Liberty Logs · 24 May 2006
A usual Monday thing, addicted as we are to teh funny and equipped with, uh, a four mile high TV antenna: eating lunch on the sofa and watching the previous night’s The Simpsons. This was the one about Homer finding himself romantic counsellor to a jock/bimbo marriage (Kris & Anna Benson maybe?) on the skids. The episode – season ender of the 17th (!) season, and surprisingly good following a series of duds over the past few months – is notable for the best title sequence ever (when couches attack) and, I’m convinced, the best one-line gag in the history of television.
Simpsons jokes have of course usually been sharp and carefully crafted, and never too easy, but I don’t recall anything as perfect as the Duff blimp crashing on the baseball field and, thinking his wife is aboard, the Kris Benson character cries out, ‘This is the worst blimp crash ever!’. A millisecond after it takes your mind (well, my mind) to assemble the image of the burning Hindenberg, old Abe Simpson shouts from the stands: ‘Too soon!’.
It’s setup/laff done at the highest possible level. Just as you ask yourself ‘am I laughing at the Hindenberg?’, you realise the gag is about you even asking the question. Not a joke skirting around tragedy, which is easy, but a joke about the way we feel about jokes about tragedy. On the one hand it mocks the hubris and humourlessness of those who mine grief for agenda advancement, on the other it pokes at those (everyone, at one time or another, I suppose) whose laughter burns hottest at the point just beyond too far.
I laughed my head off. To the writer who came up with it: I owe you beer.
* * *