Politics

Why ‘The Simpsons’ Memes Have Become The Political Voice Of Our Generation

"Steamed Hams but it’s Scomo ruining the Australian economy"

by Lachlan Williams  21 November 2019
The Simpsons memes

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Australian politics is like the sun  — only the truly insane stare directly into it. To observe it safely, you need a filter. For hundreds of thousands of Australians, that filter is The Simpsons.

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This video — a low-fi vapourwave treatment of the ‘Steamed Hams’ scene — was posted by two Melbourne-based podcasters on their Facebook page on November 5.

For those of us on algorithmic time, November 5 was when boomers found out about “ok boomer” and mere hours before New South Wales Police Minister David Elliot said he would be okay with police officers strip-searching his children.

Since emerging from the cursed mists, the video quickly racked up more than 151,000 views on Facebook.

The central point it makes via Apple vocoder dialog and janky VHS effects, is that the Morrison Government has botched things so badly people might have to pay the bank interest to look after their money.

It’s testament to the power of The Simpsons as a carrier wave for difficult messages that anyone at all watched a dense and technical argument about economic policy.

“We thought it would be fun and interesting to look at the complex, dry subject of negative interest rates and economic growth through a lense of the already absurd and then further absurdified ‘Steamed Hams’,” one of the video’s creators, Noon, told Junkee.

Noon is one half of the team behind the Auspol Snackpod podcast. He and producing partner Zac originally made the video as a treat for Patreon supporters before releasing it on social media to a clearly receptive audience.

“Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Kodos”

They aren’t the only people who have found massive audiences online stuffing the brutal realities of Australian politics into the brightly coloured container of The Simpsons.

Shortly after the 2014 budget, The Simpsons Against the Liberals emerged and amassed 2000 followers within 24 hours. It now has an audience of more than 120,000. Its anonymous admin, who we will for entertainment value call Memeskeeper Willie, credits decades-long daily broadcasts of The Simpsons with providing a common language to discuss politics.

“The Simpsons was on from 6pm every day for years. You have a whole generation of people who were raised on it and I was one of those people,” Memeskeeper Willie told Junkee.

“We only had five channels so we watched the same show after school every day for years.”

Willie has a two-knockouts, no losses record against Federal Coalition backbencher Andrew Laming, who has not once but twice involved himself in public arguments with the page.

“In December 2016 Andrew Laming said something dumb,” Memeskeeper Willie said.

“I can’t even remember what he said or who made the meme, but it made fun of Andrew Laming, which is what we do. That’s our thing – using The Simpsons to mock politicians. One hundred percent of the time they don’t respond. Except for Andrew Laming.”

Simpsons Memes Worldwide

Political commentary pages using The Simpsons have also sprung up internationally, with one Irish outfit launching its own political party that promises a voice to those who have been excluded from mainstream politics.

The one place that the Simpsons-as-politics trope hasn’t taken off appears to be the US itself. It’s possible that the variety of entertainment choices in the show’s birthplace meant millennials there didn’t absorb the show as a common language.

But that is what has happened in the rest of the English-speaking world.

Even if those making the content are politically engaged, the audience for their work indicates a broader appeal — they are pulling numbers that would satisfy a metropolitan TV news director. The generation that sat in front of countless episodes of a pioneering political animation find themselves with no other way to express their alienation from politics.

They face insecure work, stagnant wages and absurd house prices that place home ownership out of reach. Their jobs don’t provide enough hours, training opportunities have been systematically destroyed and woeful Newstart levels leave recipients living in poverty.

They have few memories of successful engagement with institutional politics and live under a Government determined to retain expensive boondoggles like negative gearing that favour an investing class of baby boomers over Simpsons-era kids, even in the face of rising wealth inequality.

The Simpsons is one of the few things that can’t be taken away.

“We are in a really weird time in politics,” Memeskeeper Willie said.

“Many in my generation are wondering why the Liberals got in power. We are yearning for something different, and when we didn’t get anything different, we reverted to our old coping mechanisms — The Simpsons.”

But it’s more than just an escape. Noon says that if just one percent of those who saw his Steamed Hams post googles negative interest rates, it’s a “great result” for engaging people in the political process.

“The Simpsons itself deals with heavy and dry content a lot, and about people without a way to express themselves politically. There’s that great joke where Homer says ‘Do I dare live out the American dream and kill my boss?’,” Noon said.

Just as alcohol can be the cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems, The Simpsons provides both relief from an often-baffling political environment, and a language to make sense of it for a generation whose needs are neglected by those in power.

Feature Image courtesy of The Simpsons Against The Liberals.

Lachlan Williams is a writer and communications consultant based in Melbourne. He has worked for the union movement and advised a Labor MP. You can bother him on Twitter