New Book Traces Cultural Impact of ‘The Simpsons’ — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

After over 35 years on air, it’s safe to say The Simpsons has left an impression on most Americans’ lives. Unless, of course, they’ve been living in a bubble (or a dome covering the entirety of Springfield).

For those not in-the-know on all things Treehouse of Horror, monorails or that time George Harrison rubbed shoulders with Homer Simpson at a Grammys afterparty, author Alan Siegel’s new book should answer a few questions. The Ringer senior staff writer’s latest release — Stupid TV, Be More Funny: How the Golden Era of “The Simpsons” Changed Television—and America—Forever takes readers “inside the making of an American phenomenon during its most influential decade, the 1990’s,” according to the book’s synopsis.

In just over 300 pages, Siegel details arguably the most impactful 10 years of the show’s run following its 1989 debut, featuring interviews with creatives who helped bring it to life. The book offers an “unparalleled look inside the making of the show,” as well as an exploration of its overall impact on popular culture.

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So crack open a can of Duff, order yourself a Krusty Burger and embiggen your knowledge of the show’s cultural impact in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, below.

It’s difficult to succinctly summarize the effect The Simpsons has had on American culture. But to do that, I’ll start with a story about an absurdly silly joke and the people who love it. On October 2, 1994, Fox aired “Itchy & Scratchy Land,” a Simpsons episode that lampoons the Disney World experience. At one point, Bart and Lisa stop in the fictional park’s gift shop. Intrigued by a display of novelty license plates, the former searches in vain for a souvenir featuring his name.

BART: Look at all this great stuff, Lis. Cool! Personalized plates! “Barclay,” “Barry,” “Bert,” “Bort”? Aw, come on. “Bort”?

CHILD: Mommy, Mommy! Buy me a license plate.

MOTHER: No. Come along, Bort.

MAN: Are you talking to me?

MOTHER: No, my son is also named Bort.

The throwaway gag returns later, when an employee manning Itchy & Scratchy Land’s underground control room says, “We need more ‘Bort’ license plates in the gift shop. I repeat, we are sold out of ‘Bort’ license plates.” The joke is so inconsequential that the episode’s DVD commentary panel — which includes Matt Groening, David Mirkin, and director Wes Archer — doesn’t bother to mention it.

Three decades later, just uttering the word “Bort” unlocks joy in even the show’s most discerning fans. Why, two decades later, do people continue to reference “Bort”? Because it’s the kind of joke that only The Simpsons could’ve made.

At its peak, the show had the ability to take something utterly inane and render it endlessly quotable.

If you believe this theory is bunk, visit the website of your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles and try to order a “Bort” vanity license plate. Chances are some other Simpsons obsessive has beaten you to the punch line.

Looking back on the golden age of The Simpsons, it’s hard not to say that the show had a huge hand in the commodification of modern fandom. The animated series helped make pop culture merch a multibillion-dollar business. These days, every last corner of every movie and TV franchise is licensed and sold. Knowing an obscure Simpsons reference used to be a secret handshake. Now it’s something you can buy and show off.

By now, The Simpsons has permeated our culture to the point where words the writers made up during the show’s first decade are entering the official lexicon. In March 2018, Merriam-Webster announced that it was adding “embiggen” to the dictionary, defined as “to make bigger or more expansive.” Writer Dan Greaney made it up for the 1996 episode “Lisa the Iconoclast.” We first hear it in an educational film about town founder Jebediah Springfield.

JEBEDIAH SPRINGFIELD: A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

MRS. KRABAPPEL: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield.

MISS HOOVER: I don’t know why. It’s a perfectly cromulent word.

In 2023, Merriam-Webster added “cromulent” to the dictionary. It means “acceptable, satisfactory.” “There are plenty of TV catchphrases that have seeped into our lexical consciousness, but none of them has been as sly as cromulent,” reads the Merriam-Webster entry.

“The joke was so sly and subtle that as ‘It’s a perfectly cromulent word’ was repeated, it wasn’t necessarily clear to the hearer that it was a joke. It was a joke and now it’s a real word,” Simpsons writer Bill Oakley says. “So there’s no joke there anymore.”

Like “embiggen,” “cromulent” has appeared in the New York Times crossword puzzle. “It seems like there’s a lot of people who spend their time communicating in Simpsons references or phrases from the show,” Oakley adds. “Then there’s also something more specialized, which is all the remixing.”

In February 2018, for example, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Kehinde Wiley’s official portrait of Barack Obama was unveiled. The painting, which features the 44th U.S. president sitting in front of lush green vines and colorful flowers, wasn’t universally beloved. Crusty art critics and right-wing trolls joined together to bash the work for not looking exactly like every other lifeless oil-on-canvas depiction of a U.S. president.

Simpsons fans, on the other hand, adored the painting. They celebrated it in the only way they knew how: by posting photos of the leafy portrait side-by-side with images of Homer walking through Ned Flanders’s bright green hedges. Both are works of art. The meme was the perfect companion to a one-of-a-kind creation. The former is a tool used to help understand the latter. This is why The Simpsons’ heyday is relevant today. It shaped the way an entire generation of smart people processes the world.

We’ve now even reached a point where a large swath of the country believes that The Simpsons can tell the future.

It’s true: The Simpsons has predicted a lot, from Washington beating Buffalo in Super Bowl XXVI, to the proliferation of video phones, to Siegfried & Roy’s tigers attacking their masters, to the Walt Disney Company buying 20th Century Fox. In a Season 11 flash-forward episode that aired in 2000, Lisa is the president of the United States. While sitting in the Oval Office, she mentions inheriting “a budget crunch from President Trump.”

“It was just kind of a fill-in-the-blank joke,” says then-showrunner Mike Scully. “We’d left Lisa saying, ‘I’ve been left a big budget deficit by President blank.’ [Writer] Mike Reiss says, ‘Who would be the dumbest person we could have?’ There were other names thrown out, but Trump, around that time had thrown out the possibility that he might run for president someday. So it was in the air. We didn’t just, you know, pull it out of nowhere.”

The writers certainly didn’t think they were making an actual prediction. And in hindsight, they don’t see themselves as soothsayers. “It’s just a matter of smart people being behind desks,” Simpsons editor Brian Roberts says. “I don’t think there’s any precognitive thing in there at all.”

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To writer Jay Kogen, the show’s predictive power is a matter of sheer volume. “We’ve been making fun of everything,” he says. “If you make fun of everything and make impossibly silly jokes about everything, it turns out 30 years later, some of them turn out to be true.”

The Simpsons has been around for so long and has covered so much ground that it’s become one of the world’s richest texts. Watch almost any episode from the ’90s and you’ll be able to identify a broad plot point or a specific sight gag that’s prophetic. The series has become a 21st-century animated Bible: it’s dense enough to be interpreted in many ways. Whatever your worldview, though, you can easily find something that seems to match your beliefs. Even if your read is completely wrong. Or at best warped.

As funny and satisfying as “Simpsons predicted” moments often are, the phenomenon is often far less meaningful than fans make it out to be. Treating the series like a mere fortune-teller cheapens its actual vision. The Simpsons didn’t just accidentally predict singular events, it understood the world in a way that most other shows didn’t.

Excerpted from the book Stupid TV, Be More Funny by Alan Siegel. Copyright © 2025 by Alan Siegel. Reprinted with Permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.

Stupid TV, Be More Funny is out now via Grand Central Publishing, wherever books are sold.