4 Moments From ‘The Simpsons’ That Prove Bart Is Secretly the Smartest Character
Despite what his teachers, grades and standardized test scores may say, Bart Simpson is, in fact, a genius — just don’t ask him to identify any paradoxes.
Matt Groening’s established canon for his cartoon masterpiece The Simpsons includes the infamous “Simpson Gene,” a devious bit of DNA that causes all the male members of the Simpsons clan to be lazy, low-intelligence underachievers. This little bit of bloodwork world-building came up in the Season Nine episode “Lisa the Simpson” as a slightly ham-fisted explanation for why the Simpson family’s allegedly most precocious and pretentious second-grader would wield such an advanced vocabulary when her brother and father struggle with multi-syllabic words on a daily basis.
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But for all of Lisa’s book smarts, in the Simpson family’s 35 years on television, she has failed to surpass her older brother in actually applying her intellect to more than just a moralizing speech delivered at the turning point of a plot line. Meanwhile, Bart has been demonstrating his secret, unmeasured brilliance for decades. Here are the top Bart moments from The Simpsons that prove that he should be the one going to Stanford:
He’s A Master Craftsman When It Comes to Pranks
A running theme in The Simpson is that Bart has nearly unlimited potential so long as he’s properly engaged with whatever task is at hand, which is usually some sort of devious plot to embarrass Principal Skinner and the entire Springfield Elementary School. For instance, in “Bart’s Comet,” the hellraiser’s most brilliant moment isn’t actually the accidental discovery of the doomsday comet heading straight for Springfield, but his secret and painstaking stitching that transformed the school’s weather balloon into Buttzilla. The careful planning and skill required to pull off such a prank is astronomical — much like Skinner’s backside.
He’s A Comic Wunderkind
Bart is rarely able to tap into his genius-level artistic skills unless he’s embarrassing an authority figure, but in the Season 13 episode “I Am Furious (Yellow),” Bart’s comic strip ”Angry Dad” about a certain stumbling, strangling father is a massive hit that later became an Academy Award-winning short film in Season 22's “Angry Dad: The Movie.” Bart’s brilliant mind turned yellow into Oscar gold.
He Outsmarted Major League Baseball
Bart is a classic case of ADHD holding back a brilliant child from achieving academic excellence, but, in Season 11’s “Brother’s Little Helper,” the miracle drug Focusyn turns Bart into the wiz-kid he was always meant to be — much to the concern of Mark McGwire and the MLB. While Bart’s significantly dumber family believed that his tinfoil hat theory about Big Baseball spying on Springfield is a crackpot conspiracy, one of the show’s all-time best plot twists proved Bart right in the closing moments.
But, hey, did you see that dinger?
He Learns Languages Stupid Fast
Beginning in the Season One episode “The Crepes of Wrath,” Bart shows a nearly superhuman aptitude for picking up languages, sometimes entirely on accident, as he learns to speak French over just two months of slave labor at a skeevy vineyard that puts antifreeze in its wine. Then, when Bart’s accidental world tour takes him to Hong Kong in Season Seven’s “Bart on the Road,” suddenly the boy’s a Cantonese speaker. Finally in the Season 13 episode “Blame It on Lisa,” Bart becomes fluent in Spanish over a single plane ride to Brazil — only to learn that Brazilians speak Portuguese. Geography might not be his best subject — aye carumba.