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With Ivy League writers like Conan O’Brien, there’s no question that some jokes made us go, “Wait… what?” And it’s not just the brainiacs like Martin Prince or Lisa, plenty of Springfielders get in on the smart jokes.
Whether we were a bit too young to get them at the time, or they were just downright confusing, these 13 jokes from The Simpsons sailed so very high over our heads.
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13
Brevity is… Wit.
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Levels… Too many levels.
In season 3, episode 2, “Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington,” the ‘Welcome Finalists’ sign is sponsored by Reading Digest, and it reads, “Brevity is… wit”.
It’s a jab at how Readers Digest edits articles in a way that removes their nuance, and fundamentally changes their meaning.
To get this one, you’d need a rough working knowledge of Shakespeare to know that it’s a contraction of the aphorism, “brevity is the soul of wit”, which Polonius uses in Hamlet.
By shortening it, they’ve literally ripped the soul out of it.
In season 8, episode 24, ”The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase" features The Simpsons Family Smile-Time Variety Hour, which is a parody of 1960s and 70s variety shows.
In season 10, episode 2, “The Wizard Of Evergreen Terrace”, the equations on Homer’s chalkboard features one put together by David Schiminovich, an astronomer at Columbia University.
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The top line on the board estimates the mass of the Higgs boson (expressed as M(H0) on the board) by combining elemental physics, namely the Planck constant, the gravitational constant, and the speed of light.
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The crazy this is that was in 1998… 14 years before scientists discovered the actual answer, and Homer was so close! if you stick those numbers into the equation itself, it’s higher than the actual mass. (Homers equation gives us 775 giga-electron-volts rather than CERNs 125).
In season 2, episode 19, “Lisa’s Substitute”, Martin Prince is in the running for class president, and delivers the speech, “As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library, featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke!”
When albino classmate Wendell Borton asks, “What about Ray Bradbury?” Martin dismissively brushes him off with a quick, “I'm aware of his work”.
Many sci-fi fans and critics consider the first three names listed as classic "hard" science fiction writers, but Bradbury is considered too wishy-washy by many sci-fi dorks to “count."
In season 6, episode 18, “A Star is Burns”, Abe Simpson yells, “The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it”.
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You might think this is complete gibberish, but a rod is actually an old English measurement that can equal anywhere from 9 to 28 feet. A hogshead is an old unit of measurement for liquids that equals about 79 old wine-gallons.
In season 3, episode 11, “Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk”, a German company purchases the nuclear plant, and Mayor Quimby welcomes them to town by saying, "Ich bin ein Springfielder."
It seemingly comes out of nowhere when Homer immediately say, "Mmmmm. Jelly Donuts”, but "Ich bin ein Springfielder" is a reference to JFK's speech in West Berlin where he said, "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner").
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A "Berliner," however, is not only someone from Berlin, but also a German word for Jelly Donut.
When Bart swaps his answer sheet with Martin Prince, everyone thinks he has an IQ of 216.
At his new school, The Learning Center for Gifted Children, the teacher writes an equation and says: “So y equals r cubed over three, and if you determine the rate of change in this curve correctly, I think you will be pleasantly surprised.”
"Ahoy," had been around for at least 100 years longer than “hello”. It too was a greeting (a nautical one) derived from the Dutch "hoi," meaning "hello." Graham Bell felt so strongly about "ahoy" that he used it for the rest of his life.
If you were up on your political news in 1992… This one’s a gem.
In season 7, episode 13, “Two Bad Neighbors”, former President George H.W. Bush moves in across the street, and things escalate into a full on brawl. As Bush chokes Homer, he tells him that he'll ruin him like a "Japanese banquet."
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This is a reference to a real incident when, a very ill President Bush threw up at a banquet hosted by the Prime Minister of Japan in 1992.
In the classic episode, "Bart vs. Australia," before ticking off all of Australia, Bart randomly prank calls random numbers. One of the numbers he calls is in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where an elderly Adolf Hitler attempts to answer.
This is a reference to the conspiracy theory that Hitler survived WWII and escaped to Argentina, where he lived until 1962.