The Love-Matic Grampa (aka Moe Szyslak vs The Laugh Track)

Season 8 may well have been the The Simpsons' last truly "great" season (obviously, it depends on who you ask, but there's a general consensus among classic Simpsons fans that the series peaked around Seasons 6-8, with the shark fins beginning to circle somewhere between Seasons 9-11) but it's also a devilishly strange one, which sees the show veer into some very bold and experimental territory while upping the overall air of cynicism by a significant notch. The driving force behind this increased cynicism looks to have been simple anxiety, a natural consequence of a series suddenly waking up and having to contemplate its own mortality. What really sticks out about Season 8, on repeat visits, is just how preoccupied the writers blatantly were with the series' inevitable demise/decline at this point in its run. A number of gags and even entire plots seem tailored to convey this unease that the series had taken things about as far as it could go and the only remaining options were either to quit while ahead or embrace the shark-infested waters looming ominously in the horizon. The first "proper" (ie: non-Halloween) episode of the season, "You Only Move Twice", kicks things off with a practical joke, of sorts (the family moves to another community and the writers were apparently hopeful that they could convince a few gullible souls that this would be a permanent shake-up), but a fairly mild one compared to the mind-bending oddities to come. The height of the season's weird experimental streak came with the penultimate episode, "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" (4F20), which first aired on 11th May 1997, and was easily as bizarre and startling an episode as The Simpsons had ever made at the time. The actual season finale, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson", is by comparison an extremely "safe" episode which bows things out on more conventional note, but ultimately it's Troy McClure's closing statements in "Spin-Off Showcase" which resonate as the season's genuine sign-of, with its implicit warning that, once you've reached your peak, the only way to go is down.

"The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" is probably best understood as the third in a trilogy of aggressively meta episodes which aired across the latter half of Season 8, and which also consisted of "The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show" and "Homer's Enemy". We might even consider it a tetralogy, with "The Principal and the Pauper" (technically part of Season 9, but originally intended for Season 8) being the last (and, many would argue, the least) of the bunch. What "Poochie", "Enemy" and "Spin-Off" all have in common is that each of them functions as a self-reflexive commentary on the blessing/curse duality of the series having been able to reach this point in its career. "Poochie" plays this the straightest of the three, with a fairly conventional Simpsons plot in which the behind-the-scenes troubles at Itchy & Scratchy are used to express the writers' own thinly-veiled sentiments on the impossibility of their own predicament (the episode does, however, strike a deliberately unsettling note with the addition of Roy, a "hip" Gen-Xer who, mirroring the main Itchy and Scratchy plot, inexplicably joins the Simpsons household only to be hastily written out before the episode is through). "Homer's Enemy" is a little less upfront about its own intended subtext, but a lot starker in its conclusion; it involves a new employee, Frank Grimes, joining the Springfield power plant and growing increasingly exasperated, not only with Homer's wacky buffoonery but with the rest of the town's willingness to accept it as the norm. Grimes, like Roy before him, has blatantly wandered in from the wrong universe altogether and for that reason alone he cannot be allowed to survive the episode - before his inevitable (and, in this case, exceedingly mean-spirited) exit, he gets to throw in a few criticisms on behalf of everyone who felt that the show was growing increasingly detached from the (comparative) realism of the earlier seasons and into a celebration of stupidity and bad work ethics (with Grimes' ultimate fate demonstrating just how lovingly the writers value such feedback). "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" demolishes the show's fourth wall entirely and in the process has a lot of fun at the expense of cheesy cop dramas, gimmicky sitcoms and tacky variety shows, as well as the blatant desperation fueling many a spin-off's attempts to eke out a profit off the back of a ready-established property; nestled beneath this slew of stinging mockery, however, is the quiet admission that, yes, perhaps The Simpsons itself was on the verge of succumbing to that very desperation. "The Principal and the Pauper" reiterates some of these aforementioned fixations, with a character, Sergeant Skinner, who is cut from much the same cloth as Grimes, Roy/Poochie and the replacement "Lisa" from "Spin-Off", in that he blatantly doesn't belong in this universe - the joke, in all four cases, revolves around the fundamental "wrongness" of the character in the show's dynamic, but Sergeant Skinner represents by far the biggest threat to the status quo because he's dead set on replacing one of its long-established characters (turns out, the Seymour Skinner we thought we knew all this time was just an imposter). Obviously, the "real" Skinner cannot be allowed to stick around because, as far as the townspeople (and the status quo) are concerned, he's the imposter. Unlike Grimes, Sergeant Skinner is shown enough mercy to exit the episode with his life intact, but he doesn't exactly get a dignified send-off either.

Noteworthy is that fan reaction to the tetralogy grew consistently frostier with each new installment.  "The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show" seems almost universally beloved and is regarded as one of the classics of Season 8, but the conclusion to "Homer's Enemy" proved extremely divisive (for the record, you can put me in the "didn't like it" camp) and not everyone was on board with the sardonic insincerity of "Spin-Off Showcase". This brings us to "The Principal and the Pauper", which may well be the single most controversial episode in the history of the series (writer Ken Keeler has since defended the episode by claiming that he intended it as a preemptive mockery of what he anticipated would be the fans' reaction all along, but not everybody buys that - I personally am quite indifferent to the episode, but I do feel that, tonally, it suffers from an identity crisis which completely negates whatever waggish commentary it might have offered).

"The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" is not the most popular of the "meta" tetralogy, but it is my personal favourite of the bunch, chiefly because it's such a bizarre and beguiling addition to the series' legacy, one that's always fascinating to watch, even in the places where it doesn't quite succeed. It was so bizarre that some of the show's staff considered it a little too chancy, even for a series which had already broken as much ground as The Simpsons. Series creator Matt Groening was not a fan of the idea when it was originally pitched by Ken Keeler - he makes this clear in the episode's DVD commentary, where he notes that he was at one time "nervous and opposed" to it. Groening explains that his concerns were rooted in a fear that such an episode would do too much damage to the internal "reality" of The Simpsons (although probably no more so than any given Treehouse of Horror episode or the Season 7 episode "The Simpsons 138th Episode Speculator", which "Spin-Off" recalls in using Troy McClure as a host who appears to have temporarily exited the reality of his own show). The bigger risk, one suspects, came in the glaring departures from the show's regular style that would entail in attempting to emulate various forms of genre television - obviously, this would need to be played at just the right level, so that the audience could appreciate the deliberate hokeyness of the venture. What's particularly complicated about "Spin-Off Showcase" is that it goes a step further than simply being a straightforward collection of TV parodies - rather, it uses the whole concept of a spin-off as a starting point for making a statement about the creative shortcomings and misjudgements that pervade the television industry in general, with the paradox that The Simpsons recognises its own place at the top of the boundary-pushing pile while realising that it cannot possibly keep on maintaining that. Robert Sloane writes a very insightful analysis of the episode, along with the more meta aspects of Season 8 in general, in his essay, "Who Wants Candy? Disenchantment In The Simpsons", which can be found in the book Leaving Springfield: The Simpsons and the Possibility of Oppositional Culture, where he ruminates on this very point.

"The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" is a risky episode, although you could argue that it is not a particularly brave one in the specific targets it chooses, which (even from a 1997 standpoint) hail overwhelmingly from the television of yesteryear. The first segment, "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", takes on the police/detective dramas that were popular in the 1980s, most obviously Magnum, P.I. and Miami Vice (get a load of that Jan Hammer-inspired theme music). The second, "The Love-Matic Grampa" harks back even further to the fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, in which the mundane life of a nondescript loser was mildly enlivened by their relationship with an unlikely companion, be it a talking animal (Mister Ed), a supernatural being (Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie) or a possessed inanimate object (My Mother The Car). Finally, "The Simpsons Smile Time Variety Hour" sends up variety shows of the late 1960s and 1970s, mainly The Brady Bunch Hour but also Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. It's easier, one assumes, to get the viewer behind this kind of extensive lampooning when it's at the expense of shows which already seem hopelessly outdated and unfashionable by contemporary standards. The challenge was to make the three segments engaging while infusing them with a nagging sense of dread, their failure as hypothetical stand-alone shows feeling like a foregone conclusion. They had to be highly watchable and yet utterly pitiful all at once.

"The Love-Matic Grampa" has its work the most cut out of the three because its parody relies heavily on the intrinsic banality of the situation - the fact that it's so dull and unfunny is kind of the whole point. "Chief Wiggum, P.I." mimics the kind of action-orientated melodrama that lends itself quite readily to spoof, while "Smile Time Variety Hour" keeps things consistently colourful by bombarding the viewer with a whole lot of madcap visual weirdness, even when its humour seems a little out there. "The Love-Matic Grampa" is so low-key by comparison that it's tempting to dismiss it as little more than an exercise in bad writing for bad writing's sake. The AV Club review of the episode, written by Erik Adams, does exactly that, commenting that, "a bad joke is a bad joke is a bad joke.  Not even the heartiest of laugh tracks can disguise it." As usual, though, The Simpsons is attempting something more complex than simply trying to replicate the contrived punchlines and one-liners of second-rate sitcoms, and the laugh track serves a far more artful purpose than to cue a well-trained audience in on when a joke has been attempted. Sloane understands this when he observes that the very presence of a laugh track feels out of place in The Simpsons and that, as such, the viewer is invited to contemplate how troublingly "off" its usage is here. This is evident from the very start of the segment, when a depressed Moe laments that he is "so desperately lonely", only for the laugh track to immediately kick in; the absence of an actual joke, even a bad one, is jarring, making this kind of mirthful reaction to Moe's muted cry of despair seem vaguely disturbing, in Sloane's words, "wholly inappropriate and almost mocking."

As noted, the set-up of "The Love-Matic Grampa" owes a lot to the fantasy sitcoms of the 1960s, most obviously My Mother The Car. There's a small behind-the-scenes in-joke in there, of sorts, for Simpsons producer James L Brooks worked as a writer for that show early on his career (and judging by what's said on the DVD commentary he's a little sensitive on the matter). The charm of fantasy sitcoms (some would say triteness) derives from how they position the bizarre and extraordinary into the context of everyday life - the suggestion being that even if your best friend was something as wonderful as a talking horse, the two of you would still spend an awful lot of time bickering over which TV channel to watch. Truthfully though, "The Love-Matic Grampa" isn't really about My Mother The Car, Mister Ed or their ilk, and from this angle the parody is fairly superficial.* An element of subtle humour is certainly mined from the entire notion that this ludicrous and utterly far-fetched scenario should be used to such thoroughly mundane ends (namely, a possessed love tester machine assisting a socially awkward bartender with his romantic problems), but the segment's true interest lies more broadly in how the laugh track is deployed throughout. It's worth noting that, back in 1997, the laugh track was still very prevalent in live action sitcoms (although the practice was long-dead in animation), with most heavy-hitters of the era - Friends, Frasier**, Seinfeld, etc - seeming quite content to roll with the convention, so "The Love-Matic Grampa" has words to say about its contemporaries too. The show's staff admit on the DVD commentary that the segment is not overwhelmingly authentic to how things work in sitcoms (for example, there's a moment where Moe directly breaks the fourth wall by gesturing to the audience while Abe is spouting off on one of his long-winded anecdotes, which Keeler notes is not a convention borrowed from actual situation comedies).  It's less a deconstruction of sitcom cliches in general than of the specific function of the laugh track in sitcoms. The laugh track in "The Love-Matic Grampa" isn't there to cover for a dearth of jokes (as we might assume would be the case with a more lackadaisical sitcom); rather, it is the joke, albeit one which isn't exactly intended to elicit laughter in the actual audience.

Of the three faux spin-offs, "The Love-Matic Grampa" resonates with me the most because of my own deep-rooted love/hate relationship with the sitcom laugh track, which I previously touched upon in my review of the Family Dog episode "Enemy Dog". I'm not exaggerating when I say that there is something about laugh tracks that I've always found inherently disturbing. As a small child, I can recall being immensely unsettled whenever I heard the sounds of disembodied laughter bellow out in between character dialogue, and that's something that's stayed with me throughout life. I have a deep distrust of sitcom laugh tracks, of how they function and what they represent, yet as is so often the case with the things that make my skin crawl, there's an element of fascination involved too. I find myself drawn to anything that attempts to do something out of the ordinary with a laugh track, to turn it on its head and make us ponder its effects. This is The Simpsons' most prominent stab at tackling the laugh track, so naturally I've found myself returning to it time after time. In my experience it's easily the most misunderstood and undervalued of the three segments, with most viewers preferring the colour and energy of the other two. In a way, I don't blame them. "The Love-Matic Grampa" is a thoroughly (if intentionally) dreary slice of Simpsons, one that largely eschews the show's traditional sense of humour in favour of dabbling with misplaced audience reactions. It's a playful segment but there's something potentially quite alienating about it too.

The artificial audience does more than simply laugh, of course. When Homer breezes in for his obligatory "guest cameo" (as Troy McClure warned us he would), it breaks out dutifully into uproarious applause. This too was a common device in contemporary sitcoms for signalling that the viewer was expected to derive immediate gratification from their prior familiarity with an actor/character, it being the standard reaction whenever an old Cheers cast member showed up at Dr Crane's apartment or when Mr Magnum P.I. himself, Tom Selleck, first appeared as Richard Burke in Friends. In both cases, the applause is our cue that, even if we came to the show with no prior understanding of what we were seeing, we should still regard it as a "special treat". Despite the obvious theatricality of Homer's entrance, his appearance here feels less contrived than the entire Simpson family's in the "Chief Wiggum, P.I." segment - after all, Homer is one of Moe's friends in the series proper and regularly hangs out at his tavern - but that in effect makes the audience's reaction feel all the more baffling. Why are we suddenly being prompted to react appreciatively to something that we see in just about every Simpsons episode? Earlier in the segment, the audience also act as enraptured spectators to the verbal sparring between Moe and Abe, the responses being so heavily overblown as to create the impression that they are actively goading the two on. Moe tells Abe that he "wrote the book on love", to which Abe replies, "Yeah, All Quiet on the Western Front!" This is the kind of spontaneous, synthetically sassy put-down one regularly encounters in sitcom exchanges, and the audience erupts with exaggerated "oooohs". Moe's response, "Aww, kiss my dishrag!", elicits laughter, but this feels less like artificial sitcom banter and more like the kind of churlish, plebeian fling back that Moe actually would say; it's funny because it's so authentically Moe. As such, this is one of the rare moments in the segment where the regular Simpsons humour and the tastes of the canned audience are actually in sync.

Despite the hokeyness of the scenario, Moe remains entirely true to his regular Simpsons characterisation throughout.  Abe for the most part does not; it's difficult to imagine any circumstances in the series proper in which he would take such an active interest in Moe's love life. Initially, he appears to embrace his newfound role with a strange enthusiasm that suggests almost self-awareness that he's now the subject of a fantasy sitcom; he introduces himself as "The Love-Matic Grampa" and buoyantly reiterates statements from the segment's theme song ("I floated up toward Heaven and got lost along the way!") as if purposely trying to imprint the "hooks" of the series upon the viewer. Abe's facade completely falls apart, however, during a scene where he is left alone in a restaurant bathroom and murmurs forlornly to himself, "I've suffered so long...why can't I die?"  We might see humour in this line - after all, Abe here is technically already dead - but it's telling that the canned audience doesn't actually respond. Initially, the laugh track is jarring but as the segment progresses and we become accustomed to its presence, we start to notice just how sparingly it's actually used throughout, with a high number of sad and awkward moments being met with total silence. In the end, the inadequacies of the laugh track are revealed less in its failure to pass off bad jokes as good ones than in its failure to disguise the fundamental desolation that underpins the segment - the patheticness of Moe's non-existent love life coupled with the bleakness of Abe's situation.

The set-up for "The Love-Matic Grampa" is sufficiently ludicrous but on close inspection it is perhaps not very funny - the ostensibly cheery theme song opens with the lyrics, "While shopping for some cans, an old man passed away." Having failed to cross over into the afterlife, Abe now finds himself stranded in a rather undignified state of living death; the only viable way out of his dreary existence has already failed him. In many respects, his undisguised despair during the bathroom sequence serves as the centrepiece for the entire episode, a brutal puncturing not only of Abe's false vigor but of the entire practice of attempting to squeeze more mileage out of a waning show by manufacturing spin-offs when the subject of exploitation really does beg to be put to rest. (We might even interpret Abe's words as merging with the existential angst of The Simpsons in general, in contemplating if it too really wanted to keep on going for as long as it had).

Sloane sees the segment as an indictment of how reliant the sitcom format is on attempting to pre-determine audience reaction through the use of a laugh track; the idea that the viewer can be manipulated into finding the unfunny funny through simple conditioning. Although he notes the self-depreciating elements of "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase", Sloane identifies a self-congratulatory one too - it wants us to notice just how different the show's regular approach to humour is to that in "The Love-Matic Grampa" and to recognise The Simpsons as superior television (even when it's simultaneously admitting that it may be past its prime). Yet, more than simply sneer at the lameness of sitcoms, "The Love-Matic Grampa" considers how this kind of conditioning is also used to numb the viewer to the pain and drudgery of the characters' existences. There's a cosy, domestic quality to the laugh track (in theory, anyway), a reassurance that everything in this show exists purely for fun and that we can feel safe in laughing at even its uglier moments. "The Love-Matic Grampa", by contrast, presents us with a fairly dismal situation and uses the pre-determined audience reactions implied in the laugh track to heighten our unease at how it plays out. Moe's life isn't massively more enticing than Abe's - although the laugh track initially seems to enjoy his lonely desperation, we hear nary a peep from it later on as he fumbles his way through a dinner date with a pitiful lack of social awareness. Without the supposed "safety net" of the laugh track, his wretchedness as a character feels all the more salient. Sometimes, the misery is accentuated by the sheer cheapness of what the laugh track actually does respond to. Moe's prospective romance, Betty, wanders in from a potentially worrying situation, reporting that she was just in a car accident and needs to use Moe's phone. Betty doesn't appear in the least bit scathed or shaken by what she's been through, but it's troubling just how quickly her own problem is forgotten, with Moe and Abe immediately working on her as a potential suitor. A perfunctory effort is made to link the two threads - Betty agrees to use the love tester machine because she "could use a laugh after that accident" - but as a character, Betty is deliberately written poorly, tending to make sharp 180 degree turns in order to serve the demands of the story. By the end of the scene, she has not only been talked into a date with Moe with minimal prompting, but her mind is also on the possibility of sexual intercourse, her appallingly trite one-liner ("If this love tester is as accurate as it looks maybe we'll be having breakfast too") getting predictably strong approval from the canned audience.  Her aforementioned accident and the telephone call she came in to make no longer seem to matter. The assumption being lampooned in "The Love-Matic Grampa" is that sitcom audiences care little for plotting, creativity or emotional depth and are easily satiated with sassy comebacks, racy innuendo and - this being the 90s - a sprinkling of gay paranoia (Kearney gets mad at the love tester machine for suggesting that he's gay. Not that there's anything wrong with that).

Paradoxically, "The Love-Matic Grampa" concludes with the implicit admission that its set-up was not built for longevity. Unlike the "Chief Wiggum, P.I." segment, where much of the humour derives from the sheer clunkiness with which it attempts to establish itself as a long-running series, continuously emphasising the "exciting, sexy adventures" that will not be coming (to the extent that Wiggum neglects to apprehend a villain for no other reason than to give himself a recurring nemesis), "The Love-Matic Grampa" gives us a more-or-less complete story; there's little attempt to convey the illusion that there could be any further adventures with a desperate Moe and an undead Abe still to come. Following an all-too recognisable sitcom predicament, in which the protagonist attends an important engagement that they then have to keep on awkwardly abandoning, Betty catches Moe arguing with the love tester machine and he finally comes clean with her, only to get the girl anyway because Betty is flattered by the lengths he went to impress her. The upbeat nature of the ending is undercut by the obvious glibness of it all, a parody of the sitcom tendency to find facile solutions to messy problems within half an hour (or in this case, seven minutes). While the majority of fantasy sitcoms would typically involve the protagonist having to keep his chum's supernatural leanings a secret at all costs, here Moe surrenders the truth about the love tester quite casually and with no repercussions, somewhat undermining the suggestion that he could keep spinning wacky charade after wacky charade from their unusual friendship week after week.*** It's hard to imagine this rather limited scenario lending itself to an infinite number of story variations, yet there is a curious sense of "what if?" to the entire affair. For all its obvious weaknesses, we come away wondering how well a sitcom featuring a miserable bartender and a haunted love tester machine really would fare if it was given a chance. Perhaps they have the answer in the same parallel universe where Hollywood Dog amounted to more than just a discarded pilot.

* Send-ups of archaic sitcoms can be a tough sell. 1990s BBC sketch show Harry Enfield and Chums once toyed with a sketch called "Mr Dead The Talking Corpse", a fairly straightforward spoof of Mister Ed, which Enfield admitted only clicked with a very small minority of his audience. Then again, Mister Ed didn't make a massive dent in British popular culture, so many were unfamiliar with the source (of course! of course!) and didn't get just what the hell they were watching.

** Frasier, of course, being one of the rare spin-offs to achieve acclaim and longevity, is kept at a firm distance during the scenes at the Museum of TV and Television, as it doesn't quite fit with the implicit narrative that spin-offs are inherently ill-conceived and doomed to failure. Also, wasn't there another highly successful series from the around the same era which was technically a spin-off from a late 80s comedy sketch show? I can't quite put my finger on it.

*** David Crabtree, the protagonist of My Mother The Car, actually does try to be honest and upfront with his family about his new 1928 porter containing the reincarnated spirit of his deceased mother, but in his case it doesn't go over so well.