Aluminum Christmas Trees / The Simpsons

The Simpsons' satire can sometimes be so absurd that not many people know they're making fun of a real person, place, thing, event, or phenomenon.

---

• Most brands in the series are fictional, of the "looks like it could be a real company" variety, with recurring ones including Duff Beer, Malibu Stacy, and Krusty Burger. Laramie cigarettes fits right in with that crew, even down to several aspects of it being based on famous cigarette companies (the boxes are almost identical to Marlboro boxes, and the company had a Joe Camel-style mascot that was retired due to claims that it was trying to push cigarette smoking on children). But there really is a company named Laramie, though they stopped manufacturing cigarettes in the 1950s and the name is now used for rolling papers.
• If you saw the episode "Tales From The Public Domain", parodying William Shakespeare's Hamlet, before reading the actual play, you might be surprised to discover that the ear poison was used in the original, and not merely a comedic prop used in the parody. Shakespeare's usage was based on a contemporary urban myth circulating in the day (the murder of that myth was well-known, the method was unverified).
• The episode "All Singing, All Dancing" opened with the family watching what seemed to be a Western, with The Man With No Name walking into a dusty town and then breaking into song about "painting his wagon" with Lee Marvin, horrifying Bart and Homer who wanted them to kill each other. The portrayal is exaggerated in the episode, which also inserts Lee Van Cleef dressed as Colonel Mortimer, but it surprised a lot of fans who later discovered the film Paint Your Wagon, starring Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin, actually exists. And it was after Clint became famous from the Leone westerns. And, yes, they both sang. Well... okay... but they both tried to. The song and wagon-painting scene aren't part of the musical, though. That was probably because they couldn't afford the rights to either the visuals or the music of the original to make a closer parody and because, let's face it... having Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood gleefully paint a wagon ("Be sure to use oil-based paint, because that wood is pine!") when Homer and Bart are waiting impatiently for them to break out in a fist- or gunfight is pure Rule of Funny.
  • Even better - Clint Eastwood tried his hand at singing country songs and released several singles over time. One duet with Merle Haggard, "Bar Room Buddies," even made it to the top of the Billboard Country charts in 1980.
• The Corey Hotline that Lisa runs up the phone bill by repeatedly calling in "Brother from the Same Planet" was a real 1-900 number.
• In "Sweets and Sour Marge", it is stated that The Duff Book of World Records, an obvious parody of the Guinness Book of World Records, was created to settle bar arguments. This seems like a non-sequitur making fun of the drunks in Springfield but this is the actual origin for the Guinness World Records. Yes, it's that Guinness.
• "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" features the titular group, the Be Sharps, managing to become well-known celebrities and even win a Grammy (for whatever that's worth). While it seems absurd that a band operating in a genre associated with the 30s could have top-billboard hits in the 80s, there really was an a capella craze during the period when the Be Sharps would have been active — Bobby McFerrin's 1988 single "Don't Worry, Be Happy" was entirely a capella and a number one hit.
• Speaking of Duff, using a superhero mascot to sell beer is probably too strange of an idea to ever happen in real life, right? Wrong. Duffman is a parody of Bud Man, a mascot character used by Budweiser from the late 60s to the early 90s. The colors of the costume are similar, and later versions of the character even sported similar sunglasses. He was likely discontinued for the same reason Joe Camel was, over concerns that the product was being marketed towards kids (a point that was actually brought up by Marge about Duffman in the episode "Waiting for Duffman").
• The episode "Lisa's First Word" flashed back to 1984 and included a running gag about Krusty's burger chain going broke due to an Olympic promotion that didn't anticipate the Communist boycott of those games; specifically, that customers would get a free Krusty Burger for every gold medal won by the American teams. And with America's top competitors sitting it out that year... yeah. As Cracked points out, that actually happened to McDonald's that year.
• "Grift of the Magi":
  • Krusty wishes his audience "a Merry Christmas, a happy Hanukkah, a 'kwazy' Kwanzaa, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn, dignified Ramadan." Because Islam runs on a lunar calendar, it is possible for Ramadan to coincide with the other December holidays, and it actually did in 1999 when this episode aired.
  • When Gary Coleman is seen working as a security guard for a toy company, it probably just seemed like a rather strange way to write him into the episode and like they were poking fun at the actor's size, but it was actually a very topical joke. Coleman really did work as a security guard for a while, gaining news attention about a year before the episode aired when he assaulted a fan who was pestering him for an autograph and insulting him while he was on patrol.
• A number of people thought that Love Is... was something Homer made up in "A Milhouse Divided".
• Remember Disco Stu's platform shoes with live (well, initially) goldfish in them in "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson"? Real. As you might've guessed, the goldfish typically didn't live through one trip to the disco.
• In "The Mysterious Voyage of Homer", when Homer starts hallucinating after eating too many spicy peppers, that's not just a G-Rated Drug: eating sufficiently spicy food really can cause hallucinations. Now, the Merciless Peppers of Quetzalacatenango that Homer ate, those are fictional. Ridiculously spicy peppers exist though. The currently highest contender is the Carolina Reaper, a crossbreed of a bhut jolokia (or "ghost pepper") and a Red Habanero. For reference, it's described to be about 12 times hotter than habanero.^note Habaneros average around 225,000 Scoville Units on the hotness scale, depending on ripeness and specific type; by this measurement, Carolina Reapers come out at 2,700,000. Oh, and for the record, self-defense grade pepper spray starts at 2,000,000 Scoville units. That's a spicy meatball-er....pepper.
• In "Mom and Pop Art", Homer tries to become a modern artist and Lisa suggests that he do something big and extravagant, citing the example of "Christo", who planted hundreds of yellow umbrellas next to a highway—some of which, she worryingly adds next, flew away and killed some children. The cited artist and the incident are real. It happened in Camarillo, California in 1991, and the only thing that contradicts Lisa's account is the fact that the sole victim was an adult woman.
• "They Saved Lisa's Brain":
  • When the smartest members of Springfield took political power over the town, Skinner announces that Springfield will convert to metric clocks. This seems like an example of the group's snobbery, but metric time was an actual concept. During The French Revolution, there was an active campaign to rid France of any trace of its former regime which included remaking the clock and calendar to fit the metric system meaning 10 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 days in a week and so on. Since the common French weren't prepared for the transition, metric time was a complete disaster.
  • Stephen Hawking, the episode's Special Guest, grumbled at one point that "people think I'm a Simpsons character." Between the relative Mainstream Obscurity of his work to the general public and the rather gleeful Adam Westing he received (including a Super Wheelchair), it's not hard to imagine why a viewer might think the show invented the character wholecloth.
• In "Homer Badman", Homer gets accused of sexually assaulting a young woman, so he goes on the Show Within a Show "Rock Bottom", a parody of the 90s investigative journalism show Hard Copy, to state his case. Unfortunately for Homer, they deliberately skew his statements to paint him as a crazed sexual predator because it's bringing in high ratings. Many of the tactics they also use, such as setting up camps outside people's homes, were things Hard Copy would do, and are not exaggerated jokes done by the Simpsons writers.
• In "Days of Wine and D'oh'ses", Homer goes to the Kwik-E-Mart and asks Apu for "those chips that cause diarrhea". Apu then returns with bags of what appear to be ordinary Ruffles. This was based on a real-life product known as Lay's WOW Chips introduced a couple years before the episode aired, which famously contained the indigestible modified fat olestra^note Long story short, olestra molecules were altered to be too big for the intestine to absorb; the effect on the body was pretty similar to swallowing mineral oil, a known stool loosener.
• "Jaws Wired Shut":
  • Mike Tyson parody Drederick Tatum, at an event about stopping littering, says "Litter is my most treacherous foe. I would like to eat its children." Seems like a bizarre non-sequitur, but it's almost a direct quote from an off-the-cuff speech of Tyson's where he was talking about a rival boxer (who didn't actually have children at that point).
  • Grampa's claim that Sauerkraut used to be known as Liberty Cabbage seems like one of his usual tall-tales about the olden days (perhaps with a hint of satire based on the then-recent renaming of French Fries to Freedom Fries). However, Sauerkraut really was marketed as Liberty Cabbage during World War I, due to concerns the American public would reject a product with a German name. A similar mentality lead to calling hamburgers "Salisbury steak", before that was used for a different dish entirely.
• In "Itchy & Scratchy Land", Bart thought it was ridiculous that the gift shop had no "Bart" vanity license plates, but they did have "Bort" ones. "Bort" is a real name - though nowhere near as common as the show made it out to be.
• The "Springfield Poolmobile" in "Bart of Darkness" seems like a kooky way for the city to provide summertime refreshment, but it actually used to be a common way for urban kids to get some well-appreciated pool time, especially before the widespread use of public pools.
• One episode has Homer hire a prostitute to play air hockey with. It seems like a simple "Homer being Homer" joke, but people hiring prostitutes for things other than sex happens all the time in real life. It's even a trope.
• "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase":
  • The "Love-Matic Grampa" section is just an over-the-top mocking of silly high-concept TV shows, right? Nope! It's pretty much lifted straight from short-lived 1960s sitcom My Mother the Car; writing for that show was Simpsons Executive Producer James L. Brooks' first gig in Hollywood.
  • "The Simpson Family Smile-Time Variety Hour" is very closely based on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, between the cheesy G-rated comedy, the C-list guest stars, the baffling use of an existing set of characters, the weird musical numbers done by people who don't seem all that well-trained, and the blatant use of The Other Darrin by replacing a main cast member with someone who looks nothing like her whatsoever. Chances are, you only know about that show because of this episode; it's a perennial placer on "worst shows of all time" lists.
• The Simpsons and John Callahan's Quads! have Homer and Riley, respectively, become ordained ministers online, and the latter even lampshades it. Yes, you actually can get ordained online.
• An automaker wouldn't actually offer a trim level on one of their cars explicitly intended for women, right? Wrong. Meet the Dodge La Femme, a rare version of the first generation Dodge Lancer offered only in 1955 and 1956. It may not have come standard with a lipstick applicator where the cigarette lighter normally goes like in the Canyonero F-Series (from "Marge Simpson in Screaming Yellow Honkers"), but it did come with a lipstick case, which could be found inside of an included purse that matched the interior of the car. The purse also contained a compact, a comb, a change purse... as well as a cigarette case and a lighter. It was the 1950s, after all. Unlike the Canyonero F-Series, it's not likely that Homer wouldn't have realized that the La Femme was intended for women: it was only offered in shades of pink, the interiors were pink and rose gold, and there were "La Femme" badges all over the thing. Long after the episode aired, there was also a controversial version of the SEAT Mii designed by Cosmopolitan and the Japan-exclusive Honda Fit She's.
• In "Bart the Fink", Kent Brockman reports on Krusty being arrested for "tax avoison", despite his crewmembers insisting he say "evasion". "Tax avoison" is a real term, though Kent wasn't using it correctly: It's a portmanteau of "tax avoidance" (lowering your paid taxes legally) and "tax evasion" (lowering them illegally), and refers to methods of tax reduction that are ambiguously legal.
• "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade" features a gag about Springfield's location that suggests the town has a Confederate flag despite being in a Northern state. Confederate flags and monuments deep in Union territory is far more common than one would think, due to the romanticizing of Confederate history in white supremacist groups (and even some Native reservations) across far more than just the South. The vast majority of them weren't even built or adopted until long after the war, even well into the twentieth century, one even going up during the shows airing.
• "Saddlesore Galactica" has Homer and Bart rescuing a race horse from a fair attraction where it is thrown into a water receptacle from a great height. This looks like a ridiculous way to introduce a horse into the story, very in line with the infamous surreal twist of the episode (all professional jockeys in Springfield are secretly elves)... but "diving horses" were an actual sideshow attraction in America during the 19th and 20th centuries. The difference is that pressure from animal rights groups discontinued them by The '70s.
• In opening of "the PTA Disbands", the "Fort Spingfield park" has been taken over by "Diz-Nee" in what seems to be a Take That! at the Walt Disney company. The gag was based on the real Disney's America planned as a park five miles/eight KM from the town of Haymarket Virgina. The park would have been very close to the site of a American Civil War battlefield. Public backlash, criticism from historians and the poor performance of EuroDisney caused the plans to be canceled.
• In "Funeral for a Fiend", Sideshow Bob brings a vial of nitroglycerin into a courtroom, which everybody believes is to blow up the place, but Bob reveals it was actually a treatment just before having a heart attack. Nitroglycerin is actually used in medicine to treat heart conditions (though obviously not in liquid form).
• In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Principal Skinner cooks lunch for himself and Superintendent Chalmers. After he burns his pot roast, he tries to pass off Krusty Burgers as "steamed hams". It actually is possible to steam a hamburger.
• To non-Americans and city-dwelling Americans, the eponymous holiday of "Whacking Day" (in which Springfielders use sticks to beat as many snakes to death as they can) sounds like something typical of the series to showcase Springfield's jerkassery. However, it is in fact based on an actual form of festival that occurs in parts of the rural midwest and Deep South in which people gather up venomous snakes and try to kill as many as they can.
• The chalkboard gag for "When You Dish Upon a Star" has Bart writing "butt.com is not my e-mail address." It was later discovered that butt.com was a real website... a pornographic one. In subsequent airings, Bart's alleged email address changed to "butt.butt".
• Bart's evil French guardians adding anti-freeze to sweeten their wine in "The Crepes of Wrath" may seem like a cartoonishly evil exaggeration, but it's actually based on a real life scandal from the 80s, when several Austrian wineries were spiking their wines with diethylene glycol to add sweetness without having to add sugar, and several people did in fact get very sick.
• In "Who Shot Mr. Burns: Part 2", it's revealed that Maggie Simpson shot Mr. Burns as he was trying to take away her lollipop (in his struggle, his gun fell into her lap and went off, wounding him). Sounds silly, doesn't it? Though as Mythbusters has demonstrated, taking candy from a baby is not as easy as it sounds.
• In "Bart Sells His Soul", Bart tricks the Springfield Church into playing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by giving it the title "In The Garden Of Eden". "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" actually was originally called "In The Garden Of Eden." Doug Ingle dictated the title to his drummer while drunk and sleep-deprived, resulting in it coming out as incomprehensible gibberish.
• Skinner in "Separate Vocations" shows Bart a storeroom of items confiscated from students, including "complete collections of MAD, Cracked, and even the occasional issue of Crazy!." Much as it sounds like just the show riffing on the first two, Crazy! was actually published by Marvel Comics, for a year in the 1950s and then from 1973-83. It had been out of publication for nine years by the time the episode aired.
• "The Itchy And Scratchy And Poochie Show:"
  • Bart, Lisa, Milhouse, Nelson, and Ralph at the focus group wanting a down to earth show with magic robots while being able to win things by watching doesn't sound so far off from either anime or Super Sentai/Power Rangers premises, and even the Pokémon anime allowed for a costless alternative for something to win for watching the show in the "Who's That Pokémon?" commercial break cutaways.
  • Homer at one point declares that if they want to save Poochie as a character, he needs to be "louder, angrier, and have access to a time machine." That last one sounds like a completely random Homer-ism, right? Not quite: it's a reference to Family Matters, where Steve Urkel built a time machine in the eighth season, a common point brought up by viewers who saw him as a Creator's Pet and a herald of the show becoming Denser and Wackier to maintain interest (a major running theme of the episode).
• "Weekend at Burnsie's" features a guest appearance by the jam band Phish; during their scene, guitarist and lead singer Trey Anastasio is shown playing a few bars of The Simpsons theme song on his guitar. This wasn't a throwaway gag for the episode, but a reference to something Anastasio actually did during the band's concerts for several years: in the early '90s, Phish had taught their fans a series of "Secret language signals" that were intended to identify regular concertgoers and to mess with newbies. One of these was Anastasio playing The Simpsons theme on his guitar, to which the audience would reply with a loud "D'oh!". For the episode, the "D'oh!" was changed to a generic "Boom!" to avoid a Celebrity Paradox. Anastasio would even deploy these signals in the middle of long jams, including during "Run Like an Antelope", the song they perform in the episode.
• In "Bart of Darkness", Bart's old-timey play script includes the line "Is it St. Swithin's Day already?" Those outside the United Kingdom may be surprised to learn that it is a real holiday, celebrated annually on July 15th. It's mostly remembered because of the folklore that if it rains on St Swithin's Day, it will rain for the next forty days.
• In "The Otto Show", Homer finds a can of Billy Beer in one of his old jackets. Surprisingly, this is an actual beverage, which started being produced in 1977, promoted by Billy Carter, brother of then-President Jimmy Carter, to cash in on his brother's presidency.
  • The same episode had Homer sing a seemingly made up lyrics to Spanish Flea. Most people don't realize that those are the actual lyrics, having only ever heard the instrumental by Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass (which is what Homer is singing along to), rather than the original by Julius Wechter.
• In "Krusty Gets Kancelled", a drunken Barney chants "We want Chilli Willi!" as the Red Hot Chili Peppers dispute with Moe, who booked them to play in his bar. This is a Stealth Pun on the pub-rock band Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers, whose members included a pre-Residents Snakefinger.
• At the start of "The Regina Monologues", the plot revolves around Bart getting a $1000 bill that Mr. Burns lost, and uses it as a museum piece that raises enough money for the family to take a trip to England. The 1000 USD Bill did exist and Grover Cleveland is indeed the face of that bill.
• In "Please, Homer, Don't Hammer 'Em", Bart has a Peanuts collection called Good Grief, More Peanuts. While this may seem like a Take That! towards the comic for running for 50 years, there have been two Peanuts collections with the same name.
• The episodes "Homer Loves Flanders" and "Lisa on Ice" both make references to a rap-oriented musical about Ronald Reagan. While this may just seem like absurdist humor, Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau really did write and produce an off-Broadway musical, music video, and made-for-TV movie between 1984 and 1988, all called "Rap Master Ronnie" and all built around the conceit of Ronald Reagan becoming a rapper to attract more black voters.
• In "The Milhouse of Sand and Fog", the Simpsons throw a "pox party" when Maggie gets chickenpox, so that other kids can catch it, since chickenpox is worse for adults than children. This may seem like some absurd ritual made up for The Simpsons, but some families actually do this. However, it's become much rarer since the advent of the chickenpox vaccine.
• It's easy to write off Truck-O-Saurus, the gigantic robotic T-Rex that eats cars in "Bart The Daredevil", as just a typical example of the show's satirical takes on American entertainment, but it's actually a direct parody of Robosaurus, a giant robot built by Doug Malewicki that has toured around the world at various stunt shows since the early 1990s. If anything the version depicted in the show is actually more subdued than the actual Robosaurus show.
• While most people today think that the reference to Donald Trump being President of the United States in the episode "Bart to the Future" (which aired in March 2000) "predicted" Trump's eventual election to the presidency, Trump was actually involved in his first unsuccessful presidential campaign at the time. He ran as a candidate for the Reform Party for the 2000 election but ended his campaign after four months with Pat Buchanan being selected as the Reform candidate.
• In "Team Homer", Skinner shares a story about his imprisonment during the Vietnam War, specifically remembering "a thin stew of fish, vegetables, prawns, coconut milk, and four kinds of rice. I came close to madness trying to find it here in the States, but they just can't get the spices right!". Skinner's describing a real Vietnamese dish called Thai Tom Kha Goong.
• In "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder", while at the bowling alley, Lenny mentions that his banana split cost him $7.10, a joke referencing the dreaded 7-10 pin split during tenpin bowling. It's actually not uncommon for bowling alley snack bars to sell banana splits with this price as a humorous reference to every bowler's worst nightmare.
• The Transclown-O-Morphs gag where the clown robot tells kids to "buy my cereal!" in "Apocalypse Cow" is only a slight exaggeration of how real cartoons in the 50's through the 70's would shill for their corporate sponsors. Before legislation was passed limiting the quantity and method of advertising in children's programming, cartoons really would grind the story to a halt for an in-show commercial.
• In "Guess Who's Coming To Criticize Dinner?", Homer gets hired as a food critic for the The Springfield Shopper newspaper and is introduced to their TV critic, but Homer gets upset with him, blaming him for getting two shows that Homer enjoyed, Platypus Man and The Cosby Mysteries, cancelled. These were, in fact, real shows that aired during the mid-90s (the ending of "Who Shot Mr. Burns?: Part 1" spoofed the latter with a Fourth Wall Psych).
• In "Principal Charming," Marge brings up the time that Homer dragged the family to visit the Bowler's Hall of Fame in St. Louis, Missouri to see a car shaped like a giant bowling pin, with Homer reminscing of a picture of it. At the time of the episode's first airing, the Bowling Hall of Fame was a real museum in St. Louis, and did have a car shaped like a bowling pin displayed there (though Homer's picture depicts the bowling pin standing up, rather than on its side). The museum has since moved to Arlington, Texas.
• "Bart on the Road" left a few people surprised to learn that the Sunsphere in Knoxville, Tennessee is actually real, and really was built for when Knoxville hosted the World's Fair in 1982. Never used as wig-storage, though.
• In "Viva Ned Flanders", the joke about the church auditing its members to make sure they were tithing 10% of their gross income. The Mormon Church actually requires members in good standing to review their tax returns with their church leaders for this exact reason.
• While it may seem made up for "Simpsons Bible Stories", there is a "Goliath II" in the King James Bible, though it is Goliath's brother rather than his son.
• At the time "Behind the Laughter" came out, there really was a Simpsons Sunday newspaper strip, which began in January 2000 and ran until 2004.
• As mentioned in "The Old Man and the 'C' Student", "intercourse" is the name of a real town in Pennsylvania.
• In "Lisa the Veterinarian", Bart's wiener-fish prank might seem like a joke in his standards, but "those tiny fish that swim up your wiener" actually exist in real life. Candiru fish (Vandellia cirrhosa) are a group of parasitic catfish that are common in South America (especially the Amazon Basin), and are known for swimming into the urethra. Although, cases of this are relatively low.
• In "Bart's Not Dead", Bart's improvised detail about Jesus riding a rainbow horse is taken straight from Heaven is for Real, one of the Near-Death Experience-based bestsellers being parodied in this episode.
• In Itchy and Scratchy: The Movie we see the original Itchy and Scratchy cartoon Steamboat Itchy a parody of the "first" Mickey Mouse cartoon Steamboat Willie. It starts innocently enough with Itchy and Scratchy whistling while Itchy steers the boat, then it takes a turn. For those who only know the cartoon for it's Signature Scene of Mickey steering the boat, this comes of as typical Itchy and Scratchy but anyone who's seen the full cartoon will know that it actually dose take a turn after that particular scene.