JOKE 2: 0’19”

Couch gag: The Simpson family run towards their sofa, and it retreats into the distance. They chase it to a vanishing point in an endless tunnel.

This is a solid visual joke. The shot of the family running and running is held slightly too long, as well, with the implication that the show can’t start until the Simpsons have “caught” their couch and sat down, as they do in every other episode. This length of hold will have been decided by the makers, so it’s not accidental.

Many fans have noticed that this shot echoes one in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, where the film’s heroes push a piece of furniture (in that case a wardrobe) down an unending, surreal corridor. If we’re playing that game, I could say that the third Hitch-Hiker’s Guide novel opens with Ford and Arthur chasing an escaping sofa across a field. This season already featured an opening couch gag with the family being crushed by the Monty Python foot. As fine comedy nerds, who knows what influences the Simpsons writers might have dragged out of their memories for this joke?

But maybe it’s just one of the limited number of things that can happen at the end of a shot where a family are running towards the middle distance to sit down, and you’re sure you’ve done everything else. There’d been over a hundred of these couch gags by this point. And of course there have been about six hundred couch gags since this one, proving that the only thing that limits the number of variations on an idea is how long a writer is prepared to sit, in front of a blank document, crying. The Simpsons couch gags are examples of a set process imposed on a fixed resource: there are limited elements to play with, so ring the changes on all of them, move them, switch them, play with them.