`Broad, Bizarre and Bold'

My 7-year-old and I saw The Simpsons Movie on Sunday, and we laughed so hard we cried and snorted and wished we had brought tissues but were glad the darkness of the theater concealed our dripping embarrassment. We missed jokes because we were too busy laughing at the last one or two – an experience I remember from the first time I saw Duck Soup and other Marx Brothers movies. My sons and I are longtime fans of the show, and my oldest son saw the movie in Manhattan on opening night, last Thursday at midnight. He’s a leaking reservoir of Simpson trivia, a true fan boy.

The writer who most reminds me of Matt Groening’s creation is Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century novelist and physician, author of Roderick Random, Humphrey Clinker and Peregrine Pickle, among other raucous and cartoon-like comic novels. A professor of 18th-century English literature introduced me to Smollett about 35 years ago, and I read and enjoyed a shelf of his works but have never read him again, or even been seriously tempted, just as I probably won’t see The Simpsons Movie again. The books merge into a single swollen Smollett narrative, all chamber pots, floggings and gluttony – that is, all surface, albeit an entertaining surface, as in a good cartoon. In one of his essays on Smollett, V.S. Pritchett wrote:

“His coarseness, like that of Joyce, is the coarseness of one whose senses were unprotected and whose nerves were exposed. Something is arrested in the growth of his robust mind; as a novelist he remains the portrayer of the outside, rarely able to get away from physical externals or to develop from that starting-point into anything but physical caricature.”

And this, on Smollett’s sense of comedy: “It is imaginative, festive and, like all Smollett’s comedy, broad, bizarre and bold.”

Like The Simpsons.