The Simpsons is the most successful animation in television history and it seems to have been around forever – and its famous ‘couch gag’ is a cultural phenomenon in its own right. In the latest instalment in our History of Culture in 100 Sofas, culture editor Andrew Nixon looks at the Simpsons’ sofa… It must be the most famous opening sequence in television history. White cumulous clouds sit in a bright blue sky, and as the choir sings ‘The Siiiiimpsons’ the words appear in yellow and we zoom through the hole in the letter ‘P’ over the town of Springfield and through the window of the Elementary School, where Bart is writing his lines on the blackboard. Then the familiar theme plays and we follow the Simpson family members home: Bart causing havoc on his skateboard; Homer clocking off from the nuclear factory and accidentally taking some glowing green toxic rod in his coat; Marge with baby Maggie at the supermarket then in the car home (apparently with Maggie driving, though it turns out to be a toy steering wheel); Lisa playing some crazy jazz on the sax as she escapes band practice. They all converge on the house at the same time, rush through to the living room and jump on to the sofa to watch TV. And then, something crazy happens.
The couch gag
The Simpsons’ running ‘couch gag’ is legendary. In the first few episodes, way back in 1990, the gags were relatively simple slapstick jokes: the family all sits down together and Bart is squeezed out onto the floor; or the arms break off from the couch; or Homer falls off and says ‘D’oh!’. By 2014 they have become surreal adventures, with the Simpsons morphing into characters from Frozen (episode 561); or appearing as pieces of sushi which get eaten (ep 565); or re-enacting the entire story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears (ep 563). In some of the gags, the sofa itself does something strange, such as deflating like a balloon (ep 65), or turning into a monster and eating the family (ep 61), or suddenly becoming the guest couch on The David Letterman Show (ep 90). In others, something strange happens to the Simpsons themselves. They are bouncing balls pinging around the living room (ep 99). They get their heads mixed up with each others’ bodies (ep 66). They are marionettes, or zombies, or made of lego (episodes 283, 86, 403 respectively). The gags first started getting really weird at the beginning of season 5 in 1993 (ep 83), with a director doing three couch gag takes: in take one the Simpsons run into the living room and shatter like glass; in take two they merge into a five-headed blob; and in take three they run in and explode on contact.
Epic gags
An advantage to the producers of the sofa gag is that it can be made longer or shorter depending on the running time of the rest of the show. The first long sofa gag was as early as episode 69 in 1992, when the family forms a chorus line and are joined ‘on stage’ by high-kicking dancing girls before the living room walls lift to reveal a large glitzy production number complete with magicians, a ring of fire and handstanding elephants. In later years, the sofa gags became whole mini-episodes in themselves featuring funny pastiches of other shows and films. These include send-ups of The Hobbit (ep 533), Breaking Bad (ep 525) and Game of Thrones
One of the best extended couch gags is the Evolution of Homer joke from episode 394, while the longest to date is the two-and-a-half minute “MusicVille”, a “Silly Simpsony” cartoon featuring every character as a musical instrument (ep 536).
Guest animators
The Simpsons’ couch gag has become such a cultural icon in America that a host of guest directors have been invited to contribute to it. Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro contributed a horror-themed one in 2013 (ep 532) but some of the best have been by animators who usually work in a very different style.
The French cartoonist Sylvain Chomet of Belleville Rendezvous fame contributed a Gallic-flavoured opening for episode 542 in 2014, while animator Bill Plympton has created a few interesting couch gags including this love story between Homer and his sofa (ep 504). However, some couch gags are virtually artworks. The surrealist filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt contributed a gag to episode 553 in which Homer travels forward in time to the year 10,535 A.D. and we see a strange, frightening version of what The Simpsons will look like in the far future – it seems to be a comment both on the commercialisation of entertainment, and the incredible longevity of the show itself. Will The Simpsons ever actually end?…
Seven Remarkable Facts about The Simpsons
- Since starting on December 17, 1989 The Simpsons has broadcast over 570 episodes and became the longest-running American sitcom, then the longest-running American animated program, and in 2009 it surpassed Gunsmoke as the longest-running American scripted primetime television series in history, and still shows no signs of finishing.
- Creator Matt Groening invented it almost by accident. Pitching concepts for animated shorts to be used in The Tracey Ullman Show, he hastily came up with the idea of a dysfunctional family while in the waiting room ahead of his meeting with the producers when he realised that his original ideas wouldn’t work.
- The series has won countless awards, including no less than 31 Emmys. In 1999 Time magazine called it the greatest TV show of the 20th Century and it has a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
- There are just six main voice actors playing the vast majority of the characters: Dan Castellaneta (Homer, Grandpa Simpson, Krustie and others); Julie Kavner (Marge, Patty and Selma); Nancy Cartwright (Bart, Nelson and others); Hank Azaria (Moe, Chief Wiggum, Apu and many more); Harry Shearer (Mr Burns, Ned Flanders, Smithers and many more); and Yeardley Smith, who just plays Lisa. Every one of them has won an Emmy for Outstanding Voice-Over Performance.
- It is popular all over the world and has been dubbed into Japanese, German, Spanish, Luxembourgish, Portuguese, Italian, Punjabi, Hindi, French and Quebec French, among others. It has been banned at various times in China and Venezuela.
- It holds the World Record for “Most Guest Stars Featured in a Television Series”, with seemingly every celebrity from Tony Bennett to Tony Blair appearing at some point in its long history.
- The Homer-coined word “d’oh” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001 (although it’s spelled “doh”) and is defined as “Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish.”
Read more about the clever ways that TV uses couches in comedy in our post Sitcom Sofas.