Who’s the Daddy?

Homer J. Simpson: America’s latest, greatest Everyman. “Three centuries from now, English professors are going to be regarding Homer Simpson as one of the greatest creations in human storytelling” — so decrees Robert Thompson, the director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University and past president of the International Popular Culture Association. Now we’re getting somewhere. But enough of your borax, Poindexter.

Homer is best known as a doughnut-munching, beer-swilling, TV-ogling slob whose most famous utterance — added to the Oxford English Dictionary in June 2001 — is an “annoyed grunt” that goes like this: “D’oh!” His simple-mindedness, his stupidity, his sometimes absolute subservience to his basest desires — these have been consistent hallmarks of his character since the first crudely drawn vignettes of The Simpsons on The Tracey Ullman Show, and they remain an enormous part of his appeal. But how did this indifferent, even callous, husband, this big dumb oaf, become the most beloved character on the show? How did Homer come to embody so fully The Meaning of America?

It’s worth emphasising right off the top that the United States is not as singular and simple a place as it is sometimes portrayed. While it’s not exclusively the moral City on the Hill of its Puritan founders or of their latter-day revivalists (your Reagans and G. W. Bushes, your Falwells and Ashcrofts), neither is it the onedimensional, debased, decayed, dumbed-down wasteland depicted by some of its critics.

Did the United States of the Simpson age bring the world Crystal Pepsi and the luxury sport-utility vehicle? Well, yes. But it also whipped up the internet. Temptation Island? Again yes. But also the sublime Sopranos and the existential hilarity of Seinfeld.

This is all critical to keep in mind when you are thinking about Homer, because he is the most American of Simpsons, with all the crassness, confusion, complexity and contradiction that this implies. He is loud, brash and boorish, quick to anger and even quicker to act, as sure of himself as he is certain that nothing’s really his fault, but endlessly fascinating and ultimately well-meaning and often even lovable.

The great failing of previous American TV Everydads was their flatness, their relentless one-dimensionality. Ralph Kramden (The Honeymooners) was a grouchy working-class slob, as was his progeny Fred Flintstone; Archie Bunker was a cranky bigot; bumbling saint Cliff Huxtable (The Cosby Show) and bleeding-heart liberal Stephen Keaton of Family Ties were saccharine family über-men.

To get a full picture of Homer’s brand of oafishness, you have to toss in a healthy dose of another archetype, this one from the ensemble comedies of American cinema: the anarchic ringleader. The zenith (and possibly also the origin) of this species is Bluto Blutarsky, the hyper-charged, incessantly soused perpetual undergrad who orchestrates the mayhem (and steals the show) in National Lampoon’s Animal House. He is almost pure id, the unruly, inventive yin to the responsible, moralising yang of the sober patriarchs of American television. Put the two together in a large canvas sack and watch them churn themselves into a red-white-and-blue froth, a raging, contradictory mass of genius and stupidity, rebellion and conformity, family-valuing responsibility and utter chaos. This is something far closer to the true American character.

This is Homer Simpson.

Here is a man who replies to the question “Would you rather have beer, or complete and utter contentment?” with the simple query “What kind of beer?” Here, too, is a man who stays up an entire night to work his way methodically through 64 slices of American cheese. A man who knowingly scoffs down expired ham and month-old rotting hoagies, and who installs a children’s lightbulb oven in his car for muffins on the go. A man for whom the notion of being a “Renaissance man” means eating eight different kinds of meat in an afternoon.

If “D’oh!” is Homer’s claim to ageless, OED-level fame, the runner-up might well be “Mmmm . . . Mmmm . . . doughnuts. Mmmm . . . beer. Mmmm . . . crumbled-up cookie things.” In one noteworthy instance, Homer eagerly devours pepper spray (”Mmmm . . . incapacitating”). Homer’s appetite is as deep as it is wide.. The Devil himself once tried to stuff Homer so full of doughnuts that he ‘d cry for mercy. This took place in Hell’s “Ironic Punishments Division” after Homer sold his eternal soul for a single doughnut. He puffed up like a beachball but kept calling for more, exhausting the resolve of the demon in charge of the punishment. There is simply no limit to Homer’s appetite, nor is there any shame — or, at least, any reflection — in his attempts to satisfy it.

Augmenting Homer’s reputation for brain-dead oafitude is his abiding love for the television set, his many years spent in a blissful staring match with its unblinking eye. When Marge suggests that Bart stop watching TV and get some exercise, Homer replies: “Marge, TV gives so much and asks so little. It’s a boy’s best friend.” In another episode, Marge gets a job at the nuclear plant, and Homer considers pursuing one of his constantly changing lifelong dreams: living in the woods and keeping a journal of his thoughts, à la Thoreau. March 15. “I wish I brought a TV. Oh, God, how I miss TV!” goes the first imagined entry, as Homer envisions himself sitting ruefully beneath a tree in a bucolic glade. Even when the idiot box turns on him — in Homer Badman, when a sleazy tabloid show trumps up a sexual harassment allegation against him — Homer’s love abides. After the scandal has been resolved, the episode closes with Homer wrapping his TV in a warm embrace, cooing: “Let’s never fight again.”

What really makes Homer happy, though, is combining his passions. His football-watching regimen is an especially stunning display of the American Everyman at leisure: flanked on his couch by bags of Salt Doodles, chips and pork rinds, he shovels in the snacks with both hands, dunking into two separate bowls of dip, with cans of ice-cold Duff beer to wash it all down.

The extent to which Homer is a (happy) slave to his various appetites is perhaps most evident in the opening sequence of the episode Homer the Heretic. The episode begins with Homer dreaming of his prenatal self enjoying “a beautiful day in the womb”. Awakening to a freezing cold Sunday morning, Homer decides to skip church, precipitating what he later pronounces the greatest day of his life. Homer’s perfect day: he sleeps in; urinates with the door open; takes a warm shower; cranks his thermostat to 100F, making it possible for him to dance around the house in his underwear to the novelty hit Short Shorts by the Royal Teens; gorges himself on a platter of his patented Space-Age Out-of-This-World Moon Waffles (main ingredients: butter, caramel, liquid smoke); wins a radio trivia contest; watches a Three Stooges movie; watches a public-affairs programme just long enough for it to be interrupted by a football game; eats a bag of chips watching the game; and finds a penny on the floor.

This heavenly experience inspires Homer to start his own religion of one. For Homer, consumption is a kind of worship; he feels closest to God — or, if you prefer, to transcendence — when he is ingesting, watching, indulging basic whims. “He follows his passions 100 per cent,” Matt Groening once said. “It gets him into a lot of trouble but there’s a part of us that wishes we had the guts to be like Homer and really savour that doughnut.”

If Homer’s doughnut is understood as symbolic — a stand-in for any product, any desire, any random hunger demanding to be sated — then in fact there are quite a lot of us with the guts to be like Homer. This is an age of super-sized fast-food feasts and gargantuan SUVs. The average size of the American home grew by 17 per cent between 1987 and 1999 alone, and the rate of credit-card debt grew even faster.

There sometimes appears to be little to Homer but id. His unwavering stupidity, for example — a core character trait almost as prominent as his appetite for doughnuts and Duff — actively repels the potential wisdom contained in the many and varied experiences of his rich life. Mere moments after being framed and then cleared of sexual-harassment charges in Homer Badman Homer finds himself believing the worst about Groundskeeper Willie, as a result of sensationalistic footage and wild accusations by the very same show.

“Hasn’t your experience taught you that you can’t believe everything you hear?” Marge asks.

“Marge, my friend, I haven’t learnt a thing,” Homer replies contentedly.

Edited extract from Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson (Ebury Press, £12.99; offer £10.39)

Seriously funny . . .

It is about the only thing I have done that any of my kids have considered worthy of comment

Tony Blair, after recording his appearance on the show

We need a nation closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons

George Bush Sr

It is one of the most subtle pieces of propaganda in the cause of sense, humility and virtue

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, on the show

Homer is a very good Western cultural icon for fathers

Charlie Lewis, professor of family and development psychology at Lancaster University

Who’s appeared?

Tony Blair

Sir Ian McKellen

J. K. Rowling

Michael Moore

Simon Cowell

Dustin Hoffman

Kelsey Grammer

Meryl Streep

Elton John

Three former Beatles (the late (George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr)

Douglas Coupland: We can’t live without them

A few times in my life I’ve met people whom I call pop-cultural blanks. They look just like you and me, except their parents were missionaries or hippies and they spent that formative and most important part of their lives — years when they ought to have been undergoing thousands of hours of unmonitored TV viewing — doing something else instead, like whittling or staring at clouds or exercising. (Insert a brisk shudder here.) I mention this because the common trait these people share is that if they could have added one pop-culture event to their formative years, they wish they could have watched The Simpsons. Always. To paraphrase their common snivelling: “Who the hell is Troy McClure?”

It’s hard for me to imagine life without The Simpsons — it would be, if nothing else, a drab place indeed. Imagine a life without . . .