It is among the greatest moments in television history. Thirty-six glorious seconds, to be exact. And each of those seconds consists of a disgruntled man being hit in the face with a rake.
Fans of “The Simpsons,” which celebrated its 35th anniversary on Dec. 17, hold varied opinions on the animated show’s best moments. But as much as I have loved (and memorized) nearly every delicious quip that renders the spoken words on “The Simpsons” among the best on TV, including “You don’t win friends with salad” and “Me fail English? That’s unpossible,” I inevitably return to that wondrous moment in a 1993 episode, “Cape Feare” (season 5, episode 2).
The sinister Sideshow Bob is eager to kill Bart Simpson but is derailed in his murderous pursuit by a series of rakes that hit him squarely in the face. Where did the rakes come from? No one knows. Who left them there? It doesn’t matter. The scene, complete with a repeated “Whack!” sound effect and Bob’s corresponding snarls (voiced perfectly by Kelsey Grammer) is so breathtakingly gratuitous and unexpected that it has remained a gift to viewers for over three decades.
I began watching “The Simpsons” in 1990, shortly after arriving in America, when the show still aired on Thursday nights. Back then, Fox was pushing the envelope with irreverent sitcoms such as “The Simpsons,” “In Living Color” and the bane of my traditional Iranian mother’s existence, “Married with Children.”
My father knew we were no longer in Iran the first time that he heard a rabbi’s voice on American radio. The 1991 “Simpsons” episode “Like Father, Like Clown” marked the first time I saw a rabbi on television, and though I was a little girl and not a rabbi, I felt strangely seen.
Depictions of rabbis and other Jews, such as those in “Yentl” or “Fiddler on the Roof,” didn’t exactly make the cut in TV program lineups or movie theaters in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. I knew I was in America the moment I saw Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky embrace his long-lost son, Herschel, otherwise known as Krusty the Clown, in that episode.
That same year, Lisa Simpson became enamored with a handsome and dedicated substitute teacher named Mr. Bergstrom, and I realized that for the most part, Springfield was a safe town in which to watch positive depictions of Jews. Having escaped the rabid antisemitism of post-revolutionary Iran, it was a good feeling.
Perhaps those positive depictions explain why, in 2014, the host of a popular show on the Egyptian TV station Al-Tahrir alleged that “The Simpsons” was a front for the Jewish lobby in America, accusing it of exerting nefarious influence by sowing the seeds of the Syrian opposition movement in an episode dating back to 2001.
As a little girl in Iran, I had innately understood that Iranian Jews had made significant contributions to fields such as music, medicine, and building/infrastructure. But in America, I proudly discovered that Jews had the capacity to deeply influence pop culture by infusing it with the kind of rapid-fire humor I had known among my own Jewish family members.
Not yet fluent in English and still struggling to understand the fair-skinned, light-haired community of Jews called Ashkenazim I had been introduced to, I nevertheless sat on our faux Persian rug in our small Los Angeles apartment, stared up at our bulky television set, and happily managed to identify every Jewish name on the list of credits at the beginning and end of each episode of “The Simpsons.”
Mike Reiss? Sounded Jewish. Sam Simon? Had to be a Jew. Josh Weinstein? Please. Conan O’Brien? Not so much. But his name already sounded like he would be funny.
In a recent podcast, David Sacks, an Emmy award-winning former “Simpsons” writer who also happens to be an Orthodox Jew, discussed how he and O’Brien had written together for The Harvard Lampoon as students (O’Brien was staying in Sacks’ apartment when he was first hired to write for “The Simpsons”). Sacks also shared the time he attended a writers’ meeting on Tisha b’Av and was the only one to sit on the floor, per the holiday’s somber restrictions. The head writer, who normally directed his hilariously sharp, acerbic tongue toward any target, simply looked at Sacks on the meeting room floor and asked, “A Jewish thing?”
For those who still do not believe that earlier episodes of “The Simpsons” featured some of the best writing on TV, Sacks recently told me that during seasons five and six the group of writers “would spend approximately 20 minutes on each line of the episode, and that includes writing billboards in the background that would only be readable if you freeze-framed the show.”
Twenty minutes per line. That is amazing: Season five was the best season in the history of “The Simpsons.” It featured such classic episodes as “Cape Feare” (mentioned earlier) and “Deep Space Homer.”
In the late 1990s, on my first day of journalism class at Beverly Hills High School with the legendary Gil Chesterton, who taught a generation of student journalists who wrote for the school’s award-winning newspaper, Highlights, and produced the award-winning student television station, KBEV, he pointed to the back of the classroom and nonchalantly announced, “Nicolas Coppola sat way in the back, right over there.”
At that moment, 15 freshmen, whom Mr. Chesterton called “cub reporters,” squealed simultaneously because we understood that Nic Cage had sat (and mostly slept) in the last chair by the wall. But when Mr. Chesterton shared that Sam Simon “sat over here and drew comic strips for Highlights,” half of the room swooned. That half was us “Simpsons” devotees.
Years later, I learned that past Beverly High students had lined up for their free copy of the weekly “Highlights” newspaper if it featured a comic strip by Sam. In 1989, Simon worked with Matt Groening and James L. Brooks to develop “The Simpsons,” infusing the nascent show with a unique sensibility that won the heart of millions of viewers, including nearly all of the newly-arrived Iranian Jewish child refugees who entered the rigorous (and most importantly, free) Beverly Hills Unified School District in the late 1980s. Sadly, Simon – one of TV’s greatest and more generous minds — passed away in 2015.
For me, “The Simpsons” is the best show in television history … that should have stopped producing new episodes 20 years ago. Somewhere in the mid-2000s, the magic seemed to end. In 2007, “The Simpsons Movie” mostly didn’t disappoint, though I admit I watched it while waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop, like a bowling ball on Homer’s head.
I have always spoken openly about the fact that I have not watched my beloved animated series in many years because newer seasons never managed to capture the multi-layered humor and utter perfection of older ones, and I would humbly share this view with the show’s creators and writers (after offering to kiss their hands, of course). There came a time when, as an undergraduate, my peers and I no longer shared the brilliant one-liners that once filled “The Simpsons” from beginning to end, mostly because they no longer existed in newer episodes. A line like “Just because I don’t care doesn’t mean I don’t understand” only comes along once in a generation.
Perhaps I’ll be accused of jumping ship, but I remain undeterred in the belief that if you are a true “Simpsons” fan, the kind who has only one association with monorails or still remembers “The Cletus Song,” you stopped watching a long time ago. If you truly love something, you will let it go, until the earlier seasons are rerun in syndication.
I have been known to thank God for the gift of this inimitable show, and for having created Matt Groening, Sam Simon, and James L. Brooks. Even without its deliciously satisfying Jewish moments, “The Simpsons” would have constituted, in the words of the Passover Haggadah, a level of “Dayenu” that would have still been enough for us.
Even without its deliciously satisfying Jewish moments, “The Simpsons” would have constituted, in the words of the Passover Haggadah, a level of “Dayenu” that would have still been enough for us.
As Mark I. Pinsky, author of “The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World’s Most Animated Family,” wrote in a 2014 essay in The Forward marking the show’s 25th anniversary, “If the only thing viewers knew about the Jews was what they saw on ‘The Simpsons,’ they — and we — would be well served.”
In a town where even the local news anchor, Kent Brockman, was previously known as Kenny Brockelstein, such innovation and brilliant blooms of comedy always managed to put the “spring” in “Springfield.”
Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on X and Instagram @TabbyRefael.
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