Today at Lit Drift I write about one of my favorite topics: the intersection of cultural intelligence and cartoons. I love cartoons. I love feigning intelligence. I love combining these loves. I hope you love reading about the combination of these loves.
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Click here to read the guest post.
About the Stranger Will Tour for Strange:
My goal is to post at a different blog every few days beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of my second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact me. I would love to compromise your integrity for a day. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow me on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend me on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb
(part of my ongoing Unexpected Literary References series)
More Unexpected Literary references from The Simpsons. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
Okay, The Simpsons, time to step aside and let some other cartoon be the smarty-pants lit reference show. You’ve been the hipster long enough. Your gags are disproportionately literary-based, and for that The Simpsons, I would appreciate more fart jokes.
By now you are probably thinking, “wait, I thought you loved lit references in cartoons.” Good call you.
Playwright David Mamet makes an appearance as the dumped-on sitcom screenwriter for the fake 80s Growing Pains derivative Thicker Than Water. Mamet is perhaps most famous for his 1984 Pulitizer Prize winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross. What many might not know (but The Simpsons writers surely did) is that Mamet wrote a 1987 episode of the TV drama Hill Street Blues and is also an oft-writer of the television series The Unit. I hope his depiction as the shat-upon sitcom writer in The Simpsons didn’t bring up long buried painful memories.
Earlier in the episode, another reference may have slipped by the casual viewer. While watching an episode of Thicker Than Water Homer quips after the television announcer states “filmed before a live studio audience” that “everyone in that studio audience is dead now.” Is this a reference taken from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Lullaby?:
“Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead” (pg 15).
If it were any other show, I’d say this is a coincidence. But because The Simpsons bogarts everything literary, I’m thinking they’ve read some Palahniuk.
(part of my ongoing Unexpected Literary References series)
Season 1, episode 15 (“Star Trek”), of the always entertaining “American Dad” plots the sudden rise of Steve Smith as a children’s book author. This premise, of course, is perfect for literary nods. Strange, though, that I only caught two.
See the entire episode here:
Additional hilarious photo (I paused the embedded video at just the right/wrong time):
(part of my ongoing Unexpected Literary References series)
I caught a rerun of The Simpsons a few days ago, one in which the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom, makes a cameo. I wish for less popular books and authors to get The Simpsons treatment, but I say that only because I am a less popular author with a less popular book. Hint, hint, The Simpsons. Trust me, Matt Groening, you’ll need my mediocre grasp of pop culture and my general irrelevance to stay alive for another 20 years. Also, you’ll need miracle medicine. What are you, like 70 years old?
In this same episode, Grandpa Abe tells a story about how he introduced the book Gone With The Wind to an ungrateful Clark Gable. Unfortunately, I could not come across a good screenshot of the book itself, so this image will have to suffice.
(part of my ongoing Unexpected Literary References series)
In yet another The Simpsons (un)expected literary reference, Stephen King’s novel, Under the Dome is called out for its similarities to the 2007 The Simpsons Movie, both stories incorporating a town-sized dome to seal people off from the outside world. The overt commentary may be a further play on the South Park episode, “The Simpsons Already Did it,” which explores the degree to which The Simpsons has embedded itself into our collective consciousness.
The screenshot below appears in Season 22 : Ep. 6, “The Fool Monty.”