Homer J. Simpson, comedy icon

Jonathan Kay

National Post

Last week, Ben Jonson's lengthy 17th-century play The Alchemist ended its run at the Classic Stage Company in New York City. Despite the lukewarm reviews, I am kicking myself for not having caught a show. This would have been a rare opportunity to see Dan Castellaneta perform in the flesh. If that name doesn't ring a bell, it should. It is his voice that breathes life into some of the funniest characters on The Simpsons -- Krusty the Clown, Barney the barfly, Mayor Quimby, Groundskeeper Willy, Sideshow Mel and, of course, the most culturally important comedic icon of the '90s, Homer J. Simpson.

Am I giving Homer too much credit? Many would argue for Jerry Seinfeld. His show, after all, was a lot funnier than every other non-animated sitcom of the last decade. Moreover, he created an entire idiom to describe the rituals of upper-middle-class urban life. Terms like "close talker," "master of your domain" and "sponge-worthy" simply did not exist until the cast of Seinfeld summoned them into existence.

But was Seinfeld "important"? Not in the way The Simpsons is, I would argue. As funny as Seinfeld was, it never aspired to being anything more than a comedy of manners. While The Simpsons, at its best, rises to the level of high social satire, Seinfeld was always merely a satire of the social.

Of course, I am talking here about The Simpsons in its mature form. When it was originally conceived, the show was not much more than a conventional gag-driven sitcom whose only novel quality was that it happened to be drawn instead of filmed. That changed when Homer overtook Bart as the show's star. Unlike his son, Homer was funnier for what he was -- overfed, jingoistic, anti-intellectual, lazy, television-addled and brimming with self-entitlement -- than for what he did. Thus did Homer develop into a definitive send-up of middle-middle-class America itself.

And yet, among avant-garde culture critics, The Simpsons never received as much attention as the cruder and markedly less funny Beavis and Butthead. There are two reasons for this:

First, while Homer's Springfield was always portrayed as a more or less happy place, Highland, the lower-class Texas milieu where Beavis and Butthead did their thing, fulfilled the critic's preference for the trashy and the dystopic.

Second, as between the two cartoons, Beavis and Butthead was by far the more "postmodern." The show featured no punchlines, no gags, no real plots -- just endless adolescent dialogue, most of it overlay commentary on the vacuous music videos we watched Beavis and Butthead watch. In the self-conscious abandonment of taste and the depiction of an unvarnished cultural wasteland, critics sensed something new.

But although there is something to be said for novelty, longevity also counts. Of the three shows, The Simpsons is the only one that survived the '90s. It is also the only one that spawned commercially significant imitators: Family Guy, The Critic and King of the Hill -- all of them comedies that satirize American culture in a familiar Simpsons-esque manner, through the mouths of overweight, Homer-like protagonists.

And so, I am not overly saddened by The Alchemist's short run. Had Mr. Castellaneta's Broadway performance been more enduring, he might have been tempted to give up his greatest role. And then the last -- and best -- of the great '90s comic icons would be dead.