s how much I care: I’m planning for a fourth.” – Llewellyn Sinclair
“Maybe I should’ve taken a nice calligraphy class.” – Marge Simpson
“Oh, forget about it. That Mr. Takahashi’s a lunatic.” – Chief Wiggum
“Quiet!” – Llewellyn Sinclair
“Homer, I found this behind the radiator. I really think you should throw it away.” – Marge Simpson
“Suggestion noted.” – Homer Simpson
“Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper Babysitting Service. – Receptionist
“Hello, this is Mr. . . . Sampson.” – Homer Simpson
“Did your wife just call a second ago?” – Receptionist
“No, I said Sampson not Simpson.” – Homer Simpson
“Thank God! Those Simpsons, what a bunch of savages! Especially that big, ape father.” – Receptionist
Rest in peace, June Foray.
“Well, I’m sure you’d like to be alone with your possessions.” – Milhouse van Houten
“Milhouse, if you stay a little while longer, you can have this blazer. It’s a Bob Mackie original.” – Bart Simpson
“Wow! A Bob Mackie!” – Milhouse van Houten
“Losers! Losers! Kiss my big Springfield behind, Shelbyville! . . . Ha ha! I am invincible! Invincible!” – Homer Simpson
“Kid, I won’t let you down! I swear to you, when you come out of there the first thing you’re gonna see is a man with a good job.” – Homer Simpson
“Yeah, the doctor.” – Patty Bouvier
“We need a fresh angle to get the public interested.” – NASA Administrator
“The public see our astronauts as clean cut, athletic go getters. They hate people like that.” – NASA Scientist
“Sometimes I think you want to fail!” – First Guy From Kabul
“Shut up. Just shut up!” – Second Guy From Kabul
“Before we continue our tour, would you mind hanging my coat up on the wall, please?” – Hank Scorpio
“Um . . . uh, let’s see . . . um . . .” – Homer Simpson
“Relax, Homer! At Globex we don’t believe in walls! Matter of fact, I didn’t even give you my coat!” – Hank Scorpio
Happy birthday, Albert Brooks!
“Crisis has been averted. Everything is super.” – Shelbyville Nuclear Plant Computer
“Thank you, Homer, for saving my plant . . . with that idiotic rhyming! Do you even know what button you pushed!?” – Aristotle Amadopolis
“Sure. Moe.” – Homer Simpson
Happy birthday, Jon Lovitz!
“But she’s better than me at everything that makes me special.” – Lisa Simpson
“Believe me honey, she’s more scared of you than you are of her.” – Marge Simpson
“You’re thinking of bears, Mom.” – Lisa Simpson
“Well, what are you waiting for? Somebody to kiss you goodbye?” – Rex Banner
“Well . . . No, no, I guess not.” – Clancy Wiggum
“Marge, this is Andre.” – Patty Bouvier
“Hello.” – Andre
“I think you two would make a lovely couple.” – Patty Bouvier
“My husband is still alive!” – Marge Simpson
“Oh. Thank God. I hope he pulls through.” – Patty Bouvier
“Not me.” – Andre
I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room right now while my Dad has (long overdue) hip replacement surgery. It’s about as low risk as getting cut open and having the top of your femur cut off comes, so I’m not really worried, but I can’t get the above quote out of my head. Like so many Simpsons jokes, it works in about five different ways: Patty and Selma’s utter loathing of Homer, the complete sleaziness of Andre (down to the visible chest hair and chains), the wild inappropriateness of him being in the waiting room, his blase dirtbag delivery on “Not me”, Patty’s deadpan sarcasm as she hopes Homer pulls through, and I think I’m forgetting a couple.
Now, hospital waiting rooms are grim places. Nobody wants to be here, everyone’s bored, and a lot of people are seriously tense. There’s a kind of quiet decorum to it where any activity that passes the time is acceptable, but having fun in any way is not. And I keep chuckling to myself about Andre, the couple making out in the surgery viewing room, and Dr. Nick smelling gas. When they let us back to see my Dad pre-op, the first thought I had upon walking in the room was “bed goes up, bed goes down”.
Times like this are when I don’t feel the least bit wasteful having dedicated significant chunks of my brain to remembering the show. What other program could de-stress me two decades after the fact? A stray line or joke, that’s easy. The Simpsons has whole scenes and episodes that amuse me wherever I go.
“Now, to show my gratitude, I want you to help yourself to an item of your choice.” – Principal Skinner
“Alright!” – Bart Simpson
“Ooh, now, you be careful with that crossbow.” – Principal Skinner
“I will.” – Bart Simpson
“We now return to Knight Boat, the crime solving boat.” – TV Announcer
“Faster, Knight Boat! We gotta catch those starfish poachers!” – Not David Hasselhoff
“You don’t have to yell, Michael. I’m all around you.” – Knight Boat
“Go forth, Noah! And remember, the key to salvation is-” – God
“You’ve seen the movie, now meet a real life Noah, only this Noah has been accused of killing two of every animal!” – Kent Brockman
“Good Lord, what a dump. It’s not surprising this school was once classified the most dilapidated in all of Missouri. That’s why it was shut down and moved here, brick by brick.” – Superintendent Chalmers
“Ah, the life of a frog. That’s the life for me.” – Bart Simpson
“Bart, how would you like to spend the next three months living in France?” – Marge Simpson
“I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z!” – Troy McClure
This afternoon, Vulture published an oral history of Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!, featuring interviews with Alf Clausen, David S/X Cohen, Chris Ledesma, Bill Oakley, Josh Weinstein, and Mark Kirkland. (Dana Gould too, but, you know, why?) The whole thing is well worth a read, but I thought I’d highlight a few pieces:
Oakley: Our goal when we took over was to copy season three. Season three of The Simpsons — which we didn’t work on by the way — was the best season of any TV show of all time. When we took over, we said, “What was it about season three that made it so good?” We reverse-engineered it and said, “Well, a lot of the stories were pretty grounded, but they took a couple of crazy leaps out into space with like, ‘Homer at the Bat.’” They did seven Homer episodes, three Lisa episodes, a Sideshow Bob, an Itchy and Scratchy, so we did exactly the same thing. Now as far as the Selma episode, there was an episode in season three where she’s going to marry Sideshow Bob.
I’ve heard Oakley and Weinstein talk about their (justified) love for Season 3, but I never knew they followed it that closely.
On one of the most memorable lines:
Cohen: The reason I remember the moment at all is that it got a big reaction in the room from the other writers, much better than I had expected. So into the script in went. To overanalyze it a little, the question is what, if anything, makes the line better than a run-of-the-mill pun on the word “chimpanzee.” The fun of it I think is that you get the joke prematurely during the contrived setup, without even needing to get to the pun part. It’s a slightly weird line in that sense.
I used to use that line as the ringtone for a friend of mine who had a (legit) job giving cocaine to monkeys.
On Homer and Bart’s love of “legitimate the-a-ter”:
Mark Kirkland (director for The Simpsons, 1990–present): It was a script that made me laugh a lot to begin with. The thing that struck me was the satire of those classic movies being made into Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, like The Phantom of the Opera and Sunset Boulevard. I caught both of those in the theater so I knew what we were trying to do based on those.
My favorite lines were the one is when Bart says, “This play has everything!” and Homer goes, “Oh, I love legitimate the-a-ter!” The saying we talk about in art and drawing, but it comes from food preparation: A good salad doesn’t have everything in it, and here they are enjoying it because it does. They don’t know how bad it is! It’s a critical success.
That is such a wonderful Simpsons joke, packing so much meaning into two lines and some (expertly) mispronounced syllables by Castellaneta.
Finally (and as usual I don’t mean to pick on anyone with these), there’s another tacit admission that Zombie Simpsons ain’t The Simpsons:
Ledesma: Fans talk so lovingly about “the golden era” from seasons one to eight, this falls right in there, and I think it’s also part of the golden era of the show’s music as well. This is not to say that the show’s music has declined in any way, but the show is different.
Indeed it is.
Anyway, read the whole thing. It’s pretty long and worth every word. Oakley called it a rare visit from the joke fairy.
charliesweatpants.com
(The crotch really does wear out too fast.)
The Mob Has Spoken