The Simpsons has parodied pop culture from the show's debut in 1989. From the annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween special episodes to regular characters lampooning real-life celebrities, the show has always satirized both real-life events and pieces of popular media.
In the show, there have been scenes depicting characters watching movies that exist within their universe. Often, they are parodies of real-life movies or humorous pastiches of popular genres, but often they are quick cutaway gags that make for some of the most memorable lines on the show.
School of Hard Knockers
In "Homer Goes To College," Homer watches this raunchy comedy movie to get into the spirit of college life. In the film, the troublemaking students prank the college dean, Dean Bitterman, by making it rain bras when the President of The United States pays a visit to the campus. Homer quickly gets into the movie and enjoys the revenge on Bitterman.
The movie is a parody of gross-out, X-rated college movies that were popular in the '80s, such as Animal House. The cutaway scene makes a great gag because of the sheer ridiculousness of the college comedy genre and sets up Homer's prank when he kidnaps his college's pig mascot to annoy the dean.
Man Getting Hit By Football
Often known as "football in the groin," this short film was made by and starring Hans Moleman in the season 6 episode "A Star Is Burns." In an attempt to make Springfield more cultured, the town hosts a film festival for citizens to submit their own movies. The film's reaction is met with silence, except for Homer, who cries with laughter.
Hans Moleman is one of The Simpsons' most underrated characters. The pint-sized senior citizen is a man of a few words, but when he speaks he has some of the best one-liners and gags in the show. The film is a few seconds of slapstick which, with the character of Hans and the silliness of the joke, made it effective and also the source of many memes amongst Simpsons fans.
Get Out of My Dreams and Also Out of My Car: A Guide to Your Restraining Order
The dysfunctional animated TV family hit a fever pitch in the season 16 episode, "On a Clear Day I Can't See My Sister." On a field trip where Lisa tries to speak to her classmates about climate change, Bart ruins the speech by making fart noises on a walkie-talkie. Tired of his pranks, Lisa files a restraining order against Bart, and Chief Wiggum shows him an instructional film on the new situation.
The title of the movie alone is a hilarious play on the title of the Billy Ocean song "Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car." Infamous Hollywood actor Gary Busey makes a cameo in the movie, explaining to the viewer how a restraining order works. This joke is a wink to the fact that Busey has been involved in many legal troubles in real life.
McBain
The McBain character appeared throughout the 1990s cartoon episodes as small clips when characters are watching television with scenes peppered across the series out of order. The clips parody cheap, predictable shoot-'em-up movies of the 1980s and 1990s that rip off popular action movies like Die Hard. The Austrian actor character portraying McBain, Rainier Wolfcastle, is in itself a parody of Austrian action star Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The sheer commitment of the Simpsons writers and animators to continue this movie in small segments out of order is an impressive running joke in itself. The McBain clips perfectly capture how clichéd and stupid many of these cash-in action movies are, usually involving a stereotypical foreign villain and a best friend character that dies just days shy of retirement.
McBain: Let's Get Silly
Rainier Wolfcastle returns to the movies in the new comedy-action film McBain: Let's Get Silly. The movie is introduced as a clip on film critic Jay Sherman's show as he interviews Wolfcastle. In the movie clip, the character poorly performs some Jerry Seinfeld-style observational stand-up and kills hecklers by shooting them and throwing grenades at them, in the way that only McBain could.
This scene has so many comedic layers that add up to one hysterical scene. The joke perfectly lampoons Arnold Schwarzenegger's subsequent comedy movie career in the 1990s that fell flat. McBain's deadpan delivery, combined with some oddly funny jokes and his violent overreaction, all add up hilariously. When Sherman asks him how he can sleep at night making such awful big-budget Hollywood movies, Wolfcastle ends the joke with the perfect punchline in his response, "on top of a pile of money, with many beautiful ladies."
Meat and You: Partners in Freedom
Just one of a selection of great Troy McClure informational films, the movie is shown at school in the episode "Lisa The Vegetarian" after Lisa refuses to dissect an animal and wants a vegetarian lunch. This meat industry-sponsored movie attempts to highlight the goodness of eating cattle meat, showing the process of cows entering a slaughterhouse.
The movie is full of many little gold nuggets of great jokes in an amazingly absurd one-minute clip. There are so many one-liners like "let's take a peek at the killing floor. Don't let the name throw you, Jimmy, it's not really a floor." The facial expressions and the brief added segments of the "food chain" all add up for constant laughs throughout, and the movie prompts one of Ralph Wiggum's best-ever lines: "When I grow up, I want to go to Bovine University!"
The Muppets Go Medieval
In his acting ventures, Troy McClure return to screens for The Muppets Go Medieval - an old movie from 1977 the Simpson family watch on a rainy day. They watch the now washed-up McClure attempt to woo princess Miss Piggy with a suave kiss and engage in a sword fight with Kermit The Frog. McClure later takes Selma to see the movie on a drive-in movie date where he proposes to her.
The movie is perfectly absurd for someone who is as cartoonish and fake as Troy McClure, who Bart mistakes for "a leather muppet." When he recites lines from the movie while proposing to Selma, asking for her "dainty hoof in marriage," while Selma swoons like Miss Piggy, this humorously foreshadows their marriage that was doomed to fail.
Truckasaurus: The Movie
Truckasaurus is a robot-dinosaur hybrid monster created by Professor Frink, parodying the popularity of franchises like Jurassic Park and Transformers, as well as the popularity of monster trucks in the 1990s. One clip shows an advertisement for the tie-in movie, apparently voiced by Marlon Brando.
The cross-over of the cash-in blockbuster movie with legendary Old Hollywood method actor Marlon Brando, coupled with a bad impression of his voice in The Godfather, makes for a gloriously silly cutaway joke. The "celebrity voice impersonated" disclaimer at the end is the cherry on top of the absurd clip.
The Monster That Ate Everybody
At a drive-in movie, Bart and Homer, living as truckers, block the view of other customers and watch a bad horror movie named The Monster That Ate Everybody as they gorge on snacks. In the movie, a man informs a woman about the titular monster that ate everybody, who keeps asking if individual characters were also eaten too.
The movie resembles many bad horror b-movies that exist in the real world that usually involve monsters. The repetition of the woman repeatedly asking if the monster who ate everybody ate Patrick and Erica too and the man getting increasingly frustrated (with Bart and Homer joining in too) makes it funnier as it goes on.
The Itchy & Scratchy Movie
This fictional movie had an entire episode dedicated to it. Unlike the other fictional movies in The Simpsons, viewers never get to see The Itchy & Scratchy Movie. Bart is punished by Homer for his behavior by banning him from seeing the movie all summer. The movie was a monster hit, winning nine Oscars and staying in theaters for almost a year until every resident in Springfield has seen it - except Bart.
The fact the viewer never get to see how insanely good the movie actually makes the joke all the funnier, as the movie cannot possibly be as good as the episode portrays. The scenes of the bleak future where Homer allows Bart to see the movie add to the humor of the episode, and the ending where an older Homer and Bart watch the movie in the future makes a heartwarming bookend for the joke.