Bart, unable to believe that his hero could be guilty of such a crime, plays detective and ultimately exonerates Krusty, though not before the clown is humiliated in court by the revelation of his illiteracy. Krusty may be a clownish figure, but he actually has a great deal of depth. In addition to his illiteracy, we also learn that he was born Herschel Krustofski, the son of a rabbi. Krusty had long been estranged from his father, who did not approve of his son’s choice of profession, but in “Like Father, Like Clown” (October 24, 1991), Bart, for once doing a good deed, effects a reconciliation between the two.
Krusty also adds significantly to the satire of television in The Simpsons, which may be more about television than anything else . Krusty’s program itself parodies live-audience children’s programming such as that pioneered by Howdy Doody, which ran on ABC from 1947 to 1960 and featured, in addition to the title puppet, a clown called Clarabell (played for the first couple of years by Bob Keeshan, who later played Captain Kangaroo for many years). Another important referent of the Krusty show is the Bozo the Clown show that was franchised to various local stations in the United States, running most prominently on Chicago television, where it was
carried in various incarnations from 1960 to 2001, attracting a national audience when its Chicago station, WGN, went national during the cable explosion of the 1980s.
Among other things, Krusty the Clown is the kingpin of a vast merchandising empire that specializes in poor-quality merchandise, often dangerous to children. Thus, at the end of “Krusty Gets Busted” we see Bart going to bed between Krusty sheets with a Krusty bedspread and with a room
entirely covered with Krusty toys and other merchandise. Perhaps the most critical depiction of Krusty’s various business enterprises occurs in the episode “Kamp Krusty” (September 24, 1992), in which Lisa and Bart attend a summer camp endorsed by the clown, only to find that children are brutally mistreated at the rundown, dilapidated facility. The treatment of Krusty’s merchandising in The Simpsons satirizes that phenomenon in general, though the most obvious referent here is The Simpsons itself, which has enjoyed some of the most successful and lucrative merchandising of any program in television history. The Simpsons, like the Flintstones, have also
Animation’s New Age: Meet The Simpsons 55
appeared in television commercials for a variety of products, most notably Butterfinger candy bars, Bart’s favorite.
An important foil for Krusty and his lowbrow antics is the erudite
Sideshow Bob, whose horror at Krusty’s lack of cultural sophistication is matched only by the sheer malice of his hatred for popular culture, not to mention for both Krusty and Krusty’s devoted fan Bart. That Krusty is perfectly willing to commit armed robbery and even murder in the interest of his cultural ends suggests that the high culture he so loves does not necessarily make one a good person. In “Sideshow Bob’s Last Gleaming”
(November 26, 1995), the cultured clown’s hatred of the “chattering
cyclops” of television finally boils over, causing him to escape from one of his many terms in prison—this time a minimum security facility where a fellow inmate is apparently Rupert Murdoch, the arch-conservative media mogul whose company owns the Fox network. Subsequently, Bob steals an atomic bomb and threatens to blow up Springfield if the town doesn’t do away with television altogether. The town reluctantly complies, leaving only the Emergency Broadcasting System operational. Desperate to stay on the air, Krusty commandeers that channel, where his program can run nonstop, assured of a 100 percent share of the local viewing audience. Bob ignites the bomb, despite the efforts of Bart and Lisa to stop him, but it turns out to be a dud, having had a 1959 expiration date. After a spirited chase, Bob is captured and returned to prison, while Springfield television returns to its usual mindless fare.
Perhaps the most mindless fare of all is the ultraviolent Itchy & Scratchy Show, in which the sadistic mouse Itchy continually visits horrific cartoon violence on the dim-witted cat Scratchy (though Scratchy, in the tradition of Wile E. Coyote, is always able to bounce back for more). Bart and Lisa are both devoted viewers of the cartoon, which often appears as a segment on the Krusty the Clown Show. Snippets of Itchy & Scratchy cartoons appear in any number of The Simpsons episodes, while a number of episodes are centrally devoted to the cartoons of the cat-and-mouse duo.
In “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” (December 20, 1990), Marge is horrified when she realizes that the spectacular violence of the Itchy & Scratchy Show has apparently inspired baby Maggie to club Homer over the head with a mallet. Marge then launches an activist campaign that eventually forces such violence off the air in Springfield. As a result, the children of the city turn away from television, returning to a variety of wholesome, mostly outdoor activities of the type that might have been pursued by characters in the sitcoms of the 1950s. Then, however, Michelangelo’s famous anatomically correct statue of David comes to Springfield in the
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Drawn to Television