Will people still "get" The Simpsons in 25 years?

Cross-posted at Robert David Sullivan.

I seem to be banned for life from posting comments on Salon.com because of a typo. The site requires you to set up an account (another password!) in order to submit a comment, but when I tried I mistakenly typed "con" instead of "com" at the end of my email address. So Salon sent a confirmation email to a nonexistent address and now won't let me set up another account because there's already a pending account with my user name (and ISP address, presumably). What a fate: trapped on Salon's No Fly List.

Wait, will "No Fly List" mean anything to someone reading this 50 years from now, as I expect millions of people to do? The Salon article I wanted to comment on, by Matt Zoller Seitz, asks "Will Future Generations Understand The SImpsons"? Seitz looks at TV comedies with topical references — not just The Simpsons, but Community, 30 Rock, etc. — and asks whether they will hold up for future generations:

Some of the most buzz-worthy TV comedies of the last 25 years have proved as sturdy as tissue paper. Even the great ones from the '90s ("The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld") are starting to seem as era-specific as high-top fades and Koosh Balls. "I Love Lucy," "The Andy Griffith Show," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Cheers" and other pre-'90s sitcoms didn't start to seem dated or irrelevant for decades, probably because they kept the pop culture references to a bare minimum; the more recent hit comedies are starting to exude that expired fish stench while they're still on the air.  Can a show still call itself a comedy if you have to explain why it's funny?

We don't know which shows will hold up 25 years from now, but I wouldn't rule out the ones with pop culture references. One piece of evidence in their favor is Monty Python's Flying Circus, which found an audience in the US despite frequent references to British places and personalities that were alien to Americans from the start. As Monty Python members found to their surprise, Americans found a lot of the references to be funny just because they sounded funny. (While watching the show as an adolescent, the town of Luton and the politician Reginald Maulding struck me as hysterical even though I had never heard of them before.)

I suspect that some pop culture references will resonate because they sound funny, whether they're real or made up. The Simpsons and 30 Rock, in particular, seem to alternate between "real" cultural references and ones made up for their own universes, and neither group is inherently funnier than the other. (MILF Island is funny even if you don't know what it's making fun of; it just becomes surreal rather than a parody.) In contrast, the sitcom Murphy Brown, which liked to lazily name-drop politicians and journalists of its time, doesn't hold up very well at all.

Do you think all of the current "meta" comedies will age well? Will I Love Lucy still be popular when The Simpsons is forgotten?

Comments

[Rolando Teco]

1.

Recently, Drew has introduced me to Friends, a show I never watched when it was on the air. I have to say, one of the things that most impresses me about the show as we work our way through full-season DVDs is the universality of it. It's basically about relationships. And the way they got to that, of course, (big surprise!) is by creating very specific characters and sticking to their truth. The show gets its laughs from the specificity of what we know about these six individuals and the jokes are not riffing on pop culture. I have a feeling its shelf life will be very long indeed.

[John Yearley]

2.

This is something that used to concern me a lot in my work, but I recently decided not to worry about it. Victorian novels were written in direct response to the issues of their time. There are whole passgaes on things that, without context, make no sense to modern readers (the origin of the cottage industry of annotating those novels). But the novels themselves are as eternal as art gets. They reach through the door of the spectific to get to the universal. Is there any other way to get there?