Here Are Nelson Muntz’ Most Brutally Funny Beatings on ‘The Simpsons’

For how often Nelson Muntz externalizes his rage in the form of hilarious beatdowns, you have to wonder what’s really going on inside Springfield’s most formidable bully among all the guts, black stuff and about 50 Slim Jims.

On The Simpsons, even bit characters are always more complicated than their surface-level trope may suggest. Take the “Just Stamp the Ticket Man,” for instance. Despite only appearing in brief, even curt scenes, the background character’s arc has spanned decades and evolved alongside the show itself. As such, it’s fitting that the archetypal bully character whom the show introduced as the antagonist of the Season One episode “Bart the General” should contain complexities and multitudes that even Springfield Elementary’s resident brainiac couldn’t fully grasp, no matter how passionately she smooched him under the moonlight. 

Nelson Muntz is an angry, precocious, resourceful and comically violent young man whose tragic home life and secret yearnings make him something like a 12-year-old Tybalt, or a face-eating chimpanzee who listens to Andy Williams.

But, ultimately, it’s not our jobs as Simpsons fans to psychoanalyze the most troubled and tender preteen in Springfield; it’s our job to laugh until we can’t breathe when Milhouse passes an extremely poorly worded note his way during class. As such, the popular Simpsons superfan Twitter account @Criminalsimpsons recently compiled a list of the top ass-kickings the Huckleberry-lover ever laid down. Here are their picks…