Tom Myatt | Senior Editor
The worst day of my life came at the tender age of ten. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Exhausted from a long, hard day of learning numbers and theorizing quantum mechanics, I was looking forward to kicking it watching TV. But my world was crushed. The BBC’s legendary 6pm slot for our favourite show had been cancelled. Permanently. Watching the pre-dinner Simpsons was a national institution for our generation in England, and it had been savagely stolen from us. Of course, if you were a rich kid and could afford Sky, you were lucky enough to have the legendary and somewhat intriguing ‘new’ episodes continuing to enlighten you with humour. But for the rest of us, we had to be Bart-free for an entire six months before Channel 4 picked it up. So 2003 was a rough year, and my friends were also in need of addiction-weaning and post-traumatic therapy.
Fast forward 12 years. Facebook, Twitter, the Iraq War and Nikki Minaj have all graced us with their presence, and we’re now getting scarily close to entering the real world. Students are partying at all-time lows, the employment market is still harsh – and we’ve all become obsessed with sharing legendary Simpsons moments on social media. It’s so much fun. The Facebook page ‘The Simpsons’ has 75 million likes, more than the entire population of densely-populated Turkey, and many more pages dedicated to reviving old and joyous memories are thriving as well. My favourite recollection is Bart vs Australia’s “you call that a knife, THIS is a knife!”, “That’s not a knife, that’s a spoon”, “ah, I see you’ve played knifey-spooney before.” This phenomenon has really taken off in the past few weeks. People use quotes in comment boxes, posts, and pretty much wherever they can at any time to be the funniest person in the conversation. And it’s certainly no accident. Simpsons, like Pokémon, is a symbol of our youth. Coming to quote it to each other all the time was inevitable. What amazes me is just how quickly it’s happened.
Every generation is extremely gratified by its collective memories, which are often used extremely tribally. Although I now appreciate the damn fine music of the Rolling Stones, I was always aware as a kid that it very much of my dad’s generation. He was extremely proud of it – not necessarily because of the music itself, but it’s what has shaped and defined his memory. And of course, in classic tribal and collective speak: “it’s better than YOUR music.” The entire concept is purely psychological. We have an innate need to distinguish and aggrandize symbols of our existence as opposed to ‘theirs’, and we derive collective comfort from reassuring ourselves that it is still relevant. Generations are prone to doing this as they become older – when there is a younger generation takin over the global reins of power and they feel the need to find comfort collectively.
Our continuing obsession with The Simpsons is exactly what this is, the only difference is that we’re utilising it way earlier than any other generation ever has. The Rolling Stones happened to my dad’s generation when they were in their teens, but ours seem to be significantly earlier in life, and we’re remembering them sooner too. I’m no psychologist, but I feel like there’s a number of potential reasons for this. People look to the past and their youth in bad times in the quest for comfort – this explains why movies set in the past have boomed since 2007 (Seriously. Ever notice how James Bond, for instance, became considerably more old-fashioned after Casino Royale? It’s extremely clever). My parent’s generation also complains that kids don’t party like they used to. Why? Because unlike in their golden-spooned lives, we have a jobs crisis. Life is tougher, and although you may well think I sound crazy, we’re looking to the simpler times of our childhood for security. Not for a long time has moving out of home and starting a new life been so difficult.
As we continue to get older we may even use The Simpsons or other popular parts of our childhood, such as Pokémon, or my childhood favourite The Fairy Odd Parents, to distinguish ourselves from the ‘others’. In fact, one of the most popular Facebook pages dedicated to these recollections is actually called ‘Simpsons quotes that nobody gets anymore’, the success of which probably has to do with the psychological satisfaction of believing you’re in a group distinct from outsiders. The boom in quoting is amazing as well as hilarious, and there’s no reason it should stop any time soon, not that it will anyway. These quotes, having been repeated to us at an early age are probably now permanently etched into our memory, unlike what we did in school. And that’s fine. It makes me considerably happier.
