There are many truly iconic moments in The Simpsons. The true measure of whether a moment has graduated to the status of popular culture legend, however, is just how many memes have been made about it.
Every Simpsons fan, no doubt, remembers the moment in which Mr. Burns reveals he has an entire room full of monkeys at typewriters, all in an effort to prove the theory that a roomful of monkeys typing away could produce Dickens. Unfortunately, the monkeys don’t succeed in quite the way that Burns had anticipated, and an entire universe of hilarious memes was spawned.
Outrage!
One of the things that makes this moment in the episode so funny is that it really does refer to a scientific theorem. As always, with this show, it’s the fact that the jokes have some purchase in the real world that gives the joke their signature bite and sense of humor.
This meme takes this a step further to show a very realistic simian expressing outrage at the very thing that it has seemingly created.
Ungrateful Dead
In case anyone was wishing for a mashup of The Grateful Dead and The Simpsons, this meme comes to the rescue. It takes one of the best lyrics that the band ever wrote and runs it through those clacking monkey typewriters to produce something that is both hilarious yet oddly beautiful.
Apparently butchering the words of the immortal Charles Dickens isn’t the only thing these typing simians are good at, and even rock music isn’t safe anymore.
This Could Get Ugly
The brilliance of the monkey moment is that it can be translated into almost any other instant in the run of the show. In this case, it’s transplanted into the time when Dr. Hibbert (one of the show's best side characters) performs an emergency appendectomy, after which the appendix actually explodes like a grenade.
There’s something morbidly funny about the moment to start with, and this is only accentuated by the idea that an appendix would “blurst.”
The Mashup We Didn’t Know We Needed
One can’t help but admire the way that people are so adept at bringing together the most incongruous pairings of pop culture in memes. In this case, it takes The Simpsons (in the form of the infamous Sideshow Bob, here transformed into a monkey) and the character of Paul Blart.
Though it’s hard to imagine wanting any character played by Kevin James to die, there’s no question that this meme still manages to be pretty hilarious (though hopefully Paul Blart has some good security around him).
Change The Settings
Everyone’s been there. Some device doesn’t work quite as it should, and no amount of tinkering seems to be able to fix the problem. Of course, all it takes is for the right person to see the problem, and everything is resolved rather quickly.
In this case, naturally, the problem is that the monkey was set to “blurst” instead of “worst.” Mr. Burns would probably have liked to have that information before he spent so much time encouraging the monkeys to try to create literature.
Money Makes The World Go Round
Of all the characters that appear in this show, Mr. Burns is by far the wealthiest and also one of the worst characters. One can’t help but think that an entire room of typing monkeys would be expensive, not just in terms of making sure that they have enough to eat but also in making sure that they have enough light to see while they’re typing.
Even for a man of Burns’s wealth, it must require quite a capital outlay, particularly for something that’s basically a whim.
Like A Layer Cake
One of the best things about this show has always been its sense of humor. Somehow, it always manages to layer all sorts of allusions to popular culture and history into its various narratives.
The brilliance of the original show is sometimes matched by the meme-makers of the internet, who seem to have as much creative energy as the best screenwriters. Here, they’ve managed to bring together The Beatles, The Simpsons, and an in-joke that is dizzyingly layered.
Another Awesome Mash-Up
As if it weren’t enough that the internet saw fit to mash together The Simpsons and Paul Blart, some enterprising genius also thought it was a good idea to mash in some Star Trek.
It’s precisely the incongruity of these two universes (can one imagine two more different people than Homer Simpson and Spock?) that makes this meme one of the funniest to make use of the literary monkeys.
Ouch
Leave it to the internet to take something from this show and transform it into a biting piece of political commentary. In this case, it translates it into the notorious interview between journalist Jonathan Swan and President Donald Trump.
Given that Swan really did have some truly incredulous looks on his face during the course of the interview, this meme format, in all its incarnations, became extremely popular, so it’s not surprising to see it turn up in The Simpsons universe.
Identity Crisis
There are many characters to love on this show, but Lisa Simpson is truly something special. She seems to have a very firm sense of herself and her personality, what she wants out of life and how to get there.
That’s exactly what makes this meme so brilliant and why it works on so many levels since it suggests that Lisa’s identity might not be quite as solid as she (and the audience) once thought.