Anniversary - Zoe Williams ponders the deeper meanings and significance of The Simpsons

Last Christmas, my mother called to let me know that, as she planned to under-resource my present both fiscally and time-wise, I might as well tell her exactly what I wanted. I said I wanted a very simple, stylish corkscrew. I didn't necessarily rule out its being plastic. She gave me a piece of Simpsons merchandise. Leaving her motives aside, let me describe it: it is in the shape of Homer, only he has a corkscrew shaft where his legs should be. It stands about nine inches off the ground, and is roughly as heavy as the bottle of wine. It never, ever enters a bottle straight. In other words, if I had launched a nationwide competition to find the least stylish, least simple corkscrew in the country, my mother's gift would have won it.

Now, The Simpsons being what it is, there is no way this unwieldy, poorly designed instrument is an accident; most likely, there is a message here about wine appreciation being a function of atavistic competition. The wonky point of entry is a means of bathetically undercutting this self-assertion, while the unavoidable largeness of Homer is a constant reminder that beer (his tipple) is the more honest and likeable drink. You think maybe I'm reading too much into this? Then I refer you to The Simpsons and Philosophy: the d'oh! of Homer, a work by genuine academics, who have jobs and everything.

The Simpsons began in 1987, was the longest-running animated series by 1997, and, now that Fox has renewed it up to 2005, will soon become the longest- running television comedy series ever. Over here, Sky is about to screen its 300th episode. The Simpsons is, in other words, cast-iron proof that whatever people tell us about the mainstream palate, and how it really wants game-show pap and jokes about women on diets, is wrong - in fact, even at our lowest common denominator, we are extremely sophisticated. There is no binary opposition between children and adults; we can all enjoy the same things on different levels (apart from sex and olives). There is no dumbing down, no inexorable slide towards inchoate grunting. All this we can extrapolate from The Simpsons - not even the whole show, just the punishment lines that Bart writes on a blackboard at the start of each episode stand as proof of its quality ("I will not eat things for money"; "I am not deliciously saucy"; "I will not hide behind the Fifth Amendment"; "I will not torment the emotionally frail" - you'll have to stop me: I could quite literally fill the magazine). No wonder people take it so seriously.

A lot of the episodes just take your classic comic dynamic (thick man/clever man) and muck about with it. Homer is the thick man ("Dear Lord, thank You for this microwave bounty, even though we don't deserve it. I mean . . . our kids are uncontrollable hellions! Pardon my French . . . but they act like savages! Did You see them at the picnic? Oh, of course You did . . . You're everywhere, You're omnivorous. O Lord! Why did You spite me with this family?"). The clever man is whoever happens to be standing next to him. Beyond this trope, there is all kinds of intellectual and political texture, which is how essays such as "Lisa and American Anti-Intellectualism" and "Does Nietzsche justify Bart's Behaviour?" came about. This does not necessarily mean it's loaded with intellectual potential (there is a general tendency to overanalyse American telly; it's because Philip Roth is too hard), but The Simpsons does seem to have a strange kind of roving, more-anarchic-than-leftist agenda that invests it with meaning. George Bush Sr took it seriously enough sincerely to hope, in an address to the nation, for American families to be more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons. (An extraordinary wish. First, if Senior Bush was against Homer et al on the basis that the parents are alcoholics and the children anti-authoritarian, then what unit ever approximated this model so closely as Junior Bush, then a wino, and his naughty twins? Second, who'd want to be the Waltons? They talk as if they're retarded.)

Crucially, like a (poncey, overpriced) wine, it gets better with age. While other shows drop off at about series five, The Simpsons has got so funny now, that you're laughing even before you've read Bart's lines. This is fortunate, given the exchange between Homer and Bart, on the occasion of the final episode of The Cosby Show:

Bart: Hey, Dad, how come they're taking The Cosby Show off the air?

Homer: Because Mr Cosby wanted to stop before the quality suffered.

Bart: Quality, schmality! If I had a TV show, I'd run that sucker into the ground!

Homer: Amen, boy. Amen.

The 300th-episode celebrations of The Simpsons run over Easter weekend (18-20 April) on Sky1

Zoe Williams is a columnist for the Guardian

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