I've Been Watching The Simpsons

Mmmm, forbidden sitcom.

I was one of a very very select few 11 year-olds in the United States to be excited about the premiere of The Tracey Ullman Show on FOX in 1987. It was partly because my intense love of Monty Python’s Flying Circus had given me an appetite for more sketch comedy on television. But mostly because I’d read an advance article about it in the New York Daily News, in which it said that Matt Groening, of the Life in Hell weekly strip, had been given the job of making animated interstitials for the show.

At summer camp the previous year, a friend had introduced me to Groening’s strip and it literally changed me. I’d never seen a showcase for sardonic, dry, and furiously angry humor that spoke about all the things I’d seen both in my childhood and the wider world around me. The “Wheel of Fortune” panel in the following strip crystallized my entire worldview at that point (I was a different kind of kid):