We loved it because of its highly distinctive upbeat nihilism, and because of the sheer density of perfectly-delivered jokes that made up the true substance of every episode. Those of us who grew up loving Golden Age Simpsons didn’t love it because of the characters.
During its Golden Age, The Simpsons was the greatest absurdist comedy ever made. There’s a name for this particular aesthetic: absurdism. Being funny was the show’s supreme value. At its peak, The Simpsons exhibited a kind of sunny, nerdish nihilism: it would sacrifice anything (character consistency, narrative logic, continuity) in order to be funny. I was buying pornography,” “Use a pen, Sideshow Bob”), and why we have a harder time reconstructing the plot of any given episode.
This is why we all remember specific lines, and the specific inflections with which they are delivered (“I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!”, “It’s a pornography store. The point of Golden Age Simpsons, in other words, was to make you laugh. Australia,” which begins with Bart & Lisa flushing bathroom products down the toilet and ends with the family being airlifted from the roof of the Australian embassy) existed not to bring about emotional catharsis but to facilitate the telling of jokes. The precision-engineered plots that defined the best Golden Age episodes (e.g. In fact, during the Golden Age, the characters were often retro-engineered backward from jokes, or they were changed entirely simply in order to facilitate a gag (as when Bart says, “I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda”). They were caricatures: collections of amusing traits. The denizens of Springfield – very much including the Simpson family – were never meant to be characters in any traditional dramatic sense. I’d like to propose that during its Golden Age, The Simpsons wasn’t really about character or plot.
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