Homer Simpson

Who is your favorite cartoon character?

View all responses

I became familiar with The Simpsons when the featured in the Tracey Ullman show back in 1989. Then, it became a series in itself. All the initial hype was about Bart, but Homer very quickly became my favourite. The actor who played him used to be in the Tracey Ullman sketches too.

I watched cartoons as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe Mr McGoo was my favourite back then. I don’t hear much about him nowadays. I think that he had bad eyesight and got confused about things. Nowadays, perhaps people feel that the show was cruel to people with disabilities. Maybe a time will come when people will think that the Homer character is cruel to silly people. The Irish are mocked in the Simpsons in a few episodes. I don’t take offence at that. It’s said that laughter is the best medicine. Nowadays too many people easily take offence. Mocking can be affectionate or nasty. Affectionate mocking has brought be a great deal of joy. I see humour as a gift of God that makes life a little easier. It’s the same with music.

Because this is a Christian blog, some might think that I should prefer Ned Flanders. I don’t dislike Ned. But we should remember that churches are made up of all types of personalities. We should be ourselves rather than model ourselves on stereotypes. Maybe all of us are somewhere between Homer and Ned – or between Lisa and Bart. And maybe there’s a bit of Marge in us too. I also like a lot of the other Simpsons characters.

There was a time when I much prefereed British comedy to American comedy. I don’t remember much Irish comedy. I did like Zig and Zag and I got to like Father Ted – about a decade after it came in TV 😀.

I’d watch American comedies, such as The Mary Typer Moore show, but I’d get much more excited about Fawlty Towers and other British comedies. But The Simpsons changed all that. Our kids grew up with it too. We all loved it. At some point it went downhill. I suppose you can’t sustain something great indefinitely. But I love to watch all the older episodes.

I like to end my posts with a few hymns in some way related to the topic. I can’t think of how to relate today’s topic to hymns. Maybe I’ll leave it to Ned Flanders and some other Simpson’s clips 😀.