The Best Times ‘The Simpsons’ Took Shots at Other TV Comedies
Not every comedy series can achieve the level of satirical excellence that The Simpsons once enjoyed — especially not those shows made by Seth MacFarlane.
Television has always played an important role within the universe of The Simpsons. After all, the sadly discontinued intro sequence famously ends with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie all crowding together on the couch to watch TV together before being sucked into a black hole, turning into butterflies or getting crushed to death by Rick and Morty. And, since the show prided itself on holding up a playful, yellow, four-fingered mirror to American society and pop culture, it inevitably had to playfully jab the other comedies on TV that were inferior to what Matt Groening and his writers had cooking.
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The Simpsons has parodied scores of sitcoms and sketch shows since it began in 1989, and much of the mockery was just some friendly ribbing between peers — but not all of it. Here are the best times The Simpsons made jokes at other comedy shows’ expense, good or mean-spirited, starting with…
‘Home Improvement’ and ‘Married… With Children’ Get Both Barrels
The first double kill on the list came from the classic Season Five episode “Deep Space Homer,” when NASA scientists decide that America wants to see more stupid and incompetent men on television after watching Tim Allen and Al Bundy at work. While Married… With Children was the subject of numerous jokes and jabs throughout early Simpsons seasons, Ed O’Neill never suffered a blow as low as Allen’s exclamation after manslaughtering Wilson, “Looks like it’s back to jail for me!”
Krusty Bombs on ‘Tuesday Night Live’
There’s this misconception among many modern Saturday Night Live haters that the show was some perfect, shining beacon of humor back when they were kids, but anyone who really remembers all the filler crap that the seminal sketch show put out weekly in the early 1990s knows that not to be the case. When Krusty appeared on Tuesday Night Live in the 1993 episode “Brother from the Same Planet,” he bombed no worse than Andrew Dice Clay did three years prior on the real SNL, and the Simpsons clown starred in a perfect “Coneheads” parody sketch that earned as many laughs as the movie adaptation did.
Bonus points for Bart’s line of “I miss Joe Piscopo” — sarcastically pretending that Eddie Murphy's aspiring jockstrap-holder is a comedy god was one of The Simpsons' absolute best running gags.
Norm Gets Stabby As Homer Stumbles Into ‘Cheers’
You have to imagine that, if Cheers dragged on for a 12th, 13th or even 14th season, the storylines in each episode would get exactly as hackneyed and repetitive as Sam’s conversation with Carla when Homer tries out Cheers while searching for a new bar to call home in the Season Six episode “Fear of Flying,” which also happened to be the first televised Cheers reunion with every character in the scene voiced by their original actor. It’s hard to see Norm ever getting ornery and inebriated enough to attempt murder on the entire bar, though — that would be more of Andy’s thing.
‘American Dad’ and ‘Family Guy’ Get A Spicy Side-Eye in Italy
MacFarlane claims that he always had a good relationship with the Simpsons writing room and that all the barbs shared between them before that horrible Simpsons/Family Guy crossover episode were all in good fun, but I know enough Italian to understand that “plagiarismo” is no small accusation.
In “The Italian Bob,” we learn that more than one Springfieldian is on the Italian police force’s list of wanted Americans, and more than one MacFarlane project rubbed Simpsons writers the wrong way. However, The Simpsons' two-part takedown of MacFarlane was still more cordial than what South Park said about him…