‘Simpsons’ Legend Bill Oakley Begs Fans to Remember the Funny Names Besides ‘Bort’

The Golden Age of The Simpsons has so many amazing, underappreciated jokes that blend into the background, but all fans seem to remember are the punchlines that get the most play. Not everyone gets to be a headliner like Bort.

The beauty of the Simpsons fandom is that, since the show’s most dedicated followers from the beginning have been, let’s just say, Comic Book Guy-esque, classic Simpsons jokes make up some of the internet’s earliest memes, thanks to the hard work of Web 1.0 fan pages from the 1990s. As such, when the profoundly quotable Season Six episode “Itchy & Scratchy Land” first aired in October 1994, the best lines and funniest bits from one of the all-time greatest Simpsons episodes immediately became inside jokes on the early internet that continue to get repeated to this day.

In 2025, much of the Simpsons shitposting that serves as the cornerstone of online culture takes place on Twitter, where the first 10 seasons of the show are treated like sacred texts from which our favorite lines emerged like commandments on tablets of stone. But the Simpsons OGs would like to remind us to take the memes in context and appreciate the less-worshipped jokes along with them:

As legendary Simpsons writer, producer and showrunner Bill Oakley pointed out, there are even more jokes stuffed into this short scene about Bart failing to find a personalized license plate in the Itchy & Scratchy Land gift shop than the ones that terminally online Simpsons fans know by heart. While the hard work some artist put into alphabetizing the names should, apparently, not go unrecognized, the secret star of this scene is whoever planted names like “Campadi,” “Cedrk" and “Gerhart” into the few visible frames — hats off to whichever Edwar came up with that gag.

In 2014, Oakley responded to an email from Slate about the Bort bit that became one of the show’s most enduring and quotable lines ever. “I always liked the joke,” Oakley wrote at the time, “but I am surprised it took on this legendary status.” Today, Oakley still seems to be perplexed over the fandom’s enduring love of Bort, and he wants us to appreciate that there are other funny names for little kids and strange men in gift shops to share.

For once, I’d like to see a “Dwain” license plate out in the wild — or, at least, in the Simpsons store at Disney World.