The most hilarious and cromulent Simpsons in-jokes in history.
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00:00Whilst The Simpsons' fierce mainstream popularity went a few years ago, there is still no denying
00:06the enormous impact that Matt Groening's legendary animation has had across the world.
00:12The Simpsons has winked at the audience many, many times over the course of its 33 seasons to date,
00:18drawing attention to its own creation and speaking to very specific portions of its
00:23viewer base through brilliantly sly niche humour. In-jokes work precisely because we,
00:28as humans, love to know something that others don't. It makes us feel special and smart,
00:34and The Simpsons has exploited that with great intelligence and humour.
00:38And so, with that in mind then, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture,
00:42here with 10 genius in-jokes in The Simpsons.
00:4510. Paul and Linda McCartney's Lentil Soup Recipe
00:49The Season 7 episode Lisa the Vegetarian is an all-time favourite amongst fans and
00:55critics alike, and contains some memorable guest appearances from Paul and Linda McCartney
01:01as themselves. While talking to Lisa, Paul explains that he's so committed to animal rights
01:07that if you play his song Maybe I'm Amazed backwards, you'll be able to hear the recipe
01:12for a really ripping lentil soup. This alone seems like a nod to the Beatles' song Revolution 9,
01:18which had alleged hidden messages when played backwards, but it's also a nod to the general
01:24satanic panic of the 1980s, where Christian groups accused rock bands of hiding subliminal
01:30messages in their songs. Yet the episode does one better during its closing credits sequence,
01:36which are in fact set to Maybe I'm Amazed. Those few who bother to actually heed Paul's
01:41advice and play this modified version of the song backwards would indeed hear McCartney
01:46reciting a recipe for lentil soup. Even better, Paul can be heard saying
01:51By the way, I'm alive, in reference to the urban legend that he actually died in 1966
01:58and was replaced by a lookalike. Season 10's Homer to the Max may not be
02:05a classic Simpsons episode, but it does contain one of the series' low-key cleverest inside gags.
02:13Early in the episode, Homer makes a crack about animated TV shows, saying
02:17Networks like animation because they don't have to pay the actors' squat.
02:21A moment later, Ned Flanders appears at the window and spouts his single line of dialogue
02:25for the entire episode. Plus, they can replace them and no one can tell the diddly difference.
02:30The cherry on top here is that this clearly isn't the work of regular Ned voice actor
02:36Harry Shearer. It's a different voice that is markedly, hilariously different.
02:41Number 8, Animators Cutting Corners. Season 4's The Front sees Bart and Lisa
02:47write an episode of the Itchy & Scratchy show and submit it under Grandpa Simpson's name,
02:52resulting in him being hired as a staff writer. The entire episode is a brilliant,
02:58relentless slew of in-jokes about both the animation industry and The Simpsons itself,
03:03and perhaps the standout gag occurs when Bart and Lisa visit Itchy & Scratchy studios.
03:08While being toured around, Lisa mentions how expensive it must be to produce cartoons,
03:13to which company head Roger Myers Jr. replies,
03:16well, we cut corners. Sometimes to save money, our animators will reuse the same backgrounds
03:22over and over and over again. And just at that moment, anyone paying even the faintest attention
03:28will surely notice that the hallway they're walking down is itself recycled, featuring the
03:33same cleaning lady indoor on a loop. It may not be subtle, but it is clever, and more importantly,
03:40very funny.
03:41Number 7, The No Soap Radio
03:44Fan favourite season 4 episode Homer, The Heretic features a gag you might have seen
03:49dozens of times and never really understood, but laughed anyway. While Homer is singing
03:53Tom Jones's Delilah in the shower, we linger briefly on a shower radio bearing the label
03:59No Soap Radio. While the label seems to be a reference to the fact that the radio is waterproof,
04:04being in the shower and all, it's actually a reference to the surreal practical joke known
04:09as No Soap Radio. The prank involves telling a joke where the punchline has absolutely
04:15no relation to the setup, with the joke teller and bystanders in on the joke,
04:20acting like it's hilarious and ridiculing the recipient for failing to understand it.
04:25Now, at its core, No Soap Radio is an experiment on social norms, and particularly in the notion
04:31of conformity, given the number of targets of the prank who will begin to laugh just
04:37so that they don't appear stupid. Now, even today, No Soap Radio isn't a widely known
04:42gag. But before the internet in 1992, when this episode aired, you'd have to be a pretty
04:49clever cookie to have caught onto it unprompted.
04:52Number 6, Seymour's Cameo
04:54Much as many might not believe it, many Simpsons fans haven't seen Futurama,
04:59save for the crossover episode Simpsorama, which aired during the Simpsons' 26th season.
05:05And while the episode as a whole is a fairly broad cross-pollination of Matt Groening's two
05:10most beloved animated shows, there is one killer gag which left Futurama fans heartbroken,
05:16and everyone else none the wiser. At one point in the episode, we see Homer Simpson,
05:20Bender, Fry and Leela crossing the street to Panucci's Pizza, a Futurama staple that's somehow
05:26now in Springfield, and for a second we focus on a small dog briefly waking up and falling back
05:32asleep. Those who don't watch Futurama will be absolutely oblivious, but even the most casual
05:37fan won't ever forget that dog. That dog is Seymour, Fry's pet, who in one of the series'
05:42most heart-wrenching episodes, Jurassic Bark, is shown waiting faithfully for a missing Fry
05:48to return, ultimately dying of old age before finding out that Fry fell into a cryotube.
05:54Now, this devastating revelation was admittedly retconned in the Futurama film Bender's Big
05:59Score, but to many fans it remains the series' emotional high point. Seeing Seymour waking up
06:06and just barely missing Fry as he walks past was then like twisting the knife in fans' aching
06:12hearts. As a small bout of solace, this episode is at least accepted to be non-canon by many.
06:19Number 5. Sneeds Feed and Seed. Season 11's EIEI-annoyed grunt boasts one of the most infamous
06:27in-jokes in the show's history, so much so that it has become an internet meme in recent years.
06:33The iconic scene sees Homer pulling up to a convenience store called Sneeds Feed and Seed,
06:39with lettering below it reading, formally, Chuck's. This seems harmless and forgettable
06:44enough until you consider the very lewd implications of the signage. Given that Sneed,
06:49Feed and Seed all rhyme, it can be inferred that Chuck's version also rhymed,
06:55and if we're following the same lettering convention with each subsequent word starting
07:00with F and S, well, you can guess what it might have said. Now, this all started as a rumor,
07:06but the episode's writer did eventually confirm it as genuine on Twitter. There's hiding a filthy
07:12joke in plain sight, and then there's burying one so ingeniously deep that even most adults
07:18don't notice it. 4. Pixar's A113 easter egg
07:23A113 is one of the most iconic in-jokes in animation history, used primarily by Disney
07:31and Pixar employees to immortalise the classroom where they learned the craft of character animation.
07:37A113 has, as a result, appeared in easter egg form in countless Disney-Pixar movies,
07:42video games and TV shows, and this includes The Simpsons. One of Pixar's most successful
07:48directors, Brad Bird, got the ball rolling by including A113 as Krusty the Clown's prison
07:54number in Krusty Gets Busted, and it also appeared as mugshot and prison uniform numbers
08:00for Sideshow Bob in the episodes Cape Fear and Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming. Additionally,
08:05it was also visible as Bart's mugshot number in the music video for the 1990 hit song Do
08:11The Bartman. Given the numerous Disney-Pixar personnel who cut their teeth working on The
08:17Simpsons, including Wreck-It Ralph and Zootopia director Rich Moore, there's been quite the
08:22connection forged between the two properties. 3. Homer's burnt tongue
08:28Season 20's Father Knows Worst offers a wink-wink gag that at once is extremely naughty,
08:33but is also designed to go sailing over kids' heads, and also underlining Marge's endearing
08:40naivety. While at the carnival, Homer burns his tongue after accidentally eating a flaming stick
08:46and being tricked into drinking lighter fluid by Bart. His tongue is put in a cast, at which
08:51point Dr Hibbert warns Marge, I'm afraid his tongue will be in that cast for a few weeks.
08:56It may put something of a cramp in your lovemaking. The obvious implication that
09:00Homer won't be giving Marge any oral stimulation for a few weeks is blissfully ignored by her,
09:05who replies, no it won't. If he wants me to do something, he'll just write it down.
09:10Even with the mention of lovemaking, this is a pretty G-rated, child-friendly joke on the surface,
09:16but any adult watching will be cracking up at the strange sweetness of Marge's response.
09:232. A perfectly cromulent word Season 7's Lisa the Iconoclast opens with
09:29Lisa's class watching a film about Springfield's founding father, Jebediah Springfield, who utters
09:35the town's iconic motto, a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
09:39At this point, we cut to Mrs Krabappel and Miss Hoover with the former asking,
09:44embiggens, I'd never heard that word before moving to Springfield, to which Hoover replies,
09:49I don't know why, it's a perfectly cromulent word. Later in the episode, Principal Skinner
09:54also says of Homer's town crier audition, he's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance.
10:00The joke here is of course that while embiggens is a word that was created by the show's writers
10:05room, so too was cromulent, despite being used here as an adjective. And yet, cromulent seems
10:12plausible enough that most viewers probably just assumed that it was in fact a word and
10:17they just didn't know what it meant, as opposed to embiggens, whose meaning is implied through
10:22its context. This is a perfect example of a snake eating its own tail joke, whilst also
10:28ingeniously toying around with how we use and understand language.
10:33Number one, brevity is wit. Some of the best jokes have layers of understanding,
10:38which allows people to interpret them on different levels. And that is absolutely the
10:43case with this killer gag in season three's Mr Lisa Goes to Washington. The episode includes
10:49the Reader's Digest parody magazine, Reading Digest, which holds a children's essay writing
10:55contest that Lisa enters. The welcome sign includes a quotation, brevity is wit, which
11:01is a clear contraction of Polonius' iconic quote from Shakespeare's Hamlet, brevity is the soul of
11:07wit. Now on the surface, this is a clever meta joke about abbreviation, but if you were alive
11:12in the 1980s and 1990s, then you might remember Reader's Digest as the very popular magazine
11:19known for republishing articles from other magazines, but in highly condensed form.
11:24And the Simpsons banner here is, first and foremost, a direct reference to that.
11:29Quite literally, the soul of the Shakespeare quote has been omitted. I mean, jokes don't
11:33get much cleverer and more multifaceted than that. And that concludes our list. If you can
11:39think of any that we missed, then do let us know in the comments below. And while you're there,
11:43don't forget to like and subscribe and tap that notification bell. Also, head over to Twitter
11:48and follow us there, and I can be found across various social medias just by searching Ellie
11:52Littlechild. I've been Ellie with WhatCulture, I hope you have a magical day, and I'll see you real soon.