Synergy Tips Its Hand

IGN: Comedically Illiterate

Our old friends at IGN are filling the summer months with content the same way we are: by talking about old episodes.  So far I’ve ignored these, I don’t need anyone to tell me that Marge vs. the Monorail is awesome, nor do I have much use for a review that docks a point from “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet” because people don’t praise it often enough.  It’s all drivel; though if they ever get around to positively reviewing some piece of shit from a later season I’ll probably be forced to weigh in with a flurry of pointless but cathartic ranting.

All that said, there is an element of this week’s review of “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” that is worth pointing out.  I bring it up because it displays the shallow and sloppy thinking that goes into much of IGN’s Simpsons fellatio:

This was also the 100th episode of the series. Goodness, that sounds like such a small number now.

As 100th episodes go, “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” seems a little out of place. Instead of getting an episode celebrating the series and its namesake family, we have an episode focusing on one of the many minor characters. It’s true that Skinner is a hilarious character, and this episode is quite funny, but wouldn’t a Bart-centric or Homer-centric episode make more sense to celebrate 100 episodes?

He’s less interested in the content and humor of the episode than he is in a mindless salute to longevity.  “Oh sure,” he’s saying, “The episode was great, but shouldn’t it have been more self congratulatory?”  This is a byproduct of the fanboy style thinking that leads people to praise Zombie Simpsons.  It essentially amounts to saying that The Simpsons is good because it’s The Simpsons instead of The Simpsons is good because it’s, you know, objectively good.

Here’s the final sentence:

Again, “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song” wasn’t what you might expect as a celebration of 100 episodes, but it was a smart and funny episode nonetheless.

“Nonetheless”?  Is he actually implying that the episode is worse for not being in love with the smell of its own farts?

Even if we set aside the obvious stupidity of that, the entire mindset is an exercise in missing the joke.  Bart’s blackboard phrase for this episode is, as you can see above, “I will not celebrate meaningless milestones”.  Now that is what The Simpsons was about.  It didn’t go down on itself for reaching 100 episodes, it just did it, made fun of people who thought it was significant, and moved along.

Not only is IGN in thrall to Zombie Simpsons, it doesn’t even understand real Simpsons.