The 25 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years
5. Homer Simpson- The Simpsons

As Modern Family swept last month’s Emmys, people seemed enamored of the idea that co-creator Steve Levitan based the characters on his own family. Levitan mentioned it three or four times in his acceptance speeches, and the smug announcer passed it on with awestruck grandstanding. Every time someone gushed “and he based them on his own family,” I felt like adding, “You know, like every storyteller since the beginning of time.”

Levitan is part of a long line of writers to have mined the people closest to them for conflict. Family is the most natural source of tension because, to a large degree, it can’t be escaped. We’re bound to these people who disappoint us, frustrate us, and embarrass us; but we learn to live with them because we have to. All of your complicated feelings about human nature begin with your family relationships, and that education is universal.

The key to understanding Homer J. Simpson—the affectation of the middle initial always gets me—is knowing that he is named after creator Matt Groening’s own father. In turn, Homer is everything our own fathers are. He’s fatuous, envious, sluggish, truculent, and petty. He is short-sighted enough to sell his soul for a doughnut, and he is unhip enough to wear a tie with a short-sleeved shirt. He hates a job he shouldn’t even have, and he performs his duties terribly. He represents the qualities an adult artist would hate in his own dad.

At the same time, Homer has huge googly eyes and four-fingered stubs for hands. His most famous catchphrases are inarticulate coos and screams. His lilting, heavy-tongued speech—which Dan Castellaneta never gets enough credit for voicing—reveals his gentle side. We see him as a child would see his father. We’ve spent hundreds of years forgiving the sins of characters because we suspect there is more to their inner lives. With Homer Simpson, we ignore the most damning characteristics of American males because, outwardly, he’s so child-like. He’s both too human to be a cartoon and too cartoon to be a human.

Over the show’s exhausting run, Groening and his writers have challenged us to sympathize with such a lazy, solipsistic person. If you started watching at any point past season nine, I can understand if you don’t see it, but Homer has always been adrift in a gulf of untenable consequences. You probably missed the season one episode in which Homer tries to throw himself off a bridge but is unable to lift the weight that would presumably drown him. You missed the season two episode in which Homer struggles to make amends in what he thinks is his last day on earth. You missed the season eight episode in which Homer drives a humble, hard-working man* to madness just by being his oblivious self.

In each of these cases, however, Homer embodies a purity of character and a lack of malice that make him admirable. He’s not gluttonous; he’s Epicurean. He’s not apathetic; he’s permissive. In all of those examples, he lives to d’oh another day, as if God can’t punish a person who is this true to himself, even if he is inconsistent to the people around him.

That’s where later episodes of the show have faltered: not by altering Homer, but by changing his environment’s response to his lovable blundering. Sure, if Homer loses his job in an episode, we know it’s temporary. But in the show’s prime that was never delivered in a condescending way, as if we were supposed to forget about the aftermath of his actions just because this is an animated sitcom. Things didn’t work out for Homer because the writers couldn’t think of better options; things worked out for Homer because he lived in a forgiving universe.

Case in point: The Simpsons Movie was modestly successful, but it played too loose with these tacit rules. When Marge breaks up with Homer halfway through the film, the rift has an air of finality that disrupted this understanding the viewer has had for twenty-odd years. As perverse as it sounds, we want Homer’s hedonism to be accepted. We want other characters, especially the one who understands him the most, to find the humor in his selfishness and stupidity. We want them to grade on a curve. We want all dads to go to heaven. And if a baby-talking yellow oaf can make us admit our own benevolent nature, he transcends his crude beginnings.

Earlier this week, Fox announced—after a bit of waffling—that it had renewed The Simpsons for two more seasons.(By now, Homer and Marge have been married way longer than my own parents ever were.) The renewal was bittersweet since I think the show is fundamentally different from the seasons three-through-nine peak. Despite evidence of the show’s decline, I hope for a renaissance, even as I pray that, in most ways, Homer never, ever changes.

It’s hard to let go of family.

*- Shout-out to Frank Grimes.