Watching Simpsons

Television is filled with absurdities, sometimes. Take Maggie Simpsons, for a moment. She’s absolutely one of the smartest toddlers on television. Think about it for a moment, she’s managed to shoot Mr. Burns, and on other occasions, escape day care, and even rescue her dad from a tow truck guy’s basement prison. These feats alone bespeak of an intelligence far more advanced than a mere two or three year told. And that’s kind of where a touch of irony comes in. For all of Lisa’s social awareness, the smartest of the Simpsons clan is the one that fall downs a lot and sucks on a pacifier. Yet, in one of the strangest touches, the writers of the show decided that Maggie needed a rival, a natural enemy. And so, the gag about the baby with black eyebrow was born. It’s probably one of the most pointless thing in the show – even if the segment was kind-of funny. Most of their “feud” consisted of the two infants glaring at each other.

Still, as pointless as “Maggie vs. Unibrow” is, it didn’t make the top ten list posted on bspcn.com. Neither did Bart’s pranks calls to Moe. Still, what the site has listed as “The Top Ten Pointless Feuds” is still instructive, and rather funny. Number seven is Wile E. Coyote vs. The Road Runner, where a chase usually ends with a poof of smoke at the bottom of a canyon. The listed number one, however, is even more instructive:

Ned Flanders is a completely selfless, moral, upstanding citizen to every fellow human he meets, free of anger and vulgarity and incapable of any action other than compassion, and yet, Homer Simpson’s unbridled hatred for Old Painty Can Ned is completely and utterly believable. No matter how many times Homer forgets the name of his third child or gets pulled over for a DUI or makes his daughter’s suitors tar his roof, every child in the world would choose his love over Ned Flanders’ locked-out satellite dish and unflavored ice milk. It’s the most unique, humorous, and impossibly relatable rivalry in contemporary history, and I would compare it to the readers’ inherent fascination with Othello’s rival Iago, but I’m just not sure Shakespeare’s quite on that level.

There’s a great point to that. After all, most rivalries between neighbors are as pointless as they are petty. Homer is jealous, even so much that he wrote an annoying song about Flanders.

The Simpsons, Homer Simpson, Ned Flanders, Maggie Simpson, rivalry