It's surprisingly hard to pin down the politics of America's favourite family
Whose Side Is Bart Simpson On? Radio 4
After 400 shows the details are fuzzy in my mind, but the episode that made me realise The Simpsons had a licence to do almost anything was the one where the Devil held a cabinet meeting and, among the trusty lieutenants around the table, there appeared, unmistakably, Rupert Murdoch. In his cool but excellent dissection of the politics of The Simpsons (30 June, 10.30am), the comedian Phill Jupitus spent some time on the paradox of how a capitalist media mogul, owner of a right-wing American news channel, could own a show as consistently liberal in tone as The Simpsons. After all, as the Maryland philosophy don Dale Snow noted in the documentary, what is Mr Burns if not a reductio ad absurdum of capitalism? "If you really lived for money, if you were solely motivated by greed," she said, "you would be alienated, you would be lonely, you would be a . . . shell of a human being."
The programme solved the puzzle quickly. Back in 1989, the still young Fox network was in desperate need of younger and classier viewers. Willing to try anything, it gave a counterculture newspaper cartoonist called Matt Groening his head at prime time. His yellow-faced take on the American family became the most profitable cartoon ever and helped save Fox in the US (as it helped save Sky here). No wonder that Murdoch voiced his own cameo on the show in the autumn of 2004, happily introducing himself as a "billionaire tyrant".
As America's and Fox's political conscience, the Simpsons writers are their own worst enemies. They would sell any political soulmate down the river for a belly laugh. Jupitus introduced us to one of their specialities, the "take-back gag". A Simpsons character cracks a joke in favour, say, of environmentalism, only for another to respond with an attack on environmentalists. This is not balance or fairness; it's show business. The cruellest and funniest barb the show ever aimed at an American president was against not Bush père or fils, but Bill Clinton, whom it accused of sleeping with pigs. (Clinton later tersely refused an invitation to appear.) Tim Long, the one Simpsons writer Jupitus managed to talk to, sat uncomfortably on the fence of the show's biases. Most of his colleagues, he admitted, were "anarchists who drive Lexuses".
Comedians - and journalists, for that matter - tend to approach The Simpsons on their knees. Though there was no doubting Jupitus's affection for it, it was to his credit that he remained erect enough to take a few pops. Dale Snow had done some counting and worked out that the gender balance on the programme, both in voice parts and crowd scenes, was four to one in favour of men. The female characters tended to be relatives of the leading males or, if professionals, unattractive, spinster chain-smokers.
This insight reminded me of an interview the programme's chief writer, Ian Maxtone-Graham, gave the Independent's Charlotte O'Sullivan back in 1998, in which he explained the dearth of female writers on the team by saying that "a lot of the humour's kind of guy humour", and of how his bosses then wrote to the paper disowning him.
Jupitus necessarily tackled the perennial question of whether the programme had gone soft in its old age. Professor Paul Cantor, whose specialism at the University of Virginia is actually Shakespeare, noted that the Simpson family was once much nastier and more dysfunctional than it is now. Politically, too, it seems to have mellowed. Months after the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair was invited to make an anodyne guest appearance. It took another three years and the latest Treehouse of Horror Halloween episode before the show mounted a thought-out satire on Iraq, with Martians invading earth, reducing it to dust, and then lamenting that they had not been "greeted as liberators".
The conflicted politics of The Simpsons (another contributor adapted Trotsky on his opponents - the programme was left in form but right in essence) demonstrated a wider point, true of most satire: if you wish mass audiences to listen to your politics, your best bet is to serve them up as humour. Just don't then expect the public to take you seriously.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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