Was Season Four of ‘The Simpsons’ Better Than Shakespeare’s Greatest Hot Streak?
How do you make a King Lear? Put the queen in a bikini!
This incredibly crafted joke was not, in fact, written by William Shakespeare himself — it’s a quip that Krusty the Klown cracked in The Simpsons Season 11 episode, “Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner?” shortly before the tough crowd roundly booed The Bard.
While the brainiac, bookish, Harvard-educated nerds of The Simpsons’ writing staff have made numerous references to and jokes about the works of Shakespeare over the course of the show’s 35 seasons and counting, it’s fair to say that the citizens of Springfield aren’t the world’s biggest admirers of the most famous dramatist in history — nor are some Simpsons fans, apparently.
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Right now, various Twitter fandoms are clashing over the definition of the phrase “locked in,” with stans of every singer, sports star, religious movement, actor, military power or TV show stretching back to prehistory all making the case that their person, place or thing had the greatest hot streak in history. When one thespian suggested that “nothing can compete” with Shakespeare writing Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra all within a two-year span, one Simpson fan doth protest:
Okay, sure, Shakespeare did a decent job with those plays. No one’s out here arguing that Macbeth isn’t a masterpiece. The only problem is that, in half the time that Shakespeare took to write four bangers, the Simpsons writing staff spat out 21 near-perfect episodes and one pretty good clip show. Seriously, between “Mr. Plow,” “Last Exit to Springfield,” “Marge vs. The Monorail” and “Duffless” alone, The Simpsons matched the output of its Victorian counterpart in both quality of writing and cultural impact, and that’s not even counting other classics like “Lisa’s First Word,” “Homer’s Triple Bypass” and “Treehouse of Horror III.”
Again, no one is saying that Shakespeare wasn’t brilliant, or that he didn’t come up with plenty of perfectly cromulent words. But, seriously, when his work is in a head-to-head with the greatest writing hot streak of all time, that zombie meets his end.
