The Best Times ‘The Simpsons’ Took Shots at Other TV Comedies

There’s this misconception among many modern Saturday Night Live haters that the show was some perfect, shining beacon of humor back when they were kids, but anyone who really remembers all the filler crap that the seminal sketch show put out weekly in the early 1990s knows that not to be the case. When Krusty appeared on Tuesday Night Live in the 1993 episode “Brother from the Same Planet,” he bombed no worse than Andrew Dice Clay did three years prior on the real SNL, and the Simpsons clown starred in a perfect “Coneheads” parody sketch that earned as many laughs as the movie adaptation did.

Bonus points for Bart’s line of “I miss Joe Piscopo” — sarcastically pretending that Eddie Murphy's aspiring jockstrap-holder is a comedy god was one of The Simpsons' absolute best running gags.

You have to imagine that, if Cheers dragged on for a 12th, 13th or even 14th season, the storylines in each episode would get exactly as hackneyed and repetitive as Sam’s conversation with Carla when Homer tries out Cheers while searching for a new bar to call home in the Season Six episode “Fear of Flying,” which also happened to be the first televised Cheers reunion with every character in the scene voiced by their original actor. It’s hard to see Norm ever getting ornery and inebriated enough to attempt murder on the entire bar, though — that would be more of Andy’s thing.