Sometimes, The Simpsons jokes hit a little too close to home.
- Due to the death of Pope John Paul II, FOX temporarily banned the Season 16 episode "The Father, The Son, and the Holy Guest Star", since it centered on Bart going to Catholic school (after once again getting expelled from public school) and Marge trying to stop him from converting (since Marge is against Catholicism). It ended up being the season finale while the intended season finale ("The Girl Who Slept Too Little," where Lisa becomes too scared to sleep after the Springfield Cemetery is moved next to the Simpson house) was aired as a season 17 episode with a season 16 production code.
- The Season 9 episode "The Cartridge Family" (where Homer buys a handgun to protect his family after the town is plagued by a soccer riot — which seemed to disappear from the plot as quickly as it came) was scheduled to air in the UK, but due to the Dunblane School Massacre (and the fact that the BBFC despises scenes of characters — be they heroes or idiots — fooling around with weapons in such a way that impressionable viewers will see it as fun to imitate), this episode was banned (though it does appear on the "Simpsons: Too Hot for TV" VHS and the Simpsons season 9 DVD set).
- In "Treehouse of Horror III," there's a Freeze-Frame Bonus of a spinning newspaper reading "Woody Allen Born." The episode aired in the fall of 1992, when the... vagaries of Allen's personal life were becoming impossible to ignore, so for most of the frames, the headline reads "Dick Cavett Born" instead.
- On the Season 4 episode, "Duffless",note the scene of Barney mistaking a pile of rags for Princess Diana (and driving his car up to get a look, leaving Homer to fall on his butt after throwing himself out a window to escape a giant spider) was edited in the UK following Princess Diana's death to make it look like Homer fell and missed the mattress on the car entirely (which, in a way, makes sense, given Homer's character and the fact that Barney is a drunk who shouldn't be behind the wheel of a stationary bike, much less a car).
- On the Season Five episode "Rosebud" note , Burns's line, "Damn you, paparazzo!" after a cameraman flashes a picture of Burns playing with Maggie in her sandbox was cut down to "Damn you!" note
- In the season 11 episode "Bart to the Future", where Bart is shown his future as a drunken wannabe rock star while Lisa is the President of the United States, Bart tries to come up with a coolness plan at Camp David, and Krusty suggests opening with a joke: "What's the difference between Pakistan and a pancake?" The punchline: "I don't know any pancakes that were nuked by India!" Bart and the others stare at Krusty in shock, and Krusty replies, "What? Too soon?" Apparently, it was — around the time that India and Pakistan really were on the brink of nuclear war, the UK airing of "Bart to the Future" cut that entire part.
- Back in the late '90s, the Season 6 episode "Homer Badman" note was edited on the UK's Sky One to remove the part where Groundskeeper Willie accidentally shows a video clip of Mayor Quimby making out with a floozy in the backseat of his car.
- After the March 2011 meltdown at Fukushima, episodes that prominently feature the nuclear plant were withdrawn from broadcast for a while in Germany and Switzerland. A spokesperson for ProSieben, the show's network in Germany however, it was stated that it hadn't had to change
its scheduled episodes in the first weeks after the disaster, and didn't edit the opening credits. - The 400th episode "You Kent Always Say What You Want" was originally titled "The Kent State Massacre", but the title was changed due to the Virginia Tech Massacre occurring one month before its scheduled airdate.
- Originally, "Stop Or My Dog Will Shoot" was scheduled to air on April 26, 2007. However, again due to the Virginia Tech Massacre on April 16, the episode was pulled (due to scenes of gun abuse and a school emergency calling for evacuation [only on the show, it was because of Bart's pet snake running loose, not from a gun-toting maniac]) and didn't air until May 13th.
- Following Michael Jackson's death, the UK's Sky One removed several scenes from the Season 12 episode "The Great Money Caper" that involved a loopy street performer who was impersonating Jackson with a quartet of rod-and-stick puppets who were resembling his brothers in their days as The Jackson 5. All of those scenes were later reinstated 2 years later.
- The Season 10 episode "Viva Ned Flanders" re-ran on the same day as the Columbine shootings. Oddly enough, the reason the episode became this trope was because of a line where Homer says that Barney's birthday is the same day as Adolf Hitler's, which was April 20th. Future airings, as well as those overseas, replaced it with him saying that he shares his birthday with Lassie the Dog on July 15th.
- In the Season 7 episode "Team Homer", Homer is shown having stolen the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor given to Dr. Haing S. Ngor for The Killing Fields. Only a month after it first aired, Dr. Ngor was murdered, meaning viewers who saw that episode afterward would likely think Homer killed him for it. In syndication and on the season seven DVD set, the Oscar was changed to the one given to Don Ameche for Cocoon, who had died a few years earlier, but of natural causes.
- After the airing of the controversial documentary Leaving Neverland, the Season 3 episode "Stark Raving Dad", guest starring Michael Jackson, was pulled from reruns, home media releases, and digital streaming at the order of the show's producers, making it the show's first straight-up Missing Episode. The producers explained that they no longer believed Jackson's intentions in participating in the episode were as "benign" as they see it.note
- "Marge in Chains" hasn't aired reruns on FXX or Freeform since March 2020, due to the episode's plot being kickstarted by a flu epidemic in Springfield, which can be seen as in poor taste due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. It's still on Disney+ and DVD, though.
- "The Joy Of Sect" was written in 1997, at roughly the same time that the members of the Heaven's Gate cult committed mass suicide. The writers noticed strange parallels between the first draft and Heaven's Gate, including the belief in the arrival of a spaceship and the group's members wearing matching clothes and odd sneakers. Because of these coincidences, several elements of the episode were changed so that it would be more sensitive in the wake of the suicides.
- In the "Treehouse Of Horror IX" segment "Hell Toupee", originally, Troy McClure was supposed to host Snake's execution on FOX, but the writers found that to be in bad taste due to Phil Hartman's recent murder (something not helped by the fact that it would have been Hartman's final performance on the show, and even if Hartman had died by other means, replacing Troy still would've been necessary as Hartman had not yet recorded his lines before his untimely death), so they reanimated the scene and hired Ed McMahon as the new host. This means that Troy's usual You Might Remember Me from... speech was reworked into Advertising by Association ("From the producers of When Skirts Fall Off, and Secrets of National Security Revealed...").
