Abstract
In a segment of The Simpsons episode “Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington” (March 2003), we see the Simpson family gathered around the television watching Krusty the Clown, who is running for a seat in Congress, engage in a televised debate with his opponent on the Fox News channel. The Fox News anchor begins the segment by saying, “Welcome to Fox News, your voice for evil.” This rather shocking announcement is then followed by a satirical attack on the bias in mainstream news media and, more specifically, on the so-called “fair and balanced” reporting that Fox purports to offer. Krusty (the Republican candidate) is introduced as “beloved children’s entertainer Krusty the Clown” and is shown standing before an American flag with a halo superimposed above his head; his opponent (the Democratic candidate) is introduced only as “this guy” and shown with a Soviet flag in the background and little red devil horns drawn atop his head. The anchor also refers to Krusty as “Congressman,” although, as his opponent exclaims, “He hasn’t won yet!” To this the anchor replies, “You make a very adulterous point.” This “debate” then concludes with a Krusty campaign commercial, an overtly propagandistic series of cliché images (apple pie, baseball, farmland, etc.) and sounds designed to invoke patriotic sentiment and to make Krusty appear “all-American.” We are additionally given a parody of the Fox News channel’s infamous “news crawl” at the bottom of the television screen; as the debate unfolds, viewers (of the debate and of The Simpsons itself) read the following messages:
Pointless News Crawls Up 37 Percent & Do Democrats Cause Cancer? Find Out at Fox news.com & Rupert Murdoch: Terrific Dancer & Dow Down 5000 Points & Study: 92 Percent of Democrats are Gay & JFK Posthumously Joins Republican Party & Oil Slicks Found to Keep Seals Young, Supple & Dan Quayle, Awesome &
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
—Vladimir Nabokov1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 75.
Jeff Guinn, “Al Franken Celebrates a Well-Timed Lawsuit with New Book,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 5, 2003, 1.
Matt Groening, interview with Jon Stewart, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central, July 18, 2007, http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=90145.
Paul Harris, “In the Yellow Corner: Simpsons and Fox Slug It Out over ‘Racism’ Jibe,” Guardian, December 1, 2010, 25.
Dave Itzkoff, “Friendly Enemies on Fox: Simpsons and O’Reilly,” New York Times, December 1, 2010, C3.
Amanda Lotz, “Textual (Im)Possibilities in the U.S. Post-Network Era: Negotiating Production and Promotion Processes on Lifetime’s Any Day Now,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, no. 1 (2004): 23.
Laurie Thomas and Barry R. Litman, “Fox Broadcasting Company, Why Now? An Economic Study of the Rise of the Fourth Broadcast ‘Network,’” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 35, no. 2 (1991): 140.
In 1945, the FCC, obligated by statute to distribute broadcast licenses and frequencies for television service, established a table allocating the VHF channels to the country’s 140 largest markets. In 1948, beset by the tremendous postwar flood of applications for new licenses, the commission issued a “freeze order” suspending all action on such applications until further study had been made of the channel-allocation problem. In 1952, the FCC lifted the freeze order and adopted its Sixth Report and Order; this established a nationwide city-by-city table of television channel assignments, which provided for the use of both VHF and unused UHF channels, in a practice known as “intermixture.” These decisions resulted in the concentration of broadcasting within the narrow confines of the VHF band (channels 2–13). Various technical and economic problems prevented the extensive use of the UHF band (channels 14–83) until 1961, when Congress passed the All-Channel Receiver Bill, which ensured greater access to UHF signals and led to the slow but steady growth of UHF stations throughout the country. For a very thorough history of this, see Hugh Slotten, Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology in the United States, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), chapter 5, “VHF and UHF: Establishing a Nationwide Television System 1945–1960,” 145–88.
Christopher H. Sterling and John Michael Kittross, Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, 3rd ed. (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 871.
For a detailed history, see William Shawcross, Murdoch (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 201–38.
Ironically, the Metromedia stations were largely the remnants of the old DuMont network. After Dumont Laboratories shut down its DuMont network, it spun off some of its holdings into the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company, which included two television stations that DuMont had owned outright. Metropolitan was later purchased by investor John Kluge, renamed Metromedia, and turned into a profitable business that specialized in airing syndicated network shows. For a more detailed history, see Daniel M. Kimmel, The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2004), 6–13.
Jonathan Mahler, “What Rupert Wrought,” New York, May 21, 2005, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11673/.
John Cassidy, “Murdoch’s Game,” New Yorker, October 16, 2006, 70.
David McKnight, “‘A World Hungry for a New Philosophy’: Rupert Murdoch and the Rise of Neo-liberalism,” Journalism Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 348.
Jeff Chester notes that between 1999 and 2002, News Corporation spent almost $10 million on lobbying, much of it directed at the FCC. Murdoch’s company donated nearly $1.8 million to political parties in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, with the majority of its funds going to the GOP, and, as of December 2003, had already made over $200,000 in contributions into the 2004 election. Chester, “A Present for Murdoch,” Nation, December 22, 2003, 26. The amount of money being spent has increased substantially since this time. Most recently, Murdoch made headlines one again with his unprecedented $1 million donation to the Republican Governor’s Association. See Eric Lichtblau and Brian Stetler, “News Corp. Gives Republicans $1 Million,” New York Times, August 18, 2010, A13.
Neil Chenoweth, Rupert Murdoch: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Media Wizard (New York: Crown Business, 2001), 200.
Quoted in David Carr, “White House Listens When Weekly Speaks,” New York Times, March 11, 2003, E1.
O’Reilly’s show was originally called The O’Reilly Report; it was renamed in 1998. See John Colapinto, “Mad Dog,” Rolling Stone, September 2, 2004, 104–11.
For more on Ailes’s career, see Tim Dickinson, “The Fox News Fear Factory,” Rolling Stone, June 9, 2011, 54–84.
For more on his role at Fox News, see Jennifer M. Proffitt, “Challenges to Democratic Discourse: Media Concentration and the Marginalization of Dissent,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 29 (2007): 65–84.
Jeffrey P. Jones, Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 59.
Diller himself had a background in Hollywood film as well as television, functioning as chairman of Paramount Pictures from 1974 to 1984. Diller also flirted briefly with establishing a fourth network, in 1977, while still at Paramount. The Paramount bid was for Saturday evening programming, but the plan never took off because of the unreliability of UHF signals and poor advertiser response, among other things. Ben Grossman, “The First Twenty Years,” Broadcasting & Cable, November 13, 2006, 18.
Alex Ben Block, Outfoxed: Marvin Davis, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Joan Rivers, and the Inside Story of America’s Fourth Television Network (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 169.
Mark Morrison, “Year of the Fox,” Rolling Stone, October 4, 1990, 76.
Ronald Grover, “The Fourth Network,” Business Week, September 17, 1990, 114–17.
Matt Groening, “Matt Groening,” in Current Biography Yearbook, 1990, ed. Charles Mortiz (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1990), 288.
Harry F. Waters, “Family Feuds,” Newsweek, April 23, 1990, 61.
Richard Zoglin, “The Fox Trots Faster,” Time, August 27, 1990, 64.
William Savage, “‘So Television’s Responsible!’: Oppositionality and the Interpretive Logic of Satire and Censorship in The Simpsons and South Park,” in Leaving Springfield: “The Simpsons” and the Possibilities of Oppositional Television, ed. John Alberti (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 220.
See, for example, Jerome Klinowitz, Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985)
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987)
Steven Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995)
Darryl Dickson-Carr African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).
Chris Lamb, Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 43.
Donald Dewey, The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 5–6.
Richard E. Marschall, “The Century in Political Cartoons,” Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1999, 54.
While both artists began offering their critiques from a generally populist and leftist position, by the early 1960s, Capp had moved to the far right politically. Dewey, Art of Ill Will, 63. For an informative overview of Capp and Kelly’s work, see Kalman Goldstein, “Al Capp and Walt Kelly: Pioneers of Political and Social Satire in the Comics,” Journal of Popular Culture 25, no. 4 (1992): 81–95.
Kristin L. Matthews, “A Mad Proposition in Postwar America,” Journal of American Culture 30, no. 2 (2007): 212.
Stephan E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 108 and 118.
John Nichols, “Huey Freeman: American Hero,” Nation, January 10, 2001, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020128/nichols.
For more on Trudeau, see Lamb, Drawn to Extremes, chapter 2, “President Bush Has Been Reading Doonesbury and Taking It Much Too Seriously,” 30–56. For more on McGruder, see Ben McGrath, “The Radical: Why Do Editors Keep Throwing The Boondocks Off the Funnies Page?” New Yorker, April 19, 2004, 152–161.
For excellent overviews, with reference to all of the artists cited, see Edward J. Lordan, Politics, Ink: How Cartoonists Skewer America’s Politicians, from King George III to George Dubya (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).
An important contribution to the discussion of satire on film is Donald McCaffrey’s Assault on Society: Satirical Literature to Film (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992), which examines selected films of the 1960s and 1970s that were adaptations of literary works.
McCaffrey’s section on Kubrick, which discusses both Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange (1971), is particularly illuminating. For more on the independent filmmakers, see Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York: New York University Press, 2001), especially chapter 7, “Comedy and Satire: Tackling Taboos,” 249–81.
It should be noted that filmmaker Robert Altman and cartoonist Gary Trudeau made a foray into television with the HBO series Tanner ’88 (1988), a satirical take on presidential politics. Altman and Trudeau teamed up again in 2004 to produce a sequel, called Tanner on Tanner, which focused on the Democratic presidential race that year. The four 30-minute episodes of Tanner on Tanner ran on the Sundance Channel in the fall of 2004, just prior to Election Day. See Jill Abramson, “A New Tanner Joins the Race,” New York Times, September 26, 2004, late ed., sec. 2, p. 26. My focus in this chapter will remain on network television.
Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, eds., Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), 8.
For more, see Aniko Bodroghkozy, “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and the Youth Rebellion,” in The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict, ed. Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 201–20
Steven Allen Carr, “On the Edge of Tastelessness: CBS, the Smothers Brothers and the Struggle for Control,” Cinema Journal 31, no. 4 (1992): 3–24; and the documentary film Smothered: The Censorship Struggles of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”, directed by Maureen Muldaur (New Video Group, 2003).
Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the American Dream (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 97.
John D. Rich and Robert W. Weisberg, “Creating All in the Family: A Case Study in Creative Thinking,” Creativity Research Journal 16, nos. 2/3 (2004): 248.
David Marc, Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 199–200.
Arnold Hano, “Can Archie Bunker Give Bigotry a Bad Name?” New York Times, April 12, 1972, SM33.
Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1989), 10.
Alfred Appel, The Annotated Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), xlix.
Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 22. For more on Nabokov’s views on parody and satire, see the relevant sections in Brian Stonehill, The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989)
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000)
David H. J. Larmour, Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov’s Prose (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Robert Lang, Parody: The Art that Plays with Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
Joanne Ostrow, “HBO Leads the Pack in Bringing Satire Back,” Denver Post, June 8, 1997, H01.
Matthew Gilbert, “Satirical Yet Sweet, Simpsons Remains America’s Favorite Nuclear Family,” Boston Globe, February 16, 2003, N1.
Paul Cantor, “The Simpsons: Atomistic Politics and the Nuclear Family,” Political Theory 27, no. 6 (1999): 734.
William Irwin and J. R. Lombardo, “The Simpsons and Allusion: ‘Worst Essay Ever,’” in “The Simpsons” and Philosophy: The D’oh of Homer, ed. William Irwin, Mark T. Conrad, and Aeon J. Skoble (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2000), 82.
Jamie J. Weinman, “Worst Episode Ever,” Salon, January 24, 2000, http://www.salon.com/2000/01/24/simpsons_2/.
David Carr, “Is Animation Funnier than Live Action?” New York Times, July 6, 2003, AR18.
Douglas Kellner, “TV, Ideology, and Emancipatory Popular Culture,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 487.
“Michael Moore Discusses His New Series, The Awful Truth,” interview with Scott Simpson, Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, April 10, 1999, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1048125.
Trish Hamilton, “Rabbit Punch,” Rolling Stone, September 1988, 81.
Jeremy Gerard, “Bad Language, Hurt Feelings and Success,” New York Times, February 21, 1990, late ed., C18.
Brian Viner, “D’oh! I Made Murdoch a Billion Dollars,” Independent, September 2, 2000, 8.
Sanjiv Bhattacharya, “Homer’s Odyssey,” Sunday Herald Sun, August 27, 2000, Z12.
Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus (1994; repr., New York: Ballantine, 1996), 7.
Brian Doherty, “Matt Groening,” interview, Mother Jones 24, no. 2 (March/April 1999): 35.
Tom Shales, “They’re Scrapping Again—But This Time It’s a Ratings Fight,” Washington Post, October 11, 1990, C1.
M. S. Mason, “Simpsons Creator on Poking Fun,” Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 1998, B7.
Brian A. Connery and Kirk Combe, Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 5.
Dustin Griffin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 186.
Steven C. Weisenburger, Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 3.
Ted Gournelos, Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 88.
Copyright information
© 2012 Matthew A. Henry
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Henry, M.A. (2012). “Entertain and Subvert”: Fox Television, Satirical Comedy, and The Simpsons . In: The Simpsons, Satire, and American Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027795_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027795_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43976-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02779-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)